Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“Is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? I mean it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? … I think so.”
“I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy, and I forget that not everyone is so fortunate.”
“What I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.”
“An added wrinkle [to the story of ever-increasing complexity] is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound.”
“I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game. If in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama. And in this particular act of the cosmic drama we hold a very central role. We are at the pinnacle of the expression of the complexification in the animal world.”
“Since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we’re getting from the impact of human culture on the Earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere …”
“History is a state of incredible destabilization. It’s a chaostrophy in the process of happening.”
“It’s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist. Because if it were to exist it would impart to reality a purpose. … Science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose.”
“Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable Omega point.”
“So why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so. I think the out-of-control-ness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control. I think that if it’s out of control then our side is winning.”
“We represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.”
“In our species complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution, and instead historical time is generated.”
“It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history. History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It’s a kind of metamorphosis. It’s an episode in the life of a species.”
“Culture is merely clothing on the human experience.”
“The body is the nexus of the mystery of life, and our culture takes us out of the body.”
“More and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious, or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization. It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian Mind.”
“We now hold, through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that…
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And today we have Jason W. to thank for sending us a nice donation to help pay some of the expenses involved in getting these podcasts out on the airwaves,
00:00:37 ►
or on the light waves, or whatever waves they come to you on.
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So, hey, thanks a lot, Jason. I appreciate your support. Now, without any further ado, the talk I’m going to play for
00:00:46 ►
us today is another one that came out of a box of tapes that Terrence McKenna left with a friend
00:00:52 ►
of mine a long time ago. And while copies of this particular talk have been floating around the net
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for a long time, I thought it was about time to bring it into the salon as well. Actually, I have played a few bits and pieces of this lecture before, but not the whole talk.
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At least I don’t think I have.
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But in any event, it’s been a long time since I last heard it all the way through,
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and like an old Grateful Dead bootleg, it still sounds good to me.
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So let’s see what you think.
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me, so let’s see what you think.
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So everyone can hear, yes? I can hear anyway. Good. Well, I want to thank Mandala Books,
00:01:36 ►
Jan. I want to thank Jay Weidner for bringing me back to
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Seattle, the home of real grunge and real
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peculiarity. Before I plunge into this, I
00:01:50 ►
should tell you, because Harper would like me to, that the invisible landscape, after
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years and years of being out of print, is shipping right now. I don’t know if it’s in the bookstores, but it’s real. And True
00:02:07 ►
Hallucinations is going into paper at the same time, so if you couldn’t afford the 22,
00:02:13 ►
wait for the 12, or the 2012. What I wanted to talk about tonight, simply because it’s the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair at the moment,
00:02:32 ►
is I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton.
00:02:36 ►
And what I could have called it is Eros and the Eschaton, What Science Forgot.
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science forgot because somebody asked me recently, is there any permission to hope?
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More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope?
00:03:02 ►
I mean, it’s easy to hope if you’re stupid, but is there any basis for intelligent people to hope?
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And I wanted to deal with that because I think so.
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I mean, it was to me a shocking question
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because I live in an aura of hope
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because I live in a twilight world
00:03:19 ►
of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy.
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And I forget that not everyone is so fortunate
00:03:29 ►
and that there’s a lot of despair and uncertainty out there. So I wanted to talk about this.
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I’ll talk for a while and then we’ll break and have an intermission.
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I’ll sign books if anybody needs a book signed,
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and then we’ll come back and do Q&A on this until we’re sick of it, basically.
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Yeah, and if there’s a technician adjusting this,
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help me out a little bit.
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Eros and the eschaton, these are the two areas that I think compromise the old paradigm and give permission to hope. And strangely, neither of these words is that well-known,
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which gives you a measure of how completely the dominator position has squelched, subverted,
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and downplayed any opposition to its worldview.
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Eros we know about in some kind of devalued, sticky, kind of glitzy way,
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because we get it in the eroticization of media and society. But really what eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature,
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a kind of all-pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another.
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This is not permitted in the official worldview of our civilization,
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which is science.
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The world of inorganic chemistry is not thought to make any statement about the organic world,
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and the organic world is not thought to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought.
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There are, imagine, to be clear breaks in these categories.
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I had a biologist tell me once,
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if genes aren’t involved, it ain’t evolution.
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So that means you can’t talk about the evolution of the earth as a physical body. You can’t talk about the evolution of human social institutions. Evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology and appropriate nowhere else. And this brings me then to the first factor easily discerned by anybody who has
00:06:30 ►
their eyes open that compromises and erodes the hopeless existential view of the world
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that we’re getting from science. And that is the idea that nature is, in fact, across all scales and all levels
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of phenomena, a unity.
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It’s not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going
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around a star and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational center of a galaxy,
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it’s no coincidence that these systems exhibit the same kind of order on different scales.
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And yet science would say that is a coincidence. You know, P.W. Bridgman, who was a philosopher of science,
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defined coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.
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It means that, you know, you’ve overlooked something,
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and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a set of relationships whose causuistry, whose relationships to each other, are simply hidden from you.
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It’s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this. What I’ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity.
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This is a great general natural law that your own senses will confirm for you,
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but that has never been allowed into the canon of science.
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And what I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the following.
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When the universe was born in the dubious and controversial circumstance
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called the Big Bang.
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It was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons.
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It was the simplest that it could possibly be.
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There were no atoms.
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There were no molecules.
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There were no highly organized systems of any kind.
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There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy.
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And as the universe cooled, simply cooled,
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new kinds of phenomena, we say, emerged out of the situation. As the universe cooled, atomic nuclei could form,
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and electrons could settle into stable orbits. As the universe further cooled, the chemical bond became a possibility.
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Still later, the hydrogen bond, which is a weaker bond,
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which is the basis of biology.
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So as the universe aged, it complexified.
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This is so obvious that it’s never really been challenged, but on the other hand, it’s never
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been embraced as a general and dependable principle either. Follow it through with me.
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Out of atomic systems come chemical systems. Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond,
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the carbon bond, complex chemistry that is prebiotic or organic.
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Out of that chemistry come the macro-physical systems
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that we call membranes, gels, charge transfer complexes, this sort of thing.
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These systems are the chemical preconditions for life, simple life, the life of the prokaryotes,
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the life of naked, unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet.
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Out of that life come eukaryotes, nucleated cells, and then complex colonies of cells,
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and then cell specialization, leading to higher animals, leading to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to technologies,
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leading to globe-girdling, electronically-based,
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information-transfer-oriented cultures like ourselves.
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Someone said, what’s so progressive about media?
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It’s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.
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It can be. It can be.
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Well, so this is very interesting,
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that apparently the way the universe works
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is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity, chemical, electrical,
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social, biological, whatever, new forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological
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boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry,
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but it is more than complex chemistry.
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Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life,
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and yet it is more than animal life.
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So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science,
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that out of complexity emerges greater complexity.
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We could almost say that the universe, nature,
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is a novelty-conserving or complexity-conserving engine.
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It makes complexity, and it preserves it
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and it uses it as the basis for further
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complexity. Now, there’s more to
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this than simply that. I think we all
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observationally could agree with what has been said so
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far. The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle,
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is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty,
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proceeds more quickly than the stage that preceded it.
00:13:43 ►
This is very profound
00:13:45 ►
because if accepted as a serious first principle,
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it ends the marginalization of our own species
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to the level of spectator status
00:14:00 ►
in a universe that knows nothing of us
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and cares nothing for us. This is the most advanced
00:14:09 ►
position that modern science will allow us. Spectators to a drama we didn’t write,
00:14:17 ►
shouldn’t expect to understand, and cannot influence. But I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game,
00:14:28 ►
if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty
00:14:33 ►
is what the universe is striving for,
00:14:36 ►
then suddenly our own human enterprise,
00:14:41 ►
previously marginalized,
00:14:43 ►
takes on an immense new importance.
00:14:49 ►
We are apparently players in the cosmic drama,
00:14:55 ►
and in this particular act of the cosmic drama, we hold a very central role. We are at the pinnacle of the expression of complexification in the animal world,
00:15:14 ►
and somehow this complexity which is concentrated in us
00:15:20 ►
has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization and into this mysterious
00:15:29 ►
domain which we call culture, language, consciousness, higher values.
00:15:36 ►
Each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded
00:15:44 ►
it.
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After the initial Big Bang, there was a period of billions of years when the universe cooled, stars condensed, planetary systems formed,
00:15:57 ►
and then the quickening process crossed an invisible rubicon into the domain of animal and biological organization.
00:16:11 ►
Well, you see, since the rise of Western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama.
00:16:28 ►
But we now know from the feedback that we’re getting
00:16:33 ►
from the impact of human culture on the Earth
00:16:38 ►
that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans,
00:16:44 ►
the composition of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere,
00:16:46 ►
the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet, so forth and so on.
00:16:53 ►
A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature
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and created a new world, an epigenetic world, meaning a world not based
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on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information, but a world
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based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination
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and concretized in three-dimensional space as choppers, arrow points, particle accelerators,
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gene sequencers, spacecraft, what have you. All of this complexification occurring at a faster and faster rate.
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And this brings me then to the second quality or phenomena
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that science has overlooked,
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which is the acceleration of a complexification, that the early history
00:18:08 ►
of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness.
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Then life took hold in the oceans of this planet, a quickening of process and evolution,
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but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of years
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to clock major change.
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Then, the conquest of the land,
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higher animals, higher exposure to radiation,
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faster change, species following species,
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one upon another.
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Then, 50,000, 100,000, a million years ago,
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anyway, recently,
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the crossover into the domain of culture,
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tool making, myth making,
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dance, poetry, song, story,
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and that set the stage for the fall into history.
00:19:06 ►
The incredibly unusual and self-consuming process
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that has been going on for the past 15 or 20,000 years,
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a biological snap of the finger,
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and yet in that time, everything that we call human, everything that we associate with higher values has been adumbrated, elaborated, created,
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set in place by one species, ourselves. This acceleration of time or complexity shows no sign of slowing down.
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In fact, within the fabric of our own lives, we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute,
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feel it speeding up, taking hold.
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It’s a cliché that time is moving faster and faster, a cliche of the mass media.
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But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage,
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that this is actually happening to the space-time matrix, that time is in fact speeding up,
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that history, in which we are embedded because our life of 50 to 80 years
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is so ephemeral on a scale of 10 to 15,000 years,
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but nevertheless, history is a state of incredible destabilization.
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It’s a chaostrophe in the process of happening.
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It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection,
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and it ends with a global internet of electronic information transfer
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and a language using species hurling its instruments toward the stars.
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There is no reason for us to suppose
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that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down or be deflected.
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It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature
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that this acceleration was built in.
00:21:32 ►
What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals
00:21:37 ►
is that the speed of involution toward concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it
00:21:49 ►
within the confines of our own lives.
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There has been more change since 1960
00:21:55 ►
than in the previous several thousand years.
00:21:58 ►
There has been more change since 1992
00:22:02 ►
than in the previous thousand years. Change is accelerating. Invention,
00:22:10 ►
connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematical algorithms, connectivity of people, social
00:22:17 ►
systems, this is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one, not the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, the IMF, no one is in charge of this process.
00:22:32 ►
This is what makes history so interesting.
00:22:35 ►
It’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.
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This is why I’m not particularly sympathetic to conspiracy theory.
00:22:48 ►
Because I can’t make the leap to faith that would cause you to believe anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it.
00:22:57 ►
I mean, conspiracies, of course, we have conspiracies up the kazoo, but none of them are succeeding. They’re all being swept away, compromised, astonished by new information, and endlessly agonized.
00:23:15 ►
So, two factors relating to Eros.
00:23:20 ►
The movement into complexity and the fact that that movement goes ever faster.
00:23:28 ►
And the second quality, the acceleration of the movement into novelty, leads me to the third point, which is, I suppose, more controversial.
00:23:48 ►
controversial and I am frankly willing to admit that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience I mean science is the
00:23:56 ►
exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise
00:24:09 ►
and say we need a science beyond science.
00:24:13 ►
We need a science which plays with a full deck.
00:24:17 ►
And the reason the psychedelic experience is so important here
00:24:22 ►
is not some namby-pamby notion that it expands consciousness
00:24:28 ►
or it makes you more perceptive or something like that. I mean, that is all true, but it
00:24:34 ►
isn’t strongly enough put. A cultural point of view is like a crystal. You have an amorphous cultural medium, which at certain
00:24:49 ►
temperatures will form a crystal of cultural convention, if you will. And within the geometry
00:24:59 ►
of that crystal, certain things make sense and certain things are excluded from making sense.
00:25:05 ►
Science is a condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking assumptions.
00:25:15 ►
Assumptions such as matter is primary, mind is tertiary, causality works from the past into the future, so forth and so on. What psychedelics
00:25:29 ►
do in terms of their impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings is they withdraw
00:25:38 ►
cultural programming. They dissolve cultural assumptions. They lift you out of that reassuring crystalline
00:25:50 ►
matrix of interlocking truths which are lies. And instead, they throw you into the presence
00:25:59 ►
of the great who knows, the mystery, the mystery that has been banished from Western thought
00:26:07 ►
since the rise of Christianity
00:26:09 ►
and the suppression of the mystery religions.
00:26:14 ►
Now, the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience
00:26:20 ►
is not that it makes you smarter,
00:26:24 ►
a kind of simple-minded idea, paradoxically,
00:26:28 ►
or the idea that you are paying attention, or the idea that it’s some kind of magnifying glass
00:26:39 ►
into the personal unconscious, your trauma, your childhood memories, the satanic abuse your parents laid on you,
00:26:49 ►
so forth and so on. The model which I like is a geometric model and says simply that
00:26:58 ►
since the rise of the Greek alphabet, print, linear thinking, and science,
00:27:06 ►
we have become imprisoned in a causal universe of material connectivity.
00:27:14 ►
And that this is a cultural myth,
00:27:16 ►
as much as believing that we are the sons and daughters of the great father
00:27:23 ►
who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak.
00:27:27 ►
I mean, these are just cultural myths.
00:27:32 ►
What is revealed through the psychedelic experience, I think,
00:27:37 ►
is a higher dimensional perspective on reality.
00:27:41 ►
And I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense.
00:27:50 ►
Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural assumptions
00:27:55 ►
and can look down with the kind of godlike understanding
00:28:01 ►
that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over a landscape previously only viewed from the ground.
00:28:09 ►
In other words, from the vantage point of the psychedelic experience, the cultural landscape is seen more nearly in its correct perspective,
00:28:21 ►
seen as historically bounded, spatially and intellectually bounded.
00:28:28 ►
Now, it’s no coincidence that if you analyze biology, what it is, it’s a kind of conquest of dimensionality. The earliest forms of life were probably slimes of some sort, stabilized on a clay surface, immobile, unable to perceive light, with no sense of time, merely a fingernail or a toehold in existence.
00:29:04 ►
toehold in existence. And then if you look at the entire fossil record, what you see
00:29:07 ►
is the evolution of senses, sensory
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perceptors and organs of locomotion.
00:29:16 ►
The perceptors, the eye, the hand,
00:29:20 ►
bring into the cognitive field
00:29:24 ►
the sense of things at a distance.
00:29:29 ►
And then language provides models for these things at a distance.
00:29:34 ►
Similarly, fins, legs, and so forth, means of locomotion, carry us through space.
00:29:44 ►
This is a journey of dimensionality.
00:29:47 ►
And essentially what animals are that plants are not
00:29:51 ►
are life forms mobile in a very conscious way
00:29:56 ►
in the spatial dimension.
00:29:58 ►
This is why, from the point of view of evolutionary biologists,
00:30:02 ►
animals are somehow more advanced than plants.
00:30:06 ►
Well, if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria, then notice that we again occupy
00:30:19 ►
a special and privileged position in nature, because we can not only run with the best of them,
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see with the best of them,
00:30:31 ►
but we can remember and anticipate like crazy.
00:30:36 ►
And other animals are not doing this.
00:30:39 ►
Other animals may imprint past situations of danger or opportunity, but they do not analyze experience
00:30:48 ►
and extrapolate it toward the hidden domain of the future. And consciousness is the generalized
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word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past
00:31:09 ►
and builds a model of the future
00:31:14 ►
and then suspends the perceiving organism
00:31:18 ►
in this magical moment called the now
00:31:21 ►
where the past is coordinated
00:31:24 ►
for the purpose of navigating the future.
00:31:27 ►
McLuhan called it driving with the rear view mirror, and the only thing good about it is
00:31:32 ►
it’s better than driving with no mirror at all. what this conquest of dimensionality comes to be
00:31:48 ►
in the presence of psychedelics
00:31:51 ►
is an anticipation of the future.
00:31:56 ►
We can anticipate the future.
00:31:59 ►
We know to, within microseconds, when the sun will rise.
00:32:03 ►
We know within a few percentage points where the prime rate will be in six months.
00:32:11 ►
Some things we can predict fairly closely, some things with less precision.
00:32:17 ►
But the perception of the future is very important to us.
00:32:21 ►
It’s very important to us.
00:32:28 ►
When we marry the need to perceive the future with the psychedelic experience,
00:32:38 ►
I believe we come up with data that is very, very difficult for science to come to terms with. And this is the third item, or really the second item in the list, what science forgot. It’s what I call the eschaton. Now, eschaton is a rare word until very recently unheard outside schools of theology, which I understand were a dying enterprise.
00:33:51 ►
enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word esk, which just means the end. The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing. And it’s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist, because if it were to exist, it would impart to reality a purpose, you see. then it’s like a goal or an attraction point or an energy sink toward which historical process is being moved.
00:33:57 ►
And science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose.
00:34:05 ►
If you are not involved in the sciences, this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you. If you are a workbench scientist or a theoretician, you know that this is what’s called the problem of teleology. It is because
00:34:13 ►
modern science defined itself in the 19th century when the reigning philosophy was deism.
00:34:23 ►
when the reigning philosophy was deism,
00:34:29 ►
and deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God, and God wound this clock and has walked away from it,
00:34:34 ►
and the clock will eventually run down.
00:34:37 ►
That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century,
00:34:44 ►
was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century.
00:34:53 ►
And so they said, we must create a theory of reality that does not require a goal,
00:34:55 ►
does not require a purpose.
00:34:58 ►
Everything must be pushed from the past. Nothing must be pulled toward the future.
00:35:02 ►
be pulled toward the future.
00:35:13 ►
The problem with this is that it does not fulfill our intuitions about reality.
00:35:28 ►
We can see that evolution, biological evolution, has built on chemical systems. We can see that social and historical systems build on biology.
00:35:36 ►
As people with open minds, or as open as they can be inside this culture, we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose.
00:35:41 ►
And it is dramatically underscored by the psychedelic experience, which takes the raw material of your life, your culture, your history, and tells you this is not an existential mishmash to be lived out with dignity because there’s nothing else to be done with it, some kind of Camusian why-not affirmation. It says no. It says, you know, your reality is a coherent cosmos, and embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose, is a microscopic reflection of the larger purpose
00:36:29 ►
that is built into the universe.
00:36:33 ►
Now, this is not just blowing smoke in the sense of it’s a nice idea,
00:36:41 ►
or it’s like a religious idea, like saying Jesus loves you and so feel all right about yourself. It isn’t like that. It’s a theory about reality that has teeth, because reality is actually following the script that this particular version of reality dictates. Reality is accelerating toward an unimaginable
00:37:08 ►
omega point. We are
00:37:11 ►
the inheritors of immense momentum
00:37:15 ►
in our social systems, our philosophical
00:37:20 ►
and scientific and technological
00:37:23 ►
approaches to the world.
00:37:26 ►
Because we’re driving the historical vehicle with a rear-view mirror,
00:37:32 ►
it appears to us that we’re headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour.
00:37:38 ►
It appears that we are destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans,
00:37:50 ►
destroying the earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future, so forth and so on.
00:37:56 ►
I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges.
00:38:07 ►
One by one, we’re burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom-dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rainforests of five million years ago. We can’t even go back to the era of
00:38:15 ►
Cayuse and Six Shooter of 200 years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape. And
00:38:29 ►
this question, you know, is there cause for optimism? The answer is it depends on where
00:38:35 ►
you placed your bets. You know, if you placed your bets on male-dominated institutions based on consumer fetishism,
00:38:48 ►
propaganda, classism, and materialism,
00:38:53 ►
then God help you, you should call your broker.
00:38:57 ►
If, on the other hand, you’ve recognized that a lifeboat strategy
00:39:05 ►
is involved here
00:39:07 ►
that what is really important
00:39:09 ►
is empowering
00:39:12 ►
personal experience
00:39:14 ►
backing off
00:39:16 ►
from consumer
00:39:18 ►
object fetishism
00:39:20 ►
freeing the mind
00:39:22 ►
empowering
00:39:24 ►
the imagination,
00:39:26 ►
then in that case, I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on.
00:39:31 ►
You know, there’s a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement,
00:39:39 ►
and it’s usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest or in Tajikistan
00:39:46 ►
making their rugs or milking their camels or something.
00:39:51 ►
And isn’t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture
00:39:58 ►
and shopping by remote?
00:40:03 ►
But in fact, all culture
00:40:06 ►
is being destroyed.
00:40:09 ►
All culture
00:40:10 ►
is being sold
00:40:12 ►
down the river
00:40:13 ►
by the sorts of people who want to turn
00:40:16 ►
the entire planet into an
00:40:17 ►
international airport arrival
00:40:19 ►
concourse. And that’s
00:40:22 ►
not the victory of somebody’s
00:40:24 ►
culture over somebody else’s culture nobody ever
00:40:27 ►
had a culture like that that’s just a call the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola
00:40:33 ►
over good taste and good sense well If I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of the ditch,
00:40:55 ►
I would be very despairing.
00:40:58 ►
As I said, nobody’s in charge.
00:41:00 ►
Not the IMF, the Pope, the Communist Party, the Jews.
00:41:04 ►
No, no, no. Nobody has their finger on
00:41:08 ►
what’s going on. So then why hope? Isn’t it just a runaway train out of control? I don’t think so.
00:41:16 ►
I think the out of control-ness is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of?
00:41:29 ►
You and I never controlled it in the first place.
00:41:33 ►
Why are we anxious about the fact that it’s out of control?
00:41:37 ►
I think if it’s out of control, then our side is winning.
00:41:42 ►
then our side is winning.
00:41:52 ►
To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience is this thing which I call the eschaton.
00:41:56 ►
And I want to talk about it a little bit this evening
00:41:58 ►
because I think it is the hardest thing for people to grasp
00:42:02 ►
about my particular rap.
00:42:06 ►
And, you know, sometimes I’ve talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism,
00:42:13 ►
techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on.
00:42:18 ►
I’m approaching this this evening as a graduate seminar.
00:42:22 ►
I figure everybody has their little mojo kit and their particular
00:42:27 ►
way of approaching these things. And then the question is, you know, what kind of conclusions
00:42:32 ►
can we draw? And the conclusion I draw is, and this is sort of pulling together what I said before. We are central to the human drama and to the drama of nature
00:42:48 ►
and process on this planet. The opposition, which is science, well, first let me say this.
00:42:59 ►
Every model of the universe has a hard swallow. What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there’s something slightly fishy about it.
00:43:16 ►
The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang.
00:43:23 ►
Now let’s give this a little attention here.
00:43:27 ►
This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant.
00:43:38 ►
Well, now before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not,
00:43:51 ►
notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely
00:43:58 ►
to be believed. I mean, I defy anyone. It’s just the limit case for unlikelihood
00:44:05 ►
that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason.
00:44:11 ►
I mean, if you believe that,
00:44:12 ►
my family has a bridge across the Hudson River
00:44:15 ►
that will give you a lease option for $5.
00:44:19 ►
It makes no sense.
00:44:22 ►
It is, in fact, no different than saying,
00:44:27 ►
and God said, let there be light.
00:44:31 ►
And what the philosophers of science are saying is, give us one free miracle,
00:44:34 ►
and we will roll from that point forward,
00:44:41 ►
from the birth of time to the crack of doom,
00:44:45 ►
just one free miracle,
00:44:48 ►
and then it will all unravel according to natural law
00:44:52 ►
and these bizarre equations which nobody can understand
00:44:55 ►
but which are so holy in this enterprise.
00:44:59 ►
Well, I say then, if science gets one free miracle,
00:45:03 ►
then everybody gets one free miracle, then everybody gets one free miracle. And I perceive
00:45:09 ►
that it is true when you build these large-scale cosmogonic theories that you have to have a kind
00:45:18 ►
of an umbilical cord or a point to start from that is different from all other points in the system.
00:45:25 ►
So if we have to have a singularity in our modeling of what reality is,
00:45:33 ►
let’s make it as modest and as non-unlikely a singularity as possible.
00:45:45 ►
The singularity that arises for no reason
00:45:48 ►
in absolutely empty space instantly
00:45:51 ►
is the least likely of all singularities.
00:45:55 ►
Doesn’t it seem more likely,
00:45:58 ►
if we have to have a singularity,
00:46:00 ►
that it occurs in a domain with a rich history,
00:46:05 ►
with many causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity.
00:46:14 ►
In other words, to put it simply, if you have to have a singularity,
00:46:18 ►
doesn’t it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the beginning. And I think this is the great breakthrough
00:46:29 ►
of psychedelics and shamanism, that science got it absolutely wrong. The universe didn’t
00:46:36 ►
begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe began or would even presume to judge. But the universe ends in a singularity.
00:46:47 ►
It has been growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel
00:46:54 ►
every passing moment since it burst into existence.
00:46:59 ►
And if that’s true, then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We’re not mere spectators,
00:47:10 ►
or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human
00:47:19 ►
experience is the main event. The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision
00:47:29 ►
that occurs inside the human heart-mind-body interface
00:47:34 ►
is the most complex phenomenon in the universe.
00:47:41 ►
Now, even the physicalists will agree that the human neocortex represents the most
00:47:49 ►
densely ramified matter known to exist in the biological world. And you don’t have to be a
00:47:57 ►
rocket scientist to see that human society, human history, human art, human literature,
00:48:16 ►
represent things for which there is no analog in the world of wasps, groundhogs, killer whales, and so forth and so on.
00:48:23 ►
In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself. And in our species, time has accelerated.
00:48:29 ►
Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation
00:48:35 ►
that characterizes biological evolution.
00:48:38 ►
And instead, historical time is generated.
00:48:43 ►
historical time is generated. And so I believe that science and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience
00:48:51 ►
and the way in which science has used then law to suppress its rival in this case arises out of a profound discomfort on the part of science about this future state
00:49:10 ►
of complexification that is clearly the grail, the dwell point, the end point of the human
00:49:20 ►
historical process. No one of us, I think, can imagine that history could go on for
00:49:28 ►
another thousand years. I mean, what would it look like at the current rate of
00:49:33 ►
population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity,
00:49:39 ►
depletion of resources, the atmosphere? It is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history.
00:49:48 ►
History then is ending.
00:49:51 ►
History is a kind of gestation process.
00:49:54 ►
It’s a kind of metamorphosis.
00:49:57 ►
It’s an episode in the life of a species.
00:50:01 ►
If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly,
00:50:08 ►
we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is, for all
00:50:15 ►
practical purposes, enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted as an entirely different kind of organism,
00:50:26 ►
with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs,
00:50:31 ►
a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before,
00:50:35 ►
with a different kind of feeding apparatus.
00:50:39 ►
This is what’s happening to us.
00:50:41 ►
History is a process of metamorphosis. It’s a pupation stage. It begins
00:50:48 ►
with naked monkeys, and it ends with a human-machine-planet-girdling interface capable
00:50:58 ►
of releasing the energies that light the stars. And it lasts about 15 or 20,000 years.
00:51:06 ►
And during that period,
00:51:07 ►
the entire process hangs in the balance.
00:51:11 ►
It’s a period of high risk.
00:51:12 ►
It’s like what a butterfly is doing in a cocoon
00:51:16 ►
or what is happening to a child in the womb.
00:51:20 ►
It’s a gestation process
00:51:21 ►
where one form of life is being changed into another.
00:51:26 ►
Well, this would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety, I imagine,
00:51:33 ►
as history builds to its ever more climactic and horrifying crescendo,
00:51:40 ►
and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on,
00:51:44 ►
and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what’s going on were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism.
00:51:50 ►
Remember I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption?
00:51:58 ►
Well, one of the strongest cemeteries in our cultural crystal is the cemetery that gathers around the concept of past and future.
00:52:10 ►
The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold.
00:52:24 ►
This is not a metaphor.
00:52:27 ►
It’s what’s really going on.
00:52:29 ►
If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment,
00:52:34 ►
it is about predicting weather,
00:52:41 ►
predicting game movement,
00:52:43 ►
and curing disease.
00:52:45 ►
If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future,
00:52:53 ►
each one of us would be able to do these things.
00:52:56 ►
Predicting the weather, you just look into next week and there it is.
00:53:02 ►
Predicting the movement of games, same deal.
00:53:06 ►
Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of your patients with a pre-knowledge
00:53:13 ►
of who will get well and who will not get well.
00:53:16 ►
So it’s as though the members of the culture are imprisoned in linear time and the shaman
00:53:24 ►
is not. And why not? Because the shaman
00:53:29 ►
has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture, sanctioned by its educational processes,
00:53:38 ►
its habits, its attitudes. And into that vacuum, created by the perturbation of these cultural values
00:53:49 ►
rushes the raw, unanalyzed datum of reality.
00:53:56 ►
This is what Aldous Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness.
00:54:03 ►
And suddenly, culture is seen to be a relative phenomena. The stockbroker,
00:54:09 ►
no different from the rainforest shaman, each somewhat similar to the Trobriand Islander
00:54:17 ►
or the Eskimo. Culture is simply clothing upon the human experience. But the human organism, outside the confines of culture,
00:54:28 ►
in a direct relationship to nature, transcends time and space.
00:54:34 ►
This was a fact, I believe, that was known in prehistory,
00:54:40 ►
and in fact was the source of Paleolithic values,
00:54:44 ►
and, in fact, was the source of Paleolithic values,
00:54:50 ►
which were not material, not linear, not surplus-oriented,
00:54:55 ►
not class-oriented, not power-oriented, but rather oriented toward a kind of egalitarian partnership
00:55:00 ►
in an environment of great material simplicity.
00:55:06 ►
Human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years, with poetry, with
00:55:11 ►
dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor, but not with the paralyzing
00:55:20 ►
and toxic artifacts of the late-evolving machine-workshipping,
00:55:26 ►
monotheistic, linear, fanatic, alphabet-tight-ass straight culture that we are a part of.
00:55:36 ►
So now, at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for Western civilization,
00:55:47 ►
which has for a thousand years called all the shots
00:55:50 ►
and shoved itself down everybody’s throat, whether they liked it or not.
00:55:54 ►
In the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology
00:55:58 ►
and ethnography and ethnomedicine and botany,
00:56:02 ►
the news has arrived that these quote-unquote primitive people
00:56:07 ►
are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination,
00:56:17 ►
a world we didn’t even know exists, a world that is as distant to us as the world at the
00:56:24 ►
heart of the atom is from the rainforest fishermen.
00:56:29 ►
And because our own cultural values seem a little shoddy at this moment,
00:56:36 ►
those on the fringes of Western civilization have begun to seek alternatives, begun to look at alternative religions, yoga, tantra, Buddhism, Zen, whatever,
00:56:52 ►
alternative approaches to diet, vegetarianism, macrobiotics, so forth and so on,
00:56:59 ►
and alternative approaches to authentic experience, which means psychedelics.
00:57:07 ►
In the early stage of psychedelic involvement,
00:57:11 ►
everyone was sort of flying under the banner of hands-on Freudianism or hands-on Jungianism.
00:57:19 ►
You know, we’re going to see those archetypes.
00:57:21 ►
We’re going to confront those sexual repressions.
00:57:24 ►
We’re going to journey those archetypes. We’re going to confront those sexual repressions. We’re going to journey into those traumatic childhood memories. Now it’s understood, I think, that those metaphors were fairly inadequate and that actually we stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary size, the world of the high Paleolithic, which is a Gaian world, a world of feeling, not analytical intellectual constructs, but a world of empowered feeling, empathy, and intuitive understanding, an understanding that doesn’t arise in a context of Greek logic,
00:58:08 ►
but in a context of animal knowing in the authentic mode of the body.
00:58:16 ►
So just to bring it all around here, the great exhibit which we must always
00:58:27 ►
keep in front of ourselves and our critics is
00:58:31 ►
the mystery of the human mind and body.
00:58:36 ►
No one knows how it is that I
00:58:39 ►
can command my hand to make a fist
00:58:43 ►
and that it will do that. I mean, that’s mind over
00:58:47 ►
matter. That’s the violation of every scientific principle in the books. And yet it is the
00:58:54 ►
most trivial experience any of us have. We expect to command our body. We expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action and it will follow.
00:59:09 ►
The body is the nexus of the mystery of life. sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on.
00:59:31 ►
The felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us.
00:59:39 ►
That’s why it’s called escape, because it’s escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what’s on the tube, from consuming trash media.
00:59:51 ►
It’s escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body.
00:59:56 ►
This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society.
01:00:02 ►
They’d make it illegal if they but could figure out how. It’s the one drug
01:00:08 ►
they can’t tear from our grip, and so they lay a guilt trip about it. But sexuality and psychedelics,
01:00:19 ►
by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body, carry us back to the domain of authentic values.
01:00:27 ►
And more and more the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconscious or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization.
01:00:45 ►
It’s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind,
01:00:50 ►
that the earth is a coherent whole.
01:00:54 ►
It is a thinking, feeling, intending being
01:00:57 ►
that in terms of our value structures,
01:01:01 ►
it would be foolish to image as anything other than female.
01:01:06 ►
And when cultural values, created by male dominance and science and linearity and so forth and so on,
01:01:13 ►
when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of matrix,
01:01:24 ►
what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious. Nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came.
01:01:48 ►
on that. And now, history has failed. Western cultural institutions, having become global cultural institutions, now show themselves to be adequate to inspire, lead, or carry anyone
01:01:55 ►
into a future worth living in. At this moment, then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative.
01:02:07 ►
So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates
01:02:13 ►
or about untaxed billions or about the mental health of our youth or any of that malarkey.
01:02:20 ►
I mean, my God, the most destructive drugs known to the species
01:02:23 ►
are peddled on every street corner without restriction. The real issue is what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit? What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed. And the value systems that aggrandize the possession of things,
01:02:47 ►
the tearing up of the earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism,
01:02:52 ►
have led us to the brink of catastrophe.
01:02:56 ►
Now, I think we have to abandon Western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body
01:03:07 ►
in connection with the plants.
01:03:11 ►
That’s the seamless web that leads us back
01:03:15 ►
into the heart of nature.
01:03:18 ►
And if we can do this,
01:03:20 ►
then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis
01:03:23 ►
can be navigated. Very little of cultural crisis can be navigated.
01:03:26 ►
Very little of the past can be saved.
01:03:30 ►
The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda,
01:03:37 ►
the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved.
01:03:48 ►
aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved. But what can be saved is the sense of love and caring and mutuality that we all put into and take from the human enterprise.
01:04:01 ►
You know, there’s a Grateful Dead song that says, you can’t go back and you can’t stand
01:04:06 ►
still. If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will. And we now hold, through the
01:04:14 ►
possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle
01:04:28 ►
that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse.
01:04:32 ►
We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it
01:04:35 ►
into a kind of starship that would carry us
01:04:38 ►
and our children out into the broad, starry galaxy
01:04:42 ►
we know to be waiting us.
01:04:45 ►
But it’s a cultural test.
01:04:48 ►
Nature is pitiless.
01:04:50 ►
Intelligence is a grand experiment upon which a great deal has been risked.
01:04:56 ►
But if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs and the
01:05:07 ►
trilobites and the cross-Optorhigian fishes and all those other folks who came before.
01:05:13 ►
So what we must do, I think, is see our future in the imagination, catalyze the imagination,
01:05:21 ►
form symbiotic relationships with the plants,
01:05:26 ►
affirm archaic values, and spread the good news that what is out of control,
01:05:33 ►
what is in fact dying, is a world that had become too top-heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems,
01:05:46 ►
and too dehumanized to care about
01:05:49 ►
what happened to its own children.
01:05:51 ►
So I say, good riddance to it.
01:05:54 ►
Bring on the archaic revival,
01:05:57 ►
and let’s create a new world.
01:06:01 ►
And that’s it.
01:06:18 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:24 ►
Bring on the archaic revival and let’s create a new world. One thought at a time. and how about that point, around 48 minutes or so into this talk,
01:06:45 ►
when Terrence describes not being able to imagine things going on like this for another thousand years,
01:06:52 ►
and of history actually being a gestation period during which the caterpillar becomes the butterfly.
01:06:58 ►
I don’t know about you, but I had to go back and listen to that part several more times.
01:07:05 ►
And if you haven’t already done that, I highly recommend it.
01:07:09 ►
This is the drumbeat we have all been hearing in the backs of our minds for many years now.
01:07:14 ►
The time is coming, it seems to me, when a whole lot of us are going to finally wake up in the default world
01:07:22 ►
with the same state of consciousness as we have in Theospace.
01:07:27 ►
Or at least that’s what Terence’s inspiring words make me feel.
01:07:32 ►
And about the only other thing I would like to add to his talk about the functions of a shaman,
01:07:38 ►
a true shaman, is that if I were you, I would become my own shaman
01:07:43 ►
and not look outside of myself for the answers that you know are within.
01:07:48 ►
Trust yourself in the days ahead.
01:07:50 ►
Trust yourself and you won’t go wrong.
01:07:53 ►
Now, just a couple of short things and then I’ve got to get out of here for today.
01:07:58 ►
But first of all, I want to read part of a note that I got on tribe.net.
01:08:03 ►
But first let me mention that I very seldom get out
01:08:05 ►
to that account anymore. And I also can’t accept any of the friend requests I get from people on
01:08:11 ►
MySpace because, well, I was kicked off of MySpace for some reason that they don’t want to tell me
01:08:18 ►
about. Anyway, here’s part of a message that I recently received. And this comes after, the part I’m going to read is just a short paragraph that comes after a rather lengthy discussion of the pros and cons of the work and life of Dr. Timothy Leary.
01:08:35 ►
Another thought that I have is that Leary is just too controversial to be spoken about in glowing terms by people trying to integrate themselves into the mainstream.
01:08:46 ►
Do you feel that this is at all the case, or is a dislike for him more deep-rooted and sincere than
01:08:52 ►
out of a desire to be accepted by the mainstream? I would love to hear any insight you have into
01:08:57 ►
Leary’s current perception if you have the time. Signed, Eric J.
01:09:03 ►
Well, Eric, I thought I would answer you here in the salon because
01:09:06 ►
it’s a question that keeps coming up. First of all, I never met him myself, so all of my
01:09:13 ►
information about him is secondhand at best. But something I’ve noticed is that the people who had
01:09:20 ►
personal relations with him often fall into two general categories.
01:09:28 ►
Those who worked with Dr. Leary in the 60s and 70s,
01:09:33 ►
and those who were associated with him in the last two decades of his life.
01:09:39 ►
And in general, the first group has a somewhat less favorable opinion than those who knew him later.
01:09:44 ►
And trying to be objective about it, I think we have to take into account that some of those people from the early days had some pretty good gigs going for them, and once LSD made it to the street, their professional involvement with psychedelics came to an end.
01:09:56 ►
But I think it’s also unfair to say that it was only Tim Leary who caused the uptight world to come down on the scene.
01:10:04 ►
It was only Tim Leary who caused the uptight world to come down on the scene.
01:10:10 ►
There was also Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters who were at large during those days,
01:10:14 ►
as were the Grateful Dead and a dozen other bands or more.
01:10:20 ►
It wasn’t all about Dr. Leary only back in those days, at least not the way I remember them.
01:10:25 ►
I was a young, straight and narrow naval officer back in those days.
01:10:31 ►
In fact, I was actually living in the Bay Area at the time of the B-In at Golden Gate Park,
01:10:37 ►
and I remember very clearly thinking that Timothy Leary was the least of the problems that were building up in the hate already. He seems to me to be more of a steadying influence on the scene
01:10:42 ►
when compared to the pranksters, but that’s just my opinion. Now, getting back to Eric’s question, I think your perception,
01:10:51 ►
Eric, may be on target. I know that I’ve had any number of people speak of Dr. Leary in positive
01:10:57 ►
terms when we’ve been alone, but I seldom hear anyone say these things in public. Now, there was
01:11:03 ►
a major exception to this, and that was the
01:11:05 ►
recent tribute to Timothy Leary that was held not too long ago in San Francisco. I wasn’t there
01:11:11 ►
myself, but I’ve watched most of the videos of it on YouTube, and the one that says it all for me
01:11:17 ►
is the beautiful and loving words of Dr. Leary’s granddaughter, Deirdre. As grandfathers like me and fellow salonner Robert O. can tell you,
01:11:27 ►
if someone is worthy of the deep love of a grandchild, like the love that Deirdre expressed
01:11:32 ►
for dear Timothy, well, there has to be a lot more to you than your detractors would want us to know.
01:11:40 ►
Wow, where did all that come from, huh? But hey, let’s face it You and I probably wouldn’t be here in the psychedelic salon together right now
01:11:48 ►
If it hadn’t been for the good Dr. Leary
01:11:50 ►
So we all owe him a lot, I’d say
01:11:53 ►
Now, I was going to say something about this year’s Burning Man activities
01:11:58 ►
But I’ll save that for next week
01:12:01 ►
One last thing I do want to mention though
01:12:03 ►
Is to remind you about the Oracle
01:12:05 ►
Gathering that’s going to be held on June 12th, 13th, and 14th at a campground a couple hours east
01:12:12 ►
of Portland. I’m going to be there with quite a few of my friends, and if you’re in the area and
01:12:18 ►
want to find a few more of the others, well, this will be a great place to be. There’s going to be a
01:12:24 ►
lot going on at this gathering, and I already have a feeling. There’s going to be a lot going on at this gathering,
01:12:25 ►
and I already have a feeling that it’s going to be one of our tribe’s legendary events.
01:12:30 ►
This will, of course, be the 23rd and final Oracle Gathering.
01:12:34 ►
At least that’s what I’m told right now.
01:12:37 ►
So if you’re interested, just surf over to Oracle Gatherings.
01:12:41 ►
That’s O-R-A-C-L-E-G-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-G-S dot com,
01:12:47 ►
and you can learn more about it.
01:12:49 ►
Oh, and one more thing.
01:12:52 ►
I want to thank the people who sent me the download to the Binary Scenes album at AtomicSkunk.com.
01:13:01 ►
I really love your music, and it’s going to work perfectly for some of my meditation work.
01:13:05 ►
So thank you very much. I appreciate the link.
01:13:09 ►
Well, I guess that’s about it for today.
01:13:11 ►
And so I’ll close the podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:13:17 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:13:21 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:13:26 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
01:13:30 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:13:35 ►
And that’s also where you’re going to find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:13:40 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:13:46 ►
Be well, my friends.