Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
11:53 “There’s no question but what the human imagination has taken to itself so much power that it no longer can remain on the surface of the planet. We sort of have to part company with the planet for our own good and for its [own good].”
14:15 “I think that the old evolutionary model, which was that evolution was the struggle of the fittest, and the devil take the hindmost, is pretty much discredited. And we now understand that what is maximized in evolution is not the sharpness of the fang or the length of the claw, but the ability to cooperate with other species, harmoniously. That’s what’s being maximized. … Humans are a perverse lot, and I suppose what one can reasonably hope for is incremental advances toward the good.”
16:02 Terence begins talking about Ketamine. [NOTE: He is talking about injecting Ketamine, NOT snorting it, which is a more recent phenomenon.]
17:19 “It’s [Ketamine] a troubling psychedelic, because a lot of people, I think, are doing it who have never done any other, and I think that would be very, very misleading.”
19:09 “On Ketamine your definitions dissolve so completely that it’s a major accomplishment to realize that you’re a human being on a drug.”
22:39 [Regarding synthetic vs. natural substances] “I’ve always taken the position that it was important that the psychedelic have a relationship to a plant.”
25:31 “I am Oss and my brother is Oeric. … When we wrote that, that was straight transcription. That’s what the mushroom said.” [Referring to their underground classic, “Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide”.
26:56 “The mushroom has this peculiar ability to invoke, or allow, or trigger a voice in the head, this logos-like phenomenon of information unrolling in your head. No other drug that I’m familiar with does that consistently.”
37:52 “What freedom means is you find out how good you are by discovering what you do when you have the power to destroy yourself, and we as a species are in that position and no one can do it but us. And if we do not destroy ourselves, then very obviously the intellectual tools that we have taken in hand are the tools which will send us out to the stars.”
49:57 “Science did work better in the 19th century than it’s working in the 20th because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Fire Ravage San Diego.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:25 ►
So, how are you today? I hope all of our fellow salonners in Southern California fared well
00:00:31 ►
during the firestorms that swept through this area during the past week or so. I know that
00:00:37 ►
late the other night, Xandor and Mrs. Z from the Grow Report podcast at dopefiend.co.uk
00:00:51 ►
from the Grow Report podcast at dopefiend.co.uk posted an update on their situation in the form of a podcast that I downloaded late the other night.
00:00:55 ►
And the good news is that they came through in pretty good shape.
00:00:59 ►
And I’ll have more to say about the firestorm at the end of this podcast.
00:01:09 ►
But first, I think it would be more interesting to get on with the program that I’d already planned before the world turned temporarily upside down.
00:01:18 ►
First of all, I want to send my deep gratitude to Jason M. and Susan L. for their more than generous donations that came in a week or so ago.
00:01:25 ►
I learned of your donations just before disconnecting my PC to load into my car for the evacuation,
00:01:31 ►
and I want to say that your kindness came at a particularly good time for me, and it made me realize just how much I have to be thankful for.
00:01:34 ►
And while I’m on the subject of donations, until Xandor and Mrs. Z from thegrovereport.com
00:01:40 ►
get 100% back on their feet after the fire. It would be wonderful if any of you who get the urge to make a small donation, send it to the Zandors.
00:01:50 ►
Besides helping us out here in the salon by setting up the Psychedelic Salon Forum for us on their growreport.com site,
00:01:59 ►
the Zandors are also providing a lot of very valuable information to the medical cannabis growers all over the world.
00:02:06 ►
And by the way, one of the really positive things to come out of our fire experience
00:02:10 ►
is that I discovered how close I live to the Zandors.
00:02:14 ►
And now I’m hoping to arrange for them to come down and spend a night or so with us here in the not-too-distant future.
00:02:21 ►
As Terrence McKenna often said, find the others.
00:02:24 ►
And thanks to this fire, the Zandors and I
00:02:27 ►
have found each other. Now before I introduce today’s program, I also want to make another
00:02:33 ►
little announcement that some of you already know about from my posting on the forums where
00:02:38 ►
Zandor set up the Psychedelic Salon forum for us to use, and that posting was about Sasha Shulgin.
00:02:45 ►
Here’s what I posted there last Friday.
00:02:48 ►
I guess it’s the Friday before last now.
00:02:51 ►
Quote,
00:02:52 ►
This past Sunday, October 21st,
00:02:55 ►
Sasha was hospitalized and treated for strep bovi.
00:02:58 ►
The good news is that he should be coming home by this weekend.
00:03:02 ►
According to Wendy, the mother of Sasha’s two-year-old playmate Audrey,
00:03:06 ►
all is well and hopefully will remain so.
00:03:09 ►
So I asked if there was anything that any of us could do to help,
00:03:13 ►
and the family said that it would be great for people to send cards to the house.
00:03:17 ►
And their address is Sasha Shulgin, 1483 Shulgin Road, Lafayette, California.
00:03:25 ►
L-A-F-A-Y-E-T-T-E.
00:03:28 ►
Lafayette, California, 94549.
00:03:33 ►
So if you’ve ever felt like saying thank you to our dear Sasha,
00:03:37 ►
this would be a perfect time to do so.
00:03:39 ►
And now I’m happy to report that in the comments section under that posting,
00:03:45 ►
Psychocentric and Crackajacka have noted that their cards to Sasha are already on the way.
00:03:51 ►
Thanks, guys. That’s really kind of you.
00:03:54 ►
And yesterday I learned that Sasha actually came home last Saturday and is getting stronger every day,
00:03:59 ►
which means he still may be able to finish his new book by the end of this year.
00:04:04 ►
And that, of course, is great news for all of us.
00:04:07 ►
The only little cloud on the horizon being that he still has to go in for a heart valve operation, possibly in January.
00:04:14 ►
So please keep those positive vibes heading Sasha’s way for a little while longer.
00:04:20 ►
Now, getting on with today’s talk by Terrence McKenna,
00:04:24 ►
we’re actually going to pick up where we left off the week before last.
00:04:28 ►
At the time I published that podcast, I kind of lamely said I didn’t know the title or even the date of that lecture.
00:04:35 ►
Had I not already started getting sick, I would have taken the time to contact Diana, the angel who gave me that recording, and asked for a few more details.
00:04:44 ►
the angel who gave me that recording, and asked for a few more details.
00:04:49 ►
Fortunately, she didn’t wait for me to get well enough to send an email and ask,
00:04:52 ►
and instead she sent the information without waiting for me.
00:04:56 ►
So, here’s the story about last week’s McKenna Talk.
00:05:02 ►
It was titled, Syntax of Psychedelic Time, and it was recorded in July 1983,
00:05:11 ►
which means it came shortly after the talk that he gave at the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference that you can hear in Podcast 100.
00:05:18 ►
Now, in our last program, we heard side one of that tape, and today I’m going to play side two from the same lecture.
00:05:25 ►
At the time I was producing that last podcast, I started to add the side two tape, but it started in the middle of a thought, and in my dazed and confused brain at the time, I was sure that
00:05:31 ►
it wasn’t connected to side one. Why I thought such a thing, I have no idea, but at the time
00:05:36 ►
it made perfect sense. However, what really must have happened is that whomever made that
00:05:42 ►
recording missed a chunk when the tape ran to the end and then reversed. And by the way, I want to mention that Eliza or Salvin Orin also pointed
00:05:51 ►
this out to me, the title, etc., via a comment on the psychedelicsalon.org blog where the program
00:05:58 ►
notes for these podcasts are posted. And thanks for posting that, Eliza. It was a big help to us all.
00:06:07 ►
posted. And thanks for posting that, Eliza. It was a big help to us all. The second side of the tape,
00:06:12 ►
which we’re about to listen to now, begins with what sounds like the end of the lecture, but then it immediately begins without the Q&A that I thought would follow based on the first few
00:06:18 ►
minutes of the tape. All of which leads me to believe that this tape may have had some editing
00:06:23 ►
done to it at some point.
00:06:31 ►
But in any event, there are some fascinating McKenna ideas here that I hadn’t picked up on before.
00:06:40 ►
So let’s join the bard McKenna when he was speaking to a small crowd in Berkeley, California, sometime in July 1983.
00:06:48 ►
So that they actually look down on their culture.
00:06:52 ►
They become extra-environmentals, is a way of putting this.
00:06:57 ►
They act the role of the extraterrestrial.
00:07:08 ►
And we all can act the role of the extraterrestrial and do when we adopt this extra-environmental position.
00:07:17 ►
It can be viewed as alienation if what arises out of it is a feeling of forlornness and being cast into being, as Heidegger says.
00:07:21 ►
But that need not necessarily be the feeling
00:07:25 ►
the extra environmental is also tremendously freed
00:07:30 ►
from the cultural conditioning
00:07:32 ►
and when you travel
00:07:34 ►
you are always an extra environmental
00:07:36 ►
and you have a very deep insight into societies
00:07:42 ►
that you may only spend a short time in. I think the emerging
00:07:48 ►
archetype of the other or the alien is an effort to integrate alienation and actually
00:07:56 ►
make it a positive thing. And I think I mentioned either here or on Will’s show about E.T. and how clever this was to make people identify
00:08:08 ►
with something which looks like a cross between a can of anchovies and the Pillsbury Doughboy
00:08:15 ►
and to actually you know love is what that movie is about and it’s alien love and it’s a very important form of love to cultivate
00:08:25 ►
because this process of integration
00:08:29 ►
of the electronic overself
00:08:31 ►
that is one way of looking at the end of history
00:08:36 ►
that is the process that we’re all involved in
00:08:44 ►
and psychedelics which I haven’t mentioned too much tonight,
00:08:49 ►
but which I hope you realize are the entire source and motivation and raison d’etre of all of this.
00:08:57 ►
Because what psychedelics are doing, they are anticipating this future state,
00:09:26 ►
they are anticipating this future state, this electronic global information organism is in fact already present in the same way that most of the future is present in the past. I mean think of any point in the past. Think of 1950. Think how much of today was present in 1950. It means that this idea that science fiction has sold us that
00:09:35 ►
the future is a total other world just up around the bend, it isn’t actually true. The future is 95% present in the present.
00:09:50 ►
And it is that 5% that eludes us
00:09:53 ►
that will provide the great adventure
00:09:56 ►
for the next 20, 30, 40 years
00:09:59 ►
as we come to terms with the fact
00:10:02 ►
that we are moving off into the human imagination.
00:10:08 ►
That’s what this godlike thing is.
00:10:11 ►
It is not a filled space, a loving figure, an angel, a god, or a demon.
00:10:20 ►
It is an empty space, a space which we will fill with our dreams, essentially,
00:10:29 ►
because our dreams have always been the appetition leading us forward into history.
00:10:36 ►
But we have not understood why, especially over the last 500 years,
00:10:41 ►
when it’s become very unfashionable to believe in dreams and visions
00:10:45 ►
and revelations.
00:10:47 ►
But I think actually the faith is well founded.
00:10:50 ►
It’s well founded
00:10:51 ►
because of the nature of the physics
00:10:54 ►
of time.
00:10:55 ►
And that is a physics
00:10:56 ►
that your own experience
00:10:59 ►
will reinforce for you
00:11:01 ►
if you examine it
00:11:03 ►
carefully enough.
00:11:07 ►
Thank you once again very much I think we’re gonna have a brief break and then questions © BF-WATCH TV 2021 There’s no question but what the human imagination
00:11:53 ►
has now taken to itself so much power
00:11:56 ►
that it can no longer remain on the surface of the planet.
00:12:00 ►
We sort of have to part company with the planet
00:12:03 ►
for our own good and for its and
00:12:07 ►
it’s just a commonplace of evolutionary theory that every frontier presents a genetic barrier
00:12:16 ►
because only the hale the hardy the adventurous the healthy go certainly space is going to be the tightest genetic filter of that
00:12:29 ►
sort that has ever been laid on a human population. It’s said, you know, that the dynamics of North
00:12:37 ►
American society are due to the fact that we can all trace ourselves back to misfits and malcontents and religious screwballs.
00:12:48 ►
And all these people who were out of it relative to Europe came here.
00:12:54 ►
A very similar thing will obviously happen in space.
00:13:00 ►
But your question is interesting.
00:13:02 ►
I can’t quote him exactly, but when I spoke in Santa Cruz,
00:13:06 ►
Tim Poston, who’s a mathematician,
00:13:09 ►
after it was all over,
00:13:10 ►
he quoted a modern poet saying,
00:13:14 ►
it won’t end with a statue of Jane Mansfield 50 miles high.
00:13:19 ►
It won’t end, and he lists several things.
00:13:23 ►
It will just go on. It will continue and, and he lists several things. It will just go on.
00:13:25 ►
It will continue and continue and continue.
00:13:29 ►
And perhaps that’s what human society will always be about.
00:13:32 ►
Perhaps there will always be a tacky element,
00:13:36 ►
and we will always flop on the seamy side.
00:13:40 ►
But I’m not sure.
00:13:42 ►
I’m not sure.
00:13:43 ►
The things which we take to be so basic to humanness
00:13:48 ►
such as all that that I just mentioned have all arisen since this hypothetical moment in
00:13:57 ►
Julian Jane’s theory when we integrated the ego perhaps integrating the super ego will actually make us stand taller and see more clearly
00:14:08 ►
into each other’s needs uh i think that the old evolutionary model which was that evolution was
00:14:16 ►
the struggle of the fittest and the devil take the hindmost is pretty much discredited and we now understand that what is maximized in evolution
00:14:28 ►
is not the sharpness of the fang or the or the length of the claw but the ability to cooperate
00:14:36 ►
with other species harmoniously that’s what’s being maximized every parasite or I mean every disease wants to be simply
00:14:46 ►
a benign parasite no disease wants to see its host die because then the party
00:14:53 ►
is over for everyone so I would say an answer to your question I’m hopeful but
00:15:00 ►
I certainly humans are a perverse lot
00:15:06 ►
and I suppose reasonably
00:15:08 ►
what one can hope for
00:15:09 ►
is incremental advancement
00:15:11 ►
toward the good
00:15:12 ►
I studied political philosophy
00:15:15 ►
under Joe Tussman
00:15:16 ►
and one of his favorite remarks
00:15:19 ►
he used to say to us was
00:15:20 ►
when you look around at the world
00:15:22 ►
it’s a terrible show to be run by angels
00:15:28 ►
but if you think of it as run by monkeys pretty amazing
00:15:33 ►
another question any other question yes Any other questions? Yes.
00:15:46 ►
I’d like to know,
00:15:50 ►
if you had an experience with ketamine,
00:15:56 ►
what do you think of its place in the future?
00:16:00 ►
Interesting question.
00:16:03 ►
What about ketamine?
00:16:05 ►
What do I think about it?
00:16:09 ►
Well, different things.
00:16:13 ►
First of all, you all know what ketamine is.
00:16:15 ►
Shall I briefly sketch it? Okay, this is a psychedelic drug that’s recently come on the scene
00:16:20 ►
that is what’s called a disassociative anesthetic.
00:16:26 ►
It was used as a veterinary and children’s anesthetic from the early 60s onward,
00:16:32 ►
and it was only slowly was it realized that at low doses there were peculiar psychic phenomena.
00:16:42 ►
And when done as an anesthetic, it’s done 600 ml IV push that means straight into
00:16:50 ►
the vein under pressure as fast as you can 600 milliliters which would be just like being hit
00:16:57 ►
by a truck but when it’s done for its I don’t like to say recreationally so when it’s done for its psychic effect it’s done
00:17:08 ►
like a hundred milliliters I am into the muscle and it’s a it’s a troubling psychedelic because
00:17:21 ►
a lot of people I think are doing it who have never done any other
00:17:25 ►
and I think that would be very very misleading when I did it the first thing that my first
00:17:33 ►
reaction was complete amazement that here was a category of experience that I had no idea existed. In other words, it was a slot on the bookshelf
00:17:46 ►
that I didn’t realize was there.
00:17:48 ►
It is not like mescaline, not like LSD,
00:17:52 ►
not like psilocybin, not like DMT,
00:17:54 ►
not like ayahuasca, not like any of these things.
00:17:56 ►
And yet, you cannot get away from the fact
00:17:59 ►
that it’s a powerful psychedelic.
00:18:02 ►
So, it’s useful for that alone to further expand the definition of
00:18:10 ►
what is a psychedelic drug the problem that i have i have two problems with it and both of them
00:18:16 ►
may be curmudgeonly on my part so you don’t have to take it from me the first one is that it’s very easy
00:18:25 ►
the first thing that happens after you’ve done ketamine is you cease to be
00:18:30 ►
concerned that you’ve done ketamine before there is any other effect that
00:18:35 ►
effect takes hold and that’s a funny thing I’m on on these tryptamine halocenogens
00:18:45 ►
you are fully aware
00:18:47 ►
that you have taken a drug
00:18:49 ►
that you’re walking on eggshells
00:18:52 ►
that you should keep yourself alert
00:18:55 ►
to what’s going on
00:18:57 ►
and in other words
00:18:58 ►
it puts you on your toes
00:18:59 ►
you know you’re in a dimension of risk
00:19:01 ►
and opportunity
00:19:03 ►
and you comport yourself that way on ketamine
00:19:07 ►
your definitions dissolve so completely that it’s a major accomplishment to realize that you’re a
00:19:14 ►
human being on a drug you keep discovering and losing that realization you keep saying oh yes that’s what it is I’m somebody and I’m stone somewhere
00:19:27 ►
and that’s what this is now it’s coming back to me
00:19:31 ►
which brings me to the second thing about ketamine which is puzzling and this is a problem with all
00:19:40 ►
psychedelic drugs but but you have to sort of get a life strategy for dealing with it because it’s
00:19:46 ►
important to overcome and that is it’s very state-bounded which is the term that the psychologist
00:19:54 ►
roland fisher coined which means you can’t remember anything about it it’s like an intense
00:20:01 ►
dream where you’re intensely dreaming and the alarm goes off.
00:20:06 ►
And as you stumble to the shower, it’s just…
00:20:11 ►
And there is nothing there.
00:20:13 ►
And ketamine is very much like this.
00:20:16 ►
While you’re on it, there is a complete conviction that this is of staggering import to you and mankind.
00:20:25 ►
And then it is just totally mercurial and elusive and slips away.
00:20:32 ►
Now that in itself is obviously an interesting experience.
00:20:36 ►
And so ketamine seems to teach obliquely.
00:20:40 ►
It teaches you that there are psychedelic states
00:20:43 ►
that you might not have called psychedelic
00:20:46 ►
it teaches you that there are wonderful insights
00:20:49 ►
that totally elevate you
00:20:53 ►
that you can’t remember 15 seconds later
00:20:55 ►
so it sort of teaches you the richness of mind
00:21:00 ►
but by example
00:21:03 ►
rather than by the imparting of information that you can take away and then
00:21:10 ►
whenever this question is asked unlike my acquaintance john lilly i always feel like i
00:21:18 ►
have to say to people if you’re going to take a new drug, you should go to the medical literature and read it. And I know there’s this match in reprints on ketamine
00:21:29 ►
because I have it.
00:21:32 ►
And what it will tell you is that there’s a kindling effect,
00:21:39 ►
which means each time you do it,
00:21:41 ►
it is easier the next time to get loaded.
00:21:46 ►
However, on the neurophysiological level, or the level of an electroencephalogram,
00:21:55 ►
this kindling effect can be considered…
00:21:58 ►
I don’t want to say it’s dangerous.
00:22:00 ►
I just want to say it’s a warning sign,
00:22:12 ►
I just want to say it’s a warning sign because the same kind of kindling will precede petite mal seizure and other forms of seizure. there are so many drugs in the MDA series making their way into society.
00:22:26 ►
MDA, MMDA, MDMA, MMDA2,
00:22:31 ►
a whole gamut of these,
00:22:33 ►
and there will be more down through the years.
00:22:37 ►
I’ve always taken the position
00:22:40 ►
that it was important that the psychedelic
00:22:43 ►
have a relationship to a plant.
00:22:46 ►
And that’s almost a perfect fit for me
00:22:51 ►
because I approve of psilocybin and it comes from a plant
00:22:55 ►
and masculine and it comes from a plant.
00:22:58 ►
LSD is sort of problematic because the LSD-25
00:23:03 ►
that is what most people are familiar with is not from a
00:23:07 ►
plant that’s a creature of pure of the laboratory but analogs active in the milligram range
00:23:15 ►
diethyl lysergic acid amide occur in morning glories of several species and in ergot and in some cases non-toxically.
00:23:28 ►
So as I live into the 80s,
00:23:33 ►
it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain this thing
00:23:36 ►
about the importance of the plant
00:23:38 ►
because so many people can’t imagine what you’re talking about.
00:23:42 ►
They are totally devoted to one or another
00:23:45 ►
completely synthetic drug
00:23:47 ►
and are having revelations
00:23:49 ►
and loving insights
00:23:52 ►
and all these things.
00:23:54 ►
And so I feel a little bit like a Puritan.
00:23:57 ►
But until I know more about it for myself,
00:24:02 ►
that’s sort of the categories I’ll work with.
00:24:07 ►
Also, the plant drugs almost always have a shamanic tradition associated with them that’s several thousand years old so
00:24:14 ►
they’re use tested in human societies both for psychic effects and physiological effects
00:24:22 ►
if a drug has been taken for 10,000 years
00:24:25 ►
chances are it’s fairly benign
00:24:32 ►
any other questions yes a statement that the office reports to be from the mushroom, whereby the mushroom offers
00:24:47 ►
a possible symbiosis to the humans. It offers to give them information on how to build spaceships
00:25:00 ►
and what you think about that and what you think about the symbiosis
00:25:06 ►
between humans and mushrooms
00:25:07 ►
just taking a mushroom dessert
00:25:09 ►
have you ever reflected on that?
00:25:12 ►
have you read this introduction?
00:25:14 ►
I’ve read that introduction, yes
00:25:16 ►
you’re a brave man to ask the question
00:25:19 ►
oh no, I shouldn’t kid you
00:25:23 ►
I wrote the introduction
00:25:25 ►
because I am Oteos
00:25:31 ►
and my brother is Olin Eric
00:25:33 ►
I can tell you this now
00:25:34 ►
because this book is going out of print
00:25:36 ►
well when we wrote that
00:25:39 ►
that was straight transcription
00:25:42 ►
that’s what the mushroom said.
00:25:48 ►
I don’t know exactly what to make of this.
00:25:51 ►
These things stretch our categories
00:25:58 ►
because it deals with our own definition of humanness.
00:26:04 ►
because it deals with our own definition of humanness.
00:26:14 ►
It’s curious that the psilocybin mushroom that my book is about,
00:26:20 ►
or that our book is about, occurs in the dung of domesticated cattle,
00:26:23 ►
the Indian humpback cattle, Bos indicus,
00:26:25 ►
so that it has been
00:26:25 ►
since very
00:26:26 ►
early in
00:26:27 ►
human history
00:26:28 ►
in a sense
00:26:30 ►
a symbiote
00:26:31 ►
of man
00:26:32 ►
because a
00:26:33 ►
symbiote of
00:26:35 ►
a domesticated
00:26:36 ►
animal which
00:26:37 ►
man had a
00:26:39 ►
symbiotic
00:26:39 ►
relationship
00:26:40 ►
with and
00:26:41 ►
when you
00:26:41 ►
study symbiosis
00:26:43 ►
among lower
00:26:44 ►
animals you often find this
00:26:46 ►
situation where it isn’t simply two species involved but three or even more
00:26:53 ►
the mushroom has this peculiar ability to invoke or allow or trigger a voice in the head, this logos-like phenomenon
00:27:05 ►
of information unrolling in your head.
00:27:10 ►
No other drug that I’m familiar with
00:27:13 ►
does that consistently.
00:27:17 ►
And our model of what psychedelic drugs should do
00:27:22 ►
has no room in it for this.
00:27:25 ►
Our model of what psychedelic drugs should do has no room in it for this. Our model of what psychedelic drugs should do is derived from Freud
00:27:29 ►
and then secondarily from Jung.
00:27:31 ►
From Freud we derive the idea that the psychedelic drugs should introduce you
00:27:37 ►
to neurotic thought processes, repressed memory, traumatic experience,
00:27:48 ►
guilt-laden incidents that have been forgotten, this sort of thing.
00:27:54 ►
And from Jung, we inherit the idea that beyond that, there is a landscape of myth myth and that we will encounter the great mythological motifs of the
00:28:07 ►
collectivity of the human psyche but what Phyllis Simon seems to be saying is
00:28:13 ►
that yes these two areas do exist but beyond them and far larger than them if
00:28:21 ►
we can speak of such dimensions in terms of relative size.
00:28:26 ►
There is an area which has very little to do with humanness, collective or particular.
00:28:34 ►
It is simply like a landscape.
00:28:36 ►
It is a world in the mind, but not related to our neuroses
00:28:41 ►
or our religious totemic and mythological figures.
00:28:47 ►
It is in fact highly independent of the human ego,
00:28:50 ►
but nevertheless discoverable through these drugs.
00:28:57 ►
And in those dimensions, we come up against things like the voice of the mushroom
00:29:06 ►
claiming to represent a galactic form of organism
00:29:11 ►
or what are conventionally called angels or demons or jinns or afrits.
00:29:22 ►
In other words, these traditional but rarely encountered by modern people
00:29:28 ►
autonomous forms of psychic existence
00:29:31 ►
and we have no models for those things
00:29:35 ►
for our civilization
00:29:37 ►
the other, if it exists
00:29:40 ►
can only come from the stars
00:29:42 ►
in ships
00:29:44 ►
it must be a carbon-based life form can only come from the stars in ships.
00:29:47 ►
It must be a carbon-based life form with the political and social and intellectual aspirations
00:29:51 ►
similar to ourselves.
00:29:53 ►
Science is not yet ready to entertain the idea
00:29:56 ►
that all points in our universe may be cotangent,
00:30:00 ►
that every form of intelligence in the cosmos
00:30:04 ►
may have the potential to communicate with every other in the here and now.
00:30:11 ►
Simply because to do this, science would throw open a floodgate of information that it cannot deal with.
00:30:19 ►
The repression of magic has been a very important part of science’s program for explaining the world.
00:30:28 ►
Not because science has an intrinsic antagonism to magic,
00:30:35 ►
but simply because magic, if tolerated, would unleash more information than any scientific theory can cope with.
00:30:44 ►
more information than any scientific theory can cope with.
00:30:48 ►
Scientific theories must first limit the amount of information that they’re dealing with before they can begin to model things.
00:30:53 ►
So in answer to your question about the mushroom
00:30:56 ►
and its role in human history,
00:30:59 ►
I’ve gone through many changes about this
00:31:02 ►
since the mushroom began talking to me,
00:31:05 ►
since I wrote that forward,
00:31:07 ►
I have a manuscript now,
00:31:09 ►
which one of the titles that we toy with for it
00:31:14 ►
is Alien Intelligence and Psilocybin.
00:31:17 ►
Although it probably won’t be called that,
00:31:20 ►
a lot of what it deals with is that,
00:31:22 ►
is the fact that post-modern people
00:31:25 ►
which is you and me
00:31:27 ►
are getting in touch with something
00:31:31 ►
which modern, the modern world view
00:31:34 ►
cannot handle at all
00:31:36 ►
for modernity voices in the head
00:31:39 ►
are a clear instance of pathology
00:31:41 ►
and yet for the Hellenistic world
00:31:44 ►
and the post-modern world
00:31:46 ►
voices in the head
00:31:48 ►
are a clear aspect
00:31:51 ►
of following the path
00:31:54 ►
and this was classic
00:31:56 ►
before the rise of the forms
00:31:59 ►
of reductionist thought
00:32:00 ►
that characterized modern thinking
00:32:02 ►
Socrates had a demon
00:32:04 ►
he mentions it many times it told him what to say thought that characterized modern thinking. Socrates had a demon.
00:32:07 ►
He mentions it many times.
00:32:09 ►
It told him what to say.
00:32:12 ►
It helped him with what he should think.
00:32:19 ►
And it was a commonplace for sages and philosophers of that time to make that kind of claim.
00:32:22 ►
Psilocybin places it within the reach of modern people, but it also,
00:32:27 ►
by so doing, serves to demonstrate that the old models of psyche, Freudian and Jungian,
00:32:33 ►
just won’t serve. I don’t think that these things can be reconciled very easily. I think science,
00:32:41 ►
if it’s going to take up the Enochian tables and that sort of thing,
00:32:47 ►
is going to transform itself to the point where it will no longer be science.
00:32:54 ►
Paul Feierabend, who lives in Berkeley, I don’t know if he still teaches,
00:32:59 ►
has written a couple of books, one called Against Method
00:33:02 ►
and another one called Science in a free society and he makes
00:33:06 ►
the point there that science has really become an enemy of the free society simply by virtue of the
00:33:16 ►
fact that it wishes to arbitrate all models so that somebody says well I believe the universe is such and so
00:33:26 ►
and everyone says
00:33:27 ►
well go ask the scientists
00:33:28 ►
if it’s true or not
00:33:30 ►
this is a staggering amount of power
00:33:34 ►
for any group of people to have
00:33:37 ►
especially a group of people
00:33:39 ►
whose accomplishments
00:33:40 ►
and I’m not now talking about the technicians
00:33:43 ►
and the engineers
00:33:44 ►
but the scientists what they have accomplished is only to give us an
00:33:48 ►
unrecognizably abstract model of the world so I would prefer a world of
00:33:55 ►
intellectual pluralism where astrology and astronomy and Kabbalah and
00:34:02 ►
information theory and all these things worked in their own area,
00:34:08 ►
but no one claimed preeminence.
00:34:10 ►
Because you see, this claiming of preeminence rests on a false assumption.
00:34:15 ►
No idea can be dismissed that is internally consistent.
00:34:23 ►
There’s nothing more than that science is not more than internally
00:34:30 ►
self-consistent and astrology is not less than internally self-consistent so why should these
00:34:38 ►
things be placed on two different levels in terms of arbitrary of being arbiters of the truth.
00:34:46 ►
So I think that there will be, by psychology for instance,
00:34:54 ►
fringe human abilities and things like that discovered.
00:34:58 ►
But I think higher magic will always operate according to the laws of higher magic
00:35:03 ►
and that this will be a closed book to science
00:35:07 ►
simply because of the nature of the premises of both concerns.
00:35:14 ►
One of the things I didn’t get to say about this time theory
00:35:17 ►
that I put down this evening
00:35:19 ►
was that it’s a very anti-scientific theory.
00:35:24 ►
It cannot be integrated.
00:35:25 ►
This is not merely a physics of time
00:35:28 ►
that can be grafted onto orthodox physics
00:35:31 ►
and have science survive
00:35:33 ►
because what I’m saying has certain consequences
00:35:38 ►
in the realm of cause and effect and experimental design
00:35:42 ►
that make what is normally called
00:35:45 ►
a scientific experience out of the question.
00:35:50 ►
And another untestable hypothesis
00:35:53 ►
that riddles science from end to end
00:35:55 ►
is the idea that if A causes B at time F,
00:36:01 ►
then A will cause B at time anything else and that’s just obviously nonsense in any
00:36:10 ►
realm where we experience things but it’s necessary to believe that and so what science
00:36:17 ►
ends up being able to do this is interesting science then becomes a way of explaining anything which happens the
00:36:29 ►
same way over and over again regardless of the time that it happens we could
00:36:36 ►
almost describe science as the descriptive that branch of human
00:36:43 ►
knowledge which is concerned with the
00:36:46 ►
description of those processes
00:36:48 ►
which are not affected by the time
00:36:50 ►
in which they occur
00:36:51 ►
and none of
00:36:54 ►
those processes are interesting
00:36:55 ►
to living, thinking, feeling
00:36:57 ►
people because everything you
00:37:00 ►
experience is unique, every
00:37:01 ►
moment, every event, every person
00:37:04 ►
every situation so
00:37:06 ►
what’s happening here something is happening to the monkeys and it’s very
00:37:11 ►
dangerous and it takes about 25,000 years to happen it’s a mad rush because
00:37:19 ►
for it to happen the most dangerous processes in the universe have to lie present at hand.
00:37:26 ►
Nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, social control, genetic control, everything has to be possible
00:37:37 ►
for the good to be possible.
00:37:40 ►
The species is completely free to mirror itself.
00:37:45 ►
That is, in fact, apparently what this test is about.
00:37:50 ►
What freedom means is you find out how good you are
00:37:55 ►
by discovering what you do when you have the power to destroy yourself.
00:38:01 ►
And we as a species are in that position.
00:38:04 ►
And no one can do it but us
00:38:06 ►
and if we do not destroy ourselves
00:38:10 ►
then very obviously the intellectual tools
00:38:13 ►
that we have taken in hand
00:38:14 ►
are the tools which will send us out to the stars
00:38:19 ►
now as far as this idea that I talked about tonight
00:38:24 ►
about temporal fractals
00:38:28 ►
and the nature of time and that sort of thing
00:38:32 ►
that is only one aspect of this conquest of reality by information
00:38:39 ►
and I think you can see if you look back through biological and cultural history
00:38:45 ►
though no one so far as I know has ever actually described it this way
00:38:49 ►
what it really is is the conquest of dimensions
00:38:53 ►
with the earliest forms of life
00:38:58 ►
you get they are like the amoeba
00:39:01 ►
they essentially have a tactile perception.
00:39:05 ►
They can only perceive what they are immediately physically in contact with.
00:39:12 ►
And then in slightly higher organisms,
00:39:14 ►
you get the evolution of cells which distinguish light and dark.
00:39:18 ►
So there is at least the idea of a sense
00:39:20 ►
that there is something out there that comes and goes
00:39:24 ►
that cannot be
00:39:25 ►
tactilely recorded. It’s the coming and going of light. But then as organisms
00:39:32 ►
advance in complexity, the eye is where the evolutionary thrust comes once you
00:39:37 ►
get past the eye spot. Then there is a sense of things at a distance which do
00:39:44 ►
not tactilely impinge upon the organism
00:39:47 ►
but which nevertheless have importance for the organism
00:39:50 ►
they are distant pieces of food
00:39:52 ►
or distant enemies
00:39:54 ►
and the organism learns to move toward or away
00:39:58 ►
from these things
00:39:59 ►
and toward or away are dimensional concepts
00:40:03 ►
then when you get truly mobile organisms,
00:40:08 ►
you get, for instance, like monkeys or that sort of thing,
00:40:12 ►
they move in a much larger control space,
00:40:16 ►
and they move through it to grasp what they desire,
00:40:21 ►
and you get the evolution of a tactile sense that is under the
00:40:25 ►
control of the eye and then that essentially ends with the binocular
00:40:33 ►
vision and the bipedal locomotion that ends the conquest of physical dimension
00:40:39 ►
for biological objects but you then get language,
00:40:46 ►
which seems to have something to do with time,
00:40:50 ►
because language allows memory and the recollection of memory
00:40:57 ►
so that past states can be brought to bear on the present
00:41:02 ►
with an eye toward anticipation of the future.
00:41:07 ►
And suddenly you realize that what language is allowing this organism to do
00:41:11 ►
is to claim a whole new dimension.
00:41:15 ►
Language then is a dimension exploring vehicle of some sort.
00:41:23 ►
And to what degree, we don’t know because for
00:41:28 ►
instance obviously as animals we contact the dimensions past and future these are
00:41:35 ►
dimensions with great importance to an animal because what you learned in the
00:41:40 ►
past may keep you from being eaten in the future. But then once you have the luxury of civilization,
00:41:47 ►
we get language applied to subjects
00:41:50 ►
which are neither related to the past nor the future,
00:41:53 ►
like mathematics.
00:41:55 ►
And mathematics is a language which has gone out
00:42:00 ►
and described multidimensional spaces.
00:42:05 ►
I think that nothing is more exquisite than the interior music.
00:42:12 ►
And all music is obviously an effort to approximate this interior music.
00:42:18 ►
And I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not,
00:42:20 ►
but I’m sure you all know the story of Beethoven saying,
00:42:24 ►
you know, if you could
00:42:26 ►
hear what I can hear, you wouldn’t bother with what I’ve written, because it’s just
00:42:32 ►
compared to what I’m hearing. You have to, it’s a knife edge, because the music does lead deeper into these visionary states
00:42:45 ►
But I still think that once you are where you want to be that if you can cast
00:42:52 ►
loose from
00:42:54 ►
exterior musical input that
00:42:57 ►
This interior music will rise
00:43:00 ►
Into perception and reward you for that
00:43:04 ►
into perception and reward you for that.
00:43:09 ►
The way that I take psychedelic drugs seems very natural to me,
00:43:12 ►
but then when I describe it to groups of people like this,
00:43:15 ►
I realize that people have all kinds of styles,
00:43:19 ►
and this has caused the psychedelic experience to be sort of blurrily defined in the mass mind.
00:43:25 ►
My idea of how you take a psychedelic drug
00:43:28 ►
is that you reduce sensory input as low as you can
00:43:32 ►
without the reduction itself becoming an impediment.
00:43:36 ►
In other words, I’m not talking about isolation tanks and all that.
00:43:40 ►
I’m just saying a dark, quiet, calm, cool, empty room is the best kind of situation.
00:43:49 ►
And some of the most interesting trips that I’ve had have been to the accompaniment of a single
00:43:59 ►
sound, which is simply a drone. It’s like the bindu, the seed,
00:44:09 ►
around which then the multiplicity of the hallucinogenic vision can gather itself and constellate.
00:44:12 ►
I mean, I blush to tell you this,
00:44:14 ►
but some of my most interesting trips
00:44:17 ►
have been to the accompaniment of my floor heater,
00:44:21 ►
which makes a buzz like a refrigerator,
00:44:30 ►
heater which makes a buzz like a refrigerator and that buzz becomes you know the cutting edge of a light which is like a comet giving off in the eddies of its trail hallucination all the
00:44:38 ►
hallucinations there are so i think that music is intrinsic to everything that we’re
00:44:46 ►
talking about. We are aspiring to the condition of music and we need music
00:44:53 ►
therefore we should have it as an exterior input when we can have it no
00:44:58 ►
other way. So saying that I don’t listen to music during those states is not a put-down of music.
00:45:07 ►
Music is obviously the ideal because it is one of these tonal languages that you understand by hearing.
00:45:16 ►
It is an ursprach. It’s a language of emotion.
00:45:21 ►
Real quick question. According to the graphs that have been developed
00:45:25 ►
it seems to me
00:45:26 ►
and to the
00:45:27 ►
end date
00:45:28 ►
that you
00:45:28 ►
were looking down
00:45:29 ►
that you could have
00:45:30 ►
almost your own
00:45:31 ►
running bio-rhythm chart
00:45:32 ►
based on this graph
00:45:34 ►
and tell whether
00:45:35 ►
novelty is going to be
00:45:36 ►
coming up in the next
00:45:36 ►
week or three months
00:45:37 ►
or whatever
00:45:38 ►
have you gone that far?
00:45:39 ►
oh yes
00:45:40 ►
definitely
00:45:41 ►
one of the things
00:45:41 ►
that I do
00:45:42 ►
is I have a
00:45:43 ►
counseling service
00:45:44 ►
called anamnesis and the I do is I have a counseling service called Anamnesis.
00:45:46 ►
And the reason I organized it as a counseling service
00:45:49 ►
was because I wanted people to interact with my wave
00:45:53 ►
on the level of their personal history.
00:45:55 ►
And I didn’t want them to be contaminated by being my friends.
00:46:01 ►
So I basically just advertised this service in common ground which says something
00:46:06 ►
about understand novelty in your life maps of the past and the future this and that and then people
00:46:13 ►
come to me and I interview them about their life and we search the wave for a good fit to their life and then we integrate their wave
00:46:25 ►
as a statistical component of the larger wave
00:46:29 ►
and then we can make maps of the present,
00:46:33 ►
the next six months,
00:46:34 ►
the next 10 or 15 years
00:46:36 ►
at different levels
00:46:37 ►
and then people live it out
00:46:39 ►
and see if it works,
00:46:40 ►
see if when the graph indicates novelty
00:46:43 ►
and their life should be increasing it is increasing
00:46:46 ►
and when it shouldn’t be it doesn’t it’s like i’ve invented a one-term form of astrology
00:46:53 ►
it only talks about novelty it tells you when it will go up when it will go down it doesn’t in any
00:47:01 ►
given situation say what will happen it only defines the level of novelty that must be fulfilled by whatever happens.
00:47:13 ►
Synchronicity, you see, one way that I think of this time wave is orthodox chemistry, physics, biology, probability theory, all these things go together to describe what is possible.
00:47:30 ►
So you say, you know, could an asteroid strike the Earth?
00:47:34 ►
Let’s ask the scientists.
00:47:35 ►
They say, well, yes, it’s possible.
00:47:37 ►
There are enough of them.
00:47:38 ►
The probability is very low.
00:47:40 ►
Or you say, you know, can we cleave this molecule with the input of this energy?
00:47:46 ►
And you say, well, yes, it’s possible.
00:47:48 ►
Physics allows for that.
00:47:50 ►
But what my theory seeks to describe is not what is possible,
00:47:56 ►
but what out of the set of all possible things,
00:48:01 ►
why is it that certain things undergo the formality of actually occurring it is as though
00:48:08 ►
they are selected out of this vast pool of possible things things which could happen without violating
00:48:15 ►
any known laws but out of that vast reservoir certain things undergo the formality of occurring. And once they have occurred, the fact of their occurring has defined the level of novelty in that now past moment.
00:48:32 ►
And so that’s what it’s like this novelty wave is an additional variable which has to be added in to physical laws. It’s the variable which dictates what, out of the possible states,
00:48:48 ►
which ones actually are realized.
00:48:51 ►
And it’s the flux, the coming and going of that wave of novelty which controls that.
00:48:57 ►
Now, if you’re in a highly novel situation,
00:49:02 ►
then you get what Lilly calls cosmic coincidence or Jung calls
00:49:07 ►
synchronicity you get obvious connections which have no obvious
00:49:13 ►
causuistry behind them they are connected through meaning not through
00:49:18 ►
the chain of cause and effect and that is simply happening because the level of novelty is so great that these
00:49:28 ►
sideways connections are beginning to come apparent and at the end of time or at the
00:49:34 ►
ingression into this higher dimension I think this will become excruciatingly present in the foreground of our experience.
00:49:47 ►
In other words, synchronicity is getting stronger.
00:49:50 ►
Coincidence is getting stronger.
00:49:53 ►
The world is becoming more irrational.
00:49:55 ►
Science did work better in the 19th century than it’s working in the 20th
00:50:02 ►
because reality is slowly slipping through its fingers.
00:50:05 ►
There was a maximum moment
00:50:07 ►
when the dreams of science and the nature of reality
00:50:10 ►
overlaid almost perfectly
00:50:12 ►
but now reality is growing beyond it
00:50:15 ►
and pulling away from it.
00:50:17 ►
And I think soon I shall be pulling away from this meeting.
00:50:22 ►
Thank you very much.
00:50:32 ►
What an amazing mind he had, don’t you think?
00:50:36 ►
I’m sure you caught it, but do you remember when Terrence said,
00:50:42 ►
the mushroom has this particular ability to invoke or allow or trigger a voice in the head,
00:50:46 ►
this logos-like phenomena of information unrolling in your head.
00:50:50 ►
No other drug that I’m familiar with does that consistently.
00:50:54 ►
But when I heard him say that, my first thought was,
00:50:55 ►
what about ayahuasca?
00:50:58 ►
But the more I think about it, the more I’ve come to agree with him.
00:51:03 ►
Without exception, the mushroom brings me a definite logos-like voice in my head every time.
00:51:05 ►
Ayahuasca, on the other hand, at least to me, doesn’t present this Logos voice.
00:51:12 ►
Lady A is much more direct in that she speaks to me as a distinct entity,
00:51:17 ►
sort of like the voice of Mother Earth, if you will.
00:51:20 ►
Once you’ve had both experiences several times yourself,
00:51:22 ►
my guess is that you’ll be able to distinguish these subtle differences on your own.
00:51:28 ►
And most likely it won’t even take multiple experiences.
00:51:32 ►
As the bard often said, pay attention. Pay attention.
00:51:46 ►
After my last podcast, the first person to write and point out the little mystery that I alluded to was Jay,
00:51:54 ►
who you will remember was the benefactor who provided the recordings for Podcast 100 and for several others.
00:51:56 ►
Here is part of what he wrote.
00:52:03 ►
Just wanted to say that I did notice the November 2012 date mentioned by Terrence in the above podcast,
00:52:06 ►
rather than the usual December 21st we’ve all heard as the end date of the time
00:52:08 ►
wave. Some refinement
00:52:10 ►
made by Terrence in the mid-80s, perhaps?
00:52:13 ►
Well,
00:52:14 ►
until we hear some more of Terrence’s
00:52:16 ►
early lectures on the subject, I’m
00:52:17 ►
not going to draw any final conclusions.
00:52:20 ►
But it is a
00:52:22 ►
neat little mystery that I’m sure will be cleared
00:52:24 ►
up eventually.
00:52:28 ►
And thanks for stopping by for a visit a few weeks ago, Jay.
00:52:34 ►
It was a real honor to meet you in person, and I look forward to our next in-person get-together.
00:52:38 ►
I don’t have the time to go into this in any detail right now,
00:52:44 ►
but I want to thank several of our fellow salonners for creating some logos for the salon.
00:52:48 ►
I hope you haven’t been thinking that I didn’t like them or appreciate them,
00:52:50 ►
because that’s not the case at all.
00:52:53 ►
My plan all along has been to set up a page on our website where they can be displayed and downloaded by any of you
00:52:56 ►
who want to link to the salon from your own sites.
00:53:00 ►
It’s just a little project that keeps slipping away on me,
00:53:03 ►
but I’ll see that it gets done before too much longer.
00:53:06 ►
But I really do appreciate your creativity and hard work, and I think all of the logos you’ve sent are quite brilliant, and hopefully they’ll be online soon.
00:53:16 ►
Well, there’s several other emails and postings that I’d like to comment on right now, but I’m going to use my remaining allocation of daily energy
00:53:25 ►
for more of a personal note instead.
00:53:28 ►
If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a long time, I’m sure you’ll recall me mentioning
00:53:32 ►
that my ultimate purpose in producing these podcasts is to leave a few traces of myself
00:53:38 ►
for my grandchildren’s grandchildren to hear, sort of a message in a time capsule.
00:53:44 ►
During my days as a lawyer, I discovered
00:53:46 ►
that when an older person dies, there’s so much stuff to go through and get rid of that nine times
00:53:52 ►
out of ten, the deceased’s last wishes are ignored, primarily due to the press of events and lack of
00:53:58 ►
time to go through everything. For example, somewhere in one of my many boxes of journals
00:54:03 ►
and other writing that I’ve done throughout my life
00:54:05 ►
are the letters that my dad sent to my mother during the time he was serving in the Navy during World War II,
00:54:11 ►
or the Big One, as he liked to call it.
00:54:13 ►
But to be honest, I really don’t expect them to be discovered due to the haphazard way I’ve thrown things together.
00:54:21 ►
Heck, I probably already threw them out myself without even knowing it.
00:54:25 ►
together. Heck, I probably already threw them out myself without even knowing it. So the rest of this podcast is intended primarily for my descendants to hear so they can get a sense of
00:54:31 ►
what one of their ancestors was thinking during these turbulent times. Part of what I’m about to
00:54:36 ►
say is a political rant. It’s something I’ve done my best to avoid in these podcasts, so don’t feel
00:54:42 ►
like you’ll be missing anything if you get on with the next item in your queue.
00:54:46 ►
There’s nothing earth-shaking here, just a little venting on my part to make me feel
00:54:51 ►
better.
00:54:52 ►
It’s been a long couple of weeks here in San Diego.
00:54:56 ►
Our worst fears were realized in that our county had to face a true firestorm.
00:55:02 ►
Since there are so many accounts of the blazes all over the web now,
00:55:05 ►
I’ll only mention one thing that may have been missed unless you paid close attention.
00:55:10 ►
And that is about the Department of U.S. Government that is supposed to help in these circumstances.
00:55:15 ►
It’s an outfit called FEMA. And before I continue, I want to point out the fact that just like
00:55:21 ►
there’s a big difference between the U.S. government and the American people, the same is true of FEMA management and the thousands of volunteers
00:55:29 ►
who gear up to staff the organization in a crisis.
00:55:32 ►
The people inside the system, for the most part, are really good people, but the system
00:55:37 ►
they’re laboring in sucks.
00:55:39 ►
Sucks big time.
00:55:41 ►
Our local firefighters started working on a Saturday but by Sunday the
00:55:46 ►
desert winds began to blow in earnest and picked up to a steady 50 miles per
00:55:50 ►
hour with gusts to 70 here in town and in the mountains they peaked at more
00:55:54 ►
than a hundred miles an hour. If I’m not mistaken our fellow saloners in Greece,
00:55:59 ►
Italy and other parts of Europe know exactly what this means because it
00:56:04 ►
wasn’t long ago that they had to battle a similar inferno in their areas.
00:56:08 ►
Basically, think hurricane, but with fire instead of water being driven by the wind.
00:56:14 ►
It was a very dicey situation, to say the least.
00:56:18 ►
Within hours of the declaration of an emergency, though,
00:56:20 ►
our wonderful neighbors to the south in the city of Tijuana, Mexico,
00:56:24 ►
sent both men and equipment to help fight the fires and their help was
00:56:28 ►
not only invaluable but it was considerably more help than we received
00:56:33 ►
at the time from FEMA it wasn’t until afternoon on Wednesday that the first
00:56:38 ►
paper pushers from FEMA arrived on the scene along with a handful of cots the
00:56:43 ►
cots of course weren’t needed by then
00:56:45 ►
because local merchants had already emptied out their warehouses
00:56:48 ►
and donated more than enough cots to cover the shelters.
00:56:52 ►
Then FEMA added insult to injury with their fake news conference
00:56:56 ►
where one of their top screwheads said he was very pleased with FEMA’s response.
00:57:01 ►
And maybe I should agree with that
00:57:03 ►
because by staying out of the way of our local
00:57:05 ►
and state firefighters and emergency workers, they were able to do their jobs much better
00:57:10 ►
without the feds getting in the way. My point is that the federal government did essentially
00:57:16 ►
nothing to help in the early critical hours of this emergency. For example, our local
00:57:21 ►
officials began getting ready for this days ahead of time.
00:57:29 ►
As soon as the weather prediction said that we would be getting strong Santa Ana winds in the days ahead,
00:57:35 ►
just as they’re predicting again right now for next weekend, well, our local officials went into action.
00:57:41 ►
They even were able to get the military to position some of its firefighting aircraft close to here.
00:57:46 ►
Had those planes been used on Saturday and Sunday, things might have been very different. But they sat on the ground for days waiting for the proper paperwork
00:57:51 ►
to allow them to help. As it turned out, by the time the federal and military bureaucracy
00:57:57 ►
got their precious little pieces of paper all stamped and signed properly, the winds
00:58:03 ►
had become so fierce that those planes
00:58:05 ►
were grounded until later in the week.
00:58:07 ►
Every time I think about that, my blood begins to boil.
00:58:10 ►
So let me get on to the positive part of this story.
00:58:14 ►
We learned something extremely valuable through all this, and that is, if your local officials
00:58:20 ►
have their act together and make their plans to handle things like this on their own, and
00:58:24 ►
not count on the federal government’s help until after the fact
00:58:27 ►
when the politicians can fly in for their photo ops and hand out a few big checks.
00:58:32 ►
If that’s all you’re counting on from the feds, well, you can come through anything.
00:58:36 ►
In the end, the fact that the entire county wasn’t burned to the ground
00:58:39 ►
can be attributed to the planning and heroics of the local, state, and out-of-county
00:58:44 ►
and out-of-state help that we got from our neighbors.
00:58:47 ►
Frankly, I was astounded at the way this large community of about 4 million people came together.
00:58:54 ►
There’s great wealth disparity in the U.S., and this county is no exception.
00:58:58 ►
But I saw some rich people bringing food and supplies, help and comfort to the people in
00:59:03 ►
the shelters.
00:59:04 ►
And by the way, what was most impressive to me, though,
00:59:07 ►
was the amount of volunteer labor that came from the less fortunate in our community.
00:59:12 ►
For example, on the first day of the firestorm, or second, whatever it was, on Monday,
00:59:17 ►
as I was shuttling between staging areas,
00:59:20 ►
I stopped to talk to some Mexicans who were cutting the lawn and cleaning up the yard of a neighbor of mine.
00:59:26 ►
And I asked them why they weren’t home with their families.
00:59:28 ►
Because of the ninos, they told me.
00:59:31 ►
Our babies need to eat tomorrow.
00:59:33 ►
Besides, one man said, their wives were already out volunteering at one of the shelters.
00:59:38 ►
Now here in San Diego, we’re only a couple dozen kilometers from the border.
00:59:43 ►
And us Caucasians are in
00:59:45 ►
the minority here so it’s very easy for us to see how much of our everyday
00:59:49 ►
activities are enhanced by Mexican labor and yes we are aware of the fact that
00:59:55 ►
many of them probably are in the US without proper documents but the truth
00:59:59 ►
is we can’t exist here without them they are are our friends and neighbors, and quite frankly,
01:00:05 ►
their ancestors were living on this land for many centuries
01:00:08 ►
before the Spanish Catholic invaders drove them out.
01:00:12 ►
As far as I’m concerned, they have more of a right to live and work here than I do.
01:00:17 ►
And I also saw several news accounts where, in the background,
01:00:21 ►
you could see wealthy landowners fleeing from their palatial homes while their day laborers continued to work the background, you can see wealthy landowners fleeing from their palatial homes
01:00:25 ►
while their day laborers continued to work the fields, all bent over and breathing this toxic air.
01:00:31 ►
And when they were questioned about why they continued to work as the fires raged around them,
01:00:35 ►
it was always the same.
01:00:37 ►
Our babies have to eat.
01:00:39 ►
For my money, these people are the real Americans here,
01:00:43 ►
not the bottled blonde beach bunnies and their rich boyfriends.
01:00:47 ►
In October of 2001, I wrote an essay titled, The Difference Between America and Americans, and it began,
01:00:54 ►
Although this seems almost too obvious to point out, there are significant differences between the government of the United States, informally called America, and the people it purports to represent, Americans.
01:01:07 ►
Now, while that essay is somewhat out of date today, its basic premise, I believe, remains
01:01:12 ►
true.
01:01:14 ►
Right now, 80% or more of the people living in the U.S. want Bush’s war to end, and we
01:01:20 ►
want it to end today.
01:01:22 ►
Yet our opinion holds absolutely no sway with the demented screwheads in Washington
01:01:27 ►
who continue to enhance their own political power at the expense of we the people.
01:01:33 ►
In short, if 80% of the people can’t get this war stopped,
01:01:37 ►
then I see absolutely no way that this can, by any stretch of the imagination, be called a democracy.
01:01:43 ►
As I wrote in an essay in January of 2005,
01:01:48 ►
Mythical America, rest in peace.
01:01:51 ►
Now, why am I taking all of this time to have this say in a podcast?
01:01:56 ►
Well, in the middle of this firestorm, I managed to contact pneumonia
01:02:00 ►
and had what, for me, was kind of a close call.
01:02:04 ►
So, for the past week, I’ve been trying to sleep sitting up in bed
01:02:07 ►
and more or less fading in and out of some fevered dreams.
01:02:11 ►
I had a few of those long nights of the soul in which to take stock of my life
01:02:16 ►
and try to look ahead as positively as possible.
01:02:19 ►
And there still is a lot of processing I have left to do,
01:02:21 ►
but many things have now become very clear to me, and in some strange way, I now also feel much closer to many of our fellow salonners,
01:02:31 ►
particularly the ones who feel stuck. Stuck like me, with no resources to move to a more
01:02:38 ►
sustainable place to live, and who also don’t want to leave their close family ties behind
01:02:42 ►
them. Not a week goes by without my receiving an email from someone who’s living at home with parents
01:02:49 ►
who don’t understand their interest in our sacred medicines.
01:02:53 ►
Well, guess what? That problem can run in both directions.
01:02:57 ►
There are some of us parents who do more or less get it, but our children don’t.
01:03:02 ►
And hey, who do we have to blame for that but ourselves?
01:03:05 ►
We’re the ones who laid those conservative, boxed-in foundations that they now live in.
01:03:11 ►
At times, us old hippies can sometimes feel as isolated as you do.
01:03:17 ►
This psychedelic adventure in consciousness exploration isn’t an easy path to follow.
01:03:24 ►
It certainly isn’t for the faint of heart,
01:03:26 ►
but you, my dear friends, whether you use the medicine or not,
01:03:31 ►
you’ve chosen to do something new and unique and creative with your mind
01:03:34 ►
rather than turn it over to our corporate masters
01:03:37 ►
whose main objective seems to be to suck the life out of us.
01:03:41 ►
So what can you do? What can any of us do?
01:03:45 ►
Heck if I know.
01:03:47 ►
Sorry about that.
01:03:49 ►
But ultimately,
01:03:51 ►
complaining about lack of resources
01:03:52 ►
and opportunity
01:03:53 ►
isn’t going to get us anywhere.
01:03:55 ►
It’s what we do
01:03:56 ►
with what we’ve got
01:03:57 ►
where we’re at
01:03:58 ►
that will eventually
01:03:59 ►
turn the tide for us.
01:04:01 ►
For me, that means
01:04:02 ►
continuing these podcasts
01:04:03 ►
at all costs.
01:04:06 ►
As William James pointed out, you can change your life simply by changing your attitude. And you do that one thought at a
01:04:12 ►
time. So I’ve decided to ignore all the great events over which I have absolutely no control.
01:04:20 ►
For me, everything from stopping this insane war to legalizing our sacred medicines
01:04:25 ►
is something that those who want to continue rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic can do.
01:04:31 ►
I’m heading to higher ground, and I’m beginning a quest to put a stake in a sustainable community somewhere before I die
01:04:38 ►
so that if everything does come completely unraveled, at least my grandchildren will have an option,
01:04:45 ►
a place to come to.
01:04:48 ►
And whether I accomplish that or not,
01:04:49 ►
well, it really doesn’t matter.
01:04:51 ►
What matters is that I try.
01:04:53 ►
It’s the journey, after all,
01:04:56 ►
not the destination that makes this life worthwhile.
01:04:58 ►
And believe it or not,
01:05:01 ►
I’ve really never been so optimistic about our future.
01:05:04 ►
The future of the psychedelic community, that is.
01:05:06 ►
I may not sound that way right now, but hey, I’m
01:05:07 ►
a little tired and hurting and possibly still
01:05:10 ►
a little bit in shock. But you know what?
01:05:12 ►
Just by stepping way
01:05:14 ►
out of my box here and
01:05:15 ►
dumping all of this on you,
01:05:17 ►
well, it’s helped me feel orders of magnitude
01:05:19 ►
better. Thanks for
01:05:22 ►
listening. And most of
01:05:24 ►
all, thanks for being here with me in the Psychedelic
01:05:26 ►
Salon. I’m really looking forward to our next time together, and I promise you that my next
01:05:31 ►
podcast is going to contain as much sunshine as it’ll hold. For now, this is Lorenzo signing off
01:05:39 ►
from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. And hey, don’t forget to send
01:05:46 ►
Sasha a get well card.
01:05:48 ►
That one thing would mean more to me than
01:05:50 ►
anything else you can do right now.
01:05:52 ►
So, bless you for doing that.