[Music]
 Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the
 psychedelic salon. And with me today, well at least virtually, are some fellow
 salonners who send us some of their hard-earned cash to help offset some of
 the expenses here in the salon. And those fine people are Garth A. and Rob P., both
 of whose names you've heard several times here before in the salon. And also
 we received a really nice donation from Ben P., along with a very generous
 donation from my longtime friend Paul W. And I should point out that it was Paul
 who is one of my beautiful young gay friends who advised me to not let the
 establishment's prejudices keep me from naming this little project the
 psychedelic salon rather than the entheogen something or other. He based
 his advice on the fact that the gay community recaptured the use of the word
 queer and of course we know listening to Cat Williams and other great black
 comedians that the black community, at least within itself, has taken back the
 n-word. And as Paul said, if you just change the word they'll try to take that
 away from you too. So why not just put it out there where they have to deal with
 it. And I still think that was among the best advice I've received. So thank you
 very much Paul and also thank you Garth, Rob and Ben for helping to keep these
 podcast fires burning during these summer months when a large part of our
 audience is out in the world having all kinds of great experiences. And it turns
 out that even some of our non-saloner friends may also be getting a taste of
 the salon because here's what Ben P said when he sent in his donation. Lorenzo
 your podcasts keep me and many passengers company in my taxi company
 driving the night shift through the streets of Sydney. I have given up
 driving to teach yoga full-time now but would never have got through those
 grueling hours without you. Heartfelt thanks. Well hey it's nice of you to say
 that Ben but as we all know I'm just the carnival barker and all the actions in
 the tent. Where you and also I guess your taxi passengers now. You guys are all in
 the center ring. My only job is just to tell you there's something
 going on in there and then from there on it's up to you. And we're now just about
 to experience two more excellent talks that may give you something new to think
 about. One is by Dr. John Lilly and the other by Dr. Albert Hoffman. And we have
 Renaissance man Gary Eisenberg to thanks for sending these talks to me to play
 for you today. As you know from my last podcast the talks we're about to hear
 were recorded at an event that was also titled Albert Hoffman in America and it
 was to celebrate among other things the 50th anniversary of the first synthesis
 of LSD 25. Now one of our other fellow salonners Niles Clifton Smith was also
 there and here's what he posted in the comment sections of last week's podcast
 notes. My t-shirt from this event is worn to near transparency but still occupies a
 treasured place in my closet. Looking back this was one of the most formative
 events for my present life path. I thank you for all the talks you have posted
 here but for this one most of all, pro-noically Niles. Well Niles you and
 Gary were certainly at one of the most historic psychedelic lecture events of
 the last century and I'm very pleased that both of you are also with us here
 in the salon each week. It gives me a feeling of continuity in our community
 in some strange way. But enough of my chatter let's get back to the events at
 the Scottish Rite Temple in Los Angeles California. It was the night of November
 2nd 1988 and let's hear what the leading lights of psychedelic research at the
 time had to say about how things appeared back then a little over two
 decades ago now and see if we think that we've maybe made a little headway in the
 struggle to reinstate our sacred medicines back into the culture where
 they once held a very significant place in the lives of us humans. And speaking
 of natural I now want to introduce a man who it was always my great fear I might
 someday have to introduce. A man who is a legend in his own right. A man who speaks
 across the species line to the denizens of the deep sea and across the stellar
 barrier to the denizens of distant stars. Like myself an altar boy in his youth.
 A man who has given new meaning to the concept enfant terrible. We can say of
 him they threw the mold away before they made him. No I love to tease him I love
 to watch him the Obi-Wan Kenobi of psychedelic research John C. Lilly.
 [Applause]
 Thomas Fulbiscombe. E.T. Misa S. Go the Mass is over.
 My psychedelic experience has started about age seven when I had visions of
 God on his throne, angel choir and so on. I told a nun about this in the Catholic
 school I was attending and she said oh but only Saints have visions. And she
 abolished me being a Saint which was a good idea.
 It wasn't until about 1953 when I was at the National Institute of Mental Health
 and the LSD pushers got after me that I heard about LSD. So I read all the
 literature and I invented the isolation tank in 1954 and I was floating around
 the tank people wanted me to take LSD and experience what that was like in the
 tank. I said no I have to get a physiological baseline being a proper
 scientist. A physiological baseline on me as an observer. So I floated around for
 ten years in spite of the pushers on both coasts. In 1964 I finally decided
 well it's time to take it. So I came to California had two trips and then got
 Sidney Cohen to give me some and I went to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and
 floated in a isolation tank there. It was an eight-foot cube of seawater. I was scared
 stiff, absolutely terrified and I took injected 300 micrograms of Dr. Hoffman's
 elixir intramuscularly and floated in the tank and suddenly I was precipitated
 out to the farthest reaches of all the universes that exist. Well I didn't
 remain human at all. I stayed out there for about six hours and then I was
 squeezed back into the body that was lying in the tank and I cried. I couldn't
 stand it. Why should this happen? Why become so limited as being human? Well
 since then I've spent many years trying to be human and some women think I'm
 successful. Others do not. And I'm still trying at age 73 to get my feet on the
 ground and my torso in the bed. It's fun and all I can say is that anybody that
 uses the word drug ought to have their heart and their soul examined.
 There's no such thing as drugs. There's no such thing as illegal drugs. They're
 only chemicals. They can change the molecular configuration within the brain
 itself and hence change who you are and where you're going and where you've come
 from. This is a profound experience. I've written up as much of it as I can in
 books but I'm wondering if it could be published. Please speak louder. We can't turn the
 mic up any higher.
 He has a boss.
 Well the DEA ought to know about this meeting tonight and round you all up and put you in jail.
 The Drug Enforcement Agency is staffed by lawyers and ex-judges and so on and I
 don't think they know what the score is. Somebody said on TV the other day the
 drug problem ought to be turned over to the Surgeon General and taken away from
 the Attorney General. I think that the laws ought to be changed in the light of new
 new knowledge of new views such as all of you have experienced and we ought to
 pressure these people to get educated in what it is to take LSD, what it is to
 take cocaine and so on. None of these substances have been treated as the way
 a proper researcher would treat them working on himself. I was brought up by a
 student of JBS Halden who laid down to his students that if you're going to do
 experiments on any human subject you must be your first subject. So I went
 through various things like explosive decompression and so on and I started my
 LSD work alone and I've continued my work with ketamine alone. The isolation
 tank is a marvelous place for the scientific observer to look at the chaos
 within himself and not attribute it to something else. However I wish to point
 out also that I've experienced intelligence as far greater than mine or
 any human and I call them the Earth Coincidence Control Office, ECCO, E-C-C-O.
 They're very profound and they're monkeying around with everybody and me
 especially and taught me many many things whether I like it or not. For
 example, when I take ketamine, I was half taking ketamine in the past, they take
 charge and I went to the UCLA Medical Library and read up on the
 psychotherapeutic use of ketamine, a psychedelic anesthetic and there's a
 uranium paper, an iranium paper in which they treated a hundred subjects in the
 hospital and they all got out of the hospital with one treatment. They used what was
 called anxiety provocation. They'd give the person ketamine and then scare them to death.
 And of course they abandoned their neurosis, their psychosis or whatever.
 Well I read that one afternoon, came home and lay down on a mattress in my living
 room and took 200 milligrams of ketamine, which is a fairly large dose and
 suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office precipitated me into the year 3000
 and they ruined my penis by bloodless methods and handed it to me.
 Well I screamed in terror and my wife Tony came in from our bedroom and said, "Oh it's still
 attached, look."
 So I looked up at the ceiling and I said, "Who's in charge up there? A bunch of
 psychotic kids?" Nancy came back, "No, you were over at UCLA reading about
 anxiety provocation in order to cure one of the unconscious conflict. That was
 your unconscious conflict and we brought it up for you."
 Well I don't know why this isn't being used in psychotherapy the way Yellow
 Steve has been. I suspect it's because psychotherapists don't like to be scared
 to death. Or don't like to see people being very badly frightened. And they
 also don't like to see them get well because then they lose their income.
 I learned long ago that one is a psychotherapist until one is cured of
 one's own diseases. I'm still not cured.
 Well I must say I want to tell you a story that I told this afternoon about me
 and Albert Hoffman. I first met him in 1977 at the University of California
 Santa Cruz. He gave a night lecture and the students cheered everything he said
 including when he said, "I'm not a guru, I'm a Swiss chemist." After his talk he
 had a reception and with my knees shaking and sweat breaking out of my
 brow I walked through the line and reached out and to shake his hand I said,
 "I'm John Lilly." He grabbed my hand and both of his and he said, "You are? I just
 finished 'The End of the Cyclone' and our experiences were very parallel." And I thought
 to myself, "God bless it, I wish he had written that up in 1943 and we'd save us a lot of trouble."
 [applause]
 Now we know that if you've been doing your homework then on average this group
 has slightly weaker kidneys than the normal American population. So we are
 going to call a 20-minute intermission and then we'll have a musical interlude
 and then Dr. Hoffman's keynote address for the evening. Will the volunteers who
 are helping with the event please come up to the stage and we'll meet back here
 everybody in 20 minutes.
 At this time I'd like to turn it over to Terrence McKenna again who's going to
 encourage you to donate freely to our foundation. So here's Terrence.
 [applause]
 And thank you all very much for being here tonight.
 [applause]
 Oscar.
 Excuse me, I want to introduce very briefly Oscar Janiger. I got out of order here.
 [applause]
 And I'd like to give him a very, very warm welcome.
 [applause]
 He's been a guiding spirit in our efforts to make this foundation a reality. Oscar.
 [applause]
 Thank you very much. I've been practicing the last hour to twinkle.
 [laughter]
 Since I heard Andy Weil. I don't know how successful I am but maybe you and
 Chuck Rose will let me know later.
 [applause]
 This is the culmination of a long journey for me which began in April of 1954
 when I first had my encounter as many of you have with these extraordinary medicines.
 And I did many years of research, about ten years, and then as we put it, the
 troubles began. Not the troubles for everybody but for some of the researchers.
 So we could not simply continue the work that we did before. Those following
 years are too well known to bear any repetition for those of you who lived
 through it. And what we have now is a memory in the general public of all of
 the evils and the problems of these drugs that accrued from its use at that time,
 illegal use of LSD. Really very little is known about the work that was done
 prior to that time by a lot of very serious people who were working very hard
 to understand this simply extraordinary substance. And we would like to be able
 to bring that forth and to let people know and pierce the obfuscations and the
 fogs of what happened in the latter years and begin to see what the basis for
 further research on LSD might really entail. And in order to do that, we have
 to collect all that material and put it together and codify it and make it
 available to the public and to researchers and investigators. And also,
 by the way, the future historians who I would like to believe will find this a
 remarkable watershed time in the history of the study of consciousness. So in
 order to do this, we've gotten a number of people together and quite
 remarkably so because in a movement this potent, this cultural movement that was
 so stirring, we still have a good number of people who were part of the original
 group. That's quite unusual in this compression of cultural time. And so what
 we would like to do is collect all this, have it available, and really give people
 some understanding and some insight and education into the use of these
 materials. And to me, that would be the greatest effort that we can make to
 legitimately bring this back and to use it properly as we would all like to do.
 In order to do that, we sincerely need your help. And your response tonight
 indicates that there is a good deal of enthusiasm and interest in doing this.
 But remember, we have to have education. We have to have people know what this
 drug has done and how we have looked at it and the care we've given to try to
 understand it. And also I might add that probably the street laboratory was not
 an entire chaos. It was probably a good amount of data that could be collected
 on personal accounts and things that happened over those years. We'd like to
 bring those in and also review those as well. Keep in mind that when we talk of
 consciousness and however you want to interpret that, the organization will
 also look at all the other methods. We're not focused on LSD alone. LSD was a
 tool that happened to be placed in our hands fortuitously at this time. So we
 want to use that, the organization as an umbrella for all of these things that
 are going on and give a further impetus to these studies. We need your help and
 Terence is going to tell you how we can get it. Thank you very much.
 Well I think you can probably tell for yourselves when you listen to Os Janneger
 talk that you're listening to a man discuss his dream. Os mentioned to me
 several years ago that he had the notion for an archive of psychedelic material
 and took me on a tour of his house to look at the filing cabinets, the packing
 boxes filled with his own immense collection of material relating to
 creativity and LSD. And as we surveyed his library, we talked of the many other
 libraries that researchers like Wasson and Hoffman have gathered together over
 the years. This is a priceless informational research repository. One of
 the largest libraries devoted to this kind of material is the Fitzhugh-Ludlow
 Library, which currently is in storage in a youth store in Santa Rosa. Now this
 is no place for these kind of collections to languish. They should be available to
 the new generation of graduate students, historians, social commentators who will
 rescue psychedelics from the opprobrium that was heaped upon them by a hysterical
 government in a hysterical era. Now thankfully, let us hope, behind us, Os is
 an extremely modest man, always willing to let somebody else stand in the
 spotlight. Well, you know, it's an old saying that the way to get things done is
 to not care about who gets the credit. So tonight when I was urging him to stand
 before you, I said, "Os, you just have to let the people of this town have an
 opportunity to show you how much they love you." Well, an Irishman giving advice
 to a Jewish psychotherapist doesn't get very far. But I want to join with you in
 saluting Oscar Jannecker, a pioneer and a giant. We have to move along here. It's a
 school night for some of us. I have a couple of announcements. Tonight's
 program will be heard tomorrow night at midnight on the most intellectually far
 reaching and deep voice in the media, Roy of Hollywood Show, What's Happening on
 KPFK. Roy and Diane are here tonight. There they are.
 [Applause]
 Another example of modest, self-effacing people who know how to get things done
 and who have an enormous impact on what gets thought in this town. I've also been
 asked to say that those of you who are suffering with the heat, the air
 conditioning has failed. It isn't your imagination. And for that, we apologize.
 It must be something about Switzerland. I don't know how many of you know who
 Brother Klaus is, probably not more than a half a dozen. Carl Jung wrote about the
 visions of Brother Klaus. Carl Jung was another Swisser with a deep love of
 country. Paracelsus, the great 16th century alchemist, was born in
 Switzerland. So this tiny country with a tradition of human freedom and a
 tradition of deep involvement with spiritual transformation has given us in
 the 20th century, in the late 20th century, the heir to Carl Jung, the heir
 to Paracelsus, the heir to Brother Klaus. Albert Hoffman, alchemist,
 philosopher, chemist, human being. A man of whom it might be said, as was said of
 Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the 16th century, they brought astronomy of age.
 What the telescope was to astronomy in the 16th century, the psychedelic
 compounds that Dr. Hoffman has discovered could be, should be, to 20th century
 psychology. Psychology without psychedelics is pissing into the wind.
 And I think we've had quite enough of it. It's time for a deep, serious
 revisioning of what notions like human potential, consciousness expansion,
 contact with the world soul, time for a deep revisioning of what these concepts
 can mean for us. You know, it was a great French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who
 said, "There are no political solutions, only technological ones. The rest is
 propaganda." And if you include in the definition of technology a revivifying
 of the ancient technology of shamanic ecstasy through the use of psychedelic
 compounds, then I think you will have to agree, and Andy hinted at this, we are not
 going to save the monkey unless we can shed the monkey. And the greatest
 impetus, the greatest inspiration to the expression of our higher selves comes in
 the confrontation with psyche that occurs in the psychedelic experience.
 Ladies and gentlemen, meet the man who made the 20th century that we all know
 can be a model for all future time. Here from Basel, Switzerland, Dr. Albert
 Hoffman, the father of psilocybin and LSD.
 [Applause]
 I am deeply impressed by the warm reception which I received here in
 California. I thank you so much.
 [Applause]
 I am sorry I must apologize that I must rely my talk on my paper, speaking a
 foreign language. The announced topic of this meeting embarrasses me to some
 extent. First, because it puts me too much in the center of the event, the
 preparation of a library dedicated to preserve and make available the legacy of
 consciousness research of the last 50 years. Through this research I made only a
 substantial contribution, substantial in the true sense of this word, namely in the
 form of two substances, which became influential. Second, I am embarrassed
 because you may expect from me a survey of 50 years of research in consciousness,
 but this research is a domain of psychologists, psychiatrists and
 philosophers. Being a chemist, I am not competent to present such a survey. What
 I can tell you are only my personal experiences and ideas. Precisely 50 years
 ago, in 1938, I synthesized a substance which had an, at that time, unexpected
 influence on my life and which later influenced and changed the life of many
 others. I mean D-glyceric acid, D-italamide, known as LSD-25 or just LSD. Its
 preparation and the discovery of its astonishing effects on the psyche have
 been described and published already so many times that they need not be repeated
 here. And in addition, Dr. Strickner has here presented to you the whole story
 this evening. I am often asked what has made the deepest impression upon me in
 my LSD experiments and whether I have arrived at new understandings through
 these experiences. Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I
 attained as a fundamental understanding from all my LSD experiences that what one
 commonly takes as the reality by no means signifies something fixed, but rather
 something that is ambiguous. That there is not only one, but there are many
 realities, each compromising a different consciousness of the ego.
 One can arrive at these insights through scientific reflection. The problem of
 reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy.
 There is, however, a fundamental distinction whether one approaches the
 problem of reality rationally or if one obtudes upon this problem emotionally
 through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experience was therefore
 so deeply moving and alarming because everyday reality, which had until then
 been considered to be the only one reality, dissolved and the unfamiliar ego
 experienced another unfamiliar reality. Another problem also appeared. That
 concerning the innermost self, which itself, unknownst, was able to record these
 external and internal transformations, how could such strange changes in the
 experience of reality be explained? Evidently, the outer, objective, material
 world did not change during the time I was under the influence of LSD.
 Therefore, something inside me, in the experiencing subject, must have been
 altered. These reflections led me to conceive reality as the product of a
 transmitter, the material, exterior world, and the receiver, our consciousness,
 the inner, spiritual center of a human individual. In order to describe the
 mechanism by which reality comes into being through the interaction of these
 two factors, transmitter and receiver, one can use the makeover of TV
 broadcasting. Evidently, both transmitter and receiver are needed to produce
 TV picture. If either of one is lacking, the TV screen will remain blank and
 there will be no sound. Correspondingly, if only the material world existed
 without conscious humans, or vice versa, no human reality would exist.
 Let us now examine what we know about what comprises human reality, still using
 the transmitter-receiver metaphor. First, what is the fundamental difference
 between transmitter and receiver? Whereas there is only one transmitter,
 one outer material world, there are as many receivers as there are human beings.
 And whereas the outer material world exists objectively, human consciousness
 is a subjective spiritual entity. All that we know objectively about the
 exterior world, about the transmitter, has been revealed by a scientific
 research. All that can be discerned objectively in the exterior world is
 matter and energy. Matter occurring in innumerable inorganic forms, the stars,
 the earth, with its oceans and mountains, with its organisms of the plant and
 animal kingdoms, with the products of human creativity, sickness, objects of
 our daily life and of arts, we are surrounded with matter and are matter
 ourselves with our bodily existence. The science which is involved with
 investigation of matter is chemistry. The other component of the outer world
 which can be objectified is energy, energy occurring as radiation, heat
 and kinetic energy, so much for the transmitter. Now, what do we know
 about the receiver, about human consciousness? Consciousness defies
 scientific definition, for it is what I need to contemplate what consciousness
 is. Our inability to grasp the very nature of consciousness can be
 illustrated by this metaphor. You can't pull yourself into the air by
 tugging on your own head. All attempts to define consciousness are
 pathological. Consciousness can only be described as the receptive and
 creative spiritual center of the ego, as the very core of what we call "I".
 Consciousness remains a mystery, the very central mystery of our existence.
 This becomes even more evident if we examine its role as receiver in the
 production of reality. The antennae of the human receiver are formed by
 our five sensory organs. The antennae for optical images, the eye, is
 capable of receiving electromagnetic waves and projecting a picture onto
 the retina that coincides with the object from which those waves emanate.
 It is important to realize that the human eye can only receive a very
 small band of the immeasurable spectrum of electromagnetic waves
 traveling through the universe, namely only waves measuring 0.4 to 0.7
 thousandth millimeter. Within this small section, our eyes and the
 receiver, our consciousness, are capable of differentiating between
 different wavelengths and recording them as different colors.
 In connection with our reflections on reality, it is important to note that
 colors do not exist in the exterior world. Most people are not aware of
 this basic fact, even though it can be looked at in every textbook on
 physiology. All that actually, objectively, exists in the outer world
 is matter, matter transmitting energy, transmitting electromagnetic
 oscillations of varying wavelength. If an object reflects or transmits
 electromagnetic waves with a length of 0.4 thousandth of a millimeter,
 say we say that it is blue, if it transmits waves with a length of 0.7
 thousandth of a millimeter, we describe the object as being red.
 This means that the perception of color is a purely psychological and
 subjective event taking place in the inner space of an individual.
 The brightly colored world as we see it does not exist on the outside.
 It exists only on the screen inside every individual, of every individual.
 Regarding the acoustic world, there is a similar relationship between
 transmitter and receiver. The antenna for acoustic signals, the ear,
 displays a similar limited breadth of reception in its function as part
 of the receiver. Unlike colors, sounds do not exist objectively.
 What does exist objectively are, once again, waves, waves like
 compressions and expansions of the air, which are received by the ear,
 registered by the tympanic membrane, and transformed into the sensation
 of sound in the hearing center of the brain. Also there are aspects of
 reality which are made accessible by the remaining three senses,
 source of taste, smell and touch are created by the interaction of
 transmitters in the outer world and receivers in the inner world.
 Just like sound and colors, touch, smell and taste don't exist objectively.
 They too represent purely subjective phenomena occurring only in the
 inner space of individual humans. The metaphor of reality as the product
 of transmitter and receiver clearly illustrates that the seemingly
 objective picture of the world surrounding us, that which we call
 reality, is actually a subjective picture. This basic fact signifies
 that the screen is not outside but inside of every human being.
 We all carry inside our own personal image of reality, created by our
 own private receiver. Understanding reality as a product of
 transmitter and receiver takes on an especially important meaning
 which could existentially alter our daily life when we consider the
 part that each receiver, each individual human, plays in the role of
 the formation of reality. We become fully aware of the world-creating
 power vested in every human being. Our understanding makes us aware
 of the fact that each individual is the creator of his or her own world.
 For it is in each individual mind and only there that the world and
 the abundance of life it contains that the stars and the sky become
 human reality. Our real, true freedom and responsibility is formed
 in our ability to create our own individual world. Once I have
 recognized what part of reality is objectively on the outside and
 what is subjectively taking place within myself, then I am more aware
 of what I can change in my life. There I have a choice and thus what
 I am responsible for. Conversely, I become aware of what is beyond
 my willpower and has to be accepted as an unalterable fact.
 This clarification of my potential and my responsibility can be of
 invaluable help. I have the ability to choose what I want to receive
 from the endless infinite program of the great transmitter from creation.
 That means that I can let those aspects of creation of the cosmos that
 make me happy enter into my consciousness and thus imbue them with reality.
 Or I can let in other aspects, those that depress me. It is I who
 creates the bright and the dark picture of the world. It is I who
 invests the objects that are only shaped matter in the outer world,
 not only with their color, but with my affection and my love,
 also with their meaning. This applies not only to my inanimate
 surroundings, but also to the living beings, to the plants, the animals
 and to my fellow humans. With this insight, the full creative power
 of love becomes evident. Just as I am the receiver for messages
 from my fellow man, I am in turn a transmitter for him. Since I am
 materially located in his outer world, I can only convey my messages,
 my desires, even if they are purely spiritual, an idea, or my love,
 only through that what characterizes the transmitter, namely via
 matter and energy, an understanding expressed by a dance or a light touch.
 Even this can only be conveyed by material fingers, material eyes,
 by the material bodies of a learning couple. This shows that
 communication would not be possible without matter and energy.
 The transmitter-receiver metaphor for reality reveals another basic
 fact, the fact that reality is not a fixed state, rather it is the
 result of a continuous input of material and energetic signals from
 the outer world and their continuous decoding and transformation
 into inner conscious experience. This demonstrates that reality
 is a dynamic process, being created anew at each moment. Actual
 reality exists in the here and now, in the moment. This explains
 why a child living in the given moment much more extensively than
 an adult perceives a real image of the world. It lives in a world
 permeated with more reality, more truth, than that of the adult.
 To experience true reality in the moment is one of the main concerns
 of mysticism. That is where childlike mystical experience meets.
 If reality were not the result of continuous changes but a stationary
 condition, there would not be no experience of the moment, there
 would not be even any time. Since the sensation of time is only
 possible through the perception of change, the dynamic character of
 reality creates time. The transmitter-receiver concept of reality
 also imparts an insight into the essence of time. This metaphor of
 reality would appear to correspond to a dualistic concept of the
 world, external space, internal space, objective transmitter,
 subjective receiver. But reality, everyday reality, can be
 experienced and imagined only as a totality of transmitter and
 receiver. There would be no picture or sound on the TV screen if
 either one were missing. This example makes it evident that
 transmitter and receiver are nothing other than constructs of our
 intellect, useful, valuable, even necessary means for a rational
 understanding of the mechanisms by which human reality exists.
 Dualism is but a construct of our intelligence, which leads us to
 believe that the so-called objective exterior world stands in
 opposition to our inner subjective spiritual world. The failure to
 grasp that there is no dualism is one of the main reasons, if not
 the main reason, for the tragic, catastrophic developments in our
 world. This dualistic worldview, so dominant in Western culture
 today, has its roots in Greek rhetorographic philosophy and in the
 Judeo-Christian belief "make the earth your servant." The experience
 of the world as matter, as an object to which man stands opposed,
 provides the philosophical basis for the development of modern
 natural sciences and technology. With this science and technology,
 man has changed the world, has subdued nature, its wealth has been
 exploited in a manner that may be characterized as plundering, and
 the sublime accomplishment of technological civilization, the
 comfort of Western industrial society, stands face to face with the
 catastrophic destruction of the environment. Our objective
 intellect has progressed even to the heart of the matter, to the
 nucleus of the atom and its licking, and has unleashed energies
 that threaten all life on our planet. This misuse of this knowledge
 could not have emerged from a consciousness of reality in which
 human beings perceive themselves as an integral part of living
 nature and the universe. All of today's attempts to make amends for
 the damage by adopting environmentally protective measures will
 remain futile or superficial touchwork if no change of the dualistic
 worldview ensues until it is replaced by an existential experience
 of a deeper reality. The experience of such an all-encompassing
 reality is impeded in an environment rendered dead by human hands,
 such as we find in our great cities and industrial districts.
 Here the contrast between self and outer world becomes especially
 evident. It is these sensations that impress themselves on everyday
 consciousness in Western industrial society and everywhere where
 technological civilization extends. It is also these morbid sensations
 that strongly influence modern art and literature. In a natural
 environment there is less danger that a split reality experience will
 arise. In fields and forests and in the animal world shelters are in,
 indeed in every garden a reality is perceptible that is infinitely more
 real, bolder, deeper and more wondrous than everything made by man,
 a reality that will endure long after the inanimate mechanical and
 concrete world has vanished, become rusted and fallen into ruin.
 In the sprouting, growth, blooming, fruiting, death and regeneration
 of plants, in their relationship with the sun, whose light they are
 able to convert into chemically bound energy in the form of organic
 compounds out of which all that lives on our earth is built, in the
 being of plants, the mysterious, inexhaustible, eternal life energy
 is evident, the same that has brought us forth and takes us back into
 its swamp and in which we are sheltered and united with all living
 things. We are not leading to a sentimental enthusiasm for nature,
 to "proto-valle-nature" in Chacrusso's sense, that romantic movement
 which sought the idyllic in nature, which can also be understood as a
 reaction to human's kind feeling of separation from nature.
 What is needed today is the fundamental existential experience of the
 oneness of all living things, of an all-encompassing reality.
 [applause]
 But this happens less and less as the primordial flora and fauna of
 the earth must yield to a dead technological environment.
 The experience of reality as the evil opposed to the outer world had
 already begun to form itself during Greek antiquity, as I mentioned
 before. No doubt at that time people already knew the suffering
 connected with the dualistic consciousness of reality.
 The Greek genius tried to cure this disease by supplementing the
 objective Apollonian worldview with the Dionysian world of experience
 in which the split was abolished in ecstatic inebriation.
 It is remarkable what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
 wrote about this in his book "Die Geburts der Tragönie" - "The Birth of Tragedy".
 We can read there, "It is either through the influence of narcotic potions
 of which all primitive peoples and races speak in hymns, or through the
 powerful approach of spring, penetrating with joy all of nature, that
 so Dionysian stirrings arise, which in their intensification leads the
 individual to forget himself completely. Not only does the bond between
 man and man become to be forged once again by the magic of the Dionysian
 rite, but alienated, hostile and subjugated nature again celebrates
 her reconciliation, it is her prodigal son with man." So far, Nietzsche.
 The Dionysian cult was closely connected with the mysteries of Eleusis,
 the most important mysteries of the antique world, which were celebrated
 annually in the fall over a span of about two thousand years.
 These mysteries were established by the goddess of agriculture and grain,
 Demeter, as thanks for the recovery of her daughter Persephone, whom Hades,
 the god of the underworld, had abducted. A first offering of thanks was the
 ear of grain, which was presented to Tryptolemus, the first high priest of
 Eleusis. The cultivation of grain was then disseminated of the whole world.
 Persephone, however, was not allowed to always remain with her mother.
 She had to return for a part of the year to the underworld. During this time
 it was winter on earth. The plants died and withdrew into the ground, only to
 awaken to new life early in the year with Persephone's journey back to earth.
 The myth of Demeter, Persephone and Hades formed, however, only the external
 framework for the events of the mysteries. The climax of the ceremonies, which
 began with the procession from Athens to Eleusis, lasting several days, was a
 concluding ceremony of initiation. The initiates were forbidden by penalty of
 death to divulge what they had learned and beheld its innermost holiest chamber
 of the temple, the telestereum. Not one of the multitude that were initiated
 ever divulged. Pausanias, Plato, Roman emperors like Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius,
 the many others known figures of antiquity were part to this initiation.
 It must have been an illumination, a visionary glimpse of a deeper reality, an
 insight into the true basis of the universe. We can deduce this from the
 initiates' own statements about the value and the importance of the vision.
 For example, it is reported in Homeric hymn, "Blissful is among men on earth
 who has beheld that. He who has not been initiated into the holy mysteries
 remains a corpse in gloomy darkness." Pindar speaks of the Eleusian
 benediction with the following words, "Blissful is he who, after having beheld
 this, enters on the way beneath the earth. He knows the end of life as well as its
 divinely granted beginning." Cicero, also a famous initiate, said about the
 splendor that fell upon his life from Eleusis, "Not only have we received the
 reason there that we may live in joy, but also besides that we may die with
 better hopes." How could the mythological representation of such an obvious
 occurrence, which runs its course annually before our eyes, the seed grain
 that is dropped into the earth, dies there, prove to be such a deep, comforting
 experience as that attested by the cited reports? It is traditional knowledge
 that the initiates were furnished with a potion, the kykeon, for the final
 ceremony. It is also known that barley extract and mint were ingredients of
 the kykeon. Scholars of mythology, like Carl Kereni, are of the opinion that the
 kykeon was mixed with a hallucinogenic drug. I was associated with Kereni in the
 sixties, doing research on this mysterious potion, an investigation as to what
 kind of hallucinogen could have been contained in the kykeon. A reference of
 this collaboration is made in Kereni's book, Eleusis, which was published in
 1977 in New York. And it is from that text that the preceding statements on the
 Eleusis mysteries were taken. Later in the seventies, I was again engaged in
 the investigation of the hallucinogen in the kykeon. This time I worked in
 collaboration with Gordon Bosson, the famous ethnomycologist with whom I had
 worked in the research of Mexican plants, the psilocybin mushroom, and Carl Röck,
 a professor at Boston University who was a classical scholar specialized in
 Greek ethnobotany. We published the results of our studies in the book
 entitled The Road to Eleusis, which was published in 1978. In that publication,
 we put forth the hypothesis that the kykeon's effect could have been due to an
 LSD-like preparation of ergot. From investigations in the Sandox Research
 Laboratories on all the various species of ergot fungus, I knew that ergot
 growing on the wild grass paspalum distichum, which is widespread in the
 Mediterranean region, contains the same alkaloids that we had found in the
 ancient Mexican drug oloduquine, namely lysergic acid amide and lysergic acid
 hydroxyamide, closely related to lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. The
 high priest of Eleusis had access to this hallucinogen just in front of the
 temple. He just had to collect the infected grains of paspalum distichum,
 grow them there, grind them, and put the powder into the kykeon in order to have
 a perfect hallucinogenic potion. If they really did so, of course, must remain a
 hypothesis, but a hypothesis with a high degree of probability. And Demeter was
 the goddess of grain. The cultural and historical meaning of the mysteries of
 Eleusis, their influence on European intellectual and spiritual history, can
 scarcely be overestimated. The hallucinogen of the kykeon may link these
 mysteries with the role of LSD in our time. What we urgently need now is
 evidently the same as was already needed during antiquity, namely to be freed
 from an experience of reality in which the individual feels himself to be
 separate from the outer world. We need to be healed from a dualism which had and
 still has such catastrophic consequences as expounded in the preceding
 reflections. Insights into the essence of reality, which I tried to provide using
 the transmit-receiver metaphor, could help us to overcome this dualistic worldview.
 However, insights that are solely the result of rational reflections are not
 effective enough to become decisive factors in our lives. Only when accompanied
 by an existential emotional experience do they grow strong enough to be able to
 influence an older overview of life. Such an emotional confirmation of an insight
 of the truth can be achieved through meditation. I see the true importance of
 LSD, the kykeon of our time, in its ability to provide a pharmacological aid
 to meditation aimed at the experience of a deeper, all-encompassing reality, a
 reality in which the outer material and the inner spiritual worlds, transmitter
 and receiver, are experienced as one.
 I thank you for your attention.
 [Applause]
 [Music]
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their
 lives one thought at a time.
 Well, what can I say after that, other than I think that I'll go back yet one
 more time and re-listen to Dr. Hoffman's words of wisdom. Just now on my second
 lesson I heard him say a couple of things that I missed the first time, because
 probably I was thinking about what he just said and didn't keep up with the
 next thought he was sending our way. I think there may be a lot more in this
 talk than a single listen can provide. Also, I'd hoped to post a picture of the
 flyer that was used for this event, but the only place I could find that had a
 copy was in the Allen Ginsberg papers at Stanford, where flat box six, folder two
 allegedly holds a poster that's labeled "Albert Hoffman in America, poster 1988,
 October 2nd." So now we have yet another date, October 2nd. We've had November
 2nd, November 4th, and in a minute I'll tell you yet one more date. So anyway, if
 you happen to be in the Stanford neighborhood, maybe you can take a look
 for yourself someday and let us know what it looks like. Also, there was one other
 recording that Gary sent me, but I'm not going to play it here in the salon
 because I'm not quite sure about the copyright on it. But what it is, is a
 recording of a radio interview that Dr. Hoffman gave on KCRW, I think a day or so
 before the talk we just heard. At least I think it was recorded in November,
 although the file name on it says April 1988. So all we know for sure is all these
 talks took place in '88 sometime. But in any event, it's really an interesting
 recording because Dr. Hoffman is heard answering questions from the interviewer
 without having to read his lecture notes. So he's much more spontaneous and just
 sounds great. So should you want to listen to it, I've posted it with the program
 notes for this podcast and you can download it directly from there if you
 want to hear it. I'll leave it up there until somebody says I can't have it and
 have to take it down. Well, that's going to have to do it for today, so I'll close
 today's podcast again by reminding you 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-A-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 webpage, which you can
 find at psychedelicsalon.org. And if you're interested in the philosophy behind
 the salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is
 available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us. And for
 now, this is Lorenzo signing off from psychedelic space. Be well, my friends.
 [music]


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