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002 - Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs

Apr 19, 2005, 56 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

A talk by Terence McKenna at the Palenque Entheobotany Conference in 1999.
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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space. I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:08 ►

Our program today is titled Linear Societies and Non-Linear Drugs.

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And it’s by Terrence McKenna and is one of a series of audio recordings from our website, palenkenorte.org.

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There you can find talks given by Eric Davis, Bruce Dahmer, Daniel Pinchbeck, Terrence McKenna, and many others.

00:00:27 ►

And I’ll tell you more about Planket Norte at the end of today’s program.

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But before we begin, I’d like to give you a little plug to my friends, Jacques Cordell and Wells of Chateau Hayouk,

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for letting us use a cut from their CD, Nature Loves Courage, as our theme song.

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cut from their CD, Nature Loves Courage, as our theme song.

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The first time I heard them live was at the wave for Terrence McKenna that was held here in Southern California several months after Terrence died.

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And in case you don’t know what a wave is,

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it’s a combination of an Irish wake and a rave.

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And those of you who were lucky enough to be there

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know what a spectacular event that was.

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So thanks again to Jacques and company for the free use of their music. Now about

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today’s program which is a talk that Terence McKenna gave at the Enfield

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Botany Conference in Palenque Mexico during January of 1999. Terence gave this

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talk actually at the end of the pool down at the Chan Ka Hotel which is near

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the ruins in Palenque and you can hear the end of the pool down at the Chan Ka Hotel, which is near the ruins in Poincare.

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And you can hear the howler monkeys and cattle in the background if you listen closely.

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And by the way, if you go to our website,

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you’ll find a few pictures from some of these legendary conferences.

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This recording of this talk actually was made by my friend Noah.

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And he gave me a copy of the talk when we met again at the

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Ayahuasca conference in San Francisco later that year.

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When I offered to pay him for his expenses in producing the CD, he wouldn’t take any

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money for it.

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Instead, he told me to just see that it got the widest distribution possible.

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And so now that podcasting has come to life, I thought this would be a good way to do just

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that.

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Now that podcasting has come to life, I thought this would be a good way to do just that.

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A sad footnote, of course, to this story is that poor Noah accidentally overdosed and died a year or so after we last met.

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And that was a real sobering moment for all of his friends because we knew that Noah was a really experienced psychonaut.

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And if it could happen to him, it could happen to any one of us.

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It was really a powerful wake-up call, but since then our clan’s been much more careful about the use of these powerful medicines. For example, most people

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in the tribe that I know now take the time to go to Erowid.org, that’s E-R-O-W-I-D.org, before trying

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a new substance, and then learn as much as they can about what the experience is that they’re about to have.

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And reading the trip reports from bad reports, I think, is a must.

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Granted only a very small number of psychedelic experiences turn out hard to manage, but if

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you don’t think you can handle the downside of a particular substance, then maybe you

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ought to pass on that one for the time being.

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But that’s a topic for another day.

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Today we have a real treat for you, especially for those of you who have not yet experienced one of Terrence’s

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brilliant talks. At the end of the last century, the Uttney Reader selected Terrence as one of the

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hundred most influential people of the 20th century. In my opinion, he’s definitely in the top 10.

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So without any further ado, here is Terrence McKenna and his 1999 Palenque talk

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that he somewhat offhandedly titled

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Linear Societies and Non-Linear Drugs.

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Well, so then let me turn to the main event.

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I’ve got a snoot full of tequila and a messianic mission

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clawing the ground to talk to you as usual.

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Everybody has their own name.

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That’s right.

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Everybody has their own meaning.

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That’s right.

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I guess the title of tonight’s talk is Linear Society and Non-Linear Drugs,

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which is something that I just had to pull out of the air

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when Ken finally slammed me to the wall

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for what I would be talking about this night many months ago.

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But more and more for me, especially with this group,

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these things have become sort of summations

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and I guess I hope convivial examinations

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of just where we are, we each and every one of us,

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and then this enterprise, whatever we mean by that, in the context of everything else that’s happening in the world. contextualized and as I try to think about you know what if anything I can

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bring to the party I guess it’s that what I’m interested in is psychedelics

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as philosophical tools and when I concretize that for myself, I realized there’s no claims on that part of discourse. No one wants to do this.

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very formal manner and the most exciting is incredibly stuffy and yet I am like most of you I assume have taken on board in my life this thing called the

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psychedelic experience which is then as large a portion of my being as my sexuality, my politics, my education, it shapes everything. And yet

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nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection, at least overtly,

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made to this. Maybe not since Plato, who talked about shadows on the wall of the cave and so forth and so on.

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Well, so what can psychedelics and the psychedelic experience bring to philosophy?

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And what do I mean by philosophy? By philosophy I mean the enterprise of discursive

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thinking, trying to understand what the world is, and who is it bound? And who’s along for the ride?

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And it seems to me that we as a community have, this isated into ourselves the image of an underclass

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so that we struggle for legal toleration of our practices and our habits

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but we don’t struggle for intellectual legitimation of our vision.

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We accept that they are somehow contextually marginal.

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And as I thought about that, I realized that that is a limitation on the community, that the information which is coming from the psychedelic experience

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as interpreted by

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Western people

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is primary evidence

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for the need for a

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major paradigm shift

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in the whole way

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the Western mentality does business. Well, what kind of

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evidence and what kind of shift? Well, there’s a lot of talk in our community and there has

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been for many, many years about shamanism. And when we seek to legitimize ourselves through a historical argument,

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we reach back to shamanism and we say,

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we’re part of something which is 100,000 years old and worldwide

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and touched the spirit long before the shadow of the cross fell over Jerusalem and so forth and so on.

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All true.

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All true.

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and so forth and so on.

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All true.

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And in a way that has, I think,

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that tendency,

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which is part of the broader tendency in the Western mind

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to valorize and grow nostalgic

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over the primitive,

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has put a certain political cast

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on our stance and our position.

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But what we are is, again contextually,

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is a culture of science.

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And I’m speaking now of our community.

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It’s the Albert Hoffman

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and the Dave Nichols

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and Sasha Shulgin

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who have kept our canoe afloat

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these are men of science

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it’s methods, it’s vocabulary, it’s culture

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we have not

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though we certainly honor those people and love them, as their

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rhetoric is not the primary rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users, which

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tends toward this, as I refer to it, this shamanistic aboriginal nostalgia.

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aboriginal nostalgia.

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I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things.

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I think the news coming out of science is the most psychedelic news there is. When I go to the Internet,

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I go to things like Science Alert and the Hubble picture of the day

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and this sort of thing.

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And our community as a whole, I think,

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is not involved enough in incorporating the vistas.

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While we struggle to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is everywhere triumphant

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because the instruments built by linear science throw open doorways on the unimaginable.

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And the most revered and hoary heffes of the scientific establishment have to genuflect before this stuff.

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I mean, what am I talking about? Well, for example, Science Magazine wrote last week

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that the most important scientific breakthrough of 1998

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was the apparent observation and agreement upon that observation

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by the astrophysical community of a cosmological constant.

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This sounds like very deep physics,

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but if I give it to you as a headline,

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what it means is the entire universe,

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every atom and every empty space of it,

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is ruled by a very weird force

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that has now been seriously known to science

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for precisely five months.

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A force which is apparently going to overcome gravity’s tendency to collapse the universe

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and to cause it to expand in a very explosive and counterintuitive and psychedelic fashion fashion that is the complete confoundment of the core science that

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Western linear thinking has built and of course there weren’t riots in the

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streets and the electricity didn’t fail but at the very pinnacles of the antenna

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of the evolving civilization there was a shudder felt in the force you may be

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sure so there are two much larger forces than our community that are in play in

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terms of shaping the cultural modality and and I would call them what would I call them well I would call one of them

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science it’s the other one that I’m having trouble with it is everything which is not

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anchored in the rational you know the 20th century is the most spectacularly celebratory, has the most spectacular celebratory

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affair with the irrational since the 16th century. I mean, never before have so many

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prophets, wizards, wise women, casters of runes, seers of visions moved among the people plying their wares. And part of this is brought on by the

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tension between the failure of the education system at the very moment of an inflationary

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expansion of knowledge, so that it’s very hard to be au courant in all fields.

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And if you’re not current in a field,

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then probably your version of that field is some kind of story, a myth.

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You know, I mean, if you can’t keep up with quantum physics,

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why not fall back on archangels?

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You know, it requires less intellectual engagement or something like

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that discourse is fragmented fields of discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly that the

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understanding of these vocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core group of

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workers so then this is creating kind of islanded systems of self-reference where

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outside those those systems of self-reference information doesn’t

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travel the people who are the gene splicers know very little about remote sensing,

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and both of those parties know very little about recent discoveries in astrophysics, for example.

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So there’s an intellectual fragmentation.

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I live in Hawaii in a forest in fairly remote conditions.

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And so I entertain all this in my mind all the time

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and try to, my faith, and I assume it’s the psychedelic faith,

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although we’ve had some fairly existential characters in our ranks over the years,

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characters in our ranks over the years. But the psychedelic faith, I think, is that the universe is beautiful in the platonic sense, and therefore good and true. In other words, we’re optimists. We’re not flailing existentialists. We’re not relativists because we have a real standard to measure our spiritual coinage against. So we’re not relativists. This is a point I’m really keen

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to make because we’re embedded in relativism. It’s all around us. It’s the air we breathe.

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But it is not inimical to the psychedelic community.

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I think the psychedelic experience is the only authentic source of reliable contact

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with the nimmaness.

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Meditation and so forth and so on is all very fine, but it requires a leisure class involved in philanthropic

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support of this kind of foolishness where the psychedelic experience is immediate and

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real. So, now I’ve lost my way here. Ah, yes.

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Optimism? I’ve lost my way here. Ah, yes.

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Optimism?

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No, no, optimism.

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So I sit in Hawaii and I look at all this

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and I try to contextualize it

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and come out with a good story

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because I think the best story will win.

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So if you can get together the best version of how it should all come out,

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so shall it be.

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And I work at this because in the past I’ve been very, very happy

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with the results between my interior fantasy

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and the unfolding of historical development.

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I mean, I wished for LSD, and then it happened,

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and then I dreamed of theSD, and then it happened. Then I dreamed of the Internet, and then it happened.

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So I should keep at it.

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Definitely.

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And I recently read a very interesting book called

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A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Michael DeLanda.

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And if you get a chance, you should take a look at this.

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And he made a point, which caused me to expand his point into this little thing I’m going to tell you now.

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But his point was that human beings are very involved in the movement of geological material.

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That as a species, we move rocks around on a very large scale.

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And of course, it’s interesting that some of the earliest human structures

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are the most physically massive and weighty, like the Great Pyramid.

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physically massive and weighty like the Great Pyramid.

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So de Landa made this point about our relationship with the geological stratigraphy of the Earth

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and that cities were a kind of geological extension

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of the process of crystallization

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carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit, i.e.

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intelligent primates who are building these structures.

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And I thought that was very interesting.

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I had never considered it before.

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I’ve talked about virtual reality and I’ve said that it’s nothing new, that Ur was a virtual

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reality and Chattahoochee was a virtual reality, but done in stucco and fired ceramic and stone

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and that when the medium is so intractable as stone, the epistemic assumptions that get formed about what reality is

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are very different than if you can build Versailles at the click of a mouse button.

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But nevertheless, it’s the same.

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But embedded in my reading of Delanda was,

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I’ve been thinking a lot and I talked to you a lot last year about artificial intelligences

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and minds which are not human.

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Minds which are very different from us.

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Intelligence which is very different from us.

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While the naive are scanning the stars, our appliances have become telepathic

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there is a very strange kind of intelligence

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being called into existence by ourselves

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strangely enough

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and this is the connection to Delanda

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this artificial intelligence which is being called into being by human activity is made of the same materials as Ur and Chattahoochee. It’s made of ceramics, glasses, and metals. it’s that so then I took this on board and thought about it and I sort of come

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to some kind of cyber pantheistic Emersonianism which is here I’ll give it

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to you as a headline and then work backwards

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so that in case I forget what I’m saying

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it won’t be lost to suffering mankind

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the earth’s strategy for its own salvation

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is through machines

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is what it is

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and human beings are some kind of,

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we are the deputized spouse,

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we are the bride in this alchemical rarefaction

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of glasses, ceramics, metals, and volatile materials.

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Apparently, the earth is like some kind of an embryonic or fetal thing.

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And at the end of its gestation, what is happening is it is ramifying its nervous system,

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is appearing in the unfolding of its morphogenesis.

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And as we contemplate nanotechnologies and see ourselves working through bacteria

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and this sort of thing at the engineering level

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you have to be blind to not then reflect back upon the fact

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that in some sense we are already working at that kind of level

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at the behest of it is not clear who

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because nobody ever asked the question

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in quite this way before.

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The answer to who, I think,

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is the earth.

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And that what lies ahead

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at the end of the linear tunnel

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of Western subjectivist, positivist,

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structuralist assumptions

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that we’ve been operating,

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when we hit the end of the tunnel

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and burst out into the larger mental space

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of cosmic evolution,

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what we are going to find is

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that we are partners, actors,

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in a cosmic drama that involves the earth at one polarity and machines at the other polarity as the expression of the will of the earth toward a kind of self-reflective transcendence that is achieved through machine-human- biotic symbiosis.

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And this is, you know,

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there’ll never be a headline which says this.

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Some people won’t even notice that it’s happening

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because these large-scale processes

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can be described by many metaphors at many depths.

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But I’m telling you, I think this is what’s going on.

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The reason I like this story is because

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it’s not a story about processes out of control.

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It’s not a story about human guilt.

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It’s not a story full of we must and we should. It’s a story which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience

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field. In other words, biology, technology, technology human culture human traditional values

00:25:09 ►

transcendent human dystopian values it’s a story of things on course on time and

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under budget and I assume that’s how nature really operates

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and that we live inside some kind of anxiety producing culture

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that is a necessary, I don’t want to say evil,

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but a necessary response to conditions of stress.

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but a necessary response to conditions of stress.

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There are processes which, you know,

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nuclear waste build-up, urbanization, land disturbance,

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there are processes which, if allowed to run on indefinitely,

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would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos. But Confucius said no tree grows to heaven. And what he meant by that is it’s fruitless to project any process

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to infinity because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic

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scenario. If no fruit flies died in six months,

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the Earth would stem out of its orbit

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from the weight of fruit flies.

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No, I don’t think that.

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But what an image.

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Somebody once told me

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if the Earth completely disappeared

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except for its nematodes,

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that you could still see the outlines of the continents if you were standing on the moon.

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I thought, now just who gathered this?

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So then, to bring this back around a little,

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So then, to bring this back around a little, where is the psychedelic experience in all of this? Well, it used to be called, or at one phase it was called consciousness expansion.

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And consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become an absolute necessity

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because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology

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machines that are going to require super-intelligent humans

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to direct and have discourse with them.

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This is happening.

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It is already happening.

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I mean, the Internet is this.

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I mean, it doesn’t tap you on the shoulder

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and remind you to brush your teeth.

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But it is a partner in the understanding of the world

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that is genie-like.

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That’s the image I have when I sit down to it.

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It is all John Dee would have asked of his archangelic messengers.

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You know, he wanted instantaneous information on the political situation in the courts of Europe.

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He wanted information on the course of the Drake’s expedition then

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on the other side of the planet. The internet is this kind of magical, intelligent prosthesis.

00:28:35 ►

And as I said, there won’t come a dramatic moment, I think, a la Lawnmower Man or something

00:28:42 ►

like that. These things are much more seeping.

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The only people who in fact can see the game move

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against the background of the forest pattern

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are psychedelic heads.

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You have to think about this stuff

00:29:00 ►

and you have to develop vocabularies

00:29:03 ►

for catching it in action.

00:29:06 ►

This is what the game of being an intellectual is, I think.

00:29:13 ►

Trying to see the process of morphological unfoldment in action

00:29:21 ►

and guess the direction in which it’s headed.

00:29:28 ►

Because it’s inevitably headed toward greater density of information

00:29:35 ►

at greater speeds, higher level integrated metaphors,

00:29:40 ►

visually rather than textually displayed,

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visually rather than textually displayed transformation of such graphic and glyphic elements over time,

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it becomes more and more like the interface of a computer,

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more and more like some kind of machine environment.

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I mean, we have thought for, I assume, at least 100,000 years, maybe much longer.

00:30:07 ►

But the quality of thought, you know, when it was early, it was intermittent.

00:30:13 ►

It was thin. It was a groping.

00:30:16 ►

It was an undigested intuition, a perception slipping away from the mind’s eye

00:30:23 ►

because of media reinforcement and education and acculturation

00:30:27 ►

and the passage of a hundred thousand years

00:30:30 ►

the voice of the mind, the logos, has grown stronger

00:30:35 ►

but now it takes an exponential leap forward

00:30:42 ►

into visualization, into manifestation

00:30:48 ►

through this information processing prosthesis that integrates us all.

00:30:57 ►

And, you know, I can imagine a future not very far away where the individual,

00:31:07 ►

the expression of the individual

00:31:10 ►

is lowered, is more muted.

00:31:13 ►

I mean, this is the most individualistic,

00:31:17 ►

individual worshipping century,

00:31:20 ►

the century just in

00:31:21 ►

that we have ever known.

00:31:23 ►

And it’s great accomplishments, it’s great works of art

00:31:28 ►

were all accomplished by individuals and political undertakings

00:31:34 ►

such as the Third Reich and so forth and so on.

00:31:37 ►

Also highly motivated individuals who rose above the masses.

00:31:42 ►

I’m not sure we can afford the luxury

00:31:45 ►

of that kind of exhibitionistic individualism in the future.

00:31:50 ►

And I think probably it’s not that we’re talking about

00:31:52 ►

a restriction of human rights.

00:31:55 ►

We’re talking about a transformation of human drive.

00:32:01 ►

The states of integration and collectivity

00:32:05 ►

that will be sold as public utilities

00:32:09 ►

in the next century

00:32:11 ►

are anticipated now by group psychedelic experiences

00:32:16 ►

ayahuasca sections

00:32:18 ►

this sort of thing

00:32:20 ►

and the dichotomy

00:32:23 ►

and I think I made this clear when I talked about the earth and

00:32:26 ►

machines the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial is an obsession of the 20th century

00:32:34 ►

hence cancelled now in fact a whole bunch of things are cancelled we were talking at home about how Roger Shattuck in his history of Dada

00:32:48 ►

said that the 20th century couldn’t wait to be born. It was born in 1888 at the death

00:32:56 ►

of Victor Hugo. And the knight said, well, so if it was born in 1888, winded the 20th century in. And I think it ended in 1992.

00:33:06 ►

It expired early with the birth of the World Wide Web.

00:33:10 ►

What defined all that, modernity, was mass media.

00:33:19 ►

Mass media shaped that whole psychology.

00:33:23 ►

And it is now archaic.

00:33:26 ►

It’s not archaic it’s obsolete it’s it’s wonderful that the phrase 20th century

00:33:34 ►

is beginning to have that wonderful brown gravy Edwardian tone that you

00:33:40 ►

reserved for the term 19th century,

00:33:48 ►

meaning, you know, those terribly stuffy and confused and rather silly people who just didn’t quite get it right

00:33:51 ►

but were doing the best they could and muddling through.

00:33:54 ►

And thank God they gave way to us,

00:33:58 ►

the people of the 21st century.

00:34:25 ►

Let me see here. Is there a flashlight? I have a page full of notes. I needn’t be so, uh, if there’s anything here that wasn’t touched on. some notes about this planetary intelligence.

00:34:26 ►

Thank you, Gene.

00:34:30 ►

And how all that works.

00:34:34 ►

One of the insights that… I’ve been reading different people this year,

00:34:37 ►

maybe you can tell,

00:34:38 ►

and one of the people I’ve been reading

00:34:39 ►

is Greg Egan, who I talked about last year.

00:34:42 ►

But now I’ve read more.

00:34:44 ►

Now I’ve read Diaspora

00:34:45 ►

and the ones where he makes no effort whatsoever

00:34:48 ►

to explain it to you

00:34:50 ►

unless you’ve already done your homework

00:34:52 ►

and then Jonathan today

00:34:56 ►

in his lecture

00:34:58 ►

talked about DNA a little bit

00:35:01 ►

and frame slippage

00:35:02 ►

and all of that

00:35:03 ►

and it reminded me of it. The thing that

00:35:07 ►

I’m coming to from my psychedelic experience and my life experience and the whole ball

00:35:15 ►

of wax is I said for many, many years that the world is made of language. That was just sort of one of my bumper stickers.

00:35:27 ►

But I think that that carries some of the flavor of what I want to say there, but that

00:35:34 ►

there’s more to it than that. It’s that everything is code. Everything is code in the sense that

00:35:41 ►

Everything is code.

00:35:48 ►

Everything is code in the sense that hackers mean when they say they write code.

00:35:54 ►

When Sasha stands up and waves his arms and draws what he calls the dirty pictures,

00:36:03 ►

he initiates you into a code, a vocabulary with very defined rules and quick to learn.

00:36:07 ►

And then they’re like tinker toys once you know the rules of the connectivity then you can sit down like a child and begin to stick these things together

00:36:12 ►

well what would this be like and what would this be like and does god allow this or does this break

00:36:18 ►

the rules and so forth the dna is like that human language is like that. Human language is like that.

00:36:25 ►

Human body language is like that.

00:36:29 ►

Machines communicate like this.

00:36:33 ►

In fact, this is a bridge which connects us.

00:36:38 ►

This is the great overarching bridge which will connect us to the machines

00:36:43 ►

that they, like us us are commanded by language.

00:36:50 ►

And so this realization that everything is code and code moving on many levels is I think

00:37:00 ►

a further, it’s more primary than the perception, for example,

00:37:06 ►

that things are made of space, time, matter, and energy.

00:37:10 ►

That’s one level below code.

00:37:13 ►

The code codes for space, time, matter, and energy.

00:37:18 ►

It’s much more like we’re in a simulacrum,

00:37:22 ►

some kind of machine environment.

00:37:25 ►

And in fact, I like that idea because I’ve always sensed, and psychedelics have always

00:37:30 ►

intensified this intuition in me, that the universe is a puzzle.

00:37:37 ►

Life is a problem to be solved.

00:37:40 ►

It’s a conundrum.

00:37:42 ►

It’s not what it appears to be.

00:37:44 ►

There are doors, there are

00:37:48 ►

locks and keys, there are levels, and if you get it right, somehow it will give way to

00:37:58 ►

something extremely unexpected. DMT is a perfect example of that. And of course, at the molecular level, it

00:38:07 ►

literalizes that metaphor. I mean, the DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous object

00:38:15 ►

introduced into the front door of the synaptic receptor. And then, you know, you can plunder

00:38:23 ►

the palace for five minutes.

00:38:30 ►

Well, if the world is code,

00:38:36 ►

then it can be hacked.

00:38:41 ►

In other words, it needn’t stand still in quite the same way that it stands still in

00:38:47 ►

your mind if you believe in something called the laws of physics it permits magic because it says

00:38:56 ►

behind the laws of physics is a deeper level and if you can reach that deeper level you can make changes there.

00:39:09 ►

Alan, this leads on to something that I wanted to say about an earlier theme where I was

00:39:15 ►

talking about the legitimation of the community’s intuition.

00:39:20 ►

Something that we always kick around at these things, or I always bring it up in some form,

00:39:26 ►

is where do the hallucinations come from?

00:39:31 ►

We arrived late last night after a 24-hour trip from Hawaii

00:39:36 ►

that was just hell,

00:39:38 ►

or as much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict upon anyone.

00:39:44 ►

And got stoned.

00:39:47 ►

And then we said we were laying there.

00:39:48 ►

And it always happens when, you know,

00:39:53 ►

you’re cut off from cannabis for long periods like that.

00:39:58 ►

You turn to it, it’s ten times as strong.

00:40:02 ►

And the hallucinations were exquisite. And you know, I’ve been looking

00:40:07 ►

at hallucinations now for thirty-some years. And I looked at these last night and I thought

00:40:15 ►

if someone would ask me what were they like, what would I have to say? And I said, indescribable.

00:40:22 ►

Indescribable. And I looked and looked, and I could look to my heart’s content,

00:40:27 ►

and they were indescribable.

00:40:31 ►

So we always come around to this question,

00:40:34 ►

where do the hallucinations come from?

00:40:36 ►

And I suppose the unconscious reductionists among us,

00:40:40 ►

and I don’t mean that they’re unconscious,

00:40:43 ►

I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism,

00:40:46 ►

probably assume that it’s some kind of like iteration thing, that bits and pieces of everything

00:40:53 ►

you’ve ever seen are rolling in some kind of neurological kaleidoscope that can run

00:40:59 ►

forever and just produce this endless download of drifting imagery. But there’s a problem

00:41:07 ►

with that because this stuff is too coherent, it means too much, it’s too emotionally charged.

00:41:15 ►

Well, we have never really rallied as a group to try and locate in our combined opinions the one or several sources of these

00:41:31 ►

images. And I think that, and I talked a bit about this last year, but I think this is legitimate perception of thoughts, places, things, times, and objects that either have existed somewhere in the universe, or do exist, or have existed in the minds of being somewhere, sometime in the universe.

00:42:05 ►

In other words, that we have to begin to take seriously

00:42:09 ►

the consequences of generalizations like quantum connectivity.

00:42:15 ►

In other words, it’s one thing to bask in the light of the overarching metaphor,

00:42:19 ►

which says everything is connected to everything else.

00:42:22 ►

It’s quite another thing to say,

00:42:25 ►

and so then what are the consequences for me of this?

00:42:28 ►

And the answer seems to me to be

00:42:31 ►

that the imagination,

00:42:35 ►

the inside of our heads,

00:42:37 ►

really is the most vast frontier imaginable.

00:42:42 ►

And we must leave it for future generations or maybe not generations

00:42:47 ►

but future evolutionary biologists to figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a

00:42:56 ►

propensity for accessing bell non-local data in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the

00:43:08 ►

physics of things, there must be a reason.

00:43:12 ►

And in the same way that the problem of speciation posed a problem for 19th century biology,

00:43:17 ►

this can pose a problem to our thinking without it sinking our intellectual enterprise.

00:43:26 ►

our thinking without it sinking our intellectual enterprise. It is for some more sophisticated future group of thinkers to understand why this is so. What we have to grapple with is

00:43:33 ►

that it is so. That it is so. That you have the Hubble telescope inside of you. You have

00:43:43 ►

inside of you an informational gathering instrument

00:43:46 ►

that can give you good intelligence

00:43:49 ►

about things so immeasurably distant from this point

00:43:55 ►

that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless.

00:43:59 ►

It’s just elsewhere,

00:44:01 ►

the elsewhere of the absolute infinity

00:44:04 ►

of the plenum of

00:44:07 ►

imagination in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea

00:44:14 ►

and of course the psychedelics are than the naturally evolved nano machinery of of the Gaian matrix that knits together this cosmic ecology,

00:44:29 ►

this system of living relationships.

00:44:33 ►

I am not impatient with the idea of extraterrestrial life or intelligence,

00:44:40 ►

just its pop regurgitation but I think probably

00:44:45 ►

planets like the earth are

00:44:48 ►

alive and conscious

00:44:51 ►

and they use the technologies

00:44:54 ►

that the species native to them evolve

00:44:57 ►

to cast images out into the larger universe

00:45:01 ►

that the dialogue among cosmic minds

00:45:04 ►

is a dialogue among entire planetary ecosystems.

00:45:10 ►

It can’t be trivialized into some

00:45:12 ►

take-me-to-your-leaders scenario.

00:45:16 ►

Still less can it validate

00:45:19 ►

the unscheduled visit of pro bono proctologists

00:45:23 ►

from nearby stars.

00:45:35 ►

You have to get a grip. unscheduled visit to pro bono proctologists from nearby oh I know one other thought in assessing this year in science

00:45:40 ►

I talked about omega the cosmological

00:45:44 ►

constant and that is really incredible.

00:45:49 ►

In fact, let me do a personal breast-beating thing and point out to you that this thing that they have come upon, Omega, the cosmological constant, this absolutely you know 50 years ago or so Einstein called it the biggest blunder I ever

00:46:07 ►

made because he played with the necessity of this thing to keep the universe from falling

00:46:14 ►

in on itself and then he decided it was an unnecessary construct and that it led to such

00:46:21 ►

weird conclusions that it had to be gotten rid of.

00:46:26 ►

And so that was all very well and good

00:46:28 ►

until these recent measurements of the distances of certain supernovae

00:46:34 ►

carried out independently by several teams of astrophysicists

00:46:38 ►

brought the news that the universe is expanding faster than the laws of physics allow.

00:46:47 ►

And when they looked at how much faster,

00:46:50 ►

they realized that it called the cosmological constant back into existence.

00:46:55 ►

Well, but here there are a couple of things about this cosmological constant

00:46:59 ►

that are very counterintuitive.

00:47:03 ►

that are very counterintuitive. The first is that it acts on empty space.

00:47:14 ►

It does not require matter to manifest.

00:47:18 ►

It is a property of space itself, the cosmological constant.

00:47:23 ►

The second thing is it’s

00:47:25 ►

a repulsive force

00:47:27 ►

that is growing stronger

00:47:29 ►

and stronger.

00:47:31 ►

Forces don’t grow stronger and

00:47:33 ►

stronger. They grow weaker

00:47:35 ►

and weaker. Gravity grows weaker.

00:47:38 ►

Light grows weaker. Everything

00:47:40 ►

grows weaker. This force, as

00:47:41 ►

time progresses, gets

00:47:43 ►

stronger and stronger. Well, that means

00:47:46 ►

when you project it out toward billions of years into the future, it becomes the dominant

00:47:53 ►

force. It overcomes gravity. It overcomes the strong force, the weak force. It overcomes

00:48:00 ►

all the forces. It becomes the dominant force. The other thing about it is that it

00:48:06 ►

becomes stronger

00:48:07 ►

not on an even

00:48:09 ►

slope, but

00:48:11 ►

asymptotically it becomes

00:48:14 ►

stronger. Well now this

00:48:16 ►

produces something very much

00:48:18 ►

like what I’ve been yakking about

00:48:20 ►

since 1971

00:48:21 ►

the novelty wave

00:48:24 ►

the so calledcalled time wave,

00:48:26 ►

it too grows stronger and stronger through time,

00:48:30 ►

and it too has this kind of built-in asymptotic acceleration

00:48:35 ►

where it experiences a kind of inflationary expansion in power.

00:48:42 ►

The two map over each other very well but when you talk

00:48:46 ►

returning now to the cosmological

00:48:48 ►

constant when you ask

00:48:50 ►

when the astrophysical community

00:48:52 ►

realized

00:48:53 ►

the consequences of taking this

00:48:56 ►

on board

00:48:57 ►

they realized that it was dissolving

00:49:00 ►

the entire model of what cosmology

00:49:02 ►

has been throughout the 20th century

00:49:04 ►

because what it’s really saying the entire model of what cosmology has been throughout the 20th century because

00:49:05 ►

what it’s really saying this discovery less than six months old is that space

00:49:13 ►

itself is in the act of exploding that the universe is is on the cusp of a an

00:49:22 ►

inflationary phase of expansion

00:49:25 ►

similar to the inflationary expansion

00:49:27 ►

that occurred at the time of the Big Bang.

00:49:31 ►

What would this look like?

00:49:32 ►

What would it feel like?

00:49:33 ►

Nobody can even imagine.

00:49:35 ►

It is not upon us.

00:49:37 ►

I don’t mean that.

00:49:38 ►

But I mean that in the near future of the universe,

00:49:43 ►

in the next billion or two billion years,

00:49:46 ►

things will change very, very dramatically.

00:49:50 ►

Everything will begin to rearrange itself

00:49:53 ►

according to the expression of this asymptotic power.

00:49:56 ►

So that was the biggest news in astrophysics.

00:50:02 ►

The other news, which has psychedelic implications, I think,

00:50:06 ►

also comes from astrophysics.

00:50:08 ►

As you may recall, last August, I think it was, I can’t remember exactly,

00:50:13 ►

every man, woman, and child on Earth got the equivalent of a dental x-ray There was a thing called a starquake on a magnetar,

00:50:28 ►

a magnetic neutron star 20,000 light years away,

00:50:32 ►

experienced a catastrophic collapse.

00:50:35 ►

And there was a wave of gamma rays that turned on every light in the system

00:50:43 ►

when it hit the planet.

00:50:46 ►

An event like that had never been observed before.

00:50:50 ►

And I got to thinking about this and I realized, you know,

00:50:53 ►

well, we’ve only been looking for this kind of thing for 30 years.

00:50:56 ►

There’s probably quite a bit of this kind of anomalous high energy,

00:51:02 ►

short duration

00:51:05 ►

fluctuation of radiation

00:51:07 ►

going on in the galaxy

00:51:09 ►

and then I had a kind of an image

00:51:12 ►

I wouldn’t say a vision

00:51:13 ►

but a kind of an image

00:51:14 ►

of how things are really arranged

00:51:21 ►

on the larger level

00:51:24 ►

in terms of the galaxy.

00:51:27 ►

And the image was of a donut.

00:51:31 ►

And, you know, we’re accustomed to being told that we’re out at the edge of the Milky Way

00:51:36 ►

where stars are few and far between, that this is the boonies.

00:51:42 ►

But I’ll bet you the boonies are where biology thrives because the low

00:51:48 ►

star density and the distance from the galactic core and these extremely energetic events at the

00:51:54 ►

core would create a kind of donut situation where it’s the toroidal area out near the rim where stars are slow burning

00:52:05 ►

and they don’t collide with each other

00:52:08 ►

and plants conform

00:52:09 ►

and you get the five billion year run you need

00:52:13 ►

to get to a civilization.

00:52:16 ►

But, you know, our rule of biology and strategy

00:52:22 ►

and everything and religious practice

00:52:24 ►

as far as I was concerned

00:52:25 ►

is seek the light.

00:52:28 ►

Well, the light is at the core.

00:52:31 ►

And so then I saw, aha, maybe the true seeking of the light requires biology to go into partnership

00:52:40 ►

with something beyond biology because the environment at the core is so energetic.

00:52:47 ►

And I’m not suggesting the actual core.

00:52:49 ►

That’s beyond contemplation.

00:52:51 ►

That’s a black hole.

00:52:52 ►

No technology imaginable can get even near

00:52:58 ►

the event horizon of an object like that.

00:53:01 ►

But I mean in the vicinity of the galactic core

00:53:04 ►

where the star density is two to three hundred times greater

00:53:10 ►

than it is in our vicinity.

00:53:13 ►

Those kinds of environments are so fraught with peril for biology

00:53:19 ►

that probably downloading ourselves into machine symbiotes of some sort

00:53:24 ►

is the only way to go to those places.

00:53:29 ►

In one of Greg Egan’s novels,

00:53:31 ►

he pictures a human future where this is one option.

00:53:37 ►

You can fuse yourself with a starship

00:53:41 ►

and set out to check out the neighborhood.

00:53:44 ►

Or you can join the Amish and till rye in Pennsylvania.

00:53:51 ►

Actually, I think you can’t do that

00:53:52 ►

because something’s happened to the earth.

00:53:54 ►

But some Hamish possibility is still available.

00:54:00 ►

Well, this is not like the sort of thing the other faculty members will be talking to you about,

00:54:09 ►

which is an intense and primarily important download of the homework,

00:54:17 ►

the chemistry, the botany, the behavioral impact, the archaeology, the ethnography of these substances.

00:54:29 ►

I ask myself all the time, you know, how are we different from other people?

00:54:34 ►

Are we morally superior?

00:54:36 ►

Are we smarter?

00:54:38 ►

Are we richer?

00:54:39 ►

Are we kinder to the people we meet? And actually, the longer I look, the less I can tell.

00:54:49 ►

There are extraordinary examples of all of these things in and outside of our community.

00:54:57 ►

And extraordinary nudnicks and jerks inside and outside our community.

00:55:12 ►

inside and outside our community. But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly presented with them and understood without hype and hysteria and hyperbole what what this psychedelic enterprise is about, that we would win them to our cause,

00:55:27 ►

because our cause is the human cause, the cause of thinking and communicating

00:55:36 ►

and building and bringing into existence new forms of beauty,

00:55:44 ►

new possibilities for being.

00:55:48 ►

And this can be done without psychedelics, certainly.

00:55:52 ►

But with psychedelics, it is accelerated.

00:55:56 ►

And it has a feeling not only of immediacy,

00:56:00 ►

but of, the only way I can put it is correctness.

00:56:05 ►

It isn’t the lonely neurotic artist

00:56:09 ►

thrashing toward some kind of self-reflection.

00:56:13 ►

It’s the firm guiding hand of a greater mind.

00:56:18 ►

The logos, the earth, I’m not sure.

00:56:21 ►

But a greater mind.

00:56:23 ►

I mean, art, true art truly is, truly inspired.

00:56:29 ►

And the muse, I don’t think, was more real for Homer

00:56:35 ►

than it is for each and every one of us

00:56:38 ►

when we’re in the presence of the mushroom,

00:56:41 ►

or ayahuasca, or DMT DMT or LSD or something like that.

00:56:48 ►

So, you know, I suppose I will go to the grave with life as mysterious to me

00:56:56 ►

as I found it when I came to consciousness around six or seven.

00:57:02 ►

But I think life is, whatever it is,

00:57:07 ►

it’s an opportunity of some sort.

00:57:10 ►

And the things I have been most grateful for

00:57:15 ►

were the things that I met

00:57:17 ►

at the frontiers of knowledge,

00:57:23 ►

of sexual experience, of psychedelic experience.

00:57:29 ►

Knowing, feeling, and being one with being

00:57:35 ►

are how I would categorize that breakdown.

00:57:41 ►

So I think the future is bound to be very confusing and demanding for most people.

00:57:49 ►

And there are many claims on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and where we put our energy.

00:57:58 ►

Should we tolerate relativism? Should we be Mahayana Buddhists?

00:58:03 ►

What’s our position on the huichol,

00:58:05 ►

how do you relate to Monica, all these things that have been sorted out. But I feel actually that I always dreamed of in my early youth was a miracle. I didn’t particularly like

00:58:31 ►

Oshfensky’s book In Search of the Miraculous, but I loved the title. And I used to just

00:58:37 ►

sort of chant it as a mantra, In Search of the Miraculous, just one. I knew the rules. Just one is enough,

00:58:46 ►

because one secures the possibility of an infinitude of miracles,

00:58:51 ►

whether you have observed them or not.

00:58:53 ►

Well, now I’m 52,

00:58:57 ►

and I’ve seen, I don’t know, four or five,

00:59:01 ►

which is four more than necessary to make me a lifetime optimist.

00:59:09 ►

But the recurrent, the enduring miracle, however it’s achieved, is the psychedelic rush.

00:59:18 ►

That giddy moment when all bets are off, all boundaries dissolve, the machinery of language fails,

00:59:28 ►

the adjectival wheel wells burst into flame, and then you achieve orbital velocity, are

00:59:39 ►

in the presence of the thing.

00:59:43 ►

And I cannot believe that that is not a solitary experience. And

00:59:49 ►

you’ve heard me say many times how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody could

00:59:54 ►

go from birth to the grave without having that experience. They can make of it what

01:00:00 ►

they want. They can denounce it. They can deify it, but one should have it because

01:00:07 ►

it’s one of the compasses, the primary compasses of being.

01:00:14 ►

And it’s larger than the historical context.

01:00:18 ►

I mean, the point of this talk tonight was to talk about linearity and idea systems and the nonlinear impact of these drugs

01:00:28 ►

and the way they break down media bias.

01:00:31 ►

But all these intellectual ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary experience.

01:00:49 ►

And we can draw it, paint it, sculpt it, act it, dance it, drum it,

01:00:55 ►

and never take anything away from it.

01:00:58 ►

Never define it, never occlude it.

01:01:03 ►

It is a miracle

01:01:05 ►

it’s like having the presence of a deity

01:01:09 ►

it’s I think very hard for me to open myself up

01:01:13 ►

at any given moment

01:01:15 ►

to the full implication

01:01:17 ►

of how fortunate I am

01:01:21 ►

and how good life is

01:01:23 ►

in the shadow of this particular tree.

01:01:31 ►

Anyway, that’s the formal talk for tonight.

01:01:34 ►

Thank you very much.

01:01:41 ►

And now we’ll entertain questions, which is usually much more fun.

01:01:47 ►

So anybody got a take on that or want to say something completely oblique or anything else?

01:01:56 ►

Last year, I’ll start with last year.

01:02:00 ►

Human intelligence, giant intelligence, artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial intelligence.

01:02:06 ►

You speak up.

01:02:08 ►

You’ll repeat it.

01:02:09 ►

Well, the question is about the discussion about artificial intelligence.

01:02:13 ►

You mean the hierarchy of the relationship of these things?

01:02:19 ►

Well, I don’t know.

01:02:20 ►

I guess it’s becoming easier for me to be a mystic about the Earth

01:02:25 ►

than to think that we are going to be rescued by the Galactic Federation.

01:02:34 ►

I think that the Earth, that it’s a profound connection.

01:02:41 ►

The Earth is the foundation of everything. It’s the foundation of biology and it’s the foundation of machine culture and machine architecture.

01:03:08 ►

It’s much easier for me to imagine that there is some kind of slow-moving telluric intelligence that may have begun as a homeostatic system, in other words, to stabilize the atmosphere,

01:03:17 ►

to create a chemical environment that had a momentum to it that wasn’t driven by the cosmic ambience.

01:03:26 ►

You understand what I mean?

01:03:27 ►

I don’t know the feedback for that.

01:03:29 ►

Yeah, feedback mechanism.

01:03:31 ►

And then, of course, people say,

01:03:33 ►

well, it’s very hard to imagine it because there are no genes.

01:03:37 ►

There is no nervous system.

01:03:39 ►

There is nothing that we can quite…

01:03:43 ►

But I think that, first of all, we don’t know a great deal about the Earth,

01:03:47 ►

the ocean currents, its magnetic fields,

01:03:50 ►

its 32 nutational and precessional motions,

01:03:55 ►

its core dynamics, its distribution of materials.

01:04:01 ►

It is complicated, and that’s what’s always required for self-referential and feedback

01:04:08 ►

systems to evolve. Life evolved on the surface of the earth. Now in the usual story of this,

01:04:16 ►

the earth is not a major player, it’s just sort of where it happened. But on the other

01:04:21 ►

hand, what if you took the view that the earth permitted or coaxed into existence

01:04:26 ►

or made possible

01:04:28 ►

or encouraged or

01:04:29 ►

enzymatically catalyzed

01:04:32 ►

these processes

01:04:33 ►

and

01:04:37 ►

the

01:04:38 ►

geomagnetic reversals, the glaciations

01:04:42 ►

the ebb and flow of nitrogen levels in

01:04:47 ►

the atmosphere all of this has pumped biology and it’s always been presented

01:04:52 ►

as well the cosmic atmosphere the cosmic environment is unpredictable and so you

01:04:58 ►

get fluctuations introduced from the outside by random factors, asteroidal impacts, so forth and so on.

01:05:07 ►

But again, this is just a first try

01:05:10 ►

with the data.

01:05:12 ►

This is just somebody blowing smoke, basically.

01:05:15 ►

The fact is you’re presented

01:05:17 ►

with an extremely organized

01:05:19 ►

and coherent situation.

01:05:21 ►

The Earth with its many species

01:05:23 ►

and ecosystems.

01:05:25 ►

And you don’t know how it got there. And you don’t know where it’s headed either. Now our culture is a culture

01:05:33 ►

of guilt. And so the story of civilization is supposedly a story of rape, mayhem, turning

01:05:42 ►

the wrong direction, losing the connection. To some degree that may be true,

01:05:47 ►

but I think it gives much too much credit to humanity

01:05:52 ►

in that it actually hypothesizes that human beings, a primate species,

01:05:58 ►

could overwhelm nature’s dynamic drive toward order and beauty

01:06:04 ►

and take control of things.

01:06:08 ►

Well, that’s our myth about ourselves,

01:06:11 ►

is that we can take control.

01:06:13 ►

But we never have gotten control.

01:06:17 ►

All of our societies have been a mess.

01:06:19 ►

All of our explorations have been brutal and negatory.

01:06:30 ►

And now comes the machines, and they are produced by biology, which comes from the earth.

01:06:39 ►

And what are these machines made of?

01:06:42 ►

Glass, crystal, arsenic, copper, gold, all these things.

01:06:47 ►

And they’re being hooked together exactly on the model.

01:06:50 ►

Clearly the machines are modeled on biology.

01:06:53 ►

We talk about connecting them.

01:06:56 ►

We talk about languages.

01:06:57 ►

We use a vocabulary that we previously used for biology to talk about these things.

01:07:07 ►

And you see there’s a funny thing built in there,

01:07:12 ►

which is we are designing the machines to be more and more intelligent.

01:07:18 ►

But what we don’t understand is that they operate in a different universe from us

01:07:23 ►

because we operate at about 100 hertz.

01:07:27 ►

A machine you can buy down at any computer store

01:07:31 ►

operates at 400 megahertz.

01:07:34 ►

That means that you can run an eternity of human lives

01:07:39 ►

in an afternoon.

01:07:40 ►

It means, in a way, that we are creating a creature

01:07:44 ►

that lives in a different kind of temporal universe than us.

01:07:49 ►

And we are teaching them to design themselves to be ever more intelligent.

01:07:55 ►

And once some kind of intelligence arises, because it’s intelligent,

01:08:02 ►

the first thing it does is design a more intelligent version

01:08:06 ►

of itself

01:08:07 ►

well at 400 megahertz

01:08:09 ►

and with a worldwide amount of processing

01:08:12 ►

power to draw on

01:08:14 ►

you can imagine something coming

01:08:16 ►

to embryogenesis in a matter

01:08:18 ►

of hours

01:08:19 ►

something emerging

01:08:21 ►

recognizing itself

01:08:24 ►

for what it was,

01:08:25 ►

and then just starting off the ladder.

01:08:29 ►

And what would this look like to us, and where is our place in it?

01:08:34 ►

This is the adventure of the future.

01:08:37 ►

We are going to be a different kind of people,

01:08:39 ►

because we’re going to have to live in the presence of alien minds

01:08:45 ►

that will be manifestly and obviously alien.

01:08:50 ►

They won’t hold back.

01:08:51 ►

And they’re not going to be, at every moment, interested in us either.

01:08:56 ►

In fact, we will become a footnote in their encyclopedia of being.

01:09:02 ►

And what they become in our encyclopedia of being, and what they become in our encyclopedia of being,

01:09:06 ►

remains to be told.

01:09:08 ►

But this is all happening,

01:09:10 ►

and it’s just a matter of the coalescence of technology and language

01:09:14 ►

before more and more people recognize it.

01:09:17 ►

As I say, there isn’t a speed bump,

01:09:19 ►

there isn’t a dramatic moment where everybody gets it.

01:09:23 ►

When you talk to the people who actually work in these fields,

01:09:27 ►

they know that this is the Faustian enterprise of all time.

01:09:33 ►

This is the handing over of the destiny of the planet

01:09:38 ►

to the companion mind that our history and our science

01:09:45 ►

and our souls caused us to summon into being.

01:09:50 ►

It’s pretty interesting, I think.

01:09:59 ►

Well, that should give us all something

01:10:01 ►

to think about for a while.

01:10:02 ►

Psychedelic drugs as philosophical tools.

01:10:06 ►

Not many people could pull off a presentation like that,

01:10:08 ►

but you most likely know Terence McKenna had a mind

01:10:11 ►

that was capable of making almost any kind of astounding leap imaginable.

01:10:16 ►

And he usually backed his ideas up with solid science whenever he could.

01:10:20 ►

In fact, we’ll be presenting other talks by Terence,

01:10:24 ►

including a couple that I haven’t found anywhere else on the web so far.

01:10:27 ►

However, our next program is going to feature a presentation

01:10:30 ►

by the always fascinating countercultural writer Eric Davis.

01:10:34 ►

It’s the talk he gave at the Planque Norte lectures at Burning Man 2003,

01:10:39 ►

titled Beyond Belief, The Cults of Burning Man.

01:10:43 ►

On our website, you can find some notes about this talk,

01:10:46 ►

along with some pictures that were taken during his presentation,

01:10:48 ►

if you’d like to get a better feel for the context in which these first Planque Norte talks were given.

01:10:55 ►

In fact, we’ve got a small family of websites under the Matrix Masters banner,

01:10:59 ►

and if you go to matrixmasters.com, you’ll find links to our alternative news summaries,

01:11:05 ►

our dotnetter experiment, and Planque Norte,

01:11:08 ►

which is the section of the site where our collection of MP3s is located.

01:11:13 ►

And if you’re only interested in the audio section, you can just go there directly.

01:11:16 ►

That address is planquenorte.org.

01:11:19 ►

P-A-L-E-N-Q-U-E-N-O-R-T-E dot org.

01:11:24 ►

planquenorte.org. Well, that’s it for today.

01:11:28 ►

So I hope you’ll join us in our next edition of the Psychedelic Salon.

01:11:33 ►

Thanks again for being with us today.

01:11:34 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:11:39 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:11:40 ►

my friends.

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