Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]
“People without plants are in a state of perpetual neurosis, a state of existential wanting.”
“The numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.”
“And I don’t mean this metaphorically. I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the ennui of modernity is the consequence of a disruptive symbiotic relationship between ourselves and vegetable nature.”
”… of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern. The pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity, no one you would invite to your garden party.”
“Technique [in taking entheogens] to me is a kind of a … I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is. I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique. And then the footnotes add; on an empty stomach, in a dark room, feeling comfortable.”
“The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer, but facing the answer.”
“I mean, we’re playing with half a deck as long as we tolerate that the Cardinals of government and science should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot. It’s essentially a preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue because what we’re talking about here is the repression of a religious sensibility In fact, not a religious sensibility, THE religious sensibility.”
“Life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego.”
“Think about our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be?”
“The ‘public’ has no history, has no future, lives in a golden moment created by credit, which binds them ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.”
“How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?”
Tibet2Timbuk2
The song, “Beautiful Girl”,
played at the end of this podcast,
is from their album titled Music is Life.
“First Rays of Sunlight”
by Clint Avery
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And here we are on the 3rd of June, 2009, which happens to be a significant day for me,
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and I’ll tell you about that in just a minute.
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But first, I want to thank Homayon Kay, and I hope I’m pronouncing your name at least halfway right, Homayon.
00:00:47 ►
But in any event, I want to thank you for your kind donation to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:51 ►
It was very nice of you to send that donation in, and I appreciate it.
00:00:56 ►
After today’s talk, I’ll have an announcement about next week’s podcast,
00:00:58 ►
along with a few other items,
00:01:01 ►
but first, let’s get on with today’s program,
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which is yet another talk by Terrence McKenna.
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However, I guess I should first mention that I’m kind of running out of new McKenna talks to play, and as you will soon
00:01:12 ►
hear, some of the topics that Terrence touches on in today’s podcast have been touched on by him in
00:01:18 ►
one or more of the 70 or so of his talks that I’ve already podcast. Now this particular lecture is one that can be found
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on the net under a variety of titles, the main one being Vision Plants. I think I got over a hundred
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hits when I searched for MP3s of Terrence with that title. However, in a move that I’m sure will
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infuriate scholars for years to come, I’m going to once again rename one of his talks. So I’ve titled
00:01:46 ►
today’s podcast, Shamanism and the Archaic Revival. But I’m sure that you’ll be able to
00:01:52 ►
come up with an even better title if you think about it. Now after we hear this talk, I’ll be
00:01:58 ►
back with a few more comments and several emails from fellow Saloners. but first here is Terrence McKenna talking sometime back
00:02:05 ►
15 or 20 years or so ago about shamanism and the archaic revival that is now well underway.
00:02:20 ►
Basically, for myself, my involvement with shamanism has been a deepening meditation over now about 20 years. integrate itself ever more deeply into the meaning of reality at large.
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So that for me shamanism has become a kind of overarching metaphor
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for not only personal being in the world,
00:02:59 ►
but the historical adventure, the being of the species in the world.
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So I want to talk about it today, and as an advocate,
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I want to make it seem indispensable to living a life of right reason in the world.
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a life of right reason in the world. I want to show that without shamanism the notion of humanism itself is in a kind of jeopardy. And probably most of us can find ourselves
00:03:38 ►
in agreement with that, but then I want to leave most of us behind and go further and suggest that
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this humaneness rooted in shamanism is a humaneness ultimately rooted in very
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complex symbiotic relationships with plants and chemicals in the environment.
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I want to argue, in fact, that people without plants are in a state of potential neurosis,
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a state of existential wanting, and that, in fact fact part of the Western dilemma is the
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sense of abandonment that followed with the breaking off of these symbiotic relations
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with vision producing plants that characterized the rise of Western monotheism and even more
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characterized the rise of modern society
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but let me return them to the origins because this is where I think the case
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can be made my interpretation of the time we’re living through and this
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amorphous movement that we all somehow in some way are a part of, which calls itself the new age
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or what have you, I call it the archaic revival. And the reason I call it the archaic revival is rooted in my conviction
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that it is in fact a revivifying of the models and energy forms of archaism.
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And shamanism then is suddenly centrally highlighted. Shamanism was the profession
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ni plus ultra of the upper Neolithic era.
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And what was this profession precisely about?
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Well, it was about exploring
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the envelope of cognition,
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pushing against the linguistic membrane of what it was possible to say, symbolize, conceive, and communicate.
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competing on the earth attains somehow a kind of mega adaptive ability that causes a kind of compression of biological time into the phenomenon that
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we call history is it simply as our theologians have always been forced to conceive that divine agency entered into the mechanism of the world
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and somehow set a spark in motion that kindled and grew into humanity?
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Or is it, as the 19th century explored so exhaustively the possibility that incremental change can eventually initiate
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and insinuate into a situation new states of higher order including even possibly the state
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of higher order that we call self-reflecting consciousness but somehow this is no more than a gradual refinement out of previous states of
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nature. Well what I want to suggest is that it is a bit of both of these points
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of view the divine intervention and the evolutionary. I think what evolutionary biologists have
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missed in looking at the emergence of human beings out of the primate
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phylogeny is generally speaking the mutagenic influence of foods. The fact that a fruit-eating arboreal primate, because of a situation
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of spreading dryness in the environment, evolved into a pack-hunting creature of
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the grasslands with an omnivorous diet. And omnivores, by their very nature, expose themselves to a very large number of mutagenic influences.
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I’m speaking now chemically.
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Mutagenic influences that interfere with correct copying of protein,
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interfere with spacing of children, lactation, interfere with mentation,
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psychoactive compounds in the food chain.
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And it’s very interesting that as human beings transform themselves into omnivorous pack-hunting omnivores, you begin to see the first
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faint stirrings of self-reflection. You begin to get the fire pits and later the
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chipped flint leavings of earliest Neolithic human tool-making. What this
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says to me is that there was a unique
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confluence of factors present in the evolutionary situation that were capable
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of kindling this ontological transformation of what had previously
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been the animal mind. And what I suggest this factor is or was psychoactive plants in the
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environment, specifically psychoactive plants in the grasslands environment in which human pastoralism evolved in Africa over a million years ago. The plant must be
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African. It must be extraordinarily noticeable in the environment. It must
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not be a deep forest endemic because this is not where human evolution was
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taking place. The only plant which fits this description is a mushroom of
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the psilocybin containing variety and it’s very easy to see I think that the
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presence then of psychoactive compounds of this sort in the early human diet set the stage for a number of
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structural and psychological changes. This means that those animals not
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including the psychoactive substance in their diet will be mitigated against and
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fade from the scene. And by this process, a steady bootstrapping process, self-reflection was born in our species.
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How do we get from visual acuity to self-reflection?
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Low doses of psilocybin give increased visual acuity.
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Medium-range doses of psilocybin give an increased interest in erotic activity.
00:11:29 ►
You should laugh, there may not be too many laughs with this one. Slightly
00:11:37 ►
higher doses of psilocybin give an experience of the numinosum, an actual contact with a mystery in the human psyche
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which is no less mysterious to us today
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than it was to our ancestors
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when the last glaciation was retreating against Canada.
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I mean, don’t kid yourself.
00:12:01 ►
In the face of the content of this symbiotic relationship,
00:12:08 ►
modernism, rationalism, positivism, all is exposed as just whistling past the graveyard
00:12:16 ►
because the numinous depth of the mystery that seems to have called us out of the animal mind is completely impenetrable to modern analysis.
00:12:31 ►
That’s why even discussing its presence
00:12:34 ►
is mitigated against so intensely.
00:12:39 ►
Well, I don’t want to spend too much time
00:12:41 ►
on this early facet of the emergence thing.
00:12:45 ►
I want to move ahead and show that as pastoralism developed,
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as the domestic relationship between cattle, human beings, and mushrooms
00:12:55 ►
settled down into a self-reinforcing cycle of consciousness,
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language arose, religion arose of the goddess-oriented variety
00:13:07 ►
and the connection of the cow to the goddess is there at the dawn time.
00:13:13 ►
There is no question about it.
00:13:16 ►
Language seems to have been the particular prerogative of women
00:13:21 ►
in the early emergent phases. This is possibly
00:13:28 ►
because men were involved in hunting activities where great premium is placed
00:13:35 ►
on silent stealthiness. While women were engaged as gatherers in the hunting-gathering phase, women were engaged in gathering plants.
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And as all botanists can tell you, gathering plants involves an extensive taxonomic language
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so that the difference, the minute differences between cereal grains and insects and all of these things need to
00:14:06 ►
be linguistically defined and characterized and to this day a
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taxonomic description of a plant is a joy see and thrill to read because you
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know sub apically glabrous with lanceolate trifolium and so on for many many lines
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but in a strange way that is a law repeated over and over again through
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history each advance somehow outsmarts itself and the wonderful linguistic depth which women attained as
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gatherers through the production of folk taxonomy eventually led them to a
00:14:53 ►
terrible discovery the discovery of agriculture because they learned that
00:15:01 ►
rather than maintain this vast library of shifting information about seasonal plants
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randomly distributed or distributed according to the whims of nature
00:15:12 ►
They could in fact focus on a very small number of plants
00:15:17 ►
learn how to grow these plants learn their needs alone and
00:15:28 ►
plants, learned their needs alone, and at that point the retreat was on and the dualism was fully in place.
00:15:30 ►
And there was that which was domesticated, that which was of the hearth, and that which
00:15:35 ►
was of the ausland, the howling unknown, that which was beyond the pale. I think it was Weston Labar, great old anthropologist,
00:15:47 ►
who felt, he said,
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hallucinogens can only be used
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in hunting and gathering cultures
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because when agriculturalists use them
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it makes it impossible to get up at dawn
00:15:59 ►
and go hoe the fields.
00:16:02 ►
And so suddenly the gods become the corn gods and the wheat
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gods gods of symbolizing domesticity and hard labor and and that sort of thing
00:16:13 ►
and at this moment of agriculture which led to overproduction which led to trade
00:16:21 ►
which led to cities and so forth there is a beginning of the breaking
00:16:28 ►
away of this symbiotic relationship which had bound human beings to nature to this time and I
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don’t mean this metaphorically I mean I want to be taken seriously as proposing that the all we of
00:16:47 ►
modernity is the consequences of a disrupted symbiotic relationship between ourselves and
00:16:55 ►
vegetable nature, and that only a restoration of this in some form is going to carry us into a full inheritance
00:17:08 ►
of our birthright as human beings.
00:17:12 ►
Now what did this symbiotic relationship consist of?
00:17:16 ►
What was the effect of this psychedelic use, this embeddedness of language using
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cognition using but stoned
00:17:30 ►
primates
00:17:31 ►
in the natural order well I submit to you that what it was or how it acted
00:17:39 ►
operationally was as a
00:17:47 ►
Feminizing pheromone that the continuous exposure to this tremendum
00:17:53 ►
represented by the hallucinogenically induced ecstasy
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acted to continuously dissolve that portion of the psyche
00:18:04 ►
which as moderns we call the male ego.
00:18:08 ►
And I don’t mean that it only worked on men.
00:18:11 ►
I mean that wherever in human personalities this certain catch began to form and build like a calcareous tumor in the personality,
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like a calcareous tumor in the personality,
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the psycholitic presence of the undeniable fact of the tremendum tended to dissolve this back into Tao, psychic hell,
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however you wish to style it.
00:18:42 ►
And that the evolution of language then setting up this
00:18:47 ►
movement off into specialization and a movement away from nature set up the
00:18:54 ►
consequences of the all we which permeates Western civilization it is
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only in Western civilization that you get this steady focus on this monotheistic ideal
00:19:09 ►
and working out the implications of what is essentially a pathological personality pattern,
00:19:19 ►
the pattern of the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing, wrathful male deity.
00:19:27 ►
No one you would invite to your garden party.
00:19:34 ►
It’s very interesting that this ideal is the only instance,
00:19:39 ►
the only hypostatization of deity that I know of
00:19:43 ►
that has no congress with woman at any
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point in the theological myth the god of Western civilization has nothing to do
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with women and the presence of the Sophia and the presence of the mater
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dolorosa and all of these things have only been tolerated as heresies in the Western tradition.
00:20:06 ►
And it is the Western tradition that has the most continuous break with this symbiotic relationship.
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In other words, we have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis
00:20:21 ►
because of the absence of a direct pipeline to the unconscious and
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we have then fallen victim to priestcraft of every conceivable sort a
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similar situation which may give us some objective perspective on our own haunts
00:20:42 ►
the fate of those portions of indo-European humanity that went east instead of west.
00:20:49 ►
In other words, the whole story of Indian civilization is the story of a masculine, static, hierarchically organized system coming into place in the wake of the loss of the secret of Soma, the loss of the portal to another kind of vegetable gnosis.
00:21:29 ►
vegetable gnosis. Well, so provided then that I have made my case and convinced you that this is all gospel, what kind of options are there to someone who
00:21:36 ►
believes this? Well, what that means is a brief survey of the anthropological opportunities to explore hallucinogenesis
00:21:49 ►
presently afforded by societies living throughout the world.
00:21:54 ►
There are, of course, the psilocybin complex discovered by Gordon Wasson, the magic mushrooms
00:22:02 ►
of central Mexico, which may have played a role in the Mayan and Toltec civilizations,
00:22:08 ►
and the wider-ranging pantropical Stropharia cubensis,
00:22:13 ►
Psilocybe cubensis, which originated in Thailand but is distributed throughout the warm tropics.
00:22:20 ►
Interesting, all of these shamanically sanctioned hallucinogens are in the indole family,
00:22:30 ►
a very narrow family of compounds, with the exception, I almost blew it, with the exception
00:22:37 ►
of mescaline, which is in a different family, a kind of amphetamine. But all the others, including the Morning Glory complex with its LSD-like
00:22:49 ►
alkaloids, chinoclovine and ergonamine, the psilocybin complex, which involves, as I said,
00:22:59 ►
several pandemic species and many highly indemnified species especially in the
00:23:05 ►
Pacific Northwest the Iboga cult of Gabon and Western Africa which is sort
00:23:12 ►
of the exotic cousin of all of these things but nevertheless structurally an
00:23:19 ►
indole and then the short-acting tryptamines and the beta carbolines.
00:23:25 ►
The short-acting tryptamines can be used separately.
00:23:30 ►
The beta carbolines, though hallucinogenic in themselves,
00:23:33 ►
are usually used as monoamine oxidase inhibitors
00:23:37 ►
to enhance the effect of short-acting tryptamines.
00:23:40 ►
This is a highly evolved pharmacology and shamanic complex in South America.
00:23:47 ►
One of the peculiar puzzles of shamanic anthropology and ethnobotany
00:23:53 ►
is the clustering of hallucinogenic plants in South America.
00:23:58 ►
Why are the Old World tropics, the tropics of the Malukas in Indonesia,
00:24:04 ►
not equally rich
00:24:05 ►
in hallucinogenic flora no one can answer this question but certainly
00:24:11 ►
Mesoamerica and the New World seems to be the great home of these things
00:24:21 ►
you notice that I don’t mention any synthetics in the list. whole strawmondong of the drug problem and the drug issue, which is a
00:24:50 ►
whole other kettle of fish and has to do with the fates of nations and trillion
00:24:56 ►
dollars, scamola, and who knows what else. I prefer the organic hallucinogens
00:25:09 ►
and recommend them to other people
00:25:11 ►
because I think their long history of shamanic usage
00:25:16 ►
is the first seal of approval that you must look for.
00:25:24 ►
I mean, if these things have been used for thousands of years,
00:25:27 ►
then you can be fairly confident that they do not cause tumors or miscarriages.
00:25:36 ►
Because nature is far richer in exotic and poisonous and mutagenic
00:25:43 ►
and psychoactive chemicals
00:25:45 ►
than the human pharmacopoeia.
00:25:48 ►
I mean, many things are avoided.
00:25:51 ►
There are many potential hallucinogens that are not utilized by human beings.
00:25:57 ►
So there has been a certain trial-and-error selectivity applied to these things.
00:26:04 ►
trial and error selectivity applied to these things.
00:26:13 ►
I think it’s important to confine oneself to compounds which are least insulting to the physical brain,
00:26:18 ►
not because the physical brain has anything to do with the mind particularly,
00:26:25 ►
physical brain has anything to do with the mind particularly, but because it certainly has to do with the metabolic end state of indoles.
00:26:32 ►
And so things which are alien to the brain should probably not be introduced into it.
00:26:40 ►
One way of judging how long a relationship between a human population and a plant has been in place
00:26:50 ►
is to see how benign the compound is in human metabolism.
00:26:57 ►
And if you take some plant and your knees are feeling rubbery three days later, or your eyes aren’t in focus 48 hours later,
00:27:08 ►
then this is not a benign compound.
00:27:11 ►
This is not a compound where there has been a smooth hand-in-glove fit with the human user.
00:27:20 ►
This is why, to my mind, the tryptamines are so interesting and why, another reason why, one I just thought of, that I argue for the mushroom as the primary hallucinogen involved in human origins. weird resemblance to human neurochemistry. The human brain and indeed all nervous systems
00:27:49 ►
run on 5-hydroxytryptamine, serotonin.
00:27:54 ►
NN-dimethyltryptamine is the hallucinogenic compound
00:28:01 ►
of this Amazonian complex,
00:28:04 ►
is the most powerful of all hallucinogens in of this Amazonian complex is the most powerful
00:28:05 ►
of all hallucinogens in the human system and yet clears your system in a matter
00:28:12 ►
of minutes
00:28:15 ►
this argues for a great antiquity of the relationship between these things.
00:28:27 ►
So then having discussed options,
00:28:32 ►
it would remain, it seems, to discuss techniques since it’s almost what Huxley called the gratuitous grace.
00:28:37 ►
All conditions for success can be present
00:28:41 ►
and one can still fail.
00:28:44 ►
success can be present and one can still fail.
00:28:50 ►
Although not if all conditions for success are present and one does it over and over again.
00:28:53 ►
Maybe there’s a temporal variable there.
00:28:57 ►
I’m not sure.
00:28:59 ►
But technique to me is a kind of a…
00:29:04 ►
I’m reluctant to talk about it because it seems so obvious to me what good technique is.
00:29:11 ►
I mean, you sit down, you shut up, and you pay attention is basically the good technique.
00:29:18 ►
And then the footnotes add on an empty stomach, in a room feeling comfortable and then sit down shut up pay attention
00:29:29 ►
it’s something which happens behind the eyelids it is not eudetic hallucination although it begins
00:29:40 ►
like eudetic hallucination I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff
00:29:45 ►
now for about ten years publicly like this and one of the major things, the
00:29:52 ►
major conceptual and linguistic problem to get over is to actually convey to
00:29:59 ►
people what’s being talked about because probably I would assume 95% of the people in this room have
00:30:08 ►
something under their belt which they call drug experience but did you know that yours is different
00:30:16 ►
from everybody else’s and that it these things range from you, mild tingling in the feet to, you know, language fails.
00:30:30 ►
And the thing to put across is the reality of the presence of this thing.
00:30:38 ►
And this is the importance in talking to a group with an interest in transpersonal psychology.
00:30:45 ►
The situation that we now reside in is not one of seeking the answer,
00:30:51 ►
but facing the answer.
00:30:55 ►
The answer has been found, it just happens to lie on the wrong side
00:31:00 ►
of the fence of social toleration and legality and so we’re just forced
00:31:08 ►
into this strange little war dance where everybody knows that psychedelics are
00:31:15 ►
the most powerful instrument for the study of the mind conceivable and yet
00:31:22 ►
you know a lot of people are still ratomorphically involved in the academic
00:31:29 ►
and university system, trying to ignore the fact that the tool has been placed in our hands,
00:31:37 ►
like the 16th century when the telescope was invented. We have proven that we are not large enough to take the tool into
00:31:45 ►
our own hands without a social and intellectual transformation. And I think
00:31:52 ►
it must begin in the field of psychology by acknowledging that if what we are
00:32:01 ►
involved in, if what this paradigm transform is, is the archaic revival,
00:32:07 ►
and that we really can create a caring, refeminized, eco-sensitive, global world
00:32:16 ►
by going back to these very, very old models,
00:32:21 ►
then it isn’t going to be possible to do it on the strength of political
00:32:27 ►
exhortation and rap alone.
00:32:30 ►
It’s going to have to rest on an experience that just shakes you to your roots, that is
00:32:39 ►
real and that is generalized and that can then be talked about and dissected.
00:32:46 ►
We need to acknowledge the depth of our dilemma
00:32:52 ►
and the real truth, I think, that we know about our options out.
00:32:59 ►
I mean, we’re playing with half the deck
00:33:02 ►
as long as we tolerate that the cardinals of government and science
00:33:09 ►
should dictate where human curiosity can legitimately send its attention and where it cannot.
00:33:18 ►
I mean, it’s a essentially preposterous situation. It is essentially a civil rights issue
00:33:28 ►
because what we’re talking about here
00:33:30 ►
is the repression of a religious sensibility.
00:33:36 ►
In fact, not a religious sensibility,
00:33:39 ►
the religious sensibility,
00:33:41 ►
not built on some con game spun out by eunuchs but based
00:33:48 ►
on the symbiotic relationship that was in place for our species for 50,000
00:33:56 ►
years before the advent of history writing priestcraft and propaganda. So it’s a clarion call to recover a birthright,
00:34:08 ►
however uncomfortable that may make us. A call to realize that life lived in the
00:34:19 ►
absence of the psychedelic experience that primordial shamanism is based on
00:34:26 ►
is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego
00:34:36 ►
and its fear of dissolution in this mysterious mama matrix
00:34:43 ►
which is all around us
00:34:45 ►
and which apparently extends to infinity
00:34:48 ►
and where our historical future actually lies.
00:34:54 ►
This is the other thing.
00:34:55 ►
It is now very clear
00:34:58 ►
that techniques of mind-human interfacing,
00:35:04 ►
pharmacology of the synthetic variety, all kinds of
00:35:10 ►
manipulative techniques, all kinds of data storage imaging and retrieval
00:35:16 ►
techniques, all of this is coalescing toward the potential of a truly demonic or angelic kind of self-imaging of our culture.
00:35:30 ►
And the people who are on the demonic side are fully aware of this
00:35:34 ►
and hurrying full tilt forward with their plans to capture everyone everyone as a 100% believing consumer inside some kind of beige
00:35:48 ►
furnished fascism that won’t even raise a ripple.
00:35:53 ►
So…
00:36:02 ►
So the shamanic response in this situation, I think,
00:36:07 ►
is to push the art pedal through the floor.
00:36:11 ►
This is, again, one of the primary functions of shamanism
00:36:16 ►
and the function that is tremendously synergized by the psychedelics.
00:36:22 ►
They are, in fact, if, as I spoke of them earlier,
00:36:26 ►
pheromones which dissolve the male ego,
00:36:29 ►
then they are also
00:36:31 ►
pheromones which synergize
00:36:34 ►
the human imagination,
00:36:37 ►
cause us to connect
00:36:39 ►
and reconnect the contents
00:36:41 ►
of the collective mind
00:36:43 ►
in ever more
00:36:46 ►
architectonic implausible and yet self-fulfilling ways that I really think that the only
00:36:53 ►
escape from
00:36:56 ►
The trap which post-industrial
00:37:00 ►
male dominated
00:37:03 ►
politically manipulative, drug-running, urban technocracy has in store for us. it and brushing it aside by virtue of an immense expansion of unpredictable creativity.
00:37:30 ►
But what shamanizing means in the ordinary folkloric level is healing, and the art function
00:37:40 ►
is somewhat in the shadow.
00:37:46 ►
function is somewhat in the shadow but in the face of the need for a planetary healing the art making function of the shaman is going to stand front and
00:37:54 ►
center because what this art making function is is generating a new guiding
00:38:01 ►
image of ourselves this is why it relates so fundamentally to
00:38:07 ►
psychology. We need a new paradigmatic image that can take us forward through
00:38:14 ►
the narrow neck of historical forces that we can feel impeding and resisting this more expansive, more at ease, more human, more caring dimension
00:38:29 ►
that is insisting on being born.
00:38:34 ►
And so, in terms of political obligation, in terms of reforming and trying to save the soul of psychology in terms of trying to goose along,
00:38:47 ►
connecting up the end of history with the beginning of history.
00:38:50 ►
All of this impels us, I think,
00:38:54 ►
to look at shamanism as the paradigmatic model,
00:39:00 ►
to take its techniques seriously,
00:39:02 ►
to take its techniques seriously,
00:39:06 ►
even those which challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary.
00:39:12 ►
Because if we don’t do that,
00:39:15 ►
as I said, we’re not playing with a full deck.
00:39:19 ►
You know, years and years ago,
00:39:21 ►
before the term psychedelic was settled on,
00:39:24 ►
there was just a phenomenological
00:39:26 ►
description these things were called consciousness expanding drugs well I think that’s a very good
00:39:34 ►
term think about our dilemma on this planet If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what
00:39:52 ►
kind of future is it going to be? Now to my mind, the psychedelic position is most fundamentally threatening
00:40:07 ►
when fully logically thought out
00:40:10 ►
because it is an anti-drug position.
00:40:17 ►
And make no mistake about it,
00:40:19 ►
the issue is drugged.
00:40:22 ►
How drugged shall you be?
00:40:24 ►
Or, to put it another way,
00:40:26 ►
consciousness.
00:40:27 ►
How conscious shall you be?
00:40:30 ►
Who shall be conscious?
00:40:33 ►
Who shall be unconscious?
00:40:35 ►
And imagine
00:40:38 ►
if the Japanese had won World War II,
00:40:43 ►
taken over America,
00:40:48 ►
and introduced an insidious drug which caused the average American to spend six and a half hours a day consuming enemy propaganda.
00:40:56 ►
But this is what was done, not by the Japanese, by ourselves.
00:41:01 ►
This is television.
00:41:03 ►
Six and a half hours a day. Average. That’s the average. So there
00:41:10 ►
must be people out there hooked on 24 hours a day. Or I visit people in LA who have one set on in
00:41:17 ►
every room. So they’re racking up a lot of time for the rest of us. You see what is needed is an operational awareness of
00:41:28 ►
what we mean by drug. A drug is something which causes unexamined, obsessive,
00:41:38 ►
habituated behavior. You don’t examine your behavior, you just do it.
00:41:45 ►
You do it obsessively.
00:41:47 ►
You let nothing get in the way of it.
00:41:52 ►
This is the kind of life we’re being sold on every level.
00:41:58 ►
To watch, to consume, to buy.
00:42:02 ►
The psychedelic thing is off in this tiny corner, never mentioned, and yet
00:42:09 ►
it represents the only counter flow toward a tendency to just leave people
00:42:16 ►
in designer states of consciousness. Not their designers, but the designers of Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, so forth and so on.
00:42:28 ►
This is really happening.
00:42:29 ►
I mean, it’s only a matter of how tight you draw the metaphor that you realize, you know,
00:42:37 ►
I’ve been coming and going from Los Angeles recently a lot.
00:42:41 ►
And when the plane swings out over the eastern part of the city
00:42:48 ►
looking down it’s like looking at a printed circuit all these curved
00:42:54 ►
driveways and cul-de-sacs with the same little modules installed on each end of
00:43:00 ►
them and you realize you know that as long as the Reader’s Digest stays subscribed to
00:43:08 ►
and the TV stays on these are all interchangeable parts the this is this nightmarish thing which
00:43:16 ►
McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw the creation of the public. The public has no history, has no future,
00:43:26 ►
lives in a golden moment created by credit which binds them
00:43:31 ►
ineluctably to a fascist system that is never criticized.
00:43:35 ►
This is the ultimate consequence
00:43:53 ►
This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off this symbiotic relationship with the vegetable, feminine, maternal matrix of the planet.
00:44:00 ►
This is what ended partnership.
00:44:03 ►
This is what ended balance between the sexes.
00:44:07 ►
This is what set us on the long slide. We can now examine the options available
00:44:15 ►
and put in place archaic options which will restore this balance and to the good credit of people like Dick Schultes
00:44:28 ►
and Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman we have in this century taken into our hands the tools
00:44:36 ►
the information and the means to do this but psychology there had better not be a Nuremberg because not enough people
00:44:48 ►
have stood up for this. People have contented themselves with ratomorphism for 25 years
00:44:55 ►
when they knew in their hearts that it was wrong. Feeling guilty out there?
00:45:02 ►
Feeling guilty out there?
00:45:11 ►
You could cheer to show that it wasn’t you.
00:45:23 ►
So now I think the culture crisis grows ever more intense. the stakes rise ever higher.
00:45:26 ►
If there were ever a time to be heard and be counted
00:45:30 ►
and try and clarify thinking on these issues,
00:45:35 ►
it would be now because, you know,
00:45:41 ►
there is a major attack on the Bill of Rights underway in the guise of a so-called drug bill.
00:45:51 ►
And somehow the drug issue is even more frightening than communism, even more insidious.
00:45:58 ►
McCarthy told America that communism was under the bed.
00:46:02 ►
He was wrong.
00:46:03 ►
Ronald Reagan and George Bush tell America
00:46:07 ►
that drugs are in the living room,
00:46:09 ►
and they’re right.
00:46:11 ►
It is here. It is real.
00:46:13 ►
It is the hydrogen bomb of the third world.
00:46:17 ►
And the quality of rhetoric,
00:46:19 ►
the quality of rhetoric emanating from therapists and psychologists and psychoanalysts
00:46:28 ►
is going to have to radically improve, or we are going to have happen to us
00:46:34 ►
what happened to genetics in the Soviet Union.
00:46:37 ►
We’re going to be lysencoized.
00:46:39 ►
We’re going to be made lily white,
00:46:42 ►
and all opportunity for exploring this dimension is going to be closed off
00:46:47 ►
almost as a footnote to the suppression of these synthetic poisonous narcotics which are mostly
00:46:54 ►
dealt by governments anyway but the psychedelic issue as I said it’s a civil rights issue it’s a civil liberties issue
00:47:05 ►
the reason women couldn’t be given the vote
00:47:09 ►
in the 19th century
00:47:11 ►
there was a very simple overpowering reason
00:47:15 ►
that was always given
00:47:17 ►
it would destroy society
00:47:19 ►
and that’s the reason given
00:47:23 ►
this was also the reason why the king could not give up a divine right
00:47:28 ►
the right of consequently
00:47:29 ►
chaos would result
00:47:32 ►
and this is why we’re told drugs cannot be legalized
00:47:36 ►
because society would disintegrate
00:47:38 ►
this is just nonsense
00:47:40 ►
most societies have always operated
00:47:44 ►
in the light of various habits based on plants.
00:47:49 ►
The whole history of mankind could be written as a series of made and broken relationships
00:47:58 ►
with plants.
00:47:59 ►
Think about the influence of tobacco on mercantilism in 17th and 18th century Europe. Think about the
00:48:07 ►
influence of coffee on the modern office worker, or the way the British influenced opium policy in
00:48:14 ►
the Far East to rule China, or the way the CIA used heroin in the American ghettos in the 1960s to choke off black dissent and black dissatisfaction with the war.
00:48:27 ►
History is about these plant relationships.
00:48:32 ►
They can be raised into consciousness, integrated into social policy, and used to create a more
00:48:40 ►
caring, meaningful world, or they can be denied the way sexuality was
00:48:46 ►
denied until the force of the work of Freud and others just made it
00:48:50 ►
impossible to maintain the fiction any longer. This choice of how quickly we
00:48:58 ►
develop into a mature community able to address this issue is entirely with us I think and certainly
00:49:07 ►
people like Stan Grof and others have worked valiantly to keep this kind of
00:49:13 ►
thing alive but my god you can count them on the fingers of one hand
00:49:21 ►
we’re not just talking about passive agents of transformation and slideshows of alien worlds and stuff like that.
00:49:32 ►
The central mystery is that the thing is animate.
00:49:39 ►
That there is at the center of these experiences an organized inteleki, an ally, a spirit, an other,
00:49:50 ►
and an I-Thou relationship is possible. And this is just, now this leads us to the edge of simply
00:50:07 ►
the edge of simply wild hyperbole and out into the realm of the utterly improbable.
00:50:14 ►
We have no place in our worldview for something like this. I mean, is it an extraterrestrial? Is it Gaia?
00:50:19 ►
Is it, as some Jungians have said, merely autonomous fragments of the personality
00:50:26 ►
that have slipped from the reins of the ego’s control
00:50:29 ►
and now return to haunt us as gnomes, kibiri, water spirits, and sylphs of the air?
00:50:38 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:50:40 ►
But the…
00:50:46 ►
Who does know?
00:50:51 ►
The point not to be lost sight of is that, again, this is real.
00:50:58 ►
This is not rare.
00:51:00 ►
This is common on psilocybin.
00:51:03 ►
What you don’t get with, I don’t believe anyway,
00:51:08 ►
but what you don’t get with yoga,
00:51:09 ►
what you certainly don’t get with mystical experience,
00:51:13 ►
is any degree of on-command repeatability
00:51:17 ►
of these bizarre mental and physical states.
00:51:22 ►
And yet with something like DMT, if you get somebody
00:51:25 ►
who is transported into a realm
00:51:29 ►
of self-transforming,
00:51:31 ►
chattering machine elves,
00:51:33 ►
chances are they will get elves every time.
00:51:37 ►
Well, imagine the impact of this
00:51:40 ►
on the rational mind
00:51:42 ►
that you can be swept into a space
00:51:44 ►
where you
00:51:46 ►
you
00:51:47 ►
have to entertain the possibility that
00:51:49 ►
is this a UFO abduction or
00:51:51 ►
am I dead
00:51:53 ►
or am I just simply, God forbid, totally insane now
00:51:58 ►
or what is
00:51:59 ►
happening
00:52:00 ►
the animate
00:52:02 ►
inteleki
00:52:03 ►
at the center of the experience is I think the greatest challenge for
00:52:08 ►
psychology for historical assimilation of this phenomenon generally because what is it I mean
00:52:15 ►
our science is trained to allow the slim possibility of extraterrestrials and so our electro I mean our radio telescopes
00:52:26 ►
point to the stars shifting millions of signals at a time searching for a radio civilization
00:52:34 ►
but what is it going to do to the forward thrust of historical continuity if right next door in the human mind there is an other so other that it cannot be assimilated
00:52:49 ►
and yet so accessible that it’s only a matter of choice to stand in its awesome presence.
00:52:57 ►
I don’t have the answer to this question. I think it’s amazing that I’m able to articulate the question because it is against 500 years of expectation and programming
00:53:15 ►
that we are finally able to wake up almost as from a fever
00:53:20 ►
and say, my God, nature is alive.
00:53:29 ►
It’s talking to us. It’s alive. No, you know,
00:53:35 ►
this is not a metaphor. I am not a romantic. This is not an artistic or aesthetic stance.
00:53:47 ►
Nature is alive. Someone is on the line. And then, you know, as far as who, I don’t rush in to say.
00:53:51 ►
I mean, I’m very wary of anyone who claims to know who because the problem seems to me one of great subtlety and depth.
00:53:56 ►
How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?
00:54:02 ►
And perhaps one problem will cast significance on the other.
00:54:09 ►
But yes, if we can encounter it temporarily through these shamanic means, then must it
00:54:15 ►
not become the historical arrow of our becoming? must we not then recognize that this Numenosum must rise into history as a fact of realizing the eschaton?
00:54:32 ►
That’s what I think, that actually the shamans are seeing and have always seen some kind of trans-historical object,
00:54:42 ►
some kind of trans-historical object,
00:54:50 ►
some kind of vast hypostatization of ourselves as deity that is casting a shadow back through time,
00:54:54 ►
and that all magic, all religion, all vision is an anticipation of this future state.
00:55:02 ►
What excites me is the notion that we may have reached the point in this process
00:55:08 ►
where we can consciously know
00:55:10 ►
that that is what we are doing,
00:55:12 ►
that that is what we are about,
00:55:14 ►
that our task is the architectonic expression
00:55:18 ►
of the divine other
00:55:20 ►
and then set about it
00:55:22 ►
without any more haggling and tail dragging. In other
00:55:27 ►
words, to realize what our destiny is will cause us to move toward it with
00:55:32 ►
much greater facility and smoothness. This is a real problem. I think it
00:55:38 ►
goes to the general state of the drug problem, which is it is one of utter ignorance and victimization
00:55:48 ►
when the government whines and yaps about education but they’re not doing any education
00:55:56 ►
I mean the what do you mean by dope I mean they have so linguistically impoverished us that we can’t even make a distinction between
00:56:05 ►
marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, LSD, what have you. A whole new vocabulary of
00:56:13 ►
consequences has to be created. That’s what I said earlier. What we don’t want
00:56:19 ►
is habitual, obsessive, unexamined activity. We don’t want it in commerce, we
00:56:29 ►
don’t want it in drug use, we don’t want it in social relations, we don’t want
00:56:36 ►
unexamined habitual forms of activity that are obsessively expressed. What we do want is conscious, caring, self-examining,
00:56:48 ►
inquisitive thinking people and institutions.
00:56:54 ►
So whatever mitigates against that has to be seen as a drug.
00:57:00 ►
And things like television, money, propaganda,
00:57:03 ►
all of these things then are seen as great evils, which they may not have been seen that way before. We have to get smart. You have to be smart to use drugs. You have us this far. It wasn’t easy. Five times the ice moved south from the poles. Five times the human family was islanded and divided by walls of moving ice. all the way along until a hundred years ago there were no inoculations for
00:57:45 ►
infectious diseases most women died in childbirth many children died in
00:57:52 ►
childbirth the average lifespan even in Western societies was 35 years old so it
00:58:00 ►
you know it’s going to be tough until we get to heaven.
00:58:08 ►
There has to be intelligence.
00:58:13 ►
And, you know, one way to be intelligent is to decondition. Our lives are not going to make sense if we tolerate propaganda in our lives.
00:58:22 ►
You cannot be half slave and half free.
00:58:27 ►
You cannot be half hip and half yup.
00:58:33 ►
You know?
00:58:34 ►
So the main thing with the drug thing
00:58:39 ►
is to get smart, get real smart, fast,
00:58:43 ►
or you will lose your children and your mind and your freedom,
00:58:47 ►
because all this is at stake. This audience has supposedly a stake in psychology,
00:58:55 ►
in transpersonal psychology, which means the destiny and opportunities of chemistry archaic and modern
00:59:09 ►
should be right at the top of the agenda we’re going to have to end this thank you for your
00:59:16 ►
tolerance you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:26 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:32 ►
Did you catch that part just now where Terrence said,
00:59:36 ►
one way to be intelligent is to be deconditioned
00:59:39 ►
to the propaganda we are all fed every day?
00:59:42 ►
As he said, you cannot live half slave and half free.
00:59:47 ►
Well, I’ve been thinking about that for a long time now.
00:59:51 ►
In fact, I’ve just spent the last six and a half years
00:59:54 ►
struggling to organize my thinking about that idea,
00:59:57 ►
and the result is my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:00:01 ►
which I finally finished writing two days ago.
01:00:04 ►
As I said at the beginning of this podcast, today holds special significance for me,
01:00:10 ►
and for two reasons. The first one is that as soon as I get this podcast posted online, I’ll
01:00:15 ►
begin recording the last chapter of that book for release next week as an audiobook.
01:00:21 ►
And so next week’s podcast will consist of me reading the first chapter of the Genesis Generation.
01:00:27 ►
And I’m telling you that as a warning
01:00:29 ►
to our fellow salonners who are less than impressed
01:00:31 ►
with my personal chatter on these podcasts.
01:00:34 ►
In fact, I’ve got to read part of a blog posting
01:00:37 ►
that a salonner sent me,
01:00:39 ►
which put a huge smile on my face.
01:00:42 ►
I don’t know the name of the blog,
01:00:44 ►
but the poster was someone who calls himself or herself
01:00:47 ►
LaserCave, or maybe it’s PDXFF, whatever that means.
01:00:53 ►
Anyway, here is the part of that posting that I really liked.
01:00:56 ►
It goes,
01:00:57 ►
Oh, and for those of you who frequent the Psychedelic Salon podcast,
01:01:02 ►
the six casts on chaos, creativity, and imagination from last December
01:01:06 ►
are an extremely rewarding listen.
01:01:10 ►
Maybe this is old news,
01:01:11 ►
but remember when listening to these
01:01:13 ►
to keep your ear tuned closely.
01:01:15 ►
When Lorenzo is saying
01:01:17 ►
his usual ridiculous commentary,
01:01:19 ►
he totally gives props to Tim Donovan
01:01:21 ►
on one of the tracks.
01:01:23 ►
It’s quite amusing.
01:01:25 ►
Well, besides the part about my usual ridiculous commentary, which is what you happen to be
01:01:32 ►
listening to right now, I might add, I wondered about the part about Tim Donovan, because not
01:01:37 ►
only do I not have any memory of saying that, I can’t even recall who Tim Donovan is, which for me reinforces the idea that, yeah,
01:01:47 ►
I guess my commentary must really be ridiculous. But since I belong to the Brendan Behan School of
01:01:53 ►
Public Relations that states one shouldn’t worry about what anybody says about you as long as they
01:01:59 ►
spell your name right, so thanks for the publicity. We’ll take it any way we can get it. But next week’s program will be all me
01:02:07 ►
and so don’t say you weren’t warned.
01:02:10 ►
And I guess I shouldn’t just leave you hanging
01:02:12 ►
about the theme of my novel.
01:02:15 ►
Basically, it’s about awakening,
01:02:17 ►
transformation, and Terrence’s dream
01:02:19 ►
of an archaic, psychedelic society.
01:02:21 ►
And it’s basically the story
01:02:24 ►
about the transformation of a 29-year-old yuppie geek into an underground
01:02:29 ►
hero in the psychedelic community.
01:02:31 ►
As I said, I’ll be posting the first chapter in next week’s podcast, and assuming that
01:02:37 ►
I can finish recording and building the delivery infrastructure by then, it will be available
01:02:42 ►
for purchase for the princely sum of $12, which will
01:02:46 ►
run you about a dollar an hour, as it takes about 12 hours to hear the entire book. But that’s for
01:02:51 ►
next week. Today I want to mention one more personal item, though, because this date, June 3rd,
01:02:59 ►
is a particularly significant one for me because of where I was and what I was doing 40 years ago today.
01:03:07 ►
I would ask you to think about what you were doing 40 years ago today,
01:03:11 ►
but from what I know about our fellow salonners,
01:03:14 ►
most of you weren’t even a twinkle in your parents’ eye back then.
01:03:18 ►
In my case, however, I was in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,
01:03:22 ►
serving as the navigator for a U.S. Navy task force
01:03:26 ►
that arrived at the site where the submarine Scorpion went down a year earlier.
01:03:30 ►
We were to spend the next couple of months floating over that spot
01:03:34 ►
while the Bathyscaphe Trieste made nine dives of more than 11,000 feet down
01:03:39 ►
to investigate the cause of her loss
01:03:41 ►
and the loss of the 99 brave men who went down with her.
01:03:47 ►
And so I wanted to remember those men and their families today.
01:03:52 ►
Well, that’s enough of the heavy stuff for a while. As I mentioned earlier, we may be coming
01:03:58 ►
to the end of the line on New Talks by Terrence McKenna. And while I still have a significant
01:04:04 ►
amount of material
01:04:05 ►
from the Timothy Leary Archive,
01:04:07 ►
as well as some interviews I want to do,
01:04:10 ►
still I’ve been thinking that maybe we ought to make
01:04:12 ►
a few changes in these podcasts.
01:04:15 ►
Nothing radical, but maybe spice it up a bit.
01:04:18 ►
And so I’m thinking about adding a Skype record button
01:04:21 ►
to our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon website
01:04:24 ►
for you to leave audio comments,
01:04:26 ►
some of which maybe I could integrate into the podcast.
01:04:30 ►
I’m still not clear on how to implement this
01:04:33 ►
because it most likely will involve finding some volunteers
01:04:36 ►
to listen to the comments and help the most relevant ones
01:04:40 ►
bubble to the top and find their way into a podcast.
01:04:43 ►
And I’ve got some other ideas about the
01:04:46 ►
salon and associated websites, becoming more of a social gathering place where we can find and talk
01:04:52 ►
with the others without any commercial interference by banner ads and stuff like that. Again, since I
01:04:59 ►
have no clear ideas on how to make this a reality, my guess is that you and some of our other fellow
01:05:05 ►
salonners will help us evolve our little community even a little further along.
01:05:11 ►
Now, one of the things that has prompted me to think in this direction is due to all of the
01:05:15 ►
great music that our fellow salonners have been sending. Hopefully, one day we’ll have a podcast
01:05:21 ►
from the salon that consists only of music. As you know, I occasionally play a song at the end of a program,
01:05:28 ►
and in podcast number 120 I included several songs that were sent to me.
01:05:33 ►
And just this past week I received a link from some music from Shah,
01:05:36 ►
who is a music producer and fellow salonner who joins us each week from his home in Israel.
01:05:42 ►
In it he has used a few samples from the salon,
01:05:45 ►
and for what it’s worth, I really enjoy listening to
01:05:48 ►
all of the interesting things that Shah and some of the others
01:05:51 ►
have done with samples from the salon.
01:05:54 ►
Hopefully, I’ll remember to add a link to his music
01:05:57 ►
along with the program notes for this podcast,
01:05:59 ►
which, as you know, you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:06:04 ►
And over the past few months, I’ve received dozens of pieces of music created by our fellow salonners,
01:06:10 ►
including a great CD from Clint Avery that took me back to some of my first encounters with our sacred medicines.
01:06:16 ►
And that was quite an interesting experience, I’m here to tell you.
01:06:20 ►
Also, Greg S. sent me an experimental meditation video that I plan to test drive on
01:06:26 ►
my next journey into entheospace. So all in all, I am overloaded with wonderful new sights and
01:06:33 ►
sounds. And I wish I had time to mention everyone who has sent me something along these lines,
01:06:39 ►
but I do want to mention one more group whose music I’ve grown very fond of, and that is the group Tibet to Timbuktu.
01:06:47 ►
I first heard them on Queer Ninja’s bi-weekly podcast over at the Cannabis Podcast Network at dopethean.co.uk.
01:06:55 ►
In fact, the second time I heard them was on the Dope Fiends podcast itself,
01:07:01 ►
and then again on BB’s Bungalow.
01:07:07 ►
podcast itself, and then again on BB’s Bungalow. And BB, or Black Beauty, by the way, is also the person whose silky voice you just heard in the break between the lecture and this commentary.
01:07:13 ►
And if you haven’t spent any time in BB’s Bungalow yet, well, you simply don’t know what you’re
01:07:18 ►
missing. Anyway, if, like me, you are already a regular listener to the programs on the Dope Beans Network,
01:07:26 ►
you’ve already heard several cuts from the Tibet to Timbuktu CD.
01:07:30 ►
But that isn’t going to keep me from playing one, too,
01:07:33 ►
and I’ll do that at the end of today’s podcast, thanks to their permission for letting me do so.
01:07:40 ►
Now, let’s see, there are a couple more things I want to pass along,
01:07:46 ►
and then I’ll be out of here for today.
01:07:48 ►
Oh yeah, Burning Man.
01:07:54 ►
First of all, here is a little story that doesn’t actually have a reason for me to tell it here,
01:07:59 ►
other than the fact that I think it points out why things like Burning Man, the salon,
01:08:04 ►
and other ways that we are going about finding each other that are popping up all over the place.
01:08:08 ►
Here is what fellow salonner Barbara S. wrote.
01:08:17 ►
Hi Lorenzo, I just got back from one of the East Coast regional burns, Playa del Fuego, and was thinking of you.
01:08:18 ►
I met some of the others.
01:08:25 ►
There was a small camp of wonderful people that played some of your podcasts over the weekend. I stopped by to chat for a while with them, and now I have some new friends. And a little piece of them came home
01:08:30 ►
with me from the playa in the form of six baby heirloom tomato plants that they gifted me when
01:08:36 ►
I mentioned making some homemade sauce. Thank you for helping to bring more of us together.
01:08:42 ►
Well, thanks for the kind words, Barbara, but it wasn’t me who brought you together,
01:08:46 ►
it was those wonderful people who were playing the podcast in the first place.
01:08:50 ►
Not to mention all the people who were involved in putting on the Afterburn event.
01:08:55 ►
So, thanks to all of you.
01:08:57 ►
But your story does remind me that I should let you know that
01:09:00 ►
our Burning Man plans are in a state of flux right now.
01:09:04 ►
Unless there is another
01:09:06 ►
change, I’m afraid that the Angel Oasis where I was going to camp isn’t going to appear after all
01:09:11 ►
this year. I’m sure things will work out because they always do, but until I get my audiobook
01:09:16 ►
online, I’m just not going to be able to even think about Burning Man for a while.
01:09:21 ►
But I’ll have more news for you about this year’s burn sometime later this month.
01:09:27 ►
Another email comes from Jimmy M., and I’ll read a few portions of that for you right now.
01:09:33 ►
Jimmy says, First, I want to tell you how much I appreciate your podcasts. I can’t stop listening
01:09:39 ►
to them, and every time I re-listen to one, I find new things. They almost seem variable in the contents.
01:09:46 ►
Well, you’re not alone there, Jimmy.
01:09:49 ►
I’ve heard some of Terrence’s talks a dozen times already
01:09:52 ►
and I still seem to hear something new each time I listen to one of them.
01:09:57 ►
Then Jimmy goes on.
01:09:59 ►
Living in a country like, and I won’t mention where he lives
01:10:02 ►
just to give him a little anonymity,
01:10:05 ►
but he says living in a country like, and I won’t mention where he lives just to give him a little anonymity, but he says, living in a country like this, where there’s zero tolerance,
01:10:10 ►
it’s very hard to find places where you can interact with other psychedelic people.
01:10:14 ►
And you can’t really mention anything about psychedelics either
01:10:17 ►
because of all the bullshit propaganda our government pours out.
01:10:22 ►
And I may have an idea about that situation, Jimmy, that I’ll pass along next
01:10:26 ►
week. Anyway, he goes on to say, I noticed that you have a comment section where people can discuss
01:10:33 ►
with each other, but I was thinking that this has probably been mentioned before, but wouldn’t it be
01:10:38 ►
great to have an IRC server where listeners could interact with each other? I would really like to
01:10:43 ►
have a place where I can talk to
01:10:45 ►
people who have an understanding for the psychedelic use and philosophies. You’re probably pretty busy
01:10:51 ►
with keeping the salon up and running, so if you want to, I could help with setting it up.
01:10:55 ►
Would be super great, don’t you think? Well, as you might guess from what I said earlier, I have
01:11:01 ►
also been thinking about these things, Jimmy. So for you and the other salonners who have offered their services,
01:11:08 ►
all I can say is that I am very appreciative of your offers to help,
01:11:12 ►
and once I get this book project behind me, I plan on focusing on some of the issues that you raise.
01:11:18 ►
Now there’s one more part of his email that I’d like to read for you,
01:11:21 ►
because it is something that seems to come up with some regularity. Here is how he concluded his email. Oh, and another thing. This might sound
01:11:32 ►
cheesy, but what the hell. During my first experiences with psychedelics, I was horrified
01:11:37 ►
by the effects. I had a shitty setting and was accompanied by people who were frightening
01:11:42 ►
throughout the whole trip. Needless to say, it was one of the worst evenings in my life.
01:11:47 ►
I tried LSD a few times after that, but I couldn’t relax and enjoy the trip.
01:11:52 ►
The first and worst experience was rooted too deep inside of me.
01:11:56 ►
But after listening to these podcasts,
01:11:58 ►
I’ve been able to relax and enjoy the psychedelic universe more and more,
01:12:03 ►
and I gain more confidence and insight every time now.
01:12:06 ►
Thanks for opening my eyes and expanding my consciousness
01:12:09 ►
with every podcast you deliver.
01:12:12 ►
Well, thanks for the kind words, Jimmy,
01:12:14 ►
but you should be thanking yourself.
01:12:17 ►
You are the one who opened your own eyes.
01:12:20 ►
Now, some of our speakers in the salon
01:12:21 ►
may have provided the catalyst you needed,
01:12:24 ►
but you are the person who did the work, the great work, some of our speakers in the salon may have provided the catalyst you needed, but you are the person who did the work.
01:12:27 ►
The great work, some people call it.
01:12:29 ►
And so it is me who should be thanking you,
01:12:31 ►
you and all of our other fellow salonners who are all doing our best to inch our way forward,
01:12:38 ►
gaining a little more insight every day.
01:12:42 ►
And now, maybe it’s time that you and I should spend a few minutes
01:12:46 ►
just to ponder some of the
01:12:48 ►
thoughts that the Bard McKenna
01:12:49 ►
passed along to us just now.
01:12:52 ►
And to set the mood for that, I’ll be
01:12:54 ►
playing a cut titled Beautiful Girl
01:12:56 ►
from the CD Music
01:12:58 ►
is Life by my new favorite
01:13:00 ►
group, Tibet to Timbuktu.
01:13:03 ►
And I hope you enjoy
01:13:04 ►
it as much as I do. For now, this is Lorenzo
01:13:08 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. up and making you move Hey!
01:13:51 ►
Hey!
01:14:08 ►
Hey, beautiful girl What’s on your mind?
01:14:13 ►
Don’t look so sad, yeah, yeah
01:14:16 ►
It’s gonna be fine
01:14:18 ►
Hey, yeah
01:14:22 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah Hey, yeah Hey, yeah, yeah
01:14:25 ►
Hey, yeah
01:14:29 ►
Ah, what you worry about?
01:14:32 ►
Wola! Hey, beautiful girl
01:15:03 ►
You look so sad
01:15:06 ►
You can talk to me
01:15:10 ►
It’s not so bad
01:15:13 ►
So hey yeah
01:15:16 ►
Hey yeah yeah
01:15:20 ►
So hey yeah
01:15:23 ►
What you worry about?
01:15:27 ►
Wola I’m going to go. Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:15 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:16 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:19 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:20 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:21 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:22 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:23 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah
01:16:24 ►
Hey, yeah, yeah Hey, yeah, yeah Hey, yeah, yeah Hey, yeah, yeah Ah, whatcha worryin’ bout? Voila! Hey beautiful girl
01:16:52 ►
What’s on your mind?
01:16:57 ►
Don’t look so sad, yeah, yeah
01:17:00 ►
It’s gonna be fine, yeah
01:17:03 ►
Hey, yeah Hey, yeah, yeah It’s gonna be fine Yeah Hey yeah
01:17:05 ►
Hey yeah yeah
01:17:09 ►
Say hey yeah
01:17:12 ►
Ah what you worry about
01:17:16 ►
Voila Thank you.