Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
2:10 “Civilization has made us uncomfortable with our human-ness because these various technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times. In a sense, [psychedelics] hit your reset button, they address the animal body, they address a deeper level than cultural conditioning, and so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings that civilization has repressed or transmuted in you.”
3:53 “Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris… Freud announces that… right beneath the surface… extremely violent, primitive impulses are [in us]… Jazz introduces syncopation… Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper-dancing… The whole of the 20th century is a turning back toward these values that had been repressed for millennia.”
7:15 “Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer about, ‘Where is the gas pedal on the spiritual vehicle?’ The issue suddenly becomes, ‘Where is the brake?’… The doorway stands open, and all it requires is courage. Which is not to say it doesn’t require a lot…”
8:30 “I’ve [taken psychedelics] many times. There are many people here who have done it many times. And, the survivors are not confident. It doesn’t build hubris in you. It doesn’t promote bravado, because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size…”
9:02 “Sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up-I wouldn’t get near that… My goal is to see more, to understand more, and what I do on a trip is damn-near absolutely nothing.”
9:38 “It’s an incredible statement about our human-ness… that within us, under the influence of these plants, we have, literally, Niagaras of alien beauty…”
10:04 “When I take mushrooms, I see more art in twenty minutes of behind the eyelids hallucination… than the human race seems to have produced in the last thousand years. On one level, that’s an incredible statement about the human capacity to generate and be in the presence of beauty. But the paradox is that so few people know this.”
11:50 “[The ‘gratuitous grace’ of the psychedelic experience] is like a secret of some sort. And it’s a true secret, in that telling it does not give it away. I know this because I’ve been trying to tell this secret for twenty-five years, to anyone who would listen…”
14:20 “If you study the mystical literature… it all triangulates toward unitary states. ‘Bodhi mind’, ‘the white light’, ‘the ineffable’, ‘the unnamable’, ‘the radiance’. Vocabularies… which indicate some kind of homogeneity. …[but] when you push [psilocybin] there seems to be… a revelation of multiplicity, of detail, of complexification within complexification… an overwhelmingly bewildering profusion of phenomena.”
17:08 “…the great confounding fact that I’ve brought back from my excursions in these places is that there is an organized intelligence in there… far more alien than the cheerful pro-bono proctologists that haunt the trailer-parks of the less-fortunate… What does it mean that our culture has sealed us off from this information?”
19:46 “What is the implication for the future [when] in this dark hour of complete over commitment to technology, economic solutions, rational reductionism, materialism, and so forth… this news [of psychedelics] arrives from these repressed aboriginal people that…
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
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Delta Machines
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Now if you’ve been here with us in the salon for the last four podcasts,
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you know that we’ve been playing cuts from a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998.
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The workshop, I guess you could say it consisted of four sections,
00:00:41 ►
because there was one on Friday night, two on Saturday, and one on Sunday.
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And also, Terrence and Ralph Abraham
00:00:48 ►
held a dialogue about the World Wide Web
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and the Millennium on Friday,
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or no, it was on Saturday night.
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Sorry about that.
00:00:56 ►
And by the way, that interesting encounter
00:00:58 ►
is posted in podcast 19 and 20
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in case you missed it.
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And I guess I should also mention that if you’re getting our podcasts
00:01:07 ►
through our RSS feed to iTunes or some other aggregator,
00:01:12 ►
we only leave about the most recent 15 podcasts on the list.
00:01:16 ►
And so if you want to get back ones,
00:01:18 ►
you can get a complete listing of all the Psychedelic Salon podcasts.
00:01:23 ►
Just go to Matrix Masters, www.matrixmasters.com
00:01:29 ►
slash podcasts. Or you can go to our other site, our audio site, palenicrevival.org book called the archaic revival where the idea yeah where the idea there is that that we are
00:02:09 ►
discomforted civilization has made us uncomfortable with our humanness because these various
00:02:16 ►
technologies and phonetic alphabets and things like that have rearranged our sensory ratios from what they were in Paleolithic times.
00:02:29 ►
And that, in a sense, what psychedelics do is they hit your reset button.
00:02:35 ►
They address the animal body.
00:02:38 ►
They address a deeper level than cultural conditioning. And so you feel and experience
00:02:45 ►
these atavistic images and feelings
00:02:48 ►
that civilization has repressed
00:02:52 ►
or transmuted in you.
00:02:54 ►
And the whole premise of that book
00:02:58 ►
was that the 20th century
00:03:04 ►
in many of its cultural manifestations
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from cubism to
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da-da, abstract expressionism, jazz
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sexual permissiveness, hallucinogenic drugs
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youth culture, a whole bunch of things
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were all impulses
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toward the primitive
00:03:24 ►
toward a return to a primal state of social organization.
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And really, this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century.
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The 19th century saw the triumph of hierarchical order,
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gentlemanly values, class structure,
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all that constipated European stuff.
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And then the 20th century is experienced as chaos.
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You know, Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins painting them.
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Freud announces that we are not just Christian ladies and gentlemen,
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but right beneath the surface, the incest drive, cannibalistic drives,
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extremely violent primitive impulses are there.
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Jazz introduces syncopation into music.
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introduces syncopation into music.
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Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper dancing.
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I don’t know, you can figure it all out for yourself.
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The point is, the whole of the 20th century
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is a turning back toward these values
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that had been repressed for millennia,
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not only by Christianity,
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but by the Greek scientific philosophy,
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the fanatic alphabet, urbanism, agriculture itself.
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There was a very long period in the human adventure
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when all of those things lay in our future.
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And we were far happier, I think, then, judging by our lack of need to make egoistic statements
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by building vast religious monuments or enslaving each other or setting down codes of laws,
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so forth and so on.
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each other or setting down codes of laws, so forth and so on.
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And, of course, we’ll never be like that again, but there is an impulse in modern society to recapture those values, and psychedelics are hugely effective at doing this.
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I mean, all this talk of shamanism and Native Americanism and getting in touch with your body and honoring gender shifts and all of this stuff
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is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude,
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a less categorical and constipated and print-defined,
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McLuhan would say, attitude toward social roles and social polity.
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Well, it’s always interesting to me to do these around in a circle things.
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First of all, it seems to me, I mean, maybe this is self-congratulatory,
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but it seems to me that people are extraordinarily serious and together. I have a real nose for nuttiness
00:06:32 ►
and I didn’t so much as twitch this evening. And this is a large group, so don’t loosen your chains too much, but congratulations for impressing me anyway as very sane.
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This is an area where I think sanity counts.
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There’s no points gained for being fanatical or maniacal.
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This isn’t an area where you have to push the process.
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The process can push you harder and faster
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than you may wish.
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So once you get to this place
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on what we might metaphorically call
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your spiritual quest,
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once you get to the place
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where you hear about psychedelics,
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the issue is no longer then about where is the gas pedal and the spiritual vehicle.
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The issue suddenly becomes where is the brake?
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Because, you know, this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power
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to lift you where you want to be lifted. Those issues are somehow now overcome. It becomes
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a very different game now, a much subtler game. The doorway stands open, and all it requires is courage,
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which is not to say it doesn’t require a lot.
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It does require a lot, but what it is is courage.
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You know, very few people go to the ashram for their daily meditation
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with their knees knocking in terror over what is about to sweep over them.
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They are pretty confident that they’ve got it confined and nailed down.
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It isn’t so with this.
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I mean, I’ve done it many times.
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There are many people here who’ve done it many times.
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And the survivors are not confident.
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It doesn’t build hubris in you.
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It doesn’t promote bravado because you know how quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size if you presume it or if you presume you understand it or if you presume to use it.
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use it. So sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up. I wouldn’t get near that.
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My goal is to see more, to understand more. And what I do on a trip is damn near absolutely nothing. I have two or three J’s rolled in front of me.
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If I can get through them in the course of the evening, all goals have been met.
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To see, to understand, to remember.
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It’s an incredible statement about our humanness.
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It’s a double-edged statement about our humanness. It’s a double-edged statement about our humanness
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that within us, under the influence of these plants,
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we have literally Niagara’s of alien beauty.
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I mean, when I go to Manhattan,
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I go to the Met and the Guggenheim
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and I haunt the galleries of Soho.
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When I take mushrooms,
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I see more art
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in 20 minutes of behind-the-eyelids hallucination
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in total darkness
00:10:13 ►
than the human race seems to have produced
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in the last thousand years.
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Well, so on one level,
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that’s an incredible statement
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about the human capacity
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to generate and be in the presence of beauty.
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But the paradox is that so few people know this, that our ordinary styles of being, our ordinary relationships to plants,
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ordinary relationships to plants, our main brand religions, almost never carry us into the sense of this potential for beauty. And when I was young, you know, in my early 20s,
00:10:58 ►
wandering around India, trying to sort all this out, having taken some psychedelics, but reading yogic texts and Mahayana texts and all this,
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I discovered in every culture there is what I call wise old man wisdom
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or wise old woman wisdom.
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You know, in every culture at evening you see sitting on porches men smoking pipes
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old men and these guys know something they know something about life how to
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till the soil how to raise a family how to know, shepherd children through their marriages and so forth and so on.
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But what I did not find in these cultures was any knowledge of this gratuitous grace.
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This is like a secret of some sort.
00:12:02 ►
And it’s a true secret in that telling it
00:12:06 ►
does not give it away.
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I know this because I’ve been trying
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to tell the secret for 25 years
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to anyone who would listen
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as you listen tonight.
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And I don’t know
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how many people hear
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at what level people hear me.
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And there are many problems.
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First of all, there’s the problem of dose.
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It’s a physical problem.
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You can take a little of a psychedelic substance,
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or an effective dose, or a lot, or too much,
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and medically not be in any particular danger.
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The LD50 of these substances is such.
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Let’s take psilocybin as an example.
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Psilocybin is effective at 15 milligrams for a 145 pound person but the LD50, the lethal dose
00:13:06 ►
is something like 110 milligrams per kilogram
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of body weight
00:13:13 ►
in other words, hundreds of times more
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than a dose that you would swear
00:13:21 ►
you were melting down
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you were becoming the earth
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you would never live to tell the tale.
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And actually, you’re in no medical danger at all.
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So people have experiences of different dose levels.
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I’ve always been interested in what the literature describes as effective doses.
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What this means is that you’re so loaded
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that a guy standing there with a clipboard
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looking at you is completely convinced
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you’re totally loaded.
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You know, all pretense dissolves.
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At these higher doses,
00:14:00 ►
the machinery of phenomenological description begins to come to pieces on you.
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And in my experience, someone mentioned the difference between mystical experiences and psychedelics.
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There are enormous similarities and enormous differences.
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If you study the mystical literature of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, it all
00:14:27 ►
triangulates toward unitary states. The bodhi mind, the white light, the ineffable, the
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unnameable, the radiance, vocabularies like this, which indicate some kind of homogeneity.
00:14:45 ►
Well, in my experience, though, when you push LSD, there is something somewhat like that.
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LSD is not my idea of the paradigmatic hallucinogen.
00:14:59 ►
It’s different in many ways.
00:15:02 ►
Psilocybin is more the paradigmatic hallucinogen
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and when you push it
00:15:07 ►
there seems to be not this
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merging into the radiance
00:15:12 ►
but a revelation
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of multiplicity
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of detail
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of complexification
00:15:19 ►
within complexification.
00:15:21 ►
Everything gives way to everything
00:15:24 ►
else. Everything is interconnected to everything else.
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But the impression is one of an overwhelmingly bewildering perfusion of phenomena.
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And, you know, I’ve discussed this with lamas and these sorts of people,
00:15:42 ►
and they say, well, you’re just, you’re in the realm of samsara.
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You’re in the realm of the multiplicity.
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Perhaps, but the sense of a hierarchy of judgment
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doesn’t feel right.
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Somehow this all and everything,
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this teeming, multiplicity universe
00:16:03 ►
that is revealed,
00:16:12 ►
seems to carry a message of ecstatic and transcendental import.
00:16:22 ►
It’s all and everything, in Gurdjieff’s phrase.
00:16:27 ►
And one of the ideas that I want to explore with you in the course of the weekend is,
00:16:29 ►
you know, most discussions of psychedelics
00:16:31 ►
orbit around what will it be like when I take it.
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Well, that’s very interesting
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and of course important to the individual.
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But to me, an equally interesting question is
00:16:43 ►
what has been the impact of this experience on the evolution not only with another order of being,
00:17:07 ►
which it certainly is,
00:17:09 ►
but the great confounding fact
00:17:13 ►
that I’ve brought back from my excursions into these places
00:17:17 ►
is that there is an organized intelligence
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in there, out there, over there,
00:17:29 ►
intelligence in there, out there, over there, far more alien than the cheerful pro bono proctologists that haunt the trailer courts of the less fortunate.
00:17:34 ►
A truly alien presence, not interested in our gross industrial output or in imparting salutary technology upon us,
00:17:51 ►
well, then what does it mean that our culture
00:17:55 ►
has sealed us off from this information?
00:18:00 ►
I mean, our culture claims under the aegis of science to bring us news of quasars,
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heliocasms of time and space away,
00:18:12 ►
news of the activities at the nucleus of the cell, at the heart of the atom,
00:18:17 ►
and yet here’s a world that begins right behind your eyebrows,
00:18:22 ►
that any mention of it either brings talk of mental pathology
00:18:27 ►
or how you’ve transgressed
00:18:30 ►
certain laws of the village.
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In other words,
00:18:35 ►
this culture has reared
00:18:37 ►
the edifice of empirical understanding
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and modern science
00:18:43 ►
and existential philosophy,
00:18:47 ►
this edifice has all been put in place in complete ignorance and denial
00:18:52 ►
of a fact of experience that is approximately as easy to access as orgasm.
00:19:02 ►
I mean, by different means but nevertheless not
00:19:06 ►
far away
00:19:07 ►
and yet we in the west
00:19:10 ►
have navigated for
00:19:12 ►
1500 to 2000 years
00:19:14 ►
with this
00:19:15 ►
simply an easily repressed
00:19:18 ►
rumor
00:19:18 ►
how did we get into this situation
00:19:22 ►
in other words
00:19:24 ►
if there was a primordial era of shamanism and plant symbiosis
00:19:29 ►
and mediated relationship with nature through the Gaian intelligence,
00:19:36 ►
how did we fall then into the domain of post-Renaissance, post-medieval, post-industrial culture?
00:19:45 ►
And then, what is the implication for the future of, in this dark hour of complete over-commitment
00:19:56 ►
to technology, economic solutions, rational reductionism, materialism, so forth and so on.
00:20:06 ►
In the darkest hour of our commitment to these things, this news arrives from these repressed Aboriginal people that we have marginalized and humiliated in the process of building our own version of a global culture.
00:20:27 ►
Well, obviously I’m not going to try to answer these questions tonight,
00:20:31 ►
but this, to my mind, you know, in the 11th century,
00:20:38 ►
when the Islam swept across Asia Minor,
00:20:42 ►
in Isfahan in Iran they built these immense mosques with
00:20:48 ►
mosaic vaulted roofs and one of the great historians of Islam said of the
00:20:55 ►
city of Isfahan in the 10th century he said it is half the world. A single city, half the world. In a way, psychedelics are half the world.
00:21:10 ►
And yet, how few people have ever visited these sites, have ever stared into these particular
00:21:17 ►
vistas of beauty. And as was said in going around the circle
00:21:26 ►
the impact of these psychedelics
00:21:29 ►
where they hit us hardest
00:21:31 ►
is in the domain of visionary imagining
00:21:35 ►
and the effort to communicate about our visionary imaginings
00:21:40 ►
in other words where they hit us hardest
00:21:42 ►
is in the domain of art and invention and novelty. friendly toward novelty, innovation, creativity, cultural evolution, celebration of difference,
00:22:10 ►
so forth and so on. So I would like to believe that the long prodigal journey of Western
00:22:19 ►
humanity to a well-nigh perfect understanding of the nature of matter and energy and space and time,
00:22:29 ►
that that prodigal journey can only be redeemed and made meaningful
00:22:35 ►
if the things learned in the shamanic descent into history,
00:22:42 ►
which it is a shamanic descent.
00:22:44 ►
I mean, we have achieved what the alchemists only dreamed of,
00:22:47 ►
and we’ve achieved it, strangely enough, by abandoning their illusions.
00:22:52 ►
They were epistemologically naive.
00:22:56 ►
You do not discover fusion by endlessly rarefying mercury.
00:23:02 ►
You do not disentangle DNA by heating chemical vessels in horse dung.
00:23:09 ►
We had to abandon the naivete of alchemy to achieve its goals, which were mastery of space
00:23:17 ►
and time, control of human longevity and health and psychological well-being.
00:23:25 ►
Well, at the center of the alchemical ideal was the idea of the stone,
00:23:31 ►
something part mineral, part mental, part spiritual,
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something drawn out of nature but perfected by human artifice, and then reflecting back upon man a perfect world created through magic.
00:23:51 ►
This is the faith of the Renaissance magi,
00:23:55 ►
Marcello Ficino and Campo Mela and these people.
00:23:59 ►
It’s a different idea than the idea of man as a fallen creature
00:24:06 ►
or science’s notion of man as a mute witness to a meaningless universe.
00:24:12 ►
The magical ideal that these things fertilize and support
00:24:19 ►
is the idea that humanity is somehow the co-partner, a full partner in creation.
00:24:28 ►
And that what God has brought into being, the human imagination can perfect.
00:24:37 ►
And it’s a necessary faith for our time because the power that we have is so great. If the power that science has given us
00:24:48 ►
does not serve a transcendental ideal, then it will serve some kind of fascist ideal and most
00:24:57 ►
people will be reduced to equations and parts of a machine that does not serve the human individual or the human community.
00:25:11 ►
Psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination.
00:25:17 ►
They raise the ante in the historical poker game.
00:25:23 ►
They show that there is more than one way to skin a cat.
00:25:27 ►
And we have come to a place of bifurcations, immense choices.
00:25:34 ►
The decisions and the processes that are put in place in the next 20 years
00:25:39 ►
will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and this planet
00:25:45 ►
are made or broken as a cosmic concern.
00:25:51 ►
Well, consciousness is the key.
00:25:55 ►
What is dragging our boat is an absence of consciousness.
00:26:01 ►
We have one foot in angelhood
00:26:05 ►
and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape.
00:26:10 ►
And the tension between these two
00:26:12 ►
on a global scale is excruciating.
00:26:17 ►
So if psychedelics,
00:26:20 ►
if there is one chance in a thousand
00:26:22 ►
that they contribute an increased measure of consciousness to this situation,
00:26:29 ►
then they are a precious gift, a resource, an option, a possibility to be explored.
00:26:36 ►
I don’t advocate these things because I think it’s a sure thing or a safe path to the eschaton. I advocate them because they’re the only game in town.
00:26:50 ►
You know, if hortatory preaching could have done the trick, then the Sermon on the Mount
00:26:55 ►
would have been the turning of the corner.
00:26:58 ►
But we have Buddha, we have Christ, we have these examples of enormously insightful spiritual beings
00:27:06 ►
who have delivered their message, and humanity has continued to flop on the seamy side.
00:27:12 ►
So it’s not about an idea.
00:27:17 ►
An idea is not sufficient to transform us.
00:27:21 ►
It’s about an experience.
00:27:29 ►
us. It’s about an experience. And this is the only experience I know that in the time given to us, on the scale given to us, we have a hope of actually cutting through the
00:27:38 ►
detritus of our historical experience and building a true human community.
00:27:47 ►
On days this nice,
00:27:50 ►
my parents used to make me go outdoors.
00:28:02 ►
I have no excuse anymore for staying in.
00:28:08 ►
No, actually I vacillated.
00:28:11 ►
I spent a lot of time on my stomach on the couch reading
00:28:14 ►
and then a lot of time scrambling around in the nearby semi-arid wilderness
00:28:22 ►
looking for fossils and later collecting butterflies,
00:28:27 ►
and then after that, building and launching rockets, Freud notwithstanding.
00:28:35 ►
And it was lots of fun, but there was certainly lots of fun inside books.
00:28:41 ►
lots of fun inside books.
00:28:46 ►
So last night was sort of a first pass at all of this.
00:28:49 ►
And there were questions left unanswered
00:28:53 ►
and threads untied.
00:28:56 ►
And now you’ve had a certain amount of time
00:28:58 ►
to absorb all that
00:29:00 ►
before I launch into some
00:29:04 ►
wrap of my own.
00:29:06 ►
Is there anything anybody wants to carry forward?
00:29:09 ►
Yeah.
00:29:11 ►
I realized last night that I didn’t mention
00:29:14 ►
that I have an interest in the I Ching.
00:29:16 ►
I don’t think anyone else has really mentioned it either.
00:29:19 ►
But you work in others
00:29:21 ►
and trying to tie that to other systems of order,
00:29:27 ►
DNA, calendars and stuff, is also difficult to understand.
00:29:33 ►
Yeah, well, several people last night mentioned novelty theory,
00:29:38 ►
but you’re right, the I Ching itself wasn’t mentioned,
00:29:41 ►
which we could do, and I have done five-day workshops on nothing
00:29:46 ►
but the I Ching, especially its mathematical deconstruction. So we’ll talk about all of
00:29:54 ►
this probably this morning, if I feel like it. Novelty, order in nature since we’re talking around it and through it i might as well just do it
00:30:07 ►
what does it have to do with psychedelics and all that well the connect the bridge of connections
00:30:16 ►
there are many but for purposes of discussion, these psychedelic experiences,
00:30:28 ►
in my opinion,
00:30:29 ►
when correctly managed,
00:30:32 ►
end up giving you a big idea.
00:30:37 ►
That’s a really successful psychedelic experience.
00:30:41 ►
It’s not where you simply have observed
00:30:43 ►
this bewildering other dimension
00:30:45 ►
and try to come to terms with it and then come out and then live in the light of it
00:30:51 ►
because it’s made the universe so much bigger. But following like a shamanic model of a journey
00:30:59 ►
to obtain a gift or to recover a lost jewel,
00:31:05 ►
or this is the shamanic motif,
00:31:07 ►
it’s always one of loss and recovery.
00:31:10 ►
These flights into this realm of the logos,
00:31:16 ►
the real stamp of authenticity on them
00:31:18 ►
comes when you bring back a new idea,
00:31:22 ►
something brand new.
00:31:24 ►
That proves that you’re not just talking to yourself.
00:31:28 ►
And so I, you know, knew this and aspired to a new idea, whatever that might be, but I had no
00:31:37 ►
notion of what it was. And my problem as an intellectual throughout my entire life has been it’s hard for me to go to depth with anything.
00:31:48 ►
You know, I study Roman history for a year.
00:31:52 ►
I study German for a year.
00:31:55 ►
I study the Maya for a year.
00:31:56 ►
But I never could get that professional mania
00:32:00 ►
that leads you into becoming, you know,
00:32:04 ►
a real academic in a specialized sense.
00:32:10 ►
So this download for a big idea, somehow these psychedelic experiences set you up for it.
00:32:21 ►
They’re not the only way, but they’re the only way where you have some managerial control.
00:32:27 ►
The other methods all seem to be
00:32:29 ►
driven from the unconscious.
00:32:32 ►
For instance, if you read Thomas Kern’s book,
00:32:34 ►
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
00:32:37 ►
you discover there that
00:32:39 ►
these huge rational idea systems
00:32:43 ►
were downloaded in very shady and shaky mystical ways.
00:32:49 ►
The classic example that I always give,
00:32:52 ►
because it has so much fun, basically,
00:32:55 ►
is that, you know,
00:32:58 ►
Rene Descartes’ invention of scientific materialism
00:33:03 ►
was at the behest of an angel.
00:33:05 ►
An angel appeared to him in a dream.
00:33:08 ►
He records it in his diary, and the angel says,
00:33:11 ►
the conquest of nature is achieved through measurement and number.
00:33:18 ►
And he awakens the founder of French empiricism, materialism,
00:33:25 ►
and derivatively this whole branch of modern science
00:33:30 ►
at the behest of an angel
00:33:32 ►
in this occult drive to understand nature.
00:33:39 ►
This is the amazing thing that the Greeks unleashed, this idea that we can not only mythologize
00:33:49 ►
the world, but that there is another way of looking at it. We can understand it. And,
00:33:56 ►
you know, they started out simply, what is air? What is fire? What is earth? And, you know, after 2,500 years of this,
00:34:07 ►
we are now to, we’ve pretty much figured out what the standard moves are.
00:34:15 ►
You know, the history of Chinese philosophy and the history of Western philosophy
00:34:19 ►
are the same schools by different names.
00:34:23 ►
You know, you get atomic materialists, you get spiritualists,
00:34:27 ►
you get what’s called occasionalism,
00:34:30 ►
you get all the possible adumbrations of a mind’s position
00:34:36 ►
in relationship to being in the search for these ideas.
00:34:40 ►
Well, my idea, which came to me, I don’t say I channeled it because I find that vocabulary infantile and obnoxious.
00:34:53 ►
But on the other hand, I don’t take credit for it in the way that I don’t feel elevated by my genius for having done this. It was definitely unfolded for me at a conversational speed
00:35:09 ►
by an intelligence for which I was little more than the secretary.
00:35:19 ►
And the idea is this, and I’ll start with the outlines
00:35:24 ►
and then move into the details. First of all,
00:35:28 ►
that two facts about nature have been overlooked by science, and that these facts are so overwhelmingly
00:35:37 ►
obvious once you begin to talk about them, that ordinary people like you and I, by talking about them, can actually
00:35:47 ►
satisfy ourselves that these two aspects of nature, these two related aspects of nature,
00:35:54 ►
have been overlooked or not properly weighted in philosophical discourse. And here’s what
00:36:02 ►
they are. The first one is, as you go back in time from the present moment,
00:36:08 ►
the universe becomes a simpler place.
00:36:13 ►
This is a huge generalization, and it’s true.
00:36:20 ►
And let’s state it now a slightly different way.
00:36:24 ►
Let’s imagine we’re at the moment of the Big Bang,
00:36:27 ►
or the moment when the universe flashed into existence 15 billion or however many billion years ago.
00:36:37 ►
It was a very simple thing.
00:36:50 ►
thing. In the first nanoseconds of its existence, it was some kind of integrated plenum. It was smaller than the diameter of a proton. All particularity was co-extensive in this
00:36:59 ►
tiny area. And then it began to expand. But for for many milliseconds it was a pure electron plasma there
00:37:10 ►
was only a certain kind of physics only the physics of pure electrons the universe had to
00:37:18 ►
cool over minutes and millennia for atomic systems to form.
00:37:26 ►
So that electrons could actually go into orbit around the atomic core
00:37:35 ►
and not be overcome by the greater dissipative power of high thermal radiation.
00:37:42 ►
So until the universe cooled below a certain point
00:37:45 ►
atomic systems as it were couldn’t crystallize out and then they did and
00:37:52 ►
there was there at that moment a whole new set of phenomena in nature emerged
00:38:01 ►
in David Bohn’s phrase emer phenomena. There had been only a universe of pure electrons.
00:38:08 ►
Suddenly there was a universe of hydrogen and helium atoms,
00:38:12 ►
much more complex organisms, if you wish.
00:38:17 ►
Well, so then the whole story of the universe
00:38:21 ►
is a story of progressive complexification accompanied
00:38:27 ►
by this phenomenon of cooling and the the universe of hydrogen and helium
00:38:35 ►
atoms under the influence of gravity these things were aggregated into huge
00:38:42 ►
masses where pressure rose at the center of these masses
00:38:47 ►
from the weight of the stuff above.
00:38:50 ►
And at a certain point, the curve of pressure that previously not by any phenomenon proclaimed
00:39:10 ►
emerged a new phenomenon, fusion.
00:39:14 ►
The stars began to burn
00:39:17 ►
and this process of nuclear burning,
00:39:21 ►
this nuclear chemistry
00:39:22 ►
created heavier elements. Instead of the universe
00:39:28 ►
of hydrogen and helium, suddenly you have a universe which contains sulfur and iron
00:39:34 ►
and for us, for our story, carbon. And at that point, you know, it’s like the rest was
00:39:43 ►
inevitable. The rest is just filling in the blanks, drawing the dots.
00:39:48 ►
I mean, it takes 14 billion years.
00:39:51 ►
But with carbon present in the universe,
00:39:57 ►
this force, which I identify and call novelty,
00:40:12 ►
which I identify and call novelty, could begin the long march forward toward this teleological ideal,
00:40:34 ►
this purpose, which beckons at the end of time things which makes it radical, is that it doesn’t simply assume that history and becoming is the unfolding of causal necessity.
00:40:45 ►
It assumes instead that there’s some kind of an attractor, that events are not just bubbling forward probabilistically and randomly,
00:40:48 ►
but that they’re actually caught in some kind of field that is pulling everything toward a conclusion.
00:40:54 ►
And this…
00:40:55 ►
So I’m making this more complicated than it needs to be.
00:40:59 ►
The basic perception is the universe has grown more complex as we approach the present.
00:41:09 ►
Now this is a huge law, if true, because it’s a statement about physical matter.
00:41:18 ►
It’s a statement about organic organization.
00:41:22 ►
It’s a statement about culture and society.
00:41:27 ►
It’s a statement about your own psychology.
00:41:32 ►
Things complexify through time.
00:41:36 ►
But science has never said this.
00:41:40 ►
It’s not even, I mean,
00:41:42 ►
the theory of evolution says
00:41:44 ►
biological systems grow more adaptive through time.
00:41:50 ►
But there’s been a real phobia against any teleological implication from that.
00:41:55 ►
But this is a general rule which I submit to you.
00:41:59 ►
You, by investigating the nature of things on your own, can completely satisfy yourself that this is true.
00:42:08 ►
Well, when you start thinking that way,
00:42:11 ►
that it begins to look like nature on all scales
00:42:16 ►
is some kind of an engine which produces complexity
00:42:22 ►
and then conserves it
00:42:25 ►
and uses it as a platform to proceed deeper into complexity.
00:42:32 ►
It’s a kind of anti-thermodynamic flow.
00:42:36 ►
It’s a dissipative, it’s what’s called autopoiesis by one school.
00:43:08 ►
by one school. So this tendency has been completely overlooked by science. In fact, science’s most secure statement is Maxwell’s second law of thermodynamics, which says all systems tend to disorder over time. But what it means is closed systems,
00:43:13 ►
all closed systems tend to disorder over time. Well, biology is some kind of a loophole
00:43:20 ►
in the laws of physics and chemistry
00:43:23 ►
because what’s happening in biology is complex materials are trapped inside membrane,
00:43:31 ►
and energy is extracted from these materials.
00:43:35 ►
And so a chemical process which would ordinarily ride down into entropy
00:43:42 ►
and obey the second law of thermodynamics actually is trapped in a kind of basin of attraction
00:43:50 ►
far from equilibrium.
00:43:53 ►
And people, you know, physical chemists look at this and say,
00:43:59 ►
well, but it’s ephemeral.
00:44:00 ►
It just happens on the surface of the earth
00:44:04 ►
and it’s very fragile and death is
00:44:07 ►
everywhere. It’s a fluke, basically, is what they’re saying. Well, but this is just their
00:44:12 ►
professional bias because you can go into the rocks of this planet and discover life and a continuous fossil record 4.83 billion years deep. The stars that you
00:44:29 ►
see when you look out at the Milky Way at night, the average star is 500, lasts
00:44:37 ►
500 million years. So we just happen to be in orbit around a very stable, slow-burning type of star.
00:44:48 ►
But in fact, life on this planet has already proven that it is more tenacious than the stars themselves by five times.
00:45:02 ►
So you can’t discount biology.
00:45:06 ►
Biology is clearly a player
00:45:09 ►
on a cosmic scale
00:45:11 ►
in this universal game
00:45:13 ►
of capturing energy
00:45:15 ►
and resisting entropy.
00:45:18 ►
So novelty theory
00:45:21 ►
says that this general law that nature conserves complexity reaches its culmination or its most interesting intersection of discursiveness in ourselves.
00:45:47 ►
that we then look different to ourselves by this theory because we are the most novel phenomenon around.
00:45:54 ►
So suddenly, you know,
00:45:56 ►
what positivist materialism teaches about man’s place in nature
00:46:05 ►
is that we’re lucky to be here.
00:46:08 ►
It’s a cosmic accident.
00:46:11 ►
Purpose is conferred.
00:46:14 ►
It’s this totally existential, you’re on your own,
00:46:17 ►
make it up, don’t make it up, who cares, doesn’t matter anyway,
00:46:22 ►
kind of modernism.
00:46:24 ►
If, in fact, we have identified nature’s purpose as to create and conserve complexity,
00:46:33 ►
then suddenly we are returned, for the first time since the 16th century,
00:46:39 ►
to the center of the cosmic stage of a universal drama of salvation and
00:46:46 ►
redemption. Isn’t that weird? I think so.
00:46:57 ►
Yeah?
00:46:59 ►
Thinking about making that shift to considering the human experience is kind of central to our understanding of the planet.
00:47:10 ►
And then seeing some of the environmental movements like Earth First that place a large emphasis on dieting ecosystems and other animals and plants on the same level as us.
00:47:23 ►
It’s kind of a dichotomy, I think think between some of the movements trying to save the planet.
00:47:29 ►
Some of our most brothers and he was not even vegan and that is a way to put the necessary factors in place to save the planet. Whereas this side of the argument says that
00:47:47 ►
we need to realize how special we are and what’s going on up here to be able to rebalance
00:47:54 ►
things. It’s kind of a strange line to walk between valuing ourselves and not over-valuing
00:48:01 ►
ourselves. Can you see that? No, I agree.
00:48:08 ►
It’s very tricky.
00:48:12 ►
There’s almost like a bifurcation where it’s hard to see how you can go,
00:48:16 ►
you can have the cake and eat it too.
00:48:22 ►
There is the concept of the forward escape,
00:48:26 ►
which I’m tending more and more to believe in,
00:48:29 ►
that it’s a desperate strategy from a military point of view,
00:48:34 ►
the forward escape.
00:48:35 ►
And the forward escape is where you realize
00:48:38 ►
the only way out is right up the center.
00:48:42 ►
And then you have to get traction and go right up the center. And then you have to get traction
00:48:45 ►
and go right up the center.
00:48:48 ►
What’s happening is that so much power
00:48:50 ►
is being given to man
00:48:54 ►
or taken by man from the universe
00:48:58 ►
through the power of scientific understanding
00:49:00 ►
that we are becoming the masters
00:49:04 ►
of the planetary destiny whether
00:49:06 ►
we want to be or not and you’re right it’s it’s the choice seems to be between
00:49:17 ►
some kind of primitivism an archaic revival that abandons technology and tries to redial the last sane moment we ever knew,
00:49:30 ►
or some kind of Gnostic rejection of the world of nature and matter
00:49:38 ►
and a complete commitment to machine symbiosis and a cosmic destiny and life extension, star flight, cloning,
00:49:49 ►
the whole mega trip.
00:49:53 ►
And of course, it’s not going to be one or the other.
00:49:57 ►
It’s going to be both and.
00:49:59 ►
There’s going to be a spectrum of possibility.
00:50:03 ►
The actual details of how do you go to the actual details of, like,
00:50:06 ►
how do you go to the stars and save the Earth?
00:50:09 ►
I don’t propose to discuss it or really know.
00:50:13 ►
I do think, you know,
00:50:16 ►
the French sociologist Jacques Ellul once said,
00:50:19 ►
he said, there are no political solutions.
00:50:22 ►
There are only technological ones.
00:50:26 ►
The rest is propaganda.
00:50:28 ►
And he wrote a whole book in which he defined these terms,
00:50:32 ►
political solutions, propaganda, technical solutions.
00:50:37 ►
And I tend to think that’s true.
00:50:40 ►
What we have to deal with in this millennial narrow neck of constricted possibility where
00:50:48 ►
it still feels as though the human race could skid off into the ditch is we have to deal
00:50:55 ►
with the fact that we have built institutions that do not serve human purposes, but that are like automata or golems among us, corporations,
00:51:08 ►
religions, cabals, ethnic tribalism, you know, and these things are like the psychotic architectonics
00:51:19 ►
of the unconscious that the information age is causing to suddenly emerge for the inspection
00:51:27 ►
of those who have eyes to see. So our humanness is not endangered by our machines. It’s endangered
00:51:40 ►
by these institutional entities. And the most spectacular and obvious example, of course,
00:51:50 ►
without getting into the whole thing,
00:51:53 ►
is corporate capitalism,
00:51:56 ►
simply because corporate capitalism
00:51:59 ►
has the intelligence of a termite
00:52:03 ►
at the organismic level.
00:52:05 ►
And all it understands is its agenda.
00:52:09 ►
And its agenda is to take
00:52:11 ►
cheaply extracted raw materials
00:52:15 ►
and fabricate them into expensive finished products
00:52:20 ►
which are sold to well-heeled markets
00:52:23 ►
in the high-tech industrial democracies.
00:52:26 ►
And it can’t propagate that cycle on the closed surface of this planet much longer
00:52:36 ►
without the contradictions becoming unbearable.
00:52:42 ►
But it doesn’t know that.
00:52:45 ►
It has a very low-grade
00:52:46 ►
intelligence. So how we communicate…
00:52:49 ►
We’re all ready to
00:52:51 ►
switch on a dime to the
00:52:53 ►
new paradigm if we can just figure it out.
00:52:55 ►
The problem is to switch
00:52:57 ►
these enormous dinosaur-like
00:52:59 ►
institutions in which we have
00:53:01 ►
invested our lives
00:53:03 ►
and our economies and our scientific research establishments
00:53:07 ►
and our civil hierarchy and so on and so on.
00:53:15 ►
Well, I’m going to have to cut it off right now, I’m afraid,
00:53:20 ►
or we’ll probably all get a case of Terrence Overload.
00:53:24 ►
I’ve been taking a few notes while I listened,
00:53:28 ►
because I want to write a description of this podcast for our webpage.
00:53:32 ►
So I’ve been jotting a few little notes about what Terrence was talking about,
00:53:36 ►
and so far I’ve counted eight major topics he’s covered in just the past 50 minutes.
00:53:43 ►
There are probably more than that, depending on how you break down his ideas.
00:53:48 ►
So, if you didn’t already realize how many things he’s covered in such a short period
00:53:55 ►
of time, it might be worth going back for another listen.
00:53:59 ►
In fact, I’m going to do just that myself as soon as I get this file posted.
00:54:06 ►
to do just that myself as soon as I get this file posted. So hey, thanks for being with us here today in the Psychedelic Salon. Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:54:13 ►
thanks again for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon. And for now,
00:54:19 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.