609 - The Rose Garden – Introduction

Program Notes

Guest speakers:
William Leonard Pickard
Kat & Alexa Lakey, discussing The Rose from Santa Cruz, and Cusco, Peru

Julian Vayne & Nikki Wyrd, reading from Devon, England
Brother David Steindl-Rast, reading from Gut Aich Priory in Salzburg, Austria
Ben Sessa MD, reading from London, England
Ra lf Jeutter, reading from Germany
Julie Holland MD, discussing The Rose from New York City
Ryan Place, reading from Detroit, Michigan
Mark Schunemann. reading from the University of Oxford
Estia from University of Durham (UK), reading from Paris
Jo from University of Durham, reading at Durham, England
Nese Devenot PhD, reading from Case Western University School of Medicine
Bruce Van Dyke, reading from Reno, Nevada
Greg Sams, reading from London, England

[https://www.amazon.com/Rose-Paracelsus-Secrets-Sacraments/dp/0692509003/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2B6AZMGUI82O&keywords=the+rose+of+paracelsus&qid=1559928257&s=gateway&sprefix=the+rose+of+%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-1

](https://www.amazon.com/Rose-Paracelsus-Secrets-Sacraments/dp/0692509003/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2B6AZMGUI82O&keywords=the+rose+of+paracelsus&qid=1559928257&s=gateway&sprefix=the+rose+of+%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-1

)Today's podcast features an introduction to The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments by Leonard Pickard. Rolling Stone once called Pickard "The Acid King", and his book is being called a modern masterpiece. It tells the story of an international clan of secret LSD chemists. And who better to tell this story than Leonard Pickard, who is now serving two life sentences in a maximum security prison in the United States, having been accused of manufacturing large quantities of acid, billions according to one ex-DEA agent. Over the next two years we will present a reading of this book, along with commentary, by friends of Leonard's. Today we feature an introduction of The Rose of Paracelsus with a series of readings from various chapters, followed by some commentary on the readings. In the months and years to come, we will be podcasting a reading of this entire book, chapter-by-chapter.

EMAIL address to contact the producers: therose (at) psychedelicsalon (dot) com
The Rose Of Paracelsus: On Secrets & Sacraments
by Leonard Pickard

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:24 ►

And today is an important day in the history of the Psychedelic Salon.

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In a few minutes, I’m going to play for you the introduction to Leonard Picard’s remarkable book,

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The Rose of Paracelsus, on Secrets and Sacraments.

00:00:38 ►

The reason I say this is an important day for the Salon is that I believe that years from now,

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if anyone still

00:00:46 ►

remembers the Psychedelic Salon, it will be because of this series, which begins today.

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Now before we get started, there are a couple of announcements about today’s podcast

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that I’ll make now rather than at the end of the program. First of all, while this podcast

00:01:03 ►

recording is freely available for you to reproduce,

00:01:06 ►

give copies away, and if you have your own podcast,

00:01:09 ►

Leonard and I would be most grateful if you repodcast it on your own channel.

00:01:14 ►

Our objective is for this story to reach as many people as possible.

00:01:18 ►

However, I do need to mention that transcripts of this podcast

00:01:22 ►

fall under the normal copyright prescription about reproducing the text of a copyrighted book. Leonard has given

00:01:29 ►

his permission for the audio of these readings, followed by commentary, to be

00:01:34 ►

freely shared, just not a written copy of the text of his book. So this is all the

00:01:39 ►

permission that you need if you want to repodcast this program. Also, should you

00:01:44 ►

want to connect with the producers of this series, or to pass a comment

00:01:48 ►

along to Leonard, in addition to the comments section in the program notes, I’ve also set

00:01:53 ►

up a single email account to focus all of the comments and inquiries about The Rose

00:01:58 ►

of Paracelsus to the following email address, theroseatsychedelicsalon.com, therosepsychedelicsalon.com, theroseatpsychedelicsalon.com, which should

00:02:08 ►

be easy to remember.

00:02:10 ►

Now, let me be clear that it may take two years or more before we have finished the

00:02:15 ►

reading and commentary on this 650-page book.

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And you may notice that I’m calling it simply a book and not a novel, because, well, I’m not entirely sure that it is, in fact, a fictional story.

00:02:30 ►

You’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.

00:02:34 ►

But here is what has been said about this book on Amazon’s website, and I quote,

00:02:39 ►

The Rose explores a global entheogen system,

00:02:43 ►

discovering their practices leading to cognitive enhancement and, arguably, the next human form.

00:02:50 ►

From Cambridge to Moscow, Oxford to Zurich, Princeton to Majerar Sharif, and Bangkok.

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The Rose records the lifestyles with a most rare and elusive organization, one that has evolved special gifts, advanced

00:03:06 ►

capacities of thought, memory, and perception, end quote. And that is what we have to look forward to

00:03:13 ►

as we listen to these recordings from the Rose of Paracelsus. Now for newcomers to the salon who

00:03:20 ►

may not already be familiar with Leonard Picard’s life story, I’ll give you a few headlines.

00:03:26 ►

Of course, the rose itself may tell more of his story than we know.

00:03:30 ►

For example, one former DEA agent went on national television

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and claimed that Leonard had created over 3 billion doses of LSD.

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That’s a lot of acid, my friends,

00:03:42 ►

enough to dose the entire Western Hemisphere, if true.

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In today’s program notes, which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com,

00:03:49 ►

I’ve linked to a story in the excellent online magazine, The Rooster,

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and it was written by a friend of the salon, Riley Capps.

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He begins his essay, titled The Acid King, by saying, and I quote,

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The Rose is the story of an international clan of secret LSD chemists

00:04:07 ►

who cook up millions of doses using elaborate clandestine methods.

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They live a fantastic lifestyle of high luxury and monastic poverty,

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daringly escaping detection and battling forces arrayed against them.

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They train ex-hippies to infiltrate the government to spy on the DEA.

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They perform magic and do telepathy and channel strange forces like sorcerers.

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End quote.

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Riley’s article contains much more interesting information about Leonard and the Rose,

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so you would be well served to read it in full.

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In it, you will learn that Leonard was accused of planning an LSD

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manufacturing operation in a missile silo in Kansas. You probably remember the news about that bust.

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Leonard has now spent the past 18 years or more living in a maximum security prison while serving

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two life sentences without the possibility of parole. He hasn’t even seen a tree in all that time while

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being held in this desert prison. But to me, the most amazing thing about Leonard is his attitude.

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I’m sure that I never could have survived in captivity as long and as in good mental shape

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as has Leonard. Although I’ve never met him in person, when we speak on the telephone,

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he comes across as an old friend with a great attitude and a genuine concern for others.

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Another thing that I would like to point out is that there are millions and millions of people around the world who are microdosing on LSD this very day.

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They are the beneficiaries of not only the skilled work of these chemists, these chemists are also risking

00:05:45 ►

their freedom to get you your medicine. You may think that for them it’s all about money, but

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after you listen, or better yet, read this book, you’ll understand that these women and men answer

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to a higher call. Now this is a long podcast today, the longest ever in the psychedelic salon,

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and throughout this podcast you’re going to hear

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from many people who will be reading and commenting on the rose. By the time this series is completed,

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over 100 people will participate in this project, and countless thousands of hours will be spent,

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all by volunteers, to help more people learn about this important work. So I want to be sure that you

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know something about the two people who have made this project possible. So I want to be sure that you know something about the two

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people who have made this project possible. They are Kat and Alexa Lakey, two sisters whose first

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podcast here in the salon last year is titled, The Family That Trips Together Sticks Together.

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Now, not long after they produced that podcast, and they’d already begun to prepare more programs

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for us, well, I kind of sidetracked them and solicited their help with this project.

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You see, a month earlier, Leonard had contacted me

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to ask if I would do a review of his book here in the salon.

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I agreed, and his publisher sent me a copy.

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Well, within my first hour of reading The Rose,

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it became clear to me that reviewing a work of this magnitude

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was most definitely out of my league. hour of reading The Rose, it became clear to me that reviewing a work of this magnitude was,

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well, it was most definitely out of my league. I’m a writer, and I’ve published a novel,

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but The Rose is so much more than a novel. To my mind, this is a real work of literature, and by that I mean it’s written, as a commentator says in this podcast,

00:07:21 ►

it is written in beautiful, powerful, multifaceted language, as you will

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hear in just a moment. So after beginning to read my copy of The Rose and talking with Leonard,

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we realized that, with the vast number of well-known people who are his friends,

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we should ask some of them to do sample readings. Then the project began to grow exponentially and,

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well, thankfully the Lakey sisters stepped up and volunteered to produce this series.

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So I want to be very clear about the fact that I’m simply the guy who is publishing these readings on the net.

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The producers, the ones who deserve the most credit here, are Kat and Alexa Lakey.

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Now, besides tracking down people to do readings, and then obtaining commentaries on the readings,

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they then added music and edited these initial readings into a seamless whole

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so that we can begin listening to the entire book after first hearing an overview of it.

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Now, if you are a podcaster or audio content producer or have been involved in recording an audiobook,

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then you understand how much technical editing work Cat has done

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to ensure that the readings flow smoothly.

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And the work of producing this series is still far from done.

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Cat and Alexa have a lot of work ahead,

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and Leonard and I can’t thank them enough.

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Now, before I turn this podcast over to Cat and Alexa,

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I want to leave you with an image of how this book was written.

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As you will hear, for more than four years, day after day, week after week, month after month,

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Leonard wrote this book using only paper and a pencil while confined in a concrete cell

00:08:58 ►

somewhere in the Arizona desert. He didn’t have an internet connection available for reference,

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and he didn’t even have the luxury of working in a library. In fact, Leonard has never even seen

00:09:10 ►

Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram, Reddit, or YouTube. Just think about that. It really boggles the mind.

00:09:19 ►

The Rose of Paracelsus was written in a prison cell, and while we may not be in a position to free Leonard’s body at this time,

00:09:26 ►

we most certainly can set his ideas, his mind, free to interact with yours and mine as we contemplate what he has to say.

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If you’ve ever been to Ireland, then you most likely have visited the library at Trinity University

00:09:40 ►

and looked on the Book of Kells, which is one of the most famous books ever written

00:09:45 ►

and is considered Ireland’s greatest treasure. After seeing it for the first time, I traveled

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to the Abbey of Kells and sat in one of the cells where the monks slowly and laboriously wrote the

00:09:58 ►

Book of Kells. Now, over 1,200 years later, another monk sat in a cell and very slowly and laboriously wrote The Rose of Paracelsus.

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I dream that one day my great-great-grandchildren will be able to view the original manuscript of this work,

00:10:16 ►

where it will be on public display and considered one of America’s greatest treasures.

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To me, this is the psychedelic book of Kells.

00:10:24 ►

And now, here are Kat and Alexa Lakey.

00:10:37 ►

Hello, and welcome to the first episode of The Rose Garden. This podcast will serve as the

00:10:43 ►

introduction to an upcoming series that will chart

00:10:45 ►

William Leonard Picard’s epic novel, The Rose of Paracelsus, on secrets and sacraments. My name is

00:10:51 ►

Kat, and I’m Alexa, and we’ll be your hosts, guiding you through this labyrinthian masterpiece

00:10:57 ►

of psychedelic literature. For those of you who’ve never heard of William Leonard Picard,

00:11:02 ►

here’s a little background on him. For the last 18 years,

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Picard has been serving two life sentences in prison without the possibility of parole.

00:11:11 ►

The Harvard graduate, UCLA drug policy researcher, and alleged LSD chemist entered into the public

00:11:18 ►

eye back in 2000 after he was arrested in the now infamous Wamego Missile Silo Bust in Kansas.

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According to the DEA, this was the largest LSD lab seizure in history

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and resulted in a 95% decrease in the supply of acid in the U.S.

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in the two years following his arrest.

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Some of you might be familiar with that story,

00:11:40 ►

but it rests in one of the final chapters in the Rosa Paracelsus,

00:11:44 ►

which serves as a

00:11:45 ►

memoir for a remarkable period in Picard’s life. At over 650 pages, the book was written with

00:11:52 ►

pencil and paper from inside a prison cell, and took over four years to complete. Like psychedelics

00:11:58 ►

themselves, The Rose blurs the lines between reality and fiction in an alchemical web of

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intrigue and mystery. The book is written from

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Picard’s perspective as he travels the world, encountering the elusive group of men known as

00:12:11 ►

the Six. The Six are clandestine LSD chemists who produce planetary-sized batches of the drug

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with the utmost of secrecy. Only five of the Six are interviewed by Picard, and they are identified by a color.

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Crimson, indigo, magenta, vermilion, and cobalt.

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As the narrator enters into their world, he uncovers an intricate psychedelic organization,

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which works across the globe and behind the scenes with entheogens to raise human consciousness and possibly to kickstart our evolution as a species.

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The Rose Garden will go chapter by chapter, with each episode read by a different voice,

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followed by a discussion on the material.

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Certain contributors are known for their work in the psychedelic community,

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like Amanda Fielding of the Beckley Foundation,

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Ben Sessa of Breaking Convention,

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and Julian Vane of The Psychedelic Press.

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Others are equally accomplished but come from completely different fields,

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and we’ll tell you more about them throughout the episode.

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This series, much like The Rose, will be long, heavy, and at times very dark.

00:13:21 ►

But if you give it a chance, you won’t be disappointed.

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We highly recommend picking up a copy of the book to read along with us. Take your time, pause when you need to, and you might start to feel the unique contact high that only this book can deliver. Other than LSD, it’s quite possibly the most psychedelic thing

00:13:37 ►

you’ll ever find on paper. From the halls of Harvard to a den of warlords in Afghanistan,

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this podcast will explore the many secrets and sacraments of a psychedelic underground few have ever encountered.

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All of this comes from the perspective of a man who hasn’t seen a tree in 18 years and may never see one again.

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William Leonard Picard is a complex and perhaps a polarizing figure.

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polarizing figure, but this series will be a platform for those who have known and loved him to speak on his behalf, and perhaps give a voice to all others like him who cannot speak out for

00:14:10 ►

themselves. So, without further ado, here’s Leonard.

00:14:21 ►

Dear friends and listeners, this is Leonard Picard welcoming you to the Rose Garden.

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In the garden, we’ll explore together the mysteries and pleasures in the Rose of Paracelsus on secrets and sacraments,

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often referred to simply as the Rose.

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And what may be a true novelty in any podcast, this first issue of the Rose Garden is a prelude

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to a more operatic experience, the first full reading in its entirety of a work of

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psychedelic literature.

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The Rose,

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each chapter at a time,

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will be read by a single reader

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and podcast

00:15:17 ►

over two years.

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Thus,

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it is our gift for you,

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our offering.

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This is very much an international effort.

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We’re privileged to hear today the voices of both men and women,

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those with ages ranging from 20 to 92,

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and with leaders from Austria, France, Germany,

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a strong contingent from the United Kingdom

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and the United States.

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The Rose Garden is hosted through the kindness

00:15:58 ►

of Lorenzo Haggerty of the Psychedelic Salon

00:16:01 ►

and produced by sisters Kat and Alexa Lakey, with a discussion by

00:16:08 ►

UK author Julian Vane and Nikki Weird, editor of Psychedelic Press UK.

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On a personal note, Kat Lakey has just returned from working in remote areas among indigenous tribes in Amazonia,

00:16:29 ►

while Julian and Nikki often speak to the Rose, to their European audiences.

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We are grateful in the Rose Garden to hear the voices and readings of quite a list of contributors.

00:16:47 ►

Among them,

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Brother David Steindl-Rost,

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the well-loved Benedictine monk

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and spiritual leader,

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who reads from Gut H. Priory

00:17:00 ►

in Salzburg, Austria,

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where he is secluded.

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Gut H. means good heart.

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Brother David was only 19

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during the Anschluss,

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the Nazi occupation of Vienna,

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and later was permitted by the Vatican

00:17:21 ►

to study Buddhism in America.

00:17:25 ►

Ben Sessa, M.D., reads as well.

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Ben is the adolescent psychiatrist and the U.K. researcher

00:17:33 ►

with the Imperial College London Psychedelic Research Group,

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an eminent host of the breaking conferences at the University of Greenwich.

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We’re very fortunate to have as a reader the young researcher and writer, Neche Devano.

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Neche is a prolific researcher and popular speaker at conferences in the U.S. and abroad, and is easily the foremost leading analyst in psychedelic literature,

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widely admired.

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I cannot speak more highly of Neche.

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Currently, she’s a postdoctoral scholar

00:18:16 ►

at the Department of Bioethics at Case Western School of Medicine.

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Neche has a firm understanding of the rose,

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and we’ll be hearing more from Nashe

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and the discussions.

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Julie Holland, MD,

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the eminent New York City psychiatrist

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and speaker and author,

00:18:36 ►

is participating in the longer readings

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as well as Whole Foods founder

00:18:42 ►

Greg Sams in London.

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In the longer series, we may expect readings from Cosmo Fielding Mullen,

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producer and director of the Sunshine Makers,

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and Amanda Fielding, director of the Beckley Foundation at Oxford.

00:19:03 ►

of the Beckley Foundation at Oxford.

00:19:11 ►

Following are passages by writer Ryan Place of the Book Club of Detroit and the Detroit Book Fest,

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Nevada radio host Bruce Van Dyke,

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and from Germany, the Greek classicist Ralph Jeter.

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and from Germany, the Greek classicist Ralph Jeter.

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Students internationally have adopted the rose in their explorations,

00:19:40 ►

so that the Rose Garden series will include passages by young theologians and philosophers,

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majors at the University of Durham in England,

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undergraduates Joe Chandler and S.G. Orion,

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graduate student Mark Shoneman,

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all founders of the Durham Psychedelic Society.

00:20:01 ►

Listeners to the Rose Garden may wish to read along with us,

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but listen carefully,

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for the words can be challenging

00:20:12 ►

and may sometimes seem like a prose poem.

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But they were written under the most arduous conditions

00:20:22 ►

and written with great affection, and written for you.

00:20:33 ►

This is Lunarge.

00:20:39 ►

Here we have Julian Vane reading an excerpt from the first chapter in The Rose.

00:20:44 ►

Julian and his partner, Nikki Weird, will have a strong presence throughout this series of podcasts,

00:20:50 ►

discussing the material and at times interviewing some of the contributors.

00:20:54 ►

Julian is an occultist and the author of several books, essays, and journals in both the academic and esoteric press.

00:21:03 ►

This excerpt is from the narrator’s first encounter with one of the six,

00:21:07 ►

a man known only as Crimson.

00:21:10 ►

On a foggy night on a beach in Point Reyes, California,

00:21:14 ►

Leonard speaks with Crimson.

00:21:17 ►

But to be in the presence of one of the six

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is like a psychedelic experience in and of itself.

00:21:23 ►

This excerpt starts on page 18. And now, Julian Vane.

00:21:30 ►

He offered a sip of mango juice from an antique silver flagon, as if it were holy water. Within

00:21:38 ►

minutes, the sea floor itself, perhaps the entire continent, seemed to move ever so slightly, like some

00:21:47 ►

microscopic, profound and irrevocable tectonic shift. The fire’s heat against the cold

00:21:56 ►

sea air became the allegory for the worlds balanced by practitioners of these clandestine arts. I could only listen to his fantastic web of recollections and foretelling

00:22:10 ►

as he spoke softly, confiding mythic tales of remote laboratory sites.

00:22:19 ►

Sacred glass furnaces disgorge illuminated fragments of mind in blinding rivers.

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Alone and on their knees, at these fountains of consciousness,

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singular beings pray for an end to suffering.

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Eternal evenings become crystal daybreakers pierced by the morning star.

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At first, thinking him messianic, pontificating, perhaps a proponent of some arcane

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religious heresy or ghastly folly, I felt mixed elation and alarm. There was a moral unease at

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his descriptions of what only could be mere simulacra, but the changes were beginning.

00:23:08 ►

mere simulacra, but the changes were beginning. With his words, the beach became luminous as noon,

00:23:15 ►

as though the sky had knocked open. There was the crackle of stars, then blood-red shells of Magellanic clouds. The ocean was billowing, cold and black, percussive between the screaming silences,

00:23:27 ►

the dunes were a moonscape of rubble.

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There is fission, then fusion of thought and feeling, as forgiveness for all blasts heavenward.

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Dissolute chaos renders to absolute certainty.

00:23:42 ►

Wrenching ignominy and confusion transmute to clarity and peace.

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The tranquil veils of Elysium are welcoming us. He fell silent. The sound of the sea began

00:23:57 ►

to evolve out of night. The hum of existences whispering secrets like some fantastic drug but not so cruelly for mind that evening was so vast no then flowed in bright streams, reflecting the plumed branches

00:24:28 ►

of heaven above. Unrolling firmaments were full of incoherent raptures. I sat speechless,

00:24:38 ►

in a hypnagogic state, while he seemed to transform in the shifting firelight and white noise and the reflections of ten thousand fingers of fractal silver waves

00:24:49 ►

into a spectrum of beings.

00:24:52 ►

He re-aggregated as the alchemist Paracelsus,

00:24:57 ►

as the Gnostic wizard Hermes Trismegistus,

00:25:00 ►

as an ecclesiastical conspirator in sixteenth-century Basel,

00:25:05 ►

as an itinerant tinker on a Scottish beach.

00:25:10 ►

He displayed the Dionysic intoxication recalled by Euripides in the Bacchae,

00:25:15 ►

yet the solemnity of a Delphic priest as clouds of myrrh trailed from his oracular pronouncements.

00:25:29 ►

of myrrh trailed from his oracular pronouncements. He became robot flesh from synthetic DNA and future avatars, penetrating the present for just this one encounter. Then a Miocene hominid,

00:25:37 ►

speaking unknown tongues before the advent of fire. He became the angel that St John saw in the sun, then all the healers and medicines of the

00:25:48 ►

world, the heretical anatomy of Galen and Vesalius, the antisepsis of Lister, the anesthesia of Crawford

00:25:57 ►

Long. Finally, the dreamlike light show slowed, the changes merging into a single, still, perfectly clear prospect.

00:26:11 ►

There appeared at last only Crimson himself, simply poking the embers around and placing driftwood,

00:26:17 ►

as if nothing at all had occurred except two friends warming themselves beneath the universal canopy.

00:26:24 ►

except two friends warming themselves beneath the universal canopy.

00:26:30 ►

After the psychic configurations, I took quite some moments to recover.

00:26:36 ►

Something more you wish to know, he said with gravitas.

00:26:44 ►

So, Julian, we’ve just listened to you reading an extract from the Rose of Paracelsus.

00:26:54 ►

And in it, one of the figures that turns up in the list that Leonard refers to is Paracelsus.

00:26:59 ►

Do you think that this is particularly important in this particular section?

00:27:07 ►

I think that the idea of, I mean, Paracelsus for me, I suppose the overriding brilliant insight that I’m aware of from his work

00:27:08 ►

is this thing about

00:27:09 ►

that it’s the dose that makes the poison

00:27:12 ►

and I guess that’s the same

00:27:16 ►

you know the whole point is

00:27:17 ►

that’s a universal kind of truth

00:27:19 ►

that he’s pointing at

00:27:20 ►

and this idea of sacraments

00:27:23 ►

of course runs all the way through the book and there’s a

00:27:26 ►

kind of a lot of oscillation between these ideas you know but a lot of the time that lena writes

00:27:32 ►

about the lsd experience including to some extent in this first section although it’s quite kind of

00:27:38 ►

upbeat there’s a lot of a sense that this is beautiful and terrible. The LSD experience is both something that is cosmic and ecstatic and rewarding

00:27:49 ►

and miraculous and outstanding.

00:27:53 ►

But it also tips over into the sublime

00:27:56 ►

and the awesome and the awful and the terrifying

00:27:59 ►

and those grand visions of destruction

00:28:04 ►

and those megalomananiac kind of um

00:28:07 ►

outpourings of human experience that those things are in there too yeah so i think that the whole

00:28:13 ►

thing about having paracelsus in there because paracelsus is you know it’s it’s the rose of

00:28:18 ►

paracelsus it’s based on this story um by borges about parelsus III, the alchemist historical character

00:28:25 ►

and I think that yeah

00:28:28 ►

a lot of it is this idea that

00:28:30 ►

I guess also in terms of Leonard’s own

00:28:32 ►

kind of history

00:28:32 ►

this substance

00:28:35 ►

is both a means of

00:28:37 ►

liberation and a

00:28:40 ►

road to incarceration

00:28:41 ►

Yes

00:28:44 ►

so you have this really double-edged sort of sword going on

00:28:48 ►

yeah and it resolves itself into a kind of a just the simplicity of the human experience

00:28:54 ►

and that’s a really interesting thing so by the end of this like massive thing that’s happened

00:28:58 ►

this is very early on in the book it’s only like in the first i don’t know 60 odd pages or something

00:29:03 ►

that he meets crimson meets this outlaw chemist

00:29:06 ►

who has this ability to kind of induce a psychedelic experience

00:29:09 ►

just by being in his presence.

00:29:11 ►

So he goes through this big experience

00:29:13 ►

where he’s kind of, you know, having that nature mystery kind of moment

00:29:16 ►

and then perceiving this person as all these different characters

00:29:19 ►

and that resolves down into the simplicity of just two guys

00:29:23 ►

sat there by the beach with a fire between them and

00:29:26 ►

and a lot of the book does that as well there’s a lot of points at which the oscillation between

00:29:31 ►

these two great extremes kind of often resolves itself into like the simplicity of an act or or

00:29:39 ►

a character or a landscape or something it becomes simple. It kind of distills into that.

00:29:48 ►

Something that I got from that particular extract is the way that it was very much about the sort of the elemental setting

00:29:52 ►

and the liminal place that they were in.

00:29:54 ►

So they’re on the beach and there’s the sky above and the sea below.

00:29:58 ►

And then there’s a brief mention of the dunes as well,

00:30:00 ►

but it’s mostly to do with that.

00:30:01 ►

And then there’s also the fire that they’re actually sitting around.

00:30:04 ►

So the setting within which these this conversation happens and the way that

00:30:10 ►

crimson is pontificating about all sorts of things in describing and evoking the world over a huge

00:30:15 ►

amount of sort of space and time which comes slightly before this bit that we’re actually

00:30:19 ►

hearing here there’s a huge sort of depth to that but but it’s within this very, yeah, very liminal, simple, elemental landscape and setting.

00:30:30 ►

And I quite like that. It’s very sort of, it has that jewel of the meaning of the different words, but set within a clear frame.

00:30:39 ►

That’s an interesting way of thinking about it. I never really thought about it like that before, but now you’re articulating that.

00:30:42 ►

interesting way of thinking about it i’d never really thought about it like that before but now you’re articulating that i think in terms of the whole book there is a sense perhaps in which that

00:30:49 ►

is like it’s like the moment you would have in a ceremony isn’t it where you would acknowledge the

00:30:53 ►

different directions and you would acknowledge the above and the below and the the you know the

00:30:59 ►

fire which is the last thing that’s spoken of in that little section so yeah it is like a kind of big an opening

00:31:05 ►

for that and and what’s interesting is it later on in this comes to say the psychedelic experiences

00:31:11 ►

that are described there’s they they kind of go off into these other sort of different directions

00:31:16 ►

they expand in these different ways and some of them are ones that um are very uh there’s one in

00:31:23 ►

particular i’m thinking of this very kind of geographical

00:31:25 ►

it’s called there’s a there’s a piece that we’ll hear later on in this sequence of readings which

00:31:31 ►

is as though kind of from space looking down onto the earth and this one is kind of sets up some of

00:31:38 ►

those axes that are explored within the later parts of the psychedelic revelation so this one

00:31:44 ►

yeah it goes into the

00:31:46 ►

elements and he goes into this is love that lovely bit where he talks about being like future avatars

00:31:50 ►

also being this myosin hominid so it is like a kind of a magical opening i think that’s a very

00:31:56 ►

good way thinking it’s the ceremonial opening for the for a lot of what’s going to happen in the book.

00:32:10 ►

Next up is a reading from the Catholic Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Ross.

00:32:16 ►

Brother David was born in 1926 in Vienna, Austria, and spent his early years living under Nazi occupation. Now in his 90s, he’s known for his active participation as an interfaith

00:32:23 ►

scholar and his work on the intersection

00:32:25 ►

of science and spirituality. Together with Thomas Merton, he was an early pioneer on the dialogue

00:32:31 ►

between Christian and Buddhist monastics. He’s also given a TED Talk on the subject of gratitude,

00:32:37 ►

which has been viewed over six million times. This excerpt, beginning on page 40, is set in the Beginner’s Mind Temple of San Francisco.

00:32:47 ►

The atmosphere of the Buddhist monastery is starkly contrasted by the city that surrounds it.

00:32:53 ►

In this segment, the author reflects on both his time at the temple and on the years he was imprisoned following an earlier arrest in the 1980s.

00:33:04 ►

There is the scent of lilacs. I am facing a wall seated on a cushion in a monk’s

00:33:14 ►

formal sitting robe, legs crossed and back straight. Across the darkened hall an incense offering burns.

00:33:28 ►

I notice my breath as it flows in and out and focus upon it.

00:33:39 ►

Distractions appear in the form of thoughts and feelings,

00:33:50 ►

Emotions appear in the form of thoughts and feelings, sounds and light, and physical sensations from the disciplined posture.

00:33:57 ►

These go away for a while, then reappear.

00:34:05 ►

I think of plants and people, feel anxiety and desire,

00:34:14 ►

hear the faint muffled traffic, and see upon the wall a shaft of sunlight.

00:34:30 ►

Within this eternal circle of perceptions, I have fleeting moments of pure consciousness. The Dalai Lama has described this essence of mind as clear and all-knowing. We are practicing at Hoshinji Beginner’s Mind Temple in San Francisco, the oldest and largest training monastery in America in Soto Zen tradition.

00:34:57 ►

We practice arts from the lineage of Japanese Zen master Dogen from 1250 AD.

00:35:08 ►

It is a place of ancient courtesies and unworldly kindnesses,

00:35:16 ►

each morning opening into the rose window of the East.

00:35:24 ►

As heirs of the final teachings of Hoshinji founder Shunryo Suzuki Roshi, we are the residents

00:35:34 ►

for months, years or a lifetime.

00:35:39 ►

We learn about simple but difficult mental practices, about graceful conduct, aesthetics, and perfections of manner, and, within all of those, the iron rail of discipline.

00:36:09 ►

After zazen or meditation, we engage in calligraphy, hibana or flower arranging,

00:36:17 ►

chano-yu or tea ceremony, gardening, and service of the dying.

00:36:24 ►

As a path to enlightenment or big mind, some Soto monasteries also may practice the martial arts of Aikido,

00:36:32 ►

the non-injurious rendering of physical aggressions by their momentum to the floor,

00:36:41 ►

the soft, elegant litanies of Hoshinji are merciless as diamonds.

00:36:53 ►

Indistinguishable from one another,

00:36:56 ►

50 Zen priests, monks, nuns and students

00:37:00 ►

sit side by side facing the wall in the zendo or meditation hall,

00:37:07 ►

a rectangular room in the 16th century style with a hand-polished wooden floor

00:37:15 ►

and elevated areas for sitting meditation.

00:37:32 ►

Sometimes our restless normal consciousness, affectionately labeled monkey mind,

00:37:38 ►

ceases praying, subsides, and becomes quiescent.

00:37:46 ►

We occasionally gain glimpses of no mind, the space between thoughts.

00:37:52 ►

It is completely silent and just before dawn.

00:38:02 ►

Outside, through the zendo walls of rebar and brick, we hear two young lesbian lovers frantically clutch and rip

00:38:08 ►

each other’s clothing, pressing against doorways, sobbing, their footsteps shuffling back and

00:38:17 ►

forth in attraction and repulsion.

00:38:21 ►

They’re coming down hot in janglesles crashing from their long sleepless night.

00:38:29 ►

They yearn at loss and gain, the fear and surrender, the tantalizing promise of new couplings,

00:38:41 ►

their tender fruitless urgencies cry to unify the spirit through flesh.

00:38:48 ►

Their voices are without bodies.

00:38:53 ►

Don’t go.

00:38:55 ►

I hate you. I can’t be with you anymore.

00:38:58 ►

Please don’t go. I love you.

00:39:00 ►

I gave you all my coke.

00:39:08 ►

you I gave you all my coke convulsive tears they run up and down the alley behind Hoshinji passed among sittings in silence passion and calm are separated

00:39:18 ►

by an aged impassable war embossed with wet lichen and lapped by the city’s mists.

00:39:30 ►

We hear the cycle of unsatiated cravings, the pleading and chasing and embraces

00:39:38 ►

and tearing away and returning the long, low moaning.

00:39:44 ►

staring away and returning the long, low moaning.

00:39:50 ►

For them, it is an ugly and poignant hour when samsara, the illusion of the world,

00:39:56 ►

becomes delirious imaginings,

00:40:01 ►

unchecked passion and the cruel severing of their hearts.

00:40:10 ►

Their anguish fades in the barely perceptible sounds of distant motors,

00:40:17 ►

opening doors, salsa music, the ignition of engines, children’s voices ready for school, drunks shouting execrations.

00:40:33 ►

Two junkies from nearby projects prowl trash cans and mutter like aimless lunatics already

00:40:44 ►

jonesing for the next fix.

00:40:49 ►

The background becomes subdued as we attend to the breath.

00:40:56 ►

It is quiet once again.

00:40:59 ►

There remain only the whistles of swifts as if from abbey walls and the smell of rain shining streets.

00:41:12 ►

No one moves, not a word is uttered.

00:41:17 ►

We sit in silence, awaiting the next manifestation of thought and feeling,

00:41:24 ►

awaiting the next manifestation of thought and feeling,

00:41:28 ►

sound and light, bodily sensations,

00:41:32 ►

before it is lost on the out-breath.

00:41:38 ►

A haiku by Zen poet Basho arises.

00:41:44 ►

Below the autumn tempest rages, while above the sky is motionless.

00:41:51 ►

A bell is struck softly. The sitting period is ended.

00:42:04 ►

turn to our cushions, gather our flowing robes, and stand simultaneously with eyes lowered, hands folded, one upon the other.

00:42:14 ►

As the bell rings again, we turn left together.

00:42:20 ►

From the sendo, a single file, we slowly walk away.

00:42:29 ►

I have entered this world by begging admission the same day as released from prison.

00:42:38 ►

Captive for a misunderstanding about laboratory equipment,

00:42:43 ►

For a misunderstanding about laboratory equipment,

00:42:50 ►

one had been consigned to a hellhole of lethargic suffering.

00:42:57 ►

By this different confinement of monastic practice, I seek healing and purification, a cloistering from endless brutality. For a thousand years, supplicants meditated

00:43:13 ►

by temple gates for weeks until their earnestness was recognized by passing monks. My years of isolated meditation

00:43:26 ►

in the midst of knives and blood

00:43:29 ►

may be apparent.

00:43:32 ►

Possessing only the second-hand clothes I wear,

00:43:36 ►

remnants from a cardboard box that day,

00:43:41 ►

I ask for refuge and am given shelter.

00:43:47 ►

The howling violence, the ferocity of oppression is gone now.

00:43:55 ►

My body is lean and tight from relentless exercise

00:44:01 ►

beneath rows of razor wires in nameless, lonely

00:44:06 ►

yards.

00:44:08 ►

Monasteries,

00:44:10 ►

some say, are places

00:44:12 ►

for desperate

00:44:14 ►

people.

00:44:16 ►

So just having heard

00:44:18 ►

that piece read

00:44:20 ►

from chapter 2 by Brother David,

00:44:23 ►

just wondering on your reflections

00:44:24 ►

on that nikki

00:44:25 ►

so firstly i really liked brother david’s voice absolutely wonderful and the thing that came to

00:44:35 ►

my head while i was listening to that is the way that the physical macrocosm of the the monks

00:44:43 ►

meditating on one side of the wall and then life going on with all

00:44:46 ►

its sort of rich tapestry on the other side from people shouting and drunks swearing and swallows

00:44:52 ►

soaring overhead and whistling and children playing and all the other different things

00:44:57 ►

that are happening. That’s like the divide in the meditator’s mind between the monkey mind and the

00:45:02 ►

still point which is listening to the chatter and the

00:45:05 ►

all the different things that arise and fall which I think are made explicit in the bit towards the

00:45:10 ►

end there where the writing describes it in in quite sort of distinct terms just like that

00:45:16 ►

it’s one of the things I find really interesting about the Rose of Parasolsus as a book is that the more I hear it read or the more that I go

00:45:26 ►

back and re-read it

00:45:27 ►

I guess in common with

00:45:29 ►

all great literature

00:45:31 ►

that there’s like other layers in it

00:45:34 ►

or other things in it that I hadn’t seen

00:45:35 ►

so one of the things I noticed about this section

00:45:37 ►

having heard that reading from

00:45:39 ►

Brother David was that a lot of the language

00:45:42 ►

is actually quite simple

00:45:43 ►

in that kind of cool Buddhist way the way that you know at least the translations that we lot of the language is actually quite simple in that kind of cool buddhist

00:45:45 ►

way the way that you know at least the translations that we have of these words are things like sort

00:45:49 ►

of no mind and big mind yeah so it’s a simple kind of anglo-saxony kind of words yes amusingly

00:45:55 ►

yes do you mean it’s like it’s really straightforward um and again that like you’re

00:46:01 ►

saying that division between those two different mental states it’s really straightforward there’s

00:46:04 ►

just like you know there’s there’s these on the hand, it’s the kind of 10,000 things, you know, this proliferation of stuff.

00:46:13 ►

But it’s just articulated really simply.

00:46:15 ►

There are some lesbian lovers and they’re outside the compound where the monks are meditating and they’re shouting and they’re shouting as this every day.

00:46:23 ►

So it’s very simple.

00:46:24 ►

meditating and they’re shouting and they’re shouting as this every day so it’s very simple it’s quite it’s quite a contrast in my head between that and some of the more um i mean

00:46:30 ►

baroque and purple and mandarin and all those words could be used with it but there are sections

00:46:34 ►

in the book that are much more um lush in their vocabulary and this has got that pared down

00:46:41 ►

simplicity of the monk’s cell about it which I hadn’t noticed until hearing it just now.

00:46:47 ►

Yes, it does have that sort of Zen feel to it, certainly.

00:46:50 ►

And then the sort of second bit of the extract that we just listened to

00:46:54 ►

where he’s comparing the prison cell to the monk’s cell.

00:47:00 ►

I think that when you’re reading it in the book,

00:47:02 ►

this comes through even more the way that one term of imprisonment leads to another term of voluntary seclusion.

00:47:10 ►

And the similarities and differences between those two different parts of Leonard’s or the author’s life, because it’s a sort of semi-fictional autobiography.

00:47:26 ►

so for me that was a particularly interesting way of looking at the situation particularly as he is now in prison once again at the moment

00:47:30 ►

and he would describe to us how that is again like being back in the monastery

00:47:35 ►

so I find that kind of moving but also it’s an interesting way of reflecting upon one’s incarceration

00:47:43 ►

which has been forcibly

00:47:45 ►

placed upon one is to have this kind of accepting this is how it is and therefore I will do the

00:47:51 ►

meditation and the other practices to get through this time yeah I mean it’s kind of difficult in

00:47:59 ►

some respects because we have to be quite thoughtful about you know Leonard is a person

00:48:03 ►

in a situation and just have to be kind of really mindful about what’s said and what’s articulated

00:48:08 ►

because it has real world effects on him.

00:48:11 ►

I know that certainly in correspondence that we’ve had,

00:48:16 ►

he’s talked about how being in the prison is like being kind of incarcerated

00:48:22 ►

in a sort of exquisite uh swiss time piece

00:48:26 ►

because everything happens and i can just imagine that you know i mean i just imagine everything

00:48:32 ►

being in this kind of steeply sequenced kind of order and so when i read this section in the

00:48:37 ►

rose of paracelsus i was really um it was yeah another bit of the book for me was really moving

00:48:43 ►

because i know that that’s

00:48:45 ►

where he is now where he’s been for you know getting on for 20 years you know um and uh

00:48:52 ►

obviously the place where you know the the zendo um uh which is itself uh uh of course you know

00:49:01 ►

it’s interesting that that that’s the term um which gets now used as, I think, maps of thinking about that term as a kind of, you know, the psychedelic sort of haven supporting environment is thought of as the Zendo.

00:49:13 ►

So there’s Leonard, Leonard Picard in his Zendo back in the day.

00:49:18 ►

And this is a space of great.

00:49:21 ►

He talks about something like innumerable small kindnesses and courtesy and all those sorts

00:49:26 ►

of things and again without going into too much detail my understanding is that the prison he’s

00:49:31 ►

in houses some uh very troubled individuals so i suspect it’s very different from being uh

00:49:39 ►

cloistered in a uh a monkish environment of many kindnesses and many courtesies.

00:49:46 ►

Yes, yes.

00:49:50 ►

You’d still get the codified body languages and all sorts of things like that that would be similar,

00:49:52 ►

but with a rather different flavour, I suspect.

00:49:57 ►

Ralph Tudor is a German national

00:49:59 ►

who currently lives in both England and Germany.

00:50:02 ►

He is a Homeric scholar who taught himself to read Homer in its original Greek.

00:50:08 ►

Through the rows of Paracelsus, Ralph has come to know Leonard.

00:50:12 ►

In this first passage, beginning on page 327,

00:50:15 ►

the chemist Indigo intervenes in the life of a young junkie in Switzerland.

00:50:20 ►

They find the girl while visiting a bombed-out squat near Needle Park in Zurich.

00:50:25 ►

There, within the constant drug use, they look more deeply at what is happening,

00:50:29 ►

and at the archetypes of addiction.

00:50:33 ►

Indigo suggested that we part the psychic veil

00:50:38 ►

and look at the dark matter rather than the atoms.

00:50:43 ►

At this, he passed his hand over the scene,

00:50:46 ►

as if trailing a transparent curtain or rippling the surface of clear water,

00:50:52 ►

beyond which nothing and everything was changed. The young people were clutched in the folds of

00:50:59 ►

some high serpent. The girls were panting and breathless within the heavy reptile kernel. The boys were

00:51:06 ►

wild and sweating, struggling, picked at by old carrion birds. The walls moved with images of

00:51:14 ►

ghastly Aztecs carvings, a felt like of fears looking back into hell. Convent devils raged

00:51:22 ►

around us like clanging torments in this common, barren world.

00:51:27 ►

The snake of Aesculapius, god of medicine, coiled around the cross in a horrific caduceus.

00:51:34 ►

These debauched teenage acolytes of opiates and stimulants had dark-ringed eyes and fevered

00:51:41 ►

grimaces. Some were whining peevishly for needles, others in corners bent

00:51:46 ►

like squaws or kneeled before those unencumbered in a room strewn with used prophylactics.

00:51:55 ►

They find the overdoses in crevices on the Bernese Oberland, Indigo whispered,

00:52:01 ►

thrown over and disguised as hiking mishaps.

00:52:10 ►

One French girl, black-haired and pale-skinned in a leather jacket,

00:52:16 ►

had her blue jeans down her long legs to her ankles, offering herself for a dose.

00:52:22 ►

She would turn heads on the Bahnhofstrasse with her white-gray eyes and white pallor.

00:52:26 ►

Removing her pointed silk brerie of theoretical black, she looked as if she were temporarily absent from a family villa near

00:52:31 ►

Niedwalden and now a roaming spectre at the peak of the Jungfrau. Her right arm

00:52:36 ►

was stained in velvet like blood drying. They come from Zug, Lucerne, Geneva, the rich into Cloten Airport and down the Zürichberg, Indigo said.

00:52:49 ►

She was pathetic in the throes of craving, baffled, her new worldliness concealing an eye not yet embittered.

00:52:58 ►

Tearful and stammering, she still had starts of revulsion, and her scanty attire, with a listless and grim resolve,

00:53:06 ►

she invited the junkies, the ghostly horsemen, to ride her.

00:53:11 ►

We saw in the girl the next pestilences of this world, the drugged future certain alias,

00:53:18 ►

like the women and men copulating on graves in Milan during the plagues, as everyone grasped

00:53:24 ►

a dwindling life with the sibilance of machines.

00:53:28 ►

Evil was at the helm.

00:53:32 ►

And these are the oldest drugs, Indigo said.

00:53:34 ►

He mentioned the abuse of the next generation of eretogenics.

00:53:39 ►

The deepest images were the most frightening.

00:53:44 ►

As we witnessed the mythic core, I almost bolted in

00:53:48 ►

horror. We saw the Christ child in a manger, infused with holy light, while surrounding him

00:53:56 ►

were giant spiders feeding at his glory. Above him stood the compassionate Mary in a robe of stars until a beatific countenance was drawn back to reveal horrible things.

00:54:10 ►

We saw who addiction truly was. I no longer could bear to look upon it.

00:54:15 ►

Indigo passed his hand across the panorama, trailing the images like strobes, and said from the vulgate the last words of Christ on the cross.

00:54:26 ►

Consumatum est.

00:54:29 ►

It is finished.

00:54:33 ►

The glissade of dimensions coalesced.

00:54:37 ►

There now were simply young people partying with spoons and pills and needles,

00:54:43 ►

a few aged junkies sharing the bags of powders.

00:54:48 ►

Some were dressing to flee into the cold Zurich air, spreading their secret infection.

00:54:56 ►

As one sluggish fetus looked on with his dimmed swivel eyes, Indigo suddenly sees the French girl, pulling her forcibly

00:55:06 ►

behind a wall, as others said. Trembling, she exposed her young, sharp, up-tilted breasts.

00:55:14 ►

She asked whether we each wanted her alone or both together.

00:55:19 ►

Amour de quatre pattes, à tous les quatre vents, love on all forms, at every opening.

00:55:27 ►

Indigo asked her if she would trade the drug for a loving husband and children

00:55:31 ►

who thought the sun rose in her eyes.

00:55:34 ►

She wavered at the unexpected truth.

00:55:38 ►

He told the lost girl to cover herself,

00:55:40 ►

then offered her a pale mother-of-pearl rosary.

00:55:44 ►

She said it glowed like a string of moonlight and silver.

00:55:48 ►

Pressing it into her hand,

00:55:49 ►

he evoked a memory from a Catholic schoolgirl youth.

00:55:53 ►

Ex tir pandum turcam, throw out the devil.

00:55:58 ►

He reminded her how to count the rosary,

00:56:00 ►

then they slowly repeated at least ten times the full Ave Maria. I heard them together,

00:56:07 ►

his voice first, her quavering refrain following, Indigo like a father guiding his children home.

00:56:14 ►

Ave Maria, gratia plena dominos tecum benedicta tu. She dressed, stumbling after us into the

00:56:22 ►

daylight, then joined us in a cab on the long ride to

00:56:25 ►

Cloughton Airport. It was like Perseus’ rescue of Andromeda. Indigo, in the manner of a seminarian

00:56:33 ►

with potent and sensuous beliefs, hovered protectively, bringing her back to a visionary,

00:56:40 ►

polite world. We helped her board her flight to Geneva. Indigo retrieved her name and number.

00:56:48 ►

He said two women would visit her one day soon. The names would be those of the muses.

00:56:55 ►

So we just heard that excerpt read by Ralph. Nikki, I’m wondering what thoughts that

00:57:01 ►

immediately provokes for you. So one of them was I was very impressed with Ralph being able to do so many different languages.

00:57:07 ►

It’s very good.

00:57:08 ►

The actual content of the piece, it’s quite messy, isn’t it?

00:57:13 ►

So it’s talking about the way that drugs enhance people’s lusts and those kind of drives.

00:57:19 ►

The way that opiates and stimulants in particular.

00:57:22 ►

It made me think that how drugs which are just focused on the pleasures of the flesh, on lust,

00:57:28 ►

they can only end up leading to excessive

00:57:30 ►

and repeated patterns of that particular

00:57:33 ►

trying to seek new sensations in the flesh.

00:57:36 ►

They don’t really lead to anything else at all.

00:57:38 ►

So they just collapse in on themselves

00:57:41 ►

in this spiralling pressure to have more and more to chase that high

00:57:46 ►

that you have the first time that you encounter something but in order to get that with this kind

00:57:50 ►

of concoction and the of the different things the opiate stimulants and sexual intercourse as well

00:57:56 ►

the only way that that you can chase that high is to get more and more extreme to get more and

00:58:01 ►

more depraved about things which ultimately is only going to lead to self-destruction and all sorts of horribleness from that i think you know it’s a really powerful

00:58:11 ►

section it’s really interesting the way that indigo kind of uh passes his hand over the scene

00:58:16 ►

and then the kind of the mythic reality behind the the practicality of what’s going on happens

00:58:22 ►

and this for me someone who’s interested in in the

00:58:26 ►

esoteric and the occult is a really powerful thing because what the rose does i think really quite

00:58:31 ►

well is it demonstrates how you know mythic magical reality and quote real reality are are

00:58:37 ►

the same thing it’s just a question of your orientation and your ability to perceive things

00:58:41 ►

so with indigo’s movement of his hand he reveals this kind of hieronymus

00:58:45 ►

bosch kind of tableau of all these people in this kind of uh kind of chem sex party kind of

00:58:51 ►

environment and he also mentions the future possibilities for this with the erotogenic so

00:58:56 ►

a class of drugs like there’s a there’s a whole sort of slew of them just about to emerge into

00:59:01 ►

culture which leonard has written about both in terms of trying to advise government and also through through this book so I think you’re right I mean this is not

00:59:12 ►

about saying you know being stimulated or or the use of opiates or the use of uh you know sexuality

00:59:17 ►

or any of these things is bad or wrong but what it is about is it’s about like Indigo in this, Leonard in this kind of work saying, as you’ve just said, that these only lead to a kind of a sort of a ramping up of these kind of, you know, human appetites.

00:59:33 ►

And they’re very, they’re the quality, the pernicious quality of them, which is exemplified by this poor lost French girl who’s interestingly, again, in terms of this kind of notion of a broad spirituality she’s actually

00:59:45 ►

redeemed by her catholic upbringing which is really interesting you know again from you know

00:59:51 ►

many people’s perspective that kind of idea of uh religion of penitence and of confession and all

00:59:58 ►

those sorts of things might be antithetical to many people’s beliefs now it does appear quite a

01:00:02 ►

lot in the rose actually this idea of a sort of

01:00:05 ►

quite a kind of christic mystical kind of aspect to that and so this idea of redemption and penitence

01:00:11 ►

and sacrament of course as well yeah i like the way that indigo not only gave her a rosary and

01:00:17 ►

gave her the spiritual help that she needed on but on that that kind of level but also made sure that

01:00:22 ►

she had the airplane tickets made sure that there were people that were going to visit her when she had got back home and did all that sort of follow

01:00:28 ►

up practical kind of stuff so the the spiritual part of it was the the flag like the this is the

01:00:34 ►

way to the route back to yourself back to who you were before you fell into this state of not

01:00:41 ►

knowing what was going on and that that’s that for me is the important aspect of

01:00:46 ►

this it’s not just the symbol of it it’s following through on what that symbol means and being christ

01:00:51 ►

and like you’re saying the christic element of of saving people who actually properly assist them

01:00:57 ►

and you’re not just telling them to go to church or whatever but actually really physically giving

01:01:02 ►

help and he repeats the rosary the ave maria 10

01:01:06 ►

times with her he’s really investing himself and his attention in this person by doing that and

01:01:13 ►

demonstrating to her how much he cares and how much he knows about her and of course on one level

01:01:18 ►

of course indigo is the psychedelic experience both in terms of the way he reveals this state

01:01:23 ►

and also the way that as you say both a very practical material level and also a deeply symbolic archetypal level

01:01:29 ►

intervenes in this this space and and helps to liberate this individual person from this kind

01:01:36 ►

of realm of you know hungry ghosts and it’s again interesting to note that psychedelics have a great potential and power it would seem to liberate us people

01:01:49 ►

from situations where we find ourselves addicted to these kind of bio survival cravings or cravings

01:01:57 ►

which we retreat into in order to protect ourselves because of various violence or

01:02:03 ►

trauma that’s been revisited on us.

01:02:05 ►

So the bottom line is that you can use acid to heal people of their addiction to opium or to

01:02:10 ►

alcohol or to amphetamines and that definitely is the case and this chapter kind of exemplifies

01:02:16 ►

that. So Indigo is embodying the spirit, the psychedelic spirit, this ability to liberate this

01:02:21 ►

young French girl from this place of craving and self-destruction.

01:02:27 ►

And the passage doesn’t let the actual church get off completely scot-free at all here,

01:02:32 ►

because there’s that whole pictures of the Christ figure and the Madonna in the actual church,

01:02:37 ►

like revealing themselves to be built upon foundations which are far more destructive with the church.

01:02:45 ►

upon foundations which are far more destructive with the church.

01:02:51 ►

The religious aspect of it is not itself the hero of the story.

01:02:57 ►

It’s the people that are able to understand the way that the compassion of the message that appears in some parts of that religion can be used really effectively.

01:03:07 ►

religion can be used really effectively. In the next excerpt, starting on page 335,

01:03:12 ►

Indigo recounts a laboratory accident which covered him in LSD.

01:03:18 ►

This resulted in what was perhaps the largest human exposure to the drug in history.

01:03:26 ►

As twilight approached, there was some urgency to climb even higher.

01:03:34 ►

We packed our things and hiked through a wall of three-meter gorge until it opened upon boulders and steep ravines.

01:03:39 ►

An imperceptible watershed led up to chasms and labyrinth of defiles.

01:03:45 ►

Near the peak, the clouds began moving in alarming haste across a running moon.

01:03:51 ►

The deep blue rotunda of the day shattered with a fierce freak storm.

01:03:56 ►

The sky began tearing, ripping white into blackness.

01:04:01 ►

A vast disorder of flying shapes began whirling like some tide of dread.

01:04:06 ►

We huddled on this porch of the unknown as the moon, far above the vapoury swiftness opens its mystic door. It was not unlike the convulsive

01:04:12 ►

birth of the Mistral, the iron north wind descending into France. We hid in a grotto,

01:04:19 ►

waiting out the storm. There was no rain, only the demented dancing of furies on ridgetops. In the loneliness of these

01:04:27 ►

highest ranges, where he had passed so many winters, Indigo seemed truly at home. I knew not

01:04:35 ►

how much longer we would be together and encouraged his disclosures by pretending I had just thought

01:04:39 ►

of a question. What human had the largest exposure to LSD? Vermilion in Berlin had revealed Indigo’s

01:04:48 ►

long night of the soul, but my polite little deception was futile. Vermilion is fond of that

01:04:55 ►

tale. We have no secrets from each other in operational necessity. I reddened and remained

01:05:00 ►

silent. He continued with a fantastical drama. The event occurred before

01:05:07 ►

we adopted fully protective moon suits with face shields and air pumps. I had risen from praying,

01:05:14 ►

then stood by a custom glass reactor that contained 10 million just activated doses.

01:05:21 ►

The Alexia swirled under argon beneath deep red illumination. The music was von Bingen,

01:05:27 ►

Gregorian, some Amazonian chants. The shrill wind of the mistral rose and fell. He looked

01:05:35 ►

out at the trailing clouds as if he were recollecting some unspeakable magic.

01:05:39 ►

Standing several rungs up a ladder and engaging a complex range of fine glassware,

01:05:47 ►

I began a purification method, decanting the 10 million doses from a 12-litre flask into a large pear-shaped separatory funnel.

01:05:56 ►

It was attached to a stainless steel rack high upon a 10-foot wall of delicate specialised glass. A pilot plant, one might say.

01:06:06 ►

What happened?

01:06:07 ►

My gloved hand, wet with solvent, slipped.

01:06:11 ►

And then?

01:06:12 ►

The flask shattered.

01:06:14 ►

Ten million doses of the most potent psychoactive substance known

01:06:19 ►

dissolved in a solvent that quickly penetrates skin,

01:06:22 ►

drenched me from head to foot.

01:06:28 ►

Oh my. I thought I was dead.

01:06:33 ►

No human could survive such an exposure to any drug. I fell from the ladder onto my back in a large pool of solvent and LSD. Screaming in fear, I staggered to the shower, shaking so I hardly

01:06:40 ►

could strip, awaiting the inevitable seizures, unconsciousness and death. And then, I was crying,

01:06:48 ►

shouting prayers to be protected, to live, to be spared. Then I was on my knees, naked and wailing

01:06:54 ►

before the blinding whiteness. I prayed in the timeless void, for it was the moment of birth

01:07:01 ►

and death. It stopped as the mistral in its agonies disturbed the interface

01:07:08 ►

between this world and the next. The grotto was dark, but for the cataclysmic shifting light.

01:07:15 ►

Please continue if you can. The badge was irretrievable, of course, although no one cared.

01:07:21 ►

I couldn’t call an ambulance, for the scene appeared like some other planet’s holy wilderness of technology. I awaited the next life, grieving for my loved one.

01:07:31 ►

For a moment, demons shrieked and stellar hosts sang of forever peace.

01:07:37 ►

Gone. I somehow stood praying. Please, God. I hung on thehatch with the water over my face carried by the river of life about the rooms which were billowing wildly in the currents of mind and refreshed the oceanic view, as we prefer for science.

01:08:26 ►

Against the wall, resigned to fate,

01:08:28 ►

I sat with legs crossed, hands in prayer,

01:08:32 ►

gazing now and then at the spectacle before me.

01:08:35 ►

What did you see or experience?

01:08:38 ►

I saw the constant creation of the most perfect world

01:08:42 ►

imaginable by the mind of God,

01:08:46 ►

the luminous air of delicious gases like the perfume of lovers and goddesses, the rich earth made

01:08:52 ►

of gems, the fecund ground of being. I saw the union of all dualities, the crystallized

01:08:58 ►

souls of heaven, the galaxies of consciousness and all life as mythic and sublime.

01:09:06 ►

How long did this last?

01:09:08 ►

Oh, it never went away.

01:09:10 ►

Even now I can see it, if I wish.

01:09:13 ►

You mean the effects were permanent?

01:09:16 ►

No.

01:09:17 ►

I mean the greatest gift is the natural mind,

01:09:20 ►

that which cannot be created or destroyed by any drug,

01:09:27 ►

that which we have always.

01:09:35 ►

How can you have seen what you described if not for the overdose? I saw the world as it truly is.

01:09:45 ►

God, or the ultimate consciousness, would not be so cruel as to make such glory dependent on a substance. Put another way, nothing happened that night.

01:09:49 ►

Nothing happened?

01:09:50 ►

I was exposed to ten million doses in seconds,

01:09:54 ►

the only human to witness or survive such an exposure.

01:09:59 ►

Beyond the initial changes, there was no effect whatsoever.

01:10:03 ►

After the first few moments on the veranda

01:10:05 ►

and the whirlwind of the unknown, the night became crystal clear. I could hear night birds

01:10:12 ►

stirring and feel little freshets of cool wind. All was perfect, beautiful. The moon

01:10:20 ►

went bronze to white as it rose, its rays dispersing through the thick forests.

01:10:27 ►

No patterning, the world was vast and still.

01:10:31 ►

The exposure was so extreme that it had no effect.

01:10:35 ►

By contrast, a milligram, a thousand micrograms, ten or twenty doses, would have been overwhelming.

01:10:43 ►

I would have writhed in rebirth for many hours.

01:10:47 ►

I was saved that night by grace alone. Then the ultimate vision was our own mundane magical world?

01:10:56 ►

Yes, that’s it. Perhaps the event was a reminder that we all already have that which we seek.

01:11:04 ►

that we all already have, that which we seek.

01:11:09 ►

Ultimate intelligence, ultimate beauty, universal peace,

01:11:12 ►

the final comprehension, ultimate love.

01:11:14 ►

What did you do?

01:11:20 ►

With humility and gratitude, I reflected on this great teaching of enlightenment as the moment one recalls the divinity of normal mind

01:11:25 ►

knowing it for the first time

01:11:27 ►

and I looked at the forest in the moonlight

01:11:30 ►

not moving through the night as the earth turned to day

01:11:33 ►

after a final prayer I rested for a few hours

01:11:37 ►

over the next weeks I decontaminated the site with care

01:11:42 ►

discarding every trace of the incident

01:11:44 ►

there were esoteric acts of frustration I decontaminated the site with care, discarding every trace of the incident.

01:11:49 ►

There were esoteric acts of flustration, ceremonial purifications,

01:11:54 ►

with quite some use of smudge sticks and candles, incense, chants and prayers.

01:11:59 ►

I ran kilometers each night, restoring physical energy,

01:12:02 ►

then with our formal traditions prepared the next batch.

01:12:06 ►

At this, he became quiet.

01:12:10 ►

We sat in meditation until the wind receded,

01:12:14 ►

the tranquil evening drifting upon us like a black silk gown at the commencement of understanding.

01:12:17 ►

So in the second of the excerpts read by Ralph,

01:12:21 ►

I really enjoyed how the setting of the wild storm

01:12:24 ►

whilst they’re climbing through the

01:12:25 ►

mountains really suited the tale. The idea that they’re hiding in this grotto away from all of

01:12:30 ►

the light and the sound and the fury of the storm and within this safe cave, this safe eye of the

01:12:37 ►

storm, he asks about something which must have been, at the time time it happened a huge maelstrom event for indigo i love the

01:12:46 ►

description of the way that the laboratory is set up with the red lights which are there for

01:12:51 ►

technical reasons but also the hildegard von bingen chants playing throughout the votive candles and

01:12:59 ►

the incenses and the prayers that have been offered the way that all this delicate glassware is all

01:13:05 ►

carefully prepared which is with hindsight asking for trouble i particularly love the phrase that

01:13:13 ►

he describes it as if it was another planet’s wilderness of alien technology it’s such a

01:13:19 ►

powerful moment anyone who’s ever taken lsd can at least imagine themselves into this kind of experience of having taken an overdose, essentially,

01:13:30 ►

a huge dose of something like this.

01:13:32 ►

And the way that Indigo responds, I guess, the way anyone would be,

01:13:38 ►

there would be panic, the way he rushes to the shower,

01:13:41 ►

and as the experience is starting to unfold,

01:13:44 ►

again, there’s that magic realist moment. So the shower and as the experience is starting to unfold again there’s that magic

01:13:45 ►

realist moment so that the shower is both pragmatically the shower is trying to get rid

01:13:49 ►

of all this acid that’s covering him that’s penetrating his skin and it’s also that this

01:13:55 ►

is the kind of the the sacred water the sacred sort of um uh sacred water of the planet washing

01:14:01 ►

over him what’s really interesting i think in terms of the account

01:14:06 ►

that indigo gives of this overdose is that what it does is it reveals what he calls just the normal

01:14:14 ►

or the natural mind and that this experience is um every day and now never it’s it never went away

01:14:22 ►

it’s always it’s always present for him.

01:14:28 ►

And it kind of reminds me of something from in Wicca.

01:14:38 ►

There’s a thing in the piece of ritual text called The Charge of the Goddess, where it says, if that which you seek, you don’t find within you, you won’t find it outside of you, to paraphrase it.

01:14:42 ►

And this is very much what this kind of LSD experience is about.

01:14:46 ►

So Indigo then goes to sit on the veranda, dresses simply, sits on the veranda, goes into meditation and kind of lsd experience is about so indigo then goes to sit on the veranda dresses simply sits on the veranda goes into meditation and kind of observes the scene and the scene is

01:14:51 ►

just the scene yeah it’s just the ocean and the world and the the the experience of being alive

01:14:57 ►

and it’s that uh all perfection all connection reality capital r reality that’s revealed to him through this

01:15:06 ►

experience and that that’s not to do with how much acid you’ve taken it’s to do with this

01:15:13 ►

illuminated understanding of the miraculous reality of existence and so it’s that kind of

01:15:21 ►

discovery within himself that’s brought out at that moment by this initiatory, transgressive, powerful act that then stays forever.

01:15:31 ►

I suspect that part of that is his fear that he’s about to die.

01:15:35 ►

So there’s nothing that brings you to the appreciation of being alive as the fact that you may at any moment suddenly not be able to function in the way that you thought that you were going to be able to.

01:15:45 ►

So on his way to the veranda, having washed underneath the sacred healing water,

01:15:50 ►

he lights more candles on there, relights them where they’ve been knocked out by the accident that’s just happened.

01:15:56 ►

So he gives himself a mission in that case, which is always helpful if you’re in a situation of emergency.

01:16:02 ►

It’s like, what can I do? What can I do?

01:16:04 ►

So he has a practical thing that he’s doing there so he’s lighting the candles and he’s constantly saying

01:16:08 ►

the prayers asking for grace asking for the blessing of being able to continue with his life

01:16:14 ►

and being in that state in itself even without the added addition of chemicals is something that

01:16:21 ►

really opens your mind to appreciate the natural mind that he was referring to there,

01:16:27 ►

which is an apocalypse of reality where the sheer, raw, magical beauty of the existence and the planet that we’re on

01:16:36 ►

is so astounding that he’s just struck with the awe of the normal.

01:16:42 ►

So instead of seeing the chaos of the normal, which is we tend to do and what in a lot of our lives he’s in awe of the normal and just the the simple reality

01:16:50 ►

of the moon rising and changing color as it goes through the different parts of the atmosphere

01:16:54 ►

or the light of it so for me a large part of what he’s going through there is not

01:17:00 ►

it’s not the psychedelics it’s that experience of continued existence

01:17:05 ►

when you’re expecting that it might suddenly stop and go out.

01:17:12 ►

Mark is one of three young students at Durham University

01:17:15 ►

who have recorded From the Rose

01:17:16 ►

and will be included in this episode.

01:17:18 ►

They do a great job of introducing themselves and the material,

01:17:22 ►

so I will leave that to them.

01:17:26 ►

Hello, my name’s Mark Schoonerman I’m a religion and society master student at

01:17:32 ►

Durham University with an undergraduate background in theology at Oxford I

01:17:40 ►

founded a psychedelic society here in Durham where we’ve been doing a reading group of this amazing book.

01:17:47 ►

And Leonard’s been calling in.

01:17:50 ►

The section I want to read, when I first read it, it brought me to tears.

01:17:54 ►

Basically because it’s an example of the way in which these altered states can turn into altered traits.

01:18:00 ►

And the way in which the religious experience can turn into the religious life and may have a concrete impact on the world,

01:18:10 ►

specifically the world here of an orphan.

01:18:14 ►

It comes from the last bit of the Mother Goddess of the World chapter

01:18:17 ►

after the protagonist has been talking for a long while with Magenta

01:18:22 ►

about the spiritual history and the potential

01:18:27 ►

future. And it’s a conversation in many ways about the ways in which drugs might serve to

01:18:37 ►

swerve and alter the future way in which humanity’s spiritual future. And it’s a conversation that happens in this religious hubbub of Kathmandu

01:18:46 ►

and it’s all very topical and basically full acid trip territory.

01:18:52 ►

But what follows is a concrete attempt to make the world a better place.

01:18:58 ►

And it doesn’t shy away from the ugly realities of poverty.

01:19:09 ►

So they have this amazing, aesthetically beautiful trip, but it’s not in complete denial about the real world. Anyway, I’m going to stop

01:19:16 ►

ranting now and start reading. Page 195. Enjoy.

01:19:20 ►

Enjoy.

01:19:31 ►

Our day had been overwhelming, for we had walked down dusty paths with little water and no food.

01:19:35 ►

We were forced to stop and take rest.

01:19:44 ►

The local villagers received us with guarded looks, though, presenting conditions not encountered by most Westerners. Rude huts and itinerant

01:19:47 ►

vendors dotted a hillside. The stench from piles of refuse and burning plastic gathered in the

01:19:54 ►

haze from smoking fires. An oily, foul river flowed, almost stagnant. Half-naked ghosts of

01:20:02 ►

children toiled in gravel pits. In the reeking squalor, some

01:20:07 ►

wandered like tiny derelicts.

01:20:11 ►

There is a Pharisaic want of charity in this community, Magenta remarked. He beckoned me

01:20:18 ►

to a crude table beneath desiccated palm fronds, supported by bamboo sticks. We asked for food from a half-blind street

01:20:27 ►

merchant in a shredded loincloth. He had only a bowl of sticky rice and a sliced papaya.

01:20:34 ►

At this humble offering we, without warning, were changed forever.

01:20:43 ►

We saw across the alley a small, very dark and ragged Nepalese girl with bare feet,

01:20:49 ►

wearing only a dirty flower sack with holes for arms and carrying a toy pail of gravel.

01:20:55 ►

She was being verbally abused by a thin, evil-looking Hindu vendor.

01:21:01 ►

Her hair was matted with excrement.

01:21:03 ►

A trickle of blood trailed down her leg.

01:21:07 ►

As he shouted, she trembled visibly, her small, fearful voice barely heard.

01:21:13 ►

Magenta, with his powerful arms, tensed. The vendor struck the girl across the face,

01:21:20 ►

sending her sprawling, almost naked, her pale spilling as she clutched in one hand a wad of chiclets.

01:21:30 ►

Magenta and I leapt forward but the vendor disappeared into his hut of tin sheets and cardboard.

01:21:36 ►

He left his wares attended by an adolescent son who displayed a sardonic smile

01:21:41 ►

and a kuari, a curved machete-like knife for chopping wood and slaughtering

01:21:47 ►

animals. We first approached the girl, where Magenta comforted her in Nepali.

01:21:56 ►

Is that your father? No, Baba, I was give away. He hurt me sometimes.

01:22:06 ►

She lifted her flower sack over her face for our examination.

01:22:11 ►

She stood there with her grubby hands held high, clutching the soiled sack and shaking, revealing her nakedness.

01:22:20 ►

Our hearts shattered.

01:22:23 ►

How old are you? What is your name?

01:22:27 ►

Dropping her sack, she spread uncertainly a few fingers.

01:22:32 ►

Her name was… you, girl!

01:22:35 ►

I remained with her while Magenta, blanching with fury, stormed into the vendor’s hut.

01:22:42 ►

After a violently heated exchange, the boy fled into the shelter.

01:22:47 ►

Returning, Magenta discovered from the girl that she was sold as a toddler into domestic servitude

01:22:53 ►

to a poor family, on most nights beaten and raped, then fled with her sisters.

01:23:01 ►

The vendor and his son molested her in exchange for scraps of tripe and spoiled

01:23:06 ►

candy. She was shivering, fearful of our intentions. Magenta purchased a mango lassie from a vendor

01:23:16 ►

of fruits and ices and provided it to the girl. Her eyes widened with disbelief. She

01:23:23 ►

devoured the sweet drink in one pass, wiping a blemished

01:23:27 ►

arm across her swollen mouth. Spying a cart of used shoes, Magenta bought some pink plastic

01:23:35 ►

sandals that seemed to fit, while I located one Hello Kitty sock and one blue diamond

01:23:41 ►

argyle of a different size. We placed them on the girl’s dirty feet

01:23:46 ►

and showed her how to wear the sandals.

01:23:50 ►

She smiled broadly with her few blackened milk teeth,

01:23:54 ►

then started to cry and shake terribly,

01:23:57 ►

lifting her flower sack again over her head

01:23:59 ►

to offer herself for the shoes.

01:24:03 ►

Her pudenda were bruised,

01:24:06 ►

her nipples were scratched and infected.

01:24:09 ►

She had cigarette burns.

01:24:13 ►

No, little one, you don’t have to do that anymore,

01:24:17 ►

Magenta gently told her,

01:24:19 ►

as he stood with the sack above her head,

01:24:22 ►

in her grimy fingers,

01:24:23 ►

and covering the anguish of her face.

01:24:27 ►

After some moments, she released her flower sack and stared at the pink plastic sandals.

01:24:34 ►

A group of Nepalese elementary students approached,

01:24:38 ►

the boys in white uniforms and the girls in matching saris with their chaperones.

01:24:43 ►

Some of the boys snickered loudly, ridiculing the girl in her sack.

01:24:48 ►

She darkened with shame, her bowels released to flood diarrhoea

01:24:52 ►

from the rich, strange mango lassie upon her Hello Kitty sock.

01:24:58 ►

She collapsed in her watery faeces and sobbed helplessly.

01:25:02 ►

We gathered her up and stood her naked in a public fountain

01:25:07 ►

as Hindu wives, witnessing her bruises,

01:25:10 ►

shook their brooms at us in anger.

01:25:13 ►

As we went to clean her, she cried,

01:25:17 ►

Don’t hurt me, Baba!

01:25:20 ►

Inconsolable, she clung to us in fright

01:25:23 ►

as we hiked to the Land Rover, then cowered in

01:25:26 ►

the back seat while Magenta called upon every orphanage in Kathmandu unsuccessfully.

01:25:33 ►

We carried the girl to a one-room open-air storefront beneath a handwritten sign scrawled

01:25:39 ►

with an A.M. Ramachandran Clinic in English and Nepali, where a Hindu physician wearing a

01:25:46 ►

smudged white lab coat sat facing the crowds. He was blunt.

01:25:53 ►

These child, Sahib, have many healed fractures, facial and severe sexual trauma, and intestine

01:26:00 ►

parasites. With nobody care, kind sir, she dies soon.

01:26:08 ►

Rummaging among donated boxes and waggling his head, he gave us antibiotics and medications

01:26:13 ►

for worms. A saver volunteer quickly located a poor, elderly and lonely Tibetan couple,

01:26:20 ►

whose children and grandchildren had fallen to their deaths in a bus accident near the remote high passes of Mustang. We took our captive to their simple dwelling, with

01:26:31 ►

its pounded earthen floors, by a fresh stream and a bunion tree. The white-haired elder

01:26:38 ►

and his wife, squatting by their cooking fire in tribal dress, stood and walked slowly to us, clearly intuiting

01:26:45 ►

the reason why two white westerners had appeared with an abused and frightened young child.

01:26:53 ►

The grandmother brought barley soup and coaxed the girl from the Land Rover. After several

01:26:59 ►

small bowls were consumed, she wet a ragged cloth in the stream and washed the girl, wrapping her in a lost

01:27:07 ►

granddaughter’s thin-worn sari. Magenta provided rupees and the saver volunteer’s name, saying he

01:27:15 ►

would visit regularly. After some hours, as the grandmother sang by the fire a lullaby that once

01:27:21 ►

comforted her dead grandchildren, the girl, now with

01:27:25 ►

thumb in mouth, turned silently to hide in the priceless warmth of the old one’s shabby

01:27:32 ►

robe. They embraced each other, rocking and whispering, the firelight reflected in the

01:27:38 ►

streaming of their tears. We left the rustic shelter with its few pots, its herbs and cooking fire, and the bottomless eyes of our little lost soul, our mother goddess of the world.

01:27:52 ►

For some hours thereafter in the Land Rover, as tin-roofed slums transformed into the grounds surrounding the King’s Palace, we said absolutely nothing.

01:28:02 ►

we said absolutely nothing.

01:28:07 ►

The weeks passed until my departure date with conversation until dawn on the final night

01:28:10 ►

as the sky lightened.

01:28:12 ►

Magenta was seated on a venerable Tabriz rug

01:28:14 ►

holding a Tibetan bell in one hand

01:28:17 ►

and a vaira on the other

01:28:19 ►

paired symbols of wisdom and heart.

01:28:24 ►

Behind him in the rude hut of an absent Rinpoche, or teacher,

01:28:28 ►

was a magnificent Thangka, a Tibetan scroll image.

01:28:33 ►

Another wall displayed images of Buddhist paradises

01:28:36 ►

done in Shingham painting with plant pigments,

01:28:39 ►

crushed gems and ashes of cremated bone.

01:28:44 ►

A mattress of straw occupied one corner, a small cooking fire

01:28:48 ►

the other. Nearing the end of my encounter with Magenta, we sought the delicious freshness of

01:28:54 ►

the early air and did long, slow sun salutations. As we glimpsed the sunrise, he reached a conclusion on what must be done.

01:29:07 ►

It was the refrain to a very old hymn.

01:29:15 ►

We feel society would best be served, not so much by a pill for intellect or sexuality, but by one for compassion, a medicine for altruism.

01:29:22 ►

Perhaps we have one.

01:29:29 ►

Above at first light, the wheel of stars turned in the morning’s ocean. We stood in contemplation while before us, Kathmandu Valley was illuminated to the horizon.

01:29:37 ►

Our long drive to Pokhara Airport was subdued. I held the glances of the Nepalese children and

01:29:42 ►

elders, both so familiar and otherworldly,

01:29:46 ►

as we passed through copses of dark yews and alder, then thorn trees stretched across the scorched meadows.

01:29:54 ►

Among the muddy trenches were the most fragrant of lilies and white narcissi.

01:30:00 ►

We entered again the elders’ camp.

01:30:03 ►

The girl was still in their granddaughter’s sari, but it was freshly washed and dried each day by the grandmother, who pounded it on stones in the stream.

01:30:12 ►

The girl wore her sandals with her Hello Kitty sock, and had been given the name Abir, or Fragrance of Flowers.

01:30:27 ►

fragrance of flowers. With a stick she proudly made an A in the dirt. I reached into my pack and produced from Berlin a little girl’s feathered angel’s wings with a furry white halo,

01:30:35 ►

and showed her how to wear them. After she was exhausted from flying around the shelter,

01:30:41 ►

I asked Magenta to translate a few words for her.

01:30:44 ►

Lying around the shelter, I asked Magenta to translate a few words for her.

01:30:50 ►

If you learn to read and write really well, you will be an angel one day.

01:30:55 ►

The girl smiled shyly and made another A.

01:31:01 ►

The old couple put the wings and halo high on a shelf by the child’s primer we had bought.

01:31:03 ►

One they barely could read.

01:31:07 ►

So wearing the angel wings would be a reward for her lessons. At Pokhara Airport, Magenta waved farewell, then decided to join me. I noticed for

01:31:16 ►

the first time the forest of short, specialised antennae protruding discreetly from his dented

01:31:22 ►

thirty-year-old rover. There had been no visible

01:31:26 ►

electronics in the cab, only marlas and bells and incense burners and images of gurus.

01:31:32 ►

As the press of travellers surrounded us and we were herded past customs, I managed my

01:31:37 ►

last important questions.

01:31:40 ►

And the girl? Will you always see to her?

01:31:44 ►

As long as we are able.

01:31:47 ►

What was the grandmother’s song that first night?

01:31:51 ►

I know it’s impossible, but the melody was haunting.

01:31:56 ►

They are illiterate and devout Tibetan Buddhists,

01:31:59 ►

but during her own childhood she was for a few weeks at a Himalayan mission school made of mud and sticks,

01:32:05 ►

before an avalanche destroyed it. Her song was her memory from Tibetan into crude Nepali.

01:32:14 ►

In English, it’s close to this. Before he could finish, the insurmountable press of shouting

01:32:20 ►

Nepalese and Hindus and monks waving passports swept me onward to the tarmac.

01:32:27 ►

I boarded the Royal Nepal 707, watching for the ritual goat’s blood on the nose wheel.

01:32:35 ►

As we entered Indian airspace near Delhi, I declined the gratuity of Periyan Lime.

01:32:41 ►

I checked my email, decrypting a message that had been anonymised through thickets

01:32:45 ►

of privacy servers, from Vanuatu to the Channel Islands. It read only,

01:32:52 ►

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Brown and yellow, black and

01:32:59 ►

white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.

01:33:08 ►

That extract read by Mark is very harrowing and it has a happy ending, sort of, but the journey

01:33:17 ►

towards that is full of despair, horror, anger, not just at the acts of the people that are described within it, but the

01:33:26 ►

fact that this is within a culture where this sort of thing has been happening for centuries

01:33:31 ►

and various other types of exploitation of people. The way that the knife is referred to,

01:33:37 ►

that the young man has, it’s a tool for cutting wood and for slaughtering animals.

01:33:42 ►

And that, for me, pointed to the way that this young child is being

01:33:47 ►

used as just another substance, just another fuel for just an object and not seen as in this

01:33:55 ►

compassionate way as another person. It’s obvious from some of the things that happen in this

01:34:00 ►

passage that the food and the shoes and so forth they’re there they’re easy to easily to

01:34:05 ►

hand it’s just the means to access these things which this child is being prohibited from having

01:34:10 ►

and that in a lot of ways is the ultimate tragedy because if those things weren’t there you could

01:34:17 ►

understand why she is going without but they are there it’s it’s just a real, so poignant, the fact that just from a decision from the people that are able to change the world for her, her life is totally transformed from one of abject misery and exploitation to one where she becomes the treasure of this old woman who’s lost her granddaughter. And that was a really lovely way of matching people

01:34:47 ►

whose needs fit together so reciprocally well.

01:34:51 ►

So the loss of the grandchild, the loss of a parental figure

01:34:55 ►

and putting these beings in touch with each other,

01:34:58 ►

that’s such a beautiful way for the events to pan out

01:35:03 ►

towards the end of the story, with their

01:35:06 ►

tears mingling as they realized that they found what it was that they needed.

01:35:12 ►

There’s a bit where it talks about the priceless warmth of the old ones shabby

01:35:17 ►

robe, this most magical of things within this really harrowing narrative.

01:35:23 ►

We know that the exploitation that you know the exploitation

01:35:25 ►

of people the exploitation of children is something that goes on in lots of different cultures and

01:35:29 ►

lots of different forms and there are yeah really kind of difficult examples this this tale is not

01:35:35 ►

by any means unrealistic i think uh whether that story is unfolding in kathmandu or perhaps even in New York or in London, that there are people,

01:35:47 ►

that there are children living in such terrifying circumstances and to be able to wish at least in

01:35:55 ►

some measure for a pill for compassion on the world, that we might care for this new generation of humans better

01:36:05 ►

and might show more compassion, more ability to help and to heal those people,

01:36:12 ►

is certainly something earnestly to be wished for.

01:36:15 ►

I was very struck by the image of the students dressed in white shirts and white saris passing by

01:36:22 ►

and laughing at the fact that she’s wearing a flower

01:36:25 ►

sack so just not even clothes and then and they’re laughing at her for the the way that

01:36:31 ►

these children can’t understand quite what’s going on so that’s their response to it

01:36:36 ►

and then even more horrifyingly the way that the when she’s being washed in the fountain

01:36:42 ►

the women are angry and shaking their brooms and they’re angry at the fact that her injuries are being revealed.

01:36:49 ►

So the compassion that’s lacking from these people is presumably partly because they can’t do anything about it,

01:36:57 ►

but also they’re not seeing the depth of the reality of what’s there

01:37:00 ►

in a way that might change their own behavior towards this girl and maybe lead to

01:37:06 ►

some kind of redemption or some to lead some kind of rescuing that didn’t take someone

01:37:12 ►

from outside of the geographical place and time to arrive and rescue her but the people within that

01:37:19 ►

milieu can actually recognize that here is someone who’s in desperate need of help. What is it that’s stopping them from being able to act and save her?

01:37:30 ►

And we can ask that question about people in our own society and the people nearest to us.

01:37:34 ►

It’s all very, very easy to point at this very extreme example of someone in another place.

01:37:39 ►

But we all see people every day that could potentially use our compassion and our help in however small a way.

01:37:46 ►

And perhaps that’s one of the lessons that we can take from this story.

01:37:51 ►

I think that’s really true.

01:37:52 ►

I think the reason that those people don’t see whether or not the women who are shaking their brooms are distressed by the girl being revealed as naked or whether or not they are angry with the men

01:38:05 ►

thinking that they are the instigators of these injuries i think that perhaps one of the the

01:38:13 ►

readings from this is about we often don’t see what we’re just familiar with you know we don’t

01:38:19 ►

see the oppression that’s the everyday oppression or the violence that’s the everyday violence,

01:38:29 ►

because it’s every day, you know, it’s all the time. And when we visit another culture,

01:38:35 ►

maybe we see that those things more explicitly, you know, we’re able to be more sensitive to those things. Because everything’s fresh in that situation. So everything is revealed anew.

01:38:40 ►

Yeah. Which is not to say that anyone is kind of lacking any kind of moral judgment.

01:38:45 ►

It’s just what happens to all of us as humans.

01:38:47 ►

Unfortunately, we get familiar and we get complacent.

01:38:51 ►

And it’s just another day, you know, at Belsen.

01:38:54 ►

And that’s just the way it is.

01:38:56 ►

And it takes this, perhaps this pill for compassion or this intervention for us to really see where those oppressions and where those hurts are and to be

01:39:06 ►

able to try and address them. And something that helps in the addressing of these wrongs is the

01:39:13 ►

way that the jeep is described as having a bristling antennae upon it and so the internal

01:39:20 ►

trappings of the pictures of the gurus and the malas and so forth, which are the technology of prayer, that’s all very well and good as far as it goes.

01:39:29 ►

But in order to act and reach the clinician that then evaluates the little girl’s situation and then finding someone that the situation can match with,

01:39:40 ►

that takes the technology and the ability to reach out into the world to to find

01:39:46 ►

these institutions these places these clinics and so forth so that’s that’s something that i really

01:39:52 ►

found it it’s another sort of overlaying of the the the magical world with the everyday realistic

01:39:59 ►

world and so having that that spiritual wanting to reach out to things but also the technological

01:40:07 ►

ability to do so it’s blending those two aspects of the world once again i think it frames what

01:40:13 ►

mark said at the beginning of that extract which is that this is spiritually motivated if you like

01:40:19 ►

but it’s it’s deeply pragmatic it’s like that’s why that little detail of the argyle sock and

01:40:24 ►

hello kitty sock is really charming because it’s just like that’s what’s like, that’s why that little detail of the Argyle sock and Hello Kitty sock is really charming,

01:40:26 ►

because it’s just like, that’s what’s to hand.

01:40:28 ►

That’s what must happen.

01:40:29 ►

They can’t be turned out like the schoolchildren.

01:40:31 ►

This girl has to be redeemed with the mechanisms that are available here and now,

01:40:37 ►

and the reality of that situation has to be addressed in that way.

01:40:44 ►

And now, a brief message to our listeners from Dr. Julie Holland. Dr. Holland

01:40:50 ►

is an American psychopharmacologist, psychiatrist, and best-selling author. She is considered a

01:40:57 ►

worldwide expert on street drugs and has been quoted in Time, Harper’s, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Holland is also the

01:41:08 ►

official medical monitor for MAPS MDMA-assisted psychotherapy studies.

01:41:16 ►

Hi there, this is Dr. Julie Holland, and I would like to speak with you a little bit about Leonard

01:41:22 ►

Picard and the audio recording of The Rose

01:41:25 ►

of Paracelsus. Something magical seems to happen to me whenever I’m in the Netherlands. With a name

01:41:33 ►

like Dr. Holland, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be treated well anywhere you go in that country.

01:41:38 ►

It opens up a lot of doors. My first trip to Amsterdam was slated for two nights and three days so I could see the rest

01:41:45 ►

of Europe during my month-long trek I stayed over a week of course and it ruined me for anywhere else

01:41:51 ►

that summer magic every single day my second trip to the Netherlands was to attend a conference on

01:41:59 ►

psychedelics this may sound commonplace at this point in history, but I assure you, this conference in 1997 was anything for me but typical.

01:42:11 ►

It was very early in the game, first of all.

01:42:14 ►

Only recently had the FDA given Charlie Grobe permission to do MDMA sessions with healthy volunteers, and the USA was not doing any psilocybin studies at all back then.

01:42:27 ►

Rick Strassman had gotten permission to give DMT, but the world did not yet know about it.

01:42:34 ►

But in Europe, things were happening. Dr. Spitzer was working with psilocybin,

01:42:41 ►

F.E. Gazoulas-Mayfrank was working with methamphetamine, psilocybin, and MDE,

01:42:48 ►

which is methylene-dioxyethylamphetamine, sometimes known as EVE to MDMA’s ADAM.

01:42:55 ►

They were also giving mescaline in Germany and in Switzerland.

01:42:59 ►

Franz Wollenweider’s lab was working with psilocybin, amphetamine, and ketamine.

01:43:06 ►

In America, we were lagging behind with only John Crystal presenting on his ketamine studies.

01:43:13 ►

But oh, the Americans were in attendance at this conference. And this is where the

01:43:19 ►

Rose of Paracelsus comes in. I was at this conference in Valls in 1997, where I had the good fortune to meet

01:43:28 ►

William Leonard Picard, a dashing and swashbuckling scientist like none I’d ever met.

01:43:37 ►

His eyes sparkled, his face was luminous, not a platinum hair out of place.

01:43:44 ►

His face was luminous, not a platinum hair out of place.

01:43:50 ►

This is not a word I use lightly, I assure you, but he was debonair.

01:43:55 ►

His eye contact was intense, his smile genuine and infectious,

01:44:01 ►

and whatever we seemed to get into topic-wise, it seemed that we agreed.

01:44:06 ►

We shared a train back to Amsterdam from the suburbs of Vals,

01:44:11 ►

and we spoke at length about psychedelics, opiates, and the fate of the free world.

01:44:19 ►

At one point, I complained to Leonard about my then-boyfriend, now-husband, Jeremy, how I was sure he was the man I should marry, but he was less convinced. Leonard took the unusual tack of suggesting to me that I

01:44:25 ►

simply get pregnant and force his hand. An intriguing suggestion, and obviously an unusual

01:44:32 ►

one from a man, or from anyone. Anyway, I didn’t take him seriously, and I didn’t follow his offhand

01:44:38 ►

advice. I didn’t really stay in touch with Leonard very much over the years, and I can’t remember how we got back in touch, but he and I are now pen pals as he serves out his life sentence.

01:44:54 ►

It is heart-wrenching thinking of him behind those walls in Tucson, living out the rest of his days with limited fresh air and sunshine, with terrible food, constant noise, the lights

01:45:08 ►

never really turning off, and being subjected to humiliations on a daily basis. Leonard was smart

01:45:18 ►

to keep up his writing, as I imagine it gives him a way out of his confines. The Rose of Paracelsus must have taken him years

01:45:26 ►

to write, and I imagine it was a welcome relief from the solitude and boredom of his cell.

01:45:33 ►

I am really pleased to be involved in this project, to bring Leonard’s book to more readers

01:45:38 ►

and listeners. He has assigned chapters to be read by some stellar participants besides me,

01:45:46 ►

such as Brother David Steindl-Rost, Dr. Ben Sessa, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Gregory Sams, Julian Vane, Amanda Fielding, and her son Cosmo Fielding-Mellon.

01:46:06 ►

and her son Cosmo Fielding Mellon. As much as I love and admire many of these contributors,

01:46:12 ►

the one I’m actually most eager to introduce to the world is Leonard’s son Duncan, who has inherited not only his father’s searing intellect, but also his debonair aura. Duncan will begin his

01:46:20 ►

medical education soon, and I look forward to calling him a colleague in the years to come.

01:46:26 ►

Duncan is reading the acknowledgement section of the book, and I will be reading chapter six, which takes place at Harvard, a place Leonard knew well, and I knew briefly one short, amazing summer in 1982 when I was roughly Duncan’s age.

01:46:46 ►

It is my sincere pleasure to be involved with this project on behalf of Leonard,

01:46:52 ►

a true prisoner of the drug war.

01:46:55 ►

May he be released.

01:46:57 ►

May his soul be released.

01:47:00 ►

And so may we all be free and without suffering.

01:47:17 ►

This next excerpt comes from Leonard himself and starts at the bottom of page 119.

01:47:24 ►

Good. A gift for you. A little reading from The Rose. Set in a cafe in Salzburg, Austria, where chemist Indigo places his forehead to mine

01:47:30 ►

and induces a series of altered states of sounds, images, thoughts, and feelings.

01:47:36 ►

Here we are. He placed his hands together in prayer and brought his forehead to mine.

01:47:41 ►

then brought his forehead to mine.

01:47:47 ►

Listen, he said, 20.2 kilometers above the Serengeti,

01:47:50 ►

the quietness of a geospatial satellite,

01:47:53 ►

low clouds and landmass rotating beneath,

01:47:58 ►

from the edge of the Gorongoro crater, the high desert wind.

01:48:02 ►

Over Congo at Mai, Denombe, Locke, 10 ten thousand snowy egrets rising as one.

01:48:07 ►

Over Laos, a bamboo flute played by a naked child, and the clapping of an old man in loincloth.

01:48:14 ►

The children of all the earth, jubilant, shrieking.

01:48:19 ►

Laplanders, Yakut, Arctic Inuits, Viennese crowds sobbing, trying to touch Beethoven’s casket.

01:48:27 ►

Howling dark wreckage of a dying planet.

01:48:31 ►

Silence of this precious island earth moving through unfeeling space, so very alone.

01:48:37 ►

A single soprano singing Misa Solemnis.

01:48:41 ►

Look, he said, 15.1 kilometers above Vincent Massif Antarctica, the last calvings of the Larson Ice Shelf, sunrise over jungles of the Pantanal, moon gate light upon Gobi Dunes, sunrise over the last hunter-gatherers, the Malaysian Bajau, the Tanzanian Hadza, the Zimani of Bolivian Amazon.

01:49:06 ►

Sunrise over Yemen, the slums of Ash-Shaba.

01:49:12 ►

Moonrise over orphanages of Bat-en-Bang,

01:49:16 ►

through rough camel skins of Bedouin tents,

01:49:19 ►

the divine brilliance of the Pleiades.

01:49:22 ►

Sunrise over Kyrgyz boy milking yak in the Afghan

01:49:26 ►

Pamir Mountains, volcanic furnaces of Iceland, aurorae dancing reflected in eyes of a newborn

01:49:33 ►

Nalut girl, stars gathering for the host, the far dawns of once and future centuries.

01:49:42 ►

of once and future centuries. Think, he said, all thought a sphere

01:49:46 ►

of 10 to the minus 21st centimeter,

01:49:49 ►

expanding to the diameter of an atom

01:49:51 ►

to the Schwarzschild radius, beyond the edge of universe.

01:49:56 ►

Every instant of comprehension, everlasting.

01:50:01 ►

The moment we all learned to tie our shoestring,

01:50:04 ►

an unborn girl in the womb of a destitute mother

01:50:07 ►

in a filthy favela on a real hillside

01:50:10 ►

dreaming of the day her equations will revise the standard model

01:50:15 ►

the ultimate intelligence of humble prayer

01:50:18 ►

the fields of mind

01:50:21 ►

all knowledge

01:50:22 ►

all cognition

01:50:24 ►

all senses all understanding, all at once.

01:50:29 ►

And their God, the light.

01:50:33 ►

Feel, he said, sorrow, desire, joy, anger, hatred.

01:50:41 ►

Eight-year-old lepers without faces in Bombay alleys.

01:50:44 ►

The endless tears of Christ,

01:50:47 ►

the irresistible hot river of a billion climaxes,

01:50:50 ►

the birth of angels,

01:50:53 ►

two-year-old girl in El Paso

01:50:55 ►

being beaten to death for soiling her diaper.

01:51:00 ►

I have not the capacity to record further here

01:51:03 ►

this unspoken exchange at once so familiar and fantastic almost as an act of mercy he lifted his forehead from mine it is finished for now he said barely heard. Like a night whisper, they were the caress of innocent clouds, like a blessing

01:51:26 ►

from a benevolent sorcerer. New recognitions arose with each of my heartbeats. I felt like

01:51:33 ►

a child hearing their first poem, as if it were the springtime of our mind.

01:51:40 ►

So that reading is very poignant because that’s William Leonard Picard himself reading from his prison.

01:51:46 ►

And he brings us a perspective in the extract of floating kilometres above the Earth’s surface

01:51:56 ►

and then zooming in onto particular scenes of events, of birds taking off, off of performances of particular music coupling this

01:52:10 ►

this higher this higher perspective with this everyday reality the everyday occurrences across

01:52:19 ►

history and doing that by listing them one after another it’s an overwhelming tumult which just

01:52:26 ►

cascades into our ears and by putting all of these things in juxtaposition with each other

01:52:32 ►

it creates this amazing sort of tapestry which throws into relief the terror the wonder the

01:52:38 ►

beauty the joy the sadness and they’re just the every day of someone milking a cow all of these different things just

01:52:45 ►

everything all at once as he actually says in that that extract which is a really good way of

01:52:54 ►

that’s what psychedelic consciousness can be like at certain stages where you have everything all

01:53:01 ►

at once where you hold all of those emotions at once, where you see all of those perspectives at once. And that’s the narrative, the literary devices

01:53:10 ►

that he uses in this passage really portray that very successfully.

01:53:16 ►

I think that idea of having this multiplicity of consciousness is perhaps something that’s particularly interesting with regard to LSD

01:53:26 ►

because there are many fabulous and valuable psychedelic medicines and they take us in kind

01:53:34 ►

of different directions and I think one of the interesting things both kind of historically

01:53:37 ►

phenomenologically and certainly for me personally with acid is that it has this kind of iconic kind of status.

01:53:54 ►

But it’s also, I think I have encountered many people who’ve shared similar observation that it’s kind of empty and without content in and of itself.

01:54:07 ►

So whilst DMT might have, or psilocybin might be, you can sort of imagine the spirit, whether it’s kind of chemically derived or organically sourced.

01:54:09 ►

But acid has this kind of openness about it. Acid is both beautiful and terrible.

01:54:11 ►

And it’s this, you know, it’s this weaponized substance that makes you go mad, but is also this beautiful part of the counterculture that’s implicit in the kind of the anti-Vietnam peace movement

01:54:25 ►

and it’s got so much stuff

01:54:27 ►

and it’s kind of a bit like a blank sheet really.

01:54:29 ►

It’s like this kind of perspective from above

01:54:32 ►

where you’re seeing all the beauty and all the horror all at the same time.

01:54:36 ►

What you said about the extract being read by Leonard from prison.

01:54:42 ►

I’ve spoken to him a few times by phone.

01:54:45 ►

And it’s very beautiful.

01:54:46 ►

It’s very intimate.

01:54:47 ►

It’s a lovely experience.

01:54:47 ►

Lovely to chat to the guy.

01:54:49 ►

But it’s also, it’s really a poignant and powerful thing.

01:54:53 ►

And I’m listening to these words,

01:54:54 ►

which in my ear sound almost like a sutra.

01:54:57 ►

Like I recorded this chapter

01:54:59 ►

and I hope I did reasonable justice

01:55:01 ►

to the complexity of the language

01:55:03 ►

and the pronunciation in it.

01:55:05 ►

So for me, listening to this, it’s like this particular, this section, it’s like a sutra.

01:55:11 ►

It has this kind of rhythm in the language and this counterpointing of the everyday and the divine.

01:55:17 ►

And at the same time, this is a recording that I heard a reading from Leonard when I was at a psychedelics conference in Berlin.

01:55:25 ►

And there was a big audience that heard this piece play back.

01:55:28 ►

And as I’m hearing his words, I’m also hearing all of those background sounds.

01:55:33 ►

You know, I’m hearing the fact that this is being read to me, this beautiful, powerful, multifaceted gem of language.

01:55:42 ►

This astonishing gift is coming from this really difficult place.

01:55:48 ►

So it’s a sutra read by a holy man in some measure, perhaps. Leonard himself has compared

01:55:56 ►

his current situation of being incarcerated as being like being a monk in a cell again.

01:56:03 ►

He seems to be destined to return to being in a small room in relatively solitude.

01:56:10 ►

And this seems to be a pattern that recurs for him in his life,

01:56:12 ►

whether willingly or less willingly.

01:56:16 ►

So he’s very much on this, he’s in that mindset of being in that state.

01:56:22 ►

And I think that his earlier days as a monk and doing all that meditation has prepared him very well for the state he now is in.

01:56:31 ►

And the fact that he’s been able to create this book from within such a small confine and get it out to the world and that we’re here today talking about it and listening to his words and reflecting upon what they mean for us and for

01:56:45 ►

other people as well potentially that in itself shows that the universe has arranged itself in

01:56:51 ►

such a way that this message is getting out i’d like to say thank you to leonard for doing his

01:56:56 ►

work there and all the people that have been involved in this particular podcast but also

01:56:59 ►

to encourage us to look at what we, as people who are free individuals,

01:57:07 ►

what more can we do in our situation?

01:57:10 ►

What influence can we have upon the world around us?

01:57:12 ►

And just ask ourselves that question,

01:57:15 ►

which might take some months or even years to answer.

01:57:19 ►

The motif of the monk kind of comes back and back and back and appears in beautiful and tragic ways for our protagonists in the story and for Leonard as a as an author

01:57:27 ►

but and I think that yeah I had to echo what you’ve just said it’s also about what you can

01:57:32 ►

give because it’s okay to kind of go and be a monk and and be isolated and so on and and respect

01:57:38 ►

for people who want to do that as part of their journey but what Leonard’s also done is from that position of absolute incarceration being entombed

01:57:48 ►

in concrete and steel he’s been able to give this gift to the world just in the same way that in

01:57:55 ►

isolated circumstances he was allegedly giving this magical transformative medicine as a gift

01:58:02 ►

to the world there’s the the story of the monk. The monk withdraws

01:58:06 ►

in order to kind of cultivate this magic which kind of goes out wider into the world and so

01:58:14 ►

it’s a real honor to be able to read and comment on aspects of the Rose of Paracelsus,

01:58:22 ►

this beautiful gift.

01:58:23 ►

aspects of the Rose of Paracelsus, this beautiful gift.

01:58:31 ►

Nishay Devano is a psychedelics researcher and postdoctoral scholar in medicine, society, and culture at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine’s Department of Bioethics.

01:58:39 ►

In this passage, the narrator is at a hidden jungle estate near Phuket, Thailand, with chemist Vermillion and two spectacular consorts, the gifted women and lovers known as V1 and

01:58:50 ►

V2.

01:58:51 ►

They accompany the narrator in the night and reveal their daily practice of caring for

01:58:56 ►

the local children.

01:58:58 ►

This passage begins on page 454.

01:59:07 ►

From the Cloud Maidens The women awaken me late one night in silence by V2 placing her hand softly on my forehead.

01:59:17 ►

We move with clouds of fireflies to the coastline as it reveals its undraped whiteness.

01:59:24 ►

The moonlight waits patiently.

01:59:27 ►

Muted, unearthly drum music comes from the dark village.

01:59:31 ►

As we enter the sea naked,

01:59:33 ►

their images are green-violet reflections upon a surface

01:59:36 ►

quiet as a moonstone mirror lake.

01:59:39 ►

The gentle waters lick and relick their slender, cherished bodies

01:59:43 ►

as they stand and extend their arms to bless the sky.

01:59:48 ►

They wade in the blue night as the fragile moon freckles the sea in glimmering points to the edge of darkness.

01:59:55 ►

They trail their hands in the deepening, phosphorescent water, dragging wide, golden-green fire that flickers like quicksilver.

02:00:04 ►

V1 and V2 come to me, the pulse of their ocean

02:00:07 ►

like warm silk. We become a silver moon riding our nest of stars as the fireflies follow our

02:00:14 ►

every motion above the rhythm and cries of the night. The last words I hear V1 and V2 speak

02:00:23 ►

are in the final evening as they sit together on a bed in a cabana.

02:00:27 ►

The outlines of their bodies are dimly candlelit, dancing behind ghostly, transparent netting.

02:00:34 ►

Perhaps they sense I am awake, watching the vision of them.

02:00:38 ►

We must make an offering to Aesculapius, the god of medicine, V1 murmurs.

02:00:44 ►

See to it, V2 softly replies, and don’t forget.

02:00:49 ►

I recognize the final words of Socrates to Crito, and fall into a dream, thinking they are saying

02:00:55 ►

it to me. In the early morning, as in Berlin, they all are gone. The privilege of being with

02:01:03 ►

them is replaced by emptiness.

02:01:06 ►

I manage my lonely bags, thinking that Vermilion and the women are not simply

02:01:10 ►

hedonists or Buddhists, but truly pagan, mythical, polytheistic. Recalling their disappearance in

02:01:17 ►

Berlin, I remember their first gift, the white wings and halo, now worn a bier in Kathmandu. I hurry to open my valise.

02:01:27 ►

Therein is a small stuffed angel, her head bowed in prayer.

02:01:32 ►

It is identical to the angel at the little girl’s tea party in the British Museum,

02:01:37 ►

when with crimson the worlds moved.

02:01:40 ►

Every image and event by the six had been thought out with precision,

02:01:44 ►

planted in my memory by these most excellent teachers honored by such devotion i rushed to find them

02:01:52 ►

collecting the tuktuk driver awaiting me for the long sojourn on the muddy road to phuket i enter the outskirts of the village there are sounds of eager cocks crowing and the melancholy drowsy tinkling of goats’ bells.

02:02:07 ►

Small tangerine trees stand alongside rude huts in the cool light,

02:02:11 ►

as flights of brilliant butterflies begin drifting in the pearly sky.

02:02:16 ►

Through the shade of vines, early sun dopples over deep garnet roses and the velvet of wine-red

02:02:22 ►

cyclamen. At the edge of hearing,

02:02:25 ►

there are small children singing.

02:02:28 ►

The song is in Thai,

02:02:30 ►

then Pali,

02:02:31 ►

but their voices transmute to English

02:02:33 ►

and finally to the flat, broad

02:02:36 ►

vowels of the American Deep South.

02:02:38 ►

It is an impossibility

02:02:40 ►

in Thailand, unless I have

02:02:42 ►

stumbled upon Mennonite or

02:02:44 ►

Southern Baptist missionaries. My strongest trials now are past, my trial has begun.

02:03:11 ►

It is overwhelming, a poignant bluegrass hymn from old Christians, sung in red dirt backwoods twang,

02:03:19 ►

as though they are settlers from the foothills of the Blue Ridge at the edge of the Shenandoah Valley.

02:03:38 ►

I look everywhere.

02:03:41 ►

Most villagers are still in their palm shelters.

02:03:47 ►

The beaches are white as tusks, the sky like blue glass over the darned calm sea.

02:04:06 ►

Within sprawling brambles, goats bleat, as the new day thickens with flower scents There are ranks of marigolds, flame red, then moon white

02:04:11 ►

Slim cypress trees move in the slight breeze

02:04:14 ►

As if they are painting the sky

02:04:16 ►

Oh, bear my longing heart to him

02:04:23 ►

Who bled and died for me.

02:04:30 ►

There they are, where they have gone every morning.

02:04:33 ►

V1 and V2 stand in their robes with many village children,

02:04:37 ►

some naked, most in tatters like defeated angels,

02:04:41 ►

the children all singing words they do not understand.

02:04:44 ►

As they lift their voices

02:04:45 ►

of heartbreaking sweetness, everyone waves and smiles, then bows to me as one.

02:05:05 ►

Fighting tears, I bow to them.

02:05:10 ►

Oh, come, angel,

02:05:14 ►

come and around me stand.

02:05:21 ►

Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home. Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings to my immortal home.

02:05:48 ►

The following excerpt is from Ryan Place.

02:05:52 ►

Ryan is the event chairman and creator of the Detroit Festival of Books,

02:05:55 ►

which has 200 vendors and more than 10,000 attendees.

02:05:58 ►

He’s also vice president of the Book Club of Detroit.

02:06:01 ►

In this passage, starting on page 380,

02:06:05 ►

the narrator is in England at a conference at Wilton Park.

02:06:10 ►

Surrounded by top officials and experts in the field of biological and chemical warfare,

02:06:12 ►

the narrator meets Magenta.

02:06:16 ►

They walk through a rose garden, and just like in his past encounters with the Six,

02:06:20 ►

this meeting turns into a transcendent and psychedelic experience.

02:06:25 ►

However, this time the visions are dark and disturbing reflections on the nature of war.

02:06:32 ►

The masters of modern biological and chemical warfare arrived one by one.

02:06:39 ►

Their black cars and chauffeurs passed the expansive lawns, grazing sheep, groomed thoroughbreds,

02:06:45 ►

rose gardens, arboretum, and stone chapel of Wilton Park, an 18th century manor in Sussex.

02:06:51 ►

Each of these special guests was attended by formal staff, then led through the chambers rife with paintings, carved balustrades, and stained glass.

02:06:56 ►

Assisted to their small room and reading lamp, they prepared to confront the malignancy of

02:07:01 ►

unrestricted weapons harbored by rogue and state actors with the technical

02:07:05 ►

capacity to disorient, infect, or kill individual targets or large populations.

02:07:13 ►

Academics, strategists, and futurologists gathered to consider chemical clouds inducing

02:07:19 ►

psychosis, plumes of weaponized anthrax and smallpox, and vapors that paralyze or maim

02:07:27 ►

a political opponent or entire villages in an agonizing welter of uncontrollable suffocation,

02:07:34 ►

lacrimation, urination, defecation, and blistered death.

02:07:41 ►

Around the estate of Wilton Park Manor, with its vaulted ceilings of painted white cherubs, were paths where pairs of young village equestrians, girls of twelve or so, cantered their bay geldings.

02:07:54 ►

By the Tudor entryway, there were fragrant beds of peonies and buttercups, and red poppies that the fresh-faced local children in the evenings gathered for Remembrance Day.

02:08:07 ►

Following at Harvard the progress of international controls on cognitive agents for warfare,

02:08:12 ►

I appeared, invitation in hand, to be welcomed by staff and introduced among the British

02:08:17 ►

chemists and military attaches from Porton Down, the UK version of American chem war

02:08:22 ►

groups in Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal.

02:08:24 ►

the UK version of American chem war groups in Fort Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal.

02:08:29 ►

A striking, soon-to-be-unforgettable maid from Edinburgh,

02:08:32 ►

with dancing eyes and skin like milk,

02:08:35 ►

dressed in formal black with a fulsome bodice,

02:08:38 ►

served hors d’oeuvres from a silver tray.

02:08:46 ►

The star-studded vernissage included officials from NATO, Whitehall, the Pentagon, private analytical firms, and the Chinese and Russian military.

02:08:50 ►

Most were concerned with containment, but the occasional face darkened with unholy powers,

02:08:56 ►

like some bête noire stealing secrets from the unsuspecting.

02:09:00 ►

These few individuals were the antithesis of those fearful of great evil.

02:09:03 ►

These few individuals were the antithesis of those fearful of great evil.

02:09:13 ►

They affected a careless hubri, but a sensitive observer could see they were riddled with mistrustfulness from their long-practiced deceits.

02:09:20 ►

Although distracted by the conflicting ethics, I tried to engage everyone cordially and indiscriminately,

02:09:25 ►

even though the lovers of light would consider the dark ones as hyperborean swine.

02:09:30 ►

From Indigo, I had learned to look for hidden agendas.

02:09:39 ►

The reception atmosphere, desiccated at first, evolved into collegial exchanges and comradeship as each found his own. It became an armed truce of the earth’s paladins in scientific lethalities,

02:09:47 ►

for all were delighted to find a virgin here.

02:09:50 ►

I had mingled with some light-hearted cluster when,

02:09:53 ►

across the polished oak-paneled room,

02:09:56 ►

a very fit Englishman glanced my way.

02:09:59 ►

With some transfixing anecdote,

02:10:01 ►

he was managing to hold down in a corner a brace of the local vampires,

02:10:06 ►

each of his prey with a name card and the manor sherry. His hair was tinted and trimmed almost

02:10:12 ►

to the scalp, his coat custom-tailored yet unremarkable. At the edge of his cuff I glimpsed

02:10:19 ►

sandalwood mala beads and a new Rolex Submariner. Unseen by others, he bowed to me in a namaste.

02:10:28 ►

Reflexively, I bowed as well, then started. Magenta.

02:10:34 ►

It was rather a trek from Pashupanipath. I relaxed as if an old friend had come round,

02:10:40 ►

but felt his visit was not for me. The vampires were disguised as unethical pharmacologists

02:10:47 ►

from Islamabad in expensive suits.

02:10:51 ►

Magenta disengaged them with a hearty farewell,

02:10:54 ►

a craft to deflect their suspicion.

02:10:57 ►

He approached me oddly, without surprise or salutation,

02:11:02 ►

but raising his voice quite audibly among others in the room,

02:11:05 ►

an inquiring of the poetry of Blake. Have you read that rebellious disciple of Swedenborg’s myths?

02:11:12 ►

He brandished instead copies of North’s Plutarch and Holland’s Head’s Chronicles,

02:11:18 ►

but avoided the usual Wildenpark references about binary bombs of hallucinogens or nerve gases or genetically modified Q fever.

02:11:28 ►

By this contrivance, he smoothly detached his companions, who had ulterior plans.

02:11:35 ►

Ever the devoted Hellenist, he slipped Pope’s Iliad translation into my jacket,

02:11:41 ►

then guided me outside through the delicate rose garden toward the 200-year-old

02:11:46 ►

chapel.

02:11:48 ►

We were alone but not by a tranquil Princeton lake or isolated within Nepalese religious

02:11:55 ►

frenzies.

02:11:56 ►

A contact high here would precipitate among closely knit circles of PhDs in unspeakable

02:12:02 ►

arts, all vastly skilled specialists in biochemical doomsday devices,

02:12:09 ►

as everyone took port cheeses and teas in the Wilton Park libraries.

02:12:14 ►

These were the heirs of the first chemical assault at Ypres, Belgium, in the Great War,

02:12:19 ►

where British soldiers choked in the trenches from the green death of chlorine.

02:12:25 ►

Collected here with us were many who defended civilization,

02:12:30 ►

but also those whose plagues would ensure a billion infectious corpses.

02:12:35 ►

I hoped the rose garden proved not to be that of Persephone, taken by Hades.

02:12:41 ►

As we passed on to the safety of the stone chapel’s consecrated ground,

02:12:46 ►

As we passed on to the safety of the stone chapel’s consecrated ground, an astral brilliance began to envelop us, a light before which all evil quailed.

02:12:53 ►

It was as though we were gently acquired by an advanced civilization, one that looked

02:12:57 ►

back upon its baser selves from that bright land inconceivable to those who would harm. Magenta remained wordless, producing only an

02:13:07 ►

antique malacca bamboo cane with an ivory handle. As at Bodanath, he began circumambulating the

02:13:15 ►

ancient pews and vestry, tapping the floor as he slowly walked, reciting prayers in Latin and

02:13:21 ►

Tibetan. The chapel walls were inlaid with centuries-old remembrances of the notable, the loved, and the brave.

02:13:30 ►

To the cadence of his muted prayers and the clicking of his staff, I walked silently as well,

02:13:37 ►

even as the chapel’s liturgical paintings and triptychs of St. Paul began to quiver,

02:13:43 ►

then float in the windless and holy sanctum.

02:13:47 ►

It began suddenly, not as the luminous benevolent aesthetics in Nepal, but as a devastating

02:13:54 ►

parade of religious conflicts.

02:13:57 ►

The slaughtering of beggars in the mosques of Wazil Khan in Lahore, the bloodbaths in

02:14:02 ►

the Peloponnese in Aegean recalled by Thucydides and Xenophon,

02:14:06 ►

the carnage of Belfast troubles and the marching season in the Catholic schoolgirls’ bodies

02:14:12 ►

desecrated by William of Orange at the Battle of Boyne, the countless slayings of infants

02:14:17 ►

from the extremes of Kierkegaardian Calvinism, unrestrained even by the harsh wisdom of Talmudic Judaism.

02:14:33 ►

By the circumambulating invitation, we were transported out of our ken, beyond the celestial mechanisms of Bodanath, beyond the concentric worlds of Ptolemy’s astronomical treatise

02:14:39 ►

The Almagest, to where the very stars burned.

02:14:43 ►

Trapped in a beastly black hole, we crawled on our bellies,

02:14:48 ►

the tapping that of some banshee tempest of brimstone upon our flayed backs,

02:14:53 ►

to the places of perdition where medieval crosses were inverted

02:14:58 ►

and images of Christ replaced mirrors.

02:15:02 ►

Long lines of hollowed-eyed and starved women and children with shattered limbs

02:15:07 ►

moved over radioactive earth, many cannibalized by vicious hordes or decimated by weaponized

02:15:14 ►

pestilences, with the last of human altruism but a single shriveled rose, secretly held against a malnourished, diseased breast.

02:15:33 ►

Within these phantasmagora of moral repugnance, each second a thousand years, we were caught in an infinite regression of unspeakable suffering, until we fleetingly glimpsed, through a crack

02:15:40 ►

in the grisly, bloody sky, the morning light of heaven.

02:15:44 ►

in the grisly, bloody sky, the morning light of heaven.

02:15:52 ►

By grace we entered a rapturous contemplation, recalling both the sorrowful and glorious mysteries.

02:15:53 ►

There was the odor of aromatic oils distilled from the relics of saints, and finally the

02:15:59 ►

scent of valerian.

02:16:01 ►

Through the narrow stone window of the chapel, I saw in the early evening a funeral

02:16:06 ►

swirling of rooks. The stars looked turbid. I turned, absorbed into the benign currents now

02:16:14 ►

manifesting, drawn at last into a laughing vortex of loving prophecies. Yet the disquieting prospects

02:16:22 ►

could not be forgotten, for we had been exposed to the

02:16:25 ►

chthonic, the underworld.

02:16:28 ►

It all stopped.

02:16:30 ►

Magenta was folding a chasuble, perusing the sanctus of high mass.

02:16:35 ►

As I listened, he began chanting a psalm, then intoned a te deum, while clouds of incense

02:16:41 ►

enfolded our somber reveries.

02:16:44 ►

I wondered if some of the conference participants

02:16:47 ►

might be the ultimate arbiters of human fate,

02:16:51 ►

and we the people, the endangered species,

02:16:54 ►

too late confronting extinction.

02:16:57 ►

We stood shriven in the garden of banksia roses,

02:17:01 ►

survivors freshly imbued with exquisite sensitivity to opposing forces. Magenta

02:17:08 ►

never again referred to the religiosity of our walk through the Valley of Shadows.

02:17:11 ►

Among the roses, after we descended, he still demonstrated his findings on experimental

02:17:20 ►

memory drugs. He did a rhapsode, comforting me greatly, by reciting long portions of the

02:17:27 ►

Homeric epics acquired from a single reading. At last, both somewhat more steady then,

02:17:35 ►

we turned to enter the high seas of gentlemanly deception.

02:17:41 ►

So we heard there from Ryan reading about a gathering in an English country house of people that study war and the various weapons of mass destruction.

02:17:56 ►

Something that I took from that extract is the way that history is very large in that extract.

02:18:02 ►

History is very large in that extract.

02:18:06 ►

There was a huge mention of the art that’s present in the location,

02:18:08 ►

the various parts of the architecture,

02:18:15 ►

references to the garden and the various flower beds and so forth that are found within that.

02:18:17 ►

The cuisine is talked about in a way that references past happenings as well,

02:18:22 ►

the history of that, and also literature.

02:18:25 ►

There’s a copy of the Iliad, which is slipped into the narrator’s pocket at one point,

02:18:29 ►

bringing to mind the ancient classics, which again turn up in the litany of the different wars and battles that are mentioned.

02:18:36 ►

And even the timing of the occurrence is quite poignant.

02:18:40 ►

So one of the things about the flowers in the garden is that the narrator describes them as being gathered by the local children in order to decorate the chapel for

02:18:49 ►

Remembrance Day, remembering those that have fallen. And the point of Remembrance Day,

02:18:54 ►

when it was originally started, was to remind ourselves of why going to war leads to so much

02:19:02 ►

pain and sorrow from the people that are survivors of that terrible thing.

02:19:07 ►

I think what’s really interesting is the idea of the chemistry and the warfare,

02:19:13 ►

because there’s a lot of references here to genetically engineered disease and biological and chemical agents.

02:19:20 ►

The passage speaks of the first use of chlorine gas during World War I, which was often described as the chemists’ war.

02:19:28 ►

And of course, LSD in its turn had at least attempts at weaponisation, although other substances were found to be more reliable.

02:19:37 ►

Wilton Park is one of those environments where, for a long time, this has been a meeting place for what we amusingly call the defense industry in its

02:19:46 ►

various forms and there’s a really interesting kind of sense in this that these people are just

02:19:52 ►

doing this this is kind of legit work they’re not being all undercover in the way that the six have

02:19:57 ►

to be in terms of their operation because despite the fact that they are dealing dealing potentially in global scale death engines of chemistry and biology.

02:20:07 ►

Nevertheless, they can sit in nice oak panelled rooms drinking tea in attractive environments in Britain.

02:20:15 ►

There’s an interesting bit as the contact high element in this passage starts to happen.

02:20:24 ►

happen i think that there’s a there’s a little reference there about something that i often think about this imagining a kind of a future self looking back at the these humans and this behavior

02:20:32 ►

at this time and um and looking how kind of you know primitive we are from almost a kind of a

02:20:37 ►

star trek kind of perspective and then magenta goes through this ritualistic process of casting

02:20:43 ►

i guess a kind of protective circle or protective environment within which they can have this experience of the parade of the horror of war.

02:20:54 ►

And very interestingly, particularly because it happens in a church, the horror of war through the institutions of religion and belief you know yeah the bad the banners of religion which are

02:21:05 ►

often used to incite people into these horrendous acts i liked how at the end of it the memory drugs

02:21:13 ►

allow magenta to recite a large passage of homer having just read it once which again ties in the

02:21:19 ►

sort of the modern technology with this ancient classical literature, but also the fact that Homer would

02:21:25 ►

have originally been, the Homeric works would have originally been recited purely from memory.

02:21:30 ►

And these hours and hours of word perfect, syllable perfect poetry would have been memorised

02:21:36 ►

by people without the aid of any memory drugs at all. The chemical technology that we have can be

02:21:42 ►

used not just for destruction. Yeah, yeah and again it folds back for me

02:21:47 ►

very much on this idea of you know if you look at the story of lsd as being kind of emblematic of

02:21:53 ►

lots of these kind of wider process the way that this substance appears and it appears of course

02:21:59 ►

in you know a neutral situation in war-torn Europe. And Arthur is certainly not looking at kind of,

02:22:09 ►

there’s not a sense of kind of an anti-technology narrative,

02:22:13 ►

I think, within this book.

02:22:15 ►

But it is very much trying to understand, you know,

02:22:19 ►

how might we press these things into the good service for ourselves and the benefit of all beings in this kind of compassionate way?

02:22:28 ►

The way that chemistry, disease, drugs, these things have been and are and continue to be used to enact huge violence on people.

02:22:39 ►

It’s one thing to talk about World War I, which is safely in the past.

02:22:43 ►

It’s one thing to talk about World War I, which is safely in the past,

02:22:47 ►

but more recent conflicts like the conflict in Syria and so on have undoubtedly shown the use of these agents,

02:22:50 ►

and particularly in Britain relatively recently,

02:22:53 ►

just down the road from Porton Down,

02:22:55 ►

there seemed to be a rather strange nerve agent incident that took place.

02:23:00 ►

So these things are abroad and happening right here now,

02:23:04 ►

and to be able to acknowledge that, which is I think what they’re doing by going to the church,

02:23:10 ►

they’re kind of witnessing the horror of what humans are capable of as well.

02:23:16 ►

You have to kind of engage with that if you’re going to try and change things in some way.

02:23:24 ►

These next recordings come from Dr. Ben Sessa.

02:23:28 ►

Ben works clinically as an adult and adolescent psychiatrist.

02:23:33 ►

As a member of the Imperial College London Psychedelic Research Group,

02:23:38 ►

he has an interest in the developmental trajectory

02:23:40 ►

from child maltreatment to adult mental health disorders.

02:23:44 ►

In the last 10 years,

02:23:46 ►

Ben has been a study doctor and a test subject, administering and receiving legal doses of pure

02:23:51 ►

intravenous LSD, psilocybin, DMT, and ketamine. And he has also trained as a registered MDMA

02:24:01 ►

psychotherapist. Ben is currently conducting the world’s first

02:24:05 ►

clinical study using MDMA to treat addiction. He is the co-founder and past president of the UK’s

02:24:12 ►

premier psychedelic research conference, Breaking Convention. He has published dozens of peer

02:24:18 ►

reviewed papers on psychedelics and is the author of several textbooks, including the influential Psychedelic Renaissance.

02:24:31 ►

This first excerpt from Ben starts on page 78 and takes place at the Harvard Kennedy School.

02:24:35 ►

This passage describes the narrator’s encounter with Ken Knauss,

02:24:40 ►

a former senior officer of the CIA Operations Directorate. it. There were countless receptions on the top floors of HKS with its mandarin calm,

02:24:51 ►

cinnamon walls, green baize tables, roped off sitting rooms, New England paintings and

02:24:58 ►

overview along the Charles from Harvard to MIT. Here we learned the easy aridities of social practice and our hearts were

02:25:08 ►

bright. Several exceptionally promising young doctoral candidates were visiting.

02:25:16 ►

We arrived at one of the myriad gatherings for students to engage with faculty,

02:25:21 ►

governors, and noblists and rainbow of former White House officials.

02:25:29 ►

The latter commonly were defrocked high-level bureaucrats waiting out the current administration

02:25:35 ►

with HKS teaching appointments. Mingling with this electric assortment of potential encounters,

02:25:43 ►

each a railway to traditional worlds, we passed

02:25:46 ►

a gallery of presidential portraits from Washington to Eisenhower. Through the vocal scholars,

02:25:53 ►

beyond the well-tendered lawns, sunshine was rippling on the Charles. We soon spied a tidy,

02:26:01 ►

poised gentleman in his early seventies standing somewhat apart with tailored suit tight military haircut pale blue eyes and bow tie he was reminiscent of a headmaster at st paul’s or pleasantries we entered into commerce with Ken Knauss, a senior officer late of

02:26:27 ►

the CIA operations directorate, now the National Clandestine Service. He chatted

02:26:35 ►

as amiably as any Gloucestershire vicar, rather than one protective of unspeakable secrets. He was a master of war.

02:26:50 ►

Knauss was a prime example of the legendary CIA spies always in residence,

02:26:56 ►

hobbyists all as talent spotters who harvested analysts from HKS classes.

02:27:03 ►

He was writing a manuscript on his early days as the young case

02:27:08 ►

officer who smuggled the adolescent Dalai Lama out of the Patala Palace in Lhasa,

02:27:15 ►

through regiments of Chinese seeking his holiness for other than religious purposes.

02:27:21 ►

On a train of mules accompanied by monks with prayer flags and bells, porters with bricks

02:27:29 ►

of tea and yak butter sampa, together with a small coterie of armed CIA personnel with encrypted

02:27:37 ►

radios, Naus and the Dalai Lama carefully treaded across the ice abysses and couloirs in the high passes of the himalayas from tibet down into the lush lowlands of dharamsala india into CIA tradecraft by easy and inoffensive verbal parries, the skills of a lifetime.

02:28:09 ►

He did acknowledge knowing Ken Olson, the biochemist under CIA psychiatrist Sidney Gottlieb,

02:28:17 ►

who died suddenly by defenestration plunging 20 stories, either pushed or suicidal, after being overdosed by CIA employees.

02:28:30 ►

Yes, I’m aware of Olsen.

02:28:34 ►

CIA technical services staff purposely administered Olsen LSD as an unwitting experimental subject in Operation MK Ultra

02:28:46 ►

during CIA’s effort to weaponize LSD as an interrogation agent in the Cold War.

02:28:55 ►

Naus said little about Olsen.

02:28:58 ►

Our benign generalities otherwise were not too pressing for him,

02:29:03 ►

so that we parted in an urbane way.

02:29:07 ►

I remained gratified by the gentlemanly manner of the secret services, if not their artful

02:29:15 ►

circumspection of actual intelligence information, for they were deft in creating a black hole from

02:29:22 ►

which no light emitted, save the smile of a Cheshire cat.

02:29:31 ►

This next excerpt, also from Ben, begins on page 80 and describes the various groups of students

02:29:37 ►

at Harvard. We continued up the Charles in the evening, where Memorial Drive traffic had been blocked off all the way to MIT.

02:29:48 ►

Beneath grand tents, almost nude taiko drummers in sweaty loincloths struck great drums in racy, overheated rhythms.

02:29:59 ►

Flocks of skaters swayed like seagrass as they flowed down open lanes.

02:30:05 ►

Semi-professional student mourners wore skeletal masks in a burial procession for the Chemical Weapons Treaty.

02:30:14 ►

Danish women engineers picked suggestively at the tassels of soft cushions

02:30:19 ►

beside owlish, frozen MIT students,

02:30:23 ►

while strobes and lasers shot from high suites in Lowell and

02:30:27 ►

Elliott houses. The light show precipitated thoughts of Crimson and how Harvard students

02:30:35 ►

were not unlike the six. Both groups had a global theater of operations. They were exiles of circumstance from many worlds,

02:30:46 ►

yet there was a fantastic poetry to them. Floating to the square, we saw Harvard women,

02:30:54 ►

fresh from encounters down the cobbled streets, teetering in high heels in the walk of shame for

02:31:00 ►

Puritans or the stride of pride for Libertines. Parisian students sat with languid,

02:31:07 ►

fruitless airs, having lost their half-dozen pliant French mistresses, and now confronted

02:31:14 ►

by thinking women with advanced cognitive skills. They claimed no taste for a girl that night.

02:31:29 ►

no taste for a girl that night. Posses of diverse women students were practicing the samba down Mass Ave. Reeling, hasty-pudding dramaturgs, flouncing in diaphanous lace and chiffon spikes,

02:31:37 ►

affected messy chic party hair and faux whorish latex pencil skirts. Clusters of cosmological physics students

02:31:48 ►

from Lowell Observatory wore fitted tops, corset belts, killer heels with vanity straps or houndstooth

02:31:56 ►

and snakeskin pumps. Others, the last of the Egyptologists, danced with Professor Gropius’s Bauhaus school designers.

02:32:08 ►

We had stumbled upon some celebrity haute couture catwalk of academic orgiasts,

02:32:15 ►

where excluded and less well-feathered males grouped in local bars,

02:32:20 ►

resorting to dropping the H-bomb, their matriculation in Cambridge, in hope of a date.

02:32:28 ►

College girls from west of the Charles to the Pacific were visiting. UCLA undergrad women

02:32:36 ►

on leave wore mouse ears. Dunster house men wore moose ears. Leveret house men wore rabbit ears. Mass Ave was rather like a galactic watering

02:32:49 ►

hole. I thought of the Harvard Botanical Museum nearby, where the inestimable Amazon explorer

02:32:59 ►

and ethnopharmacologist Richard Evans Schultz often had startlingly elegant, formidably serious grad

02:33:07 ►

students. Arrived from hot tribal nights in primitive villages in the Orinoco Basin,

02:33:14 ►

they insisted on keyboarding about hallucinogenic snuffs administered through blowpipes, while in

02:33:22 ►

the muggy Cambridge summers, the women writing their PhD theses

02:33:27 ►

were simply adorned with a macaw feather on a leather string, and were otherwise naked to the

02:33:34 ►

waist. So, I mean, first thing to say about this chapter, I really enjoyed this chapter and I think it was chosen for me rather than I chose it.

02:33:47 ►

I liked it because I like universities. I love the diversity of universities. I love the fact that

02:33:55 ►

you have thrown together people from all different parts of the social spectrum and all different disciplines and academic persuasions

02:34:07 ►

all kind of thrown together under this bizarre bubble of academia that’s outside of everyday

02:34:15 ►

life. And it reminded me of the many universities where I have worked in or been a student at or a lecturer at.

02:34:27 ►

And I think what stands out with this,

02:34:31 ►

and on all universities, and why I liked it,

02:34:32 ►

is there’s a kind of unwritten code within a university

02:34:37 ►

as to whether you’re an old don that’s been there for 60 years

02:34:41 ►

or a brand-new undergraduate,

02:34:43 ►

everyone is entitled to an opinion because anyone could

02:34:47 ►

make a breakthrough at any point so you have to be really respectful of all the different groups

02:34:53 ►

now that’s me being supremely optimistic and uh perhaps naive because in fact there’s very

02:35:09 ►

because in fact there’s very large levels of hierarchy and snobbishness and entitlement and all the rest of it.

02:35:18 ►

But I think you ideally go into the university at any level with that kind of approach that you can make changes and you are at the cutting edge of academia where the new stuff happens.

02:35:24 ►

At least that’s the kind of naive approach I have when I

02:35:28 ►

walk into a university but um whether it’s actually like that I’m not sure but that kind of it came

02:35:33 ►

across in the chapter when I was reading it that it just it reminded me of being a student which I

02:35:39 ►

really enjoyed I think as I understand it that Leonard was a student at the Harvard Kennedy School in 1994.

02:35:49 ►

So perhaps that is you’re picking up something about his experience of that kind of excitement of being in this international milieu. interesting with those two sections of your reading that on the one hand you’ve got this

02:36:05 ►

kind of narrative of the CIA and MK Ultra and all that the weaponization of LSD and on the other

02:36:13 ►

part of the reading there’s the the stuff about Richard Evans Schultes and you know his kind of

02:36:19 ►

connection to the the entheogens of the Americas and so on.

02:36:28 ►

So it kind of counterpoints those worlds as well,

02:36:30 ►

I think, in an interesting way.

02:36:34 ►

Yeah, which is actually the kind of perennial challenge of the psychedelic community today,

02:36:38 ►

as we talk about so often,

02:36:41 ►

this conflict between the scientists and the shamans and who who who

02:36:47 ►

should ask who should um occupy the main position on the astral plane is it is it is it the the

02:36:52 ►

people in the white coats or is it the plant medicines people of course the answer is they

02:36:57 ►

both can learn from each other and they both have um fantastic successes in their work and also some hideous abuses in their work on both sides

02:37:08 ►

and in a way that sort of sums up the psychedelic experience as well. When you strip away everything

02:37:15 ►

into just a pure white energy field of vibrations all of those different labels and games are

02:37:24 ►

dissolved and you’re just left with everything thrown up in

02:37:27 ►

the air and what what do we make of that and how do we piece that together into something that’s

02:37:31 ►

useful for the individual in the society and humanity and so I guess this the whole of this

02:37:37 ►

book is about this this conflict isn’t it of turning turning something magical into something that’s distributed and available and all of the

02:37:48 ►

malevolent forces that gather around such things including governments and the cia and um

02:37:56 ►

the the the people that that are kind of at the cutting edge of the psychedelics you’d like to think are those people

02:38:05 ►

who have this very wholesome approach of sharing and universal cosmic oneness um but at the same

02:38:13 ►

time it’s an enormous piece of um infrastructure and organization to actually get this product

02:38:22 ►

out there and available to tens of millions of people if

02:38:26 ►

it’s going to do any good. And of course, doing it all under the radar of the regulatory authorities,

02:38:32 ►

or indeed with the support of the regulatory authorities in a clandestine way. So

02:38:38 ►

yeah, what a Astia, I’m 19, I’m from Paris originally but grew up abroad.

02:38:59 ►

I’m currently studying politics, philosophy and economics at Durham University as an undergraduate. And I’m going

02:39:06 ►

to read a passage from the third chapter called What the Doorknob Said. The context for this

02:39:11 ►

passage is the protagonist is discovering Harvard with two cherished friends, so meandering around

02:39:17 ►

and finding out a little bit more about the institution. So this is on page 83.

02:39:23 ►

The weather was changing. Great storms lurked off Kenanburg

02:39:27 ►

ports up the rugged main coast, wet leaves and mounds in the yard. Students were bound up tightly

02:39:33 ►

by the alien integers of their midterm grades. There were histrionic silences and a pervading

02:39:39 ►

melancholy under cold rains. Intermittent stabbings of reality assured us of our imminent demise.

02:39:46 ►

The Charles was choppy, with white crest and magisterial north winds. Even in calms, a heavy

02:39:52 ►

damp came off the river with dense, blurred ground mists. A last sailboat wallowed and yawed for a

02:39:58 ►

while, then suddenly heeled before the wind, laying in sheets, shaking down the jib, coming about and tacking to shore to make fast. It finally turned on the stern anchor, helpless before

02:40:09 ►

the incoming weather. The high-spirited little warrior tribes of

02:40:14 ►

Harvard Square dwindled into gossip of the lazy and envious. Unconscious moral judgments

02:40:19 ►

flashed about. One unfortunate girl, common and fast-looking, kept swinging her leg so close to the needles and

02:40:26 ►

sores. After the hushing of the rains, as rare as sunlight dried its damp facades, Massachusetts

02:40:32 ►

Hall became an old faded daguerreotype. We moved through cold currents, the air full of static

02:40:38 ►

electricity, our colored fantasies soon drained in the insistent river wind. The nights became frozen, the stars brilliant.

02:40:46 ►

I often walked by the crisp beauty of Elliott, Quincy, and Lowell Halls, alight by the lonely

02:40:51 ►

water of the trials, thinking that this marathon intellectual orgy was but a spiraling labyrinth

02:40:57 ►

of concealed motives. The survivors thus far only whispered bruised affections, for our pierced

02:41:03 ►

happiness was suspended until finals.

02:41:06 ►

The grad students looked for traction.

02:41:08 ►

The undergrads yielded their infectious high spirits, their champagne tipsiness, their spent kisses for new constellations of profound effort.

02:41:15 ►

Odd gleams of sunshine riddled the yard.

02:41:18 ►

Torrents of brass brown leaves swirled until the first heavy frosts peeled the sky clear.

02:41:24 ►

Lean, long-haired, well-featured senior women undergrads

02:41:27 ►

stalked the steps of Widener,

02:41:29 ►

their chilled cheeks blushing, wearing long mufflers,

02:41:32 ►

fine gloves or mittens, lack warmers,

02:41:35 ►

and ankle-length coat-knit at the waist.

02:41:39 ►

Lovely in their focus, they sought warm, silent alcoves

02:41:41 ►

to ponder Goethe’s Swedenborg,

02:41:44 ►

with furtive glances

02:41:45 ►

at Exeter or Andover alums, or at each other.

02:41:50 ►

I spied Halk, a victim of the historical virus, explaining with accordial futility to ice-bound

02:41:55 ►

tourists the three lies of John Harvard’s statue, as if the tale were dismembered fragments

02:42:00 ►

of a novel. I surreptitiously joined the group. The statue of John Harvard in

02:42:05 ►

the old yard was, throughout the year, but particularly during commencement, an academic

02:42:09 ►

mecca. A bronze figure of a seated youth in the 1600s, it was akin, in religious terms, to the

02:42:16 ►

massive shrouded cube of the Kaaba, about which Islamic devotees, on the pilgrimage of Hajj,

02:42:21 ►

circumambulate counterclockwise in reverent masses.

02:42:28 ►

The statue attracted much devotion among international groups of visitors,

02:42:32 ►

no less than the rumoured white meteorite within the Meccan shroud,

02:42:35 ►

now turned black from absorbing the sins of the world.

02:42:40 ►

In the yard, tourists congregated hourly before the statue,

02:42:45 ►

which had become a type of genie representing the limits of human consciousness.

02:42:50 ►

Hulking encouraged tourists to wrap the bronze buckled boots of this hirsute founder with his fine countenance and frock coat, like actual students who appeared at the statue, to coax

02:42:55 ►

scholarly excellence to emerge before a reading period. Harvard’s sanctuary was allotted often

02:43:01 ►

to the truly accomplished, and more rarely to wandering monks of questionable

02:43:05 ►

backgrounds. Visitors sometimes mistook these privileges for the tawdry commonality of prestige,

02:43:12 ►

a word derived from prestidigitation, or the making of illusions. However it was regarded

02:43:18 ►

by passers-by, or what sins it harbored so mutely, It was regarded with affection as the statue of the three lies.

02:43:31 ►

Hulk was pontificating marvelously and winked at me. Cast by Daniel Chester French before he sculpted a Lincoln Memorial, he said, the inscription reads John Harvard, founder, 1638.

02:43:38 ►

But none of this is true. The statue is of Sherman Hoare, class of 1882, descendant of a prior president.

02:43:45 ►

I whispered, don’t forget his pluck.

02:43:49 ►

Hulk threw me a foul look.

02:43:51 ►

Sixteen years after Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock,

02:43:54 ►

Massachusetts Bay Colony purchased the acre of land that became the yard

02:43:57 ►

and founded the college in 1636.

02:44:01 ►

John Harvard, minister at Charlestown, donated in his will 400 volumes and 779 pounds, now an endowment of 35 billion.

02:44:11 ►

I began to flap my arms behind the transfixed tourists.

02:44:15 ►

17th century Harvard accepted tuition as wheat, Indian corn, apples, honey, firewood, sheep, and, uh, chickens. As the visitors moved on, Hulk and I remained at the

02:44:28 ►

statue, observing there were not three lies, but five. The seal on the left side of the statue

02:44:34 ►

read Veritas, with the original motto as Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, truth for Christ and the

02:44:41 ►

church. And in all other images, this seal was of a shield with

02:44:46 ►

three open books, but the statue had the middle book facing downward, a Puritan reminder that

02:44:51 ►

not all knowledge is written. From these unsteady bases, the moral imperatives of Veritas unseated

02:44:58 ►

the prestidigitation of those early-born members whose nimble wits first conjured the statue’s lives.

02:45:07 ►

Passing this icon frequently,

02:45:10 ►

we were reminded to look beneath accepted reality,

02:45:13 ►

even that written in stone and bronze for centuries,

02:45:16 ►

to question even the underpinning of the university itself.

02:45:20 ►

We discerned with amusement our first and final lesson,

02:45:23 ►

that the true can also be false,

02:45:27 ►

so that when we were at last set upon the world,

02:45:31 ►

standing in caps and gowns before John Harvard’s statue at commencement,

02:45:51 ►

it was as if we were favoured politicians at a landslide, recorded forever before a background so that lovely reading by estia we’re brought back into harvard which our protagonist talks about as being sort of you know this rarefied interesting diverse environment which occasionally

02:45:57 ►

welcomes wandering monks which i guess is a reference to to himself i guess one of the

02:46:02 ►

things that really comes over for me in terms of this part of the

02:46:05 ►

book is this interesting sort of play between truth and falsity where the image that we’re

02:46:13 ►

looking at of John Harvard from 1638 it’s not actually a picture a bronze of him it’s somebody

02:46:20 ►

else from much later and there’s a whole bunch of lies kind of embedded within that

02:46:26 ►

but nevertheless there is the reality of Harvard as this center of excellence and this powerhouse

02:46:33 ►

of intellectual and political might within the United States. Yeah and to some extent it doesn’t really matter who the statue is really of because it’s

02:46:46 ►

the having a memorial to the person that did found the learning the institute of learning in the

02:46:53 ►

first place that’s the thing you’re trying to remember not what he specifically looked like

02:46:57 ►

i thought it was very appropriate that estia who’s a young student is reading this bit about students

02:47:04 ►

i thought that was quite a nice uh sort of looping back upon itself of reality there

02:47:09 ►

yeah the the way that the veritas that’s talked about there the truth the part about it being the

02:47:16 ►

truth of the church has now disappeared from the statue as being not so important um although i

02:47:24 ►

also really like the way that as a Puritan,

02:47:26 ►

the middle of the three books is upside down

02:47:28 ►

because not all that’s true can be written.

02:47:30 ►

I really like that aspect.

02:47:33 ►

Yeah, I think that’s really nice.

02:47:34 ►

It’s interesting for me as a British person

02:47:36 ►

sort of reflecting on this,

02:47:38 ►

because obviously this is like,

02:47:40 ►

from the point of view of the American psyche

02:47:41 ►

or the contemporary European descent American psyche,

02:47:45 ►

this is like a really powerful kind of deep moment within that history.

02:47:49 ►

And yet, from my perspective, 1638 is relatively recent in kind of the European sort of story.

02:47:57 ►

And again, there’s this idea of European descent culture in the United States kind of sits on top of all this other stuff that’s kind of unspoken and

02:48:06 ►

hidden and the difficulties that have

02:48:08 ►

emerged with the First Nations kind of

02:48:10 ►

communities and the way that that story is played

02:48:12 ►

out is a big thing here. It’s also

02:48:14 ►

kind of amusing that the person

02:48:16 ►

who’s doing the talk is called

02:48:18 ►

Hulk and that’s kind of nice

02:48:20 ►

you know this kind of

02:48:22 ►

kind of jokey

02:48:24 ►

comic book character kind of

02:48:26 ►

referenced this this um great american hero hulk for me as someone who’s never been to harvard and

02:48:34 ►

didn’t really know much about the setting not only this extract but also other parts of the

02:48:39 ►

this chapter and the book wider where it describes harvard university as a physical place which is

02:48:46 ►

cold next to a river and the way people are dressing and behaving around it i found that

02:48:51 ►

made it really come to life as being a place where people are which i’m aware of of sort of the

02:48:56 ►

places like oxford and cambridge in the country that i’m from so they are universities which are

02:49:01 ►

these sort of bastions of learning, these figureheads, these immense, important cultural icons.

02:49:07 ►

But I also know them as real places where real people live.

02:49:11 ►

But for America, because that’s so far distant for me, it was really heartening to hear about the people that live there and the way that they are with the cold and the fact that it’s a real place with real people in it.

02:49:26 ►

the cold and the fact that it’s a real place with real people in it and therefore subject to all of the things including um you know the the convenience of various falsities etc that that brings with it

02:49:33 ►

there’s definitely a sense in which yeah the the landscape of harvard which is really powerful in

02:49:39 ►

in the rose is also really evocative for me as well because it sounds so european in some respects you know

02:49:45 ►

i’m not talking i’m not even told about sort of deserts i’m not being told about sort of

02:49:50 ►

you know grand canyons i’m being told about a landscape which sounds like a sort of european

02:49:54 ►

landscape continental european landscape this landscape where the fall where the autumn brings

02:50:02 ►

this kind of cold and this turning inward and it’s the beginning of the academic year

02:50:06 ►

and it’s a really intense kind of period of forming and storming within the groups and so on,

02:50:11 ►

which is exactly the way it is in northwestern Europe.

02:50:22 ►

Hi, I’m Jo. I’m a theology student at Durham.

02:50:26 ►

So this extract takes place shortly after the protagonist’s commencement at Harvard.

02:50:30 ►

He’s travelling the world and he keeps serendipitously bumping into Cobalt,

02:50:35 ►

who then sheds his classic contact highs and wisdom.

02:50:40 ►

So yeah, here we go.

02:50:42 ►

Page 490.

02:50:44 ►

So yeah, here we go. Page 490.

02:50:50 ►

Cobalt on tour of the earth always was a wellspring of stories.

02:50:55 ►

He moved among topics seemingly randomly, fleetingly, subject to subject,

02:51:00 ►

the listener discovering only periodically the interlacing crystalline perfection of his thought.

02:51:07 ►

At the sunset, a satellite was visible, inducing some deep reticence in him. He began alluding to rituals, primitive peoples, and the meaning of blood. I could see no connection to

02:51:12 ►

the transit in near-Earth orbit. The Bushmen of the Kalahari, he said, burn fires and offer prayers

02:51:19 ►

to the space station overhead. The astronauts, in turn, see remote lights north of the Orange River

02:51:24 ►

and south of Lake Ngami

02:51:25 ►

in Botswana and know some of the fires are for them, an interdependency of faith and magic.

02:51:32 ►

In the South African deserts, the same event occurs among outback aboriginals, a massive

02:51:38 ►

international surveillance apparatus gliding beyond the sky looking down, earth’s ancestors by rude fires looking up, the future and

02:51:46 ►

past in reverence to each other. But the Bushmen may survive us. Ah, you know that. Our science

02:51:53 ►

may lead to mass extinction, with their flutes and dance and incantations surviving. Each culture is

02:51:59 ►

the height of its own evolution, the tips of divergent lines. Exquisite that we care for each other, they in

02:52:06 ►

the dignity of their songs and prayers, and we in our humble awareness. We now abide the limitless

02:52:11 ►

ocean, as cobalt range through the spectrum of what will come, speaking of computerised and

02:52:16 ►

holographic human simulacra, three-dimensional heads or bodies from advanced AI, human identities.

02:52:23 ►

They’re related in any person’s voice, incorporating

02:52:25 ►

every detail of one’s lifelong digital record, and would be indistinguishable from a deceased

02:52:30 ►

parent or child. He mentioned such wildly alterative futures casually, almost like a

02:52:36 ►

giddy friend on an outing. Yet he had a saintly aspect of each word being some great gift,

02:52:42 ►

its utterance a compassionate act. He was never an excited

02:52:46 ►

or blustering fellow. His every action, however minor, was considered.

02:52:52 ►

You’ve heard of the AI outcome where thinking machines unified to solve the unsolvable.

02:52:57 ►

It came from an early initiate, a biochemist at Boston University. I assured him I hadn’t.

02:53:04 ►

It’s fiction, of course, he said. Even the narrator is an

02:53:07 ►

illusion. He smiled. I felt the tug of multiple identities, of other dimensions and selves.

02:53:14 ►

Cobalt always took the long view, whether into past or future, myth or reality.

02:53:20 ►

He had a pronounced tendency to the cosmic, although with affection and balance, like an astrophysicist delighted at the presumption of mathematics embracing all of space and time, describing both tigers and galaxies.

02:53:33 ►

Computer data warehouses expanded, he began, flinging an arm into the air.

02:53:38 ►

All information went to the cloud. Data grew boundlessly for ceaseless generations, a billion years of every record maintained forever.

02:53:47 ►

Physicists, concerned with the inevitable death of the sun, asked the global computer an insoluble problem.

02:53:53 ►

Can entropy be reversed?

02:53:56 ►

Artificial intelligence devoted much of the cloud’s processing power to this conundrum.

02:54:01 ►

Whether the running down of the universe, entropy, could be changed.

02:54:05 ►

The computer ultimately announced its conclusion.

02:54:08 ►

What was that?

02:54:09 ►

Insufficient data at this time.

02:54:12 ►

But how was the conundrum solved?

02:54:15 ►

500 million years passed.

02:54:17 ►

The solar-powered global computer now occupied much of the Earth’s surface.

02:54:21 ►

The spectres of war and pestilence long had been eliminated, but data continued to aggregate. The seas died. Stellar migrations absorbed the populations.

02:54:31 ►

The last human on Earth asked the question, can entropy be reversed? The global computer

02:54:37 ►

updated its investigation. I know, insufficient data at this time? The last rays of the sun enlarged to a purple glow beyond our beachhead,

02:54:47 ►

then receded into blackness.

02:54:51 ►

Yes, the universe was dying.

02:54:53 ►

The supercluster gravitational lens CL0024 plus 1624 disappeared.

02:54:59 ►

The last stars went out.

02:55:01 ►

The Higgs field, the cosmic microwave background radiation,

02:55:05 ►

all gone to black, absolute zero.

02:55:08 ►

The last mind of man was only a drifting spirit.

02:55:12 ►

The computer occupied all extra-dimensional space.

02:55:15 ►

Merging with it, the final consciousness asked,

02:55:19 ►

Can entropy be reversed?

02:55:20 ►

The last thought, insufficient data at this time.

02:55:27 ►

Stars crept in the moonless sky above us, as if strewn by the forgiving hands of grace. The hyperspace computer existed only to contemplate

02:55:34 ►

the insoluble solution. Countless eons passed, suddenly expanding to the limits of the universe.

02:55:41 ►

It then contracted to a diameter less than that of an electron.

02:55:53 ►

It had arrived at a solution. What was it? I asked. Let there be light, the universal computer said,

02:56:03 ►

and there was light. So of course it’s appropriate to have a theology student reading that mythos that’s recounted by cobalt i guess one of the things that

02:56:07 ►

it makes me think of before we go into the sort of the you know the mythic side of this story of

02:56:12 ►

the kind of global supercomputer that ends up kind of recreating the universe and all that sort of

02:56:16 ►

stuff is is just that reciprocal kind of relationship that’s spoken about between

02:56:22 ►

the people on the african savannah lighting fires

02:56:26 ►

observing the satellites making their transits and the people on you know the the people viewing

02:56:32 ►

the earth from the satellites as part of this the lights in the darkness from both of those

02:56:36 ►

perspectives exactly these two are the sort of the outward tendrils or the outward what was the word

02:56:43 ►

that he uses but the outward fingers of the sort

02:56:46 ►

of the branches of evolution where one culture has gone very much down the route of living with

02:56:50 ►

as little as possible and the other culture has gone down the route of living with as much as

02:56:54 ►

possible would be my own distinction of those two ways of looking at things.

02:57:00 ►

Cobalt’s very interested in computers, data, surveillance, all that kind of thing.

02:57:05 ►

And we know, you know, inevitably these are double-edged swords.

02:57:09 ►

You know, your mobile phone allows you to have real-time communication with other minds across the planet

02:57:13 ►

and also means that you can be tracked very successfully by a whole variety of people, government agencies and indeed others.

02:57:19 ►

One of the interesting things I think for me is that Len is actually sitting outside of a lot of this.

02:57:25 ►

So he’s been in jail for 20 years.

02:57:29 ►

And so while the digital surveillance, connection, encryption, observation, social media, multiple discourse revolution has taken place, he hasn’t actually played a part of that.

02:57:45 ►

revolution has taken place he hasn’t actually played a part of that so kind of cobalt i’m guessing you know from is that kind of characters sort of imagining very successfully i think into

02:57:51 ►

this world of kind of uh cyberdelics and interconnectivity and cloud-based computing

02:57:57 ►

and the kind of future shock ai world from somebody who hasn’t actually had very much

02:58:02 ►

kind of connection with this world as uh as

02:58:05 ►

an individual and as an author for a very long time yeah leonard’s not had any direct contact

02:58:11 ►

with that except through basic email technology so it’s quite fascinating that he’s got this

02:58:18 ►

quite um quite accurate philosophical perception of it although he’s possibly not quite so aware of the terror of

02:58:25 ►

adverts which is the bane of everyone’s existence everyone’s internet existence so yes you have

02:58:30 ►

government agencies tracking you but far more insidious and far more affecting of your everyday

02:58:37 ►

reality of the way that adverts just burst in upon your every communication and every media

02:58:43 ►

experience and that’s something that Leonard is

02:58:45 ►

not quite so aware of I suspect. So the sort of very science fiction idea of this global sized

02:58:53 ►

computer which will exist has existed in the future because we’re kind of having this story

02:58:59 ►

told to us from an eternal outside time perspective and the idea that this computer then expands along with the

02:59:06 ►

heat death of the universe and expands and expands until it takes up the entire universe itself with

02:59:12 ►

this echoing question of can entropy be reversed which then causes it to restart the whole big

02:59:20 ►

bang process once more and that rebooting of reality happens with the words

02:59:27 ►

from the book of genesis and the bible let there be light so there’s a sense in which this kind of

02:59:34 ►

hyper technology again folds back into this kind of spiritual domain looking once more reminding us

02:59:42 ►

i guess the first part of that, this relationship between these cultures that have developed this sort of spiritual way of interacting with the world,

02:59:50 ►

as opposed to these kind of like hyper-technologized ways of viewing the world.

02:59:54 ►

And the fact that these two things are not really distinct, at least in Cobalt’s mind,

02:59:58 ►

that these are part of one kind of mythical whole, one mythical reality.

03:00:04 ►

And they’re even actively looking at each other

03:00:06 ►

and knowing what the other is that for me is one of the most beautiful parts of this is the way

03:00:10 ►

that the the aborigines are looking up at the space station and they know it’s a space station

03:00:14 ►

that there are people in it and the people in the space station are looking down at the firelight

03:00:18 ►

and knowing that there are people down there so they’re not even looking at this as an abstract

03:00:21 ►

kind of thing but they’re looking at each other, as it says, with care.

03:00:27 ►

And that’s really lovely.

03:00:30 ►

It’s a both and rather than either or, like a lot of the book.

03:00:36 ►

Bruce Van Dyke is a disc jockey and an acquaintance of Leonard’s.

03:00:43 ►

Bruce has done quality time on the air in Reno, San Antonio, Denver, and Tulare, California. The inspiration for his life path occurred while he was pulling a late shift on the student station at San Diego State, KCRFM.

03:00:53 ►

It was a simple but lasting epiphany.

03:00:55 ►

If I can just get someone to pay me to play records.

03:00:59 ►

Currently, Bruce is perpetuating a format of interest mainly to the eclectically curious,

03:01:05 ►

a programming approach called Schizoclectica.

03:01:08 ►

His station will proceed with gusto through a random garden of musical genres.

03:01:13 ►

In this excerpt, starting on page 366,

03:01:18 ►

the narrator visits Afghanistan to fulfill a promise he made to Akbar Bey,

03:01:22 ►

a man he befriended in prison years earlier.

03:01:26 ►

The undulating brown plains of Afghanistan pass slowly beneath my aircraft,

03:01:33 ►

their vast abysmal reaches dotted by clusters of mud huts

03:01:37 ►

below the pristine magnificence of the Hindu Kush.

03:01:42 ►

Seemingly unchanged since the medieval era, this land, with its everlasting

03:01:47 ►

purity, was an expanse of sparse fields and stony walls. It appeared peaceful from the air.

03:01:56 ►

Yet behind this pastoral image was the hair-trigger of rapacious strife, for its peoples

03:02:02 ►

were the descendants of massacres in the three Anglo-Afghan

03:02:06 ►

wars, in a land where the first sound a newborn heard was gunfire, celebrating its birth as its

03:02:13 ►

mother sang of ancient battle. Children were reminded of how many British their ancestors

03:02:19 ►

killed as they played with East Indian Company coins handed down as heirlooms from British corpses.

03:02:26 ►

This journey was a duty to Akbar Bey, one promised so often as we sat together on a prayer rug in prison,

03:02:35 ►

sipping sweet black tea from crudely fired handmade cups beneath the only tree,

03:02:41 ►

a wretched little birch with few leaves for shade.

03:02:44 ►

beneath the only tree a wretched little birch with few leaves for shade.

03:02:50 ►

We watched as disoriented inner-city crack addicts stumbled in circles nearby.

03:02:56 ►

The first to be released, I vowed to bring a gift to his family in Central Asia.

03:03:01 ►

We swore solemnly to share a proper tea, with rice and almonds, free one day beneath the arching blue sky and crystalline white peaks of Afghanistan.

03:03:09 ►

Down from Kathmandu through Delhi, transported in a doubtful Russian Ilyushin-6 overflight across Afghanistan,

03:03:17 ►

I aimed first for Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to meet with Afghan contacts.

03:03:28 ►

Tough Uzbeks, Hindu families, and ethnic Slavs filled the rows. Sheets draped to unoccupied seats and white fog poured from air vents as hostesses

03:03:35 ►

in blonde bouffants and trim black micro skirts offered paper cups of Coca-Cola as if it were sacramental wine at communion. As our aircraft turned toward

03:03:47 ►

Uzbekistan, I could see the Fergana Valley, a finger of Afghanistan 218 miles long and only

03:03:55 ►

11 miles wide at its narrowest, where rough brigands and noble tribes on horseback rode,

03:04:02 ►

traded, and fought between the mountains of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,

03:04:07 ►

Pakistan, and China. The British surveyor Durand created these borders to point at China

03:04:15 ►

as a barrier against northward movement of hordes from the Indian subcontinent.

03:04:21 ►

Durand arbitrarily drew the lines based on geology and the politics of empire, separating

03:04:27 ►

the region’s tribes into separate nations and producing endless strife. It was a triumph of

03:04:33 ►

geographic artifice that failed to comprehend these deeply interwoven bloodlines.

03:04:40 ►

The Karakoram Range rose along the Hindu Kush Mountains down into the fabled Khyber Pass,

03:04:48 ►

while the vista of peaks to the east included the spectacle of Chomolongma, Everest.

03:04:55 ►

I thought of little Abir in Nepal, wearing her thin, worn sari,

03:05:02 ►

and reading her primer by firelight, lost in the vast range of mud and snow.

03:05:10 ►

Researchers on Central Asia at the Kennedy School had briefed me on the regional strongmen.

03:05:17 ►

Dostum, of course, the French-speaking poet Massoud, the rapacious Hekmatyar, the Uzbek Karamov, and other potentates.

03:05:27 ►

As Tajikistan appeared on the shimmering horizon, I thought of its mad president,

03:05:33 ►

Niyazov, the last of the Stalinists, whose ruthlessness included, commonly at gunpoint,

03:05:39 ►

a bizarre personality cult. He had banned libraries, dogs, men’s beards, and lipstick on newscasters.

03:05:48 ►

In the capital of Ashgabat,

03:05:51 ►

his stern visage gazed at the oppressed from a multi-story golden statue of himself.

03:05:58 ►

It rotated through the days of each week and the months he had renamed.

03:06:03 ►

Even during April, now the name of his mother.

03:06:08 ►

The Cambridge researchers advised caution. One emphatically recalled the last warning

03:06:13 ►

of British Commander Sir William McNaughton in the First Anglo-Afghan War.

03:06:19 ►

This country is one mass of loose gunpowder. McNaughton himself, another historian quickly interjected,

03:06:28 ►

arrived triumphantly on elephants with an entourage of camp followers,

03:06:33 ►

but fell into disgrace.

03:06:35 ►

By what means, I politely inquired.

03:06:40 ►

In the end he was quartered by sabers.

03:06:43 ►

His hands waved on sticks to taunt his captive men.

03:06:47 ►

They paraded his torso through Kabul.

03:06:51 ►

Where was his head?

03:06:53 ►

Traded in the bazaar, he replied with a reluctant air, cradled in his horse’s nosebag.

03:07:03 ►

The placid, limitless fields, falling away between the frozen colors of the

03:07:08 ►

Hindu Kush, thus belied the turbulent background of this country. Even now, as the Taliban crept

03:07:16 ►

northward in Toyota Jeeps affixed with heavy machine guns, this same mythical land was occupied

03:07:22 ►

by remnants of the Mujahideen,

03:07:25 ►

the former anti-Soviet freedom fighters armed by CIA.

03:07:30 ►

The researchers produced anecdotal reports that hard-pressed troops

03:07:35 ►

unflinchingly devoured or copulated without shame

03:07:39 ►

their donated Tennessee and Egyptian mules.

03:07:43 ►

The only other Westerner on the aircraft was a war correspondent

03:07:47 ►

linking from Tashkent to Frankfurt,

03:07:50 ►

a lean, crew-cut German national with a ripped bush jacket and battered sunglasses.

03:07:56 ►

He asked of my intent and then gave advice about action in rural areas.

03:08:02 ►

I had a few questions.

03:08:05 ►

Analysts tell me there are pockets of renegade Russian soldiers

03:08:09 ►

that traffic heroin across the Tajik-Uzbek borders,

03:08:14 ►

and women down into northern Afghanistan.

03:08:18 ►

Your experience?

03:08:20 ►

Perhaps a few established groups who pay tribute to the warlords for protection.

03:08:26 ►

But in the countryside, lone survivors discovered by the Muj after the Russian pullout were treated quite poorly, held in desperate rooms.

03:08:35 ►

Other things.

03:08:37 ►

What do you mean?

03:08:40 ►

British special forces sporadically repatriated captive Russian soldiers that the Muj had driven into madness.

03:08:49 ►

They were severely diminished, barely functional, often hospitalized.

03:08:54 ►

How? Why?

03:08:58 ►

The Muj spared their lives only if they prostituted themselves on demand to circles of Afghan

03:09:07 ►

troops grown savage on Naswar, opiated snuff, passed around naked, surviving only on scraps

03:09:16 ►

of offal for years.

03:09:22 ►

Although this was a land of frequent bright smiles and formidable courtesy,

03:09:27 ►

it was also a maelstrom of periodic butchery, unpredictable lust, and common treachery.

03:09:36 ►

It was a land into which I, sapped by growing trepidation, ever so slowly descended.

03:09:47 ►

The reception desk at the rude Soviet-era Hotel Uzbekistan in Tashkent

03:09:54 ►

looked upon a sea of plastic chairs populated by disoriented arrivals

03:09:59 ►

and questionable transients who were murmuring confidences or shouting excitedly in Dari,

03:10:07 ►

Uzbek, Russian, Pashto, Urdu, esoteric Indian dialects, and most rarely, English.

03:10:15 ►

A mammoth cement rabbit warren with tiny cells, frequently workable showers, iron-hard narrow bunks, and steely Russian matrons guarding each floor and one’s room key,

03:10:29 ►

the hotel was the central Asian rendezvous for those who envisioned hustling the East.

03:10:36 ►

This waiting room was a crossroad replete with silent-pock covert operatives, engaging Tajik conmen, insolent Bangladeshi hustlers,

03:10:47 ►

harried translators, raffish British refrigerator salesmen in cheap suits,

03:10:53 ►

and florid Germans purportedly buying gypsum. Closed by an abundance of risky deal-making,

03:11:00 ►

a fearless and inspired missionary or two assumed the safety of rickety elevators

03:11:05 ►

while eyeing a discreet brothel of multicultural ingenues.

03:11:11 ►

Reigning in hidden hallways,

03:11:14 ►

most were the flowers of Karachi and Bombay,

03:11:17 ►

now cut off from their roots.

03:11:20 ►

A few others were the daughters

03:11:22 ►

of stranded post-Perestroika Muscovite engineers,

03:11:26 ►

up from their tidy dachas along the renowned Silk Road and the deserts of Samarkand.

03:11:33 ►

Suddenly embraced by Akbar Bey’s brother Zalmay, smiling, besuited, and trying his few lines of rough English,

03:11:45 ►

his few lines of rough English, I soon was discomfited on a street with no name,

03:11:54 ►

accompanied on all sides by imposing surly Muslims and obdurate Turkmen. We marched down through mazes of doors into the unlit basement of a crumbling building of uncertain function,

03:12:01 ►

all in a grim, unsettling silence. Entombed 12,000 miles from home with unfriendly strangers

03:12:09 ►

who could dispatch me easily, I fell into reveries of the humble monks and nuns at the monastery,

03:12:18 ►

murmuring their prayers for world peace.

03:12:30 ►

world peace. Escorted into a small office by a brusque and well-muscled thuggee who wore a thick black mustache, together with an elderly hunched English speaker of threadbare competence,

03:12:37 ►

I spent some hours after perfunctory greetings in a hazardous standoff as speechless,

03:12:47 ►

greetings in a hazardous standoff as speechless, unsmiling servants brought the ritual tea.

03:12:55 ►

A heavyset Turk at last appeared, dark, bloodshot eyes, open collar, expensive shirt.

03:13:08 ►

He settled behind the desk for a while. The only sound was the clicking of palms from a hot, dusty courtyard. With his commanding presence,

03:13:15 ►

the Turk made an abrupt, gruff demand. Why are you here?

03:13:25 ►

Everything focused on this moment. I presented a letter of introduction in Dari from Akbar Bey.

03:13:31 ►

The headman, wary and cautious, glanced at it with a dour look,

03:13:38 ►

then placed it on his desk and fixed his guarded eyes most unwelcomingly on me.

03:13:42 ►

The dry heat lay on my nerves.

03:13:45 ►

It was my turn.

03:13:49 ►

I bear greetings from your brother, Akbar Bey.

03:13:52 ►

We were imprisoned together for years,

03:13:57 ►

and each day I promised him that in freedom I would look after his family. He sends the blessings of Allah upon you, your wife, and your children.

03:14:03 ►

upon you, your wife, and your children.

03:14:11 ►

To this my interrogator at once broached the central and delicate issue.

03:14:15 ►

By now he must have cooperated with the police.

03:14:19 ►

The room wavered.

03:14:26 ►

The dismal, hand-plastered walls seemed tightly confined, foreign, and askew. A fly drifted lazily too near a sticky strip thick with disemboweled insect carcasses.

03:14:35 ►

The ancient translator slowly struggled to deliver this accusation in English,

03:14:41 ►

while his master stared at my expression for any sign of duplicity.

03:14:46 ►

Affecting uncertainty with the translation, I waited, collecting my thoughts until he

03:14:52 ►

was quite finished.

03:14:53 ►

I assured both of them, most carefully, that Akbar Bey had maintained his integrity.

03:15:01 ►

No, he has said nothing to them. He is serving all of his time. I know. I was with him

03:15:11 ►

every hour of every day for many years. The Turk tapped his fingers for an endless moment.

03:15:30 ►

endless moment. Elbows on desk, stared at me. I remained still, clearly at their mercy.

03:15:37 ►

After an uneasy and protracted period, he finally smiled.

03:15:44 ►

How do you find Tashkent? he asked, grandly presenting an elaborate business card,

03:15:54 ►

we broke into cautious civilities as he summoned more tea and the tangible aura of danger ebbed slightly.

03:16:00 ►

We spoke of his offices in Dubai, Istanbul, Moscow, and Delhi, and of the multifarious nature of his dubious enterprises.

03:16:06 ►

I lightly proposed he develop English customers and, as with the prospect of honor among thieves,

03:16:15 ►

we quickly became friends of convenience.

03:16:18 ►

The door to Central Asia was open.

03:16:23 ►

So that was Bruce Van Dyke

03:16:25 ►

reading about Afghanistan.

03:16:27 ►

What were your initial thoughts?

03:16:31 ►

For me, one of the enduring images

03:16:33 ►

of this, which is

03:16:35 ►

repeated elsewhere in the book, is the

03:16:37 ►

conflict and the confluence of

03:16:39 ►

things that are beautiful and terrible.

03:16:42 ►

So we

03:16:43 ►

have our narrator descending from the sky into this place which is

03:16:48 ►

you know from above it has this kind of pastoral beauty and it’s also the site of the playing out

03:16:53 ►

of the 19th century great game and the series of anglo-afghan wars and terrible terrible terrible

03:17:01 ►

levels of violence you know it’s kind of like a sort of British-Russian version of Vietnam

03:17:06 ►

that he’s descending into.

03:17:07 ►

And so from above, it’s this kind of like beautiful mountain ranges

03:17:11 ►

and dwelling places.

03:17:13 ►

And then on the ground, it’s quite a different story.

03:17:17 ►

Yes, the phrase the Anglo-Afghan War doesn’t quite describe it so well

03:17:22 ►

because it was more the war that happened in Afghanistan between other forces. Afghanistan is very much the chessboard of the continental players of Britain,

03:17:30 ►

Russia and various other countries in that area with Afghanistan very much getting caught up in

03:17:36 ►

all of that simply because of where it is. And yeah going down from the airplane descending

03:17:42 ►

there I had a real sense of the narrator looking through the window and seeing what he could see in describing that,

03:17:47 ►

but also knowing the deep knowledge of that particular part of the world,

03:17:51 ►

which he would have got from his time with his friend Akbar Bey in prison,

03:17:56 ►

and also from his own knowledge about the area, which is the deep history of the different conflicts,

03:18:01 ►

the customs of the things that go on there, and having that knowledge adds so much more to what you can visually see of an area there’s an interesting

03:18:09 ►

little aside where our narrator talks about being uh sat together with akbar bay on the prayer route

03:18:15 ►

rug and whether or not that’s like a figure of speech or whatever i don’t really know but it

03:18:19 ►

kind of has that and another thing that i think is repeated again and again in the rose which is

03:18:24 ►

this kind of

03:18:25 ►

a sort of perennial wisdom a kind of an idea that spirituality that our relationship with the sacred

03:18:30 ►

god you know whatever you want to call it that that kind of transcends all of these boundaries

03:18:36 ►

and there’s an interesting little aside in this as well where he talks again about the

03:18:41 ►

story of the east india company and the brit and the British in Afghanistan and how they drew these borders, which continue to, if not create strife, then certainly to be a real part of that kind of ongoing storyline that we draw between you know islam or christianity or whatever

03:19:05 ►

and actually the human experience of the kind of relationships and uh with each other and with the

03:19:12 ►

sacred i think that the whole of the rose points out is again in microcosm very much present in

03:19:18 ►

this uh in this little excerpt one of the things that he points out to do with the idea of countries, as well as the idea of the way that borders cause dissent,

03:19:27 ►

is the way that by having a country, you have a ruler over it.

03:19:32 ►

And the example that he gives of the Tajikistan president with his statues and naming the months after his family members

03:19:39 ►

and the various other bizarre personality cult things that he has going on and not allowing people to grow beards and all

03:19:45 ►

sorts of other bizarre and fairly arbitrary rules which are just demonstrating his power over those

03:19:51 ►

people that live within the prescription of his power base that just goes to show how ludicrous

03:19:57 ►

this idea of having a person in charge of a country which is is very much a fictional proposition, which up until fairly recently in humankind’s history

03:20:08 ►

didn’t even exist as a notion.

03:20:11 ►

So this idea of lines on a map defining who we are,

03:20:14 ►

what we do and what we’re allowed to do is a bit silly.

03:20:19 ►

There’s another really interesting thing that for me comes out of this reading

03:20:23 ►

and it kind of echoes what you’re saying about the arbitrary nature of nationhood and of these divisions.

03:20:31 ►

And obvious in the case of kind of despotic, crazy rulers, whatever that means these days.

03:20:37 ►

And it’s about how Akbar’s brother is really interested as to whether or not Akbar Bey has communicated with the police.

03:20:42 ►

is really interested as to whether or not Akbar Bey has communicated with the police.

03:20:45 ►

And of course, the interesting thing is that

03:20:47 ►

our narrator’s words are being written by somebody who is in prison.

03:20:51 ►

And it’s interesting in terms of looking at the American law

03:20:55 ►

with regard to things like conspiracy,

03:20:57 ►

how much the kind of the imposed nature of these rules,

03:21:03 ►

which exist for all kinds of reasons, often to do, I would suggest, with a kind of the imposed nature of these these rules which exist for all kinds of reasons often

03:21:05 ►

to do i would suggest with a kind of concern that legislatures have for for conspiracy i mean you

03:21:12 ►

can see in say for example in the case of france or the united states how those nations would be

03:21:16 ►

very concerned because they know it works because it founded their very existence yes indeed so in

03:21:22 ►

the case of akbar bay he hasn’t confessed to the police and

03:21:25 ►

his brother is very as obviously reassured about that i don’t know with leonard what his story is

03:21:30 ►

with that because you know there’s a lot of as i understand it in america there’s a lot of kind of

03:21:34 ►

horse trading as far as like the law is concerned i know yes talking to people like amy pover from

03:21:40 ►

the can do foundation looking at the level of the way conspiracy law in particular in the

03:21:45 ►

united states is used to put people in jail and put people under pressure in order to break down

03:21:50 ►

these conspiratorial kind of organized crime or drug distribution or any of these sorts of things

03:21:55 ►

and the way that those laws whilst perhaps under certain circumstances they do have value, they seem to me to be unbearably draconian

03:22:05 ►

and kind of to have a sort of Kafkaesque madness about them,

03:22:12 ►

which frankly is not much different from despotic rulers

03:22:15 ►

in bits of the Middle East.

03:22:17 ►

Yes, and I’m reminded by the rule which no longer applies.

03:22:22 ►

But when we were growing up,

03:22:24 ►

we were hearing about the three strikes and you’re out legislation which was passed in America,

03:22:28 ►

which meant that if you were convicted of three crimes, then you had to be sent to prison for the maximum sentence that was applicable for that crime.

03:22:36 ►

And judges were being forced to pass out sentences which they definitely did not want to.

03:22:41 ►

And it just made a mockery of the whole situation the idea that the law had any kind of

03:22:45 ►

fairness to it or intelligence intelligence spirit uh humanity all of that sort of stuff you look at

03:22:51 ►

say the case of timothy tyler the um uh fan of the grateful dead who was released relatively

03:22:57 ►

recently from jail after serving an inordinate amount of time for dealing a very small quantity

03:23:01 ►

of lsd and again for me like these arbitrary lines on the

03:23:07 ►

map that of course such trauma and around afghanistan and the kinds of human writings down

03:23:14 ►

onto the onto our experience they are undoubtedly kind of totalitarian despotic and yeah not good not good making a monocultural overarching rule for how people should behave

03:23:28 ►

is a ridiculous idea because mostly people know how to behave well as long as things aren’t going

03:23:34 ►

really badly for them and by creating these overarching unforgiving and unflexible rules

03:23:42 ►

which is one of the main failings of them as well as the creation of them in the first place, but refusing to have any kind of system of, well, this is

03:23:50 ►

mitigating circumstances, or in this particular case, this person didn’t know what they were doing

03:23:54 ►

because of either mental health issues, learning difficulties, different things like that. When you

03:23:59 ►

look at the prison population in most of the world, but particularly in America, the vast majority of the people there suffered abuse as children,

03:24:07 ►

were brought up in terrible circumstances

03:24:09 ►

or have other very serious medical problems wrong with them,

03:24:14 ►

particularly at the moment the mental health issues,

03:24:18 ►

which is widely recognised by the prison system itself,

03:24:21 ►

who are very deeply unhappy by it

03:24:22 ►

because they don’t have the facilities to deal with people in that situation it’s it’s really cruel it’s really cruel how it

03:24:29 ►

is at the moment makes me sad because there’s so little chance of anyone being able to redeem

03:24:35 ►

themselves which is according to the prison reformers in a large large proportion of the

03:24:41 ►

european countries back in the sort of the 19th and early 20th century

03:24:46 ►

a lot of the prison reform at that point was all about finding redemption for people so that they

03:24:50 ►

could work out what these people needed to be rehabilitated and to rejoin society as valuable

03:24:57 ►

humans so the fact that America has very much of late gone in the other direction

03:25:02 ►

as has the prison system in this country, the UK to some regard as well.

03:25:07 ►

It makes me sad. It makes me sad because people know that it doesn’t really work, incarcerating people in this way.

03:25:16 ►

Here, organic natural foods pioneer and author Gregory Sams reads of Leonard’s final days of freedom,

03:25:24 ►

visiting Anne and Sasha Shulgin,

03:25:26 ►

and of his last encounter with the beloved Sasha.

03:25:29 ►

This passage starts on page 556.

03:25:35 ►

Evening storms were rolling in from the Pacific.

03:25:39 ►

One could smell the wild sea and hear the troubling sky.

03:25:45 ►

As I left for the Midwest, Sasha Anand’s magical compound was high in the clouds, thinning away in whiteness.

03:25:55 ►

I worried about the meeting ahead, the strangeness of my new subject Skinner, his captive girl, the near lethal drug mixtures he gave her,

03:26:09 ►

the coldness of his eyes.

03:26:13 ►

Events happened quickly, frightening, cataclysmic events with no warning. I didn’t know on the endless journey to Kansas that soon I would be incarcerated for life.

03:26:29 ►

Or that these very words would be written from a remote and forgotten prison cell.

03:26:37 ►

Or that after a bleak decade, freezing and alone in a special housing unit beneath a maximum security federal prison.

03:26:48 ►

I sometimes would use my one monthly call

03:26:51 ►

to reach out to Sasha and Anne.

03:26:56 ►

Even from this perspective of so many years

03:27:00 ►

entombed in cement and steel

03:27:03 ►

I remember well the last night we spoke.

03:27:08 ►

I crouched beneath the narrow slit of a handcuff port

03:27:12 ►

in the 300-pound steel door of my cramped cell

03:27:17 ►

and held the phone for the permitted 15 minutes.

03:27:23 ►

I’m blind now, he confided,

03:27:26 ►

although Sasha’s extended family throughout the world long had known.

03:27:32 ►

Galileo was blind the last ten years of his life, I reminded him.

03:27:38 ►

Well loved by all that knew him,

03:27:41 ►

Sasha’s life was truly blessed.

03:27:48 ►

Our last words together were not on chemistry, but on music. You could still play your balalaika, I said. His father was Russian,

03:27:57 ►

the fine triangular instrument of family heirloom. Sasha was ambulatory somewhat,

03:28:08 ►

loom Sasha was ambulatory somewhat due to the loving care of an and his Tibetan woman caregivers who daily massaged his legs and guided him to sit in his beloved laboratory with friends and

03:28:15 ►

colleagues who came to honor him how many balalaika strings are there he asked six I replied uncertain actually there are

03:28:27 ►

three that’s right he said for he never discouraged anyone by asserting his

03:28:34 ►

knowledge then he said his final words to me it was the last time I would ever

03:28:42 ►

hear his voice there are heavenly harmonics.

03:28:50 ►

Greg, I wonder if you could give me a few reflections on that excerpt that we’ve just heard from the Rose.

03:28:58 ►

Well, that excerpt is key.

03:29:03 ►

If that excerpt wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be reading the book.

03:29:05 ►

There would be no book because that is

03:29:09 ►

describing the onset of the events

03:29:13 ►

that would leave him incarcerated for life.

03:29:17 ►

And he touches upon the character, the Skinner, who is involved

03:29:21 ►

in it.

03:29:26 ►

And it gives you this evening storm we’re rolling in from the Pacific

03:29:30 ►

evening storm we’re rolling into his life

03:29:32 ►

and as a result of that this remarkable book came about

03:29:37 ►

and he speaks of his

03:29:40 ►

final phone call with Sasha

03:29:44 ►

before Sasha passed away

03:29:47 ►

from inside the prison cell.

03:29:50 ►

And it’s quite a moving last moment for him to recall,

03:29:56 ►

though I never figured out why the question

03:30:00 ►

of how many strings was asked.

03:30:04 ►

I think it reflects something really interesting about Sasha.

03:30:07 ►

I mean, what does come over, I think, in the quote

03:30:10 ►

is the way that Leonard suggests that there are six strings

03:30:14 ►

and in fact there are three, and Sasha says, yes, that’s right.

03:30:17 ►

And there’s a kind of a lovely sense for me about,

03:30:19 ►

Leonard then alludes to, that Sasha was one of those people

03:30:22 ►

who was really kind of supportive of others

03:30:25 ►

you know it was like oh yeah that’s right you know even though he knows that the answer is

03:30:29 ►

incorrect he’s kind of he’s an encouraging character and the narrative is just like a

03:30:34 ►

little moment of of the man which is you know beautiful thing for his friend to be recalling

03:30:40 ►

as I was preparing to read it I was was trying to imagine what were these heavenly harmonics that he’s mentioning.

03:30:48 ►

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s really interesting.

03:30:51 ►

I’ll find out one day, I suppose.

03:30:54 ►

I mean, it’s a really, really powerful section.

03:30:56 ►

There’s a piece where Leonard writes about from the perspective of so many years entombed in cement and steel.

03:31:03 ►

so many years entombed in cement and steel.

03:31:08 ►

And, yeah, you know, it really brings the kind of the reality of the circumstances in which the book was created.

03:31:11 ►

You’re right, it folds back into this section on page 556.

03:31:16 ►

You know, that’s where this narrative is being woven from,

03:31:20 ►

this place of entombed cement and steel.

03:31:24 ►

I know.

03:31:25 ►

I spent one day in prison

03:31:28 ►

and just contemplated what it would be like

03:31:31 ►

to be there continually

03:31:34 ►

and just having somebody lock the door

03:31:37 ►

of your room from the outside is just…

03:31:42 ►

And to adjust to that and to cope with it

03:31:44 ►

and to create a masterpiece like this from in there

03:31:47 ►

without reference to the internet or anything else

03:31:52 ►

is just quite extraordinary.

03:31:54 ►

Just on reflection with that,

03:31:56 ►

it’s interesting that he’s talking to Sasha

03:31:58 ►

and Sasha’s explaining how he’s gone blind.

03:32:01 ►

Yeah.

03:32:02 ►

And there is a sense, very much for me, certainly in The Rose, where what Leonard is doing is he’s gone blind. And there is a sense very much for me, certainly in the

03:32:05 ►

Rose, where what Leonard is doing

03:32:08 ►

is he’s remembering the world. He’s remaking

03:32:10 ►

the world because he is in this terrifying

03:32:12 ►

place. There’s these very, very difficult

03:32:13 ►

circumstances. And

03:32:15 ►

although he is in a sense blind,

03:32:17 ►

he hasn’t seen a tree, he hasn’t seen

03:32:19 ►

many things. A river, a plant,

03:32:21 ►

nothing, yeah. And yet

03:32:23 ►

so he’s trying in the book to kind of recapture this world.

03:32:28 ►

Well, I think he does it very well.

03:32:30 ►

Well, it’s a world that I’m not that familiar with.

03:32:33 ►

It’s quite extraordinary.

03:32:36 ►

Some of the experiences that he has interwoven with the world that we live in.

03:32:42 ►

And I’ve spoken to him, and he’s assured me that

03:32:45 ►

most of what’s in this book is based on factual experience.

03:32:52 ►

And obviously, there has to be some holding back on that

03:32:58 ►

because it’s a dangerous field.

03:33:02 ►

But most of this stuff happened

03:33:05 ►

that’s the incredible part

03:33:07 ►

certainly I think

03:33:09 ►

Lennon’s position on the six

03:33:11 ►

when I’ve corresponded with him is that

03:33:13 ►

this is a reality

03:33:14 ►

yeah I know

03:33:18 ►

it’s

03:33:18 ►

it makes it all the more fascinating

03:33:21 ►

to read to

03:33:22 ►

recognise that this is there are people like that out there.

03:33:27 ►

And I think, thank goodness that we don’t hear of them, but they are unknown because that’s how they’re not behind bars.

03:33:46 ►

how they’re not behind bars, but we don’t often appreciate the great debt we owe to people who are actually putting their lives, their whole, on the line to provide us with

03:33:55 ►

the magical compounds that we so enjoy.

03:33:59 ►

And this is one man who made the ultimate sacrifice in his life in prison.

03:34:09 ►

He didn’t make it, but he took that risk.

03:34:13 ►

And that’s extraordinary.

03:34:15 ►

And I really, I think one of the most important things in the world

03:34:20 ►

is for these magical compounds to be available

03:34:24 ►

and not extraordinary suppression of consciousness.

03:34:31 ►

It’s one of the most counter-evolutionary crimes

03:34:37 ►

that is taking place on a daily basis

03:34:39 ►

to prevent us from evolving as human beings

03:34:44 ►

with tools that were provided for that purpose

03:34:47 ►

by nature and chemistry.

03:34:51 ►

Yeah, and I think the rose stands as a kind of a testament

03:34:54 ►

to the work of those people,

03:34:57 ►

both the few whose names we unfortunately know

03:35:00 ►

and the others who are these kind of mythic, shadowy figures

03:35:04 ►

who are doing this i agree

03:35:06 ►

great work sure drugs might not be the kind of the the answer to the whole human experience but

03:35:13 ►

these are things that really inform our understanding about ourselves and the world

03:35:18 ►

and our relationships and so on and they are valuable things particularly for us in the these what we might perceive as times of crisis

03:35:26 ►

yeah absolutely it’s i think it’s the only thing that can get us out of the downward spiral that

03:35:36 ►

our culture was in is uh more access to these these wonderful tools that change the whole headset that we work with

03:35:46 ►

and break down the idea of sticking to something just because it’s the status quo.

03:35:53 ►

It really gets you right outside of the box.

03:35:57 ►

That’s true. Greg, thanks so much.

03:36:00 ►

A pleasure and an honour to have read that passage.

03:36:05 ►

Thank you.

03:36:06 ►

Thank you.

03:36:06 ►

Thus concludes the first episode of The Rose Garden. We hope you enjoyed listening.

03:36:12 ►

Tune in the following weeks as we dive into the full book, one chapter at a time.

03:36:17 ►

Signing off, I’m Alexa.

03:36:19 ►

And I’m Kat. With a few last parting words from William Leonard Picard, we leave you here.

03:36:40 ►

from the rose and that you will enjoy

03:36:43 ►

the forthcoming full chapter readings

03:36:46 ►

of the entirety of this work.

03:36:50 ►

My deepest gratitude to the host,

03:36:54 ►

to the many contributors,

03:36:56 ►

and to those unnamed

03:36:57 ►

who made the Rose Garden possible.

03:37:03 ►

Please contact us with suggestions and questions on the

03:37:09 ►

writing. We’d love to hear from you. In closing, I send thanks and many blessings

03:37:18 ►

to the kind readers and listeners in the worldwide community.

03:37:30 ►

And recalling the dedication of the rose,

03:37:37 ►

I send affection for the one who wept.

03:37:41 ►

Farewell, friends.

03:38:19 ►

This is Leonard. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

03:38:21 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

609 - The Rose Garden – Introduction

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