Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
07:18 Rupert Sheldrake:
“If there were to be a true Mother Earth religion develop, it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests because its central figure was a goddess. It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost … it wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.”
08:49 Terence McKenna:
“But if this Anima Mundi thing got going, this is not a fine tuning of Christianity this is, at last, the overthrow of it… . no more this patriarchal, masculine, dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism.”
13:36 Terence:
“Why not psychedelicize and sacrilize green politics? … Science and green politics can be sacrilized through the psychedelic experience.”
14:33 Terence:
“I think that green politics, what makes it so wishy-washy, is its lack of a forthright metaphysics… . A green party that used a mystical language, a psychedelic language…would have, I think, a tremendous appeal.”
15:51 Terence:
“It has to be understood that this [using psychedelic medicines] is the way to the Gaian mind. These things are sacraments, not metaphors for sacraments, real sacraments.”
16:13 Terence:
“Everybody is going to try and out-green everybody else. The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.”
21:50 Terence:
“If it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement, the people who could lead this have been training themselves for years. They just didn’t understand that that was what they were training themselves for, but called upon to do so they could step forward and operate in those positions.”
25:00 Ralph Abraham:
“The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us before people will act, and yet that seems to be the case.”
35:18 Terence:
“Well they are psychedelic experiences. The authenticity is going to come from the thing itself. We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.”
40:09 Terence:
“The only competition for that focus on the need to save the Earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is the need to preserve the purity of your precious bodily essences, or something like that… . It’s the issue of how we relate to the vegetable matrix”
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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 ►
Welcome to Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
In case you’re joining us here for the first time, I guess I should point out that for the past few weeks,
00:00:38 ►
I’ve been playing some recordings that were made at the Esalen Institute in the fall of 1989 and again in 1990.
00:00:43 ►
The tapes of these conversations, which the participants called a trialogue,
00:00:46 ►
were loaned to me by Ralph Abraham, who was one of the participants in these discussions, the other two being Terence
00:00:50 ►
McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
00:00:53 ►
So far, we’ve heard them talk about topics that run the gamut from creativity and chaos
00:00:58 ►
to imagination, the world soul, and entities from other dimensions.
00:01:04 ►
Today, we’re going to hear the second side of the eighth tape in the series, which is the world soul, and entities from other dimensions.
00:01:08 ►
Today we’re going to hear the second side of the eighth tape in the series,
00:01:11 ►
which is titled The Re-Secularization of the World.
00:01:15 ►
And we’ll pick up where Ralph Abraham was discussing the fact that organized religions should acknowledge the validity of the so-called pagan forms of worship
00:01:21 ►
that had preceded them.
00:01:23 ►
called pagan forms of worship that had preceded them.
00:01:30 ►
I think convergent evolution is a gentler way to go.
00:01:36 ►
I think that there’s a real gap,
00:01:38 ►
a conflict between these two different strategies of starting a new system based on the archaic revival
00:01:41 ►
or pagan revival on the one hand
00:01:43 ►
and revolution of the churches,
00:01:47 ►
re-sacralization by religion on the other hand.
00:01:50 ►
And that has to do with traditional church practice
00:01:55 ►
of denying the validity of previous forms,
00:01:59 ►
archaic pagan forms,
00:02:02 ►
and particularly carried to the point of revising history,
00:02:06 ►
I mean pulverizing goddess figurines
00:02:09 ►
and statues and so on.
00:02:13 ►
What would be necessary
00:02:14 ►
besides partnership of the genders,
00:02:18 ►
local control,
00:02:20 ►
a green politic and so on
00:02:21 ►
within the ritual of the church
00:02:23 ►
would be an acknowledgement of the validity
00:02:25 ►
of the essential religiosity of the pagan forms
00:02:31 ►
including the goddess, the worship of idols and so on.
00:02:35 ►
And that means that the Bible might have to be,
00:02:38 ►
here it is, abandoned.
00:02:41 ►
The Bible might have to be abandoned
00:02:43 ►
as a sacred document of the church.
00:02:48 ►
No, reinterpreted.
00:02:50 ►
Reinterpreted, okay.
00:02:51 ►
That’s a process that goes on continually, and the whole development of the Christian religion like any other
00:02:57 ►
depends on a series of reinterpretations of traditional texts.
00:03:01 ►
So, the reinterpretation that’s going on right now is through the process
00:03:07 ►
of theologians, an attempt to develop the idea of an evolutionary God, of an evolutionary
00:03:11 ►
universe. That’s one major strand of theological reinterpretation. And they have a very strong
00:03:16 ►
case, because the God of the Old Testament is not a platonic transcendent God outside
00:03:21 ►
history. He’s a thoroughly hands-on interactive God who’s
00:03:26 ►
present in within history even
00:03:28 ►
ranging details like the passage
00:03:30 ►
through the Red Sea
00:03:31 ►
this is an interactive
00:03:34 ►
process, it’s an ongoing
00:03:35 ►
providence that’s guiding
00:03:38 ►
the historical process
00:03:39 ►
that’s the Jewish conception of God, a kind of
00:03:42 ►
process God, they would say
00:03:43 ►
and I think they’re right, that this is in fact the true Judeo-Christian conception. So a process evolutionary model
00:03:52 ►
is one revolution going on in theology. Another is the recovery of the feminine and
00:04:00 ►
a recovery of the tradition of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God. Sophia, the holy wisdom, is the feminine wisdom principle,
00:04:07 ►
which could fulfill many of the roles of the world soul, which is feminine.
00:04:14 ►
And a revival of that whole tradition.
00:04:17 ►
These revolutions are actually occurring in theology right now.
00:04:21 ►
Well, is there a tradition of Old Testament scholarship that reinterpret
00:04:27 ►
stories about David and Melchizedek or Jericho I mean all these
00:04:34 ►
Melchizedek is according to Father Bede’s reinterpretation of it the figure of the cosmic priest who represents the priesthood of the cosmic religion
00:04:45 ►
which is the root of all religion
00:04:47 ►
and that’s the religion which links us
00:04:49 ►
to the future of the cosmos
00:04:51 ►
to the earth and to the heavens
00:04:52 ►
and the cosmic revelation
00:04:54 ►
and this is also implicit in the Old Testament
00:04:57 ►
you see, because Noah
00:04:58 ►
who is saved by God after this catastrophe
00:05:02 ►
is given the promise of the rainbow
00:05:04 ►
and the rainbow is the sign of the cosmic covenant
00:05:06 ►
between God and Noah.
00:05:08 ►
But Noah isn’t a Jew.
00:05:10 ►
He’s the only man and woman,
00:05:13 ►
his family’s the only family that survives the flood,
00:05:15 ►
and he’s like the new Adam,
00:05:16 ►
he’s the father of all humanity, of all races.
00:05:20 ►
It’s only much later that we get to Abraham,
00:05:22 ►
the founding father of the Jews.
00:05:24 ►
So Noah is a generic father of humanity.
00:05:28 ►
So there’s a cosmic covenant of Noah, which is the basis of all cosmic religion.
00:05:33 ►
And one can trace that in the Bible.
00:05:35 ►
So it’s not impossible, and in fact it’s already being done, to reinterpret the Bible.
00:05:40 ►
It’s always being reinterpreted.
00:05:43 ►
So one place would be getting rid of it, the
00:05:45 ►
other would be reinterpreting it, but the route that will be followed within the organic
00:05:49 ►
development of religion is reinterpretation.
00:05:53 ►
So what’s going on then? Is that the basis of optimism about the future of our
00:06:00 ►
civilization? Well I think it’s going on, I think it’s going on to some extent. I think it needs to go on a great deal more.
00:06:07 ►
And, you see, I think that if one’s going to have a syncretism, one has to have things that can grow together.
00:06:14 ►
And there’s no way in which a more priestess-based feminist element could grow together with this tradition
00:06:22 ►
than if it came into being. I mean, it has to come into into being and if the thing that can raise people to the barricades of this jihad,
00:06:30 ►
this green crusade, is the flag of Gaia, I mean that seems to be the unifying banner
00:06:37 ►
of the present movement. It’s the goddess Gaia, it’s the great mother. And as soon as
00:06:42 ►
you mention that it’s the great mother, a lot of people start going off the idea, which is why the Gaia hypothesis is preferred by
00:06:50 ►
many of its proponents to be veiled in the obscurity of an antique tongue as Gaia rather
00:06:56 ►
than Mother Earth. Because Mother Earth reminds people of mothers and then of their own mother
00:07:01 ►
and tends to press buttons which many people would rather not have pressed
00:07:06 ►
when thinking about such abstract issues
00:07:08 ►
as the future of humanity on the globe.
00:07:11 ►
But that’s the trouble with these metaphors
00:07:13 ►
or the strength of them,
00:07:15 ►
that they do connect you
00:07:16 ►
with these concrete realities of experience.
00:07:19 ►
Anyway, if there were to be
00:07:20 ►
a true Mother Earth religion developed,
00:07:24 ►
it would obviously have priestesses rather than priests
00:07:26 ►
because its central figure is a goddess.
00:07:29 ►
It would be relating human life to the Earth, first and foremost.
00:07:34 ►
And it would tend to…
00:07:36 ►
Then, you know, our bodies return to the Earth.
00:07:37 ►
It would get into the whole material cycle.
00:07:39 ►
It wouldn’t have much emphasis on the stars or the heavens.
00:07:43 ►
And I think it would be very claustrophobic
00:07:45 ►
for a lot of people before very long, and people who’d gone to religion had also brought
00:07:49 ►
in the aspirations of the stars, the heavens, the greatness of the cosmos, the space of
00:07:55 ►
the heavens. Then you’d have the choice of religious things. Is there a god of the heavens,
00:08:01 ►
or is there a goddess of the heavens?
00:08:03 ►
Well, in ancient Egypt there was a goddess of the heavens
00:08:06 ►
who arched over the body of the earth.
00:08:09 ►
And Christianity, in response to that particular question,
00:08:12 ►
offers one a choice of either,
00:08:14 ►
because God the Father is the Father in heaven,
00:08:16 ►
which is traditionally the sky god.
00:08:18 ►
He’s the sky god figure.
00:08:20 ►
But also, Our Lady is Queen of Heaven,
00:08:23 ►
having taken on the connotations of Astarte
00:08:27 ►
and the Sky Goddesses of the Near East
00:08:30 ►
and her robe of course is blue in colour
00:08:33 ►
coloured with stars
00:08:34 ►
so she’s in a sense the soul of the world
00:08:38 ►
the Annamal Mundi
00:08:39 ►
she’s the Annamal Mundi of the soul of the world
00:08:41 ►
so these are different models.
00:08:46 ►
You know, there are different models on the market,
00:08:48 ►
as it were, already within the tradition.
00:08:50 ►
But if this anima mundi thing got going,
00:08:53 ►
this is not a fine-tuning of Christianity.
00:08:56 ►
This is at last the overthrow of it.
00:09:00 ►
It’s hard to paint…
00:09:01 ►
Let’s call it a revolution.
00:09:03 ►
Yes, a revolution, an absolute no more this patriarchal
00:09:10 ►
masculine dominator thing that has descended down through monotheism. I mean it would be the
00:09:17 ►
plurabilities. Well I think in the Middle Ages in fact the animal mundi was a widely named concept.
00:09:25 ►
It almost broke out, but then it was suppressed.
00:09:28 ►
But it was compatible with the form of the Christian church
00:09:31 ►
they had at that time.
00:09:33 ►
The Aristotelian view of nature was entirely animistic.
00:09:36 ►
The Middle Ages had a form of animistic Christianity.
00:09:40 ►
But they exterminated all this.
00:09:43 ►
No, their church didn’t exterminate it.
00:09:45 ►
The Protestant Reformation tried to exterminate it,
00:09:48 ►
and the scientific revolution carried that process further.
00:09:51 ►
But here’s where you have to distinguish very sharply
00:09:53 ►
between the Protestant tradition and the Catholic tradition.
00:09:57 ►
True.
00:09:57 ►
Well, we’ve done a good work here.
00:09:59 ►
We’ve dreamed a dream.
00:10:00 ►
We’ve visioned a revolution of religion
00:10:02 ►
in which there would be priesthood and priestesses and
00:10:05 ►
the acceptance of
00:10:06 ►
psychedelics as a
00:10:07 ►
sacrament among
00:10:08 ►
the sun and
00:10:09 ►
local control
00:10:10 ►
and renewal of
00:10:13 ►
meaning in
00:10:13 ►
rites and
00:10:14 ►
rituals and so
00:10:15 ►
on.
00:10:15 ►
Unfortunately, we’ve
00:10:16 ►
still got the
00:10:17 ►
continual decrease
00:10:19 ►
of attendance in
00:10:20 ►
these churches and
00:10:21 ►
the fact that the
00:10:21 ►
revival might
00:10:22 ►
already be underway
00:10:23 ►
with the
00:10:24 ►
reinterpretation of
00:10:24 ►
the Bible and so on
00:10:25 ►
is going to be of no great use
00:10:27 ►
unless as a matter of fact it becomes attractive
00:10:30 ►
which I think it’s not
00:10:31 ►
there’s somehow a pretty
00:10:34 ►
strong habit
00:10:36 ►
of revulsion
00:10:37 ►
at churches of hatred
00:10:40 ►
for churches
00:10:41 ►
and all the sins of the
00:10:43 ►
church
00:10:44 ►
over these past centuries.
00:10:48 ►
Plus, there’s the competition of scientism
00:10:51 ►
as a new mythology,
00:10:53 ►
which is totally disjoint from the church
00:10:55 ►
and which has so many errors built into it
00:10:59 ►
as far as sensitivity to planet
00:11:01 ►
and all the Gaia and Green concerns,
00:11:05 ►
that the syncretism of the revived church with science
00:11:09 ►
would not be possible without destroying the revived church.
00:11:12 ►
So somehow this competitor,
00:11:16 ►
so attractive because of the strength of his weapons and so on,
00:11:21 ►
the mythology of scientism,
00:11:24 ►
this would have to be dealt with, or other factors,
00:11:27 ►
whatever they are, which disincline people to be attracted to church, which makes church
00:11:33 ►
repeller for them, whether revised or not. What could be done in the way of education,
00:11:38 ►
media, what could be done to reverse this?
00:11:42 ►
So you see the reason for the lack of attraction to the Church is the presence of an
00:11:46 ►
alternative attractor, as it were, namely the worldview of scientism. Well, we really… Which is rather like
00:11:52 ►
the person… one of the big pluses of scientism emotionally for people is, which I have since I
00:11:58 ►
was a convert to scientism at about age 14, I know very well, is that a bit like you, I mean, one can
00:12:04 ►
look around and everybody
00:12:05 ►
else is praying or appearing to pray, but one can somehow see from a higher point of
00:12:10 ►
view, because from the point of view of scientism, all this is just superstition.
00:12:14 ►
We’ve risen, man has risen beyond it through the advance of science and technology, and
00:12:18 ►
we’re superior to the whole of religion, which is infantile and part of the past.
00:12:23 ►
And this is part of the worldview of scientism I agree that you know religious revival depends on a
00:12:31 ►
collapse of faith in scientism but I think that collapse of faith is
00:12:35 ►
happening all around us old-style humanists secular humanists you know
00:12:40 ►
the campaigning atheist types you know are things of the past and there’s
00:12:45 ►
still a few of the older ones around in America you still find them but you
00:12:49 ►
don’t find much in England because there’s no longer much to fight
00:12:51 ►
against you know it’s not as if society is totally strangled by the power of the
00:12:56 ►
church that’s very far from being the case it’s dominated far more by banks
00:13:00 ►
financial institutions military complexes and in marginal areas it may be affected by the church,
00:13:07 ►
but for all intents and purposes it’s free of its control.
00:13:11 ►
So, scientism is, I think, losing its impetus.
00:13:17 ►
There’s a widespread public disillusionment with science,
00:13:20 ►
which is reflected in cuts in funding for scientific research
00:13:23 ►
and closing of science institutions, which is actually happening.
00:13:26 ►
But this just leaves people stranded,
00:13:28 ►
having rejected the church in favour of science
00:13:30 ►
and having rejected science in favour of nothing.
00:13:33 ►
It leaves us with the dilemma of today.
00:13:35 ►
Well, that leaves the void into which…
00:13:37 ►
Why not psychedelicise and sacralise green politics,
00:13:43 ►
which otherwise is in the hands of a very boring bunch of
00:13:46 ►
materialist, breast-beating neo-Marxists.
00:13:50 ►
A clever conspiracy between green politics and a revived church.
00:13:54 ►
Well, I would say that science and green politics can be sacralized through the psychedelic
00:14:04 ►
experience.
00:14:05 ►
Rupert’s example of seeing everyone bowed with their head in prayer
00:14:09 ►
and from the point of view of scientism,
00:14:12 ►
knowing that this is all superstition.
00:14:14 ►
But the next level up is the psychedelic person
00:14:18 ►
who knows that the scientist is missing the people bowed in prayer.
00:14:22 ►
He’s a poor fool.
00:14:25 ►
And so it’s…
00:14:31 ►
I think that green politics,
00:14:36 ►
that what makes it so wishy-washy
00:14:39 ►
is its lack of a forthright metaphysic,
00:14:47 ►
and that they insist that they’re rationalists,
00:14:52 ►
reformed socialists, saw-the-light Marxists,
00:14:56 ►
and all this other stuff.
00:14:57 ►
And none of that is good enough to inspire anybody.
00:15:01 ►
But a Green Party that used a mystical language a psychedelic language a language of
00:15:08 ►
integration and control and emotion and all this would have i think a tremendous appeal that’s why
00:15:16 ►
what that’s why rupert is so keen for this ayahuasca cult coming out of Brazil because on one level it’s simply a
00:15:32 ►
preserve the rainforest help out little people your typical bleeding heart rap
00:15:40 ►
But on another level it’s a psychedelic religion that makes claims on the imagination the heart the soul
00:15:42 ►
Here’s an attractive partnership
00:15:44 ►
Green plus psychedelic how about the ellisonian mystery
00:15:47 ►
is celebrated in the cathedral of saint john the divine yes psychedelic it has to be understood
00:15:53 ►
that it’s that this is the way to the guy in mind that these things are sacraments not metaphors for
00:15:59 ►
sacraments real sacraments and that their efficaciousness can have political consequences
00:16:08 ►
if the two forces are brought together.
00:16:11 ►
Oh, it’s all going to, everybody’s going to try and outgreen everybody else.
00:16:16 ►
The trick will be to tell the weasels from everybody else.
00:16:20 ►
No, but they very well might outgreen each other within the current context of desacralization,
00:16:31 ►
resulting in only a slight extension of time.
00:16:37 ►
You see, it’s a huge system, and green is know, to recycle the plastic bottles.
00:16:46 ►
It’s not enough to stop cutting down the Amazon jungle.
00:16:48 ►
It only earns a slight extension in the time available
00:16:52 ►
to evolve a better strategy for all the rest, the root,
00:16:56 ►
the population explosion, for example,
00:16:58 ►
the exhaustion of the energy resources.
00:17:00 ►
This is what will give force to the call for fanatical vigilance.
00:17:07 ►
It really is a thing
00:17:09 ►
that is ready-made for fanaticism
00:17:12 ►
because, you know,
00:17:13 ►
people used to say,
00:17:14 ►
if God is on your side,
00:17:18 ►
what fears do you need to do?
00:17:20 ►
Well, if what your mission is
00:17:21 ►
is to save the earth,
00:17:23 ►
it’s very hard to see how you’re going to negotiate compromises with people who don’t want to save the earth.
00:17:32 ►
Well, the answer is you have a range of people like you have in the environmental movement.
00:17:36 ►
You have earth fosters who are prepared to go furthest.
00:17:39 ►
They’re the kind of radical terrorists.
00:17:40 ►
The commander.
00:17:41 ►
And then you have other groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, which has now
00:17:45 ►
become more moderate.
00:17:46 ►
Right.
00:17:47 ►
You know, prepared to negotiate with the powers that be.
00:17:49 ►
But it’s the extremists who set the agenda.
00:17:52 ►
And then you can only… the others can only moderate…
00:17:54 ►
Now you’re talking.
00:17:55 ►
It’s…
00:17:56 ►
In the wake.
00:17:57 ►
Yes, the others can only moderate in the wake.
00:17:59 ►
And I think that’s… the right-wing think tanks in Britain and America who have shown us in the last ten years how a few people thinking out extreme policy options,
00:18:10 ►
or as they call them, future scenarios,
00:18:14 ►
just 20, 30 people think out these sort of programs
00:18:17 ►
like privatizing things and so on.
00:18:18 ►
And then they set the agenda.
00:18:20 ►
Then there’s sort of more moderate institutes
00:18:22 ►
that when the debates and the meetings stirred up
00:18:24 ►
and the whole attention of the debate has shifted over in that direction
00:18:29 ►
through creating that as an option the debate then a more moderate institute works out the
00:18:34 ►
details and they get it well this is classical revolutionary theory if 30 people were willing to
00:18:41 ►
wage unconditional warfare against anyone who opposed saving the earth headlines
00:18:47 ►
would follow huge debate in the media the immediate softened position directly behind them
00:18:55 ►
the further softened position everybody would have to be heard from like these people who who blow up lumber trucks and dynamite railroads that are
00:19:08 ►
used to bring the wood out of the forest and this is all theater well basically
00:19:16 ►
this sounds splendidly optimistic the bad news is good news the magnitude of
00:19:22 ►
the problem guarantees a response. The response will probably succeed.
00:19:28 ►
The successful Green Party will automatically negotiate a new partnership
00:19:33 ►
with the reinterpreted church.
00:19:38 ►
But frankly, I just can’t imagine a holy war
00:19:42 ►
resulting in a peaceful partnership society.
00:19:47 ►
imagine a holy war resulting in a peaceful partnership society? Well, I think that this is a very desperate situation. The hope would be that faced
00:19:52 ►
with the possibility of a holy war, they would just abdicate and the existing
00:19:58 ►
institutions would say, all right, we’ll save the earth already, rather than being hung, we’ll save the earth.
00:20:07 ►
Sorry we didn’t move faster,
00:20:09 ►
didn’t quite understand what you were signaling,
00:20:12 ►
now we’ve got it, now we’ll save the earth.
00:20:15 ►
By threatening them with chaos, absolute turmoil.
00:20:22 ►
But anyway, this green movement,
00:20:24 ►
if it’s to be effective as a political movement
00:20:26 ►
must have a spiritual and a mystical
00:20:27 ►
dimension and I think that’s where
00:20:29 ►
the question comes in of how would it acquire one
00:20:32 ►
without either allying itself
00:20:34 ►
to a green
00:20:35 ►
form of Christianity or Judaism
00:20:38 ►
or without
00:20:40 ►
inventing its own kind of priestess
00:20:42 ►
or priesthood and carrying out its own
00:20:44 ►
rituals. Now frankly I don’t see the latter happening. I can’t imagine
00:20:48 ►
bringing politicians in Germany and Britain. Psychedelics is the obvious alternative.
00:20:52 ►
Well I think there’s a time-scroll problem because the crisis is
00:21:00 ►
coming upon us with the speed of a tidal wave. I think that in the long run it will be compared to the deluge,
00:21:09 ►
it’s the flood,
00:21:11 ►
and the abdication of the great institutions of society
00:21:16 ►
from their present position
00:21:18 ►
and the rate at which they can jump onto the green bandwagon
00:21:22 ►
is quite fast compared to the time it will take
00:21:27 ►
to revitalize the church, to reinterpret the Bible,
00:21:30 ►
to obtain the sacred music, to institutionalize
00:21:33 ►
the priesthood of psychedelic exploration, and so on.
00:21:39 ►
And that people had really better get moving, I think,
00:21:42 ►
in the revitalized church movement
00:21:45 ►
if they want to be on the bandwagon at all.
00:21:49 ►
Well, there are probably,
00:21:51 ►
if it’s to be a psychedelicized green movement,
00:21:54 ►
the people who could lead it
00:21:55 ►
have been training themselves for years.
00:21:58 ►
They just didn’t understand
00:21:59 ►
that’s what they were training themselves for.
00:22:02 ►
But called upon to do so,
00:22:04 ►
they could step forward and operate in those
00:22:07 ►
positions but I think your idea of an order within you know you had this model of the Franciscans and
00:22:14 ►
so on what it would be the best model would be one of it like it in Franciscan order yes which
00:22:19 ►
remember kind of autonomous local chapters loosely affiliated with the church not in opposition to it, working loosely
00:22:26 ►
within it and therefore being able to
00:22:28 ►
affect the whole network of it
00:22:30 ►
and
00:22:31 ►
so a priesthood of greens especially
00:22:34 ►
the psychedelic committee
00:22:36 ►
would keep track
00:22:38 ►
the psychedelic order
00:22:39 ►
or a green order
00:22:41 ►
it would be a green order
00:22:43 ►
and
00:22:44 ►
I think it would be very interesting
00:22:48 ►
to see what happened
00:22:49 ►
I think it would have to have an ecumenical quality
00:22:51 ►
in other words I think it would have to be linked up
00:22:53 ►
to a green order of Judaism
00:22:54 ►
because I think they’d have to work closely together
00:22:57 ►
if this movement’s to work
00:22:59 ►
it’s to be one where the Judaic tradition
00:23:02 ►
and the Christian ones
00:23:04 ►
develop together I think in this process
00:23:06 ►
in the West because I don’t think that
00:23:08 ►
it would work otherwise
00:23:09 ►
because so many influential people in Western
00:23:12 ►
society are Jewish and
00:23:14 ►
if they’re always going to be pulled towards
00:23:16 ►
the sort of old style Zionist
00:23:18 ►
view of Israel and stuff as the sort of
00:23:20 ►
ultimate in
00:23:22 ►
world politics
00:23:24 ►
it’s not going to be very helpful.
00:23:26 ►
And so to come into this broader vision,
00:23:30 ►
I think there’d have to be green Christian and Jewish movements,
00:23:33 ►
different orders.
00:23:33 ►
Yes, different orders.
00:23:35 ►
But there need to be green mystical orders
00:23:39 ►
associated with every religion
00:23:41 ►
that among themselves would have no discrepancy as to
00:23:45 ►
their view, based as it is upon this pure channel.
00:23:51 ►
And therefore that would serve as a kind of neural network connecting up into a new unity,
00:23:56 ►
all of these presently very diverse systems.
00:23:58 ►
That’s right.
00:23:59 ►
The big green orders of Islam, green orders of Hinduism, and the green orders…
00:24:03 ►
Neosufi and Neo-Kabbalah.
00:24:06 ►
That’s right. And the green order in America
00:24:08 ►
would have as one of its roles
00:24:09 ►
the reconnection with the sacred places of America
00:24:12 ►
and their re-honoring and appropriate ceremonies.
00:24:16 ►
And the green order in England would have its role
00:24:18 ►
of connecting with the sacred places.
00:24:20 ►
So rather than a green party, a green order party
00:24:24 ►
is too much of a… The party has already happened. Well, the party is already there, but there should party a green order party is too much
00:24:25 ►
the party is already there
00:24:28 ►
there should be a green order
00:24:29 ►
now I think we’re
00:24:33 ►
summarizing our
00:24:34 ►
discussion into an actual
00:24:36 ►
proposal for
00:24:37 ►
a way that some of these goals
00:24:40 ►
could be obtained
00:24:42 ►
in a reasonable time
00:24:44 ►
through the establishment of a
00:24:48 ►
neural network, intercommunicating orders associated to the same sacrament all over
00:24:58 ►
the planet. The entire promise of the intellect has failed us if it’s necessary for the catastrophe to actually be upon us
00:25:08 ►
before people will act.
00:25:09 ►
And yet that seems to be the case.
00:25:12 ►
About nuclear power, for example,
00:25:14 ►
there’s a small number of people who will stand up at the barricades and so on,
00:25:17 ►
but the majority of people will still continue to buy nuclear power.
00:25:23 ►
And it’s really too late
00:25:25 ►
to wait until the tidal wave crashes on the shore.
00:25:29 ►
There will be no response.
00:25:31 ►
No, no, we have to remember the lives.
00:25:32 ►
I don’t think it’s already too late.
00:25:33 ►
The death of species, or 30% of the species,
00:25:36 ►
and so on, the numbers,
00:25:39 ►
the state of advance of the death of the biosphere
00:25:42 ►
is already so great that the jihad would be
00:25:46 ►
upon us if people were able to understand what they read and to project what that means and to
00:25:54 ►
respond with their heart so what they need are people and organizations which give permission
00:26:01 ►
to do that and then their anger will rise they won’t have to be told what to do that, and then their anger will rise.
00:26:07 ►
They won’t have to be told what to do.
00:26:10 ►
They will know what to do if you just connect it up for them.
00:26:11 ►
They’ll be furious.
00:26:16 ►
Well, I think that part of the problem is the denial of the problem,
00:26:23 ►
and part of the denial is the corruption of the news media in not reporting the news.
00:26:27 ►
Well, and the corruption of science on one level.
00:26:29 ►
I mean, for instance, this whole greenhouse thing,
00:26:33 ►
they’ve been hemming and hawing for 15 years,
00:26:37 ►
saying, yes, we now do detect,
00:26:40 ►
and it is true, it’s no longer about colder, warmer,
00:26:43 ►
it’s happening, we’re aboard
00:26:46 ►
we’re taking this out of the hands of the mystics
00:26:48 ►
and the chicken littles
00:26:49 ►
and saying yes, we hard-headed
00:26:52 ►
university scientists
00:26:53 ►
we agree
00:26:54 ►
well just as the organized religion needs
00:26:57 ►
revolution
00:26:59 ►
and reinterpretation
00:27:01 ►
science also needs
00:27:02 ►
revolution and reinterpretation and the also needs revolution and reinterpretation.
00:27:06 ►
And the Gaia hypothesis,
00:27:07 ►
and its accompanying revolution in the sciences,
00:27:10 ►
has forced scientists of different specialties
00:27:13 ►
to speak with each other
00:27:14 ►
who had never spoken with each other before.
00:27:16 ►
And that is a major restructuring of science,
00:27:19 ►
giving it the capacity for the first time
00:27:21 ►
to actually appreciate that there was a greenhouse effect.
00:27:24 ►
Well, science for the first time to actually appreciate that there was a greenhouse effect. Well, science for the first time has the capacity
00:27:28 ►
to measure its own impact on the world.
00:27:32 ►
I mean, the nuclear winter studies
00:27:34 ►
plus the CFC problem plus the CO2 problem,
00:27:41 ►
it’s science that created these problems and that
00:27:45 ►
now reveals their magnitude
00:27:48 ►
as they bear down upon them.
00:27:50 ►
So the accommodation of
00:27:52 ►
scientific view of history, archaeology
00:27:54 ►
and so on in the church
00:27:56 ►
has to be matched by an equal
00:27:57 ►
re-sacralization of science.
00:27:59 ►
Or I could say sacralization of science.
00:28:01 ►
I’ve never had this connection
00:28:03 ►
in the past. That might be had this connection in the past.
00:28:05 ►
That might be an essential connection
00:28:08 ►
in order for us to have a future.
00:28:11 ►
Yes, the purpose of science
00:28:12 ►
should be the Greek purpose,
00:28:15 ►
to understand nature,
00:28:19 ►
not for technique.
00:28:22 ►
That all came later.
00:28:24 ►
We need to hold back
00:28:26 ►
from applications
00:28:27 ►
that’s the problem
00:28:28 ►
I mean let’s just
00:28:29 ►
assimilate what we know
00:28:31 ►
at this level
00:28:33 ►
try and save the earth
00:28:35 ►
but not push deeper
00:28:37 ►
into application
00:28:38 ►
because that is
00:28:40 ►
rape
00:28:42 ►
that is this violation thing,
00:28:46 ►
where, you know, Taoists don’t do it that way.
00:28:49 ►
They just are content to know how it works.
00:28:53 ►
Well, all right, the catastrophe is coming.
00:28:56 ►
The revitalization of the church and the revision of science are already underway,
00:29:02 ►
and maybe in order to actually nucleate the social
00:29:05 ►
transformation that’s implied in which
00:29:07 ►
will inevitably result
00:29:10 ►
if we’re lucky, it requires
00:29:11 ►
a certain
00:29:12 ►
nucleation site,
00:29:16 ►
a model, first
00:29:17 ►
exemplar of this coalition.
00:29:20 ►
And that might take place somewhere,
00:29:22 ►
maybe in England, in Holland
00:29:24 ►
or somewhere, I would guess, probably not in the United States. And then from this model to spread outward
00:29:31 ►
in the rapid diffusion amplified by the media and so on.
00:29:36 ►
Yes, a green party, a psychedelic…
00:29:38 ►
So maybe we should be working on this model system in some particular time and place. Well, I think one local way in which it could be a…
00:29:47 ►
in which it might happen or could happen
00:29:50 ►
is in the northwest of the United States
00:29:52 ►
where there are in place quite large numbers of people
00:29:55 ►
who’ve already ritualized mushroom cults.
00:29:58 ►
And there’s an ongoing ritualized mushroom cult there,
00:30:02 ►
which is a psychedelically motivated, influenced by
00:30:06 ►
American Indian chants and American Indian practices, is, it involves an
00:30:11 ►
awareness of, in some cases, at least the American Indian versions of the four
00:30:16 ►
directions and the basic principles of localization in sacred space, yet which
00:30:21 ►
is disconnected from churches as far as I know and which is not integrated into the green political movement.
00:30:28 ►
But there’s a sense in which ingredients exist just to take where we are now,
00:30:33 ►
I mean the American West.
00:30:35 ►
Ingredients exist, I think, for such a syncretic movement to happen.
00:30:38 ►
I think influence is direct experience of these ayahuasca churches from the Amazon could help to nucleate
00:30:48 ►
the synthesis.
00:30:49 ►
The syncretism that hasn’t really happened is the formation, the integration of these
00:30:53 ►
orders with the Christian world, partly because of a deep suspicion on both sides and a kind
00:31:01 ►
of stereotyped anti-Christian view that people have developed in some kind of reaction
00:31:06 ►
against their Christian or Jewish background
00:31:08 ►
many, many years before
00:31:10 ►
and very rarely ever re-examine them.
00:31:12 ►
It’s an impenetrable barrier they erect
00:31:14 ►
against their ancestors
00:31:16 ►
and the entire tradition they’ve come from
00:31:18 ►
and try to function somehow keeping it all out.
00:31:21 ►
But it doesn’t, because it comes around
00:31:23 ►
the archetype’s work unconsciously.
00:31:25 ►
And so one gets… somehow keeping it all out, but it doesn’t because it comes around the archetypes work unconsciously and
00:31:28 ►
So one gets the I’ve met
00:31:33 ►
Members of mushroom cult who come across to me very much like
00:31:40 ►
Southern Baptists evangelists for it and on inquiry I find their backgrounds of some Baptist
00:31:48 ►
Anyway, there’s this is one area where some of the ingredients, namely green politics, the existence of such cults and an attempt to reintegrate them with the Judaic and Christian traditions
00:31:54 ►
is going on.
00:31:55 ►
So there’s a sense in which this is one area where such a syncretism could emerge.
00:32:01 ►
Now in England, one would first have to establish the mushroom cults and there are lots of people who take the native Saini-Saibe
00:32:09 ►
mushrooms or the people who gather them but I don’t know whether they’ve
00:32:12 ►
developed into sort of circles because the mushroom thing here developed
00:32:16 ►
I suppose under the influence of peyote circles and living traditions of
00:32:20 ►
sacramental use of plants and these living traditions are living in America,
00:32:25 ►
but I don’t think there are any continuous living ones in Europe.
00:32:28 ►
Well, the inner order of the proposed church could grow,
00:32:34 ►
I’m sure. It’s very easily done.
00:32:37 ►
But they’d have to import the ritual from America or something.
00:32:41 ►
I think they’d have to develop their own. I think the way to
00:32:45 ►
do it, at least the way that the ayahuasca church person that we
00:32:53 ►
met suggested, as the way with the way this ayahuasca cult happened in the
00:32:58 ►
Amazon was first somebody took it and Our Lady appeared to him in the form of Our Lady of the Forest
00:33:08 ►
and told him to go into the jungle for seven days living only on roots and berries and
00:33:12 ►
so forth alone and at the end to take a large amount of this substance, the ayahuasca.
00:33:17 ►
Then she appeared to him again as Our Lady of the Forest and revealed the outlines of
00:33:21 ►
this ritual and its essential forms.
00:33:24 ►
These things have to be channeled
00:33:25 ►
they have to grow through a channeling
00:33:28 ►
type experience, they have to be revealed
00:33:29 ►
rather than invented
00:33:31 ►
and so I think that say a mushroom cart
00:33:33 ►
were to grow up in England
00:33:34 ►
it would have to happen spontaneously
00:33:37 ►
under the guidance of
00:33:39 ►
after a suitable
00:33:42 ►
prayer, I don’t know who would be
00:33:43 ►
the essential, the great patron of it
00:33:46 ►
and Glastonbury would probably be one of its sacred centres
00:33:49 ►
but it would have to be revealed
00:33:52 ►
the details of it I think
00:33:54 ►
well there is a tradition I guess only not continuous
00:33:56 ►
because it became extinct is that right
00:33:58 ►
so the rediscovery of the druidic rites
00:34:00 ►
or something could provide the model
00:34:02 ►
I think that it would have to be
00:34:04 ►
the thing is the druidic rights are too
00:34:06 ►
far lost to be revived
00:34:07 ►
and there was this 19th century based attempt
00:34:10 ►
to revive the druidic rights and there are
00:34:12 ►
druidic orders in England, there are quite a lot of them
00:34:14 ►
they all quarrel with each other and there’s a plethora
00:34:16 ►
of these druids
00:34:17 ►
but mostly they’ve taken their
00:34:20 ►
doctrines from theosophists and reading
00:34:22 ►
esoteric books and so on
00:34:23 ►
it’s a kind of menage of Western esoteric knowledge that doesn’t really have, to me at any rate, any
00:34:30 ►
convincing continuity with the mysteries of the druidic past. So in a sense the tradition
00:34:36 ►
is lost and it’s hard to see how it could be recovered without it being a rather theatrical
00:34:40 ►
reinvention.
00:34:41 ►
Well, except if you look how the
00:34:45 ►
Mexican mushroom religion does it it’s very logical I mean that’s the way to do
00:34:51 ►
it you do it in small circles at night with intentionality there’s song there’s
00:34:57 ►
prayer there’s silence it’s not a leap of imaginative vision to conceive of one of these ceremonies
00:35:07 ►
it’s very easy to conceive of them but to have to for them to have a kind of
00:35:12 ►
authenticity in the eyes of those who participate in them they have to have
00:35:16 ►
been revealed rather than invented well they are psychedelic experiences the
00:35:21 ►
authenticity is going to come from the thing itself.
00:35:25 ►
We’re not talking here about reciting mantras. This is the real thing, you know.
00:35:31 ►
I know, but the thing is that the ceremony, I think, would need to be rooted in the spirit of the place
00:35:36 ►
and that sort of thing. There would have to be certain ritual elements for it to function rather than
00:35:41 ►
to be rooted in the spirit of the place and to be part of a larger movement such as we’re talking of,
00:35:46 ►
namely a green order,
00:35:49 ►
which would be the kind of mystical branch of a larger green movement.
00:35:54 ►
Well, you see, what I’m trying to do in my book
00:35:57 ►
is argue that the mushroom was the earth symbiote of humanity
00:36:03 ►
and thus all human beings in all times and places
00:36:08 ►
can actually claim it as their…
00:36:12 ►
So there’s a gigantic creode.
00:36:14 ►
Yes.
00:36:15 ►
It should be possible to excavate it from any time at any place in the future.
00:36:19 ►
That was the religion of human beings for the first million years, and it underwent a diminishing 10,000 years ago.
00:36:32 ►
And so the creode is vast.
00:36:34 ►
In the initial.
00:36:35 ►
Yes.
00:36:36 ►
When the desertification of Africa was broken up as recently as 7,000 or 8,000 years ago,
00:36:42 ►
there were probably still intermittent mushroom
00:36:45 ►
ceremonies when it climatically was favored to appear but i really see it as a restoration of
00:36:56 ►
this lost symbiotic partner so it isn’t even ultimately a matter of the psychedelic experience per se, it’s that psilocybin has some unique
00:37:07 ►
relationship to the evolution of the human nervous system. It in fact turns the human nervous system into an antenna
00:37:16 ►
to the Gaian mind and then people behave appropriately in the same way that
00:37:23 ►
termites behave appropriately when
00:37:25 ►
within the morphogenetic field of the termite nest but if this antenna is not
00:37:33 ►
present in the human being then the human being has to think up their own
00:37:37 ►
program and it’s usually power crazed lethal short-sighted, and grabby.
00:37:47 ►
But if that’s the case,
00:37:51 ►
do we know that the mushroom clots that have sprung up,
00:37:54 ►
for example, in the northwest of the United States,
00:37:56 ►
have these led to…
00:38:00 ►
I mean, is your impression of the people who belong to them that these are people of an entirely different quality
00:38:03 ►
from those who don’t belong to such groups
00:38:05 ►
and that they’re appropriate and in tune with the guiding mind?
00:38:08 ►
Oh yes, they tend to be rural, they tend to be communal,
00:38:12 ►
they tend to be non-motivated in the economic realm.
00:38:18 ►
In other words, they are living simply.
00:38:21 ►
Voluntary simplicity is a concept they’re well familiar with.
00:38:26 ►
They have and value their children.
00:38:30 ►
They’re exemplifying the values that peasantry has always exemplified
00:38:36 ►
because they live near the land.
00:38:39 ►
They want for nothing, but they have very little.
00:38:43 ►
That’s my impression.
00:38:45 ►
They haven’t a plan to take over the Christian churches.
00:38:49 ►
No, they are
00:38:50 ►
beyond it. They are in
00:38:52 ►
the thrall of their religious
00:38:54 ►
relationship to the mushroom.
00:38:56 ►
The save the earth part
00:38:57 ►
is sort of the political agenda.
00:39:00 ►
But they’re going to be absorbed by this
00:39:02 ►
political program sooner or later
00:39:04 ►
as the acid rain destroys their mushrooms.
00:39:08 ►
Yes, well, I think they’re more and more alarmed.
00:39:10 ►
My audiences, until very recently, preferred me to dwell on the mystical, the trans-historical.
00:39:21 ►
They loved that.
00:39:23 ►
And about a year and a half ago people started questioning why there was
00:39:28 ►
no political content now they demand political content there is definitely a shift on to make
00:39:38 ►
whatever your position is relevant to the encroaching crisis which everyone feels I mean we may imagine
00:39:47 ►
because we’re intellectuals and because we deal with this data that it’s more on
00:39:51 ►
our minds but the housewife doing her ironing the school child on the bus
00:39:57 ►
people worry about the fate of the earth because the collective information field has now shifted its attention to this.
00:40:07 ►
The only competition for that focus on the need to save the
00:40:14 ►
earth is this stupid anti-drug thing, which is, you know, the need to preserve
00:40:20 ►
the purity of your precious bodily essences or something like that and in a way the two are opposed it’s an issue of how we relate to the vegetable
00:40:32 ►
matrix yes well there we see the forces in opposition to the
00:40:37 ►
Recyclerization program gathering and arming themselves. Yes, in their usual fashion.
00:40:47 ►
But, you see, I think the psychedelic world
00:40:49 ►
is only one aspect of the re-sacralization program.
00:40:52 ►
The other one, as I suggested the other day,
00:40:53 ►
is a revival of pilgrimage and sense of sacred time.
00:40:59 ►
And this can be done in many contexts,
00:41:01 ►
and it can be easily incorporated into people’s lives.
00:41:03 ►
And moreover, I find that it immediately makes sense to most people I mean most
00:41:08 ►
people you say you know that the quality of time certain times are better and to
00:41:12 ►
be conscious of these and to the kind of historical fields attached to them is
00:41:17 ►
better than to be unconscious often and most people can see that and they say of
00:41:20 ►
course and the same with sacred places most people can see that the reason
00:41:25 ►
why pilgrims and tourists go to these places because of some quality of the place which is
00:41:30 ►
special and so do you relate to the quality of the space consciously and ask the spirit of the place
00:41:36 ►
to inform and illuminate you on your visit there and give you its blessing or do you treat it
00:41:41 ►
unconsciously and say well people lot that way in the past but now we’re scientific
00:41:45 ►
we’ve risen above all that, that’s just superstition
00:41:47 ►
but we’re interested in coming to this place anyway
00:41:49 ►
for historical or archaeological reasons and taking photographs of it
00:41:53 ►
and going home, but without opening oneself to the spirit of the place
00:41:57 ►
one’s relation to it being one of attraction to it
00:42:00 ►
and yet an unconscious barrier between one
00:42:02 ►
now if one puts it like that I think
00:42:05 ►
most people can see that because most people really are going to sacred places
00:42:10 ►
and really are going to the wilderness and so on because of a desire to make
00:42:14 ►
some such connection. It’s part of the romantic private subjective tradition of
00:42:18 ►
our culture. But I think that making it explicit and pointing it out and showing how, in simple ways, how
00:42:27 ►
pilgrimage can be revived in simple principles like going with an intention, taking some
00:42:34 ►
offering, if possible circumambulating the place to make it the cosmic center before
00:42:39 ►
entering it, and simple principles of that kind.
00:42:44 ►
It’s fairly easy to res-sacralize terrorism.
00:42:46 ►
And that’s something which is immediately available as a mass movement
00:42:49 ►
and through the impetus of the Green Movement, I think, could be spread very rapidly.
00:42:56 ►
Well, I think we’ve arrived at a certain vision
00:43:00 ►
characterized by, to me, surprising optimism
00:43:05 ►
about the possible outcome of this program
00:43:10 ►
involving the green, the sacralization, the psychedelic orders
00:43:15 ►
and the successful escape of the downward spiral
00:43:19 ►
up the down staircase.
00:43:22 ►
We’re talking about up the down staircase.
00:43:28 ►
And the way it’s emerged in our trialogue it sounds fairly
00:43:30 ►
plausible that it’s possible
00:43:33 ►
and it’s underway
00:43:35 ►
I’m sorry I haven’t the energy to summarize this
00:43:39 ►
because every time I try to summarize it you’ve added something further
00:43:43 ►
I think it’s in good shape unless unless you feel a summary coming on,
00:43:47 ►
and I’ll just shut up.
00:43:49 ►
Well, a diagram. Ralph has this great sense to turn everything into diagrams.
00:43:53 ►
Yes, well, we have a diagram in mind, definitely.
00:43:58 ►
We have, through poking around, rediscovered the basic institutions of civilization,
00:44:04 ►
through poking around, rediscovered the basic institutions of civilization,
00:44:09 ►
the religious, the political, or the state, and the relationship to the earth.
00:44:16 ►
And then we’ve proposed revitalization of each of these areas
00:44:23 ►
and found them already underway
00:44:25 ►
and then we’ve seen that the connection
00:44:29 ►
of these
00:44:31 ►
revolutionary movements
00:44:35 ►
needs to be provided as a kind of a matrix
00:44:38 ►
between them which would then integrate
00:44:41 ►
them into kind of a new social form
00:44:45 ►
with a chance of having a future.
00:44:47 ►
And this intracellular matrix between the roots
00:44:51 ►
could grow by evolution from a kind of a nucleation event.
00:44:57 ►
And so we’ve pinpointed something that actually we could do
00:45:04 ►
to provide this nucleation,
00:45:06 ►
and that would be a pilgrimage involving some small number of people
00:45:13 ►
from the green political movement and others from the new religious movements,
00:45:19 ►
for example, the councils of ayahuasca and peyote cults in the Americas,
00:45:27 ►
to give them a joint experience sharing the spirit of the field
00:45:35 ►
of a traditional sacred place,
00:45:37 ►
particularly of the oldest roots of Western civilization.
00:45:43 ►
I don’t know if we will actually do this,
00:45:45 ►
but we have at least dreamed up something
00:45:47 ►
we could do that has the potential
00:45:49 ►
of having a lot of bang for the buck
00:45:53 ►
in terms of giving people
00:45:56 ►
our idea for a new society.
00:45:59 ►
Thank you.
00:45:59 ►
Thank you.
00:46:06 ►
Well, as the saying goes, a lot of water has passed under the bridge
00:46:10 ►
since Ralph’s optimistic summation of ways to bring the sacred back into human civilization.
00:46:17 ►
I guess on one hand, you could say that not much has changed, at least on the surface.
00:46:22 ►
But behind the scenes, at least in the psychedelic community,
00:46:26 ►
I can say that my personal experience has been to see many of my friends move from using
00:46:32 ►
psychedelic substances primarily for pleasure into more of a mystical dimension, which really
00:46:38 ►
isn’t very surprising to anyone who has personally experienced these gratuitous graces.
00:46:43 ►
anyone who has personally experienced these gratuitous graces.
00:46:48 ►
So maybe the re-saccharization of the world is actually taking place,
00:46:51 ►
just like the trial loggers were hoping for.
00:46:55 ►
I guess my main criticism of this thread of their conversation stems from the fact that, for the most part,
00:46:58 ►
they were speaking from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
00:47:02 ►
Although Rupert did try to interject the Muslim side on a few occasions,
00:47:07 ►
for the most part they weren’t able to also touch on the forms of Buddhism, Hinduism,
00:47:12 ►
and the wide varieties of religious experience available throughout the Far East.
00:47:17 ►
And it’s not a criticism, actually.
00:47:19 ►
After all, they were covering a huge topic in just 90 minutes.
00:47:23 ►
And I’m mentioning this mainly because I know we have a large number of fellow psychonauts in that part of the world
00:47:30 ►
who also join us here in the Psychedelic Salon each week.
00:47:33 ►
And I don’t want you to think that your point of view doesn’t matter.
00:47:36 ►
It does.
00:47:38 ►
Unfortunately, us Westerners sometimes get so carried away with ourselves
00:47:42 ►
that we forget that we’re only one small part of the human experience.
00:47:47 ►
And I have to admit that I had to smile when Terrence kept talking about saving the earth.
00:47:54 ►
Now, while that expression was quite popular during the last century,
00:47:58 ►
it’s become kind of funny now, don’t you think?
00:48:01 ►
I can see talking about saving our species and to be honest I’m
00:48:05 ►
not sure we’re going to even make it as a species as long as most mammal species
00:48:09 ►
have survived so far but I’m pretty sure that no matter what us humans do the
00:48:14 ►
earth is going to continue along just fine. There’s nothing wrong with talking
00:48:19 ►
about saving the planet but unless and until we humans can get along with one another and
00:48:25 ►
with the biosphere, saving ourselves seems to be where the focus should be.
00:48:31 ►
And speaking of focus, I’d better come clean here and admit that my focus on replying to
00:48:37 ►
your email has really fallen by the wayside lately.
00:48:41 ►
I seem to go in spurts where for a few days I’ll answer email as soon as it comes in,
00:48:46 ►
but then I’ll start putting it off for a day or so until eventually my inbox gets so full I
00:48:51 ►
realize I’ll probably never catch up. But this kind of procrastination isn’t anything new for me.
00:48:59 ►
You know, on my last assignment in the Navy, I was the executive officer on a ship,
00:49:04 ►
On my last assignment in the Navy, I was the executive officer on a ship,
00:49:09 ►
which meant, among other things, that I was responsible for the smooth flow of the mountains of mainly unnecessary paperwork that bureaucracies seem to thrive on.
00:49:15 ►
I can remember one program that the screwheads at the top of our system implemented,
00:49:20 ►
and it was supposedly intended to reduce the number of reports a ship was required to submit.
00:49:26 ►
What really amazed me about this program was that the morons who came up with the idea
00:49:31 ►
required us to submit weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports
00:49:35 ►
detailing how we eliminated the unnecessary busywork of filing stupid reports.
00:49:42 ►
So, as you can probably guess, my first weekly report was to announce that I’d eliminated
00:49:48 ►
all of the reports about reducing paperwork.
00:49:51 ►
For the first few months after refusing to send any more of those stupid forms in to
00:49:56 ►
them, I was getting all kinds of threatening messages telling me that I was way behind
00:50:01 ►
in reporting on my paperwork problems.
00:50:04 ►
But after a while, I guess they just got tired of bugging me,
00:50:07 ►
and I stopped hearing from them.
00:50:09 ►
So I expanded that idea and didn’t turn in any reports for a few months.
00:50:13 ►
It turned out that there were actually a few people
00:50:16 ►
who seemed to really need the information that I was supposed to be reporting on,
00:50:21 ►
so I wound up doing about 10% of the required paperwork
00:50:24 ►
because they were essentially very squeaky wheels.
00:50:28 ►
I guess this is just a long way of saying that I’m still not very good at paperwork,
00:50:33 ►
even the digital kind.
00:50:35 ►
It’s rude of me, I know, particularly because I so enjoy receiving your emails.
00:50:41 ►
So for what it’s worth, if you haven’t yet received a reply to an email you sent me, well,
00:50:46 ►
I want you to know that it really bothers me that I don’t keep up with my email, and I even lose
00:50:51 ►
sleep about it at night as I lay there and compose responses to the many thoughtful messages you’ve
00:50:57 ►
been sending. And I promise to do better in my next life. Well, I’m just rambling now, I guess,
00:51:04 ►
so I’d better close and let you get on with your lives. Hey, I’m just rambling now, I guess,
00:51:07 ►
so I’d better close and let you get on with your lives.
00:51:10 ►
Hey, it’s been nice to be with you again, though,
00:51:12 ►
and thank you all for listening.
00:51:16 ►
Before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the
00:51:19 ►
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:51:24 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:51:26 ►
you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:51:30 ►
which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:51:35 ►
And if you still have questions, send them to me in an email.
00:51:38 ►
It’s Lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:51:42 ►
Thanks as always to Jacques Cordell and Wells of Chateau Hayouk
00:51:46 ►
for letting us use your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:51:50 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:51:55 ►
Be well, my friends.