Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

In just 50 minutes, Terence McKenna talks about how great cultures can lose their way, transforming machine-elves, the story of psychedelic psychotherapy, the Balkanization of epistemology, the UFO community as a social phenomenon, the role of psychedelics in the world corporate state, nanotechnology, time machines and the singularity… . See if you can keep up with this Niagara of ideas.

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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

Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:29

Well, we’re slowly coming to the end of this series of Terrence McKenna raps.

00:00:34

If you’re joining us for the first time, I guess I should let you know that this is the ninth in what looks like it’s going to be a series of ten podcasts of soundbites from

00:00:39

a workshop Terrence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998.

00:00:43

shop Terence McKenna gave in the summer of 1998.

00:00:50

When we left him in the last podcast, Terence was waxing eloquent about what happens to a seeker once she or he has found the magical essence of a true psychedelic experience.

00:00:57

And as most of you already know, once you have ingested a large dose of, say, psychedelic

00:01:04

mushrooms for the first time,

00:01:06

well, there’s simply no turning back after that moment.

00:01:10

You know, because from that moment on, as my friend Tony Rich once said

00:01:14

when he was keynoting an ayahuasca conference,

00:01:18

we do know what we know.

00:01:21

And now for those of you who haven’t yet had a well-guided and profound psychedelic

00:01:26

experience, there simply is no way to explain what an incredibly pure, crystalline, godlike

00:01:34

experience this is. As Terence often said, you can spend the rest of your life sweeping out the

00:01:40

ashram or following the rules of one of the paternalistic hierarchical religions

00:01:45

that are tearing this world apart.

00:01:48

Or you can simply take the red pill and experience the truth for yourself.

00:01:53

As I mentioned, I think, in the last podcast,

00:01:56

I was 42 years old before I mustered up the courage to find out if I’d been lied to.

00:02:02

And I hope it doesn’t take the rest of you so long to wake up yourselves.

00:02:06

Most of you have, otherwise you probably wouldn’t even be tuned in here, would you?

00:02:10

Well, that’s enough from me right now. Let’s listen to what the Bard McKenna has to say

00:02:15

about how a great culture can lose its way.

00:02:22

It’s a great puzzle how cultures lose their way.

00:02:26

I mean, in the 20th century, we have the example of National Socialism in Germany.

00:02:31

In the course of this weekend, we’ve talked about how Vedic India

00:02:37

was based on the total celebration of some kind of psychedelic,

00:02:42

and that it was lost, 100% lost,

00:02:47

so that, you know, there are a few pundits in India who claim they know what Soma is,

00:02:52

but nobody can produce something which performs as advertised.

00:02:58

Greater than Indra, greater than Brahma, shaper of the world, Soma. It’s pouring forth from the Soma presses,

00:03:07

gushing forth to intoxicate the multitudes.

00:03:11

Well, what kind of drug is this

00:03:13

that you can have three daily pressings

00:03:16

and intoxicate hundreds of people

00:03:19

and it has no reputation for anything

00:03:22

except the highest state of ecstasy.

00:03:25

And this goes on for 1,500 years and then bingo!

00:03:30

Nobody knows what it is, nobody makes it, nobody can find it.

00:03:34

It’s just something talked about in old books.

00:03:36

How do cultures lose their way?

00:03:39

It’s a hard thing for us to understand with our electronic obsession with preserving everything,

00:03:48

digging in colonial outhouses and cataloging the pottery shards and all this.

00:03:53

We’re savers of the past.

00:03:57

But several times in Chinese history, there have been enormous book burnings to basically dial back the cultural

00:04:07

clock to zero and start it ticking again. The burning of the Alexandrian Library was

00:04:13

an event like that in the West. I mean, there were over a million volumes in the Alexandrian

00:04:20

Library. You know, the guy who burned it said, there are two kinds of books here.

00:04:26

Those who contradict the Quran, they are heretical. And those that supplant the Quran, and they

00:04:33

are superfluous. Let it all burn together. And that was the second burning of the

00:04:39

Alexandrian Library. It was also burned by a Christian barbarian enthusiast called Alaric the Visigoth,

00:04:46

the same clown who burned Eleusis behind.

00:04:50

Yeah.

00:04:51

You.

00:04:53

I just have two brief questions.

00:04:55

The first one, I just wanted to know more about the visual puns of the machine-like elves,

00:05:06

or elf-like machines.

00:05:13

And the second question is, I know of someone who recently went to Holland and they brought back some tryptophan.

00:05:16

And I’ve read something in the literature about combining an MAO inhibitor with tryptophan.

00:05:23

And I just wanted to know if you knew anything about the effects of that or anything like that.

00:05:29

Well, I think tryptophan is an MAO inhibitor.

00:05:32

I’m not sure.

00:05:34

Tryptophan is a common amino acid.

00:05:38

If they’re thinking of starting toward DMT, I think you can start from tryptophan,

00:05:44

but I think it’s easier to go from indole.

00:05:47

As far as self-transforming elf machine puns,

00:05:52

what exactly did you want to know about them?

00:05:55

Just if you could kind of elaborate on

00:05:58

the three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional,

00:06:01

maybe give an example.

00:06:03

I know it’s kind of hard to put into words.

00:06:05

Yeah, well… four dimensional five what maybe give an example I know it’s kind of hard to put into words but yeah well

00:06:07

it’s some kind

00:06:12

of

00:06:12

of

00:06:13

transformation

00:06:15

of category

00:06:16

where things

00:06:18

are made

00:06:19

out of things

00:06:20

which are impossible

00:06:21

I mean as I said

00:06:22

how can something

00:06:23

be made out of

00:06:23

yesterday

00:06:24

consummate and hope?

00:06:27

It’s impossible to conceive of something like that.

00:06:31

And so in the presence of these puns,

00:06:34

they break down ordinary reality

00:06:37

even more than it’s broken down anyway in the DMT state.

00:06:42

It’s like, you know, it’s not enough that you’re loaded on this psychedelic

00:06:47

mega-halocenogen.

00:06:48

Now they tell you crazy jokes,

00:06:51

which you get in that state.

00:06:54

It’s sort of like the surrealists

00:06:56

used this, saw the pun

00:06:59

as a way of opening the crack

00:07:02

between the worlds.

00:07:05

And it would be a great challenge to artists to do this.

00:07:09

I mean, the surrealist I’m thinking of who certainly leaned on this was René Magritte,

00:07:16

where, you know, foreground and background trade shape

00:07:20

and outlines of things are silhouettes of other things and this sort of thing. Maybe

00:07:30

it’s a uniquely human capacity. We can argue about whether animals think or not, but I

00:07:37

don’t think anybody would give you much of an argument that they pun. There’s very little

00:07:44

evidence of that.

00:07:48

Terrence, what about psychotherapy?

00:07:51

Well, I think anything which gets people free associating

00:07:57

and talking freely

00:07:58

and making previously hidden connections

00:08:02

in their personal,

00:08:07

in their biographical material,

00:08:11

in doing that in the presence of a skilled therapist, if the therapist then practices their craft with skill,

00:08:15

it’s hard to see how that isn’t going to synergize the therapeutic process.

00:08:20

Is there a venue for that in this country?

00:08:23

You mean are there people doing it?

00:08:24

Yes.

00:08:25

Well, it’s very underground because giving people these things without an IMD is illegal

00:08:34

and here you’re dealing with people who are already self-defined as needing psychotherapy.

00:08:50

psychotherapy and but some of you may know that book the secret chief about a psychotherapist to this day those of us who know him don’t use his real name in public in the book he’s called

00:08:57

jacob but jacob was a guy who so strongly believed in psychedelics. He was a superb therapist to begin with,

00:09:07

fully credentialed.

00:09:08

And he taught hundreds of people

00:09:11

how to do psychedelic therapy.

00:09:15

And someday that story will be told

00:09:21

because I think that was the heart and soul of transpersonal psychology

00:09:30

in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

00:09:33

The joke on psychotherapy is whether you’re Jungian, Reichean, Kleinian, whatever you are,

00:09:42

one-third get better, one-third get worse, one-third stay the same.

00:09:46

Well, I don’t really think that’s true of psychedelic therapy.

00:09:51

And the psychedelic therapy, it’s arguable or it’s a complex issue

00:09:57

whether it should be used in cases where people are severely disturbed.

00:10:02

where people are severely disturbed.

00:10:07

The people who seem to profit most from psychedelics taken in the presence of psychotherapists

00:10:10

are people I would describe as the worried well.

00:10:14

You know, people who are anxious or have hit a block in their career

00:10:20

or have a relationship coming apart,

00:10:22

but these things happen to people.

00:10:22

or have a relationship coming apart,

00:10:24

but these things happen to people.

00:10:33

And, you know, I know psychotherapists who I really believe probably 95% of every psychotherapeutic session they have with somebody

00:10:39

changes a life for decades, if not forever.

00:10:53

life for decades, if not forever. It’s one of the great tragedies, and McCarthyism has been bared, and the blacklists in Hollywood, we’ve all done our mea copas for that, and

00:11:01

the Rosenbergs, and so forth and so on. But we’ve never as a society dealt with the way science and human mental health care

00:11:13

was sacrificed on the altar of government paranoia in the 60s

00:11:18

in the name of repressing psychedelic drugs.

00:11:22

I mean, there was work going on at Saskatoon in Canada with Humphrey Osmond

00:11:27

and in other places. They were curing serious lifelong alcoholism with one a single dose of

00:11:36

500 gamma of LSD in the presence of a psychotherapist. They were having incredible results, treating addiction, serious trauma, all of this stuff.

00:11:48

Well, then that just went down the tubes.

00:11:52

And the psychotherapeutic community didn’t have the political muscle or the guts or something to resist that.

00:12:01

The scientific community, which is very quick to tell government

00:12:05

and everybody else to take their hands off,

00:12:09

they can do anything they want

00:12:11

with studying human sexuality.

00:12:13

They can do anything they want

00:12:14

with animal experiments.

00:12:16

They can do anything they want.

00:12:17

Well, they just totally folded

00:12:19

on this drug thing.

00:12:21

And, you know, my brother

00:12:23

is a professional drug designer,

00:12:25

molecular chemist, and his career,

00:12:28

this whole story of his career,

00:12:30

is how unwelcome and threatened people felt

00:12:36

by having good psychochemists in their presence.

00:12:40

If you’re going into medical pharmacology,

00:12:43

stay away from psychedelics if you want to have any career at all.

00:12:47

The number of people who’ve been able to overcome those barriers and make significant careers and do research and publish,

00:12:55

you can count on the finger of one hand.

00:12:58

Is that true for the international community as well?

00:13:00

It’s not as bad, but it’s still, most of the world just doesn’t deal with it

00:13:06

I mean Germany

00:13:06

there’s some people

00:13:07

chemists

00:13:08

other people

00:13:09

interested

00:13:09

some Swiss people

00:13:11

it’s sort of

00:13:12

traditional there

00:13:13

you know

00:13:14

I mean

00:13:14

try and name

00:13:15

a psychedelic drug

00:13:17

that wasn’t invented

00:13:18

within 700 miles

00:13:19

of Berlin

00:13:20

it can’t be done

00:13:21

but

00:13:23

you know

00:13:24

the Japanese make no contribution the Japanese make no contribution.

00:13:27

The English make no contribution.

00:13:29

The French make no contribution.

00:13:32

It’s just not looked at.

00:13:35

Bizarre.

00:13:36

Because the impact, you know, if you’re a psychotherapist or a neurophysiologist, or anybody else, the impact of giving somebody 200 micrograms of LSD,

00:13:47

which is a vanishingly small amount of physical material,

00:13:52

is just stunning.

00:13:54

But it’s not been pursued.

00:13:57

Ibogaine is interesting.

00:14:00

Ibogaine is a psychoactive alkaloid that occurs in a plant,

00:14:06

Tabernanthi iboga,

00:14:12

that occurs in western Africa in the armpit of Africa in Gabon and Zaire.

00:14:23

And it’s used traditionally, although we have no record of it being used by anybody before 1850, which is kind of peculiar

00:14:25

because it looks like an ancient usage,

00:14:28

like people have been at this for thousands of years.

00:14:31

But the Portuguese have been in there since the 1430s

00:14:34

and there’s no mention of Ibogaine before 1850.

00:14:39

It’s a bush.

00:14:40

You scrape the bark.

00:14:42

You eat it.

00:14:43

You hallucinate.

00:14:46

The alkaloid is unique and psychoactive on its own.

00:14:53

The reason research is being done in this country

00:14:57

and it’s being somewhat talked about

00:14:59

is because the claim is made that it interrupts heroin

00:15:04

and cocaine addiction dramatically.

00:15:08

I wouldn’t rush to sign up for that.

00:15:12

I mean, it may. I think all psychedelics have this ability.

00:15:17

It’s not that ibogaine is a magic bullet for heroin addiction.

00:15:21

It’s that if you take a strong psychedelic and you’re an alcoholic or a junkie

00:15:27

or an abuser or fucked up in some way, it’s going to be very hard to go through that trip

00:15:35

without confronting this. And then you just say, you know, I’m killing myself or I’m making

00:15:42

the people around me unhappy and killing myself.

00:15:45

And it’s hard once you actually say these words to yourself

00:15:49

not to form what good Catholics call a purpose of amendment,

00:15:56

you know, to try and do better.

00:16:00

So, you know, people say, well, this question of are we better people?

00:16:06

I think it’s possible to be a bad person and take psychedelics,

00:16:11

but it’s rare because it requires enormous powers of denial and ego.

00:16:18

Most psychedelic people are pretty mellow because they’re used to looking at the shadow

00:16:25

and confronting the various facets of themselves and other people.

00:16:31

It’s a tolerant, gentle crowd, generally speaking.

00:16:39

If you look at the records, we have millions of people even in this country who claim to have some kind of encounter.

00:16:49

And studies of most of them that have been done have shown that they tend to be very what we would call normal people.

00:16:57

A lot of them have had no previous interest in this field at all, housewives, accountants, and so forth.

00:17:04

interest in this field at all, housewives, accountants, and so forth.

00:17:09

So from that point of view, many of them have also been scientists or people who are credentialed in some way.

00:17:15

So to dismiss them as people who have had some kind of bias in that area,

00:17:20

I think we’d have to delve into that a little bit more,

00:17:25

as I’m sure you’ve thought about.

00:17:27

Also, I just read an article that was pretty incredible, where I think a former Air Force

00:17:34

officer came forth and said that he had been responsible for planting technology from a crass saucer in major corporations in this country

00:17:49

that was eventually reverse engineered.

00:17:54

And a lot of people feel are responsible for the increased technology since World War II,

00:18:01

including computership and a lot of other things that have come about recently

00:18:07

and certainly revolutionized where we are right now.

00:18:12

So I just wanted to ask you again to…

00:18:17

Did you hear me right is what you’re wanting to say.

00:18:20

Yeah, right. I know your previous writings have been somewhat more liberal in that regard.

00:18:27

Well, first of all, let me say, I saw a flying saucer. I saw it up close.

00:18:33

I wrote about this in True Hallucination.

00:18:42

but there is are you suggesting

00:18:46

you said millions of people believe they’ve been abducted

00:18:50

are you suggesting that millions of people

00:18:53

that you believe that millions of people have been abducted

00:18:56

I didn’t say abducted

00:18:57

I said had some encounter with

00:18:59

like yourself possibly

00:19:01

oh well

00:19:02

by some encounter

00:19:04

if what we mean is that some people have felt the cosmic giggle come near,

00:19:10

I don’t think you can get through life without that happening.

00:19:14

The problem I have is, first of all, this is hard to talk about, but be worth talking about. First of all, because of my position as whatever

00:19:26

I am, I get to meet all these people off stage, so to speak. And it’s not been a confidence

00:19:35

building experience. Also, I noticed you had a tendency in your question to lead with credentials.

00:19:47

An Air Force colonel, a Navy officer, an ex-NASA scientist.

00:19:53

When I hear the phrase ex-NASA scientist, I reach for my revolver.

00:19:59

This is a kind…

00:20:00

I think what we have to…

00:20:02

First of all, nice people do not understand how mendacious, scheming, lying, and bizarre pathological people are.

00:20:12

They can’t imagine it.

00:20:14

That’s essentially what being a nice person means, is evil is a mystery to you.

00:20:21

I think that a lot of people are making a lot of money spreading anxiety.

00:20:29

Anxiety is cells.

00:20:34

And the earth change people, one by one,

00:20:38

we tick past the Edgar Cayce prophecies that don’t come true.

00:20:43

One by one, you know, now every piece of physical evidence

00:20:46

from the first 30 years of the UFO phenomenon

00:20:50

has now been shown to be fake.

00:20:53

None of those photographs stand up

00:20:55

under modern computerological deconstruction.

00:21:00

And so what I, my method for,

00:21:04

because I’m interested in the weird, the miraculous, the bizarre, the unearthly, the other,

00:21:10

but my method has been to go to the place or the person or the thing and then not believe.

00:21:20

Ask hard questions.

00:21:23

And everybody else goes and believes

00:21:26

well the truth doesn’t require your belief to exist

00:21:32

but

00:21:33

hokum does

00:21:36

hokum requires a relationship between the consumer of the hokum

00:21:41

and I’ve spent time

00:21:44

I’ve argued with Bud Hopkins, I’ve had lunch with

00:21:47

Whitley Streber, I’ve argued vociferously with John Mack, and these people are second-class

00:21:57

thinkers. You would not send them to investigate a bus accident.

00:22:08

I’m sorry that this is true.

00:22:10

I didn’t know this.

00:22:13

I assumed, as most people do,

00:22:15

that the word expert has meaning.

00:22:17

It has no meaning.

00:22:18

It’s just a piece,

00:22:20

it’s public relations flackery.

00:22:22

You’re a UFO expert if you say you’re a UFO expert.

00:22:26

And when you go into…

00:22:28

So my method has been, as I said, to kick the tires and make it real.

00:22:33

The other thing is, and people don’t like this, but to examine the messenger.

00:22:40

Is the messenger, you know, you mentioned in your question, these people are normal, run-of-the-mill type people, accountants, lawyers, so forth and so on.

00:22:54

In fact, when you look at these populations closely, they’re weird.

00:23:03

For example, the abduction population. A paper was written showing that the abduction population

00:23:10

tends to cluster in middle-aged white women of the middle class

00:23:16

who stay home.

00:23:22

Well, what is that population, folks? That’s the population of people who

00:23:28

watch more daytime TV than any of the rest of us. If our average TV consumption is five

00:23:35

and a half hours a day, this population is pulling up the slack for those of us who don’t watch and is watching 15 hours a day.

00:23:53

And this is an area where you see the newspapers being vended at the grocery store.

00:23:58

Virgin Mom 9 gives birth to alien Christ.

00:24:02

Are we all clear that this is a joke?

00:24:06

All of us, including the remedial readers and the people who just got off the boat from Somalia last week and everybody, are we all looking at

00:24:12

it through the eyes of a Harvard intellectual with a BA in English literature? I’m not sure.

00:24:19

So this is what I call the balkanization of epistemology. And part of it has to do with us all not,

00:24:28

nobody, apparently this was left out of our curriculum recently, what’s called rules of

00:24:35

evidence. You know, if you’re a lawyer, you learn what are called the rules of evidence.

00:24:41

What does a given set of facts, what do a given set of facts actually

00:24:46

mean? And in this UFO game, people, first of all, they repeat things, never with citation.

00:24:57

They say, did you see that article the other night or that thing on Channel 6 a few weeks

00:25:01

ago about this thing that happened in Argentina. And it’s never accompanied by citation.

00:25:09

So it’s a multi-networked game of telephone

00:25:13

where these rumors move out

00:25:16

and are endlessly adumbrated

00:25:19

and changed around.

00:25:22

And all for the purpose of filling in people’s blank spaces.

00:25:28

And I don’t like the…

00:25:31

See, I think there are two phenomena.

00:25:33

I’m not saying there aren’t strange lights in the sky,

00:25:37

that we may not know what they are,

00:25:39

and that they could be anything.

00:25:41

But that’s subject A.

00:25:42

Subject B is the UFO community as a social phenomena. It’s a

00:25:48

paranoid community. These myths that are being propagated are always myths of disempowerment.

00:25:56

It’s that they came to Babylon and gave us an alphabet because we couldn’t think it up ourselves.

00:26:02

It’s that they’re giving us fiber optic technology and computer chips because we couldn’t think it up ourselves. It’s that they’re giving us fiber optic technology and computer chips

00:26:06

because we couldn’t think it up ourselves.

00:26:09

It’s always about poor humanity receiving the largesse of the space brothers

00:26:15

and all we have to do is trade them human fetal tissue and some other stuff

00:26:20

and they’ll be happy.

00:26:32

other stuff and they’ll be happy. It’s a backward fantasy that the media has drummed up into a hysteria.

00:26:48

And if you really care about it, if it really speaks to you, then you must go and investigate it. You cannot understand it by consuming it from the media. Because all these people that you hear about, Jacques Vallée and Bud Hopkins and

00:26:56

John Mack, the gods of this, do you think they would stand out if they were sitting here in this

00:27:02

room? Do you think if we had them in front of us that these would be towering geniuses

00:27:06

or men of deeper insight than you and I?

00:27:10

Get real!

00:27:12

It’s just the New Age book circuit.

00:27:15

It’s just marketing and people making careers.

00:27:18

Not that they’re insincere,

00:27:20

but that they’re limited,

00:27:22

as you and I are limited,

00:27:23

by our understanding

00:27:25

and our past history

00:27:27

I was invited a few years ago

00:27:31

to speak at a big UFO conclave in LA

00:27:34

and I had never been to one

00:27:36

and I thought

00:27:38

as I’ll bet most of you think

00:27:40

who have a moderate interest in this

00:27:42

that if you go to one of these things

00:27:44

what you will find

00:27:45

is a whole bunch of sincere people

00:27:48

who have had strange experiences

00:27:50

and who are trying to figure it out together.

00:27:55

Not, that is not what you find.

00:27:58

What you find is booths.

00:28:02

The Urantia Book.

00:28:04

Commander Rama. The Raelians,

00:28:08

Billy Meyer, the Palladians,

00:28:12

the Roswell incident.

00:28:13

And these people operate side by side,

00:28:16

having coffee, holding smokers for each other,

00:28:21

and so forth and so on,

00:28:21

with no sense of cognitive dissonance whatsoever.

00:28:27

It doesn’t ever strike them

00:28:30

that if the Raelians are right,

00:28:33

then how can Commander Rama be right?

00:28:35

And if he’s right,

00:28:37

how can Billy Meyer and the police…

00:28:39

This doesn’t come up as an issue.

00:28:42

And you realize these people are having a lot of fun,

00:28:47

but they are not, this is a support group

00:28:51

for some kind of fallout from a religious hysteria.

00:28:56

This is not about the study of strange lights seen in the sky at night.

00:29:01

And if you try to talk about that, people will just look at you like,

00:29:04

you know, who let you in uh you know it’s now all about channelings and prophecies and the rise of

00:29:13

atlantis and the beam from the center of the galactic whoop-de-doo and the photon belt and

00:29:20

the coming of malchut sedek if matreya will get out of the way, and on and on and on.

00:29:26

And I find the only defense against this is the conjuring rod of irony and reason.

00:29:35

You know, if it seems absurd, it probably is absurd.

00:29:41

Now, I’m not saying that the world isn’t strange.

00:29:46

I’m actually saying that the world is stranger than these cheerful UFO enthusiasts

00:29:53

can even begin to imagine.

00:29:56

The stars are so diffuse in space and time,

00:30:02

the evolutionary time spans available to life

00:30:05

so vast that the idea

00:30:08

that the alien intelligence

00:30:10

will communicate through

00:30:14

sparkling-eyed, blue-eyed, middle-aged women

00:30:17

with bold haircuts and muumus

00:30:20

is mind-boggling to me.

00:30:24

And so it’s just a matter of, you know, how do you tell?

00:30:30

And I have this argument with Ralph all the time, and Rupert,

00:30:34

because they’re both softer than I am.

00:30:36

And I’m getting more hard-boiled in my old age

00:30:39

because I see how a lot of people take all this stuff much too seriously

00:30:45

and can’t even really think straight.

00:30:48

I read an interesting essay a few months ago in a book about all this by Douglas Stillings,

00:30:55

and he said, when you encounter somebody with a strange belief,

00:31:00

we have been asking the wrong question.

00:31:04

The question we’ve been asking is

00:31:06

why do you believe this?

00:31:09

wrong question

00:31:10

the question we should be asking is

00:31:13

why do you believe

00:31:15

that you believe this?

00:31:18

because the interesting thing is

00:31:20

these people don’t act differently

00:31:22

than you and me

00:31:23

somebody can claim they were

00:31:25

an abductee and they did this and they did that. They don’t act the way I would act if

00:31:31

I were abducted. If I were abducted, I would come apart at the seams. Do you realize the

00:31:37

implications of being abducted by an alien spacecraft? I don’t think I would be satisfied

00:31:42

to just tell my story to John Mack and become

00:31:45

case number 232 and then sit back and let him handle the public relations fallout of it.

00:31:51

These people do not behave as though their story was true. They behave as though it’s a story.

00:31:59

And so somehow what we’re dealing with here is clashes of epistemic values.

00:32:08

The Carlos Castaneda phenomenon was a good example.

00:32:12

Half the people who want to talk about Castaneda want to talk about is it true or not, or was this guy some kind of a charlatan?

00:32:15

The other half says, what kind of a question is that?

00:32:19

You don’t even understand the issue.

00:32:22

It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not. Well, without taking

00:32:26

sides on that issue, notice that these two groups don’t have much to negotiate because

00:32:32

for them the very notion of truth has taken on a different meaning. One is saying the

00:32:39

truth of myth is truth, and the other is saying the truth of myth is a bullshit concept.

00:32:46

We want to know if this is the truth or not.

00:32:51

Yeah.

00:32:54

About psychotherapeutic use

00:32:55

of psychedelics

00:32:57

and the lack thereof

00:32:59

in this country and in other countries.

00:33:01

Do you foresee an increase of that

00:33:03

with the decline of the nation state

00:33:07

and the rise of the World Wide Web as you’ve sort of laid it out?

00:33:13

A rise in psychedelic therapy?

00:33:15

Well, because from what I understood of what you were saying,

00:33:20

one of the main reasons why that’s been marginalized and pushed under

00:33:26

and scheduled to the degree that it’s been scheduled is

00:33:29

because it doesn’t serve the nation state to have psychedelic activity going on

00:33:37

on a large scale.

00:33:40

And so if nation states in the next 15 to 20 years go on the decline

00:33:49

and are marginalized in their power and scope,

00:33:52

and either corporations or global community take over,

00:33:57

do you foresee a rise in psychedelic use in the medical world?

00:34:03

Yeah, I think so. I think, you know,

00:34:06

we talked about the world corporate

00:34:08

entity that’s emerging,

00:34:11

that the world is being replaced

00:34:12

from 200 nations

00:34:14

to a thousand corporations.

00:34:18

The values are very different.

00:34:22

Corporations are not particularly

00:34:24

interested in suppressing dissent in quite

00:34:27

the same way that nations are because corporations don’t argue their existence from a philosophical

00:34:35

position. The other thing is corporations hate unregulated markets. And so I can imagine, I mean, drugs are a commodity,

00:34:47

an enormous money-making engine.

00:34:51

And it would be better for everyone,

00:34:54

cynics, users, purists, manufacturers, physicians, governments,

00:35:01

if drugs were simply an ordinary commodity.

00:35:04

governments, if drugs were simply an ordinary commodity.

00:35:11

And if abuse of drugs was treated like any other mental aberration,

00:35:18

simply you would be dumped into the mental health care system for treatment rather than criminalized and humiliated.

00:35:22

It would be much cheaper for health care management

00:35:26

and the legal system

00:35:27

to treat it this way.

00:35:29

Essentially, the situation now,

00:35:31

the reason drugs are so severely repressed

00:35:34

when it’s such a money-losing proposition

00:35:37

to do that

00:35:38

is because the nation-state

00:35:39

is carrying out a vestigial obligation

00:35:43

to the church,

00:35:44

to Central European Calvinism.

00:35:46

I mean, the reason drugs are illegal is because they’re evil, fundamentally.

00:35:52

Well, I think the corporate state will move beyond such theological claptrap

00:35:58

and just say, well, they may be evil, but so is pornography.

00:36:02

So are a lot of things that we traffic in with great gusto.

00:36:09

The shift to the world corporate state is an ambiguous thing. The nation state used

00:36:16

war as an instrument of national policy. Corporations don’t do that. I mean, mean yes there is a large trade in armaments

00:36:26

and those arms are created by corporations

00:36:28

but armament trade is a small percentage

00:36:32

of overall global economic activity

00:36:36

the world could live without corporations

00:36:39

that produce armaments

00:36:41

and so could capitalism

00:36:43

the world corporate state is unfriendly to racism.

00:36:47

In fact, it doesn’t like any kind of boundary definitions in the customer class.

00:36:53

It wants everybody to think of themselves as Joe Normal

00:36:57

with the buying patterns and tastes of Joe Normal.

00:37:03

What are the other differences?

00:37:06

Well, it’s non-ideological.

00:37:09

You know, all the world corporate state wants to do

00:37:12

is pick your pocket,

00:37:13

which when you think of the political agendas

00:37:16

we’ve survived in the 20th century,

00:37:19

somebody who just wants to pick your pocket

00:37:21

doesn’t exactly sound too bad.

00:37:24

Yeah.

00:37:24

Yeah, that’s a difficult question

00:37:26

because when you have corporations,

00:37:29

you have things that have to be manufactured.

00:37:33

I’ve been dealing with the uprising in Chiapas.

00:37:36

You know, somebody has to make the stuff.

00:37:40

There is a point where there are uprisings

00:37:42

and where it is shut down,

00:37:47

where there is great violence that occurs.

00:37:50

We don’t hear about it.

00:37:52

You mean violence at the behest of corporatism?

00:37:56

Indeed.

00:37:57

Yes, but it’s nothing like erasing the cities of Europe by aerial bombing or something like that.

00:38:06

I agree, there’s a low level of…

00:38:09

It may be low level.

00:38:10

It seems fairly high level where, you know, a company will go in and say,

00:38:15

you know, Guatemala is becoming socialist.

00:38:20

Let’s go to the law firm.

00:38:22

We’ll hire the lawyers.

00:38:24

They’ll get in touch with the political people,

00:38:26

and we’ll go down there and assassinate whoever,

00:38:31

so that United Fruit can continue.

00:38:33

That’s just an easy example.

00:38:36

Well, if assassination is a tool of corporate statecraft,

00:38:42

I’ve always sort of leaned toward assassination.

00:38:45

Have you ever noticed how few innocent people

00:38:48

get ground up in assassinations?

00:38:51

I mean, if someone had assassinated Saddam Hussein,

00:38:55

those hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers

00:38:57

who were buried alive in the pits in the desert

00:39:01

might have lived to tell the tale to their grandchildren.

00:39:07

But governments are horrified by assassination.

00:39:09

Oh Lord, no, you would never do that.

00:39:15

The entire fabric of diplomatic understandings established since the Congress of Vienna would come unglued.

00:39:17

Far better to conscript a million 18-year-olds and send them off to try to kill the leader by the fair rules of international

00:39:29

diplomacy. Capitalism is so triumphant now that its salvation will probably have to be

00:39:42

self-generated. In other words, it’s not going to come from slave uprisings

00:39:48

or a papal insignical,

00:39:50

or it’s simply that capitalism is going to have to grow smarter.

00:39:56

And they’re trying to do this.

00:39:58

And once they smarten beyond a certain point,

00:40:01

they will carry out what is essentially a Marxist analysis of their

00:40:05

own situation and realize we can’t keep doing this because the open system of exploitable

00:40:13

natural resources that we are assuming doesn’t exist anymore.

00:40:18

And we can’t lift everybody to the level of the American middle class without cutting

00:40:24

down every tree

00:40:25

and digging every vein of metal on the planet.

00:40:30

Now there are always,

00:40:32

as I’ve tried to stress in this weekend,

00:40:35

there are always technological fixes.

00:40:39

And it may be that there will be a technological fix for this as well.

00:40:43

One thing we haven’t talked about at all,

00:40:47

maybe it’s been mentioned but certainly not unpacked,

00:40:53

is nanotechnology.

00:40:56

You know, nanotechnology is something as mind-boggling

00:41:00

as the internet or psychedelic drugs,

00:41:03

and it isn’t exactly related to either one of them.

00:41:08

You all know what I’m talking about.

00:41:11

I’m talking about these people, many of whom are clustered down in Cambridge and Boston,

00:41:19

who propose that we’re on the brink of an entirely new way of making things, that things can

00:41:28

be made from the atoms up in chemical soups, that everything should be as small as possible.

00:41:38

And these are people who have gotten, you know, 1,500 steam engines onto a one-centimeter chip.

00:41:48

The cover of Scientific American a few years ago had this one-centimeter chip with over 1,500 steam engines on it.

00:41:59

More steam engines than were operating in England at the height of the age of steam.

00:42:05

Now, of course, each one of these steam engines produced one ten-thousandth of a millinewton of force.

00:42:12

Not much, but at the molecular level, enough to kick a tiny molecular gear into action

00:42:21

or throw a switch or something like that.

00:42:29

Nanotechnology is coming. It’s so mind-boggling that they haven’t spent any money on public relations, in other words, getting the people

00:42:34

ready. So very few people realize how close this is. I mean, the AI may be off in the mists of time. Practical nanotechnology is

00:42:48

already here. They make electric motors, 16 of which can fit inside a human hair. And

00:42:58

what’s envisioned is a world of aerosol dusts that are architected machines

00:43:05

that are creeping over our bodies, through our bloodstream,

00:43:10

in our houses, inside our larger machines.

00:43:14

And everything is made of diamond,

00:43:16

because diamond is the easiest material to manipulate at the atomic level.

00:43:22

at the atomic level.

00:43:26

The holy grail of nanotechnology is something called a matter compiler.

00:43:31

A matter compiler has its nose in a muddy ditch

00:43:35

or an ocean estuary or something like that.

00:43:39

And it essentially does to matter what Photoshop 5.0 does to images.

00:43:50

Anything you want.

00:43:52

So what’s being brought in is a kind of sludge-like raw feed.

00:43:58

It could be, in fact, in the nanotechnological future,

00:44:01

the great real estate bonanzas will be toxic dumps, because

00:44:07

there you will send the nanotechnologically designed bacterial machines into the dumps,

00:44:14

and they’ll bring out the gold, the platinum, the phosphorus, the arsenic, atom by atom,

00:44:21

and stack it up for you. You can have a closed resource cycle based on the standing crop of already extracted metals.

00:44:30

People talk about abandoning agriculture.

00:44:34

Abandoning agriculture because the populations of India and China

00:44:39

will be fed out of matter compilers that turn seawater directly into rice.

00:44:45

This could be done.

00:44:47

How do we feel about that?

00:44:49

Are we willing to give up agriculture

00:44:51

if it means an entirely artificial food cycle for us,

00:44:56

but the restoration of millions of acres of forest and prairie

00:45:01

and meadow and grassland?

00:45:03

These kinds of choices lie in the immediate future.

00:45:11

When do time machines arrive for the future?

00:45:16

The question of time machines.

00:45:18

Well, this relates to the speculation about the singularity.

00:45:30

speculation about the singularity. You know, one scenario for envisioning the singularity at the end of time would be, here we’ve had this graph which for millions of years has

00:45:37

described the unfolding of process. And then at 2012

00:45:46

at this certain date in 2012

00:45:48

it reaches infinity

00:45:50

or it stops working

00:45:52

in any case it indicates

00:45:54

novelty becomes maximized

00:45:56

at infinity and then there is no

00:45:58

more time

00:45:59

trying to imagine

00:46:02

various scenarios which would

00:46:04

destroy time or obsolete time.

00:46:07

One is a technology for moving through time.

00:46:12

The literal annihilation of time by vehicular traversing of it.

00:46:21

Well, time machines have a checkered intellectual history,

00:46:26

some people claim with good reason they’re impossible.

00:46:31

Other people claim they’re only impossible under certain conditions.

00:46:36

What’s usually put against a time machine theory is what’s called the grandfather paradox.

00:46:43

The grandfather paradox is

00:46:45

if I had a time machine

00:46:47

and I traveled into the past,

00:46:50

I could kill my grandfather.

00:46:52

Then I wouldn’t exist.

00:46:54

Then I wouldn’t have a time machine.

00:46:56

Then I couldn’t travel into the past.

00:46:58

So how could I kill my grandfather?

00:47:00

So this apparent logical contradiction

00:47:04

is used to say that travel is impossible.

00:47:08

Notice it doesn’t restrict travel forward, in the forward direction.

00:47:14

In quantum physics, it’s routine to handle, to send charges and qualities

00:47:22

backwards through time in these equations.

00:47:25

And people have always said,

00:47:26

well, it’s just a mathematical convention.

00:47:28

It doesn’t really mean anything in the real world.

00:47:31

Well, but how do we know?

00:47:33

We don’t know.

00:47:35

As we approach the speed of light,

00:47:38

according to Einstein’s theory of relativity,

00:47:41

time slows to nothingness.

00:47:44

At the speed of light, time is at zero, eternity.

00:47:49

If you were a photon, you would have no notion of time at all, but the universe would appear

00:47:56

to be aging wildly around you, but you would have no sense of time passing. Are time travel technologies possible? A lot

00:48:10

of people are beginning to think so. Some of them require almost godlike technologies.

00:48:16

In other words, if you could spin a cylinder whose radius was that of the planet Saturn and whose longitudinal length was ten times that,

00:48:28

if you could spin it at the speed of light

00:48:31

and you traversed its perpendicular axis,

00:48:34

theory indicates you would be spun into the past.

00:48:39

Well, we can’t even dream of technologies like that.

00:48:45

But it seems to indicate that in principle these things can be done.

00:48:48

Some people believe there are black holes in the universe

00:48:53

or wormholes that might be potential doorways to other dimensions.

00:48:59

The wormhole theorists calculate what kind of energies it would take

00:49:05

to pry open the mouth of one of these wormholes

00:49:08

and hold it open long enough to push some information down it.

00:49:12

Well, it’s materials, orders of magnitude,

00:49:17

more tensile in their strength than anything we can produce,

00:49:22

but still not inconceivable in some far-flung future.

00:49:30

My notion about a time machine is that it’s not what it looks like.

00:49:37

If you had a time machine and you used it and it worked,

00:49:43

I think it would actually have the effect

00:49:45

of causing the rest of the history

00:49:47

of the local universe to happen instantly

00:49:49

because it would collapse

00:49:52

the local assumption

00:49:56

of a symmetrically evolving dimension.

00:50:01

What I mean by that is

00:50:03

in order to keep the grandfather

00:50:06

well, here’s the idea. Suppose you had a time machine

00:50:11

that you had never used. You were the inventor of the first time machine.

00:50:15

And on a certain day you used it and sailed off

00:50:19

into time, the future. Well, then the presumption

00:50:23

would be, since’re in the inventor of

00:50:25

the first time machine that just moments after that event time machines from all

00:50:32

points in the future would converge on your departure point. People who would

00:50:38

come back to see the first voyage into time. This is presuming a universe where you can travel back into

00:50:46

time, but only as far as the invention of the first time machine. This is the kind of

00:50:54

universe I think we’re living in, for no good reason other than this is what the mushroom

00:50:59

told me. I said, you know, is time travel possible? And it said yes. And I said into the future

00:51:06

and it said yes. And I said into the past and it said only as far into the past as the

00:51:12

moment of the invention of the first time machine. I said, So in that kind of a universe, when you sail back in time and get to keep

00:51:34

the grandfather paradox from happening, I think all the rest of time happens instantly.

00:51:40

So it becomes more like a god whistle, more like some kind of evolutionary fast-forward button,

00:51:47

where you’re somewhere in the historical continuum messing around with technology and society and this and that.

00:51:55

Then you invent a time machine and zip, the rest of history happens in the next few milliseconds as the whole thing goes nova.

00:52:07

Well, how was that for a wild ride?

00:52:10

I only noted the major topics that Terrence touched on in those brief 50 minutes or so,

00:52:16

and what I wrote down was how a great culture can lose its way,

00:52:21

self-transforming machine elves,

00:52:24

the secret chief in the story

00:52:26

of psychedelic psychotherapy, UFOs and the UFO community as a social phenomenon, the

00:52:33

balkanization of epistemology, psychedelics in the age of the world corporate state, nanotechnology,

00:52:41

time machines and the singularity.

00:52:44

And when you realize that he’s not using notes,

00:52:47

that this is all coming right off the top of his head, well, to me, it’s even more amazing.

00:52:53

And his use of the language, I think, is exceptional. But that was Terrence. By the way,

00:52:59

have you been thinking about synchronicity since I mentioned it last week?

00:53:07

Well, here’s one that happened just a few minutes ago.

00:53:14

I just finished editing the talk that you just heard and was thinking about how far out Terrence could get,

00:53:23

talking about time travel and stuff like that, but from a rational, scientific, and yet very psychedelically philosophical point of view.

00:53:28

And right then I decided to check my email before I recorded this segment,

00:53:32

and as I was waiting for it to download, the thought popped into my head that I’d really give most anything right now to be able to hear a fireside chat

00:53:37

between Terrence and the man I consider to be really right out there

00:53:42

on the far edge of consciousness research,. That’s my good friend Zoe Seven.

00:53:47

And you probably know the rest of the story by now, don’t you?

00:53:51

Yep, the last message to come in was from Zoe.

00:53:55

Don’t you love it when things like that happen?

00:53:59

When a little synchronicity like that happens to me,

00:54:02

I explore it a bit to see if there’s a message

00:54:05

somewhere in there for me. So I read Zoe’s email with that in mind and noticed that one of the

00:54:11

things he mentioned was a website that I suspect most of you have probably already heard about.

00:54:17

It’s David J. Brown’s site, Mavericks of the Mind, and you can find it at www.mavericksofthemind.com.

00:54:27

It’s an interesting site that has interviews of many of the early luminaries of the psychedelic

00:54:32

movement, and in the interview with Terrence, I found the following McKennaism.

00:54:39

He said, we’re moving towards something very much like eternal dreaming.

00:54:44

We’re moving towards something very much like eternal dreaming.

00:54:47

Going into the imagination and staying there.

00:54:51

And that would be like a lucid dream that knew no end.

00:54:54

But what had a tight, simple solution.

00:55:00

The psychedelics, the near-death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries.

00:55:06

All of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we’ve been living in this dimension.

00:55:12

I like that, don’t you? So thank you, Zoe7, for leading me to that. And by the way, if you haven’t

00:55:20

read Zoe’s first book, Into the Void, you might want to do that soon.

00:55:28

I think it’s probably already close to becoming a classic.

00:55:33

In fact, if you go to our palenquenorte.org site,

00:55:37

that’s the corner of matrixmasters.com where these podcasts originate.

00:56:05

So if you go to palenquenorte.org starting to reach so many of you now because of some extra mojo we got from Zoe way back there in the beginning, huh? Anyway, after you read Into the Void, you’ll probably want to read his next

00:56:11

book, which has just been published, and in a few weeks we’ll be able to get a copy shipped from

00:56:17

here in the U.S. Until now, the books were only shipping from Argentina, and the shipping cost was too high for most of us, yours truly included.

00:56:27

So Zoe has fixed that, and soon Back from the Void will also be available in the U.S. with a very reasonable shipping price.

00:56:37

And Zoe’s main website, by the way, is www.zoe7.com.

00:56:50

Zoe7.com Before long, he’ll have a couple of new sites operating as well.

00:56:53

I’ll be sure to let you know when they come online.

00:56:58

So I guess I should say stay tuned if that’s a thing you can say in a podcast.

00:57:05

One other little announcement I’d like to make is that Dr. Grob would like to get the word out that he still needs seven more volunteers for his psilocybin study at Harbor UCLA Medical Center.

00:57:12

Now, before you get too excited, I need to tell you that the selection criteria is so strict for this study

00:57:19

that you definitely don’t want to qualify.

00:57:22

You see, the participant population is restricted to stage 4 cancer patients who are also suffering

00:57:29

from anxiety.

00:57:31

And since stage 4 means terminal, less than a year to live, it seems to me that you’d

00:57:36

have to be a little anxious.

00:57:38

And you can get the details about this study at www.canceranxietystudy.org.

00:57:46

So if you know of anyone who might meet the criteria,

00:57:49

it would be nice of you to pass that URL along to them.

00:57:54

Well, the next podcast will bring this series of Terrence McKenna talks to a close.

00:58:00

Following that, we’ll hear the talk that Nick Sand gave at the Mind States Conference in 2001,

00:58:07

shortly after he was released from prison.

00:58:10

Those of you who experienced the 60s might know of Nick,

00:58:13

maybe not by name, but by the name of his most famous product, Orange Sunshine.

00:58:19

Well, I guess that about does it for today.

00:58:22

I really do appreciate you joining us all here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:58:26

And I want to thank you for all the kind emails you’ve sent.

00:58:30

If I ever get caught up again after this move I’m in the middle of right now,

00:58:34

I might even be able to answer some of you.

00:58:36

But if you don’t hear back from me right away, it isn’t because I don’t care.

00:58:41

I do read everything that comes in.

00:58:43

So thanks again to all of you for being here.

00:58:46

And thanks again to Chateau Hayouk

00:58:48

for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:58:52

For now, this is Lorenzo,

00:58:55

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:58:58

Be well, my friends.