012 - Psychedelic Stories from San Diego

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Various

Lorenzo speaking at Psymposia’s Blue Dot Tour stop in San Diego

Date this lecture was recorded: April 27, 2017

Here’s the storytelling session from San Diego. It’s an especially powerful gathering thanks to the Aware Project creating community there. Plus, lucky story #7 comes from Lorenzo himself and includes a great history on the importance of the talks in Palenque, Mexico.

This episode also includes a request for your feedback about the Psychedelic Salon 2.0 now that we’ve got a few episodes under our belts. Feel free to shoot your comments, your critiques and your recommendations on who to interview or what topics to cover more to pelger (at) gmail (dot) com. I will always respond.

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:24 ►

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

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And today we will be hearing a program that, well, I was fortunate to have heard it as it was being recorded.

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These are the psychedelic stories from Symposia’s Blue Dot Tour Stop here in San Diego.

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And to be honest, I was pleasantly surprised at the size of the crowd that night.

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I don’t know what the final number was, but there must have been close to 50 people there,

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including Mike, Brian, and Lex from Symposia,

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along with the volunteers from the AWARE Project.

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But rather than have me continue to tell you what you’re going to be hearing in this podcast,

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why don’t I just get out of the way

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and let Lex take it from here.

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Today’s show is made possible

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through your crowdfunded support on Patreon.

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Unlike other crowdfunding sites,

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Patreon lets you chip in a few bucks a month

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to help us keep the lights on.

00:01:13 ►

Find out more at patreon. is Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:01:40 ►

Today we’ve got a great episode of stories from San Diego, which is naturally a hotspot of the psychedelic community, thanks to the work of the AWARE Project, bringing people together.

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So we start off with Amy on the magic of weed, and then we hear from Matt Palomari, who will be our guest on next week’s show.

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And then, lucky story number seven comes from the one and only Lorenzo Hagerty.

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That brings me to my big ask for this week.

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So we’ve been doing this for a little while, thanks to Lorenzo contributing to the Psychedelic Salon.

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We’ve got some episodes under our belt, and we’re getting our system worked out, thanks to Matt and Brian.

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And hopefully you out there are getting used to the sound of my voice.

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And so I want to ask for your feedback on how we’re doing.

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I want to know what you like and what you don’t like about what we’ve been up to.

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Because I know this is a bit of a strange transition.

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This podcast went from featuring the words of Terrence McKenna,

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who was one of the greatest wordsmiths and raconteurs of the last century.

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And now it’s focusing much more on featuring the voices of the people.

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We’re doing storytelling

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sessions that are open mic. I’m interviewing experts that are drawn from the wise elders,

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and some of them are known, but some of them are quite unknown. So I want to know what’s working

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for you. What kind of subjects do you want to hear more about? Do you have any people that you think

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I should interview? Do you want to hear more storytelling or less storytelling? What do you

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think? What do you want to hear? So always less storytelling? What do you think? What do

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you want to hear? So always feel free to send in your comments to pelger at gmail.com. That’s P-E-L-G-E-R.

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I’ll always respond and I’m always curious to hear more from people about their drug experiences

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because obviously they are endlessly fascinating. Everyone has a tale to tell.

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fascinating. Everyone has a tale to tell. So here’s the ones from San Diego. Until next time,

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enjoy the ride. So, I’m a little bit nervous to come out of the psychedelic closet.

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But I met Lex in New York City in February, and I was there to hear Robert Barnhart’s talk.

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I happened to be in town. I flew to New York for the launch of a book called Stealing Fire.

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If you haven’t read it, I do recommend it.

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for the launch of a book called Stealing Fire.

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If you haven’t read it, I do recommend it.

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There’s a whole chapter about psychedelics and how it’s contributing to humans being able to reliably access

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altered states of consciousness to up-level our thinking.

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So I was there for the book, and I came to the Alchemist’s Kitchen

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to hear Robert Barnhart, who is the producer of that movie,

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a whole new understanding, a new understanding about mushrooms. So that night he shared his

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experience with psychedelics and his life story, which was really moving. And at one point he,

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he shared an experience he had with LSD and it was very profound and

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moving and inspiring to hear him share that so openly. And he encouraged everyone, if

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you’ve had an experience like this, to come out of the psychedelic closet. So I have had

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an experience like that. I’ve had some really fun experiences in my relatively short life with psychedelics.

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And one of them was an acid trip on my 20th birthday with my best friend.

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And I had completely had the experience of being one with the universe.

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I could send my mind and my awareness back through space to the moment of the Big Bang

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and then project it forward and watch time elapse backward and forward. It was really great. It was

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really fun. And it left me with a deep knowing that we’re all one. You know, this is me, the universe, it’s all different elements rearranged, and it’s nothing more than that,

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so even though it’s been years since then, and I haven’t really shared it much with anybody,

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it’s left a profound impact in my life, just that knowing, you know, so sometimes I’ll

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be sharing with somebody that I think world peace is possible.

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And most people think that’s absolutely crazy.

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And so I start questioning, well, maybe I’m crazy.

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But I realized after the talk in New York that having had that experience, that cosmic perspective that gets talked about, it just seems like a no-brainer. Like, we’re all going to get

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it, right? That we’re all connected. Like, we’re all, that’s not that crazy. Like, don’t hurt other

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people. And like, we’re all humans. We’re all walking around, cruising through space on the

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same little rock. We all came from the same stardust you know so I don’t think I’m the one

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that’s crazy and I absolutely think that experience with psychedelics for sharing that

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awareness and that experience with me the other thing that I wanted to share and I don’t know

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how long I’ve got to share but growing up my dad dad was wildly and severely alcoholic.

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I could tell you some pretty gnarly stuff that I experienced as a little girl.

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But it left an impact.

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We’ll just say that.

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And I think most people who’ve experienced or been around somebody who’s alcoholic

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could relate and understand without saying too much more than that. But as an adult, I found myself at 30 years old going through a

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divorce that was unwanted and unexpected. And my heart was just completely broken. And I turned to

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alcohol. I knew better. I’d seen my dad do it, but there was comfort in it, you know, and I wanted to check out, and I

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felt like I deserved to, because my heart had just been smashed. Unfortunately, I don’t

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deal with alcohol well. It’s not good for my body, and even though my friends all, you

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know, I would share, I think I’m drinking too think I’m drinking too much. I think, I think I’ve got a problem. My friends would say, oh no, you’re just going through a divorce. It’s

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fine. You know, here, I, you know, have some, have some more wine. And, you know, and that was

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not a healthy way to cope. And it went on for years of, you know, mostly social drinking, but I was also drinking alone and drinking in excess.

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So I quit that cold turkey a couple years back and was stone cold sober for a full year.

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It was quite shocking.

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Like no substances, no anything, no checking out.

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Let me just deal with the stuff I have to deal with.

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And sure enough, there was still grief and things from my marriage that had just been shoved down there, it hadn’t been

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processed, and that came up, and I got to deal with that, but a revelation happened when I went to

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visit friends in Denver, and they offered me some gummy candy infused with THC, and I tried pot in

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high, in a little bit in high school, and a little bit in high school and a little bit in college and just,

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it was way too intense. I went out of my head. I talked to God. I could read people’s minds.

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I don’t think most people have that experience on weed. So for me, I was like, I can’t touch

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that stuff. Like the only way I would ever do that is like if I was deliberately going

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on a peyote type, you know, vision quest because I, you know,

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I wasn’t, yeah, was leaving my body and decided, well, my boyfriend’s going to wake up with

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a dead girl next week, so I better come back in. But I didn’t want to. And that was just

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weed, you know, in Utah in the early, in the late 90s. So it probably wasn’t that strong.

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wasn’t that strong, right? But this stuff in Denver, this was just probably about nine or 10 months ago now is all, was really nice. It was measured out. It was easy to dose.

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And I had a very relaxing experience where I’m a clinical hypnotherapist and I was able to put myself

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into self-hypnosis and process and release some trauma that was residual. My younger brother died

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of a heroin overdose most likely. It’s a little bit unclear but he had a heroin addiction and

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some painkillers in his system and so I had some residual stuff with that. So on a little bit

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of medical grade THC that I ate in a gummy candy or something, I was able to have a deeply profound

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self healing experience. So when I got back to San Diego, got my card and damn it, you know,

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having the ability to take the edge off of life a little bit, but in a way that has me be more present and engaged and aware and recognizing patterns.

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My life has drastically up-leveled and improved since I started eating a little bit of edible THC here and there on the weekends at night to relax and

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up-level my thinking. It’s really, really amazing medicine. And I keep watching for,

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like you were saying, like, well, my life’s probably going to fall apart soon.

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This can’t just be good for me. This can’t just be okay. You know, because it’s too good. I’m healthier. I lost

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weight. I’m happier. It’s so much better. Now, I was recently socializing with people

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that really love alcohol and were drinking way too much. And I was, you know, practically

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wanted to say, put down the bottle and pick up a joint or something. Like, that’s the

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wrong substance for social interaction and social cohesion and

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you know it actually is very detrimental for the body and for family relationships but

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enough of that soapbox I’m really glad I switched teams and I’m happy to be here and I’m happy to

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come out of the psychedelic closet for the first time in front of all of you.

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So books like Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception and Carlos Castaneda’s Separate Reality

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opened my mind up to this stuff.

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And also there’s a Russian guy on YouTube.

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His channel is actualize.org.

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His name is Leo, and he’s originally from Russia.

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And he’s the one who talked about the mushroom experience. And after After that I decided to take it

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See so I’ve had a few experiences with it and

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think

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the second one was when I had this religious experience and I felt like, I just felt like this glowing light and I felt like it was like healing my chest area and where I usually hold a lot of, I guess there’s unexpressed emotions there and I guess some pain and stuff like that. So there was this glowing light

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and that feeling that I was connected with this divine consciousness.

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And I’ve never had any kind of religious experiences.

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I’ve never been a believer in anything.

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And so this was like, for the first time,

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I was like, oh my god, this is it.

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Thank you so much.

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And I was like, it was so emotional.

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I just had tears pouring down and sobbing like I’ve never cried in my life.

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And it felt very healing.

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It felt like this tension and pain was slowly releasing and I was

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like this is like the best experience of my lifetime and I felt like people need

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to know about it people just need to know about what this stuff can do and

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and after that I really got interested in. I started learning as much as I could about it.

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I started just, I wished that Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth,

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and that had, like, that started solving the puzzle for me.

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Like, especially how he talked about religions and how that’s,

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a lot of people, how theyinterpret that and and see that as like

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okay there’s god out there right and there’s like jesus christ is a person that was crucified but

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he talks about how that that’s a metaphor of what’s going on inside of our bodies and so

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jesus christ it’s like us being crucified and the uh process of crucification is actually

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and the process of crucification is actually

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ego dying on

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it’s the process of ego death

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and your spirit

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ascending to this higher consciousness

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from the animalistic state

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from the

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egoic state

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anyway I feel like this is what

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we’re like in the middle of this

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paradigm shift like

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on one side there’s like this ego survival

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duality

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like this

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separate

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you know

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me versus you

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my religion versus yours

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my sports team versus yours

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Russia versus United States

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you know countries

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and on the other side this is like

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the higher consciousness the oneness love um there’s many names for it call it like quantum

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field and divine matrix uh so that’s that’s where i feel like people need to know about this. And I feel like us here, we’re going to be the first ones to tell people,

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to be like the healers and tell people about this stuff.

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Because I feel like my life completely changed after this.

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It’s like I feel like I need to tell people about it.

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And people don’t know what this stuff is.

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People that take this stuff recreationally, guys, it’s like…

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that’s nothing. You gotta… you really gotta set the time aside, prepare yourself,

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and gain as much knowledge as possible about it.

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Because if you use it in the right way, with the right preparation,

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it will show you what this consciousness state looks like. It will reconnect you with your true self.

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And you realize that we’re all one.

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We’re all higher consciousness.

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And we’re just here temporarily in these vehicles we call bodies.

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And not only the internal stuff, but also showed me like my true potential of what

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I could do like there’s like these hidden talents that I’ve never explored

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because I’ve lived most of my life here with you know through social anxiety and

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being isolated from from other people and so I built up these unnatural ways

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of behaving unnatural ways of thinking and mushrooms showed me

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like I could see clearly all this stuff while on the trip and I had this

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wisdom and I was like okay this this is reality not this not like all the stuff

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that I’ve created all these walls that I’ve built up around myself this is it

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and I was just like emotional and I was just experiencing what it’s like to cry and laugh for like

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like genuine authentic emotions for like maybe the first time in my life and

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And I feel like

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If you had this experience

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You just gotta relive it. You gotta remember it. gotta remember it you gotta keep it fresh

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and learn as much

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I’m still learning

00:18:10 ►

a lot about

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I feel like I know very little about it

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and I wanna talk to you guys

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if you had

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this experience I really would love to

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talk to you guys about it

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because I’m still trying to figure out

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what else is

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possible on it.

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It feels like there’s infinite wisdom on it and you can learn so much about it and you

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can transfer that into this world and see what your true talents are, what you’re really

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capable of.

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And this has also just propelled my life into a new direction.

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I’m starting to take voice lessons.

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I’m starting to explore this creative side of me.

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And I feel like I’m going to use these talents as an art form to really tell people about it.

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And this is my new life purpose.

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And that’s what I feel like doing

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I’m minor embarrassed to say I’ve got I’m coming up on close to 50 years of

00:19:22 ►

very intense psychedelic experience.

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Officially, if you Google my name, my website,

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I’m an author, editor, shamanic explorer.

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I’ve been studying ayahuasca for about 30 years and I’ve been going into the Amazon for coming up on 20 now,

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doing very intense plant dietas.

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Lorenzo and I met some years back. You guys know about the psychedelics on. doing very intense plant dietas.

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Lorenzo and I met some years back.

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You guys know about the psychedelics lawn.

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We’ve had lots of adventures together.

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You may refer to some of them.

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We’ve gotten in trouble and gotten out of trouble.

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Lots of fun stuff we’ve done.

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But I also like to bill myself sometimes as the unofficial co-host of the Psychedelics Salon because I helped him get it started.

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When we used to go to the Entheobotany, they used to have the Entheobotany seminars back.

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I was like, for me, it was like 96 to 2000.

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Terrence McKenna was there, Sasha Shogun, Ann Shogun, all the greats.

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And it was a week long of very intense experience.

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Not only artistically

00:20:25 ►

intellectually and musically but all the chemists would come and we had some

00:20:30 ►

wild adventures so anyway I’ve also been teaching writing for like 25 years at

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the Santa Barbara Writers Conference Southern California Writers Conference

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all over the place and I actually teach I’m glad I’ve got the reference to

00:20:43 ►

Joseph Campbell because I have a book

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called Fantastic Fiction with a PH

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and it’s a shamanic approach

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to story structure and I teach a lecture

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about that all the time.

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So I’m all about shamanism. All of my writing

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is shamanism underpins it all.

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I’m in a bunch of different genres. I have 13

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books out right now

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and I’ve got maybe 15 different

00:21:03 ►

translations all over the place. So I’m all over the place

00:21:06 ►

like a map. So you can video me

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everywhere. I don’t care. I’m out of the closet

00:21:09 ►

for a long time here.

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So, what I thought,

00:21:14 ►

by the way, are you guys all from San Diego?

00:21:17 ►

Pretty much?

00:21:18 ►

Okay. So I’ve been

00:21:20 ►

in San Diego since 78.

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And I’ve been a big

00:21:24 ►

part of the writing community here.

00:21:25 ►

So I am proud to say that this Spirit Matters,

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my memoir, which I’m going to read out,

00:21:29 ►

won the San Diego Book Award for the best spiritual book

00:21:31 ►

a few years ago.

00:21:34 ►

Thank you.

00:21:37 ►

And I’m not here to toot my horn,

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although I’m very good at that.

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The reason I’m stoked about that particular award

00:21:43 ►

is because this starts with ayahuasca and ends with ayahuasca,

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and I talk about my long and jaded history of drugs and how it came to be for me.

00:21:52 ►

So I was really ecstatic to get that award, you know, to not be judged like, you know, you’re druggy, you’re hippie, whatever, right?

00:22:01 ►

Okay, enough of that.

00:22:04 ►

Reach out if you’re out there on social media.

00:22:07 ►

If you just Google my name,

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I was telling Lex,

00:22:11 ►

any pal of Mary’s or pal of mine,

00:22:12 ►

it’s easy to remember.

00:22:15 ►

And so,

00:22:16 ►

I thought I would just read the little opening here.

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It’s not too long.

00:22:24 ►

First off, you know what?

00:22:25 ►

Because there’s an underlying theme to all of this stuff.

00:22:29 ►

In the meeting I have this little quote from Nietzsche

00:22:31 ►

and it says,

00:22:33 ►

It is returning.

00:22:35 ►

At last it is coming home to me.

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My own self, with a capital S.

00:22:41 ►

And those parts of it that have long been abroad

00:22:43 ►

and scattered among all things

00:22:45 ►

and accidents.

00:22:57 ►

Okay.

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So, this is a prelude.

00:23:00 ►

And I called it a waking dream.

00:23:03 ►

If anybody’s had any experience with ayahuasca,

00:23:06 ►

that will make sense.

00:23:06 ►

But if it doesn’t, maybe we’ll after this.

00:23:10 ►

I am outside of time and space

00:23:13 ►

where the normal rules of perception

00:23:15 ►

no longer apply.

00:23:17 ►

Colors with hues that defy description bombard me,

00:23:21 ►

then unfold in multicolored geometric progressions

00:23:24 ►

that could be microcosmic quantum

00:23:26 ►

expressions or unfolding galaxies. Within these realms, I have lived as an insect, devoured

00:23:33 ►

by still bigger insects, which have in turn been devoured by lizards and snakes with long

00:23:38 ►

ethereal stomachs that have passed me into non-rational dimensions that both amaze and terrify. Outside of my physical body, the frogs,

00:23:48 ►

birds, insects, jaguars, and other creatures of the Peruvian Amazon filled the night air with their

00:23:54 ►

calls, cries, twitters, and buzzes. For me, there is no difference between the infinity expressing

00:24:01 ►

itself outside of me and the infinity that I soar through inside of me. It is all one. Outside of time and space, a noise from

00:24:12 ►

deep in the jungle sounds as if it’s right beside me, startling me.

00:24:21 ►

Boom.

00:24:26 ►

Sorry.

00:24:30 ►

Sometimes I feel myself fully present and aware in two places at the same time,

00:24:33 ►

often in different times and dimensions.

00:24:36 ►

After experiencing the consciousness of predator and prey

00:24:39 ►

in the lower worlds, I have flown first as a condor,

00:24:42 ►

then as a hummingbird into sublime and

00:24:45 ►

exquisite high-frequency realities, exploding with neon-luminescent pastel manifestations that

00:24:52 ►

defy rationality. While my spirit soars, my body quivers on my insides, teeter on the verge of both

00:24:59 ►

vomiting and shitting. I soar between agony and ecstasy as each experience awes my soul with a pallor of emotions

00:25:07 ►

that range from heavenly bliss to a hellish, maddening terror that cannot be articulated,

00:25:13 ►

much less comprehended. I am vaguely aware of others sitting around me in the human jungle

00:25:18 ►

night inside a circular open-air hut called a maloca. Many of them vomit and sometimes cry out in fear or bliss

00:25:26 ►

as they pass through their own visions.

00:25:29 ►

I feel my soul connected to theirs.

00:25:33 ►

Our visions are directed by the music of a white-clad

00:25:35 ►

mestizo shaman who sings magical songs

00:25:38 ►

and plays different flutes and a stringed

00:25:40 ►

mandolin-like instrument called a charongo.

00:25:44 ►

He is the keeper of a vast body of knowledge

00:25:47 ►

of Amazonian healing plants that dates back to prehistoric times.

00:25:52 ►

His specialty is a unique combination of plants

00:25:55 ►

that have brought me to this visionary state

00:25:57 ►

that continues to unfold outside of three-dimensional reality.

00:26:02 ►

In this waking dream, where time and space become fluid, I not only soar

00:26:06 ►

through alien vistas of sight, sound, and feeling, I also travel through events of my life, both good

00:26:12 ►

and bad, often reliving them in their emotional content. Throughout my journey, I often confront

00:26:18 ►

hidden aspects of myself that have been ignored and denied because of the negative emotional

00:26:22 ►

charge that they hold.

00:26:29 ►

I sometimes vomit when confronted with something particularly unpleasant,

00:26:32 ►

which clears it out energetically in what is called a purge.

00:26:38 ►

I have come a long way to this remote spot, deep in the primordial rainforest, far from civilization, to spend extended time isolated in nature

00:26:43 ►

to learn what the plants have to teach me,

00:26:46 ►

especially about myself.

00:26:49 ►

To be healed, I must confront the forces

00:26:51 ►

that have driven and tortured me throughout my life

00:26:54 ►

so that I can understand the lessons that they have to teach me.

00:26:58 ►

To get to their root, I must travel back to my beginnings

00:27:01 ►

so I can come to terms with the energies

00:27:04 ►

that brought me into this life.

00:27:07 ►

So the Shaolinism has been expanding.

00:27:11 ►

I’ve even spoken to Christian groups,

00:27:14 ►

and the title for my topic is

00:27:16 ►

The World’s Real Oldest Profession.

00:27:21 ►

So I spoke to this Rotary Club in Santa Ynez

00:27:24 ►

a couple of years ago,

00:27:25 ►

and all the wives came, and these big money Christian guys

00:27:28 ►

were all there and everything.

00:27:30 ►

They’re all there, and they’re all like, you know.

00:27:33 ►

And so I said, first off, I’d like to thank you all

00:27:37 ►

for inviting me here to speak about the world’s oldest profession.

00:27:39 ►

And they all went, yeah, look where your minds are going.

00:27:42 ►

Well, guess what? You’re way off.

00:27:44 ►

The world’s oldest profession is shamanism.

00:27:46 ►

And then I just started getting into it.

00:27:48 ►

My specialty is South American shamanism.

00:27:52 ►

And there’s so many elements in the world

00:27:56 ►

in terms of religion and spirituality

00:27:57 ►

that are shifted.

00:27:59 ►

So I’ll just say this,

00:28:00 ►

because I’m trying to use my two minutes to be efficient here.

00:28:05 ►

Organized religion is about the words of prophets.

00:28:09 ►

The prophet or prophets, be it Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad,

00:28:12 ►

go to the cave or go to the middle of the desert.

00:28:13 ►

I freak out the Christians a lot when I tell them,

00:28:15 ►

I guarantee you, if I go into the desert and fast for 40 days and 40 nights,

00:28:19 ►

I guarantee you I’ll be talking to God.

00:28:23 ►

Right?

00:28:24 ►

So shamanism is the root of everything.

00:28:26 ►

So, the prophets go out

00:28:28 ►

and have their visions, and they write about it, and somebody gets that

00:28:30 ►

and they translate it, and somebody else translates it, and somebody else

00:28:32 ►

translates it to that, and gets turned it on, and somebody else does it.

00:28:34 ►

By the time you get it,

00:28:36 ►

who knows what the hell it was supposed to be in the beginning.

00:28:39 ►

Shamans say,

00:28:40 ►

bullshit.

00:28:41 ►

They say, you go out and you have your visions.

00:28:45 ►

Direct experience. Shamanism

00:28:46 ►

is about direct experience.

00:28:48 ►

So I spent my life, another, there’s many

00:28:50 ►

many definitions of shamanism,

00:28:52 ►

but one of them is a bridge.

00:28:55 ►

So I’ve struggled all these

00:28:56 ►

years, and I’ve been writing for over 30 years now,

00:28:58 ►

to take those

00:29:00 ►

non-rational, visionary experiences

00:29:02 ►

that really can’t be articulated, and I’ve struggled and struggled

00:29:04 ►

and struggled and struggled

00:29:05 ►

to articulate them.

00:29:06 ►

So that those people who haven’t been blessed

00:29:08 ►

to be able to go to the jungle like I have

00:29:09 ►

in other places too

00:29:11 ►

can maybe get a sense of what it’s all about.

00:29:14 ►

And so it’s my way artistically of contributing

00:29:16 ►

to getting this stuff out there.

00:29:20 ►

You know, a lot of big researchers

00:29:21 ►

are very good friends of mine.

00:29:23 ►

I’ve done work with them.

00:29:26 ►

Sometimes they even come to me for my advice,

00:29:27 ►

which just tickles the hell out of me.

00:29:29 ►

Anyway, thank you for indulging me.

00:29:31 ►

Thank you for coming.

00:29:34 ►

Keep on doing it.

00:29:46 ►

Hi, I’m Elizabeth Bass.

00:29:48 ►

Joe Arbogie.

00:29:49 ►

How are you doing?

00:29:51 ►

Thank you so much, everyone, for being here.

00:29:53 ►

Thank you so much, Symposia. Just everyone making safe space for the evolution.

00:29:59 ►

I’m really grateful to be standing here with my love of almost 10 years.

00:30:07 ►

Yeah.

00:30:09 ►

A few years ago, he tells me he has a heroin relapse.

00:30:15 ►

And we had been together six years at that point.

00:30:19 ►

And just devastated and long story short,

00:30:23 ►

I talked to the trees and went deep and iboga, the medicine

00:30:29 ►

from Africa, remembered me, it felt like. Somewhere along the way, I had heard about

00:30:38 ►

iboga and it just came to me. I couldn’t remember where I’d heard about it or that it was good for addiction. Did a lot of research.

00:30:46 ►

It was really uncertain.

00:30:49 ►

There’s a whole gamut of things on the web.

00:30:52 ►

Who’s ever heard of iboga?

00:30:54 ►

Can I get a raise in hand?

00:30:55 ►

Okay, awesome.

00:30:56 ►

Not the usual thing.

00:30:59 ►

One reason why I wrote the book,

00:31:01 ►

you know, we had our experience,

00:31:03 ►

and I’m like, have you heard of iboga? And almost no one in our country had. And that seems to be a crime. So, you

00:31:16 ►

know, I did a lot of research, had to sift through a lot of dubious research and present it to him in his state, and there was fear and questions and more

00:31:29 ►

research and terror, you know, horror stories of someone who did not approach the medicine

00:31:35 ►

in a good way, mail ordering online, doing it alone, not a good outcome, especially for

00:31:44 ►

that level of medicine

00:31:45 ►

so made it by the skin of our teeth

00:31:50 ►

I think really

00:31:52 ►

to a traditional African shaman

00:31:54 ►

is what we ended up going toward

00:31:58 ►

Mugenda who worked with a medical doctor

00:32:01 ►

in Costa Rica

00:32:02 ►

and blood, sweat and tears tears in here, just like medicine

00:32:09 ►

work. And in 24 hours, the man, you know, we went in, I could barely recognize him,

00:32:17 ►

and the next morning was the man I fell in love with. I could see his soul again, which was remarkable. Clear eyes, clear

00:32:26 ►

skin, and the four words. I love my life. I can only share my experience with the medicine with you. That’s it. That’s the only place I can come from.

00:32:47 ►

And when it comes to that medicine,

00:32:50 ►

like she said, like Elizabeth said,

00:32:52 ►

within 24 hours I was a whole new person.

00:32:57 ►

And yeah, a brief history of myself,

00:33:02 ►

like I was addicted to drugs at a young age.

00:33:09 ►

I don’t say I fucked up, I say I basically went into the lesson.

00:33:32 ►

So by going into this lesson at a young age, I, you know, jails, institutions, and death, and all that good stuff and basically, you know, rehabilitated myself at the age of 22 and then built my whole career up because I’m an artist. Created the artwork on this cover of this book. But

00:33:38 ►

that’s what I’m known for and I built up my whole career, my art career. And in that time, like, you know,

00:33:48 ►

fell into some circles of

00:33:50 ►

dark forces, you can say. And from there

00:33:55 ►

basically went back in the lesson again.

00:34:01 ►

By doing that, that was about a good

00:34:04 ►

I don’t know, three to five years.

00:34:07 ►

And then that’s when, you know, I got honest with myself.

00:34:11 ►

I got honest with Elizabeth and told her what was going on and, you know, put everything on the table.

00:34:16 ►

She started talking to the trees.

00:34:18 ►

And I voted and came out.

00:34:21 ►

I was scared as shit.

00:34:22 ►

I mean, you know, I’m not really about the whole psychedelic mentality, even though you can probably see it in a lot of my work.

00:34:31 ►

But when she talked to the trees, Iboga came out and it was like, okay, you either do this or you gotta get the fuck out of here. So I said okay I’ll stay and we went to go to Iboga in Costa Rica

00:34:48 ►

with Magunda, shaman out of Africa, 12th, 10th, at least 10th generation, Guiti shaman.

00:34:58 ►

So went there and like I went in there like two weeks clean before I went because I had to prepare for this because what I learned online about this medicine was like some real intense shit, you know?

00:35:25 ►

we went to the first ceremony and it was kind of like it didn’t really work for me,

00:35:26 ►

but it was working.

00:35:33 ►

It was actually detoxing my heart, my body, soul, my spirit, everything, all at once.

00:35:36 ►

But I still felt it wasn’t working,

00:35:42 ►

even though I was noticing dark forces eating each other, hovering over me,

00:35:45 ►

but it still wasn’t working.

00:35:51 ►

But the shaman, he’s coming doing a psycho-spiritual, Magunda, he’s coming doing a psycho-spiritual,

00:35:56 ►

and I’m telling him, ah, this stuff isn’t working, you know, but he’s just like, no,

00:35:56 ►

you’re still detoxing.

00:36:01 ►

Because before you enter the spirit world, you have to be pure.

00:36:05 ►

So, and usually, this is a very intense

00:36:07 ►

medicine. I really, I actually

00:36:10 ►

fell asleep on it, like, the last two hours

00:36:12 ►

of it. You know, and usually people don’t do

00:36:14 ►

that. So,

00:36:16 ►

but when I woke up,

00:36:18 ►

it was like,

00:36:19 ►

I was like a

00:36:20 ►

new person.

00:36:23 ►

Like a new being. I jumped up. What the fuck is going on? Like, really, I was like a new person, like a new being.

00:36:25 ►

I jumped up, what the fuck is going on?

00:36:28 ►

Really, I was like so happy.

00:36:31 ►

That love was there, I was feeling that warmth.

00:36:36 ►

And then I just went and gave the shopman a hug,

00:36:40 ►

picked him up and all that stuff.

00:36:41 ►

And then we went to go try to sleep for another

00:36:45 ►

two days because the medicine really

00:36:47 ►

lasts about a good

00:36:48 ►

48 hours.

00:36:52 ►

And,

00:36:53 ►

you know, the rest

00:36:55 ►

is in the book.

00:36:57 ►

But let me leave you with this,

00:36:59 ►

you know, before I

00:37:01 ►

hand the mic back over to Elizabeth.

00:37:04 ►

I did have an experience with ancestors,

00:37:06 ►

and that’s a major part of it.

00:37:08 ►

So I called upon my ancestors during a ceremony,

00:37:11 ►

a couple ceremonies after we’d done the medicine,

00:37:15 ►

and I ended up on top of a pyramid,

00:37:21 ►

breaking through my vision.

00:37:24 ►

And I’m telling you this story

00:37:26 ►

because it’s not in the book.

00:37:30 ►

On top of this pyramid

00:37:31 ►

was like a 10-foot

00:37:33 ►

bleaty shaman,

00:37:35 ►

skin made of the universe,

00:37:37 ►

with a big bright smile

00:37:39 ►

on his face and big bright eyes,

00:37:42 ►

holding his hands up in the air.

00:37:43 ►

And I’m like, what the fuck is he holding up?

00:37:45 ►

Because usually I’m like, I’m a superhero in my visions, you know, because that’s how

00:37:49 ►

I annihilate the dark forces.

00:37:52 ►

So I’m up there looking, what does he got in his hand?

00:37:56 ►

It’s like glowing.

00:37:57 ►

And he like, he like brings it down.

00:38:01 ►

And I’m like looking at it and I’m looking at his hands and it’s like a, it’s a heart. And so I’m like, oh man, and I’m looking at his hands, and it’s like a heart.

00:38:05 ►

And so I’m like, oh man, I gotta think quick, because in the pointe de triche, you gotta

00:38:11 ►

be on your P’s and Q’s, you gotta be really quick.

00:38:16 ►

So I grabbed it, and then I’m grabbing him, looking at the heart.

00:38:21 ►

It’s like a real human heart because everything’s really these visions.

00:38:29 ►

And he’s looking at me and he’s like,

00:38:30 ►

well, now what are you going to do with it?

00:38:32 ►

I’m like, oh, shit.

00:38:33 ►

What am I going to do with this fucking heart?

00:38:37 ►

Oh, damn.

00:38:38 ►

Okay.

00:38:40 ►

So I open my chest,

00:38:43 ►

like, you know, like a board game.

00:38:46 ►

And you can see everything, real estate estate like please stay clear organs everything but the only thing that was missing was the

00:38:50 ►

heart there was no heart there was just like a dark cloud then my heart area so

00:38:58 ►

I took that hard okay that’s where it goes hard in there I can literally feel

00:39:02 ►

it feel it fusing together, like outside of me.

00:39:06 ►

And then from there, I see this chalice hovering like the sun, glowing like the sun.

00:39:14 ►

I’m like, wow, and I grab it. I’m like, oh, there’s some liquid in there.

00:39:19 ►

And then it looks like gold, okay? And then I pour it over the heart and I can feel it like encapsulating the entire heart.

00:39:28 ►

Heart of gold.

00:39:30 ►

And I close it up.

00:39:32 ►

Like the close of the board came up.

00:39:34 ►

Take off like a superhero.

00:39:36 ►

Fly away.

00:39:38 ►

That was it.

00:39:40 ►

Want to know?

00:39:52 ►

Yeah, I have a great relationship with his ancestors also.

00:39:57 ►

And I’ll share just a little bit more briefly.

00:40:04 ►

I know I can speak for both of us because we almost share a brain now.

00:40:06 ►

So when I say the medicine worked,

00:40:08 ►

you know, he was a new person in 24 hours, that’s true.

00:40:13 ►

But the medicine for us was not just a material substance to consume.

00:40:19 ►

It was the preparation that began the moment we decided to take it.

00:40:24 ►

It was the full participation with the Bwiti facilitation, which was remarkable.

00:40:26 ►

It was extremely skillful, detailed, nuanced, ancient, very, very helpful in a lasting way.

00:40:34 ►

And I could feel that that was integral for us in our outcome.

00:40:39 ►

Everything from the fire talk to the music,

00:40:43 ►

which I’m going to read a tiny, short little passage about the music,

00:40:47 ►

and to the integration and the community like this.

00:40:50 ►

You know, the community and the work.

00:40:54 ►

Because when you have revelations from the medicine,

00:40:56 ►

sometimes you need to build a new skill set to support those revelations.

00:41:02 ►

So it was a lot of work before, during, and after.

00:41:08 ►

And so here’s a little taste of the music.

00:41:13 ►

It seemed intentional, even destined,

00:41:16 ►

that the Bwiti music was teaching me through space and time

00:41:19 ►

on those particular nights,

00:41:22 ►

through that device,

00:41:24 ►

there in that little makeshift temple in Costa

00:41:26 ►

Rica. The benevolent sounds were healing many layers of my being. The elaborate patterns

00:41:33 ►

of percussion were continually disrupting the habitual downward spirals of my mind.

00:41:39 ►

I sent thanks to the musicians wherever they were. The exuberant music communicated,

00:41:45 ►

life, life, life, keep dancing, keep drumming,

00:41:49 ►

keep singing, keep on, keeping on,

00:41:52 ►

keep creating, exploring, hunting, feasting,

00:41:55 ►

giving, growing, birthing, being, loving, living,

00:41:59 ►

yes, more life.

00:42:01 ►

Let me say one more thing.

00:42:03 ►

Let me speak to your soul real quick.

00:42:05 ►

When it comes to plant medicines,

00:42:08 ►

preferably Iboga,

00:42:11 ►

but any plant

00:42:11 ►

medicine that you prefer,

00:42:13 ►

as long as your intention

00:42:15 ►

is there,

00:42:17 ►

really tune into that.

00:42:19 ►

Tune into your attention when it comes to

00:42:21 ►

these plant medicines.

00:42:23 ►

Make sure the container

00:42:24 ►

is there

00:42:27 ►

for you

00:42:28 ►

the spirit of the medicine

00:42:30 ►

is there for you

00:42:31 ►

really tune into your attention

00:42:33 ►

that is like

00:42:34 ►

you need to overstand that

00:42:37 ►

yes

00:42:39 ►

really feel that

00:42:41 ►

yeah

00:42:43 ►

that is the truth.

00:42:45 ►

That is from the heart.

00:42:46 ►

From me to you.

00:42:47 ►

Great.

00:42:49 ►

Great.

00:42:49 ►

Thank you.

00:43:01 ►

So I brought my water with me, which is important because I could get a little bit nervous.

00:43:06 ►

As one of the other speakers said earlier, he talked about having social anxiety for his whole life,

00:43:12 ►

and that’s the case for me too.

00:43:13 ►

And even though I’ve done a lot of public speaking in the last several years,

00:43:16 ►

now I still can get nervous.

00:43:17 ►

So it’s important to have water.

00:43:19 ►

But the other thing about the water you’ll hear later on, it’s an integral part of my story.

00:43:27 ►

So it’s there for security purposes as well as part of the story.

00:43:32 ►

So about seven years ago, when I first was about to embark on my research on Ibogaine treatment for opioid use disorder,

00:43:43 ►

I had the opportunity to take part in an ayahuasca circle

00:43:47 ►

and unlike mateo earlier who said talking about going to the amazon i went to an ayahuasca circle

00:43:53 ►

which was about less than 50 miles from here and it was my first experience with ayahuasca and it’s to this point my only one and I had prepared for it with

00:44:08 ►

the diet that was prescribed and I abstained from sex for at least a week

00:44:14 ►

beforehand and I was getting ready for it and the day of it I took off the

00:44:18 ►

entire day from work and I ate very little and I had only a little bit of water too

00:44:25 ►

and it turned out that this ceremony was out in the desert

00:44:28 ►

inside, but it was an overnight ceremony in the desert

00:44:32 ►

and

00:44:33 ►

there were maybe 30 or 40 people there

00:44:38 ►

and it was beautiful, they had a song book

00:44:41 ►

which had traditional songs in Portuguese

00:44:44 ►

and in other languages,

00:44:46 ►

as well as some kind of modern pop songs like by the Beatles or the Carpenters.

00:44:51 ►

And so we had this hymnal of songs basically to sing during the entire thing.

00:44:58 ►

And we were told by the facilitators of this ceremony that if we ever got into a tough spot, if we were

00:45:05 ►

really struggling, just to make sure we continued to sing the songs that would keep us anchored

00:45:11 ►

and keep us grounded.

00:45:13 ►

And the songs were quite beautiful.

00:45:17 ►

And so I went there with a close friend of mine, another guy, and he was right next to me during this whole experience.

00:45:28 ►

And we started out with one cup of the ayahuasca brew.

00:45:34 ►

And it affected me.

00:45:37 ►

Within about 30 minutes, I felt it really strongly within me,

00:45:41 ►

but I was still really lucid,

00:45:42 ►

and I could continue reading the songbook

00:45:45 ►

and singing the songs.

00:45:47 ►

And at one point, I heard some panpipes.

00:45:53 ►

There were instruments all over this room, and people could pick the instruments up and

00:45:58 ►

play along with the facilitators who had guitars and other instruments that they were playing,

00:46:03 ►

and they were singing as well.

00:46:06 ►

And I looked around to see who the panpipe player was,

00:46:08 ►

and there wasn’t anybody playing a panpipe.

00:46:12 ►

And so I thought, well, this is music.

00:46:13 ►

I’m going to make this music.

00:46:15 ►

So I whistled the music, and the man who was co-facilitating,

00:46:21 ►

who was playing guitar, told me later on,

00:46:24 ►

he said, it was really great, but I had my eyes closed.

00:46:26 ►

He wanted me to keep doing it, but he was signaling to me,

00:46:28 ►

and I wasn’t looking because I had my eyes closed at the time.

00:46:32 ►

But what really struck me at that point was how my self-judgment,

00:46:37 ►

which had been with me my whole life, completely went away.

00:46:42 ►

And so I was just able to hear this music and and put it

00:46:45 ►

out there without any because I didn’t have that judgment of all is this okay

00:46:49 ►

is it something I should be doing I just did it so it just that flow is so easy

00:46:55 ►

so we get we get to this part where we have the second cup of the ayahuasca and

00:47:00 ►

I have no idea was about to come up but the second one really put me into a completely

00:47:07 ►

different space so maybe 15 or 20 minutes after the second cup we each had a second cup of this

00:47:17 ►

this brew and I was looking at that was sharing the songbook with my friend, and I started, I got to the

00:47:25 ►

point where the words started to look really blurry, and I couldn’t really make out the

00:47:29 ►

words very well on the page.

00:47:32 ►

And then I got to the point where I really couldn’t see anything, and I couldn’t really

00:47:36 ►

focus on the page at all, and I couldn’t really even think about the song that much.

00:47:41 ►

I could just kind of absorb everything.

00:47:43 ►

So I put the song that much. I could just kind of absorb everything. So I put the songbook down. And that’s when I really started to go inward. And I started to think about

00:47:57 ►

a point in my life when I was in my teens where I was suicidal. Another point in my life where I was in my mid-20s,

00:48:05 ►

I was 25 years old.

00:48:08 ►

So that was about 20 years before that,

00:48:11 ►

that I had very nearly killed myself.

00:48:14 ►

And I started asking myself this question of why.

00:48:17 ►

Why was I suicidal?

00:48:18 ►

Why did I have this self-hatred pattern through my life?

00:48:22 ►

this self-hatred pattern through my life.

00:48:30 ►

And something that was very familiar to me came up, which was this idea of having some kind of a demon inside me,

00:48:36 ►

which was telling me my whole life,

00:48:38 ►

I recognized this thing from when I was a child,

00:48:40 ►

that I’d had with me my whole life,

00:48:43 ►

and that had gripped me,

00:48:44 ►

and was telling me,

00:48:45 ►

you’re broken, there’s something wrong with you at your very core.

00:48:50 ►

And I saw this as being a sort of root of why I had been suicidal,

00:48:55 ►

why I hated myself,

00:48:56 ►

and why I went through these periods of suicidality.

00:49:00 ►

And we’d been told before we went into the ceremony that we should let the medicine present

00:49:09 ►

whatever was going to happen,

00:49:11 ►

but also that we could ask the medicine,

00:49:12 ►

we could ask the spirit of the plant

00:49:15 ►

any questions we wanted to ask.

00:49:17 ►

So I said, okay, I want to know what this is.

00:49:21 ►

Please tell me where this is coming from.

00:49:24 ►

It doesn’t matter whether it is something really frightening that I’ve forgotten about

00:49:28 ►

or something from a past life.

00:49:31 ►

Just please show me what this is so I can move past it.

00:49:36 ►

And I couldn’t see anything. All I could see was I was ripped by this self-hatred and this anguish of wanting to just be in such pain and not being able to end it.

00:49:56 ►

And so I started to, my heart started to raise, and I was getting really, like, I was breathing really heavily.

00:50:04 ►

And I realized that I started starting to get really thirsty too.

00:50:07 ►

So on top of being in this really anguished state,

00:50:10 ►

I was feeling really thirsty and I realized,

00:50:13 ►

oh, I’m out in the desert.

00:50:15 ►

I haven’t had much to eat.

00:50:17 ►

I haven’t been drinking much water.

00:50:19 ►

They’ve been telling us they don’t drink too much water,

00:50:20 ►

so I’ve been careful about that.

00:50:23 ►

And I had this liter of water that I’ve been careful about that and I had this liter

00:50:25 ►

of water that I brought with me and I hadn’t purged but I was and I’d been

00:50:32 ►

there in the ceremony for probably a few hours and it only had a little bit of

00:50:36 ►

water at that point so I thought oh I’m gonna I should drink some water because

00:50:40 ►

I’m dehydrated this could be be dangerous. So at that point, I started drinking water,

00:50:45 ►

and I tried to calm myself down by getting into a…

00:50:49 ►

I was doing yoga to calm myself down

00:50:51 ►

and doing yoga breathing.

00:50:54 ►

And I started drinking more and more water,

00:50:57 ►

and I realized no matter how much water I was drinking,

00:50:59 ►

I was still thirsty, and my heart was still racing.

00:51:02 ►

I thought, okay, I’ve done it this time

00:51:04 ►

because I didn’t drink enough water. I didn’t plan well. And at this point, my body’s probably,

00:51:11 ►

you know, it’s too far gone. You know, I’m just going to die. And so I started really

00:51:18 ►

convincing myself I was going to die. But I thought, I don’t want to die. For one thing,

00:51:23 ►

if I die here, there’s this secret ceremony out in the desert.

00:51:28 ►

What are they going to do if I say,

00:51:29 ►

look, I’m going to die.

00:51:30 ►

Could you please call the paramedics?

00:51:33 ►

It’s going to end the ceremony.

00:51:34 ►

It’s going to ruin the whole thing for everybody.

00:51:37 ►

So seriously, this is my thought.

00:51:39 ►

And I also thought, I’ve got these two young boys at home.

00:51:42 ►

I don’t want them to be the kids

00:51:44 ►

who had their dad die in an ayahuasca ceremony.

00:51:48 ►

And I thought, I really don’t want this to happen.

00:51:50 ►

I just don’t want to die anyway.

00:51:52 ►

I don’t think this is my time to die.

00:51:55 ►

So I started kind of bargaining, like, okay, I just want to make it through this.

00:52:01 ►

And I continued the yoga breathing and everything.

00:52:08 ►

So I finished the whole liter of water and I’m thinking, wow, I haven’t even peed in like four hours

00:52:11 ►

what’s going on here?

00:52:13 ►

and I thought, okay

00:52:16 ►

I don’t want to die here

00:52:19 ►

but it looks like it might happen

00:52:21 ►

I’m not going to get him to call the paramedics

00:52:23 ►

if I’m going to die here I’m going to go back to reading the song

00:52:28 ►

book and singing along. If I’m going to die here, it’s going to be a, it’s going to be

00:52:32 ►

a good death. You know, it’s going to go down. I’m going to have the best ceremony ever.

00:52:37 ►

You know, so, and then once I accepted that I might die, that I was going to, I might die here, you know, that’s okay.

00:52:47 ►

And I was like, I need to pee.

00:52:49 ►

Wow, I need to pee.

00:52:51 ►

Oh, I made it.

00:52:52 ►

So I was like, I was so ecstatic that I had to pee.

00:52:55 ►

And I got up and I walked out of the bathroom, peed.

00:52:59 ►

And I thought, I’m going to live.

00:53:00 ►

I’m going to live.

00:53:01 ►

I’m going to go back and I’m going to be able to see my kids again.

00:53:05 ►

You know, This is great.

00:53:09 ►

And I never really got that answer about why I had been suicidal.

00:53:13 ►

But when I came back, what the medicine told me was,

00:53:19 ►

it doesn’t matter why.

00:53:21 ►

It doesn’t matter why you felt that way, why you had those thoughts.

00:53:29 ►

Because no matter what you had in you it was just a story and you can the story only has power over you if you believe that story if you let it if you

00:53:33 ►

let it have power over you so you know make your own story Three years ago was the last time I appeared in public.

00:53:53 ►

I took myself off of the circuit, and I’ve become a hermit.

00:53:57 ►

I live up in Carlsbad.

00:53:59 ►

This is the farthest I’ve ventured from home in quite a while.

00:54:04 ►

Don’t start my time yet.

00:54:05 ►

I’ll tell you when I start the story.

00:54:07 ►

Oh, no, no.

00:54:09 ►

I wanted to mention that Caitlin said how Ashley Booth started the AWARE project.

00:54:18 ►

Probably about two years ago, I guess, it started up in L.A.,

00:54:22 ►

and Ashley got a hold of me to see if I’d podcast some of them.

00:54:25 ►

Particularly the first one she did, she invited Kathleen Wirt to speak,

00:54:31 ►

because what she wanted to do, Ashley wanted to do, was recreate Kathleen’s salon.

00:54:36 ►

Kathleen held a salon in Venice for a number of years.

00:54:39 ►

It started out as the Hoffman Foundation Salon, and it was for the Albert Hoffman Foundation. And they had all of the work that Hoffman had done, and people came down from up north.

00:54:52 ►

The Shildons came down to start it, and so did the Stoleroffs.

00:54:55 ►

And it was once a month, and it was held at her house in Venice Beach.

00:54:59 ►

It was a really funky house.

00:55:01 ►

I had such a feeling of deja vu when Caitlin started tonight

00:55:05 ►

because Kathleen, Kathleen Work, who had the salon,

00:55:08 ►

started every salon the same way, saying, you know,

00:55:11 ►

don’t buy, don’t sell here, don’t use your drugs here.

00:55:14 ►

This is to talk about.

00:55:15 ►

I heard the whole thing again.

00:55:16 ►

In fact, her salon was really an impressive salon.

00:55:20 ►

It was such a collection of people that, you know,

00:55:24 ►

the guy who wrote the drug law for the state of Washington

00:55:27 ►

was one of the regulars there. That was long before he did it.

00:55:31 ►

But the salons by Kathleen were really

00:55:35 ►

important because it brought together a group of people like this once a month.

00:55:39 ►

And now that I know there were projects here in San Diego, I will venture out and start

00:55:43 ►

coming to these affairs because they’re a lot of fun.

00:55:48 ►

And in my novel, The Genesis Generation, I actually have a whole chapter about Kathleen’s salon.

00:55:54 ►

But Kathleen didn’t want to be too public, and so we used the Irish spelling of her name, Caitlin’s Salon.

00:56:01 ►

So there’s a good description of what that salon

00:56:06 ►

used to be like.

00:56:07 ►

I also wanted to talk

00:56:09 ►

just a moment about the Symposia team.

00:56:12 ►

This is an awesome thing

00:56:13 ►

these guys are doing.

00:56:15 ►

My friend Bruce Dahmer bumped into

00:56:17 ►

them for the first time. I think it was at

00:56:19 ►

Symbiosis. Is that where it was?

00:56:21 ►

He came back from Symbiosis and called me the day

00:56:23 ►

he got home. He says, these guys are doing some amazing things.

00:56:27 ►

You need to get a hold of them.

00:56:28 ►

Because, see, Bruce knew that I was burning out on the salon.

00:56:31 ►

I’ve done it for over 12 years now.

00:56:32 ►

And when I started it in 2005, I was thinking about calling it, oh, maybe the Entheogen Salon or something like that.

00:56:40 ►

Because the word psychedelic back then just wasn’t that long ago.

00:56:43 ►

It was kind of toxic, and you had to be careful.

00:56:45 ►

But a really close friend of mine who’s gay said,

00:56:48 ►

you know, they’re going to take that word away from you.

00:56:50 ►

I don’t care what you call it

00:56:51 ►

because they tried to take queer away from us,

00:56:53 ►

but we took it back.

00:56:55 ►

So why don’t you just start with psychedelic?

00:56:57 ►

And so that’s where the psychedelic salon came from.

00:57:00 ►

And now I’ve done over 500, about 538 podcasts a day.

00:57:05 ►

But I was getting a little burned

00:57:08 ►

out. And so now, because of

00:57:10 ►

what the Symposia team’s doing,

00:57:12 ►

is we’ve started a parallel track. We’re calling

00:57:14 ►

it Salon 2. And every week

00:57:16 ►

I’m putting out one of their podcasts too.

00:57:18 ►

And then in another year or so, when I’ve

00:57:20 ►

run out of the last few Terrence McKenna

00:57:22 ►

tapes I have, I can see how

00:57:23 ►

very easily I can ease

00:57:25 ►

myself into the sunset and the salon will continue because it has a big audience.

00:57:30 ►

I was, you know, when I first started, it was the only psychedelic podcast.

00:57:33 ►

And so it got picked up on iTunes and hundreds of thousands of people listen to this every

00:57:38 ►

week.

00:57:38 ►

And that’s one of the reasons I kind of took myself off the circuit because I really don’t

00:57:42 ►

want to think about all that.

00:57:44 ►

I do this as a hobby and it was a lot of fun.

00:57:47 ►

And, you know, I wanted to preserve Terrence McKenna’s talks because his archive got destroyed.

00:57:52 ►

And so Ralph Abraham gave me all those talks that they’ve done with the trilogues.

00:57:57 ►

And things started growing.

00:57:59 ►

Then I started the, I’d already started the Planket Norte talks at Burning Man.

00:58:04 ►

And so those are going on every year, and I’ve been able to…

00:58:07 ►

I haven’t been back to Burning Man since 2007,

00:58:10 ►

but the Planque Norte talks keep going on because I pass it on to, well, Chris Pezza first,

00:58:15 ►

and he’s passed it on to some other people.

00:58:16 ►

So it’s still become a really interesting session at Burning Man.

00:58:22 ►

When we started in 2003 at Burning Man, it was the only talk series.

00:58:27 ►

I just called up Eric Davis and a few friends of mine and said, hey, we ought to do this. And

00:58:31 ►

they didn’t think anything would come of it, but they all agreed to do it. And that first year,

00:58:36 ►

we had Alex and Allison Gray and Bruce Dahmer and Eric Davis and Daniel Pinchbeck and people

00:58:42 ►

like that, who were just people I knew from our Palenque meetings down in Palenque, Mexico.

00:58:48 ►

Well, now Burning Man has a whole program of talks that are given at a dozen camps.

00:58:55 ►

It’s become a really kind of a thing out there.

00:58:58 ►

So that’s very satisfying to see that go on,

00:59:00 ►

and that’s why I hope that over the years, next year or two now,

00:59:04 ►

that the symposia team gears up even more, and I gear down, and we can just turn the Salon

00:59:11 ►

podcast over to them, because it’s a big audience, and these guys are doing a lot of work. I

00:59:16 ►

think they deserve a big hand for traveling around the country.

00:59:30 ►

So just a real thing before I introduce, don’t start my time yet.

00:59:37 ►

See why I had to get off the road, I like to talk too much.

00:59:43 ►

Just to give you a little background, because those of you who don’t know me, I was a naval officer in Vietnam,

00:59:46 ►

came back to Houston, finished law school,

00:59:48 ►

practiced law in Houston,

00:59:51 ►

moved to Dallas, started a computer company,

00:59:53 ►

and at the age of 42,

00:59:55 ►

I had still never yet even smoked pot.

00:59:57 ►

I was a Texas lawyer.

01:00:00 ►

I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer,

01:00:09 ►

and then I had my first hit of MDMA. I’m still Irish, but everything else is going on. Well, I’m still a member of the Texas Bar, and if you go to the Texas Bar Association

01:00:15 ►

website, my picture’s still there, but I’m the only one not in a coat and tie. I put

01:00:19 ►

my Burning Man picture up there. So here I was, 42 years old, and I’d never experienced any of this stuff.

01:00:28 ►

I’d been straight and narrow, a good Catholic boy. I was pretty much getting to not be a Catholic by

01:00:35 ►

then, but I fell in with some people that were selling MDMA, ecstasy. And a lot of people aren’t

01:00:42 ►

aware of this, but Dallas was ground zero for ecstasy hitting the street.

01:00:47 ►

Out here in the West Coast,

01:00:48 ►

they’ve been using it for psychotherapy for years,

01:00:51 ►

and it was all big underground thing.

01:00:53 ►

Dallas, it hit the street, and it got into the Stark Club,

01:00:56 ►

and it was an amazing scene.

01:00:58 ►

I won’t talk about that now,

01:01:00 ►

because you can go to our website, psychedelicsalon.com,

01:01:03 ►

and on the front page, there’s a 30-minute interview

01:01:05 ►

called Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate,

01:01:08 ►

and that tells the stories of how I got involved in all this.

01:01:12 ►

But after a little while, things got hot in Dallas,

01:01:14 ►

and I had to back up the family and move to another state

01:01:17 ►

because what happened is I became a drug dealer.

01:01:20 ►

I didn’t intend to do it,

01:01:22 ►

but my computer company was struggling struggling and I was making so much

01:01:27 ►

money selling Ecstasy. I kept the darn thing open for probably a year longer than I should have, but

01:01:33 ►

anyhow, we closed it, packed up, went to Florida. And for the next seven, eight, nine years, I

01:01:40 ►

didn’t know anybody. I had to buy drugs from my teenage son. Well, he was in

01:01:41 ►

Yeah, I didn’t know anybody.

01:01:43 ►

You know, I had to buy drugs from my teenage son.

01:01:46 ►

Well, he was in 25 or so by then.

01:01:50 ►

But, you know, I had one friend my age who was still doing psychedelics.

01:01:51 ►

I didn’t know anybody, anything.

01:01:57 ►

Well, I wound up, long story short, I found out about the Palenque conferences,

01:02:00 ►

the Palenque and Theobotany conferences in Palenque, Mexico.

01:02:06 ►

And they were a long-running affair that stopped in 2001,

01:02:07 ►

was the last one.

01:02:09 ►

And it was in 99,

01:02:11 ►

I went to the first one I went to,

01:02:13 ►

and I guess you can start this story just about now, the timing.

01:02:16 ►

So I’m out there at the end of the line,

01:02:19 ►

didn’t know anybody,

01:02:20 ►

but one other guy doing psychedelics,

01:02:23 ►

he and I go down to Palenque,

01:02:24 ►

it’s down in

01:02:25 ►

the Chiapas. It’s when all that problem was going on with the revolution down there. And

01:02:29 ►

I thought we were being really brave going down to this drug conference in Chiapas. And

01:02:35 ►

I get down there and the woman who’s now my wife, I saw her. She’s sitting by the pool.

01:02:41 ►

It was her sixth year there. And that’s where we got to know so many people that were involved in this type of work.

01:02:50 ►

Because what they did in those conferences is they ran for a week, two weeks back-to-back,

01:02:55 ►

but there were like 20 speakers.

01:02:57 ►

But it was Sasha Shulgin and Jonathan Ott and Rob Montgomery and I’m trying to think of his name, the Italian guy that did all the work with Iboga.

01:03:09 ►

What?

01:03:10 ►

Giorgio Sammarini.

01:03:11 ►

Giorgio Sammarini, yeah.

01:03:12 ►

And it was really a cool thing because they had a family-style dinner where you could sit and really get to know these speakers.

01:03:20 ►

I mean, we’d spend a whole week with them and sit around smoking dope and talking in the evenings on our little patios.

01:03:27 ►

Everybody had, there were little cabins for rooms, and there were two cabins to a little building.

01:03:33 ►

And all these little buildings were scattered out in the jungle, around the jungle and the pool.

01:03:38 ►

And then up high, on a higher elevation was the restaurant.

01:03:43 ►

And then way up at the top, across the road, up this big hill,

01:03:47 ►

it was a mountain, there was a big meeting room. That’s where the meetings were. And it was where

01:03:52 ►

the overflow crowd would stay. There were rooms there. So on this particular one, when you went

01:03:59 ►

up there, it wasn’t like climbing stairs. It was like carved into the side of this wall

01:04:06 ►

were these big steps

01:04:07 ►

and it was really a climb to get up there

01:04:09 ►

I always liked following the Shoguns

01:04:11 ►

because they went really slowly

01:04:12 ►

you didn’t want to get young people behind you

01:04:15 ►

because they were always mad

01:04:16 ►

because it was really difficult to climb this thing

01:04:18 ►

because it was a climb

01:04:19 ►

it wasn’t like stairs

01:04:20 ►

you could do them one at a time

01:04:21 ►

and they were pretty steep

01:04:22 ►

anyhow we get up there

01:04:24 ►

and this one day it was in 2000 the first year that Terence McKenna didn’t make it, and

01:04:30 ►

actually, he died just like three months later, but we were, a whole bunch of us down there,

01:04:37 ►

and this one chemist, whose name has to still not be revealed, He had made some 2CT7 and actually had a whole

01:04:48 ►

bunch of stuff. We experimented with a lot of things down there and over

01:04:52 ►

the, you know, right now I’ll be 75 in August and I have tried everything

01:04:57 ►

except heroin, crack, and although I’ve had several chances to try it, I’ve never

01:05:02 ►

had the courage to try Iboga.

01:05:09 ►

But it’s something you have to really be serious about.

01:05:13 ►

And I never just really set aside the time to do that.

01:05:16 ►

But I’ve done dozens of Sasha’s things.

01:05:18 ►

I’ve done lots of ayahuasca,

01:05:20 ►

a lot of things that you’ve heard about.

01:05:22 ►

And here I am, almost 75.

01:05:25 ►

One year ago is the very first time I started taking any kind of prescription medicine. And I take five milligrams of a little heart

01:05:30 ►

blood pressure medicine. They started out at 10. They had to cut it down because the cannabis was

01:05:35 ►

knocking my blood pressure down about 15 points when I’d smoke it every day. And I smoke cannabis

01:05:40 ►

every day, so I didn’t see taking all this prescription medicine. So I don’t have side effects of all these medicines that my friends my age do.

01:05:48 ►

I smoke pot every day, and I’m very healthy.

01:05:50 ►

I eat organic food, and I exercise.

01:05:53 ►

But I think that one of the reasons I’m trying to promote psychedelics is because, as the young lady said earlier today, we can actually save the world.

01:06:03 ►

I’m not encouraged that I’m going to get it done yet in my lifetime, but I really

01:06:08 ►

believe that if more people, 15% of the population,

01:06:12 ►

no more than that is necessary to really change the world, because

01:06:16 ►

we touch so many people and do so many other things. So getting to

01:06:20 ►

my story, finally. We’re having this experiment,

01:06:23 ►

2CT7. Chemists

01:06:25 ►

are staying at the top, up by the

01:06:28 ►

place where we had

01:06:29 ►

our lectures. And so

01:06:31 ►

this big climb up there, we go up, and

01:06:33 ►

48 of us decided to

01:06:35 ►

try it for the first time

01:06:37 ►

that day. I think it’s probably still the biggest

01:06:39 ►

group of people

01:06:41 ►

taking 2CT7 at one time ever.

01:06:44 ►

So this was on a Sunday, and I had made

01:06:48 ►

arrangements to buy some pot at 11 o’clock in the morning. Well, we took this about,

01:06:53 ►

I guess between 8 and 9 sometime at his room up there, and everybody walked in, and it

01:06:58 ►

was all powder, and he’d check your weight, and then he’d measure out just enough for

01:07:02 ►

you. I have no idea how much I took, but it was the right amount.

01:07:05 ►

Because you know how Sasha has a scale of plus one to plus five.

01:07:11 ►

And a plus one means you get a little tingle, you know you’ve taken something,

01:07:15 ►

but it’s just a little tingle.

01:07:17 ►

A plus five, that’s not where you see God, that’s where you are God.

01:07:21 ►

And plus fives are amazing in that you come back knowing everything’s fine.

01:07:29 ►

Everything’s perfect.

01:07:30 ►

You don’t have to worry about a thing.

01:07:32 ►

But you can’t remember what happened.

01:07:35 ►

You can’t put a word around it.

01:07:36 ►

So plus ones and plus fives really I don’t think are worth the time.

01:07:42 ►

This was one of my very best plus fours

01:07:46 ►

ever. So I take this

01:07:48 ►

two seats, C7, and we go sit in the

01:07:50 ►

conference room, and I don’t remember who was

01:07:52 ►

speaking in the morning, but I knew at noon

01:07:54 ►

we were going to have lunch and then go out to the

01:07:56 ►

ruins at Palenque where Christian

01:07:58 ►

Rush, who is probably the world’s leading expert

01:08:00 ►

on shamanism, and had lived there

01:08:02 ►

in the jungle with the Lock and Don’t

01:08:04 ►

for three years, and really knew those ruins better than anybody.

01:08:09 ►

I was so looking forward to hear this talk, but I’m sitting in the room, and I can tell

01:08:15 ►

things are starting to get a little wobbly.

01:08:19 ►

Something’s happening, and all of a sudden, I realize it’s close to 11, and my drug deal

01:08:24 ►

is going to go on down at the next level down at the lunch place.

01:08:29 ►

So I decide I better head on down there.

01:08:33 ►

And I go out, and going up those stairs, I guess you’d call them,

01:08:38 ►

was not so bad as going down because they were like, it felt like this.

01:08:42 ►

You know, you felt you were going to fall.

01:08:44 ►

So I had to sit in my butt and just go one down at a time.

01:08:48 ►

It took a long time to get down.

01:08:50 ►

Then I had to walk down this hill to the restaurant.

01:08:54 ►

And some people who I passed told me the next day,

01:08:57 ►

they said, man, did you look weird.

01:09:00 ►

You’re taking these little tiny baby steps,

01:09:03 ►

and you’re glowing.

01:09:05 ►

You know, I knew.

01:09:06 ►

I go, well, the guy I bought the pot from, first thing he saw me from across the room,

01:09:10 ►

and he said, whoa, you better sit down.

01:09:13 ►

I was just ecstatic.

01:09:16 ►

Well, somehow I get through lunch, and my wife got me on the bus, and we all go out.

01:09:23 ►

Now, keep in mind, there’s 48 of us that have done this.

01:09:27 ►

I think they’re probably all having experiences like mine.

01:09:31 ►

But we get out there, and Christian gets everybody off to the side to do his talk.

01:09:37 ►

It was quite obvious that I was not going to be able to stand up to do it.

01:09:41 ►

My wife walks me into the compound and sits me down on the main pyramid

01:09:45 ►

there and said, just wait here and I’ll come back and get you. Well, she said it was about two hours

01:09:52 ►

later when she came back to get me. And I’m still sitting there because, and this, I can still see

01:09:58 ►

this. You know what Cairo syrup is? You know that sticky, but it’s clear clear I was in Cairo syrup

01:10:05 ►

but it was energy

01:10:07 ►

I could see the energy of the ruins

01:10:09 ►

and it was so thick

01:10:11 ►

that when she got me up to walk

01:10:14 ►

down to where the queen’s bath

01:10:16 ►

was it took forever because

01:10:17 ►

I was pushing this energy

01:10:19 ►

I mean I could see the energy

01:10:22 ►

it was awesome it was one of the most amazing

01:10:24 ►

trips I’ve ever had.

01:10:25 ►

Long story short, we get back, and it’s the next day.

01:10:33 ►

Well, I should say one other thing as a side note.

01:10:36 ►

One of the people in our little experiment had been taking a prescription SSRI, I think it was,

01:10:41 ►

and had a horrible reaction, almost died. And that was the first time that some of these chemists realized how

01:10:48 ►

bad it was to interact with prescription drugs with some of these ABC

01:10:52 ►

things that Sasha came up with. But anyhow, we come back and everybody’s

01:10:56 ►

settling down, we had a great night. So it’s the next day and we’re

01:11:00 ►

on to some new drug. And I was in this

01:11:04 ►

cabin with four other people and we’re on to some new drug. And I was in this cabin with four other people,

01:11:06 ►

and we were having what for me at that time

01:11:09 ►

was one of the wildest experiences of my life,

01:11:12 ►

when all of a sudden the door blasts open,

01:11:15 ►

and this young scientist comes in.

01:11:17 ►

He made type A people look lethargic.

01:11:20 ►

He was just wired.

01:11:21 ►

And he had his laptop in his hand,

01:11:24 ►

and he came in and he says, I’m doing a survey.

01:11:27 ►

This is the biggest group ever with 2CT7.

01:11:29 ►

We’re going to publish the results of this survey.

01:11:31 ►

And he’s going on like this.

01:11:33 ►

And we were all just really not in a mood to hear this.

01:11:38 ►

And he says, I’ve got some questionnaires I’d like to give you.

01:11:42 ►

And he’s reaching for his backpack as he sees us getting stuff to throw at him.

01:11:46 ►

So he backed out.

01:11:48 ►

And the next day, he actually did write his report.

01:11:54 ►

It was published in Maps.

01:11:55 ►

I printed out a copy of it today.

01:11:58 ►

Because my plus four trip, which was really,

01:12:01 ►

I can still remember so much.

01:12:03 ►

It was an incredible trip.

01:12:04 ►

Here is the entire, I filled up like so much. It was an incredible trip. Here is

01:12:05 ►

the entire, you know, I filled up like a three-page form for this guy. Here is what I got out

01:12:12 ►

of the trip. Here’s what came into the form. At the three-hour mark, I had to interact

01:12:17 ►

with straight people and negotiate a business exchange. No problem, as long as I focused

01:12:23 ►

my concentration. Now, that’s the rest of the story.

01:12:26 ►

You know, Paul Harvey used to do the rest of the story. Well, my plus four experience is like a

01:12:32 ►

nothing thing here, but the real rest of the story is the name of the person who wrote this report,

01:12:37 ►

the wild type A scientist, was Casey Hardison. Now, some of you know the name Casey Hardison because a few years later, he was arrested in England

01:12:47 ►

with the biggest drug bust, biggest chemical lab

01:12:51 ►

they’d ever had in the history.

01:12:53 ►

And Casey went on to defend himself in court,

01:12:57 ►

and he didn’t defend himself the normal way.

01:12:59 ►

Instead, he castigated and just gave the lawyers and judges

01:13:03 ►

a hard time about cognitive liberty,

01:13:05 ►

and it was the right of human beings, and he wound up with a 20-year sentence.

01:13:09 ►

And he did wind up spending about 10 years in a cage in England.

01:13:14 ►

But Casey is the one that wrote this report.

01:13:17 ►

Casey and Mateo and I had some unfortunate experiences together,

01:13:23 ►

where Casey was a lot of overhead at one time, but I want to say

01:13:26 ►

this about him. He has one of the most brilliant minds of any young person I’ve ever come across,

01:13:32 ►

and Casey now is not only out of prison, he’s married, he’s living here back in the States,

01:13:36 ►

has a child, and I expect a lot of brilliant work from Casey. In fact, the Symposia people just recently, yesterday or today or the day before,

01:13:46 ►

posted the obituary that Casey wrote about our friend Nick Sand. And as you probably know,

01:13:52 ►

Nick died Monday night, died in his sleep. And Casey wrote, I think, a really brilliant obituary.

01:13:59 ►

And even though Casey and I, I still think of Casey as a friend, but he was a difficult friend for a while.

01:14:07 ►

All I can say for sure about my future with Casey is that when I die, I really hope he writes my obituary.

01:14:15 ►

I don’t know what he’ll say, but it’ll be very well written.

01:14:19 ►

That’s my story. Thank you.

01:14:39 ►

So about, I would say maybe a year and a half, I guess July or so of 2015,

01:14:44 ►

life started to get really complicated for me.

01:14:48 ►

And interestingly enough, that’s about when I started dating Jake.

01:14:50 ►

Maybe not a coincidence.

01:14:58 ►

And it was around this time that I just started to experience Cambo,

01:15:01 ►

Cambo frog medicine, if you guys are not aware of it.

01:15:06 ►

It’s this Amazonian medicine where you burn people, and then you rub this frog venom in their burns and then they vomit and it’s healing and there’s a lot in between.

01:15:13 ►

But anyways, there was a lot of complicated things going on in my life and I felt like

01:15:19 ►

my whole life was kind of crashing down and I was feeling very confused about things.

01:15:24 ►

life was kind of crashing down, and I was feeling very confused about things.

01:15:27 ►

And so, rewind.

01:15:34 ►

About five years ago, I went to the Peruvian Amazon by myself. I was 21, and I went to have my first ayahuasca experiences in Iquitos, Peru.

01:15:40 ►

And the first night that I got to this ayahuasca center, um, I had this very vivid dream and it was this green tree frog.

01:15:52 ►

And, um, there was a chameleon also in the dream and the chameleon kept saying to me, what is you?

01:16:00 ►

What is you kind of like Yoda?

01:16:02 ►

And I couldn’t really understand what this dream was about, but

01:16:05 ►

it was so vivid that I remembered it. And at this time, I didn’t even know what Cambo was. So I had

01:16:10 ►

this green tree frog dream. Hadn’t even drank ayahuasca yet. And then, you know, as I was

01:16:19 ►

participating in the ayahuasca ceremonies, this symbol of a rattlesnake kept coming up and it brought me a message.

01:16:27 ►

And it all started when I was drawing these animal cards. And when I was looking through them,

01:16:34 ►

the rattlesnake really jumped out at me. And I ended up drawing the rattlesnake card. And

01:16:40 ►

underneath the card, it said, this retreat, specifically the word retreat, is your initiation of becoming a healer.

01:16:49 ►

I’m like, hmm, that’s cool.

01:16:51 ►

Yeah, okay.

01:16:52 ►

So that night, I drank in ceremony.

01:16:55 ►

Brow snakes everywhere.

01:16:57 ►

And that message was reiterated to me.

01:17:00 ►

And so I’m like, okay, you know, maybe I’m having a shamanic initiation, whatever.

01:17:06 ►

And there was probably a bit of ego tied to that. I’m sure we all know a lot of people

01:17:11 ►

that are, you know, want to be healers and shamans and such. And in the end, we all kind

01:17:16 ►

of have the ability to be a healer. So I left that experience, bringing that home, that maybe I had some special gift to help facilitate healing in others.

01:17:31 ►

So I returned to Peru a year later, actually, with my mom, who’s here.

01:17:35 ►

And I snuck away to Pisac, Sacred Valley, and I did an ayahuasca ceremony.

01:17:41 ►

And I met my mom the next day in Pisac.

01:17:44 ►

And it was a very potent experience, and at that time,

01:17:49 ►

probably the most productive of the five ceremonies that I had done.

01:17:53 ►

And I ended up going on the Ica Trail two days later,

01:17:58 ►

which if, I don’t know if any of you have been on the Ica Trail, but it’s amazing.

01:18:02 ►

So I was kind of blasted wide open.

01:18:05 ►

have been on the eco trail, but it’s amazing. So I was kind of blasted wide open and I’m hiking on the eco trail. Um, a lot of silence, a lot of time to be alone with my thoughts. And, um, this might

01:18:13 ►

sound a little crazy, but maybe not so crazy to you guys. Um, this was the first time that plants

01:18:18 ►

started to communicate with me and I’m sure they were probably, they’re probably trying all the time, but it was the first

01:18:25 ►

time I was quiet enough to listen. And they gave me this message that in three years, I was going

01:18:32 ►

to come back to the jungle and study shamanism, plant medicine. I’m like, oh, cool. Kind of took

01:18:38 ►

it with a grain of salt. Went back to my life. Time went by, and then fast forward now to July, August 2015.

01:18:50 ►

Life is crumbling, crumbling down.

01:18:53 ►

I just started to experiment with Cambo.

01:18:55 ►

And I don’t know if any of you have tried Cambo, but it’s a very mysterious and bizarre medicine,

01:19:01 ►

and it works very much in the metaphysical realm as much as the biochemical.

01:19:06 ►

And so my roommate showed up one day with a chameleon, a pet chameleon.

01:19:14 ►

I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen a chameleon in real life.

01:19:18 ►

And I’m like, huh.

01:19:19 ►

And my instant sort of thought was this dream that I had four years ago in the jungle.

01:19:26 ►

I’m like, huh, the frog and the chameleon.

01:19:29 ►

That’s weird.

01:19:30 ►

And it was all occurring, I think, this happened maybe a weekend that I decided to drink ayahuasca again after maybe a year and a half of not drinking.

01:19:39 ►

Very bizarre.

01:19:40 ►

It felt not coincidental.

01:19:44 ►

So I started having all these really weird things happening. I started to

01:19:48 ►

experience this weird brain fog and confusion. Shit was hitting the fan with some drama in the

01:19:54 ►

house with roommates and there was a lot of difficult decisions that I was having to make

01:19:58 ►

in life and I was feeling completely overwhelmed like I didn’t know what to do with my life.

01:20:06 ►

completely overwhelmed, like I didn’t know what to do with my life, and I remember I stepped out into the backyard after a very upsetting encounter with a roommate, and I was just trying to get some

01:20:14 ►

fresh air, and all of a sudden, I felt the embrace of the weeds. The weeds were spiritually embracing

01:20:22 ►

me and communicating with me, and I was like, oh my God. And they

01:20:27 ►

just said, you’re fine. Trust us. We’re helping you. We’re guiding you. And my first thought

01:20:32 ►

was, oh my God, they can read my thoughts. I hope they don’t, I hope they’re not upset

01:20:36 ►

that we are planning on trimming them soon. So I was getting a lot of really strange,

01:20:47 ►

And so I was getting a lot of really strange, the plants were reaching out to me more than usual.

01:20:53 ►

They had kind of done it sporadically over the years, but it was happening a lot.

01:20:58 ►

And I was, you know, I felt like I was kind of going psychotic in a way, and I didn’t know what was happening.

01:21:03 ►

And I was really looking for answers. And so a friend of mine that I had met in Miss Akito’s

01:21:07 ►

retreat, he messaged me on Facebook and he said, Hey, I’m going to this retreat in Ecuador with

01:21:13 ►

the shaman I’ve been working with. You should come. And immediately, um, I just felt like,

01:21:21 ►

yes, the plants just screamed at me and they’re like yes this is it this is what we’re

01:21:25 ►

leading you to just do it so I very impulsively was like okay I’m going to Ecuador so um about

01:21:31 ►

a week later I found out I had to move out of my house that I had been living in for five years

01:21:36 ►

um and so I had you know a month trip planned in two months it was during the holidays and so I

01:21:42 ►

ended up moving in with my parents house temporarily temporarily. I own a business that sells supplements. So I had thousands of dollars of

01:21:49 ►

inventory that I ended up storing in five different locations while I’m living with my parents and

01:21:54 ►

going to Ecuador. So anyways, I get to Ecuador. By the way, this was about three years after I

01:22:03 ►

had that experience where the plants were going to tell me I was going to come back in three years.

01:22:07 ►

Very weird.

01:22:08 ►

So I signed up for this retreat in Ecuador, and it was very, very intense.

01:22:14 ►

It was meant to be intense.

01:22:16 ►

So it was, to give you some frame of reference, I drank 14 times in 16 days.

01:22:24 ►

I don’t recommend that, honestly.

01:22:28 ►

And where do I even start?

01:22:31 ►

So basically every night we did ceremony, and it was mostly ayahuasca.

01:22:37 ►

However, we also did a San Pedro and a tobacco tea,

01:22:41 ►

and then we did this ceremony called Natumamu, two nights. And so this was

01:22:47 ►

the Shuar tradition. It wasn’t the Shipibo that a lot of people are used to, it was Shuar,

01:22:51 ►

which is a different sort of indigenous culture. And in Shuar, they call ayahuasca Natem.

01:22:59 ►

So Natumamu, I just want to share what Nat to mom is with you guys. So not to mom is a ceremony

01:23:06 ►

where you just drink the vine, you make a brew out of the vine. So normally ayahuasca has the vine,

01:23:15 ►

which has the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. And then chacruna usually is the plant with the DMT.

01:23:21 ►

is the plant with the DMT.

01:23:26 ►

So in this case, I just had the vine, no DMT.

01:23:36 ►

So monoamine oxidase degrades your own endogenous neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine to some extent.

01:23:41 ►

And so the ayahuasca vine is full of these myoamine oxidase inhibitors.

01:23:47 ►

So what’s kind of fascinating about it is you actually get high off your own brain chemistry

01:23:52 ►

because if you don’t have the DMT added, then it’s just blocking the natural degradation process of

01:24:00 ►

serotonin and these other neurotransmitters. So that I find kind of fascinating that the experience is really occurring within you. So how the ceremony works is normally when

01:24:13 ►

you drink ayahuasca, it’s like a shot glass, right? It’s this very condensed syrupy liquid.

01:24:20 ►

Natum Omnu is, it’s not quite as concentrated.

01:24:26 ►

It’s more dilute.

01:24:30 ►

And you actually drink liters and liters and liters and liters of it.

01:24:33 ►

And so there were about 25 of us in the group.

01:24:38 ►

And there were about four vats, like maybe this big,

01:24:42 ►

and filled with this Natu Mamu brew.

01:24:46 ►

And we all line up on the edge of the jungle,

01:24:53 ►

and we all have a bowl that’s about maybe half a liter of liquid can fit in it,

01:24:56 ►

and there’s maybe five or so helpers.

01:25:03 ►

And basically, you have to chug as much of this fluid as you can tolerate,

01:25:06 ►

not even to tolerate, until it’s all gone.

01:25:12 ►

So it’s the responsibility of the group to drink the entire four vats of this brew that we all made that morning. And everybody lines up on the edge of the jungle, their little vomit center. And

01:25:18 ►

we have these bowls. And the helper’s job is to refill your bowl and yell at you to keep drinking

01:25:26 ►

and hand you tissues. And they’re saying mate, mate, mate, which is the shuar word for drink.

01:25:33 ►

And so you start out, it’s like not so bad, you know, and then you’re drinking it. And

01:25:37 ►

then maybe after like three or four bowls, that’s when you start to vomit. And you’re

01:25:42 ►

basically alternating between guzzling this fluid and vomiting.

01:25:46 ►

It’s kind of, I call it the schwar frat party.

01:25:49 ►

It’s like complete binge drinking.

01:25:51 ►

And it’s just, I mean, I probably vomited like 100 times at each ceremony.

01:25:58 ►

And you start to get really high.

01:26:00 ►

And, you know, you’re staring into the jungle.

01:26:03 ►

And the sound’s reverberating off the plants

01:26:05 ►

in front of you and your hands start to shake and you can’t hold your bowl and you’re sitting

01:26:12 ►

there and you’re crying and they see you not drinking or vomiting and they’re like, you

01:26:15 ►

gotta do one or the other. And they keep filling your bowl while you’re puking, they’re filling

01:26:21 ►

your bowl while you’re puking. Eventually you get to a point that you can’t stand anymore. So they bring you a chair and they keep filling

01:26:29 ►

up your bowl. And at the end of it, anyone, anywhere between maybe 10 to 20 liters of

01:26:36 ►

fluid have been consumed and vomited quite quickly. And finally, when it’s all said and done, you know, everybody’s, we finished the brew

01:26:48 ►

between all 25 of us. You know, they ring the gong, okay, the drinking part is over. This goes

01:26:54 ►

on for about an hour, by the way. It’s awful. It’s awful. I remember both times, we did this two days

01:27:00 ►

in a row, actually. I remember both times I’m holding the bowl and I’m holding

01:27:05 ►

it up to me and like faking drinking it because I’m just like, I can’t keep going. And I’m

01:27:10 ►

like crying, like I fucking hate this. And then, you know, when you’re done drinking

01:27:15 ►

it, they have to help you to your bed. And most times when you drink ayahuasca, you have

01:27:21 ►

to sit up. That’s the sort of tradition. This,

01:27:25 ►

they let you lay down because it’s like you’re pretty fucked up. And then you continue to

01:27:30 ►

vomit and, you know, purge through the back end and all sorts of other things. And then

01:27:36 ►

you lay there for a five-hour psychoactive experience and ceremony. Pretty wild. So I,

01:27:47 ►

in ceremony. Pretty wild. Um, so I, we did that two nights in a row and then we, um, you know, did a lot of other, other ayahuasca ceremonies. And, um, so like I said, this went on for about

01:27:55 ►

two and a half weeks and, um, we were eating one meal a day in the breakfast. We were eating

01:28:01 ►

breakfast and it was basically like fruit and white rice which is

01:28:05 ►

not at all what my body needs i i’m normally on like a high fat low carb diet and i am i started

01:28:12 ►

out really healthy like going for jobs and shit and uh then i began to deteriorate um because

01:28:20 ►

um i wasn’t we weren’t sleeping at all it was like maybe two hours a night. I was just kind of,

01:28:27 ►

my nervous system would be very agitated until the sun would come up and I’m like,

01:28:31 ►

there’s no fucking way I’m missing the one meal I get. So I would of course wake up and have

01:28:35 ►

breakfast. And, um, it got to the point where, you know, initially I was doing a lot of healing,

01:28:42 ►

but then the level of exhaustion and malnourishment became very disruptive, and I felt like the drinking every night became excessive.

01:28:53 ►

It became like beating a dead horse.

01:28:55 ►

And one of the reasons I’m sharing this is because while I think psychedelics are amazing medicines, I think that they need to be used responsibly and respectfully. And I felt like

01:29:07 ►

I was disrespecting this medicine and just consuming it because. And, you know, towards

01:29:13 ►

the end, so the last six days of the retreat, we actually left the center and then we traveled.

01:29:21 ►

It was a few of us traveled to these different shuar shaman’s houses, and they were

01:29:25 ►

generations of generations, and we drank with them in their homes, and stayed with them in their

01:29:31 ►

homes with their families, and the first one we visited, it was a very interesting experience,

01:29:38 ►

this was, you know, like I said, probably like two weeks into it, I was starting to really

01:29:45 ►

But, you know, like I said, probably like two weeks into it, I was starting to really dive downhill health-wise.

01:29:50 ►

And, you know, we show up and there’s this hut we’re supposed to drink in.

01:29:52 ►

And it’s like we have logs to sit on.

01:29:56 ►

And we’re all looking around like we’re going to drink ayahuasca in here.

01:29:58 ►

Like this is going to be so uncomfortable.

01:30:01 ►

And there’s bugs crawling everywhere. They’re biting everybody.

01:30:03 ►

And it’s like really not fun.

01:30:04 ►

There’s bugs crawling everywhere. They’re biting everybody, and it’s, like, really not fun,

01:30:11 ►

and I was kind of at the point where I was, like, achieving a little bit of psychosis in between the ceremonies because I felt like my brain was atrophying just from lack of sleep and nutrition,

01:30:19 ►

and so I’m sitting there already kind of, like, over it. I’m like, I don’t want to drink tonight.

01:30:24 ►

I’m just tired. I want to sleep. I want to. I’m like, I don’t want to drink tonight. I’m just tired.

01:30:25 ►

I want to sleep.

01:30:26 ►

I want to integrate.

01:30:29 ►

You know, I don’t want to just keep beating this dead horse.

01:30:34 ►

And I had a really strange experience where I was sitting by the door.

01:30:37 ►

And so it was kind of like a, you know, like that.

01:30:38 ►

And I was sitting by the door.

01:30:43 ►

And I kind of was not getting a good vibe from the shaman and his assistant and um so I was the first one that

01:30:47 ►

they you know handed handed the brew to and um I actually only shot maybe two-thirds of it I like

01:30:54 ►

intentionally didn’t didn’t drink at all because I felt like something wasn’t right and then everyone

01:30:59 ►

else drank their medicine and then when it was the shaman and his assistants turned to drink, I watched them

01:31:06 ►

and they both took their thing outside, put it in their mouth and then vigorously rinsed it out

01:31:15 ►

with water and spat it out over and over. And I was very skeptical because I’m like, why didn’t

01:31:21 ►

they swallow the ayahuasca? And then, I wasn’t even high yet.

01:31:29 ►

Then I started going on all these sort of paranoid thoughts of like,

01:31:32 ►

they hate gringos and it’s really toe-ay, which is detoura,

01:31:35 ►

and we’re actually about to be poisoned, we’re all going to die.

01:31:39 ►

And like, I went through this whole story where I was like, oh my God, what’s going on? And then it was the most agonizing four hours of me sitting there

01:31:44 ►

not knowing why they didn’t drink the ayahuasca.

01:31:48 ►

It was very concerning to me.

01:31:50 ►

And in the shuar tradition, most of the ceremony is very silent and dark,

01:31:56 ►

whereas in Shipibo there’s a lot more ikaros, a lot more singing,

01:31:59 ►

which I think really brightens the space

01:32:01 ►

and can help guide you into a positive, you know, way of navigating.

01:32:05 ►

And the shuar was just dead silent, and it was the most uncomfortable four hours of my life, where I’m

01:32:10 ►

being attacked by bugs, my back hurts, I’m just so exhausted, and I’m just paranoid. I don’t, I don’t

01:32:17 ►

know why these, these shaman didn’t drink. So the next night, I ended ended up sitting out and I said, you know, I’m so exhausted.

01:32:25 ►

I feel like I’m, I literally feel like I’m going to die if I drink tonight.

01:32:30 ►

Like, I just felt like my heart would just give out.

01:32:32 ►

I was so tired.

01:32:34 ►

Um, and so there were, I finished up, I finished up the last like, you know, three, four days

01:32:41 ►

of the retreat.

01:32:42 ►

And at a certain point, um, I, I knew that I was hurting

01:32:47 ►

myself physically. I knew that I was hurting the medicine. I was being, I was disrespecting it by

01:32:53 ►

just drinking it to drink it. Um, but I said to myself, you know what, finish this, do what you

01:33:00 ►

came to do because, um, once you, once you do do this you will know that you can do whatever you

01:33:07 ►

put your mind to and you’ll never have to prove it to yourself ever again and so that’s what I did

01:33:13 ►

I finished up the retreat and um you know I I did bounce back fairly okay you know once I was

01:33:21 ►

you know in Quito and Macas and was able to, like, eat normally. I think

01:33:25 ►

I would eat two dinners a day, actually. Like, I was eating a lot. I would, like, go to a restaurant,

01:33:30 ►

have a full dinner, and then 30 minutes, walk around, and then go to another restaurant and

01:33:35 ►

have a second dinner. But I guess my point for sharing this story is while these medicines are

01:33:42 ►

really powerful and beautiful, they are to be respected and not

01:33:45 ►

abused. And, um, I also think it’s really important to consider what your body is asking for, um,

01:33:53 ►

in, in deciding, you know, what traditions to adhere to, because, you know, when, when it was

01:33:59 ►

all said and done, I went and ate red meat afterwards. Um, you know, they said, oh, you

01:34:03 ►

should stay on diet. I’m like, no, my body needs red meat.

01:34:06 ►

I’m getting that right now.

01:34:08 ►

And so when I came home, unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of, it was not an easy transition back.

01:34:18 ►

I was hoping that I could bring some of the sort of lessons and glowing with me.

01:34:22 ►

But basically, I came home and I realized that all my problems were still there.

01:34:28 ►

And I had probably the most difficult year of my life.

01:34:32 ►

Within five days of returning, I got an antibiotic-resistant kidney infection.

01:34:36 ►

And I had to take a large amount of antibiotics that basically devastated my health

01:34:43 ►

that I had spent the last

01:34:45 ►

three years rebuilding. And it took me about a year to recover from the antibiotics.

01:34:51 ►

But I’m happy to say that I feel like all of that ayahuasca, all of that medicine

01:34:57 ►

really unwound something deep in me. And it took a year to fully integrate it and to fully process the amount of

01:35:06 ►

toxicity that I had to really unleash out of my system and you know since 2017 has happened um

01:35:14 ►

you know I say that for an arrow to be shot forward it needs to be pulled back

01:35:19 ►

and now I’m very happy to say that that challenging year and a half was really worth it

01:35:23 ►

and my health is better than it’s ever been.

01:35:27 ►

My business that I’ve been working on for the last three and a half years of my life is profitable now.

01:35:34 ►

And I’m a Cambo practitioner, and that has really taken off.

01:35:39 ►

So I guess, sorry, this is a lot of things.

01:35:44 ►

So I guess, sorry, this is a lot of things.

01:35:48 ►

So tying in sort of the frog and the frog,

01:35:52 ►

I really felt like the cambo was an ally for bringing me this message with the ayahuasca and bringing me to where I am today.

01:35:57 ►

And I think it’s really important that we respect these substances

01:36:04 ►

and realize that more is not always more. And

01:36:09 ►

maybe that’s why I’m sharing this story is because, um, I’ve, I’ve seen, I’ve seen too much medicine

01:36:16 ►

actually hurt people and allow them to exist in this space where they just keep sort of avoiding pain in their physical bodies that

01:36:28 ►

needs to be grounded and actually processed and felt.

01:36:32 ►

So thank you for that.

01:36:33 ►

Yeah.

01:36:34 ►

Thanks again for listening to Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

01:36:42 ►

Do us a favor.

01:36:44 ►

Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.

01:36:47 ►

Tell your friends.

01:36:48 ►

That’s how you can really help us out.

01:36:51 ►

Thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound,

01:36:53 ►

Joey Witt for the intro music,

01:36:55 ►

California Smile for the outro music,

01:36:57 ►

and Brian Norman, who produced the show.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

012 - Psychedelic Stories from San Diego

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Program Notes

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