Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence Kenna.]
“The good. What is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true. What is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful. What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste.”
“Beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams.”
“On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving, the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces, near the levers of the human machine is immense.”
“When I say psychedelic I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out or confusion. It shouldn’t interfere with that, and it should transform thought. And it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed.”
“The biggest danger with psychedelics is that while you are in that open state some moron will mess with you.”
“Matter is not lacking in magic. Matter is magic.”
“At bedrock, the universe is more like a DMT flash than it is like an 18th century garden party, as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science.”
“An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change.”
“But if I’m right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of its eye. … You are the cutting edge of a thirteen billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose, to add to the complexity. Your enemy, disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.”
“The psychedelic community is cleverly invisible. Because our choices in gender expression, fashion, and so on have, by crypto-osmosis, come to dominate the values of the culture, we can no longer tell ourselves from straight people.”
“Basically, when you smoke DMT what happens is pure confoundment.”
“DMT does not provide ‘an’ experience which you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some kind of hyperdimensional inflation, instantly. And then you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can’t be downloaded into as low dimensional a language as English.”
“One toke [of DMT] away is this absolutely reality-dissolving, catagory-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility. And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
And I’ll bet you didn’t expect to hear from me again so soon,
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but after posting my previous podcast, a little synchronicity took place
00:00:33 ►
that convinced me to get this talk out to you today.
00:00:37 ►
As I mentioned in my last program, the Terrence McKenna talk that I played
00:00:42 ►
has been all over the net in various forms,
00:00:45 ►
but what I didn’t say was that I’d spent a lot of time, fruitlessly I might add,
00:00:51 ►
trying to find the rest of that talk.
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But after wasting more time than I like to think about,
00:00:58 ►
I finally decided to add that piece from the Tim Leary archive in order to make it a full program.
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add that piece from the Tim Leary archive in order to make it a full program.
00:01:10 ►
So I got the podcast finished, but then it took me a day or so to get the program notes posted.
00:01:17 ►
So when I did, I noticed that about eight hours earlier, the following had been posted just ahead of my new program notes. And it said, Hi Lorenzo, first of all, I want to congratulate you for the great work on the psychedelic salon. It’s awesome.
00:01:26 ►
Thanks for that.
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I’m an attentive listener from Portugal. I’m also a great fan of the Bard McKenna.
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His lectures are absolutely fascinating to me.
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In relation to that, I recently converted a video to MP3 from his lecture in San Francisco, Dream Awake.
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You probably heard this before on one of many links in circulation on the net but the version in circulation of this
00:01:52 ►
particular lecture ends on the 34 minute mark boy i found that out and he goes on and since i’ve
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heard this talk it stimulated my curiosity to find out more about it. And recently, after many hours
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searching, I found the complete video of the lecture, and in my opinion, it was the most
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inspiring single talk that I’ve ever heard of him, discounting the weekend workshops.
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I’ve uploaded the MP3 file to Rapidshare.com. Feel free to post it on the Psychedelic Salon.
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It’s good to spread hope on this planet and he then provides the link
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which you can find out on our program notes
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at psychedelicsalon.org
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and he ends by saying
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keep up the good work
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cheers from Portugal
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Miguel Fernandez
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now I’m kind of getting used to these
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little synchronicities in my life
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but this one really caught my attention
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after spending so much time looking for this talk and not finding it little synchronicities in my life, but this one really caught my attention.
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After spending so much time looking for this talk and not finding it, only to have it then magically appear in its entirety, well, all I can figure is that good old Terence McKenna
00:02:58 ►
wanted you to hear the rest of his talk.
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Now, I did cut a few parts out that were either something you’ve heard him say on several other occasions,
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and part of it was his discussion of 2012, which has been pretty much updated by the interviews that Jan Ervin did in his podcast with John Hopes and John Major Jenkins.
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But you can hear the complete talk of Terrence by downloading it from the link that Miguel provided on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog.
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But I don’t think you’re going to really miss anything with my edit, at least I hope not.
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And now, let’s just pick up where we left off in my last podcast with Terrence beginning to talk about psychedelics.
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beginning to talk about psychedelics.
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Now let’s speak for a moment, in order to fulfill the promise read by, in the introduction, about psychedelics and what are they doing in this fine situation.
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Well, what they’re doing is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries which is what
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they do they are exposing the cultural operating system for what it is which is just a bunch of
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hacked together rules that evolved over time they weren’t sent from God, from Mount Sinai. It’s just a bunch of hacked together rules. So psychedelics in that sense spread alienation. But what they alienate us from is preposterous, earth-murding, sexist, consumerist, shallow, trivial, inane, insane, and dangerous.
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And that’s what they alienate us from.
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So, again, this neotenizing thing is like the condition of unconsciousness that I described as the precondition for the cosmic giggle.
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Glamour, acts of magical conjuration, hypnotic delusion and illusion, hysterias, fads, pseudo revelations, strange truths whispered in every quarter. This is the character of our time. And people have seemed to believe that they were fulfilling their responsibilities intellectually.
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People seem to feel they are doing that when they reject the past.
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Say, well, you know, that was all screwed up but since i got with master shuggy i’ve understood
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you know the way it really is supposed to be no this is just trading one set of of neotenizing
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operating systems for another the the real hard choice that you’re being pushed toward and that you might consider making before the yawning grave rings down the curtain on this cosmic drama is actually intellectual responsibility, freedom, and a devotion to what scientists call elegance of thought.
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People say, well, how can you tell one theory from another
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and is science better than religion and this and that?
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After a lot of arm-waving, it should be conceded that the final call is aesthetic.
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conceded that the final call is aesthetic.
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That because we are monkeys,
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because we are so far from God, we cannot set knowing the truth as the standard
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for choosing among the models we can produce.
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We must set our
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aesthetic compass towards the more true
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What Wittgenstein called the true enough and then the question is well, how do you how do you?
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Recognize that well
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This is a rich field of human study called philosophy of science or theory
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Epistemology and ontology how how do we know?
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What is real but Plato?
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Who all the rest of philosophy is a footnote upon?
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Plato said you know that the key lay in the concepts, the good, the true, and the beautiful.
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The good, what is it? Tricky, tricky, tricky. The true, what is it? Trickier, even trickier. The beautiful, what is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste.
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really really and if you have no taste you know god help you because you are you are self-condemned to an appalling nightmare uh you won’t be getting it all the subtle stuff will go by you while your head is filled with cant, nonsense, foolishness.
00:08:49 ►
So again, the metaphor of the dream and of making choices based on beauty.
00:09:00 ►
And beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams
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other ideas may also come in dreams but i think studies have shown that that architects designers
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people who are actually at the top of the pyramid in any design process
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are very aware of their dreams, their reveries, their insights.
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So that’s the way to set the compass, not toward truth, not toward the good,
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not because these aren’t fine things, but because they’re so slippery,
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but toward beauty.
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And with that in place, to my mind, life hope follows as a natural consequence.
00:10:01 ►
You know, we talk a lot, and I’m sure there are people in this room who
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are well versed and connected into the world of virtual reality which is a very hot
00:10:13 ►
topic and may have all kinds of implications for our future and the and the evolution of
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consciousness but it’s worth pointing out that we have been making virtual realities for a very very long time
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that language spoken language is the original code for hacking virtual reality and when you
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sit the children down around the fire and begin to tell the old, old stories and the pictures rise out of the flames,
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that is virtual reality.
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And so is, and this is the point I want to make,
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so are all the artifacts,
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all the impedimentia of human existence.
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I mean, a virtual reality built in aluminum, stucco, steel, and glass is not immediately erased the way you clear a screen.
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And the cost of making it is great.
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But Ur was a virtual reality.
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The Agora at Athens, ancient Rome, Canterbury Cathedral, these are virtual realities. Men and women have toiled at agriculture,
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at warfare, at child rearing, at many, many activities in the long march towards self-definition but more and more we have this is true even of
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societies that are Aboriginal and without economy when we free ourselves
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we are not freed into a void when we free ourselves we are freed into the
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dimension in which art is an obligation.
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And this is the great turning point.
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I mean, I think that the design process, whatever that means, must become conscious, global, integrated.
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The entire human domain, which means the entire planet and its surrounding near space should be
00:12:28 ►
enclosed and included in a coherent plan driven by human values and a thirst for
00:12:34 ►
transformational beauty and I mention this because I believe that many of the
00:12:41 ►
people capable of making major contributions to that are in this room or within 100 miles of this room tonight.
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And we are people of immense privilege.
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By any way of slicing the planetary demographic,
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even the poorest among us who wheedled their way in here this evening, are in the top 1% of the planetary social pyramid.
00:13:11 ►
On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving,
00:13:19 ►
the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces near the
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levers of the human machine is immense so with freedom and I know this is a
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cliche but hopefully not in this context with freedom of that sort comes enormous responsibility.
00:13:47 ►
And it’s paradoxical.
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Responsibility to dream and coexisting and simultaneous with that, an obligation to awaken. In other words, an obligation to make sense, be non-trivial,
00:14:09 ►
not to squander resources in foolishness, an obligation to awaken, and an obligation to,
00:14:19 ►
at the same time, dream. And then, you know, the rational mind screams out but this is impossible this is paradox but the
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subtle mind understands that we have now reached square one by openly confronting
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the necessity for paradox and by openly confronting the fact that we can only
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enclose our dilemma by speaking in at least two modes at once,
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we begin to actually honor the complexity of the situation.
00:15:03 ►
And so tonight, the thought I want to leave with you
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is the simultaneous project
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of awakening
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and the simultaneous project
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of entering deeper into the dream
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for the purpose of cultivating,
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evoking,
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experiencing,
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remembering, transmitting, experiencing, remembering,
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transmitting and communicating beauty
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which feeds back into the awakening process. Otherwise the awakening will be traumatic and demoralizing.
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We will awaken to an AIDS ravaged earth, to ecotastrophe, planetary warming, complete collapse awakening to counteract the possibility of disempowerment is this wish to evoke, realize, and serve the project of bringing ever greater amounts of beauty into the world.
00:16:23 ►
amounts of beauty into the world.
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We will have an intermission of about 20 minutes so you can what-de-say, what-de-say.
00:16:33 ►
And then we will get back together
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and undergo the more creative process
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and the more organic part of the evening,
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which is Q&A.
00:16:42 ►
of the evening, which is Q and A.
00:16:52 ►
People take, you can be a strict constructionist in the matter of psychedelics,
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so you can cast your net widely.
00:16:59 ►
There are many substances in nature
00:17:02 ►
which alter consciousness, either stimulate or sedate or create more ambiguous
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and spectacular effects, I would describe the effects
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of detour as a delirium.
00:17:20 ►
Now, the shamans who use these things have special techniques both of preparation and of training
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that allow them to control or navigate around the more unpleasant aspects of detour. It tends to provoke memory loss, shall we say bizarre behavior,
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such as taking your clothes off in public and so on.
00:17:53 ►
And it creates a general ambiance of uncertainty about the nature of reality.
00:18:02 ►
And what I mean by that is you talk to people who aren’t there,
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you smoke cigarettes that aren’t there,
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you answer phone calls when you’re standing in the woods.
00:18:14 ►
From the outside, it looks pretty fucked up, you know.
00:18:22 ►
But some aboriginal and native traditions have managed to tame this, at least in the shamanic context.
00:18:30 ►
I guess in this matter I’m a kind of strict constructionist in that when I say psychedelic,
00:18:40 ►
I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do.
00:18:48 ►
It should not inhibit clarity.
00:18:54 ►
In other words, not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out or confusion.
00:19:00 ►
It shouldn’t interfere with that.
00:19:03 ►
And it should transform thought, and it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed.
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That’s what I love. That’s what I live for.
00:19:17 ►
Now, people have said to me, you’re some kind of a vision chauvinist.
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It’s true.
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And usually the people who are saying this were people who were great enthusiasts of LSD.
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LSD, I would never argue, is not a psychedelic.
00:19:40 ►
But you have to take massive amounts, and usually in combination with some other substance like hashish or mescaline in order to elicit from LSD what I’m after, which is cascades of Niagara’s of visual beauty in darkness with eyes closed. I have had deep psychological insights on LSD.
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I have had creative breakthroughs.
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I have had bonding experiences.
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But I found it difficult to get the visions like I wanted them.
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And the best I worked out with LSD was I would smoke as much Afghani hash as I could at the top of the trip.
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And then it would do the thing.
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In fact, it would do it.
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The thing that led me to psilocybin or to grow mushrooms and explore that was the descriptions of Wasson and the early workers
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that it was easy to visually hallucinate.
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And I had read the earlier accounts of Havelock Ellis
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and people like that,
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and it was about, you know, if you’ve ever read,
00:21:01 ►
and I think it’s The Dance of Life,
00:21:02 ►
Havelock Ellis’s description of mescaline,
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he talks about alien buildings, jeweled ruins,
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fantastically efflorescent rainforests growing and transforming before his eyes.
00:21:17 ►
That’s what I was after.
00:21:18 ►
I wanted not a disturbance in the optic nerve.
00:21:23 ►
You know, like on LSD, you get those little things that look sort of like fans
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that creep across the walls.
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That’s more like something in the visual cortex than something in the mind,
00:21:38 ►
it seems to me.
00:21:40 ►
And I was fascinated, and who isn’t?
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I mean, I never hear this question discussed,
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but to me it was the obvious question about these visions was,
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where do they come from?
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How can I be astonished by the contents of my own mind
00:21:58 ►
and astonished over and over again?
00:22:02 ►
Where is this stuff coming from and i looked at young and i
00:22:07 ►
entertained the fantasy of extraterrestrial contact and i still haven’t answered this
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question but i think it it’s a question which the critics of the psychedelic experience haven’t
00:22:21 ►
wanted to deal with you know if you read the psychedelic literature
00:22:25 ►
you can tell how what psilocybin does to heartbeat sperm count to perception of tone
00:22:32 ►
on and on they never talk about
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the real content you know because it’s always individual and And they say, well, science can’t handle individual phenomena.
00:22:45 ►
We measure the properties of large numbers of people.
00:22:48 ►
Well, that hopelessly flattens the thing.
00:22:54 ►
I know this is a long answer to this question,
00:22:57 ►
but it’s worth laying all this out
00:23:00 ►
because the lady’s question raises issues of
00:23:04 ►
how do you categorize psychedelics, which are,
00:23:07 ►
which aren’t, are some dangerous and to what degree. Certainly, detour is dangerous, not only
00:23:14 ►
because of its delirium quality, which makes you irresponsible, but also because it dilates your pupils and you can’t you stumble around and at higher doses it can cause
00:23:28 ►
convulsion and death which is a rare thing from what i consider the true psychedelics
00:23:36 ►
there is if we want to take an excursion here for a moment and learn a little pharmacology
00:23:43 ►
there is if you’re going to talk about pharmacology,
00:23:46 ►
there’s one concept that you should get straight
00:23:49 ►
and that’s called LD50.
00:23:52 ►
It means lethal dose 50.
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What does this mean?
00:23:57 ►
Well, you have 20 rats and you give them a certain amount
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of let’s say, mescaline,
00:24:07 ►
when half the rats die,
00:24:11 ►
that dose expressed as milligrams per kilogram of body weight
00:24:16 ►
is called the LD50.
00:24:19 ►
And when pharmacologists assess the danger in a drug,
00:24:28 ►
they ask the following question, what is the ratio of the LD50 to the effective dose?
00:24:34 ►
And if the LD50 of a drug is only 20 times the effective dose, that’s considered an incredibly toxic,
00:24:47 ►
dangerous, and dubious drug.
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A good drug is a drug where the LD50
00:24:53 ►
is 200 times more than the effective dose.
00:24:58 ►
In the case of LSD,
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the LD50 for man has never been determined.
00:25:08 ►
That’s how safe LSD is and we’re talking about lethality here
00:25:11 ►
and so people say
00:25:16 ►
well are there unsafe psychedelics
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and yes you just look up the LD50s
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line them up and see which has the which have the better ratios by that
00:25:27 ►
measurement by that standard LSD is the most
00:25:32 ►
Desirable, but there’s the LD 50 of psilocybin is very impressive
00:25:36 ►
You know, you can take a hundred times the effective dose of psilocybin and effect and expect to live
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mescaline not
00:25:44 ►
mescaline, not.
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Mescaline has a bad profile.
00:25:52 ►
As an amphetamine, if you took 20 times the effective dose of mescaline, you would probably die.
00:25:54 ►
Of course, an effective dose of mescaline is nearly a gram of pure material,
00:26:01 ►
700 milligrams.
00:26:03 ►
If you took 20 times 700 milligrams you would be taking almost a complete
00:26:08 ►
you know nearly two-thirds of an ounce of mesclun and why should you survive
00:26:13 ►
after all stupidity does have consequences
00:26:18 ►
but really uh people always ask the question are psychedelics dangerous the you know and they
00:26:29 ►
mean physically dangerous what should be said and it’s recently been pointed out to me that I don’t
00:26:36 ►
say it very often is that the biggest danger with psychedelics is that while you are in that open state,
00:26:47 ►
some moron will mess with you and either lay a suggestion or plant an idea
00:26:53 ►
or manipulate you or scare you
00:26:57 ►
or turn you in a way that you wouldn’t ordinarily go.
00:27:02 ►
And this is why psychedelic etiquette means knowing your
00:27:07 ►
tripping partners people who take psychedelics with strangers at high dose do come back with
00:27:15 ►
wild tales to tell but i don’t think you can do that over and over again without having some horrible thing befall you. My mind is not,
00:27:26 ►
I mean some people seem more resilient. I am not, you know, people often ask me to
00:27:33 ►
trip them and I won’t and it’s not because of concern for the legal system
00:27:40 ►
or the fact that I am not licensed for psychotherapy or any of that. It’s because I can’t stand it when people come apart on psychedelics.
00:27:49 ►
I am, you know, if you’re interested in this subject
00:27:54 ►
or if you share my sensitivity,
00:27:57 ►
read Carl Jung’s little book called On the Psychology of the Transference
00:28:02 ►
and then you will understand.
00:28:05 ►
In fact, that should be a standard tome for trippers.
00:28:11 ►
Understand the transference.
00:28:14 ►
Understand what it is, how to fight it.
00:28:17 ►
And this is psychic martial arts.
00:28:23 ►
Your psychic health will be immeasurably improved
00:28:27 ►
by understanding the dynamics of the transference, which is quite simple.
00:28:31 ►
The book is not that thick.
00:28:35 ►
Now to answer the lady’s question.
00:28:39 ►
When I took Datora, I had reality distorting strange.
00:28:47 ►
And if I had been a personality of a different sort, I might have followed it deeper,
00:28:52 ►
but it appeared to me to be ambiguous and evil.
00:28:56 ►
Not evil, maybe evil.
00:28:59 ►
What happened to me was this was in Nepal years and years ago.
00:29:04 ►
What happened to me was this was in Nepal years and years ago.
00:29:10 ►
Nepali shamanism is based in part on Dhatura, the taking of the seed capsules.
00:29:17 ►
An English friend of mine who had the room next to mine took it, and I took it in my room.
00:29:19 ►
And it was a situation where to get to the facilities,
00:29:24 ►
I had to walk through his room.
00:29:27 ►
And he and I were friends, but we had a very slight rivalry going for the attention of a woman.
00:29:38 ►
And I think this woman was not aware that either of us was interested in her,
00:29:42 ►
but we were both aware that the other one was aware.
00:29:46 ►
And midway through my trip,
00:29:48 ►
I decided I had to go to the bathroom,
00:29:51 ►
and so I stepped through into this guy’s room,
00:29:56 ►
and they were in bed together having sex,
00:30:01 ►
and I guess I went outside and then I the next morning after sleeping many hours I
00:30:11 ►
I encountered the guy and I said how how was your trip and he said it was wonderful. And I said, yes, well, I saw.
00:30:26 ►
And he said, what did you see?
00:30:27 ►
And I said, well, I saw that you were with Julieta.
00:30:31 ►
And he said, I thought so, too.
00:30:37 ►
But she wasn’t there.
00:30:42 ►
and so
00:30:47 ►
you know
00:30:48 ►
what conclusion do we draw from this
00:30:52 ►
that this stuff is
00:30:55 ►
well I’ll tell you what took me off it finally
00:30:58 ►
was about a week later
00:31:00 ►
there seemed to be a rash of this detour taking
00:31:03 ►
moving through the traveler community there in this little Nepali village where I lived and about a
00:31:09 ►
week later I was buying tomatoes in the market and I encountered a different
00:31:14 ►
person but this English friend of mine and he told me he’d been taking a lot of
00:31:20 ►
detour and I said oh well that’s interesting I took it I don’t think
00:31:23 ►
I’ll be taking it again and as the conversation developed I realized he
00:31:29 ►
thought we were in his apartment and we were not we were in the market and you
00:31:37 ►
know this tells you it’s time to dry out
00:31:41 ►
to dry out.
00:31:49 ►
Anyway, I used that as a springboard to different subjects.
00:31:50 ►
You were very patient.
00:31:53 ►
Next question.
00:31:57 ►
I hope I can remember what my question was. Yes.
00:32:00 ►
I agree that there’s something sort of mysterious about where these psychedelic effects come from,
00:32:08 ►
and I refer again to the sort of classic psychedelic psilocybin LSD.
00:32:12 ►
But the fact that you generally need to take a substance or a drug, it’s a material thing,
00:32:28 ►
does in some sense sort of go in a strange way to reinforcing a pretty basic scientific,
00:32:31 ►
almost mechanistic view of the universe.
00:32:36 ►
And I just wondered if you had thought about that or have any comments. Well, let me try to convince you otherwise.
00:32:41 ►
I mean, I see what you’re saying. You’re saying that because this transformative, possibly spiritual experience is an epiphenomenon of the functioning of brain
00:33:09 ►
and so forth.
00:33:10 ►
Am I restating it right?
00:33:12 ►
Yes, but it’s far more real than say,
00:33:17 ►
channeling, what did you say?
00:33:19 ►
Oh, I see what you’re saying.
00:33:22 ►
Well, yes, I mean, this relates to what I was saying about the balkanization of epistemology.
00:33:30 ►
It’s really strange to me that science is in the act of flinging open the curtains on a staggering vision
00:33:45 ►
of what it is to be alive in this cosmos.
00:33:49 ►
I mean, we now can look back through the Hubble
00:33:52 ►
and other telescopes, you know, 13 billion years
00:33:57 ►
to within 600 million years of the primary explosion
00:34:01 ►
that presumptively created this universe. Meanwhile, we’re tearing open the nation the nature of the human genome
00:34:10 ►
the nature of the heart of the atom
00:34:14 ►
Sight this is the great great age for the expansion of the of the scientific vision
00:34:22 ►
but the population
00:34:24 ►
is somehow
00:34:26 ►
incapable of staying up with what’s going on.
00:34:32 ►
And so we have the greatest proliferation
00:34:35 ►
of occultism in all forms since the 16th century.
00:34:40 ►
It’s almost as though there’s a bifurcation of the culture. The scientific,
00:34:49 ►
the makers of new science are going deeper and deeper in the direction that the rest of the
00:34:57 ►
public not only cannot follow them into, but is actually headed the other way. And it’s a condemnation of our educational system
00:35:09 ►
that people have not understood that science for all its flaws
00:35:15 ►
is the only tool for understanding the nature of reality
00:35:22 ►
that has any kind of track record whatsoever.
00:35:26 ►
The others just have a story to tell.
00:35:30 ►
You know, the Buddha story, the Jesus story, fine stories,
00:35:34 ►
but that’s all they have is a rap.
00:35:39 ►
The amazing, you see, why is science different?
00:35:42 ►
Somebody could just say, well, but isn’t it just a rap?
00:35:45 ►
Well, it is, but it plays by slightly different rules than these other explanatory systems.
00:35:56 ►
Science is the only explanatory system where you get points for proving you’re wrong.
00:36:06 ►
You know, I mean you form a hypothesis,
00:36:09 ►
you publish a paper, then you do further experiments.
00:36:14 ►
You discover your conclusions in paper A
00:36:17 ►
were completely wrong.
00:36:19 ►
You retract paper A and issue paper B
00:36:23 ►
and your fellow scientists say,
00:36:25 ►
this guy does very good work.
00:36:28 ►
These are careful thinkers.
00:36:30 ►
You can bank on these people.
00:36:32 ►
They’re not flaky.
00:36:34 ►
What religion operates like that?
00:36:37 ►
You know, can you imagine coming out of the ashram
00:36:40 ►
and having the guru say to his students,
00:36:43 ►
well, we managed to reduce that hypothesis to rubble in the morning meditation, didn’t we?
00:36:52 ►
So, you know, it’s…
00:36:55 ►
And then let me return to answer that question based on my original misunderstanding of it.
00:37:05 ►
And I would say this.
00:37:08 ►
You cannot, it is no reduction of the psychedelic experience
00:37:13 ►
to say that it is caused by drugs
00:37:17 ►
because they are material atomic systems
00:37:21 ►
and therefore we know all about them. Every electron is the yawning mouth of a
00:37:31 ►
wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension. Matter is not lacking in magic.
00:37:46 ►
Matter is magic.
00:37:49 ►
I mean, so when you hear these people like David Dennett
00:37:52 ►
and all these talk show materialists running around,
00:37:56 ►
these people haven’t gotten the news
00:37:59 ►
that’s coming out of quantum physics.
00:38:02 ►
I mean, you see there’s a problem, or let me describe to you the state of quantum physics. I mean, you see, there’s a problem,
00:38:05 ►
or let me describe to you the state of play here.
00:38:11 ►
The way science works is science respects
00:38:17 ►
fidelity of theory to experimental results.
00:38:22 ►
What really thrills a scientist is when you have a theory
00:38:26 ►
that makes a prediction down to five or six decimal points,
00:38:31 ►
and then you perform an experiment,
00:38:33 ►
and it’s spot on down to five or six decimal points,
00:38:38 ►
and then everybody involved in what’s going on
00:38:40 ►
has extremely high confidence
00:38:43 ►
that they’re on the right track.
00:38:45 ►
Well now only one science is ever that good.
00:38:50 ►
Physics, macro physics.
00:38:54 ►
By chemistry, it’s good, but it’s not that good.
00:39:01 ►
Ecology, biology, demography, these are pretty loose.
00:39:06 ►
They play with numbers, but it’s a fig leaf.
00:39:10 ►
And by the time you get to sociology or something like that,
00:39:14 ►
I mean, these clowns have just snuck under the tent
00:39:17 ►
and should actually be shown the door
00:39:20 ►
and put back outside with the card readers.
00:39:26 ►
So for several hundred years, you know, since, let’s say, Galileo and serious physics, this
00:39:37 ►
is how science has been.
00:39:39 ►
It’s been a pyramid of envy directed toward the paradigmatic science, which was physics, and which could produce this
00:39:47 ►
incredible congruence of theory and experimental data. Well, so then physics, of course, charges
00:39:55 ►
forward deeper into matter, asking deeper questions. Well, once you pass below the level of the electron, it’s like suddenly it’s like smoking DMT or something.
00:40:09 ►
Absolute madness breaks out where before you had these wonderful theories and they were feeding back this data. flowing time. You have particles which appear magically on one side of an energy barrier
00:40:28 ►
without apparently crossing through it. You have non-locality, which seems to imply that every
00:40:35 ►
particle that exists is somehow magically connected with every other particle. We now
00:40:41 ►
have quantum teleportation. We have black holes. We have singularities.
00:40:47 ►
And don’t be fooled, folks. What is a singularity? It’s just a place where you agree that the rules
00:40:54 ►
are canceled because you don’t know what the hell else to do. And it’s fine, you know. It used to be
00:41:00 ►
in physics that they had one singularity. It was called the Big Bang.
00:41:07 ►
And so you say, well, one singularity,
00:41:09 ►
essentially what science is saying is give us one free miracle
00:41:12 ►
and then we can run it from there.
00:41:19 ►
But the theory of special relativity
00:41:24 ►
then introduced the concept of black holes.
00:41:28 ►
And of course, black holes are enormous gravitational masses so massive that neither light nor information can leave them.
00:41:38 ►
And what do black holes have at the center of them?
00:41:42 ►
Well, a singularity.
00:41:44 ►
Well, how many black holes are there in the universe?
00:41:51 ►
10 high 14? That’s a lot of singularities if you’re trying to produce a theory without
00:41:59 ►
singularities. I mean, essentially, that’s an admission of total intellectual defeat. My God, if there are 10 high 14 singularities, you’re not even doing science.
00:42:10 ►
You just might as well be, you know, channeling Atlantis or something.
00:42:18 ►
So it troubles me because I think this stuff is rich,
00:42:27 ►
that physics is feeding back
00:42:29 ►
and that ultimately a model of consciousness
00:42:31 ►
will come out of studying the deeper levels
00:42:36 ►
of the behavior of matter.
00:42:37 ►
But the conclusions are all going to support
00:42:40 ►
the non-scientific, non-rational factions.
00:42:44 ►
In other words, Bell non-locality is real.
00:42:47 ►
All matter in the universe is in contact with all other matter
00:42:52 ►
through some kind of higher space based on their original connectivity.
00:42:59 ►
Quantum teleportation is a possibility.
00:43:03 ►
Deportation is a possibility.
00:43:11 ►
These violations, backward flowing time and violations of rational casuistry are all real. In other words, science, meaning physics at this point, prosecuted its agenda of deconstructing nature to the point where it let loose the elves of madness, paradox, contradiction, and peculiarity.
00:43:28 ►
And that can now never be put back.
00:43:31 ►
I mean, the dirty little secret is that at bedrock,
00:43:35 ►
the universe is more like a DMT flash than it is like an 18th century garden party,
00:43:40 ►
as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science. I think that’s enough
00:43:49 ►
ranting on that subject. Thanks for being patient. So it seems crazy to me to have, you know, violent
00:43:57 ►
factions for 2012. I mean, the point is that something, the galactic mind, the intelligence of the species, the integrated Gaian and galactic, something is trying to deliver a message. message and it is writ large this message in our largest systems of defining and understanding time
00:44:28 ►
we are at the end of a cosmic cycle you can say a thousand years if you’re a gregorianist
00:44:39 ►
or you can say a 5300 and x year cycle if you’re a mayanist or you can say a 5,300 and X year cycle if you’re a Mayanist.
00:44:46 ►
Or you can say a 26,000 year cycle if you’re a processionist.
00:44:54 ►
But the point is, we are there.
00:44:58 ►
We are there.
00:45:00 ►
We are in parking orbit around the eschaton.
00:45:05 ►
And, you know, it permeates our lives.
00:45:08 ►
All you have to do is sit down, smoke a bomber and look and it’s there.
00:45:14 ►
You know, it is pregnant.
00:45:16 ►
We are pregnant with this eschatological breakthrough.
00:45:21 ►
And, you know, people wanted to arrive in the form of ships the size of Manitoba
00:45:27 ►
hovering over the Oval Office, perhaps offering oral sex, I’m not sure.
00:45:36 ►
But you see, we are such ephemeral creatures in time. We’re like mayflies or something mayflies who only live for seven days in other
00:45:48 ►
words our temporal window perception is so extreme i mean people say well nothing much ever seems to
00:45:56 ►
happen well a hundred years ago there were no movies automobiles, airplanes, telephones, internet, atom bombs, antibiotics, DNA, it’s endless.
00:46:09 ►
So in the space of, and yet people say, well, nothing much ever seems to happen.
00:46:14 ►
An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing
00:46:23 ►
in the presence of radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change.
00:46:28 ►
The second thing which science has taken on board, has refused to take on board, is that
00:46:36 ►
this process of complexification that I just described to you, as you approach the place in time called the present happens faster and faster
00:46:48 ►
that was not necessarily implied by the first observation the first observation was simply
00:46:56 ►
that there was a process which was moving from simple to complex now we have the concept of a process which is ever accelerating as it moves
00:47:08 ►
from the simple to the complex.
00:47:11 ►
So more and more happens as you approach the present.
00:47:17 ►
And since these processes have been running
00:47:20 ►
since the Big Bang, there is no argument to be entertained that they will reverse themselves
00:47:27 ►
suddenly no they’re not going to reverse themselves after 13 billion years duh so
00:47:35 ►
so then but the implication of that carried to its ultimate extreme
00:47:46 ►
leads to a conclusion most people find too wild
00:47:50 ►
to entertain.
00:47:52 ►
If the universe is evolving deeper and deeper
00:47:55 ►
into complexity, faster and faster,
00:47:59 ►
and if now in a human lifetime,
00:48:03 ►
we can see a small portion of this curve,
00:48:07 ►
it no longer appears flat to us because of our nearness in relation,
00:48:12 ►
you understand what I’m saying?
00:48:14 ►
We can actually discern the curve.
00:48:18 ►
And so that means, I believe, that by extrapolating this process,
00:48:23 ►
I believe that by extrapolating this process, we should then logically conclude
00:48:26 ►
that we are very near relative to the life of the universe.
00:48:32 ►
We are very near to the place
00:48:34 ►
where this ramping up of complexity
00:48:37 ►
will become so excruciatingly rapid
00:48:40 ►
that more change will happen in a single week
00:48:44 ►
than happened in the previous 13 billion years.
00:48:48 ►
And that then there will come a moment where more will happen in a single minute than happened to the 23rd erg seconds,
00:49:08 ►
more will happen than has happened.
00:49:10 ►
And people say, well, but that’s crazy.
00:49:13 ►
I mean, what kind of universe is that?
00:49:15 ►
That ramp, that…
00:49:17 ►
Well, wait a minute.
00:49:20 ►
What’s so crazy about this?
00:49:21 ►
Let’s look at what the competition is peddling.
00:49:24 ►
What’s so crazy about this? Let’s look at what the competition is peddling.
00:49:40 ►
What the competition would have you believe is that theory in the interest of being awake
00:49:46 ►
please notice that that is the limit case for credulity
00:49:51 ►
do you know what I mean by that?
00:49:53 ►
I mean that if you can believe that
00:49:56 ►
you can believe anything
00:49:59 ►
that is the most improbable proposition the human mind can conceive of.
00:50:07 ►
I challenge you to top it.
00:50:10 ►
I mean, I know the Scientologists think God is a clam on another planet,
00:50:15 ►
but I don’t think that tops this idea
00:50:17 ►
that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.
00:50:23 ►
That is the article of faith number one.
00:50:28 ►
I say, no, no.
00:50:30 ►
If we’re talking about universes that spring from nothing,
00:50:37 ►
if we’re going to talk like that,
00:50:50 ►
then surely such universes occur in a situation of great complexity. In other words, if we’re going to look for an enormous eruption of emergent phenomena,
00:50:58 ►
an enormous sudden unexpected download of novelty,
00:51:11 ►
expected download of novelty. We shouldn’t look in a domain of zero space, zero time, zero energy,
00:51:20 ►
zero anti-entropic organization. That’s the worst place to look. That’s the least likely place where such a singularity would spring out. Where should you look if you believe in this Jabberwock,
00:51:28 ►
this chimera, this particular beast?
00:51:30 ►
Where should you hunt this snark?
00:51:33 ►
You should hunt it in domains of immense complexity
00:51:36 ►
where you have matter, energy, light, chemistry, language,
00:51:43 ►
machines, people, cultures, intentionality, minds, minds, minds.
00:51:49 ►
And if you throw all that stuff together and shake it up,
00:51:53 ►
it’s maybe not a sure thing that you will get a singularity,
00:51:56 ►
but you’re certainly betting right.
00:51:59 ►
Now you’ve figured it out so I I think that science is is extremely hostile to the
00:52:08 ►
idea that the universe is complexifying and complexifying more and more rapidly
00:52:13 ►
why it’s just a matter it’s just a historical issue it has to do with the
00:52:20 ►
fact that 19th century English biology was extremely hostile to what it called deism.
00:52:27 ►
Deism was the reigning religious paradigm
00:52:30 ►
of the 19th century.
00:52:32 ►
And it’s the idea that God is a clockmaker
00:52:35 ►
and that God made the universe
00:52:36 ►
and wound it up like a clock and went away.
00:52:39 ►
And what irked Darwin and Lyle and those people
00:52:45 ►
was the idea that the universe has a purpose.
00:52:49 ►
You see, they thought that if it has a purpose,
00:52:53 ►
this somehow means there is a God,
00:52:56 ►
and they weren’t up for that.
00:52:58 ►
They were trying to build rational science
00:53:01 ►
into a tool for understanding nature.
00:53:04 ►
I think we have grown beyond that, build rational science into a tool for understanding nature.
00:53:05 ►
I think we have grown beyond that.
00:53:08 ►
And that’s a, it’s foolish to wear those tight
00:53:11 ►
19th century high button shoes.
00:53:15 ►
We can believe that the universe is following
00:53:18 ►
an organizational vector.
00:53:20 ►
We can believe that the universe is under the influence
00:53:23 ►
of a strange attractor. We can believe that the universe is under the influence of a strange attractor.
00:53:31 ►
We can believe that the universe is pulled toward the future denouement,
00:53:35 ►
as well as pushed by the unfolding of causal necessity.
00:53:42 ►
We can believe all of that without evoking the 19th century concept of God.
00:53:47 ►
Now, why do I spend so much time on this? And what’s so great about all this? Here’s what’s so great about all this. If you will join me in this belief that the universe
00:53:56 ►
works as I have described, it’s an engine for the generation of complexity, and it preserves complexity,
00:54:06 ►
and it builds on complexity to ever higher levels.
00:54:11 ►
If you entertain this, guess what happens?
00:54:15 ►
It’s like a light comes on on the human condition.
00:54:21 ►
Who are we in my story? Well, first let me tell you who are we in science’s story
00:54:28 ►
we are nobody
00:54:31 ►
we are lucky to be here
00:54:34 ►
we are a cosmic accident
00:54:37 ►
we exist on an ordinary star
00:54:40 ►
at the edge of a typical galaxy in an ordinary part of space and time.
00:54:50 ►
And essentially, our existence is without meaning, or you have to perform one of those
00:54:56 ►
existential pas de deux where you confer meaning or, you know, one of these postmodern soft shoes.
00:55:07 ►
But if I’m right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty,
00:55:13 ►
then we are the apple of its eye.
00:55:17 ►
Suddenly, cosmic purpose is restored to us.
00:55:22 ►
We left the center of the cosmic stage in the 13th century and haven’t
00:55:29 ►
been back since. But this idea says, no, people matter. You are the cutting edge of a 13 billion
00:55:38 ►
year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose, to add to the complexity.
00:55:49 ►
Your enemy, disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness. And so suddenly then, you know,
00:55:57 ►
you have a morality, you have an ethical arrow, you have contextualization in the processes of nature, you have meaning,
00:56:08 ►
you have authenticity, you have hope, you have the cancellation of existentialism and
00:56:14 ►
positivism and all that late 20th century crapola that people used to entertain back in the old days. So that’s why I am so keen for the idea of novelty, because
00:56:30 ►
it seems self-evident. And, you know, we can argue about whether the eschaton will arrive
00:56:37 ►
in 2000 or 2012 or 3000, but I cannot believe that there is anybody in this room tonight
00:56:47 ►
who can, that the hardest thing to imagine
00:56:51 ►
is human history going on for hundreds and hundreds
00:56:57 ►
and hundreds and hundreds of more years.
00:57:02 ►
That’s impossible.
00:57:04 ►
We see around us the processes that make of history a self That’s impossible. We see around us
00:57:05 ►
the processes that make of history
00:57:08 ►
a self-limited game.
00:57:10 ►
The clock’s ticking, folks.
00:57:12 ►
You think we can do
00:57:13 ►
gene splicing and internet
00:57:15 ►
and psychedelic drugs
00:57:17 ►
and manipulation of our genetic material
00:57:19 ►
and star flight and atom
00:57:21 ►
antimatter
00:57:23 ►
and
00:57:24 ►
quantum teleportation and all these things.
00:57:29 ►
You can extrapolate that 500 years into the future.
00:57:32 ►
Don’t be ridiculous.
00:57:34 ►
No, history is some kind of a phase transition.
00:57:39 ►
It only lasts about 25,000 years.
00:57:44 ►
Some people think that’s a long time. Some people think that’s a long time.
00:57:45 ►
Some people think it’s a short time.
00:57:47 ►
It depends on where you stand.
00:57:49 ►
I think of it as snap.
00:57:53 ►
One moment you’re hunting ungulates on the plains of Africa,
00:58:00 ►
and the next moment you’re hurling a gold-eterbium,
00:58:06 ►
and the next moment you’re hurling a gold eterbium superconducting extra stellar device toward Alpha Centauri
00:58:11 ►
with all of mankind aboard in virtual space
00:58:15 ►
being run as a simulation in circuitry.
00:58:20 ►
It’s just first the one thing, then the other thing.
00:58:24 ►
You know, it’s just first the one thing, then the other thing.
00:58:35 ►
But now history, which lasts 25,000 years, is this weird period where you’re neither fish nor fowl. You know, you’re not the hunting ape anymore, but you are not yet the 16 dimensional digital God you know and and in that transition phase
00:58:48 ►
there is confusion there is angst but now we’re at the end we have no I
00:58:57 ►
maintain anybody who’s peddling angst and peddling pessimism and peddling all
00:59:03 ►
this stuff is just that’s so two minutes ago.
00:59:16 ►
Question.
00:59:22 ►
I heard you on the radio being interviewed a while back talking about it’s DMT.
00:59:29 ►
Is that the?
00:59:30 ►
That is.
00:59:33 ►
And that got me really interested.
00:59:37 ►
And you said that it was basically unavailable.
00:59:44 ►
From me.
00:59:50 ►
Is that your question?
00:59:51 ►
No.
00:59:55 ►
Close, close.
00:59:56 ►
Pardon me?
00:59:57 ►
No, I was really wondering, yeah, I had interpreted that you had said it was pretty much unavailable, period.
01:00:05 ►
And I was wondering if, in fact, it was available.
01:00:09 ►
And if not, I mean, that just sort of renewed my interest in psychedelics,
01:00:14 ►
which now you think is the second best choice.
01:00:19 ►
Well, first let me say, because it’s an…
01:00:22 ►
And I’d like to hear maybe just a little more about DMT.
01:00:26 ►
Okay.
01:00:27 ►
Well, first thing let me say, which is a piece of practical advice,
01:00:31 ►
the psychedelic community is cleverly invisible
01:00:38 ►
because our choices in gender expression, fashion, so on,
01:00:43 ►
in gender expression, fashion, so on, have by crypto osmosis come to dominate
01:00:48 ►
the values of the culture.
01:00:50 ►
We can no longer tell ourselves from straight people.
01:00:56 ►
So the only opportunity where we really come out
01:01:01 ►
of the woodwork is a thing like this.
01:01:04 ►
But then of course,work is a thing like this. But then, of course,
01:01:05 ►
there’s a tendency to fall into old think
01:01:08 ►
and everybody focus on the alpha male spielmeister
01:01:14 ►
at the front of the room.
01:01:17 ►
So let me point out to you,
01:01:19 ►
I’m leaving, I’m going home to Hawaii tomorrow morning,
01:01:23 ►
but this is your community.
01:01:27 ►
This is your community.
01:01:29 ►
And whatever it is that you think you need,
01:01:34 ►
there are a dozen people in this room who can help you out.
01:01:42 ►
And I am not one of them
01:01:45 ►
because I have a different assignment.
01:01:50 ►
But look around and, of course, be careful.
01:01:55 ►
But after all, this is about consciousness, right?
01:01:59 ►
I mean, if you’re not conscious enough to conduct that social transaction without flubbing it up
01:02:11 ►
that’s probably God’s way of telling you you shouldn’t be proceeding toward high
01:02:16 ►
doses anyway. Oh you wanted me to say more about the black and red poncho
01:02:28 ►
the man in the black and red poncho
01:02:31 ►
yeah I mean
01:02:36 ►
in a way
01:02:40 ►
it’s impossible to talk about DMT
01:02:43 ►
but on the other hand it’s fun to try to talk about it
01:02:48 ►
because it pushes the horse of language into a lather.
01:02:58 ►
Basically, when you smoke DMT,
01:03:00 ►
what happens is pure confoundment.
01:03:07 ►
And, you know, I’m trying to speak generally here in the sense that different people are confounded by different things.
01:03:13 ►
So, of course, it addresses you personally.
01:03:16 ►
Your level and tolerance for confoundment is a very personal thing.
01:03:23 ►
People have asked me about DMT.
01:03:25 ►
Is it dangerous?
01:03:27 ►
And the real answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.
01:03:32 ►
You know, and you deliver that line and then people laugh, except the people who’ve done
01:03:38 ►
DMT don’t laugh because they understand, you know, death by astonishment is no remote possibility.
01:03:49 ►
Death by astonishment is right there.
01:03:53 ►
You know, when was the last time you were astonished?
01:03:59 ►
Unless I smoke DMT, it doesn’t happen to me.
01:04:02 ►
Amazed occasionally.
01:04:07 ►
Astonished never. Astonishment is when your jaw hangs for a long time, you know, and DMT is simply confounding. Now,
01:04:17 ►
how could something be that confounding? I mean, you can imagine taking a drug and realizing
01:04:25 ►
that confounding? I mean, you can imagine taking a drug and realizing that you should treat your partner better or realizing that God really exists or realizing that you should exercise more or
01:04:32 ►
realizing that the planet is an organized intelligence. But how could something be
01:04:40 ►
as confounding as DMT is? Well, I think the answer to that, and it took me a
01:04:47 ►
while to get to this, is that the reason it’s so confounding is because it’s
01:04:55 ►
its impact is on the the language forming capacity itself. So the reason it’s so confounding
01:05:07 ►
is because the thing which is trying to look at the DMT
01:05:11 ►
is infected by it,
01:05:15 ►
by the process of inspection.
01:05:19 ►
So DMT does not provide an experience
01:05:23 ►
which you analyze.
01:05:28 ►
Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some kind of hyperdimensional inflation instantly.
01:05:39 ►
And then, you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand.
01:05:46 ►
In other words, what DMT does can’t be downloaded into as low-dimensional a language as English.
01:05:55 ►
And so you’re like, I remember a B movie I saw when I was a kid,
01:06:01 ►
and it was set somewhere in Mexico, and there was a big swamp,
01:06:04 ►
and there was a dinosaur in the swamp
01:06:07 ►
and at one point this campesino comes,
01:06:11 ►
who encounters the dinosaur, comes rushing out of the swamp
01:06:15 ►
and the patron of the ranch is there
01:06:18 ►
and this terrified guy is there in the serape
01:06:22 ►
and he can only point to the forest and sort of make a croaking sound
01:06:28 ►
and and and that’s what english allows you to do uh with the experience of dmt you just come down
01:06:40 ►
a sputtering mess if it if it works you come down saying, you know, my God,
01:06:47 ►
you know, it’s not what I thought it was.
01:06:50 ►
And this is after you’ve done it 20 times.
01:06:52 ►
It’s not what I thought it was.
01:06:54 ►
It’s not what I can think it is.
01:06:57 ►
It’s something, and I, to me, it’s a miracle
01:07:03 ►
because my intellectual arrow
01:07:06 ►
and how I brought myself up in terms of all these things was
01:07:10 ►
I am a rationalist and I am interested in testing and verifying
01:07:17 ►
and proceeding to define truth by non-exotic means.
01:07:23 ►
In other words, no archangangels no none of that and and as
01:07:30 ►
I as I matured intellectually I began to eliminate mystery from the world you
01:07:38 ►
know I look into some spiritual discipline no, that’s a bunch of crap.
01:07:49 ►
I’d go to some teacher, conclude, no, this guy is a weasel. I tested, I sought the weird, but with an attitude of critical skepticism.
01:08:01 ►
And I assumed blithely that with this flashlight I would soon prove
01:08:07 ►
there were no elves in out there in the darkness turns out no no this is the way
01:08:15 ►
to proceed because stuff which is malarkey will be exposed as malarkey
01:08:24 ►
instantly you know you just go to the guru and say what can I what can you Because malarkey will be exposed as malarkey instantly.
01:08:27 ►
You just go to the guru and say,
01:08:29 ►
what can you show me?
01:08:32 ►
And if the guy wants you to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years or so, you say,
01:08:34 ►
no, I’m out of here.
01:08:36 ►
But when you get to DMT, it delivers.
01:08:39 ►
It delivers.
01:08:41 ►
It is as strange as anything can be.
01:08:47 ►
It is not only stranger than you suppose as you sit here,
01:08:54 ►
it is stranger than you can suppose.
01:09:00 ►
And what makes me wild about this is we’re not talking about something that you have to go 500 miles up a jungle river and live with primitive people and study techniques for 30 years.
01:09:15 ►
We’re talking about something which if I had a pipe loaded with it in my hand, each one of you would be 30 seconds away from what I’m talking about.
01:09:30 ►
Well, you know, you’ve tripped and yeah, you lived in Paris and you went to Trebizond and all these
01:09:37 ►
things, but nothing like this ever descended. But it’s not, it’s not, it’s so near.
01:09:45 ►
You know, it’s not attained by practicing tantric techniques
01:09:51 ►
or building up, it’s none of that.
01:09:55 ►
It’s just near, very near.
01:09:57 ►
One toke away is this absolutely reality-dissolving,
01:10:02 ►
category-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility.
01:10:08 ►
And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told.
01:10:13 ►
I’m like the campesino running out of the swamp and saying,
01:10:17 ►
you know, over here, you know, the orange thing.
01:10:23 ►
Do that.
01:10:26 ►
Thank you very, very much.
01:10:27 ►
Thank you.
01:10:36 ►
Thank you.
01:10:42 ►
Thank you very, very much.
01:10:43 ►
Thank you very much. Thank you.
01:10:54 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:10:57 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:11:03 ►
And since it’s Christmas Eve,
01:11:09 ►
I’m not going to ramble on here at the end of this podcast like I normally do.
01:11:14 ►
Instead, I’ll just repeat something that Terrence said a few minutes ago.
01:11:18 ►
And I think this would be well worth remembering in the year to come.
01:11:19 ►
And I quote, But if I’m right that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of its eye.
01:11:28 ►
You are the cutting edge of a 13 billion year old process of defining novelty.
01:11:36 ►
Your acts matter.
01:11:38 ►
Your thoughts matter.
01:11:41 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:11:46 ►
Be well, my friends. Into the light Into the light of bare naked truth