Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speakers: Tania and Greg Manning
http://www.shulginresearch.org/home/about/alexander-sasha-shulgin/This lecture was recorded live in the salon on October 21, 2019.
Today’s podcast features what I hope will be the first of many more visits with Tania and Greg Manning. In addition to assisting Sasha Shulgin during the final years of his life, they continue working with Ann Shulgin to preserve the laboratory and other effects of her’s and Sasha’s life and work. In this initial conversation with “Sasha’s Sidekicks”, we reminisce about the Shulgins’ first Burning Man experience and the Mind States conferences. Additionally, Tania reads some of Sasha’s unpublished writing in which he talks about his relationship with Albert Hofmann, including an interesting anecdote about their favorite drugs, and Greg gives an emotional description of the peaceful final day of Sasha’s life.
Shulgin Research Institute
Sasha Shulgin’s Joke Book
Download free copies of Lorenzo’s latest books
Previous Episode
Next Episode
631 - Tim Scully and Orange Sunshine
Similar Episodes
- 409 - The Shulgin Memorial - score: 0.83953
- 453 - Palenque Norte Tribute to Sasha Shulgin - score: 0.76271
- 307 - Palenque Entheobotany Seminars Remembered - score: 0.76164
- 599 - The Psychedelic Hospice Movement - score: 0.74510
- 668 - Nature Loves Courage - score: 0.74196
- 443 - The Legendary Venice Salon - score: 0.71898
- 098 - Psychedelic Research in the 1960s (Part 2) - score: 0.71684
- 338 - A Tribute to Myron Stolaroff - score: 0.71610
- 232 - Fisher, Stolaroff, and Al Hubbard - score: 0.71366
- 678 - Tripping with Albert - score: 0.71341
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today I’m going to play a recording of what I hope will be the first of many more visits with Tanya and Greg Manning.
00:00:31 ►
In addition to assisting Sasha Shulgin during the final years of his life,
00:00:36 ►
they are continuing to work with Ann Shulgin to preserve the laboratory and other effects of hers and Sasha’s life and work together.
00:00:43 ►
and other effects of hers and Sasha’s life and work together.
00:00:48 ►
One of the things that I found really fascinating about our conversation was when Tanya read some of Sasha’s unpublished writing
00:00:52 ►
in which he talks about his relationship with Albert Hoffman,
00:00:56 ►
including an interesting antidote about their favorite drugs.
00:01:00 ►
And then later, Greg gave a really emotional description
00:01:04 ►
of the peaceful final day of Sasha’s
00:01:06 ►
life. As you’ll hear in just a moment, Tanya and Greg first came into Ann and Sasha’s lives at the
00:01:13 ►
2001 Mind States conference that John Hanna produced. And to let you know what a big deal
00:01:19 ►
that conference was for me, you can go back to my podcast number one here in the salon,
00:01:24 ►
that conference was for me, you can go back to my podcast number one here in the salon,
00:01:30 ►
and that is a recording of the talk that I gave at that conference. And for what it’s worth, even though I’ve given hundreds of public talks during my lifetime, the talk that I gave at Mind
00:01:36 ►
States that year will always remain, in my mind at least, the highlight of my public speaking career.
00:01:43 ►
So all three of us, Greg, Tanya, and myself,
00:01:46 ►
have a lot to thank John Hanna for. And if you go back and listen to some of the old Terrence
00:01:51 ►
McKenna talks, you’ll also hear Terrence singing John’s praises. Although he tends to keep a low
00:01:57 ►
profile, John has been the cornerstone of the psychedelic community for many decades, and we owe him a great deal.
00:02:06 ►
So now let’s jump into this enjoyable conversation with Tanya and Greg,
00:02:11 ►
and be sure to pay attention to the comment about Albert Hoffman’s favorite drug.
00:02:19 ►
Cohen, I told Greg and Tanya earlier today that you’re the guy from Belgium who stopped by with a case of beer unannounced.
00:02:29 ►
I don’t know if they remember you.
00:02:33 ►
Do you remember that, Greg or Tanya?
00:02:35 ►
Yeah, I actually do.
00:02:37 ►
And you were very polite and nice. We’d like to take, we have, you know, the space to be able to have people like you who’ve, you know, traveled so far and come with, you know, bearing gifts and just have, you know, want to do the pilgrimage.
00:02:53 ►
That’s why we’re here.
00:02:54 ►
We want to keep supporting people who have interest in Sasha and Nan’s work here.
00:02:59 ►
So you were delightful, I remember.
00:03:03 ►
Let’s see, where is he?
00:03:05 ►
Which one is he? What’s his name? It’s very night remember. Let’s see, where is he? Which one is he?
00:03:06 ►
What’s his name?
00:03:07 ►
It’s very night here.
00:03:08 ►
Let me just.
00:03:09 ►
Oh, there you are.
00:03:10 ►
Yes, yes.
00:03:11 ►
I’m happy to be here.
00:03:12 ►
Very well.
00:03:13 ►
Greg and Tanya, up at the top corner, it says speaker view and gallery view.
00:03:19 ►
If you go to gallery view, you can kind of see everybody here.
00:03:22 ►
Okay, great.
00:03:23 ►
Oh, my goodness.
00:03:23 ►
Perfect.
00:03:24 ►
Wow.
00:03:24 ►
Hi, everybody. review you can kind of see everybody here okay great oh my goodness wow hi everybody
00:03:25 ►
so anyhow cone is coming to us from belgium and it’s what like three o’clock in the morning there
00:03:32 ►
cone oh yes it’s 3 30 now 3 30 thank you for getting up appreciate it but i told them that
00:03:39 ►
you were here a couple weeks ago when we had some technical difficulties and didn’t make it so i wanted to be sure that you knew and and uh we’ll uh i i want to open this up to questions in a little bit
00:03:51 ►
but uh for for greg and tanya what i’d like to do is uh over the course of the next uh little bit
00:03:59 ►
here to eventually i’d like to talk about s, the guy, the human being, not just the chemist,
00:04:07 ►
you know. And I also wanted to find out what you all are doing to preserve his legacy, and they’re
00:04:14 ►
at the farm and things like that. But I want to start out way back a ways, when I first started a snail mail correspondence with Sasha back in the mid-80s,
00:04:27 ►
and it wasn’t until the mid-90s or mid-99 when I got out here and really got to know Sasha going
00:04:35 ►
through conferences and stuff like that, but it seems like from the time I got to know Sasha in
00:04:42 ►
person rather than by mail, the two of you were already involved in his life.
00:04:46 ►
How did this all happen? How did you come to be what I call his right and left hand?
00:04:53 ►
Well, let’s see. I read the P. Collin T. Coll in probably the late 90s and attended a mind states conference and i really wanted to meet
00:05:05 ►
them and so i was you know that conference i bet you and mary c there and carla turned me on to all
00:05:13 ►
our community that we are very dear friends of now carla hignan was that in 2001 yes it was oh wow
00:05:21 ►
and so we all met and i mean laurauxley was there Myron and Jean amazing people
00:05:27 ►
at that conference showed up Amanda and Jamie just it’s a it’s a cast of all stars and that is
00:05:36 ►
my most memorable conference of all time so this is the highlight of my whole life being at that
00:05:42 ►
conference it was amazing yeah well John Hanna really knew how to put together conferences, you know,
00:05:48 ►
and after the Palenque conferences,
00:05:49 ►
he really took over as the guy who really knew how to combine art and science
00:05:56 ►
and just in a, in a, such a beautiful and music,
00:06:01 ►
just such a beautiful combination of all those things in one weekend
00:06:05 ►
that it really, it blew all of us away and very blessed to have had those times.
00:06:13 ►
Well, you know, for what it’s worth, I attended several of the Palenka conferences and while
00:06:18 ►
they were really special, I think that when it comes to conferences that have made a difference
00:06:23 ►
in the psychedelic community,
00:06:27 ►
the mind states conferences are the ones that really stand out.
00:06:30 ►
You know, they were, they were larger. And like you said,
00:06:31 ►
they were much more diverse. They brought in music and art and all kinds of cultural activities too.
00:06:36 ►
It wasn’t just the conferences,
00:06:37 ►
everything that happened around it at that night in the morning.
00:06:40 ►
And John really was magical in what he did.
00:06:44 ►
He was. he lost money
00:06:47 ►
he did yes and and he did he really was mindful and he was also putting out the entheogen review
00:06:54 ►
and uh in the early days of the internet before we really had all of the social media he that was
00:07:01 ►
the only way we really could find out the latest um discoveries in how to um
00:07:08 ►
how to use uh visionary plants and and and kind of and the early chemists really wanted to create
00:07:15 ►
Sasha’s compounds in a righteous way before they became scheduled you know this all was in the very
00:07:21 ►
early days of that and so anyway I met them and then i was greg and i lived right
00:07:27 ►
next door and i said i just really want to for 25 years you actually live next door to the show
00:07:32 ►
right on the other side of the fence for 25 years so uh what what did you know about them before the
00:07:39 ►
conference well i knew he was a chemist but i didn’t know really what they were up to until I
00:07:45 ►
read the books. And then I said, I’ve got to meet these people are amazing. They bared their souls
00:07:49 ►
in these books. I mean, you know, they were just so you know, the highs, the lows, and I love Anne’s
00:07:55 ►
writing. I love how she, you know, wore her emotions on her sleeve and was just so real. They were both so real. I was just saying that, you know,
00:08:06 ►
I have known you guys for 20 years now,
00:08:09 ►
but this is the first moment I found out
00:08:12 ►
that you actually live next door to the Shoguns.
00:08:15 ►
Yes, yes.
00:08:18 ►
And Tanya worked for Sasha for a few years
00:08:23 ►
before one day we were,
00:08:30 ►
Sasha and Tanya and I were walking down Shulgin Road and we were.
00:08:32 ►
We needed a place to stay. We needed a place to stay. After 25 years, we were separating from the communal group that we were living with next door.
00:08:39 ►
So Sasha stopped and he turned towards us and he said these words, you know, you are family now.
00:08:47 ►
And then he invited us to move on to the farm. And there were tears. And of course, it was a
00:08:55 ►
very moving and momentous occasion. And it’s amazing how many little things have to happen
00:09:03 ►
in just a precise order
00:09:05 ►
and timing in order for people to find each other well and it was the altered states conference in
00:09:11 ►
san francisco that ann said oh i have a job for you my daughter’s getting married and moving to
00:09:15 ►
la would you like to work for sasha and write his next book with him like sure i’ll join in and so
00:09:23 ►
that’s what happened in 2004 and then we moved in in 2007
00:09:27 ►
right and then I’d been going to Burning Man Carla turned me on to Burning Man and then Ann saw that
00:09:33 ►
I came back very happy and I showed her pictures and so Ann goes I want to we want to go to Burning
00:09:38 ►
Man too so then we all went I think uh 2006, 2007 and 8 right in 2006 is when i did the the really big
00:09:49 ►
plank a north day up in theon village where we had that huge tent and yes right that was the first
00:09:55 ►
time ann and sasha spoke there and then uh 2007 i had a little smaller thing but i i was over there
00:10:02 ►
visiting with you all and in my uh i have a little 15
00:10:06 ►
minute video from larry to lorenzo my my biography and tanya there’s a picture of you and i and ann
00:10:13 ►
in there from the 2007 burning man oh that’s great i had no idea um about um their their fame until
00:10:21 ►
uh till we saw them at burnt till we went to burning man with them
00:10:25 ►
um that was when i when people surrounded them and showered love on them and i was oh wow okay
00:10:33 ►
they were really superstars and and you know not only you might have been in the right place at
00:10:41 ►
the right time but greg the story that you just told about how you told
00:10:46 ►
Sasha that you were looking for a place to live and without hesitation, he invited you to move
00:10:51 ►
to the farm. That speaks so many volumes about Ann and Sasha. I mean, what incredible people to
00:10:59 ►
be able to just on the spur of the moment, do something like that. They were so generous. And Anne still is so
00:11:05 ►
generous. I mean, just the generosity. And it’s going to go for centuries, I think, for his
00:11:12 ►
contributions. But just on a personal level, he treated every single person with respect, whether
00:11:18 ►
you were washing floors or had a PhD, he treated every person with respect he communicated with prisoners who uh would
00:11:26 ►
communicate with them he took phone calls from young chemistry students he would he really spent
00:11:32 ►
time with everyone when you look at his files all the correspondence that he did he really loved
00:11:39 ►
people you can tell he really uh just just adored people and and he really had us uh he believed in you more than
00:11:48 ►
you believed in yourself that’s he you excelled around him because he was so infectious believing
00:11:55 ►
in people and believing in him he always said you can do what i do if you’re interested but
00:12:00 ►
you don’t you’re not interested in chemistry it’s okay but you know he just he he was so
00:12:05 ►
infectious with his passion about adventure in life he was a he was a genius who didn’t believe
00:12:12 ►
his own bs you know he just he didn’t drink his own the kool-aid he didn’t yeah he didn’t have
00:12:19 ►
any what a terrible analogy yeah he was so self-aware. Also, an example of his adventurous soul.
00:12:26 ►
I say every time I go to Burning Man, I have to go walk to the man because we’re in a seat for so many hours.
00:12:33 ►
He goes, oh, I’ll go with you.
00:12:35 ►
And this was the Alex Gray one time.
00:12:38 ►
I think it was Alex Gray put the inside the Burning Man there.
00:12:42 ►
That was the 2006 one.
00:12:44 ►
Yes.
00:12:44 ►
And so anyway, we go in there they
00:12:47 ►
didn’t finish and they wouldn’t let us in but then they recognized sasha and they go oh well you can
00:12:52 ►
come in so we’re like oh right we’re with the right people here we got dread actually somewhere
00:12:58 ►
i’ve got a picture i took of ian and sasha sitting there they they got chairs for them all too and
00:13:03 ►
the thing was packed you know that was the biggest stint they’ve, they got chairs for them all too. And the thing was packed, you know,
00:13:05 ►
that was the biggest stint they’ve ever had on the line.
00:13:08 ►
Yes. And I want to tell you, Lorenzo, by the way,
00:13:11 ►
when I went back in 2011,
00:13:12 ►
the last time Pez really has taken Palenque Norte and you would,
00:13:18 ►
you would be proud of how he’s continued what you started.
00:13:22 ►
So thank you.
00:13:23 ►
Well, you know,
00:13:24 ►
I’ve podcast a bunch of
00:13:25 ►
things from Blank and Arte and Pez has actually passed it on to other people now. And I’m
00:13:30 ►
expecting the recordings from this year to come to me soon. And I’ll be podcasting those too.
00:13:35 ►
That, that, that has, you know, I, I, Mary C and I got that thing kicked off, but there’s been so
00:13:41 ►
many other people that have really built it up now that I can only take credit for the first few years.
00:13:47 ►
But after that, it’s all, you know, like Pez and Raphael and Sobe and then all of the new people now like Eric and people like that.
00:13:56 ►
So it’s really comforting to see.
00:13:59 ►
But what it is, it’s about the community.
00:14:01 ►
And that’s what Sasha was about, you know, in building on what you said, Tanya,
00:14:06 ►
I wrote to Sasha around 84 or 85. And, uh, you know,
00:14:11 ►
I just, I knew who he was because I had a copy of his speech from the, uh,
00:14:16 ►
uh, thing in Santa Barbara in 81 or two.
00:14:20 ►
And so I wrote to him just Sasha Sheldon,
00:14:23 ►
Sheldon way in Way in Berkeley, not much of an address, because I had a substance I was questioning about.
00:14:31 ►
And I was shocked.
00:14:32 ►
He sent this detailed letter back. those big GBC binders, sick binders. Out of the blue, I get one in the mail from him,
00:14:46 ►
not only autographed but endorsed with a really nice letter on the cover of it.
00:14:50 ►
And although I have a copy of Myron’s first edition of Secret Chiefs
00:14:56 ►
that Albert Hoffman signed,
00:14:57 ►
the Analog Drug Law Act signed by Sasha is the number one treasure in my whole life.
00:15:04 ►
Well, you know, that’s a segue for me. I really would love to read this one page that is
00:15:10 ►
unpublished that Sasha wrote. It’s a story about him and Albert Hoffman.
00:15:14 ►
Oh, yeah, please.
00:15:16 ►
Okay, this is Sasha’s writing. And I have a little caveat to the end,
00:15:22 ►
because he told me the story, but then he wrote it up. Okay, here we go.
00:15:26 ►
Many, many years ago, while I was still a research chemist at Dow Chemical Company, I received a
00:15:32 ►
cutting of a plant from somewhere in Mexico. I was told that the plant was Salvia divinorum,
00:15:37 ►
that it was a psychedelic, that it was orally active, and that no one knew what was in it.
00:15:43 ►
So I went to the nearby lumber company, bought some
00:15:46 ►
wood and windows and built a small greenhouse out near the employee’s parking lot at Dow.
00:15:51 ►
I put the cutting in there. I grew like fury. It grew like fury. And in six months,
00:15:57 ►
I had a greenhouse completely filled with salvia divinorum. This was in the days before desktop
00:16:04 ►
GCMS has even existed. My primary tool
00:16:07 ►
for exploring the unknown was spectroscopy, so I made a bunch of extracts with a variety of
00:16:12 ►
solvents and failed to get any information that would lead to identifying any compounds that were
00:16:16 ►
present. A general feeling of being made a fool of took over, so I bolted down as much of the leaf
00:16:22 ►
as I could, and it all came up as vomit. I had no
00:16:26 ►
mental effects at all. Quite a few years later, I had the pleasure of meeting Albert Hoffman at a
00:16:31 ►
party down the coast from San Francisco Bay Area at a place called Esalen. I told him my story,
00:16:37 ►
and he told me that years before, probably at about the same time I had gotten my cutting,
00:16:42 ►
he had received a cutting from Mexico. He built a
00:16:45 ►
small greenhouse behind Sandoz in Switzerland, and in a few months he had a greenhouse full of
00:16:50 ►
salvia divinorum. His principal tool of exploratory analysis was chromatography. He went through his
00:16:57 ►
research tools with extracts from the plant, and he also failed to find anything of interest.
00:17:02 ►
He also swallowed as much as he could of the leaf,
00:17:05 ►
and he also threw up. There was no mental activity at all. What a pleasure to find that the two of us,
00:17:11 ►
unbeknownst to one another, had walked the same path. Everyone now knows that oral activity in
00:17:17 ►
quotation marks, in the case of Salvia divinorum, means not swallowing, but chewing it up and
00:17:23 ►
keeping the chewed material
00:17:25 ►
in your mouth. I mentioned MDMA to Albert and he had not heard of it. I fortunately had some with
00:17:32 ►
me. This was before it was made illegal and I offered him a dose. He said he was a little bit
00:17:37 ►
sensitive to stimulants so he would start with half a dose. Within an hour he said this was very
00:17:42 ►
nice material and he took the other half. So about six
00:17:46 ►
of us shared a very nice afternoon together. He said he thought his wife would enjoy MDMA,
00:17:52 ►
so I gave him two more doses to take back to Switzerland. Years later, he confessed to me
00:17:57 ►
that he much preferred MDMA to his famous problem child LSD, adding that he thought it best not to reveal this story to any but a few close friends.
00:18:07 ►
I said that I thought this was a wise decision. I have a feeling now, having had his 101st birthday,
00:18:14 ►
Albert wouldn’t mind my having told this story to the rest of his admirers. Well, you know that the
00:18:20 ►
date of that, of course, probably 2007 then, because he died in 2008 at 102.
00:18:26 ►
But what Sasha told me was, he said, you know,
00:18:29 ►
it’s funny after telling me this story, he said,
00:18:32 ►
I much prefer LSD to MDMA and he preferred my MDMA to his LSD.
00:18:38 ►
So they both like each other’s compounds,
00:18:40 ►
even though Sasha didn’t first synthesize it, you know,
00:18:43 ►
he did make it known,
00:18:46 ►
the oral activity to the masses, so anyway. That is a wonderful story, Tanya, and obviously,
00:18:53 ►
I’ve never heard it before, neither has anybody else, that’s great. Right, and you know, so there’s
00:18:59 ►
little tidbits like this that we’re archiving and digitizing, John Hannah, God bless. And we went down to Myron and jeans and we, we took,
00:19:09 ►
took all the saved files that Myron had and God bless John.
00:19:14 ►
He saw this, this,
00:19:16 ►
these letters that over a 10 year period there was correspondence between
00:19:21 ►
mainly Ann and Myron, but also with Sasha and Jean as well. But
00:19:25 ►
the four of them over the 10 year period when they were trying all the two C compounds. And so
00:19:32 ►
John made a nice book and gave it to Jean and Jean loves reading. She just loved reading it.
00:19:37 ►
She can’t read very well now because she has macular degeneration, but she’s so enjoyed reading
00:19:42 ►
those. And, and then Anne read it and she goes oh this would
00:19:47 ►
and john said this would make a great book and so that’s what she’s doing now she’s making a book
00:19:52 ►
out of it and she’s gone through a second edit so that hopefully will be the next book to be um
00:19:58 ►
launched at some point in time you know how long books take i can’t give you a date so but let me let me tell you a little
00:20:05 ►
bit more about that material in that back uh this is when Myron was still living there in Lone Pine
00:20:13 ►
but he’d already uh uh you know become kind of just disoriented and and uh and he slept most of
00:20:20 ►
the time and and so I I would go up there and I spent the time mainly with Jean,
00:20:25 ►
you know, because Myron was really just not really available. And at some point in time, I said,
00:20:30 ►
well, did Myron ever get that box of correspondence and other material out of your neighbor’s barn?
00:20:37 ►
And she said, what are you talking about? And I said, well, Myron told me that when the analog
00:20:42 ►
drug law was passed, and he told his secretary to get rid of all the, the Menlo park records that, uh,
00:20:48 ►
he said that he had had this box of material where he had, uh,
00:20:53 ►
done all the, uh, the, uh,
00:20:55 ►
write-ups for the work that they’d done for P call and T call the,
00:20:58 ►
the session work. And he put it in the neighbor’s barn.
00:21:02 ►
And Jean didn’t know about this so really just I told her
00:21:07 ►
that and I was hardly done talking before she was putting her coat on and went over to the neighbor’s
00:21:14 ►
house I stayed with Myra and she went over and she got that box and came back and for the next
00:21:19 ►
three days Jean and I were like little kids in a candy store going through that box oh wow and and uh i
00:21:27 ►
won’t i don’t want to interrupt you with with too much of this but when when uh i i came back and i
00:21:34 ►
told john about it and i said you know you really need to go down and rescue that thing and i said
00:21:39 ►
that’s only the tip of the iceberg and so he goes down and you were with him i’m pretty sure that first
00:21:45 ►
time yeah yeah and you were down there and and john calls me uh it was like the day you got there
00:21:52 ►
the next day and he’s just reveling about all this stuff and i said but what about the stuff in the
00:21:57 ►
shed and he said what shed i said that’s where the gold is. Go on down there. And that’s what you guys have dug out since then.
00:22:07 ►
Well, see, that’s community working with each other.
00:22:10 ►
And that’s the beauty of our group.
00:22:12 ►
And, you know, Sasha and Ann and Gene and Myron, to me,
00:22:15 ►
they are matriarchs and patriarchs.
00:22:18 ►
And they just, you know.
00:22:21 ►
Listen, all of that material, and I want to get into talking about what’s being done to preserve it and all.
00:22:27 ►
And I just want to give an indication of some of the treasures that in the future maybe researchers can find.
00:22:34 ►
The correspondence between them is amazing.
00:22:38 ►
And I don’t know if they’ll make this public, but I read the correspondence that the letters that Sasha wrote from his time in the at the what’s that that controversial place he goes every year.
00:22:50 ►
He wrote some really funny, funny stories about that to to Myron.
00:22:58 ►
But the thing that the from like for me from and this isn’t really big history, but I became really good friends with both Myron and Gary Fisher. And Gary was with Timothy Leary down in Zewatonejo. And that’s when Al Hubbard sent Myron down there to see what was going on and try to put a lid on things.
00:23:22 ►
I said, oh, yeah, Gary remembers you coming down there.
00:23:26 ►
And he said, oh, I don’t remember Gary at all.
00:23:27 ►
I don’t think he was there.
00:23:32 ►
Well, it turns out Gary and Jim Fadiman were the two that hooked up because they were about the same age at the time.
00:23:39 ►
But I come to find this letter from Sasha to Myron.
00:23:42 ►
And he said, you won’t believe the attachment in here.
00:23:46 ►
But he said, I got this German book on alchemy. And it a big old book 100 years old it’s in another language he said I’m paging through it and the
00:23:51 ►
attached uh letter was in there and what it was was a letter from Myron to Timothy Leary telling
00:23:59 ►
what his travel commitment was and when he would be there in Zewatanejo so I was able to tell I
00:24:04 ►
was able to tell Gary Fisher without a doubt My, Myron was there, even though you don’t remember
00:24:08 ►
him. Those are the kind of little tidbits that are in this material that you have. And,
00:24:14 ►
and of course you have all the lab books and everything too. So tell us a little about what’s
00:24:19 ►
going on with all that. Oh, well, God bless the Erewids. They, you know, of course they published the
00:24:25 ►
first half of Tikal and Tikal and the, when that came out, um, so that the information would be
00:24:31 ►
out there. And now they have really been our heroes in, uh, in preserving and very, very
00:24:40 ►
methodically slowly, you know, but trout comes out every couple of weeks, Sylvia, Earth and Fire, you know,
00:24:47 ►
going through just multitudes of photographs.
00:24:51 ►
The whole barn that’s full of stuff.
00:24:54 ►
The file cabinets are full and, you know, people trusted Sasha.
00:24:58 ►
So the underground chemists who had these,
00:25:00 ►
these brilliant discoveries that they couldn’t share with anyone because it
00:25:04 ►
was so taboo. Then they would share their synthesis.
00:25:09 ►
And they had Sasha keep it in safekeeping.
00:25:13 ►
And, you know, someone like Daryl Lemaire, who didn’t want to be found out,
00:25:16 ►
and then finally when he turned 80 said, screw it, you know,
00:25:19 ►
I want people to know that I made the 2CT ETO.
00:25:23 ►
And I was the one, you know, I was the one I know I was Lazar and because
00:25:26 ►
under his pseudonym and and and I said I want we want to honor you you know but we also want to
00:25:31 ►
honor your your uh your secrecy if you want it that way you know that’s every person is different
00:25:37 ►
each individual wants it a different way some individuals have uh republican relatives so they
00:25:43 ►
don’t want to be outed you know it, it’s different with every single person that we encounter.
00:25:49 ►
So we have to communicate with them.
00:25:50 ►
And, you know, so it’s a very, you know, it’s a slow process, but it’s so worthwhile.
00:25:57 ►
And the gems are, you know, like the one I just read that may or may never be published,
00:26:03 ►
but would be up on Arrowhead someday. But there’s just
00:26:06 ►
so many little data points, just like in your podcast, you have such gold in there. And it’s
00:26:13 ►
just a treasure trove of collection of amazing speakers and topics of this sort.
00:26:20 ►
Well, and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to have you and Greg here tonight, because, you know, you, the two of you really got to know Sasha in his final years, you know, as a human
00:26:30 ►
being. And of course, you guys are still very involved with Anne. And by the way, let me ask,
00:26:35 ►
how is Anne? Anne, you know, she’s 88 years old, and she’s my best girlfriend I can get in trouble
00:26:43 ►
with. She’s my therapist.
00:26:45 ►
She’s my mommy.
00:26:47 ►
She’s all those things, you know.
00:26:53 ►
We have a family dynamic and, you know, we have our ups and downs together. But, you know, she’s amazing.
00:26:56 ►
And, you know, she’s in a lot of physical pain.
00:26:59 ►
But it doesn’t destroy her desire to, you know,
00:27:09 ►
keep looking at her writing and editing it.
00:27:12 ►
And, you know, she’s engaged in, you know,
00:27:14 ►
she has little therapy groups with people that want to have consultation about certain cases.
00:27:18 ►
And she’s very engaged with life.
00:27:20 ►
And God bless her.
00:27:21 ►
I think she’s doing great for all that’s going on with her. And,
00:27:26 ►
you know, and she just adores her grandchildren as you would understand. And, and her son just
00:27:35 ►
moved back. So she’s, he comes over once a week. So, you know, she just, she’s enjoying life as
00:27:41 ►
much as she can, you know? Yes. And she wanted to send her, she sends her love to you
00:27:46 ►
and she’s so pleased that we’re doing this. And, and she, she, anyway, she just wanted to send her
00:27:53 ►
love to you and Mary C too. So tell us what, what, what is going on to preserve the, the legacy there
00:28:02 ►
at the farm? I know, you know, when we were talking this afternoon,
00:28:06 ►
you guys were surprised to hear that I’m one of the people that’s never been to the farm.
00:28:10 ►
I know the Easter extravaganzas and almost everybody I know has been there.
00:28:15 ►
So what’s going to be done to keep this alive?
00:28:20 ►
Well, so far, we, you know, we’re making sure that all the materials digitized that we can can find that it’s possible.
00:28:28 ►
Paul Daly has taken over Sasha’s lab. You know, Paul started working with Sasha in 2007.
00:28:35 ►
And he really invested a lot of his own money and equipment and and to make it, you know, to to maintain it.
00:28:43 ►
and to make it, you know, to maintain it, and also keep that kind of mad scientist lab alive that Sasha had,
00:28:48 ►
as you haven’t seen yet.
00:28:51 ►
I’ve seen a lot of pictures of it, and Paul, by the way,
00:28:55 ►
is very near and dear to my heart.
00:28:56 ►
He took my very favorite picture of me giving a talk,
00:29:00 ►
and it was at MindStates, and it’s still my favorite picture of me.
00:29:03 ►
So thank Paul for that. I will do that. giving a talk and it was at mind states and it’s still my favorite picture of me so uh thank paul
00:29:05 ►
for that i will do that and uh and so um and and trout is helping me preserve the ethnobotanical
00:29:13 ►
garden here and i’d like to you know we’re thinking about now we have things that were
00:29:19 ►
on hold when sasha’s health was declining so now i feel like like, you know, he died five years ago. And also,
00:29:25 ►
Anne is our first, you know, our first priority. So in the midst, so thank God for the Erowitz to
00:29:32 ►
take on the archiving and Trout really coming in and doing this. And Trout’s helping with the-
00:29:38 ►
He’s masterful. He really is.
00:29:40 ►
He’s the perfect person for the job.
00:29:42 ►
Hey, listen, will you give Trout a message for me?
00:29:45 ►
He and I exchanged a few emails a little while back,
00:29:48 ►
and I’m trying to get him to come on here one Monday night
00:29:50 ►
and see if you can encourage him a little bit.
00:29:53 ►
I haven’t seen him in a while either.
00:29:55 ►
I think he would be up for it, and frankly, he’s here right now,
00:29:59 ►
and I was even thinking, oh, maybe at some point it would be fun
00:30:03 ►
if he did it in the office,
00:30:06 ►
from the office, it’d be kind of cool.
00:30:07 ►
But the audio, I think we have to do audio.
00:30:11 ►
But anyway.
00:30:12 ►
Well, listen, tell Trout I have a guest next Monday.
00:30:16 ►
But any time after next Monday, I would love to have him
00:30:19 ►
and have him get back in touch with me.
00:30:21 ►
I think he is such an amazing guy.
00:30:24 ►
He is.
00:30:24 ►
Plus, you know, at one of our, we had,
00:30:27 ►
we used to have these Frogwood events where Sasha and Ann would come and all
00:30:31 ►
of their, their dear friends. And we were part,
00:30:34 ►
we would help organize those weekends and he started the Cactus Conservation
00:30:39 ►
Corps at one of those conferences. And he’s just,
00:30:44 ►
he’s an amazing guy And he’s just, he’s an amazing guy.
00:30:46 ►
And he has just, he reminds me of a little bit of Sasha
00:30:49 ►
that I miss, like his genius brain, his wit,
00:30:53 ►
how he can distill information and retain it.
00:30:57 ►
And so he puts pieces together and will distill it
00:31:02 ►
and have an outcome as as as kind of an uh a private
00:31:07 ►
investigator on certain things that were so underground in the past and you know there’s
00:31:12 ►
there’s old micrograms where they wouldn’t be let out and unless just to a very few people so
00:31:19 ►
uh he’s he’s just he’s he’s doing great work there and we’ll find out a lot more information of our history in the years that it were kind of the dark ages of psychedelics.
00:31:30 ►
So that’s what he’s.
00:31:31 ►
Yeah, Trout is probably the maybe one of, if not the world’s leading expert on cacti, cactuses, you know.
00:31:38 ►
Yes, I would say so.
00:31:40 ►
And other areas as well.
00:31:42 ►
Fungi.
00:31:43 ►
Yeah.
00:31:42 ►
And other areas as well.
00:31:43 ►
Fungi.
00:31:43 ►
Yeah.
00:31:55 ►
You know, I remember him at one of the mine states where I think that during the coming back from lunch or something, they did a question, a trivia thing.
00:31:58 ►
And it was trying to stump trout and nobody could.
00:31:59 ►
That’s right.
00:32:00 ►
That’s true.
00:32:01 ►
He always wins them.
00:32:03 ►
The Entheo Jeopardy is always. It was a mistake putting him on that panel. Nobody else had a chance. Not a chance. Not a chance. That was true. He always wins them. The Entheo Jeopardy is always… It was a mistake putting him on that panel.
00:32:05 ►
Nobody else had a chance.
00:32:07 ►
Not a chance.
00:32:08 ►
That was a bad choice.
00:32:10 ►
The thing about all these people, Trout and Sasha
00:32:13 ►
and Ann, with all their
00:32:15 ►
genius and all their
00:32:17 ►
discoveries and
00:32:19 ►
their achievements, is that
00:32:21 ►
they are
00:32:23 ►
completely… They’re just regular, you know,
00:32:26 ►
they just, you know, they’re rascals. They want to play. They want to just be one of the friends,
00:32:34 ►
you know, and that’s, I think, more brilliant than all their brilliance is that they see the pitfalls of fame and all this special, you know,
00:32:47 ►
acclaim and knowledge and they do whatever they can to disarm all of it.
00:32:54 ►
And Sasha was famous for farting at exactly the right moment, you know,
00:33:00 ►
and plenty of other things on top of that.
00:33:06 ►
You know, so, you know, I took him to a dentist appointment once in Berkeley.
00:33:12 ►
And we had a half an hour before the dentist appointment.
00:33:16 ►
So I thought maybe I could stop in a head shop and Sasha could wait in the car.
00:33:20 ►
Is it okay with you, Sasha?
00:33:22 ►
And he said, sure, sure.
00:33:23 ►
And I parked the car before I got out of the car is it okay with you Sasha and he’s sure sure and I parked the car before I got
00:33:25 ►
out of the car he was already out and ready to go walk down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley to go in
00:33:30 ►
the head shop with me and so we went down Telegraph into the head shop and we walked in and was really
00:33:37 ►
obvious as soon as we walked in the door that these people behind the counter knew who walked in the door. And I said, I’d like to get a case of nitrous.
00:33:47 ►
And they said, absolutely.
00:33:51 ►
This is the best stuff.
00:33:52 ►
This is what you should get.
00:33:53 ►
And we’re going to give you a discount.
00:33:56 ►
And so Sasha and I walked out of that head shop
00:33:59 ►
with that case of nitrous on my shoulder
00:34:01 ►
and walking down Telegraph Avenue together.
00:34:04 ►
And it was just, you know, he was just a great friend,
00:34:10 ►
a cool guy. He just, he, he would pun you to death, you know,
00:34:14 ►
make you groan, you pull jokes on you, you know but he was also a great teacher
00:34:20 ►
and he just didn’t take himself seriously. He never,
00:34:24 ►
he never got the feeling like this guy’s ego was in control. It was such a pleasure to be loved by him and to love him and to hang out, mess around you know you know until the the two of you mentioned it just now i hadn’t consciously
00:34:46 ►
thought of it about how how they were like my next door neighbors you know they like you said
00:34:52 ►
they had no ego they and sasha was without a doubt the the greatest chemist living during
00:34:58 ►
my lifetime and i i include albert hoffman in there i I think Sasha really excelled everything there. And yet, the longest conversation I had with him was Christian Rush was giving a talk at Palenque, and I dropped a little acid, and Sasha knew that, and he and I sat down and talked for the hour and a half.
00:35:20 ►
And we talked the whole time about our experiences in the Navy.
00:35:23 ►
And I felt like, you know, he was a sailor buddy of mine,
00:35:27 ►
not that he was Sasha Shulgin.
00:35:30 ►
And when you talk with Ann, it’s like she’s not like my mother.
00:35:36 ►
She’s like a woman friend who is really wise.
00:35:40 ►
I wouldn’t say she’s like my mother because she’s not that much older than me,
00:35:44 ►
but she is so not just wise, but comforting, you know, that I’ve talked to Anne about a few issues and she’s really just kind of grounds everybody.
00:35:54 ►
And, oh, I don’t have to tell you guys, do I?
00:35:56 ►
No, that’s she does that for me.
00:35:58 ►
That’s that you know
00:36:09 ►
you can get into this you know you can get in this back and forth it’s really fun you know it’s it’s
00:36:15 ►
sly it’s snide it’s sarcastic you know it’s all these it can be a whole realm on the dark side
00:36:23 ►
she talks about um the shadow you know, well, she’s,
00:36:27 ►
she’s very good friends with her shadow.
00:36:30 ►
And these two shadows have fun with each other. When he,
00:36:33 ►
when she and Greg get together, they play, they have shadow play.
00:36:36 ►
And I’ve never seen anything like it.
00:36:38 ►
It’s very particular kind of sense of humor.
00:36:41 ►
So it’s, you know, well-rounded.
00:36:43 ►
This is the first
00:36:45 ►
time i’m hearing this about ian and i and i love it because one of the things i really enjoyed
00:36:49 ►
about sasha was his sense of humor and i don’t remember exactly which birthday it was but we
00:36:54 ►
we were all asked to send our favorite jokes to him somebody put a joke book together you remember
00:36:59 ►
that with john hannah it was limericks uh and it was his 82nd birthday, I think. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I made my contribution to that one.
00:37:09 ►
I’m sorry to say.
00:37:11 ►
Yes. Yes. I think I might be on the Arrowhead website.
00:37:14 ►
I think they published that finally.
00:37:16 ►
Oh no, I’ll have to check that.
00:37:19 ►
Oh, I just wanted to say that also be, yeah.
00:37:23 ►
Sasha being to me the greatest chemist, when he introduced me to Peyton, he said, oh, everybody thinks I’m the greatest chemist.
00:37:30 ►
But this guy, Peyton, he’s better than I am.
00:37:34 ►
Because he, you know, Peyton was kind of the unsung hero behind.
00:37:37 ►
He never really wanted to be in the spotlight.
00:37:40 ►
But he created all the 2C compounds with him right up until 5-MeO malt.
00:37:45 ►
They had a regular weekly pizza place meeting for many, many, many years.
00:37:51 ►
They’d hang out, and Peyton still comes to the house for the parties.
00:37:55 ►
Yeah.
00:37:56 ►
Would the two of you be interested in maybe talking him,
00:38:00 ►
coming in one Monday night, the two of you interviewing for us?
00:38:03 ►
Oh, my God.
00:38:04 ►
You know he he
00:38:05 ►
might be up for it now i don’t know because i’ve always and you’d be a great interviewer because
00:38:10 ►
uh you know i i i tease out stuff out out of him once in a while but he’s just you know he knows
00:38:17 ►
the the the playful side of sasha and he and his father and sasha and Ann would go to the Berkeley rep every month.
00:38:25 ►
He would be in the lab with Sasha.
00:38:28 ►
He was actually with, before Sasha was with Ann,
00:38:31 ►
he knew he was at the tail end of when his first wife Nina was around.
00:38:36 ►
He’d come over for Sunday dinners.
00:38:38 ►
They’d drink red wine until three in the morning,
00:38:40 ►
creating compounds at Sunday night,
00:38:42 ►
then go to UCSF Monday have pizza at roundtable pizza this was
00:38:46 ►
every weekly this was for 40 years oh my god you know uh so that guy has a lot and he has some
00:38:53 ►
really fun stories about when they were trying to name uh the oh what turned out to be twat
00:39:01 ►
t-o-e-t and he has this whole chemical explanation they said you know
00:39:07 ►
what should we name this olate’s name it taught this was at the intermission of the berkeley
00:39:10 ►
repertory theater and all these people were just aghast at what they had just said out of their
00:39:15 ►
mouths so but he tells the story much better than i do because hey listen this is this is really
00:39:20 ►
important because this is you know one of the things I’m trying to do here is to preserve some of the the history and we do that through storytelling this is a really important part of
00:39:30 ►
our community history that that he needs to stand up and take credit for plus I’d love to meet him
00:39:36 ►
and I think everybody from him well we’ll talk to him but no guarantees no no guarantee but but if
00:39:42 ►
if he came with the two of you and the two of you just had a conversation with
00:39:46 ►
him, I think that would be really magical. Yeah. And you know, Trout,
00:39:50 ►
actually he’s very comfortable with Trout too. And, and,
00:39:54 ►
and Trout remembers some things that I may not.
00:39:56 ►
So it might be a group grope on, on some.
00:40:02 ►
It’s all about community, no matter how you.
00:40:10 ►
I think that I’ll leave that to you and we inspire each other it’s it’s great because because that reminds me of this one uh this one day i was coming up from below the house
00:40:15 ►
and it was the day when peyton and sasha were hanging out and drinking their wine and it was
00:40:22 ►
a couple hours in and they were and i was messing with them
00:40:26 ►
through the big picture window that you can see mount diablo and i have a flashlight to get around
00:40:32 ►
the dark so i’d be flashing them with the flashlight and i as i’m walking to come up the
00:40:37 ►
steps into the house i look up again and there’s peyton he came up to the window turned around and
00:40:43 ►
dropped his pants and was mooning me through the window.
00:40:47 ►
Okay, this is a memory I’m going to really struggle to forget.
00:40:53 ►
And Sasha would have to come up with limericks.
00:40:55 ►
They had a Christmas party at UCSF in their lab.
00:40:58 ►
And he’d always come up with a clever limerick about Peyton and the people that worked in the lab.
00:41:03 ►
And it was very clever.
00:41:04 ►
And I’m sorry I
00:41:05 ►
didn’t whip one one of those out but maybe when Peyton comes then he’ll he can relate better and
00:41:10 ►
he can explain who these people are in the lab that he refers to so cleverly in these and maybe
00:41:15 ►
the two of you can come with trout too I think that would be great all right cool you know there’s a
00:41:21 ►
lot of this is the whole range of stories there’s uh there There’s the rascally stuff and there’s the brilliant stuff and there’s the moving stuff.
00:41:29 ►
I mean, after Sasha started to show signs of dementia, a bunch of us were sitting around the kitchen table one day and Sasha said something.
00:41:42 ►
And he was silent a lot at that point.
00:41:49 ►
He was, he’d be sitting for long periods of time and just kind of in some silent world.
00:41:53 ►
And, but then he said something and I, and I asked him to repeat it.
00:41:57 ►
And he said, oops, can’t remember.
00:42:01 ►
And so I said, so how does that feel, Sasha?
00:42:04 ►
To not have all that stuff running around in your brain anymore?
00:42:10 ►
And Sasha said immediately, it’s very freeing.
00:42:15 ►
I am in shy amazement of the world in front of me that I haven’t touched yet.
00:42:16 ►
Wow.
00:42:19 ►
He would come up with these amazing.
00:42:19 ►
Wow. And I jumped up.
00:42:21 ►
I ran right into Ann’s lair and said, I got to tell you what Sasha just said.
00:42:26 ►
It was just this like beautiful moving family moment of, you know, the inner Sasha, you know.
00:42:36 ►
You know, and then John Han and I would we would go with Sasha and Anne and Phyllis and Dale to Lone Pine. And when Myron was starting to show signs and he wasn’t talking at all,
00:42:47 ►
Sasha had this nonverbal communication with him.
00:42:50 ►
I remember because Myron would pretty much just kind of grunt.
00:42:53 ►
He’d go, hmm, hmm.
00:42:55 ►
And so Sasha did this whole hmm, hmm, back and forth with him,
00:42:58 ►
call and response.
00:42:59 ►
And he was communicating with them on a very interesting level that I thought
00:43:03 ►
he was getting through to his, his inner being somehow. And,
00:43:08 ►
and that led to Myron and Jean dancing at some point.
00:43:11 ►
We found his dance card in high school at Cotillion,
00:43:14 ►
but those kinds of things is the humanity of all those people. And,
00:43:18 ►
and what, what great, what,
00:43:21 ►
what great examples to be like and just to play with.
00:43:25 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:43:25 ►
You know, I hope that Anne can put together
00:43:30 ►
or someone can put together a volume of some of the correspondence
00:43:35 ►
between Myron and Sasha.
00:43:37 ►
It’s so classic.
00:43:38 ►
And I remember there was one summer where throughout the summer,
00:43:42 ►
the letters from Sasha kept saying,
00:43:44 ►
well, I need to do something
00:43:46 ►
such and such in the lab but first i’ve got the gophers are getting in my garden
00:43:49 ►
one thing after another laying wired up and by the end of the summer he wrote a letter and said
00:43:56 ►
well didn’t get anything done in the lab and the gophers ate the whole garden
00:44:00 ►
yes i know i’m dealing with them right now there aren’t enough hawks and owls out
00:44:07 ►
there’s a lot of critters around this place let me open this up to anybody here in in the audience
00:44:14 ►
i’m going to unmute everybody but if you’ll mute your mics again so that you don’t get background
00:44:18 ►
noise but everybody’s unmuted if somebody’d like to come in and ask some questions. Yeah. Oh, okay.
00:44:25 ►
Go ahead.
00:44:26 ►
Go ahead.
00:44:26 ►
Enjoy the little stories.
00:44:27 ►
So if there’s any other little tidbits that, you know,
00:44:32 ►
pop up to the top of your mind, I’d love to hear them.
00:44:36 ►
Well, you know,
00:44:37 ►
I was trying to find the story that you told about Sasha’s death and you
00:44:43 ►
described it at Sasha’s memorial, but it’s not up on video.
00:44:46 ►
No, I
00:44:48 ►
called it Sasha’s last Heidi Hope.
00:44:56 ►
Sasha, it was the day he died that I
00:44:59 ►
was describing.
00:45:04 ►
Well, I just,
00:45:05 ►
I guess I could just read it to you. What the hell? Yeah. Yeah, go ahead.
00:45:08 ►
Okay. Let’s see.
00:45:10 ►
Sasha Shulgin died at 5 PM on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2014.
00:45:16 ►
He was many things to me, friend, father figure, role model,
00:45:21 ►
teacher, and much, much more.
00:45:29 ►
After discussion with ann and others i’ve decided to share my personal account of his death with all of you although difficult i think it is the
00:45:34 ►
right thing to do full disclosure has always been after all one of the cornerstones of sasha’s
00:45:39 ►
belief system sasha’s breathing had suddenly become more shallow and labored, so we were all at a
00:45:48 ►
heightened state of awareness. Peaceful and touching Tibetan music was playing in the background.
00:45:54 ►
Surrounding Sasha, with whispers of love and support, were wonderful wife and magical matriarch
00:46:00 ►
Anne Shulgin, Wendy, Anne’s daughter, Jason, son-in-law, and eight-year-old Audrey,
00:46:09 ►
granddaughter, DeChin, caregiver, Tanya, my wife, and me. I spoke my last hidey-ho to Sasha.
00:46:19 ►
Back some years ago, when he started losing his sight, I began greeting him with that phrase. It became a
00:46:26 ►
statement of endearment, but at the time I just wanted him to know that no matter where he was
00:46:30 ►
or how big a crowd surrounded him, I was nearby and had his back. Sasha exhaled strongly and seemed
00:46:37 ►
to not take in another breath. I was in disbelief. My hand was touching his foot. Someone else was listening closely for breath.
00:46:47 ►
Another was checking his wrist and then his neck for pulse.
00:46:52 ►
A kiss, a caress, faces of stark, honest emotion.
00:46:58 ►
Loss and love, but no fear.
00:47:01 ►
Anne left the room, returning quickly with a brightly colored cloth belt she wrapped it under
00:47:07 ►
Sasha’s chin past his ears and tied it at the top of his head this she said was a tradition to
00:47:14 ►
respect the deceased by ensuring that the mouth would not remain agape someone else produced a
00:47:20 ►
white Tibetan scarf and arranged it around Sasha’s head as an offering. Tanya went
00:47:25 ►
out into the garden and returned with rose petals, which were sprinkled generously around his body.
00:47:31 ►
He seemed so peaceful, so angelic. I looked at Audrey and thought how good it was that she was
00:47:38 ►
present to witness death as it should be, the natural conclusion of life. We all started hugging each other.
00:47:46 ►
Tears flowed like rain on a warm day at dusk.
00:47:50 ►
Anne whispered to Sasha and kissed him.
00:47:52 ►
She later told me how evident it was when she kissed Sasha that our bodies are like suits of clothing.
00:47:59 ►
At some point, we just take them off and move on.
00:48:03 ►
What is left is not us Sasha’s body stayed with us for
00:48:08 ►
five more hours as we grieved and communed and talked and occasionally even laughed
00:48:12 ►
he died as he lived full of grace uncomplaining yeah it was uh it was quite something and you know uh i didn’t realize that um i mean my my uh i’m sorry i’m not i’m
00:48:28 ►
actually uh when but right before he went into that that phase i i remember seeing him look up
00:48:36 ►
and and like he’s coming on to another psychedelic going oh wow this is how it is he wasn’t saying
00:48:42 ►
those words but his expression was like oh wow this is you know like i’m going into that other space and like he was familiar wonder it was
00:48:51 ►
wonderment like yeah like all the other time you know but the biggest wonderment you know and i’d
00:48:56 ►
never seen it i’ve seen a lot of deaths i’d never seen this this this gave me this gave me hope for
00:49:03 ►
uh how beautiful this there was a beautiful death.
00:49:06 ►
Most beautiful death I’ve ever seen.
00:49:07 ►
I’ve seen some people die.
00:49:08 ►
And he was not in pain, so it helped.
00:49:11 ►
He was so present.
00:49:13 ►
And I suspect Myron might have been too,
00:49:16 ►
because Myron was living in the present moment,
00:49:18 ►
and so was Sasha when I saw them in their later stages right before death.
00:49:27 ►
And it was really a marvel to see that I think all of his experiences
00:49:32 ►
were training him for this moment.
00:49:34 ►
That’s right.
00:49:35 ►
And it was such a beautiful exit.
00:49:37 ►
And then he trained us all the way to the end.
00:49:40 ►
Yeah.
00:49:41 ►
You know, we’ve heard so many times here in talks here in the salon about how psychedelics are a perfect preparation for death.
00:49:51 ►
And you have just now given really solid confirmation of that.
00:49:57 ►
Somebody who has experienced more psychedelics than any other human being and had a beautiful death.
00:50:03 ►
I can’t imagine anything better.
00:50:05 ►
Oh, my God.
00:50:06 ►
It’s such a privilege to be in the presence of that.
00:50:10 ►
And you can’t be anything but grateful every morning you wake up here on the farm.
00:50:16 ►
But, you know, here’s something else that I want to kind of put out here is that,
00:50:21 ►
you know, people have all kinds of different beliefs about life after death
00:50:26 ►
and ancestors. And it really doesn’t, what I’m going to say right now, it doesn’t matter what
00:50:29 ►
somebody’s belief is about that. But I happen to think that as long as we are carrying somebody
00:50:37 ►
in our mind, that their spirit is still alive. And right at this very moment, there’s no doubt, but in this room, Sasha Shulgin’s
00:50:46 ►
spirit is very alive. And I think that now throughout, you know, we’ve got dozens of his
00:50:53 ►
talks, there’s on YouTube, there’s hundreds of them. There’s not a minute of the day goes by
00:50:58 ►
that someone somewhere in the world isn’t hearing the words and wisdom of Sasha Shulgin.
00:51:04 ►
somewhere in the world isn’t hearing the words and wisdom of Sasha Shulgin.
00:51:07 ►
So in that regard, he is still alive.
00:51:09 ►
His spirit is still with us.
00:51:13 ►
And boy, were we lucky to have somebody like him.
00:51:14 ►
Oh, we’re so blessed. No kidding.
00:51:14 ►
Absolutely.
00:51:15 ►
And, you know, another thing about, you know, dementia,
00:51:17 ►
I’d never experienced or lived with a person with dementia.
00:51:21 ►
And, you know, all dementias are different.
00:51:22 ►
But his emotional intelligence
00:51:25 ►
kept developing through throughout like it was it enriched his emotional his love grew it seemed
00:51:34 ►
like because he didn’t have anything in the way of that and i felt like myrons did too and you know
00:51:39 ►
myron spent his whole life uh walking the spiritual path. And I experienced that from both of them when I saw them at different stages,
00:51:48 ►
of course, on a day-to-day basis with Sasha.
00:51:50 ►
But both of them seemed to me, with all the work that they’ve done on themselves
00:51:57 ►
and their lives through the use of psychedelics, prepared them for that time being maybe a little bit easier
00:52:06 ►
or being able to transcend that
00:52:09 ►
and to develop their inner spirituality off of that.
00:52:15 ►
But you know what else was fascinating about Sasha
00:52:17 ►
was that he approached his own aging,
00:52:20 ►
his own body, his own ailments.
00:52:23 ►
As a scientist.
00:52:24 ►
Just like he approached everything in the lab.
00:52:27 ►
I remember sitting at the desk next to him in his office one day,
00:52:33 ►
and he goes, hey, Greg, check this out.
00:52:36 ►
And I turn, I look, and he says, okay, now watch this.
00:52:39 ►
I have this pencil in my right hand here.
00:52:43 ►
Now I’m going to reach down with my left hand.
00:52:46 ►
Now watch what happens to the pencil.
00:52:48 ►
And he reached down with his left hand to touch his, towards his left calf.
00:52:53 ►
And as he got to his left calf, the pencil dropped out of the right hand.
00:52:58 ►
And he was, he was, he was saying that, and then he said, that’s peripheral neuropathy.
00:53:03 ►
This is, this is, he was, he was investigating that’s and then he said that’s peripheral neuropathy this is he was he was investigating all the pathways as that as these nerve problems were going on in his
00:53:14 ►
body and he wanted me to see it and i’m like and i really didn’t know how to hold it at the moment
00:53:21 ►
you know but i could i was like oh that’s kind of strange sasha you
00:53:26 ►
know but but i can see now that that was about him just viewing his own life just like he viewed
00:53:33 ►
everything else you know and you know both of his parents an experiment in process both of his
00:53:37 ►
parents were school teachers and it’s great to have the archives of them too because there’s
00:53:41 ►
you know his mother taught him this scientific inquiry and this wonderment and discovery. And so did his father. And there’s some great stories about them too.
00:53:50 ►
But another story, oh God, I wanted to say is he decided he, one day he just handed the car keys
00:53:56 ►
to me and he says, you know, my macular degeneration is to the point where I don’t,
00:54:00 ►
I don’t think I should drive anymore. And I have never heard of any elder that has done that
00:54:06 ►
because it’s such a fierce, independent kind of action to drive.
00:54:11 ►
And then usually people are trying to yank it away from you.
00:54:15 ►
But he himself volunteered to give me the keys and said,
00:54:18 ►
would you drive me around?
00:54:19 ►
I said, I’d be my pleasure.
00:54:21 ►
And he never did something for top efficiency. He did things,
00:54:26 ►
we did things together.
00:54:27 ►
He would drive me to the bank and we would go places together because it was
00:54:31 ►
more fun to be in each other’s company than to get the work done.
00:54:35 ►
No, he just felt like doing stuff. You know, we went to Bev Mo together,
00:54:39 ►
you know, whatever.
00:54:42 ►
He liked running errands.
00:54:44 ►
Yeah. I’m going yeah I’m going to Costco
00:54:46 ►
can I come with you Greg?
00:54:48 ►
I mean if he had time
00:54:50 ►
if he was working in the lab not
00:54:52 ►
but to be together was more fun
00:54:55 ►
and engaging than
00:54:56 ►
efficiency like oh if you do this
00:54:58 ►
and then you go get that then I’ll
00:55:00 ►
do this in here I mean he did that when
00:55:02 ►
he was writing the book sometimes
00:55:04 ►
but more often than not he would try to carve out the time that we then I’ll do this in here. I mean, he did that when we were, he was writing the book sometimes,
00:55:10 ►
but more often than not, he would try to carve out the time that we could be together more,
00:55:15 ►
so it’d be more fun in company, you know, it’d just be more fun having companionship.
00:55:21 ►
You know, I remember him telling jokes, but I have a hunch he probably did pranks too. Did he ever do? Oh, yes. Well, at the bohemian grove too he did quite a bit because
00:55:27 ►
there were a few arrogant people and some of his very close friends would say it was just a marvel
00:55:32 ►
to watch him just just ask this impossible question that he knew the guy could not answer
00:55:37 ►
but the guy thought he knew the answer so much and then and then he would just slice and dice him but
00:55:42 ►
he did it with he didn’t do it insultingly he did it kind of with a loving teasing spin on it so the guy would be chopped
00:55:50 ►
up and put together again wouldn’t know what happened to him and all of Sasha’s friends around
00:55:55 ►
would be just laughing and it and the guy didn’t know what would what what happened to him and uh
00:56:00 ►
he would do he would do things to mortify us. Yes. Like we went on this cruise down to Mexico together, the four of us.
00:56:08 ►
And Sasha and we get on an elevator and some strange woman would get in the elevator and Sasha would turn to me and say.
00:56:18 ►
Have you ever gone down in an elevator?
00:56:22 ►
And I and I’d say, i really don’t know him he’s not i’m not with him
00:56:29 ►
really really and it wasn’t for the stranger it was just to make me melt into you know this
00:56:36 ►
feeling completely well this l this elder aussie woman i think i know what y’all talking about and
00:56:42 ►
then ann would go sasha you know and he just, and he just loved it. He just loved it.
00:56:45 ►
They would just, you know, he’d do it for
00:56:47 ►
shock treatment, you know.
00:56:49 ►
He was multifaceted.
00:56:55 ►
So yes, you’re right.
00:56:56 ►
Question?
00:56:59 ►
Yeah.
00:56:59 ►
Yes.
00:57:01 ►
So to kind of riff on what
00:57:03 ►
Lorenzo was saying earlier about how he doesn’t really think
00:57:06 ►
people really pass as long as their memories are being shared like I remember right after I lost
00:57:11 ►
my grandpa I would be hearing things that he would say in my head like little catchphrases
00:57:15 ►
or sayings or anecdotes like now we’re cooking with or you know just weird quirky quirky things
00:57:22 ►
that were personal to him did did Sasha have any of those sayings or anything like that that you could share that come to mind?
00:57:30 ►
Well, what comes to mind really that sticks in my head right now is that he died a month before his anniversary to Anne.
00:57:41 ►
And we have a party every year to celebrate that with our close
00:57:45 ►
friends. And there was a,
00:57:48 ►
oh, there’s a story that’s written here.
00:57:52 ►
So my memory is probably not as good as the written story. So yeah,
00:57:56 ►
it was 4th of July and we were talking,
00:57:59 ►
Greg and I were talking with some friends outside the house,
00:58:03 ►
the front door when a red red-tailed hawk
00:58:05 ►
flying about 20 feet above our heads let out a shriek. As if we were characters in the movie
00:58:11 ►
Forrest Gump, a single feather floated down elegantly, yet with enchanting intentionality.
00:58:17 ►
Our friend Patricia, a Native American of Native American heritage, which took the power of this
00:58:22 ►
gift from Sasha. A feather from a hawk symbolizes guardianship, strength, and farsightedness.
00:58:28 ►
Also, she says it’s very uncommon to actually catch the feather in your hand.
00:58:33 ►
It usually falls into the ground.
00:58:34 ►
Right.
00:58:35 ►
This feather was delivered to us from the hawk directly.
00:58:39 ►
And it was on the Fourth of July party that Sasha, well, it’s 4th of July is their anniversary.
00:58:46 ►
Yes.
00:58:47 ►
We didn’t, 4th of July party here that’s been going on for years.
00:58:49 ►
People think it’s the 4th of July.
00:58:51 ►
No, it’s because it’s Sasha and Anne’s anniversary.
00:58:55 ►
So, so it was really a miraculous thing.
00:58:59 ►
So I can, I understand what you’re saying about the voices in your head.
00:59:02 ►
I understand what you’re saying about the voices in your head. I mean,
00:59:09 ►
I’ve had other experiences where somebody died and I had a vision of them when they died. And that vision came back to me over and over again for months.
00:59:15 ►
And it was a beautiful, serene
00:59:17 ►
image of them moving into another world or universe or dimension.
00:59:25 ►
So I hope that answers your question.
00:59:27 ►
But also there’s a piece of music, you know,
00:59:29 ►
that Sasha and Ann would typically listen to.
00:59:33 ►
And like Prokofiev,
00:59:34 ►
when a certain piece of Prokofiev comes and Ann remembers Sasha,
00:59:38 ►
and then I remember her loving Sasha.
00:59:41 ►
And there are these moments, it’s more musical for me than language.
00:59:45 ►
So maybe we all perceive it or get the download in different ways using different different ways
00:59:52 ►
like language or music or you know different ways of communicating that that person’s spirit to us
00:59:58 ►
yes I think that’s very very true because you know, people are also multifaceted anyway, that they all affect us a little differently.
01:00:08 ►
So that could be very true.
01:00:11 ►
We’ve come up on our hour here, and I try to keep these to an hour so that people don’t get too long.
01:00:16 ►
But I see Larry.
01:00:18 ►
Go ahead, Larry.
01:00:20 ►
Take your time.
01:00:21 ►
Hello.
01:00:23 ►
I’m just curious.
01:00:24 ►
Larry. Thank you. Hello. I’m just curious.
01:00:31 ►
Was he a member of the Bohemian Grove Society or was he just a regular visitor as a guest?
01:00:38 ►
No, he was a member. No, he was a member. And, you know, it started as an artist’s journalist club. And he was part of the Tunerville Viola Squadron section.
01:00:49 ►
tunerville uh viola squadron section so he he loved playing music with them and you know he said it really it was the art artsy side of it rather than the political republican what people
01:00:55 ►
think of the club as as as that um but he had so much fun frolicking with the boys for two weeks
01:01:01 ►
and you know being silly and because i never really thought about it, but because of all the ceremonies they do with the giant owl,
01:01:08 ►
it is an ancestor of Burning Man.
01:01:12 ►
Well, Larry, I can add a little information,
01:01:16 ►
because I read Sasha’s letters from Bohemian Grove.
01:01:20 ►
I don’t want to reveal too much, but at one point,
01:01:24 ►
I can’t remember exactly what it was.
01:01:25 ►
He got injured somehow.
01:01:27 ►
Now, they put on these musical presentations, and I forget which one this year it was,
01:01:35 ►
but he was obviously playing the viola, but the narrator for the thing at the time that year was Henry Kissinger,
01:01:43 ►
who he really disparaged and said the
01:01:45 ►
guy had no talent at all but uh anyhow sasha got got injured and had to go to the medical tent
01:01:51 ►
and he said so this year i won the pool as to be the first one in bohemian
01:01:57 ►
to have the medical tent to pickle his balls
01:02:00 ►
so it wasn’t all serious conspiracy theories going on out there he told me and then
01:02:11 ►
you know there’s one story he said that where henry kissinger had his entourage and he was
01:02:14 ►
making bloody marys in the morning and he handed hank he said hank can you move your whole entourage
01:02:20 ►
to the side i’m trying to serve bloody marys here I called him Hank. He didn’t have anything going on. Oh, Mr. Kissinger.
01:02:28 ►
No, that wasn’t like that. You know, he treated everybody, you know,
01:02:32 ►
as an equal.
01:02:33 ►
Well, I’ll tell you what, Greg and Tanya, this,
01:02:35 ►
this has been really fun and we’re just now getting up to speed.
01:02:38 ►
It feels like, why don’t, why don’t we plan on doing more of these?
01:02:43 ►
And you guys, you guys round up people like Trout and some of the other characters up there,
01:02:51 ►
and they come in with you.
01:02:53 ►
These are all, you can see, really informal.
01:02:55 ►
But I think we can really capture a little corner of history that’s going to disappear otherwise.
01:03:02 ►
I think you’re – I’m all about preserving history and these storytelling is, you know,
01:03:08 ►
our oral history is ages old and let’s keep it going.
01:03:12 ►
I had a feeling you were going to say this at the end of this.
01:03:16 ►
Listen, you guys have access to some of the best oral history that we know of.
01:03:20 ►
And I really hope that you’ll consider doing doing this because it uh it’ll be a continuation
01:03:26 ►
of the wonderful work you’ve been doing we all appreciate you know we all could breathe so much
01:03:31 ►
easier knowing that that ann had the two of you to to help with uh sasha because you know it can
01:03:36 ►
be a real burden and they’re still there with her too and i want to thank everybody who helped us
01:03:41 ►
take care of sasha too there it was a village’m telling you, it was our whole community pitched in to help take care of Sasha
01:03:47 ►
and we’re continuing to do it with Ann and thank you all
01:03:52 ►
for being part of this and in the room here, the chat room.
01:03:56 ►
And we will do this again for sure. Please give our
01:03:59 ►
love to Ann and to the rest of the
01:04:04 ►
gang up there at the lab.
01:04:05 ►
Well, it was fun hanging out with y’all.
01:04:07 ►
Yeah.
01:04:07 ►
Until next week, y’all, keep the old faith and stay high.
01:04:12 ►
All right, sweetie, take care.
01:04:14 ►
Love to marry C.
01:04:15 ►
Okay, thank you.
01:04:19 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:04:23 ►
Be well, my friends.