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112 - Psychedelic Ideas

Oct 19, 2007, 73 min read

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

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(Minutes : Seconds into program)

04:11Terence McKenna:“My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.”

09:42 Terence McKenna: “This is a think-along lecture, by-the-way, and you’re free to think-along at any point that you feel so moved to do so.”

11:53 Terence begins telling the story of how the Timewave Zero hypothesis came to him during a long meditation on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

20:36 Terence McKenna: “We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration.”

27:33 Terence McKenna: “But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.”

32:29 Terence McKenna: “We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don’t matter. And that now doesn’t matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.”

41:50 Terence McKenna: “This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.”

35:41 Terence McKenna: “And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.”

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111 - Establishing a Tribal Land Base

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113 - Syntax of Psychedelic Time

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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.

00:00:25 ►

So, how are you today? Well, I hope the change of seasons is treating you kindly.

00:00:31 ►

For a while there, I thought I’d dodged my annual fall cold, but it wasn’t worth staying away from

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one of my grandchildren when she had a cold, and so we’re now both recovering. But a few minutes

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with a two-year-old is certainly worth getting a cold for,

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don’t you think? Anyway, I had planned on getting this podcast out a little earlier this week, but

00:00:52 ►

with my cold, my voice sounded like I had a clothespin on my nose when I was talking.

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And in case a few of our younger salonners haven’t heard of a clothespin, well,

00:01:02 ►

don’t worry about it. They’re just another obsolete technology. Sort of like an 8-track player or, before long, a PC, I hope.

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Well, are you ready for a little more Terrence McKenna? While I continue tracking down some

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leads on getting recordings of the rest of this year’s Palenque Norte Plyologs at the

00:01:21 ►

Burning Man Festival, I thought I’d go ahead and play this recording that was sent to me by one of our fellow salonners.

00:01:28 ►

In fact, I actually met Diana at Burning Man this year

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when she spent some time with us

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and stayed to participate in a few of the pliologues.

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At the time, she mentioned the fact

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that she had some old McKenna recordings

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and asked if I’d like to hear them.

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So, long story short, thanks to Diana, we are about to

00:01:47 ►

hear what may be one of Terrence’s earliest recorded talks. Hopefully, someone who is at this lecture

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will appear and give us all the details about when and where it took place. All I know is that the

00:02:00 ►

MP3 file was labeled 83-7. And in the talk we’re about to listen to, you’ll hear a reference Terence makes to the Mayan calendar in connection with his time wave hypothesis.

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And that makes me suspect this talk came very early in his career, possibly before he knew very much about the Mayan calendar.

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very much about the Mayim calendar.

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Or maybe I’m reading too much into this myself,

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and so I’ll just wait and see if anybody comments on this phantom issue on the psychedelicsalon.org blog,

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where I’ve posted the program notes for this podcast.

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But as you listen to this with me right now,

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you might find it interesting to think about the fact that

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this talk might be almost 25 years old, and that

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certainly might give you a little better appreciation for the quality of the mind of Terence McKenna.

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Now you might want to brace yourself for one particularly long stretch in which Terence

00:02:59 ►

goes into minute detail about his insights into the structure of the I Ching.

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But even if you don’t want to make the effort to follow his every little description to its conclusion, I hope you can appreciate this particular recording of this rap of his,

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because it seems to have come early enough in his public speaking career that he still

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seems to have great enthusiasm for this new idea.

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Actually, I can’t remember hearing him do a better job of describing

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this somewhat abstract concept. And I’m going to drop a little clue here before we begin.

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Listen closely to the date that Terence gives for the end point of his time wave hypothesis.

00:03:37 ►

I think you’ll find this something worth discussing in the comment section of the program notes,

00:03:42 ►

and that’s all I’ll have to say about this for now, but I do find it quite curious myself.

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So we begin with Terrence reading a few words he jotted down that cover the range of topics

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he planned on covering in the talk we are about to hear.

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I’d not heard this recording before, and so it held quite a few surprises for me, and

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I hope that’s true for you too.

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Let’s listen.

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So it held quite a few surprises for me.

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And I hope that’s true for you too.

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Let’s listen.

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The poster says the syntax of psychedelic time, fractals, endpoints, end times, zero points, something like that.

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What all this indicates is a set of ideas that I want to share with you that are a slightly different tack than my normal lectures.

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My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon.

00:04:39 ►

But this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart one idea

00:04:50 ►

that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances my idea it is idiosyncratic. It is a psychedelic idea, certainly, but it’s only one of an infinite possible set of

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such ideas. And the reason I spend time on it to communicate it to a group of people like this

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is because I think it can serve as an example of psychedelic ideas generally,

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how they’re formed, how they operate, and what’s so great about them.

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And perhaps with an element of ego,

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I think that this idea intrinsically has an elegance that makes it worth pursuing.

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But before I talk about that, I want to talk about fractals for a moment

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as they’re understood in orthodox mathematics, because the idea of fractals will serve as a basis

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for much of what I’m going to talk about. Fractals are technically defined as curves with a dimension greater than one and less than two

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or surfaces with a dimension greater than two and less than three

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none of which need concern us what’s important to know about fractals is that they have the peculiar property of presenting the

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same appearance at all scales. An example of a fractal in nature or a fractal-like phenomenon

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would be a mountain range, which when you get up to it and examine small pieces of rock that are sloughing

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off the face of the cliff and hold one up against the light you discover that the edge of the small

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fragment of rock and the edge of the mountain range are in fact the same thing and at first

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this doesn’t appear startling because you say well the mountain is made of this stuff

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this small boulder is made of this stuff and it simply

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fractures the same way but actually a

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Number of issues are being touched on in this phenomenon

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first of all when you begin analyzing nature, you discover that many, many forms

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of phenomena are fractal. Coastlines, islands, the way processes condense, the way solids

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condense out of liquids in cheese making, for example, or something like that.

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There are many kinds of processes where a single process is reflected and refracted at many levels of magnitude

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so that the whole and its parts and many levels within the whole composed of its parts all have the same structure.

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Some fractals have been known for quite some time,

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since the late 19th century,

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but they were considered pathological curves

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because they had the property of infinite lengths

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in very short distances because they adumbrate

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themselves so intricately that their length can be said to be infinite in the

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same way you can understand that very readily if you ask yourself how long is

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the coast of California well it depends depends on what we mean by this.

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Because the smaller the unit of measurement that you use,

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the more detail that will arise.

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And at some level, the unit of measurement is so small

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that it’s smaller than the molecular interstices

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of that which composes California.

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And at that point, the length of the coastline becomes infinite.

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Okay, so you get the drift of what fractals are

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and how they’ve been treated by mathematicians,

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particularly one mathematician.

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You can’t discuss fractals without giving all the credit there is to Bernoull Mantelbrot

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Because if you don’t give him all the credit there is he’ll ask you why not

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So he has invented this branch of mathematics. He has perfected it and he’s given us

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marvelous books where you can see these curves and I thought about making this a slideshow because the fractals

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are tremendously beautiful objects aesthetically but i decided against that because i want to

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hold to ideas this is a think along lecture by the, and you’re free to think along at any point that you feel so moved to do so.

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Okay, so that’s what fractals are for orthodox mathematics.

00:10:14 ►

The psychedelic part, and what I did with this, was I began to think about time.

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was I began to think about time.

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I’ve always had this idea that our physics has failed us because it is not true to experience,

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and every advance in physics has been gained

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at the expense of moving the terms of physics

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further and further away from anything

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that could be called concrete experience,

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so that what we finally

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have is an integrated set of complicated equations that we are told correctly map at the

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microphysical and or the cosmological level the objects of nature that we’re interested in but it

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does not come tangential to our experience i’m sure you’ve heard me say this before.

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So I meditated on time with the idea of fractals in the background,

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and I noticed certain things which are obvious,

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except they have implication when the idea of fractals is linked to them.

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And they’re trivial things, really.

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They’re things like every day is rather like every other day,

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and every week is rather like every other week,

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and every year, and to some degree every century,

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and to some degree every millennium.

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But I noticed that as you raised the ante in these temporal scales,

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change did become apparent,

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but at the daily level, every day is very much like every other day,

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but every day also is obviously different,

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and it’s in these differences that we have the feeling of advance into a future and a feeling of completion.

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So I took all these ideas and in the Amazon, when we were investigating the beta-carboline drugs which are used in combination with DMT I under the influence of these drugs fell into a long extended meditation about all these

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themes in fact it actually went on for years in fact it’s still going on in some sense. It was a true boost.

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And I looked at the I Ching, which I was familiar with,

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but had never particularly been obsessed with,

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and I noticed something very interesting about it,

00:13:01 ►

which is the King Wen sequence,

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which is the oldest sequence of the hexagrams, a sequence which precedes any written commentary, when mapped for its first order of difference, and its

00:13:17 ►

first order of difference is nothing more than as you pass from one hexagram

00:13:21 ►

to another, how many hexagrams change, how many lines change. So for instance as you pass from one hexagram to another, how many hexagrams change, how many lines change.

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So, for instance, as you go from hexagram 1 to 2,

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all lines change.

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So 6 is the value of that, 6 lines change.

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When you go from 2 to 3, there is another value.

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And I graphed the yi qing this way for its first order of difference. Now in

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a random distribution you would expect fairly even distribution of breaks of

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orders one, two, three, four, five and six but I found immediately that there were no fives whatsoever, no breaks of order five, and that

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there had been an obvious effort to optimize breaks of value two and four. So that in itself,

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I mean, obviously it’s ordered some way, so this wouldn’t be too startling to discover a property like that.

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And I should pause for a moment and point out for people who have interest in the I Ching,

00:14:35 ►

that the I Ching is actually formed of 32 pairs, if you’ve ever looked at it, it’s formed of pairs such that the second term in each pair is the inverse of the first term.

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Except there are eight cases, naturally, where inverting a hexagram has no effect on it.

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The obvious case is where you invert the first one.

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It’s all solid lines, so inverting it has no effect.

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In those eight cases, the rule is all lines change, and you see following the first hexagram,

00:15:17 ►

which is all solid lines, is the second hexagram, which is all broken lines. So in studying the sequence of the I Ching, your problem is not really how are these

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64 hexagrams arranged. The question is how are these 32 pairs of hexagrams arranged.

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So I graphed the first order of difference as I mentioned, and then I noticed a peculiar visual symmetry in my graph

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which was it looked basically like a random squiggle

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except that the beginning and the end of the wave

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were stereo isometric reflections of each other.

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Now what that means is that if you were to rotate in the plane

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an image of this wave without

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lifting it off the paper, you could bring the two graphs together and they would dovetail

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together perfectly at the beginning and at the end, but nowhere in between.

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And this seemed to me a very powerful argument for order that I had in fact discovered a previous kind of order

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that was implicit in this thing now to some audiences I have to make a complicated apology

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about logos and voices in the head and all that I’ll just skip that and say, and so I continued working with this thing

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under the instruction of the voices in my head. And the first thing that I noticed when the wave

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was fitted together in this particular way was that the hexagrams paired up so that they always summed to 64. In other words, 63 would pair with 1,

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62 with 2, 61 with 3, 60 with 4, and so on.

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So it was as though a kind of magic square was being generated

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where the I Ching was additive to itself in all directions on a grid.

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additive to itself in all directions on a grid.

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And so I took this forward and backward running

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64 term glyph or graph, and I said, aha, it is the complete I Ching

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running forward and backward against itself.

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Since it is the complete I Ching, all 64 hexagrams, all 384 lines,

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I will follow the principle of constructing modular hierarchies. I will collapse it to the

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simplest term in a system of levels. And I will this this rather complicated looking thing as though it were a line

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one of only

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384 and

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then I

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Then from there over a period of years and many pencil sharpenings

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We went to computers and produced very complicated

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versions of this graph and then found a way to mathematically quantify it so that it could be, instead of a network of lines running forward and backward against each other, it became a single line running in one direction into the future okay so now what’s so great about this in its own terms it is a self-consistent idea about time that tries to be true to experience it’s saying that

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time is made of elements it is not simply an event space something required for things to

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have duration you see before einstein space was thought of as as the place where you put things.

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The necessary adumbration of a thing having being was that it be in space.

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Einstein came along and said, no, time can be thought of as a surface, as a continuum,

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as something which in and of itself can affect the outcome of the propagation of a beam of light

00:19:48 ►

or an electromagnetic field or something like that.

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What this idea suggests is something similar about time, that time is made of elements

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and that what we intuit about time is more true to the facts of the matter

00:20:05 ►

than what physicists are telling us about time.

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What we intuit about time and what astrology and all forms of prophecy

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and intuition and clairvoyance and all these things are,

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are the ideas that we can know about time by deploying our feelings into it.

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And what this theory does is take what has generally been

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a very feeling-toned, intuitional kind of idea

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and to mathematicize it and give it rigor

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and say that with a very simple computer we can predict novelty.

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We can understand, first of all, that what is happening in the world of becoming,

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the world that we all experience as beings,

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is that novelty is entering into being,

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and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration.

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And no matter on what time scale you view the universe, you see this happening.

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In other words, the universe in its early moments is all chaos.

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Temperatures are too high to allow even interatomic bonding.

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So there’s only a plasma of strict particles, charged particles and then as the universe cools

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atomic bonds become possible and atomic systems come into being which which

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indicate a more refined level of organization and then later much later molecular systems and

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and on another level, stellar dust and star systems

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and organization of large aggregates of matter.

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Then life, and it represents another one

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of these quantum leaps in complexity, which is old stuff,

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but something else besides a leap in complexity is happening with each of these ingressions into novelty.

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What is happening is a speeding up of the speed at which these ingressions are happening,

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so that the early, the first half of the history of the universe, you can say virtually nothing happened.

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Everything happened in the last half of the universe, of the life of the universe you can say virtually nothing happened everything happened in the last

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half of the universe of the life of the universe and about a billion or two or three billion years

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ago about 20 percent of what we assume to be the total life of the universe ago, life appeared. And then the mammalian line, the early mammalian line

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appeared 60 or 70 million years ago

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at the close of the dinosaurs.

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Then we get culture 25, 30, 50,000 years ago,

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and very shortly after that, mathematics,

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and very shortly after that electronic circuitry and there is

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this compression of events which from the point of view of the historian is

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the major thing that he sees when he looks at the history of the universe but

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science has never mentioned this peculiar compression of events and densifying of complexity. Science takes the position that if that’s happening

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it’s unimportant and it probably isn’t happening at all and

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science goes to great lengths though it admits evolution to make sure that it arises out of

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non teleological processes and to make sure that it’s always confined within the realm of biology

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So that a real an orthodox evolutionist is very uncomfortable if you start speaking of stellar evolution or cultural evolution

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I’ve heard these guys say if there are no genes involved you do not use the word evolution.

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See, they don’t want to see it as a formative process

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touching the organic, the inorganic, the social, the psychological.

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So I took very seriously this deepening ingression into novelty,

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and I said it is a physical quality of the continuum that we’re

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existing in it is not a loose and unconstrained tendency but it is a predictable tendency like

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charge speed momentum that kind of thing and I noticed something very interesting about the number 384,

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which, if you’ll recall, is the number of lines in the complete set of the I Ching.

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The number 384 is 13 lunar cycles.

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There are 29.29, I believe, days in a lunar cycle,

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I believe days in a lunar cycle

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13 of which gives you

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383 point eight nine days or something like that. So in other words, it’s to within a

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fraction of a day 384 days so I it suggested to me a calendar and then I noticed that in

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hexagram 49 which is revolution it

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specifically says the magician is a calendar maker and then I used

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resonances of this 384 day solar year resonances of 64. So, for instance, I would take the 384-day year

00:26:07 ►

and multiply it times 64.

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This gives you a period of time which is 67 years, 104.25 days.

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That is six minor sunspot cycles and two major sunspot cycles.

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Plus it also, in the invisible landscape the other astrological

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astronomical pardon me correlations are made clear uh when you rise to the next level when

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you take the 67 year cycle times 64 you get 4 306 years this is very close to

00:26:48 ►

Let’s see

00:26:51 ►

half of a zodiacal age

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in other words the procession of the earth on its

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Nutational axis requires about

00:27:02 ►

25,000 years and that is what is spoken of when they talk of the Piscean Age, the Aquarian Age.

00:27:08 ►

They’re talking about how through the slow procession of the equinox,

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it is moving from sign to sign.

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And it takes about 2,000 years for a sign to be transited.

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So two signs can be transited in exactly the cycle of time indicated.

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I’ve spent so much time laying this out because I’ve noticed in other lectures that I’ve given

00:27:32 ►

what of this theory, what has come through to people is the notion that I have a prediction about the end of the world,

00:27:40 ►

that I predict an end time.

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And then there’s always lots of questions about what is your eschatology?

00:27:48 ►

What kind of an end of the world do you foresee?

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But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world,

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but everything which precedes it.

00:27:59 ►

And that’s what this wave is looking at.

00:28:30 ►

And that’s what this wave is a mathematical fixed entity,

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once you have a good fit to one historical period, if it’s a very good fit,

00:28:41 ►

the wave will fit then all of history.

00:28:48 ►

a very good fit, the wave will fit then all of history so that you can say you’ve been using Periclean Greece as your benchmark date with a certain idea about how the wave must look

00:28:55 ►

in that period. So then you find a configuration that fits. You say, okay, that perfectly fulfills

00:29:02 ►

my intuition about how the wave should look for Periclean Greece.

00:29:06 ►

However, I have an equally strong intuition about how it should look for the French Revolution.

00:29:11 ►

So now let’s scroll forward and see how it looks against the French Revolution.

00:29:18 ►

And as the intuition of the fit builds, you define the number of applicable cases where the wave seems to be

00:29:28 ►

working and we have done this and settled on a date which i discussed a little bit last time

00:29:35 ►

which is november 12 2012 and someone brought up that the mayan calendar also predicts the end of the world, whatever that means.

00:29:47 ►

It simply means that your calendar spins off its axis and you have to reset your clock.

00:29:54 ►

Maybe. It may mean something else. Whitehead, who I’m a great follower of, had the idea

00:30:01 ►

of what he called epochs, and he pointed out that a constant, for instance the idea of what he called epochs and he pointed out that a constant for instance

00:30:06 ►

the speed of light we’ll say which is a favorite constant the speed of light has only been measured

00:30:12 ►

for about 80 years and yet all of our physics hinges absolutely on the supposition that this is unchanging over the life of the universe, 20 billion years.

00:30:27 ►

And so what sample of 20 billion years have we looked at?

00:30:32 ►

We have sampled 80 years in one spot in the universe.

00:30:38 ►

And yet from that, our physics is extrapolated.

00:30:42 ►

Whitehead had the idea of what he called epochs, which were like bubbles

00:30:48 ►

in the universe of possible time. And within these bubbles, certain laws were operating,

00:30:56 ►

and they would operate consistently throughout the bubble. But when you passed beyond the

00:31:01 ►

bubble, you found a different set of physical laws operating.

00:31:05 ►

And very recently, this idea I noticed has been brought back with this inflationary nothing cosmology that’s catching on,

00:31:15 ►

where the universe may have a false vacuum bottom and may be suspended in a much deeper, stronger, denser vacuum.

00:31:23 ►

in a much deeper, stronger, denser vacuum.

00:31:30 ►

But what this theory is suggesting is that there are not only epochs of very long duration, such as the epochs which were in force when temperature and pressure in the universe were such

00:31:38 ►

that molecular organization couldn’t sustain itself, we’ll say.

00:31:42 ►

molecular organization couldn’t

00:31:47 ►

Sustain itself will say there may be very short epochs where laws

00:31:50 ►

manifest that Are normally hidden for instance the puzzle of human history is something like this

00:31:57 ►

a million two million years ago there were only monkeys on this planet and a very

00:32:03 ►

advanced bipedal chimpanzee perhaps now suddenly

00:32:08 ►

there are atom smashers and video games barry manilow all these things and this has happened

00:32:17 ►

with startling rapidity and it well may be it is because mind is manifesting the constraints on mind as a force in nature

00:32:29 ►

have been lifted over the last 10 to 15,000 years

00:32:34 ►

and nature and mind is claiming these new levels of freedom

00:32:40 ►

and what I see happening and this is why these lectures always seem to gravitate

00:32:46 ►

toward the future

00:32:47 ►

is we are living in a very pivotal time

00:32:51 ►

the time that we inherit from science

00:32:55 ►

is a time to humble you

00:32:57 ►

to dwarf you

00:32:59 ►

it tells you that the sun will not fluctuate

00:33:02 ►

for another billion years

00:33:04 ►

that species come and go,

00:33:07 ►

and that, in other words, that on the temporal scale,

00:33:10 ►

that you don’t matter and that now doesn’t matter.

00:33:13 ►

But when you look at the release of energy,

00:33:16 ►

the asymptotic speeding up of processes,

00:33:21 ►

we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.

00:33:26 ►

So what we say is that human history is taking place.

00:33:30 ►

But if you were an extraterrestrial lying off in your flying saucer and looking down at Earth,

00:33:37 ►

you would not see species.

00:33:39 ►

This is a Linnaean European concept that aids in the cataloging of natural products, what you would

00:33:47 ►

see if you saw biology is you would see a gene swarm on the planet Earth using species as the

00:33:56 ►

reduction valve as it flows through time, but only generally. There are many other ways that

00:34:03 ►

genes are transferred through

00:34:06 ►

Episomes and vegetative propagation and this kind of thing which doesn’t need to worry us

00:34:11 ►

but

00:34:13 ►

process and

00:34:15 ►

Information which is what has been happening from the very beginning the atomic system codes and releases more

00:34:23 ►

information than the plasma the molecules have a similar relationship

00:34:28 ►

to the atomic systems and so on right up to the cultural systems and now we have reached the point

00:34:35 ►

where the culture is cohering and we are becoming too big for the planet. All the natural resources are running out.

00:34:45 ►

All the political institutions which normally control the monkey tribe are breaking down so that every man can know everything,

00:34:56 ►

which makes previous forms of social organization virtually impossible.

00:35:03 ►

All of these things uh are happening and it is because there

00:35:06 ►

actually is closure into these shorter epochs we can now after almost a thousand years if not more

00:35:16 ►

of moving man off the stage and saying no man is not the image of god man is not the image of God, man is not the beloved of the creator.

00:35:26 ►

We are on a small planet around a small star off on the edge of the universe

00:35:31 ►

and our fate, if we have one, rests in our own hands, if in anyone’s.

00:35:37 ►

This may not be true in the sense that if we change our values and say that nature conserves complexity and strives for

00:35:50 ►

complexity if that’s true then the human neocortex and human society are the most precious and

00:35:58 ►

advanced objects and organizational dynamics in the universe.

00:36:09 ►

Now I want to talk briefly about

00:36:18 ►

something which happened in the past, possibly, hypothetically, and how it relates to this

00:36:28 ►

running into the short epochs where all time and culture and information seem to flow together in a kind of psychedelic

00:36:32 ►

Eternity an information

00:36:36 ►

stasis a kind of standing wave hologram that is

00:36:44 ►

The now I mean I believe the poster says Plato says time is the moving image of eternity because we

00:36:46 ►

We talked about that last time.

00:36:51 ►

Julian Jaynes, who was a psychologist at Princeton, talked about what he called the origin of consciousness in the bicameral mind.

00:36:57 ►

And he said that in pre-Homeric times,

00:37:01 ►

excuse me,

00:37:12 ►

times excuse me what we experience as ego consciousness was experienced differently by people uh in those early societies what we experience as ourselves something which we

00:37:22 ►

completely dominate and somehow enfold in our bodies

00:37:27 ►

this is the cultural metaphor that the self is inside the body they experienced as outside the

00:37:33 ►

body and exterior from the ego and somehow independent of their own will so that what we experience as the self and the ego they experienced

00:37:47 ►

as a kind of disembodied god or guiding voice or inner spirit or guardian angel the important

00:37:57 ►

concept in all of this being that they experienced it as separate from themselves.

00:38:07 ►

And then James goes on to suggest that it was traders

00:38:13 ►

who were people who passed from one society to another

00:38:17 ►

for the purpose of exchanging goods who were the first cynics

00:38:22 ►

because they realized

00:38:25 ►

that everybody’s gods in different places

00:38:29 ►

were saying different things.

00:38:32 ►

And they realized, therefore,

00:38:33 ►

that there was something funny about these gods,

00:38:36 ►

that they were, in fact,

00:38:37 ►

somehow rooted in human psychology

00:38:43 ►

rather than in theogony in some sense and they became the world’s first

00:38:49 ►

egotists or the world’s first individuated people because they correctly

00:38:56 ►

identified a psychic function as arising from themselves and they integrated it and then he goes on I

00:39:07 ►

don’t want to spend too much time with this but then he goes on to say that it

00:39:11 ►

was the spread of trade the rise of money all these things which broke down

00:39:17 ►

these dialogues between cultural holes and their gods, and that when it broke down, that was what shattered that

00:39:29 ►

world of city civilizations that is the true ancient world.

00:39:34 ►

In other words, the world of Babylon, Ur, Sumer, Chaldea, the states which precede the

00:39:41 ►

Hellenic world were shattered by the breakdown of this dialogue between the people

00:39:47 ►

and the god and kingship he talks a lot about how the kings assimilated were associated with this

00:39:55 ►

voice in the head so everyone thought the king was speaking to them when they were told to go pump water, herd the cows, shear the sheep, whatever they were told to do.

00:40:09 ►

Okay, I mention this because I think that something similar is happening in the present

00:40:16 ►

and that unwittingly James may have provided a metaphor for understanding this. We talked a bit last time about the flying saucer

00:40:28 ►

and how it was a projection of a future state of mankind, a mobile psychic entity linked to the

00:40:38 ►

idea of the exteriorization of the soul and the interiorization of the body in electronic circuitry.

00:40:48 ►

I think that what we all experience as our culture, fashion, rock and roll, politics, music, media,

00:41:12 ►

music, media, all of these things which we experience as the clothing that we must put on in order to be able to talk to each other.

00:41:51 ►

This is a kind of God or a kind of autonomous psychic function that has slipped out of our control or which has arisen outside of our control as a legacy of these integrative holistic feeling toned you could almost say liberal or you

00:41:59 ►

could almost say that liberalism in its classic 19th century guise is the first faint sounding of this theme.

00:42:10 ►

This rising global humanism is in fact the rising into consciousness of a tribal god

00:42:19 ►

similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.

00:42:28 ►

And, however, in the present cultural context,

00:42:32 ►

cultural evolution is happening so fast that it is not going to take a millennium

00:42:38 ►

to pass through, you know, the first faint enunciation of the theme,

00:42:44 ►

through the first faint enunciation of the theme, the full-fledged exploration of the theme of cultural wholeness

00:42:51 ►

as exteriorized God or God-like mind to the integration of it.

00:43:01 ►

And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like clothes to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self and that’s what all the hullabaloo is about I think and I think that

00:43:28 ►

this is happening and

00:43:31 ►

if if the date

00:43:33 ►

2012 means anything it means

00:43:36 ►

simply that we could take that as we could make a statistical model of what’s happening and say that

00:43:44 ►

on November 15th, 2012,

00:43:48 ►

a sufficient number of people will have integrated this state of global electronic selfhood

00:43:56 ►

that it will be irreversible.

00:44:03 ►

That up until a certain point,

00:44:05 ►

when any stochastic process begins to happen

00:44:08 ►

or when any cascade begins to get going,

00:44:12 ►

up until it has a certain momentum,

00:44:15 ►

there is a possibility of many different bifurcations

00:44:18 ►

leading to different end states.

00:44:21 ►

But once a certain amount of energy is in the system,

00:44:24 ►

then you can say you know it’s going

00:44:26 ►

to go all the way and i prefer to think of i prefer to probabilitize all of these predictions

00:44:34 ►

of the end of the world and to think of them simply the way you think of a particle in the

00:44:41 ►

quantum mechanical model when we assign a position to the particle,

00:44:46 ►

we understand that the particle isn’t at that position, that that point is merely the center

00:44:52 ►

of a cloud of probable positions, any one of which could be occupied.

00:44:58 ►

Nevertheless, outside of a certain short distance from that point, the probability of finding the particle drops off asymptotically.

00:45:09 ►

So it’s a cloud of probability.

00:45:11 ►

And this date up after the first of the century is the center of a cloud of probability.

00:45:19 ►

Now, what kind of ethics decline from that kind of a position?

00:45:27 ►

It seems to me obvious that the first thing that’s apparent from that is that you don’t sit around waiting for the apocalypse.

00:45:34 ►

You understand that as soon as you push yourself over the brink, you’ve done the major piece of

00:45:41 ►

work that has to be done in your cosmos.

00:45:49 ►

From then on, you just sit around watching it happen.

00:45:52 ►

So it’s an invitation.

00:45:54 ►

We’re all very fortunate.

00:45:58 ►

It reminds me, and I probably mentioned this last time,

00:46:00 ►

I think about it fairly often, of the Irish prayer,

00:46:02 ►

May you be alive at the end of the world.

00:46:06 ►

Probably we all have a very good shot at it,

00:46:10 ►

but I have no idea what the probabilities are for any one of us.

00:46:18 ►

I’ve spoken of this tonight more in its operational terms

00:46:23 ►

rather than in the gee whiz kind of terms, which I did last time where I painted a picture of what it will be like to invoke this global electronic aspect of the self and to integrate it but these ideas about collapsing time vectors about history having

00:46:49 ►

an end about in fact history being the shock wave of an event at the end of time these are the ideas

00:46:58 ►

that religions handle uh fairly well i mean this is not religion so much, but theology. Religion tends to concern

00:47:10 ►

itself with public morality, but underpinning religion is theology. And it seems to always,

00:47:19 ►

at least in the West, meaning in Judaism and Christianity and Islam and in all of the spectrum of cults that each one spawned

00:47:28 ►

and continues to spawn,

00:47:30 ►

there is this wish to put an end to time,

00:47:33 ►

to close it off,

00:47:35 ►

to redeem us from the cycle of becoming.

00:47:40 ►

And I think that the reason these ideas are so persistent in the human psyche is because all of history can be seen in biological time as so brief that it is simply a prelude and an anticipation.

00:48:02 ►

I don’t know if you caught it, but about 24 minutes into this talk,

00:48:06 ►

Terrence very casually said about novelty that it is a form of connectedness.

00:48:12 ►

Have you ever heard him say that before?

00:48:14 ►

If I did, it never stuck out to me before.

00:48:17 ►

So does this mean that Terrence’s 2012 end point of infinite novelty means infinite connectedness?

00:48:26 ►

Well, to relieve the tension that such a question might bring up in some minds,

00:48:31 ►

I think this might be a good time to remind myself that in addition to many other things,

00:48:36 ►

the good Bard McKenna had a streak of poet in him.

00:48:39 ►

So maybe we shouldn’t think along too deeply to his each and every word.

00:48:45 ►

Or maybe we should. You’ve got deeply to his each and every word. Or maybe we should.

00:48:47 ►

You’ve got to be your own judge about that.

00:48:49 ►

Just like everything else, for that matter.

00:48:52 ►

And keep in mind that the talk you just heard may be a quarter of a century old.

00:48:57 ►

A lot has changed since then.

00:49:00 ►

For one thing, as one of the scientists at the CPAC conference just explained,

00:49:04 ►

For one thing, as one of the scientists at the CPAC conference just explained,

00:49:10 ►

our sun being stable for another billion years is perhaps just another myth.

00:49:15 ►

In fact, there is more concern about the health of the sun right now than you normally hear.

00:49:19 ►

And in a few months, I’ll be traveling up to interview one of these researchers so you can hear this information directly.

00:49:22 ►

And there will be more information coming to you as a result of that conference also.

00:49:27 ►

As fellow salonner Max can tell you,

00:49:30 ►

there is a world of information about our prehistory

00:49:33 ►

that isn’t being taught in the universities.

00:49:36 ►

And once a few more pieces of it become so well-researched,

00:49:39 ►

well, a lot of things may change then in the human psyche.

00:49:43 ►

But I’d better get off this topic now and save it for another day.

00:49:47 ►

By the way, in case you’ve never had a chance to check out our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog at psychedelicsalon.org,

00:49:55 ►

I probably should let you know that for the program notes for each of these podcasts,

00:49:59 ►

you can find the number of minutes and seconds into each program where various quotes may be found.

00:50:05 ►

Now, in case you’re wondering why I’ve gone to the trouble of doing this,

00:50:08 ►

it’s for you DJs out there who are looking for new McKenna soundbites to add to your mixes.

00:50:14 ►

All you have to do is go to our blog and search on Terrence’s name

00:50:18 ►

along with any word combinations you’re looking for a soundbite with.

00:50:22 ►

At least that’s one reason for the program notes.

00:50:21 ►

you’re looking for a sound byte with.

00:50:24 ►

At least that’s one reason for the program notes.

00:50:30 ►

The other is that until the search engines figure out how to index MP3 files for searches,

00:50:36 ►

the program notes can act as sort of a low-tech pointer for the search engines to pick up on.

00:50:39 ►

I’ve received a lot of interesting email lately, and if I don’t start reading some of it soon, we’ll probably be almost a year behind.

00:50:45 ►

But the next two actually did come in this week.

00:50:48 ►

The first is from Jed, who says, among other things,

00:50:51 ►

Oh yeah, the other question. What are you reading at the moment? I’m reading

00:50:56 ►

Living My Life by Emma Goldman. Good stuff. I’m on

00:51:00 ►

the first volume and it keeps drawing me back in. I didn’t get what my

00:51:03 ►

fiancé meant when she described it to me when she was reading it.

00:51:07 ►

Now it’s my turn, and I’m actually getting it.

00:51:10 ►

I thought it was just some kind of a communist, anarchy, feminist literature,

00:51:14 ►

the way she described it before.

00:51:15 ►

Not that that’s a bad thing.

00:51:17 ►

Just didn’t think it was my thing.

00:51:19 ►

It’s so much more, though.

00:51:20 ►

Check it out if you haven’t read it yet.

00:51:22 ►

Well, Jed, right now I’m reading two books about the Dogon

00:51:25 ►

by Laird Scranton, who I

00:51:27 ►

interviewed a week ago and will be podcasting

00:51:30 ►

before long. Did I

00:51:32 ►

mention that I never read only one

00:51:33 ►

book at a time? Because I’m also

00:51:36 ►

in the middle of two other books.

00:51:38 ►

Programming the Universe by

00:51:39 ►

Seth Lloyd and The Zaheer

00:51:42 ►

by Paulo Coelho.

00:51:44 ►

And after that, I’m planning on reading Chemical Warfare by James Ketchum,

00:51:48 ►

who I met at Burning Man this year and who I’ll be interviewing for a podcast sometime after I finish his book.

00:51:54 ►

Getting back to the email, Jed finishes,

00:51:57 ►

Peace, my friend. P.S. I sent a donation via PayPal,

00:52:00 ►

but it’s that they’re loading the next page for five plus minutes, so I don’t know if you got it. I certainly hope so.

00:52:06 ►

It wasn’t much, but I know you’ll put it to good use.

00:52:09 ►

Well, it did arrive, Jed, and hey, thank you so much for your donation.

00:52:13 ►

And you’re right, it will be put to good use in support of the salon.

00:52:18 ►

Our second donation this week came in from, well, I’ll call him DJL,

00:52:22 ►

who also sent an email that I have to say totally blew me

00:52:26 ►

away. I’m going to read a few parts that might resonate with you, but first I want to make

00:52:31 ►

a little disclaimer here. And this goes out to a whole lot of you who write to thank me

00:52:36 ►

for doing these podcasts. I want you all to know how deeply I appreciate your thoughts,

00:52:42 ►

and I also want to remind you of something,

00:52:46 ►

sort of a reality check, I guess.

00:52:51 ►

I’ve said this before, but it probably bears repeating.

00:52:53 ►

I’m just an ordinary person like you.

00:52:58 ►

Granted, my life since leaving the world of the corporate wage slave has been significantly more interesting than my life before,

00:53:02 ►

but that doesn’t change the fact

00:53:04 ►

that I’m looking for the same

00:53:05 ►

answers you are. My role, as I see it, is that of a carnival barker. My job is to get you into this

00:53:11 ►

great big psychedelic tent so you can take a look around for yourself and come to your own

00:53:16 ►

conclusions. I really don’t, at least I try not to pretend to have any answers. And now that I’m

00:53:22 ►

getting older, I’m even having trouble remembering all the questions. So I’ll continue

00:53:27 ►

to collect some of these interesting thoughts and pass them along to you.

00:53:31 ►

The ones that resonate best with you are the trails maybe you should follow.

00:53:35 ►

Or maybe they’re the trails to avoid. Heck, I don’t know.

00:53:39 ►

Like that radio comedian says, I’m just another guy searching for answers

00:53:43 ►

to life’s persistent questions.

00:53:46 ►

So that’s a long way of saying, hey, thanks for the thanks, you guys.

00:53:50 ►

But if there’s anything life-changing going on in here, it isn’t because of me.

00:53:55 ►

It’s because of the person who is in the process of changing her or his life on their own, one thought at a time.

00:54:02 ►

Now, getting back to DJL’s email, and first I want to thank

00:54:07 ►

you for your donation and even more for your email. It moved me deeply. One of the things

00:54:13 ►

DJL said was, I was a rave disciple. I was certain without a shadow of doubt that rave

00:54:21 ►

culture would change the world. The power emanating from a solid, well-formed

00:54:26 ►

and well-vibed rave seemed so important and so unique that the idea of it dying off seemed

00:54:31 ►

impossible. The last rave I attended that managed to achieve a deep and important vibe

00:54:37 ►

was in 1999. I’ve been paid to spin records all over, from Hawaii to New York since then. But the vibe of clubland

00:54:45 ►

and its alcohol amphetamine-fueled energy has effectively suppressed the vibrations

00:54:51 ►

of those early, innocent, pure, homeopathic raves. I am writing all of this to let you

00:54:57 ►

know that I understand and feel your pain over the last Burning Man that has seemed

00:55:02 ►

to test your faith in very real ways. I felt that

00:55:05 ►

same challenge as I watched a scene that I loved and meant so much to me dissolving under the heavy

00:55:11 ►

yoke of marketing money and the law. I know there may be an event or two that bubble up with some

00:55:16 ►

level of honesty throughout this country and all over the world, but their rarity has made spending

00:55:21 ►

my limited resources hunting them down a less than attractive choice.

00:55:26 ►

I had given up.

00:55:28 ►

Well, I appreciate you relating to my feelings about Burning Man, DJ Al.

00:55:32 ►

And, in fact, I’ve received similar messages from a lot of people

00:55:36 ►

who also experienced the end of something that at first felt so promising.

00:55:41 ►

And I’ll have more to say about that in future podcasts.

00:55:46 ►

felt so promising. And I’ll have more to say about that in future podcasts. But as an aside,

00:55:50 ►

for all of you who wrote to ask about my intentions about going to Burning Man next year,

00:55:55 ►

let me put you at ease. Even though I’m re-evaluating my thoughts about that event,

00:55:59 ►

and even though it appears that some of my friends won’t be going next year,

00:56:06 ►

nonetheless, barring anything unforeseen, I do plan on going again next year, so I’ll see you all there, I’m sure.

00:56:14 ►

Now, getting back to DJ L’s email, after telling me about the trajectory of his life lately, he went on to say,

00:56:17 ►

This April, I picked up my first iPod.

00:56:22 ►

After all, I’ve been DJing records for years and hated going to MP3s.

00:56:26 ►

I did a few iTunes searches and came across the psychedelic salon and dope fiend even after 15 years of a psychedelic search for truth even after hearing

00:56:32 ►

terence mckenna and his space time recordings years ago i still felt lonely other than my wife

00:56:38 ►

my belief seemed so out there that i didn’t feel comfortable discussing my visions with others

00:56:43 ►

after listening to terence and shulgin and you and so many others on your podcast,

00:56:48 ►

I began to find my faith again. While the rave scene

00:56:52 ►

still labors under the oppression of money and law, I found

00:56:55 ►

in the wisdom captured on your podcast keeping me in tune.

00:56:59 ►

I know that right now your experience at Burning Man was frustrating.

00:57:03 ►

As I heard you speak on this in the last few weeks, I felt much empathy.

00:57:07 ►

It’s hard to watch something you love being trampled on by commercialism, marketing, and a loss of focus.

00:57:13 ►

Maybe that isn’t what you experienced, but if it is, if you’re feeling your faith tested through this situation,

00:57:18 ►

I would like to offer my story and my reconnection through your hard work as a positive, hopefully motivational

00:57:25 ►

addition to your story. Well, DJ L, you have certainly motivated me, that’s for sure. And

00:57:33 ►

in a way, this all circles back around to what I was saying a few minutes ago, that

00:57:38 ►

all the action is in the tent, and I listen to these lectures for the same reason you

00:57:42 ►

do, to be challenged by new ideas and to get motivated to stay outside the mental boxes my culture tries to force upon me.

00:57:50 ►

As that Canadian comedian read, somebody or other always said,

00:57:54 ►

we’re all in this together, you know.

00:57:56 ►

But to close the loop on your comments about the rave scene,

00:57:59 ►

I’ve been hearing much the same from a lot of different directions,

00:58:03 ►

which is why I was disappointed that Mark Healy didn’t make it to the burn this year.

00:58:08 ►

He was to be one of the Plylog leaders and is as well connected to the current dance scene as most anybody I know.

00:58:14 ►

I keep meaning to email him and catch up, but I’m now managing to have several email-free days a week,

00:58:20 ►

and so those little things keep slipping down the list.

00:58:24 ►

And I’ve decided to not feel bad about not keeping up with email, because unless I miss

00:58:28 ►

my guests, you’re probably in the same boat right now.

00:58:32 ►

Now let’s get on to a couple other emails that are more or less representative of several

00:58:36 ►

others as far as the comments or questions that they pose.

00:58:40 ►

And I hope I don’t hurt anybody’s feelings by choosing one message on a particular topic

00:58:44 ►

over another

00:58:45 ►

but hopefully this will answer a lot of your questions.

00:58:49 ►

The first one is from Gary who writes,

00:58:51 ►

This latest one intrigued me. Podcast 111. Establishing a tribal land base.

00:58:58 ►

The part where people are talking about you cannot choose your relatives but you can choose your family.

00:59:04 ►

I’d like to try hooking up with some of these people by email,

00:59:06 ►

as it seems silly not to make some new friends.

00:59:09 ►

What is the best way of doing this?

00:59:11 ►

Is it possible to get personal messages if I leave my email address in the comments area where the podcast is?

00:59:17 ►

Or is there a special board available where I can leave a post?

00:59:20 ►

Are there any video chats going on now on a regular basis?

00:59:23 ►

I’d like to know more about what is available and already up to facilitate meetings.

00:59:28 ►

From what I could see, there seems like little input from people in the comments area, which surprised me.

00:59:33 ►

I thought things would be jumping with activity.

00:59:36 ►

Maybe I’m not in the right area on the website.

00:59:39 ►

Well, Gary, I too wish there was more activity on the psychedelicsalon.org website,

00:59:45 ►

but the fact is that we all listen to these podcasts,

00:59:48 ►

mostly when we’re away from our computers.

00:59:50 ►

And by the time we get back into the net,

00:59:52 ►

we’ve forgotten about what we were going to do

00:59:54 ►

because we’ve taken in so much new information in between.

00:59:58 ►

In fact, I do this all the time myself, just today in fact.

01:00:01 ►

So let me just take a little side here and say,

01:00:04 ►

Hey, Dope Fiend, if you hear this

01:00:06 ►

hey, thanks for that nice shout out

01:00:08 ►

in your podcast number 97.

01:00:10 ►

That was really kind of you.

01:00:12 ►

And I’m looking forward to your 100th

01:00:13 ►

podcast from Amsterdam.

01:00:15 ►

Any chance you’ll try to get

01:00:17 ►

the dopefiend.co.uk

01:00:19 ►

chat room going while you’re there?

01:00:21 ►

I think a bunch of us would like to jump in

01:00:23 ►

and say hello in real time. Now the final thing Gary had to say was, the other thing I wanted to

01:00:30 ►

mention is you should try checking out some videos in the video section of Google.com.

01:00:35 ►

And then he went on to list some of his favorites. And so this is probably a good segue for me

01:00:40 ►

to mention that the other day I posted a YouTube video of a few of the ply logs,

01:00:45 ►

at least a few moments of a few ply logs. And you can find that on the psychedelicsalon.org blog as

01:00:50 ►

well. The next email, and by the way, I’m shortening all of these emails a little bit,

01:00:55 ►

just reading the parts that are pertinent to everybody here. And this one comes from Ruskin,

01:01:00 ►

who says, I went to the burn this year. It was my first Burning Man experience.

01:01:05 ►

I went with three months’ notice along with two of my close friends

01:01:08 ►

who had never been either,

01:01:09 ►

but have wanted to go for several years, like me.

01:01:12 ►

We knew a friend of a friend of someone who was part of the BRC staff,

01:01:16 ►

and they were camped at Intheon Village.

01:01:18 ►

So we got to have our own camp at Intheon

01:01:21 ►

at the intersection of 230 and Boriel,

01:01:23 ►

one block from the Esplanade. Not bad for

01:01:26 ►

a virgin, eh? Well, that’s a lot better than not bad, Ruskin. I’d say you caught the wave on your

01:01:31 ►

first try. He goes on, I had made plans ahead of time to attend the ply logs at your Plankay Yurt,

01:01:39 ►

but I couldn’t find it. I know it was 730 and intertidal, and I rode by that area like three times, but no success.

01:01:46 ►

I did get to see Daniel Pinchbeck

01:01:48 ►

and Theon on Friday, but

01:01:49 ►

the end was cut short by the whiteout

01:01:52 ►

that afternoon. Oh well.

01:01:54 ►

Well, to keep this part short, I’ll say

01:01:55 ►

that Burning Man was the greatest

01:01:57 ►

thing I’ve ever done, seen, felt,

01:01:59 ►

or known, and my friends feel the same

01:02:01 ►

way. All of us, plus new

01:02:03 ►

recruits, are already planning for

01:02:05 ►

next year’s burn. I’m counting the days. I’m sorry you’re having mixed emotions about Burning Man.

01:02:11 ►

I can’t see myself becoming jaded about it simply because I see it as much too important an event

01:02:16 ►

at this time in our history to take it for granted. For me, it is a clear reflection of the

01:02:21 ►

attractor, of the transcendental object at the end of time.

01:02:25 ►

See you on the playa.

01:02:27 ►

Well, Ruskin, yes you will.

01:02:29 ►

And this time I’ll make sure that we post some better directions to our location.

01:02:34 ►

You weren’t the only one, by the way, who didn’t find us this year.

01:02:36 ►

But, hey, that’s the playa.

01:02:38 ►

All the better reason to go back next year.

01:02:41 ►

And I’ve been meaning to mention this for over a month now,

01:02:43 ►

but one of our fellow salonners, I think his name is Michael, asked me for a

01:02:48 ►

copy of the Vavom CD when we met at Center Camp on Tuesday morning.

01:02:52 ►

And I didn’t have a copy with me, but Michael, I think

01:02:56 ►

you did come back to the yurt later on, but if you reminded me about that CD,

01:03:00 ►

I must have zoned out on you, for which I do apologize. Anyway,

01:03:04 ►

if you send me your snail mail address, I’ll mail your CD.

01:03:07 ►

I’ve been saving it for you.

01:03:10 ►

Also, I received an email from Keen,

01:03:13 ►

who has a really interesting experience that I want to talk with him about,

01:03:17 ►

but until this very moment, I’d forgotten that I hadn’t responded to him yet.

01:03:21 ►

Sorry, Keen.

01:03:22 ►

I’ll try to remember to answer as soon as I get this

01:03:25 ►

podcast out. Now, an email I got from Cannabis King is one that I’ve been asked several times

01:03:31 ►

about, but just haven’t had a chance to answer. Here’s what he writes. I’ve attached a picture

01:03:37 ►

that I’ve seen numerous times. I saw this tapestry at Burning Man in your tent. It seems to surround

01:03:43 ►

Terrence McKenna. What is the story behind it? Is there any way I can get a tapestry at Burning Man in your tent. It seems to surround Terrence McKenna. What is the

01:03:45 ►

story behind it? Is there any way I can get a tapestry? And would you be able to send me a

01:03:50 ►

full-size picture of the figure if it’s not too much trouble? I want to make a sticker of it,

01:03:55 ►

slap it on my car. Well, here’s the story as I understand it, but maybe one of our fellow

01:04:01 ►

salonners can correct me if I’m wrong. What I was told was that this drawing was found in a cave in Algeria,

01:04:08 ►

and that the reproduction of the image was done by Kat Harrison.

01:04:12 ►

How it got from her drawing to that particular tapestry, I don’t know.

01:04:16 ►

But the tapestry, if you want to call it that,

01:04:19 ►

is actually just a piece of canvas that one of our fellow campmates used to reproduce from a photo he had.

01:04:25 ►

At least that’s how I understand its origin,

01:04:27 ►

and I’ve checked all of my photos from this year,

01:04:30 ►

but none of them is of the tapestry alone, and they’re all kind of dim.

01:04:35 ►

The only other year we used that was in 2003,

01:04:38 ►

and somewhere I think I have a picture of it then,

01:04:40 ►

when we had it on a big frame outside in the sun.

01:04:43 ►

I’ll see if I can find that and send it to you.

01:04:46 ►

Cannabis King, by the way, is one of our fellow salonners who turned up at Burning Man this year.

01:04:51 ►

And I look forward to seeing you again next year, Cannabis King.

01:04:55 ►

Wow, this is the longest I’ve ever gone on in one of these podcasts.

01:04:59 ►

But there’s been so much email that I don’t have time to answer that have some of these same themes running in them

01:05:06 ►

that I think it’s important to clear it all out right now.

01:05:09 ►

So if you’ll hang in here with me, I’ll read a couple more emails.

01:05:13 ►

This particular one comes from Eric,

01:05:16 ►

but it’s representative of far too many emails I get.

01:05:20 ►

And remember as I read this that I’m just the carnival barker,

01:05:23 ►

so it’s hard for me to know how to respond to emails like this

01:05:26 ►

other than to just keep on producing these podcasts.

01:05:30 ►

Here’s part of what Eric wrote.

01:05:32 ►

I am 19 years old, and I feel compelled to share with you my gratitude toward your efforts.

01:05:38 ►

Your podcast has changed my life, or at least confirmed my questioning of life.

01:05:44 ►

I live in an extremely religious area.

01:05:47 ►

In fact, our small hick town has the world record for the most churches on one street.

01:05:53 ►

I’ve been forced to go to church and believe in some wonderful fairy tale all of my life.

01:05:58 ►

I never really fell for it.

01:05:59 ►

I’m more critical of things, but my family misunderstands my curiosity.

01:06:03 ►

They use the term blasphemy.

01:06:06 ►

Two years ago, my dad found out I was growing mushrooms in my room. He actually called the

01:06:11 ►

police and had me charged with manufacturing and delivery of psilocybin. He claimed that he wanted

01:06:16 ►

to stop me now before it ruined my life. Now I’m a convicted felon. My title does not by any means

01:06:24 ►

help me out in life.

01:06:25 ►

If anything, the violation of my spiritual practices only delayed my spiritual development.

01:06:31 ►

When we were 17, my friend and I found out about a local head shop that sold mushroom kits.

01:06:37 ►

We bought one. It produced a little over an ounce.

01:06:40 ►

At this time, I did not know about Arrowhead, and that’s arrowhead.org in case you guys are wondering.

01:06:46 ►

So we had to guess on how many of the sacred sacraments to eat.

01:06:50 ►

I ate 4.1 grams of dried, and he ate the equivalent of about 8 grams.

01:06:56 ►

My friend did not have a very pleasant time.

01:06:59 ►

He said he was possessed by demons.

01:07:01 ►

He would tense up and grumble evil-sounding noises constantly.

01:07:05 ►

I,

01:07:10 ►

on the other hand, had a pleasant trip and started realizing things. I noticed I thought about weird stuff. It was the kind of stuff that normal people don’t usually worry about.

01:07:15 ►

I realized people don’t think about these things because it’s all explained to them

01:07:19 ►

in their religious brainwashings. My friends never shared this insight.

01:07:27 ►

They could not shed their brainwashings as easily as I could.

01:07:31 ►

To this day, they only take shrooms to get messed up,

01:07:34 ►

whereas I take them only on my own and I think about things.

01:07:38 ►

After I got busted, I began to think I was the only one who thought this way,

01:07:43 ►

and I started to revert back to knowing nothing and believing in the obnoxious hypocritical,

01:07:48 ►

too-good-to-be-true fantasy that my family so strongly and blindly embraces.

01:07:50 ►

One day I got an iPod.

01:07:52 ►

A friend told me about podcasts.

01:07:54 ►

That’s when I stumbled on the psychedelic salon.

01:07:56 ►

I listened to a few episodes.

01:08:00 ►

I noticed that everything these people were talking about and explaining,

01:08:03 ►

I had already discovered on my own inner space voyages. I mean word for word most of it.

01:08:06 ►

Even though I had already obtained the information on my own,

01:08:09 ►

it was so critical for me to know that there are others that think the same way I do.

01:08:14 ►

I have never met any person face to face that shares the same thoughts that I have.

01:08:19 ►

Thank you, Lorenzo, for helping me in my personal battle with the government

01:08:22 ►

and its corporate methods of mind control, in parentheses, religion. I’m fully

01:08:28 ►

behind the effort to expand human consciousness, but there are so many people

01:08:32 ►

who don’t have the ability to think for themselves, like 90% of America.

01:08:36 ►

What can we do? Please, whatever you do, do not

01:08:40 ►

stop doing these podcasts until there is not one more ounce of information

01:08:44 ►

that could possibly

01:08:45 ►

be shared. Well, thank you so much for sharing that, Eric, and for letting me share it with the

01:08:51 ►

rest of the salon. And like I said a minute ago, I hardly know where to start to comment on it.

01:08:57 ►

Perhaps the most important lesson we can all take from this is that it’s truly possible to

01:09:02 ►

overcome some incredibly high barriers that our cultures

01:09:05 ►

use to fence in our minds. First of all, and I really hate to admit this, but before I found

01:09:12 ►

these sacred medicines myself, I was a parent much like your dad is. Well, not quite that

01:09:18 ►

close-minded, because in my wildest imagination, I can’t think of ever turning one of my children

01:09:23 ►

into the police, or anybody else for that matter.

01:09:27 ►

It boggles the mind to think that someone could be so blinded by government and religious propaganda

01:09:32 ►

that they’d do something like that to another human being.

01:09:36 ►

But being psychedelic as you are, I’m hoping that after a few years pass,

01:09:41 ►

that your parents will wise up and see that it’s the screwhead cops

01:09:44 ►

and the U.S. system of criminal injustice that are screwed up. a few years pass that your parents will wise up and see that it’s the screwhead cops and

01:09:45 ►

the U.S. system of criminal injustice that are screwed up. In my humble opinion, you

01:09:50 ►

actually saved your life. You didn’t ruin it. And it sounds as if you’ve come to the

01:09:55 ►

same conclusion. Well done. You’re a true psychonaut.

01:10:00 ►

Now as to the religion part, well, that’s a little trickier for me.

01:10:09 ►

I, too, was raised in a religious household, not as strict as yours, Eric,

01:10:14 ►

but strict enough that it took me over 40 years to break my mind free from their brainwashing.

01:10:19 ►

And I probably never would have made it without the help of our sacred medicines.

01:10:22 ►

But from the point of view of my longtime friends and family,

01:10:28 ►

well, the way they see it is what they call drugs has ruined my life.

01:10:40 ►

And all they see is a former altar boy and Notre Dame graduate who is now very much against the entire structure, system, and mental gulag that the Catholic Church has become, at least in my humble opinion.

01:10:45 ►

And for what it’s worth, I’m equally jaded about every other organized religion as well.

01:10:51 ►

As you’ve probably discovered, there is little if any overlap between religion and spirituality.

01:10:58 ►

Frankly, all I see in religion is power-mad, money-mad, and just plain mad people whose main thrust in life is to control everybody else. That said, I also know quite a few highly

01:11:04 ►

psychedelic people who still practice

01:11:06 ►

one of the major religions. Now, don’t ask me how they reconcile that behavior with some of the

01:11:11 ►

mystical experiences they’ve had with our medicines. I can’t figure that out myself. But nonetheless,

01:11:17 ►

they’re really wonderful people, and I don’t feel that it’s my place to spout my own feelings about

01:11:22 ►

religion to them. In my case, I’ve found it easier to move through my world

01:11:28 ►

without any unnecessary confrontations, particularly about a topic

01:11:32 ►

on which people seldom change the minds that were forced upon them as children.

01:11:37 ►

Maybe on the religion front, it’s best to just lay low

01:11:40 ►

right now until you’re completely out on your own, physically,

01:11:43 ►

like you already are mentally.

01:11:46 ►

For my part, I’ll do my best to follow your suggestion and keep on podcasting until there’s

01:11:51 ►

not one ounce of information left that could possibly be shared. Thanks again for writing,

01:11:56 ►

Eric. Hey, hang in there, my friend. I’m sure that you’re going to come out of this with a

01:12:02 ►

life that your friends can only wonder at.

01:12:07 ►

Press on, Eric. Press on.

01:12:09 ►

You’re already a hero in my book.

01:12:14 ►

Well, this has certainly been the email day, hasn’t it?

01:12:19 ►

I guess I’ve got enough energy left to read one more before we leave the salon today,

01:12:23 ►

but it brings up something that I hope a few more of you will become involved with.

01:12:28 ►

This email comes from, and I hope I’m saying this the right way, because at first I was going to say Jerome, but it looks like you’ve done a real cool thing the way you write your

01:12:33 ►

name, and so I probably should pronounce it J-Rome.

01:12:37 ►

Anyway, J-Rome sent a great little poem of his along with these words.

01:12:43 ►

Lorenzo, you are a cool man. And J-Rome, I’ve got to thank you

01:12:47 ►

for that. It isn’t very often that a 65-year-old guy can be made to feel that he’s cool, but coming

01:12:54 ►

from you, I’ve decided to believe it. So, hey, thanks for that. He goes on. Please accept this

01:13:00 ►

digital hug complete with a manly pat to the back and slightly extended duration for sincerity.

01:13:06 ►

Hey, great imagery, J-Rome. It’s my very first digital hug. Thanks.

01:13:12 ►

From your podcast, I gather that you are very busy.

01:13:15 ►

So if this message reaches your eyes, score one for my internal get-off-your-butt-and-follow-your-heart program.

01:13:22 ►

I have more works from my heart I want to share with you if

01:13:25 ►

you like this one. I have never been able to make it to a rave or rainbow gathering. Thanks to you,

01:13:31 ►

I am now aware of Burning Man and the Mind States conferences, which I also keep missing. But it’s

01:13:37 ►

coming. I can feel it. At long last, a purpose for this monster that rages inside of me is becoming clear. Mankind, through

01:13:45 ►

negligence, has already purchased tickets to some planetary thrill rides. Katrina was

01:13:51 ►

just the tip of the iceberg. Two of the keys to survival are attention and love. We need

01:13:58 ►

to switch from striving for profit to striving for the prosperity of life. Whether you’re

01:14:03 ►

wealthy or poor, profit’s more

01:14:05 ►

important than you, which means profit will consume you too. While we’re selling more and

01:14:10 ►

jailing more, profit’s prevailing more than life and profit’s not alive, yet consumes the living

01:14:16 ►

to survive, like a zombie, right? So it’s fright night on planet Earth. Profit zombies are trying

01:14:23 ►

to devour her. Let’s stick together and help spread the word.

01:14:27 ►

Brothers, sisters, it’s time you heard.

01:14:30 ►

That it’s Fright Night on planet Earth, and we all need to become janitors.

01:14:35 ►

We have a big mess left by our ancestors.

01:14:38 ►

Brothers, sisters, help spread the word.

01:14:41 ►

Keep up the good work, Lorenzo.

01:14:42 ►

As per your advice, I will try to post this on the latest

01:14:45 ►

Psychedelic Salon forum. And thank you, J-Rome. I’m sorry I didn’t do a good job reading that for you,

01:14:51 ►

but I very much would like to hear your poetry and your own words. So how about recording a few of

01:14:57 ►

them and sending it to me to post on the psychedelicsalon.org blog? Or you can do it yourself

01:15:01 ►

if you’ve got the technical whiz, which isn’t that tough, I don’t think.

01:15:06 ►

In fact, if you take a look at the posting just before the program notes for this podcast, where I posted that YouTube video clip,

01:15:13 ►

I also posted an MP3 file with Seabrook’s poem, The Vision of My Conscious Decision, that he recited at Burning Man.

01:15:21 ►

In fact, I’ve also asked Seabrook to record some more of his work for us here also.

01:15:26 ►

So how about it, J. Rome?

01:15:28 ►

And how about you other poets out there

01:15:30 ►

in cyberdelic space?

01:15:31 ►

Why don’t you all add your voices

01:15:33 ►

to this beautiful song we’re creating together

01:15:35 ►

here in the psychedelic salon?

01:15:37 ►

And thanks a lot for the kind words, J. Rome.

01:15:40 ►

They mean a lot coming from you.

01:15:42 ►

Well, that’s about all I can do for now.

01:15:45 ►

This has been our longest time together for a while, but it’s been fun.

01:15:50 ►

I look forward to being back here with you next week.

01:15:53 ►

Before I go, I want to mention that this and all the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:15:57 ►

are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 2.5 license.

01:16:03 ►

I think it’s 3.0 license now, actually.

01:16:06 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:16:08 ►

you can click on the Creative Commons link

01:16:10 ►

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:16:12 ►

which you know you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:16:15 ►

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints,

01:16:18 ►

or suggestions about these podcasts,

01:16:20 ►

well, hey, just send them to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:16:25 ►

And thanks again to Diana for sending me today’s talk by Terrence McKenna.

01:16:30 ►

And thank you, dear Terrence.

01:16:31 ►

What would we have ever done without you?

01:16:34 ►

Shatol Hayuk, thanks again for the use of your music here in the salon.

01:16:39 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:16:43 ►

Be well, my friends.

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