Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
This is the Question and Answer session following the talk heard in the previous podcast. In it, Terence answers questions from the audience, such as, “Can you talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms?”
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope, or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way. And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world of abstract mathematics and the world of nature. These things are as it were simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff.”
“Thinking means something. It’s not just something we do. It means something. It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system to be both right or wrong.”
QUESTION: What is the nature of magic, or what is magic or the wonder it invokes?
“Magic is not a trivial issue at all.”
“If you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what actually is are very close to the same thing.”
“The mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality, through acts of language. And language is very, very mysterious. I mean, it is true magic.”
“All so-called primitive people know that the world is made up of language. That you sing it into existence. That what you say it is is what it is. That is it maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension.”
“Mind is necessary for the world to undergo the formality of existing. This is what quantum physics teaches.”
“Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy. Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty that it’s, at this point, to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors.”
QUESTION: Why don’t some people get high when they take psychedelics?
“The way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting.”
“But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden. This is an outrage. It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.”
“We are caged by our cultural programing, and this is the most powerful imprisoning factor in our lives.”
“If we could train ourselves to simply remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete.”
“Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside the mass hallucination you see it for what it is worth.”
“Language is partially the key here. We cannot move into a reality we cannot describe. If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there.”
“As long as we let the establishment set the language agenda we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian, world of consumerism and schloko values that the establishment has prepared for us.”
“The way I think of these psychedelics are a different way, is that they are catalysts for the imagination.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And my guess is that you’ve been wondering what happened to me all this week.
00:00:29 ►
Well, first of all, I’ve been focused on recording my new book.
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But as you might be able to tell, I’ve got a slight head cold,
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and so I’ve had to stop recording for long periods of time until that clears up.
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Which means that I’m going to have to keep my own chatter to a minimum here
00:00:45 ►
today. But one thing I definitely want to say right now is a great big thank you to Amy W.,
00:00:52 ►
Anthony D., Robert B., Garrett W., and Eric F., all of whom sent in donations to the salon over
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the past two weeks. I feel badly about not getting a podcast out sooner.
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Particularly with all of this support that you guys are giving me.
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So thanks for your support and for being so patient with me.
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Amy, Anthony, Robert, Garrett and Eric.
00:01:16 ►
I couldn’t do this without you.
00:01:25 ►
Now the other reason for this podcast being so late is that I’ve been waiting to hear the latest news about the Oracle gathering that will be held this summer. But that news still isn’t available, and so I thought I had better
00:01:30 ►
get this program out anyway. So the only news I can pass along right now is that there is the
00:01:35 ►
possibility that both the date and the location of this event are going to have to be changed.
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I wish I could tell you more than that, but as of a few minutes ago, that is still the only firm news that I have.
00:01:47 ►
But as soon as more information becomes available, I’ll get a podcast out right away.
00:01:52 ►
What I can tell you for sure is that one way or another, I plan on being there myself.
00:01:57 ►
So please stay tuned, and I’m sure there will be another update soon.
00:02:02 ►
And in the meantime, you can check the oraclegatherings.com
00:02:05 ►
website for any possible updates. Now getting on with today’s program, I’m going to play the Q&A
00:02:13 ►
session from the Terrence McKenna lecture that I played last week. The only edits I’ve made to
00:02:19 ►
this part of his talk is to cut out the questions from the audience that couldn’t be heard.
00:02:24 ►
However, Terrence repeats most of those questions,
00:02:27 ►
and so I don’t think you’ll be missing anything.
00:02:29 ►
And I guess that I should also let you know
00:02:31 ►
that you are going to hear part of a rap that I played sometime last year.
00:02:36 ►
However, it was one of the most popular soundbites of his that I played,
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at least so it seems from the email I received.
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And so I left it in for us to hear again today.
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And so now, here is a little more of Terrence McKenna.
00:02:56 ►
Okay, well I trust that that was all perfectly clear before the break. This is the part I enjoy the most because I’m not into the white guy at the front of the room with all the answers trip.
00:03:13 ►
It’s just unfortunate that I have the body I do.
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I’m actually a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but I’ve done the very best with that that I could,
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which hasn’t been bad, let me tell you.
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Yes.
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Wait a minute, wait, wait.
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You’re going to have to yell, and then I’ll repeat it.
00:03:41 ►
Well, this is a really interesting question.
00:03:45 ►
I can talk about it.
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I’ll repeat the question.
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It’s, can I talk about the relationship of advanced mathematics
00:03:51 ►
to modeling of consciousness in layman’s terms, correct?
00:03:59 ►
One of the great mysteries still to be addressed by philosophy is why is it that numbers,
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which are, after all, constructs of the human mind,
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why is it that numbers are so incredibly powerful for the description of nature?
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Nature, after all, is somehow given. We find it all around
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us. And numbers arise in the depths of
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human ratiocination. So what is the relationship
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of these things to each other?
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This may appear to be an easy
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question.
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It’s such a difficult question that it wasn’t even asked in philosophy until the 20th century.
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It’s very puzzling, and I think that it indicates a fundamental congruency
00:05:02 ►
between processes that are mental
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and the structure of the world itself.
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This is why I didn’t get into it too much tonight in a popular lecture like this,
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but I am the inventor or the purveyor of a mathematical theory of consciousness.
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And I believe that more powerful than any atom smasher,
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more subtle than any space telescope, is the human mind.
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The human mind is the most subtle and superb of all instruments
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for the study and measurement of nature.
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When we look into ourselves, we discover the same patterns
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that we discover in the birth and death of a species,
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the flow of a river, the collapse of a corporation,
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or the flowering of a love affair.
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It’s that process is somehow under the aegis of a kind of universal equation of description.
00:06:17 ►
So it doesn’t matter whether it’s the birth and death of your hope,
00:06:22 ►
or the rise and fall of the Assyrian Empire, or the evolution of
00:06:27 ►
the Pacific Ocean, processes always occur in the same way.
00:06:33 ►
And this is why there is congruence between the mental world of human beings and the world
00:06:40 ►
of abstract mathematics and the world of nature.
00:06:44 ►
and the world of abstract mathematics, and the world of nature. These things are, as it were, simply different levels of condensation of the same universal stuff.
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This is why the concept of truth can have some meaning.
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I mean, when you think about it, truth,
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I mean, when you think about it, truth,
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why should it even be possible for us as monkeys to entertain that notion? Where is it writ large that mammals traveling in packs
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should have any relationship to truth whatsoever?
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And yet the faith is that somehow thinking means something.
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It’s not just something we do.
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It means something.
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It means something because there is sufficient freedom within the human system
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to be both right or wrong.
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And this right or wrong lays upon us the obligation of mirroring nature
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in models which we build in our own minds.
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Now, the old idea in science was that these mathematical models of nature were in fact laws,
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truths, eternal platonic truths that were being teased out.
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In the 20th century, a slight epistemological sophistication leads to this word
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models, where we say we’re modeling reality. And our model is only as good as we need it to be.
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If we’re trying to model the flight of an artillery shell. The model needs to be only good enough
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to get the artillery shell to its target.
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We don’t need to understand the essence of lead
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or the nature of motion there.
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We simply need the model to kick out the data that interests us.
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And in the 20th century, it’s been understood
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that all knowledge is And in the 20th century, it’s been understood that all knowledge
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is dependent upon the question asked.
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And the relationship of mathematics to nature
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is one of the profound indicators, I think,
00:08:56 ►
that truth can be known.
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Maybe not the truth,
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but I always think of the positivist philosopher
00:09:06 ►
Wittgenstein who was once asked
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in a classroom situation about a certain proposition
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is it the truth?
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and he said well it’s certainly true enough
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and you know that’s where we are
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with our modeling of the world and with our mathematics
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it is the truest truth we know You know, that’s where we are with our modeling of the world and with our mathematics.
00:09:28 ►
It is the truest truth we know.
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It is true enough.
00:09:33 ►
Somebody else here. Yeah, in front.
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The question is from a stage magician, and the question is what is the nature of magic,
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or what is magic, or the
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wonder that it invokes. There are two theories. I mean, magic is not a trivial issue at all.
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There are two theories about how the world works, and each one depends on a fundamental assumption about what the world is.
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There’s the scientific theory, which says the world is tiny packets of matter
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squealing along through empty space at close to the speed of light
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and subject to a certain set of interlocking laws.
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That’s what science tells us the world is.
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Another theory is, and to my mind,
00:10:34 ►
a much more appealing and even intuitively correct theory,
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is the world is language.
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The world is made of language.
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We can say that the world is composed of little demons doing calisthenics,
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each one the size of a pissant’s eyebrow.
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Or we can say the world is made out of wave mechanical packets of matter
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flying along at the speed of light.
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But notice that what we get each time is words.
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Our model of what the world
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is is made of words, and the world is composed
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of description. Now, in the era
00:11:19 ►
before science, scientists like to say
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people were more epistemologically naive.
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What they mean by that is they didn’t have a clear understanding of the division
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between the inside and the outside, between what we imagine and what actually is.
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But if you live long enough, I think you discover what we imagine and what
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actually is are very close to the same thing. Now, whenever you say the world is made of
00:11:55 ►
language, the positivists object by saying, well, then why isn’t it the way we say it is. I didn’t say it’s the way we say it is.
00:12:05 ►
I said it’s made of language.
00:12:08 ►
And part of the inspiration for my career
00:12:12 ►
is the realization
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that you could get up in front of audiences
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and say how the world is.
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And to a small degree,
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for a limited time in a limited space it
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shimmers and recasts itself and becomes the thing that we say that it is the
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mind is somehow a co-creator in the process of reality through acts of language.
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And language is very, very mysterious.
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I mean, it is true magic.
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People run all over the place looking for paranormal abilities.
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But notice that when I speak,
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if your internal dictionary matches my internal dictionary,
00:13:09 ►
dictionary matches my internal dictionary that my thoughts cross through the air as an acoustical pressure wave and are reconstructed inside your cerebral cortex as your thought, your understanding
00:13:18 ►
of my words. Telepathy exists. It’s just that the carrier wave is small mouth noises. All so-called primitive people know that the world is made of language, that you sing it into existence, that what you say it is is what it is, that it is maintained in existence by an act of rational apprehension.
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And it’s only science which has taken this very weird approach and said,
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no, no, the world is somehow independent from the act of description.
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And this is not a situation where we have two separate points of view, both open-hearted and trying their best to work hard for you.
00:14:24 ►
Science carried out its analysis of nature to the point where it shot itself in the foot. Science carried out an analysis of nature that went to such depth
00:14:29 ►
that it discovered that nature doesn’t exist except as an object of description,
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that there are no little objects winging their way through empty space.
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There is only a situation
00:14:45 ►
describable by multileveled fishy formula,
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and when you drop a mind into that situation,
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the fishy formula condense out into a little particle
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which can be measured.
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Mind is necessary for the world
00:15:02 ►
to undergo the formality of existing.
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This is what quantum physics teaches.
00:15:08 ►
Unfortunately, this news has not reached the other sciences.
00:15:13 ►
This is a real failure on the part of science.
00:15:16 ►
You see, throughout the 19th century, physics was the paradigmatic science.
00:16:07 ►
It was the science everybody envied. It’s not unusual in physics for theory and measurement fall into congruency like that. And so everyone wanted to be like physics. Chemistry sought that, sociology, psychology, biology. Meanwhile, physics, pursuing the exploration of matter, broke through to a domain where matter ceased to be definable, ceased to even exist in any ordinary way,
00:16:14 ►
seemed to behave in incredibly strange ways. Time flows backward. Energy crosses barriers
00:16:21 ►
without ever going through them by tunneling through them in some way.
00:16:28 ►
Modern biology is still afflicted with physics envy.
00:16:34 ►
Meanwhile, physics has gone on to a realm of such exotic and surreal uncertainty
00:16:40 ►
that it’s at this point to the left of psychology in the precision of its metaphors.
00:16:46 ►
So science has undercut itself and now exists in a state of unrecognized crisis
00:16:52 ►
that hopefully the psychedelic experience will exacerbate to the point
00:16:58 ►
where this will arrive on the plate of every experimentalist and observational and observer of nature.
00:17:08 ►
Yeah, here.
00:17:11 ►
People don’t take enough.
00:17:14 ►
That’s all.
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You know, I mean, people are confused about what’s going on.
00:17:21 ►
First of all, taking psychedelics has a certain measure of chicness about it.
00:17:29 ►
Well, everybody wants to be chic.
00:17:31 ►
And you can get into the club merely by saying you took it.
00:17:36 ►
But you don’t want to lie like a dog.
00:17:39 ►
So the way to get into the club without paying your dues is to take some pissant amount.
00:17:48 ►
And then run around raving about that.
00:17:52 ►
So when we talk about the psychedelic experience, it’s not clear we’re all talking about the same thing.
00:17:56 ►
It’s sort of like talking about France,
00:17:59 ►
and you have the people who changed planes in the airport
00:18:02 ►
and the people who moved there for 30 years and
00:18:06 ►
learned the literature and got a job and married the locals.
00:18:09 ►
So the way to do psychedelics is, I believe, at higher doses than most people are comfortable with, and rarely, and with great attention to set and setting.
00:18:29 ►
The social use of psychedelics in the club scene or at rock and roll concerts and so forth,
00:18:36 ►
I mean, when I go to those kind of scenes, I just smoke pot. I don’t, because I want to be part of what’s going on, I want to have a good time, but you would be nuts to take a major psychedelic in that circumstance.
00:18:58 ►
Socially dense environments filled with light and noise are a strategy for coming down.
00:19:07 ►
You know, I mean, if you took a drug you didn’t like,
00:19:10 ►
the smartest thing to do would be to jog around the block ten times and then chop a bunch of wood.
00:19:18 ►
Very similar to dancing your ass off, in other words.
00:19:22 ►
So the way I recommend doing psychedelics is in silent darkness and with
00:19:30 ►
as little input from other people as possible i mean i say alone if you are experienced if you’re
00:19:38 ►
really confident just alone for crying out loud if that that gives you pause, and you must have a sitter,
00:19:47 ►
and let’s use the word sitter, not guide.
00:19:50 ►
My God, nobody’s guiding you anywhere.
00:19:52 ►
They have no more notion where you are than, you know,
00:19:57 ►
we know where Judge Carter is at this point.
00:20:01 ►
So the sitter, and my idea of the perfect sitter is, you know, you have
00:20:06 ►
a little Tibetan bell by your side, and the sitter is three rooms away, and if you need
00:20:12 ►
the sitter, you ring the bell, they stick their head in the room and say, it’s cool,
00:20:18 ►
lay down, and, you know, do that. And I, you know, as long as this question was brought up
00:20:28 ►
and so much of the lecture was somewhat high-toned,
00:20:31 ►
let me get into this for a minute.
00:20:34 ►
There are thousands of altered states.
00:20:38 ►
You know, we know them.
00:20:40 ►
Orgasm, indigestion, two cappuccinos, where tequila takes you, so endless altered states.
00:20:53 ►
And I’m not really interested in them more or less than any of you are.
00:20:57 ►
I mean, they’re part of life.
00:20:58 ►
But what I’m interested in as an experimentalist, as a connoisseur of nature, you know, somebody who loves
00:21:07 ►
fossils, butterflies, rainforests, that kind of thing, is this family of compounds called the
00:21:15 ►
indole hallucinogens. Indoles. And they cause hallucination. And some people say, you know, that I’m a fetishist about this,
00:21:26 ►
that who cares,
00:21:27 ►
or that there are other things besides hallucination.
00:21:31 ►
Yes, I know, maybe, and of course,
00:21:34 ►
but the reason I’m so fascinated by hallucinations
00:21:39 ►
is because to my mind,
00:21:42 ►
when you’re hallucinating,
00:21:44 ►
you have an absolutely clear proof that you are not generating this material.
00:21:54 ►
It’s not funny ideas.
00:21:56 ►
It’s not racing thoughts.
00:21:58 ►
It’s not insight into what your boyfriend really meant yesterday.
00:22:04 ►
That kind of thing we all can generate
00:22:06 ►
by just inspecting our own minds.
00:22:09 ►
But a hallucination is to be in the presence of that
00:22:15 ►
which previously could not be imagined.
00:22:18 ►
And if it previously could not be imagined,
00:22:22 ►
then there is no grounds for believing
00:22:24 ►
that you generated it out of yourself.
00:22:28 ►
I mean, we should each know our own inventory. You know, you know what’s in your cupboard. You
00:22:34 ►
know what’s in your chest of drawers. For God’s sake, you ought to know what’s in your mind.
00:22:39 ►
Well, then if something comes forward and you say, that’s not mine, that’s not in my inventory,
00:22:47 ►
then you have a kind of perfect proof that this is coming from somewhere else.
00:22:53 ►
And then the question becomes, where?
00:22:56 ►
And we can set off into that.
00:22:59 ►
Opinions differ, and nobody has God’s truth on it. A reductionist, somebody who didn’t like these substances, would say,
00:23:11 ►
oh, well, it’s just neurological chaos.
00:23:15 ►
It’s just you’ve interrupted the normal functioning of good brain chemicals,
00:23:20 ►
and evil brain chemicals are now giving a sense of a chaos.
00:23:28 ►
Well, that just doesn’t cut the mustard.
00:23:31 ►
I mean, that kind of stuff may work if you’re talking to the troops,
00:23:35 ►
but not if you’re talking to anybody who’s ever been there.
00:23:38 ►
I know what a neurological chaos would look like.
00:23:42 ►
It would look like bright lights, moving patterns, colored this, something
00:23:47 ►
that. It would not be ruins, landscapes, machines, paintings, works of art, building plans, weapons,
00:24:00 ►
bits of manufactured technological detritus.
00:24:06 ►
These things are too coherent.
00:24:08 ►
They’re objects in some kind of superstructure of the mind.
00:24:13 ►
And for me, this was the revelation.
00:24:16 ►
I didn’t get into this business by being an airhead or a screwball.
00:24:22 ►
My attitude was always, if it’s real, it can take the pressure. You
00:24:29 ►
know, you don’t have to pussyfoot around the real thing. If they’re telling you, you know,
00:24:35 ►
oh, you must lower your voice and avert your gaze or this and that, then you’re probably probably in the presence of crap. Because the real thing is real.
00:24:47 ►
It doesn’t demand that you adjust your opinion to suit it.
00:24:53 ►
It’s real.
00:24:54 ►
That means it is preeminent.
00:24:56 ►
That means it sets the agenda.
00:24:58 ►
And I studied yoga.
00:25:01 ►
I wandered around in the East.
00:25:03 ►
I was fast shuffled by beady eyed little men in dotis
00:25:07 ►
I know the whole spiritual supermarket and
00:25:11 ►
rigamarole and I find nothing there
00:25:15 ►
to interest me on the level
00:25:20 ►
of you know 5 grams of psilocybin mushrooms
00:25:24 ►
in silent darkness.
00:25:25 ►
I mean, that’s where the pedal meets the metal.
00:25:27 ►
That’s where the rubber meets the road.
00:25:30 ►
And the inspiration for me to get up and talk to an audience like this
00:25:36 ►
simply comes from the fact that I cannot believe
00:25:40 ►
that this could be kept under wraps the way it has.
00:25:45 ►
I mean, I kidded with you earlier that they would make sex illegal if they could.
00:25:51 ►
Well, they can’t, so it isn’t.
00:25:53 ►
But the psychedelic experience is as central to understanding your humanness
00:26:01 ►
as having sex, or having a child, or having responsibilities, or having hopes and
00:26:11 ►
dreams, and yet it is illegal. We are somehow told we are infantilized. We’re told, you know,
00:26:18 ►
you can wander around within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness.
00:26:27 ►
And we have some intoxicants over here,
00:26:30 ►
if you want to mess yourself up.
00:26:34 ►
We’ve got some scotch here and some tobacco and red meat and some sugar and a little TV and so forth and so on.
00:26:38 ►
But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens
00:26:43 ►
that give you a sense of unity with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden.
00:26:50 ►
This is an outrage.
00:26:52 ►
It’s a sign of cultural immaturity, and the fact that we tolerate it is a sign that we are living in a society as oppressed as any society in the past.
00:27:10 ►
My thing is not about my opinion or what I saw in Africa or anything like that.
00:27:16 ►
This is, get it straight, this is about an experience.
00:27:20 ►
Not my experience, your experience.
00:27:23 ►
It’s about an experience which you have,
00:27:25 ►
like getting laid or like going to Africa.
00:27:29 ►
You must do the experience.
00:27:31 ►
Otherwise, it’s just whistling past the graveyard.
00:27:35 ►
And we’re not talking about something like being born again
00:27:39 ►
or meeting the flying saucers or something like that,
00:27:43 ►
where good works and prayer are the method.
00:27:46 ►
No, if you take a sufficient dose of an active compound,
00:27:51 ►
it will deliver itself to you on the money.
00:27:54 ►
If it doesn’t work, take more.
00:27:57 ►
Nobody is in a position to dismiss this
00:28:01 ►
just because it didn’t work for them on one or two tries.
00:28:06 ►
This is an art.
00:28:08 ►
It’s an art. It’s something you coax into existence.
00:28:10 ►
I mean, you have to learn to make love.
00:28:12 ►
You have to learn to speak English.
00:28:14 ►
Anything worth doing is an
00:28:16 ►
art that is acquired.
00:28:18 ►
This is part of our birthright.
00:28:20 ►
Perhaps the most important part of
00:28:22 ►
our birthright. These substances
00:28:24 ►
will deliver. It is the conf important part of our birthright. These substances will deliver.
00:28:25 ►
It is the confoundment of psychology and science generally.
00:28:30 ►
And that’s why it’s so touchy for cultural institutions.
00:28:35 ►
But you are not a cultural institution.
00:28:37 ►
You are a free and independent human being.
00:28:40 ►
And these things have your name written on them in big gold letters.
00:28:44 ►
Yes, here.
00:28:49 ►
Could you please speak to clairvoyance, whether or not it’s a subset of the psychedelics of the white person?
00:28:57 ►
What do clairvoyance have to do with it?
00:29:16 ►
Well, clairvoyance, all forms of paranormal activity, I think, are part of a 5% leakage around normal culturally sanctioned brain function. Groff’s books about LSD, which is one case history after another, virtually every paranormal
00:29:27 ►
phenomenon ever cataloged has occurred under the influence of LSD. Seeing things at a distance,
00:29:37 ►
recovering past lives where then you could actually check the data and it happened, knowledge of things going on at a distance.
00:29:46 ►
I think that we are caged by our cultural programming and that this is the most powerful
00:29:56 ►
imprisoning factor in our lives.
00:30:00 ►
That if we could train ourselves simply to remember our dreams, psychedelics would become obsolete.
00:30:09 ►
If we could train ourselves simply to pay attention to our ordinary states of consciousness as we live through our days and nights,
00:30:19 ►
culture is a mass hallucination.
00:30:23 ►
And when you step outside the mass hallucination, you see it for what it is worth.
00:30:30 ►
Language is partially the key here.
00:30:32 ►
We cannot move into a reality that we cannot describe.
00:30:40 ►
If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there.
00:30:45 ►
And so the interesting place to be is at the cutting edge of language.
00:30:50 ►
And it’s interesting that the legacy of the 1960s is a legacy of language evolution.
00:30:58 ►
I mean, concepts like ego trip, vibe, bummer, so forth and so on.
00:31:05 ►
I mean, we sneer at these concepts, but there was no word for these things before.
00:31:11 ►
Once there is a word, then that word is like a stepping stone out into the fog.
00:31:17 ►
And as long as we let the establishment set the language agenda, we will be imprisoned in the tiny, rather pedestrian world of consumerism
00:31:28 ►
and schlocko values that the establishment has prepared for us.
00:31:34 ►
So the way I think of these psychedelics, or a different way, is that they’re catalysts for the imagination.
00:31:43 ►
Catalysts to say what has never been said, to see what
00:31:47 ►
has never been seen, to draw, paint, sing, sculpt, dance, and act what has never before
00:31:54 ►
been done, to push the envelope of creativity and language.
00:32:00 ►
And what’s really important is, I call it the felt presence of direct experience,
00:32:06 ►
which is a fancy term which just simply means we have to stop consuming our culture.
00:32:14 ►
We have to create culture.
00:32:16 ►
Don’t watch TV.
00:32:18 ►
Don’t read magazines.
00:32:20 ►
Don’t even listen to NPR.
00:32:23 ►
Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are disempowered. You’re giving it all away to icons.
00:32:47 ►
Icons which are maintained by an electronic media
00:32:51 ►
so that, you know, you want to dress like X or have lips like Y or something.
00:32:57 ►
This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
00:33:01 ►
That is all cultural diversion. And what is real is you and your friends and
00:33:09 ►
your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we’re
00:33:17 ►
told, no, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral, get a degree, get a job, get a this peripheral get a degree get a job get a this get a that
00:33:25 ►
and then you’re a player
00:33:26 ►
you don’t even want to play in that game
00:33:29 ►
you want to reclaim your mind
00:33:32 ►
and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers
00:33:36 ►
who want to turn you into a half-baked moron
00:33:39 ►
consuming all this trash
00:33:42 ►
that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.
00:33:46 ►
Where is that at?
00:33:48 ►
Yeah, over here.
00:34:25 ►
Well, religion is simply the word we use to describe our intuition that there is something outside the realm of culture and the three-dimensional surfaces of things, that there is a hidden dimension to reality.
00:34:32 ►
Call it a plan, a purpose, a loving God, a cosmos instead of a chaos.
00:34:40 ►
And psychedelics, I believe, reveal a greater order than the order of the human world.
00:34:47 ►
This is why the way I do them is either in darkness, which means surrounded by the body,
00:34:54 ►
my body, which is part of nature, or in nature itself, in the mountains, at the beach,
00:35:01 ►
in the jungle. Because what we are lacking existentially is any sense of order, meaning, and beauty in the world, because the society we’re living in has no order or beauty or meaning.
00:35:10 ►
It’s just a scam and a rat race.
00:35:12 ►
But if you take the psychedelics in these contexts
00:35:17 ►
where the culture and its artifacts are suppressed,
00:35:21 ►
then you connect up to the greater whole.
00:35:25 ►
The question of God, meaning in Milton’s phrase,
00:35:31 ►
the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven,
00:35:35 ►
I don’t think psychedelics can address that definitively.
00:35:41 ►
But there is another God, a a goddess the goddess of biology the goddess of the coherent
00:35:50 ►
animal human world the world of the oceans the atmosphere and the planet in short our world
00:35:58 ►
the world we were born into that we evolved into and that we came from. That world the psychedelics want to connect us up to,
00:36:07 ►
because our individuality as people and as a species
00:36:12 ►
is an illusion of bad language that the psychedelics dissolve
00:36:19 ►
into the greater feeling of connectedness that underlies our being here.
00:36:26 ►
And to my mind, that’s the religious impulse.
00:36:30 ►
It’s not a laundry list of moral do’s and don’ts or a set of dietary prescriptions or
00:36:37 ►
practices.
00:36:38 ►
It’s a sense of connectedness, responsibility for your fellow human beings and for the earth you’re walking around on.
00:36:46 ►
And because these psychedelics come out of that plant-vegetable matrix,
00:36:52 ►
they are the way back into it.
00:36:55 ►
I want a woman here.
00:37:00 ►
Good question.
00:37:02 ►
Well, the answer is, I think, pretty obvious. Yes, how do we emancipate people from the foolishness of the drug war? How do we, as a community, as a point of view, how do we gain legitimacy?
00:37:28 ►
legitimacy? This is a really important question. I mean, if you look around yourself tonight,
00:37:40 ►
you don’t see the uneducated, the unhealthy, the demented, or the deluded. And yet, this is the stereotype of our subculture. Instead, what you see are well-dressed, creative people
00:37:48 ►
holding down positions in society,
00:37:51 ►
the parents of children, the heads of departments,
00:37:55 ►
the authors of books, the painters of paintings.
00:37:59 ►
You may not have noticed, but in this society,
00:38:02 ►
they’re not handing out rights.
00:38:04 ►
You may not have noticed, but in this society, they’re not handing out rights.
00:38:06 ►
Ask black people.
00:38:10 ►
Ask members of any sexual minority.
00:38:13 ►
They don’t hand out rights in this society.
00:38:20 ►
And we, meaning we psychedelic people, by and large, this isn’t always true, but by and large, we tend to be white and middle class.
00:38:27 ►
always true, but by and large we tend to be white and middle class. A translation of those two terms into gutless would not be inappropriate. We have the most to lose, and so we’re not
00:38:36 ►
given to hurling ourselves into the breach or building barricades in the street to hurl our bodies against the machine. Nevertheless, if you don’t claim
00:38:49 ►
your political birthright, it will never be given to you. And black people and gay people and
00:38:59 ►
American Indians, Native Americans, all of these people have learned that you don’t go on bended knee to petition the official culture for your rights.
00:39:12 ►
You have to take them.
00:39:14 ►
And people ask me, you know, how can you stand up and say the things you do?
00:39:20 ►
Why don’t they take you away?
00:39:23 ►
They don’t take me away because they’re more chicken shit than you do. Why don’t they take you away? They don’t take me away because they’re more
00:39:26 ►
chicken shit than you think. They’re more off balance than you think. They’re more uncertain
00:39:32 ►
of themselves than you think. The legitimacy of this point of view is established in their minds.
00:39:40 ►
The reason drugs are illegal and suppressed and blah, is because you can make a shitload of money off them in that context.
00:39:50 ►
It’s a money issue.
00:39:51 ►
Do you think a loving government is trying to keep you from jumping out of third floor windows
00:39:56 ►
and that’s why LSD is illegal?
00:39:58 ►
I mean, give me a break for crying out loud.
00:40:02 ►
If this government felt strongly enough about certain issues,
00:40:06 ►
all of us between 18 and 26 would be sent off to die for that policy decision. So the
00:40:14 ►
government is not interested in your health. The government is artificially interested
00:40:19 ►
in inflating the prices of certain substances in order to create a focus for clandestine money
00:40:29 ►
that is used then to destabilize unfriendly governments, murder labor union leaders,
00:40:37 ►
kill and blackmail the editors of left-wing newspapers, so forth and so on.
00:40:42 ►
Drugs are enormous big business, and not psychedelic drugs.
00:40:48 ►
Psychedelic drugs, the only one that ever amounted to anything as a financial enterprise
00:40:54 ►
was cannabis, and cannabis is many things besides psychedelic.
00:41:02 ►
besides psychedelic.
00:41:07 ►
The deep, dramatic psychedelics,
00:41:09 ►
which are all Schedule I,
00:41:11 ►
the most repressed schedule,
00:41:15 ►
don’t produce great amounts of money at all. What they do produce is questioning minds.
00:41:20 ►
They cause people to ask questions.
00:41:22 ►
They cause people to ask for clarification. They cause people to ask questions. They cause people to ask for clarification.
00:41:26 ►
They cause people to challenge cultural values
00:41:28 ►
because they decondition you.
00:41:30 ►
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Hasid,
00:41:33 ►
a communist apparatchik,
00:41:35 ►
a rainforest shaman.
00:41:37 ►
If you take psychedelics,
00:41:38 ►
you will question your first premises.
00:41:41 ►
And that is a business that all governments,
00:41:44 ►
right, left, middle,
00:41:45 ►
are in the business of repressing.
00:41:47 ►
They don’t want to have to explain
00:41:50 ►
why things are done as they are.
00:41:53 ►
But if we don’t begin asking for that explanation,
00:41:56 ►
they’re going to run this planet right into ruin.
00:42:01 ►
And we are the generation responsible.
00:42:04 ►
You are the generation responsible. You are the generation of response that is
00:42:07 ►
responsible. You can’t claim that you grew up in a village in Nigeria and you didn’t
00:42:12 ►
know. You can’t claim that you’re the child of poor Bangladeshi parents and you had no
00:42:20 ►
opportunity. The responsibility rests upon the educated and the
00:42:26 ►
financially capable of doing
00:42:28 ►
something about it. And by that
00:42:30 ►
measure, you and I are probably
00:42:32 ►
in the upper 3% of people
00:42:34 ►
on this planet. And
00:42:36 ►
if we don’t take responsibility,
00:42:38 ►
then that responsibility will
00:42:40 ►
devolve to others,
00:42:42 ►
BDI to others with an agenda
00:42:44 ►
that would stand your hair on end.
00:42:47 ►
Yes, over here.
00:42:51 ►
This will be the last question, so make it hit.
00:43:00 ►
Well, let’s go back and talk about schizophrenia for just a second.
00:43:05 ►
The question is, you know, schizophrenia involves basically breaking with ordinary value systems
00:43:15 ►
and how does it relate to the psychedelic state and people who have schizophrenic relatives in their family tree,
00:43:24 ►
how should they relate to the psychedelic experience and so forth.
00:43:28 ►
I mean, I’m extrapolating, but that’s the basic thing.
00:43:34 ►
Well, there are different things to be said about this.
00:43:37 ►
I mean, first of all, how many psychiatric residents
00:43:42 ►
who are the people who come most in contact with schizophrenics, whatever that means,
00:43:47 ►
how many psychiatric residents have ever seen an undrugged schizophrenic?
00:43:53 ►
Very, very few, because the very first thing that happens is for the convenience of physicians and the nursing staff,
00:44:07 ►
and the nursing staff, some outlandish drug is brought into the picture,
00:44:16 ►
which then deflects this healing process from ever reaching any kind of natural conclusion.
00:44:29 ►
Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for mental forms of mental behavior that we don’t understand. In the 19th century, there was a term melancholia, which we would now call bipolar depression, so forth and
00:44:36 ►
so on. But all forms of sadness, unhappiness, maladaptation, so forth and so on were poured into this label melancholia.
00:44:47 ►
Now, schizophrenia is a similar thing.
00:44:50 ►
I can remember an experience I had years ago.
00:44:53 ►
I was in the Tolman Library at the University of California, which is the psych library,
00:44:59 ►
and I was looking up some drug or something, and I just saw a book, and I pulled it off the shelf,
00:45:05 ►
a book about schizophrenia.
00:45:08 ►
And it said,
00:45:08 ►
the typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining,
00:45:15 ►
marginal to his society,
00:45:18 ►
incapable of holding a regular job.
00:45:20 ►
These people live on the fringes,
00:45:24 ►
content to drift in their own self-created value system.
00:45:28 ►
I said, that’s it? That’s it? Now I understand. We have no tradition of shamanism. We have no tradition of journeying into these mental worlds. We are terrified of madness. We fear it because the Western mind is a house of cards, and the people who built that house of cards know that, and they are terrified of madness.
00:46:06 ►
Tim Leary once said, or I gave him credit for saying, he later told me he never said it, but whoever said it, this was a brilliant statement.
00:46:15 ►
Someone once said, LSD is a psychedelic substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.
00:46:27 ►
Right?
00:46:30 ►
And I would bet you that more people have exhibited psychotic behavior from not taking
00:46:38 ►
LSD but just thinking about it than ever exhibited it from taking it.
00:46:43 ►
Certainly in my family, I watched my parents
00:46:46 ►
both go psychotic from the mere fact that LSD existed. They would never have taken it.
00:46:52 ►
There is a great phobia about the mind. The Western mind is very queasy when first principles First principles are questioned. Rarer than corpses in this society are the untreated mad,
00:47:08 ►
because we can’t come to terms with that.
00:47:12 ►
A shaman is someone who swims in the same ocean as a schizophrenic,
00:47:18 ►
but the shaman has thousands and thousands of years of sanctioned technique and tradition to draw upon.
00:47:27 ►
In a traditional society, if you exhibit quote-unquote schizophrenic tendencies,
00:47:34 ►
you are immediately drawn out of the pack and put under the care and tutelage of master shamans.
00:47:44 ►
You are told you are special.
00:47:48 ►
Your abilities are very central to the health of our society.
00:47:53 ►
You will cure.
00:47:55 ►
You will prophesy.
00:47:57 ►
You will guide our society in its most fundamental decisions.
00:48:03 ►
Contrast this with what a person
00:48:05 ►
exhibiting schizophrenic activity and narcissism is told.
00:48:09 ►
They’re told, you don’t fit in.
00:48:11 ►
You are becoming a problem.
00:48:14 ►
You don’t pull your own weight.
00:48:16 ►
You are not of equal worth to the rest of us.
00:48:20 ►
You are sick.
00:48:22 ►
You have to go to the hospital.
00:48:24 ►
You have to be locked up.
00:48:25 ►
You are on a par with prisoners and lost dogs in our society.
00:48:30 ►
So that treatment of schizophrenia makes it incurable.
00:48:37 ►
Imagine if you were slightly odd
00:48:40 ►
and the solution were to take you and put you,
00:48:44 ►
lock you into a place where everyone was seriously mad.
00:48:47 ►
That would drive anyone mad.
00:48:50 ►
If you’ve ever been in a madhouse,
00:48:52 ►
you know that it’s an environment calculated to make you crazy
00:48:56 ►
and to keep you crazy.
00:49:00 ►
This would never happen in an aboriginal or traditional society.
00:49:05 ►
I wrote a book.
00:49:06 ►
I mean, this has to be the wrap-up because we’re over time.
00:49:09 ►
But I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival.
00:49:12 ►
I signed it tonight for some of you.
00:49:15 ►
The idea there is that we have gone sick
00:49:19 ►
by following a path of untrammeled rationalism,
00:49:26 ►
male dominance,
00:49:27 ►
attention to the visible surface of things,
00:49:31 ►
practicality,
00:49:33 ►
bottom-line-ism.
00:49:34 ►
We have gone very, very sick.
00:49:38 ►
And the body politic, like any body,
00:49:42 ►
when it feels itself to be sick,
00:49:44 ►
it begins to produce antibodies or strategies for overcoming the condition of dis-ease. as diverse as surrealism, body piercing,
00:50:06 ►
psychedelic drug use,
00:50:08 ►
sexual permissiveness,
00:50:10 ►
jazz, experimental
00:50:12 ►
dance,
00:50:15 ►
rave culture,
00:50:17 ►
tattooing,
00:50:18 ►
the list is endless.
00:50:20 ►
What do all these things have in common?
00:50:22 ►
They represent various
00:50:24 ►
styles of rejection of linear values.
00:50:29 ►
The society is trying to cure itself by an archaic revival,
00:50:34 ►
by a reversion to archaic values.
00:50:37 ►
So when I see people manifesting sexual ambiguity
00:50:42 ►
or scarifying themselves or showing a lot of flesh or dancing to syncopated music or getting loaded or violating ordinary canons of sexual behavior.
00:50:55 ►
I applaud all of this because it’s an impulse to return to what is felt by the body, what is authentic, what is archaic. And when you
00:51:06 ►
tease apart these archaic impulses, at the very center of all these impulses is the desire to
00:51:15 ►
return to a world of magical empowerment of feeling. And at the center of that impulse is the shaman, stoned, intoxicated on plants,
00:51:30 ►
speaking with the spirit helpers, dancing in the moonlight, and vivifying and invoking
00:51:38 ►
a world of conscious living mystery. That’s what the world is. The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery. Our birth, our death, our being in the moment, these are mysteries. They are doorways opening on to unimaginable vistas of self-exploration, empowerment, and hope for the human enterprise.
00:52:07 ►
And our culture has killed that, taken it away from us,
00:52:10 ►
made us consumers of shoddy products and shoddier ideals.
00:52:15 ►
We have to get away from that.
00:52:18 ►
And the way to get away from it is by a return to the authentic experience of the body.
00:52:24 ►
And that means sexually empowering ourselves, and it means getting loaded, exploring the
00:52:31 ►
mind as a tool for personal and social transformation.
00:52:37 ►
The hour is late.
00:52:39 ►
The clock is ticking.
00:52:41 ►
We will be judged very harshly if we fumble the ball. We are the inheritors of born may have a place to put their feet and a sky
00:53:08 ►
to walk under.
00:53:10 ►
And that’s what the psychedelic experience is about, is caring for, empowering, and building
00:53:17 ►
a future that honors the past, honors the planet, and honors the power of the human
00:53:23 ►
imagination. There is nothing as powerful, as capable of transforming itself and the planet
00:53:31 ►
as the human imagination.
00:53:34 ►
Let’s not sell it straight.
00:53:36 ►
Let’s not whore ourselves to nitwit ideologies.
00:53:40 ►
Let’s not give our control over to the least among us
00:53:45 ►
rather, you know, claim your place in the sun
00:53:48 ►
and go forward into the light
00:53:51 ►
the tools are there
00:53:53 ►
the path is known
00:53:55 ►
you simply have to turn your back on a culture
00:53:58 ►
that has gone sterile and dead
00:53:59 ►
and get with the program of a living world
00:54:03 ►
and a re-empowerment of the imagination.
00:54:06 ►
Thank you very, very much.
00:54:18 ►
Thank you. Thank you. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:54:36 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:54:42 ►
As I said last week at the end of the first part of this talk,
00:54:46 ►
doesn’t it sound as if his last rap was given just this week?
00:54:49 ►
And that was all ad lib in answer to a question.
00:54:53 ►
What an incredible mind he had.
00:54:56 ►
And I’ll bet I know what you were thinking a while back when Terrence was talking about magic.
00:55:01 ►
Do you remember that point when he was going through the magic of transferring a thought
00:55:05 ►
from his mind through the air to the audience’s minds? At that point, I suspect that you thought
00:55:12 ►
the same thing I did, and that was the now doubling down of the magic by transferring
00:55:17 ►
Terrence’s thoughts through a cassette tape and then into digital format and from my computer to your MP3 player.
00:55:26 ►
How’s that for pure magic?
00:55:28 ►
Isn’t it nice to know that the spirit of our dear Bard McKenna is still here with us today?
00:55:34 ►
I know you thought it, and so I just had to say it aloud for you.
00:55:40 ►
Another thought that you gamers probably picked up on was when he said,
00:55:44 ►
Language is partially the key here.
00:55:47 ►
We cannot move into a reality we cannot describe.
00:55:50 ►
If we can’t describe a world, we can’t be there.
00:55:55 ►
Now just replace the word language with the word code,
00:55:59 ►
which is another word for computer language,
00:56:01 ►
and his words have a very literal meaning.
00:56:04 ►
In gaming, you know,
00:56:06 ►
if you can’t describe a world, you can’t be there. Maybe it’s the same here in the default world.
00:56:12 ►
Sometimes I really think so, but that’s a story for another day.
00:56:17 ►
Well, there’s a lot more on my mind today, but my nose keeps getting stuffed up, making it
00:56:22 ►
hard to talk much right now.
00:56:31 ►
And so I’ll just close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
00:56:39 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:56:50 ►
And that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
00:56:54 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:56:59 ►
Be well, my friends.