Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
05:29
Bruce tells the story of the first and only Terence McKenna workshop that was held in a virtual world in cyberspace.
07:00 The story of the bizarre dreams Terence McKenna was having in the weeks before his first major seizure.
08:32 Bruce tells of Terence saying, “It’s all about love,” a few days before he died. “Terence said, ‘The whole psychedelic movement, it’s about love. It’s not about all this other stuff. It’s about love.’ ”
13:20 “It seems as though the universe
is a sort of self-contained thing that never loses any information.”
18:34 An epiphany about DNA.
21:09 “What if the universe, like Chris Langton’s brain, is gradually booting up an awareness of itself, and why would it do this?”
29:07 Universe2, the second phase of this universe.
30:19
“All events that happened in the past and that will happen in the future
are happening at once. What you’re living in is a mesh… . Everything is
happening at once.”
33:19 “Why does the universe create human beings?” … and what about these amazing brains we have?
Bruce Damer’s Web site
Photo credits: www.damer.com
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084 - Lone Pine Stories (Part 2)
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086 - MDMA for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
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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 ►
Well, I didn’t quite
00:00:26 ►
make it out with this podcast yesterday like I planned, but at least it’s a day earlier than
00:00:31 ►
last week. And eventually, I hope to post these podcasts on Tuesdays so as to fit into the
00:00:37 ►
schedule of some of my personal favorite podcasts. Because as you know, on Mondays, we’ve got the Thank you. This would be the ideal day for me to post installments of the psychedelic salon. Of course, there’s always these technical glitches.
00:01:06 ►
I had today’s program all recorded, or I was in the middle of recording, I should say,
00:01:11 ►
when all of a sudden, I don’t know if it’s this wonderful Dell computer or this WavePad software,
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but it just stopped recording right in the middle.
00:01:21 ►
So now I’m doing it all over again, recording it on my little SanDisk MP3 player, and hopefully
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we’ll get this out to you one way or another, but don’t ask me to tell you my opinion about
00:01:34 ►
either WavePad or Dell or whatever is going wrong here, because it’s very frustrating.
00:01:40 ►
Anyhow, this week I was determined to get this program online by Tuesday,
00:01:46 ►
but after listening to the talk you’re about to hear,
00:01:48 ►
I got carried away with organizing what I wanted to say about today’s program.
00:01:53 ►
Needless to say, I wound up in a series of mental loops,
00:01:58 ►
each one bringing yet another thought that today’s talk brought to mind,
00:02:03 ►
and the result was a long outline that may someday be expanded into an essay.
00:02:08 ►
In other words, I got so carried away with myself that nothing else got done,
00:02:14 ►
other than some interesting thinking on my part. At least it was interesting to me.
00:02:20 ►
So now I’ve come full circle and have decided to just play this talk for you and let you do your own wild speculating and come to your own conclusions about at least one of the topics raised in today’s talk by Bruce Dahmer.
00:02:33 ►
This talk was actually presented at the 2004 MindStates conference that was held in Oaxaca, Mexico.
00:02:40 ►
And I wasn’t able to make it to this conference myself, but from what I’ve been told by some of the people who were there
00:02:46 ►
it was a wonderful experience
00:02:48 ►
and besides Bruce, some of the other presenters there included
00:02:52 ►
Anne and Sasha Shulgin, Alex and Allison Gray, Jonathan Ott
00:02:55 ►
and Daniel Siebert
00:02:56 ►
Today I’m going to play one of the talks that Bruce Dahmer gave
00:03:00 ►
and while it is relatively short and disarmingly easy to grok, I hope
00:03:06 ►
it gives you the same kind of jolt to your brain that it gave me.
00:03:10 ►
In particular, I recommend that you pay very close attention to the part where Bruce talks
00:03:15 ►
about a man who gradually came out of a coma and regathered the pieces of his psyche.
00:03:21 ►
As I said, I’ve decided against laying on you my own spin on this, at least for now,
00:03:26 ►
but I hope that you’re able to spend a few moments thinking about Bruce’s comment about how
00:03:31 ►
the universe may actually be in the process of waking up, becoming aware of itself. While I’ve
00:03:39 ►
heard and read similar ideas before, it wasn’t until Bruce brought it up in the context of a man
00:03:45 ►
coming out of a coma that the full implications of this line of thought really dawned on me.
00:03:51 ►
And as I said in an earlier podcast, Terrence McKenna once called Bruce a visionary’s visionary.
00:03:58 ►
In my humble opinion, Terrence was right on the mark. While futurists like Werner Wenge
00:04:03 ►
and Ray Kurzweil have been dancing along
00:04:05 ►
the far edge of the future of human life for a long time, Bruce’s mental reach is far, far beyond
00:04:12 ►
this little planet. In fact, he is one of those rare intellects who takes the entire universe
00:04:18 ►
into account when he peers deeply into the future. So let’s join Bruce now for a mental stroll that stretches from stories about Terrence McKenna
00:04:27 ►
all the way to what might be going on
00:04:30 ►
in this incredible universe we now find ourselves in.
00:04:36 ►
What I’m going to do,
00:04:37 ►
this is going to take approximately 33 minutes.
00:04:41 ►
I talked to him this morning.
00:04:43 ►
33-minute journey where we’re going to start with
00:04:45 ►
and don’t hold me to that
00:04:46 ►
you can start throwing the cream pies
00:04:48 ►
34 minutes
00:04:50 ►
we’re going to kind of do a journey
00:04:54 ►
starting with Terrence McKenna
00:04:56 ►
because I know he keeps getting mentioned here
00:04:59 ►
and we just did a series of lectures
00:05:01 ►
at Burning Man called Palenque Norte
00:05:02 ►
which is the second year that it’s been there
00:05:04 ►
and they’re in honor of Palenque and in, which is the second year that it’s been there,
00:05:07 ►
and they’re in honor of Palenque and in honor of Terrence.
00:05:10 ►
We’re going to kind of go from Terrence,
00:05:12 ►
and then we’re going to go way out into the cosmos,
00:05:15 ►
and we may find him there,
00:05:18 ►
and then we’re going to kind of come back.
00:05:20 ►
And so it’s quite a journey.
00:05:22 ►
I’m sorry it’s the end of the day. I hope there’s some caffeine molecules in some of the brains out there that need it.
00:05:28 ►
Terrence, as you may know, died in the year 2000.
00:05:34 ►
I was at Terrence’s house in April of 1999 when he looked terrible.
00:05:40 ►
We did a project with him where we built, his son Finn McKenna and several other people,
00:05:44 ►
built a virtual world in cyberspace.
00:05:46 ►
And he went into this world,
00:05:48 ►
and people came in as avatars, as little characters,
00:05:51 ►
and then he did a talk.
00:05:53 ►
About 30 people showed up.
00:05:55 ►
And he said, you know, I usually travel in a jumbo jet
00:05:59 ►
for six hours to talk to an audience of 30 people.
00:06:03 ►
So in the comfort of his home,
00:06:06 ►
there he was, doing this,
00:06:08 ►
and people wrote trip reports. He was fascinated
00:06:09 ►
by virtual worlds and shared online
00:06:12 ►
spaces. But one
00:06:14 ►
of the things that’s interesting is his mind
00:06:15 ►
contained such visions that he described
00:06:18 ►
that he said, can these worlds be done?
00:06:20 ►
The visions, one of the visions he
00:06:21 ►
described was one of dancing Fabergé eggs.
00:06:24 ►
I think you’ve probably heard of
00:06:25 ►
dancing silvery Fabergé eggs
00:06:28 ►
I said, Terrence, I don’t think we’re going to get there
00:06:30 ►
for a long time
00:06:31 ►
in computer rendering
00:06:33 ►
but we’ll have to have hope
00:06:37 ►
and he said, well the good thing about this stuff
00:06:39 ►
is it’s not scheduled yet
00:06:41 ►
I bet there’s a multi-billion dollar
00:06:44 ►
massive multiplayer gaming industry out there it’s not scheduled yet. There’s a multi-billion dollar massive multiplayer gaming industry out there.
00:06:46 ►
It’s not scheduled.
00:06:48 ►
Anyway, so at Alchemical Arts, which is a profound conference because it was the last conference Terrence was able to attend
00:06:57 ►
because in May he started having seizures.
00:07:01 ►
In April he told us we were staying with him.
00:07:04 ►
He said, I’m having dreams that I cannot explain. Now from anybody else in the world you
00:07:09 ►
think, well you know you have dreams, but not for Terrence. Terrence really knew the
00:07:13 ►
landscape of all things big that could come into his mind and he just couldn’t
00:07:18 ►
understand these things. And he started suffering seizures in May. Went for a
00:07:22 ►
scan, the doctor came into his room and said,
00:07:27 ►
this will seem very ironic to you,
00:07:30 ►
but you have a tumor, a very large one,
00:07:31 ►
the shape of a mushroom.
00:07:35 ►
And Terrence said, this is very ironic.
00:07:38 ►
This tumor is the shape of a mushroom, but he had less than about 10 months to live.
00:07:40 ►
So we held this conference,
00:07:42 ►
and at one point, I don’t know who suggested this, but
00:07:45 ►
Terence laid down on the floor in sort of a circular room and we all lay down, our heads
00:07:50 ►
pointing toward Terence and tried to conjure up any vision that came to us. Some people
00:07:56 ►
wanted to try to heal him. I think it was, by this point, literally the physical matter
00:08:00 ►
of his brain was dissolving. The man was dissolving. He was very cognizant to the last moment,
00:08:07 ►
but he was kind of coming apart.
00:08:09 ►
And the vision that I conjured into my brain
00:08:13 ►
was this sort of Faberge egg on the side
00:08:16 ►
with shining polygons with little cushions in there,
00:08:20 ►
and there was Terence, and it was going up,
00:08:22 ►
and it was carrying him away.
00:08:24 ►
And I told
00:08:25 ►
him later about this and somebody said, that was like Terrence’s getaway car. Sort of seriousness
00:08:33 ►
aside, well, he was in Marin County for the last few weeks of his life, people always
00:08:39 ►
attending to him. And when he was really a couple of days from death, having trouble breathing,
00:08:48 ►
one of the things that came over him, suddenly he sat like a romantic poet in the fourth poster bed,
00:08:55 ►
he sat bolt up right in bed, and he said, it’s all about love.
00:09:01 ►
Now, you probably do this all the time, but understand, Terrence was a serious forebrain case, head case.
00:09:09 ►
It was all, for him, it was all about words.
00:09:12 ►
Words, visions, pictures, and, you know, weaving words together, just a barge of words.
00:09:17 ►
And he turned to somebody and said, you know, I’ve never really been a love bug.
00:09:22 ►
no, I’ve never really been a love bug.
00:09:24 ►
But it strikes me now,
00:09:26 ►
because in a sense,
00:09:28 ►
the great powerful forebrain of this man was dissolving,
00:09:30 ►
and what was coming up into that
00:09:32 ►
was this overwhelming sense of love
00:09:34 ►
as he was approaching death.
00:09:36 ►
He said, the whole psychedelic movement,
00:09:38 ►
it’s about love.
00:09:40 ►
It’s not about all this other stuff.
00:09:42 ►
It’s about love.
00:09:44 ►
It was pouring through. And two You know, it was pouring through.
00:09:46 ►
And two days later, he was just sort of in bed,
00:09:49 ►
just very, very little of him left.
00:09:52 ►
And he said, just before he died, he said,
00:09:55 ►
now I could have got this wrong,
00:09:58 ►
but he said, people keep on breathing.
00:10:00 ►
Just keep on breathing.
00:10:02 ►
And that was the last of Terrence McKenna. If you come down to this thing,
00:10:07 ►
if you have some kind of an experience where you dissolve, where you’re gone,
00:10:11 ►
and then you have, how many people felt like they’re almost gone? Like, now those kind of
00:10:19 ►
trips tend to strip away, they blow away stuff. And you come out of the bad phase, or the good phase, you might call it,
00:10:27 ►
there’s like nothing left. There’s this little shaking thing that’s just you,
00:10:31 ►
that survived that, and it comes into a new territory.
00:10:34 ►
And it’s very open to things, because everything else has been blown away.
00:10:38 ►
And however method you use to get through that phase, is you’re now open.
00:10:43 ►
And I did that once myself, and the words came,
00:10:46 ►
all it needs is love.
00:10:48 ►
The Beatles have told us this, but the little being
00:10:51 ►
wanted just one love.
00:10:55 ►
And so I started to think about the Fabergé eggs and love
00:10:59 ►
and things like that, and it struck me in the last few years
00:11:03 ►
that the over-self-loving sense of powerful love is so big,
00:11:10 ►
it’s almost bigger than a human being.
00:11:12 ►
It’s bigger than you can make from inside.
00:11:15 ►
And maybe the dancing Fabergé eggs that Terrence saw are so fantastical,
00:11:20 ►
and there’s such a complete universe of these eggs,
00:11:22 ►
it was a civilization of dancing Fabergé eggs,
00:11:25 ►
that it’s almost sort of inconceivable
00:11:27 ►
that the memories that Terence had in his life,
00:11:31 ►
in his day-to-day life,
00:11:32 ►
could add up to making this self-consistent universe he saw.
00:11:37 ►
So I pose the question,
00:11:41 ►
does this stuff come from inside our bodies,
00:11:43 ►
from the complexity of our brains and our glial cells and whatever
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it just may
00:11:48 ►
does it come from somewhere else
00:11:49 ►
now for millennia
00:11:52 ►
of course there’s an outside
00:11:55 ►
there’s an ether, there’s a god
00:11:56 ►
there’s Mount Zeus
00:11:58 ►
there’s all these explanations for where these things come from
00:12:01 ►
we’re in a remarkable era
00:12:03 ►
an era of opening of understanding in cosmology
00:12:08 ►
that I think is so big.
00:12:10 ►
When you start to read,
00:12:12 ►
if you’re way too scientific American
00:12:14 ►
or discover whatever,
00:12:15 ►
you start to,
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when you read these articles
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and you start putting them together,
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your mind starts to just like,
00:12:19 ►
oh my God,
00:12:21 ►
this picture’s emerging.
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And of course,
00:12:23 ►
everyone’s working in their specialty,
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but if you read this stuff,
00:12:26 ►
it almost creates a sense of wonder.
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Every time you start reading it,
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it’s like, oh my God,
00:12:31 ►
it’s almost a trip comes on
00:12:33 ►
because the picture that’s emerging
00:12:35 ►
of the whole universe
00:12:36 ►
and maybe how it began
00:12:37 ►
and maybe how it’s going to end
00:12:39 ►
is dumbstrucking.
00:12:42 ►
And so what I want to do is to
00:12:45 ►
kind of try to give you a real short summary of that picture,
00:12:49 ►
because it is an awestrucking kind of a thing,
00:12:53 ►
and then maybe try to cast us out far into the future,
00:12:58 ►
maybe to the point of the death of the universe,
00:13:00 ►
because the universe, it seems, has a life cycle just like you,
00:13:03 ►
just like a plant or a bird,
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or in a sense a single cell, the universe is a birth, a seems, has a life cycle just like you, just like a plant or a bird or, in a sense, a single cell.
00:13:09 ►
The universe is a birth, a life, and a death.
00:13:14 ►
And maybe it would suggest where some of this stuff,
00:13:16 ►
this big stuff, comes from.
00:13:19 ►
Maybe it comes from somewhere pretty remarkable.
00:13:24 ►
So it seems as though the universe is a sort of self-contained thing,
00:13:26 ►
never loses any information.
00:13:28 ►
If you look out into the night sky,
00:13:31 ►
you’re looking back billions of years in some cases.
00:13:33 ►
And everything’s still there.
00:13:34 ►
I mean, the signals are very faint.
00:13:38 ►
But they’re looking back to periods of the formation of the first stars now.
00:13:41 ►
They’re looking back to the cosmic background radiation which was formed at the point of the inflationary Big Bang.
00:13:47 ►
They’re sort of seeing,
00:13:47 ►
oh, it’s all there.
00:13:48 ►
The whole movie’s recorded.
00:13:50 ►
There’s nothing that’s been lost.
00:13:51 ►
There’s nothing dribbled over the edge and lost.
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There’s no files been deleted.
00:13:55 ►
Sorry for you security people.
00:13:57 ►
It’s all there.
00:14:00 ►
It seems, though,
00:14:01 ►
there’s a professor, Arnold Guth,
00:14:04 ►
that has proposed that if you add up all the stuff,
00:14:07 ►
all the dark matter and the energy
00:14:09 ►
and the positive and negative energy,
00:14:12 ►
whatever you add it all up comes to zero.
00:14:14 ►
Adds to zero. Sums completely to zero.
00:14:16 ►
So it’s actually, the universe is nothing in total.
00:14:20 ►
Space keeps things apart
00:14:22 ►
because if it was all in one spot,
00:14:23 ►
it would just split out of existence
00:14:25 ►
there’s nothing there
00:14:26 ►
so space and change make the dynamism
00:14:29 ►
but there really is nothing
00:14:30 ►
adds to nothing
00:14:31 ►
and what’s interesting about all this
00:14:36 ►
is that
00:14:37 ►
how did the universe start?
00:14:39 ►
well, Goethe says
00:14:40 ►
well, it made this random quantum fluctuation
00:14:43 ►
in a field
00:14:43 ►
so there was this happy time the time of Eden and may be just a random quantum fluctuation in a field. So there was this happy time, the time of Eden,
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and it was just a quantum field.
00:14:48 ►
Everything was fluctuating properly,
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and then something didn’t fluctuate properly,
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and it unkeeled into the entire universe.
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The potential energy is so big, a whole universe is formed.
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And maybe what’s happening now is that this horrible pile of junk
00:15:02 ►
that appears to get cleaned up.
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So all these black holes are like,
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the mechanism is saying,
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oh, I’ve got to get this mess cleaned up.
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And these black holes are sucking it all back in,
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and everything, sort of the vacuum cleaners have begun.
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Maybe that’s the process.
00:15:20 ►
So if that’s the case,
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it’s the universe of one-shot error
00:15:23 ►
that’s eventually going to get cleaned up
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and it’ll be back to the quantum field.
00:15:30 ►
Now, if the universe could continue to expand at a faster and faster rate,
00:15:35 ►
as seems to be evidenced by what you can see,
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and therefore things in the far future, galaxies will be so far apart
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you won’t be able to detect each other and stars will be all brown dwarfs and the stuff will just be going almost
00:15:49 ►
at the speed of light and it will basically, matter and energy, the whole thing will evaporate
00:15:53 ►
into one big smear of all gone.
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The other alternative is that there is enough of this dark unknown matter to reverse that
00:16:00 ►
expansion and pull it back. When it pulls back, of course it’s going to,
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that universe is moving and changing.
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It’s not just sort of sitting there.
00:16:11 ►
It’s always moving.
00:16:11 ►
So either it’s got to be expanding to a complete smear
00:16:15 ►
or it’s going to pull back.
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When it pulls back, it’s going to collapse down.
00:16:18 ►
It’s like if you were re-entering Earth’s orbit
00:16:20 ►
or something was crashing in the sun.
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It can pull back.
00:16:24 ►
And when it reaches that point,
00:16:26 ►
poof, it goes out of existence.
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And all the information, everything with it, will be gone.
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It will all add up to zero.
00:16:34 ►
So, what if, indeed, in this whole process,
00:16:40 ►
if you look at the universe,
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you probably could categorize all this stuff out there into two classes of stuff.
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Stars, they have birth, life, and death, but they’re not living things in the way we define it.
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If you look back to the very first stars, they’re the same as the stars we have now.
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Stars have not evolved. They’ve not created any new structure. They
00:17:05 ►
just sort of appear and they crush a bunch of gases together and then they do something
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and then they have a blast and that will blow the material off and it will become a black
00:17:13 ►
hole. Rocks have been rocks for all time. Rocks haven’t changed and evolved new structures.
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And then there’s this funny little thing called life, which seems to go counter to all that.
00:17:23 ►
And it’s the other classification of stuff.
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And where I had this epiphany about this was I was down in South Africa in a gold mine
00:17:32 ►
about 600 feet down below the surface.
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And South Africans are, they’re not, you can say they’re risk-averse, they’re risk-seeking
00:17:40 ►
peoples.
00:17:42 ►
So they love to show off to tourists, so they have this great steam hammer, jackhammer,
00:17:47 ►
and there you are in this tunnel.
00:17:49 ►
Stuff is dripping down.
00:17:51 ►
It’s dark.
00:17:52 ►
And you’re 600 feet down.
00:17:53 ►
Of course, they’ve gone down for miles.
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And it’s hot.
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And they’re banging away on the side of the tunnel,
00:17:59 ►
chipping away some more gold.
00:18:01 ►
Same thing.
00:18:02 ►
Here’s some gold, and it’s oxidizing
00:18:05 ►
because there wasn’t
00:18:06 ►
any oxygen in the atmosphere
00:18:07 ►
when this gold
00:18:08 ►
was laid down in a reef.
00:18:10 ►
Just a little bit,
00:18:11 ►
little bits and pieces.
00:18:12 ►
And you’re in there
00:18:13 ►
and you’re shaking
00:18:14 ►
and the beams are shaking
00:18:15 ►
and you’re thinking
00:18:16 ►
this whole thing
00:18:17 ►
is going to come down
00:18:17 ►
and crush my body.
00:18:19 ►
And the gold reef,
00:18:20 ►
which was mined
00:18:21 ►
for a century,
00:18:22 ►
created great wealth
00:18:23 ►
in southern Africa,
00:18:24 ►
was, it’s two billion years old. No oxygen in the atmosphere two billion years ago. The Gold Reef, which was mine for a century, created great wealth in southern Africa,
00:18:25 ►
was 2 billion years old.
00:18:27 ►
No oxygen in the atmosphere 2 billion years ago, not enough for you.
00:18:32 ►
And I had this sort of epiphany that, so what?
00:18:35 ►
The mountain can come down and crush my bloody little body,
00:18:39 ►
there’d be no remnant of it left.
00:18:41 ►
But I tell you, the DNA in my cells is tougher and more persistent
00:18:47 ►
than this gold reef, Africa, most star systems, i.e. for three point some billion years, there’s
00:18:57 ►
little sequences of information that have been coded. They’re coded in every cell in
00:19:01 ►
your body that had unchanged. They go back. They march back billions of years.
00:19:06 ►
A mechanism called life was able to fight against all this crud
00:19:09 ►
and entropy and fires and brimstone
00:19:11 ►
and preserve this little piece of information forward,
00:19:14 ►
and that’s called reproduction.
00:19:15 ►
That’s called life.
00:19:16 ►
And that process is tougher.
00:19:18 ►
It outlives the life of most stars.
00:19:22 ►
It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than all the configurations of most stars. It’s certainly older and tougher and more resilient than
00:19:27 ►
all the configurations of the continents. So in the middle of this great machine that’s
00:19:32 ►
the universe, if you can think of the machine, you have this tiny process that fights against
00:19:37 ►
the odds and wins in the universal game to a point. I’ll digress for a moment. I have
00:19:48 ►
universal gain to a point. I’ll digress for a moment. I have a… the whole thing is a digression.
00:19:54 ►
There’s a fellow named Chris Langton, and many of you may know him. He started the artificial life field research. He started that field because one day, I think he fell out of a hang glider. He told
00:20:00 ►
me he was in a coma for two months. And this guy has broken almost
00:20:05 ►
every bone in his body. He just formed that. He likes to work with concrete, things like
00:20:10 ►
this. He built tree houses. And he told me that in the second month, as he started to
00:20:17 ►
come out of a coma, he started to sense his consciousness rebooting and coming back. And
00:20:22 ►
he said it was like phases. There was one bit, and then another bit,
00:20:26 ►
and another bit, and I started to know I had a body,
00:20:28 ►
and then I rebooted.
00:20:29 ►
And I realized my consciousness was built out of emergent bits
00:20:32 ►
that just came together and started talking to each other,
00:20:35 ►
and another one was talking, and I said to Chris,
00:20:39 ►
well, what was the thing that was watching
00:20:40 ►
and feeling yourself rebooting?
00:20:43 ►
Was it sort of outside of you?
00:20:45 ►
And he said, it’s a curious idea.
00:20:48 ►
But it led to the idea that what if the universe,
00:20:50 ►
as this great big mass of stuff,
00:20:53 ►
has managed to create little bits of life here and there?
00:20:58 ►
Some of them go beyond the bacterial level
00:21:00 ►
and become more complex.
00:21:01 ►
Some of them start to look out at the universe
00:21:03 ►
and become aware of it.
00:21:05 ►
And they even communicate with other chunks of life
00:21:08 ►
here and there.
00:21:09 ►
What if the universe, like Chris Langton’s brain,
00:21:11 ►
is gradually booting up an awareness of itself?
00:21:15 ►
Why would it do this?
00:21:17 ►
Why would it do this?
00:21:19 ►
Well, every living thing seems to be…
00:21:24 ►
You know, we have pigs,
00:21:25 ►
and we have them anesthetized to get their tusks cut off.
00:21:29 ►
It was a horrible thing when they came out of anesthetic
00:21:32 ►
because a pig is an animal that wants to be on its feet at all times.
00:21:37 ►
If it can’t stand up, it’s going to bash its head
00:21:39 ►
hundreds of times against every surface known
00:21:42 ►
unless you can get to it and sit on it
00:21:44 ►
because it’s trying to come back to consciousness
00:21:46 ►
and it knows what the right state for a pig should be
00:21:48 ►
and it’s going to go crazy
00:21:49 ►
until it can be in the right state,
00:21:51 ►
which is on all fours.
00:21:54 ►
And so watching the pig’s emergent consciousness
00:21:56 ►
come back is a frightening thing.
00:21:58 ►
I mean, you want to run out of a pen.
00:22:00 ►
I mean, you’re going to get killed.
00:22:02 ►
It’s just a terrible thing.
00:22:03 ►
So in a sense, the universe is coming to consciousness. There’s a certain urgency. And what is that
00:22:10 ►
urgency? Just like any living thing, it’s its own life. It wants to be alive. It wants
00:22:17 ►
to know itself, but it wants to survive. Well, what is its doom? Well, its doom probably
00:22:22 ►
is the collapse. So in a sense, is the collapse. So, in a sense,
00:22:26 ►
is the universe trying to
00:22:28 ►
boot itself into consciousness
00:22:29 ►
before it collapses back down?
00:22:33 ►
Now,
00:22:35 ►
consider,
00:22:36 ►
when you’re a little glass
00:22:38 ►
fuel, when your egg has
00:22:39 ►
had the sperm and it’s starting to
00:22:42 ►
duplicate and replicate,
00:22:43 ►
little ball forms of cells
00:22:45 ►
and it gets to a certain size
00:22:48 ►
and a researcher friend of mine
00:22:50 ►
has written a giant tome about
00:22:52 ►
observing sonic waves going
00:22:54 ►
back and forth across this embryo
00:22:56 ►
and they’re very complex
00:22:58 ►
and they’re studying them because of course
00:23:00 ►
the key question in the embryo is
00:23:01 ►
what starts cell differentiation
00:23:03 ►
why does the whole thing start turning into a cup and then you get your gut on the inside
00:23:08 ►
and your outside on the outside?
00:23:10 ►
What really starts that?
00:23:12 ►
And it seems, he claims, that it’s this complex sonic wave.
00:23:16 ►
Well, in the birth of the universe, up to a certain period, the universe was a gas and
00:23:21 ►
massive sound waves were reverberating across the universe, and they were creating
00:23:25 ►
the structure of sheet walls of galaxies and everything you see.
00:23:29 ►
And you can see that structure from satellites launched recently, like WMAP.
00:23:34 ►
So at a certain point, just like in an embryo, the universe was a giant voice.
00:23:39 ►
And then it went silent.
00:23:40 ►
All the parts separated.
00:23:41 ►
There was no way to get sound waves across.
00:23:45 ►
Of course, we live in a
00:23:46 ►
gas ball, too. Is it a
00:23:47 ►
coincidence that having a gas or a
00:23:50 ►
liquid as a medium for resonant
00:23:52 ►
communication
00:23:53 ►
seems to be present to make
00:23:56 ►
structure? That’s one
00:23:57 ►
idea. So, consider
00:23:59 ►
if the universe is
00:24:02 ►
going into its collapse
00:24:04 ►
phase, it’s coming back down
00:24:05 ►
what is happening?
00:24:07 ►
maybe the largest engineering project undertaken in the universe
00:24:11 ►
which is the sentient beings
00:24:14 ►
the percentage of the universe which is actually organized into life
00:24:18 ►
is increasing, it’s up to half a percent
00:24:20 ►
or something like that, which would be enormous
00:24:22 ►
it’s up to half a percent
00:24:24 ►
and this collapse is
00:24:25 ►
occurring there’s a couple hundred thousand years left what has to happen well the sentient races
00:24:30 ►
are actually now quite physically close indeed the period in which the universe will be again
00:24:37 ►
in a gas is coming where the entire thing is going to be connected sonically again. Well, if the universe has managed to convert a percentage of itself into an aware stratum,
00:24:52 ►
those beings, of course, have to make a decision.
00:24:55 ►
Do we work together as a team, because we know the inevitable,
00:24:59 ►
or do we carry on what we’ve always been doing, as we do on this planet, fight with each other, argue over budget and allocations
00:25:06 ►
and resources and culture and difference?
00:25:09 ►
Or do we try to save the whole thing?
00:25:13 ►
Can you picture, in some future universe,
00:25:16 ►
entering the gas phase and there’s this glowing cloud,
00:25:19 ►
and the glowing cloud is getting brighter and brighter
00:25:21 ►
because it’s actually the ignition of the sentience.
00:25:24 ►
And what are they doing?
00:25:26 ►
To do the engineering job of saving the universe
00:25:28 ►
from final annihilation,
00:25:30 ►
they have to do something pretty unusual.
00:25:33 ►
They have to sacrifice themselves completely.
00:25:35 ►
All those civilizations, all that history,
00:25:38 ►
all those beings have to give themselves over
00:25:40 ►
and dissolve themselves,
00:25:42 ►
like Terence’s brain dissolving,
00:25:43 ►
to create a single entity.
00:25:46 ►
A single entity that can live and exist long enough
00:25:49 ►
in this collapsing universe to figure it out.
00:25:53 ►
So, a baby is born.
00:25:55 ►
An ignition happens.
00:25:57 ►
The gas phase is there.
00:25:59 ►
There’s enough there.
00:26:00 ►
And the whole universe is now a single conscious entity.
00:26:06 ►
Now, like any baby,
00:26:08 ►
if you’ve had kids,
00:26:10 ►
they all think they’re the universe, right?
00:26:13 ►
At the beginning.
00:26:14 ►
Air everything, the center of everything
00:26:15 ►
is nothing else, there’s no other demands.
00:26:18 ►
So there would be a period indeed
00:26:19 ►
where this universe is actually
00:26:21 ►
this tremendous creation of love
00:26:24 ►
because the only way it could be created is in complete love.
00:26:27 ►
Anything else, anything short,
00:26:29 ►
would create something not whole enough to do this job.
00:26:32 ►
So this baby is created and born in love.
00:26:35 ►
The baby has many abilities.
00:26:38 ►
The baby must start feeding.
00:26:39 ►
This baby feeds on knowledge.
00:26:43 ►
And where’s the knowledge?
00:26:44 ►
It’s totally contained within the cosmic universe.
00:26:46 ►
The universe didn’t lose anything.
00:26:47 ►
It’s able to look back,
00:26:48 ►
and look back at you sitting here,
00:26:52 ►
look back at everything,
00:26:53 ►
and try to figure out where its family is.
00:26:55 ►
Where did it come from?
00:26:57 ►
And why is it here?
00:26:59 ►
Why is it created?
00:27:01 ►
And it has a little time.
00:27:02 ►
And like any sentient species,
00:27:04 ►
things are left to the damn last minute
00:27:06 ►
so the whole project
00:27:08 ►
was delivered at the last minute
00:27:10 ►
so that the baby is
00:27:12 ►
figured out
00:27:13 ►
ooh I’m getting really comfortable
00:27:15 ►
because I’m getting smaller and smaller
00:27:17 ►
ooh, bad news
00:27:19 ►
I’m about to be doomed
00:27:21 ►
the great crime of all this
00:27:23 ►
is the oneness was established that we all seek, we all seek to be part of it and it’s about to be doomed. The great crime of all this is the oneness that’s established
00:27:25 ►
that we all seek.
00:27:26 ►
We all seek to be part of it,
00:27:27 ►
and it’s about to be extinguished.
00:27:29 ►
The baby has to use every deductive power.
00:27:34 ►
It has to call back through time
00:27:35 ►
for every piece of support it can get
00:27:37 ►
to figure out how to save everything.
00:27:39 ►
Now, why would it save everything?
00:27:41 ►
Why wouldn’t it just say,
00:27:42 ►
that’s fine, it was a great life,
00:27:44 ►
but let’s just go. Well, it’s the, it was a great life, let’s just go.
00:27:45 ►
Well, it’s the prerogative of life.
00:27:48 ►
It’s going to make that decision
00:27:49 ►
to preserve the investment,
00:27:51 ►
to preserve the legacy,
00:27:52 ►
to go on, just have a future.
00:27:55 ►
So the baby works it out.
00:27:57 ►
The baby sees physics
00:27:59 ►
and sees how it can do this job.
00:28:02 ►
And what does it do?
00:28:03 ►
It starts to turn its body.
00:28:05 ►
It has all the resources that it can call. Every molecule, every wave of energy it can
00:28:10 ►
muster as this collapse occurs. It starts to turn like almost like a dancer or a
00:28:15 ►
skater because it knows from having worked out everything that it turns fast
00:28:21 ►
enough it can kind of pull itself apart and pull the big blob, which is about to collapse, into two blobs.
00:28:28 ►
So a gigantic cell mitosis happens.
00:28:32 ►
Two blobs, two bits of what was once one being, are now rotating like this.
00:28:38 ►
It’s not the end of the story, because those two pieces are so big
00:28:41 ►
that they’re going to implode into an inviolate way
00:28:45 ►
and destroy most of what was there.
00:28:47 ►
So those two pieces have to be my toast.
00:28:48 ►
And again, and again, and again,
00:28:50 ►
until you have the safe level of the blastula
00:28:54 ►
that forms in every living being,
00:28:56 ►
including the main you,
00:28:58 ►
that ball forms,
00:29:00 ►
where each component can stand alone
00:29:02 ►
and can survive on its own.
00:29:06 ►
So where would the universe to?
00:29:09 ►
That’s the second phase of the universe.
00:29:11 ►
What is it?
00:29:12 ►
It’s now a colony.
00:29:13 ►
It’s now a society.
00:29:15 ►
Complete consciousness.
00:29:16 ►
But it has lost the one thing that had always been dreamed of,
00:29:20 ►
which was total unity.
00:29:22 ►
It’s now a community again.
00:29:24 ►
And now it has to work
00:29:25 ►
with all those things that communities do, including aloneness for the individuals.
00:29:32 ►
So where that second phase, that second life of the universe, should it achieve it, who
00:29:37 ►
knows where it goes. Does it try to figure out how to make another quantum wiggle? It’s hard to know.
00:29:47 ►
I’m trying to bring this guy to earth a little bit.
00:29:54 ►
So, in a sense,
00:29:56 ►
one of the weird things
00:29:58 ►
about all the new work
00:30:00 ►
on string theory and other things
00:30:01 ►
is you might think, well, that’s a remote
00:30:03 ►
event. It’s like the Great Quake, you know, we won’t think about it and lay out. Well in
00:30:09 ►
some interpretations of string theory we’re kind of living along several
00:30:13 ►
string dimensions which resonate in a certain way but there’s so many
00:30:16 ►
dimensions that in fact all events that happened in the past and happen in the
00:30:22 ►
future are happening at once. What you’re living in is a mesh.
00:30:26 ►
And it’s kind of like a mesh that comes out.
00:30:28 ►
You see big bang, big crunch, or something like this.
00:30:31 ►
This is one of the pictures drawn.
00:30:32 ►
Then, in fact, you’re inside the resonance of things that are happening at the same time.
00:30:37 ►
Everything’s happening at once.
00:30:39 ►
So, in fact, the event of the formation of that being,
00:30:43 ►
and that being’s looking back,
00:30:46 ►
is happening all the time.
00:30:50 ►
You’re just getting little cracked visions of that,
00:30:53 ►
little gaps where that comes through every once in a while.
00:30:55 ►
And that the power that you feel
00:30:56 ►
when love comes through you,
00:30:59 ►
or when you see something,
00:31:01 ►
you have a vision that seems to be completely
00:31:03 ►
out of this world,
00:31:07 ►
could it be coming from that future, present event that is occurring,
00:31:14 ►
that you’re just tapping into, that you’re just opening a little door to?
00:31:18 ►
That’s the question.
00:31:19 ►
Could that be where that is coming from?
00:31:21 ►
And are you part of that great project the universe is trying to do, which is to know itself and to then save itself
00:31:29 ►
and the only way is through love? And would somebody like Jesus Christ have
00:31:34 ►
been a human being that just happened to be born with an open valve, or maybe
00:31:40 ►
Buddha or Muhammad, an open valve to that massive form out there, or in
00:31:48 ►
there, that is this universal love. And that as a human being, they didn’t kind of shut
00:31:54 ►
it off. They didn’t kind of like, you know, do the shutdown and go, gee, that’s too powerful,
00:32:00 ►
I’m scared about that. They just simply, they couldn’t help themselves, it just came out
00:32:04 ►
and blasting out. And that’s the way they live, they couldn’t help themselves. It just came out, came blasting out.
00:32:06 ►
And that’s the way they, where they live.
00:32:08 ►
They’re tied into that all the time.
00:32:10 ►
It’s a question.
00:32:13 ►
So in a sense, Terrence having the,
00:32:19 ►
and we talked about autism
00:32:20 ►
and we talked about shutting down parts of the brain
00:32:23 ►
to see other, to have other things emerge,
00:32:26 ►
as Terrence’s brain dissolved, literally physically dissolved,
00:32:30 ►
what came rushing up through him was this tremendously powerful feeling about love
00:32:36 ►
that he could hardly, barely communicate.
00:32:39 ►
And maybe Terrence’s leaving us allowed him to melt into that
00:32:45 ►
space
00:32:47 ►
into that project to join
00:32:50 ►
that project
00:32:51 ►
so maybe that while he was here
00:32:53 ►
like all people who create
00:32:56 ►
communication with a resonant voice
00:32:58 ►
or make music and create a
00:33:00 ►
resonant vibration
00:33:01 ►
with other humans through love
00:33:04 ►
they’re part of maybe that great
00:33:06 ►
project and maybe Terence melted into that project or was taken back into that project
00:33:14 ►
because that did come to him in the end.
00:33:19 ►
The last point is kind of a strange one. Why did the universe create human beings?
00:33:26 ►
This human brain,
00:33:28 ►
and we talk a lot about the brain,
00:33:30 ►
I have been told that there are more
00:33:32 ►
discrete pathways through the brain
00:33:34 ►
than there are countable particles
00:33:37 ►
in the universe down to the quantum level.
00:33:39 ►
So the numbers are very big.
00:33:42 ►
And this thing, this jelly gray jelly mass
00:33:45 ►
has been created into us
00:33:47 ►
so the universe has actually
00:33:49 ►
created a machine
00:33:51 ►
or a mechanism that can contain
00:33:54 ►
something
00:33:55 ►
a substantial portion
00:33:57 ►
of the vision of the whole universe
00:33:59 ►
and that maybe
00:34:01 ►
that’s part of
00:34:03 ►
from the single cell
00:34:04 ►
that’s part of the from the single cell, that’s part of the drive, is to create
00:34:07 ►
a machine that is able to be large enough that it can look out into the cosmos and start
00:34:12 ►
by bits and pieces and fits and starts to put together the whole picture.
00:34:15 ►
John Wheeler, the physicist and contemporary of Dick Feynman says, perhaps the universe
00:34:20 ►
is something that’s created observers in order to then create the reality of itself,
00:34:27 ►
that the observation and the reality go step by step
00:34:30 ►
so that if you get observers emerging,
00:34:32 ►
more structure emerges in the universe at the same time.
00:34:36 ►
So maybe your brain, you’ve got two things going for you.
00:34:40 ►
Your brain is maybe big enough to get a rendering of a fraction of the universe,
00:34:44 ►
the whole thing, to accept, not burn out like Johnny Mnemonic, but accept visions and things
00:34:51 ►
that are large enough, sort of in a sense like a camera obscura. You can see the little
00:34:58 ►
fragments, and they’re actually, your brain is big enough to carry those fragments that
00:35:02 ►
are very large. And the second thing is that you,
00:35:06 ►
through DNA and through the graciousness
00:35:08 ►
of our sun being so stable
00:35:09 ►
and not going through any dangerous parts of the galaxy
00:35:12 ►
for the last 4 billion years,
00:35:14 ►
your DNA has allowed
00:35:16 ►
you to go back 4 billion years
00:35:17 ►
and to journey around 65
00:35:19 ►
times around the galaxy, etc.
00:35:22 ►
And that you’ve survived
00:35:23 ►
and given this incredible legacy of stability
00:35:27 ►
to evolve to this point so that you can be a camera obscura on something.
00:35:34 ►
And because you’re here at this conference,
00:35:36 ►
what you’re seeking is a connection with some greater thing.
00:35:40 ►
Well, maybe you’re part of a great project that is unfolding as we speak and that you’re citizens of.
00:35:49 ►
I know it’s a wacky idea, but in a sense, after reading all this cosmology stuff,
00:35:57 ►
I kind of tend to want to believe that more than sort of traditional religious explanations,
00:36:03 ►
leave that more than sort of traditional religious explanations.
00:36:07 ►
Because, my goodness, the people who looked at the night sky and followed leaders in white garb and whatnot
00:36:11 ►
didn’t have this knowledge.
00:36:12 ►
And if they did, it would have blown their minds.
00:36:14 ►
They would have said, oh, we’ll create a bigger vision for human spirituality
00:36:18 ►
if we had that knowledge.
00:36:19 ►
And some of them had that knowledge tacitly.
00:36:21 ►
Some of the indigenous peoples did have
00:36:25 ►
a more profound knowledge of where we are in the universe
00:36:28 ►
and we give them credit for it.
00:36:31 ►
So anyway, so I hope that that’s,
00:36:35 ►
and I think Terrence is out there.
00:36:37 ►
So if you want to reach him,
00:36:39 ►
I think you can reach him through love at this point.
00:36:42 ►
That was his last message.
00:36:44 ►
And keep breathing.
00:36:46 ►
So thank you.
00:36:52 ►
Keep breathing.
00:36:58 ►
Keep breathing.
00:36:59 ►
How many times have we all heard Terrence McKenna give that advice
00:37:03 ►
when he was telling us what to do on a DMT trip?
00:37:06 ►
I think you can hear him say that in several of the podcasts that I’ve done of his talks.
00:37:11 ►
And I can still remember my first smoked DMT trip.
00:37:15 ►
It was in a small cabin in a Mexican jungle, and the person who guided me on that first trip had also been trained by Terrence.
00:37:25 ►
me on that first trip had also been trained by Terrence. And after a few deep inhalations of that acrid smoke, I remember entering into a space that held me totally, totally in awe.
00:37:32 ►
That’s about the only way I can describe it. But I think you know what I’m trying to say.
00:37:36 ►
You know, it was one of those plus five experiences that just takes your breath away.
00:37:41 ►
And after what seemed to me like an eternity, I heard my guide whispering in my
00:37:45 ►
ear, breathe, keep breathing. And until right now, I hadn’t connected that moment with an experience
00:37:54 ►
I had in the mountains a few weeks ago. It was another of those rare moments that hovered between
00:37:59 ►
a plus four and plus five on Sasha’s psychedelic experience scale.
00:38:10 ►
And the experience was so profound, in fact, that I’m only now, several weeks later, beginning to get my mind around what happened.
00:38:13 ►
And it was during that experience that I can distinctly remember hearing a voice.
00:38:17 ►
Maybe it was someone in the circle with me, and maybe it was only in my mind, but I distinctly
00:38:22 ►
heard a voice saying, Keep breathing. Keep breathing.
00:38:26 ►
And now we hear Bruce say that those two words were among the last words that Terrence ever spoke.
00:38:33 ►
Having just finished reading the appendix to Graham Hancock’s incredible new book, Supernatural,
00:38:38 ►
where he interviews Rick Strassman,
00:38:41 ►
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the death experience
00:38:44 ►
and the possibility that Dr. Strassman, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the death experience and the possibility
00:38:46 ►
that Dr. Strassman presents that we spontaneously release some DMT from our pineal gland, both
00:38:52 ►
at birth and at death.
00:38:54 ►
And by the way, if you haven’t heard about this, just Google the words DMT birth death
00:39:00 ►
pineal without the quotes and you’ll get hundreds of hits.
00:39:04 ►
So let’s speculate a
00:39:06 ►
bit here. When talking about the DMT experience one of the things that Terence
00:39:11 ►
McKenna almost always said was that during the experience it was important
00:39:16 ►
to keep breathing. Now I don’t know about you but my guess is that in the hour or
00:39:21 ►
so before his death Terence may have experienced a spontaneous release of DMT
00:39:27 ►
and almost as a reflex reaction to entering DMT space,
00:39:32 ►
perhaps he reminded himself to keep breathing.
00:39:35 ►
Or, and this is my favorite speculation here,
00:39:39 ►
what if by saying keep breathing,
00:39:41 ►
it was actually Terrence’s way of telling us that it’s true.
00:39:46 ►
We do have a spontaneous DMT release of death.
00:39:49 ►
And maybe Terrence’s keep breathing is just his prankish version of Rosebud.
00:39:55 ►
The truth is, we’ll never know.
00:39:58 ►
I’d like to go on and talk about some of the other ideas Bruce presented here,
00:40:01 ►
but I’ve got several other things to cover today, and so I better move on. I will tell you this, though. Last November, when Bruce and I were staying up through
00:40:11 ►
several nights of digitizing Ralph Abraham’s tapes of the trilogues, I recorded an hour-long
00:40:17 ►
rap of Bruce that is really mind-blowing, at least if you’re interested in space exploration,
00:40:24 ►
which is a field where
00:40:25 ►
Bruce spends a great deal of his professional life.
00:40:28 ►
I would have played it for you by now, but it doesn’t quite fit into the mix here in
00:40:32 ►
the Psychedelic Salon.
00:40:34 ►
My intention is to start another podcast channel where I can play this kind of talk, but as
00:40:40 ►
you already know, I have way too many balls in the air right now to undertake a project like that.
00:40:47 ►
But if you’re interested in some of the things Bruce is up to,
00:40:50 ►
I highly recommend that you visit his website at www.damer.com.
00:40:56 ►
Even if you just go there to look at the thousands of photos he’s posted,
00:41:00 ►
it will probably be well worth your time.
00:41:03 ►
Another use of your time that I can recommend
00:41:05 ►
is a new podcast called
00:41:07 ►
Psychonautica that is coming from
00:41:10 ►
the Cannabis Podcast Network,
00:41:12 ►
which you can find at
00:41:13 ►
00:41:16 ►
00:41:18 ►
And this program is hosted by
00:41:19 ►
KMO of the Sea Realm and
00:41:21 ►
the ever-popular Max Freakout.
00:41:24 ►
Now, you might think that just because KMO and Max have interviewed me for one of their programs
00:41:30 ►
that I’m giving them a gratuitous plug, but I can assure you that I’d be plugging this podcast anyway.
00:41:37 ►
So you might want to check it out for yourself and see what I mean.
00:41:41 ►
Overall, I have to say that I’m close to 100% on board with almost all of the
00:41:46 ►
opinions that the two of them have about psychedelic medicines. However, for the very first time, I’ve
00:41:53 ►
got to disagree with Max Freakout on something, and that has to do with how one should use ayahuasca.
00:41:59 ►
Now, I don’t mean this to be critical, because Max did preface his remarks by saying that he’d never taken ayahuasca himself,
00:42:07 ►
and he very correctly said that he was quite leery of all these shaman wannabes who are going around and charging an exorbitant amount of money to participate in what they consider to be an authentic experience.
00:42:20 ►
Now, I’m sure that some of them are actually coming close to an authentic ayahuasca experience
00:42:25 ►
but my gut feeling is that the real ones are few and far between
00:42:30 ►
so here is my opinion and you can take this advice or not
00:42:34 ►
but what I very strongly believe about the use of ayahuasca
00:42:38 ►
is that you should not come to any conclusions about it yourself
00:42:42 ►
until you have at the very least had the experience
00:42:46 ►
under the guidance of an Iowa scarrow who was born into the tradition and who had been a full-time
00:42:52 ►
apprentice to a respected Iowa scarrow for at least 10 years or more before leading circles
00:42:58 ►
on his or her own and that the actual brew be made in the Amazon by that very same ayahuasquera,
00:43:06 ►
and out of wild, non-cultivated vines.
00:43:10 ►
And even then, you won’t have an experience equal to what it would have been in the Amazon,
00:43:14 ►
but if you at least meet those criteria, I’m convinced that you will know what the experience should be like.
00:43:21 ►
Normally, I’m right there with Max Freakout and Terrence McKenna on the value of having these
00:43:26 ►
experiences alone, but ayahuasca is so very different than smoked DMT or any other experience
00:43:33 ►
that I’ve ever had, and that is largely due to being in a group and the expert guidance of the
00:43:40 ►
group’s energy by a skilled ayahuasquero. And even though this is basically a solo experience,
00:43:46 ►
there is an entirely new layer to it
00:43:49 ►
that’s added by being in a circle of 6 to 20 or so others.
00:43:54 ►
And one last thought about this, and I’ll move on,
00:43:58 ►
but the little package of pills that you can get
00:44:01 ►
that call themselves Farmawaska will definitely not, I say definitely
00:44:07 ►
not, come anywhere close to reproducing the ayahuasca experience.
00:44:12 ►
With one exception, that is, and unless you have a very unusual metabolism, you will definitely
00:44:18 ►
throw up about an hour or so after ingesting those little pills.
00:44:23 ►
And I deliberately use the phrase throw up rather than purge.
00:44:27 ►
Purging under the influence of ayahuasca, as gross as it sounds,
00:44:31 ►
is usually a peak psychedelic experience, one you definitely don’t want to miss.
00:44:36 ►
But farm ayahuasca just made me sick for many, many hours.
00:44:40 ►
So if you do try it, please don’t think you’ve tried the vine itself. This is
00:44:45 ►
one time that I think all of the experts, at least almost all of them, would agree that
00:44:51 ►
the natural substance is orders and orders of magnitude different than a laboratory-made
00:44:56 ►
chemical substitute. So now let’s go to the old email bag, if there is such a thing, and finish up today’s program with some thoughts from some of you.
00:45:10 ►
Louie Gallipieu, and I hope I pronounced your name right there, Louie,
00:45:15 ►
sent some interesting thoughts about alternative education models
00:45:18 ►
and how they might interface with the trialogue method used by McKenna and others.
00:45:23 ►
And one of the things he points out is that there are a lot of good free educational programs
00:45:28 ►
available on the Internet, including MIT’s OpenCourseWare series
00:45:32 ►
that you can find at ocw.mit.edu.
00:45:37 ►
And if you’ve never been to that site, it certainly is worth visiting.
00:45:41 ►
Louie also sent a number of other links, but I don’t have time to go into them now.
00:45:46 ►
Maybe we can get him to start a thread
00:45:47 ►
on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog
00:45:50 ►
where you can add your own links as well.
00:45:53 ►
I’ve also received quite a few emails,
00:45:56 ►
like one from Joanne,
00:45:58 ►
in which you’re asking if I have any advice
00:46:00 ►
on how to connect with other members
00:46:02 ►
of the psychedelic community.
00:46:04 ►
And that’s a problem I wish I had the answer to.
00:46:07 ►
Like Joanne and many others who join us in the salon each week,
00:46:12 ►
I spent many years thinking that I was the last person my age to
00:46:15 ►
still be interested in these sacred medicines. Then the internet came
00:46:20 ►
along and I discovered that not only was I not alone, but that there were
00:46:24 ►
millions of other people walking around on this planet who were feeling exactly the same way. For now, I guess
00:46:30 ►
the only suggestions I have are to find conferences that focus on some of the topics we’re interested
00:46:36 ►
in and try to find like-minded people there. In my case, I did that and found a lot of people to
00:46:43 ►
connect with, but very few of them lived close to me, so I moved to California to be closer to them.
00:46:49 ►
I realized that moving to California really isn’t an option for many people, so I’m not the best person to be giving advice in this area.
00:46:59 ►
About the only thing I can say right now is that I’m sure, I am sure, that there are dozens of psychedelic explorers within driving distance of where you are right at this moment.
00:47:10 ►
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were literally hundreds of like-minded people near you.
00:47:15 ►
And if you ever figure out a good way of connecting with them, well, please let me know and I’ll pass your ideas along.
00:47:21 ►
your ideas along.
00:47:26 ►
I also received an interesting email from Christian, who says he is from a far corner of the UK and finds it a pretty lonely place for people like us.
00:47:30 ►
And that reminded me of a story I just heard, and it was either Max Freakout or the Dope
00:47:35 ►
Fiend who told it in the podcast.
00:47:37 ►
Basically, someone contacted them after hearing the podcast, and they exchanged a few emails
00:47:43 ►
and found that they had a lot in common.
00:47:46 ►
And then,
00:47:47 ►
they discovered that they lived
00:47:49 ►
almost within walking distance of one another.
00:47:51 ►
So, if you think you’re living in a place
00:47:54 ►
where these sacred medicines
00:47:55 ►
aren’t truly appreciated,
00:47:56 ►
well, you might want to think again
00:47:58 ►
because we’re everywhere.
00:48:01 ►
And a special thanks, by the way,
00:48:03 ►
to Christian, Joseph, and the dozens of others who have offered to help me with work on the various websites that support the Psychedelic Salon.
00:48:11 ►
If I can ever get my act together, which may be quite doubtful at this stage of my life, well, if I can ever get organized, I hope to take some of you up on your offers.
00:48:22 ►
For now, I do want to at least acknowledge the fact that it brings
00:48:25 ►
great joy to my life to know that you’re
00:48:28 ►
out there and willing to help.
00:48:29 ►
In fact, all of your emails, even
00:48:31 ►
though I can no longer keep up with answering them,
00:48:34 ►
they all mean a lot to me.
00:48:36 ►
And as any podcaster will
00:48:38 ►
tell you, it’s your feedback that keeps us going.
00:48:40 ►
So, thank you all for
00:48:41 ►
your interest in these programs.
00:48:43 ►
And in particular, thank you to Michael, who I think goes by the email handle of A Dime Short,
00:48:50 ►
and Kevin and John, who have sent very generous donations to help keep the salon going.
00:48:56 ►
Like the Sea Realm and the podcasts from the Cannabis Podcast Network, this is a listener-sponsored program.
00:49:02 ►
And thanks to you, I’ve been able to manage the growth and bandwidth requirements as this podcast audience grows.
00:49:08 ►
In fact, I haven’t had a single complaint from either of my web hosting companies in several months now, so we’re on a good track here to keep growing our audience.
00:49:17 ►
And while I’m at it, I want to mention once again the super generous Robert, who also hails from the UK.
00:49:23 ►
Once again, the super generous Robert, who also hails from the UK.
00:49:30 ►
Robert has sent in a second generous donation, which is way above and beyond the call of duty here.
00:49:35 ►
Once I get today’s program posted, I’ll be sending a personal thank you to you all.
00:49:38 ►
And I apologize for not doing so earlier.
00:49:40 ►
You guys are the greatest. You really are. Thank you so much for helping us to keep these podcasts coming.
00:49:45 ►
Another interesting email I received came from Eric, who said, among other things,
00:49:50 ►
Fraser Clark’s talk on outdoor raves also interested me,
00:49:54 ►
as the outdoor trance party scene in and around Cape Town is absolutely cooking,
00:49:59 ►
and has been for quite a few years.
00:50:01 ►
The Earth Dance Festival in September of last year was an incredible experience, and I’m looking forward to Vortex on Easter weekend 2007. I’m glad
00:50:11 ►
you mentioned the Vortex celebration, Eric, because although I haven’t been there myself,
00:50:16 ►
a close friend of mine has spent many hours telling me wonderful stories about Vortex.
00:50:22 ►
And maybe Eric or some of the other salonners can pull together a few sound bites
00:50:26 ►
from the event this year
00:50:27 ►
and we can pass them along in the salon.
00:50:30 ►
Like dope stock that will be held in Amsterdam
00:50:33 ►
on April 20th.
00:50:35 ►
While I won’t be there in the flesh,
00:50:36 ►
I most certainly will be there with you in spirit.
00:50:39 ►
And that reminds me that I’d better sign off for now
00:50:42 ►
and get back to work on organizing
00:50:44 ►
the Flanque Norte lectures for this year’s Burning Man Festival.
00:50:48 ►
And I’ll tell you more about that in the months ahead.
00:50:51 ►
Before I go, I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license.
00:51:02 ►
license. And if you have any questions about that, just click on the link at the bottom
00:51:04 ►
of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
00:51:06 ►
which you can find at
00:51:07 ►
matrixmasters.com slash podcast.
00:51:10 ►
If you still have questions,
00:51:12 ►
just send them in an email to
00:51:13 ►
lorenzo at matrixmasters.com
00:51:16 ►
I want to thank Chateau Hayuk
00:51:18 ►
for the use of their music here in the salon
00:51:20 ►
today and in all of the previous
00:51:21 ►
podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:51:24 ►
I guess that by now you’ve figured out
00:51:25 ►
that their song, Hell Alien, has
00:51:27 ►
become our theme song.
00:51:30 ►
Well, that’s it for today.
00:51:32 ►
Thanks for joining us again, and
00:51:33 ►
I look forward to being with you next week.
00:51:36 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo
00:51:37 ►
signing off from the Cyberdelic Space.
00:51:40 ►
Be well, my friends.
00:00:00 ►
It is the impossible. Be well, my friends.