Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]
“I’m very pleased … to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue. Because it really means that after 20, 30 years of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the media and some of the powers that be, that nevertheless the curiosity is intact, the opportunity is available, and people have not been fooled by the effort to denigrate, dumb-down, sideline, water down, sell out, whitewash and screw over the idea that psychedelic plants are an excellent and necessary part of any program of spiritual self-exploration.”
“Our evolutionary heritage lies in the use of psychedelics. It was in all probability that psychedelics called forth our humanness.”
“For all of its capacity to razzle dazzle, science has some serious drawbacks, some serious limitations that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think, simply because psychedelic people then compare the full spectrum of their experience to the paradigm they’re being offered.”
“Nature is self-similar across scale.”
“We can extrapolate towards cosmic processes by thinking about our own lives.”
“In other words, we represent the quintessential gathering together of novelty. We are more than mere matter. We are more than mere biology. We are more than mere aboriginal culture. We are all of those things plus we are our skin of technical connections.”
“The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly improbable. It is the most improbable of all improbabilities. So just remember that when the fascism of science is telling you that astrologers don’t know what they’re talking about, and somebody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I mean, science has built a house of cards on worse than sand, quicksand!”
“I’m willing to say I’m convinced that history is the annunciation of the nearby presence of a transformational event… . History is what happens when an animal species has its genome distorted by the nearby presence of a transcendental object.”
“Love, in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are, is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time. To love is to open to the presence of the Other, and that’s a very, very profound boundary dissolution.”
“Ultimately at death, I think probably the only way you can meet death fully in command of your faculties is to love it, to surrender to it.”
“What it might take you forty years to do through a process of rational analysis, and psychotherapy, and deconstruction, and so on and so forth, it can happen literally overnight on a sufficiently alarming dose of a psychedelic substance.”
“One of the great things about psychedelics that is so corrosive to capitalistic values is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head, better than walking down Madison Avenue looking in the windows is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams [of psilocybin mushrooms] looking in the windows.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:35 ►
Well, I’m pleased to report that the response to last week’s podcast of the Timothy Leary talk at Cooper Union has been very well received.
00:00:42 ►
And so I’ll definitely be podcasting more lectures from the Leary archives in the weeks and months ahead.
00:00:46 ►
In fact, I suddenly have all kinds of new material to play for you. But before we get started today, first I want to thank several people who have very kindly
00:00:52 ►
made donations to help offset the expenses of publishing these podcasts. And those people are
00:00:58 ►
Jason M., Eighth Estate Public Media and Research, Dharma Built,
00:01:06 ►
Lee M., and Robert O.,
00:01:07 ►
my friend and fellow grandfather from South Wales.
00:01:11 ►
And thanks for sending the photos, Robert.
00:01:13 ►
I love the one with you making eyes at your little granddaughter.
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And the other picture also gave me a chuckle
00:01:19 ►
when I looked at it while contemplating your comment about it.
00:01:23 ►
What it was is a picture of a couple dozen beautiful people who looked very happy.
00:01:28 ►
But looking at it while taking Robert’s comment literally
00:01:32 ►
made me smile because what he said was, and I quote,
00:01:36 ►
the second picture is with an ayahuasca gang I joined
00:01:40 ►
in Brazil. Now I know that some of these people
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in the picture are also fellow salonners,
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so please don’t take this wrong,
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but you look like a really positive version of one of those old Wild West gangs of outlaws, you know,
00:01:53 ►
but instead of spreading fear, you’re riding across the plains and spreading love,
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or something like that.
00:02:00 ►
Anyway, a big thank you for all of your very generous donations to the salon.
00:02:05 ►
One and all, I really appreciate it.
00:02:08 ►
And as I mentioned last week, for today’s podcast, I thought I’d play another Terrence McKenna lecture
00:02:14 ►
in order to better draw the contrast between the styles of Timothy Leary and Terrence.
00:02:20 ►
But besides the difference in personalities, I think it’s also important to recognize that approximately 25 years came between the talk Dr. Leary gave at Cooper Union and Terrence’s State of the Stone address that we’re about to hear.
00:02:36 ►
In a way, I find this one of the most hopeful talks that I’ve heard Terrence give.
00:02:41 ►
As always, he seems to come up with new ideas that, while revolutionary in one sense,
00:02:47 ►
seem so obvious when he states them. For example, a little over halfway into the talk that I’m about
00:02:54 ►
to play, he makes the rather bold statement that perhaps Gaia thinks we humans are actually worth
00:03:01 ►
the risk that we now pose to other life on this planet.
00:03:09 ►
For me, the thought that perhaps we humans may still have the potential to justify Mother Earth’s putting up with our non-sustainable and polluting ways for so long,
00:03:16 ►
well, it’s something new, and at least for me, it’s a hopeful thought.
00:03:21 ►
Now, to kind of just tie last week and this week together a little bit, and to give you a small idea of the relationship between Terrence and the good Dr. Leary,
00:03:30 ►
I’m going to first play a very short soundbite of Leary introducing Terrence.
00:03:36 ►
I’m not sure where it was that this introduction was made, but it definitely wasn’t from the same event where the talk we were about to hear was given.
00:03:45 ►
So I don’t want to mislead you about that.
00:03:47 ►
The Leary clip actually comes from one of my favorite CDs, which is called Journey Through the Spheres,
00:03:54 ►
and is a tribute to Terrence McKenna that was created by the Novelty Project not long after Terrence died.
00:04:01 ►
not long after Terrence died.
00:04:05 ►
So let’s begin with an introduction of Terrence by Tim Leary,
00:04:10 ►
and then go right to a 1995 talk by Terrence McKenna that he called The State of the Stone.
00:04:16 ►
I’d like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
00:04:27 ►
Terrence McKenna means a great deal to me
00:04:29 ►
I would say he’s one of the
00:04:30 ►
five or six most important people
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on the planet
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I can’t even think of any others
00:04:40 ►
short term memory loss but
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by the way the role that Terrence is playing right now is one that takes not
00:04:53 ►
only vision but it also takes fucking courage
00:04:56 ►
I sort of think of these get-togethers, they happen periodically, cyclically, but unscheduled,
00:05:07 ►
as state-of-the-stone addresses or an opportunity for the community to come together
00:05:17 ►
and everybody see who’s here once again, who has survived, who’s gotten out, so forth and so on.
00:05:28 ►
I’m very, very bullish about the situation.
00:05:36 ►
Fortunately, I hold the theory that things have to get a lot worse before they can get better.
00:05:42 ►
So whenever I see things getting worse I assume that’s
00:05:46 ►
the first step toward progress. I think that in the time we’ve been getting
00:05:53 ►
together and talking about these things the general tone has changed
00:05:58 ►
dramatically. When I started talking about all of this, my audience was entirely my peers, old freaks.
00:06:10 ►
And many of you were 10 years old.
00:06:16 ►
And now the message has been out there for about 12 years, that psychedelics actually represent an opportunity for healing,
00:06:30 ►
an opportunity to return to religion
00:06:33 ►
as it was practiced before the invention of the marketplace.
00:06:39 ►
And I’m very pleased as I go around meeting people and discussing this issue
00:06:47 ►
to see how much of the youth culture has become sensitive to the psychedelic issue.
00:06:57 ►
Because it really means that after 20, 30 years of unstinting distortion and misrepresentation by the
00:07:10 ►
media and some of the powers that be that nevertheless the curiosity is
00:07:17 ►
intact the opportunity is available and people have not been fooled
00:07:25 ►
by the effort to
00:07:28 ►
denigrate, dumb down
00:07:31 ►
sideline, water down
00:07:35 ►
sell out, whitewash
00:07:38 ►
and screw over
00:07:40 ►
the idea that psychedelic plants are
00:07:43 ►
an excellent and necessary part
00:07:47 ►
of any program of spiritual self-exploration.
00:07:52 ►
I’m not going to talk that much about this today
00:07:56 ►
because I think it would be preaching to the converted.
00:08:01 ►
I’m not even going to remind you that our evolutionary heritage lies in the use of psychedelics
00:08:13 ►
that it was in all probability psychedelics that called forth our humanness
00:08:21 ►
I’ve talked about this in numerous forums
00:08:24 ►
it doesn’t have to be particularly gone over today. Since this is a hometown crowd, since this is peer review, I would rather go to some of the stuff that plays with more resistance in Des Moines and Cleveland,
00:08:45 ►
and beta test it here.
00:08:51 ►
While there’s still time to recant.
00:08:57 ►
San Francisco is an incredibly forgiving town.
00:09:01 ►
If you need to go somewhere and make a mistake this is probably the play
00:09:07 ►
anyway after a you know i mean i’ve been altering my consciousness pharmacologically since i was 18
00:09:19 ►
then trying to fold it back into the database of the culture
00:09:26 ►
to make sense of it mathematically, religiously, philosophically,
00:09:32 ►
historically, artistically, so forth and so on.
00:09:37 ►
And my conclusions become more and more radical.
00:09:44 ►
Last night in Sacramento, I lectured the psilocybin’s impact
00:09:48 ►
on human evolution and they quoted some anthropologist somewhere who wouldn’t even
00:09:55 ►
give his name for the attribution of his no comment saying it was too radical to even be considered. And I thought to myself, and the problem is,
00:10:07 ►
it’s the most respectable idea I’ve got.
00:10:18 ►
So, having given that it’s run for its money last night,
00:10:27 ►
what I’ll talk to you about today,
00:10:29 ►
and then later we can have a question period,
00:10:32 ►
and it can be free-ranging,
00:10:35 ►
and whatever your concerns can come to the fore.
00:10:39 ►
But it occurs to me that science has very radically failed.
00:10:47 ►
And it’s an unusual point to make
00:10:51 ►
because we live in the impression
00:10:54 ►
that science is somehow at the pinnacle of its explanatory powers
00:10:59 ►
and that it is going to give us clean air,
00:11:03 ►
better societies, safer sex, better entertainment,
00:11:08 ►
and ultimately some kind of explanation about how the universe really works.
00:11:15 ►
And in the past year, you know, like happy kittens, they have dragged in and dropped on our doorstep the top quark,
00:11:23 ►
which is something to find out there in the bulrushes.
00:11:27 ►
If you didn’t know to look for it, you probably would never find it.
00:11:34 ►
But nevertheless, for all of its capacity to razzle-dazzle,
00:11:41 ►
science has some serious drawbacks, some serious limitations that psychedelic experiences make more starkly evident, I think,
00:11:58 ►
simply because psychedelic people then compare the full spectrum of their experience to the paradigm they’re being offered.
00:12:08 ►
For example, science proceeds probabilistically.
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This is how it’s been doing its work for about three centuries.
00:12:19 ►
This involves an assumption that has never been proven and is very, very difficult to test.
00:12:29 ►
It’s the assumption that time is invariant.
00:12:34 ►
You see, probability theory rests on the idea of experiment.
00:12:41 ►
Science proceeds by experiment.
00:12:44 ►
science proceeds by experiment but built into the concept of experiment
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is this very fishy notion called
00:12:52 ►
the restoration of initial conditions
00:12:55 ►
and it turns out that there ain’t no such creature
00:13:00 ►
you can never restore initial conditions
00:13:04 ►
a way of putting it is you can never go home again
00:13:07 ►
you know Heraclitus said we never step into the same river twice if you’re paying attention you
00:13:15 ►
might notice that that means we never step into the same river once right right you see
00:13:25 ►
science is a
00:13:27 ►
historical process
00:13:30 ►
that began
00:13:32 ►
with the Greeks
00:13:33 ►
and naturally dealt
00:13:36 ►
with the simpler
00:13:37 ►
questions first
00:13:39 ►
and the simpler questions
00:13:42 ►
are
00:13:42 ►
what is the world made of?
00:13:46 ►
How does it work?
00:13:48 ►
The complex questions are things like, what is language and how do we know truth?
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The Greeks sort of bridged that one.
00:13:58 ►
But they had this idea that because God was perfect,
00:14:03 ►
the universe should behave according to models of mathematical perfection.
00:14:09 ►
And so the planets were assumed to go in perfect circles
00:14:12 ►
and the classical objects of Aristotelian geometry
00:14:18 ►
were made the basis of science.
00:14:21 ►
Now, one by one, over time,
00:14:28 ►
of science. Now one by one over time these perfect mathematical objects have had to be dumped and gotten rid of because they came into contradiction
00:14:33 ►
with observation. The difference between Ptolemaic astronomy and Copernican
00:14:39 ►
astronomy is that Ptolemaic astronomy does all its calculations with perfect circles within perfect circles.
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And what Copernicus said was, wouldn’t it be simpler to use ellipses?
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And then you only have to use one ellipse rather than circles within circles within circles.
00:15:01 ►
But the leap of faith or the leap of understanding that you have
00:15:07 ►
to make there is the understanding that nature doesn’t the planets don’t move in
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perfect circles they’re not gods they’re balls of rock obeying the laws of
00:15:20 ►
gravitation keeping them in orbit so So one by one, these perfect objects of Greek mathematical explanation were abandoned.
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The sole exception is the idea that time is a perfectly smooth surface.
00:15:40 ►
This idea is very necessary to science
00:15:45 ►
because it means that measurements
00:15:47 ►
of physical systems
00:15:49 ►
are not time dependent
00:15:51 ►
in other words
00:15:53 ►
it would be counterintuitive to a scientist
00:15:56 ►
to be told
00:15:57 ►
you will get a different charge for the electron
00:16:00 ►
if you measure it on Tuesdays and Thursdays
00:16:03 ►
than Mondays and Saturdays
00:16:05 ►
they would say that’s preposterous the charge of the electron must be invariant
00:16:12 ►
in time why it’s simply a first pass with the razor of simplicity I mean
00:16:21 ►
explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler, or you miss the point.
00:16:31 ►
So when we look at complex phenomenon, like the fall of empires, love affairs, corporate takeovers, social revolutions,
00:16:44 ►
these things never happen the same way twice
00:16:48 ►
that’s why we invented what we call the social sciences
00:16:52 ►
meaning no science at all
00:16:55 ►
but full of good intention
00:16:57 ►
these kinds of complex phenomena
00:17:03 ►
are very critically dependent on initial conditions.
00:17:08 ►
You know, a love affair.
00:17:10 ►
Between whom and whom?
00:17:13 ►
Where?
00:17:14 ►
Under what economic conditions?
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What were the religious preferences of the parties?
00:17:20 ►
And what did their parents think?
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And what did their children think?
00:17:24 ►
In other words, initial conditions set the course
00:17:27 ►
and yet initial conditions are never the same
00:17:31 ►
in these complex systems
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science works very differently from ordinary perception
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as you can see if you walked around on the floor of this gathering
00:17:43 ►
anomaly is highly prized here.
00:17:50 ►
If we have a thousand people who go out on a starry night
00:17:54 ►
and see only the ordinary constellations,
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that is buried.
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But if one person goes out on a starry night
00:18:03 ►
and sees a rectangular black object, a city block long with softly glowing yellow lights moving along the horizon, that’s big news.
00:18:15 ►
Science works exactly the opposite.
00:18:18 ►
If you want, for example, to carry out a scientific observation and you measure let’s say
00:18:25 ►
the electrical charge running through a wire and you measure it a thousand times
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and 999 times it’s between three and four volts but one time you get a
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measurement of 1290 volts a good scientist discards the aberrant measurement.
00:18:46 ►
He says, well, that can’t be right.
00:18:48 ►
That’s ridiculous.
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Get that puppy out of there.
00:18:52 ►
Now average the other 999.
00:18:56 ►
Completely different way
00:18:58 ►
of doing intellectual business
00:19:01 ►
than the way it is done
00:19:03 ►
at the edge of human thought,
00:19:05 ►
where we seek the curious, the anomalous, the unusual,
00:19:10 ►
and then that leads us to wild generalizations,
00:19:14 ►
backward against the pattern of normality, of normal happenstance.
00:19:22 ►
of normal happenstance.
00:19:30 ►
Okay, so this enslavement to Greek idealism of this particular sort has caused science to be fairly helpless
00:19:34 ►
in describing the kinds of complex systems
00:19:37 ►
that now more and more dominate our lives.
00:19:40 ►
Global economies, the internet, interlockinging markets so forth and so on
00:19:48 ►
I want to suggest it’s a two-part suggestion and this is the first part
00:19:54 ►
that there is going to have to be a general revision of how science does its
00:20:01 ►
business if we want to actually extend the explanatory power of science
00:20:08 ►
into the domain of human social and intellectual complexity.
00:20:16 ►
And what science is going to have to do is recognize that,
00:20:21 ►
like everything else ever examined through the lens of science,
00:20:27 ►
time is going to have to be seen as some kind of variable phenomenon,
00:20:34 ►
something that is not a perfect mathematical plane,
00:20:38 ►
but has a topological texture at some level.
00:20:43 ►
It may appear smooth from a certain distance,
00:20:46 ►
but as your point of view sinks into it,
00:20:51 ►
this perfect smoothness is revealed to be, in fact,
00:20:55 ►
a composite of irregularities,
00:20:59 ►
that it is made of fractal subsets of itself.
00:21:06 ►
Now, science has led in this discovery of the fractal reordering of nature,
00:21:13 ►
but it hasn’t extended it to time.
00:21:18 ►
The big news coming out of science in the last ten years,
00:21:22 ►
coming out of science in the last ten years,
00:21:25 ►
perhaps the last certain truth that science will secure
00:21:27 ►
before its transformation,
00:21:30 ►
and it’s a very important one.
00:21:32 ►
It’s that nature is self-similar across scale.
00:21:40 ►
This is something that couldn’t have been said
00:21:42 ►
even ten years ago.
00:21:45 ►
Nature is self-similar across scale.
00:21:48 ►
This is big news, big understanding.
00:21:52 ►
And what does it mean?
00:21:54 ►
Well, it means, I’m sure you all have pondered the similarity
00:21:59 ►
between the structure of an atom, a galaxy, and a solar system.
00:22:08 ►
And if you inquired about this, you were told it’s coincidence.
00:22:15 ►
Well, P.W. Bridgman is the person who pointed out
00:22:18 ►
that a coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.
00:22:27 ►
You see? is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. So until 10 years ago, when you asked this question,
00:22:30 ►
you would be told it’s a coincidence.
00:22:33 ►
You know, it’s easy to make a scientific revolution.
00:22:36 ►
I can remember when I was about nine,
00:22:40 ►
going to my mother in a state of high excitement
00:22:44 ►
and saying, have you noticed that South America
00:22:49 ►
will fit against Africa like a puzzle piece?
00:22:54 ►
And then we looked into it and we were told,
00:22:57 ►
this is a coincidence.
00:22:59 ►
Well, it wasn’t 10 years before continental drift
00:23:03 ►
made a revolution out of the earth sciences
00:23:06 ►
by doing what?
00:23:08 ►
By recognizing what an eight-year-old child could point out,
00:23:13 ►
that Africa and South America were obviously once joined together.
00:23:17 ►
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see this.
00:23:19 ►
You just have to have some experience with crossword puzzles and an open mind.
00:23:27 ►
So nature is self-similar across scales.
00:23:33 ►
That means that an atom is like a galaxy, is like a solar system,
00:23:37 ►
but it means more than that.
00:23:39 ►
It means that we can extrapolate toward cosmic processes
00:23:45 ►
by thinking about our own lives.
00:23:49 ►
Because our own lives are a tiny, fractal piece of data
00:23:54 ►
that is part of a much larger, integrated, modular hierarchy
00:23:59 ►
that we now realize will have the same architectonic
00:24:03 ►
as our own immediate experience, except it will be
00:24:07 ►
expressed on a much larger scale. So that’s the first and simplest part of this suggestion for
00:24:19 ►
a reformation of science that I want to propose. of all that this fractal principle be more clearly
00:24:28 ►
enunciated and understood
00:24:31 ►
Everybody is talking about fractals
00:24:33 ►
But if it took Ralph Abraham to get it down to a bumper sticker for me and it is nature is
00:24:41 ►
self-similar across scales
00:24:47 ►
is nature is self-similar across scales companies explode the same way economies explode the same way the biota of a continent explode processes are always
00:24:54 ►
similar but only differ in scale and what that means then is that our most immediate datum of experience which is the feeling of being
00:25:08 ►
in a body alive and feeling can be extrapolated and mapped on to larger and
00:25:19 ►
smaller processes in the universe to give not not only a sentient universe the living
00:25:28 ►
universe the dynamic universe a universe with purpose but it it also gives us a
00:25:37 ►
universe with a very interesting set of closure properties that are different
00:25:43 ►
from the ones we learned from science
00:25:46 ►
The thing about science and its cosmology is that it makes us irrelevant
00:25:53 ►
We’re told that we are an accident
00:25:57 ►
Around an ordinary star in an ordinary galaxy in an ordinary
00:26:03 ►
portion of the local supercluster,
00:26:06 ►
and it’s just ordinary, ordinary, ordinary, nothing to be excited about.
00:26:11 ►
And then, you know, you have existentialism, which says,
00:26:14 ►
well, then, if you want to get excited, you have to admit that you’re just doing it on your own hook.
00:26:21 ►
This is called conferring meaning rather than discovering meaning.
00:26:26 ►
We confer meaning,
00:26:28 ►
the existentialists tell us,
00:26:30 ►
and it’s good as long as it lasts
00:26:32 ►
and then that’s nothing too.
00:26:35 ►
But all of these conclusions
00:26:37 ►
have been based on ignoring
00:26:39 ►
a second fact about nature
00:26:42 ►
that is as cogent as its fractality,
00:26:48 ►
and far more important for us, I believe.
00:26:51 ►
And this second factor is that the further back in time you go,
00:26:58 ►
the slower everything unfolds.
00:27:03 ►
everything unfolds our present domain of experience
00:27:07 ►
is a domain of furious activity
00:27:11 ►
I mean, many, many things go on on this planet
00:27:16 ►
in a single day
00:27:18 ►
there are inventions
00:27:20 ►
there are books
00:27:21 ►
there are transactions
00:27:22 ►
there are meetings and dissolutions
00:27:26 ►
we live in a busy, busy, busy world
00:27:31 ►
as you journey backward in time
00:27:33 ►
the world becomes less and less busy
00:27:36 ►
and when you leave the domain of organic evolution
00:27:41 ►
the world becomes boring as hell
00:27:44 ►
and when you go further back
00:27:47 ►
to the period before even molecular chemistry
00:27:51 ►
you know, it’s so boring
00:27:53 ►
one can barely compose a comment
00:27:56 ►
so infused with ennui
00:28:00 ►
is the observer in the contemplation of the scene
00:28:04 ►
but science has never in
00:28:08 ►
inculcated this observation into its model of reality we’re told time is
00:28:16 ►
invariant therefore this notion of speeding up or of complexity in some parts of time and not in others,
00:28:26 ►
it must be an artifact of observation.
00:28:30 ►
It must be an illusion or a mistake.
00:28:33 ►
It isn’t real.
00:28:35 ►
But I maintain it is one of the most persistent facts about reality.
00:28:42 ►
facts about reality
00:28:43 ►
and I’ve spoken of it here
00:28:46 ►
in terms of things get simpler
00:28:48 ►
as you go backward in time
00:28:50 ►
we could stand that on its head
00:28:52 ►
and point out that things
00:28:54 ►
get more complex
00:28:55 ►
as you move forward
00:28:57 ►
in time
00:28:59 ►
and that means
00:29:00 ►
that this moment
00:29:02 ►
is the most complex moment the universe has ever known,
00:29:07 ►
at least the local universe.
00:29:10 ►
That means, in a way, if the universe started at the Big Bang,
00:29:14 ►
it ends right here, right now, what I call local now,
00:29:22 ►
because the rest of time has not yet
00:29:25 ►
undergone
00:29:26 ►
the formality
00:29:27 ►
of occurring
00:29:28 ►
so
00:29:30 ►
here we are
00:29:31 ►
the inherities
00:29:32 ►
of the big bang
00:29:33 ►
standing
00:29:34 ►
in the
00:29:35 ►
ultra complex
00:29:36 ►
local
00:29:37 ►
now
00:29:38 ►
now
00:29:39 ►
what do I mean
00:29:40 ►
by complex
00:29:41 ►
well
00:29:42 ►
on the
00:29:44 ►
platform of cellular evolution arose higher animals,
00:29:50 ►
complex ecosystems. On the platform of that arose early human culture. Upon that
00:30:01 ►
platform rose late human culture culture including ourselves, including technology
00:30:07 ►
my point here that I want to try to settle you on
00:30:14 ►
is that nature is a novelty conserving engine
00:30:19 ►
of some sort
00:30:21 ►
that far from being a random process
00:30:26 ►
driven toward entropy
00:30:29 ►
by the second law of thermodynamics
00:30:31 ►
nature is a process of
00:30:35 ►
complexification
00:30:37 ►
that whenever this process is dealt a blow
00:30:42 ►
it immediately sets out
00:30:44 ►
to recover and surpass whatever previous
00:30:48 ►
level of complexification it had attained. Well, no. The important thing about this,
00:30:56 ►
other than just its intrinsic importance for people doing philosophy, is that it holds out the possibility of a theory of ethics because
00:31:07 ►
we are the most complex phenomenon that we know of on this planet. Now, you may edge
00:31:18 ►
forward in your seat ready to spring forward with some objection. But give me a moment here.
00:31:27 ►
Complexity is a tricky concept to define, first of all,
00:31:31 ►
to define mathematically or any other way.
00:31:34 ►
Norbert Wiener and some of those people spent some time on this.
00:31:38 ►
But intuitively, I think it’s a pretty straightforward concept.
00:31:43 ►
The way I define complexity is density of connections.
00:31:49 ►
If point A has 16 connecting points,
00:31:53 ►
it is less complex than point B with 32 connecting points.
00:31:58 ►
That seems fairly clear.
00:32:00 ►
You would have an uphill battle to argue against that.
00:32:03 ►
Some weasel might but
00:32:05 ►
who knows I mean hell you can’t get consensus on what time it is but if
00:32:14 ►
nature is a novelty conserving engine if that’s what nature treasures then we are
00:32:21 ►
not the chance witnesses of an existential universe
00:32:26 ►
we are in fact all God’s children in some sense
00:32:32 ►
in other words we represent the quintessence gathering together of novelty
00:32:42 ►
we are more than mere matter we are more than mere biology we are more than
00:32:52 ►
mere aboriginal culture we are all of those things plus we are our technical uh our skin of technical connections, our extruded culture, our fecal coral reef of transistors, resistors, transponders, databases, and transmission systems. the organic. So suddenly this message that has been relatively ignored by
00:33:29 ►
secular intellectuals for 500 years’re the part of the universe where value a loaded gun held at the head of the planet.
00:34:06 ►
In other words, all other systems and processes seem to have been put at risk
00:34:13 ►
to achieve this thin and wavering spire of complexification
00:34:21 ►
that threatens to come down around our ears at any moment
00:34:25 ►
and send us back to the 14th century if not the Stone Age if we mismanage
00:34:31 ►
ourselves well I think that we need to look at this process from the broadest
00:34:39 ►
possible perspective and try to decondition ourselves from the assumptions of science.
00:34:48 ►
Every theory has what I call a hard swallow.
00:34:54 ►
I mean, because probably because every theory is horseshit in some sense.
00:34:59 ►
I mean, truth is known in silence. So if you’re going out of that area,
00:35:06 ►
you should expect some rather peculiar blemishes on the enterprise.
00:35:12 ►
So every theory has a hard swallow.
00:35:16 ►
Science, their hard swallow is what’s called the Big Bang,
00:35:22 ►
the idea that the universe sprang from nothing
00:35:26 ►
for no reason whatsoever
00:35:28 ►
in a single moment.
00:35:33 ►
So notice that whether you find that persuasive or not,
00:35:37 ►
it is the limit test for credulity.
00:35:42 ►
Do you understand what I mean?
00:35:44 ►
I mean, mean if you
00:35:45 ►
will believe that
00:35:46 ►
what would you
00:35:50 ►
dig in your
00:35:51 ►
heels on
00:35:52 ►
I mean
00:35:54 ►
if
00:35:54 ►
if you
00:35:56 ►
if you would
00:35:56 ►
believe that
00:35:57 ►
then my family
00:35:58 ►
has a bridge
00:35:59 ►
over the Hudson
00:36:00 ►
River that we
00:36:01 ►
are willing to
00:36:02 ►
let go for a
00:36:03 ►
song
00:36:03 ►
and you you could really get in on
00:36:06 ►
something good there. The Big Bang is completely improbable, utterly
00:36:14 ►
improbable. It is the most improbable of all improbabilities. So just remember
00:36:19 ►
that when the fascism of science is telling you that astrologers don’t know what they’re talking
00:36:25 ►
about and somebody else doesn’t know what they’re talking about i mean science has built a house of
00:36:31 ►
cards on worse than sand quicksand i would like to propose a completely different theory which sounds, I know, far-fetched, but I think it answers certain problems
00:36:48 ►
that can’t be reasonably dealt with otherwise.
00:36:52 ►
I would like to propose that the universe is headed toward a singularity,
00:36:58 ►
not that it was born in a singularity
00:37:02 ►
and has been blasted outward
00:37:03 ►
with the unraveling of the laws of physics ever since.
00:37:07 ►
But rather, the idea that the universe is not a purposeless explosion running down into entropy,
00:37:21 ►
that in fact the universe is some kind of process
00:37:24 ►
that is running along
00:37:27 ►
fairly well-defined runnels
00:37:30 ►
or what the British biologist
00:37:33 ►
C.H. Waddington called creodes
00:37:35 ►
in other words it is not
00:37:37 ►
again it is not a flat surface
00:37:39 ►
over which we are free
00:37:40 ►
to lurch and careen
00:37:42 ►
in some kind of random walk
00:37:44 ►
or parody of Brownian motion.
00:37:47 ►
It isn’t that at all.
00:37:49 ►
It is a topology.
00:37:50 ►
It is a surface, a slalom, whose high walls confine us as we move deeper and deeper into the process of complexification.
00:38:02 ►
And we move into that process
00:38:05 ►
faster and faster and faster.
00:38:09 ►
And this is where it gets woo-woo
00:38:11 ►
because I am, you know,
00:38:16 ►
willing to say I’m convinced, anyway.
00:38:20 ►
I’m willing to say I’m convinced
00:38:23 ►
that history is the enunciation of the nearby presence of a transformational event.
00:38:34 ►
In other words, a planet without history is what you get if it’s business as usual. The chipmunks dig their burrows,
00:38:45 ►
the hummingbirds fertilize the nectar,
00:38:48 ►
the trumpet flowers,
00:38:50 ►
the ants dig out the ground.
00:38:53 ►
Everything proceeds normally.
00:38:57 ►
History is what happens
00:39:01 ►
when an animal species
00:39:03 ►
has its genome distorted
00:39:07 ►
by the nearby presence of a transcendental object.
00:39:12 ►
It only lasts 12 to 1500 generations.
00:39:18 ►
It’s very brief in terms of the life of this planet
00:39:22 ►
where a city block history
00:39:25 ►
would be as thick as a piece of typing
00:39:27 ►
paper that’s how long it lasts and yet
00:39:31 ►
this is all we’ve ever known the inside
00:39:35 ►
of this transitory domain called history
00:39:39 ►
and without thinking about it very much
00:39:42 ►
we have our secular society tells us to assume it will go on forever.
00:39:50 ►
You know, assume it will go on forever.
00:39:52 ►
That’s a bigger stretch than the Big Bang for me.
00:39:57 ►
I cannot see how anyone could assume that human history will go on,
00:40:03 ►
not forever, but let’s say as long as it
00:40:06 ►
has gone on can anyone
00:40:07 ►
imagine the next 10,000
00:40:10 ►
years of technological
00:40:11 ►
development and global
00:40:13 ►
civilization it’s a joke
00:40:16 ►
can anyone
00:40:17 ►
imagine the next thousand
00:40:19 ►
years or hundred
00:40:21 ►
years I think
00:40:23 ►
that the asymptotic
00:40:25 ►
curve of
00:40:26 ►
technological
00:40:26 ►
development,
00:40:28 ►
complexification,
00:40:29 ►
the spread of
00:40:30 ►
communication
00:40:31 ►
technologies and
00:40:32 ►
yada, yada,
00:40:33 ►
yada is
00:40:34 ►
happening so
00:40:35 ►
fast that
00:40:36 ►
within our
00:40:37 ►
lifetimes we
00:40:39 ►
can see the
00:40:40 ►
transcendental
00:40:41 ►
object rearing
00:40:42 ►
up and
00:40:43 ►
throwing the
00:40:44 ►
shadow of its enormous protean form
00:40:48 ►
across the surface of social processes and social evolution.
00:40:58 ►
History, the purpose of history is to create planetary crisis,
00:41:05 ►
and it’s doing a splendid job of it.
00:41:10 ►
You know, apparently monkeys would rather kick back and chill,
00:41:17 ►
and so we only function well under pressure,
00:41:22 ►
and so the pressure is rising. you know our responses have been astonishing
00:41:29 ►
when the African continent dried up we invented agriculture when spoken language was insufficient
00:41:37 ►
we invented alphabets when they were insufficient we invented mathematical modeling
00:41:46 ►
when the complexity of the world
00:41:49 ►
exceeded our mathematical models
00:41:51 ►
we built computational machinery
00:41:54 ►
to expand the power of our mathematical tools
00:41:57 ►
we seem to function well under pressure
00:42:01 ►
and now we are coming under pressure
00:42:04 ►
not this, this is not pressure this is
00:42:07 ►
the long garden party before pressure when people can still you know worry about whether they’re
00:42:15 ►
getting enough antioxidants and so forth and so on not to gore anyone’s particular ox.
00:42:25 ►
I’m as concerned about antioxidants as the next person.
00:42:32 ►
But I think that for a very long time,
00:42:37 ►
maybe, oh, I don’t know, pick a number,
00:42:40 ►
but let’s say 50,000 years,
00:42:42 ►
at least since language,
00:42:50 ►
number but let’s say 50,000 years at least since language shamans or users of hallucinogenic plants have had what Wordsworth called intimations of immortality that aside from everything else which the shamanic mind space there is this view
00:43:05 ►
along the forward vector of time
00:43:08 ►
to this brilliant
00:43:11 ►
boundary dissolving
00:43:14 ►
light that seems to
00:43:17 ►
throw its influence across
00:43:20 ►
all processes that precede it
00:43:24 ►
and religions, great religions across all processes that precede it.
00:43:27 ►
And religions, great religions that involve the fates of hundreds of millions of people
00:43:31 ►
are intimations of this transcendental object
00:43:35 ►
at the end of time.
00:43:37 ►
And they all get it wrong, of course.
00:43:40 ►
They get it wrong because it is always filtered
00:43:44 ►
through the vicissitudes of the historical moment
00:43:47 ►
and the political needs
00:43:49 ►
of those who are telling the tale
00:43:52 ►
but if you take all of these things
00:43:54 ►
not as God’s revealed truth
00:43:57 ►
but more as God’s image
00:44:00 ►
in the funhouse mirror of bent ideology
00:44:03 ►
you can sort of extract out of all these images
00:44:09 ►
a sense of what the transcendental reality must be like. And I think, you know, recurring to the
00:44:18 ►
idea that we are fractally organized, that we are microcosms of the larger structure of the universe,
00:44:28 ►
then I think in the natural phenomenon of orgasm and in the, how would you put it,
00:44:38 ►
the human-plant interaction occasioned by psychedelics,
00:44:44 ►
human-plant interaction occasioned by psychedelics, so orgasm and the psychedelic experience,
00:44:48 ►
we actually, in fractal form,
00:44:52 ►
anticipate this boundary-dissolving conclusion
00:44:56 ►
to the historical process.
00:44:59 ►
I mean, that’s why Eros is like a compass of hope.
00:45:05 ►
Why everybody says, you know,
00:45:07 ►
after the hortatory political breast-beating and all of that,
00:45:12 ►
everyone knows that what we really need is love.
00:45:16 ►
That without that, it won’t work.
00:45:18 ►
With that, the political, social, intellectual, and technological details
00:45:23 ►
will probably take care of themselves.
00:45:27 ►
But love in the heart of a monkey, which is what we are,
00:45:32 ►
is an effort to image this transcendental thing at the end of time.
00:45:39 ►
I mean, to love is to open to the presence of the other.
00:45:46 ►
And that’s a very, very profound boundary, dissolution.
00:45:52 ►
Ultimately, at death, I think probably the only way you can meet death
00:45:56 ►
fully in command of your faculties
00:46:01 ►
is to love it to surrender
00:46:06 ►
to it
00:46:06 ►
well we each can make
00:46:10 ►
whatever peace we can or cannot
00:46:12 ►
make with our own death
00:46:13 ►
but we get much more agitated
00:46:16 ►
when we contemplate
00:46:18 ►
the death of the species
00:46:20 ►
or the death of the planet
00:46:22 ►
because that seems to
00:46:24 ►
involve such higher stakes,
00:46:28 ►
such greater loss.
00:46:30 ►
What I observe in nature is an incredible…
00:46:33 ►
Nature is a very high-stakes gambler.
00:46:37 ►
You know, nature is like the good shepherd in the gospel story.
00:46:41 ►
I mean, she will leave the 99 to save the one that is lost
00:46:47 ►
her interest in complexity
00:46:50 ►
and her willingness to allow it
00:46:53 ►
to adumbrate in ourselves
00:46:55 ►
to such excruciating levels
00:46:57 ►
is basically a willingness
00:46:59 ►
to put every grey whale
00:47:01 ►
dandelion, parakeet
00:47:03 ►
and spotted owl on notice
00:47:07 ►
that the human enterprise is somehow an acceptable risk for them to endure.
00:47:16 ►
And I think that the way psychedelics play in to all of this is they by being boundary dissolving by
00:47:28 ►
being deconditioning agents they strip from your eyes this downer trip that we
00:47:37 ►
have inherited out of a scientific model of reality we are not lost in a mute, uncaring, purposeless universe. How anybody could ever suppose this? It takes an extraordinary power of the denial of simple observation to come to this conclusion. Nevertheless, this is what modern science tells us.
00:48:03 ►
Nevertheless, this is what modern science tells us.
00:48:08 ►
If this isn’t obvious to you,
00:48:13 ►
then you probably need to do five grams in silent darkness on an empty stomach and just weigh the various ideas that are being peddled in the intellectual marketplace.
00:48:21 ►
You know, Big Bang, God’s love love transcendental object at the end of
00:48:27 ►
history it’s a small number of items on the menu most of these items on the menu
00:48:35 ►
are are simply ideologies none except for psychedelics I would submit are an experience
00:48:45 ►
a direct experience
00:48:48 ►
and this is what gives it a leg up
00:48:51 ►
it’s not an appeal to reason
00:48:53 ►
it’s not an appeal to reason
00:48:56 ►
and in fact it is ultimately unreasonable
00:48:59 ►
you know, Tertullian
00:49:01 ►
when he was asked about the resurrection
00:49:04 ►
they said, you know why do you believe in this? It’s so stupid. And he said, credo te absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd. I believe it because it is absurd. This is a thoroughly modern sentiment. If the rest of the fathers of the early church had been as hip as that statement,
00:49:28 ►
we wouldn’t have come away with the original sin and the virgin birth.
00:49:34 ►
I believe that there is very little time left
00:49:39 ►
that history is the enunciation of human morphogenetic transformation
00:49:49 ►
that is under the control of the largest control structures in the planetary ecology.
00:49:57 ►
In other words, it’s not up to Bill Clinton or Skink Gingrich or any of these reptiles.
00:50:04 ►
It is not a matter of human decision it is
00:50:10 ►
built in to the dynamics of the planet and consequently all this western
00:50:20 ►
breast beating and blame taking about what we did
00:50:26 ►
and how we fucked up
00:50:27 ►
and all this
00:50:28 ►
is a bunch of nonsense
00:50:30 ►
nobody screwed up
00:50:31 ►
you have to have an enormous sense
00:50:34 ►
of your own self importance
00:50:35 ►
to believe that you
00:50:37 ►
got away from the control
00:50:40 ►
of nature
00:50:41 ►
and against her wishes
00:50:44 ►
were able to set the planet up for Armageddon I mean
00:50:48 ►
it’s such a typical western fantasy of uh ofguided and messy and very redundant and iterative, but it isn’t evil.
00:51:46 ►
years ago the human family divided into two camps the sacred ritual eternal shamanic style of existence which lived lightly on the land and was tribal and non-technologically based, and our style, which was a style of conquest and denial, virtual reality building.
00:52:01 ►
I mean, now this is thought to be the technological edge,
00:52:03 ►
but the earliest technology for virtual reality implementation
00:52:07 ►
was language
00:52:08 ►
followed quickly by the hard wiring we call urbanization
00:52:14 ►
you know once you have an urban setting
00:52:18 ►
you are walking around inside a virtual reality
00:52:21 ►
this is an ideology that has been turned into matter it’s as virtual as anything
00:52:27 ►
could possibly be there is nothing new about setting up symbols and taking them for truth
00:52:35 ►
i mean this seems to be our unique uh curse as it were what the psychedelics do is decondition us from all the media induced ratios
00:52:50 ►
of perception and value systems and then you just see that culture is just some story
00:52:59 ►
that a bunch of people got together all culture doesn’t matter whether you’re rainforest pygmies
00:53:05 ►
or Japanese bankers or whoever you are.
00:53:09 ►
Your story is just some story
00:53:11 ►
that has a certain amount of drama,
00:53:15 ►
a certain amount of self-congratulation,
00:53:18 ►
a certain amount of risk.
00:53:19 ►
And it keeps thought away, that story.
00:53:29 ►
But if we dissolve our cultural story,
00:53:33 ►
then we discover what it is that we’ve been ignoring for 20,000 years,
00:53:38 ►
which is the nature of nature, that it preserves novelty,
00:53:44 ►
that it is an engine for the production of
00:53:48 ►
complexity that this complexity extends from the abiotic realm into the biotic
00:53:55 ►
into the cultural into the technological seamlessly with no ontological break or transformation.
00:54:10 ►
You know, shamans have a number of abilities which are thought to indicate their special status.
00:54:17 ►
They can predict the weather.
00:54:22 ►
They can tell where the game has gone. They are very adept at seeing into little social hassles like who’s sleeping with whom that they shouldn’t be or who stole the chicken. Shamans can cure. Or, to put it slightly more cynically,
00:54:46 ►
shamans have an incredible ability to choose clients that get well.
00:54:54 ►
Well, which is not to knock them.
00:54:58 ►
I mean, any doctor will tell you this is part of being a good doctor.
00:55:04 ►
So, if you analyze these abilities you see that they go
00:55:09 ►
from being miraculous and mysterious to being trivial and straightforward if you assume that
00:55:18 ►
the shamans can see forward into time in a way that ordinary people can’t.
00:55:25 ►
Well, then where the game went, next week’s weather,
00:55:28 ►
who’s sleeping with who and who will get well,
00:55:32 ►
become trivial.
00:55:33 ►
No big deal.
00:55:35 ►
And so the charge that shamans are tricksters
00:55:39 ►
is in a sense true,
00:55:42 ►
except that the trick is not an illusion.
00:55:47 ►
It’s a real trick.
00:55:49 ►
They really can project their consciousness into hyperspace.
00:55:55 ►
And thinking about this and thinking about the psychedelic experience,
00:55:59 ►
I think this is a clue, a partial clue, to how to unravel our dilemma in being.
00:56:09 ►
Because, you know, here’s an analogy from chemistry.
00:56:14 ►
You all probably took chemistry in high school.
00:56:17 ►
You know how sulfur has two melting points?
00:56:21 ►
Sulfur we think of as a yellow powder.
00:56:24 ►
But put it in a spoon and heat it and it
00:56:27 ►
will turn to a black liquid. Keep heating it and that black liquid will turn to a black solid.
00:56:34 ►
Continue heating it and that black liquid and that black solid will turn back into a liquid.
00:56:42 ►
Sulfur has two melting points. This is a very curious property of some forms of matter.
00:56:50 ►
It seems to me it suggests an analogy about our own consciousness,
00:56:55 ►
which is consciousness is a kind of omnidirectional threat detection and assessment system
00:57:02 ►
that a very paranoid and small monkey put in place in a
00:57:08 ►
grassland environment frequented by very large hunting cats and so the purpose of consciousness
00:57:17 ►
is to inform you of something horrific about to happen that in the hope that you can then take some action
00:57:26 ►
against it.
00:57:28 ►
But in the bottom of a cave or high up in a tree or on a small island or somewhere where
00:57:36 ►
you feel safe, if you will then intoxicate yourself with psychedelics the evolutionarily
00:57:45 ►
defined and paranoid
00:57:48 ►
threat detection
00:57:51 ►
configuration of consciousness breaks down and
00:57:55 ►
You discover that you have an angel inside your head and this angel is the non paranoid
00:58:02 ►
non carnivorous
00:58:04 ►
monkey who is still nevertheless you and And this angel is the non-paranoid, non-carnivorous monkey
00:58:05 ►
who is still nevertheless you.
00:58:09 ►
And that from this angelic point of perception,
00:58:13 ►
both the past and the future have an immediacy,
00:58:19 ►
a co-presence with the moment that they lack in ordinary experience.
00:58:26 ►
And I believe that as we create a non-paranoid world,
00:58:32 ►
a loving world, a world where people can operate in an atmosphere of trust of each other,
00:58:40 ►
that consciousness is slowly trying to relax and recast itself.
00:58:47 ►
And the grease for these skids is, of course, the psychedelic experience
00:58:54 ►
because it forces this dissolving of cultural values.
00:58:59 ►
It catalyzes it.
00:59:01 ►
What it might take you 40 years to do through a process of rational analysis and psychotherapy
00:59:08 ►
and deconstruction and so forth and so on it can happen literally overnight on a sufficiently
00:59:15 ►
alarming dose of a psychedelic substance the reason I’m willing to speak to this is because I think it’s
00:59:25 ►
not without reason that in this final
00:59:29 ►
moment of historical culmination
00:59:31 ►
that our inventorying of the life and
00:59:36 ►
customs of this planet has brought to
00:59:40 ►
our attention then these aboriginal
00:59:43 ►
practices because they are the other half of the equation.
00:59:50 ►
What we have brought forward is little truths
00:59:55 ►
like energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared,
01:00:00 ►
so forth and so on.
01:00:01 ►
We are the masters of matter and energy
01:00:05 ►
but not the masters of our own dreams
01:00:09 ►
our own spiritual striving
01:00:11 ►
for that we are going to have to infuse
01:00:15 ►
our sense of technical accomplishment
01:00:19 ►
with the heart
01:00:21 ►
basically
01:00:23 ►
the heart that these aboriginal cultures have kept intact the
01:00:31 ►
next few years are going to be wild and woolly wilder and woolier than anything
01:00:36 ►
we have seen so far things this tendency of things to appear to be getting both better and worse is going to be itself exacerbated tremendously.
01:00:49 ►
And people who have outmoded or silly or incomplete
01:00:56 ►
or insufficient models of reality
01:01:00 ►
are going to find themselves running very, very hard
01:01:04 ►
to catch up with a rising sense
01:01:07 ►
of anxiety i think it’s going to necessitate a discussion about time’s direction the meaning
01:01:18 ►
of history the meaning of the presence of messianic and utopian visions in our shamanic and spiritual legacy
01:01:29 ►
and i am convinced that the best thing we can do to help this along is to
01:01:37 ►
argue against anxiety inform people of the concerning the shamanic
01:01:45 ►
technologies
01:01:46 ►
that are
01:01:47 ►
available to
01:01:48 ►
them
01:01:48 ►
and urge
01:01:49 ►
people
01:01:50 ►
to have
01:01:51 ►
faith
01:01:51 ►
in the
01:01:52 ►
larger
01:01:52 ►
dynamical
01:01:53 ►
processes
01:01:54 ►
that define
01:01:55 ►
the universe
01:01:56 ►
the universe
01:01:57 ►
has been at
01:01:58 ►
this game
01:01:59 ►
a long
01:02:00 ►
long time
01:02:02 ►
it knows
01:02:03 ►
what it is
01:02:03 ►
about
01:02:04 ►
far better than do we.
01:02:07 ►
And if we wish to align ourselves
01:02:09 ►
with cosmic purpose,
01:02:12 ►
we have to find out what it is.
01:02:15 ►
And to find out what it is,
01:02:16 ►
we have to go outside
01:02:18 ►
of our cultural values
01:02:20 ►
and our programming.
01:02:23 ►
And we are not, not fortunately without helpers without
01:02:27 ►
aids the plants have always been there they are the repositories of this
01:02:35 ►
transforming gnosis and if we avail ourselves of it we can overcome the dis-ease of culture
01:02:45 ►
and begin to function for each other as we should,
01:02:50 ►
which is as nodes of transformative information
01:02:55 ►
and domains of permission, surrender, and affirmation
01:03:02 ►
that recover the real meaning of humanness that history has tended to
01:03:09 ►
mitigate and betray that’s what i have to say this afternoon it’s uh 10 after four
01:03:19 ►
thank you and I’ll do questions.
01:03:26 ►
So, questions.
01:03:29 ►
Sure, the question is about ayahuasca and its ability to heal the body and the mind.
01:03:33 ►
In a way, the question is just a continuation
01:03:35 ►
of what we’ve been talking about
01:03:37 ►
because ayahuasca is one of these aboriginal hallucinogens
01:03:43 ►
that has arrived on the menu
01:03:46 ►
of western culture
01:03:48 ►
right when we need it
01:03:50 ►
ayahuasca is made of a
01:03:52 ►
large woody jungle vine
01:03:54 ►
which contains an MAO inhibitor
01:03:57 ►
harming
01:03:57 ►
which is complexed with
01:04:00 ►
DMT which comes from
01:04:02 ►
a plant called
01:04:04 ►
cicotria viridis, Chacruna.
01:04:08 ►
And these two plants are mixed together and boiled,
01:04:11 ►
and the solid fraction is eventually discarded,
01:04:15 ►
and the boiled fraction is concentrated tremendously,
01:04:19 ►
and then you get a liquid that is the equivalent of a slow release DMT trip and over four or five hours you
01:04:31 ►
are swept into a titanically alien psychedelic experience characterized by DMT-like hallucinations?
01:04:46 ►
Yeah, good question.
01:04:48 ►
Interesting question.
01:04:48 ►
The question is,
01:04:50 ►
harming and harmaline,
01:04:51 ►
what’s the difference?
01:04:55 ►
Well, both are beta-carbolines.
01:04:58 ►
Harming occurs in ayahuasca. Harming is harder to take than harmaline.
01:05:03 ►
Harmaline occurs
01:05:05 ►
in Syrian rue
01:05:07 ►
and is by itself
01:05:10 ►
a hallucinogen
01:05:11 ►
and probably in the presence of
01:05:14 ►
cannabis which certainly
01:05:15 ►
in Iran wouldn’t have been a problem
01:05:18 ►
it’s probably
01:05:20 ►
quite an
01:05:21 ►
active hallucinogen
01:05:23 ►
haramine the one in banisteriopsis copy, is a little rugged.
01:05:29 ►
If you actually reach hallucinatory level on it, you’re fairly close to toxicity.
01:05:36 ►
A lot of generalizations have been made about Harmaline based on Haramine that we now probably should go back and look at.
01:05:47 ►
If you are looking for a source of a good, if you’re looking for a good MAO inhibitor source,
01:05:54 ►
Hormol, which is the seeds of Pegam and Harmala, are sold in many Iranian markets. markets and if you buy a if you have two grams of that reduced to powder and taken orally will
01:06:09 ►
thoroughly inhibit your mao for four to six hours and if you then add a tryptamine it will not
01:06:18 ►
metabolize away and you’ll have a psychedelic experience of some sort a lot of people are doing this there’s
01:06:26 ►
a whole movement i don’t know if you’re aware about ayahuasca analogs in other words finding
01:06:32 ►
local plants in your environment that contain mao inhibitors and dmt so that instead of going to the Amazon and spreading cultural death,
01:06:46 ►
you can, in the confines of your own kitchen, cook up a kind of ayahuasca-like thing.
01:06:53 ►
A lot of people are experimenting with this.
01:06:56 ►
There have been a few tummy aches.
01:06:58 ►
No, we haven’t lost anybody.
01:07:00 ►
But this is definitely one of the frontiers of botanical consciousness while I’m on the
01:07:07 ►
subject let me just in the interest of stirring the pot so to speak call your attention to there
01:07:15 ►
is a new psychedelic that has been discovered that is I believe very destined to play a role in our future.
01:07:25 ►
And that is salvia divinorum, this Mexican mint,
01:07:31 ►
which has a compound, it’s either an isoquinoline or a sesquiterpene,
01:07:37 ►
not an alkaloid, that is active at the one milligram level.
01:07:49 ►
That’s astonishingly intense that’s big news in pharmacology lsd is active at 500 micrograms that’s half a milligram but lsd is a is a hybrid
01:07:59 ►
of the laboratory this new compound called alpha salvinorin or salvinorin-alpha occurs in this Mexican plant, Salvia divinorum, in quite robust amounts.
01:08:14 ►
I mean, it’s well worth your while to extract it.
01:08:18 ►
It’s worth your while to chew it.
01:08:20 ►
It’s worth your while to smoke it.
01:08:22 ►
And, you know, the reports about this substance are pretty
01:08:27 ►
exciting even dmt test pilots come back white knuckled from this one
01:08:36 ►
as far as contraindications you should know some people lose consciousness and get up and move
01:08:48 ►
around even though they’re loaded so this suggests what we call the time to the tree protocol
01:08:55 ►
you know it only it only lasts about 40 minutes so just have somebody rope you as ulysses had his crew rope him to the
01:09:08 ►
mast and then you can hear the siren song without disgracing yourself yes yes this is a reference
01:09:16 ►
to my time wave theory which i obliquely referred to today but didn’t flay you with the details but the nice thing about my theory is it
01:09:26 ►
has these hideous tests built into it that are unavoidable you can’t sweep it under the rug
01:09:33 ►
and one of the tests is that the theory predicts that next year beginning around I believe the end
01:09:40 ►
of February and on through till December
01:09:45 ►
is going to be, without contest,
01:09:48 ►
the most dramatic plunge into novelty so far in our lifetimes.
01:09:55 ►
And so it has to outdo the fall of the Soviet Union.
01:09:59 ►
It has to even outdo Ross Perot’s announcing for the presidency.
01:10:04 ►
There are giants that it must surpass.
01:10:08 ►
So I will be either here crowing a year from now,
01:10:13 ►
or it’ll be very hard to get calls through to me as I’ll be in seclusion.
01:10:33 ►
you’re describing our consciousness as having being in need of a lack of individuation well it’s the issue between individuation and ego
01:10:39 ►
and I think your question implies a confusion of the two
01:10:45 ►
I mean we glory in our individuality
01:10:52 ►
our uniqueness, our specialness
01:10:56 ►
but the ego is something else
01:11:01 ►
the ego is something which seeks to actually empower itself
01:11:06 ►
at the expense of other people.
01:11:09 ►
And so, you know, there has to be a trade-off.
01:11:12 ►
I think the glory of Western civilization
01:11:14 ►
is our empowering of our uniqueness,
01:11:18 ►
the unique artistic vision, the unique scientific vision.
01:11:23 ►
The appalling thing about western civilization is how we have
01:11:27 ►
you know taken the worst aspects of dominator society and institutionalized it and then passed
01:11:36 ►
laws which make it almost impossible to overturn it so I’m not preaching any form of anthill, fascist or communist or otherwise.
01:11:49 ►
But I do think that we over-identify ourselves with things.
01:11:56 ►
We over-identify our happiness with objects. objects one of the great things about psychedelics that is so corrosive to capitalistic values
01:12:08 ►
is that psychedelics show you that the best stuff is in your own head you know better than walking
01:12:16 ►
down madison avenue looking in the windows is sitting in your shabby apartment on six dried grams looking in the windows you know
01:12:27 ►
you know when you talk about a transcendental object the thing that occurs to me is um let’s
01:12:35 ►
get back to some other things you say about hypercognition or a hypercognitive object
01:12:40 ►
if you go into certain states you can see sort of like hologramic visions,
01:12:47 ►
where your consciousness is not mediated by senses, but you’re perceiving things that
01:12:57 ►
have holographic qualities. You just talked about hyper-transognition. What does the experience the shaman will sometimes have in perceiving hyper-cognitive beings?
01:13:10 ►
Well, obviously the world arrives at the surface of your skin as one thing,
01:13:17 ►
and then it enters into channels, perceptual channels of distinction.
01:13:25 ►
The eyes bring you some data, the ears bring you data,
01:13:29 ►
and the idea is that within the brain,
01:13:31 ►
all these channels are supposed to be recombined
01:13:34 ►
to give you the original input.
01:13:38 ►
And apparently, this is a culturally defined undertaking.
01:13:43 ►
In other words words when you think
01:13:46 ►
You think you’re thinking the way people have always thought
01:13:51 ►
But in fact how people think is very much dependent on
01:13:58 ►
Media and informational
01:14:00 ►
Biases in the society in which they were raised I believe most western people
01:14:06 ►
hear themselves
01:14:08 ►
think, in other words
01:14:10 ►
they hear the equivalent of a
01:14:12 ►
voice speaking in their head
01:14:14 ►
and it speaks their thoughts
01:14:16 ►
when you smoke
01:14:18 ►
halfway decent pot or take
01:14:20 ►
psychedelics or something like that
01:14:22 ►
you become aware that
01:14:24 ►
the processing of incoming audio data
01:14:28 ►
shifts slightly toward the visual,
01:14:32 ►
and you see what people mean,
01:14:36 ►
or their speech seems more colorful,
01:14:39 ►
it seems to convey more.
01:14:41 ►
And I think whether we process incoming speech
01:14:46 ►
by the ear or by the eye
01:14:48 ►
internally
01:14:49 ►
is a cultural
01:14:51 ►
piece of cultural conditioning
01:14:54 ►
and that in fact
01:14:56 ►
we are in the act of
01:14:57 ►
changing over
01:14:59 ►
this generation of young people
01:15:02 ►
who are always dissed
01:15:04 ►
as illiterate
01:15:05 ►
are in fact print illiterate.
01:15:10 ►
But they know more about electronic literacy
01:15:13 ►
than the people who are knocking them.
01:15:16 ►
And their bias is primarily toward the eye
01:15:20 ►
rather than the ear.
01:15:22 ►
That’s why what we really have are two cultures
01:15:24 ►
talking past each other.
01:15:27 ►
And I think that psychedelics sort of strip out
01:15:33 ►
culturally conditioned styles of sensory processing
01:15:38 ►
and that what we call hallucinations
01:15:41 ►
are nothing more than our thoughts beheld to some degree and that we’re not used to
01:15:48 ►
beholding our thoughts we’re used to hearing our thoughts yeah the question is talk about time
01:15:55 ►
speeding up maybe we’re experiencing the rapture right now well in a, that’s what I was hinting at. History is a very low-volume version of the rapture.
01:16:11 ►
And the 20th century is a slightly higher volume of the rapture.
01:16:16 ►
And the year preceding concrescence will be yet more like the rapture.
01:16:23 ►
And the minutes preceding concrescence,
01:16:26 ►
probably, hell, it will be the rapture.
01:16:30 ►
The universe is seeking some kind of completion
01:16:34 ►
at a very, very rapid state,
01:16:36 ►
and clearly technology is now what is driving it.
01:16:43 ►
For a long time it was driven by chemistry
01:16:46 ►
and then 1.3 billion years ago
01:16:50 ►
it began to be driven by genetics
01:16:53 ►
biology became the carrier of change
01:16:57 ►
on this planet
01:16:58 ►
15-20,000 years ago
01:17:02 ►
it moved into what some people call
01:17:04 ►
the epigenetic domain.
01:17:07 ►
That means change not in the genes.
01:17:11 ►
Writing is an epigenetic behavior.
01:17:14 ►
Language is an epigenetic behavior.
01:17:16 ►
Painting, dance, language, or possibly borderline,
01:17:20 ►
quasi-genetic, quasi-epigenetic, as Chomsky implied.
01:17:26 ►
The thing that we’re not coming to terms with,
01:17:29 ►
because it’s almost literally unthinkable,
01:17:33 ►
is that history is a birthing process.
01:17:38 ►
History is a very dramatic, painful, sudden episode where you begin at the top of the birth canal and you’re a
01:17:50 ►
cheerful nomad herding your cattle across the African plains, worshiping a mother goddess,
01:17:58 ►
having your orgies, having your intoxication, so forth and so on. That’s us at the top of the birth canal 18 17 16 000 years ago
01:18:08 ►
now you know we are at the narrow neck and uh we feel like we’re being squeezed to death
01:18:17 ►
suffocated uh there is not enough water there is not enough air. There is only pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure.
01:18:27 ►
And how in this moment of cumulative global crisis
01:18:32 ►
can we imagine that this is simply a passage
01:18:37 ►
to a wider domain of being
01:18:41 ►
as different from the world we have known
01:18:43 ►
as this world is from the
01:18:46 ►
omniotic oceans of the womb but humanness survives the humanness is
01:18:53 ►
fully present in the womb fully present in the world makes the transition through
01:18:59 ►
the narrow neck of the birth canal and we will make the transition I am confident
01:19:05 ►
through the narrow neck
01:19:06 ►
of modern history
01:19:08 ►
and into this wider
01:19:10 ►
post-historical domain
01:19:12 ►
how much
01:19:13 ►
of our foolishness
01:19:15 ►
our religions
01:19:17 ►
our prejudices
01:19:18 ►
our habits
01:19:20 ►
we will be able to take with us
01:19:22 ►
into that new domain
01:19:24 ►
we don’t know we’ll be lucky if we get
01:19:27 ►
to keep the body you know and i’m for that but i’m also completely aware it may not go according to
01:19:37 ►
my wishes there may come a moment when there are levels of surrender that are trying to the most crazed among us.
01:19:46 ►
But nature is clearly now in the third and final act of her love affair with complexity.
01:19:54 ►
And our cultures, our technologies now have such a momentum
01:19:59 ►
for the production of this kind of complexity
01:20:02 ►
that political decisions hardly matter anymore.
01:20:07 ►
That’s become a sideshow.
01:20:10 ►
And driven by money and scientific understanding,
01:20:16 ►
technology has taken the lead.
01:20:19 ►
And by technology, I don’t mean simply machines.
01:20:23 ►
I use McLuhan’s definition.
01:20:25 ►
Technology is simply the extensions of man.
01:20:31 ►
The extensions of man.
01:20:32 ►
We are hardwiring the unconscious.
01:20:36 ►
We are shrinking the planet to a point.
01:20:39 ►
We are democratizing the availability of data.
01:20:44 ►
We are digitalizing our past so that it doesn’t decay.
01:20:47 ►
And we are triangulating and anticipating our future and discovering it as we live into it to be more fun than we ever dared imagine, more psychedelic than we ever dared imagine.
01:21:05 ►
And I look for this to continue until it just reaches excruciating levels.
01:21:13 ►
You put it very well.
01:21:15 ►
We are in the shadow of the rapture that is the end of history.
01:21:22 ►
And this is the end of this little get-together.
01:21:27 ►
Thank you very much.
01:21:37 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:21:40 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:21:45 ►
We are in the shadow of the rapture that is called the end of history.
01:21:50 ►
Wow, that’s a pretty bold statement.
01:21:54 ►
But one thing we probably should keep in mind when we hear Terence say things like that
01:21:59 ►
is that he sometimes thinks more in terms of cosmic time than human time.
01:22:04 ►
but he sometimes thinks more in terms of cosmic time than human time.
01:22:07 ►
For example, if you listen closely,
01:22:11 ►
you’ll hear him compare the past 50,000 years of human history as being a mere blink of the cosmic eye.
01:22:15 ►
So I try to not take him too literally
01:22:18 ►
whenever he gets into one of his end-of-history riffs.
01:22:21 ►
While I agree that 1,000 years isn’t much on some scales, well,
01:22:27 ►
it’s really a long way off from where we stand right now. And so I’m going to concentrate
01:22:32 ►
on events that may be significantly closer in time right now than what the eschaton may
01:22:37 ►
be. Because to tell the truth, I’ve got no idea how to prepare myself for the end of history but before I get to the end of this podcast
01:22:48 ►
there are a couple of things I want to mention
01:22:50 ►
that came in through email
01:22:52 ►
or a comment on the psychedelicsalon.org blog
01:22:55 ►
or on the psychedelicsalon forum
01:22:58 ►
over on thegirlreport.com
01:23:00 ►
and one of them is a note that came from Christian C
01:23:04 ►
who sent me some links to several screenshots from the World of Warcraft.
01:23:09 ►
I’ve heard about that game, of course, but I’ve never actually seen any screens from it before.
01:23:14 ►
And as Christian says, it’s hard to miss the psychedelic influence on the landscape.
01:23:19 ►
In fact, one screen looked just like an ayahuasca vision I once had.
01:23:23 ►
In fact, one screen looked just like an ayahuasca vision I once had.
01:23:30 ►
Interestingly, I’ve lately seen several television programs for preschool children,
01:23:35 ►
and I’ve been amazed to see all the psychedelic mushrooms all over the place,
01:23:39 ►
and not to mention just a lot of other psychedelic influence there as well.
01:23:43 ►
So, all in all, I’d say these are actually good trends.
01:23:52 ►
Also, I want to mention a couple of new podcasts that I’ve started listening to, both of which are produced by fellow salonners.
01:24:04 ►
If you are also a listener of KMO’s Sea Realm podcast, you may remember his interview with Dr. Martin Ball, who has considerable knowledge about Native American traditions.
01:24:10 ►
In fact, my wife and I were fortunate to get to meet Martin and his friend Mara last December,
01:24:13 ►
and we found them both really fascinating.
01:24:17 ►
And now, of course, you can also hear Martin more frequently on his own podcast,
01:24:20 ►
which is called The Entheogenic Evolution.
01:24:27 ►
And you can find it at www.entheogenic.podomatic.com.
01:24:31 ►
And I’ll put a link to that along with the program notes for this podcast. He has some really interesting programs, some that are titled such as DMT and the Mystic Toad,
01:24:39 ►
Sound Structures in Hyperspace, DMT vs. Salvia Divinorum,
01:24:44 ►
and Becoming Quetzalcoatl and the Pyramid of Fire, among others.
01:24:50 ►
Another fellow salonner, by the way, Rich M.,
01:24:53 ►
has a podcast that you can find at www.appnews.net.
01:25:02 ►
And that carries the interesting banner that reads,
01:25:06 ►
And in case you haven’t heard the word pro-noic before,
01:25:17 ►
I suspect it comes from pro-noia,
01:25:20 ►
which is the sneaking suspicion that others are conspiring to help you.
01:25:25 ►
So if you’re looking for a more positive slant on things,
01:25:28 ►
you might also want to check out the APP podcast.
01:25:31 ►
And on the good news front here in the States,
01:25:35 ►
the American College of Physicians has just come out in favor of the use of medical marijuana.
01:25:41 ►
And this is big news here because this organization has been around since 1915 and represents over
01:25:47 ►
124,000 doctors who treat adults.
01:25:51 ►
So finally there’s a well-respected group of physicians who are calling
01:25:55 ►
for the end of federal restrictions on the use of medical marijuana,
01:26:00 ►
which has now been approved in quite a few states.
01:26:03 ►
Well, that’s about it for today.
01:26:06 ►
Next week, I’m going to play another one of the plilogues that we recorded at Burning Man last year.
01:26:11 ►
And following that will be another talk from the Leary Archives.
01:26:15 ►
My intention is to try to mix it up a little bit with Dr. Leary, Terrence McKenna,
01:26:20 ►
and selections from other speakers and conferences that I hope you’re going to find interesting.
01:26:25 ►
And before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:26:29 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License.
01:26:35 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link
01:26:39 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:26:46 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:26:50 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:26:54 ►
Be well, my friends.