Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
06:48 Ralph Abraham: Explains his bifurcation theory of the unconscious
08:01 Ralph:
“We can speak of the consciousness of animals, the consciousness of plants, the consciousness of Mother Earth.”
11:57 Ralph:
“Chaos goes to the basement, and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness, giving us the unconscious, which appears to be gaining ever since.”
17:02 Ralph:
“I think we want Saint George and the Dragon getting it on together in a May Day celebration where Dionysian elements are accepted.”
18.21 Terence McKenna: “The orgies driven by the psychedelic religion completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity.”
21:21 Terence:
“Basically the choice was between fun [through orgies] and full knowledge of the flow of your genes, and once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue, then the concept of ‘mine’ comes into existence… . And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundry-disolving mushroom religion was holding at bay. It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology [patriarchal] from getting going.”
23:33 Terence:
“They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores.”
30:16 Ralph:
“And in this sense, a restrictive society which narrows the choice of addictions is somehow anti-evolutionary in that it promotes the growth of unconsciousness, insensitivity, is a danger to the biosphere and so on.”
31:11 Rupert Sheldrake: Explains his proposal to legalize psychedelics in an ‘age-related manner’.
33:55 Rupert:
“And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit. However conscious we think we become we don’t become fully conscious of the unconscious embryonic habits that formed us.”
40:03 Ralph:
“And so we would have to work at maintenance of consciousness as we work at maintenance of the garden.”
46:47 Terence:
“It [coffee] is the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of the coffee break.”
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072 - The Unconscious (Part 2)
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:26 ►
Well, it’s good to be back here in the salon with all of you once again. I guess that most
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of the big holiday celebrations and parties are over for a while, but it was nice while
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it lasted. How about you? I hope all of you had a few perfect moments during the past
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few weeks. I had a relatively quiet couple of weeks myself,
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and to tell the truth, it’s been hard getting back up to speed.
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My plan for this year is to publish a podcast by the end of each Wednesday and Friday.
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And as you can tell, I cut it a little close already this week.
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And by the way, that’s Wednesday and Friday Pacific time.
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If all goes well, I may actually get them out a little earlier each week,
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but Wednesday and Friday schedule I think I can stick to,
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at least until further notice.
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Now before I do anything else, I want to thank the people at GigaVox.com
00:01:21 ►
for making their Levelator product available online and for free.
00:01:26 ►
As you regulars here in the salon know, I’ve been struggling with volume levels for quite a while,
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particularly with these trial logs.
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And the one we were about to hear was the worst one so far.
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The microphone on Terrence was okay, and Ralph’s voice was in mono and not too clear,
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and it sounded like Rupert’s voice was only being picked up by the other two mics.
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In short, this tape was a mess, and so I just kept putting off doing this show
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because the cleanup on the file was just going to take so long.
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And then yesterday I was listening to a podcast from PodcastTools.com and learned about the Levelator from Gigavox.
00:02:09 ►
That’s G-I-G-A-V, as in Victor, O-X.
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Gigavox.com slash Levelator, L-E-V-E-L-A-T-O-R.
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Now, I won’t go into a major geek out on you here, but for you other podcasters out there,
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particularly if you’re doing phone interviews, you might want to check this tool out.
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All I had to do was drag the audio file to the levelator,
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and it automatically brought all of the voice levels up to a relatively equal point.
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And it’s not perfect, but it’s free, and it sure did a better job than I could do manually.
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So a big thank you to the good people at GigaVox.com.
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Today’s program, as you already know if you’ve been listening to this entire series,
00:02:56 ►
comes from the seventh tape of the trilogues between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
00:03:03 ►
that were held at Esalen Institute in 1989 and 1990.
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And this tape was simply titled, The Unconscious.
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And sure enough, it begins with Ralph Abraham explaining his bifurcation theory of the unconscious.
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But by the time they were halfway into the discussion, their talk had turned to orgies
00:03:25 ►
and to the competing forms of consciousness brought about by alcohol versus psychedelics.
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And rather than tell you how it ends, why don’t I just put it on right now and we can listen to it together.
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I’d like to try today an experiment in rapid induction.
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And then that might fail, and then we could fall back on it.
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But I think that we haven’t tried to push our format in any way.
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We’re now feeling more confident here at home base at the Esselstyn Institute.
00:04:09 ►
at the Eswagdha Institute. So this would be a quick one-two-three where I would try to
00:04:14 ►
suggest some actual questions that you could respond to as if somebody in the audience had asked questions, you see what I mean, trying to lock it most rapidly into
00:04:20 ►
a designated point on a target as it were.
00:04:25 ►
the designated point on a target as it were. So, the unconscious.
00:04:29 ►
Here’s the one, two, three in summary.
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One is a theory, the bifurcation theory, that the unconscious was created one afternoon in a certain place.
00:04:39 ►
A curtain which then divided the conscious and the unconscious forever.
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An iron curtain in
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in the species mind and two is a question about the relationship between this bifurcation and
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other bifurcations and then three is um a theory which wouldn’t have to be taken too seriously as
00:04:59 ►
to a particular relationship between this bifurcation and some other one that I propose for the sake of discussion.
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Well, all of this is very hypothetical.
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So, one, the unconscious.
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Well, I did a talk recently in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
00:05:18 ►
That’s the most successful program at UCSC, internationally known graduate program.
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Thousands of applicants every year for a few
00:05:27 ►
places. So to begin with, I
00:05:30 ►
challenge them to change
00:05:32 ►
the name from the history of consciousness to the
00:05:34 ►
history of unconsciousness.
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So, as long as we restrict
00:05:40 ►
attention to the historical period, then there’s
00:05:42 ►
not much to say, but all the interesting events
00:05:44 ►
I want to point out are prehistoric so therefore we have to
00:05:47 ►
speculate among the possibilities are that the conscious mind developed from
00:05:55 ►
the unconscious mind another one is that the unconscious mind developed from the
00:05:59 ►
conscious mind and another one is that consciousness existed always and that
00:06:03 ►
there was never any division all these possibilities
00:06:05 ►
So for the sake of discussion, I’ll choose one my favorite one, but only for today
00:06:10 ►
And that is the consciousness is always and the unconscious is recently created
00:06:15 ►
So that we can view it like this
00:06:17 ►
But we have consciousness going on and then the unconscious begins one day created by an accident in a historical
00:06:24 ►
accident or a natural law of
00:06:26 ►
evolution.
00:06:28 ►
This fantasy, however, because of peculiarities in the evolution of conscious mind and culture
00:06:37 ►
and civilization and so on, more and more things were regarded as illegal in the current
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world view and by the paradigm rejected,
00:06:46 ►
from above the curtain to below,
00:06:48 ►
so that as we go along,
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unconscious begins growing from modest origins,
00:06:53 ►
while the conscious mind correspondingly shrinks.
00:06:58 ►
So eventually, it looks more like this,
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where you have conscious, conscious, unconscious,
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but this is growing.
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And in its growing, evolution, further bifurcations morphogenesis and uh emergence of form in the
00:07:14 ►
unconscious so all what we identify today as fundamental deck furniture of the unconscious
00:07:21 ►
the dreams the archetypal symbols, and so on.
00:07:26 ►
All of that is evolved and has evolved from simpler origins and so on.
00:07:30 ►
And this history of the unconscious we seek to discuss.
00:07:34 ►
So I’ll call that the bifurcation theory of the unconscious.
00:07:38 ►
Now, one virtue of this theory before going on to number two is that it allows us to see our conscious mind
00:07:48 ►
in evolution from a universal conscious mind.
00:07:51 ►
The Gaian mind is then regarded as conscious.
00:07:57 ►
The animal mind is conscious.
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The mind of plants,
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we can speak of the consciousness of animals,
00:08:02 ►
the consciousness of plants,
00:08:03 ►
the consciousness of Mother Earth, the consciousness of Father Sky,
00:08:10 ►
the consciousness of their partnership in the nuclear family of the all and everything.
00:08:17 ►
And this is valuable, if we could promote this somehow,
00:08:31 ►
and if we could promote this somehow in terms of our future and relating with respect to the mind of all the other entities.
00:08:45 ►
Now, number two, this question is about the relationship of this bifurcations in history of ideas, such as the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden,
00:08:51 ►
the fall of Archangel Lucifer and other angels and so on,
00:08:57 ►
the creation of the devil, the growth, the emergence,
00:09:00 ►
the importance of evil, the empowerment of the negative,
00:09:03 ►
mammon and so on.
00:09:05 ►
We have a lot of other dichotomies
00:09:07 ►
which might have emerged from a unity
00:09:09 ►
by a process of mitosis, as it were,
00:09:12 ►
in the world of ideas.
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And we can try to relate these bifurcation events
00:09:16 ►
to each other in time,
00:09:18 ►
or in space, or as waves,
00:09:19 ►
or carnal relationships, or whatever,
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your favorite ones.
00:09:23 ►
The third, just for example, I’m going to recommend an example
00:09:26 ►
which for me was the source of my thinking about the history of unconsciousness in this way.
00:09:32 ►
So this is a specific hypothesis on the creation of the unconscious
00:09:35 ►
by the rejection of something according to a dogmatic paradigm.
00:09:42 ►
And this has to do with Marduk and Tiamat. The first creation myth that I know
00:09:48 ►
about that has the subjugation of chaos by a law and order executive, a cosmic god. The war between
00:10:01 ►
chaos and cosmos, won by cosmos, the king of law and order. The first one I
00:10:05 ►
know about is Marnuk and Tiamat and this is historical and is written on
00:10:11 ►
tablets. It was part of the Akitu festival that I always talk about. It was
00:10:15 ►
celebrated for 2,000 new years in a row throughout Babylonia by the Akkadians, the Semitic successors to the Sumerian civilization.
00:10:27 ►
And in this horror story, repeated every year
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and actually acted out by the king playing the role of Mandu,
00:10:37 ►
Tiamat, a dragon, goddess of chaos,
00:10:40 ►
is actually divided in two, murdered with a sword and stretched.
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The two halves open like an oyster shell,
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forming the sky and the earth
00:10:49 ►
at the beginning of the Babylonian creation myth.
00:10:54 ►
At this time, this ritual,
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so in a time when rituals were performed well
00:11:00 ►
and successfully in stabilizing the evolution of culture,
00:11:07 ►
chaos, which is essential to life and happiness, was subjugated. But we experience it all the
00:11:11 ►
time, but that was not allowed by the paradigm. And in this myth was created, I
00:11:17 ►
claim, the unconscious, the negative charge on the serpent image, the snake, the guy being the innocent, the essential symbol
00:11:27 ►
of Mother Earth itself, the consciousness of Gaia, that this symbol came to be
00:11:36 ►
associated with Hades, with evil, with terrorism, with Pluto Pluto with the torture of Erich Kegel and
00:11:48 ►
Submitted
00:11:50 ►
The torture of Inanna by Erich Kegel and so on in the underworld somehow is associated
00:11:56 ►
Chaos goes to the basement and with this gesture created the bifurcation in consciousness giving us the unconscious which appears to be
00:12:05 ►
gaining ever since and in this gain also our life our history of the human species going and more
00:12:12 ►
and more into the evil the demonic uh the evolutionarily unsuccessful forms of society
00:12:22 ►
that’s the one two two, three of it.
00:12:29 ►
I see. So you’re in favor of the kind of fold theory of the unconscious.
00:12:33 ►
Yes. One from which if we adopt it we could seek
00:12:39 ►
also to escape and we would have a mechanism to escape because we have a historical map as it were of the creation itself.
00:12:43 ►
How would escape happen?
00:12:48 ►
We would bring unconsciousness back into consciousness. We would take the deck furniture from the lower floors of the boat back up to the deck where it belongs.
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We would take back what’s happening if…
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I mean, this is just an example of the chaos theory of the bifurcation or creation of the unconscious.
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In this case, we see that science,
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which is the main temple of law and order,
00:13:09 ►
is now having to eat humble pie and to accept chaos again.
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That’s a good thing, I think, for our future.
00:13:14 ►
And this good thing is apparently happening
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more or less accidentally.
00:13:18 ►
But suppose that we had this talk in 1960
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and we decided that we would try to do something,
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something intentional to restore Tiamat to her throne,
00:13:31 ►
to bring up chaos from the unconscious and make it okay.
00:13:34 ►
Then we’d hunt around with these computer people.
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We’d locate Ed Lorenz.
00:13:39 ►
We’d popularize his model.
00:13:41 ►
We’d revolutionize the sciences on purpose in 1963 instead of waiting for it to happen spontaneously in 1973.
00:13:48 ►
And if we’d done that, we’d never know about that.
00:13:52 ►
It would never have happened without our intentional intervention.
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I’m not recommending an intentional intervention.
00:14:00 ►
I’m just saying that if some of these things are brought into consciousness,
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that the little that we do in our lives for the future generations,
00:14:10 ►
it consists of this discussion alone, maybe all that it takes, you see,
00:14:14 ►
to bring something back from the basement, to put it in consciousness,
00:14:17 ►
starting a new upward spiral somewhere in the evolution of the spirit.
00:14:23 ►
Well, could it be that the unconscious was created?
00:14:27 ►
Could it be that there was a time in history
00:14:28 ►
before which there was no unconscious,
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there was no split, there was only one,
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which you wouldn’t know whether to call it conscious or unconscious.
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I mean, we don’t know what consciousness means,
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except to say it’s the other one from unconsciousness.
00:14:40 ►
What do you imagine caused this bifurcation?
00:14:43 ►
I don’t know.
00:14:45 ►
I know that in historical time we have this horrific story, Babylonian myth,
00:14:56 ►
in the sense of myth as the lyric of the opera, which is a ritual.
00:15:04 ►
And that all the rest of this story
00:15:07 ►
had Sumerian precedence
00:15:08 ►
and this part didn’t
00:15:09 ►
so I’m not able to say
00:15:11 ►
to speculate
00:15:12 ►
that this had a 2000 year history
00:15:14 ►
before Marduk
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Marduk was the city god of Babylon
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and there was a time when Babylon didn’t exist
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other towns existed
00:15:24 ►
Eridu existed in 2000 B.C.,
00:15:26 ►
Ur existed in Sumerian time and they had their city gods.
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Every city in that early urban revolution,
00:15:37 ►
every city coalesced around a god or goddess
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and the form of the goddess was materialized
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in the form of the city and this is the whole idea of the sacred city the God concepts or goddess
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concepts which were successful which were attractors created cities and the
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other ones didn’t and you had therefore a kind of a morphogenesis in the full
00:15:58 ►
complex of population movement urban technology technology, city design, and religion, ritual, and so on.
00:16:09 ►
And the successful ones accreted with other ones.
00:16:12 ►
And syncretism was the way in which empires were created.
00:16:17 ►
So before 2000 BC, we didn’t have Marduk.
00:16:20 ►
This didn’t exist.
00:16:22 ►
Bel-Moradach, it was called.
00:16:23 ►
And this was a synchronism from previous elements.
00:16:28 ►
So there are books about the serpent, about dragon image in mythology, and many cultures
00:16:38 ►
have dragon images, and they’re all associated with chaos, and basically they’re okay. Suddenly
00:16:44 ►
we have Saint. George killing
00:16:46 ►
the dragon, we have St. Michael with his foot
00:16:48 ►
on the dragon’s throat, we have
00:16:50 ►
all this energy given to killing
00:16:52 ►
the dragons in Celtic
00:16:54 ►
mythology in England coming over into
00:16:56 ►
Christianity and so on, now I think
00:16:58 ►
it’s important that that be
00:16:59 ►
undone, I think we want
00:17:02 ►
St. George and the dragon
00:17:04 ►
getting it on together in a May Day celebration
00:17:08 ►
where Dionysian elements are accepted. I think it’s possible that this particular bifurcation
00:17:15 ►
has to do with the patrilineal necessity of knowing who is the father of the children
00:17:31 ►
of knowing who is the father of the children and therefore the rejection of the ritual in which sexual license was an important part of the nuclear family brought about the rejection of the dragon
00:17:49 ►
and the killing of the dragon and so on.
00:17:52 ►
But this is a speculation I don’t know.
00:17:54 ►
Lately I’ve come to think it would be nice to have a competing theory.
00:17:57 ►
I’m not sure we can blame everything on the patriarchal structure.
00:18:03 ►
But now you’re suggesting that it was the concern for male paternity
00:18:06 ►
that drove the breakdown of this whole thing.
00:18:09 ►
That killed the goddess, yes.
00:18:11 ►
We couldn’t have this goddess around who liked to seduce young men and so on.
00:18:14 ►
Well, the suppression of psychedelics comes at that same phase
00:18:20 ►
because the orgies driven by the psychedelic religion
00:18:24 ►
completely frustrated that desire to identify male paternity.
00:18:30 ►
The rejection of psychedelics and shamanism and so on
00:18:33 ►
could be likewise associated.
00:18:36 ►
So now we’re getting a certain collage of barfication events.
00:18:42 ►
And only so-called primitive societies have shamans.
00:18:47 ►
They have psychedelic rituals on a weekly basis
00:18:50 ►
and they believe that spirits are alive in rocks and plants
00:18:56 ►
and they believe this because they’ve seen them
00:18:58 ►
and they believe in the reincarnation of the spirit
00:19:00 ►
and that a human soul could reincarnate in an animal and so on.
00:19:08 ►
So it’s possible that a whole complex of things all disappeared at the same time because of some evolutionary selection,
00:19:20 ►
some unnatural selection as it were. And it might be important to try to figure out
00:19:25 ►
the mechanism of this fall,
00:19:28 ►
because this is a really big fall,
00:19:30 ►
and now since these thousands of years
00:19:31 ►
we’re suffering from the loss
00:19:34 ►
of this whole complex of ideas together.
00:19:37 ►
And I don’t know if there’s any one of them
00:19:39 ►
which is the cause.
00:19:41 ►
I’m not sure they were simultaneous,
00:19:43 ►
or if there was one place in the world
00:19:45 ►
where they were simultaneous.
00:19:47 ►
I can’t accept blindly
00:19:49 ►
the theory of the Kurgan waves,
00:19:51 ►
the three Kurgan waves and so on.
00:19:53 ►
I think that over time
00:19:55 ►
these mushroom-using people in the Sahara
00:19:58 ►
were transformed unwittingly
00:20:00 ►
into mead cults
00:20:03 ►
by a scarcity of mushrooms and the recognition that honey was
00:20:09 ►
a potential preserving medium for the mushroom so as the mushrooms became rarer and rarer
00:20:15 ►
the effort to preserve them in honey and to concentrate the use of them into large festivals
00:20:22 ►
intensified and finally what you had were mead festivals
00:20:27 ►
where mushrooms were no more than a flavoring
00:20:30 ►
and ultimately no more than a memory.
00:20:32 ►
And that the shift from the psychology
00:20:35 ►
of a psilocybin mushroom cult
00:20:38 ►
to the psychology of a beer mead intoxicating cult
00:20:43 ►
is precisely the difference in emphasis
00:20:46 ►
of inner dynamics that would shift you
00:20:49 ►
from a partnership arrangement
00:20:53 ►
sensitive to social cuing
00:20:55 ►
to a patriarchal relationship
00:20:57 ►
insensitive to social cuing,
00:21:00 ►
which is precisely the effect.
00:21:02 ►
So first the mead, then the patriarchy?
00:21:05 ►
The patriarchy and the mead and involved together along with the concern for male
00:21:12 ►
paternity it had to do with the suppression of orgies this was a
00:21:16 ►
critical decision that had to be faced basically the choice was between fun and full knowledge of the flow of your genes.
00:21:28 ►
And once it was decided that male paternity was an important issue,
00:21:33 ►
then the concept mine comes into existence.
00:21:37 ►
My women, in this case.
00:21:39 ►
My women, and then my children, and then my food, my weapons, my land.
00:21:46 ►
And this was the whole thing which this orgiastic, psychedelic, boundary-dissolving mushroom religion was holding at bay.
00:21:58 ►
It was literally a pharmacological intervention to keep that kind of a psychology from getting old. Well, maybe it was an accident.
00:22:07 ►
You see, an accident in the kitchen that Mead took over just because, well, the climate warmed up and
00:22:14 ►
there was no other way to preserve it or something, and after the Mead entered the kitchen by accident
00:22:21 ►
and then all these other shifts followed so this would be an alternative
00:22:26 ►
to the kurgan wave theory this is an alternative to the kurgan well i like that i like that terence
00:22:31 ►
i think we need an alternative well you see it would happen quite naturally you have this
00:22:36 ►
flourishing mushroom cult on the plains of africa and then the drying which created that situation continues,
00:22:49 ►
and you get, first of all, seasonality to the mushrooms.
00:22:51 ►
So that’s all right.
00:22:55 ►
You just have these wonderful, huge, seasonal celebrations,
00:22:58 ►
and your psychology can be basically intact.
00:23:01 ►
But then as the drying continues,
00:23:04 ►
and the water holes are further and further apart,
00:23:06 ►
the need to preserve the sacrament and to spread it ever more thinly i mean this is how so this is the only scenario i
00:23:12 ►
can imagine by which psychedelic mysteries are lost is if they actually slowly fade from the
00:23:20 ►
zone of occupation of the culture using them, and a substitute slowly takes their place
00:23:28 ►
in a way that is at least satisfyingly…
00:23:31 ►
Booze.
00:23:32 ►
Booze.
00:23:33 ►
They went from an ecstatic goddess cult of orgy
00:23:37 ►
to a drunken reverie of warriors and whores.
00:23:40 ►
So this is a two-phase theory,
00:23:42 ►
the psychedelic partnership phase
00:23:45 ►
or the alcoholic
00:23:47 ►
dominator phase
00:23:49 ►
drug driven phase
00:23:51 ►
transformation repeating itself
00:23:53 ►
endlessly flip flop
00:23:55 ►
seesaw in the history of consciousness
00:23:57 ►
I like that
00:23:58 ►
and there’s historical evidence as well
00:24:00 ►
in crete where we see this
00:24:02 ►
phase reversal phenomenon
00:24:04 ►
went on into historical times, ending there,
00:24:08 ►
because the Dionysian ceremonies
00:24:11 ►
were apparently debased into alcoholic revels,
00:24:16 ►
and Orpheus was a reformer,
00:24:18 ►
trying to get the Dionysian religion back on track,
00:24:21 ►
as it were, with psychedelics and away from the booze.
00:24:23 ►
And it happened again with Pythagoras and again with buddha well and it happened with dionysius turning into bacchus
00:24:31 ►
into bacchus and then it was the vine it was wine and the early bacchus is a frightening figure
00:24:38 ►
whose practitioners fell into such frenzies of ecstasy that it was charged against them that they devoured their own children.
00:24:47 ►
The late, hairy-footed, lascivious Bacchus
00:24:50 ►
is simply an image of the alcohol consciousness
00:24:55 ►
made concrete.
00:24:57 ►
So if we took this theory seriously for a moment,
00:25:00 ►
which we won’t too seriously,
00:25:03 ►
with this two-phase theory,
00:25:04 ►
and then we favored one phase
00:25:05 ►
in the other phase, and then we would
00:25:07 ►
seek the mechanism of a phase transition
00:25:10 ►
as you turn on heat
00:25:11 ►
underwater and it boils or something.
00:25:14 ►
Then we would try to get
00:25:15 ►
psychedelic drugs back into
00:25:17 ►
the agenda and somehow
00:25:19 ►
get rid of
00:25:21 ►
alcohol.
00:25:24 ►
This would then explain
00:25:26 ►
why alcohol is legal and marijuana
00:25:28 ►
is not in these societies
00:25:30 ►
and so on is there is some
00:25:32 ►
self preservation function
00:25:34 ►
there’s a phase maintaining
00:25:36 ►
mechanism within
00:25:38 ►
this phase which has made it dominant
00:25:40 ►
this past 6,000 years
00:25:42 ►
it reinforces male dominance.
00:25:45 ►
Why?
00:25:46 ►
Why?
00:25:46 ►
Because if you technically analyze
00:25:49 ►
what alcohol does pharmacologically,
00:25:52 ►
it actually does diminish
00:25:54 ►
sensitivity to social cueing.
00:25:57 ►
This is a technical way of saying
00:25:59 ►
you turn into a boor and an oaf.
00:26:02 ►
Zombie.
00:26:03 ►
No.
00:26:04 ►
A libidinally driven oaf is what you turn into.
00:26:09 ►
And because you now have a reduced sensitivity to social cuing,
00:26:13 ►
and your normal good sense is impaired,
00:26:19 ►
you’re prepared to make a sexual conquest.
00:26:23 ►
And most of the sexual neurosis
00:26:25 ►
of the western civilization
00:26:27 ►
can be traced to incidents
00:26:29 ►
of early sexual imprinting
00:26:32 ►
in the presence of alcohol
00:26:34 ►
how many women lose their virginity
00:26:38 ►
in an ambiance of a drunken groping encounter
00:26:42 ►
this is how it is normally done
00:26:44 ►
in the West.
00:26:46 ►
So that alcohol is so spun into our
00:26:49 ►
simultaneous terror and attraction
00:26:51 ►
for the sexual experience
00:26:53 ►
that it’s just become scripted in
00:26:56 ►
as part of our cultural neurosis.
00:26:58 ►
I’m willing to bet that for a thousand years in the West
00:27:01 ►
nobody got laid who wasn’t smashed.
00:27:05 ►
I did.
00:27:06 ►
This was the period I’m talking about ends
00:27:09 ►
before you were born, Ralph.
00:27:15 ►
So it’s just a matter of,
00:27:17 ►
there’s a good point for the discussion.
00:27:21 ►
The way in which our relationships
00:27:23 ►
to the material world,
00:27:24 ►
specifically drugs,
00:27:26 ►
promote or retard the expression of what we’re calling the unconscious. Because one of the
00:27:32 ►
things that I think repels us all about drug abuse is that it is unexamined, unconscious and unconscious behavior. And it’s worth thinking then
00:27:45 ►
about how the unconscious is, in a way,
00:27:50 ►
an out-of-doubt relationship to the exterior world
00:27:54 ►
because we can call it forth.
00:27:56 ►
We can addict to heroin or television
00:27:58 ►
and turn 90% of our lives
00:28:01 ►
into an indwelling in the unconscious.
00:28:03 ►
Well, I do this in my own way.
00:28:04 ►
I feel that I’m unable to become unaddicted, of our lives into an indwelling in the unconscious. Yes, well, I do this in my own way.
00:28:08 ►
I feel that I’m unable to become unaddicted,
00:28:10 ►
totally unaddicted.
00:28:13 ►
But I could be addicted to this or that.
00:28:13 ►
Right.
00:28:16 ►
So after I figured that out, I decided not to be addicted to chocolate,
00:28:20 ►
ice cream, alcohol,
00:28:21 ►
and a whole bunch of other things.
00:28:23 ►
And it seems very easy to make these choices.
00:28:28 ►
You can replace something with something else.
00:28:29 ►
You just touch it, and it’s attractive,
00:28:31 ►
so then you get pulled away from this one to that one.
00:28:35 ►
Could this then be inserted in our educational system,
00:28:40 ►
rites of passage and so on,
00:28:41 ►
so that people know that they have a choice,
00:28:44 ►
and they don’t have to be addicted only to alcohol and not to anything else,
00:28:48 ►
and that they could actually choose reclaiming free will without rejecting addiction.
00:28:56 ►
This is what it has to be, because this is the kind of creature we are.
00:29:00 ►
And the addiction of addictions, which spawned this itch originally is no addiction
00:29:08 ►
at all but rather our natural connection into the hierarchy of gaian information that was accessible
00:29:15 ►
to us when these nature religions were freely practiced a sacrament is not a symbol and the day they were able to sell people on the notion that a sacrament is a symbol
00:29:28 ►
they severed the umbilical connection to the logos and
00:29:33 ►
Then ran off the track and screwed everything up. Well to get back to the conscious and the unconscious here. I I
00:29:41 ►
Think it’s not necessary to destroy the unconscious or to make everything unconscious become conscious.
00:29:49 ►
But I do think some growth of consciousness could be associated with some shrinkage of unconsciousness.
00:29:55 ►
And if we can’t undo this bifurcation in which the curtain was developed,
00:30:00 ►
at least we could rearrange the furniture a little bit.
00:30:06 ►
So we see one
00:30:07 ►
way that might be relevant for doing this
00:30:10 ►
is giving people a
00:30:12 ►
wider choice of addictions.
00:30:15 ►
And in this
00:30:16 ►
sense, a restrictive society which narrows
00:30:18 ►
the choice of addictions
00:30:19 ►
is somehow anti-evolutionary
00:30:22 ►
in that it promotes
00:30:23 ►
the growth of unconsciousness,
00:30:25 ►
insensitivity and danger
00:30:27 ►
to life and limb of the biosphere and so on.
00:30:30 ►
But what could be done
00:30:34 ►
besides somehow diminishing alcoholism?
00:30:41 ►
What could be done
00:30:42 ►
for the advance of consciousness to develop kind of telescopes,
00:30:47 ►
little stellarators where we can look into the unconscious and the dream. I mean dream analysis
00:30:53 ►
just doesn’t really do it for people. Well your idea Rupert about the age-related reestablishment of shamanic sacraments might come in here.
00:31:07 ►
I think so, yes.
00:31:10 ►
This is this idea that came up at Hollyhock recently.
00:31:16 ►
Legalizing psychedelics in an age-related manner.
00:31:19 ►
Already we have age-related legislation.
00:31:22 ►
Before 18 in Britain it’s illegal to buy and consume alcohol.
00:31:23 ►
After 18 it’s okay.
00:31:25 ►
Before 16 it’s illegal to buy and consume alcohol, after 18 it’s okay. Before 16 it’s illegal to buy and consume tobacco, after 16 it’s okay. So now what about legislation
00:31:30 ►
before 30 it’s illegal to buy and consume mushrooms, after 30 it’s okay. Before 40 it’s
00:31:37 ►
illegal to buy and consume, say, LSD, after 40 it’s okay, 50 DMT, etc. There’s a series of age-related initiation-related
00:31:47 ►
legalizations, and your ability to purchase the substance legally after you’ve reached
00:31:53 ►
that age depends on being initiated into it. You have to go to be held at weekends, post-night
00:31:58 ►
guests, etc. Your friends for your 50th birthday know exactly what to do they’d have a whip around to subscribe
00:32:06 ►
for the price of a free gift voucher
00:32:08 ►
for a DMT initiation
00:32:10 ►
valid at either Omega, Esalen, Honohalf or the New Yorker
00:32:14 ►
this is a vision you understand
00:32:17 ►
anyway there’s an initiation
00:32:21 ►
so there’s a series of openings
00:32:25 ►
into other realms of perception
00:32:27 ►
but you see I don’t think that the problem is so much
00:32:30 ►
that the unconscious is a kind of conspiracy or fall
00:32:33 ►
the fact that the whole way that nature works in all aspects
00:32:37 ►
is through the whole formation of habits
00:32:38 ►
and as we know from our own experience
00:32:41 ►
that habit formation involves going into unconsciousness.
00:32:46 ►
The principal model of which is habituation, found among animals right down to the level
00:32:50 ►
of stentor, you know, unicellular ciliates.
00:32:55 ►
Habituation where, like when we go into a room and there’s a funny smell, you notice
00:32:58 ►
it, then after a while you stop noticing it, the background noises.
00:33:03 ►
Habituation is the way we actually personally experience and share with the entire animal kingdom by going into
00:33:08 ►
unconsciousness of a large part of the environmental stimuli and what’s
00:33:14 ►
acting upon us. And it seems that the focus of attention is always quite
00:33:19 ►
narrow. What sensory systems and lunisomal organisms do right through the
00:33:23 ►
animal kingdom is perceive differences
00:33:26 ►
you know, differences in smell, differences in temperature, differences in pressure when you move your finger over something
00:33:32 ►
all sensory systems, differences in movement
00:33:35 ►
sensory systems work on differences and what becomes conscious of differences
00:33:39 ►
and they’re on the surface, it’s as if it’s on the entire surface of a largely unconscious system.
00:33:48 ►
The shimmering surface where you notice differences, there’s a kind of awareness or consciousness of differences,
00:33:51 ►
but the heart of the whole thing is unconscious habit.
00:33:54 ►
And the heart of all living systems is unconscious habit.
00:33:57 ►
However conscious we become, we don’t become fully conscious of the
00:34:00 ►
unconscious embryonic habits that formed us,
00:34:03 ►
and the unfolding of human instinctive and cultural habits
00:34:07 ►
that so conditioned our development and our culture.
00:34:12 ►
So, as these habits are inbuilt in the whole of nature,
00:34:15 ►
and I don’t think there’s a kind of sinister conspiracy around consciousness,
00:34:19 ►
it may be that a sharper awareness of the interface developed at some time.
00:34:24 ►
I don’t know.
00:34:25 ►
I mean, maybe, perhaps through psychedelic visions themselves,
00:34:30 ►
the sense that in certain moments you’re conscious of things that in other moments you’re not conscious of.
00:34:35 ►
You become aware of beings and entities and dimensions, etc., which you’re not normally aware of.
00:34:40 ►
So, it’s not that you’re conscious all the time, you’re conscious sometimes.
00:34:45 ►
The fact that when you start from habit, that habit is a natural process that occurs in
00:34:50 ►
all nature, shimmering on the surface of the habits of atoms, of molecules, of crystals,
00:34:56 ►
disruptions and chaotic perturbations and so on, like crystal faults and fractures that
00:35:02 ►
make each crystal different in the kind of form.
00:35:09 ►
There’s a kind of consciousness associated with these discontinuities and differences.
00:35:17 ►
So everywhere there’s this kind of awareness of difference which is the kind of consciousness level but below that is a large underground thing of habit or unconsciousness. And there’s a sense in which shamanic journeyings,
00:35:27 ►
ritual practices like an annual liturgical year,
00:35:30 ►
where, like still today, September the 29th,
00:35:33 ►
the Festival of St. Michael and all angels,
00:35:35 ►
liturgies and masses for the angels,
00:35:37 ►
said all throughout the Christian world,
00:35:39 ►
a day of invocation and hymns to the angels.
00:35:42 ►
It’s a day on which you become particularly aware
00:35:44 ►
and open to and invoke and talk to and communicate with the angelic orders
00:35:48 ►
there’s a day for it it’s there today it’s practice and then there are other
00:35:53 ►
days like All Souls Day when you communicate through repriant
00:35:56 ►
reprimand and masses and relate to the souls of all the departed then there are
00:36:01 ►
the various Saints days that relate you the lives the lights, the kind of
00:36:06 ►
as you were saying this morning
00:36:07 ►
each saint representing a kind of
00:36:09 ►
christianization of a sort of
00:36:11 ►
spirit principle or in some cases
00:36:13 ►
even nature’s spirit principle
00:36:15 ►
the green men
00:36:18 ►
the green men
00:36:19 ►
so you have all this going on
00:36:22 ►
so I think that somehow
00:36:25 ►
there’s the sense in which
00:36:26 ►
through liturgies
00:36:28 ►
through rituals
00:36:29 ►
through psychedelic visioning
00:36:30 ►
it’s possible to come
00:36:31 ►
to bring to awareness
00:36:32 ►
with a whole liturgical calendar
00:36:34 ►
all these different qualities
00:36:36 ►
celebrated on different days
00:36:38 ►
throughout the year
00:36:38 ►
this is found in Bali today
00:36:41 ►
in the Catholic calendar
00:36:42 ►
in the saints days
00:36:44 ►
and services throughout the liturgical calendar and in the Catholic calendar, you know, in the saints’ days, and observances throughout the liturgical calendar,
00:36:47 ►
and in the major festivals,
00:36:49 ►
the solar and lunar festivals,
00:36:51 ►
like Christmas and Easter.
00:36:54 ►
So there is this awareness through ritual
00:36:57 ►
of all these different dimensions.
00:36:59 ►
They’re brought into awareness.
00:37:01 ►
They’re normally unconscious,
00:37:02 ►
but there are particular days in the year
00:37:04 ►
when they’re brought into consciousness you can’t be consciousness
00:37:06 ►
of everything all the time we have a limited focus on awareness or attention
00:37:10 ►
so you’re saying the calendar can be an engine for illuminating the calendar of
00:37:17 ►
rituals that actually achieve opening yeah I think that the theory of habituation, like sensory inhibition, is
00:37:29 ►
it’s a good model for the mind in which the whole thing is viewed as
00:37:38 ►
essentially unconscious and that consciousness is a little window which
00:37:43 ►
rolls over and could be redirected at will by a ritual or something at a certain
00:37:48 ►
Part of the unconscious which would then become by a voluntary choice
00:37:52 ►
Conscious for a day it would have his day of days. Yes
00:37:57 ►
the unconscious that I was speaking about before is a region of this whole thing in which the contents have somehow become
00:38:05 ►
unavailable.
00:38:11 ►
And it’s the unavailability that I would identify that as the ultimate unconscious.
00:38:13 ►
Let’s call that then the unavailable unconscious.
00:38:18 ►
The unavailable unconscious has been growing since a certain time in history where it’s not possible to rove the window over it anymore
00:38:22 ►
because it’s been declared illegal.
00:38:26 ►
I think perhaps because it doesn’t have its day.
00:38:30 ►
The orgy principle has its day and still does in Indian holy festivals.
00:38:34 ►
Yes.
00:38:35 ►
And throw those around, have talent processions and so on.
00:38:38 ►
So, and revassals of the social order, those kinds of things are very alive in India.
00:38:44 ►
There’s all these different principles throughout the year which we find mirrored in Carnival
00:38:49 ►
and Mardi Gras and so on, the same kinds of festivals, you see, suppressed in the Protestant
00:38:54 ►
countries through the Reformation. So no longer did the goddess have her day in the various
00:38:59 ►
Marian festivals, all these female saints and Saint Francis and all the rest no longer had their days.
00:39:06 ►
The days of the angels were not observed.
00:39:08 ►
Only the most important biblical festivals like Easter and of course Christmas.
00:39:15 ►
So there was a great shrinking of the number of observed days.
00:39:20 ►
Mammon doesn’t have an observed day and the goddess doesn’t have an observed day.
00:39:24 ►
All these principles are entirely unconscious in our culture because they’re not collectively and publicly observed.
00:39:31 ►
So, I think that probably the traditional model for bringing to consciousness what is so largely unconscious,
00:39:38 ►
not necessarily through an evil conspiracy or names of ignorance or anything like that,
00:39:42 ►
but simply through the natural tendency to habituation observed in the operation of all sensory systems everywhere.
00:39:48 ►
Things that remain the same are not perceived, whereas
00:39:51 ►
differences that are. So unconsciousness proceeds by a lack of attention
00:39:56 ►
as it were, only by focusing attention and having days
00:39:59 ►
and special rituals and so on we could maintain consciousness.
00:40:04 ►
We would have to work at the maintenance of consciousness
00:40:08 ►
as we work at the maintenance of the garden,
00:40:11 ►
keep weeding and watering and so on.
00:40:14 ►
And these mythic festivals you talked about were obviously a way of doing that.
00:40:17 ►
You reenact every year the drama of the myths.
00:40:19 ►
So that you bring the myths to consciousness
00:40:21 ►
and make them seen by the senses, heard, enacted and real
00:40:24 ►
in the sense that kings contempl’s concept is not equal to whatever.
00:40:28 ►
Yes, well…
00:40:29 ►
So, that it’s… and it happens on particular days in the year, that’s how it works, that
00:40:35 ►
our attention is selective and this has always been based on seasonal festivals and tragical
00:40:40 ►
calendars and so forth.
00:40:42 ►
So you’re saying everything tends toward unconsciousness and it’s only by this act of awareness pushing
00:40:50 ►
against this universal principle that we illuminate phenomena in consciousness?
00:40:57 ►
Yes, and I think this relates to Ralph’s model of the spirit, where he told us that on the
00:41:02 ►
one hand you have the soul, on the other hand what you have is the body, and the spirit which where he told us that on the one hand you have the the soul on the other hand what you have the body and the spirits what mediates
00:41:08 ►
between them well in it’s interesting in the late medieval or Renaissance theory
00:41:14 ►
or certainly the 17th century theory the animal spirits were what mediated
00:41:18 ►
between the psyche the soul or the person and the body they were an
00:41:24 ►
intermediate position the animal spirits.
00:41:27 ►
Now the impasses are thought to be due to animal spirits by the incarnate.
00:41:31 ►
So the spirit is, if it’s the surface or the interface between them,
00:41:34 ►
then it’s that part which picks up differences,
00:41:37 ►
and in which differences can only be known through an awareness of differences,
00:41:40 ►
the inner way difference can be perceived,
00:41:42 ►
or you have to have a larger space within which it’s seen as a difference
00:41:45 ►
and that means difference is defined relative to non-difference or sameness or or steady habit or
00:41:52 ►
whatever it’s measured against a background of unconscious habit which isn’t changing
00:41:57 ►
or by clock time as a model for that so you that it’s differences and it’s therefore differences
00:42:04 ►
that would be observed throughout.
00:42:05 ►
Gaia would be very conscious during ice ages,
00:42:07 ►
because things would be changing at the beginnings and the ends of ice ages.
00:42:11 ►
There’d be a tremendous difference going on, and Gaia would come to a higher consciousness,
00:42:15 ►
as Gaia must be coming to a higher consciousness now through these large ecological changes.
00:42:19 ►
So that’s, history is triggering this awareness.
00:42:24 ►
Something like that.
00:42:25 ►
But it’s to do with differences,
00:42:27 ►
and it’s to do with rates of change
00:42:29 ►
that consciousness or awareness are concerned.
00:42:33 ►
You know, in sensory physiology,
00:42:35 ►
the whole thing is to do with all these laws, logarithmic laws,
00:42:37 ►
our sensory perception of rates of change,
00:42:40 ►
ten times an increase in stimulus strength.
00:42:44 ►
It usually represents a two-fold increase in subjective stimulus,
00:42:48 ►
a hundredfold, threefold.
00:42:49 ►
It’s a logarithmic scale that the senses work on pretty universally.
00:42:55 ►
Well, I think this is right. This is good.
00:42:57 ►
This is a theory of the importance of holidays.
00:43:01 ►
But there’s still something wrong
00:43:03 ►
because through the annual repetition of Christmas which persists
00:43:08 ►
to this day the consciousness is still gone because there’s not enough difference I guess
00:43:14 ►
every year Christmas is the same I mean people have have they not completely forgotten the
00:43:20 ►
significance of Christmas it’s possible to experience Christmas with full regalia of angels on the trees and so on,
00:43:27 ►
and still to not have any awakening
00:43:30 ►
into consciousness of lost archetypes.
00:43:34 ►
That’s precisely why Christmas is a child’s festival
00:43:37 ►
and why the delight of Christmas,
00:43:39 ►
explained by everyone,
00:43:40 ►
the ideal archetypal delight of it,
00:43:41 ►
is young children waking up on Christmas Day
00:43:44 ►
and seeing the stars and the angels and the suns and the stars and the ideal archetypal delight of it is young children waking up on Christmas Day and seeing the stars and the angels
00:43:45 ►
and the suns and the bells and the presents.
00:43:48 ►
And the magic of Christmas is considered to work for young children.
00:43:52 ►
Adults feel somewhat guilty about being jaded about it
00:43:55 ►
and there’s a great impulse to recapture it
00:43:58 ►
through the delight of young children.
00:44:00 ►
And since it’s a young children’s festival,
00:44:03 ►
it’s a nativity festival, it’s a child festival, the sacred child festival.
00:44:08 ►
That’s the pole it touches in us, the sacred child.
00:44:12 ►
So I think that that’s what that particular festival is about,
00:44:16 ►
and I think that it operates quite well in this way,
00:44:19 ►
as a reminder and reactivator.
00:44:22 ►
So it works a few times.
00:44:24 ►
I think it has a few times.
00:44:26 ►
I think it has a particular,
00:44:27 ►
because of its ritual power,
00:44:28 ►
there are a lot of people who then go to church at Christmas.
00:44:31 ►
It’s very common in England.
00:44:33 ►
They go to church in England.
00:44:35 ►
Lots of people go to Christmas and Easter.
00:44:37 ►
They never normally go at all.
00:44:39 ►
And so there are some people
00:44:41 ►
whose connection with the Christian faith
00:44:43 ►
is confined to these major seasonal festivals.
00:44:47 ►
And it therefore sort of still has a kind of pulse,
00:44:52 ►
the basic ritual pulse of the seasonal festival year,
00:44:56 ►
of the liturgical year, is still alive, however sluggishly, in a lot of people.
00:45:01 ►
So it’s not that most people have forgotten it.
00:45:04 ►
But one thing I think,
00:45:06 ►
one of the troubles with Terence and his suggestions
00:45:08 ►
is that they’re usually,
00:45:09 ►
the ideal state that he usually portrays,
00:45:12 ►
like his idea of moving over to an entirely lunar calendar
00:45:15 ►
to bring about feminine virtues and partnership values,
00:45:19 ►
his ideal predictions usually turn out
00:45:22 ►
to be that they’ve been realized
00:45:23 ►
and often refuted by the world of Islam.
00:45:28 ►
Like the lunar calendar.
00:45:30 ►
That’s true. They were big on that.
00:45:32 ►
And the other thing is that they were big on banning alcohol.
00:45:36 ►
One of the most important Quranic prohibitions is on intoxicating drink.
00:45:40 ►
And the result, therefore, is that many Muslims, mainstream Muslim culture,
00:45:43 ►
and certainly on the surface of righteous Muslim life,
00:45:47 ►
alcohol is not consumed. But in most Muslim societies,
00:45:52 ►
cannabis has been considered all right. It’s still an intoxicant and still falls under a kind of Quranic prohibition,
00:45:58 ►
but not one that’s taken as seriously as the prohibition of alcohol.
00:46:00 ►
That’s right. No, that’s a good point. You’re right.
00:46:03 ►
So Islamic culture is a culture that the drug of which is cannabis, the largest part of the Islamic world, rather than alcohol. Yes, although whether Islam has a drug at all could be argued. I mean, perhaps the drug of the Islamic world is coffee. Caffeine is more typical of the state of mind we associate with most of the denizens of that part of the world,
00:46:29 ►
rather than the affable states induced by cannabis.
00:46:33 ►
It’s the shrill argumentative and mercenary arguments of the marketplace,
00:46:38 ►
and coffee managed to take that basic foothold and write itself into every labor contract
00:46:45 ►
on earth. It’s the only drug sanctioned by industrial capitalism in the form of
00:46:51 ►
the coffee break. They don’t have smoking breaks you mean at factories in the
00:47:01 ►
global world. That’s right They don’t have cannabis breaks.
00:47:07 ►
Do they have cannabis parties on the weekend?
00:47:11 ►
I think cannabis is associated with the mystical strain in Islam that’s definitely minority
00:47:13 ►
and doesn’t really, when it has shaped Islamic culture,
00:47:20 ►
it’s been episodic and far in the past.
00:47:25 ►
Did you catch that part where Terrence said that he thought that the only way that psychedelic mysteries could have been lost
00:47:32 ►
was through climate changes that caused the plants and mushrooms to become ever more scarce until they disappeared,
00:47:40 ►
along with the knowledge about how to use them?
00:47:42 ►
along with the knowledge about how to use them.
00:47:48 ►
And it made me think, wonder a little bit about whether the Internet might play a role in preserving psychedelic knowledge this time around.
00:47:51 ►
Of course, what if the net goes down in some kind of a new dark age?
00:47:56 ►
I can’t really foresee that right now, but hey, then again,
00:48:00 ►
I never thought my good old 8-track tapes would ever become obsolete either.
00:48:04 ►
So just to be sure that the core of this vitally important information isn’t lost, Then again, I never thought my good old 8-track tapes would ever become obsolete either.
00:48:09 ►
So just to be sure that the core of this vitally important information isn’t lost,
00:48:16 ►
everyone who can might want to think about buying a copy of Picol and of Tikal,
00:48:18 ►
both by Ann and Sasha Shulgin.
00:48:22 ►
If you haven’t already seen these valuable books, you might want to check them out,
00:48:25 ►
particularly if you’re one of these chemists out there.
00:48:27 ►
I think the Shulgens still have some copies left that you can order from their publishing
00:48:32 ►
company, Transform Press, which is at Box 13675, Berkeley, California, 94712.
00:48:41 ►
Or if you want to buy them through Amazon, I’ve put links to them at the top of our Amazon store page at matrixmasters.com.
00:48:49 ►
I’ve kind of let the email pile up these past few weeks, but there are a couple of things that came up that I’d like to mention.
00:48:57 ►
And the first one, I think, is one I’ve mentioned before, but maybe some of you missed that program, so I need to bring it up again.
00:49:04 ►
mentioned before, but maybe some of you missed that program, so I need to bring it up again.
00:49:11 ►
And that is the fact that if you write to me and ask about where you can obtain any illegal substance, well, you’re simply not going to hear back from me.
00:49:15 ►
At least for the time being, the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is still in place
00:49:21 ►
somewhat, and it allows us to discuss these sacred medicines in almost any kind of way we want to.
00:49:29 ►
The thing we can’t do, however, is talk about how and where to get them.
00:49:33 ►
But please don’t think that I don’t understand how you feel when you’re essentially out there on your own without any connections to the worldwide psychedelic community.
00:49:43 ►
I was in exactly the same place about ten years ago.
00:49:47 ►
You know, I’d moved to a new state, didn’t know anybody there,
00:49:50 ►
I didn’t feel like I could trust anybody at work to talk to about it.
00:49:55 ►
In short, I just thought I’d run out of options.
00:49:58 ►
So how did things change for me, you ask?
00:50:00 ►
Well, I went to hear Terence McKenna talk at Omega Institute in New York. And he told me about
00:50:07 ►
the Entheobotany Conference in Blanque, Mexico. And it was at
00:50:12 ►
that conference that the door kind of opened to this community for me.
00:50:16 ►
Unfortunately, that conference series no longer exists.
00:50:20 ►
So, where does that leave us today? Well,
00:50:23 ►
here are three events
00:50:25 ►
that might hold some promise for you
00:50:26 ►
to meet like-minded people
00:50:28 ►
and I’m sure that there are
00:50:31 ►
more of these going on as well
00:50:32 ►
the first one is taking place
00:50:34 ►
on April 20th in Amsterdam
00:50:37 ►
and you can learn more about this event
00:50:39 ►
00:50:44 ►
and listen to the Dopecast for more information.
00:50:48 ►
I’m not sure exactly what kind of event this is,
00:50:51 ►
but it sounds really similar to the Cannabis Cup parties
00:50:55 ►
that are held every November.
00:50:57 ►
And my guess is it won’t be as big as the Cup,
00:50:59 ►
which had over 2,000 people there the year I attended.
00:51:03 ►
But with the crew from the Cannabis Podcast Network as a part of it,
00:51:07 ►
I’m sure that you’ll have a great time there.
00:51:10 ►
Hard not to have a good time in Amsterdam, isn’t it?
00:51:14 ►
And the next big event that I know about will be from June 13th through the 17th in Costa Rica.
00:51:21 ►
And this is John Hanna’s 2007 Mind States Conference.
00:51:26 ►
While John does a large conference every other year in the States, I’ve been told by several
00:51:31 ►
people who attended the alternative ones out of the country that they are the closest conferences
00:51:36 ►
you’re going to find to the original and theobotany series in Palenque.
00:51:40 ►
And I’m not sure where the ticket sales on that conference stand right now, but I think
00:51:44 ►
John keeps attendance down at these out-of-country events down to around 100 people or so.
00:51:49 ►
So if you’re thinking about going, you might want to get your reservation in early.
00:51:54 ►
And all the information about that conference is online at mindstates.org.
00:52:03 ►
And, of course, the third event that I’d recommend is Burning Man.
00:52:08 ►
And now the problem is that it’s really expensive to go to any of these events.
00:52:13 ►
And there’s no getting around that fact.
00:52:16 ►
When I was working in the corporate world, it didn’t seem too bad.
00:52:20 ►
I just took several short vacations each year to attend a couple of conferences.
00:52:25 ►
But now that I’m essentially in the same boat that a lot of students are,
00:52:29 ►
I don’t have much disposable income.
00:52:31 ►
And so in my case, rather than do something different each year,
00:52:35 ►
at least for the time being,
00:52:36 ►
I’ve decided to just go to Burning Man each year and pass on the others.
00:52:41 ►
And for those of you who can’t make any events like these this year,
00:52:48 ►
well, that’s one of the main reasons that I’m doing these podcasts at least this way you can get some of the information that’s available
00:52:51 ►
it’s not as good as being there of course
00:52:54 ►
mainly because the thing that sets these other events apart
00:52:58 ►
is that the people that you’re going to meet there
00:53:01 ►
are really spectacular crowds usually
00:53:03 ►
but let me circle back to where I started here and say that you shouldn’t expect to find sources
00:53:08 ►
for any illegal substances simply by showing up at a conference or two. You know, thanks
00:53:15 ►
to the draconian laws that have made outlaws out of people who ingest certain plants and
00:53:21 ►
chemicals, our community has become wary of strangers.
00:53:25 ►
So my advice is not to be a stranger.
00:53:29 ►
Attend as many events like these as you can get to,
00:53:31 ►
and get to know the people there,
00:53:33 ►
and more importantly, let them get to know you.
00:53:36 ►
Even the narcs do it this way,
00:53:38 ►
which of course makes it even more difficult
00:53:41 ►
for good guys like you and me,
00:53:43 ►
but that’s the way the game is being played these days.
00:53:46 ►
So let’s just hope that the rules become a little more sensible before much longer.
00:53:51 ►
I said that’s the first thing I want to talk about, and there are a couple other email
00:53:55 ►
topics that I’d like to get to today, but if I don’t quit talking pretty soon, I’m not
00:53:59 ►
going to get this program posted, so I guess I’d better sign off.
00:54:03 ►
And before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic
00:54:08 ►
Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5
00:54:13 ►
license.
00:54:14 ►
And if you have any questions about that, you can click on the link at the bottom of
00:54:18 ►
the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:54:24 ►
which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:54:29 ►
And if you still have any questions, you can send them to me in the email.
00:54:33 ►
The address is lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:54:40 ►
And thanks again to Jacques, Cordell, and Wells for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:54:43 ►
I hope you guys are going to have a terrific year this year.
00:54:49 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzozo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:51 ►
Be well, my friends.