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624 - The Way of the Psychonaut

Sep 23, 2019, 65 min read

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Susan Hess Logeais

Lorenzo and Susan Hess Logeais in the Live Salon

Date this lecture was recorded: September 16, 2019.

Today podcast is a recording from last Monday evening’s Live Salon with Susan Hess Logeais, the producer/director of a feature length film about Dr. Stan Grof. The film is titled “The Way of the Psychonaut” and presents Dr. Grof’s work with some stunning graphics and effects. Even if you are already quite familiar with the life and work of Stan Grof, I am sure that you will learn even more when you see this documentary.
TRAILER:
The Way of the Psychonaut
WEBSITE:
Documentary project featuring
psychedelic psychotherapy pioneer
Stanislav Grof
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View  by Richard Tarnas
The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View  by Richard Tarnas

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:22 ►

Salon.

00:00:23 ►

And today I’m going to play a recording that I made last Monday evening in the Live Salon.

00:00:29 ►

Our guest was Susan Hess-Logies, and she is the producer-director of a film about the life and work of Dr. Stan Groff.

00:00:39 ►

As you know, Dr. Groff is not only one of the world’s leading LSD researchers going back into the 50s

00:00:45 ►

with his work, he is also one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and along

00:00:52 ►

with his wife Christina, he created the system of holotropic breathwork. Now, technically Susan’s

00:00:58 ►

film is a documentary, but to me it’s really much more than that, because she wrapped her own personal experiences around the main story of Groff’s life and work.

00:01:09 ►

Now, I’ve placed a link to the trailer for this new movie with the program notes for this podcast,

00:01:14 ►

and you can find that at psychedelicsalon.com.

00:01:17 ►

And if you have a few minutes, be sure to take a look at it just to get a few ideas about the graphics and effects that she uses in this full

00:01:25 ►

length feature film. But enough of me telling you about this conversation. Why don’t we just listen

00:01:30 ►

to it now? We have Susan with us here tonight and I’ve had the honor and privilege of seeing her,

00:01:41 ►

you know, an early cut of her film, which is just, I think, just stunning.

00:01:46 ►

You know, I don’t say that often because, you know, it’s hard to make a documentary

00:01:50 ►

fun and interesting. And we’ll get to the film in a bit. But I’ll tell you what, you know, that

00:01:58 ►

I think most of the people here, hopefully they had a chance to see the trailer. And everybody in my listening audience here, all the fellow salonners, if they go out and listen to that trailer,

00:02:13 ►

they’re going to not in the beginning, first part of it, hear about Stan Groff.

00:02:18 ►

They’re going to hear somebody say something that they’ve all said to themselves, which is, you know,

00:02:23 ►

I didn’t really fit in until

00:02:25 ►

I had LSD. And I mean, that is something everybody here is going to relate to, at least if not

00:02:32 ►

personally, by knowing some friends that felt the same way. So would you care to go on about that at

00:02:37 ►

all? Well, first of all, we just updated the trailer. So it’s the same link, so it’s the same link but it’s the it’s the most recent

00:02:46 ►

version that reflects the entire length of the movie now and and what you’re

00:02:52 ►

saying is true in the sense that I always felt like I came from another

00:02:56 ►

planet I remember looking around and just going I don’t fit in I don’t I

00:03:00 ►

don’t relate to what these people think is important I don’t I don’t see the

00:03:04 ►

world through the same perspective that they do.

00:03:08 ►

And then, so I just felt like an outsider.

00:03:10 ►

And then when I had that first psychedelic.

00:03:13 ►

Let me interrupt you just a moment.

00:03:15 ►

Where was this?

00:03:16 ►

What part of the world was this where you were growing up and feeling like an outsider?

00:03:21 ►

Outside of Seattle, Washington.

00:03:23 ►

Oh, okay.

00:03:23 ►

Okay.

00:03:24 ►

Fury in Washington, a suburb of seattle

00:03:26 ►

oh okay yeah and uh and so i was in new york and and um friends of mine would go to studio 54

00:03:33 ►

and that was the first time i had lsd and i remember in that environment yeah

00:03:38 ►

that’s about the worst setting you could do it in. Well, you know, it was the interesting, I mean, I understand the, you know, the idea of waves.

00:03:51 ►

I also recently interviewed Stan Grof’s brother, Paul, who has studied the neurophysiological non-ordinary states of consciousness.

00:04:02 ►

And he talks about the brain has these oscillating waves

00:04:06 ►

and so the waves that we experience in a psychedelic journey are a result of how the brain

00:04:12 ►

processes information and so i remember these waves you know like oh my god here comes another

00:04:19 ►

one you know and i just sort of hang on to somebody and And do you care to reveal how old you were then?

00:04:26 ►

I think I was 19.

00:04:34 ►

So, you know, but the outcome, I remember just going, oh my God, I love myself.

00:04:37 ►

And I felt okay.

00:04:38 ►

I finally felt okay.

00:04:41 ►

And it really did change my life after that.

00:04:46 ►

So I opened the movie with just a little bit about me so that people understand what drew me to Stan and why it was important.

00:04:51 ►

Well, you know, most of the people who see this movie are going to either have been in

00:04:58 ►

one of his workshops or know of him or read one of the books or something like that. And yet, and you know, there, as you

00:05:05 ►

know, there are hundreds of thousands of people whose lives he’s affected. And all of us, when

00:05:11 ►

we come into contact with somebody like him, we get this energy, we want to go tell the world.

00:05:17 ►

And yet you actually did it. I mean, you did something that, you know, I know how hard it is to kind of bootstrap things like this.

00:05:25 ►

And your dedication is amazing.

00:05:30 ►

And we’ll get into talking about the film in a bit because it’s truly a wonderful movie you put together.

00:05:35 ►

But how did this inspiration, how and when, and then, you know, how did you bootstrap this whole thing?

00:05:43 ►

Because it’s a big production.

00:05:44 ►

This is a feature film. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, how did you bootstrap this whole thing? Because it’s a big production. This is a feature film.

00:05:45 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:05:46 ►

Well, I mean, I have I’ve made other films.

00:05:49 ►

So I’ve done film work previously.

00:05:53 ►

And when I met Stan, when I heard him lecture, he covered mythology.

00:06:02 ►

He covered Tibetan Buddhism.

00:06:09 ►

He covered Tantra. He covered he covered Tibetan Buddhism, he covered Tantra, he covered, he covered so many subjects, he covered shamanism, he covered all these things that I really wanted to learn. And my first

00:06:15 ►

thought was, if I make a movie about Stan, I’ll get to learn all these things. And then the second feeling I had was that I had, I mean, I’m 61.

00:06:26 ►

So I started in my mid-20s with shamanic work and other spiritual experiences.

00:06:33 ►

And so it’s been a solid 30-something years of work.

00:06:37 ►

And quantum physics is another thing that I really appreciate.

00:06:42 ►

And so Stan’s story represented everything that I had

00:06:46 ►

ever practiced. And then later, of course, in the course of making the movie, I was lamenting to

00:06:53 ►

Rick Tarnas that I missed Esalen, that I missed Stan teaching at Esalen. And when he heard about

00:07:02 ►

all the things that I tried he said you had your own mini

00:07:05 ►

Esalen and then I learned later that Stan had introduced every technique that I had done

00:07:11 ►

and so so it was just like it was the perfect way to honor him and um and Stan was very involved in

00:07:20 ►

the production of the film and his wife Brigitte was responsible for raising a lot of

00:07:25 ►

the money that allowed us to make the movie we hired 35 actors and had a film crew and we

00:07:33 ►

reenacted a lot of scenes and I’ve been working with motion graphics people and animators and a

00:07:39 ►

composer so yeah you know I even hesitate to call this a documentary, because it’s really a

00:07:47 ►

feature film, and, you know, it’s until the people see it, even in the trailer, though,

00:07:54 ►

you can see some of the, a brief glimpse of some of the graphics and the effects, and, you know,

00:08:00 ►

I’ve known of Stan’s work, and read his work, and I’ve known people that worked with him, and I knew a lot about him, I thought.

00:08:10 ►

But I learned so much more from your film that there was a lot about him that, you know, maybe in a book I’d read or something, there would be a paragraph about it where you really, you know, you had the pictures and the images that really reinforced it. And some great film of Stan himself.

00:08:30 ►

And for what it’s worth, Charlie Grove just sent me a copy of the video they made at the memorial.

00:08:38 ►

Stan was there with his wife, and he was moving kind of slowly,

00:08:41 ►

but he was looking pretty good and chipper and cheery and talking with a lot of people.

00:08:46 ►

So, you know, he still hasn’t given up the fight.

00:08:49 ►

But he’s had some physical problems, right?

00:08:52 ►

Some health problems.

00:08:53 ►

Well, you know, it’s kind of remarkable.

00:08:56 ►

He had a stroke in August of last year.

00:09:00 ►

And we had pretty much finished our interview process every time so Stan married a German woman

00:09:09 ►

and they were spending most of their time in Germany so every time he would come back to the

00:09:14 ►

United States and go to Mill Valley I would fly down and interview him or show him footage and

00:09:20 ►

just make sure that that he would look at all these reenactment scenes and say

00:09:25 ►

well no we didn’t quite do that you’ll see in the in when you watch the film eventually

00:09:31 ►

there’s a reenactment of all the um insulin comas that he induced and we give one of the patients a

00:09:39 ►

shot and and he looked at me and he said i would have sterilized the area first. And it was like, Stan, I can’t go back and fix that.

00:09:49 ►

You know, those stories were so amazing because, you know, I’d known that he had had to do that.

00:09:56 ►

But when I heard the amount of work that he’d done there, how he was able to keep his own sanity while doing that is pretty amazing.

00:10:05 ►

Well, yeah. I mean, he was really ready to quit. So the last time I interviewed Stan was in May

00:10:11 ►

of, I think it was, I can’t remember the year. Was it 2017? And then that August, he was going

00:10:17 ►

to have back surgery and he stopped taking blood thinner and he had a stroke. So although he’s speaking and fully functioning, his, his

00:10:27 ►

ease of speech is not fully back. So it’s maybe the last time he’s able to publicly express himself

00:10:39 ►

as completely and eloquently as he would like. Yeah, I was just going to say that he,

00:10:48 ►

I could see from the video that he was talking with people and he hasn’t lost the ability to communicate.

00:10:51 ►

But this may be the last one where he’s perfectly satisfied

00:10:55 ►

that he was on top of his game.

00:10:58 ►

Yeah, yeah.

00:10:59 ►

And he and his wife Brigitte have pretty well decided

00:11:02 ►

that they don’t want him.

00:11:09 ►

They’re not. I mean, God bless Ram Dass, but that’s not the direction they want to go.

00:11:14 ►

They don’t care to have him be remembered where he is now, although he’s doing great.

00:11:20 ►

But it was I just had a sense that this is now, you know, I have to work with him now. And every time was this could be it so thank goodness well you know that and I think he made a

00:11:27 ►

very good decision there because it was Ralph Metzner’s memorial that I was thinking of and

00:11:32 ►

there there were so many people that spoke at the memorial and there were some that were kind of

00:11:38 ►

disjointed I thought and then when I when I saw Stan there I I thought, well, it was really wise of him to not go. You could see he

00:11:47 ►

was walking and talking. And then Charlie Grove told me that, yeah, he hasn’t lost anything as

00:11:53 ►

far as his sharpness and all of his mind. And so he’s getting things back. But I think that’s a

00:11:58 ►

good decision to not leave some of your final images, at least uh less than what you’d like people to see

00:12:06 ►

yeah well and you know he when i first attended a lecture of his it was one of the um uh what do

00:12:16 ►

we call those things uh modules for the groff holotropic breathwork training and it was a six

00:12:22 ►

day event and there was two two breathworks each person and two days of lecture from Stan and

00:12:29 ►

People were passed out cold sleeping and he’s just going

00:12:35 ►

So, you know Stan could just go I have I guess you have no idea the amount of hard drives that I have to hold

00:12:46 ►

I have no idea the amount of hard drives that I have to hold all of the footage that we shot.

00:12:55 ►

And what was wonderful was to have filmed a conversation between Stan and Ralph Metzner and between Stan and Michael Harner. And they’re both no longer with us. Right. And those conversations are really remarkable.

00:13:01 ►

Both men come from very academic backgrounds, Ralph and Michael Harner,

00:13:07 ►

and it was really in the last months of their lives that they publicly stated that there is

00:13:13 ►

a spiritual dimension, there are spiritual beings, and we interact with them. And I find that

00:13:18 ►

remarkable that, you know, this was their, finally, finally, they felt comfortable to say that.

00:13:24 ►

you know, this was their, finally, finally, they felt comfortable to say that.

00:13:29 ►

Yeah. And, and, you know, it’s, it’s a part of personal growth, obviously too. They had to really be convinced of what they’re saying. They weren’t just out there, you know, selling a tape or

00:13:34 ►

something like that. When, when it comes to accomplishments, you know, I knew somebody that,

00:13:40 ►

that worked with Stan Groff out in Maryland and And I knew some of the work they did there.

00:13:46 ►

But when I saw your film and saw the entire history of Stan Groff’s

00:13:53 ►

psychedelic research and medical work, it’s just astounding.

00:13:56 ►

I don’t see how anybody can repeat something even close to that again.

00:14:02 ►

Well, and that was, you know,

00:14:03 ►

the choice actually to make a biographical

00:14:06 ►

film about Stan was to show his process because I believe that he’s been dismissed by much of the

00:14:15 ►

psychiatric community and they’ve just decided that, you know, oh no, it’s not true. And so I

00:14:21 ►

felt that if I showed how he developed his theories,

00:14:25 ►

5000 sessions with patients, and that’s the official number, but there are plenty more,

00:14:31 ►

right? Plenty more. And and so, you know, it took him years before he published the book.

00:14:37 ►

I can’t remember the name of it, darn it, where he lists all the experiences that he observed.

00:14:43 ►

Forgive me for that, you know know i should have a list of his

00:14:45 ►

books but if you go to his uh website you’ll you’ll see them but but he really describes in

00:14:51 ►

detail the variety of experiences and and then you you i actually gained the courage to have one of

00:14:58 ►

these deep deep journeys because a high dose is very different than what I had done it. You know, that was one hit at Studio 54.

00:15:07 ►

But when you have like three times that amount,

00:15:10 ►

it’s a very different experience.

00:15:13 ►

And you think sometimes you’re not going to survive it,

00:15:16 ►

but he had the courage to do it.

00:15:18 ►

And I got that courage from him

00:15:20 ►

because he over and over told these stories

00:15:23 ►

of people who went through that darkness and their

00:15:27 ►

lives were transformed and so how old were you the second time you had lsd well that was probably in

00:15:35 ►

my mid-20s wow um and it was uh but again not a high dose and and I my experiences with LSD were one of them, I was trying to become an actress,

00:15:47 ►

I felt stalled. And I remember taking it. And as I sat there talking to somebody, it’s like I could

00:15:53 ►

see myself climbing to the top of a mountain. And I could see the path that I would have to take

00:15:58 ►

to succeed. And then as soon as it was over, I knew exactly what to do. And it worked. And then

00:16:04 ►

the third time I did it was when I decided that I was done with acting and it was time to get behind the camera.

00:16:10 ►

I did it in Santa Monica and went out, walked.

00:16:14 ►

And I remember walking to the end of the pier, Santa Monica Pier, and looking back at the coastline and thinking, the earth is sick of us.

00:16:23 ►

She’s like a dog with fleas

00:16:25 ►

and she’s gonna roll in the mud to get us off.

00:16:28 ►

And that was 30 something years ago, you know?

00:16:31 ►

So that was the last time I had done it

00:16:33 ►

before these experiences during the course of the film.

00:16:36 ►

Now, how did you find the breathwork courses?

00:16:40 ►

How’d you come into, get into involved in that

00:16:42 ►

or learn about it even?

00:16:44 ►

Well, initially, you know, it’s like, well, let’s see.

00:16:47 ►

I was a mother of teenage children. I don’t want to get arrested.

00:16:50 ►

Where do I find LSD? You know, how do I,

00:16:53 ►

I don’t want to end up in jail at this point in my life.

00:16:56 ►

So when I discovered Stan, I was looking for actual drug trials.

00:17:02 ►

I was hoping that I could sign up for a drug trial and do it legally. And that’s

00:17:06 ►

when I discovered Stan. I’ve been there, by the way, in the same situation.

00:17:11 ►

So I found Stan. And then I saw that he did this breath work. And I thought, oh,

00:17:15 ►

I’d had very powerful shamanic journey experiences from working with Michael Harner. And I thought,

00:17:21 ►

maybe that’s what I need. Maybe that’ll reconnect me because I

00:17:25 ►

had had these deep, deep experiences. And then once I had kids, it was over. And, and I was looking

00:17:32 ►

for a way back in and I thought the breathwork could help. And, and initially the breathwork

00:17:38 ►

wasn’t as powerful. But then after the psychedelic experiences again, and I go back to the breath work and it’s amazing.

00:17:47 ►

So powerful.

00:17:48 ►

Well, you know, it’s interesting some of your path.

00:17:52 ►

I had done a little work with one of Michael Harner’s students before I moved out here to the coast.

00:17:59 ►

And then a friend of mine who is very much in your same position, you know, she was, you know, young, had children and didn’t want to take, you know,

00:18:08 ►

there’s a lot of potential risks besides all the psych psychological risks,

00:18:12 ►

you know, there’s the legal risk. And, and so she was into breath work.

00:18:16 ►

And so my wife and I went with her to, to one and,

00:18:20 ►

and I found it very fascinating. I really had a powerful experience, but it was so much work.

00:18:28 ►

And at the time, I had like almost unlimited source of some of the purest LSD around.

00:18:36 ►

And so I decided to just kind of pass on the breath work because I had some good acid.

00:18:42 ►

But for anyone who’s in a situation where,

00:18:45 ►

you know, they want to explore their consciousness, and they’re in a position where,

00:18:51 ►

even if they do have access to LSD, but they’ve never tried it, breathwork is a really good way

00:18:56 ►

to get started, to test these areas, because you can definitely get to altered states that are

00:19:03 ►

very powerful.

00:19:11 ►

Well, and it’s, I think the difference between a psychedelic experience for me and breath work, just like with shamanic journey work is, is you’re, you set the intention and you

00:19:16 ►

do the work and you commit to it.

00:19:18 ►

And it’s up to your own kind of determination and will that gives you that experience. And I think what sometimes,

00:19:29 ►

at least me, when it’s a substance that I’ve taken, even though it might be a very profound

00:19:34 ►

experience, there might be a residual doubt about, about was that real? And so when there’s nothing

00:19:42 ►

involved, and it’s breathing or meditation or shamanic journey work, then there’s nothing involved and it’s breathing or meditation or

00:19:45 ►

shamanic journey work, then there’s this feeling that, that, no,

00:19:49 ►

that was real.

00:19:50 ►

That was absolutely real because it happened without a substance in my body.

00:19:55 ►

So for me, it’s been helpful in that regard. It, and you know,

00:19:59 ►

when my son told me that he’d been exploring mushrooms, I was like, okay,

00:20:04 ►

great.

00:20:05 ►

Now we’re going to do breath work because I want you to see that there are other ways to go there. I think it’s important

00:20:11 ►

to know that there’s more than one way in. And, and, and, you know, that’s the kind of experience

00:20:16 ►

that Terrence called on the natch. And, uh, it’s, it’s definitely an experience. I think that,

00:20:22 ►

that the fact that he has, uh, experienced he has experienced mushroom consciousness a little bit will make it even easier to go through breathwork because he knows what the space is like a little bit.

00:20:34 ►

And so I really, I think there’s a lot that can be learned with breathwork, even if you are a psychedelic person, simply because you can do it more often, you know,

00:20:46 ►

and it’s free, you know, with no legal ramifications. Although, maybe you can tell

00:20:54 ►

me the truth of this. I’ve heard the urban legend that at one time they were going to try to make

00:20:59 ►

breath work illegal, and Stan laughed about them trying to make breathing illegal. Did you ever hear that story?

00:21:12 ►

I haven’t, but you know that in France, they declared it a sect and they made it unavailable.

00:21:17 ►

They were teaching people and the French government decided that it was a sect.

00:21:28 ►

They consider Waldorf education to be a sect, which is weird. It’s a weird, I mean, I’m married to a Frenchman, but that’s strange.

00:21:31 ►

So I don’t know about that.

00:21:33 ►

Is that still the case in France?

00:21:34 ►

I’m not sure. But Brigitte was facilitating or teaching facilitators there, training people.

00:21:42 ►

And then I believe that there was an issue with the government because

00:21:45 ►

of the way they regarded it. Well, that really speaks well for breathwork because they obviously

00:21:50 ►

saw it as a threat and any change in consciousness from the status quo is a threat. So I think that

00:21:57 ►

speaks well for it. Although I feel sorry for the people in France, but it’s really difficult

00:22:02 ►

to get busted buying a breathwork course over the internet,

00:22:07 ►

you know? Of course. Well, and you know, the idea of it too is I’m in conversation with Phil Borges,

00:22:13 ►

who wrote and directed and produced a film called Crazy Wise. And Crazy Wise is about people who

00:22:21 ►

have psychotic breaks that are considered psychotic breaks, but in other

00:22:25 ►

cultures, they might be an opening to a shamanic destiny or to the capacity for psychic and

00:22:33 ►

clairvoyant knowledge. And in our culture, if you’re hearing voices and seeing things,

00:22:38 ►

then we better give you some drug to stop it. And so these poor people that there’s two people that are focused on in the

00:22:46 ►

course of the movie, and it’s really tragic,

00:22:48 ►

the process they have to go through before they’re finally allowed to be who

00:22:51 ►

they are.

00:22:52 ►

And so Phil and I would like to pair screenings of our film in addition to

00:22:58 ►

breath work at universities that have psychology and psychiatric departments

00:23:04 ►

and make it

00:23:05 ►

available to students as well as, you know, alumni,

00:23:09 ►

people who are actually practicing so that they understand what we’re talking

00:23:13 ►

about, non-ordinary states of consciousness,

00:23:15 ►

and then have a legal experience of what’s possible.

00:23:19 ►

Now, if, if a student group or association wanted to, to air,

00:23:24 ►

view this,

00:23:26 ►

is there, does you have a speaker that will zoom in or something like that?

00:23:30 ►

Or is there a preparatory material that goes with it?

00:23:33 ►

Well, this we’re working on, actually.

00:23:35 ►

You know, we’re just in the version that you saw is the final cut of the film.

00:23:39 ►

And we’re in the process of finishing the score and some of the special effects.

00:23:44 ►

And then once that’s completed, I’ve submitted it to various film festivals.

00:23:48 ►

And we’ll see where it gets in.

00:23:50 ►

But theoretically, I can’t have it available prior to screenings at a film festival.

00:23:57 ►

It would make it, you know, whatever.

00:23:59 ►

They won’t consider it.

00:24:01 ►

And so we have to kind of wait until next spring, late spring, but then, yeah,

00:24:06 ►

absolutely available for groups and workshops and all kinds of things with materials that they can

00:24:13 ►

follow along or potentially even somebody Skyping in to talk to them about it. Well, for sure,

00:24:20 ►

when you get that program put together and you’re ready to roll it out,

00:24:28 ►

I definitely want to have you come back so that we can present this. And I know there are people maybe even here tonight who have contacts with some of the psychedelic student associations,

00:24:34 ►

and they’ve become very large both here and in Europe, I know for sure.

00:24:40 ►

So we can help you get in touch with some of those people as well.

00:24:44 ►

So we can help you get in touch with some of those people as well.

00:24:54 ►

I think this is really exciting because, you know, that I’ve read some of Stan’s books and you’re talking about finalizing some of the graphics and effects. And I have to really compliment you on the graphics were stellar.

00:25:00 ►

I mean, I’ve I’ve seen a lot of psychedel, and I’d like to re-watch this one on stone

00:25:06 ►

sometime, but the part that really made a big impression on me is I had read more than one

00:25:15 ►

of Stan’s books where it’s about going through the birthing process and how that affects you,

00:25:21 ►

and it’s always a picture of a little, you know, person getting born. And you had

00:25:28 ►

an adult human in the fetal position with the graphics of the womb around it. And what an

00:25:36 ►

impression that made on me. All of a sudden, I realized what Stan was saying about the changes

00:25:41 ►

that you go through during the birth process it never impressed it

00:25:45 ►

never hit me the way it did with your film so I think that just on that score alone it’s worth

00:25:51 ►

getting into all these universities to so they can really understand what happened to them yeah

00:25:58 ►

yeah and it’s you know that was uh initially Stan said, Stan, because my here’s my method.

00:26:06 ►

Often I have an idea. Not quite sure. I’ll put on something trippy.

00:26:11 ►

East Forest is perfect for just sort of nothing. I love deep forest.

00:26:15 ►

Yeah. And then like a tiny I’m a micro doser with marijuana, a tiny little bit of marijuana.

00:26:20 ►

And then I just it just happens. I just see it.

00:26:25 ►

want to and and then I just it just happens I just see it and then and then I I came to Stan and I said I want to get dancers uh to to create the womb and be the fetus and he was looking at me

00:26:33 ►

like I came from another planet and and then as I edited it together and he saw what I had in mind

00:26:39 ►

then he was like oh I get it how did he like it loved it I imagine loved it and then breathwork facilitators

00:26:46 ►

were saying it’s so dark and and but that’s what Stan loves you know so I added a bit of

00:26:54 ►

happier stuff to it but Stan was like it knocked my socks off you know so it it certainly should

00:27:03 ►

I mean it did mine too so this is going to have a great

00:27:05 ►

reception it’s going to be fun to uh hear what happens in the film festivals have you had an

00:27:10 ►

acceptance from any of them yet well we did get one but it was in israel and it would be for

00:27:16 ►

november and we’re not ready so um i’ve got my fingers crossed that something will happen

00:27:21 ►

somewhere well we’ll keep our fingers crossed

00:27:25 ►

too. So before I, you know, hog all the time here, if anybody else would like to ask a question,

00:27:31 ►

like either raise your hand or unmute your mic or hit that little button somewhere and

00:27:36 ►

we’ll get you involved as well. Charles, I was wondering if maybe a screening of this sometime

00:27:42 ►

next spring might be working in Portland for you.

00:27:46 ►

Oh, we’d love to. In fact,

00:27:47 ►

I think I responded to an email that you connected us on and yeah,

00:27:52 ►

we would love to have it.

00:27:53 ►

He’s an incredible innovator and it sounds like an incredible film.

00:27:56 ►

I really look forward to seeing it.

00:27:59 ►

Yeah, I did. I reached out to the folks at the Oregon Psilocybin Society.

00:28:07 ►

Yeah, they’re a different group.

00:28:08 ►

Right.

00:28:09 ►

And just to let them know that this film is available for fundraising.

00:28:13 ►

It’s not specifically about psilocybin,

00:28:16 ►

but I think it makes the case for this kind of deep work.

00:28:21 ►

You know, Susan,

00:28:22 ►

one of the things that kind of fascinates me about your courage

00:28:27 ►

in making this is that you made it a very personal film as well. And, you know, 10 years ago,

00:28:34 ►

it was difficult to get anybody to kind of come out of the psychedelic closet, but particularly

00:28:39 ►

a woman. And it all had to do with raising children, because that’s essentially where

00:28:44 ►

the responsibility is going to end. And, you know, they couldn’t afford to lose their children. And it all had to do with raising children, because that’s essentially where the responsibility is going to end. And, you know, they couldn’t afford to lose their children. And

00:28:49 ►

that’s very understandable. But fortunately, we have people now like you and Shauna Holm, who

00:28:55 ►

their children are getting to be adults now that it’s a little more safe. And yet, how are you

00:29:03 ►

treated among your friends and community that weren’t really aware of your extracurriculars?

00:29:10 ►

Well, to be very honest, just about everybody that I know has some experience with a psychedelic.

00:29:18 ►

And they start telling me their stories, how it was so amazing.

00:29:22 ►

Or I took acid and went to the art museum and it was like

00:29:25 ►

wow you know and so somebody everybody has some experience or a family member or a friend has

00:29:33 ►

suffered with um treatment resistant depression or some issue that that the um psycho psychological

00:29:42 ►

or psychiatric um fields can’t can’t answer, can’t help.

00:29:47 ►

So these individuals, some of them have done ketamine.

00:29:50 ►

Some of them would be interested in doing MDMA or psilocybin or something like that.

00:29:58 ►

So it’s really fascinating.

00:30:00 ►

There’s been very little resistance to it.

00:30:03 ►

And there’s been quite a lot of press

00:30:05 ►

people are actually investing quite a bit of money now in these what was it 17 million was donated to

00:30:13 ►

psychedelic research center at johns hopkins roland griffiths will be running that program

00:30:18 ►

one of the interesting things is there’s so many uh so much wealth being generated in the tech field, and the tech field was generated by asset heads.

00:30:28 ►

So they’re getting into a position now to fund the research,

00:30:33 ►

but the researchers have been there for a long time.

00:30:36 ►

Many of them have been, and they’ve been working in the dark,

00:30:39 ►

but it’s being recognized by these young, wealthy entrepreneurs,

00:30:44 ►

and they’re putting money back into the research. And so I think,

00:30:48 ►

I think the resurgence of what we know about these is going to be great.

00:30:53 ►

And, and as Terrence said one time, not a moment too soon.

00:30:58 ►

Well, yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the point of the movie is I don’t know,

00:31:03 ►

Rick Tarnas is a pretty brilliant man. He’s written the passion of the movie is, I don’t know, Rick Tarnas is a pretty brilliant man.

00:31:05 ►

He’s written The Passion of the Western Mind.

00:31:08 ►

He’s a philosopher and an astrologer.

00:31:10 ►

That is a must-read book.

00:31:13 ►

That is absolutely a must-read book.

00:31:15 ►

And I’m trying to think of the title of another one of his books that’s a must-read.

00:31:19 ►

Cosmos and Psyche.

00:31:20 ►

Yes.

00:31:21 ►

It’s 3,000 years of Earth history through the lens of archetypal astrology.

00:31:26 ►

And it was Myron Stolaroff that recommended Cosmos and Psyche to me,

00:31:30 ►

and that’s when I learned about Tarnas.

00:31:31 ►

He’s a really brilliant man.

00:31:33 ►

Well, he’s in the movie.

00:31:35 ►

Right, right.

00:31:35 ►

And what he’s basically saying is that this is it.

00:31:40 ►

We are heading into a death-rebirth experience.

00:31:46 ►

it you know we are heading into a death rebirth experience and one of the points he makes is that you can’t have a fake death rebirth experience we have to really believe this is it and surrender

00:31:53 ►

just like in a psychedelic experience surrender to the experience and allow something new to come

00:32:01 ►

out because it’s really our limited sense of who we are and how we are in the world that needs to shift.

00:32:06 ►

There’s got to be something to these experiences,

00:32:09 ►

whether they come through breath work or psychedelics or what,

00:32:13 ►

but the experience of an alteration of consciousness out of the status quo

00:32:16 ►

that is really important to survival, I think.

00:32:20 ►

Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, you know,

00:32:23 ►

there’s a practice that I do now that’s based in Tibetan Buddhism, and it’s called Chö, which is essentially, it’s basically sacrificing yourself.

00:32:35 ►

How do you spell that? idea is that you’re you’re chanting and you’re imagining uh you’re describing how you’re offering

00:32:46 ►

yourself and you’re eaten first by the gods who are so pleased by the nectar of your your purified

00:32:52 ►

brain that they bless you and suddenly you become this purified source of nutrition and nourishment

00:32:59 ►

for all the souls you know the entire spectrum of beings. And the idea is that by, by feasting on you, by,

00:33:07 ►

by eating every tiny bit of you that you help uplift the rest of humanity.

00:33:12 ►

And so it’s really sort of practicing dying, you know,

00:33:16 ►

practicing giving it up. I think it’s a really powerful thing to do.

00:33:20 ►

What were the two books? Oh, the two books that we talked about?

00:33:25 ►

Yeah.

00:33:26 ►

Go ahead, Susan.

00:33:28 ►

The Richard Tarnas books.

00:33:30 ►

Oh, right.

00:33:30 ►

Yeah.

00:33:30 ►

Richard Tarnas wrote Passion of the Western Mind, which is a philosophy textbook for many colleges.

00:33:41 ►

And it covers the early Greeks all the way through to the post

00:33:46 ►

modern. And the second book is called Cosmos and Psyche. And that covers 3000 years of the world’s

00:33:55 ►

history, but through the lens of what were the planetary transits. And so it shows, it really does show kind of how Jung and Freud and Einstein were all born around the same time.

00:34:11 ►

And what were the planetary transits and what was the basic aspect of their charts and why Freud had a particular perspective and Jung had a different one.

00:34:20 ►

And when you see how these things work it’s it’s pretty remarkable yeah and and you know this is a

00:34:28 ►

book that i i urge uh skeptics about astrology to read because first of all it’s a big book it

00:34:34 ►

must be 500 pages or so and it is it is so filled with with facts and logic that facts are amazing. I mean, the number of what we would,

00:34:47 ►

some people would call coincidences is uncountable.

00:34:51 ►

It’s really fascinating.

00:34:52 ►

And like I say, that astrologers don’t need to read it.

00:34:56 ►

People who have a little skepticism about it should read it.

00:35:00 ►

People like me, I guess.

00:35:01 ►

But it really captured me. And the book about the Western mind

00:35:08 ►

is like a trip through history of Western consciousness. And, and it’s, it’s got a lot

00:35:15 ►

of great stories in it. I mean, I’d forgotten about that until just now, I’m gonna have to

00:35:18 ►

reread that. That’s one I’ll put back on my list. Well, and the other thing that I really love about that book is that

00:35:25 ►

it, it, it, the very, the epilogue of it really talks about Stan’s work. And it really mentions

00:35:32 ►

how Stan, how Stan’s understanding of the perinatal matrices and these death rebirth

00:35:40 ►

experiences describe what’s happening right now. And it really is sort of gives a framework for

00:35:47 ►

the post-modern in that way and um and the other thing and i remembered the other book that i was

00:35:52 ►

trying to remember is called when the impossible happens that’s dan’s book where he writes um

00:35:59 ►

so many amazing stories that cover reincarnation it can cover um let me think reincarnation um

00:36:08 ►

being possessed by the devil uh or what he perceived to be the devil um past life uh

00:36:18 ►

memories relationships with other people um how some people are channeling access to mythic characters that they couldn’t otherwise

00:36:28 ►

know. And so it’s a remarkable book for just showing the full spectrum of experiences that

00:36:35 ►

are possible. You know, I came to Richard Tarnas, like I said, through Myron Stolaroff. And by then,

00:36:44 ►

you know, he was a professor, maybe I think at CIIS, I’m not sure where.

00:36:47 ►

But, you know, he, in my mind, he was this big, you know, professor in an ivory tower and thinking about these things.

00:36:55 ►

And then in your film, I discovered his connection to Esalen and Stan Groff.

00:37:00 ►

And all of a sudden, so many more of these things started making sense to me.

00:37:04 ►

off and all of a sudden so many more of these things started making sense to me you know that that uh one of the things that that struck me when I was I was watching your movie is that

00:37:09 ►

how many of my intellectual you know people I admire intellectual heroes I guess uh are in that

00:37:18 ►

I mean you you’ve hit the base uh home run with so many of them. I mean, it’s really a fun film to watch,

00:37:25 ►

and I look forward to seeing it again, actually.

00:37:28 ►

Well, and the goal, actually, of the eventually,

00:37:31 ►

and I’ll probably start sooner rather than later,

00:37:33 ►

I will be, we will be creating,

00:37:37 ►

the website will have the possibility of subscribing,

00:37:41 ►

and then you would have access

00:37:43 ►

to all the full-length supporting interviews

00:37:45 ►

Fritjof Capra’s interview is remarkable. Will Keeppin, who

00:37:50 ►

was a physicist and then he basically created environmental science and now he’s then he got a

00:37:57 ►

comparative religion degree and now he’s doing something called gender equity and so his

00:38:02 ►

understanding of spirituality, quantum physics,

00:38:05 ►

you know, all these things, it’s really remarkable. Richard Tarnas, in depth about this process,

00:38:11 ►

we’re going through Michael Murphy and the stories that he tells about Esalen and Stan’s time there,

00:38:18 ►

Rupert Sheldrake, and what he has to share. Sean Kelly, who’s a professor at California Institute of Integral Studies,

00:38:28 ►

also, he describes the transpersonal psychology perspective.

00:38:35 ►

So there’s just a lot of information by these people that we interviewed.

00:38:39 ►

It’s a real rich source of information.

00:38:42 ►

Richard Tarnas’ daughter, Becca, fully describes archetypal astrology.

00:38:47 ►

And then Susan Waukelke,

00:38:48 ►

who’s the president of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies,

00:38:51 ►

also describes what is their process of teaching shamanism

00:38:56 ►

and the worlds that we have the possibility of interacting with.

00:39:00 ►

So it’s meant to sort of be a portal for people who watch to whether it’s breath work

00:39:08 ►

or, um, shamanic journey work or psychedelics or whatever, that they might find a pathway

00:39:14 ►

to, um, continue their work. Well, you know, all of that, that footage of interviews that you

00:39:21 ►

described is like so invaluable. And, and if once you get that set up, I’ll be one of the first people to subscribe because,

00:39:28 ►

you know, that, that I just,

00:39:30 ►

I just love to hear some of these people in more in depth, you know, and,

00:39:33 ►

and in an unedited interview,

00:39:35 ►

just so that you can kind of get the flow of the thing. And, and,

00:39:39 ►

and yet you have such valuable information. I was thinking earlier how I would,

00:39:44 ►

I would hope at the very least,

00:39:45 ►

and I know it probably would wind up in an archive somewhere, but, you know, the Timothy Leary

00:39:50 ►

material is now in the New York City Public Library Archive, and a lot of other people’s

00:39:57 ►

stuff like Gary Fisher’s at Purdue and stuff, but nobody sees it. And so by doing this, I mean, making it available in an internet accessible archive,

00:40:08 ►

particularly for scholars and young kids who are going to be doing research for, you know,

00:40:13 ►

dissertations, things like this. What a valuable resource. I’ll definitely help you publicize that.

00:40:18 ►

Oh, good. Yeah.

00:40:19 ►

Be a participant myself.

00:40:21 ►

Well, I learned a lot. I really learned a lot and uh Stan gave me a really great compliment

00:40:27 ►

because I gave him a copy of all these full-length interviews that we had done and uh and he told me

00:40:34 ►

I was the queen of slicing and dicing because the interviews are maybe an hour long and yet I’m

00:40:41 ►

pulling three minutes out when I finished filming um oh darn it the

00:40:47 ►

head of maps darn it what’s his last name yes and Rick went on for an hour non-stop and then

00:40:53 ►

he goes I could have told you that was Rick Rick’s a long-time friend I’ve known him since

00:41:00 ►

before he started maps so yeah well and then he said to me, good luck pulling three minutes out of that.

00:41:05 ►

You know, and it’s like, I will.

00:41:08 ►

I did, I know.

00:41:09 ►

You know, I edited about 100 video programs

00:41:13 ►

for a TV show in Tampa, Florida.

00:41:16 ►

So I know what editing is like,

00:41:18 ►

particularly if you get a loquacious subject

00:41:20 ►

like Rick would be.

00:41:23 ►

Yeah, but he’s funny. Rick is very funny. And you, you, earlier you

00:41:28 ►

mentioned I’ve been so brave. Well, one of my first conversations with Rick was, can I talk

00:41:33 ►

about my psychedelic experiences without opening myself up to being arrested? And he said, you

00:41:38 ►

cannot perjure yourself. I’m sorry, you can’t, you can’t incriminate yourself. So therefore, you can describe all you want, but you can’t bear witness against yourself. It’s the law. It’s not acceptable. So Michael Pollan and his book about all his experiences. He’s not in jail.

00:42:03 ►

You know, I actually hesitated 15 years ago when I started this.

00:42:05 ►

I wasn’t sure I should call it the psychedelic salon.

00:42:11 ►

But, you know, I am a lawyer, so I knew how to avoid those traps. But I asked both Terrence McKenna and Sasha Shulgin on different occasions what it was like when they became public figures.

00:42:20 ►

And they both said the same thing.

00:42:21 ►

And they both said the same thing. It’s the more public they became about the psychedelic community,

00:42:26 ►

the less intention attention they got from any authorities because they did

00:42:32 ►

not want to give them any free publicity or make them seem important.

00:42:36 ►

And they said,

00:42:37 ►

Terrence said he didn’t get hassled at all.

00:42:39 ►

And Sasha only got this one time.

00:42:42 ►

So, you know, the, the more public you get, now I’ve been doing this for, this is my 15th year.

00:42:47 ►

And, you know, I’ve done almost 700 of these programs.

00:42:51 ►

And, you know, I’m good.

00:42:53 ►

I was good friends with Nick Sand and stuff like that.

00:42:56 ►

But I’ve never been contacted once.

00:42:58 ►

You know, I’m very open.

00:43:00 ►

But, again, I’m very clear about we don’t talk about where you can sell these things.

00:43:04 ►

We don’t have average.

00:43:05 ►

I don’t even have Google ads on my site.

00:43:07 ►

I try to keep it so that they don’t get tracked.

00:43:10 ►

There’s a lot of young people come out here to hear these things.

00:43:12 ►

And one of the intentions of these podcasts is to reach the people that are sitting out in the heartland and they’re in a small town or living on a farm and they’ve stumbled on mushrooms or something

00:43:25 ►

and they think they’re the only people in the world who have this experience

00:43:27 ►

and they’re afraid to talk about it and all, we want to make sure people don’t feel alone

00:43:32 ►

because I was like that for a long time.

00:43:34 ►

I thought I was the only person my age in my community that was doing this.

00:43:37 ►

So I want to make sure that people know that it is just not young people that there’s, I’m 77, but there’s a lot

00:43:47 ►

of people older than me that are doing these things. So it’s not about, you know, having a

00:43:54 ►

good time. Now, granted, you know, we’ve all enjoyed ourselves. I’m sure Studio 54 on Asset

00:44:00 ►

was probably much like the Start Club on MDMA you know it was it was an experience but uh

00:44:07 ►

the people who are listening to these podcasts and are here tonight are are not the the tourists

00:44:12 ►

that want to come and just have a quick trip and go home that uh you know we come because it is

00:44:17 ►

enjoyable at first but then it becomes really hard and difficult work and and uh not everybody’s cut

00:44:23 ►

out for that but the people who just do stick around, I think,

00:44:26 ►

are the ones who are going to be raising the kids

00:44:29 ►

that we want to see leading the world here in the years ahead.

00:44:32 ►

Well, and I think one of the people,

00:44:35 ►

we’ve had a number of screenings over the last five months or so

00:44:39 ►

to sort of gauge how well the film was working,

00:44:42 ►

to see what wasn’t working,

00:44:45 ►

to fix the storyline and the pacing and all these things.

00:44:48 ►

And so one person spoke specifically about the value

00:44:53 ►

that this film holds for young people

00:44:55 ►

who are exploring and experimenting

00:44:57 ►

with the idea that, A, you better know what you might uncover

00:45:02 ►

and don’t be afraid if it becomes dark but that and then the

00:45:08 ►

wisdom of having someone with you who is sitting for you you know that’s the term who’s your sitter

00:45:16 ►

who’s going to make sure that your experience is safe who’s going to be there to you know put your

00:45:22 ►

feet back on the ground if if you’re spiraling so far out you’re afraid you can’t come back?

00:45:28 ►

And so the film is really meant to show people who might sit for somebody and people who might have that deep experience that, you know, you can survive it, but you do need to be in the proper setting.

00:45:40 ►

You do need to be safe.

00:45:41 ►

And that’s critical.

00:45:44 ►

And it’s not, yeah, it can’t be fun,

00:45:46 ►

but especially a higher dose, it’s often quite deep.

00:45:50 ►

And what archetypal astrology does

00:45:54 ►

is it can give you an idea of what you’re headed into,

00:45:57 ►

depending on your transits.

00:45:59 ►

Like I didn’t know initially making this movie

00:46:02 ►

that I had what’s called Pluto opposite my son, my natal son,

00:46:09 ►

which is nothing but death, rebirth and vomiting. And it’s the it’s the shamanic dismemberment. And

00:46:15 ►

so all of my experiences in the course of these four years, that was the length of the transit

00:46:20 ►

were death and, you know, just basically being shredded.

00:46:25 ►

It was not fun.

00:46:27 ►

It’s been a while since I’ve done it because I kind of needed to, you know,

00:46:31 ►

I’d rather meditate for a while. That was a bumpy ride.

00:46:35 ►

And that’s one of the other things that you learn that the peer pressure no

00:46:40 ►

longer has any effect on you,

00:46:42 ►

that you have these experiences when you need to have one of

00:46:45 ►

these experiences, and you always know. And by the way, I want to compliment you for showing that

00:46:50 ►

one kind of a bad trip a guy was having on a breathwork experience, because, you know,

00:46:55 ►

it was very similar to a guy I was sitting for one time on a ketamine experience, where

00:47:01 ►

it’s quite frightening, and I think it’s important to people to see that it’s not all just, you know, you know, sunbeams and moonshines or moonbeams, I guess, sunshine

00:47:10 ►

and moonbeams. I don’t know. But in any event, it’s good to not gloss over things like that.

00:47:17 ►

But as I was watching it, you mentioned something here about younger people. For me, I’ve got

00:47:24 ►

people that, fellow salonners who have been listening to this program since their early 20s,

00:47:30 ►

who now have teenagers of their own.

00:47:34 ►

And they’re all having all kinds of issues.

00:47:39 ►

And how do I deal with this?

00:47:40 ►

And I’m not the right person to tell.

00:47:43 ►

I was 42 years old

00:47:45 ►

before I had my first experience. And I was a horrible, as far as a parent of a young man who

00:47:51 ►

was having some great experiences, and is now a really close friend of mine, my oldest son. But,

00:47:57 ►

but, you know, this, this film is something that I think parents can sit down with their teenage kids who are learning about

00:48:06 ►

psychedelics. And this is a really perfect enclosure, a perfect space for you to sit down

00:48:12 ►

with your kids or your grandkids even and say, here’s what mind work, what consciousness is all

00:48:18 ►

about, you know, and you need to be really careful about these things because it is a big deal. You

00:48:24 ►

know, somebody says here, you know, let’s go to Studio 54 and drop some acid.

00:48:28 ►

It could take you 30 years to recover.

00:48:32 ►

Well, the other point to make, you know, and we did put this in the trailer,

00:48:37 ►

is it’s a moment from my experience where I experienced my father dying before he died.

00:48:43 ►

And it was so painful. I really felt like a piece of

00:48:47 ►

my heart got ripped out. And, and as I started crying, it was this flood of sadness. I mean,

00:48:54 ►

I really thought I couldn’t breathe, like I was going to choke. And, and I realized in that moment

00:49:00 ►

that, that when you do this work, you are opening yourself to the collective experience

00:49:06 ►

of these deep emotions and and what can come through you is not just your stuff but the planetary

00:49:13 ►

unexpressed repressed emotional content that’s just looking for a crack in the sidewalk, you know, and geyser to shoot out of. And so you can, you can have some really

00:49:26 ►

powerful, profound emotional expression. And it’s not yours, necessarily, it might initially be,

00:49:34 ►

but then it becomes the collective. And, and if you’re not prepared, and then also imagine

00:49:40 ►

young people who have these experiences, and they can’t talk to their parents.

00:49:45 ►

young people who have these experiences and they can’t talk to their parents and they don’t know who to talk to and and so for for the world you know the parents and kids alike I love what you’re

00:49:52 ►

suggesting Lorenzo the idea that that if you watch it together if a kid had or a teenager a young

00:49:58 ►

person has these powerful experiences that they could then come to adults and say, I saw this, I felt this, help me make sense of it.

00:50:07 ►

Because in the end, it’s the ability to integrate that experience that will change your life.

00:50:13 ►

And being so upfront and honest with your kids in a very safe way by watching this film with them,

00:50:21 ►

you’re going to install some trust, some two-way trust, because I guarantee

00:50:27 ►

if you have somebody that’s even just 15 years old, they know probably more about drugs than

00:50:33 ►

most adults do. Because, you know, I mean, these kids know everything. And, you know,

00:50:38 ►

they know where your stash is in case you think you’ve got it hidden. Believe me, my kids, you

00:50:44 ►

know, my youngest son, let’s see, he was born

00:50:46 ►

in 72. So he’s kind of old now. That’s my youngest. And my kids are telling me now stories about

00:50:52 ►

finding my roaches on the windowsill and stuff. You know, I thought I was so clever, but I didn’t

00:50:58 ►

hide anything from them. And now the other day, my 11-year-old granddaughter asked me if it was CBD in my vaporizer because she saw me outside with it.

00:51:11 ►

So, you know, how did she know about CBD?

00:51:14 ►

I only learned about it recently.

00:51:16 ►

So, I mean, we have to really be much more honest with our children today because they’ve got the Internet and they know so much more than we did,

00:51:25 ►

me in particular, you know, so, so, but I don’t care if you’re only in your thirties,

00:51:30 ►

your, your teenagers know a lot right now. And so the sooner we can get clean with them and honest

00:51:36 ►

and have a good family discussions about these things, I think the healthier our families are

00:51:41 ►

going to be. I completely agree. And I was so thankful that

00:51:47 ►

both of my kids, now my daughter’s 23 and my son is 21, that they were both able to come to me

00:51:53 ►

and tell me about experiences that they’ve had. And the one thing I’ve cautioned people when I

00:51:59 ►

hear that they do like MDMA at a rave or something. It’s like, you realize that you’ve just opened yourself up

00:52:05 ►

to the collective stuff in the room and that you could be going home with all that to process.

00:52:12 ►

And it can be, you know, so the idea of set and setting, where do you have these experiences?

00:52:17 ►

Who is around you? I’ve, I’ve been in ayahuasca circles and had feelings of something stuck in my throat.

00:52:27 ►

And actually, someone was there to do body work, thank God.

00:52:31 ►

And stuff started moving, and it moved into my belly, and I breathed into it.

00:52:36 ►

And someone on the other side of the room starts sobbing.

00:52:38 ►

And then later describing how she was stuck, and then suddenly there was this huge burst of energy and she she could be crying and or or you speak together after a circle and you discover that everybody

00:52:51 ►

saw a piece of the same thing that there was some sort of shared experience there so it’s important

00:52:58 ►

to understand how these things work because then you’re not putting yourself in a situation where you might be absorbing a lot of unprocessed emotion that is awfully dark and could be disturbing.

00:53:12 ►

You know, Susan, you just brought something to my mind that I’ve never had thought about before.

00:53:16 ►

Because I always, like everybody in this community, we talk about set and setting.

00:53:20 ►

And we’re always thinking about, or I am, I shouldn’t only speak for myself.

00:53:23 ►

I think, well, what’s my state of mind? What’s my mindset? And how are we set up tonight? We got the music ready, the candles here. is a global setting because of social media and the internet. And so that pressure out there

00:53:48 ►

is there. And also the mindset of our families and our friends and those around, we might get

00:53:55 ►

ourself in a good space for two or three days, but we still are dealing with a lot of other people.

00:54:01 ►

So I think that’s a really interesting point. And like you said,

00:54:05 ►

that with breath work and meditation, you can pick a point you want to go to and intention.

00:54:12 ►

And while you do that with psychedelics, oftentimes you get spread in other places.

00:54:16 ►

I think maybe one of the reasons it spreads out is what you were just talking about,

00:54:21 ►

is we’re bringing in this other information energy.

00:54:24 ►

what you were just talking about as we’re bringing in this other information energy.

00:54:30 ►

Or bringing in, or as I interviewed Robin Carhart-Harris as well, and he’s currently the head of psychedelic research at Imperial College in London. And he was talking about

00:54:38 ►

how the brain functions basically as a filtering device, that it narrows our perception and our ability to sense and feel.

00:54:46 ►

And that when, so a best way of describing it would be how the brain has these regions,

00:54:52 ►

and each region is associated with a particular function. Excuse me. And then when you’re in

00:54:58 ►

waking consciousness, these regions are basically only interacting with themselves.

00:55:03 ►

When they’ve done scans with someone on a psychedelic,

00:55:07 ►

the entire brain is lit up.

00:55:08 ►

Every region is talking to every other region.

00:55:11 ►

And that’s why it’s successful in stopping a loop sort of mentality of

00:55:18 ►

addiction, depression, anorexia, compulsive behaviors.

00:55:23 ►

It breaks that hierarchical structure where it’s one part of

00:55:27 ►

the brain who’s basically deciding what’s going to come through. And suddenly all these things

00:55:32 ►

are communicating. And I like to throw in my interview with Rupert Sheldrake, who has a field

00:55:38 ►

theory of the mind. And he describes that you’re not, it’s not happening in here. It’s really what’s out there.

00:55:45 ►

So if you think about the brain completely turned on,

00:55:49 ►

imagine if that means access to the field at large.

00:55:53 ►

So suddenly you have access to all this information.

00:55:57 ►

And then when the experience is over,

00:55:59 ►

that structure comes back in terms of, you know, regional activity,

00:56:06 ►

not total access, but new information came in, new ways of perceiving and thinking. So it’s pretty

00:56:14 ►

remarkable. And then Stan’s brother, Paul, was describing how once you’ve had these experiences,

00:56:28 ►

these experiences, once your brain has been able to go there, you can get it back. The way a flashback works is the brain has already been there. It’s already had that experience. And so

00:56:35 ►

something triggers it, music, light, sound, smell, and then suddenly you’re right back. The brain can

00:56:41 ►

go right there. So that’s sort of something I think that’s really interesting to understand.

00:56:47 ►

Yeah.

00:56:47 ►

You know, I don’t know where it was somewhere this past week.

00:56:51 ►

I was listening to somebody talk about how memories are stored in two ways.

00:56:57 ►

One is a memory and the other, everything is a memory because all of our senses are,

00:57:02 ►

you know, microseconds behind.

00:57:05 ►

So those are fresh memories like what we have right now.

00:57:08 ►

And then there’s old memories that have a little hashtag on it that says old memory.

00:57:13 ►

But sometimes that old memory gets confused with the real time, and that’s deja vu.

00:57:18 ►

So as a geek, that made sense to me.

00:57:21 ►

Well, or if you – we also have a conversation betweenit ghaswami and urban laszlo and stan

00:57:27 ►

which just briefly shows up in the movie just to sort of acknowledge that we had that conversation

00:57:32 ►

but you’ve got a longer one last an hour oh wow and so it’s pretty interesting uh because

00:57:39 ►

urban’s perspective is that the akashic field, everything that ever was and ever will be is available in these states of non, well, non-ordinary states of consciousness when we open to them.

00:57:52 ►

And so his perspective is, you know, a clairvoyant is just better able to see what’s out there.

00:57:59 ►

Past life memory might be an ancestor’s experience that we’re tapping into.

00:58:05 ►

He doesn’t necessarily believe in reincarnation. he just thinks that we’re accessing memories i had a i got shoved

00:58:10 ►

from behind once and had this memory of having my head chopped off and many psychedelic experiences

00:58:16 ►

have been there my mother told me when i told her about this that i have a cousin who was beheaded by a Cossack. So it’s like, so is that my memory or this cousin’s experience?

00:58:28 ►

Or is it in what’s called the junk DNA that keeps track of our ancestry?

00:58:33 ►

Who knows, you know?

00:58:34 ►

Exactly.

00:58:36 ►

Yeah.

00:58:36 ►

These are all such fascinating questions and I’m,

00:58:39 ►

I’m really looking forward to getting you come back here once you get your,

00:58:42 ►

your site together and you’re able to talk about how we can let everybody else see this wonderful film i i really i’ve become your biggest

00:58:50 ►

fan susan so be sure we stay in touch because uh this is something i think a lot of people need to

00:58:55 ►

see and uh i i plan to watch it with my grandchildren so uh well good i love i really

00:59:01 ►

love what you’re suggesting because i also feel like like, you know, one of the things that Rick is suggesting and Stan as well, as Stan says, individually, he’s seen this remarkable transformation take place in individuals who are able to do this work.

00:59:25 ►

at large, for the culture at large. I mean, who knows what’s coming our way? Rick Tarnas has said things like there’s plastic eating bacteria that presents itself. Who knows what the planet’s

00:59:31 ►

capable of doing? Maybe all the creepy people will get on spaceships and head off to Mars,

00:59:36 ►

and then the planet will go, thank God. You know, all those wealthy folks that put us in the mess

00:59:41 ►

we’re in right now. So I don’t know what’s possible, but I do know

00:59:45 ►

that it’s really worth exploring that sort of space between here and what’s on the other side.

00:59:54 ►

Final thing I have to say is, I don’t know who’s familiar with Rudolf Steiner, but he was the

01:00:00 ►

inspiration behind Waldorf education and was the founder of Anthroposophy.

01:00:05 ►

And one of the things that he talks about is the importance of not necessarily

01:00:10 ►

being positive, but seeing things as they are.

01:00:13 ►

And that we have the sort of survival mechanism to be critical,

01:00:18 ►

to look for what’s wrong.

01:00:20 ►

And,

01:00:21 ►

and our reptilian brains are set up in such a way as to hang on to the memories

01:00:26 ►

of what was threatening and upsetting for our survival.

01:00:30 ►

But if quantum physics is accurate

01:00:33 ►

in terms of our things,

01:00:35 ►

sort of what is being observed

01:00:38 ►

presents itself in the way it’s expected to be seen.

01:00:42 ►

So if we’re really participating

01:00:44 ►

in the creation of reality,

01:00:46 ►

then if we hold memories of what we didn’t like, and what doesn’t work, and we’re sort of

01:00:51 ►

projecting that on to every moment, and we’re sort of perpetuating the bullshit that we’re in.

01:00:56 ►

And if we’re able to decide to like with fresh eyes, try to see the world and not allow ourselves

01:01:02 ►

to fall back into habit, I think we have a chance

01:01:05 ►

of something new happening. Well, I don’t know how anybody could say that any better, Susan. I

01:01:11 ►

think that is a wonderful note to end on. So I thank you very much for your time and the work

01:01:16 ►

on this film. I know it’s been a long four years and I’m looking forward to the ongoing

01:01:20 ►

revelations that you come with all the new interviews,

01:01:25 ►

because I think that we can have you here a number of times talks about some

01:01:29 ►

of these full interviews. So I’m really excited about that.

01:01:32 ►

Thank you for all that you’re doing and we look forward to the next time.

01:01:37 ►

Thank you so much. And thanks everybody for joining in.

01:01:40 ►

Yeah, everybody. And till next week, keep the old faith and stay high.

01:01:46 ►

Okay. Bye-bye. Yeah, everybody. And till next week, keep the old faith and stay high. Okay, bye bye.

01:01:50 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:01:58 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. you

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