Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends
PROGRAM NOTES:
Today’s podcast features the next installment of the workshop that Bruce Damer and Lorenzo led at the Esalen Institute in June of 2012. The majority of this program features comments by some of the workshop’s participants who bring up topics that include:
-Heroic doses
-Body load with psychedelics
-Techniques for using psychedelics
-What exactly is the psychedelic state
-The perfect answer when a cop asks, “Were are you at, buddy?”
-The re-introduction of psychedelics to our species
-How do we tell the psychedelic story
-The Occupy Movement and the banking system
-The need for a parallel system of money
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Yes Lorenzo, your podcast is great. due to the economic shenanigans( i won’t call it a crisis) i always feel pangs of guilt when you mention contributors, but the time is soon for a purchase or a donation. your comments about the money hit me in my feral peeve, and there is a solution, already introduced in congress. it’s H.R.2990, Dennis’s N.E.E.D Act, which is based on the American Monetary Act, which is developed by the American Monetary Institute, and it’s founder Stephen Zarlenga ( who has a seminar every Sept. in chicago, and has many really interesting speakers and papers, and panels). I love the fact that you tie in with occupy, keep up the good work, and i’ll keep trying to improve my mind, one thought at a time.
Hey Lorenzo,
First off, I have to thank you for all your efforts. My day job consists of driving around for hours making deliveries, and there’s no way I could make it without your podcast. I’ve literally logged 100’s of hours of the psychedelic salon over the past year, and I find your content peerless in mind stimulation. Truly psychedelic.
This is my first time on this site, and I simply could no longer resist the urge to chime in on the liberty/political/monetary side of things. During my time driving around, I’ve also spent hours educating myself in ethics and free-market Austrian economics. I’ve become utterly and rationally convinced that the psychedelic community, for the sake of the future of mankind, must universally adopt and work towards a Voluntaryist society – the belief that voluntary interaction is the only moral form of interaction. Just like we learned in kindergarten – no hitting, no stealing…and yet as adults, we have literally institutionalized hitting and stealing in the form of government. Not only must we outgrow the delusion that government is necessary for ethical reasons, but economically, a society free of institutions of coercion (government) will always produce the wealthiest and healthiest lives for the most people.
I am far from the best voice to convey these vital truths that we all must know, but I come here to URGE you to consider reviewing Austrian economics, and watching the host of the most popular philosophical podcast in the world, Stefan Molyneux, explain the ideas of the Non-Aggression Principle, Voluntaryism, Peaceful Parenting, but more than anything, the rock-solid rational reasoning of why we must oppose the idea of Government, not just in its current form, but in any form.
I know you enjoy reading books, for Austrian economics please consider reading:
Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt – it will forever change your worldview (http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0930073193)
But most of all, please watch this one Stefan Molyneux video of an interview he gave on Red Ice Podcast providing an overview of liberty, anarchy, and philosophy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEelxIu3vrA
We must understand economics. We must understand ethics. We must know the true ramifications of our political endeavors.
ps. Ron Paul, author of the book End The Fed, explains why forms of money/currency must be allowed to compete in a free market, free of government coercion, not only for economic reasons, but for moral reasons. You can be arrested today for using gold and silver as money instead of the US Dollar. People should be free, among other things, to transact in whatever voluntary way they choose, and the market will decide which currency or money is the best.
Thanks for this Lorenzo – your closing remarks really touched me. I know you think the real show’s in the tent (and to be honest I sometimes skip over your intros!) but with this podcast it was your comments during and particularly at the end that have made my day.
On food – the other big issue is land. Most people nowadays spend most of their working life simply paying for the right to occupy a certain plot of dirt or even a platform in a highrise. That, to me, is the biggest nonsense.
On slavery … just so happened to be thinking about this last night and found this clip from the ever-incisive Chomsky: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oztdRo9GLLk .
from Food Of The Gods, by Terence McKenna:
In the case of Stropharia cubensis in Africa, a gradual trivialization scenario is reasonable: With changes in climate, frequent, if not continual, low levels of mushroom ingestion gradually gave way to use that was merely seasonal. Conscious ceremonial use of mushrooms must have been at it’s apex during this seasonal availability phase, which may have lasted thousands of years. Gradually, as mushrooms and mushroom ecologies grew more rare, there may have been efforts to preserve mushrooms by drying and preserving them in honey. As honey easily ferments into an alcoholic intoxicant, it is possible that over time, a practice of mixing fewer and fewer mushrooms in more and more honey may have encouraged replacement of the mushroom cult with a cult of mead. No greater shift of social values is possible to imagine than that which would accompany the gradual changeover of a psilocybin cult to an alcohol cult.
…just sayin’…
—
& while here, i’ll add this, i found i didn’t care for bluelight’s forum too much on first impression. lots of little things but the biggest was the sudden spam in my heretofore virgin email addy after registering with them. coincidental perhaps but i don’t believe so. sigh.
There’s smth about new money sys paradigm (or lost archaic):
* Bitcoin is a new alt currency which is undergoing case testing right now…
* a concept of dulaistic money: one is under masculine archetype (the current one) of domination and central power and the other is feminine type (or lost archetype which is to be revoked)
More about this in the excellent book:
http://tinyurl.com/c47ydok
Smoking cannabis slowly has tended to make the high smoother. And deeper. I have had the same experience with alcohol. Drinking high quality alcohol slowly is really a nice form of intoxication. My friend who does not do any sort of psychedelics but is an expert bar tender agrees with me that drinking alcohol is an art form. If you drink it right, you will NOT get a hang over the next day. I think perhaps it is the same with psychedelics.
I have to say that these podcasts have constantly blown my mind for a long time now. And while there have been some things I’m not into here (very rarely), the overall vibe is so amazing that I will still give those things an honest listen with an open mind. All the information here is valuable!!
Thanks for the work, Lorenzo!
forum? did i want forums? forums i found.
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/links/
gobs.
e-zines too.
(under which Matrix Masters can be found.)
http://www.spiritplants.org/forums/index.php
i’d already been a habitual listener to http://www.spiritplantsradio.com/ for a while, thanks to your linking to them at right.
going to their radio blog, http://spiritplantsradioblog.blogspot.com/ i see it linked up top of the link list as the radio site’s forum even, a link i’d blithely missed in the past.
i use coolplayer to listen to your podcasts, and for spirit plants radio too, via a playlist file. i don’t know where i snagged the pls file from but for anybody who wants it, here’s the content:
[playlist]
numberofentries=1
File1=http://173.193.9.73:8022
Title1=SpiritPlants Radio: Turn on. Tune in!
Length1=-1
version=2
…save that as spr.pls and there you are.
http://www.shaman-australis.com/forum/
http://www.bluelight.ru/vb/
and on. each chockful of posts.
did i want forums? forums i found.
Lozo!
right around the 22:00 mark… completely blows me away.
you articulate it all so well, the cognitive liberty aspect in particular, and it’s responsibility. babes in the woods indeed.
freethinker as pariah, born debt slaves, yes. all that. thank you. for all that, @13:30, the remarks on Fear are apt. that commenter is spot on. remarks on Fear are, of course, always appropriate, and especially in a psychedelic context, mind manifesting state that it is, yes.
re: isolation. depending completely on the [current] internet to maintain a personally pertinent connection to community is a tenuous and poor circumstance, sad to say. the ‘cloud’ is not our friend, for one thing. (neither will be windows 8, for that matter.)
…which brings to mind a 2 year old cryptogon post (“BitTorrent Based DNS to Counter U.S. Domain Seizures”) on a peer to peer network -pertinent even moreover for a comment there:
http://cryptogon.com/?p=19008#comment-20094
One of my favorite lines of literature is the closing sentence of George Eliot’s _Middlemarch_ (one of the greatest novels in English Lit):
“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”
the cloud, the war on personal computing, facebook, google, smart phones -all that -may well be converging to it’s own ultimate omega point quite shortly. & it’s all already bad. Fear? no, but where one is physically located seems, imho, to matter much more than ever (at least compared to the last half of the 20th century). (& again, depending completely on the internet to maintain a ‘personally pertinent connection to community’ in itself is a patently poor human state.)
-i wonder where the densest node of psychedelic salon listeners in the U.S. is? (personally, i’m curious about the Taos, N.M. area…) where is the locus?
(speaking of food & money & the food supply… so many people living off the grid do so in desert environs. growing food is such a fundamental and root question…)
living in oklahoma city as i do may not be quite as bad as maricopa county, az. but it’s plenty isolated enough for me culturally. san francisco or christiania it ain’t and even those places have their great adversities. i hail from south florida, 12 years past now, but it left me long before i left it. the midwest was a chilling eyeopener. i did not really know this strange country of my birth.
in between the web and physical locality, however, is the mail… back in 1980, matt howarth opened a door to a room of his that held nothing but mail art products. mountains of it! non-commercial products. i got involved and contributed to something called an ‘apa’ that furry couch (joel shipley) was doing, ‘the quiet sheet’. each contributor printed 100 copies of their contribution and mailed it off to joel who collated all the contributions together and mailed back copies of the collected issue.
print matters again, i do believe.
http://www.tcj.com/reading-periodicals/
independent cartoonists maintain doing their mini-comics globally while the corporate publishers and others are having to come to terms with their digital decisions and the growing disenchantment with the apps business model. surveillance questions too prompt us to look more at print.
printing on any greater appreciable scale costs even more money, however… i say let that question address itself (as ‘re-publishing’?) when it arises and let us retain a sense of small scale. content first!
you are definitely the trusted soul here, heads and shoulders above any others i know of, but this is an extremely limited forum -it is definitely a salon. http://www.erowid.org/culture/art/art_submissions.php is no longer accepting submissions and evolver’s TOS turned me off from the getgo (seen only *after* signing up). the vast advantages of the web do indeed make an ensnaring web of it, and the master switch may yet get thrown one way or another.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/22/ray-bradbury-internet-error-message-451
meanwhile… where’s stewart brand when we need him?
http://www.ep.tc/realist/89/front-cover.html
i miss the old wired magazine.
there’s so many things tangental to our concerns that need be gathered in a bigger basket. the new DSM5 coming out next year for example and the entire big pharma front at odds with base sanity itself. fear? f*** fear, you bet, but there’s a point where adaptability to the wildest reality has diminishing returns. krystle cole’s experience comes to mind.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qliVpGEk0&feature=relmfu
this reality, these times, make of tripping at all an entirely different proposition than before. they also make it more imperative, i do assert.
3 things seem absent; a forum locus, a print locus, and a physical locus. there still is mail art culture even yet. i have not stayed current on it for many many years but it’s there. the model, as much non-capitalist as one can find, has worked for many decades. it may darn well have a sober psychedelic side now. physically, myself, i’ve an eye on new mexico. & as far as forums go, well, whatever -content first. any web site that actually accomplishes anything does so aboveground… such centralization as such ‘locii’ is a box i may yet crawl out of…
we own our own words. should something like evolver arise where that is respected first and foremost, i’m there. meanwhile xerox machines are my friend. as is my own website. and this one.
a ‘bypass’ bank is a great idea. so is a worldwide ‘bypass’ society.
Great podcast.