Program Notes
Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Terence McKenna, and Rupert Sheldrake
“I think that any models [of the psychedelic experience] that we can build, verbal, visual, or mathematical are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself.” –Ralph Abraham
“It’s the Logos-world that we’ve lost the connection with.” –Terence McKenna
“I think the difference between a representation of the [psychedelic] state and being in the state itself is the sense of meaning, engagement, and intensity.” –Rupert Sheldrake
“When language became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became then the willing servant of abstraction, which before had been an exotic and little explored branch of linguistic activity, that suddenly burgeoned into the major concern of a lot of people.” –Ralph Abraham
“I regard language as some kind of project that is uncompleted as we sit here… . Clearly, the whole world is held together by small mouth noises, and it’s only BARELY held together by small mouth noises.” –Terence McKenna
“If you buy in to the idea that psychedelics somehow are showing you the evolutionary path yet to be followed, then it seems obvious that what it entails is a further completion of the project of language.” –Terence McKenna
“The intellectuals, unfortunately, at the top of the pyramid are the last to get the news. They’re still pouring over Locke, and Hegel when what’s really happening is Guns n Roses and Nirvana, and I don’t mean the Buddhist state of transcendence… . So culture tends to be ruled by the people who are the last to get the news in terms of new technologies which are reshaping the culture.” –TerenceMcKenna
“Literacy is finished. It was a phase. It’s not to be preserved by anyone other than curators. The rest of us are going to live, obviously, in a culture shaped by new forms of media.” –Terence McKenna
Spirit Matters
by Matthew Pallamary
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Well, I’m sorry about being so late getting this podcast out again,
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but there’s been a lot going on around here this week.
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Primarily, a Plylog salon that Bruce Dahmer and Galen Brandt led here in San Diego last Monday night.
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And in a few weeks, I hope to play a few selections from that salon for you.
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But today we’re going to hear the rest of the trialogue that we began listening to last week
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when Ralph Abraham presented his introduction to today’s topic, which seemed to morph into a
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contemplation of visual psychedelic language, something our visionary artists are working on feverishly every day.
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But first, I want to thank two people who have sent in donations this week to help keep
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the salon going, and they are Aiden L. and RPC Services.
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So thank you very much, RPC and Aiden.
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I really appreciate your help getting these podcasts out each week, and I hope that life
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is treating you well these days.
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In just a minute, I’m going to play today’s talk for us, but first I want to say a little something about Ralph Abraham,
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because most of our fellow salonners primarily know Ralph as one of Terrence McKenna’s best friends and intellectual peers.
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But it is the mathematician side of Ralph that I want to mention right now.
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Before I went to law school,
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I did my undergraduate work in electrical engineering,
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and as a result, I took quite a few advanced math courses.
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Now, over 40 years later,
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I have to admit that all of those long hours of studying math
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seem to have been wasted
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because I don’t remember a thing
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about them anymore and maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if I’d had
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Ralph as my teacher because from what I’ve heard Ralph not only is a
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world-class mathematician he also excels in his ability to teach math and my good
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friend Michael Shields and I were exchanging a few emails about Ralph the other
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day, and here’s part of what he had to say. I moved to Santa Cruz in 1981 and took the beginning
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Calculus 1 class taught by Ralph Abraham at UCSC. It was the third or fourth time I had tried to
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learn calculus since 1965. Ralph taught the math algorithms, or equations,
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by drawing with colored chalks and making visual simulated moving graphs, and I could
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see for the first time that all the equations were moving visual events. Earlier math teachers
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had always emphasized the numerical and symbolic algorithms rather than the visual movement.
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numerical and symbolic algorithms rather than the visual movement, I finally got it.
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Ralph is an amazing teacher, and he’s still going strong, as his schedule shows below.
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And then Michael listed a few of the items on Ralph’s current schedule,
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like speaking engagements in the States as well as in Greece, Italy, India, and Japan.
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And you can find out more about these events by going to www.ralf-abraham.org and click on the Upcoming Events link.
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Hopefully, a few of our fellow Saloners will attend one of Ralph’s lectures and send us a report.
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So now let’s pick up with the last minute or so from the end of last week’s podcast,
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where Ralph Abraham posed the question on which this trialogue was to proceed.
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I should warn you that there is a brief break about halfway through this trialogue.
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Just as Terrence McKenna was in the middle of something, one tape ended,
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and the next tape apparently didn’t begin recording immediately.
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However, I don’t think too much was lost,
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so I hope you don’t get too confused
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when there seems to be a little disconnect in one of Terrence’s thoughts.
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Now, here is Ralph Abraham speaking just where last week’s podcast left off.
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I call down then the
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trilog mode
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psychedelics and mathematical
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vision
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well the question that you posed
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in all of that
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the nuts and bolts question is
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can it be visualized with technologies
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ranging from paint and brush to supercomputers?
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I think it can.
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I think it is not in principle mysterious
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that it’s a domain to be explored.
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It may be fleeting,
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like the situation that follows upon the splitting of the atom
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or something like that.
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It may be remote,
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but it is in principle describable,
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and it’s simply a matter of paying attention,
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gaining inspiration,
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and gaining skill of technical execution.
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I think you think that, don’t you?
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Well, I think that any models that we can build,
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verbal, visual, or mathematical,
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are really, really feeble compared to the experience itself.
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On the other hand, this experience is within all and without all,
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and we are immersed in this spiritual world,
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so the tiniest resonance from the most feeble model
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may suffice to excite,
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as poetry excites emotion,
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to excite spirit.
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And this is the essence of communication,
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is to have a compact representation.
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So the experience is infinitely complex.
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The representations have to be really simple.
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But the representation restricted to verbal mode alone might be too feeble,
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not similar enough to excite by resonance the similar state. I mean, we have the situation where we agree
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that not every person is going to become a cephalopod.
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Not every person has the time to become a shaman.
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We need a certain number of shamans in our culture
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to help to reconnect human society
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and the planet and the sky.
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So we need some kind of amplifying and communicating device
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between the few people who are real shamans,
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let’s say sacred artists of the future,
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and the mass society watching MTV.
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And so the question is can these means be of use to the clarion
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call that you’ve given in your book yeah I mean I think that what makes it
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confusing is when you go into these domains the encounter is an emotionally powerful one.
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And the situation is so novel
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that the experience tends to assume
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that this emotional power is coming from the input.
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It’s not.
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It’s coming from the encounter with the input.
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I mean, it’s like posing the question, can you make a stirring record of the Grand Canyon?
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Yes, you can with helicopter-mounted cameras
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and this sort of thing.
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But the emotion you have watching that,
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you bring to it.
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So the psychedelic dimension is objective,
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but it’s also so awesome and so different from what we know
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that it encourages and promotes and triggers awe in us.
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And so we bring something to it,
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which we can never image or reduce to a verbal description or
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a piece of film.
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But in principle, I think the thing itself is just more of reality.
00:08:56 ►
It’s like the heart of the cell, the radar maps of the Venusian surface, the center of
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the atom.
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I mean, these are real places.
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But this kind of reality,
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we don’t need more of this.
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We’ve already got so much.
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No, we need more of this mental
00:09:12 ►
Logos world.
00:09:16 ►
It’s the Logos world
00:09:18 ►
that we’ve lost the connection with.
00:09:20 ►
And so these computer programs,
00:09:23 ►
psychedelic drugs,
00:09:24 ►
dynamic modeling schemes are the equivalent of probes like Voyager.
00:09:31 ►
But they’re sent not to an alien planet, but to an alien phase space of some sort, but one that we need connection to.
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need connection to.
00:09:46 ►
I agree with Terence.
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The problem is one of the emotional intensity of a psychedelic
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experience is totally different from
00:09:52 ►
seeing the computer graphic
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display, the kind we saw.
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And it’s
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possible to get something a bit
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like that just by shaking a kaleidoscope
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and looking into it. And in these
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expensive novelty shops
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that dot California
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one can find fancy kaleidoscopes
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beautifully made
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people buy them I suppose
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and you look through them and within a few seconds
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you’re just bored, nobody ever really looks at them
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for very long, you can see a dazzling
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series of displays of pattern
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and colour but somehow they have no
00:10:24 ►
meaning and don’t engage one
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and I think the
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difference between a representation
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of the state and being in the state
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itself is this sense of meaning
00:10:33 ►
engagement and intensity
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and that I think is
00:10:38 ►
the problem because
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I don’t think it’s just the graphic representation
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I think it’s that meaning and intensity
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that we can find in many areas.
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I, for one, being a botanist, am very drawn to flowers.
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I love looking at flowers.
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And sometimes you can look at a whole garden full of flowers,
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like here in Esalen, and it’s quite meaningless.
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At other times, you can look at a single flower for a long time,
00:11:02 ►
and you can go into it.
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It’s like a mandala.
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You enter into this realm, and it takes on incredible meaning
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beauty and significance and the realm of flowers is one that’s explored these
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mandala type almost psychedelic spaces if you like and one can sometimes enter
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into it and sometimes one doesn’t the same with butterflies and many other
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natural creations so it seems to me the problem
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is how to enter into that engagement intensity and sense of meaning rather
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than representation of the pattern itself because there’s plenty of
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patterns around in the natural world. No but these are space-time patterns and
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whereas we can say the words space-time pattern, we nevertheless have no language for individual
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space-time patterns.
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Within space-time pattern as experienced by us, as perceived by us, there is a kind of
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resonance between different patterns that we see.
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Let us say the bobbing kelp forest in the ocean out here,
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that somehow makes different elements of that space-time pattern
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make a resonance with different space-time patterns
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of neurotransmitters in the visual cortex or something.
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So some aspects are perceived and other aspects are not.
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They remain invisible to us.
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And yet we don’t have any language for what we perceive.
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So we can’t, as Rupert suggested,
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have data storage and retrieval on this level.
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We don’t have language for that.
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You’ve been speaking of the flowers in the garden
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or the images in the kaleidoscope.
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These are static patterns.
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We have an extensive verbal language for that.
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So what I’m suggesting is an expansion of our visual linguistic capability
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in the direction of a universal language for space-time patterns,
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such that we could then speak of our experience.
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We could remember space-time pattern experiences, call them by name.
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We could mention to each other the mere drop of a word or a code, an I-75, a Highway 1, a Highway 0,
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and then we would be transmitting a huge image of a space-time pattern along with whatever emotion you remember from the time when you experienced that,
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awakening this in the mind of the listener,
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and therefore able to converse, intellectualize, understand, and reconnect with the space-time pattern and feeling of the spiritual world.
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I mean, let’s face it, we have had the most extensive experience of this world
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through visual metaphors of, well, movies.
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We experience the logos as movies.
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We don’t experience this at words, although there are sounds,
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and there are words pop up, and sometimes there’s writing on the wall like graffiti.
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Basically, it’s an infinite field of consciousness,
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of vibration, of waves moving, of intelligence,
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which may be disconnected in different parts.
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And when we travel in this realm,
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we go somewhere we’ve been before
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and we recognize it
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and that excites in us memory
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which is reinforced
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which is extended
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upon which we can do further experiment
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because we do remember
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that somehow our mental faculty
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individually and within
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it has data storage and retrieval
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and it has a language or something
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and yet we can’t share it
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even let us just say us three data storage and retrieval and it has a language or something, and yet we can’t share it. Even
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let us just say us three, we’ve had many experiences which I trust, I have great faith, are similar,
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that are universal experience, and yet we are absolutely speechless in verbalizing them
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to each other so we could see whether we had or didn’t have any similarity in this certain
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form.
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I’m sorry, words fail me.
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Well, I don’t know.
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It seems to me that art or that mind responds.
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It has an affinity for itself, and if it’s universal, then it has an affinity for the
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universal mind. What’s interesting about the example of the kaleidoscope
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is it’s boring after a few minutes.
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We all agree on that.
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If you analyze how it works and take it apart,
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the base units in most kaleidoscopes
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are pieces of broken glass, pebbles, things like this.
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Detritus, junk.
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And somehow splitting this into six sections with a mirror and putting it in heavy oil
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is supposed to bring you to the realm of something watchable and interesting but it isn’t
00:16:07 ►
the brain machines being produced in germany are the same way all pattern seems to be to quickly
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lose its charm unless it’s patterned that has been put through the sieve of minds, any mind, so that we enjoy looking at ruins
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and the artifacts of vanished civilizations
00:16:33 ►
a lot more than random arrangements
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of natural objects.
00:16:38 ►
So it seems to me what we’re looking for
00:16:41 ►
when we say it’s like a DMT trip, the MPPI data on chaos,
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then what we’re saying is, aha, here in this pattern, there is the footstep, the footprint
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of meaning. It’s as though an architect passed through here, and so we can appreciate it. So we’re always looking for the betraying presence
00:17:07 ►
of an order that is more than an order of,
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I don’t know even how to say it, economy, I guess.
00:17:15 ►
We look for an aesthetic order.
00:17:17 ►
And when we find that,
00:17:20 ►
then we have this reciprocal sense of recognition and transcendence.
00:17:25 ►
And this is what the psychedelic experience provides in spades.
00:17:31 ►
Now, a critic of the psychedelic experience would object,
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of course it’s made of mind.
00:17:39 ►
It’s made of your mind.
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But for the psychedelic voyager, this does not seem to be obvious the
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intuition is it is made of mine but it is not made of my mind so then either
00:17:54 ►
there’s an identity problem or a real frontier of communication is being
00:18:01 ►
crossed but I think when we say we look for living pattern or
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aesthetically satisfying order, what we really mean is we look for the sign that mind has somehow touched the
00:18:14 ►
stochastic processes of nature.
00:18:19 ►
Yes, but still the limiting factor seems to be neither the richness of display we find in nature
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still the limiting factor seems to be neither the richness of display we find in nature,
00:18:28 ►
nor even the language that we can communicate with, but rather the ability to go into something with intensity of vision.
00:18:32 ►
Because I don’t think language is a limiting problem.
00:18:35 ►
I mean, for example, music can be written down in a language.
00:18:39 ►
You can get a score of Beethoven’s symphonies or Mozart’s piano concertos.
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I mean, I can read music,
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but for me, it doesn’t come to life from this language. I have to hear it for it to come
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to life. The language is indeed a kind of communication, but it has to come to life.
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Presumably, mathematical notation is a form of notating things in the mathematical landscape
00:19:00 ►
which mathematicians can see. And take the realm of plants again.
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If you look at the incredible richness of botany, of flower forms,
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this is, or there is a language for this, it’s used by botanists in florists.
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You’ve got books about, there are words for these different kinds of flowers.
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And for a botanist, the whole thing can be written down in this specialised language.
00:19:23 ►
But even so, it doesn’t mean that
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most botanists spend most of
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their time contemplating the beauty of flowers
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they’re sort of rushing to the next committee
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meeting or getting their paper
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ready for the next public
00:19:35 ►
journal or something.
00:19:37 ►
Somehow there isn’t much time spent in actually
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entering into these realms
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even for people whose profession it is
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to be concerned with them.
00:19:45 ►
So we’re neither short of images nor of languages in many realms, but rather of the time, the space,
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and the inclination to enter into these realms, to be within them.
00:19:59 ►
Well, this is a good metaphor, I think, the musical metaphor. Let’s just think of this for a minute.
00:20:02 ►
This is a good metaphor, I think, the musical metaphor. Let’s just think of this for a minute.
00:20:05 ►
I don’t propose that a mathematical model of a brain or a plant or something would be
00:20:12 ►
as wonderful as a brain or a plant.
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Life will not be replaced by language.
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We never demand that much of ordinary language or poetry or of the graphic arts. Nevertheless, the evolution of music has been
00:20:27 ►
greatly aided by musical notation, because we wouldn’t like music to end and simply be left
00:20:34 ►
with a library of musical scores. Nevertheless, the evolution of music, the evolution of culture,
00:20:39 ►
has been enormously facilitated by having a graphic language that can, to some extent, recall the actual musical experience.
00:20:48 ►
And this is the role that I’m proposing for mathematics,
00:20:51 ►
not to replace the earth or the heavenly realms,
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but just somehow to facilitate the traffic through, let us say,
00:21:01 ►
simply an analog on the same level of musical staff notation
00:21:06 ►
that pertains to the visual experience of space-time patterns,
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whether of a flowering garden or the waving sea or the psychedelic vision.
00:21:17 ►
Maybe I need to tell you of last week in Denmark.
00:21:20 ►
I attended a conference about chaos theory and its applications, and I showed this video.
00:21:28 ►
There was in the audience another speaker who is the world expert on algorithmic information
00:21:35 ►
theory.
00:21:36 ►
This is a way of telling the difference between chaos and randomness. And as Terence was saying,
00:21:45 ►
there is in verbal representation
00:21:47 ►
a kind of economy,
00:21:50 ►
that there is a simple formula
00:21:51 ►
that calls forth a complex experience.
00:21:55 ►
And this economy is the reason
00:21:57 ►
that language is interesting.
00:21:59 ►
Algorithmic information theory
00:22:01 ►
gives a way of measuring randomness
00:22:03 ►
and what seems to us as random sometimes can be generated by a very small code or musical staff notation,
00:22:12 ►
for example.
00:22:15 ►
And when data from a scientific experiment looks random, one can try to test it as to whether there is or isn’t a compact economical
00:22:28 ►
model for it.
00:22:29 ►
And if there is, it’s more chaotic and less random.
00:22:32 ►
So there’s a measure for this.
00:22:34 ►
And a truly, according to their definition, a truly random process which would provide data which could not be represented by any formula shorter
00:22:47 ►
than itself.
00:22:51 ►
But it turns out that the weirdest, most random-looking data from the natural world, for example,
00:22:57 ►
earthquakes, sunspots, and so on, always seems to have a very compact mathematical model.
00:23:04 ►
Therefore it’s not truly random.
00:23:05 ►
It only looks random.
00:23:07 ►
And this is what is called deep data.
00:23:10 ►
So what I’m suggesting is an increase
00:23:15 ►
in our encyclopedia of models,
00:23:20 ►
extending language,
00:23:21 ►
so that we can name, store, retrieve, and recreate, not the
00:23:28 ►
experience itself, but the data of it, as it were, for the sake of communication with
00:23:32 ►
something which is very small, so that many of these models can be put in the closet.
00:23:36 ►
And this is exactly what musical staff notation did for music. It pertains not only to the spiritual experience, but also to fundamental questions
00:23:50 ►
on the future of human societies, environmental problems. Can we understand the space-time
00:23:56 ►
nature of the planet well enough, since it’s so complex, to even be sensitive to it and
00:24:04 ►
cooperate with it? I mean, if we be sensitive to it and cooperate with it.
00:24:06 ►
I mean, if we can’t even understand what we’re seeing when we look at the planet,
00:24:11 ►
then there’s not much we can do to cooperate.
00:24:16 ►
Biogeography, for example, is a botanical field that could be revolutionized
00:24:20 ►
by a staff notation for a space-time pattern, which it doesn’t have.
00:24:24 ►
by a staff notation for space-time pattern, which it doesn’t have.
00:24:31 ►
But surely what we’re looking for is meaning that seems to us somehow full of significance.
00:24:35 ►
I mean, in terms of information, even patterns, we’ve got libraries full.
00:24:40 ►
You go into any bookshop and you’re just overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff there.
00:24:46 ►
And the idea of just having more, even more models on the shelf the shelf even more somehow doesn’t seem very exciting to me i mean what would be exciting would be to see some deep meaning in
00:24:51 ►
all of this and maybe mathematics is one way to find the deep meaning in things um but if so i’m
00:24:58 ►
not quite sure how well the taxonomy of plants is not full of meaning, and nevertheless vocabulary has evolved,
00:25:06 ►
so the exfoliate and all these words are put on a page,
00:25:10 ►
and then another botanist can read this and actually tell,
00:25:12 ►
well, yes, this is the plant, therefore it’s safe to eat it and have an experience.
00:25:17 ►
So I think a further development in evolution from the stage of having language
00:25:24 ►
may be the generation of meaning.
00:25:27 ►
I mean, meaning is not given in the data.
00:25:29 ►
We have to grok things.
00:25:31 ►
We have to struggle and evolve understanding by some hermeneutical process.
00:25:37 ►
So, well, our language, as people said, when printing began, that would be the end of memory.
00:25:47 ►
When writing began, that would be the end of history.
00:25:51 ►
Well, in both cases, they were correct, I think.
00:25:55 ►
Yes, but when language began, we actually, that’s when we lost our connection with the natural world.
00:26:02 ►
Well, maybe it was a kind of language yeah i mean spoken language maybe language processed
00:26:09 ►
acoustically that it’s not in the generation of it that you want to put your attention but in the
00:26:15 ►
reception and decoding of it that when language became something acoustically processed it became so bloodless that it became then the willing servant of
00:26:27 ►
abstraction which before had been an exotic and little explored branch of linguistic activity that suddenly
00:26:35 ►
burgeoned into the major concern of a lot of people that
00:26:40 ►
language processed visually is
00:26:44 ►
here-and-now language processed visually is here and now stuff
00:26:46 ►
of great density
00:26:48 ►
and acoustical language
00:26:49 ►
permits a level of abstraction
00:26:51 ►
that creates a higher inclusiveness
00:26:56 ►
that’s achieved by a necessary
00:27:00 ►
dropping out of detail
00:27:02 ►
I’m glad to hear you say so
00:27:04 ►
since it always sounds that
00:27:06 ►
you think the logos itself is speech.
00:27:10 ►
But I must say I’m astonished
00:27:13 ►
at the resistance I’m getting here
00:27:15 ►
to the idea of visual language.
00:27:18 ►
I think that, well, when I travel in France,
00:27:23 ►
I’m riding in the train or something,
00:27:25 ►
and I’m really bothered by all the gossip going around,
00:27:27 ►
because I understand French, and then I realize this couple is having trouble,
00:27:31 ►
and the train is not stopping in the station that I expected, and so on.
00:27:35 ►
When I travel in Japan, I don’t understand anything,
00:27:37 ►
so it seems to me it’s really silent there.
00:27:39 ►
It’s very quiet. I just don’t hear anything.
00:27:42 ►
And where we have an aural language
00:27:47 ►
for a certain phenomenon,
00:27:49 ►
we then perceive it. It is
00:27:52 ►
moved by a moving truck.
00:27:54 ►
This moving van comes along and
00:27:55 ►
transports this stuff from the
00:27:57 ►
unconscious system to the conscious
00:28:00 ►
system. Then we deal with it in a different
00:28:01 ►
way. And these
00:28:03 ►
visions, space-time patterns
00:28:06 ►
which we can’t recognize, for which we have
00:28:08 ►
no visual language, they
00:28:10 ►
are essentially unconscious to us. So therefore
00:28:12 ►
we can’t interact with them. And this might be
00:28:13 ►
a fundamental reason that the
00:28:16 ►
planet is dying.
00:28:18 ►
Either we shouldn’t have verbal
00:28:20 ►
language, or we should
00:28:21 ►
have verbal language and visual language
00:28:24 ►
as well. I’m not sure
00:28:26 ►
which. But since verbal language is so poorly adapted to space-time patterns, I mean, we
00:28:30 ►
don’t describe music in verbal language. We have staff notation, a visual language for
00:28:35 ►
music. And I think that our intellectual relationship to the sky and to the earth would be vastly improved by developing a larger
00:28:49 ►
closet of models for visual processes.
00:28:54 ►
But I can’t get you to agree to this.
00:28:56 ►
DR.
00:28:57 ►
No, I agree.
00:28:58 ►
I agree.
00:28:59 ►
I think you’re right that seeing language, I regard language as some kind of project
00:29:05 ►
that is uncompleted as we sit here,
00:29:10 ►
that it isn’t the transfer of thought and intention into speech.
00:29:16 ►
That doesn’t do it.
00:29:18 ►
I mean, clearly, you know, the whole world is held together by small mouth noises,
00:29:23 ►
and it’s only barely held together by small mouth noises and it’s only barely held together by small mouth
00:29:27 ►
noises if we could have a tighter network of communication we would in a sense be a less
00:29:35 ►
diffuse species communication the lack of it is what’s shoving us over the brink into possible planetary catastrophe.
00:29:47 ►
Of the psychedelic experience,
00:29:49 ►
because then you see that if you buy into the idea
00:29:54 ►
that psychedelics somehow are showing you the evolutionary path yet to be followed,
00:30:08 ►
yet to be followed, then it seems obvious that what it entails is a further completion of the project of language. Maybe what all this technology is about is actually a more explicit condensation
00:30:19 ►
of the word. I mean, it is interesting that modernity is characterized by an ever more explicit evocation of the image.
00:30:32 ►
I mean, you just have to go back a hundred years and the HDTV, high-speed printing, virtual reality.
00:30:51 ►
It’s as though, you know, language is becoming, the word is becoming flesh.
00:30:59 ►
And condensing into the visual realm would make it, would be almost a kind of telepathy compared to the kind of
00:31:08 ►
linguistic reality we’re living in now.
00:31:11 ►
I mean…
00:31:12 ►
Glad to hear it.
00:31:13 ►
Yeah, no argument on that.
00:31:16 ►
Well, I think, I mean, what we may be doing is returning after a detour of centuries into
00:31:21 ►
the realm of literacy.
00:31:22 ►
You see, I think it’s interesting that in most of human history,
00:31:26 ►
and still today for more than half the people alive on this planet,
00:31:32 ►
literacy is not the big thing about language.
00:31:35 ►
It’s spoken language.
00:31:36 ►
Most cultures are originally oral cultures.
00:31:39 ►
Still, the majority of people can’t read and write.
00:31:42 ►
If you can’t read and write,
00:31:43 ►
it means that the visual cortex in the left hemisphere of your brain has not been hijacked by the
00:31:49 ►
speech centers. As soon as you learn to read and write the visual part of the
00:31:53 ►
left-hand side of the brain gets taken over by the speech centers which are to
00:31:58 ►
do with sound and the processing of sound and becomes adapted to reading and
00:32:03 ►
writing letters language and
00:32:05 ►
This knocks out one half or a large part of half of one’s brains visual processing capacity
00:32:12 ►
It gets into the habit of dealing with linear print. Yeah, you’re afraid I’m going to knock out the other half
00:32:20 ►
Well, I think that this this I think that the
00:32:31 ►
Well, I think that this, I think that the, as far as I know, there’s been very few studies of the difference in thought patterns between people who can’t read and write and those who can.
00:32:45 ►
And I’m not now talking about people in our society who can’t read and write because they’re dyslexic or dropped out of school, but whole cultures, like many traditional cultures where nobody reads and writes or very few do.
00:32:47 ►
There, language has a different role.
00:32:51 ►
In India, when I lived there, I found for illiterate people,
00:32:58 ►
language is a very powerful medium and it conjures up metaphors, images,
00:33:02 ►
in a quite different way than it does for people who are literate. So you yourself are complaining
00:33:07 ►
you find new generations of students at Santa Cruz can’t read or write anymore
00:33:13 ►
and it may be that this process of short-circuiting out literacy is already
00:33:19 ►
well advanced and that a new kind of visual language is developing. But I think that there’s been actually a huge amount of discussion
00:33:29 ►
about this difference between so-called print linear cultures
00:33:34 ►
and oral aboriginal cultures.
00:33:37 ►
This is what McLuhan’s whole work was about
00:33:42 ►
and saying that somehow the symbolic
00:33:45 ►
signification of language
00:33:48 ►
first through writing
00:33:50 ►
and then through printing
00:33:52 ►
has created
00:33:55 ►
has had all kinds
00:33:58 ►
of effects on the evolution
00:34:00 ►
of the western mind
00:34:01 ►
that we, until McLuhan
00:34:04 ►
were totally unaware of i mean he believes
00:34:09 ►
that the linear uniform quality of print creates the intellectual preconditions for the acceptance
00:34:18 ►
of an idea like democracy that you would never get that notion. The Greeks invented it, they had a phonetic alphabet.
00:34:32 ►
Modern industrial methods of production
00:34:34 ►
based on interchangeable parts,
00:34:38 ►
he felt that was inconceivable except by a print culture
00:34:42 ►
that had the notion of movable type.
00:34:45 ►
The idea of the citizen is a uniformitarian impulse
00:34:52 ►
laid over the biological diversity of our individuality
00:34:57 ►
that could never have occurred in a culture without print.
00:35:02 ►
So the bottom line in the McLuhanist analysis
00:35:07 ►
is that we tend to be incredibly naive
00:35:11 ►
about the information processing technologies
00:35:15 ►
we put in place
00:35:17 ►
because all we care about is input and output
00:35:20 ►
and what we don’t understand
00:35:22 ►
is it’s the plumbing that there’s between the input and the
00:35:26 ►
output that gives a culture its whole tone its values its implicit political assumptions its
00:35:35 ►
attitude toward nature so forth and so on and that what we are is a print culture, you know, linear, hierarchical.
00:35:45 ►
What we were.
00:35:46 ►
What we were, yes.
00:35:47 ►
We’re undergoing a transition in the 20th century.
00:35:51 ►
But the intellectuals, unfortunately, at the top of the pyramid
00:35:55 ►
are the last to get the news.
00:35:58 ►
I mean, they’re still pouring over Locke and Hegel
00:36:02 ►
when, you know, what’s really happening is guns and roses and nirvana.
00:36:06 ►
And I don’t mean the Buddhist state of transcendence.
00:36:11 ►
So culture tends to be ruled by the people who are the last to get the news
00:36:19 ►
in terms of new technologies which are reshaping the culture.
00:36:23 ►
Like I think all this beefing
00:36:25 ►
about the death of literacy, you might as well beef about the passing of the
00:36:31 ►
high-buttoned shoe or the beaver hat. I mean literacy is finished. It was a
00:36:36 ►
phase. It’s not to be preserved by anyone other than curators. The rest of us are going to live, obviously,
00:36:46 ►
in a culture shaped by new forms of media.
00:36:50 ►
We haven’t given up writing books ourselves, have we?
00:36:54 ►
Well, I think we’re reactionaries.
00:36:57 ►
It’s true.
00:36:58 ►
It’s the drugs we extol that get us called modern,
00:37:02 ►
not or post-modern.
00:37:04 ►
Well, we’d like to
00:37:05 ►
abandon
00:37:08 ►
books and only make documentary
00:37:10 ►
videos for PBS and
00:37:12 ►
BBC. It pays
00:37:14 ►
so much better.
00:37:15 ►
It doesn’t pay. It can’t
00:37:18 ►
support the process.
00:37:20 ►
So that’s
00:37:21 ►
at best for some time in the future.
00:37:25 ►
Meanwhile, the reason that I complain that my students are illiterate
00:37:29 ►
is that history is unavailable to them.
00:37:32 ►
There’s no way to tap into it.
00:37:34 ►
All these fantastic books on the Middle Ages, the prehistoric, the archaeology and so on,
00:37:40 ►
this stuff is never going to be translated into documentary videos.
00:37:46 ►
It’s not enough to just have a few curators
00:37:49 ►
who are in touch with the Library of Congress and the British Museum.
00:37:53 ►
I think that we need a large number of people who read as a hobby or something.
00:38:00 ►
Meanwhile…
00:38:01 ►
But don’t you think, Ralph, that that’s actually a kind of amnesia?
00:38:06 ►
It’s not that they’re illiterate.
00:38:08 ►
Illiterate is when you don’t know the difference between Melville and Hawthorne.
00:38:13 ►
Amnesia is when you don’t know whether the Thirty Years’ War
00:38:16 ►
came before or after the War of the Roses.
00:38:22 ►
Well, if you’re literate and you forgot
00:38:25 ►
you could look it up in the Encyclopedia
00:38:27 ►
Britannica
00:38:28 ►
you could dial it up in a hypercard
00:38:32 ►
I mean there’s going to be a CD-ROM
00:38:33 ►
for in fact I think you’re the manufacturer
00:38:36 ►
true, true
00:38:37 ►
so
00:38:39 ►
these
00:38:41 ►
historical media let us say
00:38:44 ►
they don’t lose their importance just because new media are developed.
00:38:47 ►
Now there’s a further problem, which you touch on extensively in your book, which relates television as a drug.
00:38:56 ►
And I think this is interesting that we had, you know, we had botanical drugs, then we have chemical drugs,
00:39:05 ►
now we have electronic drugs.
00:39:07 ►
What’s coming next?
00:39:09 ►
So the fact is that my students have watched television
00:39:14 ►
seven hours a day, six and a half, according to your book, since birth.
00:39:20 ►
And they are unbelievably quick with images,
00:39:23 ►
and it’s great because this is a fantastic advance
00:39:28 ►
in intelligence, in human intelligence.
00:39:30 ►
And the way that information can be communicated
00:39:34 ►
in 25 seconds by the best of the television commercials,
00:39:37 ►
I think, is truly astonishing.
00:39:40 ►
And not everybody can show these commercials
00:39:42 ►
in the African bush or something and get a response.
00:39:44 ►
You have to have people who have been trained up to it
00:39:47 ►
by doing their visual calisthenics six and a half hours a day since birth.
00:39:54 ►
So that’s good.
00:39:55 ►
What’s not so good is that the material is available in the video store
00:40:00 ►
or from the Library of Congress after we get FDDI and so on.
00:40:07 ►
This material is unbelievably poor.
00:40:15 ►
And the fact is that if you make a PBS documentary on Fruit of the Gods, for example, nobody will watch it because they’re busy watching Dynasty,
00:40:20 ►
or I don’t even know the names of them.
00:40:22 ►
or I don’t even know the names of them.
00:40:29 ►
And that somehow the drug abuse aspect of the new media has already dominated its future.
00:40:33 ►
So that this creode is already so deep
00:40:35 ►
that it’s unlikely we can swerve the video technology
00:40:41 ►
into an interesting cultural resource
00:40:46 ►
well that is my problem with your
00:40:50 ►
approach actually
00:40:51 ►
these computer
00:40:54 ►
graphics use basically
00:40:56 ►
television style technologies
00:40:58 ►
no the computer graphics you see are going to be
00:41:00 ►
we’re only five years away from
00:41:02 ►
having super computers like that
00:41:04 ►
that was made on a 200-megaflop machine, which cost $13 million three years ago.
00:41:12 ►
And today you can buy them for $500,000.
00:41:14 ►
We’re using a $500,000 one.
00:41:17 ►
It will be delivered to the Cathedral of St. John Divine in five years.
00:41:20 ►
That will be in the kitchen keeping track of your recipes and running your microwave.
00:41:25 ►
So the possibility is to interact with this.
00:41:28 ►
You see, it already becomes almost as interesting as a psychedelic trip as long as you can interact.
00:41:33 ►
What’s wrong with this passive medium is it’s dead and some idiot programmed it
00:41:38 ►
and made it available and then it was distributed as a drug
00:41:41 ►
and people are actually addicted to the passive process of
00:41:45 ►
sitting there knocked out and just like
00:41:47 ►
receiving somebody else’s fantasy.
00:41:50 ►
So I think that when
00:41:51 ►
these supercomputers are
00:41:53 ►
available in kitchens and
00:41:55 ►
kindergarten playrooms, and people
00:41:57 ►
are brought up on, this is an
00:41:59 ►
extension of life.
00:42:02 ►
This is an increase
00:42:03 ►
in the size of the playroom.
00:42:07 ►
The thing is, you can’t underestimate the perversity of people in terms of their tendency
00:42:15 ►
to prefer this passive thing. I remember in 1977 when I bought my first home computer,
00:42:23 ►
when I bought my first home computer,
00:42:27 ►
you got a manual with it called Basic Basic.
00:42:30 ►
And the intent of this manual was to teach you how to program your computer.
00:42:34 ►
Well, six months of trying to peddle that
00:42:36 ►
to the American public,
00:42:38 ►
and they realized they had to completely rethink the product
00:42:41 ►
that only a vanishingly small number of people were
00:42:45 ►
ever going to program a computer it’s like when you used to buy an automobile
00:42:49 ►
and you got a toolbox with it well that’s not been true since the 20s so
00:42:56 ►
there’s a certain responsibility on the consumer not to demand the prepackaged stuff.
00:43:06 ►
The MPPI, these big machines,
00:43:10 ►
are, to my mind, like the psychedelic drug state,
00:43:15 ►
but then everybody’s trip
00:43:17 ►
is like the software they bring to it and run.
00:43:22 ►
And someone who goes to the MPPI machine
00:43:25 ►
to keep track of their recipes
00:43:28 ►
is essentially trivializing it
00:43:31 ►
because they don’t know what it could do.
00:43:33 ►
This is probably the equivalent
00:43:35 ►
of going to a psychedelic drug
00:43:37 ►
to solve your relationship problems.
00:43:40 ►
It’s the question you framed was so stupid and mini-minded,
00:43:48 ►
and perhaps the drug, the psychedelic, can help,
00:43:52 ►
but what a tremendous misappropriation of its power. Well, every tool will be misused as well as used will be misused more than it’s used.
00:43:58 ►
And the most popular books are cookbooks, and nevertheless we write books.
00:44:03 ►
And to some little extent they participate in the evolution of history.
00:44:09 ►
The fact that most books are used for recipes
00:44:12 ►
doesn’t totally destroy all value of books,
00:44:17 ►
and so it is with the new media,
00:44:19 ►
whereas most people will use them to hypercard a stack of recipes
00:44:24 ►
or sex postures or something.
00:44:27 ►
There will still be a lot of arcane and important material available in this medium
00:44:32 ►
which can’t be accessed any other way.
00:44:35 ►
Nevertheless, I must say, you’re kind of dragging me down here.
00:44:39 ►
Maybe it’s time I need some help from this group.
00:44:42 ►
I became very depressed this year when I realized that not only my students couldn’t read or write,
00:44:49 ►
but also that their interest in computers was much less than the preceding generation a year ago,
00:44:54 ►
which was much less.
00:44:55 ►
For the last three or four years, interest in computers has been on the decline.
00:45:00 ►
So along with the television medium, the interactive capability, I mean, you’re
00:45:06 ►
right about the tool kit that comes
00:45:07 ►
with the car and basic and so on.
00:45:10 ►
Not even to use
00:45:12 ►
tools like Adobe
00:45:14 ►
Illustrator or HyperCard or
00:45:16 ►
even
00:45:17 ►
McWrite or anything. Not to use any of those
00:45:19 ►
tools. To be only interested in computer
00:45:21 ►
games. Here’s the most brilliant kids in
00:45:23 ►
high school
00:45:24 ►
doing nothing but play Tetron Game Boy.
00:45:29 ►
Just think that over.
00:45:31 ►
I have my colleague, brilliant professors of mathematics from China
00:45:35 ►
who do nothing but, after work, they play Tetron Game Boy.
00:45:39 ►
Think it over.
00:45:41 ►
But ten years ago it would have been heroin.
00:45:44 ►
Now it’s just Gameboy what
00:45:47 ►
do you mean just Gameboy is much more dangerous hasn’t been made illegal yet
00:45:56 ►
true they can just do it unto death but I mean just one final point I want to
00:46:03 ►
make the model you’re suggesting takes us further into the artificial world,
00:46:08 ►
the man-made world of technology.
00:46:10 ►
And we’ve still got this incredible resource,
00:46:14 ►
five million species of beetles in the Amazon.
00:46:17 ►
I mean, incredible diversity of the natural world
00:46:19 ►
that hardly anyone’s interested in anymore.
00:46:22 ►
There are these herbarium collections,
00:46:24 ►
there are all these different plants butterfly collections geological
00:46:29 ►
museums with rocks and crystals of every kind go into them in London or Prague or
00:46:34 ►
anywhere they’re completely deserted that there’s an incredible diversity of
00:46:38 ►
form in the natural world and we become more and more plugged into the entirely
00:46:43 ►
human world of technologies
00:46:45 ►
and man-made patterns models and so on I mean how does this relate towards how
00:46:52 ►
could it help in a greater sense of connection with the living world well
00:46:57 ►
this will be maybe a good place to stop I believe that our connection to the
00:47:04 ►
natural world will be enormously enhanced by the new media.
00:47:09 ►
And this is in spite of the fact that most people will relate to it as a new form of drug.
00:47:16 ►
I don’t feel personally responsible for the habits of the human species.
00:47:21 ►
I think that planetaria, for example, which are artificial models of the sky,
00:47:28 ►
which are brighter and simpler
00:47:33 ►
and easier to understand,
00:47:35 ►
especially along with special programs
00:47:37 ►
that show only certain motions at one time,
00:47:40 ►
that planetaria have an enormous potential
00:47:43 ►
to turn people on to the real sky,
00:47:46 ►
which, after all, is the ultimate source of our mind, our intellect,
00:47:52 ►
our mathematics and language, and so on.
00:47:55 ►
So although the construction of planetaria in big cities around the world
00:48:01 ►
is an expansion of the synthetic world
00:48:05 ►
at the expense of the natural.
00:48:06 ►
The whole idea of it is to try to turn a switch
00:48:10 ►
in some few people that makes them aware
00:48:13 ►
of what was there all the time.
00:48:15 ►
And I think a hypercard stack with high-speed,
00:48:20 ►
high-quality color pictures and sound
00:48:23 ►
giving all the beetles in the Amazon jungle
00:48:26 ►
would enormously help me personally
00:48:28 ►
to understand what I’m seeing when I go there.
00:48:32 ►
So, nevertheless, nobody goes to planetaria.
00:48:38 ►
Nobody accesses these.
00:48:39 ►
A few schoolchildren will go once,
00:48:41 ►
and nobody will really be affected by them.
00:48:43 ►
So, somehow, the habits of society are such that we can’t make good use,
00:48:53 ►
what could be critical good use of technology.
00:48:58 ►
And in the meanwhile, there are these elements that amplify infinitely the bad uses for some kind of
00:49:08 ►
piracy i guess but but i’d like to defend ralph to you rup i don’t think that it’s really a journey
00:49:18 ►
deeper into artificiality i mean science has been dependent on instrumentality for a long, long time.
00:49:27 ►
The natural world that Ralph’s program would reveal is the natural world of syntax.
00:49:37 ►
That, in other words, language would become a much more accessible object for study if it were visually explicit and I
00:49:46 ►
expect that this is happening I so it seems to me it’s just a new frontier in
00:49:54 ►
natural history it’s this most complex and least understood of all behaviors
00:50:02 ►
which is language and while the instrumentalities may be computers, high-speed imaging, and so forth, it’s no
00:50:11 ►
more than using the Hubble telescope or something like that to tease data out of a very distant
00:50:20 ►
part of the universe and then make it explicit.
00:50:26 ►
part of the universe and then make it explicit and if we could understand language we would understand something about our own place in nature that
00:50:34 ►
eludes us because it’s clearly the most complex thing we do and we’re the most
00:50:41 ►
complex thing we know and the feedback from it is culture,
00:50:47 ►
the most anomalous phenomenon in the natural world.
00:50:53 ►
So I think it’s pretty exciting to use these things
00:50:56 ►
to try and understand,
00:50:59 ►
I mean, people say spirit, cognition, consciousness,
00:51:03 ►
but ultimately just language
00:51:05 ►
is what should come out of this,
00:51:08 ►
a much deeper understanding of language.
00:51:12 ►
Well, it’s time… Is this okay?
00:51:15 ►
Yes. Yeah, let’s throw it over.
00:51:16 ►
Time to open up for our interaction
00:51:22 ►
on the larger scale.
00:51:23 ►
Customarily, whoever does the induction
00:51:29 ►
also summarizes or concludes.
00:51:32 ►
I don’t feel I have the wherewithal
00:51:34 ►
to really conclude this.
00:51:36 ►
I would like to just end our trialogue
00:51:42 ►
with a kind of emotional reaction to the synthesis of all this
00:51:48 ►
What I see as negative feedback
00:51:52 ►
Not only my idea this morning, but also my life work
00:52:07 ►
I’m going to say that I
00:52:09 ►
this was kind of a strategy
00:52:12 ►
that backfired
00:52:14 ►
I chose to
00:52:16 ►
out of
00:52:19 ►
from an initial statement where
00:52:22 ►
I put mathematics on a fairly high
00:52:24 ►
pedestal there
00:52:26 ►
as the marriage counselor of Father Sky and Mother Earth,
00:52:33 ►
I then, for the sake of discussion with these guys for our own group mind,
00:52:41 ►
I scaled down the image of mathematics to an extension
00:52:46 ►
of language, a kind of language, a visual
00:52:48 ►
language, and so on, because we have
00:52:50 ►
to actually discuss mathematics
00:52:52 ►
here without really knowing what it is.
00:52:54 ►
It’s a study of space-time
00:52:56 ►
pattern or something. I just want to end
00:52:58 ►
by saying this, that mathematics
00:53:00 ►
is part of the natural world.
00:53:02 ►
It is not an extension. It’s just part
00:53:04 ►
of the natural world. Mathematics is a of the natural world. It is not an extension. It’s just part of the natural world.
00:53:05 ►
Mathematics is a landscape which can be explored.
00:53:09 ►
It’s simply and directly and with much incredible pleasure, delight, and advancement
00:53:14 ►
as the psychedelic logos or any other aspect of the intellect.
00:53:20 ►
Mathematical landscape does not belong to the human species.
00:53:23 ►
It belongs not to the earth, but to the sky.
00:53:28 ►
It’s part of the infinite universe we live in.
00:53:31 ►
And whatever microscopes, telescopes, k-scopes, and computer graphic tools we can devise to enhance our vision of the mathematical universe is definitely advantageous. How this will fit into society, however, we admit
00:53:49 ►
that we are in a problem. We are in a cultural problem. We are in an evolutionary challenge from
00:53:57 ►
which the human species may not survive. Part of our difficulty is the rejection, I mean,
00:54:03 ►
there’s perhaps a small part
00:54:05 ►
but mathematics is essential in the marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth
00:54:09 ►
and our culture has totally rejected mathematics
00:54:12 ►
so it’s possible that that’s part of the problem
00:54:16 ►
and that’s kind of what I’ve given my life work to as it were
00:54:22 ►
so the answer to the
00:54:26 ►
question on the psychedelic and the mathematical
00:54:28 ►
vision is
00:54:30 ►
that there is a relationship
00:54:32 ►
and is kind of abstract
00:54:33 ►
because we’re stymied I guess
00:54:36 ►
to summarize our
00:54:38 ►
discussion by bad habits
00:54:40 ►
of the human species at the present time
00:54:42 ►
so I’ll leave it
00:54:43 ►
there habits of the human species at the present time. So I’ll leave it there.
00:54:48 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:54:51 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:54:58 ►
So what did you think about Ralph’s idea that we develop a visual language,
00:55:03 ►
a vocabulary, if you will, to describe psychedelic journeys in more exact detail? Thank you. I’m really tempted to tell a corny joke about the idea of giving numbers to various types of experiences,
00:55:27 ►
but I’ll spare you for now.
00:55:29 ►
Ask me the next time we meet in person and I’ll tell you.
00:55:32 ►
It really does crack me up, though.
00:55:34 ►
Anyway, I hope that if some of our fellow salonners come across attempts to create a language of the psychedelic experience,
00:55:42 ►
that they’ll post information about it on our notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org, as you know.
00:55:51 ►
And did you catch that part when Ralph and Terrence were talking about looking up information
00:55:56 ►
in an encyclopedia or on a hypercard?
00:56:00 ►
Do you Macheads remember the hypercard?
00:56:02 ►
So I guess it’s safe to assume that the date on this cassette tape we just heard was correct, 1992,
00:56:09 ►
shortly before the World Wide Web came on the scene.
00:56:12 ►
And I have to give credit to Ralph here, and I guess to Terrence as well,
00:56:18 ►
where they were comparing our evolving digital technology to a drug.
00:56:22 ►
It was almost eight years later when I wrote about the Internet being a new psychoactive drug Thank you. putting ideas out that we’re pulling out of the noosphere. You know, ideas that are floating all around the world in some form of collective human holon.
00:56:50 ►
Maybe Teilhard’s prediction for humans to achieve a form of super psychic ability
00:56:55 ►
is actually unfolding all around us.
00:56:58 ►
Who knows?
00:56:59 ►
I’ve also got to give some more thought to what they were just saying about the end of literacy.
00:57:04 ►
I’ve also got to give some more thought to what they were just saying about the end of literacy.
00:57:11 ►
While I applaud the evolution to more condensed forms of communication like the ones that they were discussing,
00:57:19 ►
the point that Ralph brought up about history not being available to those who cannot read is a very serious problem.
00:57:26 ►
One recent example came a few months ago when the official spokeswoman for the man currently occupying the White House had to admit that she had no idea at all about what the Cuban Missile Crisis was all about.
00:57:33 ►
Granted, that happened while I was in college, and so it’s imprinted on my mind pretty clearly.
00:57:38 ►
But still, it remains the closest the world has yet come to a full-on nuclear war.
00:57:43 ►
the closest the world has yet come to a full-on nuclear war.
00:57:48 ►
And that, my friends, is a little bit of history that one would hope that those surrounding the most ignorant president in the United States’ history
00:57:51 ►
would be able to at least fill him in on the five or six biggest headlines of recent history.
00:57:57 ►
But I don’t want to get started on down this path right now.
00:58:00 ►
You know, it just seems that not having a working grasp of at least recent history is a very serious problem. Thank you. When they first brought up the topic of the end of literacy, I first thought about some of my friends, like Matt Palomary, who earned their living by writing.
00:58:29 ►
Let’s hope that enough people remain literate and keep buying books long enough
00:58:34 ►
to keep Matt and my other friends out of the poorhouse as they grow a little older.
00:58:38 ►
But my guess is that it’s still going to be a while before books go away,
00:58:43 ►
particularly great books like Spirit Matters, which is the title of Mateo’s new memoir.
00:58:49 ►
And I’m very pleased to report that at last Saturday’s very prestigious San Diego Book Awards ceremony, Matt Palomari’s memoir won first place in the spiritual books category.
00:59:06 ►
category. Now to be honest, when Mateo first told me that his book had been selected as a finalist in that category, I kind of groaned inside because I didn’t think it had a prayer in that category.
00:59:12 ►
Pun intended, by the way. After all, Mateo’s story is one of transformation that had as one of its
00:59:19 ►
primary catalysts our sacred ayahuasca ceremonies. Now just think about this for a minute.
00:59:25 ►
Here in San Diego, possibly the most conservative city on the west coast,
00:59:30 ►
home of a huge military and defense establishment,
00:59:33 ►
along with thousands of retired defense and military people,
00:59:38 ►
you know the type, cranky old geezers who think us kids shouldn’t be fooling around with that damn marijuana,
00:59:44 ►
let alone things like ayahuasca.
00:59:46 ►
Well, politically, this is a pretty buttoned-down place.
00:59:50 ►
And yet, Spirit Matters beat out all of the conventional spiritual books.
00:59:54 ►
Personally, I think this is a very positive sign of the change in human consciousness
00:59:59 ►
that is now taking place just below the surface of our everyday affairs.
01:00:04 ►
So a big well done to Mateo.
01:00:06 ►
You’re doing a terrific job of moving these topics into the mainstream.
01:00:11 ►
Bravo!
01:00:12 ►
And I have another bit of exciting news,
01:00:14 ►
particularly for those of you who live near Ojai, California,
01:00:19 ►
or can get there for an exciting workshop that will be held
01:00:22 ►
June 13th through June 15th of this year,
01:00:26 ►
which is 2008, in case you aren’t keeping up with trivia like that.
01:00:31 ►
I first found out about this event from at least a half a dozen of our fellow salonners,
01:00:36 ►
including Dr. Charlie Grove and one of the presenters of that workshop, Dale Pendell.
01:00:41 ►
The title of this workshop is Visionary Practice, Ritual and Reshaping Consciousness, and it Thank you. fantastic weekend. You already know three of the presenters, Dale and Laura Pendell and Eric Davis,
01:01:07 ►
and they’ve all been with us here in the salon through their appearances as featured speakers
01:01:11 ►
at our Planque Norte lecture series at Burning Man. And the fourth leader of that workshop happens
01:01:17 ►
to be one of my heroes, although we’ve never met. And I’ll bet many of our fellow salonners also
01:01:23 ►
hold him in high regard. The person I’m talking about is David Presti, the neurologist from UC Berkeley, whose downloadable
01:01:31 ►
lectures have been talked about here in the Psychedelic Salon and in several of the programs
01:01:36 ►
over on the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:01:41 ►
The version of his course that I got through iTunes is titled Psych 119, Fall 2006,
01:01:48 ►
Drugs and Behavior. But the poster for this event says that the title of his course now is
01:01:54 ►
Brain, Mind, and Behavior. But if you go to the iTunes store and search on Presti, P-R-E-S-T-I,
01:02:01 ►
you will find his course under the iTunes U heading, where it’s still titled Drugs and Behavior.
01:02:08 ►
There are 29 lectures in this series, and they are so packed with, at least for me, new and interesting information in each week’s lecture that I’ve put them on a DVD so I can be sure they’re still available for me to revisit once in a while.
01:02:23 ►
And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a long time, you already know about those famous lectures.
01:02:28 ►
But if you’re new to the salon, you might want to check them out for yourself.
01:02:33 ►
But I’m getting off track here.
01:02:34 ►
The main thing I want to once again stress is the fact that if you’re really serious about meeting people like yourself,
01:02:41 ►
then eventually you’re going to have to attend a few of these workshops,
01:02:45 ►
gatherings, conferences, festivals, and whatever.
01:02:48 ►
It isn’t easy. I know that.
01:02:50 ►
Even if you can afford to take some vacation time
01:02:53 ►
and travel to one of these workshops,
01:02:55 ►
it still isn’t easy to do for some reason.
01:02:58 ►
I know that I was living alone
01:03:00 ►
and thinking about going to one of these events
01:03:02 ►
for over five years before I finally did.
01:03:04 ►
And that was in July of 1998, just ten years ago. alone and thinking about going to one of these events for over five years before I finally did.
01:03:13 ►
And that was in July of 1998, just 10 years ago. And believe me, it changed my life. There is where I first met Terrence McKenna, who suggested I come to his Entheobotany conference in Mexico
01:03:19 ►
the following January. I did, and within six months, I quit my job, moved to California, and began doing whatever it is that I’ve been doing here until now when we’re having this little chat, along with tens of thousands of other close friends of ours here in the psychedelic salon.
01:03:39 ►
You never know what awaits you once you finally step out of your self-imposed box.
01:03:43 ►
And no, I don’t get a commission if you attend this upcoming workshop.
01:03:47 ►
That’s not why I’m promoting it.
01:03:49 ►
And it isn’t because three of the workshop leaders are friends of mine either.
01:03:54 ►
But I’m really passionate about all of us doing a better job at finding the others,
01:03:58 ►
as Terrence so directed.
01:04:02 ►
Before I go, I want to read part of an email I received from JJ.
01:04:06 ►
He says, Hey, Lorenzo, my name is JJ and recently listened to a podcast in which you said that Burning Man was out of the picture for you.
01:04:15 ►
I’m sorry to hear that.
01:04:17 ►
Now, I’ve never been to Burning Man, but it seems like you had a lot to do with setting up the ply logs.
01:04:21 ►
So I was wondering what will happen to the Burning Man lectures.
01:04:24 ►
Have you ever considered moving them? I gave this little thought. If there were
01:04:29 ►
psychedelic talks given at a music festival, like Bonnaroo or Lollapalooza, you could get your
01:04:35 ►
message to the people who are on the fence, so to speak, regarding the responsible use of these
01:04:40 ►
medicines. People who take these substances at music festivals seem to be on the right path,
01:04:46 ►
but sort of stumbling towards spirituality,
01:04:49 ►
empowerment, and responsibility.
01:04:51 ►
Some are on the wrong path altogether
01:04:53 ►
and stumbling toward burnout.
01:04:56 ►
There’s a lot of energy,
01:04:57 ►
but it is hedonistic and unfocused.
01:05:00 ►
By giving lectures at the festivals,
01:05:02 ►
the thousands of people who attend these events
01:05:04 ►
may find the same reassuring sense of community that the podcasts provide my fellow salonners and I.
01:05:12 ►
Well, that’s a great idea, J.J.
01:05:14 ►
I know that Daniel Pinchbeck, Eric Davis, and Bruce Dahmer, among others,
01:05:18 ►
have all spoken at some of these other festivals,
01:05:21 ►
but I’ve never given any thought to taking the Planque Norte lectures to one. And to tell the truth, it’s a lot more work than I have time for until I finish
01:05:30 ►
this book that I’ve been working on for several years. But if any of you event organizers out
01:05:35 ►
there would like me to help you connect with some of the past Planque Norte speakers, I’d be glad
01:05:41 ►
to help. And if there are any talks held at some of these events that anyone thinks
01:05:45 ►
might fit here in the salon,
01:05:47 ►
I’d love to hear them. And
01:05:49 ►
if you do record them, be sure to get permission
01:05:51 ►
from both the speaker and the event organizer
01:05:54 ►
before letting me know about them,
01:05:55 ►
just so I know I could use them if I hear them.
01:05:58 ►
One last
01:06:00 ►
thing I want to mention from JJ’s
01:06:01 ►
email is the tagline at the end
01:06:04 ►
which reads,
01:06:05 ►
You can never solve a problem with the same
01:06:07 ►
state of consciousness that started the problem.
01:06:10 ►
Well said.
01:06:13 ►
And a little note
01:06:13 ►
to Posh, who just joined
01:06:15 ►
what I’m sorry to report is the
01:06:17 ►
now defunct Palenque Norte
01:06:19 ►
mailing list. Sorry everybody,
01:06:22 ►
but I’m no longer able to spend
01:06:23 ►
time on the two mailing lists that I once maintained. These podcasts are now my Thank you. Several of my friends tell me that in their opinions, yes, it does contain a lot of psychedelic thinking.
01:06:46 ►
And maybe somebody will start a thread on that topic on our blog or on the Psychedelic Salon Forum over at thegrowreport.com.
01:06:54 ►
I think that might evolve into a really interesting thread.
01:06:59 ►
And one last thing I want to mention before I close with my usual rap about the creative commons license I’ve used for these podcasts for a long time.
01:07:08 ►
The lawyer in me was saying that these podcasts are protected under the
01:07:12 ►
creative commons license.
01:07:14 ►
What I really should have been saying,
01:07:16 ►
of course,
01:07:16 ►
is that these podcasts are available for your use under this license.
01:07:21 ►
Basically,
01:07:21 ►
what that means is that you don’t have to ask permission to use sections or even all of any of these podcasts in your own work, as long as it isn’t for commercial purposes.
01:07:31 ►
Over the last few years, I’ve been sent links to dozens of places where parts of these programs
01:07:37 ►
are being used, and I’m overjoyed each time that happens. Recently, one of our fellow saloners,
01:07:43 ►
Murr, I believe his name is, posted a very brief comment on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon Thank you. But as a former marketing guy, I have to admit that it’s a perfect name and that it’s going to be almost impossible to forget once you hear it.
01:08:09 ►
Anyway, Brain Douche No. 9, titled Birthright, is to me a perfect example of artistic ways that sound bites from these podcasts can be used.
01:08:19 ►
He’s taken a short Terrence McKenna piece and not just put it to music, but he’s also used some very interesting audio techniques to emphasize the underlying theme that Terrence is presenting.
01:08:31 ►
As we’ve all discovered on our own, when listening to one of Terrence’s talks, there is so much information packed into them that they have to be listened to several times before we can fully grok all that he’s saying.
01:09:05 ►
Thank you. And Murr, I apologize for not clearing this with you via email before posting this podcast, but recently someone hijacked my email address,
01:09:08 ►
and now I’m getting thousands and thousands of notices of undeliverable mail every time I open my email client.
01:09:15 ►
So I’m going to have to give up on email for a little while until this spammer moves on to some other target.
01:09:21 ►
And so I hope you don’t mind my playing your short podcast number nine.
01:09:26 ►
I haven’t had a chance to listen to any of your other podcasts, but as you go forward,
01:09:30 ►
I hope you do some more shows like number nine.
01:09:33 ►
As you can tell, I like your work.
01:09:35 ►
So once again, I will close my portion of today’s podcast by saying that this and all
01:09:40 ►
of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:09:49 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:09:51 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:09:57 ►
And that’s where you’ll also find the program notes for this podcast.
01:10:01 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:10:06 ►
Be well, my friends.
01:10:23 ►
Welcome to Brain Douche.
01:10:25 ►
Tonight I’m trying a couple of new things.
01:10:28 ►
First of all, I’m going to try and sound like a podcast, so God help me.
01:10:34 ►
And second of all, I’m just sitting in my living room talking into my computer.
01:10:38 ►
I’m not up in the studio right now.
01:10:40 ►
This is just an experiment to see if this will work for recording little intros
01:10:46 ►
and things like this, so I can try and get stuff out a little more frequently for you.
01:10:50 ►
We’ll see how this works.
01:10:56 ►
Tonight I have a piece for you called The Birthright. It’s based on a series of short
01:11:02 ►
lectures done by the bar Terrence McKenna.
01:11:06 ►
They were all posted at the Psychedelic Salon podcast a couple of months ago.
01:11:12 ►
It was show number 120.
01:11:13 ►
I’ll put the link in the show notes, obviously.
01:11:16 ►
And it’s a really excellent podcast.
01:11:19 ►
You should really go listen to it.
01:11:21 ►
I can’t do it justice, but it’s outsider philosophy.
01:11:26 ►
It’s psychedelic thinking. It’s all kinds of good stuff. If you’re at all interested in philosophy or
01:11:33 ►
liminal art or anything like that, drugs, obviously, go check them out. They’re excellent.
01:11:43 ►
Anyway, Lorenzo, the host of the podcast, posted show 120,
01:11:47 ►
which is just a series of short things. He called it notes to himself, just little things
01:11:52 ►
that he never got around to doing anything else with. And one of these talks really,
01:11:59 ►
really inspired me. And I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, but I just sat down and
01:12:03 ►
started playing with it. And I ended up with the following piece now the background music is a song Babaji by the band and
01:12:11 ►
or artist Stargarden magnatoons.com they’ve got all kinds of interesting
01:12:16 ►
other music that you should also go listen to
01:12:20 ►
now sit back relax put your feet up.
01:12:25 ►
It’s kind of trippy.
01:12:26 ►
Enjoy.
01:12:28 ►
If you want to get in contact with me,
01:12:30 ►
you can email me at podcast at braindouche.net
01:12:33 ►
or you can leave comments on the website.
01:12:37 ►
I like feedback.
01:12:38 ►
Everybody likes feedback.
01:12:39 ►
Love to hear from you and hear what you think.
01:12:42 ►
All right.
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I hope you enjoy.
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There are thousands of altered states. You know, we know them. Orgasm, indigestion,
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two cappuccinos, where tequila takes you. So endless altered states.
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you endless altered states.
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And I’m not really interested in them, more or less, than any of you are.
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I mean, they’re part of life.
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What I’m interested in, as an experimentalist, as a connoisseur of nature, is this family of compounds called the indole hallucinogens.
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Indoles.
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They cause hallucination.
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They cause hallucinations.
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They’re objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
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A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be. Some people say, you know, that I’m a fetishist about this, that who cares, or that there are other things besides hallucination.
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Yes, I know, maybe, and of course, but the reason I’m so fascinated by hallucinations is because to my mind, when you’re hallucinating, you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not generating this material.
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For me, this was the revelation.
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It’s not funny ideas.
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For me, this was the revelation.
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It’s not racing thoughts. For me, this was the revelation. It’s not racing thoughts. For me, this was the revelation. It’s not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday. This
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is part of our birthright. That kind of thing we all can generate by just inspecting our own minds.
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They cause hallucination.
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A hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined.
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And if it previously could not be imagined,
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then there is no grounds for believing that you generated it out of yourself.
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For me, this was the revelation.
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For God’s sake, you ought to know what’s in your mind.
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This is part of our birthright.
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Well, then, if something comes forward and you say that’s not mine
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then you have a kind of perfect proof that this is coming from somewhere else
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is to be in the presence of that which previously could not be imagined. And then the question becomes, where?
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Where?
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Where?
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Somebody who didn’t like these substances would say,
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oh, well, it’s just neurological chaos.
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I know what a neurological chaos would look like.
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It would look like bright lights, moving patterns, of art, building plans, weapons, bits of manufactured technological detritus.
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These things are too coherent.
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They’re objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
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And for me, this was the revelation.
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The revelation of hallucination is to be in the presence of that which previously…
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The psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness
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as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities,
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or having hopes and dreams. Get it straight.
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This is about an experience, not my experience, your experience.
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It’s about an experience which you have, like getting laid or like going to Africa.
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You must do the experience.
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Otherwise, it’s just whistling past the graveyard.
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experience. Otherwise, it’s just whistling past the graveyard. And we’re not talking about something like being born again or meeting the flying saucers or something like that
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where good works and prayer are the method.
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Nobody is in a position to dismiss this just because it didn’t work for them on one or two tries.
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This is an art. It’s an art.
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It’s something you coax into existence.
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You have to learn to make love.
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You have to learn to speak English.
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Anything worth doing is an art that is acquired.
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This is part of our birthright.
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This is part of our birthright.
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Perhaps the most important part of our birthright. © transcript Emily Beynon you