Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Ram Das and Dr. Kenneth Ring
Ram Das and a young Lorenzo
Today’s podcast features two speakers, Ram Das and Dr. Kenneth Ring. Their topic is death! Unless you have come up with a plan to avoid dying, you may find some interesting observations from these talks.
Dr. Ring, one of the world’s leading experts on the Near Death Experience (NDEs), describes NDEs as being along the same lines as are stories about high-dose psychedelic experiences.
Ram Das talks about why people avoid thinking about death and suggests ways to overcome this mental block. He also describes what I consider to be the worst possible setting for an acid trip.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Three-dimensional, transforming, musical, linguistic objects.
00:00:08 ►
Alpha Chains.
00:00:17 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today we’re going to travel back in time some 30 years or so,
00:00:28 ►
back to the 1992 Transpersonal Association Conference,
00:00:33 ►
and we’re going to get to listen to two talks.
00:00:35 ►
The first one is given by Ram Dass, and he will be followed by Dr. Kenneth Ring.
00:00:41 ►
Now this isn’t exactly a spoiler alert,
00:00:43 ►
but I’m giving you a heads up here about what may
00:00:46 ►
be the worst possible setting for an acid trip. I doubt if many people have what it takes to
00:00:52 ►
manage an LSD experience like the one that Ram Dass describes. It speaks volumes about the degree
00:00:59 ►
of control that he has over his own mind. So, without any further ado, here’s Ram Dass.
00:01:07 ►
I’ll just introduce myself. I’m Rick Doblin,
00:01:10 ►
and I’ve managed to be so motivated by my psychedelic experiences
00:01:17 ►
that I decided that it was something worth doing myself too.
00:01:21 ►
And I kind of, more out of self-defense than anything else besides
00:01:26 ►
focus on the political aspects I applied for entrance into the PhD program in
00:01:31 ►
psychology at Harvard and told me that they would never let me in that the
00:01:35 ►
ghost of Timothy Leary walks the halls and they don’t want to talk to me luckily
00:01:41 ►
Mark Kleinman is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government, and I had read
00:01:46 ►
something that he’d written that made me think that maybe there was a place for me at the
00:01:51 ►
Kennedy School.
00:01:52 ►
And so he encouraged me to apply, and lo and behold, they made me the token hippie of the
00:01:57 ►
year and let me in.
00:02:00 ►
So now I’m working on a PhD in public policy, working on the regulatory aspect of the beneficial use of Schedule I drugs.
00:02:09 ►
And I have a nonprofit organization, which I’ll hand out the newsletter
00:02:12 ►
to those of you that haven’t got it,
00:02:14 ►
that’s acting as a pharmaceutical company to try to raise money to fund this research.
00:02:20 ►
So we’ve actually funded preclinical animal studies,
00:02:23 ►
have opened what’s called a drug master file at the Food and Drug Administration for MDMA, and we’re funding research and hopefully
00:02:30 ►
50 years from now and $10 million later we’ll have permission to have some psychiatrists
00:02:37 ►
prescribe MDMA.
00:02:38 ►
I’m also interested in funding research with other substances as well. But MDMA, I think, is the one to start with.
00:02:48 ►
We can maybe just go around and introduce ourselves.
00:02:54 ►
Yeah, maybe we should…
00:02:55 ►
Well, in one sense, I feel more like a historical figure here.
00:03:04 ►
Well, in one sense, I feel more like a historical figure here.
00:03:08 ►
I feel that a lot of you have gone way beyond me in terms of some of the work that’s relevant today.
00:03:14 ►
But I’ll share some of the sequence
00:03:17 ►
and a few things that might be relevant and useful to you guys in your research.
00:03:36 ►
Historically, when I first started to work with the psilocybin,
00:03:39 ►
the synthetic of the psilocybin mushroom,
00:03:45 ►
shortly after beginning that Ralph and Tim and I and others
00:03:48 ►
George and Gunther were introduced to
00:03:52 ►
the Tibetan Book of the Dead
00:03:53 ►
and
00:03:56 ►
I was a little
00:04:00 ►
what I experienced in reading that book
00:04:03 ►
was a direct almost eerie
00:04:10 ►
parallel between certain descriptions of the bardos or the islands or the
00:04:17 ►
states that one goes through in the process of death and experiences that I had had with the psychedelics.
00:04:27 ►
And fortunately, I had Ralph and Kim as colleagues,
00:04:34 ►
and they saw this parallel and ran with it
00:04:37 ►
and created a book called The Psychedelic Experience,
00:04:39 ►
which they kindly allowed me to co-author,
00:04:43 ►
which they kindly allowed me to co-author,
00:04:50 ►
which was a manual for taking psychedelics and based upon this book that had been used for some 2,500 years
00:04:57 ►
as a vehicle for helping Tibetan monks
00:05:01 ►
to use the moment of death as a vehicle for releasing the clinging of mind
00:05:10 ►
to allow them to have, in a way, as advantageous a reincarnation as possible.
00:05:20 ►
And potentially no reincarnation at all if they had finished their work.
00:05:24 ►
potentially no reincarnation at all if they had finished their work.
00:05:34 ►
What I experienced, and this just happened in some subtle sequence,
00:05:39 ►
was that the repetitive use of the psychedelics that first saw Simon in LSD started to alter my own feelings about death.
00:05:45 ►
There was a way in which the parallel of the psychological death and rebirth process
00:05:51 ►
that went on in very intense and psychedelic experiences
00:05:53 ►
started to open to me a different state, a different perception of death,
00:06:06 ►
so that I noticed that a lot of the anxiety attendant to the concept started to be absent.
00:06:17 ►
In the course of our early work, we came across the work by Dr. Eric Kass,
00:06:22 ►
who was really a very outstanding and unusual
00:06:27 ►
man, but did some interesting research with people who were dying with
00:06:35 ►
psychedelics. And I remembered the profound statement in one of the
00:06:40 ►
articles that was published in which a nurse who had been working on the
00:06:50 ►
intensive care, I think, and then she developed cancer, which had metastasized extensively,
00:06:56 ►
and she had her first LSD experience, and she said at the end of it, the quote was,
00:07:03 ►
I know I’m dying of this disease, but look at the beauty of the universe.
00:07:09 ►
And there was something that I heard in that,
00:07:12 ►
which was a shifting in emphasis that I felt extremely profoundly about.
00:07:29 ►
And I started to be drawn towards being with dying people because I saw that in terms of my own inner spiritual work,
00:07:35 ►
the deepest fear that an incarnate has is the fear of death.
00:07:43 ►
And one can, as I did, fly my airplane dangerously or drive my
00:07:48 ►
motorcycle dangerously and try to play with the edge of death, but I realized
00:07:53 ►
that coming, being in the presence of people who was dying was incredibly
00:07:57 ►
important work that I could do on myself as that was my original feeling about it. The experiences that followed as a result of that,
00:08:10 ►
you know, I’m trying to get my sequence right. Somewhere along the way after I had been working
00:08:19 ►
with psychedelics for about six years, I began to feel the finiteness of the experience and I felt
00:08:30 ►
that the finiteness of the experience I was having with LSD and with the other
00:08:35 ►
psychedelics that I had the chance to work with was a result primarily of the
00:08:41 ►
set that I had in the way I used them, the launching pad, if you will,
00:08:45 ►
where I was starting from as I started to work with them.
00:08:49 ►
And I felt, as others had felt,
00:08:53 ►
that the maps we had found,
00:08:54 ►
which were things like the Tripitaka,
00:08:59 ►
the Sudimaga, some of the Tibetan texts
00:09:02 ►
that described the inner states Maga, some of the Tibetan texts that describe the inner states of consciousness
00:09:06 ►
suggested that there were maps in the East
00:09:10 ►
that were much, much more sophisticated
00:09:12 ►
about altered states of consciousness
00:09:14 ►
than Western psychology,
00:09:15 ►
which I had been teaching up until I got thrown out of Harvard.
00:09:23 ►
So I, along with a lot of other people like Ralph and Tim and Allen Ginsberg and many others, went to India.
00:09:30 ►
But I was really fortunate in meeting a very, a realized being, a being that seems and continues to seem totally free. And the first thing that happened
00:09:46 ►
was that I began to be aware
00:09:48 ►
that in India there was such a different
00:09:50 ►
perception of death
00:09:51 ►
because of the depth of the
00:09:53 ►
reincarnational and karma models
00:09:56 ►
in that culture
00:09:57 ►
that people were,
00:10:01 ►
first of all, it was much more
00:10:02 ►
out in the open.
00:10:03 ►
When a person died,
00:10:04 ►
they were wrapped in a cloth, put on a rickshaw and driven to the funeral grounds.
00:10:11 ►
You’d see bodies going through the streets and the burning ceremony was available for everybody.
00:10:16 ►
I mean, I went to the burning gods in Benares where they burn the bodies all day and all night, and I took LSD and stood in the middle of this
00:10:25 ►
to steep myself in the whole process of heads being cracked open and bodies being burned.
00:10:32 ►
And it felt as if the nature, the naturalness of the cycle of birth, life, death
00:10:45 ►
was somehow much more perceived
00:10:48 ►
in a much more healthy way
00:10:49 ►
than in the culture I had grown up with.
00:10:51 ►
I realized the sickness of my own culture at that point.
00:10:55 ►
And I imbibed it very deeply in my being,
00:11:00 ►
not only the smell of the dead bodies,
00:11:01 ►
but just the quality of these values,
00:11:05 ►
the combination of the dead bodies, but just the quality of these values. The combination of the psychedelics, which had given me the inner experience
00:11:10 ►
of seeing my own dissolution of an identity,
00:11:14 ►
and also the experience of the way the culture treated death in the East.
00:11:20 ►
So I came back and I started to work much more systematically with dying people.
00:11:25 ►
And my intent at that time, as you can see, was that it was work on myself as a spiritual practice to be with dying people.
00:11:38 ►
And then I saw that as in Buddhism, for example, in a way it is perceived that your entire life
00:11:45 ►
is a preparation
00:11:46 ►
for the moment of your death
00:11:47 ►
and life is a preparation
00:11:49 ►
for dying as consciously
00:11:51 ►
as you possibly can
00:11:52 ►
so
00:11:54 ►
I saw that there were
00:11:57 ►
some people
00:11:58 ►
who wanted to
00:11:59 ►
use their dying
00:12:01 ►
I kept meeting people
00:12:03 ►
who said
00:12:03 ►
who had been doing some spiritual practice or
00:12:07 ►
taken drugs, who then were dying, and they said they would like to work on themselves through the
00:12:13 ►
process of dying. And I started to conceive of the possibility that the people who wanted to
00:12:21 ►
awaken through dying, and the people like me who wanted to work with people
00:12:26 ►
who were dying to awaken
00:12:28 ►
should somehow come together
00:12:30 ►
and we would create what is basically an ashram.
00:12:33 ►
It’s basically a place where everybody is there to awaken.
00:12:36 ►
It just happens some of them are dying
00:12:38 ►
and some of them are helping the others die.
00:12:39 ►
And so I first spelled that out in a book with Sidney Cohen in 1966, a book on LSD.
00:12:50 ►
And then the kinds of experiences that followed over the years,
00:12:56 ►
I’ll describe just one.
00:13:02 ►
Sitting with a woman who lived with the Huxleys.
00:13:08 ►
Her name was Ginny Pfeiffer.
00:13:10 ►
And she was dying of pelvic cancer
00:13:14 ►
and I was called in to be with her.
00:13:17 ►
And she was a very heavy intellectual person
00:13:20 ►
and she said for the first time,
00:13:23 ►
I don’t want any of your spiritual bullshit
00:13:27 ►
dick and that was fine and
00:13:30 ►
So she turned me off completely and I went away and then Laura said now she’s much closer to death. Would you come again?
00:13:37 ►
She can’t
00:13:41 ►
So I went again and I
00:13:44 ►
Sat by her bedside and she was lying on the bed and she was
00:13:50 ►
writhing in pain from her pelvic cancer. She was using the minimum amount of pain
00:13:59 ►
pain killers, alleviation pain, and she was just writhing with pain
00:14:07 ►
and looked very uncomfortable and unhappy.
00:14:10 ►
She didn’t want me to talk,
00:14:13 ►
so I sat there and I started to meditate next to her bed.
00:14:16 ►
And I started to do what is traditional
00:14:19 ►
in the Theravadan Buddhist tradition,
00:14:21 ►
which the monks do as part of their training.
00:14:24 ►
They go to the charnel grounds where the bodies are thrown.
00:14:28 ►
In Buddhism, they don’t burn the bodies.
00:14:29 ►
They throw them there for the birds to eat.
00:14:32 ►
And I was watching, and they watch the fly-infested corpse, the bloated corpse, the skeleton,
00:14:38 ►
and they meditate on it in order to see the impermanence of the body
00:14:42 ►
and in order to deeply understand the impermanence of the body and in order to deeply understand the impermanence of the body.
00:14:46 ►
So I was just meditating on her body
00:14:49 ►
and at the same moment in my heart,
00:14:52 ►
feeling the pain of somebody who I was very attached to
00:14:55 ►
and she’s a great, fun, wonderful woman,
00:14:58 ►
my friend dying, and feeling the sadness
00:15:01 ►
and watching that in my meditation
00:15:04 ►
and then just watching the decay of the body and
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I started to get into a very deep space
00:15:10 ►
which I
00:15:13 ►
The experience I had was the entire room turned purple. That was my personal experience
00:15:19 ►
that moment I see her rising on the bed and
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she turns to me
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and she says
00:15:27 ►
I’m feeling such
00:15:29 ►
incredible peace
00:15:30 ►
I don’t ever remember
00:15:32 ►
feeling this before
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I wouldn’t be anywhere
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else but here at this
00:15:37 ►
moment
00:15:37 ►
she’s saying this and
00:15:39 ►
at the same moment her
00:15:40 ►
body is writhing in
00:15:41 ►
pain
00:15:41 ►
now the question is
00:15:44 ►
who’s feeling the pain?
00:15:45 ►
And it was a great appreciation to me that the planes of consciousness, the
00:15:52 ►
plane at which pain exists and which one identifies with the being the
00:15:56 ►
experiencer of pain and the planes of consciousness in which one sees pain but
00:16:00 ►
is not identified with it, are different and that she through this connection had moved
00:16:06 ►
into this other plane of consciousness through a contact high or whatever you want to call that
00:16:11 ►
thing i don’t know so um i have continued to work with uh people that are dying and have and i now work with a very large a lot of aids patients
00:16:27 ►
and i’d say for the past 15 years i’ve been helping people die and i’ve found that it is
00:16:34 ►
probably the most ecstatic part of my life and i say that because what i find is that this kind of work demands of me that I transcend my usual defense structures.
00:16:55 ►
It demands a quality of truth.
00:17:00 ►
It’s as if that being pulled from me something more than I would be used to giving to other
00:17:07 ►
people in an interpersonal way.
00:17:11 ►
In doing that work, I’ve been learning and I continue to learn a huge amount. I had already guided many hundreds of acid trips over the years,
00:17:31 ►
and other psychedelics.
00:17:34 ►
And what I remember was,
00:17:36 ►
because my pattern of guiding people was that I always took it with them.
00:17:40 ►
I didn’t give it to them.
00:17:42 ►
I always took it with them.
00:17:43 ►
That was the first thing.
00:17:44 ►
Because I felt that I didn’t want to be down in the control tower when they were up above the clouds.
00:17:50 ►
I didn’t want to lose them. I wanted to stay with them. I took a small dose.
00:17:54 ►
And then I usually dedicated myself for eight hours to just being with their consciousness, never straying for a moment.
00:18:02 ►
I didn’t have my own fantasies or thoughts. I just stayed with them,
00:18:05 ►
even when they seemed to be comatose. I mean, I just stayed right there with their consciousness.
00:18:12 ►
And the few times that I had people that had what we’re called with,
00:18:20 ►
I never know whether a bad trip is really a bad trip because I don’t know whether suffering is grace or hell.
00:18:25 ►
I mean, you’ve got to realize what a weirdo I am.
00:18:30 ►
People that had difficult trips
00:18:31 ►
was when some circumstance happened
00:18:34 ►
where our consciousnesses separated from one another for a moment.
00:18:38 ►
And they went towards me and I wasn’t there.
00:18:40 ►
And then they felt isolated and they felt alone.
00:18:43 ►
So I really kept it
00:18:45 ►
as a very sacramental way
00:18:48 ►
of working in the sense
00:18:49 ►
that I really feel
00:18:50 ►
a tremendous moral commitment
00:18:52 ►
that if you’re going to be
00:18:54 ►
in the presence of somebody
00:18:55 ►
whose consciousness opens
00:18:56 ►
and it’s new to them,
00:18:58 ►
that you be right there
00:18:59 ►
with them and available.
00:19:01 ►
Not directing them,
00:19:03 ►
not coming on to them,
00:19:04 ►
not doing anything,
00:19:05 ►
just being there.
00:19:06 ►
And what I’ve learned is that people’s safety at being heard, just being heard, being listened
00:19:15 ►
to and being heard, and feeling the presence of another being, is the kind of support that
00:19:21 ►
allows people to go extremely far and extremely deep,
00:19:26 ►
psychedelically and in the work with dying.
00:19:36 ►
Now, because the circumstances often haven’t been ones where I could use psychedelics with people that are dying, in the cases I have used them,
00:19:58 ►
cases I have used them, it’s been… I never would, was able to use a psychedelic without the person in advance knowing exactly what it was they were getting into. I felt that there was a moral limit
00:20:05 ►
to using somebody’s experimental subject, to imposing psychedelics for their own
00:20:10 ►
good, to giving it to somebody that they didn’t expect. I’ve made some moral
00:20:15 ►
errors in this line. They were errors that I made because I was too drugged, by the
00:20:20 ►
way, but there are errors that I have to live with. And there are people I assume are all right,
00:20:25 ►
but I feel a very strong moral conviction
00:20:33 ►
about having people understand and ask for
00:20:37 ►
and want what they are getting
00:20:39 ►
and it not being presented as if it was something else.
00:20:42 ►
I really feel strongly about that.
00:20:42 ►
not being presented as if it was something else. I really feel strongly about that.
00:20:53 ►
As the years have gone on, and I’ve
00:20:54 ►
done this over and over again, what I’ve found
00:20:57 ►
is that my attitudes towards death
00:21:00 ►
have shifted so deeply that I find myself often sitting at a bedside of somebody, say,
00:21:08 ►
a young person with AIDS whose family is ostracized,
00:21:12 ►
whose economics is completely wiped out,
00:21:16 ►
with an opportunistic illness and carposi sarcoma and neuro…
00:21:21 ►
I mean, the whole thing.
00:21:23 ►
It’s as hard as the human being can die
00:21:25 ►
in many ways and I find myself in with a set of feelings simultaneously of one is
00:21:36 ►
that my my heart is breaking for this human being because of the dream that is
00:21:43 ►
being crushed as the human dream that’s being crushed.
00:21:47 ►
At the same moment, there is another part of me that is absolutely equanimous, perfectly quiet
00:21:56 ►
inside, just watching the phenomena of the universe occurring, the life and the death and the passing
00:22:03 ►
as if the leaves and the color of the leaves were changing. It has that quality of absolute all rightness.
00:22:10 ►
It’s all right. And then there’s another part of me that I’ve been embarrassed about that
00:22:15 ►
is, I can describe it because I saw it in my guru so often, it’s a cosmic giggle. It’s an inner laugh at the play of life, the play of life and death.
00:22:27 ►
And what I’ve experienced now is that as I’ve worked on myself to become an instrument for
00:22:35 ►
being in the presence of somebody that’s dying, what I do is I offer myself to that being and literally, it sounds strange and almost
00:22:47 ►
masochistic from psychodynamic level, is actually fall into love with each of
00:22:53 ►
these beings. That it’s not a romantic love, it’s not a possessive love, but it’s
00:22:58 ►
a space of merging, of non-differentiation with them, of just being, just through that practice
00:23:05 ►
of listening and tuning and being and hearing and opening and opening and opening until
00:23:12 ►
you have, in a sense, taken on all of their pain and suffering.
00:23:18 ►
Not that you’re holding on to it, not that you’re a good person, you’re not taking it
00:23:21 ►
away from them, but you’re not separating yourself to protect yourself from their pain.
00:23:28 ►
And so what I have learned is that my reactions to suffering
00:23:32 ►
are key as to how helpful I am to people that are dying.
00:23:38 ►
And to the extent that I am afraid of pain
00:23:41 ►
and haven’t cultivated a part in myself of awareness that can say,
00:23:48 ►
I don’t want the pain, but if it’s here, ah, so we’ll work with it.
00:23:53 ►
The extent that I’ve cultivated that other part of me, I can stay open in the presence
00:23:58 ►
of their pain and allow myself to feel their pain and feel this kind of merging quality and what I watch
00:24:06 ►
is just to give you one I’ll stop it I don’t know what I want to do I don’t my
00:24:25 ►
my stepmother
00:24:27 ►
was dying of
00:24:30 ►
cancer that is metastasized
00:24:34 ►
to her liver and so on
00:24:35 ►
and I was working
00:24:38 ►
with helping her die, being with her
00:24:39 ►
through her death and we became
00:24:41 ►
very close and she was a very tough
00:24:43 ►
woman, she was
00:24:44 ►
a very strong ego very
00:24:47 ►
knew what was right and what was wrong she had a religious bent but she was not certainly
00:24:56 ►
somebody that was wide open to spiritual liquidity across planes of consciousness. Very good New England solid woman. And her
00:25:09 ►
pain got more and more intense and I saw the reason I bring her up is because she’s a dramatic
00:25:14 ►
example of something I see again and again and again. If I listen carefully enough, there
00:25:18 ►
was a moment when she was fighting the pain and resisting. Stephen Levine and I have done a lot of work
00:25:26 ►
with the resistance against pain
00:25:28 ►
and how it exacerbates pain.
00:25:29 ►
And I know a lot of you know a lot about that,
00:25:31 ►
how when you defend against pain,
00:25:33 ►
it increases its time.
00:25:35 ►
And she was really the will,
00:25:40 ►
I’m not going to suffer.
00:25:42 ►
This is pain.
00:25:43 ►
It’s terrible.
00:25:44 ►
Death is horrible.
00:25:50 ►
You know, that’s a whole strong conceptual model of reality, of life and death.
00:25:57 ►
And there was a moment when she surrendered, when she gave up.
00:26:05 ►
Now, in Western culture, giving up is seen as bigger, and you all know, you see through that, but you can hear it, how deep it is in all of us.
00:26:07 ►
You can go on, hang in, and she
00:26:09 ►
gave up.
00:26:11 ►
And
00:26:12 ►
most people psychologically
00:26:15 ►
would then describe her
00:26:17 ►
as going into a depression
00:26:18 ►
about
00:26:21 ►
her death.
00:26:23 ►
But at that moment when she gave up,
00:26:27 ►
we were lying in bed and I was holding her in my arms
00:26:31 ►
and we started to just whisper about consciousness.
00:26:38 ►
And instead of her pulling back into an emotional reaction to the giving up,
00:26:44 ►
it was very much like seeing somebody inside an egg
00:26:48 ►
and the shell has just broken open.
00:26:51 ►
And a being appeared at that moment
00:26:55 ►
who was so radiant,
00:26:58 ►
so incredibly beautiful from within,
00:27:01 ►
so joyful, so light,
00:27:09 ►
that she had never seen herself that way in this lifetime.
00:27:19 ►
And she and I both celebrated, not in words, just in presence, the beauty of this moment until her death, she stayed in this absolutely exalted light,
00:27:28 ►
seeing her death as the way they talk about in India called dropping the body.
00:27:33 ►
She was just going to drop her body.
00:27:35 ►
She had broken the identification where that was done.
00:27:39 ►
And I just recall her last moment, and she said,
00:27:44 ►
Richard, sit me up.
00:27:46 ►
And I put her legs over the end of the bed,
00:27:49 ►
and I held her up, and she was falling forward,
00:27:52 ►
and I put my hand against her chest.
00:27:54 ►
Falling back, I put the other hand against her back,
00:27:56 ►
and her head was lolling, and I put my head against her head
00:28:00 ►
so she could sit really upright.
00:28:02 ►
And then she took three deep breaths, each in-breath longer,
00:28:07 ►
each out-breath longer than the in-breath, and she died. And if you read the Tibetan literature,
00:28:17 ►
one of the ways, in the traditional ways in which the monks leave their body, is to sit up, take
00:28:22 ►
three breaths, and die. She obviously wasn’t trained in that and didn’t know that,
00:28:27 ►
but I experienced that I had been privy to something
00:28:30 ►
that reminded me about what was possible in this business.
00:28:37 ►
So I’ll stop, except to just say that I am I first honor
00:28:46 ►
the
00:28:47 ►
willingness for you to stay
00:28:50 ►
with the
00:28:52 ►
discipline
00:28:54 ►
necessary to put together a game like this
00:28:56 ►
and I want to apologize
00:28:58 ►
to you for whatever
00:29:00 ►
we did back in the 60s
00:29:03 ►
out of our greed to go ahead that caused you all this trouble now
00:29:08 ►
because I was part of that. I realize that the protocol focuses on the drug,
00:29:21 ►
on the effects of the MDMA, but I really want to encourage you to recognize
00:29:29 ►
that the psychological environment and your relationship to the people, while it is only
00:29:36 ►
that, depending on their readiness and willingness, the subjects will be encouraged to have verbal
00:29:41 ►
interactions with the therapist, discussing the content of the experience
00:29:45 ►
and how it relates to pain reduction. I just want to, I mean, I understand how the government
00:29:52 ►
hears that, but from your and my point of view, the difference between
00:29:58 ►
somebody who’s had MDMA and somebody who had a controlled substance,
00:30:07 ►
Somebody who’s had MDMA and somebody who had a controlled substance, all of us in this room know that a
00:30:10 ►
controlled experiment with psychedelics is
00:30:17 ►
It’s a monstrous joke at some level and we’ve just got to face the fact that it was a joke We are doing it out of a game. We have to play by saying it’s nothing but we’ll prove that it’s not the null hypothesis
00:30:24 ►
It’s proven all the time by saying it’s nothing but we’ll prove that it’s not the null hypothesis.
00:30:30 ►
But as Ralph, who was part of the Good Friday experiment,
00:30:35 ►
will, I’m sure, reassure you that the people that took the psychedelic had no, there was no question of who would have the psychedelic
00:30:39 ►
after they had taken it.
00:30:40 ►
And the kind of interaction you as human beings will have
00:30:44 ►
with the people that had the MDA will be entirely different from the kind you will have with the people that took the controlled substance.
00:30:51 ►
And just the metaphysics and the love and the demand for your presence and the involvement are variables that are so profound that you will literally never know, ultimately, what was drug and what wasn’t drug.
00:31:06 ►
You will only know what was drug plus all the rest of it.
00:31:10 ►
And I just encourage you to focus in your own lives
00:31:15 ►
on seeing this as work on yourself,
00:31:19 ►
even though here you’re working on subjects.
00:31:22 ►
And understanding, and as much as you can,
00:31:25 ►
creating with the people you work with
00:31:27 ►
a collaborative contract
00:31:29 ►
in which you share your truth
00:31:32 ►
and find what in the protocol
00:31:35 ►
prevents you from sharing any truth
00:31:37 ►
and look at that very carefully,
00:31:39 ►
if there’s anything.
00:31:40 ►
And I don’t think there is anything in here.
00:31:41 ►
I’ve looked at it.
00:31:43 ►
Why don’t I stop now?
00:31:46 ►
You want me to talk about Huxley?
00:31:50 ►
Rick asked me just to say one thing.
00:31:54 ►
When Aldous Huxley was dying, Laura gave him LSD.
00:32:00 ►
And she wrote about it in his timeless moment.
00:32:03 ►
And she sat by Aldous’s bedside,
00:32:06 ►
and he couldn’t speak, and he wrote on his pad,
00:32:10 ►
now I don’t feel any sensation in my legs.
00:32:13 ►
He was watching his body die.
00:32:19 ►
And I was critical of Aldous in that writing,
00:32:24 ►
and Rick has taken me, not to task,
00:32:27 ►
but he’s questioned my wisdom in doing that.
00:32:32 ►
The deeper you get into spiritual practices,
00:32:37 ►
the more you see the pitfall
00:32:42 ►
of the way the mind works
00:32:45 ►
and the ultimate place
00:32:47 ►
being curiosity
00:32:48 ►
and
00:32:51 ►
there’s a way
00:32:54 ►
of not being personally involved
00:32:56 ►
in your death
00:32:57 ►
but in a slightly dissociative way
00:32:59 ►
psychologically
00:33:00 ►
pulling back
00:33:01 ►
to appreciate it
00:33:03 ►
as an interesting phenomenon
00:33:04 ►
that’s a level it’s another plane of consciousness psychologically, pulling back to appreciate it as an interesting phenomenon.
00:33:06 ►
That’s a level.
00:33:08 ►
It’s another plane of consciousness.
00:33:15 ►
But it isn’t the plane of consciousness that is possible where the body, the dying, the person’s dying, all of it dissolves back into just pure, undifferentiated awareness.
00:33:23 ►
And I never experienced in my time with Aldous or my readings of any of Aldous’ work, that quality of his being.
00:33:33 ►
I felt that he always remained the exquisite appreciator of life.
00:33:45 ►
of life. And I felt that even at the moment, I don’t think the LSD did that to him, but I don’t think 100 micrograms of LSD was enough to take Aldous beyond the power of his own mind.
00:33:53 ►
And I felt that with Alan Watts. I felt that with many, many people. I felt that
00:33:57 ►
your mind can get so clever, you can socialize the drug very, very quickly. And I felt that all of these people did that.
00:34:06 ►
And I found it very hard
00:34:08 ►
for me not to do that again and again and again.
00:34:10 ►
Just one more thing about the protocol
00:34:12 ►
is that the use
00:34:14 ►
of earphones, eye masks,
00:34:16 ►
imagery, just remember
00:34:18 ►
how it separates
00:34:20 ►
people. The same moment as
00:34:22 ►
how you’re trying to create a nice setting
00:34:23 ►
for them and having a
00:34:25 ►
feeling of standardization. It may be that you want to hold a hand during it. It may be that you
00:34:30 ►
want to do something just in some way so the person doesn’t get isolated because paranoia,
00:34:38 ►
while MDMA is really good in the sense that it doesn’t feed paranoia a great deal,
00:34:44 ►
the conditions of isolating a person that’s already feeling isolated,
00:34:48 ►
because they come in feeling isolated because they’re dying.
00:34:51 ►
Because when you realize, when you see the world the dying person is in,
00:34:54 ►
they are almost totally surrounded by people who are at some psychological level
00:34:59 ►
distancing themselves from the person.
00:35:01 ►
Nurses, doctors, family, everybody. the person nurses doctors family everybody the deal you’re seeing the projections of everybody
00:35:08 ►
around them the projections of their own fear of death ministers rabbis everybody and so you realize
00:35:16 ►
how isolated the person that’s dying is and all of us that know set and setting realize that to
00:35:23 ►
take somebody through a psychedelic experience
00:35:26 ►
in a way that isolates them psychologically, to me, that doesn’t seem like an optimum strategy.
00:35:33 ►
I mean, others may.
00:35:35 ►
Ralph, who knows ritual much better than I do, may understand this in a ritualistic way
00:35:39 ►
in a way that I don’t understand it.
00:35:41 ►
But that’s what I think.
00:35:44 ►
And that’s where Ram Dass’ talk came to an end on this tape.
00:35:48 ►
His talk was then followed by another brief talk that I’m going to play for us right now.
00:35:53 ►
This talk is given by Dr. Kenneth Ring, who is a professor emeritus of psychology
00:35:59 ►
at the University of Connecticut. And he’s perhaps best known as one of the leading researchers
00:36:05 ►
in the field of near-death experiences. Like you, sometimes when I read about a person’s
00:36:11 ►
near-death experience, I feel as if I’m actually reading about a full-blown major psychedelic trip.
00:36:18 ►
And, as we will hear in a few moments, Dr. Ring, one of the world’s leading experts on NDEs, also sees
00:36:26 ►
a possible connection between them. Now, here’s Dr. Kenneth Ring.
00:36:33 ►
Friends, I think that you’ll be relieved to know that my remarks will be very brief,
00:36:40 ►
and probably dismayed to find out soon enough that they’ll be of almost no value whatever,
00:36:47 ►
particularly because of what has already been said here by our first two speakers.
00:36:50 ►
But since Rick did do me the honor to ask me here to address you, I’ll do so, I guess in my own terms.
00:36:58 ►
Like the people who have spoken before me, I also am a psychologist, but unlike them, I’m a researcher.
00:37:05 ►
before me, I also am a psychologist, but unlike them, I’m a researcher. I’m not a therapist.
00:37:12 ►
And as I said before, I’ve not worked with dying persons professionally, although my stepfather just died in California this year. And so I did spend 10 days at the hospital
00:37:17 ►
with him. It was a very interesting experience, but not particularly relevant to what I like to talk about here because I’ve been asked
00:37:25 ►
to talk about the implications of what I have studied over the last 15 years in near-death
00:37:33 ►
experience for possible work with dying patients. I’ve thought about this a fair amount even though
00:37:40 ►
I haven’t done work along these lines because I’ve had occasion to give talks to hospice groups in the United States or in hospitals or to nurses or other health care professionals.
00:37:52 ►
And I don’t want to talk about the near-death experience today.
00:37:56 ►
I’m going to be doing that later in the conference.
00:37:57 ►
But I think I would just draw out three aspects of it that I think might be relevant to the kind of research that a
00:38:05 ►
number of people here have an interest to do with psychedelic agents. Ram Dass touched
00:38:13 ►
on this very eloquently also, so I need hardly say more about it, but certainly one facet
00:38:19 ►
of the near-death experience that’s almost universal among people who go through and survive this experience is the feeling that they have when they undergo it.
00:38:29 ►
The most common word used to describe what it feels like to die is peace.
00:38:34 ►
But it is not just simply peace as such.
00:38:39 ►
It is an overwhelming, absolute, total peace.
00:38:43 ►
To give you an idea of the depth of the feeling
00:38:46 ►
that accompanies the transition to death
00:38:48 ►
among the people that I’ve talked with
00:38:51 ►
who were on the verge of what they thought was imminent biological demise,
00:38:55 ►
I remember one woman said, reflecting on this aspect,
00:38:59 ►
she said, if you could take the 1,000 best things
00:39:03 ►
that ever happened to you in your life
00:39:05 ►
and multiply by a million, maybe, she said,
00:39:10 ►
with the emphasis on the maybe, you could get close to this.
00:39:14 ►
I remember another man saying, peace, and he was giving me a,
00:39:20 ►
he wrote me a description of this.
00:39:22 ►
I didn’t interview him.
00:39:24 ►
But he said, peace, and he capitalized every single letter in the word He wrote me a description of this. I didn’t interview him.
00:39:29 ►
But he said, peace, and he capitalized every single letter in the word and then put a couple of exclamation points behind it and said, peace.
00:39:32 ►
But to give you an idea of what this piece was,
00:39:34 ►
you have to write the letters a mile high in soft, glowing colors.
00:39:39 ►
So the quality of peace that attends the experience of dying
00:39:43 ►
is, I think, beyond imagination for anyone who hasn’t had this experience.
00:39:49 ►
There’s another aspect of the near-death experience I point to.
00:39:52 ►
Virtually everyone that I’ve talked with, and I think this is the common experience of other NDE researchers,
00:39:58 ►
has said that as a result of this experience, their fear of death has been, if not extinguished and extinguished
00:40:05 ►
permanently, then radically, drastically reduced. Almost everybody talks about this particular
00:40:11 ►
effect, the loss of the fear of death. And the third thing that I’ll mention is that
00:40:16 ►
almost invariably, people who have this experience will say afterward, in terms of its implications,
00:40:22 ►
that not merely that they’ve come to believe, but they know with a deep
00:40:26 ►
inner certitude that there is some form of conscious existence after what we still here call
00:40:31 ►
death. So the feelings of peace, the sense of the loss of the fear of death, and the sense of some
00:40:38 ►
continuation after death, these are almost three universal attributes of the experience of dying, the near-death experience as I’ve studied it.
00:40:46 ►
Now it’s obvious that if you could induce through a psychedelic agent or in some other
00:40:53 ►
way aspects of this kind of experience in people and in dying people, then you would
00:40:59 ►
certainly ease the transition into death.
00:41:03 ►
You’d give people in a sense a rehearsal into death. You’d give people, in a sense, a rehearsal for death.
00:41:05 ►
Now, all of us who are listening to these words of mine
00:41:09 ►
know this is hardly an original idea, nor a new one.
00:41:12 ►
It’s been around for a long time.
00:41:14 ►
Everybody here, I’m sure, is familiar with the Spring Grove experiments,
00:41:17 ►
the research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center,
00:41:21 ►
which was involved with this, Stan Grof, a number of others,
00:41:26 ►
which showed that LSD given to terminally ill cancer patients could be of enormous benefit to them. But more than that,
00:41:32 ►
in this context, that in a number of instances, people who had this kind of treatment did
00:41:36 ►
experience many of the aspects of the near-death experience that I’ve just spoken of, and were able
00:41:41 ►
to testify that this was very helpful in preparing them for their
00:41:45 ►
eventual death. And even outside of a death context, I’ve talked with many people, and
00:41:52 ►
probably there are people in this room that could testify to this, who have told me something
00:41:57 ►
like, well, I’ve never had a near-death experience, but I had a high-dose LSD session, and I had all of those things that you talk about as
00:42:06 ►
characteristic of a near-death experience. There’s nothing unique about a near-death experience. It’s
00:42:11 ►
only that coming close to death is a reliable pathway to release all these kinds of experiences.
00:42:17 ►
There are other ways, and obviously LSD and other drugs can do it. This is obvious. I just mentioned
00:42:22 ►
it here more or less for the record, and most of you already know about this. Obviously, the main thrust of this
00:42:29 ►
meeting of the research protocol, which I’ve just gotten, haven’t had a chance to read,
00:42:35 ►
is on MDMA. And I have some personal interest in MDMA also, since discovering it in 1985.
00:42:44 ►
But I have a kind of professional interest in this too,
00:42:48 ►
although, as I said, I’ve never worked professionally with these substances
00:42:50 ►
because I’ve been interested to talk with people who have had near-death experiences
00:42:55 ►
who have also explored the uses of MDMA.
00:42:58 ►
And I’ve questioned them about how the experiences compare.
00:43:01 ►
And one thing about what they’ve told me has really struck me and has
00:43:05 ►
stayed with me, and it may be that it would be useful to you to bear in mind. Perhaps it’s even
00:43:09 ►
mentioned some way in your protocol, I don’t know. But the three people that I can think of whom I
00:43:15 ►
asked about this said that the feeling of wordless love that they encounter during the NDE, which so
00:43:21 ►
many other people speak of as essentially the heart of the NDE, that that
00:43:26 ►
feeling of love was almost indistinguishable from the feeling of love that they had on MDMA.
00:43:32 ►
It was the same feeling. And I’ve heard about Marilyn Ferguson, who many of you will know,
00:43:37 ►
told me about an instance that she knew of exactly the same kind of comparison. So just that alone would be, I think, additional fuel to the rationale
00:43:47 ►
that it might be very useful to use MDMA with the terminally ill
00:43:51 ►
if it can give that kind of experience, that sense of love, which is death.
00:43:59 ►
Yevgeny was mentioning in his initial introduction his work with ketamine,
00:44:04 ►
and I have had some
00:44:06 ►
experience with an interest in that as well. I know there are some people, and there may
00:44:14 ►
be some people here who believe that it is, to use a fancy word, a thanatomimetic. Yes,
00:44:22 ►
I should have had you say that. It’s an experience that induces something like a near-death experience.
00:44:27 ►
That wasn’t my experience when I took it.
00:44:30 ►
I think it’s quite different in some ways from the NDE,
00:44:33 ►
as I’ve understood it from talking with many people who have this experience.
00:44:36 ►
But that being said, I would also go on to say
00:44:39 ►
there certainly are aspects of the ketamine experience,
00:44:42 ►
as doubtless many of you know,
00:44:44 ►
that are suggestive of some features of the the ketamine experience, as doubtless many of you know, that are suggestive
00:44:46 ►
of some features of the near-death experience. The sense of complete separation from the body,
00:44:51 ►
a disembodied existence, and other transcendental features would make it an obvious candidate for
00:44:57 ►
use with a terminally ill. And I do know of one oncologist in California who some years ago,
00:45:04 ►
I’ve forgotten his name, unfortunately,
00:45:05 ►
but I met him and participated as a volunteer subject in his study,
00:45:09 ►
who was doing a pilot study with ketamine with terminally ill patients, I think mostly with cancer patients.
00:45:16 ►
It may have been some people suffering from AIDS as well were in his sample.
00:45:19 ►
I don’t know what happened to that study, what the final results were,
00:45:23 ►
but I know that he himself was persuaded of the efficacy of this drug
00:45:26 ►
for this particular purpose with the terminally ill.
00:45:30 ►
So I guess, speaking as a researcher,
00:45:33 ►
all I really have to say is that I support and encourage these efforts
00:45:38 ►
to use some of these substances and perhaps others with the terminally ill.
00:45:42 ►
I think it could enormously benefit the people who would be given these substances,
00:45:49 ►
and as the two previous speakers brought out so well, certainly benefit those who work with individuals in this way.
00:45:55 ►
I have a feeling that the death context, as it were, in which these substances would be used might even enhance their value.
00:46:02 ►
I was talking to Yevgeny earlier and he
00:46:06 ►
mentioned to me that he was using one of the instruments, one of the questionnaires
00:46:10 ►
that I developed for my own work on the near-death experience in his work with
00:46:15 ►
his ketamine patients and found it useful. I know other people have made use
00:46:20 ►
of these instruments as well and so I would simply like to say if any of the
00:46:24 ►
work that I’ve done or any of the work that I’ve done
00:46:25 ►
or any of the instruments that I’ve developed for research on NDE,
00:46:29 ►
particularly for changes that people experience afterward
00:46:32 ►
in terms of the loss of the fear of death
00:46:35 ►
or belief in the continuation of life following death
00:46:37 ►
or other spiritual values,
00:46:39 ►
if any of these instruments would be useful,
00:46:41 ►
I’d be happy to make them available to people
00:46:43 ►
or talk more fully about them with you
00:46:46 ►
afterward. So, thank you very much.
00:46:47 ►
Could you talk just a bit more about how
00:46:49 ►
those questionnaires could be used?
00:46:51 ►
Because we haven’t yet included it.
00:46:55 ►
Yeah,
00:46:56 ►
well, I could talk about one in particular.
00:46:58 ►
It’s called the Life Changes Inventory.
00:47:00 ►
And it essentially asks
00:47:01 ►
people to say
00:47:03 ►
how a particular experience
00:47:05 ►
in the case that I’m studying
00:47:07 ►
a near-death experience
00:47:09 ►
altered, if it altered at all
00:47:10 ►
a person’s value or belief
00:47:12 ►
having to do, say, with feelings of compassion
00:47:15 ►
feelings of love toward others
00:47:16 ►
their feelings or fears about death
00:47:19 ►
or a life after death
00:47:20 ►
their desire to help other people
00:47:24 ►
their ability to live life more or enjoy life
00:47:27 ►
more fully, to appreciate life more fully.
00:47:30 ►
It’s a fairly wide range of value clusters and beliefs that might be expected to change
00:47:38 ►
following some kind of transcendental experience.
00:47:41 ►
And I have found, at least in my my own work Very substantial changes that people who have near-death experiences report on this particular inventory
00:47:50 ►
And as I was saying we have Danny and I were talking about this earlier
00:47:54 ►
It’s an instrument that can be fairly easily adapted for anybody who wants to look at the effect of one or a small number
00:48:02 ►
of very powerful transcendental experiences to see what kinds of change might ensue in the lives of one or a small number of very powerful transcendental experiences
00:48:05 ►
to see what kinds of change might ensue in the lives of people afterward.
00:48:09 ►
I’m sorry, I’ll just add one more thing.
00:48:12 ►
I did bring copies, not of these particular instruments as such,
00:48:16 ►
but I bought copies of my last two books for display purposes.
00:48:20 ►
They’re called Heading Toward Omega and The Omega Project.
00:48:24 ►
And if anybody is interested
00:48:25 ►
to look at those questionnaires or others that I’ve used, they’re in the appendices of both of
00:48:30 ►
those books. The second, The Omega Project, has an updated and expanded version of the Life Changes
00:48:36 ►
Inventory that I’ve just discussed. Would you expect that the changes along certain values
00:48:41 ►
could be correlated with pain reduction?
00:48:48 ►
Well, it’s interesting to talk about that because I haven’t thought about it in any depth at all.
00:48:52 ►
But one of the things that happens to people who have near-death experiences
00:48:55 ►
is they have no sense of pain, and this tremendous peace instead.
00:49:00 ►
So I think there’s kind of a built-in correlation.
00:49:02 ►
Many of the people that I’ve talked with, of course,
00:49:06 ►
are essentially analgesic.
00:49:08 ►
They’re in an analgesic state for pain,
00:49:13 ►
and they feel a tremendous euphoria of bliss beyond all words,
00:49:15 ►
as I’ve tried even briefly to indicate.
00:49:21 ►
If there’s something similar that happens with the use of some of these substances, then I’d expect the same kind of correlation might obtain for people
00:49:24 ►
who are given psychedelics to assist their dying process. But as we in our research traits say,
00:49:30 ►
it’s an empirical question. It could easily be investigated and the correlations determined.
00:49:34 ►
Well, thank you. I probably shouldn’t tell this little story, but since Dr. Ring brought up
00:49:42 ►
Marilyn Ferguson, and sadly, since Marilyn is no longer with us
00:49:47 ►
well I think it’s maybe okay for me to tell it.
00:49:50 ►
As you know she was the author of The Aquarian Conspiracy.
00:49:54 ►
This book which had a major impact on me
00:49:57 ►
was very influential also as a catalyst for discussions
00:50:01 ►
about personal and social transformation.
00:50:05 ►
Dr. Ring says that Marilyn told him about a friend who tried MDMA.
00:50:10 ►
Well, I happen to know that Marilyn herself had at least one MDMA session,
00:50:16 ►
because the person who launched her on that trip was a good friend of mine.
00:50:21 ►
So, my guess is that Marilyn was actually speaking from personal experience and asked Ken to
00:50:26 ►
not bust her since MDMA was illegal at the time she tried it. Of course, it’s illegal now too, I guess,
00:50:33 ►
except in a setting under the MAPS protocol. Also, as you most likely figured out already,
00:50:40 ►
the other voice that you heard on these recordings from time to time was none other than
00:50:45 ►
Rick Doblin. And since so many of us have known Rick for a long time, it’s sometimes easy to
00:50:51 ►
overlook the significance of his work. How many people do you know who are long out of college,
00:50:58 ►
returned to get a doctorate just so they would be listened to more closely? Well, Rick did just that.
00:51:04 ►
I may not agree with Rick about some things,
00:51:06 ►
but in the Psychedelic Hall of Fame, I think that Rick Doblin is right up there with Albert Hoffman
00:51:12 ►
when considering the long-term effects of their work. In the Navy, we’d give him a Bravo Zulu,
00:51:18 ►
but I can’t tell you what that stands for because I think it’s still classified.
00:51:23 ►
Just ask an old sailor what it means. Now, getting back to the matter at hand, what did you think about the
00:51:30 ►
story Ram Dass told about taking acid and walking through a place where there were numerous corpses
00:51:36 ►
being burned? Personally, I can’t imagine a worse setting for a trip. Of course, after listening to
00:51:43 ►
Ram Dass and Dr. Ring, I may have to revise that opinion.
00:51:47 ►
It just may be the perfect way to overcome one’s fear of death. For me, the end of that fear came
00:51:53 ►
with a long-ago ketamine experience in Palenque. Statistically, I’m probably closer to dying than
00:52:00 ►
you are, but I can honestly say that I haven’t even given it a thought in many years. That one experience was so transformative that it has permanently
00:52:10 ►
changed my attitude about dying. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work
00:52:14 ►
that way for everybody, but if you keep working on your concerns about dying, and
00:52:19 ►
if you are fortunate enough to find the proper lubricant for your mind, you can
00:52:24 ►
banish that fear and begin to enjoy each day as it unfolds,
00:52:28 ►
without worrying about what comes next.
00:52:31 ►
Of course, that’s easier said than done,
00:52:34 ►
but with a little help from your friends, it isn’t impossible.
00:52:38 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:52:43 ►
Namaste, my friends.