Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotes are by Terence McKenna]
“Culture denies experience.”
“We live at the end of a thousand year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism, in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that world is what it appears to be, a thing composed of matter, and pretty much confined to its surface.”
“We’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason, and science, and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm.”
“We’re in, essentially, a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it.”
“All the boundaries we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved [when using psychedelics]. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. Government institutions become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them.”
“The drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the slave-driven agricultural projects, in the corporate office, whatever it is.”
“Madness, basically, up until the level of physical violence, means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore there is something wrong with you.”
“I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience, and the drug is technology.”
“History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. We have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years.”
“What psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable, is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.”
“The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego.”
“The key, on one level, to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding. That’s where it begins.”
“We have the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort… . You don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population.”
“What the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable.”
“It seems to me that culture, at least this culture, is a shabby lie.”
Previous Episode
116 - Techno Pagans at the End of History
Next Episode
118 - Human Nature, Synesthesia and Art
Similar Episodes
- 185 - Shamanism and the Archaic Revival - score: 0.91337
- 174 - Pushing the Envelope - score: 0.89950
- 382 - The Psychedelic Option - score: 0.89120
- 525 - History Ends In Green – Part 2 - score: 0.88748
- 136 - A Few Conclusions About Life - score: 0.88111
- 221 - McKenna_ Evolving Times - score: 0.88011
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.87698
- 625 - Nature Loves Complexity - score: 0.87424
- 567 - Psychedelicize Yourself - score: 0.87382
- 367 - The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker - score: 0.87221
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, how are you doing today?
00:00:27 ►
If you are in a place similar to where my spirit is moving right now, you’ll probably say,
00:00:33 ►
well, now that I think about it, I’m doing a little better than I was last year this time.
00:00:39 ►
And even if it’s only a very slight improvement in your state of mind,
00:00:43 ►
not necessarily in your physical circumstances,
00:00:47 ►
but if it’s a slight improvement over where it was a year ago, then I guess we should count our blessings.
00:00:53 ►
For what it’s worth, I know that we have quite a few fellow salonners scattered all over the Middle East right now.
00:00:59 ►
And I want you to know that my heart goes out to all of you.
00:01:03 ►
Here in the States, we just celebrated a holiday that we call Thanksgiving.
00:01:08 ►
But sadly, most of the people in this country just use the day to stuff themselves with far more food than they need for energy,
00:01:15 ►
and I’m afraid that not many of them actually stop and think about how much they truly have to be thankful for.
00:01:22 ►
But in my case, I did pause and give some thought to all of my fellow swanners
00:01:27 ►
and thank the goddess for my great good fortune at being in a position to connect with you here in cyberdelic space.
00:01:35 ►
So even if you now find yourself in a difficult situation,
00:01:39 ►
whether it be in Baghdad, Berlin, or downtown Chicago,
00:01:42 ►
I want you to know that you’re not alone.
00:01:46 ►
We’re all into this together, you know,
00:01:48 ►
and together we will eventually get our species through this rather difficult birth
00:01:53 ►
of a new form of human consciousness that we all so desperately hope is actually taking place.
00:02:00 ►
And in spite of what the corporate media is telling us,
00:02:03 ►
in my experience, once fear is removed from the conversation, the great majority of people are just like you and me.
00:02:10 ►
And that does give me great hope for our future.
00:02:14 ►
Hmm. Now, I wonder where that came from.
00:02:18 ►
I wasn’t planning on beginning with such a heavy thought, but maybe that’s the vibe that’s going around right now.
00:02:24 ►
And if so, then let’s all give a big smile to the next stranger we see.
00:02:30 ►
Even if it doesn’t lighten their day, at least they’ll walk away wondering what you’re thinking about.
00:02:35 ►
And that can be kind of fun, too.
00:02:38 ►
And there are some people who have put a smile on my face this week
00:02:42 ►
by making a donation to help with the expenses of keeping these podcasts winging their way through cyberspace.
00:02:49 ►
And please, please don’t feel obligated to make a donation out of fear that these podcasts won’t go on without it.
00:02:56 ►
So far this year, we’ve received enough in donations to keep these podcasts going all of next year.
00:03:03 ►
Even with the added expense of steadily increasing our server capacity,
00:03:07 ►
I think we’re pretty well covered for the next 12 months.
00:03:10 ►
So if you have other causes that you want to support,
00:03:13 ►
well, please don’t feel any sense of obligation to donate to the salon.
00:03:18 ►
You are already giving your most valuable asset, and that’s your time.
00:03:22 ►
And ultimately, that’s the gift that actually keeps
00:03:26 ►
these podcasts coming i i wouldn’t be doing this if no one was listening or on second thought yeah
00:03:34 ►
i probably would still be producing these programs even then simply because this is one of the things
00:03:39 ►
that gives me the most pleasure out of life and the other is spending four or five hours a day playing with one of my grandchildren.
00:03:47 ►
I do it in the guise of providing a few hours a day of daycare,
00:03:50 ►
but the truth is it’s actually my playtime.
00:03:54 ►
I don’t know why I’m being so long-winded today,
00:03:56 ►
but if I don’t concentrate on getting this show on the road,
00:03:59 ►
we’ll never get to today’s lecture by Terrence McKenna.
00:04:02 ►
So let me first give a great big thank you to James A., Rob P., Anikita K., and to Larry
00:04:11 ►
T. for their very generous donations to help offset our future expenses here in the swan.
00:04:18 ►
And while it may make Larry T. a little uncomfortable by me saying this, I want to acknowledge his
00:04:23 ►
gift as what I consider to be the
00:04:26 ►
first actual grant that we’ve
00:04:28 ►
received. And I didn’t even
00:04:30 ►
have to do all the paperwork involved in
00:04:31 ►
applying for a grant, which is
00:04:33 ►
quite fortunate since I no longer
00:04:36 ►
have the patience to deal with paperwork.
00:04:38 ►
But Larry, thank you
00:04:40 ►
again for your wonderful gesture.
00:04:42 ►
Your gift, along with those
00:04:44 ►
of James, Rob, Ann and Kita, and all of the other people who have sent some money our way,
00:04:49 ►
will most definitely be put to use on behalf of all of us who gather here in the Psychedelic Salon each week.
00:04:56 ►
So, now I hope you’re up for a little more of Terrence McKenna.
00:05:01 ►
Although I realize that some of our fellow salonners really appreciate talks by Mark Pesci and others, I’m kind of in a McKenna state Although I realize that some of our fellow salonners really appreciate talks by
00:05:05 ►
Mark Pesci and others, I’m kind of in a McKenna state of mind lately, and to be honest, I’m
00:05:12 ►
playing these talks more for myself to hear than for you. Sorry about that, but I have
00:05:17 ►
to be honest here. Over the past couple of months, a half dozen or more people have sent
00:05:22 ►
me discs with some 70-plus McKenna talks that were once online somewhere but have now been taken down for one reason or another.
00:05:30 ►
And I’m having a ball previewing these talks, many of which I’ve never heard before.
00:05:35 ►
So I hope you’ll bear with me for a little while here as I continue getting my weekly McKenna fix.
00:05:41 ►
Now, many of these talks, I believe, are actually from studio recordings that were made as money-making enterprises,
00:05:48 ►
both for Terrence and for their producers.
00:05:50 ►
And I’m not going to play any of those recordings due to the possible copyright problems.
00:05:55 ►
But should you come across some of them on the net, I highly recommend listening to them.
00:06:00 ►
What I’m concentrating on, however, are the bootleg tapes from lectures he gave at Esalen and other places.
00:06:06 ►
And actually, they aren’t true bootleg tapes in the normal sense of the word,
00:06:10 ►
because at all of the workshops of Terrence’s that I attended,
00:06:14 ►
he always told his audience that it was okay to record his talks,
00:06:17 ►
as long as they weren’t packaged and sold as commercial projects,
00:06:21 ►
which is another reason I’m keeping the salon commercial-free and a user-sponsored
00:06:26 ►
podcast, so to speak.
00:06:28 ►
The talk we’re about to hear right now is one you can find in quite a few places under
00:06:32 ►
the title, The World and Its Double.
00:06:35 ►
But as you might have noticed, I’m calling it The Importance of Psychedelics, which I
00:06:40 ►
think more accurately describes this lecture.
00:06:44 ►
So let’s get comfortable, at least as comfortable as you can,
00:06:48 ►
wherever you happen to be right now,
00:06:50 ►
and join the bard McKenna as he takes us on yet another flight of the imagination
00:06:54 ►
into realms that as yet remain little explored by our fellow human beings.
00:07:06 ►
Well, the world and its double
00:07:09 ►
is how we styled
00:07:12 ►
this
00:07:12 ►
this is simply a
00:07:15 ►
high visibility
00:07:17 ►
flashy way of reminding
00:07:20 ►
people whose eyes fall
00:07:22 ►
upon that text
00:07:23 ►
that the world has a double.
00:07:28 ►
The world is not entirely or completely
00:07:32 ►
what it seems to be.
00:07:36 ►
Culture, and by culture I mean any culture,
00:07:40 ►
anywhere, anytime,
00:07:42 ►
gives you the message that everything is humdrum, everything is normal.
00:07:53 ►
In other words, culture denies experience.
00:07:58 ►
You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, all of these sort of things.
00:08:16 ►
These are experiences which cultures deny.
00:08:21 ►
Cultures put in place, I’m sure you’ve heard this word, a paradigm.
00:08:25 ►
And then what fits within the cultural paradigm is accentuated, stressed,
00:08:34 ►
and what doesn’t fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against.
00:08:43 ►
marginalized, argued against.
00:08:48 ►
And we live at the end of a thousand-year binge on the philosophical position known as materialism
00:08:54 ►
in its many guises.
00:08:57 ►
And the basic message of materialism
00:09:00 ►
is that the world is what it appears to be,
00:09:04 ►
a thing composed of matter
00:09:08 ►
and pretty much confined to its surface.
00:09:13 ►
The world is what it appears to be.
00:09:16 ►
Now, this on the face of it is a tremendously naive position
00:09:23 ►
because what it says is
00:09:25 ►
the animal body that you inhabit
00:09:28 ►
the eyes you look through
00:09:31 ►
the fingers you feel through
00:09:33 ►
are somehow the ultimate instruments
00:09:37 ►
of metaphysical conjecture
00:09:39 ►
which is highly improbable
00:09:43 ►
it seems to me metaphysical conjecture begins with the logic of the situation
00:09:51 ►
and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you.
00:09:58 ►
Well, if logic is true to experience then we have to make room
00:10:05 ►
in any theory for
00:10:08 ►
invisible
00:10:09 ►
connectedness between
00:10:11 ►
people, anticipation
00:10:13 ►
of a future that has
00:10:15 ►
not yet occurred
00:10:17 ►
shared
00:10:20 ►
dreaming
00:10:21 ►
all kinds of
00:10:23 ►
possibilities that materialism has denied.
00:10:27 ►
For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science,
00:10:34 ►
materialism has had the field all to itself. And its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create.
00:10:49 ►
Aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft.
00:10:56 ►
But that is a fool’s argument for truth.
00:11:01 ►
I mean, that’s after all how a medicine show operates, you know.
00:11:06 ►
The juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better.
00:11:11 ►
This is not an entirely rational way to proceed.
00:11:15 ►
And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of rational, quote-unquote, scientific culture, we’re literally at the end of our rope. Reason and science and the practice of unbridled capitalism have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary, they’ve delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed
00:11:51 ►
by guilt about what’s happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it.
00:11:56 ►
It’s not a pretty picture, modern civilization.
00:12:01 ►
Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually. They have very little
00:12:08 ►
hope. Their religions, their traditional value
00:12:11 ►
systems are being eroded by Dallas
00:12:16 ►
and Hawaii Five-0, which are on the village television every
00:12:20 ►
night. Lifespans are being shortened
00:12:24 ►
by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment.
00:12:28 ►
And there is very little political light on the horizon. So I believe that it’s reasonable,
00:12:40 ►
looking at this situation, to say that history failed and that the grand dream
00:12:47 ►
of western civilization
00:12:49 ►
has in fact failed
00:12:52 ►
and now we are attempting
00:12:55 ►
with basically a carved wooden oar
00:12:59 ►
to turn a battleship around
00:13:02 ►
and it’s a very frustrating undertaking.
00:13:06 ►
The momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation.
00:13:14 ►
But it’s not 100% certain that catastrophe is what we’re headed for
00:13:23 ►
because we are not 100% unconscious.
00:13:27 ►
There are people struggling to figure out
00:13:30 ►
how to control population,
00:13:32 ►
struggling to figure out
00:13:34 ►
how to balance the relationship
00:13:37 ►
between the masculine and the feminine,
00:13:39 ►
struggling to bring amelioration
00:13:43 ►
of hunger and disease to various parts of the world.
00:13:47 ►
So we’re in essentially a tragic situation.
00:13:51 ►
A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it, you see. Part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own.
00:14:11 ►
And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture.
00:14:32 ►
Native American culture, the ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the megaculture of Nouveau Europa, whatever that means.
00:14:49 ►
Cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast, and then they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.
00:14:58 ►
However, the psychedelic experience as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world is apparently a bite too large to swallow.
00:15:04 ►
Apparently, a bite too large to swallow.
00:15:09 ►
Psychedelics arrived on the Western agenda only about 100 years ago
00:15:12 ►
when German chemists brought peyote to Berlin
00:15:18 ►
and extracted mescaline.
00:15:22 ►
And for the next 50 years up until about 1945
00:15:26 ►
55 years make it
00:15:29 ►
very little happened
00:15:31 ►
mescaline did not
00:15:34 ►
though it was taken by
00:15:36 ►
Havelock Ellis and
00:15:38 ►
William James and
00:15:40 ►
F. Weir Mitchell
00:15:43 ►
it did not spawn a craze.
00:15:46 ►
It did not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly.
00:15:52 ►
Then in the 40s, LSD was discovered.
00:15:56 ►
In the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered.
00:16:01 ►
And then in 1966, all these things were made illegal.
00:16:08 ►
There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things
00:16:14 ►
before they were decided to be too hot to handle,
00:16:19 ►
made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people,
00:16:25 ►
but taken off the agenda of scientific research.
00:16:30 ►
In the Middle Ages,
00:16:32 ►
the church forbade dissection of human bodies
00:16:36 ►
and medical students would visit battlefields
00:16:42 ►
and the gallows at night
00:16:43 ►
and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology.
00:16:54 ►
Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don’t know, but there’s very little of it left. Now people feed at the trough of government grants
00:17:05 ►
and enormous corporate research budgets,
00:17:08 ►
and the idea of actually pursuing truth
00:17:11 ►
or attempting to understand the phenomenon
00:17:14 ►
in an unbiased fashion,
00:17:17 ►
divorced from its commercial, social,
00:17:20 ►
and political dimensions,
00:17:23 ►
is unheard of.
00:17:25 ►
If you look at thousands of these experiences,
00:17:30 ►
they dissolve boundaries.
00:17:33 ►
They dissolve boundaries between you and your past,
00:17:38 ►
you and the part of your unconscious you don’t want to look at,
00:17:42 ►
between you and your partner,
00:18:05 ►
between you and the feminine, between you and the feminine if you’re masculine and vice versa, between you and the world, all the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved. And boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity
00:18:10 ►
that can go on in a society.
00:18:13 ►
People get very…
00:18:14 ►
People, meaning government institutions,
00:18:16 ►
become very nervous
00:18:18 ►
when people begin to talk to each other.
00:18:22 ►
Yes, the whole name of the Western game is to create
00:18:26 ►
boundaries and maintain them.
00:18:28 ►
The church and the state,
00:18:30 ►
the poor and the wealthy,
00:18:32 ►
the black and the white,
00:18:34 ►
the male and the female, the young
00:18:36 ►
and the old, the gay and the
00:18:38 ►
straight, the living and the dead,
00:18:40 ►
the foreign and the familiar.
00:18:42 ►
All of these
00:18:44 ►
categorical divisions
00:18:46 ►
allow a kind of thinking
00:18:49 ►
that is completely cockamamie
00:18:51 ►
after all reality is in fact
00:18:54 ►
a seamless unspeakable something
00:18:57 ►
and we understand
00:18:59 ►
that to perceive it separately
00:19:02 ►
is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding.
00:19:09 ►
But it is not the end of the program of understanding.
00:19:14 ►
The particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm,
00:19:24 ►
a seamless overview of what is happening.
00:19:28 ►
And the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored
00:19:33 ►
have either been drugs which maintain boundaries
00:19:37 ►
or drugs which promote mindless, repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the latifundia, the slave-driven agricultural project, whatever it is.
00:19:56 ►
In the corporate office. You know, every labor contract on this planet, at least in Western civilization, contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times.
00:20:15 ►
But the drug shall be caffeine.
00:20:22 ►
is so welcome in the workplace is because the last three hours of the workday
00:20:27 ►
are utterly unproductive
00:20:29 ►
unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee
00:20:33 ►
and then they can go back to the word processor,
00:20:35 ►
the widget tightening machine or whatever they’re doing
00:20:39 ►
and mindlessly and happily carry on.
00:20:43 ►
If it were suggested that there be a pot break twice a day,
00:20:48 ►
you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something.
00:20:55 ►
And alcohol, our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar, and tobacco culture.
00:21:06 ►
And all of these are forms of speed, basically,
00:21:13 ►
in the way that we use them.
00:21:14 ►
I mean, yes, you can tranquilize yourself on alcohol,
00:21:17 ►
but you’re pushing toward levels
00:21:20 ►
where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself on alcohol
00:21:23 ►
will be a short lifetime if you use it that way.
00:21:28 ►
So there’s a lot of tension in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly line citizen. The citizen is defined by obligation
00:21:46 ►
and by the boundaries
00:21:50 ►
that define the next citizen,
00:21:54 ►
either because it’s a neighbor or worker or employer
00:21:59 ►
or something like that.
00:22:01 ►
And the grand exploring soul
00:22:03 ►
is marginalized as an eccentric,
00:22:07 ►
or if necessary, more seriously marginalized as mad in some way.
00:22:13 ►
I mean, madness basically, up until the level of physical violence,
00:22:18 ►
means you are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable.
00:22:23 ►
Therefore, there’s something wrong with you.
00:22:28 ►
Yes.
00:22:29 ►
So, now, it’s interesting,
00:22:35 ►
and this is one of the points that’s dear to me.
00:22:39 ►
I mean, they arrive in different orders each time.
00:22:43 ►
But I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience.
00:22:51 ►
And the drug is technology.
00:22:54 ►
And as technology gets more and more perfected
00:23:01 ►
as a mirror of the human mind,
00:23:04 ►
the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory. perfected as a mirror of the human mind,
00:23:09 ►
the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory.
00:23:13 ►
And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway
00:23:17 ►
at every level of Western civilization.
00:23:21 ►
I mean, you could push it further back.
00:23:24 ►
The Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the king’s signature on a document defining their privileges. They are, after all, ordinary human beings. The king is the divine appointed regent of God in heaven.
00:23:48 ►
So this was a severe boundary dissolution
00:23:51 ►
within the context of the age in which it was taking place.
00:23:56 ►
They were actually saying,
00:23:57 ►
you, as Christ’s representative on earth,
00:24:00 ►
should cede some of this omnipotence to us,
00:24:08 ►
mere mortals suspended in the political process well that leads then to broader demands for human rights for uh the idea that a permanent
00:24:16 ►
and large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable. We got rid of debtors’ prisons
00:24:26 ►
and things like this.
00:24:29 ►
As the collectivity of our humanness
00:24:34 ►
becomes an intellectual legacy
00:24:37 ►
for all of us,
00:24:39 ►
there is a dissolving
00:24:41 ►
of boundaries of race, class, status,
00:24:47 ►
language, so forth and so on. And the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this.
00:24:54 ►
The breakdown of the Soviet Union was in fact simply, it was even so described,
00:25:01 ►
the lifting of the Iron Curtain, meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared
00:25:08 ►
and more and more of these membranes are disappearing.
00:25:14 ►
And what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience,
00:25:21 ►
meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow, a sense of rising
00:25:28 ►
ambiguity about what it all means. Everything seems
00:25:32 ►
to carry both a good facet and a
00:25:36 ►
detrimental facet. The ambiguity of everything is increasing.
00:25:40 ►
The connectedness of everything is
00:25:43 ►
increasing. And I will argue later in the day
00:25:48 ►
that this is a general tendency of the time and space
00:25:53 ►
in which we are embedded,
00:25:55 ►
and that we ourselves are a reflection of this.
00:26:00 ►
Where is life carrying us?
00:26:04 ►
What is this all about? Is it carrying us toward extinction so that the rest of nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief and then get back to the business of nest building, mating flights and over-posturing
00:26:25 ►
and whatever it is that they’re doing out there?
00:26:28 ►
Or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition?
00:26:37 ►
If you look back through the history of life,
00:26:40 ►
which is a long history, I mean it reaches back a billion years,
00:26:53 ►
every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably,
00:26:57 ►
and in a very short period of time. Some of you who stay tuned to the scientific literature
00:27:00 ►
may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week about what they’re calling the big bang of biology.
00:27:11 ►
That there was a period of time, incredibly brief existence sometime between 525 and 535 million years ago.
00:27:32 ►
Just it all snapped into existence.
00:27:37 ►
The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event.
00:27:48 ►
People recently have written about
00:27:51 ►
what they call punctated or punctuated evolution.
00:27:56 ►
Evolution is not apparently a slow curve of unfoldment.
00:28:01 ►
It is instead a series of equilibrium states
00:28:06 ►
punctuated by violent fluctuations
00:28:09 ►
in between
00:28:11 ►
and then a new equilibrium state
00:28:14 ►
so history
00:28:18 ►
I believe is not an aberration
00:28:21 ►
any more than leaving the sea
00:28:24 ►
could be called an aberration of marine existence.
00:28:29 ►
I mean, obviously it is not marine existence,
00:28:31 ►
and obviously we are not living in the same world
00:28:34 ►
as groundhogs and hummingbirds psychologically.
00:28:37 ►
But leaving the sea did not represent an ontological transition.
00:28:45 ►
It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality.
00:28:51 ►
And this is what history is.
00:28:53 ►
History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing.
00:29:00 ►
I mean, we have packed more change into the last 10,000 years than the billion years which preceded it.
00:29:11 ►
And yet as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in 10,000 years. If you were to go back to that era,
00:29:26 ►
the people would be exactly like people we see today.
00:29:30 ►
They wouldn’t be so racially heterogeneous
00:29:33 ►
because the great gene streamings and migrations
00:29:37 ►
that characterize history had not yet taken place,
00:29:41 ►
but essentially perfectly modern people. then history is apparently if we
00:29:49 ►
view it as a process that nature tolerates if not encourages then history is essentially
00:29:59 ►
apparently uh important enough to place the to jeopardize the stability of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world.
00:30:13 ►
It’s as though nature is saying we are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for 50,000 years in order for the opportunity to be explored
00:30:27 ►
of language using, technologically expressing intelligence
00:30:32 ►
carrying all of life to the next level.
00:30:37 ►
And it’s a terrifying enterprise
00:30:40 ►
because apparently to carry life to the next level tremendous intellectual
00:30:49 ►
sophistication is required about the release and control of energy the problem is energy can be
00:30:58 ►
used to destroy as well as build so as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater power
00:31:07 ►
and ability to manipulate the environment,
00:31:11 ►
the stakes in the cosmic game have risen.
00:31:17 ►
And now what we have
00:31:18 ►
is approximately $100 billion
00:31:20 ►
sitting in the center of the crap table
00:31:23 ►
and one roll of the dice more and we’re going to either win it or lose everything.
00:31:31 ►
Because intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have reached. Why? Because we have extracted
00:31:46 ►
all the available metals
00:31:48 ►
near the surface of the earth.
00:31:51 ►
An evolving species
00:31:54 ►
following after us
00:31:56 ►
will find the earth
00:31:58 ►
strangely depleted of usable materials
00:32:02 ►
down to the 1500 foot level.
00:32:05 ►
And so intelligence coming beyond us
00:32:09 ►
will find it just does not have the resources
00:32:12 ►
to make the leap to technical civilization.
00:32:15 ►
So it’s beginning to look like a one-shot deal.
00:32:20 ►
And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons.
00:32:25 ►
First of all, because they allow us as individuals to break out of the flat cultural illusion
00:32:34 ►
and to rise up and look at this situation.
00:32:39 ►
So it’s for us a tool to understand our predicament. But the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance to arise in part
00:32:53 ►
because what psychedelics do, and I think this isn’t too challengeable,
00:32:59 ►
is they catalyze imagination.
00:33:04 ►
They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise.
00:33:09 ►
Well, notice that the enterprise of human history
00:33:13 ►
is nothing more than the fallout created by strange ideas.
00:33:18 ►
You know, let’s build a pyramid.
00:33:21 ►
Let’s build a windmill.
00:33:23 ►
Let’s build a pyramid let’s build a windmill let’s build a water wheel you know and then empires
00:33:27 ►
philosophies religions arise in the wake of these situations i’ve argued in the past and i’m going
00:33:36 ►
to try not to repeat it here today because i think you’ve all heard it but i will just mention it in
00:33:41 ►
a sentence or two that the critical catalyst propelling us
00:33:46 ►
out of the slowly evolving hominid line
00:33:49 ►
and caused us to take an orthogonal right-hand turn
00:33:54 ►
into culture, language, art, yearning,
00:33:58 ►
probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet
00:34:04 ►
during that episodic moment
00:34:07 ►
when we went from being fruititarian canopy dwellers
00:34:11 ►
to omnivorous pack-hunting creatures of the grassland.
00:34:16 ►
And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in our grassland diet
00:34:21 ►
that caused us to discover that there is a mind and you can perturb it.
00:34:28 ►
I mean, think about, I mean, I don’t think you could discover consciousness if you didn’t
00:34:34 ►
perturb it because as Marshall McLuhan said, whoever discovered water, it certainly wasn’t
00:34:41 ►
a fish.
00:34:42 ►
Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness,
00:34:47 ►
and yet we know it’s there.
00:34:49 ►
Well, the reason we know it’s there is because if you perturb it,
00:34:53 ►
then you see it,
00:34:55 ►
and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it,
00:35:00 ►
which is the mind-brain system resting behind your eyebrows.
00:35:04 ►
which is the mind-brain system resting behind your eyebrows, if you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion,
00:35:15 ►
then you see it’s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water.
00:35:21 ►
Suddenly the convection currents operating in the in the clear water
00:35:26 ►
become visible because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics
00:35:35 ►
of of the standing water the mind is precisely like that and the psychedelic is like a die marker being dropped into this aqueous system.
00:35:47 ►
And then you say, oh, I see.
00:35:49 ►
It works like this and like this.
00:35:53 ►
Well, if psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination,
00:36:00 ►
and if history is driven by the imagination,
00:36:04 ►
it is driven through the fallout from the imagination, which is technology and culture.
00:36:11 ►
Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives of the ratiocination of the mind. And technology has, like biological life,
00:36:29 ►
but on a much faster or accelerated time frame,
00:36:33 ►
technology has this weird tendency
00:36:36 ►
to transcend itself,
00:36:39 ►
to bootstrap itself.
00:36:41 ►
You know, if you have a cart,
00:36:44 ►
then it implies better wheels, better bearings, better structure,
00:36:50 ►
and then higher speed, more control, more feedback from the machine.
00:36:56 ►
That means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so on.
00:37:02 ►
Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature has
00:37:09 ►
itself this self-transcending quality. But ever-accelerating, this is the important point, accelerating accretion of technology
00:37:26 ►
means that history is strangely
00:37:30 ►
foreshortened at the future end because
00:37:33 ►
it happens faster and faster it’s like a
00:37:37 ►
process that begins very slowly but once
00:37:40 ►
started has the quality of a cascade
00:37:43 ►
every or you know the rate at which falling bodies move.
00:37:48 ►
32.5 feet per second, per second.
00:37:52 ►
Each second it accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second.
00:38:01 ►
Technology is like this.
00:38:07 ►
second. Technology is like this and we now are in a domain where if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years it becomes unmanageable
00:38:18 ►
as an as a intellectual task. We can talk about the automobile,
00:38:26 ►
what it might look like 50 years from now.
00:38:29 ►
It would float.
00:38:31 ►
It would go 500 miles an hour.
00:38:33 ►
It would be guided by your mind,
00:38:36 ►
so forth and so on.
00:38:37 ►
These kinds of ideas.
00:38:40 ►
But when you think that
00:38:42 ►
every artifact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation
00:38:50 ►
and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations that we can’t anticipate,
00:39:01 ►
that’s the key thing, our inability to anticipate the synergies between
00:39:07 ►
our technologies. I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity.
00:39:19 ►
Those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences.
00:39:29 ►
Yeah.
00:39:29 ►
The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego.
00:39:35 ►
I mean, we hope, we straight people hope, that they never meet it except at death.
00:39:44 ►
hope that they never meet it except at death.
00:39:50 ►
Of course, they don’t realize going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution.
00:39:59 ►
But the government is expressive of this dominator culture that we’re living in. The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very tenuous,
00:40:09 ►
and consequently it walks around imbued with fear.
00:40:14 ►
I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs.
00:40:18 ►
That’s because it’s a very recent development.
00:40:23 ►
I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development
00:40:28 ►
and say, just very briefly, here’s how I think this worked. I’m not going to run through
00:40:38 ►
the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego. all primates
00:40:46 ►
have what are called dominance hierarchies
00:40:50 ►
that simply means that the hard bodied
00:40:53 ►
long fanged young males
00:40:56 ►
kick everybody else around
00:40:59 ►
they control the females
00:41:01 ►
the children
00:41:03 ►
homosexuals, the elderly. Everybody is taking orders from this
00:41:11 ►
dominance hierarchy. And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys. It’s a generalized feature
00:41:17 ►
of primate behavior. And it’s an aspect of our behavior as we sit here.
00:41:25 ►
Women, the feminine is not honored.
00:41:29 ►
The elderly are marginalized.
00:41:32 ►
Homosexuals, that whole issue.
00:41:37 ►
Many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude.
00:42:08 ►
ills stem from this attitude. Well, but you see, I believe that when we left the trees and admitted psilocybin into our diet, that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very very difficult uh first of all the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair bonding that’s
00:42:15 ►
where it begins uh if in in a society taking a lot of psilocybin monogamous pair bonding breaks down
00:42:25 ►
because of
00:42:27 ►
CNS activation
00:42:29 ►
and sexual arousal
00:42:32 ►
so in a psilocybin
00:42:34 ►
using culture
00:42:35 ►
there will be a tendency
00:42:37 ►
to orgiastic
00:42:38 ►
sexual behavior
00:42:41 ►
rather than monogamous pair bonding
00:42:43 ►
what that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion
00:42:51 ►
because in an orgiastic society,
00:42:55 ►
men cannot trace lines of male paternity.
00:42:59 ►
So men’s attitude toward children is,
00:43:03 ►
these children are all ours.
00:43:06 ►
We the group.
00:43:07 ►
It’s a glue that we, in our paranoid social style, with everybody having the deed to their property and their 11 foot high fence, can hardly imagine. But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate,
00:43:31 ►
the evolving proto-hominid, now hominid, now human being. When psilocybin was taken out of the diet,
00:43:46 ►
the old, old primate program was still there.
00:43:48 ►
It had not been bred out.
00:43:51 ►
The genes were always there. It’s just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years,
00:43:54 ►
we medicated ourselves, literally, religiously.
00:43:59 ►
We religiously medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener.
00:44:06 ►
These orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward.
00:44:13 ►
The problem was when the psilocybin was taken away, we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years.
00:44:24 ►
We had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years.
00:44:32 ►
We had evolved language, rudimentary abstract philosophy, a sense of religion. We had invented technology in the form of using fire and chipping flint and all that.
00:44:38 ►
The psilocybin goes away and suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies are in the hands of marauding apes.
00:44:50 ►
Not any more cohesive, caring human social groups,
00:44:59 ►
but marauding territorial apes driven by the desire to control
00:45:05 ►
all weaker members of the social group
00:45:08 ►
and that’s our circumstance
00:45:11 ►
we have the tools that would allow us
00:45:15 ►
to sculpt paradise
00:45:17 ►
but we have the reflexes and value systems
00:45:21 ►
of anthropoid apes of some sort.
00:45:26 ►
So the split between our conscious hopes,
00:45:32 ►
our best foot,
00:45:33 ►
and the bottom of the human scale is appalling.
00:45:39 ►
I mean, look at the spread.
00:45:42 ►
It’s a spread from Mother Teresa to serial killers.
00:45:50 ►
I mean, you don’t get serial killers in the chipmunk population or the grasshopper population.
00:46:10 ►
These animals are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies can erupt. We, on the other hand, are half angel, half pack hunting killer ape.
00:46:17 ►
I mean, we’re an object fetish society.
00:46:21 ►
I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a profound
00:46:26 ►
discontent
00:46:28 ►
that’s what we’re about
00:46:30 ►
it doesn’t matter, no matter what’s
00:46:32 ►
going on, after a little
00:46:34 ►
while, we get restless
00:46:37 ►
and move on, other animal
00:46:39 ►
species are embedded in a
00:46:41 ►
kind of world of endless
00:46:43 ►
genetic
00:46:44 ►
cycling no are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling.
00:46:46 ►
No fox grows bored with hunting, you know.
00:46:53 ►
And yet our thing is a profound dis-ease.
00:46:59 ►
And I believe it’s because,
00:47:01 ►
and slowly you forced me to do this whole rap,
00:47:19 ►
which I swore I wouldn’t do. I believe it’s because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of Godhead. But then it disappeared and we are left in this very peculiar situation.
00:47:26 ►
This is the myth of the fall.
00:47:28 ►
We are half angel, half beast.
00:47:32 ►
And these two natures are united in every one of us.
00:47:36 ►
And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community and ascent to a higher level if you
00:47:47 ►
completely restrict your your intake of intoxicants of any sort then you get the
00:47:56 ►
teetotaler type personality which is characterized by incredible smugness,
00:48:05 ►
limited intellectual horizons,
00:48:08 ►
and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation
00:48:12 ►
that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.
00:48:18 ►
Yes.
00:48:19 ►
See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key.
00:48:24 ►
See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key.
00:48:31 ►
Psilocybin in small amounts increases visual acuity.
00:48:34 ►
This is not an arguable point.
00:48:38 ►
I mean, you can just give people psilocybin and give them eye tests,
00:48:41 ►
and people with astigmatism see better. Your edge detection ability is greatly increased. Well, you can see that an animal like our remote ancestors in a hunting environment in the grassland, if there’s an item of diet that will make you a better and more efficient hunter, the equivalent of chemical binoculars
00:49:06 ►
lying around on the grassland, those animals that avail themselves of this technology will
00:49:14 ►
be more successful hunters.
00:49:18 ►
And so it was.
00:49:20 ►
Psilocybin, animals using psilocybin were more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age well then at slightly higher doses you get this CNS arousal which in highly sexed animals such as primates arousal means sexual arousal and erection in the male.
00:49:52 ►
So then, without the overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors,
00:50:01 ►
I’m sure these organisms simply flopped in a heap and sorted it all out later.
00:50:05 ►
So that’s the middle range of the dosage.
00:50:08 ►
Low dose, success in hunting.
00:50:13 ►
Medium dose, social cohesion achieved through ego dissolution and orgiastic sexuality.
00:50:18 ►
Yet higher doses, five grams and up,
00:50:23 ►
hunting is out of the question. Sex is out of the question
00:50:25 ►
sex is out of the question
00:50:28 ►
you’re just nailed to the ground by the campfire
00:50:31 ►
and in the course of the evening you discover
00:50:35 ►
religion
00:50:36 ►
philosophy, art and you know
00:50:40 ►
all of that
00:50:41 ►
so here is a unique chemical that at every dose level synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self-expression.
00:51:01 ►
The driving of the imagination.
00:51:08 ►
self-expression, the driving of the imagination. Yes, in the question back here, you said we can’t create what we can’t conceive of. This is why what the psychedelic experience does, really,
00:51:16 ►
is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable. I mean, what can be imagined can be created. What cannot be imagined is not part of the play.
00:51:28 ►
So psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product
00:51:38 ►
in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting,
00:51:47 ►
abstract ideas.
00:51:49 ►
All of these things are what we are most unique.
00:51:56 ►
Well, that’s how it seemed to me.
00:51:58 ►
It seemed to me culture is a shabby lie.
00:52:03 ►
Or at least this culture is a shabby lie
00:52:06 ►
I mean if you work like a dog
00:52:09 ►
you get 260 channels
00:52:13 ►
of bad television
00:52:15 ►
and a German automobile
00:52:16 ►
what kind of perfection is that?
00:52:22 ►
our secular society.
00:52:29 ►
Religion is completely devalued.
00:52:38 ►
And consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize.
00:52:40 ►
I’m sure you’ve all seen the T-shirt that says,
00:52:50 ►
he, notice he, who dies with the most toys wins uh that is in fact the banner under which we’re flying here and the level of unhappiness is immense i mean the level of unhappiness among
00:52:58 ►
the poor they’ve always been miserable but we’ve managed to create something entirely new in human
00:53:05 ►
history an utterly miserable ruling class I mean there seems no excuse for
00:53:11 ►
that aren’t those last words so true the ones where he said it seems to me that
00:53:22 ►
culture at least this culture is a shabby lie.
00:53:27 ►
Well, I could go on at length right now about the horrors of American culture,
00:53:31 ►
which include alcohol, television, and conspicuous consumption.
00:53:36 ►
But my guess is that you’ve already figured that out for yourself.
00:53:40 ►
Hopefully enough people will also figure that one out on their own
00:53:43 ►
before the final roll of the dice that Terrence just mentioned.
00:53:48 ►
It dawned on me when he was talking just now about his hypothesis of how the apes came down from the canopy and began eating psilocybin mushrooms,
00:53:58 ►
which subsequently acted to catalyze early human consciousness,
00:54:06 ►
acted to catalyze early human consciousness, that some of our fellow saloners may not have had the opportunity to hear his complete, detailed description of this idea.
00:54:13 ►
And so I’m going to dig out a recording of a talk where he goes into that concept in
00:54:17 ►
greater detail, and I’ll play it here in the salon in order to give you a better understanding
00:54:22 ►
of how he came to this somewhat
00:54:25 ►
startling conclusion.
00:54:27 ►
Now, for a little news that has recently come across my desk that you might not have noticed,
00:54:33 ►
and that has to do with some rather shady characters who are passing themselves off
00:54:38 ►
as Iowa Scaros, but who actually are demented criminals.
00:54:43 ►
A couple of days ago I received an email from an elder who I have a great deal of respect for
00:54:49 ►
and he told me that there is a man operating out of North Carolina
00:54:53 ►
and advertising ayahuasca experiences in reputable publications such as Shaman’s Drum
00:55:00 ►
but who are not true Iowa Scaros. And this particular person, so the story goes,
00:55:07 ►
is that he’s been making sexual advances to women immediately after conducting ayahuasca ceremonies.
00:55:16 ►
And at a time when they are particularly vulnerable to such attacks.
00:55:20 ►
And make no mistake about it,
00:55:22 ►
coming on to someone during or immediately after a medicine ceremony is an attack in every sense of the word.
00:55:30 ►
Now, since I don’t have any first-hand information about this person, I’m not going to give his name.
00:55:35 ►
However, I feel that it’s important to bring this to your attention and let you know that everyone who gets involved with our sacred medicines is not necessarily a pure spirit.
00:55:46 ►
And the day after I received this very disturbing email,
00:55:50 ►
I received the following email from Dennis McKenna, who said,
00:55:54 ►
Yes, it’s a pity, but this kind of thing goes on all the time.
00:55:59 ►
Even the traditional Iowa Scaros do this.
00:56:02 ►
As my friend Alan Shoemaker in Iquitos says, they all do it.
00:56:06 ►
That doesn’t make it right, and in fact, they don’t all do it.
00:56:10 ►
One more reason to respect Eduardo Luna’s integrity.
00:56:14 ►
He provides a safe environment where anyone, man or woman, knows they are in good hands, protected and safe.
00:56:20 ►
He would never do shit like this.
00:56:22 ►
And, of course, Andrina would kick his butt if he even tried.
00:56:28 ►
And Dennis continues,
00:56:29 ►
I don’t know what the answer is here.
00:56:31 ►
There is no board of shamanic integrity to separate the predator charlatans from the real ones.
00:56:38 ►
I guess all we can do is make sure the word about these jerks get out and is spread far and wide.
00:56:44 ►
So, there you have it. Please be
00:56:47 ►
very cautious, my friends, when you place yourself in the hands of someone who you know little about.
00:56:53 ►
It’s still a dangerous world out there, even in the psychedelic community, at least for the time
00:56:59 ►
being. And this brings me to something else I want to say about the ayahuasca experience that Max Freakout has been talking about in his excellent podcast, Psychonautica, which you can find at dopethemed.co.uk.
00:57:13 ►
As you know, I’ve had nothing but high praise for Max and the valuable information he provides.
00:57:20 ►
But as I’ve mentioned before, there is one area in which we have a major disagreement, and that is on the use of ayahuasca.
00:57:28 ►
Now, while listening to his recent program, number 20, I made a few notes about what I wanted to say about where our opinions differ.
00:57:37 ►
And now I find it quite ironic that the story of sexual predators came to me at this time.
00:57:43 ►
that the story of sexual predators came to me at this time.
00:57:47 ►
You see, where Max and I part company on this issue is that I very strongly believe that a true, genuine, authentic ayahuasca experience
00:57:54 ►
must be done in a small group and be guided by the singing of vicaros,
00:57:59 ►
by a skilled ayahuasquero.
00:58:01 ►
And now I have to admit that Max’s intuition about letting someone else have control,
00:58:06 ►
any control at all over an experience like that, well, his intuition seems to be well grounded
00:58:13 ►
when you’re seeking an experience of this nature. In fact, a while back on KMO’s Sea Realm podcast,
00:58:20 ►
he played a recording from two different ayahuasca sessions he attended
00:58:25 ►
last summer while in the Amazon.
00:58:27 ►
And to be honest, the first experience he had sounded more like a cut from the Texas
00:58:32 ►
Chainsaw Massacre than anything even remotely resembling an ayahuasca ceremony.
00:58:38 ►
And I still shudder to think that people are being exposed to such horror and come away
00:58:44 ►
thinking that they know
00:58:45 ►
something about the vine. Nonetheless, I want to be sure to distance myself from most of what Max
00:58:51 ►
said about ayahuasca in his Psychonautica number 20. In my humble opinion, there was a lot of bad
00:58:59 ►
information passed on in that program. One example is when he compared DMT to psilocybin by saying that they weren’t all that different
00:59:07 ►
from one another because their chemicals’ names kind of sounded alike.
00:59:12 ►
Now, I don’t mind people giving their opinion about things, but that opinion is so far off
00:59:17 ►
base that I actually began to laugh when I heard it.
00:59:21 ►
So while I have given my blessing to Max and his program, I want
00:59:25 ►
to make it very clear that I in no way support his opinions about ayahuasca, a sacred medicine
00:59:31 ►
which he admits he has never used. This is serious and potentially dangerous business.
00:59:38 ►
And over and above all of the other sacred medicines, I think ayahuasca should be very,
00:59:43 ►
very respected. Because if you don’t respect
00:59:46 ►
Lady Ayahuasca, you might be in for a lifetime of trouble. So go slowly here, very slowly, and
00:59:53 ►
tread lightly, my friends. There’s no need to be in a rush to have this experience, and I still
00:59:59 ►
remain convinced that if and when the time is right for you, well, she’ll find you. It just seems to work that way.
01:00:06 ►
Now, while I’m thinking about Psychonautica, I also want to say something about my dear
01:00:11 ►
friend Dope Fiend, who is the beautiful spirit behind the Cannabis Podcast Network, which
01:00:17 ►
is the collection of podcasts that you’ll find at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:00:22 ►
And to keep this brief, I’d like to suggest that you listen to his podcast number 103,
01:00:28 ►
for there’s a wealth of wisdom in that program.
01:00:31 ►
And I’ll have more to say about some of those issues
01:00:34 ►
that Dope Fiend raises,
01:00:36 ►
but I’m going to save them for a later podcast
01:00:38 ►
and give you a chance to listen to that particular show first
01:00:41 ►
so that you have a little background
01:00:43 ►
for what I’d like to discuss.
01:00:46 ►
And I seem to have gotten a little heavy here
01:00:49 ►
and I didn’t mean to bring you down,
01:00:50 ►
but there are times when we’ve got to take the bull by the tail
01:00:54 ►
and face the situation, if you know what I mean.
01:00:57 ►
And even though his podcast 103 begins with a heavy trip,
01:01:01 ►
it quickly moves into music and light.
01:01:04 ►
I think you’ll enjoy it and you’ll most certainly come away from it with something worth thinking about.
01:01:10 ►
Now let’s get on to some fun stuff.
01:01:13 ►
First of all, if you are a contributor to the very important website, arrowid.org,
01:01:19 ►
that’s E-R-O-W-I-D dot org,
01:01:22 ►
you’ve already received the latest copy of Arrowid Extracts, which always comes packed with great information.
01:01:30 ►
In fact, I think I mentioned this recently, but their current issue has several excellent articles about the varieties of the nicotine experience and about absinthe, which now seems to be making its way back into the world.
01:01:42 ►
seems to be making its way back into the world.
01:01:46 ►
But one of the little tidbits in that issue that I would have missed otherwise is the fact that in the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary,
01:01:51 ►
the word entheogen has at long last been added.
01:01:55 ►
So congratulations to Jeremy Bigwood, Jonathan Ott, Carl Ruck, Danny Staples,
01:02:01 ►
and R. Gordon Wasson for coining that word.
01:02:04 ►
It’s good to know that the straight world now recognizes it. Thank you. all one word. And I’m now, at long last, starting to get up to speed with MySpace.
01:02:27 ►
And so I want to thank them and all of the new friends who are linking to us on MySpace.
01:02:32 ►
Quite frankly, I’m blown away by all of you.
01:02:35 ►
And Spongle, the Shaman, and Grateful Dead, hey, I love your music and have some of your CDs that I’ve had for years now. And as for great music, that also goes for my friends Vav On, Lunatinker, The Sun Blindness,
01:02:53 ►
Ethno Superlounge, Empyrean Imagio, DJ Mystery, Indica Tricome Project, Shaman’s Path, Audiolyzer, DJ Dreamcode, Salvia Sound System, Primicide 2,
01:03:09 ►
Tiesto, Brian Metcalf, The Delusions, Daft Punk, Grackle, Salvia Sound System, Utah Saints,
01:03:20 ►
and Cy Shrek. And I’ve probably pronounced some of your names improperly,
01:03:25 ►
and I apologize for that.
01:03:27 ►
But I’ve spent some time listening to at least one of each of your tracks on MySpace
01:03:31 ►
and found it all quite enjoyable.
01:03:33 ►
Incredible, actually.
01:03:35 ►
And I’ve been returning to some of your pages for extended listening when I get the time.
01:03:40 ►
You know, it’s nice to visit your pages late in the evening
01:03:43 ►
when I’m kind of run down and need to get re-energized by your wonderful music.
01:03:47 ►
You all have opened me up to a world of new music, and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart.
01:03:54 ►
And thanks to all of you for connecting with us in MySpace.
01:03:57 ►
You’ve made this old guy feel young once again.
01:04:01 ►
And if I’ve missed any other musical groups, please forgive me, but I’ll continue to
01:04:05 ►
visit each of my friends’ MySpace pages, and I’ll eventually find you. And by the way, until a few
01:04:12 ►
weeks ago, I hadn’t actually spent much time on MySpace, but now that I’ve visited all of my
01:04:18 ►
friends’ pages, I have to say how impressed I am with the enormous creativity that has gone into
01:04:23 ►
your work.
01:04:27 ►
And thank you all for the comments you’ve left.
01:04:31 ►
While I’m not quite up to speed on responding to them online,
01:04:33 ►
I want you to know that I’ve read them all and really appreciate you taking the time to add a comment to our page.
01:04:38 ►
And also I want to thank those artists who have added some of your artwork to our page.
01:04:43 ►
Wow, you guys really blow me away.
01:04:47 ►
And so that you know, I do make a point of visiting each and every one of my friends’ pages on MySpace,
01:04:53 ►
even if it’s only for a few minutes.
01:04:55 ►
But doing so has given me a much better idea of who some of our fellow salonners are.
01:05:00 ►
In fact, if you’re interested in getting a better idea of who a few of the people are who also are
01:05:07 ►
listening to these podcasts just go to our myspace page and check out some of our friends and i i say
01:05:13 ►
our friends because as fellow salonners they’re your friends too and what a wonderfully talented
01:05:20 ►
group of friends we have i’m i’m really greatly honored by you connecting with the Psychedelic Salon’s page.
01:05:27 ►
One last thing I want to mention is that I’ve begun podcasting on a new channel as well.
01:05:33 ►
So in addition to the Psychedelic Salon, I now have another program simply called the Matrix Cast.
01:05:39 ►
It’s going to be a while before I submit it to iTunes,
01:05:42 ►
and so for now the only way you’ll be able to listen to it is go to www.matrixcast.com and download it from there.
01:05:56 ►
Or if you prefer, you can stream it online from that site as well.
01:06:00 ►
My first program is now out, and it’s a conversation that Bruce Dahmer and I had late one November night in 2006.
01:06:08 ►
Now, the reason for this new podcast channel is so that I can make available to you some talks and conversations that fall more into the realm of the down to earth physical world.
01:06:25 ►
physical world. While in the salon, I intend to keep the topics more on the philosophical and metaphysical ideas that often arise in the minds of people after they’ve used our sacred medicines
01:06:31 ►
or achieved similar insights through trance dance, meditation, and other techniques that
01:06:37 ►
boost our everyday consciousness to a slightly higher plane. So if you’re interested in things like harnessing asteroids, moon bases, the extinction of species,
01:06:48 ►
and a wide range of other topics that our corporate media tries
01:06:52 ►
to keep hidden from your view, well, just cruise over to the Matrixcast
01:06:56 ►
and give it a listen. Before I go, I want
01:07:00 ►
to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are
01:07:03 ►
protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:07:09 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:07:23 ►
Any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions about these podcasts?
01:07:28 ►
Well, please add them as comments to the program notes on the psychedelicsalon.org blog so that our entire community can get involved in these discussions.
01:07:33 ►
Or you can also post your thoughts on the Psychedelic Salon forum,
01:07:37 ►
which you’ll find at thegrowreport.com,
01:07:40 ►
where I also spend some of my online surfing time each week.
01:07:44 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:07:49 ►
Be well, my friends. Human, Dian, Artificial, and Extraterrestrial.
01:08:10 ►
It is the impossible become possible and yet remaining impossible.