Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Well if you’re looking for psychoactive plants, nature is full of them. In every environment, in every ecosystem there are plants that either singly, or in combination with nearby plants, will deliver powerful mind-altering experiences.”
“For the person who does their homework, there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things and their legal status.” (This was in response to a question about legal highs.)
“Drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them than on the people who do take them.” (In amplification of the Timothy Leary quote that these substances often cause psychotic behavior in people who haven’t taken them. NOTE: Leary denied being the source of this quote.)
“Science fiction is the gateway drug.”
“I spent last week with Bruce Damer, who is one of the great mavens of interactive, virtual worlds, and we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace (see photos, right) … and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen. So you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at one time. After a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard, and you can practically feel the McLuhanesque reprogramming of your communications-based categories based on this bizarre informational environment that you’ve been spending time in.”
“Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of post-modern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal they will spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social pressure and hype and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life. … If we don’t educate people we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims for the courts and the prisons to make their grist.”
“I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret. I’m interested in finding one doorway that works.”
“Pro bono proctologists from other star systems are not making unannounced, free house calls in our homes. This could almost be a litmus test for sanity.”
“Whether achieved through some yogic or some quasi-religious technique or through the use of drugs, but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart and reweaves itself in unexpected ways.”
“It’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight [that we are creatures of language] is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently. It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds. … Code is the primary reality.”
“I’ve always felt in a way that the New Age was a flight from the psychedelic experience, that the New Age was saying its invisible agenda was ‘We’ll try anything as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work,’ and that automatically exempts psychedelics.”
“Once you find psychedelics you’re not looking for the accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine, or oneness, or something like that.”
“Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously, since the sixteenth century, magic is the idea that the world is made of language, and that you can control the world through language, through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on.”
“Computer code is magical language.
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And although I still haven’t quite recovered from a weekend of camping and music at the symbiosis gathering,
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I wanted to get this podcast out to you mainly because I couldn’t wait to hear the talk myself.
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Because in it, Terrence precisely defines what he means by the end of history.
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And I’ve been waiting for that for a while.
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But before I tell you a little more about this talk,
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I first would like to thank Colin F., Kenneth R., and Mark C.
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for their generous donations to the salon.
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I know that I say this every week, but I also think about it every day. And that is the fact of how incredible it is that people like Colin and Kenneth and
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Mark and all of the other salonners who have sent in financial donations, created and printed
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flyers about the salon or linked to us on their own blogs and websites.
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And even when you just tell a friend about the salon, all of those things are what is
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helping our worldwide psychedelic community
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establish deeper roots in the cultures in which we now find ourselves.
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Getting the word out, it’s important work, I believe,
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and you too are most definitely a part of this exciting adventure we so casually call our lives.
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Okay, enough philosophizing. Let’s get on with the show. Now, as you already know, we are
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about to hear once again from Terrence McKenna. And this recording comes to us through Bruce
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Dahmer, who had it sent to him by a friend who had recorded it from the radio and sent it to
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Bruce because this interview was given shortly after the virtual reality session that Bruce did for a McKenna workshop,
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and it was facilitated over at Terrence’s house in Hawaii.
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And by the way, you can see several photos of what went on behind the scenes at that VR session.
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I posted some of those along with the program notes for several other McKenna podcasts,
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and I’ll try to find another new image or two to post with the notes notes for several other McKenna podcasts, and I’ll try to find
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another new image or two to post with the notes for today’s program. What we are now going to hear
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is a March 1999 appearance by Terrence McKenna on Michael Krantz’s Forum, which is a show on the NPR
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station KQED. And so I want to thank Michael, KQED, Bruce Dahmer,
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and the unnamed person who actually made the recording and sent it to Bruce.
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Without all of you, these words of wisdom from the bard McKenna might have been lost forever.
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But such is not the case, and now that you have already turned on your MP3 player,
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let’s tune in to the mind of McKenna uh drop out of the default world for the next hour now here is michael crancy to get things rolling we uh always enjoy having
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terrence with us to talk about all kinds of things welcome to the program good morning
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pleasure to be with you well let’s actually, let me begin with something that just came up the other night.
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I was at an event, an environmental fundraising event down the peninsula.
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And a few years ago, I had done something with Mark Plotkin,
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an ethnobotanist who wrote all about the rainforest and finding shamanistic roots
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and actually started a company to go pursue pharmaceuticals in the jungle and all that sort of thing.
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Somebody said to me, you know, Mark Plotkin’s Shaman Pharmaceuticals has gone belly up,
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and I hadn’t known that.
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And suddenly I started reflecting on that, that maybe it might have something to do with
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all these inflated expectations about the medicinal power of plants that Americans have
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perhaps bought into too strong.
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Is that, do you think, operative here?
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Well, my brother worked for Shaman Pharmaceuticals for a while. I’m not sure it’s
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accurate to call it Mark Potkin’s company. We’re probably sending several people
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through the roof. Mark was one of the
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prototypical things. I think that a number of problems converged
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on their desire to make money, one of which was
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the startling evolution
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of sampling technology,
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so that now it’s possible to look at slurries
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of potentially drug-like material
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produced synthetically in the laboratory
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and identify thousands and thousands of compounds
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in a matter of hours.
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And this technology didn’t exist 10 years ago
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when Shaman was getting going.
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Another company put out of business by technology?
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Exactly.
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Not keeping up with what the other guy was doing.
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But has there been, in your judgment,
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maybe a bit of overzeal with respect to the press
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and the inflated expectations about what can be done for all?
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I mean, the notion that there are panaceas out there cures to aids etc we just haven’t found them the right
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plans well i think you have to understand if you’re talking to tribal people and they tell you
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that they have a plant that causes visions they’re probably right but if they tell you they have a plant which cures diabetes, diabetes is a set of syndromes
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defined by modern medical science. How can aboriginal people have those kinds of insights
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into physiological functioning? So the search for psychoactive drugs was very successful based on
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interviewing aboriginal people. But the search for drugs applicable to other areas of modern medicine,
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I think target-based drug design is much more effective.
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Well, I kept thinking that our language is very revealing.
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We have notions of magic mushrooms,
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and we talk medicinally about magic bullets.
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I mean, what you’ve been in quest of in some respects is this magic.
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I mean, that’s what you’ve been looking for in a way, hasn’t it?
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Well, if you’re looking for magical, psychoactive plants,
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nature is full of them in every environment, in every ecosystem.
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There are plants that either singly or in combination with nearby plants
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will deliver powerful, mind-altering experiences.
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Naturally, the jungles are most rich
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because the jungles are most species-rich in plants generally.
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But the chemistry of plants seems to have a place in it
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for the production of compounds
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which are very active in mammalian nervous systems.
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And of course course that includes
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ourselves still much to be discovered in that whole realm much to be discovered in terms of
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sites of activity characterization of receptors uh cross indexing the effects of various drugs. As an example of new discoveries,
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Salvia divinorum is a Mexican mint plant
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that has been discovered to have a compound in it.
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Microgram for microgram, as powerful as LSD,
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completely disorientingly psychedelic.
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This is not a plant that has been made illegal or scheduled.
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And the compound, when studied,
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revealed itself to be from a chemical family
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never known to contain psychoactive substances.
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So the analytical tools are getting more subtle.
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The ability to detect nanogram amounts of material is now standard.
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And as it were, we’re going back through the tailings and getting the gold out that was overlooked by cruder methods used in the past.
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You’ve never really, particularly in recent history, advocated illegal drug use, right?
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You mean somehow protesting the current legal situation?
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Or suggesting or countenancing in some way that those who want these kinds of experiences should avail themselves of them in defiance of the law.
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No, I’ve always had the political attitude that this was not something that you wanted to turn into a mass movement.
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I came up through the 60s and saw the fallacy of that. I think if people want to pursue
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these experiences, they can go to countries where they’re available or they can grow these plants.
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And for example, this plant I just mentioned, Salvia divinorum, there is no more powerful
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psychedelic and there is no more legal object in all of nature. This is as legal as lawn cuttings.
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So for the person who does their homework,
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there is no conflict between the wish to experience these things
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and their legal status.
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Can we do the homework to the extent that we really know such things as…
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I mean, you’ve written about the acid scare in the 60s
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and all that sense of flashbacks
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and Art Linkletter’s daughter jumping out of a window.
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And I mean, a lot of people are very frightened by psychedelics and frightened by hallucinogens and with, some might say, good reason.
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Do we really know, in other words, the overall effects?
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Well, Tim Leary once said, he said, LSD is a psychoactive compound that occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who haven’t
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taken it and this occurs quite often drugs often have more effect on the people who don’t take them
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than on the people who do take them uh drugs have to begin somewhere though although you’ve said
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science fiction is the gateway drug i i believe science fiction is the gateway drug. Paleontology for seven-year-olds
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is also a serious gateway drug. I think that society, rather than dealing with this as it
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should, has dealt with it with the heavy hand of the courts and the prisons, when what we should
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be doing is educating ourselves and our children. Drugs are here to stay. They’re a part of
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postmodern life. There will be more and more of them. Wherever they are illegal, they will
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spawn criminal syndicalism. We need to sit down with our children and explain to them
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how you take drugs, how you evaluate their effect on you, how you make decisions absent social
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pressure and hype, and how you come to terms with this particular aspect of modern life.
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Most parents would just want to steer their children away from drugs altogether, though,
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I would think.
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Well, but that sends a message that these things are bad, and then, of course, indiscriminately, children will involve themselves in these things,
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and the results are not happy.
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Knowledge is the only way to come to terms with this.
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It’s a bit like sexuality.
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The battle for sex education is, I suppose, more or less won now,
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but that was a huge issue as I was growing up.
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Now, drugs, the response is the hammer of imprisonment,
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and yet, as I said, the number of drugs, the opportunities to take drugs,
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endlessly proliferate.
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If we don’t educate people, we are going to produce a continuous supply of victims
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for the courts and the prisons to make their grist.
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Some might argue that sex education has only marginally affected, and perhaps because of our culture,
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the problem of sexual excess and, I suppose, what could come under categories of misuse of sexuality or abuse of sexuality
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have been, if anything, exacerbated through the years.
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misuse of sexuality or abuse of sexuality have been, if anything, exacerbated through the years.
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Well, I suppose it’s absence statistics. It’s everybody’s opinion.
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I certainly think people are having more and better sex than they were having in the 50s.
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Terrence McKenna, our guest, and we’re going to talk to him, as I said, about a whole range of things here.
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You know, when you, you’ve always struck me and you struck many people and you describe yourself as a very rational man and you certainly are an omnivorous thinker,
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reader, scholar, and so forth. And yet sometimes when you talk about some things that you have
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talked about, aliens, UFOs, intergalactic stuff and so forth, it makes rational skeptical people’s skin begin to percolate in many ways.
00:12:27 ►
What do you say to that kind of response? Well, I think they’re not listening carefully. My
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method, if you want to call it that, has been to explore the weird, the bizarre, the marginal marginal, with a rational mind, not with a will to believe.
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The truth doesn’t need your cooperation to exist.
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The truth, you can kick the tires, they’ll let you take it for a spin.
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All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion
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do require your participation in order to exist.
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So I’ve looked into marginal areas of human experience, historical and otherwise, with a rational mind.
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And what I have found is doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the new age would have us believe
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on the other hand they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism
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would have us believe there are doorways out of the mundane human condition I explored all candidates with an open mind and came to the conclusion
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that psychedelic drugs are the most accessible, the most efficient, the least
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dangerous. Now there may be other ways to access the miraculous, flagellation,
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prayer, wilderness abandonment, what have you.
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I’m not interested in cataloging the varieties of the doorways to the secret.
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I’m interested in finding one doorway that worked.
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How does the rational mind determine what is miraculous as opposed to what may be induced or may be some sort of delirium
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or some kind of hallucinatory experience that has no basis in rationality.
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Well, I think, you know, Heidegger said,
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we measure our relationship to reality by the depth of the call.
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And I think one of the chief justices said he couldn’t define pornography,
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but he knew it when he saw it.
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The miraculous is self-evidently the miraculous,
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and it’s certainly possible to take many drugs
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and have many kinds of experiences without coming near it.
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On the other hand, these psychoactive substances
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seem to be the most direct path to the miraculous.
00:15:02 ►
Now, what do I mean by that?
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I mean the dissolving of cultural
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constructs, the reality that is ever-present outside who you are, who your culture is,
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what language you speak, your expectations. You know, we could disagree about the worth and the
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efficacy of psychedelics, but I think if we had shared the experience, we
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could agree that it is characterized by boundary dissolution.
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You’re talking about something universal, something that suggests spirituality or aesthetics
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or maybe even theology, but not necessarily intergalactic communication, let’s say, or
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exobiology.
00:15:41 ►
No, I don’t think that the culture at the end of the 20th century is penetrated by
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dozens or hundreds of alien cultures seeking to trade high technology for fetal body parts or all
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of that in fact i consider all that pop culture to be indicative of of the hysteria that is engendered by science
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moving beyond the range of the understanding of ordinary people.
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People will always generate explanations for what they see around them.
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And if they lack education, their explanations will be bizarre, quirky, primitive.
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will be bizarre, quirky, primitive.
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And I take all this New Age channeling and all these extraterrestrial revelations and so forth
00:16:31 ►
to signify a profound dichotomy
00:16:38 ►
between officially sanctioned models of reality
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and then what people are saying to each other on the buses
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and in the dime stores there have been some very telling studies in fact about those who had ufo
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close encounters and who were taken aboard ships and often you know various parts of the anatomy
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are penetrated or these kinds of things happen and in most cases the proliferation of these
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things occurred almost exclusively especially the same kinds of descriptions of alien forms and so forth occurred after the
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spate of movies about these things pro bono proctologist from other star
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systems are not making unannounced free house calls in our homes I mean this
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could almost be a litmus test for sanity if If you believe that, then I want to sell you a bridge over the Hudson
00:17:27 ►
River quite cheaply. Then what is out there? How do we begin to even assume a kind of cosmic
00:17:34 ►
consciousness or awareness of what might be alive beyond this planet? Well, Michael, imagine if
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there were a force in the water or in the air or in the advertising that was causing a
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certain significant percentage of people here at the end of the 20th century to simply lose the
00:17:54 ►
ability to distinguish between memory and dream then people wouldn’t know whether that image in
00:18:02 ►
their mind of a flying saucer came from close encounters or from that weekend at Uncle Tom’s farm when they were 11.
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And I think something like this is happening.
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We as tribal people with aboriginal roots are set up to handle about 10 stories and one long epic poem.
00:18:24 ►
Intellectually, the machinery of our brains, and yet modern
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media has exposed each of us to thousands of movies, hundreds of thousands of sitcoms,
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endless clips of film and audio data, and I think people are losing the ability to distinguish their own past from a kind of media-created
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collective past that has more the character of the Jungian unconscious about it than it
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has the character of the warm and friendly world of physics.
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A kind of filmic unconscious?
00:18:59 ►
Yes, a kind of collective dream on which we draw, and out of it comes the Bigfoot, the flying saucers,
00:19:07 ►
the proctologists from nearby star systems. And people who have not been trained to deconstruct
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data or think rationally are completely victim of these media spread meme-like viruses that distort ordinary thinking, balkanize
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epistemology, and make social and political consensus on anything that much harder to
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reach.
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Just reminded me of Doug Rushkoff’s work we were talking about before we went on the air
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and the allusion to memes.
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I wanted to allude to something else, and that is a 1971
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trip that you made to South America, and you were out, it’s been written about a number
00:19:50 ►
of times, with your brother. And your brother experienced, as a result of ingesting a plant,
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hearing a conversation his mother had on the telephone, your mother had on the telephone
00:20:02 ►
in 1953, and you can correct me in the details of this, but Dizzy Dean was pitching a game that was
00:20:10 ►
being broadcast on the radio.
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He could hear all this.
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He believed he could hear all this.
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And at the same time, he was a three-year-old at the time.
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Now, presumably your mother would have remembered this or maybe not if it actually happened.
00:20:22 ►
But this is the realm we’re talking about.
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Your brother said it was all inner he thought but this realm between dream and memory
00:20:27 ►
and the indecipherability of the two well it is certainly true that in the presence of certain
00:20:33 ►
forms of schizophrenia uh ordinary reality seems to dissolve into a stew of coincidences, laden facts, side glances from reality, if you will.
00:20:49 ►
I think that time and space is generally pretty firm,
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but that there are conditions,
00:20:58 ►
and it always seems to have to do with perturbation of mental states,
00:21:02 ►
whether achieved through some yogic or quasi-religious technique
00:21:06 ►
or through the use of drugs but when we perturb our mental machinery time and space comes apart
00:21:13 ►
and reweaves itself in unexpected ways to me this is not surprising because it seems to me
00:21:21 ►
we obviously create time and space. These are mental constructs.
00:21:26 ►
They’re not given from Mount Sinai.
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They’re conventions that the animal body brings together
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in order to organize data about its place in the world.
00:21:38 ►
So, to borrow a little from Cartesian thought,
00:21:40 ►
I think time and space, therefore time and space exist?
00:21:42 ►
Something like that, absolutely.
00:21:44 ►
The world is made of language, Michael.
00:21:47 ►
That’s the insight of psychedelics.
00:21:50 ►
What we expect to see, we see.
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What we say is there, is there.
00:21:57 ►
And this is really what the 20th century has contributed to philosophy, I think.
00:22:04 ►
The understanding that language is primary.
00:22:08 ►
Concepts like space, time, matter, energy,
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these are culture-bound, linguistically defined concepts.
00:22:16 ►
What is primary is the word.
00:22:19 ►
And it’s very interesting to me that this psychedelic insight
00:22:24 ►
is restated by the cyber revolution, which says it slightly differently.
00:22:31 ►
It says the world is code. Everything is code. Your DNA creates you as its code unfolds.
00:22:47 ►
its code unfolds. The world around us is defined by legal codes. The world inside our machines are defined by what we call computer languages, more code. Code is the primary reality. And
00:22:56 ►
in ordinary experience, code is language. Now, this creates opportunities for relativism.
00:23:03 ►
It creates opportunities for all kinds of dangerous and sloppy thinking.
00:23:08 ►
Nevertheless, we have to go down that route because it is clear this is a deeper understanding than what we inherited from the philosophies of the 19th century.
00:23:18 ►
Talking to Terence McKenna about a whole range of things, including changing philosophy.
00:23:24 ►
His newest book actually trial logs with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham
00:23:28 ►
is called The Evolutionary Mind. It’s a feast of all kinds of stuff
00:23:32 ►
on visual math and factals and psychic pets and the millennium.
00:23:36 ►
Which brings up another interesting point. A number of years ago you talked about December
00:23:39 ►
22, 2012 as the date of, I guess, what would be
00:23:44 ►
characterized as the secular apocalypse.
00:23:46 ►
Are you still with that date?
00:23:47 ►
Yes, it’s nice now to have it all to myself, since everyone’s rushing the gun and piled on to Y2K.
00:23:55 ►
I was accused of being too crazy to suppose the world could transform in 2012.
00:24:02 ►
Now no one will wait. I represent an extremely conservative position.
00:24:07 ►
You’re not that concerned about Y2K, then?
00:24:09 ►
I really am not. I live in Hawaii, off-grid. It may be because I’m already prepared for it,
00:24:19 ►
but I suspect problems from Y2K will be local, confined in time, and fairly manageable.
00:24:27 ►
Of course, it’s simply a projection for opinion. No one knows.
00:24:32 ►
We’re talking with Terrence McKenna, and I want to go to your phone calls, and we’ll do that momentarily.
00:24:36 ►
Just a quick question, though, when you talk about the miraculous
00:24:38 ►
and certainly getting a sense of the visionary power of plants and all of that, psychedelics, etc.
00:24:46 ►
Is there a sense of your, as a Westerner, and as a serious thinker and rationalist,
00:24:56 ►
being able to feel the kind of sacred and divine power that is often attached to many of these plants by other cultures?
00:25:03 ►
Can you absorb that? Can you internalize that?
00:25:05 ►
Yes, absolutely absolutely you can.
00:25:07 ►
I mean, it comes in the form of awe and astonishment,
00:25:10 ►
but awe has always been spoken of as an appropriate emotion
00:25:14 ►
in the presence of the supernatural.
00:25:17 ►
And when you finally grab on to the 100,000 volt psychedelic experience,
00:25:23 ►
it’s absolutely confounding because it seems to be the thing which
00:25:27 ►
our culture has been most at pains to deny the existence of. And so it’s as though you come around
00:25:34 ►
the corner and there’s Santa Claus, Bugs Bunny, and the Easter Bunny all playing poker together
00:25:40 ►
and you realize you were given the wrong story all the way down the line.
00:25:45 ►
And the appropriate response to that is humility and awe
00:25:50 ►
and a kind of redirecting of one’s energies to try and get in line
00:25:55 ►
with this very large reality suddenly to be revealed
00:25:59 ►
outside the confines of our cultural agenda or our cultural concern.
00:26:04 ►
But you know, it’s interesting because you speak with this kind of derogation about New Age,
00:26:08 ►
and yet at the same time, when you talk about the direct results and consequences
00:26:13 ►
of many of your experiences with these sacred plants,
00:26:16 ►
it suggests a sense of awe and mystery,
00:26:19 ►
but also a sense of the oneness and unity of life
00:26:23 ►
and a feeling of spiritual transformation of feminism
00:26:26 ►
and ecology coming to the fore in terms of your political consciousness all things which are very
00:26:31 ►
much a part of the zeitgeist and the new age uh movement as well well i’ve always felt that in a
00:26:37 ►
way the new age was a flight from the psychedelic experience that the new age was saying its invisible agenda was we’ll try anything
00:26:47 ►
as long as we’re sure it doesn’t work. And that automatically exempts psychedelics. All talk of
00:26:55 ►
spiritual advancement is always talk of pushing, trying, practice, concentration, attention. Once
00:27:03 ►
you find psychedelics, you’re not looking for the
00:27:06 ►
accelerator anymore. You’re looking for the brakes on your spiritual vehicle. You have suddenly found
00:27:12 ►
the means to achieve the stated goal, which is union with the divine or oneness or something
00:27:18 ►
like that. Now the game becomes a very grown-up game. How are you going to integrate this into your ordinary life?
00:27:27 ►
You’re no longer a seeker.
00:27:28 ►
You’re no longer an ingenue.
00:27:30 ►
Now you’re an insider.
00:27:32 ►
Now you can come and go from these transcendental places at will.
00:27:37 ►
Now how do you use that to make yourself a better person,
00:27:41 ►
better parent, better citizen of your community.
00:27:45 ►
You mean as a result of the opening up of your consciousness
00:27:47 ►
through the sorts of experiences you’ve had,
00:27:50 ►
you can become transcendental at will?
00:27:53 ►
Well, you can have recourse to the effective method at will,
00:27:57 ►
because the substances work.
00:28:00 ►
Taking the substance over and over again.
00:28:00 ►
The substances work, yes.
00:28:02 ►
Lee is our first caller from Pine Grove. Good morning.
00:28:05 ►
Good morning, Michael.
00:28:06 ►
I’d like to ask Mr. McKenna if he can direct me to references in the botanical literature regarding Salvia dividorum.
00:28:14 ►
I grow 15 or 16 different species of Salvia, and I have a fair library, and I’m unable to locate it.
00:28:21 ►
You should simply search on the Internet, Salvia Divinorum.
00:28:26 ►
There are several pages with dozens of links, and there are active lists on the Internet.
00:28:33 ►
If you run an Excite search on Salvia Divinorum, you will have more than you know what to do with.
00:28:39 ►
All right.
00:28:39 ►
That’s D-I-V-A or D-I-V-I?
00:28:42 ►
D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M.
00:28:45 ►
I’ve got it.
00:28:46 ►
All right, Lee.
00:28:46 ►
Thank you for your call.
00:28:48 ►
To Santa Cruz we go.
00:28:49 ►
To BJ, good morning.
00:28:50 ►
Oh, thanks for taking my call.
00:28:52 ►
Hello, Terrence.
00:28:53 ►
Hi, Barry.
00:28:54 ►
How are you this morning?
00:28:56 ►
Great.
00:28:57 ►
Yes, I just wanted to comment on a misunderstanding of the New Age.
00:29:04 ►
I heard Mr. Krasny say, isn’t this New Age?
00:29:07 ►
The misunderstanding, as far as the New Age is concerned, is that we can’t arrive at truth, or whatever it’s going by these days, by transcendence.
00:29:23 ►
these days, by transcendence.
00:29:30 ►
And I think what has occurred is that when the psychedelic movement was crushed in the 60s,
00:29:37 ►
the failure of the psychedelic revolution brought on the New Age.
00:29:44 ►
In other words, we replaced vision and imagination with visualization and its concomitant techniques, crystals and all that.
00:29:49 ►
It is a New Age dance where really it’s disguised as a visionary movement,
00:29:57 ►
but it really is all about the lack of vision and keeping the same structure,
00:30:04 ►
but changing the content of traditional patriarchal
00:30:08 ►
religion.
00:30:09 ►
As a matter of fact, there have been quite a number of feminists who have commented on
00:30:13 ►
the deep patriarchal character of the New Age, and I think that centers in the idea
00:30:19 ►
of transcendence, where you transcend the earth and your body and all this.
00:30:25 ►
And instead, I think psychedelics brings you to the depth ecology vision of the earth,
00:30:34 ►
which I think Terrence calls Gaia.
00:30:36 ►
It brings you to the mind of the earth and not transcending.
00:30:40 ►
So I think that we need a real alternative to the new age, and I think Terrence is quite right metaphorically, because Terrence rejected going up to the high Himalayas, and he instead went down south to the depths of the Amazon. And I think that is a signal of the way to go.
00:31:08 ►
Go south, young man.
00:31:10 ►
BJ, thank you for that call.
00:31:12 ►
I mean, it’s an important distinction he’s making here,
00:31:14 ►
at least as he sees the differences between New Age and what Terrence McKenna is all about.
00:31:18 ►
Let me get more of your calls on in the meantime.
00:31:19 ►
Chris from Inverness is next.
00:31:20 ►
Yes, Terrence, I was intrigued by your emphasis on language.
00:31:49 ►
It’s long seemed to me, and I’m sure it’s not an original thought, that a lot of the, let’s quote, spiritual realm, religions, the I Ching, the tarot, astrology, the UFO thing, all of that are forms of metaphor for something that we have coming up or that we’re engaging in evolutionarily that our language is to cope with and express.
00:32:00 ►
In other words, I wonder if the whole psychedelic thing and your descriptions of the places that you’ve gone on DMT,
00:32:09 ►
I wonder to what degree those are metaphoric and what kind of metaphor is it?
00:32:17 ►
Is it a synecdoche?
00:32:19 ►
Is it a part for a whole?
00:32:23 ►
Is it next to something?
00:32:25 ►
Do you see what I mean?
00:32:27 ►
Well, I think I understand what you mean.
00:32:29 ►
As far as reality and its relationship to language is concerned,
00:32:34 ►
this is a fundamental split in the Western mind.
00:32:39 ►
Magic, which we haven’t heard much about seriously since the 16th century,
00:32:44 ►
magic is the idea that the world is made of language
00:32:48 ►
and that you can control the world through language,
00:32:52 ►
through spells, through the power of letters, so forth and so on.
00:32:57 ►
That idea gave way to modern science’s idea
00:33:01 ►
that there were stubborn facts in the world
00:33:03 ►
that language could neither eradicate
00:33:06 ►
or ameliorate now with the rise of cyberspace and virtual reality language is becoming again
00:33:15 ►
re-empowered i mean in a sense computer code is magical language it’s language which, when executed, causes something to actually happen. Now, as far
00:33:27 ►
as to what degree descriptions of these psychedelic states are metaphors, they have to be metaphors,
00:33:35 ►
because what is not often mentioned but always experienced with high-dose psychedelics, is an actual alteration of the language-producing machinery itself.
00:33:49 ►
You know, some people have the idea you take a psychedelic drug or substance
00:33:53 ►
and the world transforms itself and you watch this happen.
00:33:57 ►
That’s true to some degree, but the person, the watcher, is themselves transformed.
00:34:05 ►
This is not a clean process.
00:34:07 ►
And when you actually see the machinery of language melt,
00:34:11 ►
involute, fractalize, crystallize, and transform itself before you,
00:34:17 ►
you get a tremendous sense of the malleability of reality
00:34:21 ►
and how it rests on a platform of stable physiological functioning.
00:34:27 ►
It also suggests, thank you, Chris, that if reality is shifting and perception is shifting all the time
00:34:33 ►
in this cyber revolution with all this information technology,
00:34:35 ►
then we’re evolving in different ways that we don’t even understand yet.
00:34:38 ►
We’re perceiving time in ways that we don’t even understand yet.
00:34:41 ►
Well, yes. I spent last week with Bruce Dahmer,
00:34:44 ►
who’s one of the great mavens of interactive virtual worlds.
00:34:48 ►
And we were dressing in avatars, meeting people in cyberspace.
00:34:54 ►
But occasionally we would open…
00:34:55 ►
Dressing in avatars?
00:34:56 ►
This means an avatar is how you appear to other people in cyberspace.
00:35:01 ►
So you choose to be a mini-skirted girl.
00:35:04 ►
I know it mainly is a Hindu word.
00:35:05 ►
Oh, no, it’s been appropriated and trademarked, and the Hindus are now out.
00:35:11 ►
But anyway, being in your avatar in a virtual world, talking to other people in a virtual world,
00:35:17 ►
and then opening several virtual worlds at once on your screen,
00:35:21 ►
so you actually have the experience of being in more than one place at
00:35:25 ►
one time after a couple of hours of that you leave the keyboard and you you can practically feel the
00:35:32 ►
mclewinesque reprogramming of your communication based categories based on this bizarre informational
00:35:40 ►
environment that you’ve been spending time in so So, yes, I think we’re evolving.
00:35:45 ►
The shift in media is changing human beings at least as much as the introduction of print
00:35:51 ►
did in the 1440s.
00:35:53 ►
And the good news about all of this is that no one is in control and no one understands
00:35:59 ►
enough about it to direct or sculpt it to some secular end.
00:36:04 ►
Have you read Leonard Schlein’s book? I did read Leonard Shlain’s book.
00:36:06 ►
You put much credence in that, that the whole nature of our brain is changing and that’s the result of the goddess
00:36:11 ►
and feminism becoming more preeminent in our lives and so forth.
00:36:14 ►
He worked off an earlier book by Ivan Illich called
00:36:19 ►
The ABCdization of Culture, who was also then cribbing
00:36:23 ►
from Marshall McLuhan,
00:36:28 ►
who talked about how sensory ratios changed cultures from hot to cool. You’ve got the genealogy and the derivations right.
00:36:30 ►
But, I mean, do you believe the premise?
00:36:32 ►
No, I do believe it.
00:36:33 ►
I think print created not only the modern notion of the citizen,
00:36:38 ►
it created the modern assembly line,
00:36:42 ►
it created all kinds of things which we assume are basic to
00:36:47 ►
humaneness that are in fact artifacts of the technologies accepted by Europe some
00:36:53 ►
400 years ago and then spread throughout the world. And misogyny too? Misogyny
00:36:58 ►
probably has an older history. Phyllis from Menlo Park join us please. Good
00:37:03 ►
morning. Wow my mind is spinning.
00:37:05 ►
Hi, Terrence. I was at the conference at Esalen where you and Mr. Abraham and, pardon me,
00:37:13 ►
Rupert Sheldrake, I think, first developed some of these ideas. Is this the book that’s
00:37:19 ►
come out of that? Well, there were two of those books of dialogues or trilogues with Rupert and Ralph.
00:37:25 ►
The first one was called Trilogues at the Edge of the West, and the new one is called The
00:37:31 ►
Evolutionary Mind, and we just simply take up where we left off with that first book.
00:37:36 ►
It’s fabulous ideas, and the mind spins. Could you explain a little more the year 2012,
00:37:44 ►
what it is you envision as happening?
00:37:48 ►
Not only the year, Phyllis, we’ve got the date, December 22nd, 2012.
00:37:51 ►
Oh, wow.
00:37:52 ►
Yeah, well, that’s the nice thing about mathematics.
00:37:54 ►
If you do it right, there’s not much of a fudge factor.
00:37:59 ►
The idea about 2012 was simply from studying the structure of the yi qing specifically the
00:38:07 ►
structure of the sequence of the hexagrams way back in the middle 70s i discovered a curve there
00:38:16 ►
which is a fractal curve with the property of damping its own oscillation now what that means
00:38:22 ►
is that it eventually runs down and disappears,
00:38:26 ►
and it looks somewhat like a stock market. And I discovered that if you went at history with
00:38:33 ►
the concept that it was an ebb and flow between two polar forces, which I named habit and novelty,
00:38:41 ►
that you could actually get a conformational fit
00:38:45 ►
between this abstract mathematical algorithm, this curve,
00:38:50 ►
and the vicissitudes of invention, migration, warfare, political advance, and so forth.
00:38:58 ►
The factors that…
00:39:00 ►
All of our global up and downs.
00:39:01 ►
Exactly.
00:39:02 ►
And this was very satisfying to see history so well described by a mathematical algorithm.
00:39:09 ►
There was just one minor problem, which was the algorithm predicted that the quality I called novelty would reach infinity in our lifetimes.
00:39:21 ►
And when the calculation was finally done, December 22nd 2012 a.d but what do you think
00:39:27 ►
will happen are we all going to dissolve into subatomic particles well there are two ways to
00:39:32 ►
answer that question the honest answer is it’s too early to tell it’s like asking a man facing east
00:39:39 ►
at 2 a.m to describe the coming sunrise he can’t do it because the sunrise is over the curvature
00:39:46 ►
of the event horizon of the Earth.
00:39:49 ►
That’s the honest answer.
00:39:50 ►
Then the more fun answer is to pretend we do know what’s going on
00:39:55 ►
based on looking at what novelty has been in the past.
00:40:00 ►
Novelty seems to be definable as density of connectivity.
00:40:05 ►
So what is going to happen in 2012 is that all points in this universe will be what mathematicians call cotangent.
00:40:13 ►
In other words, all points will be connected to all other points.
00:40:17 ►
Now, I dreamed this up in the early 70s, early 80s, where talking about all points being connected seemed pie in the sky.
00:40:26 ►
Although the New Age people did it with harmonic convergence, didn’t they?
00:40:29 ►
To some degree.
00:40:30 ►
But now the Internet appears on the scene, and lo and behold, what is the Internet but
00:40:36 ►
a global connection machine, knitting everything together, and everything we want from the
00:40:43 ►
Internet, higher speed, greater flexibility, more intelligent searches, so forth and so on, tend to push the Internet toward ever greater states of complexification and connectivity.
00:40:55 ►
So I would say on this 2012 thing, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
00:41:07 ►
light at the end of the tunnel. Human history ends in human-machine prosthesis, and machine history begins in human-machine prosthesis. So mark it on your calendar, Phyllis. Okay,
00:41:13 ►
one more question. Is there an evolutionary intention in this? I mean, we want to get back
00:41:19 ►
to whatever state we’re going to be in in 2012, so we have somehow managed to invent things like cyberspace
00:41:25 ►
well evolution and intent are words which evolutionary thinkers don’t like to see on the
00:41:32 ►
same page because they believe that evolution is essentially purposeless driven by random mutation
00:41:39 ►
and very capricious facts yeah right that isn’t That isn’t what I believe. Well, no, it isn’t what most people believe.
00:41:45 ►
There does seem to be a discernible morphogenetic unfolding toward a higher state of unity and connectivity.
00:41:56 ►
And that’s what we’re riffing off.
00:41:57 ►
Phyllis, thank you.
00:41:58 ►
And let’s riff a little with Lawrence from Berkeley.
00:42:00 ►
Hi, Lawrence.
00:42:01 ►
Yes, hi.
00:42:01 ►
Good morning. I wanted to speak up for traditional meditation and traditional methods of meditative discipline and mysticism as opposed to drugs.
00:42:11 ►
Now, I know that everything I’m going to say is going to be anathema to your guest, but I think it’s important that the audience hear it.
00:42:19 ►
I wanted to, you know, what happens with drugs is what happens with St. John of the Cross writing writing in the 16th century, talks about as the dark night of the soul.
00:42:30 ►
And this is something that happens with any kind of meditative or mystical high.
00:42:36 ►
It goes away.
00:42:45 ►
the contrast between the incredible light and joy that you were feeling and the absence of it produces great depression,
00:42:48 ►
which John calls the dark night.
00:42:51 ►
In traditional mysticism, what happens when the dark night of the soul occurs,
00:42:57 ►
when the mystical light goes away, is that you have to do some work.
00:43:02 ►
You have to do some work that is required by faith to
00:43:06 ►
say, okay, I remember this state, even though I’m not feeling it now. And to get back to it,
00:43:12 ►
I have to exhibit love. I have to exhibit humility. I have to exhibit harmony between myself and
00:43:20 ►
others, not in my imagination, but in reality, you know, by working to create this
00:43:26 ►
harmony with others. The problem with taking any form of drugs or, you know, whether it’s a pill
00:43:31 ►
or a natural plant is that when that dark night comes, when the light goes away, you don’t have
00:43:37 ►
to do the required work. All you have to do is pop a pill again or pop another drug again.
00:43:48 ►
again or pop another drug again so that instead of getting a condition of love um which is produced by actually serving people and by trying to produce a condition in which their needs are in reality
00:43:54 ►
um as great or as important as your own personal needs you simply assume that what feels you you
00:44:03 ►
you go for a kind of a unity through the back door you
00:44:06 ►
say what feels good to me must therefore be good to you and you get a unity of fantasy rather than
00:44:14 ►
a unity of of love and work all right you’re listening to forum i’m michael krasny harris
00:44:20 ►
mckenna let’s go to you on that, this is a standard argument, meditation versus drugs.
00:44:27 ►
I think there’s a misconception about how people who use drugs for self-exploration do it.
00:44:35 ►
It’s not a matter of combating coming down by taking the drug again.
00:44:40 ►
I think the dark night of the soul is a natural and unavoidable part of any psychological
00:44:47 ►
growth process. Jung called it the negredo, taking a term from alchemy. My idea of the way to use
00:44:56 ►
psychedelics is very similar to how the caller described using ordinary spiritual techniques.
00:45:02 ►
It takes about seven or eight hours to have a psilocybin trip.
00:45:07 ►
I would think it would take 30 or 40 days
00:45:10 ►
to assimilate the messages of that trip
00:45:13 ►
and integrate them into your life.
00:45:16 ►
Certainly the visions which you obtain
00:45:18 ►
are an inspiration to community, to love,
00:45:22 ►
to striving to return to these places.
00:45:26 ►
Now, the perils of drugs are the perils of overdose or underdose.
00:45:32 ►
The perils of the traditional spiritual methods are the malevolence of the guru,
00:45:39 ►
the potential for being manipulated on somebody else’s schedule and agenda.
00:45:45 ►
No path of spiritual advance can be said to be without risk.
00:45:51 ►
I looked into yoga.
00:45:52 ►
I’ve studied Zen.
00:45:54 ►
I’ve studied a number of these so-called spiritual disciplines.
00:45:58 ►
And I find more backbiting, more human frailty on display
00:46:05 ►
than I find in the solitary practice of taking drugs with an exploring attitude.
00:46:13 ►
Let me thank Lawrence for the call.
00:46:14 ►
Do you find that there’s sometimes a kind of expectation
00:46:18 ►
that someone who has experimented with drugs as much as you have
00:46:22 ►
should be much more wiggy and out of it and less rational than you are?
00:46:26 ►
Oh, yes.
00:46:28 ►
You should be ravaged by these drugs?
00:46:29 ►
Yes. Well, my public image, I think, is a kind of wild man
00:46:33 ►
halfway between William Burroughs and Tim Leary.
00:46:36 ►
But that’s not who you are.
00:46:37 ►
No, it’s not who I am at all.
00:46:39 ►
I’m a somewhat stodgy, logical Irish scholar.
00:46:44 ►
a somewhat stodgy, logical Irish scholar.
00:46:52 ►
Yes, drug-taking and drug-using people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had had to put up with the crap that we’ve had to put up with,
00:46:59 ►
we would have gotten some kind of remediation from the Justice Department.
00:47:04 ►
I mean, the idea that potheads are stupid, the idea that acid makes it impossible for you to think straight.
00:47:10 ►
You know, the dirty little secret of Northern California’s vast economic success down at Silicon Valley is the creativity that was injected into this area in the 1960s through the LSD revolution.
00:47:24 ►
In many, many significant cases, it’s the same people.
00:47:28 ►
But you do see people who are wigged out as a result of…
00:47:30 ►
I mean, like you say, it’s individual cases, perhaps, but you see them,
00:47:33 ►
and you see people who use marijuana chronically who seem to slow down.
00:47:37 ►
I mean, I’ve seen it.
00:47:38 ►
It’s an evolution or a trajectory that I’ve seen all too frequently
00:47:41 ►
with people who are very heavy pot users.
00:47:43 ►
Well, you see it with uh
00:47:45 ►
alcohol you see exactly tobacco you uh life is not user safe you know whitehead said it’s the
00:47:55 ►
business of the future uh to be dangerous on the other hand it’s good to get an education it’s good
00:48:01 ►
to know the classics it’s good to be able to do a quadratic equation.
00:48:05 ►
And it’s very good to understand what LSD is all about. I mean, these are aspects of life. You don’t
00:48:11 ►
want to go to the yawning grave without having been exposed to. Troy is our next caller from
00:48:17 ►
Pacific Grove. Good morning. Good morning, Michael. And thank you very much for this. This has been
00:48:21 ►
one of the best in a long time. And I’d like to get my fingers on this big, huge door of perception that we’re trying to ease open.
00:48:46 ►
like a mansion inside your own mind. There’s something that, two things. One, you know then that you are the son of the king and that this is your mansion and it’s in your mind and you were
00:48:52 ►
right all along. The only thing is, is that there is a policeman that comes around. It’s the rules.
00:48:59 ►
You break in through the window, then you must get tossed out.
00:49:03 ►
I think Freud would call that super ego.
00:49:05 ►
But the truth is that it is your house.
00:49:07 ►
The only thing is you’ve just got to find the key to get in the front door the way you’re supposed to enter it.
00:49:13 ►
And then it becomes your own home.
00:49:14 ►
Well, don’t you think the disenfranchising of people from their own bodies has been a major cultural agenda for the past 300 or 400 years?
00:49:24 ►
It’s incredibly so.
00:49:25 ►
You know, I’d like to…
00:49:26 ►
Except I must confess, when you started talking using your castle metaphor,
00:49:29 ►
I thought right away of Kafka.
00:49:30 ►
That’s my own proclivities.
00:49:32 ►
In a sense, it is just a metaphor, again,
00:49:34 ►
because we’re really struggling with this
00:49:36 ►
to get back to the beginning premise of the show
00:49:38 ►
of how language constructs our world
00:49:40 ►
and how the visual experience now
00:49:42 ►
is somehow seemingly a bit disconnected
00:49:44 ►
from our
00:49:45 ►
lexicological order and we’re able to vision things that don’t necessarily always fall into
00:49:51 ►
an ability to communicate a vision is a key word here try thank you i mean for much of what
00:49:56 ►
terence mckenna’s whole thinking career and search has been about uh i mean where do we get vision
00:50:01 ►
from from from what part of nature does… Where do the ideas come from?
00:50:06 ►
You know, people who don’t take psychedelics
00:50:08 ►
think it’s all moving lights and little concentric circles.
00:50:11 ►
They don’t understand that these are tremendously emotionally moving,
00:50:16 ►
dramatic scenarios that one could not possibly generate out of one’s own mind.
00:50:22 ►
Or if one could, then every single one of us is a
00:50:25 ►
Beethoven is a Gilbert and Sullivan is a Shakespeare and maybe that’s true
00:50:30 ►
But if that’s true that is empowering and worth knowing
00:50:34 ►
Remember once many years ago interviewing Ram Dass and he said I honor what psychedelics have done for me
00:50:38 ►
And there was a storm of protest because he seemed to be countenancing the use of psychedelics
00:50:42 ►
And that was during part of the whole scary era
00:50:44 ►
I think many people still are particularly where children are concerned
00:50:47 ►
scared about psychedelics and scared about drugs in general even in terms of frontiers of
00:50:52 ►
consciousness you honor what psychedelics have done for you obviously don’t you oh absolutely
00:50:57 ►
to me uh they opened my mind to realms of beauty and understanding that would never
00:51:05 ►
have been accessible otherwise.
00:51:07 ►
I read the mystical literature.
00:51:10 ►
I knew what I was shooting for. That’s what I
00:51:12 ►
mean by doing your homework.
00:51:14 ►
But for me, it fell
00:51:16 ►
upon me with the force of a
00:51:18 ►
transforming miracle, and it’s always been
00:51:20 ►
my motivation publicly to
00:51:22 ►
speak about that for that reason.
00:51:24 ►
Well, we’ve been speaking with that walking miracle himself, Terrence McKenna.
00:51:27 ►
Always delighted to have you and to engage with you.
00:51:30 ►
Thank you so much for being with us.
00:51:33 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:51:38 ►
thought at a time.
00:51:41 ►
Did you find it as interesting as I did that in this interview, Terrence wound up talking about both the Y2K scare and his own 2012 scare, if you call it that?
00:51:53 ►
I’m not going to get back into it here, because if you want my views on 2012, you can hear them in my podcast number 56, which is a talk that I gave at an Oracle gathering back in 2006, and I titled
00:52:07 ►
it The Other Side of 2012.
00:52:10 ►
And I hate to break your bubble, and I also dearly hope that I’m wrong about this, but
00:52:15 ►
my guess is that the 2012 event will come and go about the same way the Y2K event went
00:52:21 ►
down.
00:52:21 ►
As I said, I hope I’m wrong about that, because we sure do need a global
00:52:26 ►
change in consciousness right now. But isn’t it great that we don’t have long to wait to see
00:52:32 ►
who’s right about this grand event? Now, one thing that I want to mention before I forget it is that
00:52:38 ►
you can actually revisit part of that VR world experience that Terrence talked about. Bruce Dahmer has preserved part of that world online for us McKenna fans
00:52:48 ►
who might want to see what it is that first got him so excited about cyberspace.
00:52:54 ►
And while I’m on that subject, I’ve just got to have a little moment of geek here.
00:53:00 ►
As you recall, this interview took place in 1999.
00:53:04 ►
So when a caller asked Terrence for a reference in literature,
00:53:08 ►
Terrence referred him to the Internet where he could do an Excite search.
00:53:13 ►
Wow, the phrase Google, it hadn’t really been entered into the lexicon.
00:53:18 ►
And being a geek wannabe myself, I had to run a little test just now
00:53:23 ►
to see how Excite.com is holding up in the
00:53:26 ►
search engine business. So in both Excite and Google, I searched on the words psychedelic
00:53:31 ►
salon in quotes. Well, Excite came up with 56 hits and Google came up with 14,800. So I think
00:53:40 ►
I’ll stick with Google for now. But the point that I seem to be dancing around is that it was only about ten years ago that Google was not yet a major force in the world,
00:53:51 ►
and that Terrence even had to point out the fact that there was such a thing as the Internet,
00:53:55 ►
and that there were several pages about Salvia Divinorum, and they even had links to other pages.
00:54:03 ►
So, of course, I had to do a Google search with Salvia Divinorum in quotes,
00:54:07 ►
and lo and behold, Terrence’s several pages about Salvia have now blossomed into over 578,000 pages.
00:54:18 ►
Now, just stop and think about that for a moment.
00:54:20 ►
Only ten years ago, there were probably less than a hundred webpages about Salvia, and today there are over a half a million.
00:54:29 ►
Do we really need any more convincing that the worldwide psychedelic community is massive?
00:54:35 ►
There’s some momentum building here, and it’s going to eventually become clearly noticeable to even the most ignorant politician among us that the tide has turned.
00:54:46 ►
You know, according to the FBI, every 37 seconds somebody is arrested in the United States
00:54:52 ►
on a marijuana charge.
00:54:54 ►
And since this nutty war against you and me began back in the 60s, over 12 million Americans
00:55:00 ►
have served time in jail cells because of their involvement with a plant that grows like a weed all over the world.
00:55:07 ►
What’s more, well over a third of all the adults in the states have now tried cannabis,
00:55:12 ►
and a significant percentage of them still use it.
00:55:16 ►
At this sad moment, when the legendary Jack Herrer lies critically ill,
00:55:20 ►
perhaps his dream of the populace shouting,
00:55:23 ►
the emperor wears no clothes, will finally come true.
00:55:27 ►
But now I’m getting way off track here,
00:55:29 ►
and I’ve still got a few other things I want to get to,
00:55:31 ►
so let’s get back on a more positive track.
00:55:36 ►
First of all, if you happen to live close to Manhattan,
00:55:38 ►
or will be close on the 4th of October,
00:55:41 ►
there will be a screening of the film Manifesting the Mind,
00:55:45 ►
followed by a group discussion with the filmmaker and others involved in the issue.
00:55:49 ►
And this screening is going to begin at 7 p.m.
00:55:52 ►
And as I understand it, this is the first in a series of three films discussing various aspects of shamanism
00:55:58 ►
and is a broad look at psychedelics in general.
00:56:01 ►
So you might want to check this out.
00:56:04 ►
And you can find all of the details about this event
00:56:06 ►
on Daniel Pinchbeck’s realitysandwich.com website.
00:56:10 ►
And I’ll put a link along with the program notes as well.
00:56:14 ►
Also, this coming weekend of September 25th, 26th, and 27th,
00:56:19 ►
again in Manhattan, I might point out,
00:56:21 ►
is the third edition of the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics conference,
00:56:27 ►
where you’ll be able to hear Alicia Danforth, Earth and Fire Arrowwood, Dr. William Richards, and many other psychedelic notables.
00:56:35 ►
And from the messages I’ve received via email and Facebook, I know that there will be also several of our fellow salonners there.
00:56:42 ►
So you may want to ask around and see if you can connect with some of the others while you are there.
00:56:49 ►
And speaking of connecting with the others, I am happy to report that my wife and I connected and reconnected with an amazing number of our old and now new best friends at the Symbiosis Gathering last weekend.
00:57:02 ►
at the Symbiosis Gathering last weekend.
00:57:06 ►
Not only did we bump into Michael, Darren,
00:57:09 ►
and some of our other friends from the Oracle Gathering the month before,
00:57:14 ►
we also came across a lot of people that we haven’t seen for several years.
00:57:20 ►
And I’ve been working in my mind on some things that I want to say about these events and similar gatherings and how important they are in the grand scheme of what is underway right now.
00:57:26 ►
Basically, a lot of formerly jumbled thoughts are at long last taking shape in my mind.
00:57:32 ►
And as much as I’d like to talk about them right now,
00:57:35 ►
I’m going to have to save that for another day when we have a little more time.
00:57:39 ►
And also, if I don’t finish this recording right now,
00:57:42 ►
it might be another couple of days before I have a chance to do so.
00:57:46 ►
And besides, I think we probably already have more than enough to think about.
00:57:50 ►
I can always tell when one of Terrence’s talks has something new for me to think about by the number of quotes that I record for the program notes.
00:57:59 ►
And the program notes for today’s podcast, I think, has as many new Terrence quotes as I’ve posted in a long time.
00:58:05 ►
Maybe I was just paying closer attention. In any event, I’m looking forward to listening
00:58:11 ►
to this interview one more time just to hear him say once again. Yes, drug taking and drug using
00:58:20 ►
people have been hideously stereotyped. If a racial or religious minority had
00:58:26 ►
had to put up with the crap that we’ve
00:58:28 ►
had to put up with,
00:58:29 ►
we would have gotten some kind of
00:58:32 ►
remediation from the Justice
00:58:33 ►
Department.
00:58:36 ►
Well, that should do it for now,
00:58:38 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast
00:58:40 ►
by reminding you that
00:58:41 ►
this and all of the podcasts from the
00:58:43 ►
Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio Thank you. Find at psychedelicsalon.org. And if you are interested in the philosophy behind The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:06 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
00:59:10 ►
which is available as an audiobook that eventually,
00:59:13 ►
eventually you’ll again be able to download at genesisgeneration.us.
00:59:19 ►
However, that site crashed a couple of weeks ago,
00:59:22 ►
and I’m only now getting back to work on it.
00:59:24 ►
So hopefully my lovely new novel will soon be available once again.
00:59:30 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdellic Space.
00:59:35 ►
Be well, my friends.