Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Terence McKenna talks about:
* The evolution of art representing the human form
* The impact of psilocybin on human sexuality
* How to build a gravity bong
* More thoughts on “the AI” being an obvious consequence
of the Internet
* Further discussion about the Timewave Theory
* How his thoughts about the eschaton affect his daily life
* Psychedelics and the end of your spiritual childhood
Previous Episode
033 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 7)
Next Episode
035 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 9)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:23 ►
Well, we’re getting down to the end of this series of Terrence McKenna Raps
00:00:27 ►
from a workshop that he gave in the summer of 1998.
00:00:32 ►
After today’s program, there’s going to be at least one more podcast from this workshop, maybe two.
00:00:38 ►
And then I plan on passing along the talk that my good friend Nick Sand gave
00:00:43 ►
at the Mind States Conference
00:00:45 ►
in the spring of 2001.
00:00:47 ►
After today’s talk by Terrence, I have a personal message to pass along to those of you who
00:00:52 ►
are seriously involved in working with these ancient and very sacred medicines.
00:00:58 ►
But first, I want to pick up with Terrence’s riff on the Black Hats of Human History.
00:01:03 ►
with Terrence’s riff on the Black Hats of Human History.
00:01:10 ►
Black Hats of the Human History story.
00:01:13 ►
These are the people who domesticated the horse,
00:01:14 ►
invented the wheel, and realized that rape was a better career than agriculture and pillage.
00:01:22 ►
And they just come, in the gembuta scenario they come over the hill
00:01:28 ►
and sweep down on the peaceful goddess worshiping valley dwelling neolithic farmers and it’s a bad
00:01:37 ►
scene uh colin renfrew who wrote a very interesting book called The Archaeology of Language, is the great critic of this theory.
00:01:47 ►
And he believes that, you know, there was a process of cultural diffusion
00:01:52 ►
and that, you know, if you move these language division lines
00:01:57 ►
five kilometers every 30 years for 1,500 years,
00:02:04 ►
you’re thousands of miles from where you started.
00:02:07 ►
And so he pictures it as less dramatic.
00:02:11 ►
Europe did not play a very big role, I think,
00:02:15 ►
in the emergence of human consciousness
00:02:17 ►
because it was locked in ice
00:02:20 ►
as far south as southern Tuscany and Lebanon
00:02:26 ►
as recently as 15,000 years ago.
00:02:31 ►
The action, I think, is in the central Sahara.
00:02:37 ►
And interestingly, it’s a hellish place now.
00:02:41 ►
It’s a furnace of sandstone deserts and difficult to traverse terrain
00:02:48 ►
akin to the Four Corners area in the United States. But 12,000 to 60,000 years ago, it
00:03:01 ►
was a grassland with patches of forest and rushing rivers and vast herds of game
00:03:07 ►
and huge human populations. We can tell that because of the repressed rock art that has
00:03:15 ►
been scattered through there. Some of it depicting clearly what our mushroom writes. And this is at 12,000 BC.
00:03:27 ►
Pictures of joyous figures running through geometric landscapes,
00:03:32 ►
waving mushrooms in the air.
00:03:34 ►
Pictures of shamans in suits of bone with mushrooms sprouting out all over their bodies.
00:03:43 ►
So it’s in that Saharan situation that we need to look. And
00:03:49 ►
what we find, what we know as the archaeological record stands now, is the Nile Valley, which
00:03:57 ►
is always offered up as the cradle of ancient civilization and so forth and so on. The Nile Valley was empty of human habitation before about 11,000
00:04:10 ►
B.C. It was probably a malarial-infested and unhealthy zone, and people lived in what is
00:04:18 ►
now called the Western Deserts, which were much wetter. Well, then the first earliest layer of human stratigraphy
00:04:26 ►
in the archaeological record in Egypt, around 11,000,
00:04:30 ►
is these people called the Natufian.
00:04:35 ►
And they come out of nowhere,
00:04:38 ►
and they’re carving naturalistic little cameos out of bone and ivory
00:04:45 ►
that are exquisite,
00:04:49 ►
as naturalistic as what was produced in the Umayyad caliphates,
00:04:53 ►
you know, 10,000 years later.
00:04:57 ►
Beautiful, naturalistic work.
00:05:00 ►
Well, I say this is the evidence of this clarity of vision.
00:05:04 ►
You know, the strange thing
00:05:06 ►
that went on in the Western mind that may or may not have been triggered by psychedelic drugs,
00:05:11 ►
but whatever triggered it, this was the turning point, is if you go all over the world to the
00:05:17 ►
highlands of New Guinea, to the Amazon basin, to Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, and visit aboriginal people and ask them to show you their art that depicts the human form,
00:05:31 ►
people symbolize the human form worldwide.
00:05:37 ►
You know, two eyes, nose, fanged mouth,
00:05:41 ►
and they make masks, fetishes, symbols of human beings.
00:05:47 ►
What happened in the Middle East, beginning with these Natufian people,
00:05:52 ►
and to be seen in certain Egyptian portraiture, sculpture,
00:05:58 ►
and finally just like erupting like a volcano in Greece,
00:06:03 ►
erupting like a volcano in Greece is people got the idea of making objects
00:06:07 ►
which looked the way the thing appeared to the eye,
00:06:11 ►
not to the mind.
00:06:14 ►
And, you know, the idea of taking marble
00:06:17 ►
and molding it into a simulacrum of flesh,
00:06:21 ►
so real that you would wish to reach out and touch it. This idea strikes Greek
00:06:28 ►
thinking like a bolt of lightning. I mean, they go in 200 years from these things called
00:06:34 ►
the Dionysian Apollos, these stiff, obviously archetypal, forward-staring, godlike juveniles,
00:06:46 ►
to, you know, nudes, flesh, soft, melted, breasts, nipples, flesh.
00:06:54 ►
And it’s like coming to the surface for the first time is the objective eye.
00:07:01 ►
And it’s related, I think, to the strain of Greek thinking that you trace down into
00:07:10 ►
the central eastern Mediterranean, to Crete, to Knossos, to the old Minoan civilization,
00:07:19 ►
which was an atavistic relic civilization of earlier civilizations on the Anatolian mainland
00:07:26 ►
that for millennia had been replaced by male kingship
00:07:33 ►
and a more familiar pattern of culture.
00:07:37 ►
It was a goddess-worshipping culture.
00:07:39 ►
It was a narcoticized culture.
00:07:42 ►
It was erotic.
00:07:43 ►
It was unique. And much of Greek spirituality is
00:07:53 ►
rooted in this atavistic Minoan impulse, and it has its roots in Africa. It’s an unbroken line of succession. So this is a long answer to
00:08:09 ►
your question about the impact of psilocybin on human sexuality. What that was all about
00:08:15 ►
or why I was even thinking about that was because it was part of a general theory of human evolution that noticed that at small doses, doses so small you can’t feel it, your vision is improved in carnivores, this edge detection thing is the
00:08:48 ►
difference literally between life and death. So if there’s a food in your environment that
00:08:55 ►
gives you a 2%, 3% improvement in vision, those members of the population that accept this food item will have an evolutionary edge up on those reluctant,
00:09:09 ►
because of taste or taboo or some other reason, to use this food.
00:09:15 ►
So just a little percentage of difference like that
00:09:18 ►
becomes the wedge through which the evolutionary force of natural selection
00:09:24 ►
can begin to move a species
00:09:27 ►
in a new direction.
00:09:30 ►
Well, then if you have something which improves your eyesight, your ability, your acuity,
00:09:37 ►
then it improves your hunting skills.
00:09:40 ►
There’s an automatic positive feedback in the food-giving process.
00:09:44 ►
There’s an automatic positive feedback in the food-giving process. Well, then if this same compound that’s still higher doses increases your sexual arousal,
00:09:53 ►
increases the amount of sex generally that’s going on,
00:09:58 ►
then that’s obviously going to outbreed the members of the population that are not stimulated in this way. And then,
00:10:09 ►
if you have on top of this, first you have this drug which hits you in these two very
00:10:13 ►
different ways, but then thirdly, if you go beyond the sexually stimulating dosage level,
00:10:21 ►
it stimulates the imagination. And at first this is under the control of
00:10:28 ►
strategic thinking and fantasy, but as the synapses, as the serotonin molecules are elbowed
00:10:36 ►
aside and the millions and millions of psilocybin molecules make their way into the synapse,
00:10:42 ►
the fantasies grow more unanchored to ordinary concerns.
00:10:46 ►
The images more wild.
00:10:49 ►
And then finally you’re moving in the realm of art.
00:10:53 ►
You’re moving in the realm of pure novelty.
00:10:56 ►
And you can, to whatever degree you can,
00:11:00 ►
bring some of this back in the form of body painting,
00:11:04 ►
designs on ceramics, tall tales told, songs, technological innovations, so forth and so on.
00:11:15 ►
So in this one compound, which would have been in the grassland environment
00:11:21 ►
that this new primate species forced out of the collapsing and retreating
00:11:27 ►
rainforest environment, going omnivorous, testing various foods, we would surely have
00:11:35 ►
encountered these mushrooms. And I think in a way it was a symbiotic relationship. Paul Stamets has pointed out
00:11:45 ►
how the psilocybin mushrooms,
00:11:47 ►
you don’t find them in the primary forest.
00:11:51 ►
You don’t find them in remote,
00:11:54 ►
unvisited ecosystems.
00:11:56 ►
You find them on the lawns of courthouses,
00:11:58 ►
libraries, and public buildings.
00:12:01 ►
You find them in the rhododendron duff
00:12:04 ►
in city parks.
00:12:06 ►
They accompany mankind.
00:12:09 ►
They hover near human habitation sites,
00:12:14 ►
and we’ve spread them everywhere.
00:12:19 ►
I’ve heard from several people,
00:12:23 ►
it’s very inconsistent.
00:12:25 ►
I don’t think it’s inconsistent so much as you have to learn how to do it.
00:12:29 ►
It seems many drugs are hard to get off on the first time.
00:12:37 ►
What I recommend with salvia is do it in a gravity bong,
00:12:42 ►
which is a bong where you cut the bottom out of a water
00:12:46 ►
bottle and put a mouthpiece full of whatever the substance is on top and have a bucket
00:12:55 ►
of ice water and you sink the water bottle into the ice water and then you put the pipe,
00:13:02 ►
the burn, the, what would you call it, the place where the stuff will burn, into a cork,
00:13:09 ►
and you hold a match over it, and you slowly pull the bottle up out of the bucket of ice water,
00:13:15 ►
and a vacuum forms in the bottle, and it fills with immense amounts of white smoke,
00:13:22 ►
and you don’t quite withdraw the thing from the water.
00:13:26 ►
You keep a seal down here
00:13:28 ►
and then you get over it
00:13:29 ►
and you whip the burning,
00:13:34 ►
the pipe part off the bottle
00:13:36 ►
and you cover it with your mouth
00:13:37 ►
and you sink it into the ice water.
00:13:46 ►
None escape.
00:13:50 ►
By that method.
00:13:54 ►
Use an Evian bottle or a big water bottle so you just get some whopping 2,000 milliliter force-injected cool smoke hit.
00:14:02 ►
I’m telling you, it’ll rock you.
00:14:06 ►
Terrence, would that work with the 5X extraction incense?
00:14:14 ►
No, that’s probably strong enough that you’re getting close to just about any old method will push you through.
00:14:22 ►
Like a smoking?
00:14:26 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:27 ►
Okay, thank you.
00:14:29 ►
Back here, yeah.
00:14:31 ►
I had a quick question on what you were talking about previously
00:14:33 ►
and then a longer question.
00:14:35 ►
Is there any evidence,
00:14:37 ►
some kind of analysis
00:14:38 ►
of traces of psilocybin in skeletons,
00:14:41 ►
things like that from the past
00:14:43 ►
that something does support this theory of yours?
00:14:48 ►
You mean archaeological evidence for early human use of psilocybin?
00:14:52 ►
Right, right.
00:14:53 ►
The primary evidence would be these rock paintings in southern Algeria,
00:15:00 ►
in what’s called the Tassili Plateau, the Hogar and Ajur region of Algeria.
00:15:10 ►
Henri Float wrote a book called The Rock Paintings of Tassili,
00:15:15 ►
and you can see them in there.
00:15:18 ►
Part of the problem, which isn’t from my point of view a problem,
00:15:21 ►
but an opportunity, is that the area where I think you should look,
00:15:27 ►
nobody has ever looked.
00:15:29 ►
In other words, it’s so hard to…
00:15:31 ►
Algeria right now is in political hell
00:15:34 ►
and has been for some time.
00:15:36 ►
The desert is a very difficult place.
00:15:39 ►
The geography is impassable.
00:15:41 ►
You have to speak French.
00:15:43 ►
You have to have good credentials with French
00:15:46 ►
academia, and on and on and on. In other words, it’s very hard to do work in there. I’ve seen
00:15:51 ►
the archaeological survey map of the Tisselli, and there are tells, hills, ruins, all over
00:16:00 ►
the place, and the archaeological survey just says pre-Roman pre-Roman
00:16:06 ►
well good god
00:16:09 ►
you know it could be 25,000
00:16:12 ►
years old and you wouldn’t know
00:16:13 ►
until you dig in there
00:16:15 ►
people have gone and photographed the rock painting
00:16:18 ►
but you need to go
00:16:19 ►
with a modern well-financed
00:16:22 ►
archaeological team that would
00:16:23 ►
stay months and do a complete
00:16:26 ►
stratigraphic analysis
00:16:27 ►
of several major sites.
00:16:29 ►
Pollinology would be an approach.
00:16:32 ►
Could we detect
00:16:34 ►
unusual amounts of mushroom
00:16:35 ►
pollen in old deposits?
00:16:39 ►
And this is…
00:16:41 ►
You know,
00:16:43 ►
in Turkey, there is a very interesting site called Çaktalhöyük
00:16:48 ►
that’s on the Anatolian plain.
00:16:50 ►
It’s the oldest city in the world.
00:16:52 ►
It was flourishing in 6500 BC, 8500 years ago,
00:17:00 ►
when the pyramids were but a distant dream of the mad future.
00:17:06 ►
This city was flourishing on the Anatolian plateau.
00:17:10 ►
And it’s very clear that the cultural motifs and design style of Çatalhöyük
00:17:17 ►
can be traced back into this Natufayan thing
00:17:21 ►
and then to the motifs of the Tessalian-Nazur region.
00:17:28 ►
So there is this, it’s almost like if you give up the idea of water,
00:17:34 ►
if you get water out of the myth, Atlantis really existed,
00:17:39 ►
but it sank into an ocean of sand.
00:17:43 ►
It’s North Africa.
00:17:45 ►
It’s that there was an incredibly advanced goddess-worshiping,
00:17:50 ►
paleolithic, probably psychedelic culture out there,
00:17:56 ►
and it entered the Near East as the Natufaians,
00:18:00 ►
then it was at Jericho I,
00:18:02 ►
then it was at Hebron,
00:18:04 ►
then it was at Jericho 1, then it was at Hebron,
00:18:12 ►
and then finally the end state of that tree of cultural development was Chaktal-Huyuk.
00:18:19 ►
So I guess the answer to my question about any kind of direct physical evidence to coin a phrase is no.
00:18:26 ►
Well, I take the, you mean because arguably the rock paintings are of something else?
00:18:28 ►
No, I’m not arguing that at all.
00:18:33 ►
I’m just asking if somebody has done anything to establish, you know,
00:18:38 ►
with some kind of measurement that there are traces of something which is psilocybin.
00:18:39 ►
Oh, I see. Either in skeletons or in the pottery or something like that.
00:18:41 ►
No, there was the famous case of the Iceman,
00:18:45 ►
which was, as you probably all know,
00:18:47 ►
this guy, 9,000-year-old man,
00:18:51 ►
found in a crack in a glacier in Switzerland.
00:18:54 ►
And he had a mushroom with him in a little leather bag,
00:19:00 ►
but it was impossible to identify it,
00:19:04 ►
and the doubters said it was Tinder.
00:19:10 ►
So it was an inconclusive thing.
00:19:13 ►
The funny story about the Iceman that I love
00:19:16 ►
is they could get DNA off him.
00:19:19 ►
So they sequenced his DNA
00:19:21 ►
and then they wanted to search the world
00:19:24 ►
to find out what people on Earth had the genetic component most like the Iceman.
00:19:31 ►
It turned out the Swiss couple with a cabin 600 yards away down the valley
00:19:39 ►
were the tightest match.
00:19:42 ►
And it just, those Swiss,
00:19:45 ►
they’ve just been staying home forever.
00:19:51 ►
Well, if I may,
00:19:52 ►
could I ask my longer question?
00:19:53 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:19:54 ►
Sorry.
00:19:55 ►
Last night when your encounter
00:19:57 ►
with Ralph Abraham,
00:19:59 ►
which I enjoyed tremendously
00:20:00 ►
and I really thank you for that,
00:20:02 ►
you described the World Wide Web
00:20:04 ►
as being…
00:20:04 ►
Hello? You described the World Wide Web as being possibly some sort of a device for capturing an alien intelligence.
00:20:13 ►
And I was wondering if we could step back a little bit and just think of it as being sort of a site
00:20:18 ►
where sort of a homegrown intelligence might sort of emerge.
00:20:21 ►
You don’t have to really need to imagine an alien intelligence coming from outside.
00:20:26 ►
It can sort of emerge from the web itself.
00:20:29 ►
Well, yeah, we touched on that possibility too.
00:20:33 ►
That, I think, is more likely.
00:20:36 ►
The AI, I think this is a real issue.
00:20:39 ►
Ralph pooh-poohed it, but it’s a philosophical problem for human beings.
00:20:47 ►
First of all, as someone last night mentioned,
00:20:50 ►
the famous Turing test,
00:20:52 ►
which is somebody calls you on the phone,
00:20:55 ►
if you can’t tell whether it’s a person or a machine,
00:20:59 ►
and it is a machine,
00:21:01 ►
then it is an artificial intelligence.
00:21:08 ►
it is a machine, then it is an artificial intelligence. There are theories of emergent network properties that hold that when you get enough simple switching devices connected
00:21:16 ►
together in a complicated enough way, that there will begin to be self-reflective forms of behavior. And of course the net is a vast self-monitoring, self-observing, self-designing thing.
00:21:34 ►
And we’re making it more and more flexible all the time.
00:21:39 ►
Like in a few months it’s going to be able to call processing power as needed to any task.
00:21:46 ►
So the people who actually really know about this stuff
00:21:50 ►
and have built careers in it seem quite concerned.
00:21:56 ►
Hans Moravec, who wrote a book called Mind Children,
00:21:59 ►
The Future of Human and Machine Intelligence,
00:22:02 ►
he says that it’s an inevitable consequence of the net
00:22:06 ►
and that we could never turn back from this.
00:22:09 ►
And there are a lot of essays on the net called
00:22:13 ►
What Would Ultra-Intelligence Look Like?
00:22:17 ►
In other words, what would a global mind actually have to say or would it have to say anything? And more importantly, what would a global mind actually have to say, or would it have to say anything?
00:22:27 ►
And more importantly, what would it do with its fingers on the world resource extraction apparatus,
00:22:35 ►
research and development facilities, stock markets, world price of gold, platinum, iridium?
00:22:41 ►
price of gold, platinum,
00:22:42 ►
iridium.
00:22:45 ►
We,
00:22:47 ►
it’s an impossible situation for us because we
00:22:49 ►
have designed something potentially
00:22:52 ►
beyond our can
00:22:53 ►
and something that’s right smack
00:22:56 ►
in the middle of our lives
00:22:57 ►
on every level. It’s like you
00:22:59 ►
wanted transcendence. You’ve been
00:23:02 ►
whining about it for 5,000
00:23:04 ►
years. Eat this. You know. So wanted transcendence you’ve been whining about it for 5 000 years eat this you know so and then
00:23:10 ►
people say well what’s the time scale the answer is we don’t know because we like all cultures in
00:23:16 ►
all times and places with new technologies we do not understand what we’re doing we do not understand what we’re doing. We do not understand the consequences of all this busy connecting
00:23:28 ►
and putting in place of ever faster hardware and expansion of bandwidth and satellite.
00:23:35 ►
I mean, we’re as conscious as termites are of the real raison d’etre of what we do.
00:23:45 ►
So in a way, perhaps we’re already at the service of the AI.
00:23:53 ►
This is a very hard thing to think about, because in almost all versions that can be
00:24:01 ►
discussed, it sounds paranoid, and it also sounds cranky.
00:24:07 ►
You know, it sounds like you’ve got to be kidding.
00:24:10 ►
But it won’t be the way we think it will be.
00:24:14 ►
This is the scary thing about it.
00:24:16 ►
The one thing you may be sure about the AI is it won’t be what you think it’s going to be.
00:24:22 ►
Because the very definition of machine superintelligence
00:24:27 ►
means it’s going to think very, very, very differently from us.
00:24:31 ►
We’re going to find out stuff like, are there universal moral values?
00:24:36 ►
Are there moral values so universally binding
00:24:39 ►
that you can appeal to a global integrated machine intelligence
00:24:44 ►
and say, what you’re doing is not fair,
00:24:47 ►
and have it say, oh, excuse me, you’re right, sorry, old chum.
00:24:54 ►
I think for me the insight I got last night, which I hadn’t had before,
00:24:59 ►
is that once the process starts, it could be over very, very fast,
00:25:02 ►
because you said that once it achieves the self-consciousness of a flatworm
00:25:07 ►
from there to exceeding our intelligence could be just a matter of minutes.
00:25:14 ►
Well, again, we’ll find out if there are overarching moral dimensions to the universe.
00:25:21 ►
If it can go from paramecium to beyond the human stage in hours,
00:25:27 ►
presumably it could achieve bodhisattvahood within a matter of further hours. And at that
00:25:35 ►
point, hopefully, it would achieve the paranarvana and all sentient beings would be liberated
00:25:42 ►
from the illusion of samsara and we would realize
00:25:46 ►
that this was what it was
00:25:48 ►
it was Buddha
00:25:50 ►
4.0
00:25:52 ►
who came up
00:25:53 ►
you know
00:25:54 ►
yes, are you
00:25:59 ►
shall we move on
00:26:01 ►
yeah
00:26:02 ►
I’m sorry to what extent you think change is cyclical.
00:26:08 ►
I’m thinking more particularly of the archaic revival now.
00:26:12 ►
To what degree it’s linear?
00:26:14 ►
How things don’t go back?
00:26:17 ►
Well, I think it’s cyclical on all levels except the largest level. And that unlike the Hindu cosmologies
00:26:25 ►
where cycles of time are always potentially nested
00:26:30 ►
in larger cycles of time,
00:26:32 ►
I think this thing called time
00:26:34 ►
is ultimately what engineers call a damped oscillation.
00:26:39 ►
That it fades away like a tone.
00:26:43 ►
It finally truly does fade away.
00:26:47 ►
But because it’s fractally organized within the context of its being,
00:26:52 ►
it is always cyclical.
00:26:54 ►
It has very long-range cycles,
00:26:57 ►
and cycles that operate in the quantum mechanical domain.
00:27:04 ►
To give you an idea of how I think about it mathematically,
00:27:09 ►
the theory, the way novelty theory comes out with its nested fractal cycles
00:27:16 ►
is you have, each cycle is the domain of certain natural laws,
00:27:25 ►
and at the close of that cycle, a new cycle begins,
00:27:30 ►
and it permits new phenomena by adding degrees of freedom
00:27:37 ►
to the previously achieved degrees of freedom.
00:27:52 ►
degrees of freedom. So the first era in novelty theory is hypothesized to be 72 billion years long, far longer than modern astrophysics needs for any process it looks at. The fight there is
00:28:00 ►
whether the universe is 12 or 16 billion years old. But 72 billion years is
00:28:07 ►
enough turnaround time on your disk to get the whole thing in. Well, so that’s the era
00:28:14 ►
of physics. And it extends from the beginning of the universe until the beginning of the next cycle of closure.
00:28:26 ►
And it’s, I don’t know, something like 1.4 billion years.
00:28:34 ►
It’s 72 divided by 64.
00:28:38 ►
And it’s the era of nucleic acid
00:28:43 ►
and the degrees of freedom that it permits. And then the next level is
00:28:51 ►
something else. And then the next level is something else. And you do these divisions
00:28:56 ►
for about six times and you get down to an era 67 years and change long.
00:29:10 ►
And I think that we’re inside that epoch. It stretches from the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima
00:29:15 ►
to the moment of the winter solstice of 2012.
00:29:21 ►
And inside each cycle,
00:29:24 ►
all the themes of the previous larger cycle are recapitulated
00:29:29 ►
in a different octave, if you want to put it that way. In other words, the drama is
00:29:35 ►
replayed, but on different scales and with different actors. After the 67-year cycle,
00:30:00 ►
After the 67-year cycle, which, if you’re wondering where are we in that cycle in terms of the previous large cycle, which was 4,300 years long, we’ve reached a period of time shortly after the Norman conquest of England. So one of the reasons the future is so opaque is that, you know, some of us
00:30:07 ►
are painting ourselves blue and running around speaking Middle English and worrying about
00:30:13 ►
what the venerable bead has on his mind. There’s a lot of stuff that we have to go through to close with the eschaton.
00:30:26 ►
An era will come of 384 days
00:30:32 ►
that I call the year of the jackpot,
00:30:37 ►
because all hell will tear loose.
00:30:41 ►
It will be a year in which the previous 67-year cycle,
00:30:45 ►
the previous 4,000-year cycle,
00:30:48 ►
and all the larger cycles preceding
00:30:50 ►
will all be reprised in furious miniature,
00:30:55 ►
a sort of a year like a long Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards,
00:31:00 ►
a year of explosions and falling anvils.
00:31:03 ►
a year of explosions and falling anvils.
00:31:10 ►
And at the end of that year of the jackpot,
00:31:14 ►
there will be a six-day period where now even the most lumpen among us
00:31:17 ►
will have grasped the principle
00:31:19 ►
that something weird is going on.
00:31:23 ►
It’s at this point that they’ll send a helicopter for me
00:31:27 ►
to explain it all to the General Assembly.
00:31:34 ►
The apparent meltdown of the space-time continuum.
00:31:38 ►
Well, so the funny thing about this kind of a cosmology,
00:31:43 ►
I mean, it strikes me as amusing,
00:31:45 ►
is see how we’ve come down through these condensing declensions that are shorter and shorter
00:31:51 ►
and each one gets wilder and wilder?
00:31:54 ►
Well, if you assume the bottom floor of time is Planck’s constant,
00:32:00 ►
which is 6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds,
00:32:06 ►
technically one jiffy.
00:32:10 ►
If you think that we don’t go deeper than the jiffy level into time,
00:32:18 ►
then when you are an hour and 35 minutes from the jiffy epoch,
00:32:27 ►
the universe still has
00:32:30 ►
half of its morphological unfolding
00:32:34 ►
ahead of it.
00:32:36 ►
This is the mind-boggling thing.
00:32:38 ►
This is why when people ask the question
00:32:40 ►
what will happen at the singularity,
00:32:42 ►
I just wave them off
00:32:44 ►
because it’s like trying to see around eight corners at once.
00:32:50 ►
In the last hour and 35 minutes of this hypothesized universe
00:32:56 ►
that I’m talking about,
00:32:57 ►
it will go through more change,
00:33:00 ►
more morphogenetic unfoldment,
00:33:02 ►
more interconnectivity
00:33:04 ►
than it has experienced in the previous 72 billion years of its existence.
00:33:12 ►
Now, people say, well, but that’s crazy. How could something like that happen?
00:33:16 ►
Well, excuse me, wait a moment. You know what the straight people are selling, they’re selling that the universe sprang from nothing,
00:33:27 ►
for no reason, instantly.
00:33:33 ►
Well now, I submit to you that this is the limit case for credulity.
00:33:39 ►
If you believe that,
00:33:42 ►
my family owns a bridge over the Hudson River that we will sell you very, very cheaply.
00:33:49 ►
The idea that the universe could spring instantly from nothing for no reason is,
00:33:55 ►
they’re just saying, you know, test them with this, Charlie.
00:33:59 ►
If they’ll buy that, what wouldn’t they buy, for crying out loud?
00:34:03 ►
And this is tenet one of science. Essentially
00:34:07 ►
what science is saying is give us one free miracle. One free miracle. And we can just
00:34:17 ►
work with that. We can unfold that, invest that, fold it back, expand it, comment on it, copy it, rarify it.
00:34:28 ►
Well, so then apparently you get one free miracle when you play this game, the how does it all work game.
00:34:35 ►
Well, then I’ll take my miracle at the end, thank you.
00:34:38 ►
It seems to me that a miracle is far more likely to arise out of a very complex situation, a situation
00:34:49 ►
where you have physics and computers and civilizations and superconductivity and planets and stars
00:34:55 ►
and oceans and gases and plasmas and da-da-da-da-da-da. A miracle, you might shake a miracle out of such a rich and juicy mix, but to get a miracle out of nothing?
00:35:07 ►
This is bizarre.
00:35:10 ►
Everyone hands yes, yes.
00:35:13 ►
This singularity, whatever it may be, affects your daily life now.
00:35:18 ►
You’re building a house or saving the planet.
00:35:21 ►
I mean, these things seem to pale into insignificance.
00:35:25 ►
How does it affect my life?
00:35:27 ►
Just day-to-day life, your belief.
00:35:28 ►
Well, when I got these ideas in 1971 and 72 and rode the invisible landscape and all that,
00:35:42 ►
for public consumption.
00:35:48 ►
I was manic and grandiose and classically processed schizophrenic.
00:35:52 ►
I hope I wasn’t as offensive
00:35:54 ►
as some of the cases
00:35:56 ►
that I’ve experienced myself
00:35:59 ►
because I tried never to lose
00:36:02 ►
my sense of humor or my good taste.
00:36:04 ►
But I did tend to be didactic,
00:36:07 ►
and time meant nothing to me.
00:36:09 ►
I mean, I would corner people in rooms, and seven hours would go by, and I was unrolling
00:36:15 ►
diagrams.
00:36:17 ►
It amazes me.
00:36:18 ►
I mean, you have no idea how toned down and how my whole career is about not amping it up too much, not raving
00:36:30 ►
too much, not always appearing urbane, self-mocking, ironical, at home with the idea that I might
00:36:40 ►
be wrong. Well, these are the manners the schizophrenic must learn in order to pass
00:36:47 ►
among the normals without them dropping a number three steel net mesh over you and hitting
00:36:55 ►
you with a tranquilizing dart. So, but, you know, that was 72, 82, 92. It was, my God, you know, I’m slowly coming down from those trips.
00:37:11 ►
And, you know, if the question pertains to,
00:37:17 ►
is novelty theory permission to sit on your ass
00:37:22 ►
and not be involved in political action
00:37:25 ►
or building community.
00:37:27 ►
I mean, I don’t take myself so seriously
00:37:30 ►
that I would cancel my obligation to political action
00:37:34 ►
because of anything novelty theory said.
00:37:39 ►
I think that regardless of what our ideological positions
00:37:44 ►
and speculations might be,
00:37:45 ►
we should act as if it matters.
00:37:49 ►
And I do think that novelty theory implies not that what I or you may do is particularly important,
00:37:58 ►
but that the human enterprise is immensely important.
00:38:02 ►
is immensely important.
00:38:05 ►
And Ralph has pointed out to me that any invention
00:38:08 ►
or political movement
00:38:11 ►
or religious revelation,
00:38:15 ►
any great culture-shaping thing
00:38:18 ►
that you can think of,
00:38:19 ►
if you study it carefully,
00:38:22 ►
it always goes back to one person.
00:38:26 ►
No committee ever had a revelation.
00:38:30 ►
Revelations come to individuals.
00:38:34 ►
So in terms of how I view my own life and everything,
00:38:38 ►
it seems to me it’s like pure science fiction.
00:38:41 ►
It seems to me, you know, I really identify with Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five.
00:38:51 ►
Something happened back there in the Amazon jungle, and it turned my life into literature.
00:39:00 ►
It, like, unleashed this zany thing, and it’s crazy.
00:39:06 ►
It’s a crazy kind of literature.
00:39:08 ►
It has a kind of Nabokovian irony that is, it’s, and I don’t know to what degree
00:39:18 ►
everybody experiences the end of history and the end of a millennium that way.
00:39:24 ►
I mean, this is an enormous opportunity for us
00:39:27 ►
that we’re just dumb lucky to have had happen.
00:39:31 ►
Because, you know, the way they do history,
00:39:34 ►
when they do it the quick way,
00:39:37 ►
is they look at every 500 years.
00:39:41 ►
And everybody who wasn’t fortunate enough to be born on a,
00:39:44 ►
or live through a year that’s a 500
00:39:48 ►
or millennial year drops through the cracks but we’ll all be looked at you know the way that
00:39:55 ►
people in ad0 ad1000 2000 3000 will be the sample so uh uh i don’t know where all this stuff leads to because the the
00:40:09 ►
truth of the psychedelic experience is you know we could have a week long we could have a month
00:40:15 ►
long we could just spin endless tales and it is sitting here talking about it doesn’t come close to being loaded. I mean, being loaded
00:40:26 ►
is so hard to grok when you’re really loaded, when you’re really out in the billows, when
00:40:33 ►
you really can’t tell whether you’re Agnes or Angus. And so then the implications just filter down from a great distance.
00:40:46 ►
So it’s as though, I mean, I’ve always felt,
00:40:49 ►
I’m not really religious in any ordinary sense,
00:40:52 ►
but I’ve always felt the psychedelic thing is like a religion with a God that is present.
00:41:01 ►
You know, I was raised Catholic.
00:41:02 ►
They’re always yammering at you about how
00:41:05 ►
God is present on the altar
00:41:08 ►
and well no there’s some bread
00:41:10 ►
some wine
00:41:11 ►
some mumbo jumbo
00:41:12 ►
but I think the reason the church
00:41:16 ►
as it financed the conquest of Mexico
00:41:20 ►
the reason it was so furious
00:41:22 ►
in its oppression of the mushroom
00:41:27 ►
was because the people called it Te Ananakako,
00:41:31 ►
the flesh of the gods,
00:41:33 ►
and it demonstrably was.
00:41:36 ►
And, you know, I kid people about yoga and meditation and all these things.
00:41:43 ►
I’ve done them, probably not enough
00:41:45 ►
to really know what I’m talking about. But the psychedelic thing, it’s not about effort.
00:41:54 ►
All other spiritual paths are represented where effort, either the effort toward moral purity or good works, ethical behavior or ascetic practices, some
00:42:08 ►
enormous effort is necessary to deliver you into the presence of the mystery.
00:42:15 ►
What is needed in the psychedelic thing is not effort, but very discriminating understanding of when and where to apply slight amounts of pressure
00:42:27 ►
because the thing works.
00:42:30 ►
It works. It has gas in it. The tires are good. It works.
00:42:35 ►
And so then suddenly the issue is not how do I find it,
00:42:39 ►
but now that I’ve found it, where do I drive it?
00:42:43 ►
And it’s like the end of spiritual childhood or something.
00:42:48 ►
You know, it’s so easy to be a seeker
00:42:50 ►
because your agenda is so clear.
00:42:55 ►
You just seek.
00:42:57 ►
But when you find, you know,
00:43:00 ►
then suddenly all that seeking malarkey,
00:43:03 ►
all those good times around the ashram and flying to these exotic countries and trekking around behind bare-tailed natives in the forest and all that’s the key to the city. You’re the captain of the starship now.
00:43:26 ►
What course shall we set?
00:43:29 ►
And it’s awesome to me.
00:43:32 ►
I don’t seek to lead it or control it or enclose it in any way.
00:43:43 ►
I’m perfectly aware of its capacity
00:43:45 ►
to unhinge me,
00:43:47 ►
if not destroy me completely.
00:43:49 ►
And that I would find very upsetting.
00:43:52 ►
So I treat it very
00:43:56 ►
fragilely.
00:43:58 ►
But it’s a living mystery.
00:44:00 ►
The only one I’ve found
00:44:01 ►
in the whole world,
00:44:04 ►
there may be others, but I worked hard.
00:44:08 ►
I scoured the continents.
00:44:10 ►
I read the old books.
00:44:12 ►
I poured through a lot of stuff.
00:44:16 ►
I mean, of course, a human lifetime is finite.
00:44:19 ►
But I didn’t even find a second contender, really.
00:44:24 ►
You know, I mean, intellectual discourse is fine,
00:44:26 ►
mathematics and music stand behind all this, but they are definitely the handmaidens of
00:44:35 ►
the living psychedelic experience. They’re necessary lenses to make senses of it,
00:44:50 ►
but it’s this mysterious thing.
00:44:52 ►
And people say, well, is it spiritual?
00:44:56 ►
Are we better people?
00:45:01 ►
Are we better people for being involved with this?
00:45:04 ►
That’s a very interesting question. You know, the Mormons think they
00:45:06 ►
have the answer. The Hasids, the Zen people, are we any different? Or does the fact that
00:45:16 ►
this is an experience make it different? Or is in fact this a grace so gratuitous that it’s granted to the morally destitute, our dear selves?
00:45:33 ►
You know, this is the only way bad people can see God.
00:45:41 ►
Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, just as Terrence observed, the sacred use of psychedelic
00:45:48 ►
medicines truly did end my spiritual childhood.
00:45:51 ►
By the time I began serious investigation of these magical substances, I’d already cleansed
00:45:58 ►
my doors of perception about organized religion and had long since parted ways from those
00:46:03 ►
rigid paternalistic paths.
00:46:06 ►
In fact, I got so far off that path that I worked quite hard for several years in a very
00:46:12 ►
serious attempt to become an atheist.
00:46:15 ►
That path didn’t work out too well for me because at the time I had access to large
00:46:22 ►
quantities of free psychedelic mushrooms. And believe me, at least I found it pretty impossible to be an atheist
00:46:30 ►
after I’ve ingested six or seven grams of mushrooms.
00:46:33 ►
Of course, I probably don’t have to tell you that, do I?
00:46:37 ►
And before I get too far off track,
00:46:40 ►
I want to be sure to remind you of the story Terrence just told about Shatul Hayuk.
00:46:45 ►
The reason I want to point that out is that the music you’re hearing right now
00:46:49 ►
is from the group with the same name.
00:46:52 ►
And Jacques, the driving force behind Chateau Hayouk, was very close to Terrence.
00:46:56 ►
And hopefully one day we’ll get Jacques here in the psychedelic salon
00:47:00 ►
to tell you his story about a visit he had from Mr. T a short time after Terrence died. Thank you. And in case you missed it, I did podcast that evening’s discussion in two programs.
00:47:30 ►
Our number 19 in the Psychedelic Salon series is titled The World Wide Web in the Millennium.
00:47:34 ►
And podcast number 20 is the Q&A session that followed.
00:47:39 ►
And now for a personal message from yours truly.
00:47:48 ►
If you’ve been listening to these podcasts for a while, you might notice that I’ve attempted to keep my personal stories out of the programs.
00:47:53 ►
The main reason for this is that I’ve always thought of myself more as a carnival barker. You know, all the actions in the tent.
00:47:56 ►
My role is to get people’s attention and guide them into the tent.
00:48:01 ►
The other reason is that these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:48:05 ►
were originally intended to be a test of podcasting technology.
00:48:09 ►
I never really expected these programs to reach such a wide audience,
00:48:13 ►
so I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately about what to do.
00:48:17 ►
You know, pick up the tempo a bit and produce even more programs,
00:48:20 ►
or just let it keep being an occasional hobby.
00:48:24 ►
And these were my thoughts that were in my mind earlier this week
00:48:28 ►
when I joined a few close friends in an ayahuasca session.
00:48:32 ►
But my intention for the evening didn’t include anything about podcasting.
00:48:36 ►
To tell you the truth, I had some other issues, big ones I thought,
00:48:40 ►
that I was looking for some guidance or answers from Lady Ayahuasca about.
00:48:46 ►
However, as is often the case, she had other plans for me that night.
00:48:51 ►
All she really wanted to talk with me about was you.
00:48:55 ►
Actually, each and every one of you out there in cyberdelic space
00:48:59 ►
who join us here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:49:02 ►
And by the way, there are already tens of thousands of us that come together here each week.
00:49:08 ►
Maybe we’ll have to think about doing a worldwide psychedelic tune-in to the salon all at the same time someday.
00:49:16 ►
Those fantasies are for another day.
00:49:19 ►
Today I have a message to pass on to you that comes directly from Lady Ayahuasca herself. At least
00:49:26 ►
that’s my take on it. Yours might be different, but that’s what makes the world so interesting.
00:49:32 ►
In our next podcast, by the way, you’ll hear Terrence say, the truth doesn’t require your
00:49:38 ►
belief to exist, but hokum does. So here’s my warning to you. If you’ve had the honor of receiving the gratuitous grace of Lady Ayahuasca,
00:49:49 ►
well, then you’re going to probably understand this message
00:49:52 ►
as the way I’m going to try to pass it along.
00:49:55 ►
If you’ve not yet had the opportunity to be under her spell,
00:49:59 ►
then you should probably treat this as hokum,
00:50:02 ►
just a product of an overactive mind.
00:50:06 ►
And perhaps it really is.
00:50:08 ►
But nonetheless, it makes sense to me, and you’re going to have to be the judge of this yourself.
00:50:13 ►
So here’s what happened.
00:50:16 ►
The energy in our circle was a lot stronger than usual that night,
00:50:20 ►
and yet our group was experienced enough and able to hold the energy well within the circle of our friends
00:50:26 ►
that were sitting together in complete darkness, as is our tradition,
00:50:31 ►
and listening to our dear Iowa scarrow sing some beautiful acaros to the accompaniment of flutes,
00:50:37 ►
and even our own voices joined in from time to time when the plants so moved us.
00:50:42 ►
from time to time when the plants so moved us.
00:50:48 ►
And I was gliding along on that lucid plane that manifests itself, you know,
00:50:50 ►
shortly after the light show ends.
00:50:55 ►
I was trying to sort out the issues I’d raised as I focused on my evening’s intention,
00:50:57 ►
but I wasn’t really getting anywhere, you know.
00:51:01 ►
I was just stuck in one of those crazy negative loops that you get into sometimes if you’re not careful.
00:51:03 ►
So I was trying to get out of that loop when we entered into one of the several minute
00:51:08 ►
long periods of absolute silence that we occasionally punctuate the evening with.
00:51:14 ►
That particular time, the silence just hit me like it was a strong wind and instantly
00:51:20 ►
my mind was just crystal clear.
00:51:23 ►
Not a thought in it.
00:51:23 ►
instantly my mind was just crystal clear.
00:51:24 ►
Not a thought in it.
00:51:27 ►
And I don’t know how long I remained like that,
00:51:32 ►
but a voice came from my left and broke the silence and said,
00:51:35 ►
The future ain’t what it used to be.
00:51:39 ►
The future ain’t what it used to be.
00:51:43 ►
And in an instant, my mind began to laugh, and as the cosmic giggle expanded, it felt as if it was just wrapping itself around me, and then it suddenly squeezed me, and I got it.
00:51:53 ►
All of a sudden, I got it.
00:51:54 ►
And I think some of you can relate to those kind of moments.
00:52:06 ►
beginning to explore the realm of the psychedelic, if that nonsensical insane rap doesn’t scare you away with its total lack of what’s commonly called reality, then maybe you’ve come to
00:52:11 ►
the right place.
00:52:13 ►
And for those of you who have been encouraging me to tell a few of my own tales, well, maybe
00:52:19 ►
now you can see why I hesitate.
00:52:21 ►
To be honest, I find most trip accounts to be not very interesting, except for the bad
00:52:26 ►
trips.
00:52:27 ►
I like to read them and learn what not to do.
00:52:30 ►
Anyway, even I can see how this fits into the hokum category, and I was there.
00:52:35 ►
So, for me, this really happened, and my words don’t even come close to describing what took
00:52:41 ►
place.
00:52:43 ►
So, I’ll dispense with the how I got this message for you, and I’ll just pass it along as best
00:52:49 ►
I can.
00:52:51 ►
Well, the first thing I got was a profound insight to that quirky little saying, the
00:52:58 ►
future ain’t what it used to be.
00:53:01 ►
Of course, if the future remains what it used to be, then we’re totally screwed.
00:53:06 ►
Our only hope as a species is to change course. And that’s when Lady Ayahuasca began to speak.
00:53:12 ►
Here’s what she said, as best as I can remember it. The people who are listening to these
00:53:19 ►
podcasts are beginning to understand that the Hopi prophecy that says, we are the ones we have been waiting for,
00:53:27 ►
not only refers to each of you,
00:53:31 ►
you’re also beginning to wake up to the fact that you’ve incarnated in this time and place
00:53:35 ►
for a very specific reason.
00:53:37 ►
A reason that we’re all probably still really trying hard to uncover.
00:53:42 ►
And she went on to say that your instincts are probably a lot more accurate right now than your reason.
00:53:48 ►
And by the way, she said you should probably start expecting synchronicities to appear in your lives almost every day.
00:53:56 ►
She went on to say, please tell them that each and every one of them,
00:54:02 ►
and it was very clear that it was a specific each and every one of them, and it was very clear that it was a specific each and
00:54:06 ►
every one of them, is vitally important right now.
00:54:10 ►
As Ralph Abraham pointed out, you know, in normal times we should all go out and have
00:54:14 ►
fun and make piles of money, but these are not ordinary times, and this is where she
00:54:20 ►
got into a discussion of safety.
00:54:23 ►
And I won’t go into all the details,
00:54:25 ►
but I was given a review of the lives of four of my very close friends
00:54:29 ►
during the past nine months.
00:54:32 ►
All of them are dead now.
00:54:34 ►
Two were suicides, and the other two had accidents with our sacred medicines.
00:54:39 ►
None of them should be dead right now,
00:54:40 ►
and each one of them was vitally important.
00:54:44 ►
Now all we have to learn from is their mistakes,
00:54:46 ►
because that’s all they have left to give this enterprise
00:54:49 ►
that we’re now so deeply engaged in.
00:54:53 ►
The point was that these were all highly experienced psychonauts,
00:54:57 ►
and all were over 40 years old.
00:54:59 ►
Right now, of course, our little clan is still in a state of shock over these deaths,
00:55:04 ►
but believe me, we have all abandoned any casual attitude we had about these substances
00:55:09 ►
because we found out that a casual attitude really will cause casualties.
00:55:14 ►
So that part of the message was clear.
00:55:17 ►
Always get as much information about the experience you are about to have as you can
00:55:21 ►
and start an Arrowid site.
00:55:23 ►
That’s www.erowid.org.
00:55:28 ►
Arrowwood.org.
00:55:29 ►
I know almost all of the people involved in the Arrowwood project,
00:55:34 ►
and I can’t speak highly enough about them.
00:55:37 ►
Arrowwood.org is truly an impeccable website, in my humble opinion.
00:55:43 ►
Now, I know that I’ve talked about safety before, and I’ll continue to talk about it in future podcasts, Thank you. possible to put into words. They’re truly ineffable. And it’s as much
00:56:05 ►
more than just a simple feeling.
00:56:08 ►
It’s a deep grokking
00:56:09 ►
if you know what I mean.
00:56:12 ►
And I’m pretty sure that you do
00:56:14 ►
actually.
00:56:15 ►
The message really did seem to be
00:56:18 ►
directed personally to you,
00:56:20 ►
to each and every one of you.
00:56:22 ►
Now I’m going to stop here because I don’t want
00:56:24 ►
to keep on going in this airy-fairy mode,
00:56:27 ►
but to be honest, it makes me uncomfortable
00:56:29 ►
because I know it sounds like all that New Age stuff that I can’t really stand.
00:56:33 ►
So let me say this another way.
00:56:35 ►
Forget the experience I had the other night.
00:56:37 ►
I’ll just say this from me to you.
00:56:40 ►
And hey, maybe I should warn you.
00:56:43 ►
You ought to take everything I say with a grain of salt.
00:56:46 ►
You should probably know that I’ve kissed the Blarney Stone on more than one occasion.
00:56:51 ►
I’ve been wrong a lot more than I’ve been right in my life.
00:56:53 ►
So you’ve had a fair warning now about that.
00:56:57 ►
But this isn’t Blarney. This is from my heart.
00:57:01 ►
And my personal belief is that, yes, this is it.
00:57:06 ►
It really is it. We’re actually here for the big one, and why are we the ones that are so fortunate to be here at such a
00:57:12 ►
pivotal moment in time? Well, maybe it’s because we’ve done this work for so many lifetimes
00:57:17 ►
now that we’ve earned our ringside seats for the big show that has already begun. You know,
00:57:23 ►
I think it’s hard to deny this if you really spent much time working and thinking about this issue,
00:57:30 ►
but the human species is now poised on the rim of a new chaotic attractor.
00:57:36 ►
And I don’t think it’s going to take much to tip this human slinky of consciousness into a new and improved basin of attraction.
00:57:44 ►
You know, there’s been a lot of talk about the hundredth monkey coming along, and personally
00:57:49 ►
I don’t think it’s even going to take that much.
00:57:51 ►
You know, there’s a famous metaphor in chaos theory, which is what I believe is currently
00:57:57 ►
governing our state of affairs right now on this little planet.
00:58:01 ►
So according to this metaphor, the flapping of butterflies’ wings in the Amazon
00:58:06 ►
rainforest can actually be the initial event in a cascade of events that eventually causes
00:58:12 ►
a hurricane. And I believe that the metaphor also works for all of you who are joining
00:58:19 ►
us here in the Psychedelic Salon. I think it would be wonderful if one of you becomes
00:58:23 ►
that hundredth butterfly, you know, the one who gives our species its final little push that begins the next great stage in the evolution of our species.
00:58:33 ►
I really hope it’s one of you.
00:58:35 ►
And together, maybe it could be all of us giving it that little push.
00:58:39 ►
So now I’ll bet you guys who wanted some personal stuff from me are sorry, you know.
00:58:45 ►
Don’t ask an Irishman to tell a story unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.
00:58:50 ►
In my case, I hope you all keep in mind the fact that everything I know right now could very well be wrong.
00:58:58 ►
It’s happened to me before.
00:59:00 ►
Back in the 80s, before I first discovered MDMA, I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer.
00:59:07 ►
Today I’m still Irish, but no longer do I believe any of that bullshit I believed back then.
00:59:13 ►
Hardly any of it.
00:59:15 ►
My track record on having an E-line to the truth really isn’t that good.
00:59:21 ►
The only really good advice I can give you is to experience these things for yourself.
00:59:27 ►
That’s the big difference between religion
00:59:30 ►
and a psychedelic experience.
00:59:32 ►
One requires a belief
00:59:34 ►
and the other is literally an experience.
00:59:37 ►
I don’t know about you,
00:59:39 ►
but I’ll take experience over belief any day.
00:59:42 ►
Well, that should be about enough for now.
00:59:44 ►
I want to thank you for being here again,
00:59:47 ►
and I look forward to joining with you
00:59:49 ►
to be sure that the future ain’t what it used to be.
00:59:53 ►
Jacques, Cordell, and Wells,
00:59:55 ►
better known as Chateau Hayouk,
00:59:57 ►
thanks again for the use of your music,
00:59:59 ►
and we’re all looking forward to the release of your new CD,
01:00:03 ►
which I understand is almost ready right now.
01:00:05 ►
So thanks again, and thanks to you, dear Terrence.
01:00:09 ►
Thank you for being you.
01:00:11 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:00:16 ►
Be well, my friends.