Program Notes
Guest speaker: Various
Date this lecture was recorded: April 26, 2017
Psymposia hopes that you enjoy these stories from Los Angeles. Besides the police officer Michael Wood & UltraCulture’s Jason Louv and an array of other storytellers who have fathomed hell or soared angelic. This episode ends with one of the most powerful stories we have ever heard on on our stage.
Also there is an announcement about the Psychedelic History Project for which Lex Pelger will be archiving this summer in order to save a unique treasure trove acquired by Dr. Timothy Leary and saving it for the world.
To support that work or learn more about Lex’s other projects in psychoactive history and education, go to his Patreon for No Nonsense Productions where you can get his Queer chapter for free.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:33 ►
And after reading what Lex has to say about the psychedelic storytelling time that took place in Los Angeles on the 26th of April this year,
00:00:35 ►
I am really anxious to hear it.
00:00:40 ►
That was actually the night before Symposia’s Blue Dot Tour came here to San Diego,
00:00:45 ►
and I can remember how excited they all were about the previous night’s storytelling session in LA. Actually, since I was at the San Diego event, I was hoping that they would podcast
00:00:52 ►
the LA session before the one in San Diego. Because, well, since I was there, I’d already
00:00:56 ►
heard the San Diego stories. But now I don’t have to wait anymore. So here’s Lex.
00:01:04 ►
Today’s episode is made possible through
00:01:06 ►
your crowdfunded support on Patreon.
00:01:08 ►
Unlike other crowdfunding sites,
00:01:10 ►
Patreon allows you to chip in a few bucks
00:01:12 ►
a month to help us keep the lights on.
00:01:14 ►
Check it out at patreon.com
00:01:16 ►
slash symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:01:40 ►
This week we have some great storytelling from the City of Angels,
00:01:44 ►
with former police officer Michael Wood,
00:01:46 ►
Ultra Culture’s Jason Lou,
00:01:48 ►
and a bunch of other guests who know how to fathom hell or soar angelic.
00:01:52 ►
But first, I have my own story to tell.
00:01:55 ►
This summer, I’m going out to Dr. Bruce Dahmer’s house,
00:01:57 ►
who some of you probably know from the Psychedelic Salon
00:02:00 ►
or his other work around science, NASA, and the origin of life.
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But he also is the proud possessor of everything else that was in Timothy Leary’s archives
00:02:09 ►
that the New York Public Library didn’t want.
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And that includes 16 giant plastic bins from a press clipping service that Dr. Leary had
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that cut out everything in the popular press with the word drug in it,
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starting from the early 60s all the way through the 90s.
00:02:27 ►
And so it’s a really unique archive.
00:02:30 ►
It is pretty much the complete popular response to this psychedelic revolution.
00:02:47 ►
for the summer is to spend it on his farm, digitizing this unique archive to be put on Erewid and archive.org so people can always use it from here on out.
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And so I am driving across the country, leaving New York almost by the time that this is out,
00:02:57 ►
and will be out there turning this archive into something that will be forever searchable.
00:03:03 ►
So if that interests any of you out there and you want to volunteer to help,
00:03:07 ►
feel free to reach out to me at pelger at gmail.com.
00:03:10 ►
P-E-L-G-E-R at gmail.com.
00:03:13 ►
Any assistance would be much appreciated,
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and I think you’ll get a glimpse at something that not many people get to see
00:03:18 ►
until we free it for the world.
00:03:21 ►
If you want to see more about this project,
00:03:22 ►
I’ll have additional info on my website at lexpelger.com. And if you’d like to support the saving of this unique history for posterity,
00:03:31 ►
please consider supporting the work on my own Patreon. It’s called No Nonsense Productions
00:03:36 ►
because it includes this psychedelic history project. It includes my work hosting this podcast
00:03:41 ►
and for writing my graphic novel series, People of the Cannabinoids,
00:03:46 ►
which are my pot books based on Moby Dick that order people to talk to their grandparents about
00:03:51 ►
weed. Also, I just want to say thank you for all the emails that people already sent in about
00:03:57 ►
questions and comments about the podcast. We are sitting, reading, listening to everyone,
00:04:02 ►
figuring out what works and what doesn’t. And so thanks for all your comments.
00:04:06 ►
Please keep them coming in.
00:04:07 ►
They all get read.
00:04:08 ►
We couldn’t do it without you.
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Well, we could, but it wouldn’t be any fun.
00:04:12 ►
So now on to the stories.
00:04:26 ►
My name is Rachel.
00:04:33 ►
I’m a mental health advocate, and I run a blog about being diagnosed with mental illness and using psychedelics to help me live a functional life without being on prescription pills.
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So I’m just going to explain a little bit about what I’m diagnosed with.
00:04:43 ►
It’s bipolar I and borderline personality disorder.
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So you picture a person’s baseline emotions.
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They all go up and down, sad and unhappy.
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But when it comes to bipolar, it’s basically going very quickly and sometimes for no rhyme or reason.
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I can suddenly wake up and be enraged and I can suddenly shift and be happy.
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suddenly wake up and be enraged and I can suddenly shift and be happy. And then with the double diagnosis, when it comes to borderline is those ups and downs are exasperated to
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the highest extent. So when I’m angry, I’m rageful and violent. And when I’m happy, I’m
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euphoric and I have feelings of invincibility and these all lead to very dangerous situations.
00:05:21 ►
When I was younger, I would go look for fights, and when I would get angry, I would get violent, or when I get sad, it’s absolute depression.
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So I’ve been struggling with this for about 10 years. I’ve survived five suicide attempts,
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and I was just diagnosed a few months ago. I grew up in a time where we don’t talk about
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mental illness. We don’t talk about what’s know, what’s happening in our brains. So, um, that’s just a little go down on what
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it’s like to live with this. Um, another serious symptom that psychedelics have helped is this
00:05:57 ►
feeling of fragmentation with all these different emotions I feel inside of me. I start to fragment.
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I start feeling like I’m living with seven different people inside of me and I never know, you know, if my fiance is going
00:06:09 ►
to be experienced, the angry Rachel, or I’m going to wake up and be the happy Rachel. So over time,
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I start to struggle with all these people inside of me and it starts to make me lose my mind
00:06:20 ►
because I don’t know who I am. Um, so the one thing I do when I trip once a month,
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which is what my treatment is, is I meditate on wholeness. And, you know, all these personalities
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are able to come into one. And the only way I can describe it is there’s these shatters
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of my consciousness that I have to deal with. And when I meditate, when
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I, the only way I can describe it is like a cosmic glue and it pulls everything together
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and, you know, forms me back into one person. You know, I’m not these personalities anymore.
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I’m not, you know, all these mood swings anymore. I’m Rachel again and I am the person that I know again. So I just want to describe a little bit about that.
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Most people don’t get this kind of self-awareness or clarity
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to be able to explain what these diseases are doing inside of them.
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I had no idea all this was happening until I started using psychedelics.
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I wasn’t able to visualize the graph of the ups and downs, and what these magical medicines were able to do was bring me outside of
00:07:30 ►
myself as an intellectual observer of my mental illness. For the past four years of using them,
00:07:36 ►
they’ve been guiding me in revealing the patterns of emotions that I cannot make sense of on my own.
00:07:41 ►
When I’m low, that’s the only thing I know is truth, and when I’m high, that’s the only thing
00:07:45 ►
I’ve ever known. I’m a prisoner of whatever reality my brain decides for me, but the psychedelics were
00:07:51 ►
able to give me a blueprint of the prison. Another thing the psychedelics have done is help with
00:07:56 ►
fragmentation. I heavy trip once a month to keep my mental health in check. When I meditate on all
00:08:02 ►
the personalities, they stop tearing me apart and fighting. I
00:08:05 ►
come back together as one whole being. The only way I can describe it is I can feel the
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shadows of my consciousness pulled back together into a complete peace and repair. The psychedelics
00:08:15 ►
ability to help me heal mentally goes beyond the trip and have given me a quality of life
00:08:19 ►
I never thought possible. It takes a lot of work, but they’re not medicating my mental
00:08:24 ►
illness or masking the symptoms. They regulate the chemicals in my brain and guide me on a path where my
00:08:29 ►
disease, my diseases are not something I can make go away, but I can learn how to live with them by
00:08:34 ►
understanding them. Also for the past two weeks, I’ve been practicing microdosing. It’s been helping
00:08:40 ►
my day-to-day functionality a lot better than I expected. I honestly believe the combination of microdosing and periodic trips are going to help me fight this fight
00:08:48 ►
even better. Not only do they help repair my broken brain, but they’ve detailed my soul
00:08:53 ►
in depths that I didn’t know were possible. They’re the best medicine I could ask for.
00:08:59 ►
I would be in a lot more turmoil had they not found their way into my life looking to heal another major impact you know
00:09:07 ►
using psychedelics is i use them with my fiance the love of my life and when we trip together he
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is able to deal with the emotions that he goes through with living with a woman with mental
00:09:19 ►
illness and he gets a perspective and a healing that only in my opinion that he can find on these drugs he can
00:09:28 ►
explain to me his fears and he can be honest with me about how terrifying it is to live with me at
00:09:33 ►
times and you know when we’re tripping we’re able to look at that wholly like i said as outside
00:09:40 ►
observers so that has brought healing to my love life and healing to my brain and
00:09:45 ►
you know lastly the only way I can describe it is uh there’s this ancient Japanese art where
00:09:52 ►
broken pottery is repaired with gold and it creates a new piece of pottery but it’s still
00:09:58 ►
the same and you can see the gold and you can see the cracks you can see all these things that have
00:10:02 ►
been broken but it becomes a new beautiful object you know so i’ve been broken my entire life and my crane
00:10:10 ►
has been broken and my consciousness has been broken i get ripped in and out of these realities
00:10:15 ►
you know and there were parts of me that weren’t broken that had to be shattered but these drugs
00:10:19 ►
shattered and then they built them back up with this gold. And now I’m a new piece of pottery.
00:10:30 ►
And since then, they’ve been doing nothing but filling me up with what they need to fill me up with.
00:10:32 ►
So I’m grateful for them. And the only reason I’m still alive and able to function in society is because of what they’ve done for me.
00:10:38 ►
So that’s just, I advocate for it.
00:10:41 ►
I advocate for mental illness.
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That’s what my ribbon is for.
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And I advocate for psychedelics to be used to help with people that are struggling.
00:10:50 ►
And their brains are broken and these drugs are helping.
00:10:53 ►
Thank you.
00:11:12 ►
My name is TJ, and Lex just asked me about ten minutes ago if I would speak, and I said I would, and then he asked me a minute ago if I would go second, so I said I would.
00:11:17 ►
Currently, I’ve been working for years now on a dissertation, And it turns out I’m studying 5-MAOD&T,
00:11:26 ►
and we’re going to do a qualitative study
00:11:28 ►
of some experiences that are happening
00:11:31 ►
at a clinic south of the border.
00:11:34 ►
And it’s all legal and really cool
00:11:36 ►
and empirical and the whole thing.
00:11:39 ►
So we have here Joseph,
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who eventually will be on my committee.
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I promise you, you’re going to get there.
00:11:44 ►
And so
00:11:45 ►
we’re looking at some very cool stuff.
00:11:48 ►
And so
00:11:49 ►
obviously I got to this point of
00:11:52 ►
wanting to know more about psychedelics because of the experiences
00:11:54 ►
that I’ve had on psychedelics. What the hell is that?
00:11:56 ►
What’s going on?
00:11:57 ►
And you’re looking at someone who, I mean, I was born
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I had a congenital medical condition
00:12:01 ►
and so for years, what is this?
00:12:03 ►
Why? What’s going on?
00:12:05 ►
We all are asking ourselves this question in some way.
00:12:08 ►
And so when I have these psychedelic experiences,
00:12:10 ►
it’s centered, often I’m thinking, obviously,
00:12:13 ►
about my being and my place and why me and what’s going on
00:12:17 ►
and what should I do about it.
00:12:19 ►
So that’s sort of underscoring all of my experiences
00:12:22 ►
and what drives me or what has driven me
00:12:24 ►
to want to try one and another and another and another.
00:12:27 ►
It’s God, right?
00:12:29 ►
It’s this experience of together or something, whatever it is, that can’t be spoken.
00:12:33 ►
It’s that thing which when you have it, it slips through your fingers.
00:12:36 ►
But it’s this amazing thing.
00:12:37 ►
So some of the more profound experiences, as a person who I was raised in the Catholic Church,
00:12:42 ►
I would expect to have some angelic and very coherent divine experiences,
00:12:47 ►
and it’s usually the opposite of that.
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It’s not coherent at all.
00:12:51 ►
And in fact, some of the more memorable experiences
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are ones which are just totally outrageous
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and ones which I would not have expected at all.
00:13:00 ►
And the first one I’ll mention,
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well, I will mention that it was psilocybin,
00:13:04 ►
which was my introduction and which was, for me, for a long time, one of my favorites.
00:13:07 ►
But finally, it was NN-dimethyltryptamine,
00:13:11 ►
which really sort of helped me to understand the absurdity and the paradoxicality
00:13:17 ►
and start to help me with the dualism here and the thing.
00:13:21 ►
But it was an experience with NNDMT where, you know, you go in the
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thing and then all of a sudden there’s this entity appearing in front of me, which many
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of you may have this experience with NNDMT. It is relatively common, these discarded entities,
00:13:36 ►
and they appear. They’re there. There was a couple over here and there was one right
00:13:39 ►
in front of me. And in fact, it looked very much like this scene. Maybe this is the scene. I don’t
00:13:45 ►
know. It was a kitchen like this, and there was in front of me a woman sitting on a kitchen
00:13:54 ►
counter with her legs crossed, and she was smoking a cigarette. And I thought that was
00:13:58 ►
the craziest thing I’d ever seen. Because I’m expecting God or God’s representative. And she’s smoking a
00:14:07 ►
cigarette. And so I, and there are some others in the room, I just laughed out loud. And
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the others in the room, they noticed that I was laughing like this, like just joyous,
00:14:19 ►
you know, ear to ear. And in fact, I heard one of them say, I want to know what he’s
00:14:22 ►
seeing. And it was this absurd situation, and I thought it was just hilarious.
00:14:27 ►
And instantly the message I got was, you know, first of all, I’m right here.
00:14:32 ►
I’ve always been here, and I’m on break right now because you’re here.
00:14:36 ►
And that was the message.
00:14:39 ►
And so I kind of thought, oh, all right, so nothing to worry about.
00:14:43 ►
And also, it’s kind of funny, and I shouldn’t be so serious.
00:14:46 ►
Everything’s fine.
00:14:48 ►
And so I guess I don’t know if it was in retrospect or during the thing that occurred to me
00:14:52 ►
that this was in some form or whatever, this is an angel or a guardian of mine,
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and that in some way this entity or being or consciousness is with me
00:15:03 ►
and looking over me and helping throughout the
00:15:05 ►
thing but the message then was i’m here we’re here there’s a lot more than what you think going on
00:15:11 ►
that was the big message right the first one is like you know your little boxing parameters they’re
00:15:15 ►
they’re they’re little and so there’s a lot more going on and way outside the usual models and so
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okay we’re here.
00:15:26 ►
Don’t take it all so seriously.
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It’s fine.
00:15:29 ►
And was there another message there somewhere?
00:15:31 ►
Anyway, it was that.
00:15:32 ►
So that was one experience with NMDMT.
00:15:33 ►
It was just wonderful. Awesome.
00:15:38 ►
My name’s Jason Louv, and I’m into magic, right?
00:15:49 ►
Or magic with a K.
00:15:51 ►
And magic with a K, as I’m sure many of,
00:15:54 ►
this is, as we’ve already established, a muggle-free zone,
00:15:57 ►
so I’m just going to be totally, thank you, I’m going to be totally open.
00:16:00 ►
So magic is, I look at it like this,
00:16:03 ►
to put it like this for this audience.
00:16:07 ►
If psychedelics, like let’s say psilocybin, you know, you take and you get a six-hour experience and you’re like,
00:16:12 ►
I just want to go to sleep, you know, you’re just getting download, you’re getting the download, the download.
00:16:19 ►
And it’s out of your control.
00:16:22 ►
Magic is a programming language or a targeting system for saying,
00:16:27 ►
okay, I just want this.
00:16:29 ►
I just want to talk to the god Ganesh.
00:16:32 ►
I just want to talk to this part of myself.
00:16:34 ►
I just want to talk to the god Hermes.
00:16:36 ►
I just want to talk to this dark part of myself or this higher part of myself.
00:16:41 ►
I want to talk to an angel, whatever it happens to be.
00:16:44 ►
That’s what magic is. It’s a protocol. It’s a system, and it doesn’t want to talk to an angel. Whatever it happens to be, that’s what
00:16:45 ►
magic is. It’s a protocol. It’s a system. And it doesn’t need to go to psychedelics.
00:16:48 ►
It can be done in 15 minutes, completely sober, once you get good at it. But it can also be
00:16:53 ►
done with the psychedelic experience. And when we combine them, as I’m sure many of
00:16:56 ►
you know, whether it’s magic or some other sacred discipline, that’s when you get the
00:17:00 ►
real downloads. Now,
00:17:08 ►
let me ask you a question. All that aside,
00:17:09 ►
the psychedelic experience, what’s the number one most important lesson
00:17:11 ►
of the psychedelic experience? There’s lots.
00:17:14 ►
There’s a lot.
00:17:15 ►
That’s a good one. Anyone else?
00:17:18 ►
You’re not just your mind.
00:17:19 ►
What is it? You’re not just your mind.
00:17:22 ►
Excellent. Okay, I shouldn’t say the most
00:17:24 ►
important. What’s the most important.
00:17:27 ►
What’s the most important for you?
00:17:27 ►
Anybody?
00:17:30 ►
It’s all about love. Excellent.
00:17:33 ►
Excellent.
00:17:33 ►
Yes.
00:17:36 ►
We are perfect.
00:17:38 ►
Everything changes.
00:17:41 ►
So, yes.
00:17:42 ►
Once you get the message, hang up the phone.
00:17:43 ►
That’s a good one.
00:17:46 ►
Yes.
00:17:47 ►
Or someone else.
00:17:48 ►
Show up.
00:17:49 ►
Show up.
00:17:50 ►
Anyone else?
00:17:51 ►
Dissolving of ego.
00:17:52 ►
Dissolving of ego.
00:17:53 ►
Excellent.
00:17:54 ►
So, yes.
00:17:55 ►
All right.
00:17:55 ►
So for me, that’s what it was.
00:17:56 ►
For me, it was let go.
00:17:58 ►
That was the most important message for me.
00:18:01 ►
And that’s always what I tell people when they ask me about the psychedelic experience.
00:18:04 ►
I tell them, let go. Because as we all know, if you’re hanging on and you’re
00:18:10 ►
clenched up and you’re not into it and you haven’t let go, then you’re going to have
00:18:13 ►
a bad time until the medicine forces you to let go. So for me, when I trip, I preemptively
00:18:19 ►
let go. And people who are into yoga, for instance, know how to do that very well.
00:18:24 ►
let go. And people who are into yoga, for instance, know how to do that very well.
00:18:34 ►
So I want to tell a story about letting go. And so for a little bit about me, for the last 20 years, I have spent nearly all of my time immersing myself in the world’s esoteric
00:18:41 ►
and spiritual and occult traditions traditions and going all around the world
00:18:45 ►
and getting people to learn from Sufism, Hindu Tantra, Buddhism, neuro-linguistic programming,
00:18:52 ►
everything I can get my hands on.
00:18:54 ►
I’ve been through a couple dozen different systems.
00:18:57 ►
You could say I have ADD or you could just say I’m really curious.
00:19:00 ►
I come from a journalistic background and so I will go and I will just immerse myself into something
00:19:06 ►
and take it fully on for like a year and then shift into something else.
00:19:12 ►
And this process is called chaos magic.
00:19:16 ►
Chaos magic is the idea that there is no one truth.
00:19:20 ►
There’s no one true system.
00:19:22 ►
So what you should really do is experience life from as many different angles as possible become a Sufi but do it seriously become
00:19:29 ►
a Sufi for you become a tantric for a year become a cynical madman advertising
00:19:34 ►
executive become become whatever it is you know or yoga or or psychedelics, you know, psychedelic shamanism, things like
00:19:47 ►
that.
00:19:47 ►
So that’s what I’ve been up to, and I’ve put out several books about it.
00:19:51 ►
So it’s hard for me to narrow down to one story, but I’m just going to tell this one
00:19:54 ►
story, which is about the process of letting go.
00:19:57 ►
When I was 23, I was working on my first book, and I was in London, and some of you may know
00:20:03 ►
or may remember there was this great glorious
00:20:06 ►
period in London in the early 2000s when psilocybin mushrooms were legal for like two years
00:20:12 ►
and you could just buy them in open markets you could like I went to Portobello Road Market I was
00:20:16 ►
there for a year and I went to Portobello Road Market they’d just be selling them you could go
00:20:19 ►
into head shops and they’d have them in fridges and they’d give you they were selling grow kits
00:20:23 ►
so I bought a couple psilocybin grow kits and i brought them back to my apartment and of course you have to
00:20:28 ►
keep it at a certain temperature to grow them so i had like the the heater like the heater on in the
00:20:34 ►
in the apartment on it’s exactly 80 degrees or whatever it is the entire time it’s driving my
00:20:38 ►
roommate nuts but but i got lots of psilocybin mushrooms. So I must have spent like four or five months just doing psilocybin and ritual magic all day long every day while working on a book.
00:20:53 ►
So I learned to let go really quick.
00:20:57 ►
And so I was just like going in and in and in and trying to get more and more.
00:21:01 ►
It’s like when you’re young, you overdo everything.
00:21:03 ►
in and trying to get more and more. It’s like when you’re young, you overdo everything. So I was just like, and for me, and I’m sure many of you probably resonate with this experience.
00:21:09 ►
For me, I didn’t really feel fully happy until I had taken psilocybin mushrooms. I didn’t
00:21:16 ►
really feel like a full human being until I had taken psilocybin mushrooms. There’s
00:21:20 ►
something about that that it’s like, it’s almost like it’s the missing piece. It fits in and it makes you feel more human, right? And so after, but, you know, so finally
00:21:33 ►
I got this message, you know, I was getting through this upbringing as a very rational,
00:21:38 ►
very hard-headed, very cynical, very, you know, I was a goth teenager, you know, I was just over, I was over the world at 14.
00:21:48 ►
And so getting through, breaking through that character armoring, as Wilhelm Reich would have put it,
00:21:53 ►
was one of the most profoundly evolutionary periods of my life when I became a convert.
00:21:59 ►
And, but I got this message, let go, let go, let go.
00:22:03 ►
And I got so good at tripping that it got to be my favorite game became taking mushrooms and forcing myself not to trip.
00:22:09 ►
I was like, taking mushrooms, like, can I meditate so severely, strong, that I just reject all, you know, I just like, I stay completely sober.
00:22:18 ►
So I would sit there and take a bunch of mushrooms and then drink cheap English beer while listening to The Clash.
00:22:23 ►
Just like, I’m not going to trip.
00:22:26 ►
I have so much willpower.
00:22:27 ►
Okay, that’s one way you can do it.
00:22:29 ►
Or you can just let go.
00:22:31 ►
So I got to a point where I let go,
00:22:33 ►
and then I had an experience in my life where, as you said,
00:22:39 ►
when you get the message, put down the phone.
00:22:41 ►
And when I began to not just take psychedelics,
00:22:44 ►
but apply psychedelic lessons
00:22:45 ►
to life, that’s when life got really magical. So how many people in here, let me ask, have had an
00:22:51 ►
experience where you’ve relaxed, you’ve let go, you’ve decided to stop controlling, and then life
00:22:58 ►
got really magical all of a sudden? How many people have? Raise your hand and say aye.
00:23:03 ►
Wow, I’m impressed. A whole group of psychedelic shippers
00:23:05 ►
that actually haven’t said aye.
00:23:07 ►
I thought you were all supposed to have no ego.
00:23:11 ►
Okay, maybe it was just performed.
00:23:14 ►
But it’s about practically the whole room, right?
00:23:17 ►
So this is when I learned that profound lesson
00:23:20 ►
that we’ve all learned,
00:23:21 ►
which is I decided to start traveling around. So I started traveling
00:23:25 ►
around Europe and going to old hermetic sites. And Europe is fucking expensive, right? So I started
00:23:32 ►
to run out of money. And I was like, what do I do now? And I decided maybe I should go to India.
00:23:36 ►
Yeah, that’s like what spiritual people do, right? You know, like that sounds cool. That’s like a
00:23:41 ►
psychedelic thing to do. So I book a ticket to India.
00:23:45 ►
And I was still in college at this point.
00:23:47 ►
So I was on my year abroad.
00:23:49 ►
And I book a ticket to India.
00:23:51 ►
And it turns out my final exam for my course is on the day that I was supposed to leave.
00:23:56 ►
So I go to the travel agent.
00:23:58 ►
I didn’t know I had it.
00:23:59 ►
So I go to the travel agent.
00:24:00 ►
And I say, look, the date changed.
00:24:04 ►
Can I change my date? And they
00:24:06 ►
said, no, we can’t. We have no more tickets for you. So immediately, punch down. What
00:24:09 ►
are you talking about? I paid for this ticket. What are you talking about? And we’ve all
00:24:14 ►
done this, right? It’s like, no, I refuse. You have to give me the ticket. And they’re
00:24:18 ►
like, no, we can’t do it. We can’t do it. So immediately, I start trying to control
00:24:22 ►
my environment. And then she says, well, we could, after I start to kick up a bit of a fuss,
00:24:27 ►
she says, well, we could fly you to Kathmandu.
00:24:30 ►
I said, well, how much would that cost?
00:24:34 ►
And she said, well, it’ll be the same price, but why not?
00:24:38 ►
Or I said, why not?
00:24:39 ►
Okay, fine, fine.
00:24:40 ►
I’ll go to Kathmandu.
00:24:41 ►
God.
00:24:43 ►
And so I get
00:24:45 ►
my ticket. I said, that sounds fine
00:24:48 ►
because I figured I can just go and then I can buy
00:24:50 ►
a plane ticket back to India or take a bus to India.
00:24:52 ►
Very next day, Nepal has gone
00:24:54 ►
into civil war.
00:24:56 ►
Fuck. Okay. So I go
00:24:58 ►
and I’m looking on the news
00:25:00 ►
and it’s like Nepal is in civil war. There’s a Maoist
00:25:02 ►
insurgency uprising. They’re
00:25:04 ►
firebombing the buses bus is going to India.
00:25:05 ►
Oh, fuck, okay.
00:25:07 ►
So I think, well, this ticket was $500.
00:25:12 ►
I’m going to lose the money if I didn’t go.
00:25:14 ►
All right, I’m just going to let go.
00:25:15 ►
I’m going to apply what I learned.
00:25:16 ►
I’m going to let go.
00:25:16 ►
I’m going to do it.
00:25:17 ►
So I go, and I land, and has anyone ever been to Kathmandu?
00:25:24 ►
Okay, if you haven’t gone, you have to go.
00:25:26 ►
It’s the most psychedelic place on earth.
00:25:28 ►
You go there, it’s one valley,
00:25:30 ►
and it’s a place where Buddhists, Hindus,
00:25:33 ►
and animistic shamans have all been sharing sacred sites
00:25:37 ►
and practices and belief systems
00:25:40 ►
for a couple thousand years,
00:25:43 ►
certainly back to the 1400s.
00:25:45 ►
It’s the last magical tantra kingdom on Earth.
00:25:47 ►
Very sadly, a lot of it has been destroyed now by the earthquake, the recent earthquake.
00:25:53 ►
But you go in, and it’s just prayer flags and temples and giant Buddhist stupas
00:25:58 ►
and spires and incense smoke and the sound of chanting
00:26:02 ►
and the sound of people running and animals and it’s fucking phenomenal and so i went in and i just immediately was like okay this is great i’m so
00:26:10 ►
glad that i’m here i’m just gonna relax this is so great so i go and i go start i i’m sitting in
00:26:16 ►
the city town square durbar square which has now been destroyed by the earthquake and uh this kid
00:26:21 ►
comes up to me and he’s a tour guide he wants to know where he can take me
00:26:25 ►
and I have been looking at my lonely planet
00:26:28 ►
and I’ve seen that there’s shamans
00:26:29 ►
still practicing in Nepal
00:26:31 ►
and I say, well, do you know anything about shamanism?
00:26:33 ►
He says, sure, I can take you up into the hills
00:26:35 ►
and we can learn about shamanism
00:26:38 ►
they practice it in my village
00:26:40 ►
so I go, okay
00:26:41 ►
and at this point in the trip I’m like, alright, I’m just enjoying this
00:26:44 ►
I’m letting go, like, whatever and so we go up into the and at this point in the trip I’m like, alright, I’m just enjoying this I’m letting go, whatever
00:26:45 ►
so we go up into the mountains
00:26:48 ►
we meet the shamans
00:26:49 ►
and the first thing I ask them
00:26:52 ►
is, is shamanism real?
00:26:54 ►
and the first thing they ask me is
00:26:56 ►
is pro-wrestling real?
00:27:04 ►
that’s when I realized reality was you know, it was going to do that.
00:27:08 ►
So, but I got to see there, you know, what I came to realize was I had this idea.
00:27:14 ►
It’s like, you know, I was consuming the stuff.
00:27:16 ►
Like Terrence McKenna, that first Daniel Pinchbeck book had just come out.
00:27:19 ►
And I was reading the stuff and I had this idea of psychedelic shamanism.
00:27:22 ►
Shamanism, I went and I said, that’s really not the case. What shamanism really is in most places is it’s a plan B
00:27:29 ►
for when there’s no medical care available. It’s, you know, if we can’t get access to
00:27:34 ►
medical care, then we do essentially occult rituals. And that’s what magic was in Europe
00:27:41 ►
in the Middle Ages. It’s very similar.
00:27:45 ►
It’s kind of the same around the world.
00:27:47 ►
And so long story short, they performed a ritual.
00:27:52 ►
I got to witness a ritual where they were going through the three different worlds,
00:27:55 ►
the celestial, the terrestrial, the infernal worlds.
00:27:59 ►
And then, of course, it was beautiful, and I got to stay there.
00:28:04 ►
And so just amazing meeting people who were just totally without guile,
00:28:08 ►
totally without this, you know, insectile front that Western people have.
00:28:14 ►
What can I manipulate? What can I get?
00:28:16 ►
Totally without that.
00:28:20 ►
And so, but the guy looked at me and he said, you know,
00:28:23 ►
you would probably be good at this. We can train you at this.
00:28:26 ►
I said, okay.
00:28:27 ►
Again, okay, why not?
00:28:29 ►
My tour guide says, no, like, you know, you’re going to go crazy.
00:28:32 ►
And so I demonstrated a bunch of Western magical rituals, like the Western magical ritual of the pentagram and all the hermetic rituals, obelisk rituals.
00:28:38 ►
And he was like, okay, you won’t go crazy.
00:28:40 ►
You’re already crazy.
00:28:43 ►
So long story short, we’re coming to the end of the time.
00:28:46 ►
So I got to spend almost a month learning shamanism.
00:28:49 ►
And I learned later that throughout that entire process,
00:28:54 ►
Maoist insurgents were attempting to kidnap me.
00:28:57 ►
And my guide was paying them off to not kidnap me
00:29:01 ►
and didn’t tell me because he thought that I would run away and stop paying him.
00:29:07 ►
But when I came out of it, and I got to India after this,
00:29:10 ►
but what I took out of this was I realized all I did was I let go and I believed and I had faith
00:29:15 ►
and I was able to walk into a war zone and come out and everything was fine.
00:29:20 ►
I didn’t even get food poisoning.
00:29:21 ►
And all these incredible experiences happen.
00:29:24 ►
And how often do we forget this in life,
00:29:26 ►
where we believe all these things that are going to happen,
00:29:29 ►
and oh, you know, traffic is going to be so fucking terrible,
00:29:32 ►
I can’t even go outside today.
00:29:35 ►
If you live in L.A.
00:29:38 ►
How often do we get into this mindset where we just let go and had a little faith,
00:29:42 ►
it’s a taboo word in Western culture right now, we just had a little faith and believed and let go and had a little faith. It’s a taboo word in Western culture right now.
00:29:45 ►
We just had a little faith and believed and let go.
00:29:49 ►
And how wonderful would things,
00:29:50 ►
how magical would things be truly all the time, all the time.
00:29:54 ►
So, and that’s my story.
00:29:56 ►
Thank you for having me.
00:29:56 ►
I’m really grateful to be here.
00:30:10 ►
I had the luck, actually, of witnessing symposia in various
00:30:12 ►
cities around the country.
00:30:15 ►
I don’t know how many people
00:30:16 ►
here were at Psychedelic Science,
00:30:18 ►
but it was
00:30:20 ►
a big deal this year.
00:30:22 ►
I would describe it as booming.
00:30:25 ►
And symposia of course was huge there. it was a big deal this year. I would describe it as booming. And
00:30:25 ►
Symposia, of course, was huge there.
00:30:28 ►
And everywhere they’ve gone,
00:30:30 ►
it’s kind of amazing.
00:30:31 ►
I have to say, these guys are brilliant geniuses,
00:30:34 ►
but they’re not the most organized
00:30:36 ►
people. And what’s amazing is they just
00:30:38 ►
seem to manifest crowds,
00:30:40 ►
much like this one, wherever they go.
00:30:42 ►
It’s chaos magic.
00:30:43 ►
Chaos magic, exactly.
00:30:44 ►
I can attest that much like this one, wherever they go. It’s chaos magic. Chaos magic, exactly.
00:30:47 ►
I can attest that it’s really amazing
00:30:50 ►
to see their effect on
00:30:51 ►
every city they seem to go to.
00:30:54 ►
I should explain, yes, we did something
00:30:56 ►
called the Hypnotic Bar in New York.
00:30:57 ►
It did it three times.
00:30:58 ►
It’s a demonstration that it is possible to induce
00:31:01 ►
all drug and alcohol states
00:31:03 ►
without drugs or alcohol
00:31:04 ►
simply using trance. There is a catch. that it is possible to induce all drug and alcohol states without drugs or alcohol,
00:31:06 ►
simply using trance.
00:31:09 ►
And there is a catch.
00:31:13 ►
The catch is that not everyone can do it, but about a quarter of the population can.
00:31:19 ►
But Lex, actually, Mike made me promise not to hypnotize anybody tonight,
00:31:22 ►
but I thought the catch is if you want, you can hypnotize yourself.
00:31:24 ►
I can’t hypnotize you. But it’s a different topic tonight. We’re not doing trance, but if you want. You can hypnotize yourself. I can’t hypnotize you.
00:31:29 ►
But it’s a different topic tonight. We’re not doing a trance, but if you want to know more about it,
00:31:33 ►
I’m hoping actually to bring the show through here next fall.
00:31:34 ►
It’s called The Hypnotic Bar.
00:31:37 ►
So anyways, I do have a story. And like the previous speaker, I was journalistically inclined.
00:31:41 ►
I’m still a journalist. I’m actually here shooting a documentary with my producer.
00:31:46 ►
And my producer, actually,
00:31:47 ►
when we were coming here,
00:31:48 ►
he hasn’t been that exposed
00:31:50 ►
in that much psychedelic culture.
00:31:52 ►
And he said,
00:31:52 ►
is there going to be bongos?
00:31:55 ►
And I assured him
00:31:57 ►
that there would be no bongos.
00:31:58 ►
And he’s very happy about that.
00:32:01 ►
Anyways, I should explain that
00:32:04 ►
as a journalist,
00:32:05 ►
I was covering a story about 10 years ago in Canada. There was a really weird moment in Canadian law where
00:32:10 ►
medical marijuana became legal, but the general prohibition against marijuana still stood.
00:32:17 ►
And one lawyer had a brilliant idea. He basically found a guy who had been busted in a very
00:32:22 ►
kind of rudimentary way. He was in a park smoking a joint.
00:32:25 ►
He got busted by the police.
00:32:27 ►
He actually thought that maybe the law against marijuana wouldn’t stand.
00:32:33 ►
So he took it to court.
00:32:35 ►
By finding this sort of loophole that basically the medical marijuana law,
00:32:40 ►
and I’m sorry it’s a bit complicated,
00:32:42 ►
was thrown out because people with epilepsy
00:32:45 ►
had demonstrated that medical marijuana helped people with epilepsy. He made the case that
00:32:50 ►
the general prohibition against marijuana endangered people with epilepsy, because the
00:32:56 ►
evidence for marijuana helping people with epilepsy was so clear. So at that moment,
00:33:03 ►
the judge said, you’re right, and right then and there, in one day,
00:33:06 ►
they threw up the entire marijuana prohibition for Canada in one afternoon.
00:33:12 ►
And there’s a fellow in Canada known as Mark Emery.
00:33:15 ►
He’s kind of a wild guy.
00:33:17 ►
He’s known in Canada as the Prince of Pot.
00:33:20 ►
And when he saw that the law had been thrown out, he seized on the moment.
00:33:23 ►
He said marijuana is effectively legal.
00:33:26 ►
And he started a campaign, basically, to travel across the country smoking enormous, in some
00:33:31 ►
case, 14-foot joints, specifically in front of police stations, to demonstrate that he
00:33:39 ►
could not be arrested or that it was legal.
00:33:42 ►
And I was a reporter saying, this was very awkward for me because as a reporter I would arrive and people would be smoking a legitimate 14 foot
00:33:48 ►
joint in front of, let’s say, the Calgary police station. And I would just have to ask
00:33:51 ►
very neutral questions like, you know, how do you feel about the current prohibition
00:33:55 ►
against marijuana? Well, you know, not partaking, but standing close enough that I was very
00:34:01 ►
affected. So the interesting thing about Mark Emery is that he quickly
00:34:07 ►
became a multi-millionaire. And he didn’t do it by these joints. He had a very brilliant
00:34:12 ►
idea, which was that at the time, marijuana still was technically illegal, maybe in Canada
00:34:16 ►
and the US, but selling marijuana seeds, at least in Canada, was not. And he saw himself
00:34:22 ►
as a Johnny Appleseed character, spreading marijuana seeds around was not. And he saw himself as a Johnny-sort-of-appleseed character, spreading
00:34:25 ►
marijuana seeds around the country. And he sold them all across Canada, became very wealthy,
00:34:30 ►
and then he had this brilliant idea. America has a lot more people than America, and they
00:34:34 ►
sell them into the States. And this was his fatal error, because the DEA, of course, your
00:34:40 ►
friends, came after him. To make a long story short, he had so much money, though, for a while,
00:34:45 ►
and he knew, kind of like his time was running out,
00:34:47 ►
he would host these huge conferences,
00:34:49 ►
well, huge in that they were well-financed,
00:34:51 ►
on entheogens.
00:34:52 ►
And he would invite people like Robert Doblin
00:34:54 ►
and people from MAPS,
00:34:56 ►
and they would all show up and talk about drugs.
00:34:58 ►
Now, he had so many people talking about
00:35:00 ►
so many different drugs,
00:35:01 ►
and probably experienced this before.
00:35:03 ►
If you spend an entire day talking about, let’s say, the science of drugs,
00:35:06 ►
usually by nighttime you kind of want to do those drugs.
00:35:09 ►
That’s just the way it works.
00:35:11 ►
And so they would have these parties, and I went as a neutral reporter,
00:35:16 ►
and I was working with another guy who was a very straight journalist guy named Sean.
00:35:20 ►
And both of us, I said, Sean, we’re going to go to a party,
00:35:22 ►
and I said, there’s probably going to be a lot of drugs, just to let you know.
00:35:26 ►
And when we got there, it was more than we imagined, there was a buffet
00:35:28 ►
it really was a buffet
00:35:29 ►
a huge table, and it had a series of bowls
00:35:32 ►
so there was like an ecstasy bowl
00:35:34 ►
mushroom bowl, various kinds of
00:35:36 ►
marijuana bowl, liquid LSD
00:35:38 ►
vials, DMT
00:35:40 ►
it was all like, it was just like a buffet
00:35:42 ►
and
00:35:43 ►
I was like I said, okay, I’ll do the
00:35:47 ►
ecstasy. And so I did quite a bit of ecstasy. And my friend Sean, I think he didn’t know
00:35:52 ►
what to do. And he said, I’ll try the LSD. I was like, are you sure? I didn’t know. He
00:36:00 ►
seemed to know what he was doing. So he actually talked to Mark Emory himself.
00:36:05 ►
Mark Emory said, here, here, here’s a bottle of liquid LSD.
00:36:07 ►
And I just remember him going, this was the motion.
00:36:09 ►
He was like, squirt, into his mouth.
00:36:11 ►
No!
00:36:12 ►
I remember thinking, no.
00:36:14 ►
Uh-oh.
00:36:16 ►
Anyway, sorry, everything was okay for a little while.
00:36:21 ►
Then my friend actually, I looked over at one point, and I saw that he was taking off all his clothes.
00:36:28 ►
And so I just went over and said, like, why are you taking off your clothes?
00:36:34 ►
And he was like, what? I didn’t realize it.
00:36:36 ►
So he put his clothes back on.
00:36:38 ►
And then a few minutes later, he was taking his clothes off again.
00:36:41 ►
And it started to show some distress.
00:36:44 ►
And so I said to, said to whoever was in charge,
00:36:46 ►
I think my friend is kind of in trouble,
00:36:48 ►
and they said,
00:36:49 ►
okay, well, we’ll call the trip goddesses.
00:36:52 ►
And I didn’t know if they meant it.
00:36:55 ►
At this point, I’m on ecstasy,
00:36:56 ►
and then all of a sudden,
00:36:57 ►
I see these beautiful women
00:36:58 ►
with long, flowing hair,
00:37:00 ►
very Earth goddess types,
00:37:02 ►
and they arrive,
00:37:03 ►
and they start talking to him.
00:37:06 ►
It was very beautiful for me because I was sort of trying to explain the world to him
00:37:08 ►
everything’s going to be okay, don’t worry
00:37:10 ►
you don’t need to take your clothes off, you’re fine
00:37:12 ►
and it worked for a while
00:37:14 ►
it was quite an amazing work for a while
00:37:16 ►
then of course he took off, ran out the door
00:37:18 ►
and ran into traffic
00:37:19 ►
and I remember chasing him through
00:37:22 ►
this was downtown Vancouver, I’m chasing him through traffic
00:37:24 ►
and I had to literally tackle him
00:37:26 ►
and drag him back into the place.
00:37:29 ►
And then we, of course I said,
00:37:31 ►
you’re not going to try jumping out a window, are you?
00:37:33 ►
Because I thought he was doing all the acid clichés.
00:37:36 ►
I should not have said that, because a few minutes later,
00:37:38 ►
I caught him out a window trying to open it,
00:37:41 ►
and luckily he was too incoherent.
00:37:43 ►
Anyways, as the night went on, it got kind of even weirder.
00:37:46 ►
At one point he said to me, I really need to go to the bathroom.
00:37:49 ►
So I said, okay, I’ll take you to the bathroom, we’ll go to the bathroom.
00:37:52 ►
And he goes in for a while, and he comes out and looks at me and says,
00:37:56 ►
I don’t know what to do.
00:37:58 ►
And I’m like, well, you just…
00:38:00 ►
So I found myself explaining to somebody how you go to the bathroom.
00:38:06 ►
So this is how you go to the bathroom, which I explained the whole thing to him. And then he came out
00:38:11 ►
after a while and says, I don’t understand. So there are a lot of things that animals
00:38:19 ►
might find themselves doing for friends. But one of the weirdest ones I’ve had to do is help another friend
00:38:25 ►
and go to the bathroom in a urinal.
00:38:29 ►
And so that night I discovered
00:38:31 ►
quite high on ecstasy
00:38:33 ►
that it’s quite possible to do.
00:38:36 ►
And so I helped my friend pee in the toilet
00:38:39 ►
and everything was fine.
00:38:43 ►
It took about the rest of the night for him to recover,
00:38:45 ►
but here’s sort of the weird part.
00:38:47 ►
A few weeks later, Mark Emery, of course, was arrested.
00:38:52 ►
He was arrested by the American DEA,
00:38:54 ►
and it’s a big sore point in Canada,
00:38:56 ►
because the DEA came into Canada, took Mark Emery away,
00:39:00 ►
went to jail for five years in South Carolina, of all places.
00:39:05 ►
He learned to play the bass, apparently, while in jail.
00:39:08 ►
And then he finally just got released probably about eight months ago,
00:39:13 ►
and now he’s back in Canada as a free man.
00:39:14 ►
He’s getting in trouble again.
00:39:16 ►
He opened up a bunch of marijuana shops before the law has changed.
00:39:20 ►
But the weird thing about this whole experience is all these crazy things that Mark Henry did,
00:39:24 ►
including the party, and
00:39:25 ►
obviously a lot of other people did as well, not just
00:39:27 ►
him, was that now, as of
00:39:29 ►
three months ago, partly because of all this
00:39:31 ►
shenanigans,
00:39:33 ►
the Canadian government has passed a law, or
00:39:35 ►
announced they’re passing a law that will legalize
00:39:37 ►
marijuana. Now for California, it’s maybe not a big deal,
00:39:40 ►
but for the entire country of Canada, we’re legalizing
00:39:42 ►
marijuana next year,
00:39:43 ►
and partly because of these crazy events that took place.
00:39:47 ►
And I was glad to be sort of a witness to all the strangeness.
00:39:50 ►
That’s what I said.
00:39:51 ►
Woo!
00:39:51 ►
Woo!
00:39:57 ►
All right, thanks.
00:40:03 ►
I’m Michael Wood, best known for being a police reform activist,
00:40:07 ►
being a whistleblower from Baltimore and the police department there,
00:40:10 ►
and exploring what reality of policing is in our time right now and what it’s always been,
00:40:15 ►
because really the curtain’s just revealed.
00:40:17 ►
And the other thing is for leading the veterans movement going up the Standing Rock, the pipeline.
00:40:21 ►
Thank you.
00:40:26 ►
And I’m going to tell you a quick story about now, really, because I had no idea what I
00:40:32 ►
was going to talk about coming in here, because we’re talking about psychedelics.
00:40:36 ►
And psychedelics are something that is different, really, for everybody.
00:40:39 ►
And everybody’s experience that you hear is very anecdotally different.
00:40:42 ►
It’s a new horizon for them. So I
00:40:45 ►
just didn’t understand how I was going to apply that to what would be important for you to take
00:40:50 ►
home to yourself from this idea. So where I really kind of am known for is I was an endeavoring
00:41:00 ►
scholar while I was a Baltimore police officer and I was a shift commander there.
00:41:10 ►
And I was in the world of Freddie Gray, the environment, and I was looking at the product of policing and trying to figure out and becoming obsessed with systems. What does that translate
00:41:17 ►
from the policy and the decisions we make to this product that I’m getting on the ground?
00:41:24 ►
And so being a systems expert, what does that mean for us in psychotropics?
00:41:28 ►
Well, I was giving this talk at Loyola a couple weeks ago,
00:41:31 ►
and it was focused on education, how education kind of opened these paths for me.
00:41:36 ►
And that’s what it was.
00:41:37 ►
I couldn’t think about what it was.
00:41:39 ►
And going farther back, it’s not just school education.
00:41:42 ►
It was the words of Zack DeLaRocca in Rage Against the Machine telling me to fuck the system
00:41:47 ►
and figure out who was really telling me, what the teacher was telling me in school,
00:41:51 ►
and the lies that they told us about the history of the whitewashing.
00:41:54 ►
So that kind of formulated a revolutionary seed and a path that was opened up.
00:41:59 ►
When I was listening to you guys, I was saying maybe it’s not really the path.
00:42:06 ►
It’s that there’s doors in front of these paths that we can go to.
00:42:10 ►
And education really is about breaking down the walls we have in ourselves.
00:42:16 ►
And where that came from is I realized I had to start in my master’s degree.
00:42:23 ►
You know, transformational leadership is kind of like the way we’re going in the future.
00:42:27 ►
And so it means we have to be ourselves if we’re going to lead people.
00:42:29 ►
We can’t put up these phony shows anymore.
00:42:32 ►
So I started to dress normal instead of dressing all pretty and proper in my gay speeches.
00:42:37 ►
And one of the reasons I’m not in LEAP anymore is because we have a stigmata about tattooing.
00:42:41 ►
So I started giving all my interviews with tattoos out so I could kind
00:42:46 ►
of break that down. And it’s a convenient excuse, by the way. So I said, well, if that’s
00:42:53 ►
for us and we need to use education to break down our barriers, what the psychedelics do
00:42:59 ►
and have done for me and many of us is provide these keys. But there’s these stigmatas that we allow to exist
00:43:07 ►
in our society that are blocking us. And psychedelics are one of those. So what I’m
00:43:13 ►
trying to just quickly leave you with is the idea that we all talk to everybody and spread our
00:43:20 ►
messages so that we educate and help others break down walls so that they can get those
00:43:27 ►
keys which will open up their pathways. Thank you.
00:43:43 ►
I’m kind of like filled with nervous energy right now.
00:43:46 ►
I’ve never told this story in public before.
00:43:50 ►
But so I’m going to do my best to tell the truth without, you know, hiding out of embarrassment.
00:44:01 ►
And if there’s room for it, I’ll try to tell a serious story in the beginning and a funny story at the end. So the story I’m going to start with is a serious story that
00:44:11 ►
sparked a period of immense change in my life. And this happened a few years ago on January
00:44:18 ►
1st. My friend Charles and I, that’s a made-up name to protect his identity, my friend Charles and I that’s a made up name to protect his identity
00:44:25 ►
my friend Charles and I
00:44:27 ►
decided
00:44:29 ►
that we were going to go on a little
00:44:31 ►
spiritual journey on January 1st
00:44:33 ►
to welcome in the new year
00:44:34 ►
and we were going to take with us
00:44:37 ►
a couple pals
00:44:39 ►
to help us along our spiritual journey
00:44:41 ►
one was psilocybin
00:44:43 ►
via mushrooms
00:44:44 ►
in the form of chocolate,
00:44:46 ►
and the other was DMT stored in a pen that you can keep in your pocket
00:44:52 ►
and smoke on demand.
00:44:54 ►
So for our spiritual journey, we need a spiritual setting,
00:44:58 ►
and we settled on Ojai, California,
00:45:01 ►
because it’s full of hippies and hot springs.
00:45:04 ►
It’s known to be a spiritual destination
00:45:06 ►
and it’s within a couple hours travel of Los Angeles. So we went to Ojai and we had this
00:45:14 ►
vision of hanging out in hot springs as the clock ticked over through midnight, as we peaked on our
00:45:22 ►
mushroom experience, toked up some DMT,
00:45:26 ►
and then blasted off into the universe
00:45:27 ►
to welcome in the new year.
00:45:29 ►
When we arrived in Ojai,
00:45:31 ►
we talked to some locals
00:45:32 ►
and found out that the hot springs
00:45:34 ►
had been fenced up,
00:45:36 ►
were no longer available to the public
00:45:38 ►
because someone had purchased them.
00:45:40 ►
People of Ojai felt that this was unfair,
00:45:43 ►
and I agreed with them.
00:45:44 ►
So we decided that we were just going to go sneak in anyway.
00:45:49 ►
So we asked someone, okay, like, where do we get off the road and start hiking to find this place?
00:45:56 ►
And we roughly pinpointed it.
00:45:58 ►
We said, okay, and then we parked our cars.
00:46:00 ►
And then we’re like, well, let’s eat our chocolates now so that, you know, by the time we
00:46:06 ►
get there, we’ll be coming up. This will work great. We eat our chocolates. We start walking.
00:46:13 ►
We find the place where we’re supposed to exit the road. There’s a barbed wire fence, by the way.
00:46:17 ►
So we cross over the barbed wire fence and we start wandering into the woods towards where we think the hot springs are.
00:46:26 ►
Of course, we get impossibly, indelibly lost
00:46:30 ►
in the dirty woods of Ojai.
00:46:34 ►
And we just have no idea where we are.
00:46:37 ►
And then, bang, we are mushrooms at us.
00:46:39 ►
And now we’re high, and we really just have to give up hope
00:46:42 ►
of ever finding the hot springs,
00:46:44 ►
make a little home for ourselves in the leaves and the spiders and the muck of the Ojai Woods.
00:46:54 ►
And since we’ve settled in for the night, we decide to go ahead and do that D&T we’ve been saving
00:47:02 ►
and make this our blasting off spot.
00:47:07 ►
So we take our hits of DMT and I consider opening up to my friend about some weird dreams I’ve been having.
00:47:17 ►
These dreams have started making me question my sexuality.
00:47:22 ►
They’ve been like homoerotic dreams.
00:47:28 ►
And I’ve never talked to anyone about this.
00:47:33 ►
And it’s not that I’m attracted to my friend or that he’s gay. He’s neither of those things. He’s just someone I can trust. And so in my brain, I’m rehearsing how I might open up to him about these
00:47:40 ►
dreams. And I go back and forth like, come on, just tell him you got to open up to someone
00:47:47 ►
about this. And then it fires back like, no, you’re going to make him uncomfortable and that’ll
00:47:53 ►
destroy this whole experience. And I fought back and forth with my psyche and ultimately I lost.
00:48:00 ►
I couldn’t open up. I decided that I couldn’t open up to my friend about this. And in that moment, after I fully repressed any desire to talk about this, I had a break with reality.
00:48:15 ►
And I entered some kind of weird state where I thought that everything I was experiencing was a dream, but actually it wasn’t. And I was awake. And the
00:48:27 ►
weird thing about the state is that it lasted almost until dawn for hours, far longer than
00:48:33 ►
mushrooms and certainly far longer than DMT, which, you know, you might know lasts very briefly.
00:48:49 ►
Um, and in this state, I saw all kinds of shit, you know, both the real and the unreal.
00:48:51 ►
That’s what made it so tricky.
00:48:53 ►
It was a little bit hard to tell which was which.
00:48:57 ►
Um, I project, I thought he was all kinds of people.
00:49:02 ►
Um, you know, ex, ex lovers, women I had been with.
00:49:04 ►
I thought he was his dog.
00:49:06 ►
I did all kinds of weird shit.
00:49:17 ►
And God bless him. He, you know, you know, put on a great came to many hours later, I heard a reflection from him that it was a really scary experience, not only because he couldn’t guess what I was going to do to him or anyone we ran into, but also because he couldn’t guess what I was going to do to myself.
00:49:42 ►
but also because he couldn’t guess what I was going to do to myself.
00:49:47 ►
Like, because I was so goofy, was I going to jump off a cliff?
00:49:51 ►
He had actually watched me put my hands on the barbed wire as I walked over it and, like, get cuts in my hands
00:49:56 ►
and, you know, act like it was nothing because I didn’t feel any pain.
00:50:02 ►
And when I heard that reflection from him
00:50:05 ►
it helped me commit to doing my work
00:50:10 ►
to embrace all parts of myself
00:50:14 ►
so that I could be a better friend
00:50:18 ►
to the people who cared about me
00:50:21 ►
as well as healing myself
00:50:23 ►
so thank you for listening.
00:50:39 ►
2007, my father died of squamous cell carcinoma,
00:50:42 ►
which is a nasty form of lung cancer.
00:50:45 ►
He withered away in about six months, and when he died, he lost 50 pounds, and there was nothing left on
00:50:49 ►
his skeleton. His funeral was in Huntington, West Virginia, a church filled with about 300 people
00:50:54 ►
who could not say enough nice things about my father as they were following up. What a wonderful
00:50:59 ►
man he was, how much he’d helped them, what good he’d done as a deacon in that church. None of them knew my father was an abusive, controlling, narcissistic asshole who’d made my life hell when I was growing
00:51:11 ►
up. Fucked up my life for over 40 years. Took me a long time to get over it. He was gone. What was
00:51:17 ►
left was my mother, my relationship with her. My mother had aligned herself with my father at
00:51:22 ►
certain times to the extent that we hadn’t spoken for years at a time sometimes.
00:51:26 ►
So my mother and I had this elephant in the room all the time.
00:51:30 ►
This hate-love relationship that I finally figured out was on my shoulders.
00:51:34 ►
So over the course of about three psilocybin trips, I figured out how to get rid of that, that I was the one carrying it, and that I could actually let it go.
00:51:42 ►
So I called her with a one-time offer.
00:51:44 ►
I said, if you say you’re sorry called her with a one-time offer.
00:51:49 ►
I said, if you say you’re sorry right now, I will forgive you forever,
00:51:51 ►
and this will never come up again.
00:51:54 ►
And she said, I’m sorry, and I forgave her.
00:51:55 ►
And that was the end of it.
00:52:00 ►
So three weeks ago, she came up to visit because my other sister was getting married.
00:52:04 ►
And I decided I was going to talk to her about her relationship with my older sister who was getting married, which was really strange.
00:52:06 ►
My sister would not make the move to make up with her.
00:52:09 ►
She was really pissed about what happened with my father.
00:52:11 ►
I decided I could intervene.
00:52:13 ►
So I told her, you can talk to Stephanie right now
00:52:15 ►
and give her the greatest wedding present she’s ever had.
00:52:17 ►
You can tell her you’re sorry for what happened,
00:52:20 ►
that you’re in her life now,
00:52:22 ►
that you’re there for her any time.
00:52:24 ►
All she has to do is pick up the phone that you love her and you’re proud of her. And she decided to do that. She decided to
00:52:30 ►
talk to her. And I felt great about that. And about two hours later, we were in my office. I
00:52:36 ►
work at home and I forgot I had gone to a presentation about ayahuasca. And my mom said,
00:52:41 ►
is that that ayahuasca thing they talk about where people go to the jungle and throw up and see visions?
00:52:46 ►
And I said, yeah.
00:52:48 ►
She said, I’ve always been curious about that, but I’m not going to go to the jungle or sit around for like eight hours seeing visions.
00:52:53 ►
Now, I had some changa.
00:52:55 ►
Now, what changa is, it is DMT infused onto, in this case, capi leaves.
00:53:01 ►
This one had added harmless.
00:53:02 ►
So what I had was basically a smokable form of ayahuasca
00:53:05 ►
that will give you an intense psychedelic
00:53:08 ►
journey for about 10 or 15 minutes.
00:53:10 ►
So I said, are you curious enough
00:53:12 ►
that you want to experience that? It lasts
00:53:13 ►
about 10 minutes? And she said,
00:53:16 ►
yeah, I am.
00:53:19 ►
I said, alright,
00:53:20 ►
well let me know. We can go to my meditation
00:53:22 ►
room and do that. I have something that will help you with that.
00:53:24 ►
And in the meantime, we started talking.
00:53:26 ►
She started unloading about what she’d gone through with my father,
00:53:29 ►
how he’d abused her, how he’d abused her psychologically and physically at times,
00:53:33 ►
and the hell that she’d gone through,
00:53:34 ►
and how she really couldn’t stand her relationship with him,
00:53:36 ►
but couldn’t get away from him.
00:53:38 ►
You know, I was a kid in the 60s,
00:53:39 ►
and you didn’t just leave your husband when you had three little kids to take care of.
00:53:43 ►
And she unloaded all this.
00:53:44 ►
She said, I’ve never told anybody about these things. I felt myself getting closer to her. So a few
00:53:51 ►
hours later, she said, I want to try that thing. So I said, all right, let’s go to my meditation
00:53:55 ►
room. So on planet earth, year 2017, Ado Domini, Woodland Hills, California, in a room filled with
00:54:01 ►
Buddhist and Hindu symbology, psychedelic tapestries, and probably about 150 crystals, I’m handing my 75-year-old mother a bowl with a spirit molecule and a pipe.
00:54:11 ►
I grounded her. We did some meditation. I let her know. I said, if you have any questions for
00:54:15 ►
the medicine, why don’t you ask it now while we’re meditating? She did that. I handed her the pipe.
00:54:21 ►
One hit. You feel it? She said, not really. Another hit. Do you feel it? She said,
00:54:28 ►
I’m starting to feel something. I said, try one more and hold as long as you can. Third hit. I
00:54:34 ►
said, hold as long as you can. She held it about 15 seconds. I was impressed. I said, are you seeing
00:54:39 ►
anything? She said, oh yeah. So I turned up the music. I had Sanatam Kaur. It’s a nice lilting chance going.
00:54:47 ►
I said, you just go ahead and go on that journey. When you’re awake, you can open your eyes and tell
00:54:50 ►
me how you feel. So I saw her moving her head, moving around and like struggling with something.
00:54:57 ►
And after a while she smiled and their shoulders went down. She just sat there and she smiled.
00:55:03 ►
And after about 10 minutes, she opened her eyes and she said, I think he’s gone. I said, who? She said, your father. I said, what do
00:55:13 ►
you mean? She said, he was like a monster face coming at me. And I realized I didn’t
00:55:17 ►
just have a difficult time with him. I hated that motherfucker. I said, so did I. She said, so I just told him, you know what? I used to hate
00:55:28 ►
you, but I don’t have to hate you anymore. I’ve got my own life to live now and you can go away.
00:55:32 ►
She said, and he faded. And then all I saw were swirling colors and flowers. And I felt like I
00:55:36 ►
touched a piece of heaven. And then she started crying and she said, thank you. And she reached
00:55:40 ►
over and she hugged me. I talked to her about three days ago and she said,
00:55:46 ►
I had never felt like this in my entire life.
00:55:48 ►
That was one of the best things that ever happened to me.
00:55:50 ►
I love you and thank you.
00:55:51 ►
And I feel like I really talked to my mother for the first time in about 40 years.
00:55:55 ►
That’s my story.
00:56:02 ►
Thanks again for listening to Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:56:06 ►
Do us a favor.
00:56:07 ►
Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.
00:56:10 ►
Tell your friends.
00:56:11 ►
That’s how you can really help us out.
00:56:15 ►
Thanks to Matt Payne who engineered the sound,
00:56:18 ►
Joey Wipp for the intro music,
00:56:19 ►
California Smile for the outro music,
00:56:21 ►
and Brian Norman who produced the show.