[Music]
 [Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. And today I've got what I consider to be a real treat, some
 new mind candy that was sent to me by our fellow salonner Gary Eisenberg. In
 fact Gary sent me several interesting recordings that you'll be hearing this
 week and next and here's a description of the event where this recording was
 made and by the way Gary what a thrill it must have been to be there in person.
 Maybe some of our other fellow salonners who were there will also let us know
 about it. Anyway this is the description that I found on the subgenius.com
 website which actually was a repost from the old Usenet news group which was one
 of the tribes first stops on the net before the World Wide Web made its
 appearance. I'm sure you remember it you know the one alt.drugs. And as a
 little aside if I'm not mistaken it was John Gilmore who has been with us here
 in the salon a couple of times who is the person who actually originated or
 invented I guess you'd say the alt news groups in the early years of the net.
 And if you were already on the net back in the 80s I'm sure that you remember
 well how exciting it was to watch the words tumble onto your screen through
 that wonderful little 300 baud dial-up modem. Anyway here's what one person who
 attended the event had to say about it in a Usenet posting. I attended the
 Albert Hoffman in America celebrating 50 years of consciousness research event in
 Los Angeles and I'm forwarding some of the information because I know some of
 you would want to hear it. The event featured lectures by Terrence McKenna,
 Stanley Krippner, Andrew Weil, John C. Lilly and Albert Hoffman himself.
 Unfortunately Laura Huxley could not attend. There was also live music. A
 staggering 2,000 or so people filled the hall at the Scottish Rite Temple in Los
 Angeles. It was also the inauguration of the Albert Hoffman Foundation, an archive
 and information center dedicated to the scientific study of human consciousness.
 And now thanks to fellow Slaughter artist and all about Renaissance man
 Gary Eisenberg we are going to revisit that historic occasion. And Gary I can't
 thank you enough for these recordings. I've really enjoyed previewing them and
 I'm looking forward to listening again right now. As you'll hear in just a
 moment the recording begins with an introduction by Robert Zanger who I
 think was the first president of the newly formed Albert Hoffman Foundation.
 Sadly although there have been many generous donors over the years the
 Albert Hoffman Foundation has now fallen fallow and exists primarily as an old
 text-based website. However if you're interested in all things psychedelic
 particularly from the scientific point of view I think you'll find a visit to
 www.hoffman.org and he spells his name H-O-F-M-A-N-N. One F, two M's in case
 you're wondering. I think you'll find the visit there quite worthwhile and should
 you go there I recommend that you begin with the what's new link as it now
 serves more or less as a table of contents. But I should also note that all
 of those boxes containing thousands of papers that you'll hear talked about
 have now been scanned and are available for you to read at www.erowid.org
 www.erowid.org. It's an amazingly valuable resource for psychedelic
 researchers and there's a link to that collection at the beginning of the
 program notes for this podcast which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org
 But right now let's join Robert Zanger as he introduces the evening's master of
 ceremonies. A fellow you may have heard of before. His name is Terrence McKenna.
 My name is Robert Zanger and I'm president of the new Albert Hoffman
 Foundation. This is indeed a historic occasion for modern consciousness
 research for a number of reasons. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the
 first synthesis of LSD by Dr. Hoffman in 1938.
 It also marks the inauguration of the new Albert Hoffman Foundation which will
 be dedicated to preserving the psychedelic research that's been done
 over the last 50 years. And for a third reason because just a few weeks ago LSD
 has been legalized in Switzerland for use in psychotherapy.
 [Applause]
 This is something that Dr. Hoffman will be telling you more about himself later
 in the program when he gives his presentation. At this time I'd like to
 introduce our first speaker of the evening and our emcee for the rest of
 the program. He's a lecturer, an extremely articulate and poetic speaker
 as many of you know, a shamanologist, an expert on psychoactive plants and
 medicinal plants from around the world, director of the Botanical Dimensions
 Foundation in Hawaii. Please welcome Terrence McKenna.
 [Applause]
 Well it's very heartening to see so many people here tonight to celebrate an
 event like this. Talking about 50 years of consciousness research in America
 reminds me a little bit of the story that's told of Mahatma Gandhi when he
 was asked what did he think of Western civilization and he said it sounds like
 a good idea. [Laughter]
 Because as a matter of fact consciousness research in America has
 been severely stifled over the last 35-40 years. Science is invited to look
 deeply into all aspects of nature except the nature of the self and yet clearly a
 crowd like this, an event like this, indicates that this issue will not die.
 This issue is not going to go away. And so it's wonderfully fitting I think that
 we bring Dr. Hoffman from his bastion in neutral Switzerland to the city of lost
 angels to celebrate what was one of the great seminal events in the history of
 the 20th century. You know Newton was asked of his theory of gravitation how
 could he ever have made this leap of imagination and Newton said it was very
 easy I stood on the shoulders of Giants and everyone who has done psychedelic
 research, research on consciousness in America has stood on the shoulders of
 Giants. People like Robert Gordon Watson the discoverer of the magic mushrooms in
 Mexico, the man who propounded and founded the field of ethnobotany. People
 like Richard Evans Schultes who is an advisor to the Hoffman library and the
 great ethnobotanist of the 20th century and without doubt people like Albert
 Hoffman people who laboring in the confines of their laboratories have
 thrown open the doorway to new worlds of possibility for the human spirit. Tonight
 as Dr. Hoffman was receiving the accolades of the crowd for the invention
 of LSD I couldn't help but think to myself that he probably never dreamed
 that the search for a better vaginal constrictor would carry him so far.
 So I'm going to keep my remarks brief this evening I think a visit by Albert
 Hoffman to America the foundation of a library that bears his name that will
 serve as an archive for the research that has been locked away in filing
 cabinets and packing boxes for 30 years and in concert with the political
 situation in the society the larger society around us is a sufficient reason
 for pausing for a moment and actually considering what is the psychedelic
 experience what promise does it hold for a sane future for our planet and our
 children and what is it about it that kindles the kind of loyalty that I feel
 coming from the people in this room this evening and I submit to you that it is
 nothing less than the rebirth of a voice that has been silent for at least a
 thousand years the still small voice of the logos of the planet you know the Old
 Testament says you don't have to study the difference between good and evil you
 know it the still small voice in your heart elucidates the correct way to live
 and in Western culture this still small voice has been stilled for over a
 millennia and we have operated in a world that is reductionist objectivist
 materialistic secular male-dominated stressing stasis stressing the minute
 particulars in favor of the great overarching picture and in some way we
 have lost our way and it remained for giants of 20th century thought like
 Freud and Jung to announce the startling fact that there was a human
 unconscious and then it took still a different generation of researchers with
 a different set of analytical skills to take the concepts of the unconscious and
 turn it in to a frontier full of challenge to a topological manifold that
 courageous minds could sail out into to map and to explore and squarely then in
 the path of the materialist reductionist crypto fascist dreams of high-tech
 industrialism there emerged
 there emerged a mystery the last thing you would expect a true mystery now dr.
 Hoffman has been lauded here this evening for his invention of LSD
 certainly this is what he will be remembered for over the long centuries
 ahead but as a matter of fact he is a thinker of extreme breadth and depth it
 was he working with Karl Ruck and Gordon Wasson who proposed that it was
 actually psychoactive ergot alkaloids that lay behind the Ellisonian mysteries
 and thereby rubbed the nose of classical scholarship in the fact that the
 foundation and the wellspring of the Western imagination which was the
 mystery cults of ancient Greece that that foundation is firmly rooted in a
 psychedelic experience that when we leave these things behind we leave
 behind our cultural birthright no less than when the Amazonian Indian deserts
 his home village for the sawmills we too were once tribal people who lived in the
 light of mysteries that came to us mediated by shamans and created out of
 the magic of the natural world it was Albert Hoffman who synthesized
 psilocybin for the first time and described its absolute structural
 characteristics this is a man who is astride both the synthetic and natural
 product chemistry of the 20th century like no one else his research has
 revealed the unexpected fact that there are biodynamic alkaloids in our
 environment in our food chain indeed in our history that argue that we are the
 bearers of a great promise that the future of consciousness can be
 endlessly bright in any age this message would have tremendous impact but it is
 particularly poignant in our own age because we live in an age of global
 crisis and the crisis is not that there is not enough food there is the crisis
 is not that we are victims of warfare and propaganda we are but the crisis is
 rooted in our own minds it's a crisis of point of view a crisis of psychology a
 crisis that requires a new look at the human enterprise and I submit to you
 that there is no faster clearer and cleaner way to get a new look at the
 human enterprise than by availing yourself of the tools and the compounds
 which men like John Lilly Albert Hoffman Richard Schultes Gordon Watson
 Oscar Jannecker have placed before us don't let anyone tell you that we're not
 living in an age of heroes because we are these people have set a standard
 that will be difficult to follow these people when it was for God's sake
 very controversial to be a communist dared to give people LSD dared to suggest
 that a new world of the mind might lay right ahead of us and so I think it's
 very fitting that the Albert Hoffman library be an ongoing project a project
 that the community can rally around and see itself reflected in we're living in
 an age where people have an in who have an interest in these things are marked
 as escapists pariahs cultural anarchists ne'er-do-well's hedonists look at the
 people around you did any of you watch the Republican Convention
 so I submit to you that what we represent is a fifth column a fifth
 column that represents the best aspirations that human community is
 capable of a fifth column that is willing to look at the structure of the
 psyche in contrast to the the mess of society and willing to dream I'm
 reminded of William Faulkner in his Nobel address he said man will not
 simply endure man will prevail now of course he should have said humanity but
 this was years ago but the thought is there we have the tools the intellect
 the will to create a caring global culture it isn't going to come without a
 recognition of the power of the psychedelic experience the psychedelic
 experience is the birthright of every human being on the planet it is as much
 a basic part of each and every one of us as our sexuality our national identity
 our consciousness of self and any society which attempts to hold back or
 impede this dimension of self-expression when the history of that society is
 written it will be called barbarous the movement toward legitimizing
 psychedelics I see as part of the broader movement throughout human
 history that gave us the Magna Carta the Bill of Rights women's suffrage in the
 future it will be unimaginable that governments once regulated the
 substances that people use to explore personal growth it is the mark of a
 barbarous culture and we are here to raise a light to say truth is not so
 easily swept aside one doesn't just say no to truth truth
 truth requires engagement it requires courage it requires a sense of where we
 have been and of where we are going and what is preached all around us is the
 quick fix the fast buck the temporary solution the throwaway and disposable
 culture that ends up throwing away and disposing of human lives and what we
 place against that is a humanism that does not rise out of theory it's a
 humanism that rises out of experience the experience that informed the great
 mystics of every religion is not something that we strain for throughout
 a life of self-discipline and self-subjugation that isn't it it is our
 birthright each of us dr. Hoffman and his discoveries place this dimension
 within the reach of all of us dr. Hoffman and his discoveries place this
 dimension on a social agenda that cannot be denied that will not wait if not now
 when if not us who it's that simple we are moving now I think unfortunately
 into yet a darker political night in terms of the larger society around us
 and I make an analogy to the coming of the Dark Ages but what the Dark Ages
 promoted that is going to work in our favor were monastic gatherings of
 like-minded people who preserved information through the time of darkness
 and social ignorance toward a new day when it could be utilized to mitigate
 the suffering of men and women everywhere LSD is to my mind first and
 foremost the greatest medical discovery of the 20th century and I use it in the
 sense of ameliorating pain creating caring promoting unity healing not so
 much of the individual psyche although certainly its impact in that dimension
 is tremendous but ultimately as a deconditioning agent allowing us to move
 beyond the confines of historical society to see what we could be what we
 have been and what in fact we have the energy to be in the future thank you
 very much
 okay
 so I'm doing double duty up here tonight as MC as well and I want to
 introduce the next speaker he's an extremely eminent psychologist
 researcher long on the scene there at the beginning he his work with dreams at
 Maimonides Hospital set him on a lifelong course of the study of
 consciousness he is published extensively on shamanism he is a teacher
 lecturer mentor and all-around great guy please welcome to the podium dr. Stanley
 Krippner
 thank you very much Terrence and thank you very much for such a brilliant
 introductory talk well some of you remember that when Albert Hoffman wrote
 his autobiography he called it LSD my problem child I have news for you
 Albert LSD was not your only problem child many of your problem children are
 here tonight and I think you will be very proud of us before the night is
 over now I'm going to discuss the way that Albert Hoffman and his work have
 influenced the whole field of consciousness studies and I'm going to
 use the term consciousness to refer to a person or other organisms pattern of
 perceptual cognitive affective functioning either on an everyday
 ordinary basis or in so-called altered or alternative states the field of
 consciousness studies includes descriptive experimental and
 theoretical approaches to the investigation of these patterns of
 functioning emphasis also is placed on relating phenomenological techniques to
 the measurement of externally observable behavior as well as to abstract model
 building at Saybrook Institute Graduate School where I teach we have one of the
 few carefully thought-out sequences of courses in consciousness studies at any
 accredited university in the United States and Albert you'll be happy to
 know that at Saybrook we don't keep interest in psychedelics in the closet
 students write dissertations on the topic they write papers on the topic
 they contribute articles and chapters to monographs and books and you are
 certainly to us at Saybrook a great cultural and scientific hero now
 consciousness studies were neglected by most psychologists for several decades
 but they began to emerge under the impact of developments in psychopharmacology
 such as the discovery of LSD and related compounds but also developments in
 neuropsychology engineering psychology sensory deprivation studies and the
 discovery that rapid eye movements during sleep were quantitatively related
 to dream reports the latter investigations demonstrated that
 objective and subjective methods could be combined in consciousness studies
 research and hypnosis meditation and by altering drugs suggested ways in which
 changes in sensory processing and cognition could be investigated in
 laboratory settings biofeedback terminology and technology demonstrated
 that many internal states could be monitored and could be regulated
 voluntarily transpersonal approaches to psychology have brought Eastern models
 of consciousness to the attention of Western investigators as a result of
 these wide-ranging developments a new introspectionism emerged in the study of
 spontaneous fantasy daydreaming imagery and creativity data from studies of
 memory attention learning and cognitive styles indicated the need to determine
 how awareness influences sensory input and motor output neuropsychological
 research produced data concerning the functioning of the two cortical
 hemispheres as well as the role played by neurotransmitters and regulating
 behavior as the scientific study of behavior experience and intentionality
 humanistic psychology has assisted in the rediscovery of what William James
 called the stream of consciousness as a proper area of investigation the
 groundwork was prepared for the advent of the scientific exploration of
 consciousness five decades ago when Albert Hoffman synthesized a lysergic
 acid compound known as LSD 25 initial trials were disappointing it did not
 seem to have any medical use and the dog appeared to have psychoactive
 properties of animals but there was something puzzling and curious about LSD
 25 and the 1943 Hoffman investigated again he accidentally absorbed some of
 it through his skin and had what he later called a dreamlike but not
 disagreeable experience Albert always has the talent for understatement
 three days later Hoffman arranged to take what he believed to be a very weak
 dose he tried to take notes in his laboratory journal but after a few pages
 found out that he could not write anymore so he headed for home on a
 bicycle why because automobile use is restricted in Switzerland during the
 Second World War which was then raging through most of the rest of Europe even
 though aspects of his bicycle ride were terrifying Albert realized that he had
 made an important discovery because no known substance in the world would have
 any effect at all in such a small dosage one quarter of a milligram
 Hoffman called a physician but by the time the good doctor arrived he had
 began to enjoy the experience the endless variety of colors the happiness
 the rapture and the feeling that he had come back to life eventually Albert
 Hoffman decided to explore the new drug in a setting outside the conventional
 laboratory and had what he considered to be the first psychedelic LSD experience
 in 1951 joining him were the pharmacologist Herbert Nasr and the
 novelist Ernst Jünger again he took a low dose of the substance but found
 himself transported to North Africa among the Berber tribes enjoying
 beautiful landscapes and exotic oases while a Mozart record played music from
 above and sometime later Albert had his first religious LSD experience having a
 confrontation with death and feeling that he had left the ordinary world
 forever fortunately for us he came back Hoffman became convinced that LSD could
 be important for psychotherapy for treating the terminally ill for brain
 research and as an adjunct to meditation but he also concluded that it should
 only be given to people who were prepared for it the people who had strong
 psychological structures he once commented and I agree with him I thought
 of LSD as being appropriate for an elite for artists writers and philosophers
 Hoffman's work with LSD was responsible for invitation to investigate the
 pharmacological properties of the Mexican mushrooms used in sacred rituals
 before the arrival of the Europeans by this time Hoffman was director of
 research for the Sandoz Pharmaceuticals Department of Natural Products
 chemical studies of the mushroom by French and American firms have ended
 inconclusively so Hoffman was eager to accept the challenge and this and other
 stories come through in his book plant of the gods origins of hallucinogenic
 use co-authored with Richard Evans shootings well Hoffman was later to
 note that the earlier investigations had used animals as subjects but Hoffman
 having learned that humans have a greater sensitivity to psychedelic
 substances ate the mushrooms himself see this was very radical at this time to
 try something out on yourself who would have thought of that who would have
 thought that that would be science in 1958 he reported the results of his
 studies having isolated the active ingredients of the sacred mushrooms to
 new substances which he named psilocybin in silosin and a few years ago
 Walter Houston Clark was with us tonight and I and some other people went to
 Mexico for an interview with Maria Sabina in the last few years of her life
 and saw firsthand the setting in which some of the early explorers like Watson
 and Hoffman had observed firsthand the workings of the sacred mushrooms well
 Hoffman was later to synthesize the active ingredients of rye ergot, squill,
 psychoactive morning glory seeds and reywolfia these investigations led to
 the production of several important medicines he also made a retrospective
 study of the Ylecenian mysteries of ancient Greece producing compelling
 evidence that a psychoactive substance probably rye ergot was used at the
 climax of the initiation and this is described in his book the road to
 Elysius a thrilling detective story on how this discovery was made which had
 eluded humankind for thousands of years Albert Hoffman has had an important
 effect upon consciousness research in several ways his synthesis of LSD 25
 provided humankind with an incisive tool for the investigation of perception
 cognition affect creativity imagery and imagination the difficulties that science
 medicine and society at large have had in making full use of this gift suggests
 that alas LSD was probably a premature discovery at least in industrialized
 countries in native societies they have known for thousands of years how to use
 wisely these compounds and I've seen Albert over the years on both sides of
 the Atlantic one of our meetings was in the Austrian Alps we were there for a
 conference of shamans and we both gave our talks but the real stars were the
 traditional healers from North America South America from Asia one of them Don
 Jose Rios also known as Matsuo a Huichol shaman who at that time was 107 years of
 age and who was still going strong was flown to Europe for this trip and we
 were all worried about how he would take that transatlantic crossing and at the
 airport they're saying Don Jose, how did you do it how do you feel you know
 at your age were you able to make that crossing he said well I just took a
 little peyote before I got on the airplane I'm still flying
 well we can learn a lot from these native practitioners I've certainly
 learned a lot in my day Albert as well
 Hoffman has contributed to the development of methodological advances
 in consciousness research obviously he is a first-rate chemist who has been
 awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Zurich and the Stockholm
 Pharmaceutical Trust but he is also pioneered in the study of participant
 observation techniques using himself as a human laboratory for the study of drug
 effects in addition he is engaged in field research visiting remote parts of
 the world to observe the use of psychoactive plants and native settings
 all of these research approaches are approaches that we endorse and use at
 Saybrook and this is why Hoffman is such an important figure to our graduate
 students also incidentally a few weeks ago some of us including Andy Weil who
 are in the audience were in the Soviet Union for a conference on hidden
 reserves of the human psyche in Moscow and one of the discoveries that I made
 was that in the 1930s and 1940s Soviet researchers were using mescaline and
 other psychedelic substances for self experimentation now they didn't dare
 write this up because this was in the days of the Stalinist terror but they
 kept journals and now finally those journals are being are being carefully
 collected and hopefully will be published and let me tell you this is an
 important piece of data that I hope we can get here for the Albert Hoffman
 library these journals from Moscow
 finally Albert Hoffman has never hesitated to consider the ethical
 implications of his discoveries he has made known his opposition to the casual
 use of LSD and similar substances but he has also been open in discussing the
 philosophical implications of his work he has spent time with numerous visitors
 discussing their LSD induced mystical and religious experiences he has written
 and lectured on such topics as appearance and reality the connections
 between human and humans in the environment and the presence of a
 creative force in all living things in his autobiography Albert Hoffman wrote
 what is needed today is a fundamental re-experience of the openness of all
 living things a comprehensive reality consciousness that will evermore
 infrequently develop spontaneously the more the primordial flora and fauna of
 our mother earth must yield to a dead technological environment that's
 something that my shaman friends would say and Albert said it just as eloquently
 when the history of consciousness research is fully written the stature of
 Albert Hoffman will be obvious to the historians they will write that here was
 a man who was a brilliant scientist and an innovative researcher but more
 important one who accepted the responsibilities accompanying his
 discoveries unlike many other scientists of the 20th century he did not separate
 science from ethics he behaved responsibly with commitment accepting
 the burdens as well as the joys of his mission our tributes to him tonight only
 foreshadow the accolades that will accumulate in time from a new psychology
 a new medicine and a new science of consciousness that will freely
 acknowledge that they will always be in Albert Hoffman's debt
 [applause]
 before I introduce this next speaker I should say it's a great honor for me to
 be asked to make these introductions I am definitely the new kid on the block
 and quite in awe of these characters let me tell you our next speaker a figure
 known to many of you I think I first became aware of him I don't know
 exactly probably it was fall of 65 or 66 there was a magazine called Ramparts
 which has been defunct now for many years but they printed an extract from
 the natural mind and my friends and I who were just beginning to smoke
 marijuana and use LSD avidly studied the pages of this Ramparts article for it
 purported to represent different drug states on each page of illustration and
 I think the natural mind which was later superseded by chocolate to morphine
 which had the to my mind indubitable honor of being banned in Florida
 these publications which I'm sure are familiar to all of you countless
 publications in ethnomycology a man with a great enthusiasm for the mushroom foray
 the long conversation scholar physician social theorist your friend and mine
 Andy Weil
 hi it's good to be here it's always good to be among friends I have to do a lot
 of work in the course of an average year and a lot of that is going out into the
 cold and not being among friends and trying to talk the message in this past
 year for example I had to go and give a number of all-day workshops on
 consciousness and drug policy in the Iron Range of Minnesota and a number of
 community colleges that keep asking me to come back and do that I had to talk
 to a number of audiences of psychiatrists in medical schools and
 hospitals giving grand rounds on such subjects as the nature of the placebo
 response it's hard it's nice to be among friends now I wish I could tell you I
 wish I could join in all the warmth of this occasion to tell you that the
 revolution in consciousness is moving right ahead and that we are about to
 transform government and external reality as a result of that but you know
 it ain't so and I say that as somebody who goes through the Iron Range of
 Minnesota and passes through airports and looks around me and I have to tell
 you that I feel that the majority of human beings that I encounter operate
 mostly out of fear guilt and when people operate from those emotions they are
 dangerous to themselves and to others we are a very small minority a very small
 minority and have no illusions about that and whether our minority will grow
 fast enough and be able to influence humanity fast enough to avoid the
 catastrophe that is certain to come if we persist in the ways that we now
 persist I don't know and if we can't if it may be as it appears that our ability
 to manipulate the environment our technological ability is so disparate
 with our ability to control our own emotions that may be a fatal flaw of our
 species it may be if it is that has to be all right too because I feel and this
 is based on a lot of my experiences with substances that we all know and love
 that deep down everything is all right and that's the way it's supposed to be
 and there may be a lot of drama in between but it's all alright
 I upset people a lot when I say but this is true that I am NOT a human chauvinist
 if our species destroys itself which is a possibility I don't think there's any
 way that we can destroy life by the way or the life process or consciousness
 which I think preceded life and preceded the human organism and the human brain
 now if that happens it's okay with me if something else gets a chance if the
 life force experiments with another form that's fine that's okay too I mean I
 hope that doesn't happen I will work to try to keep it from happening but either
 way it's alright now if there's any hope of keeping that from happening it has to
 involve basic change at the level of consciousness and particularly it has to
 involve basic change in the nature of science and technology which has become
 the religion of our society medicine which is an arm of that really I think
 has taken the function of religion in traditional societies and physicians
 fulfill the roles although not very well that priests have in traditional
 societies and when people in traditional system when something happens that's
 never happened before in a traditional society you go to the shaman for an
 interpretation of whether it's good or evil in our society we go to doctors and
 we ask whether it's good or bad for our health you know that is our modern
 version of all this but medicine and science do not fulfill this magical
 religious role well there has to be a change in that area and some of what I'd
 like to say to you tonight is about the nature of science the problem of studying
 consciousness and some of the lessons that I have learned from having the
 privilege of knowing Albert Hofmann and having seen him although infrequently at
 gatherings of this sort the prop there are some inherent problems in studying
 consciousness and they should not be belittled because you can't make them go
 away the first is that consciousness is not material our science is
 materialistic how do you study by methods looking at the material world
 something which is fundamentally not material this is why research on
 hypnosis is so awful it's why hypnosis for however many years it's been around
 remains something has an unsavory scent about it to scientists and medical
 doctors why it has always had an uneasy relationship to medical science and even
 though the effects are dramatic and obvious I once saw a woman have a baby
 by cesarean section under hypnosis anesthesia she was fully conscious and
 was asked to look up and watch them the baby was delivered and so forth and what
 more could you ask of the way of a dramatic example of how consciousness
 can change physical reactions and yet despite this research in this area is
 just awful the reason is simply that when someone is in hypnosis there is no
 objective way that you can document that fact there is no objective reproducible
 change in the physical sphere that is a marker of that altered state of
 consciousness and if your science is totally materialistic how can you make
 sense of that and if you can't make sense of things as a scientist what are
 you going to do about that the first thing you can do is try to ignore it
 because it's a threat to your worldview if there's something out there that you
 can't explain and if people won't let you ignore it then you can make fun of
 it or belittle it or treat it as if it's a joke or something irrelevant and if
 you can't do that and somebody continues to force you to look at it you can get
 mad at the person and punch them out and you see all these range of responses in
 this field of consciousness research and the second problem is that
 consciousness is rooted in experience and here it seems to me is the
 fundamental absurdity of the way that our science has developed the most
 obvious fact of our existence is that we are conscious that is the most obvious
 most important aspect of our existence how can you construct a worldview how
 can you construct a system that tries to explain the universe and leave that out
 and yet that is what our science tries to do it tries to act as if
 consciousness doesn't exist and to construct mechanistic explanations of
 phenomena without reference to that and that gets us in a lot of trouble it
 leads us to come up with some very implausible mechanisms and explanations
 for phenomena and it also leaves us unable to explain a lot of things out
 there like hypnosis that may be very important to us now I am particularly
 conscious of this because I work as a physician I practice general medicine
 and I practice medicine based on the assumption that consciousness is
 central to any theory of health and healing and illness and that when
 anybody comes to me whether they're well or sick I am always paying attention to
 their state of consciousness as well as to their state of the body and often I
 find in my experience that changes in the realm of consciousness must
 accompany physical treatments if the physical treatments are to work that is
 my experience and I go by my experience I see all the time one of the saddest
 things that I see in my practice is vast numbers of people who come to me who
 have been inadvertently hexed by their encounters with medical doctors you know
 there's a very well-known phenomenon of hexing that has been described by
 anthropologists and psychologists there's a little bit of medical
 literature on this as well there was a an article in the AMA journal in this
 past year reported without comment of a woman in Cal here in Southern California
 who had an advanced case of lupus systemic lupus a major and serious
 autoimmune disease she was examined at a university hospital here put on massive
 doses of steroids and immunosuppressive drugs did not respond she was Filipino
 and after a period of time she told her doctor that she was certain that the
 disease was the result of a curse that had been placed on her by a witch doctor
 in the Philippines and that she could not be helped unless she went back there
 and had that lifted so she went back there and had a good witch doctor lift
 the curse and she came back cured she was awful medication at that point and
 this was reported in the AMA journal without comment as an example of hexing
 in medicine so they can see that kind of thing but don't know what to make of it
 but what I see is the creation of disease by doctors or the perpetuation
 of disease by doctors some and this is done with verbal magic if I were King I
 would require in medical schools a course in the power of words and the
 importance in being very
 the importance of being extremely careful about the words you choose and
 speaking to a sick patient and a patient who has come to you most medical doctors
 have no sense of their power as priests they have no sense of their power to
 create expectation in somebody who comes to them in that role and they abuse that
 all the time occasionally this happens consciously sometimes I see cases where
 doctors dislike patients and say nasty things to them in anger but that's quite
 rare much more often these things are said unconsciously and unthinkingly a
 doctor's make some idle remark and years later this remark burns like a red hot
 coal in that person's memory and is a principal obstacle to healing or any
 change in their physical condition let me give you a very gross example a
 patient came to me this past year from Finland the woman from Helsinki who was
 in her mid-30s and had had multiple sclerosis for the past five years she
 was on large doses of toxic drugs steroids and immunosuppressive drugs
 which she did not need and we're doing her only harm she was very depressed the
 thing that most alarmed me about her was that her emotional reaction to her
 illness was completely wooden she talked about it as if it were happening to
 someone else I thought that was a very alarming state of consciousness to be in
 about having a devastating disease I worked with her over the period of a
 month and got her connected up with I put her on a good diet and I gave her
 some herbal medicines to take and I got her connected up with a visualization
 therapist and with some good exercise physiology people and a lot of people
 had very positive attitudes and over the space of a month she changed completely
 she became a happy person who was able to laugh and for the first time she saw
 the possibility that she could affect the course of this disease that she was
 not simply a passive victim of some outside force operating her and the day
 before she was to go back to Finland we were sitting together and she was
 laughing and joking and she said to me you know you wouldn't believe what those
 doctors did to me in Helsinki she said that the neurologist at this hospital
 that had taken a while to make the diagnosis her main symptom was dizzy
 spells and there had been endless testing and finally they had made the
 diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and when they did the chief neurologist called
 her into his office and told her she had this disease and then he said wait here
 a minute and he went out and brought in a wheelchair and told asked her to sit
 in the wheelchair and said that he suggested that she sit in a wheelchair
 for one to two hours a day to practice
 wheelchair practice I say that's a gross example but I see many many many
 examples of this kind of things and it comes from ignorance it comes from not
 seeing the importance of states of consciousness of the non-physical realm
 of medicine and treatment and interaction with people of thinking that
 everything is material and I must also tell you that in my time in medicine I
 got my medical degree in 1968 20 years this has gotten worse not better for
 example when I was in medical school ulcerative colitis was considered one of
 the classic for psychosomatic diseases one of the four diseases that all
 doctors recognized had a mental emotional component medical students
 today are not taught that they're now taught all about the elaborate
 mechanisms in the colon and interactions with bacteria and biochemical things in
 the colon and I presented them a case the way I discovered is I had a
 fascinating case of a man who was a heavy smoker in good health in his 50s
 who quit smoking and three months later out of the blue developed the symptoms
 of ulcerative colitis he was went to a chief of gastroenterology the University
 Hospital was put on a lot of drugs that did him no good they did not tell him
 not to drink coffee he was drinking three cups of coffee in the morning
 which is poison for anyone with colitis after several months of getting in worse
 and worse relations with the gastroenterologist he had an intuition
 that if he started smoking again his colitis would go away so he did and it
 did very rapidly and when he came to see me he had been through this cycle two
 more times with the same results except that each time the colitis had appeared
 faster after he stopped smoking and took longer to go away after he started and
 when I saw him he was terrified that he was going to wind up both being an
 addicted smoker and have ulcerative colitis this year at the beginning or at
 the beginning of Latin in the middle of last year an article appeared in the New
 England Journal of Medicine reporting an increased incidence of ulcerative colitis
 in ex-smokers not in current smokers and the article went through all this
 biochemistry about nicotine and so forth and the conclusion was we can think of
 no possible mechanism by which cessation of smoking could result in an increased
 incidence of ulcerative colitis I mean how dense do you have to be to see that
 mechanism smoking literally burns up nervous energy that's one reason why
 people get sucked into it and if you shut that door that energy is going to go
 somewhere why in one person it goes down and causes this problem of the colon and
 why in another person it may do something else I don't know and I have
 no problem saying I don't know about things either
 the reason that's not anyway I presented this case to a group of second-year
 medical students at the University of Arizona they had not been taught that
 ulcerative colitis was a psychosomatic disease they had not heard that the most
 important single fact about ulcerative colitis because that's the sphere
 through which you can influence it most not mentioned so in 20 years I don't see
 progress I see things going in the other direction now one of the most obnoxious
 traits of modern science is its tendency to negate our experience I mean there is
 nothing more obnoxious than to tell a scientist that you have experienced
 something and the science tells tells you that no you haven't because we can
 demonstrate objectively that that didn't happen and science does this all the
 time science does it very frequently in the area of psychoactive drug research
 there are an awful lot of researchers who have never taken a psychoactive drug
 and are studying things like marijuana or LSD and have not tried it themselves
 how can you how can you how can you do that
 there was a period when I there was a period when I get that we've got asked a
 lot to testify as an expert witness and in various drug cases and when these
 would go to juries you know in front of judges the prosecutors are usually
 reasonably well behaved but when you get in front of a jury it's no holds barred
 and so they start right in with well dr. Weil have you ever taken this drug
 yourself and I did this recently with in a peyote case in Arizona in a Mormon
 area of Arizona which didn't look great and the chief of pharmacology who is a
 hard core scientific materialist at my medical school and we don't get along
 very well we nod to each other in the hall but we think very differently was
 the chief witness for the prosecution who tested about talked about giving
 mescaline to cats grinding up their brains and looking at degenerative
 changes I said what I knew about peyote and the prosecutor a woman then lit into
 me and started with you know well dr. while have you ever taken peyote I said
 of course I had taken peyote that I wouldn't consider myself an expert on
 peyote if in addition to whatever else I did I haven't taken it myself and she
 said and what other to have you taken this and have you taken that I said
 look I can save you time I have taken every drug I have ever written about
 I wouldn't do it otherwise she said well have you gotten legal
 permission to do this I said well I don't know who you apply to for a permit
 to take nutmeg for example
 anyway the jury acquitted the man they said this was an unwarranted invasion of
 freedom of religion by the state of Arizona great
 and when talked to afterwards by lawyers they said a major reason was the
 contrast between this pharmacologist who testified a great length and talked down
 to them and made them feel as if they didn't know anything and couldn't
 understand science and somebody who talked from their own experience now
 this is a real problem because science and its products today are very toxic in
 our world a lot of the problem that we have is the way that science and
 technology are going Albert Hofmann has is to me a model for what science can
 be he has operated from intuition he has operated from his own experience he is a
 good scientist he combines the best of experience of intuition and intellect
 that to me is a model for what science should be and he's come up with very
 good things
 and I want to make one other comment about him that I find another area in
 which I am very impressed by him and this I say as a medical doctor he ages
 terrifically well when I first met him years ago he presented himself as a very
 formal Swiss chemist but I noticed that he twinkled and I still see that twinkle
 about him and his the his presence is much younger than his chronological age
 that to me is very interesting I have a lot of old people in my medical
 practice a lot of people in their 70s and 80s and a lot of people ask me what
 is the secret of growing old well well the materialistic scientist says it's to
 choose your parents right no that it's all genes well I don't believe that
 because that's not my prejudice I look at the other side of things and I think
 that mental state and mental attitude are the key to that and there is
 something to me that I connect that fact of twinkling and youthfulness not
 equivalent to chronological age so I think in both of those areas he has a
 teacher for me and an inspiration for all of us and I'm delighted to have been
 asked here to talk about it
 [Applause]
 well Andy will be a tough back to follow but we have just the man but before I
 introduce him I some of you may wonder why Laura Huxley is not here tonight she
 had a crisis in her family that arose rather close to this date and so she was
 unable to be here tonight it's a great pity because she was to represent
 femininity and the goddess which is certainly a central concern for anyone
 who is sensitive to the psychedelic issue in fact one way of looking at what
 psychedelics do is they simply dissolve the male ego and allow a more natural
 constellation of the psyche to show through you're listening to the
 psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a
 time and who is this just the man to follow Andy while you may ask well my
 guess is that it's John Lilly but I actually haven't had a chance to listen
 to the next part of this conference yet and so can't say for absolute certainty
 that that's who it is what I can say for sure is that you'll find out in my next
 podcast and also I think we'll be hearing directly from dr. Hoffman
 himself now I'd be remiss if I didn't point out something that you already
 know but maybe you didn't think about when you heard dr. Andrew Weil just now
 say we meaning the psychedelic community we are a very small minority a very
 small minority and have no illusions about that as you know he made that
 statement in 1988 and I guess in the context of six and a half billion people
 on earth that may be so but I can promise you that there must be many
 millions of us today because just for this podcast alone there have been
 downloads from over a million unique IP addresses which may only translate into
 a few hundred thousand people but this is only one of many many podcasts that
 focus on the worldwide psychedelic community what wasn't expected in 1988
 is this thing we call the internet it's brought about more rapid change in this
 world over the past 20 years than the entire amount of change our species has
 experienced in hundreds of generations at least that's my humble opinion this
 is it in case you missed the memo by the way this is the big one the quantum
 change that Terence sometimes called the end of history but what I think may be
 more accurately called the beginning of the history of a global species of
 constantly interconnected communicating beings maybe it's even the awakening of
 the noosphere as Teal hard once proposed or of course we can still blow it and
 the tipper of the last tipping point may just be you so I'm gonna be really nice
 to you and encourage you to stay calm and keep on an even keel so that you can
 tip us in the right direction right now every single woman child and man on the
 planet stands to be a pivotal figure in their immediate surroundings which means
 that you and I had better take a little break right now maybe have a bag of vape
 turn on some good music and get up and dance for life is ultimately a dance you
 know the point isn't to get somewhere it is simply to dance to enjoy the dance of
 life who knows this could be your last life so why not make it enjoyable well
 that's a little more philosophic than this old carnival Barker should be
 waxing and so I'd better close today's podcast by reminding you once again that
 this and most of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are freely available
 for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons
 attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions
 about that just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the
 psychedelic salon web page which you can find at psychedelic salon org and if
 you're interested in the philosophy behind the salon well you can hear all
 about it in my novel the Genesis Generation which is available as an
 audiobook that you can download at Genesis Generation dot us and for now
 this is Lorenzo signing off from cyber delic space be well my friends
 you
 (upbeat music)
 (upbeat music)


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.62 sec
Decoding  : 2.97 sec
Transcribe: 3815.93 sec
Total Time: 3819.52 sec