Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Tom Roberts
https://www.amazon.com/Mindapps-Multistate-Theory-Tools-Design/dp/1620558181/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=Thomas+Roberts+Ph.D.&qid=1574629189&sr=8-5Today’s podcast features a conversation from last Monday’s Live Salon with Thomas B. Roberts, Ph.D., who is a professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University. Tom not only began teaching the world’s first university catalog-listed psychedelics course in 1981, he is also a founding member of MAPS, former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, editor of Spiritual Growth with Entheogens, and author of Psychedelic Horizons and The Psychedelic Future of the Mind. In this interview, Tom talks about his latest book, MindApps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design. However, you most likely know him as the man who created the first Bicycle Day celebration.
Date this lecture was recorded: November 18, 2019
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Tom Roberts.]
“I’m attempting to broaden the field [of psychedelics], and trying to get people who are interested in history and literature and philosophy interested in psychedelics.”
“We can install ideas in our brain/mind complex, just as we install apps on our devices.”
Thomas Roperts, Ph.D. Publications
Mindapps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design
ALSO MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
Boohbah: Skipping Rope (Episode 1)
A visual trip - no drugs needed :-)
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today’s podcast features a conversation that I had last Monday night in the live salon with Dr. Thomas Roberts.
00:00:32 ►
Tom is a professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University,
00:00:36 ►
and he not only began teaching the world’s first university catalog listed psychedelics course in 1981,
00:00:43 ►
he is also a founding member of MAPS, a former visiting
00:00:48 ►
scientist at Johns Hopkins, and he’s the author of quite a few books. But in this interview,
00:00:54 ►
we’re mainly going to talk about his latest book, Mind Apps, Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind
00:01:01 ►
Design. Pretty interesting book, by the way.
00:01:10 ►
And while Tom is also the author of dozens of other books and academic papers that deal largely with psychedelics and what we often call consciousness,
00:01:15 ►
whatever that may mean,
00:01:17 ►
but in any event, you most likely know Tom as the man who created the first Bicycle Day celebration.
00:01:23 ►
So let me play the recording of our conversation now.
00:01:28 ►
And I’ve got good.
00:01:29 ►
I’ve just gone to full screen.
00:01:30 ►
All right.
00:01:31 ►
Okay.
00:01:31 ►
Yeah.
00:01:31 ►
You can see Stanley is here from Washington State and Niles from the Bay Area.
00:01:37 ►
And then Gene’s coming in from Nova Scotia.
00:01:39 ►
So these are all the early birds.
00:01:42 ►
But Thomas, it would be great to get to finally meet you
00:01:46 ►
you know I don’t
00:01:48 ►
I’m absolutely certain
00:01:50 ►
but this is like three computers ago so I’ve lost
00:01:52 ►
all the records but I think you and I
00:01:54 ►
conversed or by email
00:01:56 ►
way back when
00:01:57 ►
gee back in 2002
00:02:00 ►
3, 4, 5 somewhere around there
00:02:02 ►
yeah when I saw
00:02:04 ►
your email it sort of rang a bell, but I wasn’t sure, you know,
00:02:08 ►
whether I was real there or not.
00:02:11 ►
Yeah, that was some time ago.
00:02:12 ►
Right.
00:02:13 ►
Yeah.
00:02:13 ►
The reason I’m absolutely sure about it is, you know,
00:02:18 ►
I can’t remember how you first came to my awareness,
00:02:23 ►
is that when I saw that you’re a professor at Northern Illinois,
00:02:27 ►
but you know, I graduated from Rochelle Township High School, and quite a few of my classmates went
00:02:33 ►
to NIU. Oh, sure. And of course, when I was in high school, we were up there for science fairs.
00:02:39 ►
So NIU is sort of a branch of my high school experience. And when I saw there’s a professor there and he’s teaching a course in psychedelics, it just blew me away.
00:02:52 ►
And we’ll talk about I don’t want to get into that right now, but I want you to know that it’s NIU that stuck out with me so much when I when I first saw your connection.
00:03:01 ►
There’s a lot of people that are interested in this.
00:03:04 ►
And now we’re doing a lot of people that are interested in this. And now we’re
00:03:05 ►
doing a series of podcasts. I don’t know if you know who Leonard Picard is. He’s the guy who’s,
00:03:12 ►
isn’t he in jail still? Yes, he’s the one got two consecutive life sentences for essentially
00:03:19 ►
threatening to make LSD. He never had manufactured any. It was just the possession of stuff.
00:03:25 ►
And Leonard, in 2014, published a novel that he wrote, or maybe that’s when he started writing it.
00:03:31 ►
He’s in maximum security prison in Tucson. And he wrote this novel with literally a pencil and
00:03:40 ►
paper, no access to the internet, no access to a library. And it’s being taught now in places like Oxford and Cambridge and in Europe.
00:03:49 ►
It’s an unbelievably beautiful piece of literary work.
00:03:53 ►
Plus it’s a psychedelic work that’s par excellence.
00:03:56 ►
What’s the name of it?
00:03:58 ►
It’s called The Rose of Paracelsus.
00:04:00 ►
And in my podcast 609, I did a three and a half hour podcast with people reading excerpts from it
00:04:07 ►
including people like Dave brother David Stendhal Ross and people like that and and Ben Sassa who I
00:04:14 ►
see you you mentioned in your book Ben is one of the readers and recently we did a podcast with a
00:04:21 ►
number of people who are trying to help Leonard get out, but he served almost 20 years in a horrible, horrible conditions.
00:04:28 ►
And so the first chapter will be coming out next month that Leonard is reading
00:04:33 ►
himself. And it’s been kind of a struggle, you know,
00:04:35 ►
getting it out of the prison because I can imagine interrupting your phone call
00:04:40 ►
every five or 10 minutes saying you’re talking to a federal penitentiary and
00:04:43 ►
then they cut you off. And but anyhow, Kat Lakey has done a magnificent job of putting all this together and
00:04:49 ►
she’s uh over the next two years we’re going to podcast the whole book it’s it’s like over 600
00:04:54 ►
pages and it’s the rose the rose of paracelsus yeah and uh it is a a story about the six major LSD chemists in the world, a secret society thing.
00:05:11 ►
And when I was talking about to Leonard about it, about a year ago, I guess he said he laughed in
00:05:17 ►
that everybody thought it was a novel. And when you read it, you’ll see that it’s much more than
00:05:23 ►
that. So anyhow, that’s been the big project we have going on right now.
00:05:28 ►
And so we’re picking up a lot of new listeners that aren’t necessarily into the scene.
00:05:32 ►
So anyhow, it’s 630-ish now, and I see some of our old regulars are here.
00:05:40 ►
And so I thought we’d kind of get into it.
00:05:42 ►
But eventually, I want to get to your new book, which is really exciting,
00:05:47 ►
and it’s one of a dozen psychedelic books you’ve written.
00:05:51 ►
But I want to start out way back in the beginning, in your beginning,
00:05:55 ►
which was also Myron Stoleroff’s beginning, and that was Willis Harmon.
00:06:00 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:06:02 ►
Tell us about how you got connected with Willis Harmon.
00:06:06 ►
Well, I was writing my dissertation at Stanford on Abraham Maslow’s need hierarchy.
00:06:12 ►
And somebody told me that Harmon had been doing some work along those lines.
00:06:16 ►
So I wanted to find out what he knew.
00:06:19 ►
I enrolled in a class that he had called the Human Potential.
00:06:23 ►
And it was called a graduate special it was
00:06:26 ►
available only to graduate students and from anywhere across the university and it met just
00:06:32 ►
once a week and this was probably in 1968 or 69 and it was talking about all kinds of things that
00:06:40 ►
were very quote fringy at the time like biofeedback and meditation and yoga
00:06:46 ►
and hypnosis and um during the class we i guess there must have been about 25 of us we met once
00:06:53 ►
a week around our table um a married couple who were taking the class started to describe their
00:07:01 ►
first psychedelic experience and this is the first time I ever heard anyone describe a psychedelic experience.
00:07:08 ►
How old were you then, Tom?
00:07:14 ►
Let’s see.
00:07:14 ►
I would have been 30.
00:07:17 ►
30 and 68, yeah.
00:07:19 ►
Okay.
00:07:20 ►
I think one of the things I’ve been lucky about
00:07:23 ►
is I didn’t have my first psychedelic experience until I was 32.
00:07:27 ►
I don’t know how I could have handled it if I was 16, you know,
00:07:30 ►
just somehow or other, you know.
00:07:32 ►
For what it’s worth, Tom, I was 42.
00:07:35 ►
So I understand and I agree totally with you.
00:07:37 ►
I wouldn’t be here right now if I’d done this in my 20s.
00:07:40 ►
Yeah, right.
00:07:41 ►
I just can’t imagine what I’d be like.
00:07:44 ►
So anyway, they described it, this in my 20s because I could yeah right I just can’t imagine what I’d be like so anyway they
00:07:45 ►
they described it and um and um they didn’t fit my model of the the scrawly awful looking you know
00:07:53 ►
drug spleen you know you know with the bad eyes and looking to have crazed and these were and
00:07:58 ►
these were two graduate students in an advanced course at Stanford. And about half or maybe three quarters of the rest of the class
00:08:07 ►
started to get in on the conversation and talk about psychedelics.
00:08:11 ►
And it was clear they knew what they were talking about
00:08:13 ►
and then talk about their own experiences.
00:08:15 ►
So this really jolted my view of what psychedelics were.
00:08:19 ►
So that was my first sort of opening to the field.
00:08:21 ►
And I realized that you could be an advanced graduate student at Stanford
00:08:26 ►
and still have done psychedelics.
00:08:28 ►
And, you know, it was Willis Harmon who turned Myron Stoller off onto psychedelics.
00:08:33 ►
Myron was, he got his master’s at Stanford in electrical engineering.
00:08:37 ►
And then he was the engineer at Ampex that actually got the patent
00:08:42 ►
on the feedback mechanism for the first digital tape
00:08:45 ►
system. So we owe Myron all that too. But then Willis Harmon, while Myron’s doing all this stuff,
00:08:52 ►
Harmon tells him about LSD and connects him up with Al Hubbard. And then Myron was gone from
00:08:59 ►
Ampex for the rest of his life. So Willis Harmon started a lot of balls rolling, didn’t he?
00:09:01 ►
for the rest of his life.
00:09:04 ►
So Willis Harmon started a lot of balls rolling, didn’t he?
00:09:07 ►
Yeah, he started Jim Farman going too.
00:09:08 ►
Right, right.
00:09:16 ►
And, of course, Jim then went to work for Myron at the institute in – Menlo Park.
00:09:17 ►
Yeah, Menlo Park Institute.
00:09:19 ►
And, you know, I asked Myron one time, I said,
00:09:22 ►
well, when you were interviewing people to hire there, what were Fadiman’s qualifications?
00:09:28 ►
And he said, well, mainly he just graduated and he was the cheapest guy I could get.
00:09:33 ►
Yeah.
00:09:35 ►
So from your exposure through Willis Harmon, did you actually try psychedelics back then?
00:09:45 ►
No, not until February 1970.
00:09:49 ►
So that would have been two or maybe three years later.
00:09:53 ►
And although I was sort of curious about them,
00:09:56 ►
I didn’t really think about trying them.
00:09:59 ►
You know, of course, I was near San Francisco.
00:10:01 ►
This was the late 70s.
00:10:02 ►
So there’s a lot of sort of news around and some discussion
00:10:05 ►
a lot around Stanford, but I was sort of busy working on my dissertation, so I didn’t have much
00:10:10 ►
time to do it, although actually I did take my first psychedelic before I finished my dissertation,
00:10:17 ►
and so little by little I sort of got, you know, interested in it. I’m not someone whose life goes
00:10:23 ►
along and suddenly makes a quick change of direction things just slowly accumulate with me so over time i accumulated some in one of
00:10:31 ►
my classes there was a dentist from san francisco who had done psychedelics and got interested in
00:10:38 ►
education my major was educational administration and educational psychology and he was interested in how people learn things so he talked about his experiences so
00:10:48 ►
little by little I sort of got used to the idea and then the opportunity came
00:10:53 ►
along in February 1970. Now that was that was before you went to that conference
00:10:58 ►
in Iceland then right? Yeah Iceland was in the summer of 1972 and that was
00:11:06 ►
I was invited there
00:11:07 ►
basically I wanted to go along with my girlfriend
00:11:10 ►
I’d go on where she went
00:11:12 ►
I know that story
00:11:15 ►
I think every man listening knows that expression
00:11:18 ►
knows what it feels like
00:11:19 ►
yeah so anyway
00:11:22 ►
I went and
00:11:24 ►
that’s where I ran across Stan Groff
00:11:26 ►
and Walter Clark and Joseph Campbell and a lot of the other people.
00:11:34 ►
And Houston Smith was there as well.
00:11:37 ►
Yes, right.
00:11:38 ►
So there were all these.
00:11:39 ►
I didn’t know who these people were, you know.
00:11:41 ►
And I’d find out he’s the world’s expert in in this and he’s written the main work in the other
00:11:47 ►
thing. And so I was really impressed with that.
00:11:49 ►
And I realized you can get into it.
00:11:51 ►
Let me just, let me just put an exclamation point here.
00:11:54 ►
Cause most of the people here, you know,
00:11:56 ►
going to conferences here, there, and everywhere. And, and they’re,
00:12:00 ►
they’re going to conferences right now where people are not really well known,
00:12:03 ►
but can you imagine going to a conference in 1972 with Stan Groff,
00:12:08 ►
Houston Smith, Joseph Campbell, and Walter Clark?
00:12:12 ►
I mean, this is the bedrock of the psychedelic renaissance.
00:12:16 ►
Absolutely, yes.
00:12:17 ►
And I’ve been lucky sort of throughout my life making those chance contacts.
00:12:27 ►
And so that was some – Billards was there too you know the guy who’s now yeah um at hopkins and and i’m sure there are other people there
00:12:34 ►
there whose names i would recognize or should have recognized and didn’t and so then two years
00:12:41 ►
later there was another one in Iceland in 1975.
00:12:50 ►
And that worked into one that was held in northern Finland in 1976.
00:12:55 ►
So there are all these like, these are little small invitational conferences.
00:12:57 ►
Let me ask you about that. Now, this is in the early to mid 70s.
00:13:00 ►
And these are international psychedelic conferences, invitation only.
00:13:05 ►
How do you wrangle an invite to something like that?
00:13:09 ►
I don’t know.
00:13:10 ►
You go to one, and then they invite you to the rest of them, I guess,
00:13:14 ►
the way it goes.
00:13:15 ►
And also, I mean, there wasn’t that much interest in that time.
00:13:18 ►
There weren’t people trying to pilot.
00:13:21 ►
There would have been a lot of people sort of who’d done acid
00:13:23 ►
and wanted to come and talk about their experiences, not relatively fewer who were thinking a lot about acid
00:13:29 ►
and also um you know psychotherapy hadn’t been done at that time except by growth
00:13:34 ►
um and so there were none of this um things that we know about going on now so anyway that’s that’s
00:13:42 ►
the way those worked out and um sort of one thing led to another,
00:13:45 ►
and I ran into somebody. And, you know, it was a small enough group so that the same people would
00:13:52 ►
appear with, you know, a few new people coming in, a few old people dropping out.
00:13:57 ►
But let me, let’s fast forward. You go to Stanford, you start going to these conferences how in your you become a
00:14:06 ►
professor at Northern Illinois and in 1981 you introduce a course on psychedelics now
00:14:13 ►
how on earth now that’s back when acid was being made illegal and it’s all the horror stories how
00:14:19 ►
did you pull that off oh well I already had tenure So if I didn’t have tenure, I probably wouldn’t dare to do that.
00:14:28 ►
And, well, I had been teaching a graduate educational psychology course, and we had a
00:14:34 ►
section on transpersonal psychology. So that worked into the sort of the psychedelic angle.
00:14:41 ►
And then I’m not sure how I actually got the idea. I submitted a
00:14:46 ►
proposal. Oh, there was just these one-off special topics courses, you know,
00:14:53 ►
studies and this that meet just once and then that’s it. And so I proposed the
00:14:58 ►
course, you know, for that special topics readings and workshop in kind of course so I put up notices around campus
00:15:08 ►
because you know to recruit students and I figured I’d get enough students at that time it was open
00:15:16 ►
to anybody in above graduates or undergraduates and I later changed it to just Students in the Honors Program.
00:15:25 ►
But at that time, my assistant department chair got a call from the provost
00:15:30 ►
who wondered whether this was an appropriate topic for a university course.
00:15:35 ►
I got on my high horse and felt very self-righteous about it.
00:15:41 ►
And I wrote the Provost a letter and right at that time the paperback edition
00:15:47 ►
of psychedelic drugs reconsidered came out by Grinspoon and Bacalar. Grinspoon
00:15:52 ►
was a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Bacalar a lawyer at Harvard
00:15:59 ►
Medical School so it’s written from a medical and lawyers point of view and it
00:16:03 ►
had a 40 page annotated bibliography if anybody has a chance to buy the book, buy the paperback edition because
00:16:11 ►
it has the bibliography. So I photocopied that, I sent it to the provost, and I very self-righteously
00:16:18 ►
sort of sent him a letter challenging him and saying that it was my judgment that the content of courses were all
00:16:28 ►
were determined by the department members, not the provost’s office, and his job did not include
00:16:34 ►
censoring ideas. And if you had any, if you want to discuss this with me, I’d like to discuss it
00:16:40 ►
with him in an open meeting of the college council, which is all of the university council,
00:16:49 ►
which has delegates from every department and every department delegate would agree that their department has the right to determine what goes into their
00:16:52 ►
content, the content of their courses.
00:16:55 ►
And two days later,
00:16:57 ►
my assistant department chair got a telephone call from the provost and said,
00:17:02 ►
he was just checking because somebody wondered.
00:17:06 ►
call from the provost and said he was just checking because somebody wondered you know if if anybody ever wonders about the value and power of tenure that’s right yeah yeah it’s it’s it’s a
00:17:14 ►
shame we can’t get that in other fields as well uh you know i i uh i’ve got a couple other questions
00:17:20 ►
i want to ask you before we get into talking about your book and I want to open up to the rest of people here but first I’ve got a first I want
00:17:29 ►
to ask you because in your book you talk about this not I’d like you to kind of
00:17:32 ►
tell us a little bit more about it coming out of the psychedelic closet how
00:17:36 ►
what was that like for you well I was um in the spring of 60 just at 78 I was in the spring of 68, I was in a month-long seminar at S.
00:17:49 ►
Olympus, Stan Groff, and one of the other people was James Bacalar,
00:17:53 ►
that guy from Harvard.
00:17:55 ►
And they were writing a book called Psychedelic Grugs Reconsidered,
00:18:00 ►
and they asked me to write a chapter for it.
00:18:03 ►
And that’s the chapter where I first wrote that I had a psychedelic experience. I think probably everybody figured it out,
00:18:08 ►
but nobody really, I never said anything, you know. And so the book came out, and I
00:18:14 ►
was worried about it. I thought, you know, what will my colleagues think? What will people
00:18:18 ►
quote across campus think? You know, am I going to get nasty telephone calls? What about
00:18:24 ►
parents who are afraid their kids are going to this wild place?
00:18:27 ►
And the book came out, no response at all.
00:18:30 ►
Absolutely none.
00:18:33 ►
And I don’t know whether nobody read it or they just figured out, you know,
00:18:38 ►
they knew me anyway.
00:18:39 ►
So at any rate, so I was all the night before, you know,
00:18:43 ►
sort of thinking I was awake at night thinking I can use this
00:18:46 ►
with this argument and I can explain this this way.
00:18:49 ►
And so then it came out and so that basically was it.
00:18:54 ►
Now, you know, you’ve been teaching this course,
00:18:57 ►
or you’re Professor Emeritus now, but this course lasted for so long.
00:19:01 ►
Did you get any pushback over the years,
00:19:04 ►
like you just mentioned,
00:19:05 ►
parents or anything like that? Surprisingly little. I’m not sure exactly why, although I mean,
00:19:13 ►
I approached it very much from a scholarly point of view, not this is the way you do acid kind of
00:19:20 ►
view. And when I moved particularly to the honors program,
00:19:25 ►
I had advanced juniors and seniors who were really, you know,
00:19:30 ►
very good students.
00:19:31 ►
Although I had one whose father was a retired either FBI or CIA guy.
00:19:38 ►
I think it must have been FBI.
00:19:40 ►
And part of his job was to infiltrate the youth movements of the 1960s.
00:19:46 ►
And so I invited her to ask him to come and talk to the class.
00:19:50 ►
And he brought along a bunch of posters for people who were the sort of wanted
00:19:56 ►
druggies of the late 60s, 1960s.
00:20:01 ►
So it was fascinating.
00:20:02 ►
And I figured out that’s a tactic to take, that if somebody,
00:20:07 ►
and they’re, you know, well-meaning people who are very concerned about psychedelics, you know,
00:20:12 ►
they’re not all sort of boot jack guys, but the thing is to, you know, I think is to let them
00:20:19 ►
come to the class and actually talk to the class, Although he’s the only one and he was actually talking about the work he had done and wasn’t really
00:20:28 ►
sort of anti-class. And when I started my
00:20:31 ►
class, I would start off by asking the students what reaction
00:20:36 ►
did they get from their parents and their friends when they told
00:20:40 ►
me they were taking a class on psychedelics. And that was always a good icebreaker.
00:20:44 ►
Right.
00:20:45 ►
So I would say, well, that won’t look good on your record.
00:20:49 ►
What are you wasting your time for?
00:20:51 ►
And then I had one student, I wish I had met her parents,
00:20:54 ►
and her student said, that’s about time.
00:20:59 ►
Today, that’s what I would say.
00:21:01 ►
But back then, I was, One other thing I want to…
00:21:06 ►
Or two other things.
00:21:07 ►
First of all, I want to tell you, along with you,
00:21:11 ►
I’m also one of these people that wakes up between 2 and 4 in the morning,
00:21:15 ►
and that’s where I get a lot of my good ideas.
00:21:17 ►
How long have you been doing that?
00:21:20 ►
You mean waking up at night with ideas?
00:21:22 ►
Yeah.
00:21:23 ►
Well, I’ve been aware of it probably for eight or ten years,
00:21:28 ►
but I’ve probably been doing it for a long time.
00:21:31 ►
I mean, I really have no idea.
00:21:33 ►
And, of course, I think you probably found the same thing I do.
00:21:36 ►
You have to write it down because you won’t remember it in the morning
00:21:40 ►
no matter how good the idea is.
00:21:42 ►
Well, you know, I did that for a while.
00:21:47 ►
morning, no matter how good the idea is. Well, you know, I did that for a while. And now I make a practice. And I started doing this sometime in my late 60s. So I’ve been doing it for, you know,
00:21:51 ►
eight or nine years. And I noticed it, like you said, I might have been doing it before.
00:21:57 ►
And at first, I would, you know, I’d make some notes or something. But now, for the last maybe
00:22:02 ►
five years, I make a point of not turning on the
00:22:05 ►
lights or anything. And thanks to new technology, it’s really easy to have a couple of cokes of
00:22:11 ►
cannabis, you know, without fumbling around for lighters and things. And so I’ll come up with,
00:22:17 ►
I have a lot of ideas, but I don’t write them down until the next morning. I get up and I
00:22:22 ►
help the grandkids get ready for school and then I exercise.
00:22:25 ►
And then anything that has still stuck from then is what I write down.
00:22:30 ►
And actually, I’ve gotten some really great things out of that.
00:22:34 ►
It’s a good time to do things.
00:22:36 ►
But I never did that or noticed doing that until I got older
00:22:40 ►
and didn’t have the cares of the next day.
00:22:42 ►
And so it didn’t really matter if I was awake,
00:22:45 ►
I could take a nap the next day,
00:22:46 ►
you know?
00:22:47 ►
Yeah.
00:22:48 ►
That’s an advantage of being older.
00:22:50 ►
In the copy of your book,
00:22:52 ►
I got one of the first things I wanted to read was appendix C,
00:22:57 ►
but in my early copy,
00:22:58 ►
it didn’t have appendix C about the origins of bicycle day.
00:23:03 ►
Oh,
00:23:04 ►
everybody here knows about Bicycle Day.
00:23:06 ►
We’ve all celebrated it.
00:23:08 ►
We talk about it.
00:23:09 ►
I’ve got a picture.
00:23:10 ►
I took at Burning Man of a sculpture of Albert on a bicycle and everything.
00:23:15 ►
Oh, wow.
00:23:16 ►
Great.
00:23:16 ►
But we owe it to you, I understand, for Bicycle Day celebration.
00:23:20 ►
Tell us about that.
00:23:21 ►
Yeah.
00:23:22 ►
I started it in my backyard.
00:23:21 ►
celebration. Tell us about that.
00:23:24 ►
Yeah. I started it in my backyard.
00:23:26 ►
I’m not sure whether it was
00:23:28 ►
1983, 84,
00:23:32 ►
or 85.
00:23:34 ►
Sometime early there. I just thought
00:23:36 ►
that we needed a holiday just like, you know,
00:23:38 ►
there are all these other holidays.
00:23:40 ►
And I sort
00:23:42 ►
of thought about the idea.
00:23:43 ►
That’s one of those ideas that sort of popped into my mind.
00:23:45 ►
I knew immediately I liked the idea.
00:23:48 ►
Now, since then, I’ve sort of rationalized it.
00:23:50 ►
I said, you know, the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day,
00:23:53 ►
and generally speaking, Columbus Day was an Italian day and so forth.
00:23:57 ►
And I thought, well, psychedelicists, we need a day.
00:23:59 ►
But that’s really rationalizing it after the idea popped into my mind.
00:24:03 ►
And originally, we were going to have it on the 16th of April.
00:24:07 ►
You know, that’s the day that Albert Hoffman first accidentally took LSD.
00:24:11 ►
By the way, there’s a really great graphic novel out on Bicycle Day.
00:24:15 ►
I recommend it very strongly.
00:24:18 ►
It’s a beautiful book.
00:24:19 ►
I think we talked about that here in the salon.
00:24:22 ►
I think I have a link to it.
00:24:23 ►
I know what you’re talking about.
00:24:24 ►
Yeah, it’s a great book.
00:24:25 ►
Right.
00:24:25 ►
So anyway, the 16th was in the middle of the week
00:24:29 ►
and not a good time to have a celebration.
00:24:32 ►
So I had it on the day that Albert Hoffman
00:24:36 ►
took his first intentional on the 19th
00:24:39 ►
and rode the bike home on that.
00:24:42 ►
Actually, one of the other famous,
00:24:44 ►
the two bike rides, the 16th and there’s the 19th. Actually, one of the other famous, the two-bike ride,
00:24:46 ►
the 16th and there’s the 19th.
00:24:49 ►
The 19th was the big, strong one.
00:24:52 ►
So that’s why I got to be April 19th.
00:24:55 ►
And we’d get together.
00:24:56 ►
It was really more of a family affair.
00:25:00 ►
I mean, it’s not a psychedelic concert-y sort of thing at all.
00:25:01 ►
We’d get together.
00:25:03 ►
We had some people would bring their children.
00:25:05 ►
And if it was good weather, we’d meet in the backyard. If it was bad weather, we’d meet in the house and just sort of
00:25:09 ►
hang out together and have a good time. And that was about it. And then so I decided it was a good
00:25:17 ►
idea and I wanted other people to know about it. So I started sending out letters to people. I don’t
00:25:23 ►
know when I got online with it.
00:25:25 ►
I couldn’t have been in the early 80s, I don’t think.
00:25:29 ►
And it got picked up.
00:25:31 ►
I think the Mass Bulletin might have had something on it.
00:25:36 ►
And anyway, people picked up on it.
00:25:38 ►
That’s really my big contribution is the bicycle day.
00:25:44 ►
And actually, a lot of people don’t know how it started or where it started,
00:25:48 ►
but it started right here in the nice, flat agricultural Midwest,
00:25:52 ►
not in San Francisco or Madison or somewhere.
00:25:55 ►
But, you know, first of all, being a Midwesterner myself,
00:25:59 ►
I’m really proud to hear that.
00:26:00 ►
But it’s interesting how the thing has spread the meat spread and
00:26:05 ►
and this is the first time I’ve heard that the but we can figure out what year
00:26:10 ►
it was because it would be the year that the 19th of April fell on a Saturday
00:26:14 ►
because you wanted to do it on the weekend yeah I’m not sure it might have
00:26:20 ►
been we might have fudged it by the did that I mean the 19th could have been a
00:26:24 ►
Monday and we met on the weekend it could have been Sunday we might have fudged it by, I mean, the 19th could have been on Monday and we met on the weekend.
00:26:25 ►
It could have been Sunday.
00:26:26 ►
I’m not sure, you know, that was not a big thing we thought about at the time.
00:26:31 ►
Well, you didn’t think it was going to be an ongoing event.
00:26:33 ►
Yeah.
00:26:33 ►
I mean, it’s mentioned in all kinds of articles and books.
00:26:36 ►
I’m really pleased with that.
00:26:38 ►
Albert Hoffman was not too happy about it.
00:26:41 ►
Well, you know. happy about it. I wrote to him and he was a little annoyed
00:26:45 ►
that I had chosen the bicycle
00:26:47 ►
to focus on and not the
00:26:49 ►
LSD molecule.
00:26:51 ►
Obviously, that’s what he’d be interested in.
00:26:54 ►
And so
00:26:56 ►
we wrote back and
00:26:58 ►
forth for a while
00:26:58 ►
and I explained to him that
00:27:01 ►
the reason I chose a bicycle
00:27:03 ►
was that it was a good visual content.
00:27:07 ►
I asked him if he still had the bicycle.
00:27:09 ►
And if he did, I’d buy it from him, but he had sold it.
00:27:11 ►
Oh, I see.
00:27:12 ►
And I told him then that sort of the 19th of April, when he had the ride,
00:27:20 ►
would be similar to the 18th of April when Paul Revere had his ride, you know.
00:27:23 ►
would be similar to the 18th of April when Paul Revere had his ride, you know.
00:27:30 ►
And so these are both life-changing, culture-changing events.
00:27:33 ►
And when it would be the 19th of April in Basel,
00:27:37 ►
it would still be the 18th of April in Boston because of the time change.
00:27:43 ►
You know, this is the first time I have learned when Paul Revere’s ride took place. Oh, that famous poem was the 18th of April in 75,
00:27:47 ►
that hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year
00:27:51 ►
and famous ride of Paul Revere, et cetera.
00:27:55 ►
And, you know, from a marketing standpoint,
00:27:59 ►
LSD Day doesn’t have nearly the buzz that Bicycle Day does
00:28:03 ►
because anybody can talk about Bicycle Day and
00:28:06 ►
mixed company, and they’ll get a wink and a nod from people who know, but if they don’t know,
00:28:11 ►
you know, it’s just Bicycle Day. We’re riding bikes. That’s right. It sounds like a nice,
00:28:15 ►
healthy way to spend a Saturday afternoon. That was a lucky stroke of genius there. So,
00:28:21 ►
before we start talking about your book, let me see if anybody else has some
00:28:25 ►
questions about things we’ve already talked about here. And there’s an electronic way to raise your
00:28:30 ►
hand and I can unmute you or you can wave your arms if you’re on video. So how long ago did you
00:28:37 ►
start Bicycle Day? I think it was 1983 or 80, no, 83, 84, something like that. I was born in 84, February.
00:28:47 ►
A bicycle year, baby.
00:28:49 ►
Yeah.
00:28:51 ►
Well, I’m officially going to say it’s 1984, April 19th, 1984 now.
00:28:57 ►
So since it was your birthday, Stanley,
00:28:59 ►
since we don’t know anything differently for sure,
00:29:01 ►
you came in a few days before bicycle day.
00:29:13 ►
Let me do this i’m going to uh share the screen here for people to see and this i don’t know if this is a pdf copy i have of your book uh mind apps uh multi-state theory and tools for mind design.
00:29:26 ►
And the metaphor of an app for your mind is, to make a pun,
00:29:33 ►
it’s a very apt metaphor.
00:29:36 ►
That was one of those early morning ideas.
00:29:39 ►
Was it?
00:29:40 ►
Was it?
00:29:40 ►
So where do you want to begin talking about?
00:29:45 ►
Do you want to lead up to this book with some of the others that you’ve prefaced this with,
00:29:50 ►
or do you want to jump right into a MindApp wrap?
00:29:53 ►
Well, let’s get into MindApp because that sort of describes what I’m working in.
00:29:58 ►
Okay.
00:29:58 ►
I’m trying to get people to recognize that psychedelics can be used intellectually,
00:30:02 ►
not just in religion or just in
00:30:05 ►
psychotherapy. So I’m trying to broaden the field and trying to get people who are interested in,
00:30:11 ►
you know, things like history and literature and philosophy interested in psychedelics.
00:30:18 ►
So the purpose of the book is to try to interest people in the humanities and psychedelics.
00:30:23 ►
And I use that mind app as
00:30:25 ►
a nice metaphor,
00:30:27 ►
which doesn’t particularly have to do with
00:30:29 ►
the humanities, but it
00:30:31 ►
tries to get across
00:30:33 ►
the idea that
00:30:34 ►
we can install things in our
00:30:37 ►
brain-mind complex just as
00:30:39 ►
we can install programs in our devices.
00:30:42 ►
And we can do more things
00:30:43 ►
with them and new things with them.
00:30:46 ►
And that’s the metaphor that the book is built around.
00:30:50 ►
And from there on, once you get that idea, there are a lot of new ideas in the book.
00:30:54 ►
But once you get that idea, everything else falls into place.
00:30:57 ►
That’s the key idea.
00:31:00 ►
And you’re talking about mind apps as not just psychedelics, but things like yoga, other ways to enter into other than default consciousness. Is that correct?
00:31:24 ►
I think the psychedelics is one family among lots of other mind apps.
00:31:27 ►
So the psychedelics are the one that we’re interested in,
00:31:31 ►
but others are interested in yoga and the martial arts and hypnosis and breathing techniques and brain stimulation and all those other things.
00:31:37 ►
And so I’m saying that psychedelics are the mind app that most of us are interested in,
00:31:43 ►
but that’s just one family and this whole big family of ways of looking at the mind.
00:31:48 ►
So all these areas that have been very,
00:31:51 ►
so to quote, fringing to psychology,
00:31:54 ►
I’m trying to bring them into the center of psychology
00:31:57 ►
and to say, to look at the human mind
00:31:59 ►
and it’s full of sense.
00:32:01 ►
We have to look at every mind-body state
00:32:03 ►
and all the mind apps we’re producing in those states.
00:32:06 ►
So it’s a bigger view of the human mind.
00:32:09 ►
Of course, it’s very much like what Charlie Tartt pointed out
00:32:12 ►
in Altered States of Consciousness.
00:32:15 ►
It’s that idea developed a little bit more.
00:32:18 ►
And I should, I guess, point out that the obvious,
00:32:22 ►
everybody here knows that even within the realm
00:32:25 ►
of psychedelics and yoga and buddhism there are a lot of apps different apps within those uh areas
00:32:32 ►
you know we talk about the different uh ways uh different some of the psychedelics affect our
00:32:38 ►
consciousness in different ways and uh in fact just uh today i put out a talk that was a man who was here in the salon a couple of weeks ago, the difference between Yahweh and ayahuasca.
00:32:50 ►
And, you know, some people just say they’re both very similar.
00:32:53 ►
They’re, you know, vines from the Amazon, but you’re talking about is, you know, the huge area that’s sort of, you know, consciousness. and I just read an article last week about another consciousness article,
00:33:25 ►
and we’ve all heard the story about the indigenous people talking about the world on the back of a turtle,
00:33:30 ►
and somebody said, well, what’s under the turtle, and it’s turtles all the way down,
00:33:35 ►
and this guy said, well, it’s consciousness all the way down now.
00:33:38 ►
So if that’s true, then a mind app should certainly be something we should not only look at using, but at creating ourselves, building the apps.
00:33:49 ►
Not only that, we can put these together in new combinations that have never been tried before and develop mind-body states that have never been developed before.
00:33:57 ►
Just as we can put together chemicals and result in new molecules, we can put together mind wraps and develop new mind-body states.
00:34:05 ►
That’s the big adventure that we’re looking at.
00:34:09 ►
I don’t use the word consciousness because it’s so ambiguous.
00:34:14 ►
I use the word mind-body state, and what I mean is consciousness in the sense that Charlie
00:34:20 ►
Tartt does of mind and body operating together as one particular whole.
00:34:27 ►
And the common ones are awake, sleeping, and dreaming.
00:34:32 ►
So when I use mind-body state, I mean consciousness in that Charlie Tart sense.
00:34:39 ►
But consciousness has a lot of other meanings.
00:34:41 ►
And the problem is people get together and they start discussing consciousness
00:34:45 ►
and they’re using different
00:34:47 ►
meanings of the word consciousness.
00:34:49 ►
And so the discussion gets very
00:34:51 ►
confusing. For example,
00:34:54 ►
the simple one is
00:34:55 ►
an anesthesiologist
00:34:57 ►
conscious means awake and interacting with
00:34:59 ►
the world. But that would apply to
00:35:01 ►
dogs and cats just as well as to humans.
00:35:04 ►
But we generally don’t think of dogs and cats just as well as the humans so but we generally don’t
00:35:05 ►
think of dogs and cats having consciousness at least in the human sense so so consciousness i
00:35:11 ►
think is still a good word but people who use it have to be clear about what they’re talking about
00:35:15 ►
yeah i totally agree in in my book the spirit of the internet which is subtitled speculations on
00:35:21 ►
the evolution of on the evolution of globalness, I started out in the very beginning saying exactly what you just said.
00:35:28 ►
You know, it’s a word that doesn’t really have a specific meaning.
00:35:31 ►
And so I said, so for this book,
00:35:33 ►
here’s a really narrow focused meaning I’m going to use for this book.
00:35:37 ►
But you can put another word in there if you want, you know.
00:35:40 ►
And that’s the trouble we have with a lot of words, I think.
00:35:44 ►
And last night, you know, a, and that’s the trouble we have with a lot of words, I think, and last night, you know,
00:35:45 ►
I, a few years ago, I started doing crossword puzzles, because I’m told it’s good for old
00:35:50 ►
brains, and so I see how simple words are used so differently, and last night, when I woke up
00:35:56 ►
middle night, I’d been reading your book, and I was sitting there, or laying there in bed, and
00:36:01 ►
thinking, mind, body, mind, body, and then I changed it around, I started saying body, mind, body, mind, body. And then I changed it around.
00:36:06 ►
I started saying body, mind, body, mind.
00:36:08 ►
And I had a whole new different series of thoughts come through.
00:36:14 ►
And, you know, that goes back to the thing about the gut feeling and all,
00:36:17 ►
and the neurons in other parts of our body.
00:36:19 ►
So I think this is really important work that you’re doing to get the message
00:36:24 ►
that our mind isn’t just one little place somewhere you know in our
00:36:29 ►
head yeah yeah and there are different number of lines that we can construct
00:36:34 ►
using the various mind-body techniques yeah and one of the things that that you
00:36:42 ►
know I’m also an old besides being being a lawyer, I’m a computer programmer, too.
00:36:47 ►
I quit practicing law because I didn’t think it was very honest.
00:36:50 ►
So writing code is pretty honest.
00:36:52 ►
It’s hard to cheat.
00:36:53 ►
And, you know, when you’re writing code, we have the concept of a sandbox where you put your code in the sandbox that it can’t interact with anything else on your machine.
00:37:04 ►
And until it’s all debugged and
00:37:06 ►
pretty well working, you don’t let it get out. And so when I hear the word app, I think of all
00:37:11 ►
the apps on a phone and being a programmer, I know how they can crash and do problems and all.
00:37:17 ►
And so as I’m reading your book, I’m thinking of these mind apps being really well tested before you start interconnecting them.
00:37:28 ►
And in a sandbox kind of thing, and since my oldest son was really into Legos and still loves Legos,
00:37:34 ►
I’m thinking about putting these apps in Legos.
00:37:38 ►
And once they’re debugged, then you can stack them together to build this new person or whatever you want to call it. So, you
00:37:47 ►
know, it’s just metaphors that we’re working with and we all need or use
00:37:50 ►
different ones, but if you’re an old programmer like me and you’re worried
00:37:54 ►
about bugs in the code, think Lego blocks after it’s taken out of the sandbox. Yeah,
00:38:00 ►
that’s a nice image, that’s a good image, right. And also, I’m sure there are, I think most of the mind-body states that we created probably won’t be good for much.
00:38:12 ►
But a few of them that will be good, will be good for a lot.
00:38:15 ►
It’s just like most molecules are just kind of molecules.
00:38:19 ►
But the ones that are useful are really useful.
00:38:21 ►
I try to find the same kind of thing in mind-body states.
00:38:26 ►
And also we have to have to consider that these are just not things
00:38:32 ►
people should jump into, you know, they should approach it very carefully.
00:38:36 ►
Unfortunately we don’t have a university or research institute that can just
00:38:42 ►
start systematically looking at these and trying to figure out
00:38:45 ►
what’s the proper protocol for using these various mind-body apps well i i want to uh tell you about
00:38:53 ►
about something that hasn’t made uh made the the mainstream media yet but uh one of our guests here
00:38:58 ►
tonight uh kevin uh who’s who’s actually in a in a car driving around central Ohio right now. He’s like he usually is.
00:39:06 ►
He’s not on video.
00:39:07 ►
Yep, there he is.
00:39:08 ►
He’s coming from his drive home.
00:39:11 ►
And Kevin is working with a group that is definitely something
00:39:16 ►
that would interact with a mind-body state.
00:39:21 ►
They are looking at extending the DMT experience based on Dr. Strassman’s
00:39:28 ►
work into a multi-hour experience that you could go out of and come back into at the
00:39:33 ►
same place.
00:39:34 ►
And they’re doing, they haven’t done any of this yet because they’re doing training,
00:39:38 ►
several years of training, and to make sure that something like this can be done safely.
00:39:45 ►
And I don’t know, Kevin, do you want to give some of the headlines from this
00:39:48 ►
or are you able to right now?
00:39:51 ►
Yeah.
00:39:54 ►
Where do I start?
00:39:55 ►
Yeah.
00:39:56 ►
Two years in to training.
00:39:59 ►
We stepped into ketamine this year, which actually I just got back from Colorado a couple days ago.
00:40:09 ►
So Daniel McQueen with Medicinal Mindfulness, who is the kind of started the DMTX project,
00:40:17 ►
they opened up, they’re stepping out into the public with psychedelic work that they’re doing.
00:40:24 ►
stepping out into the public with psychedelic work that they’re doing.
00:40:31 ►
So they’re starting with the ketamine infusions and injections. And that’s the same technology that we’ll step into with the DMT.
00:40:36 ►
So with the target infusion technology and the pharmacokinetic model that
00:40:41 ►
Strassman and Andrew Gallimore have come up with.
00:40:45 ►
So that’s kind of where we’re at.
00:40:46 ►
We’re headed to Costa Rica in June so we can legally work with, you know,
00:40:53 ►
some ayahuasca and some other DMT analog type things.
00:40:58 ►
And then 2021 is looking where we’ll probably get started.
00:41:05 ►
That’s kind of our timeline right now,
00:41:07 ►
but those are kind of the headlines,
00:41:09 ►
but there’s a lot going on.
00:41:10 ►
We meet monthly online,
00:41:12 ►
kind of like we’re doing now.
00:41:14 ►
We’ve got a whole team of doctors,
00:41:16 ►
therapists, integration specialists.
00:41:21 ►
It’s growing like crazy.
00:41:22 ►
So, yeah.
00:41:27 ►
Those are kind of the headlines are you suggesting
00:41:31 ►
using several drugs
00:41:32 ►
in a series
00:41:33 ►
or how are you
00:41:34 ►
approaching it
00:41:35 ►
no so
00:41:36 ►
so the idea
00:41:38 ►
is this
00:41:39 ►
is that
00:41:39 ►
we’ll be able to
00:41:42 ►
overcome our body’s
00:41:43 ►
natural
00:41:44 ►
breakdown of dimethyltryptamine
00:41:48 ►
by continuous diffusion of DMT.
00:41:52 ►
So Andrew Gallimore is a neuropharmacologist.
00:41:57 ►
He works out of Okinawa, Japan.
00:42:00 ►
And using Rick Strassman’s original research when he did the dose response.
00:42:05 ►
So he injected people four times every half hour,
00:42:09 ►
and he used that blood data to come up with what’s called a pharmacokinetic model.
00:42:13 ►
It’s what anesthesiologists use to be able to keep you under,
00:42:18 ►
but not too under or not awake up.
00:42:22 ►
So DMT fits within that model because it’s short acting. It doesn’t build up in our
00:42:28 ►
system, et cetera, et cetera. So basically the idea is that you’ll get a bolus injection like
00:42:35 ►
Strassman did of a breakthrough amount of DMT. And then the pharmacokinetic model, let’s say for
00:42:42 ►
someone like me, about a 70 kilogram person is about four milligrams of DMT a minute to keep you in that breakthrough experience without an MAOI for essentially as long as you want. this machine with the target controlled infusion pump that they use with ketamine and anesthesiologists
00:43:06 ►
use it is that we could you can basically increase or decrease the dose so you can bring somebody
00:43:13 ►
back out maybe talk for a little while and bring them back in you know and kind of figure out
00:43:18 ►
individual dosing for people so that’s what we’re going to be studying and working with so so tom does this qualify as a
00:43:26 ►
mind app do you think oh yeah sure very interesting fascinating one of using them two or more drugs
00:43:34 ►
together or i don’t know whatever else you’re using like breathing techniques and the diet and
00:43:38 ►
so forth yeah well this would be one of the sort of ways of combining different mind apps and to produce a new mind-body state.
00:43:47 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:43:48 ►
Yeah, we’ve been training mainly with breath work, cannabis, ketamine, peyote,
00:43:55 ►
you know, all in intentional settings kind of training, getting ready for this.
00:44:02 ►
So, yeah, a lot of mind apps going on for sure. I like the idea.
00:44:08 ►
Well, I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop on this, Thomas, as it unfolds, because I think this,
00:44:15 ►
you know, it’s over a multi-year project, and we’ve done three podcasts on this already with
00:44:20 ►
the principals involved, and I think it’s a really fascinating experiment.
00:44:25 ►
And of course, nobody knows where it’s going to go
00:44:27 ►
and what it’s going to do.
00:44:28 ►
But the fact that, you know,
00:44:31 ►
we need to push forward into this area.
00:44:34 ►
And fortunately, there’s some people
00:44:36 ►
who are now doing it not like we did in the,
00:44:38 ►
or you did in the 60s.
00:44:40 ►
I wasn’t.
00:44:41 ►
Not the reckless stuff.
00:44:43 ►
But, you know, some really serious scientific work.
00:44:46 ►
But they’re combining like you wanted the philosophy and art, things like that as well.
00:44:53 ►
So you have a couple of broadcasts on this. I’ll have to see if I can find it.
00:44:57 ►
I’ll send you the links on it. We’ve had Rick Strassman and the other two people that Kevin mentioned that have put this program together.
00:45:05 ►
And I think they’re in like their second or third year now.
00:45:09 ►
And, you know, it’s a really serious project.
00:45:12 ►
They’re going very slowly.
00:45:13 ►
They don’t want to take, you know, unnecessary risks.
00:45:16 ►
They don’t want anybody having problems like Rick had in his first part of the experiment.
00:45:22 ►
And, Kevin, I thank you.
00:45:23 ►
I always hate to ask
00:45:25 ►
kevin to talk because i know he’s got to pay attention to the road he’s driving right now
00:45:29 ►
one night tom he uh we ended the salon a little early and like 30 seconds later a tornado crossed
00:45:38 ►
right behind him on the road is when they’re having those big tornadoes in Ohio. So living in Illinois, you know what that’s like.
00:45:45 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:45:46 ►
Wow.
00:45:51 ►
So, Tom, as I understand it, you’re talking about mind apps as new instruments
00:45:54 ►
and mind-body states as like new places to go.
00:45:59 ►
Do you want to elaborate on that a bit?
00:46:02 ►
Well, you use mind apps,
00:46:06 ►
singly or possibly together,
00:46:08 ►
to produce different mind-body states.
00:46:11 ►
Now, once the state is produced,
00:46:13 ►
you can look at all the possible things
00:46:16 ►
that we can do with our minds
00:46:17 ►
and ask how do they operate in this state.
00:46:20 ►
For example, memory or physical production. and you can look at all the things
00:46:28 ►
we do and say how does that vary from mind body state to mind’s body state so there may be different
00:46:33 ►
types of memory different types of creativity different types of perception in each state
00:46:38 ►
and this is a way of actually building a fuller model of the mind. So actually, it’s impossible to build a full model of the mind
00:46:47 ►
because these new apps are being invented and being imported.
00:46:51 ►
There’s a lot of import.
00:46:52 ►
Ayahuasca is the prime example of that all the time.
00:46:57 ►
So there’s this great international trade of apps,
00:47:02 ►
mind apps, I’d call them,
00:47:04 ►
just as they’re for cars and food and
00:47:06 ►
everything else. So we have no idea where this is going to go and what remains to
00:47:11 ►
be discovered. When I first heard about Ibogaine I thought, oh well, you
00:47:16 ►
know, some guy’s just trying to make some money off of addicts. Now, you know,
00:47:21 ►
it’s a really accepted thing that has to be looked at.
00:47:26 ►
So there are all these new things coming along.
00:47:36 ►
And also an interesting thing is that we’re learning more about the brain at least weekly and maybe almost daily.
00:47:39 ►
It’s just an amazing amount of information that’s coming along.
00:47:47 ►
And basically it’s all done with the opportunity of overcoming a disease or some problems. But also, those are skills then of manipulating our minds and our brains.
00:47:53 ►
And all the new stuff that’s being discovered as treatments can also be developed as mind apps.
00:48:01 ►
So there’s an enormous area that’s going on here.
00:48:09 ►
so there’s an enormous area that’s going on on there and and how how uh how do you suggest uh we we think about mapping some of these new mind states uh cataloging them or talking about them
00:48:15 ►
with one another that’s that’s an area that to me it really needs a lot of work on it not to
00:48:21 ►
on to build categories i think that we probably will categorize them differently
00:48:27 ►
according to what we’re interested in.
00:48:28 ►
Like if we’re interested in creativity or the arts,
00:48:31 ►
we’ll catalog them one way.
00:48:33 ►
If we’re interested in, let’s say, psychotherapy,
00:48:36 ►
we can catalog them another way.
00:48:38 ►
I developed what I call a central mind-body state question.
00:48:43 ►
And it’s how does blank, whatever you’re interested in, vary from one mind-body state question and it’s how does blank whatever you’re interested in
00:48:46 ►
vary from one mind-body state to another and basically this is what’s happening
00:48:51 ►
now in psychotherapy it’s answering the question how does psychotherapy vary
00:48:55 ►
from psychedelic mind state to another psychedelic mind state so
00:49:00 ►
that’s a an example of some good practical use that’s come out of using that question.
00:49:06 ►
But we can put all kinds of things in there.
00:49:08 ►
We can even put in things like sacredness and beauty, truth, reality.
00:49:13 ►
One of the things I find most fascinating about psychedelics is, you know,
00:49:18 ►
they can amplify your sense of whatever you’re interested in.
00:49:21 ►
Like probably everybody listening to this has had the experience of this is real.
00:49:26 ►
This is really real.
00:49:28 ►
This is realer than real.
00:49:29 ►
So reality is something we can do experiments on
00:49:34 ►
or sacredness.
00:49:36 ►
I mean, sometimes things we’ll see not at all sacred.
00:49:39 ►
It’s very sacred.
00:49:41 ►
So all the beauties and other,
00:49:42 ►
probably everybody listening to this knows
00:49:44 ►
beauty can
00:49:46 ►
be hyped up or it can be dropped
00:49:48 ►
down. So all these things that used to be
00:49:50 ►
just general
00:49:50 ►
philosophical generalizations
00:49:54 ►
and generalized ideas, we
00:49:56 ►
can actually do research on now.
00:49:58 ►
And this means that we can
00:50:00 ►
look at things that have been
00:50:01 ►
the truth, you know,
00:50:04 ►
philosophical philosophies, great
00:50:06 ►
sort of goal of truth.
00:50:08 ►
But the sense of truth can be amplified up and amplified down.
00:50:13 ►
The image I use there is a rheostat, and we can rheostat all these things up and down.
00:50:18 ►
And this opens philosophical areas that have been really armchair philosophy and people
00:50:24 ►
thinking about them to do some experimental work on them.
00:50:27 ►
So I’d like to see experimental philosophy come along. But this applies to all the
00:50:32 ►
areas of cognition that cognitive psychology is looking at. How does that vary from one mind-body state to another state?
00:50:40 ►
And are there ways of thinking in other mind-body states that are not in our ordinary
00:50:45 ►
state that will be useful?
00:50:47 ►
It’s not just a matter of describing them, but seeing if we can discover some sort of
00:50:52 ►
use for them.
00:50:52 ►
It’s like discovering a new continent.
00:50:55 ►
You explore it, you find out what’s there, and then you use whatever’s there to build
00:51:00 ►
a city or whatever.
00:51:02 ►
So that’s what I find very intriguing about this,
00:51:05 ►
is that it’s not just a matter of describing the mind fully,
00:51:10 ►
but also being able to use our minds in new ways.
00:51:13 ►
Also, some of those things that people think are rare or impossible,
00:51:19 ►
I’d say the parapsychological abilities are prime here.
00:51:22 ►
Or, you know, sometimes during the summer when the news is kind of slow,
00:51:27 ►
there’ll be newspaper articles like 97-pound woman lifts cement truck off baby.
00:51:34 ►
Okay, so there are these unusual abilities that are out there.
00:51:37 ►
And they may be unusual because they live in other mind-body states,
00:51:41 ►
not an ordinary state.
00:51:42 ►
And if we go into other states, we may discover abilities
00:51:45 ►
that we didn’t know that we had, or that were just seen as sort of very questionable, but they’re
00:51:51 ►
questionable because they’re not in our ordinary mind-body state, they’re in other states. And
00:51:55 ►
basically, who knows what we might find. You know, as far as your work with philosophy, art, music, things like that, and in these mind-body states,
00:52:07 ►
have you talked with Jim Fadiman at all about the work that they did in Menlo Park?
00:52:13 ►
Yes.
00:52:14 ►
I know they’ve done the creative problem-solving work.
00:52:16 ►
Yeah.
00:52:18 ►
Jim and I present sometimes together at MAPS conferences.
00:52:23 ►
You know, it’s unfortunate, but they had like 350 people went through that program.
00:52:29 ►
And once they made the analog drug law came in, Myron had all of the records destroyed.
00:52:34 ►
So all of that research is lost, or not all of it, but a lot of it’s been lost, which is a shame.
00:52:40 ►
Jim’s recent book has some of the new research on it.
00:52:43 ►
I mean, he’s covered some of the research.
00:52:46 ►
The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, really top book.
00:52:49 ►
You know who, and we’ve had him in here in the salon talking about that too.
00:52:54 ►
He’s going to be back here one Monday night.
00:52:57 ►
That Psychedelic Explorers Guide is one of the five books you need to have in your library, I think.
00:53:02 ►
Absolutely, yeah.
00:53:03 ►
But the other person who did work with creative work was Oscar Janiger.
00:53:10 ►
You know, back in the 60s, he was the psychiatrist for Cary Grant
00:53:14 ►
and all of those guys.
00:53:17 ►
He had a number of famous artists draw, you know, make a drawing of a particular piece of art or a vase or something.
00:53:29 ►
I can’t remember what it was.
00:53:31 ►
But he had them do it before and then when they were on LSD.
00:53:34 ►
And these before and during paintings, there’s dozens of them,
00:53:39 ►
and they’re very valuable.
00:53:41 ►
But unfortunately, Oscar’s sons have put all of this stuff in storage along with all of
00:53:45 ►
his records too but i think there’s a wealth of information there about the artistic and creative
00:53:52 ►
potential of these medicines that hopefully we can uncover someday and i expect them them to be more
00:54:00 ►
dramatic and colorful in the ordinary artwork too, you know, like weeks and months later
00:54:05 ►
that they have more insights into their own work or the sense of texture of the oils on the canvas.
00:54:11 ►
And, you know, that’s true with, not just with artistic endeavors, but I remember one time
00:54:18 ►
Ralph Messner saying how he’d had an ayahuasca experience and he was just so disappointed he
00:54:23 ►
didn’t get any answers. And like six months months later this big aha moment came these things keep working in your subconscious as you
00:54:30 ►
well know yeah in your mind body i should not say subconscious should i i don’t know i know to me
00:54:37 ►
that something else i’d like to point out about this book and and i i mistakenly uh told the
00:54:43 ►
people today that it hadn’t been published
00:54:45 ►
but it’s published in june of this year right right and and uh one of the the things that i’m
00:54:50 ►
going to urge uh particularly young people and particularly university students to uh reason to
00:54:56 ►
get a copy of it is appendix a is an outline for a psychedelic course could you tell us a little
00:55:02 ►
bit more about that yeah well that well that’s my last syllabus of the
00:55:06 ►
years that I was teaching it, and of course people would adopt it any number of different ways,
00:55:12 ►
but this was a course for either 15 or 20 honors students in a seminar, and I basically
00:55:19 ►
wanted to introduce them to some of the classics and some of the main ideas in the field,
00:55:24 ►
I wanted to introduce them to some of the classics and some of the main ideas in the field and to have them carry these ideas back into whatever their majors were.
00:55:30 ►
Because these were majors from all over the university,
00:55:32 ►
from engineering and the arts and sciences and so forth.
00:55:37 ►
So I tried to get them to have insights or questions about their own fields coming out of that.
00:55:43 ►
And so I started off with good old
00:55:45 ►
Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
00:55:47 ►
because he raises all the topics about mind
00:55:51 ►
that we’ve really discovered and went through in the course.
00:55:54 ►
And then I like Stan Groff’s book,
00:55:56 ►
now called LSD, Doorway to the Numinous,
00:56:00 ►
but originally Realms of the Human Unconscious.
00:56:02 ►
And then I have a Groffian interpretation
00:56:06 ►
of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
00:56:09 ►
And I’d give that to the class and then have them use Stan’s view of the mind
00:56:14 ►
to describe something in their own lives.
00:56:17 ►
And that was fascinating.
00:56:19 ►
They had all kinds of different things.
00:56:21 ►
Of course, a lot of them, because I used a movie,
00:56:22 ►
would use a movie or a TV show.
00:56:29 ►
But some of them used, you know, moving into a new apartment or some other thing going in their life. So it helps them understand themselves. Stan’s book is very good in helping
00:56:36 ►
people understand why their emotions are somewhere much more intense than they probably should be.
00:56:45 ►
Because Stan uses this idea that emotions are clumped together
00:56:48 ►
in these things called coaxes.
00:56:50 ►
And when you have an emotion that fits that coax,
00:56:53 ►
you’re activating the whole thing, not just your individual event.
00:56:57 ►
And then we have various books at the end of the semester
00:57:01 ►
on sort of the sociopolitical times of the 60s.
00:57:05 ►
So have you had students come back to you, you know,
00:57:08 ►
a decade later that are now involved in psychedelics and thank you for the course?
00:57:14 ►
Yeah, not very many.
00:57:16 ►
A few.
00:57:18 ►
And actually I have recently had a contact with one I had quite a few years ago
00:57:26 ►
who is going to graduate school now
00:57:29 ►
and is trying to find a graduate school where he can do work on psychedelics.
00:57:34 ►
And fortunately, there are more schools,
00:57:36 ►
although they’re mostly oriented towards psychotherapy.
00:57:39 ►
But what I’m trying to do is to interest people in all these different fields.
00:57:44 ►
You can do psychedelics as something to study as the history of psychedelics,
00:57:49 ►
or you can use psychedelics as a way to get ideas in your field
00:57:53 ►
and develop new paradigms in the field.
00:57:57 ►
Because when you go to different mind-body states,
00:58:00 ►
you’re using different cognitive processes
00:58:01 ►
so you can come up with ideas you couldn’t come up with before.
00:58:05 ►
You know, we’re running out of time.
00:58:08 ►
I’ve got one last question since you mentioned Aldous Huxley.
00:58:11 ►
And I’ll tell you ahead of time, it’s a loaded question, Tom.
00:58:15 ►
Being a lawyer, you know, I always argue both sides of every issue.
00:58:18 ►
And I can argue both sides of this one.
00:58:20 ►
But, you know, Aldous Huxley was known that he thought psychedelics should be a top-down thing with the intellectuals
00:58:27 ►
and artists and political leaders.
00:58:28 ►
And then Ken Kesey thought it should be the bottom-up thing.
00:58:33 ►
And I can see the benefits of both.
00:58:36 ►
I can argue both.
00:58:37 ►
Do you have any feelings one way or another about this?
00:58:41 ►
Yeah.
00:58:43 ►
If you look at the progress that has been made since particularly
00:58:47 ►
there was that first article at Johns Hopkins in 2006, all the progress that’s been made has been
00:58:53 ►
made within structures that exist now, basically medical schools. And I think that’s the way to go.
00:58:59 ►
That’s not exactly the elite thing, but what it means is that people who are providing psychedelics
00:59:05 ►
have a professional background, and they know how to handle situations, they know how to
00:59:10 ►
screen people, and so forth.
00:59:12 ►
And I think that’s the way to go.
00:59:14 ►
So I wouldn’t exactly call that an elite way of doing it, but I think we have to present
00:59:21 ►
psychedelics in a way that doesn’t scare people.
00:59:24 ►
And I think that the medical school model is the way to go.
00:59:27 ►
Now, what I’m wondering about is what happens when we move out of medicine
00:59:31 ►
into literature and philosophy and psychology.
00:59:35 ►
But I think that’s, we have to work at it.
00:59:39 ►
And people get used to things slowly.
00:59:41 ►
I mean, cultures don’t change overnight.
00:59:44 ►
But the changes have
00:59:46 ►
been made you know basically since 2006 they’ve just been enormous and people you know new new
00:59:52 ►
york times and new yorker and there’s michael pollan’s book that was a new york times bestseller
00:59:57 ►
i think that’s the the way to go to get people used to the idea little by little and i think i
01:00:03 ►
agree psychedelics are not for everyone i mean some people just should not do them or they should do them only you know
01:00:10 ►
in a program of a good psychotherapy with a psychotherapist who knows how to use them so
01:00:17 ►
i think i’m all for making progress as fast as we can but making it slow enough so it isn’t frightening to people or we
01:00:25 ►
don’t get too many people
01:00:27 ►
freaking out. That’s
01:00:29 ►
my concern about Denver and Oakland.
01:00:32 ►
I’m afraid that
01:00:33 ►
there may be some people there who will do
01:00:35 ►
mushrooms who shouldn’t be doing them and give
01:00:37 ►
the whole area a bad name.
01:00:40 ►
Yeah, that is a concern
01:00:42 ►
we’ve talked about here too and
01:00:43 ►
getting back to psychedelics seeping into the culture, in technology, for sure, we wouldn’t be having this conversation without LSD. The internet was invented and fueled by acid, you know. youngest grandchildren are now 11 and 14 but when they were preschool and their parents were working
01:01:05 ►
my wife and I took care of them during the day and I spent literally hundreds of hours watching
01:01:13 ►
these preschool cartoons and all and there there was one called booba that I could I’ve never tried
01:01:20 ►
to watch it on acid but I’m sure I would not be able to handle it. It was a full-on major acid trip.
01:01:27 ►
I mean, these are little three- and four-year-old kids seeing this.
01:01:31 ►
It’s seeping into our consciousness.
01:01:34 ►
And I think you hit the nail on the head with, like, the Buddhist middle way is that the medical model makes it feel a lot safer for everybody.
01:01:43 ►
And, you know, like most everybody here,
01:01:45 ►
I had a lot of trepidation before the first time I tried any of these things. And I have even more
01:01:51 ►
trepidation these days. But, you know, I think the more you learn about them, the more respect
01:01:56 ►
you have for them. And the work that you’ve been doing over all these years, you know,
01:02:02 ►
co-founding MAPS and the Council on Spiritual Practices and all of the
01:02:05 ►
books you’ve written and the courses you’ve done, tells me I can’t wait to get you back in the salon
01:02:10 ►
here. And I’m about two-thirds of the way through your book. I want to finish it and get you back
01:02:17 ►
in here and maybe with Jim Fadiman or somebody to talk about some of the more creative aspects of using these substances.
01:02:25 ►
It’s a very readable book.
01:02:27 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:02:28 ►
I started it on, I guess, Friday, and I’m doing a lot of other things,
01:02:33 ►
but I’m at least two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through it now.
01:02:36 ►
And the reason I probably haven’t gone faster is because you’ve given me
01:02:41 ►
so many trails to follow.
01:02:42 ►
I’m going out and I’m wearing out Wikipedia following out some of your leads.
01:02:46 ►
So I’d heard of things like Council Grove before,
01:02:50 ►
but you’ve added a lot of color to it for me
01:02:52 ►
and I appreciate that.
01:02:53 ►
Yeah.
01:02:54 ►
In closing, Tom, do you have any words
01:02:57 ►
that you’d like to leave us with here
01:02:58 ►
and until the next time you return?
01:03:01 ►
Well, you know, I’d like everybody
01:03:04 ►
just to keep on Harvard’s path.
01:03:05 ►
They’re going along.
01:03:08 ►
Follow whoever
01:03:09 ►
feels right for you. Go that way.
01:03:14 ►
There are all
01:03:15 ►
kinds of good books that are coming out.
01:03:17 ►
Oh, there’s one on Sid
01:03:19 ►
Gottlieb, the guy who ran
01:03:21 ►
MKUltra, called
01:03:23 ►
The Chief Poisoner.
01:03:25 ►
I just downloaded it, yes.
01:03:28 ►
There’s another book called Terrible Mistake that came out in 2009.
01:03:34 ►
Oh, I love it.
01:03:35 ►
Details of MKUltra in excruciating detail.
01:03:39 ►
And Gottlieb is, of course, the central figure in there too.
01:03:42 ►
But anybody interested in the history of psychedelics in the United States
01:03:46 ►
and the nefarious ways the government has worked on them
01:03:50 ►
definitely should read one or both of those books.
01:03:54 ►
Yeah, I hope people will, whatever their main interest in,
01:03:57 ►
will widen and look at the things that are adjacent to it.
01:04:02 ►
Because with psychedelics, you can go practically into it. What I find
01:04:06 ►
most interesting about psychedelics is that I’ve had to learn so many different kinds
01:04:09 ►
of things. And that’s one of the really fun things with it.
01:04:16 ►
Maybe it’s psychedelics all the way down.
01:04:18 ►
What’s the name of that cartoon, Booba?
01:04:22 ►
Booba. It’s no longer, you can find it on YouTube.
01:04:25 ►
B-O-O-B-A-H.
01:04:27 ►
I’ll go look for it.
01:04:29 ►
Watch it full screen after a few tokes
01:04:31 ►
and you won’t need
01:04:33 ►
any acid ever again.
01:04:35 ►
Oh.
01:04:37 ►
Well, listen everybody, thank you again for being here
01:04:39 ►
and until next week, keep the
01:04:41 ►
old faith and stay high.
01:04:44 ►
Thanks.
01:04:46 ►
Bye all.
01:04:47 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:04:55 ►
Well, before I close today, I want to let you know what I think that I figured out about when the first Bicycle Day celebration actually took place.
01:05:03 ►
about when the first bicycle day celebration actually took place.
01:05:10 ►
You know, we just heard Tom say that it was in 1983, 84, or 85, something like that.
01:05:17 ►
But according to Wikipedia, for what that’s worth, there it says it took place in 1985.
01:05:23 ►
So we just heard Tom say that since the 16th was in the middle of the week, he picked the 19th so that their little
01:05:25 ►
party could be held on a weekend. But he also said something else that I think solidifies the 1985 as
01:05:32 ►
being the year. If you recall, Tom said that he wanted the party to be held on a weekend,
01:05:38 ►
but April 19th in 1985 was on a Friday. It wasn’t until 1986 that it landed on a Saturday. But Tom said one other
01:05:46 ►
thing that was in kind of an offhand way about the 19th maybe was only close to the weekend.
01:05:54 ►
That, I think, would make it 1985. Well, I’m sure that eventually somebody who was at that very first
01:06:01 ►
Bicycle Day celebration that was held in DeKalb, Illinois, of all places,
01:06:06 ►
well, somebody’s going to hear this podcast
01:06:08 ►
and let us know for sure what year it was first held.
01:06:11 ►
But until then, I’m putting my money on 1985.
01:06:15 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:06:17 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:06:19 ►
Be well, my friends. you