Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[Note: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“These are the two things we don’t have: As a society we cannot seem to make peace with nature. As human beings, as individuals, it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves.”

ArtByHiginio004.jpg

“We have not, in this culture, awakened to the depths of the crisis that surrounds us.”

“Our culture is in trouble. Not trouble! We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways, horror beyond your wildest imagination, or breakthrough to dignity, decency, community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination.”

“The only thing I can preach is the felt presence of immediate experience, which for me came through the psychedelics, which are not drugs but plants. It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs. There are spirits in the natural world that come to us in this way.”

“When you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women. It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals.”

“We have descended into a dominator pattern that is basically based on clutching, on fear. And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue that this is the consequence of ceasing, basically, to do enough hallucinogens in the diet.”

“It is a crisis in consciousness which confronts us globally. Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough, then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in.”

“Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behavior are acceptable.”

“There are not rosy futures of suburban housing and ratatouille to be extended endlessly into the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven or hell. One of the other.”

“What we deny, as a culture, as a culture of materialist positivist reductionists, it the presence of spirit in the world, in ourselves, or in nature.”

“I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence. But that means softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24

So, are you surprised to see a second podcast from the salon this week?

00:00:30

Actually, I hadn’t planned it that way, but this morning I was listening to KMO’s excellent interview with Nate Hagans of TheOildrum.com

00:00:39

in KMO’s Sea Realm podcast number 67,

00:00:43

and I decided that rather than wait until next year to play this particular talk by Terence McKenna,

00:00:49

that it really needed to reach you right now. And so, here we are once again.

00:00:56

Now, one of the reasons I’m playing this particular lecture today is to point out the fact that,

00:01:02

while it’s very nice that Al Gore has received a Nobel Prize

00:01:06

for sounding the ecological alarm,

00:01:09

the simple fact of the matter is that a lot of people have been trying to get our species’ attention

00:01:15

on this situation for years, for many decades in fact.

00:01:19

And almost without exception, the most active members of our psychedelic community the world over have been sounding the alarm.

00:01:29

And yet, for the most part, we’ve been ignored and put down as nothing more than a bunch of drug-addled hippies.

00:01:43

because taking care of our very fragile life support system here on Earth might also mean, to them at least,

00:01:47

a slight reduction in the obscene profits being made by the global corporations they control.

00:01:53

I’m not sure exactly when Terence gave this talk,

00:01:57

but I believe it took place sometime in 1995,

00:02:01

which means this lecture was given over a decade ago.

00:02:05

Yet the message of this talk is still right on point today.

00:02:09

So let’s join Terence McKenna as he discusses some of the critical issues that are now threatening

00:02:15

the continued existence of our species.

00:02:23

Well, let’s see here

00:02:25

I think what we have to do

00:02:27

is think in terms

00:02:28

of the exhaustion

00:02:30

of our own cultural forms

00:02:33

I mean that’s what we’re living through

00:02:35

is the global dying

00:02:37

created by the exhaustion

00:02:39

of our cultural forms

00:02:41

and the vitality

00:02:44

of the cultural forms that we see in these so-called

00:02:49

primitive, I call them pre-literate, people.

00:02:54

As Nicole pointed out, they have nothing, but what they seem to have that we cannot

00:03:00

seem to get a grip on is a kind of dynamic equilibrium with their environment

00:03:07

and peace of mind in the felt experience of the moment.

00:03:13

These are the two things we don’t have.

00:03:15

As a society, we cannot seem to make peace with nature.

00:03:21

As human beings, as individuals,

00:03:24

it’s very hard for us to be at peace with ourselves

00:03:28

i mean i consider my own life the search for peace of mind forget enlightenment forget shunyata

00:03:37

all this stuff you know just a little peace of mind would be a tremendous boon as far as I can see.

00:03:46

So I really think that there’s a confluence here of themes and possibilities.

00:03:54

It has this richly plotted texture that always lets you know

00:03:59

that you’re in the presence of a higher order of things.

00:04:06

It’s that the shamans whom we admire, who we idealize,

00:04:13

are seen to be at the center of this environment,

00:04:18

the warm jungle, the tropics, the warm tropics,

00:04:22

that we find it necessary to destroy. So it’s a perfect image

00:04:28

of us being at war, not only with ourselves, but with nature itself. And, you know, for you’ve

00:04:39

heard all about how the Amazon and the Congo Basin and Eastern Indonesia are all being cleared and lumbered and turned into cattle ranches.

00:04:49

This is a tragedy, obviously.

00:04:51

We understand and can perceive the dynamics of that.

00:04:55

But how to make sense of a situation where,

00:04:58

as the World Bank and the IMF attempt to halt this kind of destruction.

00:05:06

On the other side of the coin,

00:05:09

the United States State Department and the DEA and these agencies

00:05:14

propose and are planning to carry out the defoliation of the Wyjaga Basin.

00:05:22

So there’s a schizophrenia here that is not academic. I mean, are we trying

00:05:29

to get the patient well or are we pulling the plugs one by one? We seem to be acting in both

00:05:36

dimensions simultaneously. And I think it’s because we have not in this culture awakened to the depth of the crisis that surrounds us.

00:05:50

You know, there’s a lot of kind of self-congratulatory back-slapping going around these days

00:05:57

over the fact that communists everywhere are in hot water and have to admit that they did it wrong. And this gives a lot of

00:06:08

satisfaction to people who feel that that means we did it right. We didn’t do it right. They did

00:06:17

it wrong and now admit they did it wrong. We do it wrong and have yet to even raise the possibility of turning away from what we are doing.

00:06:27

The internal contradictions of Marxism were based on a false definition of what people are.

00:06:36

People do not respond to central planning, hortatory propaganda, and stereotyping. Neither do people respond to an ethos of self-denial or a view of

00:06:54

human beings that denies the fact that we have certain itches which must be scratched. So,

00:07:01

you know, I think that the collapse of Marxism is only the collapse of the outer edge of the societal and civilizing assumptions that we have made. After all, Marxism is nothing more than the millenarian retread of Christian millenarianism, and so is modern science, yet another secular retread of Christian millenarianism.

00:07:28

So our culture is in trouble.

00:07:33

Not trouble.

00:07:34

We are at a terminal crisis, a bifurcation that can only go one of two ways.

00:07:42

Horror beyond your wildest imagination,

00:07:49

only go one of two ways. Horror beyond your wildest imagination or breakthrough to dignity, decency,

00:07:57

community, and caring beyond your wildest imagination. Now, where do you look for models? Where do you go? The answer is so obvious. You go to nature. Nature has been playing this game for three billion years on this planet. We have been playing the game, we the apostles of Christian scientism, for aboutance, a style that if we could but emulate it, we could rise out of the rubble

00:08:29

that we are making of the planet. You know, it was the geographer Carl Sauer who said,

00:08:34

man found the planet a climaxed primeval forest. He, and notice the gender here, he will leave the planet a weedy lot.

00:08:47

A weedy lot.

00:08:49

Now this is a metaphor where you change climax rainforest for weeds,

00:08:55

but it’s also true.

00:08:57

By clearing land, we promote the kind of plant evolution that stresses very rapid seed production

00:09:06

and annular cycles of growth, in other words, weeds.

00:09:12

And this tendency to find perfection and then to leave rubble in our wake

00:09:19

has haunted us for the past 3,000 or 4,000 years of our history.

00:09:27

us for the past three or four thousand years of our history now with the ozone shield disappearing with acid rain falling on the earth that can melt blocks of marble with the co2 levels rising

00:09:35

with the levels of strontium and chlorofluorocarbons and and you know the litany. We have now one last chance to fish or cut bait.

00:09:47

And the place where nature has provided the models for how to respond to this situation

00:09:55

is the climaxed rainforest.

00:09:58

Only the climaxed tropical rainforest has the kind of complexity of signal transfer,

00:10:09

Rainforest has the kind of complexity of signal transfer, movement of nutritional materials,

00:10:15

movement of electromagnetic radiation that we find in the modern city. It is a cliche of modernity that the city is a jungle.

00:10:20

The problem is it isn’t jungle enough.

00:10:22

The problem is it isn’t jungle enough. And I think it’s the task of the new shamans to take the metaphor of the jungle,

00:10:30

which is a metaphor of tremendous wealth, tremendous variety,

00:10:38

a tremendous outpouring of form and of energy

00:10:42

and of potential fulfillment of various bifurcation patterns of flow to take

00:10:50

that and in enrich our own lives with it and the way this is done is by empowering

00:10:58

the the presence of experience the main thing that you get with these so-called primitive, preliterate people

00:11:09

and with people like Nicole, who have spent time in this situation,

00:11:14

is they are in the moment.

00:11:17

They know how to have fun.

00:11:19

They know how to work.

00:11:21

They know how to live. And the reason they understand this is because they are focused

00:11:28

within the confines of the felt presence of experience. They do not live by abstraction.

00:11:36

And abstraction is the knife poised at our hearts. We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the earth in flames,

00:11:46

we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

00:11:51

That’s the level of disimpassioning that abstraction has laid upon us.

00:11:59

Well, hopefully this weekend there will be passion.

00:12:03

Well, hopefully this weekend there will be passion.

00:12:08

There will be an effort, wherever there is abstraction,

00:12:12

to drag it down into the felt presence of the moment.

00:12:18

I think basically what we are, are a kind of green anarchy,

00:12:25

an effort to revivify social forms that have been atrophied in the West at least since the destruction of Eleusis,

00:12:28

probably in most places thousands of years before that.

00:12:32

This is our last chance.

00:12:34

I have done the best I could

00:12:36

in terms of trying to sift through all these options

00:12:41

and as a communicator offer the best way out and you know i could only do my best

00:12:51

and so that’s what you get i can’t preach scientism because i don’t believe in it i can’t

00:12:59

preach buddhism because i can’t understand it the only thing I can preach is

00:13:06

the felt

00:13:07

presence of immediate experience which for me came through

00:13:12

The psychedelics which are not drugs, but plants

00:13:16

It’s a perversion of language to try and derail this thing into talk of drugs

00:13:23

There are spirits in the natural world

00:13:27

that come to us in this way.

00:13:30

And so far as I can tell,

00:13:33

this is the only way that they come to us

00:13:36

that is rapid enough

00:13:38

for it to have an impact upon us

00:13:41

as a global population.

00:13:44

This weekend will be different because we will be

00:13:46

hewing close to the source. Nicole is a priceless repository of information, more even than she

00:13:56

knows. If I could declare her a national treasure, I would. Who knows what this woman knows who knows how much human suffering the alleviation

00:14:09

of how much anxiety lies in the hands of perhaps half a dozen people of Nicole’s caliber who have

00:14:17

paid their dues in these jungles this information is flowing through our fingers and disappearing. In another 30 years, it will be all gone. Every time I go to the Amazon, I can feel the way in which it’s slipping away. often we have the experience where when we finally find the person who claims they know what we’re after

00:14:46

the line goes like this

00:14:49

well I’ve never taken it

00:14:52

but as a child I remember seeing my grandfather prepare it

00:14:58

and I think I can do it

00:15:01

if it weren’t for us standing there

00:15:03

asking that it be done,

00:15:05

it would never have even risen into the gentleman’s mind as a possibility.

00:15:09

This is the knife edge upon which this knowledge is poised.

00:15:15

If it can be saved, it gives me hope that we can be saved.

00:15:20

If we can’t save this kind of knowledge we cannot save ourselves

00:15:25

because this kind of knowledge is ourselves

00:15:29

culture is a garment which you put on

00:15:32

medical systems are pieces of jewelry

00:15:35

which you wrap around your throat or neck

00:15:37

religious ideals are like objects

00:15:40

which you push through pierced nostrils and earlobes

00:15:44

if we cannot come to terms with that

00:15:48

which allows us to give birth with ease, to die with dignity, and to live in health, then what

00:15:55

kind of a future do we have? No future at all. So this is not a meeting of obscurantists or enthusiasts for some private vista of transcendence.

00:16:06

This is a meeting of political activists, people who are socially committed to themselves, to each other, to the larger idea of community,

00:16:16

and who understand that when you talk about Gaia, it’s only an abstraction unless you talk about plants. The division between the masculine and the feminine is only trivially a difference between men and women.

00:16:38

It is fundamentally a division between plants and animals.

00:16:42

fundamentally a division between plants and animals

00:16:45

Plants are the enveloping feminine

00:16:49

matrix of control and refurbishment

00:16:53

animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around

00:16:59

Extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced

00:17:09

So the archaic revival if it means anything it means reconnecting the guyan mind which is a vegetable mind a feminine enfolding boundary

00:17:19

dissolving planetary mind that is not an abstraction, not a stereotype,

00:17:27

not something used to create hortatory propaganda, but a living, breathing reality.

00:17:34

A reality which is the only thing which stands between us and Armageddon.

00:17:41

History is a kind of horrified realization that something has been lost,

00:17:50

that there is an itch hard to scratch in the civilized context,

00:17:57

that we have, out of fear really, descended into patterns of domination

00:18:05

of each other,

00:18:07

of the environment,

00:18:09

of our children,

00:18:10

of our social relations

00:18:11

with exogamous groups.

00:18:13

We have descended into a dominator pattern

00:18:16

that is basically based on clutching,

00:18:19

on fear.

00:18:21

And I’m sure most of you have heard me argue

00:18:24

that this is the consequence of

00:18:27

ceasing basically to do enough hallucinogens in the diet that in fact

00:18:35

what human beings were flirting with over many many tens of millennia. Let’s say from 100,000 years ago to 15,000 years ago, human beings were in a

00:18:50

flirtatious situation with a symbiotic relationship with this mind resident in vegetable nature. Now, you all know what classic symbiosis is in biology.

00:19:08

It’s where, let’s take the example of the little fish

00:19:12

who lives in the sea anemone,

00:19:14

and big fish don’t bother it.

00:19:17

It gains protection.

00:19:18

The sea anemone gains access to larger prey,

00:19:23

which come to investigate the little fish.

00:19:26

That kind of symbiosis is genetically locked in.

00:19:30

And if you take the little fish

00:19:33

away from the anemone

00:19:37

and put it, let us say, in an aquarium without anemones,

00:19:41

it doesn’t die.

00:19:42

It doesn’t go into an immediate physiological crisis.

00:19:46

No, what happens is it simply has a low body weight and a short lifespan. In

00:19:53

other words, it is under stress. And I believe, I lost secret of human emergence,

00:20:08

the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey

00:20:14

and turned that species into a tormented, self-reflecting poet dreamer, that catalyst has to be sought in these tertiary alkaloids in the food chain

00:20:30

that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity.

00:20:36

And I’ve pointed out to you ad nauseum, I’m sure, the reciprocal feedback relationship that was working there.

00:20:48

In the case of the mushroom, in the veldt situation in Africa,

00:20:53

it was promoting at low doses visual acuity,

00:20:57

which was feeding back into the hunting and gathering process,

00:21:01

making those animals with this increased visual acuity more adaptively successful,

00:21:09

hence more reproductively successful, hence they’re outbreeding their competitors.

00:21:16

At higher doses, psilocybin actually causes a generalized arousal, which includes sexual

00:21:23

arousal, which includes sexual arousal.

00:21:30

Again, it becomes a catalyst for increased reproductive success.

00:21:34

More instances of copulation in a situation like that lead to more successful births of those into family structures

00:21:40

where the alkaloid has been accepted into the food chain. Well, this would be only an obscure topic of interest to primatologists

00:21:51

were it not for the fact that it is a crisis in consciousness

00:21:57

which confronts us globally.

00:22:00

Consciousness is the commodity that if we do not have enough of it, do not produce it fast enough,

00:22:08

then the momentum of the processes we set in motion in our ignorance is going to sterilize the planet and do us all in.

00:22:18

So we have to have consciousness. Well, then you look at the smorgasbord of ethnographic possibilities

00:22:27

and you discover this institution of shamanism. It is the institution of planner, of visionary,

00:22:35

of manager, of large system coordinator. That’s what it’s about. You call it magic on one level. You call it curing.

00:22:46

You call it folk psychiatry or weather prediction.

00:22:53

Shamans have been involved in all of these things.

00:22:55

But as Nicole made so eloquently the point last night,

00:23:00

to these deep forest people, it is ordinary.

00:23:04

It is ordinary. It is ordinary.

00:23:06

They live in a different cultural dimension than we do.

00:23:10

Dimensions which to us are completely value dark

00:23:14

are to them completely transparent.

00:23:18

And dimensions which to us are extremely rich and complex,

00:23:23

the inner world of the nucleus of the atom,

00:23:26

let us say, are for them totally value dark. They don’t even cognize the

00:23:32

possibility of asking the question. But nevertheless, the specialization in these

00:23:39

various domains is not something where one is as good as another.

00:23:46

Consciousness is the domain of immediate experience.

00:23:54

How are we going to save this planet?

00:23:59

How are we going to take the lethal cascade of toxic technological and ignorance producing

00:24:09

habits that are loose on this planet and channel them toward some kind of a sane and livable

00:24:17

world?

00:24:18

Well, the answer is emerging in culture out of the collectivity of global consciousness.

00:24:26

It is what I call the archaic revival.

00:24:29

It is this very large turnover in the mass mind.

00:24:34

Some people call it a paradigm shift. The sensory race shows the feelings and the attitudes of 15 to 20,000 years ago,

00:24:50

before fear, before ego, before male dominance, before hierarchy, hoarding, warfare, propaganda, child abuse,

00:25:03

all of these things. And the answer lies, as was indicated last night,

00:25:10

in integration into the dynamics of nature. Well, so far as my analysis gives it to me,

00:25:18

the only way you can abandon yourself to the dynamics of nature is to break through the language shell.

00:25:28

You must cut through the aura of programming

00:25:34

and cultural assumptions that surround us

00:25:37

from the moment we are able to speak.

00:25:39

The only way this can be done is by dissolving the boundaries of ego.

00:25:46

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual

00:25:51

who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter.

00:25:58

And culture, which we put on like an overcoat,

00:26:02

culture is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors

00:26:08

are acceptable. Now, I don’t know… So, you see, what I see going on in the Amazon is

00:26:17

a very radical, psycholitic therapy where they are dissolving literally dissolving the boundaries of self

00:26:27

culture and

00:26:29

And ego assumption and then what you discover is not

00:26:34

The white light or what William James called a blooming buzzing confusion

00:26:40

Although in the first few minutes it can be like that. But what you really discover is sentient, organized, living, loving nature.

00:26:52

That nature is a force.

00:26:54

Nature is a mind, a personality, organized with intentionality,

00:27:00

organized with feeling, humor, grace, and conviction.

00:27:09

Conviction.

00:27:11

And if you can get right with that conviction,

00:27:14

then that’s the secret of dancing in the waterfall.

00:27:18

That’s the secret of the shaman’s apparent transcendence

00:27:22

of the rules of mundane statistics.

00:27:26

Because that is what it is.

00:27:28

The shaman doesn’t violate physics.

00:27:30

He or she simply knows how to push the improbable to its greatest extent.

00:27:38

And in Eastern philosophy, this is called the Tao.

00:27:43

You know, abandonment to the flow,

00:27:46

fitting of the small pattern into the larger pattern.

00:27:52

Well, I think these things are very important because I think that psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis,

00:28:00

it’s a good idea, but it will never reach any kind of operational effectiveness

00:28:06

until we look to these native healers all over the world

00:28:11

and study their methods, and their methods are chemical and personal.

00:28:20

It’s a combination of care, attention, intention, and chemistry that allows consciousness to be made malleable and then recast in other forms.

00:28:36

So, I find myself this weekend explaining myself.

00:28:43

That’s what I feel like I’m doing.

00:28:51

Why does someone who extols the self-transforming elf machines of the DMT space also claim to be a conservationist,

00:28:55

also, you know, have a mathematical dog and poodle show?

00:29:00

Well, it’s because all of these things emerge out of the concrescence of consciousness,

00:29:07

its intention toward its own transformation. Nature is the answer. It’s not enough to be

00:29:17

like Wordsworth. It’s not enough to… This is not, Mao Zedong said the revolution is not a dinner party.

00:29:27

And certainly the ecological revolution is not a dinner party.

00:29:31

Poetic sensitivity to the death of the planet is not what we’re striving for here.

00:29:36

What we’re striving for is to halt, overturn, and back out of the impending death of the planet. It is very clear now that consciousness will decide

00:29:49

that the planet, there are not rosy futures

00:29:53

of suburban housing and Ratatouille

00:29:57

to be extended endlessly into the future.

00:30:01

We are approaching a bifurcation

00:30:03

where it is either going to become heaven or hell, one or the future. We are approaching a bifurcation where it is either going to become heaven

00:30:05

or hell, one or the other. And I think that this archaic intuition, which I see reaching

00:30:14

clear back to the birth of the 20th century and the 19th century, back to people like Alfred Jarry and Guillaume Apollinaire and the paraphysicians, the surrealists,

00:30:29

the physicists around Einstein, Freud,

00:30:32

modern art, modern dance, jazz,

00:30:36

all of this stuff is an effort to reclaim the primitive,

00:30:42

to reclaim the archaic,

00:30:44

to reject all that powdered wig algebra that

00:30:48

comes down through the French, English, German tradition of constipated male dominance.

00:30:55

And instead, you know, intuit, that’s what it is in Freud and Jung and the New Age. Intuit our way out.

00:31:06

But now, the intuition is rising to the surface.

00:31:11

We no longer have to operate without the presence of the goal firmly in hand.

00:31:19

The goal can now be stated.

00:31:21

What this is all about is a return to archaism

00:31:26

with the lessons learned in history.

00:31:30

That’s where we were happy.

00:31:32

The fall was a fall into a veil of tears,

00:31:37

into a world of limitation and pain and suffering

00:31:42

and infectious disease and so forth and so on.

00:31:49

It’s a prodigal journey into a lower dimension that can now be ended by a collective cultural decision

00:31:54

to commit to this Taoist, shamanistic, feminized, cybernetic,

00:32:03

caring, aware, present kind of being.

00:32:09

I mean, it’s nothing more than what each of us is in our very best moments.

00:32:14

But we have to extend those very best moments to fill whole lifetimes.

00:32:21

You know, think of the number of people who suffered and died that we could sit under this tree this morning.

00:32:29

I mean, in the last million years, nine times the glaciers have ground south from the poles,

00:32:36

freezing the world into ice and confining human populations to subtropical valleys and the warm tropics. Nine times the interglacial periods have come

00:32:47

and human populations have spread out over the earth.

00:32:50

They didn’t have radio.

00:32:54

They didn’t have antibiotics, contraception,

00:32:57

statistical analysis or the partial differential equation.

00:33:01

And yet somehow they managed to get us here.

00:33:04

Are we then, as the heirs of that

00:33:07

wavefront, of the inheritors of a billion-year process, are we in one generation to turn it into

00:33:15

a massive pottage? I think not. I certainly hope not. I would like to believe that we could make that leap to conscious awareness that would allow us to take

00:33:29

hold. Now the problem, it was easy the first 10 years that I sat before you, because what we were

00:33:37

doing was getting to know each other, to verify that we in fact existed, that I wasn’t crazy, you weren’t crazy, so forth and so on.

00:33:48

Now what looms ahead is the mess of politics.

00:33:53

And this I’m sure you have no stomach for.

00:33:57

I certainly don’t.

00:33:58

I’d rather be stoned and rocked in the arms of the goddess.

00:34:03

and rocked in the arms of the goddess.

00:34:05

But as a matter of fact,

00:34:08

this dominator thing is not going to be unhooked and put to bed without a struggle.

00:34:12

Everyone is going to have to be counted.

00:34:16

I’ve talked to you in recent months about memes.

00:34:21

Memes being the smallest potential units of ideas.

00:34:25

They’re like genes.

00:34:28

We are the nucleus of a mutant meme,

00:34:32

the meme of plant consciousness, hallucinogenic consciousness, shamanistic consciousness.

00:34:40

We have to refine this meme, replicate it through repetition, and spread it through society in the same way that a plant sheds seeds into an ecosystem. The idea will compete. The idea is a good one. It’s adaptive. It’s clever. It’s tough. It’s invasive. It can make use of many contexts to promote its own existence.

00:35:06

But it can’t do any of that if we don’t replicate it and get it out.

00:35:11

So I see these kinds of meetings as an opportunity for building community,

00:35:18

as an opportunity for people to look around themselves

00:35:22

and connect with the other people who are here. We cannot be told

00:35:27

from the rest of the population unless we self-select and gather together at a single point

00:35:34

in space and time. When we do that, we recognize each other. When this meeting is concluded we will merge back into the larger stream of the body politic but carrying this meme

00:35:48

of the guyan resurgence the gylanic wave that must come i mean people say it’s so wonderful

00:35:58

that you articulate these feminist ideas and so forth i do it because I don’t want to be dead.

00:36:07

I do it because I don’t want my children to have no world to live in.

00:36:09

There is no choice.

00:36:12

The walls are high

00:36:14

and the current is moving very fast.

00:36:17

What we need to do is merely

00:36:20

keep our spirits high

00:36:23

and learn to sing the song.

00:36:27

My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called chaotic

00:36:35

attractors or dynamics.

00:36:38

And this is the notion that many processes are not pushed from behind

00:36:45

by the momentum of causuistry

00:36:48

as in the ordinary Newtonian model of process

00:36:52

but that there are what he calls attractors

00:36:56

or basins of attraction

00:36:58

and these are things which lead processes forward

00:37:03

for instance a somewhat trivial example would be if we had a

00:37:09

large bowl and a marble, and every time we released the marble up near the rim of the bowl, we would

00:37:16

notice that it unfailingly rolled to the bottom of the bowl and located itself somewhere near the

00:37:22

center of the bottom of the bowl, we could say that the

00:37:26

bottom of the bowl acts as a basin of attraction for the marble. In other words, the marble finds

00:37:33

that its energy state is most at equilibrium when it locates itself in the trough of the bowl.

00:37:43

So there is a way of analyzing processes

00:37:46

to see them as though they were led rather than pushed.

00:37:50

And I think it’s fruitful to see human history this way.

00:37:55

You see, what we deny as a culture,

00:37:59

as a culture of materialist, positivist, reductionists,

00:38:04

is the presence of spirit in the world,

00:38:08

in ourselves, or in nature.

00:38:11

And so, Western science is very concerned

00:38:15

to deny what is called telos.

00:38:18

Telos is a Greek term for purpose.

00:38:21

Purpose.

00:38:22

The same idea as the attractor that I was trying. If you have a target, if you’re driving

00:38:30

a car toward a goal, the goal is your telos. It decides

00:38:35

how you will steer the car. Well, it has been for the

00:38:40

past 150 years extremely fashionable in sociology and biology because of Darwin,

00:38:46

to deny telos in nature, to say that, you know, any apparent order in nature is made up of the

00:38:57

disorder of random mutation meeting the disorder of natural selective processes, and these two streams of converging disorder

00:39:08

create a kind of apparent or virtual order,

00:39:12

which is an illusion.

00:39:14

This is the orthodox theory.

00:39:16

And when you take this Darwinism

00:39:18

and put it into historical theory,

00:39:21

theory of human processes in time,

00:39:24

you get the modern position in academic

00:39:28

philosophy about history, which is that it is, and the official phrase is,

00:39:33

trendlessly fluctuating. That’s what we’re asked to believe we are embedded

00:39:39

in, a 10,000 yearold process of trendless fluctuation.

00:39:45

In mathematics, this is called a random walk.

00:39:48

It means you just go over here a few steps,

00:39:51

and then you go this way, and then you go back.

00:39:53

You’re like a drunk lurching around in this space.

00:39:57

And this is the highest vision of human purpose

00:40:01

that the reductionist vision can offer. Well, what the intuition of religion is, especially Western religion, and I wouldn’t even bother to mention it, except that it also is the strong intuition of a lot of psychedelic experience, that there is some kind of a tractor in the historical phase space.

00:40:27

There is something which is drawing everything toward it.

00:40:31

It’s like a higher dimensional entity that casts an enormous shadow over the human landscape

00:40:39

so that, you know, at sitting around campfires 50,000 years ago,

00:40:45

people felt this vague tug toward organization, order, cognitive activity, epigenetic activity.

00:40:55

Epigenetic activity means coding stuff not in your genes, but in dance, gesture, ritual, and ultimately in clay and on paper and in electronic storage methods.

00:41:10

This proliferation of complexity is a response to and an anticipation of this transcendental object

00:41:20

at the end of historical process. You see, if it weren’t for our presence on this planet,

00:41:27

even modern science at its present primitive state could give a fairly good accounting

00:41:35

of what’s going on, that out of complex polymers arose super super complex polymers which were self-replicating,

00:41:45

and that was life, and then you have an animal population.

00:41:48

But the fly in the ointment of this rational model of reality is ourselves.

00:41:55

We are clearly imbued with a higher dimension, which we call spirit,

00:42:04

in a way that ordinary matter, when imbued with a higher dimension, which we call spirit, in a way that ordinary matter,

00:42:07

when imbued with a higher dimension,

00:42:10

is called life.

00:42:12

In other words,

00:42:12

we represent a different ontological level

00:42:16

in the career of organization

00:42:19

because we hope,

00:42:22

we despair,

00:42:23

we plan,

00:42:24

we remember, and we misremember. You know, we hope, we despair, we plan, we remember, and we misremember.

00:42:28

We lie, we fabricate, we delude ourselves.

00:42:32

All of these things are uniquely human functions.

00:42:36

Well, I think that shamanism, which is the focus of our concern here,

00:42:43

is a kind of anticipating of the whole pattern

00:42:47

and that this is really the way to think about shamanism

00:42:52

when thinking of it as a force

00:42:55

that can steady and complete an individual human life.

00:43:01

The shamans are not in history in the same way that we are.

00:43:08

By having access to this higher dimension

00:43:11

that they go to in their trance states

00:43:17

and their states of intoxication,

00:43:19

they gain a fractal overview on process,

00:43:23

on life.

00:43:28

I mean, after all, isn’t that what we mean by wisdom?

00:43:39

Wisdom is understanding how things really work, how they really work. Love affairs, the raising of children, the managing of corporations, the prosecution of wars. How do these things really work?

00:43:46

Not the deluded and fumbling attempts of the proponents of this or that school,

00:43:52

but a Taoistic insight into the actual appropriate dynamics of everything.

00:43:59

Well, how do you gain that kind of an insight?

00:44:03

The answer is you must have a superior model. You must have a superior model. Now if you believe, you know, that the world is composed of three levels and they are held up on the back of a woman who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space, this is a model of the universe. It can take you

00:44:26

a certain distance. But what model of the universe can actually offer reassurance in

00:44:36

all kinds of situations? Well, strangely enough, I think that these models come from the frontiers of mathematics,

00:44:47

that it is not near coincidence that the storms of visionary hallucination

00:44:55

that the shaman encounters are very much like the storms of form and color

00:45:02

that are spewed out of a Cray-3 supercomputer when it conducts a thousand iterations per second inside the Julius set or the Mantelbrot set or one of these other compound complex mathematical objects that we are beginning to see. You see, mathematics up to this point has been a computational science

00:45:26

because mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk to describe their objects. And consequently,

00:45:34

an excruciatingly difficult vocabulary kept most people from appreciating what mathematics was about.

00:45:45

Now the computer is to modern mathematics

00:45:49

like the telescope was to 16th century astronomy.

00:45:53

The computer becomes a window

00:45:55

into domains of hyper-complex computability

00:46:01

that previously could barely even be conceived,

00:46:06

but that now, at a rate of millions approaching billions of iterations per second, Ralph works on the

00:46:12

MMPP machine, the Multiple Parallel Processing Machine at Goddard Space Flight Center, it

00:46:19

does 800 mega-flops per second, 800 million floating point decimal calculations per second.

00:46:28

Well, you can dream dreams with a machine like that.

00:46:32

And strangely enough, at the edge of the super technology of the dominator culture

00:46:37

at Goddard Space Flight Center with guys, high priests standing around in white coats, when you get it up and running,

00:46:46

what you see is what an ayahuasca shaman sees on a Saturday night in the Amazon.

00:46:52

You see that you are navigating through a complex higher dimensional phase space

00:46:58

where by varying the inputs of amplitude and frequency,

00:47:03

in one case using an electronic box,

00:47:05

in the other case using the human voice,

00:47:08

you sing your way through a mathematical domain

00:47:12

which is a higher resonance of reality.

00:47:17

And you learn how the world really works,

00:47:21

how things happen.

00:47:23

Well, how the hell do they happen? Well, on the

00:47:26

simplest level they happen like this. They have a beginning, they have a middle,

00:47:32

and then they die away as an oscillation, a damped oscillation. Now this simple

00:47:39

truth to which we all nod assent is in fact the hardest thing, the hardest swallow

00:47:47

there is for the dominator ego and the dominator personality, because what this

00:47:53

simple truth says, things come into being, they achieve their inflorescence and

00:47:59

they fade away, is, as Heraclitus put it, pantit rea, all flows.

00:48:07

Nothing lasts.

00:48:10

Nothing is saved.

00:48:13

And this is, you know, our glory and our agony

00:48:16

that, you know,

00:48:18

the people we love and the people we hate

00:48:25

are swept away by time.

00:48:28

Empires, dynasties, continents

00:48:31

are swept away by time.

00:48:34

And yet our search for security

00:48:37

is cast in the dominator culture

00:48:41

as a search for permanence.

00:48:45

You know?

00:48:46

I want to buy a house.

00:48:48

I’d like to get my trust fund

00:48:50

functioning a little better.

00:48:52

I’d like to pay off X, Y, and Z.

00:48:55

You know, a search for permanence.

00:48:57

So what you do when you do that

00:49:00

is you set yourself at war

00:49:02

against the cosmos,

00:49:05

which is a heroic stance

00:49:07

if you’re trying to produce Melvillian opera out of your life.

00:49:12

You know, Ahab says in Moby Dick,

00:49:17

he’s talking to his first mate Starbuck,

00:49:20

who signifies Christian right reason,

00:49:23

and he says, he’s raving about going after the whale.

00:49:29

And he says, you know,

00:49:31

we’ll chase it over both sides of earth

00:49:34

and round perdition’s flame.

00:49:38

And Starbuck says,

00:49:41

to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy. And he says, blasphemy, Starbuck says, to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy.

00:49:46

And he says, blasphemy, Starbuck?

00:49:50

Speak not to me of blasphemy.

00:49:53

I would strike out the sun if it insulted me.

00:49:58

For could it do that, then could I do the other,

00:50:01

since there is ever a sort of fair play.

00:50:04

could I do the other since there is ever a sort of fair play?

00:50:10

Well, you know, this is locker room talk.

00:50:17

The notion that there is fair play between a man and a nearby star is the finest expression of the dominator ego I can imagine.

00:50:22

And of course, you know know the story of Moby Dick

00:50:26

can be read on many levels

00:50:27

but finally it is the story

00:50:29

of the submerging of the

00:50:31

male ego in the oceans

00:50:33

of the unconscious born

00:50:35

to its destruction and

00:50:37

transformation by an encounter

00:50:39

with the maternal matrix

00:50:41

in the form of the vagina

00:50:43

dentata of the sperm whale and everything that it symbolized.

00:50:50

So I don’t think we want to go that way.

00:50:52

I don’t think we want to set ourselves up as the crusaders for permanence.

00:50:58

But that means softening to the fact of the flow

00:51:05

and of the impermanence.

00:51:07

Nicole has made the point very eloquently

00:51:10

that these people in the Amazon have nothing.

00:51:14

The wonderful thing about the Amazon is

00:51:17

that nothing lasts.

00:51:20

Nothing is worth having.

00:51:21

I mean, a book? Forget it.

00:51:24

Clothing? Houses?

00:51:26

Everything is just swept away by the incessant recycling of material.

00:51:31

So all that is permanent are values, personality, strength, honesty, decency, dignity.

00:51:40

These are things which can be erected against the flow and have some hope of permanence.

00:51:47

So I think, you know, shamanism is permission to transcend anxiety by accepting the transience of all form.

00:52:03

And this is a truth of the universe

00:52:06

that cannot be ignored.

00:52:07

So once it is integrated,

00:52:12

then it’s as though resistance

00:52:18

in the electrical circuits

00:52:20

that surround your integration into the world

00:52:23

begins to fall.

00:52:24

You accept that the present

00:52:27

moment is the richest apex of being, that on the downside back into the past, it shades off into

00:52:37

memory and its vagaries. In the future, it shades off into a series of adumbrations and anticipations.

00:52:48

I think that the shamans gain this tremendous authenticity

00:52:52

that you feel in their presence, the good ones,

00:52:56

because they have seen the end.

00:53:00

They have a model of how process happens,

00:53:03

and so they don’t push and they don’t clutch,

00:53:07

and then energy flows through them.

00:53:11

And our civilization has to learn this.

00:53:16

You know, I think I said at one point in this weekend,

00:53:20

only Gorbachev is taking the position that we did it wrong

00:53:26

and that we need to deconstruct

00:53:30

and yet every society did it wrong

00:53:33

we all did it wrong

00:53:35

capitalism, it’s wonderful that you can get a safety pin at 4 a.m.

00:53:42

within a half mile of anywhere in the United States

00:53:44

and I’m sure the Russians

00:53:46

wish they had it so good. But is that the be-all and the end-all of cultural values, that you can

00:53:54

walk the fluorescent-lit aisles of Kmart and congratulate yourself that whether it be gas can, sanitary napkin or whatever, it’s there

00:54:06

waiting for you. I don’t think so. I think that we have built in the termination of

00:54:13

our world just as surely as the Marxist world built in a tripwire into its

00:54:19

social mechanism. It’s just that we’re going to have to pay the piper more downstream.

00:54:27

If we descend into the dominator metaphor and play its game, we’re probably going to be snookered

00:54:34

because they’ve had a long, long time to figure out all the angles. What I find myself more and more leaning to is sharing the meme of the irrelevance of conservative institutions.

00:54:54

History is not a process for which you ask permission.

00:54:58

History is just something you make, and then other people pick up the pieces. Henry David Thoreau understood

00:55:06

this very well when he wrote his famous treatise on civil disobedience. The

00:55:14

growth of culture is something that comes out of the animal body. Rousseau

00:55:20

called it the general will. You know, man proposes and God disposes.

00:55:28

But in the realm of civil polity, the people dispose and government is allowed to propose.

00:55:38

But that’s all.

00:55:39

And now what we are involved in, really, is a debate about human nature.

00:55:47

Who are we? What are we?

00:55:54

The French cartoonist Mobius put it very well in his book where he asked the question,

00:56:12

is man good? This is what we’re going to find out. And my feeling is that it isn’t decided yet, that it is, you know, H.G. Wells called history a race between education and disaster.

00:56:16

Well, you know, they’re in the home stretch, neck and neck.

00:56:19

It’s clearly going to be a photo finish. But there is a responsibility on everyone who sees this to communicate it to other people and to act upon it.

00:56:33

Now, that’s a difficult challenge.

00:56:37

How do we communicate our message to other people and how do we act upon it?

00:56:42

and how do we act upon it?

00:56:46

Well, for what it’s worth, I’ll just mention one simple,

00:56:50

yet probably very difficult thing that you can do,

00:56:55

both to communicate your understanding of the ecological crisis we face,

00:56:58

and to act upon it at the same time.

00:57:01

If you haven’t already done this, that is.

00:57:05

And my sense is that a good many of our fellow salonners actually have taken this step.

00:57:07

And that one thing is to, once and for all, give up eating red meat.

00:57:13

I firmly believe that if everyone in the U.S. and in Western Europe gave up eating beef

00:57:18

and pork, that within a year we would most likely see a noticeable decrease in the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest,

00:57:26

not to mention the elimination of the horrible suffering those poor animals go through

00:57:31

just so that we can eat their flesh in a frenzy of fast food insanity.

00:57:37

While I have no illusions that the majority of people in the West will actually give up eating the flesh of dead animals,

00:57:44

I remain certain that even if you are the only

00:57:47

person who hears this podcast and who then takes such a personally

00:57:51

challenging step, well, my friend, then at least you

00:57:55

have become part of the solution and are no longer a part of the problem.

00:58:01

I was going to say a few more things right now,

00:58:04

but on second thought, I think it best to leave you alone with that one thought for now.

00:58:09

You actually can make a big difference in your own life by taking that one little step.

00:58:15

And believe me, your friends, relatives and neighbors will notice.

00:58:20

And you will have communicated on a very deep and personal level how serious you are about making a positive change in the world.

00:58:28

I’m not saying that it’s going to be easy,

00:58:31

particularly if you have grown up on a diet of meat and potatoes as I did.

00:58:36

In fact, there are still nights when I actually have dreams about eating meat.

00:58:43

But every time I pass up an opportunity to

00:58:46

indulge my carnivorous appetite, I discover that I somehow feel a little better about myself.

00:58:52

So I hope you’ll at least give it some serious consideration yourself.

00:58:58

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

00:59:02

are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution

00:59:05

Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License.

00:59:09

And if you have any questions about that,

00:59:10

you can just click on the Creative Commons link

00:59:12

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

00:59:15

which may be found at www.psychedelicsalon.org.

00:59:20

And if you have any questions, comments, complaints,

00:59:22

or suggestions about these podcasts,

00:59:25

well, just add them as comments to the program notes on the psychedelicsalon.org blog

00:59:30

so that our entire community can get involved in these discussions.

00:59:35

Or you can also post your thoughts on the Psychedelic Salon forum,

00:59:39

which you will find at thegrowreport.com,

00:59:42

where I also spend some of my online surfing time each week.

00:59:47

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

00:59:51

Be well, my friends.