Lenny Gibson - A brief history of psychedelics in the Western world

hey everybody joe here psychedelics today thanks for tuning in again today kyle and i didn't really have time to get a new recording out for you so we dug through our archives and found a quick short lecture from lenny gibson one of our mutual breathwork teachers and it's from a maps dinner maybe a year or two ago where they talked about the history or lenny presented on the history of psychedelics in the western world and gave a pretty good rundown i think this is really critical information and people really should know more about this subject than they do currently so that's why we're broadcasting it i gave it a listen this morning and really did enjoy it so i think you'll like it too let us know what you think you can reach us over at you know facebook instagram twitter pinterest psychedelics today just search that you'll find it or email at psychedelics today email at gmail.com and we wanted to remind you all that we do have a really cool class that we're offering online called navigating psychedelics where we give essentially a 101 slash 102 education on psychedelics to students and we also have i think maybe even 14 don't quote me on that 14 master classes by experts on their individual expertise area we tried to give a broad spectrum so everything from microdosing to picking a safe good ayahuasca center prepping for ceremonial psychedelic sessions mitch gomez joins us from dance safe he's the executive director over there he gives us a lot of safety tips and some really interesting info so we really think you'll like it and we'll see you in the next video bye bye you really check it out you can find that from our main website psychedelicstoday.com or find it at psychedelicstoday.teachable.com and secondly we really think you should check out our friend eric osborne's micro meditations he is doing legal psilocybin mushroom retreats he's calling them psilocybin assisted retreats in jamaica at a beach called i think it's treasure beach and it's i think on the western side of the island and and he's been developing this organization for probably 15 years and people really enjoy his work down there so definitely something to check out coming up in november there was a special retreat with katherine mclean and shane moss katherine was involved in some of the research with psilocybin at john hopkins she's also a presenter on our master class helping out with integration and she's also a presenter on our master class helping out with integration and integration subjects and she's definitely a real expert highly regarded in the field she's got some great ted talks out there so you know if you want to check her out you know google katherine mclean ted talk and shane moss who is actually a really famous comedian at this point kind of blowing up because he's really identified with the psychedelic space and he actually i believe headlined with duncan trussell at the recent oakland psychedelic science conference i guess that was in april so yeah really fun yeah both of those two will be there it should add a very interesting dimension to the retreat so you could actually like ask them specific questions that eric might not have expertise on or talk to them about integration or what you know shane what was your dmt experience like or eric is definitely an expert on mushrooms don't know how much he's dug into ayahuasca so it would be cool to have people that have more broader experiences talking about other drugs but yeah in terms of mushrooms i think it's going to be a really interesting experience and i think it's going to be a really interesting experience and i think it's going to be a really interesting experience and i think it's going to be a really And he burst out laughing. And I can tell your age by whether you laughed or not. There are three, I think, modern turning points in the modern history of psychedelics. I'll go back to the ancient in just a minute. But the first one being when Albert had his experience that led him to realize the psychotropic properties of his substance he had synthesized. The second one was Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina, when they connected with Maria Sabina, who was a corandero who used the mushrooms. And that was interesting. And then there was the introduction of psilocybin in addition to LSD. And the third one was when Hoffman and Wasson worked together, and Hoffman was able to synthesize psilocybin on the base of the mushrooms. And then it became readily available. Instead of having to go to some obscure place in Mexico and beg people and find somebody who practiced, it was a mass-produced chemical. But the use of substances in providing transcendent moments goes back beyond the beginnings of our written history in the West. And there were many shamanic traditions. The shamanic tradition in Greece led to the development of the tragic plays, the great tragic plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus. The Greek word "tragedy" literally means "goat-skin". Because, in the Greek language, the word "tragedy" literally means "goat-skin". Because, in the festivals of Dionysus, who was the god of wine, when the new wine was decanted and everybody got really high on the new wine, it gave people permission to act like goats. And as you know, Dionysus was portrayed as half-man, half-goat. Dionysus had also been to the underworld and back. Like Orpheus, another person that comes out of the shamanic traditions and into what we call the Greek mystery religions. The most prominent of the mystery religions, was one called the Eleusinian Mysteries. A mystery not in the sense of Ellery Queen, but a mystery in the sense of mystical. That rite goes back beyond recorded time and lasted for at least 2,000 years. It was a rite built around the myth of Demeter and Persephone. There's Maria Sabina. I should pause, Maria. And there's Gordon Watson's book. Persephone, the site of the temple of Eleusis. Persephone was out picking flowers in the meadow on a spring day, and Hades came along and grabbed her. Took her down into the underworld. Demeter, her mother, was distraught, but Persephone was gone. Demeter appealed to the other gods for help getting Persephone back. It was of no use. So finally, Demeter said she was the goddess of agriculture and growing things, decided that she would stop everything growing. Clearly, a symptom of depression. I did that for the psychiatrists in the audience. Didn't bother the gods because they lived on ambrosia. But then it occurred to them that if the human beings starved to death, there'd be no one to worship the gods. That got to them, and they agreed to help Demeter. And prevailed upon Hades to let Persephone come back. But she had sampled a few, maybe one or seven seeds from pomegranate. And the way those myths work, she couldn't be completely freed of Hades and had to, ended up spending half her time in Hades and half with her mother. Thus, the variation of the season. So the myth is about going into the underworld, coming back. Basically about death and rebirth. And it appears to have involved an ergot-derived substance. A psychedelic. The first, we don't know exactly because the initiates were sworn to secrecy. And the secret was never revealed. 2,000 years. All of the major people, all the intelligentsia, many of the regular people of Greece were initiates into it. You could do it once. And Pindar, the famous poet, who was also an initiate, along with Plato and Xenophon, and the whole, even to the Romans. Cicero was an initiate. Marcus Aurelius was the last Roman emperor who was an initiate. Othin was killed, and Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity. Pindar. says, not revealing the secret but says of the rite it was an experience of dying before dying but as I said, Constantine saw the ring of fire and decided that the Roman Empire should become Christian, they should stop persecuting the Christians and become part of it and so Christianity doesn't have a very good track record with substances other than wine and Eucharist which are psychedelic for a very limited group of people who are intensely into the sacred technology of the mass so the Middle Ages is a kind of in the West, is a kind of desert as far as psychedelics are concerned and we don't really find anything of interest until we jump up to the 19th century Havelock Ellis took peyote on Good Friday 1897 he wrote it up for the British Journal of Medicine they rejected it too fantastical his other major work which was in the Psychology of Sex seven volumes sold very well he gave some peyote buttons to William Butler Yates who realized that we're all slouching towards Bethlehem so some of the people that are denizens of the psychedelic history in modern times Humphrey Osmond worked at a little mental hospital up in Saskatchewan and began experimenting with psilocybin peyote I forget psilocybin I think it was doesn't make a whole lot of difference it's like North Korea, South Korea North Vietnam, South Vietnam you get them mixed up all the time as Richard Nixon testified laughter but Aldous Huxley somehow learned of his work and sent him a note and said hey if you're in LA come by and see me Osmond didn't think it would ever happen but in fact there was a bureaucratic problem at the hospital and they needed to reorganize and put get rid of the move Osmond up and get rid of the guy that was above him and so they while they were doing that they sent Osmond off to an APA convention in LA and he got in touch with Huxley they went to a few sessions of the APA convention and were bored to tears so they adjourned back to Huxley's place and Osmond turned him on it took about 90 minutes before it really hit him and then it blew his mind Huxley very brave in the world ape in essence Huxley was like a major intellectual one of the major intellectuals and enormously successful author, half blind but intensely intellectual part of a circle of people that stretches back really to Havlock Ellis and two more recent people Hessa, Herman Hessa, Siddhartha the glass bead game, Magister Rudy Carl Jung these are all people who tried mescaline but the psychedelic experience was restricted to a very small elite and Huxley upon trying that called it the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the beatific vision the doors of perception he produced as a result of it in there he mentions C.D. Broad a British philosopher who characterizes the brain as a cerebral reducing valve and Huxley's one of the first theories here was that psychedelics eliminate some of the filtering of the brain and the brain itself that's a very crude theory we have a lot more sophisticated stuff now Robin Carhart Harris has advanced that considerably Huxley was also friends with a fellow named Gerald Hurd who was again a major intellectual personage in the early mid 20th century the two of them eventually came into contact with a guy named Al Hubbard nicknamed Cappy because he was the president of the Vancouver Yacht Club and also the uranium corporation in Vancouver out of Vancouver he is best described as a kind of peripatetic imp and he rode off the sand doves got a huge supply of LSD and just tried around the world turning people on but kept it limited to a very small group of people like this there's Gerald Hurd there's Oscar Janager who eventually who was a psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who found out about LSD got a large supply of it and a group around him Huxley, Hurd Hubbard Janager, Sidney Cohen they were involved in Salon in the LA area and their recording secretary was Anna Nye pardon? Anna Nye is the name Anna Nye is the way it's pronounced in the song tell me what kind of man this Jesus is Anna Nye Janager also obtained DMT and introduced that into the whole thing another fellow that we'll get to there's Sidney Cohen and his trying LSD on Housewives do you find that well just hang on hang onto your seats for a little while so Alan Watts got into this but before I leave the earlier group behind Humphrey Osmond first proposed the term psychedelic at a meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957 he said the word meant mind manifesto from the two Greek words for psyche and and which means clear Huxley had sent Osmond a rhyme in which he suggested which went to make this trivial world sublime take a half a gram of time two must mean spiritedness in Greek Osmond wrote back to fathom heaven to fathom hell or soar angelic just take a pinch of psychedelic so you have to remember Maria Sabina and Wasson from that early slide introduced psilocybin and that was what Tim Lurie started with now until Tim Lurie came along the psychedelic usage although it was a growing circle was pretty much limited to a fairly elite circle a circle of intellectuals and a few housewives as you saw but then Timothy Lurie got a hold of psilocybin and this is a major turning point because Tim Lurie couldn't contain himself and in some ways he advanced things enormously and in other ways he set them back terribly but certainly and there you see him in some of his many guises so it was a major turning point for Tim Lurie the basic issue was he started out doing reasonable research at Harvard and he couldn't keep it in and started spewing it out and so you get the stuff starting to come out into very into settings that are not conducive to people getting the best out of it and so Tim Lurie was getting the best out of it and he became involved with these folks okay good old Alan William Burroughs you may some of you may know he was heir to the Burroughs fortune the Burroughs adding machine didn't have to work a day in his life and finally ended up preferring heroin which he said the only problem was it caused constipation which is probably the reason for its deleterious effects is because of the culture that we use it in but basically as long as you can deal with constipation and have plenty of money you're fine you don't have to steal things it's the stealing that really makes it problematic we'll see it's a cultural problem in Portugal in the Netherlands it's not a problem because they provide it people don't have to reuse needles they don't have to steal to support their habit is it a problem if you want to stop if you want to stop you just stop if you don't want to stop you don't stop maybe when the constipation gets to you you know that's enough I mean in a way it's a jiggering it's just another phase of prohibition and the problem is it's a cultural problem if you're working in a safe environment you're not going to overdose if you're in a clinic where it's supervised and most people get tired of it after a while okay but so here we have these guys Kerouac on the road and Ellen Watts who was a great talker so east coast we've got Tim Leary west coast we've got Ken Kesey Neil Cassidy coming out of on the road there's the bus the first acid tests which morphed into the trips festivals which morphed into Burning Man Burning Man the first human being and down there in the corner is one of the sponsors Augustus Stanley Owsley III who learned how to make who had a girlfriend who was good at making LSD and he produced zillions of doses really she blew it out but we've got some problems here the war psychedelics and the anti-war movement started synergizing with each other and the government got really scared they had been interested in LSD early on there was a guy named James Moore who accompanied Wasson Gordon and Valentina to Mexico under the pretext of being a photographer one of those CIA plans okay and he brought psilocybin back to the world back to the mushrooms back to the CIA they were interested in it because of it having mind effects they discovered was when they gave it to the spies those hardened spooks ended up over in the corner weeping and crying about brotherly love other than the ones who ran frantically out of the room and had to be chased down in Virginia where they were found under a fountain talking about those terrible lies and the monsters that were assaulting them so it didn't work out for the CIA. Prohibition California criminalized LSD on October 7th 1966 and that's when things started to head down because it drove it underground and the worst thing you can do I mean prohibition it's like will we ever learn okay we tried prohibition with alcohol when I lived in Oklahoma one of the lines there was it was still dry there were still dry counties in Oklahoma in the 1970s and the line was they would remain dry as long as the Baptists and the bootleggers could stagger to the poles went underground and at the same time proliferated Sasha Shulgin wonderful man wonderful wonderful man he could give a lecture on chemistry that was just if you didn't know a bit about chemistry you would be fascinated okay and there he is with his wife Ann and immortalized by Alex Gray and there's one of his dirty pictures down there in the corner we call them dirty pictures the molecules there's a great video on YouTube Sasha's Alex's dirty pictures wonderful video and Harris other folks of later time Richard Alpert of course was with Tim Leary at Harvard early on but they diverged India took on Alpert but it didn't take on Tim and we see Tim in an early phase down there in the corner we see him in his post India phase when he turned back into just an ordinary transcendental we have the intellectualization of Ken Wilber and we have a leprechaun fully fully as filled with the impishness as was Tappy Terry McKenna that book I remember going to the Unitarian Church in LA after Ram Dass had come back from India and it was lovely and it was robes and beads and flowers and it was just fun and they were passing out this thing that says you want a copy of this book we're going to publish you know oh these hippies I'm not going to buy another car because it will never happen but it did and it's still in public publication then as the glorious phase was being dampened by the criminalization and all it came from Czechoslovakia Stanislav Graf where Stanislav Graf had been when he was graduating from gymnasium gymnasium is like high school junior college in the summer after gymnasium he wanted to become a cartoonist he liked to draw cartoons he was headed for the state animation school he had put in his application because you go right from gymnasium to university or professional school or whatever and a friend of his came by who had found a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams Freud was forbidden literature in communist culture Czechoslovakia behind the Iron Curtain at that point and the friend was very excited about the book trying to get a college kid today to read the Interpretation of Dreams it's impossible but tell them I can't and boy Stan picked up excitement and begged to borrow the book he said he stayed up all night reading it withdrew his application to film school and put in one to become to medical school a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst which he did trained underground doing his residency at Charles Hospital in Prague where they were working with the Sandoz Corporation in the development of some of the new major tranquilizers Melro they were working with and Stan says you know when you work with a pharmaceutical company they're always sending you stuff and they sent in the program he was in there appeared a box of ampules of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories and they started a research program that was totally the opposite of what Tim Leary's operation was communist country people put things close to their chest amazing research curing curing not suppressive like most of the psychotropic tranquilizers like curative of people with profound depression in his book it's now called LSD Door to the Numinous it was called Homes of the Human Unconscious originally but a fellow who was severely catatonically depressed for a long time their practice was to give a small dose of LSD didn't get anything they increased the dose kept increasing they'd gotten this guy up to 3500 micrograms 3500 micrograms before they got the first reaction the guy got up out of his room went to the kitchen made a bologna sandwich and then went to the day room and played chess sounds like my day mom I don't play chess so Stan got out of Czechoslovakia this country said he came out there two suitcases he had his notes and two shirts came and fortuitously hooked up with a man named Walter Pankey who had Timothy Leary in his still relatively stable phase as a dissertation advisor and engaged the famous Good Friday experiment Walter Pankey was a physician who'd taken a sabbatical to go to divinity school then went back to Johns Hopkins and was working with cancer patients on whom the oncologists had given up because they were beyond any help they were in pain they were in despair they were scared they were using LSD with these patients all the videotapes had gone the last little bits of videotape burned when Stan's house burned down some years ago the most astounding videotape is a guy who was a stevedore on the docks of Baltimore in his 60's metastasized melanoma they couldn't give him anything orally they had to inject him with dichrobaltryptamine Stan is sitting for him and in the course of this session a certain Neanderthal with like maybe a vocabulary of 600 words half of which are profanities but mostly grunts his family had abandoned him and in the course of this session he is transformed and he's lecturing the great Dr. Stanislav Grof about the great recycling yard in the sky I cry because I've been through throat cancer myself I'm with people who are with cancers and who are still facing terror and with 35, 40 years, he could have been making it better. But we're getting there, finally. I never thought it would happen. So here's Stan with Christina when they were young and in love. They always were in love. There's Stan with Albert. Albert Hoffman. Yeah, he and Stan were good buddies. And there he is with Hans-Rudy Dieger. Dieger. The Descent of the Alien. And Stan's latest book focuses on Dieger's art. And there's Alex Gray. There's Stan with Mr. Shamanism. Another leprechaun. I'm sorry, who's that with the shamanism you said? The Zavada, right? The Way of the Shaman. Michael Shaman. Oh. Yeah. Michael Harner, who was the one who brought shamanism into the mix in the mid-50s. Went to the Amazon as a field anthropologist. Ended up going native. Apprentice of the shaman. They were learning the spirit of the river and the spirit of the trees and the spirit of the tiger. And then one day the shaman says, Now we're going to do the spirit of the outboard motor. Blew his mind. That's what I like. Outboard motor. So Michael has wonderful stories. Wonderful stories. He's pretty old right now, but I think he can still tell stories. Wonderful stories. Well, the missionaries come in. Missionaries come in. Everybody, these guys have heard their own stories over and over again. The missionaries come in with these new stories. So one night a missionary's in and they're walking back down to the river because the only way to get around the Amazon is with boats. Walking back down to the river the next morning with the missionary and they're chatting and joking. So I said, you know, we really love that Lazarus story. Some of you may have had biblical training. Oh, yeah? Yeah, we tried it and it works. At which point the missionary moved a little faster toward the river. So Stan came up with this thing. He couldn't use the Johns Hopkins thing fell apart when LSD became criminalized. Michael Murphy and he fortuitously hooked up and he invited Stan to Esalen as scholar in residence. After a few years, Stan needed to produce some income for Esalen, so he put together this technique called holotropic breathwork, which when I was telling Stan about for the second time, he wasn't quite focused, that the reason I decided upon holotropic breathwork training to go into this holotropic breathwork training was because I had an experience in holotropic breathwork that was identical with the most powerful experiences I've ever had with LSD. And Stan said, that's what convinced me too. It's not like taking a pill and you don't have any choice because you've got to work at it. That's why it's called breathwork. But you can get to the same place. And Rick Goblin was in-- there were two parallel groups of trainees in holotropic breathwork in the mid-'80s. Rick Goblin was in one of them. And Rick got it that Timothy O'Leary wasn't the way to go. The way to go was to start, get the credentials, go slowly, and slowly, and slowly. And it's effective. And through the holotropic breathwork training, it's brought people together who had that interest that was disappointed as the '60s began to fade, a fellow named Michael Mithofer, who became the lead word searcher for MDMA. So the holotropic breathwork stuff really has been the means, has been the leverage that's kept things going in as far as where we actually have hope now that we're going to get this. Now, the '60s, one of the artifacts of the '60s there, and that's the internet. So psychedelics for psychological healing. And I was saying to Stan, you know, isn't this great? You know, finally, you know, the stuff's being done. Michael's doing the MDMA. He's doing the MDMA stuff. And Stan says, yeah. But he says, you know, that's all been done. It's all been written up before. It's all there, just been forgotten. He says, the real potential is creativity. And indeed, from counterculture to cyberculture. Rick has been working in the psychological realm. And some of the other people that came out of the '60s, Steve Jobs, among them, the future looks bright to me. And I'm sure happy I've lived long enough to see it. Thank you very much. So hope you all liked that. Pretty short, pretty sweet. And I got a few giggles out of it. I really appreciate Lenny's sense of humor on his take on history. You know, being a person who lived through the '60s, he definitely has some direct experience to share about, you know, what the successes were, what maybe some of the shortcomings were. And his insights have very much been helpful to me. So I hope you liked that. And you can check him out over at dreamshadow.com and lennygibson.com, I believe. He's got a lot of academic papers that he's been working on. I think that's been his focus over the last few years, just trying to synthesize Alfred North Whitehead, which, I think, is a very good example of how we can work closely with him. And I think that's been a really good example of how we can work closely with him.