Events - World Psychedelic Transcription: What Lectures Would You Most Like To See Typed up?

[Shampoo]

I have acquired professional recordings of every english presentation, lecture and panel at the World Psychedelic Forum and would like to begin transcription. This is a long and time-consuming process and for the benefit of DF members I would like to begin on the most desired lectures. There are some speakers that seem obvious choices for early transcription, notably the more popular authors and researchers like Pinchbeck, McKenna, Grof...etc., which I will try to type up as soon as possible. Please respond with your feedback and preferences.

You may vote more than once.

[Metomni]

If it would be possible, I could help transcribe some if you're looking for some help.

This sounds like something that would be worthwhile and desired.

[RaverHippie]

I'd be happy to chip in as well. Anything to consume my meaningless days.

[Dole654]

Same here, send em over!

[turkeyphant]

Good work, Shamps - looking forward to it.

[Shampoo]

Well, so far it appears the MAPS presentation on "Developing LSD, Psilocybin and other Psychedelics into Legal Prescription Medicines" is most highly desired, so I will begin by transcribing that. Daniel Pinchbeck and Dennis McKenna will follow shortly.

[Shampoo]

A portion of the MAPS presentation DVD appears to be absent from the disc so I am waiting for the replacement. In the meantime, I have typed up the Daniel Pinchbeck afternoon presentation, as well as his Q & A session. Thanks to RaverHippie for helping to edit. Here is the first portion of the presentation:

Daniel Pinchbeck- Afternoon Session

"So I just spoke a little bit about my first Iboga experience in the earlier panorama event but I think I’ll go through that again. Then I’ll talk about my experience in Mexico, then I guess, open it to questions or discussion. It might be interesting to talk about Iboga in comparison to Ayahuasca and then the Iboga ceremony in relationship to Ayahuasca ceremonies.

I guess I was in my, what was I like 29 or 30 when I had my Iboga initiation and I got through this kind of intense existential crisis in New York where I was working as a journalist and I began to look at my life up to that point and sort of desperately scavenging for any point of avenue or access point to other forms of consciousness or dimensions of being and remembered the psychedelic experiences I had had in college. I had a handful of mushrooms and LSD that had seemed very significant at that point but then life intruded and I put them on the backburner but I always knew that I would get back there or hoped that I would get back there. So when I hit this existential emergency I then decided to, as a journalist, start exploring psychedelics thoroughly, because I had this tool that would allow me to get information. And so I got an assignment from the village voice to cover and Ayahuasca ceremony in New York and I did another piece for the voice on Stan Grof’s work and I started to learn and began experimenting again with mushrooms and LSD and found them just as fascinating and amazing as I had found them when I was 20 years old. So that I began to learn about these other psychedelics like salvia or iboga and I think it was in an anarchist bookstore on the lower east side where I first found this strange book on Ibogaine therapy on Staten island. So finally I got an assignment to go to west Africa and go through this Ibogaine initiation. I found a botanist, this south African guy, Dan, who had been studying the Bwiti tribe in Gabon for several years. He was creating a business taking people through initiations. I flew out to Leiberville which is the capital of Gabon and there was another woman from New York who turned out to be a psychoanalyst. We met the shaman and he was a very charismatic character, big personality like lots of wives, lots of kids, lots of houses. We hung out with him and he was playing his music for us and a very unsettling- the Bwiti music is a very special kind of music. It’s got this twangy almost alien sound to it. It doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve encountered. So we went driving off into the jungle with him. The ceremony had these different stages. In the first stages you had to go and buy a bunch of things for the ceremony. I think that included like a mirror, a live chicken, some incense, and it was interesting because I went to Mexico a couple years later and I did a ceremony with a Mazatec shaman in Oaxaca and it was very similar. Before the ceremony he sent us out to buy certain objects. It seems in shamanic culture there is this consistent idea. You have to go out and find these objects, its like a little mini quest, a treasure hunt before you actually have the ceremony. In ‘Breaking Open the Head’, I’m not going to go into this experience in too much detail but there was a kind of funny, scary part of the experience where, when we got into the village the shaman began to scream at us. he called himself the king, he called himself king Motumba, saying we weren’t paying him enough money and that he began to demand more money and at various points he would be yelling at us about the money piece but somehow I still trusted the situations. I remember at one point he was yelling at us about the money with one of his sons and his son was cleaning the hunting rifle and kind of glowering at us and I was, you know, wondering if we were going to be killed and stuffed if we didn’t pay up.

So, we got over that problem, and did the ceremony. The ceremony had different phases. The first part of the ceremony was with the men of the tribe. I was taken down to the local river or stream where I undressed and they smeared this, I sort of rebaptized, ceremonial rebaptism in the river and then they smeared this sort of herbal paste over me and then I had to wear this sort of tribal initiation outfit, this red outfit. Then they marched me back up playing their music, and started feeding me a huge amount of this Iboga powder, which was in plantains. Its very dry, you know it’s a sort of root bark, an alkaloid, and it was definitely the worst tasting thing I had ever experienced and I described it in ‘Breaking Open the Head’ as sort of sawdust laced with battery acid. But id come all this way, I really wanted to have this experience so I ate as much of it as I could get down and even the king was ultimately impressed saying ‘The journalist has eaten much, much,’ then I was like freaked out thinking ‘Have I eaten too much, am I going to die here?’ Obviously before doing this initiation experience I had read a lot about Iboga and Ibogaine and I had read that it was being used in the west for an addiction interruption treatment and that was one of the reasons that this magazine sent me over there, they were interested in this aspect of it. I had also read in different accounts that some people had described the experience as ten years of psychoanalysis in one night or ten years of psychotherapy in one night, which of course, before having the experience sounded totally absurd and impossible and ludicrous but actually when I had the experience that began to make a little more sense to me.

The shamans clearly understood the nuances of this Iboga experience in great depth and detail. There were different phases of the ceremony that corresponded to different parts of the visionary journey you go through with Iboga, which is a very long acting psychedelic. I think it lasts maybe 15, 20 hours, maybe the most intense part is 10 hours, but it has effects that go on for days. What it does, it must access a lot of your REM cycling because for weeks after you need considerably less sleep, after just one Iboga experience. They were obviously, had a very detailed knowledge of Iboga, how it worked and the different segments of it. The first segment of this experience, after kind of eating all this Iboga, waiting for a while they sat me in front of a mirror and it was this phase of open eyed hallucinations like I looked at my face and I saw my face changing form becoming an infant, then a child, an old man and then a skull. I saw different kind of images opening up in the mirror. I saw goblins, candles skulls at one point, then I saw a little kind of window opened up and a kind of black and white movie was being projected and in the black and white movie, saw my apartment back in New York, I could see the hanging plants in my window and stuff. Then I saw a street intersection where people were just crossing the street. So after the initiation I asked one of the shamans, 'Why did I see like my house and my boring apartment and this boring street' and he said, 'Oh, it was just a telepathic check in, it was showing you that everything was tranquil back at home.' So, then I saw, again with eyes open—you know I think its kind of rare, with most psychedelics to have open eyed visuals, unless you have a massive dose most of the visuals are closed eyed but these were open—but I saw this rough, wooden statue made out of tree limbs walk across the room and sit by the shaman, who was watching me and he kind of leaned over and put his chin on his hand as if he was curious about what was happening and again after this ceremony I asked one of the shamans what was this statue that appear and he said, 'That is the spirit of Iboga coming to see what was up and open the gate for the experience.'

It was like every question I had for them they had this answer it was like they had all these different aspects of the experience, or possibilities mapped out. So after this open eyed phase which lasted an hour or something there was this very long phase which lasted 6 or 7 hours or something where I was lying down—maybe even longer than that—and they would be playing music and singing really incredibly beautiful songs and hymns and so on the whole night and during this phase it kind of was like ten years of psychotherapy in one night in that I was kind of guided, I was taken on a sort of guided journey of my life up to that point and it really felt as if there was a guiding intelligence or wisdom in this plant material that was capable of arranging this projection, inner projection, this almost holographic recreation of aspects of my life like I would be going back into these memories but also getting them as full emotional, sense experiences. So I would go back to my parents who split up when I was like four, their fights and them separating, this sort of childhood fear you have that there are monsters under your bed and you don’t want to put your toes out of the cover because the monsters might get you; I would have that kind of experience, but really the way you have it as a seven year old. And then illnesses that I’d had, when I was a little older I had this illness where I was in the hospital for like 5 or 6 months when I was 11 so I went back into that experience. And I kept going back through these experiences as I got older and it was really as if it was allowing me to emotionally reprocess my life up to the present. When it came closer to the time it was then, I saw a lot about my use of alcohol and I don’t think I was an alcoholic but I drank a lot, I was part of this whole media-literary-art-worlds-cocktail-party circuit and all my friends were drinking, doing the drugs of the death culture, coke and heroin a bit and stuff like that and so I just—in a way it was like, well the two times I’ve done it with Iboga its almost a stern, ultimately just, but very tough father figure, that has a really sardonic, nasty sense of humor and so it sort of projects your faults at you, it shows you your own faults over and over again until you get the message. So I was just shown these little movies of myself drinking at cocktail parties and not functioning well the next day—over and over again in these little repeating loops, and it definitely had an effect. After the Iboga experience I radically cut down on my drinking and really never went as deep into it again. That was really extraordinary.

There was this whole personal, psychological dimension and then, towards the end of that, there were more kind of visionary aspects. I guess earlier there were scenes of landscapes and almost like I was floating down to different houses and so on and then towards the end of it I got this sense that I was being given hints about the future and at one point there was this rebus-like puzzle of letters that rearranged and it spelled out this phrase, ‘Touchers teach too’. I didn’t totally understand what that meant when I wrote my first book, ‘Breaking Open the Head’ but in ‘2012’ it kind of came around again and I sort of understood it from my perspective like I am very intellectual and not as much in my body as I should be and so ‘Touchers’ you know, people who do physical energy, massage work, I mean that’s another form of teaching and healing so I came to understand that lesson at a deeper level there, so I thought it was a very valuable lesson. So I got other little hints. And then we got up and we danced with them and so on.

A couple nights later we did another ceremony with a different group of Bwiti who were actually friendlier and didn’t keep on like demanding more money from us and stuff and the main thing that struck me from that second experience was, one of the shamans from this group, this big black man with these bright eyes who’d been eating the Iboga and he said that when he looked at me he could see the spirit of my mother’s mother hovering over me and that she had died recently and she was protecting me. She was still possessive and she was stopping me from seeing different aspects of the visionary worlds. And it was a very…for me a very interesting comment because actually my mother’s mother had died in the last year and she’d actually been the only grandparent that I’d even known and I hadn’t talked to any body there about my family background, this was just not information that anybody in that group in Gabon would have had access to. It was one of the first experiences or indications I’ve had, and I’ve had many since, that shamans are actually capable of accessing this other form of knowledge, this other form of awareness where they bring in information that you couldn’t access through ordinary channels.

Similarly, the guy who I was traveling with, Daniel Leiberman, said that when he took his Iboga initiation he had been shown that he wasn’t going to live very long. At the time I was like laughing it off like, ‘Oh, how could that be serious’. But about a year and a half or two years after I got back to the states I learned from an email exchange that he had died in a freak car accident in south Africa and I think he really had been potentially shown that something like that was going to happen to him. So, that leads into a much larger arena of discussion in ‘Breaking Open the Head’, my first book, I kind of started as a secular-materialist. I had come from this atheist background…had a Newtonian-Cartesian view on reality and starting with this experience-- and then a series of experiences that I describe in the book and also gathering anecdotal material, interviewing people, reading-- I began to shift to accepting that there’s other things going on in the cosmos than our scientific, materialist, rationalist perspective is allowing us to talk about mostly, and that there is some kind of realm of the psyche. I guess Stan Grof was talking about this yesterday, so that there are other levels where other types of knowledge is available, and the way we experience time and space is just like we’re on a little treadmill but the whole panorama exists somewhere else it seems. We could talk about that more later if you want..."


"Question 1: ‘I was wondering if the experiences you’ve had in ceremonial contexts in these far places like Mexico or Gabon…do you find them as a rule to be more valuable than a trip you may have had somewhere up in New York or just on a beach somewhere by yourself—do you think that the traditional environment and teachers generally always make a big difference to the potency of the experience?

Pinchbeck: That’s a great question and I guess the answer is, not really. I think that…for people who want to explore psychedelics, at a certain point it’s almost necessary for them to connect with a shamanic lineage and to have some experiences in a lineage. I don’t know totally why that’s the case, and my kind of hypothesis about it is that you open yourself radically through psychedelics to these other worlds and as westerners, we’re not really prepared for those types of openings and its almost like you get a certain number of ‘free-passes’ or ‘free-rides’ and then some kind of experience might happen where you have this wrenching, negative experience or something and if you go through the shamanic ceremonies, by connecting to this lineage you almost made a pact…its like you’ve connected to a morphinogetic field of past-practitioners who’ve known how to use the medicine properly and so I think that it’s really important to…for me so much of the stress of the conference is on the medical and the scientific aspect but I think there’s something beyond that in terms of what the shamanic and indigenous cultures bring to it and its very much like the importance of lineage in the Tibetan Buddhism. And I think somehow I was very luck, as I was doing these books—whatever luck is –to connect with these certain lineages, whether it was the Bwiti or the Sequoia in Ecuador who work with Ayahuasca or the Santo Daime religion in Brazil, which also uses Ayahuasca. But personally, I’ve had really tremendously important experiences in the shamanic ceremonial context, but I’ve also had really important experiences on my own in the western context and even experiences that where supposed to be quote unquote hedonistic. So, I personally don’t make strict divisions like that but I definitely feel that if people want to pursue psychedelics as something that is meaningful and important to them it’s a very, very important thing to at some point connect with a shamanic lineage of some sort.

Question 2: I know that in the US there is an Ibogaine treatment program where heroin addicts—former heroin addicts—are getting other heroin addicts to use Ibogaine to try to help them free themselves from the addiction of heroin, and I don’t know if that’s international or not. I was also just curious about the different voices that different substances have. I mean, it sounds like—I’ve never done Ibogaine—but it sounds like it has a very specifically stern voice, which is what you were saying and there there’s a different voice for other substances. Mushrooms have a kind of a voice, and Ayahuasca has a kind of a voice and…I just wondered if you wanted to comment on that…do you see that these are actual other levels of reality? Do you think that there are other levels of reality that are speaking through these substances? And the other thing I wanted to ask you was one of the stern things that it said to you …sort of telling you to straighten out your act…what did you think that it meant by that? I mean I know you said you were an alcoholic. ‘Don’t deviate,’ that’s what it said, what did it mean by that, ‘Don’t deviate?’

Pinchbeck: I think that we have this tendency as human beings to be lazy. There’s lots of little options—you can do this, you can go to the psychedelic forum, you can go to ESTS, you can go to whatever, and there was this sense of: if you take on a mission, you’ve got to keep at it. You don’t have to take on a mission, but if you do…I think that it was just giving me…it was in relationship also to Jose Arguelles’s work in that. To your other question, what I kind of love about my position my position as this…I don’t know if I’m an expert or an authority now, is actually that I actually don’t know much, and I don’t know…I don’t know the answer about the psychedelics. What I really love about the whole subject of psychedelics is that, nobody knows! What we’re confronted with here is true mystery, and that is a beautiful thing. Our culture, our whole scientific culture is all about wanting to explain everything and to grasp knowledge and separate and then we can master and control knowledge…this is something that seems to be outside of our normal categories of knowing or explaining. My personal experiences have suggested that the different psychedelics are almost like different bandwidths of consciousness that are somehow part of me and also somehow out there, wherever the out there is…in some other dimension of reality. Maybe there’s a dimension where time and space are reversed or something…like there’s not temporality in the way we experience it. Its kind of like the DMT experience indicates that. If you smoke DMT you go into this kind of eternal time for as long as the experience lasts and…you start to panic. It’s like, ‘Well, am I ever going to come out of this eternity?’ and then you do. Actually when I did the second Iboga experience I had taken DMT fairly recently before it and it was almost like I could feel the DMT behind the Iboga and every now and then it was like I was going into that DMT dimension and space. Rick Strassman had that book, ‘DMT: The Spirit Molecule’ that--do most people here know that book? Or the concept?—So, the concept that maybe DMT is access to this atemporal spiritual reality beyond what we experience as time and space, where incarnation comes from. So Ayahuasca obviously has DMT as one of its constituents. Iboga is, not as we know, related chemically, but maybe Iboga and Ayahuasca are almost like interfaces…so we can get the DMT messages, but slowed down enough and in these different modes or frequencies, that we can actually take them in and experience them…transduce them into human form and human language…because I certainly couldn’t do that personally with my DMT experiences.

Question 3: Hi! Thanks for all of this. Very interesting experiences. To continue on with this theme that you briefly touched on in the pervious question, could you give us a brief summary of your…a comparative summary of how you’ve experienced the different psychedelics; LSD vs. the DMT vs. the Ibogaine, and do you intend to continue your adventures to more exotic things such as smoking the skins of Cane toads and so forth.

Pinchbeck: Do you have a toad in the house? I can only do a little gloss…LSD seems more like…somebody described it to me as more analytical. It’s kind of colder in a way. It’s almost like you get these index cards of different realities. You know, it’s really hard to put this stuff into language. It all has this different tonal, frequency feeling to it. Ayahuasca to me feels like the most naturally connective, like you really get into the source of nature in some sense and it feels like it has a maybe more feminine intelligence, but once again that word seems almost antiquated. Iboga seemed a bit more masculine, and as I said from my perspective it was these stern, almost paternalistic messages.

Question 4: Daniel, I’d like to follow up on what Allyson said and make a couple of comments and just a point of fact. I think she was asking about, is there an Iboga therapy clinic available in North America…yes, there is and its not in the United States its in Vancouver where I live and its called the Iboga Therapy House. You can just Google that and go to their website. In fact, Sandra Carpedes are you in the room? She works there and her colleagues are there. MAPS is very involved in this and they are doing Iboga therapy up there. Its quite interesting because in the states Ibogaine is a schedule I controlled substance, so its one of these…in this demon-drug category along with all the other substances we love. In Canada it’s not even scheduled so it’s being used clinically and in other clinics around the world. So the North American venue for that is the Iboga Therapy House and they’re operating an in-patient program and doing it with the complete knowledge and support of the Coastal Health Authorities. They know all about it. They’re supportive of it. They have a real addiction problem in the Vancouver area so they’re very practical…its like, ‘Whatever works, we’ll support it.’ I mean they don’t support it financially but conceptually so people might be aware of that program but it’s a poor distinction. It’s not in the United States, its in Canada.
Then the other thing I wanted to mention about what Allyson was asking about and what you’ve been discussing about how these plants sometimes present themselves in this sort of oracular way. They hand down the gnosis from on high…have this kind of commanding effect…not always, but Iboga seems to be that way, mushrooms present themselves another way, Ayahuasca another way and so on. But they all present themselves as entities that are not you. I mean, you have a dialogue with these plants, with these substances. But a rather rationalist reductionist would say, ‘Well, that’s not possible. Obviously it’s part of your brain or part of your personality that split itself off and is presenting itself as something other than yourself. But it obviously has to be a part of yourself. What else can it be?’ Well, it could be an entity from another dimension or whatever. How do you test that? And, I’m sorry for being lengthy but my brother and I used to discuss this, that the mushrooms present itself as an entity. Is it real? Or are we just deluded? So, people in these explorations doing these things might keep in mind…we used to say…we would actually badger the mushroom, say, ‘Tell us something we cannot possibly know.’ That’s a test, right? That’s trying to be scientific about the thing. ‘Tell me something I don’t know and I couldn’t possibly know.’ And, you know, we never got very far. It was always very cagey about it. But that’s an approach, you know? Give me the answer to a mathematical problem? And maybe sometimes, what Jeremy was alluding to before, gave Wasson…was it? Crick, that took the LSD…gave him an insight into the structure of DNA that he could not possibly know. Carey Mullis’s experiences…I think it’d be very interesting to explore that. Maybe there are other people out there who’ve had, essentially, knowledge transmitted that they could not possibly know and that’s a strong case for saying that these entities are independent of the self, that they really are intelligences that are not us. So, that’s all I wanted to say. In your explorations, ask these questions of these entities. Force them to tell you things that you can’t possibly know.

Pinchbeck: Along with the DNA discovery potentially being linked to LSD, a lot of the early work around the internet was done by Douglas Engelbart and his crew, who were also potentially psychedelically inspired to some of those initial breakthroughs that you could have these technological mechanisms of interconnectivity, and it may have also been psychological insight.

Question 4 cont.: I guess my follow up to that is a personal question: what has ever told you anything that you can’t possibly know?

Pinchbeck: Hmm, I’ll have to think about that one. I feel like a lot.

Guest: The guy that died.

Pinchbeck: Yeah. Well, like this guy that had this foretelling of his own death. I mean, that’s not the kind of information you want, but it’s what he got…maybe it is, I don’t know.

Question 5: Since the gentleman brought up the question about comparative substances and he also mentioned the myth that you smoke cane toad skins when you actually milk the venom of the Bufo toads of the Alvarius. In ‘Cracking Open your Head’ you talk about your friends, the ‘Church of Mofos’ and a mysterious smokeable white powder. Was that 5-meo-dmt? And do you have any experience with 5-meo-dmt?

Pinchbeck: That was 5-meo-dmt and I’ve had a few experiences with 5-meo-dmt.

Question 5 cont.: Huxley and various mystical people through the ages speak about the concept that you have to rise above the entities and the deities and that true knowledge comes from a dissolution and the absolute which is beyond deification, beyond images. What do you think about that concept?

Pinchbeck: I more like William Irwin Thompson’s concept that…I think that we have Ken Wilber in the West and it’s all about the cosmic consciousness, this absolute thing. I actually think that the shamanic experience is all about the intermediate realms. There are these other realms of entities and intelligence and spirits and so on, but I’m not sure you can get to the absolute until you know more about these intermediate bardo-type realms. So I think in a way we’re too quick to jump to that absolute.

Question 5 cont.: Do you see a distinction between the shamanic tradition and the mystical tradition?

Pinchbeck: Well, those are big words, you know what I mean? There’s lots of mystical traditions and lots of shamanic traditions and even shaman is a word from Siberia which refers to one little culture. I think that…I’m just making this distinction between the American, Buddhist tendency to just want to negate in a sense, these intermediate realms and that shamanism actually says you have to go through them. And I think there are reasons you have to go through them. If you look at a lot of indigenous cultures they talk about the ancestor spirits…that you have to actually reckon, deal, and negotiate with the ancestor spirits, or they come back and they plague you as depressions, addictions, neuroses…and the only work that’s going to be effective to deal with angry, untethered ancestor spirits is going to be shamanic work. So, if you look at a country like the US—I don’t think Europe is very different—nobody wants to deal with their ancestors. Their ancestors killed the Indians, enslaved the blacks…we don’t want to deal with our ancestors, we want to forget all of that. Well, shamanism is telling us that actually, you have to go into those very uncomfortable and disturbing patterns of the past and somehow reckon with those spirits.

Question 5 cont.: Have you ever experienced what they call ‘God-consciousness?’

Pinchbeck: I don’t know what that means exactly…

Question 5 cont.: A resonant field beyond energy.

Pinchbeck: Yeah, I have.

Question 6: I have two questions, one is a small follow-up question to the first one about ritual context with the Mexican clinic. In what way was there ritual involved into the experience?

Pinchbeck: There was absolutely no ritual in the Mexican clinic whatsoever. You got the pills, you wore a headset, they played this new-agey music and you lay on the bed and tripped.

Question 6 cont.: And then, back to the first experience, I don’t know if you or anyone here knows the ‘Going Tribal’ series with this guy Bruce going past various tribes in the world, living with them for a few weeks, and he also went and visited the Bwiti tribe and what I remember from what he said after the experience, when he explained what he was going through, that he couldn’t, what he talked to with the shamans, they told him specifically not to go into detail of what his experience was about and he told about the spirit of Iboga talking to him and showing him personal stuff about his psyche and how other people reacted…how his actions influenced other people like bad reactions and stuff like that. But, in what way did they tell you not to go into detail? I don’t know how far you went in your books into these experiences.

Pinchbeck: Nobody really told me to shut up so I didn’t shut up."


Enjoy!

[turkeyphant]

Thanks, that's amazing work. I actually quite enjoyed that talk at Basel...

Looking forward to the next transcription!

[RaverHippie]

Perhaps these should be added to the archive?

Reputation Comments on this post:

Thanks for working on that!

[Expat98]

Muchas gracias to Shampoo and RaverHippie. It must have been some work to transcribe all that, and you did it very nicely. BTW, I sometimes transcribe audio recordings using Dragon Naturally Speaking voice dictation software. (I listen to the audio and then repeat it into the microphone.) It works very well, and I find it much easier and faster than typing. Just thought I would mention it.

This was an interesting talk. I was especially intrigued with the following part because it directly addresses a question I raised in another thread just a couple of days ago about the different types of spiritual/mystical experiences induced by different types of psychedelics. This even addresses the idea which I was writing about, how the unitive, "all is one" viewpoint espoused by Huxley (and linked with Eastern religions) has historically been portrayed as being the ultimate form of spiritual experience.

Question 5 cont.: Huxley and various mystical people through the ages speak about the concept that you have to rise above the entities and the deities and that true knowledge comes from a dissolution and the absolute which is beyond deification, beyond images. What do you think about that concept?

Pinchbeck: I more like William Irwin Thompson’s concept that…I think that we have Ken Wilber in the West and it’s all about the cosmic consciousness, this absolute thing. I actually think that the shamanic experience is all about the intermediate realms. There are these other realms of entities and intelligence and spirits and so on, but I’m not sure you can get to the absolute until you know more about these intermediate bardo-type realms. So I think in a way we’re too quick to jump to that absolute.

Question 5 cont.: Do you see a distinction between the shamanic tradition and the mystical tradition?

Pinchbeck: Well, those are big words, you know what I mean? There’s lots of mystical traditions and lots of shamanic traditions and even shaman is a word from Siberia which refers to one little culture. I think that…I’m just making this distinction between the American, Buddhist tendency to just want to negate in a sense, these intermediate realms and that shamanism actually says you have to go through them. And I think there are reasons you have to go through them. If you look at a lot of indigenous cultures they talk about the ancestor spirits…that you have to actually reckon, deal, and negotiate with the ancestor spirits, or they come back and they plague you as depressions, addictions, neuroses…and the only work that’s going to be effective to deal with angry, untethered ancestor spirits is going to be shamanic work. So, if you look at a country like the US—I don’t think Europe is very different—nobody wants to deal with their ancestors. Their ancestors killed the Indians, enslaved the blacks…we don’t want to deal with our ancestors, we want to forget all of that. Well, shamanism is telling us that actually, you have to go into those very uncomfortable and disturbing patterns of the past and somehow reckon with those spirits.

If anybody is interested in discussing this, please go here:

http://www.drugs-forum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=55091

[Shampoo]

That was one of my favorite responses. Hopefully as I have more time I will be able to join that conversation with you Expat, as I find these concepts equally as fascinating as you do.

Work is now underway at my desk on both the Stanislav Grof presentation on "Consciousness Evolution and Human Survival: Psychospiritual Roots of the Current Global Crisis" and, thanks to Metomni, the Alex & Allyson Grey talk (due to some constraints, it is one of the few ones I can share with another person). They should both be completed sometime next week.

[Shampoo]

Thanks to help from Metomni, I can now post the transcribed lecture for Alex & Allyson Grey's lecture.

Enjoy!

Allyson Grey: Thank you so much and while you're sitting down let me introduce this session. Thank you so much for coming to this session, I'm Allyson Grey, this is Alex Grey, I think you know that, and we're going to address the subject of children and young people, and one of our favorite subjects: entheogens in relation to that and family. And we are a family, and how many people here have children? Quite a few, and how many people here have parents? So we all have something in common and we want to figure what to do and how to be responsible. Come join us in the front if you can because we're going to interact with each other. First three rows maybe, fill them up. Great people are still coming in, I'll just keep introducing and maybe we'll sing or something while people come in. Alex and I are very happy to be here, we come here
from New York where we have a wonderful chapel and if you are ever in New
York or find yourself in the area or know anyone who is going to be in the area, we hope you'll come and visit the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and that's the only ad I'll say for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, but it is a wonderful and beautiful place and we welcome you and we hope you will visit us there. If you come at the full moon or new moon ceremonies you'll see us most likely. So anyway, Alex is going to start the presentation, we worked until 4 this morning on a slide talk, a little tiny one that I hope you'll both find interesting and informative and then we'll join together in discussion.

Alex Grey: I thought this was more the display, the father knows best kind of picture there was the kind of idea of family that Allyson and I grew up with as the happy family where drugs weren't discussed at all, you know we had no discussion with our parents about drugs and yet surrounding us on all sides were a variety of different kinds of things. My mother smoked.

Allyson Grey: My mother smoked through 3 pregnancys, so did yours.

Alex Grey: And alcoholism just sort of hovered in the background of both of our families.

Allyson Grey: Although both of our parents weren't alcoholics, but they
took a drink socially, only the legal drugs they used.

Alex Grey: So they were completely unprepared for the 60's and for our behavior. This is another way of thinking about families, we've got 2 ozzy's here, ozzy and harriette was the kind of family that I grew up with thinking this is the norm and that this was kind of the american ideal of the happy family, you know with its teenagers. Ozzy Osbourne and the Osbournes present maybe an update of someone who has been through the drug situation and is working it out with their kids and stuff like that. I think that what characterizes both of the families obviously is that they care about each other a lot and even if the Osbournes are pretty eccentric by many standards you can tell that there is love there.

Allyson Grey: They stay together, which in this day and age is really quite something and they are a psychedelic family.

Alex Grey: So what's the problem with drug education usually, and we'll cover some of the ideas about drug education first off, is that there is a over-riding mischaracterization of the drugs and an exaggeration of the problems that marijuana especially gives us.

Allyson Grey: They contradict people's own observations, like you know if marijuana is not really going to kill you then maybe you know cocaine won't either or heroin won't either, like I don't believe it. You know people told me that about marijuana and I know that wasn't true so why don't I just try something else... I don't believe what people tell me.

Alex Grey: Yeah, that's a flaw from the beginning and this was one of those campaigns, the ad campaigns that we had that were very compelling to us, but because it mushes all sorts of drugs together, it doesn't really distinguish things. Certainly it doesn't really give you any kind of distinction about the nature of antheogens (not sure about the spelling) as regards the nature of other substances which are truly harmful.

Allyson Grey: And it doesn't distinguish between use and abuse

Alex Grey: Yeah, so this is the kind of drug education that we've been living with in America and the Reagan eras "Just Say No" campaign and certainly it was admirable in terms of wanting to safeguard the lives and minds the young, and it's obviously been parodied through our culture as well and for very good reason, because it actually doesn't work. What's interesting, although the DARE program has admirable ideals about wanting to safeguard the young, part of it becomes these unmanageable kind of promises that the unwitting young are kind of demanded to make and that they're enrolled in this idea that drugs are bad 'mkay so I pledge to lead a drug-free life. This is one of the vows that they're asked to make before really having an understanding of the true nature of the various kinds of substances.

Allyson Grey: And it's a lie, it's a lie because nobody is going to, maybe christian scientists, but very few will lead a truly drug-free life. They'll take over the counter medications and they'll take prescription medications, they'll use cigarrettes and alcohol and still make this pledge, so that's just a lie.

Alex Grey: Yeah, it has to do with these inner conflicts and inner contradictions that end up as hipocracy. Kids are fine-tuned to catch any kind of hipocracy and that's why on the follow-up studies they found that it has actually worked against them. This pledge became a gateway to abuse for many kids from the suburbs and so there's various myths about this that are part of the conventional drug education programs,
they rely on the just say no, they say experimentation, the myth that experimentation with drugs is uncommon, that drug use is the same as drug abuse, marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin and cocaine, and the continued exageration of the risks. Looking at the realities over 50% of high school seniors have experimented with the various kinds of drugs at some point in their life. Over 41% have used a drug in the past year and around 25% have used in the last month. So this is also interesting because of the over-exagerations, every 100 people who've tried marijuana, only one is a current user of cocaine. So what we're looking for in terms of education as a kind of harm reduction approach and it distinguishes between use and abuse and that the majority of drug use doesn't lead to drug addiction or abuse. Most users of psychoactive substances control their intake. There's a certain kind of ethics for using drugs: You know, not to dose other people, not to use them during school or maybe at work, or in sports or driving. These kinds of things seem obvious, but they should be...

Allyson Grey: Well these are the things that parents fear. I mean that's why I put that picture in there of that car, I couldn't believe it really. There are perils, and when we have children we want to protect them, and drugs can lead to terrible things as well.

Alex Grey: It's just unrealistic to think that teenagers are going to avoid drugs when they're trying to push the envelope of their identity, they're trying to discover who they are sexually and consciousness wise. So keeping kids safe should be the highest priority and a reality-based approach would provide an honest and scientifically informed education on all the drugs, including the prescription medications like the anti-depressants whose side effects can be suicide and mass murder and then alcohol and tobacco and these other kinds of addictive substances that are a normal part of the routine, instead of demonizing entheogens and other types of substances. Encouraging moderation if experimentation continues to exist and providing an understanding of the legal and social kinds of consequences of drug use and just putting the responsibility back on the person who is using so that they really understand where they're coming from and aren't just being led along in a peer slip stream or things like that. Basically, you want to establish a bond with your children and not to come in with total preconceived notions about how they ought to behave. The idea is to listen and to establish a link of trust so that you can really be there for them instead of alienating them. So you have to learn about the substances and the possible substances that they're using so that you can be an informed assistance for them.

Allyson Grey: I just want to say one thing. I just wanted to remind everyone of one thing, as parents we know that if we go ballistic about something, we know that is a signal to them, "Don't talk about that anymore." So when you hear something you don't like, it's almost counter-intuitive not to let the lid fly off, but that's kind of what we have to be as adults is a listener because then they'll come back to talk to
you more about it. So that's a really crucial time.

Alex Grey: And it's not easy to restrain yourself when you have kids telling them how they should behave. This is kind of a funny thing, but basically you want to encourage whatever creative or physical activities your youngsters really want to explore. The other thing is to actively engage in whatever kind of social life they have as a leader in terms of the PTA and things that are part of their peer's parents and their teachers situation, you know, just get involved with their school.

Allyson Grey: Yeah, we were always the parents in the school setting, you know the PTA situation where everyone just kind of looked at us like we knew, you know, "You guys do drugs." But we had some interesting points of view so you have to be there and speak up and be a reality check for the rest of the group in the straight backed chairs.

Alex Grey: So also be willing to recognize if there's a problem. If the kids are struggling and they're hooked, then you have to be able to, if you have this bond of trust, you may be able to be there to be a support. Safety first is a great organization and safetyfirst.org, they have a lot of literature and support.

Allyson Grey: You really want to be informed if you're a parent. Marsha Rosenbaum by the way works for drug policy alliance, she's one of us. She goes around and talks to people about the reality based approach.

Alex Grey: Yeah, and in PTA meetings, she's an awesome lady. So this is one view of how states can also respect the parental authority, basically allowing them to make out whether sharing a drink with their kids is okay, so this is instead of just an age limit on drinking and things like that. This is interesting because we don't want to discount that there are some substances like methamphetamine and stuff that if you get hooked can be completely self-destructive.

Allyson Grey: There is a difference. This is what we fear.

Alex Grey: Yeah, and it's the kind of thing that if you've already been lying to your kids about drugs then why should they listen to you about anything, including the dangers of meth? So, in the west there's this condemnation of psychedelic use and nevertheless it continues to be used by a significant portion of teenagers and young adults from 18 to 25. So this is interesting, I think that this is one of our biggest problems as antheogen users and parents and things like that, is that we're lacking context for the use of the substances in a kind of sacred setting. So there's been a kind of social disintegration that sometimes follows the use of psychedelics. Just this past summer we had two young friends who were 18 years old who went through a kind of break, almost schizophrenic break and I think they could have gotten through it if they had gotten the proper kind of supportive setting, but they used the substances in social settings that weren't really condusive to a spiritual immgergence and wound up in the hospitals and have had continued problems. So I think this lack of sacred context for the western use of entheogens is a true area that we have to learn about and develop strategies to work with. In places like Brazil and the UDV, the adolescents in that society use ayahuasca in a very positive and life enhancing way. It's a way of also bonding with the group. We go through such alienation, in some way it's really important to distinguish ourselves from our parents but the substances can help us to overcome the sort of deviciveness and face the inner problems directly. In the UDV pregnant mothers are encouraged to use ayahuasca and it's used even during childbirth. The young children are given a little bit while they're growing up until they're able to use full servings. One of the indigenous tribes of Peru used the ayahuasca as part of their religious upbringing and its window to enlightenment and portal to devination and teacher of honey and plant of spiritual knowledge with a way of integrating into our society. The Bwiti initiate the young in their iboga ceremonies and so this is another model, another way of looking at this sort of drug use as an initiation and a kind of rite of passage. In the native american church, the teenagers are actively encouraged to take part in the ceremonies, the all-night peyote use and it integrates them into the tradition. The Wietchel I think have a fascinating use of peyote, they also use during pregnancy and child birth and they start using the substance around the ages of 6 to 8. It's interesting that they believe it should be used in earlier childhood before they reach this age of understanding...Oh sorry, they say they should have reached their verbal age of understand so they could articulate their experience, but before the sort of sexual and other kinds of identity questions of teenagehood click in. I can imagine that this keys them into their tribal culture in an extraordinary way and they gain access to the imaginal worlds and this just becomes a permanant part of their world-view.

Allyson Grey: And it's an initiation of course into their community, it's like becoming a part of the community. Like saying, "You're six years old, but you're one of us. You're part of us."

Alex Grey: In the book Island that Allyson was mentioning that the palenese have their own kind of ritual that involves climbing this perilous mountain and then being introduced to the moksha. It's put in a kind of symbolic way of your life and coming toward enlightenment so it's another initiatory rite, a way to use these substances in a way that is respectful to their sacramental quality. Huxley, in Island, is talking about how do we educate our children, you know...

Allyson Grey: Just read it.

Alex Grey: Okay, "You never give children a chance of imagining anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds, in the streams, and in the village, and the country around it, rub it in.

Allyson Grey: I wanted to be personal here, and talk about our personal experience as parents. We have one daughter as some of you are aware, she's 19 years old. Alex and I, after 11 years of being together happily doing our thing as artists, I introduced the idea that we should become parents. I lobbied, I took Alex up a mountain and we took MDMA and I said if I recall, "I regret to inform ourselves that I don't want to do the life training without the parent training." I think parent training is an important part of life training and we had thought we would be child free for a life time, but you know, I was 34 years old, the clock was ticking and I'm going wait a minute, I really think parent training is an important part of life that I don't want to miss out on. So Alex was down.

Alex Grey: Seemed like a really good idea on MDMA.

Allyson Grey: I picked the perfect set and setting, the top of a mountain, hearts were open and it was a beautiful day around the little fire that we made. Alex said, great, I really agree, I think you're right except that we're really not ready because we were performance artists that were going to parties every day, smoking, doing a lot of psychedelics, really not living the sort of life that we envisioned good parents would live. Alex initiated the idea that we should wait, that we should give ourselves this probationary period, a year was the original thought, that we would get our act together and make some money because we thought that money was so important, but later on we found that it is not that important, we found out that children bring money. The idea was that we should work and be abstinent, so we chose to be abstinent for a year, we ended up being abstinent for a year and a half. At a year we looked at our funds and our life and thought, let's give ourselves another 6 months to have a conscious conception, and I really recommend that, I won't go into that, but ask me about it. So we waited a year and a half with absolutely nothing, I think we maybe drank some coffee, but we didn't drink alcohol, or smoke pot, or use psychedelics for a year and a half, and believe me, if any of you haven't gone for a year and a half without any substances, it's really a great experience. It's the altered state of sobriety. We've had several periods in our lives where we've done that, and it really is wonderful, a drug fast. So we went for a year and a half, to the pregnancy, and then during the pregnancy, and then through the nursing, and I nursed for 8 months. So through all that we were completely sober, absolutely no substances at all, and it was fantastic and just didn't want to take any chances. I was 36 by then and just didn't want to take any chances, I got pregnant the first and only time we ever tried, every other time we tried not to. So we did get pregnant that one time and had that one child, but we only had one.

Alex Grey: You know Terence said, "All this visionary stuff is really interesting, but can you tell me something really worthwhile and useful and something down to earth?" and the mushrooms said, "Have only one child. It will make your lives easier and it will be less of a load on the planet." So, I thought, "Good idea."

Allyson Grey: We thought about it, we just never tried again and decided that the triangle configuration of our family was perfect for us. So what did we do about drugs and teaching Xena about drugs? Through those early years, children just don't like to have a lot of smoke around them and you don't want to smoke on top of them so we pretty much limited our use to when she wasn't around. We didn't keep it from her, and we always answered her questions. This is what my mother taught me when it came to sex and I applied it to drugs. Whenever they ask a question, you answer it. You don't tell them the things that they don't want to know or that they aren't ready to know, but if they ask you something you tell them honestly. I would never keep anything from Xena and so she doesn't keep all that much from me, I mean I'm sure she keeps something, but we've been pretty open with each other through the years. So we answered questions and then as time progressed if we wanted to take a psychedelic we wouldn't include her in that experience, for basically 3 reasons. We would get a baby sitter and we would go somewhere and do it elsewhere, but we would make sure she was being taken care of, maybe seeing a friend or going to camp or something for three reasons, one, we didn't want to be weird around her. What if we acted strange and she thought what's going on with mom and dad and number 2, what if something happened? What if something caught on fire, or she got hurt, or she needed us to be completely available and present and we weren't, then I would not want to blame it on the substance, on this holy sacrament.
The third reason is really personal and selfish that I don't want to be worrying about Xena, I don't want to be thinking about a young child when I'm having my own personal experiences. You do it for your inner life and your partners life if you do it with a partner, and so for those reasons we never tripped around Xena. Between the ages of 8 and 12 they're very rule conscious, and very rule oriented and they really understand about following the rules and not following the rules. It is illegal what you're doing and it scares them, so during that period our use was infrequent and I know really close friends who were users that actually gave up use during that period so they wouldn't worry their children. You know, they had serious discussions with them and their children were concerned about them getting caught so they basically gave it up for a little while, it's okay to give it up for a little while. You can always go back, you know, the teaching you have is always there so it will actually help you. So our use was infrequent during that period and not so much around her even though we were always open with questions.

Alex Grey: She would come with us though to the psychedelic conferences and she had lunch with Dr. Hofmann once when she was 9. It's interesting though that she didn't always put everything together.

Allyson Grey: Alex would go out and do his talks, I don't know how many of you have seen him do his talk about his art, but he includes all of his art that was influenced by psychedelics and discusses the influence and what he saw under the influence and Xena would be sitting in the front row when she was 2 and when she was 4 and when she was 6 and she would hear these talks over and over again. Then, when she was 10 I remember her saying to me one time when we were walking down the street, "I know you and dad smoke marijuana, but that's all." And I just didn't say anything because that's all she wanted to know, that's what she made up in her mind like, "I know there's Santa Clause because I saw him." What do you say? No there isn't? You kill their fantasy whatever it is, so when she finally came around to understanding that that was part of our life. They only hear what they want to hear so you only answer what they ask you, she didn't ask a question so I didn't answer it.

Alex Grey: At the same time then, when those questions did come up we had to address the idea that this is like the early christians living in their spiritual lives in the catacombs and things. We had to emphasize that this is not something to discuss with your friends at school, unfortunately we're part of an underground society and that's a heavy burden to place on a young mind if they're not ready. At the time she seemed ready though, we delivered that one.

Allyson Grey: But they also really appreciate that you confide in them like that and they do keep a secret, they do keep it to themselves because we explained to her what could happen if she told her friends that we smoke pot. You know, their parents might not let their children come to our house or something worse could happen. They could come and take us away. What I wanted to do, just for 2 minutes each, or a minute and a half each find a partner that you don't know, somebody that's sitting near you. This is a community so you're going to know more people when you leave than when you came. Find somebody you don't know and discuss for a minute and a half something about your own drug education, something either that you learned or that you taught your child.




Stanislav Grof's presentation is quite long, full of mysterious words and lengthy diagrams, and is thus taking a bit longer than expected. It should be ready sometime during the coming week.

[Metomni]

Thanks for cleaning it up Shampoo, and I hope you guys enjoy reading through that. It was interesting to listen to them and it should provide a good, fairly short read.

Reputation Comments on this post:

nice work

[string]

These transcriptions are absolutely wonderful, thank you for doing this!

Originally Posted by Shampoo

I have acquired professional recordings of every english presentation, lecture and panel at the World Psychedelic Forum and would like to begin transcription.

Did you by any chance get this one:

11.00 – 12.30 Room Samarkand Seminar MAPS
From Problem Child to Wonder Child: The Next 20 Years (English, without translation)
Rick Doblin: Teaching Psychedelic Psychotherapy:
MDMA/PTSD Therapist Training Protocol and Continuing Medical Education Courses
Evgeny Krupitsky: Ketamine-assisted Psychedelic Psychotherapy of Heroin Dependance
Valerie Mojeiko: Psychedelic Emergency Services: Harm Reduction in Action

I was particularly interested in the Ketamine talk, and couldn't attend due to a schedule conflict, but the CD of this session didn't seem to be available for sale.

If you need help transcribing anything, I could lend a hand.

[turkeyphant]

I don't think Room Samarkand was recorded which was a shame, because there was some fascinating stuff in there...

[ThirdEyeFloond]

Originally Posted by string

I was particularly interested in the Ketamine talk, and couldn't attend due to a schedule conflict, but the CD of this session didn't seem to be available for sale.

I don't think Samarkand was recorded either unfortunately.
I only heard the first 10-15 minutes of Krupitsky's talk on Ketamine-assisted psychedelic therapy's effects on heroin dependence because another lecture I didn't wan't to miss started. I shared my only pen with a nice girl sitting next to me so didn't get to take many notes.
The study had been shutdown by the russian gov. due to its controversial nature. The initial results looked promising though. I'm pretty sure I took a pic of a graph he showed of how many that where still clean and how many that had relapsed after 1 ketamine session but I can't find it atm. I'm only sure about that 25% where still clean after 12 months, but IIRC about 75% were clean 3 months after the session and about half after 6 months. I don't know how this compares to other treatment methods but to me it sounded pretty good. A ketamine session each 6 months could be a succes and additionally give patients a more positive outlook on life I suspect a lack thereof keep many in a negative addiction spiral on opioids.

Michael J. Winkelman's talk on psychedelics and human revolution was very fascinating and I'd would like to read a transcription of it. I will gladly lend a hand in that if someone would hook me up with an audio recording