143 - Rethinking Society

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake

[Quoting a friend] ” ‘The apocalypse is already happening.’ The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world.” –Terence McKenna

“If it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realm, then very little has to be done. If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic then what is the nature of the political and social world that we should construct for ourselves and our children?” –Terence McKenna

“What we have is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called “Family Values” by some people, but it has many names. It’s not an archaic social model, or anything rooted in long-term human organization. It’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy.” –Terence McKenna

“It seems to me that a whole re-thinking of the notion of freedom has to come, and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom.” –Terence McKenna

“I think we’re going to have to go back to Plato. Plato did not trust the poets, and the heirs of the poets in our hell bard are Madison Avenue.” –Terence McKenna

“The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos.”–Terence McKenna

“I’m basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions. But because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire.” –Terence McKenna

“I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other, which is acting on ordinary biology.” –Terence McKenna

“The government follows. It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now, and leadership comes from people, that’s us.” –Ralph Abraham

“We’re not being led by evil people. We’re being led by jackasses at this point.” –Terence McKenna

“Pretending that this catastrophe [a coming global ice age] is not probable will almost certainly guarantee that it takes place real soon.” -Ralph Abraham

“Let’s avoid the disease of denial, because if we don’t admit a problem then there is no solution.” –Ralph Abraham

“What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere. The right to deal Coca Cola in Afghanistan, that’s what free trade is, the right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan. It’s a bad idea, free trade. We don’t want to make trade easier. We want to make the manufacture of objects and excruciatingly expensive process and the moving of them from one market to another damn near impossible, because what we want is the de-materialization of culture.” –Terence McKenna

“The Great Leveling, which the Left always called for has in fact taken place in part, and that’s why you have less money. When the leveling took place did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook? You haven’t visited Bangladesh recently.” –Terence McKenna

Transcript

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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, it’s another week of getting this podcast out a little late.

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Sorry about that.

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However, since we were last together here in the salon,

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I traveled up to the high desert and spent some time with Gene and Myron Stolaroff.

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And while I was there, we called the Shulgens,

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and I got to hear Sasha sounding like

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his old self again. And I’ll tell you more about all of that after we hear today’s trial log.

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First, however, I want to thank Barry H. for sending us a donation this week. Thanks a lot,

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Barry. I know that we all listen to podcasts while we’re out and about, and so it takes a little extra effort to go to our website and make a donation,

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but I want you to know that your help in getting these podcasts out each week is very greatly appreciated.

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Now, I have a feeling that today’s talk is going to become the basis for some interesting discussion in the program notes for this podcast. It’s a trilogue and is

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led by Terence McKenna, who establishes the topic

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as shamanism as a forecasting tool, but

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then he seems to, or the whole discussion kind of seems to

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drift off into a rethinking of society and the

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nation-state as a tool of fascism,

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before morphing into a discussion of the then newly emerging rave phenomena.

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Did I mention that this was recorded in 1992?

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It’s a really wide-ranging discussion,

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and I think it provides some interesting twists and turns in addition to

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a few good laughs. Terrence evokes the Trilog by giving his forecast of what may happen between

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1992 and the year 2000. Now, if you are a strictly literal person, the change in the millennium has come and gone. But if you’re of a more poetic bent,

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then you understand that these numbered years are only approximations for the changes in

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consciousness that seem to take place every thousand years or so. And in a moment, we’re

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going to hear Terence talking about what went on, or more accurately, what didn’t go on around the year 999.

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And then he goes on to talk about managing our way through the millennium, which I think suggests that maybe we’re still doing just that.

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My take on all of this millennial stuff is that perhaps we’re still in the midst of a major change in our

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perceptions of the world, not all that unlike the change that took place around the year

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1500 when it finally began to dawn on people that the earth wasn’t the center of the universe,

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nor was it flat.

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It seems to me that we humans are now undergoing a similar change in consciousness

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and realizing that, yes, in fact, there are dimensions beyond the four we seem to be stuck in,

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and that there may even be sentient life in those other dimensions as well.

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Maybe the actual calendar date for the millennium turnover is 2012,

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and that the significance of that date, like

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the year 1500, a year that marked the approximate middle of a multi-generational shift in consciousness,

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or maybe it’s just another number.

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Only time will tell, I guess.

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Anyway, as we listen to Terence right now, You may find his comments more significant if you aren’t completely locked into thinking that the Millennium Consciousness changeover date was the year 2000.

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So let’s join Terrence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake for an afternoon trialogue on the campus of Esalen sometime in 1992.

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And we’ll see how close to the mark their predictions were.

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Oh, and one more thing.

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As has been the case with all of the trialogues in this series,

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there’s a short gap in the recording while a full tape was being replaced with a new one.

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This time it’s Ralph who has one of his thoughts truncated a bit,

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but I think you’ll be able to piece it together as not much seems to have been lost.

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Now, here’s Terrence McKenna.

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Okay, Dad.

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So we’ll have the same format as this morning,

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and I guess I’ll be up to bat this afternoon.

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The notion being to talk about the future,

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not the future that I love so well,

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not the future that I love so well, which is the future where the whole world

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disappears up its own kazoo

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in a kind of transcendental self-erasure

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sometime around 2012,

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but something more immediate,

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which is the immediate future and the situation

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surrounding the millennium

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the idea being

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that shamanism

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if it’s

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to make good on its claim

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of being a penetration

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into a kind of higher mathematical

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space

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ought then to be

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a forecasting tool in any and all situations. And so I thought to evoke the

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future as I see it, some of it being positive, some of it being negative, and then just see what kind of a

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response it evokes.

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Recently I’ve seen the future somewhat differently, I think in the wake of the Rio conference

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and then the large conference on AIDS that was held in Amsterdam, because it seemed to me, as a child, I grew up near Mesa Verde

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in the Four Corners area of Colorado, and we would always visit this as a family outing.

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And the great mystery the rangers would tell us is why these people died out, why they

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left the mesas after living there for a thousand years.

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And this fascinated me, this concept of a culture dying out.

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And it’s sort of like these catchphrases like the end of the novel or the end of the symphony.

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You know, you try to imagine how can such a thing end. And recently I’ve had a glimpse of how cultures slip away from themselves.

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And I think it’s worth invoking so that it doesn’t happen to us.

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It’s hard for us to imagine our culture dying because it’s a global culture. I mean it seems to have

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unlimited resources that it can call upon, but when you travel in the third

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world you encounter what is referred to in United Nations reports as deferred maintenance.

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This is where you go to the International Airport and large pieces

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of plumbing are peeling out of the walls or as you motor into the capital city

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you see gutter reconstruction projects that have obviously gone on for decades with no conclusion.

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And more and more you see this kind of thing in this country.

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Someone visited me from England last week and said,

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the apocalypse is already happening.

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The slow apocalypse is unraveling all over the world.

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I mean, if you want apocalypse,

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you only have to take an airplane to Yugoslavia,

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to Lebanon, to Somalia.

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You know, the list is far too long.

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And there you find it.

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Here among our prophets and seers

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from Malibu to Mendocino,

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the thing is only dimly glimpsed as yet

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with the aid of the Mayan calendar

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and other suitable divinatory tools.

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But that’s because we live in an incredible bubble of privilege

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well so i’m in my own life think a lot about both historical inevitability and its paradoxical

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twin political responsibility you know if it’s all on automatic, if the world is either undergoing some kind of mass

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extinction and soul migration into the Elysium realms, then very little has to be done.

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If, on the other hand, it isn’t on automatic, then what is the nature of the political and social world

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that we should construct for ourselves and our children?

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And I think for a long, long time,

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since the end of World War II, basically,

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we have been living in a future-phobic society

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where for all of the baubles and technology that has been foisted upon us

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no real change has been tolerated I mean when you look back to the 1930s you see

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that for better or ill enormous social experiments were underway the New Deal in the United States and the Third

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Reich in Germany which was a thousand year plan involving genetic purification

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of a race highways from Vladivostok to Paris so forth and so on that scale of planning has been banished since, well, for sixty years, basically.

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And what we have instead is a future-phobic society that places a great deal of stress

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on the preservation of a pseudo-tradition called family values by some people but it has many names it is it is

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not any it’s not an archaic social model or anything rooted in long-term human

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organization it’s basically the 19th century industrial model of the couple with some children fitted into an industrial economy.

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Now I think that the contradictions of these future phobic attitudes

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have become unbearable.

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And so the log jam that has been in place essentially since 1945

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is beginning to break up. It

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came first at the weak point, obviously, which is was the Soviet Union. I mean a

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system so built on contradiction that, you know, the least breath of reality and it collapsed and that spread a lot of joy in the murkier minds of the West,

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I think, because what was not understood initially was that what this presaged was a crisis in values in our societies

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because the fact is

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capitalism and democracy

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are implacable foes.

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They can give no quarter.

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These are two utterly distinct theories of human worth. One which says you are what you own and control, preferably the means of production. have equal weight in the political process and by implication in some metaphysical scheme

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of values.

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Well, now these two systems are nakedly exposed in their opposition to each other.

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It seems to me, and it sort of comes out of what Ralph talked about this morning,

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that in trying to get a general overview of what these bifurcations are that loom in the future,

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they have to do with choice on many, many levels.

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I mean, obviously what’s up for a lot of people is reproductive choice.

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But there are also, you know, a lot of people in the world don’t like being where they are.

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They would rather migrate somewhere else. choice of travel, choice of location, reproductive choice, job choice,

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all of these things are values either to be preserved or to be consciously suppressed.

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suppressed. The global society is now an integrated unit in the sense that the data that it generates

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flows into central modeling institutions that then give a picture of it back.

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But to date, we have not confronted the implications of this in terms of planning.

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We have been essentially passively contemplating the buildup of an explosive

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situation very fatalistically, and now

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we at least I think should contemplate the possibility of intervening in our situation

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you know I hear all kinds of fatalism

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I hear people saying that our two main problems are population

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and epidemically transmitted sexual social diseases

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and that therefore no problem, you see.

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But I find that a fairly horrifying way to manage human affairs

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simply by an appeal to nature to cut us down,

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to send the grim reaper among us

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because we can’t manage our own destinies.

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It seems to me that a whole rethinking

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of the notion of freedom has to come

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and that it isn’t strictly a matter of more freedom.

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One of the things that I think the 20th century

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has secured

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but is reluctant to face

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is the toxic power of imagery

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that this is the century of the perfection

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on a scale previously undreamed of

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of propaganda

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and propaganda

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has to do with the toxicity

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of images

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now here at a place like Esalen

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we give lip service

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to the idea that images can heal

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but it also means

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they can hurt

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and there are far more hurtful

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images around than healing

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images

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now a social polity coming out of John Locke and the

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English social philosophers would want to stay away from that in the John

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Stuart Mill tradition but I think we’re gonna have to go back to Plato Plato did

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not trust the poets and the heirs of the poets in our hell bardo or madison avenue because uh you know images

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are being manipulated to the point where democratic institutions become a joke because they are simply

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referendums of or rather exhibitions of conditioned behavior which was not the notion in the first place.

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I’m trying to stay away from the obvious things on the political agenda.

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Reconstruction of the environment,

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advancement of women to positions of power,

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advancement of women to positions of power,

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promotion of multiculturalism, this sort of thing,

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because these are, to my mind, basically clichés.

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Not that I don’t agree with them,

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but they’re not particularly interesting. The interesting ideas have to do with touching the taboos.

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As we approach the millennium,

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it’s going to become increasingly important to,

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if not control,

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certainly regulate and monitor the irrational element among us,

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which is a curious concept

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because largely we are the irrational element.

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However, we’re not nearly as irrational

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as you might wish to be assured.

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Just listen to what’s on AM radio on Sunday morning

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and you’ll discover that you ain’t irrational.

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You represent an extremely high slice of rationality

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compared to the foment that builds

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in those that follow

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what we euphemistically call

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the way of cheeses.

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And this is going to pose social problems

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as we manage our way through the millennium.

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It did at the last millennium.

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I mean, for the three years centered around 999,

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people simply stood slack-jawed in the streets of Europe

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with their eyes fixed on the sky.

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No work got done.

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Well, the consequences then were trivial.

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Now it’s not so clear.

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I mean, what we’re really caught in is a clash of values

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that’s getting an un, that where the traditionalist

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side is getting an unhealthy handicap because of calendrical coincidence. You know, just

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being born or living through the close of the second millennium Poses all kinds of problems for societies that are trying to preserve

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Humanist social values if the Renaissance had begun in 985 I dare say it would have failed

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Let’s see anything else I guess I should just sum it up

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The concept which lies behind this is the idea of guiding images

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Eric Jancz who I think we all

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Related to used to talk about this that a society has to be given guiding images

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Mike Lewin said the 20th century has navigated the way you drive a car using a rear-view mirror.

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In other words, almost entirely without guiding images.

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It’s the disgrace of 20th century social philosophy

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that the only two innovative social ideas the 20th century can claim as its own

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are Freudian psychoanalysis

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which was put out of business last week by Woody Allen

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and fascism

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these are the two authentic ideological contributions

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of the 20th century

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socialism is a 19th century idea

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fully worked out in the 19th century

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so I think that, you know, I’m

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basically an optimist, but not because I have faith in human institutions, but

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because I think there is a transcendental attractor that will

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eventually pull our chestnuts out of the fire. But in the time which lies between then and now,

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and in the spirit of covering one’s bets,

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I think it’s worthwhile talking about

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how society should seriously be reconstructed

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to make it a more livable place.

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I think the recent election in England

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and the election we’re enduring here

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prove that we cannot expect to hear

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any kind of meaningful reformist rhetoric from politicians

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and have there be any hope of it actually winning at the polls.

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So then

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it behooves dissidents

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like ourselves to try

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and offer something

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other than

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UFO

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rescue or utter

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despair as

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the two poles of the

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political dialogue.

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Gentlemen.

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I missed a key word there.

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What is it that’s going to pull our chestnuts out of the fire?

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The transcendental object at the end of time.

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I mean, I still believe that time is speeding up,

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that history is an alchemical rarefaction,

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up, that history is an alchemical rarefaction, that at the end we’ll all go off hand in hand with the sacred heart or something.

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You agree with Robbie Reagan.

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Well, we’ve had this discussion before.

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In fact, it’s in our other book.

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All these Christers got a piece of the action, but they didn’t get the clear vision.

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They just have a fairy tale about it, and I suppose so do we.

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But I do believe that history is the proof of the presence of a hyperdimensional something or other

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which is acting on ordinary biology

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But what are we going to do until that?

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Final moment when it reveals itself to us

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I think it’s only you know 20 years or so in the future

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But I also am going to live through that 20 years with a bunch of anxious and disturbed people.

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Well, why don’t we just take drugs?

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I mean, 20 years?

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I mean, the millennia…

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He said it, Fox.

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What a brilliant suggestion.

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Why shall we, you know, struggle to envision

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or more than envision to remake society in 10 years

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when in 20 years we’re going to be carried off in chariots.

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Well, I’m not sure.

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Maybe, I mean, I’m not sure.

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Maybe we shouldn’t.

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The whole idea of the eschaton might be one of those ideas

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working militantly most strongly against any social change.

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Let’s just hang on to our flying carpets.

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Well, you may

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be right. So if that were

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true, would you think it a

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good thing or a bad thing?

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Well, just in case the eschaton

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doesn’t snatch us from the fire.

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Yeah, that’s what I have. What to do

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if the end of time is postponed?

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A couple of… So what would you suggest?

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Well, let’s say we’re visioning the year 2000.

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We got, let’s say, seven years from today.

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We’ll be back here again for only our 11th trial arc.

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And then we’ll be looking backward on those magic three years

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which produced this.

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And seven years is not such a long time.

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So one reason we despair is that we can’t achieve much in seven years.

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I mean, look at the last seven years.

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Suppose we had 20 years or 30 years,

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that’s not much better.

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History is a snail crawling down the trail.

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So I think we, just to inject a note of positivity,

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if that’s allowed,

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let us think briefly of the years 1965 to 1968.

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They are in a short time. I mean, all of you were here,

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were somewhere nearby,

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and experienced a fantastic social transformation,

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more than we could have dreamed.

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Now, true, it died. It peaked and died.

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Nevertheless, what could be achieved,

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and it was kind of going in the direction we’ve been talking about.

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There we had the total transformation of the family

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into the extended family of a prehistoric tribal life.

00:26:39 ►

We had the resacralization of the world with new religions,

00:26:44 ►

some of them inherited from

00:26:47 ►

the pagan past, practiced on every mountaintop in California and around the world.

00:26:53 ►

There we had new forms of music, new forms of government, new schools, different ways

00:26:58 ►

of teaching an entire new society, such as we feel we need now.

00:27:03 ►

And nevertheless, it failed.

00:27:05 ►

Furthermore, we experienced that it had faults in its structure,

00:27:09 ►

and also the staff.

00:27:13 ►

Some of the people involved, such as us, had faults,

00:27:17 ►

which we carried along from our history in this dominator society

00:27:21 ►

that we couldn’t expunge sufficiently rapidly to

00:27:27 ►

function successfully in the new family structures and so on. So when, for example,

00:27:36 ►

we can dismiss revolutionary movements of the environment and women’s rights, on

00:27:44 ►

the other hand, the existence of these movements,

00:27:47 ►

which began with the failure of the 60s revolution

00:27:51 ►

and continue to this day,

00:27:53 ►

when another social transformation of that rapidity should start,

00:27:57 ►

if that were a possibility,

00:27:59 ►

then the progress made in the meanwhile

00:28:00 ►

might actually be the foundation for a success

00:28:04 ►

instead of a failure of that three-year miracle.

00:28:08 ►

So that’s just for the sake of optimism to recall that a rapid change can take place,

00:28:14 ►

and we have made big strides as a family in the intervening years.

00:28:18 ►

So if we could achieve even a fraction of what was achieved in the 60s,

00:28:23 ►

that might actually be enough.

00:28:26 ►

Probably not, because, don’t forget,

00:28:28 ►

there was the forces of opposition, right,

00:28:32 ►

as documented in the end of your book,

00:28:35 ►

with their insidious campaign of crack cocaine,

00:28:38 ►

heroin from the Golden Triangle, and so on,

00:28:41 ►

destroying the heart of the revolutionary movement

00:28:44 ►

in urban America.

00:28:47 ►

So we need more than any of this.

00:28:55 ►

I think we need to think of a trigger, what you call a clarion call in your book. And, well, we want to avoid the use of the word revolution due to the fact that that

00:29:10 ►

always polarizes an equal and opposite reaction, which we don’t want to trigger.

00:29:17 ►

But…

00:29:18 ►

Call it an evolution.

00:29:19 ►

An evolution.

00:29:20 ►

In the past, there have been all of these, you know, popular uprisings where actually the trigger came.

00:29:28 ►

We don’t care who’s elected, really, on the 2nd of November for president of the United States because the government follows.

00:29:36 ►

It doesn’t lead. We need leadership now. Leadership comes from people. That’s us.

00:29:41 ►

So we don’t want a violent revolution and destroying all these

00:29:46 ►

buildings downtown. But somehow we would like to see within seven years a kind of a wake-up

00:29:57 ►

where a certain number of people just woke up and said, that’s enough of that. That’s

00:30:01 ►

all what we, the idea, and then to start doing it.

00:30:06 ►

We don’t even know what ever triggered

00:30:08 ►

one of these major social transformations of the past,

00:30:11 ►

such as, let’s say, the Renaissance,

00:30:14 ►

or the one we actually lived through, the 1960s.

00:30:18 ►

What triggered it?

00:30:20 ►

I know what you’d say.

00:30:22 ►

It’s too obvious.

00:30:24 ►

It’s what anyone would say.

00:30:26 ►

Try and go for

00:30:27 ►

the Renaissance. Money.

00:30:30 ►

Something is happening

00:30:31 ►

again, and maybe Rupert should tell us about

00:30:33 ►

the raves going on in London.

00:30:38 ►

But…

00:30:39 ►

I don’t know about that.

00:30:40 ►

I certainly think

00:30:42 ►

that the year

00:30:44 ►

2000 is a way of focusing our minds tremendously

00:30:48 ►

I find 2012 a kind of diversion from this exercise that it does make it seem almost

00:30:58 ►

irrelevant 2000 is very much a subsidiary thing from the point of view of the 2012 scenario.

00:31:08 ►

It’s at best a kind of temporary holding operation.

00:31:15 ►

I had hoped that we’d have a full-scale rehearsal for this revisioning exercise this year.

00:31:20 ►

I’ve been sadly disappointed, since, as everybody knows, this is the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Columbus by the Native Americans.

00:31:29 ►

This is one of those historical moments which reaches popular consciousness everywhere.

00:31:36 ►

These calendrical moments can affect the consciousness of everybody.

00:31:41 ►

Books that we write or anybody in this room writes or TV documentaries on public

00:31:47 ►

television reach a few but this Columbus thing Columbus Day this year there’s not going to be

00:31:52 ►

a man woman or child in the Americas who’s not going to know about it and the the 500th anniversary

00:32:00 ►

could have been an opportunity for a tremendous revisioning

00:32:06 ►

of America, the new vision that

00:32:08 ►

America gave 500 years

00:32:10 ►

ago and which still exerts

00:32:12 ►

a kind of fascination over the imagination

00:32:14 ►

of the world. What these

00:32:16 ►

people in Russia and Georgia

00:32:18 ►

and everywhere else want, what they’re aspiring

00:32:20 ►

to is something to do

00:32:22 ►

with what’s happening in the west coast

00:32:23 ►

of the USA

00:32:24 ►

so America’s still to is something to do with what’s happening in the west coast of the USA

00:32:26 ►

so America’s still the source of vision for the whole world but unfortunately

00:32:30 ►

the vision that’s coming out of Hollywood and TV productions here is not

00:32:36 ►

one really the first one with tremendous optimism so it could have been a huge

00:32:42 ►

revisioning opportunity that the new vision of where America could go for the next 500 years or just the next 100 years.

00:32:50 ►

And I’d hope that there’d be a massive ferment of visionary activity in the Americas leading up to this year.

00:32:57 ►

Maybe it’s going on, maybe I just haven’t heard about it.

00:33:01 ►

But so far it’s not given much hope for encouragement

00:33:06 ►

I’d hope this would be a

00:33:08 ►

rehearsal for the year 2000

00:33:10 ►

when surely all of us

00:33:12 ►

will feel a need for some new

00:33:14 ►

vision to stumble into the next millennium

00:33:16 ►

with people like John Major

00:33:18 ►

and George Bush around

00:33:19 ►

is not really going to be

00:33:22 ►

very inspiring for many, many people

00:33:24 ►

are going to want a greater inspiration than that.

00:33:29 ►

And I find it very hard to see where it’s going to come from,

00:33:32 ►

because it’s not as if there are totally fascinating models of the future available at the moment.

00:33:39 ►

The only ones I find really exciting are the ecological ones,

00:33:43 ►

and those are largely negative, stop cutting

00:33:45 ►

down the rainforests, stop

00:33:47 ►

killing the whales

00:33:48 ►

just limiting the destruction that

00:33:51 ►

we’re bringing about, in terms of

00:33:54 ►

positive visions

00:33:54 ►

the ones that I find most exciting are

00:33:57 ►

ones that involve a return to local

00:33:59 ►

communities, the people walking

00:34:01 ►

around or cycling and not

00:34:04 ►

travelling everywhere,

00:34:05 ►

huge distances, enormous consumption of fossil fuels, emissions of CO2 and so on.

00:34:12 ►

But most forces are working against that at the moment.

00:34:16 ►

And even our present, I don’t know how many tonnes of carbon dioxide

00:34:20 ►

have been released by our gathering here this weekend, a formidable amount.

00:34:25 ►

So we still haven’t got that vision, and for me that’s the thing we lack most,

00:34:30 ►

the vision of where we actually want to go.

00:34:33 ►

Because the vision of local community, which is the one I find most attractive,

00:34:36 ►

is still far away from the lifestyle of myself or most people I know.

00:34:42 ►

So I myself don’t quite see where this new vision is going to come from. It

00:34:47 ►

hasn’t emerged so far. So what you’re saying is that the alternative vision that is offered

00:34:55 ►

is basically a steady state thing. It’s all about stop cutting down the rainforests, stop releasing CFCs. Nobody ever says, you know,

00:35:06 ►

but what about the future destiny of the human species? What’s your plan for that?

00:35:11 ►

Well, I think that most people when they confront that question find it so

00:35:16 ►

horrific, you know, overpopulation. Well, there’s been a total, as you say, a total

00:35:22 ►

failure in leadership. How the Soviet Union could undergo collapse,

00:35:28 ►

and it’s almost like there must be an official ban

00:35:31 ►

on suggesting a worldwide cutback in military expenditures.

00:35:38 ►

I mean, why isn’t there a 20% cutback by everybody?

00:35:43 ►

How could that hurt anybody?

00:35:46 ►

All games could continue to be played,

00:35:49 ►

but just simply at a slightly lower level.

00:35:52 ►

There’s been another thing I don’t understand.

00:35:58 ►

The collapse of the international military machine

00:36:02 ►

is creating mass joblessness,

00:36:06 ►

but at the same time they decide to end all manned space flight and high-tech space

00:36:11 ►

exploration when this is clearly a perfect field in which to funnel

00:36:16 ►

high-tech military budgets and keep the engineers employed keep your technical

00:36:22 ►

base sharp and not produce useless weapons and stuff that depreciates at a staggering rate.

00:36:31 ►

So it’s bad management, even of their own stated goals.

00:36:38 ►

I mean, we’re not being led by evil people.

00:36:40 ►

We’re being led by jackasses at this point.

00:36:44 ►

Well, I don’t know.

00:36:47 ►

I think it looks like we’re being led by jackasses,

00:36:52 ►

and I certainly don’t want to suggest that there might be intelligent leaders somewhere,

00:36:57 ►

but I think the situation is rather worse than that.

00:37:00 ►

The leaders are pretending to lead, but as a matter of fact,

00:37:04 ►

the entire system is way out of control, as, of course, it always has been, because it’s evolving

00:37:10 ►

under essentially mathematical forces, I mean a dynamical system inherent in the rules of

00:37:17 ►

the game, the fundamental psychic equipment of the human species. So whereas it looks like there are nations with leaders

00:37:27 ►

and organizations of nations like NATO, the United Nations, and so on,

00:37:32 ►

as a matter of fact, the whole system, I think, is simply out of control,

00:37:36 ►

always was, and not necessarily always will be.

00:37:42 ►

The collapse of the Soviet Union

00:37:45 ►

was inherent in the dynamic,

00:37:47 ►

the rules of the game of the Soviet Union,

00:37:50 ►

in that it was over-controlled

00:37:51 ►

and there was inadequate space for chaos to play.

00:37:56 ►

It had to crash.

00:37:58 ►

No decision of a leader

00:38:00 ►

or popular movement of revolt

00:38:03 ►

or minor change of the structure could make

00:38:06 ►

any change in this collapse

00:38:08 ►

except possibly a year

00:38:10 ►

or two one way or the other.

00:38:12 ►

So I think the

00:38:13 ►

I don’t want to sound

00:38:16 ►

pessimistic because I think

00:38:18 ►

there might be some solution

00:38:19 ►

that an intervention

00:38:22 ►

as Terence suggested is

00:38:24 ►

possible and may even take place, resulting from meetings like Rio and Amsterdam,

00:38:30 ►

where not the George Bushes of the world,

00:38:33 ►

but the native peoples of the world somehow get together

00:38:38 ►

and produce and implement a new idea.

00:38:42 ►

produce and implement a new idea.

00:38:50 ►

So this is in the category bad news is good news.

00:38:56 ►

It seems pretty certain that a real nightmare is coming.

00:38:57 ►

It’s evident. I don’t mean the ozone hole and an increased rate of skin cancer.

00:39:09 ►

rate of skin cancer. I’m talking about an ice age, glaciation, inhabitability of most of the northern hemisphere, the rapid flight of people from the northern cities like London and Copenhagen

00:39:15 ►

leaving for Portugal and North Africa. I’m talking about the collapse of the monetary system,

00:39:22 ►

the increasing poverty of the United States

00:39:25 ►

and later other developed nations,

00:39:27 ►

especially Europe,

00:39:28 ►

a process that would be accelerated

00:39:31 ►

by the unification of Europe

00:39:33 ►

as understood by the Danish voters

00:39:37 ►

and maybe a few other people in Europe.

00:39:42 ►

This, pretending that this catastrophe is not probable will almost certainly guarantee

00:39:49 ►

that it takes place real soon. So I think what we want to do is to vision the magnitude of the

00:39:56 ►

problem and then to vision a few alternative miracles by which this catastrophe would be adverted. And one of them I’ve been trying to advertise has to do with the incomprehensible complexity

00:40:11 ►

of the combined system of the environment and the economy.

00:40:17 ►

Now we have so many people on Earth, there’s no way, just by returning to local communities,

00:40:22 ►

even if we could achieve that within 12 months,

00:40:26 ►

we could still not avert an economic catastrophe

00:40:29 ►

due to the fact that the economic system,

00:40:32 ►

there are so many people, there has to be an economy,

00:40:34 ►

it’s highly unstable, and it’s strongly coupled to the environment.

00:40:39 ►

So if we evoke any apparently wise move, intervention, risky experiment

00:40:47 ►

with regard to the environment,

00:40:51 ►

like make it impossible for people to cut a single additional tree in the Amazon,

00:40:56 ►

then the backlash, the uncontrollable, unpredictable backlash into the economy

00:41:03 ►

could actually be catastrophic

00:41:06 ►

and much faster than if we made no intervention.

00:41:10 ►

What we need in order to survive as a species is to increase our intelligence

00:41:16 ►

beyond the cleverness of, at present, the most clever people,

00:41:21 ►

the most radical thinking, the best artists, and so on. We need to advance our intelligence through coming to understand new mathematical structures

00:41:31 ►

and ways of understanding the complexity of the most complicated systems,

00:41:35 ►

so that if we were going to do an intervention, either with regard to the economic system,

00:41:43 ►

with regard to the economic system, such as the unification of Europe, or the environment, such as making combustion of fossil fuel illegal,

00:41:53 ►

or something like that,

00:41:55 ►

that this intervention that we plan to do,

00:41:59 ►

although still not guaranteed to work,

00:42:02 ►

would have its possibility, and for a lot of places around

00:42:07 ►

the world. Unfortunately, we don’t have 50 years, and the strategy that I’m recommending,

00:42:12 ►

I guess I have already abandoned it because it takes too long. It seems to me, this is

00:42:19 ►

the microstructure of my own pessimism that we don’t even have

00:42:26 ►

ten years really to

00:42:27 ►

avoid a really

00:42:29 ►

terminal

00:42:32 ►

situation

00:42:33 ►

for

00:42:34 ►

society as we know it

00:42:37 ►

for the civilization

00:42:40 ►

of these past thousands

00:42:42 ►

of years

00:42:42 ►

so the vision that I’m recommending in place of,

00:42:48 ►

I mean, the vision department here is empty.

00:42:50 ►

I’m saying let’s avoid the disease of denial

00:42:55 ►

because if we don’t admit a problem, then there’s no solution.

00:43:00 ►

And let’s, people always say, oh, doomsday,

00:43:04 ►

if you think like that then no

00:43:06 ►

I want to acknowledge

00:43:08 ►

the magnitude of the problem

00:43:10 ►

and simultaneously

00:43:11 ►

to vision

00:43:13 ►

what would have to be essentially a miracle

00:43:16 ►

which averts the disaster

00:43:18 ►

for humans

00:43:20 ►

and the environment

00:43:21 ►

so what is the miracle

00:43:24 ►

for uh… humans and the environment so what i’m calling for

00:43:29 ►

well i i think that uh… it’s

00:43:32 ►

uh… possible for

00:43:34 ►

people to get together

00:43:36 ►

and uh…

00:43:38 ►

undertake

00:43:39 ►

the visioning process

00:43:42 ►

that will produce a miracle we can’t think up a miracle right now

00:43:47 ►

but it would take

00:43:49 ►

a clarion call

00:43:50 ►

by all means we have to

00:43:53 ►

avoid practicing

00:43:55 ►

denial

00:43:56 ►

we have to admit that the environment is threatened

00:43:59 ►

and the economy is threatened

00:44:01 ►

and what happened in the Soviet Union

00:44:03 ►

happened very rapidly

00:44:05 ►

and was incontrovertible.

00:44:09 ►

And it’s happened now. It’s history, and yet they have a future.

00:44:12 ►

That may be happening here also.

00:44:14 ►

I think that the people who run the world are not in a state of denial.

00:44:19 ►

Then nobody runs the world.

00:44:21 ►

Well, I mean the people who think they own it.

00:44:23 ►

In other words, the Fortune 500 corporations.

00:44:26 ►

No, but giving them responsibility itself is part of the problem

00:44:30 ►

because they have nothing to do with it.

00:44:32 ►

There’s nothing they can do.

00:44:34 ►

I think that’s their conclusion as well, that there’s a spreading.

00:44:38 ►

Did you see this report from the Vienna modeling group

00:44:41 ►

that was released two weeks ago where they said,

00:44:44 ►

there’s

00:44:45 ►

nothing anybody can do it’s too late the fail-safe point was passed I don’t know

00:44:52 ►

18 months ago or something anyway their view of it is hang on no I think we can

00:45:00 ►

do better than that I think let’s let’s just suppose for a moment that the

00:45:04 ►

doomsday people

00:45:05 ►

were right. Then, although

00:45:07 ►

it’s very rapid, it proceeds in steps.

00:45:10 ►

So it would get to a certain

00:45:11 ►

step, which is, let’s say

00:45:13 ►

the climate got three degrees

00:45:15 ►

warmer.

00:45:17 ►

I don’t think you need these exotic

00:45:19 ►

scenarios. You’ve got an epidemic

00:45:22 ►

disease going that

00:45:23 ►

could kill

00:45:24 ►

seven-eighths

00:45:26 ►

of the Earth’s population

00:45:27 ►

in the next 40 years. You don’t need

00:45:30 ►

planetary

00:45:31 ►

dynamics or any of this

00:45:34 ►

woo-woo stuff. You’ve got a

00:45:36 ►

science fiction situation

00:45:38 ►

raging. No, people are still

00:45:40 ►

completely denying that there’s any

00:45:42 ►

problem.

00:45:44 ►

I don’t think most people I think

00:45:46 ►

certainly these big corporations

00:45:47 ►

say the 500 top

00:45:49 ►

corporations, I’ve had contact

00:45:52 ►

recently with one of them in Britain, Shell

00:45:54 ►

the international

00:45:55 ►

oil company

00:45:57 ►

and they have a think tank

00:45:59 ►

situated in London with the brightest people

00:46:02 ►

from their offices all around the world

00:46:04 ►

and the job of this think tank is to think out future scenarios

00:46:08 ►

because their managers are having to invest 20, 50 years ahead in some cases.

00:46:13 ►

And so they don’t know what’s going to happen.

00:46:15 ►

So they’ve got this group together.

00:46:18 ►

And this group that’s trying to write the scenarios for the top managers of Shell

00:46:21 ►

doesn’t know what’s going to happen either.

00:46:23 ►

So they asked me to come along and to try and tell them what I thought was going

00:46:27 ►

to happen well so I spent I’ve spent some interesting days with these

00:46:33 ►

scenario writers in just one such company and they don’t have any better

00:46:38 ►

clue than we do and the the main thing they’ve got there is they have

00:46:43 ►

alternative scenarios and they the two alternatives they’ve got though is they have alternative scenarios and the

00:46:46 ►

two alternatives they’re working on

00:46:48 ►

are actually quite interesting, they systematise

00:46:50 ►

what we all know, two major

00:46:52 ►

processes, one is globalisation

00:46:54 ►

one scenario has

00:46:56 ►

more and more multinationals, more and more

00:46:58 ►

media link-ups, more and more

00:47:00 ►

integration of the world economy

00:47:01 ►

more and more of this globalising process

00:47:04 ►

of which the European

00:47:05 ►

common market is a political expression

00:47:07 ►

you know the mega

00:47:09 ►

bureaucracy running Europe

00:47:11 ►

then expansion of the western European

00:47:13 ►

common market to include eastern Europe

00:47:15 ►

and Russia opening up

00:47:17 ►

Siberia and so on as part of a

00:47:19 ►

greater European

00:47:20 ►

new European empire with vast hinterlands

00:47:24 ►

it was Hitler’s plan Ilands it was Hitler’s plan

00:47:25 ►

it’s Hitler’s plan basically

00:47:28 ►

that the EEC has inherited

00:47:29 ►

now that

00:47:30 ►

Russia and Eastern Europe

00:47:33 ►

those empires have collapsed

00:47:35 ►

anyway there’s this globalization

00:47:37 ►

model but the

00:47:39 ►

alternative scenario is the exact

00:47:41 ►

opposite, it’s one of progressive

00:47:43 ►

fragmentationmentation large units

00:47:45 ►

falling apart, states decomposing

00:47:48 ►

as the Soviet Union has and

00:47:49 ►

Yugoslavia is, petty nationalisms

00:47:52 ►

tin pot

00:47:54 ►

fascist states

00:47:55 ►

ethnic unrest and conflict

00:47:57 ►

in the cities and so on, that’s all

00:47:59 ►

happening too, and the interesting

00:48:02 ►

thing is that these seemingly opposite

00:48:03 ►

processes are both happening in dramatic and lurid ways right now. And one of their models extrapolates

00:48:11 ►

one as the main tendency of the future, the other model extrapolates the other. And they

00:48:17 ►

have of course an intermediate scenario that’s a mixture of the two. But they haven’t a clue

00:48:23 ►

which of these models is going to happen all they

00:48:26 ►

do in their planning at the moment is to consider that they have to work in a

00:48:30 ►

situation where it could go one way or the other or be a mixture between the

00:48:34 ►

two but beyond that they don’t seem to have any idea of the way things are

00:48:39 ►

going and they’ll I mean if you were around in London more or you Terence

00:48:42 ►

they probably ask you as well to go along and tell them.

00:48:45 ►

We don’t know either.

00:48:46 ►

So it is a matter of the blind.

00:48:48 ►

No, we know, we know.

00:48:50 ►

We don’t know whether, well, do we?

00:48:53 ►

Yes, I think we do.

00:48:55 ►

Well, as far back as the Mechanical Bride, which was 1952,

00:49:03 ►

McLuhan was talking about what he called electronic feudalism and

00:49:07 ►

Said the world will fragment and it seemed completely unlikely

00:49:12 ►

Because the United Nations was on the rise these vast power blocks were squaring off

00:49:17 ►

But I think it’s clearly happening. I think that federal Europe is a dream. It will never happen

00:49:23 ►

I think that federal Europe is a dream.

00:49:24 ►

It will never happen.

00:49:26 ►

It’s dead.

00:49:28 ►

The people reject it.

00:49:31 ►

It’s only in the glass ministries in Brussels that the heart beats fast for European federalism now.

00:49:36 ►

It’s finished.

00:49:37 ►

Russia is falling apart.

00:49:39 ►

But it’s not a state.

00:49:41 ►

Russia is falling apart.

00:49:43 ►

Russia will become what the Soviet Union

00:49:46 ►

was, 15 separate warring

00:49:48 ►

factions.

00:49:49 ►

32 out of

00:49:51 ►

36 Northern California

00:49:54 ►

counties voted

00:49:55 ►

to separate from Southern

00:49:58 ►

California. Canada

00:49:59 ►

is falling apart. And strangely

00:50:02 ►

enough, meanwhile, at the top in the

00:50:04 ►

world of George Bush and John Maj John majors there’s a feverish enthusiasm for unity for great

00:50:11 ►

trade blocs and wide-flung negotiation this is clearly a last-ditch effort to

00:50:19 ►

keep this globalism together and you know Yugoslavia is a bad example, obviously,

00:50:28 ►

but it was the inheritor of great power rivalry.

00:50:32 ►

I think that Czechoslovakia, that dissolution is the one to watch,

00:50:38 ►

because here people simply want to rule their own turf.

00:50:43 ►

And after all, why shouldn’t they?

00:50:45 ►

Like one of the most suspect notions running around is free trade.

00:50:52 ►

Free trade is a notion that people, right-thinking people of decent upbringing,

00:50:59 ►

are expected to stand up and salute.

00:51:02 ►

What free trade means is the right to sell crap everywhere.

00:51:07 ►

The right to deal Coca-Cola in Afghanistan.

00:51:11 ►

That’s what free trade is.

00:51:12 ►

The right to sell Volvos in Turkmenistan.

00:51:16 ►

It’s a bad idea, free trade.

00:51:19 ►

We don’t want to make trade easier.

00:51:22 ►

We want to make the manufacture of objects an excruciatingly expensive process

00:51:28 ►

and the moving them from one market to another damn near impossible because what we want

00:51:34 ►

is the dematerialization of culture. What free trade means is turning the entire world into a marketplace for high-tech, pre-obsolescent, durable goods.

00:51:53 ►

And yet, you know, nobody points this out at all.

00:51:57 ►

People, and what’s going on in the American economy is that over the past 12 years under the aegis of the crypto fascist

00:52:06 ►

republic rats an enormous transfer of wealth has gone on to the top 3% in in

00:52:15 ►

1980 six Americans had more than a billion dollars. In 1992, over 80 Americans have more than a billion dollars. Meanwhile,

00:52:28 ►

most Americans have gotten considerably poorer because the money which was not transferred to

00:52:34 ►

the super rich was transferred to the third world. The great leveling which the left always called for has in fact taken place in

00:52:46 ►

part and that’s why you have less money because you when the leveling took place

00:52:51 ►

did you think it was going to kick back into your pocketbook you haven’t visited

00:52:55 ►

Bangladesh recently so a whole bunch of manipulations have gone on which tend to I think support the idea that nations are being

00:53:07 ►

looted and dissolved by ethnic factionalism and corporate hegemony and

00:53:14 ►

that in the future these are the two things that will exist and you know

00:53:19 ►

people will it’s a Japanese model, basically.

00:53:28 ►

I mean, in Japan, your corporation is your identity if you’re really embedded in the culture.

00:53:32 ►

And the nation state…

00:53:33 ►

I’m not sure whether this is a bad thing or a good thing.

00:53:36 ►

I mean, the nation state has become a fascist tool.

00:53:40 ►

All nation states.

00:53:42 ►

What these companies stand for is unbridled gangsterism

00:53:47 ►

but on the other hand

00:53:48 ►

that’s what political revolution

00:53:51 ►

has often meant in the past

00:53:53 ►

so it’s a complicated situation

00:53:58 ►

the world is feudalizing

00:53:59 ►

fractioning into interest blocks

00:54:04 ►

at the same time that technologically,

00:54:07 ►

you mentioned MTV,

00:54:09 ►

technologically it’s being knit into a single psychology.

00:54:14 ►

So it’s…

00:54:16 ►

Well, I don’t want to stand in the way of such a pessimistic vision.

00:54:21 ►

Well, I don’t consider it pessimistic.

00:54:23 ►

I don’t think it matters if there’s a political

00:54:27 ►

fractionation or the unification of a single world government. It doesn’t matter because

00:54:35 ►

it won’t affect the religious observance, the mythological base, the family structure,

00:54:41 ►

the distribution of wealth or anything else. All these problems will go one way or another

00:54:46 ►

totally independent of political realities.

00:54:49 ►

See, we give too much credit to the political realities

00:54:54 ►

when actually they don’t do anything,

00:54:56 ►

essentially, except collect taxes and give welfare.

00:55:01 ►

So I think no matter which way it goes,

00:55:04 ►

for the sake of the Shell Oil Corporation,

00:55:08 ►

we still need to consider some interventions either way. We need, for example, we need

00:55:15 ►

the empowerment of women worldwide without delay, without waiting a day. I mean, this

00:55:21 ►

has to be achieved because otherwise the overpopulation,

00:55:25 ►

I mean, it’s irrelevant,

00:55:27 ►

the political organization of the country.

00:55:29 ►

It is neither good news nor bad news

00:55:31 ►

if it goes this way or that.

00:55:34 ►

We need to have a vision on another level,

00:55:36 ►

let us say on the mythological level.

00:55:38 ►

We need to provoke a resurgence of shamanic practice.

00:55:46 ►

We need to make changes that everybody desires,

00:55:53 ►

changes that only need nucleation.

00:55:55 ►

I mean, the clouds are filling the sky,

00:55:59 ►

and yet there’s no rain.

00:56:00 ►

We just need to salt these clouds.

00:56:02 ►

Somehow it needs social transformation.

00:56:04 ►

It has to come up from below as the crop circles come from the the earth we need a totally unexpected

00:56:12 ►

miraculous flattening of the the grain into new patterns and this is the way social transformation

00:56:22 ►

has taken it has come in the past past and will happen again in the future.

00:56:26 ►

It doesn’t matter if, for example, there was, okay, the partition of India.

00:56:30 ►

Now we have Pakistan before we didn’t,

00:56:32 ►

and there’s still Hindus and Muslims there.

00:56:35 ►

This is the problem.

00:56:37 ►

The birth rate didn’t change by the partition of India.

00:56:40 ►

The birth rate in Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia won’t change.

00:56:43 ►

Of course, the war will kill off millions of people.

00:56:46 ►

Well, the only thing we’ve ever been able to come up with that has this grassroots quality,

00:56:51 ►

I don’t know if we discussed it in trilogues,

00:56:53 ►

but was this notion that every woman should limit herself to conceiving one natural child,

00:57:02 ►

and that then the population of the planet would fall by 50 percent in 40 years

00:57:08 ►

without war migration etc etc it pushes responsibility on this previously oppressed

00:57:18 ►

minority it’s a personal thing it doesn’t governments. But that can be expected of a woman in a culture where they’re normally tied down.

00:57:31 ►

But we discussed the fact that it’s in the cultures where that isn’t happening

00:57:35 ►

where this decision would have the greatest impact.

00:57:38 ►

It’s the women of Malibu and the Upper East Side

00:57:42 ►

who, by making this decision,

00:57:44 ►

would immediately have a huge

00:57:46 ►

impact on the destruction of the earth, because a child born to a woman in Malibu uses about

00:57:53 ►

a thousand times more resources than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.

00:58:00 ►

So they present our problems as insoluble,

00:58:05 ►

but something as simple as that, women are reproductive…

00:58:09 ►

We have already zero population growth in Malibu.

00:58:12 ►

Zero population growth isn’t what we’re talking about.

00:58:14 ►

We’re talking about cutting the population rate in half in one generation.

00:58:19 ►

Zero population growth perpetuates the rape,

00:58:23 ►

keeps us at this unbearable level of self-gnawing destruction.

00:58:30 ►

But I don’t… I mean, this is a long…

00:58:32 ►

Even if it were work, it’s a long-term solution.

00:58:35 ►

Each of us has two children, so we’re not exactly setting an example.

00:58:41 ►

So…

00:58:41 ►

You could get a vasectomy, that would set an example.

00:58:46 ►

Well… No takers.

00:58:50 ►

We’re talking about a much more short-term need for change.

00:58:53 ►

I mean, if we’re talking about the millennium,

00:58:55 ►

I mean, even if every woman started doing this today,

00:58:58 ►

it’s not going to affect things much within eight years.

00:59:01 ►

Well, you’d have to model that, but you may be right.

00:59:04 ►

So this miraculous thing that we’re talking about

00:59:08 ►

clearly involves something of the scale

00:59:10 ►

of a huge psychic transformation or religious revival.

00:59:16 ►

I mean, religious revivals have changed the face of the world

00:59:19 ►

more quickly than those things.

00:59:21 ►

The rise of Islam, for example.

00:59:23 ►

The transformation of England in the

00:59:26 ►

early 19th century by a massive

00:59:28 ►

religious revival which totally

00:59:30 ►

transformed England

00:59:31 ►

in general for the better.

00:59:35 ►

These

00:59:36 ►

things are fundamentalist

00:59:38 ►

Islam is having a huge impact

00:59:40 ►

for good or ill over

00:59:41 ►

large parts of the world.

00:59:44 ►

And something of that kind seems to me necessary.

00:59:48 ►

Now, one form that it could take is through the psychedelic revival.

00:59:54 ►

And interestingly, as you mentioned briefly earlier,

00:59:56 ►

this is actually happening in Britain at the moment.

00:59:59 ►

There’s a massive psychedelic revival going on,

01:00:02 ►

partly because Britain represents an extreme case

01:00:05 ►

of overdevelopment and collapse of the older order.

01:00:08 ►

I mean, the sense of decadence,

01:00:10 ►

of things falling apart in America,

01:00:12 ►

is nothing compared with what we’ve lived with

01:00:15 ►

for much longer in Britain,

01:00:17 ►

a decline over decades from world power,

01:00:20 ►

from economic domination.

01:00:23 ►

Now, through Thatcher and the successor conservative government,

01:00:28 ►

an undoing of many of the better aspects of our social institutions.

01:00:33 ►

A sense of disempowerment and despair

01:00:35 ►

among many people,

01:00:37 ►

economic recession deepening and deepening

01:00:39 ►

with no light at the end of the tunnel.

01:00:42 ►

All these things have combined to deprive most people of any sense of faith in the democratic process,

01:00:49 ►

in the normal political and economic mechanisms.

01:00:52 ►

And as people contemplate falling incomes,

01:00:55 ►

and as children now expect to earn less than their parents rather than more,

01:01:00 ►

as has been the case for many generations,

01:01:01 ►

more, as has been the case for many generations

01:01:02 ►

there’s a situation

01:01:06 ►

where the old models, the old hopes

01:01:08 ►

don’t really apply

01:01:10 ►

anymore, socialism is no longer

01:01:12 ►

a hope for many

01:01:13 ►

and in this moral vacuum and in this

01:01:16 ►

visionary vacuum, what is happening

01:01:18 ►

but a massive psychedelic

01:01:20 ►

revival, the rave scene

01:01:21 ►

which is sweeping the youth of Britain

01:01:24 ►

I think probably, I don’t know

01:01:26 ►

what the percentage but my impression is

01:01:27 ►

about 50% of the youth of Britain

01:01:29 ►

is now caught up in this, it’s now swept

01:01:31 ►

the provinces, it started in London

01:01:33 ►

a few years ago, it’s now sweeping

01:01:36 ►

through, even through

01:01:37 ►

small towns and so on

01:01:39 ►

these huge

01:01:41 ►

parties at which

01:01:43 ►

people dance wildly all night,

01:01:46 ►

having consumed MDMA and LSD,

01:01:50 ►

leading to a revival of interest in psychedelics and in 60s-type music.

01:01:57 ►

And now, of course, as Terence knows full well,

01:02:00 ►

but some of you may not, the rave scene in Britain has discovered Terence McKenna.

01:02:01 ►

well but some of you may not the rave scene in Britain has discovered

01:02:03 ►

Terence McKenna

01:02:04 ►

so there’s this

01:02:10 ►

this other direction

01:02:13 ►

all normal kinds of means of hope

01:02:16 ►

and action have been

01:02:18 ►

blocked and what’s happening is an expression

01:02:20 ►

of trying

01:02:22 ►

to find some way out

01:02:24 ►

or way forward or just way sideways or just to

01:02:26 ►

have a good time which is having a big effect at the moment but it’s difficult

01:02:32 ►

to see where that could go beyond itself you see although it’s an expression of

01:02:36 ►

a desire for some kind of spiritual renewal the kind of new tribalism

01:02:39 ►

dancing all night a sense of incredible unity with everybody else through the MDMA,

01:02:50 ►

the shared beat, the sense of new vision through psychedelics.

01:02:55 ►

But so far it has no political organization, no expression.

01:02:59 ►

It represents a need for a huge transformation in vision,

01:03:03 ►

but one which can’t in itself actually go anywhere, in my opinion.

01:03:08 ►

Yes, I think in the 60s what gave the American thing a focus was people could unite around the notion of stopping the war.

01:03:13 ►

And in fact, when the war was sort of stopped,

01:03:17 ►

then the whole thing was more blunted and muddled.

01:03:22 ►

So in the absence of a clear vision or a clear task it is

01:03:27 ►

hard to know where it goes you’re right so then the question is there’s no clear

01:03:34 ►

vision there right now as we seem fairly clear there are little indications of

01:03:37 ►

one there are communities here and they’re doing things in a different way

01:03:40 ►

it’s not all bleak there are are signs of hope, shoots of spring

01:03:45 ►

and so on. But basically, there is no really clear vision. So how are we going to get one?

01:03:51 ►

That seems the problem. Now, we’ve got maybe 20 minutes to think one up right now. Or else

01:03:59 ►

we have to think of ways in which we might be able to come up with one.

01:04:08 ►

What about some kind of collective vision quest?

01:04:10 ►

Is that a way?

01:04:14 ►

Well, I mean, wasn’t that what space flight was?

01:04:21 ►

It was the shamanic flight cast in a technological mold.

01:04:23 ►

Yes, but it didn’t work, did it? I mean, the jet travelers, in a sense, shamanic flight cast in a technological and commercial mold. Yes, but it didn’t work, did it? I mean, the jet travelers, in a sense, shamanic

01:04:25 ►

flight cast in a technological

01:04:27 ►

and commercial mold.

01:04:30 ►

Most of the dreams of modern civilization,

01:04:32 ►

limitless mobility, flying

01:04:34 ►

through the air, seeing what’s going on

01:04:36 ►

somewhere else, these are all the technological

01:04:38 ►

realizations of shamanic

01:04:40 ►

visions. These things have been envisaged

01:04:42 ►

for thousands of years by shamans.

01:04:44 ►

Now we can all have them for

01:04:45 ►

just the press of

01:04:48 ►

a credit card.

01:04:50 ►

Well, it seems that a social transformation

01:04:52 ►

is imminent in Britain.

01:04:54 ►

This, if successful,

01:04:56 ►

would then be exported to the rest of the

01:04:58 ►

world. Here in the United States

01:05:00 ►

we’re some years behind.

01:05:02 ►

We haven’t reached

01:05:04 ►

50% of youth in the rave movement.

01:05:08 ►

But let’s just say, to put an actual vision on the table,

01:05:11 ►

that there was a social transformation that took place this year in Britain

01:05:17 ►

that was something like and to a degree evolving upon

01:05:23 ►

the model of the 1960s in California.

01:05:28 ►

And unlike that one, it sort of succeeded.

01:05:32 ►

Is this fantasy too much to hold?

01:05:34 ►

But we need religious, mythological, ethical, social, political structures

01:05:41 ►

to emerge in this movement in Britain.

01:05:43 ►

Well, one thing that might, I mean,

01:05:45 ►

we have to think up some idea and put

01:05:48 ►

it there. Not that we’re going to do it, but maybe somebody

01:05:50 ►

would actually have an idea that would take hold,

01:05:52 ►

so we’ll try.

01:05:53 ►

The church

01:05:55 ►

attendance in England, I believe you told me,

01:05:58 ►

is down to 2%, whereas in the United

01:06:00 ►

States it’s still 24%, but of

01:06:02 ►

course declining rapidly. Well, if you

01:06:04 ►

take all denominations in the U.S., it’s about 50% and in Britain about 9%. So 9% is

01:06:11 ►

close to zero. It’s going fast again. It’s far ahead of the United States, where for

01:06:15 ►

some reason in the Midwest things are really slow to, I don’t know, but… Yahooism!

01:06:20 ►

These churches in England, I’ve seen this in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York,

01:06:26 ►

that the budget problem in that church is actually destroying all its spectacularly innovative programs.

01:06:33 ►

So these churches in England are desperate for even maintenance funds.

01:06:37 ►

The roof leaks, the rain is coming through, pretty soon there’ll just be a pile of rubble.

01:06:41 ►

It’ll look like Glastonbury Abbey.

01:06:43 ►

So perhaps what we need is that the raves would take over

01:06:47 ►

these vacant, unused churches

01:06:49 ►

and move the raves into the churches

01:06:56 ►

and try to psychedelicize them just slightly more

01:07:02 ►

because, well, I don’t want to put down ecstasy,

01:07:06 ►

but it’s a little bit lacking when it comes to true vision.

01:07:12 ►

A little psilocybin poured in there.

01:07:14 ►

A little psilocybin poured in.

01:07:17 ►

If there was an international cartel

01:07:21 ►

as greedy for the salvation of human life

01:07:24 ►

in the biosphere of planet Earth as

01:07:27 ►

the current cartels are greedy for

01:07:30 ►

totally meaningless and useless piles of money

01:07:33 ►

and arms

01:07:35 ►

Then they would start you know taking these piles of money and putting them into the churches now this year

01:07:42 ►

making attractive raves with more availability of

01:07:46 ►

synthetic and natural psilocybin

01:07:49 ►

DMT ayahuasca

01:07:52 ►

and

01:07:53 ►

well

01:07:55 ►

what else? let’s think it up

01:07:58 ►

well actually

01:08:00 ►

there’s an opportunity

01:08:01 ►

I mean there was an effort to do something

01:08:04 ►

somewhat like what you’re describing with somewhat different players.

01:08:10 ►

You know that Canary Wharf is the tallest building in Europe.

01:08:15 ►

And you know that it was…

01:08:16 ►

What’s Canary Wharf?

01:08:17 ►

The tallest building in Europe.

01:08:19 ►

It’s in London.

01:08:20 ►

It’s in London on the Docklands.

01:08:25 ►

It’s in London on the docklands and it was built by Olympia in New York a company run by

01:08:32 ►

Idiots of such depth that they have managed to get themselves seven billion dollars in debt go figure

01:08:35 ►

so July there was an effort by the rave culture to seize the Grand Piazza

01:08:41 ►

At Canary Wharf figuring that if they could hold it for 24 hours,

01:08:47 ►

they could get a quarter of a million people

01:08:49 ►

to come into London, onto the Docklands,

01:08:52 ►

and they would liberate the tallest building in Europe and just…

01:08:55 ►

And stone it.

01:08:56 ►

No, enter and live in it from top to bottom.

01:09:00 ►

However, Scotland Yard had intelligence on all this

01:09:04 ►

and stopped

01:09:05 ►

all traffic moving into that

01:09:08 ►

area after there were only a thousand

01:09:09 ►

people in the piazza.

01:09:11 ►

So it’s like a replay of the

01:09:13 ►

1960s. There’s that old problem

01:09:16 ►

that the man gets there

01:09:18 ►

first. It’s no good trying to steal the

01:09:20 ►

buildings. We’ve been through that.

01:09:21 ►

Violent Revolution

01:09:22 ►

only worked in the 19th century.

01:09:25 ►

What we need now

01:09:26 ►

is a conspiracy with the leaders

01:09:29 ►

of the church. They’ve got to understand

01:09:31 ►

that there’s no other hope for the

01:09:33 ►

survival of the Anglican church establishment.

01:09:36 ►

This is the last

01:09:37 ►

hope to maintain these buildings,

01:09:39 ►

is to move young people in them.

01:09:41 ►

I went to the temple with my mother.

01:09:44 ►

There wasn’t anyone

01:09:45 ►

younger than 85 years old

01:09:48 ►

attending there.

01:09:49 ►

So it may still be 50% in the United States,

01:09:52 ►

including all denominations.

01:09:54 ►

Well, there’s 50% of all

01:09:56 ►

older than 50.

01:09:58 ►

So I think the

01:10:00 ►

church, I mean,

01:10:02 ►

are they

01:10:02 ►

beyond the possibility of understanding

01:10:08 ►

that this is an opportunity for the future life of Christianity transformed?

01:10:13 ►

Young people in the church, not only having a good time, but getting religion.

01:10:18 ►

But how does this plan square up against Voltaire’s observation

01:10:25 ►

that mankind will know no peace

01:10:29 ►

until the last politician is strangled in the entrails of the last priest?

01:10:38 ►

Give us Voltaire here today and let’s discuss this.

01:10:43 ►

He will agree with me. We are the priests.

01:10:50 ►

We are the politicians. Who’s this Voltaire? He’s one of us too. But climbing in bed with

01:10:57 ►

the dominator institution par excellence as the first move in trying to create a sane society at the turn of the millennium

01:11:07 ►

Sounds like a real offer of free

01:11:09 ►

Real estate we can’t build all these enormous and expensive buildings on gigantic fields

01:11:15 ►

Well, I’m into taking the church

01:11:17 ►

But instead of negotiating you’re just hanging all these people who claim ownership

01:11:23 ►

We could just hang all these people who claim ownership,

01:11:25 ►

point out that we’re the original owners,

01:11:30 ►

the lease is up, they’ve had it 2,000 years, and we’re back. We’re talking about mom and dad.

01:11:33 ►

The LSD in the water.

01:11:35 ►

Ah, it always comes down to that.

01:11:39 ►

Rupert, maybe you should rescue us.

01:11:42 ►

Maybe we don’t deserve it.

01:11:44 ►

I mean, the miraculous change

01:11:46 ►

is obviously going to have to involve

01:11:48 ►

this new vision it has to involve

01:11:50 ►

some spreading through society

01:11:52 ►

it has to involve some kind of institutional

01:11:54 ►

framework

01:11:55 ►

because otherwise it won’t have any

01:11:57 ►

way of gearing in with the way people live

01:12:00 ►

I don’t think that

01:12:04 ►

the acid house scene at the moment

01:12:06 ►

is based on the Terence McKenna model

01:12:08 ►

it’s the anarchic

01:12:10 ►

model

01:12:11 ►

and

01:12:12 ►

we’ll see what happens

01:12:15 ►

but I myself don’t think it’s likely to

01:12:18 ►

have any big or enduring effect

01:12:20 ►

so what about

01:12:24 ►

I mean, visioning, I mean, do you spend much time

01:12:29 ►

trying to vision what you would like the world to be like if you could actually

01:12:32 ►

write down a feasible scenario for the year 2000? Well, I don’t know. We know what

01:12:39 ►

we don’t want it to be like. 2000 is a little close, but if you move away from the idea of some day

01:12:47 ►

of sex machina ending, then it seems to me that we could direct resources. They publish

01:12:55 ►

these pies of the world output of GNP, and 40 to 60 percent of it is going into military budgets. The way money is being spent

01:13:07 ►

is absolutely crazy. In other words, we could clothe the naked, feed the hungry, cure the

01:13:15 ►

sick, probably with 30 percent of global GNP. If we need to keep our technological skills honed, then I would think, you know,

01:13:27 ►

as achievable as building the super collider

01:13:31 ►

or a colony on Ganymede

01:13:34 ►

or some of these other things they come up with,

01:13:37 ►

why not unleash R&D

01:13:42 ►

toward the production of something which essentially looks like a contact lens,

01:13:51 ►

but which is surgically implanted in the inside of your eyelid at age three or something,

01:13:58 ►

and that when you then close your eyes, there are menus hanging in space,

01:14:09 ►

your eyes there are menus hanging in space and you make your way into a virtual culture that what we need to do is dematerialize our interfacing with

01:14:17 ►

nature if we want if we’re going to keep the body then we have to jettison material culture.

01:14:26 ►

We cannot have both the body and material culture.

01:14:29 ►

So I can imagine a world where people appear naked and aboriginal and sacral and so forth,

01:14:40 ►

but when they close their eyes, they step into a world of electronically sustained data banks,

01:14:48 ►

sensory impressions, virtual realities, so forth and so on.

01:14:51 ►

And that is what culture comes to mean.

01:14:56 ►

And the idea of actually building something in three-dimensional space

01:15:00 ►

becomes just vulgar and barbarous.

01:15:03 ►

Why would you?

01:15:03 ►

It’s like shitting on your

01:15:05 ►

doorstep or something it’s just no sane person would ever do that that’s it that

01:15:13 ►

technological goal married to the empowerment of women and their full

01:15:21 ►

exercise of control over their reproductive capacity

01:15:25 ►

along the lines I outlined

01:15:27 ►

would deliver us into a closer version of Eden

01:15:32 ►

than I think most people dare dream could be achieved within our lifetimes.

01:15:40 ►

So it’s, yeah, stuff like that.

01:15:42 ►

It’s not inconceivable.

01:15:46 ►

This sounds not unlike Ralph’s vision this morning,

01:15:49 ►

except you’ve got it miniaturized further.

01:15:52 ►

Yeah, it should be completely, it can be…

01:15:55 ►

Maybe to the vanishing point.

01:15:56 ►

I have the same problem.

01:15:57 ►

A contact lens is sufficient.

01:15:59 ►

Smaller.

01:16:00 ►

I have the same problem with it, though,

01:16:02 ►

because it involves a detachment from the earth, from nature, from biology.

01:16:06 ►

And I’d like to move in exactly the opposite direction, you see.

01:16:10 ►

But how is it a detachment if you’re cooking your food over an open fire,

01:16:15 ►

walking barefoot on the earth, living in restored ecosystems and fishing on the reef for breakfast?

01:16:23 ►

You didn’t mention that then.

01:16:25 ►

Oh, that’s what I meant when I said

01:16:28 ►

living an aboriginal lifestyle.

01:16:31 ►

I mean, you look like a rainforest Indian,

01:16:34 ►

it’s just that if you step into this person’s body

01:16:37 ►

you discover that they’re browsing

01:16:39 ►

at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

01:16:42 ►

They just appeared to be wandering along a river in Brazil.

01:16:47 ►

Well, we don’t have to do anything yet. This is the vision, because as a matter of fact,

01:16:51 ►

this is what we’re on the way to, the post-catastrophic world society.

01:16:56 ►

No, there’s still a lot of people into dealing stuff. The dematerialization of culture has

01:17:02 ►

not yet been announced as a goal.

01:17:11 ►

Some people might not voluntarily desist from their usual form of piracy. So while we’re back in the Amazon fishing,

01:17:16 ►

they’ll be flying overhead with helicopter gunships.

01:17:20 ►

Well, in my fantasy, that was all in the past.

01:17:26 ►

I mean, like you would not allow people to assemble objects in three-dimensional space.

01:17:32 ►

The only legally allowed object would be the inner lens.

01:17:38 ►

And the inner lens would be a surgical implant.

01:17:41 ►

And the pilots would all be shamans.

01:17:43 ►

Well, that’s how it’s always been yeah now you’re back

01:17:46 ►

to the archaic you know you’re living in a in a mythological uh archetypal society ruled by magic

01:17:55 ►

but nothing’s going to happen you see with the within 30 years according to current predictions

01:18:02 ►

two-thirds of the world’s population will live in mega cities like Mexico City or Calcutta at present the majority

01:18:09 ►

is still rural no I think that what we’re not being told is that four-fifths

01:18:14 ►

of the earth’s population is headed for the early grave and that nobody wants to

01:18:19 ►

face it or understand it I could not believe what was coming out of that

01:18:23 ►

conference in Amsterdam.

01:18:25 ►

Absolutely apocalyptic statements where you read the statement and you expect the last line to be,

01:18:32 ►

and therefore experts conclude the human race will become extinct sometime after 2035. But they never

01:18:39 ►

drew that conclusion. But the data was horrendous. I mean, we’re kidding ourselves. You know,

01:18:46 ►

people think, well, science will deliver an AIDS cure. Science might deliver an AIDS cure

01:18:54 ►

to the super wealthy and well-connected, but the human heart will not deliver a medical

01:19:00 ►

delivery system that will get the cure to the billions of infected

01:19:05 ►

people in the third world who because of the color of their skin and the

01:19:09 ►

misfortune of their place of birth are going to be condemned to death whether

01:19:14 ►

there’s a cure or not I mean there are partial cures now and only the super

01:19:20 ►

rich are getting them no matter what anybody says about who’s getting them.

01:19:31 ►

So, you know, I don’t understand the denial about this epidemic. You just draw the curves, and there’s no cure on the horizon.

01:19:37 ►

And nobody knows how many people are infected,

01:19:40 ►

and nobody knows how virulent the mutational capacity of this thing is.

01:19:46 ►

If it’s like flu and some of these other things, then it’s, you know, hell itself stalks the planet.

01:19:53 ►

And what we’re all being asked to do is hide ourselves in the skirts of science.

01:20:00 ►

Well, by God, they better be able to deliver.

01:20:05 ►

well by God they better be able to deliver it’s been a long time since they’ve delivered anything but nuclear weapons remote lethal delivery systems

01:20:14 ►

mega death brainwashing and propaganda if science is the friend of suffering mankind it’s time to step forward. Sorry to rave.

01:20:27 ►

Well, rant.

01:20:29 ►

Rant, rant.

01:20:30 ►

I mean it’s clear that all these crises, problems, etc. are coming faster and faster.

01:20:41 ►

The thing that I think is important is to realise that if the social

01:20:46 ►

order does break down, if these crises do overwhelm us, there’s no longer going to be

01:20:50 ►

any place for rational deliberation, international agreements, and you couldn’t get someone in

01:20:56 ►

Bosnia to sign an agreement to cut CO2 emissions according to some rational plan. The moment

01:21:04 ►

when we can still do that is perhaps now,

01:21:06 ►

but as things break down further,

01:21:09 ►

it’ll be less and less possible for any global vision

01:21:12 ►

or rational planning, chaotic models on computers and so on,

01:21:16 ►

to be put into place,

01:21:17 ►

because those all depend on intact institutions,

01:21:20 ►

functioning civil services, and so forth.

01:21:24 ►

So a plunge into the… not the kind of anarchy you would advocate,

01:21:29 ►

but old-fashioned anarchy of the most unpleasant kind

01:21:34 ►

seems quite likely in many parts of the world.

01:21:38 ►

So the hope that we might have is something that can survive that

01:21:42 ►

and somehow grow up from

01:21:46 ►

out of that crisis.

01:21:47 ►

I mean, we’re going to be forced to change by crisis, like individuals are so we are

01:21:51 ►

socially.

01:21:52 ►

But at the moment, we still hope we can do it by some kind of rational plan and international

01:21:58 ►

agreement.

01:22:00 ►

So we come back again to this question of where will the new vision come from

01:22:05 ►

and I think at the moment we all seem to think we can only rely on miracles

01:22:10 ►

I suppose all we can do is pray for it

01:22:12 ►

so when psychedelics are the only miracle we really can get on command

01:22:20 ►

but whether they’re adequate to the task remains to be seen

01:22:24 ►

I myself think they’re adequate to the task remains to be seen. I myself think they’re not.

01:22:26 ►

The psychedelics may help the coming into being of the new vision.

01:22:30 ►

Psychedelic vision quests with the intention of finding or seeing this new vision may be our best hope.

01:22:37 ►

But how many people are undertaking them?

01:22:41 ►

Well, let’s hope it’s like other revolutions and that you can build it

01:22:45 ►

with somewhere between 10 and 15 percent. Let’s hope. We’re not about sustaining the

01:22:54 ►

planet. I think we’re about doing something else. And that’s what we have to figure out,

01:22:58 ►

what it is. How are we being attracted by this endpoint?

01:23:07 ►

And we have to align ourselves with that.

01:23:10 ►

It’s a mystery, but we all have to ask ourselves a few questions.

01:23:13 ►

Well, I stayed away from that subject simply because for me it’s slightly later than 2000 AD,

01:23:18 ►

but I agree with you.

01:23:20 ►

I mean, I think that, you know,

01:23:24 ►

the earth is not our mother exactly.

01:23:27 ►

It’s more like the placenta.

01:23:30 ►

And something is going on here in this species.

01:23:34 ►

It’s been going on for 100,000 years, long before history,

01:23:38 ►

long before Western man, long before Greece, long before Christianity.

01:23:43 ►

There has been something fomenting in this one species.

01:23:48 ►

And it seems that, you know, we are going to burst through

01:23:51 ►

into some kind of super dimension,

01:23:54 ►

and we don’t really care what kind of mess we leave behind.

01:23:59 ►

The planet groans in travail

01:24:01 ►

because the planet would like to get back to business as usual

01:24:07 ►

Coral atolls glaciers volcanoes the usual menu, but it has to shed this information

01:24:14 ►

infected

01:24:15 ►

technology producing virus that has taken hold of it and as soon as we part

01:24:22 ►

We will feel much more relieved because our dreams, which are the dreams of the imagination,

01:24:29 ►

can be unfolded in super space or outer space.

01:24:34 ►

Anyway, they can’t be unfolded on the ground of a planet.

01:24:38 ►

When we unfold our dreams on the surface of a planet,

01:24:41 ►

you get Los Angeles or London.

01:24:44 ►

This is not what we’re striving for.

01:24:46 ►

It’s a sorry symbol

01:24:48 ►

for the cities of the heart

01:24:51 ►

that we would build if we could.

01:24:54 ►

In some ways,

01:24:55 ►

it is indicative

01:24:56 ►

of what we’re striving for.

01:24:59 ►

Oh, you mean that these are like

01:25:01 ►

intimations of immortality

01:25:04 ►

in Wordsworth’s phrase. Yes, I think that these are like intimations of immortality in Wordsworth’s phrase.

01:25:06 ►

Yes, I think that we’re going to a grand destiny and that the planet will survive this,

01:25:13 ►

but consciousness is the flashlight to throw on the path.

01:25:18 ►

And we will probably be pulled, sucked, hammered and pushed into this destiny

01:25:24 ►

if we refuse to become conscious.

01:25:28 ►

But why do that?

01:25:29 ►

Why not grease the slides?

01:25:31 ►

Why not get in on the plan and help it forward?

01:25:36 ►

It seems, you know, it’s the only game in town.

01:25:42 ►

Then what these people are talking about becomes ultimate.

01:25:45 ►

To say,

01:25:47 ►

wait a minute, what did we do wrong there?

01:25:49 ►

Well, but there’s another possibility.

01:25:51 ►

It may be out of our control, but it may not be

01:25:54 ►

out of control.

01:25:55 ►

The eschaton is there.

01:25:57 ►

The eschaton is there.

01:25:59 ►

The eschaton is the

01:26:01 ►

hyper-object at the end of history

01:26:04 ►

that, like an enormous magnet,

01:26:06 ►

is organizing the iron filings of societies,

01:26:10 ►

messiahs, housewives, and day nurses,

01:26:13 ►

and orienting it all toward an expression of divinity

01:26:18 ►

which lies at the end of the historical process.

01:26:23 ►

In other words, history is an agitation in biology

01:26:26 ►

that precedes the eschaton,

01:26:29 ►

and it only takes it 25,000 years

01:26:32 ►

to rise out of the sea of chaos.

01:26:35 ►

Like we came here to play a game,

01:26:37 ►

and we’re playing it out,

01:26:38 ►

and it’s played out.

01:26:40 ►

And it may be on this hopeful road.

01:26:42 ►

It’s almost over.

01:26:43 ►

And we’ll leave, over earth will survive without us

01:26:45 ►

and we’ll be somewhere else

01:26:46 ►

it was a chance

01:26:49 ►

meant affair

01:26:50 ►

it was an alliance

01:26:53 ►

of the road

01:26:54 ►

Jim Lovelock believes that

01:26:57 ►

the microbes will try again

01:26:59 ►

laughter

01:27:00 ►

right

01:27:02 ►

yeah exactly that notion

01:27:07 ►

so the end product was we revolved to a higher state of consciousness

01:27:11 ►

and being connected with God

01:27:13 ►

oh clearly I was a little more optimistic than Terence

01:27:16 ►

no I don’t think so it’s the same idea

01:27:19 ►

I don’t understand why you think it’s so pessimistic

01:27:22 ►

it is get this straight

01:27:24 ►

when you talk about the eschaton at the end of history I don’t understand why you think it’s so pessimistic. It is, get this straight. Maybe I don’t understand you.

01:27:25 ►

When you talk about the eschaton at the end of history,

01:27:28 ►

are we talking about the end of history and the beginning of post-history?

01:27:32 ►

Or are we just talking about the end?

01:27:34 ►

We’re talking about the end of history.

01:27:37 ►

And then?

01:27:38 ►

And what that is, is the erasure of all boundary.

01:27:42 ►

So the only thing I can imagine that to be is pure

01:27:46 ►

pure love so how can that be pessimistic don’t you get it men and women the

01:27:55 ►

boundaries disappear life and death the boundaries disappear spirit and matter

01:28:01 ►

no boundary we get to carry on our lives in a post-historical realm in the sky,

01:28:07 ►

disembodied and having graduated from the destroyed…

01:28:12 ►

It can’t be described as disembodied because that would imply boundaries.

01:28:19 ►

Anything you can say about it, out of the language that it springs,

01:28:24 ►

is necessarily unfaithful to it.

01:28:27 ►

Well, I think that Teilhard de Chardin had in mind something more like what we’ve got,

01:28:33 ►

except there was a change in consciousness so that practically every person was connected

01:28:42 ►

up into an infinite field of consciousness that was basically love

01:28:46 ►

that was Christ

01:28:48 ►

that was the Messiah

01:28:49 ►

it wasn’t in the sky, it was on earth

01:28:51 ►

we still had trees and red surfing

01:28:54 ►

I think you read him wrong

01:28:55 ►

it continues to go out of space

01:28:58 ►

yeah

01:28:59 ►

some other realm

01:29:03 ►

the transcendent realm of the deity.

01:29:06 ►

Going home.

01:29:06 ►

Home.

01:29:07 ►

This is only temporary.

01:29:08 ►

Yeah.

01:29:09 ►

He was an absolute eschatonic millenarian.

01:29:13 ►

Love is what lies at the end of the historical descent into novelty.

01:29:20 ►

It has to be.

01:29:21 ►

Now, the reason there’s a lot of freaking out is because the trip gets rougher as you approach

01:29:28 ►

The zero point and that’s the way that you know on an airfoil

01:29:33 ►

Approaching the speed of sound you get cue forces build up along the cutting edge of the airfoil and the cue forces are at

01:29:42 ►

maximum

01:29:43 ►

Immediately before you break the sound barrier.

01:29:46 ►

So the history barrier, history, the ride is going to get,

01:29:49 ►

it’s going to shake your teeth out in the last moments,

01:29:52 ►

and then you will touch the eschaton and break through.

01:29:56 ►

That’s grand. That’s grand, grand.

01:29:59 ►

I hope this won’t seem too petty.

01:30:02 ►

But this one tiny little detail, this number, 2012,

01:30:08 ►

I mean, if it would be just postponed 20, 30, 40 years, that would be okay with Thierry

01:30:17 ►

Arduchardin, but not with you.

01:30:20 ►

You’re fixed on this date.

01:30:22 ►

I mean, wouldn’t it be a completely different future

01:30:25 ►

if the eschaton at the end of time was two or three centuries away?

01:30:31 ►

Sure it would. Yes, it would.

01:30:33 ►

But when you look at the curves of population,

01:30:36 ►

CFC release, rising radiation,

01:30:39 ►

toxification of the oceans,

01:30:42 ►

spread of nuclear waste, spread of…

01:30:47 ►

A lot of other pessimists have given us 35 years.

01:30:51 ►

Well, so I’m an optimist. I say 20 years.

01:30:59 ►

It seems that the process of all religion and philosophy

01:31:03 ►

is to try and guide us back to that oneness, to that eschaton.

01:31:10 ►

Yeah, you got it absolutely right.

01:31:12 ►

That’s exactly what’s going on.

01:31:15 ►

Religion is the anticipation,

01:31:17 ►

and then different plans for recovering this thing

01:31:21 ►

which caused our fall into this lower state.

01:31:26 ►

And what gives it cogency is to see that

01:31:30 ►

the scenario we’ve reached the third act, you know.

01:31:34 ►

It has to be this way, or it’s hardly a play at all.

01:31:40 ►

It’s just a mess.

01:31:41 ►

As Shakespeare said, sound and fury signifying nothing.

01:31:46 ►

That’s your other choice.

01:31:47 ►

Maybe our bill will be forwarded to the future

01:31:53 ►

so that after the Omega point,

01:31:56 ►

we’ll look up there and find that the bill has been forwarded,

01:31:59 ►

that we still have to pay for this mess.

01:32:01 ►

Not only the bill, but the Bobs and Johns as well.

01:32:10 ►

Could this be the fourth day the Bill, but the Bobs and Johns as well. The big surprise is how we name this cosmology. Well, we should knock off. Thank you very much.

01:32:30 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:32:37 ►

Okay, when Terence was just now talking about the fact that

01:32:42 ►

we humans couldn’t unfold our dreams on the surface of this

01:32:46 ►

planet. Was I the only one who was thinking about some of the things Bruce Dahmer and others bring

01:32:52 ►

to the table about virtual worlds? If you want to read a great novel about the potential of a

01:33:00 ►

silicone-based consciousness, you might want to read Greg Egan’s amazing book, Permutation City, which is where I think Terence got some of his ideas about cyberdelic space.

01:33:12 ►

And before I forget, I want to remind you that when Ralph and Terence were talking about the fact

01:33:18 ►

that our leaders are jackasses, well, the George Bush they were talking about back then

01:33:23 ►

was the father of the current jackass in the White House.

01:33:27 ►

Who could have guessed how much more ignorant a family could get in just a single generation?

01:33:33 ►

At least this current age of darkness is finally coming to an end.

01:33:38 ►

One of the things that struck me when Rupert first began to speak

01:33:43 ►

and was saying that he thought that 2012 was a distraction from the coming year 2000,

01:33:50 ►

was that maybe it’s actually the other way around.

01:33:54 ►

You know, if you think back, the whole world was worrying about the Y2K problem

01:33:58 ►

and what would happen when the year rolled over.

01:34:02 ►

But it went fut instead of boom, and we all more or less forgot about the millennium fever.

01:34:09 ►

So what if that was just a distraction from the real changeover year,

01:34:14 ►

which may be 2012 or 2030 or 8731?

01:34:20 ►

Who knows?

01:34:22 ►

But in any event, I think Terrence’s initial point is well taken

01:34:25 ►

and that is that we shouldn’t wait around for the UFOs or Jesus or a meteor

01:34:31 ►

or anything else unpredictable to arrive it’s what we do with what we’ve got

01:34:37 ►

where we’re at right now that is the only thing that seems to have any meaning

01:34:42 ►

in the here and now which by the by the way, is all we’ve got.

01:34:48 ►

Another interesting comment Rupert made just before talking about a psychedelic revival

01:34:53 ►

was about the fact that another one of the possibilities for a global change of consciousness on a massive scale

01:35:00 ►

might involve a religious revival of some kind.

01:35:05 ►

And he’s correct, of course, and historically that seems like a good bet.

01:35:10 ►

But what I hope happens instead of a religious revival is a spiritual revival, a revival

01:35:17 ►

that has no hierarchy, no dogma, no required faith, but instead a revival of the spirit

01:35:24 ►

that is our essential life force.

01:35:27 ►

I remember hearing Terrence one time say that if the word spirit bothers you, which it did

01:35:33 ►

me at the time, then instead think of it as the feeling of the indwelling of consciousness,

01:35:40 ►

because that was what he meant by spirit at that time.

01:35:44 ►

And personally, I like that definition.

01:35:47 ►

And by that definition, what I mean by a spiritual revival

01:35:50 ►

is a rekindling of the spirit that we all had within us

01:35:55 ►

on those warm summer days when we were young children

01:35:58 ►

who were dreaming of what a wonderful world this would be

01:36:01 ►

once we were the ones making the decisions.

01:36:04 ►

What a wonderful world this would be once we were the ones making the decisions.

01:36:10 ►

If we could all only recapture our spirit of pre-adolescent youth,

01:36:16 ►

I think we could probably get things back on schedule and under budget in only a generation or two.

01:36:20 ►

It can be done, you know, if only we find the will.

01:36:25 ►

Well, one good sign since this trilogue was held is the fact that Ralph’s

01:36:28 ►

suggestion that raves be held in the old

01:36:30 ►

abandoned churches has actually

01:36:32 ►

materialized. I know that in just the

01:36:35 ►

past couple of months I’ve heard from

01:36:37 ►

several fellow Saloners who were talking

01:36:40 ►

about raves that were being held in old

01:36:42 ►

churches. Maybe if we evolutionaries do our jobs right,

01:36:47 ►

then 20,000 years from now or so,

01:36:49 ►

when they excavate the sites of these old churches,

01:36:52 ►

maybe they might think that the only thing they were used for was raves.

01:36:56 ►

Wouldn’t that be a kick, huh?

01:36:59 ►

And speaking of dreams,

01:37:00 ►

you can help the good folks at Arrowwood

01:37:04 ►

fulfill their dreams of serving

01:37:06 ►

our community now as a certified non-profit organization.

01:37:10 ►

And for those of you in the Bay Area and who are gainfully employed with a little extra

01:37:16 ►

cash in your pocket, I might add, well, there’s going to be a big celebration on June 21st,

01:37:22 ►

the summer solstice in San Francisco.

01:37:25 ►

And it’s billed as the Arrowwood Center Benefit Gala, a feast for the mind and for the senses,

01:37:33 ►

an evening of celebration to honor Arrowwood’s newly achieved non-profit status.

01:37:38 ►

Now, this event is a charity fundraiser that costs $250 a t i c k e t, an d$ 100 of that is a tax-deductible donation to the Arrowwood Center.

01:37:49 ►

And to further entice you to make such a generous donation,

01:37:54 ►

Arrowwood’s arranged for some of their friends to be there as well.

01:37:58 ►

I’m not going to read all of the names of the celebrities who will be there,

01:38:01 ►

but some of them you already know from here in the salon. I’m talking about Allison and Alex Gray,

01:38:08 ►

John Hanna, Eric Davis, and Dale Pendell, among others, who will be

01:38:12 ►

speaking to the event and mingling with the crowd.

01:38:15 ►

I’ll put a link on the website with program notes to that event.

01:38:20 ►

If you can’t make this gathering, I understand there’s

01:38:23 ►

also going to be a fundraising event for Arrowwood of some kind this July in Seattle.

01:38:30 ►

So stay tuned for more about that.

01:38:33 ►

And by the way, if you’ve never been to the Arrowwood.org, that’s E-R-O-W-I-D, by the way, Arrowwood.org site, well, what are you waiting for?

01:38:42 ►

site, well, what are you waiting for?

01:38:49 ►

Without exception, I think Arrowhead is the primary source for drug education and information on the net.

01:38:50 ►

In a sense, it’s the web hub of the worldwide psychedelic community.

01:38:55 ►

It has literally tens and tens of thousands of people come there each day, every day of

01:39:01 ►

the year.

01:39:02 ►

I can’t say enough, really, for the work they do.

01:39:10 ►

And I hope that even if it’s just sending them $25 a year, you’ll find a way to help.

01:39:17 ►

And speaking of people who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to help our community,

01:39:26 ►

there are few people, only a handful actually, who have done even nearly as much as Gene and Myron Stolaroff.

01:39:31 ►

And if you haven’t already heard some of our podcasts with the Stolaroffs,

01:39:42 ►

either one or both of them have been featured in podcasts number 13, 60, 83, 84, 92, a few others, I think.

01:39:46 ►

And you can also see Myron in the film Hoffman’s Potion,

01:39:48 ►

which I think is up on YouTube now.

01:39:51 ►

Anyway, I drove up to Lone Pine last week and spent some time with Myron and Gene.

01:39:54 ►

And while I was there, we also got to call Ann and Sasha Shulgin on the phone.

01:39:58 ►

So I was able to hear Ann’s lovely voice sounding confident

01:40:02 ►

that Sasha was well on the road to recovery.

01:40:06 ►

But that wasn’t actually necessary because Sasha started cracking his corny jokes right away and

01:40:13 ►

I knew that all was well up their way. As for Gene and Myron, well, for two people in their 80s,

01:40:22 ►

they are in remarkably good health.

01:40:27 ►

With one big exception, I’m afraid, that I must add,

01:40:34 ►

and that is the sad fact that Myron has lost much of his ability to recall things.

01:40:37 ►

Acute memory loss, I’m sad to say.

01:40:42 ►

But he assures us that he isn’t suffering or in any way distressed about it.

01:40:51 ►

His sense of humor is intact, and the love that pours from his always smiling eyes is a true wonder to behold.

01:40:55 ►

Now, in addition to letting you know about Myron’s condition,

01:41:00 ►

Gene asked me to also let you know that they’ve discontinued their Internet service,

01:41:05 ►

and so any email you may be sending to Myron is no longer reaching them.

01:41:12 ►

Which brings me to something else that I’d like to mention. While I was visiting with the Stoller office, I noticed that Myron really lit up when he received a card in the mail. In a way, greeting

01:41:18 ►

cards are now the main way for Myron to realize, yes, he actually was a person who did his part to make this world a little better.

01:41:29 ►

And so if you’ve ever been inspired by Gene and Myron and all of the groundbreaking research work they did on behalf of all of us back during the Dark Ages,

01:41:40 ►

when only a very few people were privy to the work that Sasha was doing in his little lab.

01:41:47 ►

Well, if you’ve ever wanted to do something to say thank you to these brave pioneers,

01:41:53 ►

well, here’s something you could do for them and for me.

01:41:56 ►

It’d be a huge favor by sending them a short note or a card to let them know that you’re thinking about them.

01:42:03 ►

or a card to let them know that you’re thinking about them.

01:42:10 ►

Their address is Gene and Myron Stolaroff, S-T-O-L-A-R-O-F-F,

01:42:16 ►

Post Office Box 742, Lone Pine, California.

01:42:18 ►

That’s two words, Lone Pine.

01:42:21 ►

California, 93545.

01:42:27 ►

And it would really please me beyond measure to hear that a few of our fellow salonners actually took the time to send the Stolaroffs a short note.

01:42:32 ►

So thank you in advance for doing that.

01:42:36 ►

Now I’m going to sign off here in just a minute, but right after I do,

01:42:41 ►

I’m going to play for you two short sound bites.

01:42:43 ►

Right after I do, I’m going to play for you two short sound bites.

01:42:50 ►

One is of Terrence McKenna and his poetic version of the naked, high-tech ape of the future.

01:42:56 ►

And immediately following that, I’m going to play a cut from our podcast number 45,

01:43:00 ►

where Fraser Clark gives his interpretation of Terrence’s rap.

01:43:08 ►

And I think you’ll find them both interesting and fun to think about now as always I’ll close this podcast by saying that this and all of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon

01:43:12 ►

are available for your use under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike

01:43:18 ►

3.0 license and if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:43:25 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:43:29 ►

And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:43:33 ►

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

01:43:38 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:43:47 ►

where we really want to be is naked

01:43:49 ►

singing in the rainforest

01:43:51 ►

stoned and exalted

01:43:54 ►

one with the

01:43:55 ►

souls of the ancestors

01:43:57 ►

one with the

01:43:59 ►

Gaian spirit of the planet

01:44:01 ►

ok this is a perfect place to end

01:44:06 ►

I think McKenna

01:44:08 ►

talked about this a couple of years ago

01:44:09 ►

and I used it last year

01:44:12 ►

as kind of what is the zippy vision

01:44:14 ►

of where we want to go to

01:44:15 ►

what is the balance between technology and organic

01:44:18 ►

imagine a world in the future

01:44:21 ►

a planet where there isn’t one inch of concrete

01:44:24 ►

it’s covered in rainforest, completely 100% natural.

01:44:28 ►

A naked couple walking across a clearing.

01:44:31 ►

Looked pretty much like I was maybe a little bit hairier, but naked.

01:44:35 ►

They pause, she bends down, lifts the floor without breaking it and puts it in her mouth,

01:44:42 ►

thereby making an electronic connection.

01:44:46 ►

Men use drop-down in their eyes.

01:44:48 ►

They plug into a sort of global computerized brain.

01:44:52 ►

They go into a virtual reality super city.

01:44:55 ►

They make their deals.

01:44:56 ►

They go to college.

01:44:57 ►

They have all the whatever they’re doing.

01:44:59 ►

We have meetings in virtual reality.

01:45:01 ►

But in fact, we’re all living as naked apes back in the jungle.

01:45:07 ►

In other words, the whole of technology has been inhaled into virtual reality.

01:45:12 ►

There’s no more concrete, no more physical buildings anywhere, instead of being exhaled on the planet.

01:45:17 ►

Now this, to me, this is a zippy vision, because I love nature, and I love the super city.

01:45:23 ►

The only thing I’ve got against the super city is that it’s killing off the nature.

01:45:27 ►

So if somehow we could put that into virtual reality, into cyberspace, then we’ve cracked it.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

143 - Rethinking Society

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