Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon. So what's my excuse this week you ask for being late at getting this podcast out? Well in the Navy I learned that the only proper answer to a question like that is no excuse sir. Now I'd like to be able to tell you that I've got chronic fatigue syndrome or something like that. Although you astrologers out there might also be interested in knowing that for the next year or so Saturn will continue conjuncting my natal Sun in the 12th house. And if you know what that means you know that I'm in for a long haul of the blaws. However my guess is that I'm just overly tired from staying up late and talking for several days in a row. And from that perspective it's it's been a good week around the old psychedelic salon. On Sunday our musician artist friend Jarrett stopped by and so I called Matt Palomari who's also a friend of his and Matt came over for what turned out to be a long day and night of interesting conversation. And that vibe just continued on Monday and Tuesday when Charlie Grobe spent some time here during appearances at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association where he and Francisco Moreno and one of the doctors involved in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin study gave a presentation about their collective work using psilocybin, one of the active ingredients in magic mushrooms, in their research in new treatment methods for various illnesses. I think it's interesting that a mainstream group like the American Psychiatric Association would put a topic like that on their agenda. Maybe the evidence of the effectiveness of psychedelic medicines is becoming so obvious that even the mainstream now has to take notice. Charlie is going to send me a copy of their presentation and if it has some new information that we haven't already heard in a podcast well then I'll pass it along to you. But right now I don't know much about what was said because Charlie and I had all kinds of other things to talk about and then Mateo came back by to see Charlie and it turned into another late night. While I didn't turn on my recorder and record any of our conversations I did arrange with Charlie to do a couple of interviews in the next few weeks and I'll do my best to make that happen. But right now I'd better get back to today's program which is the continuation of a trial log that was recorded on June 8th 1998 in Santa Cruz California where Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham and Terrence McKenna were talking about Rupert's hypothesis about morphogenic family fields. When we left off last week Terrence McKenna was just saying that he thought perhaps the concept of a family field was only a metaphor and not an actual energy field. So we'll pick up where Terrence had just floated that idea and see where they take it. It's a conceptual metaphor. The field? Yes, it doesn't have any dynamics of its own. But maybe a few other models you make would have the dynamics. Yes, there's nothing there to measure, there's nothing there to interfere with. This is a way of describing a situation. Or modeling it. Yes. Like a magnetic field is a way of modeling magnetic fields. Field in this sense means an extended wavy thing that an object would have like a sphere of it around it or something. But I'm not sure when you originally started speaking about morphic fields and so on were you thinking of something like the magnetic field or were you thinking of more abstractly as Hellinger uses it in the context of the family field? Well I was thinking of something more abstractly but I think that these fields have a kind of ontological reality comparable to that of electromagnetic fields. I always thought of it more as the electromagnetic field kind of that kind of field. When I first read your works many years ago. The primary metaphors the magnetic field I mean that's what gives you a sense of the field. Yes. But if you look at the kind of physics that would be most appropriate for describing these fields it's not electromagnetism it's quantum field theory. Oh it's not that either it's the gravitational field. Does the field concept mean an extended thing that's represented by a continuous real number variable defined on a coordinate system? Well no I had a discussion with David Peat and Basil Hiley recently in London. We had a whole day discussing this question. Hiley is Bohm's principal follower. He worked with Bohm for many years. And we were discussing we went at great lengths about this nature of fields and with one distinction they made for me which was very helpful was that these quantum fields of the quantum say you've got two photons whizzing apart from the same atom and you measure the polarization of one and the others immediately instantaneously by entanglement or nonlocality or non separability or Bell's theorem or the EPR paradox the other immediately has the opposite polarization. That the model you have for the connection of those the quantum function that describes them is until the moment you measure it is a kind of private field. There is a connection between the two. One here and one here. But it's not like the connection between a magnet and another magnet or between the source of light the Sun and the sink the earth where the light goes in. It's all the gravitational field between the earth and the moon. It's not that at any point in between you can go and measure the strength of that field because that field only affects those two photons. It's a kind of private field that links them. That's not determinable by measurements in between. But isn't the very notion of field carry with it an idea of inclusivity of space and time? In other words why call it a field at all? Why not just call it a connection? Well you could call it you could just call it a connection but the the I think quantum field theory does have a notion of fields underlying this but they're not in normal space and time. Ralph would know that. It's a completely different use of the word field and it is a private in that particles have a field. I mean there only exist fields and their interpretation is as particles is just a kind of interpretation but that the universe consists of like so many of these fields of interaction as it were and their variables are not spatial. It's a completely different model. There couldn't be anything more different than the use of this word field in the quantum domain, the use of the word field in classical physics for example. So I'm extremely suspicious of the application of quantum mechanical concepts in the arena of psychology, consciousness, sociology and so on. Yes but you see we've got two fields. It's not much funnier than the face on Mars. All right but we've got two, you see we've got two field models in physics, what the sort of classical electromagnetic field models with continuous fields and measure between. So measurements can be carried out at any point in the field and it can be discovered to be there. But you see now David Bohm's model of quantum theory which you referred to earlier, the one that involves you know if you can get rid of the non-causal indeterminism but what he substitutes for indeterminism what he calls a quantum potential which is a field, an invisible field of quantum potentials that shapes what happens to different particles and which has as a part of its very nature non-locality. This quantum potential means something would happen here or it can happen there but the field itself is in some kind of higher dimension which he calls the implicate order and it's the realm of possibilities which quantum fields are defined in terms of fields of multi-dimensional fields of possibility which are not the same kinds of things. Now morphic resonance involves what one might call non-local effects. That makes me interested in the only branch of science which has non-locality as part of its normal structure and so the question is, is there anything in this quantum stuff with its non-locality that relates to all these other instances? A mother knowing about a child, a pigeon separated from its flock many miles away and being able to come home and so on. A father separated from a son and having a telepathic link between them. These are kinds of non-locality. They are systems, parts of the same system still remain connected at a distance. Is this a mere analogy or does it show us that there's something deep being revealed by quantum physics? Not that you can explain all things in terms of existing quantum theory of particles but that they've stumbled on something in quantum theory which is common to systems of organization of many levels of complexity and that there is therefore more similarity between the quantum models of fields and these phenomena than classical Maxwell type electromagnetic models of fields. These are two quite different sorts of fields and the gravitational field is different again. So which field model? We maybe need a quite different field model and we don't necessarily have to have any of those but it would have to include what quantum field theory has. I think the model, what it has in common with that that's interesting is the private field. The fact that if you have a tremendous emotional link to Finn say and if you could pick up telepathically messages from Finn, that's a kind of private field. It affects you and Finn but I wouldn't expect in a linear line between you and Finn to go along with a meter and measure it. Now so the private field aspect is interesting, the non-locality aspect of it is interesting and therefore it may be a better model or at least it frees us up from thinking we've got to have a model that's only based on the electromagnetic pattern of that. It seems to me that a great deal is lost that way because for example there's no natural model for communication. In the case of a mechanical field like two billion balls are connected by a spring. If one billion ball shakes then the vibration travels down the spring to the other one. This is electromagnetic photons, all kinds of communication in the world are modeled in more or less the same way. Through a vibration like disturbance of a sort of mechanical vibrating field and that's convenient because we're thinking of communications, actually we're trying to model communications in the family field, it's the communications between different members of the family that make it happen, that's where the activity is. But in a quantum field like in the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky thing, like if you measure the polarization of this photon here and immediately the other one has the opposite polarization, although it's not communication through photons because it's twice the speed of light if they're moving apart, it's considered to be instantaneous, although the word communication is denied to this and the correct usage is instantaneous correlation, if a member of the family dies and another member of the family immediately feels some kind of perturbation, maybe it is more like that quantum effect and like a series of wobbling springs moving through the intervening space. Seems like a long shot to me. The problem is that physical models break down when prosecuted to quantum mechanical levels. For example, when you stand on a hillside at night and look at the stars, you see all the stars in the sky. Well if you move three feet and look again, you still see all the stars in the sky. The implication of this is that wherever you stand in the universe you can see all the stars that can be seen, a great many stars. Well what you're seeing are photons. Well do photons from all the stars fill every cubic volume of space no matter how small or are we asked to believe that if you were shrinking you would finally reach dimensions where the stars begin going out because there isn't room in the space you're in for the photons to occupy that space. Quantum physicists tell us no, there is no size so small that it causes the stars to go out. But this seems to imply then that life photons, which are real things from every star in the universe, can crowd themselves into another real thing, a physical volume, no matter how small. And this generates contradictions which point out that even trying to use language about these things somehow betrays them. What we think they're saying they aren't saying because if they're really saying what we think they're saying they generate absurdities such as that. I mean think how many photons there must be in the universe if you can see every star from every point and what is a photon that an object a hundred million light-years away can fill all space right down to the nanometer and below volumes with photons. This is absurdity. Well you wouldn't be so keen on this one. This is orthodox physics as I understand. Well that's the corpuscular view. I think many metaphors we've shared over the years like the owner and the pet are separated in space. There's kind of an elastic dough in between them that gets stretched out and the vibrating realms, the resonance, okay, like resonance doesn't make a big deal of sense in quantum mechanics. Resonance is a metaphor that comes from the acoustic realm. I like the acoustic realm. We are connected by air, an elastic medium. We snap our fingers here, sound wave goes down, another sound wave goes down. They can amplify or they can interact additively or destructively depending on their frequencies and so on. These metaphors we've used over and over again that I thought they were in love. Now I find out that you know that it seemed to me that we were using this particular metaphoric language to cover a lot of ground in the embryogenesis and in the social sphere and the emergence of behavior and evolution of the mind and so on. That was more or less based in this kind of mechanical meaning, concept associated with the word field. Field, resonance and so on. And quantum mechanics is nothing like this. It's a very, very complicated model. I mean it's good in its spheres. It has completely different concepts and that's good. And there are realms in classical physics where you have two different models, the quantum mechanical one and another one. They're complementary or supplementary models and that's useful. But if it's already such a complicated model for a single particle then what are we talking about with the state of consciousness and extended mind or the communication between animals of the same species and communication between animals of different species and so on. We don't have a rich enough vocabulary of metaphors from quantum mechanics to deal with any of the things we conventionally deal with. Communication, resonance, telepathy is the sharing of idea, whatever an idea is. We think of it as kind of a space-time pattern and an extended thing. This is a cognitive strategy basically. Or a feeling. Telepathy is literally a distant feeling. Yeah. I don't really see quantum mechanics being very useful. No, but you see then we can't have a situation where either we have to pick existing quantum mechanics or we have to have traditional mechanical models. And the ideal situation would be a field model that can pick and mix these different metaphors in a new way. Maybe the best thing is to just give up trying to anchor it to the vocabulary of quantum physics and invent a vocabulary of macro physical fields. Yes. We have a probability wave associated to a bird, another probability wave associated to another bird, and then collapsing wave functions with integration operator and the Dirac delta of two. I don't know. I think it's... Well then, I mean, the idea of morphic fields, as I see it, is more... it's not a fully articulated model. It's a kind of word or phrase that can cover a host of possible models. It's like a hope for a field. A hope for a field. Yes. Success, metaphorically speaking, depends on a certain amount of fuzziness. Yes. Now if someone can come along and say, "Okay, we've got the perfect model for these things. We call it super-connectionism or whatever." That's fine by me. I mean, it just doesn't have to be called a field. But unless you have the idea that there's something there... Why not call it something like the vocabulary that associates with the Bell field or the Bell phenomena. Call it a dimension of coextensive connectivity. Well, that's not the term they use. I mean, that would be introducing sort of rather white-headian type language. And for most people, the hypothesis of coextensive connectivity is rather too much. It'd be called CC or something. It should soon be abbreviated because it's too much of a mouthful. You could call it anything. I mean, it may be good to have a completely new name for it. But that new name would have to... I think I use quite often use the word connectivity now, interconnection, because that's what it's about. But it's not just an interconnection in space, but in time. So a connectionist model is sort of the simplest. It doesn't capture all the phenomena. It's very easy to think about. It's the rubber band approach. Yes, the nodes connected by the rubber bands, you can flip one and the message will go down. Yes, I like that. I mean, I use the rubber band message a lot. And then there's another level up where each individual has a vibrating halo or something which may extend to infinity because thinners goes out and then different halos move around and their communication has to do with the morphic resonance, as it were, in the overlap of these halos. And that is a more complicated and a higher level model. And from a halo model, with this vibrating nimbus around each head, you could then collapse down to a connectionist model that would be like a simpler representation of some of the information in the Nimbic model. I like that, the Nimbic model. Well, I have the whole Nimbic theory in my paper on angels, on the physics of angels, but I didn't call it that. There's a Catholic orgy called the Knights of St. Nimbus. And in the representation of angels of the Renaissance painters, you see, that's where the word "nimbus" is used. That this golden circle around the head, no matter from what angle you look, you always see the entire globe behind the head. So the halo cannot possibly be a disk, like a graduation hat. It's not like a disk. It looks like a disk. Sometimes it's a conical, elliptical thing. But the only physical object that you could imagine that would appear, as it appears in the paintings of Renaissance painters, would be a spherical globe around the head, which appears gold only when seen from the inside. And therefore, from any angle you look, you would see the front hemisphere of the Nimbus as transparent, and the back hemisphere of it as golden. I see. So you've worked out the physics of the Nimbus. Yes. This is quite an advance. Yes. Yes. Well, you look at these things and you don't think. It's quite forgivable, because we don't spend too much time looking at angels. No. But the wings, I noticed that the sections are elliptical, and that means when they flap them, they're making circles. Well, it's not the physics, honestly. It's the geometry of angels. I see. But still, I wish I'd known this earlier, because in the next edition of the Physics of Angels, maybe we should have a geometrical appendix. Yes. The geometry of the Nimbus, the flapping of the circular motion of the wings, and the mechanics of the Seraphim with its six wings. I don't know whether that features in your... No, I have an unpublished extrapolation to... What's it called? Tetramorph. The tetramorph? The ones with four wings. Yes. Oh, I see. I was thinking of the four angels facing in the four directions, and their wings are hitched in Ezekiel, Saul, Leo, where... No, that may actually be the real meaning of the tetramorph. I think so. I think so. So, yes, we do have... Yes, it generates six dimensions. Well, this is another story. I stopped sending my papers around published on paper when the papers actually became NIMBY, and what you call it, the pages on the World Wide Web. But you don't read papers on the World Wide Web, so therefore you never receive. Maybe I should send you a copy of the geometry of the Nimbus. Yes, maybe a physical hard copy would be a good thing to have. Yes, in this case. Well, Terence doesn't, although he's constantly on the web. He doesn't give signs of instant recognition of his geometrical model. True. Well, we only write. We do not read. We do not have time to read other people's pages because we're so busy writing our own. It's an occupational hazard being an author. There's no time to read. So in terms of field theories, there's another kind that you haven't mentioned so far, which is the hydrodynamical fields. Yes. Now, how do they compare with all these other kinds of fields? Well, the hydrodynamic field is very similar to the electromagnetic field, but because fluids move and the electromagnetic field doesn't move, then you have your choice with, say, shallow water waves and standing on the bank of the cliff, I'm looking down at the beach and I see these waves are coming along. So I can think either of the water is standing still, which it is actually, molecules of water moving up and down vertically only, and then they're coordinating in such a way as if pulling and pushing on their neighbors so that a wave goes along. So that's an earth-centered coordinate system, as it were. Or you could ride along the wave, but then the mathematical description is somehow simpler because three feet ahead of you is lower and three feet behind you is lower, and you're at the top of the wave. So you move along, let surface do on the crest of the wave. Geometry is fixed. It's not moving along. So your framework moves with it. That's called the co-moving frame. So coordinates are the most basic thing in mathematical modeling is coordinates. There was an extensive geometry of conic sections along with Apollonius, very good, complete, all we know. Conic sections was known to Apollonius, but it was very difficult and became simple when the idea of coordinate systems was abstracted from Renaissance painters by Descartes and turned into a cognitive strategy based on rulers and so on. So the coordinate frame is the basis of everything. And even if you don't think of a material field, quantum mechanics has the coordinate frame anyway. I think that this hydrodynamics is good because it forces you to have two different coordinate frames, one moving relative to the other. In the three-body problem, for example, you have the earth, the sun, and the moon. The moon is considered sort of half of a restricted three-body problem. The moon is infinitesimally light compared to the earth and the sun. So the convenient coordinate system is like this. You draw a line between the earth and the sun, and you measure along it until you get to the place where it balances, the center of mass, which might be actually inside the sun. And then you have to take the coordinate grid and you attach it to that line with the origin of the center at that point and make it rotate around. So in that coordinate system, there is no rotation of the earth and the sun. The sun is fixed a little bit away from the origin. The earth is fixed way out there. In this coordinate plane, you then let the moon move. And then that's the simplest model. It's the one that really, you know, awkward. One of the ones in which Newton proved Kepler's laws. So a coordinate is the most basic thing when mathematics is going to be used for anything. It's not a symbol or form of logic and so on. It's the coordinate grid in which you measure something. What do you measure? Well, the aggressiveness of the gander or the submissiveness of the goose or whatever you're measuring with these in a coordinate grid where the members of the family are placed in the family field. There, the word "field" is sort of referring to the coordinate grid, which is the stage in which the actors are placed, together with perhaps some attributes at different places, like the temperature varies from place to place. In case you took the temperature only of the individual birds or the actors in the family or something, then temperature would only be measurable in certain places in the coordinate grid, and there would be no measurements elsewhere. And then that's when you get into more or less quantum mechanics, which tries to deal with this, that you don't have continuous functions representing particles, just discontinuities, so you think of them as a point with attributes. The probability wave is sort of the attribute of a point. They have different points moving around, they have different waves moving relative to each other and maybe even ignorant of each other. Nothing is more basic than the coordinate grid. So do we have a wrap on this? Yes. Well, do we have... Well, so do we conclude that it's possible to build models of fields starting from this hydrodynamic... Is the best starting point, in your opinion, then this hydrodynamical system? Well, if the system... If the... If mathematics is going to be at all helpful in this area of the family field, and thus if it's to be at all helpful in the context of the psychic pets or any of the other experiments, we have a mathematical model for the observations of any experiment, then it's necessary to choose the simplest case, because it's already complicated enough. And then it's essential to have data. And Bob Lane, the psychiatrist, came to me wanting to apply chaos theory in this practice. You have to get some numerical data. I don't know if ufologists and anthropologists have very much numerical data, but that would be the start. And the wish to mathematize psychology generally is not a wish to make people healthier or happier. It's a wish to make psychology more respectable as a science. It's not clear it's a healthy trend at all, though it's been pursued furiously for nearly a century. The more successful psychoanalytic theories, it seems to me, something that could offer counter data, are the least mathematically driven and depend really on this mysterious business that we call the gifted therapist. The gifted therapist is not a mathematically defined entity. Psychology would love to be a science, but perhaps at the expense of the client base it's supposed to serve, which are pathological and neurotic human beings. Well, the adult psychologists came up with extensive field theories in the 1930s and 40s. But little mathematics. What we're talking about, the family-- No, well, they have a growing mathematical model, which I think personally is quite promising for the future of psychology in terms of its potential usefulness in dealing with world problems and so on. I think it's very important developments, like models for the arms race and for family complex and specific strategies for conflict resolution. These actually might be effective strategies evolved for the first time thanks to mathematical modeling as a possibility that can't be ruled out. So I think it's a valuable exercise that we should try to develop a mathematical model for family fields and particularly in families of birds where there's extensive data. It would be great to find a synthetic up-to-date modern ecologist who knew of the existence and the literature of actual numerical data from experiments measured with comparable to your experiments with videotapes where we count how many times in an hour the dog goes to the window. Yes, so data. We need more data. But we won't get more data unless people have the idea that it's worth trying to model. Thus the hermeneutics of science. And we need more data in several areas. One is on anthropology where in fact a lot of classical anthropology involves those kinship structures of circles and triangles and those kind of family tree. A lot of it actually does have models of the social structure. That's what they've concentrated on in social anthropology, classical but with social anthropologies of that kind. So there's that data. Then there's data from ethology. And there could be more if quantitative ethology could be done if people had a model to guide them in what they do. Helling's work could be extended to classify different kinds of fields and look at those of different cultural groups. If you ask lots of Indians and Chinese, you could do that. So these are all empirical ways of approaching it. Yes, and that seems to be the only way forward. Well, mathematical modelling is one question and then the efficacy of it and then the other is specifically field modelling. You're going to have to go in and have to go. But I think this was very-- No, I didn't cut it off right as Terence seemed to be saying that he thought it was very something or other. That's actually where the tape cut off. So I'm going to assume that Terence was about to say that he thought their conversation was either very interesting or helpful in some way. But I've got to be honest with you. The family fields trilogue has been my least favourite so far. Not that I didn't get a few nuggets out of it, but it just didn't seem loaded with golden ore like some of their earlier conversations. As far as the tapes that Ralph Abraham loaned Bruce Dameron made to digitize, the talk you just heard was the last one we have a recording of, at least chronologically. And for me at least, it seemed as if they were running out of steam, particularly Terence, who we hardly heard from in this discussion. And it was less than a year after this trilogue that he was stricken with terminal cancer. But maybe I'm just imagining a decrease in their energy levels in this podcast. To test my theory, however, I think that the next series of trilogues I'll podcast will be the ones that were held at Hazelwood in Devon, England sometime in 1993. And then you can decide along with me whether you think the early trilogues were more energy and idea-packed than their later conversations were. On a little different subject, a few weeks ago I mentioned an article that a friend sent me about a plant whose folk name is "berry dreamflower". And one of the more remarkable things about it was the fact that apparently you can just sniff it and get high. Well, that little comment has touched off a flurry of email, two of which I'll read right now. One comes from Nat Bletter who said, "I'm an ethnobotanist, the one recently interviewed by KMO on SeaRome and Psychonautica about salvia, and I was really interested in your little note about Jiji Bong at the end of your last podcast. My friend studies this genus of plants, but I can't find a reference to this species or the common name "berry dreamflower". Where was the "Is There Sex After Death" article published that you mentioned? I have access to a huge amount of botanical literature at the New York Botanical Garden where I work, so if I had a reference I could track it down for you. It would kind of make sense if this genus was psychoactive since cloves, its sister species in the same genus, has some reports of psychoactivity. But there are no other plants I know of in this family that are psychoactive." And another email came from Eric who said, "Any luck on finding some info on the Australian fairy flower whose fragrance is reportedly intoxicating? The one you mentioned at the end of podcast 89 I believe. What was the spelling of the official name? I would like to research it a little." Well, Nat was correct in his guess that I misspelled the botanical name of this plant a few podcasts back. So here is the full quote on the article and the spelling of the name. The article itself was a reprint from the Encyclopedia of Entheogens published in 2005 by Zoskin Books. That's X-A-S, new word, K-I-N. Zoskins Books. And if I'm not mistaken, Zoskin is a town in Australia. But Google doesn't seem to be of much help in finding this publication. The copy of the story that I received was published in RFD #129, Autumn 2007. Which also suggests that this story has an Australian origin. Unless a time warp has already moved me into autumn without first having had a spring and summer here in sunny Southern California. Now the full botanical name is spelled, and I'll go slowly here because I got it wrong the last time. It's S-S-Y-Z-G-I-U-M. And the second name is G-I-D-J-I-B-A-N-G. And the common name is G-G-B-O-N-G. I think I'm saying that's right, but it's G-E-J-E-B-O-N-G. And the folk name is Fairy Dreamflower, with the old time spelling of fairy as F-A-E-R-I-E. As for distribution of this plant, the article that I have says, and I quote, "At the present early stage of research into G-G-B-O-N-G, it appears to be restricted to a remote and relatively inaccessible rock ledges on the slopes of certain mountains close to the east coast of Australia." And in regards to cultivation, the article goes on to say, "G-G-B-O-N-G grows so profusely in its natural habitat that it is difficult to understand why it has proved so hard to cultivate. Research continues." I'm glad to hear that. In appearance, G-G-B-O-N-G is a small shrub up to 60 centimeters tall, with upright, fluffy, violet-magenta colored flowers, and stiff, narrow, crispet leaves to 25 centimeters by 5 centimeters. Dark green and dull on upper surface, and paler on the underneath side of the leaf. The flower has a characteristic fragrance resembling a blend of gangle, juniper, and clove. And that hint of clove seems to me to be a confirmation of Nat's hunch about this plant. I think the thing about that article that has generated the most interest is the line that says, "The flower acts as a mild hypnotic when sniffed, independent of the dosage." Similarly, quite small quantities of G-G-B-O-N-G leaves will produce an entheogenic effect, which is not increased by larger doses. So now we're going to have to wait and see if any of our intrepid researchers can come up with some more information for us about this interesting little plant. Another thing that Eric said in his email was, "I've been interested in ethnobotany, more specifically those within theogenic properties, since the early 90s. I was an occasional BPC student back then, went to a few conferences, classes, workshops, and other similar events. I just began converting my old tapes to MP3. We should trade some recordings someday." As you probably know, his reference to BPC, at least I believe, is to the Botanical Preservation Corps, which I think is still being operated by Rob Montgomery. And you can find their website at www.botanicalpreservationcorps.com, where Rob has quite a few books and tapes he's selling. About a year ago, Rob gave me a call to say that he was thinking about releasing some of his cassette recordings for me to play here in the salon, but I haven't had a chance to follow up on that one yet either. So, Eric, if those tapes you're converting to MP3 format are from BPC, we've probably got a copyright problem in using them. But any tapes that you or any of our other listeners have that you've recorded yourself at some of these conferences, well, I'd be happy to consider them for inclusion in some of our podcasts. And I'm mentioning this because each week I get a few offers like this, and I'm always excited to hear these talks, and hopefully we'll be able to play some of them here in the salon. Another email came in from someone I'll just call Mr. S, who said, "I just wanted to thank you for all of your hard work and effort in posting all the McKenna podcasts. I've had many hours of enjoyment listening to them. I often listen to them in bed and hear the bard talking about elf machines in my sleep. P.S. As I'm a little paranoid, please do not publish my email address or full name on your website. The reason I'm reading this right now is to assure you that any and all communications I receive I keep very confidential. As much as I'd like to use the full names or even screen names to thank people who write, and particularly those kind listeners who have sent in donations, I've made a point of only using first names or pseudonyms so as to keep your private lives private. And don't feel bad about being a bit paranoid. I can certainly understand that emotion, and I even live with it myself from time to time. And you know what they say, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean that no one is after you. Another email comes from Pio, who says, "I've really been enriched by the show, and even if it's under today's shadow of oppression, it really brings the whole salon concept back from the 1800s in Paris. First world folks seem to become increasingly more insular with technology putting us in front of computer screens more often than other like-minded humans. Your show really puts us all in a spot where we can feel like we're keeping a finger on the erratic, thrilled pulse of what goes on for the greater psychedelic work today." Well, thank you for your kind words, Pio. I really do appreciate them. And along those lines, I'd like to point out that, yes, it is difficult to overcome all this tech that now seems to get in the way of person-to-person meetings. And of course, that's one of the reasons I like the salon concept myself. And if you're like a significant number of our other fellow saloners, you're probably feeling a little bit isolated, particularly if you don't have anyone to talk with about these interesting topics. But I've found that one of the things that helps me feel less alone is to tune into some of the programs coming out of the UK on the Cannabis Podcast Network. In fact, they've got a new program over there now called Lefty's Lounge that actually makes me feel like I'm sitting in my living room listening to Lefty and his friends carry on about all kinds of interesting topics. And the same goes for the other programs in that network, which you can find at dopefiend.co.uk. After you listen to some of these programs for several weeks, it's just like getting a phone call from some friends who are having a party and gave you a call. It's not as good as sitting around sharing a pipe or two, but in my humble opinion, it's the next best thing. And if you do join Lefty, well, tell them I said hello. Continuing with Pio's email, he said, "As a fellow recovering Catholic," and by the way, Pio, I feel I'm fully recovered now, but I was a recovering Catholic. "I've sort of painted myself into a corner, surrounded by empiricism and the need to prove out every idea outside the realm of concrete experience. And at the same time, wishing to crawl the beckoning walls of the unprovable and the unexplained. I have some experience with mushrooms, and I was really interested in attending the shamanic conference in Iquitos in July. I felt from your talks with Matt Palomary that there is a sort of in-club mentality that surrounds contacts in South America. I've noticed this in my readings online as well. I don't begrudge anyone not wanting to let others in on their secret, sort of like the way my relatives treat fishing spots. I was curious if you could offer any recommendations or hints of a trail beyond the general advice to look out on the web and ask around to people who have been there. I'm balkanized not so much by the lack of other psychedelic seekers locally, but by time factors of working in the belly of the corporate beast. And I feel more compelled each day to find a breakout experience." And he finished by saying, "P.S. My dad was on the Haberfield DDG. Maybe you two cross wakes at a time or two." Well, I did steam with the Haberfield a time or two, so I'm going to assume that your dad and I covered a lot of ocean together. So please tell him hello for me. And as for the appearance of an in-club mentality surrounding South American contacts, well, I'm sorry about coming across that way, and I certainly understand how people can get that opinion. I can remember that it was only about ten years ago that I was sitting in the swamps of Florida and wondering why it was so difficult to find out about reputable Iowa scarrows. And I wish there was an easy answer here, but the truth is that it's that old paranoia thing that's causing this reticence on our part about publishing the names and locations of healers we know to be sincere and true to the spirit of Lady Ayahuasca. For example, if I gave the contact information for the group of healers that I work with, well, there's a possibility that they might receive thousands of emails if only a small percentage of our fellow saloners contacted them. And if that happened, who could blame them if they told me to not come around anymore? You know, there isn't an easy solution to this problem that I know of. But Pio does mention the conference that Alan Shoemaker has organized for this summer in Iquitos. Granted, few people are going to be able to take advantage of that due to the expense, and I know that I would truly love to attend myself, but my one trip this year is going to be to Burning Man, and so I won't be able to make it either. However, if you're drawn to Ayahuasca like a moth to a flame, well, then this is the first place I'd probably go if I were you, because I doubt if there will be a larger assembly of reputable healers than you're going to find anywhere else other than at that conference this year. And I'm sorry that I don't feel comfortable giving out more information, but the Ayahuasqueros who do this work often do it at great personal risk for their own freedom, and I certainly don't want to do anything to harm them or their important work. Another common thread in the email lately has been to ask if we're sponsoring a theme camp at Burning Man this year. Well, after organizing the Planque Norte camp in 2003, I decided that the theme camp organization was best left to younger people. It's an incredibly difficult thing to plan and organize, and that goes off to all of you who are actively engaged in putting together camps for this year's burn. For my part, I organize and produce the Planque Norte lectures there, but not the camp that they're held in. This year, we're going to be with the good folks at Eco Village, and I've been told that we'll have that gigantic tent again for our lecture series this year. As the summer progresses, I'll be passing along more information about the lectures, and as far as a place to actually camp, I'm not the one who can help you on that, I'm afraid. But maybe some of our fellow Saloners are looking for help with their camps, and let me know so I can pass the information along. On a slightly different note, Alicia, who is working with Charlie Grobe and Preet Chopra on the psilocybin study at Harbor UCLA, has posed the following question. "If you were a DJ for a therapeutic psilocybin session in a clinical setting, what would you play?" After posting that question on some Tribe.net forums, Alicia tells me that she was surprised at how many suggestions she received. So I thought I'd pass her a request along here and see if any of our fellow Saloners have some suggestions along those lines. And if you do, just send them to Lorenzo@matrixmasters.com, and I'll eventually post the list on our psychedelicsalon.org blog. Well, there's more mail to read, but there's no more energy on my part, so I'm going to close for today. But next week I'll be playing an interview I recorded the day before yesterday with John Hanna, who does far more than his share of the heavy lifting for the psychedelic community. John and I talked about several information resources that are available to you, including his MindStates conferences, and I think you'll enjoy hearing about what he's been up to lately, including his latest research into energy drinks, which is something I could use right now. Before I go, as always, I want to 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. If you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at www.psychedelicsalon.org. And if you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts, well, just send them to lorenzo@matrixmasters.com. My thanks again go out to Shatul Hayyuk for the use of your music here in the Salon, and thank you. Thank you for joining me here in the Salon today. It's really nice of you to stop by. For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends, and especially you, Queer Ninja. I know you're going to be alright. Take care, my friend. (music) {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.51 sec Transcribe: 2971.54 sec Total Time: 2973.70 sec