Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:40 Terence McKenna: “Going back to this thing about language,
you get this same peculiar emphasis on language and letters in the esoteric doctrine that surrounds the chakras.”
06:57 Terence:
“Linearity in print conferred upon language an inability to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology, but now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this and move it forward.”
09:55 Ralph Abraham: “There is very little discussion of the intelligent
science, mythology, and so on of these 100-, 200-, 300-thousand B.C., what is going on during these previous interglacials, and it could be that there was agriculture. There would be no way to rule that out.”
15:30 Rupert Sheldrake: “If that’s possible [communicating with a star entity], what kind of information would such beings impart?”
17:27 Ralph:
“Myth is from mythos. Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the song from the rituals. Myth gained the power it now has in our conscious and unconscious life through its secondary role in the ritual. The ritual and the myth together, I think, is one of the most important things for us to regain.”
19:11 Ralph:
“Peace [in Crete], I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm in a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm. There was also the conscious interaction with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere in bringing peace down.”
22:12 Terence:
“I think when you go to the edges … then you discover there is an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomenon around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors.”
25:02 Rupert:
“The spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm… . So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the Faust myth, is a demon. It’s in fact a Satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles… . How seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money?”
28:34 Rupert:
“If we take seriously these entities, how much can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities, like Mammon or Satanic powers or fallen angles, which are actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology?”
30:50 Terence:
“Probably the process of civilization is going to reveal the final status of this shadow within us.”
36:12 Ralph:
“I think we need the Gaian, and we need the Chaotic, that is the celestial sphere, to be re-connected, to be coupled, to the human spirit … that is the ultimate partnership.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:28 ►
Today’s program is the conclusion of the trialogue between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake
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on the topic of entities. Earlier today I was
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thinking about what Terrence said in one of the recent programs about the fact that
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the discussions they were having weren’t just frivolous conversations
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but that they were serious investigations into topics that the majority of people seldom think about
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and are rarely discussed in public.
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And that, I think, is one of the things that’s so appealing about these trilogues.
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The fact that the three of them were willing to be so public about such speculative issues,
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I think, is really impressive.
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And the reason I mention that is so that near the end of today’s program,
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when Rupert Sheldrake begins talking about how our current system of civilization is now devouring the Amazon rainforest,
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well, if you can, pause there for a moment and give some serious thought to what he has just been talking about.
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At least for me, it brought about an aha moment of understanding how important these big-picture metaphysical concepts
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may actually be in playing roles here in our physical world.
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One other thing that you might want to think about is when you hear Ralph Abraham talking about human prehistory
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in the intergalatial period hundreds of thousands of years ago,
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particularly the point where he talks about the interior life of early humans.
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Right there is where I think Graham Hancock’s book that I referred to in the last podcast comes in.
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The book is titled Supernatural, Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
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And in it, he reports on the current state of our understanding about prehistoric cave
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art, and I think this new book may fill in some of the gaps that Ralph mentions.
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With that, we’ll get right into the second side of tape six of the Trilog with Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake that was held at Esalen in 1989 or 1990.
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The set of ten tapes weren’t really clear about which year they were recorded, only that it was either 89 or 90, so take your pick.
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or 90, so take your pick.
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Anyhow, we’ll begin by first listening to a few minutes from the end of the last podcast,
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which was of the first side of the tape titled Entities.
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Incenses that were to be burned.
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Yes, we’ll tell you the history of that.
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You probably know it.
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A.E. Wade is derived from the Enochian.
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The Enochian is the revelation to John Dee of an earlier magic. And when we look in the literature of the pre-Christian
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Jews in Jerusalem, and especially in Alexandria, there we find the Merkaba mysticism. In heaven,
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you know, there’s the seventh heaven. Actually, there are eight heavens according to the Merkaba mysticism. In heaven, you know, there’s the seventh heaven. I mean, seventh heaven.
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Actually, there are eight heavens
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according to the Merkaba mystics.
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These are visualized as kind of concentric spheres,
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and this is a particular visualization
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of the spirit, of the logos,
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of the elastic medium between here
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and the end of the great chain of being,
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the one God.
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So in the eighth heaven,
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you have God in his own
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castle, in his own chambers, and along
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the way there are these chariots, you know,
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with the wheels that go this way and this way,
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and then there’s
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the being that’s holding up the chariot, which
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has four faces, one facing in each direction,
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the lion and so on, and then
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there’s, to get into the chariot, there
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are the four gates, and each gate has
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eight guardians, four on each side,
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and you have to repeat each of them with a word, with an incident.
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And all of this was revealed to travelers
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who were doing their best to be ambassadors.
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They were going out to bring back the necessary knowledge for our evolution,
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and one by one, successive generations,
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and they wrote down and kept their records,
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and they had their specific means of traveling,
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which involved putting your head between your knees
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in a dark room in the basement
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for which reason they spoke of going down to the chariot
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instead of going up to the chariot
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which was envisioned in the sky.
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So these early travelers of the millennium before Christ
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had brought back this picture
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which evolved into what we have today under the name of ceremonial magic in the Western tradition and since it’s a
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quite a long history of a constant vision which is a particular well verbal
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they never drew pictures they just described this in words as far as we
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know that original manuscripts are it’s stand many of them collected in Jerusalem
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and translated from Hebrew into English by several different
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translators and studied by these scholars known to people who read the
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Gershom Scholar. So that is the root of the sigil, the circle, the holy words, the holy letters, all of that can be traced to
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them.
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Oh, go back to Babylonia, to Chaldean magic.
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But through this Merkabah mystical tradition.
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Yes.
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Very interesting.
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You see, I keep going back to this thing about language, you get this same peculiar emphasis on language
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and letters in the esoteric doctrines that surround the chakras in tantric Shaivism.
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A huge amount of exegesis goes into the explication of these letters which appear on the petals
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of the chakras, and talking about the ontological status of these letters which appear on the petals of the chakras
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and talking about the ontological status of these letters
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and what they mean and so forth.
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It’s as though the medium of language itself
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is under review in these encounters with these entities.
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It may be that somehow the field of language needs
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to be prepared for communication with them, or that the field of language can be prepared
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for communication with them, and that what happened in the West was some kind of peculiar stiffening of language against the ability to perceive
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and express this stuff that is now beginning to break down.
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Yes, we have to misuse language as our defined responsibility.
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Yes, and that linearity and print and all that conferred upon language an inability
00:07:02 ►
to deal with the invisible world in any meaningful way, and so it just became pathology.
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But now it’s returning, and people such as ourselves who have one foot in each world have a real obligation to cognize this.
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Well, the Indian tradition, according to the theory of Alain Danielou,
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identifies Shiva with Dionysus.
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Alain Danielou, identifies Shiva with Dionysus.
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And Dionysus, according to Diodorus Siculus,
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writing the history of the world in 50 BC,
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is a translation of Isis to Crete.
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So there’s the suggestion then,
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combining these two historians, of a transmission of the Isis legend from Egypt to the Indus River.
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That’s sort of a suggested transmission there. And if so, we could see the
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Judeo-Christian tradition preceding primarily from the Chaldean, and the Hindu
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primarily from the Egyptian. And the enormous differences between these two nearby systems
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coexisting in the same time and evolving,
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but in totally different flavors of images.
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It’s really different, the language,
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the Indo-European versus the Semitic, basically.
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Completely different images, language, alphabets.
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And yet, to go back one step,
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so reaching, outreach to Chetal-Huyuk
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to try to see the common root of the Sumerian,
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say, Babylonian on the one hand,
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and the Egyptian on the other.
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Each had a version of the Hermetic tradition with magic,
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with journeys, with afterlife, and so on.
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But here we reach sort of the dawn of the horizon
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of our current vision into the past is there.
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We can’t really see into Anatolia very well.
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Well, I believe that the people that you call Egyptian were the African peoples who were
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coming out of Africa as the interglacial proceeded, and that the people that you’re calling Sumerian were these older people who had been already
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crossed into Asia before the last glacial, and they were there. And then when these two
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floods came together during the last melt, history was born in the subjugation of these…
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So this is the horizon you’re suggesting that might actually be the Holocene, that the prehistorians never
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suggest
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civilizations before the Holocene. There’s very little discussion of the intelligent
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science, mythology, and so on, of these
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you know, 100, 200, 300 thousand year BC, what is going on during these previous
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interglacials.
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And it could be that there was agriculture.
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I mean, there would be no way to rule that out, that there was an agricultural revolution
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in the interglacial before the Holocene.
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So what are they called, the Cro-Magnon or the Neanderthals,
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I guess is the usual word for this period of time.
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So I’m suggesting they had navigation,
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they had architecture, they had sacred geometry,
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and they had astrology, and they had magic
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and travel in their own images of the heavens and the underworld.
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All of that tradition comes fully formed into the Holocene interglacial
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from these previous interglacials,
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from the memory of people hiding out in caves,
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preserving their knowledge in cave drawings.
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Yes, I think the major cultural artifact that was added
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during that glacial period that the new people expressed
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as they moved out of Africa
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17,000 years ago was pastoralism. Pastoralism was invented during that
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last interglacial, during that last glacial period when those populations
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were bottled up in Africa. All previous human migrations into the Middle East out of Africa had been
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in the absence of domesticated animals. When you mentioned that this entity theme was of
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high importance in the Hermetic tradition, was it because you were thinking of the fact
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that actually the main focus of the book four of the Hermetic Corpus
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is this animation of statues. This was a major concern in the early Hermetic tradition, was
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to somehow draw the stellar demon down into a simulacrum from which it could then articulate.
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Yes, this is a high technology of beyond communication, assisting in the intervention,
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talking about embassies.
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Embassies were temples, and if we were going to think about some day a new society of world
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order, you know, what education would be, what rituals would be, and so on.
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I think we should take care of the fact that
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our culture had evolved around rituals, that they were very important guiding centers, particularly the
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Akitu festival,
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the
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Kitu festival, the paradigmatic New Year’s festival that was celebrated annually in Babylonia for 13 years, for 2,000 years without missing a beat. This had certain basic elements which
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characterize our whole history, most particularly the sacred marriage and the sacred procession. The sacred marriage was the obtaining for a temporary
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contract for one year between the king, that is to say the social organization of humans
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in this city-state, with divine god and goddess essentially in charge of prosperity, crops and so on.
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So that contract was renewed for a year
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in the New Year’s festival in the sacred marriage,
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which was kind of a ritual that was played out
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with actors and actresses.
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But the role of the king was actually played by the king,
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who actually took his power from the ritual.
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Then the sacred procession had to do with the hermetic
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empowerment of the
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statues of gods and goddesses
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which included a lot of animals, mushrooms
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and so on. And then these were paraded in a
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circle tour through the town and everything
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and one of the day, usually these festivals
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lasted 11 days. It was plenty of time
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to do a lot of stuff. But
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Egypt had more festivals than days
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in the year. It wasn’t necessary
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to go to them. The priests and priestesses did the work for you. You could just keep
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on working. But every day, one of the temples in one of the cities of Egypt would be having
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one of these things where they’re doing the work for you. And it involved the magical
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empowerment of these statues. The main theme was celestial magic. I mean, it was the incorporation or the bringing
00:14:27 ►
down the inspiration of Gaia with celestial themes, intelligence, and powers, understanding
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Gaia as a younger entity than the celestial sphere. I would see that as the key theory,
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if there is one, in the Hermetic Corpus. And the reason why a lot of people nowadays practicing magic
00:14:47 ►
are specializing in star magic
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and trying to reconstruct it from the corrupt mythology of Western astrology.
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So then, what personal experience do we have of entities?
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I mean, if there are star spirits,
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as I believe perfectly possible,
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and I think it’s very likely you could invoke them
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by various kinds of magic,
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you could somehow connect with the star,
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and I think to do that you’d have to look at it.
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I don’t think it’s any good doing this just from books.
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I think you have to lie into the sky
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and actually connect with the star
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through line of sight,
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or do it through a mirror or whatever, but you have to look at it. Then, if that’s possible, what
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kind of information would such beings impart? We know that they thought that Sirius had
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particular things, Aldebrand, various stars had particular properties, and Sir Alderall
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was a dangerous one. So there were these widespread beliefs about the
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properties of particular stars and then there were lots hosts of lesser stars and in fact most books
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on angels and most accounts of angels describe them as innumerable as the stars are and the
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connection of angels and stars is made very explicit in Christian tradition. So there’s one class of spirits associated with stars. Now, have you ever met one? And if we haven’t met one, which I haven’t, could we,
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or would we want to try and meet one by carrying out an appropriate ceremony invocation in a
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suitably receptive pharmacological state or whatever? Well, with the proviso suitable pharmacological state I think
00:16:27 ►
suddenly the stage becomes crowded with stellar demons, earth demons and what
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have you. But do you know for sure that they’re stellar demons? Have you ever
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connected your experience of a stellar demon with directly looking at its
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resident star and connecting through the sensors?
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Well, yes, I think we do have this experience in a limited way.
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Among the stars there are all these asterisms which are among our most ancient knowledge.
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And I think pictograms, petroglyphs and so on, in many cases are drawings of asterisms.
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It’s sort of like a Rorschach when you look at the sky.
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And there are all these dots and you could connect them up
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anyway. When there’s a tradition of
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connecting them up in a certain way, then you have
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an astrological tradition.
00:17:12 ►
So mythology, I mean
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there’s star mythology, is
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all of the Greek myths, for example, are
00:17:18 ►
projected into the sky in these asterisms
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or what we call constellations.
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So mythology is suggested that myth is from mythos.
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Mythos meant the lyrics, the words of the songs from the rituals, and that myths gained
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the power they now have in unconscious and unconscious lives through their secondary
00:17:44 ►
role in the ritual, which I think the ritual
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and the myth together, as part of our tradition, is one of the most important things for us
00:17:52 ►
to regain.
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And these old rituals were actually the bringing down, I mean, the place where star magic was
00:17:59 ►
worked successfully to empower our evolution.
00:18:04 ►
Our own experience, like my experience of watching the sky
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and trying to figure out the asterisms,
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had only been going on for two or three years.
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However, in all of these astrological systems that we know,
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the wanderers are particularly important
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and most important, the sun and the moon.
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And we do have, I think, travels and communications
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with the sun and the moon in our recent experience
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of shamanic journeys and dreams.
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There were, during the 1960s in Santa Cruz, when I first came there, monthly moon festivals
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where we did a ritual that we imagine very much to be like the Dionysian festivals in Crete,
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the Orphic rituals translated to Greece as the Eleusinian Mysteries and so on,
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where psychedelics, where sexual rites and star magic were combined
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into an annual or monthly ritual of tremendous power,
00:19:05 ►
of adequate power to produce prosperity for people, for animals, for plants.
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Peace, I think, was not produced by just a partnership paradigm
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with a lucky society to have escaped the bad habits of the dominator paradigm.
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There was also the conscious interaction
00:19:26 ►
with the peaceful initiative of the celestial sphere
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in bringing peace down.
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I mean, Krieti had no fortifications.
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They had all this wealth.
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They had wealth like Kuwait,
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and they didn’t get captured until the third millennium.
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So we have definitely our experience of the sun and the moon,
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and if we wanted to investigate astrology experientially,
00:19:51 ►
then perhaps we could concentrate on the sun and the moon.
00:19:54 ►
Tonight will be a full moon.
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The moon soul will be in its greatest power.
00:20:00 ►
The spirit between the moon and ourselves,
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our own soul, will be in its most receptive,
00:20:06 ►
and we can do an experiment.
00:20:08 ►
The sun, I think we spoke yesterday of the eclipse of the sun
00:20:12 ►
and the power of this experience in the psyche,
00:20:16 ►
and that would be also a place where we could look for a modulation
00:20:20 ►
of the influence of the sun soul that occurs when the moon soul passes into
00:20:30 ►
a linear, rare, collinear arrangement with our own soul.
00:20:35 ►
So those are some experiences that we can have really on a daily basis.
00:20:40 ►
The star magicians I came to know in Santa Cruz who came to my class
00:20:45 ►
they get up every day, every morning and evening
00:20:49 ►
and watch the sunrise and the sunset
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no matter how it disturbs their sleep schedule
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and I think I’ve been very affected by sunrises and sunsets
00:21:01 ►
in my own life
00:21:02 ►
since early babyhood
00:21:03 ►
I have a fantastic fascination with sunrise and
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sunset. In India I had seen particularly good ones that I felt to be amplified, their meaning
00:21:15 ►
amplified by the appreciation of an entire civilization, a whole country appreciating,
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knowing, taking the meaning, basking in the rays, and giving conscious attention to your sunrise and sunset.
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Surya Namaskar, and other greetings.
00:21:29 ►
Surya Namaskar.
00:21:30 ►
A splendid thing to do with the sun is to greet it.
00:21:34 ►
And to take note of the fact that it did happen again,
00:21:39 ►
which we have no reason to believe that it always will.
00:21:43 ►
Well, in our physical environment,
00:21:45 ►
we tend to move into cities,
00:21:48 ►
move into apartments,
00:21:50 ►
exclude nature,
00:21:52 ►
push it away from ourselves.
00:21:53 ►
In our mental environment,
00:21:55 ►
we actually do the same thing.
00:21:57 ►
Most people in a culture
00:21:58 ►
live in a very conventionalized set of notions
00:22:02 ►
that are deeply embedded
00:22:04 ►
in other conventionalized notions far
00:22:06 ►
from any edge. I think when you go to the edges, physically that would mean deserts, jungles,
00:22:15 ►
remote and wild nature, and when you go to the edges in your own mind, meaning meditation,
00:22:22 ►
dreams, psychedelics, then you discover there’s an extremely rich
00:22:27 ►
flora and fauna in the imagination that has simply been ignored because our tendency has
00:22:34 ►
always been to look inward, to build inward, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean
00:22:42 ►
of phenomena around us that entirely overwhelms our metaphors?
00:22:47 ►
Well, it’s all the Satanic spirit of science, isn’t it?
00:22:52 ►
I mean, if one says, what was it that caused this blindness, the question you raise,
00:22:57 ►
there’s something that happened around the 17th century that Milton described so well in Paradise Lost.
00:23:07 ►
There is a consciousness of the spirit of Satan,
00:23:11 ►
which is what Paradise Lost is largely about. And there’s also a taxonomy of the various demons and fallen angels,
00:23:17 ►
which act as malevolent powers that somehow influence things,
00:23:21 ►
like Mammon, the demon of commercial greed.
00:23:24 ►
So if Mammon is
00:23:26 ►
worshipped then you have a whole society that’s motivated by money, Mammon’s
00:23:30 ►
instrument, and entirely under the influence of commercial greed as our own
00:23:35 ►
is obviously to a very large extent. So here’s this personification of Satan and
00:23:43 ►
the primary sin of Satan is pride,
00:23:47 ►
turning away from God and declaring his own self-sufficiency.
00:23:53 ►
Well, this is precisely the beginning of turning away from God and the angelic and the whole spirit realm and declaring the self-sufficiency of man.
00:23:56 ►
It’s the humanist illusion.
00:24:00 ►
So you then have this humanist point of view, and then from that,
00:24:04 ►
all God’s demons and everything
00:24:05 ►
else become projections of the human mind, which now becomes a kind of geocentric universe.
00:24:10 ►
I mean, it’s like the old geocentric model.
00:24:13 ►
You even get it in Ficino, who says, man is the measure of all things, when actually
00:24:20 ►
the order of intelligence could have been the measure of all things.
00:24:24 ►
Exactly. It’s humanism. The order of intelligence could have been the measure of all things.
00:24:26 ►
Exactly. It’s humanism.
00:24:30 ►
And it’s this putting man at the center.
00:24:37 ►
That’s why adopting this alternative position of recognizing all the living… of animism, recognizing the living spirit of all nature
00:24:41 ►
and living souls of all nature,
00:24:43 ►
is profoundly repugnant to humanism,
00:24:46 ►
but yet is the common ground of all human civilization, thought and tradition, apart
00:24:51 ►
from this deviation that we’re thinking about now.
00:24:58 ►
So this blinding is a kind of satanic pride, and the spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency,
00:25:05 ►
Finding is a kind of satanic pride, and the spirit of Satan is the spirit of self-sufficiency, of being in charge, and the spirit of denial of the whole other realm.
00:25:13 ►
Like in Goethe’s Faust, I mean Faust being the paradigm scientist, selling his soul to
00:25:17 ►
the devil in return for unlimited knowledge and power, the paradigm of the entire process.
00:25:24 ►
By selling it through ceremonial magic, he invokes Mephistopheles.
00:25:27 ►
So the guiding spirit of modern science, according to the first myth,
00:25:30 ►
is a demon.
00:25:32 ►
It’s in fact a satanic demon, a fallen angel, Mephistopheles.
00:25:38 ►
So how seriously does one take then the role of Satan
00:25:42 ►
and of malevolent spirits in this disembodied
00:25:45 ►
world because they’re part of its taxonomy and its landscape in many traditions, not
00:25:50 ►
any of the Christian. And how seriously does one need to take the idea that our whole society
00:25:57 ►
and civilization may be under the possession of such a spirit, worship through money and other, you know, mammon.
00:26:09 ►
The spirit of mammon, as Milton describes him in Paradise Lost,
00:26:14 ►
he says, even in heaven, his looks and thoughts were always downward bent,
00:26:20 ►
admiring more heaven’s pavement than ought divine or holy else enjoyed in vision beatific.
00:26:24 ►
So there’s mammon, who has this kind of characteristic,
00:26:27 ►
and then when he falls to earth, the first thing he does, he and his crew opened up the sacred hill and digged out ribs of
00:26:32 ►
gold.
00:26:33 ►
It’s the first thing Mammon did when he got to earth.
00:26:37 ►
And started… and uncovering treasures better hid, Mother Nature’s treasures better hid. So here’s the description of a demon,
00:26:48 ►
which actually is the spirit of our whole civilization,
00:26:52 ►
by Milton in Paradise Lost, as an actual entity.
00:26:56 ►
Now, in that case, it’s a kind of poetic entity,
00:26:59 ►
but it’s also a biblical one, you know, Mammon.
00:27:03 ►
And Mammon is one of the hosts of Satan or of
00:27:06 ►
the fallen angels. So there’s this idea of these malevolent powers that goes back much
00:27:11 ►
in every society you get these malevolent, you know, jinns and deceptive spirits and
00:27:17 ►
dangerous entities of a kind of, in some sense autonomous, but in some other sense
00:27:25 ►
related to some historical process involving human beings.
00:27:33 ►
So the current manifestation of this satanic entity is the impasse in the
00:27:41 ►
world petroleum market over supplies, resources, possession,
00:27:47 ►
distribution. Yes, and obviously particularly the United States needs the
00:27:53 ►
satanic entity to be incarnate, and now it can’t be incarnate in Russia anymore.
00:27:58 ►
It’s, you know, where for a long time the entire imagination could focus on the
00:28:02 ►
satanic powers being over there, you know now is a perfect satanic figure emerged for the
00:28:09 ►
projection being Saddam Hussein you know his pronouncement about hostages and
00:28:13 ►
babies starving and stuff you know now he Hitler the whole sort of projection
00:28:17 ►
thing has got working and now he’s become this totally evil power. So this same projection is operating and the question
00:28:28 ►
is, one thing that does is blind us to the satanic powers
00:28:32 ►
within our own civilization and if we take seriously these entities, how much
00:28:38 ►
can we admit the possibility that there are these malevolent entities like
00:28:42 ►
mammon or satanic powers or fallen angels which are
00:28:45 ►
actually guiding and perverting the progress of science and technology which are actually
00:28:52 ►
intervening and conducting in many respects the ways of the world through influence on people
00:28:59 ►
through inspiration putting ideas in people’s minds which which is how these things work, and actually
00:29:08 ►
channeling or directing a large portion of human history. You then get back to the classic
00:29:13 ►
scenario that there are some people whose consciousness goes beyond that who are fighting
00:29:17 ►
on the side of the light, and you get a standard good versus evil, celestial struggle, like
00:29:23 ►
the Great War in Heaven, being acted out on earth.
00:29:27 ►
And for a lot of people that’s a very plausible picture.
00:29:30 ►
I mean, for these Amazonian Ayahuasca Christians, the idea that Satan has taken on the force of, like the great dragon,
00:29:38 ►
is coming into the forest, devouring it and burning it, as prophecies foretold.
00:29:42 ►
This entire system that devours the forests and destroys and so on,
00:29:46 ►
this whole technological civilization, Leviathan as Hobbes called it,
00:29:49 ►
is in fact the great dragon,
00:29:53 ►
and somehow possessed by its spirit,
00:29:56 ►
and that this is an entirely destructive spirit,
00:29:59 ►
it’s the satanic spirit, which is destroying the earth.
00:30:02 ►
So then you see it’s very hard to avoid falling back into this
00:30:07 ►
archetype and then the question is, is that the way it really is? And I see if one allows for
00:30:13 ►
autonomous entities, if one allows for them to have a historical rootedness and to represent
00:30:18 ►
spirits of things that have happened or spirits that inspired things that have happened, since human history reveals millennia of oppression,
00:30:28 ►
exploitation, imperialism, enslavement, brutality, torture,
00:30:33 ►
and which goes on today, war, domination of every kind,
00:30:39 ►
is this influence somehow evolving along with humanity
00:30:43 ►
or in some sense inspiring the development of civilization, and energy presumably fall away,
00:31:07 ►
more and more our self-expression will be unimpeded,
00:31:12 ►
and we don’t know what you get when you get unimpeded human self-expression
00:31:18 ►
in architectonic form or social organization or something like that.
00:31:26 ►
On the other hand, it may be just the gradual devolution
00:31:30 ►
in which the same old forms continue to dominate,
00:31:34 ►
but the satanic forms become more and more inflated
00:31:39 ►
by energy and attention, as it were,
00:31:41 ►
as if there were, in the mathematics of the process, two competing
00:31:47 ►
attractors in this dualistic theory of the battle of good and evil in heaven, of God
00:31:54 ►
and Satan in heaven struggling with each other to attract a multitude of human souls.
00:32:02 ►
And the forces of evil, as it were, progressively more inflated by the forces of evil as it were progressively
00:32:05 ►
more inflated by the
00:32:08 ►
acquisition of more souls
00:32:10 ►
as more and more angels
00:32:12 ►
are falling from heaven.
00:32:14 ►
If we wanted,
00:32:15 ►
if people could get
00:32:18 ►
together and try
00:32:20 ►
to conceptualize
00:32:21 ►
the role of their species
00:32:24 ►
in the evolution of the universe, and decide,
00:32:28 ►
vote for the forces of good over the forces of evil or something, and then try to redirect
00:32:36 ►
the trend of human consciousness and unconsciousness toward this other attractor, it would be necessary to, I suppose, to do interventions on this level
00:32:48 ►
with ritual, with magic, with astrology, with inspiration, with imagination, in which attention
00:32:57 ►
was redirected to the positive forms, if we can find them, if we can identify them.
00:33:05 ►
Probably everything is disguised as something else,
00:33:09 ►
and our ignorance is enormous.
00:33:12 ►
But traditionally, I think,
00:33:15 ►
through the study of world mythology, ritual, religion, and so on,
00:33:20 ►
in the sense of Joseph Campbell, let us say,
00:33:22 ►
we could identify, let us say,
00:33:24 ►
we could successfully identify the good genies
00:33:27 ►
and then design rituals.
00:33:31 ►
Let us say we tried to present music and visual music on MTV
00:33:36 ►
and on the World Cable Network
00:33:39 ►
so that people could be exposed to visualizations and harmonizations of these good forms selected
00:33:48 ►
through from the world history of mythology religion and so on collect up some of these
00:33:55 ►
good rituals like we felt moon rituals were in the 1960s and do them, present them on TV and so on, would they or would they not attract souls?
00:34:07 ►
And my feeling is that the enhanced,
00:34:13 ►
the winning attractiveness of the satanic form
00:34:16 ►
somehow is irreversible at this time
00:34:19 ►
as far as the human species is concerned.
00:34:22 ►
It’s practically the only evil species as far as we can see.
00:34:26 ►
And I don’t know about age and so on,
00:34:29 ►
but that might be actually a celestial intervention.
00:34:37 ►
The evil forms, the satanic images,
00:34:40 ►
have been most successful with people,
00:34:43 ►
at least during this patriarchal time of the
00:34:46 ►
past 6,000 years, which seems to coincide with the dawn of history. So we don’t even
00:34:52 ►
know exactly what preceded in the early history of our species.
00:34:57 ►
So could Eros provide a counter-attractor?
00:35:00 ►
Well, I wouldn’t think so. It’s fantastic.
00:35:04 ►
It’s more interesting than evil. Well, the forces
00:35:09 ►
of evil, of course, have adopted every attractor, like mammon. I mean, money is perhaps not necessarily
00:35:15 ►
bad, and prosperity is not necessarily bad, but it seems to have been engulfed by the forces of evil. Likewise, sexual images are used extensively
00:35:29 ►
and have become almost totally identified with evil.
00:35:33 ►
So the shadow side of sexuality in our culture has dominated.
00:35:39 ►
So how could that be reclaimed?
00:35:42 ►
How could you even begin that?
00:35:44 ►
I think we’d have to ask the stars for guidance. I’m very positive about the Green Revolution,
00:35:50 ►
and I think the revival of the Gaian soul and our consciousness of the Earth as a living or divine being is very important. But still, I don’t think this is enough.
00:36:06 ►
I don’t think we could make it out of this cul-de-sac
00:36:08 ►
without the stars.
00:36:11 ►
So I think we need the Gaian,
00:36:13 ►
and we need the chaotic, that is, the celestial sphere,
00:36:18 ►
to be reconnected,
00:36:20 ►
to be coupled to the human spirit
00:36:29 ►
in such a way that their part,
00:36:31 ►
that is the ultimate partnership.
00:36:35 ►
You’re dreaming the dream of alchemical revolution that would do pride to a renaissance magus.
00:36:41 ►
That’s essentially what you’re calling for.
00:36:44 ►
Yes, it’s very close to John Dee’s dream
00:36:46 ►
John Dee’s failed dream
00:36:50 ►
and his dream failed because the Thirty Years’ War
00:36:54 ►
wiped out the possibility of an alchemical kingdom in Central Europe
00:36:59 ►
Queen Elizabeth withdrew from participating in this partnership
00:37:04 ►
even before she died.
00:37:07 ►
And I think that is a key.
00:37:09 ►
The failure of courage on the part of Queen Elizabeth
00:37:13 ►
might be an important historical element in our own fall from a divine path.
00:37:19 ►
But we can always try again.
00:37:22 ►
And where would the new alchemical kingdom be?
00:37:24 ►
I think it would probably have to be in Czechoslovakia. You know, there’s not much
00:37:28 ►
chance that Bush is America turning into it, or Britain at the moment.
00:37:33 ►
Well, that was where the original alchemical kingdom was planned, for Prague.
00:37:38 ►
That’s right. And you’re on your way. I don’t discuss it with proper officials.
00:37:46 ►
I think I’ve been in Prague,
00:37:48 ►
and I think that it’s a really dark place,
00:37:52 ►
and there is very little hope of illuminating it at this time.
00:37:55 ►
And I have my highest hopes for England, as a matter of fact.
00:37:59 ►
I always have been a great Anglophile,
00:38:02 ►
and particularly now I think it’s very auspicious there,
00:38:06 ►
the number of people who are thinking
00:38:08 ►
and reviving in great detail
00:38:11 ►
and with great love and integrity
00:38:12 ►
all of these old things,
00:38:14 ►
digging in the archaeology of the mind
00:38:16 ►
and trying to seek rituals
00:38:17 ►
and actually perform them and live them.
00:38:22 ►
Well, why don’t we call it quits then?
00:38:24 ►
Okay.
00:38:28 ►
Did you find it as
00:38:30 ►
fascinating as I did when
00:38:31 ►
Rupert Sheldrake was talking about the
00:38:33 ►
Faustian story of Metisopheles?
00:38:36 ►
And then he brought out the fact
00:38:38 ►
that the United States has always
00:38:40 ►
needed a demon to keep it
00:38:42 ►
from examining the satanic
00:38:43 ►
powers within our own civilization.
00:38:47 ►
And then he went on to say that after the fall of the USSR, the focus was shifted to Saddam Hussein.
00:38:53 ►
Now keep in mind that this trialogue took place before the first Gulf War.
00:38:58 ►
And now that we seem to be only weeks away from the state-sponsored murder of the very same Saddam Hussein,
00:39:06 ►
a search for a new Satan is underway.
00:39:09 ►
It looks like the American fascists in Washington are focusing on Iran,
00:39:13 ►
while the rest of the country, and the rest of the world for that matter,
00:39:17 ►
sees the new Satan as that insane little bush fellow.
00:39:21 ►
Ah, the world is in flux once again, don’t you think?
00:39:28 ►
fellow. Ah, the world is in flux once again, don’t you think? There’s some kind of a new tidal shift in human consciousness that’s already begun. I know a lot of you can feel it because you tell
00:39:33 ►
me so in your emails. What it will amount to and where it will lead us still isn’t clear,
00:39:38 ►
at least to me. But being an incurable optimist, I can’t help but believe that things are going to work out just fine.
00:39:47 ►
And those of you who have had the great good fortune to have ventured very deep into the far reaches of entheospace know exactly what I mean.
00:39:56 ►
I know that Trey understands because in a recent email he said,
00:40:00 ►
I know this thing with the great world age shift is really going to happen because I’ve somehow known it my whole life.
00:40:07 ►
And my bet is that a lot of us have felt that way too, Trey.
00:40:12 ►
I also received an interesting email from Justin who writes in response to a question I asked a while back about what some of you are doing as the year 2012 approaches.
00:40:22 ►
Well, Justin is part of a new rock group called
00:40:26 ►
Vav-Om. It’s V-A-V-O-H-M. And here’s what he had to say.
00:40:33 ►
Our intention with our music is to break people from their molds of habit, get them thinking
00:40:38 ►
psychedelically, and suggest how to properly align their dreams with their will. I guess
00:40:44 ►
you could say that we’re of the mind that what happens on 2012 is what we can create.
00:40:49 ►
But the lines between doing and being done to are getting harder and harder to discern.
00:40:55 ►
The music draws on as many influences as musical history has to offer,
00:40:59 ►
from Mingus to Motown, Beatles to Mozart, Radiohead to Pink Floyd, and Michael Bolton.
00:41:06 ►
Mix it all up, sprinkle a bit of future perspective on it,
00:41:09 ►
and you end up with what’s been called post-historical rock.
00:41:14 ►
Well, on a personal note, I think that one of their tracks is also reminiscent of an old favorite of mine called Morphine.
00:41:22 ►
The band, that is, not the drug.
00:41:21 ►
old favorite of mine called Morphine.
00:41:24 ►
The band, that is, not the drug.
00:41:30 ►
Anyway, it’s good to know that there still remains a future for psychedelic-inspired rock music.
00:41:35 ►
I don’t know about you, but there’s just something about Pink Floyd and mushrooms that seem to go together for me.
00:41:38 ►
Also this week, I received an email from Ben.
00:41:41 ►
And by the way, I’m not sure if you guys want me to mention your last names here in the podcast or not.
00:41:48 ►
So I’ll continue to only use first names unless you specifically tell me otherwise.
00:41:53 ►
But Ben, and I hope I’m not breaking a rule here,
00:41:56 ►
Ben is also known as Valley Sequence on Arrowwood’s Visionary Arts Vault.
00:42:02 ►
In fact, Valley Sequence is the featured artist for December 2006.
00:42:08 ►
And here’s part of what he had to say in his email.
00:42:11 ►
I am writing in regards to psychedelic art
00:42:14 ►
and its relation to the coming technological slash consciousness shift.
00:42:19 ►
The lecture series by Terence McKenna was very inspiring.
00:42:23 ►
When he asked what form this shift would occur
00:42:25 ►
or how it would first be seen, it seems that Terrence would point to art as the domain for
00:42:31 ►
the most future growth. I am a traditional and digital artist and am seeking innovative ways of
00:42:37 ►
synthesizing the traditional with the digital and to create expressions that deal with the medium of perception itself.
00:42:46 ►
He said that the coming art would be art with teeth, and that’s what I see too.
00:42:53 ►
And if you check out his work on the Arrowwood site, you will see what he means.
00:42:57 ►
I’m really blown away that an artist this gifted is one of our regulars here in the
00:43:01 ►
Psychedelic Salon.
00:43:03 ►
And Ben is correct in his
00:43:05 ►
observation about Terrence McKenna’s position on the importance of art. I’ve heard Terrence
00:43:10 ►
express that thought from many different directions, one of which is that today’s artists are actually
00:43:16 ►
creating a new language for us to use and communicating some of the experiences that
00:43:21 ►
we have in entheospace. I don’t know about you, but when I go to the
00:43:25 ►
Arrowwood vault and look at Ben’s painting that’s simply titled 4981, I’m swept up in
00:43:31 ►
a range of emotions that I experienced a long time ago when I saw, I think I saw, a very
00:43:40 ►
similar vision one night. And that was only the first painting in the series on Arrowwood.
00:43:45 ►
Needless to say, it wasn’t the only familiar sight
00:43:48 ►
that Valley Sequence captured for me.
00:43:51 ►
What an interesting and talented clan we have here in the salon.
00:43:56 ►
Before I go, I guess I should mention again
00:43:58 ►
that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:44:01 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution
00:44:04 ►
Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:44:07 ►
And if you have any questions about that, you can check on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:44:13 ►
which can be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:44:17 ►
And if you still have questions, you can send them in an email to me.
00:44:21 ►
The address is lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:44:26 ►
And thanks again to Chateau Hayouk
00:44:28 ►
for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:44:31 ►
And a special thank you goes out to
00:44:33 ►
Ralph Abraham and Bruce Dahmer
00:44:35 ►
for seeing to it that the tapes of these trialogues
00:44:38 ►
were preserved and digitized.
00:44:40 ►
From the email I’ve been receiving,
00:44:42 ►
I think it’s safe to say that
00:44:44 ►
there are now thousands of other people around the world
00:44:47 ►
who would also like to thank you guys
00:44:49 ►
and for now
00:44:50 ►
this is Lorenzo
00:44:52 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space
00:44:54 ►
be well my friends
00:44:56 ►
and may you all have a joyous
00:44:58 ►
and peaceful new year