Program Notes
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https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Erik Davis
https://www.amazon.com/High-Weirdness-Esoterica-Visionary-Experience/dp/1907222766Date this conversation was recorded: July 22, 2019.
In today’s podcast we listen in on a live salon conversation with author Erik Davis, who is an author, podcaster, award-winning journalist, and popular speaker. Erik was also instrumental in establishing the Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man, which eventually led to these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon. In 1999, Terence McKenna first brought Erik to my attention, and it has been a fascinating intellectual ride for me to follow his work since then. In this conversation, among several other topics, Erik talks about his new book, High Weirdness, which explores the work of Robert Anton Wilson, Phillip K. Dick, and Terence McKenna as they strode through the 60s, 70s, and into our future.
Erik Davis’ Techgnosis
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
by Erik Davis
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner Obituary
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
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And today you’re in for a real treat
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because I’m going to play a recording of last Monday night’s live salon with Eric Davis.
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And although Eric and I have known one another for a long time now, well, we really haven’t
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had much of a chance in recent years to visit very often. And so it was really refreshing
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for me to see how easily we slipped back into a casual conversation.
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And while I’m not going to give something away about what Eric has to say here,
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but I am going to let you know that if you listen really closely to a brief comment that he makes about the psychedelic community early on in this conversation,
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well, then you’re going to better understand the important message that he closes with. It’s something that, well, I’ve been thinking about for a long time now, and I know that it’s
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something that many of our fellow salonners have been talking about as well, and, well, Eric just
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really put it really well. So, now that you have your assignment, please join Eric and me, along
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with a few dozen of our fellow salonners who are also my Patreon supporters and find out what’s been going on lately in the life of one of our
00:01:31 ►
younger elders. There we go. Well, we can see you, Eric. Yeah. Hello. Hey, long time no see,
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Eric. How are you? Pretty good, man. It’s true. It’s been a while.
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I know. You’ve been traveling the world, got a PhD, and tonight I’m really excited about talking about your new book because it’s the subject matter, of course, that interests all of us a whole lot.
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You are just right now on a book tour. Is that right?
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Scott, you are just right now on a book tour.
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Is that right?
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Well, I’m home now, but I’ve been doing the book off and on all summer,
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and it’s going to continue.
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I didn’t – smart guys bank it all in like three weeks,
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but I just kind of spread it out over the whole summer.
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But it’s more fun that way.
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There’s more space.
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Doing a lot of podcasts, doing some in-person stuff,
00:02:27 ►
doing an event tomorrow.
00:02:28 ►
I’m really excited tomorrow night.
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I’m doing a reading at Moe’s books, which is on telegraph Avenue,
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the fable telegraph Avenue in Berkeley,
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right?
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Very,
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very famous place to do a reading.
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And I’m doing it on July 23rd, which was a very important date for Robert Anton Wilson,
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one of the guys I talk about in my book.
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And he was in Berkeley when, on July 23rd, he got his first serious transmission,
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his sense that there was something important about the star system Sirius,
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and this became part of his whole kind of rabbit hole experience
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that he later called Chapel Perilous.
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And that actually took place in Berkeley?
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Yeah, he was in Berkeley when he was doing that stuff.
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So I think tomorrow there’ll be some interesting folks
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coming out of the woodwork.
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And in addition, I was in Berkeley when I first read Illuminatus, Robert Anton Wilson’s book with Robert Shea, when I first read Alistair Crowley, and when I first heard about Philip K. Dick.
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Somebody in Berkeley told me, oh, dude, you’d really like Philip K. Dick.
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So I blame Berkeley.
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Well, let me circle around to everything that’s going on with the psychedelic salon we’re
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in our 15th year and i’m going to blame you because i was uh it was at at that uh conference
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that terence mckenna did in hawaii uh his last one uh a few months before he died and it was the
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the last chance i had to have an interesting talk with him.
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And I was in the middle of writing Spirit of the Internet.
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And he says, you’ve got to stop what you’re doing right now and read Technosis by Eric Davis.
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He says, then you can go ahead and write your book.
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So I first heard about you, which has led to many other people through Terrence McKenna.
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And also, I’ve said this in the salon, but I never had a chance to tell you personally,
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that back in 2003, when I decided to launch those Plancky Norte lectures at Burning Man,
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you were the first person I called.
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And you weren’t really sure it was the best idea, but you wanted to give it a shot.
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And you got Daniel Pinchbeck on and Alex and Allison Gray.
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And that really, you know, has launched it. It’s still going on today. I haven’t been there since
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- But the recordings of those first ones is what I used to do the first podcast because
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I never intended to podcast. I was just geeking out. You know, I wanted to see how it worked.
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I had all these recordings and one thing led to another and here we are. So it all came about when Terrence McKenna said,
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you’ve got to read Technosis by Eric Davis. That’s so funny. All those links. I mean,
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it’s the same kind of thing. You know, it’s funny how lives are, our lives are all interwoven. You
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know, part of the reason Terrence is in my book is, is because I was friends with him
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and, uh, you know, that’s super close, but we were, we were colleagues mostly. And then towards
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the end of, end of his life, we were friends. He, uh, in addition to, uh, doing one of the last
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interviews with him in Hawaii and, uh, you know, the few months before he died, half a year before
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he died, he stayed at our apartment because our apartment is right near UCSF where he was getting treatments.
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So, you know, we were traveling.
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So he would come and stay here when we were gone.
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And, you know, we’d overlap and hang out.
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So I was, you know, I’d spend time with him hanging out when he was in this, you know, the last stage of his life, which was very interesting. I mean, one thing I’m, you know, I have, especially these days,
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a lot of complicated feelings about psychedelic culture
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and the psychedelic scene.
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But one thing I really believe is that I think that psychedelic people
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who have been paying attention, one sign of their experience
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is that they tend to die well. And, uh, in
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Terrence’s case, uh, it was pretty clear, you know, I mean, he, you know, whatever he was,
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you know, freaked out and sad and, you know, whatever, all the things you, one would be,
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one will be, we will be probably unless we were, you know, snuffed out like that.
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But at the same time, there’s a kind of psychedelic wisdom that kicks in or that can kick in,
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that I really believe in. And certainly, I think was demonstrated, at least in the way that he presented himself, you know, because he is a public figure, then he gets a, you know, basically a
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death sentence, and he’s a public figure in the scene. And how do you represent
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that? How do you model your experience? And this was something I could also see on an intimate
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level. So Terrence is something that draws us together. But that year in Palenque Norte was
00:07:15 ►
very significant for me as well. And you’re correct. I was reticent about it. And here’s why.
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So I went to Burning Man the first time in 1994. I didn’t know anything about it. I was reticent about it and here’s why. So I went to Burning Man the first time in 1994.
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I didn’t know anything about it.
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I was on a listserv, fringe wear review listserv.
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Back in the days of listserv,
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probably your younger listeners
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won’t even know what I’m talking about.
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We’ve got enough people here that are fully aware of it.
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I’m pretty sure.
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So, you know, basically an email list
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and it just said, you know, like art festival, Nevada and somewhere.
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And I was like and I was just happened to be in that area with my with my girlfriend at the time.
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Now, my wife traveling around and we said, OK, great.
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So I had this sublime, in retrospect, sublime experience going to Burning Man with having absolutely no idea.
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And that was in the really wild and woolly days.
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Yeah, yeah.
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There was about 2,000 people.
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So, you know, my experience of entering the festival is worth relating.
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So, you know, it’s basically like there’s a map point, you know,
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go to Gerlach, drive nine miles, get off the road.
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So you go nine miles, you get off the road,
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there’s like one shack and one like dusty mad max dude you know all covered up you
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can’t even really see him he takes like 40 bucks or something and then he says he says he points
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out he goes you see that mountain you know it’s like this mountain like you know 50 miles away
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or something drive 12 miles towards that mountain and then make a right. So you go out there, you’re like, I have no idea.
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It’s totally disorienting.
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You know, there’s no, you know, because now people don’t realize it,
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but the festival is tucked in very comfortably at the point of these two
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ridges, very near Gerlach.
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But it was way out before, so it was extremely disorienting.
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You really didn’t know where you were.
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And, you know, it was a wonderful time. The next year I said, this is great shit. I’m going to write
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about it. So I wrote one of the first national articles about Burning Man, 1995. It came out
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in the Village Voice with a great name, Terminal Beach Party.
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You know, because it was a more apocalyptic event back then. It was, it was more punk rock,
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less hippie,
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although there were witches there,
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you know,
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it was always a little bit of hippie.
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And didn’t they have a drive by shooting range at that time?
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They did.
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They did.
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That was the last year of the drive by shooting range.
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Die Bernie,
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die.
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You know,
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it was crazy.
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So anyway,
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I wrote about it and then I was like,
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that’s it. I don’t want to write about
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it anymore. Like I want to go to Burning Man and just do it. Just be there. Just do whatever I’m
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doing. I don’t want to take notes. I don’t want to interview people. I don’t want to write about
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it later. I don’t want to pretend like I know what it’s about. I just want to leave it alone
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and just enjoy, just have that experience. And so that was how I went through,
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I skipped a couple of years, but how I went through the late nineties and the early 2000s.
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So when you asked me, I was like, I don’t want to give talks here. I’ve been giving talks for
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a decade at that point, but like, screw that. And then I was like, well, you know,
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maybe it’s time. And it was really amazing experience amazing experience i mean really was one of the
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best pieces i’ve ever written i love that piece i wrote about burning man back in the day it was
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one of the best very very memorable talk you know the windstorm came up and i’m talking and it’s
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like dusty and then later on i had someone who said you know that was my first year at burning
00:10:40 ►
man and i came to hear your talk and it totally like shaped my whole experience.
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And I’m like, ah, you know, but anyway, it was a wonderful thing. And I was very happy to help
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initiate this whole marvelous project that you’ve been running for so long. It’s really, I’m really
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happy. Hey, by the way, are you still in Del Mar? No, no. We’ve moved from there to Carlsbad.
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No, it’s still North County, you know.
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Sounds great to me, man, as long as you have access to those books.
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Well, I’ve got over 700 on my Kindle right now, too.
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Way to go.
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Way to go. And the one I’m working on, working through, is one that you’re going to be involved in, too, the Rose of Paracelsus.
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Is that right?
00:11:23 ►
Yes, that’s right.
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I’m going to help
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participate and read a chapter that I haven’t heard from it recently, but I haven’t picked
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out my chapter. I have to admit, I have not read the tome. It’s a long book. There’s a lot of long
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books out there. But I really look forward to finding a juicy bit and supporting it.
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Right now, Kat Lakey is the primary producer of it. And she’s in the Amazon
00:11:45 ►
right now. She’s been on a work study program there for several years. And so when she gets
00:11:50 ►
back, we’re going to pick it up again. We put that preliminary one out that three and a half hour
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one has had a lot of play and a lot of good comments. And, you know, it’s encouraging to
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Leonard to be able to know that his story is getting out, you know, so appreciate you stepping up to read them, and let’s talk about your book here. The title, go ahead and give us a title,
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and tell us these three characters, and by the way, you’re sort of a character yourself now,
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you know, I’m older than you, but you’re actually more of an elder than I am.
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I think I am. I remember distinctly
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the first time that someone called me an elder. And at that point, I was in my 30s. But I was
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like, ah, I was terrifying, but I could see my fate, you know. Your first Planque Norte talk
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is one of the first 10 podcasts on the salon too. Yes. you definitely qualify but uh uh the rather than
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have me kind of mess it up because there’s a lot of things i’d like to hear about why don’t you
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kind of give us a title tell us uh i know it came about through your thesis work and uh some of the
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surprises that came about yeah i mean there’s a lot say, but I’ll just give a brief one, then we can just talk from there. The book is called High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica, I got it from Rice University and from a department of religion.
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But they let me study this weird shit.
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Like most departments of religion don’t let you study psychedelics in the 70s and write a dissertation on it.
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But I was lucky.
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I had a great advisor, Jeff Kripal, who writes wonderful books.
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If you like this kind of stuff, you should check out particularly his book on comic books and mysticism called Mutants and Mystics, an awesome book.
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Anyway, so he’s a cool guy. He supported me. And what the book is, there’s sort of three levels of
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it. On one level, it’s a kind of in-depth story of the extraordinary experiences in the 1970s of three or four guys. The first
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group is Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis, who I’m sure you guys are familiar with,
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goes down to La Charrera, 1971, has these extraordinary experiences, changes their lives,
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you know, eventually leads to, you know, a handbook about mushrooms and all of
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Terrence’s later ideas, inspires Dennis to go on and do all sorts of psychedelic science.
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The second person is Robert Anton Wilson. He wrote a famous, very influential underground
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head classic called Illuminatus in 1975. He also had an extraordinary experience a couple of years later in Berkeley.
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There’s a lot of Berkeley, a lot of California in my story.
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And in Berkeley, he had written all these crazy books about conspiracy theories and
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esotericism, but funny and satirical.
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Like he wasn’t believing any of it.
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It was all kind of jive.
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It was all kind of a countercultural joke.
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You know, real good humored, sort of mischievous guy, a little bit of a…
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It was really fun to read, too.
00:15:14 ►
Yeah, yeah.
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I mean, super fun.
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But then what happens is he moves to Berkeley, doesn’t have a real job anymore.
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He’s taking a lot of acid.
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He’s doing a lot of ritual magic, reading a lot of Alistair
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Crowley. Things get weirder and weirder. He starts noticing that he can kind of program his
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experiences in advance. And then he wakes up on this July 23rd. Tomorrow is the day I’m doing
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the reading on July 23rd. And he goes, serious is important. And then he kind of enters what he later called a chapel perilous,
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where he really believed wholeheartedly that he was receiving
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extraterrestrial transmissions from some alien intelligence associated
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with the star system Sirius.
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And so he entered a kind of paranoid reality tunnel,
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all these synchronicities, blah, blah, blah.
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People who
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have done high dose psychedelics can appreciate some of the characteristics of what he was talking
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about, but he kind of lived it for like a year. And he came out the other side and he returned
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to a kind of skepticism, a kind of open-ended, playful skepticism, as opposed to a hard edge,
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negative, you know, rationalist kind of skepticism.
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And I wrote a great book about it called Cosmic Trigger, highly, highly recommended for people
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who are interested in psychedelics and all this weird stuff. And so I write about that and his
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experiences there in the 1970s. And then the third character I write about, another, the only native
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Californian, but another one-time Berkeley resident,
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the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who in addition to writing a lot of science fiction,
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had this extraordinary experience happen to him in 1974. And Dick’s a little different than the
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other guys because he didn’t take psychedelics that often, like hardly at all actually, and
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mostly in the 1960s.
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His trips were very influential for him.
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Some of them were bad.
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Some of them were good.
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But he wasn’t like a psychedelic user.
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He wasn’t using psychedelics to break through.
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He wasn’t Promethean the way McKenna and Wilson both were.
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It kind of happened to him more sort of naturally.
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He was non-neurotypical.
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He had mental health problems. He was non-neurotypical. He had mental
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health problems. He was, you know, a challenged guy. He was a hurt puppy in some ways, but also
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an extraordinarily creative guy and a visionary of sorts. So in 1974, he has a series of extraordinary
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experiences, you know, synchronicities, voices in his head. He feels there’s another being
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You know, synchronicities, voices in his head. He feels there’s another being inhabiting him. He gets, you know, beams of light flash to him. He gets information. You know, it’s a very rich stew. And he spent the rest of his life, the next eight years of his life, kind of working out the implications of these experiences. He wrote a number of novels sort of based on his experiences or inspired by them, the most famous of which, and the most valuable, highly recommended.
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It’s not the easiest read.
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It’s heavy, but life is heavy sometimes.
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And it’s called Valis.
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And he also wrote this enormous private philosophical diary called the exegesis. Huge.
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It’s like a million words long. And I worked on an edited version of it that was like a tenth of it.
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It’s still this massive book that’s only a tenth of the whole thing. Anyway, he tried to work out
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what his experiences meant and he never came to a conclusion. So it’s like he got the revelation, but he didn’t get the message, which is a very funny paradox and also a difficult
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one. And so frustrating, too. I guess that probably spurred a lot of his work. Exactly. He was
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frustrated and inspired at this kind of a mutual balance. So I talk about him as well. So on one
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level, my book is about these three
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stories. On another level, my book, you know, like a lot of people who write history, you’re like,
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you got to put it in context. When is it happening? Why? Where is it happening? What’s the historical
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context? It’s always the first question to ask. Anytime you read anything that blows your mind,
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as soon as you can step away, take one step back and go, okay, who was this person?
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Where did they live? How did they live? What time was it? What was going on around them? It’s always
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a great way to kind of get a sense of where things are coming from. And it helps you, you know,
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get some ballast, some sense about how things are working rather than just listening to the
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voice itself. It’s not a perfect method,
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but it really helps. So in this case, I’m interested in the 1970s. I think the 1970s
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are an extremely important era. I think that for me personally, they’re much more interesting than
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the 60s. The 60s is awesome. Great. We kind of all know the story. The 70s is a much murkier,
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The 70s is a much murkier, weirder, darker, but in some ways even more creative story.
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And so I was really interested in why did all these things happen to these guys in sort of a similar way.
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A lot of their experiences were very similar. There were themes of science fiction, of future technology, of esoterica, mystical experience.
00:20:24 ►
There was a kind of humor to them. There was a
00:20:26 ►
kind of reflexivity. They were kind of aware of the way that it wasn’t quite what it seemed. And
00:20:33 ►
there was a kind of paradoxical mischievous quality. There’s a lot of resonances between
00:20:39 ►
their experiences, but that to me says something about the 70s. So I’m also talking about the 1970s.
00:20:42 ►
That, to me, says something about the 70s.
00:20:44 ►
So I’m also talking about the 1970s.
00:20:50 ►
And finally, the most sort of scholarly layer, the more difficult layer,
00:20:52 ►
is just like, how do we think about this stuff?
00:20:56 ►
How do you think about these extraordinary experiences? And in this case, all three of these guys wrote very extraordinary books
00:21:02 ►
about their experiences.
00:21:04 ►
So it’s not like we just have someone’s story.
00:21:06 ►
We have a book or a set of books that help us kind of put together what happened to them
00:21:12 ►
or at least the way they experienced what happened to them.
00:21:15 ►
So how do we think about it?
00:21:16 ►
Is it true?
00:21:17 ►
Are they crazy?
00:21:19 ►
Are they mystics?
00:21:21 ►
Is it a fiction?
00:21:23 ►
Is it a part of all of those?
00:21:24 ►
Which is, of course, what I think.
00:21:27 ►
And really, let’s try to think about how to think about these kinds of experiences.
00:21:33 ►
And so to do that, and then I’ll end this kind of introduction of the book. To do that,
00:21:39 ►
I had to come up with some kind of idea because even though these kinds of experiences and psychedelic experiences in general resemble religious
00:21:50 ►
experiences or mystical experiences,
00:21:53 ►
which are established idea in the history of religions. Oh,
00:21:56 ►
we religious experiences. People have these things and you go, yeah,
00:22:00 ►
it’s kind of like religious experiences,
00:22:03 ►
but they’re also kind of not like religious experiences.
00:22:06 ►
There’s something else going on.
00:22:09 ►
Sometimes, especially at these high-dose ones
00:22:11 ►
or with someone like Philip K. Dick,
00:22:13 ►
who was really a little nutty,
00:22:16 ►
they resemble psychotic experiences.
00:22:19 ►
Oh, crazy.
00:22:21 ►
Kind of really crazy, actually.
00:22:23 ►
I mean, with Terrence,
00:22:24 ►
Dennis basically lost it for two weeks.
00:22:27 ►
He wasn’t there.
00:22:28 ►
He was babbling.
00:22:30 ►
He couldn’t respond to social cues.
00:22:32 ►
Half the people that were hanging out with him thought he was crazy and they needed to
00:22:36 ►
airlift him to a hospital.
00:22:38 ►
I mean, it was serious stuff.
00:22:39 ►
I mean, if your friend acted like that, you’d go, my friend is crazy now.
00:22:43 ►
We have to deal with this.
00:22:44 ►
This is not just fun and games anymore.
00:22:46 ►
So there’s an element of psychosis in the story.
00:22:49 ►
But like religious experience, it doesn’t quite work.
00:22:53 ►
It’s not just psychotic.
00:22:54 ►
There’s something else.
00:22:55 ►
It’s too coherent.
00:22:57 ►
It’s too much like a story.
00:22:59 ►
It’s too rich, and it means too much to them.
00:23:03 ►
It’s not just like a break or running against the wall or unraveling.
00:23:09 ►
There’s something else going on here.
00:23:10 ►
So I had to go, what is this?
00:23:11 ►
What’s a way to think about it?
00:23:13 ►
And what I decided or what I fell on, what kind of came to me as a way of thinking about it,
00:23:18 ►
was this idea of the weird.
00:23:22 ►
The weird.
00:23:23 ►
Now, weirdness is a really interesting idea. We use the term
00:23:28 ►
all the time. After I’ve said this, just take the next week and just kind of keep your ears open
00:23:34 ►
for how often people go, yeah, it was weird. Yeah, this weird thing happened to me. This
00:23:38 ►
really weird guy. It was a weird movie, whatever. It’s a common term we use, but we don’t really think about.
00:23:46 ►
We just kind of put stuff there that’s sort of uncomfortable, strange, kind of enchanted,
00:23:53 ►
sometimes paranormal.
00:23:54 ►
You know, if we have like a paranormal experience, we start seeing, you know, the number 23 all
00:23:59 ►
day long.
00:24:00 ►
You’re like, you know, and you’re telling someone like, oh my God, I was seeing like
00:24:04 ►
the number 23 all day long. I opened the book, it was 23. The guy came to the thing at a 23 in a shirt.
00:24:09 ►
You know, I got the 23rd, you know, ticket for the lotto. You know, it’s really weird. Like
00:24:16 ►
it’s weird, you know, cause you don’t, you don’t want to say, Oh, it means like the hand of God
00:24:21 ►
is writing my fate. What? I don’t know what that means. It’s
00:24:25 ►
supernatural. Maybe. I don’t know if it’s supernatural, but it’s weird. We can all agree,
00:24:31 ►
all of us, sometimes reality, or at least our experience of reality, is very, very weird.
00:24:40 ►
You know, I never thought about that, Eric. That’s such an obvious thing now that you pointed out, because I use that all the time myself. I’m not going to make any extra claims like reality is supernatural, reality is mystical,
00:25:05 ►
reality is religious, actually, reality is part of a larger field. Those things might be true,
00:25:11 ►
but I don’t know about that. But I definitely, totally to my bones know that reality can be very
00:25:20 ►
weird. Dreams can be weird. Encounters can be weird. Experience can be weird. Drugs can be weird.
00:25:28 ►
So I use this idea of weirdness as a way to talk about these experiences, I hope, in kind of a
00:25:35 ►
fresh way, not just sort of talking about them in terms of religion or psychosis or projection
00:25:41 ►
or even psychedelics. You know, Philip K. Dick’s experiences weren’t
00:25:45 ►
psychedelic, but they were very similar to these other experiences. So it’s not just about drugs
00:25:51 ►
and drug experience. It’s something else about our minds, about the world, about the nature of
00:25:57 ►
reality that I’m trying to point to. So it’s a big book. You know, it’s like a big, it’s a tome.
00:26:01 ►
It’s a big book.
00:26:03 ►
You know, it’s like a big, it’s a tome.
00:26:07 ►
I like to think of it as a, it’s like a chocolate cake.
00:26:09 ►
It’s got many layers.
00:26:10 ►
It’s dense.
00:26:11 ►
It’s rich.
00:26:18 ►
And it’s got a tasty pop frosting that’s slightly psychoactive itself.
00:26:22 ►
Do the publishers at MIT Press know you call it with a frosting?
00:26:27 ►
I think, yeah, actually, they’ve been enjoying it.
00:26:31 ►
They’ve been actually really fun, really, really fun to work with. You know, I was really happy to get it on a good academic press, but it’s co-published. So MIT Press is one of the publishers,
00:26:37 ►
you know, a solid academic publisher. But the other publisher is Strange Attractor, which is a wonderful independent publisher out of London in the United Kingdom.
00:26:49 ►
And they’ve been they publish all sorts of strange books about, you know, witchcraft museums and underground music and animals, music and, you know, weird fiction.
00:27:02 ►
It’s a wonderful zombie movies,
00:27:07 ►
horror films, all sorts of stuff like that. So it’s a wonderful mix of the kind of weird esoteric and the kind of official
00:27:13 ►
academic. And that’s, that’s very much what the book is.
00:27:15 ►
It’s kind of like a weird scholarly book.
00:27:18 ►
The I’ve got a quick question for you,
00:27:21 ►
but I’ve got a quick comment too, to sort of back up what you’re saying,
00:27:24 ►
how a psychedelic people are interested in dying properly.
00:27:30 ►
Because the most recent talk I gave last March at a conference was about the psychedelic hospice movement and ways that psychedelic people can learn to die properly.
00:27:41 ►
So, yeah, I’m about to turn 77 in a few weeks,
00:27:45 ►
and so I’ve got to think about these things.
00:27:48 ►
And quite frankly, it’s psychedelics are what really makes the whole thought process
00:27:53 ►
about dying real comfortable and easy to do.
00:27:56 ►
I have a question for you, rather than get back into the dying thing,
00:27:59 ►
is we have a lot of young listeners that are high school and college age students.
00:28:08 ►
And I also get questions about how can I get into psychedelic work of some kind,
00:28:16 ►
whether it’s research, medical, literature, whatever, the arts.
00:28:19 ►
And I’m just curious about how did you approach the religious department at Rice University to accept a thesis based on what you just described?
00:28:32 ►
Well, it was easy for me.
00:28:34 ►
I was lucky because of my advisor, this guy, Jeff Kripal.
00:28:39 ►
And Jeff Kripal is an unusual figure in religious studies.
00:28:42 ►
He’s very well respected by some.
00:28:44 ►
I mean, some people disagree with him quite a bit,
00:28:47 ►
but he still has a lot of power, if you will, in the field.
00:28:52 ►
And he’s always been interested in the kind of extreme events.
00:28:57 ►
And while in some ways he’s kind of a normie,
00:29:01 ►
you know, a straight guy, midwesterner former catholic you know good student you know
00:29:08 ►
father husband dude uh he also had his own mystical experience when he was in india studying
00:29:16 ►
doing writing his first book uh which was about the indian 19th century indian saint ramakrishna
00:29:23 ►
so he’s writing about Ramakrishna, studying about
00:29:26 ►
Ramakrishna. And he had basically an experience of the goddess Kali. And his whole body was
00:29:34 ►
inflamed. He had a classic, very bodily, very energetic, mystical experience that was like
00:29:40 ►
full on, you know, A plus mystical experience on the natch, no drugs, no expectations, no religious practice,
00:29:47 ►
just one night the lights went on.
00:29:51 ►
And so that made him a very interesting kind of scholar.
00:29:55 ►
He became very, he is very interested in the paranormal, in the mystical,
00:30:00 ►
in what drives mystical scholars, you know, people like me,
00:30:07 ►
who have experiences but then also want to think about their experiences and the loop between books and experience,
00:30:12 ►
which is very important. It’s a very important part of my writing and I think is a very important
00:30:16 ►
part of psychedelics. A lot of being a psychedelic person is reading about psychedelics, is knowing
00:30:21 ►
about other stories, other people, other times, other places,
00:30:25 ►
and these things kind of mix together. So in any case, he invited me to get a PhD. He was like,
00:30:31 ►
come on down to Rice and get a PhD and we’ll let you write about whatever you want to write about.
00:30:36 ►
So it was kind of a no brainer for me once I was in that position, because there’s still very,
00:30:42 ►
just it’s changing now within the humanities and the
00:30:46 ►
social sciences there’s a lot more openness to psychedelics and that’s just going to keep on
00:30:51 ►
changing as psychedelics the can the renaissance i’ve noticed the same thing you know it’s probably
00:30:56 ►
a partially a generational shift because so many of the baby boomers are moving out and the younger
00:31:01 ►
generations coming into positions like that when you were talking about the number 23 popping up and synchronicities, I couldn’t help but to
00:31:09 ►
remember that you were born in Del Mar and I was living in Del Mar when we first met.
00:31:15 ►
You got your PhD from Rice in Houston. I got my PhD from the University of Houston, my doctorate, and my college roommate was the first Ph.D. in space science
00:31:29 ►
from Rice University in 1965 or 1967.
00:31:33 ►
So we have a number 23 between us somewhere.
00:31:37 ►
Yeah, it’s true.
00:31:38 ►
It’s true.
00:31:38 ►
That’s what I mean when you start looking at it.
00:31:40 ►
That’s part of that weirdness.
00:31:42 ►
You know, the thing about the weirdness is one of the reasons i like it is that on the one hand it gestures towards the enchanted to the the beyond
00:31:51 ►
the outside the things that don’t fit in our reality but there’s another aspect of the weird
00:31:56 ►
that is partly what makes things weird that’s actually very ordinary it’s very banal it’s right
00:32:01 ►
in front of us just basic stuff stuff. Just the way things feel.
00:32:05 ►
Like, wait, I thought my glass was over here, but now it’s over here. Oh, well, I guess I didn’t
00:32:11 ►
remember it well. But if you really pay attention, actually, ordinary life is pretty weird, including
00:32:16 ►
your own experience. Like, oh, I went here, and then this happened, and I met this guy. But if
00:32:20 ►
you start going into all those connections, you’re going to find all sorts of really interesting resonances.
00:32:26 ►
And there’s a kind of poetry of our of our ordinary experiences in a way that that I think is well described by the by the weird.
00:32:35 ►
Yeah. You know, I’ve always thought of coincidences as clues.
00:32:38 ►
And if you stop getting coincidences, you’re on the wrong track because you’re not getting any clues anymore.
00:32:44 ►
And synchronicity is sort of a clue on steroids, you know?
00:32:48 ►
Well, but here’s the interesting thing.
00:32:49 ►
Yeah.
00:32:50 ►
I totally agree with you.
00:32:51 ►
Like, if you, you know, if you haven’t had one for a while, you have a couple of synchronicities
00:32:56 ►
and it’s like, all right, I’m on the right path.
00:32:59 ►
Like just this last weekend, I had some 23s.
00:33:02 ►
Now, 23 is a number that’s in the Robert Anton Wilson book,
00:33:07 ►
Illuminatus. And he first heard about it from William Burroughs, you know, the famous beat
00:33:12 ►
writer who said, yeah, there’s something about 20. There’s something around 23. That’s not a
00:33:17 ►
very good Burroughs. But anyway, there’s something about 23. You’re coming on, Larry, with the 23 comment?
00:33:26 ►
Well, what I was going to say is because I read the Illuminati’s trilogy
00:33:31 ►
in the early 70s, and I’m in the comic book business,
00:33:37 ►
and so I know for a fact that media is filled with 23s
00:33:42 ►
because people know that, they’re trying to,
00:33:45 ►
you know,
00:33:45 ►
they want to actually freak you out and communicate with you.
00:33:49 ►
And so to me,
00:33:49 ►
23 has lost some of its power when you see,
00:33:52 ►
you know,
00:33:52 ►
they’re in a hotel room and it’s the doors 23,
00:33:54 ►
because that is,
00:33:56 ►
um,
00:33:57 ►
that’s a choice that somebody made.
00:33:59 ►
But,
00:34:00 ►
um,
00:34:01 ►
but the word weird,
00:34:02 ►
I mean,
00:34:03 ►
first of all,
00:34:03 ►
I’m late here because it just got back from Comic-Con.
00:34:06 ►
And so, but.
00:34:08 ►
So you just came from weird.
00:34:11 ►
The word that is most identified with my work for the over the last 30 years is weird.
00:34:18 ►
It’s like.
00:34:19 ►
I don’t know if you know, Eric, Larry is the creator of Bean World.
00:34:23 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:34:24 ►
Well, anyway. if you know eric uh he’s hilarious creator of bean world yeah yeah well anyway so but you know
00:34:26 ►
it’s like i don’t know how to describe this book but it’s really really weird i was once told by a
00:34:31 ►
high up librarian in indianapolis that my book was the weirdest book in her entire library
00:34:37 ►
you know it’s just it’s a funny word and i’m not even really sure what it means yeah that that that was that was one of my the points i was making is that we don’t really sure what it means. Yeah. That was one of the points I was making
00:34:47 ►
is that we don’t really know what it means.
00:34:49 ►
And so one of the things I was like,
00:34:50 ►
where does it come from?
00:34:52 ►
So I just did an etymology.
00:34:53 ►
I traced where do we start using it?
00:34:55 ►
How does it evolve?
00:34:57 ►
How does it become associated
00:34:58 ►
with a certain kind of creative art?
00:35:02 ►
Like when do we say,
00:35:03 ►
oh, that’s a weird story.
00:35:05 ►
That’s weird fiction.
00:35:06 ►
And then I trace it through comic books.
00:35:08 ►
And,
00:35:09 ►
you know,
00:35:09 ►
in the,
00:35:09 ►
in the fifties,
00:35:10 ►
there’s tons of these EC comics that are like weird science,
00:35:14 ►
weird,
00:35:14 ►
this weird,
00:35:15 ►
that,
00:35:15 ►
I mean,
00:35:15 ►
it’s like dozens of them.
00:35:17 ►
Weird was banned from the covers.
00:35:18 ►
It was one of the banned books.
00:35:20 ►
Yeah,
00:35:20 ►
it’s true.
00:35:20 ►
Once,
00:35:21 ►
once they put the regulation on that was like that indicated something that was sort indicated something that was sort of nasty, various, something under, you know, like, right, it undermined, there’s definitely a sort of undermining quality to it.
00:35:44 ►
not exclusively, but I love tracing where things come from.
00:35:47 ►
You know, where does the phrase weird tale come from?
00:35:49 ►
What did Lovecraft think about the weird?
00:35:51 ►
He has wonderful definition. They were in Weird Tales.
00:35:53 ►
Yeah.
00:35:53 ►
Lovecraft and Howard.
00:35:55 ►
Yeah.
00:35:55 ►
And Clark Ashton Smith are California’s own.
00:36:00 ►
So I am going to ask a question that’s going to kind of divert a little bit.
00:36:06 ►
But the reason why I became part of this group was a lecture I think that you gave at – it’s on Lorenzo’s podcast and that you gave at Burning Man.
00:36:19 ►
And it had to do with – because a friend of ours, a mutual friend of ours who’s not here between me and
00:36:25 ►
lorenzo um knew that i would be really interested in this but you know i wasn’t paying attention
00:36:30 ►
but you said something about you know that the original elements were earth water fire and air
00:36:39 ►
and they have been kind of surpassed by electricity and i i’m still not over that one that is that is mind-blowing
00:36:50 ►
yeah well that no that’s that’s a good riff that’s it brings me back you know uh even back
00:36:59 ►
when that you know when they have the five you know the the one thing to say about the uh the
00:37:03 ►
pentagram the five points is to say that there are the four classic elements earth air fire water
00:37:09 ►
and then the fifth one is the quintessence the fifth essence when they
00:37:15 ►
first started to explore electricity in the 17th little bit 18th definitely
00:37:22 ►
early 19th century one of the interesting things when they first started to muscle around with electricity,
00:37:28 ►
lightning rods, batteries, et cetera, is that nobody had any idea what it was.
00:37:37 ►
They knew it went zap.
00:37:39 ►
They knew there was something happening, but there was no theory of it.
00:37:43 ►
Now, if you ask a physicist, what’s electricity?
00:37:47 ►
All while it’s a flow of ions between blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:37:50 ►
And they’ll hand you the textbook and, you know, you read it.
00:37:53 ►
It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
00:37:54 ►
You’re like, what?
00:37:55 ►
Are you guys sure you know what you’re talking about?
00:37:56 ►
Like, oh, yeah, we understand it.
00:37:58 ►
They don’t really because it’s pretty weird.
00:38:00 ►
Like electricity is weird.
00:38:01 ►
And that’s one of my points about weird is there’s parts of reality like quantum physics and electricity that are pretty weird. But in any case, so when they first
00:38:09 ►
started building things out of electricity, even the telegraph in the 1840s, it was this very
00:38:17 ►
mysterious stuff and people would even call it the quintessence. And people don’t really take electricity that seriously they think it’s like
00:38:27 ►
well you know we just have this stuff we figured out how to use it we can generate it with you know
00:38:32 ►
induction coils and you know big deal we can bring some lights and i’m like no no no no no it’s like
00:38:39 ►
the earth is evolving for millions of years and human beings are on it for hundreds of thousands of years
00:38:46 ►
doing their evolution and then at some point this electrical fluid which is another way they called
00:38:53 ►
it which is distributed throughout the cosmos becomes technologized and suddenly begins to
00:38:59 ►
move around and shape and now completely fuels our whole civilization and but it’s an element it’s
00:39:07 ►
not human it’s not an idea it’s juice it’s like something that’s both a real thing and a symbol
00:39:15 ►
the way earth air fire not water are and it’s what we live and breathe and there’s some really
00:39:21 ►
interesting stuff by uh rudolph steiner you know, this esoteric thinker.
00:39:27 ►
He has some great stuff on electricity because he’s like, he mostly, he thinks it’s a little bit more on the dark side, but not entirely.
00:39:36 ►
It’s sort of like a troll for him.
00:39:39 ►
It’s like, you know, we could do better, but it’s, you know, we got to use it.
00:39:43 ►
So, you know, let’s do better, but it’s, you know, we got to use it. So, you know, let’s do our best with it.
00:39:46 ►
But he very much wrapped it into his esoteric thinking that very much involved
00:39:52 ►
these elemental forces in the cosmos or whatever.
00:39:55 ►
So for me, once I kind of grok that about, I’ve never seen civilization the same
00:40:01 ►
because I always feel like we’re inside of some kind of
00:40:05 ►
electrical, spiritual, troll experiment that we can’t stop now.
00:40:13 ►
Thanks for talking about that.
00:40:16 ►
Sure, sure, absolutely.
00:40:19 ►
So does anybody else have a question?
00:40:22 ►
If you’d like, you can hit that participant button. Okay,
00:40:25 ►
go ahead, Rich. Eric, I’m reading your book right now, man. It’s great. Great. Yeah, the inside,
00:40:32 ►
the inside jacket is so cool, man. Yeah, I love it. I read Prometheus Rising last year and got
00:40:40 ►
stuck in Robert Anton Wilson’s reality tunnel and had quite a dissociative
00:40:46 ►
experience for a few weeks. And you mentioned somewhere else that you wanted to get into
00:40:52 ►
Philip K. Dick’s head, but not for three years. Did you, when writing this and researching all
00:40:58 ►
this, did you, or I’m sure you have in the past, what’s your experience been with getting stuck in
00:41:04 ►
one of those reality
00:41:05 ►
tunnels or just starting to believe in all of this stuff that they’ve
00:41:08 ►
churned out of their head?
00:41:10 ►
You know, that’s a wonderful question.
00:41:11 ►
I mean, I’ve been, since talking about this book and bringing it out there,
00:41:15 ►
one of the things I’ve been thinking about more is how to say the ethics of
00:41:24 ►
these writers, meaning they put these ideas out there,
00:41:28 ►
but there’s something infectious about them. There’s something a little viral. And there’s
00:41:34 ►
a dark side to that. And there’s a disruptive side to it. And they’re not always that responsible
00:41:41 ►
about that, which means that we as readers, especially if we’re susceptible to
00:41:46 ►
this stuff, or if we’re particularly at difficult points of our lives, or we’re really obsessed with
00:41:51 ►
it, or, you know, whatever, there’s different situations where we’re more susceptible to things
00:41:58 ►
than others. And those things can come in, you know, just the way we talk about memes today,
00:42:03 ►
you know, online, or ideas that are viral, or political positions that are, you know, just the way we talk about memes today, you know, online or ideas that are
00:42:05 ►
viral or political positions that are, you know, have a certain kind of expand and slide their way
00:42:12 ►
through things, that there’s something about this esoteric, weird stuff, especially the three guys
00:42:18 ►
that I’m talking about, that has that infectious quality, but definitely more Wilson and Dick, I think, than McKenna.
00:42:27 ►
I think McKenna doesn’t have quite so dark a dimension to what he was talking about.
00:42:34 ►
And it’s not just dark by any means.
00:42:36 ►
But your question about me is what happened to me.
00:42:39 ►
You know, that’s a really interesting one because I think in some ways,
00:42:46 ►
That’s a really interesting one because I think in some ways putting all the time into writing this, you know,
00:42:49 ►
many years of study and reading is both a symptom of the way in which I had
00:42:58 ►
the same experience you did and the antidote to it at the same time.
00:43:04 ►
It’s like, in some ways I never totally got out.
00:43:09 ►
Like I was still, I still have the Philip K. Dick reality
00:43:14 ►
might be a construct by some evil demon thing in my head
00:43:18 ►
or Robert Anton Wilson, you can’t know anything.
00:43:21 ►
So you’re just let loose and there’s no orientation and good luck
00:43:26 ►
kid and a kind of paranoid quality or weird dreams or, you know, I’ve had parts of my life
00:43:35 ►
that were challenging that way. They never became like a real problem. It never looked to anyone
00:43:43 ►
else or even really me like mental illness exactly.
00:43:47 ►
But it has, you know, you’re going down the park. I mean, one, just as a side note,
00:43:51 ►
I didn’t finish what I was saying earlier, how, like synchronicities, you get a couple
00:43:59 ►
and you’re like, oh, it’s kind of cool. Something’s happening. I’m on, you know, maybe I’m on the right path or, you know, something’s unfolding.
00:44:07 ►
Great.
00:44:08 ►
But if you get synchronicity after synchronicity after synchronicity after synchronicity, you’re nuts.
00:44:16 ►
I mean, you’re crazy.
00:44:17 ►
Uh-oh, here we go.
00:44:18 ►
And maybe you can hold it together.
00:44:22 ►
But if you can’t hold it together, you know, is going, oh, he’s not, he’s saying,
00:44:27 ►
the telephone’s talking to the thing,
00:44:30 ►
and the class is just the same as the other person said.
00:44:33 ►
And then you’ve lost the plot, as they say in the UK.
00:44:37 ►
That’s a great phrase, losing the plot.
00:44:41 ►
And so it’s a knife edge.
00:45:02 ►
And one of the things I talk about in the book is the idea of, uh, the, uh, the tightrope walk that as we go through these strange experiences, reading weird books, kind of bringing it on in a sense, it’s like being on a tightrope. You got to keep your balance and it’s,
00:45:05 ►
you got to keep awake,
00:45:07 ►
you know,
00:45:07 ►
and,
00:45:08 ►
and not just get drawn into whatever.
00:45:11 ►
Recognize that you’re in a difficult situation.
00:45:14 ►
You can’t just get to solid ground.
00:45:16 ►
You’re not on solid ground,
00:45:19 ►
but there’s something about maintaining a balance and a clarity and to some degree, a common sense that works in an uncommon situation.
00:45:32 ►
So my writing of this book, again, is very much both the way that these things still haunt me, that I’m still marked by them in ways that I can’t control.
00:45:44 ►
And at the same time, that there’s, I believe, a kind of way through.
00:45:49 ►
And there was a way through to a degree for all the people I’m talking about.
00:45:53 ►
And that’s one of the interesting things about the people,
00:45:56 ►
as you’ll see when you get to, you know, deeper into the book,
00:46:00 ►
which is, you know, it’s not the easiest read,
00:46:03 ►
but I like to think that it’s worth it. That all three of these guys, McKenna, Wilson, you know, it’s not the easiest read, but I like to think that it’s worth it,
00:46:06 ►
that all three of these guys, McKenna, Wilson, and Dick, they both succeeded.
00:46:12 ►
They were good tightrope walkers, and they fell.
00:46:16 ►
We all kind of fall.
00:46:17 ►
They fell into delusion.
00:46:19 ►
They fell into messianic thinking.
00:46:22 ►
They fell into inflation, which is the idea that you’re a messiah
00:46:26 ►
or you know something that’s going to help the world drastically, transform everything.
00:46:33 ►
And these are familiar motifs, both from psychedelic experience and from psychosis and
00:46:39 ►
from life on the fringe. And they kind of did both. They sort of show both how to do it and what happens when you don’t.
00:46:48 ►
And in some sense, if we’re drawn to this stuff, we’re on that tightrope.
00:46:53 ►
And we can always, we can always gain our, you know, you always get better.
00:46:57 ►
You know, it’s like a practice.
00:46:58 ►
You can always get better at being a tightrope walker.
00:47:01 ►
Yeah. You know, that’s a good point, Eric, about the people like,
00:47:04 ►
like Terrence McKenna and Dick and Yeah, you know, that’s a good point, Eric, about the people like Terrence McKenna and
00:47:06 ►
Dick and Wilson, you know, being out on the fringe, on the edge, and then also being expected to live
00:47:13 ►
up to a reputation you didn’t totally create yourself. I know that work on Terrence, and I’m
00:47:19 ►
sure it did on the others. In fact, just about three weeks ago, I podcast another Robert Anton Wilson talk.
00:47:25 ►
I’ve had him here in the salon a few times. And Terrence has had over 270 appearances here. So
00:47:31 ►
oh my gosh, we preserved a lot of him. And I the Leary estate gave me all his digital stuff. So I
00:47:37 ►
have about 50 of those up there. So so it is sort of a record of some of the thinking from back in
00:47:43 ►
those days, too. And and I think what the comments I get from people after I podcast some of these talks,
00:47:50 ►
I’ve never done one by Dick.
00:47:51 ►
It’s very difficult to find stuff by him.
00:47:54 ►
But the comments are generally they say, you know,
00:47:57 ►
I don’t really buy a lot of what they’re saying,
00:48:00 ►
but he’s really pushed me to think about these things.
00:48:03 ►
And I think Terrence really understood that himself.
00:48:06 ►
I don’t think he really wanted to be a guru of any kind.
00:48:09 ►
No, he really did.
00:48:10 ►
Better than most people.
00:48:11 ►
So no, he really, he really didn’t.
00:48:14 ►
Dick was never respectable in his lifetime.
00:48:18 ►
Correct.
00:48:19 ►
He, and he died.
00:48:21 ►
He went on the set of Blade Runner,
00:48:23 ►
but he died before his influence hit the media and and
00:48:27 ►
and really so many things that we live with in our world are in his are in his books and
00:48:35 ►
i don’t think he thought of himself as any kind of you know certainly when he was writing his
00:48:40 ►
books in the 50s and 60s once he had you know valus you know everything after that uh it kind
00:48:46 ►
of became very different but just the idea because one of my favorite things about his books was
00:48:52 ►
there’s this you know this guy gets in a car he wants to go to california and his car tells him
00:48:57 ►
not i can’t make it to california i don’t have enough oil. And he says, well, we’re going anyway. And the car says, I’ll sue you.
00:49:06 ►
And it’s just, we’re.
00:49:08 ►
Yeah, no, no.
00:49:10 ►
There’s a lot of things like that, you know,
00:49:14 ►
or there’s little kind of insect robots that are, you know, tracking your credit
00:49:17 ►
and hassling you if you don’t have, you know,
00:49:19 ►
credit or the guy who’s got to, you know,
00:49:21 ►
feed money to his household devices
00:49:24 ►
to get out of his to get the door open.
00:49:28 ►
And it’s funny because when you read the novels
00:49:34 ►
outside the context of our contemporary moment,
00:49:37 ►
these things don’t seem like,
00:49:39 ►
this isn’t science fiction that’s like predicting
00:49:42 ►
the actual technological future.
00:49:44 ►
It’s not hard science fiction. It’s absurdism. It’s like predicting the actual technological future. It’s not hard science fiction.
00:49:45 ►
It’s absurdism.
00:49:46 ►
It’s Kafka.
00:49:48 ►
It’s Dada.
00:49:49 ►
It’s wacky.
00:49:51 ►
And yet, he got closer to the texture of our contemporary existence probably than anyone.
00:49:59 ►
The way that it feels, this sort of vague unease, a little little paranoid not really sure what all these objects
00:50:06 ►
are doing kind of confused it’s sort of enchanted but not in a particularly fun way you know i mean
00:50:13 ►
it’s it’s really kind of striking there’s a very much of a sense of of uh we’re very aware of money
00:50:19 ►
of of capitalism and how capitalism distorts reality. I mean, that’s a major theme throughout his fiction.
00:50:27 ►
So yeah, he’s a grim prophet
00:50:29 ►
in a really, really interesting way.
00:50:32 ►
May I chime in with something?
00:50:35 ►
Sure, go ahead.
00:50:37 ►
Amazing.
00:50:37 ►
I just wanted to, I’m pretty new to the live salons,
00:50:40 ►
but I’ve listened, I’ve been following Lorenzo
00:50:42 ►
like that from episode one.
00:50:46 ►
I just, just because there’s been a little bit of chat going on on the side I just wanted to put my hand up uh
00:50:51 ►
makes me feel nervous to say it because I’m aware that there’s all sorts of labels that come with it
00:50:55 ►
I have dedicated my life to seeking out people that have regular out-of-body mystical lucid dream
00:51:02 ►
precognition telepathy you name it experiences
00:51:05 ►
on the natch so i came very very late to psychedelics because all of this was going on in
00:51:10 ►
my life anyway but i also have an incredibly good bullshit detector i’m not just in for you know the
00:51:17 ►
game of it i’ve never made a living out of it it’s not something that i’m into i’m genuinely
00:51:20 ►
interested because i was born into a white western culture that didn’t have any words for any of this.
00:51:26 ►
And I do feel like Kenya was saying in the chat, in another culture, it’s a very ordinary thing to have these mystical experiences, etc.
00:51:33 ►
What I wanted to say was that this is very timely, this book and this work, because when I did come to psychedelics,
00:51:39 ►
I came to see how comparable the psychedelic experience was with other sorts of experiences
00:51:46 ►
and found some overlap and some divergence. But it’s a very, I think it’s a really critical time
00:51:52 ►
for us to be aware that we can activate a lot of this stuff through sound frequency,
00:51:56 ►
through meditation, through just lucid dreaming is one of the most easy things you can practice.
00:52:01 ►
So these things will happen to me spontaneously and because I was
00:52:05 ►
brought up in a house that was very much against it it made me protect these capacities and go
00:52:10 ►
looking for other people so I just I just gently wanted to say there are so many people living
00:52:16 ►
sane sober you know they may use medicines they may not but they’re out in the world I’ve spent
00:52:22 ►
my entire life seeking them out to find them and they’re not just hear anecdotes but actually have mutually activated experiences
00:52:29 ►
on the next with people and in australia it’s a very common thing you sit with a clever man
00:52:33 ►
there doesn’t need to be anything in the mix you sit with a clever man there’s some ditch
00:52:37 ►
and they’ll hold their hands out and you’ll see the entire ancestral line of you know flashing
00:52:42 ►
before your eyes in their palms and it’s it’s not trickery it’s just a tapped in this so i just want to let me let me interrupt you a second here because while
00:52:50 ►
we have eric here you brought up something interesting that eric referred to in the very
00:52:55 ►
beginning uh just uh sideways kind of eric you said something like you had some issues with the
00:53:03 ►
psychedelic experience uh ways presented by some members of the community, if I understood you right.
00:53:09 ►
Yeah, I mean, there’s actually a lot of issues, and I’ve been around the scene for a while.
00:53:13 ►
But I mean, just in order to focus on what Un said, I think one of it is that we tend to kind of overly fetishize psychedelics as psychedelics.
00:53:26 ►
And now they’re groovy and it’s like, oh, they’re medicines.
00:53:30 ►
They’re going to save all this and dah, dah, dah.
00:53:31 ►
And it’s still this obsession with the material.
00:53:34 ►
And one of the reasons that I wrote the book the way I did is I put these three figures together
00:53:39 ►
is two of them are profoundly psychedelic.
00:53:42 ►
They would not have had their experiences unless they were taking high doses of,
00:53:46 ►
in Terrence’s case, mushrooms with a little bit of other stuff added on there,
00:53:51 ►
and in Wilson’s case, LSD.
00:53:57 ►
But Dick, again, though he had used drugs a lot in the 60s,
00:54:02 ►
by the time he had his really breakthrough experience,
00:54:04 ►
he wasn’t really using drugs at all. And while he had an unusual mind and, you know, was having, he had a
00:54:11 ►
lot of difficult mental experiences as well, he was also having things on the natch. And indeed,
00:54:18 ►
a lot of the really important stuff around these experiences in 1974 and the few years afterwards had to do with dreams,
00:54:27 ►
with encountering things in dreams, and with actually him learning to sort of surf his dreams,
00:54:33 ►
to listen to his dreams. Not so much lucid dreaming, but more exploring hypnagogia,
00:54:39 ►
that period of time between waking and sleeping. As you go to sleep, you kind of things start to get weird
00:54:46 ►
and you can kind of like begin to surf that space. My wife, Jennifer Dumpert, just wrote a book about
00:54:52 ►
this actually called Liminal Dreaming. And lucid dreaming doesn’t come to everyone. It takes a lot
00:55:02 ►
of practice to learn how to do it. And some people work really, really hard and don’t get that much results. But liminal dreaming is actually much
00:55:08 ►
easier in a lot of ways. All you’re really doing is learning to stay awake as you go to sleep and
00:55:13 ►
to pay attention as you enter into the dream realm. And things become extremely bizarre,
00:55:19 ►
very wonderful, very mercurial, very interesting. And Dick learned to kind of stay awake there and he would get
00:55:26 ►
messages from this realm and then he would write them down and then those messages would help him
00:55:31 ►
understand all these other experiences he was happening. So he’s very much an example of the
00:55:36 ►
kind of thing that you’re talking about is that there’s a lot of stuff that happens to people on
00:55:41 ►
the Nash. Now, some of these people, they don’t have any choice in the matter, like Dick. It just happens. They’re just going to get it. And sometimes they get too
00:55:48 ►
much. And sometimes they get a little crazy. And sometimes they get really crazy. And it’s a
00:55:53 ►
continuum. In other cultures, as you point out, there are different ways of organizing it. Now,
00:55:58 ►
people can still go crazy in any culture, any indigenous culture. You can still have someone
00:56:03 ►
who just loses the plot. But overwhelmingly, there’s far more ways the culture has to kind of hold, contain, shape, only that these other things happen and that
00:56:25 ►
they’re related but not the same thing as psychedelics but that people who are interested
00:56:30 ►
in psychedelics who see it sounds cool sounds interesting you’re probably better off trying to
00:56:36 ►
see these up some of these other techniques see if they work for you you know at least initially
00:56:40 ►
because if you end up deciding to use psychedelics, you’ll probably
00:56:45 ►
have a more grounded sense of it as a practice.
00:56:47 ►
One of the criticisms I have about drugs is that it’s very easy, especially in our, you
00:56:53 ►
know, particularly in our culture, in fact, you know, in our culture to just, it’s just
00:56:59 ►
another thing.
00:57:00 ►
It’s like, you know, buying a toy.
00:57:02 ►
It’s like going to the movies.
00:57:04 ►
It’s like getting a hamburger. You like get like going to the movies it’s like getting a hamburger you
00:57:06 ►
like get a thing you buy it you take it it does something for you you have an experience like
00:57:12 ►
going to the movie or going to a theme park you have an experience and that kind of consumerist
00:57:18 ►
attitude is so embodied in taking a drug and not doing anything
00:57:25 ►
that we forget that psychedelics, properly taken, I believe, are a practice.
00:57:32 ►
They’re not just a thing or an experience.
00:57:35 ►
It’s a practice.
00:57:36 ►
It’s something you’ve got to bring yourself to,
00:57:38 ►
and you do it intelligently over time with work,
00:57:42 ►
the same way you learned how to lucid dream with the practice
00:57:45 ►
some people it comes naturally but most of us have to learn it’s just like meditation you know
00:57:51 ►
i’ve been meditating for 30 years it’s pretty trippy out there let me tell you it’s pretty fun
00:57:56 ►
i mean sometimes it’s a drag but like it’s it’s like not normal out there in meditation land but
00:58:03 ►
it’s taken me years and years of practice to do that.
00:58:06 ►
I don’t even recommend it.
00:58:07 ►
It’s a lot of work,
00:58:08 ►
but the point being that all this whole realm is way better when you think of
00:58:15 ►
it as a practice.
00:58:16 ►
And one of the reasons that indigenous cultures are able to contain these
00:58:20 ►
otherworldly experiences is not just because they,
00:58:24 ►
they’re more mythological or they don’t have this
00:58:28 ►
idea of psychosis and they’re not pathologizing and they’re not stuck in rationality. That’s
00:58:33 ►
probably part of it. But I think more to the point is that they have all of these practices
00:58:38 ►
that people are able to engage in that enable them to integrate, play with, shape, reflect, express, creatively respond
00:58:48 ►
to these impulses that come from outside the norm. So I really encourage anybody who’s doing
00:58:55 ►
this kind of stuff seriously is to have a practice. Think about psychedelics as a practice,
00:59:03 ►
you know, where you bring yourself, you have intention, you have a ritual, you have a way of integrating, you know, some sense that you’re learning how to navigate when you go back there, you like, you learn more, you read about other people’s techniques, not their experiences.
00:59:19 ►
I don’t think the experiences in a lot of ways are that important, actually.
00:59:23 ►
There’s too much of an emphasis on experiences.
00:59:26 ►
This happened, I saw this, I had this vision.
00:59:29 ►
Great, whatever.
00:59:30 ►
It’s much more about who you are as you learn to exist in between this realm and that realm
00:59:36 ►
and in this other realm.
00:59:38 ►
And how do you show up there?
00:59:40 ►
How do you behave?
00:59:41 ►
How do you bring yourself to these experiences,
00:59:46 ►
especially to the difficult parts of them?
00:59:49 ►
But in addition to treating psychedelics as a practice,
00:59:51 ►
have another practice.
00:59:52 ►
Meditate.
00:59:54 ►
Do Aikido.
00:59:55 ►
Do Judo.
00:59:56 ►
Do yoga.
00:59:58 ►
Like, have a regular practice where you just have the idea of practice in your life,
01:00:02 ►
where you put yourself in there,
01:00:03 ►
you got to devote some time,
01:00:05 ►
you got to sacrifice a little, you do it over and over and over, and you begin to change.
01:00:10 ►
And the way you begin to change in response to a practice, to a spiritual practice,
01:00:14 ►
but also physical practice, martial arts, mixed wrestling, you know, anything physical that you
01:00:21 ►
bring yourself to with your whole body and being, that’s totally going to help all of your explorations.
01:00:27 ►
And I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on that for sure.
01:00:31 ►
But Eric, that was so beautifully said, even though I have more questions,
01:00:35 ►
I think we should end on that because that was just,
01:00:38 ►
just wonderful what you said and I’m in total agreement with all of it.
01:00:42 ►
And I think most of the people that listen to these podcasts do too.
01:00:46 ►
We’ve talked about this before.
01:00:49 ►
And the point of having a practice is crucial.
01:00:51 ►
And you stated it just perfectly.
01:00:57 ►
I hope that maybe you can come back sometime here before too much longer and we can talk some more.
01:00:58 ►
Oh, yeah, this is fun.
01:01:00 ►
I feel like we barely scratched the surface.
01:01:01 ►
We haven’t. And let me ask, is your wife’s book published yet?
01:01:04 ►
Yeah, it just came out
01:01:05 ►
it’s called liminal dreaming and it’s a it’s a really cool book because the thing about hypnagogy
01:01:10 ►
is is we don’t really think about it like it’s not a term people think about they don’t really
01:01:15 ►
notice it a lot of people don’t even notice it once you tell them yeah you know that part where
01:01:19 ►
you’re between sleeping and waking and they’re they’re like oh yeah yeah oh yeah yeah i know i
01:01:24 ►
know that.
01:01:27 ►
Do you think I could talk her into coming in here one night and talking about her new book?
01:01:29 ►
Oh, yeah, I think she’d love to, and she loves talking to people.
01:01:31 ►
She does a lot of workshops, and one of the things that’s great about the book
01:01:35 ►
is it’s very practical.
01:01:36 ►
There’s a lot of techniques in it that are, you know, really accessible,
01:01:41 ►
and it comes quickly, and it’s a really wonderful way to explore very psychedelic places totally on the natch free no hangover no cost
01:01:51 ►
tell her i’m looking forward to it and i’ll get a hold of you offline and uh in touch with her and
01:01:57 ►
and we’ll set something up i think that’d be great great fun so excellent well it’s been
01:02:01 ►
wonderful to be back to see you again and see you doing so well and to meet a lot of your great crew here. Same here. And we’ll put this out in a podcast
01:02:10 ►
next week and then I’ll be in touch and we’ll do this again. So thank you and thank everybody for
01:02:15 ►
being here. And until next week, keep the old faith and stay high. Thanks. Thanks, Eric. Thanks,
01:02:23 ►
Ernst. I. See you guys.
01:02:30 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:36 ►
Hopefully, you’ll take those closing words of Eric’s to heart.
01:02:39 ►
Well, we’ve talked about this here in the salon before.
01:02:48 ►
I think that the, well, I think that the rap that Eric just gave is the best summation of the psychedelic situation that I’ve heard in a long time.
01:02:51 ►
In one of the talks that we’ve heard from Terence McKenna,
01:02:57 ►
he also talks about people who take one small dose of LSD and then claim to be a psychonaut,
01:03:01 ►
when in fact they are merely psychedelic tourists.
01:03:06 ►
But a true psychonaut, someone who is dedicated to further exploring the depths of consciousness, is a person with a plan, and a plan involves a well-thought-out
01:03:12 ►
practice. My friend Myron Stolaroff was a person like that, and he combined a 40-plus year
01:03:18 ►
exploration of LSD with an equally intense meditation practice. And from what I could see,
01:03:25 ►
Myron was as close to a fully enlightened human being
01:03:28 ►
as I’ve ever encountered.
01:03:30 ►
So I hope that you’ll review Eric’s closing message
01:03:33 ►
and then solidify your own practice
01:03:35 ►
of consciousness exploration.
01:03:38 ►
Now, I’d like to close today’s podcast
01:03:41 ►
with a brief tribute to one of my heroes,
01:03:47 ►
a true giant from the 60s right up to the present. I’m talking about Paul Krasner, who died yesterday. He was 87 years old, and while
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you may not recognize his name, I can assure you that his influence on American culture was quite
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literally orders of magnitude more than that even of Terence McKenna.
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You see, the underground press in this country basically began with The Realist magazine,
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which Paul founded and first published from the offices of Mad Magazine. Now, The Realist began
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as a nationally distributed magazine in 1958, and it continued off and on until 2001.
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Over the course of its existence, The Realist featured many up-and-coming writers, such as
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Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller. But back in the 60s and 70s,
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for many of us, The Realist was sort of the adult intellectual version of Mad Magazine.
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If you were young and alive back then, well, you most likely remember seeing some of the Realist projects,
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like the bumper sticker that said, Fuck Communism, and the wonderful Disneyland Memorial orgy poster.
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And, of course, their over-the-top satire about the Kennedy assassination that was so gross I don’t even want to think about it again.
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But it was funny, at least if you enjoy satire.
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Paul Krasner once said that English was his second language, but laughter was his first.
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And I’m here to tell you he made me laugh many, many times.
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But more than that, he also became a really good example for many of us
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who are now old guys, because even though he was right in the middle of some really exciting times
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in the 60s and 70s, and well, he hung around with some truly heavy-duty characters, he nonetheless
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survived long into old age. An obituary that I read this morning closed with this.
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into old age. An obituary that I read this morning closed with this. I asked him how he’d been able to survive while so many of his contemporaries, like Timothy Leary, Lenny Bruce, Ken Kesey,
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Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg, and most notably his fellow co-founders of the
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Youth International Party, the Yippies, and co-conspirators in the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial,
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Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin,
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well, all of those people now have died.
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How did you survive?
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Simple, he said.
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I’ve never taken any legal drugs.
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And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. you