Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What we have been calling human consciousness is the only consciousness there is. It’s something you tap into, not something you evolve out of yourselves.”
“If your local language is insufficient then you abide in a domain of intuition, and that’s what I would call animal consciousness. It’s a domain of intuition of being. Animals intuit being. But given a more advanced nervous system and a more advanced cultural tool kit the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and experience loss and feel love.”
“The thing that makes psychedelics so central to a position like this is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion, the illusion created by the local language.”
“The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.”
“Ninety percent of the difficulty in your intellectual life would never have happened if you just had better taste.”
“The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest in the universal hierarchy of good and evil.”
“Nature seems to be in the business of building systems that transcend themselves.”
“We are all just swarms of personalities. The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea.”
“Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over.”
“We’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get rolling until we’re painted into a corner.”
“What shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply alienated intellectuals.”
“The keeper of the values [of his culture] is the one person who knows that the values are bullshit. … The shaman at the top realizes that, my god we stare out onto an abyss. We do not know.”
“Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness.”
“Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent, and ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises.”
“Sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideology.”
“Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment. If nothing lasts, then there’s a conclusion, not a feeling to be drawn from that observation, the conclusion to be drawn from it is then the felt present of the immediate moment must be what life is for.”
“I would say the bouquet of life is this moment.”
“I certainly am not interested in living forever, whatever that might mean, because I suspect if you live forever you miss the point.”
“We’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future from our children.”
“Life is what you get when a hyper dimensional object protrudes into ordinary space.”
“We clothe ourselves in matter, but we are not matter.”
“In my highest states I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this [human existence] is the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than this. This is the bottom line, and so the good news is it’s only up from here.”
“The last dance you dance alone, and nobody will be watching.”
“I don’t think you should live in anticipation of the drama of your death-bead scene, better to repair to the moment.
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201 - Appreciating Imagination – Part 1
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203 - Appreciating Imagination – Part 3
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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.
00:00:25 ►
Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And before I go any farther, I would first like to thank Joseph S., Mark C., and John H., all of whom
00:00:32 ►
sent in generous donations to the salon over the past week. So Joseph, Mark, and
00:00:37 ►
John, thank you for your continuing support. It’s what keeps us going around
00:00:41 ►
here. Now getting on with the show, so to speak,
00:00:45 ►
I’m going to continue with the McKenna workshop about imagination that we began last week.
00:00:51 ►
But when I introduced it, I said it’s how this workshop took place in 1994,
00:00:56 ►
because that was how the folder that these files were in was labeled.
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But in a few minutes, you’ll hear Terrence refer to the Heaven’s Gate cult,
00:01:04 ►
and they didn’t actually become widely known until their mass suicide in March of 1997.
00:01:10 ►
So it is now obvious to me, at least, that this workshop was most definitely not held in 1994, but several years afterwards.
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Which means that this came much closer to the end of Terrence’s career than I first thought.
00:01:24 ►
that this came much closer to the end of Terrence’s career than I first thought,
00:01:28 ►
which makes the last part of today’s talk even more interesting, at least to me,
00:01:34 ►
because he talks about longevity and death in ways that he most likely wouldn’t have spoken about them after his diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.
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So let’s get back to the one and only Terrence McKenna as he begins to discuss the core of the oyster.
00:01:44 ►
one and only Terence McKenna as he begins to discuss the core of the oyster.
00:01:55 ►
Obviously, when you evolve inside an animal body localized in space and time, you get a hellacious set of reflexes and muscles designed to deal with immediate threat in the environment. But at the core of the oyster is, you know,
00:02:08 ►
this portal into universalism,
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which we have denigrated to what we call the imagination.
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It is a…
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There is a third eye.
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The third eye exists,
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but it doesn’t look out at this world. You’ve
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got two perfectly good eyes for doing that. The third eye looks out at the
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holographic matrix of informational totality, and then the problem for that
00:02:39 ►
form of perception is filtering. Well, Atman means soul or being or… Yes, I mean
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it’s simply that consciousness is distributed and holographic and nobody
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has their brand on it.
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What we have been calling human consciousness
00:03:08 ►
is the only consciousness there is.
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It’s something you tap into,
00:03:15 ►
not something you evolve out of yourself.
00:03:20 ►
I mean, you require a local language to create a local model of this universal input.
00:03:33 ►
If your local language is insufficient, then you abide in a domain of intuition.
00:03:43 ►
And that’s what I would call animal consciousness.
00:03:46 ►
It’s a domain of intuition of being, animals intuit being.
00:03:54 ►
But given a more advanced nervous system, a more advanced cultural toolkit,
00:04:01 ►
the intuition changes into a direct perception, and you begin to make poetry and
00:04:10 ►
experience loss and feel love, and you begin to feel the emotional outlines of the enterprise
00:04:20 ►
of being, and how far one can go into that. I assume it’s infinite, or at least appears
00:04:28 ►
infinite from our limited position. So the local language is? Well, the local language is a
00:04:35 ►
necessary compromise. It would be, it’s interesting, the thing that makes psychedelics so central to a discussion like this
00:04:47 ►
is they are the only thing which pulls the plug on the illusion,
00:04:53 ►
the illusion created by local language.
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That’s why people are both in love with it and terrified of it,
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because it addresses a fundamental aspect of reality and it addresses it
00:05:08 ►
incontrovertibly. And people who feel culture as a safety zone that is keeping at bay the black
00:05:20 ►
oceans of God knows what are not interested in taking psychedelics. On the
00:05:26 ►
other hand, people who feel confined by the cultural dream and who want to cross
00:05:33 ►
the black oceans of who knows what to see what’s on the other side, they
00:05:38 ►
embrace that same experience as a God-sent gift, but it’s the same phenomenon.
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So it addresses one’s own fundamental relationship to the unknown.
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Local languages, like local cultures and architectural styles and everything else, are designed to create, I think, an infantile sense of security.
00:06:11 ►
One of the bees up my rear end these days is the idea that culture is not our friend,
00:06:31 ►
our friend, that we have been very naive about what culture is and how it is something designed for the convenience of the species. And, you know, it could turn you into a janitor or a banker
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or a celebrity or anything else with no interest or concern
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for whether that’s good for you.
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It plays with individuals.
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And most people think,
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or at least I think most people think,
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that when you get to be, I don’t know,
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30, 35, 40 or something, you have jumped all the hurdles.
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You got your college degree. You had some children. You made some money. You lost some money.
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Maybe you had a marriage. Maybe you had several. And anyway, people sort of get the feeling, well, I’ve done it. Actually, the major adventure still lies ahead. And the major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you.
00:07:47 ►
culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuse, actress, whatever, but it will not
00:07:54 ►
give you true being. And maybe this is the voice of somebody who just turned 50 talking. But I thought it would get simpler. It doesn’t, because this rejection of
00:08:10 ►
culture thing is the last and hardest step to take. And there are all kinds of impediments
00:08:20 ►
to taking it. The fact that in middle age, if you’ve played the game right,
00:08:27 ►
you get a lot of money. That’s totally stultifying in most cases in terms of going forward to the
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next level. It’s almost as though culture is an enterprise self-organized to buy you off at the moment when you might be most dangerous to its values and goals.
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Well, you know, in Revelations, the Ancient of Days is described as,
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there’s a sword which comes out of the mouth.
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It’s a very hard image to picture,
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but a sword, a turning sword, which comes out of the mouth.
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And, of course, the whole Western myth of creation
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is that the world was made by an utterance.
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In Principio ad verbum, ad verbo caro factum est in the beginning
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was the word and the word was made flesh and in some sense I think the the what is not stated
00:09:37 ►
there is that then out of the flesh the word must be redistilled that’s the second half of the flesh the word must be redistilled.
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That’s the second half of the historical process.
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In this book, which I may mention at some point,
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the statement is made, God created man in order to taste the bitter fruit of time.
00:10:02 ►
In the DMT flash, the entities that appear, their entire program is a program
00:10:15 ►
of language acquisition. And, you know, this is a point that’s brushed over in science fiction films because it’s actually such a conundrum.
00:10:27 ►
Those of you who saw and you suffered, as I did, Mars Attacks, the little role for Rod Steiger in
00:10:39 ►
there as the German guy with the translation machine. Well, if you think about alien contact,
00:10:47 ►
real alien contact,
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we cannot assume that universal understanding
00:10:54 ►
is easily achieved.
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The very first aspect of true alien contact
00:11:00 ►
would probably be a language lesson of some sort, because the aliens don’t want to
00:11:08 ►
communicate about our gross national product or our political system. If they do, they’re not
00:11:15 ►
really aliens. They’re just odd-looking people from far away. Real aliens have something really alien to communicate, and it can only be communicated in an alien language.
00:11:29 ►
So I think it’s very suggestive that these invisible entities that we contact, when we dissolve the local language boundaries,
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language boundaries and they are they’re like mud walls built around our little hut of mental you know our collection of goats and stuff that we’ve pushed together and then we dissolve the
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walls and you know there’s alien people there’s alien minds out there waiting to trade with us. They probably have always been trading
00:12:06 ►
with individual geniuses through dream, through insight, through imagination. I mean, many of,
00:12:14 ►
you know, if you’ve read Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
00:12:21 ►
you know that even in as constipated and self-conscious an enterprise as science, the real breakthroughs occur in situations of delirium, frenzy, drunkenness, inspiration.
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guys spend the whole rest of their professional life trying to make it all sound reasonable and rational and how it proceeded from earlier work done by other people and so forth and so on
00:12:53 ►
this is just a fantasy a kind of way of attaining respectability well yeah I mean Hinduism and Hebrew and I think those are the two biggies have really elaborate
00:13:12 ►
theories of the power and the place in the universal scheme of things of certain tones
00:13:20 ►
and as I was sitting I was thinking Sufi and then I was also thinking Pythagorean. I mean, some people call this the Pythagorean impulse, the belief that basically the universe is harmonious and exists as a series of octaves and that if you know the mechanics of this you can converse with
00:13:47 ►
angels you can ascend to higher levels yes again it’s an issue of language I
00:13:57 ►
mean some languages fill your pockets with lead and some languages give you a helium balloon
00:14:06 ►
for plunging into these metaphysical areas.
00:14:12 ►
One thing I wanted to talk about this morning
00:14:15 ►
and maybe this is the place to get into it
00:14:17 ►
is we’ve spoken of the imagination
00:14:21 ►
as a seemingly boundless realm but but it’s not ruleless. And people who
00:14:31 ►
encounter it without rules often have very difficult experiences, the most difficult of
00:14:40 ►
which can be raving madness, I would think. And so if we’re going to embrace the imagination
00:14:47 ►
as the new benchmark of being,
00:14:53 ►
then we need to talk about what the rules are
00:14:59 ►
that obtain in the imagination.
00:15:03 ►
You know, the 14th century nominalist William of Ockham
00:15:07 ►
dealt with questions like,
00:15:10 ►
can God do anything?
00:15:13 ►
Yes, God can do anything.
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Then can God make a rock so heavy that God can’t pick it up?
00:15:21 ►
And then, if not, why not?
00:15:24 ►
And what does this mean? Well, this is an effort to tame
00:15:28 ►
the imagination. And Occam concluded from exercises like that, that even God must follow
00:15:37 ►
the rules of logical necessity, otherwise becoming trapped in self-negating paradox.
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So I am thinking about this.
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I listed three areas where rules might be gleaned
00:15:59 ►
that could be applied to the imagination.
00:16:03 ►
The first two are linked somehow. Mathematics. Mathematics
00:16:14 ►
is not what you think it is. Mathematics is basically rational thinking about defined sets of entities.
00:16:33 ►
And since the imagination is nothing but defined sets of entities, the rules which govern them are worth learning.
00:16:38 ►
In practical terms, what this comes down to is logic.
00:16:50 ►
this comes down to is logic. And one of the problems that I think haunts the current cultural impasse is the fact that there is a lot of hostility to science, and it has spilled,
00:16:59 ►
and science we should be very suspicious of. It’s a wonder worker. It’s a magician dealing its wares in
00:17:07 ►
the marketplace. So we should be suspicious of science. But this scientistic paranoia has spilled
00:17:16 ►
over into a suspicion of reason. This is too much. If you abandon reason, you will have nothing to guide you but the emotional depth of the situation. This is what Heidegger called the depth of the call has not been a happy one. We cannot trust the call of the blood uncritiqued by reason.
00:17:53 ►
Reason is primary in this situation.
00:17:57 ►
Well, so then many people say,
00:17:59 ►
well, mathematics is impossible, logic is difficult.
00:18:04 ►
Isn’t there a third possibility?
00:18:07 ►
Isn’t there yet another way to get a handle on this?
00:18:11 ►
And the answer is yes, but I’m not sure it’s easier.
00:18:16 ►
It may seem at first easier, but that is aesthetics.
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is aesthetics.
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The imagination must
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serve the ideal
00:18:30 ►
of the beautiful.
00:18:32 ►
I talked about this a little bit
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last night.
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That which is tasteless
00:18:42 ►
is to be avoided
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at all costs.
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And 90% of the difficulty in your intellectual life
00:18:50 ►
would never have happened if you had just had better taste.
00:18:55 ►
Am I not right?
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You know?
00:19:00 ►
I look at this Heaven’s Gate thing in amazement because of its tastelessness.
00:19:09 ►
That’s all.
00:19:10 ►
I mean, it is utterly unappealing for that reason.
00:19:17 ►
I don’t even have to reach for the club of logic.
00:19:20 ►
If it had been better scripted, I might need logic.
00:19:26 ►
But the aesthetics of the situation are just so overwhelmingly…
00:19:32 ►
Ugh.
00:19:33 ►
You’re speaking towards what?
00:19:35 ►
The suicide cult that eliminated itself in San Diego.
00:19:41 ►
Yeah.
00:19:42 ►
I’m going to get up for a second.
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Well, usually,
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I mean, usually people ask me
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what will happen in 2012
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and I say
00:19:51 ►
it’s like asking
00:19:53 ►
a man facing east
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at 2 a.m.
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what will sunrise look like?
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In other words,
00:19:59 ►
it’s too early to ask.
00:20:01 ►
I mean, in terms of
00:20:02 ►
technology…
00:20:03 ►
Well, I think that
00:20:05 ►
A. I don’t have an answer
00:20:07 ►
to the problem of the bully
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and the slave
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unless as the
00:20:13 ►
Marxists claim
00:20:15 ►
that is inimical
00:20:18 ►
to
00:20:19 ►
disparity of wealth
00:20:21 ►
because I think disparity
00:20:23 ►
of wealth is a transient phenomenon based on a limited technology.
00:20:30 ►
But it is entirely possible that we can make everyone a king and we will still have bullies and slaves.
00:20:47 ►
slaves. So if the Marxists are wrong and the addressing of the economic disparity doesn’t change the structure of the human soul, then we will have to go deeper. And I don’t know how this
00:20:56 ►
is going to look. There’s a lot of tension in any community that discusses this kind of stuff over where the body lies in all of this. Can we solve
00:21:10 ►
our problems and maintain our individual existences? Or are we in fact furiously building
00:21:19 ►
a level of hierarchical control above the level of the individual
00:21:25 ►
that will make things like states
00:21:29 ►
and corporations seem like pale soup indeed.
00:21:33 ►
Are we, in fact, trying to create a superorganism?
00:21:38 ►
What is the relationship of an idea like that
00:21:41 ►
to classic fascism?
00:21:43 ►
I’m thinking of the Internet.
00:21:47 ►
Well, what about the internet
00:21:49 ►
you mean is it the coming
00:21:51 ►
of the super organism
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it is prosthesis
00:21:55 ►
on an incredible scale
00:21:57 ►
it is going to define
00:21:59 ►
to redefine what it is
00:22:01 ►
to be human
00:22:02 ►
I think technologies are neither gods nor demons.
00:22:08 ►
It’s what you do with it.
00:22:10 ►
The dilemma of human freedom is that we don’t know where we rest
00:22:20 ►
in the universal hierarchy of good and evil.
00:22:25 ►
In other words, what would we do if we could do anything?
00:22:29 ►
Would our transcendent impulses drive us to a kind of angelhood?
00:22:35 ►
Or, as James Joyce says, would we flop on the seamy side?
00:22:42 ►
And the answer normally given is some would do one and some the other
00:22:48 ►
yes but what if we erase that possibility of individual action and is there then only one And then what shall it be and who shall decide?
00:23:06 ►
I would be fairly pessimistic if I saw this all going on on a level playing field.
00:23:15 ►
But it isn’t going on on a level playing field.
00:23:20 ►
Transcendence is favored.
00:23:24 ►
Nature seems to be in the business
00:23:26 ►
of building systems which transcend themselves.
00:23:30 ►
We can see that as far back in time
00:23:33 ►
as we care to look and throughout all of nature.
00:23:37 ►
So it seems like we actually have a hell of a tailwind
00:23:41 ►
helping us toward the transcendent other, probably that is what
00:23:47 ►
will make the difference. We couldn’t have done it by ourselves, but we happen to be in a universe
00:23:54 ►
which is itself involved in the process of bootstrapping to higher levels.
00:24:03 ►
bootstrapping to higher levels.
00:24:04 ►
Yeah.
00:24:09 ►
Well, traditionally, meaning since the invention of print,
00:24:12 ►
the artist has had this role where the eccentricity and the bohemian lifestyle
00:24:17 ►
and so forth of the artist was tolerated
00:24:20 ►
because the argument was the artist is a kind of antenna
00:24:24 ►
for this mysterious thing
00:24:26 ►
called the future, and the artist would sound the alarm and bring the news. In a sense,
00:24:34 ►
we don’t hear this kind of talk anymore because this is the future. You know, we have become the very thing our parents warned us against.
00:24:48 ►
We, those cheerful dreams of endless progressivism that built up the 19th century and early 20th
00:24:57 ►
century, have given way to a much more cynical and sophisticated understanding that our buildings may become taller, our automobiles
00:25:08 ►
shinier, but somehow the human animal is not moving forward at the same rate as our technology.
00:25:20 ►
So what we have to do then is give people opportunities and let the devil take the hindmost. At least create a world others the haunters of the sleazy side of the Internet.
00:25:49 ►
We each play all these roles
00:25:52 ►
and move in between them according to taste and mood.
00:25:56 ►
I mean, one of the great falsities of print
00:26:01 ►
is the making illegitimate of schizophrenia. I mean, we are all just swarms of personalities.
00:26:12 ►
The idea that a healthy person has a unified identity is just a silly idea. It’s like
00:26:22 ►
believing that sexual preference comes in only two flavors or something.
00:26:27 ►
It’s one of those incredibly weird simplifications that once made, everybody lines up and salutes,
00:26:34 ►
no matter how much agony it causes individuals. Yeah. Well, last night what I said was that I was a Platonist and that Plato felt that the world was approached through three paths, the good, the true, and the beautiful. that goodness is controversial and truth difficult to discern,
00:27:06 ►
but that beauty has a kind of resonant self-evidence.
00:27:13 ►
And so following beauty, it’s my faith, will lead to the good and the true.
00:27:23 ►
And some beauty is…
00:27:25 ►
I mean, I’m a fan of extreme forms of beauty.
00:27:30 ►
Hieronymus Bosch and Redon and James Ensor.
00:27:36 ►
I mean, the beautiful can be grotesque.
00:27:39 ►
Of course, this then opens up a whole aesthetic can of worms
00:27:44 ►
that maybe we don’t want to get into.
00:27:50 ►
Well, beautiful art is never bad.
00:27:55 ►
Yes, I think grotesque, the beauty of the grotesque
00:27:59 ►
is the unique modern contribution to the discussion of beauty.
00:28:08 ►
And it’s a higher form of perception.
00:28:15 ►
I mean, it’s all very fine to find beauty in wildflowers and women dancing in diaphanous dresses and harpsichord music. And it’s quite another to find beauty in ripped up railway
00:28:22 ►
tickets and found objects and smashed machinery and that sort of
00:28:27 ►
thing. The modern sensibility has been unsentimental and has, in that sense, I think,
00:28:35 ►
advanced the canon of beauty. Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over.
00:28:43 ►
Modernity I’m feeling much better about now that it’s over.
00:28:50 ►
It’s such a huge enterprise to look back on. I mean, what faith, what simplicity,
00:28:57 ►
what naivete those people possessed.
00:29:03 ►
I can hardly get over it.
00:29:06 ►
The 20th century, for all of its brutality
00:29:09 ►
and its flirtation with the dark side of the human soul,
00:29:17 ►
the counterpoint to that was its incredible optimism
00:29:21 ►
and idealism and simplicity.
00:29:25 ►
I mean, the simplicity of fascism, the simplicity of Marxism,
00:29:30 ►
the simplicity of democratic political theory.
00:29:34 ►
I mean, these are ideologies that clearly never met a human being.
00:29:43 ►
Yeah.
00:29:57 ►
being. Well the idea of an attractor, this you see these huge thought structures that we live inside that we’re not even aware of and one of them is the idea that causes precede their effect.
00:30:12 ►
This seems like a non-statement to most people. Of course causes precede effect,
00:30:20 ►
but in fact processes, if causes always preceded effects, then many, many processes would
00:30:31 ►
be unpredictable, that are in fact predictable. And this has to do with this word we introduced
00:30:39 ►
last night briefly, the creode, the runnel, a given process, the destiny of a people or the evolution of a
00:30:48 ►
political system or the growth of a series of interconnected scientific ideas, is not in fact
00:30:55 ►
free to develop in any direction it wants. It is going on in an epigenetic environment of intellectual confinement of some sort.
00:31:09 ►
And in the same way that water runs downhill, a given idea developing in a given time and place will predictably develop in a certain direction.
00:31:22 ►
develop in a certain direction.
00:31:26 ►
One of the very large creodes that we can see at work in nature and society
00:31:31 ►
is what I call the conquest of dimensionality.
00:31:38 ►
Biology is a strategy
00:31:42 ►
for moving into and occupying ever more dimensions.
00:31:50 ►
And biology begins as a point-like chemical replicating system
00:31:56 ►
attached to a primordial clay in a proverbial warm pond
00:32:02 ►
somewhere at the dawn of time.
00:32:04 ►
And as life develops, it folds itself.
00:32:10 ►
It becomes a three-dimensional object.
00:32:14 ►
It replicates itself in time.
00:32:17 ►
By that means it claims the temporal dimension.
00:32:21 ►
After two or three billion years of that, it has evolved itself to the point
00:32:27 ►
where with strong muscles it can move through space, with superb visual organs it can coordinate
00:32:36 ►
its exterior environment, and finally, through the advent of language, it can tell its story,
00:32:45 ►
it can move information around not present,
00:32:49 ►
and as soon as you begin to code that information
00:32:52 ►
into stone or magnetic medium or whatever,
00:32:57 ►
in a sense, time has stopped.
00:32:59 ►
You are moving outward now,
00:33:03 ►
and this very large creode seems to inform not only biology, but the human enterprise as well. out of photography and the evolution of surround sound and the global airline system and these kinds of things.
00:33:30 ►
These are dimension-conquering phenomena
00:33:34 ►
designed to shrink the Earth to a point.
00:33:37 ►
And, of course, the Internet is the mother of all dimensional conquest.
00:33:44 ►
I mean, in a single 40-minute session on the Internet,
00:33:49 ►
I may talk to computers in Helsinki, Australia, Paris, Vanuatu, you name it,
00:33:58 ►
and I don’t even notice that this has happened.
00:34:01 ►
Yeah, it doesn’t matter.
00:34:03 ►
It’s meaningless to think in those terms
00:34:06 ►
because, in fact, you might as well think of it
00:34:09 ►
all being inside your CPU sitting on your desk.
00:34:13 ►
It has the same effect.
00:34:16 ►
And what that is is it’s the sum total of human knowledge
00:34:21 ►
being daily augmented
00:34:23 ►
and the fury with which people put their thing on the internet
00:34:27 ►
everything from you know how grandma’s recovering from her stroke to I visited a language site the
00:34:37 ►
other night that had 122 syllabuses for 122 languages that were philological engines
00:34:47 ►
for searching these languages.
00:34:50 ►
I got there through the Vonage Manuscript site.
00:34:54 ►
Yes, that all still goes on.
00:34:57 ►
That community is at work.
00:34:59 ►
So apparently we will not rest
00:35:03 ►
until all space and all time is brought down into, for all practical purposes, a single point.
00:35:13 ►
And this is an idea that has been around in various forms since at least the 16th century.
00:35:28 ►
century. I mean, it’s the alchemical idea of the philosopher’s stone, a universal panacea,
00:35:39 ►
a medicine which makes you wise, immortal, all-seeing, all-knowing, all-good, but interestingly conceived as an artifact of technology, conceived as something brought into being
00:35:45 ►
through the effort of a technological worker
00:35:49 ►
in concert, in resonance with the intention of nature,
00:35:55 ►
which is to do the same thing.
00:35:57 ►
The human world is simply a catalyst for nature’s intention.
00:36:02 ►
for nature’s intentions.
00:36:07 ►
We are speeding up nature’s program of dimensional transcendence.
00:36:11 ►
Nina?
00:36:12 ►
The issue is that it is to sound more and more
00:36:15 ►
like the unconscious record.
00:36:17 ►
It is.
00:36:20 ►
It is that, and it is in a sense
00:36:23 ►
the Jungian unconscious,
00:36:25 ►
but no longer unconscious.
00:36:28 ►
In a sense, what we’re saying is, you know, we all, before the Internet,
00:36:34 ►
you were who you are, you knew what you knew,
00:36:37 ►
and you knew there was a great deal that you didn’t know.
00:36:41 ►
You had once known it, but forgotten it, it or never learned it but somebody somewhere knew it.
00:36:49 ►
And because we had this vast, dark companion,
00:36:54 ►
the unconscious, bad things keep jumping out of it.
00:37:01 ►
It was remarkable to me that throughout the Cold War period,
00:37:09 ►
where a planet ruled by carnivorous monkeys,
00:37:13 ►
filled with ideological hatreds,
00:37:16 ►
under immense economic and social pressure,
00:37:19 ►
and yet nobody ever used atomic weapons,
00:37:24 ►
except once, the two Japanese instances.
00:37:28 ►
And in a sense, they don’t count because they didn’t know what it was.
00:37:36 ►
They had to use it to see what it was.
00:37:39 ►
And once they saw what it was, remarkable restraint set in.
00:37:47 ►
I would never have guessed that we would have been capable.
00:37:51 ►
I mean, remember how deep the fear of the Soviet Union was.
00:37:55 ►
Remember that for 35 years, a thermonuclear strike was a possibility within a half an hour of any undue movement on the other side, and yet
00:38:10 ►
somehow we got through that. So there is in the human animal an effort to awaken. You know, it was H.G. Wells who said,
00:38:26 ►
history is a race between education and catastrophe.
00:38:32 ►
And, you know, it’s a white-knuckle enterprise.
00:38:39 ►
You know, catastrophe edges inches ahead, education moves ahead. And again, if it were a level playing
00:38:48 ►
field, I’d be betting on catastrophe because I believe that nature favors the good, the true,
00:38:57 ►
and the beautiful. I’ve got all my money on education. I think we’ll make it, but I think we have to scare ourselves to death
00:39:07 ►
in order to keep focused. You know, we’re primates, and we don’t really dig in and get
00:39:16 ►
rolling until we’re painted into a corner. Yeah, man. I guess the answer is to, you have to somehow make it your friend.
00:39:27 ►
You have to make it your friend.
00:39:31 ►
There are ways to do that, actually.
00:39:35 ►
I made a little list you played right into my hands.
00:39:51 ►
The first and probably oldest friend, older even than psychedelics, is dreams.
00:39:57 ►
Dreams are hugely important.
00:40:05 ►
I was in Australia in February, and I did a lot of reading up before I went down.
00:40:15 ►
The aboriginals of Australia have been at the cultural enterprise for a long, long time along a different path than the rest of us. I mean, I’ve spent time with Amazon tribes
00:40:23 ►
and with people in Central Asia,
00:40:26 ►
and yes, they’re funky, and yes, they’re different,
00:40:29 ►
but these Australian Aboriginals are on to something quite other.
00:40:36 ►
Many people barely open their eyes.
00:40:40 ►
People sit silently. people don’t talk.
00:40:45 ►
This again relates to what we said about language.
00:40:48 ►
In Australia, among these people, you get the feeling that they don’t talk
00:40:53 ►
because they’re not sure it’s here to stay.
00:40:56 ►
If an aboriginal wants to communicate something to you,
00:41:01 ►
they would far rather walk with you a half mile into the bush and point at it than to simply describe it back at camp. So the dream time and
00:41:15 ►
the Jungian unconscious and the unconscious made conscious by
00:41:22 ►
the Internet begin to sound like the same things. I previously
00:41:29 ►
didn’t have much interest in the Australian aboriginals because I was slightly irritated by
00:41:36 ►
reliance on psychedelics. And so it was like, it was like, what am I supposed to do with these people?
00:41:49 ►
They’re clearly very loaded and very far out.
00:41:52 ►
And how do they do that without drugs?
00:41:57 ►
It was paradigm agonizing to me.
00:42:06 ►
Well, it turns out that they just are better at keeping secrets than the people in the Amazon.
00:42:12 ►
There is a revolution breaking over ethnobotany.
00:42:16 ►
We have been saying for decades that South America was the most hallucinogen-rich ecology on the planet,
00:42:20 ►
and why was that, and wasn’t it fascinating, and so forth and so on.
00:42:24 ►
and why was that and wasn’t it fascinating and so forth and so on.
00:42:32 ►
In the next 18 months, some Australian ethnobotanists and trippers are going to publish data that shows that the Australian Aboriginal worldview
00:42:39 ►
is entirely running on DMT.
00:42:42 ►
These acacias, this gum tree ecology that stretches from
00:42:46 ►
Queensland down to the south coast is replete with DMT. It’s simply that the
00:42:55 ►
Aboriginal culture is even more secretive than other cultures, other
00:43:02 ►
Aboriginal cultures in other parts of the world.
00:43:13 ►
And only very, very slowly is this information being let out.
00:43:17 ►
So dreams are one of the great friends of the imagination.
00:43:23 ►
Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, basically.
00:43:28 ►
There’ll be more. It’s not for me to take the thunder. Very good people have hundreds and hundreds of pages about to be published, and they’ve
00:43:33 ►
got the data and they’ve done the analysis. Yeah?
00:43:38 ►
What do you say to the point that you were overtaxing?
00:43:42 ►
Well, I pretty much take the position that there may be people who can do it on the natch,
00:43:48 ►
but there’s no technique.
00:43:51 ►
It’s something you have to be born to, and there’s no culture that can do it.
00:43:56 ►
I think throughout the human population, there may be one person in a hundred
00:44:02 ►
who has a futuristic set of synapses.
00:44:08 ►
Because I occasionally, in a group like this,
00:44:11 ►
somebody will come up to me and say,
00:44:13 ►
well, I’ve never taken a psychedelic drug,
00:44:16 ►
but I know exactly what you’re talking about,
00:44:18 ►
and I see visions and so forth and so on.
00:44:22 ►
I used to just think that these people were nutcases.
00:44:26 ►
I’ve now encountered enough of it that I modify my position to say these are just incredibly
00:44:35 ►
fortunate people. And you can’t tell how much of it is personality and how much of it is chemically real. Again, how much of what I’m
00:44:50 ►
saying to you right now, it’s being processed differently in every head in the room. Some
00:44:55 ►
people are seeing pictures. Some people are hearing words. Some people are logically building
00:45:02 ►
on what I say. And for some people it’s just music.
00:45:06 ►
And so it’s very different, and again, it’s something very hard to share
00:45:11 ►
because it’s so subjective.
00:45:14 ►
But throughout the world there are what we would call primitive or aboriginal cultures,
00:45:20 ►
and some are drug users and some are not.
00:45:26 ►
And it isn’t a matter of ecology, it’s a matter of something else.
00:45:30 ►
In eastern Ecuador, you have tribes that are just totally druggy
00:45:37 ►
and across the river, people who never touch anything.
00:45:41 ►
Living basically what appears to the unschooled observer, two cultural
00:45:47 ►
systems not that different from each other. So you know it’s a… but generally
00:45:56 ►
speaking the psychedelic cultures seem more…
00:46:05 ►
Let me put it this way.
00:46:06 ►
The psychedelic cultures seem less dogmatic.
00:46:09 ►
Shamanism comes in two flavors, at least two.
00:46:15 ►
There’s what I call a traditional shamanism
00:46:20 ►
is very rigid and ritual-driven
00:46:23 ►
and usually non-ic and the other
00:46:28 ►
kind of shamanism there are rituals but they are basically for the consumer not
00:46:35 ►
the producer and what shamans in these psychedelic cultures are are simply
00:46:41 ►
alienated intellectuals you know I’ve been in situations in the amazon
00:46:46 ►
where you fly into some remote place and and the people come and the women come and they want to
00:46:54 ►
touch the airplane and they want to look at your camera and touch your clothes and all this and so
00:47:01 ►
while this is going on meanwhile standing off is the shaman and he
00:47:07 ►
doesn’t give a shit about the airplane or your camera or any of that he is interested in you
00:47:15 ►
as a person and what he is is he’s alienated from the values of his culture the keeper of the values of his culture. The keeper of the values is the one person who knows
00:47:27 ►
that the values are bullshit.
00:47:30 ►
That’s what they’re doing in that function. It’s like somebody has to know and
00:47:37 ►
so all the people are, you know, kowtowing and going through their business, but the shaman at the top
00:47:45 ►
realizes, my God, we stare out onto an abyss
00:47:48 ►
We do not know and they’re like scientists. I mean they are
00:47:54 ►
scientists
00:47:56 ►
Yeah
00:47:59 ►
Well, this is an interesting question there’s a hard and answer. It depends on whether you think the need to commodify
00:48:08 ►
is so basic to human beings that it can’t be removed.
00:48:14 ►
If that’s true,
00:48:17 ►
then the Internet still holds out a certain amount of hope.
00:48:22 ►
A hardcore anti-capitalist position wants to eliminate
00:48:28 ►
capitalism because it sees it as an unreclaimable evil. But it’s possible that the only thing wrong
00:48:37 ►
with capitalism is that it manufactures, distributes, and commodifies physical objects.
00:48:47 ►
What if there was a capitalism that only commodified information and light?
00:48:54 ►
That might be more tolerable.
00:49:00 ►
In the future, not that long in the future, if you want to live at Versailles,
00:49:08 ►
it’ll cost you $149 to buy the software package and set it up and live in it. Well, if Versailles
00:49:18 ►
can be made to cost $149, how much is it worth? And the answer is only what the market will pay. So I think for a long time this process of raising standards of living has been underway. today in the world hundreds of millions of people live
00:49:46 ►
better than
00:49:47 ►
emperors and
00:49:50 ►
kings two centuries
00:49:52 ►
ago so
00:49:54 ►
I think the important
00:49:56 ►
thing well
00:49:58 ►
before we totally dismiss
00:50:00 ►
capitalism we should see
00:50:02 ►
if it can operate in a virtual
00:50:04 ►
informational environment less
00:50:07 ►
destructively. If it can’t, then something else will have to come along. But certainly capitalism
00:50:15 ►
based on the extraction of resources and their fabrication by cheap labor populations into objects to be sold in a central economy,
00:50:28 ►
that’s finished, that’s a dinosaur, that’s self-limiting.
00:50:33 ►
Because there is not an ultimately exploitable resource base,
00:50:40 ►
the end of that kind of capitalism is easily discerned.
00:50:47 ►
Well, that’s an interesting question.
00:50:48 ►
Is there a kind of natural selection of means in the marketplace?
00:50:55 ►
There probably is.
00:50:58 ►
For example, imagine governments deal with information
00:51:03 ►
completely differently than corporations.
00:51:06 ►
If a government obtains a proprietary technology,
00:51:11 ►
its impulse is to classify it, move it out of sight,
00:51:16 ►
and exploit it for political advantage.
00:51:19 ►
If a corporation achieves a proprietary technology,
00:51:24 ►
If a corporation achieves a proprietary technology,
00:51:29 ►
it drops a huge amount of money on promoting it,
00:51:33 ►
rushes products based on it to market, and tries to spread it everywhere as fast as it can.
00:51:38 ►
This certainly has caused an evolution of certain kinds of technology.
00:51:45 ►
But the two systems, the capitalist corporate system
00:51:51 ►
and the governmental system, value and put emphasis
00:51:56 ►
on different kinds of technology.
00:51:58 ►
For example, nation-states use war as an instrument of national policy.
00:52:05 ►
Corporations almost never do that.
00:52:09 ►
Corporations don’t like war.
00:52:12 ►
It busts up environments.
00:52:14 ►
It makes products difficult to move around.
00:52:17 ►
And where you had happy, healthy customers,
00:52:20 ►
you now have hollow-eyed refugees standing around with their hands out.
00:52:26 ►
But those were national interests.
00:52:29 ►
No corporation could have launched a war like that.
00:52:32 ►
It wasn’t Exxon who had a knife poised at their throat.
00:52:37 ►
It was the economies of France, Germany, and the United States.
00:52:43 ►
Also, that war was generations ago. A completely different set of
00:52:50 ►
political rules were in place. That was probably the last of those sorts of wars, I would bet.
00:53:02 ►
What capitalism does with war is it exports it to already burnt out market areas
00:53:08 ►
like Rwanda, Bosnia, Albania. They don’t care what people do to each other in those places because
00:53:15 ►
they don’t have, there’s no market there anyway. Let me go on with my list here. I think I got through Dreams and Drugs,
00:53:28 ►
which were probably the biggies. This is Friends of the Imagination, in case you lost your place
00:53:35 ►
here. Fiction and the enterprise of fiction, not necessarily science fiction, although it’s
00:53:48 ►
interesting if you look at the golden age of science fiction, the magazines that created that
00:53:55 ►
had names like Amazing, Astounding, and If. These are the very words and themes that we’ve been pursuing around here.
00:54:07 ►
But fiction is, until we get virtual reality up and running in the hands of a master,
00:54:16 ►
the best way we have of showing each other the contents of our own head.
00:54:22 ►
Any of you who have made your way through the remembrance of things past,
00:54:28 ►
Proust’s enormous novel about
00:54:31 ►
syndesic life in Paris,
00:54:34 ►
there are thoughts
00:54:36 ►
uttered there
00:54:38 ►
that are so fragile and delicate that when you read it,
00:54:44 ►
you think you were the only person who ever thought
00:54:48 ►
this, and you never bothered to mention it to anybody because it seems so ineffable, and yet
00:54:57 ►
Proust has gotten it down on the page. So it shows you what human beings are. And of course our world, pardon?
00:55:06 ►
Can you give an example of that?
00:55:09 ►
I’m trying to think of an example. There’s an example where they’re going to a beach town,
00:55:16 ►
and he’s riding with this dowager woman, a great society woman, and he’s watching the trees go by the carriage,
00:55:30 ►
and he notices that, now how does this work, that the nearer trees move faster than the trees
00:55:40 ►
further away, and then over this spatial metaphor is mapped a temporal metaphor about people
00:55:48 ►
changing in time. And, you know, God knows what it is in French, but even in English,
00:55:54 ►
it’s this exquisitely complicated thought that you wouldn’t think anybody could actually do justice to the feeling,
00:56:06 ►
and yet there it is in its completion.
00:56:11 ►
The other great friend of the imagination is travel.
00:56:18 ►
Travel is another way, a more gentle way,
00:56:23 ►
to break down cultural conditioning.
00:56:28 ►
I mean, what we call culture shock is when you go to Afghanistan or Albania
00:56:34 ►
and you realize that your expectations of how a table should be set,
00:56:40 ►
what a toilet looks like, how a bus ticket works,
00:56:44 ►
and how a telephone is supposed to operate.
00:56:47 ►
We’re just so narrowly defined that now you’re confronted with a telephone and a toilet,
00:56:53 ►
and you don’t even know which end is which. And it’s not for nothing that the vocabulary of
00:57:01 ►
psychedelic experience has borrowed from the vocabulary of travel.
00:57:06 ►
So we take a trip.
00:57:08 ►
We have a journey.
00:57:10 ►
We go to an alien landscape.
00:57:16 ►
And then finally, the great friend of the imagination, is the future.
00:57:27 ►
Because it’s in the future that we place our hopes,
00:57:33 ►
our fears, our suppositions.
00:57:36 ►
I mean, the future is a land of things imagined,
00:57:42 ►
things that have not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring.
00:57:49 ►
Yeah.
00:57:49 ►
As a friend of the imagination?
00:57:55 ►
Well, did I not mention last night that the two great motivators were food fantasies and
00:58:03 ►
sex fantasies and sex fantasies. And yes, the sexual imagination is at a very early,
00:58:14 ►
I almost said primitive, but I don’t mean that, but I mean early level, because if I’m understanding you correctly, it revolves around the if operator.
00:58:27 ►
If I approach the desirable female with the proper blandishment,
00:58:33 ►
if, and then, of course, just sexual fantasy,
00:58:37 ►
then we will do this, then we will do that, and so forth and so on.
00:58:41 ►
It certainly is a vehicle for altered states, whether I would call them
00:58:47 ►
imagination or not. I suppose I would. But now that I’m thinking about your question,
00:58:54 ►
I think, you know, there are pitfalls in the imagination. And probably the sexual pitfall is
00:59:02 ►
sentimentality.
00:59:09 ►
Well, tastelessness is in there, too.
00:59:13 ►
Sentimentality is a virulent form of tastelessness.
00:59:20 ►
And sentimentality is very hard to root out.
00:59:26 ►
You may think you’re a hard cookie,
00:59:28 ►
but I’ll bet there are areas of sentimental delusion
00:59:33 ►
so broad and deep in every one of us,
00:59:35 ►
and some people carry that to the grave.
00:59:38 ►
They’re the lucky ones.
00:59:40 ►
The rest of us have divorces, bankruptcies,
00:59:44 ►
muggings, and what have you.
00:59:46 ►
And slowly our sentimentality is pounded out of us.
00:59:53 ►
And, you know, it’s a good thing to lose sentimentality
00:59:59 ►
because it’s a false aesthetic.
01:00:02 ►
And I think we recognize it.
01:00:04 ►
It’s also a very easily manipulative, it is truly a
01:00:07 ►
false aesthetic in the hands of modern media, because it is a great ploy for buying. If you
01:00:17 ►
can induce sentimentality in people, they will buy the object of that induction.
01:00:26 ►
Yeah.
01:00:28 ►
Well, your word idealism is good here
01:00:33 ►
because it brings me to something I always eventually get to,
01:00:37 ►
which is in line with this thought,
01:00:40 ►
culture is not your friend.
01:00:43 ►
Ideology is not your friend ideology is not your friend and ideology some people
01:00:49 ►
think what we’re trying to do here is sort out good ideologies from bad should
01:00:54 ►
I be a Marxist should I be deconstructionist and the answer is no, none of the above. All ideologies are viral infections of some sort,
01:01:11 ►
memetic infections that erode your functionability and your comfort with
01:01:21 ►
yourself. Ideologies set up polarities that are based on discontent.
01:01:27 ►
And ideologies are always, always, always based on false premises. Whatever the, I mean,
01:01:35 ►
name an ideology and I’ll tell you the false premises that it’s based on. So part of this process of cultural maturity that I’ve been talking about is to get beyond ideology without embracing cynicism. It’s not a fuck you thing. It’s a deeply saddening awareness that we are not yet angel enough, that we should take ourselves that seriously.
01:02:08 ►
Yes, I would say sentimentality is the feeling of attachment we have to our ideologies.
01:02:16 ►
So, for instance, someone says, well, you know, Marxism, maybe we didn’t have the right answer, but we certainly had a sense of a mission and a
01:02:28 ►
wonderful, you know, we knew who we were, and that’s crazy talk. You know, if it was wrong,
01:02:37 ►
it was wrong. I mean, it’s like old Nazis sitting around the thing, the great old days, you know.
01:02:46 ►
sitting around the thing the great old days you know what was so great about the old days you want community join a bowling league for crying out loud yeah no that that’s a sub that’s a that’s
01:02:55 ►
a lesser evil that’s nostalgia another impulse for marketing frenzy. Yeah.
01:03:09 ►
But romanticism, I think,
01:03:11 ►
is a legitimate impulse
01:03:13 ►
and well-situated in historical context
01:03:16 ►
and so forth and so on.
01:03:18 ►
Sentimentality can break out
01:03:20 ►
anywhere, anytime,
01:03:22 ►
and is, you know, can find anything for its object.
01:03:30 ►
Sentimentality is a lazy form of thinking, I think. You know, people
01:03:38 ►
don’t want to think the hard thoughts, and yet I find the hard thoughts very paradoxically liberating. For instance,
01:03:50 ►
here is the hard thought. I don’t want anybody to burst into tears on me, so gird your loins.
01:03:58 ►
But, you know, I’ve spent a lifetime taking drugs, knocking around the world,
01:04:05 ►
having affairs, being married, being unmarried,
01:04:08 ►
this, that, and the other.
01:04:09 ►
If somebody asked me,
01:04:10 ►
so what do you know?
01:04:12 ►
What have you learned?
01:04:13 ►
I would have to say what I’ve learned
01:04:16 ►
is that nothing lasts.
01:04:21 ►
There’s a hard thought.
01:04:23 ►
Is that a cause for joy or despair?
01:04:28 ►
Well, if you’re thinking about everything you loved
01:04:31 ►
and how it’s going to turn into mush
01:04:34 ►
as you’re shoveled into the grave,
01:04:36 ►
it’s a hard thought.
01:04:37 ►
But on the other hand,
01:04:39 ►
if you think of all the jerks who’ve oppressed you,
01:04:42 ►
it’s a great consolation to know that they too will go down
01:04:50 ►
into that good night. Nothing lasts. That is not a cause for joy or despair. It’s a cause for expanding one’s feeling in the moment.
01:05:08 ►
If nothing lasts,
01:05:10 ►
then there’s a conclusion,
01:05:12 ►
not a feeling to be drawn from that observation.
01:05:16 ►
The conclusion to be drawn from it is
01:05:19 ►
then the felt presence of the immediate moment
01:05:24 ►
must be what life is for.
01:05:28 ►
And somebody who could take that perception and use it that way
01:05:33 ►
could immediately transcend all kinds of neurotic behavior,
01:05:37 ►
longings, regrets, doubts, fears.
01:05:42 ►
No, you’re just saying no, the felt presence of immediate experience.
01:05:45 ►
Yeah, sentimentalism, yeah.
01:05:49 ►
Well, first of all, let me comment on the Buddhist thing. I’m not that friendly to that formulation because it still is postponing gratification
01:06:07 ►
it’s saying death is the bouquet of life
01:06:10 ►
you should live toward death
01:06:12 ►
I would say the bouquet of life is this moment
01:06:15 ►
but to the more important point of longevity
01:06:19 ►
I certainly am not interested in living forever
01:06:24 ►
whatever that might mean because I suspect if you live forever, you miss the point. In issues of are people buying time at the expense of somebody else.
01:07:08 ►
things this culture, about this culture, is we’ve invented a sin for which there is no name. It’s so beyond most people’s ability to conceive. And this sin that we’ve invented is we steal the future
01:07:18 ►
from our children. You know, we do it with our medical health care plans where we know that all this fine surgery and stuff that you’re getting is at the expense of the next generation of people.
01:07:33 ►
We overuse resources, leaving nothing for future generations.
01:07:39 ►
I don’t know how that would all be sorted out. I am attracted by the idea of living as long as I want to live.
01:07:50 ►
I wonder how long that would be. And of course, if you make people comfortable,
01:07:57 ►
probably they would like to live a lot longer. What reason is there for a person to check out of a comfortable situation in a sense what
01:08:08 ►
nature does is make the body a less and less comfortable place to be until finally you just
01:08:15 ►
say all right already you know take beam me up, Scotty.
01:08:28 ►
But then, you know, the other possibility is what if there were forms of existence that were dematerialized?
01:08:33 ►
How would we feel about going into circuitry
01:08:37 ►
for a few rounds of eternity?
01:08:39 ►
And what are the moral implications of that?
01:08:42 ►
I don’t know.
01:08:44 ►
I’ve had this argument with Robert
01:08:45 ►
Anton Wilson. He’s a big enthusiast for life extension. It depends on what you think death
01:08:54 ►
is. And I’ve managed to talk myself into the idea that death is probably not simply dissolution and chaos,
01:09:06 ►
not because I have received any guidance from on high,
01:09:11 ►
but just as I observe nature,
01:09:15 ►
she has a wonderful parsimoniousness about her behavior.
01:09:21 ►
And clearly this form,
01:09:24 ►
which is basically an unraveled DNA molecule that is now
01:09:29 ►
making a lot of claims on resources in the environment in order to keep this
01:09:34 ►
body going is nature put a lot of effort into this.
01:09:45 ►
And I think that the best model for what life is,
01:09:50 ►
based not on religious thinking but on biological thinking,
01:09:54 ►
is life is what you get when a hyperdimensional object protrudes into ordinary space.
01:10:10 ►
protrudes into ordinary space. In other words, if we take this cup and cut it in two,
01:10:18 ►
it doesn’t change. It just becomes a cup in two pieces. But it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t rot, it doesn’t lose its essence. If we take any living being from a bacterium to a brontosaur and cut it into,
01:10:28 ►
the entire system falls apart very quickly and we’ve created a mess and we see that the thing
01:10:35 ►
that we had is no longer there. So I think what biology is, is the intrusion into three-dimensional space and time of hyper dimensional objects and
01:10:48 ►
The other clue to that that seems an argument for it is that we do have this thing called a mind
01:10:55 ►
But we can’t find it anywhere. It doesn’t seem to be
01:11:01 ►
Anywhere even when you get down to the level of electrodes in the brain and saying words
01:11:07 ►
to people and watching oscilloscopes, you still can’t seem to quite nail it down. So I think
01:11:15 ►
probably these objects retract back into hyperspace, higher space, and that this is what the soul is. The soul is the…
01:11:31 ►
there is something to this idea of a morphogenetic field, and we clothe ourselves in matter,
01:11:52 ►
but we are we are not matter and so to actually complete a human cycle of existence you have to go into death it’s where you came from in some sense I mean the whole we put a lot of attention
01:11:59 ►
into death we don’t look very much at birth. We think we understand it. I mean, we all know
01:12:06 ►
the story about the sperm and the egg and all that. But before that, what is going on? You know,
01:12:15 ►
whence come these forms? We seem to have the matter down pretty good. But really what a being is, is the intrusion into space-time of a form,
01:12:27 ►
and the form is unique, and then it retreats. I think it would be one of the great
01:12:35 ►
jokes of human history if here at the end of the 20th century, at the end of the millennium,
01:12:47 ►
century, at the end of the millennium, with all this techno-hypola surging around us, if we were to actually gain insight into the after-death state. And one of the reasons I’m
01:12:56 ►
so keen for DMT is because when I have given it to people who were purported experts in the after-death state, Tibetan lamas and
01:13:07 ►
shamans and this sort of thing, they come back and they say, yep, that’s the territory, all right.
01:13:14 ►
And so in my highest states, I have had the insight, which I will convey to you without saying it’s true, that this is
01:13:27 ►
the most limited form of existence you will ever know. You can’t be deader than
01:13:36 ►
this. This is the bottom line. And so the good news is
01:13:46 ►
it’s only up from here.
01:13:50 ►
But of course you have to bet the farm
01:13:53 ►
on this cheerful rap.
01:13:55 ►
And there’s no whining if you’re wrong.
01:13:58 ►
This is an all or nothing bet.
01:14:01 ►
And so naturally it brings your heart
01:14:04 ►
into your throat but
01:14:05 ►
that’s the kind of enterprise life is all risk and the race to the swift I
01:14:12 ►
think one last well I don’t know and I wonder what I will think as I approach
01:14:22 ►
the great divide it’s easy in the pink of hell to speculate
01:14:27 ►
and play the philosophes and all that nonsense. But, you know, the last dance you dance, you dance
01:14:36 ►
alone, and nobody will be watching. But I have seen people die, and it is an inspiration. I hope to have that equanimity of mind.
01:14:47 ►
The other thing about death that needs to be said is we all imagine, I think,
01:14:53 ►
that we will have a leisurely philosophical death.
01:14:57 ►
That’s what we all want, you know.
01:15:00 ►
Months to get used to the idea, to say goodbye, to gather friends, to make our bequeathments,
01:15:07 ►
to speak our final wisdom. But death for most people comes messily and unexpectedly.
01:15:16 ►
And so I don’t think you should live in an anticipation of the drama of your deathbed scene. Better to repair to the moment, you know, being a realist
01:15:29 ►
primarily. What I find always waiting when I return from these flights of philosophical fancy is my body, my history, my space, my time, and these things are all good.
01:15:51 ►
It’s a great space, a great time, a great body, a great being to be.
01:15:58 ►
So the real message of the psychedelic experience and of the anti-historical thrust of the critique
01:16:08 ►
we’ve been carrying out here is to take the moment, the felt presence of immediate experience.
01:16:18 ►
This is all you know, it’s all you will ever know. Everything else comes as unconfirmed rumor, innuendo, unrealized possibility, fading memory, conjecture, is always complete, every moment.
01:16:46 ►
And to the degree that we force ourselves to look beyond it
01:16:50 ►
or cannot find ourselves within it,
01:16:53 ►
we betray it.
01:16:55 ►
And then we have more work to do.
01:16:59 ►
Well, that’s enough, I think.
01:17:03 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:17:06 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:17:12 ►
And then we have more work to do, so says the Bard McKenna.
01:17:17 ►
And I also want to repeat here what he said at the end just now.
01:17:21 ►
I think it’s very significant.
01:17:23 ►
He said,
01:17:24 ►
The real message of the psychedelic
01:17:26 ►
experience and of the anti-historical
01:17:28 ►
thrust of the critique we’ve been
01:17:30 ►
carrying out here is to take the moment,
01:17:32 ►
the felt present of immediate
01:17:33 ►
experience. This is all you know.
01:17:36 ►
It’s all you’ll ever know.
01:17:38 ►
Everything else comes as
01:17:39 ►
unconfirmed rumor, innuendo,
01:17:42 ►
unrealized possibilities,
01:17:44 ►
fading memory, conjecture, lie, hope, who knows?
01:17:48 ►
But in the moment of being, we have the completion of being.
01:17:52 ►
It is always complete, every moment.
01:17:56 ►
And this, I think, goes right to the heart of the matter when he also asks,
01:18:02 ►
How are we doing in the here and now?
01:18:04 ►
Part of the matter when he also asks, how are we doing in the here and now?
01:18:12 ►
Because after all, the here and now is the only reality that we seem to share, at least in some small way.
01:18:22 ►
So the next time you’re feeling a little blue, be sure to ask yourself if it’s because of something that is going on in your current environment and in the present moment.
01:18:25 ►
Or is it because of something that happened in the past or something that you fear may happen in the future?
01:18:28 ►
As you already know, the past is just a figment of our imagination now,
01:18:34 ►
as is the future.
01:18:35 ►
All there is is the here and now.
01:18:38 ►
And it is in the here and now that we need to keep in focus
01:18:41 ►
if we are to hold steady during the great shift that has now begun.
01:18:46 ►
But for me right now, the great shift is going to be shifting me out of here
01:18:50 ►
because I’m about to lose access to my computer for the rest of the day.
01:18:54 ►
So I’m going to have to sign off for now,
01:18:56 ►
and hopefully I’ll have enough time on my machine tomorrow to do the post-production
01:19:00 ►
and publish this program before I leave on a little trip
01:19:03 ►
that is going to take me away from the
01:19:06 ►
salon here for a week or more,
01:19:07 ►
which is my way of letting you know
01:19:10 ►
that there most likely won’t be another podcast
01:19:12 ►
from the salon for about two weeks.
01:19:14 ►
I’ll miss you, to be sure,
01:19:16 ►
but we’ll be back together again
01:19:18 ►
in cyberdelic space before you know it.
01:19:20 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast
01:19:22 ►
by reminding you that this
01:19:24 ►
and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:19:34 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
00:00:00 ►
Thank you. From cyberdelic space. Be well my friends.