Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. Even though it's only been about eight days since my last
 podcast it seems like it's been a month. Sorry about the delay in getting this
 week's program out to you but I just returned from a trip to the East Coast
 to visit my children and grandchildren and to tell you the truth it's a little
 hard to get back into the swing of things. Particularly when I logged in
 after being offline for a week and found several hundred emails waiting for me.
 But more about that after we hear the rest of the trial log that we began last
 week. As you know I've been podcasting a series of conversations at Terrence
 McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake held at the Esalen Institute
 in 1989 and 1990 and today's program is the second half of a tape from that
 series that was titled "Education in the New World Order" and we'll begin where
 we left off last week when Rupert opened the conversation up to a discussion of a
 school voucher system. So let's rejoin the merry trial loggers and see where
 their discussion leads with a topic that has caused a lot of controversy here in
 the States in the last ten years or so. And I'll pick up by playing a couple of
 minutes from the end of the previous podcast with Ralph Abraham speaking.
 I think that some people have suggested actually that the public school system
 be replaced with a voucher system. That's an active proposal at the moment.
 This is a Thatcherite idea too. The point is this voucher system is part of the
 current political orthodoxy so it's very easy to see how it might be realized in
 a new form. Yeah, well that's I think some a question we have to face is the
 besides the envision of the final product also some idea as to the path
 that goes from here point A to their point B and it's hard to see how to get
 rid of this entrenched public school system. It would have to be, as we're
 talking about politics here, there would have to be a plebiscite. The voters
 insist on the opportunity to control the school system and that they want a
 voucher system. You simply privatize it and you privatize the education. You have
 a voucher system, valid at any school, on an approved list which is
 constituted by a new kind of educational board, not the old one. And the approved
 list includes Waldorf schools, you know Montessori schools, and it would include
 Catholic schools, Islamic schools. I mean there'd be a whole range of accredited
 schools including former public schools which would now become sort of
 autonomous town schools or something. They'd compete in the open market and
 and this system would be extremely, it'd be pluralistic, it would be extremely
 responsive to what people actually want and what parents and students are really
 interested in. And it would have the advantage of being very decentralized
 and self-regulating. School as a business? Yes. That you're proposing. Well right now
 school is a business, it's a professional career. The only thing is that it's
 administered by money taken from us through taxes and administered through a
 centralized bureaucracy for a bureaucratic organization. Now school as a
 business, both ways we're paying for it and it's not coming free either way.
 But the way that you can deal with this is the voucher system are issued by the
 government to each student by the Ministry of Education. When you're 18 you
 get a book of vouchers. Probably medical schools and attorneys and so on would
 continue more or less as at present. And they would have entrance requirements
 that so many B courses for biology or S courses for science or something like that.
 But I think that the, you see the voucher system, the workshop mode like that you
 see the other side of this is the reform of the existing professions. Because if
 you have a group of astronomers for example, re-visioning astronomy, you know
 workshop weekend led by some astronomer plus maybe Terence or you or somebody
 or me, you know an outside person also to be part of the workshop, maybe George
 Leedon-Sanchanti. And then you go into what's their original vision in astronomy,
 what is it that's interesting most, what could astronomy be again today. Well one
 thing it could be is we can helping to reconnect people to heaven, designing
 these hinges that we were talking about, setting these things where you know
 where Jupiter and things are. So that this goes into every school and so that
 children actually learn about the heavens. This would be, you know, then
 there'd be things where people who are learning astronomy go out at night, have
 classes at night under the stars and learn the constellations and have tests and how
 well we know them. So astronomy related once more to the actual heavens. That
 would be the new vision in astronomy, which would, the direct experience
 including maybe communicating with stars and start the subject of stars,
 though together with all the stuff on radio passing nebulae and quasars and
 stuff. So and in each science Gaia, geology, the new geology, would not only
 involve studying rocks and knowing about them, but studying them in the context of
 the census, the life of Gaia, a Gaian geology. It would be in a Gaian
 perspective and which would begin and end with right rituals that connect the
 geological profession to its patroness, Mother Earth. Well as the bond issue
 with the planet site are put on the ballot and passed, the students are
 issued their booklets of 55 vouchers and the new structure is put in place and
 simply begins. There still may remain a terrific lack of teachers who would wish
 to or be able to offer such courses. The ignorance of the meaning of the
 ancient sites and the significance of the stars and so on can't be overcome in
 a day. So chances are in the new form people would continue teaching exactly
 what they teach today and that the workshop of astronomers to revision
 astronomy and so on would not have a very quick feedback or maybe any
 feedback into the curriculum or the actual conduct of the school. So that
 while they envisioned a new astronomical profession that the workshops, you know,
 the workshop centers kept on teaching the old one. Somehow there would
 have to be a miracle to get the whole system on to a new track. Wouldn't it happen overnight?
 The re-sacralization aspect that we are mostly longing for could never happen,
 might never happen. We need to trigger it. Well I think that it would
 have to happen in this new model. You wouldn't just get a booklet of vouchers
 through the post. To start your path you'd now be entering the
 stage of a kind of apprenticeship or learning. There'd be an initiation
 ceremony and you could be initiated in any one of a number of ways through a
 Christian, Jewish, Muslim. Each religion could run or if you didn't want to have
 any of the ones offered by the various religions. The New World religion would
 always be a possibility. There'd be a chance for free
 enterprise in this area, sort of New Age initiation, the vague stuff about
 crystals. Green feminists. Yes, that kind of thing. There'd be all sorts of...
 But you'd have to go through one of these initiations which would be based
 on initiating you on the path you're going on and calling in blessings on
 your journey and that kind of thing. Then you get your booklet of vouchers as part of
 the ceremony. And this happens at one of the sacred place of your choice. I mean you're not
 forced to go through any one tradition. So setting up that particular system of
 initiation rites would be the key step for switching the whole system onto a
 new path. You'd have to sort of engineer that. That would be fairly easy though
 because you'd say the importance of initiation for the psychology of
 children is of vast importance is now universally recognized and you can make
 a strong case for that. Therefore our educational system needs to have a more
 initiatory quality. We are a secular state. We're talking about the 27 million young Americans who are of
 the age for this first initiation this coming fall. And how exactly are we going
 to accommodate this number of people in a new system with the production of
 three to five thousand new teachers? Well I'm not thinking... you're thinking about a
 model of overnight change of the entire American system. I'm thinking of a
 pioneering experiment in the limited area. That slowly grows if it deserves to.
 The thing is the way that things happen organically in society, you never
 convert a system without some prior model of it working. And whenever you try
 and get any money and you persuade anyone, if you can say look this is I've
 got it going, here it is, you can come and see it, you know, it's vastly more
 sophisticated and Shaw Churns does a lot better by being able to say look here are the
 plants, this is the botanic garden, that's it. Rather than with a bit of paper saying
 that this project and you know I think we ought to do something concrete. And so if the
 workshop system is already up and running as a concrete alternative to the
 present age, that's its great advantage. It exists. It exists in a pluralistic
 free-market form which is self-sustaining so far without state subsidy.
 Yes. That people do because they want to do them and they want to do them because
 they know that in the workshop they'll on balance come out feeling better than
 when they went in. So it's not much growing now but perhaps if people did
 have vouchers then it would suddenly start a rapid expansion. I think it would be...
 I think it would be a completely new format because at present no one aged 18
 goes to the workshop. It's a system of education entirely for the middle-aged.
 It's made no... One-diometric. Yes, no, he's on to something. It's made no contact. How could you possibly
 attract an 18 year old to a workshop? What would be necessary? You have to talk
 about psychedelic drugs, I guess. Not quite 18 but 20, 25. I think if we did
 dialogues on morphic resonance and chaos and psychedelics, it'd try a lot. I think
 there are a lot of... Younger crowd. Yes, if right now they had to pay $385.
 They don't have the money. They don't have the vouchers. The problem with the
 workshop system, because it's self-financing, it's expensive. What about
 Esalen giving, what do you call them, scholarships for young people?
 That would be... Yes, well that would be all right but I think it would be a
 kind of token, a token thing at Esalen. I think that they maybe have to have some
 young people's workshops here. That would be at two or three a year where they're
 offered at a much reduced price. Yeah. And that the people who come on them have to
 be recommended by somebody who's been to Esalen, something like that. So it would
 create the sense of the Esalen community. Oh, we'd have to reshape the system.
 Because we're really lacking that generation now. It's a serious problem. You know,
 the Lindisfarne Fellowship, which is just one of these many
 invisible colleges existing around the globe, I think they're valuable. It's now
 proposing to dissolve itself on its 20th birthday because there is no coming
 generation. People are dying of old age and nobody knows a young person to
 introduce into the circle. So this is a tremendous hole in our bucket. Exactly.
 Well, this is exactly where there's a tremendous scope for the initiatory
 model. You see, the Esalen, coming to Esalen is a kind of initiation for most people.
 Whenever you come here for the first time it has an initiatory quality and
 most people are the initiates who have an easy familiarity with things like
 hot tubs and getting to know people at large. Web powers. Yes, and that kind of thing. So if you create, there's one
 group of initiates. The initiative, the teenage workshops, the 18 to 20 year old
 workshops that happen at Esalen, which are initiations into kind of gestalt and
 the kind of things that happen here and you talking about the empty and so on.
 To get there you have to be recommended by someone who's been here and
 therefore there's a much greater sense of initiation into this world. The fact
 is a lot of teenagers may not know that this world exists or if they do have a
 totally distorted view, but it is an independent autonomous adult world and
 that's exactly what people want to be initiated into. So the sense of a kind
 of somewhat more mysterious realm of possibility that you don't know about. This is a real
 thing. There is a whole world that most people don't know about. That's a great idea. We should end this
 trilogue and run out immediately and grab Steve and Nancy and tell them all the Esalen
 youth program. But you see things like in schools, like the initiatory things you
 could do here, like I did on my rebirth of nature weekend. One of the things
 everyone did was the tree ceremony, where you go out to the tree and you ask
 the tree four questions. North, south, east, west, side. The tree oracle.
 Well, Jill does this in her workshops and I found that within three hours of
 talking about in this kind of context, you know, the reasons for thinking the
 old world view was inadequate, the problems of mechanistic worldview,
 it's a temporary nature in relation to resurgent animism, the rising tide of
 new attitudes, etc. The temporary nature of mechanistic predominance.
 Then, you know, everybody is happy to go and hold the tree and ask it questions and
 sit down by it. This tree oracle is very effective, it really works. Now that can be
 done and is being done with kids, because the Ojai Foundation has now started
 workshops for school teachers to teach them about the kinds of things you can do,
 you know, chants, fire cycles, you know, vision quests, tree ceremonies.
 No, they're now doing this with various schools and including bringing them
 onto the land and doing ceremonies with them there. From Holland, there's 15 schools now.
 So they've actually already got something going along these lines. And so you see
 this initiatory quality, so that if you're doing botany, then you learn to
 about tree oracles. Part of it, you know, you have at the beginning of your course
 a tree oracle quest at the beginning of each term. And you have vision quests of
 various kinds built through the system. So I think that the Esselin and places
 which could be centers for these quests, these initiatory journeys, could
 fulfill them immediately. And I think the age range they should be doing the
 initiation is not the key one from 12 to 13. I think that's best done through
 modified summer camps, specially designed. But this could be the initiation into
 adulthood at 18 or 21. So these 55 workshops, they would begin it with
 adulthood. Is that your idea? That the entire elementary and junior and what we
 call high school, that all that would remain as it is? Well, I think that
 the model of having, trying it out with the initiation at 18 into
 adulthood, all applicants must be 18 or over. And you know, this
 would be a pioneering thing that we could talk to Steve about. It could
 happen in six months' time right here. Now the other thing we're talking
 about is to change the initiations through summer camps, since none of us
 are in elementary or primary or middle school education. But if you are in
 that, it's quite easy to do. The people who we were studying, Master Andreas,
 their sons are at a very open school. And I said, you know, why not get...
 He did the tree ceremony here. He really liked it. You know, why not choose to teach
 that? Why not do it there in the school? They do a vision request in a tree ceremony.
 They'll do it. So the 55 vouchers and the workshops, how long are they?
 Are these weekend workshops, week-long workshop, or five-week, week-long mini-courses?
 Well, I mean, these are all details that one would work out. But
 obviously there'd need to be a whole new breed of workshop-type leaders. So the
 other thing is that Esalen, Hollyhock, Omega and some take on a new role as
 they'd have workshops for workshop leaders, where you'd actually train people
 how to do workshops. You'd initiate them into being workshop leaders, and where
 better to initiate them than in a workshop here? So you'd have these...
 And then, instead of these so many thousand people come to Esalen, if a few
 hundred of those that came to Esalen every year were initiated into being
 workshop leaders, and they were each doing workshops, this system could very rapidly
 propagate. Yeah, very rapidly. In a self-initiating, self-propagating mode.
 And there'd have to be some attention given to the initiatory structure of
 each type of workshop. To start with a dedication or an acknowledgment of the
 spirit of the place and the powers in the light of which the
 workshop is being done. If it's being done in the light of a spirit or a reason or
 emotion or of holism or integration or whatever. I mean, whatever...
 What's the guiding principle? An initial ceremony and a closing ceremony and some
 kind of opening dedication, chant or... I mean, this is a pattern of most workshops
 anyway. And so, initiating people into workshop leading would very easily,
 very naturally be modified, I think. And I don't think even one would have to write
 the program for it. I think that people have worked it out themselves in the
 workshops for that. So how standards would be maintained for workshops, at least at
 the most famous workshop centers? Yes. There would be some monitoring. It wouldn't be only the
 popularity of a certain workshop which guaranteed its continued existence. You
 would have to, for example, we wouldn't want to continue some workshop that only
 taught that the body is the body. Well, presumably the feedback, the automatic
 free market feedback mechanisms would regulate this because if somebody... No,
 because corruption is a known mechanism for the downward spiral of society. And
 worse and worse workshops become more and more popular because they give the
 valuation, the value, the accreditation to keep on the initiation without your
 actually doing anything other than sitting in the hot bath and repeating
 three times the event is the event and the body is the body. Well, what you're
 implying is what you sought to avoid, which is that there has to be a second
 entity which tests the workshop graduate to see whether... I want to avoid that. Well, it
 could be intrinsic and that industries would not employ somebody just from
 having graduated, that is to say, spent 55 vouchers. They would insist on the
 courses from some of their favorite teachers or institutions as obviously a
 bachelor's degree from Stanford is worth more than a bachelor's degree from Great
 West. Well, a corporation could post a list of courses that would enhance your
 likelihood of being hired by them and then you could choose for yourself
 whether or not to include those as you formed your curriculum. So this is the
 self-organizational model. Yes, I think it's quite good. I think it sounds doable.
 Very, very quality of most of these schemes. Well, we'd have to persuade, I mean,
 industries would have to suddenly start opening their doors to graduates of the
 new system and this of course was a great inhibition for students choosing
 UC Santa Cruz, although they did, because it was considered a great experiment in
 its early days 20 years ago. Well, you would have to go to people like Lawrence
 Rockefeller and Andrew Mellon and people like that to get a group of corporations
 to commit to accepting and hiring on the alternative. Yes, who are the great
 railroad magnates of today would not yet endow the university. Well, you could go
 to Apple Computer and look at them. Or you could go to some of these hip
 haberdasheries, or Freeze and so forth. So listen, these are big corporations. Well, you could
 start it actually with just a system, a voluntary system right now. You could
 offer these scholarships where you have to be recommended by an alumnus of one
 of the existing, you know, Omega, Epsilon or something, and you get these
 scholarships for, say, five workshop lectures down in over a six-month period
 or something, and with a beginning ceremony and an ending ceremony for the
 whole thing as this kind of initiation into adult. This could be started right
 away and, you know, they could do them in their vacations or in their summer
 vacation, you know, it could fit in even with a standard student life pattern.
 But there'd be then this category of people who had a different kind of
 initiation, and each of them, when they went back to their college or university,
 people would be curious about what they'd done, and whatever it is they'd done, whatever
 they said they did, would be quite intriguing to a lot of people. So the New
 World System would actually begin with its educational program, and the New
 World System educational program would have to have a pilot project, which I
 guess would be the New Village, the New Village School System. The Hawaiian Island.
 And then, so we would have to seek a way to actually begin this pilot project
 with, I guess it would take one leader, one workshop leader, one ritualist who
 would make the arrangements for this first initiation, the class of '92, I guess.
 And then there would be a few people coming of age, maybe children of people
 we know or something, who would enthusiastically volunteer to be the
 first, you know, entrance of the class of '92. And then if successful in design,
 this attractor would then grow. Where we have to begin, probably it would be here
 at Esalen, because we're here dreaming this up for some reason. Yes, I think it
 would be called the, what would it be called, the personal, the growth... No, no,
 something like, there'd have to be some kind of certificate you get from this
 this five workshop course, and beginning and end things through places like
 Esalen. Initiative education. Initiative education, or initiative educational...
 Initiative initiative... initiate. You'd be an initiative initiate, and an II for short.
 And this, when you're applying for a job with the New York Times or, you know,
 Bank or something like that, you'd have your degrees and you'd say I'm also
 initiative initiate. And they'd get to know that people who've done this kind of
 thing, if indeed it did do them any good, were much cooler, much better, much more
 together, much more aware of group dynamics, you know... Like Kelly girls.
 And so this would then become something that would be highly attractive to a lot of
 employers. It would be detractive to others of the more conventional kind, but
 the kind of people who've been through this course wouldn't want those jobs
 anyway. It may be possible... Yes, all the corporate people who've passed through a place like Esalen would feel a subtle
 pressure to convert their hiring practices to recognize... And to send their
 children. And to send their children and to hire these kinds of people into their organization. And the feeling of a kind of a real
 kind of group or... because there is this initiatory quality, a feeling
 far actually more effective than the usual bonds from college
 alumnus graduation festivals. I mean it's much more true. Some colleges could be
 persuaded to offer transfer credit for a set of five workshops in this program.
 Yes. So they would... five workshops would count as one course. It adds up about
 right. And it'd be like an extension course or transfer of credit from a
 course taken in another university. That's right. And that would mean that students from the more
 liberal-minded, experimental liberal arts colleges, that kind of thing, could give students these batches.
 Yes, they could turn it into a course of five weeks in the summer. Yes. They could take workshops in five
 different workshops. Omega, Hollyhock, Esalen. And get a college credit for it. Yes. I think you should be made Minister of Education.
 Of the New World Order. The NWO. Yes, well it's a devious way of achieving the
 re-sacralization of the world. Assuming always, of course, that corruption doesn't
 somehow annihilate the system as soon as it started. But I think centering it in a
 place like this, which has inertia, a track record, a good habit, as it were,
 would give a good chance for success. I think so. I think a lot of... I mean if I
 had the chance of spending a weekend hanging around with my tinkly teenage
 friends at home, or coming to Esalen and doing something that was a threshold, an entirely new...
 Meeting some teenagers from far away. Right!
 I went to a summer camp. Of both sexes. Yeah. From age nine to thirteen or something, I went to a summer camp for musical
 prodigies. And no one went there unless they were interested in music. And
 anybody who was really interested in music went to this particular camp. It was
 a great escape from a small town in Vermont, because I went there, there were
 a lot of kids from Philadelphia and New York and Miami and so on. And they were very
 exciting. And mostly we played music together. But such things, specialized
 camps to learn ballet, you know, sports and so on, they exist. And some of them have
 track records. They have terrific reputation compared to other ones for
 the quality of the faculty, also the quality of the students. And such a summer...
 particularly the summer youth program at Esalen would give it a huge additional
 scope. And training workshop leaders would give them a bigger choice of
 workshop leaders in the future. So then they would be creating expansion of
 their own system. As they don't do now. They have to hand down serendipity to find new
 workshop leaders. And as the popularity of workshop-type education grew in
 schools, as people in 16, 17, 18 got into an age group where some of their friends
 had been on workshops and had come back, obviously changed in some way, and
 talking about this thing, a kind of secret to which they were not yet privy,
 the only way they could have this experience of scale among these workshops
 and be part of it, actually, they'd really want to do it. And a huge new market would
 open up in the sort of high school age. Yes. We have to get this tape to Steve
 immediately. With our bill. Well, they may not want to expand Esalen, but if Esalen
 wanted to expand as a business and take on a whole national dimension...
 Well, they're very interested in all these strategies and because it's a revolutionary
 educational concept, it's not simply a strategy for expanding revenue. It's
 actually a seminal kind of thing. It took hold and it seems very sound because the
 old method is breaking down. There is either some substitute off in the future
 or we're just looking at a generation in anarchy, largely, in American education.
 Well, this does seem immediately feasible. This really could swing into action next
 year, next summer. And it could attract capital, you know, endowments from people
 who see the value of extending our successful adult educational system
 downward. And nobody seems to have thought of this. There aren't any summer
 camps along these lines. There are traditional summer camps which are
 excellent for everything, for tennis, for organists and so on, but not for the new
 world order. But most of what goes on here could be extended down. It's only
 shamanic rattling, chants before sessions and groups, vision quests, shamanic type,
 all this stuff is instantly adaptable. In fact, it probably appears. Chanting,
 chilled out... So the Ojai Foundation has apparently had a similar fantasy as they
 declared two or three years ago that they were going into general education. I
 think that this is something that they're doing and I heard about this
 when we were at Hollyhock, but I didn't... I've never seen it in action, somebody
 talked about it. John Bloomfield talked about it. About a Vachi system? No, about Ojai training school
 teachers, who then... and then the teachers can bring some of the groups to the
 land and they do vision quests, they do tree ceremonies, they do medicine wheel
 circles, sweat lodges, all this kind of thing. And I suppose there are private
 schools that are participating, but the kids love it. It's an incredibly successful
 program. Formerly they had to go to Berlin to be able to do this, but now they
 can do this right here in the Native American heartland. So I think that
 there's plenty of scope for starting straight away. Yes, and for competing
 in systems and different versions, varieties, different flavors of the idea
 could be instituted in different locations, because there's an infinite
 market, essentially, for related issues. As soon as... and right now people under 25 are
 totally insulated from this. When I give talks in Germany and England, here in
 America, in the kinds of places I'm usually invited to give them, or conferences,
 the age range is from 35 to 50. Exactly. When I'm invited to give talks in
 universities, which in many ways I prefer, not because I like the structure, you
 know, there's the kind of hierarchical structure, the professor, the lecture
 theater, and all that kind of thing, but the face is full of bright, eager eyes.
 Yes. 18, 17, 19, 20. It's a totally different experience, and when I gave my lecture at
 the University of Bern on my German-Swiss tour, the only university one I did on the
 trip, it was much the best. There were 250 people in the Botany Institute.
 I was introduced by the man who invited me, who's a visionary, holistic botanist
 who really likes the idea of morphic resonance and understanding the
 evolution of plant form. Quite enthusiastic. But all the
 professors from different faculties, students, and so on, the whole thing in
 English, no translation. And the atmosphere was absolutely electric. I mean, these kids
 have never heard this kind of view. I mean, it was totally new. They're
 normally insulated completely from ideas we take for granted. And they were
 extremely interested, very excited. Everyone was excited, positive, enthusiastic.
 It was a really wonderful event. Well, my courses in history of mathematics in
 Santa Cruz have a very enthusiastic audience. And my feeling is that
 this is sort of the radical fringe of the student population in Santa Cruz. So
 there's 10,000 students. I get 50, 60, or 70 of them once a year. But these people
 are very responsive, and they love the Hermetic arts, magic, astrology, alchemy,
 and so on. They're seriously excited. They're really turned on by it. And they
 do great research and study. And they know a lot already because they've
 been studying in the closet. And this is their first opportunity to come out and
 see that other people are also interested in this, and connect up, and
 have fun, and be able to do it together. So what we do is introduce this
 parallel system which operates alongside the existing system. But it becomes so
 powerful and attractive as it impacts on schools as six, seventeen, eighteen year
 olds go to the Esalen and other summer programs. And they go back and tell their
 friends, you know, school is nothing like this. It's really fun. I think
 this is really our best and most revolutionary idea. Everyone will want to do it. I think it's a good
 idea. And it'll spread enormously fast, I think, if it becomes something that
 slightly older people do that somehow could be done. See the possibility of the CIA
 instituting some negative publicity action on us, such as older teacher,
 younger student taking drugs, commuting with tree, or some kind of thing. They're very paranoid about this kind of negative publicity here ruining. And for this
 reason they may not want anybody aged 16 or less hanging around because of the
 age of scandal. Make it 18 to 23 for a start. I think make it 18 to 23 for a start.
 And then the parallel for the sort of 11 to 13, this kind of puberty
 initiation, the parallel which is often associated with transferring to a
 different grade of school, being in a middle school or whatever. That
 whole thing is ceremonialized, or at least puberty rights through vision camps. But
 the people who best handle that are the people who run kids' summer camps,
 many of which do have another dimension and get back to nature. Yes, and they
 have their watchdog mechanisms in place. And they have campfires and so on. I mean
 better to... people from that world come to a workshop at Esalen where
 there's an exploration of new revisioning education. And the two are
 discussed together and they go back and work out models that work there.
 Meanwhile this new one works out here. We can handle... the people at
 Esalen can handle in general, this age group. I think that's 18 to 23. Yes.
 We'll start by the revision of higher education as they call it, 18 to 23.
 That's the university age bracket. And this would create such a powerful
 competing attractor, because the more people know that it's more fun than that
 system, and the more the possibility of doing it through or within the
 traditional system by vouchers or going out and getting credits, the more and
 more people want to do it. Yes. And I think that it would then... the traditional
 system's faults have become more and more apparent, because more and more people
 within it would have seen... had another take on what education could be like.
 Yeah. And I think that morale would rapidly crumble and be replaced with...
 since they'd already got it, by reform they could introduce more of that kind of
 thing. Teachers would be rushing to take courses in the new method. Yes, the new
 methods. So that they could compete successfully with their neighboring
 teachers for students. Who wants to have an empty home room? That's right. No, this
 is free market economics, working in yet another area. Yes. Because right now
 education is one of the areas that's been insulated from free market economics
 by being a state monopoly run by a bureaucratic institution and operated by
 an old-style hierarchical priesthood, with higher universities at the top and
 higher degrees at the top, and all teachers in regular schools in awe of
 all these people with higher degrees, because they're lower officiated, you know, they're
 like deacons. You know, there are bishops out there, archbishops, cardinals, and so on.
 So it would dismantle... it's one of the last bastions of the old
 hierarchical order. Now I may be living in dreamland, but I think the ideas they
 talked about at the beginning of today's trialogue about setting up a network of
 workshops that young people could attend for free is a really good idea. In fact,
 just last year Sobe and I were trying to generate interest in a similar project
 where there would be a series of raves held beginning in, say, in Vancouver and
 gradually heading south until they reached LA or San Diego. And
 preceding each party there'd be a series of workshops where we'd get some of the
 local elders to come out and exchange ideas and lessons learned with the
 generations who are now beginning to take over. But we never quite got enough
 momentum going to get that little project off the ground. However, I still
 think it's a good idea in some form or other. I know there are really a lot of
 psychedelic elders out there in almost every community who would be willing to
 participate, and in fact there are already a few places where this type of
 underground university is taking place. Besides the Oracle gatherings in
 the Seattle area, I've heard of events like this that combine a party with some
 lectures or workshops that are taking place in all the way from Vancouver down
 to Portland. And I've participated in things like Cinnamon Twists learning
 parties in LA as well as the underground university programs at the Blue Bongo,
 among others. So it's an idea that seems to have taken hold and maybe now is a
 good time to try and expand the concept so that we can reach even more people.
 You know, maybe we can do some of it online, which would significantly
 reduce the costs involved and allow students and other cash poor people like
 me to become more involved without having to incur the travel and other
 expenses that usually go along with the workshop model. Of course the suggestions
 for a new education system based on workshops that the trial augers made
 came over 15 years ago, and you know not a whole lot has really happened on this
 front during all that time, at least in the way of free ones. And as my dear
 mother said shortly before she died a few years ago, "Everything is different,
 but nothing has changed." Well maybe now is the hour to begin making some of
 these changes. So if you have any ideas on how to get something like this
 started, please pass them along either in an email that I can read in a podcast or
 on the notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which you can participate in if you
 want. You know I had to laugh when Rupert said that a lot of teenagers may
 not even know, or it might have been Ralph, I can't remember which one, said a lot of them
 may not even know that the worldwide psychedelic community even existed, or if
 they did know it that they had a totally distorted view of it. And the reason I
 had to laugh is that it isn't just teenagers who don't know about this huge
 community. As I've mentioned in past podcasts, I was over 40 years old before
 I stumbled into the tribe as I like to call it. Now as hard as it is for me to
 believe now, I had no idea that there were millions of highly educated and
 very successful psychedelic people out there. And even if I had known that there
 were so many people around the world who used cannabis and the psychedelics on a
 regular basis, I'm sure that my view of what they were like would have been
 completely distorted. You know here is what you really need to know about the
 psychedelic community. We're everywhere. I want to read something here that Dr.
 German, he's a professor emeritus of the Criminal Justice School at
 Long Beach State University, and here's what he had to say. "If the ears of all
 the people in the nation who had ingested illicit substances in the past
 six months were to turn bright green for one whole week, the nation would be
 amazed, confused, astounded, and quickly taught something very important as they
 identified friends, relatives, neighbors, doctors, lawyers, accountants, priests,
 nuns, ministers, rabbis, soldiers, policemen, firemen, military personnel,
 businessmen, teachers, students, politicians, respected policymakers,
 administrators, supervisors, and workers from a variety of private and government
 institutions everywhere." And by the way, Dr. German was the founder of the
 graduate school that trains many of the LA Police Department, among others, so he
 knows what's going on at a street level, and having met with him myself, my guess
 is that he just might have green ears too. So maybe that's what we should all
 do next Halloween, you know, our only costume should be to paint our ears
 green. I'm not sure what we would tell people who asked what the point of
 painting our ears green was, but for those who knew what it meant, it might be
 a way to make a whole new range of contacts with our community. Maybe we
 should try it first in St. Patrick's Day, and most people probably wouldn't think
 much about why we were doing it. Or maybe I'd better get on with today's
 program and leave the realm of new ideas to you. Actually, one idea that came in a
 recent email from John, who said, among other things, "listening to your back
 catalog kept me going through a dull software contract and has really changed
 my views about a lot of things." And then he went on to ask if I've ever been to
 Amsterdam. Well, John, just as you suspected, yeah, I've been there a few
 times, and I guess my most memorable trip there was for the 11th Annual Cannabis
 Cup, which I think was way back in 1998. And I know that event is still growing
 strong, but it doesn't take place until next November. So if you're looking to
 get together in Amsterdam with a group of like-minded people before then, you
 might want to consider the very first Dope Stock, which is going to take place,
 I think, on April 20th this year that my friends over at the Cannabis Podcast
 Network are putting together. And you get the details about that on their website,
 which is at www.dopefiend.co.uk. And there are links and feeds to several
 other podcasts there that I think you're going to find quite interesting and
 definitely entertaining. John also said, "have you thought about accepting
 donations for your work? This is how the dope fiend pays for his bandwidth seems
 to work." Well, yes, I have been thinking about it, but you know, I know you've got
 a lot of options on how to spend your time, and so I don't really want to waste
 it by sounding like a preacher begging for money all the time. But that said, I
 do want to take a moment here to thank two of our fellow salonners who went way
 out of their way and searched through the Matrix Masters website to find the
 page where I'd kind of hidden a little PayPal donation button. So Jason and
 William, who I think actually is better known as Bill, I want you to know that I
 was really touched to find your donations waiting for me when I returned
 from my recent trip. Your generosity really means a lot to me, and
 particularly since you both live outside of the U.S. You know, interestingly, your
 financial help came the same day as I received a notice from my web hosting
 company that the large number of downloads of these podcasts was causing
 them to throttle back access to the site at various times during the day, and that
 they wanted me to upgrade to my own server. Well, the cost of doing that is
 still too high for me right now, so I've come up with another plan, and thanks to
 the financial help some of you have been providing, I've opened a companion site
 with another hosting company, and they've promised to work with us as these
 podcasts continue to grow in popularity. In fact, this podcast is the first one
 I've uploaded to this new server, and I hope that you didn't have any issues
 downloading it. If you did, please let me know, because over the next few months
 I'm going to migrate all of the old podcast files to this new server. In the
 process, I'm going to do a little cleanup on the file tags so that these programs
 will be a little easier to find and to manage in your mp3 players. Now, as those
 of you who have been with us for a while already know, I've gone through a number
 of different iterations and file naming conventions, but I think I've finally
 come up with a way that'll make life a little easier for you, no matter what
 brand of mp3 player you decide to use. So I'll tell you more about the changes to
 our website in the next couple of podcasts, but I think I've probably gone
 on long enough for today. But before I go, I also want to mention that Jeffrey just
 wrote to let me know that he mentioned the Psychedelic Salon in his blog on the
 IONS website, which reminded me that I wanted to let you know that I'm also
 shifting the program notes to our new server, and I'm posting them on the
 WordPress-powered blog that you can participate in if you want. And by
 participate, I don't mean just adding comments to my posts, but you can post
 items yourself. It does require that you register, but that's only to keep the
 spammers from taking it over. So if you're interested, you can find the blog
 from a link on the home page at matrixmasters.com, and eventually you'll
 be able to click a link under each post to dig it if you want. And I've already
 got the code working for you to bookmark individual posts to "delicious." Also, I've
 got a long way to go before the new site is finished, but with the help from
 Joseph, Robert, and a few others who have volunteered to help, I think we're
 eventually going to have a really interesting place to meet online. Which
 finally brings me to the last point I wanted to make, and that is that if you
 want to help us build the Psychedelic Salon community, there are things that
 you can do that don't require making a financial donation, which I realize isn't
 possible for many of you. And what would be the biggest help right now would be
 for some of you to go back through some of the older programs, the ones before
 program number 58, when I started posting the more detailed program notes, and to
 compile some program notes for them that I could put on the new blog. You know, I
 think it'd be a great service to our whole community if you did that. And all
 I'm really looking for is to get the time into the program, and then the quote,
 and who's saying it, and it's just in the format I've been doing here lately. And I
 think it's really important to get some of these out there, because the
 search engines will pick them up, and it'll definitely help attract more
 people to the Psychedelic Salon. So any help like that, in any other ways you can
 help to spread the word about these podcasts, will be most appreciated. Well
 before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the
 Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution
 Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license. And if you have any questions about that,
 you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which
 you can find at www.matrixmasters.com/podcasts. If you still have
 questions, you can send them to me at lorenzo@matrixmasters.com. And thanks
 again to Ralph Abraham and Bruce Dahmer for preserving and digitizing these
 wonderful trilogues. And of course, thanks again to Shetld Huyghe for letting us
 use your music here in the salon. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
 Psyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.
 [Music]
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