Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

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(Minutes : Seconds into program)

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

04:33 “What I think a psychedelic society, what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology, is the idea of creating a society which always lives in the light of the mystery of being. In other words, that solutions should be displaced from the central role that they have had in social organization. And mysteries, irreducible mysteries, should be put in their place.”

06:44 “Much of the problem of the modern dilemma is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected… . You see, if you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”

11:59 “Experience must be made primary. The language of the self must be made primary.”

12:14 “What I’m advocating is that we each take responsibility for the cultural transformation by realizing it is not something which will be disseminated from the top down. It is something which each of us can contribute to by attempting to live as far into the future as possible.”

15:12 “A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks.”

19:07 “We need to realize that there is a gene-swarm, not a set of species on the Earth, that half the time when you think you are thinking you are actually listening.”

29:44 “I think the engineering mentality, which will [???] to change man into his machines, will have to be counter-poised by the psychedelic, Earth-oriented, imagination oriented side of things, which will create then the potential for the spiritual marriage that will be the alchemical perfection of a new form of humanity.”

31:14 “You claim this higher level of freedom by the simple act of applying attention to being.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:24

Now, before I go on, I want to thank all of you who sent get-well greetings,

00:00:29

and I want to let you know that I’m definitely on the mend.

00:00:32

I’ve even begun to get some of my energy back, thanks in no small part to my friend Mateo,

00:00:38

who just returned from the jungle with some magical plants and medicines to help me on my way.

00:00:43

with some magical plants and medicines to help me on my way.

00:00:48

Also, I want to thank Terry L., who last week sent in a donation to help with the expenses of producing these podcasts.

00:00:52

Terry, I really appreciate your generosity, and thank you for helping out.

00:00:57

Now, as for today’s program, I’m really excited about this one.

00:01:02

It’s another Terrence McKenna talk, of course, but this one is special to me.

00:01:07

Although our angel Diana sent it to me a few weeks ago,

00:01:11

it wasn’t until today that I got around to listening to it.

00:01:14

And what a gem it is, at least from my perspective.

00:01:18

I know that many of our fellow salonners have already read Terrence’s essay titled Psychedelic Society.

00:01:24

Fellow Saloners have already read Terrence’s essay titled Psychedelic Society.

00:01:29

The copy of it that I have is in a wonderful little book titled Entheogens and the Future of Religion that my friend Robert Forte edited.

00:01:34

And it’s chock full of great essays by such psychedelic luminaries as Robert Jesse, Dale Pendle, and Albert Hoffman.

00:01:42

But it’s Terrence’s essay that I’ve read and re-read over and over.

00:01:47

In fact, my copy is so marked up with notes I’ve written and highlights that I’ve made,

00:01:53

well, it’s getting kind of hard to read.

00:01:55

Now, one of the quotes from that essay is something I’ve used in several of my own lectures,

00:01:59

and that is,

00:02:00

Half the time you think you’re thinking, you are actually listening.

00:02:04

And that is, half the time you think you’re thinking, you are actually listening.

00:02:13

And if you haven’t already done so, you may find it interesting to pause for a moment now and think about what that statement implies.

00:02:18

In Bob Forte’s book, there is a note at the beginning of the essay that says,

00:02:26

this is based on a talk given at an ARUPA meeting at Esalen Institute in June 1984.

00:02:33

Well, the talk you’re about to hear is perhaps even a precursor to the June 1984 version because he begins by saying that the date of this talk is February 1984,

00:02:39

which means that this might be the earliest version of this particular talk.

00:02:43

And for me, it was a real thrill to hear this wonderful tapestry of ideas in Terrence’s own words.

00:02:50

So without any further ado, why don’t we join Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends at Esalen Institute in February 1984

00:02:58

and hear what he was thinking about way back then

00:03:02

and see if we can pick out a few tidbits that are still relevant to us yet today.

00:03:12

What I want to talk about tonight is the notion or the idea of a psychedelic society.

00:03:20

When I spoke at Santa Barbara at the psychedelics conference

00:03:25

whenever it was

00:03:27

last May a year ago

00:03:29

my contact lenses failed me

00:03:33

at a critical point in my lecture

00:03:36

I simply had to wing it

00:03:39

and later when I played this tape back

00:03:43

I heard this phrase

00:03:45

psychedelic society

00:03:47

and I had never used it consciously in a lecture

00:03:51

but because I had said it

00:03:54

and because there had been a ripple of resonance to it

00:03:58

from the crowd of people there

00:04:00

I began to think about it

00:04:02

and this evening I will just generally assess

00:04:07

what it might mean for us I’m definitely a pioneer in this field I’m sure you’re

00:04:15

all familiar with the book Megatrends which is making quite an impression at

00:04:22

the moment well Meg. Omega Trans nowhere mentions

00:04:25

the eminent transformation of human society

00:04:28

through the application of psychedelic drugs.

00:04:32

I don’t know what they were thinking of.

00:04:40

What I think of psychedelic society,

00:04:43

what that notion means or implies to me in terms of ideology, is the idea of creating a society which always lives in the light of the mystery of being.

00:05:18

of being. In other words, that solutions should be displaced from the central role that they have had in social organization. And mysteries, irre Haldane in the 1920s in an essay said,

00:05:27

the universe may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose.

00:05:36

And I suggest to you that as we look back over human history, every pinnacle of civilization,

00:05:49

human history, every pinnacle of civilization, whether it be Mayan or Greco-Roman or Sung dynasty, has believed that it was in possession of an accurate description of the cosmos and

00:05:57

of man’s relationship to it that seems to go along with the full flowering of a civilization.

00:06:07

But from the point of view of our present civilization,

00:06:11

we regard all those conceptions as at worst quaint, at best half right,

00:06:17

and congratulate ourselves that our civilization at last has its finger on the real description of what is going on.

00:06:30

But I think that this is not ignorance and that beliefs should be put aside

00:06:50

and that a psychedelic society would abandon belief systems for direct experience and this

00:07:00

is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma is that direct experience has been

00:07:07

discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected I would prefer a

00:07:14

kind of intellectual anarchy where whatever was pragmatically applicable was brought to bear on any situation but where belief was understood

00:07:27

as a self-limiting function because you see if you believe something you’re automatically precluded

00:07:35

from believing its opposite which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief.

00:07:47

And I maintain that it’s pointless to have beliefs, in a sense,

00:07:53

because the universe really is stranger than we suppose.

00:07:59

And what we need is a return to what in the 16th century was called the Baconian method,

00:08:07

which means not the elaboration of fantastic thought constructs which explain,

00:08:14

but merely a phenomenological cataloging of what we experience.

00:08:23

Computer networks and psychedelic

00:08:25

drugs

00:08:26

and the

00:08:26

increased

00:08:27

availability

00:08:27

of information

00:08:29

in the

00:08:29

world

00:08:29

have actually

00:08:31

made possible

00:08:32

the evolution

00:08:33

of new

00:08:34

alien

00:08:35

information

00:08:36

states

00:08:36

which never

00:08:37

existed

00:08:38

before

00:08:38

and we

00:08:40

are

00:08:41

processing

00:08:42

these things

00:08:43

but at a

00:08:44

very slow rate because we are hindered by ideology.

00:08:48

Now, I mentioned in an earlier workshop this afternoon that Freudian models, Jungian models of the psychedelic experience,

00:09:08

models of the psychedelic experience which saw it as somehow a stripping away of resistance and a revealing of complex and hidden emotions and motives and belief systems has been replaced

00:09:18

in the last 10 5 to 10 years with the shamanic model of hallucinogenic and shamanic experience.

00:09:28

This model holds that archaic peoples have deputized special people to probe hidden information

00:09:39

fields using psychedelic drugs, and these the information extracted from these information

00:09:47

fields is then used to guide and direct the society now i’m interested in this second model

00:09:58

and spend time in the amazon and and i’m familiar with the operational mechanics of shamanism

00:10:06

and shamanic personalities and that sort of thing.

00:10:09

But I believe actually that the psychedelic experience looms larger

00:10:15

than the institution of shamanism

00:10:18

and that we hold a unique opportunity

00:10:23

which is sort of the flip side of the culture crisis.

00:10:28

Our ability to destroy ourselves

00:10:31

is the mirror image of our ability to save ourselves.

00:10:36

And what is lacking is a clear vision of what should be done.

00:10:41

What should be done is certainly not the accumulation

00:10:44

of ever larger nuclear arsenals

00:10:47

and the promotion of all kinds of primate game playing of the sort that Tim Leary is well

00:10:55

reversed in denouncing what needs to be done is that fundamental ontological conceptions about reality have to be remade. We need a

00:11:09

new language and in order to have a new language we must have a new reality. It’s almost a

00:11:17

kind of Ouroboric equation or a bootstrap situation. A new reality will generate a new language.

00:11:26

A new language will fix a new reality

00:11:30

and make it part of this reality.

00:11:35

These psychedelic drugs

00:11:37

can be conceived of as points

00:11:41

on an informational grid.

00:11:43

They provide new perspectives on reality. And it

00:11:48

is when you connect all the points of perspective that you have on reality that a reasonably

00:11:55

applicable model of it begins to appear. And I think this reasonably applicable model,

00:12:02

what Wittgenstein called something which is true enough

00:12:06

is what we’re looking for

00:12:08

the true enough mapping

00:12:11

of experience onto theory

00:12:13

is what we’re looking for

00:12:15

but experience must be made primary

00:12:19

the language of the self

00:12:21

must be made primary

00:12:23

and anarchy carries this responsibility even when it’s only political anarchy.

00:12:31

What I’m advocating is that we each take responsibility for the cultural transformation

00:12:38

by realizing that it is not something which will be disseminated from the top down.

00:12:49

It is something which each of us can contribute to by attempting to live as far into the future as possible.

00:12:54

You know, we must get rid of the conceptions of the 40s, the 50s, the 60s,

00:13:00

the 70s, the 80s, the 90s.

00:13:10

60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, we must smear the historical moment and become exemplars of the humanity of the end time. And those of you who attended my lecture this afternoon

00:13:17

about time know that I believe that liberation, or let’s even say decency

00:13:26

as a human quality

00:13:28

is an actual resonance

00:13:31

and anticipation

00:13:32

of this future perfected state of humanity

00:13:36

and we can will the perfect future into being

00:13:41

by becoming microcosms

00:13:43

of the perfect future and no longer casting blame outward on

00:13:49

institutions or hierarchies of responsibility and control but by realizing that the opportunity is

00:13:58

here the responsibility is here and the two may never be congruent again and the salvation of your immortal soul may depend on what you do with the opportunity.

00:14:13

So what do you do with the opportunity?

00:14:17

What does it mean to say in operational terms,

00:14:21

live as far into the future as you can live. It means taking a position vis-a-vis

00:14:30

this emergent hyper-dimensional reality. It does not necessarily mean becoming a psychedelic

00:14:38

drug user yourself, but it means admitting to yourself the possibility.

00:14:58

And if you feel the heroic potential within yourself to be one of the experiencers, one of the pioneers, then you know what to do.

00:15:06

If, on the other hand, you fear to be lost in the abyss, you fear what William Blake called falling into eternal death,

00:15:09

falling from the spiral of being,

00:15:12

which connects one reincarnation to another,

00:15:15

and falling into the realm of eternal death,

00:15:18

then you orient yourself towards the psychedelic experience,

00:15:24

towards the psychedelic phenomenon as a source of information.

00:15:28

A mirror image of the psychedelic experience in hardware are computer networks.

00:15:37

Computer networks, paradoxically enough, are a deeply feminizing influence on society

00:15:45

where in hardware the unconscious is actually being created.

00:15:51

It’s as though we took the platonic bon mot

00:15:55

about how if God did not exist man would invent him

00:15:59

and say if the unconscious does not exist

00:16:03

humanity will invent it in the form of these vast networks

00:16:08

able to transfer and transform information. This is in fact what we are caught up in,

00:16:16

is a transforming of information. We have not physically changed in the last 40,000 years.

00:16:25

not physically changed in the last 40,000 years.

00:16:28

The human type was established at the end of the last glaciation.

00:16:31

But change, which was previously operable

00:16:34

in the biological realm,

00:16:36

is now operable in the realm of culture.

00:16:40

And we are shedding cultural adumbrations

00:16:43

of our vision of the unitary mystery

00:16:46

at a faster and faster rate as we try to accommodate ourselves

00:16:51

and mirror ourselves to the mystery which lies ahead of us in time

00:16:57

and which is throwing this vast shadow of fatedness

00:17:03

back over the entire experience

00:17:05

of human history

00:17:06

for everyone who has lived in it.

00:17:09

And previous to our own era,

00:17:11

the only control language

00:17:14

which could be applied to this thing

00:17:16

which was bringing people together

00:17:19

and causing birth and death

00:17:21

and tearing down and erecting civilizations

00:17:24

was God.

00:17:25

And it was imagined as a self-conscious force that was leaning into the world like a cat

00:17:34

into a fishbowl and making things happen.

00:17:38

Now we have a different notion, a notion of a vector system where forces over a large area are oriented

00:17:50

toward a very small space. And this is what history is. It’s an inrushing toward what

00:17:58

the Buddhists call the realm of the densely packed a transformational realm

00:18:05

where the opposites are unified

00:18:08

and the way I characterize

00:18:11

this union of opposites

00:18:12

is to say

00:18:13

it is that realm

00:18:15

where the body

00:18:16

is finally interiorized

00:18:19

the mind

00:18:20

is finally exteriorized

00:18:23

the way I think of the mind is as the fourth dimensional, a fourth

00:18:28

dimensional organ of your body. You can’t see it because it’s in the fourth dimension, but you

00:18:35

experience a sectioning of it in the phenomenon of consciousness. But that is only a partial

00:18:42

sectioning of it, the way a plane gives a

00:18:46

partial picture of a cone when it truncates it.

00:18:51

The growth of information systems is only a mirroring in masculine hardware of what already exists in nature as a fact

00:19:05

and it is up to us to hone our intuitions

00:19:09

and to become aware of this pre-existent system

00:19:14

of communication and wiring

00:19:16

so that we can step away from the dualisms

00:19:20

which separate us from each other and from the world.

00:19:24

We need to realize that there is a gene swarm,

00:19:28

not a set of species on the earth,

00:19:31

that half the time when you think you’re thinking,

00:19:35

you’re actually listening,

00:19:37

and that ideas are remarkably slippery things

00:19:40

and are very difficult to trace to their origins,

00:19:44

and that we really are

00:19:45

one-on-one and all together in a dimension that is not as accessible as

00:19:52

you might wish to be congealed as Finnegan’s Wakes is. The psychedelics are a

00:20:01

red-hot social issue issue social issue, ethical issue

00:20:07

whatever the term for it is

00:20:10

and it is precisely because

00:20:12

they are deconditioning agents

00:20:14

they will cast doubt in you

00:20:17

if you’re a Hasidic rabbi

00:20:19

a Marxist anthropologist

00:20:21

or an altar boy

00:20:22

because their business is to dissolve belief systems

00:20:27

and they do this very well and then they leave you with the raw datum of experience

00:20:33

what William James called in talking of infants a blooming buzzing confusion is what they leave you with the raw datum of experience and out of that

00:20:46

you reconstruct the world and you need to understand that it is a

00:20:54

dialogue where your decisions the projection of your grammar on to the

00:21:00

Intellectual space in front of you is going to gel into a mode of being.

00:21:06

We actually all create our own universe

00:21:12

because we are all operating with our own private languages

00:21:16

which are only very crudely translatable

00:21:20

into any other person’s language.

00:21:24

There’s even a physical analog to this

00:21:26

which will further reinforce this notion of alienation.

00:21:31

It is that your picture of the world

00:21:34

impinging on your eyes is made of photons.

00:21:37

Photons are tiny wave packets

00:21:40

so closely circumscribed energetically

00:21:43

that they can be thought of particles,

00:21:45

thought of as particles.

00:21:47

That means that every single photon

00:21:50

which falls on the back of my eye

00:21:52

is different from every single photon

00:21:55

which falls on the back of any one of your eyes.

00:21:59

This means that I am using 100%

00:22:02

a different section of the world

00:22:04

than any one of you is to get a picture of the world.

00:22:10

And yet we are sitting here with the naive assumption that our pictures of the world differ only by our perspective within the space of the room. and we have numerous extremely naive assumptions like this

00:22:26

built into our thinking

00:22:28

and our most venerable explanatory engines

00:22:34

such as science

00:22:36

happen also to be our oldest explanatory engines

00:22:41

and therefore they have built into them

00:22:44

the most naive and unexamined assumptions.

00:22:48

For instance, science, we can demolish it in 30 seconds.

00:22:52

Science tells you that a set of conditions will create a given effect,

00:22:58

and that every time that set of conditions is in place, that effect will be found to obtain. Well, the only place this happens is in laboratories. In our experience, it isn’t like that. A contact with a person is always different. The experience of making love, having a meal, riding the bus, These things are always different. It is their

00:23:25

uniqueness in fact, and the uniqueness that pervades all being that makes it

00:23:30

bearable at all. Yet science is willing to tell you that the only things worth

00:23:35

describing are those phenomena that can be repeatedly triggered. This is because

00:23:40

these are the only phenomena science can describe, and that’s the name of the game as far as they are concerned.

00:23:49

But we, to claim our freedom, to take advantage of the tiny moment between immense abysses of unknowability,

00:24:03

perhaps death, perhaps other reincarnations perhaps

00:24:06

transitions into other life forms these things we don’t know but in the moment

00:24:12

of being human we have a unique opportunity to figure things out and I

00:24:19

have the faith that it is possible sometime somewhere to have a conversation perhaps no progress would be

00:24:28

made until the ninth hour but to have a conversation in which reality could be literally

00:24:35

pulled to pieces beyond the point of reconstructing i had a friend i’m not sure this is germane, but I had a friend back in the 60s who one day on LSD took a toothpick and he sat for 14 solid hours with the toothpick and his fingernail long after the toothpick was gone.

00:25:08

And this is what we have to do to the ideological concrete in which we are set.

00:25:14

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist.

00:25:26

There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

00:25:32

Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who was the inventor of general systems theory,

00:25:36

said, you know, people are not machines,

00:25:40

but in every situation where they are given the choice they will behave like

00:25:46

machines we all fall into patterns we all then hold those patterns ever more

00:25:53

tightly they cannot be violated and this happens on the thought level and we are

00:25:59

at the cresting wave of a historical wave of this kind of uptightness that stretches back millennia.

00:26:07

And I think that we have now come to the end of this phase.

00:26:12

Whether you buy into my own peculiar,

00:26:17

apocalyptic, transformative vision involving 2012,

00:26:21

or whether you just can tell by looking around you

00:26:24

that the shit may soon hit the

00:26:26

fan i think we can agree that we have come to some kind of a pass and what is going to come out of it

00:26:35

is either going to be a great deal of dislocation in the biosphere the invalidation of intelligence as an adaptation of biology, and our extinction,

00:26:49

or we are going to become, as James Joyce dreamed we could, man-made dirigible, is how he put it.

00:26:58

In other words, the exteriorization of the soul, the interiorization of the body.

00:27:05

And in this process, everything is going to be challenged.

00:27:10

The very notion of humanness is going to be challenged

00:27:15

because we are on the brink through genetic manipulation of DNA,

00:27:21

of actually taking control of the human form of being able

00:27:25

to extend

00:27:26

the notion

00:27:27

of art

00:27:28

inward

00:27:29

into the human

00:27:31

body

00:27:31

and form

00:27:32

are we

00:27:33

classicists

00:27:34

shall we

00:27:35

each be

00:27:36

an Adonis

00:27:37

and a Persephone

00:27:38

or are we

00:27:40

what are we

00:27:41

are we surrealists

00:27:42

shall I be

00:27:43

a potato

00:27:43

and you

00:27:44

a burning leopard?

00:27:46

These are decisions which will have to be faced.

00:27:51

These are the important questions.

00:27:55

And

00:27:56

this vertical gain which we see in the metaphors that are applied to

00:28:02

psychedelic drugs, consciousness expansion, getting high,

00:28:06

psychedelic tripping, shamanic flight,

00:28:09

all of these things are being paralleled.

00:28:12

It’s like the drugs are the feminine software formative

00:28:19

leading edge of what is happening.

00:28:23

Coming along behind that is the hardware engineering

00:28:27

masculine mentality that is processing all this stuff into hardware and this

00:28:35

will continue until the leading edge out distances the engineering mentality through breakthrough.

00:28:46

And this is what I think the shamanic hope is,

00:28:50

that we can find a way to use chemicals in our bodies

00:28:56

and our voices and our thoughts

00:28:59

and our hands upon ourselves and each other

00:29:03

to transform ourselves without technology,

00:29:08

to move into the realm of the imagination on the natch, as it were,

00:29:13

with an interiorized, psychopharmacologically applied technology that frees us in the imagination.

00:29:21

At the same time that this is going on,

00:29:27

imagination at the same time that this is going on the engineering mentality is going to set human societies in orbit around the earth and the moon and the near planets but there’s a catch here for

00:29:35

the engineering mentality which is that the very void which surrounds the planet exemplifies this enfolding abyssal feminine element.

00:29:49

It is the mysterious mama matrix of Finnegan’s Wake.

00:29:55

The mysterious mama matrix is the universe and there is no escaping that fact.

00:30:02

there’s no escaping that fact. So that I think the engineering mentality,

00:30:06

which will seek to change man into his machines,

00:30:10

will have to be counterpoised by the psychedelic,

00:30:15

earth-oriented, imagination-oriented side of things,

00:30:21

which will create then the potential for the spiritual marriage that will be the alchemical

00:30:29

perfection of a new form of humanity and this is not far away it can’t be far away

00:30:37

it is a personal responsibility incumbent upon all of us to act

00:30:45

there is

00:30:46

definitely

00:30:47

an obligation

00:30:48

to examine

00:30:49

the possibility

00:30:50

of action

00:30:51

and to think

00:30:53

clearly

00:30:54

about

00:30:55

self

00:30:56

and other

00:30:57

language

00:30:58

and world

00:30:59

past

00:31:00

and future

00:31:01

because

00:31:02

too much

00:31:03

we have lived

00:31:04

in the light of the idea that your

00:31:07

ideology will be dictated to you essentially by geography and

00:31:12

If you’re born in India, you’ll find out that the cosmos is one way if you’re born in Brooklyn you find out it’s another way

00:31:20

What we need to do is transcend these localized grids of fate

00:31:26

which make us what we are but don’t want to be

00:31:31

because you claim this higher level of freedom

00:31:36

by the simple act of applying attention to being

00:31:40

the experience of being

00:31:43

the primacy of experience this is why I can get along with these people in

00:31:49

the Amazon who do these drugs because though my Spanish is terrible and often theirs is worse

00:31:55

because they’re Indians like spirit and yes in your and, we understand, we know. And he says, you know,

00:32:08

because we’re posing usually as scientists of some sort,

00:32:11

you’re from this or that university,

00:32:13

you will return to this laboratory,

00:32:17

you show me this paper which has the name of my friend in it because he helped you last year.

00:32:18

But I say to you, experience is the thing.

00:32:23

And the only thing you can say to that is,

00:32:24

we know, it is we must begin to

00:32:28

send out ideological visions rather than be the consumers of them we need to turn off the

00:32:36

metaphorical televisions which are hooking us in to the network of cultural assumptions dictated from the Pentagon, Madison Avenue,

00:32:46

and what have you.

00:32:47

We need instead to turn on our terminals and to begin to interact with like-minded people

00:32:55

throughout the world and establish this new intellectual order, which will be then the

00:33:03

salvation of mankind, I firmly believe, because

00:33:07

it is a collectivity, and people will then feel the interrelatedness of their faiths,

00:33:14

feel that interrelatedness as a thing which transcends national divisions, ideological

00:33:21

divisions, feel the primacy of being part of the human family and I

00:33:27

think that it will not be done without psychedelics because we have drifted so

00:33:33

long without them surely we are the culture that has gone longest without

00:33:38

psychedelics in any cultural situation throughout the world. It’s been 2,000 years since the mystery was real at Eleusis.

00:33:50

And in that 2,000 years, we have wandered far, far into confusion.

00:33:56

But we are the prodigal sons.

00:33:59

We can redeem the ideal of shamanism from pre-technological social stasis

00:34:06

and actually project it, perfect it, and send it out to the stars.

00:34:13

And if we don’t do this, everything is lost.

00:34:16

There is no standing still.

00:34:18

There is only risk and commitment to these millennia-long cultural goals

00:34:25

that will restore meaning and direction to our civilization

00:34:29

or we will fritter it away into chaos and destruction

00:34:34

and the horrors of the typical future scenario.

00:34:39

Thank you.

00:34:55

Questions?

00:34:58

I can’t hear.

00:35:02

Earlier in your talk, you mentioned the expression,

00:35:05

Jim Swann, and I’m not familiar with Jim Swann gene swarm yes I talked about this in the workshop this afternoon

00:35:09

pointing out that the notion of species

00:35:12

is simply a 17th century convention

00:35:16

of biological classification begun by Linnaeus

00:35:20

because when you visually look around

00:35:23

with no awareness of geological time,

00:35:27

you do seem to see distinct plants and animals.

00:35:31

But now that we are aware of such things as bacterial transfer of genes from one organism to another

00:35:41

and this sort of thing, we realize that the apparent fixity of the species

00:35:46

is an illusion and that actually there is only a gene swarm on the planet and it coagulates into

00:35:56

centers the densest kind of center it coagulates into we call an organism but it also coagulates into

00:36:07

more loosely bound systems such as symbiotic relationships or yet more

00:36:14

loosely bound relationships ecotomes and biospheres and that really there are

00:36:22

just from any given biological center there is just a series

00:36:27

of concentric shells of influence going both directions outward and that’s a more true view

00:36:36

of the situation on the planet than the notion that there are distinct species

00:36:40

species so that you

00:36:43

would see

00:36:43

the actual

00:36:45

organisms and

00:36:46

all that as

00:36:46

being maybe

00:36:47

or the

00:36:49

gene swarm

00:36:50

expressing

00:36:51

itself as

00:36:52

an interaction

00:36:54

with the

00:36:54

environment at

00:36:55

that particular

00:36:55

moment

00:36:56

yes so

00:36:56

temporary

00:36:57

aggregates of

00:36:59

genetic material

00:37:00

I’ve never

00:37:01

read that

00:37:01

that’s not

00:37:01

very interesting

00:37:02

well it

00:37:04

turns out when you start I don’t want to get too deeply into it because it’s a sideline,

00:37:09

but when you start looking at the ways that genetic material is transferred around,

00:37:15

there are all kinds of ways. There’s even been a kind of termite found in Africa where the mating activity is so furious that and the sexual organ of the

00:37:34

male insects so sharp that they actually pierce the body cavity not only of females, but also of other males.

00:37:51

And by marking the sperm of these insects and following it, you can discover that some male individuals are transferring sperm to females

00:37:59

that is not their sperm.

00:38:02

And that absolutely violates the central dogma of Darwinian evolution

00:38:08

which is that the genetic material the transferability and adaptability of the

00:38:14

genetic material is directly linked to the adaptability of its carrier but here

00:38:21

you have a situation where the owner of the sperm may be dead because he was non-adaptive

00:38:26

but the sperm because it’s in the body of a more adaptive insect

00:38:31

is actually having an impact on the expression of the phenotype

00:38:36

so that’s very technical but anyway genetic material moves around in all kinds of ways

00:38:43

and I’m sure there are more ways soon to be discovered.

00:38:47

Politically speaking, what would be some of the first steps for our great psychedelics into our culture?

00:38:55

Well, harking back to my notion that the responsibility always rests on us and that you don’t want to go out and

00:39:05

immediately form a movement to change those guys or that bureau.

00:39:11

I think the thing that should be done is people who are involved in psychedelics should live

00:39:19

lives of such exemplitude and impeccability that the notion that there was anything shady or wrong

00:39:29

or curious about this phenomenon would be ludicrous.

00:39:34

I thought about it.

00:39:41

See I didn’t make that right there any other

00:39:47

questions

00:39:47

then thank you

00:39:50

very very

00:39:50

yes

00:39:51

I’d like to have

00:39:52

a clearer vision

00:39:53

of how you

00:39:54

would see

00:39:55

a psychedelic

00:39:56

society

00:39:56

in that

00:39:58

if we were

00:39:58

able to

00:39:59

demolish a lot

00:40:00

of the belief

00:40:00

systems that

00:40:01

we do operate

00:40:02

under

00:40:02

how would we

00:40:04

relate to one another

00:40:05

how would you see that vision unfolding okay well there was a french sociologist about 15 years ago

00:40:14

who had some vogue and then faded i don’t know what his scene was but his name was jacques

00:40:20

and he wrote a book called the technological society and in there he had an axiom

00:40:28

and the axiom was there are no political solutions only technological ones the rest is propaganda

00:40:42

what a psychedelic society would do I think

00:40:45

is it would rationally solve problems

00:40:48

the first thing to notice is that

00:40:51

we could pave the streets with gold

00:40:53

if we would just eliminate defense spending

00:40:56

in other words our limited energy resources

00:41:00

are not being allocated in such a way

00:41:03

as to move us towards survival we have to begin to solve our problems using solutions that are

00:41:13

present at hand no matter who they offend

00:41:21

a value system a humanist value system. It’s very interesting

00:41:25

that to me

00:41:26

that the,

00:41:29

what do they call,

00:41:30

silent majority,

00:41:31

that the way

00:41:33

in which they name

00:41:34

their enemies

00:41:35

is secular humanists.

00:41:38

This is the only

00:41:39

intelligent thing

00:41:40

they ever say.

00:41:41

It’s the only

00:41:42

intelligent phrase

00:41:43

in their entire repertoire.

00:41:46

But it’s fascinating. We are secular humanists. That’s precisely what we are. We believe that human beings

00:41:56

are to be the measure of all things, that there is no other standard, not a classless society or God Almighty.

00:42:06

There is no other standard but man, humanity, people.

00:42:11

And this is a Renaissance ideal.

00:42:14

It was first enunciated by Marcello Ficino in 1510.

00:42:19

But we have not acted upon it.

00:42:22

We have not up to this time had a secular humanist society.

00:42:27

We’ve had this curious mix of medieval remnants in the religious department, gangster capitalism

00:42:38

in the economic department, stasis-seeking Marxism as a counterpoise to that.

00:42:47

We have never rationally tried to solve our problems.

00:42:50

And we have never rationally tried to solve our problems on a personal level

00:42:57

until the advent of, well, psychology in the modern sense people never examined the center they thought of the center

00:43:10

as a mirrored bead and that this you didn’t ask questions about the self or motive or the

00:43:18

relationship of your world view to trauma, expectation, class level.

00:43:27

All of these things we have become aware of

00:43:30

as we have steadily retreated from the illusion

00:43:34

of a world deployed in three-dimensional space.

00:43:38

And we’re only at the beginning of this process.

00:43:41

For instance, I mean, I don’t say this to knock Esalen I say it as an example I think

00:43:47

Esalen is definitely the cutting edge of things and has been for some time but isn’t it preposterous

00:43:55

that Esalen operates under the laws of the United States which make taking these drugs

00:44:01

illegal they must do that they must do that. They must do that.

00:44:06

They have no choice,

00:44:07

whatever their private opinions may be.

00:44:09

And all institutions are in that bind.

00:44:15

There’s no such thing as a revolutionary institution.

00:44:19

There are only revolutionary people.

00:44:22

And this is why this de-emphasis on belief systems and their support systems,

00:44:33

which are institutions, seems to me the essence of this psychedelic message.

00:44:38

It says, be against method.

00:44:43

Don’t be enslaved to method.

00:44:46

Embrace anarchy.

00:44:47

Anarchy has a bad name because in the political arena it’s a weird number.

00:44:53

But in philosophy, in science, in love and in human relations generally,

00:45:00

it seems to me it is the most respectable system based on its track record.

00:45:07

There are these lines that can be traced back.

00:45:11

Gnosis. I didn’t use this word tonight, gnosis, nor did I use the word logos.

00:45:16

But this notion of an accessible truth, which is self-evidently true when heard,

00:45:27

truth which is self-evidently true when heard is very close to the notion of the collectivity of the psychedelic society my idea is that we could change the

00:45:35

logos of the mystery religions from a religious mystery into a social reality

00:45:41

and that would be a social transformation because it would

00:45:46

essentially sacralize

00:45:48

the secular humanist

00:45:50

society that I mentioned

00:45:51

yeah

00:45:52

I’ve been picking up a sort of an urgency

00:45:55

of

00:45:56

we gotta do it and do it now

00:46:00

type of thing as far as shamanism

00:46:02

is concerned

00:46:03

I couldn’t quite understand why I can’t sit back in my stupidity and continue this practice.

00:46:13

Is it because we’re coming to man can destroy the world?

00:46:21

No, it may be related to that we can’t know about that but for sure what it’s related to is

00:46:28

that your human existence is a unique opportunity it’s only the opportunity there is no great

00:46:35

urgency as far as you see it’s not a matter of we got to do it now because we got ourselves into a bind and if we don’t get the realization or the knowledge of getting along with it.

00:46:52

If we don’t do it someone else will that’s my faith but there’s only one game in town and if you want to be part of the adventure of being, you have to get your feet wet.

00:47:07

And that means you have to get committed in some way.

00:47:11

So if it’s not done now, it will be done in a hundred years from now.

00:47:12

This is coming.

00:47:16

I mean, this wave has been rolling toward completion since before the breakup of Pangea.

00:47:19

This is the big picture.

00:47:21

Yes, it’s coming.

00:47:22

The monkeys are going to the stars whether smoothly or not

00:47:27

so smoothly is not clear but the monkeys are going to the stars and they’re going to take everyone

00:47:33

with them and it can be a relatively smooth birth with no tearing and no bleeding and everything

00:47:41

just moving right along or it can be holy hell and leave the earth a smoking cinder

00:47:46

before it’s over with.

00:47:48

But the monkey thing,

00:47:51

the information creature,

00:47:53

is definitely on its way to the stars.

00:47:55

I don’t think anything can stop that.

00:47:58

If you wanted to stop that,

00:48:00

you had to get back there before the pyramids.

00:48:05

Well, thank you very much.

00:48:17

Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did just now.

00:48:24

And the next time you listen to this talk,

00:48:26

try to keep in mind how much has taken place in the world since he gave this lecture.

00:48:31

Unfortunately, as my dear departed mother once said,

00:48:35

everything is different, but nothing has changed.

00:48:39

And on the world stage, I believe she was right.

00:48:43

However, from my own perspective, I have certainly changed.

00:48:46

I know that. And I’ve done that one thought at a time after closely examining one or more of the

00:48:52

personal beliefs that were imposed upon me simply as an accident of birth. Where you are born on

00:48:59

this planet truly does have a profound impact on your consciousness. And unless you are willing to open up your mind and take in a few thoughts that are completely

00:49:08

foreign to the culture that you are immersed in right now, well, the geography of your

00:49:14

birth can imprison your mind for the rest of your life, which is why our sacred medicines

00:49:18

are so important to the continuing evolution of the overall consciousness of our species.

00:49:24

Stepping out of your current mental prison may be the single most important thing you

00:49:28

can do right now.

00:49:30

You know, a few minutes into this talk, Terrence said, much of the problem of the modern dilemma

00:49:35

is that direct experience has been discounted and in its place all kinds of belief systems

00:49:42

have been erected.

00:49:43

You see, if you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

00:49:49

For example, with the exception of a few thousand researchers and interested laypersons such as myself,

00:49:56

the rest of the world believes that the great Egyptian civilization essentially sprang out of nowhere around 3000 BC.

00:50:03

Of course, they’re all ignoring the many thousands of archaeological discoveries

00:50:08

that don’t fit this belief.

00:50:10

Anomalies, they call them.

00:50:12

Well, in a few weeks, I hope to podcast a conversation I had last month with Laird Scranton,

00:50:17

a man who I think might one day be hailed as having uncovered a key to Egyptian hieroglyphics

00:50:23

that is as important as the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

00:50:28

Laird has just published his second book about the Dogon,

00:50:31

who many believe have a direct lineage to the ancient Egyptians.

00:50:35

And if you read Laird’s books with an open mind,

00:50:38

a mind that is willing to suspend its preconceptions about ancient history for a few hours,

00:50:44

I think you’re going to be blown away.

00:50:46

The implication of his work, at least for me,

00:50:49

spins me off into some psychedelic thoughts

00:50:52

that are as profound as any I’ve had

00:50:54

while under the influence of our sacred medicines.

00:50:57

So if you can, try to keep your mind as free from confining beliefs as possible,

00:51:02

and you might really amaze yourself at what can happen.

00:51:07

Now, let’s see, I know there’s a couple other things I wanted to mention today.

00:51:11

Oh, yeah.

00:51:12

Quite a few of our fellow Saloners have written and sent links

00:51:16

to dozens of websites where you can download other Terrence McKenna lectures.

00:51:20

In fact, with the exception of the ten Valley of Novelty lectures

00:51:24

I posted a while back,

00:51:26

I think that probably all of the McKenna Talks I’ve podcast are already online in the raw format

00:51:32

somewhere. And one of the best places to find them is to go to arrowid.org. That’s E-R-O-W-I-D.org,

00:51:40

where in their arts and culture section, you’ll find a link to the character vaults.

00:51:46

And at the very bottom of the Terrence McKenna page, you can find a link to Terrence McKenna MP3 downloads,

00:51:52

which must have 50 or more talks archived there.

00:51:57

On a more personal note, I want to mention that San Diego is recovering quite well from the firestorm that swept through here.

00:52:05

But there’s a much more serious problem to the south of us.

00:52:09

As you know, there right now is some dangerous flooding in the Mexican state of Tabasco.

00:52:14

At this moment, over 70% of the state is underwater.

00:52:18

And the beautiful city of Villahermosa is 80% flooded.

00:52:22

Which is painful for me to think about because I feel such

00:52:26

a deep connection to that city. Back when we were making our annual journey to Palenque

00:52:32

for another week with Terrence McKenna and friends, it was in Villahermosa that we gathered

00:52:37

for our last stop before heading to the Chiapas. It’s a wonderful city and is home to some

00:52:42

of the friendliest people in the world. So if you can find a way to send a little assistance down their way, I’m sure it will be deeply appreciated.

00:52:51

There’s one last thing I want to mention before I go, and that’s something I’ve been meaning to say ever since returning from Burning Man.

00:52:58

I’ve been thinking that it would probably be more appropriate to mention this in a podcast with one of the Plyologs,

00:53:04

but since I haven’t been able to track down any more recordings of those

00:53:07

talks, I want to say it now. And that is to send a huge

00:53:12

thank you to Sharon Stetter, who gifted me with what is now my

00:53:16

most precious book. It’s an art book titled Interplanetary

00:53:19

Pueblos by the brilliant and gifted Hopi artist and architect

00:53:24

Dennis Numkina. I’ve mentioned Dennis’ work once before,

00:53:28

but this is the first time I’ve actually been this close to his work.

00:53:32

During my recent illness, I spent some time just staring

00:53:36

at a small print of one of Dennis’ paintings titled Mayan Migration.

00:53:41

And I’m here to tell you that in my fevered

00:53:44

condition, it transported me to places

00:53:46

I’ve never been before. The note in this book says that the original is seven feet by seven feet,

00:53:52

and I suspect that seeing that work in person might quite literally knock me off my feet.

00:53:57

It’s truly a Mayan Hopi masterpiece, in my humble opinion. But this book is much more than just a

00:54:04

coffee table art book.

00:54:06

In fact, the only color plates are of the painting I just mentioned

00:54:09

and one other page that has photographs of some of Dennis’ major architectural work,

00:54:15

like the Pyramid Lake Museum that us Berners are familiar with.

00:54:20

But the core of the book consists of 17 original sketches

00:54:23

that are meant to be colored in by you, the owner of the book consists of 17 original sketches that are meant to be colored in by you, the owner of the book.

00:54:27

And to add to its unique character, built right into the design of the book is a little case that holds a half a dozen colored pencils for you to use as you add color to the sketches.

00:54:39

Now to be honest, this is such a beautiful book that I probably would have preserved it in its pristine condition and not actually colored in any of the drawings.

00:54:49

But Sharon must have guessed that I’d do something like that, and so during the whiteout on the playa during Bruce Dahmer’s talk, Sharon added color to one half of the first drawing.

00:55:07

So as I rested in bed this week, or last week I guess, bored but too exhausted to read or even listen to my MP3 player,

00:55:12

I picked up the pencils and finished what I now think of as our painting.

00:55:16

I completed on the 29th of October, Sharon, in case you’re wondering.

00:55:23

And if the spirits of my grammar school teachers are listening, yes, I actually stayed in the lines.

00:55:27

So you don’t have to smack my knuckles with your rulers this time.

00:55:36

Now the reason I’m going on so long about this is that through this simple act of adding color to one of Dennis Numkema’s sketches,

00:55:41

I now feel a direct physical connection to both Dennis and to Sharon.

00:55:45

This drawing now has a little of all three of us in it.

00:55:49

So now I’m really excited about adding color to some more drawings.

00:55:51

In fact, one for each of my grandchildren,

00:55:57

who as soon as each of them gets old enough to kind of stay in the lines themselves,

00:55:59

they’ll be able to finish them.

00:56:04

And it’s funny, but somehow that’s giving me a warm glow to think that an art project with my grandchildren

00:56:07

might possibly be around for a long time.

00:56:10

Now, I don’t know how many of these books are still available,

00:56:12

as they were produced in a limited signed edition of only 250,

00:56:17

and it may be that they’re probably out of the reach financially

00:56:20

for most of us here in the salon,

00:56:22

but if you’re looking for a unique gift for someone very special, I can’t think of anything better than this beautiful work of art. Thank you. And if you go to numkina.com, you’ll also find several of his major works available as well.

00:56:46

I hope one day to meet Dennis in person, but even if that never happens, I already feel like he’s an old friend.

00:56:54

And Sharon, thank you so very much for this wonderful gift.

00:56:57

It’s now at the top of my checklist of things to take if we ever have to evacuate for another fire.

00:57:03

You are way too kind.

00:57:05

And now I’m off to do some coloring.

00:57:08

But before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

00:57:13

are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 License.

00:57:18

And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link

00:57:22

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which may be found at psychedelicsalon.org. And if you have any questions,

00:57:30

comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts, well, just send them to lorenzo

00:57:35

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

00:57:43

Be well well my friends