Who Has Agency Over Your Consciousness? || Larry Norris

Meet Larry Norris, PhD

Larry Norris is the co-founder, national organizing director, and board member for Decriminalize Nature. He also has a nonprofit organization here in the San Francisco Bay Area called Entheogenic Research Integration & Education (ERIE). In this interview Larry dives deep in what it means to claim back agency over your consciousness.

Larry wrote his dissertation looking at Ayahuasca experiences and archetypes of transformations that truly impact an individual for not just months or years, but decades after.

Short clip from our interview with Larry Norris

Full Interview with Larry Norris Pt. 1

Full Interview with Larry Norris Pt. 2

Why should we focus on a relationship with Nature?

Larry
When we began in December of 2018 to have this conversation, our conversation was around, okay, so there’s decriminalization of mushrooms happening in Denver, legalization of mushrooms happening in Oregon.

What can we do here in Oakland and so part of that conversation is saying, you know, hey, why are we doing just one substance, we have a lot of different communities in the San Francisco Bay area. There’s an ayahuasca community, there’s an Iboga community, there’s a DMT community, there’s mushroom community.

So why are we going to just limit to just one material?

So we said, let’s have a bigger conversation about nature. It’s not just about one particular plant or one particular mushroom, but our relationship with nature.

Who has agency over your consciousness?

What can we learn from nature? We are nature. Why are we criminalized?

And so these are the kind of conversations we wanted to have. And I think once we started having that conversation, it opened up a much broader understanding of policy.

So by having all the different plants and mushrooms together really allowed us to have this conversation about nature, which then goes into what are we doing to the environment?

What are we doing to ourselves?

What are the issues around homelessness?

What are the issues around economic reform?

What are the issues around people and their connection to each other?

And so by having this conversation about nature, we were able to have a much bigger one.