Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima(?)
“There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education.” –Timothy Leary
“I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.” –Allen Ginsberg
[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]
http://kleamckenna.com/Books“To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances.” –Terence McKenna
“It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone.”
“Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence.”
“I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!”
“The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.”
“The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature.”
“The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked.”
The Butterfly Hunter by Klea McKenna
Psychedelic Salon Forum at TheGrowReport.com (closed)
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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 have to tell you that I’m continually amazed at the generosity of our fellow salonners,
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particularly here at the end of the year when there are so many other demands being made on us for gifts and donations of all kinds.
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And this week is no exception here in the salon as Max T., Paul H., and Maureen M.
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have all made very generous donations to help offset some of the out-of-pocket expenses involved in producing these podcasts.
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You know, when I first began doing these podcasts in 2005,
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the last thing I was thinking about was that I’d still be doing them over three years later. And I have to
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admit that a significant part of my motivation comes from the support of people like Max, Paul,
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and Maureen who have pitched in and helped. Another kind of support we are receiving here
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in the salon has come in the way of papers being submitted and volunteers stepping up to help with
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the inaugural publication of the Psychedelic Salon Quarterly. As you know, a friend of the salon, Thank you. online journal is going to provide some very interesting points for future research and
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discussion in our community. So if you’ve been thinking about writing or publishing something
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you wrote in the past that fits the PSQ’s mission, or if you would like to be considered for a role
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as a peer reviewer, I hope you will surf over to psq.criticalmath.com where you’ll see the following call for papers, and I quote,
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The Psychedelic Salon Quarterly publishes peer-reviewed articles on the subject of psychedelics,
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including thoughtful scientific, psychological, historical, and sociological works
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that for conventional or ethical reasons may not be accepted by mainstream publications.
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conventional or ethical reasons may not be accepted by mainstream publications.
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The PSQ aims to facilitate a thoughtful and scientific dialogue on the utility of psychedelic substances through legitimate research and experience.
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Like its namesake, the Psychedelic Salon,
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the PSQ maintains that psychedelic substances are a valid part of the human experience,
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and we welcome submissions from any discipline that approaches the subject with enlightenment.
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And ultimately, that’s what we’re all looking for, isn’t it? Just a little enlightenment to help us get through the day.
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Now, I don’t know that today’s podcast is going to fill that need, because, well, I’m not really sure that I even have a clear
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theme for today’s program, other than the fact that after putting it together, I realized
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that everyone in it, except for me, of course, is now dead.
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So maybe I should call this the ghost edition or something like that.
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What happened was that I was going through some of the tapes in the Timothy Leary archive
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and came across a short little piece that was part of the question and answer session of a panel
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that in addition to Dr. Leary included Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs,
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Abby Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and other notables from the Beat Generation
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and from what some people are calling the 60s,
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even though there wasn’t much 60 in the 60s.
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And listening to them talk about the sad state of affairs and the war on consciousness back then
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got me to thinking about how much our psychedelic community likes to talk,
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but how, in fact, we really haven’t accomplished
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all that much on the political front.
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At least that was my first pass on it.
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But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a few great strides have actually
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been made, depending on how you look at things.
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For example, back in the 80s, when I was first becoming acquainted with the psychedelic worldview, there was no World Wide Web, and my local bookstore didn’t have many books on the subject.
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Yet, look at the state of information about psychoactive medicines that’s available online today.
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There’s so much valuable information available just on arrowhead.org that you couldn’t go through it all in several years of full-time reading.
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So from a cultural point of view, information about our sacred medicines has certainly become more readily available.
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But I want you to hear for yourself what some of the elders of the time had to say about the state of affairs sometime back in the 1980s.
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And then I’m going to follow this short discussion with part of a talk that Terrence McKenna gave
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sometime that was probably within a decade of this Q&A session.
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And after you’ve heard them both,
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see if you can’t already hear a slight shift
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in the way things now seem, at least to Terrence.
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But first, let’s listen to this interesting panel of cultural icons
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in what may have been one of their last group conversations.
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One thing I say, I copped this line from a woman named Barbara Woodhouse
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who wrote a book called There Are No Bad Dogs.
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named Barbro Woodhouse who wrote a book called There Are No Bad Dogs. They’re only unprepared or neurotic owners. So it kind of works well. He said there are no bad drugs. There are
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simply people that don’t know how to use them. And that intelligent people use drugs intelligently
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and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else.
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And our function is to raise the level of intelligence.
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We have to have a program of drug education.
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A hundred years ago, there was no sex education.
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As a result, there was neurosis, there was closet stuff, there was period disease, there was unwanted pregnancy.
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Now we have probably more sex education than we need.
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The same thing has got to happen with drugs.
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We simply have to have an intelligent, scientifically-based program of telling everyone,
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including young people, exactly how and how not to use drugs.
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I presented in the Senate in 1963 to the Dodd Committee
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and later to the Kennedy Committee a simple-minded program
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that said that both guns and drugs should be licensed.
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And you’d have to pass a test in order to smoke marijuana,
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show that you understand what it is, what its effect is on the brain,
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how it operates, 101 times not to use marijuana to get an LSD license, the 1,001 places and times not to use LSD.
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If you misuse the car or the gun or the drug, I agree with you, Abby, a.357 Magnum, I mean,
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I agree with you, Abby, a.357 Magnum, I mean, the test you’d have to pass to get that would be, you know, 10,001 reasons why not to do it.
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But still, if you misuse or abuse the drug or the gun or the car, you should have your license ripped away.
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You should be popped in prison or whatever, depending on how much damage you’ve done to other people. But drug education, intelligence drug education is what it’s all about. We’ve simply got to raise the intelligence of the American people on
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this, and I’m continuing to do it, and I think Abby is too.
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I’ll just add to that a quote of Eugene Schoenfeld, who is known as Dr. Hip,
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who said that drug abuse is what somebody else does.
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We’ll switch back and forth between the two microphones, so we’ll start with you.
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I wanted to just point out that I’m totally in agreement with what you’re talking about,
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that drugs are indeed things to be used like everything else you know
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they’re what we have in our hands on the planet is what we have to use and not
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abuse but it’s here for us to use it’s not to turn our back on and I think even
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Tim didn’t really address in his talk right now and no one here has at all
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given an indication of the degree to which drugs did bring about the changes that we’re living in.
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And, you know, totally and completely for me, I don’t think, I agree, Abby, that, you know,
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you can be controlled, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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We’re not talking about drug addiction.
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We’re talking about psychedelic, sacred substances that have been used not here.
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Drug culture isn’t American.
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It’s worldwide.
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It’s been so from forever.
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Every culture, the shapes of its civilization come from its basic psychedelic.
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You know, whether we’re eating mushrooms or drinking booze or eating peyote tells you something to start with about what you’re going to see in the painting,
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what you’re going to see in the lifestyle and so on.
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And every culture has always had at least one strong consciousness-changing substance.
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So we’re not playing with something new.
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I think what’s new is that we’ve been taken away from that by the church, by the government.
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Don’t forget the church is just a continuation of the Roman Empire for a few thousand years.
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But guess what? It’s coming back in.
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So we’ve got to learn again to use it.
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If we haven’t had something for a long time, we forget its true use. And I just want to say that
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I really felt that this was something that all you guys needed to talk about here today,
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you know, a little bit. Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Thank you, Diane, very much. We needed to have someone say that. I think we’re all a little too modest to say that, in one sense.
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We’re all in parole. Now that I’m off parole, I tell almost every audience when they ask,
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my wife and I and our friends use any drug we want to because we’re intelligent people and know how to do it,
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and no government law is going to stop us in the privacy of our own home doing that.
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Now, there’s one other comment here of encouragement now that we’ve gotten into drugs.
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The game has just begun.
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We are now discovering, neurology discovering, you know, the way a drug works, there has to be a receptor site.
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There’s a receptor site for morphine and heroin.
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There’s a Hoffman-LaRoche receptor site.
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There’s a Pooh’s receptor site. site, they’re discovering dozens of new receptor sites every year for drugs, which we haven’t
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figured out fit those keys so that there are more and better drugs coming on the market
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every year. So I have bad news for Nancy Reagan and her hopes for a drug-free America. We’re to get the game together.
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Okay, now.
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I have two questions.
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The first for Alan or Mr. Leary,
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and the second for Mr. Burroughs.
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Wait till you hear this.
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The first one,
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I’m sort of obsessed with death.
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Whose?
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Mine.
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Well, everyone’s.
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And I was thinking about the nuclear nonsense.
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And it seems that nuclear war, notwithstanding, we’re going to die,
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which is not a very optimistic thought. So the question is, is death inevitable?
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thought. So the question is, is death inevitable? And if so or not, how does that relate to language and the transmutation of consciousness?
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Death is not only not inevitable.
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A week ago, in a public audience in Los Angeles, in the third row was a man named Roy Walford.
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He’s one of at least 12 geneticists, immunologists, inoculation antigen people who are working on life extension. I asked Roy Walford, who is a hotshot professor, how many years before you guys will give us a pill or inoculation which will double the human lifespan? And he said, between 10 and 20 years. Therefore, I say
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to you, death is stupidity or laziness or bad luck. There’s no reason why anyone in
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this room, in reasonable health, need ever die. Scratch that from your appointment book.
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The death trip has been laid on us by the religions and the philosophers of power and
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fear trying to make us feel submissive
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and helpless and all this stuff about
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yeah, you’re going to live
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for 60, 70
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years like a slug
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on a planet you can’t leave.
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We’re going to leave the planet. We’re going to live as long as we want to.
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It’s an option. If you want to die,
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do it.
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I wonder
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if we could I wonder if we could…
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I wonder if this subject could be addressed by
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Gregory Corso.
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Gregory, are you here?
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Gregory? Come on, Gregory. Come up here and shoot
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yourself.
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Is Gregory there?
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Where’s Gregory? My hair is… Will you come and take a chair? I took on death a long time ago. I was a little scared of dying, but I was young, so they put, no, no, I had to go.
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More scared now.
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More scared now.
00:14:10 ►
Well, this is what I checked out about death.
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That is a duet.
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There’s a natural death, and there’s an unnatural death.
00:14:18 ►
The natural shot, you’re going to go.
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Like I told you today, you’re going to have shark shit, and that’s a natural death.
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When the shark eats you and shits you out
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that’s natural
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but a bullet, the atom bomb, electric chair
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unnatural
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you can stop that shit
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that’s the death you can be
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not the other ball game baby Hey, Greg, what happens if a shark shoots you?
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Okay, what’s your question for Bill Burrows?
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Yes, for Mr. Burrows, I was very interested in your experiments with tape recording
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and the experiments, as i understand where you’re
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putting tape recorders in empty rooms and leaving the tape machines on but yet picking up certain
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sounds and i was curious in terms of kerouac being he’s dead uh do you make any attempts to
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contact like kerouac or something is it that sort of approach or
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through tape recorders no
00:15:27 ►
by what means well he asked if I thought his question was through tape recorders
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although a lot of that has been done by someone named Rowdy Bay.
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He got a lot of voices on tape with no, I mean, under controlled conditions where there was no possibility that anyone said anything.
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Thank you.
00:15:59 ►
Okay, did somebody at the other microphone have a question?
00:16:01 ►
Yeah.
00:16:02 ►
Yes, all you gentlemen here have for years, including tonight,
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been sketching out a plan of life that’s very admirable,
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basically one of quiet ecstasy incorporated into the productive apparatus
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of the planet and so forth.
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And yet it seems to me in a sense that this apparatus,
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at least in moments, seems to have stagnated.
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And most of the avenues that you’ve been suggesting we go down have been partially blocked.
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Like the drug trade, even though LSD and the other psychoactives are great,
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it’s turned into basically a battleground between official and unofficial mobs and gangsters.
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between official and unofficial mob gangsters.
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Poetry and literature seems to have turned into a sort of hermetic game that the general public is unaware of.
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In fact, the library censorship cases are beginning to suggest that
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reading has been considered by the power structure of subversive activity,
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which is being gradually eliminated.
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Or even, like, say, the great music and culture of the 60s,
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as rock music has basically turned, for the most part,
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into a set of, say, stagnant conventions,
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which are extremely hard to break out of,
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even when, say, Allen Ginsberg worked with The Clash, you know, even though his…
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Are you leading up to a question?
00:17:30 ►
Yeah.
00:17:31 ►
Well, and so then even with all the work he did with them and appearing in the album,
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it was still, say, it was still basically totally enmeshed within, say, the outmoded macho rock and roll bit.
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And this goes across the board.
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Our politics is official politics that turned a game for halfwits.
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Look at Reagan, for example.
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And basically I’m wondering what can we do about it?
00:18:03 ►
It seems like we’re not approaching this new age as fast as we might like,
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and how are we going to get things moving again?
00:18:10 ►
Let’s paraphrase that.
00:18:11 ►
Alan, do you think that you’ve become too macho by singing with the Clash?
00:18:14 ►
No, I was just saying, you know.
00:18:18 ►
Smoking in the dark cinema
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See the bath go down again that’s very pretty I don’t agree with
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your aesthetic judgment about the new clash album nor with some of the other
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aesthetic judgments I think this conference and the consciousness of this
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conference is one way of getting the ball rolling again. And I don’t think that meditative awareness is a road that is blocked.
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I don’t think that although the government and, I’ve got to say, the drug bureaucracies,
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working in consort historically as they always have with organized crime and Cosa Nostra,
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have created a giant drug problem together.
00:19:08 ►
Organized crime and the government drug agencies together, I think,
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are mostly responsible for the difficulties we’re having with the interesting drugs.
00:19:18 ►
I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness
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and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not for
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the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting thing
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is the struggle with the self and the relation with the self, and there’s no end to the improvement
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that can be done there.
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You know, it’s a great democratic experience that you can have the greatest so many times.
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It’s not just Muhammad Ali.
00:19:48 ►
I mean, I think that that was the kind of message of the Beats.
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They did remove not only the Protestant ethic,
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but the whole concept of original sin,
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which I thought was a much better idea for a perfume
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than a philosophy, really.
00:20:01 ►
But they did take the idea of guilt away.
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And I shuddered a little
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with the guy with the black question, because it did have a touch of guilt around it, which
00:20:10 ►
I’m no longer into in the 80s. In the 60s, guilt and gut checking went very well, where
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the young checked the old, and blacks checked the whites, and the women checked the men,
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and the gays checked the straights, and the hips checked the straights. I don’t think that’s going to work in the 80s. We’ve got to learn how
00:20:27 ►
to look for the most common denominator that we have between us and develop new coalitions.
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And, you know, I read the polls. I don’t care who’s in office. Who’s ever in office is the
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lesser of two, is the evil of two lessers. Because that’s what we get every four years.
00:20:44 ►
So just because it looks the same to you, Tim,
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I think there is a change.
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And every four years, they are going to get kicked out.
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Because when you only get that kind of choice,
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the rule is to vote the incumbent out
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and get the new in.
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That’s the only rule.
00:20:59 ►
But if you look at the polls,
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you’re finding 75, 80% of the American people
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now connect their own personal situation,
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vis-a-vis a job, vis-a-vis unclean streets, crime in the streets, whatever it is, to global issues.
00:21:15 ►
This was totally unheard of 25 years ago.
00:21:18 ►
And now we’re talking about the average American, be they liberal, conservative, left-wing, right-wing.
00:21:24 ►
When you organize in a conservative area like I do,
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you kind of discover the fact that people aren’t left-wing or right-wing.
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In fact, they don’t even have wings at all, I tend to notice,
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now that I’ve become an environmentalist.
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So we have to look for those new coalitions anyway.
00:21:42 ►
Fuck guilt.
00:21:45 ►
Good old Abbie Hoffman.
00:21:48 ►
Fuck guilt.
00:21:50 ►
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
00:21:53 ►
And now I want
00:21:54 ►
to continue our little historical
00:21:56 ►
end of the year journey
00:21:57 ►
by playing part of a talk that
00:22:00 ►
Terrence McKenna gave and I found
00:22:02 ►
it under several titles on over
00:22:04 ►
a hundred websites, so
00:22:05 ►
I don’t know the exact date of this talk or the real title of it, but since he mentions conferences
00:22:11 ►
in both Palenque and Hawaii, I’m guessing that this might have taken place sometime late in 1998,
00:22:19 ►
maybe sometime after his Valley of Novelty workshop that I featured back several years ago,
00:22:24 ►
but it could have been given long before that.
00:22:27 ►
Your guess is as good as mine on this one.
00:22:30 ►
Anyway, here is Terrence McKenna with a few more of his sometimes very provocative thoughts.
00:22:40 ►
Before I get into the main body of tonight’s entertainment,
00:22:46 ►
I want to call your attention to the propaganda for an event in Mexico and another event in Hawaii.
00:22:55 ►
These events, in the case of the Mexico event, you get a major slice of the psychedelic community you get Robert Montgomery, Jonathan Ott,
00:23:08 ►
Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Manolo Torres, Christian Resch, Terence McKenna and
00:23:17 ►
others who unfortunately slipped my mind at the ceremonial Center of Palenque in Chiapas.
00:23:25 ►
We’ve been doing these events somewhere in Mayan Mexico for the past 10 or 12 years.
00:23:32 ►
Many of you are graduates, which doesn’t mean you can’t come again.
00:23:37 ►
But I want to invite all of you there.
00:23:40 ►
If you’re interested in ethnobotany, shamanism, ethnopharmacology,
00:23:46 ►
altered states of consciousness, the politics of all of this, this is as intense and information-packed
00:23:53 ►
an exposure as you can have, and it’s straight from the mouths of the scholars and scientists
00:23:59 ►
and writers who have spent a great deal of time in that area. So I just want to invite you to that.
00:24:06 ►
It’s also a great party.
00:24:08 ►
It’s the height of mushroom season.
00:24:12 ►
There’s nothing we could do about that.
00:24:16 ►
So you just are on your own.
00:24:31 ►
well so when I start out on these tours I usually have an agenda and prepared remarks and and then as I make my way through my venues and I hear the feedback and I feel the ambience of
00:24:40 ►
of the people and the the throb of the zeitgeist,
00:24:46 ►
it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary
00:24:50 ►
on our moment in space and time
00:24:52 ►
and the various dimensions, adumbrations, and opportunities of our dilemma.
00:25:00 ►
But I want tonight to couch it for you in the context of, I guess, an extended metaphor.
00:25:08 ►
We could talk about these things in many ways, but I find this particular extended metaphor illuminating.
00:25:19 ►
And I start by recalling an observation from someone whose name rarely falls from my lips,
00:25:27 ►
and that would be Gurdjieff.
00:25:30 ►
And Gurdjieff said at one point, or was known to comment,
00:25:35 ►
that people are asleep, he said.
00:25:38 ►
And he, by implication, suggested people awaken.
00:25:43 ►
I’m not sure if he fully grasped the implication for his own
00:25:46 ►
product line had that occurred, but in any case, you’re on it, you’re with me, yes.
00:25:56 ►
It’s very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different,
00:26:03 ►
which is what is supposed to be going on, you know.
00:26:09 ►
Well, so thinking about this comment that people are asleep, I see several implications.
00:26:21 ►
I ask myself, what is awake in my own notion? And I thought to myself,
00:26:28 ►
awake is, for me, awake is where the laws of physics are fully operable. You know,
00:26:39 ►
hurled objects shatter, electricity shocks, I cannot fly, the laws of physics are in operation.
00:26:48 ►
In that domain, I consider myself to be fully awake.
00:26:53 ►
Now, in terms of occult and spiritual traditions, the admonition to awaken
00:27:00 ►
always seems to imply that higher consciousness is approached through an expansion of clarity and awareness.
00:27:11 ►
And that seems obvious. I don’t argue with it as a rationalist.
00:27:16 ►
But as somebody who has run the edges, I’ve noticed something somewhat counterintuitive to that teaching, and it’s this, it’s that to contact the cosmic giggle,
00:27:31 ►
to have the flow of kazooistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples,
00:27:39 ►
white caps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will,
00:27:46 ►
in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will, to achieve that.
00:27:54 ►
It requires, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting,
00:28:23 ►
a certain taking your eye off the ball, a certain assumption that things are simpler than they are almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called the rupture of plane that indicates, you know, that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power beyond, behind profane appearances. And in my own life,
00:28:26 ►
for those of you who are conversant with my output,
00:28:30 ►
when I went to the Amazon in 1971
00:28:33 ►
and had the experiences that are described
00:28:36 ►
in true hallucinations,
00:28:38 ►
I had been, for many months before that,
00:28:40 ►
in Asia, smuggling, hanging out,
00:28:44 ►
and I had taken my eye off the ball. I had become very
00:28:49 ►
gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people’s opinions and behaviors. I was easygoing,
00:29:00 ►
is what I’m trying to say. Too easygoing. And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness,
00:29:09 ►
the cosmic giggle approaches. And I compare this, this is closing of a theme, I compare this to sleep or two states that lie between waking and sleeping and so again an odd
00:29:29 ►
take on this remark of Gurdjieff I remember someone many years ago said to
00:29:35 ►
me they evoked the symbol of the yin and the yang, the two tiers folded against each other within a circle.
00:29:49 ►
And this person, who was no rishi, roshi, geishay, or guru, but simply observant, said,
00:29:57 ►
it’s not the black side, it’s not the white side. It’s the interface. It’s the edge. And I found
00:30:09 ►
by observing sleep, and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher’s Amphiatrium
00:30:18 ►
Satientium that’s chiseled over the alchemist’s doorway. I can’t do it in Latin, but it says, while sleeping, watch.
00:30:28 ►
While sleeping, watch.
00:30:31 ►
And I’ve noticed that while going to sleep,
00:30:35 ►
there is a barrier,
00:30:39 ►
a place in the process of going to sleep
00:30:42 ►
that is like a mercurial edge.
00:30:45 ►
It’s a river.
00:30:46 ►
It’s a zone of hypnagogia.
00:30:48 ►
You often pass through it post-orgasm.
00:30:52 ►
It’s a place of drifting amoeboid colored afterimage lights
00:30:57 ►
and then true hallucination, images, strange, transcendental or transpersonal images.
00:31:08 ►
Well, so then, so far in the context of pursuing this extended metaphor about sleep,
00:31:15 ►
I’ve talked basically, essentially about the individual’s relationship to the concept, to the fact.
00:31:28 ►
relationship to the concept, to the fact. But there’s also a social or a political, a species-wide implication. It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of
00:31:37 ►
the way the planet is as a thing, some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake.
00:31:51 ►
And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is
00:31:59 ►
never entirely awake.
00:32:02 ►
It is never entirely asleep it exists in I guess you can hear me it
00:32:11 ►
exists in some kind of indeterminate zone and this to me is the clue to
00:32:19 ►
understanding something that is personally fascinating to me and it revolves around why people believe
00:32:28 ►
such weird things and and why either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium
00:32:37 ►
or the breakdown of traditional values or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place.
00:32:51 ►
And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding.
00:32:58 ►
I mean, for some people, quantum physics provides the answers.
00:33:03 ►
Their next-door neighbor may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor.
00:33:09 ►
I mean, if this is not a balkanization of epistemology, I don’t know what it is.
00:33:16 ►
It is accompanied by a related phenomenon, which is technology or the historical momentum of things
00:33:28 ►
is creating such a bewildering social milieu
00:33:31 ►
that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story,
00:33:39 ►
a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno
00:33:49 ►
consumerist post-McGluinist electronic pre-apocalyptic existence and and so into that
00:33:59 ►
dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality rushes a bewildering
00:34:09 ►
variety of squirrely notions um epistemological cartoons if you will uh that and conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion, I’m somewhat immune to paranoia.
00:34:29 ►
So those of you who aren’t, you know, gays in wonder, conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality.
00:34:47 ►
cartoon about reality? I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the grays and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological
00:34:53 ►
problems? Or isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything or the Communist Party or the Catholic Church or the Masons. Well
00:35:07 ►
these are epistemological cartoons it’s you know kindergarten stuff in the art
00:35:13 ►
of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying, that the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one
00:35:32 ►
is in control. Absolutely no one. You know, you don’t understand Monica, you don’t understand Netanyahu, it’s because nobody is in
00:35:46 ►
control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now,
00:35:53 ►
there may be entities seeking control, the World Bank, the Communist Party, the
00:35:58 ►
rich, the somebody others, but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself.
00:36:09 ►
Because this process that is underway will take the control freak by the short and curly
00:36:16 ►
and throw them against the wall.
00:36:20 ►
It’s like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.
00:36:33 ►
Well, now a Jungian would say, no surprise here, history is the collective dream of humanity.
00:36:40 ►
It is run by archetypal energies.
00:36:44 ►
It is run by archetypal energies.
00:36:55 ►
It is downloaded by the zeitgeist into the various milieus and epochs of which it is composed.
00:36:59 ►
This seems reasonable to me.
00:37:10 ►
I don’t want to give you the impression it’s too linear to understand that what I am saying is that awake is good, asleep is bad.
00:37:19 ►
What I would rather do is explain this whole gradient of possible positioning vis-a-vis your life and your destiny, these choices that you have, and then have people understand that they choose
00:37:25 ►
you choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake or to be one part of the time and
00:37:35 ►
in some situations and one part of the time and in other situations now if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field
00:37:48 ►
that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet and if in fact
00:37:55 ►
in half or more of those minds at any given moment the rules of the dream hold sway, then it is no surprise that when we make our way
00:38:09 ►
into society or just when we live our lives there’s an eeriness to it, there’s
00:38:17 ►
a fatedness to it, there’s a plottedness to it. You know, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative, I believe.
00:38:29 ►
You know, some science fiction writers such as Greg Egan and others have suggested that this could even be a
00:38:37 ►
form of recorded medium.
00:38:40 ►
You can see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention.
00:38:50 ►
I mean, if you’re a devotee of the theory of stochastic and random unfolding of events,
00:38:59 ►
then you have to look very carefully at how unrandom and how mythical and archetypal most people’s lives are.
00:39:11 ►
You know, if you take psychedelics and hurl yourself to the edge
00:39:17 ►
and spend time with strange aboriginal people in remote parts of the world,
00:39:21 ►
the cosmic giggle becomes your friend. But in fact, ordinary people’s lives,
00:39:33 ►
everyone’s lives, are touched by deep magic. And I’ve, you know, again, the primary data is experience,
00:39:48 ►
and then the models are built backward from the primary data without prejudice,
00:39:51 ►
and in an attempt to transcend historical momentum.
00:39:56 ►
And when I do that, what I see is that the
00:40:00 ►
the carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love.
00:40:11 ►
Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in nature.
00:40:26 ►
What do I mean by that?
00:40:27 ►
I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft and the vice president-in-chief of operations.
00:40:50 ►
lunch one day and you can from a distance have your eye fall upon her and fall in love with her and you know from that point to having the five children she bears you go off to Harvard and the
00:40:58 ►
Sorbonne it’s just a matter of running the clock forward. And these things have, I mean, to you it may seem like a miracle,
00:41:08 ►
but to those of us who are students of human happenstance, it’s inevitable.
00:41:14 ►
I mean, you can launch your story.
00:41:17 ►
And I’ve, you know, in the course of taking psychedelics
00:41:21 ►
and looking at my life and other people’s lives and narrative i i
00:41:26 ►
think that the the secret of i don’t want to say anything as pretentious as transcendence or
00:41:35 ►
enlightenment but the secret of uh of taking hold of one’s destiny is to understand that one is a character.
00:41:46 ►
A character is a different thing than this model you inherit
00:41:50 ►
out of the idea that you’re a three-dimensional animal inside a democracy
00:41:55 ►
with a Christian heritage and, you know, a Dewey Decimal cataloging system or whatever.
00:42:10 ►
system or whatever. Anyway these are some of the notions that occur to me in the context of comparing dream on many scales. It’s you have to really struggle I think to believe that you actually live inside the model
00:42:30 ►
of reality that science and Newtonian physics and the mathematical analysis of
00:42:36 ►
nature have given us you know not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers,
00:42:49 ►
everything that is important,
00:42:52 ►
color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, appetition,
00:43:02 ►
these things are called secondary qualities. In other words, they’re peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding. They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body and hence dismissible by a theory of pure abstraction, which says, you know, what is real is spin, charge, angular momentum.
00:43:32 ►
None of these things are very rich concepts for a living human being.
00:43:37 ►
Who knows what any of these things are, you know?
00:44:08 ►
are, you know. So, one, I mean, we don’t have time in a situation like I think I would argue as the devil’s advocate that it is the plasticity of
00:44:15 ►
historical time and the acceleration the sense of an out-of-control spin-up or spin-down into new domains of possibility
00:44:29 ►
that is the strongest evidence present at hand that we are in some kind of dream.
00:44:37 ►
I’ve struggled my whole life with…
00:44:40 ►
I’ve always believed or I’ve always felt the power of the statement,
00:44:44 ►
the world is made of language.
00:44:48 ►
But, of course, you think about this proposition for 30 seconds
00:44:52 ►
and the question that arises then is,
00:44:54 ►
if the world is made of language, then why isn’t it the way I want it to be?
00:45:00 ►
You know, why does it have its own raison d’etre, even if it is language?
00:45:09 ►
Well, I think it’s appropriate to speak of this to an audience as digitally sophisticated as I assume you must be.
00:45:18 ►
I think the primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the 20th century the primary
00:45:28 ►
contribution of 20th century thinking if you will is to have understood finally that information is
00:45:37 ►
primary that this world this cosmos this universe this body and soul are all made of information.
00:45:49 ►
Information is a deeper and more primary concept than space, time, matter, energy, charge, spin, angular momentum.
00:46:00 ►
The world is made of language.
00:46:03 ►
The world is made of language.
00:46:12 ►
The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked.
00:46:26 ►
If reality is made of language, then what we’re saying is that it’s code then it is far more deeply open
00:46:28 ►
to manipulation than we ever dared
00:46:31 ►
dream
00:46:32 ►
I mean we’ve been messing around on the desktop
00:46:35 ►
opening files
00:46:37 ►
with religions
00:46:38 ►
and political systems
00:46:40 ►
and xenophobic theories
00:46:43 ►
and racial superiority
00:46:44 ►
all this crap that haunts the
00:46:47 ►
human historical adventure, means we have not addressed the deeper levels.
00:46:54 ►
And in thinking about this and the relationship to dream and human culture, I have realized
00:47:01 ►
that cultures are like operating systems.
00:47:10 ►
We are like hardware.
00:47:12 ►
The human animal is a piece of biological wetware slash hardware.
00:47:21 ►
And it has been, we know, pretty much as we confront it today
00:47:26 ►
for at least 140,000 years
00:47:28 ►
at Klossus River cave mouth in South Africa
00:47:34 ►
they have excavated Homo sapiens, sapiens skeletons
00:47:38 ►
100,000 years old
00:47:40 ►
and that person could have sat in the front row here tonight
00:47:43 ►
and nobody would have batted an eyebrow.
00:47:46 ►
So the human hardware has been in place for a while.
00:47:54 ►
What has changed rapidly in comparison to the rates of biological evolution, are the operating systems.
00:48:08 ►
The people who excavated Ur, which was at that time thought to be the world’s first city,
00:48:14 ►
and in any case is a city seven millennia old,
00:48:19 ►
when they excavated the central plaza at Ur,
00:48:23 ►
they discovered that a black basaltic slab had been set up there
00:48:29 ►
by the earliest kings of Ur, and that was the cultural operating system.
00:48:35 ►
And if in a deal trading goats for olives, the dispute arose, people had reference to the central operating system,
00:48:43 ►
and these things were determined
00:48:45 ►
well now er 101 was fine for olives and goat trading but it didn’t support higher mathematics
00:48:56 ►
it didn’t support rational exploration of nature it didn’t support astrological knowledge about the movement of the
00:49:06 ►
stars. As we have gone forward through culture, we have swapped out these
00:49:13 ►
operating systems. And at each swap out, there has been a lot of hair pulling
00:49:20 ►
and cussing and screaming. Anyone who has installed a new operating system is
00:49:25 ►
completely familiar with that sickening from the bowels kind of coldness as you
00:49:34 ►
know you realize it all hangs by a thread. Now this situation of this
00:49:43 ►
operating system metaphor I think is a useful one for understanding,
00:49:48 ►
and again, a circle closes, the balkanization of epistemology that causes me such anxiety.
00:49:57 ►
If you meet an aboriginal person from the Amazon, for example,
00:50:10 ►
An aboriginal person from the Amazon, for example, they may be running WeToto 3.0 as their operating system. Nicely supports animistic magic, huge capacity when it comes to making fish traps and bird traps.
00:50:20 ►
WeToto is a powerful operating system for a rainforest Aboriginal. In our
00:50:26 ►
culture, you know, there are, I have no idea, at least 10 or 20 operating systems
00:50:32 ►
all going at the same time. Some will run Mormonism, some will support Catholicism. Others, Kabbalah goes at the speed of light.
00:50:47 ►
Others support quantum physics.
00:50:49 ►
Some support econometrics.
00:50:51 ►
Others support political correctness.
00:50:53 ►
And these things are mutually exclusive.
00:51:00 ►
And so looking at this and looking at this clash of operating systems,
00:51:05 ►
I’ve come to the conclusion, and some of you may have heard me say this before,
00:51:11 ►
that culture is not your friend.
00:51:18 ►
That’s the final conclusion.
00:51:20 ►
You see, well, this came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical.
00:51:28 ►
And as I was buttoning up, my doctor said to me,
00:51:31 ►
he said, you know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead.
00:51:40 ►
And I realized that this was true, and that among all the revolutions that we are enduring,
00:51:53 ►
one of them is that we live nearly twice as long as people lived very recently in the past.
00:52:10 ►
recently in the past. Well, culture is a kind of neoteny, and I don’t want to belabor that at great length, but for those of you who are not biologists, neoteny is the retention of juvenile
00:52:18 ►
characteristics into adulthood. It’s used to describe animal behavior for instance I’ll give the most
00:52:26 ►
spectacular example of neoteny there is a kind of animal which lives in ponds in
00:52:33 ►
Africa and it reproduces like a fish it lays eggs on the bottom of these ponds
00:52:40 ►
more fish like animals come from these eggs and so forth however if the pond dries up the creature undergoes metamorphosis and
00:52:51 ►
becomes an animal somewhat like a gecko and lays eggs and from these eggs come
00:52:59 ►
creatures that are like geckos in In other words, this is an animal which actually achieves sexual maturity
00:53:06 ►
in two forms,
00:53:09 ►
depending on environmental stress.
00:53:12 ►
Spectacular example of neoteny.
00:53:14 ►
Turning to human beings,
00:53:15 ►
the less spectacular example,
00:53:17 ►
but relevant to us,
00:53:19 ►
is our general body hairlessness
00:53:22 ►
compared to other primates.
00:53:25 ►
We look like fetal apes.
00:53:28 ►
Human beings look like fetal apes.
00:53:33 ►
Why? What is neoteny?
00:53:36 ►
Well, this is hotly debated among evolutionary biologists.
00:53:41 ►
But the point I want to make is a socio-political comment, which is
00:53:47 ►
culture itself is some kind of neotenizing force. Because what culture provides is a bunch of rules,
00:53:58 ►
so you don’t have to think, and a bunch of myths, so you don’t have to think again.
00:54:03 ►
and a bunch of myths, so you don’t have to think again.
00:54:07 ►
Culture has all the answers, you know.
00:54:09 ►
You want to know where people came from?
00:54:15 ►
Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took a leak,
00:54:19 ►
then we, the true people, appeared like ants,
00:54:22 ►
and we’ve been living here ever since.
00:54:25 ►
Oh, gee, thanks.
00:54:27 ►
I’m glad I asked.
00:54:31 ►
You know, this is what culture does for you. So, but now technology throws a curve.
00:54:40 ►
And the curve is that we live so long
00:54:43 ►
that we figure out what a scam this is.
00:54:47 ►
We figure out that what you’re supposed to work for isn’t worth having.
00:54:52 ►
We figure out that our politicians are buffoons.
00:54:56 ►
We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels.
00:55:03 ►
We discover that all organizations are
00:55:06 ►
corrupted by ambition. You know, you get the picture. We figure it out. Well then
00:55:17 ►
as intellectuals and anybody who figures it out is an intellectual, believe me,
00:55:21 ►
because they’re slinging the programming to push you
00:55:25 ►
the other way so then intellectuals defined as people who figure it out uh discover that you are
00:55:34 ►
alienated that’s what figuring it out means it means you understand that the bmw the harvard
00:55:41 ►
degree this whatever it is that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped
00:55:47 ►
and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people
00:55:50 ►
who are figuring out which fork they should use.
00:55:55 ►
But this position is presented as alienation
00:55:59 ►
and therefore somehow tinged with the potential for pathology.
00:56:04 ►
You know, it’s a bad thing to be alienated.
00:56:07 ►
Now let’s speak for a moment, in order to fulfill the promise read in the introduction,
00:56:14 ►
about psychedelics and what are they doing in this fine situation.
00:56:20 ►
Well, what they’re doing is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries, which is what they do.
00:56:32 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:40 ►
So, have you figured it all out yet?
00:56:44 ►
My guess is that you have.
00:56:47 ►
Of course, the problem still remains as to what you do now that you’ve figured it out.
00:56:52 ►
How embedded in the system are you?
00:56:56 ►
You know, if you’re still in school, well, you actually have more choices available to you than you might realize.
00:57:01 ►
As Terrence just pointed out, if you’ve figured out that
00:57:05 ►
the BMWs, the Harvard degree, and so on are way overhyped, then what do you do?
00:57:12 ►
Of course, if you want to become part of the system, then those things aren’t overhyped.
00:57:17 ►
It all comes down to how you want to spend what you have left of this lifetime.
00:57:23 ►
Do you want to spend it as a thoughtless consumer
00:57:25 ►
who works like a slave just to be able to acquire more stuff
00:57:28 ►
and to keep the stuff you’ve got?
00:57:31 ►
Or do you find ways to live a little closer to the earth
00:57:35 ►
to maybe raise a few herbs, if not more of your own food?
00:57:40 ►
What kind of people are you attracted to?
00:57:42 ►
The ones with a lot of excess money and a lot of stuff?
00:57:46 ►
Or are you looking for a more human being to have a relationship with?
00:57:51 ►
And if you already are hooked into the system in some way,
00:57:55 ►
how can you begin to detach without going back on whatever commitments and promises you’ve already made to others
00:58:01 ►
who may not have quite figured it out just yet?
00:58:05 ►
Well, these are all difficult questions.
00:58:08 ►
And interestingly, they are questions that we all seem to be asking ourselves on an almost daily basis now.
00:58:15 ►
And there aren’t any simple answers that I can see.
00:58:19 ►
That must be why Terrence often ended his talks by saying,
00:58:22 ►
keep the old faith and stay high.
00:58:22 ►
Terrence often ended his talks by saying,
00:58:24 ►
keep the old faith and stay high.
00:58:28 ►
Well, finally I want to touch on something that Jimmy M. had to say in a recent email I received.
00:58:31 ►
It began,
00:58:33 ►
Hello, first I want to tell you how much I appreciate your podcasts.
00:58:37 ►
I can’t stop listening to them.
00:58:39 ►
And every time I re-listen to one, I find new things.
00:58:41 ►
They almost seem variable in the contents.
00:58:45 ►
Well, I sure agree with you about that one, Jimmy.
00:58:48 ►
Some of those talks, like Terrence’s Valley of Novelty workshop,
00:58:52 ►
I’ve probably heard a dozen, maybe 20 or 30 or more times.
00:58:56 ►
Yet, I still seem to always pick up something new each time I
00:59:00 ►
listen to them. Then Jimmy goes on to say,
00:59:04 ►
I notice that you have a comment section where
00:59:06 ►
people can discuss with each other. But I was thinking, and this has probably been mentioned
00:59:11 ►
before, but wouldn’t it be great to have an IRC server where the listeners could interact with
00:59:17 ►
each other? I would really like to have a place where I can talk to people who have an understanding
00:59:22 ►
for the psychedelic use and psychophiles.
00:59:28 ►
You’re probably pretty busy with keeping the salon up and running,
00:59:30 ►
so if you want, I could help with setting it up.
00:59:32 ►
Would be super great, don’t you think?
00:59:38 ►
Well, I agree that this would be a great way for like-minded people to get together,
00:59:43 ►
but having had some experience with physical, on-the-ground salons where people can connect with one another, I found that
00:59:47 ►
very frequently they get infiltrated by government goons.
00:59:52 ►
Most of our fellow salonners are probably too young to
00:59:55 ►
remember the FBI’s insidious internal spying program that they
01:00:00 ►
called COINTELPRO, but you really should look into this sorted history.
01:00:06 ►
It’s spelled C-O-I-N-T-E-L-P-R-O, and I think the Wikipedia article, particularly the external
01:00:15 ►
links section, will give you a good look into the links that the Empire will go to to find
01:00:21 ►
ways to put you in a prison cage just because you’re interested in some non-prescription medicines.
01:00:27 ►
So the problem I see with setting up an IRC or other way to chat is that
01:00:33 ►
there really is no easy way I can think of to uncover any government goons
01:00:38 ►
who might be going there and trying to entrap unsuspecting people into talking about buying or selling contraband.
01:00:46 ►
However, a good place you might want to begin working into a community such as we would all like
01:00:52 ►
can be found on the forums over at thegrowreport.com.
01:00:56 ►
There you’ll find over 50 forums, including one for the psychedelic salon,
01:01:01 ►
and there are literally thousands of interesting threads over there, including several for people who are traveling around the world and are looking to find the others.
01:01:11 ►
But just keep in mind that even on those forums, there may be a narc or two trying to make a name for himself or herself by entrapping someone.
01:01:21 ►
So be careful out there.
01:01:23 ►
One last thing Jimmy had to say really got to me. He said,
01:01:28 ►
oh, and another thing. This might sound cheesy, but what the hell. During my first experiences
01:01:33 ►
with psychedelics, I was horrified by the effects. I had a shitty setting and was accompanied by
01:01:38 ►
people who were fighting throughout the whole trip. Needless to say, it was one of the worst
01:01:43 ►
evenings of my life. I tried LSD a few times after that, but I couldn’t relax and enjoy whole trip. Needless to say, it was one of the worst evenings of my life.
01:01:47 ►
I tried LSD a few times after that,
01:01:49 ►
but I couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip.
01:01:53 ►
The first and worst experience was rooted too deep inside me.
01:01:55 ►
But after listening to these podcasts, I’ve been able to relax and enjoy the psychedelic universe more and more,
01:01:59 ►
and I gain more confidence and insight every time now.
01:02:03 ►
Thanks for opening my eyes and expanding my consciousness with every podcast you deliver.
01:02:08 ►
Well, you know, Jimmy, saying that makes me feel very good about spending the time to produce these shows.
01:02:15 ►
I realize that some of my guest speakers don’t resonate with everyone,
01:02:19 ►
but what is so rewarding for me to hear is that overall what you are hearing has helped you to overcome
01:02:26 ►
what sounds like a really bad way to first become involved with our sacred medicines.
01:02:32 ►
As you already know, I don’t advocate anyone simply trying these substances on a whim or a dare or because of social pressure.
01:02:41 ►
You have to be really drawn to them in a way that not everyone is.
01:02:45 ►
And to hear that even having had some relatively bad trips,
01:02:50 ►
the spirit still calls you and that the salon has played a small part in keeping you on the path,
01:02:56 ►
a path that may have chosen you.
01:03:00 ►
Well, in any event, thanks for writing and letting me know how you feel.
01:03:03 ►
It made me feel good.
01:03:06 ►
And I also want to thank you, fellow any event, thanks for writing and letting me know how you feel. It made me feel good. And I also want to thank you, fellow salonner.
01:03:10 ►
Thank you for being here in the salon with me again today.
01:03:13 ►
I know that I don’t always mention this, but right at this very moment,
01:03:17 ►
I feel like I’m sitting in your kitchen having a cup of tea around the table
01:03:22 ►
and discussing some of the interesting ideas that come up here each week.
01:03:26 ►
It’s really good to be with you again,
01:03:29 ►
and I’m already looking forward to our next get-together
01:03:31 ►
here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:03:34 ►
But before I go, there is one more announcement I’d like to make,
01:03:38 ►
and it’s one that you have probably already read elsewhere on the net.
01:03:43 ►
And that is the exciting announcement that Clea McKenna, Terrence’s daughter,
01:03:48 ►
has produced a limited edition book titled The Butterfly Hunter.
01:03:53 ►
All 480 books in this very limited edition are signed and numbered by Clea
01:03:59 ►
and contain a bit of McKenna lore or history or legend that I’ve not seen anywhere else.
01:04:06 ►
Here’s a brief overview of this project.
01:04:08 ►
In The Butterfly Hunter, Clea McKenna creates a photographic archive of her father’s butterfly collection,
01:04:15 ►
hunted and preserved nearly 40 years ago.
01:04:18 ►
The images display delicate butterflies framed by faded and stained newspapers, magazines, letters, and manuscripts.
01:04:27 ►
Materials McKenna’s father used as envelopes to hold his findings.
01:04:31 ►
The headlines and fragmented news stories paint a conflicted portrait of the era.
01:04:37 ►
Each image holds narratives that are at once personal and historical.
01:04:41 ►
McKenna has used this unique material to create a moving and relevant piece.
01:04:47 ►
And then Eric Davis had this to say about it. A remarkable visual meditation on time,
01:04:54 ►
loss, and the culture of nature. The Butterfly Hunter is also a cool but intimate engagement
01:04:59 ►
with Terence McKenna’s fanatical romanticism. It is a mark of Cleo McKenna’s courage that she has taken on the legacy of a man so concerned with his own legacy,
01:05:11 ►
and a mark of her success that she does it with such candor and care.
01:05:15 ►
This beautifully produced book is, as Terence himself would deeply appreciate, an artifact of wonder.
01:05:23 ►
Now, while this book is a little expensive for us old retired guys and for you students,
01:05:29 ►
I think it’s selling for $130 US,
01:05:32 ►
for our fellow slaughters who have a little extra cash
01:05:35 ►
or who maybe will receive some money from your relatives during the holiday season,
01:05:40 ►
this would be an excellent way to begin a psychedelic library,
01:05:44 ►
even though the topic has little, if anything, to do with psychedelics.
01:05:49 ►
You know, after suffering the loss to our community of all of Terrence’s manuscripts,
01:05:54 ►
papers, books, and other items, his entire archive, in fact, in the Esalen carelessness,
01:06:00 ►
you know, this seems like a gift from the bard himself to now have this new book
01:06:05 ►
available, which even includes one of his unpublished short stories. So if the spirit
01:06:12 ►
of Terrence so moves you, why don’t you surf over to www.kleamckenna.com and order your own
01:06:24 ►
copy of this
01:06:25 ►
historical work of art
01:06:27 ►
and love.
01:06:30 ►
Now, as always,
01:06:31 ►
I’ll close this podcast by saying
01:06:33 ►
that this and all of the podcasts
01:06:35 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon are available
01:06:37 ►
for your use under the Creative Commons
01:06:39 ►
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
01:06:41 ►
3.0 license. And if you have
01:06:43 ►
any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:06:49 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:06:52 ►
And that’s also where you will find the program notes for this podcast.
01:06:57 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:07:02 ►
Be well well my friends