Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“If you insist on, I don’t want to use the word ‘abusing’ it, but if you insist on using psychedelics frequently, at high doses back-to-back, you will unlock your way into a set of assumptions, and perceptions, and feelings that not very many people can follow you into. And then the question is have you gone into a spiritual domain or have you just fallen off the track? And it’s hard to tell, and maybe it can happen both ways.”
“What does it mean if it becomes harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean you’re getting out of balance? Does it mean you’re just getting older? Where should the blame be put, and what can you do about it.”
“Maybe [the psychedelic community is] a special slice. First of all, it is a monkey brain that we’re operating with here. Nowhere is it writ large that it can actually encompass ‘the truth’. Why should it? … So then, if you’re into these consciousness-expanding techniques, whether it’s just paying attention, or using psychedelic drugs, or something else, then you actually get to a place where there is an abyss of knowing.”
“Nowhere is it writ that the universe should be rationally apprehendable.”
“Abstract expressionism, all of these things, Freudianism, Jung, National Socialist, it’s all anti-reasonable. From the point of view of the 19th Century we don’t have to worry about madness, we are mad, every last one of us. We’ve so thoroughly imbibed the values of modernity that we are incomprehensible to our own past.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And since the insanity of this year’s Burning Man Festival is now behind us,
00:00:28 ►
I thought that it would be fun to kick around a few ideas about, well, what it actually means to go crazy.
00:00:35 ►
Which is a term that I understand healthcare professionals kind of frown at, but you know what I mean.
00:00:41 ►
However, it isn’t a healthcare professional that we are going to be hearing from about the potential that psychedelic substances have to cause damage to our psyches.
00:00:51 ►
No, today’s expert is none other than the one and only Terrence McKenna.
00:00:55 ►
Now, many of us have probably had the difficult experience of being around somebody who has had a psychotic break during a psychedelic trip.
00:01:04 ►
being around somebody who has had a psychotic break during a psychedelic trip,
00:01:11 ►
and in fact I suspect that I’m probably not the only one here who has had that kind of experience himself.
00:01:19 ►
Fortunately for me, I was able to pull out of it, but for several days I was definitely not myself, as they say.
00:01:26 ►
After seeing all too many people break with their previous default reality when they’re having a difficult trip,
00:01:31 ►
I eventually became convinced that I most definitely wasn’t the right guy to be a sitter.
00:01:38 ►
When serious mental breaks occur, I firmly believe that mental health care professionals need to be called.
00:01:46 ►
Even the volunteers in the MAPS Zendo and other places like that are much better trained to help in situations than I am.
00:01:51 ►
It’s a very difficult and delicate job to talk somebody back down from a bad trip.
00:01:56 ►
And some people, like Sid Barrett, one of the founding members of Pink Floyd,
00:02:02 ►
were never able to come back to what you and I call normal after he had an acid trip.
00:02:09 ►
The lesson here, of course, is that psychedelic trips can be extremely powerful mind-altering experiences,
00:02:14 ►
and sometimes they can be like a Category 5 mind storm, if you know what I mean.
00:02:19 ►
So I hope that you listen closely to this talk by Terence McKenna, in which he explores some of the potential dangers that come with psychedelic experimentation.
00:02:26 ►
Of course, he also tells a few good stories along the way.
00:02:30 ►
And while we’ve heard some of these stories before, I find that with each telling I come
00:02:35 ►
away with yet another new thought about the point he was making.
00:02:39 ►
However, it is his unvarnished opinion about the possibility of abusing psychedelics to,
00:02:44 ►
well, to the point of going mad,
00:02:47 ►
that I found the most fascinating feature of this talk.
00:02:50 ►
Now, here’s Terrence.
00:02:54 ►
What I’m always afraid of is that I’ll be ostracized, except that it’ll be entirely deserved.
00:03:03 ►
except that it’ll be entirely deserved.
00:03:10 ►
In other words, that going off the deep end into some kind of appropriate behavior,
00:03:12 ►
the word that I would use over and over again is disgrace,
00:03:17 ►
that it would disgrace everything.
00:03:20 ►
And it’s gotten weird for me because there used to be nothing to
00:03:29 ►
disgrace because there was no reputation now I’m always aware that you know if I
00:03:36 ►
go bananas then people will say you know what happened to that guy you know you
00:03:42 ►
think this is good you read these books
00:03:45 ►
did you hear how this guy ended up
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so then it’s all ruined
00:03:51 ►
it’s like they’re saying about Woody Allen
00:03:54 ►
his entire work
00:03:56 ►
must now be reassessed
00:03:58 ►
and you think oh god
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what if that were me
00:04:01 ►
your entire work needs to be reassessed
00:04:01 ►
What if that were me?
00:04:05 ►
Your entire work needs to be reassessed.
00:04:11 ►
And it’s interesting to think about madness,
00:04:13 ►
or what we’re calling madness.
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I mean, I’ve also,
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the religious thing is the one that overcomes me or overcame me.
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That’s how I imagine I would go.
00:04:23 ►
And even as it is,
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I’m practically a
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repent the end is nigh
00:04:28 ►
person I mean it’s all
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couched and we have the
00:04:32 ►
computer and the mathematics
00:04:34 ►
and the dazzling
00:04:35 ►
you know rhetoric
00:04:38 ►
but it’s basically
00:04:39 ►
the end is nigh
00:04:41 ►
rap of some sort
00:04:43 ►
and yet I I’m very intolerant intellectually.
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I mean, there are perfectly harmless, functioning people
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that I, in my own mind, consider crazy
00:05:00 ►
simply because of what they believe.
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I mean, you know, one way of thinking about crazy
00:05:08 ►
is it’s just you have looser rules of evidence than the rest of us.
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So, and in a society falling to pieces like ours
00:05:20 ►
where nobody has a very firm grip on what’s going on,
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you know, if you’re nuts but you’re not sure you’re nuts,
00:05:28 ►
you just have to get ten people to believe you
00:05:30 ►
and suddenly you’re a method, a school, a point of view.
00:05:34 ►
You’re not nuts anymore.
00:05:36 ►
You’re invited to teach your insanity and show others the way.
00:05:44 ►
But I think there’s an unmistakable
00:05:47 ►
threshold that when
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I think people who are
00:05:51 ►
insane
00:05:53 ►
in the way that you’re concerned about
00:05:55 ►
and that I’m concerned about
00:05:57 ►
know it
00:05:58 ►
it’s not something
00:06:00 ►
and I think Dick was the great
00:06:03 ►
exemplar in this area I mean he was nuts
00:06:07 ►
and he knew it and he managed it and worked with it and got juice out of it
00:06:12 ►
and was sometimes overwhelmed by it because it’s a feeling don’t you think
00:06:19 ►
that it’s a it transcends intellectualizing. One can believe all kinds of odd things,
00:06:26 ►
but there’s a certain existential intensity that overcomes you,
00:06:32 ►
and then you are crazy or insane,
00:06:37 ►
because it’s almost like with psychedelics or practices that are very powerful,
00:06:47 ►
you do begin to rise through some kind of spiritual domain.
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But if you’re unbalanced slightly to one side or the other,
00:06:58 ►
you’ll start to skew and it’ll get worse and worse
00:07:02 ►
and it will feed back negatively into your life
00:07:05 ►
and you know insanity is a kind of like a divine madness of some sort I mean
00:07:16 ►
it’s a it’s not clear what it is exactly I mean I think people really do touch
00:07:21 ►
extraordinary states I’m not a psychotherapist, so I haven’t seen
00:07:27 ►
like hundreds of people who were diagnosed as mad, but these people who go off the deep
00:07:34 ►
end with religious ideas and so forth, it seems to me there’s more going on than a disintegrating psychology because it’s always accompanied by events in the real world
00:07:48 ►
which reinforce the crazy assumption.
00:07:53 ►
It’s like from the point of view of the person who is undergoing this,
00:07:57 ►
there’s ample evidence always at hand that they’re not crazy,
00:08:02 ►
that this is really happening.
00:08:02 ►
at hand that they’re not crazy that this is really happening
00:08:04 ►
I remember
00:08:06 ►
when I was at my most
00:08:08 ►
unreclaimable
00:08:11 ►
you know one of the things
00:08:14 ►
I would do was in the Amazon
00:08:15 ►
and very fortunately because
00:08:18 ►
modern mental health care
00:08:19 ►
delivery systems couldn’t reach
00:08:22 ►
me and so I
00:08:23 ►
survived it but otherwise I doubt that I would
00:08:27 ►
have because when they drug you and interrupt these cycles of whatever this is then it’s very
00:08:33 ►
hard to ever get straight again but the form that my madness would take I mean on one level was I would go into I would go alone into the jungle
00:08:45 ►
and
00:08:47 ►
I could call
00:08:49 ►
butterflies to me
00:08:52 ►
which was a strange
00:08:54 ►
thing because I had earlier made
00:08:55 ►
my living as a butterfly
00:08:57 ►
collector and so I would just
00:09:00 ►
like Saint Francis
00:09:01 ►
I would go out and hold up my
00:09:03 ►
hands and the butterflies would come and descend
00:09:07 ►
and walk on my hands and I would
00:09:11 ►
oh yes, no, this happened, I mean nobody was there but me
00:09:16 ►
and you know we can even create an explanation
00:09:20 ►
that I was able to generate an odor or something
00:09:24 ►
that brought him in
00:09:25 ►
but so then I would have like an epiphany it would prove to me my divine
00:09:30 ►
nature and the my divine mission and so forth and so on and so then I would sink
00:09:37 ►
to my knees the butterflies surrounding me and weep with ecstasy that I had been granted this sign and you know then weep a
00:09:49 ►
little more and but then the mind would begin to wander and then I would think about how but
00:09:54 ►
but nobody else is uh is getting the benefit of this miracle and so then I would dry my tears and go look for somebody to show this to and then I would
00:10:07 ►
take these people who were by now fairly concerned about my state of mind anyway and I would insist
00:10:14 ►
that they walk with me into the jungle and then I would hold out my arms to the skies expecting
00:10:21 ►
butterflies to descend and envelop me and of course nothing would happen
00:10:25 ►
and then people would just turn away
00:10:28 ►
aghast at such a display of
00:10:31 ►
hubris, ego, fucked up
00:10:36 ►
delusory, just that you’d lost it
00:10:38 ►
you would become unbearable, egomaniacal
00:10:41 ►
and then you say, but no, listen, it’s really true.
00:10:45 ►
And then it’s even more pathetic.
00:10:47 ►
And so there are cycles of distancing that go on.
00:10:54 ►
I don’t know.
00:10:54 ►
I think in the course of a life lived to its fullest,
00:11:00 ►
most people pass through these places on some level
00:11:05 ►
or another is that generally
00:11:06 ►
agreed upon
00:11:08 ►
is this totally wild territory
00:11:11 ►
to everybody here or
00:11:12 ►
no no it’s pretty
00:11:14 ►
yeah
00:11:15 ►
not exactly passing
00:11:18 ►
through but
00:11:19 ►
you know for myself leaving something
00:11:22 ►
unresolved that still needs to be integrated.
00:11:26 ►
And I imagine you have this with places that you’ve been to, Terence,
00:11:31 ►
where in some way it’s not resolved and to go. And my fear is to explore too much is, you know, a ticket to, you know, a crazy farm of some kind.
00:11:53 ►
Well, leaving consensus.
00:11:57 ►
I mean, I think it’s true that, you know, with psychedelics,
00:12:29 ►
You know, with psychedelics, the practice works too well almost in that it will, if you insist on, I don’t want to use the word abusing it, but if you insist on using psychedelics frequently at high doses back to back, you will unlock your way into a set of assumptions and perceptions and feelings that not very many people can follow you into.
00:12:32 ►
And then the question is, you know, have you gone into a spiritual domain
00:12:39 ►
or have you just fallen off the track?
00:12:42 ►
And it’s hard to tell and maybe it can happen both ways.
00:12:47 ►
It’s so hard to convey the mind of the schizophrenic.
00:12:52 ►
I mean, people who we call crazy do not seem to themselves to be crazy.
00:12:58 ►
They look at the world from a different perspective and through a different logic,
00:13:04 ►
but they’re trying to make sense of it.
00:13:09 ►
It’s just that the data that they’re trying to handle
00:13:12 ►
is extremely alien from what the rest of us use.
00:13:21 ►
I mean, I can remember when I was in these states that I would, I would, it’s so hard to explain, but I would like see waves of historical association out of my past. I mean, it’s like I would be in a small town in Columbia, but something would, it would be as though
00:13:48 ►
there was another time
00:13:49 ►
a time from my past
00:13:51 ►
overlaid over everything
00:13:53 ►
and so a waitress
00:13:56 ►
serving me in a restaurant
00:13:57 ►
a hotel keeper
00:13:59 ►
would also be
00:14:01 ►
another person
00:14:03 ►
in another time
00:14:04 ►
in another place,
00:14:06 ►
with a set of associations to me.
00:14:08 ►
And I had a friend, actually, who became schizophrenic
00:14:14 ►
and did get electroshock in the whole nine yards.
00:14:18 ►
And he said, you know, what you have to do, what you must do,
00:14:24 ►
is learn to shut up.
00:14:27 ►
You know, do not run around.
00:14:29 ►
And there’s a compulsion to confess as well.
00:14:34 ►
This is not easy because there’s something about these perceptions that have to be communicated.
00:14:41 ►
And yet when you communicate them, know people are appalled they do not
00:14:46 ►
know how to handle it i remember when my brother did what he called turning inside out and you know
00:14:56 ►
he didn’t know whether he was agnes or angus and there was some intimation of some psychosexual transformation.
00:15:05 ►
It wasn’t clear whether it was like a transsexual operation
00:15:09 ►
or the metamorphosis of an insect or something else.
00:15:13 ►
And, you know, he’s saying this, I mean, I don’t know.
00:15:21 ►
I suppose we can multiply these examples endlessly.
00:15:26 ►
In thinking about this talk,
00:15:29 ►
for me personally what it comes down to is
00:15:34 ►
somehow, and I don’t know the how,
00:15:38 ►
but the issue is clear, I think.
00:15:40 ►
It’s an issue of courage and a failure of nerve
00:15:45 ►
you have to
00:15:47 ►
you have to be willing to put yourself on the line
00:15:54 ►
and it’s all tied into what we always talk about
00:15:57 ►
in these circles
00:15:58 ►
which is the ego
00:16:00 ►
and how the ego’s final defense
00:16:03 ►
against its own dissolution
00:16:05 ►
is telling you that you’re either going mad or dying.
00:16:10 ►
And in the psychedelics, you know,
00:16:12 ►
you can usually defeat the dying rap
00:16:16 ►
because you just have to have the faith
00:16:21 ►
that you’re not dying on 15 milligrams of psilocybin.
00:16:26 ►
It’s highly unlikely, not impossible, but you can argue that it’s unlikely.
00:16:31 ►
But when it tells you you’re going mad, you have nothing to stand on
00:16:37 ►
because you can’t tell. Who knows?
00:16:39 ►
I mean, what is the effective dose of psilocybin for triggering madness?
00:16:43 ►
The question doesn’t even exist back in the world you left behind.
00:16:50 ►
And the only way I, you know, Shakespeare says,
00:16:54 ►
screw your courage to the sticking point.
00:16:57 ►
The only way I’ve found to deal with this is the rough,
00:17:02 ►
personally speaking, the absolutely rough straight-ahead way,
00:17:07 ►
which is after putting it off and putting it off and putting it off,
00:17:11 ►
I finally just say, oh, fuck it, you know, do it.
00:17:15 ►
You know, if that’s what you want to do, if you want to destroy me, do it.
00:17:20 ►
But it requires, you know, it’s a kind of recklessness.
00:17:23 ►
I can’t find a calm place in which to meet it. I can only meet it if I force myself to assume that it’s going to leave me high and dry. a psychotherapist who I don’t want to name
00:17:46 ►
but who used psychedelics very extensively for years and years
00:17:51 ►
and turned on hundreds of people
00:17:53 ►
and with combinations and all kinds of stuff
00:17:56 ►
toward the end of his life
00:17:58 ►
it grew harder and harder and harder
00:18:03 ►
for him to take it
00:18:05 ►
and when I asked him why he said
00:18:08 ►
I always
00:18:10 ►
have bad trips
00:18:11 ►
and we talked about it
00:18:14 ►
whether that it
00:18:16 ►
was you know
00:18:17 ►
that just a lifetime
00:18:22 ►
of tripping other people had done this
00:18:24 ►
or whether maybe as you pass a certain age
00:18:27 ►
it doesn’t do the same thing,
00:18:30 ►
it becomes darker and darker
00:18:32 ►
or whether it was something in his personality.
00:18:36 ►
I really resist the idea
00:18:40 ►
that you couldn’t ever get to the place
00:18:43 ►
where you say, as some people love to say
00:18:47 ►
psychedelics I took them don’t need them anymore learned what it has to offer but
00:18:55 ►
one reason I mean I one excuse that I use in my own inner rhetoric is that, you know, sitting here in this moment,
00:19:08 ►
I can really strongly imagine what it’s like to be stoned on any one of these things.
00:19:16 ►
It doesn’t feel remote to me anymore. And I don’t know whether that’s a delusion and an excuse for not doing it or whether my thresholds are getting lower.
00:19:30 ►
I don’t know.
00:19:30 ►
I was in London a few weeks ago at a party and I was the guest of honor
00:19:36 ►
and they brought out last year’s Welch mushrooms
00:19:39 ►
and made a big tea for everybody.
00:19:42 ►
And the hostess said, you know, it’s just almost like a gesture.
00:19:48 ►
I mean, there are so many of us,
00:19:50 ►
and so few mushrooms,
00:19:52 ►
but we’ll each just get a little bit.
00:19:54 ►
Well, so I was first out of the shoot,
00:19:57 ►
and, you know, I was,
00:19:59 ►
I don’t know whether it all pooled on the top in one place,
00:20:04 ►
or what was going on, but, you know, I all pooled on the top in one place or what was going on,
00:20:06 ►
but, you know, I just sat down on the ground,
00:20:10 ►
and this guy who said, some person of great reputation,
00:20:14 ►
who said he’d wanted to meet me for years and years,
00:20:17 ►
was sitting in front of me trying to get to know me.
00:20:20 ►
And finally he just said, he said,
00:20:23 ►
you’re flaming flaming aren’t you
00:20:25 ►
and I said yes I can’t carry on this conversation
00:20:29 ►
I just have to hold on to the grass
00:20:31 ►
well I don’t know
00:20:33 ►
what all this means
00:20:37 ►
I don’t want to become afraid of it
00:20:40 ►
and I blame myself
00:20:42 ►
I don’t think the thing has a negative edge unless you’ve somehow come out of jiggle with it. And I don’t know whether that means, you know, what does it mean if it becomes harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean you’re getting out of balance? Does it mean you’re just getting older? Where should the blame be put? And then what can
00:21:07 ►
you do about it? The only thing I found to do about it is stop running and turn and face it.
00:21:14 ►
But each time I do that, it seems to require the very limit of my courage. And I don’t know how
00:21:21 ►
long one’s courage lasts.
00:21:26 ►
Maybe it’s not a bad thing.
00:21:30 ►
I mean, after all, people who climb mountains like Mount Everest,
00:21:33 ►
they don’t do it till their dying day.
00:21:36 ►
At some point, they, you know, knock off and become a consultant for a sportswear manufacturer or something.
00:21:44 ►
Well, what does anybody else
00:21:46 ►
think about any of this?
00:21:48 ►
I’m getting agitated.
00:21:50 ►
I’m getting really agitated because
00:21:52 ►
I don’t know even what you’re
00:21:54 ►
talking about except that you’re
00:21:56 ►
talking about having your mushrooms and you’re
00:21:58 ►
having these experiences and I’ve never
00:22:00 ►
taken drugs in my life ever
00:22:02 ►
and I’ve had just normal
00:22:04 ►
or just abnormal kind of breaks since I was 15.
00:22:09 ►
And I’m having these things, and I’m not eating anything.
00:22:12 ►
It just comes on. It’s very scary for me.
00:22:15 ►
And from the time, and David, I really feel for what you were saying,
00:22:19 ►
because I’m scared to death.
00:22:20 ►
Because since I was like 15 in high school,
00:22:24 ►
and then they sent me to
00:22:25 ►
the hospital and psychiatrist got hold of me 35 years ago and did a number on
00:22:30 ►
me and you know quickly I learned that when when that when the experience comes
00:22:36 ►
and that I get scared I go back to that doctor and I did that until I came to
00:22:40 ►
Esalen seven years ago and when I came here I came to Esalen seven years ago. And when I came here, I came to meet Dick
00:22:46 ►
and work with him and ask him to work with me. And he took me under his wing for six
00:22:52 ►
weeks and worked with me every other day. And what I had then, David, was I had permission
00:22:59 ►
to go through it and he was going to be there with me and then dick died you know we hiked monday
00:23:05 ►
wednesday and friday on monday he said to me you’re gonna are you ready to go up here by yourself
00:23:10 ►
because you know preaching you have to go alone and i said i’m not i don’t want to go alone i
00:23:14 ►
just want to be with you and then on wednesday died and i’m haunted by that because you know
00:23:20 ►
i keep coming back to eslen and and they say well dick’s dead now you know this is not the place
00:23:24 ►
for you to go through that.
00:23:26 ►
And I say, well, where in the fuck is the place to go,
00:23:29 ►
because there’s so many people here that want to go through to this other side.
00:23:33 ►
I don’t want to do it living in my van on the streets in San Diego.
00:23:36 ►
I mean, it’s not about me telling people my experience.
00:23:41 ►
Sometimes the actions look pretty bizarre to the people out on the streets,
00:23:46 ►
and I get to the point where then they, you know, they’re alarmed, and they go back, right, and I’m
00:23:52 ►
not walking around telling them that, so it’s like, okay, am I, you know, if I’m living away from Eslo,
00:23:57 ►
even at Eslo now, because last year I was having a break, and I went to jail in the lodge, and I was
00:24:03 ►
really scared, and I was reaching out.
00:24:08 ►
And she said, well, why don’t you go to a movie in town for a few hours and then see?
00:24:14 ►
And that was the wrong thing to say, so I terrified and somehow ended up in San Diego in the hospital,
00:24:19 ►
got on some new kind of medication, and that’s been the pattern too. But when Dick was here and I felt like there was a support to go through it that felt okay you know and then
00:24:27 ►
now when it comes up I do get scared and I don’t go through it like you just suggested I
00:24:32 ►
I go back and you know take a drug and I haven’t been on drugs for 10 months now and I’m back here
00:24:40 ►
and I’m terrified that that you know when it when it comes up,
00:24:46 ►
I’m going to have to run away.
00:24:49 ►
I don’t feel a support anymore here.
00:24:54 ►
And what haunts me is that Dick wanted to have that.
00:24:55 ►
That was his dream.
00:24:58 ►
I know he’s dead and it’s not his place anymore,
00:25:01 ►
but his dream was to have a sanctuary right down there in that canyon.
00:25:03 ►
He talked to me for six weeks
00:25:04 ►
about putting me in on the deal.
00:25:08 ►
I’d be the first one he turns loose in there
00:25:10 ►
like they did with him.
00:25:11 ►
They’d just wander around
00:25:13 ►
and have all kinds of experiences.
00:25:14 ►
And then if you come out fine,
00:25:16 ►
if you don’t come out,
00:25:17 ►
they could ship you off
00:25:18 ►
up the highway somewhere.
00:25:21 ►
But in fact,
00:25:23 ►
most people came out fine
00:25:25 ►
I think
00:25:25 ►
no all
00:25:27 ►
these drugs
00:25:28 ►
these
00:25:28 ►
antipsychotic
00:25:30 ►
drugs are
00:25:30 ►
basically
00:25:31 ►
warehousing
00:25:32 ►
strategies for
00:25:33 ►
the convenience
00:25:34 ►
of doctors
00:25:35 ►
because the
00:25:37 ►
only way that
00:25:37 ►
works with
00:25:38 ►
people who
00:25:39 ►
have this
00:25:39 ►
problem is
00:25:40 ►
so labor
00:25:41 ►
intensive and
00:25:43 ►
so demanding
00:25:44 ►
I mean what you need basically is six people to watch you,
00:25:49 ►
some to hold your hand and reassure you,
00:25:52 ►
some to physically grab you and sit on you when you head for the hills.
00:25:59 ►
Very few people get through it without being messed with.
00:26:02 ►
Like I say, I think I was lucky and my brother was lucky because some force some intuition led us to get
00:26:10 ►
so far out that they couldn’t find us you know they literally couldn’t come
00:26:16 ►
and get us Rd Lang as well as dick had this idea that people have to go through it.
00:26:27 ►
But not everybody can go to the… I can’t right now go to the jungle.
00:26:30 ►
Well, you’ve got to have some kind of a support group.
00:26:35 ►
And if you don’t have a support group,
00:26:37 ►
then you have to stay away from people who will mess with it.
00:26:41 ►
And, you know, it’s hermit time, if nothing else.
00:26:45 ►
Yeah.
00:26:46 ►
There are several places now open.
00:26:49 ►
One is called Pocket Ranch in Geyserville.
00:26:52 ►
It’s $475 a day, and I’ve been crazy since I’m 15,
00:26:56 ►
so I can’t even get insurance that would even pay for that,
00:26:58 ►
so it’s kind of for people that are rich.
00:27:00 ►
No scholarship in the world?
00:27:03 ►
No, they don’t have anything.
00:27:04 ►
Steve gave me some brochures when I found out about that.
00:27:09 ►
Medicare doesn’t pay for that.
00:27:11 ►
I’m on disability for psychiatric problems from Social Security,
00:27:17 ►
and they don’t pay for shit, which is good in a way,
00:27:21 ►
because I don’t get too many drugs that way to cover it.
00:27:25 ►
Well, you know know it’s hard to
00:27:26 ►
tease apart
00:27:27 ►
whether you’ve
00:27:29 ►
got
00:27:29 ►
I mean I think
00:27:30 ►
it’s amazing to
00:27:31 ►
me that at
00:27:32 ►
Esalen that
00:27:33 ►
we’re discussing
00:27:34 ►
insanity
00:27:34 ►
it’s even
00:27:36 ►
I think a kind
00:27:37 ►
of an old
00:27:37 ►
fashioned word
00:27:39 ►
I mean
00:27:39 ►
you’d think
00:27:41 ►
this would be
00:27:41 ►
the thing
00:27:42 ►
they would have
00:27:43 ►
worked through
00:27:43 ►
here isn’t that
00:27:44 ►
what I mean it was Steve who said to me once you’ll you’d think this would be the thing they would have worked through here. Isn’t that what…
00:27:45 ►
I mean, it was Steve who said to me once,
00:27:48 ►
you’ll understand this place a lot better
00:27:51 ►
if you think of it as a kind of hospital.
00:27:54 ►
And I’ve, you know, looked at it like that ever since.
00:28:00 ►
We have all these therapists.
00:28:02 ►
The greats have come and gone, three schools now,
00:28:06 ►
and we don’t understand it.
00:28:08 ►
So what can we expect from the rest of society?
00:28:13 ►
I mean, when I was schizophrenic,
00:28:16 ►
if this is what we’re talking about,
00:28:18 ►
my feeling about it was,
00:28:20 ►
and maybe this is, if not true,
00:28:23 ►
a delusion worth playing with is I thought aha what we call
00:28:30 ►
mental illness what we call schizophrenia and what we look into the body or the mind or the
00:28:38 ►
personal history or the dream state to try and understand and possibly cure it’s not like that at all it isn’t your
00:28:49 ►
if you’re the person who’s nuts it isn’t your problem it’s something that’s happened to you
00:28:57 ►
not more fundamentally than catching the flu it’s like you just happened to step in some cosmic doo-doo,
00:29:08 ►
and now it’s on the bottom of your shoe,
00:29:10 ►
and everybody’s pointing at you and backing up,
00:29:13 ►
but it isn’t your fault.
00:29:16 ►
It just happened to be in your path.
00:29:20 ►
It’s a horrible piece of luck
00:29:25 ►
unless you can turn it to your own advantage.
00:29:32 ►
And what that means, I think, is obviously integrating it.
00:29:38 ►
Well, then how do you integrate these things?
00:29:43 ►
I think it has to do, again again a lot with where you start from just
00:29:49 ►
speaking from my own personal experience what saved me was my cynicism that I
00:29:58 ►
didn’t believe in anything never had had always thought believing in things was a bad idea so then when
00:30:06 ►
this whole cosmos of beliefs was handed to me on a platter I just simply said
00:30:16 ►
maybe you know I’ll act it out but I won’t I won’t believe it and I think that had I been
00:30:25 ►
a good Mormon, a good Catholic
00:30:28 ►
a good Buddhist, a good something else
00:30:30 ►
then I would have been lost
00:30:32 ►
because I would have traded whatever it was I believed
00:30:36 ►
for the new set of beliefs
00:30:38 ►
as it was I just said
00:30:40 ►
what’s this? Beliefs
00:30:42 ►
I don’t do that
00:30:44 ►
but I played with it
00:30:46 ►
and somehow the playing with it
00:30:49 ►
was able to depotentiate it.
00:30:54 ►
I had a conversation with someone very recently
00:30:57 ►
who, by ordinary standards, I think,
00:31:00 ►
would have to be considered nutty as a fruitcake.
00:31:04 ►
And, you know, they could hardly speak of their condition
00:31:07 ►
without being swept by an emotion that was so intense
00:31:12 ►
that it reduced them to tears, you know.
00:31:15 ►
And I said, you know, if you’re going to be this nuts,
00:31:20 ►
you should enjoy it more, you know.
00:31:23 ►
It’s too, and they said, you know, I am enjoying it. And too and they said you know I am enjoying
00:31:26 ►
it and I said well I’m not enjoying it because you’re just projecting such an
00:31:30 ►
emotional intensity that it makes me very nervous and I think I’m generally I
00:31:36 ►
speak then for the same general masses about that what makes it hard for the
00:31:44 ►
person who’s going through this
00:31:46 ►
is that it’s so hard for other people.
00:31:49 ►
I mean, it’s freaky to be around somebody who’s crazy.
00:31:53 ►
I don’t, you know, because I’m such a purveyor of psychedelics,
00:31:58 ►
people are forever leaning on me to trip with them.
00:32:03 ►
And I dare say, you know, there are people in this room who’ve known me for years
00:32:07 ►
and no one here can say
00:32:09 ►
they’ve ever been seriously loaded with me
00:32:12 ►
because I just don’t do it.
00:32:14 ►
I can’t take it.
00:32:15 ►
I can’t handle the feeling of risk that permeates that.
00:32:24 ►
That’s why it amazes me.
00:32:26 ►
I’m fascinated by people who have such faith in their knowledge
00:32:32 ►
that apparent difficult situations don’t freak them out.
00:32:39 ►
As an example, some of you know Frank Barr.
00:32:42 ►
He’s an emergency room doctor.
00:32:46 ►
some of you know Frank Barr he’s an emergency room doctor and I’m amazed that he can deal with people who are dead out unconscious and just say she’ll
00:32:53 ►
come to in 40 minutes or so don’t worry about that when I would be frantic I
00:33:00 ►
mean if I can’t get a reaction out of somebody, I just go berserk.
00:33:11 ►
And the notion, I don’t know whether that’s a kind of callousness.
00:33:14 ►
Therapists are like that.
00:33:20 ►
I mean, they say, you know, you come upon somebody flopping around on the floor,
00:33:22 ►
screaming, pleading, weeping.
00:33:25 ►
My inclination is to make them feel better for God’s sake and a therapist would just say well they’re working through
00:33:29 ►
their stuff it’s all right you know how do you get that level of self-confidence
00:33:36 ►
where you can see somebody in agony and say that’s right, it’s the best thing for them. Check on them in an hour and to see where they’re at.
00:33:48 ►
It’s awfully…
00:33:49 ►
So I stay away from it.
00:33:52 ►
And in my own situation, I keep people away from me.
00:33:56 ►
I’ve had many trips where I’ve thought in the middle of it,
00:34:00 ►
thank God there’s no one here to see this,
00:34:03 ►
because if there were someone here
00:34:05 ►
to see it I’m sure they would become alarmed and decide that some crisis was
00:34:10 ►
in progress and you know ultimately you have to sort of get a kind of
00:34:16 ►
perspective where you just say if I die I die But it usually has to slam you to the wall pretty severely to make you turn.
00:34:28 ►
The image I have is that I run from it
00:34:32 ►
until I become so furious at this humiliating situation
00:34:36 ►
that I turn and face it.
00:34:40 ►
And then, you know, if you curse it,
00:34:43 ►
it will step back sometimes.
00:34:48 ►
And it’s worked every time.
00:34:51 ►
The other thing is, you know, the wonderful instinct for equilibrium that the human mind has,
00:35:03 ►
that you can get pretty twisted around and if you’ll wait 24 hours 72 hours 10
00:35:13 ►
days six months it will restore to equilibrium i’m puzzled by the cases of permanent raving madness, and I wonder how common they are.
00:35:27 ►
It’s all messed up in this society.
00:35:30 ►
I mean, I can show you psychiatric residents
00:35:32 ►
who have never seen an unmedicated schizophrenic
00:35:37 ►
in their entire life, you know,
00:35:40 ►
because they just do not encounter people in that state.
00:35:43 ►
What they deal with are people who come in and have been given drugs
00:35:47 ►
and kept on drugs and drugs, drugs, drugs.
00:35:50 ►
That’s the whole dynamic.
00:35:55 ►
Can I ask something about the last person here
00:35:57 ►
that the community really got behind sitting for
00:36:00 ►
through a state of this?
00:36:04 ►
I’m wondering
00:36:05 ►
how much to
00:36:05 ►
say because
00:36:06 ►
she’s not
00:36:06 ►
here, but
00:36:07 ►
perhaps the
00:36:09 ►
reason we
00:36:10 ►
don’t know
00:36:10 ►
more about
00:36:11 ►
this is, as
00:36:11 ►
you say, how
00:36:12 ►
many psychiatric
00:36:13 ►
residents have
00:36:14 ►
ever seen
00:36:14 ►
somebody who’s
00:36:15 ►
not on
00:36:16 ►
caretaking
00:36:16 ►
drugs.
00:36:18 ►
And the
00:36:18 ►
amount of
00:36:18 ►
energy it
00:36:19 ►
took for
00:36:20 ►
the community
00:36:21 ►
to mobilize
00:36:22 ►
to take care
00:36:23 ►
of this
00:36:23 ►
person was
00:36:23 ►
pretty
00:36:24 ►
overwhelming.
00:36:25 ►
It takes a team of six to twelve people.
00:36:27 ►
Day in and day out.
00:36:29 ►
And this went on for ten days or so.
00:36:31 ►
Thirty days.
00:36:32 ►
Thirty days.
00:36:33 ►
Thirty days.
00:36:34 ►
And was there a resolution that was satisfying?
00:36:38 ►
There was a resolution of sorts,
00:36:40 ►
but the thing that I was most impressed with
00:36:43 ►
is in a psychiatric ward among people
00:36:46 ►
who didn’t know the person, you would have assumed that all these associations were meaningless
00:36:53 ►
stuff and that this person had been in, and the review of the material, it all made sense
00:37:01 ►
in a particular way. And that would never be, that would be completely missed.
00:37:06 ►
There was definitely a way that
00:37:08 ►
a lot of stuff was being worked
00:37:10 ►
through, maybe not to satisfaction,
00:37:12 ►
but on some level
00:37:13 ►
that you couldn’t possibly know unless
00:37:16 ►
you knew this person very, very well.
00:37:18 ►
Yeah, that’s exactly
00:37:20 ►
what I saw with my brother.
00:37:22 ►
I mean, when my brother went bananas,
00:37:24 ►
I sat
00:37:26 ►
and you know it was a
00:37:28 ►
complicated case because there was
00:37:30 ►
something wrong with me in the sense that
00:37:32 ►
I didn’t sleep for 11 days
00:37:34 ►
just but
00:37:35 ►
he raved
00:37:37 ►
day and night and what
00:37:39 ►
in every single thing was
00:37:41 ►
or to my mind
00:37:44 ►
at least 90% of it was incredibly interesting and revelatory.
00:37:48 ►
He imitated every relative.
00:37:52 ►
He imitated music teachers not dealt with since age six.
00:37:59 ►
He revealed vast scenarios of stuff going on in the town
00:38:04 ►
where we had grown up together well
00:38:06 ►
if he had been straightjacketed in a ward somewhere they would have just
00:38:11 ►
thought that this was garbage and what it actually was was you know brilliant
00:38:17 ►
insightful almost literarily deep stuff and the other thing is I’ve always thought you know that a mental ward I don’t understand
00:38:31 ►
the thinking of the psychiatric community a mental ward is my idea of an environment designed to
00:38:38 ►
drive you crazy I mean because crazy people drive me. Just one who is very slightly crazy is unbearable.
00:38:49 ►
And to be put into a ward with people wandering around,
00:38:53 ►
and I really think it’s a pheromonal,
00:38:56 ►
that I don’t want to go as far as some people have gone
00:38:59 ►
and say that schizophrenia is entirely a pheromonal disorder.
00:39:03 ►
But do you know what I’m talking about here?
00:39:05 ►
Well, some people say that we have left over from earlier stages of evolution
00:39:14 ►
all kinds of physiological systems that produce odors
00:39:20 ►
that we are not consciously aware of
00:39:25 ►
but that set the ambience for social interaction
00:39:29 ►
because we are, after all, social animals.
00:39:32 ►
We’re as social as honeybees or something.
00:39:34 ►
And all social animals regulate behavior through pheromones.
00:39:40 ►
And it’s known, for instance,
00:39:42 ►
that when a person walks into a crowded room,
00:39:47 ►
instinctively the first thing they do is they take a deep breath.
00:39:51 ►
And it’s thought that this is a whole bunch of chemical messengers are coming in saying,
00:39:56 ►
you know, people have been drinking, one couple isn’t getting along, somebody’s on the make.
00:40:02 ►
So all this stuff is going on and you get this gestalt in one single moment.
00:40:08 ►
Well then, because of a phenomenon
00:40:11 ►
that’s fairly common called allophrinia,
00:40:15 ►
which is where your friend gets committed
00:40:18 ►
to a mental hospital for schizophrenic behavior
00:40:21 ►
and you buy a book and take it to them
00:40:25 ►
and visit them
00:40:26 ►
and while visiting
00:40:28 ►
you behave so oddly
00:40:30 ►
that you’re not allowed to leave
00:40:33 ►
allophrania
00:40:34 ►
schizophrenic behavior
00:40:37 ►
by non-schizophrenic persons
00:40:39 ►
in the presence of schizophrenia
00:40:40 ►
it’s thought that perhaps
00:40:44 ►
what schizophrenia is
00:40:45 ►
is an odor malfunction
00:40:49 ►
where the person
00:40:50 ►
who is becoming schizophrenic
00:40:52 ►
is literally beginning
00:40:54 ►
to smell funny.
00:40:56 ►
And this causes the people
00:40:57 ►
around them to begin
00:40:59 ►
to send the wrong signal,
00:41:01 ►
which begins to activate anxiety
00:41:04 ►
in the schizophrenic person which accentuates
00:41:08 ►
the production of the pheromone so then people start saying you know that guy’s really weird
00:41:13 ►
he’s so weird well then the person picks up on this and what’s happening your word ostracized
00:41:21 ►
they’re being pushed to the periphery of the social thing
00:41:25 ►
and they feel it’s unfair
00:41:27 ►
because they and the people doing it
00:41:30 ►
don’t know why they’re doing it
00:41:31 ►
and what’s happening is it’s a horrible misunderstanding
00:41:34 ►
and it ends
00:41:35 ►
in making somebody completely dysfunctional
00:41:38 ►
because they don’t know
00:41:39 ►
they’ve lost their place in the net
00:41:41 ►
they literally don’t know who they are
00:41:43 ►
you’re pointing out
00:41:45 ►
like a fragile and kind of a desperate nature
00:41:48 ►
of consensual reality
00:41:49 ►
where there’s a desperate grip
00:41:52 ►
on this consensual reality
00:41:54 ►
and when that starts to slip,
00:41:56 ►
when people feel that that’s slipping,
00:41:59 ►
there’s some grabbing that goes on
00:42:02 ►
and that’s the response that you’re talking about.
00:42:06 ►
Yeah, that it’s somehow we’re all anxious about this.
00:42:12 ►
I mean, consciousness, after all,
00:42:14 ►
is probably less than 100,000 years old.
00:42:20 ►
And we’re losing it all the time.
00:42:22 ►
I mean, like when you deal with these real nightmare trips
00:42:26 ►
like the Jeffrey Dahmer thing,
00:42:30 ►
the reason that’s so horrifying, I think,
00:42:32 ►
is because it’s a loss of any value that you can relate to.
00:42:39 ►
It’s like the real darkness rises up and you say, you know,
00:42:44 ►
it’s all so fragile, you know.
00:42:47 ►
If we stopped loving each other or even just talking about how we should love each other,
00:42:53 ►
then, you know, cannibalism, murder, sacrifice, death.
00:42:58 ►
I mean, inevitably, these really horrifying mass murder things are very primitive in some sense.
00:43:06 ►
I mean, dismemberment and so forth.
00:43:09 ►
It’s fetishism.
00:43:10 ►
It’s activation of primitive forms of behavior.
00:43:14 ►
So I think the anxiety we feel around these issues
00:43:18 ►
is because mental clarity, sanity, belonging,
00:43:25 ►
these things are fragile.
00:43:27 ►
And we’ve each earned it, and it wasn’t easy.
00:43:31 ►
And so we’re anxious about our purchase on it.
00:43:37 ►
You know, I always felt that in the 60s,
00:43:42 ►
it was so clear to me when LSD was around
00:43:45 ►
and I would debate it with my parents
00:43:48 ►
and people were talking about whether they would take it or not,
00:43:52 ►
that the people who were alarmed by it
00:43:55 ►
were alarmed by it because they self-diagnosed themselves as insane.
00:44:02 ►
They knew.
00:44:03 ►
They said, you know, we don’t want it knew are you kidding
00:44:06 ►
a drug that opens the doorways
00:44:09 ►
to the inner world of the mind
00:44:11 ►
no thank you
00:44:12 ►
that’s the last thing
00:44:15 ►
we’re interested in
00:44:16 ►
and they were right
00:44:18 ►
they had no business
00:44:21 ►
fiddling with that
00:44:22 ►
well we’re the children of those people and in
00:44:25 ►
some cases, you know, maybe those people ourselves. So it’s very dicey. I really admire people.
00:44:35 ►
I don’t understand these people who just take these enormous doses of psychedelics and it
00:44:41 ►
just beats the shit out of them and one week later they’re back ready for
00:44:47 ►
more you know they don’t i mean it’s like they’re made of different stuff than i am don’t they
00:44:53 ►
understand you know that it’s uh it’s uh i don’t i mean i admire them i just don’t have that kind of stamina I take it too seriously Alan did
00:45:08 ►
you want to say something huge doses and it slams them around well I know people
00:45:20 ►
who just describe outlandish trips and then they say they’ll be doing eight grams again
00:45:27 ►
and looking forward to it and i know one person who says each time i take it i try to stand more
00:45:35 ►
and i have the feeling you know that it’s very coddling of me and that I sort of march around inside a
00:45:45 ►
hall of mirrors
00:45:47 ►
because I can say to it
00:45:50 ►
stop coddling
00:45:52 ►
me and
00:45:53 ►
after 30 seconds of what happens
00:45:56 ►
when I say that I’m saying
00:45:58 ►
coddle me, coddle me
00:46:00 ►
enough already
00:46:01 ►
because it begins to go
00:46:04 ►
fugue likelike and lift
00:46:06 ►
these veils and you say
00:46:07 ►
you know
00:46:09 ►
it’s
00:46:10 ►
I don’t know maybe I read too much
00:46:13 ►
H.P. Lovecraft as a kid
00:46:15 ►
and it contaminated
00:46:17 ►
my categories
00:46:19 ►
for me
00:46:23 ►
I have a horror sometimes of the sense of when I come down, as I start to come down,
00:46:35 ►
of the certainty that I’m coming into illusion in something that is essentially meaningless
00:46:40 ►
compared to where I just was.
00:46:47 ►
So a horror of return.
00:46:52 ►
It’s a horror that I’ve somehow created a universe that is like somehow it’s my fault
00:46:55 ►
that I’m returning to something that is less than.
00:47:01 ►
What it might be or what it could be
00:47:04 ►
or what you saw it to be
00:47:06 ►
in that state
00:47:07 ►
and then I will gradually forget
00:47:12 ►
and experiences
00:47:14 ►
of gradually forgetting even that
00:47:16 ►
well
00:47:19 ►
you know I don’t
00:47:22 ►
maybe we’re a special
00:47:24 ►
slice I mean there is the notion that You know, I don’t… Maybe we’re a special slice.
00:47:25 ►
I mean, there is the notion that,
00:47:28 ►
first of all, it’s a monkey brain
00:47:31 ►
that we’re operating with here.
00:47:34 ►
Nowhere is it writ large
00:47:36 ►
that it can actually encompass the truth.
00:47:41 ►
I mean, why should it?
00:47:42 ►
I mean, do we believe that banana trees perceive the truth? They’re flatworms,, why should it? Do we believe that banana trees perceive the truth?
00:47:46 ►
They’re flatworms, so why should monkeys?
00:47:49 ►
So then if you’re into these consciousness-expanding techniques,
00:47:56 ►
whether they’re just simply paying attention
00:47:58 ►
or using psychedelic drugs or something else,
00:48:02 ►
then you actually get to a place
00:48:05 ►
where there is
00:48:06 ►
you know it’s like
00:48:09 ►
an abyss of knowing
00:48:11 ►
it’s like
00:48:13 ►
you know that poem
00:48:19 ►
that says
00:48:20 ►
I look over your meaning’s edge
00:48:24 ►
and feel the dizziness of the things that you have not said.
00:48:29 ►
Well, that’s about a relationship.
00:48:31 ►
But it could also just be, I look over meaning’s edge
00:48:34 ►
and feel the dizziness of things unsaid.
00:48:38 ►
It’s that nowhere is it writ
00:48:40 ►
that the universe should be rationally apprehendable.
00:48:47 ►
And maybe when you get the distances and the energies and the time scales when you have even a
00:48:51 ►
remote intimation of these things it’s your mind
00:48:56 ►
can’t handle it you know it actually implodes
00:49:00 ►
under the force of reality
00:49:03 ►
I mean I sort of feel like that that what we have under the force of reality.
00:49:07 ►
I mean, I sort of feel like that,
00:49:11 ►
that what we have uncovered with all this thinking and exploring is not the white light
00:49:15 ►
or some cheerful Buddhist hypostatization like that,
00:49:21 ►
but what we’ve uncovered is ungodly complexity I remember once at
00:49:27 ►
the height of an LSD trip years ago being with somebody who yelled out I’m
00:49:34 ►
drowning in the spaghetti of ambiguity I know that feeling you know it’s just
00:49:41 ►
that you know you it’s all very cut and dried it’s you know and then
00:49:47 ►
you start delving and you start you know reading weird literature and taking strange drugs and
00:49:54 ►
going to strange places and you begin this deconstruction process and what you find out is
00:50:00 ►
not only that the world is weirder than you can suppose, but that this situation is fundamentally alarming,
00:50:08 ►
that the world is stranger than you can suppose.
00:50:12 ►
And it carries an existential implication.
00:50:18 ►
It does for me.
00:50:20 ►
I mean, I can’t believe anymore that, just now speaking of the psychedelics, that this is about human psychology.
00:50:33 ►
You press it too hard and go too far. scene in Rosemary’s Baby where Mia Farrow in the middle of this
00:50:45 ►
dream sits up
00:50:47 ►
and says my god
00:50:50 ►
this is really happening
00:50:52 ►
and that’s
00:50:54 ►
the
00:50:54 ►
thing which lies behind all this
00:50:58 ►
delving that
00:50:59 ►
you know the cheerful assumption
00:51:01 ►
that it’s all mental
00:51:03 ►
and that you’re going to return to reality
00:51:06 ►
and that the here and now is the stable part of the mandala,
00:51:10 ►
you know, it may not be true,
00:51:13 ►
or it seems to me that it’s not necessarily true.
00:51:16 ►
And then you just say, you know,
00:51:18 ►
you could find out something that would make it impossible to speak to anybody,
00:51:23 ►
you know, that you would just have to turn away from people
00:51:27 ►
with an unspeakable truth and be isolated by it.
00:51:34 ►
I wanted to ask a question that came up for me last weekend.
00:51:39 ►
You said that when you took DMT to the shamans in South America, the Ayahuasca,
00:51:45 ►
and they said that it was ancestor spirits were coming through.
00:51:52 ►
A comment, I believe I heard you say this,
00:51:56 ►
that the Ayahuasca seemed to be more interested in using the Ayahuasca
00:52:01 ►
or the medicines they had more like a doctor would.
00:52:11 ►
the ayahuasca or the medicines they had for more like a doctor would um what what that that is uh how i’ve used them i would say more like a helping someone and how you use them is more for an
00:52:20 ►
inquiry like to ask a question. What’s the difference?
00:52:25 ►
Is one more of a psychological
00:52:27 ►
approach and one more
00:52:29 ►
an intellectual?
00:52:31 ►
I’m curious.
00:52:33 ►
Well, yeah, I mean, one is a shamanic
00:52:35 ►
approach because the center thing
00:52:37 ►
of shamanism is healing.
00:52:40 ►
I mean, that’s really how you
00:52:41 ►
judge a shaman in a
00:52:43 ►
traditional fashion is by healing.
00:52:46 ►
And then this other, you know, it is intellectual.
00:52:50 ►
And because the idea is to be able to say something.
00:52:54 ►
And I guess maybe where the problem comes, and I’m blinded to it because I have the problem,
00:53:00 ►
is that you have to have heart, a lot of it.
00:53:08 ►
I mean, maybe more heart than I’m able to muster.
00:53:11 ►
And that if you try and do it through the intellect alone,
00:53:16 ►
it becomes, I don’t know, there’s some mythological metaphor here,
00:53:22 ►
but it becomes titanic.
00:53:24 ►
There’s some mythological metaphor here, but it becomes titanic. It becomes dangerous and possibly capable of collapsing upon itself.
00:53:34 ►
Maybe the healing is the way you pay your dues
00:53:38 ►
and that somehow curiosity alone is a false coinage
00:53:46 ►
and that the lack of the desire to heal
00:53:50 ►
is the manifestation of the lack of heart.
00:53:55 ►
I mean, I don’t know.
00:53:56 ►
I just know that if you have a heart mission,
00:54:01 ►
I think it’s easier to travel those rails.
00:54:06 ►
I don’t only for myself, but sometimes you see something that’s just so horrible,
00:54:11 ►
you have seen too much and it makes you insane.
00:54:16 ►
And I was just wondering about that, you know, that connection,
00:54:22 ►
that you maybe witnessed something as a child
00:54:26 ►
or at war or whatever that is just so horrific about the potential of you know the human race
00:54:34 ►
or whatever happens that you can’t fathom it that you can’t you know try to leave
00:54:39 ►
and you mean and then you’re like contaminated by this image.
00:54:49 ►
Yeah, well, I think a lot about that kind of thing because one of the things that has been established
00:54:55 ►
through places like Esalen, I think,
00:54:58 ►
and rightly so and correctly,
00:55:02 ►
is that images can heal and that visualization can promote health and this sort of thing.
00:55:11 ►
But what you never hear discussed then is the implied opposite,
00:55:21 ►
which is that some images can harm and that information has a quality of harming
00:55:29 ►
and hurting we are the inheritors of Lockean theories of government and so our approach
00:55:38 ►
toward information is you know free speech and anything can be said but I’m I don’t know whether this made I mean I
00:55:50 ►
feel very sensitive to images it’s a kind of funny thing so I don’t I like I
00:55:58 ►
don’t own a TV simply because I think it’s a source of toxic imaging.
00:56:07 ►
And, you know, one of the forms that the encroaching madness
00:56:13 ►
induced by the psychedelics takes, I’ve noticed,
00:56:18 ►
is that you are open to invasion by images
00:56:22 ►
that are loose in the mass consciousness.
00:56:27 ►
On three separate occasions,
00:56:30 ►
I’ve seen people freak out on psychedelics about Charles Manson.
00:56:38 ►
Either they thought they were Manson, or they thought I was Manson,
00:56:42 ►
or they thought something…
00:56:44 ►
Well, it’s clear that
00:56:45 ►
this is toxic information
00:56:48 ►
that moves around in the body
00:56:49 ►
politic and then is magnified
00:56:52 ►
under certain
00:56:53 ►
circumstances
00:56:55 ►
Auschwitz
00:56:56 ►
all of this stuff
00:56:58 ►
and all the images of sadomasochism
00:57:02 ►
and all
00:57:03 ►
and our society seems more into this than any in history.
00:57:10 ►
I read a really freaky thing.
00:57:12 ►
I mean, I don’t even understand some of this stuff.
00:57:15 ►
I mean, this is my idea of toxic information.
00:57:17 ►
Maybe some of you saw this.
00:57:19 ►
It was in Timer Newsweek around the time of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial.
00:57:22 ►
in Timer Newsweek around the time of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial
00:57:24 ►
Norman Mailer
00:57:26 ►
wrote an essay
00:57:27 ►
on the psychotic
00:57:30 ►
as
00:57:31 ►
harbinger of future
00:57:33 ►
style
00:57:34 ►
and said you know
00:57:37 ►
the psychotic is the role
00:57:40 ►
model for the future
00:57:42 ►
and
00:57:43 ►
like I say I can’t even understand what this stuff
00:57:46 ►
means or who understands this but I didn’t think it should be said I thought
00:57:53 ►
you know this is the raving of a diseased mind and now it’s in the of the culture huh? yeah and
00:58:05 ►
it contaminates
00:58:08 ►
a whole culture
00:58:11 ►
can sink
00:58:12 ►
into madness
00:58:14 ►
you know
00:58:14 ►
I mean
00:58:16 ►
you know
00:58:17 ►
we like to think
00:58:18 ►
we’re in a terminal
00:58:19 ►
phase
00:58:20 ►
of decadence
00:58:21 ►
but
00:58:22 ►
you know
00:58:26 ►
the Roman emperor
00:58:27 ►
Heterogabulus used to
00:58:29 ►
castrate his lovers and hurl
00:58:31 ►
them out on the front steps
00:58:33 ►
of the official
00:58:35 ►
residence to be found
00:58:38 ►
in the morning by the street sweepers
00:58:40 ►
we have a way to go
00:58:41 ►
before we get
00:58:43 ►
to those places.
00:58:46 ►
But still, maybe it’s because of Freud and Nietzsche
00:58:53 ►
and all the bad boys of the 19th century or something,
00:59:00 ►
but we really have pried open a fairly toxic aspect of ourselves.
00:59:06 ►
And in the name of facing ourselves,
00:59:09 ►
we tend to make ourselves more ill, I think.
00:59:16 ►
I’ve always had trouble with Stan’s theory about the unconscious,
00:59:22 ►
and I can’t go to those slideshows
00:59:26 ►
with the crazy
00:59:28 ►
I can’t take it
00:59:30 ►
you know and I don’t know what that
00:59:32 ►
means about me whether it means I’m
00:59:34 ►
sensitive or feel
00:59:36 ►
threatened by all that
00:59:38 ►
stuff but it just seems to me
00:59:40 ►
unnecessary
00:59:41 ►
and
00:59:42 ►
unhelpful.
00:59:46 ►
Yeah.
00:59:47 ►
I found that to be true too.
00:59:50 ►
Six hours of that type of slideshow was too much.
00:59:54 ►
Well, and when you hear about somebody like Salvador Roquet
00:59:57 ►
who will take a room full of Jewish women from Yonkers
01:00:02 ►
and give them 500 micrograms
01:00:06 ►
of LSD and then
01:00:08 ►
show Auschwitz
01:00:09 ►
army footage of Auschwitz
01:00:12 ►
you think this is my
01:00:14 ►
idea of hell
01:00:15 ►
this is exactly what I don’t want
01:00:18 ►
to get near
01:00:19 ►
and would expect to emerge from
01:00:22 ►
severely impaired
01:00:23 ►
in my personal progress.
01:00:28 ►
This is kind of a downer, isn’t it?
01:00:37 ►
I think it’s all, there’s a lot of, an impulse in a lot of schools of psychotherapy to rub your nose in it.
01:00:45 ►
And I don’t know, you represent a school.
01:00:48 ►
How do you see that?
01:00:49 ►
I don’t know what your school’s position is on this,
01:00:52 ►
but do we have to rub our nose in it,
01:00:54 ►
or we miss it, or what’s that all about?
01:00:57 ►
I’m not going to talk in terms of the school,
01:00:59 ►
but if I take psychedelics, I go out in nature.
01:01:02 ►
And you’re okay there.
01:01:03 ►
And I’m okay there.
01:01:04 ►
And so that what I don’t want to amplify won’t happen.
01:01:07 ►
That’s what I personally do.
01:01:09 ►
I can’t imagine doing that or exposing it.
01:01:13 ►
I can’t imagine taking a thousand micrograms of LSD in this room at night.
01:01:19 ►
Right, that would be too profaning.
01:01:23 ►
That’s my own personal.
01:01:29 ►
But it isn’t, you can never insulate yourself from it. I mean, I’ve had trips about nature
01:01:32 ►
that are sort of along the lines of, you know,
01:01:39 ►
the life cycle of the alien.
01:01:42 ►
And it was all about the
01:01:45 ►
how it was a vision of nature
01:01:48 ►
as this thing
01:01:49 ►
feeding upon itself
01:01:51 ►
and how egg cases were being
01:01:54 ►
inserted into tissue
01:01:55 ►
and free swimming
01:01:57 ►
life stages were attaching
01:02:00 ►
to tissue
01:02:01 ►
and pathways were being
01:02:03 ►
I mean it’s a yuck image,
01:02:06 ►
and that could come easily out of examining
01:02:09 ►
six square inches of soil under a redwood tree.
01:02:14 ►
It isn’t always affirming.
01:02:16 ►
It’s like there’s a balance in your own perception
01:02:19 ►
that if it’s thrown off,
01:02:22 ►
a sunset can drive you into despair.
01:02:28 ►
What is the general, I mean, there’s a lot of expertise in the room.
01:02:31 ►
Is it useful for us to go through these darker sides of ourselves?
01:02:38 ►
Do we feel better afterwards, or does bringing it to the surface bring,
01:02:43 ►
then you have shit on the surface?
01:02:46 ►
I personally think,
01:02:47 ►
it must be my German heritage,
01:02:49 ►
I like to go into those places
01:02:51 ►
and like to discover those dark sides of my soul
01:02:54 ►
or whatever it is, you know.
01:02:56 ►
I like to really rub my nose into it
01:02:59 ►
because usually if something isn’t a part of me,
01:03:02 ►
it doesn’t touch me.
01:03:04 ►
Uh-huh. You know, so if something touches’t a part of me, it doesn’t touch me. Uh-huh.
01:03:05 ►
You know, so if something touches me in a way, I like to go to the root of it.
01:03:10 ►
And what is there when you get there?
01:03:14 ►
I mean, what’s the experience, in other words, of instead of saying,
01:03:18 ►
oh, no, not that, my God, saying, oh, great, a chance to understand more about myself,
01:03:24 ►
and rush in, what do you find
01:03:26 ►
when you get in there um i just find that i get a more complete picture of the whole
01:03:33 ►
like i i feel like i get you know the karmic wheel like i’m discovering every aspect of it
01:03:41 ►
instead of just heading for the light
01:03:45 ►
and gives me a better understanding
01:03:48 ►
of human nature
01:03:49 ►
of the human psyche
01:03:51 ►
of my own psyche
01:03:52 ►
I don’t think it’s pleasurable
01:03:56 ►
but is it awful?
01:04:00 ►
it’s awful if you make it awful
01:04:02 ►
it’s awful when you put a judgment on it
01:04:04 ►
so the trick is to just not judge it It’s awful if you make it awful. It’s awful when you put a judgment on it.
01:04:08 ►
So the trick is to just not judge it.
01:04:09 ►
The trick is to just not judge it and just see it on the other side of the karmic wheel.
01:04:13 ►
Well, I think that’s what I do,
01:04:15 ►
but I feel it’s a struggle to not judge it.
01:04:20 ►
You say, oh God, if I judge this, it will get worse, I should just try and ride it through.
01:04:27 ►
I’ll give a try on the school part of it.
01:04:32 ►
Uh-huh.
01:04:33 ►
I mean, what’s haunting me is this picture of having these women from Yonkers take
01:04:40 ►
500 micrograms and watch this stuff.
01:04:43 ►
I mean, there is this modern pop psychology idea,
01:04:47 ►
some of which is to the monetary benefit of therapists,
01:04:50 ►
that wallowing in this stuff gets you somewhere.
01:04:55 ►
And my current thinking,
01:04:58 ►
which is always, of course, subject to change,
01:05:00 ►
is that very fine edge between not denying something
01:05:04 ►
and not wallowing in it either.
01:05:08 ►
Yeah.
01:05:08 ►
And that’s a very…
01:05:10 ►
That’s a good point.
01:05:12 ►
Allowing.
01:05:13 ►
Allowing.
01:05:14 ►
That’s what I mean.
01:05:15 ►
You trust your state,
01:05:16 ►
you observe it to it.
01:05:17 ►
You become the witness to it
01:05:19 ►
and without judging it
01:05:20 ►
as good or bad or whatever.
01:05:23 ►
So a kind of detachment.
01:05:25 ►
Well, even more than that, from the gestalt perspective,
01:05:28 ►
which I’ll represent,
01:05:30 ►
the edge between wallowing and…
01:05:33 ►
I mean, you don’t ever want to deny,
01:05:34 ►
but you want to go into something far enough
01:05:36 ►
to begin to get a reversal,
01:05:38 ►
to begin to get the other side.
01:05:41 ►
So from the theoretical thing,
01:05:43 ►
I don’t know how wallowing would ever serve that purpose.
01:05:46 ►
So what you’re talking about though is coming to a point of balance, right?
01:05:50 ►
Ultimately, being able to integrate and accept all of the various aspects.
01:05:56 ►
But wallowing obviously is not coming to a point of balance.
01:06:01 ►
What you’re talking about with the women from Yonkers and watching the film,
01:06:06 ►
I mean, that is…
01:06:08 ►
You don’t come into
01:06:09 ►
balance by assaulting your psyche
01:06:11 ►
with everything that is the most horrific
01:06:13 ►
that you could possibly confront. And I think
01:06:15 ►
that can be very damaging.
01:06:17 ►
And probably more so to some people than others
01:06:19 ►
because people’s tolerances are different,
01:06:21 ►
people’s individual place of balance is different.
01:06:24 ►
And so I think there is a lot of individual variation,
01:06:28 ►
and it’s very subtle and it’s very delicate.
01:06:30 ►
But I agree that toxicity is toxic in whatever form it comes,
01:06:35 ►
and if it has that effect, I do not see benefit in that.
01:06:39 ►
Well, perhaps a better word than wallowing could be formulated.
01:06:42 ►
It’s just the one that I chose.
01:06:45 ►
But in dealing with psychological material,
01:06:48 ►
you’re mostly dealing with something that’s already happened.
01:06:52 ►
So why would you ever want to stay in something
01:06:54 ►
that the outcome is predetermined,
01:06:57 ►
that you already know the end?
01:07:00 ►
Most people are most afraid of what they’ve already experienced.
01:07:04 ►
So why would you want to spend a lot of time
01:07:06 ►
hanging around in a bad place that you’ve already experienced,
01:07:10 ►
that you already know the end outcome of,
01:07:14 ►
but you also don’t want to deny that it happened?
01:07:17 ►
And that’s the kind of edge.
01:07:18 ►
That may be a better way of saying it.
01:07:20 ►
To begin then to get a reversal.
01:07:23 ►
Yeah, I think we all have a sense of
01:07:26 ►
that there should be a balance,
01:07:29 ►
but we all have a different sense of where it should be.
01:07:33 ►
I mean, for instance, I feel mild irritation
01:07:39 ►
with people who don’t like horror literature,
01:07:44 ►
people who don’t like horror literature.
01:07:50 ►
But I don’t like slasher literature, and I’m very clear what the difference is.
01:07:53 ►
I mean, one is psychological and the other is science fiction.
01:07:59 ►
But I can’t put up with, you know, Silence of the Lambs
01:08:03 ►
and from there on
01:08:05 ►
because it’s offensive
01:08:07 ►
but on the other hand if somebody doesn’t
01:08:10 ►
want to see Alien because
01:08:11 ►
they say it scares them
01:08:13 ►
I think that they’re
01:08:15 ►
a nervous Nelly
01:08:17 ►
you know and that they should actually
01:08:19 ►
steal themselves to this experience
01:08:22 ►
and it’s good to watch
01:08:24 ►
Alien because you learn something.
01:08:27 ►
I guess it confers an immunity.
01:08:31 ►
It’s one of the reasons why people don’t.
01:08:34 ►
There’s a feeling that it confers some sort of immunity
01:08:39 ►
by having undergone it.
01:08:41 ►
Maybe that’s why people are into all these affectations of negativity.
01:08:46 ►
It’s a kind of sympathetic magic.
01:08:49 ►
So maybe this is why adolescents who feel tremendously empowered
01:08:55 ►
are into T-shirts with dismembered bodies and bands whose images rotate around themes of mayhem, incest and destruction.
01:09:12 ►
It’s a kind of counter charm.
01:09:18 ►
And in that case it shouldn’t be put down.
01:09:21 ►
These people are not sick.
01:09:23 ►
They’re doing something to keep from being sick.
01:09:27 ►
You know, they’re gaining confidence
01:09:29 ►
by associating in a familiar manner
01:09:32 ►
with the things that actually make them very nervous and uneasy.
01:09:37 ►
I mean, I don’t know.
01:09:38 ►
This could be cheap shot.
01:09:42 ►
But I tend to…
01:09:44 ►
I mean, I would stick with that for a minute
01:09:46 ►
I tend to think that’s true
01:09:48 ►
because
01:09:49 ►
I know some of these
01:09:52 ►
people who are behind all of
01:09:54 ►
these symbols and they seem
01:09:56 ►
like very nice people
01:09:58 ►
who are striving to keep their lives
01:10:00 ►
together I mean my son is
01:10:02 ►
one of them
01:10:03 ►
every time I have an impulse
01:10:06 ►
to condemn you know it is pretty horrific I mean my son brings home CDs
01:10:14 ►
and I read the lyrics and it is a jaw-dropper what some of this stuff is
01:10:20 ►
you know but then if you actually play the CD you discover that the lyrics
01:10:26 ►
are so lost in walls of noise and special effects and all this other stuff
01:10:31 ►
that it isn’t as in your face as when you read the the lyrics and in any case
01:10:39 ►
you know nobody’s ever topped thators song about murdering your father and screwing your mother,
01:10:48 ►
and that was the anthem of our generation.
01:10:51 ►
So who are we to point a finger at Guns N’ Roses?
01:10:56 ►
I mean, and, you know, we think of the Doors as a wholesome impulse or something.
01:11:02 ►
I don’t know.
01:11:03 ►
Some incredible mental side of hand goes on here.
01:11:07 ►
Sympathy for the devil, all of this stuff.
01:11:10 ►
I mean, it’s black in that phase.
01:11:12 ►
But if you’re in it, it’s fun, it’s theater.
01:11:15 ►
It establishes a ring pass knot that keeps the boring people out.
01:11:21 ►
If you’re on the outside, know this is pathological demented it
01:11:26 ►
leads to mass murder and it’s unacceptable well you got to go easy on
01:11:32 ►
some of this anybody right anybody want to say any more about this?
01:11:48 ►
Let me see if I wanted to say any more about it.
01:11:51 ►
It made me think of a funny cartoon,
01:11:54 ►
the whole subject of madness.
01:11:58 ►
Maybe some of you saw this cartoon in the New Yorker a few years ago, but a bunch of obviously very straight businessmen
01:12:03 ►
are sitting around a conference table
01:12:05 ►
and they have the downward moving chart of their company’s profits up on the wall in front of them.
01:12:11 ►
And the CEO is saying to a smiling man sitting at the end of the table,
01:12:18 ►
it’s true, Hedley, a deliberate derangement of the senses worked for Rimbaud,
01:12:24 ►
but would it work for us?
01:12:27 ►
And it’s worth remembering, you know,
01:12:30 ►
that this madness we fear so much,
01:12:32 ►
we are essentially the unhappy inheritors of the romantic legacy.
01:12:37 ►
I mean, they brought this upon us.
01:12:40 ►
This is what they wanted.
01:12:42 ►
They worshipped this.
01:12:44 ►
And the entirety of the 20th century
01:12:46 ►
has been a deconstruction
01:12:48 ►
of gentlemanly
01:12:50 ►
reason
01:12:50 ►
abstract expressionism
01:12:56 ►
all of these things
01:12:57 ►
Freudianism, Jung
01:12:59 ►
National Socialism
01:13:01 ►
it’s all anti-reasonable
01:13:03 ►
from the point of view of the 19th century,
01:13:06 ►
we don’t have to worry about madness.
01:13:08 ►
We are mad, every last one of us.
01:13:12 ►
I mean, we’ve so thoroughly imbibed the values of modernity
01:13:17 ►
that we are incomprehensible to our own past.
01:13:22 ►
And this brings up the issue of,
01:13:27 ►
you know, someone said
01:13:29 ►
it was a problem of consensus.
01:13:31 ►
What do you do if the society is crazy?
01:13:36 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:13:38 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:13:40 ►
one thought at a time.
01:13:43 ►
One of the parts of the talk that you and I just listened
01:13:46 ►
to that made a deep impression on me was when Terrence said, what does it mean if it becomes
01:13:53 ►
harder and harder to take these things? Does it mean that you’re getting out of balance? Does it
01:13:58 ►
mean that you’re just getting older? Where should the blame be put and what can you do about it?
01:14:04 ►
Well, if you’ve been joining me in the live salon on Monday evenings,
01:14:08 ►
then you already know that this is the topic that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
01:14:13 ►
First of all, I disagree with Terrence in thinking that there is blame to be associated
01:14:18 ►
with a loss of appetite or having more psychedelic experiences.
01:14:22 ►
To me, blame just doesn’t sound like the right word.
01:14:26 ►
In my view, when older people who have been deeply involved in the world of personal psychedelic
01:14:31 ►
research taper off on their use of these substances, well, it’s usually for a combination
01:14:36 ►
of reasons, I think. For sure, at least in my case, one of the main reasons for me not taking
01:14:43 ►
these things as often is that my body no longer can bounce back from a big trip like it once did.
01:14:50 ►
For example, I found that as I moved into my late 60s,
01:14:53 ►
my ayahuasca experiences were becoming more and more physically difficult.
01:14:57 ►
So that’s one reason.
01:15:00 ►
And I’m not so sure about Terrence’s question as to whether the loss of interest in psychedelics
01:15:04 ►
could also be because you’re getting out of balance.
01:15:08 ►
You know, it seems to me that when somebody’s out of balance,
01:15:11 ►
that’s the perfect time to have a psychedelic tune-up.
01:15:14 ►
But hey, that’s just me.
01:15:17 ►
Now, I also know that it seems cool and macho to brag about polydrugging and about taking high-dose trips.
01:15:24 ►
But whenever us old psychonauts who have had a few close calls of our own,
01:15:29 ►
well, what we think when we hear those kinds of stories is,
01:15:32 ►
well, what a fucking jerk.
01:15:34 ►
I hope he gets over himself soon or he’s going to be dead.
01:15:37 ►
So please don’t make me say that about you or your friends.
01:15:41 ►
The psychedelic community has a lot of work to do in the years ahead,
01:15:44 ►
and, well, we need all the help we can get. In fact, we need you. So be careful out there and
01:15:50 ►
quit trying to impress your friends with your risky adventures. The best way to impress an
01:15:55 ►
elder is to become one yourself. As you’ve heard here in the salon many times before,
01:16:02 ►
there are old psychonauts and there are bold psychonauts,
01:16:05 ►
but there certainly are no old bold psychonauts. Enough said. And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:16:12 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.