Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]
“Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured.”
“The precondition for creativity is, I think, is disequilibrium, what mathematicians now call chaos.”
“The prototypic figure for the artist, as well as for the scientist, is the shaman.”
“This really is the bridge back to the archaic, shamanic function of the artist, permission to explore the irrational.”
“And this pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings, first in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone, within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us and points us toward the kind of extra-planetary mega-civilization that we can feel operating on our own present like a kind of great attractor.”
“This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal, is the production and condensation of ideas. And what made it possible for the human animal is language. … Human language represents an ontological break of major magnitude with anything else going on on this planet.”
“Language is the unique province of human beings, and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language.”
“Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys. It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream.”
“The glory of the human animal is cognitive activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain of a genuine relationship to the transcendent.”
“The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half than the human species has produced in fifteen or twenty thousand years.”
“The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done. What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act.”
“Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness.”
“Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind, and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns. … If the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.”
“Nature is not mute. It is man who is deaf, and the way to open our ears, open our eyes and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics.”
“The civilization that was created out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
So, here we are at the beginning of 2008.
00:00:28 ►
Can you believe it?
00:00:30 ►
Sometimes it seems as if time stopped, at least for me, way back on New Year’s Day of 2000,
00:00:37 ►
after the Y2K scare turned out to be a dud.
00:00:41 ►
It’s almost as if we’re still waiting for a shoe to drop, as the saying goes.
00:00:46 ►
But nothing earth-shattering happened on that long-anticipated day, and my guess is that the
00:00:52 ►
same will be true about the winter solstice in 2012. But I’m getting way ahead of myself here.
00:00:59 ►
I’ll have more to say about my personal beliefs about 2012 later in today’s podcast.
00:01:06 ►
But first, I want to send my gratitude and give a big thank you to these fellow salonners
00:01:12 ►
who made donations during the past four weeks to help with the expenses of these podcasts.
00:01:30 ►
people are John P, Steven B, David G, Dr. Laura, Adam L, and a friend in the Haight-Ashbury.
00:01:37 ►
I thank you one and all, including our fellow salonners who have been adding their thoughts to the psychedelicsalon.org blog and to our forum over on thegrowreport.com.
00:01:44 ►
Now, how to begin another new year in the salon?
00:01:47 ►
That’s what I was wondering as my wife and I were driving up the West Coast
00:01:51 ►
visiting friends and family recently.
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Unfortunately, a change in the weather caused us to return home
00:01:58 ►
without making it all the way up to the Seattle area
00:02:01 ►
where we’d planned on bringing in the new year with some friends.
00:02:04 ►
So, hey you guys, I hope you had a great time and sorry we missed it, but we were with you
00:02:10 ►
all in spirit.
00:02:12 ►
You know, it was kind of strange during our long car ride to find myself spending so much
00:02:17 ►
time thinking about the salon and what it is we seem to be doing here.
00:02:23 ►
And I’ll try to get back to that thought later in the program,
00:02:26 ►
but first I want to get on with today’s talk by Terrence McKenna.
00:02:30 ►
I realize that we were in the middle of listening to one of the trilogues
00:02:35 ►
between Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, and Terrence,
00:02:38 ►
but I wanted to begin the year with something more focused,
00:02:42 ►
something that we maybe could use to help set our course
00:02:46 ►
for what I think has the potential of being a year of great consequence.
00:02:51 ►
Lots of things will take place this year.
00:02:54 ►
Pluto is entering Capricorn for the first time in about 240-some years.
00:02:59 ►
The U.S. elections are promising some kind of change in direction for the American empire.
00:03:05 ►
The tottering world economy and our global ecology are sure to bring a few surprises.
00:03:12 ►
And then we are also in the closing years of the current Mayan calendar.
00:03:17 ►
The list goes on.
00:03:19 ►
And if you’re paying close attention, you already know these things
00:03:23 ►
and can almost feel the impending, what shall we call it, the crunch, the shift, or just change.
00:03:31 ►
In the U.S., that’s the buzzword for all the politicians right now, change.
00:03:37 ►
But they’d better be careful of what they’re asking for because they might really get it this time.
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they’re asking for because they might really get it this time.
00:03:49 ►
You know, it seems to me that a radical change is what our species requires if it’s going to survive this millennium.
00:03:52 ►
But the only people who are going to have a difficult time this year, at least the way
00:03:56 ►
I choose to believe, are those who are going to try to hold what they got, hold the status
00:04:01 ►
quo or even go backwards.
00:04:04 ►
Well, I’ve got news for them. The status quo isn’t sustainable.
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At least it isn’t sustainable for the human species.
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So maybe we’d better begin to make some radical changes in the way we’re
00:04:16 ►
living on this planet. And we’d better begin making those changes now.
00:04:20 ►
Of course, the only person I actually have
00:04:24 ►
even the slightest degree of control over is
00:04:27 ►
myself, and so I thought I’d better listen to something inspirational to get myself geared up
00:04:33 ►
for a year of change, and for me, that means another dose of Terrence McKenna. Now, you might
00:04:41 ►
wonder why I picked this particular talk to play today, because at first you might think he’s only talking to visual artists.
00:04:48 ►
But for me, this talk has a message that is worth taking to heart, no matter what your chosen path in this life is, because I find that each and every person’s life is actually a work of art.
00:05:00 ►
I still remember the first time that thought came to me. It was when I was in grammar school and we learned that an artist named Van Gogh had cut his ear off.
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Now, to be honest, I wasn’t all that interested in his painting.
00:05:14 ►
At least back then I wasn’t.
00:05:16 ►
But the fact that he cut his own ear off is what really got me interested in art for the first time.
00:05:22 ►
Immediately I went to the encyclopedia to read more about him,
00:05:25 ►
and in the process, the story of his life and his paintings
00:05:29 ►
kind of became jumbled together in my mind.
00:05:32 ►
I saw his paintings and his life of suffering as a single work of art.
00:05:37 ►
And it was then that I decided to forego a normal career
00:05:41 ►
and instead try my hand at a whole range of experiences.
00:05:46 ►
At least that’s how I like to rationalize my life now,
00:05:49 ►
that a normal career is no longer a possibility.
00:05:53 ►
So perhaps I am just rationalizing,
00:05:55 ►
but it certainly is more enjoyable to think of my life as a work of art
00:05:59 ►
rather than as a long series of false starts
00:06:03 ►
while I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up.
00:06:08 ►
Fortunately, I never grew up.
00:06:10 ►
But enough about me. Now it’s about you.
00:06:13 ►
And the talk I’m going to play for you right now was given by Terrence McKenna in Port Hueneme, California,
00:06:20 ►
and was sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard.
00:06:24 ►
and was sponsored by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Oxnard.
00:06:32 ►
And it was given sometime in the early 1990s, no later than 1992 is my guess,
00:06:36 ►
and he titled this talk, Opening the Doors of Creativity.
00:06:43 ►
As we listen to this talk right now, try to keep in mind what I said about your life being your ultimate work of art. Try to think of yourself
00:06:45 ►
as the artist he talks of and think of this year as a canvas that already has the background faintly
00:06:52 ►
traced in, waiting for events to unfold before coming fully into focus. But against this background
00:06:59 ►
is where you’ll be painting your life this year. And so now, let’s open our doors of creativity
00:07:07 ►
and see what new thoughts Terrence McKenna might have for us today.
00:07:17 ►
Well, the theme that unites these lectures is creativity
00:07:25 ►
and the techniques by which the artist
00:07:28 ►
can refine his or her vision,
00:07:34 ►
expand the vision, communicate the vision.
00:07:40 ►
And before I get into that issue, I thought I would talk just a little bit about my notion of creativity per se.
00:07:52 ►
What is it in and of itself?
00:07:58 ►
And when I think like that, of course, I cast my mind back to nature.
00:08:04 ►
When I think like that, of course, I cast my mind back to nature. Nature is the great visible engine of creativity against which all other creative efforts are measured.
00:08:17 ►
And creativity in nature has a curious distribution.
00:08:23 ►
It’s something which accumulates through time.
00:08:28 ►
If we stand back and look at the universe,
00:08:32 ►
we see that at its earliest moments,
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it was very simple.
00:08:38 ►
It was a plenum.
00:08:40 ►
It was without characters or characteristics.
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It was what in Hindu mythology is called the Turaya,
00:08:49 ►
which is described as attributeless.
00:08:53 ►
And naturally, if something is without attribution,
00:08:55 ►
you can’t say much about it.
00:08:58 ►
It takes a while for it to undergo a declension
00:09:03 ►
into more creative realms.
00:09:07 ►
And these creative realms are distinguished as domains of difference.
00:09:12 ►
The precondition for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium,
00:09:18 ►
what mathematicians now call chaos.
00:09:23 ►
And through the life of the universe,
00:09:27 ►
as temperatures have fallen,
00:09:30 ►
more and more complex compound structures have arisen.
00:09:36 ►
And though there’s been many a slipping back in this process,
00:09:44 ►
over very large spans of time we can say that creativity is
00:09:50 ►
conserved that the universe becomes more creative and out of that state of creative fecundity
00:09:59 ►
more creativity is manifest so that from that point of view,
00:10:06 ►
the universe is almost what we would have to call
00:10:10 ►
an art making machine,
00:10:13 ►
an engine for the production
00:10:16 ►
of ever more novel forms of connectedness,
00:10:20 ►
ever more exotic juxtapositions of disparate elements.
00:10:26 ►
And out of this, I believe, arises implicitly a set of principles
00:10:33 ►
that we can then apply to the human artist in the human world.
00:10:41 ►
Nature’s creativity is obviously the wellspring of human creativity we emerge out of nature
00:10:51 ►
almost and this idea i think was fairly present close to the surface of the medieval mind
00:10:59 ►
we emerge out of nature almost as its finest work of art.
00:11:06 ►
The medieval mind spoke of the productions of nature.
00:11:11 ►
This is a phrase you hear as late as the 18th century,
00:11:15 ►
the productions of nature.
00:11:18 ►
And human creativity emerges out of that,
00:11:22 ►
whether you have a model of the Aristotelian great ladder of being
00:11:28 ►
or a more modern evolutionary view where we actually consolidate emergent properties
00:11:36 ►
and somehow bring them to a focus of self-reflection.
00:11:43 ►
Now, I’m sure that we couldn’t
00:11:46 ►
carry out a discussion of this sort
00:11:49 ►
without observing that the prototypic figure
00:11:54 ►
for the artist,
00:11:56 ►
as well as for the scientist,
00:12:00 ►
is the shaman.
00:12:02 ►
The shaman is the figure at the beginning of human history
00:12:08 ►
that unites the doctor, the scientist, and the artist
00:12:14 ►
into a single notion of caregiving and creativity.
00:12:23 ►
And I think that to whatever degree
00:12:27 ►
art over the past several centuries
00:12:30 ►
has wandered in the desert,
00:12:33 ►
it is because this shamanic function
00:12:36 ►
has been either suppressed or forgotten.
00:12:40 ►
And different images of the artist
00:12:44 ►
have been held up at different times.
00:12:47 ►
The artist as artisan, the artist as handmaiden of a ruling class or family,
00:12:59 ►
the artist as designer for the production of integrated objects into a civilization.
00:13:10 ►
This notion of the artist as mystical journeyer, as one who goes into a world unseen by others and then returns to tell them of it was pretty much lost in the post-medieval
00:13:32 ►
and renaissance conception of art up until the late 19th century or early 20th century
00:13:40 ►
where beginning with the romantics there is a new permission to explore the irrational.
00:13:49 ►
This really is the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist.
00:13:58 ►
Permission to explore the irrational.
00:14:00 ►
The romantics did it with their elevation of titanic emotion, romantic love
00:14:11 ►
specifically. The symbolists in the mid-19th century did it by a re-emphasis on the emotional content of the image and a rejection of the previous rationalism.
00:14:29 ►
And that emphasis on the image and on the emotions set the stage then for what I take to be the truly shamanic movements in art which begin really with Alfred Jarry
00:14:45 ►
in the late 1880s and early 1890s
00:14:50 ►
Jarry you may remember
00:14:51 ►
was the founder of something called
00:14:53 ►
the Ecole du Pataphysique
00:14:55 ►
the paraphysical college
00:14:57 ►
Jarry announced paraphysics is the science
00:15:01 ►
the problem was nobody could understand
00:15:04 ►
what it meant or what it stood for,
00:15:06 ►
including Jarry.
00:15:09 ►
Jarry was tight with Montremont,
00:15:13 ►
who you may recall said,
00:15:17 ►
I am fascinated with that kind of beauty
00:15:20 ►
that arises when a sewing machine
00:15:24 ►
meets a bicycle
00:15:25 ►
on an operating table.
00:15:29 ►
See,
00:15:29 ►
this is a true effort
00:15:32 ►
to bend the
00:15:33 ►
boundaries of art, to create
00:15:35 ►
new permission, permission
00:15:37 ►
really for the unthinkable.
00:15:41 ►
And this,
00:15:42 ►
again, reinforces
00:15:44 ►
the shamanic function.
00:15:46 ►
What do we mean when we say unthinkable?
00:15:49 ►
We mean the envelope of that which can be conceived.
00:15:55 ►
And for at least 200 years, the ostensible mission of the artist has been to test the conceptual and imagistic envelope
00:16:09 ►
of what society is willing to tolerate.
00:16:12 ►
And this has taken many forms.
00:16:15 ►
The deconstruction of imagery that we get with abstract expressionism going back into impressionism and the pointillism
00:16:25 ►
or the permission for
00:16:28 ►
the irrational imagery of the
00:16:31 ►
unconscious surrealism
00:16:34 ►
and German expressionism
00:16:37 ►
make use of this permission
00:16:40 ►
always the idea being to somehow
00:16:43 ►
destroy the idols of the tribe,
00:16:47 ►
dissolve the conceptual boundary of ordinary expectation.
00:16:53 ►
Well, in order to do this, it seems to me there is a precondition for the creation of art,
00:17:02 ►
which I call understanding and I don’t
00:17:07 ►
mean this in an intellectual sense I mean it in the sense that Alfred North
00:17:15 ►
Whitehead intended when he defined understanding as the apperception of pattern as such.
00:17:26 ►
As such.
00:17:28 ►
There’s nothing more to it than that.
00:17:30 ►
You see, if we were to look at this room
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and we were to squint our eyes,
00:17:37 ►
and I’m doing this right now,
00:17:40 ►
and I see that the room divides itself into
00:17:42 ►
people dressed in red and people dressed in blue.
00:17:47 ►
This is a pattern and it tells me something about what I’m looking at.
00:17:53 ►
Now I shift my depth of field.
00:17:57 ►
Now I’m looking at where men are sitting and where women are sitting.
00:18:02 ►
This is a different pattern and it tells me more about what I am looking at.
00:18:08 ►
The number of these patterns,
00:18:12 ►
theoretically present in any construction,
00:18:15 ►
is infinite.
00:18:17 ►
That says to me, then,
00:18:19 ►
that the depth of understanding cannot be known.
00:18:24 ►
It cannot be known. It cannot be known.
00:18:26 ►
Everything is imminent.
00:18:29 ►
William Blake makes this point, you know,
00:18:31 ►
that you can see infinity in a grain of sand.
00:18:36 ►
So understanding then is the precondition for creativity.
00:18:43 ►
And this understanding is not so much intellectual
00:18:48 ►
as it is visual.
00:18:51 ►
Visual.
00:18:53 ►
And in thinking about this,
00:18:56 ►
I realized what an influence upon my own ideas in this area
00:19:01 ►
Aldous Huxley was not the Huxley that we might ordinarily associate
00:19:08 ►
with my concerns the Huxley of the doors of perception and heaven and hell but the Huxley
00:19:16 ►
of a very modest book that he wrote in the early 50s called the art of Seeing. The Art of Seeing.
00:19:29 ►
And in that book, he makes the point that a good art education begins with a good drawing hand.
00:19:36 ►
That to be able to coordinate the hand and eye
00:19:39 ►
and to see into nature,
00:19:44 ►
to see into the patterns present as such,
00:19:49 ►
is the precondition for a kind of approach to the absolute.
00:19:57 ►
Now, out of this process of seeing, which I’m calling understanding,
00:20:04 ►
of seeing, which I’m calling understanding,
00:20:11 ►
the creative process ushers in novelty.
00:20:18 ►
And many of you have heard me speak of novelty in another context,
00:20:26 ►
in the context of nature as a novelty-producing engine of some sort and ourselves almost as the handiwork of nature.
00:20:33 ►
But this same handiwork of nature which we represent,
00:20:39 ►
we also internalize and re-express through the novelty of the human world.
00:20:49 ►
Well now, if we take seriously the shamanic model as a basis for authentic art,
00:20:59 ►
then certainly in the modern context, what we see missing from the repertoire of the artist
00:21:08 ►
are shamanic techniques.
00:21:12 ►
And it’s for the discussion of these shamanic techniques,
00:21:16 ►
I believe, that I was brought here this evening.
00:21:20 ►
So I want you to cast your mind back to a great seminal moment, germinal moment in the history of human thought, which was about 25,000 years ago, the great glaciers that had covered most of the Eurasian landmass began to melt.
00:21:47 ►
And human populations that had been islanded from each other for about 15 millennia
00:21:55 ►
began to recontact each other and reconnect.
00:22:00 ►
And out of this comes what is called the Magdalenian Revolution
00:22:04 ►
from 18,000 to 22,000 years ago.
00:22:09 ►
And what it is, is nothing less than a tremendous explosion of creativity and aesthetic self-expression on the part of the human species.
00:22:26 ►
We find for the first time
00:22:30 ►
bone and antler technology
00:22:33 ►
takes its place along with stone technology.
00:22:38 ►
Musical instruments appear
00:22:40 ►
over a wide area.
00:22:43 ►
And cave paintings,
00:22:45 ►
some paintings in areas and recesses
00:22:49 ►
so remote from the surface of the ground
00:22:52 ►
that it takes several hours to reach them,
00:22:56 ►
are painted and set up in dramatic tableaus
00:23:02 ►
specifically designed to bring together sound, light, and dance in hierophanies,
00:23:14 ►
extravaganzas of aesthetic output that invoke a kind of transcendent other
00:23:22 ►
that human beings for the first time are trying to
00:23:26 ►
come to grips with and make some kind of cultural statement about and this
00:23:33 ►
pulling into matter of the ideas of human beings first you know in the forms of beadwork and chipped stone and carved bone,
00:23:49 ►
within 20,000 years ushers into the kinds of high civilizations that we see around us
00:23:57 ►
and points us toward the kind of extraplanetary mega-civilization
00:24:03 ►
that we can feel operating on our own present
00:24:07 ►
like a kind of great attractor.
00:24:09 ►
Now, this whole intellectual adventure
00:24:14 ►
in exteriorization of ideas
00:24:18 ►
is entirely an aesthetic adventure
00:24:22 ►
until very recently
00:24:25 ►
utility is only a secondary consideration.
00:24:29 ►
The real notion
00:24:32 ►
is a kind of seizure
00:24:34 ►
by the tremendum,
00:24:37 ►
by the other,
00:24:39 ►
which then forces us
00:24:41 ►
to take up matter,
00:24:44 ►
clay, bone, flint,
00:24:46 ►
and put it through a mental process where we then excrete it
00:24:51 ►
as objects that have lodged within them ideas.
00:24:57 ►
This seems to be the special, unique, transcendental function of the human animal,
00:25:04 ►
is the production and condensation of ideas
00:25:08 ►
and what made it possible
00:25:10 ►
for the human animal
00:25:12 ►
is language
00:25:15 ►
if you’re seeking the thumbprint
00:25:19 ►
of the transcendental
00:25:21 ►
on the myriad phenomena
00:25:26 ►
that compose life on this planet.
00:25:29 ►
To my mind, the place to look is human language.
00:25:34 ►
Human language represents an ontological break
00:25:38 ►
of major magnitude with anything else going on
00:25:42 ►
on this planet.
00:25:43 ►
I mean, yes, bees dance and dolphins squeak and chimpanzees do what they do,
00:25:50 ►
but it’s a hell of a step from there to Wallace Stevens,
00:25:56 ►
let alone William Shakespeare.
00:26:00 ►
Language is the unique province of human beings and language is the unique tool of the artist. The artist is the person of language. the work that I’ve done with psilocybin mushrooms
00:26:27 ►
and the observations
00:26:29 ►
of psychedelic plant use
00:26:32 ►
in the Amazon
00:26:33 ►
centered around ayahuasca
00:26:36 ►
lead me to the conclusion
00:26:38 ►
that it is the synergy
00:26:40 ►
and catalysis of language
00:26:44 ►
that lies behind not only the emergence
00:26:48 ►
of human consciousness out of animal organization,
00:26:53 ►
but then its ability to set a course
00:26:57 ►
for a transcendental dimension
00:26:59 ►
and pursue that course
00:27:02 ►
against all the vicissitudes of biology and history over 10 or 15,000 years.
00:27:11 ►
Language has made us more than a group of pack-hunting monkeys.
00:27:17 ►
It’s made us a group of pack-hunting monkeys with a dream.
00:27:37 ►
with a dream. And the fallout from that dream has given us our glory and our shame, our weaponry, our technology, our art, our hopes, our fears. All of this arises out of our own ability to articulate and to
00:27:50 ►
communicate with each other. And I use this in the broadest sense. I mean, for me, the activity, song, dance, sculpture, poetry, all of these cognitive activities, when we
00:28:13 ►
participate in them, we cross out of the domain of animal organization and into the domain
00:28:21 ►
of a genuine relationship
00:28:25 ►
to the transcendent.
00:28:27 ►
As you know, shamans in all times and places
00:28:33 ►
gain their power through relationships
00:28:37 ►
with helping spirits, which they sometimes call ancestors,
00:28:42 ►
sometimes call nature spirits,
00:28:44 ►
but somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a disincarnate intelligence
00:28:51 ►
is the precondition for authentic shamanism.
00:28:56 ►
Now, nowhere in our world do we have an institution like that
00:29:02 ►
that we do not consider pathological,
00:29:06 ►
except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the muse,
00:29:15 ►
that artists alone among human beings are given permission to talk in terms of my inspiration
00:29:25 ►
or a voice which told me to do this
00:29:30 ►
or a vision that must be realized.
00:29:35 ►
The thin line, the thin thread of shamanic descent into our profane world leads through the office of the artist.
00:29:51 ►
And so if society is to somehow take hold of itself at this penultimate moment as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,
00:30:07 ►
then the artist, like Ariadne,
00:30:10 ►
following her thread out of the labyrinth
00:30:13 ►
is going to have to follow this shamanic thread
00:30:17 ►
back through time.
00:30:20 ►
And you know, one of the most disempowering things
00:30:23 ►
that has been done to us by the male dominant culture is to brush out our footprints into the past
00:30:34 ►
we don’t have a clue as to how we got here
00:30:39 ►
most people can’t think further back than the first Nixon administration,
00:30:45 ►
let alone, you know, the arrival of the Vikings,
00:30:51 ►
the fall of Chattahoochee, the melting of the glaciers, so forth and so on.
00:30:56 ►
We have been disempowered by a rational tendency to deny our irrational roots,
00:31:06 ►
which are a kind of embarrassment to science,
00:31:09 ►
because science is the special province of the ego,
00:31:15 ►
and magic and art are the special province
00:31:20 ►
of something else.
00:31:21 ►
I could name it, but I won’t.
00:31:24 ►
It prefers to be unnamed, I think.
00:31:28 ►
So how seriously then are we to take this,
00:31:34 ►
I’ll call it an obligation,
00:31:38 ►
to follow the shamanic thread back into time?
00:31:52 ►
thread back into time well I think that it is a matter of saving our own souls that this is the real challenge you know I love to dig at the yogans by saying nobody ever went into an ashram
00:32:01 ►
with their knees knocking in fear over the tremendous dimension they know they were
00:32:07 ►
about to enter through meditation still truer and more sad still more true and more sad is the
00:32:18 ►
notion that very few of us pick up our sculpting tools or our airbrush with our knees knocking with fear
00:32:27 ►
because we know we are invoking and acting with the muse at our elbow. And somehow I
00:32:36 ►
think the artists need to recover this sense of mystery.
00:32:50 ►
One of the most depressing things to me about the art scene,
00:32:54 ►
and I had a chance to reconnect with this because I was just in New York,
00:33:01 ►
is it now has a kind of directionless quality.
00:33:11 ►
You can go into a gallery and you cannot tell whether it is 1990 1980 1970 or 1960 because a kind of eschatological malaise has settled over art all notion of any forward movement toward a transcendental ideal has been put aside for the exploration
00:33:31 ►
of idiosyncratic vision. And I grant you, this is a tension, and perhaps in the question period we can talk about this. There is a tension between the individual vision and the notion of an attractor
00:33:52 ►
or a collective vision which wants to be expressed.
00:33:58 ►
But to my mind, this is the same dichotomous tension that haunts the individual
00:34:04 ►
in his or her relationship to Tao.
00:34:09 ►
You know, we don’t want to be lost in ego, but on the other hand, if we completely express
00:34:17 ►
the Tao, we have no sense of self.
00:34:20 ►
The ideal seems to be a kind of coincidencia appositorum
00:34:25 ►
a kind of literalizing of a paradox
00:34:29 ►
where what we have is Tao
00:34:33 ►
but we perceive it as ego
00:34:35 ►
and in the application of this notion to the art problem
00:34:40 ►
I would say what we need is a situation
00:34:43 ►
where schooling,
00:34:46 ►
if you want to put it that way,
00:34:47 ►
or a tendency toward a coherent vision
00:34:50 ►
expressed by many artists is spontaneous.
00:34:55 ►
Each artist imagines that they are pursuing their own vision
00:34:59 ►
yet obviously they are in the grip of an archetype
00:35:04 ►
which is rising through the medium of the unconscious.
00:35:09 ►
Now the last time we saw this in American art
00:35:12 ►
was in abstract expressionism,
00:35:14 ►
which was probably in terms of the values,
00:35:19 ►
in terms of tension
00:35:23 ►
and the amount of emotional gain
00:35:28 ►
between one artistic moment and another,
00:35:32 ►
the break between abstract expressionism
00:35:35 ►
and what preceded it was the most radical break
00:35:39 ►
in American art in this century.
00:35:42 ►
Abstract expressionism actually carried us in to a confrontation
00:35:48 ►
with what the quantum physicists were telling us, that the universe is field upon field
00:35:55 ►
of integrated vibration, that there is no top level, there is no bottom level. That the ordinary structures of provisional space-time are simply that.
00:36:08 ►
That if we can rise out of the human dimension,
00:36:13 ►
then we discover these larger, more integrated dimensions
00:36:17 ►
where mind and nature somehow interpenetrate each other.
00:36:23 ►
A vision like that, a coherent vision,
00:36:27 ►
has yet to announce itself here in the post-history,
00:36:33 ►
pre-apocalypse phase of things.
00:36:37 ►
Well, I guess I have a kind of reactionary side
00:36:43 ►
when I think about the creative endeavor.
00:36:46 ►
I believe that the psychedelic experience as encountered by each of you in the privacy of your own mind
00:36:59 ►
or as encountered by a pre-literate society somewhere in the world,
00:37:07 ►
that that psychedelic experience is in a way the Rosetta Stone,
00:37:15 ►
not only for understanding the encryption that our own lives represent each to ourselves, but it’s also a Rosetta Stone for
00:37:30 ►
uncoding the historical experience. Art is this endeavor to leave the animal domain behind,
00:37:45 ►
to create another dimension,
00:37:49 ►
orthogonal to the concerns of ordinary history.
00:37:57 ►
And this orthogonal domain, to my mind,
00:38:01 ►
is glimpsed most clearly in the psychedelic experience.
00:38:08 ►
The psychedelic experience shows you more art in an hour and a half
00:38:14 ►
than the human species has produced in 15 or 20,000 years.
00:38:21 ►
Now, this is an incredible claim.
00:38:24 ►
This is why I make it. The energy barrier which
00:38:32 ►
separates us from this tremendous repository of transcendental imagery is very low. You know,
00:38:41 ►
it’s a matter of a little personal commitment and the substances which make the transition possible.
00:38:51 ►
The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done.
00:38:56 ►
What is not so easily done
00:38:58 ►
is the assimilation of the consequences of this act.
00:39:04 ►
Ordinarily, we assume that consciousness is channeled
00:39:10 ►
between tremendously deep walls,
00:39:14 ►
that there is no way to force a confrontation
00:39:20 ►
with the other or the transcendent or the unconscious.
00:39:26 ►
We tend to assume that, you know, we’re going to have to do double duty at the ashram for three decades
00:39:32 ►
before you’re vouchsafed even a glimpse into these places.
00:39:38 ►
This is not true.
00:39:41 ►
Culture, and this is my message to artists and to anybody else who cares to notice
00:39:48 ►
culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness
00:39:54 ►
and this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language.
00:40:08 ►
Language is the battleground over which the fight will take place
00:40:12 ►
because what we cannot say,
00:40:19 ►
we cannot communicate,
00:40:20 ►
and by say I mean dance, paint, sing, meme. What we cannot say, we cannot communicate. We can conceive of things that we cannot communicate. And I think every one of us here has done that. And that’s a thrilling thing.
00:40:46 ►
That is the deep homework.
00:40:48 ►
The psychedelic inner astronaut sees things which no human being has ever seen before.
00:40:58 ►
And no human being will ever see again.
00:41:09 ►
being will ever see again. But in fact this has no meaning unless it is possible to carry it back into the collectivity. And what motivates me to
00:41:18 ►
talk to groups like this is the belief that we do not have centuries of gently unfolding time ahead of us
00:41:30 ►
in which to you know gently tease apart the threads of the human endeavor and create a bright new world that’s not our circumstance this is a fire in a madhouse and to get a hold on the
00:41:51 ►
situation I think we are going to have to force the issue well one one way of forcing the issue
00:42:02 ►
or a chemical definition of forcing the issue
00:42:06 ►
when you’re talking about a chemical reaction is catalysis.
00:42:11 ►
We want to catalyze consciousness.
00:42:14 ►
We want to move it faster toward its goals, whatever those goals are.
00:42:20 ►
Well, I believe that to the present moment language again in the broadest sense speech
00:42:27 ►
dance musical composition language has just been allowed to grow like topsy it’s been a kind of
00:42:37 ►
every man for himself situation now what we really need as we see ourselves moving from one species among tens of
00:42:51 ►
thousands of species on this planet, over the past 10,000 years we have redefined ourselves
00:42:59 ►
and now like it or not we are the custodians of the destiny of this planet our decisions affect
00:43:09 ►
every life form on the planet and yet we are still communicating with each other with the
00:43:16 ►
extremely precise medium of small mouth noises mediated by ignorance and hate.
00:43:29 ►
This doesn’t seem like the way to do business as we approach the third millennium.
00:43:35 ►
So what I’m hopeful for and what I actually see happening,
00:43:44 ►
I mean, I think that we’re on the right track.
00:43:47 ►
The birth of a new kind of humanity is going to take place,
00:43:53 ►
but there are still a lot of decisions to be made.
00:43:58 ►
How violent shall this birth be?
00:44:01 ►
What toll shall it take upon our mother, the earth?
00:44:04 ►
What shape shall the baby be in when it
00:44:07 ►
finally is delivered? These are the decisions that artists can mediate and control. Most people
00:44:17 ►
are afraid of the unconscious. This is why, you know, you can have a psychedelic compound like DMT which is very much
00:44:29 ►
like ordinary brain chemistry appears completely physiologically harmless only last 10 minutes
00:44:38 ►
extremely powerful and generally in this society you have no takers. This is because there has been a failure
00:44:48 ►
of moral courage and the failure of moral courage is perhaps most evident in our own community,
00:44:58 ►
the community of the artists. In a way it’s the poets that have failed us
00:45:07 ►
because they have not provided a song
00:45:12 ►
or sung a vision that we could all move in concert to.
00:45:19 ►
So now we are in the absurd position
00:45:22 ►
of being able to do anything and what we are doing
00:45:28 ►
is fouling our own nest and pushing ourselves toward planetary toxification and extinction.
00:45:37 ►
This is because the poets, the artists have not articulated a moral vision.
00:45:47 ►
The moral vision must come from the unconscious.
00:45:52 ►
It doesn’t have to do, I believe,
00:45:55 ►
with these post-meaning movements in art,
00:46:04 ►
deconstructionism and this sort of thing.
00:46:07 ►
That art’s task is to save the soul of mankind,
00:46:13 ►
and that anything less is a dithering while Rome burns.
00:46:19 ►
Because if the artists who are self-selected for being able to journey into the other,
00:46:29 ►
if the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found.
00:46:37 ►
Ideology is extremely alien to art.
00:46:43 ►
Political ideology, I mean.
00:46:45 ►
And if you will but notice,
00:46:47 ►
it is political ideology that has been calling the shots
00:46:50 ►
for the last seven or eight hundred years.
00:46:54 ►
We can transcend politics
00:46:57 ►
if we can put some other program in place.
00:47:01 ►
You cannot transcend politics into a void and I believe that
00:47:08 ►
a world without ideology could be created if what were put in place of
00:47:14 ►
ideology were the notion of the realization of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
00:47:25 ►
The three-tiered canon of the platonic aesthetic.
00:47:30 ►
Reconnect the notion of the good,
00:47:34 ►
the true, and the beautiful.
00:47:37 ►
Then use psychedelics to empower the artist
00:47:43 ►
to go into this vast dimension
00:47:46 ►
that surrounds human history on all sides to an infinite depth
00:47:53 ►
and return from that world with the transcendental images
00:47:59 ►
that can lift us to a new cultural level.
00:48:03 ►
The muse is there.
00:48:06 ►
The dull maps that rationalism has given us
00:48:11 ►
are nothing more than whistling past the graveyard
00:48:15 ►
by the bad little boys of science.
00:48:17 ►
You only have to avail yourselves of these shamanic tools to rediscover a nature which is not mute, as Sartre said
00:48:31 ►
in a kind of culmination of the modern viewpoint.
00:48:34 ►
Nature is not mute.
00:48:36 ►
It is man who is deaf.
00:48:53 ►
And the way to open our ears, open our eyes, and reconnect with the intent of a living world is through the psychedelics. Now, as you know, biology runs on genes, and genes are the units of meaning of heredity.
00:49:04 ►
Genes are the units of meaning of heredity.
00:49:13 ►
But we could make a model of the informational environment that is represented by culture.
00:49:14 ►
And in fact, this is done.
00:49:20 ►
A word has been invented, meme, M-E-M-E, meme.
00:49:25 ►
A meme is not the smallest unit of heredity. A meme is the smallest unit of meaning of an idea.
00:49:31 ►
Ideas are made of memes.
00:49:35 ►
And I think the art community might function with more efficiency
00:49:41 ►
in the production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs,
00:49:47 ►
if we would think of ourselves as an environment
00:49:51 ►
modeled after the natural environment
00:49:55 ►
where we as artists are attempting to create means
00:50:01 ►
which enter an environment of other means that are in competition with each other.
00:50:08 ►
And out of this competition of memes, ever more appropriate, adapted, and suitable ideas
00:50:19 ►
can gather and link themselves together into higher and higher organisms.
00:50:27 ►
Now, in order for this to happen,
00:50:30 ►
there is an obligation upon each one of us to carry our ideas clearly.
00:50:36 ►
Because in the same way that a gene must be copied correctly to be replicated,
00:50:43 ►
or it will cause some pathological mutation a meme must be
00:50:49 ►
correctly replicated or it will cause a pathological mutation for instance i would say what the nazis
00:50:56 ►
did to frederick nietzsche’s philosophy was a bad cop a miscopied meme became a toxic mutation inside a culture.
00:51:08 ►
So I would suggest to the people in this room tonight
00:51:14 ►
that you take a good look around at who’s here.
00:51:19 ►
Artistic people, psychedelic people,
00:51:23 ►
look pretty much like everybody else out in society.
00:51:28 ►
But we have come here tonight self-selected for our interest in the empowering capacity of psychedelic plants and the empowering capacity of art. So we represent an affinity group,
00:51:46 ►
a population with a potential for mutagenic impact
00:51:54 ►
on the ideological structures of the rest of society.
00:51:59 ►
So look around.
00:52:01 ►
Someone here has what you need.
00:52:04 ►
And if you can only figure out who it is, you can make a novel connection to move then into a new level of creativity.
00:52:16 ►
Well, what is this new level of creativity?
00:52:22 ►
of creativity.
00:52:27 ►
Some of you may be familiar with a theme that was very big in medieval religious art,
00:52:30 ►
which was the apocalypse of St. John or of somebody.
00:52:37 ►
There are a number of these apocalypses.
00:52:41 ►
And I think that many of us may come out of a kind of secular background or have not given this kind of a religious idea too much consideration. idiosyncratic conclusion based simply on trying to be honest about the content of the psychedelic experience
00:53:08 ►
is that human history really is on a collision course with a transcendental object of some sort.
00:53:22 ►
object of some sort it is not going to be business as usual
00:53:27 ►
into the endless unfolding confines
00:53:31 ►
of the future
00:53:32 ►
the very fact
00:53:35 ►
that human history is occurring
00:53:38 ►
on this planet
00:53:40 ►
the very fact that a primate
00:53:42 ►
has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone into the business of running stock markets and molecular biology labs and art museums indicates to me the nearby presence in another dimension of a kind of hyper-organizing force,
00:54:07 ►
or what I call the transcendental object.
00:54:10 ►
And I believe that this transcendental object is casting an enormous shadow
00:54:17 ►
over the human historical landscape.
00:54:21 ►
So that if you’re back in ancient Judea,
00:54:26 ►
you have an anticipation of the Messiah.
00:54:31 ►
If you are at Eleusis,
00:54:34 ►
at the height of the practice of the Eleusinian mysteries,
00:54:37 ►
you have an anticipation of the dark God.
00:54:43 ►
of the dark god.
00:54:46 ►
These anticipations of an unspeakable transcendent reality
00:54:51 ►
that are always clothed
00:54:53 ►
in the assumptions of the individual artist
00:54:58 ►
and the society in which he or she is working
00:55:01 ►
are in fact genuine
00:55:04 ►
and that you don’t have to give yourself over to fundamentalist religion
00:55:11 ►
to connect with the fact that human history is an adventure.
00:55:19 ►
And this adventure has a number of startling reverses
00:55:24 ►
and sudden plot shifts that are very difficult
00:55:28 ►
to anticipate and that we are coming up on one of those. The civilization that was created
00:55:35 ►
out of the collapse of the medieval world has now shown its contradictions to be unbearable.
00:55:44 ►
shown its contradictions to be unbearable.
00:55:51 ►
And though no one of us knows what the shape of the new civilization will be,
00:55:56 ►
somehow in the singing of the ayahuasca songs in the rainforest,
00:56:08 ►
in the tremendous hypermetallic transcendental off-planetary flash of psilocybin in the teaching of the self-transforming machine elves that seem to dwell in the DMT dimension, we see that
00:56:15 ►
the ordinary linear expectations of history are breaking down and that the truth of the eminence of the mystery is breaking through all the structures of denial of the male dominator paradigm that has been in place so long. the way to make this birth process smooth, the way to bring it to a conclusion
00:56:45 ►
that will not betray the thousands and thousands of generations of people
00:56:53 ►
who suffered birth and disease and migration and starvation and lonely death
00:57:01 ►
so that we could sit here this evening,
00:57:04 ►
the redeeming of the human enterprise all lies then in helping this thing come to birth.
00:57:14 ►
And each artist is an antenna to the transcendental other.
00:57:19 ►
And as we go with our own history into that thing
00:57:25 ►
and then create a unique confluence of our uniqueness
00:57:31 ►
and its uniqueness, we collectively create an arrow,
00:57:38 ►
an arrow out of history, out of time,
00:57:42 ►
perhaps even out of matter,
00:57:45 ►
that will redeem then the idea that man is good.
00:57:52 ►
Redeem the idea that man is good.
00:57:56 ►
This is the promise of art, and its fulfillment
00:58:01 ►
is never more near than the present moment.
00:58:07 ►
Thank you very much. I think we’ll take a…
00:58:28 ►
I’m happy to take questions.
00:58:30 ►
Here.
00:58:32 ►
Second awareness can be more easily accessible.
00:58:37 ►
What do you mean by the second awareness?
00:58:40 ►
Say a little more about it.
00:58:42 ►
Of being aware that the other realm
00:58:44 ►
is something that’s also very personal.
00:58:48 ►
Well, yes.
00:58:50 ►
I mean, it seems it’s a landscape that begins within the self
00:58:55 ►
and seems to extend into the world.
00:59:00 ►
I mean, one of the very puzzling things about the psychedelic experience
00:59:05 ►
is that it argues that we are not atomic individuals
00:59:10 ►
running around in some kind of society,
00:59:14 ►
but that if you actually drain the psychic water away,
00:59:19 ►
you’ll discover that we’re all connected at the roots,
00:59:25 ►
that it isn’t a journey to another world.
00:59:30 ►
It’s a journey inward to a world that is already present and there.
00:59:37 ►
The astonishing thing is how alienated we are from our own interior,
00:59:44 ►
how alienated we are from our own interior,
00:59:46 ►
from the interior world,
00:59:50 ►
to the point where we can hardly recognize it.
00:59:55 ►
I mean, I’ve talked a lot about the alien nature of the psychedelic experience
00:59:57 ►
and how it seems to be mappable
01:00:00 ►
over something as radical as the UFO experience.
01:00:05 ►
This is because we truly do not know who we are.
01:00:11 ►
The past 10,000 years have been so disempowering to us.
01:00:17 ►
We are really like the children of a dysfunctional relationship.
01:00:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:00:26 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:00:28 ►
one thought at a time.
01:00:32 ►
In case you thought you recognized
01:00:34 ►
that voice just now,
01:00:35 ►
you probably did.
01:00:37 ►
Because that was the lovely Black Beauty,
01:00:40 ►
who is the host of BB’s Bungalow,
01:00:42 ►
which you can catch over
01:00:43 ►
on the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopefiend.co.uk,
01:00:48 ►
along with a whole range of other interesting podcasts.
01:00:53 ►
Well, where to begin after a heavy dose of the Bard McKenna, huh?
01:00:58 ►
In the comments section of one of my blogs the other day, fellow salonner Dr. Laura posted several questions,
01:01:04 ►
of one of my blogs the other day, fellow salonner Dr. Laura posted several questions.
01:01:14 ►
And one of them was, is there another someone who has even a part of TM’s bardic and intellectual capacity to hear now?
01:01:20 ►
Well, I’m sure there probably are several people like that walking around with us right now.
01:01:23 ►
But so far, I haven’t been able to find any of them. And what to me seems so unique about Terence McKenna
01:01:28 ►
was the fact that he combined several sometimes contradictory roles.
01:01:34 ►
He was a mystic, a philosopher, a poet, an intellectual,
01:01:38 ►
and at times a crank, and often cranky, I’m told.
01:01:42 ►
So combine all of that with the bardic role he fell into,
01:01:46 ►
and you have a hard combination to come up with again.
01:01:50 ►
But, at least for me, the one thing that set Terrence apart
01:01:54 ►
from the equally great minds of some of his contemporaries
01:01:58 ►
is his ability to not take himself too seriously
01:02:02 ►
and admit to the fact that we are all still just groping around in the dark
01:02:07 ►
for a few solid answers about existence.
01:02:11 ►
And unlike some other eggheads I’ve met, Terrence was always able to laugh at himself.
01:02:17 ►
But nonetheless, he truly did have a remarkable mind.
01:02:21 ►
Just think about a few of the things he said in this talk we just listened to. Ideas like, the precondition
01:02:28 ►
for creativity is, I think, disequilibrium.
01:02:32 ►
What mathematicians now call chaos. Well,
01:02:36 ►
Terrence, if disequilibrium is conductive to creativity,
01:02:40 ►
it looks as if we’re about to enter a highly creative year.
01:02:45 ►
And do his words about the shamanic function of the artist, the artist of life, hold any interest for you?
01:02:52 ►
Remember what he said?
01:02:54 ►
This is really the bridge back to the archaic shamanic function of the artist.
01:02:59 ►
Permission to explore the irrational.
01:03:03 ►
Hey, these seem to be pretty irrational times to me.
01:03:07 ►
Maybe we should go exploring.
01:03:10 ►
For example, here’s an idea that one of our fellow salonners,
01:03:13 ►
Zach Crow, is exploring and has asked for some help with.
01:03:18 ►
I’ll read you part of an email he sent me last month.
01:03:21 ►
I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction with something.
01:03:25 ►
In the Syntax of Psychedelic Time podcast,
01:03:29 ►
Terrence mentions making projections of the time wave of individuals
01:03:33 ►
to show the rise and fall of novelty.
01:03:36 ►
He says you cannot determine the nature of the change,
01:03:38 ►
but only observe times of extreme novelty or habit.
01:03:43 ►
However, he used the I Ching as a base, which is a category
01:03:47 ►
for the elements that make up the substance of time. Is there ever any mention by him of taking
01:03:53 ►
specific points on the time wave and generating an I Ching hexagram for that time? If you know
01:04:00 ►
where I could find more information about his graphing for specific people and or
01:04:05 ►
ever heard mention of his deriving a hexagram from points on the wave, I would be grateful to you for
01:04:11 ►
sharing this information. Well, Zach, I don’t have a clue about this myself, but if any of our fellow
01:04:19 ►
salonners know something about that, well, please post it on the psychedelicsalon.org blog, and hopefully
01:04:25 ►
we’ll get some discussion going.
01:04:28 ►
Also, Murr and several others asked about the raw source file for the McKenna excerpt
01:04:35 ►
I used in Podcast 120.
01:04:38 ►
And yes, somewhere I’ve got that raw file, but for the life of me, I can’t remember which
01:04:43 ►
talk it came from.
01:04:46 ►
that raw file, but for the life of me, I can’t remember which talk it came from. But like the talk I just played today, it was on a disc full of McKenna Talks that E-Rock X1
01:04:51 ►
sent me. And hey, thanks again, E-Rock X1. I appreciate everything you’ve done for us
01:04:56 ►
here in the salon. So somewhere you can find that whole talk online, and hopefully I’ll
01:05:02 ►
find it again and podcast it yet this year. Now before I forget
01:05:06 ►
it another of Dr. Laura’s questions was any advice on the order to listen to Terrence McKenna from
01:05:13 ►
sources not on your podcast? Well just now I googled Terrence McKenna in quotes, followed by MP3, and came up with 25,000 hits. So I see what you mean.
01:05:27 ►
It’s really kind of overwhelming.
01:05:30 ►
But fortunately, Terrence was almost always in good form and interesting,
01:05:34 ►
so you probably can’t go wrong just following your instincts
01:05:38 ►
and click away until he says something that holds your attention.
01:05:42 ►
I don’t mean to trivialize this,
01:05:45 ►
but my hunch is that every one of us would come up with a different list
01:05:49 ►
of where to begin to listen to Terrence.
01:05:52 ►
But if anyone does have some ideas that they would like to share about this,
01:05:55 ►
why don’t you begin a topic about it on the psychedelicsalon.org blog
01:05:59 ►
or on our forum at thegrowreport.com
01:06:03 ►
and I’ll add my two cents there.
01:06:06 ►
Actually, I’m really behind in reading these forums right now,
01:06:10 ►
but I hope to catch up in the next few weeks as I get back into the old podcasting groove again.
01:06:16 ►
Since it’s been so long since my last podcast,
01:06:19 ►
I’m afraid that I’ve let a whole bunch of thank yous slip by without proper mention.
01:06:23 ►
I’m afraid that I’ve let a whole bunch of thank yous slip by without proper mention.
01:06:30 ►
For example, I received several really cool gifts from fellow salonners that I truly appreciate,
01:06:33 ►
even though I haven’t gotten a thank you out to you yet,
01:06:46 ►
like the music from Tor, DJ, Martin, and several others whose names, I’m sorry to say, escape me at the moment. And I also received several wonderful pieces of art,
01:06:51 ►
including a print of Syrians reflecting the vocal chords of Gaia,
01:06:53 ►
all of which I really appreciate.
01:07:00 ►
And that music and art kind of got me to thinking about how I miss being able to listen to the music and see the art that our fellow salonners have posted to MySpace.
01:07:04 ►
Before we got kicked out of that site, I found it interesting to click through to the pages
01:07:09 ►
of some of our fellow salonners who posted their art and music on that site and see and
01:07:15 ►
hear your creations.
01:07:18 ►
Now this is just an offhand idea, but if somebody wanted to volunteer to manage the site, I’d be happy to set aside some server space and bandwidth
01:07:27 ►
to host art and music created by our fellow salonners.
01:07:32 ►
Maybe it would just be links to other sites where your artwork is already online,
01:07:36 ►
sort of like a MySpace page or something.
01:07:39 ►
But it’d be nice to be able to just focus on the art and music of friends of ours from the salon.
01:07:45 ►
This may not be of any interest to you,
01:07:47 ►
but if you’d like to organize and run a little project like that,
01:07:50 ►
just send your ideas to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
01:07:55 ►
Or maybe we can work something like that into the psychedelicsalon.org blog.
01:08:00 ►
Better yet, if this idea interests you,
01:08:03 ►
why not start a topic on our blog or our forum at thegrowreport.com
01:08:08 ►
and get some discussion going if there’s any interest in collecting something like this into one place.
01:08:15 ►
But mainly, I want to thank all of you that sent a gift or a note or a kind thought or two.
01:08:21 ►
I really appreciate all of your love and support. Most of all, I appreciate you stopping by the salon to
01:08:27 ►
join us for a little mind candy from time to time.
01:08:32 ►
And getting back to the mind candy for a moment, there is
01:08:36 ►
one more question that Dr. Laura posed that I think needs
01:08:40 ►
answering. And not just by me, but by you as well.
01:08:44 ►
The question is, but by you as well.
01:08:49 ►
The question is, where are you on the 2012 fence?
01:08:52 ►
Well, that’s an excellent question, don’t you think?
01:08:59 ►
Now that we’re only a few years away from the winter solstice of 2012, where do you stand?
01:09:05 ►
Do you think that there will be an event of cosmic proportions take place?
01:09:08 ►
Or do you think it’s just going to be another day?
01:09:15 ►
For two different views about that day, you can listen to podcasts 56 and 57,
01:09:19 ►
where Daniel Pinchbeck and I took opposite sides in that debate.
01:09:26 ►
I’ll spare you the details, but basically Daniel, and a significant number of my other friends, I might add,
01:09:31 ►
hold the belief that some sort of cosmic event will take place at that time.
01:09:37 ►
For my own part, I’m sorry to report that I’m much more pedestrian in my beliefs.
01:09:41 ►
But my hopes are a completely different thing.
01:09:46 ►
My hope is that on the morning after the winter solstice of 2012,
01:09:49 ►
Daniel will come knocking at my door,
01:09:51 ►
all dressed in his finest feathers and light,
01:09:52 ►
and will say,
01:09:54 ►
See, I told you so.
01:09:57 ►
I really do hope that Daniel and all of my other friends will stop by to say that.
01:09:59 ►
But what I choose to believe is that
01:10:02 ►
it’ll be a thousand years from now
01:10:04 ►
before historians look back and say,
01:10:07 ►
you know, the generations that lived on either side of 2012 really did bring about a major change in the way we humans live on this little planet.
01:10:16 ►
You know, just like now we can look back on the year 1500 and say that about the women and men who were alive at that moment in time.
01:10:24 ►
1500 and say that about the women and men who were alive at that moment in time.
01:10:30 ►
So I’m looking at 2012 as the beginning of the next phase of my life.
01:10:33 ►
No matter what everybody else on this planet does,
01:10:38 ►
I’m going to do my best by then to be as far off the energy grid as possible and to be eating only food grown close to where I live.
01:10:43 ►
Now that may not seem like very much in the grand scheme of things,
01:10:47 ►
but at least it’s something I can achieve, even with limited resources.
01:10:51 ►
For you, there may be other things you can do during the next four years,
01:10:55 ►
so that come the winter solstice of 2012,
01:10:58 ►
you can also say that you’re living in a new and better world than the one you now find yourself in.
01:11:05 ►
I don’t know what those things are, but I bet you can figure them out if you spend a little time thinking about it.
01:11:11 ►
True, the world could magically change for the better overnight.
01:11:17 ►
But what you can count on is that your world can magically change for the better, simply by changing your attitude about your life.
01:11:27 ►
You know, if you see your life as a work of art,
01:11:29 ►
well, make sure it doesn’t have too much gloom in it.
01:11:32 ►
Maybe you should add some lighter colors here and there.
01:11:35 ►
You certainly have an interesting backdrop to work with this year,
01:11:39 ►
and some challenging energy is also heading your way.
01:11:43 ►
You know, I can hardly wait to see what you do with it.
01:11:45 ►
In fact, to reinforce the new commitment that you may have to become a shaman artist
01:11:52 ►
and to live this year as if it were a work of art,
01:11:55 ►
I’m going to close this podcast a little differently
01:11:59 ►
and replay a brief comment that Terrence just made about finding your muse.
01:12:04 ►
Replay a brief comment that Terrence just made about finding your muse.
01:12:17 ►
As you know, shamans in all times and places gain their power through relationships with helping spirits,
01:12:22 ►
which they sometimes call ancestors, sometimes call nature spirits, but somehow the acquisition of a relationship to a
01:12:27 ►
disincarnate
01:12:29 ►
Intelligence is the precondition for authentic shamanism
01:12:34 ►
now
01:12:35 ►
Nowhere in our world do we have an institution like that?
01:12:41 ►
That we do not consider
01:12:43 ►
pathological except in the now very thinly spread tradition of the muse,
01:12:53 ►
that artists alone among human beings are given permission to talk in terms of my inspiration, or a voice which told me to do this,
01:13:08 ►
or a vision that must be realized.
01:13:13 ►
The thin line, the thin thread of shamanic descent
01:13:21 ►
into our profane world leads through the office of the artist.
01:13:28 ►
And so if society is to somehow take hold of itself at this penultimate moment,
01:13:38 ►
as we literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,
01:13:44 ►
literally waver on the brink of planetary extinction,
01:13:48 ►
then the artist, like Ariadne,
01:13:52 ►
following her thread out of the labyrinth is going to have to follow this shamanic thread
01:13:56 ►
back through time.
01:13:58 ►
And you know, one of the most disempowering things
01:14:01 ►
that has been done to us by the male dominant culture is to
01:14:06 ►
brush out our footprints into the past we don’t have a clue as to how we got
01:14:17 ►
here most people can’t think further back than the first Nixon administration.
01:14:25 ►
Let alone, you know, the arrival of the Vikings,
01:14:29 ►
the fall of Chattahoochee, the melting of the glaciers,
01:14:33 ►
so forth and so on.
01:14:35 ►
We have been disempowered by a rational tendency
01:14:41 ►
to deny our irrational roots,
01:14:44 ►
which are a kind of embarrassment to science, because
01:14:48 ►
science is the special province of the ego, and magic and art are the special province
01:14:57 ►
of something else. I could name it, but I won’t. It prefers to be unnamed, I think.
01:15:06 ►
So how seriously then are we to take this, I’ll call it an obligation,
01:15:16 ►
to follow the shamanic thread back into time?
01:15:22 ►
Ah, yes.
01:15:20 ►
to time.
01:15:23 ►
Ah, yes.
01:15:26 ►
And how seriously are we to take the challenge of turning
01:15:27 ►
this year into a magical
01:15:30 ►
work of art?
01:15:31 ►
For now, this is
01:15:34 ►
Lorenzo, signing off from
01:15:35 ►
Cyberdelic Space.
01:15:37 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.