Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
07:58 Terence McKenna:
“People should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen.”
09:35 Rupert Sheldrake:
“I would say that the Big Bang cosmology, which is an apolocyptic vision of history, with an explosive beginning and therefore implying an explosive end, is a kind of projection of this Judeo-Christian model of history. It’s not just confined to churches and synagogs. It’s the myth which encloses our entire scientific world view, which has grown up within this Judeo-Christian matrix.”
12:35 Terence:
“This is not paranoia. Paranoia? The Earth is on fire, haven’t you heard? There’s no reason to worry about being too paranoid. You can lift your foot off that pedal. It’s OK. You can go with that intuition now. The planet is on fire.”
18:38 Terence:
“So much is happening. Everything is knitting together. It cannot be stopped. There will be cellular technology and human-machine interface and uploading and downloading of clones of people and memories and places. The boundries are disolving into some kind of techno-biological informational soup of intentionality.”
19:12 Terence:
“It’s incomprehensible what is happening on this planet. It is like the metamorphosis that goes on inside a crysalisis, excpt this is a planet that is having its forests liquified, its oceans boiled, its populations moved, its genes streaming in all directions with all these exotic toxins mixed in. It isn’t for death that it’s moving. It’s moving towards some kind of other thing, not death.”
22:20 Rupert Sheldrake:
“Assuming that human consciousness doesn’t simply become extinguished at death, we have the question of what happens when millions of people die together… . an extraordinary flux of souls”
27:31 Terence:
“We don’t know what life is for or what death is for.”
28:13 Rupert:
“If the state of being after death is like dreaming without being able to wake up, so that when we die we’re captured in the realm of our dreams, we pass through this tunnel, and we enter a realm which is more like the realm of dreams than the life of waking experience, that there is indeed a post-mortal life in such a form, a form glimpsed in dreams in some kinds of psychedelic epxerience where the barrier that is penetrated may be like the membrane or barrier that we penetrate at death and may therefore be akin to near death experiences, which I think DMT probably is.”
30:28 Rupert:
“It’s an interesting question as to why the apocolypse is such a strong attractor.”
36:12 Rupert:
“It seems to us unlikely, given our old-fashioned cosmological view, that anything that happens on Earth would affect the rest of the cosmos. But if lots of Earths were synchronized [through morphogenic fields] then we do indeed begin to get the sense of the possible cosmic apolypotic.”
38:28 Terence: “We have to believe that the universe is stranger than we can suppose, and that’s the way, by avoiding closure and keeping that in front of us I think we will not go far wrong.”
44:23 Terence:
“The middle name of chaos is opportunity.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, are you ready to wind up these trialogues for a while?
00:00:28 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon since last December,
00:00:32 ►
well, you know that I’ve been working my way through the first series of trialogue tapes
00:00:37 ►
that Ralph Abraham loaned to me for podcasting.
00:00:40 ►
Now, the tapes were labeled 1989 and 1990,
00:00:57 ►
and I’ve been told that these conversations, which took place between Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake, actually took place first in September of 1989 and again the following year.
00:01:04 ►
But there wasn’t any marking or other indication on the tapes as to which year they were actually recorded. In any event, today I’m going to play the last side of the tenth tape in the series
00:01:10 ►
where they conclude their conversation about the apocalypse.
00:01:14 ►
Now, if you’re a long-time listener to these podcasts,
00:01:18 ►
you’ll also remember that I kind of screwed up and didn’t get Tape 4 digitized.
00:01:23 ►
And of all the tapes to miss, the one that I thought had the most interesting title was Tape 4.
00:01:29 ►
It was called The World’s Soul and the Mushroom.
00:01:33 ►
But don’t give up hope.
00:01:34 ►
Right now I’m trying to raise the funds to rent a car and return to Santa Cruz
00:01:39 ►
where I can not only interview some of the original merry pranksters who are still around,
00:01:43 ►
and not only interview some of the original Merry Pranksters who are still around,
00:01:48 ►
but I also hope to re-borrow that tape number four from Ralph and get it digitized and into podcast form for us.
00:01:52 ►
But for now, we’ll just have to imagine what exotic thoughts it may hold.
00:01:57 ►
So let’s pick up at the end of last week’s podcast,
00:02:00 ►
where Rupert Sheldrake discusses the historical origins of the Christian
00:02:05 ►
view of the apocalypse as a
00:02:08 ►
journey through time and as
00:02:09 ►
the source of human migratory urges.
00:02:13 ►
And
00:02:13 ►
after we hear today’s concluding talk
00:02:16 ►
I’ll come back and let you know what’s
00:02:18 ►
in store from the Psychedelic Salon in the
00:02:20 ►
weeks ahead.
00:02:24 ►
Well first one, historical
00:02:26 ►
note, that the revelation
00:02:28 ►
of St. John the Divine is not a unique
00:02:30 ►
phenomenon in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:02:32 ►
It’s in a succession of
00:02:34 ►
apocalyptic books which abounded around
00:02:36 ►
the time of Christ, because many people believed
00:02:37 ►
that the end was literally at hand.
00:02:40 ►
St. John the Baptist’s message was repent
00:02:42 ►
for the end is at hand. It was a period
00:02:44 ►
very similar to our own, in the sense that the idea of the end being at hand was widely believed,
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only too credible to them for whatever their reasons were.
00:02:52 ►
The book of Daniel in the Old Testament is an apocalyptic prophetic book
00:02:57 ►
and is a precursor of the revelation of St. John the Divine.
00:03:01 ►
These are just two examples in a large and extensive literature.
00:03:04 ►
revelation of St. John the Divine. These are just two examples in a large and extensive literature. It pervades the teachings of Jesus, this apocalyptic sense of the changing of everything.
00:03:12 ►
So, where was I?
00:03:16 ►
About Daniel.
00:03:17 ►
Oh yes, Daniel. That it pervades the thing and it pervades, it comes very early on because the promise of the, to Abraham, it starts with Abraham.
00:03:28 ►
God promises Abraham that he’ll take him and his descendants to another land.
00:03:32 ►
He’ll give them a land.
00:03:34 ►
There’s a promise of a land where wonderful things will happen.
00:03:38 ►
Abraham’s children shall be as the sands of the sea and he shall be the father of many nations.
00:03:43 ►
And these are promises about things
00:03:45 ►
that haven’t happened but will happen and through faith in these promises history is made and there’s
00:03:51 ►
a passage in the 11th chapter of the epistle to the hebrews which is in the new testament a doctrine
00:03:58 ►
to jewish christians and there’s a whole sermon on faith how the entire motor of history for the
00:04:04 ►
jewish people was this faith in what they hadn’t yet seen faith how the entire motor of history for the Jewish people
00:04:05 ►
was this faith in what they hadn’t yet seen
00:04:07 ►
faith is the substance of things hoped for
00:04:09 ►
the passage begins
00:04:11 ►
and by faith Abraham went out to find a strange land
00:04:14 ►
not having seen it
00:04:15 ►
or even glimpsed it afar off
00:04:16 ►
by faith Moses led the people of Israel out of Egypt
00:04:20 ►
to the promised land
00:04:21 ►
and then by faith Noah built the ark knowing not for what
00:04:26 ►
or when and so when the rains came he’d already built this ark and everyone else
00:04:31 ►
was drowned and he and his family took off all these things are done by faith
00:04:34 ►
and it ends with this thing about how we are moving by faith towards a new
00:04:41 ►
state a promised land because if we belong to the cities of the
00:04:46 ►
world as we know them, we’d go back to those cities, but we’re moving onwards. And it ends
00:04:49 ►
with that famous passage, we’re strangers and pilgrims in this land. So there’s this
00:04:54 ►
sense of being on a journey through time towards some destiny in the future, which can be a
00:05:00 ►
different place, like America. The Pilgrim Fathers were inspired by this mythology to come to America and see in it a new promised land. It’s inspired the
00:05:08 ►
migratory ages of the northern Europeans for centuries now, this vision. And it’s
00:05:16 ►
also inspired the attempt to change the world through science and technology. But
00:05:21 ►
it’s so deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition that mere tampering with the book of Revelation won’t make it go away.
00:05:28 ►
It’s fundamental to the entire historical orientation of the religion.
00:05:32 ►
We need to direct it toward a non-lethal, satisfying conclusion.
00:05:39 ►
Well, the momentum can’t be stopped. I don’t think the momentum of the technological effects of all this can be stopped.
00:05:44 ►
Or at least certainly not in a short time.
00:05:47 ►
You’re not considering the possibility that I mentioned at the beginning, Ralph, which is that there is this intuition is of something profound.
00:05:57 ►
That it isn’t simply a lethal neurosis, it’s the actual anticipation of what is now made inevitable by all this technology.
00:06:06 ►
Well, in that case, there’s no problem.
00:06:09 ►
No, I’m not going to reject the problem.
00:06:10 ►
We’re not going to reject the inevitable.
00:06:12 ►
We just, as you suggested, sort of like get used to it happening.
00:06:18 ►
Well, get used to the fact it could happen at any time.
00:06:20 ►
You see, Terence is so much like St. John,
00:06:23 ►
both in his St. John the Baptist form and
00:06:27 ►
and in the St John the Divine there’s the work that in in the gospels there’s these passages
00:06:34 ►
of Jesus which Terence could easily quote and add to his armamentarium is that Nicodemus what Christ
00:06:42 ►
told Nicodemus no it’s his prophecies in St. Luke’s Gospel
00:06:45 ►
about how when the kingdom of heaven comes,
00:06:49 ►
it will be like a thief in the night.
00:06:52 ►
And in the parable of the seven wise and foolish virgins
00:06:55 ►
who are not ready for the end,
00:06:57 ►
many stories that say that when it comes, it will come suddenly,
00:07:02 ►
and you won’t know when it’s coming.
00:07:04 ►
And you have to live… Yes, I’ll come suddenly, and you won’t know when it’s coming. And you have to live…
00:07:06 ►
Yes, I will come like a beast in the night,
00:07:07 ►
and no man will know the moment of my coming.
00:07:10 ►
Well, I’m yielding now to Terence’s view
00:07:16 ►
that there’s no way to save this vehicle,
00:07:18 ►
that the basic scriptures are riddled
00:07:22 ►
with a self-fulfilling prophecy of apocalypse
00:07:26 ►
and either
00:07:28 ►
there is an inevitable
00:07:30 ►
apocalypse on the horizon
00:07:32 ►
or
00:07:33 ►
in case there’s not
00:07:35 ►
one might be created
00:07:38 ►
by the
00:07:39 ►
self-fulfilling prophecy
00:07:41 ►
the mechanism of paranoid delusion
00:07:44 ►
then
00:07:44 ►
we would have
00:07:46 ►
to diffuse the time bomb of the Bible. That’s a good way of thinking. Yes. And the
00:07:56 ►
Korah. People should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen.
00:08:02 ►
Yeah. If culture is a fantasy coming out of the unconscious, then we have set ourselves up
00:08:12 ►
for this.
00:08:13 ►
It’s now going to be very delicate to ride this through, understand it, stop it, back
00:08:19 ►
out, integrate it.
00:08:20 ►
So the myth of apocalypse, is this then one of the major weaknesses of this system from the
00:08:27 ►
evolutionary point of view? It’s what enabled us to understand and discover the evolutionary point
00:08:33 ►
of view. The evolutionary point of view is the apocalyptic vision of history writ large, surely.
00:08:38 ►
I mean the very fact that the notion of human progress made progress requires the beginning the middle
00:08:45 ►
and the end to even gawk it yes and the thing is that from the idea of human progress which was
00:08:51 ►
widespread by the end of the 18th century the idea of biological progress i.e the same process
00:08:57 ►
recognized in the human realm but extended to all life was seemed increasingly plausible to many
00:09:03 ►
people because the idea of life is
00:09:06 ►
totally static and the whole of nature is utterly frozen with only humans developing
00:09:10 ►
in this mode. You see when Hegel showed the dialectical development of thought it was
00:09:16 ►
a fairly obvious idea that Marx and others took up of thinking of a kind of evolutionary
00:09:21 ►
development of matter as well. In other words, seeing the evolutionary process as not just a human one, but involving all life,
00:09:27 ►
and then since 1966, the entire cosmos
00:09:30 ►
with Big Bang cosmology.
00:09:32 ►
So I would say that the Big Bang cosmology,
00:09:35 ►
which is an apocalyptic vision of history
00:09:37 ►
with an explosive beginning
00:09:39 ►
and therefore implying an explosive end,
00:09:42 ►
is simply a projection, well, I shouldn’t say simply,
00:09:45 ►
but is a kind of projection of this Judeo-Christian model of history. It’s not just confined to
00:09:49 ►
churches and synagogues. It’s something which has come to be. It’s the myth which encloses
00:09:54 ►
our entire scientific worldview, which has grown up within this Judeo-Christian matrix.
00:10:00 ►
And it started in the human realm, then it spread to… It became an apocalyptic terium.
00:10:05 ►
Good.
00:10:08 ►
It seems inevitable.
00:10:10 ►
It is inevitable.
00:10:12 ►
It used to.
00:10:18 ►
You see, the evolutionary view gives us a sort of vast time scale for this process.
00:10:20 ►
Basically, it’s still in the same model.
00:10:25 ►
It says, sooner or later, maybe in five, maybe ten billion years, our sun will explode. It will follow the course of a grade three star, or whatever it’s classified
00:10:30 ►
as. Not that we know what the course is. But the typical course of such a star, we say
00:10:35 ►
airily, having observed stars for a few… A few years. 50 years of careful observation.
00:10:49 ►
And big supernovas that tell us what happens when a star blows up are things that we’ve observed occasionally,
00:10:52 ►
like one in 1987.
00:10:54 ►
Anyway, so the theory is it’s just a star.
00:10:56 ►
It will, like any other star, burn out.
00:10:58 ►
It’ll either become a red giant or a black hole.
00:11:00 ►
I’ve forgotten which it’ll become.
00:11:02 ►
But at any rate, that’s the end for us us so the scientific worldview actually does have the same thing it has
00:11:08 ►
I think the start some becoming a supernova or a red giant and killing
00:11:14 ►
everything in the solar system that would be our end and it would be one
00:11:17 ►
that mirrored the Big Bang as a kind of incandescent beginning that’s the
00:11:21 ►
scientific view that is an apocalyptic view it’s just that it transfers
00:11:26 ►
the apocalypse to the remote future
00:11:28 ►
so that you don’t have to
00:11:30 ►
it doesn’t get rid of it
00:11:32 ►
it has it
00:11:34 ►
and the heat death of the old
00:11:36 ►
thermodynamic 19th century universe
00:11:38 ►
the steam engine running out of steam
00:11:40 ►
was a kind of slow but inevitable
00:11:42 ►
ending of time
00:11:44 ►
the heat death of the cosmos was when entropy was at a maximum
00:11:47 ►
and processes, work, and that kind of thing came to an end.
00:11:50 ►
And so it was a kind of…
00:11:52 ►
But you see…
00:11:52 ►
So now we’re down to this.
00:11:54 ►
We’re accepting the apocalypse myth
00:11:57 ►
because it’s an integral part of the historical concept
00:12:00 ►
as the Israelites invented it.
00:12:03 ►
And we can’t do anything about that.
00:12:06 ►
And nevertheless, this has no implication at all as to the overall longevity of our
00:12:11 ►
human habitation on earth no I disagree so therefore the paranoia of our culture
00:12:17 ►
is manifest in the assumption that is happening tomorrow except that there’s
00:12:22 ►
ample evidence it isn’t paranoia.
00:12:27 ►
Who else has nuclear stockpiles?
00:12:29 ►
Who else has agent orbit? Who else has CFCs dissolving the ozone hole?
00:12:33 ►
This is not paranoia.
00:12:35 ►
Paranoia?
00:12:36 ►
The earth is on fire, haven’t you heard?
00:12:40 ►
There’s no reason to worry about being too paranoid.
00:12:43 ►
You can lift your foot off that pedal.
00:12:46 ►
It’s so tiny.
00:12:47 ►
You can go with that intuition now.
00:12:50 ►
The planet is on fire.
00:12:52 ►
To fasten the fire to a complete incineration in a certain year,
00:13:00 ►
no matter what the response.
00:13:01 ►
No, that’s not what’s being said.
00:13:03 ►
You can interpret it as the smeared apocalypse
00:13:06 ►
that takes 200 years
00:13:08 ►
but still ends with everybody dead at the end of it,
00:13:11 ►
or the fast apocalypse that takes 15 minutes
00:13:14 ►
and could happen today or tomorrow.
00:13:16 ►
There are all these styles of imagining it.
00:13:19 ►
The style matters.
00:13:21 ►
I think the style…
00:13:22 ►
But all the possibilities are real.
00:13:24 ►
The projection of the apocalypse in the year 2012, I think, is actually damaging of our chances of having a future. No, I think it’s a way to manage it. If it’s just it could be tomorrow, it could be 200 years from now. That’s a little weird. Why not manage ourselves through a narrow neck in a state of high awareness by, you know,
00:13:46 ►
there should be tremendous pressure on governments to get rid of nuclear stockpiles by 2000.
00:13:52 ►
Yes, sure.
00:13:53 ►
Well, but to use the calendar as a club saying, you know,
00:13:57 ►
do you want to enter the third millennium armed like barbarians?
00:14:01 ►
Do you want to be just like King Canute?
00:14:03 ►
He was who was in charge at the turn of the last millennium.
00:14:06 ►
You want them to hold you up to King Canute and say, Canute, Bush, two
00:14:12 ►
Viking warlords, two notheads. Or do you want to drape yourself in the olive of peace and be, you know,
00:14:20 ►
the savior of the world, the unifier of mankind, and so forth and so on.
00:14:25 ►
It’s a great thing to do.
00:14:26 ►
What I’m suggesting is that the coupling of the apocalyptic vision of the revelation of St. John
00:14:31 ►
with the concept of the end of time in the year 2012
00:14:36 ►
makes most likely the response of the secretary of the interior who says,
00:14:41 ►
well, so what? I mean, there’s nothing we can do about it, so let it go.
00:14:44 ►
Going back to the revelation of John i would have seen i could have seen this discussion go on
00:14:51 ►
with never a mention of it that’s just an obscure christian text interesting to fanatics but the
00:14:57 ►
overall world but the whole idea of this issue that idea is evoked in people’s minds through use of the word apocalypse.
00:15:06 ►
Our subject here.
00:15:08 ►
Well, I called it the end of the world.
00:15:11 ►
Good, that’s much better.
00:15:14 ►
It was my notion.
00:15:17 ►
That lets John off the hook and the Bible.
00:15:17 ►
The end of the world. All right.
00:15:18 ►
The proposal of the end of the world
00:15:19 ►
happening in a fixed year
00:15:21 ►
is not inclining people
00:15:22 ►
to do something about nuclear stockpiles
00:15:25 ►
by the year
00:15:26 ►
00:15:28 ►
Like, who
00:15:28 ►
cares if the
00:15:29 ►
last 12 years
00:15:30 ►
have or do not
00:15:31 ►
have nuclear
00:15:31 ►
stockpiles?
00:15:32 ►
No, I didn’t
00:15:33 ►
link the two
00:15:33 ►
together.
00:15:34 ►
I meant that
00:15:35 ►
the year 2000,
00:15:37 ►
everyone wants
00:15:38 ►
to celebrate
00:15:38 ►
the millennium
00:15:39 ►
by feeling like
00:15:40 ►
there’s a new
00:15:41 ►
style, a breath
00:15:43 ►
of fresh air,
00:15:44 ►
a new order
00:15:45 ►
so the year 2000
00:15:47 ►
forget 20
00:15:48 ►
there should be
00:15:51 ►
a thorough examination
00:15:53 ►
on the part of everybody
00:15:55 ►
of their society
00:15:57 ►
as we approach the third millennium
00:15:59 ►
that sounds good
00:16:00 ►
that would be a fine thing
00:16:02 ►
you know it’s interesting when they
00:16:06 ►
tested the first atomic bomb at Trinity site at Alamogordo of the 19 physicists
00:16:16 ►
who observed it there were six who believed that the temperatures were high enough to ignite the
00:16:26 ►
atmosphere and that the entire planet was in a there was a 30% chance that the
00:16:33 ►
entire planet’s atmosphere would be set on fire by this experiment and they went
00:16:39 ►
forward they had no reason to believe that this wouldn’t happen.
00:16:45 ►
That would be an interesting experiment.
00:16:47 ►
Well, it didn’t happen, I’ll be honest.
00:16:50 ►
It’s not hot enough.
00:16:51 ►
I wonder how hot it is.
00:16:52 ►
That was a close one.
00:16:53 ►
That was a close one.
00:16:54 ►
And this comet coming back in 2012 looks like a close one.
00:16:59 ►
That’s the definition of a close one.
00:17:01 ►
That’s a close one.
00:17:03 ►
And the toxicity… the population explosion what about
00:17:07 ►
projecting the population explosion to the year 2012 how many people would that be
00:17:12 ►
continue to pace i don’t know it depends on whose figures you use but probably approaching 10 billion
00:17:20 ►
10 billion people and ozone if you take the ozone hole which we know that’s a
00:17:27 ►
problem propagated at the present rate of a there will be no ozone hole so
00:17:34 ►
you’ve got 10 billion people no ozone hole the impact of that single parameter is totally unknown.
00:17:49 ►
The carbon dioxide emission continues.
00:17:51 ►
That’s a whole other issue.
00:17:53 ►
The acid rain continues.
00:17:57 ►
Nuclear proliferation continues.
00:18:00 ►
Propaganda runs rampant. Meanwhile, pharmacology, brainwashing,
00:18:04 ►
surgical reconstruction,
00:18:06 ►
all of this stuff has made new leaps toward great, precious accomplishments.
00:18:11 ►
I mean, it’s a pressure cooker world that we’re describing.
00:18:15 ►
And I think under such conditions of cultural compression,
00:18:19 ►
forms of novelty will erupt that are totally unpredictable in the present context and
00:18:25 ►
that these are the forces that will create the end of the world I mean I
00:18:29 ►
think of it sort of like the DMT wave hits the planet or something like that
00:18:36 ►
so much is happening everything is knitting together it cannot be stopped I
00:18:41 ►
mean there will be cellular technology and human
00:18:45 ►
machine interface and uploading and downloading of clones of people and
00:18:50 ►
memories and places and everything the boundaries are dissolving into some kind
00:18:56 ►
of techno-biological informational soup of intentionality but what is its
00:19:02 ►
intentionality? It’s not in the hands of
00:19:05 ►
any person in the organization, anything we can figure out, it’s just the Gaian
00:19:09 ►
will and it’s incomprehensible what is happening on this planet. It is like the
00:19:15 ►
metamorphosis that goes on inside the chrysalis, except this is a planet that
00:19:21 ►
is having its forests liquefied its oceans boiled its populations moved its genes
00:19:28 ►
streaming in all directions with all these exotic toxins mixed in and uh it has this it isn’t for
00:19:37 ►
death that it’s moving it’s moving towards some kind of other thing, not death. Yes, well, this is the new gospel of St. John,
00:19:47 ►
is what you’re raving.
00:19:48 ►
Gnostic apotheosis.
00:19:50 ►
This is the green version of the apocalyptic vision,
00:19:54 ►
that the apocalypse is actually this.
00:19:58 ►
This ecological poison
00:20:00 ►
through the rampant infection of the of the planet by the human species?
00:20:06 ►
Well, but is it poison? I mean you have to remember that oxygen was a deadly gas that
00:20:12 ►
totally destroyed the biotic organization of this planet and in fact a
00:20:17 ►
billion years was spent responding to the presence of oxygen yet it is the
00:20:22 ►
basis of all present life. No, I think we’re at the edge of oxygen yet it is the basis of all present life no I think we’re at the edge
00:20:27 ►
of the apocalypse
00:20:29 ►
without having the complete
00:20:31 ►
sterilization of the planet
00:20:33 ►
something on the
00:20:35 ►
on that order that took a mere billion years
00:20:38 ►
to recover
00:20:38 ►
the evolution of
00:20:41 ►
life on the planet begins
00:20:43 ►
again from scratch at the microbial level.
00:20:47 ►
That’s right.
00:20:48 ►
At these asteroid strikes, nothing larger than a chicken…
00:20:51 ►
You’d have to say that satisfied the original St. John’s description of the apocalypse.
00:20:58 ►
Yes.
00:21:00 ►
So that’s it, then.
00:21:01 ►
The green version, the green reinterpretation of the Bible
00:21:05 ►
identifies the present moment as the apocalypse.
00:21:08 ►
Oh, I’m sure.
00:21:09 ►
It’s not even in 2012.
00:21:11 ►
We’re on the edge of the apocalypse. It’s a time storm.
00:21:15 ►
Since 1847.
00:21:16 ►
It’s a time storm whose diameter is impossible to estimate,
00:21:20 ►
and all we know is that the barometric pressure is dropping faster than you’ve ever seen it drop and there’s an eerie stillness and the light
00:21:28 ►
in the sky looks very strange but nothing has happened yet.
00:21:33 ►
It does seem to be out of hand as far as you know the scale of something that we
00:21:40 ►
could interact with and in any way I mean we’re the passive observers of this problem well if we could model it well I are we the passive observer I mean we’re all
00:21:51 ►
tragic you mean well then we can prepare fractal dynamics the apocalypse must have
00:21:56 ►
its own inner laws and dynamics this is what we’re attempting to do, I assume. Yes, but it also, I mean, before we get into the actual mechanics,
00:22:09 ►
I think a bit more speculation is called for.
00:22:15 ►
Surely not!
00:22:18 ►
Assuming that human consciousness doesn’t simply become extinguished at death,
00:22:24 ►
we have the question of what happens when millions of people die together and what happened
00:22:30 ►
in Hiroshima when all those people died or in Dresden and the firebomb attacks
00:22:34 ►
caused this fireball and firestorm in Dresden. All these people suddenly die
00:22:41 ►
together they all pass through the state of the death experience,
00:22:45 ►
not the near-death experience, because this is for real.
00:22:48 ►
The death experience, which, from the descriptions we have,
00:22:52 ►
involves going through a tunnel,
00:22:54 ►
entering a new kind of realm, a different order of reality,
00:22:56 ►
rather like the birth canal, but into another dimension.
00:23:00 ►
However we conceive of what happens at death,
00:23:02 ►
leaving aside only the materialist hypothesis that it all just goes blank,
00:23:07 ►
the end of the world through any of these scenarios, billions of people more than ever before dying at once or by the million,
00:23:18 ►
is going to create an extraordinary flux of souls, to put it in traditional language an unprecedented
00:23:25 ►
rate of flux and in an unprecedented passage and perhaps those who die in the
00:23:33 ►
same moment through the same cause undergo some kind of fusion there may be
00:23:37 ►
some kind of psychic being a kind of humanity what a one way of picturing it in Christian terms
00:23:47 ►
is that what’s happening to the earth
00:23:48 ►
is a global crucifixion
00:23:50 ►
the whole of humanity is undergoing
00:23:52 ►
a kind of crucifixion
00:23:53 ►
and there’ll be a moment when
00:23:55 ►
the crucified body of humanity
00:23:58 ►
there’s a collective moment
00:24:00 ►
at which humanity gives up the ghost
00:24:01 ►
or at least large sections of it
00:24:03 ►
the nuclear scenario incidentally according to its script since the Second World War,
00:24:09 ►
is essentially meant as the autodestruct of Christendom,
00:24:12 ►
because all nuclear targets, bar those in Turkey, which is in NATO,
00:24:17 ►
but NATO and Warsaw Pact countries, with the exception of Turkey, are all Christendom,
00:24:22 ►
and there’s Western Christendom in Western Europe and the United States and there’s Eastern
00:24:26 ►
Christendom in the Soviet Union
00:24:28 ►
in Greece and essentially
00:24:30 ►
a nuclear thing would be
00:24:32 ►
the auto-destructive Christendom which would be
00:24:34 ►
very much in the self-fulfilling prophecy mode
00:24:36 ►
of this particular
00:24:38 ►
apocalyptic but the environmental
00:24:40 ►
one is much more global
00:24:41 ►
it’s no longer as we shift from our
00:24:44 ►
focus of
00:24:45 ►
attention to the dangers of nuclear war, not that there’s any reason to shift
00:24:48 ►
from it, all the weapons are still there, but or as the fashion changes and we
00:24:53 ►
turn our attention to the global thing, we now see that this isn’t just
00:24:56 ►
Christendom, it’s everybody. Anyway, if it does involve everybody then part of the
00:25:02 ►
Omega point or the thing that Terence is trying to describe,
00:25:05 ►
obviously involves some kind of transition in consciousness,
00:25:09 ►
which might be achieved through mass death,
00:25:11 ►
and might be achieved without mass death,
00:25:14 ►
through something that I think Terence rather vividly portrayed
00:25:18 ►
on one occasion as being like a kind of collective BMT experience.
00:25:23 ►
The glory.
00:25:24 ►
The glory. I know the… I’m not sure that i can explain the
00:25:28 ►
glory it’s a rat oh they also call it the rapture fundamental the rapture yes the eminent expectation
00:25:35 ►
of this thing that they call the rapture which will be the opening note of this end of the world
00:25:42 ►
scenario and they’re carried off into the
00:25:45 ►
heavens in the rapture they’re actually born aloft. Their clothes are left behind as they leave the
00:25:51 ►
ottoman building vertically towards the sky. That’s the one, the rapture. See it’s
00:25:56 ►
interesting because we all die there is an built in. It’s just that it only happens to you.
00:26:08 ►
And so every human life becomes ultimately
00:26:11 ►
an approach to this question of final time.
00:26:15 ►
What difference does it make that you’re the only one that’s going to die after all?
00:26:19 ►
That’s the one you’re standing in.
00:26:22 ►
So it isn’t that if you don’t live in the age of the end of the world,
00:26:26 ►
you don’t get to deal with the question of final time.
00:26:29 ►
It’s just that in this age,
00:26:32 ►
the death of the individual and the death of the species
00:26:35 ►
are somehow both possible to contemplate.
00:26:38 ►
Yeah.
00:26:40 ►
And the death of the other species.
00:26:41 ►
And the death of the other.
00:26:44 ►
It may be, you know, I mean, lots of traditions teach that life is organization
00:26:51 ►
for the purpose of creating a kind of after-death vehicle
00:26:56 ►
or some kind of structure in a higher dimension,
00:26:59 ►
which is if carefully made will survive some kind of transition
00:27:04 ►
that is potentially could
00:27:08 ►
fail and that you’re supposed to spend your life doing this well if the Sun
00:27:15 ►
were to explode then the entire biological shell of organizational soul, ecoplasm,
00:27:25 ►
would be liberated
00:27:26 ►
in a fraction of a second.
00:27:30 ►
We don’t know what life is for
00:27:33 ►
or what death is for.
00:27:35 ►
Well, I think it certainly makes a difference.
00:27:38 ►
It certainly makes a difference
00:27:39 ►
to the way that individuals face death
00:27:41 ►
in what they believe happens to them afterwards.
00:27:45 ►
And people who’ve had near-death experiences, where they’ve experienced this going through
00:27:49 ►
a tunnel, an altered state of consciousness, out-of-the-body experience, so they have the
00:27:53 ►
sensation that there’s something in them that leaves the body and survives it.
00:27:57 ►
An experience which I think is related to lucid dreaming, which in turn is related to
00:28:01 ►
dreaming, which is the experience we all have every night whether we remember it or not
00:28:05 ►
of travelling in other realms with another body
00:28:07 ►
not the same as the physical body in bed
00:28:09 ►
but an implicit body at least
00:28:11 ►
and if the state of being after death
00:28:15 ►
is like dreaming without being able to wake up
00:28:18 ►
so that when we die we are captured in a realm of our dreams
00:28:21 ►
we pass through this tunnel
00:28:23 ►
and we enter a realm which is more like the realm of dreams than the life of waking experience that there is indeed a
00:28:29 ►
post-mortal active life in in such a form um a form glimpsed in dreams in some kinds of psychedelic
00:28:38 ►
experience where the barrier that’s penetrated may be like the membrane or the barrier that we
00:28:42 ►
penetrate at death and they may therefore be akin to near-death experiences,
00:28:47 ►
which I think DMT probably is,
00:28:51 ►
then if there is indeed this state of individual survival after death,
00:28:56 ►
we have to ask ourselves what would be the state of collective survival
00:28:59 ►
if indeed billions of people were wiped off the earth.
00:29:04 ►
Most people don’t want to think beyond that moment.
00:29:06 ►
It’s a catastrophe and we must do everything
00:29:07 ►
that we can possibly do to avoid.
00:29:10 ►
And let’s start by recycling our beer cans.
00:29:14 ►
That’s the usual approach.
00:29:15 ►
But if you carry it through
00:29:17 ►
and see what might happen afterwards,
00:29:20 ►
vast numbers of people
00:29:22 ►
going through this barrier at the same time,
00:29:24 ►
creating a kind of group mind
00:29:27 ►
of a kind never before seen
00:29:29 ►
post-mortal plane
00:29:30 ►
possessed of a powerful imagination
00:29:33 ►
perhaps
00:29:34 ►
I mean if all of them passed through and believed in the New Jerusalem
00:29:37 ►
the New Jerusalem might indeed manifest
00:29:39 ►
in this plane
00:29:40 ►
and there might be some kind of
00:29:42 ►
post-mortal state
00:29:44 ►
which is the attractor
00:29:45 ►
the point is that the there are various ways of thinking of what it is that’s
00:29:51 ►
drawing people to this millennium both in expectation and in dread I mean this
00:29:57 ►
is the approach of another metaphor is that is the last judgment meeting
00:30:01 ►
meeting God those Terence put it like the mind of God coming into history the the it’s a mixture it’s no longer just the loving
00:30:11 ►
God but it’s the it’s the image of God that certainly has the shadow side in it
00:30:15 ►
because it’s the it’s a dreadful moment judgment yes day of wrath and doom
00:30:23 ►
impending as the DA’s ear eye puts it.
00:30:26 ►
It’s an interesting question as to why the Apocalypse is such a strong
00:30:31 ►
attractor, and the attractor is that somewhere beyond that, all the doom and
00:30:35 ►
this moment, there’s some other state of being which is extraordinarily
00:30:39 ►
blissful compared with anything we know here, and is utterly more perfect. And
00:30:44 ►
it’s the same fantasy or dream that was the recovery of Eden the going to the
00:30:48 ►
promised land the coming to America the transformation of the world through
00:30:52 ►
science and technology there’s something quite magical and infinitely attractive
00:30:56 ►
that’s motivated the entire historical process and if and Terence’s view what
00:31:03 ►
we experience is some kind of shock wave coming back from the future,
00:31:07 ►
that this thing is going to happen,
00:31:10 ►
and its approach is sending back these kind of shock waves through time,
00:31:14 ►
quite a powerful image, I think.
00:31:19 ►
Then we have to consider that this is what really is happening,
00:31:24 ►
it’s the blissful state or whatever this might
00:31:27 ►
be that is actually acting as a historical attractor.
00:31:31 ►
So powerful an attractor is it that do as we, whatever we do, we can’t escape from it
00:31:37 ►
once that’s been conceived and allowed to infiltrate not just our religion but our entire
00:31:42 ►
secular political and scientific and intellectual life so the justification for the Omega point
00:31:50 ►
concept of to show down is actually this mechanism built into the apocalypse
00:31:57 ►
vision the end of the point is apocalypse it’s it’s it’s the showdowns
00:32:03 ►
conception of the apocalypse not just at a human level, but at a cosmic level.
00:32:07 ►
Yes, it happens to all nature.
00:32:11 ►
And let me just add one more ingredient to this particular line of thought.
00:32:15 ►
When we were at Hollyhock recently,
00:32:17 ►
Brian Swim came up and was talking about his cosmological views.
00:32:25 ►
And he was exploring the idea that the universe,
00:32:28 ►
like a developing organism,
00:32:30 ►
has ages at which things happen.
00:32:32 ►
It has an inbuilt cosmological time.
00:32:35 ►
It’s not like the old universe
00:32:36 ►
where galaxies were coming into being,
00:32:38 ►
others were dissolving,
00:32:39 ►
it just all went on forever in endless cycles.
00:32:41 ►
There was a time when atoms came into being first in the universe. There was a time when galaxies formed, or at least the great majority of them. There
00:32:48 ►
was a time when planets could form. Planets couldn’t have formed a minute after the Big
00:32:53 ►
Bang. There was only a time after supernovae had been in existence, stars had formed in
00:32:58 ►
stardust from supernovae, the time when planets could form. So in a sense, just as in a developing embryo, the development
00:33:05 ►
has particular times or phases or synchronies. So if there were life on other planets,
00:33:11 ►
that the stage it’s at might not be that very different from the stage ours is at.
00:33:16 ►
So I said to him, this was the most interesting line of thought, and if since I’d also been
00:33:21 ►
thinking about parallel evolution and their possible effect on us through morphic resonance
00:33:27 ►
interplanetary morphic resonance similar Gaia’s in other solar systems
00:33:31 ►
planets of the species Gaia will be in resonance with ours and
00:33:36 ►
planets of the species Venus will resonate with Venus and so on but we’re interested in Gaian resonances and
00:33:42 ►
I said well how far how far, you know,
00:33:45 ►
in just sort of rough estimate, order of magnitude,
00:33:47 ►
in time, do you think they’d be within a billion years
00:33:50 ►
of where we are, within a million,
00:33:52 ►
within 500,000, within 50,000, within five?
00:33:55 ►
You know, what just, where would you put it?
00:33:58 ►
He said, just guessing 50,000 to 500,000 years
00:34:02 ►
of where we are.
00:34:05 ►
So there might be, you see, similar processes.
00:34:09 ►
That’s really a big bang.
00:34:11 ►
I don’t understand why he assumes that.
00:34:15 ►
Because of this developmental theory.
00:34:16 ►
I understand that, but my guess would be 500 million years.
00:34:21 ►
I mean, you have to be reasonable with the size of the universe.
00:34:24 ►
Yes, but take into account
00:34:25 ►
morphic resonance if there is indeed morphic resonance between the planets so
00:34:30 ►
that when a new form appears on earth it’s vastly more likely to appear on
00:34:34 ►
other planets you think you could have a greatly accelerated evolution on other
00:34:37 ►
plants till they almost caught up so if any got in far in the lead the morphic
00:34:42 ►
resonance effect would tend to make the others catch up a little bit like how time works yes is cosmic synchronization
00:34:48 ►
principle then yes place you can check this is 4.5 light years away and that
00:34:53 ►
may not be suitable there is a Sun type star in Centauri 1.1 solar masses if
00:35:02 ►
there were an oxygen rich water heavy planet there you could
00:35:08 ►
It could be a twin earth. Haven’t we been here somewhere before?
00:35:14 ►
This island earth
00:35:17 ►
What are you doing about your apocalypse problem?
00:35:21 ►
But the thing is you see that the the christian apocalyptic version the vision has several forms
00:35:27 ►
one’s the local human one it just happens to people like the jews going to the promised land
00:35:33 ►
didn’t change all nature it just meant they got other people’s vineyards and took over other
00:35:37 ►
people’s fields and killed the native inhabitants or reduced them to some second-class status, a repetitive pattern in history.
00:35:50 ►
But this was a limited vision of where this whole process was led.
00:35:53 ►
Then it got more and more elaborated,
00:35:55 ►
this apocalyptic vision,
00:35:57 ►
until in Teil of the Chandon,
00:35:58 ►
it’s the end of the evolutionary cosmos.
00:36:01 ►
And it’s not just the big crunch,
00:36:02 ►
it’s much more immediate than that somehow.
00:36:10 ►
And so it’s this attractor pulling forward so it’s this cosmic vision but the thing is that it seems to us unlikely given our standard old-fashioned cosmological view that anything
00:36:15 ►
that happens on earth would affect the rest of the cosmos but if lots of earths are synchronized
00:36:21 ►
and if there are these you see then then we do indeed begin to get the sense of the possible cosmic apocalyptic. I don’t know how much you…
00:36:29 ►
That’s an interesting idea.
00:36:31 ►
Maybe it’s pointing to the cosmic scale.
00:36:34 ►
That the end time of the cosmos…
00:36:36 ►
The end of the soul of the world.
00:36:38 ►
Yes, or the total transformation of the soul of the world. That it may be a maturation
00:36:44 ►
process or that’s… because present cosmology hasn’t got very much to offer in the soul of the world that it may be a maturation process because present cosmology hasn’t
00:36:48 ►
got very much to offer in the way of what happens
00:36:50 ►
in the future either you’ve got endless
00:36:51 ►
expansion which seemed
00:36:53 ►
persuasive to people in the 1960s
00:36:55 ►
when it was generally believed that
00:36:57 ►
economies could go on expanding forever and forever
00:37:00 ►
so cosmos went on
00:37:02 ►
then people got worried about
00:37:03 ►
the big stock market crashes that were all going, the whole
00:37:07 ►
thing ending in tears.
00:37:08 ►
Then we got more big crunch scenarios on the market.
00:37:10 ►
It may be just enough dark matter to…
00:37:12 ►
They say it’s close to the indeterminate value they can’t tell.
00:37:16 ►
Exactly.
00:37:17 ►
Now they’ve got into a very subtle position, which I’m sure the medieval schoolmen would
00:37:21 ►
have admired as a solution to the problem, saying that we’re hovering on the very brink between an ever-expanding,
00:37:27 ►
an ever-collapsing, so close to the margin that it’s impossible ever to tell.
00:37:31 ►
Yes.
00:37:32 ►
So, but, you know, these are rather uninteresting visions of the future.
00:37:38 ►
Well, you’ve actually created another mechanism for an apocalypse.
00:37:43 ►
It happens somewhere else.
00:37:45 ►
Yes.
00:37:46 ►
And then by this kind of imploding process, once one pops…
00:37:50 ►
It’s a chain reaction.
00:37:52 ►
And the stars would fall from heaven and the lights of the galaxies would go out and that would be it.
00:37:58 ►
Well, it’s similar to this time travel problem of collapsing time.
00:38:03 ►
The God Whistle.
00:38:04 ►
The God Whistle. The god whistle.
00:38:06 ►
That’s right.
00:38:08 ►
It’s a spatial version of the god whistle.
00:38:08 ►
Yes.
00:38:12 ►
A synchronization of god whistles, cosmos-wide. Yes, a cosmic chain reaction at a certain developmental stage
00:38:17 ►
that just pulls everything down into it.
00:38:21 ►
We have to believe that the universe is stranger than we can suppose.
00:38:26 ►
Yes. And that’s the way by avoiding closure and keeping that in front of us
00:38:33 ►
I think we will not go far wrong. The trouble is that at the apocalypse if it
00:38:38 ►
happens the hermeneutic cycle will come to an end. Yes. If it happens in 2012 I’m sure I’ll get no credit whatsoever for having been right.
00:38:50 ►
It’d be a bit late for credit to be much value to you. I suppose so. Well our
00:38:58 ►
raptural New Jerusalem might have to take its physical existence in another universe
00:39:05 ►
I mean only this universe will pop yes well what is it this new Jerusalem that
00:39:10 ►
everybody leaves this machine of sapphire and emerald and chalcedony that
00:39:17 ►
descends from the sky and in which there is a world of delight before the
00:39:24 ►
presence of God.
00:39:25 ►
This is the promise.
00:39:27 ►
This is the covenant.
00:39:28 ►
This is the fulfillment of the covenant.
00:39:30 ►
It’s by us here, too, of course.
00:39:31 ►
The ocean will boil, everything will be lost,
00:39:35 ►
and do not give up the faith,
00:39:37 ►
because at the landing of the ark,
00:39:40 ►
the covenant was made, not with Abraham,
00:39:43 ►
but with Noah, with humanity humanity and it will be redeemed
00:39:48 ►
there was all this yes this the pledge will be redeemed the the promise will be kept don’t throw
00:39:56 ►
away your coupons they’ll be cashed in due time that’s right the promise will be kept I think it probably will be kept well I do believe we’ve transformed
00:40:06 ►
the apocalypse myth
00:40:08 ►
suitable for the purple and green church
00:40:12 ►
you think that we’ve
00:40:14 ►
we’ve transformed it, yes
00:40:17 ►
well the green church of Brazil
00:40:20 ►
already has a version of the apocalypse myth
00:40:22 ►
which is
00:40:22 ►
they believe in very strongly and and they
00:40:26 ►
in theirs the the dragon in the last days comes and eats up the forest they say it’s an Inca
00:40:32 ►
prophecy and burns and destroys a dragon incidentally which is prophesied at the very
00:40:40 ►
beginning of Anglo-Saxon liberal political theory in Hobbes’ model of Leviathan,
00:40:45 ►
because the dragon that’s destroying the Amazon forest is the great monster Leviathan, which
00:40:50 ►
society, in Hobbes’ view, is the aggregate like cells in the body, individuals are like atoms in
00:40:57 ►
the body of Leviathan. There’s a dragon in the Revelation of St. John. Yes. The idea of heaven crushes the head of the serpent.
00:41:07 ►
So here’s the serpent, which is…
00:41:09 ►
And in the last days,
00:41:11 ►
the struggle between the serpent
00:41:15 ►
and the forces of light grows ever more intense.
00:41:18 ►
People are forced to take sides
00:41:20 ►
because it no longer is possible to sit on the fence
00:41:22 ►
because the fence itself is crumbling.
00:41:31 ►
And there will be an intense polarization through the 1990s in their view you know towards the coming of the millennium because these forces become ever more powerful preparing for the final
00:41:35 ►
battle well this is a fairly traditional version of the millennium this is already one adopted by
00:41:43 ►
what one could call a green church and it’s one that sees the struggle that’s going on as being of
00:41:50 ►
uncertain outcome in a sense although through faith in the victory over the
00:41:57 ►
dragon though the victory will be achieved through faith so it’s another
00:42:01 ►
form of seeing faith motivating faith in some future state,
00:42:07 ►
motivating the struggle. It’s a powerful inspiration and actually without some
00:42:12 ►
such inspiration I don’t think the Green Movement can function properly. And that
00:42:16 ►
means that any apocalyptic vision that either sees the apocalypse as inevitable
00:42:21 ►
or as something we can’t do anything about is as you
00:42:25 ►
were suggesting earlier perhaps destructive in its effect but an
00:42:28 ►
apocalyptic vision which sees it as a process in which we’re participants and
00:42:33 ►
to which we can make some difference then unleashes this kind of heroic
00:42:41 ►
heroic archetype incidentally I think that both the conquest of nature and the environmental
00:42:47 ►
movements are under the aegis of the heroic archetype. In one of them, the hero’s saving
00:42:53 ►
humanity from the ravaging powers of destructive nature, like the battle of doctors against cancer.
00:43:00 ►
In the other one, the environmentalist is saving the virgin nature from the onslaughts of this destructive dragon, Leviathan, which is devouring the forest, polluting the world, shitting everywhere.
00:43:17 ►
So anyway, they’re both under this archetype.
00:43:20 ►
And maybe it’s too late for us to escape that particular heroic archetype either, because the only thing that can motivate the Green Movement is a heroic archetype,
00:43:29 ►
whether it takes the form of actual guerrilla fighting,
00:43:31 ►
or whether it takes the form of non-violent resistance,
00:43:34 ►
a kind of Gandhian and Christian version which will generate martyrs
00:43:39 ►
who will then have this great archetypal appeal.
00:43:42 ►
But only some such millenarian faith, I think,
00:43:44 ►
could motivate the Green movement sufficiently fast enough
00:43:48 ►
and sufficiently deeply enough to change the scenario.
00:43:52 ►
And so I think that this is another way of saying
00:43:54 ►
we’re so in the fold of this millenarian in its field
00:43:58 ►
that only another millenarian scenario could possibly help undo it.
00:44:03 ►
Rubbing it out, getting rid of it, forgetting it, suppressing it, psych it rubbing it out getting rid of it forgetting
00:44:05 ►
it suppressing it psychically engineering it out of our psyche i think we’re past all that yeah
00:44:11 ►
that’s why a jihad to save the earth doesn’t sound like a half bad alternative chaos became and
00:44:20 ►
chaos shall return the middle name of chaos is opportunity.
00:44:26 ►
Well, we have to end somewhere.
00:44:31 ►
If, like me, you listened to last week’s podcast before picking up on today’s,
00:44:37 ►
you probably right now have your head so full of new thoughts
00:44:41 ►
that you don’t know where to start thinking about these things first.
00:44:44 ►
One of my favorite lines in today’s podcast was when Terrence said,
00:44:49 ►
people should be allowed to let the apocalypse happen, not make it happen.
00:44:55 ►
And I wonder if I’m the only one who had to stop for a minute
00:44:59 ►
when Terrence called Bush a knothead,
00:45:02 ►
had to stop and remember that he was talking about Bush I,
00:45:06 ►
the father of the current knothead in the White House.
00:45:09 ►
I can hardly imagine what the good bard McKenna would think about the moron in charge today.
00:45:15 ►
And actually, you know, it’s kind of sad in a way to hear Terrence, Ralph, and Rupert talk so positively
00:45:21 ►
about their hopes for change in this new millennium.
00:45:24 ►
I guess that way back in 1989, when this talk was recorded, talk so positively about their hopes for change in this new millennium?
00:45:28 ►
I guess that way back in 1989, when this talk was recorded,
00:45:33 ►
no one on the planet could imagine how a single psychopath like Bush Jr.
00:45:35 ►
could make such a horrible mess of things.
00:45:38 ►
But enough of the dark side.
00:45:40 ►
Let’s go for a little light.
00:45:45 ►
And I don’t know a better way to lighten up than to kick back and listen to a podcast of the sounds of the worldwide weed.
00:45:49 ►
In case you missed it, Queer Ninja’s World Music Podcast is back online
00:45:54 ►
after several disasters that included a flood and a trip to the emergency room.
00:45:59 ►
Hey Ninja, it’s good to have you back again.
00:46:02 ►
And even though the dope fiend did a really good job of filling in for you,
00:46:06 ►
I think it’s safe to say that your beautiful podcasting personality
00:46:10 ►
was greatly missed by listeners all around the world.
00:46:14 ►
And it seems like Queer Ninja wasn’t the only podcaster
00:46:17 ►
to suffer a series of near disasters recently.
00:46:21 ►
From what he’s had to say on his latest podcast,
00:46:23 ►
it sounds like KMO has had a battle with the elements as well. Thank you. and to ask why some of the back podcasts you’ve already downloaded have begun showing up in your aggregators as new material.
00:46:48 ►
Well, I’m sorry for any confusion or inconvenience that is caused by this,
00:46:53 ►
but I’m in the process of moving all of the MP3 files to a new server.
00:46:58 ►
But never fear, any of you who have made direct links to the programs from your websites,
00:47:04 ►
I’m not going to remove any of the original MP3 files from their locations.
00:47:09 ►
This move is just to point new people to these somewhat refurbished files.
00:47:14 ►
And by that I mean I’ve tried to fix the problems in the ID tags
00:47:18 ►
that cause some of the old programs to be difficult to find in your directories.
00:47:23 ►
I’ve finally gone to a consistent naming format
00:47:26 ►
that I think will work on most of the popular MP3 players.
00:47:29 ►
And once this project is completed,
00:47:31 ►
all of the programs from the salon should show up in one place
00:47:35 ►
and be numbered consecutively,
00:47:37 ►
which will make it a lot easier to find a specific program
00:47:40 ►
that you may want to go back to for another listen.
00:47:43 ►
Of course, all of this work isn’t going to help you if you’ve been with us for a long
00:47:48 ►
time, unless you want to download the refurbished files.
00:47:51 ►
And in that case, if I were you, I’d wait until I let you know that the project’s completed,
00:47:56 ►
just in case there are any more last-minute revisions that I need to make.
00:48:01 ►
And by the way, our new server and the improved performance it promises as our audience
00:48:06 ►
continues to grow is thanks to some of you salonners out there. In the past few weeks,
00:48:12 ►
I’ve noticed that several copies of the Shulgin’s books were ordered from our Amazon store,
00:48:17 ►
along with several other books and memory cards and stuff like that. I want to thank those of
00:48:22 ►
you who ordered through our Amazon store because we get a 4% commission on your purchases.
00:48:27 ►
And while it only adds up to a few dollars a quarter, it all does help.
00:48:32 ►
And I’d like to give some particular thanks to Yarov and RJ,
00:48:37 ►
both of whom very generously made donations to the salon this week.
00:48:42 ►
And I’m very happy to report that thanks to our wonderful donors,
00:48:46 ►
all of our out-of-pocket expenses
00:48:48 ►
for the first two months of this year
00:48:50 ►
have now been covered.
00:48:52 ►
So, Yarov, RJ, Jason, and Bill,
00:48:55 ►
all of us here in the psychedelic salon,
00:48:57 ►
thank you for your very kind generosity.
00:49:00 ►
Thanks for keeping us going.
00:49:02 ►
And where will we be going from here, you ask?
00:49:04 ►
Well, there are a lot of choices, but here’s what I’m planning on doing in the next few podcasts.
00:49:12 ►
Next week, as promised a while back, I’ll be playing the recordings that I made at Burning Man last year of Mark Pesci and Amanda Fielding’s talks.
00:49:22 ►
and Amanda Fielding’s talks.
00:49:25 ►
The following week, I plan on presenting an interview that I’ll be doing with Daniel Siebert,
00:49:28 ►
who many of you know as the proprietor of sagewisdom.org,
00:49:33 ►
and who is perhaps the world’s leading researcher
00:49:36 ►
and expert on salvia divinorum.
00:49:39 ►
And I’ll also be interviewing Nick Sand,
00:49:41 ►
hopefully sometime next week,
00:49:43 ►
so if you’ve got any questions for the creator of Orange Sunshine,
00:49:47 ►
well, please send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com,
00:49:51 ►
and I’ll ask Nick for you.
00:49:53 ►
Also, in the next week or so, I’ll be interviewing Matthew Palomary,
00:49:58 ►
who is a novelist and shamanic traveler of great repute
00:50:02 ►
in some of the more esoteric circles out here in the West.
00:50:05 ►
And there are a few other interviews that I’m trying to set up as well.
00:50:09 ►
So if you heard KMO’s interview with the Dope Fiend last week,
00:50:14 ►
where they were suggesting that I do more live interviews,
00:50:17 ►
well, I guess you can tell that I heard them loud and clear.
00:50:21 ►
In fact, with all of the podcasts that I’ve done of Terrence McKenna talks,
00:50:26 ►
it was kind of a surprise that it was my interview with Sheldon Norberg in Podcast 64 that brought
00:50:33 ►
the complaints from my web hosting company. Apparently, the number of simultaneous downloads
00:50:38 ►
of the great Sheldonese talk actually swamped the server. So I guess it’s fair to say that
00:50:44 ►
I’ve got your message
00:50:45 ►
and will be peppering these podcasts with some live interviews from time to time.
00:50:50 ►
In fact, one of the interviews that I hope to do sometime this year is with Graham Hancock,
00:50:55 ►
whose new book, Supernatural, is something you’re going to be hearing a lot more about
00:51:00 ►
on these podcasts in the months ahead.
00:51:03 ►
I’m about two-thirds of the way through it right now, and my wife already finished reading
00:51:07 ►
it, so we’ve been having a lot of discussions about what we think is truly seminal work.
00:51:13 ►
And if you’re like I was about 20 years ago and are having to fend off your friends, relatives,
00:51:19 ►
neighbors, and co-workers who try to make you feel guilty about using entheogens, then
00:51:24 ►
I think this book might really be for you, one you might not want to miss.
00:51:29 ►
I don’t have time to go into it more today,
00:51:31 ►
but I think that the historical and scientific connections that Graham Hancock makes in Supernatural
00:51:37 ►
make it really clear that there is no more important work to be done today
00:51:42 ►
than what is being done by you brave psychonauts
00:51:45 ►
who are taking great risks to venture into entheospace and search for what Guy Noir calls
00:51:52 ►
the answers to life’s persistent questions.
00:51:56 ►
Anyway, it’s a great book, and I hope we can get Graham as one of our guests here in the salon one day.
00:52:01 ►
I haven’t even mentioned the interview I did with Myron and Jane Stolaroff when Mary C.
00:52:06 ►
and I stayed with them late last year. I hope to get that edited and then in podcast format before
00:52:12 ►
too long as well. Not to mention the fact that there are still quite a few trialogues left to
00:52:17 ►
hear. I haven’t scheduled the exact date yet, but the next series of trialogue podcasts will be from Thank you. just concluded today to the last one in an attempt to see how, if at all, their thoughts
00:52:46 ►
on some of these topics might have changed in the intervening years.
00:52:50 ►
So there are a few of the programs that will be coming your way in the weeks ahead, and
00:52:55 ►
if you have suggestions for other interviews or program topics, please let me know and
00:53:00 ►
I’ll see what I can do to accommodate you.
00:53:03 ►
Before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:53:07 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.
00:53:14 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
00:53:15 ►
just click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:53:19 ►
which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:53:24 ►
which you can find at matrixmasters.com slash podcasts.
00:53:30 ►
And if you still have questions, send them in an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:53:37 ►
And thanks again to Jacques Cordell and Wells, otherwise known as Chateau Hayuk,
00:53:40 ►
for letting us use your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:53:45 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:53:47 ►
Be well, my friends.