010 - Stories from Boulder, Colorado

Program Notes

Lex Pelger on Psymposia’s Blue Dot Tour

Date these stories were recorded: April 15, 2017

Today’s podcast features the Psymposia Stories from Boulder, CO. A wide-range of people gathered under Naropa University to share their personal tales.

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:24 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:30 ►

And before I turn this over to Lex, I’m going to first do something that I’ve never done before,

00:00:35 ►

and that is to give a plug to a company to which my only connection really is as a customer.

00:00:42 ►

That company is Pax, P-A-X, and they are the makers of my favorite portable vaporizer.

00:00:44 ►

They’re not paying me to do this, by the way.

00:00:48 ►

Now, I’ve owned a PAX 1, and now I’m using a PAX 2.

00:00:51 ►

But in all honesty, I’ve never tried the PAX 3.

00:00:53 ►

A friend of mine has one and says it’s great.

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But here’s why I’m mentioning them right now.

00:01:00 ►

They just announced that from today through the 31st of this month,

00:01:03 ►

which here in the States is Memorial Day,

00:01:05 ►

the PAX company will be donating all, not just a few percent, but all of their net profits during this period to veteran-approved

00:01:11 ►

charities. And on top of that, they are giving a 20% discount to veterans on their Pax 2 and Pax

00:01:17 ►

3 vaporizers. So if you’re in the market for a good portable vaporizer, well, this would be a good time to make your move.

00:01:26 ►

Now, for our podcast today, which comes again from the Symposia team’s Blue Dot Tour,

00:01:33 ►

it takes them to Boulder, Colorado, where adventurous psychonauts gather to tell a few interesting stories.

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And while the tour itself is coming to an end, Lex tells me that he has recorded a whole lot of really great material

00:01:47 ►

while on his travels and we’ll be hearing it in the months ahead

00:01:50 ►

now there still are three cities left on the symposia’s tour schedule

00:01:55 ►

so if you’re in Charleston, South Carolina tomorrow night

00:01:59 ►

or Nashville, Tennessee on the 25th

00:02:02 ►

or for the last stop of the tour in Baltimore, Maryland on June 2nd,

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well, you still have a chance to tell your stories at one of their gatherings.

00:02:11 ►

And even if you don’t want to tell a story of your own, these events are really great places to find

00:02:16 ►

some of the others. I was at their stop in San Diego, and well, I met dozens of interesting

00:02:22 ►

people there, some of whom were brave enough to get up and tell us their own tales of adventure and fun.

00:02:28 ►

So now let’s join a few of the good citizens of Colorado

00:02:32 ►

and find out what Rocky Mountain High really means.

00:02:41 ►

I’m Lex Pelger of Symposia, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:02:49 ►

This week is another set of our storytelling events from the Blue Dot Tour,

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and I’m pleased to be presenting some from Boulder, Colorado.

00:02:56 ►

We had the pleasure of being in a classroom at Naropa University,

00:02:59 ►

one of the most intriguing, strange, craziest colleges, I believe, in the United States.

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And we were hosted by NAPS, the Naropa Alliance for Psychedelic Studies.

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This was an especially intriguing mix because not only was it youth from the university,

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but a number of elders from the local Boulder community came out as well.

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Plus, we had a hat trick from the family of my editor, Zoe Plattik.

00:03:24 ►

we had a hat trick from the family of my editor, Zoe Plattik.

00:03:29 ►

Not only did her father lead us off with an amazing story about knowing all of these people throughout the psychedelic renaissance

00:03:34 ►

and the psychedelic revolution,

00:03:37 ►

but then a little bit later, his daughter Zoe shared about

00:03:39 ►

one of her first hard trips and how her mother helped her.

00:03:43 ►

And finally, her mother got up to share about the beginnings of their psychedelic romance.

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And those family stories around psychedelics that I think can be so important,

00:03:55 ►

they hint at what so often happens in indigenous cultures,

00:03:58 ►

where relatives get to know each other through the auspices of these psychoactive experiences.

00:04:05 ►

So please enjoy this set of stories from Boulder, Colorado.

00:04:19 ►

So I’ve got a lot of stories, but I came to the conclusion that I need to tell this one.

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I’ve got a lot of stories, but I came to the conclusion that I need to tell this one.

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And its seed is, I guess, in the roots of high school, middle school.

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I’m not sure when.

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But at some point, when I was in my younger days,

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one of my best friend’s dads told me I should read electric coolant acid tests.

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And apparently, I was shown signs of something. And then right after I graduated high school,

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I got myself, I bought a copy of On the Road and One Floor Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and then

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checked out Electro-Cooled Acid Test from the library. I ended up getting through One Floor

00:04:58 ►

Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and On the Road but not finishing Electro-Cooled Acid Test and I was totally taken by

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Kesey’s writing and Kerouac’s writing and then over I went to college and over the

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years then got into Ginsburg and started to really understand the beats and

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Cassidy and then Kesey and like kind of all their place in the mythos that is

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the kind of psychedelia culture of the 60s and so then after all of their place in the mythos that is the kind of psychedelia culture of the 60s.

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And so then, after all of that, I’ve come to, I went, it was my Christmas break of my

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junior, maybe senior year of college, and I was finally getting around to reading Electric

00:05:40 ►

Cooled Acid Test, and it was like like four years later and then the opening scene of the

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book is there’s a they’re in a garage and there’s this frantic kind of probably jazz type music

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going on and there’s this guy just beating on some steel just to the rhythm of it and then it

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reveals that the character is Neil Cassidy and after all these four years of reading and starting to understand these characters

00:06:06 ►

it all just kind of clicked and I could see the threads in between all of it and so during like

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Christmas break and I’m getting to the end of the book of

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Electrical Acid Test and I’ve got like 40 pages left and then a friend

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calls me up and says he’s got some blotter which is just like holy shit and

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it’s not gonna be my first experience with it with blotter but when the

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universe just like hands you a watermelon you got to take a swing at it

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and so I just instantly went and met up with my friend and picked up the water.

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It was like two tabs, not that much.

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But I went home, finished the last 40 pages of the book, and then dosed almost instantly after the book.

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And then within an hour or so, I started to get sent into a journey that was like one of the deepest journeys of my life and

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At one point I was listening to

00:07:11 ►

The greatest hits of hurdy-gurdy man

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Donovan yeah

00:07:17 ►

Donovan’s greatest hits and the song season of the witch came on and

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Talking about having to put all the stitches together and just the cosmic threads and everything.

00:07:26 ►

And just all the threads of my life were just coming together and spinning around and just

00:07:31 ►

seeing the threads of all of it and the beats and literature.

00:07:36 ►

And that was kind of always my first impulse was literary culture and medicine.

00:07:41 ►

And that kind of, again, that magazine that I’m founding is all about bringing literature back into the festival community and grounded

00:07:48 ►

educational medicine community and then after so as that song’s going on season

00:07:54 ►

of the witch at some point I meet the bait energetic presence of Kerouac

00:07:58 ►

Kesey Ginsburg and Cassidy and they’re just kind of these light pink hue beings

00:08:03 ►

and I’m just like on the floor just like in total awe, just like whoa

00:08:07 ►

what’s happening and just kind of feel like entered into that energy of

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writers and echelon of cultural reality and

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then after that I’m laying on my floor and

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I feel this energy kind of white white light, just pulling me forward, and

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then it comes and smacks me right in the third eye and knocks me out of my body, where I’m

00:08:33 ►

looking at myself, third person, overlooking the earth, and then it zooms back into the

00:08:38 ►

earth really quickly, and it’s just a large field of green grass with an outcropping of

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rocks in the shape of a heart and there’s

00:08:47 ►

two skeletons holding hands which I associate with the Grateful Dead because I had just

00:08:51 ►

been reading electrical acetic tests and one of them is growing a beard and one of them

00:08:56 ►

isn’t so I can tell that there’s like a male female aspect within all of this and I just

00:09:00 ►

instantly think I’m going to meet the love of my life and that whole vision happened in like 30 seconds like on the minute it was just like flash stop motion animations like

00:09:08 ►

and then I just came back to my body which is like whoa that was crazy and I didn’t quite

00:09:14 ►

know what to think of it and then six months later I just graduated college

00:09:20 ►

and I was sitting and just and moved into a new apartment in Iowa City which

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is where I did my undergraduate studying theater and I’m sitting there and there

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is a sliding glass door on the first night that I moved into this apartment

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and I get a knock on the door and it’s an Asian man who can’t speak much

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English because he’s a transfer student and I get that he wants to borrow an internet course to see if

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his internet works and it’s just

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weird like what’s going on here and it turns out I feel like it was kind of like that story of like

00:09:55 ►

you know if you meet a

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someone along a path that is in need and if you offer that person in need

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it’s kind of it’s actually a god or a goddess in disguise,

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and you meet those needs, and then your dreams are manifested through giving.

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And then I saw giving the cord, and then there’s a house party right next door, so I’m going

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to go over there, and I’m standing there in a tie-dye shirt with a beard that’s just starting

00:10:24 ►

to be able to freshly grow.

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That’s also part of the whole thing was that I saw the skeleton with a beard and I always had

00:10:31 ►

sideburns and facial hair but like a beard wasn’t really able to start growing until this fall and

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I’m standing there and next thing I know is I see this woman in white just walking up to me like on a beeline and I can just see this radiant light and she walks up to

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me and she goes do you have a scale and I did I like did one of my in-laws and

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people like asked me how I met I say she we met asking for a proverbial cup of

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sugar and she had French she had just moved to Boulder from to Iowa City which is a whole other story

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and we just instantly connected into that night and she was then and I was like when I saw her

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I was like oh man I hope she doesn’t have a boyfriend she was still was with the father of my

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stepdaughter and now we’ve been together since since 2010, and we’re all families just connected

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and growing, and it all just continues to unfold, and kind of the conclusion of this

00:11:34 ►

story is just about how the medicine, when you’re in the work, it’ll just call to you,

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and the signs are very hard to miss when you’re just like deep in it and it just keeps calling us forward and

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you’ve got to keep leaning into the fear and watch it flower blossom thank you so much

00:12:13 ►

I had my first psychedelic experience in the spring of 1961 as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project directed by Timothy Lerner.

00:12:19 ►

So if you could do the arithmetic, you see that I’ve been in this conversation for 56

00:12:24 ►

years.

00:12:36 ►

I know how I’m going to condense that into 15 minutes. The person I knew nothing about, or know than anybody else, in 1961. Let me just back up a second. Timothy Leary came to Harvard in 1960, the academic term, 60-61.

00:12:47 ►

And he began his work with psilocybin there. And he gathered around a bunch of graduate students from the Center of Personality Research.

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That’s where he was located. And then when he had a cadre, he decided that the next thing to do is to turn on as many influential people as he could.

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For example, jazz musicians. Thelonious Monk was one of his great conquests.

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And religious leaders. Zalman Shakta, who was the founder of Jewish Renewal

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was another one of those

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kind of questions at that time

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and Houston Smith

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Houston Smith was a professor of philosophy

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at MIT, I was at MIT

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undergraduate at the time

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I want to use that word undergraduate

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carefully, as you may know

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if you know the history, Leary and

00:13:44 ►

Alpert were dismissed from Harvard. One of the charges against them was that they had

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promised not to give psychedelic drugs to undergraduates. Well, that was

00:13:57 ►

interpreted as undergraduates at Harvard. I was an undergraduate at MIT, and I had been very close with Houston Smith for a while.

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I’m a mathematician.

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I got my undergraduate mathematics degree at MIT.

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I got my PhD at Stanford University.

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I was a natal postdoctoral fellow at the University of Paris and then Oxford University the next

00:14:26 ►

year.

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Then I went back to MIT to teach for one year.

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And then I went to Cornell University where I spent 35 years on the faculty as a mathematician.

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So I was very, I was at MIT, very mathematical person.

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But Houston Smith came there and he started giving this year-long course in

00:14:47 ►

the Religions of Man. That’s the original title of his book. If you look, you’ll see

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he re-titled it World Religions a little later on. The idea was Religions of Man, and he

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didn’t want to have that to take there. And when he actually taught his class, you know, you can go take a class

00:15:09 ►

on religion, oh, this is a Buddhist university, right? You can go take a class on religion,

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and they’ll say things like, well, Buddhism teaches such and such. Hinduism teaches such

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and such, and so on and so on. Houston Smith had participated in each one of these religions.

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The 10 years before he came to MIT,

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he was at the University of St. Louis.

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It’s either Washington University or George Washington

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University.

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I always get it confused.

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There’s two schools in America that have the same name.

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One’s in Washington, DC.

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The other one is in St. Louis.

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And he had as his teacher a Hindu swami from the Rana Christian Society in St. Louis. And he was, he had as his teacher a Hindu swami from the Rana

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Krishna Society in St. Louis. He also spent a lot of time in a Zen monastery, Rinzai Zen,

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in Japan. He had gone everywhere in the world and when it came to religion he did it. So

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when he spoke he didn’t say things like, Buddhists

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teach you such and such. He spoke

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as a Buddhist. In fact,

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if you go on,

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Bill Moyers made a

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series on Houston Smith,

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and

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it was put out on DVD,

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and now I think you can get

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it on YouTube, if you look

00:16:24 ►

for it, and it’s a very good, it’s worth reading.

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By the way, you saw his book there, Cleansing the Doors of Religion, Cleansing the Doors of Perception.

00:16:32 ►

Yes. So, there was, there was ex, people in the class, a lot of them were foreign students.

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Now there were no foreign students in America in the late 50s and early 60s, very few.

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They had to be pretty wealthy and pretty established in their own country. So they came there. But the

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thing about people coming from foreign countries is that they’re very religious because they come

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from traditional societies. And many of these people have things that were given to them by

00:17:01 ►

their family. Oh, you’re going among the agnostics. Here,

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here’s something to take with you, a relic or so on. And they would bring it in to Houston

00:17:11 ►

Smith. I saw this one Egyptian fellow. He was a Coptic Christian. And he brought in

00:17:16 ►

an illustrated Coptic manuscript like you’d find in the British Museum. It was museum

00:17:21 ►

quality. And when he handed it to Houston Smith to look at, his face lit up like a child

00:17:26 ►

who had just got like ice cream or something like that. This to him was the biggest thing that could happen.

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And when the fellow said, oh you could take it home and just return it next week or something like that, he was in seven head.

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I took those two courses and then the third course I took was this very small seminar in metaphysics.

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those two courses and then the third course I took was this very small seminar in metaphysics and in that seminar we went through a whole bunch of

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metaphysicians like Alfred North Whitehead and Hegel from the 19th century and also a

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thing on mysticism. You know I knew that Houston Smith was a friend of Aldous

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Huxley and I didn’t know I didn’t know at the time, I didn’t

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have, I had not yet read the book,

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Huxley’s book, you know,

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Doors of Perceptions, the Cleansing of the Doors

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of Perceptions and the Play on the Roots.

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But I just knew one fact,

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that Huxley,

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Huxley, drugs, and

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mysticism was sort of

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connected. And I went over to,

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I had, you had to, it was like

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a tutorial with your professor.

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I went, one day I was with Houston

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Smith. I said to him, by the way,

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what do you think about this thing

00:18:34 ►

with drugs and mysticism?

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And he said, oh, it’s

00:18:38 ►

interesting you should ask. There’s a

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project over in Harvard where

00:18:41 ►

they’re exploring exactly that.

00:18:44 ►

And I said, oh, there it meeting tonight? Would you like to come? Alan Watts will be speaking.

00:18:51 ►

Now, Alan Watts had always been a big, I’d always been a big fan of Alan Watts.

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I mean, until I found out that he was a chronic alcoholic and did not practice boozing at all.

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But besides that, I was always a big fan of him. He could speak.

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He was like a Terrence McKenna.

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Okay, so I went there.

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I saw how he wanted to speak.

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But the interesting thing, oh, and Timothy Leary at that time was completely buttoned down.

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He looked like a Harvard professor.

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You know, tie, everything you could imagine.

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I never expected that he would become as, I don’t know, scandalous as he became.

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But it was the people around, the people around him, the students that he had collected,

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they looked at him like, I don’t know, maybe when St. Paul went to some of Athens and the

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early Christians came out, oh, he’s here, St. Paul’s here.

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They were very spitting.

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So,

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a couple days later, Houston said,

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would you like to try it?

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You know, I said, yeah.

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Okay, so, I don’t know.

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I have no idea.

00:20:00 ►

There was no Life magazine on it. Oh, there was, the one on mushrooms.

00:20:02 ►

But that was from 54.

00:20:04 ►

But Gordon Ross and everything.

00:20:06 ►

I said, yes. He said, okay, come over, we’ll come over, we set a time, I came over to his house.

00:20:14 ►

Now, to come to a, I’m working class. I have never been in a, anybody who had a profession.

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I mean, working class people don’t have any fessings. They just have a job. So I know, to go to a professor’s house is a big deal.

00:20:29 ►

And I walked up to it, I didn’t have a car, I was poor. I walked up to it, and in the window was one of those Natarajas.

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You know, the dancing Shiva, dancing the alphanumeric. I said, this is a very middle class neighborhood.

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Look at that. I didn’t see any other Hindu things in there.

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So I went in there, and his wife, Kenra, was there.

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And I had no preparation whatsoever.

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I didn’t know what to expect.

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He put the pills.

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He was suicidal.

00:20:56 ►

From the Sandoz company itself.

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That was the bottle.

00:21:00 ►

He put it on the table.

00:21:01 ►

And I said, what do I do?

00:21:04 ►

Nobody came and put earphones on me

00:21:06 ►

or put a blind around me.

00:21:08 ►

I said, well, what do you do?

00:21:10 ►

I said, how many do you take? He said, I take as many

00:21:12 ►

as you like.

00:21:16 ►

I said,

00:21:18 ►

give me a hint.

00:21:20 ►

I said,

00:21:21 ►

how much was the most that anybody ever

00:21:24 ►

took? So I get the upper and lower bound.

00:21:26 ►

And he said, well, Thelonious Monk, who was very knowledgeable about drugs, took a certain amount.

00:21:32 ►

I think he said 15 pills.

00:21:34 ►

So I took 16.

00:21:38 ►

I thought when he said knowledgeable about drugs, I thought it meant that he would need a lot, a little?

00:21:44 ►

I don’t know. Yeah, a little. There was no knowledge about drugs, I thought it meant that he would need a lot, a little, I don’t know, yeah,

00:21:46 ►

a little, I thought there was no knowledge about drugs. He would need a little, so that would be the bottom line.

00:21:50 ►

Was it 160? I didn’t know it was the top line.

00:21:54 ►

Um, but now, I’m not going to go through the actual trip.

00:22:00 ►

You’ve all read enough trip reports.

00:22:04 ►

But, I’ll tell you some facts about it that I think are really interesting.

00:22:09 ►

Set in Seddon.

00:22:10 ►

There I was, in a professor who I admired, loved, respected, in his house,

00:22:17 ►

and I felt, at the time, there weren’t any astronauts, but there was an astronaut program.

00:22:23 ►

I don’t think John Glenn and Lex would go around the world.

00:22:26 ►

And when the experience started happening, the thing that went through my mind is,

00:22:30 ►

I’m doing this for humanity.

00:22:32 ►

I’m doing this for science, because I’m a scientist.

00:22:35 ►

I’m doing this for science.

00:22:37 ►

I’m like an astronaut.

00:22:39 ►

And it’s interesting that the word psychonaut is coined by a German, actually,

00:22:44 ►

who was actually

00:22:46 ►

earlier than that, but nobody in America knew who he was.

00:22:49 ►

I was a friend of this writer who was a friend of Hoffman in Germany, coined it, Tony Psychonaut.

00:22:57 ►

Anyway, it was a truly moving experience.

00:23:02 ►

All I would say is, I certainly stopped becoming a materialist

00:23:06 ►

of any sense.

00:23:07 ►

And even some

00:23:09 ►

modern philosophers don’t like to be called materialists

00:23:12 ►

either. They call themselves a physicalist.

00:23:14 ►

But the physical world

00:23:15 ►

is the thing that they’re talking about.

00:23:18 ►

That they’re concerned with.

00:23:19 ►

Well, I certainly became much more of a mentalist.

00:23:22 ►

What was absolutely real

00:23:23 ►

was the psyche, the mind,

00:23:25 ►

and even all your perceptions is what you see.

00:23:29 ►

But the point is, set and seven.

00:23:31 ►

I had a beautiful set, I had a beautiful setting.

00:23:34 ►

I didn’t have to work on it.

00:23:35 ►

You see the movie about taking these patients

00:23:38 ►

and giving them psilocybin.

00:23:41 ►

All the work they have to do to sort of filter out all the propaganda

00:23:46 ►

that they’ve heard about psychoactive drugs, in particular psychedelic drugs.

00:23:51 ►

They have to have a physician there, they have to have a therapist constantly with them,

00:23:57 ►

and so on. In fact, okay, I’ll get to that in a second. So, set and setting were perfect.

00:24:04 ►

Nothing bad about the experience whatsoever.

00:24:07 ►

I redid it with him, though he was away,

00:24:09 ►

with his wife about a month later.

00:24:13 ►

Then I went off to graduate school

00:24:15 ►

because I was a graduate of the senior.

00:24:16 ►

And when I got to Stanford,

00:24:18 ►

there was nobody around in that area that I could find

00:24:22 ►

who knew anything about psychedelic drugs.

00:24:24 ►

The one person I did find was a man named Willis Harmon.

00:24:28 ►

He was an electrical engineer and a professor of electrical engineering, and he was associated

00:24:34 ►

with this little institute that they set up in Menlo Park to give LSD experiences to people

00:24:41 ►

where they had a doctor on the premises. They have everything that you see here

00:24:46 ►

That’s it was all done in 1962

00:24:49 ►

It was the fact of this black dark age that came between them, but now it has to be rediscovered

00:24:55 ►

00:24:57 ►

Didn’t go to that place because they charged 500 dollars for the session at the same time

00:25:03 ►

I knew acid was being sold

00:25:05 ►

in the street for $5.

00:25:08 ►

And I’m a poor graduate student.

00:25:10 ►

But when I was a graduate student,

00:25:12 ►

I didn’t take, I met all these people,

00:25:15 ►

but I did not take drugs while I was a grad,

00:25:17 ►

because I had to write a PhD thesis.

00:25:19 ►

I had to be a mathematician, but I waited.

00:25:23 ►

And when I finished my thesis, I got more into the scene.

00:25:26 ►

And that was four years later, or five years later. So I got more into the scene, and then it was a big scene.

00:25:31 ►

When I first moved to Stanford, I had a child and a wife, and we put in to go to marriage student housing.

00:25:40 ►

But it wasn’t available. So we had a little apartment in Palo Alto.

00:25:45 ►

But it wasn’t available. So we had a little apartment in Palo Alto. So when I got back on the path, as it were, I asked, you know, I found out the places where I could get a listing, which I hadn’t taken yet.

00:25:54 ►

I’d only been so excited. And I went, the guy says, for your company.

00:25:58 ►

And I went to this place, and all of a sudden I realized it’s the house that I lived in the first year I was at Stanford.

00:26:04 ►

And not only that, I went upstairs and I found the people who were living there. It was these

00:26:08 ►

grungy people who had a band called the Warlocks. And there in the nursery room were my little

00:26:19 ►

daughter, Barbara, who’s now a union therapist, who she was listing her little crib yesterday. There was this guy called Pink Pep, and he was sprawled out there. It was disgusting.

00:26:30 ►

But anyway, I met the guy who made the stuff, the Ouseley. I said, I want to ask you a question.

00:26:39 ►

I’m very happy that you’re doing this and you’re selling it because I wanted to buy it in trial but

00:26:45 ►

do you sell it to everybody who comes in the door he said yes of course I want to

00:26:52 ►

spread the maximize the exposure and I said well I don’t know about that

00:26:58 ►

because I know I mean people some people get in trouble with psychedelics. They truly do. I have a very close friend who committed suicide.

00:27:09 ►

Psychedelics. I have people who never recovered.

00:27:13 ►

Their life sort of went downhill. In fact, I know people from the late 60s and the hippie era who are still living today as if it was 1968.

00:27:22 ►

There’s been no change in their life. They think I’m

00:27:25 ►

the one who fell off the truck. But anyway, and he said to me, he says, I always use words,

00:27:32 ►

he said, there’s no trouble you can get into with LSD that you can’t get out of with LSD.

00:27:40 ►

Oh, oh. Okay. A little while later,

00:27:46 ►

they had,

00:27:47 ►

the reason I’m bringing this up,

00:27:48 ►

you mentioned the electric Kool-Aid test.

00:27:50 ►

They had one,

00:27:51 ►

they had an acid test in Palo Alto,

00:27:54 ►

and I went to it because

00:27:55 ►

I’ve met these people,

00:27:57 ►

the warlocks and so on,

00:27:59 ►

they told me to come over,

00:28:00 ►

and I did.

00:28:01 ►

It was the worst thing I had ever seen

00:28:03 ►

in my life.

00:28:06 ►

You have no idea. These were teeny-bobbers. These were high school kids. They just came in

00:28:11 ►

there and it was in the Kool-Aid and they took it and so on. The music was awful.

00:28:16 ►

The warlocks were not yet quite that great from then. But the music, you know, but

00:28:21 ►

worse than that, it seemed to me that their method was to try, with sensory

00:28:28 ►

overload, to try to break people apart, you know, and give them the drug and play this

00:28:35 ►

very, very loud, raucous music. I’m sure when they have this tape that they give to people

00:28:40 ►

with John Hopkins, it doesn’t include music like that. And I saw people freaking out.

00:28:47 ►

About the only interesting thing about going,

00:28:49 ►

I left, I wouldn’t stay.

00:28:50 ►

But the only interesting thing about going there

00:28:52 ►

is I did meet Neil Cassidy.

00:28:55 ►

And Neil Cassidy was,

00:28:57 ►

I understood in literature

00:28:59 ►

when the word speed freak came out a few years later,

00:29:02 ►

I understood what that meant, remembering Neil Cassidy.

00:29:06 ►

Neil Cassidy didn’t take any psychedelics.

00:29:09 ►

He loaded himself up.

00:29:10 ►

He was the driver of the truck, of the bus,

00:29:13 ►

when they had furlough.

00:29:14 ►

They’d go across the country, take a sleep, he could drive.

00:29:17 ►

He just kept driving and driving.

00:29:20 ►

So I thought that was not going to come to a good end.

00:29:25 ►

And this whole idea of, you know,

00:29:27 ►

the French have the epithet, the bourgeoisie,

00:29:29 ►

because you do things to, like,

00:29:31 ►

really rattle the bourgeoisie.

00:29:33 ►

And they were doing it.

00:29:35 ►

I said, no, no, no.

00:29:36 ►

The bourgeoisie rattled bigger than you did.

00:29:39 ►

They’re going to rattle your cage bigger than theirs.

00:29:42 ►

Okay.

00:29:43 ►

And it was at that same time

00:29:44 ►

that Leary took on

00:29:46 ►

these messianic qualities.

00:29:48 ►

And I am very

00:29:50 ►

ambiguous about Timothy Leary.

00:29:51 ►

If you talk to the people in

00:29:53 ►

the medical psychedelic community,

00:29:56 ►

they will say, oh,

00:29:57 ►

Timothy Leary, he set back research

00:29:59 ►

for decades, and

00:30:01 ►

now it’s on schedule one.

00:30:03 ►

Oh, we’re going to get it on schedule two.

00:30:06 ►

People know your drug schedule is,

00:30:07 ►

schedule two is not a place you wanna be either.

00:30:11 ►

Cocaine’s on schedule two.

00:30:13 ►

It just means it has some medical use.

00:30:15 ►

So yeah, it’s the first thing you gotta do.

00:30:17 ►

I mean if you’re going down that road,

00:30:19 ►

you gotta do some medical use.

00:30:21 ►

What was I saying?

00:30:24 ►

Oh, Tim Laird.

00:30:29 ►

I met him.

00:30:32 ►

There was a time with my relationship with him

00:30:35 ►

that I wouldn’t go anywhere near him.

00:30:37 ►

I mean, if I saw him come into a room,

00:30:39 ►

I left the room.

00:30:41 ►

I didn’t like the way he was presenting himself

00:30:44 ►

as a guru. Because I know

00:30:46 ►

gurus. I mean real gurus. I know spiritual people. And they weren’t like that at all.

00:30:54 ►

If you ever see the Dalai Lama, he came to see you last year or the year before, you

00:31:01 ►

would never confuse him with Timothy Leary. On the other hand,

00:31:05 ►

on the other hand,

00:31:07 ►

I wouldn’t be here today if Timothy Leary hadn’t in a sense turned

00:31:10 ►

me on by bringing Silas Ivan

00:31:12 ►

00:31:13 ►

Harvard and

00:31:15 ►

making it available to these people.

00:31:18 ►

And thousands and thousands

00:31:20 ►

of people were turned on by him

00:31:22 ►

in these public events and so on.

00:31:24 ►

But these public events, you know what they were like?

00:31:26 ►

If you read the history of religion in America, there’s been several Great Awakenings.

00:31:31 ►

When preachers came, and they, the first Great Awakening was in the early part of the 18th century.

00:31:37 ►

This Methodist preacher, George Buckingham, from England came, and, what’s the guy, Jonathan Edwards,

00:31:43 ►

he’s the American one, and then the second one came in the early part of the 19th century, and it was really big,

00:31:49 ►

much bigger than the first one.

00:31:51 ►

And a lot of things came out of that, such as LDS, the Mormons, Joseph Smith had been

00:31:57 ►

to many of these revivals that were happening, and he went into the forest to ask for guidance

00:32:04 ►

of where he should be.

00:32:05 ►

He says, you don’t belong in any of those churches.

00:32:06 ►

You’re going to have your own church.

00:32:09 ►

And then there was a third Great Awakening

00:32:13 ►

in the end of the 19th century

00:32:14 ►

where the social gospel was introduced,

00:32:16 ►

which is why you have food kitchens in churches

00:32:18 ►

and things like that.

00:32:20 ►

And Timothy Leary was trying to make

00:32:22 ►

the fourth Great Awakening.

00:32:24 ►

And what his events were, were exactly that.

00:32:28 ►

They were like the things you would see if you went in the South to a tent.

00:32:33 ►

Or my favorite guy is Jimmy Swaggart. I love Jimmy Swaggart.

00:32:38 ►

He said Jews will never go to heaven.

00:32:42 ►

But I’ll never put it in my book.

00:32:48 ►

Anyway, so I don’t know what effect

00:32:50 ►

he really had. There was all this

00:32:52 ►

nonsense about when he went to jail.

00:32:54 ►

Oh, and I was very disappointed when he

00:32:56 ►

went to jail and that the academic

00:32:58 ►

community didn’t come forward in any

00:33:00 ►

way to support him, which is what you

00:33:02 ►

would do for other writers and

00:33:04 ►

so on when they get in trouble.

00:33:05 ►

But, as you probably all know, he got out of jail by giving information to the authorities

00:33:10 ►

on people who had helped him out, like the lawyer who had smuggled in LSD to the jail

00:33:15 ►

for him.

00:33:16 ►

He gave him his name, according to what I understand was DeBar and things like that.

00:33:22 ►

So he has a, and then after he he came out a broken leg, he became

00:33:26 ►

an entertainer, really.

00:33:28 ►

And when I met him again

00:33:29 ►

at Cornell when he came there, he was

00:33:32 ►

talking about space exploration and

00:33:34 ►

colonization and things like that.

00:33:36 ►

And I’m sure he tightened in his own

00:33:38 ►

line with psychedelics, but he

00:33:40 ►

never mentioned him again because that was a condition

00:33:42 ►

for him to be released.

00:33:43 ►

He could talk any nonsense he wants as long as it isn’t using drugs.

00:33:50 ►

Oh, I think I better…

00:33:51 ►

Oh, oh, oh, one more thing.

00:33:53 ►

No, no, very important.

00:33:57 ►

I gave up drugs for 25 years.

00:34:00 ►

I didn’t have a joint.

00:34:01 ►

And believe me, I was a big idiot.

00:34:03 ►

There was no drug on the scene at that time that I didn’t try.

00:34:05 ►

Because I was considered from the side of the group.

00:34:08 ►

Yeah.

00:34:13 ►

Well, part of it was.

00:34:19 ►

What was he saying?

00:34:20 ►

He said, he’s been trying for 25 years.

00:34:21 ►

25 years.

00:34:22 ►

Because I, because I know a spiritual teacher.

00:34:26 ►

He didn’t insist on it.

00:34:28 ►

But I saw what it did.

00:34:30 ►

I saw meditation,

00:34:32 ►

daily meditation,

00:34:34 ►

and long meditations

00:34:36 ►

on certain weekends and so on.

00:34:38 ►

And I saw what deep study

00:34:39 ►

in the traditional texts

00:34:41 ►

did to a person.

00:34:43 ►

It’s wrong. They’re wrong.

00:34:46 ►

Psychedelic experience is not a mystical experience.

00:34:49 ►

It’s a prayer.

00:34:49 ►

A mystical experience is extremely calm.

00:34:53 ►

Totally calm.

00:34:54 ►

The mind doesn’t move.

00:34:56 ►

And it takes…

00:34:57 ►

There were times on my Oscar

00:34:59 ►

that I did have the mind not moving

00:35:02 ►

for long.

00:35:06 ►

Anyway, so I did have the mind not moving for long. You couldn’t afford it. Anyway, so I did that for 25 years.

00:35:11 ►

And then I decided it was time to write up my life’s thought on all of these psychedelics.

00:35:19 ►

Then I realized I hadn’t had psychedelics in 25 years.

00:35:22 ►

So what am I going to do about that?

00:35:24 ►

I mean, I can’t remember anything.

00:35:25 ►

Well, so we moved to Maui. We lived in Maui for 12 years. We just got to Belgium three years ago.

00:35:30 ►

I harvested the roots and the leaves for ayahuasca and made it and had a regular

00:35:38 ►

regimen of using it once a week for a few months. Right? Something like that.

00:35:44 ►

Well, I did it with a friend.

00:35:46 ►

A friend who, by the way, graduated from Naropa.

00:35:48 ►

And he graduated from Naropa.

00:35:50 ►

He was trained as a caregiver.

00:35:55 ►

And he took care of me.

00:35:57 ►

He took the medicine, too.

00:35:59 ►

But he took care of me.

00:36:01 ►

And that was a very fruitful thing.

00:36:02 ►

And many of my thoughts on psychedelics and so on

00:36:06 ►

snapped into place and i hope if i live long enough i’ll be able to finish my book

00:36:27 ►

I am not your typical sterner.

00:36:33 ►

I’m not, I don’t have any Birkenstocks at all.

00:36:39 ►

I don’t have the black thick-rimmed glasses.

00:36:41 ►

Oh, no, no, no, no.

00:36:45 ►

I’m not a man.

00:36:53 ►

When I was back home, it seemed like everybody who did marijuana was a 20-year-old white man.

00:36:59 ►

No offense, but just like, oh, well, I’m not that, so it’s not for me.

00:37:02 ►

And then I moved to Boulder.

00:37:05 ►

And, well, went in Rome right

00:37:07 ►

so I was in Boulder for a few months

00:37:12 ►

didn’t do anything

00:37:14 ►

and then I moseyed on down

00:37:17 ►

to my now dispensary of choice

00:37:21 ►

and just started

00:37:23 ►

asking a lot of questions I had been in a dispensary of choice and just started asking a lot of questions. I had been in

00:37:28 ►

a dispensary before that. It was a medical marijuana dispensary and I was

00:37:35 ►

blown away because everybody’s been to a CVS right where they’re like oh you have

00:37:40 ►

a coffee you go bye but the medical marijuana place was like, what do you feel?

00:37:46 ►

What do you want to feel?

00:37:48 ►

What is your medical history?

00:37:50 ►

And they’re asking questions for 10, 15 minutes,

00:37:53 ►

really caring about your medical health.

00:37:56 ►

So I became a little curious myself.

00:38:00 ►

So I went down to a recreational one,

00:38:04 ►

since I don’t have one of those handy cards yet

00:38:06 ►

and

00:38:07 ►

I went home with

00:38:12 ►

a canister of gummies

00:38:14 ►

and I didn’t know

00:38:16 ►

what to do

00:38:18 ►

or what to think

00:38:19 ►

so I did what they tell you

00:38:22 ►

never to do

00:38:23 ►

you take the full dosage because you have no experience with the drug whatsoever, right?

00:38:30 ►

And I took it.

00:38:32 ►

And the first time it was just sort of strange.

00:38:37 ►

But like by the fourth time, I had a story to tell.

00:38:44 ►

And that’s the story I’m going to tell you.

00:38:47 ►

When you have depression or anxiety,

00:38:51 ►

you wake up with dread and you go to bed with dread.

00:38:56 ►

It’s not a fun life.

00:38:58 ►

So you’re curious as to whatever could change that,

00:39:03 ►

whether it be cognitive behavioral therapy, whether it be you know cognitive behavioral

00:39:06 ►

therapy whether it be Lexapro whatever you want it to stop whatever it takes

00:39:12 ►

you want it to stop so I took that gummy not knowing what to expect

00:39:20 ►

tasted delicious that was good love candy candy. That was the problem back because I saw all those

00:39:28 ►

20 year old white dudes and they were like they had the vape and I’m like I’m a germaphobe I don’t

00:39:34 ►

want to touch that. I want my own, my own private weed. I didn’t want to share yours. I didn’t like your germs. But with the gummies, it was just mine.

00:39:45 ►

So I had that, and it was just a feeling of overwhelming balance and awe.

00:39:57 ►

Like you feel the comfort of the colors, and there are no five senses anymore. They all merge. What you smell is what you

00:40:09 ►

taste, what you hear is what you see. Everything is the same. And yes, you do get hungry, but

00:40:15 ►

I’m always hungry. I’m in a constant state of munchies. But it was more profound. It was like, I really, really, really need this snack right now, this specific snack.

00:40:30 ►

And you just feel this sense of, it’s more profound than calm.

00:40:36 ►

I don’t know what it is. We call it just the state of supreme gummy nirvana.

00:40:46 ►

I don’t know what it is.

00:40:47 ►

Yes, gummy nirvana.

00:40:48 ►

And the anxiety was just gone.

00:40:52 ►

It was just, it was gone.

00:40:56 ►

And was I cured in an instant?

00:40:59 ►

No.

00:41:00 ►

You know, those are my demons, and I’m going to have to wrestle with them probably for a long time.

00:41:05 ►

But for that moment at least, I had peace and balance and I could go on.

00:41:13 ►

I could say I can do tomorrow.

00:41:16 ►

Tomorrow is possible.

00:41:18 ►

And that’s my story. So I was just going to tell the story of the first time I consumed LSD.

00:41:36 ►

I was young and dumb and reckless and having a great time.

00:41:41 ►

So my friend tells me that he has some LSD.

00:41:44 ►

He has a strip of acid, and I was interested,

00:41:48 ►

of course, like, I wanted to try this. And so we go over to his house that night, and

00:41:53 ►

he was living in this, like, essentially a mansion at the time. There were three or four

00:41:58 ►

stories, a dozen rooms, like, it was quite a a large house because his mom was a real estate broker and she

00:42:05 ►

was like moving house to house, selling, selling these large houses. So I was in Northern Arizona.

00:42:13 ►

It was around this time of year, I think a little bit later. So you would expect it to be relatively

00:42:18 ►

warm. And it was that day. So we get into the night and we’re lying down in his bed and he’s like, let’s take this.

00:42:26 ►

And he hands me a little tap.

00:42:28 ►

We both put it under our tongues and we’re like, do we swallow this?

00:42:32 ►

Do we just sit it on our tongue?

00:42:36 ►

So we do that and I think we both ended up swallowing it after a little bit underneath our tubs.

00:42:46 ►

And to describe the house a little bit more,

00:42:49 ►

his anti-drug, his very anti-drug brother was sharing a room with him at the time.

00:42:56 ►

His anti-drug brother was across the room on a bed from us,

00:43:00 ►

and we were both lying in his bed.

00:43:03 ►

Upstairs, his mother, who was also very anti-drug, she

00:43:08 ►

had had addictive experiences earlier in life, so she was very hostile to any drug usage

00:43:15 ►

in her house at all. She was up there, and right after we dropped, his sister comes in.

00:43:23 ►

And his sister, nobody had known where she was.

00:43:25 ►

Nobody was really worried about it, but she just kind of disappeared.

00:43:29 ►

That was something his sister did.

00:43:31 ►

She comes in the room, and she’s just crying, just wailing.

00:43:36 ►

Both me and him had no clue what was going on

00:43:38 ►

and did not really comprehend why she was upset.

00:43:42 ►

Later, we found out that apparently his sister’s best friend had died that day, just a couple

00:43:50 ►

hours before.

00:43:51 ►

And so his sister’s freaking out, and we are unable to comprehend exactly why she’s upset.

00:43:57 ►

So she leaves again and disappears.

00:44:00 ►

So that was the general mood going into this experience, which wasn’t exactly

00:44:07 ►

the ideal setting, but I think it turned out all right. So my friend, around 30 minutes

00:44:15 ►

later, we were watching some television, just some patterns and listening to some music,

00:44:22 ►

and he falls asleep. So his brother falls asleep asleep as well so i’m sitting in this room

00:44:28 ►

alone like right next to the wall um so i’m i’m right next to the wall he’s sitting on the edge

00:44:34 ►

of the bed or he’s lying on the edge of the bed and his brother’s sleeping across the room and

00:44:39 ►

i’m sitting here coming up on lsd for my time, staring at these weird patterns on the TV, not sure

00:44:47 ►

what exactly I should be doing at this point, like wondering if I should be sitting here

00:44:52 ►

for six hours straight, just tripping balls, not knowing what was about to happen at all.

00:45:01 ►

So I end up wandering out.

00:45:03 ►

The wind was going crazy

00:45:05 ►

and I was wondering what was going on

00:45:06 ►

so I wander out into the living room

00:45:08 ►

and it’s snowing

00:45:11 ►

so like

00:45:12 ►

a little later than now

00:45:14 ►

a little later than now in the year

00:45:16 ►

several years ago

00:45:17 ►

so it was summer in Arizona

00:45:20 ►

and it was just pouring snow

00:45:23 ►

just massive amounts of snow everywhere and this was just pouring snow, just massive amounts of snow everywhere. And this was not

00:45:28 ►

expected. Like this is not common. It does snow in Arizona, actually similar amounts to here in

00:45:33 ►

Northern Arizona, but this was just shocking and unexpected. So I’m staring outside and it starts

00:45:39 ►

lightning and thunder with the snow. And this wasn’t a hallucination, to be clear. When I woke up the next day, there was quite a bit of snow on the ground.

00:45:47 ►

So this was something that legitimately happened.

00:45:51 ►

So I go out on the balcony, and I’m just sitting on the balcony wondering about existence.

00:45:59 ►

And I had all of those thoughts that everybody has on their first psychedelic experience.

00:46:04 ►

Oh, the universe is one.

00:46:06 ►

Oh, God is everything around us.

00:46:08 ►

And all of these things are true, not to, like, deny them or anything.

00:46:12 ►

But that was the experience I had just sitting out there, just a breathtaking experience.

00:46:17 ►

I was dressed in something like I’m dressed today, except a little bit lighter,

00:46:21 ►

sitting in a snowstorm at midnight in Arizona,

00:46:26 ►

and just freezing, and just staring at the clouds as lightning just strikes over and over again.

00:46:35 ►

So that was the peak of the experience, that craziness.

00:46:40 ►

So the only other notable thing that really occurred that night was I got really hungry around 2 a.m.

00:46:49 ►

So, I start raiding my friend’s fridge, and I pick out these orange fruits.

00:46:54 ►

They were about this big. Apricots, right?

00:46:56 ►

So, I just start throwing them in my mouth, and I chomp down.

00:47:00 ►

And it turns out they were tomatoes.

00:47:02 ►

And I haven’t liked tomatoes since.

00:47:05 ►

And that is the end of the interesting part.

00:47:18 ►

Um, I don’t really write that poetry ever,

00:47:23 ►

but a couple months ago I took part in a therapeutic ceremony with MDA or Sassafras.

00:47:34 ►

Sassafras.

00:47:35 ►

Yeah, and it was amazing.

00:47:39 ►

And so I decided to write a poem about it because it was just that cool.

00:47:45 ►

Okay, so my poem is called An Ode to Sassafras.

00:47:52 ►

You, the one who cosmically pokes and prods inside my brain,

00:47:56 ►

watering seeds of wisdom with colorful, fractal, whimsical, sacred geometric symbols,

00:48:02 ►

with deformed faces, demon beings, cartoon characters, and swirling

00:48:06 ►

furniture, with the wave of tears and screams and explosions of joyous expression. You, with the

00:48:14 ►

ability to witness my transience, see and love the impermanence of all that is, showing truth to those

00:48:21 ►

who are looking. You are a spirit, although not many recognize you as this.

00:48:27 ►

I see you as a scapegoat for that which remains in the dark of the human heart,

00:48:32 ►

a mother, fierce yet unconditionally loving. You, God’s messenger, God’s translator,

00:48:39 ►

the mystical bridge between realities. You show me that what I fear the most is also what I desire

00:48:45 ►

the most. Freedom, inner power, inner knowing, connection, love. You show me the unavoidability

00:48:53 ►

and absolute perfection of paradox, how nothing exists without its opposite, how feeling painfully

00:49:00 ►

insecure and divinely compassionate can and must coexist.

00:49:10 ►

You show me how to disengage from and witness the fight between my mind and my body,

00:49:11 ►

no matter how messy it is,

00:49:14 ►

and show me that I am not one nor the other,

00:49:17 ►

but rather both of them and neither of them all at once.

00:49:19 ►

Talk about paradox.

00:49:22 ►

You teach me what presence really means, that letting go, looking, and actually seeing is all it takes.

00:49:28 ►

Showing me not a cut-and-dry map of how to be present, but gifting me with a feeling, a compass,

00:49:34 ►

pointing to the divine primordial light within myself that is also seen in everything infinitely.

00:49:40 ►

You teach me to embody that which my mind thought it knew,

00:49:44 ►

alchemizing otherwise empty words into actual meaning, taking me blindly on a trip through the cosmos, one on which I must either trust fully or suffer.

00:49:54 ►

Reminding me of the obvious yet forgotten non-duality and interconnectedness of literally everything in our universe, even me.

00:50:02 ►

Planting seeds of true knowing in my my core in exactly the ways I need,

00:50:07 ►

but I must do the watering. You, a fierce spirit being that can heal me by destroying me,

00:50:15 ►

sacredly shattering the dark glass that only keeps me hidden from my infinitely connected existence.

00:50:21 ►

Your destruction of me is a divine blessing. You, you understand. You understand

00:50:28 ►

that God is you, that you are me, and that I am God all at once. Thank you, my psychedelic teacher.

00:50:52 ►

so i’m a senior at neuropa and so tonight i’m going to do a reading from my undergraduate thesis titled forbidden fruits

00:51:01 ►

religion psychedelics and the power to heal.

00:51:10 ►

And so the narrative that I’m going to read is called The Voice Inside My Head, A Mystical Encounter With God.

00:51:16 ►

It is the night of New Year’s Eve 2014,

00:51:20 ►

and I find myself alone in my one-bedroom apartment in California.

00:51:25 ►

Sitting on my couch, looking back at my spacious yet paradoxically cluttered apartment,

00:51:32 ►

reflecting on the past year as the clock counts down the hours until it’s all over.

00:51:38 ►

What had I accomplished?

00:51:40 ►

Not just in the last year, but the last two.

00:51:43 ►

My entire life.

00:51:47 ►

My mind had been poisoned by a great darkness that had hollowed out my soul as I drifted aimlessly through life destroying my

00:51:53 ►

health with drugs and junk food a slow suicide that would allow my evil corrupted nature to

00:51:59 ►

finally evaporate from history a deep anger and hatred had burned within me, like a hot

00:52:05 ►

coal at the back of a raging furnace that forever roared through the night. I

00:52:10 ►

had a deep loathing for myself and my own existence, but that was nothing

00:52:15 ►

compared to what I felt towards the people around me. Other humans who came

00:52:19 ►

into my life like newspapers drifting through the wind only for them to add to

00:52:24 ►

the chaos and the pain

00:52:25 ►

that had progressed the rotting wounds of my psyche. There was a cure, I remembered, as I

00:52:31 ►

looked up from the space before me and at my future and the year that lay ahead. I had heard

00:52:37 ►

of this religion known as Buddhism, hailed as the cure to ending all forms of suffering, and finally I would be free from the prison that was my existence.

00:52:47 ►

I would start along this path tomorrow,

00:52:50 ►

but in order to begin the first maiden steps upon my journey into healing,

00:52:55 ►

I had to put down the knife.

00:52:57 ►

Now, I hadn’t been literally drawing a knife across my wrist,

00:53:00 ►

but I had imagined so, and for every day for the last 10 years since I was 14 years old.

00:53:06 ►

I had been abusing any recreational drug I could get my hands on, from dirty cocaine that had been

00:53:12 ►

cut with toxic bath salts to lighter fluid that could kill me suddenly with one sniff. I had to

00:53:18 ►

stop trying to end my life and learn to live again. I was going to quit everything tomorrow morning, New Year’s Day,

00:53:25 ►

but before I did so, I wanted to go out of 2013 with a bang. I remember the bag of magic mushrooms

00:53:33 ►

my best friend’s stepbrother had managed to score for me and quickly got up off the couch away from

00:53:39 ►

my overthinking and hurried over to the lockbox where I had kept everything. I hesitated for a moment as the

00:53:46 ►

whirling of the overhead fan filled the air and the lights illuminated the room with a bright glow.

00:53:53 ►

I took out a single mushroom from the plastic Ziploc bag and swallowed it, chewing it in my

00:53:59 ►

mouth as a slight wince crossed my face as the strange flavor hit my taste buds. I was already in a bad place,

00:54:07 ►

mentally and emotionally. I found a bottle of anti-anxiety pills and downed a pill,

00:54:13 ►

just to be sure that I wouldn’t have a bad trip. I waited for about an hour, allowing the sensation

00:54:19 ►

to wash over me. I managed to take out my glass pipe and fire up a bowl of medical grade cannabis.

00:54:27 ►

Something must have begun to kick in because I felt the loving embrace of a familiar persona

00:54:32 ►

that had greeted me like I was getting back together with a long lost love. The cannabis

00:54:38 ►

deity gently walked me around my house, turning off most of my lights to a dim ambience. She then led me back to my couch,

00:54:46 ►

where I folded my legs across one another and began to meditate as my mind left the chaos of

00:54:52 ►

the world that I continued to inhabit, to a sanctuary within my inner being where I could

00:54:58 ►

finally find the peace that my spirit so desperately longed for. I had sat there for about 20 minutes as the psilocybin began to

00:55:07 ►

dance with the tetrahydrocannabinol as I began to come up and peak. I felt the elastic, almost

00:55:14 ►

taffy-like feeling as they paraded through my brain and activated an ocean of neurons,

00:55:21 ►

a pair of maestros conducting a grand orchestra of sensations and experience.

00:55:27 ►

Five more minutes had passed when reality finally broke.

00:55:32 ►

My mind had been a dark abyss up until that point, and then a vision had entered my mind.

00:55:38 ►

It was a blurry image of a large mass of people wearing red.

00:55:42 ►

A woman’s voice had entered my head, and at that moment,

00:55:46 ►

I knew in my heart that I was hearing the voice of God, manifesting as the archetype of the divine

00:55:51 ►

feminine. The voice told me that she had created my soul to simply and effortlessly, unconditionally

00:56:00 ►

love other people, and that was all. The voice was gone and the image faded away and by the time the

00:56:07 ►

30 minutes were up I opened my eyes, tears streaming down my face for a deep and powerfully

00:56:12 ►

transformative experience had just occurred. Some divine sacred light had entered my being

00:56:19 ►

and had illuminated all the darkness, purifying all the hate anger pain and suffering

00:56:25 ►

that I had endured my grudge against the world had dissipated and the long drug

00:56:30 ►

dragging depression that had clung to me like a suffocating blanket had subsided

00:56:35 ►

no longer did I want to abuse recreational drugs to take my life but

00:56:41 ►

to now create intentional rituals to enliven it. In a state of ecstatic joy,

00:56:47 ►

I reveled in the experience and journaled in my notebook so I could never forget this mystical

00:56:52 ►

experience. God had reached across the divide to commune with me, to remind me what I’m here to do

00:56:59 ►

and what the purpose of my very existence was. It was an experience that had deeply changed my makeup,

00:57:07 ►

and I no longer was the hateful person that I was before,

00:57:11 ►

and have become a much more loving

00:57:13 ►

and compassionate person ever since.

00:57:15 ►

And while I’m sure that neuroscientists

00:57:18 ►

could disprove the experience’s validity,

00:57:21 ►

it was still a real journey

00:57:23 ►

that had reawakened my spiritual being

00:57:25 ►

and belief in a higher power that had the ability to heal me in my darkest

00:57:30 ►

hour, setting me upon my adventure into a lifelong future of using psychedelics to

00:57:36 ►

connect with the divinity within. so I

00:57:52 ►

recently published

00:57:55 ►

an article with Sympoisia

00:57:56 ►

I shared a story about

00:57:59 ►

the first time that I ever did

00:58:01 ►

psilocybin

00:58:02 ►

and it was connecting, to say the least.

00:58:11 ►

The more I talk about it, the less magic it feels.

00:58:15 ►

So if you’re ever curious to read it, it’s on their website.

00:58:19 ►

But, so, recently I got told that spending time with me and my partner Justin, who’s coming up next,

00:58:28 ►

is sort of like being in a Seinfeld episode. Like, how am I supposed to take that? Am I George?

00:58:36 ►

But the point being, I had been ruminating over that, like, is that supposed to be offensive? Is it supposed to be funny? Like, what? And then I was really re-reflecting on my first, like, experience

00:58:51 ►

that I got to publish at Symposia. And, um, so let’s, let’s flash forward. I am on one

00:59:01 ►

eighth, which I thought that wouldn’t be a lot, but apparently it knocked my socks off.

00:59:07 ►

You don’t have socks, though.

00:59:09 ►

Precisely.

00:59:11 ►

Oh, girl.

00:59:12 ►

And I was at my parents’ house.

00:59:14 ►

That’s probably really, really important to say.

00:59:16 ►

And I thought it would be a really good idea.

00:59:19 ►

They were sleeping downstairs.

00:59:20 ►

I’m like, I just, this is getting really intense.

00:59:22 ►

I need my dog.

00:59:23 ►

I just, I needed my dog more than

00:59:25 ►

anything. So I remember like creeping downstairs as if like this dog had the answers for me. Like

00:59:32 ►

he could help me ground in this situation. He’s this really lovely wiener dog. Um, and I walk

00:59:42 ►

into my parents’ dark room and the hall, like the short hallway,

00:59:46 ►

which is only a few feet, extends to miles,

00:59:49 ►

and I start creeping towards their bed,

00:59:51 ►

and my hand is on their bed,

00:59:53 ►

and I’m just reaching for my dog,

00:59:55 ►

and it was like a thousand snakes were on that bed.

00:59:58 ►

I will never forget that weird sensation.

01:00:01 ►

Yeah, so I grabbed the dog, and I ran for my life. But they never got

01:00:07 ►

up, they never said anything the next day. And I’m just like wondering if they got up.

01:00:12 ►

I don’t know. You see, I don’t, nowadays I don’t think I have any interesting stories,

01:00:19 ►

so that’s the best I have. I just, I thought my parents my parents into some castle snakes yeah I

01:00:33 ►

took the dog he didn’t have all the answers but he did just you know just

01:00:39 ►

because dog is God, spelled backwards, so he knows everything. Okay.

01:00:45 ►

Okay.

01:00:47 ►

Okay.

01:00:56 ►

This is a quick story about my first experience with LSD,

01:01:00 ►

and I was dosed.

01:01:02 ►

I didn’t know.

01:01:03 ►

I was buying MDMA,

01:01:04 ►

and they told me that it was MDMA, and so I took two, and it turned out it was LSD and I was dosed. I didn’t know. I was buying MDMA and they told me that it was MDMA.

01:01:06 ►

And so I took two and it turned out it was LSD. And it was like midnight, which is never

01:01:11 ►

the way I would choose to do that. And it’s a quick story because my parents are in the

01:01:14 ►

room. So many things happened that night. And many things happened, but luckily I got

01:01:20 ►

back to my apartment and I was fine and wrapped in a green sheet with a cucumber and all sorts of things but at one point I realized that the benefits of being a

01:01:30 ►

second generation psychodont were that I could call my parents and so I did call my parents and

01:01:36 ►

where they were it was much earlier in the morning than it was where I was and yet my mother answered

01:01:41 ►

the phone and I told her that I’m on LSD for the first time.

01:01:46 ►

I didn’t expect to be this way.

01:01:48 ►

And at first she was like, can you have somebody who can call?

01:01:50 ►

Can you have somebody come over?

01:01:51 ►

And I was like, stop making me feel like I’m not okay.

01:01:55 ►

And she was fine with that.

01:01:57 ►

And so she began to sing me lullabies that she had sung me when I was a child.

01:02:03 ►

And tears began sliding down my face

01:02:05 ►

and I knew at that point that no matter what happened I would be okay and I was loved.

01:02:11 ►

And I just have to say with gratitude that it’s a really great thing to be a second generation My mother is Shiva, my father, Kali.

01:02:31 ►

This is why my car was towed from the liquor store,

01:02:34 ►

why I can’t get it back till Friday.

01:02:36 ►

I learned from my brother how to eat boogers.

01:02:39 ►

If you have a significant struggle, you have a significant self.

01:03:03 ►

So the first time I took LSD was with a friend. I had no idea what it was at all. I had marijuana before, so I didn’t change consciousness, but not many. And I came from a family that was

01:03:36 ►

Jewish, but poor, with kind of new immigrants. My father couldn’t speak English very well even until he died.

01:03:50 ►

And my mother was a feeling type, a singer, a loving, loving being who also ate too much and died when I was nine years old.

01:04:07 ►

And my father died when I was 19.

01:04:13 ►

And in between there

01:04:15 ►

was a person who became totally independent

01:04:21 ►

by the time I was 11.

01:04:23 ►

I bought my own clothes. I worked for it, you know, and had odd jobs.

01:04:31 ►

Not the story that you would generally get from a Jewish.

01:04:41 ►

I was very, very loved and pampered by my mother before all this happened.

01:04:48 ►

And then that crashed.

01:04:50 ►

And, you know, it sounds really, really sad when I think about it,

01:04:56 ►

but when I went through it, it didn’t feel very sad at all.

01:04:59 ►

I mean, I took every single day and every single thing that happened to me as, well, this happened, that happened.

01:05:09 ►

You know, yes, I need to buy clothing.

01:05:12 ►

I need to find some way to make money so I can make the clothing, you know, so I can get clothing.

01:05:18 ►

And I was a very good student in school, a Molly student, except for mathematics.

01:05:29 ►

school, I’m an all-A student, except for mathematics. So I actually took a course in mathematics, and it was really funny so I could understand what Richard did a little bit more. But anyway,

01:05:38 ►

so I was out, this is what happens, and my friend, I was living in Back Bay at the time.

01:05:49 ►

It was in a house that was run by the socialist guy,

01:05:54 ►

and he had to be really poor and sort of weird, you know,

01:05:57 ►

to get into it.

01:06:00 ►

So it didn’t cost very much money to live there.

01:06:05 ►

But anyway, we went for a walk on a big street.

01:06:08 ►

I’ve forgotten what the name of it was.

01:06:13 ►

And as we walked, it started to work,

01:06:23 ►

and all of a sudden I saw the world, and I looked up and I saw everything. Everything

01:06:29 ►

was dancing. Everything was dancing. The all the time, and I can only see

01:06:54 ►

it now, but something was removed so that I could understand where I really am every minute of every day.

01:07:12 ►

That consciousness has come back to me as I age,

01:07:16 ►

and I look at the world without amnesty,

01:07:20 ►

and it begins dancing all the time.

01:07:23 ►

And that was my first experience. So I remember that what I did was, for the first time,

01:07:30 ►

I put my hair behind my ears.

01:07:35 ►

I wanted everything that I was to be okay

01:07:40 ►

and change my life so much.

01:07:45 ►

I became a total introvert beforehand.

01:07:50 ►

And I became not afraid of anything or anyone anymore.

01:07:57 ►

I also had much faith in myself.

01:08:04 ►

I understood what happened,

01:08:06 ►

better, you know, and who I was.

01:08:09 ►

And I began meeting all kinds of crazy people

01:08:13 ►

everywhere in the whole world, you know.

01:08:16 ►

I became a friend of them.

01:08:20 ►

I wrote to the man mentioned, and Houston Smith.

01:08:33 ►

He stayed at our house and so forth

01:08:37 ►

and met many, many, many people.

01:08:41 ►

The Dalai Lama came to the place that I studied.

01:08:46 ►

We invited him and he

01:08:47 ►

accepted.

01:08:49 ►

All of us

01:08:51 ►

invited him and he accepted.

01:08:54 ►

Many, many incredible

01:08:56 ►

and wonderful things happened

01:08:58 ►

because of that and because

01:09:00 ►

of the understanding that was

01:09:02 ►

given to me so unexpectedly.

01:09:05 ►

And that’s all.

01:09:18 ►

So my story is about medicine.

01:09:20 ►

It’s going to be about holding medicine and about the medicine itself.

01:09:24 ►

It’s not exactly a tripping story, but it is about a psychedelic medicine.

01:09:29 ►

This story is about toad medicine.

01:09:32 ►

It takes place a long time ago.

01:09:36 ►

There was a time when 5-MeO-DMT was not scheduled.

01:09:40 ►

It wasn’t that long ago.

01:09:42 ►

This also takes place before the shame that’s going on with the medicine right now and the

01:09:47 ►

false prophets that are going around the world, spreading it in fame and fortune, leaving

01:09:52 ►

destruction in their waste, but I digress.

01:09:55 ►

Anyways, this story takes place in the summertime. time I had a a shepherdle a Cobra a 78 Chevy Cobra RV and I was traveling for

01:10:09 ►

the summer I took off and I was in Crestone for a while they went out to

01:10:13 ►

Taos and it was started to rain this is the end of July and it started when it

01:10:18 ►

starts to rain that’s when the toads come out and so whatever this guy’s

01:10:22 ►

house that I know and I walked in there,

01:10:25 ►

and I’m like, dude, it’s raining. It’s raining. We’ve got to do something. And he’s like,

01:10:28 ►

what are you talking about? It’s raining. It’s raining, dude. I didn’t call him dude.

01:10:31 ►

He’s not the kind of person that I would ever call dude. But anyway, he’s like, yeah, so?

01:10:37 ►

And I’m like, what’s a toad? We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go to Arizona. And he just

01:10:41 ►

looks at me, and he’s like, yeah, you you’re crazy whatever and so so I ended up leaving that night I went over his friend’s house his arm and

01:10:49 ►

stayed over the state overnight that night the next day we went back to his

01:10:54 ►

house it was probably around 3 34 o’clock in the afternoon and as we’re

01:10:58 ►

pulling in he’s pulling in and he looks different and he’s got this goofy smile

01:11:02 ►

on his face and we get out of the car, and like, where did you, what’s going on?

01:11:08 ►

And he’s like, come on in, I have something for you.

01:11:10 ►

Right?

01:11:11 ►

And I’m thinking, you know, maybe he found some, you know, some medicine he wanted me to try, or, you know, something like that.

01:11:17 ►

I walk in, and he had gone, he had left, the minute I left his place, and went to Arizona, and came back with actual back with actual toes, I was horrified, actually.

01:11:29 ►

It was really just, you know, like, what are you doing?

01:11:32 ►

You’re not supposed to do that.

01:11:33 ►

It’s not, you know, the medicine’s not going to be any good.

01:11:36 ►

You know, what are you, crazy, blah, blah, blah, you know.

01:11:38 ►

And he’s like, no, I’m giving you these two toes as a present.

01:11:41 ►

I’m like, no.

01:11:42 ►

Hey.

01:11:44 ►

Thanks, you know. And he didn’t give me a carton

01:11:47 ►

for them. I had to go to Walmart and get a carton and all that. So anyway, I quickly

01:11:52 ►

got out of there and I left. I went to a friend’s house that night and I was looking for crickets

01:11:57 ►

and ants and we went and got worms and we had another container. The next morning I

01:12:03 ►

take off in my RV. I’m coming back to Colorado from Taos.

01:12:07 ►

And they’re in a container in the back of my RV,

01:12:10 ►

you know, with a top on them.

01:12:12 ►

I had also been collecting plants and a whole bunch of things.

01:12:15 ►

So my RV was like a tricolour.

01:12:17 ►

I had some beautiful datura flowers that I’d found,

01:12:22 ►

and I had strung them with some some beautiful fishing line

01:12:25 ►

you know going across the across the windows and um so anyways I ended up breaking down no yeah I

01:12:31 ►

break down in a c-dot road stop um it was a vapor lock um I was there for quite a while the guy had

01:12:38 ►

to come into my little rv and we pushed it out of the way um at that point, you know, the toads are in this

01:12:45 ►

container, they’re making noise and they’re jumping around. I mean, yeah, I had a

01:12:49 ►

fishing license for them, but I mean, this was Colorado, not Arizona. So I took them

01:12:54 ►

and I put them in the toilet and put the cover down. You know, in an RV toilet, they

01:12:59 ►

can’t go anywhere, they’re just there, you know, it was fine um i got out of the vapor lock um

01:13:06 ►

the room for the future just pour some water over your your water pump and that usually will freeze

01:13:11 ►

it up so i got out of that i was driving back home and remember those little garmin gps machines i

01:13:18 ►

had one of those and my my rv didn’t um tell me how much gas I had. So I always had to do the math in my head and figure it out.

01:13:27 ►

And I could really only go like 150 miles or something before I had to get gas.

01:13:31 ►

And I mean, from Wazenburg to like Denver, it’s 25.

01:13:37 ►

There’s no exits at all.

01:13:39 ►

And so I’m driving down in my little garden thing.

01:13:43 ►

It starts telling me to get off, get off the

01:13:45 ►

highway, get off the highway. It was in Spanish. I didn’t have it in English. It was, you know,

01:13:50 ►

toma la escala. He’s yelling at me, get off, get off. So I finally get off, and I go, and

01:13:56 ►

I swipe, and I get gas, right? And I look over, and there’s a PetSmart. I’m like, yeah,

01:14:01 ►

I probably should get some crickets. That’d be a good idea. But I don’t. I get back in the car, I mean back in the RV and I go about my way. Twenty minutes goes

01:14:10 ►

by, same thing. Tomalapapa. Get off here. Get off here. And I’m like, what? I’m like,

01:14:17 ►

okay. So I get off and I look and there’s this pet store, another pet store. And I’m

01:14:22 ►

like, okay, right. I’m gonna go get some crickets.

01:14:25 ►

So I went in there and I got 15 crickets. I came out and I put them in the toad thing,

01:14:29 ►

and it was gone in like five seconds. I’m like, ah, right, like that’s weird. Okay, so I ended up holding

01:14:37 ►

onto these toads for a year because my whole goal was to bring them back, and it was too late

01:14:41 ►

in the season by that time to do it. So I had them for an entire year.

01:14:46 ►

And it was the hardest medicine I ever had to hold.

01:14:50 ►

And I’m talking about them themselves.

01:14:53 ►

They were pretty needy in a way.

01:14:57 ►

They’re extremely trippy to look at.

01:15:00 ►

Their eyes were like looking at the flower of life,

01:15:02 ►

tens of thousands you can just lose yourself into.

01:15:08 ►

But the hardest thing for me was that they would actually jump into my consciousness they would come into my dreams there was a

01:15:13 ►

time when you know like a good herbalist that I am I overtook my own cannabis

01:15:18 ►

medicine and was a complete amateur on the floor throwing up and literally

01:15:22 ►

couldn’t pick up a glass of water two feet away from me and that day the toads had jumped into my brain again that day um i had been feeding them

01:15:31 ►

some crickets and it was late they were crickets were pregnant and they were all squishy and as

01:15:37 ►

soon as i thought of you know the toads i started to think about the crickets and yeah i lost it it

01:15:42 ►

was it was bad but they were it was really hard medicine to hold um

01:15:45 ►

I had them in a container in my house um I lived in a a-frame and so they were at the very top of

01:15:53 ►

the a-frame in the little room so it was like a toad room and you actually had to get into toad

01:15:57 ►

position to even go in and give them crickets and I didn’t name them or anything I called them um los sagrados sin nombre

01:16:07 ►

meaning the sacred ones without names and I never showed them to people or anything like that and

01:16:12 ►

then a year later I brought them back um they were a little fat I felt really bad about that

01:16:18 ►

and I brought them back and I let them go back to the same pond

01:16:22 ►

unfortunately our park is no longer carrying toads. So yeah,

01:16:27 ►

that’s my toad story.

01:16:28 ►

Thank you!

01:16:39 ►

Hello, I’m Allison. I think I’m going to tell a quick story about a trip from this week.

01:16:47 ►

Yeah, I’m going to talk about my mom a little bit.

01:16:51 ►

My mom is the warmest, most beautiful, insightful, vivacious woman I’ve ever met in my entire life.

01:17:10 ►

woman I’ve ever met in my entire life. And these past few years, her soul has been completely stripped of her through heavy use of drugs, not psychedelics to be specific. She has been

01:17:20 ►

struggling since I’m born, but through her times of sobriety, I’ve just seen such an incredible person.

01:17:29 ►

She recently moved back to New York, which is where I’m from, and brought along my three younger siblings.

01:17:41 ►

And the first few months of living with her again, after about five years of separation,

01:17:46 ►

were beautiful.

01:17:47 ►

Um, it really was just unreal.

01:17:51 ►

Um, almost too good to be true, considering all the dysfunction that had gone on prior.

01:17:56 ►

Um, a few months into her being into New York, she relapsed. And for lack of a better term, I’m just watching

01:18:06 ►

her wither. And watching the way she interacts with my younger siblings is heartbreaking

01:18:12 ►

compared to the way she interacted with my older sister and I. I remember her running

01:18:22 ►

through the aisles of Target with us and laughing

01:18:25 ►

and grabbing things and throwing things off hangers. And now she has little to no patience

01:18:33 ►

for the three little ones. We, my older sister and I have taken on a lot of responsibility regarding our younger siblings. And I wouldn’t take any of that back

01:18:48 ►

because it’s building incredible relationships

01:18:52 ►

that we’ve lost over the years.

01:18:55 ►

But there’s been so much hate and resentment towards my mom.

01:19:01 ►

You know, I picked up, I moved back into a house with her

01:19:04 ►

hoping things would be good and now I’m

01:19:06 ►

in such a messy situation to say the least but I was leaving for Colorado about a week ago and

01:19:16 ►

I think I told her about 30 minutes before my ride to the airport was coming. Mom, I’m going to Colorado for a week. And she was like, oh,

01:19:27 ►

you’re leaving already? I was like, yeah, I’ve been talking about it for weeks, months, you know.

01:19:34 ►

All my siblings knew I was leaving. And she said, okay, text me when you land.

01:19:40 ►

As if in my head, I thought that really mattered to her. So we came here, and I texted my dad, who’s very involved,

01:19:50 ►

and I was like, you know, I’ll send her a text.

01:19:54 ►

So I spent about a day and a half here,

01:19:59 ►

and I was tripping on psilocybin.

01:20:03 ►

Yeah.

01:20:02 ►

And I was tripping on psilocybin.

01:20:04 ►

Yeah.

01:20:16 ►

And I, at probably the peak of my trip, I received a text maybe 20 hours after I had sent her a message.

01:20:20 ►

I felt my phone vibrate on the bed.

01:20:22 ►

And I looked at it and it said mom.

01:20:24 ►

And my initial reaction was an eye roll um and I opened my phone

01:20:28 ►

and it said okay I love you and which is not uncommon for her you know um

01:20:34 ►

and in that moment I realized that yes she’s struggling and she’s not doing the best, but she’s trying her best.

01:20:55 ►

And I am just looking forward to going home and approaching her struggle differently and with a new mindset.

01:20:57 ►

And I know I can’t fix it, but I am.

01:20:59 ►

The hate is gone. The hate is gone.

01:21:01 ►

Thank you. So from a very, very early age, I’ve wanted to try LSD.

01:21:19 ►

When I was probably 10 or 11, I discovered Arrow,

01:21:24 ►

on which I would read lots and lots of trick

01:21:26 ►

reports on my little device, my little portable game device when I was supposed to be at bed.

01:21:32 ►

I believe bedtime was at 8.30, so it was something like 9 o’clock. Each night, scrolling through

01:21:35 ►

Arrowhead, reading these crazy trick reports. Really, really interested in having this experience.

01:21:41 ►

Now, I lived in Houston, Texas, at which it was kind of commonly known not to take

01:21:47 ►

the LSD there, because it wasn’t LSD, generally speaking. At that time, we didn’t know about drug

01:21:52 ►

checking, so I never bothered to do that. So I didn’t have the opportunity to take LSD until I just a couple years ago, 24 today.

01:22:07 ►

So,

01:22:12 ►

sorry, should I have said your name anonymously?

01:22:19 ►

So generously offered to hold space for me.

01:22:22 ►

So we rented an Airbnb in Idaho Springs,

01:22:25 ►

found a source, a nice little purple piece of paper, I think it was purple at least, and we had a nice little intention-making session.

01:22:31 ►

We sat, meditation for about 10 minutes, and I ate the little purple piece of paper.

01:22:38 ►

Now my first experience was not overwhelming, nor was it even anything that I would call

01:22:44 ►

really psychedelic. It was really subtle,

01:22:46 ►

but it was absolutely beautiful for many different reasons. The first thing I noticed was jaw pain

01:22:53 ►

and a subtle pain in my stomach. So Melissa offered to make me some ginger tea. She brought

01:22:59 ►

me over the ginger tea, and as I took the mug from her, I got flushed with this somatic gratitude

01:23:05 ►

for her giving me the T. Now, not to assume that I take T for granted at all points when

01:23:11 ►

I’m at baseline, but this reaction was not a baseline reaction, so I knew there was something

01:23:16 ►

going on. So later on, I’m just kind of looking for effects, and probably this proactive searching

01:23:23 ►

for effects was what was making it so subtle

01:23:26 ►

on my part. Alyssa had stepped outside into the snowy weather outside of this cabin and saw this

01:23:32 ►

large wooden pentagram and yelled, what the fuck? I came outside and realized there’s this giant

01:23:38 ►

wooden like pentagram made out of logs outside of our Airbnb. Very mysterious. We never found out why that was there. But it made

01:23:46 ►

a good start to them. Yeah, it was a middle school history teacher. So that was interesting. So we

01:23:52 ►

went on our way, walked around the town. And if anyone knows Idaho Springs, it’s a relatively

01:23:56 ►

small town. Now, this dose wasn’t a microdose because it was perceptual. I’d say it’d be a

01:24:02 ►

museum dose or even an antique store dose. And I say that

01:24:05 ►

because we ended up in an antique store and I was able to function just well enough to

01:24:10 ►

be okay in there and not knock anything over. So we continue on and I’m still babbling that,

01:24:16 ►

you know, I don’t know if I’m feeling it, I don’t know what’s going on. And we come

01:24:19 ►

up to this door and this door, on this door I saw what looked like this really interesting artwork of mountains.

01:24:27 ►

I’m like, do you see? This is really cool how this is kind of in the middle of nowhere

01:24:32 ►

on this door, these cracked mountains. She goes, no, that’s just cracked paint. So somehow

01:24:38 ►

my brain had interpreted that as mountains, which is really interesting. So I knew something

01:24:42 ►

was going on. We eventually ended up at this little park, and I really wanted to go to the park and swing on the swings.

01:24:49 ►

And as we’re swinging, there walks in this small park a mother and her two young children.

01:24:56 ►

I was so excited to see kids. I’m waving at the kids, and the mother kind of pulls the kids away,

01:25:01 ►

at which I realize, I’m that guy on drugs, wait for the children.

01:25:07 ►

So we swing, and at that swing set, I’d say, I’m assuming that’s where the peak was,

01:25:12 ►

because we’re swinging, and I’m in the air, and I was extremely embodied, and after we spoke about

01:25:19 ►

it, I said that was a transpersonal swing set experience, which we thought is a great name for a band,

01:25:26 ►

the transpersonal swing set experience.

01:25:32 ►

So I’ll fast forward to my next experience with LSD, which was also very subtle.

01:25:36 ►

However, this one had a little more visual effect to it.

01:25:39 ►

We were in the town of Marfa, Texas.

01:25:41 ►

Does anybody know Marfa, Texas here?

01:25:42 ►

Got a few.

01:25:45 ►

So Marfa, as Melissa says, is like straight out of a John Waters movie.

01:25:50 ►

It’s in West Texas, a deserty area.

01:25:53 ►

In the 1970s, this minimalist artist moved to Marfa and started directing his own minimalist

01:25:58 ►

art.

01:25:59 ►

This kind of became a hub for young artists and hip folk to move to.

01:26:04 ►

It kind of became an alternative to Austin.

01:26:06 ►

So it’s a small town, middle of nowhere, population, I don’t even know, maybe a thousand or something.

01:26:11 ►

And just obscure stuff all over the place.

01:26:15 ►

So we’re wandering this town, and we end up in the city center, and that’s during the come-up.

01:26:20 ►

And this woman was very excited that we were there,

01:26:23 ►

because obviously there was nobody

01:26:25 ►

visiting that day being that it was a summer weekday and it was excruciatingly i’m sorry

01:26:30 ►

actually it was a winter weekday but it was still excruciatingly hot outside and so she’s giving me

01:26:37 ►

paper after paper about information on the city and this is during the come up and it’s entering

01:26:42 ►

my bloodstream as it’s happening as she’s handing me paper after paper she’s giving me the stack and i’m becoming like really overwhelmed at this

01:26:50 ►

point we had to leave we couldn’t contain our laughter we exit we exit the uh the city center

01:26:57 ►

i think we just wandered and saw some art exhibits eventually we made our way toward fort stockton

01:27:04 ►

i think it was fort stockton is what it was called.

01:27:06 ►

Fort Davis.

01:27:07 ►

Excuse me, not Stockton.

01:27:09 ►

Fort Davis is where McDonald Observatory is.

01:27:14 ►

Happened that at this night, there was a star party.

01:27:17 ►

So at a star party, they have all of their telescopes set up.

01:27:21 ►

And you could just pay a fee, get in,

01:27:24 ►

and the people working there

01:27:26 ►

will let you look through the telescopes. So there we were on pretty low dose of LSD

01:27:32 ►

getting to see the most high resolution images of different figures in space, including the

01:27:38 ►

moon, a few nebulas, some stars. And it really bonded us. And I could go on and on about this experience but that had to have

01:27:47 ►

been one of the most profound experiences in my life medicine induced or not it was wonderful

01:27:54 ►

thank you If you enjoyed this podcast, please support us on Patreon.

01:28:10 ►

Unlike other crowdfunding platforms,

01:28:12 ►

Patreon allows you to pledge any amount you’d like per month.

01:28:16 ►

To say thanks, we have perks like bladder art, hemp t-shirts, Palo Santo,

01:28:20 ►

and some of the new chapters from my graphic novel series about marijuana

01:28:23 ►

that’s based on Moby Dick and that we’re calling Anandamide, or the cannabinoid.

01:28:29 ►

Find out more at patreon.com slash symposia.

01:28:33 ►

Thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound,

01:28:36 ►

to Joey Whipp in California Smile, who made the music,

01:28:39 ►

and to Brian Norman, who produced the show.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

010 - Stories from Boulder, Colorado

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