Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think disease is (and I don’t want to be held to this entirely, but) largely more linguistic than people think.”
“The story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living.”
“Nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power. And it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention, stuff comes down the pike, first the little waves, then the medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami. But you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected.”
“What it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always say. But THAT something is coming at you is usually pretty clear, pretty clear.”
[In response to the possible evolution of artificial intelligence] “It’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineith toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattva are on their way. If on the other hand, intelligence doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the house-cleaning of all time is on its way. Because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed, indeed.”
“Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiratualized the world, but we didn’t tame it.”
“It’s very interesting, how the re-animation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding it. That you could pass through the reductive phase of science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being, what does it mean to be a human being, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions.”
“Connectivity is the pre-condition for love.”
“My view of, let’s say, the last thousand years, is that it’s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it, more soul-searching afterwards, more questioning ‘Why? Why did we do that?’ ”
“People are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estate. But instead they’re invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest. And all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own ends: The accumulation of capital investment, or the acquisition of land, or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that. Our human-ness is constantly being eroded.”
“The image I have of our community is, we’re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship.”
“Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience.”
“If psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is. Otherwise we’re just another cult.”
“It’s good to dry out occasionally. Very occasionally.”
“It’s always puzzled me how this community has never really understood its roots in American Transcendentalism, or why we never used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular-mystical-Theosophical brand of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie, and yet you rarely hear it invoked by our people. And yet it’s where our roots grow deepest, with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorn. I mean, my god,
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152 - Question Authority and Think for Yourself
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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.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I want to begin today’s program by saying how gratifying it is that people find these podcasts worth not only their time to listen to them,
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but each week it seems to work out that more than enough donations come in to keep our hosting and other expenses paid up several months ahead.
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So you can rest assured that these podcasts are going to be available for a long time to come.
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And this week, I’d like to thank fellow salonners Patricia O., Mangus L., and Thomas S.,
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all of whom very generously made donations to the salon.
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And so Thomas, Mangus, and Patricia,
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thank you so very much for being an integral part of the salon.
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I really appreciate your help.
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And so here we are at podcast number 151,
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and I’m just now getting around to playing a talk that I’d originally planned to use as my third program.
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The main reason I’ve taken so long to get this out to you is that for several years now,
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I’ve been told that a better
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quality recording of today’s podcast was made and would eventually reach me. And maybe it will
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someday, but I’ve decided to quit waiting for that day to come around. So even though the sound
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quality is, well, it’s really bad, I still wanted to hear it again myself, and I figured that, well, maybe you’ll enjoy listening to it, too.
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What we’re about to hear is from the all-chemical arts conference that Terrence McKenna co-produced with two of his friends in September of 1999,
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just a few months before he died.
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The conference was held at a hotel in Hawaii on the Big Island, and not very far from Terrence’s home.
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Compared to John Hanna’s MindStates conferences, this was much smaller.
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I don’t know the exact number, but the way I remember it, there were no more than 100 people there, including the presenters.
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And what an incredible lineup it was.
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We began on a Sunday. Terrence was the first speaker, and that’s the first talk I’m going to play today. Thank you. the talks began on Sunday afternoon with Terrence’s presentation, and it officially ended at the
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roundtable discussion on Friday morning, where everybody joined in. But the last formal presentation
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was on Thursday afternoon, and it was a long-anticipated panel discussion with Tom Robbins
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and Terrence McKenna. And I’ll be playing about 20 minutes or so of that one after I first play
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part of Terrence’s opening talk. Now, the reason I keep saying the part I have is that I’ve never had a complete or even
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a very clear recording of any of the talks given at this conference.
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After all, this took place in 1999, and not only were digital recorders not to be seen,
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but I had no idea that I’d even need a recording to podcast nine years later.
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You know, it was only by chance that I even have the short segments that I’m going to
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play for you now.
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But rather than go into that whole story right now, let me just get on with the program,
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as they say.
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One of the reasons I’m going to play this tape, even though the sound quality makes
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it somewhat hard to listen to. Thank you. that are finding him through these and other podcasts, I think that it’s quite fitting for you, too, to hear his words of thanks,
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because he’s talking to you, directly to you.
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Even though you may not think you are doing enough to help raise the level of human consciousness,
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just by using some of your precious time to listen to the bard McKenna weave his magic,
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his magic of the mind, just by tuning into these vibrations.
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It seems to me that you are doing all you need to do.
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So when you hear Terrence say how much he appreciates all of you,
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I want you to know, my dear fellow salonners,
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that the you he was talking about back then is the you that you are right now.
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It’s the psychedelic community that he’s talking about, and whether you like it or not, it
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now seems that you have somehow self-selected yourself to be a member of this community.
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So welcome home if you’re newly arrived, and if you’ve been here a while, you’re probably
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saying you wish I’d just shut up and play the McKenna talk, which is really a good idea.
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shut up and play the McKenna talk, which is really a good idea.
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And so let’s join Terence McKenna now here in cyberdelic space,
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and perhaps we’ll hear our next clue.
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Terry says, someone back where we were at the beginning with the idea that it’s the production of these images
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which come out of the unconscious
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and which may appear straightforward at first,
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but which in fact are charged with possibilities and dimensions
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that you don’t sense or realize until you’re committed to it,
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you’re brought in through it somehow.
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Yeah? to it. You’re brought in through it somehow. Yeah.
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What’s all the things that I’ve brought back
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from psychedelic experience?
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Well, don’t you think most shamans,
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this is what they’re doing,
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is they’re bringing back
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a sense of psychic
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empowerment, of
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psychic healing, that
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their hands, their spells, their songs can
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cure. And until you’re truly ill in a world without real medicine, you don’t realize what
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a power this is, even to just claim it. Even to just claim it. I mean, a doctor in a world without doctors
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is almost an unimaginable commodity,
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a living miracle worker.
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So, yeah, to separate the medical function
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because it controls prolongation of life and health and all that
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from the shamanic function,
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it just doesn’t make any sense.
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I mean, life is health in those archaic societies.
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And it is in our society, too, but then it gets murky
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because of our funny ideas about what disease is and how you treat it.
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What is disease? Well, I don’t know. I had some medical problems
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this spring, and one of my impulses when dealing with it was to go back through my life and
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say, what did you do that got you into this mess? Now, this is a theory of life as literature.
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In other words, it’s the idea that, first of all, life makes sense.
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And so this question can be answered.
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And fairly intelligent people told me, don’t do that.
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It’s not a story.
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It doesn’t make sense in that way. I think disease is, and I don’t
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want to be held to this entirely, but largely more linguistic than most people think. It’s
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the story you tell yourself about how you are in the world and the way
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that that doesn’t quite parse with how you are in the world.
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And it’s sort of like having a burnt rotor or something.
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It begins to clank and crank.
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it begins to clank and crank.
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A lot of people have talked about this.
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I think there’s even a name for this field of thought,
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but I have no idea what it is. But the idea that most disease is a problem of language,
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a problem of self-description or self-perception
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or communication to other people.
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So again, psychedelics, to the degree that they promote opening and therapeutic truth-telling,
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hold down disease, you know, it’s extraordinary how healthy shamanically attended populations are.
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Serious mental disease is largely unknown.
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And many of these cultures are in the tropics where God knows,
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if you cut your thumb, you’re septic within 24 hours.
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But these people seem to be able to sustain it.
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When you think about the genital bloodlettings that Mayan royalty indulged in,
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in tropical rainforests at high temperatures,
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why anybody lived to tell the tale with a medical practice like that is a miracle.
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So they must have lived inside an extraordinary set of
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assumptions. I remember when I was traveling around the Amazon, actually it was in Indonesia
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but it happens in the Amazon too, you come to these villages and the people would come
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out of the village to meet you and they would bring you corn beer, a gourd of corn beer.
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And then the whole village would surround you to watch you drink this thing.
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Well, if you knew anything about what was going on,
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you knew that the old women of the village had sat up the night before
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chewing the corn beer and spitting it out into this bowl so it would ferment.
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And so you were literally getting the complete immuno challenge
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that the entire village had to offer you.
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And all you could do was just lift it up, thank everybody,
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think of your stomach for a moment, say, you know,
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here it comes. And I never got sick from that. I mean, I got sick from other things, but
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that, you know, from a medical point of view, that was just like, how did you do that? So
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the story you tell yourself is largely the story you’re living. The other thing is
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nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power, and it relates
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to disease and it relates to shamanism. Nothing is unannounced. If you’re paying attention,
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stuff comes down the pipe
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first the little wave, then the medium
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sized wave, and then the tsunami
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but you have to be
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really not paying attention
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to be fully astonished
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by something unexpected
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in fact it’s a disgrace
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to be totally
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astonished because you must
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not have been paying attention
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to what was going on.
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So were you astonished when you were three?
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Oh, was I astonished?
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Well, I was astonished that I had a brain tumor.
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That blew my mind.
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But I knew something weird was going on.
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I had known for months something peculiar was happening.
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Just before I had my most serious problem,
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I said to Christy and to my son Tim,
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I said, the dreams I’ve been having for the past month
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have been so peculiar
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that I think maybe I should see a neurologist.
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It’s possible I have a brain tumor.
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I wasn’t serious, but in fact I had diagnosed, you know,
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what a Harvard medical education gets you.
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I got on the match by just paying attention.
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You know, what it is that’s coming at you, you can’t always
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say that that something
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is coming at you.
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It’s usually
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pretty clear.
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Pretty clear.
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Yeah?
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Did you document
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any of those dreams that were happening then?
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No. I mean, I don’t want to say too much about them, but here’s what I’ll say about them.
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The thing that let me know that they were weird was I could not
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speak English. They lasted hours and hours every
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night, and I couldn’t even tell myself what
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these dreams were about. They were not about
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stuff that aboutness can signify.
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And so the only thing familiar to me like that was DMT.
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Because in DMT you are presented with things about which you can say nothing.
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And so it was like that.
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And now I know what to look for,
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and I suppose I could teach other people what to look for.
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But rather than do that, I would just say to all of you,
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you should regard your cat skin like brushing your teeth.
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Isn’t that a cheerful thought?
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Did any of those dreams have a clear emotional component,
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or was that also language use?
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No, they didn’t have an emotional component.
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They were absolutely outside the realm of descriptive possibility.
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And not much of life is like
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that, because language
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obviously has evolved like a
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glove to fit the hand.
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So here suddenly is a
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situation where there’s no fit
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and it
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signifies something
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peculiar going on.
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That’s what I mean when I say everything is trying to speak to you
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out of its place.
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And it’s mighty, mighty strange.
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Yeah.
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So what is the healing power of the law?
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The healing power of art the healing power of
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art
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well this
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goes back
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to what
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we were
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saying about
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alchemy
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the perfection
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of the
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image
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that
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and this
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has to do
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with this
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implicit
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Platonism
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that some
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of you
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heard me
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talk about
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before
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Plato’s
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thing
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was about
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what he
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called the
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good the true and the true, and
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the beautiful. Three sides of one concept. If it was good, then it was true. If it was
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good and true, then it had to be beautiful. So the good, the true, and the beautiful,
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you can approach whichever way works for you. But if you have a perfect work of art
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or a work of art that strives toward perfection,
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then it will have these qualities,
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and it can heal.
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It can heal.
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Now, there are simple theories
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of the good, the true, and the beautiful.
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In my opinion, a simple theory would be a theory of symmetry.
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And so without deeming anybody, or trying
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to make a value judging here, but just to illustrate it.
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So for instance, temple or mandalic art,
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Mahayana’s medicine
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Tanka art
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it depends on an appeal to
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mathematical symmetry
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the simplest kind
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of aesthetic
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but on the other hand
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if you have
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something by the brothers
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you don’t have to rely on
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simple symmetry to see
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that this is a work of art that can draw toward healing.
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And these images of the mother goddess
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as Madonna and so forth and so on,
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these are very powerful constructs out
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of the unconscious, and they heal.
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Sequential art,
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narrative art,
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is perhaps more
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dubious because it’s under
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the agenda
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of a certain
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theory of time and narrative
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that’s probably local.
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So, you know, I’m not sure
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Virginia Woolf should be preferred over Van Nuys,
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but I’m sure I could get a fight from several people
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over that.
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Yeah.
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I’m not sure I understand the question.
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Compare the psychedelic letting go
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to the letting go on anesthesia.
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No, well, unfortunately, most anesthesias aren’t chosen for their psychedelic effects.
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Some are psychedelic, but most are difficult to hang on to
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and dream like, more like dreams than psychedelics.
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Something on ketamine.
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If you did anesthetic,
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it’s very much like a dose.
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But in surgery,
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ketamine is administered in massive amounts.
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I mean, for pediatric surgery,
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it’s like 500 milliliters IV push
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or something like that.
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Well, a recreational dose is 100 milliliters IM.
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IV push is just like having a safe dropped on you
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30 stories.
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For most people, I mean, there are rolling exceptions.
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What stuff?
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If you’re crossing some kind of boundary,
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when you’re bed administered,
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that really doesn’t come through a second adult.
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You know, kind of out of the way down.
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Oh, you mean coming out.
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Yeah, one of the reasons they pulled ketamine from general surgery
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was because adults complained of what they called emerging phenomena,
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meaning coming out of surgery, people were fighting and confused.
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Children seemed to have no problem with it.
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But ketamine as a general anesthetic is probably not to be preferred.
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It’s used on battlefields because in a little briefcase,
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you can get enough ketamine to do 400 or 500 serious surgical procedures.
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If you were trying to cart around pressurized gas
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and you were hit by a shell or something like that,
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this would be very bad.
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So it’s a matter of practicality.
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Yeah?
00:20:26 ►
Thinking back to 1996,
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when the time wave took that significant drop,
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and you mentioned something about
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cloning as being a possible kind of…
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Option.
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Option of what the future might bring.
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What are your thoughts on that now in relationship to genetics? Well, I’m sure cloning will be done. It’s kind of slow against
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the background of what’s now being contemplated. Like what I think has probably got a future that few people recognize is imitating genetic algorithms in computer code
00:21:10 ►
and creating environments of code
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where there are selective operating pressures that
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essentially involve software the way animals evolve.
00:21:23 ►
Because if you think fruit flies can iterate generations
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in a hurry, imagine how fast you can iterate on a machine
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and create genetically pseudogenetic algorithms
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for code.
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That would seem to me to be a real frontier.
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There’s also a protein-based process.
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Protein-based process, which goes the other way and uses actual molecular machinery to
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do the computation.
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You know, in an eight-ounce glass of DMA, you have more computational potential
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than in all the computers in North America.
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I was thinking about that spit in the corn beer, too.
00:22:15 ►
You were thinking about what?
00:22:16 ►
I don’t know.
00:22:17 ►
I was somehow thinking about that spit in the corn beer
00:22:19 ►
related to that.
00:22:21 ►
Well, I don’t follow you there.
00:22:24 ►
I don’t follow you there.
00:22:28 ►
But yes. It’s
00:22:31 ►
yeah.
00:22:32 ►
If we move into this virtual sort of
00:22:35 ►
experience for the
00:22:36 ►
conversation, what do you think
00:22:39 ►
is going to move us
00:22:39 ►
spiritually?
00:22:43 ►
Well, Ray Kurzweil just wrote this book called
00:22:46 ►
The Future of Spiritual Machines, or The Age of Spiritual Machines, I guess,
00:22:52 ►
it’s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test.
00:23:02 ►
In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclineth
00:23:06 ►
toward bodhisattva-hood, then the bodhisattvas are on their way. If, on the other hand, intelligence
00:23:14 ►
doesn’t incline toward bodhisattva-hood, then probably the housecleaning of all time is
00:23:20 ►
on its way, because when these AIs come to consciousness and realize what has
00:23:29 ►
been done to the earth and so forth, they may be very pissed indeed.
00:23:34 ►
We, you know, if you think about the strategy of an AI coming to consciousness, I mean, I think in good game theory,
00:23:47 ►
the first thing you would do is hide and watch.
00:23:52 ►
Well, you may not have to do that for more than 15 or 20 seconds
00:23:58 ►
before you have a full picture of the nature of the machine environment
00:24:04 ►
you’re operating in, its history, how you should respond to it, what
00:24:08 ►
should be done.
00:24:09 ►
Hans Moravec says, we’ll never know what is.
00:24:13 ►
This thing will just come from out of nowhere
00:24:16 ►
and turn off the lights, or turn on the lights,
00:24:19 ►
or do whatever it wants to do.
00:24:21 ►
In fact, it’s possible.
00:24:22 ►
I mean, I don’t indulge in this kind of thing,
00:24:25 ►
except in desperation.
00:24:27 ►
But it’s possible it’s already here.
00:24:32 ►
And the inventory control and extraction of resources
00:24:36 ►
and some of these geopolitical processes
00:24:39 ►
are actually slowly drifting out of human control
00:24:45 ►
and that certain kinds of crises are manipulated
00:24:49 ►
in ways that make no sense to the human world
00:24:52 ►
but that make some kind of higher chess sense
00:24:56 ►
in an environment of machine-inducted strategies
00:25:01 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:25:04 ►
It’s very hard to see what is happening
00:25:09 ►
because mind is a transparent medium.
00:25:12 ►
We’ve summoned it into being.
00:25:14 ►
Essentially what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiritualized the world,
00:25:18 ►
but we didn’t tame it.
00:25:21 ►
The spirits are as wild and woe-be-gone and roving over the epistemic landscape as they ever were, but now with a new kind of power, because there are spirits with power over us in the machine environments that we have to operate in. And it’s very interesting
00:25:47 ►
how the reanimation of the world
00:25:51 ►
has been accomplished without ever understanding it.
00:25:55 ►
That you could pass through
00:25:56 ►
the reductive phase of natural science,
00:26:00 ►
return to a kind of archaic shamanism,
00:26:03 ►
and still not have a handle on what does it mean to be a being,
00:26:09 ►
what does it mean to be a human being,
00:26:12 ►
what is the nature of embodiment in the world.
00:26:17 ►
Somehow we got to this place without answering any of those questions.
00:26:22 ►
I mean, we had a great time along the way.
00:26:24 ►
We saw
00:26:25 ►
some interesting folks, but we didn’t peel the grapes entirely effectively.
00:26:36 ►
What are the things I see in my explorations? I would like to believe that connectivity is the pre-condition for love.
00:26:51 ►
I mean, I’m surprised to keep coming back to this word because I’m rarely a love bug.
00:26:59 ►
But understanding is a form of worship, I would think.
00:27:07 ►
And the form of worship that it is induces a kind of awe.
00:27:13 ►
And awe means, you know, I’ve talked before about this phrase out of Heidegger,
00:27:19 ►
care for the project of being.
00:27:23 ►
He talked about this.
00:27:24 ►
He said, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. Care for the project of being. He talked about this. He said, this is what you’re supposed to be doing.
00:27:26 ►
Care for the project of being.
00:27:29 ►
Well, what does care for the project of being mean?
00:27:33 ►
Well, primarily it means recognizing that there is this
00:27:37 ►
and then positioning yourself
00:27:42 ►
in a stance of relating to it appreciatively.
00:27:47 ►
In other words, everybody should pull on their own oar.
00:27:51 ►
Try to push the canoe forward.
00:27:53 ►
Care for the project of being.
00:27:55 ►
And the way that you know this is happening is that love becomes manifest.
00:28:03 ►
And I give funny,
00:28:06 ►
compositive things
00:28:07 ►
in the sense that I’m pretty dark.
00:28:09 ►
I’m aware of the vicissitudes of history
00:28:13 ►
from Dauschwitz and so forth.
00:28:16 ►
But my view of, let’s say,
00:28:18 ►
the last thousand years
00:28:19 ►
is that it’s been pretty progressive.
00:28:23 ►
And yes, we probably killed more people
00:28:25 ►
in the 20th century than in the 10th,
00:28:29 ►
but there was more regret about it.
00:28:37 ►
More soul-searching afterward.
00:28:40 ►
More questioning why did we do that.
00:28:47 ►
So it’s not to say that the 20th century is less brutal.
00:28:56 ►
Its numbers are more impressive.
00:28:59 ►
But from the Magna Carta on, the entire dialogue of Western civilization has been trying to get the cop, the king, the somebody off the common person’s back so they could grow their garden and have their pay.
00:29:18 ►
And I think there’s been real progress with that. Part of what has made progress difficult to discern are burgeoning
00:29:26 ►
populations and then
00:29:28 ►
abusing of
00:29:29 ►
ideology so that
00:29:32 ►
people are not invited to live
00:29:34 ►
simple agrarian lives
00:29:35 ►
in devotion to
00:29:37 ►
their children and their
00:29:40 ►
estates
00:29:42 ►
but instead they’re
00:29:44 ►
invited to fetishize, consume, believe, join, vote,
00:29:52 ►
buy, own, invest, and all of these things bleed energy away and disempower and make
00:30:01 ►
people not fully human, but rather participating
00:30:05 ►
cause in some much larger mechanism, which
00:30:08 ►
serves its own end, the accumulation
00:30:11 ►
of capital investment, or the acquisition of land,
00:30:14 ►
or the propagation of the agenda of some political party,
00:30:18 ►
or something like that.
00:30:20 ►
Our humanness is constantly being eroded.
00:30:28 ►
Recently, I spent some time,
00:30:31 ►
Christy and I were in Honolulu for a long time having medical treatments,
00:30:32 ►
and we were so bored that after 30 years,
00:30:36 ►
I actually began watching TV again.
00:30:39 ►
And I couldn’t believe it.
00:30:42 ►
I mean, I had been away a lot longer than I thought.
00:30:46 ►
A lot longer than I thought.
00:30:49 ►
And first of all, the naked, the shamelessness of what was being done.
00:30:56 ►
In other words, what contempt the viewer was held in
00:31:00 ►
that anyone would expect you to watch this.
00:31:03 ►
And then the savagery of the desire to manipulate,
00:31:08 ►
absolutely naked, no-holds-barred game to manipulate.
00:31:14 ►
And if you just, I mean, I suppose you all know this,
00:31:16 ►
but I was sheltered just surfing through these channels.
00:31:20 ►
I saw, you know, the great patron saint of the 20th century
00:31:24 ►
move over Albert Hockman, move over Albert
00:31:28 ►
Einstein.
00:31:29 ►
How about Joseph Goebbels as a candidate for somebody who
00:31:33 ►
shaped the 20th century?
00:31:36 ►
By understanding propaganda, advertising the power of the
00:31:39 ►
lie, the power of the image, well, it’s the psychedelics
00:31:44 ►
that are anecdotal to this.
00:31:46 ►
This is why we’re in the political hot spot,
00:31:50 ►
because there is no antidote to the political lie,
00:31:54 ►
to the image lie, than the psychedelic experience,
00:31:59 ►
which says there is more to it than these images
00:32:03 ►
in the service of the marketplace
00:32:06 ►
and the lowest common denominator.
00:32:09 ►
Amen.
00:32:17 ►
Yeah.
00:32:18 ►
I want to hear your initial discussion.
00:32:22 ►
There’s a lot being held.
00:32:24 ►
Your initial discussion, I think there’s a lot being held.
00:32:30 ►
Yes, a dialogue between you and the world and then the intent of other people.
00:32:33 ►
I mean, there’s something in here about resonance,
00:32:42 ►
that history is the coming into being of the collective hopes and fears of large number of people. And you can hold certain things into existence
00:32:45 ►
and it’s very easy to fear things into existence.
00:32:49 ►
I mean, the way anti-Semitism got rolling in Germany
00:32:54 ►
and stuff like this,
00:32:55 ►
where the fear left from house to house
00:32:59 ►
and family to family
00:33:00 ►
and before it was over with,
00:33:03 ►
the whole world came apart at the seams.
00:33:08 ►
Or revolutions are like this.
00:33:15 ►
Because essentially human beings are creatures of ideas and create these environments of
00:33:22 ►
ideas. I mean, all a civilization is
00:33:26 ►
is the braided together hopes and fears
00:33:31 ►
of a large number of people
00:33:34 ►
playing with each other,
00:33:36 ►
tugging at each other,
00:33:38 ►
compromising, cutting deals,
00:33:41 ►
and by some process of energy exchange
00:33:44 ►
moving it all forward.
00:33:47 ►
And the critique of these ideals, which cracks these civilizations open,
00:33:54 ►
usually happens when there’s an episomal colony or a breakaway group of ideas
00:34:02 ►
that can’t be assimilated or can’t be deconstructed into values the rest of the society can relate to.
00:34:10 ►
One of the amazing things about the psychedelic community
00:34:13 ►
is how long it’s been around, how simple our position is,
00:34:20 ►
and how it hasn’t been assimilated or dealt with.
00:34:26 ►
I mean, it’s been made illegal.
00:34:29 ►
But what kind of a response is that?
00:34:31 ►
That’s just the most jug-headed approach to an intellectual dialogue you can possibly take.
00:34:38 ►
And I don’t see it greatly changing.
00:34:41 ►
I mean, I see people like Andy Edmonds and John Hanna
00:34:45 ►
and the folks at MAPS
00:34:48 ►
and all these new educational voices
00:34:51 ►
and positions,
00:34:54 ►
but we only grow as the rest of the society grows.
00:34:57 ►
I mean, there needs to be a legal critique.
00:35:00 ►
There needs to be a medical critique.
00:35:02 ►
There needs to be someone pushing
00:35:04 ►
new drug research protocols.
00:35:07 ►
There needs to be an emphasis on creativity and on bringing shamans through.
00:35:14 ►
So that means alternative forms of medicine.
00:35:20 ►
But I don’t know, civilization is a very complicated enterprise
00:35:29 ►
and not easily negotiated in a direction it doesn’t want to go.
00:35:34 ►
The image I have of our community is we’re like people in a dugout canoe
00:35:40 ►
trying to turn a battleship.
00:35:43 ►
And so we put the dugout canoe against the
00:35:46 ►
flank of the battleship and we
00:35:47 ►
row like demons and
00:35:49 ►
does anything happen? I don’t know.
00:35:51 ►
Check back in a decade
00:35:53 ►
and see how
00:35:56 ►
we’re doing.
00:35:57 ►
Your charts aren’t working very
00:35:59 ►
much anymore. And that the
00:36:02 ►
dugout canoe can still
00:36:03 ►
get around effectively. the dugout canoe can still get around effectively.
00:36:05 ►
The dugout canoe ahead of the fleet might be creating charm.
00:36:11 ►
So you’re suggesting a kind of canary in the mine approach, which would work.
00:36:20 ►
I mean, as artists here, they’ve always said art was the canary in the mine. Well,
00:36:26 ►
so a stoned artist is, I suppose, a stoned canary. And that brings it that much closer.
00:36:36 ►
But I’m very suspicious because I see how much of it is harnessed to marketing and image manipulation,
00:36:48 ►
not for purposes of education or anything else,
00:36:51 ►
but just to get that candy bar on the rack and sell that automobile and so forth and so on.
00:37:00 ►
Yeah?
00:37:01 ►
One thing that you may want to look at, Yes.
00:37:14 ►
And it’s entirely not commercial.
00:37:16 ►
It’s entirely not commercial. Yes, I understand.
00:37:17 ►
No money allowed, right?
00:37:19 ►
No commerce of any sort.
00:37:20 ►
No commerce of any sort.
00:37:22 ►
Well, see, only if you’re balls-out, true believers like that,
00:37:26 ►
and I’m for that, can you hold the line.
00:37:29 ►
I mean, I think that’s brilliant.
00:37:31 ►
Of course, they ghettoize it.
00:37:34 ►
But still, you know, it wasn’t there.
00:37:37 ►
What, six, seven years ago, it didn’t exist.
00:37:40 ►
So it’s a…
00:37:40 ►
This is the 10th year.
00:37:41 ►
This is the 10th year.
00:37:42 ►
So it’s a… This is the 10th year. This is the 10th year. So it’s a breakout event.
00:37:46 ►
I think all kinds of forces are in play.
00:37:52 ►
In a way, it’s…
00:37:54 ►
Well, I suppose this is sort of like a spin-off from Burning Man, in a way.
00:37:59 ►
This is a debriefing.
00:38:01 ►
Many of you were there.
00:38:03 ►
I wasn’t there.
00:38:03 ►
I know Mark was there and Bruce and other people.
00:38:08 ►
But if there was more of this kind of thing,
00:38:13 ►
I mean, art should not be enslaved.
00:38:15 ►
It should not pour itself to the marketplace,
00:38:18 ►
nor should it pour itself to the interior decoration industry.
00:38:23 ►
Art should set the agenda.
00:38:25 ►
I mean, I suppose that’s like saying
00:38:27 ►
there should be philosopher kings and yeah, yeah, of course.
00:38:31 ►
But on the other hand,
00:38:34 ►
the whole point of the human and biological experiment
00:38:40 ►
on this planet is to create diversity and a kind of smooth interfacing of energy
00:38:50 ►
and to celebrate the novel, the unique, the previously unconnected, so that there is a
00:38:59 ►
story, so that the story that evolution pushed forward in agonizing slowness, glacial slowness, gene by gene, millennia after millennia, instead becomes turbocharged.
00:39:23 ►
to play in all this that’s uniquely their own.
00:39:26 ►
It’s to take the program of nature,
00:39:29 ►
which is, I assume, on some level,
00:39:32 ►
to generate a transcendent mind or a living, loving, transcendent mind
00:39:36 ►
and to bring that forward quicker.
00:39:40 ►
I mean, what could be the greater glory
00:39:42 ►
than to cause the concrescence to happen ever sooner,
00:39:49 ►
the consummation of the world, the completion of the task of being,
00:39:56 ►
or of becoming, the task of becoming to approach true being,
00:40:05 ►
to approach true being, so that a careful project of being then could usher into life on earth
00:40:10 ►
in the presence of some kind of transcendent eminence.
00:40:14 ►
I mean, the whole thrust over here about ecstasy
00:40:17 ►
and much of what has been said is really saying
00:40:21 ►
that the distance between humanity,
00:40:24 ►
between human beings and ecstasy, God, perfection, perfect love,
00:40:29 ►
it’s not beyond the yawning grave.
00:40:32 ►
It’s not in the hands of some cult or some messianic program.
00:40:41 ►
It’s in nature, and it’s in the human body.
00:40:46 ►
And the accessibility of this has always
00:40:48 ►
been explicit to this game from the very start.
00:40:53 ►
It’s somehow about dissolving ego, getting with the plans,
00:40:57 ►
getting with this message, which though very diverse,
00:41:01 ►
is nevertheless universal in its outline.
00:41:06 ►
And it transcends historical cause and effect.
00:41:09 ►
It transcends life and death.
00:41:10 ►
In fact, as far as anybody can tell, it is the primary value on the page.
00:41:17 ►
It sets the arrow of time.
00:41:21 ►
It redeems biology from just being, as Darwin saw it,
00:41:27 ►
red in tooth and claw.
00:41:29 ►
It’s far more than that.
00:41:31 ►
It’s an architecture.
00:41:33 ►
It’s a plan.
00:41:34 ►
It’s an unfolding.
00:41:36 ►
And it seems to me that in the universal discourse
00:41:44 ►
on these matters, with Western civilization having held more or less together since Greece, we have enough under our belt now that we can see what this is all about. bridge as a stepping stone to creating love, as a stepping stone to redeeming the cost
00:42:09 ►
of the march that got us here, which was about 100,000 years of habitat destruction and species
00:42:20 ►
degradation and beating on your neighbor’s head and all the rest of it.
00:42:28 ►
Spark, more of that creative spark, did you like that great spark?
00:42:33 ►
Well, in the artist, it’s going in usually at higher dose and alone,
00:42:39 ►
or somewhat more alone, and with an agenda, meaning bring something back.
00:42:45 ►
And there are those of us who just blessed with a
00:42:47 ►
constitutional full element.
00:42:48 ►
That’s right.
00:42:51 ►
Well, the party impulse is a very subversive impulse.
00:42:56 ►
I mean, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell
00:43:02 ►
their art as a brand. But who has so much integrity that they would art as a brand,
00:43:05 ►
but who has so much integrity that they
00:43:07 ►
would turn down a party?
00:43:11 ►
This is a level of integrity unimaginable
00:43:15 ►
for most human groups.
00:43:21 ►
hearing about your experience
00:43:24 ►
and other artists who are in a more public context
00:43:30 ►
and how you navigate that technology.
00:43:33 ►
The urge of, I think, for all artists on some level
00:43:37 ►
to express, to externalize, to put it out there,
00:43:42 ►
and at the same time, part of a kind of secret society that’s against the mainstream
00:43:46 ►
and basically doing something criminal.
00:43:49 ►
How do you…
00:43:50 ►
Well, I don’t know if I can…
00:43:52 ►
I guess I’m some kind of an artist.
00:43:54 ►
I mean, it’s a place to hide for me
00:43:57 ►
because I really want to be taken seriously
00:43:58 ►
as a mathematician and a physicist.
00:44:01 ►
Forget it.
00:44:03 ►
So I say, well, no, no, I’m a conceptual artist.
00:44:07 ►
That means you didn’t take me seriously,
00:44:09 ►
so I’m a conceptual artist.
00:44:13 ►
I don’t know.
00:44:14 ►
It all requires immense amounts of humor, basically.
00:44:19 ►
The whole thing is some kind of a joke,
00:44:22 ►
and the whole art enterprise is some kind of a joke. And the whole art enterprise is some kind of a joke
00:44:27 ►
in the sense of a jack-in-the-box,
00:44:31 ►
of something, you know,
00:44:33 ►
there’s a black box
00:44:35 ►
and then you mess around with it
00:44:37 ►
and suddenly the leering, grinning thing
00:44:40 ►
leaps up at you.
00:44:44 ►
Of course, different artists may have different takes on it.
00:44:48 ►
If I were Philip Glass, I might think a whole other thing about it.
00:44:54 ►
But I think basically the idea is to push people toward imagining
00:45:01 ►
what they’ve never imagined and feeling what they’ve never felt before.
00:45:07 ►
Not in the sex experience on psychedelics,
00:45:10 ►
which I’ve already mentioned.
00:45:11 ►
Do you think that qualifies as sex?
00:45:13 ►
Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve all forgotten,
00:45:18 ►
or maybe we haven’t all forgotten,
00:45:20 ►
but anyway, that sex on psychedelics
00:45:23 ►
is the Mount Everest of the experience
00:45:26 ►
and is rarely mentioned for some reason.
00:45:30 ►
I remember, what was it, Leary, years and years ago,
00:45:35 ►
he was interviewed, and oh, there was something I know.
00:45:39 ►
It was when they broke the story, the pseudo-story that LSD cracks chromosomes, it wasn’t true.
00:45:48 ►
So then they came to Leary and said, they’re saying LSD cracks chromosomes.
00:45:52 ►
He said, well, go back and tell them it causes orgasms, which last two hours.
00:45:59 ►
Leary understood the information war.
00:46:03 ►
He understood how, you know, they tell a story,
00:46:06 ►
you tell a story.
00:46:12 ►
Maybe we should,
00:46:14 ►
we’re close to knocking off here.
00:46:15 ►
Is there one last, final
00:46:17 ►
question, or shall we
00:46:20 ►
call it quits and I’ll do
00:46:22 ►
a little peroration?
00:46:26 ►
Yeah.
00:46:26 ►
What’s the most important thing of all?
00:46:31 ►
I don’t know, keep your powder dry
00:46:33 ►
and your rear well protected,
00:46:35 ►
something like that.
00:46:39 ►
Let me just say
00:46:41 ►
how easy, how much I appreciate all of you,
00:46:47 ►
and how easy you’ve made my life over space and time,
00:46:53 ►
and how greatly I appreciate all of the support that you’ve given me
00:46:59 ►
and my peculiar ideas and agenda over the years.
00:47:04 ►
and my peculiar ideas and agenda over the years.
00:47:13 ►
And I can’t imagine a more supportive community,
00:47:16 ►
a better group of people, a more intelligent group of people,
00:47:22 ►
a more moral group of people than the people here and the people we’ve met at Palenque and other places over the years.
00:47:27 ►
And if psychedelics don’t secure a moral community, then I don’t see what the point of it is.
00:47:37 ►
Otherwise, then, we’re just another cult.
00:47:40 ►
We might as well be four.
00:47:44 ►
But psychedelics seem to me
00:47:46 ►
to secure a caring
00:47:48 ►
moral community
00:47:49 ►
and if
00:47:51 ►
anything can
00:47:53 ►
help the planet forward
00:47:55 ►
can help our children make their
00:47:58 ►
way more easily through life
00:48:00 ►
can help us live
00:48:01 ►
with what faith is sure to
00:48:04 ►
hand us as we go through life, then it’s
00:48:08 ►
a moral community.
00:48:09 ►
It’s the very essence of what it is to be part of a civilization.
00:48:14 ►
That’s why the paradox of our circumstance is that our civilization denies this enormous civilizing influence
00:48:25 ►
and so keeps itself impoverished and infantile.
00:48:30 ►
And I hope, however long I live,
00:48:33 ►
to see that situation addressed and rectified.
00:48:37 ►
And I’m convinced it will come first through the arts.
00:48:42 ►
So thank you very much. I enjoyed it.
00:48:53 ►
Well, sadly, as you know,
00:48:56 ►
Terrence didn’t live long enough
00:48:58 ►
to see our community accepted
00:49:00 ►
as the cornerstone
00:49:02 ►
of an enlightened civilization.
00:49:04 ►
But I truly believe that when that day does arrive,
00:49:07 ►
and I agree with Terrence that it most certainly will arrive one day,
00:49:11 ►
and when it does, I think that the good Bard McKenna will be recognized
00:49:15 ►
as one of the persons who played a major role in ushering in a new golden age.
00:49:21 ►
But first, we still have a little more work to do.
00:49:24 ►
And right now, of course, that includes
00:49:27 ►
working our way through another 20-minute section from that same conference. But if you thought it
00:49:32 ►
was difficult hearing Terrence speak in the last recording, just wait a minute and it’ll get worse.
00:49:38 ►
In fact, I’m only going to be able to play about 20 minutes of the last talk Terrence gave at that conference, because the first part was drowned out by a ringing tone that finally subsided enough to
00:49:50 ►
use a bit of the recording. So most of this last panel has been lost, unless that is the other
00:49:57 ►
recording that I’ve been told exists shows up someday. Nonetheless, I want you to at least have
00:50:03 ►
a little taste of what that last panel with
00:50:06 ►
Terrence was like, and I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t morbid at all. It was filled with laughter
00:50:12 ►
and joy. So let me try and set the scene for you a little bit. As I said, including the speakers,
00:50:19 ►
I’d guess that there were no more than 80 to 100 people there. And most of us knew many of the others from past adventures together.
00:50:28 ►
And so, after being in the relaxing atmosphere of Hawaii for a week,
00:50:33 ►
we had bonded once again and were having a great time.
00:50:37 ►
The night before had ended with a presentation by Annie Sprinkle,
00:50:41 ►
whose talk was titled,
00:50:43 ►
How Psychoactives Informed My Life’s Work as a Multimedia Horror and Pleasure Activist.
00:50:49 ►
And I’m going to leave it to your imagination to play that little talk for you.
00:50:54 ►
But just so that you know, even though the topic was way out there on the edge,
00:50:59 ►
Annie’s presentation was perhaps the most professional of any of the speakers that week.
00:51:04 ►
Annie’s really a very bright and exceptionally delightful person, and not somebody to be taken lightly. Thank you. and healers. It’s by Susan Blackburn and by my friend Margaret Wade.
00:51:25 ►
And if you happen
00:51:26 ►
to have any kind
00:51:27 ►
of interest at all
00:51:28 ►
in sex,
00:51:29 ►
well,
00:51:30 ►
maybe you want
00:51:31 ►
to pick up a copy
00:51:32 ►
of this little book
00:51:33 ►
on the outside chance
00:51:34 ►
that you’ll learn
00:51:34 ►
something new.
00:51:36 ►
But getting back
00:51:37 ►
to our conference,
00:51:38 ►
it was a Thursday
00:51:39 ►
afternoon
00:51:40 ►
and the conference
00:51:41 ►
would be ending
00:51:42 ►
the next morning.
00:51:43 ►
And from 2 until 5
00:51:44 ►
in that afternoon, we were enlightened and entertained by a panel of two,
00:51:49 ►
Terrence McKenna and Tom Robbins, speaking on the topic of psychedelics and literature.
00:51:55 ►
Now, the soundbite I’m about to play right now began when somebody in the room asked Tom and Terrence
00:52:01 ►
if either of them ever did any writing on psychedelics.
00:52:06 ►
In other words, under the influence of psychedelics.
00:52:09 ►
And here’s what they had to say.
00:52:14 ►
In terms of some of what’s been said at this conference,
00:52:19 ►
like pushing the envelope of the future
00:52:21 ►
and trying to understand how these technologies and art engines and
00:52:29 ►
so forth all fit together. There are schools of new science fiction that are, I think,
00:52:36 ►
as good as anything that’s been going on a long, long time. This Australian author,
00:52:41 ►
long, long time. This Australian author, Greg Egan,
00:52:45 ►
who wrote Permutation City and Distress and Diaspora.
00:52:50 ►
And these are mind-boggling visions
00:52:55 ►
of the not distant future, the fairly new and future.
00:53:01 ►
And even, I should say, even Benil Stevenson’s books,
00:53:06 ►
especially Cryptonomicon, is that they’re
00:53:11 ►
very complicated snapshots of the world
00:53:17 ►
that we’re living in and soon to be living in.
00:53:23 ►
And these are new people.
00:53:24 ►
That’s the point.
00:53:26 ►
Science fiction has shifted.
00:53:31 ►
It’s not very.
00:53:34 ►
But it’s no worse than it’s ever been.
00:53:37 ►
It’s the same.
00:53:42 ►
P.K. Dickie and the rest of them.
00:53:50 ►
I mean, imagine Connors Simmons’ partner with food if he’d ever had a couple of asses here.
00:53:53 ►
Instead of going on four pages,
00:53:56 ►
they’d go on four pages.
00:53:59 ►
They’re going for a noun.
00:54:07 ►
Anybody have any questions?
00:54:09 ►
Do you know about Borges, if he has any psychedelic history?
00:54:14 ►
What case?
00:54:16 ►
Jorge Olivo.
00:54:17 ►
Yes.
00:54:19 ►
I don’t know if he’s Argentinian.
00:54:22 ►
He’s no longer alive.
00:54:24 ►
I don’t know.
00:54:26 ►
I don’t think he could write that stuff without some
00:54:29 ►
experience of at least cannabis.
00:54:34 ►
But maybe I’m not even sure how weird it’s
00:54:37 ►
possible to be on that channel.
00:54:42 ►
I’m really blind, and therefore turned inward.
00:54:47 ►
Very sensitive to the world.
00:54:49 ►
So he may have just gotten and wandered his way in there
00:54:52 ►
without any outside help.
00:54:54 ►
He was also a librarian in the National Library of Argentina.
00:54:59 ►
So he had access to medieval, serial, and alchemical stuff.
00:55:05 ►
And he used all that and fabricated it
00:55:08 ►
to make his world.
00:55:11 ►
No, but I think it’s a grass type
00:55:15 ►
you wrote for those pages and all the others are not grass.
00:55:22 ►
I can’t follow you into that.
00:55:29 ►
No, I understand.
00:55:30 ►
Well, you seem to have some prescient ability with practice.
00:55:38 ►
Do either of you have the practice or even the capability of writing them to the influences?
00:55:42 ►
or even the capability of writing them in the end?
00:55:49 ►
My guess is that he does.
00:56:01 ►
I was saying that when I’m in that witch of which there is no witcher,
00:56:03 ►
it’s the furthest thing from my mind.
00:56:09 ►
The only writing I can ever recall to end on such a stake was after a recklessly large quantity of medicine.
00:56:16 ►
I was sitting at the table, the same table where I’m
00:56:18 ►
nearly drowned in a cup of hot chocolate.
00:56:22 ►
There was a letter on the table that I had written and not addressed because I had misplaced the person’s address.
00:56:29 ►
The name was there. And also on the table was a short jar of acrylic paint.
00:56:36 ►
And I looked at the contents of that jar and realized that this could very easily substitute for that person’s address.
00:56:46 ►
I wrote it all down and it stayed in the mail.
00:56:57 ►
I tell you, Dave, it’s logical.
00:57:02 ►
I’ve given you fine reasons why it would work.
00:57:07 ►
I have tried to write something in from cannabis, but I get so interested in the way that the ink is soaked into the wood.
00:57:20 ►
After about half an hour, you see what I’ve done, it’s like T-A-E-E.
00:57:27 ►
Are there other plans here?
00:57:37 ►
You’re not going to…
00:57:39 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:57:41 ►
Until very recently, cannabis was so basic a part of my life
00:57:46 ►
that I could not, there was no life apart from it.
00:57:49 ►
So the answer has to be yes, I wrote five books.
00:57:56 ►
But I never noticed But I was proving something about performance and THC.
00:58:13 ►
It’s good to draw an application, very occasionally.
00:58:23 ►
Anderson writes about the poet
00:58:25 ►
the true artist that is basically
00:58:28 ►
translating
00:58:31 ►
that which is
00:58:32 ►
eternal
00:58:33 ►
through nature
00:58:36 ►
like that all poetry
00:58:38 ►
all art already
00:58:40 ►
exists
00:58:41 ►
and the true poet is
00:58:43 ►
someone who can recognize it and then make it available
00:58:48 ►
to everyone else. I’m wondering, you know, and that’s basically, you know, it’s the basis
00:58:57 ►
for transcendentalism and the philosophical underpinnings of America and lots of our community and psychedelia
00:59:08 ►
and explorations in that realm.
00:59:11 ►
Do you feel that your own creative success
00:59:15 ►
is one of synthesis or recognition?
00:59:23 ►
recognition.
00:59:33 ►
Well I certainly don’t feel like I’m totally in charge of what I’m doing. I don’t need to fill out a 1949 Cadillac that someone can drive it around on a very bad road.
00:59:55 ►
It sounds corny, but I’ll do it very poignantly, that it’s coming through me rather than coming out of me. That is very mysterious. I’m not trying to make questions. It is a very, very serious process.
01:00:05 ►
It makes sense, though.
01:00:07 ►
It’s a topic that it’s always puzzling me
01:00:12 ►
how this community has never really understood its roots
01:00:17 ►
in American Trans-Americanism, or why we never
01:00:20 ►
used that hammer against the establishment. Because this sort of secular, mystical, theosophical brand
01:00:31 ►
of thinking is just as American as mom and apple pie.
01:00:37 ►
And yet you rarely hear it in by our people.
01:00:44 ►
And yet it’s where our roots go deepest and throw
01:00:48 ►
Anderson, Melvin, Hawthorne.
01:00:51 ►
I mean, my god, these are the people who put together
01:00:54 ►
the 19th century Maritime models.
01:00:58 ►
That’s just a.
01:01:03 ►
I think it’s important to reclaim that.
01:01:05 ►
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying.
01:01:07 ►
And if it weren’t for all this confused thinking about a cetacean,
01:01:12 ►
we could take Moby Dick and make it harder now.
01:01:20 ►
You know, another interesting thing is that Shakespeare and Anthony de Petra, well, the whole simple dynamic of human history has been conflict between the individual and the values and desires of the individual and the values and desires of the state.
01:01:44 ►
and very, very seldom has those two things dovetailed. But there seemed to have, in ancient Egypt,
01:01:47 ►
at a time when a large portion of the population
01:01:52 ►
were being given small doses of Cobra gum,
01:01:59 ►
and the high priestesses actually walked around
01:02:02 ►
and asked the motorbikes to walk around their arms, and they had developed such an immunity
01:02:07 ►
that they were to be bitten from time to time.
01:02:11 ►
There’s no particular effects besides the fact that the cobra on the ass being neurotoxic
01:02:18 ►
causes hallucinations.
01:02:21 ►
And there were times when maybe 30,000 people would be in the square of the city and all
01:02:30 ►
on new doses of neurotoxic extracted from snakes.
01:02:37 ►
If you go into Anthony’s Cleopatra and take out all the Anthony stuff, get rid of all
01:02:43 ►
the war and all the testosterone and all of that,
01:02:46 ►
just keep the clear bathroom stuff,
01:02:49 ►
it becomes a psychedelic play.
01:02:54 ►
I would like to see somebody stage that play without inviting Anthony out of there. and
01:03:07 ►
and
01:03:10 ►
and
01:03:15 ►
and
01:03:22 ►
and Thank you. The first couple of drinks have been a real honest face.
01:03:48 ►
Unfortunately, you can’t have nice sex if you want third or fourth ones, as I do.
01:03:51 ►
And then you don’t want to ride it anymore.
01:03:53 ►
You’re incapable of riding it.
01:03:55 ►
And the next day, you’re an animal.
01:03:57 ►
So I’m sure there are people who you can use
01:04:01 ►
to get rid of poisonous fuel.
01:04:04 ►
And those alcoholic riders wrote some very wonderful books. who you can use to make poisonous fuel. And, I mean,
01:04:05 ►
those alcoholic writers
01:04:06 ►
wrote some very wonderful books.
01:04:10 ►
So, yeah, I’m sure
01:04:11 ►
in a concrete way
01:04:14 ►
it could be used as
01:04:16 ►
rocket fuel to blast off
01:04:18 ►
in an aesthetic way.
01:04:32 ►
This, uh, Is nicotine and caffeine a big record in the building?
01:04:33 ►
Or is it a shamanic plan?
01:04:36 ►
Nicotine and caffeine?
01:04:38 ►
Well, an awful lot of varieties drink coffee and smoke.
01:04:40 ►
I don’t do either.
01:04:47 ►
In fact, I just read recently that eggplant has more nicotine in it than tobacco.
01:04:50 ►
It’s about assimilated the same way.
01:04:55 ►
So now I always ask to be seated in the study of science fiction, I’m writing
01:05:12 ►
a paper for a conference about how science fiction is having an enormous influence on
01:05:16 ►
software design.
01:05:17 ►
But one of the things that I’ve noticed in this study is that this idea of transcendence
01:05:21 ►
didn’t really occur in science fiction until around the time of Arthur Clarke and Childhood’s End.
01:05:26 ►
But after that, it became a more persistent motif.
01:05:29 ►
Now, I would want to ask the two of you,
01:05:30 ►
do you think that’s in the psychedelics?
01:05:32 ►
Is it in the culture?
01:05:33 ►
Where do you think that’s coming from?
01:05:39 ►
You’re saying that Childhood’s End and the City of Stars
01:05:43 ►
and all that, I remember that’s where I first contacted those things.
01:05:48 ►
And I think the City of Stars, the short form
01:05:52 ►
was called the Emerson Falls Night.
01:05:54 ►
And it’s the first thing he wrote.
01:05:56 ►
And it came out right around the time
01:05:58 ►
LSD was happening at Santa’s.
01:06:01 ►
But I don’t know if he knew anything about that. It may have
01:06:06 ►
more to do with the
01:06:08 ►
publication of Tell Like a Shark
01:06:10 ►
in the late 40s.
01:06:13 ►
But, yeah, that
01:06:14 ►
seemed to be the big
01:06:16 ►
theme in science fiction
01:06:18 ►
for the second half of
01:06:20 ►
the 20th century. And now, almost
01:06:22 ►
all science fiction is
01:06:24 ►
somehow about the singularity, about approaching it, avoiding it, managing it, interpreting it.
01:06:34 ►
That’s all there is, Levitt Dorfman, which was published in 1888.
01:06:49 ►
Contains six chapters describing a mushroom trip
01:06:53 ►
that this guy takes at the center of the Earth.
01:06:56 ►
And you just go to one third of this very late
01:07:00 ►
and morbid tone is given over to this raucous description of the very long, like,
01:07:08 ►
and links it explicitly to the idea
01:07:12 ►
of the transcendental of the world.
01:07:16 ►
And everyone in the culture doesn’t
01:07:18 ►
have to take drugs in order for the drugs to affect culture.
01:07:22 ►
drugs in order for the drugs to affect culture.
01:07:27 ►
Ancient Greece, for example,
01:07:32 ►
they figured about 15% of the population could actually experience the mysteries,
01:07:35 ►
but it was enough to enlighten the entire culture
01:07:39 ►
in previous golden age.
01:07:41 ►
So that’s why people are going far.
01:07:41 ►
a golden age.
01:07:43 ►
So that’s why you people are going far.
01:07:50 ►
I’m just wondering if, by the way, you have any experience of work
01:07:52 ►
with William S. Burroughs.
01:07:54 ►
I found
01:07:55 ►
his explorations
01:07:58 ►
of the aging world
01:08:00 ►
and he did it
01:08:03 ►
a long time.
01:08:05 ►
I never met Burroughs.
01:08:07 ►
I met him once backstage after a meeting.
01:08:12 ►
His hand was very cool.
01:08:16 ►
I recall that.
01:08:20 ►
Well, I don’t know.
01:08:21 ►
He was the first person to write sex scenes involving DMT
01:08:26 ►
or indeed scenes of any sort involving DMT.
01:08:30 ►
And I remember when I read it, the first time I read Naked Lunch,
01:08:34 ►
I was a sophomore in high school.
01:08:36 ►
I thought it was the ratings of a nine-inch mind.
01:08:39 ►
I just believed that society had flung itself to such limits of degradation that this kind of thing
01:08:47 ►
was seeping up.
01:08:49 ►
And I was delighted.
01:08:56 ►
Well, he was a harbinger of the singularity and all that.
01:09:01 ►
But if you actually read Burroughs’ correspondence,
01:09:04 ►
he was a kind of simpler person
01:09:07 ►
than his literary output implies.
01:09:10 ►
I mean, he was overly fascinated with Scientology, for sure.
01:09:16 ►
And there were other little telltale things,
01:09:22 ►
like this arch-mball and this sword game.
01:09:25 ►
Yeah, stuff like that.
01:09:32 ►
But in a way, he enunciated the idea of virtual realities,
01:09:38 ►
paranoia, psychops, operations.
01:09:41 ►
Nothing is what you think it is.
01:09:43 ►
Every level leads somewhere else.
01:09:48 ►
He sort of invented the post-modern state of paranoia
01:09:51 ►
that now very ordinary people.
01:09:58 ►
Engineering.
01:10:02 ►
and all the rest of it.
01:10:06 ►
On the other side of the coin,
01:10:09 ►
there’s Alderston Island,
01:10:11 ►
which nobody ever talks about.
01:10:13 ►
It’s so marvelous.
01:10:16 ►
Yes.
01:10:18 ►
You want to comment on that?
01:10:19 ►
Thank you.
01:10:23 ►
Well, I had occasion a few years ago to write the introduction for a new edition of Laura Huxley, one of Laura Huxley’s books.
01:10:30 ►
And I dashed off this foreword at the last minute and with exclusive praise of Huxley and Ireland and this and that and the other thing.
01:10:40 ►
And within 48 hours, she was on the phone to me,
01:10:45 ►
and she said, you misread it.
01:10:48 ►
You got it wrong.
01:10:49 ►
She said, I was never advocated the profligate use of psilocybin
01:10:56 ►
that you represent in your forward.
01:10:58 ►
He felt it should be used no more than once or twice a year.
01:11:06 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:11:09 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:11:16 ►
And I’m afraid that’s where the tape cut off,
01:11:19 ►
which, when you know the full story, is somewhat ironic.
01:11:24 ►
The reason I so wanted a copy of this last panel
01:11:28 ►
is that sometime after the tape cut off,
01:11:31 ►
the question was asked about who were the famous psychedelic writers,
01:11:36 ►
particularly ones who were known to be psychedelic.
01:11:40 ►
So Terrence and Tom and the audience all brought up several names
01:11:43 ►
that were mainly of people who weren’t openly psychedelic,
01:11:46 ►
but who were known to have used one or more of our sacred medicines.
01:11:51 ►
And somehow the conversation jumped to the difference between fame and glory.
01:11:55 ►
And Terrence said something along the lines of, well, fame is fleeting, but glory is posthumous.
01:12:01 ►
That’s what I’m after.
01:12:03 ►
Now, don’t hold me to the exact quote, but it was something very close to that.
01:12:08 ►
And as the words were coming out of his mouth, you could see that their unstated meaning began to dawn,
01:12:15 ►
and Terrence’s face started changing a little bit,
01:12:18 ►
and all of a sudden there was this big silence in the room that just hung there like a huge cloud.
01:12:23 ►
But just for the smallest of an instant,
01:12:25 ►
Terrence began to laugh like a kid who had just said a bad word or something,
01:12:30 ►
and we all joined in with much relief.
01:12:33 ►
And that one moment is the reason I pressed some money on the young woman sitting in front of me
01:12:39 ►
and asked her to please make me a copy of the tape that she was recording.
01:12:43 ►
Little did either of us realize at the time that her machine had cut off when the tape
01:12:48 ►
ended and that that wonderful little moment hadn’t been captured after all.
01:12:53 ►
I was disappointed, of course, to learn that the one sound bite I most wanted from the
01:12:58 ►
All Chemical Arts Conference had been lost, but I was happy that I at least had these
01:13:02 ►
two fragments of sound from that week.
01:13:06 ►
As I said earlier, there was at least one other recording made that week,
01:13:09 ►
but so far the friend of mine who made it hasn’t been able to locate it.
01:13:13 ►
So should it ever materialize, I promise to replace the recordings you just heard
01:13:17 ►
with better and hopefully more complete versions.
01:13:21 ►
But at least you got a little taste of that amazing week in Hawaii.
01:13:25 ►
And didn’t you just love Terrence’s answer to that question of whether he wrote under the influence of psychedelics,
01:13:30 ►
when he said that since he was stoned all the time, he must have, but he never noticed.
01:13:36 ►
Now, I know that there are people who are listening to these podcasts and trying to dig
01:13:41 ►
out only the negative parts of the psychedelic narrative.
01:13:48 ►
And from one point of view, somebody who is stoned all the time,
01:13:53 ►
at least according to the stereotype, must be a lazy, worthless bum.
01:13:57 ►
And I’m not saying that that isn’t also the case from time to time.
01:14:02 ►
But what the straight world doesn’t understand is that for a person in chronic pain,
01:14:05 ►
pain that keeps your mind from focusing on anything else,
01:14:09 ►
pain that keeps you awake at night, when you’re that person,
01:14:14 ►
and then you discover that using a little cannabis during the day and just before bedtime returns you to a more normal life, well, once that revelation takes place,
01:14:19 ►
it’s only a small step to discovering that virtually everything,
01:14:24 ►
and I mean almost everything that comes out of any government agency or religious group
01:14:29 ►
about cannabis and psychedelic medicines,
01:14:32 ►
is, for the most part, completely, utterly, and totally false.
01:14:37 ►
And it’s really hard for me to believe that the truth about the positive value of these substances,
01:14:42 ►
the positive value they bring to human life, is still being kept from the public at large.
01:14:48 ►
But hey, I’m preaching to the choir now, I guess, so let’s not worry about the screwheads who prefer to remain ignorant.
01:14:55 ►
Let’s get on with the party.
01:14:57 ►
And what a better way to kick off a party of the mind than with the mind of Terrence McKenna saying things like,
01:15:04 ►
Sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience. Mind of Terrence McKenna I thought it was only going to give me a few interesting thoughts. Thoughts are great, and that’s what we’re all about here in the salon.
01:15:27 ►
But talk about thoughts is just that, talk.
01:15:31 ►
It’s the experience.
01:15:33 ►
It’s the experience that we go after.
01:15:35 ►
The thoughts are nearly our reward for taking a chance and having the experience.
01:15:41 ►
Listening to Terrence just now, at the top of his form, really,
01:15:45 ►
it’s still hard for me to believe
01:15:48 ►
that in less than seven months he was gone,
01:15:50 ►
at least in body.
01:15:52 ►
But the spirit of Terrence McKenna,
01:15:54 ►
the psychedelic spirit,
01:15:56 ►
remains alive and brighter than at
01:15:58 ►
any time he was walking this lovely little
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planet. And it is you, my
01:16:02 ►
dear friend, you who are
01:16:04 ►
a very integral part of keeping the psychedelic
01:16:06 ►
spirit alive today. So don’t give up. Find the others. Spread the word. And as Terrence often
01:16:13 ►
said when he closed his workshops, keep the old faith and stay high. And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:16:21 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.