Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Eric Cifani and Chris Grasso
The Morning After!Eric Cifani (right foreground)
Date this lecture was recorded: August 2019.
Today’s podcast features a Palenque Norte Lecture that was presented at Burning Man last August. This presentation was given by long-time friend and supporter of the salon, Eric Cifani. With Eric is Chris Grasso, who also happens to be an attorney. Their presentation brings together the values that shaped shamanism and today’s struggle for the freedom to explore our own consciousness without government interference. And I end the podcast with a few words of my own about the importance of shamanism in today’s technical world.
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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.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And today’s podcast features the first of the Palenque Norte lectures that were given at last year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:00:37 ►
Now, you may wonder why it’s taken so long for me to begin releasing these recordings, so I’m going to tell you.
00:00:42 ►
Now, if you don’t live here in the States, well, you may not get this joke,
00:00:45 ►
but when a young child fails to turn in their homework at school, they would sometimes say, the dog ate my homework. Well, I’m going to
00:00:52 ►
give you that excuse on steroids. You see, a tornado ate my recordings. Actually, they weren’t
00:01:00 ►
my recordings. They belonged to fellow salonner and longtime friend of the salon,
00:01:11 ►
Frank Nussio. Now, what happened was that after returning from the burn last year, and just as he was getting settled back into the default world, well, a tornado came through Dallas and
00:01:16 ►
wiped out a number of businesses, including his. And that was where the computer was that held the Planque Norte recordings from 2019.
00:01:26 ►
It took many weeks before FEMA would even let him back in to look through the rubble.
00:01:31 ►
But when he did, Frank found his computer and, well, it worked well enough for him to recover these recordings for us.
00:01:37 ►
So thanks a million, Frank.
00:01:40 ►
Without you, the 2019 Planque Norte lectures would have been lost forever.
00:01:44 ►
Without you, the 2019 Palenque Norte lectures would have been lost forever.
00:01:51 ►
And so today I’m going to begin playing some recordings from that lecture series.
00:01:58 ►
And the presentation I’m going to begin with today was given by my longtime friend and supporter of the salon, Eric Cifani.
00:02:05 ►
Along with Eric is Chris Grasso, who also happens to be a lawyer, like me,
00:02:08 ►
only much better and still active, I should add.
00:02:14 ►
Their presentation brings together the values that shaped shamanism,
00:02:20 ►
along with today’s struggle for the freedom to explore our own consciousness without government interference.
00:02:25 ►
And after their talk, I’ll end the podcast with a few words of my own about the importance of shamanism in today’s technical world. Now keep in mind that the
00:02:32 ►
Planque Norte lectures are given at Burning Man, and if you’ve ever been there, then well,
00:02:37 ►
you already know that there’s no escaping the constant sound of people, drums, and music in
00:02:42 ►
the background. So after a minute or so of listening to this talk, I’m sure your mind is
00:02:48 ►
going to most likely tune out the background noise. But hey,
00:02:52 ►
if you’ve been to a burn, this is going to bring back some nice memories.
00:02:57 ►
And hey, don’t be surprised when the first voice you hear
00:03:00 ►
right now is mine.
00:03:05 ►
I’m with you here today so that I can introduce my good friend, Eric Stefani, who has, well,
00:03:12 ►
Eric’s been involved with me in the psychedelic salon for many years.
00:03:16 ►
Now, hey, can you in the back see me okay?
00:03:19 ►
Oh, wait, right, I’m in the back, or is this the side?
00:03:22 ►
Or are you all so dazed and confused that you haven’t realized that my Irish humor just couldn’t resist pretending to actually be with you on the playa right now?
00:03:34 ►
Believe me, I really wish that I was there with you.
00:03:37 ►
But alas, I actually recorded this message a few days ago when I asked Eric if it would be okay if I introduced he and his friend
00:03:45 ►
Chris Grasso. As you probably know, Chris is a lawyer, as I am, so it’s really gratifying to know
00:03:52 ►
that as us older lawyers fade away, there’s a crop of younger ones who are a lot smarter than we were,
00:03:58 ►
so I think you’re going to be in good hands. As for Eric, or as I originally knew him, E-Rock X-1, we’ve been through some
00:04:08 ►
interesting times together, but one that I’ve never told him about was back when one of
00:04:14 ►
my granddaughters was only four years old. And at the time, Eric had just sent me some
00:04:19 ►
bookmarks that he printed. They had a psychedelic background, my picture, and a blurb about the psychedelic
00:04:25 ►
salon. Well, to make a long story short, one afternoon when I was with my little granddaughter
00:04:33 ►
at the park, I noticed her handing out something to her playmates, and she was passing out
00:04:39 ►
promos for the salon to her little friends. Needless to say, I quickly retrieved them from the
00:04:45 ►
kids before their mothers could
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discover who this guy was that was among them.
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It was
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a close call, but it remains
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one of my fondest memories of that little
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girl who, well, she begins
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high school next month. So,
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Eric, thank you for that, too.
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As you see, my
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connections with Eric are many and varied.
00:05:06 ►
And he’s been a great friend for many years,
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and now we get to listen to him here in the playa,
00:05:11 ►
live at the Wanky Norty Lectures.
00:05:13 ►
It’s all yours, Eric and Chris, so take it away.
00:05:23 ►
So that was a message from my friend Lorenzo.
00:05:26 ►
I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the Psychedelic Salon podcast,
00:05:30 ►
but it’s been going on since around 2003,
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and I wanted to pay a little tribute to the founders of Plank Day.
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And I don’t know how many of you are aware,
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but Plank Day actually started in 1994 in the Yucatan jungle with four guys.
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One, Terrence McKenna, Ken Simonton, Jonathan Ott, and one of my teachers, Rob Montgomery.
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And they did that for 10 years.
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And so Ken’s over 90 now.
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And Lorenzo decided to pack the thing up
00:06:06 ►
and bring it to Burning Man in 2003,
00:06:09 ►
and so this is a long tradition,
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and it’s meaningful for me
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because 1994 was sort of when I began
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embarking on this seriously,
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and so it’s a very special group of people who’ve been doing this for about 27 years.
00:06:32 ►
I just want to take a moment to recognize those folks.
00:06:37 ►
And so our talk today is on shamanism and cognitive liberty. And I actually met this guy, Trailblazer,
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giving a talk on shamanism about five years ago or so.
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And a young kid who seemed to know what he was talking about.
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And then he was a criminal defense attorney.
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And he and I have been close friends ever since.
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So as my teachers led to me coming here I am really honored to bring him and
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carry this torch forward as it’s gone for millennia. So what is shamanism and why is it important? Shamanism is an archaic practice that’s gone on longer than reported history.
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And it’s a means of direct religious experience for all sorts of purposes, healing, prognostication,
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insight.
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In the jungle, I spent some time in the jungle
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with one of the founders of Pony Day,
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who’s Rob Montgomery.
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And I had, I guess it’d be easy for me to tell you
00:07:59 ►
why shamanism is meaningful in my life.
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It’s a transformative tool.
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shamanism is meaningful in my life. It’s a transformative tool and I was born in the orphanage in East Los Angeles during the height of the gang-banging drug
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epidemic to my mother who’s 15 years older than me and I grew up in drug houses and all kinds of violence and craziness.
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I stumbled onto this thing in a way,
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and I immediately knew that’s where I wanted to put my energy.
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From dance, I was doing visuals and laser projections and graphic designs for parties and digitizing DJ Rave mixtapes.
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I had the good fortune of meeting Timothy Leary at one of these events,
00:08:52 ►
who later connected asking me what I charged to bring all my stuff.
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I said I’d do it for free and I began
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digitizing a lot of
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academic
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lectures on the subject
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and many of those are on the
00:09:12 ►
Psychedelics of Modern Podcast
00:09:14 ►
and
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so it’s been a long strange
00:09:21 ►
trip from where I started
00:09:22 ►
up into the deep Amazon basin, about
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350 miles past Iquitos, where I also had the good fortune of being part of a multidisciplinary
00:09:36 ►
expedition who made contact with an isolated band of indigenous people named the Mastis.
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contact with an isolated band of indigenous people named the Mastis. And when I met Burning Man, I often think of these guys because they never absorbed
00:09:54 ►
or assimilated into culture.
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They maintained their authentic selves as their ancestors had done since forever. And I think Burning Man, when I met these people,
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I was astonished at how free they were.
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I mean, truly free.
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And when I come to Burning Man,
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it’s sort of an archaic revival
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where we drop out of culture for a week and live as free people where we’re not
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paying bills and punching the clock and doing all these things that we do to survive.
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And it sort of reminds me of that.
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And so this tradition of shamanism is a long process and it’s been great to watch it evolve into what it has been.
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It’s now a recognized, legitimate science that even the FDA and DEA recognize.
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So that’s a little about myself,
00:11:00 ►
and I’d like to hand this over to Chris for a moment
00:11:04 ►
because he has some interesting sites that I’d like for hand this over to Chris for a moment, because he has some interesting
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insights that I’d like for you all to hear.
00:11:09 ►
I feel like I need to stand up for this.
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First of all, it’s an honor to be here, and I’ll make this portion short.
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Honor to be here speaking next to my good friend Eric.
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Honor to speak right after a very inspirational figure in this world here, Rick Doblin.
00:11:24 ►
And so, with that being said, he spoke a little bit about Burning Man.
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He spoke a little bit about a cultural programming that’s changed.
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And I want to speak about a theater of perception.
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I want to speak about lenses.
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I want to speak about hallways of mind, programming of neural imprints in your brain.
00:11:44 ►
And so that’s what we’re talking about here.
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For example, like at Burning Man, you have a little bit of a dissolving of social imprints.
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And similarly, I think a really good friend of mine, Space Cowboy over there,
00:11:57 ►
came up with a very good weird riff on this last night.
00:12:00 ►
He says, you know, it’s sort of like you disconnect all the nodes and watch how they reconnect
00:12:03 ►
in a more way from the bottom up. And that’s sort of what we’re talking about nodes and watch how they reconnect in a more way from the bottom up.
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And that’s sort of what we’re talking about here.
00:12:07 ►
At Burning Man, it has to do with the ten principles.
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We slowly, you know, change the way we interact, change the way we see ourselves, change the way we see others, change the way we see community.
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And so that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about chemical lenses, changing perception.
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We’re talking about what could be described as operating systems.
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we’re talking about what could be described as operating systems and I know that’s just using our technical you know modern language to describe it but I like it you know some of us run
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old operating systems some of us run mac os some of us run windows xp and sometimes using a lens
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a lens shifting experience of some sort can shift us from one operating system to the other.
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Maybe one step to the left, one step to the right.
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And so, you know, Ruth, I want to talk a little bit more expansively.
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When we think about, like, you know, the nature of perception, consciousness,
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you know, how beings in this world that we know about, you know,
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can information process the variables around them and react
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according to their beings.
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When you start with small genetic forms,
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like for example, pre-Cambrian soup-like things,
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their very genetic material seems
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to propel them towards, for example, sugars
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in their environment or something like that.
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But as far as complex egos, complex forms of culture
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that can support the type of operating system to run as a 21st century human, we’re talking about something different.
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From there, you go to, for example, let’s go all the way down the biology chain to whatever, like a dog or a mammal.
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You have experiential learning, where now you have Pavlovian-like programming.
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Pavlov being a psychologist in the 20th century who pioneered behaviorism which means
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basically you have like a in his classic experiment really briefly in a nutshell
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you have like a dog who gets conditioned to salivate the stimulus of a bell and
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then eventually they feed him with the bell if you do with the bell they feed
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him with the bell they take away the food and then just the bell creates the
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salivation of their mouth so so with that, you can program into neural imprinting
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and behaviorism in that way, and experiential learning.
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But human beings take it one level further.
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There’s like an abstract programming that happens.
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There’s a cultural hijack of the mind.
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This process from the first man pointing out a lion
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and going, ooh, or whatever it might be that type of cultural hijack begins to
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program our minds at an abstract level and suddenly we get theaters of
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perception these corridors of mind you ever walked out of like a movie like a
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double of seven movie and you’re kind of like a spy a little bit you know you
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know like that type of thing you still got that theater of mind sort of you know you use you like walk out of the, you’ve still got that theater of mind.
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You know, you walk into the movie theater and you still feel it.
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So I’m talking about, in other words, a change of lens.
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And so how does language and symbol use and cultural programming change our perception?
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It’s a spilling of colored lenses upon the mind.
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It’s sort of like I said, it’s a hijack of the brain.
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And so with that, I want to go directly to plant chemicals and use of a purposeful, individual lens-changing experience.
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And I want to speak about indigenous use at least first,
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but with that, I think Eric might have a comment on indigenous use. So thinking back at my
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time in the jungle working with indigenous shaman all sorts of purposes, but the person I generally regard as my shaman
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was a man named Uido.
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And he was kidnapped as a child by the Mastis.
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He was actually a Uitoto.
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And a doctor on our expedition said he displayed signs of untreated meningitis.
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He didn’t see very well, he didn’t hear very well, he couldn’t speak very well,
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he didn’t move very well, and he suffered from violent epileptic seizures.
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And his adopted father told him he had a gift.
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And his gift was that he had one foot in this world
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and one foot in the world of the ancestors.
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And I think what a different experience
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for a young person in our culture
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who may have a disability or perceived disability. We must fix you.
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There’s something wrong with you. You can’t quite keep up with everyone else. But to tell
00:16:57 ►
them that they have a gift and you can learn how to use this gift, and I’ll teach you how to use this gift, and you could be of service to a community.
00:17:08 ►
I sure wish that we had something like that here.
00:17:15 ►
Coming here to Burning Man, where it’s dusty and dry,
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I mean, everything there is alive,
00:17:21 ►
and it feels, for me me very much like home.
00:17:26 ►
And if you have any interest in ever going,
00:17:28 ►
I highly recommend it.
00:17:30 ►
It will certainly change your life for the better.
00:17:42 ►
All right.
00:17:43 ►
So, you know, I spoke very,
00:17:46 ►
with a lot of different concepts
00:17:47 ►
about being able to change your perception,
00:17:49 ►
and it’s kind of a weird thing
00:17:50 ►
because, you know, we have these hardwired neurons.
00:17:52 ►
I want to go more specifically
00:17:54 ►
to how this can practically change
00:17:56 ►
an individual’s consciousness
00:17:58 ►
or social consciousness at large.
00:18:00 ►
So when we talk about, like, indigenous use,
00:18:03 ►
imagine yourself, like Eric’s saying,
00:18:04 ►
go visit one of these tribes out there.
00:18:07 ►
And you say, oh, you know, I got a cut on my leg.
00:18:10 ►
Do you have any neosporin?
00:18:11 ►
Oh, you better bet they don’t have any neosporin, but they’ve got this plant over here.
00:18:15 ►
You just take a little bit of that, put it on there.
00:18:17 ►
Oh, okay, all right.
00:18:18 ►
Well, actually, I ate something bad, and it really messed up my stomach.
00:18:22 ►
Do you got something for that?
00:18:23 ►
Oh, you better believe it. Their relationship with the plant kingdom
00:18:25 ►
is so
00:18:26 ►
well-tuned
00:18:30 ►
that they have this type
00:18:32 ►
of connection. So you’re telling me
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that the neocortex,
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the real focus of the
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catalyst of what it is to be a
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human, what it is to evolve culture on the level
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that we’ve done it, evolve thinking and consciousness
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on the level that we’ve done it, we’re not going to have an intimate connection with the plant kingdom at the neocortex level
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i would suggest that’s the most essential connection that we have with the plant kingdom
00:18:52 ►
and and traditionally it’s been a major catalyst in evolving culture all up from the indigenous
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tribes and so what are we talking about we’re talking about thinking about thinking we’re
00:19:01 ►
talking about metacognition it’s kind of like you’re going to the eye doctor and you’re sitting there at the eye doctor with a lens thing.
00:19:07 ►
Is this better or is that better?
00:19:09 ►
Sometimes you have to shift back.
00:19:09 ►
Oh, let me see the other one.
00:19:11 ►
Okay, but what if you were controlling it yourself?
00:19:13 ►
What if you had the ability no longer just to be the subject
00:19:16 ►
of the cultural imprints that are hitting you
00:19:18 ►
and the way that you’ve experienced the world
00:19:19 ►
and the habitual corridors of your mind
00:19:21 ►
that have formed once you perceive reality?
00:19:24 ►
And you could take that and you’re at the eye doctor yourself,
00:19:26 ►
and you’re going, you know, turn the thing yourself.
00:19:30 ►
There’s something about that,
00:19:32 ►
an individual’s sovereignty over his or her own mind
00:19:37 ►
that is not only powerful, but I’d say a catalyst for the evolution of consciousness.
00:19:42 ►
And so I would say that a lot of our human success over time has
00:19:45 ►
focused on this ability to be able to think
00:19:48 ►
in new ways. And then we come up with things
00:19:50 ►
like, for example,
00:19:52 ►
I don’t know word for word, but the Einstein
00:19:54 ►
quote, we can’t solve yesterday’s
00:19:56 ►
or we can’t solve tomorrow’s problems with
00:19:58 ►
yesterday’s forms of thinking. We sort
00:20:00 ►
of need to stare at the night sky and
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say, oh,
00:20:03 ►
those are distant fires the night
00:20:05 ►
sky has been staring at us this whole time but it’s taken you know many different shifts of
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lens to understand in a way and scratching at what’s out there and so the same energetic reality
00:20:15 ►
has been necessarily facing us the entire time and our task as we move into the chaos of the 21st
00:20:20 ►
century is to figure out new ways to wrap our minds around it and so taking an ability to
00:20:25 ►
go to be at that eye doctor and take it upon yourself to change your own lens whether it’s
00:20:30 ►
chemically through something like what we talked about rick doblin was just talking about the
00:20:34 ►
decriminalization of psilocybin that’s going on that’s currently experienced in denver the initiate
00:20:38 ►
that’s going to go on in 2020 in oregon these things are happening right now um and and these
00:20:43 ►
are these are tools that people are using right now.
00:20:46 ►
And before I turn it over once more, I just
00:20:48 ►
want to suggest that in my mind,
00:20:50 ►
in the 21st century, if not
00:20:52 ►
sooner rather than later, we’re going to have the
00:20:54 ►
ability to have a technological shift
00:20:56 ►
of mind that’s much more precise than
00:20:58 ►
the wide swath of effects that you might get from
00:21:00 ►
your favorite
00:21:01 ►
mind-altering chemical like cannabis or something
00:21:04 ►
like that. There might be some effects that you enjoy from that,
00:21:06 ►
and there might be some effects that don’t serve you as well.
00:21:08 ►
But I have a strong belief that things like Elon Musk, Neuralink, and stuff like that,
00:21:12 ►
we’re going to have the ability to shift our lens non-invasively through technology.
00:21:16 ►
And so this conversation is much grander than just using humanity’s oldest form of changing our minds
00:21:24 ►
and catalyzing our minds, which are plant chemicals.
00:21:28 ►
I recently had a recreational psilocybin experience.
00:21:34 ►
Right.
00:21:41 ►
And I found myself wishing that I was in a more ceremonial setting.
00:21:50 ►
I wanted to start doing the work, and that’s what shamanism is, it’s work.
00:21:57 ►
It’s one thing to see pretty lights and visual distortions,
00:22:04 ►
but it’s another thing to actually try and cope
00:22:08 ►
something out of it.
00:22:10 ►
And many people fear a quote-unquote bad trip, and I maintain that that’s where you yield the most rewarding work.
00:22:26 ►
Because our culture tends to want to amuse ourselves to death
00:22:31 ►
by focusing on meaningless distractions,
00:22:36 ►
watching other people live their lives on TV.
00:22:41 ►
And what a name of shamanism is is to look within
00:22:45 ►
so most indigenous traditional shamanic ceremonies
00:22:50 ►
are almost always in total darkness
00:22:51 ►
in a circle
00:22:54 ►
where you set an intention
00:22:56 ►
and you observe
00:22:59 ►
and you experience
00:23:02 ►
and then you process
00:23:04 ►
and then you integrate and then you integrate.
00:23:07 ►
And so I’d like to encourage everybody,
00:23:10 ►
if you’re not doing that,
00:23:12 ►
to look into it a little bit
00:23:13 ►
because we tend to not want to look at the things
00:23:18 ►
that we don’t like, especially about ourselves.
00:23:22 ►
that we don’t like, especially about ourselves.
00:23:31 ►
And I think disassociating with nature,
00:23:32 ►
living in artificial environments,
00:23:36 ►
has really done ourselves a disservice.
00:23:45 ►
So instead of begging to not have a bad trip in a safe setting
00:23:47 ►
embrace it
00:23:51 ►
and see what it has to tell you
00:23:54 ►
about yourself
00:23:55 ►
because there are things that
00:23:58 ►
we repress or we don’t want
00:24:00 ►
to think about
00:24:01 ►
that manifest in our lives
00:24:04 ►
in other ways, whether it be
00:24:06 ►
a dis-ease, or anxiety, or depression, or addiction. These things come from somewhere,
00:24:15 ►
and that somewhere is some place deep inside of you, a trauma that you may be trying to forget.
00:24:26 ►
And I’ve talked to people who think they have no traumas.
00:24:32 ►
This mystery of life is one thing that every single one of us absolutely share,
00:24:40 ►
is we’re all born to die.
00:24:43 ►
And we don’t know where we go after and a big piece of human
00:24:50 ►
i don’t want to say mythology but i’ll say mythology you know if you do these things and you
00:24:58 ►
you’ll go to the clouds of the sky
00:25:00 ►
it’s okay to be a mystery and not know. I think that’s a big part of this
00:25:08 ►
experience of wars.
00:25:27 ►
That does not mean that we’ve somehow managed to escape these things.
00:25:32 ►
They still live.
00:25:33 ►
So even if it’s only coming to terms with your own mortality,
00:25:37 ►
my shaman would call, I had an experience where I was torn apart by jaguars.
00:25:47 ►
Numerous times.
00:25:49 ►
And pulling my body apart.
00:25:52 ►
And I was this wounded creature in the middle of a maloca.
00:25:56 ►
And this fucked up psychedelic lion king, simple wife thing.
00:26:01 ►
I was eaten by a cat and I became the cat and I was eaten by the cat
00:26:05 ►
all right I got the message I had not escaped the circle of life even though we managed to hunt
00:26:12 ►
anything above us off the food chain into extinction we still have to come to terms with
00:26:19 ►
that so try setting an intention and observe and don’t evade.
00:26:26 ►
Pay attention and then have a solid plan to integrate and assimilate what you’ve experienced.
00:26:34 ►
And I’ve seen people make the most significant changes in their lives, myself included.
00:26:50 ►
included. So I encourage you to not look away. Pay attention, especially to ourselves.
00:26:56 ►
I’ve been speaking a lot in like philosophical generalities, and I dig the fact that Eric’s bringing up these personal tools for practical use. I want to focus my talk a little bit more,
00:27:03 ►
but I want to remind you again, what we’re talking about here, you know, even using the term ego
00:27:08 ►
and some sort of habitual perceptual tubes that, you know, reality runs through your sensorium
00:27:13 ►
and into your, you know, cognition and default mode network.
00:27:17 ►
That is being changed.
00:27:19 ►
You can tell, like classically said in these type of cultures, dissolving ego, lens shifting,
00:27:23 ►
changing the format of perceptions. Okay, now that we’re back here at this sufficiently general spot,
00:27:30 ►
let’s talk about, for example, the First Amendment. We live in a country where we have the First
00:27:34 ►
Amendment here. And what’s really the First Amendment about? Is it, for example, freedom
00:27:39 ►
of assembly? I can get together with anybody I’d like to and give them a hug and that type
00:27:44 ►
of thing. Is it that type of thing?
00:27:45 ►
Is it about freedom of speech?
00:27:47 ►
Like I can say whatever the hell I want
00:27:49 ►
even if it’s not correct or factually correct
00:27:51 ►
or whatever you want to say.
00:27:53 ►
Is it about freedom of religion?
00:27:55 ►
Just to say I believe in any random,
00:27:57 ►
whacked out thing so you can’t tell me anything about that.
00:28:00 ►
I’d say it points to something deeper.
00:28:01 ►
All these things are surface level understandings.
00:28:04 ►
It points to something deeper to say that we have an ability to express their conscience or what means
00:28:25 ►
what what means most to them in this reality the way they perceive this chaos of energetic reality
00:28:30 ►
because remember like terence mckenna says reality is stranger than we can suppose and our best way
00:28:37 ►
to march into this 21st century of ai and all this bunch of crazy stuff that we’re going to run into
00:28:42 ►
when we do this global project of becoming a global culture here on Earth
00:28:46 ►
is to have as many different channels of thought available to us as possible.
00:28:52 ►
If you’re going to assemble a group,
00:28:54 ►
oh, I’m assembling a team to go to Mars or whatever it may be,
00:28:57 ►
you better not assemble it as all white men or something like that.
00:29:00 ►
It better be a group of culturally diverse men, women, everything in between,
00:29:05 ►
because that’s going to be your most powerful group. That’s going to be the group that has
00:29:08 ►
the ability to perceive the chaos of energetic reality from as many different angles as possible
00:29:12 ►
and amalgamate it into a whole that we can be integrated and used in the new level of cultural
00:29:17 ►
programming. And so that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about First Amendment
00:29:21 ►
engine and democracy. And that, I believe, should fuel the idea that over your own mind, you are sovereign.
00:29:30 ►
And that’s, again, pointing directly to the interconnection between the First Amendment and democracy.
00:29:36 ►
And how does that affect us?
00:29:37 ►
How does that go into what we’re saying here if it wasn’t clear enough um you know you’re you if you have again the cookie cultural
00:29:47 ►
model of a person inputting their you know literal vote or their set of you know even their words
00:29:52 ►
they use and enter into just the marketplace of ideas in general you know colloquial talk just
00:29:56 ►
from person to person if it’s the same cookie cutter model we’re going to get you know channels
00:30:01 ►
of thought that that equal certain ends that that are not necessarily
00:30:05 ►
you know from the ground up of all our possible perceptions but rather fed to us from the top
00:30:10 ►
down and we take it whole cloth and so you know we need to dissolve that and that’s a common word
00:30:16 ►
in this area too dissolving those imprints in order to let like space cowboy says have their
00:30:22 ►
the connections you know disconnect and then reconnect themselves from
00:30:25 ►
like a ground up kind of way. And so I’d really like to speak very briefly on, for example,
00:30:32 ►
like spiritually, this is just me sort of throwing out some conjecture, but you have this default
00:30:36 ►
mode network, you have this set of perceptions that you and your hundred billion neuron specific
00:30:43 ►
snowflake imprinting and all the energy that gets
00:30:46 ►
channeled through this long mess of tangles
00:30:48 ►
that is your brain
00:30:49 ►
and those perceptions
00:30:52 ►
create certain notions of reality
00:30:53 ►
one thing that I would suggest about
00:30:56 ►
spiritual use is not only that it
00:30:58 ►
connects you with your subconscious
00:31:00 ►
in the sense that no longer is your brain
00:31:02 ►
being fed from
00:31:04 ►
like I said this default mode network,
00:31:06 ►
but you get echoes from disparate parts of your brain that are not normally connected.
00:31:12 ►
And I’d say that’s touching on the subconscious.
00:31:13 ►
But also I have this feeling that there’s this baseline conscious energy.
00:31:18 ►
We talked about it, and the last few speakers, wonderful speakers,
00:31:21 ►
talked a little bit about having this resounding feeling that we’re all connected.
00:31:26 ►
And that just sounds like another,
00:31:28 ►
maybe to the wrong, maybe not to anybody here,
00:31:30 ►
but maybe in a normal group,
00:31:32 ►
that’s sort of an inanity of the countercultural movement
00:31:34 ►
from the 60s.
00:31:35 ►
Oh, everyone’s one, we’re all together.
00:31:38 ►
But what I’m scratching at here is that
00:31:40 ►
it’s also the sense that our imprinting,
00:31:43 ►
our neuronal programming,
00:31:44 ►
creates the necessary
00:31:46 ►
cultural estrangement to make us fluid as citizens, as consumers, as whatever it may
00:31:50 ►
be.
00:31:51 ►
And even if you’re a tribesman, even your own tribe back in the day programmed you to
00:31:55 ►
a certain extent to cut up the world away from the baseline conscious energy.
00:32:00 ►
And so not only is there a connection to subconscious, but you’re often forging sort of new purposeful connections that really, I think, will rather, let me step back and just say, the subconscious and this feeling of like connecting to a baseline conscious energy, or in other words, peeling away the onion as feasibly much as you can and sort of connect to baseline conscious energy.
00:32:21 ►
With that, I’ll turn it over.
00:32:21 ►
and sort of connect it based on consciousness.
00:32:22 ►
With that, I’ll turn it over.
00:32:27 ►
So in my shamanic practice,
00:32:31 ►
besides confronting that we all give up the ghost,
00:32:39 ►
I think everybody has had their heart broken.
00:32:50 ►
They’ve been wounded emotionally in some way. And so we shut ourselves off to not be subjected to that pain.
00:32:56 ►
And in the process, we just create more pain.
00:33:02 ►
And after my last ceremony, I had wrote a little something.
00:33:05 ►
If that’s okay with you, I’d like to share.
00:33:06 ►
Yeah.
00:33:13 ►
Pain and heartbreak are essential to the human experience.
00:33:16 ►
While they may cause temporary suffering,
00:33:20 ►
there lies within an opportunity to learn a valuable lesson that abuse wisely forces us to evolve into a new state of being.
00:33:26 ►
Over the long term, only a modicum of positive results are ever achieved
00:33:31 ►
driven by anger, fear, hurt, and frustration.
00:33:34 ►
When we are no longer able to change the situation,
00:33:38 ►
we are challenged to change ourselves.
00:33:42 ►
Between every sensation, emotion, and thought there is a space.
00:33:47 ►
And in that space is the power to choose our response. Every decision and action we make
00:33:53 ►
co-creates the reality in which we inhabit. This is the key to manifesting the life we truly desire,
00:34:01 ►
deserve, right now, right here, within our reach, if only we have
00:34:06 ►
the courage to grasp it.
00:34:08 ►
One of my cherished friends and mentors once said, nature loves courage.
00:34:15 ►
You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible
00:34:20 ►
obstacles.
00:34:21 ►
Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you. It’ll lift
00:34:26 ►
you up. This is what many great teachers, gurus, and philosophers who really
00:34:31 ►
counted, who really touched alchemical gold, those who pierced the veil between
00:34:36 ►
us and the divine, this is what they understood. This is how magic is done. For
00:34:43 ►
when it’s all over, all that defines us are those magical
00:34:46 ►
moments that made us feel alive. This is the truth said in this psalm by so many poets,
00:34:52 ►
and proclaimed as the ultimate wisdom of many thinkers. The truth is, love is the highest
00:34:57 ►
goal we could inspire. Love is the opium that genuinely comforts the pain of life.
00:35:07 ►
is the opium that genuinely comforts the pain of life. The shaman’s song, the baptism, the rebirth, the new, the enlightened state of nirvana, the absolute apex of consciousness.
00:35:14 ►
Our time is far too precious for it to exist in any state other than total and unconditional
00:35:21 ►
love. The salvation of humanity is through love and in love.
00:35:26 ►
Open your hearts.
00:35:28 ►
Live in love.
00:35:29 ►
Let our final breath not be
00:35:31 ►
filled with fear and regret,
00:35:33 ►
but in our final exhalation,
00:35:36 ►
the moment before we join the ancestors,
00:35:39 ►
let us proclaim
00:35:40 ►
with absolute surety
00:35:41 ►
and sincerity,
00:35:42 ►
I am unconditional love.
00:35:56 ►
I did have just a couple more points.
00:35:58 ►
I mean, I’m kind of scratching over the same thing,
00:36:00 ►
but let me summarize by saying
00:36:01 ►
we recognize that freedom itself
00:36:04 ►
is fueled by the ability to call upon the same thing, but let me summarize by saying we recognize that freedom itself is
00:36:05 ►
fueled by the ability to call upon
00:36:07 ►
a more full spectrum of thought.
00:36:11 ►
And so
00:36:11 ►
is this happening today?
00:36:13 ►
We already talked a little bit about the decriminalization movement,
00:36:16 ►
but one thing I didn’t mention is that Oakland
00:36:17 ►
recently, with
00:36:20 ►
the city council, had passed
00:36:21 ►
a bill talking about entheogenic plants
00:36:24 ►
saying that, for example, I just wanted council, I passed a bill talking about entheogenic plants, saying that, for example, I hate the exact quote,
00:36:29 ►
but agenda report from council member Noel Gallo says,
00:36:32 ►
and this is just mind-blowing to me that this was spoken,
00:36:35 ►
for millennia, cultures have respected entheogenic plants and fungi
00:36:39 ►
for providing healing, knowledge, creativity, and spiritual connection.
00:36:42 ►
So the tide is rising.
00:36:44 ►
I would suggest that the tide is rising.
00:36:48 ►
It is.
00:36:51 ►
I was also momentarily in POW and on drugs
00:36:55 ►
and over something ridiculous like a small quantity of cannabis
00:36:59 ►
and a couple of pieces of paper.
00:37:03 ►
And to see all the progress that’s been made,
00:37:05 ►
I never thought I’d see the day.
00:37:09 ►
And folks like Rick, Betty, and Mitch
00:37:13 ►
are doing incredible…
00:37:16 ►
When Rick got into this,
00:37:19 ►
who would have thought
00:37:22 ►
that it would be possible for the FDA, DEA,
00:37:27 ►
to approve clinical trials that are so successful
00:37:30 ►
that even the Department of Defense is using it to treat PTSD for victims of war,
00:37:39 ►
victims of rape and violence and end-of-life anxiety.
00:37:44 ►
And so it’s very encouraging.
00:37:47 ►
And if you find a movement, I believe they mentioned a few.
00:37:57 ►
We just mentioned Denver.
00:38:00 ►
There was a guy in Iowa who put out, yeah, I mean, it’s happening.
00:38:05 ►
The Farm Bill CBD is also a mentionable one where, you know, last year the Farm Bill in 2018 got passed.
00:38:11 ►
And although CBD is widely considered not psychoactive, you know, I would suggest that the, whatever it’s called,
00:38:19 ►
the mycerine and the limonene and all that type of stuff are still present there.
00:38:23 ►
And so it’s at least, know progress on that that front but also um i guess the only other thing mentionable recently was
00:38:30 ►
in early 2019 an iowa republican senator republican uh jeff shipley said uh uh he
00:38:37 ►
introduced two bills removing psilocybin from the control substances act there and legalizing
00:38:43 ►
them for med use or medical use.
00:38:45 ►
I don’t think it’s gone anywhere, but nonetheless, you know,
00:38:48 ►
it’s things that are happening other than Oakland, Denver, Oregon, like we mentioned,
00:38:52 ►
and then the federal bill, that’s happening.
00:38:56 ►
And then just even though it’s really not my area,
00:38:58 ►
I just want to make one more comment there you were talking about, you know,
00:39:01 ►
and I want to make more explicit my point when you’re dealing with things like ptsd or anxiety you have a a programming that’s running a certain program
00:39:10 ►
and that maybe the person cannot see beyond and then it’s intervention like great things like
00:39:15 ►
rick dobbins doing and stuff like that that allows them to see beyond that to break the
00:39:20 ►
perceptual corridors that had normally hemmed them in and be able to see themselves or the situation from a new light.
00:39:26 ►
And so there we go. I’m just tying it back into the shifting of lens, being back at the eye doctor yourself.
00:39:33 ►
We get trapped in the boundaries that we create in our minds to make us feel safe and in control.
00:39:56 ►
Perturbing your consciousness to view things from an alternate perspective outside of your normal biases and prejudices and habits could be a rewarding experience. I’m sure all of you know that. with the legality issues
00:40:05 ►
seeing all the progress
00:40:06 ►
as Terrence McKenna said
00:40:09 ►
if the words life, liberty
00:40:11 ►
and the pursuit of happiness
00:40:13 ►
do not include the right to use your own body
00:40:15 ►
as you see fit
00:40:16 ►
the Declaration of Independence isn’t worth
00:40:19 ►
the hemp it’s written on
00:40:21 ►
I really appreciate everyone coming out,
00:40:25 ►
and I really hope you guys have a really awesome
00:40:27 ►
rest of your burn.
00:40:30 ►
And, uh…
00:40:31 ►
Thank you. We appreciate your time
00:40:36 ►
and your attention. Thank you.
00:40:38 ►
Thank you.
00:40:43 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:40:45 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:40:51 ►
In closing, I’d like to add a few of my own thoughts
00:40:54 ►
about the importance of shamanism in today’s modern world,
00:40:58 ►
a world that is flooded in technology.
00:41:01 ►
Almost 20 years ago, I published a book titled
00:41:04 ►
The Spirit of the Internet,
00:41:06 ►
Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness. It came out about 10 years or so
00:41:12 ►
before the iPhone was first marketed, yet thanks to the many contacts that I had in Silicon Valley
00:41:18 ►
at the time, I had some good ideas about where the R&D money in those high-tech firms was being spent.
00:41:24 ►
I had some good ideas about where the R&D money in those high-tech firms was being spent.
00:41:32 ►
And from that, I extrapolated some ideas about the evolution of our species into a, well, a new form of being,
00:41:35 ►
one that many of us are calling homo-cyber.
00:41:42 ►
And I still see homo-cyber as the logical evolutionary step from our current state of homo faber. Obviously, these are cultural terms,
00:41:46 ►
and aren’t intended to signify any biological differences
00:41:49 ►
in what scientists call homo sapiens sapiens.
00:41:53 ►
Now, we human toolmakers are evolving into beings
00:41:56 ►
who are part biological and part cyborg.
00:42:00 ►
Perhaps we should call these new shamans who arise under these conditions
00:42:03 ►
to be homo cyberdelics, but I digress.
00:42:08 ►
Right now I’m going to read an abridged ending to the spirit of the internet,
00:42:12 ►
and if you want to read the unabridged version, all of my books are available for free at LorenzoHaggerty.com.
00:42:20 ►
Now, as I read to you, I suggest that you consider the fact that you have already begun your transformation into homo-cyber.
00:42:29 ►
Evidence for this is my hunch that it’s been a long time since you have gone a week without your trusty phone at your side.
00:42:36 ►
In fact, I’ll bet it’s been a while since you’ve even gone a single day without that digital limb in your pocket.
00:42:43 ►
Our species is in some kind of a major shift in our approach to the world and to one another.
00:42:50 ►
Like it or not, you are an early example of this new form of human.
00:42:55 ►
My point is that just as humans once used plant medicines to tame their jungle surroundings,
00:43:01 ►
today’s shamans are using plant medicines to tame the technology
00:43:05 ►
that is rapidly taking over our lives.
00:43:08 ►
And once again, it is the medicine men and women, the shamans, who are helping us tame
00:43:13 ►
this new jungle.
00:43:15 ►
Now, here are a few thoughts from the closing chapter of The Spirit of the Internet, which
00:43:20 ►
was written in 1999 and published in the summer of the year 2000.
00:43:24 ►
which was written in 1999 and published in the summer of the year 2000.
00:43:31 ►
Of course, we are faced with the possibility that consciousness may eventually reach a pinnacle of its ability to evolve solely within the biological structure of a human organism.
00:43:37 ►
In the terminology of chaos theory,
00:43:40 ►
this potential evolutionary dead end can be described as what happens when human consciousness becomes stuck in a
00:43:48 ►
less than optimal basin of attraction.
00:43:51 ►
The time may be close at hand, however,
00:43:54 ►
when the gift of self-reflection becomes embedded in a larger structure,
00:43:58 ►
one that embraces the entire human species.
00:44:01 ►
How else are we going to rise above the narrow-minded thinking that
00:44:06 ►
results in wars and massive ecological destruction? Viewed from a planetary perspective,
00:44:13 ►
it appears that the natural evolution of the human species has run into some kind of invisible
00:44:18 ►
barrier, unable to overcome the demands of our individual egos. It is now up to consciousness itself to
00:44:26 ►
take control of the evolution of our species and oversee our transition from toolmaker,
00:44:32 ►
homo faber, into a new form of being that becomes virtually inseparable from the technology it
00:44:38 ►
creates, homo cyber. As shamans and psychonauts the world over will tell you, the realm of existence in which
00:44:47 ►
Gaian consciousness operates contains measureless treasures of mind. A deep love for the earth and
00:44:54 ►
concern for its biosphere are actually the result of entering into the state of full Gaian awareness
00:45:00 ►
that is to be found in entheospace. Picture a world in which the distinctions between cyberspace
00:45:08 ►
and what we now consider to be consensual reality begin to blur.
00:45:13 ►
No longer would it be fashionable to say one is in cyberspace.
00:45:18 ►
Instead, each of us will bring part of cyberspace with us into the material world.
00:45:23 ►
Over time, our cognitive distinctions between these worlds
00:45:28 ►
will dissolve as devices such as the ones described
00:45:31 ►
in the following section become commonplace. If such an
00:45:35 ►
incredibly complex environment, packed with cybernetically enhanced
00:45:40 ►
human consciousness, follows the patterns discovered by Stuart
00:45:43 ►
Kaufman in his work on
00:45:45 ►
self-organizing complex systems, it follows that the possibility exists for some form
00:45:51 ►
of spontaneous new order to arise out of this densely complex soup of consciousness.
00:45:57 ►
Before long, it will be commonplace to see affluent teenagers carrying personal electronic
00:46:02 ►
companions.
00:46:04 ►
And you should keep in mind that I use that term because,
00:46:08 ►
well, this was written 10 years before the iPhone was even invented.
00:46:11 ►
So I’ll begin again here.
00:46:13 ►
Before long, it will be commonplace to see affluent teenagers
00:46:17 ►
carrying personal electronic companions
00:46:19 ►
that are orders of magnitude greater in function
00:46:22 ►
than the personal digital assistants used in today’s world of business.
00:46:27 ►
These new small devices will create a new wave of personal communications unlike anything we have yet experienced.
00:46:35 ►
Over time, these devices will become electronic clones of their owners.
00:46:41 ►
Remembering what books are purchased, which movies are seen, where regular
00:46:45 ►
stops are made during the day, and so on. These devices will remember where one goes, what one
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does, and even what one thinks about the quality and importance of the advertisements that are
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constantly being streamed to them. The kind of world we are about to bring into existence is
00:47:02 ►
being shaped each day by thousands of little decisions
00:47:05 ►
being made in companies all around the globe. This is why it’s so important for all of us
00:47:11 ►
to become more involved in discussions about how this powerful technology is to be deployed.
00:47:17 ►
Many of the people participating in these online debates are the same ones who go to
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work each day and make these important decisions. Of prime
00:47:26 ►
importance in all of these decisions is the issue of privacy. If we do not clearly establish one’s
00:47:33 ►
personal privacy as an absolute and inalienable human right, our grandchildren may never know
00:47:40 ►
what it’s like to have a private moment. Before we know what hit us,
00:47:45 ►
teenagers around the world will always be online,
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always be able to chat with a friend,
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no matter where either of them may be at the moment.
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This constant sense of always being connected
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will bring with it a definitive change
00:47:59 ►
in the way they experience this world.
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In addition to always being connected,
00:48:04 ►
many, if not most,
00:48:05 ►
of these pre-cyborgs will also be spending some of their time in one or
00:48:09 ►
more of their richly textured and densely populated inhabited virtual
00:48:14 ►
worlds that will be springing up by the thousands in deep cyberspace, which is
00:48:20 ►
one of the portals to entheospace. As more and more minds constantly jump in and out of entheospace,
00:48:28 ►
the possibility arises for order to spring from this chaos of mind,
00:48:33 ►
and it is this new order that I see as the awakening of the noosphere,
00:48:38 ►
as foretold by Teilhard de Chardin.
00:48:40 ►
It is anyone’s guess as to what form this new order will take.
00:48:46 ►
It might become manifest in a kind of super psychic awareness that we all share. In essence, a true global consciousness.
00:48:53 ►
Should ever such a moment occur, it would be fair to say that that moment is also when the
00:48:59 ►
evolution of global consciousness actually begins. As you may recall, I preface this section with the assumption that within three generations
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everyone on earth will always be connected.
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What if this transition takes thirty generations instead of only three?
00:49:18 ►
Is this any less reason to lay the proper foundation for such a future?
00:49:23 ►
At this pivotal moment in the evolution of our species,
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we are all butterflies on the edge of chaos.
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And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Namaste, my friends. Thank you. you