Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Rick Doblin, Lester Grinspoon, Richard Yensen, Donna Dryer, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, Ralph Abraham, and Robert Anton Wilson
Today’s program features the continuation of Podcast 684, the Psychedelic Summit that was held in Santa Cruz in 1992. As you can tell from the list of speakers, it was another celebrity-packed speakers’ list. While all of the names will be famaliar to you, this is the first time that we’ve had talks by Lester Grinspoon, Willis Harman and Robert Anton Wilson here in the salon.
PSYCHEDELIC AGENTS IN CREATIVE PROBLEM-SOLVING: A PILOT STUDY (1966)
The Issue of the Consciousness-Expanding Drugs - Willis Harman (1963)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:08 ►
Alpha Shades.
00:00:17 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today we’re going to get to listen to, well, a few more talks from the 1992 Psychedelic Summit that was held in Santa
00:00:34 ►
Cruz, California. And by the way, where were you in 92 when LSD was about to turn 50? Now this
00:00:42 ►
session begins with Rick Doblin introducing Dr. Lester Grinspoon.
00:00:47 ►
And as you know, here in the salon we’re doing what we can to preserve the historical record
00:00:52 ►
of the psychedelic movement during the second half of the 20th century. Today it’s, well,
00:00:59 ►
it’s easy to kind of overlook how tense and difficult it was to even discuss these substances back then.
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My guess is that many of those in attendance at this talk were more than a little paranoid about simply being there.
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And as difficult as it may be to believe, well, we’ve actually made a lot of progress in winning this war on people who use non-prescription drugs.
00:01:23 ►
winning this war on people who use non-prescription drugs.
00:01:29 ►
As you know, Dr. Grinspoon achieved legendary status many years ago as one of the very few academics who spoke favorably about psychedelics.
00:01:35 ►
For 40 years, he acted as senior psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center,
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and he was also professor emeritus Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
00:01:46 ►
And if you were around at the beginning of this so-called war on drugs, you remember him as an outspoken hero of our community, not just your average psychonaut.
00:01:57 ►
Now, other speakers in this podcast include Donna Dreyer, Richard Jensen, Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harmon,
00:02:09 ►
Ralph Abraham, Rick Doblin, and Robert Anton Wilson.
00:02:12 ►
And as we listen to these presentations,
00:02:16 ►
please keep in mind that these talks were given over 31 years ago.
00:02:22 ►
I want to introduce Lester Grinspoon.
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He’s been a strong inspiration for me,
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but he’s, you know,
00:02:32 ►
very well known for his academic work.
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He’s probably the leading academic expert on psychedelics, on marijuana,
00:02:36 ►
on, well,
00:02:38 ►
he’s not quite proud of all
00:02:40 ►
the things he said in his book on cocaine, but
00:02:42 ►
I think
00:02:44 ►
just like a a brief personal story
00:02:47 ►
that impressed me more than anything that he’s written.
00:02:50 ►
It’s something that he said, and it’s where he said it.
00:02:53 ►
And it was in the courtroom with the federal judge of the DEA attorneys,
00:02:56 ►
and it was during the hearings concerning whether MDMA would be maybe illegal or not.
00:03:00 ►
And that’s actually what caused many of us here to catalyze around
00:03:04 ►
starting to think that we needed an organization that would deal with government.
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So we got these hearings, and Lester was one of the witnesses to talk about the medical
00:03:14 ►
use of MDMA. The attorneys for the DEA really tried to trap him, and they thought they had
00:03:24 ►
the thing, and they asked him if he’d
00:03:26 ►
ever done MDMA. So obviously if he’d done it, he was completely impartial and completely
00:03:31 ►
biased and that he was obviously going to be seen in the light of a drug user and they
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thought that would destroy his credibility. And the story that he told about the fact that he did do it, and why he did it, and how he did
00:03:47 ►
it, and how his wife Betsy was very concerned about it and reluctant to do it, and how they
00:03:55 ►
agreed that he would do it first, and she would watch him.
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It’s just, the fear that she had was sort of transferred to the judge
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and the prosecutors and all these people in this courtroom
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and they could sort of live out their fear
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through her and then when he described
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how she grew much calmer afterwards
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and the two of them did it together
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and that was the only time he’d done it, those two times
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it just left
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everybody in awe
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that he’d been able to say that
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in this courtroom
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and as soon as he was done left everybody in awe that he’d been able to say that in this courtroom.
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And as soon as he was done, everybody left,
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and it was just the court reporter and myself just staying there,
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and I knew that we’d won the case.
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That was the moment, and that was because of the courage of Lester to be willing to be honest about those things.
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And we did win the case.
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Although we didn’t win the whole war.
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I don’t even want to call it a war anymore.
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I think we need to get rid of the whole war analogy.
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And we’re duped into keeping it.
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So it’s a great pleasure to introduce
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Lester, who will speak about the
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scientific
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endeavor involving psychedelics.
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Thank you.
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Boy, that was awkward.
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First, let me tell you how intimidated I am to be here.
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It reminds me
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of the time
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in 1972 or 73
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when I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the first annual
00:05:27 ►
normal meeting.
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And I got up there and I thought, my goodness, I, a marijuana virgin, trying to tell these
00:05:34 ►
people something about grass. You know, like a mirror image of the multifaceted effects or aspects of the psychedelic experience,
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there are many interests in psychedelics represented here.
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I am interested or want to represent, and some of you may have noticed my garb, American psychiatry.
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I don’t mean that I can speak for American psychiatry, but I’d like to speak to American psychiatry.
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I should hasten to add that I don’t think American psychiatry
00:06:26 ►
would be very pleased with this self-appointed task.
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In fact, they might wonder about my being here in the first place.
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Now, Impresario Rick has given me 15 minutes,
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and I think it’s important to speak about the intersection of psychiatry and psychedelic drugs.
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So if you will bear with me, I’m going to try and read these.
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I hope to get it in 15 minutes.
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I expect Rick, after what he just said, to come after me with a club.
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But let me try.
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Please bear with me.
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I’m going to read kind of fast.
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Ever since experimentation with psychedelic drugs began,
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some users and psychotherapists have maintained
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that a single psychedelic experience,
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or several such experiences,
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can provide religious insight,
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heightened creative capacity,
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psychological insight,
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or relief from neurotic symptoms.
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From 1950 to the mid-1960s,
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psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin,
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were used extensively in experimental psychiatry.
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The drugs were first studied as a chemical model for natural psychoses.
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Little came of this line of inquiry.
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Big surprise.
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And it was soon abandoned.
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They were then studied and used extensively in psychotherapy.
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More than 1,000 clinical papers were published discussing 40,000 patients.
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There were several dozen books and six international conferences on psychedelic drug therapy.
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It was recommended at one time or another for a wide variety of problems,
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including alcoholism, obsessional neurosis, and childhood autism. Beginning in the mid-1960s,
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with the increase of illicit use, it became difficult to obtain the drugs and get funding
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for research, and professional interest declined. There is at present a growing interest in
00:08:24 ►
the therapeutic
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potential of this class of drugs, particularly some of the new phenethylamines.
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But because they are all in Schedule I, it is not practically possible to do clinical
00:08:35 ►
work research with these substances.
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Now, maybe those two decades of psychedelic research will eventually be written off as
00:08:43 ►
a mistake that has only historical
00:08:45 ►
interest, but it might be wise to see if something can be salvaged from it.
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One source of a therapeutic interest was the belief of some experimental subjects after
00:08:56 ►
taking a psychedelic drive that they were less depressed, anxious, and guilty, and more
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self-accepting, tolerant, or sensually alert.
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and guilty, and more self-accepting, tolerant, or sensually alert.
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Interest also arose from a possibility of making therapy the use of the powerful psychedelic experiences of regression, ab reaction, intense transference, and symbolic grammar to improve
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the results of psychodynamic psychotherapy.
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Two kinds of therapies emerged, one making use of the mystical and conversion
00:09:26 ►
experience, and the other exploring the unconscious in the manner of psychoanalysis. Psychedelic
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therapy, as the first kind was called, involved the use of a large dose in a single session.
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It was thought to be potentially helpful in reforming alcoholics and criminals, as well as improving
00:09:45 ►
the lives of normal people. The second type, psycholytic therapy, literally mind-loosening,
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required relatively small doses in several or even many sessions. It was used mainly
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for neurotic and psychosomatic disorders. In practice, many combinations, variations,
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and special applications with some
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of the features of both psychedelic
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and psychedelic therapy
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evolved.
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Dry lips.
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No longer a virgin. The most serious efficiencies in psychedelic drug studies were absence of controls and inadequate follow-up.
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But psychedelic drug effects are so striking that it is difficult to design a double-blind study
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in which neither the person administering the drug nor the person taking it knows whether he is an active substance or a placebo.
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However, no form of psychotherapy for neurotics has ever been able to justify itself under stringent controls,
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and LSD therapy is no exception.
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Furthermore, psychiatrists did not agree about details.
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Should the emphasis be on expression of repressed feelings,
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or on working through a transference attachment,
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how much therapy is necessary in the intervals between LSD treatments?
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Because of the complexity of psychedelic drug effects,
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there are no answers to these questions.
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It appeared that LSD treatments sometimes produced spectacular
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improvement in neurotic symptoms, but no reliable formula for success was derived from these
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results. But again, in these respects, psychedelic drug therapy seems to be in no better or worse
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position than most other forms of psychotherapy. Now, there are now dozens of known psychedelic drugs,
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some of them synthesized only in the last 20 years.
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Few have been tested seriously in human beings.
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Their effects are sometimes different from those of LSD, psilocybin, and other familiar substances.
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In particular, there are certain psychedelic drugs that do not produce the same degree
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of perceptual changes or emotional unpredictability as LSD or psilocybin.
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Among these is MDMA, a relatively mild, short-acting drug that is said to give a heightened capacity
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for introspection, insight, and intimacy, along with temporary freedom from anxiety
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and depression, and without distracting
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changes in perception, body image, and the sense of self.
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While MDMA was first synthesized in 1914, it only began to come into both therapeutic
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and non-therapeutic use in the United States and Europe in the early 1970s.
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What we know about it now is largely anecdotal, but enough has been written to give some confidence
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that the general nature of the experience can be accurately described.
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As compared with the more familiar psychedelic drives, he devotes a gentler, subtler, highly
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controllable experience which invites, rather than compels, intensification of feelings
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and self-exploration.
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The user is not forced into any mental or emotional path that is frightening or even uncomfortable.
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A few psychiatrists and other therapists in Europe and the United States
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have used MDMA as an aid to psychotherapy for more than 15 years.
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It has now been taken in a therapeutic setting by thousands of people,
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apparently with few complications.
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At this time, it is difficult to state precisely how MDMA may be helpful
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in any particular type of psychotherapy,
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but the characteristics of the experience suggest
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that it could be useful in catalyzing the psychotherapeutic process
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irrespective of the theoretical grounding
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of the particular psychotherapy.
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These characteristics should be of interest to Freudian, Rogerian, and existential humanist
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therapists, for example.
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MDA is generally used once or at most a few times in the course of therapy.
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It is said to fortify the therapeutic alliance by inviting self-disclosure
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and enhancing trust. Some patients also report better mood, greater relaxation, heightened
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self-esteem, and other beneficial changes that last from several days to several weeks.
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Psychiatrists have used MDMA to suggest that it might be helpful, for example, in marital
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counseling and in diagnostic interviews,
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as well as in more traditional forms of psychotherapy.
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The reports of therapeutic results so far are anecdotal, but they are promising.
00:14:36 ►
MDMA carries little of the baggage that made it difficult to work with LSD in psychotherapy,
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the 8- to 12-hour duration of action, the possible loss of emotional control,
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the conceptual distortion,
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and the occasional adverse reactions and flashbacks.
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Now, I mention MDMA here not so much
00:14:56 ►
because I believe that it is the ultimate agent
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for catalyzing insight-oriented psychotherapy,
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but rather to illustrate that it is no longer unreasonable
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to pursue the development of drugs which can facilitate psychotherapy.
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I see the experience with MDMA, albeit limited, as one more indication that this pathway should
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be explored.
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The potential to develop psychotherapeutically useful phenethylamines is as yet barely tapped.
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It is a misunderstanding to regard psychedelic drug therapy as a form of chemotherapy,
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like giving lithium to managed patients.
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Patients are not maintained for a long time on psychedelic drugs,
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and these drugs do not produce dependence or addiction.
00:15:42 ►
On the other hand, the claims of psychedelic drug therapy are
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subject to the same doubts as those of psychoanalysis or religious conversions. The mixture of mystical
00:15:54 ►
and transcendental claims with therapeutic ones is an aspect of psychedelic drug therapy
00:16:00 ►
troubling to our culture. The pronouncements of drug enthusiasts are sometimes too much
00:16:07 ►
like religious testimonials to please either psychiatrists or priests and ministers. Pre-industrial
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cultures seem to tolerate more ambiguity in this matter, and there is now a growing interest
00:16:20 ►
in the ideas and techniques shared by primitive shamans, Eastern spiritual teachers, and modern
00:16:26 ►
psychiatrists.
00:16:27 ►
The word cure, after all, means both treatment for disease and the care of souls.
00:16:35 ►
The role of the guide on a psychedelic drug trip, which has both religious and medical
00:16:40 ►
aspects, is spontaneously reproduced in all cultures where psychedelic drugs come to be used.
00:16:48 ►
Much of the controversy about psychedelic drugs in the 1960s was in effect concerned with the question of who was qualified to be a guide.
00:16:58 ►
For the moment we have made the curious decision that no one in modern industrial society is qualified for this kind of change.
00:17:07 ►
Nevertheless, psychedelic drug therapy apparently still goes on in the ground in one form or
00:17:12 ►
another. Many have regarded it as an experience worth having, some as a first step toward
00:17:18 ►
change, and a few as a turning point in their lives. They might be deceiving themselves,
00:17:26 ►
but we do not know enough to be certain the field has
00:17:30 ►
potentialities that are not being allowed
00:17:34 ►
to reveal themselves.
00:17:36 ►
Now, when a new kind of therapy is announced, especially
00:17:39 ►
a new psychoactive drug, events often
00:17:42 ►
follow a pattern of spectacular success and enormous enthusiasm
00:17:47 ►
followed by disillusionment.
00:17:49 ►
But the rise and decline of psychedelic drug therapy took a somewhat unusual course.
00:17:54 ►
From the early 1960s on, the revolutionary proclamations and religious fervor of the
00:18:01 ►
non-medical advocates of psychedelic drugs began to evoke hostile
00:18:07 ►
incredulity rather than simply the natural skeptical response to extravagant claims backed
00:18:14 ►
mainly by intense subjective experiences. Twenty years after their introduction, psychedelics
00:18:22 ►
were pariah drugs, scorned by the medical establishment and banned by the law.
00:18:29 ►
In rejecting the absurd notion that these drugs were a panacea, we have chosen to treat them as entirely worthless and extraordinarily dangerous.
00:18:43 ►
Maybe the time has come to find an intermediate decision.
00:18:47 ►
If the therapeutic results have been erratic and inconsistent, that is partly because of
00:18:55 ►
the complexity of psychedelic drug effects. For the same reason, we may simply not yet
00:19:01 ►
have had enough time to sort out the best uses of these drugs.
00:19:06 ►
An informal kind of research continues anyway.
00:19:10 ►
Illicit psychedelic drug use is an underground spring
00:19:13 ►
that continues to feed the stream of interest in systematic and publicly controlled experimentation.
00:19:21 ►
Ironically, the illicit drug use that was one of the reasons for the interruption of
00:19:31 ►
legitimate research now serves to keep alive efforts aimed at resuming that research.
00:19:38 ►
Thank you. Now, speaking about psychedelic research, in 1963,atist, Albert Curlin, was able to get an IND for the study of LSD in alcoholism.
00:20:17 ►
Miraculously, this IND remained extant and has so. I think it’s the only extant IND for this kind of research in the country.
00:20:29 ►
Two prime movers have now engineered with the FDA
00:20:35 ►
an addendum or a codicil to this ancient IND
00:20:41 ►
for the study of LSD and its utility or possible utility in the treatment of addictions.
00:20:52 ►
Those two people, Adonadriah and Richard Yenison, they are truly present-day pioneers in this.
00:21:03 ►
uh… president well i have approval to do this they need to say that he yet
00:21:10 ►
a few minutes later
00:21:11 ►
community artists who so you were
00:21:13 ►
to approve it
00:21:15 ►
and they need
00:21:17 ►
that’s probably what we can do with the
00:21:20 ►
i have the problem
00:21:22 ►
but that may be something that we can do
00:21:24 ►
to help with the funding.
00:21:25 ►
Our next speakers are these two investigators, Donna Dryad and Richard Jensen.
00:21:44 ►
Thank you very much.
00:21:53 ►
It’s an honor for me to be here and acting as a bridge between one stream and the other river.
00:22:04 ►
And I just wanted to remind myself and all of us that any culture that has been able to use psychedelics, use
00:22:06 ►
them in the context of the culture and of their society and never as a counter to the
00:22:12 ►
culture. And that’s what we’re trying to do here. And we are trying to continue that
00:22:21 ►
by taking this old investigational drug permit that Al Kerwin still is the administrator of,
00:22:29 ►
and we added this new protocol to it, which was approved in the spring of 1991,
00:22:36 ►
to do a study that we call the relationship between peak experience and outcome in LSD-assisted psychotherapy with
00:22:47 ►
substance abusers, a double-blind controlled study.
00:22:54 ►
And we did this in the context of trying to find a group of people who obviously were being not treated very well and thought we might be able to get funding for this eventually.
00:23:15 ►
The hypotheses that we have in this study are, number one, to determine the relationship between the occurrence of a peak experience, which we hope to be
00:23:25 ►
able to measure as objectively as possible, the number of exposures of LSD during the
00:23:35 ►
psychotherapy, and clinical improvement as reflected as objective measures of therapeutic
00:23:41 ►
outcome over a period of time, three months, six months,
00:23:45 ►
and a year following.
00:23:48 ►
This outcome would be demonstrated by a statistically greater or more sustained improvement in the
00:23:54 ►
subjects who have had the peak experience, and this would be measured by therapist evaluation,
00:24:01 ►
the peak experience profile, and also measures of significant others.
00:24:08 ►
At the end of the therapy and throughout the follow-up period of one year, the subjects
00:24:12 ►
with peak experiences would demonstrate less substance abuse, and these would be measured
00:24:17 ►
by weekly urine drug screenings and other objective measures.
00:24:22 ►
They would also report fewer psychiatric symptoms and demonstrate
00:24:25 ►
less effect on pathology than the subjects without these peak experiences.
00:24:30 ►
We are also trying to use this addendum as a way into this little tiny window that we
00:24:40 ►
still have, and it’s like trying to push the Trojan horse through a very small
00:24:47 ►
hole, and I’ll let Richard describe to you what the Trojan horse is.
00:24:55 ►
First of all, before I talk about the Trojan horse, I’d like to share with you why it is
00:25:03 ►
that we’re trying to do this.
00:25:06 ►
I’ve been a very lucky man.
00:25:10 ►
As a graduate student, I was very interested in psychedelics,
00:25:14 ►
and I heard about the work of Stanislav Grof
00:25:16 ►
at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
00:25:20 ►
And I was actually able to go there and work from 1972 to 1976.
00:25:28 ►
During that time, I was administering the LSD to welders, to a shorter hook, to an electrician, to a miner, to a nurse,
00:25:42 ►
to alcoholic patients, to paramedics, to terminal patients, to people with neurotic problems.
00:25:50 ►
During that time, I saw those people make a journey through the difficulty of their personal lives,
00:25:58 ►
crying at the sad parts, laughing at the happy parts, until they came to a core of being.
00:26:08 ►
They came to a place of oneness,
00:26:11 ►
to a place that was beyond time and space,
00:26:16 ►
and yet somehow within each of their experiences,
00:26:20 ►
to a place of a profound positive mood,
00:26:24 ►
to a place of a profound positive mood,
00:26:30 ►
to a place that’s more real than the place that we know being here in this room,
00:26:38 ►
to a place that for them was more real than any other place they’d ever been in their lives,
00:26:44 ►
a place where opposites were paradoxically true.
00:26:48 ►
A place that was deeply sacred.
00:26:52 ►
A place that can’t be described in words.
00:26:56 ►
And this place motivated them to live better lives.
00:27:01 ►
To be better human beings.
00:27:06 ►
To love and to work.
00:27:09 ►
But maybe it’s really all just love.
00:27:13 ►
What we can give while we’re here.
00:27:19 ►
But we’re here to celebrate the fact that
00:27:21 ►
50 years ago,
00:27:29 ►
LSD was discovered. It was discovered in a laboratory.
00:27:33 ►
It’s a fascinating thing for a culture that’s lost any alive sense of sacredness to discover in the laboratory a chemical that has only been viewed throughout
00:27:52 ►
human history as sacred. So, born out of a laboratory into our culture was a chemical, it was a drug laboratory, it must be a drug. So we must be able to study
00:28:09 ►
it with the methods that we have to study everything else. Well, at the Maryland Psychiatric
00:28:18 ►
Research Center, I had the privilege of being in a place where, with I think a great deal
00:28:23 ►
of humbleness, people were trying to
00:28:25 ►
study the kinds of experiences I’ve outlined for you. To be perfectly honest with you,
00:28:32 ►
I don’t believe we have the tools to adequately register the depth and the meaning of these
00:28:38 ►
kinds of experiences. But with such tools as we had, we saw that a large number of people could turn their
00:28:48 ►
lives around.
00:28:51 ►
In 1976, for no apparent reason, that research was shut down.
00:28:58 ►
And I went about entering private practice and trying to treat patients without the benefits of LSD, and trying to
00:29:07 ►
develop other technologies, other ways to approach those same dimensions of the mind.
00:29:16 ►
Occasionally in teaching or public speaking when I would talk about my involvement with
00:29:21 ►
LSD research, I suddenly found myself confronted with a society, with
00:29:26 ►
an audience that was hostile to the idea. The most meaningful changes I’d ever seen
00:29:34 ►
people go through in my life. I was suddenly told I should be ashamed of being involved
00:29:42 ►
in such research, that the CIA had given LSD
00:29:46 ►
to somebody who jumped out the window that LSD was a terrible drug. Well, clearly these
00:29:56 ►
transcendently beautiful experiences didn’t live in the LSD. In fact, maybe everything about a drug doesn’t apply very well to LSD,
00:30:11 ►
or psychedelics.
00:30:14 ►
Maybe that concept of sacredness has something to do with
00:30:19 ►
what is really the most appropriate approach. Does that mean that we have to throw science out the window?
00:30:28 ►
I don’t think so. But it means that we have to look at what a hunting and gathering or
00:30:36 ►
a moral tradition people mean when they tell us, this is the flesh of the gods.
00:30:49 ►
They’re talking about a substance that takes us to the edge of human nature.
00:30:54 ►
They’re talking about a plant or a drink that in some way transports us to spiritual dimensions
00:30:59 ►
that is best held with the kind of idealism
00:31:06 ►
that we reserve for deities,
00:31:09 ►
that is best used with the kind of respect
00:31:13 ►
that we would accord a deity.
00:31:19 ►
Because it is an avenue for us to touch
00:31:22 ►
the deity that is the highest potential of being
00:31:26 ►
a human being.
00:31:32 ►
So our Trojan horse, our Trojan horse is an attempt to secure permission to do a study,
00:31:48 ►
where hopefully we will be able to document this kind of approach to using AUSTI
00:31:52 ►
in a scientific manner,
00:31:57 ►
also in a humanistic manner.
00:32:01 ►
How do you train people to conduct a session
00:32:05 ►
that takes into account the infinite worth
00:32:10 ►
of the human being who’s going to have that experience
00:32:12 ►
and the potentially infinite worth of that experience
00:32:16 ►
how do you do that justice
00:32:19 ►
and then to humbly bring all of the measurement tools that we have at our disposal,
00:32:30 ►
and I mean humbly, to try to measure what’s going on there,
00:32:34 ►
to try to figure out why sometimes it works, and when it works, it’s miraculous,
00:32:43 ►
and sometimes it doesn’t work.
00:32:46 ►
And when it doesn’t work,
00:32:48 ►
really, it usually just doesn’t work.
00:32:51 ►
It isn’t catastrophic.
00:32:53 ►
It just doesn’t work.
00:32:56 ►
Are there ways that might help it to work
00:33:00 ►
more or more often?
00:33:03 ►
Is it related to how much LSD the person receives? Or is it
00:33:09 ►
related instead maybe to the quality of the relationship that they take, that LSD? Is
00:33:17 ►
it maybe the kind of music that was played? Is it maybe something that we have no idea of at the time, but we might see in going over videotape later on.
00:33:29 ►
So, in a sense, the scientific design that Donna talked to you about
00:33:35 ►
is a large vehicle in which 60 human beings might make journeys of varying depths.
00:33:44 ►
human beings might make journeys of varying depths.
00:33:48 ►
But the really important part of this work is every single human being’s experience
00:33:52 ►
and our finding a way to do that justice
00:33:55 ►
in measuring it as respectfully as we can,
00:34:01 ►
in helping it to be as deep and as meaningful as it possibly can be.
00:34:06 ►
And then in sifting through this and trying to understand what’s going on.
00:34:12 ►
It’s doubtful that we’re going to prove that LSD is a panacea.
00:34:19 ►
But I think that almost certainly we will find that some people will be profoundly helped.
00:34:21 ►
that almost certainly we will find that some people will be profoundly
00:34:23 ►
helped.
00:34:25 ►
And it’s those cases that we need to
00:34:27 ►
focus on and try to understand.
00:34:31 ►
We need to try to move
00:34:33 ►
healing in this culture
00:34:35 ►
into a dimension that has an
00:34:37 ►
appreciation for the sacredness of being alive.
00:34:41 ►
It doesn’t mean creating
00:34:43 ►
a new religion.
00:34:48 ►
This doesn’t have to do with the building of structure this has to do with respect for direct experience
00:34:51 ►
and its potential
00:34:52 ►
thank you I’m Myron Stoverov, and it’s my honor and privilege to introduce the next speaker, Willis Harmon.
00:35:23 ►
I’ve been asked to do this in two minutes,
00:35:26 ►
and there’s absolutely no way that in two minutes
00:35:30 ►
I can cover even a fraction of the accomplishments
00:35:33 ►
of this wonderful man.
00:35:36 ►
We did a number of things together
00:35:39 ►
starting some 40 years ago,
00:35:41 ►
and probably the most dramatic was
00:35:44 ►
when we ran into a very remarkable character
00:35:47 ►
by the name of Al Hubbard.
00:35:51 ►
I see that strikes a note in some places.
00:35:55 ►
Well, Al became our LSD guru.
00:35:59 ►
But Bill and I took rather different paths.
00:36:03 ►
I think to have a penchant for exploring the nether regions.
00:36:07 ►
In fact, I had a very difficult time escaping them.
00:36:10 ►
It took maybe two or three decades before I learned how to get free of that.
00:36:16 ►
But Bill was much brighter.
00:36:18 ►
He hit for the stars immediately.
00:36:29 ►
immediately. Early in his experience he had for a friend, Sachu Cheldon, who called it a plus-four experience. That mystical, overwhelming, unspeakable experience where you’re united
00:36:39 ►
with all of creation. And I’m sure that’s been a guiding light for Bill for the rest of his life.
00:36:50 ►
In the early 60s, we had a foundation that was doing research with LSD, and Bill added
00:36:57 ►
his weight. He and a number of other volunteers did the work to make it credible research and we published papers.
00:37:07 ►
First paper that we published was called The Psychedelic Experience,
00:37:12 ►
a New Concept in Psychotherapy. We had a friend in Canada by the name of Duncan Blewett,
00:37:18 ►
who was one of the early researchers with LSD in Canada. Duncan was very impressed with this paper. I should add
00:37:26 ►
that the bulk of the paper was written by Bill. And Duncan said, Bill writes even better
00:37:34 ►
than all this Huxley. And I really think today, although the paper is over 30 years old, it
00:37:41 ►
still describes the stages that a person can go through in the psychedelic
00:37:47 ►
experience as well as anything in the literature.
00:37:52 ►
For the last 20 years, Bill has been the president of the Noetic Institute, where he is now recognized
00:38:01 ►
around the world for the work that he and the Institute have done
00:38:05 ►
in holding conferences, sponsoring research, writing books, publishing papers,
00:38:13 ►
all directed toward helping humanity become aware of the enormous potential that we have.
00:38:20 ►
So I’m happy to present Bill Harmon.
00:38:45 ►
Thank you. It’s moving, it’s inspiring, it’s joyous. It’s a wonderful evening.
00:38:49 ►
I’d like to share some thoughts continuing along the lines of that wonderfully described Trojan horse
00:38:54 ►
because it’s time for the Trojan horse to get through the kegel.
00:39:01 ►
As Myron indicated, he and I worked together for about nine years, and we were in association
00:39:10 ►
with a network of people, many of whose names you heard here tonight, Humphrey Osmond, Abe Little Ed and Nicky Chuelos across the plain. Largely Canadian, some in England, some in the United States.
00:39:30 ►
And these were really very heady times.
00:39:33 ►
There were exciting times.
00:39:34 ►
There were times where any unusual was always happening.
00:39:38 ►
I’m surprised there haven’t been more anecdotes this evening
00:39:41 ►
about some of the episodes that occurred back in those years.
00:39:45 ►
The one I remember most fondly is when four of these people took LSD and went driving in a car.
00:39:52 ►
And they’d been driving for some time, and one of them had to go to the bathroom.
00:39:58 ►
And the rapport was so great, they couldn’t figure out which one it was.
00:40:17 ►
As I said, these were very heady times because
00:40:25 ►
we really knew what we were dealing with, at least up to a point.
00:40:31 ►
And we knew that the potentiality was there for the world to change.
00:40:37 ►
And finally everything hit the fan around 1965, and we stopped.
00:40:44 ►
But in the process, we did get some research papers published. And in particular, one of the research projects was on psychotherapy,
00:40:49 ►
and the other one was on creativity and creative problem solving.
00:40:53 ►
And I’d like to say just a word about each,
00:40:55 ►
because they give us an idea of some of the potentialities here.
00:40:59 ►
In the psychotherapy experiment, we had something of the order of 80 clients,
00:41:03 ►
and they took before and
00:41:05 ►
after tests which had to do with values and beliefs and with personality profile and with
00:41:13 ►
behavior change.
00:41:15 ►
And it turned out that yes, some had profound life changing experiences and it was quite clear that therapeutically that
00:41:27 ►
this had been very successful for them. Some didn’t have such successful
00:41:32 ►
experiences but the most important thing was that you could tell from the
00:41:36 ►
personality profile ahead of time which ones were going to have these
00:41:43 ►
experiences. You can also tell something about the dynamics, which were rather different from the dynamics
00:41:49 ►
of personal change as talked about by most social scientists, because it was the belief
00:41:56 ►
system, it was the picture of reality that changed first, and everything else followed
00:42:01 ►
after that, and most of our personal change is not of that sort.
00:42:08 ►
Then the other experiment was with creative problem solving and here again we gave before
00:42:17 ►
and after tests that related to these measures of creativity or measures of something like
00:42:29 ►
these measures of creativity or measures of something like field independence,
00:42:32 ►
which correlates very highly with creativity.
00:42:40 ►
And first of all, we had the anecdotal reports. These were people who were in industry or in research laboratories.
00:42:44 ►
They had real problems.
00:42:46 ►
They’d been stuck on these problems for weeks.
00:42:50 ►
And typically, sometime during the session,
00:42:54 ►
they would find that it came to them in a flash what the solution was.
00:42:58 ►
And the solution was something very concrete.
00:43:01 ►
There was a product.
00:43:03 ►
In one case, I remember very well,
00:43:05 ►
an architect discovered that he could see,
00:43:09 ►
as though he were seeing into the future,
00:43:10 ►
he could see a model, a three-dimensional model
00:43:13 ►
of the future project when it would be built.
00:43:17 ►
And furthermore, that model would obligingly turn itself around
00:43:21 ►
so he could get a side view and a front view and a top view.
00:43:24 ►
And all he had to do was simply copy that down and his work was done.
00:43:29 ►
This was on a project on which he’d been stuck for several weeks.
00:43:33 ►
We had a mathematician who was working on some computer-related circuits,
00:43:39 ►
and he discovered that he could visualize these circuits
00:43:42 ►
and visualize throwing a switch and energizing
00:43:45 ►
the circuit and watching to see what it does and change an element and do it again.
00:43:50 ►
And then when he went into the laboratory to build the circuits, of course, they weren’t
00:43:55 ►
the way they had in the image.
00:43:57 ►
So this was all very impressive. impressive was that the before the major maps the field independence the field independence
00:44:12 ►
the life that relate to creativity and these are majors which are not supposed to change very much
00:44:20 ►
through their lifetime and they’re not changed by drugs or hypnosis or psychotherapy or any other intervention.
00:44:27 ►
And we have changes of the order of a couple hundred percent temporarily during these times.
00:44:34 ►
So here we have this puzzling situation where you had psychotherapy that was effective for
00:44:40 ►
certain persons.
00:44:41 ►
You could tell ahead of time which persons it would be effective for.
00:44:43 ►
effective for certain persons you could tell ahead of time which persons it would be effective for and you had an experience which heightened creativity
00:44:48 ►
and you had clear measures that would indicate that this was not just
00:44:53 ►
imagination and yet the research got very little attention and before very
00:44:58 ►
long it was all shut down. How did that come about? I think it’s because there
00:45:04 ►
were two big issues in here one was a medical issue and one was a scientific issue. If you take these experiences in general, you know, the thing that we all got impressed with, you’ve heard it over and over again, this evening, although not just in these words, people came out of these experiences with the conviction that reality is not like
00:45:26 ►
they taught us in science class.
00:45:30 ►
That’s very disturbing to the people around you who still believe in the scientific reality.
00:45:36 ►
So the medical question was, what is sanity?
00:45:41 ►
These people have experiences, they seem to have a positive effect, and yet according
00:45:49 ►
to our customary assessments of these things, these are the kind of experiences that people
00:45:56 ►
have in psychosis.
00:45:58 ►
The scientific question was somewhat similar to the question, what is reality? Or more specifically,
00:46:05 ►
how do we find out what reality is?
00:46:07 ►
How do we test the knowledge that we have?
00:46:11 ►
What are the rules of evidence?
00:46:14 ►
What’s the epistemology?
00:46:17 ►
The rules by which you decide
00:46:19 ►
how you know what you know.
00:46:22 ►
Let me just give you one short anecdote
00:46:25 ►
which will illustrate the kind of predicament.
00:46:29 ►
I’m sure you can think of many others.
00:46:32 ►
We had one colleague
00:46:35 ►
who was in one of the major aerospace companies.
00:46:43 ►
In fact, he rose rather rapidly to the top of one of the medium-sized
00:46:47 ►
aerospace companies, largely on the basis of the personality change that took place,
00:46:52 ►
originating in a one-day experience. This was an outdoor experience. He was taken out
00:46:58 ►
for a drive on the desert floor. He saw wonderful things. He became convinced of various things
00:47:07 ►
in the spiritual direction, and also it seemed commonplace that various kinds of psychic
00:47:13 ►
phenomena could occur. And one of the things that impressed him the most was that there
00:47:17 ►
was a little Pomeranian dog along, and he discovered that he could communicate with that dog in an extraordinary and exquisitely
00:47:26 ►
clear way, and non-verbally, of course, but nevertheless very impressively.
00:47:33 ►
And this impressed him almost more than anything else that happened during the day.
00:47:39 ►
Well, during the afternoon, he began to drift back toward what we euphemistically call normal.
00:47:49 ►
And so he began to puzzle with his mind about the question,
00:47:55 ►
is there an experiment that I could perform so that there would be some evidence left tomorrow
00:48:00 ►
and I could satisfy myself that this wasn’t just illusion?
00:48:04 ►
And he couldn’t think of any such experiment. left tomorrow and I could satisfy myself that this wasn’t just illusion and he
00:48:05 ►
couldn’t think of any such experiment and meanwhile Al Hubbard who was driving
00:48:11 ►
him around suggested that however you may know some of you know some of you
00:48:15 ►
may not he used to be called the Johnny Appleseed of LSD he probably did more
00:48:21 ►
than any one person that spread person to spread the secret around.
00:48:26 ►
But at any rate, he suggested that they stop and get a cup of coffee, which they did.
00:48:32 ►
And they were sitting there waiting for the coffee to cool.
00:48:35 ►
And all of a sudden, this chap clutched his left arm and said,
00:48:38 ►
We’ve got to go back to that car that little dog has hurt.
00:48:42 ►
And Hal tried to talk him out of it.
00:48:44 ►
There was no need to go back. The door was locked. The windows were open to crack. The dog is hurt. And Hal tried to talk him out of it. There was no need to go back.
00:48:45 ►
The door was locked.
00:48:46 ►
The windows were open and cracked.
00:48:48 ►
The dog had air.
00:48:49 ►
Nothing could happen.
00:48:51 ►
Anyway, they went out to the door
00:48:52 ►
and there was the dog’s head in the window
00:48:54 ►
and everything looked all right.
00:48:55 ►
He was still touching his arm
00:48:57 ►
and insisting that they go out.
00:48:59 ►
And so they went out and opened the door
00:49:01 ►
and discovered that this dog
00:49:03 ►
had somehow slipped down
00:49:04 ►
between the two seats apparently and had broken the left front leg right at that point. out and opened the door and discovered that this dog had somehow slipped down between
00:49:05 ►
the two seats, apparently, and had broken the left front leg right at that point.
00:49:11 ►
For which he said, thank you, I didn’t really ask for that kind of an experiment, but I’m
00:49:17 ►
convinced.
00:49:21 ►
There’s a dilemma in science, and it’s a dilemma that has not been really faced directly, and
00:49:28 ►
it has to do with research protocols and with epistemologies and with this whole definition
00:49:36 ►
of what is scientific research and what is scientific reality.
00:49:42 ►
One of the things we certainly know by now is that what goes on in the unconscious mind
00:49:47 ►
very much affects our perceptions, affects how we see things, how we experience whatever
00:49:53 ►
it is we experience.
00:49:58 ►
So you have to take that into account, obviously, if you’re going to be an aware scientist and so in order to
00:50:09 ►
carry out science make observations gather data you need an epistemology of mind you need an
00:50:16 ►
epistemology of consciousness in order to tell you how to deal with the fact that you
00:50:28 ►
to deal with the fact that you know in general that you have to mistrust anything that you observe.
00:50:36 ►
But in order to understand consciousness, you already have to have an epistemology, a set of rules of evidence. So you have to break into this circle somehow. And I became convinced during those years,
00:50:49 ►
and I became much more convinced as the years went on,
00:50:52 ►
that we’re never going to be able to get the attention
00:50:57 ►
and to deal effectively with the kinds of research we all agree need doing,
00:51:06 ►
until we have a new epistemology for science,
00:51:10 ►
until we have an epistemology of subjectivity,
00:51:13 ►
an epistemology that handles this rich subject of data.
00:51:30 ►
subjective data because the epistemology of quantum physics and biochemistry and neuroscience that epistemology is not suitable for studying human beings it’s
00:51:36 ►
not suitable for studying consciousness and we all know this in a way that we
00:51:41 ►
have not felt up to confronting the issue very directly.
00:51:46 ►
So at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, we gathered together and managed to find a couple dozen scientists and philosophers of science who were willing to take this on and work with us.
00:51:58 ►
We got a couple of foundations interested who put up some money, and we were able to have some meetings and try to
00:52:05 ►
get a consensus.
00:52:06 ►
And I think we’ve come rather far on this, and if anybody’s interested in it, the Institute
00:52:12 ►
of Noetic Sciences could easily be located in Sausalito, and you can drop me a note or
00:52:17 ►
call me and I’ll send you a paper on this.
00:52:21 ►
But essentially, a couple of things have happened that make this search
00:52:26 ►
much more promising than it had been before.
00:52:29 ►
One is that there have been some studies of perception, and especially a chap in London
00:52:35 ►
at the University of London named Max Feldman, have made it very clear that, and again it’s
00:52:42 ►
something we all know if we think about it, but it helps to make it clear with a lot of research papers, etc.,
00:52:50 ►
that science has never had any data to work with that were other than subjective.
00:52:57 ►
It has only had the subjective observations of the scientists
00:53:01 ►
and then the reported subjective experiences of any subjects they choose to study.
00:53:09 ►
So that
00:53:10 ►
we’re not in a position to say that there’s an objective world out there and we’re shooting some probes at it
00:53:16 ►
and that’s what makes up science. Science is made up of the
00:53:20 ►
reports of scientists and non-scientists of their subjective experiences of what’s
00:53:25 ►
going on out there in the laboratory.
00:53:28 ►
And once you make that point clear, and also another one which was brought up by William
00:53:32 ►
James, and that’s a concept he called radical empiricism, which is, yes, let’s be empirical,
00:53:39 ►
but let us not exclude any aspect of human experience that appears to occur simply on the grounds
00:53:46 ►
that it violates known scientific laws.
00:53:51 ►
What this really does is put in question whether the whole concept of a quantitative, nomothetic,
00:53:57 ►
that is, scientific law-like science, to cover all aspects of the totality of human experience,
00:54:05 ►
whether that’s really even the right goal,
00:54:09 ►
or whether that’s a very limited goal for a certain kind of science
00:54:12 ►
that deals with prediction and control and building technologies and so on.
00:54:17 ►
So just very, very briefly,
00:54:19 ►
the scientific epistemology that would include subjective experience will count certain characteristics.
00:54:29 ►
It will be more holistic.
00:54:32 ►
It will take into account that everything is connected to everything.
00:54:36 ►
It will be more participatory and more democratic in that sense.
00:54:39 ►
It will recognize the partial nature of any concept of scientific causality.
00:54:46 ►
We have two, broadly speaking in the world, two pictures of causality.
00:54:50 ►
One is that ultimate causality is from the fundamental particles that physicists study,
00:54:55 ►
and the other is that ultimate causality is in the realm of consciousness.
00:55:01 ►
And we may, for a long time, find that these two models are complementary and fit well side by side,
00:55:11 ►
but either one of them then gives us only a partial picture.
00:55:18 ►
This epistemology will admit multiple metaphors, including the metaphor that the universe really might be,
00:55:25 ►
in some respects, like my own consciousness.
00:55:28 ►
I might look for parallels there.
00:55:30 ►
That’s been a forbidden metaphor.
00:55:32 ►
You can have particle metaphors, you can use system metaphors, but you’re forbidden to
00:55:38 ►
use consciousness metaphor, and that’s a little odd.
00:55:41 ►
that’s a little odd another
00:55:43 ►
one more characteristic
00:55:45 ►
you recognize
00:55:46 ►
that if you’re really going to study
00:55:50 ►
inner experience as well as what we
00:55:52 ►
call outer experience
00:55:53 ►
you’re going to have to deal with the fact that
00:55:56 ►
the
00:55:56 ►
investigator
00:55:59 ►
the scientist is very likely
00:56:02 ►
to be transformed in the process
00:56:04 ►
and therefore the epistemology The scientist is very likely to be transformed in the process.
00:56:11 ►
And therefore, the epistemology that everybody might agree to initially is not the same epistemology that you might have later on
00:56:15 ►
when a fair fraction of the scientific community has gone through some transforming experiences.
00:56:21 ►
So we may end up with not one epistemology,
00:56:26 ►
but two or more.
00:56:27 ►
But nevertheless, the one thing
00:56:29 ►
that it seems to me is historically
00:56:31 ►
timely to do
00:56:33 ►
is to recognize that
00:56:35 ►
the present methods of research
00:56:37 ►
and the present epistemology
00:56:39 ►
of science is in no way
00:56:41 ►
suited for
00:56:43 ►
the real exploration of what the psychedelic chemicals are about,
00:56:48 ►
and we need to confront that question directly rather than tiptoe around and bow to power
00:56:54 ►
and pretend that the question isn’t there, which is, I’m afraid, what we’ve been doing for the last 30 years.
00:57:01 ►
Thank you. Thank you.
00:57:29 ►
My name is Nina Graboi, and I’ve been asked to introduce Ralph Abraham.
00:57:38 ►
Ralph Abraham is a professor of mathematics who has taught here at UCSC for the past 25 years. He is a philosopher and cultural historian who is known for his pioneering contribution to chaos
00:57:46 ►
theory. His involvement in the deep culture of the 60s led him to India, and his mystical
00:57:55 ►
experiences brought a new orientation to his work. Please welcome Ralph Abraham.
00:58:18 ►
Well, it’s a terrific honor to take place here in this parade of generations.
00:58:26 ►
And I’ll tell just one short story, not yet finished.
00:58:35 ►
Once upon a time, 25 years ago, I was an orthodox math professor at Princeton University.
00:58:43 ►
I looked up proving a theorem one day, and there was a promotion outside, and I asked one of my students, a precocious 15 year old,
00:58:47 ►
what was going on and he gave me LSD. This began a trip which went on up and down for six years. During this absence from academic mathematics, I pursued a strategy of alternating trips,
00:59:16 ►
inner experiences, spiritual journeys, which each one extended past the stopping point of a previous one,
00:59:27 ►
with interludes of reading the mystical literature and sacred books
00:59:33 ►
and reports of previous travelers from ancient times,
00:59:38 ►
the Middle Ages, and many different cultures.
00:59:40 ►
I also apprenticed myself to teachers in schools and caves and things.
00:59:47 ►
I found that my own inner experience made it possible to understand what I read in a way that I couldn’t understand before I had these inner experiences.
01:00:01 ►
And that this perinatural cycle was exactly described by these earlier travelers.
01:00:09 ►
Among these narratives were a certain number of mathematicians who seemed to be taking
01:00:16 ►
place in this mystical tradition. And because of my training, I was better able to understand what they had to say.
01:00:27 ►
So out of this prolonged period of what I could call illuminated scholarship emerged
01:00:35 ►
a clear picture of a continuous tradition of sacred mathematics from Pythagoras to the Renaissance.
01:00:50 ►
And this tradition, which had primary place in cultures of the past,
01:00:57 ►
came to a dead end on Easter Sunday in the year 1600
01:01:02 ►
when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome.
01:01:09 ►
From that time till now, this tradition has existed only in the collective unconscious
01:01:16 ►
or something.
01:01:17 ►
When I came down from this trip of six years, I found myself in Santa Cruz exactly 20 years ago. And by coincidence,
01:01:34 ►
as it were, that was the very starting moment of the so-called chaos revolution.
01:01:50 ►
So since that time, the chaos revolution has developed explosively, has turned science on its head, has opened literature and philosophy to completely new appreciation from a perspective
01:01:57 ►
that was lost to us 6,000 years ago when the patriarchy took over, a major social transformation, I would say,
01:02:06 ►
seems to be in progress. The connection between this social transformation, the chaos revolution,
01:02:17 ►
and the psychedelic revolution of the 60s has gradually begun to emerge and become clear and reach the public media about
01:02:30 ►
two years ago in GQ magazine.
01:02:37 ►
Anyway, this is, I think, the case seen from the perspective of today, that what is potentially the larger social transformation
01:02:47 ►
in 6,000 years has actually been sprung loose through the resumption of an ancient tradition
01:02:55 ►
in the 1960s under the influence of psychedelics and other major forces, spiritual awakenings that coincided at that time.
01:03:08 ►
Now, where this will go from here is an open question, because we have seen a number of social transformations.
01:03:19 ►
There is a pattern of them. In fact, throughout the past 6,000 years since that first major suppression of chaos with the arrival of patriarchy,
01:03:29 ►
such as the Renaissance, such as culture in the 60s, in which transformation began and then was extinguished by backlash.
01:04:16 ►
extinguished by backlash. So we are today at a kind of turning point in history that may be just another failure or actually may produce the world of our greens. Where it goes from here, I guess, is up to Ross. Hello.
01:04:17 ►
Howdy.
01:04:18 ►
Hi.
01:04:20 ►
Hey.
01:04:22 ►
I’ve been asked to represent
01:04:24 ►
Timothy Leary tonight. I couldn’t be here.
01:04:26 ►
Are you serious?
01:04:27 ►
Yeah, being asked to represent him reminds me of that joke about the guy who’s going to the electric chair and saying,
01:04:36 ►
Can I offer my seat to a lady?
01:04:41 ►
That’s what the message is about, actually.
01:04:44 ►
That’s what the message is about actually. Talking to Tim about speaking on his behalf has been sort of like a trip all week long.
01:04:54 ►
It sort of started off, you know, yeah, let’s do this thing, okay.
01:04:59 ►
And then we crept up and started to peek.
01:05:03 ►
And it’s like, okay, let’s get out there and really tear down the walls.
01:05:08 ►
Tell these people about the intense apocalypse that’s happening in our heads
01:05:13 ►
and out on the streets.
01:05:15 ►
In fact, that psychedelics are already out there.
01:05:20 ►
What are we talking about?
01:05:21 ►
And then finally he said, well, just pour a, gooey gobs of love all over everybody there.
01:05:30 ►
Is that legal?
01:05:36 ►
Maybe you can send your wet, gooey gobs of love back to Timothy.
01:05:42 ►
And I’ll read his statement here.
01:05:47 ►
Sometimes I can do a good imitation of Tim’s voice,
01:05:50 ►
but I usually have to have a couple of beers to hide it.
01:05:53 ►
I regret it.
01:05:54 ►
I can’t quite do it tonight.
01:05:57 ►
Okay.
01:06:02 ►
Okay.
01:06:04 ►
I regret that I can’t be here and send my love to all of the noble and wise gathered here today.
01:06:14 ►
This wonderful day honoring Albert Hoffman is being celebrated worldwide.
01:06:19 ►
I’ve had messages this morning from London, Tokyo, and New York.
01:06:23 ►
Luke saw a call from Amsterdam where he tells me that every day is bicycle day.
01:06:34 ►
I can’t be present because I’m escorting Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon to the wedding of
01:06:42 ►
Thorn Hall and Danny Sugarman.
01:06:44 ►
Now, if you don’t think everything is connected,
01:06:46 ►
now, you know, it’s kind of connected.
01:06:50 ►
All for us and fondest wishes to Dr. Hoffman
01:06:54 ►
and our friends in Santa Cruz and San Francisco.
01:06:58 ►
And lastly, I invite you to the Whole Life Expo
01:07:02 ►
on Friday night, April 3rd,
01:07:04 ►
for a rampant rave and a look at the next 50 years of psychedelics.
01:07:11 ►
So that’s from Tim.
01:07:13 ►
And I’ve also been asked to introduce Robert Anton Wilson, which I’ll try to do in 60 seconds or less.
01:07:30 ►
I wouldn’t be here today or I don’t know, I wouldn’t exist as R. E. Sirius at SIRIUS without the unbelievable sort of mythological fiction and factual work of Robert Anton Wilson has books, the Illuminatus Trilogy, Cosmic Trigger 1, 2, Schrodinger’s Cat, another trilogy,
01:07:52 ►
and the Illuminatus Trilogy, it seemed really weird when I read it in the 70s,
01:07:58 ►
so well, of course, all come completely true.
01:08:00 ►
Things are weirder than that, I think.
01:08:03 ►
It turned out to be even stranger. The great thing about Robert Anton Wilson, actually, is that he takes these concepts like, you know, influence of the hippies and the punks and all that, and manages to get it all said in
01:08:27 ►
this very logical and succinct way. And you come away with these extremely bizarre notions
01:08:34 ►
that seem to make complete sense. And I guess I’ll let him do that for you now. So here’s
01:08:40 ►
Robert Anton Wilson. Here’s Robin and him listening. Thank you.
01:09:05 ►
I don’t know how logical and succinct I can be at this hour, but I’ll try.
01:09:15 ►
I lived in Ireland for six years, and my very first day there,
01:09:19 ►
I heard a Kerry Fonger being interviewed on radio television,
01:09:28 ►
or on the Irish radio television network, about local legends about the Pooka.
01:09:31 ►
The Pooka is a six-foot-tall white rabbit who frequently grabs people,
01:09:33 ►
drags them into alternative realities,
01:09:36 ►
plays with them for, oh, 70,000 years,
01:09:41 ►
takes them back to St. McCool and Cahoolan
01:09:44 ►
and Brontëwan and all the great heroes
01:09:47 ►
and heroines of the Irish past
01:09:49 ►
and they meet
01:09:51 ►
Krishna and
01:09:52 ►
all sorts of Devas
01:09:54 ►
and Luke Skywalker
01:09:57 ►
and Darth Vader
01:09:59 ►
they go through the whole collective
01:10:01 ►
unconscious in every possible
01:10:03 ►
fairy world
01:10:04 ►
and when the hooker is tired playing with them, he lets them go.
01:10:08 ►
And in consensus time, it’s only a few minutes after they left the pub.
01:10:14 ►
There’s a widespread belief among the cynics in Dublin
01:10:19 ►
that you’re more likely to beat the hooker if you’ve had 14 pints of Guinness that night.
01:10:25 ►
But be that as it may, the interviewer asked this farmer,
01:10:30 ►
Do you believe in the Pooka yourself?
01:10:33 ►
And the farmer said, That I do not, and I doubt much that he believes in me either.
01:10:40 ►
And the story is, since everything is connected to everything else, especially in my head,
01:10:47 ►
which is the only reality I know anything about, it’s always linked with a book by an
01:10:57 ►
African physicist named Peter O’Kara.
01:11:01 ►
Peter is a black African, which is important to this context
01:11:07 ►
I have to say that because there are white Africans
01:11:11 ►
I think there are, there are white people living there
01:11:13 ►
I think they’re Africans
01:11:15 ►
I think I’m an American even though
01:11:17 ►
my ancestors only arrived here about 100 years ago
01:11:21 ►
anyway, Peter O’Kara
01:11:24 ►
in a book called
01:11:25 ►
North, South, East, West
01:11:28 ►
tries to explain the difference between
01:11:31 ►
African ways of conceiving, perceiving,
01:11:36 ►
organizing, orchestrating the world
01:11:39 ►
inside their heads
01:11:40 ►
and European ways.
01:11:43 ►
And he presents this in terms of a trial between himself and a liberal English housewife named
01:11:52 ►
Myra and an extraterrestrial named Algal.
01:11:57 ►
And one of his points that he returns to over and over again is if you ask, if you even raise the question,
01:12:05 ►
is alcohol a metaphor or a reality, you are stuck in the European reality tunnel and you
01:12:13 ►
can’t understand Africans. In other words, I don’t believe in Algar and I doubt much that he believes in me either.
01:12:26 ►
There is a connection between the Irish and the African ways of looking at things.
01:12:32 ►
After all, it was an Irishman, William Rowan Hamilton, who after a couple of thousand years
01:12:41 ►
of everybody in Europe agreeing that x times y equals y times x.
01:12:46 ►
And Africa, I’ll bet you it doesn’t, created a whole system of mathematics in which it doesn’t.
01:12:52 ►
Known as quaternions, which turned out to be very important in quantum mechanics.
01:12:58 ►
And there was an Irishman named Jonathan Swift who got into a debate with an astrologer named Partridge
01:13:03 ►
about whether Partridge was dead or alive.
01:13:06 ►
And no matter how much Partridge argued that he was alive,
01:13:10 ►
Swift came back with further arguments that he was dead.
01:13:14 ►
And Partridge lost the debate.
01:13:16 ►
And he studied the matter closely.
01:13:22 ►
And, of course, it was an Irishman
01:13:25 ►
named George Barclay
01:13:27 ►
after whom the city of Berkeley
01:13:29 ►
is inaccurately named
01:13:31 ►
because nobody in America knows how to pronounce
01:13:33 ►
Irish names
01:13:34 ►
Bishop George Barclay
01:13:37 ►
proved that the universe doesn’t exist
01:13:39 ►
but God thinks it does
01:13:41 ►
and
01:13:44 ►
while I’m waving the green flag up here,
01:13:49 ►
there was another Irishman named John S. Bell
01:13:54 ►
who proved mathematically that everything really is connected
01:13:57 ►
and that’s not just the delusion, the vastness.
01:14:00 ►
That’s not his best theory,
01:14:02 ►
but it’s a very central part of modern physics.
01:14:08 ►
The reason I’m talking about these Irish and African and other exotic
01:14:11 ►
reality totals the way of looking at the world
01:14:14 ►
is because the main thing
01:14:17 ►
I have learned from LSD
01:14:19 ►
and peyote and mushrooms and other psychedelics
01:14:24 ►
is as Albert Hoffman himself once said in an essay about ten years ago,
01:14:32 ►
there is no one reality.
01:14:36 ►
For the last 200 years, our culture has been torn apart
01:14:40 ►
by the debate between the mechanists and the romantics.
01:14:44 ►
The mechanists say everything is mechanism. The mechanists say everything is mechanism.
01:14:46 ►
The romantics say everything is emotion.
01:14:49 ►
And this has been the dullest and stupidest argument
01:14:54 ►
that I’ve ever heard.
01:15:00 ►
One of the exercises I do is have everybody listen to the sounds for a given period of time.
01:15:09 ►
Then we compare notes. It turns out no two people heard the same sounds.
01:15:14 ►
Ergo, we all live in a different sonic universe. We create our own sonic reality tunnel. Later on I asked them how long that experiment took, and they all make different estimates
01:15:26 ►
of the time, running from 30 seconds up to 5 minutes, with a peak usually around 3 minutes.
01:15:33 ►
And then some idiot usually asks me, how long was it really?
01:15:37 ►
Well, it was as long as your experience shows. The idea that there is one reality has made science almost as pig-headed, dogmatic, and reactionary as theology was in the Middle Ages.
01:16:16 ►
The great liberation that LSD has brought to our culture is the recognition that the scientific reality tunnel, with all of the tremendous value it has, and I yield to none in my respect for the value of scientific work.
01:16:21 ►
I get into all sorts of quarrels with people who hate science.
01:16:25 ►
The scientific reality tunnel is useful to scientists to solve scientific problems.
01:16:28 ►
In that scientific reality tunnel,
01:16:30 ►
for instance,
01:16:31 ►
this doesn’t have any color.
01:16:33 ►
Color is created by our brains
01:16:36 ►
interpreting waves
01:16:37 ►
bouncing off of us.
01:16:39 ►
Not only does this have no color,
01:16:41 ►
it has no temperature, ultimately,
01:16:43 ►
at the atomic level
01:16:44 ►
because the temperature is a function at the atomic level because the temperature
01:16:46 ►
is a function above the molecular
01:16:48 ►
level and above.
01:16:51 ►
That is the scientific
01:16:52 ►
reality and it is very useful
01:16:54 ►
for solving scientific problems.
01:16:56 ►
Most of us are living in a reality
01:16:58 ►
where this does have a color and a temperature.
01:17:01 ►
And which color it has
01:17:02 ►
depends on whether we’re on time or
01:17:04 ►
accident.
01:17:04 ►
The more we know. And which color it is depends on whether we’re on a car accident.
01:17:09 ►
Everybody creates their own reality tunnel
01:17:11 ►
moment by moment, and
01:17:13 ►
having told you a few Irish
01:17:15 ►
anecdotes and a bit of African
01:17:17 ►
lore, I will,
01:17:19 ►
since I’ve got a very short time up
01:17:21 ►
here, I
01:17:23 ►
think I will
01:17:24 ►
the parable
01:17:26 ►
that best sums up what
01:17:27 ►
LSD is all about
01:17:29 ►
is the parable
01:17:31 ►
of a Sufi story
01:17:33 ►
of Nasruddin
01:17:35 ►
who went galloping through the streets
01:17:37 ►
of Baghdad one day on his donkey
01:17:40 ►
as fast as he could go and people
01:17:42 ►
came out and yelled, Nasruddin, what are you
01:17:44 ►
looking for? He yelled, Nasruddin, what are you looking for?
01:17:45 ►
He yelled, I’m looking for my donkey.
01:17:50 ►
Everybody who gets into what’s known as higher consciousness
01:17:55 ►
or ways of liberation or mysticism or whatever you want to call it,
01:17:59 ►
they look here, they look there, they look everywhere.
01:18:02 ►
All the time what they’re looking for is carrying them around.
01:18:06 ►
It is what creates the reality tunnel that you live in.
01:18:09 ►
It’s what makes a sad world for the sad person,
01:18:13 ►
a happy world for the happy person,
01:18:15 ►
an angry world for the angry person,
01:18:18 ►
and a totally paranoid world for the DEA and other people.
01:18:25 ►
Everybody creates their own reality,
01:18:28 ►
or as Dietzsch just said,
01:18:30 ►
we are all greater artists than we realize.
01:18:34 ►
And so when you’re hunting around to find out
01:18:36 ►
what made the world the way it is,
01:18:39 ►
what gave the world three dimensions
01:18:41 ►
or four dimensions or ten dimensions
01:18:44 ►
as in some modern theories, what makes the world sad, or four dimensions or ten dimensions as in some modern theories
01:18:45 ►
what makes the world sad what makes it happy the answer to the question is what’s carrying you
01:18:52 ►
around all the time the metaprogramming centers in the human brain and they can be altered
01:18:58 ►
radically and we have known that for 50 years now that means we don’t have to live in one reality.
01:19:05 ►
We can change our realities the way we change the dials on the television set.
01:19:12 ►
And in conclusion, keep the lasagna flying over Vatican City.
01:19:33 ►
I’m sure that you and I could discuss some of these ideas for hours on end,
01:19:36 ►
but we’ll save that for the live salons.
01:19:41 ►
However, I do want to close with what I believe to be some of the best advice that was given in this recording. And that came from Robert Anton Wilson.
01:19:47 ►
Keep the lasagna flying over Vatican City.
01:19:51 ►
And if you don’t get that,
01:19:53 ►
then you owe it to yourself to read some of his books.
01:19:56 ►
They’ll not only entertain you, they’ll enlighten you as well.
01:20:00 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:06 ►
Namaste, my friends.