Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination.”
“There have been many episodes in the history of science where great hope gave way to paranoia.”
“The [UFO] hysteria has become more explicit and has wandered in first one direction and then another, but if this is a contact it’s the most peculiarly un-contact-like contact it’s possible to imagine.”
“And this is something I’m going to try and convince the UFO community of, what we drug people have that you don’t is repeatability.”
“The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history. Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity.”
“Reason, but a willingness to explore the edges has been [my] method. … I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience.”
“Not all psychedelics are alike. And this very small family of compounds, called the tryptomine hallucinogens, bear careful examination if we’re seriously interested in this question of exterrestial penetration of the human world.”
“Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff [psilocybin], Gordon Wasson, Richard Shulties, Albert Hofmann, the giants know that this stuff is animate. This is not a drug. It’s something that’s disguising itself as a drug in order not to spread alarm.”
“I think that the alien will be so alien that your jaw will hang in the air. And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien with an interest in your reproductive machinery and gross industrial capacity is as culture-bound a concept as searching NGC-321 for a good Italian restaurant. It’s absurd on the face of it.”
“All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien. Human history is what happens to an advance animal species when it is inner-penetrated on a scale of a million years by a mind in another dimension.”
“The flying saucer, the alien, the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time. This is what shamanism is all about. This is what the psychedelic people are discovering as they descend into these trances.”
“A shaman, and a psychedelic person, and a UFO contactee, is someone who has seen the end. They simply didn’t know what they were looking at, because who knows what the end looks like.”
“The world is not what it appears to be.”
“Psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was to the re-defining of astronomy.”
“I think that the ‘real other’ need not be guarded by the frail efforts of a cults apologists.”
“Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning.”
“I think that we are on a collision course with a planet-transforming event, and that we have been for a very, very long time. I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time.”
“That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed,
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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 well based on
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what i said in my last podcast i’ll bet that you thought i would get today’s podcast out a few days
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ago and that was my intention but obviously i didn’t get around to it until now i can still
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remember my mother saying that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.
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And since I’ve never had any interest in visiting hell, I’ve now decided to do away with all of my good intentions from here on out.
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I’ll let somebody else pave that road for a while.
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So I’ll continue to do my best to average at least one podcast a week this year, but I no longer have any good intentions along those lines.
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How’s that?
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Can you tell that I’m into the relaxing flow of summer?
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Now the trick is to remain relaxed and easygoing all year long, not just during the summer months.
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But three of our fellow swanners haven’t slacked off any this summer, in that they have very
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generously made donations to help offset the expenses
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involved in producing these podcasts each week.
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And these wonderful people are Jorge H., Leon M., and Noah H.
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Besides parting with some of your hard-earned cash, I know it takes some extra effort to
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take the time to go to our website and make a donation.
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some extra effort to take the time to go to our website and make a donation.
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So, Jorge, Leon, Noah, and to all of our other donors over the past three years,
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there isn’t much I can say other than to send you a big thank you for your help.
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But I guess there is something I can do,
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and that’s to get this podcast going and winging its way to you.
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Actually, I hadn’t planned on podcasting another Terrence McKenna talk just now, but sometimes it seems as if I’m not given a choice
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in what to play next. After the last podcast about the heavens, all kinds of funny little
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things started happening, like I was in the gym listening to the second Black Light in the Attic podcast
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about synchronicity, which of course had me thinking about synchronicities a little later
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when I was listening to Lefty’s Lounge and a song came on about UFOs. Well, just the night before,
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I was trying to figure out more about how BitTorrent works. And one of the things I stumbled on was a torrent with Terrence McKenna talking about UFOs.
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Now, maybe that’s a feeble excuse for sending a little more of the bard McKenna your way.
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But what can I say other than here is Terrence McKenna speaking at a UFO convention,
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possibly the one we’ve heard him talk about in past podcasts.
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I’m not sure exactly when this talk took place,
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but maybe one of our fellow slaughters was there,
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and we’ll post some more information about it in the comments section of the program notes for this talk.
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And I guess I should also warn you ahead of time that you are once again going to hear Terrence
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give a description of a smoked DMT experience.
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And like you, I think I’ve probably heard it enough times by now.
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But this time, at least to me, Terrence seems to bring an interesting new energy to his story,
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and my guess is that it’s because his audience, at least for the most part, had never heard him before.
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Remember, this is a UFO convention, and so my hunch is that he was really getting into the far-outness of the crowd
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and maybe embellished his story a little like the great bard he was.
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Or maybe I’m just imagining all of that.
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So you’ll have to decide for yourself, I guess.
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Let’s just join Terrence right now and hear what he has to say about UFOs.
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It’s very nice to be here.
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I come in peace for all mankind and womankind as well, if I may dare to represent them.
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womankind as well, if I may dare to represent them.
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The way I thought I would structure the thing is basically read a bit from my new book,
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which I hope then establishes my credentials
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as an authentic UFO witness and possible abductee.
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And then I’ll talk a little bit about what I think about it,
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because I don’t think about it what most people think about it.
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My dream from the time I was eight or nine was to encounter a UFO,
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because I always had the impression that if you would encounter one
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you could understand it
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that it was maddening to realize
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that it seemed to have a great affinity
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for people who live in trailer courts
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but very little affinity for anybody I knew
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and so you constantly had to filter
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these eyewitness reports by people that you wouldn’t send to the corner store to buy milk.
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So this was a problem and it will haunt.
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I’m sure it haunts many of you who have never encountered a UFO.
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So I’ll read the description of the encounter, then talk a little bit about my conclusions and ideas about it,
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and then we can just have a discussion.
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I guess I should say a little bit about my method.
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I really am a fence-sitter.
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I loathe science and am always keen to attack it in most situations, though not here, because I love reason
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and I’m perfectly aware of the difference. I also know what a concept means like rules of evidence.
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I’m not sure that’s a concept as widely circulated in these circles as it needs to be. In other words, how do you tell shit from Shinola? That’s very critical.
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I think reason can take us only a certain distance, and then we have to go with the divine imagination,
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but with all safety systems fully in operation,
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or the divine imagination will lead us into complete paranoia.
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This is what happens to a body of knowledge
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when it’s unable to make good on its first premises.
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In other words, if you have a great notion of reality
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but you can’t confirm it,
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then it must be because evil forces are conspiring against you
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and somehow subverting the success of your neat version of reality.
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And as someone who at one point in my life studied the history of science,
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there have been many episodes in the history of science
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where great hope gave way to paranoia.
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The phlogiston phenomenon is one example, or lysenclin genetics.
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And, you know, it’s been, what, 47 years since the Rainier lights are close to it.
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And the phenomenon has not become more explicit the hysteria
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has become more explicit and has wandered first in one direction and then another but if this is
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a contact it’s the most peculiarly uncontact like, it’s possible to imagine.
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It reminds me of what people say of the crop circles.
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They’re communicating.
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Yes, but if they are,
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they picked an incredibly obscure medium in which to do it
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because we who love communication
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can glean very little from what they’re trying to say.
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Well, enough barn beating.
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Let me read this passage,
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and then I’ll talk more about it,
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and this will bring, I think, the thing into focus.
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I have to introduce the context,
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because it wasn’t like that we just happened to be driving in a lonely and remote place and suddenly, no, it wasn’t like that.
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We were in the center of the Amazon basin.
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We had come there to explore tryptamine hallucinogens.
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These are short-acting, very powerful psychedelic drugs. the intoxication was invariably characterized by encounters with elves, gnomes, fairies,
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thousands of these things.
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And this is something I’m going to try and convince
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the UFO community of.
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What we drug people have that you don’t
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is repeatability.
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And the scientists always said to you UFO people,
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what you don’t have is repeatability.
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They don’t want to even talk to us.
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But it is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently
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high and prepared dose, you get elves. Everybody does. You may not believe it, but on the other
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hand, it only takes five minutes to prove that I’m bullshitting you 100%.
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Surely anyone who studied UFOs and alien intelligence
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for as many years as the people represented here have
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can afford to invest ten minutes in the wild-eyed assertion
00:11:00 ►
that all you need do is inhale deeply three times,
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and, you know, you want contact?
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You want elves?
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You want alien intelligence?
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You’ll have it up the kazoo.
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Now, of course, it comes from an unsanctioned dimension,
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but I’ll talk more about that after the reading.
00:11:23 ►
So here we were in the Amazon basin
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experimenting with mushrooms
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and here is the passage.
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And so, all night long,
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I sat reviewing the things that had passed,
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seeming to divide my consciousness and send it both backward through my family tree and forward into the future.
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I seemed to see all the years still ahead.
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our careers pursued across time and space, and finally vindication as the world realized the truth of the trans-dimensional nature of the Stropharia visions and the true nearness of the worlds that they had thrown open.
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For it had become my belief that the contact with an intelligent and utterly alien species was beginning for humanity.
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It seemed that out of the long night of cosmic time, the novelty of novelties,
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the moment of contact between minds on utterly different planes was beginning.
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We were among the first to achieve contact with this other. It was the real thing.
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We had come to the equatorial jungle to explore the dimensions glimpsed in tryptamine ecstasy,
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and there, in the darkness of the heart of the Amazon, we had been found and touched by this bizarre and ancient life form that was now awakening to the global
00:13:07 ►
potential of a symbiotic relationship with technical humanity. All night long, strange
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vistas and insights poured through me. I saw gigantic machineries and worlds of vegetable and mechanical forms on scales inconceivably vast.
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Time, agatized and glittering, seemed to pour by me like living superfluids,
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inhabiting dream regions of terrible pressure and super cold.
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And I saw the plan, the mighty plan, at last.
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It was an ecstasy, an ecstasis that lasted hours
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and placed the seal of completion on all of my previous life.
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At the end, I felt reborn, but as what, I knew not.
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In the gray light of a false dawn,
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and I should say I wasn’t loaded, I was insomniac.
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In the gray light of a false dawn,
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the wave of internal imagery faded away.
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I rose from where I had been sitting for hours and stretched. The sky was clear, but it was still very early,
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and stars were still shining dimly in
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the west. In the southeast, the direction toward which my attention had been focused, the sky was
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clear except for a line of fog or ground mist lying parallel to the horizon only a few feet above the treetops on the other side of the river, perhaps a
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half mile away.
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As I stretched and stood up on the flat stone where I had been sitting, I noticed that the
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line of fog seemed to have grown darker and now seemed to be churning or rolling in place.
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I watched very carefully as the rolling line of darkening mist split into two parts,
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and each of these smaller clouds also divided apart. It took only a minute or so for these
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changes to be executed, and I was now looking at four lens-shaped clouds of the same size lying in a row and slightly above the horizon
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only a half mile or so away.
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A wave of excitement swept through me
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followed by a wave of definite fear.
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I was glued to the spot,
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unable to move as in a dream.
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As I watched, the clouds recoalesced
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in the same way that they had divided apart,
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taking another few minutes.
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The symmetry of this dividing and rejoining
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and the fact that the smaller clouds
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were all the same size
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lent the performance an eerie air
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as if nature herself were suddenly the tool of some unseen organizing agency.
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As the clouds recoalesced, they seemed to grow even darker and more opaque.
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As they all became one, the clouds seemed to whirl inward like a tornado or a water spout,
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and it flashed into my mind, perhaps it was a water spout,
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something I still have never seen.
00:16:32 ►
But even as the thought formed, I heard a high-pitched,
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ululating whine,
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come drifting over the jungle treetops,
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obviously from the direction of the thing I was watching
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I turned and gave one glance at the river house
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70 feet behind me and up the steep hill
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gauging whether I had time to run and awaken someone
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to get confirmation of what was happening
00:17:02 ►
to arouse someone I would have had to go hand over hand
00:17:06 ►
up the slope and consequently take my eyes off the thing I was watching. In the space of an instant,
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I decided that I could not cease observing. I tried to shout, but no sound came from my fear
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constricted throat. The siren sound was rapidly gaining pitch,
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and in fact everything seemed to be speeding up.
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The moving cloud was definitely growing rapidly larger,
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moving straight toward the place where I was.
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I felt my legs turn to water and sat down, shaking terribly.
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For the first time, I really believed all that
00:17:47 ►
had happened to us, and I knew that the flying concrescence was now about to take me. Its details
00:17:54 ►
seemed to solidify as it approached. Then it passed directly overhead at an altitude of about
00:18:01 ►
200 feet, banked steeply upward, and was lost from sight over the edge of the slope behind me.
00:18:09 ►
In the last moment before it was lost,
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I completely threw open my senses to it and saw it very clearly.
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It was a saucer-shaped machine rotating slowly
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with unobtrusive soft blue and orange lights.
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As it passed over me, I could see symmetrical indentations on the underside.
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It was making the wee, wee, wee sound of science fiction flying saucers.
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My emotions were all in a jumble.
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At first I was terrified, but the moment I knew that whatever was in the sky
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was not going to take me,
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I felt disappointment.
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I was amazed, and I was trying to remember
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what I had seen as clearly as possible.
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Was it real in the naive sense
00:19:00 ►
in which that question is asked of UFOs and tables and chairs?
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No one else saw this thing as far as I know.
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I alone was its observer.
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I believe that had there been other observers,
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they would have seen what I had seen.
00:19:18 ►
But as for real, who can say?
00:19:21 ►
I saw this thing go from being a bit of cloud
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to being a rivet studded aircraft of some
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kind. Was it more true to itself as cloud or aircraft? Was it a hallucination? Against my
00:19:36 ►
testimony can be put my admitted lack of sleep and our involvement with psychedelic plants. Yet curiously, this last point can be interpreted in my favor.
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I am familiar by direct experience with every known class of hallucinogen.
00:19:54 ►
What I saw that morning did not fall into any of the categories of hallucinated imagery I am familiar with.
00:20:02 ►
Yet also against my testimony is the inevitable incongruous detail
00:20:09 ►
that seems to render the entire incident absurd. It is that, as the saucer passed overhead,
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I saw it clearly enough to judge that it was identical with the UFO with three half spheres on its underside
00:20:27 ►
that appears in an infamous photo by George Adamski, widely assumed to be a hoax. I had not
00:20:36 ►
closely followed the matter, but I accepted the expert opinion that what Adamski had photographed was a rigged up end cap of a 1937 Hoover vacuum
00:20:48 ►
cleaner. But I saw this same object in the sky above La Charrera. Was it a fact picked up
00:20:58 ►
as a boyhood UFO enthusiast? Something as easily picked out of my mind as other memories seem to have been,
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my stereotyped but already debunked notion of a UFO suddenly appears in the sky.
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By appearing in a form that casts doubt on itself,
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it achieves a more complete cognitive dissonance than if its seeming alienness were completely convincing.
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perfection impossible on earth today, or it was the manifestation of a something, which in that instance chose to begin as mist and end as machine, but which could have appeared
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in any form a manifestation of a humorous something’s omniscient control over the world
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of form and matter.
00:22:12 ►
And I flash forward two paragraphs.
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In the previous paragraph, I had been discussing mirages and I said an ordinary mirage is something that
00:22:27 ►
we see in space that isn’t there. Could there be mirages in time? In other words, could there be
00:22:35 ►
reflections of distant technologies that haunt space the way images of distant cities haunt time, haunt space.
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I believe that this latter comes close to the mark.
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The UFO is a reflection of a future event
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that promises humanity’s eventual mastery over time, space, and matter.
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We, in our clumsy attempt to probe these mysteries, we meaning my brother and myself,
00:23:07 ►
were able to coax nature into throwing out this great burning scintilla of pure contradiction
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from the dark retort where she labors over the chemistry of the millennium. That we were able to do this is full of import.
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It meant to me that we were on the right track.
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The Stropharia cubensis mushroom is a memory bank of galactic history.
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Alien, but full of promise, it throws open a potential for understanding that will sweep
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away the petty concerns of earth and history-bound humanity.
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So that was the encounter, not the only encounter. The book is full of weird shit, but that is
00:23:58 ►
actually, in a sense, the most conventional presentation of the encounter. It was absolutely convincing.
00:24:06 ►
It was the Adamski disk, which I do believe is malarkey. It was as cognitively dissonant
00:24:16 ►
as it could possibly be, you see, because if it were convincing in its alienness,
00:24:22 ►
you would know what you were dealing with a ufo from another star
00:24:26 ►
system obviously but what are we to make of a 45 foot diameter hoover end cap sailing through the
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blue skies of the amazon uh well i’ve given a lot of thought to these questions because my method has always been rational.
00:24:50 ►
In other words, I hear about something weird and I go there and I say, what can you show me?
00:24:57 ►
What have you got?
00:24:59 ►
I applied this to yogans in India, UFOs, fairy sightings, reason, but a willingness to explore the edges
00:25:11 ►
has been the method. And when I applied that method to the spiritual traditions of mystical
00:25:20 ►
India, I came away with considerable skepticism as to their accomplishments in that domain,
00:25:29 ►
at least in the contemporary scene. I have never seen a violation of physics that was not connected somehow with a psychedelic experience. My entry into psychedelics began very naively.
00:25:49 ►
It was presented as instant psychotherapy or insight, however vaguely defined.
00:25:58 ►
What I discovered when you make your way through these chemical families is that not all psychedelics are alike.
00:26:07 ►
And this very small family of compounds
00:26:11 ►
called the tryptamine hallucinogens
00:26:14 ►
bear careful examination
00:26:18 ►
if we’re seriously interested in this question
00:26:23 ►
of extraterrestrial penetration
00:26:25 ►
of the human world.
00:26:27 ►
On two grounds immediately
00:26:31 ►
the mushroom bears looking at.
00:26:35 ►
First argument,
00:26:37 ►
entirely a physical argument,
00:26:40 ►
psilocybin is for
00:26:43 ►
phosphoriloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:26:47 ►
What this means is that there is a phosphorus group substituted at the 4 position of the molecule.
00:26:58 ►
Now, here’s the headline, folks.
00:27:00 ►
This is the only 4-phosphorylated
00:27:05 ►
indole on this planet.
00:27:09 ►
On this planet.
00:27:12 ►
Now, if you were searching for
00:27:14 ►
extraterrestrial thumbprints on the
00:27:17 ►
biology of Earth, you would look
00:27:20 ►
for molecules that are unique,
00:27:24 ►
that don’t have near relatives spread through other life forms.
00:27:30 ►
In psilocybin, we have a perfect example of this.
00:27:34 ►
It is the only 4-phosphorylated indole known to occur in nature.
00:27:40 ►
Nature doesn’t work like that, folks.
00:27:43 ►
Nature builds always on what has previously been accomplished.
00:27:47 ►
So this is a red flag saying at the molecular level,
00:27:53 ►
this thing looks like an alien artifact at the molecular level.
00:27:57 ►
Now, let’s cut to the chase.
00:28:00 ►
What happens when you take 30 milligrams of this stuff?
00:28:06 ►
I don’t know how sophisticated this audience is.
00:28:09 ►
People who have never taken hallucinogenic drugs
00:28:12 ►
but have some mild interest in it
00:28:15 ►
or just in the course of generally educating yourself about reality,
00:28:19 ►
I think people who have never taken psychedelics
00:28:22 ►
think that it’s sort of like dreaming while you’re awake or geometric patterns, colors.
00:28:29 ►
They always say, the colors, the colors, malarkey, the colors, forget the colors.
00:28:35 ►
It is not like that.
00:28:37 ►
Psychedelic experiences at effective doses, not piddling doses, effective doses,
00:28:45 ►
are visionary scenarios.
00:28:48 ►
They are three-dimensional unfoldments of information
00:28:54 ►
that is extraordinarily complex, architectonically connected, and ordered.
00:29:01 ►
That’s not what I want to talk about.
00:29:03 ►
I want to talk about what is unique to psilocybin.
00:29:07 ►
What is unique to psilocybin is that overlaid over what I just described is, big surprise, a voice.
00:29:19 ►
A voice. Everybody knows this who has to do with this stuff stuff Gordon Wasson, Richard Schultes, Albert Hoffman
00:29:28 ►
the giants know that this stuff is animate
00:29:33 ►
this is not a drug
00:29:35 ►
it’s something which is disguising itself as a drug
00:29:40 ►
in order not to spread alarm
00:29:42 ►
there is a voice
00:29:43 ►
which speaks to you in the language of your homeland,
00:29:48 ►
whether that be Mazatecan or English.
00:29:51 ►
And the voice surprises you.
00:29:56 ►
In other words, you cannot anticipate it.
00:29:58 ►
Now, of course, at this point,
00:30:00 ►
though I don’t imagine many of them have forced their way in here,
00:30:05 ►
the psychological school will come forward and say,
00:30:09 ►
well, it’s a voice, typical of mental aberration,
00:30:13 ►
symptom one of schizophrenia, a voice.
00:30:17 ►
Yes, yes, we are not naive.
00:30:19 ►
We went to the same schools you did, thank you.
00:30:27 ►
read that we went to the same schools you did, thank you. However, the fact that this voice is accessible to non-pathological personalities and on demand is highly suggestive, I think.
00:30:38 ►
Next point, but let me belabor the point. This experience is available to everyone.
00:30:45 ►
The thing I love about psychedelics is no guru, no method, no teacher.
00:30:54 ►
You don’t need any of that crap.
00:30:57 ►
This will work.
00:30:58 ►
If it doesn’t work the first time, you didn’t take enough.
00:31:01 ►
This will work. It will work on you, Mr. MIT engineer, with your
00:31:07 ►
diagrams of antimatter propulsion systems. It will work on anybody. I started out from that place.
00:31:17 ►
Okay, that’s the first thing. Now, this small family of compounds, of which psilocybin is an interesting example because it occurs in the
00:31:28 ►
mushroom and let me say this it’s my workshop we’ll do it my way
00:31:34 ►
what troubles me about the uf the current state of u UFO modeling is how incredibly pedestrian
00:31:47 ►
the alien is assumed to be.
00:31:52 ►
I mean, their little gray suits,
00:31:55 ►
their charmingly slanted eyes,
00:31:58 ►
their cheerful interest in our reproductive capacity.
00:32:02 ►
I mean, I think that the alien will be so alien
00:32:07 ►
that your jaw will hang in the air.
00:32:11 ►
And expecting to meet an anthropoid-like alien
00:32:17 ►
with an interest in your reproductive machinery
00:32:20 ►
and gross industrial capacity
00:32:23 ►
is as culture-bound a concept
00:32:25 ►
as searching NGC 321
00:32:28 ►
for a good Italian restaurant.
00:32:31 ►
It’s absurd on the face of it.
00:32:36 ►
Let us for a moment hypothesize aliens.
00:32:40 ►
Somebody, the guy before me,
00:32:42 ►
spoke of being 100,000 years in advance.
00:32:46 ►
If you want to know how far in advance you are,
00:32:49 ►
if you’re 100,000 years in advance,
00:32:52 ►
ask yourself, where were we 100,000 years ago?
00:32:56 ►
And I think you see the gap is very large.
00:33:02 ►
If we are in fact being penetrated by a non-human intelligence that presumably
00:33:11 ►
somehow, perhaps not physically, but perhaps physically can cross from star to star, then
00:33:19 ►
we are dealing with something vastly more sophisticated than ourselves.
00:33:24 ►
That’s just given at the get-go.
00:33:27 ►
Well, if it’s vastly more advanced than we are,
00:33:31 ►
then DNA sequencing, complete understanding of the molecular genesis of thought,
00:33:39 ►
so forth and so on, would be no problem for that level of technical sophistication.
00:33:46 ►
You would also like to think that ethics and good taste would keep pace with this evolutionary process.
00:33:56 ►
So to my mind, the idea of fleets of alien spacecraft filling the skies of Earth,
00:34:02 ►
that’s as unsubtle as kicking down somebody’s front door
00:34:06 ►
with an M1 tank to announce,
00:34:08 ►
we’re here.
00:34:10 ►
I don’t think you would do it that way.
00:34:12 ►
If you really wanted to study an aboriginal race
00:34:19 ►
and you really had a hot technology,
00:34:23 ►
what you would do is you would study their social psychology,
00:34:29 ►
and you would say,
00:34:30 ►
are there any chinks in the armor of their expectations about how reality behaves?
00:34:40 ►
And you would discover, in studying us,
00:34:44 ►
this species intoxicates itself.
00:34:48 ►
And it has a curious attitude towards its intoxications.
00:34:53 ►
Anything goes.
00:34:55 ►
So if somebody drinks a pint of Stolichnaya and announces that they see pink elephants, we are all amused.
00:35:05 ►
We say, of course you do.
00:35:07 ►
You were drunk out of your mind.
00:35:09 ►
Isn’t it obvious that an alien would hide its presence in an intoxication?
00:35:17 ►
That this is the non-invasive, tasteful, respectful way
00:35:24 ►
to have intercourse with another species.
00:35:28 ►
You say, you put yourself into a plant.
00:35:32 ►
You put a barcode into a molecule.
00:35:36 ►
Then the shaman intoxicates himself
00:35:38 ►
and he says, aha, it’s an ancestor spirit
00:35:42 ►
or it’s the soul of the plant.
00:35:46 ►
But whatever it is, it’s giving me good information.
00:35:49 ►
It’s telling me where the reindeer went.
00:35:53 ►
It’s telling me what the weather will be next week.
00:35:58 ►
It’s telling me who stole the goose and it’s telling me who slept with who.
00:36:02 ►
the goose and it’s telling me who slept with who and it’s telling me who among
00:36:06 ►
the ill members of my tribe will live
00:36:09 ►
and who will die.
00:36:12 ►
And with that information I can make a political career
00:36:15 ►
as a healer.
00:36:18 ►
So you see, the
00:36:21 ►
extraterrestrial is a mean trader.
00:36:24 ►
The extraterrestrial is a mean trader. The extraterrestrial is trading data.
00:36:28 ►
Giving data, maybe.
00:36:31 ►
But I think trading, because it’s taking something away.
00:36:35 ►
So first it tells you where the reindeer have gone
00:36:39 ►
and who’s sleeping with who.
00:36:41 ►
Later it suggests things like alphabets.
00:36:46 ►
Later still, it suggests things like the calculus.
00:36:51 ►
Do you see where it’s leading?
00:36:52 ►
All of human history is the signifier of the presence of the alien.
00:37:02 ►
Human history is what happens to an advanced animal species
00:37:07 ►
when it is interpenetrated on a scale of a million years
00:37:12 ►
by a mind in another dimension.
00:37:15 ►
We were selected out of the swift running river of animal organization,
00:37:24 ►
swift running river of animal organization, took an orthogonal turn and headed out into the world of symbolic activity,
00:37:31 ►
cognition, signification, ritual, analysis, projection.
00:37:39 ►
The flying saucers, the alien, the other,
00:37:52 ►
saucers the alien the other is what is sculpting us out of animal organization as we move toward it in time this is what shamanism is all about this is what the psychedelic people are discovering
00:37:59 ►
as they descend into these trances well okay, okay, well, one more thing,
00:38:06 ►
and then I’ll leave that,
00:38:07 ►
given the interests of this crowd.
00:38:11 ►
Mushrooms cannot be found in the fossil record
00:38:14 ►
older than 40 million years.
00:38:18 ►
You ask a straight paleontologist why,
00:38:21 ►
and he says it’s because they’re soft-bodied
00:38:23 ►
and none survived older than that.
00:38:26 ►
We have soft-bodied creatures in the Burgess Shale that are dating out at 3.8 billion years.
00:38:35 ►
If you assume a super technology, it means that the species that holds that technology can design itself.
00:38:46 ►
It is not subject to the tyranny of whatever form it inherits
00:38:50 ►
from the evolutionary processes of its home planet.
00:38:54 ►
Even we in our primitive state are on the brink of being able to design ourselves
00:39:00 ►
through genetic manipulation.
00:39:04 ►
Therefore, look at
00:39:06 ►
Stropharia cubensis, the psychedelic mushroom.
00:39:12 ►
Spores are the most
00:39:14 ►
electron-dense organic material known.
00:39:20 ►
The electron density of the outer case of a spore
00:39:23 ►
approaches that of a metal.
00:39:26 ►
A single mushroom in the sporulation phase can shed up to 3 million spores a minute for up to 6 weeks.
00:39:37 ►
One mushroom can do this. I maintain, following Bracewell, that a strategy for extraterrestrial contact carried on by a super technology would take the following form.
00:39:51 ►
Build a probe. Give the probe the ability to replicate itself.
00:40:09 ►
probes out from your home planet and that every, say every half AU or something, the probe replicates so that the volume of probes stays constant as the volume of space increases. If you’re carrying
00:40:16 ►
out an exhaustive search of the galaxy for life, it’s very hard to imagine a civilization that could visit every star
00:40:26 ►
and monitor every star over long periods
00:40:29 ►
of time. A much more efficient strategy
00:40:32 ►
would be the phone home strategy.
00:40:35 ►
You send essentially
00:40:38 ►
a credit card which says
00:40:41 ►
if you get this message, call the enclosed
00:40:44 ►
toll-free number
00:40:46 ►
and immediately report your location.
00:40:49 ►
We will come at that point.
00:40:51 ►
That’s, I think, what’s going on.
00:40:54 ►
Human history is the effort to phone home.
00:40:57 ►
Human history is the effort to decode a message
00:41:02 ►
in the terrestrial environment of this planet
00:41:05 ►
that shamans and dreamers and mystics,
00:41:10 ►
and let’s throw in a few schizophrenics and out-and-out screwballs,
00:41:14 ►
have been accessing for millennia.
00:41:18 ►
And it’s not new.
00:41:19 ►
It’s very, very old.
00:41:22 ►
And it cannot be without significance
00:41:26 ►
that the Mayan civilization, which used these mushrooms,
00:41:31 ►
became obsessed with 2012 A.D.
00:41:35 ►
I, who am absolutely phobic of obsessions in all forms,
00:41:41 ►
am myself obsessed by December 21st, 2012 AD.
00:41:47 ►
That’s the bottom line of the barcode.
00:41:50 ►
And my notion of what’s going on in the informational phase space of contemporary existence is that
00:42:01 ►
we are under the influence of a kind of attractor.
00:42:06 ►
This is this thing I mentioned which seized hold of us as a higher animal
00:42:11 ►
and steered us toward language, ritual, religion, the calculus, so forth and so on.
00:42:18 ►
This attractor is literally sucking the world of three-dimensional space and time into itself.
00:42:29 ►
This is what history is.
00:42:31 ►
History is biological time turning into some other kind of time.
00:42:38 ►
History is speeding up as we approach the omega point.
00:42:44 ►
And here is a granted idiotic but nevertheless serviceable metaphor for how this thing at
00:42:51 ►
the end of time works and why we are driven so nutty by things like flying saucers.
00:42:58 ►
The transcendental attractor at the end of the historical process. Think of it like one of those mirrored bar balls
00:43:07 ►
that hang in a disco that catch the light
00:43:12 ►
and put scintillations on the walls as it spins around.
00:43:18 ►
As we approach the transcendental object at the end of time,
00:43:23 ►
the reflections,
00:43:27 ►
the precursive anticipations,
00:43:29 ►
what Wordsworth called the intimations of immortality,
00:43:33 ►
grow ever stronger.
00:43:35 ►
The world is becoming
00:43:36 ►
more and more irrational,
00:43:39 ►
more and more fraught with anomaly.
00:43:43 ►
You know, not only flying saucers, but Bigfoot.
00:43:47 ►
And the crop circles, which are quite new as a wrinkle.
00:43:51 ►
There will be more and more of this stuff as we approach the moment of concrescence.
00:43:59 ►
And people in the past, Christ, Buddha, you name them,
00:44:05 ►
these are people who literally stood in a correct geometrical relationship
00:44:13 ►
to the transcendental object at the end of time.
00:44:17 ►
But it was just dumb luck, that’s all.
00:44:21 ►
They were not superior people.
00:44:23 ►
I’m sure that if you could enter into the mind of Christ
00:44:26 ►
as he went around Galilee performing his miracles,
00:44:29 ►
the main thing which preoccupied his inner circumlocution
00:44:34 ►
was the question, why me?
00:44:37 ►
What’s happening?
00:44:39 ►
Why am I compelled to do and say these things?
00:44:43 ►
Well, the answer is
00:44:47 ►
you’ve got eschatological fever.
00:44:50 ►
You’ve been infected by a retrovirus
00:44:53 ►
that operates not in space, but in time.
00:44:57 ►
And to the degree that one can clear themselves
00:45:02 ►
of the momentum of past presupposition, the transcendental object
00:45:09 ►
at the end of time actually comes into view. Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
00:45:18 ►
The way I think of shamanism and psychedelic voyaging is that it is trans-dimensional travel,
00:45:29 ►
literally, not in the undefined way
00:45:37 ►
that you often hear it used,
00:45:39 ►
but in the mathematical sense.
00:45:41 ►
A shaman and a psychedelic person and
00:45:46 ►
a UFO contactee
00:45:48 ►
is someone who has
00:45:50 ►
seen the end.
00:45:53 ►
They simply didn’t
00:45:54 ►
know what they were looking at because who
00:45:56 ►
knows what the end looks
00:45:58 ►
like. The
00:45:59 ►
world of historical possibility
00:46:02 ►
concresses into
00:46:04 ►
a mercurial hologrammatic disk.
00:46:08 ►
Part bios, part machine, part syntax, part mind.
00:46:15 ►
The categories dissolve.
00:46:18 ►
The world is not what it appears to be.
00:46:22 ►
I was very interested in
00:46:25 ►
coming to this thing
00:46:29 ►
and studying the psychology of the group
00:46:32 ►
and it was very fascinating to me
00:46:35 ►
that both of the speakers
00:46:37 ►
where I listened to the whole thing
00:46:38 ►
were very concerned to refute
00:46:41 ►
the psychological explanation
00:46:44 ►
which I gather is the Antichrist around here.
00:46:49 ►
And as I understand it,
00:46:51 ►
somebody said to me,
00:46:52 ►
the first thing they said to me,
00:46:53 ►
I thought, my God, these people are on edge.
00:46:56 ►
He said, I want you to know
00:46:57 ►
that this Jungian thing is bullshit.
00:46:59 ►
I said, okay, that’s fine.
00:47:04 ►
However, this is like beating a dead horse.
00:47:09 ►
Has the news from quantum physics not reached the UFO community?
00:47:16 ►
Is it not now thoroughly assimilated that an observer is necessary for reality to exist at all.
00:47:26 ►
It’s all psychological.
00:47:30 ►
There’s no distinction.
00:47:32 ►
And so these people who have such enthusiasm
00:47:34 ►
for beryllium ships from Arturus or wherever
00:47:38 ►
should be informed, you know.
00:47:41 ►
Same, same.
00:47:43 ►
That’s important news it isn’t now and where is it coming from let’s let’s not
00:47:52 ►
rush past this here physics has always been the paradigmatic science All sciences have physics envy.
00:48:06 ►
Why is that?
00:48:07 ►
Because it’s not unlikely in a physics experiment
00:48:12 ►
to be able to predict an experimental result
00:48:16 ►
to three decimal points of accuracy.
00:48:20 ►
That’s science.
00:48:22 ►
You don’t get that in sociology.
00:48:25 ►
You don’t get that in psychology. You don’t even get that in science. You don’t get that in sociology. You don’t get that in psychology.
00:48:27 ►
You don’t even get that in biology.
00:48:30 ►
And physics is the most mathematical
00:48:32 ►
of all the sciences.
00:48:34 ►
So around the towering edifice of physics,
00:48:40 ►
the more frightened and uncertain
00:48:42 ►
of the sciences had gathered
00:48:44 ►
near her skirts.
00:48:47 ►
Well, so now what is physics telling us?
00:48:50 ►
Saying, folks, hold your horses here.
00:48:55 ►
It turns out the cheerful world of billiard ball like atoms winging their way through Newtonian
00:49:06 ►
space is in for serious
00:49:09 ►
revision. It turns out that these
00:49:12 ►
particles aren’t even particles. They’re
00:49:15 ►
waves. Well, no, not exactly.
00:49:18 ►
They’re both. Well, what I actually
00:49:21 ►
meant to say was, and you discover
00:49:24 ►
the babble of mad people.
00:49:28 ►
Science has collapsed.
00:49:31 ►
Its core has given way to contradiction.
00:49:35 ►
The cheerful exploration of matter that begins with the Greeks
00:49:39 ►
is destroyed by Werner Heisenberg and all his evil grandchildren,
00:49:47 ►
who now show that, you know, number one, it’s incomprehensible.
00:49:52 ►
Number two, it’s self-contradictory.
00:49:55 ►
Number three, you can’t conceptualize it
00:50:00 ►
except in some enormously complicated mathematical phase space anyway.
00:50:07 ►
So this concern for the materiality of the saucers
00:50:12 ►
is a completely anachronistic issue.
00:50:17 ►
Carried far enough, the analysis of this stage
00:50:22 ►
will show you that it has no quote reality to it now this play is nicely
00:50:30 ►
right into my hands let’s go back now to those drug-induced hallucinations you know i think every
00:50:37 ►
every ufo investigator in the country uh they have these forms when they come rushing out to your house
00:50:46 ►
when you report an 11-mile-long green cigar overhead.
00:50:52 ►
And the first question is, are you intoxicated?
00:50:55 ►
Do you have a history of taking drugs?
00:50:57 ►
What is your relationship to altered states?
00:51:00 ►
This is complete fascism.
00:51:03 ►
Most encounters with extraterrestrials take place in altered states.
00:51:09 ►
That’s what altered states are.
00:51:11 ►
Reality is the tip of an iceberg of irrationality that we’ve managed to drag ourselves up onto for a few panting moments before we slip back into the sea of the unreal what this means
00:51:29 ►
then just to cut to the chase is that um psychedelic drugs are as important to the study of UFOs as the telescope was
00:51:46 ►
to the redefining of astronomy.
00:51:50 ►
You can meet the alien.
00:51:54 ►
You can meet the alien.
00:51:57 ►
Tomorrow night,
00:51:59 ►
if your connections are good enough,
00:52:02 ►
and you can meet the alien
00:52:04 ►
over and over and over again.
00:52:07 ►
You said this was what you wanted, baby.
00:52:11 ►
It’s on its way.
00:52:13 ►
It’s being served.
00:52:15 ►
The anxiety that society feels about psychedelic drugs,
00:52:22 ►
and notice, psychedelic drugs do not cause addiction, ruin lives, or inspire people to rob banks or any of that. Psychedelic drugs, nothing has ever been adduced against stigmatized for dealing in funny ideas.
00:52:46 ►
They haven’t made UFOs illegal, but they certainly have made psychedelics illegal.
00:52:53 ►
This is because this is the portal.
00:52:56 ►
The secret is out.
00:52:57 ►
It isn’t going to be a top-down revelation.
00:53:00 ►
It isn’t going to come on McNeil-Lehrer or the cover of Time.
00:53:05 ►
There will not be an announcement from the White House press office.
00:53:09 ►
Anybody who has that vision of how it works has completely given away their own power.
00:53:17 ►
You are not to be a consumer of the UFO.
00:53:22 ►
It is not for your amusement.
00:53:25 ►
It is for your transformation.
00:53:29 ►
And you can play the game
00:53:31 ►
of waiting with the uninitiated
00:53:34 ►
or you can simply
00:53:36 ►
go look at the end of the movie.
00:53:40 ►
Shamans have been doing this
00:53:42 ►
for at least probably
00:53:44 ►
100,000 years.
00:53:47 ►
And it’s a process of opening to an experience, not an ideology.
00:53:59 ►
It’s not an ideology. It’s an experience. The UFO thing began as an experience.
00:54:07 ►
The Rainier Lights, the rest of it.
00:54:10 ►
It was quickly seized upon by ideologues,
00:54:15 ►
the contactees of the 50s.
00:54:17 ►
Now there are new ideologues.
00:54:20 ►
The problem is everybody claims too much information.
00:54:25 ►
Where does it end?
00:54:27 ►
People who have exact information on the geography of Atlantis
00:54:32 ►
or the pecking orders of distant planets and this sort of thing.
00:54:37 ►
I mean, there are rules of evidence.
00:54:40 ►
There are rules of evidence.
00:54:42 ►
And what can’t pass through that filter has to be discarded.
00:54:49 ►
I think that the real other need not be guarded by the frail efforts of occult apologists.
00:55:00 ►
The real other can be hammered on with a ball-peen hammer, and it will do just fine, thank you.
00:55:08 ►
So I want to suggest, and I’m very delighted to have the opportunity,
00:55:14 ►
the UFO community has a great database of experience with weirdness.
00:55:20 ►
Now you need to just take it one vibratory level over and cut your teeth on what we’ve been putting up with for years, which is these alien entities that are so easily contacted and dealt with through the intercession of the psilocybin and DMT family of compounds.
00:55:48 ►
I want to describe my DMT experience just to let you know how alien it is,
00:55:54 ►
and then we can discuss this a little.
00:55:56 ►
I described the psilocybin experience, or I mentioned that it is a voice.
00:56:02 ►
DMT, which is a near relative of psilocybin.
00:56:06 ►
Psilocybin I mentioned for phosphoriloxy-NN-DMT.
00:56:11 ►
Now I want to talk about NN-DMT.
00:56:14 ►
This is a compound,
00:56:16 ►
the commonest hallucinogen in nature.
00:56:19 ►
Note that, because if an alien
00:56:20 ►
were spreading hallucinogens around,
00:56:23 ►
this would be the one to look at.
00:56:24 ►
It’s the commonest one.
00:56:27 ►
You smoke it.
00:56:29 ►
It only lasts three to seven minutes.
00:56:33 ►
Not long, folks.
00:56:35 ►
Anybody can invest three to seven minutes, I would think,
00:56:39 ►
in an experiment which might alter your complete ontology.
00:56:44 ►
What happens when you smoke DMT?
00:56:48 ►
Well, here’s what happens to me.
00:56:52 ►
There is a mandolic pattern which forms,
00:56:56 ►
which is identifiable as what pharmacologists call preliminary hypnagogia.
00:57:01 ►
It just simply means that the brain-mind system is saying,
00:57:07 ►
yes, exotic indoles are arriving at the synaptic receptors in unexpected numbers.
00:57:14 ►
Yes, we are monitoring this situation.
00:57:17 ►
Yes, yes, yes.
00:57:19 ►
Okay.
00:57:20 ►
That goes on for about 30 seconds,
00:57:23 ►
and then you are propelled through it into a place.
00:57:27 ►
A place, not a state of mind, a place.
00:57:32 ►
And this place has its low, it’s no higher than this ceiling.
00:57:38 ►
And it’s actually about the size of this room, but rounded, softened lighting indirect lighting
00:57:45 ►
but the main
00:57:48 ►
action is
00:57:49 ►
you are instantly
00:57:51 ►
plunged into an environment
00:57:54 ►
of elf intelligence
00:57:56 ►
self transforming
00:57:58 ►
machine elves
00:57:59 ►
I call these things
00:58:01 ►
or tykes just for want of a better
00:58:04 ►
name they are not cheerfully portrayed and suitable material for T-shirts and coffee mugs.
00:58:12 ►
They are self-transforming, jeweled, basketball-like things.
00:58:18 ►
It’s not clear they are made of matter.
00:58:21 ►
They are made of light.
00:58:22 ►
Their status on the phylogeny of biology is extraordinarily murky.
00:58:29 ►
And they come pounding forward like badly trained dogs, cheering. They say, here you are. You may
00:58:38 ►
all recall, some of you may recall that old Pink Floyd song, the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.
00:58:48 ►
So there you are.
00:58:49 ►
And now, 20 seconds before,
00:58:52 ►
you were in an apartment somewhere
00:58:54 ►
with your scuzzy friends doing drugs.
00:58:58 ►
Now that’s gone.
00:59:00 ►
And you are in this place
00:59:03 ►
being confronted by these entities.
00:59:07 ►
And one of the things they do
00:59:08 ►
that’s quite disconcerting
00:59:10 ►
is they come jumping up
00:59:11 ►
or dribbling up to you
00:59:13 ►
and then they will sort of
00:59:14 ►
vibrate in place.
00:59:15 ►
Then they jump into your chest.
00:59:18 ►
Then they jump back out.
00:59:20 ►
But the main thing is
00:59:22 ►
they are doing something
00:59:24 ►
very, very interesting.
00:59:27 ►
What they’re doing is they, I call, the reason I call them language elves
00:59:34 ►
is because they possess an ontos of language that is completely alien to us.
00:59:42 ►
They use a language which you can see. They can condense meaning before your very eyes.
00:59:52 ►
For them, syntax is not acoustical rules. It’s pictorial rules. And they are doing this. They
01:00:02 ►
will scramble forward forward elbowing each other
01:00:05 ►
jumping up and down
01:00:06 ►
very excited
01:00:07 ►
and they say
01:00:08 ►
look at this
01:00:09 ►
look at this
01:00:11 ►
and they
01:00:12 ►
pull objects
01:00:15 ►
sing objects
01:00:16 ►
into existence
01:00:17 ►
and show them to you
01:00:19 ►
and as your attention
01:00:20 ►
goes into these things
01:00:22 ►
you are
01:00:23 ►
the emotion
01:00:26 ►
is indescribable.
01:00:27 ►
These objects are made of
01:00:29 ►
gold, ivory, smaragdine,
01:00:32 ►
chalcedony,
01:00:34 ►
beryllium, ytterbium,
01:00:36 ►
flesh, gold, blood,
01:00:38 ►
heat, tears, and
01:00:39 ►
it’s all changing, morphing
01:00:42 ►
as you look at it. And as you
01:00:44 ►
look at this, you have, without an iota of doubt, the conviction,
01:00:51 ►
if I could bring this thing across, it would end human history.
01:00:56 ►
Argument would cease.
01:00:58 ►
You would just say, look, look at this.
01:01:03 ►
And they’re pushing each other away, showing you, look at this one, look at this. And they’re pushing each other away,
01:01:05 ►
showing you, look at this one, look at this one.
01:01:08 ►
These objects themselves emit sound
01:01:11 ►
and make other objects.
01:01:13 ►
The whole thing is going on
01:01:14 ►
in an atmosphere of incredible hilarity and confusion.
01:01:19 ►
It’s now one minute since you left your scuzzy friends
01:01:23 ►
in that badly furnished apartment.
01:01:27 ►
Naturally, the fact that you’re having this experience raises certain fundamental questions,
01:01:34 ►
such as, am I dead now?
01:01:37 ►
Is that what’s happened?
01:01:39 ►
And the entities say, they say, don’t give way to amazement.
01:01:51 ►
Don’t flip out about how you can’t believe it and it’s impossible and so forth and so on. Don’t do that.
01:01:52 ►
Just pay attention.
01:01:54 ►
Pay attention to what we are doing and what we are showing you.
01:01:59 ►
And what they preach is a new dispensation of language, a language that can be beheld.
01:02:08 ►
And as you sit there, you feel like a bubble form in your stomach you too can make jeweled objects with spinning interiors and reflexively rotating sub- indescribable but fortunately doable.
01:02:51 ►
It sounds like this. This is a pictorial activity.
01:03:13 ►
Now, when I went to the Amazon,
01:03:16 ►
I discovered,
01:03:18 ►
I didn’t discover, I went to,
01:03:19 ►
they’ve been known for years,
01:03:21 ►
tribes of people using a hallucinogen
01:03:23 ►
called ayahuasca. And when you take
01:03:26 ►
ayahuasca with these people, they sing. And then they have like little intermissions. And I would
01:03:32 ►
be in my horrible Spanish ear listening to these people. The guy next to me is saying to the guy
01:03:38 ►
next to him about the song, he says, I love the olive drab part, but when he got into that thing with the silver
01:03:47 ►
on magenta, I just thought it was tacky.
01:03:50 ►
And I’m, what?
01:03:51 ►
Say what?
01:03:54 ►
You realize these people, for them, sound is being transduced in the visual cortex.
01:04:04 ►
The ordinary processing of acoustical input is being shunted in the visual cortex. The ordinary processing of acoustical input
01:04:06 ►
is being shunted to the visual cortex.
01:04:09 ►
This is the same thing the DMT types are talking about.
01:04:13 ►
And these are the very jungle tribes
01:04:16 ►
that it’s always been charged,
01:04:18 ►
had group mind, telepathy,
01:04:21 ►
ways of creating a social cohesion
01:04:24 ►
that was contravened reason
01:04:26 ►
this is what’s going on I think
01:04:29 ►
now I then studied this phenomenon
01:04:34 ►
of language very carefully
01:04:36 ►
it never even occurred to me of visual language
01:04:39 ►
I discovered however
01:04:41 ►
that nature has anticipated this phenomenon
01:04:46 ►
in the organisms that are known to us as octopi and cephalopods.
01:04:54 ►
As you all know, as you’re probably graduates of those horrible nature specials on TV,
01:05:00 ►
octopi can change color.
01:05:03 ►
Most people think this is camouflage.
01:05:06 ►
It isn’t camouflage.
01:05:09 ►
It is language.
01:05:11 ►
Octopi control an enormous repertoire
01:05:14 ►
of what are called traveling dots,
01:05:17 ►
blushes, shadings, striping,
01:05:21 ►
wavy lines, and a huge color palette.
01:05:24 ►
These exterior changes on the surface of the octopus
01:05:29 ►
are a direct readout of its state of mind.
01:05:35 ►
It wears its mind on its surface.
01:05:40 ►
And you may not know, but at the third gastrulation of the blastopore in the human fetus the
01:05:47 ►
it becomes the surface of the body the surface of the body is brain tissue essentially a very
01:05:56 ►
thin sheet of brain tissue all over the outside of the body that’s why there’s so many nerves in the skin. So what seems to be being preached
01:06:07 ►
in the DMT encounter is the ontological transformation into a telepathic mode.
01:06:16 ►
Now you may have thought telepathy was you hearing somebody else think. Apparently, that’s not what telepathy is. Telepathy is you seeing what somebody else
01:06:29 ►
means. It’s the visual acquisition of meaning rather than the audio acquisition of meaning,
01:06:38 ►
because there is no ambiguity. You see, we use local languages. If your dictionary matches my dictionary, you can understand me. And that’s fine if we’re saying, you know, could you close the door or get me a grant? of language or the political obligations to the community in the light of the inevitability of mortality or something like that,
01:07:09 ►
then acoustically transduced sound and common dictionaries don’t cut the mustard.
01:07:14 ►
One of the most uncool things you can say in any situation is,
01:07:20 ►
would you please explain to me what I just said?
01:07:23 ►
is would you please explain to me what I just said?
01:07:27 ►
Because that rends the fabric and we’re then faced in the mud of the fact
01:07:31 ►
that nobody understands or even bothers to listen to anybody else
01:07:35 ►
and if they do, they don’t get it anyway.
01:07:39 ►
Well, I think that we are on the collision course with a planet transforming event.
01:07:49 ►
And that we have been for a very, very long time.
01:07:52 ►
I also believe that it lies below the horizon of rational apprehension at this point in time.
01:08:02 ►
If you’re in this game for fun, there’s lots of fun to be had. If you’re in
01:08:08 ►
this game for final answers, I suggest you take up geometry. It will be much more satisfying. There
01:08:16 ►
isn’t going to be closure. I mean, because after all, don’t lose sight of the fact that we’re advanced monkeys of some sort.
01:08:25 ►
The idea that advanced monkeys could, in fact, unearth and then cognize the secret of the universe
01:08:34 ►
is like expecting the same thing from termites or, you know, mussels.
01:08:41 ►
It’s absurd. It’s ridiculous.
01:08:44 ►
I mean, we are embedded in mystery. Our brains were evolved
01:08:48 ►
to keep us from being eaten by nearby hungry competitors. It is not a tool for philosophy.
01:08:56 ►
Philosophy comes later. And I think that what the UFO community and what the psychedelic community share
01:09:09 ►
is a tremendous impatience with scientism and the fascism of scientism.
01:09:37 ►
And the way to overcome these things is to simply opt out of the historical game and avail yourselves of the shamanic tools which have always been there.
01:09:45 ►
The whisperings from the other dimension are probably a thousand millennia old.
01:09:47 ►
That’s a million years.
01:09:51 ►
That’s the time that we have been sitting around campfires,
01:09:53 ►
spinning yarns for each other,
01:09:57 ►
and looking up at the night sky. We are not alone on this planet.
01:10:01 ►
But it may be that we are the late evolving intelligence. The mushroom said to me
01:10:08 ►
once, it said, I said, what are you doing here? It said, you’re a mushroom, you live cheap. I said,
01:10:16 ►
but it said it was not such a bad neighborhood till the monkeys went berserk and that was only yesterday so
01:10:27 ►
you see it isn’t that they’re coming to us from the stars it’s that we are
01:10:34 ►
finally having the scales far fall from our eyes to realize what it means to be
01:10:41 ►
on a water heavy oxygen rich planet with over two and a half billion years of biological history
01:10:48 ►
already neatly tucked under the belt.
01:10:52 ►
I mean, the peculiarities and singularities
01:11:01 ►
that have been built into our circumstance,
01:11:04 ►
I believe, would literally stand
01:11:06 ►
our hair on end. And the only way, the only way to make your way through this morass of claim
01:11:17 ►
and counterclaim is do not move your faith an an iota, beyond your own direct experience.
01:11:29 ►
If you haven’t seen a UFO, believe no one.
01:11:34 ►
No photograph, no testimony, no nothing.
01:11:37 ►
Because everything is contaminated.
01:11:40 ►
Forget UFOs. Take Mount Everest.
01:11:42 ►
Have you seen it?
01:11:44 ►
Then for you it doesn’t exist.
01:11:46 ►
I saw it. It couldn’t possibly be the world’s largest mountain.
01:11:50 ►
I could hold it between this finger and this finger.
01:11:55 ►
So, then if you limit yourself to direct experience,
01:12:01 ►
does that mean that you’re shit out of luck?
01:12:04 ►
No. It means that you have arrived
01:12:07 ►
at the beginning of the real path toward the saucer. Because you don’t want to hear that
01:12:16 ►
Whitley Strieber or Bud Hopkins walked in through the purple doorway and was never seen again.
01:12:23 ►
You want to be the person to walk through the purple doorway and was never seen again you want to be the
01:12:25 ►
person to walk through the purple doorway and never be seen again well I
01:12:30 ►
guarantee you it’s more easily done than you might wish to suppose but you’re
01:12:38 ►
going to have to avail yourself of the shamanic technology,
01:12:45 ►
which is a super technology,
01:12:49 ►
of the shamanic technology that we inherit
01:12:52 ►
from the archaic civilizations.
01:12:55 ►
Not everybody fell into physics, worship, and materialism.
01:13:00 ►
The rainforest cultures, the aboriginal cultures,
01:13:04 ►
have kept the channel open while we dithered and mucked about in the historical process, materialism, of courage, real courage, because it’s real. It’s absolutely
01:13:29 ►
real. But the sine qua non is the psychedelic molecule. It was designed this way. It isn’t that
01:13:39 ►
it’s impossible to encounter these things in any other fashion, but it’s impossible to coherently encounter them
01:13:47 ►
in any other fashion
01:13:49 ►
because that’s the part that is obtruding
01:13:53 ►
into the social sphere,
01:13:56 ►
and that’s the area where contention, control,
01:14:00 ►
informational viruses, disinformation,
01:14:04 ►
false testimony
01:14:06 ►
hidden agendas
01:14:08 ►
are totally corrupting
01:14:11 ►
of the phenomenon
01:14:12 ►
but you can get it down
01:14:14 ►
to you
01:14:16 ►
and it
01:14:17 ►
if you will simply avail yourself
01:14:20 ►
of the psychedelic tools
01:14:23 ►
that nature created
01:14:25 ►
and that shamanism places at our disposal.
01:14:29 ►
That’s where the frontier of this hyper-technical fantasy is headed,
01:14:35 ►
toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient
01:14:40 ►
when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye.
01:14:46 ►
Questions? Thank you very much. when the pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye? Question.
01:14:48 ►
Thank you very much.
01:14:57 ►
Thank you.
01:14:59 ►
It’s lots of fun.
01:15:01 ►
You have no idea how much fun this is.
01:15:03 ►
Yeah.
01:15:04 ►
I have two questions.
01:15:06 ►
One, are you aware of any psychedelics being used in ancient Greece
01:15:10 ►
around the time of Plato or Aristotle?
01:15:12 ►
Sure.
01:15:13 ►
You should read The Road to Eleusis by Wasson and Hoffman
01:15:17 ►
that argues very persuasively that an LSD-like alkaloid
01:15:23 ►
lay behind the Eleusinian mysteries.
01:15:27 ►
That was the great mystery religion
01:15:29 ►
that inspired all of the movers and shakers of the Hellenistic world.
01:15:37 ►
And your second question?
01:15:38 ►
My second question was,
01:15:39 ►
would you comment on the connection between serotonin and psilocybin?
01:15:45 ►
Good question.
01:15:46 ►
Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that occurs in almost all life.
01:15:52 ►
It occurs from flatworms to human beings.
01:15:56 ►
And interestingly, as you ascend the phylogeny, there is more and more serotonin.
01:16:02 ►
More in mammals than in any other major order of animals,
01:16:07 ►
more in primates than in any other kind of mammal, and more in man than in any other primate.
01:16:14 ►
Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine, 4-phosphoriloxy, and then DMT,
01:16:23 ►
although it must be said that the phosphorus group is clipped off almost immediately
01:16:29 ►
and it becomes psilocin for hydroxy and then dimethyltryptamine.
01:16:34 ►
I believe that on one level what’s happening is that there is a kind of evolutionary competition going on.
01:16:44 ►
Obviously, some neurotransmitters are more efficient than others.
01:16:49 ►
And it may be that we are only a one or two gene mutation away from a swapping out of serotonin
01:17:00 ►
for some more efficient, whatever that might mean, neurotransmitter.
01:17:05 ►
Now, romantically, wouldn’t it be nice if psilocybin were it?
01:17:09 ►
I suspect it isn’t because psilocybin is not known to be elaborated in the tissue of any higher animal.
01:17:18 ►
But what’s a good candidate is there is an enzyme in the pineal gland
01:17:24 ►
called adenoglomerotropine
01:17:26 ►
that chemically analyzed turns out to be harmaline.
01:17:32 ►
It’s a beta-carboline.
01:17:34 ►
It’s 4-hydroxytetrahydroharmalan.
01:17:38 ►
These harming molecules are part of the mystery.
01:17:42 ►
Incredibly bioelectronically active
01:17:45 ►
with a structure that assimilates to the Anjane Chakra.
01:17:49 ►
And they are the molecules which are a part of the ayahuasca brew.
01:17:56 ►
I think we’re on the brink of a tremendous evolutionary adventure
01:18:01 ►
and that it will involve physically redesigning ourselves.
01:18:07 ►
Look at the mushroom.
01:18:08 ►
Just to go off on a wild tear
01:18:10 ►
here. Mushrooms
01:18:12 ►
are what are called primary
01:18:14 ►
decomposers, fungi, right?
01:18:17 ►
Means they only live
01:18:18 ►
off dead matter.
01:18:20 ►
Now, vegetarianism
01:18:22 ►
is held up as a spiritual
01:18:24 ►
ideal, but compared to the strategy of mushrooms, now vegetarianism is held up as a spiritual ideal
01:18:25 ►
but compared to the strategy of mushrooms
01:18:28 ►
vegetarianism is an orgy of mass death
01:18:31 ►
on an appalling scale
01:18:34 ►
so if perhaps the mushroom is essentially Buddhist
01:18:39 ►
in its approach
01:18:40 ►
notice how non-invasive of the world of matter the mushroom is. It forms a
01:18:49 ►
diaphanous network through the soil as tenuous as cobwebs, and yet filled with neurotransmitters.
01:18:57 ►
And you may remember from last year, it was discovered that the largest organisms on this planet are mushroom mycelial mats.
01:19:07 ►
They cover acres.
01:19:09 ►
They weigh more than blue whales.
01:19:10 ►
And they’re so old, it’s better not even to speak of it.
01:19:15 ►
This looks to me like this is what intelligence,
01:19:19 ►
driven by ethical concern for life,
01:19:22 ►
would design itself into.
01:19:25 ►
Say, no harm.
01:19:27 ►
We want to be primary decomposers.
01:19:29 ►
We want to be as diaphanous as cobwebs.
01:19:32 ►
We want to be a spore-bearing life form that can percolate through the universe.
01:19:37 ►
And we want to have instantaneous access time to the galactic databases.
01:19:43 ►
This is what the mushroom looks like.
01:19:46 ►
And, you know, if you think this is malarkey,
01:19:50 ►
please do not intellectually evade the challenge that it poses you.
01:19:56 ►
Because if you think this is malarkey,
01:19:58 ►
then take mushrooms and tell me I’m full of shit.
01:20:02 ►
That’s all you have to do, you know.
01:20:04 ►
It’s easy.
01:20:05 ►
You don’t have to camp out on some mesa in New Mexico for three weeks.
01:20:10 ►
Yeah.
01:20:10 ►
Yeah.
01:20:13 ►
I think it was so private or the trip to the hallucinogens.
01:20:18 ►
The only four possible in those.
01:20:21 ►
And that makes it especially understandable
01:20:26 ►
something an alien would present. Is that essentially correct?
01:20:29 ►
Because it’s so unique? Yes, because it’s unique.
01:20:32 ►
In other words, I can imagine
01:20:35 ►
a scenario like this.
01:20:38 ►
A spore-bearing life form somewhere in the
01:20:41 ►
universe. It does everything with the
01:20:44 ►
technology of DNA.
01:20:46 ►
And you see these spores actually can survive
01:20:50 ►
in the environment of outer space.
01:20:52 ►
I mean, that’s what they love.
01:20:53 ►
If you store spores,
01:20:56 ►
you store them at 220 degrees below zero in liquid nitrogen.
01:21:00 ►
You store them in an outer space-like environment.
01:21:04 ►
Well, you can imagine a spore drifting in here, inculcating itself into the environment,
01:21:13 ►
and then carrying out a complete survey.
01:21:19 ►
And then isn’t it strange that these mushrooms were right in our paths
01:21:24 ►
as we left the trees and descended
01:21:27 ►
onto the African grassland. My book, Food of the Gods, I argued that… I thought of
01:21:40 ►
a joke about Food of the Gods, but I won’t belabor it with you.
01:21:47 ►
No, no, it was something about smorgasbord of the gods.
01:21:53 ►
But I argued that psilocybin is what propelled us into humanness. But I didn’t discuss the potential alien origin of the mushroom itself.
01:22:00 ►
I just said there is an X factor in human history.
01:22:04 ►
Something caused the human brain size to double in about a million years.
01:22:09 ►
No straight anthropologist or evolutionary primatologist has a clue as to what it was. an enzyme for cognitive activity, and that it coaxed out of us language, theater, art, religion, poetry,
01:22:31 ►
all of these things, and it created a kind of partnership paradise,
01:22:36 ►
a role-appropriate, sexually balanced, gender-honoring,
01:22:43 ►
child-sensitive, nature-sensitive civilization, balanced gender honoring child sensitive nature sensitive
01:22:46 ►
civilization and that
01:22:48 ►
all fell to pieces
01:22:50 ►
about 15,000 years ago
01:22:52 ►
and we have been
01:22:54 ►
on you know
01:22:55 ►
a death march into hell
01:22:58 ►
ever since as soon as you
01:23:00 ►
get agriculture you get
01:23:02 ►
surplus that
01:23:04 ►
gives you haves and have-nots and the need to
01:23:08 ►
beat out the brains of people who are not in your social group because they’re trying to get at your
01:23:14 ►
grain storage. Agriculture means the end of nomadism. It means sedentary populations. It means cities. It means standing armies, male kingship, hierarchical
01:23:28 ►
structures, law, all of the stuff that is so odious and horrible and that has led us so wrong. I mean,
01:23:37 ►
it may have seemed like a good idea at Ur, but we’re the unhappy inheritors of the consequence of 6,000 years of unopposed dominator culture.
01:23:49 ►
And what have we got?
01:23:50 ►
A shattered atmosphere, toxified oceans, schizophrenic populations, and mendacious politicians.
01:23:59 ►
This is not what our parents raised us for, folks.
01:24:04 ►
A woman. Yeah.
01:24:06 ►
What’s the
01:24:07 ►
triggering activity being a genetic
01:24:10 ►
chance? The endo gets
01:24:11 ►
created, people respond to it, and then
01:24:14 ►
are drawn to it, and they keep on co-evolving
01:24:16 ►
together. As people evolve,
01:24:18 ►
they find more and more substances
01:24:19 ►
that they can then go further with.
01:24:21 ►
Does it have to be a teacher from outside
01:24:24 ►
introducing these things to simple animals?
01:24:27 ►
No, it doesn’t.
01:24:29 ►
You’re quite right.
01:24:29 ►
I mean, I’m not at all clear on the location of these things.
01:24:35 ►
The people who just assume that metal ships
01:24:39 ►
from other star systems arrive here
01:24:42 ►
have a lot of explaining to do.
01:24:45 ►
I mean, I was fascinated by the last speaker
01:24:48 ►
with the, you don’t go there,
01:24:49 ►
you grab the space and move it to you.
01:24:52 ►
Well, then obviously the question is,
01:24:54 ►
well, how do you grab it?
01:24:56 ►
You know, something crosses
01:24:58 ►
that stellar distance instantly,
01:25:00 ►
and I don’t think you can fake your way around it.
01:25:03 ►
It’s a tough nut to crack.
01:25:05 ►
Now, there may be, I think it’s, there’s an image and I’ll, we’re getting close to the end so I’ll leave you
01:25:13 ►
with it because it amuses me so much. As you know the world’s largest radio telescope is at Arecibo,
01:25:20 ►
Puerto Rico and as you probably know a multi-million channel analyzer has been attached
01:25:27 ►
to that thing. And there’s been funding for another deep space search. And so there they are
01:25:33 ►
at Arecibo with the world’s largest radio telescope reaching out, you know, mega marubi sticks into the universe. When you actually go there,
01:25:47 ►
the telescope was built into a natural bowl,
01:25:51 ►
which they made further, they rounded out.
01:25:55 ►
And then they planted grass in this bowl to halt erosion.
01:25:59 ►
Well, then to keep the grass from getting out of hand,
01:26:02 ►
they brought in white cows to crop the grass.
01:26:07 ►
So there in the grass, beneath the world’s largest radio telescope
01:26:11 ►
engaged in searching for extraterrestrial life,
01:26:14 ►
is the mushroom in great profusion.
01:26:18 ►
If you wanted it, that’s where you’d go and get it.
01:26:21 ►
And that is the perfect symbol for how we search for extraterrestrial life.
01:26:28 ►
It’s at your feet, my friends.
01:26:31 ►
Thank you very, very much.
01:26:41 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:26:44 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:26:50 ►
I know it isn’t fair to just pull one sentence out of one of Terence McKenna’s talks,
01:26:55 ►
but just think about the implications of what he said about lost ancient knowledge.
01:27:01 ►
The particular quote I’m thinking of is,
01:27:04 ►
that’s where the frontier of this hyper
01:27:07 ►
technical fantasy is headed, toward a revivification of knowledge systems that were ancient when the
01:27:13 ►
pyramids were not yet even a gleam in the eye. Now if you think that is all just some fanciful
01:27:21 ►
language on Terence’s part, you might be mistaken,
01:27:25 ►
because there’s actually a lot of substance
01:27:26 ►
and scientific research that’s being conducted
01:27:29 ►
in the area of ancient knowledge
01:27:32 ►
that has been lost,
01:27:33 ►
or at best, misplaced, I guess.
01:27:35 ►
And if you are interested in that kind of information,
01:27:38 ►
there’s probably no better place to go
01:27:40 ►
than to the CPAC convention
01:27:42 ►
that will be held in San Diego in October.
01:27:44 ►
My wife and I have attended the past two of these conferences Thank you. before the Great Pyramid was built in Egypt. It’ll be years before this new information works its way
01:28:06 ►
through all of the twists and turns of our current school systems,
01:28:09 ►
but once people become aware of the civilizations
01:28:12 ►
that built Newgrange, Stonehenge,
01:28:15 ►
and some of the other prehistoric monuments,
01:28:18 ►
I think that our place in the cosmos
01:28:20 ►
will begin to become maybe more obvious.
01:28:23 ►
At least I hope so.
01:28:25 ►
Anyway, it’s a great conference, and if you make it, I’m sure I’ll see you there.
01:28:29 ►
Hopefully, I’ll remember to put a link to that conference along with the program notes for this podcast
01:28:34 ►
for those of you who might be interested.
01:28:37 ►
There’s one more thing I guess I’d like to say about today’s talk, though,
01:28:41 ►
and I think I should mention it it and it has to do with the
01:28:45 ►
smoked DMT experience that we’ve heard Terrence describe quite a few times and what I want to
01:28:51 ►
mention is that not everyone has the same kind of experience as Terrence describes. Now after
01:28:58 ►
listening to him describe his experience on DMT so many times, but with each description having some slight nuance, I can finally say that, yes, that is one way to describe what it’s like to smoke DMT.
01:29:12 ►
I now understand where he’s coming from on that, but that description didn’t seem to come close to what I was experiencing the first few times I tried it.
01:29:25 ►
few times I tried it. My point here isn’t to give you yet another description of a psychedelic experience because, well, frankly, I’ve come to find these descriptions a little boring.
01:29:32 ►
You know, it’s like having someone describe a dream to you. If you weren’t there, it really
01:29:37 ►
loses a lot of its magic. And the same is true with psychedelic experiences. So I hope you don’t get too hung up on some of Terrence’s or my or anyone else’s poetic description of what goes on in theospace.
01:29:52 ►
There’s a reason these experiences are called ineffable.
01:29:56 ►
So should you be fortunate enough to ever have a DMT experience,
01:30:00 ►
I don’t want you to be disappointed if you don’t see the elves or the basketballs
01:30:05 ►
the first time you try it. But I do guarantee that you will probably have one of the wildest
01:30:10 ►
psychedelic rides of your life. And my guess is that even if those jeweled self-dribbling
01:30:16 ►
basketballs don’t come bounding your way, you will still have more than enough going on to
01:30:21 ►
hold your attention. And my guess is that you probably
01:30:26 ►
already know exactly what I mean. Well, I’m going to cut this off for now because I’m anxious to
01:30:32 ►
begin editing the next talk I’m going to play here in the salon. And I guess I should warn you right
01:30:38 ►
now, it’s going to be yet another talk by Terrence McKenna. Originally, I was going to play a talk that I gave at the Inside Edge about seven years ago,
01:30:48 ►
but after listening to a bit of it, I decided that I guess it’d probably be a waste of your time.
01:30:54 ►
I’ve pretty much moved on since then and now think there are more interesting topics than the one I spoke on back then.
01:31:01 ►
But as I was going through my box of old cassette tapes looking for that talk,
01:31:06 ►
I stumbled on a tape that I wanted to use for a long time but haven’t been able to because the
01:31:11 ►
sound quality wasn’t too great. But I’ve now got a new tool and I’m going to try to get the sound
01:31:16 ►
cleaned up good enough so it’s at least passable because I really want to hear this talk again
01:31:21 ►
myself. It was the last talk that I actually was there in person for
01:31:26 ►
to hear Terrence give, and so it has a lot of meaning for me on other levels too, but one of
01:31:31 ►
the things he talks about in there is disease, his own and what disease is in general, and I think
01:31:36 ►
that that may have some interest for all of us. So I guess I’d better let you go for now so we can
01:31:43 ►
both get back to work.
01:31:50 ►
But first, as always, I want to say that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are available for your use under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 3.0 license.
01:31:57 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:32:03 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:32:06 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:32:10 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:32:15 ►
Be well, my friends.