POPULARITY
7 episodes with robert forte
4 episodes with robert forte
3 episodes with robert forte
2 episodes with robert forte
2 episodes with robert forte
2 episodes with robert forte
The Psychedelic Entrepreneur - Medicine for These Times with Beth Weinstein
Robert Forte is a scholar of the history and psychology of religion, with a special focus on the ancient and modern use—and misuse—of psychedelic plants and drugs. He has studied and collaborated with many of the most seminal figures who first brought these substances to public consciousness since the 1940s, including Albert Hofmann, Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Alexander Shulgin, Stanislav Grof, and others.His first book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, was praised by Huston Smith as “the best single inquiry into the religious significance of psychedelics.” His second book, Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences of Timothy Leary, offers an intimate look at this controversial figure. In 1998, he republished an updated edition of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck—a seminal text that initiated the inquiry into the role of entheogens in Western religion and philosophy.Over the years, Forte has manufactured MDMA before it was scheduled, conducted research into its clinical effects, and performed fieldwork in Peru studying the impact of ayahuasca on cancer patients. He has also maintained an underground practice utilizing various medicines for psychotherapy and spiritual exploration.Around 20 years ago, his interests shifted toward the sociology of psychedelic experience, where he has developed a somewhat controversial perspective on how these substances entered modern consciousness. He argues that the history of psychedelics, much like the history of religion, contains both the best and worst of humanity. Without acknowledging and integrating its shadow aspects, he warns, we risk becoming victims of them.Episode Highlights▶ How early psychedelic experiences profoundly influenced individual perspectives.▶ How the 1980s saw a resurgence in psychedelic research following prior suppression.▶ MDMA's shift from therapeutic tool to illegal substance exemplifies drug policy complexities.▶ Government drug policies and how they often prioritize control over public health.▶ The psychedelic narratives that are often entangled with conspiracy theories and misinformation.▶ How psychedelics offer potential for consciousness expansion, but require careful integration to avoid pitfalls like spiritual bypassing.▶ The Controlled Substances Act and how it's rationality is widely questioned.▶ How despite illegality, MDMA's popularity grew, reflecting societal interest.▶ The societal impact of psychedelics is multifaceted, demanding ethical consideration.▶ Why meaningful change requires applying psychedelic insights to daily life, beyond mere experience.Robert Forte's Links & Resources▶ Website: alteredstatesofamerica.net▶ Substack: alteredstatesofamerica.substack.com▶ Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/robert.forte.79 Download Beth's free trainings here: Clarity to Clients: Start & Grow a Transformational Coaching, Healing, Spiritual, or Psychedelic Business: https://bethaweinstein.com/grow-your-spiritual-businessIntegrating Psychedelics & Sacred Medicines Into Business: https://bethaweinstein.com/psychedelics-in-business▶ Beth's Coaching & Guidance: https://bethaweinstein.com/coaching ▶ Beth's Offerings & Courses: https://bethaweinstein.com/services▶ Instagram: @bethaweinstein ▶ FB: / bethw.nyc + bethweinsteinbiz ▶ Join the free Psychedelics & Purpose Community: / psychedelicsandsacredmedicines
Word Up podcast favorite and psychedelic scholar, Robert Forte, returned to the podcast to talk about the Kennedy family legacy, JFK's history with psychedelics and the impending possibly, maybe confirmation of one RFK into the Department of Health and Human Services.Part 2:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatzAll things Dani, including books, courses, webinars and coaching:www.danikatz.comRegister for Confluence (with Promo code KATZ10):https://brushfire.com/confluence/Confluence2025/590269Find Robert:www.alteredstatesofamerica.netalteredstatesofmaerica.substack.comtwitter.com/divinecomedy56Show notes:Forte's new book pending Is Trump a ‘new administration'? JFK, Zapruder, and official narrative2024 Election & propaganda Assassination attempt- real or fake?Plato's cave allegoryConfronting cognitive dissonance with dialogueBuddhism- 4 noble truths & last mealWhat is our role in other's lives and suffering?Psychedelic community movements & psy-opsNature of non-conformistsAssassination of JFKForte and The Kennedy's- hope & RFK RFK- good or bad faith actorAntonio Gracias & Rick Doblin- follow the moneyThe need for and naïveté of ‘hope'Political climate in GreeceTo write or not to write and make olive oilThe JFK files and suppressionThe alien & UFO psyopTrump, FDA, and psychedelicsTrump as CEO of America Corp
Psychedelic scholar and Word Up favorite, Robert Forte, returned to the podcast to talk about the early days of microdosing and how “the secret that everybody knew” became a tech bro fad/multi-illion dollar psyop.Part 2:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatzAll things Dani, including books, courses, webinars and coaching:www.danikatz.comShow notes:Micro-dosing: "the secret everybody knew"“Acid Hype: American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience” by Steven Siff'Father of Microdosing'- James Fadiman & LSDInsertion of micro-dosing into social arena via mediaPlacebo to clinical effectsCIA & the Psychedelic Renaissance1960's Anti-war movement- Weathermen Underground Psychedelic psy-op as gov't mind control‘Severity of initiation' studiesMysticism and formation of cultsPodcasters- agents for control or seekers of truthCurrent micro-dosing trend- helpful or harmful?Zuckerberg- modelling “only happy/no shadow-work"Psychedelics aren't for everybody- “the rich get richer"The Upanishads- micro-dosing is a personal exploration Ayahuasca- perversion of a sacred shamanistic practiceImpermanence of life“Christianization” of psychedelics
Psychedelic scholar, Robert Forte, returned to the podcast to FINALLY set the record straight on MDMA, MAPS and the FDA's recent (and salient) decision to not approve Rick Doblin's MDMA trauma therapy proposal, which the fake alt media community would have us believing is some sort of travesty. Oy.Part 2:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatzwww.danikatz.comFind Robert:Twitter: @divinecomedy56https://www.alteredstatesofamerica.net/https://alteredstatesofamerica.substack.com/Show notes:Returning to the USA from GreeceSetting the record straight: MDMA, MAPS & the FDARFK & drug policy advisoryUpholding “The Narrative”: Joe Rogan, Aubrey Marcus, Jordan PetersonPsychedelic field researchersOrigins of Forte's MDMA journeyUS Neo-Conservatism & TotalitarianismTimothy Leary and Frank BaronConference of 1981 and Esalen InstituteHunter S. ThompsonDoblin- Secret snitch to Drug Guru and media darling“Conspiracy theorist” label vs real drug-related conspiraciesAmanda Fielding, Rebel Wisdom, ConspiritualityBooks: CIA, drug trade conspiraciesWWII: OSS members to Harvard professors/CIATimothy Leary: 1948 CIA funded MKUltraOperation Paperclip- Nazi's into USAAmerican Spirit diluted with drug psyops40's-50's psychedelic researchLeary- flawed character with anti-authoritarian spirit1985- Forte at U of Chicago- religion studyCharles Schuster & MDMA brain damageSchedule 1 drug & most popular drug in the worldEcstasy & Rave movement- drug deployment psychological warfareSalon article: art students, Mossad spies, DEA & drug ringsRick Doblin- questionable credentialsHeseg Foundation- “greatest moment of his life”Disclaimer- re Israel‘Orphan drug'- MDMA has no owner/no $ for PharmaAlex Shulgin- Bohemian GroveHuxley- Soma for the masses1984- MAPS (scam) launched- non-profit to $15kLeonard Pickard- DIA, LSD, & MDMAWhere is MAPS now?1970=Controlled Substance Act$16 million grant at Harvard for psychedelic researchBring MDMA back to consciousness explorationBill Maher and story-tellingAltered States of America and psychedelic movements
We have Robert Forte back on today. Robert is one of the most knowledgeable men I know on the psychedelic movement of the 60's and has some hot takes on what we all think we know about the movement. He may surprise you with some of the things he says. As always come with an open mind and Fit For Service Trimester One was the best program I've personally put together so far. We had 40 folks come with honesty and commitment. We went through cleanses, workout overhauls, working-in practices, optimized our diets and sleep. Then topped it all off with a gathering at the feet of Montana Mountains. Come join me to get on track to the best shape of your life and kick it out in Sedona this fall for Trimester 2 Connect with Robert: Website: Altered States of America - Altered States of America.Substack Books: "Entheogens And The Future of Religion" -Robert Forte Facebook: Robert Forte Show Notes: British Army on LSD "The Most Dangerous Superstition" -Larken Rose Sponsors: Caldera Lab is the best in men's skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off Bioptimizers To get the 'Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu Monetary Metals Start investing in your future with Monetary Metals. Head to https://bit.ly/3zaKcEJ & monetary-metals.com/kkp Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn't.
Former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation talks about how LSD is linked to the origins of man's religion and how he found his purpose in life through psychedelic experiences.
How did psychedelics become part of the American lexicon in the 1960s, and what has changed since then?Explore the true history and the people behind the Psychedelic era with scholar, historian and researcher Robert Forte in this very revealing Living 4D conversation.Learn more about Robert on his website, Substack and on social media via Facebook.TimestampsRobert's first encounter with psychedelics in fifth grade via Life Magazine in 1966. (6:01)Little known psychologist Frank X. Barron was the man who later turned on Timothy Leary. (12:01)At the origin of the major world religions and nearly all traditional Shamanic practices, you will find a sacred plant. (20:37)Why so many religious people reject psychedelics. (23:38)The MK-Ultra program. (37:09)Timothy Leary and Ram Dass/Dr. Richard Alpert: Facts versus fiction. (44:10)“What do you call someone who's not a conspiracy theorist?” (1:01:32)Why would the CIA popularize magic mushrooms in the 1950s? (1:15:08)Are today's medical “experts” truly trained to work with patients using psychedelics? (1:28:07)Robert's ayahuasca vision for enlightenment and a bleak future. (1:38:38)Is Paul too young to retire? (1:49:21)Huston Smith on psychedelics and the differences between religious experiences and a religious life. (1:54:57)The Greek origin of the word mystery. (2:01:11)Why don't more people realize that all of us are connected to each other? (2:25:40)“I knew Terence McKenna before he was Terence McKenna.” (2:34:27)The origins of MDMA (ecstasy). (2:50:52)“Psychedelics attract dissidents.” (3:03:14)ResourcesTimothy Leary: Outside Looking In edited by Robert ForteEntheogens and the Future of Religion edited by Robert ForteFind more resources for this episode on our website.Thanks to our awesome sponsors:PaleovalleyBiOptimizers US and BiOptimizers UK PAUL10Organifi CHEK20CHEK Institute/CHEK Academy Open HouseWild PasturesNedPique LifeWe may earn commissions from qualifying purchases using affiliate links.
Robert Forte and I share such meaty, sparkly conversations that I figured it was time for us to share another one with YOU. And so it was that we dropped in and caught up on the various op evolutions. Note: We did have some tech difficulties in the beginning of our conversation, which had us freezing a few times. It all worked itself out after the first 10-15 minutes, so thank you for your patience and understanding. Tech…oy. Find Robert: https://www.alteredstatesofamerica.net/https://alteredstatesofamerica.substack.com/https://www.facebook.com/robert.forte.79 Show notes:"In the beginning…..”~ how Jesus was born to be the very first psy-opAn encounter with the Dalai Llama~ the paradox of worshipping false idolsNew age apathy vs the rebellious American spirit~ a search for common groundLiving in the upside down~ Is our realm a satanic inversion run by reptilian overlords?The charisma of Camelot ~ Robert's love for the Kennedy's & thoughts on RFk JrScripts and screenplays~ Israel & the confusion of cognitive dissonance Surviving Samsara~ "let us not talk falsely now…."The “wild” fire of Maui~ Robert's tale of loss & choice to savour life in the midst of chaosDeath happens~ the end of the world is not the end of the story Altered States of America~ Robert's online presence
I was introduced to Vincent Rado's AMAZING work through our mutual friend, Robert Forte. Emily and I immediately booked him on our Words podcast, and have since started a Vince-specific sub-series, “Psychedelic Fascism,” AND been going back and forth about sharing him on our individual podcasts, and which topics we want to tackle with him. In this interview, Vince slowly walks us through the creepy and complicated relationship between the military industrial complex and psychedelics, filling in oodles of blanks with ancient philosophy, and oodles of previously disconnected dots. Part 2 is available for my donating supporters here:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatz Find Vince at: https://twitter.com/vincent_radohttps://vincentrado.substack.com/ Show notes:A devotion to drugs~ Vincent's background & journey into deep-divingVincent's red flags~ cluing into the counter-culture propaganda around psychedelicsAcid Dreams~ a must-read book for connecting dots“Drugism” & “High and Mighty”~ Vincent's new books exposing the psychedelic psy-opsA salty past~ how the military is historically entwined with drugsTimothy Leary & MK Ultra: digging into the roots of psychedelic propagandaA parallel to Plato: is the modern-day psy(chedelic)-ops a distraction that fosters apolitical apathy?The myth of Micro-dosing~ is it simply a palatable control mechanism to maintain status-quo?Peter Thiel & Leafly~ as always, follow the money….High THC levels & the Vietnam War: a history of government modification and manipulation“Halluncinations” by Dr. West~ a book dissuading youth from engaging with the systemA spectrum of responses~ how Vincent's ideas are received by the world around him
I was introduced to Vincent Rado's AMAZING work through our mutual friend, Robert Forte. Emily and I immediately booked him on our Words podcast, and have since started a Vince-specific sub-series, “Psychedelic Fascism,” AND been going back and forth about sharing him on our individual podcasts, and which topics we want to tackle with him. In this interview, Vince slowly walks us through the creepy and complicated relationship between the military industrial complex and psychedelics, filling in oodles of blanks with ancient philosophy, and oodles of previously disconnected dots. Part 2 is available for my donating supporters here:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatz Find Vince at: https://twitter.com/vincent_radohttps://vincentrado.substack.com/ Show notes:A devotion to drugs~ Vincent's background & journey into deep-diving Vincent's red flags~ cluing into the counter-culture propaganda around psychedelicsAcid Dreams~ a must-read book for connecting dots “Drugism” & “High and Mighty”~ Vincent's new books exposing the psychedelic psy-opsA salty past~ how the military is historically entwined with drugsTimothy Leary & MK Ultra: digging into the roots of psychedelic propaganda A parallel to Plato: is the modern-day psy(chedelic)-ops a distraction that fosters apolitical apathy?The myth of Micro-dosing~ is it simply a palatable control mechanism to maintain status-quo?Peter Thiel & Leafly~ as always, follow the money….High THC levels & the Vietnam War: a history of government modification and manipulation“Halluncinations” by Dr. West~ a book dissuading youth from engaging with the systemA spectrum of responses~ how Vincent's ideas are received by the world around him
I was introduced to Jay Stevens by our mutual friend, Robert Forte. Jay is the author of “Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream”, as well as a poet, and musician. He's an expansive thinker with a wide breadth of knowledge, and I so enjoyed the conversation we shared. Find Part 2 here:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatz Find Jay's Orphics here:https://jaystevens.bandcamp.com/album/what-the-moon-wants-from-the-wolfhttps://jaystevens.bandcamp.com/album/orphic-revival Show notes:Storming Heaven~ compelling readers to read the next sentenceThe art of saying “NO!”~ who says it best and why? Has the worship of celebrities & authority figures supplanted a worship of God?Examining the deterioration of the Creative Class through the lens of the Hollywood writer's strike1960's Revolutionary moments~ how LSD gave the gift of creative inspiration Modern-day Psychedelics & Psy-ops~ soma for the masses in an absence of sacrednessThoughts on the rise of Ayahuasca popularity & the origins of plant wisdom From demonization to institutional acceptance~ how trendy psychedelic therapies can lead us away from knowing & healing ourselvesPsy-ops One, drugs and the Black Bureaucracy MKUltra and the conjuring of mass rhythmic entrainment~ what is the end game?The science of sound~ examining the origin of linguistics & the power of language "Everywhere I looked was poetry"~ Jay's personal journey with his museFinding flow~ the nature of entrainment What are we?~ Insectoids or bio-cosmic resonators?“In the beginning was the word….”~ thoughts on language as technology for communicating & creating realityThe cream doesn't rise to the top!~ the arrogance & psychopathy of our ruling classAI and the digitization of humanity~ can we opt out of the machine?Re-mixing Storming Heaven~ expanding the second edition to include updated material
Robert Forte is an independent scholar, international lecturer and is widely recognized as one of the foremost historians and researchers in the field of psychedelic movements and psychedelic plants and drugs healing and transformative potential. His research also includes psychedelics' darker side and abuse by government agencies and the medical establishment for experimenting on methods of social engineering and mind control. During the past 45 years Robert has collaborated with the most important and influential pioneers in psychedelic research including Stanislav Grof, Albert Hoffman (the scientist who discovered LSD), Timothy Leary, Gordon Wasson, Terence McKenna and many others. He has authored several books including "Entheogens and the Future of Religion" and "Outside Looking In" -- an edited collection of essays by both Leary's friends and foes to better understand Leary's impact on American culture. Bob holds a degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a graduate degree in the History of Religion from the University of Chicago Divinity School. His website is AlteredStatesOfAmerica.net
Psychedelic revolution or schismogenesis? Robert Forte is basically the Forrest Gump of the psychedelic world. He's been in the gam with some of the biggest names in psychedelic history, Grav, Leary, Sholgren, Stamets, Doblin, the list goes on. In this conversation Robert lays out one of my favorite things in the world, an alternate narrative to the one we've been presented around psychedelics. Robert presents us with a deep history of psychedelics as a weapon on the American public. Some of the players are surprises to me and I think you'll be as delighted as I was to hear the big name drop. The details are substantial, please dispel some disbelief and use your own discernment. ORGANIFI GIVEAWAY Keep those reviews coming in! Please drop a dope review and include your IG/Twitter handle and we'll get together for some Organifi even faster moving forward. Connect with Robert: Website: Altered States of America - Altered States of America.Substack Books: "Entheogens And The Future of Religion" -Robert Forte Facebook: Robert Forte Show Notes: "Brave New World" -Aldous Huxley "The Creature of Jekyll Island" - G Edward Griffin More Deadly than War - G Edward Griffin(youtube) "Acid Dreams" -Martin Lee "The Beast Reawakens" Martin Lee Schismogenesis: The Generations of schisms, creation of division "Mary's Mosaic" -Peter Janney President John F Kennedy's Peace Speech "The Immortality Key" -Brian C Muraresku "The Secret Teachings of All Ages" -Manly P Hall "Outside Looking In" -TC Boyle "The Road To Eleusis" -Gordon Wassan, Albert Hofmann Sponsors: Mark Bell's Mind Bullet This Kratom Extract supplement supports your cognition like no other and that's not just because Mark's a homie. Get some over at mindbullet.com and use “KKP” at checkout for 20% off! Ancestral Hunting School To learn many skills of survival and ancestral tradition, head over to ancestralhuntingschool.com, punch in “KKP” at checkout for 10% off! Cured Nutrition has a wide variety of stellar, naturally sourced, products. They're chock full of adaptogens and cannabinoids to optimize your meatsuit. You can get 20% off by heading over to www.curednutrition.com/KKP using code “KKP” Lucy Go to lucy.co and use codeword “KKP” at Checkout to get 20% off the best nicotine gum in the game, or check out their lozenge. To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast Connect with Kyle: Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn't.
Robert Forte is an author, editor, publisher, psychedelic scholar and researcher, and a dear, dear friend. As we've spent the past two years unpacking the sham show and talking each other off of countless “why aren't they seeing this??????” ledges, Robert proposed sharing a proper podcast conversation on the psychology of non-perception. It's a doozy… Find Part 2:danikatz.locals.comwww.patreon.com/danikatz Register NOW for my last-ever LIVE virtual POP PROPAGANDA home school course for teens, 4/12-6/15:www.danikatz.com/poppropcourse Find Robert:https://www.alteredstatesofamerica.net/ Show notes:The concept that flew into his head: Mind Control & the Psychology of Non-Perception, from JFK to 9/11His journey of awakening: from disbelieving “conspiracy theories” to the discovery of facts that cast doubt on the official narrativeBelieving JFK conspiracy but not 9/11: Forte's personal experience of non-perceptionHis complicated story in PsychedelicsSoloman Ash: the conformity studies and the startling discovery of human behaviourFrank Baron's deep exploration of non-conformists vs conformists & creativity The origin of “Conspiracy Theorist” as a psychological weapon of censorship through ridiculeThe shocking truth: Milgram studies funded by CIA to gather intel for future social engineering Cognitive Dissonance: a pillar of non-perception caused by repression of trauma and/or uncomfortable truthsPledge of Allegiance~ what is the origin story of the ritual?Henry Luce: Time Life, psychedelic propagation & American hypnosisThe thwarting of intelligent thought~ is the CIA behind it?“The rich get richer”~ why many psychedelic users are stuck in the conformity of non-perceptionPsychedelics, the Kennedy's, & the fetishizing of the sacredNon-Perception & the Hopi Prophecies~ where does humanity go from here? RFk Jr's globalist conflicts of interest hidden inside a movement of freedomThe fallacy of believing in famous false idols operating inside the old system vs renouncing and creating solutions-based societiesNew growths of Nature and signs of spring bring hopeHow do we flip the non-perception script?The greater the darkness, the brighter the lightBalancing truth-seeking with being connected with the beauty of life & power of integrity
For any of us that are a part of the current Psychedelic renaissance, it is crucial that we realize & understand that, in a big part, the awareness & popularity we are currently experiencing within this field was made possible by individuals such as todays guest over the last 50 years or so. It is because of these individuals that we are now able to see psychedelic medicines being respected & made credible by prestigious organizations & able to be utilized to treat challenging societal issues, such as the subject of mental health as a whole. As I hinted to briefly already, todays guest for episode 100 of the podcast is someone who has been referred to by individuals such as James Fadiman as a “great & not well known hero of the psychedelic movement” & who has worked with & been a close friend of individuals such as Terrance McKenna, Stanislav Grov, Albert Hoffman & Timothy Leary, to name but a few. In addition, he is also the author behind books such as “Entheogens & the future of religion” & “Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In” & has been an educator at prestigious organizations such as the California Institute of Integral Studies & played a pivotal role in the Harvard Psilocybin project. As amazing as all of what I just laid out is, this is only a fraction of the incredible life he has lived & in todays episode, we will doing a deep dive into where ever the cosmos takes us in this epic journey we are about to embark upon!Check out Robert's pages:https://www.alteredstatesofamerica.nethttps://alteredstatesofamerica.substack.comShow Notes:(5:04) Robert's viewpoint on the psychedelic renaissance. (7:05) How Robert's views have shifted over the years.(22:57) When do you know that you're on the right path in life?(32:16) When MDMA was legal.(44:28) The lies and myths surrounding MDMA.()1:06:47) Mushrooms and their history.(01:27:36) Where you can reach Robert!(01:30:43) One final question…Join the Highly Optimized Ceremony Circle on Facebook! https://www.highlyoptimized.me This episode was produced by Mazel Tov Media in Quincy, Massachusetts.
This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article." Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show. Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there, you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me". The other, "Day Tripper", was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV, The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though. As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]
(Psychedelic Renaissance Series) Robert Forte has been around the psychedelic world for decades as an author, facilitator and researcher. For three decades, Forte has worked closely with many of the most prominent leaders of the psychedelic movement, including Dr. Stanislav Grof, Timothy Leary, R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others.#BenStewartPodcast #RobertForte #Psychedelics #Culture #Historyhttps://www.alteredstatesofamerica.net/Produced live, Thursdays at 5:00 PM EST. CoHost/Producer: IG@Gordon_CummingsBen Stewart Podcast strives to offer awareness and solutions to a rapidly evolving world, while building community… Join our kickass Discord community!https://discord.gg/7QadgxEK4zSupport & Access Exclusive Content!https://www.benjosephstewart.com/plans-pricingCheck Out My Latest Documentaries - “Awake In The Darkness” - https://www.aubreymarcus.com/"DMT QUEST" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My95s6ZryPgVisit https://www.BenJosephStewart.com/ to get more involved.Check out my Gaia shows "Psychedelica" & "Limitless" with a free trial. - https://www.gaia.com/invite/join?rfd=AGvFiE&utm_source=iafMake sure to hit the like button and Follow me on:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BenJosephStewartMinds: https://www.minds.com/BenJosephStewart/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/BenJosephStewart/Twitter: https://twitter.com/BenJosephStewRumble: https://rumble.com/c/c-1044023BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/aanpGqOQt8ZX/
First Draft Episode #199: Robin Wasserman Robin Wasserman, New York Times bestselling author of adult novel Girls on Fire, as well as young adult novels The Waking Dark, The Book of Blood and Shadow, Hacking Harvard, The Cold Awakening series, the Seven Deadly Sins series. Her next novel, to come out with Scribner, is Mother Daughter Widow Wife. Links and Topics Mentioned In This Episode Robin loved Diane Wynne Jones and Stephen King as a kid, particularly Salem’s Lot, The Stand, and It. (Robin wrote for The Atlantic about, “How Stephen King Saved My Life”) Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, mathematician, and astrologer, about whom Robin would gladly talk about forever. (And I would listen!) Robin wrote her senior thesis about Dr. Timothy Leary, who co-conducted studies known as the Psilocybin Project, which sought to test whether psychedelics could cure the emotional pain of Western man. Leary was fired from Harvard when the ethics of his studies came into question, and went on to continue promoting the use of psychedelics as a thought leader in the 60s counter-cultural movement. Leary has written extensively about his philosophy, including in books like The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, his book with his partner in the experiments, Richard Alpert* (now known as Ram Dass); his autobiography, Flashbacks; and Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Many have written about him, including The Timothy Leary Project: Inside the Great Counterculture Experiment, compiled by the archivist Jennifer Ulrich; and Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte. *Of interest to me is that the TV show LOST paid homage to Ram Dass by naming a character Richard Alpert David Levithan, who has and does host a regular drinks night for New York authors of young adult fiction. Robin went to one of these gatherings and met John Green before Looking for Alaska won the Printz. Kurt Cobain was the lead singer of Nirvana, the band that broke open grunge. Cobain died by suicide in 1994. If you’re interested in Cobain, or Nirvana, or the grunge scene generally, I personally recommend Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm, and the documentary Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen (about which Robin wrote, “The Art of Resurrection: Montage of Heck,” in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books). The Satanic Panic was a phenomenon in the 1980s, wherein millions of Americans feared that an underground cult of Satan worshipers were practicing rituals and committing crimes. Robin particularly recommends Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children, which covers the phenomenon of, specifically, day care workers being charged with horrible accusations of child abuse. I’m obsessed with this phenomenon, and there are a ton of other podcasts that do a great job explaining it: For a broad overview, the Stuff You Should Know podcast released an episode about The Satanic Panic The Satanic Panic is a multi-part, deep dive into the phenomenon and many of the cases that came to define it (and their resources page isn’t to be missed) The McMartin Child Abuse trial was one of the most massive and egregious examples of the Satanic Panic as a community-seizing exercise of hysteria. Both WNYC’s The Takeaway and Generation Why have devoted episodes to exploring the case. Documentary filmmaker Penny Lane (whose most recent film, Hail Satan?, is awesome) went on KCRW’s The Document to discuss the case, and the phenomenon. Robin was inspired, in part, by an event of mass hysteria that afflicted dozens (of mostly high school cheerleaders) in LeRoy, New York, a phenomenon covered in the New York Times and Slate. Robin wrote about the phenomenon for the Los Angeles Times Review of Books (“Girl Trouble”), which is a non-fiction piece on the history of hysteria and a review of The Fever by Megan Abbott. Another book written about that phenomenon is The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas (listen to Kara’s episodes of First Draft here and here). The West Memphis Three was another case of hysteria leading to false convictions, in which three men in West Memphis, Arkansas were held responsible for the deaths of three young boys. The trial was controversial, and the three convicted men were released after serving more than 18 years in prison. The case is covered in a modern classic of documentary filmmaking, a trio of docs that begins with Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. The concept of “kindred spirits” put forth by Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery led Robin to some dysfunctional concepts of female friendship as a young woman Holly Black, who Robin calls “the queen of life modeling exercises” (listen to Holly Black’s First Draft episode here), asked her to write out what author she’d like to be. Robert Cormier and Neil Gaiman were among the many different answers to that question. Robin threw out that she’d like to be a cross between Michael Chabon and Joss Whedon. What/If, the TV show that Robin wrote for, is now available to watch on Netflix! Subscribe To First Draft with Sarah Enni Every Tuesday, I speak to storytellers like Veronica Roth, author of Divergent; Linda Holmes, author and host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast; Jonny Sun, internet superstar, illustrator of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gmorning, Gnight! and author and illustrator of Everyone’s an Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too; Michael Dante DiMartino, co-creator of Avatar: The Last Airbender; John August, screenwriter of Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; or Rhett Miller, musician and frontman for The Old 97s. Together, we take deep dives on their careers and creative works. Don’t miss an episode! Subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. It’s free! Rate, Review, and Recommend How do you like the show? Please take a moment to rate and review First Draft with Sarah Enni in Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your honest and positive review helps others discover the show -- so thank you! Is there someone you think would love this podcast as much as you do? Please share this episode on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or via carrier pigeon (maybe try a text or e-mail, come to think of it). Just click the Share button at the bottom of this post! Thanks again!
This is a segment of episode #195 of Last Born In The Wilderness “Mind Control: Psychedelics, Conspiracy, & Truth In The Post-Truth Era w/ Robert Forte.” Listen to the full episode: http://bit.ly/LBWforte2 Read the 1956 Life Magazine photo essay by R. Gordon Wasson: http://bit.ly/2Hjr2y9 In this segment of my discussion with psychedelic researcher Robert Forte, I ask Robert to explore the early days of psychedelic interest in American society, initially generated in large part by the release of the 1956 Life Magazine photo essay by R. Gordon Wasson (J.P. Morgan Vice President of Public Relations) — a landmark piece that was the first to expose the American public to the use and effects of psilocybin mushrooms. As Robert explains, the C.I.A. funded this venture (http://bit.ly/2VXcr4J), and was largely behind, along with media mogul Henry Luce, the branding of the psychedelic experience for Western audiences. Why would this be the case? In the episode, we descend down this rabbit hole of inquiry we discuss the absolutely perplexing history of the popularization (and demonization) of psychedelic use in the modern era, including the overwhelming interest by Western elites to use these substances for mind control and social engineering purposes, as demonstrated in the MK-ULTRA project by the C.I.A., among other examples. Toward the end of our discussion, Robert and I get into some rather hairy topics relating to “conspiracy theory” in the “post-truth era,” as defined by the blurring of lines between what is verifiably true and what is difficult to make sense of. While Robert and I may not come to agreement on these difficult subjects, we both absolutely recognize the necessity of questioning officially sanctioned narratives of events as propagated by the corporate-and-state managed press. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). James Fadiman, psychedelic researcher and writer, has described Robert as “a major but not well-known hero of the psychedelic movement.” WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast DROP ME A LINE: (208) 918-2837 EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior
[INTRO: 11:06] In this episode, I speak with psychedelic scholar, editor, publisher, and researcher Robert Forte. For over three decades, Robert has collaborated with some of the most influential and well-known figures within the psychedelic movement, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, and Alexander Shulgin, to name a few. In this discussion with Robert, we reference a recent article published by Marine Corp Times, titled ‘Can LSD and magic mushrooms help win wars? This Marine officer says ‘yes’.’ As the article states, the “military should join the growing list of psychedelic beneficiaries […] to become “stronger, faster and smarter than our adversaries”” through the microdosing of psychedelic compounds, like LSD and psilocybin, in order to counter “the nearly-insurmountable task of analyzing a rapidly-growing tidal wave of analytical data that, with today’s advances in technology, will only continue to expose cognitive shortfalls.” (http://bit.ly/2JfKIq1) As the use of psychedelics enters the public discourse again, and as we continue to see the normalization of their use by Silicon Valley corporate executives and others to “significantly heighten alertness, creativity, and problem solving,” we have to step back and examine the ways psychedelic use is actually reinforcing the status quo of our society. I ask Robert to explore the early days of psychedelic interest in American society, initially generated in large part by the release of the 1956 Life Magazine photo essay by R. Gordon Wasson (J.P. Morgan Vice President of Public Relations) — a landmark piece that was the first to expose the American public to the use and effects of psilocybin mushrooms. (http://bit.ly/2Hjr2y9) As Robert explains, the C.I.A. funded this venture (http://bit.ly/2VXcr4J), and was largely behind, along with media mogul Henry Luce, the branding of the psychedelic experience for Western audiences. Why would this be the case? As we descend down this rabbit hole of inquiry, we discuss the absolutely perplexing history of the popularization (and demonization) of psychedelic use in the modern era, including the overwhelming interest by Western elites to use these substances for mind control and social engineering purposes, as demonstrated in the MK-ULTRA project by the C.I.A., among other examples. Toward the end of our discussion, Robert and I get into some rather hairy topics relating to “conspiracy theory” in the “post-truth era,” as defined by the blurring of lines between what is verifiably true and what is difficult to make sense of. While Robert and I may not come to agreement on these difficult subjects, we both absolutely recognize the necessity of questioning officially sanctioned narratives of events as propagated by the corporate-and-state managed press. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). James Fadiman, psychedelic researcher and writer, has described Robert as “a major but not well-known hero of the psychedelic movement.” Episode Notes: - Follow Robert on Facebook: http://bit.ly/2VvlNoW - Read the article ‘Can LSD and magic mushrooms help win wars? This Marine officer says ‘yes’’: http://bit.ly/2JfKIq1 - Read the 1956 Life Magazine photo essay by R. Gordon Wasson: http://bit.ly/2Hjr2y9 - Watch the Alex Jones deposition: https://youtu.be/I7siWJ86g40 - The song featured in this episode is “Hi-Potent” by Roni Size & Reprazent from the album New Forms (20th Anniversary Edition). WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewilderness DONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcast DROP ME A LINE: (208) 918-2837 EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior
Robert Forte has lived at the center of the psychedelics/entheogens/mind control revolution. photo by: Skeptiko Do you know where you are, right now? I’m in a drug trial. What do you think is wrong with you? I’m sick. That I don’t matter. That’s Emma Stone and Jonah Hill participating in a futuristic drug experiment in […] The post Robert Forte, The Softer Side of CIA Psychedelic Mind Control |407| appeared first on Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping Point.
This is quite an incredible story, and I’d like to sincerely thank Chip for choosing my channel to break it on. Please contribute to Chip’s GoFundMe, which will help him finish and publish his book. Let us know what you … Continue reading →
In this segment, longtime psychedelic scholar and researcher Robert Forte discusses his concerns regarding the “psychedelic renaissance” currently underway, in particular as we begin to see a resurgence of public interest (including more positive coverage in the corporate press) of MDMA and other psychedelic compounds in recent years. To understand Robert’s perspective, we touch on the work of Aldous Huxley and his book ‘Brave New World’ and its addendum ‘Brave New World Revisted’ in order to frame our understanding of what is currently taking place within the broader cultural and societal trends regarding the use of psychedelics (and cannabis) for therapeutic, medical, and recreational use. Having a deep respect for psychedelics and their appropriate use, Robert asks that the psychedelic community be aware of and counter the underlying agendas of these forces within our society, in particular when it comes to approaching the subject of the legalization and therapeutic use of these substances in the modern era. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. In 1981 he moved to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, and then attended the Divinity School, University of Chicago. During this time Forte conducted an independent investigation of MDMA. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at CIIS. This is a segment of episode #147 of Last Born In The Wilderness “The Devil Is In The Details: Psychedelics & Our Brave New World w/ Robert Forte.” Listen to the full episode: http://bit.ly/LBWforte WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com PATREON: http://bit.ly/LBWPATREON DONATE: Paypal: http://bit.ly/LBWPAYPAL Ko-Fi: http://bit.ly/LBWKOFI FOLLOW & LISTEN: SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/LBWSOUNDCLOUD iTunes: http://bit.ly/LBWITUNES Google Play: http://bit.ly/LBWGOOGLE Stitcher: http://bit.ly/LBWSTITCHER RadioPublic: http://bit.ly/LBWRADIOPUB YouTube: http://bit.ly/LBWYOUTUBE SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook: http://bit.ly/LBWFACEBOOK Twitter: http://bit.ly/LBWTWITTER Instagram: http://bit.ly/LBWINSTA
In this episode, I speak with psychedelic scholar, editor, publisher, and researcher Robert Forte. For over three decades, Robert has collaborated with some of the most influential and well-known figures within the psychedelic movement, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, Stanislav Grof, and Alexander Shulgin, to name a few. James Fadiman, psychedelic researcher and writer, has described Robert as “a major but not well-known hero of the psychedelic movement.”✧ In this discussion, we discuss Robert’s skeptical, but well-grounded, concerns regarding the “psychedelic renaissance” currently underway, in particular as we begin to see a resurgence of public interest (including more positive coverage in the corporate press) of MDMA and other psychedelic compounds, as well as the ongoing legalization (or as Robert states it: the commodification) of cannabis through out the United States in recent years. Robert is fundamentally concerned with the various forces that aim to control the ways psychedelics and cannabis are perceived and received by the general public — pointing to the reality that we exist within a capitalist consumer culture, and as such corporations, government institutions, and policy-makers have their own agendas when it comes to the decriminalization and legalization of these substances for broader public use. To understand Robert’s perspective, we touch on the work of Aldous Huxley and his book ‘Brave New World’ and its addendum ‘Brave New World Revisited’ in order to frame our understanding of what is currently taking place within the broader cultural and societal trends regarding the use of psychedelics and cannabis for therapeutic, medical, and recreational use. Having a deep respect for psychedelics and their appropriate use, Robert asks that the psychedelic community be aware of and counter the underlying agendas of these forces within our society, in particular when it comes to approaching the subject of the legalization and therapeutic use of these substances in the modern era. Robert Forte is a scholar and researcher of psychedelic drugs. He first studied with Frank Barron, who started the Psilocybin Project at Harvard with Timothy Leary in 1963. In 1981 he moved to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, and then attended the Divinity School, University of Chicago. During this time Forte conducted an independent investigation of MDMA. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. Robert is the former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, and currently is adjunct faculty at CIIS.♀︎ ✧ Source: http://bit.ly/DarkHistory ♀︎Source: http://bit.ly/ForteBio Episode Notes: - Learn more and purchase Robert’s book ‘Entheogens and the Future of Religion’: https://amzn.to/2IasXVI - Learn more and purchase Robert’s book ‘Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In’: https://amzn.to/2IcxGGw - Listen to the episode of Psychedelics Today that sparked my interest in Robert’s work: http://bit.ly/DarkHistory - The song featured in this episode is “Rap” by Actress from the album Ghettoville. - WEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.com - PATREON: http://bit.ly/LBWPATREON - DONATE: Paypal: http://bit.ly/LBWPAYPAL Ko-Fi: http://bit.ly/LBWKOFI - FOLLOW & LISTEN: SoundCloud: http://bit.ly/LBWSOUNDCLOUD iTunes: http://bit.ly/LBWITUNES Google Play: http://bit.ly/LBWGOOGLE Stitcher: http://bit.ly/LBWSTITCHER RadioPublic: http://bit.ly/LBWRADIOPUB YouTube: http://bit.ly/LBWYOUTUBE - SOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook: http://bit.ly/LBWFACEBOOK Twitter: http://bit.ly/LBWTWITTER Instagram: http://bit.ly/LBWINSTA
Download Kyle and Joe interview Robert Forte who has been around the psychedelic world for decades as a writer, facilitator and researcher. He has known or has worked with most of the biggest names in psychedelic history including Dr. Stanislav Grof and Timothy Leary among others. The interview covers a lot of ground and will likely ruffle some feathers. Robert has extensively studied the history of psychedelics and has drawn some conclusions about the origins of the field. Psychedelics as Weapons From the early days, scientists have been working with psychedelics to weaponize them. From project artichoke to MK Ultra, the US government and many foreign governments have spent a tremendous amount of effort researching these powerful compounds and likely still are. Robert states that various governments particularly the United States government have groups that are using drugs to derange the public to make it easier for these groups to meet their desired outcomes - less democracy, increased plutocratic power, etc. Think Brave New World and Brave New World Revisitied. Deranged from Miriam Webster: 1: mentally unsound : crazy2: disturbed or disordered in function, structure, or condition My leg was propped up on a library chair at the time, as it was too deranged to bend.3: wildly odd or eccentric He makes a compelling argument, but we want you the listener and reader to "Think for Yourself and Question Authority". That was a Leary line that we think is valuablein situations like this. Read books on the subject, question the purpose behind them, think critically and see where you want to go with it. After recording this interview Joe Moore read the amazing and comprehensive 2016 history The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government. The book filled in some gaps for me (Joe) but didn't really change my mind much on the topic of psychedelics specifically. Please enjoy the episode and if you want to discuss it, please join us at our facebook group here. Links & Show Notes Colin Ross - Researcher Psychiatrist John Potash | Drugs as Weapons Against Us MK Ultra - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra Acid Hype -American News Media and the Psychedelic Experience (History of Communication) Henry Luce Theodore Shackley - CIA Officer Reinhard Galen Samuel Russell - Russell Trust opium skull and bones Brave new world revisited - https://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/ Entheogens and the Future of Religion The Devil's Chessboard Allen Dulles 10 Global Businesses That Worked with the Nazis http://www.businesspundit.com/10-global-businesses-that-worked-with-the-nazis/2/ JP Morgan Bank complicit in financial crimes in WWII The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade Mossad Israeli Mafia One Nation Under God: The Triumph of the Native American Church J. Tony Serra (born December 30, 1934) is an American civil rights lawyer, activist and tax resister from San Francisco - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Serra About Robert Forte James Fadiman calls Robert Forte, “a major but not well known hero of the psychedelic movement.” A scholar, editor, publisher, professor, researcher of the subject for over 3 decades, Forte has come to some disturbing realizations about the psychedelic renaissance that he helped to start. Huston Smith called his first book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, “the best single inquiry into the religious significance of chemically occasioned mystical experience that has yet appeared.” Forte was introduced to psychedelics in 1980 by Frank Barron, who initiated Timothy Leary and started the Harvard Psilocybin Project with him. From the University of California Forte was invited to Esalen to study with Stanislav Grof, before going to the University of Chicago to study the history and psychology of religion under Mircea Eliade. Over the years Forte has worked closely with many of the most prominent leaders of the psychedelic movement, including R. G. Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Alexander Shulgin, Claudio Naranjo, and many others. His early MDMA research in 1981-85 turned on 100s of people to this new medicine. Though this project led to the creation of MAPS, Forte is a vocal critic of MAPS government collusion and deceptive policies. His second book is a rounded view of Timothy Leary, Outside Looking In: Appreciations, Castigations, Reminiscences. He first experienced ayahuasca in 1988, and conducted ayahuasca research with cancer patients in Peru, yet he is now suspicious of the globalizing of ayahuasca as an form of “spiritual colonialism.” He is a enthusiastic supporter of conscious, independent psychedelic healing and recreation, and an equally fierce opponent of psychedelics for mind control, profiteering, and social engineering by political and economic elites.
Mushroom Medicine Mojo for Modernity – honoring the Eleusinian Mysteries, Visionary Actvist Show Today, July 10th 2 pm PDT On this Waxing Moon of ancient guiding knowledge brought to light, Caroline hosts Robert Forte, editor of the 1st paperback edition of “The Road To Eleusis,” by R. Gordon Wasson! Albert Hofmann! and Carl Ruck! We invoke the necessary sacraments of Ceres-Demeter and Persephone, so needed now at this time of Dire Beauty, that Persephone may be re-born and bound onto the world stage. Robert Forte:The Eleusinian Mysteries are considered by some to have been the greatest mystical-religious celebration of all time. For over 1500 years initiates would tread the sacred way from Athens to Eleusis to take part in this ritual celebration, once in their lives, to re-enact Persephone's abduction to the the underworld and rebirth into the arms of the her mother, Demeter, Goddess of the Earth. The ceremony likely involved the ingestion of a powerful entheogen derived from ergot, much like LSD. Initiates were forbidden to reveal what transpired within the walls of the sanctuary. So powerful and revered were these mysteries that for 1500 years only one person betrayed the secret. Caroline Casey and I will discuss this myth at 2:00 pm pdt on her Visionary Activist Show on www.kpfa.org http://coyotenetworknews.com/ http://www.northatlanticbooks.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781556437526 The post Visionary Activist – July 10, 2014 appeared first on KPFA.
Caroline hosting psychedelic scholar, author of “Entheogens & the Future of Religion”, mmda researcher at U of Chicago, Robert Forte, that we may honor Sasha Shulgin, as Neptune, Intelligence of Empathic Altruism and entheogenic-mythological literacy stations. The post The Visionary Activist – June 5, 2014 appeared first on KPFA.
Guest speaker: Myron Stolaroff and Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: This is a recording from the spring of 2006, at Kathleen's Salon in Venice Beach, California, where Robert Forte and Myron Stolaroff came to tell their stories about the recent festivities in Basil, Switzerland celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD. After telling a little about the Hofmann event, Myron read part of the talk that he gave in Basil. From there, the conversation ranged widely, eventually ending with an argument about the Kennedy assassination. Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
In this episode we speak with Robert Forte editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion, The Road to Eleusis, and interviewer of Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In. We discuss his work as well as his relationship with Timothy Leary, and what he thinks of the future of entheogens. Read more at www.iamubermensch.com
In this continuation of In a Perfect World 33, experiential journalist Rak Razam interviews author and academic Robert Forte about the origins of the Psychedelic Movement and manipulation by the power elites as a social engineering tool for control of the dominant paradigm. This far-ranging discussion covers Huxley, Wasson, Hofmann, Leary et.al and the social milieu and the role of the CIA and elite steering of the dissemination of psychedelics in the West and the vested interests behind them that have culminated in the global police state that confronts us today. The medical, spiritual and religious arms of the movement are dissected in light of the political agendas that control civilization, as Forte and Razam examine the revolution of the 60s and the revolutionary times we now live through. They ask the critical question: is the commodification of the modern psychedelic movement a prelude to global Soma, and can individuals awaken to their own cosmic sovereignty before it's too late? ROBERT FORTE, AMRS, began his work with psychedelics as a student of Stanislav Grof and Frank Barron, cofounder of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He obtained his master’s degree under Mircea Eliade and has collaborated with many of the leaders in the field of psychedelics, including R. Gordon Wasson, Timothy Leary, and Huston Smith. A former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation, he teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Forte's seminal book, Entheogens and the Future of Religion, with contributions by Albert Hofmann, R. Gordon Wasson, Jack Kornfield, Terence McKenna, the Shulgins, Rick Strassman, and others is now back in print, with all proceeds going to support the Council on Spiritual Practices work with psilocybin research. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
with Robert Forte Just who does take psychedelics in the 21st century, after the lockdown of consciousness post 9/11? What role does the psychedelic community still offer as an activist movement? Psychedelic academic and author Robert Forte cuts to the chase by proposing that the medicinal resurgence of psychedelics obscures their real purpose as an anti-war, expansion of consciousness and creativity movement. Forte explores how psychedelics permit the illusion of America as a free state instead of a failed state, and the origins of the war on drugs and the Nixon-Leary struggle for the soul of a generation... Were avant guard psychologists of the late 50s and early 60s like Frank Barron and Tim Leary "assassin bees of consciousness", aware of the mass mind-control operation on America? And what lessons can we learn from such models, strategically using the mind-expansion psychedelics provide to best re-engineer the psychedelic movement into the future? Be provoked by this controversial discussion with experiential journalist Rak Razam... This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Guest speaker: Robert Forte PROGRAM NOTES: "Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within." –Nina Graboi "How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream." –Robert Forte Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: FREE Mp3 Downloads "Psychedelics, Science, and WTF" (Comment thread with Robert Forte) ">Operation Mockingbird Project MKULTRA Cointelpro 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made. This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some "conspiracy theory" about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers – who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers – is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 – stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves – and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day p> 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1 Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world's strongest and most technologically sophisticated country? Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that ...
Guest speakers: Robert Forte, Ann Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin PROGRAM NOTES: "I think it's extraordinarily important, again, the context of set and setting that we use these drugs in, if we're going to succeed in the Psychedelic Renaissance, is something that needs to be underlined again and again." –Robert Forte "I would say that, arguably, the oldest use of psychedelics in our Western culture, let's say, is the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were a psychedelic drug ceremony that occurred every year for 2,000 years in ancient Greece." –Robert Forte "Using appropriate scientific methodologies and naturalistic observations, [Timothy Leary] showed that psychedelic drugs were safe. He showed their clinical effectiveness. He showed their effects on enhancing creativity." –Robert Forte "Personally, I think my most keen friend amongst the various phenethylamines and alkaloids I've worked with and synthesized has been 2CB. To me, it's a vary favorable, warm, and very comfortable compound." –Sasha Shulgin [MDMA] is the most remarkable insight drug, and is a suburb tool for psychotherapy." –Ann Shulgin "Any drug, including MDMA, the most it can do is open up what's inside you already." –Ann Shulgin "When I have not had a good psychedelic trip for, let's say, six months, I begin to feel that I'm beginning to get out of balance. … I think that instead of regarding psychedelics as a drain on the system, frankly, they are my favorite vitamin. That's the effect they have on me." –Ann Shulgin "And for all I know there are three, or four, or seven lives going on that I don't remember either awake or asleep, but I feel consciousness is my living relationship with the world." –Sasha Shulgin "My belief is that when you get involved in a psychedelic experience you are in a communication with part of yourself that you've given up trying to communicate with or forgotten about communicating with. So it's not something that's imposed by a drug. It's something [that is already there and] the drug allows you to experience and to function with. So I look upon it as being a revealing thing from within myself, rather than a thing imposed upon myself by an external drug." –Sasha Shulgin Download MP3 PCs – Right click, select option Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (2008 Conference) Horizons Conference audio online at the Internet Archive The Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics “Ghosts I” from Nine Inch Nails The first 9 tracks from the Ghosts I-IV collection available as high-quality, DRM-free MP3s, including the complete PDF.
Don’t miss our interview with author and psychedelic scholar Robert Forte. We discuss historical and contemporary uses of entheogens (psychedelics) within the context of religion. Also, we take a closer look at the meaning of the psychedelic explosion of the 1960’s and its most controversial figure, Timothy Leary. Robert Forte interned with Stan Grof before studying history and the psychology of religion at the University of Chicago. He has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and served on the board of directors of the Albert Hoffman Foundation. Since 1985 he has been president of the Church of the Awakening.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
