CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Theme music]

This is the podcast of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where we bring you conversations and lectures from our public programs series featuring world-renowned scholars, leaders, authors, artists and thinkers. To make sure you never miss an episode of the CIIS Public Programs podcast, find us and subscribe on iTunes or on our website at ciis.edu/podcast.

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[Applause]

Nicholas: Hey, how ya doin’ friend?

Natalie: Doing really well. Doing really well. Thank you all for being here this evening. It's totally an honor to get to be on the stage with you and be in a place of sharing and exploring. Super blessed. Dr. Powers and I had the pleasure of meeting last year at Bioneers, which is taking place this weekend as well. We were on a panel and giving some of our own perspective about global festival culture and whether that is a vehicle for transformation or escapism or perhaps both. They are that/and of course [Nicholas: Yeah.] That was really fun and a nice way to drop in and connect. We're really happy to have you back.

Nicholas: Thank you.

Natalie: Yeah!

Nicholas: I feel a little bit like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. [Natalie: Uh huh] Like “Islands in the Stream.”

Natalie: [Laughs] Okay.

Nicholas: That’s who we are.

Natalie: So maybe I'll just invite you to say a little bit about who you are and what you're up to in the world.

Nicholas: First of all, thank you everyone because I know San Francisco, like New York, there's a million and one things to do every night. So, I appreciate you being here. I am a poet, a journalist, and professor of literature and I have inherited the counterculture from the stories that my mom would tell me while we were walking to and from the bus stop when I was a child. At that point, she had to kind of drop out of activism and a counterculture to raise me as a single mom, but that meant she was overflowing with stories that were very, very fresh. So she would tell me stories about being part of the Young Lords, marching in the streets, or um hosting rent parties and people would put the needle on the groove and dance all night. Or doing LSD and spinning around on the dance floor until all the lights look like comets circling her hands. So I just kind of grew up with a counterculture as kind of like part of my bedtime story. I think they were the best bedtime stories ever because it was no Boogeyman. It was just everyone was dancing.

Natalie: Everyone was dancing.

[Laughter]

Nicholas: Yeah

Natalie: More Dancing. [Nicholas: Yeah.] Yeah. That's beautiful. So, how has that informed your worldview?

Nicholas: Hmm. “The Man,” there's always “The Man.” If there was a villain, it was this abstract idea embodied in people with uniforms or guns or badges like “The Man,” you know this repressive force. How people were trying to find creative side alleys, backstreets, barren deserts, forests, abandoned apartments, to act out their freedom. [Natalie: Mmm.] So they would find places that hadn't been commercialized, commodified, or gentrified um to kind of unzip their social mask and let the unicorn power out. And so I kind of grew up with a worldview that was I guess implicitly Freudian um but socialized in the sense that there's desires that we have, instincts that we have that are often deeply repressed and unnecessarily so. And that there was constant colorful eruptions in everyday life. Sometimes eruptions coming out of our eyes the way that we imagine or fantasize. Sometimes eruptions coming out of our mouths, the way that we make jokes and tease and flirt and imagine. Sometimes eruptions would come out of our bodies, the way that we danced and the way we move. And so I always saw the world as a contest between the repressive force and the eruption of the colorful and the playful and coming out of our bodies in everyday life. Yeah.

Natalie: What's that showing up like now and your work in the world and what you're doing at SUNY and beyond.

Nicholas: I try to make the classroom a place of play. Recently we did Plato's Allegory of the Cave. I told them, “Come on in but wear gloves and bring something that could start a fire.”

[Laughter]

Nicholas: I was like, we're not actually going to burn the building down. This is not like the Pink Floyd movie The Wall. So they came in and they wrote their dreams on paper then we taped the paper on the walls. We turned down the lights and we lit candles and we let them go through their own Plato's cave. They got to see everyone else's dream images. And so by going back and forth with this flickering candle light on these strange, but somehow familiar images, it made them feel like they were inside of a dream. Then we tore it down, threw it away, turned on the lights and it was like waking up. [Natalie: Hmm.] It's a very kind of stark emotional journey from beginning, middle, and end. I try to bring play into the classroom. And then for writing, I try to find the thing that I'm either scared to say [Natalie: Mmm.] or things that are so pleasurable that I want to keep them to myself [Natalie laughs] and I put that on the page. I've usually find that when that dam bursts, everything else flows pretty freely.

Natalie: Curious what helps you get to that place to open up the dam or to...

Nicholas: Finding where I'm repressing myself and also acknowledging that some forms of self repression are also forms of consideration in grace towards others or maturity so that not all forms of self-repression are innately hostile or bad. They don't all hobble you. Some are just you know, just learning how to deal with others and balancing what you need and others need. When I have the pen in my hand and it's hovering over the page, I sometimes imagine that the pen is a drill and that it's going to drill into a vein of the unconscious. Then when it goes the unconscious comes out through the pen and it spills over the page. Then later on you do the work of shaping and forming it into a poem or to an essay, into a vignette, into a confession, and to a prophecy. Whatever form it is, but you gotta get that kind of initial blood out [Natalie: Mhm]. You know let it come out. Yeah.

Natalie: Stream, flow. [Nicolas: Yeah] I love that. It’s a beautiful image. [Nicolas: Yeah] Yeah.

Nicholas: Thank you.

Natalie: Mmm. Thank you.

Nicholas: I know. I know.

Natalie:  So happy to be here together. [Nicolas: Yeah] [Natalie sighs and laughs]. Yeah. Our topic tonight, psychedelics and social justice. [Nicholas: I know.] Why? Why should we even have this conversation? What's so important about this?

Nicholas: Yeah. um probably many in this room, at least I know I have, I've noticed that since the the Psychedelic Renaissance or the acceptance increasingly of psychedelics as a medical tool that it's brought psychedelics in a certain sense out of the counterculture and further step by step into the mainstream and oddly enough. It's a kind of generational project. So Michael Pollan's book How to Change Your Mind. He actually I think talked about how it was the Aging Baby Boomers who are dealing with the kind of inevitable difficulties of Aging are at sometimes turning towards psychedelics again, but for a different reason and so it opens up a very justifiable way for people to talk about psychedelics it within a medical framework and and so then it raises up so many other questions such as well if psychedelics are going to be used as a form of Medical Practice. then what other traumas what other ailments both personal and political the self and the social um can they be applied to? So those are just some questions but then the other question is: If it's not just psychedelics in and of themselves, it's not just a sparkle in the brain when the chemicals reconnect and reignite the neurons, but it's the culture around it. It's the ceremony around it. Then the question is is are the chemicals that important or is it the culture around the chemicals that allow them to do their kind of psychological Alchemy in which you know the souls kind of emerging like a butterfly from a cocoon and I think that that's maybe The unspoken tension because the counterculture has tried to create a ceremony space where the psychedelics can help you transform and the further that they go out of that concert cultural space. Will it have that transformative impact or is it going to become very personal, very commodified, very individualistic. So I think those are some of the questions that are floating around and I won't pretend to have any answers, but I think those are some of the questions.

Natalie: Brings up a couple things for me one is that you know, there's a lot of value to just being with the question. And in fact this year on the Playa somebody said that they saw a wonderful little book called Your Answers Questioned [laughs] So, okay, let's keep up with that. But I think this is, you know, we're touching on a really important part of what's happening in the landscape of the Psychedelic Renaissance if you will around the potential for commodification and I’m wondering if you could just speak to that what what what we're what you feel like we're observing and what we might want to look out for. [Nicholas: Well, I guess] it's that force in action.

Nicholas: Imagine walking into a CVS and one of the things that you can buy in a package is psilocybin or A copy of it that has similar effects or MDMA or something that has similar effects and how would you feel how would you feel knowing that you can go into a Walgreens and buy psychedelics and/or if maybe that's to an extreme of a vision? Maybe it won't be something over the counter, something that needs to be prescribed or taken within a medical you know office or Center, what does that do for the bulk of psychedelic use, which is not Medical. It's like carnivals. It's in one's private life. It's a trip that one may take out to a forest or a beach or go camping or with friends. I think the reality is the bulk of psychedelics are done outside of a medical context. So that guess the question is does that then become destigmatized? Will that also be legalized or is legalization and normalization only going to be for the medical context? So and that's the question you're going to have to I think grapple with as you think about psychedelics at Walgreens.

Natalie:  [laughs] Mmm Yeah, I mean, I think just for the purpose of clarification for the audience. I think that what we're actually looking at as specifically MDMA and psilocybin or moving through the The Phase 2 and phase 3 clinical trials is actually a potential rescheduling so that's different than a legalization and definitely different than a the decriminalization movements for example are also not legalization movements um but we're looking at moving these what I refer to as sacred. Technologies out of an inaccessible, you know bind behind a lock and key and into a place where they could have some more accessibility, which is another topic we can definitely grapple with tonight. But again, yeah, what what will be the binds of staying within that model of the medical model?

Nicholas: Yeah, and then also so the one question is a accessibility, but the other side is cultural resistance and in the research that I have done. And then also in the personal experience psychedelics within the Black American tradition and drugs in general have been seen as tools of white supremacy to destroy the people. Hmm, right? And so Malcolm X said that Assata Shakur said that Public Enemy said “the blunt is what's behind for the black behind” you don't mean just like just you know, like the constant suspicion of drugs as a means of holding people back and then it also my own personal life. I remember again walking with my mom and she would tell me stories of how people who were in The Movement one day where clear-eyed fiery activist and then the next day we're walking around glazed eyed in their own escaped world [Natalie: Mmm] and she said that they let the drugs in the street to destroy the movement and um whether or not that's true or whether it was just letting the drugs in to make money and that was a side effect that it destroyed the movement in the end that's what happened. So there is on the other side of the accessibility a deep suspicion within at least Black America and to in a certain sense Latin America is obviously very diverse of Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Mexico. Let me know but within communities of color that have dealt with American racism, there's a fear and a suspicion that also comes from the hyper criminalization of people of color from the drug war so you have different forms of resistance against this that would really have to be targeted and understood and worked with and massaged if psychedelics was going to be an option for these communities to use as part of a medical treatment to be able to trust establishments to be able to have places where one can be vulnerable and let their mind detach, feel grief, feel anger, feel all those feelings and then be able to integrate them into their totality of their life story. And then I think the final point is not so you have accessibility then you have cultural resistance and then you have the after effect. If you take psychedelics to integrate trauma back into your body and kind of bring all the shadow wounds into your life so you can kind of be a complete person again and not be driven into cycles of behavior by pain. What happens if you wake up the

next day and Section 8 housing? you're still there or on a Native American reservation, you're still there or if you're white and poor and you're waking up in a trailer home or in the sticks and Washington State and you're still there, like what if poverty and or race and or sexual orientation and/or gender like what if you're still waking up in places that caused you great amount of pain and so I think that there's a limit to the personal as what can be healed. And then you're fine when you're still confronted with the social that's causing so much damage, and I think that's why [Natalie: Mmm] think the counterculture has so many urgent lessons for the larger culture that the risk I think is that those lessons will be left behind on the rush to get psilocybin, MDMA, you know in the hands of the doctors. How do you treat a society? How do you treat a culture? Right and what are the things that we that are ailing us as a culture? Materialism? The planet is choking with garbage and carbon the skies are choking with carbon. The seas are choking with plastic. um militarism, there's wars that are erupting and streams of blood flowing over borders. We just heard what's happening with Syria and the courage and the Turkish Army. There's so many forms of violence that are happening in the world. And in that context personal healing isn't enough. There has to be a greater social healing

Natalie: Mhmm Mhmm. [deep inhale] ooo let’s take a breath there for a moment. That was great. Really great. It’s just you know, what? What do you offer for some guideposts If you will to move towards building these types of bridges especially amongst marginalized communities where that level of mistrust if you will is so ingrained and such a barrier to potentially opening up to maybe the healing potential of working with these types of tools

Nicholas:  One thing is to be aware that marginalized communities actually already have have Transcendent traditions of healing the may not actually involve. Sometimes they do but they may not actually involve drugs or psychedelics and one example is I'm a co-parent and my the co-parent she is working on a documentary and the documentary is about the house scene in Newark, New Jersey and it's amazing that this scene has gone back 30 to 40 years. And so she invited me there and so we're playing with our son and he's, you know, bobbing his head to the house music. He loves it and he was gets a little bit too close to the speakers and you can just see his skin like being blown back by the sound waves, and I'm just always waiting one day for the speaker to short-circuit and it just blooms out this huge Sonic Blast and my son is just Sailing In The Air. Um but when she's a really good reporter and she interviews people very carefully and meticulously and so she told me the pattern was a lot of the people at the Newark house music scene 30 or 40 years been going strong are former addicts and they go to the house music scene because there's no drugs there. And there's no alcohol very few people are smoking joints or anything and the strongest thing that people take is coffee and hot dogs and so people are in recovery. And so they get an endorphin rush from the house music and people are high from the dancing. You can see if they have to just this blissful face and they're just spinning and dancing and they get the endorphins up and they blessed the stage before the dancers and the in the DJ blesses the equipment before she or he DJ's and what I've noticed is that many communities that are oppressed have Transcendent traditions where they find their way to a psychedelic space but not necessarily through the chemicals because the chemicals can happen naturally in the brain with dance. They can have naturally in the brain through sport. They can have they can happen naturally in the brain through friendship, talking, intimacy, laughter. There's so many ways that those same high that you get from psychedelics or almost a similar high can happen organically and so what I was realizing is that there are so many of these Transcendent communities that heal trauma through this Transcendence into this kind of psychedelic space, but the doors that you can get there are many and what's happening is that there's an in segregation between these different communities. There's no bridges between them. So you have Burning Man in the desert which is kind of the Crown Jewel of the counterculture, but there's not really a lot of connection between that and saying the newer cal scene or maybe the house music scene in Oakland and the Bay Area. I mean all of these different communities have ways of reaching that [Natalie: Mm] but they don't have ways of reaching each other and I think that if that coalition of the transcendent could be established, then you would have people leaving the Silo,leaving the privatized space of say the church, or the house music scene or the Gay Pride March, or Burning Man and start to party in public together. And when they did that then a new social trust will be formed and people would find that they were glued to each other by their sweat by their smiles. They would be united and a lot of these kind of smaller level politics that we see getting played out would shrink and kind of disappear because we're building a new kind of constitution in the street or writing a new constitution with our bodies in the street, but you have to connect those communities instead of all of them like paying high ticket prices to go out to the private event. Like it has to be in the street, has to be accessible to poor people and it has to bring people in who don't normally meet.

Natalie:  Mmm. Mmm I love this notion of the coalition of the transcendent. Yeah we should keep working with that one.

Nicholas:  I’ll get a tattoo [Natalie: laughs] Yeah, it's right here so people don't ever forget it.

Natalie: Won’t ever forget it. And I  think that's a really important point is you know, how do these communities connect and then find the common ground like that, you know the smiles in the sweat that six times together and then invites an opening invites an inquiry a curiosity around. Well, how do you what is your doorway into your transcendent experience? And then maybe I want to dance fast, meditate, try a psychedelic substance, go out to the desert, make lov,e whatever it is. Yeah.

Nicholas: Yeah, and I find that that part of The CounterCulture is everywhere. But within the United States it is the dynamic part of the culture that actually makes often times Americans out of immigrants. I mean in New York, which is the classic place for immigrants to come to and many of my students are first-generation South Asian, Desi. African, Nigerian West African, mostly Latino Dominican Puerto Rican mostly Mexican too so we have like a huge able-bodied disabled gay and straight. So we have this kind of big like Noah's Ark of students there. And what I've noticed is that it is the dancing it is the body humo,  the politically incorrect humor done with trust. It is the creativity that binds people together because they know they can let their old selves go. So it's actually the counter cultural values of America which are the dynamic part of the nation that actually bring people in and allow them to recreate themselves and yet that's all. The very part of the culture that's most repressed by conservatives who are constantly saying these immigrants need to either be American or get out. I'm like, well the very part of the culture that you are constantly repressing, passing laws against trying to stigmatize and demonize that's the part of the culture that actually creates new Americans um and then the counterculture worldwide is what creates new people. It allows them to unzip, allows them to come out of their kind of old cocoons or old religions and create something new. It's always going to happen. I guess that the difference is doesn't happen quickly or does it happen? Glacially? It's going to happen.

Natalie: [laughs] mmm something that feels important to name as we're coursing through this conversation this evening is just this notion around cultural appropriation too. One is going to explore something from another tradition. How do we be mindful of that?

Nicholas: It was two or three Burns ago in those on the Playa and you just saw the Silhouettes of people walking around and then in our car would come by fire would shoot out and see people's faces and then would pass and I went into this one Art Exhibit. It was a like LED spinning and I saw this one man Latino, but he was wearing a Native American headdress. And of course my instinct gut reaction was like, oh man, don't be a douche like why are you wearing that? But I was like, I'm not I'm not going to be the PC police tonight. I just want to relax but then I thought about burning man in general and I think this happens in the American counterculture in general is that the crisis and the political debate have happening over symbols like say the Native American headdress or or South Asian symbols everything from the sarees to yoga the people wearing the Bindi to African American symbols, like braids Etc that there's a fighting over those symbols and who gets to wear them who doesn't. The reason those symbols become emotionally charged is because there's a displaced guilt because the symbols of a people are there but not the people themselves. So I see in our car passing by and it's got James Brown and you know, The Pointer Sisters and you know, just really classic black music from like Motown to trap but there's not many black people at Burning Man. You see a Native American headdress is not many indigenous people there even though we actually passed through like route 107 through a reservation to get there. And etc etc. And so those symbols become highly charged, but the the wall that that conversation hits is that you can fight over who gets to wear them or not. But I think sometimes that might be a displaced fight because what really we want is the people who those symbols represent to be there. It's not the symbols themselves. Is that the symbols of an absence [Natalie: Hmm] and so if you're fighting over an absence, you can't really win. So what you need to do is actually fill that absence with the presence of people. And again, that's why I think the most conservative part of the American counterculture is that it's privatized and it's walled off. It's walled off by distance is walled off by prices. It's walled off by so many different types of privilege and that's why I think reaching out and actually making the street into a Playa. [Natalie: Hmm] Is then you will realize that those symbols that we were fighting for mean very very little when you actually have the real people themselves there and then you find that the people themselves have a very complex relationship to those symbols. So there's gonna be Native Americans who look at the headdress and don't really feel that much about it or maybe use it to make fun of just like the way Catholics use the Pope's hat to make fun of as well or the way. Or the way that black folks will make fun of you know, how many musicians have we made fun of from R.Kelly to you know Flavor flav? You know what I mean? I'm just saying it's like people have complex relations to the symbols and you realize that that are using those symbols for displaced guilt maybe because of this struggle we're having with absence, but it doesn't actually reflect the way the culture sees excuse me sees those symbols because people are complex. They're always more complex than the symbols that they use.

Natalie: [deep inhale] Yeah, so continue on with burning man. Could you say a little bit about your experiment and forming the POC camp and just yeah, maybe a little bit about your first burning what that impact was for you

Nicholas: I  jumped so we drove into past the greater station and you just saw that the dust and I popped out of the car. I got naked. I made a Dusty Angel and then I hit the bell with my ass and somehow it rang, you know mass is not that pointy but you know, I mean like I definitely [Natalie:you did the thing] I did the thing. Yeah, so I got baptized by the dust and um I was blown away and immersed into a reality that I thought was only possible in dreams and when I left burning man, I realized that the world that I thought was only possible in either the afterlife and I don't and I'm atheist. I don't believe in the afterlife but only possible in dreams. It was actually real was happening every year. So I had I could let go of faith that human beings could create a lot a much better society and I had knowledge was like, oh we actually do it and going from faith to knowledge having the ephemeral made concrete, even if it only lasted seven days was incredibly healing because it gave me faith that human beings can actually create a much better world under the right conditions. So Burning Man did that for me and also and so forgive me for this. I mean if you really if anyone here is really invested in white guilt. I'm sorry. This is going to rub you the wrong way. But so when I went there I realized that this is not I don't think CNN Headline that the level of racism, obviously explicit even microaggressions was dramatically decreased. Like I just didn't feel a lot of racial surveillance. I didn't feel the heaviness of race there and I think when so many mostly white people left capitalism left a nine-to-five left their own class anxiety and security their own like constantly monitoring their bank accounts and dealing with children and elderly like when they left so much and they just got their in their freedom. So much of the implicit racism left as well. And so it's like the whiteness was turned down and the weirdness was turned up. So they went from being like white Americans to just weird Americans and then just weirdos and it was beautiful too beautiful transformation. And so the racism there is dramatically lowered and I could I walked into this one Workshop as a people of Color Workshop. This is way way way before the POC camp and they asked well, how does it feel to be a POC at Burning Man and back then? I had like these long dreads, you know like these like they almost look like remember the Matrix with those like squiggly little things. That's what I look like, you know side like these really really long dreads. And so I was like walking around like all militant and I remember when the the guide asked that question she said, what does it feel like to be a POC at Burning Man? and I felt this great sadness welling up in my body and in my throat constricted in my eyes burned and it was because I realized I felt so much Freer at Burning Man than I did outside. And I realized outside in the default world,there was this heaviness that I was living under and had gotten so used to it that it was like those fish at the bottom of the ocean with the hard calcified armor and our small little blinky lights. Yeah and like, you know, Spanish galleons and Russian subs and like whales and like all the stuff that you know’s there [Natalie: laughs] Waldo that [Natalie: Waldo’s this definitely there. Yeah].that tand I realized that one the essentialist and I think too easy and forgive me for being a little bit rough. I think the lazy accusation that whiteness and Blackness and Ness Ness Ness is all essential in permanent is actually false. It's very fluid race is a construction it didn't always exist and it won't always exist in at Burning Man actually felt it close to not existing. So when I was there I felt a sadness like wow, this is what it's like to live without that wait. And I realized I wanted to start a POC Camp because I wanted other people of color to be able to come to a space and if they had to have that feeling they could have that feeling so I started it and the first year it was a hot mess. It was I think the Borg you know how it is. If you ever look at the yoga magazines, you know how like they have like the one black person like in every single photo right, you know, and so I think the board God bless them, but they put me on rods roadway before I was ready and I was just like thanks guys, but I don't know if this is going to happen. So I was like putting up like rebar and like putting up the thing and I threw a parachute over it thinking that that was smart. I wish I would have been like no because of high winds came and the parachute started to blow away and it was expensive. I was like, no I'm not going to let this blow away. So then I grabbed it and then started wind sailing and [audience laughs] and luckily the wind stopped where I would have been a headline and so that didn't work, but then I threw some other like camouflage the wind can go through and so I sat down and it was basically for you know, bars, whatever camouflage netting in a couple of excuse me a couple of chairs. It was raggedy and then so I sat there. And I just waited it was like the Field of Dreams. Like if you build it they will come and at first the crew of people of color came there like this is the POC camp and I was like, yeah, it was like a cantaloupe and like, you know soda and I was like, yeah and they're like No And they just they had pride and they just kept going. I don't blame them and then and then a dust storm came and then out of this dust storm this very dark-skinned Desi South Asian young man came up and he sat down he's like, this is the POC camp?. Yeah talk to me. You know, how you feeling? This Is this is your space man. He said, can I just tell you something? I was like tell me I'm Dr. Phil and he said it was very hard for him. Sometimes to be a burning man because he grown up he had grown up in the Midwest and his parents had told him don't talk with an Indian accent. Don't tell anyone about Hinduism and blend into the majority white culture as much as possible and he did he succeeded. He was really really good. But he said man, it's really really hard to come here and see the very people who I was supposed to blend into using the various symbols and religion that I was told to let go of And then his body went *exhales* and he just said something out and then he got up and he kind of motion to towards me and he gave me a hug and I could tell he was squeezing out the last of it and then you know, just give him a kiss on the forehead like a dad and I said, you know and then he disappeared and I don't know his name. I don't know where he is, but I know that he left some of that weight on the ground that day. So that's what the POC Camp was meant for and grown, like it's grown from me. They're holding a cantaloupe under some raggedy-ass camouflage to like 30 people now, he's got like a shower. [Natalie: Alright] real shade structure [Natalie:mm] and some people go there and they go there to deal with race in a lot of different ways. Some people don't have that, you know sadness they're not like all they'll be the boys about it and other people go there just to enjoy having inside jokes that wouldn't happen elsewhere. So people come there for a lot of different reasons and that's the goal like it's not just my trip and it's not even my camp anymore. Now, it's it's everyone's Camp. So now it's kind of grown up and is doing its own thing. Yeah. So there it is POC camp at Burning Man, right? Yeah

Natalie: *inaudible* for that gift to the community. I think it's important to highlight that you know Burning Man is one of the spaces not only but one of the spaces where these isms can fall aside and that there is a degree of um invitation towards perhaps a never felt before freedom in that, you know when gender and the color of one's skin or eyes or what one is wearing when that when they attachment to that just falls away, you know, the pure essence of the human spirit comes forth people ask me. Why do you like? Why do you still go? I just celebrated my 18th consecutive year on the Playa and many of the past few years. I'm thinking am I totally crazy. Yes. I'm totally crazy. Okay, I'm going again. Why am I going to this thing then I get there. I'm like, why am I here and then I love it. I love it and it's partly because the I come into contact with the human spirit and it's some of its purest most raw Essence. It's not the only place but it is it is a place out of time that invites this force and once for at least for me when I start contacting it and I look around it's contagious. It's a contagious feeling to be in a celebratory space of generosity and see past those isms and just be open to receive, to explore, to fall apart, to come back together again, I mean the Playa is quite a place to just bring it all right up real fast. And I think that's that there's such a correlation too between what can be available in the Psychedelic space. You know, this is a place to where all these egoic constructs can really fall aside if we are open to that.

Nicholas: It is. Yeah, I think the place that I've experienced that psychedelic openness outside of um the Playa consistently has been actually in the activists protest tradition and Occupy Wall Street felt very very much like the Playa and I remember so I mean, I'm in New York and you know, I've slept out there for quite a couple of days and was out there and I met my friend Danny and he also is a burner and he's with The stop shopping choir with Reverend Billy. And so and I see him on stage singing. It's got a great voice and we were sitting there in the middle occupy and everyone's there and waking up in the morning the middle of the street. And I was like “doesn’t this feel like the Playa?”. He's like, yeah really does you know and oddly enoughThat's what my mom said that the 60s and 70s were like and you know, because I asked her I said “What the hell was going on?” and she's like “well a lot” and I was it. Yeah, but like she's like well, of course there was the activism but more than that every city you went to in the 60s the scene was there you could crash some plays, you know, find a sofa. Someone would give you food. You would do the same if they came to your city. Of course, it was music and sex and drugs rock and roll and everything and she said it was a big party. The activism was an incredible stream, but it was one stream within a larger party. And so the politicized Hedonism and the pleasure and the joy was itself a political force. And so and I think also she's was saying that the amount of social trust increased also because the barriers that it took for people to give and receive it lowered, so instead of having to wear a suit and tie and or dress and go to a job and say I earn enough money to show that I'm a disciplined productive member of society and I have earned my love. You could just wear sandals and sleep out in the park and you deserved food. You deserve safety deserved love just because. You didn't have to earn it. You didn't have to slave away at a 9 to 5. You didn't have to support the work machine. You didn't even have to support the country. You just have to be a human being you deserved it. You deserve food shelter and love and because it D Crete it lowered the barriers the kind of the tariffs the toll booths that it takes the people have to pay for trust it then increased dramatically and I think that that was that contagious joy the people think about when they remember those days or Occupy Wall Street, or to a certain extent Black Lives Matters, and I think that that's what we need. That's like our special power for those of us who are on the left or progressives where the counterculture the kind of Coalition of the Transcendent our special powers. How do we increase social trust and lower the barrier so that more people can come in knowing that it's contagious? because we can't beat the right with guns. You know? and I know and I know Marxist like in New York Marxism is a pretty kind of valid tradition. And so people follow it and there is a line of logic and marks Marxist that say we have to take over the state with a violent revolution. And so there is that mode of analysis but in real practice the left is not looked towards weapons to defeat the state or the right. We do it with the contagiousness of love. So in other words instead of using weapons, we make weapons obsolete instead of picking up the gun. We make it why bother picking it up in the first place. We try to create a world where guns aren't needed and I think that that seems to be our tactics in our strategy.

Natalie: Yeah important strategy for us to invite ourselves into and what do you think are some tools that we can kind of harness in our day-to-day experience to help us come into contact with that more as we get, you know assaulted with what's going on in the world. I mean walk down the street here in San Francisco, especially in this neighborhood. It is so intense the degree of disparity is so ever-present not everyone has necessarily all of their basic needs met to even be able to be in this type of conversation. So how do we sharpen our own tools and skills for resilience to be models of this?

Nicholas: So I think the things that that I do and I don't pretend to do this as consistently as I want but something's changing inside of me. I think it’s the birth of my son, but I'll get to that in a second. [Natalie: Yay]. I will give food and time for a conversation if it's safe with people who are homeless or poor or destitute and not because I'm trying to invite them in my life. I'm not an idiot. But like because I want to create a human connection and touch.It doesn't mean that you're going to crash in my bed, but it does mean that I need to see you as a human being and I need to force myself out of looking at people like price tags every single day. And so I just go up as kindness like you deserve some food today and here it is. Umm we can just talk for a minute before I got to catch a bus and I tried to do these rituals of seeing past a capitalist hallucination and puncture through that with acts of generosity and kindness because that heals me as much as it helps them a little bit through the day now, I'm not saying that’s systemic change, but what it does is it keeps in live inside of me a consciousness that the world that I want to see has time. I need to create a little bit every day. I also turn off my cell phone for long stretches of time because the cell phones like the new crack crack pipe and what I've noticed is that the capitalist form of the totalitarian control is before like, you know, I'm an 80s kid. The TV was over there you had to go to the TV and wrestle with the antenna to try to get like, you know, like a frequency was weird, you know, like electricity with movies was flying through the sky and you have to like angle it and then with with every new wave of technology the screen which was over there and I had to go to it and like the the turner would fall off you have to get pliers like it just got closer. So then like I was in cable, you know now it was consistent right and then it got closer now. It's on our cell phones and it's like everywhere. So it's like the screens are pouring into our brains through our eyes and our ears are pouring into our minds. This ideology this false world. The the jewels, the bling, the people with washboard abs, the people who are are stretched by the computers to make them look like barbie dolls when no human being can look like that like they're pouring into our brains this false world and it controls us almost totally so I try to shut it off because I go oh they're just trying to control my head. So I shut off the cell phone and I stay away from the screens and I go towards faces like a moth to a flame go towards the faces. That's where reality is at. And lastly I try to get involved in local politics and because I find that the national politics are important to follow but it's easy to have like a virtual life where you projecting yourself on the faces of these kind of far away gladiators fighting it out and suits and dresses on the TV and debates. Whereas there's literally people right there on my street who I could talk to and connect with so um those are the three things. Shut off the screen every single day do an act of anti-capitalist kindness um something that circumvents money and also try to get involved locally because also it's more empowering if you get involved locally, you can actually see things that you do change and it becomes addictive to see your empowerment. I can actually change my local world um and that I could feel something changing inside of me because my son is 18 months old and I keep falling more and more in love with him. And it sounds Disney but like it's a little scary. [Nataie: laughs] Because I'm like me how much can I fucking love this kid? [Audience laughs] Um, and and it's a lot because it feels like my heart is like bursting a little bit every time I see him. It's like this is a lot and I think it's like a parental plateau like doesn't it like chill at some point? And I remember it really began when we went to the ultrasound and I heard his heartbeat for the first time and it sounds like a hummingbird. And when I came out I was just I could kept hearing his heartbeat, even though you know, we were out of the office and the jelly had been cleaned off of her belly. I kept hearing the heartbeat in my head and I looked and I saw all the people in New York and Manhattan. And I I imagined they had heart beats like his. And everyone's heartbeat started like that and everyone started like he did and I just looked at everyone in the streets as if each human being had poured out of a woman's body from nothingness into life. And like a river of life, they flowed into the city. They flowed into languages, they flowed into roles, they float into masks.But this River of Life was flowing from bodies out into the world and then becoming their own bodies and all of them were connected by this heartbeat. I could feel it pulsing underneath everything. And that's when I felt something changed inside of me and it was deeper than any holy book or deeper than any ideology. It was just in my body I could feel it. I was like, oh, we're all very very deeply connected. We're all very very much the same and yet our lives have taken us into these different corners, different addresses, different places, but underneath it is still this beating constantly beating.so that's changing and I don't know what's changing me into but I could just feel it every time. I hold him and he's growing and I've become dangerously bored with capitalism. I feel like you know, it's not really offering a world that connects to that heartbeat. And so when I go to the counterculture feel this is the only culture that I feel is actually connected to that heartbeat because it's a culture where things connect with a grow and I'm like, oh that's where it's really at.

Natalie:  Yeah, yeah I feel you on that for sure. hmm do something a little risky here. I'm just going to invite us each to maybe just put a hand on your heart if that feels right for a moment, like just connect to that heartbeat, you know, we each have that. At one point in time. We were just a little star seed coming into form and planting ourselves precisely within our parents desire as Poet Laureate Joy Harjo says in one of her poems. And then the rhythm came forth and now you get to sing your own fantastic song. Hmm. [deep inhale] Thank you. Mmm-hmm. So where to from here? What kind of world would you like to see for your son if we can do our best to be instruments of change and embody these values such that the children can live into a future that is brighter than at least what I am in contact with right now. What can we do? What would you like to see available for true especially in this lens of social justice and..

Nicholas: Want to start creating the world that I want him to live in. So I'm protesting more sometimes by myself like a protest in front of Trump Tower, you know, just a sign um I'm gonna go that in front of Wall Street as well. But then protest with others. Extinction Rebellion, Sunrise movement, so protest more but then also reach out to friends who I love and love me and I want him to grow up around love as much as possible. I also am going to work very hard to withhold any anxiety about him keeping up with the Joneses as he goes into the education. I want him to love learning and I need to find out whoever and wherever learning is loved for him to be there and not to be pressured into thinking that a high price tag means quality. I want him to know the wildness of people who are free. So I want him to take him to the free places. The partying, the festivals, the gatherings, the witching hours all of that all the warlocks everything. I want him to fall in love with the Earth. And I want him to fall in love with his body and through that to love other people. And I want him to be comfortable in telling me and other people his truth but in a way that's mature and graceful and acknowledging that it's his truth. It's not everyone's truth and don't be an asshole about it. [Natalie: mhmm] [Audience laughs] Um and I want him to grow up with the common sense that everyone has a shadow side and he's going to have his own shadow side and that's going to be with him for the rest of his life and that it's not something to run away from but it's actually his greatest teacher. And to talk with other people about it and be honest and honesty is what kills the fear that makes our shadows into our masters. So I think that that's what I want for him.

Natalie: Will you maybe talk with him about psychedelics?

Nicholas: Well I think from [Natalie: besides just going to the festivals] Yeah Yeah. I'm not gonna like, you know, like dose him at six years old. Like “Here you go kid, here's some sugar.” From a very early age I wanted there's one value that I really like in New York. And that's because New York is such a competitive shitty City. I was born in New York and so it's born in me. And so I have mixed feelings about that place. You know, I love it. I was baptized by it, but it's a shitty fucking city. But because a lot of people there hustle because it's like the amount of vesuvius capitalism. There's a lot of hustling that happens there and because of that people are always the common sense in New York is don't get hustled. Don't get hustled. Look behind you when you're walking on the street, you know, if you see a bunch of people in there looking a little iffy don't panic and run walk fast walk slow and look them in the eye and if someone tries to sell you something just don't buy it the harder they try to sell you something the worse it is. And so to translate that into psychedelics, I'm going to very early and say look, this is a great hypocrisy about drugs. I'm drinking coffee right now. Coffee is a drug. You're going to see people smoking cigarettes. That's a drug. They're legal. There's these other drugs that don't do that much more or different and they're illegal and then I'm going to sit here and teach him the effect that every drug has so when those kids at school say, oh I got this at home. You want to try some he's like, I already know what that does. Are you ready for it? Are you ready for the hangover from it? So I want him to be incredibly knowledgeable. So whenever he chooses I would prefer for him to do psychedelics after 18 after he’s like matured and is able to deal with such a hard trip. Different cultures have different times in their life when they or times for children to try psychedelics. So I'm aware of that but in our culture like after 18, I don't pretend that I would be able to control him. But at least I can teach him. And I think if I teach him honestly he can make a good decision on his own whatever the decision that is, but I don't want him to get hustled by a peer pressure into doing something that seems like it's cool but really it's foolishness. So I'd rather teach him the honest facts first and then let him make the decisions about his drug use and then always say you can talk to me and I'll be honest with him like if he does drugs and irresponsible way is like yeah. I'm going to judge you you that's being an idiot, but it doesn't mean I don't love you. I love you. And guess what when your dad was your age. I was an idiot too [Natalie: laughs] Welcome to the family!

Natalie: *laughs* Yeah, welcome to the family. Hmm, one of the things that I think a lot about when it comes to psychedelics, you know, we have this interesting and I think kind of fascinating an amazing opportunity right now to be looking at some of the biological correlates for the phenomenological experience. Right? [Nicholas: Mmm] We have these fMRI studies and all these scans of what's happening in the brain and we're seeing blood flow is here not there. It's away from the default mode network and all these fun neuroscientific terms for why these experiences might be helping to shape the neurochemistry and help us to essentially build new neurons. I find all of that very fascinating and on the other hand. It doesn't directly translate and something I think a lot about around how these, again what I call sacred technology and there are many technologies of the Sacred. So whether that's fasting drumming, dancing house music what not. One of the things I think a lot about is how the common thread that I see is that they help us to come into contact with humility and vulnerability and when we are in contact with our vulnerability it help into deep it helps to deepen our intimacy with ourselves if we want to avail ourselves to that and by default with others those around us and the universe the cosmos and in that space of Intimacy it is, I think, supported to naturally develop an extent a space of empathy and compassion and to look out and see others as self and self as others and it naturally I naturally want to extend compassion and care to my fellow person to the plants to the animals to the ocean. And so again, we have these kind of biological correlate things going on in the scientific world, very interesting and then this is kind of my my idea around what's happening on that phenomenological level and I think that that is something that can unify us if we can come into more contact with vulnerable spaces and and safe places and create safe spaces together. We can start to bridge some of these um illusions of divide between the isms. Right race, gender. blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah.

Nichola: No, that's totally agree with you. I totally, yes and that's the political utility of psychedelics that when people are painted. Oh, you're you're this race, you know you're this gender or this or this or that but the reality is that a lot of us live inside of each other. Our brains are mirrors. Our brains are hungry mirrors that take the reflections of other people deep inside of our own bodies. And I think one of the reasons social justice movements at their best work is remind people who think they're very different that they actually carry the other person inside of them. And so at its best the feminist movement reminds men you have women inside of you and it reminds women you have men inside of you. Your fathers, your uncles, for man your arms, your sisters, nieces. They were all intertwined. It reminds social justice at their best reminds quote unquote and I use this because race is a social construction quote-unquote white people or Latinos are Asians are black people like you have actually the other people inside of you. In reality you carry them inside of you all the time and you play with their culture and they play with your culture and is a constant flow like a river going in between our mirrors and I think our language sometimes is timid and is hesitant into stepping into the reality of that flow between the brain mirrors between the body mirrors and how we all imitate bits and pieces of each other and use it to articulate things that we can't really speak about yet and it's hazy and it's a little awkward. It's sometimes it's exploitative and sometimes it's sincere but in bad taste and sometimes it's great and wonderful and triumphant, but it's all those things but we're constantly flowing in between each other and I think psychedelics exposes that invisible river. That is tactile. We feel it, we flow on it, but it's not visible always in language. And so we don't always own it and I think that's actually the real human reality and psychedelics is one way of getting us there and I think we need it because right now the country is thirsty and it's starving and it's a little bit like a desert where there's no party that there are there are so many people who are literally in the streets starving because it's an Emotional desert and that's the thing is that we actually live in a world of incredible abundance. We have enough food, especially if you chill out with the fucking meat, chill out what the may we really don't need it. We have so much food. We have enough technology to create tons of housing. We don't even need oil anymore. Like we literally have the technology to suck up energy from the sun and the wind and the and the motions of the water. [Natalie: Mhmm] So we live in this world of abundance and yet there's people who are living in Scarcity. So it's not the physical technological world. It's in trouble. It's that we live in an emotional desert. And so I think that's what we need more of that flow to let us know. We actually belong to each other. We always did and we always will. That's the price of being a human being. We belong to each other.

Natalie: Beautiful! Thank you so much. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm

[Audience applauses]

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