Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: The following quotes are by Terence McKenna.]
“One has, you know, a window of opportunity somewhere between zip and a hundred to solve, or understand, or penetrate, or appreciate, or come to terms with the conundrum of being, this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves, both individually and collectively.”
“The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people that there is a spiritual dimension, or a hidden dimension, or a transcendental dimension.”
“So the conclusion that I reach, visa vie the individual and civilization, is this: Culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It’s not my friend. It’s a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for the convenience of institutions.”
“Culturally defined reality is some kind of intelligence test, and those who are joining are failing the test.”
“The imagination is a dimension of non-local information.”
“And so, these are the things, the exploration of which, the singing about of which, makes us human beings. The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.”
“And what is shamanism but philosophy with a hands-on attitude. Philosophy not made around the camp fire, but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience. That’s how you figure out what the world is, not by bicycling around in the burbs, but by forcing extreme experience.”
“What they [psychedelics] cause is what I’m advocating, a fundamental revaluation of cultural values, because culture as we’re practicing it currently is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people, and animals, and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted this process to go in this direction.”
“What is happening, I think, it’s really bigger than psychedelics, it’s bigger than human evolution. We are not making the waves in this ocean. We are corks, riding the waves of the ocean. But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique moment in the history of the universe. A moment when the universe goes through some kind of self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion. That’s what’s happening.”
“This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.”
“The shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence… . Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously. That’s how he can do his magic.”
“There is no contradiction between technology and spirit. There is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience. There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspacial cyber culture and Paleolithic archaic culture. We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter. We have come to the end of our separateness.”
“There is a morphological enfoldment occurring on this planet. It is bringing forth some entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this.”
“The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention. It’s just not a coincidence that these plants carry this immense spiritual message. They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:25 ►
Well, I guess I’m a little later getting this podcast out than I thought I’d be,
00:00:29 ►
but the trip up to visit Bruce Dahmer was well worth a little wear and tear.
00:00:34 ►
And I’ll tell you more about my visit with Bruce in a future podcast when I
00:00:38 ►
play a part of one of the conversations we had. But since I want to get this podcast out today,
00:00:43 ►
I’m going to keep my own comments as
00:00:45 ►
brief as possible. Of course, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to take the time to thank
00:00:50 ►
Graham W., Andrew S., and Philip P., all of whom sent in donations in the past two weeks to
00:00:57 ►
help with the expenses in keeping these podcasts coming to many thousands of people each week.
00:01:03 ►
So, Graham, Andrew, and Philip, along with all of the other salonners around the world, Thank you. I’ve got some good news to report about the psilocybin research study that is being conducted at Harbor UCLA in Los Angeles by Dr. Charlie Grobe.
00:01:29 ►
As you may recall, a few weeks ago I mentioned that Dr. Grobe’s study had run out of funds, even though it was very near to completion.
00:01:37 ►
Well, Charlie stopped by for a visit the other morning, and he told me that thanks to several of our fellow salonners,
00:01:43 ►
it looks like the funding required to complete his Phase I study has now been found.
00:01:49 ►
So let’s all send some white light, love, and appreciation to all of our fellow salonners
00:01:54 ►
who each in their own way are helping to get the message about the importance
00:01:58 ►
of these sacred psychedelic medicines out to the world at large.
00:02:03 ►
And that includes all of our fellow salonners who are cutting CDs of these programs, Thank you. Find at dopethiend.co.uk. Somebody mentioned that one of my Terrence McKenna podcasts may have been a repeat.
00:02:28 ►
And that is certainly possible, although I don’t think I replayed the same talk more than once.
00:02:34 ►
What is the case, however, is that Terrence often included the same riff in several different talks.
00:02:40 ►
And usually in the Q&A sessions when somebody brought up something that wasn’t in his main presentation.
00:02:46 ►
So I’ve decided to do something that may upset some McKenna purists,
00:02:51 ►
but since we’ve already heard him talk about some topics, like the apes discovering mushrooms,
00:02:56 ►
on more than one occasion, I’ve decided to cut some of these really long recapitulations out
00:03:02 ►
in order to help focus on whatever new ideas he’s presenting.
00:03:06 ►
In other words, I’m going to do some Terrence McKenna cut-ups, as Burroughs would call them.
00:03:11 ►
But don’t worry, I’m not going to splice any talks together.
00:03:15 ►
All I’m planning on doing is to delete any stories that we’ve already heard more than once.
00:03:20 ►
And I’m sure there will be times when I don’t even do that if they seem important to the flow of the discussion.
00:03:26 ►
That said, the only thing I’ve cut out of the talk we’re about to hear
00:03:30 ►
is the Q&A at the end.
00:03:32 ►
You’ll just have to trust me, but there really wasn’t anything talked about
00:03:35 ►
that we haven’t heard in previous McKenna Talks.
00:03:38 ►
However, the main talk has a lot of new material in it.
00:03:41 ►
At least it covers some areas I hadn’t heard Terrence talk about
00:03:45 ►
in the same way before.
00:03:47 ►
And as you can see,
00:03:48 ►
I’ve titled this talk
00:03:49 ►
A Few Conclusions About Life.
00:03:52 ►
And I did that because
00:03:53 ►
that’s what Terrence seems to indicate
00:03:55 ►
the title should be
00:03:56 ►
after he’s been talking for a bit.
00:03:59 ►
But the title of the file I was given
00:04:01 ►
is In the Light of the Third Millennium.
00:04:04 ►
I’m not positive as to when this talk was given,
00:04:07 ►
but in it he says he’s 50 years old,
00:04:10 ►
which means that this must have taken place sometime in 1996.
00:04:13 ►
And it was given in Chicago at some kind of a New Age gathering,
00:04:17 ►
at which Terrence obviously felt somewhat out of place,
00:04:21 ►
because at one point he even described himself as
00:04:24 ►
the crazy uncle at a
00:04:25 ►
family gathering.
00:04:27 ►
In some ways, this sounds like his State of the Stone speeches that he began giving a
00:04:32 ►
few years later.
00:04:33 ►
So, if you can, why don’t you kick back, relax a little, and have a listen to a few conclusions
00:04:40 ►
about life that Terence McKenna had come to by the time he’d turned 50.
00:04:44 ►
conclusions about life that Terrence McKenna had come to by the time he’d turned 50.
00:04:53 ►
It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to see so many people here.
00:05:03 ►
Once again, this strange, magical moment when we come together again, or perhaps for the first time.
00:05:06 ►
You, having come from wherever you came from, me having come from the slopes of the world’s
00:05:14 ►
largest active volcano, actually, but via Manhattan and Austin last weekend.
00:05:23 ►
in Austin last weekend.
00:05:34 ►
And the purpose of these things is sort of to check the state of the condensing collective understanding about what is going on in the world or what might be going on in the world.
00:05:44 ►
This, it seems to me, is the subject worth talking about. going on in the world.
00:05:48 ►
This, it seems to me, is the subject worth talking about.
00:05:51 ►
What is going on?
00:05:55 ►
How can you find out what is going on?
00:06:00 ►
How do you know when you’ve found out what’s going on? Can one know what is going on?
00:06:04 ►
Can one know what is going on?
00:06:10 ►
And my involvement with this is no different from your own.
00:06:15 ►
A sincere desire to untangle these questions before the yawning grave closes over the enterprise
00:06:20 ►
and the entire thing becomes moot.
00:06:23 ►
One has, you know, a window of opportunity
00:06:26 ►
somewhere between zip and a hundred
00:06:30 ►
to solve or understand or penetrate or appreciate
00:06:37 ►
or come to terms with the conundrum of being,
00:06:42 ►
this amazing circumstance in which we find ourselves,
00:06:47 ►
both individually and collectively.
00:06:51 ►
Collectively, we find ourselves somewhere between the slime and the archangels,
00:06:59 ►
making our way perilously over the millennia up the evolutionary ladder
00:07:05 ►
toward
00:07:06 ►
the platonic
00:07:08 ►
light
00:07:08 ►
or something
00:07:09 ►
like that
00:07:10 ►
at least
00:07:11 ►
this is the
00:07:11 ►
myth
00:07:12 ►
of intellectuals
00:07:14 ►
of the
00:07:15 ►
high-tech
00:07:15 ►
industrial
00:07:16 ►
democracies
00:07:17 ►
evolved over
00:07:18 ►
the past
00:07:18 ►
150 years
00:07:20 ►
the triumphant
00:07:22 ►
ascent
00:07:23 ►
of organic
00:07:23 ►
life
00:07:24 ►
toward ever greater complexity.
00:07:30 ►
Individually, we each find ourselves born into a culture we have no share in designing,
00:07:41 ►
have no share in designing,
00:07:47 ►
but that we will be expected to inhabit, inculcate,
00:07:52 ►
and in fact pass on to our own progeny.
00:07:57 ►
And so this is our circumstance, I think,
00:07:59 ►
individually and collectively,
00:08:02 ►
thrown into being, Heidegger said.
00:08:05 ►
We didn’t ask for it.
00:08:07 ►
Here it is.
00:08:10 ►
What are we to make of it?
00:08:14 ►
And obviously, if you toured the halls of this exhibition,
00:08:19 ►
we are to make much of it and money of it.
00:08:24 ►
These two principles seem to emerge.
00:08:30 ►
That there is much to be said, many ways to slice the pie,
00:08:39 ►
and the market economy is a very fertile domain in which to thrash this all out.
00:08:46 ►
You can sell your answers, you can trade your answers. You can upgrade your answers. You can subscribe, serialize, retrofit, export, import, and reinvent answers.
00:08:57 ►
Ultimately, I wonder how satisfying all this is.
00:09:03 ►
And I’m always amused at my own position in this situation.
00:09:10 ►
It’s a great pain to the tolerance of the new age
00:09:15 ►
that they keep inviting me back.
00:09:18 ►
I’m sort of like the crazy uncle.
00:09:22 ►
You hope for good behavior, but you understand
00:09:27 ►
that it’s a gamble. Because I’m very ambiguous about much of the methods and ways by which our intellectual business, and pursue the matter of community and salvation.
00:09:49 ►
The intellectual tension that seems to work its way through this society almost like fat through meat
00:09:59 ►
is the tension between scientific reductionism and the deeply felt intuition of most people
00:10:08 ►
that there is a spiritual dimension,
00:10:13 ►
or a hidden dimension,
00:10:15 ►
or a transcendental dimension.
00:10:18 ►
And of course, downloaded into language,
00:10:22 ►
it becomes easily ridiculed. And downloaded into tasteless language, it becomes easily ridiculed.
00:10:25 ►
And downloaded into tasteless language, it should be ridiculed.
00:10:31 ►
So when we try to formulate our spiritual intuitions,
00:10:38 ►
they are inevitably, I think, tainted by what we bring to it.
00:10:43 ►
And I was struck as I moved through the hall,
00:10:46 ►
it was almost like an exhibition of language types
00:10:50 ►
as much as an exhibition of products or possibilities.
00:10:56 ►
What were being sold were closed systems of jargon,
00:11:02 ►
which once opted into tended to produce answers
00:11:06 ►
in a short
00:11:07 ►
loop of
00:11:08 ►
possibilities
00:11:09 ►
all
00:11:11 ►
closed
00:11:13 ►
systems
00:11:14 ►
of thought
00:11:16 ►
are like
00:11:17 ►
this
00:11:17 ►
and to
00:11:19 ►
my mind
00:11:19 ►
that the
00:11:20 ►
what seems
00:11:21 ►
to me
00:11:21 ►
very elderly
00:11:22 ►
age of
00:11:23 ►
50
00:11:23 ►
and I know
00:11:24 ►
to some people in the room it does seem very elderly,
00:11:27 ►
and to others I seem a pup.
00:11:30 ►
But anyway, from this vantage point,
00:11:33 ►
it seems to me that all of these ideologies are cartoon-like.
00:11:40 ►
They flatten, they simplify, they betray.
00:11:45 ►
They amuse, which is also cartoon-like.
00:11:49 ►
And in amusing, I think that this is where their health-fulfilling and solitary worth lies.
00:11:58 ►
They are intended to provoke a small smile.
00:12:02 ►
to provoke a small smile.
00:12:09 ►
That smile will lift you a little further up the ladder,
00:12:13 ►
the rungs of the ladder of being.
00:12:16 ►
So I thought today what I would talk about is some of the conclusions that I’ve come to
00:12:20 ►
out of a life of psychedelic voyaging,
00:12:29 ►
to out of a life of psychedelic voyaging, living inside this insanely contradictory society, and going through the standard moves, marriage, divorce, children, career, controversy, allies, enemies, attorneys, counselors, consultants, accountants, so forth and so on.
00:12:53 ►
The same world you live in.
00:12:56 ►
What have I…
00:12:58 ►
Well, the first thing I concluded was to try and flee it,
00:13:01 ►
which I did a pretty good job of by going to
00:13:05 ►
Hawaii
00:13:05 ►
which believe
00:13:06 ►
me is a
00:13:07 ►
private Idaho
00:13:08 ►
but the
00:13:14 ►
conclusions that
00:13:15 ►
I’ve reached
00:13:15 ►
are not
00:13:16 ►
politically
00:13:17 ►
correct
00:13:18 ►
anywhere
00:13:19 ►
and so
00:13:21 ►
I’m very
00:13:22 ►
happy to
00:13:23 ►
offend
00:13:23 ►
everyone
00:13:24 ►
because it doesn’t seem to be what I did best
00:13:28 ►
and there’s no sign of mellowing at this point
00:13:31 ►
so the conclusion that I reach
00:13:36 ►
vis-a-vis the individual and civilization is this
00:13:41 ►
culture is not our friend
00:13:44 ►
culture is not our friend. Culture is not your friend. It’s not my friend.
00:13:51 ►
It’s a very uncomfortable set of accommodations that have been hammered out over time for
00:13:59 ►
the convenience of institutions. A young man gets his first dose of the news that culture
00:14:09 ►
is not his friend when told that he’s going to be given an air ticket and some training
00:14:18 ►
and sent to an exotic country to kill its inhabitants in the name of some political ideal. You have to be fairly dense
00:14:27 ►
not to get the message at that point that culture is not your friend. It is using you for its
00:14:33 ►
purposes. You would never dream of doing what it now proposes as the only conceivably right and
00:14:41 ►
righteous course of action. Well, that’s, you know, a black and white,
00:14:46 ►
a stark and enormous example of what I’m talking about.
00:14:51 ►
But I think every day, in thousands of ways,
00:14:54 ►
we betray our impulses toward wholeness,
00:14:58 ►
toward community, toward freedom,
00:15:01 ►
toward the spirit,
00:15:02 ►
by genuflecting two cultural values that are squirrely or toxic or simply wrong-headed or obsolete.
00:15:14 ►
Culture is not your friend. It’s an illusion. What kind of an illusion is it?
00:15:24 ►
And this sort of leads on to the other thing I’ve come to. what kind of an illusion is it?
00:15:28 ►
And this sort of leads on to the other thing I’ve come to.
00:15:35 ►
It’s a childish illusion is the kind of illusion it is.
00:15:39 ►
Recently I had a physical examination with my doctor
00:15:43 ►
and after it was all over he leaned back in his chair and he said,
00:15:47 ►
well, you know, most people your age in the 19th century were dead.
00:15:54 ►
Yes, quite true.
00:15:57 ►
People live a great deal longer in the 20th century.
00:16:01 ►
And consequently, I think we,
00:16:08 ►
part of what drives alienation is it’s like being,
00:16:11 ►
culture is like being taken in a crap game.
00:16:15 ►
If you play long enough,
00:16:16 ►
you will figure out that you’re being screwed.
00:16:20 ►
And of course, if you die shortly into the game,
00:16:24 ►
it never enters your mind
00:16:25 ►
we are all
00:16:26 ►
some of you may have seen the little saying
00:16:29 ►
that hangs behind bars in Minnesota
00:16:32 ►
we get too soon old and too late smart
00:16:36 ►
well some of us are getting smart earlier and earlier
00:16:41 ►
and what is seen through to them
00:16:44 ►
is the fact that culture victimizes,
00:16:48 ►
ideology victimizes.
00:16:51 ►
These things are all con games.
00:16:55 ►
Reality, culturally defined reality,
00:16:57 ►
is some kind of an intelligence test.
00:17:01 ►
And those who are joining are failing the test.
00:17:06 ►
This is very clear to me looking at, well, phenomena like alien abduction
00:17:15 ►
and the great enthusiasm for conspiracy theory
00:17:22 ►
that now seems to attend so much modern thinking.
00:17:26 ►
Again, these are epistemological cartoons
00:17:30 ►
where low production values
00:17:33 ►
made acceptable through tolerance of TV
00:17:36 ►
is allowing people to accept
00:17:39 ►
material into their own story
00:17:43 ►
which should actually end up on the cutting room floor.
00:17:51 ►
Everything, nothing is what it appears to be.
00:17:56 ►
Surely you’ve noticed that.
00:17:58 ►
That’s A, right?
00:18:00 ►
A is nothing is what it appears to be.
00:18:04 ►
Well, therefore, complex, difficult, tricky, and mercurial things
00:18:09 ►
are even less likely to be what they claim to be than other forms of reality.
00:18:16 ►
So, confronted with the endless whispered rumors and doctored photographs
00:18:24 ►
and breathless testimony from the denizens of trailer courts
00:18:29 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:18:31 ►
What is one to make of all that?
00:18:35 ►
Well, I think what you’re…
00:18:37 ►
The message is return to basics.
00:18:41 ►
The information matrix has become compromised.
00:18:46 ►
The data stream is now suspect.
00:18:50 ►
Return to first principles.
00:18:52 ►
What are first principles?
00:18:55 ►
That’s what the 20th century is trying to figure out.
00:18:58 ►
Yes, what are first principles?
00:19:01 ►
I’d like to suggest to you that a place to begin is the body
00:19:05 ►
you have one
00:19:08 ►
it isn’t ideologically defined
00:19:12 ►
it can be ideologically defined
00:19:15 ►
you know in Catholic school the nuns used to tell us
00:19:18 ►
we should dress in darkness
00:19:20 ►
so we wouldn’t be an occasion of sin to ourselves
00:19:24 ►
that’s an example of the body becoming
00:19:27 ►
ideologically defined. But it precedes culture. Culture has to deal with the fact that your eyes
00:19:39 ►
are on the front of your face and your anal pore is located near your genitals. Culture would probably rather have it some other way.
00:19:48 ►
It would be so convenient.
00:19:50 ►
But, hey, it’s a given.
00:19:53 ►
I’m so happy our rumps don’t swell in estrus the way some of the other primates do.
00:20:01 ►
Can you imagine Giorgio Armani trying to create a line of fashion that comes
00:20:08 ►
to term with that? But I digress. So the body, the body is this amazing thing
00:20:26 ►
which everyone wants to give away
00:20:28 ►
throw away
00:20:29 ►
get away from
00:20:30 ►
called the felt moment of immediate experience
00:20:35 ►
the felt moment of immediate experience
00:20:38 ►
this is you
00:20:40 ►
now
00:20:41 ►
here
00:20:42 ►
in your body
00:20:44 ►
with the cheeseburger slowly dissolving,
00:20:47 ►
the cup of coffee, the caffeine, the bladder, all of these things,
00:20:54 ►
collisions, concrescences, the crossing of trajectories of mental process, digestive process,
00:21:02 ►
metabolism, intent, income, emotional state, the felt presence
00:21:07 ►
of immediate experience lodged in the body-mind system in the moment.
00:21:14 ►
That’s who you are.
00:21:17 ►
That’s what they can’t take away from you, whether they drag you away to prison, beat
00:21:22 ►
you, drug you, whatever they do to you, you will still have some kind of felt presence of experience
00:21:27 ►
until you drift into the darkness of non-entity.
00:21:32 ►
So there then one can begin to build outward from that core and say, aha, so the stuff of understanding is not information passed by culturally validated coding systems
00:21:50 ►
among the primates at high chatter rate.
00:21:54 ►
In other words, the truth is not in the public space or the historical space.
00:21:59 ►
The truth is in the felt space of the body in the moment.
00:22:07 ►
Well, so some great religions have gotten this far,
00:22:11 ►
and they, whatever they are, and there are many of them,
00:22:15 ►
come at last to advocate something called meditation,
00:22:19 ►
which has many guises and travels under many names and methods,
00:22:24 ►
but what it primarily is is attention to attention.
00:22:30 ►
And what it primarily reveals in the ordinary metabolism is, frankly, bloody little.
00:22:42 ►
Good meditators will tell you how incredibly boring it is
00:22:46 ►
and the rhetoric
00:22:47 ►
of the religions
00:22:48 ►
that have made
00:22:49 ►
meditation
00:22:50 ►
the centerpiece
00:22:51 ►
of their ontology
00:22:52 ►
is a rhetoric
00:22:53 ►
of nihilism
00:22:55 ►
I mean this is
00:22:56 ►
you know
00:22:56 ►
oh I should have said
00:22:57 ►
nihilism
00:22:58 ►
because this is
00:22:59 ►
sort of
00:22:59 ►
the dirty
00:23:00 ►
little secret
00:23:01 ►
of Buddhist ontology
00:23:03 ►
it isn’t
00:23:04 ►
the cheerful new Buddhism being exported from California.
00:23:08 ►
It’s the old-style Nagarjunian Buddhism that says, you know,
00:23:14 ►
it is an emptiness within an emptiness after an emptiness before an emptiness.
00:23:20 ►
This is Nagarjuna on the nature of Bodhimine.
00:23:24 ►
This is Nagarjuna on the nature of bodhimaya.
00:23:35 ►
But, interestingly, meditation, pursued not for years or lifetimes,
00:23:40 ►
but pursued as a cultural project over centuries,
00:23:46 ►
leads not to a clarifying of this philosophical emptiness,
00:23:53 ►
but to a discovery that the depths of nihilism, the depths of non-entity,
00:23:56 ►
are in fact multifarious in their aspects,
00:24:07 ►
not a plenum,
00:24:08 ►
is what I’m grasping for,
00:24:10 ►
not a plenum,
00:24:11 ►
not an undivided platonic thing,
00:24:13 ►
but an environment of spirit,
00:24:17 ►
meaning,
00:24:18 ►
power,
00:24:19 ►
intentionality,
00:24:20 ►
entities,
00:24:21 ►
intelligences,
00:24:22 ►
levels,
00:24:23 ►
swarming,
00:24:24 ►
swarming, swarming in the imagination.
00:24:28 ►
And these things can be accessed through drugs, through extraordinary physical practices or ordeals,
00:24:38 ►
through various kinds of driving of physiological systems like sonic driving,
00:24:45 ►
through drumming or physiological driving through repeated chanting.
00:24:49 ►
And then the ordinary boundaries of culture and of body
00:24:54 ►
dissolve into a much larger realm, the imagination.
00:25:01 ►
And it is this imagination that I think is the place to put our attention.
00:25:08 ►
The imagination is a dimension of non-local information. that in some kind of a mathematical super space,
00:25:33 ►
all particles in the universe maintain a kind of super state of connectivity called Bell’s non-local connectivity.
00:25:38 ►
What this means to me is that the imagination is literally another dimension,
00:25:49 ►
a dimension that is non-local.
00:25:53 ►
Now, the mind, the animal mind, the human mind, the paleolithic mind,
00:25:59 ►
evolved as a master coordinator of sensory data
00:26:06 ►
coming into the body from the senses
00:26:10 ►
about the level of threat and danger in immediate three-dimensional space.
00:26:16 ►
That’s the mind’s evolutionary function,
00:26:18 ►
to preserve the body, to preserve the genetic stream of unfolding
00:26:24 ►
by detecting and avoiding threat.
00:26:27 ►
And so our minds have evolved
00:26:30 ►
in the same way that water takes the shape of its container.
00:26:35 ►
Our minds have evolved to take the shape
00:26:38 ►
of three-dimensional space and time
00:26:41 ►
under cultural and environmental pressure.
00:26:48 ►
Well, we’ve paid a huge price for this.
00:26:51 ►
It probably also has ensured
00:26:53 ►
that we’re here this afternoon
00:26:55 ►
to discuss it.
00:26:58 ►
But it’s been a long time
00:27:00 ►
since the instantaneous reflex
00:27:02 ►
to bash the brains out
00:27:04 ►
of anything moving near you that’s unfamiliar
00:27:07 ►
has served us well.
00:27:11 ►
You know, I mean, that got old 12,000 years ago.
00:27:14 ►
The entire enterprise of civilization has been about something else.
00:27:21 ►
The felt presence nearby, ineffable, unsayable,
00:27:26 ►
but uncannily penetrating of beauty, of mathematical connectivity,
00:27:35 ►
of supernatural power.
00:27:40 ►
And so these are the things, the exploration of which,
00:27:44 ►
the singing about of which, make us human beings.
00:27:49 ►
The exploration of the universe of the unseen is the business of human beings.
00:27:56 ►
It’s why we are the way we are.
00:27:58 ►
It’s why we will be the way we will be.
00:28:02 ►
It’s how we got where we are.
00:28:05 ►
How is it done?
00:28:06 ►
It’s done by dissolving ordinary cultural boundaries,
00:28:12 ►
by perturbing consciousness,
00:28:15 ►
and by paying careful attention to the results
00:28:19 ►
and attempting to build models therefrom.
00:28:24 ►
Now, in the last few thousand years in the West,
00:28:29 ►
this enterprise has been tamed by priestcraft,
00:28:33 ►
which combines the enterprise with judicious politicking
00:28:37 ►
and a certain amount of ass-licking.
00:28:40 ►
Before that, the enterprise was untainted by such secular concerns
00:28:47 ►
it was full force forward
00:28:51 ►
into the unknown
00:28:52 ►
and this is the great era of shamanism
00:28:55 ►
and what is shamanism
00:28:58 ►
but philosophy with a hands-on attitude
00:29:02 ►
philosophy not made around the campfire,
00:29:05 ►
but philosophy based on the acquisition of extreme experience.
00:29:12 ►
That’s how you figure out what the world is,
00:29:15 ►
not by bicycling around in the burbs,
00:29:18 ►
but by forcing extreme experience.
00:29:23 ►
The reason people refer to
00:29:25 ►
psychedelic endeavors
00:29:28 ►
with the vocabulary of travel,
00:29:31 ►
taking a trip, and so on,
00:29:33 ►
is because that is an extreme endeavor.
00:29:38 ►
It’s the same endeavor.
00:29:39 ►
It’s the leaving behind of the values
00:29:41 ►
of your own culture.
00:29:43 ►
Take nothing but a change of clothes,
00:29:46 ►
fly to Benares,
00:29:49 ►
and take up residence at Dasasamid Ghat
00:29:52 ►
among the Charas Sadhus,
00:29:54 ►
and I guarantee you,
00:29:56 ►
whether you resort to psychedelics or not,
00:29:59 ►
you will experience boundary dissolution,
00:30:02 ►
a reorienting of categories,
00:30:07 ►
and a reframing of your perspective on your life and your being. So extreme experience is the necessary key. This is true in all
00:30:16 ►
forms of endeavor. I mean, if you want to understand the atom, you have to smash it.
00:30:23 ►
You know, sitting around looking at it, it will never
00:30:26 ►
yield its secrets. You have to smash that sucker to bits and then collect the pieces
00:30:32 ►
and then examine exactly how it all came apart. In the same way, and without going too far
00:30:41 ►
afield for the pun, we must smash ordinary consciousness.
00:30:46 ►
Get smashed.
00:30:47 ►
And then look at the pieces flying in all directions
00:30:51 ►
and say, gee, I didn’t know minds could do that.
00:30:55 ►
Well, they can’t in the workaday rote
00:30:59 ►
of living inside the little boxes of positivism
00:31:03 ►
and constipated behaviorism and all the rest of it.
00:31:10 ►
So, extreme experiences.
00:31:13 ►
But, you know, you don’t want these experiences to be too extreme,
00:31:17 ►
or you will sever the connectivity among the various subsystems,
00:31:22 ►
and then we’ll have to bury you.
00:31:24 ►
And this is always a huge strain on those left behind.
00:31:29 ►
So there is a practical element here, which is,
00:31:35 ►
okay, so we want to have extreme experiences,
00:31:37 ►
but we don’t want to have such extreme experiences that we don’t live to tell the tale.
00:31:42 ►
We want control to some degree over these experiences.
00:31:48 ►
Well, this is where the incredible thoroughness of our human ancestors comes to our aid.
00:31:58 ►
Throughout time and space on this planet,
00:32:01 ►
our remote, the tribal societies that preceded us
00:32:05 ►
made it their business
00:32:06 ►
to discover
00:32:07 ►
catalog
00:32:08 ►
and learn to
00:32:10 ►
manipulate
00:32:11 ►
plants
00:32:13 ►
in the environment
00:32:14 ►
as the carriers
00:32:16 ►
as the sources
00:32:17 ►
of chemical compounds
00:32:19 ►
in the environment
00:32:21 ►
which would work
00:32:22 ►
extraordinary transformations
00:32:24 ►
on consciousness
00:32:25 ►
without physical harm, without physiological damage to the organism.
00:32:33 ►
And of all the many techniques, ordeal, abandonment in the wilderness,
00:32:40 ►
sexual abstinence, hanging by your pectoral muscles from hooks in the sun for days,
00:32:48 ►
all of these sorts of things, of all of these methods,
00:32:51 ►
psychedelic plants and their judicious use is arguably the most effective,
00:32:59 ►
the, now get that, the most effective and the least invasive and the most likely to produce negative long-term consequences.
00:33:12 ►
Well, this was not news or even controversy anywhere in the world
00:33:17 ►
until within the confines of the 20th century, basically.
00:33:23 ►
within the confines of the 20th century, basically,
00:33:26 ►
the presence of these substances and plants began to alarm the order-keeping forces
00:33:30 ►
of the high-tech industrial democracies.
00:33:34 ►
An issue separate from the issue of stimulants and depressants,
00:33:39 ►
it’s an issue separate from the issue of addiction and dependency.
00:33:44 ►
These things are not stimulants or depressants,
00:33:46 ►
and they do not cause addiction or dependency.
00:33:51 ►
What they cause is what I’m advocating,
00:33:54 ►
a fundamental revaluation of cultural values.
00:33:59 ►
Because culture, as we’re practicing it currently,
00:34:03 ►
is causing a lot of pain to a lot of people and
00:34:12 ►
animals and ecosystems, none of whom were ever allowed to vote on whether they wanted
00:34:19 ►
this process to go in this direction. We do not feel what we are doing.
00:34:26 ►
Remember I spoke about the primacy of the felt moment of experience.
00:34:30 ►
If we could feel what we are doing, we would stop doing it.
00:34:35 ►
But between us and the consequences of our action,
00:34:39 ►
there are endless veils of political rhetoric,
00:34:54 ►
Endless veils of political rhetoric, stultification, denial, sedation, intoxication, ideological delusion.
00:35:06 ►
Now, normally, I think a rap like this tends to, if you have to pigeonhole it, to come down on the side of pessimism.
00:35:10 ►
But I am not pessimistic. I see everything as though it were integrated and connected,
00:35:16 ►
and there is an unfolding and a plottedness about our situation.
00:35:21 ►
about our situation.
00:35:23 ►
It’s not for nothing that at the very pinnacle
00:35:26 ►
of the age of faith in the machine
00:35:30 ►
and science and male dominance
00:35:33 ►
and projection of strategic weaponry
00:35:35 ►
and so forth and so on,
00:35:37 ►
that there should come
00:35:38 ►
from the gentler societies of the world,
00:35:42 ►
from the rainforests and high deserts of the world, the news of
00:35:47 ►
these plants. You know, the Western mind, the cataloging mind, the Cartesian mind in
00:35:53 ►
its frenzy to locate, list, isolate, and define everything, carried these plants and substances
00:36:00 ►
over the past 150 years into the confines of our society, and they are much
00:36:07 ►
like Trojan horses, left there by the bedraggled, beat-down, disenfranchised, third-world shamanic
00:36:16 ►
people, to be found by the white-coated priests and priestesses of science and to be brought back into the laboratory
00:36:25 ►
to be picked apart for their efficacy
00:36:28 ►
in treating addiction or overcoming neurotic behavior
00:36:33 ►
or something like that.
00:36:36 ►
But of course, the neurotic behavior
00:36:40 ►
that they impact upon
00:36:43 ►
is neurotic behavior so wide, so deep, so revered that
00:36:48 ►
it is in fact cultural values themselves. You see, what is happening, I think, is it’s
00:37:00 ►
really bigger than psychedelics. It’s bigger than human evolution.
00:37:05 ►
We are not making the waves in this ocean.
00:37:10 ►
We are our corks riding the waves of the ocean.
00:37:16 ►
But we are privileged by perhaps chance alone
00:37:23 ►
to occupy a unique moment
00:37:26 ►
in the history of the universe.
00:37:29 ►
A moment when the universe
00:37:30 ►
goes through some kind of
00:37:33 ►
self-transforming,
00:37:37 ►
evolutionary,
00:37:39 ►
inflationary expansion.
00:37:42 ►
That’s what’s happening.
00:37:43 ►
I mean, it’s been happening for a long time. It depends
00:37:46 ►
on where you pull back to, to get your perspective. One could say, looking at the universe in
00:37:53 ►
general, that this planet has been favored from the very beginning. That by a billion
00:37:59 ►
years ago, the discerning could tell that this was a planet going places.
00:38:07 ►
But certainly, by 500 million years ago,
00:38:12 ►
it was clear that this was a planet going places.
00:38:17 ►
One complex animal life form gave way to another.
00:38:23 ►
Catastrophes, yes, but never catastrophes so total that the enterprise was wiped out.
00:38:29 ►
We know that 65 million years ago, a catastrophe, an asteroid, a planetesimal impact occurred
00:38:36 ►
on this planet.
00:38:37 ►
Nothing larger than a chicken walked away from that on this planet.
00:38:43 ►
A bad day, you say.
00:38:47 ►
But were it not for that bad day,
00:38:51 ►
we would still be the egg-eating shrews
00:38:55 ►
at the edge of the reptilian garden party.
00:39:00 ►
These marvelous flowering plants,
00:39:03 ►
chock full of psychedelic alkaloids, none of them would have existed.
00:39:08 ►
The flowering plants and the higher mammals all arose in the wake of this planet-scouring catastrophe.
00:39:16 ►
So, you see, there is built in to the larger systems of nature an enormous, what my mentor Eric Jansch used to call,
00:39:28 ►
metastability.
00:39:30 ►
They are metastable.
00:39:32 ►
They are not easily deflected.
00:39:34 ►
An event as large as a planetesimal impact
00:39:37 ►
basically only resets the evolutionary clock
00:39:41 ►
by a few million years,
00:39:42 ►
and then almost over-leaping itself to make up for lost time,
00:39:48 ►
out of all of that catastrophe come primates,
00:39:53 ►
animals of such complexity and coordinated sensoria
00:39:56 ►
that they are wonders to behold.
00:40:00 ►
And from them, and quickly,
00:40:02 ►
then come abilities never before seen in the world of organic organization.
00:40:09 ►
Freely commandable languages, spoken languages, symbolic activity for the first time.
00:40:17 ►
Well, at that point, you know, even the academics believe human language is less than 40,000 years old. That means it’s as artificial as the dirigible or the hypodermic needle.
00:40:31 ►
It’s an invention of some sort within the confines of human history
00:40:35 ►
or at the beginning of human history.
00:40:37 ►
Recall in South Africa we have fire pits and stone tools 2 million years old.
00:40:43 ►
Those are not Homo sapien tools, but they’re the tools of Homo habilis,
00:40:47 ►
the preceding ancestor in the human line.
00:40:53 ►
My point is, we are caught up in a process of unfolding complexification
00:41:01 ►
that has now lodged in our species.
00:41:09 ►
We are its source at this point. At one point, its source was the geology of the planet. At a later point, closer to us in time, its source
00:41:15 ►
was all biological diversity. But as the novelty has increased, the domain of its expression has narrowed, and it is now confined largely to the human species.
00:41:28 ►
Oh yes, the rest of nature continues the slow unfolding of continental drift
00:41:34 ►
and gene mutation and transfer and so forth.
00:41:38 ►
But these things have now receded into the background
00:41:41 ►
as the human adventure takes center stage. So it’s almost as though,
00:41:49 ►
in fact, this is what I believe, that we are not pushed from behind by the causal unfolding
00:41:57 ►
of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort
00:42:07 ►
which lies ahead of us in time.
00:42:11 ►
And so we are not, as it were, following what the statisticians call
00:42:15 ►
a random walk across the temporal landscape.
00:42:19 ►
In fact, the temporal landscape is a canyon with incredibly steep walls
00:42:25 ►
In fact, the temporal landscape is a canyon with incredibly steep walls, and we are only free to move within very narrow confines
00:42:30 ►
as the grip, almost the morphogenetic intensity of the attractor at the end of time
00:42:38 ►
increases its penetration and its hold over our imaginations,
00:42:50 ►
its penetration and its hold over our imaginations, our city plans, our technologies, our religious ontologies,
00:42:53 ►
our medical strategies, so forth and so on.
00:42:57 ►
Something is revealing itself to us through us.
00:43:08 ►
And as we get closer, the chatter of noise and static being given off of this thing increases exponentially because, you know, McLuhan said once, he said,
00:43:11 ►
we move into the future like a person driving who uses only the rear-view mirror.
00:43:18 ►
That’s how we understand the future, by driving in the rear view mirror. All of our models of what lies ahead are based on
00:43:28 ►
inverted models of the past. And the one thing you can be certain of is that won’t do it. Because we
00:43:36 ►
can see a person standing in 1900 using that method would have been wrong about the late 1990s. A person standing in 1600 using that method
00:43:47 ►
would have been wrong about the late 1900s,
00:43:50 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:43:51 ►
You cannot extrapolate from the past into the future
00:43:56 ►
because the real nature of the future is its deng’ansish,
00:44:00 ►
the thing in itself, and that’s what it’s trying to reveal.
00:44:10 ►
And so the whisperings that reach the ears of the channelers,
00:44:18 ►
the visions that come through the hands of painters, sculptors, choreographers, musicians,
00:44:30 ►
all of the felt presence of the invisible world is now incredibly pregnant with this message of transformation.
00:44:41 ►
And the challenge for each of us is to streamline our language sufficiently that we may mirror this thing in a way that is both true to it and rationally apprehendable to ourselves.
00:44:49 ►
And this is a fractal boundary.
00:44:51 ►
This is a test of intelligence
00:44:54 ►
because the thing in itself cannot be rationally beheld.
00:44:59 ►
You know, the enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane once said,
00:45:03 ►
he said, the world is not only stranger than we suppose,
00:45:08 ►
it’s stranger than we can suppose.
00:45:12 ►
That to me is a dizzying thought and obviously true.
00:45:17 ►
So what we want is a model true to the stranger than we can suppose,
00:45:23 ►
true to the stranger than we can suppose,
00:45:25 ►
but not so alien that there is no emotional or spiritual support in it
00:45:30 ►
for the enterprise of being human.
00:45:33 ►
How do we do that?
00:45:34 ►
How do we inculcate the unspeakable mystery
00:45:38 ►
of the transcendental object at the end of time
00:45:41 ►
with the mundane nexus of real occasions that happens to be our own existence?
00:45:50 ►
To my mind, the answer is it lies in the ability to assimilate paradox.
00:45:56 ►
And that means you have to transcend the idea of a closed logical system.
00:46:02 ►
You have to live with the idea that there is no intellectual closure.
00:46:09 ►
This is, in fact, the door marked freedom, but you’ve been taught that it’s the door
00:46:15 ►
marked madness, to live in the light of paradox. Things cannot be, we are taught, both A and B simultaneously.
00:46:29 ►
This is Aristotelian logic.
00:46:31 ►
A is A.
00:46:32 ►
This is as old as thought in the West.
00:46:35 ►
But it has to be overcome.
00:46:37 ►
And in the felt presence of the moment of immediate experience, it is overcome.
00:46:44 ►
The mystery does not lie far.
00:46:47 ►
It lies in the immediate moment, in the act, the fact of being.
00:46:52 ►
The only time we really confront this is in the psychedelic experience
00:46:58 ►
or other moments of extreme epiphany.
00:47:02 ►
other moments of extreme epiphany.
00:47:12 ►
The model that I have come to wrap around all of this,
00:47:14 ►
because I think it’s simple and straightforward and it leaves plenty of room for people to add their own filigree,
00:47:19 ►
is a dimensional model.
00:47:24 ►
God forbid a mathematical model. But forbid, a mathematical model.
00:47:27 ►
But it works something like this.
00:47:29 ►
I mentioned earlier that our senses have evolved
00:47:33 ►
as a threat detection device
00:47:35 ►
and have sort of crunched us down
00:47:38 ►
into three-dimensional space.
00:47:40 ►
The shaman, wherever and whenever
00:47:44 ►
he or she does their shamanizing,
00:47:48 ►
the shaman is a person who is able to transcend the dimensional confines of cultural existence.
00:47:58 ►
They know more than the people they serve.
00:48:03 ►
The people they serve are like children within the game
00:48:07 ►
of culture. Only the shaman knows that culture is a game. Everyone else takes it seriously.
00:48:13 ►
That’s how he can do his magic. I was recently in Australia, and of course, Aboriginal culture
00:48:22 ►
and shamanism is a topic of great interest down there and i learned maybe
00:48:27 ►
some of you already knew this that the term for shaman among english-speaking aboriginals of whom
00:48:34 ►
there are many some who have spoken it for several hundred years uh or over a hundred years anyway
00:48:40 ►
the term for shaman is simply clever fella and if someone says i am a clever fella
00:48:47 ►
they are making a professional claim of great weight but i love that because it’s it says it all
00:48:56 ►
you know a clever fella when i was in the amazon in my exploring days. We would go up these rivers to these bare-ass folks and spend time with them.
00:49:08 ►
And the people would want to touch the outboard motors
00:49:12 ►
and look at your camera equipment and the butterfly nets
00:49:16 ►
and gather around, open-faced, totally innocent.
00:49:20 ►
You could always tell the showman.
00:49:22 ►
Because, first of all, he usually didn’t come out to see who was there,
00:49:26 ►
even though no one ever came.
00:49:27 ►
Even though these people had visitors once every six months,
00:49:30 ►
the guy who wouldn’t come out of his hut for the only event in six months
00:49:34 ►
was inevitably the shaman.
00:49:35 ►
And when you met him, he wasn’t interested in your Velcro
00:49:40 ►
or your break-apart glow-in-the-dark little trinkets
00:49:45 ►
or any of the rest of it.
00:49:47 ►
It is looking straight at you through the eyes outside the culture
00:49:53 ►
saying, what kind of a person are you?
00:49:55 ►
Are you a fool or are you a clever fellow?
00:49:59 ►
What is your measure?
00:50:01 ►
How much of the situation do you understand?
00:50:01 ►
your measure.
00:50:04 ►
How much of the situation do you understand?
00:50:09 ►
How many levels are you simultaneously aware of at this moment?
00:50:12 ►
And looking into the eyes of that sort of person,
00:50:15 ►
you either grow or turn away.
00:50:17 ►
You have not much choice.
00:50:21 ►
So what’s happening with the shaman, I think,
00:50:23 ►
is he’s a hands-on mathematician,
00:50:27 ►
a hands-on non-Euclidean geometer.pace. And in it, the adumbrations of the
00:50:52 ►
trees of possibility can be followed. One can see who stole the eggs. One can see who cuckolded
00:51:01 ►
the chief’s nephew. One can see who will die and who will live.
00:51:06 ►
One can see how the weather is going to change,
00:51:09 ►
and one can know where the game went.
00:51:13 ►
And this is not magic, not in that world.
00:51:16 ►
It’s impossible in three-dimensional space and time.
00:51:20 ►
But in fourth-dimensional space and time, it not only is possible,
00:51:23 ►
it’s inevitable and unavoidable.
00:51:25 ►
It’s a different kind of way of being with the information.
00:51:32 ►
And, you know, I’m sure many of you have your own psychedelic epiphanies
00:51:38 ►
that are as gripping and as fascinating as anything that has happened to me.
00:51:43 ►
Epiphanies that show that under certain circumstances,
00:51:48 ►
the ordinary boundaries of information, space, time, limitation are dissolved.
00:51:55 ►
And it may happen only for a moment.
00:51:57 ►
It may involve a curing with a laying on of hands.
00:52:00 ►
It may involve a sudden insight into a set of complex relationships. It may
00:52:07 ►
involve a sudden unexpected certitude about how a certain event went down that when checked
00:52:15 ►
upon turns out to be true. What we know about the world is defined by our culture.
00:52:26 ►
And the way culture does this is through language.
00:52:31 ►
You can’t know or perceive or appreciate
00:52:37 ►
what cannot be brought in to the domain of language.
00:52:44 ►
You can’t publicly know or appreciate these things.
00:52:47 ►
You can feel them as the rich, contextual embeddedness of your own being,
00:52:57 ►
but you can’t communicate them.
00:53:00 ►
Sometimes when I read Marcel Proust, I come upon passages where the conveyance of the information,
00:53:08 ►
of the emotion, is so exquisitely subtle that I have the feeling, I know what he means.
00:53:18 ►
I felt this, but I never dreamed I would ever see it in print or have a thought about it that I could share with anyone else
00:53:27 ►
because it is so subtle.
00:53:31 ►
So the challenge to all of us, I think,
00:53:35 ►
is not this one-dimensional chasing after of answers.
00:53:42 ►
This is a fool’s game, but an actual stepping back to gain perspective
00:53:50 ►
and to realize, you know, salvation is always available. It’s in the moment. It’s an act
00:53:57 ►
of understanding. It doesn’t come down through a lineage. It doesn’t come through a substance, an empowerment,
00:54:10 ►
a word. It comes through understanding. Salvation is an act of rational apprehension of some sort. And, you know, I really believe
00:54:27 ►
that we are now in a relationship
00:54:30 ►
to the transcendental object at the end of time
00:54:33 ►
such that the revelations are daily.
00:54:38 ►
The unfoldment, the connectivity,
00:54:41 ►
we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
00:54:45 ►
I mean, I’ve had long practice at this.
00:54:47 ►
I’ve been thinking like this since 1968,
00:54:51 ►
talking about it like this since 1980,
00:54:55 ►
but I never knew how it would come or what it would be.
00:55:00 ►
In the last few years, with the rise of a technological, a cultural artifact like the Internet,
00:55:08 ►
I now see how it will make its way into the world.
00:55:14 ►
We are building the nervous system of the human over-soul.
00:55:29 ►
system of the human over soul. We are individual units operating under social rules that are pushing us ever closer toward dissolving our societies, societies, human groups run by
00:55:38 ►
rules, into telepathic collectivities of some sort. The chaos of the internet is chaos only to the constipated order freaks
00:55:50 ►
of the Hobbesian sociological machine.
00:55:53 ►
It makes them uncomfortable because they can’t find the head,
00:55:57 ►
they can’t find the hierarchy.
00:55:59 ►
It’s head and hierarchy that have distorted and made human institutions
00:56:05 ►
so abrasive and uncomfortable for the people who inhabit them.
00:56:11 ►
So I really believe there is no contradiction between technology and the spirit.
00:56:22 ►
Between technology and the spirit,
00:56:31 ►
there is no contradiction between the search for intellectual integration and understanding and the psychedelic experience.
00:56:33 ►
There is no contradiction between ultra-advanced hyperspatial cyberculture
00:56:40 ►
and paleolithic archaic culture.
00:56:44 ►
and paleolithic archaic culture.
00:56:50 ►
We have come to the end of our sojourn in matter.
00:56:54 ►
We have come to the end of our separateness.
00:56:57 ►
This is all very scary.
00:56:59 ►
None of us know what it means, but the forces that have been called into being
00:57:02 ►
are now beyond the control
00:57:06 ►
of any institution
00:57:07 ►
or any strategic planning
00:57:10 ►
committee or any banking
00:57:12 ►
committee. These
00:57:14 ►
things have a life of their own.
00:57:16 ►
There is a morphological
00:57:18 ►
unfoldment occurring
00:57:20 ►
on this planet. It is
00:57:22 ►
bringing forth some
00:57:24 ►
entirely new order of being. We are a privileged part of this. Individually, our hope is to understand and participate in the epiphany. Nothing is off-kilter or wrong or unnatural or artificial.
00:57:46 ►
No principle has been betrayed.
00:57:49 ►
This is how it is supposed to be.
00:57:51 ►
But as it picks up speed, it’s going to become more and more frightening as most metaphors fail.
00:58:02 ►
And this is why the rise of cults and why the grasping at ontological straws
00:58:07 ►
and why the whisperings from various corners of the universe
00:58:12 ►
have grown to a roar.
00:58:14 ►
Because we are uncertain.
00:58:17 ►
We are not sure.
00:58:20 ►
But I think you become sure by connecting to the source.
00:58:24 ►
And then what you become for other people is a source of reassurance.
00:58:31 ►
The perfect metaphor for understanding this situation is a birth.
00:58:38 ►
If you had never seen a birth, and you were rushing about your daily business,
00:58:44 ►
and suddenly came around a corner and
00:58:45 ►
this was happening as for example could happen to you in India or in Africa somewhere and here you
00:58:52 ►
confronted human birth if you had not been prepared for that moment you would have a real emotional
00:58:59 ►
thing on your hands it looks like a medical emergency. Blood is being shed, organs are being
00:59:07 ►
stretched, there’s pleading and groaning and moaning. You have to have your chops very together
00:59:13 ►
to look at this situation and say, how wonderful, new life coming into the world as it has always come into the world.
00:59:30 ►
Now, a birth can be simple and easy, or it can be prolonged and tormented. It can be an occasion for joy, or it can end in catastrophe.
00:59:42 ►
understanding, awareness,
00:59:51 ►
and a desire to meet the experience in all of its fullness.
00:59:52 ►
The birth is coming.
00:59:54 ►
The birth is coming.
00:59:59 ►
And what it does to the social systems we’ve put in place, the groaning ecologies that are taking the weight of our billions,
01:00:04 ►
what it does to the atmosphere, what it does to the atmosphere,
01:00:06 ►
what it does to the economies upon which you and I depend.
01:00:09 ►
This all depends on how educated and enlightened each one of us
01:00:16 ►
can make ourselves as the thing moves toward completion.
01:00:19 ►
And it’s no time for foolishness.
01:00:22 ►
And it’s no time for rumor mongering
01:00:25 ►
and it’s no time for throwing away your epistemological razors
01:00:30 ►
and indulging in the spreading of unlikelihoods.
01:00:35 ►
It’s time to actually pull together.
01:00:39 ►
The plants are the pipeline into the Gaian intention.
01:00:44 ►
It’s just not a coincidence
01:00:45 ►
that these plants carry this immense spiritual message.
01:00:51 ►
They are the pipeline of Gaian intentionality.
01:00:55 ►
We were not out of balance
01:00:57 ►
for millions of years
01:00:59 ►
or hundreds of thousands of years
01:01:01 ►
of intellectual existence
01:01:03 ►
in which we had humor and song and ribaldry and poetry
01:01:08 ►
and horsing around and art and theater,
01:01:12 ►
we were not out of balance.
01:01:14 ►
Because our religion involved the dissolving of our cultural values
01:01:20 ►
once a week or once a month
01:01:21 ►
back into the mysterious mama matrix
01:01:27 ►
of primordial being.
01:01:29 ►
Once we cut that off,
01:01:32 ►
once we began to make it up
01:01:33 ►
or to listen to the most shrill among us make it up,
01:01:38 ►
we were lost.
01:01:39 ►
That’s what we’re returning to.
01:01:42 ►
Our story is the story of the prodigal son.
01:01:45 ►
We left the family farm, the balance, the domesticity,
01:01:50 ►
and we made a shaman’s journey deep into the heart of matter and of energy, of space and time.
01:01:56 ►
We return with gifts, with understandings no shaman before ever had.
01:02:02 ►
Quantum physics, fractal mathematics, astrophysics, cosmology,
01:02:07 ►
the knowledge of DNA.
01:02:09 ►
This is real knowledge and we shed real blood to obtain it.
01:02:13 ►
Now it can be given meaning by being brought under the umbrella
01:02:18 ►
of authentic, archaic human values
01:02:22 ►
informed by relationships with psychedelic parents.
01:02:26 ►
This is the comfortable future, the hopeful future that lies ahead.
01:02:31 ►
To the degree that people turn their back on this,
01:02:34 ►
they’re going to have a rough time explaining to themselves and their children
01:02:39 ►
just what exactly is happening at the end of the 20th century.
01:02:46 ►
Okay, that’s my rap.
01:02:48 ►
Now I want to hear from you.
01:02:57 ►
Thank you.
01:03:05 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:15 ►
Hmm, where to begin?
01:03:17 ►
Maybe it’s because I haven’t heard a new, or at least new to me, McKenna talk lately,
01:03:22 ►
but this one seemed to have more concrete statements in it than usual.
01:03:27 ►
For example, at one point he said,
01:03:29 ►
What is happening, I think, it’s really bigger than psychedelics.
01:03:33 ►
It’s bigger than human evolution.
01:03:35 ►
We are not making the waves in this ocean.
01:03:38 ►
We are corks riding the waves of the ocean.
01:03:41 ►
But we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone,
01:03:44 ►
to occupy a unique moment in the history of the ocean, but we are privileged, by perhaps chance alone, to occupy a unique
01:03:46 ►
moment in the history of the universe, a moment when the universe goes through some kind of
01:03:50 ►
self-transforming, evolutionary, inflationary expansion.
01:03:55 ►
That’s what’s happening.
01:03:57 ►
And then he went on to talk about a morphological unfolding that is bringing about some entirely
01:04:03 ►
new order of being, and that the plants are the pipeline into Gaia’s intentions.
01:04:09 ►
Wow, I’m going to have to stop for a while and think about all of that some more before adding any comments.
01:04:15 ►
Maybe some of our fellow salonners will pick up on this conversation in the comments section of our blog about this podcast.
01:04:23 ►
Terrence sure didn’t hesitate to stir up the
01:04:25 ►
conversation, did he? Well, since I’m planning on getting out another podcast in the next few days,
01:04:31 ►
I’m going to leave off the rest of the news for today. However, I do want to pass along an update
01:04:37 ►
on Sasha Shulgin. As you know, last week Sasha had a heart valve replacement. I haven’t bothered Ann or Sasha’s assistant for specific details,
01:04:47 ►
but they are keeping a running log about Sasha’s condition on a blog at CaringBridge,
01:04:52 ►
which you can find at www.caringbridge.org
01:05:01 ►
slash visit slash Sasha Shulgin, all one word.
01:05:05 ►
And I’ll post that link along with the program notes for this podcast.
01:05:10 ►
But Sasha has now had four hospitalizations since last October.
01:05:14 ►
So it’s really good news that he pulled through this major surgery.
01:05:19 ►
There hasn’t been a post to that site for a few days, but I’m assuming that no news is good news.
01:05:23 ►
post to that site for a few days, but I’m assuming that no news is good news.
01:05:29 ►
And by the way, at that CaringBridge site, there is also a guest book where you can leave a message for Sasha, and Ann has been printing them out and reading them to him.
01:05:34 ►
And the latest news is the best.
01:05:36 ►
Sasha is now resting at home and beginning what we all hope will be a lasting recovery.
01:05:42 ►
And while I’m on the topic of hospital stays of our elders,
01:05:46 ►
I also want to ask you to keep Gary Fisher in mind this week,
01:05:50 ►
as he is also going in for additional surgery at the end of the week.
01:05:53 ►
And I’ll keep you posted about Gary’s progress as well.
01:05:58 ►
Well, I don’t like signing off with all of this news about the hospital stays,
01:06:02 ►
but I do want to get this program posted so
01:06:05 ►
that I can begin working on the next one,
01:06:08 ►
which I plan on having out by the end
01:06:10 ►
of this week. And for
01:06:11 ►
my next podcast, I’ll be playing another
01:06:13 ►
talk from the Timothy Leary Archive.
01:06:16 ►
Just last week, I had the
01:06:18 ►
great privilege of spending an afternoon
01:06:20 ►
poking around in some of the boxes
01:06:22 ►
of papers that are also in the archive,
01:06:24 ►
and I’ll be giving you my impression of this amazing cache of historic material,
01:06:29 ►
along with a few stories about a couple of the things I found there.
01:06:33 ►
But for now, I’ll just close by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:06:38 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:06:44 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that,
01:06:46 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:06:50 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:06:54 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:06:58 ►
And until next time, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:07:02 ►
Be well, my friends.