Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
In this last of a ten part series, Terence McKenna closes this workshop with some thoughts about psychedelics as time machines, the forest of the Internet, the erotization of our technology, a form of circus called the DMT experience, and ending with some practical tools you can use to prepare for a psychedelic experience.
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035 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 9)
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037 - Imprisonment & Liberation Aspects of Consciousness
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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Have you ever had one of those times when all of your tech just seems to conspire against you,
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and the sad part is that mercury isn’t even retrograde?
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Well, that’s what’s been happening around the old Psychedelic Salon lately.
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My plan was to get a better microphone and start producing more frequent programs,
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but as the fates would
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have it, a cascade of little changes to my system has resulted in a Niagara of problems,
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and the main one is that I can’t get any microphones to work properly on my PC right now, so after
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several days of frustration, I decided to use my trusty SanDisk MP3 recorder to finish this program
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and get this podcast on its way to you before we all forget where we last left the good bard.
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And so, it is that we finally reached the end of this long series of Terrence McKenna recordings.
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I hadn’t planned on doing so many of them in a row, but I hadn’t heard these
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tapes in a long time, and once I got started, I couldn’t stop listening. And from some of the
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comments you’ve sent, I hear it’s the same with many of you. You know, I keep telling myself that
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some night I’m going to self-medicate a bit and listen to all 10 of these McKenna rhapsodies in a
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row, but I’m afraid that maybe my head would explode if I did.
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So, let’s get on with it.
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Here’s the tenth and final installment of a workshop
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Terrence McKenna conducted in the summer of 1998.
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Yeah, machine is a very general term.
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I mean, the machine might be a mantra, a drug,
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a physical position.
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This is the kind of stuff we were playing with at La Charrera.
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But I’m now afraid of it because I know that it’s real.
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You have to believe you’re going to fail to attempt to build a time machine
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because no one in their right mind, if they thought it was going to work,
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would in fact climb into the gleaming saddle
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and slam the lever forward.
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You have to believe that you’re going to fail
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or you wouldn’t do that.
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I had a particular psychedelic journey
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where I was going into the wormholes
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and I was realizing,
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wow, if people really are serious about doing this, this is the way.
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Because I was actually feeling like I was able to go wherever I wanted.
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But at that moment I refrained because, wow, this is real.
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I can actually traverse through the timeless singularities or the timeless wormholes
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and pop out at any point in space-time
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because it’s all interconnected at that one point.
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The name of the game is to bring back real information.
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That’s how you will convince the rest of us
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to do it and to believe you.
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And I think it can be done.
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I think probably shamanism is about
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this. But, you know, I really, like one of the things we talked about a little bit here,
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but maybe not enough, is this bell, non-local information space that seems to lurk beneath
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the surface of ordinary reality. For 50 years in quantum physics,
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this was denied as so counterintuitive
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and leading to such bizarre conclusions
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and possibilities that it must be impossible.
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And now they’ve done experiments
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that pretty much show this is real.
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This is real.
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And what it means is
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all the mystics of history were right.
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You can journey from any place in the universe
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to any other place instantly.
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You can extract information
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that lies on the other side of the cosmos instantly.
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It’s all done in the imagination.
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The imagination is this sense which you have that is your non-local perceptor.
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Your local perceptors are your eyes, your ears, the surface of your body, so forth.
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The non-local perceptor is the imagination. And it’s giving you a continuous holographic readout
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of the bell non-local dimension.
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And it’s like a cheat on your being trapped
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in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of Newtonian space and time.
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You are trapped in the evolutionary cul-de-sac of Newtonian space and time. You are trapped in the evolutionary cul-de-sac
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of Newtonian space and time,
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but you have this little tiny peephole,
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this doorway,
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into the entire cosmos.
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All the races that ever were there,
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all the catastrophes and civilizations
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and philosophies and messiahs
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and so forth and so on.
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But you have to, like, tune it.
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99.99999% of this bell information
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is utterly incomprehensible to the human mind
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because it’s on a scale too large or too small
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or it involves premises or environments
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or presuppositions so bizarre that we can’t grok them.
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But the remaining 0.0000001% of this data is absolutely fascinating.
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Beings, philosophies, works of art, ruins, planets, hierophanies, strange music, strange art, strange ideas,
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endlessly to be explored and then to be brought back as much as can be to the human camp and examined.
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I mean, we are hunters and gatherers in hyperspace as much as we are in 3D. And what we’re roving and scanning for
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in those informational spaces
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is things which delight us
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or make life more comfortable
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or inform our relationship to each other
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or our environment.
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The future lies in the imagination.
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The imagination is going to get louder
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and louder and louder.
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William Blake saw this.
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We talk about virtual realities,
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designer drugs,
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downloading ourselves into circuitry,
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travel through time,
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disincarnate bodies,
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cloned identities,
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gender shifting,
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point of view shifting,
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all of these things.
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This is all about the rules of mind overwhelming the rules of physics.
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The rules of physics say, you know, you are a body, you are on a planet,
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you have weight, you have momentum, you have specific gravity,
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you must behave like this and like this and like this.
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And mind says, no, I want to be pure unleashed conceptuality.
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I want to be a thought blown in a hyperdimensional wind.
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I want to move from planet to planet with the twink of an eye.
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I want to know everything, see everything, be everything, feel everything,
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and then by that means, somehow, I will make my way back to my higher and hidden source.
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And who knows, you know, maybe this always awaited us beyond the grave,
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and what we’re doing, in some sense, is drawing death into the world,
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and erasing that most profound of all boundary distinctions,
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the distinction between life and death itself
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becomes thin, becomes transparent in these contexts.
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I mean, it’s very easy to imagine technologies
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such that human identity will be scrambled beyond imagining.
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If you can download yourself into circuitry, you can make copies of yourself.
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If you can make copies of yourself, you can collage these copies and make selves that never were or might have been.
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You can have multiple identities.
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In one of Greg Egan’s stories,
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people have this thing inside them that is implanted when you’re two years old
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that’s called, it starts out being called the dual
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and it ends up being called the jewel.
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And what it is is it’s a thing which simply maps and studies your nervous system
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and creates a perfect copy in silicone
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of your being for the first 23 years of your life.
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Well, then when you’re 23, you go through this ceremony
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where the body is vaporized
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and the jewel, this eternal copy of your youthful self, lives on.
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This is, you know, within reach.
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Hans Moravec had the idea that you could take,
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you could nano-engineer bacteria such that they,
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you could nanotechnologically engineer a leprosy bacteria
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because leprosy moves along the nerves from the point of infection.
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A bacteria that would lay down a thin wire of molecular gold along every nerve.
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And so you would undergo these operations where you would slowly be changed
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into a thing of gold and silicon, glass and arsenic, but there would be no moment of transition,
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no loss of consciousness, no speed bump, no transition of identity. It’s just over time
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you would become something completely eternal and machine-like
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you know that poem by William Butler Yeats sailing to Byzantium where he says once out of nature I
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would be a thing of gold and gold enameling set before the lords and ladies of Byzantium to sing of what was and what will be.
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Once out of nature,
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what he means is when I am dead,
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I will be a thing of gold and gold enamelling.
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There’s the image of the flying saucer
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coming out of the collective unconscious.
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We want to become the stone.
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We want to become somehow a living thing that
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is nevertheless has the character of machinery and objectification. It’s a very complex image
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in the human mind, you know, with Christ at one end of the spectrum, and the universal medicine of longevity at the other end of the spectrum,
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and then all these adumbrations and resonances,
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the philosopher’s stone, the grail, the gift difficult to obtain,
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the magical object, the talking stick,
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the jeweled, self-revealing basketballs of the DMT state.
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You know, in the 53rd fragment of Heraclitus,
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he says the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls in eternity.
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And, you know, this makes no sense until you smoke DMT
00:12:01 ►
and then you find yourself in the presence of the Aeon,
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the archon of the world age
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it’s a child at
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play with colored balls in some
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kind of a virtual
00:12:11 ►
reality, yeah
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I have two questions
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before the whole workshop
00:12:17 ►
ends up, one of them is if you could talk
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a little bit about the tone that you and Dennis
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used to intercalate
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tritomy molecules
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in DNA, how you decided to use it,
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that particular tone, if it’s occurred
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again in your life, what it may
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mean to you,
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as well as just a brief
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comment on gender
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ratios in your workshops, whether there’s
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more men than women usually.
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You’ve talked a little bit about that before. I’ve heard you
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say that men may be more drawn
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toward the psychedelic experience
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because of some lack of intuitive knowledge about…
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Yeah, well, I don’t know why exactly it is.
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It certainly seems true that men
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have a deeper relationship to drugs than women.
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I think that’s generally true.
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Even hard drugs. Women don’t seem as
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interested in drugs or as potentially addicted to drugs. Maybe there’s a deeper survival
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instinct there. Women are constantly burying the dead, caring for the sick, giving birth,
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constantly burying the dead, caring for the sick, giving birth, helping with miscarriages.
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They may be more rock-bottom realists.
00:13:39 ►
Well, you know, the guys are harping 100,000-line oral epics and stuff like that. I quoted this statistic in a different context,
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that in 1800 the average American woman gave birth 13 times.
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Giving birth, especially in a world without anesthetic,
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is a pretty psychedelic and boundary-dissolving
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and ego-erasing and whoop-de-doo kind of experience.
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I think women may, in traditional societies, not care to contextualize
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psychedelics simply because they have enough on their hands. I don’t know the gender, you
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know, there’s a lot about gender stuff I’m interested in, but I don’t understand. My friend Brenda Laurel studies girls
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and why they seem to have some difficulty
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naturally acclimating to the Internet
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and how boy and girl, male-female mathematical abilities
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seem to differ, although I think that’s changing.
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I think the latest data is that women are pulling even with men
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in mathematical graduate schools, at least in some places.
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I don’t know.
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Men are, and maybe this is cultural or maybe this is biological,
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but men are maybe more boundary defined than women.
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Like women seem, and again, you make these statements,
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you don’t know whether you’re making a biological statement or a cultural statement,
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but women seem more tolerant of bisexual and homosexual behavior.
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They’re sort of comfortable with all that,
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where male-male sexual encounters are always defined to some
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degree by competitiveness or the hidden shadow of competition.
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Now, what was the other part of your question?
00:15:39 ►
Oh, about the tone.
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About the tone.
00:15:42 ►
Well, this is a very specific question, but in the story that’s
00:15:46 ►
told in The Invisible Landscape, Dennis seemed, as he went around the bend, to have insights
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into these, like, shamanic techniques that were real techniques, and that he could not
00:16:01 ►
only tell you what they were, he could tell you how they worked. And one of the things he insisted upon was that you could use your voice
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to transduce energy into your own body and other people’s bodies,
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which this is no news.
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Acoustical signals are a good way to transduce energy across space.
00:16:23 ►
But that you could actually use it almost like
00:16:25 ►
an acoustical laser or something like that, and that you could interfere with the normal
00:16:33 ►
chemistry of these drug molecules and make them enter into bonding situations that they
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would normally not have affinity for the bond.
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You do this by making them superconductive.
00:16:47 ►
You make them superconductive by stilling their molecular motion.
00:16:53 ►
We tend to think of absolute zero as a temperature,
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but in fact, when an atom is still,
00:17:01 ►
from a physicist’s point of view, it’s at absolute zero.
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At absolute zero, the normal rules of bonding are cancelled
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and these things become like sticky.
00:17:12 ►
They’ll bond to anything.
00:17:15 ►
And so he said you could use voice to form a relationship
00:17:22 ►
of the geometric incident of the angle of attack
00:17:27 ►
of the incoming acoustical wave as it encountered the molecular matrix,
00:17:32 ►
that it would cause some of these molecules to become superconducting,
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and that then they would bond permanently into the bond site of activity,
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and that instead of having a transient psychedelic trip,
00:17:48 ►
you would lock this stuff in.
00:17:50 ►
And he envisioned the harmine molecule,
00:17:54 ►
which has these two Mickey Mouse-like ears
00:17:59 ►
of benzene rings hanging off the pentaxal structure of the center.
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He visualized them like vibrating antenna.
00:18:10 ►
And he said, you know, you will land these molecules
00:18:13 ►
into the nuclear cleft of the DNA
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and then bond them in with this acoustically generated sound.
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And then forever after,
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the person that we do this to will have a standing waveform holographic image
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in their imagination
00:18:34 ►
of the sum total of space and time.
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It was like he said,
00:18:41 ►
you’ll get this image of the universe
00:18:44 ►
that will be sort of like your interface to the big Internet.
00:18:50 ►
You know, the Internet where every star is a website.
00:18:55 ►
And the sound that you were to make to cause this to happen
00:19:02 ►
was the electrons, an octave or a harmonic, I’m sorry,
00:19:08 ►
a harmonic of the electron spin resonance
00:19:13 ►
of the harming molecule in your system.
00:19:17 ►
And it is true that a significant percentage of the people who take ayahuasca
00:19:22 ►
report a loud hum.
00:19:32 ►
A hum. It was a hum, and so he felt that by imitating these molecular hums and tuning through them, that you only, according
00:19:40 ►
to him, you only had to make the right sound for a few milliseconds.
00:19:46 ►
So doing the scales was an effort to hit all possible sounds,
00:19:52 ►
knowing that when you got it right for just a few milliseconds, it would lock in.
00:19:57 ►
And so these sounds sounded somewhat like this. and then he somehow was able to keep going
00:20:14 ►
and then he would start over and do this
00:20:16 ►
and he called this the strum
00:20:18 ►
and it would not have been worth talking about
00:20:21 ►
32 years later or whatever
00:20:24 ►
except that it seemed to
00:20:26 ►
work. It caused him to go spectacularly bananas and me to go arguably nearly as spectacularly
00:20:36 ►
bananas. And in a way, you know, that trip we’ve never come down from. I mean, I’m not saying that as I sit here
00:20:45 ►
I am in contact with the eschaton
00:20:49 ►
or the spinning violet torus
00:20:53 ►
of hyper-dimensionally stored holographic information.
00:20:58 ►
But on the other hand,
00:21:00 ►
I feel a very strange, weird connection to those times,
00:21:06 ►
probably because he put all kinds of strange suggestions into my mind.
00:21:10 ►
I mean, at one point he said,
00:21:12 ►
you know we can never leave this place.
00:21:15 ►
We’ll never leave this place.
00:21:18 ►
He said, but we have to fashion an image and send it forth.
00:21:23 ►
We have to send forth holographic images of ourselves.
00:21:27 ►
And I’ve often wondered, you know,
00:21:30 ►
am I still down there rising at dawn
00:21:33 ►
to walk the grassy pasture loaded out of my skull?
00:21:38 ►
And, you know, this is all some sort of solar dream, actually.
00:21:44 ►
I think after that experience,
00:21:47 ►
you said before, I’ve heard that
00:21:48 ►
you felt the mushroom gave you
00:21:51 ►
your powers of locution or memory
00:21:53 ►
and that’s something that you didn’t have access to before.
00:21:57 ►
It certainly oiled my tongue.
00:22:00 ►
It did.
00:22:01 ►
And when we would, we,
00:22:03 ►
yeah, psilocybin facilitates language.
00:22:07 ►
I mean, it wants to be expressed.
00:22:09 ►
Henry Munn’s essay that I mentioned to you makes this clear.
00:22:16 ►
Yeah.
00:22:17 ►
A couple weeks ago, I was giving a talk at the World Future Society in Chicago,
00:22:23 ►
and it was entitled Beyond Alternative Medicine.
00:22:26 ►
And in that talk, I talk, you know, I bring up the Internet, and I talk about the shift
00:22:31 ►
from the industrial paradigm to the information age and all that kind of stuff.
00:22:36 ►
And I was presenting that, and I was going down the list of the industrial things, massification to customization,
00:22:46 ►
quantity to quality, hard resources to soft resources.
00:22:51 ►
And as I was looking at the list of the industrial age and the information age,
00:22:56 ►
the thing that came off was it was almost like masculinity moving to femininity.
00:23:03 ►
And I said to myself, you could almost look at these columns in front of this group
00:23:07 ►
as testosterone loaded and estrogen loaded.
00:23:12 ►
And then I says, what in the hell is a man supposed to do with testosterone in the information age?
00:23:18 ►
So I throw that out at you.
00:23:22 ►
How do we fit in as hunters and gatherers in the information age?
00:23:29 ►
Well, the Internet is a large and multilevel forest environment with all kinds of…
00:23:38 ►
I mean, I think there’s a place for the stealthy and the swift. I think it’s a place where
00:23:45 ►
steely-eyed courage pays off
00:23:49 ►
and chance-taking is rewarded.
00:23:57 ►
We’re probably, this whole gender thing,
00:24:00 ►
it’s locked into the way
00:24:04 ►
we’re focused on identity.
00:24:07 ►
I would think probably we’re on the brink of,
00:24:13 ►
I’m not sure I would say transcending gender,
00:24:16 ►
but having a different relationship to it
00:24:19 ►
as we have a different relationship to our bodies.
00:24:23 ►
And in the future it it will be thoughts absurd
00:24:26 ►
for people to think of themselves as heterosexual, homosexual, exclusive this, exclusive that.
00:24:36 ►
After all, you know, Freud showed that our fantasies are almost always contain counter-elements to our expressed choices, gender or otherwise.
00:24:49 ►
And I think hyperspace is going to give a lot of space for acting out.
00:24:57 ►
And it’s harmless acting out.
00:24:59 ►
It doesn’t shake the social boat.
00:25:04 ►
How we deal with our sexuality,
00:25:06 ►
because it’s at the center of our biological nature,
00:25:10 ►
is going to be one of the most interesting things
00:25:12 ►
about how we manage cyberspace.
00:25:16 ►
You know, the things that are usually put against cyberspace
00:25:19 ►
is that, oh, people just become lumpen
00:25:22 ►
and they never leave the keyboard
00:25:23 ►
and they’re not interested in smelling the roses,
00:25:25 ►
still less in making love.
00:25:28 ►
That’s objection number one.
00:25:30 ►
Number two, oh, people just spend all their time fantasizing
00:25:34 ►
and looking at pornography
00:25:36 ►
and making distant friends in different places under false pretenses.
00:25:41 ►
So it seems to be it’s either it’s too sexy or it’s not sexy enough.
00:25:49 ►
You know, Howard Rheingold got taken to lunch
00:25:52 ►
a million times for inventing the word teledildonics,
00:25:57 ►
which always gets a laugh,
00:26:00 ►
but teledildonics is nothing more than
00:26:03 ►
sexual prosthesis extended over space and time.
00:26:09 ►
And it’s interesting to me that pornography is the most successful business on the net
00:26:18 ►
and drives technological innovation,
00:26:22 ►
because they’re the only people who actually care about having the server always up, having the downloads occur fast, having the real audio not flicker, having the sound of high quality. upgrading sexuality without being anchored to biology is naughty in the western canon
00:26:51 ►
of values but nevertheless for quite some time naughtiness has held a real fascination
00:26:57 ►
for large numbers of people um so uh and virtual reality you know people want to act out strange fantasies
00:27:08 ►
should you feel guilty about a fantasy
00:27:11 ►
acted out with pieces of software
00:27:15 ►
rather than poor hard working prostitutes
00:27:19 ►
is it a more horrifying thing
00:27:22 ►
a less horrifying thing
00:27:24 ►
shouldn’t even be mentioned?
00:27:26 ►
What is our relationship to the eroticization, potentially, of our technology?
00:27:34 ►
Is that healthy? Is it not healthy?
00:27:37 ►
We don’t know. I mean, for crying out loud, we’re barely 80 years from Freud,
00:27:42 ►
and now look what we’re going to have to deal with.
00:27:45 ►
You know, on one level,
00:27:46 ►
the way to think of the Internet and what it is,
00:27:48 ►
is it’s simply the collective unconscious
00:27:51 ►
is becoming conscious.
00:27:54 ►
They’re draining the water out of the bathtub,
00:27:57 ►
and suddenly the toys that were hidden there
00:27:59 ►
are now to be seen for all to behold.
00:28:04 ►
And we’re squeamish about this
00:28:06 ►
because our culture is based on the myth of niceness
00:28:11 ►
and gentlemanly and ladylike behavior.
00:28:15 ►
And so still this is a huge echo for us.
00:28:19 ►
And we designate certain clubs, certain holidays,
00:28:23 ►
certain drug states
00:28:25 ►
as permission to transcend the normal strictures of bourgeois behavior.
00:28:31 ►
But, you know, what outrages conservatives about the net,
00:28:35 ►
for example, in the area of pornography is, you know,
00:28:39 ►
pornography used to be urban.
00:28:42 ►
It used to be you had to go to some seedy section of town and mingle
00:28:47 ►
with seedy characters. Now, every living room in America can have endless amounts of pornography
00:28:55 ►
that would stand your hair on end. Well, what’s happening is an erasure of the previously print-created domain called public spaces.
00:29:11 ►
And people wanted private property and public spaces,
00:29:15 ►
and certain business was confined to one area and certain to another,
00:29:19 ►
and the Internet is neither public nor private space. You know, I play around with C-U-C, and I visit technology, which is a technology of using small TV cameras to conference with people at a distance.
00:29:33 ►
Well, you often go into these reflectors where many people are making appointments to see other people, not you, and people don’t know how to handle the technology. They leave
00:29:45 ►
switches on they shouldn’t leave
00:29:47 ►
on and so forth and so on. You’ll log
00:29:49 ►
into a place where there are 11
00:29:51 ►
guys. Four
00:29:53 ►
seem to be masturbating
00:29:56 ►
but not in a particularly
00:29:58 ►
exhibitionistic way.
00:30:00 ►
Sort of half-heartedly
00:30:02 ►
and lackadaisically.
00:30:04 ►
And then other people, you can see them, they’re staring at screens.
00:30:08 ►
And you’re wondering, do I look like that?
00:30:12 ►
Am I staring at a screen?
00:30:13 ►
Are they watching the people masturbating?
00:30:16 ►
What is the relationship between these people?
00:30:19 ►
Is this an invited situation?
00:30:21 ►
Is it a situation of voyeurism?
00:30:25 ►
Or is it a situation of voyeurism? Or is it a situation
00:30:26 ►
of domestic carelessness
00:30:28 ►
where this guy forgot to turn off
00:30:30 ►
his software? And you realize
00:30:32 ►
these are the frantic questions
00:30:34 ►
of someone enraged
00:30:36 ►
by the breakdown of public
00:30:38 ►
space. You say, I don’t
00:30:40 ►
understand what’s happening here. Are we
00:30:42 ►
in a private space? Are we
00:30:44 ►
in a public space? Can people see us? What do they think? what’s happening here. Are we in a private space? Are we in a public space?
00:30:45 ►
Can people see us?
00:30:46 ►
What do they think?
00:30:47 ►
What’s happening?
00:30:48 ►
It doesn’t make any sense.
00:30:50 ►
You just have to go with the flow.
00:30:52 ►
I don’t know what those people are doing.
00:30:54 ►
Yeah.
00:30:55 ►
Do most people who take DMT have the same encounter with the machine-like elves?
00:31:02 ►
So how similar are they?
00:31:04 ►
And then also I’m wondering what your relationship is with law enforcement.
00:31:10 ►
Is that fine?
00:31:12 ►
Well, the first question, everybody’s different,
00:31:18 ►
and everybody takes the dose differently and gets a different amount
00:31:23 ►
and brings different baggage to the
00:31:25 ►
train station. Having said all that, I think if the dose, the stronger, the higher the
00:31:32 ►
dose, the more everybody’s experience converges. If people get 50 to 70 milligrams in a big
00:31:42 ►
hit, they will go to the realm of the self-transforming machine
00:31:46 ►
elves as described by yours truly. They may not describe it as I do. I’ve turned a number
00:31:53 ►
of people on to DMT. I’ve listened to a lot of stories. And slowly the image that has
00:32:00 ►
emerged for me, if you want to think of the DMT place as an archetype,
00:32:05 ►
it’s the archetype of the circus.
00:32:09 ►
The circus is a very complex archetype.
00:32:13 ►
It’s a rupture of plane of the bizarre and the transmundane,
00:32:20 ►
which shatters bourgeois expectations.
00:32:25 ►
The circus comes packaged in several ways.
00:32:28 ►
First of all, it’s a great place for children.
00:32:31 ►
Clowns, animals, bright music, cotton candy,
00:32:34 ►
the hurdy-gurdy and the calliope.
00:32:37 ►
Great place for children.
00:32:38 ►
But also, the circus traditionally packaged and marketed Eros.
00:32:46 ►
I think my earliest intimation of sexuality and Eros
00:32:52 ►
was when I was a creature so small that I was wrapped in a blanket
00:32:57 ►
and handed from shoulder to shoulder.
00:32:59 ►
And I was taken to a circus and I saw the woman in the nearly naked perfect woman in the little spangled costume hanging by her teeth I got the feeling of the fear of death,
00:33:27 ►
the beauty of youth,
00:33:29 ►
the risk of performance,
00:33:32 ►
the whole glamour of it.
00:33:35 ►
So that’s part of DMT.
00:33:38 ►
Clowns.
00:33:39 ►
DMT is always characterized by clowns.
00:33:42 ►
They arrive in a tiny automobile,
00:33:46 ►
exploding and chugging.
00:33:48 ►
Fifteen of them get out.
00:33:50 ►
Huge noses, huge shoes.
00:33:52 ►
They’re poking each other in the eye.
00:33:53 ►
They’re dropping anvils.
00:33:55 ►
They’re flinging irons around.
00:33:59 ►
But then just off the center ring it gets weird.
00:34:02 ►
The goat-faced boy,
00:34:04 ►
the thing in the bottle,
00:34:06 ►
the hermaphrodite, the harlequin,
00:34:09 ►
it’s all this, ooh, strange stuff.
00:34:13 ►
Well then, and then every child worth their salt
00:34:17 ►
wants to run off with the circus.
00:34:20 ►
The circus represents such a countervailing force
00:34:24 ►
to middle class respectability
00:34:26 ►
and small town rules and so forth. You want to run off with the circus. I remember when I was a kid,
00:34:33 ►
the town I grew up in every 4th of July was the big festival of the town and a carnival would come
00:34:41 ►
and our parents would tell us, you can’t stay out after nine o’clock at night while
00:34:47 ►
the carnival is in town well why not well you just can’t these carny people are different they’re
00:34:54 ►
uh you know a little darker shade than most of us uh some of them might use drugs. Some of them may, God forbid, have once been divorced.
00:35:06 ►
I grew up in the 50s.
00:35:08 ►
Things were pretty screwed down.
00:35:12 ►
And then when the circus would leave town, of course,
00:35:16 ►
reality would seamlessly close over it where it had been,
00:35:20 ►
and the city park would once again be a place for Kiwanis picnics and football practice.
00:35:27 ►
So the archetype of the circus is, I think, the ruling thing of DMT.
00:35:34 ►
It’s made me a fan of Fellini’s circuses.
00:35:38 ►
His wonderful circuses are very DMT-like
00:35:41 ►
and have everything I’m talking about,
00:35:44 ►
the erotic, the humorous, the menace,
00:35:47 ►
the shadows and the light.
00:35:49 ►
As far as my relationship to law enforcement is concerned,
00:35:54 ►
I’m happy to say I don’t have any.
00:35:58 ►
It disappoints people,
00:36:00 ►
especially conspiracy theorists.
00:36:02 ►
Of course, they can assume I’m lying,
00:36:07 ►
but nobody has ever bothered me years ago I was a hashish smuggler and then they did
00:36:15 ►
bother me they indicted me when I was in India and I had a whole opera as a youth
00:36:23 ►
and had to come back and work all that out. But that was all settled
00:36:28 ►
by the mid-70s. Why do I not have a relationship to law enforcement? In other words, why don’t
00:36:37 ►
they watch me, bother me, tell me to shut up? I mean, it’s sort of disappointing to
00:36:43 ►
people to hear, I think,
00:36:45 ►
because I love it when people come up and congratulate me on my courage and say, you know,
00:36:51 ►
we’re so happy that you’re doing what you do. It must take enormous courage. No, I think if it took
00:36:57 ►
enormous courage, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. I just have made an assessment of how things work, and my assessment seems to be right, and here’s how they work.
00:37:11 ►
Eggheads don’t count in America.
00:37:14 ►
It doesn’t matter shit what we say here.
00:37:18 ►
What drugs are about in America is money, from the law enforcement point of view. You can bet your booties that if in the
00:37:26 ►
next year I cleared a million dollars in untaxed money dealing drugs, I would have trouble. You
00:37:33 ►
would have trouble too, probably, unless you’re already in the mafia or something and you’ve got
00:37:38 ►
it wired. They hate not getting their cut. And psychedelics generally have not been big money makers.
00:37:50 ►
They’re not addicting.
00:37:53 ►
And so they’ve always been a side issue for criminal syndicalism.
00:37:58 ►
The criminal syndicates that have marketed drugs, psychedelic drugs, with the possible exception of cannabis,
00:38:07 ►
have just basically done it for humanitarian reasons.
00:38:12 ►
You know, there’s lots more money to be made in heroin and cocaine
00:38:16 ►
and MDMA and all these things than in true psychedelics.
00:38:20 ►
Usually the only time you meet idealistic criminals
00:38:24 ►
is when you meet idealistic criminals
00:38:25 ►
is when you meet psychedelic chemists
00:38:28 ►
and the people who distribute their wares
00:38:30 ►
because if you’re good enough to make LSD
00:38:34 ►
you’re certainly good enough to make methamphetamine
00:38:37 ►
and cook up all kinds of skaggy drugs
00:38:41 ►
so it’s not a good idea to make money with drugs, I think.
00:38:47 ►
I think that people are entirely too willing to police themselves.
00:38:55 ►
The Internet is solving some of this problem
00:38:58 ►
by creating an incredible forum of information
00:39:02 ►
where, you know, when I was a kid,
00:39:04 ►
if you wanted information about
00:39:06 ►
drugs, it was like the most forbidden thing imaginable. Now you just log on to lycineum.com
00:39:14 ►
or the maps page, or if you go to my website, there are buttons there, to enormous ongoing discussions 30 posts a day to the salvia list 30 posts a day to
00:39:29 ►
the ayahuasca list you can’t possibly churn through all this stuff let alone the vast amounts
00:39:35 ►
of material that have been archived and articles transcribed and stuff like that. So the net, the web,
00:39:46 ►
which empowers all fringes,
00:39:49 ►
especially empowers fringes
00:39:51 ►
where information has previously been restricted.
00:39:55 ►
And I think that’s why I’m shoulder to shoulder
00:39:59 ►
with these pornography people.
00:40:01 ►
I mean, some pornography may be odious,
00:40:06 ►
but if you let the Calvinist mentality start digging there, you know, the next thing you know, it’ll be drug information
00:40:12 ►
and then sexual, you know, contraceptive information and then certain political points of view
00:40:17 ►
and on and on. And it just can’t be that way. No nation state can set an agenda. And pornography is the least, you know, the
00:40:28 ►
most discussed and least offensive of the world’s problems. I mean, my God, we have
00:40:36 ►
serious problems. Let’s put control of pornography. And I mean by adults for adults. Child pornography is odious, of course,
00:40:46 ►
but pursuit of child pornography is a rare pathology, I choose to believe.
00:40:52 ►
Yeah.
00:40:56 ►
Actually, I don’t know anything about all this.
00:40:59 ►
I’m sort of conservative.
00:41:01 ►
I’ve not, like my approach is not to try every drug that comes down the pike,
00:41:07 ►
but to just use the drugs that work for me quite a bit. So I’m aware of things like what you
00:41:17 ►
mentioned and DEPT and there’s another one. But I’ll let, I won’t be in the first charge to try all those things
00:41:29 ►
because I’m pretty happy with my circumstance.
00:41:33 ►
If I were depressed or bipolar or something,
00:41:38 ►
I would certainly medicate it.
00:41:40 ►
I think it’s really crazy to think that pathological traits are somehow character building
00:41:47 ►
or to be treasured as a charming part of one’s personal toolkit.
00:41:53 ►
I think they should just throw that stuff out of the rowboat and become a more bearable person.
00:42:01 ►
But my ignorance of these things doesn’t mean they’re not important fields.
00:42:08 ►
Obviously, the rest of our future is going to be chemically engineered,
00:42:13 ►
and drugs, pseudo-neurotransmitters, enzymes, immune stimulants.
00:42:22 ►
There’s an endless potential market for all of this stuff.
00:42:26 ►
And not all of it will be hype.
00:42:29 ►
Some of it will actually change our lives,
00:42:34 ►
like Viagra, for example, or Prozac.
00:42:37 ►
I mean, we kid about these drugs,
00:42:40 ►
but if in fact Prozac is the most prescribed drug in the world,
00:42:50 ►
maybe that’s why things have seemed to me to be running rather smoothly recently. A whole bunch of people who would be moping in their beer or snapping or dragging their tail or not cooperating are, in fact, cheerful, bright-, and bushy-tailed. And Viagra, you know, it can’t hurt that people are having more orgasms
00:43:10 ►
and more profound sexual encounters with each other.
00:43:15 ►
And at some point, these fixes, chemical and informational fixes of our lifestyle,
00:43:22 ►
have got to feed back into greater happiness
00:43:27 ►
or what’s the point of it.
00:43:30 ►
Yeah.
00:43:31 ►
I just wanted to make a comment before
00:43:33 ►
when you were talking about the question
00:43:36 ►
about the similarity of DMT experiences.
00:43:39 ►
And I remember the first workshop I saw you at
00:43:42 ►
was about five years ago
00:43:44 ►
and I had done quite a bit of psilocybin and LSD, but never DMT.
00:43:48 ►
And I heard you talking about coming into contact with the alien and the visual language.
00:43:54 ►
And I guess I was quite skeptical, because it just seemed like it was a lot of romanticism.
00:44:01 ►
And then I had my experience, and it was all there. these jeweled basketballs, the carnival-like quality.
00:44:08 ►
So it kind of was the evidence for me that it was more than just a vague memory of a trip,
00:44:20 ►
that it was really something outside of our own consciousness, that we weren’t creating it and experiencing some variation on our path.
00:44:31 ►
Yeah, I mean, something, you know, we talk about DMT and all this. Remember, it’s just
00:44:36 ►
three tokes away, and it only lasts ten minutes. So your major problem, I suppose, is accessing it. Well, why are you sitting here,
00:44:48 ►
for crying out loud? In other words, if you worked at accessing it 24 hours a day,
00:44:55 ►
how the hell long would it take before you accessed it? I know, I’m sure there are people
00:45:01 ►
in this room who could help you. So if you didn’t meet them this weekend,
00:45:05 ►
well, then you wandered in the wilderness.
00:45:08 ►
What were you doing?
00:45:09 ►
Sitting by the brook, browsing in the bookstore?
00:45:11 ►
You blew it.
00:45:13 ►
It’s to be sought.
00:45:17 ►
And what?
00:45:21 ►
Well, that…
00:45:23 ►
It’s an intelligence test.
00:45:25 ►
That would give it away. You’re supposed to figure it out. Well, that, it’s an intelligence test.
00:45:26 ►
That would give it away.
00:45:28 ►
You’re supposed to figure it out.
00:45:33 ►
My notion is once I have performed my job,
00:45:35 ►
which is telling you this stuff exists,
00:45:38 ►
and I tell it in such a dramatic way that you’re supposed to doubt me.
00:45:42 ►
And so then the only way to prove that I’m full of it is to go out and find
00:45:47 ►
this stuff, smoke it, and then come find me and tug at my wrist and say, I smoked it, and nothing,
00:45:57 ►
or whatever. And one person in 20 will be able to do that, but the other 20 will come, you know,
00:46:05 ►
with flowers, offerings, incense,
00:46:08 ►
and the sound of yellow brass
00:46:10 ►
because this is there,
00:46:14 ►
and it’s a real thing.
00:46:15 ►
I mean, if I were to tell you
00:46:16 ►
that you should go meet the flying saucers
00:46:19 ►
or go find Atlantis
00:46:21 ►
or go find Bodimine, for that matter,
00:46:24 ►
it’s a pretty tall order.
00:46:26 ►
Where do you begin?
00:46:27 ►
But finding DMT, you know, it’s matter.
00:46:32 ►
It’s an object in this world.
00:46:34 ►
You know, if you wanted a print by Hieronymus Bosch,
00:46:37 ►
you’d know how to proceed.
00:46:39 ►
If you wanted to buy the Koh-i-Noor diamond,
00:46:42 ►
you’d know how to proceed.
00:46:44 ►
If you needed a Mercedes, you’d know how to proceed. If you needed a Mercedes,
00:46:46 ►
you’d know how to proceed.
00:46:48 ►
If you wanted a first edition
00:46:49 ►
of the poetry of E.E. Cummings,
00:46:51 ►
you’d know how to proceed.
00:46:52 ►
Why do you have so much trouble
00:46:54 ►
figuring this out?
00:46:56 ►
Just proceed as you would
00:46:58 ►
in the pursuit of any other
00:46:59 ►
defined material object.
00:47:01 ►
Basically, put the word out
00:47:03 ►
that money is no object. Basically put the word out that money is no object.
00:47:06 ►
And I’m sure you’ll be amazed
00:47:12 ►
at how the market responds.
00:47:16 ►
I’m wondering,
00:47:17 ►
I find my balance in meditation
00:47:21 ►
and psychedelics have given me tools,
00:47:24 ►
I think.
00:47:27 ►
I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for preparing ourselves for this evolutionary acceleration.
00:47:36 ►
You mean practical tools? Basically, you know, in the short term, I don’t eat for six hours.
00:47:47 ►
I don’t call that fasting.
00:47:49 ►
I just call it emptying my stomach.
00:47:51 ►
I don’t fast because I get dizzy and have headaches.
00:47:55 ►
Why fast?
00:47:57 ►
It’s going to work anyway.
00:48:00 ►
But I don’t eat meat or greasy food and sugar and stuff like that leading into it.
00:48:07 ►
I fast for six hours and then I do it in a quiet, secure, not likely to be interrupted space.
00:48:20 ►
And so those are the short term.
00:48:21 ►
And I smoke cannabis on psychedelics.
00:48:25 ►
I navigate with cannabis.
00:48:27 ►
I cannot imagine taking psychedelics without cannabis.
00:48:30 ►
In fact, wouldn’t.
00:48:32 ►
That would just, if there was no cannabis,
00:48:34 ►
that would be the problem to be solved.
00:48:36 ►
And we couldn’t think of getting loads
00:48:38 ►
until we had that nailed down.
00:48:40 ►
In terms of longer term preparation,
00:48:43 ►
how do you really prepare?
00:48:45 ►
By cultivating wonder, imagination, and curiosity.
00:48:52 ►
Curiosity is really the psychedelic impulse in the absence of psychedelics.
00:48:58 ►
If you like to look at things, paintings, ants, bugs, butterflies, flowers, and pay attention. Look at things.
00:49:12 ►
And then the other thing is love knowledge and love the weird. Love the fringes of knowledge.
00:49:20 ►
Love the weird.
00:49:24 ►
Love the fringes of knowledge.
00:49:27 ►
I said at some point in this weekend that the alien intelligence is a collagist.
00:49:32 ►
The more you put into your head,
00:49:34 ►
the more far out your trips can be.
00:49:39 ►
There are people so lumpen
00:49:41 ►
that you give them DMT
00:49:44 ►
and they come down with the standard stereotype
00:49:48 ►
of the psychedelic drug taker. Pretty colors, you know. Well, you have to be pretty dumb
00:49:56 ►
to come away with the impression that all there was was pretty colors. So, you know,
00:50:08 ►
was was pretty colors so you know read strange stuff go to strange places there’s an old alchemical saying something like this uh the highest mountains the wildest deserts the oldest books
00:50:17 ►
there will you find the stone and so it’s, you know, the common opinion should be rejected on principle.
00:50:28 ►
I mean, this sometimes makes you seem kind of quirky because everybody’s running toward fish
00:50:34 ►
and you’re talking about buxtehude. Everybody’s interested in sushi and, you know, you want fermented mare’s milk.
00:50:46 ►
But usually you find out that by behaving in this way,
00:50:50 ►
you end up ahead of the curve.
00:50:54 ►
And life is beautiful without psychedelics.
00:51:01 ►
Psychedelics simply make you aware of that primarily and then secondarily lead you
00:51:09 ►
deeper into it the affirmation of psychedelics is not the affirmation of an ideological position
00:51:16 ►
or a moral point of view it’s the affirmation of the existence of beauty itself. The pursuit of psychedelics is the
00:51:26 ►
pursuit of beauty. The taking of psychedelics is a religion of platonic beauty. To know
00:51:36 ►
that it exists and to live one’s life in the shadow of that knowing, is transformative and carries us and the rest of evolution forward.
00:51:51 ►
So that’s the weekend, folks.
00:51:53 ►
That’s the wrap.
00:51:55 ►
Thank you very, very much.
00:52:01 ►
Ah, and so dims the voice of the sweet bard McKenna.
00:52:06 ►
Didn’t you love the part where he said that the best way to prepare for a psychedelic experience
00:52:11 ►
is to cultivate wonder, imagination, and curiosity?
00:52:17 ►
And isn’t that exactly what we’re all trying to do here in the psychedelic salon?
00:52:21 ►
At least I hope it is.
00:52:27 ►
the psychedelic salon. At least I hope it is. Which reminds me, I wanted to comment on something else Terrence said that kind of disturbed me. It’s something I don’t think he made very clear.
00:52:34 ►
And that was when he said, if you didn’t make a connection this weekend, you blew it.
00:52:39 ►
Well, I’ve got to take issue with that, at least the way it sounded. When I heard Terrence say that just now, I thought of all the times my friends and I have met new people
00:52:50 ►
who are way too overeager to make contacts.
00:52:54 ►
And if you’re smart, you’ll be leery of over-friendly people yourself.
00:52:59 ►
I don’t mean this to be a downer, but you’ve got to be careful out there.
00:53:03 ►
I don’t mean this to be a downer, but you’ve got to be careful out there.
00:53:10 ►
You know, here in the Psychedelic Salon, we’re exercising our First Amendment rights of free speech and talking freely about psychedelic medicines.
00:53:13 ►
But we’re not going to be talking about where or how to find these sacred medicines
00:53:18 ►
because I truly believe that when your mind and spirit are properly prepared and ready,
00:53:24 ►
they’ll magically manifest themselves to you.
00:53:27 ►
It happened that way for me, and I’ve seen it happen that way many times since.
00:53:33 ►
So be patient and take your time to get to know people,
00:53:36 ►
and more importantly, let them get to know you.
00:53:39 ►
I have a personal rule of thumb that if somebody asks me
00:53:44 ►
if I can help them find one of our sacred medicines,
00:53:46 ►
and if I haven’t known these people really for at least a year or more,
00:53:51 ►
they immediately go on my suspected narc list, and most likely they’re not ever going to become close friends of mine.
00:53:59 ►
I know that’s kind of a cold thing to say and do, but there’s no room for error right now.
00:54:05 ►
So be careful. Be really careful out there.
00:54:09 ►
You know, a few years ago I was told that 90% of all drug busts come out of traffic stops.
00:54:14 ►
And the other 10% were from friends who rolled over on them.
00:54:18 ►
So be warned. Don’t drive with or under the influence of these substances.
00:54:22 ►
And be very careful about
00:54:25 ►
making new friends, particularly when you only know them through cyberspace.
00:54:30 ►
Enough said.
00:54:32 ►
So, why do we take these risks?
00:54:36 ►
Well, maybe it’s because if we use these sacred medicines the right way, then they do what
00:54:41 ►
Terrence said.
00:54:43 ►
Psychedelics make you aware of the
00:54:45 ►
fact that life is beautiful without psychedelics it’s true you know life is
00:54:51 ►
beautiful and for me it’s even more beautiful with all of you being here
00:54:56 ►
with us in the psychedelic salon although Terrance didn’t end this
00:55:00 ►
particular workshop the way I’ve heard of men several others I think it might be fitting right now so in the words of the bard McKenna keep the old
00:55:10 ►
faith and stay high for now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyber deluxe
00:55:17 ►
space be well my friends you