CSC’s Founder:
Bernard von NotHaus
Read Bernard’s entry in One Toke To God.
The founder of the Cannabis Spiritual Center – a special place that empowers people to experience their inner spirituality with just one toke of cannabis – is no stranger to controversy or outside-the-box thinking. Bernard von NotHaus (BVNH), born in 1944 in St. Joseph, Missouri, created his first important project while majoring in architecture at Kansas State University. This was the Pit Theatre, which he designed, built and operated. It featured national and local musical talent and experimental, avant-garde, over-the-top light-show productions.
BVNH sold the Pit Theatre in 1968, moved to Europe, and quickly became involved with the import/export business – specifically, smuggling hashish from the Hindu Kush to Boston. A trip to London led to staging a Pit Theatre production at The Arts Laboratory, hanging out with John Lennon at his Tittenhurst Estate and driving the Apple van in the crazy London traffic.
Fast-forwarding to 1974 found BVNH in Hawaii, where he experienced an epiphany involving automatic writing and wrote a 30 page economic research paper titled: To Know Value in one day. Circulated it among friends, the paper soon catapulted BVNH and his partner, Talena Jay Presley (Telle), from living on $30 per month without electricity or a car on the Big Island of Hawaii, to jetting around the state and selling gold and silver.
This led BVNH and Telle to found the Royal Hawaiian Mint in 1974, dedicated to commemorating Hawaiiana in precious metals and provided a springboard for research into the role of precious metals in monetary economics. Thisdecades-long project resulted, in 1998,
with the introduction of the Liberty Dollar, designed to exemplify the principles of a free-market, value-backed, private currency, free from government control. In 1999, BVNH retired after 25 years as the Mintmaster at the Mint and started touring the U.S. mainland in support of the Liberty Dollar.
The national response was outstanding. In the next 10 years, BVNH’s National Organization for the Repeal of the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service (NORFED) issued approximately $65 million to $85 million in Liberty Dollars to more than 250,000 people. During this period, in 2003, BVNH wrote The Liberty Dollar SOLUTION to the Federal Reserve with two dozen national contributors, including Ron Paul and Ed Griffin – a 500-page treatise on the benefits of value-based currencies.
For eight years from 1998 to 2006, the Liberty Dollar was featured in countless articles in major publications, including The Washington Post and USA Today, and the U.S. Treasury acknowledged that the Liberty Dollar was legal. But in September 2006, the U.S. Mint suddenly issued a warning that the Liberty Dollar was illegal – so BVNH sued the U.S. Mint in early 2007. The government retaliated by raiding the Liberty Dollar offices and seizing more than 7 tons of gold, silver, platinum and copper. The raid landed BVNH on CNN, CNBC, and the front page of The Washington Post – and led to BVNH being charged with counterfeiting U.S. currency in 2009. Two years later, on March 18, 2011, BVNH was found guilty and faced 22 years in federal prison.
This was scarcely the end. After waiting three very long years, BVNH was finally sentenced – but not to prison! He served only a single year of probation as the judge obviously did not agree with the government’s over-zealous handling of the case. BVNH remains a cause célèbre for a value-based monetary system and is often referred to as the ‘Rosa Parks of Sound Money.’
And it was in the midst of his promotion of a value-based monetary system that BVNH made another discovery – that one led him to founding of the Cannabis Spiritual Center. On Sunday, April 21, 1996, BVNH paused from his unrelentingly busy schedule and found time to take a toke, which reawakened him to the spiritual power of cannabis. He repeated the life-changing event the following Sunday and has now enjoyed one toke every Sunday for more than 21 years – the world’s longest recorded case study of using cannabis spiritually. BVNH branded the weekly toke as the Special Sunday Service (SSS) and started sharing his amazing cannabis-inspired experiences with other people. As the SSS grew, he developed a set of 12 Guidelines so that anyone can experience their own innate spirituality with cannabis.
During a SSS in 2014 the idea for the Cannabis Spiritual Center came to BVNH. The thought was of creating a special place devoted to empower people to experience their inner spirituality with just one toke of cannabis. But how to introduce such an idea to the world? In another SSS, the idea of the book: One Toke to God came to BVNH. The concept quickly caught fire with top academics and national researchers, 30 of whom contributed to the book that confirms that a genuine spiritual experience is possible, upon demand, with cannabis. One Toke to God supplies part of the foundation of the Cannabis Spiritual Center and affirms BVNH’s dedication to catch the wave of cannabis legalization and celebrate cannabis’ potential for personal spiritual growth and hopefully, for world peace.