Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:18

I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23

You know, I have to admit that I had a lot of fun putting today’s program together.

00:00:28

In one of my never-ending attempts to get better organized, I was cleaning out a closet

00:00:33

and came across some old cassette tapes from a weekend workshop I’d taken with Terrence

00:00:39

McKenna.

00:00:40

It was, as the old-timers would say, it was back in the summer of 98.

00:00:48

And it was an interesting workshop.

00:00:52

Terrence gave it at a place that he called a New Age watering hole.

00:00:57

And so I guess I should probably leave that nameless for now.

00:01:01

There were about 60 of us in the group maybe as many as 80 i don’t know

00:01:05

but uh we had had our first session on friday night and spent a couple hours going around the

00:01:11

circle and everybody told a little bit about themselves you know i was i was really blown

00:01:17

away to see the wide range of people who had been drawn together for that weekend. It was quite interesting to see just every profession and race and creed,

00:01:29

and even people from all over the different countries were there.

00:01:34

It was just a real eclectic group.

00:01:36

I went alone, but actually I left with several friends that I know I’m going to have for the rest of my life.

00:01:42

So it was a great weekend.

00:01:44

And Terrence, of course, was really at the top of his form, I think.

00:01:49

In fact, I’ve already played the rap that he and Ralph Abraham did that Saturday night,

00:01:55

the one about the World Wide Web and the Millennium.

00:01:57

Those were our podcasts 19 and 20, in case you missed them.

00:02:02

What I’m going to play right now, though, is a cut from the

00:02:05

Saturday morning session that begins with a question about how the internet figured into

00:02:10

Terrence’s time wave theory. And from there, well, I tell you what, let’s just listen to the master,

00:02:17

the one and only Terrence McKenna. The original prediction was that there would be a deep plunge into novelty in 1996.

00:02:29

That it would be the deepest plunge in the 90s.

00:02:33

But that was based on my mathematics before John Sheliak corrected it.

00:02:40

Once his corrections were factored in,

00:02:47

it. Once his corrections were factored in, it showed that there was a deep plunge into novelty where I said it was in 96, but that it wasn’t the deepest. It was the second deepest.

00:02:54

The deepest was, I believe, in 93, in fall of 93, which was right when the internet was going public

00:03:05

and the World Wide Web was coming into being

00:03:08

and all that was happening.

00:03:10

The plunge that I predicted in 1996,

00:03:13

I felt pretty good about

00:03:15

because right near the place

00:03:19

where I predicted the maximum amount of novelty,

00:03:23

we got within 10 days of each other

00:03:26

the announcement of the Martian meteorite with fossils in it,

00:03:31

which has since been hassled over royally, I’m aware of that.

00:03:36

But still, I think it was a watershed moment

00:03:43

that the President of the United States

00:03:46

felt the need to address the nation on the subject of extraterrestrial life.

00:03:51

It was a rare moment.

00:03:55

And then within eight days of that announcement was the announcement of Dolly,

00:04:01

the cloning of the sheep in England,

00:04:07

which again, if certain scenarios come to pass,

00:04:11

that will be a moment, you know, the point the human race passed

00:04:17

from which there was no going back then.

00:04:20

Because basically, if you can clone a sheep, you can clone a human being.

00:04:25

And these technologies are all rushing upon us.

00:04:29

I mean, the body is being dissolved as much by advanced medical technology

00:04:34

as it is by cyberspace and the Internet.

00:04:39

I read this story, this amazing story recently set slightly in the future.

00:04:45

And this guy has been in this very bad accident

00:04:48

and virtually nothing has survived but his brain.

00:04:53

But they have a medical technology that they can take a fragment of flesh

00:04:58

and clone him and then with hormones rapidly age the infant so that in two years there will be a brand new adult body

00:05:09

for his brain to be transplanted in.

00:05:12

And these people have this fantastic medical policy.

00:05:16

But the fine print says that the brain can be kept alive,

00:05:21

must be kept alive by a medically approved method,

00:05:24

but the insurance company reserves the right to choose the cheapest method.

00:05:30

And the cheapest method is implant into the body wall of the co-signatory of the insurance policy.

00:05:38

So this woman carries her husband’s brain for two years inside her body cavity while his body is being grown to manhood for the transplant.

00:05:51

It’s a dilemma we all may face someday.

00:05:56

Yes.

00:05:58

Yeah.

00:05:59

I wanted to ask you about novelty and psychedelics

00:06:04

and the language that changes through the use of them.

00:06:09

I remember reading Maria Sabina saying that the mushrooms

00:06:13

spoke a different language to her

00:06:15

after people like Watson came down and began to use them.

00:06:20

They went from Spanish to English,

00:06:22

from Catholic mushrooms to, I don’t know, Harvard mushrooms or something.

00:06:27

Harvard mushrooms.

00:06:29

I don’t know.

00:06:30

So I haven’t spoken with people that have taken DNA.

00:06:35

I’m a DRT, so.

00:06:40

In the 60s, very much, The people I’ve talked to that did

00:06:45

said it was so overwhelming

00:06:46

they could not even understand the language.

00:06:50

I haven’t read about this anywhere.

00:06:53

Maybe you can.

00:06:54

Well, one place,

00:06:55

there aren’t many places you can read about it.

00:06:57

One place you can read about it

00:06:59

is there’s a book edited by Michael Harner

00:07:02

called Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press.

00:07:08

And there’s an essay in there by Henry Munn called The Mushrooms of Language,

00:07:13

which is one of the most eloquent and beautiful essays ever written on psilocybin.

00:07:18

It’s so wonderful.

00:07:20

Henry Munn.

00:07:22

Then harder to get, but equally interesting,

00:07:25

is a doctoral study that a guy named Horace Beach did at CIIS,

00:07:32

and it’s called something like

00:07:34

The Perception of Audio Phenomenon Under the Influence of Psilocybin,

00:07:40

and he interviewed Bay Area psilocybin heads

00:07:45

about their experiences with language.

00:07:48

And it’s very interesting.

00:07:51

This is a very interesting area of discussion.

00:07:56

On DMT and on psilocybin,

00:08:00

and they are closely related,

00:08:02

psilocybin being for phosphoriloxy and dimethyltryptamine, the phosphorylated form of DMT, though they do not degrade into one pathway in the body.

00:08:15

It’s a parallel pathway.

00:08:17

DMT is NN, dimethyltryptamine.

00:08:26

these psychedelics particularly seem to impact the language forming portion of the brain

00:08:30

and this produces truly bizarre states of mind

00:08:35

because it’s the language forming part of your brain

00:08:38

that is explaining to you moment to moment

00:08:41

what is going on

00:08:43

now I am eating, now I am having sex, now I am flashing on DMT.

00:08:48

And when that part of the brain gets foobarred, then you really do have a puzzlement on your

00:08:59

hands because the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process.

00:09:07

On DMT, these entities, these machine-like, diminutive, shapeshifting, faceted, machine-elf type creatures

00:09:22

that come bounding out of the state

00:09:25

they come bounding out

00:09:28

of my stereo speakers

00:09:29

if I have my eyes open

00:09:31

they are like

00:09:33

you know they’re

00:09:35

elf and embodiments of

00:09:37

syntactical intent

00:09:38

somehow syntax

00:09:40

which is normally the invisible

00:09:43

architecture behind language,

00:09:46

has moved into the foreground.

00:09:48

And you can see it.

00:09:50

I mean, it’s doing calisthenics and acrobatics in front of you.

00:09:54

It’s crawling all over you.

00:09:56

And what’s happened is that your categories have been scrambled or something.

00:10:03

And this thing, which is normally supposed to be invisible

00:10:06

and in the background and an abstraction

00:10:09

has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you.

00:10:15

And the thing makes linguistic objects.

00:10:20

It sheds syntactical objectification

00:10:24

so that it comes toward you.

00:10:27

They come toward you.

00:10:28

They divide.

00:10:29

They merge.

00:10:30

They’re bounding.

00:10:31

They’re screaming.

00:10:32

They’re squeaking.

00:10:33

And they hold out objects which they sing into existence or which they pull out of some other place. And these things are like jewels and lights,

00:10:47

but also like consomme and old farts

00:10:51

and yesterday and high speed.

00:10:54

In other words, they are made of

00:10:56

juxtapositions of qualities

00:11:00

that are impossible in three-dimensional space.

00:11:03

What they’re like is, and in fact this is probably what they are,

00:11:08

what they’re like is they’re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns.

00:11:16

And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B, it’s that it’s simultaneously

00:11:28

A and B, and when the pun is really funny, it’s an A, B, C, D pun, and it’s simultaneously

00:11:35

all these things.

00:11:37

Well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output

00:11:45

or a glyph, which stands for an acoustical output,

00:11:50

in other words, a printed pun.

00:11:51

In the DMT world, objects can do this.

00:11:57

Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once.

00:12:02

And like a pun,

00:12:05

the result is always funny.

00:12:08

It’s amusing.

00:12:10

You cannot help but be delighted

00:12:13

by this thing doing this thing.

00:12:16

Well, so these syntactical animals

00:12:18

or these linguistic elves

00:12:20

are pulling this stuff out

00:12:22

and gesturing with it,

00:12:24

pushing it in your face, saying,

00:12:27

look at this, look at this, and you are fascinated, you know, pulled into it because each one

00:12:34

is, you know, what? How can this be happening? It’s not, we’re not in the world anymore. We’re not in the world, no artist, however gifted, could make one of these objects because they have qualities, extremely difficult to language qualities that no object in this world has.

00:13:04

you’re trying to wrap your mind and say, my God, what is it?

00:13:08

Because in spite of the fact that it’s just a little thing,

00:13:13

you can tell by looking at it that its implications are earth-shaking.

00:13:19

In other words, that if I could suddenly pull one of these things out of hyperspace and we would all look at it, we would all realize that that was the ballgame right there.

00:13:25

That somehow this proved it, was it, did it,

00:13:30

ended it, started it, made it clear.

00:13:34

How can this be?

00:13:36

Well, I don’t know.

00:13:37

You had to be there, sort of.

00:13:42

And then what lies behind this, or as you try to analyze the situation,

00:13:48

you realize that these objects that these things are making are made by utterances.

00:13:58

That sound is how this trick is done.

00:14:02

And meanwhile these things are saying or beaming at you.

00:14:06

The general vibe is, strangely enough,

00:14:09

do not give way to astonishment.

00:14:13

Do not abandon yourself to wonder.

00:14:17

Get a grip.

00:14:19

Try to get a grip.

00:14:21

And notice what we’re doing.

00:14:24

Pay attention. This is the mantra we’re doing. Pay attention.

00:14:25

This is the mantra.

00:14:26

Pay attention.

00:14:28

Pay attention.

00:14:32

Well, somebody once asked me, you know,

00:14:34

is it dangerous?

00:14:35

And the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.

00:14:39

But death by astonishment is entirely possible.

00:14:43

I’m not kidding.

00:14:44

I mean, you are so fucking astonished

00:14:47

that you’ve never felt your astonishment circuits

00:14:51

get a workout like that before.

00:14:54

I mean, what is astonishment in this world?

00:14:57

It’s like, oh, this is a different form of astonishment.

00:15:01

This is, you know. So, and then the whole notion that’s

00:15:10

being pushed here is, do this thing. Do this activity. Do as we do. And you can sort of

00:15:20

feel your intentionality or your inner something or other reorganizing.

00:15:28

And there’s this like heat.

00:15:30

It’s quite akin to heartburn.

00:15:32

I won’t metaphysicize it.

00:15:35

But heat in your stomach.

00:15:37

And it just moves up.

00:15:39

And then your mouth flies open.

00:15:42

And this stuff comes out,

00:15:45

which is a very highly articulated, syntactically controlled,

00:15:49

non-English, non-European language behavior of some sort.

00:15:57

Not, strictly speaking, though I call it glossolalia,

00:16:02

it, strictly speaking, is not glossolalia.

00:16:04

Glossolalia has been carefully studied and it’s a trance-like state.

00:16:09

On the floors of these Pentecostal churches in Guatemala,

00:16:14

they measured pools of saliva 16 inches across

00:16:18

from people who were in ecstatic glossolalia.

00:16:23

This is much more conscious, much more controlled.

00:16:27

It’s almost like a kind of spontaneous singing.

00:16:30

But your mind steps aside and this linguistic stuff comes out

00:16:35

and you can see it.

00:16:38

That’s the amazing thing.

00:16:40

It is not to be heard even though it is carried as an acoustical signal.

00:16:47

Its meaning resides in what happens to it when the acoustical signal is processed by the visual cortex.

00:16:54

That’s the important thing.

00:16:56

It is a new kind of language.

00:16:59

It’s a visible three-dimensional language. It’s not something I ever heard about

00:17:06

or any mystical tradition I ever heard about

00:17:09

anticipated.

00:17:10

But it’s as though the process

00:17:14

or the project of language,

00:17:18

which according to academic linguists

00:17:20

began no more than 50,000 years ago,

00:17:23

the process of doing language in us is not yet finished.

00:17:29

And this thing we do with small mouth noises

00:17:33

and each of us consulting our own learned dictionary

00:17:38

and quickly decoding each other’s intent,

00:17:41

this is a stumble-bum, cobbled together, half-assed way to do language.

00:17:50

And what we’re on the brink of, or what these psychedelic states seem to hold out, is a

00:17:57

much more seamless kind of fusion of minds by generating topological manifolds that we look at rather than

00:18:06

that we

00:18:07

localize into designated

00:18:12

meaning

00:18:13

and I didn’t mention ayahuasca in this

00:18:18

rap but ayahuasca being

00:18:20

along with the mushrooms

00:18:23

a natural and shamanically used

00:18:28

for many millennia doorway into these places.

00:18:33

And what you find in ayahuasca groups

00:18:35

in the upriver tribal situation

00:18:38

is the whole way the ayahuasca taking is set up is to facilitate singing.

00:18:49

The shamans get loaded, then they sing, then they go outside and take a leak and smoke and talk. I liked the violet and yellow part,

00:19:05

but I thought the olive drab with the silver spattering

00:19:09

was way over the top.

00:19:12

And you think, what kind of a critique of a song is that?

00:19:18

Well, it’s the critique of a song that is designed to be looked at.

00:19:22

Nobody talks about the sound.

00:19:24

Everybody talks about the sound.

00:19:30

Everybody talks about the visual impression left by the sound. It was these groups, these ayahuasca-taking groups,

00:19:34

that when the German ethnographers got into the Amazon

00:19:38

in the early part of the 20th century,

00:19:40

they called this chemical telepathy.

00:19:44

They recognized, you know, that the reputation

00:19:47

of ayahuasca is group states of mind. Well, if you’re naive, then you think you’re going

00:19:52

to hear everybody thinking. No, you’re going to see everyone thinking. You know, you’re

00:19:59

going to see what people mean. And it’s not that surprising when you think of it

00:20:05

because obviously the world arrives at the surface of our skin

00:20:09

as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data.

00:20:16

It’s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin,

00:20:21

we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we’re close to McLuhan

00:20:27

country here. I think what this hints at is that print ske parsing perceptual data toward the

00:20:48

acoustic space so that for us thought became

00:20:52

a voice. And very early in the western

00:20:55

tradition this is so. Jehovah is

00:21:00

a voice in the Old Testament. The Logos is a voice

00:21:04

in Hellenistic philosophy.

00:21:07

We’re the people of the voice.

00:21:10

But apparently, you know, there’s a passage in Philo-Judaist

00:21:16

where he talks about the etymology of the word Israel.

00:21:21

And he says Israel means he who sees God. He who sees God. And then he

00:21:29

says, he poses the question to himself, what is the more perfect logos? And then he says

00:21:38

the more perfect logos is that logos which goes from being heard to being seen

00:21:46

without ever passing over a moment of noticeable transition.

00:21:54

Well, I’ve actually seen this happen in psychedelic states

00:21:59

where you will be lying in silent darkness,

00:22:02

you hear distant music.

00:22:06

And as the music gets closer,

00:22:09

it’s like a band with lights and drums coming over a hill.

00:22:14

As the music gets louder,

00:22:16

it seems to physically approach

00:22:18

and a confusion of light turns into, you know,

00:22:22

of light turns into you know

00:22:23

umpapa

00:22:25

brass band, dancing

00:22:28

elves, cavorting harlequins

00:22:30

and

00:22:32

less easily described

00:22:34

denizens of the imagination

00:22:35

and then it all goes

00:22:38

thumping and marching past

00:22:40

and disappears but it’s a perfect

00:22:42

example of light and

00:22:44

sound arriving together in the

00:22:47

hallucinogenic space. The fact that we’ve talked here or mentioned that we have DMT in our pineal

00:22:56

glands, in our brains, what we haven’t said is we also have compounds in that same organ,

00:23:02

very much like what’s in ayahuasca.

00:23:07

Occurring in the human pineal gland is a compound called adenoglomerotropine.

00:23:11

But when you give it its physical chemical nomenclature,

00:23:17

it turns out it’s 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan.

00:23:22

It’s a very near relative of haramine and harmaline.

00:23:26

So it doesn’t strain me to believe

00:23:31

that perhaps in looking at this phenomenon,

00:23:35

we have actually put our finger on the place,

00:23:39

the cutting edge of the evolution of consciousness right now

00:23:43

at the biochemical level.

00:23:46

What’s happening is there is a shifting

00:23:49

or an acceleration of the concentration

00:23:52

of harming like alkaloids and DMT

00:23:56

in the human pineal

00:23:57

and it’s affecting our ability to process language

00:24:01

and it’s pushing and exacerbating

00:24:04

a bias toward visual understanding.

00:24:09

And I see this then also reinforced and accelerated by the evolution of media. 150 years we go from photography to color photography

00:24:26

to moving

00:24:29

colored photography with sound

00:24:32

with stereophonic sound

00:24:34

and pointing toward virtual reality

00:24:37

with more and more money to be made

00:24:40

at each step of the way and clearly

00:24:43

with the amounts of money now it’s we’re outspending

00:24:47

defense for entertainment uh we will produce simulacrums of imaginary worlds and you know

00:24:57

engineering bench tests will be to make it as much like haw as possible or as much like Tibet as possible.

00:25:05

But what people will really want to do with these things

00:25:08

is make worlds as strange as we can stand

00:25:13

that are in these virtual places.

00:25:16

So whether it comes through a natural evolution

00:25:20

of the human nervous system

00:25:21

or the evolution of an advanced interface

00:25:24

with prostheses that create virtual realities.

00:25:28

I think the transformation of how we do language

00:25:32

is part of this acceleration into singularity.

00:25:38

Yeah.

00:25:39

I believe you made a reference in one of your books

00:25:42

to Julian James’ book,

00:25:45

The Origin of Consciousness, and the breakdown of bicameral mind. I believe you made a reference in one of your books to Julian James’ book,

00:25:48

The Origin of Consciousness, and the way it got a bicameral mind.

00:25:54

And the way we evolved, and God was like an auditory hallucination before, I guess, our consciousness really developed,

00:25:58

and we were thinking human beings.

00:26:02

Yeah, Julian James, it didn’t win him

00:26:05

too many friends but he

00:26:07

wrote a big book and had this

00:26:09

theory that this

00:26:11

thing which we call the

00:26:13

ego is so

00:26:15

recent in human

00:26:17

beings that it actually

00:26:19

didn’t exist at the time of

00:26:21

Homer and he

00:26:23

goes into Homer and he shows

00:26:26

that the

00:26:27

God always breaks

00:26:30

through in situations

00:26:32

of crisis

00:26:33

and danger and

00:26:36

he felt that

00:26:38

before Homeric times

00:26:40

people were

00:26:41

essentially like ants

00:26:43

or something.

00:26:49

That their behavior was largely instinctual and that the only time they encountered this phenomenon of free will,

00:26:54

the interrupting of the instinctual pattern,

00:26:56

was in situations of great crisis and impending danger.

00:27:01

And then this thing would literally almost come out of the sky

00:27:05

and say,

00:27:06

get your ass out of there,

00:27:08

save yourself.

00:27:10

Well, then over time,

00:27:13

this ability to access

00:27:16

this higher informational thing

00:27:18

was like, again,

00:27:20

the metaphor of insisted,

00:27:22

closed over with the membrane of the self

00:27:25

and made part of the machinery of the self,

00:27:28

and that this is what the ego is.

00:27:30

The ego is a Greek god

00:27:32

that you have frozen like an ice cube behind your eyes

00:27:36

and that you think you are this thing.

00:27:40

And that this is just a cultural myth,

00:27:44

a necessary weird idea,

00:27:46

no more a true statement about the nature of the mind of the hominid Eve

00:27:50

than anything else.

00:27:54

One of the conclusions that novelty theory leads to

00:27:58

in terms of its feedback stuff, here and now stuff,

00:28:06

is the idea that culture is not your friend.

00:28:11

That culture is an impediment to understanding what’s going on.

00:28:17

That’s why, to my mind, the word cult and the word culture

00:28:23

have a direct relationship to each other.

00:28:27

Culture is a cult.

00:28:30

And if you feel revulsion at the thought of somebody offering to the great carrot

00:28:36

or tithing to some squirrely notion,

00:28:39

just notice that your own culture is an extremely repressive cult

00:28:47

that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation

00:28:51

and automatic and unquestioned and unthinking behavior.

00:28:58

There’s a tendency to want to celebrate culture,

00:29:03

springing both from the French deconstructionists

00:29:07

and their fascination with culture,

00:29:09

and then the effort to build pride through ethnicity thing.

00:29:16

Well, that’s all very fine,

00:29:18

but I think the cultures we should all revere

00:29:21

are our ancestral cultures,

00:29:24

the cultures most of us have our roots in,

00:29:28

the actual culture we came from was probably fairly squirrely.

00:29:33

I mean, the American family is what keeps American psychotherapy alive and well.

00:29:42

This is a cauldron for the production of neurosis

00:29:45

and in some cases little else.

00:29:50

So part of what psychedelics do

00:29:55

is they decondition you from cultural values.

00:29:59

This is what makes it such a political hot potato.

00:30:03

If there’s anything,

00:30:05

since all culture is a kind of con game,

00:30:08

the most dangerous candy you can hand out

00:30:12

is candy which causes people to start questioning

00:30:16

the rules of the game.

00:30:18

So you can have a Stalinist state,

00:30:20

a parliamentary democracy,

00:30:22

and a theocratic state.

00:30:26

And they all can agree on one thing,

00:30:28

that psychedelics are just terrible

00:30:31

because then citizens start asking all kinds of hard questions

00:30:36

and the devotion to the values of the fatherland

00:30:42

become mired in pseudo-intellectual discourse,

00:30:48

and the next thing you know,

00:30:50

somebody has to be shipped off to the camps

00:30:52

in order to right the situation.

00:30:55

Or even our own structures are dissolved

00:30:56

and we’re frightened of that,

00:30:57

and we’re taking those issues in that regard.

00:31:00

Oh, yeah.

00:31:01

No, it definitely works in the personal life.

00:31:04

Like I, you know, I’ve been building a house in Hawaii

00:31:08

and while I’ve been building it,

00:31:10

I’ve definitely cut back my intake of psychedelics

00:31:14

because I don’t want the answer to the question,

00:31:17

is this a good idea,

00:31:19

until it’s too late to do anything about it.

00:31:33

It’s like St. Augustine’s prayer,

00:31:37

God grant me chastity and continence,

00:31:38

but not yet.

00:31:42

Yeah. Yeah.

00:31:44

One of the big ideas

00:31:46

that seems to be in the notion

00:31:48

of the archaic revival is that

00:31:50

the whole big thing

00:31:52

is really conscious and alive

00:31:55

the universe, the galaxy

00:31:56

the larger entities

00:31:58

and that’s interesting because

00:32:00

it’s a traditional belief that’s held by

00:32:02

non-modern, non-scientific cultures.

00:32:08

If, in fact, our belief systems

00:32:10

aren’t taking us in that direction

00:32:12

such that that makes sense to us,

00:32:14

it’s really interesting,

00:32:15

but it also sort of upsets

00:32:17

the current description of evolution

00:32:21

within, say, the Darwinian dogma.

00:32:26

Because that seems to be, you know,

00:32:28

based on the idea that it’s all very random

00:32:30

and it’s just all material

00:32:32

and life is a big accident that’s moving forward.

00:32:35

So I think that one of the ideas

00:32:38

that you’re talking about today

00:32:40

is teleology.

00:32:42

That whether or not when we really want to talk about evolution

00:32:45

and how evolution as a theory is going to itself evolve and absorb this idea,

00:32:52

comes down to whether or not these larger things have in fact some kind of direction behind them,

00:33:01

which is what I think your work and observations imply.

00:33:06

And so I thought one day about how to understand that, and I had a question, which is whether

00:33:14

or not you can talk about creativity as having a fractal nature, since self-similarity shows

00:33:21

you at various levels similar principles, and since on our level as human beings, anything that we make, we first think about.

00:33:31

It begins as thought, and then it becomes matter.

00:33:34

And so if creativity could be seen as having a fractal dimension,

00:33:38

it would be a way to talk about all kinds of creation

00:33:42

by simply understanding it at the level at which we see it.

00:33:47

And it would suggest that to modify the Big Bang Theory a little bit

00:33:50

before there’s a Big Bang,

00:33:51

there would have to be a Big Fly.

00:33:53

And you kind of move along with that idea.

00:33:55

So I want to ask you a comment on that,

00:33:56

but also in relation to the idea

00:34:00

that is also contained in evolution

00:34:03

about the origin of language,

00:34:05

because some of the things you’re speaking about from your DMT experiences

00:34:09

have a funny resonance with creation stories,

00:34:13

like Adam and Eve naming the animals.

00:34:16

And I’ve never really been all that comfortable with the idea

00:34:19

that language would evolve out of grunts and groans

00:34:21

when guys like Chomsky say it’s all organized.

00:34:27

There’s a big system in language, and all kinds of languages can be very different,

00:34:32

but inside they always have these structures.

00:34:34

And nature and ecosystems and languages always seem to pop out fully formed and integrated.

00:34:41

So is there any possible way that we could think that language rather than

00:34:46

evolving from grunts and groans evolved

00:34:48

in the opposite direction

00:34:50

that the first time language was used

00:34:52

it was used with the power that you

00:34:54

ascribed to the machine elves

00:34:56

that it was something that was done

00:34:58

carefully and precisely

00:35:00

because it could manifest form

00:35:02

or something like that

00:35:03

well in terms of how and precisely because it could manifest form, or something like that.

00:35:07

One more idea.

00:35:11

In terms of how new species come into being,

00:35:18

the only idea that we really get to allow into the theory of evolution is that it’s an accident, that there will be a mutation,

00:35:22

and a new species similar to another species will be born, and it will survive, and that will mutation and a new species similar to another species

00:35:25

will be born and it will survive

00:35:26

and that will lead to a new species.

00:35:29

But I have a logical problem with that

00:35:31

in that any female creature

00:35:33

which gives birth to a new species

00:35:35

is going to perceive that species as a birth defect

00:35:38

and is maybe not going to want it to survive.

00:35:42

And then there’s only one.

00:35:45

And so that Barbara Cloud book I read talked about nine dimensions

00:35:49

and said the sixth dimension was the morphogenetic field

00:35:52

from which all species and organisms evolved.

00:35:56

So I was kind of thinking, maybe along the lines of the metaphor of the computer,

00:36:00

there’s a software program in which new species are developed and designed and the whole way in which they

00:36:06

integrate themselves into

00:36:08

existing ecosystems etc

00:36:10

somehow or other all gets worked out

00:36:12

and there’s a mystery that we don’t see and don’t understand

00:36:14

by which these new forms come into being

00:36:16

maybe they all come into being

00:36:18

at once with a thousand or a million

00:36:20

creatures instead of just one

00:36:22

having a stroke

00:36:22

well all this raises a lot of stuff,

00:36:27

most of which I can’t remember

00:36:29

because of my devotion to cannabis.

00:36:31

But let’s go back to the thing about language.

00:36:35

The origins of language.

00:36:37

Well, the origins of language.

00:36:39

Let’s talk about that for a minute.

00:36:41

I think that I’ve been thinking about this

00:36:43

because I’ve been writing about it. And here’s what I’ve come up with. Part of what makes it difficult for us to

00:36:52

think about language clearly in English is that this word language is used by us to mean

00:37:01

spoken language, and it also means the general class of linguistic activity,

00:37:07

as in computer language, body language, so forth and so on.

00:37:16

And to think clearly about language,

00:37:19

we need to have a clear distinction between spoken language

00:37:24

and the general syntactical organization of reality.

00:37:30

Language, because that is old.

00:37:34

Honeybees do it, dolphins do it, termites do it,

00:37:38

they all do it different ways, octopi do it.

00:37:41

There is much of language in nature.

00:37:44

In fact, you could argue that all of nature

00:37:46

is a linguistic enterprise

00:37:48

because the DNA

00:37:50

essentially is a symbolic system

00:37:53

those codons which code for protein

00:37:56

are arbitrarily assigned

00:37:59

assigned in other words by convention

00:38:01

there is no chemical relationship

00:38:04

between the codons and the proteins they code for

00:38:07

any more than there is a relationship between an English word and the thing it intends.

00:38:14

Those are just conventionalized by probability over time.

00:38:19

So language is deep in nature.

00:38:23

What is not deep in nature is speech.

00:38:28

Speech is as artificial as the water wheel,

00:38:33

the bicycle pump, the Tesla coil, and the space shuttle.

00:38:38

Somebody figured this out somewhere.

00:38:41

So then people say, but this is hard to understand.

00:38:45

It’s hard to picture how it could happen.

00:38:48

Well, here’s how I think it happened.

00:38:50

My little example about the songs earlier

00:38:53

was a stab at this,

00:38:54

but here’s more.

00:38:56

It’s that all kinds,

00:38:58

all non-genetic behaviors,

00:39:02

which are called, reasonably enough, epigenetic behaviors, which are called, reasonably enough, epigenetic behaviors,

00:39:07

are nevertheless, they’re not simply expressions of free will.

00:39:12

They are under the control of a looser system of rules than the genetic rules,

00:39:19

which are chemical and absolute.

00:39:21

The epigenetic behaviors are under the control

00:39:25

of syntactical constraints.

00:39:30

In other words, we need to expand the concept of syntax

00:39:33

from the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language

00:39:38

to the rules which govern the behavior of any complex system.

00:39:44

So, for example,

00:39:47

before speech among human beings,

00:39:50

I think it was probably very touchy-feely.

00:39:54

If you watch monkeys, you see this.

00:39:57

They touch each other.

00:39:59

They stroke, they grunt, they groom,

00:40:04

they goose, they push, they do all of these things.

00:40:09

The repertoire of this kind of behavior, if you’re good at it,

00:40:15

may be on the order of having four or five thousand words in your vocabulary.

00:40:21

Well, when we watch primates do this kind of behavior,

00:40:25

we don’t think of it as a language.

00:40:27

But in fact it is.

00:40:29

It’s a gestural language.

00:40:32

A couple of years ago some research was done

00:40:35

where these people took pre-verbal infants

00:40:38

and they taught them standard American sign language

00:40:43

before they could speak. So these little tiny children

00:40:48

could sign, pick me up, please change me, where is daddy, I’m hungry, I want to watch

00:40:55

TV, before they could ever utter a word. Well, now what we’re always told about spoken language

00:41:03

is it’s this miracle and that we’re genetically hardwired for it

00:41:07

well these experiments seem to imply

00:41:09

we’re even more genetically hardwired

00:41:11

for standard American Sign Language

00:41:13

which is something very few of us

00:41:15

will ever learn to use

00:41:17

what does this mean?

00:41:18

well it means that the gestural capacity

00:41:21

is deeper than the ability to verbalize, and hence probably older. So

00:41:28

I think there was a gestural language as complex as standard English, probably, in place before

00:41:37

anyone ever uttered a word. Now, what the psychedelics seem to suggest is that you can get so hyped up on tryptamines

00:41:46

that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock

00:41:53

and the normally acoustically modulated processing of language

00:42:01

flows over into the voice box and you begin to literally articulate syntax.

00:42:09

You begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that’s

00:42:19

organizing gestural intent.

00:42:22

And it’s like going from carving in stone to color TV.

00:42:28

Your listener

00:42:30

immediately transfers loyalty

00:42:34

to this much more spectacular

00:42:36

form of behavior.

00:42:38

And so it’s like literally

00:42:39

that the word burst forth

00:42:42

full-blown

00:42:44

based on a platform of gestural syntax

00:42:48

that had been maybe millions of years in its formation.

00:42:52

It was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical intent through the body

00:42:58

so that instead of coming out at the end of the fingers,

00:43:02

it came out at the end of the tongue,

00:43:04

flapping

00:43:05

in the airstream, and this thing happened. It’s amazing to me that the straight linguists,

00:43:15

you know, if you go to an academic university and study linguistics, will teach you that

00:43:20

language is no more than 35 to 40,000 years old.

00:43:27

I mean, that’s like yesterday.

00:43:30

I mean, fire is half a million years.

00:43:33

Chipped flint, a million and a half years.

00:43:35

Language, 35,000 years old.

00:43:38

Language is everything we are, everything we do.

00:43:40

You can’t think without it. You can’t do anything without it.

00:43:48

And yet, if it’s that new, then what it represents is simply a technology, a form of media that squeezed out other forms of media. And it’s

00:43:56

not hard to see why. After all, it works in the dark. That’s good. It allows politics. You can make speeches to large groups of people.

00:44:10

And it’s, well, it’s just very portable. It’s the cleanest technology ever put in place.

00:44:21

When you think about it, it’s one of the weirdest abilities human beings exhibit.

00:44:27

And when you go forward to reading,

00:44:30

you realize this is an animal

00:44:32

in some kind of an informational tizzy.

00:44:36

I mean, the idea that you would make marks in clay

00:44:39

which signify tongue noises,

00:44:43

which signify designated objects

00:44:46

so that these pieces of clay can be lugged hundreds of miles

00:44:49

so that other people can reconstruct your thought

00:44:53

by looking at these pieces of clay.

00:44:56

This is bizarre.

00:44:58

For animal behavior, this is absolutely…

00:45:02

It’s just how they managed to do that.

00:45:07

And of course, the picture writing we understand.

00:45:10

But similar to the breakthrough to speech is the breakthrough to a phonetic alphabet.

00:45:16

Where you see, aha, we don’t have to portray the thing we intend.

00:45:22

All we have to portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend. All we have to portray is the sound of the word

00:45:26

that signifies the thing we intend.

00:45:30

And then, you know, you’re just roaring forward.

00:45:33

And from there to the printing press,

00:45:34

what is it, a couple of thousand years or something.

00:45:38

And then there’s no going back.

00:45:42

So that’s the part about language.

00:45:44

Now, what was the second part after that?

00:45:46

Well, just whether you could think about

00:45:48

creativity as a principle

00:45:49

that could have a fractal dimension

00:45:51

and that would be a way to think about design

00:45:53

on a larger universal order

00:45:55

as having some consciousness.

00:45:58

Well, if you think of the universe

00:46:00

as an engine which produces

00:46:03

and conserves novelty and you think of it as a fractal

00:46:08

thing, a fractal hierarchy built up and built downward of subsets of itself, then in a sense

00:46:16

every creative act is the paradigmatic act of the Big Bang. I mean, it always struck me, you know, that the end of the novelty

00:46:26

wave, which is up, down, oscillate, zero, it’s like, it’s a general map of all process.

00:46:37

We could be describing the life of the energy output of a star, or the firing of a single neuron or the birth and death of an economy.

00:46:48

In a sense, you get down to a fractal level where you can say all processes are the same.

00:46:53

They have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

00:46:56

And if you know where you are in this concatenation of process, you can sort of locate yourself in the cosmic domain. The thing that I tried to talk about this morning that we need to map into our maps of reality is the acceleration.

00:47:27

weird idea to talk about a thousand years in the future. I mean, good grief. A thousand years in the future? What do you imagine will be left standing that you call home? What

00:47:37

will cast your mind back a thousand years? King Canute was taking charge of things across northern Northumbria, and

00:47:47

the Anglo-Saxons were making forays along the coast of Norway, and very few of the concerns

00:47:56

of the day have survived to this moment, and that was the slow-moving part of the process.

00:48:02

We’re going to move, you know,

00:48:05

in the next ten years

00:48:06

further than we’ve moved

00:48:08

since the time of King Canute

00:48:10

to this morning.

00:48:12

So, it seems to me

00:48:18

the most unlikely future scenario

00:48:21

is one which assumes things

00:48:24

will stay more or less

00:48:26

the same. Because we’ve put

00:48:28

in place all these processes

00:48:30

designed to make sure that

00:48:32

does not happen.

00:48:34

You know, rapacious capitalism,

00:48:36

technological innovation,

00:48:38

bourgeois,

00:48:39

social aspirations in the hearts

00:48:42

of every man, woman, and child on the

00:48:44

planet,

00:48:45

urbanization, connectivity,

00:48:50

all of these processes are designed to erase reality as we know it.

00:48:57

Yeah.

00:48:59

I’m wondering what you think of the kind of athletic paradigm involving the states of consciousness

00:49:09

we call the waking state, the freedom state, and the transcendental force state?

00:49:14

And they use that on an individual basis, but also in regards to cosmologogenesis.

00:49:21

And in fact, criticize the West saying that, well, the West has taken the waking state as its standard

00:49:28

and evolved its philosophy, philosophical views,

00:49:32

without accounting for these other states of consciousness.

00:49:38

Well, certainly the West has built its house

00:49:41

on a narrow foundation,

00:49:45

denying these other possibilities.

00:49:50

On the other hand,

00:49:52

well, you get into all kinds of difficulties here.

00:49:59

How do you judge whether or not a civilization

00:50:02

has assimilated or explored the domains it’s named its own.

00:50:08

One way is by looking at the technological applications that it’s created. And for all

00:50:15

this talking about these other states of mind, they seem actually as mysterious to the east

00:50:21

as they are to the west. I don’t get the feeling they’re really navigating

00:50:27

through what they’re talking about.

00:50:29

In the past, there may have been levels of understanding.

00:50:33

It may be, see, that psychology,

00:50:39

though it’s a mystery to us,

00:50:41

it may be that it’s an easier nut to crack

00:50:44

than the nut of matter. And so

00:50:47

I don’t have any trouble believing that Vedic India of 3500 BC may have known all kinds

00:50:54

of things about how the mind works and how to navigate through these imaginal spaces spaces that we’ve lost. But the spirituality of modern India is thoroughly contaminated

00:51:09

by a thousand years of commerce with Islam and the West. It isn’t that different, really.

00:51:18

I mean, Vedic theology and German idealism are strikingly similar cousins.

00:51:26

Yeah.

00:51:29

In spite of a number of things in conflict,

00:51:33

when you talk about the arcades of the Bible

00:51:35

and then the current sort of cultural revolution,

00:51:39

technological revolution,

00:51:40

it seems to me that a lot of the stimulus for novelty that was generated by psychedelic experience

00:51:52

now may be generated without that experience,

00:51:56

such as through virtual reality technological advancements,

00:52:02

and perhaps would maybe make the psychedelic

00:52:06

experience less

00:52:07

necessary in order to be

00:52:09

a point of

00:52:10

observe in the whole process

00:52:13

well definitely

00:52:15

what you’re getting at is that technology

00:52:17

itself is a kind of psychedelic

00:52:19

drug

00:52:20

that you know by chance

00:52:23

or design

00:52:24

the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it’s

00:52:29

totally acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment and

00:52:36

put it out that way. So the web is incredibly subversive. Simply the fact that all that information is there and available

00:52:46

in a world where control of access to information has always been the game.

00:52:52

So yeah, the way I see it is that the psychedelic people

00:52:57

need to use the new information technologies

00:53:02

to build art of a type more powerful and more compelling

00:53:09

than the world has ever seen. Call it virtual reality, call it multimedia, whatever you

00:53:16

want, but it’s basically walk into, walk around art. And then the boundaries will fall for ordinary people.

00:53:28

Because you see, when you build a virtual reality, in a sense, what that technology

00:53:35

is allowing you to do is it’s allowing you to show people the inside of your own head.

00:53:41

We have never had a technology that would do that. We think the inside of

00:53:46

our heads are all the same. But, you know, when I say to you that when I smoke DMT, it

00:53:53

unleashes a Niagara of alien beauty, if I had spent the last 30 years building that

00:53:59

Niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go, then we

00:54:06

would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going. And so I really see

00:54:12

art as the great searchlight that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead. And I

00:54:22

think that art is about to get teeth for the first time in human history.

00:54:28

I mean, it’s all very fine scratching on cave walls and film and video and all that, but

00:54:34

it’s always artifice. You never are convinced, or only for seconds, that you’re in the presence

00:54:43

of reality when you’re in the presence of art.

00:54:45

But we will build art that will literally stand your hair on end.

00:54:50

And the amount of creativity in a single human mind is, as I said,

00:54:56

more than fills all the museums of this planet.

00:55:00

So what we need is to figure out how to get a spigot into that

00:55:03

and get this stuff out.

00:55:05

And then, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible.

00:55:12

Well, as you may have surmised by now,

00:55:16

the way Terence ran his workshops, or at least that weekend,

00:55:20

was to not use any kind of an outline,

00:55:23

but instead just respond to questions that would take us, as he called it,

00:55:28

into the valley of novelty.

00:55:30

I think that was the title of the workshop that weekend.

00:55:33

I’ve heard this tape actually probably a half dozen times or more now,

00:55:37

and I still hear something new each time I listen to it.

00:55:40

So that’s what I really recommend that you do right now.

00:55:44

Go back to the beginning of Terrence’s talk and really listen to it. So that’s what I really recommend that you do right now. Go back to the beginning

00:55:46

of Terrence’s talk and really listen to it right now while it’s fresh in your mind. There’s

00:55:52

a lot of really important information here that you don’t want to miss. And what I think

00:55:57

sometimes happens is Terrence will say something and you’ll be off in the clouds thinking about

00:56:02

what he said and you’ll miss about six thoughts in the meantime, because he’s a pretty rapid-fire thinker.

00:56:09

And before you go, I just want to thank you again for joining this extended family of

00:56:14

now thousands of us here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:56:18

It’s good to get together with you again.

00:56:21

And Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, my friends in Chateau Hayouk, thanks again for the use of your

00:56:27

great music here in the Psychedelic Salon. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from

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Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. you