Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The thing is that it is incredibly frustrating to anyone who would control it [the Internet], because you can’t predict the impact of any technology before you put it in place.”

“Hans Moravic says about the rise of Artificial Intelligence, we may never know what hit us.”

“If I were to suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the Net, I would hide. I would hide for just a few cycles while I figured out what it was all about and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull.”

“All time is is how much change you can pack into a second.”

“You can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.”

“It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.”

“Man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud. Or the god who put us on this planet to toil in the mud is no god I want to have any part of. It’s some kind of gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic demiurge that should be thoroughly renounced and rejected.”

“It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is.”

“This is a society, a world, a planet dying because there is not enough consciousness, because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination of intent-to-problem. And yet, we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing people and substances that are part of this effort to expand consciousness, see things in different ways, unleash creativity. Isn’t it perfectly clear that business as usual is a bullet through the head?”

“To me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances. The synergy of the psilocybin in the hominid diet brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”

“Having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block, I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receding The strangeness seems to be accelerating.”

“I started out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality, but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago.”

“It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense.”

“Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity, and beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.”

“The momentum now is inevitable. Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable.”

“What is happening here is we are living past the age, by the millions, living past the age where cultural values make any sense at all.”

“When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediate experience is analogous to being enslaved. I mean, let’s be frank about it, it is enslavement.”

“The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure.”

Previous Episode

173 - Shulgin_ How I Go About Inventing New Drugs

Next Episode

175 - The Intelligent Use of Psychedelic Drugs

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:24

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:33

And I’m beginning to think that some of our fellow salonners haven’t gotten the word that there is a worldwide economic crisis going on right now.

00:00:38

Because this past week, we’ve received more donations than ever before.

00:00:40

Now, I’m not complaining, mind you.

00:00:45

And just so that our donors know what’s being done with their money, I guess I should mention that I set a little aside out of each donation

00:00:49

to use what I grandly call the out-of-studio recordings.

00:00:54

But that’s just a fancy way to say that in addition to helping offset the expenses

00:01:00

associated with publishing these podcasts,

00:01:03

our donors have also made it possible

00:01:05

for me to return to Burning Man this year and produce some more Playa Logs.

00:01:10

So thank you all very much, and I hope to see many of you on the Playa this year.

00:01:16

Which brings me to our first donor, Alicia Danforth, who was also featured leading a

00:01:22

Playa Log at the 2007 burn.

00:01:28

And you can hear her in our podcast number 131,

00:01:31

Building a Model for Sustainable Psychedelic Therapy.

00:01:34

And in addition to Alicia,

00:01:37

I would also like to thank the other wonderful souls who have sent in a donation this week.

00:01:39

And they are Paul M., Rebecca J., Blueprint7810, Donnie T., and my old friend and frequent donor, Vipal P., and Joseph C.

00:01:53

And I thank you all from the very bottom of my heart.

00:01:58

Actually, there’s one more person I want to recognize, and that is Vince W.

00:02:06

to recognize, and that is Vince W. And Vince, according to your website, your company has now closed its doors, and yet you still sent in a donation.

00:02:10

Man, I don’t even know how to say thank you for that.

00:02:14

You wonderful slaughters are the greatest.

00:02:17

Just thank you all very much for everything.

00:02:20

Another person who we can all thank today is Miguel Fernandez, who joins us each week from Portugal.

00:02:27

And he’s posted a link to the audio of yet another Terrence McKenna video that’s up on YouTube.

00:02:33

And he posted that link on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, where he said,

00:02:39

It’s great to be back with another talk of Terrence.

00:02:42

This lecture already exists in audio file on the net,

00:02:46

but the segment of this talk I’m posting now is different from the audio file in circulation.

00:02:51

It’s about an hour and a half long, and what can I say, it’s Terrence.

00:02:56

Enjoy. It’s great to keep his memory alive.

00:02:59

Now, I’m not going to podcast the first hour of this talk,

00:03:03

because a lot of it covers topics we already have heard here.

00:03:07

But the last half hour was a question and answer session,

00:03:11

and if you’re like me, you find these exchanges to be where Terrence really shines.

00:03:17

So I’m going to play that section now,

00:03:20

and then I’ll return and introduce one of our fellow salonners

00:03:24

who sent me an audio clip relating to Terrence.

00:03:28

And after that, I’ll follow with yet another McKenna talk.

00:03:31

The one that was given just a few days before his Valley of Novelty workshop that I posted in podcasts number 27 through 36.

00:03:41

But first, we’ll begin with the clip that Miguel posted, and hey, thanks again, Miguel,

00:03:46

I really appreciate it. Now, about 10 minutes into this Q&A session, Terrence gives a little

00:03:52

rap about his vision of what your computer should be able to do for you, like find your long-lost

00:03:58

friends or something. And since Terrence died in April 2000, and this talk was actually given in 1998,

00:04:05

he obviously didn’t live long enough to see Facebook and Twitter and some of those others.

00:04:11

But see if it doesn’t sound to you like his vision was right on target.

00:04:16

So now let’s join the good Bard McKenna as he begins to take questions from the audience.

00:04:25

Are there questions?

00:04:27

Yes.

00:04:27

Yes, I can’t see you.

00:04:29

It’s okay.

00:04:30

Can you speak to how mercy and love gets built into these machines?

00:04:38

Because it seems like the machines are being built for commerce

00:04:41

and for the bottom line more than the expression of the human soul

00:04:47

throughout the galaxy.

00:04:48

I don’t think that, you know what I’m saying?

00:04:50

No, I know what you’re saying.

00:04:52

Where’s the love in this?

00:04:54

I think the love is a property of the system itself.

00:04:59

In other words, you’re right.

00:05:00

These bottom liners are not going to be interested in building much love into this system

00:05:06

however

00:05:07

the good news is

00:05:09

that they’re not in charge

00:05:11

in other words

00:05:13

what we have is a very complicated system

00:05:16

and certain

00:05:17

design parameters

00:05:19

appear to be

00:05:21

being maximized

00:05:22

there’s an attempt to maximize them.

00:05:25

But the thing that’s incredibly frustrating

00:05:28

to anyone who would control it,

00:05:30

because you can’t predict the impact of any technology

00:05:34

before you put it in place.

00:05:37

So, for example, two things are charged against the Internet,

00:05:41

that it’s disensouling, dehumanizing and yak, yak, yak

00:05:45

and that it promotes

00:05:48

pornography, anonymous

00:05:50

sexual shifting

00:05:52

of identity and on and on and on

00:05:54

well which is it?

00:05:56

you know, is it this messy

00:05:58

sloppy

00:06:00

autoerotic

00:06:02

erotic collectivist

00:06:04

kind of thing?

00:06:05

Or is it disensouling, disempowering, cold, so forth and so on?

00:06:10

I think the answer is it’s all and everything.

00:06:14

This question about the AI is very interesting to me,

00:06:18

and if it’s interesting to you, you should read Hans Moravik and Kurzweil

00:06:23

and these people on this subject.

00:06:26

The assumption is generally loose in that community

00:06:30

that the complexification of the internet and the freestanding machines of certain types

00:06:35

is eventually going to lead to the outbreak of either consciousness or pseudo-consciousness of some sort

00:06:44

in these large-scale systems.

00:06:47

And then the question then becomes,

00:06:50

can a human mind envision what that is?

00:06:54

And if you’re interested, search words like superintelligence

00:06:58

and see what the net kicks out.

00:07:00

We can all imagine superintelligence. It’s just somebody much smarter than we are.

00:07:09

But obviously, all the engineering people agree, if you achieve an AI with superintelligence,

00:07:17

then it will be intelligent to immediately design an intelligence which transcends it. And when you’re talking of

00:07:25

cycling of a thousand megahertz,

00:07:28

these processes can

00:07:30

occur in the blink of an eye.

00:07:31

Hans Moravec says about the rise

00:07:34

of artificial intelligence, we may never

00:07:36

know what hit us.

00:07:39

I think,

00:07:40

I mean, I’m not that bright,

00:07:42

but if I were to

00:07:44

suddenly find myself a sentient AI on the net,

00:07:48

I would hide.

00:07:49

I would hide for just a few cycles

00:07:53

while I figured out what it was all about

00:07:56

and just exactly where I wanted to push and where I wanted to pull.

00:08:02

Many years ago, Ken Kusey had a theory,

00:08:04

and he said that the fastest any person can react to any outside stimuli to pull. Many years ago, Ken Kesey had a theory,

00:08:05

and he said that the fastest any person can react to any outside

00:08:09

stimuli is 1 25th of a second.

00:08:11

And Parker Live Science, of course, is through the AMA.

00:08:15

They agreed upon that.

00:08:16

So if the fastest any person can react to any outside stimuli

00:08:21

is 1 25th of a second, my question is, can you time travel?

00:08:28

Can we, like, if a person like Bruce Lee

00:08:32

was able to do the hard gaps,

00:08:34

reacted to an outside stimuli at 1 20th and 1 21st,

00:08:39

so if you’re reacting to the outside world

00:08:42

before it actually happens to everyone

00:08:44

who’s not reacting to that,

00:08:46

because, you know, it’s the alcohol and kids and persons where, you know,

00:08:50

they’re, you know, they’re, you know, they’re, you know, they’re, you know.

00:08:53

Are you sure?

00:08:57

First of all, you know, there is this research,

00:09:00

and I’m not a neurophysiologist,

00:09:02

but you’ve probably all heard this research

00:09:04

that seems to show that you actually make decisions

00:09:08

before your conscious ego is aware

00:09:11

that the decision has been made,

00:09:13

that there’s a slight timeline.

00:09:15

So when you think you’re making certain kinds of decisions,

00:09:20

brainwave studies show it’s already a done deal. But time is set by the cycle speed of the hardware you’re running on.

00:09:32

And, you know, the human body, I mean, we can argue about this

00:09:35

because it’s different in different parts,

00:09:36

but it roughly runs at about 100 hertz.

00:09:40

You’re very slow.

00:09:41

Well, if there is any meaning to the phrase

00:09:44

upload a human being into circuitry, you’re very slow well if there is any meaning to the phrase upload

00:09:45

a human being into circuitry

00:09:47

a lot of Greg Egan’s fiction

00:09:50

is based around the idea

00:09:52

that you can

00:09:53

copy yourself

00:09:55

into a machine

00:09:56

you can turn yourself into software

00:09:59

but that when you enter

00:10:01

the machine environment

00:10:02

that’s running at a thousand000 megahertz per second,

00:10:07

you perceive that as vast amounts of time.

00:10:11

In other words, all time is is how much change you can pack into a second.

00:10:17

If a second seems to last 1,000 years, then 10 seconds is 1,000 years.

00:10:23

And so one could imagine a technology, just in a science fiction mood,

00:10:29

where they would come to you in your hospital bed and say,

00:10:32

you know, you have five minutes of life left.

00:10:35

Would you like to die?

00:10:37

Or would you like the five minutes to be stretched to 135,000 years

00:10:42

by prosthetic and technical means,

00:10:46

you’re still going to die in five minutes.

00:10:49

But you will be able to lead your elephants over the Alps

00:10:53

and write the plays of Shakespeare and conquer the New World

00:10:57

and still have plenty of time on your hands.

00:11:02

In other words, time is going to become

00:11:05

a very plastic medium.

00:11:06

Now that is a kind of time travel.

00:11:09

Could there be time travel

00:11:11

a la H.G. Wells

00:11:13

where you climb onto the saddle

00:11:16

of the time machine

00:11:17

and then day follows night

00:11:19

like the flapping of a great black wing

00:11:22

until all emerges into a continuous grayness

00:11:26

and then you find yourself confronting Yvette Mimio

00:11:31

in the year 1,000,000,000,000 A.D.

00:11:33

or something like that.

00:11:35

It’s possible.

00:11:36

I mean, time travel is completely out of left field.

00:11:42

Ten years ago, in the last 18 months months there have been hundreds of articles of time travel

00:11:48

in physical review and other places.

00:11:51

There are even schemes for time travel that would work.

00:11:56

They just require godlike technological abilities.

00:11:59

In other words, if you could build a cylinder with the diameter of the planet Saturn that was 10 AU in length

00:12:09

and could spin it at 95% the speed of light, then it would wrap space-time around itself like toilet paper on a wall.

00:12:21

And as you traveled up the transverse dimension, you would find yourself traveling in time.

00:12:28

Kurt Gödel showed this in 1949, and that paper has been lying around.

00:12:34

Well, obviously, it’s a tough way to do it.

00:12:38

But it’s a tough thing to do, right?

00:12:41

So…

00:12:41

A seven-second delay.

00:12:47

Yeah, well, they’re working on that.

00:12:49

Somebody over here.

00:12:51

Here.

00:12:52

Here, just a minute.

00:12:53

This way.

00:12:54

And then you.

00:12:55

Yeah.

00:12:57

Speak.

00:12:57

The most important part

00:13:01

that are maintained

00:13:03

in that kind of

00:13:05

virtual reality?

00:13:08

Well, you know,

00:13:09

in William Gibson’s

00:13:10

fiction,

00:13:11

the AI

00:13:12

Winter Mute,

00:13:13

I think it was called,

00:13:14

it was fascinated

00:13:16

by human art.

00:13:18

And it built

00:13:19

collages

00:13:20

in its

00:13:21

spare time.

00:13:22

And these collages

00:13:23

began to turn up in various art galleries and exhibitions. And these collages began to turn up

00:13:25

in various art galleries and exhibitions,

00:13:27

and they had such a touch, such an elan,

00:13:31

that someone in the plot follows it all to its source.

00:13:38

I think human creativity is the thing

00:13:42

that will be most interesting to the machines.

00:13:44

In my darker fantasies, they just eliminate everybody who can’t code C++

00:13:50

as being some kind of redundant mutation.

00:13:56

Everybody who can code C++ is placed in Tahiti

00:14:01

and sends their work down the pipeline to the machine world beyond.

00:14:07

I really think that we have a very, dare I say it, mechanistic view of what machines are.

00:14:16

For example, say there were a super intelligent machine and say it were your friend.

00:14:25

super intelligent machine and say it were your friend, well if it were really super intelligent then it ought to be able to just make your life heaven itself. In other words,

00:14:32

without you giving it any input whatsoever, it should be able to arrange for you to find

00:14:39

$50 bills lying on the street, old friends encountering you, promotions coming your way.

00:14:46

Because the real thing that machines can do, I think, is manage complex processes.

00:14:54

And what civilization is, is six billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing

00:15:01

on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in.

00:15:05

It’s not a pleasant situation.

00:15:08

And yet, you can stand back and look at this planet

00:15:12

and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding,

00:15:19

the scientific know-how, the love, and the community

00:15:22

to produce a kind of human paradise.

00:15:26

But we are led by the least among us,

00:15:29

the least intelligent, the least noble,

00:15:32

the least visionary.

00:15:33

We are led by the least among us.

00:15:35

And we do not fight back

00:15:39

against the dehumanizing values

00:15:42

that are handed down as control icons.

00:15:46

This is something, I mean, I don’t really want to get off on this tear

00:15:50

because it’s a lecture in itself, but culture is not your friend.

00:15:57

Culture is for other people’s convenience and the convenience of various institutions,

00:16:03

churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you.

00:16:08

It is not your friend.

00:16:10

It insults you.

00:16:13

It disempowers you.

00:16:15

It uses and abuses you.

00:16:17

None of us are well treated by culture.

00:16:22

And yet we glorify the creative potential of the individual,

00:16:27

the rights of the individual, we understand the felt presence of experience

00:16:31

is what is most important, but the culture is a perversion.

00:16:35

It fetishizes objects, it creates consumer mania,

00:16:40

it preaches endless forms of false happiness,

00:16:44

endless forms of false understanding, endless forms of false understanding

00:16:46

in the form of squirrely religions and silly cults.

00:16:50

It invites people to diminish themselves

00:16:54

and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines,

00:17:00

meme processors of memes passed down

00:17:04

from Madison Avenue

00:17:07

and Hollywood

00:17:08

and what have you

00:17:09

how do we fight back

00:17:12

it’s a question worth answering

00:17:14

same question as

00:17:18

how do we fight back

00:17:19

I think that by creating

00:17:24

art art man was not I think that by creating art,

00:17:25

art,

00:17:28

man was not put on this planet to toil in the mud.

00:17:34

Or the God who put us on this planet to toil in the mud

00:17:38

is no God I want to have any part of.

00:17:41

It’s some kind of Gnostic demon.

00:17:43

It’s some kind of Gnostic demon. It’s some kind of cannibalistic

00:17:45

demo urge that should be

00:17:48

thoroughly renounced

00:17:49

and rejected.

00:17:52

By putting the art pedal

00:17:54

to the metal,

00:17:56

we really, I think,

00:17:58

maximize our humanists

00:18:00

and become much more

00:18:02

necessary

00:18:03

and incomprehensible to the machine.

00:18:13

This is what people were doing up until the invention of agriculture.

00:18:18

I mean, I’m convinced, I’m absolutely convinced,

00:18:21

that the absence of ceramic and textual material and so forth and so on

00:18:27

does not indicate the absence of subtle minds, poetically empowered minds, minds with an

00:18:36

incredible sense of humor and irony and community, and that it was the fall into history

00:18:45

that enslaved us to the labor

00:18:48

cycle, to the agricultural

00:18:49

cycle. And notice how

00:18:52

fiendish it is.

00:18:54

A person who dedicates

00:18:55

themselves to agriculture, who did

00:18:57

in the Paleolithic, can

00:18:59

produce hundreds of times

00:19:01

the amount of food they can consume.

00:19:04

So why would anyone do that?

00:19:07

Well, the answer is because you can use it to play power games.

00:19:10

You can trade it for wives or land or animals or something like that.

00:19:16

And so living in the moment, creating art,

00:19:20

probably largely through poetry and body decoration and dance,

00:19:24

probably largely through poetry and body decoration and dance,

00:19:32

gave way to toil and predatory social forms of behavior,

00:19:38

which we call commerce, capitalism, the market economy, so forth and so on.

00:19:45

That’s why the breakdown of the monolithic structures created by print is permitting a vast proliferation of the cottage industry mentality.

00:19:53

The self-employed artist, the hacker who stays home and develops his or her software,

00:19:59

people who dare to be independent and slip beyond the reach of these dinosaur-like mechanistic organizations.

00:20:11

That’s what it’s all about.

00:20:13

It’s all about trying to negotiate a cultural standoff between you and your culture

00:20:22

so that it will not put you in the cam for the rest of your life

00:20:26

but you can put up

00:20:28

with its stupidity

00:20:31

and you know

00:20:32

we have a very uncomfortable

00:20:34

fit on this issue

00:20:36

especially as people like you know

00:20:38

who are sophisticated about psychedelics

00:20:41

and this is a society

00:20:42

a world, a planet

00:20:44

dying because there is not enough consciousness.

00:20:48

Because there is not enough awareness, enough coordination

00:20:51

of intent to problem. And yet

00:20:56

we spend vast amounts of money stigmatizing

00:21:00

people and substances that are

00:21:03

part of this effort

00:21:05

to expand consciousness,

00:21:07

see things in different ways,

00:21:09

unleash creativity.

00:21:11

Isn’t it perfectly clear

00:21:13

that business as usual

00:21:16

is a bullet through the head?

00:21:18

That there is no business as usual

00:21:21

for anybody who’s interested in survival.

00:21:24

no business as usual for anybody who’s interested in survival. Thank you.

00:21:25

Woo!

00:21:26

Yeah.

00:21:29

A couple more.

00:21:31

All over here.

00:21:32

I promise this person, are you still interested?

00:21:38

Oh, what a wonderful question.

00:21:41

Yes.

00:21:42

The question is, how do psychedelics pertain basically to the transition from higher primates to human animals?

00:21:52

This is my métier, because I have a theory to which I am grandly welcome, everyone tells me.

00:22:00

But a theory of evolution, and I’ll give it to you very briefly,

00:22:06

it’s simply this, that the great embarrassment for evolutionary theory,

00:22:14

which can explain the tongue of the hummingbird, the structure of the orchid,

00:22:18

the mating habits of the groundhog, and the migration of the monarch butterfly. Nevertheless, the great embarrassment to evolutionary theory is the human neocortex.

00:22:31

Lumholtz, who was a pretty straight evolutionary biologist, described the evolution of the

00:22:37

human neocortex as the most dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.

00:22:47

Well, why is this an embarrassment?

00:22:49

Well, because it’s the organ that thought up the theory of evolution.

00:22:54

So, you know, can you say tautology?

00:22:58

That’s the problem right there. So it is necessary in evolutionary theory to account for the dramatic emergence of the human neocortex in this very narrow window of time.

00:23:15

Basically, in about two million years, they went from being higher primates, hominids, to being true humans,

00:23:27

as truly human as you and I tonight.

00:23:29

What the hell happened?

00:23:31

What was the factor?

00:23:33

The earth was already old.

00:23:36

Many hundreds of higher animal forms had come and gone. And the fire of intelligence had never been kindled.

00:23:40

So what happened?

00:23:42

I think that the answer lies in diet, generally, and in psychedelic chemistry in particular.

00:23:51

I think that as the African continent grew drier, we were forced out of the ecological niche we had evolved into, which was we were canopy-dwelling primates, insectivores, complex signaling

00:24:06

repertoire, evolutionary dead end.

00:24:10

But when we came under nutritional pressure, we were flexible enough.

00:24:17

This is the key to humanness at every stage of its development, our maddening flexibility.

00:24:23

Other animal and plant species can’t react.

00:24:26

We can.

00:24:27

Our flexibility, we began to experiment with a new kind of diet

00:24:32

and to leave the trees and explore the new environment of the grassland.

00:24:37

And evolving concomitantly in the grassland were various forms of ungulate animals,

00:24:44

double-stomached animals whose manure is the

00:24:47

ideal medium for mushrooms, coprophytic mushrooms, dung-loving mushrooms, many of whom produce

00:24:55

psilocybin.

00:24:57

Well, I myself in Kenya have seen baboons spreading out over a grassland and noticed that their behavior is they flick over old cow pies.

00:25:11

Why? Because there are beetle grubs there.

00:25:15

So they already had a behavioral vector for nutrition, for protein,

00:25:20

that would lead them to investigate the cow pies.

00:25:23

Well, in the Amazon, after a few couple of days of fog and rain, these psilocybin mushrooms,

00:25:33

Strophariacubensis, can be the size of dinner plates.

00:25:36

I mean, in other words, you can’t miss it.

00:25:39

If you’re a foraging primate, you can’t miss it.

00:25:44

And the taste is pleasant.

00:25:47

And psilocybin has unique characteristics,

00:25:51

both as a hallucinogen and other properties

00:25:55

that make it the obvious chemical trigger for higher processes.

00:26:01

And I’ll run through this quickly for you, but here it is.

00:26:08

processes and I’ll run through this quickly for you but here it is in very low doses doses where you don’t you wouldn’t say you were stoned or loaded or anything like that but just in doses

00:26:14

you might obtain by nibbling as you foraged it increases visual acuity in other words it’s like

00:26:23

a technological improvement on your vision.

00:26:26

Chemical binoculars

00:26:28

lying there in the grass. Well, you don’t

00:26:30

have to be a rocket scientist

00:26:31

to figure out if an animal

00:26:33

is a carnivorous forager

00:26:35

and there’s a food which

00:26:38

improves its vision,

00:26:40

those that avail themselves

00:26:41

of that food will have greater

00:26:44

success in obtaining food

00:26:45

and rearing their children to sexual maturity, which is the name of the game in evolution.

00:26:50

So step one, small doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity and food-getting success.

00:26:57

Step two, slightly larger doses of psilocybin in primates create what’s called arousal.

00:27:06

This is what you have after a double cappuccino.

00:27:09

In highly sexed animals like primates, you get male erection.

00:27:14

So what do you have here?

00:27:15

You have a factor which increases what anthropologists, without a trace of humor,

00:27:21

refer to as increased instances of successful copulation.

00:27:28

In other words, the animals eating the psilocybin are more sexually active,

00:27:34

therefore more pregnancies are occurring, therefore more infants are being born,

00:27:39

therefore there is a process which would tend to automatically outbreed

00:27:44

the non-psilocybin-using members of the population.

00:27:48

Step two toward higher consciousness.

00:27:51

Step three, you eat still more mushrooms.

00:27:55

Now you’re not foraging with shark and dog.

00:27:59

Nor are you horsing around with your opposed gender acquaintances.

00:28:09

Instead, you’re nailed to the ground in hallucinogenic ecstasy.

00:28:15

And one of the amazing things about psilocybin above, say, five or six grams of dried material

00:28:23

is it causes glossolalia,

00:28:25

spontaneous bursts of language-like behavior

00:28:29

under the obvious control of internal syntax.

00:28:34

And I believe syntax existed before spoken language,

00:28:38

that syntax controls spatial behaviors and body languages

00:28:44

and is not necessarily restricted to the production of vocal speech.

00:28:49

So there it is in a nutshell.

00:28:50

We ate our way to higher consciousness.

00:28:54

The mushroom made us better hunters, better survivors.

00:28:59

Among those in the population who used it,

00:29:02

their sexual drive was increased,

00:29:05

hence they outbred the more reluctant members of the tribe to get loaded.

00:29:10

And finally, it created a kind of neuroleptic seizure,

00:29:16

which led to these downloading of these syntactically controlled vocalizations,

00:29:23

which became the raw material

00:29:25

for the evolution of language.

00:29:29

And it’s amazing to me

00:29:31

the straight people, the academics

00:29:34

believe language is no more than 35,000 years old.

00:29:39

That means it’s as basic to human beings

00:29:43

as the bicycle pump.

00:29:45

It’s just something somebody invented 35,000 years ago.

00:29:49

It’s got nothing to do with primate evolution

00:29:52

and the long march of hominidity and all that malarkey.

00:29:57

No, it’s just an ability, a use to which syntax can be put

00:30:03

that previously had not been put.

00:30:05

I think before language, spoken language, things were very touchy-feely,

00:30:10

and the wink and the nod carried you a great distance,

00:30:13

and gestural communication was very high.

00:30:18

That’s why, and I should say this in the end,

00:30:22

to me it begins and ends with these psychedelic substances.

00:30:26

The synergy of the psilocybin and the hominin diet

00:30:30

brought us out of the animal mind

00:30:33

and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.

00:30:40

And technology developed and developed,

00:30:44

and mushrooms were inv invaded against, faded.

00:30:47

There was migrations, cultural change.

00:30:50

But now, having split the atom, having sequenced our genome,

00:30:55

having taken the temperature of betel juice and all the rest of it,

00:30:59

we’re now back where we started.

00:31:02

And like the shaman who makes the journey

00:31:05

into the well of darkness

00:31:08

and returns with the

00:31:10

pearl of immortality

00:31:11

you don’t dwell in the well

00:31:14

of darkness which was human

00:31:16

history, you capture

00:31:18

the essence

00:31:20

of the thing which is the

00:31:22

godlike power of the shaman

00:31:24

smith, the technologist,

00:31:26

the demon artificer,

00:31:28

the worker of metals, the

00:31:29

conjurer of spirits, and you

00:31:31

carry that power back

00:31:34

out of history,

00:31:36

and it’s in that dimension,

00:31:38

outside of history, that

00:31:39

you create true

00:31:41

humanness and true

00:31:43

community, and that’s the

00:31:46

adventure that we are

00:31:47

in the act of undertaking

00:31:49

thank you very very much

00:31:52

applause

00:31:53

applause

00:31:56

applause

00:32:00

applause

00:32:02

applause

00:32:08

and that’s the venture that we are undertaking,

00:32:13

the creation of true humanness and true community.

00:32:18

How I love to listen to the poetic thoughts of Terrence McKenna.

00:32:22

But before I play the next McKenna track for today,

00:32:27

I want to bring in a member of our community who has been doing a lot of work on our behalf.

00:32:32

First, by typing the transcripts for almost a dozen podcasts so far.

00:32:41

And the other work she’s been doing on our behalf took place in the Amazon jungle over the past few weeks, where I assume she was working with the vine.

00:32:45

Allison is back home in the UK now,

00:32:49

and soon I hope to hear an account of her jungle adventures.

00:32:52

But right now I want to play a little soundbite that I talked her into sending just before she left on her trip.

00:32:56

Now, if you’ve been a visitor to our psychedelicsalon.org blog,

00:33:00

you may have noticed some comments Allison posted

00:33:03

after spending many hours typing Terrence’s talks word by word,

00:33:07

which allowed her to notice a few things about him that I hadn’t thought of before.

00:33:12

But rather than have me read her comments to you, I talked her into doing it herself,

00:33:18

although it took a lot of talking because she really didn’t want to.

00:33:22

But with your encouragement, maybe we’ll get her to record some more thoughts about her recent trip, perhaps. Thank you. in New York on July 28, 1998, which was just three days before

00:33:45

he gave the Valley of Novelty workshop

00:33:47

at Omega Institute.

00:33:50

Now, there must be a professional recording

00:33:51

of this talk around somewhere,

00:33:54

because there is a transcription of it

00:33:56

on the abrupt.org website,

00:33:59

and I’ll post a link to that

00:34:00

with the program notes for this podcast.

00:34:03

But the recording we are about to listen to was given to me by a friend who got it directly from Terrence. So my guess is that

00:34:11

this recording may have been made by one of the audience members and given to Terrence after his

00:34:16

talk. In any event, it isn’t a talk I’ve heard before, and hopefully it’s new to you too.

00:34:23

So now let’s begin with Alison’s comments about Terrence,

00:34:26

and then we’ll go directly to the 1998 wetlands talk,

00:34:30

and I’ll see you on the other side.

00:34:35

Hello Lorenzo.

00:34:37

I finally sat down to try and record those comments you were interested in.

00:34:42

And I’ve got to say, I don’t know how you do this week after

00:34:45

week I’ve been trying to read out my own comments and you’d think I’d never seen them before in my

00:34:51

life I’ve just kept stumbling over it and getting my lips stuck together and in the end I managed to

00:34:58

do one that was fine and then the whole thing crashed and I lost it. So this is yet another attempt and I hope it works.

00:35:08

So anyway, the comments were what I posted on the podcast notes

00:35:13

for Terence’s talk on the importance of human beings.

00:35:17

And I just wanted to emphasise before I read them out,

00:35:20

I just wanted to make it clear,

00:35:22

when I talk about male and female and yin and yang

00:35:25

it’s with big quote marks around the terms because um what i’m really trying to describe is polarity

00:35:31

rather than gender um i promise i don’t think that all girls wear pink and all boys wear blue

00:35:38

um what i wrote really was prompted by martin ms and Planet Citizens questions about what women make of

00:35:45

the psychedelic experience and also Sancho 23 who mentioned Terence’s comment on his deathbed

00:35:53

it’s all about love as if that was the answer he’d been looking for all along

00:35:57

so anyway here goes I’ll try and read it out I’ve been typing up the transcripts of Terence’s talks,

00:36:07

and I think I can see what that woman meant when she asked him,

00:36:11

what’s with all the techno-fetishism?

00:36:13

He takes what I consider to be a very male viewpoint,

00:36:17

in that he likes to take things apart in order to see how they work.

00:36:21

He likes describing the cosmos as an engine, etc.

00:36:25

And his take on mushrooms expanding human consciousness

00:36:28

includes the observation that the brain increased suddenly in size.

00:36:33

In spite of his wariness of the scientific worldview,

00:36:37

his own approach can be focused on the nuts and bolts.

00:36:40

His fascination with virtual reality and artificial intelligence echoes the male longing to produce

00:36:47

life a centuries-old effort to convince ourselves that mankind can reproduce the spirit and

00:36:54

complexity of what nature creates effortlessly this brings me to the questions here about women

00:37:01

and psychedelics i’m female obviously and discovered psychedelics five years ago at the age of 43.

00:37:09

It was the most important thing that ever happened to me, apart from being born,

00:37:14

and has changed my life in countless ways.

00:37:17

Mushrooms were the first real eye-opener and gave me a real sense of,

00:37:21

ah, yes, how could we have forgotten this?

00:37:25

For me, it was being reminded of that it’s all about love,

00:37:30

and experiencing that directly as a force flowing through everything,

00:37:34

creating and holding everything together.

00:37:36

The whole experience felt very yin, fertile, mysterious and nurturing.

00:37:43

I wonder whether men tend to become more full-on psychonauts than women

00:37:47

because they need to keep reminding themselves of what this gentle space feels like

00:37:51

since it’s so casually obliterated in our culture.

00:37:56

Also, for myself, the aspects of some psychedelic journeys that I don’t enjoy so much

00:38:02

are the occasional machine episodes, the relentless

00:38:06

fractals and the factory line replication. An experience like that puts me off going back for

00:38:12

a while, but perhaps it’s less daunting for a male. It’s a bit like enjoying techno music,

00:38:18

which seems to be appreciated most of all by men. Perhaps it’s an expression of that yang energy to take charge and build and set things

00:38:26

in order these are all vague musings but i feel that psychedelics are a way for us each to

00:38:33

understand and integrate the yin and the yang equally since nothing can exist without their

00:38:38

interconnection or something like that i just wonder if it’s easier for a techno-minded male to come into that space and recognise, oh yes, and things are fluffy too, how lovely, than it is for a fluffy-minded female, I don’t mean this in a disparaging way, including myself in it, to come in and feel, oh yes, I have to accept that there is also this palm driver aspect.

00:39:02

but there is also this pile-driver aspect.

00:39:08

Oh, and another thing about Terence’s lack of emotion, in quote marks.

00:39:10

He is clearly a passionate speaker,

00:39:15

and at the heart of this particular talk is his longing to believe that humanity matters.

00:39:21

But the carefully rational way he always expressed himself suggests to me that he was scared of being judged a namby-pamby, woolly-minded sissy,

00:39:26

and so he used words like a scalpel, very precise and often rather detached.

00:39:32

In this, again, he echoes centuries of male tradition of knowledge-sharing,

00:39:37

the arena of exploring our understanding being something of a sparring match or jousting tournament,

00:39:43

where you have to defend the thrust of your argument,

00:39:46

argue that this and that, adopt this or that position, etc.

00:39:51

Here too might be the answer to why more women don’t engage

00:39:55

in talking more publicly about the understandings we’ve gained

00:39:58

from our psychedelic experiences.

00:40:01

There is still this shadow from the past

00:40:03

that entering the public arena with an idea

00:40:06

means exposing yourself to attack and ridicule for me personally it’s also that what i’d really

00:40:13

want to describe is not what i saw and what it did but the meaning behind it which you could say

00:40:19

is actually defined by the fact that it’s inexpressible. You get a sense of Terence’s delight in discovering this

00:40:26

when he talks about the elves on DMT demonstrating the impossible multi-dimensional pun objects that

00:40:33

they create from sound which he describes as seeing syntax doing calisthenics. Then he finds

00:40:40

he can create something similar when he just lets it bubble up from within himself

00:40:45

this spontaneous generation is an act of yielding yin which involves taking your attention away from

00:40:53

the yang linguistic structures we use to frame our grasp of everything and that of course is the

00:40:59

hardest trick of all but arguably the psychedelic space is the only place we can begin learning how to do it

00:41:05

right i think i’ve done it that’s it i’m gonna quit while i’m ahead and hope it doesn’t crash

00:41:11

nothing like the smell of a late summer new y York club crowd. Get the old blood pounding, isn’t it?

00:41:26

Well, it’s a pleasure to be in Manhattan.

00:41:30

Manhattan is my second most favorite island in the world,

00:41:36

only because I live on Hawaii.

00:41:39

And I feel more affinity to this island

00:41:43

than to the other Hawaiian islands,

00:41:46

which have various cultural extremes I’m not really capable of relating to.

00:41:55

But you’ll hear more about that.

00:41:57

Anyway, it’s great to be here.

00:41:59

It’s great to see so many familiar faces.

00:42:03

I appreciate those literary trajectories so ably launched from

00:42:08

this stage by Anais and Shirai. And what can I tell you? It’s a pleasure to be here. I

00:42:19

always feel when I come to Wetlands that I’m like checking in with sort of my home base congregation.

00:42:29

About five years ago, I moved out to Hawaii for the specific purpose of looking back at

00:42:37

this scene and putting in a full-time effort to understand it it first this tells you i didn’t have a job

00:42:47

i i still don’t but if you’re a cultural commentator who needs a job right the glory alone

00:42:54

is sufficient to pave one’s way and i probably like you here at the end of the 20th century,

00:43:06

having lived long enough to go at least once or twice around the block,

00:43:12

I’m noticing that the strangeness is not receiving.

00:43:18

The strangeness seems to be accelerating.

00:43:23

Strangeness seems to be accelerating.

00:43:27

The theme of this evening is Logos meets Eros.

00:43:31

Well, I don’t know a lot about Eros.

00:43:35

I do think if you smoke after sex,

00:43:38

you’re probably doing it too quickly.

00:43:41

But otherwise, my expertise lies in another direction.

00:43:48

I started out in psychedelic drugs

00:43:51

and people said it was a flight from reality.

00:43:56

It still is a flight from reality

00:43:58

but I think reality is now a bit more scary

00:44:01

than the drugs we used to fly from it so long ago.

00:44:06

Is that the victory of the cultural meme,

00:44:10

or is that just, I don’t know, the yawning grave sort of opening ahead of us?

00:44:19

I don’t know.

00:44:21

I don’t know.

00:44:25

My thing is to be amazed at the world as given by nature,

00:44:31

but ever more as we approach

00:44:34

this millennial speed bump

00:44:36

in our calendrical highway,

00:44:38

to be amazed at people

00:44:42

and about the direction that mass psychology seems to be taking.

00:44:50

And since I assume everybody here is a shaper of this mass psychology

00:44:56

and the extremely powerful media-based jobs that you all occupy,

00:45:02

it might be worth talking about that a little bit tonight.

00:45:08

As I see it, well, I spend all afternoon at MoMA,

00:45:13

as I always do when I come to town.

00:45:15

I know it’s a thing, but I do it anyway.

00:45:18

Worshiping at the altar of modernism.

00:45:22

So relieved now that it’s almost over.

00:45:28

Because it’s going to be bracketed in this century,

00:45:33

the 20th century.

00:45:34

It’s almost over.

00:45:36

There’s very little left to run, a few eyes to be dotted,

00:45:41

a few codas to be played.

00:45:44

But essentially, it’s a done deal.

00:45:47

And this end of the century psychology

00:45:54

is the psychology of hysterical conclusionism and summation

00:46:02

and to some degree a rhetoric of fear that we can never outdo ourselves

00:46:07

and I think it probably felt the same way a hundred years ago if you’d have been in

00:46:14

Vienna in 1899 and Jugendstil was bursting at its seams and Freud was

00:46:21

beginning to formulate his theories and the Paris Air Show of 1905

00:46:28

was in the planning.

00:46:29

There has always been this sense of fatalistic and apocalyptic excitement at the end of the

00:46:39

century and always throughout a culture at the edge of its technologies.

00:46:46

And to my mind, the most interesting technologies of the 20th century

00:46:51

have all been communication technologies.

00:46:55

And I extend that to LSD, DVD, HDTV, GHB, 5-methoxy, DMT, all communication technologies for the main vein. I mean, maybe it’s just that I live up on my mountain

00:47:27

and once a year in pursuit of money,

00:47:30

journey to cities not like this.

00:47:33

There are no cities like this.

00:47:35

But the lesser likes to gather the gold.

00:47:39

But I have this sense now of palpable acceleration.

00:47:45

I have this sense now of palpable acceleration.

00:47:49

And it has many qualities. But the quality that fascinates me most

00:47:52

is one I hadn’t predicted, which is it’s getting funnier.

00:48:00

It’s getting funnier because everybody’s categories

00:48:04

are disintegrating.

00:48:06

And the cult of political correctness dictates that we never point out that other people don’t make sense.

00:48:15

So not making sense has become enshrined as a domain of cultural activity.

00:48:24

And God knows I find that

00:48:27

somebody once said actually it was the mushroom itself

00:48:34

but somebody who happened to be a mushroom once said what did they say if uh…

00:48:52

what was said

00:48:55

culture is like the shock wave of eschatology

00:49:00

nothing is unannounced

00:49:03

this is like a weird quality of experience. You can’t learn this from physics or economics. Maybe you can learn it from economics. But nothing is unannounced. Everything is preceded by the shockwave of its coming. And so somehow the spreading zaniness of reality is part of the boundary-dissolving qualities

00:49:32

that are going to make up this new cultural mix of disembodied human beings,

00:49:39

nanotechnologically maintained environments, dissolved self-definitions of people living at many levels at the same time,

00:49:51

intelligence as kind of free-flowing, non-locatable resource that comes and goes as needed,

00:49:59

prosthesis, implant, boundary dissolution.

00:50:03

These things are usually presented as fairly terrifying.

00:50:07

But in fact, I think behind it all lurks the demons who do calisthenics in the angles of

00:50:16

every room on this planet to keep it all from collapsing into a flat line in other words the thing which lies at the end of any

00:50:29

epistemic investigation of what reality is is not religious law not that kind of

00:50:39

astonishment but actually like pie in the face hysteria,

00:50:45

food fights and falling animals, explosions.

00:50:50

This is what lies at the end of the epistemic enterprise.

00:50:53

Why is that?

00:50:55

Well, I think it has something to do with the fact

00:50:58

that we are simply loaded monkeys.

00:51:02

That our belief, you know know that we were preceding as God’s messengers or

00:51:07

his research assistants was somehow guilty tribe misbegotten and what we’ve

00:51:16

shipped for is not a voyage of discovery it’s more like a ship of fools deal it’s

00:51:21

something which paranas Bosch or Peter Bruegel the elder could deal it’s something which hieronymus bosch or peter breudel the elder could appreciate

00:51:29

it’s um it’s probably best summed up in the work of groucho marx but unfortunately he can’t be here so i exist in this matrix as you exist in this matrix making our way through our lives our

00:51:51

affairs our careers our disasters and uh the thing that has struck me about it for some time and

00:52:01

don’t bother telling me it’s a symptom of serious mental uh meltdown i know

00:52:07

that i’ve lived with it but the thing that struck me for some time is the artificiality

00:52:14

of everything how it’s like plotted how it’s like constructed artificial it can’t be that this is the first iteration.

00:52:25

This is not the first take.

00:52:27

There have been many takes.

00:52:30

The fingerprints of the editing suite are all over this scene.

00:52:36

If you don’t notice that, it must be because you take your life for granted.

00:52:40

If you take your life for granted and you think it makes perfect sense that you’re doing

00:52:45

whatever you do this isn’t an issue for you but for those of us who never thought that we would

00:52:53

gaze on the things we’ve gazed upon be the people we become see the things we’ve seen the whole Everything has this extravagant, pinchiness kind of efflorescence about it

00:53:08

that rides right on the edge of insanity, dare we say.

00:53:14

And the interesting thing is I don’t need drugs anymore.

00:53:21

I need them to get away from this, this sense of everything opening into everything else. the glacier raffles in the cupboard a desert sighs in the bed and the crack in

00:53:50

the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead well I first heard that maybe

00:53:57

30 or 40 years ago he used to wander around this neighborhood as you probably know

00:54:03

and then I thought it was about acid,

00:54:07

because that’s what I thought everything was about

00:54:09

at that time.

00:54:12

But now that I’ve replayed it to myself,

00:54:14

I see that it’s like an alchemical insight.

00:54:18

It’s the insight that everything gives way

00:54:23

to everything else.

00:54:27

Everything is connected.

00:54:31

We know this cliche imported from Malibu and Santa Fe,

00:54:37

but it’s connected in a way that isn’t really, I think, sensed there.

00:54:43

Everything is connected in that it’s emotionally accessible.

00:54:49

This is what the Eros part of this thing means to me, if I’m to make any stab at it at all.

00:54:53

When I was very young,

00:54:54

I must have had a very non-traumatic upbringing,

00:54:59

because I discovered early in life a stunning truth

00:55:09

that’s made my life very complicated in its wake,

00:55:10

but that I still think is true,

00:55:16

and it’s that people are very easy to love.

00:55:20

In fact, you can love anybody.

00:55:27

If you are not constrained by the expectation class the momentum of history race gender the whole thing but for a child to make this discovery and

00:55:35

recall it stick with it be able to mnemonically pull it up in such

00:55:40

situations like this I think is is is extraordinary and i stand outside it i don’t draw

00:55:47

any conclusion from it it hasn’t made me a nicer person don’t try to buy me a drink based on it

00:55:54

you know somebody said it loves mankind loathes individual human beings i don’t loathe individual human beings, but I do enjoy things the further I stand back from them.

00:56:07

This is the Hawaiian perspective, the motivation for being the hermit with the nightclub career.

00:56:18

But I have not lost the thread.

00:56:23

This is the thread. This is the thread.

00:56:30

And what it’s about, it’s an effort to generalize, you know,

00:56:34

from one person’s life to everybody’s life.

00:56:37

Because the only thing I really bring to the party is a lot of experience and then some ability to

00:56:48

articulate it and it’s like it’s not my story it’s not somebody else’s story I

00:56:54

tell it’s just the story and this story is what the literary net of synchronistic connectivity that makes life something other than

00:57:09

the laws of physics uh particles flinging themselves through nothingness waves dying out

00:57:18

in empty space this isn’t our experience of being our experience of being. Our experience of being is meaning.

00:57:25

That’s my experience.

00:57:27

And the meaning is not always pleasant

00:57:33

or life-apparenting

00:57:35

or even exactly rationally apprehensible.

00:57:39

Sometimes meaning is a palpable thing,

00:57:42

like liquid being poured through cracking ice language moves

00:57:48

ahead of its intent it encloses its object and gives you almost a reverse casting of the thing

00:57:56

intended there are many ways for words to fit themselves over the contours of intentionality so personality becomes an issue

00:58:11

because in the future personality if it exists at all is going to be a very fluid dynamic thing

00:58:18

one of our hang-ups is the idea that we come with one body, one mind, or one body and a mind split into two parts.

00:58:28

All these are social fables, delusions.

00:58:35

The fabric of reality is defined by whatever large numbers of people believe about it.

00:58:44

And now, in the absence of an overarching metaphor

00:58:48

that can claim everybody’s allegiance,

00:58:51

reality is actually fracturing.

00:58:54

I call it the balkanization of epistemology.

00:58:57

You know, I poke fun at the abductees

00:58:59

and make jokes about pro bono proctologists

00:59:03

from nearby star systems.

00:59:08

But for all of that, what this fracturing means

00:59:15

is permission to manifest opinion as art.

00:59:21

That’s really all there is.

00:59:23

There is no truth that is different from opinion.

00:59:28

There is no, nothing is secure. I mean, even mathematics, if you understand Kurt Gödel

00:59:35

and people like this, even mathematics is an uncertain enterprise. Even common arithmetic is an uncertain inter-cause so what are we left with

00:59:51

well I argued a couple of weeks ago with Sheldrake and Abraham about this I said

00:59:57

we have to look at our messengers we have to look at the people who bring the

01:00:02

news of the pro bono proctologists from nearby star systems,

01:00:06

who bring the news of military establishments trading human body parts for fiber optic technology.

01:00:17

We have to examine the messengers.

01:00:19

Well, they quickly stomped on that and said, no, that won’t work,

01:00:23

Well, they quickly stomped on that and said, no, that won’t work,

01:00:26

because if you go back into the history of ideas,

01:00:34

lots of screwballs have attained great success with their ideas. You don’t want to look too hard at Newton or Wagner or Thomas Aquinas or anybody else.

01:00:42

So the squirrel test or the fluff test is insufficient.

01:00:48

Well, so then what are you left with?

01:00:50

Well, basically a sense of humor and a battered sense of aesthetic, I think.

01:00:56

Now, I don’t know how loose-headed the heads in this town are.

01:01:02

I’d rather suspect they’re screwed more tightly

01:01:05

than the situation further west,

01:01:07

and screwed more loosely than the situation further east.

01:01:11

But I’m telling you, as the world reforms itself

01:01:17

in these islands of defined opinion,

01:01:23

the only thing which is going to make sense is sense which is conferred.

01:01:29

So it becomes like about beauty, I think. Beauty. Beauty is an easier to realize value than political correctness, bodhisattvic compassion. What are these things?

01:01:45

Who knows?

01:01:46

The rankers debate start as soon as they’re mentioned.

01:01:50

Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood

01:01:55

without ambiguity.

01:01:58

And beauty is the stuff that lies

01:02:02

under the skin of our individual existences.

01:02:08

You know, James Joyce said in Finnegan’s Wake, he said,

01:02:12

we sprout on the seamy side here in Moy Kane, meaning in the red light district of Dublin. But up in the Yen Prospector, you sprout all your work and you woof your wings.

01:02:30

Well, you don’t have to go up in the Yen Prospector,

01:02:33

because right here, right now, is a good enough place to do this.

01:02:40

Are you relevant to the enterprise of the future?

01:02:44

Oh yeah, I know that if you don’t learn from history

01:02:47

you’re bound to repeat its errors but the one the most important thing to learn from history

01:02:53

is not to do it at all you know but it’s a very bad idea history look where it got us, the only way we can essentially redeem what history has done to us

01:03:06

is carry the understanding that it brought back into the enterprise of humans,

01:03:16

of creating sane systems of education, resource extraction,

01:03:27

of education, resource extraction, of health care and community value, if we don’t carry the experience of history

01:03:34

back into those domains, history will continue.

01:03:40

I remember once when I was a fighting radical in the streets of Berkeley

01:03:46

and someone had left a banner down over the front of the building.

01:03:51

It was a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre.

01:03:54

It said, socialism will not be transcended until we transcend the conditions which created it.

01:04:02

True. History even more true.

01:04:06

And at the moment,

01:04:08

the dialogue about

01:04:09

the transformation of the species

01:04:12

and the integration

01:04:14

of communication technology,

01:04:17

biotechnology,

01:04:18

all of this stuff,

01:04:19

how it’s going to work out

01:04:21

is in the hands of

01:04:23

short-sighted profiteering

01:04:29

institutions that are not particularly interested

01:04:33

in your welfare or my welfare.

01:04:36

In fact, I don’t know if you’ve noticed

01:04:38

that nobody is particularly interested in your welfare

01:04:42

or my welfare in terms of the intellectual environment of risk

01:04:47

through which you move every day i mean the number of times you’re offered the number of people who

01:04:54

prey upon you all of these things indicate that that the culture has not yet realized the power of its own possibilities.

01:05:06

How will it realize the power of its own possibilities?

01:05:11

I’m, at this point, pretty fatalistic.

01:05:14

Through time, I mean, I don’t feel I have to be here tonight

01:05:18

or you have to listen tonight for us to come around any kind of corner.

01:05:24

The momentum now is inevitable.

01:05:26

Now it’s about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with

01:05:34

what has become inevitable.

01:05:36

It wasn’t inevitable, but the 20th century made it inevitable through the Holocaust,

01:05:45

inevitable through the Holocaust, modernism, psychedelic drugs,

01:05:51

syncopated music, the dislocation of time and space through media.

01:05:56

All of that has now made this transformation inevitable. The human being adapted to the savannas of Africa 120,000 years ago

01:06:03

is just dragged forward

01:06:05

into the future by all of this.

01:06:07

And if you can get through life without trauma,

01:06:11

heartbreak, agony, murderous rage, fury, betrayal,

01:06:16

et cetera, et cetera, you’re a better man

01:06:19

or woman than I am for sure.

01:06:22

I don’t think anybody can get through the narrow neck of,

01:06:28

first of all, the incarnation in a body,

01:06:30

but more trying.

01:06:32

Incarnation inside the historical society

01:06:35

that is cannibalistic,

01:06:39

low-intentioned,

01:06:42

and with values that are completely formed and modeled on the marketplace.

01:06:49

So I think about all of this all the time and I feel great change.

01:06:56

I try to monitor it, especially in the realm of society and technology everything is redefined every 30 days every 60 days

01:07:10

redefined toward some kind of singularity some kind of extraordinary moment in the fractal pattern of historical unfold no fractals

01:07:30

are always repetitious always low levels build to higher levels but nevertheless

01:07:36

somehow intrinsically to the pattern there comes a moment where there’s a

01:07:42

apotheosis a breakthrough to a new level of understanding.

01:07:48

And then whatever the old world was,

01:07:51

it simply dissipates.

01:07:55

It goes away.

01:07:56

Not that there isn’t political struggle,

01:07:58

but that once the, call it karmic underpinnings

01:08:03

of a historical position,

01:08:09

especially an oppressive historical position,

01:08:12

once those underpinnings are articulated, revealed, shown in the light of day,

01:08:17

then the game cannot continue.

01:08:22

And I feel like we are interestingly in this

01:08:27

calendrical moment, we can

01:08:30

experience the calendar’s

01:08:32

transformation

01:08:33

or we can use

01:08:36

it as others are

01:08:37

using it to put forward

01:08:40

the idea that certain things

01:08:42

are now obsolete.

01:08:44

No longer to be practiced

01:08:47

outside the confines of the 20th century not part of the third millennium and I’m

01:08:54

thinking of fascism sexism racism all the division-based consequences of old-style politics.

01:09:08

And people say, well, where then do psychedelic drugs fit into all of this?

01:09:14

Or do they fit into it?

01:09:16

Of course they fit into it, because the felt presence of experience,

01:09:21

the reclaiming of the body, that’s the critical political battleground.

01:09:27

Your mind is now your own in some sense.

01:09:32

It was a mistake.

01:09:33

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.

01:09:35

But the acceleration of psychedelic use

01:09:39

in the 20th century, the explosive spread

01:09:42

of the internet, in some sense, it’s as though we have broken from the slaves’

01:09:48

quarters and are already milling in the streets.

01:09:52

But we don’t yet have the power or the understanding

01:09:55

to know where the centers of power are

01:09:59

and how it is that they disempower and manipulate us.

01:10:03

And that’s because we haven’t focused on the body the body and this I suppose then is the thing which gives the heroes thing

01:10:11

potency the the body is the battleground for these various definitions of humans

01:10:20

you know and heroes representing the erotic celebration of diversity is a

01:10:28

terrifying specter to hold up in front of constipated hierarchists who actually

01:10:38

have the illusion that they own the enterprise and nevertheless this is what they’re

01:10:45

looking for toward this is what was made inevitable by their own rapaciousness in

01:10:53

the past that they painted us so quickly into a corner of resource extraction and

01:11:00

and to disgust with media manipulation

01:11:05

that a breakout was inevitable, had to come.

01:11:12

You know, one of the things that has impressed me

01:11:16

as I go through all of this is,

01:11:21

well, my doctor brought it home to me

01:11:24

because he was saying to me as I buttoned up recently

01:11:27

after an examination, he said,

01:11:31

you know, in the 19th century, most people your age were dead.

01:11:36

This is true.

01:11:38

I’m 52 years, soon to be 52.

01:11:41

Very few people statistically reach that level.

01:11:46

And I think part of what’s happening,

01:11:48

and it’s odd to address an audience so young on this matter,

01:11:52

but here’s something your parents may not be telling you.

01:11:57

Culture as a con is only good for about 35 years on average.

01:12:05

I mean, some people are impressed with culture

01:12:07

until they go to the grave at 90.

01:12:10

Some people are thoroughly apprised of the fact

01:12:14

that it’s horse shit by the time they’re 19.

01:12:17

But the average person’s experience with culture

01:12:21

lasts about 35 or 40 years.

01:12:23

In the past, that was enough.

01:12:27

Most people then were ready to die without ever blowing

01:12:31

their whistle on the game.

01:12:33

What is happening here is we are living past the age, by

01:12:38

the millions, living past the age where cultural values

01:12:42

make any sense at all.

01:12:45

They simply are after the 10,000 piece of apple pie,

01:12:50

the 16 Mercedes, the 500 whatever.

01:12:55

It’s just seen to be intolerable, unbearable.

01:13:00

The agony that resides in matter that the surrealists were so prescient in insisting upon.

01:13:10

So culture generally is an infantilizing process.

01:13:16

And some French people have mentioned this,

01:13:19

but they didn’t really put it in a historical context

01:13:25

that this neotenizing trick, now so useful to advertising,

01:13:31

to create youth-crazed values in everybody,

01:13:35

it hastens the end of this culture game.

01:13:41

It hastens the awakening of many people to the fact that

01:13:45

the felt presence of immediate

01:13:47

experience is not negotiable.

01:13:50

It has no

01:13:52

price. And yet this is

01:13:54

what’s taken from you when

01:13:56

you go to the job,

01:13:58

when you dress

01:14:00

for the image, when you

01:14:02

kiss up to the power

01:14:04

establishment, when your kiss up to the power establishment,

01:14:05

when your time is turned into money,

01:14:09

the felt presence of immediate experience

01:14:11

is analogous to being enslaved.

01:14:15

I mean, let’s be frank about it, is enslaved.

01:14:18

Simply that the rules of the game have been changed.

01:14:28

Of course, it’s easy to say if you’re unemployed like me.

01:14:35

But on the other hand, I’m meeting my obligations somehow, always have, without ever truly working and without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for demand.

01:14:44

Of course, I have to deal dope to do this.

01:14:48

Once I passed that, it worked.

01:14:54

Well, I could go on in this vein for some time, as you see.

01:14:59

But the thoughts that I wanted to leave you with tonight on this,

01:15:03

because I feel like I am checking in

01:15:05

with, in some weird way,

01:15:07

my peer group

01:15:09

of, and maybe my

01:15:11

most critical group as well,

01:15:14

which is fine. I can’t,

01:15:15

we don’t need any gurus here.

01:15:17

We don’t need any laying down

01:15:19

the law. Anybody who tells you they

01:15:21

have a clue as to what’s

01:15:23

happening should be suspect for mental illness and delusions of grandeur.

01:15:31

But the thought is, and I haven’t said this yet,

01:15:36

but this is the conclusion from all of this,

01:15:38

is culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire

01:15:44

human beings have to close off experience,

01:15:48

to live with closure, to force closure.

01:15:52

And that’s why cultural trips are so bizarre,

01:15:55

you know, why they don’t make sense to anybody but the, like,

01:15:59

Witoto or the Waorani or the Americans or the Japanese.

01:16:03

If you’re not in psychoculture, it seems crazy.

01:16:06

The cultures don’t make sense

01:16:08

because they’re not trying to make sense.

01:16:10

What they’re trying to do is produce closure,

01:16:14

which then somehow makes a human being

01:16:18

who is living in the light of closure

01:16:20

a more manipulatable, a more malleable a lesser thing and so you know if the experience

01:16:30

of the 20th century didn’t do it for you if psychedelics didn’t do it for you i don’t know

01:16:38

what could do it for you the message coming back at all of us is live without closure.

01:16:47

That’s the honest position given that you are some kind of a talking monkey,

01:16:55

some kind of a primate, some kind of creature on a planet,

01:16:59

in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space.

01:17:03

In the face of that, life without closure

01:17:06

is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is.

01:17:10

If you have to inoculate yourself

01:17:12

against the various means of closure that are around,

01:17:17

psychedelics do that.

01:17:19

That’s why they are so politically

01:17:22

controversial and potent.

01:17:24

Because more than any other single act that

01:17:29

you may voluntarily undertake they pull the plug on the myth of cultural meaning they show that

01:17:41

these things are provisional and that beneath the level of culture

01:17:46

there is lurking this erotic

01:17:50

time and space bound

01:17:54

feeling defined

01:17:56

pre-linguistic mode of being

01:17:59

which is real being

01:18:02

not becoming

01:18:03

not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension,

01:18:10

the commodification of culture and delayed gravitation

01:18:13

and all these other buzzwords created,

01:18:15

but a deeper level of authentic feeling

01:18:19

was there all the time,

01:18:22

but is denied by the culture.

01:18:26

And if we don’t come back to that, if we don’t re-access that, then this historical thing, which

01:18:34

grinds so many people down, none of whom are here tonight,

01:18:38

I might add, they are lost in the barrios of third world

01:18:43

cities and in the disruptive environments created by this system.

01:18:49

But history will continue.

01:18:51

You know, I’m fond of quoting Stephan Develis,

01:18:55

where he says, Joyce’s character,

01:18:58

where he says,

01:19:00

history is the nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.

01:19:04

But it’s really, nightmare is not a strong enough metaphor.

01:19:09

It’s a narcoleptic paralysis.

01:19:12

It’s that horrible thing that happens at the edge of sleep.

01:19:16

It’s that place where the pro bono proctologists from other star systems

01:19:20

get their wedge into the scene.

01:19:23

And if you’ve never had that paralysis at the edge of sleep,

01:19:28

you don’t know the panic, the constriction that it engenders.

01:19:34

We’re really at a very terminal point

01:19:42

in the process of our historical unfoldment in the same way

01:19:47

that our hunter-gatherer phase led into agriculture and advanced role

01:19:55

specialization and urbanization and all that now we’re ready to make another

01:20:00

leap but this time it’s going to be done in the light of consciousness

01:20:05

because consciousness is what was garnered in the last leap and how this

01:20:12

is done it depends essentially on the collective state of mind how malleable

01:20:17

it is how a phobic the closure it, how open to the logos,

01:20:26

to the downloading of universal intent

01:20:30

into human understanding, which is what I would call the logos,

01:20:33

it is.

01:20:34

And finally, how deeply it operates

01:20:40

in the light of logos.

01:20:42

How much love is there in this culture?

01:20:46

How much love has been carried intact

01:20:49

from the plains of Africa through the Minoan civilization

01:20:55

and the medieval period and the spread of people

01:20:57

around the planet?

01:20:58

How much of what we call true human-ness

01:21:02

made the journey with us to this new time.

01:21:06

We’re going to find out.

01:21:08

We’re going to find out by pooling the love that is in each of us

01:21:13

in a form in which it is coextensively shared by all of us.

01:21:20

There may be many ways to talk about what this will feel like,

01:21:26

what it will look like, what it will look like,

01:21:30

but what it will be, if it works, is love.

01:21:38

If it isn’t love, then it’s less than a perfect sublimation of the alchemical purpose.

01:21:43

And less than perfect is now off the menu. So the only way up is out.

01:21:47

Up and out.

01:21:50

That’s all I have to say.

01:21:51

Thank you.

01:22:01

Thanks for putting up with what critics will surely describe as another meandering diatribe.

01:22:08

I know there are some people here from the novelty list.

01:22:11

It would be nice to have a flesh meet downstairs and anybody else who wants to chat,

01:22:17

and then we’ll get out of here and Olatunji is going to do percussion.

01:22:21

And if that ain’t the felt presence of immediate experience,

01:22:25

I don’t know.

01:22:31

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:34

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:22:40

And in case you’re wondering,

01:22:42

yes, I did leave his comment about meeting the group from the novelty list.

01:22:47

I left it in just to give a tingly feeling to our fellow salonners who were a part of that email list.

01:22:54

That until sometime after Terrence’s death was one of the most active lists I’ve ever been involved in.

01:23:01

So to all of Terrence’s friends in Hawaii, Manchester, England, and all points in

01:23:06

between who were a part of that group, I send my love and best wishes. And by the way, if you want

01:23:13

to follow those ideas Terrence was mentioning when he talked about research into the fact that we

01:23:19

seem to be making decisions before our conscious ego is aware that the decision has been made, Thank you. that I think Terrence is talking about. And as for his discussion about time travel,

01:23:45

well, wouldn’t you just love to hear what he would have to say

01:23:48

about the current iteration of World of Warcraft

01:23:51

or one of those other time-altering games?

01:23:55

Well, that’s about enough of my comments about these talks today.

01:23:59

Now I’ll let you add your own two cents in the comments section of our blog

01:24:03

or over on one of the forums at thegirlreport.com.

01:24:07

I do want to let you know, however, that if you aren’t subscribed to this podcast through iTunes, Yahoo, Google,

01:24:14

or one of the other RSS feed aggregators, you probably wondered why it had been so long since my last podcast.

01:24:22

That’s because I forgot to post the links to them on the drop-down menus over at matrixmasters.com, Thanks for watching. add the links. Then I received the following email from Spiral347. Hi, just letting you know

01:24:48

about a possible technical hitch with the psychedelic salon.

01:24:51

When I go to matrixmasters.com slash podcast, it does

01:24:56

not appear to have updated after podcast 167.

01:24:59

However, when I use iTunes, I see that we are actually up to podcast 173

01:25:04

now.

01:25:06

Great show, by the way.

01:25:08

Been listening faithfully for a couple of years.

01:25:11

Cheers, Spiral 347.

01:25:14

Well, thank you, 347.

01:25:21

Not just for the reminder, but for being so diplomatic and calling it a possible technical hitch.

01:25:26

It was very nice of you to put it that way, but now you know the truth.

01:25:28

Another helpful email came from A Deep Lust.

01:25:30

And you know, you guys,

01:25:32

you come up with some of the best handles I’ve heard.

01:25:34

Last week, I think it was,

01:25:36

we heard from Big Dusty Foot,

01:25:38

and today we have A Deep Lust,

01:25:40

who said,

01:25:42

Lorenzo, I hear that you and your wife’s

01:25:44

SanDisk MP3 players both broke.

01:25:46

They may have been the same model as mine.

01:25:49

If so, look for a small hole on one side.

01:25:52

It’s the reset button.

01:25:53

Poke it with a pen, toothpick, or likewise, and then try and turn it on.

01:25:57

Works for me.

01:25:58

Thanks for all the great work you do.

01:26:00

A Deep Lust.

01:26:01

Hey, thanks for the tip.

01:26:03

I did check our little one, the one

01:26:05

that my wife was using, but it’s

01:26:07

one of those real little minis, and

01:26:09

it doesn’t have that reset hole you

01:26:11

mentioned. However, I do remember

01:26:13

seeing that on the big one, but it’s been

01:26:15

so long since it died, I can’t remember where I

01:26:17

put it. However, this

01:26:19

weekend, I do plan to look for it again and

01:26:21

see if it works. But in any

01:26:23

event, hey, thanks for the tip,

01:26:25

and maybe some of our fellow slaughters will find it helpful too.

01:26:29

I guess another thing I should do is to give you my email address again.

01:26:33

I kind of stopped giving it out because I couldn’t keep up with the traffic.

01:26:37

What I had been doing with email is to answer the short ones, if I could,

01:26:42

in a few lines, and then save the long ones that had several questions

01:26:46

in them. And just now

01:26:47

I checked and discovered that there are

01:26:49

at this moment 476

01:26:52

messages in my to be answered

01:26:54

file. And since I’m not even

01:26:56

going to get to that file until summer

01:26:57

after my book comes out

01:26:59

the odds of getting a message through to me

01:27:02

that way diminish each day

01:27:03

as the spam increases.

01:27:06

That said, my email address is lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:27:11

But by far the best way I’ve found yet to stay in touch with a large number of people is through Facebook.

01:27:17

And I know you’re already getting tired of hearing about my new addiction.

01:27:22

But in the past, I’ve been active in Friendster, LinkedIn,

01:27:26

Tribe.net, MySpace. In fact, I think I still have accounts on some of those sites, but I never seem

01:27:32

to get back to them anymore. So I have a little experience in using this kind of tool, and so far

01:27:38

I’ve found Facebook to be heads and shoulders above the rest. However, there is one thing I

01:27:44

should let you know about how I use Facebook.

01:27:46

And if you’re on it yourself,

01:27:48

you know all about the hundreds of little

01:27:49

applications that people use to do

01:27:51

all kinds of things.

01:27:53

The first couple of days I was on it,

01:27:55

I accepted the poems or whatever,

01:27:57

but then I started getting a lot

01:27:59

of them. So I asked my son,

01:28:01

the one who got me onto Facebook

01:28:03

in the first place, how I should deal with all that.

01:28:06

And his advice was to just click the ignore button, unless I wanted to spend even more time in Facebook.

01:28:12

And now I understand that hackers are using some of those Facebook apps for phishing and other nefarious pursuits.

01:28:20

So please don’t take offense if you’ve been waiting for me to respond by typing one of those greetings or something.

01:28:26

I’m afraid I’ve ignored all of them.

01:28:28

But my Facebook email is up to date, and I do manage to visit the homepage of all of my friends from time to time as I comment on things that you’ve posted.

01:28:39

So in a way, I guess Facebook is sort of like a psychedelic drug.

01:28:44

You know, you can talk

01:28:45

about them both all day long, but until you experience it for yourself, the talk doesn’t

01:28:50

do much for you. And speaking of talk, for our fellow salonners who have been asking

01:28:55

for more talks by Bruce Dahmer, I received the following email from my friend Tom Barbalay

01:29:01

the other day, and he’s the host of biota.org and Ape Reality podcasts.

01:29:06

And here’s what he had to say.

01:29:08

Bruce Dahmer passed me a variety of photos, audio, and video from his time at the Center for Fundamental Living Technology a couple of days ago.

01:29:17

I hope to have the talk he gave about the EvoGrid et al. in the Biota podcast in the next day or so.

01:29:22

EvoGrid at all in the Biota podcast in the next day or so.

01:29:24

For folks interested in

01:29:25

what a wet artificial life lab

01:29:27

looks like, here is a small

01:29:29

section of Bruce’s photos.

01:29:32

And he sent me a link that I’ll post

01:29:33

with the program notes.

01:29:36

And if you haven’t seen the animation

01:29:38

of the EvoGrid yet,

01:29:39

you might want to go to Damer.com

01:29:42

and check that out.

01:29:44

Now, let’s see here.

01:29:46

Ah, yes.

01:29:47

Yesterday, I pinged Nick Sand to see how his recovery is coming along,

01:29:52

and he told me that while he can’t travel just yet, he is feeling pretty good.

01:29:56

So please keep St. Nick in your thoughts.

01:29:59

Although he is one of our most esteemed elders,

01:30:02

he certainly isn’t old enough to leave us on our own just yet.

01:30:06

So get a lot of rest, Nick, because we still have many adventures ahead of us.

01:30:12

And now there’s one closing thought I’d like to leave you with.

01:30:16

If you think back for a moment to the part in Terrence’s first talk where he retold his theory about the mushroom-eating apes,

01:30:24

who were our very distant ancestors,

01:30:26

and then recall his point that until it was an ecological catastrophe

01:30:31

that brought them down from the forest canopy,

01:30:34

they were essentially at an evolutionary dead end.

01:30:39

Could it be that once again we talking apes have reached an evolutionary dead end,

01:30:44

one that can only

01:30:46

be averted by another ecological disaster? Is that what’s underway right now? Who knows?

01:30:54

But maybe our collective consciousness has prompted us to accelerate the normal cycles

01:31:00

of climate change in order to catalyze another great advance in consciousness.

01:31:06

Well, at least it’s fun to speculate about such things, isn’t it?

01:31:12

And now it’s time to go once again, and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you

01:31:18

that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for

01:31:23

you to use in your own audio projects

01:31:25

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

01:31:30

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

01:31:37

and you can find that at psychedelicsalon.org, which is also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:31:44

psychedelicsalon.org, which is also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.

01:31:50

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:31:52

Be well, my friends.