Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this installment, Terence McKenna continues his discussion about schizophrenia, and then he goes on to discuss his involvement in the rave scene, the possibility of psychedelic mushrooms being messengers from an alien intelligence, culture as a conn, and a suggestion for reversing the destruction of our Earthly environment.
Previous Episode
032 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 6)
Next Episode
034 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 8)
Similar Episodes
- 423 - Is There Hope In All Of This_ - score: 0.85261
- 358 - This Psychedelic Thing - score: 0.85077
- 525 - History Ends In Green – Part 2 - score: 0.84196
- 513 - An Ocean of Ideas - score: 0.84116
- 351 - What Is Truth_ - score: 0.84062
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.83711
- 165 - From Beats, to Hippies, to McKenna - score: 0.83205
- 035 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 9) - score: 0.83127
- 515 - Our Cyberspiritual Future Part 1 - score: 0.83032
- 226 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 4 - score: 0.83025
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3-Dimensional Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
00:00:10 ►
Help Me Change
00:00:11 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
Well, as promised, here is the next installment of the Terrence McKenna Workshop held in the summer of 1998.
00:00:39 ►
There’s really an interesting cut in this segment where Terrence explains how he got involved in the rave scene and what he thought about the scene and the youth culture in general at that point in time.
00:00:44 ►
and what he thought about the scene and the youth culture in general at that point in time.
00:00:51 ►
You’ll also hear a short version of his theory about psychedelic mushrooms and the possibility that they may actually be ETs that we’re looking for.
00:00:57 ►
And he ends with a message that the mushroom gave him about a simple, surefire way
00:01:03 ►
to save the planet from an ecological disaster.
00:01:07 ►
I’m sure you’ll be interested in hearing that one.
00:01:11 ►
Now, if you were with us for our last podcast from the Psychedelic Salon,
00:01:16 ►
you might remember, at least depending on your current state of short-term memory function, of course.
00:01:24 ►
What was I talking about?
00:01:25 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:01:27 ►
Our last podcast, we left Terrence saying he’d just said about all he had to say about schizophrenia.
00:01:34 ►
Well, but it turns out there was another question on that topic,
00:01:38 ►
so we’ll pick up the conversation with Terrence right there.
00:01:45 ►
Yeah, I, be kind.
00:01:46 ►
The question about schizophrenia, I agree with you that a big part of it is just that our culture should be more tolerant of people that are crazy.
00:01:55 ►
If there was a place for them, then maybe less of them would be warehoused off.
00:02:00 ►
Like people in less developed countries, schizophrenics tend to do much better in those cultures.
00:02:08 ►
But my question is the fact that a lot of them really are suffering
00:02:12 ►
and they really are suffering with the voices in their heads
00:02:15 ►
and many of them do commit suicide because they’re suffering so much with those voices
00:02:19 ►
and some of them do see the hospital as a safe place for them.
00:02:25 ►
How do you balance those two?
00:02:28 ►
Yeah, well, I think the paranoid kind of schizophrenia
00:02:32 ►
is different from this process schizophrenia.
00:02:37 ►
From having seen people in that state,
00:02:39 ►
it’s clearly a very uncomfortable state.
00:02:43 ►
These people are not happy.
00:02:44 ►
They don’t like being where they are. It doesn’t seem like a very uncomfortable state. These people are not happy. They don’t like being where they are.
00:02:46 ►
It doesn’t seem like a very functional state.
00:02:49 ►
I think what we’re dealing with
00:02:50 ►
is probably a group of pathologies
00:02:54 ►
that may or may not have common origins.
00:02:57 ►
These may be completely different screw-ups,
00:03:01 ►
chemical or genetic screw-ups
00:03:03 ►
of one sort or another.
00:03:06 ►
Certainly the catatonic schizophrenic and the process schizophrenic
00:03:11 ►
present completely differently.
00:03:14 ►
The catatonic doesn’t move, has nothing to say,
00:03:17 ►
can’t care for their own body functions.
00:03:19 ►
The process schizophrenic wants to reorganize the company
00:03:22 ►
and call the president and talk, you know, invest and invent and travel and speak and heal and cure.
00:03:32 ►
And they’re just all over the map.
00:03:34 ►
It’s a whole different style.
00:03:37 ►
So, you know, in the classification of fungi,
00:03:40 ►
they have this classification called fungi obscurante. And it just means everything
00:03:49 ►
we haven’t classified. And I think probably schizophrenia will be seen to be a group of
00:03:56 ►
unrelated phenomena requiring different kinds of intervention and different kinds of therapy.
00:04:03 ►
You know, when the psychedelics were first coming on,
00:04:07 ►
everybody had the idea,
00:04:08 ►
aha, these things are what was called psychotomimetics.
00:04:13 ►
In other words, they imitate psychosis.
00:04:16 ►
And so then people said,
00:04:17 ►
well, it must be that people produce DM,
00:04:20 ►
that schizophrenics are overproducing DMT
00:04:23 ►
or they’re producing LSD-like compounds in their blood.
00:04:27 ►
And people went tearing off in search of the schizogen,
00:04:31 ►
it was called in the literature.
00:04:33 ►
Well, the schizogen was never found.
00:04:37 ►
Schizophrenics have slightly depleted levels of DMT
00:04:41 ►
than the ordinary population,
00:04:44 ►
not dramatically depleted. No other chemical
00:04:49 ►
analog as a real marker for schizophrenia has been found. So it’s more complicated than
00:04:57 ►
that. And once you go back through the literature and compare with more attention to detail, the differences are clear.
00:05:06 ►
The paranoid schizophrenic hears voices.
00:05:11 ►
Visual hallucinations are actually pretty rare.
00:05:17 ►
Hallucinogenic trips inevitably tend to be more positive
00:05:21 ►
than what schizophrenics are reporting.
00:05:25 ►
You have only to contrast my encounters with zany, punning, self-transforming elf machines.
00:05:33 ►
Compare that to these gray-faced proctologists who come in the middle of the night
00:05:40 ►
and look up your ass and take you off and abuse you and surgically snip and tuck.
00:05:50 ►
I mean, this is appalling stuff, the stuff of nightmare. If there was a drug that did
00:05:56 ►
that, none of us would get near it, I dare say, after one exposure.
00:06:02 ►
Yeah?
00:06:01 ►
one exposure.
00:06:02 ►
Yeah.
00:06:05 ►
Eight-circuit model of evolution.
00:06:07 ►
Because I was thinking that it just sounds
00:06:10 ►
really close to what you were talking about
00:06:12 ►
especially the neurogenetic level
00:06:14 ►
where you can tune into the
00:06:16 ►
actual DNA and get a
00:06:17 ►
sort of a readout of
00:06:19 ►
the evolutionary process
00:06:22 ►
and pattern.
00:06:24 ►
Yeah, I like the model. I’m not sure of the mechanism. On the. Yeah, I like the model.
00:06:26 ►
I’m not sure of the mechanism.
00:06:28 ►
On the other hand,
00:06:29 ►
one of the most mysterious issues in neurophysiology
00:06:33 ►
is the issue of memory.
00:06:35 ►
In other words, where is it?
00:06:38 ►
We know that in the course of your lifetime,
00:06:42 ►
every molecule in your body
00:06:44 ►
will be swapped out five times.
00:06:47 ►
Well, then how can a 70-year-old woman
00:06:50 ►
remember the smell of her grandmother’s dress
00:06:53 ►
when she used to climb up into her lap?
00:06:57 ►
We know that people can undergo horrific accidents,
00:07:01 ►
brain damage and cancer of the, and this sort of thing,
00:07:05 ►
and that their memory is, in some cases, virtually unscathed.
00:07:11 ►
This has been, in fact, the greatest embarrassment of materialist science in the past 50 years.
00:07:18 ►
One of them is they have made zilch progress on understanding memory.
00:07:25 ►
And it’s right smack in the center of everything we want to do.
00:07:29 ►
It’s a communication technology.
00:07:31 ►
It’s a nanotechnology.
00:07:32 ►
It’s a molecular genetic technology for information and storage retrieval
00:07:37 ►
that works with images, music, sound.
00:07:41 ►
And we don’t have a clue as to how it works.
00:07:47 ►
I tend to believe that nature is fairly conservative
00:07:51 ►
and that once you develop a mechanism that’s good for a certain function,
00:07:57 ►
you will find it iterated in other areas where that function is called upon.
00:08:03 ►
in other areas where that function is called upon. So notice that the DNA, in a way, if you understand how it works,
00:08:11 ►
it’s like a chemical learning system.
00:08:15 ►
It templates the environment and it responds to environmental selection
00:08:21 ►
by building proteins of a certain type. In a way, it’s a chemical engine for responding to the environment.
00:08:32 ►
Well, then if you look at the nervous system,
00:08:35 ►
it’s an electrochemical system.
00:08:39 ►
It’s a combinatory system
00:08:42 ►
where information moves in the body down the nerve fibers at a pretty good clip.
00:08:50 ►
But why then are we such slow moving creatures?
00:08:54 ►
Well, because every time it gets to a synaptic cleft, it stops being electricity and it turns into a complex chemical reaction to bridge the gap,
00:09:06 ►
to go down the next wire to the next gap.
00:09:08 ►
And so in the course of this electro-to-chemical-to-electro-to-chemical
00:09:14 ►
transmission of the signal,
00:09:17 ►
it slows down to a few hundred miles an hour.
00:09:20 ►
And that determines our speed as organisms.
00:09:24 ►
And that determines our speed as organisms.
00:09:31 ►
Downstream, this may all be sped up.
00:09:35 ►
Memory seems to work almost instantaneously,
00:09:38 ►
but no mechanism is visible.
00:09:42 ►
If you really want to look at a human function that’s present in all of us and easily studied and
00:09:45 ►
may hint at undiscovered
00:09:48 ►
principles in physics or
00:09:49 ►
miraculous new
00:09:51 ►
orders of nature
00:09:53 ►
human memory would be
00:09:55 ►
a real place to begin
00:09:57 ►
I think
00:09:58 ►
and I wondered what your involvement is
00:10:01 ►
today, what you hope to get at
00:10:03 ►
have hope to get out of your involvement with the rave scene,
00:10:07 ►
and just what role do you think youth culture will have in the next 12, 13 years
00:10:16 ►
as we approach a possible singularity?
00:10:19 ►
Well, I didn’t intend to get involved in rave, really.
00:10:25 ►
I mean, I was interested in it.
00:10:26 ►
When I went to England in 1990,
00:10:30 ►
I had a pretty academic schedule of lecturing,
00:10:34 ►
but a lot of ravers came,
00:10:37 ►
and the zippies were just getting organized
00:10:40 ►
around the club called Megatripolis in Charing Cross.
00:10:45 ►
And I met Colin Shaman of the Shaman,
00:10:49 ►
and then we talked about me doing something with them,
00:10:54 ►
and he taped our conversation.
00:11:00 ►
And then I thought it was like a job interview,
00:11:04 ►
but then when it was all over
00:11:05 ►
he said that would do fine
00:11:07 ►
that that was what they would use on the record
00:11:10 ►
and that became
00:11:11 ►
and then
00:11:12 ►
so that CD was called Boss Drum
00:11:16 ►
and just by chance
00:11:17 ►
it went double platinum in England
00:11:20 ►
which means hard to believe
00:11:22 ►
but every 15th person in the British Isles bought this album and so it
00:11:28 ►
was a mega hit and suddenly I was an icon to a whole bunch of people who had never heard of me
00:11:35 ►
before and then I worked with Zivuja which was another English band tribal Spiral Tribe, which was an English band. I met an Austrian couple in Frankfurt
00:11:49 ►
who are Station Rose, which was a German doof band. And last year I went to South Africa
00:11:57 ►
and Australia and ended up doing raves there. It’s a kind of a weird thing for a person
00:12:06 ►
my age to be the world’s oldest raver or something. But the rave scene needs to be more psychedelic.
00:12:17 ►
It breaks down. It breaks toward amphetamine. It breaks toward heroin. It breaks toward alcohol. You have to keep constantly reminding it. Plus, the youth culture is incredibly powerful and creative. Well, I was there. I was at ground zero.
00:12:52 ►
And it lasted from about 1966 until early 1968.
00:12:58 ►
And 1968 was called the year of rage or the days of rage.
00:13:05 ►
That was all street fighting and rocking out bank windows and burning police cars.
00:13:08 ►
The Summer of Love, which was 1967,
00:13:10 ►
it was like a two-year thing,
00:13:12 ►
66, 67.
00:13:14 ►
The current youth culture has been going in the same direction
00:13:17 ►
strong since 1986.
00:13:20 ►
There are people who will tell you
00:13:22 ►
if you were not in London
00:13:23 ►
in the summer of 88
00:13:25 ►
you missed it
00:13:27 ►
and yet there are kids who obviously don’t feel they missed it
00:13:33 ►
because they were children in 1988
00:13:35 ►
so it’s an incredibly vital culture
00:13:39 ►
it’s worldwide
00:13:41 ►
it was born in the bowels of Thatcherite Britain.
00:13:46 ►
And it’s very cynical about bourgeois social values
00:13:50 ►
and getting a job and fitting in and all that.
00:13:54 ►
And it speaks German, Afrikaner, Japanese, French, English
00:14:02 ►
with equal fluency.
00:14:05 ►
And it’s not rock and roll.
00:14:07 ►
The ultimate heresy against the 60s musical fascisti.
00:14:14 ►
It’s not rock and roll.
00:14:16 ►
It’s doof, if it’s anything.
00:14:18 ►
It comes out of hip-hop.
00:14:20 ►
It’s syncopated and ambient and experimental.
00:14:26 ►
And I really don’t understand the youth bashing tendency of this culture.
00:14:35 ►
It seems to me one of the most chuckle-headed things that we’re involved in is youth bashing,
00:14:42 ►
because it all rides on the back of youth. They’re the ones who are
00:14:46 ►
going to be asked to live in and perfect the future that all this technology and integration
00:14:55 ►
and bioengineering and so forth and so on is going to bring to fruition. And the great
00:15:04 ►
thing about the youth culture,
00:15:06 ►
and there are many great things about it,
00:15:08 ►
but one is that it’s so suspicious
00:15:10 ►
of bourgeois values
00:15:12 ►
and that it’s so friendly
00:15:14 ►
to the internet.
00:15:16 ►
You know, the internet is owned
00:15:18 ►
and managed by the Fortune 500 corporations,
00:15:22 ►
but they own and manage it
00:15:24 ►
somewhat like a little old lady
00:15:26 ►
who owns a gorilla.
00:15:28 ►
They really fear it
00:15:30 ►
and they don’t understand it
00:15:31 ►
and they have to hire guys
00:15:33 ►
with rings in their ears
00:15:35 ►
and ponytails
00:15:36 ►
to turn on the machines
00:15:39 ►
in the morning
00:15:40 ►
and to run the payroll software
00:15:43 ►
and the inventory control software
00:15:45 ►
and everything.
00:15:46 ►
So it’s a very uneasy alliance
00:15:50 ►
as far as whether I’ll do more
00:15:53 ►
with rave culture.
00:15:54 ►
I don’t know.
00:15:55 ►
I keep trying to back out of it.
00:15:57 ►
It’s different.
00:15:58 ►
It’s strange to go on stage
00:16:01 ►
in front of a screaming crowd
00:16:03 ►
at 2 a.m.
00:16:07 ►
and try to talk philosophy.
00:16:10 ►
And so I’ve given up trying to talk philosophy,
00:16:19 ►
and instead I find myself behaving more incoherently and crazily than I do in any other fashion. And the crowd seems to love it, but the crowd is predisposed to love it.
00:16:28 ►
crowd seems to love it, but the crowd is predisposed to love it. The crowd is not terribly discriminating at that point. But I have been working with a band called Lost at Last, a Maui band transplanted
00:16:36 ►
to Santa Cruz. And if you’re in San Francisco, New Year’s Eve will be at the Veterans Administration doing glossolalia
00:16:45 ►
and handling boa constrictors
00:16:48 ►
with light show and
00:16:49 ►
the whole razzmatazz.
00:16:53 ►
If only this
00:16:54 ►
had come when I was 20.
00:16:56 ►
I feel like
00:16:57 ►
Billy Pilgrim or something.
00:17:00 ►
I’m living my life
00:17:02 ►
entirely out of sequence.
00:17:04 ►
I mean, what does a 51-year-old guy need with a career as a raver?
00:17:10 ►
Beats the shit out of me, but there you have it.
00:17:14 ►
You know, and I’m poor enough.
00:17:16 ►
I can’t just say no, either.
00:17:18 ►
I have to negotiate this stuff.
00:17:20 ►
Do you have a shamanic role?
00:17:23 ►
Oh, yeah, it’s a shamanic role for sure i mean jumping jack flash it’s a gas gas gas
00:17:30 ►
for sure it’s a shamanic role
00:17:32 ►
but i’m sure i mean it’s would be perfectly reasonable to stand aside and let a 22-year-old do it, let Spooky do it, let somebody else do it.
00:17:48 ►
Yeah.
00:17:49 ►
With all your talk about the proctologists who come in the night,
00:17:53 ►
what do you think about the extraterrestrials?
00:17:58 ►
I thought you would never ask.
00:18:03 ►
Well, first of all before i weighed in visor down razors flashing let me say that i have at
00:18:13 ►
times proposed various extraterrestrial theories because it seemed to me back in the mid-70s, that if you were to take seriously the idea
00:18:27 ►
that there was an extraterrestrial penetration of the terrestrial ecology,
00:18:33 ►
that the mushroom would be it.
00:18:36 ►
The mushroom is alien enough in its life cycle,
00:18:41 ►
alien enough to survive the conditions of outer space,
00:18:44 ►
and when complexed with a mammalian
00:18:47 ►
nervous system it seems to want to download these messages from far away shall we say so that’s my
00:18:55 ►
idea of of how an alien would be that the first problem you would have with a real alien would be
00:19:03 ►
to recognize it because first
00:19:05 ►
of all it’s going to be alien for crying out loud this thing evolved on some
00:19:09 ►
other planet under a completely different chemical and regime of
00:19:14 ►
pressure and chemistry and and I mean if you can’t understand your next-door
00:19:19 ►
neighbor do you what do you think it’s going to be like to stare into the face, if it has a face, of somebody from Zenebel
00:19:27 ►
Genubi? So the mushroom seemed alien enough, and it’s also very low-key. It looks high-technology. I don’t expect
00:19:38 ►
them to come in trillion-ton ships of titanium, roaring out of the cosmic
00:19:45 ►
darkness into parking orbit
00:19:48 ►
around our planet
00:19:49 ►
I seriously doubt if it will happen
00:19:52 ►
that way
00:19:52 ►
if they don’t want to be detected
00:19:55 ►
they certainly will not
00:19:57 ►
be detected
00:19:59 ►
because you have to assume
00:20:01 ►
that the technology
00:20:03 ►
will be beyond your wildest imaginings.
00:20:08 ►
The idea that someone is going to come in ships speaking languages
00:20:14 ►
and with an interest in our gross industrial output or trading with us or some crap like that,
00:20:20 ►
this is what I call failure of scale.
00:20:24 ►
This is for people who don’t understand
00:20:26 ►
how weird reality is.
00:20:28 ►
This is for people who’ve been watching
00:20:29 ►
too much daytime TV
00:20:31 ►
to think it’s going to be so humdrum as that.
00:20:38 ►
So then we’re left with this residuum of testimony
00:20:41 ►
that something weird is going on.
00:20:44 ►
I think this is like an intelligence test
00:20:48 ►
built into reality.
00:20:51 ►
Life presents itself as a mystery.
00:20:54 ►
The people who pass the intelligence test
00:20:57 ►
are not worrying about gray-faced aliens
00:21:00 ►
checking them for hemorrhoids in the middle of the night.
00:21:03 ►
They have passed this intelligence
00:21:06 ►
test and their conclusion is whatever this is, it is not what it claims to be. It is not what it
00:21:15 ►
appears to be. And then people are very puzzled and they say, well, but what about all these people
00:21:22 ►
who have these things happen to them? Well, this now we sort of get down to the nut of the matter.
00:21:29 ►
And this is where I often feel my audience is peeling away from me in horror and disappointment.
00:21:39 ►
Because I think we’re very naive about what information is and how it works.
00:21:47 ►
And let’s see how I can give examples of this
00:21:53 ►
or start into it.
00:21:56 ►
First of all, the media that we are embedded in
00:22:01 ►
are designed to amplify anomalies.
00:22:05 ►
In other words, here’s a story. are embedded in are designed to amplify anomalies.
00:22:08 ►
In other words, here’s a story.
00:22:12 ►
Man goes to work, does moderately good job.
00:22:17 ►
No newspaper on earth would run this as a headline.
00:22:18 ►
Why?
00:22:20 ►
Because it’s not news.
00:22:21 ►
It’s ordinary.
00:22:29 ►
On the other hand, Volkswagen-sized chunk of ice falls in Massachusetts farm field.
00:22:31 ►
This is news.
00:22:39 ►
And if it passes the first gateway, which is the local news reporting apparatus,
00:22:46 ►
passes it on to the AP and UPI and like that.
00:22:50 ►
Then it makes its way out into the electromagnetic medium.
00:22:53 ►
Well, in the electromagnetic medium,
00:22:56 ►
the laws of perspective are weirdly distorted. The further away you are from something,
00:22:59 ►
the more real it looks.
00:23:01 ►
The closer you get to it,
00:23:03 ►
the less substantial it becomes in the world of
00:23:07 ►
media. So, for example, let’s say that the New York Times on a certain day reports that
00:23:15 ►
in a Massachusetts field, a large chunk of ice has fallen. And so you look at that and
00:23:22 ►
then you think to yourself, well, let’s see what Dilbert’s up to.
00:23:27 ►
Of course, with the New York Times,
00:23:29 ►
you will not be satisfied in your quest
00:23:33 ►
because there is no Dilbert
00:23:34 ►
because the great grey maiden doesn’t stoop to comics.
00:23:39 ►
But suppose you’re reading a civilized newspaper.
00:23:42 ►
Well, then you just go and read Dilbert.
00:23:44 ►
But a newspaper like that is designed to be read
00:23:48 ►
by 5 million, 6 million people per day.
00:23:52 ►
Well, sure as hell,
00:23:54 ►
someone will open the paper to page 42,
00:23:58 ►
Chunk of Ice Falls in Massachusetts Field,
00:24:01 ►
and they will notice that the county in which this field is located
00:24:08 ►
contains their mother’s maiden name initials.
00:24:13 ►
And by that, and the dream they had the night before of something wet falling from the sky,
00:24:21 ►
they realize that God has sent them a message.
00:24:35 ►
And they call work and cancel and jump in the car and head for Amherst or wherever the action is.
00:24:38 ►
Well, meanwhile, the rest of us go on about our business with one exception.
00:24:41 ►
go on about our business with one exception.
00:24:44 ►
Editors of
00:24:45 ►
newspapers where the story has
00:24:47 ►
been put out are now getting
00:24:49 ►
feedback.
00:24:51 ►
The editor calls up the cub reporter
00:24:53 ►
and he says, we’re really
00:24:55 ►
getting a lot of interest on that ice
00:24:57 ►
fall in Massachusetts deal.
00:24:59 ►
I want you to drive up there
00:25:01 ►
and get the story. Interview
00:25:03 ►
everybody. Find out what’s going on.
00:25:05 ►
Is there a religious angle?
00:25:07 ►
Is there a this?
00:25:07 ►
Is there a that?
00:25:08 ►
What do people see?
00:25:09 ►
So this guy thinks,
00:25:10 ►
I have to find honest work.
00:25:14 ►
But until then,
00:25:16 ►
I have to drive up to Massachusetts
00:25:18 ►
and find out what’s going on.
00:25:20 ►
The person for whom God was speaking to them
00:25:24 ►
and the reporter
00:25:25 ►
encounter each other at the edge
00:25:28 ►
of what is now a drying mud hole.
00:25:31 ►
And then he says,
00:25:32 ►
and who are you?
00:25:34 ►
He says, well,
00:25:35 ►
funny you should ask.
00:25:37 ►
I’m Dr. Raymond Hammarubi-Bird,
00:25:40 ►
expert in telluric energies,
00:25:43 ►
ley lines,
00:25:44 ►
radiosthesic energy
00:25:46 ►
genies, afrits
00:25:48 ►
and ancestor spirits
00:25:49 ►
and I can tell you what’s going on here
00:25:52 ►
this confirms a theory that I published
00:25:54 ►
in my book
00:25:55 ►
turning the world upside down
00:25:58 ►
in ten different ways
00:25:59 ►
I self-published my book
00:26:00 ►
and you’re off
00:26:02 ►
at this point
00:26:04 ►
and so to make a long story
00:26:07 ►
short and you maybe can’t always follow this advice but it’s very good advice
00:26:13 ►
nevertheless whether you follow it or not when confronted with the irrational
00:26:19 ►
or the extraordinary or the miraculous it is legitimate to carefully examine the messenger.
00:26:30 ►
The key to understanding what is going on
00:26:33 ►
is to examine the messenger.
00:26:35 ►
People don’t do this.
00:26:36 ►
They examine the testimony of the messenger.
00:26:42 ►
So they say,
00:26:42 ►
now stand exactly where you were standing
00:26:45 ►
when the saucer first appeared.
00:26:48 ►
Aha.
00:26:49 ►
And so it was 20 degrees above the horizon
00:26:51 ►
and it moved so we can calculate
00:26:53 ►
it must have been moving at this speed.
00:26:56 ►
This is not the right question
00:26:57 ►
to be asking this person.
00:26:59 ►
The right question to be asking is,
00:27:02 ►
have you ever seen a ghost what’s your position on the
00:27:07 ►
resurrection how do you feel about homeopathy what’s your position on major
00:27:16 ►
earth changes in the short-term projection of things And if you do this, you will begin to discover
00:27:26 ►
an epistemological naivete,
00:27:29 ►
I maintain,
00:27:31 ►
that the illusion
00:27:33 ►
that you and this person
00:27:34 ►
are living in the same Idaho
00:27:36 ►
begins to break down.
00:27:38 ►
They have categories
00:27:40 ►
and presuppositions
00:27:42 ►
and expectations
00:27:43 ►
that you can’t follow along with.
00:27:46 ►
And so the illusion of communication is necessary for there to be the mirage of an event, is
00:27:56 ►
essentially a way of putting it.
00:27:58 ►
So these things are like informational viruses.
00:28:02 ►
It’s because of how we as organisms handle information.
00:28:06 ►
For example,
00:28:08 ►
here’s a counter way to approach
00:28:10 ►
a problem in nature.
00:28:12 ►
Suppose you want to know
00:28:12 ►
how much electricity is running through a wire.
00:28:18 ►
The way to do this
00:28:20 ►
is to measure 100 times,
00:28:24 ►
add these numbers together,
00:28:27 ►
divide by 100,
00:28:29 ►
and you will have the average amount of energy
00:28:31 ►
flowing through the wire.
00:28:35 ►
Now suppose your 100 numbers
00:28:38 ►
fluctuate between 3 volts and 3.5 volts,
00:28:44 ►
except that measurement 72 tells you that 11,000 volts are running through this wire.
00:28:52 ►
Well, what do you do with that reading if you’re a good scientist?
00:28:56 ►
Well, you throw it out.
00:28:58 ►
You say, well, that’s crazy.
00:29:00 ►
That can’t be right.
00:29:00 ►
There’s something wrong with that one.
00:29:02 ►
Get that puppy out of there.
00:29:03 ►
In other words, you reject the anomalous.
00:29:07 ►
Instead of pouncing on it and triumphantly raising it on high for all to adore,
00:29:13 ►
you simply eliminate it.
00:29:15 ►
The media works exactly the opposite.
00:29:18 ►
It seizes on the, you know, every night a million people go out and look into the night sky.
00:29:23 ►
They seize Zilch, the stars, the moon.
00:29:26 ►
One person goes out, they see a triangular spaceship 800 feet across
00:29:31 ►
with red running lights broadcasting, you know, the second chapter of Mark.
00:29:37 ►
Well, what are we told the next morning?
00:29:40 ►
That this was seen and this disrupted the night sky over Phoenix or Alamogordo or
00:29:46 ►
someplace like that. Always someplace you aren’t, by the way. So people say, well, but
00:29:54 ►
is it all like that? Is it all so much like that? I think it pretty much is. People don’t
00:30:02 ►
like, I mean, I’ve told stories here about strange events, but I’ve said the
00:30:07 ►
real weirdness does not have to be treated with respect or as though it were fragile.
00:30:15 ►
True weirdness is true weirdness. You can kick the tires, honk the horn, drive it around
00:30:20 ►
the block. Phony weirdness is incredibly fragile and they don’t want you to get near and
00:30:26 ►
you can only see it if you stand here and please don’t touch and the speaker is veiled and the
00:30:32 ►
voice is distorted because the CIA might kill him if they knew who he was a million reasons why it’s
00:30:38 ►
just not totally straightforward you know all resting on the preposterous notion that we couldn’t stand
00:30:48 ►
knowing the truth and therefore these things must be shielded from us well if we’re so fragile why
00:30:55 ►
weren’t we shielded from the knowledge of the president’s blow job i mean that shook up more
00:30:59 ►
people than the knowledge that extraterrestrials are trading human fetal tissue for advanced
00:31:05 ►
technology it’s it seems to me that as psychedelic people we should be more immune to these rumors of
00:31:15 ►
miracles signs and wonders than the rest of the population because we have a benchmark to measure it against. And the cultification of discourse
00:31:27 ►
and the rising tolerance for raps,
00:31:34 ►
which don’t make sense,
00:31:36 ►
is a really weird aspect of the end of the millennium discussion
00:31:40 ►
that we’re trying to have.
00:31:42 ►
I mean, somebody on no evidence at all
00:31:46 ►
can introduce the most preposterous
00:31:50 ►
and outlandish hypotheses into a conversation,
00:31:53 ►
and it has to be treated with the same respect
00:31:56 ►
that the pronouncements of quantum physics
00:32:00 ►
or evolutionary theory are treated.
00:32:06 ►
And then people say,
00:32:07 ►
well, how do you not throw out the baby with the bathwater?
00:32:12 ►
Well, it’s tricky.
00:32:13 ►
I think we all need to get our razors clarified
00:32:17 ►
and also a little less politesse would be all right.
00:32:21 ►
I don’t know what it’s like here.
00:32:24 ►
I said all these things I’m saying
00:32:26 ►
to you now to Rupert recently, and he said, well, you’re just, you know, sinking in malibuitis.
00:32:33 ►
He said in an average English pub, if somebody started raving about this stuff, there would
00:32:40 ►
be half a dozen people on their feet instantly just smearing it out of existence.
00:32:47 ►
Well, upstate New York is halfway between London and Malibu,
00:32:51 ►
so maybe you’re leavened with reason and temperance.
00:32:58 ►
But there certainly is a lot of loose-headed metaphor building out there in the intellectual marketplace.
00:33:04 ►
We almost need a
00:33:06 ►
new vocabulary of fluff, you know. I mean, there are different kinds of fluff. For instance, there’s
00:33:13 ►
what I call deep fluff, which is fluff with a history. So that would be, for example, alchemy, which is something dear to my heart.
00:33:30 ►
Alchemy is fluff with depth because it’s 4,000 years old,
00:33:35 ►
and even though it’s never made good on its promises or agenda,
00:33:37 ►
it just keeps popping up in various places.
00:33:39 ►
It’s generated a rich literature.
00:33:41 ►
It’s deep fluff.
00:33:46 ►
The kind of fluff that freaks me out is where you get one person who never read the Old Testament,
00:33:50 ►
never read Plato,
00:33:51 ►
doesn’t understand mathematics, music, history,
00:33:55 ►
art, literature, religion, economics, or philosophy,
00:34:00 ►
but they have all the answers.
00:34:02 ►
Because when they were in the desert,
00:34:05 ►
the archangel Malingi appeared to them
00:34:09 ►
and downloaded the entire shtick from A to Z
00:34:13 ►
in 11 simple lessons,
00:34:17 ►
which they will share with you
00:34:19 ►
for a significant portion of your income.
00:34:23 ►
This kind of thing, you should automatically…
00:34:26 ►
You know, the mushroom said to me once, apropos of all this,
00:34:30 ►
and I’ve tried to live by it,
00:34:32 ►
it said,
00:34:33 ►
for one human being to seek enlightenment from another
00:34:40 ►
is like a grain of sand on the beach
00:34:43 ►
to seek enlightenment from another.
00:34:48 ►
And, you know, for me that puts in perspective all this malarkey about lineages and secret orders
00:34:55 ►
and having to sweep up around the ashram for 15 years before they cut you any juice
00:35:02 ►
and all of that stuff. A truth which you cannot understand
00:35:09 ►
is of no use to you. So don’t tell yourself that the fact that you don’t understand quantum
00:35:17 ►
physics is okay because these guys at MIT have it under control. Until you understand it, it’s utterly useless to you. So people
00:35:30 ►
live by hearsay and rumor, and people delightedly spread rumors of the miraculous. People say,
00:35:39 ►
well, did you see that thing on TV the other night where they had that Air Force colonel
00:35:43 ►
who claimed that he was there at Roswell when there was a buzzabuzz? Well, to repeat this kind of stuff is the
00:35:51 ►
equivalent of taking home a newspaper with a headline that says, Alien Mom 9 Gives Birth to
00:35:58 ►
Dead Christ. This is not something people of intellectual integrity involve themselves with.
00:36:07 ►
Isn’t that a downer, that rap?
00:36:10 ►
It’s so…
00:36:11 ►
And it’s especially a downer when I get more specific
00:36:14 ►
than I have been here.
00:36:16 ►
Because, of course, it really becomes cogent
00:36:19 ►
when you tear into somebody by example.
00:36:23 ►
And the reigning cult of niceness precludes that I do too much of
00:36:28 ►
that because my own ox might be gored but I do urge you to you know disperse your your money
00:36:37 ►
and attention with extreme miserliness when people start telling you they have the answers there are no answers
00:36:46 ►
at this point part of growing up is to live without answers you know culture is a kind of con
00:36:54 ►
that works on you if you’re smart till you’re about 35 or 40 or 50 it takes longer for some
00:37:02 ►
people but if you live long enough
00:37:05 ►
and you’re paying attention,
00:37:08 ►
you will eventually notice
00:37:09 ►
that culture is a con.
00:37:12 ►
It just wants to pick your pocket
00:37:14 ►
and get your vote
00:37:16 ►
and make a fool out of you.
00:37:19 ►
And around age 35, 45, 55,
00:37:23 ►
people just say,
00:37:24 ►
screw it, you know, who needs this?
00:37:26 ►
I’m not going.
00:37:27 ►
Or they become defenders of it because they somehow see into a wisdom that it contains
00:37:35 ►
that I have not perceived.
00:37:38 ►
I think really, you know, part of, there is an idea around that sometime in your mid-twenties you mature, and that then you are a fully mature human being. This is obviously not true. You’re still a puppet of culture.
00:38:06 ►
and forties and if you live that long what you should end up being is an independent idiot an independent person free of ideology free of object
00:38:15 ►
fetishism consumer fetishism free of pathological attachments to other people
00:38:22 ►
free of codependent relationships.
00:38:26 ►
I mean, these are all kinds of things which people in their 20s
00:38:29 ►
are just beginning to encounter as possibilities.
00:38:33 ►
And if you don’t grow past these things,
00:38:37 ►
then you become these people who watch daytime TV
00:38:41 ►
and roam the malls and vacation in artificial paradises
00:38:47 ►
and a lot of lottery, attention to lotteries
00:38:52 ►
and to publishers clearing house millions that are soon to arrive
00:38:57 ►
and just a squirrely lifestyle,
00:39:00 ►
hardly above the level of a laboratory rat.
00:39:10 ►
lifestyle hardly above the level of a laboratory rat and and if consciousness expansion means anything it means thinking your way out of these cultural cul-de-sacs and dilemmas you know don’t
00:39:18 ►
buy anything because the very very rarely is what you are being sold
00:39:25 ►
what it represents to be
00:39:27 ►
nor worth what’s being asked for it.
00:39:33 ►
Yeah.
00:39:34 ►
Do something about our planet quickly.
00:39:37 ►
Well, in terms of suggestions,
00:39:39 ►
and we have ten minutes left,
00:39:42 ►
so I’ll be able to get out of here
00:39:44 ►
without the hour of discussion this usually provokes.
00:39:49 ►
In terms of suggestions, when I have said to them, I once said to the mushroom,
00:39:56 ►
how can we save the world?
00:39:59 ►
Somebody had challenged me in a group like this.
00:40:01 ►
They said, why don’t you ask it how we can save the world,
00:40:04 ►
which I had never been being sort of an oblique thinker it had never
00:40:09 ►
occurred to me to be so blunt with it but the next time I found myself with it
00:40:15 ►
I said how can we save the world and without a moment’s hesitation it said It said each person should parent only once.
00:40:29 ►
This is an astonishing idea.
00:40:32 ►
This is not zero population growth.
00:40:40 ►
This is population falling by 50% every 20 years from here on out.
00:40:46 ►
If people in the high-tech industrial democracies would limit themselves to one child
00:40:49 ►
almost immediately
00:40:52 ►
the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems and resources would halt
00:40:56 ►
we preach population control in the third world
00:41:01 ►
but the statistics show that
00:41:04 ►
to a woman in the third world but the statistics show that to a woman in the first world who
00:41:09 ►
has a child that child will consume between 800 and a thousand times more
00:41:15 ►
resources in the course of its lifetime than a child born in Bangladesh or some other third world place. So if we were to practice this
00:41:29 ►
one person, one child policy in the first world democracies, there would almost immediately
00:41:39 ►
be a visible slackening of the pressure on resources and population is the is the thing which
00:41:47 ►
is driving everything over the edge and is not allowing any time for full
00:41:53 ►
reflection about land use implementation of technologies the political directions
00:42:00 ►
we want to go in because everywhere you know no you just hurl money at problems
00:42:06 ►
like sanitation detoxification of land education of children cleaning up of
00:42:14 ►
water supplies extension of early primary education and so forth and so on
00:42:18 ►
no matter how much money you throw at these problems you see no progress because it’s all dragged down by burgeoning populations so and it’s interesting I’ve always felt that the
00:42:34 ►
way to solve social problems collective social problems is to find solutions
00:42:40 ►
which advance the agendas of individuals in other words some version
00:42:46 ►
of enlightened self-interest and if you think about this one person one child
00:42:53 ►
thing what we’re saying is how would you like to have increased leisure time, increased disposable income, and the sincere gratitude of humanity
00:43:12 ►
by volunteering to limit your procreative activity. And I would favor social policies
00:43:22 ►
that would give people cradle to the grave medical care
00:43:26 ►
and cancel their income tax and whatever it took to honor people who did that
00:43:34 ►
because that is the most significant single political act any one of us could probably do.
00:43:43 ►
It’s very practical. It’s a bumper sticker.
00:43:46 ►
It astonished me when the mushroom said this.
00:43:48 ►
I thought it was going to be a discourse.
00:43:50 ►
It said, you know,
00:43:51 ►
each person should parent only one child.
00:43:55 ►
In a single sentence,
00:43:56 ►
it offers probably the only solution
00:43:59 ►
to our long-term dilemma on this planet.
00:44:03 ►
Can we do it?
00:44:04 ►
Well, we don’t know.
00:44:06 ►
It involves changing our habits,
00:44:08 ►
the hardest things we have to change.
00:44:13 ►
It involves injecting novelty in an area
00:44:16 ►
where habits have ruled for millennia and tens of millennia,
00:44:21 ►
our reproductive behaviors.
00:44:24 ►
On the other hand, as primates,
00:44:26 ►
we never really get rocking and rolling
00:44:29 ►
until we’re painted into a corner.
00:44:33 ►
Now, China is attempting to do something like this.
00:44:38 ►
But, of course, they start from a more problematic circumstance
00:44:44 ►
than our own. However, if China continues to limit its
00:44:48 ►
population, that’s the one piece of the puzzle missing from its ability to project its culture
00:44:55 ►
onto a global scale. If the rest of us pollute our social systems and drag the development of
00:45:02 ►
our economies with burgeoning populations
00:45:05 ►
at the same time that the Chinese
00:45:07 ►
population is falling and
00:45:10 ►
they are bringing their technologies
00:45:12 ►
and infrastructure
00:45:13 ►
up to speed then we could find
00:45:15 ►
ourselves in a very different
00:45:17 ►
socio-political circumstance
00:45:20 ►
not far
00:45:21 ►
downstream. Any comment
00:45:24 ►
on
00:45:24 ►
that whole idea
00:45:26 ►
it’s an interesting idea
00:45:28 ►
I’m surprised that there is no society for it
00:45:32 ►
I’ve never heard it discussed
00:45:34 ►
not radical lesbians
00:45:37 ►
not libertarians
00:45:39 ►
and I also thought when it first came up
00:45:42 ►
that there must be some hideous political flaw in it,
00:45:48 ►
that some radical feminist or somebody would spring forward
00:45:54 ►
and point out this appalling contradiction
00:45:57 ►
as to why this couldn’t be done
00:45:59 ►
or why this was utterly unacceptable and dehumanizing.
00:46:03 ►
Nobody has ever done that either.
00:46:05 ►
People have said, the only criticism I’ve had of it
00:46:08 ►
is people have said that political power is based on population.
00:46:16 ►
But I argue that’s not true.
00:46:18 ►
If that were true, India would be the second most powerful nation in the world.
00:46:22 ►
Well, what about France? What about Germany? What about England? So, you know, we are not in a breeding race with the brown-skinned
00:46:31 ►
people of the planet. Thinking like that is crazy-making. What determines the viability
00:46:38 ►
of a society is the quality of life that it delivers to the greatest number of people.
00:46:46 ►
So I think one person, one child,
00:46:49 ►
those of you who haven’t yet entered the reproductive phase of your life,
00:46:54 ►
you might consider.
00:46:56 ►
People have objected and said,
00:46:57 ►
well, but children need other children.
00:47:02 ►
This is arguable.
00:47:09 ►
children this is arguable the nuclear family is not handed down from Mount Sinai the nuclear family is a late 19th century invention at the convenience of
00:47:16 ►
industrial capitalism if there is a human model handed down from Mount Sinai
00:47:22 ►
it’s the extended family group the the aunts, the uncles,
00:47:26 ►
the cousins, all together in a longhouse or a compound. Well, we haven’t lived like that
00:47:33 ►
in America since the 1840s. And, you know, it was no way to live anyway. In 1800, the average American woman,
00:47:45 ►
the average American woman,
00:47:47 ►
gave birth 13 times in her life.
00:47:52 ►
This is no population,
00:47:55 ►
this is not a behavior pattern we want to emulate.
00:47:59 ►
I think that we are sentimental
00:48:02 ►
that the concept of the child is some kind of morbid download from 19th century romanticism,
00:48:11 ►
and that it’s a morbid concept.
00:48:16 ►
The child in our society is a symbol of innocence and victim of mayhem.
00:48:23 ►
symbol of innocence and victim of mayhem.
00:48:29 ►
It would be, you know, in Amazonian societies that I’ve observed,
00:48:32 ►
children are small versions of adults,
00:48:35 ►
and as quickly as they can handle them,
00:48:38 ►
they are given responsibilities and roles, and they participate in life, birth, death, sexuality, hunting rituals.
00:48:44 ►
There is no, this idea that we screen people from the facts of life
00:48:49 ►
because they are innocent and fragile.
00:48:51 ►
And it’s a complete paradox in our society
00:48:54 ►
because while we’re dishing out this rhetoric of innocence,
00:48:57 ►
we’re creating a popular culture so steeped in images of violence
00:49:02 ►
and abuse and rape and so forth
00:49:04 ►
that the idea that there are
00:49:06 ►
any secrets from anybody is a pretty hollow rhetoric so we need to re-envision our relationship
00:49:14 ►
to children they are more precious than we have tended to treat them. They are more central to our future than we have tended to admit.
00:49:28 ►
And our population policies, if they don’t swing around to take cognizance of this, will
00:49:36 ►
probably derail all our best intents to build a sane and caring world.
00:49:42 ►
Anyway, that’s the opinion of an extraterrestrial fungus
00:49:46 ►
on a matter of human population.
00:49:51 ►
You know, I can still remember sitting in that hot August room
00:49:56 ►
and sitting on a thin cushion that didn’t do a thing
00:49:59 ►
to soften the hardwood floor after a few hours.
00:50:02 ►
I was actually wishing Terrence would call it a day
00:50:07 ►
because my butt was so sore.
00:50:10 ►
Then he dropped that idea about each person having only one child,
00:50:14 ►
and that idea caught my imagination and attention so much
00:50:17 ►
that I forgot all about the pain.
00:50:20 ►
It’s really quite an elegant idea, don’t you think?
00:50:23 ►
It’s really quite an elegant idea, don’t you think?
00:50:31 ►
And do you think that Terrence’s take on the rave scene as of 1998 fits in today?
00:50:37 ►
Particularly the point about using more psychedelics and dumping that meth crap.
00:50:39 ►
You’ve got to watch that stuff. It’s the easiest thing there is to get habituated to,
00:50:42 ►
but I’ve never seen a good ending for someone who gets hooked on meth or crack, you know.
00:50:48 ►
Stick with the psychedelics.
00:50:49 ►
Use them right and you’ll be all right.
00:50:52 ►
I don’t think you can go wrong.
00:50:54 ►
And I guess I should maybe say the previous announcement was brought to you
00:50:58 ►
by the Partnership of Free Drugs in America or something like that.
00:51:04 ►
By the way, that was a joke for those of you who are just maintaining right now
00:51:08 ►
and maybe a little paranoid or something.
00:51:11 ►
By the way, if you don’t have a copy of Boss Drum by The Shaman,
00:51:15 ►
you ought to go out and pick up one.
00:51:18 ►
Just to hear Terrence’s rap called Re-Evolution.
00:51:21 ►
I play it when I do a solo mushroom trip quite often.
00:51:25 ►
I like to sit in the dark with headphones on and play that track just as the light show is starting to come on.
00:51:32 ►
If you’ve heard that cut, you remember the kind of eerie keyboard background intro where Terrence begins saying,
00:51:40 ►
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
00:51:47 ►
I’ve always enjoyed hearing that particular rap,
00:51:50 ►
particularly because I think, as you just heard,
00:51:53 ►
Terrence had just come from the club Megatriplice,
00:51:57 ►
and I think it probably had been his first rave experience,
00:52:01 ►
at least according to the story he tells here.
00:52:03 ►
And how appropriate is that, that it’s Terrence’s first rave at the Megatriplice in the UK?
00:52:10 ►
As I’m sure most of you already know, the force behind that club was Fraser Clark,
00:52:15 ►
who was with us here in the Psychedelic Salon for our podcast number 16,
00:52:21 ►
where we were treated to Fraser’s famous epic,
00:52:25 ►
Monkey’s Trip, A Short History of the Human Species.
00:52:29 ►
Which reminds me, by the way, that Fraser just told me that he came across a recording of a talk he gave at Stanford University.
00:52:38 ►
I think it was probably, it must have been during the time he was leading that Zippy Pronoya tour across the U.S.,
00:52:43 ►
a few years after Terrence was first at the Megatripolis.
00:52:48 ►
And this talk, by the way, is called Rave Culture and the End of the World.
00:52:52 ►
And if all goes well, I should have a copy in hand,
00:52:55 ►
and we’ll podcast it in the near future.
00:52:58 ►
Right now, there are either two or three more podcasts left of this McKenna workshop,
00:53:03 ►
and then we’re going to hear the talk
00:53:05 ►
that Nick Sand gave at the
00:53:07 ►
MindStates 2001 conference.
00:53:09 ►
At the time he was still under the
00:53:12 ►
heavy yoke of the U.S. parole system.
00:53:15 ►
It’s quite a powerful talk
00:53:16 ►
by a living legend in the psychedelic community.
00:53:20 ►
Can you say orange sunshine?
00:53:23 ►
Before we go, there’s one last thing I’d like to point out.
00:53:27 ►
And that’s a new book by James Kent that hopefully will be published really soon.
00:53:32 ►
Some of you may not recognize James’ name, but I’m sure you’re already familiar with his work.
00:53:38 ►
He was the former editor of the classic Psychedelic Illuminations magazine,
00:53:43 ►
of which I still have a few treasured
00:53:45 ►
copies in my library. And James was also the publisher of Trip Magazine. Sadly, I think
00:53:53 ►
that for our community, there just weren’t enough of us in the psychedelic community
00:53:57 ►
to keep Trip Magazine alive. Right now, Trip and James can be found online at www.trippzine.com.
00:54:09 ►
And if you go to that site right now, which, by the way, is the spring of 2006 for you time travelers
00:54:16 ►
who might come across this podcast in the far distant future.
00:54:21 ►
Anyhow, right now you’ll see a link to James’s new book, Psychedelic Information
00:54:26 ►
Theory, and he’s also posted the table of contents and several chapters for you to read online.
00:54:33 ►
I think that if you take the time to read a little of this book, you’ll see that it’s a completely
00:54:38 ►
new take on the subject. In fact, James was recently invited to present his new psychedelic information theory
00:54:46 ►
at the recent Tour de Science of Consciousness conference,
00:54:50 ►
which is a venue for the real heavy hitters in consciousness research.
00:54:55 ►
And as I said a minute ago, our community wasn’t able to muster up enough subscriptions
00:55:00 ►
to keep Trip Magazine alive, but now we’ve got another chance to make up for it.
00:55:12 ►
And if you go to the webpage at TripScene that has the link to the table of contents for his new book,
00:55:18 ►
there’s also a link right below it to donate to the publishing fund for this groundbreaking book.
00:55:33 ►
If you donate five bucks, you’ll get a full online preview of the chapters as they become available. And the first 100 people who chip in $50 will receive a numbered autographed copy of the limited first edition.
00:55:37 ►
So I don’t know how many of those 100 copies are left.
00:55:46 ►
In fact, I can guarantee that there are at least less than 100 now because I’ve ordered mine and if you’re interested and so inclined why don’t you give one
00:55:48 ►
of our own your support
00:55:50 ►
to help get this important
00:55:52 ►
book published
00:55:53 ►
I guess I’ve rambled on long enough for now
00:55:56 ►
I appreciate you being with us
00:55:59 ►
here today in the Psychedelic Salon
00:56:00 ►
and I appreciate Chateau Hayouk
00:56:03 ►
for letting us use their music for these podcasts so thanks again Jacques Cordell and Wells Thank you.