Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“An ideology is a simplification of reality where the vast, messy, baroqueness of being is put through some kind of rasher of language and comes out grossly simplified. … Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.”
“Reducing, as we have done for the past two hundred years, the universe to a machine, some kind of a machine, then robs it of meaning. Then we stand back and look at our lives and our societies and say how come they have no meaning? It’s because we labored like demons to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal of experience that we achieved in that process.”
“Feelings are primary. The primary datum of experience is feeling, and then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience. And then still lower on the rung, and I maintain lower on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience.”
“I think it’s really important to keep things as simple as possible because they will still be hellaciously complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here is still maddeningly baroque. So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting and the plans of Great Atlantis only further exacerbates the problem.”
“We know that behind all this constipated sociability lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience. It’s important to keep it in mind in very psychedelically situations. But people who have never broken through the cultural dream take it to be reality and commit crimes based on delusion about what is and isn’t reality.”
“The ego is a maladaptive, tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of the culture. It is literally the response to toxic cultures. The more toxic the culture the more ego is revered as a natural value within that culture.”
“People are clueless, and they’re being used and abused. Seemingly intelligent people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconsciousable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous towards the Earth. … Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decomodify experience. … What is the charm of all this crap? Can anybody explain it to me?”
“Novelty is that quality of nature that seeks complexity. It’s countervailing force is called habit.”
“The Timewave is not occult, but it is not science as we have done it these past 500 years, because it assumes that one of our primary intuitions is actually true; the intuition that every moment is unique [time is not uniform]. It treats that as the central starting point for an entirely new metaphysics of being.”
“The way you investigate time is by moving inward, by investigating metabolism. The human body is a knot in time.”
“It is as though the Winter Solstice of 2012 was some kind of dwell point out of which the temporal continuum is being generated.”
“The more of a mind you have, the more fun you can have when it’s fucked-up.” -Nick Herbert (Wikipedia entry about Nick)
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203 - Appreciating Imagination – Part 3
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205 - Appreciating Imagination – Part 5 (Timewave)
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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 I’d like to begin today’s podcast, first of all, by thanking John H., Eric K., and Warren E.
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for their more than generous donations to the salon.
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And Warren, I have to say that your donation was way over and above the call of duty.
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And I do thank you all, Warren, John, and Eric, for your continuing support of the salon.
00:00:53 ►
And I would be remiss today if I didn’t also thank the Dope Fiend in advance for what in a few days will be his 200th podcast.
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And the truth is that he’s responsible for considerably more hours of podcasting pleasure
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than the 200 programs of his own,
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because the Dope Fiend is also the mastermind behind the Cannabis Podcast Network
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over at dopefiend.co.uk.
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And collectively, they have produced over 500 programs already.
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At least, I think I counted right.
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That’s an amazing body of work, I’m here to tell you.
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And I think that the entire worldwide psychedelic community owes the dope fiend a huge debt of gratitude. I can tell you from a personal standpoint that there has been more than one week where I thought about quitting my podcast from the salon just because it was a lot of work.
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But then here comes another podcast from the Dope Fiend, and I figured that as long as someone like him, who actually has a job and a real life, can take the time to do a weekly podcast, well, so can I.
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So, Dope Fiend and friends, thank you one and all for many years of friendship and fun, and that also goes for you guys over at thegirlreport.com forums.
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You’re all providing the rhythm for the heartbeat of the tribe.
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I don’t know what we’d do without all of you right now.
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And speaking of someone I can’t do without,
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it seems that Terrence McKenna also fills that bill for me.
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So we’ll pick up where I left off in my last podcast,
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and that is with Terrence talking about where ideologies fit into our pictures of reality.
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Then after 20 minutes or so, I guess there’s a brief pause where they take a break for lunch.
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And after lunch, he picks up with a discussion of his time wave hypothesis.
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Now, I’m only going to play the first 20 minutes or so of the time wave discussion today
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because there’s another little sound bite I’d like to squeeze in here also.
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Thank you for your question today, because there’s another little soundbite I’d like to squeeze in here also. But first, let’s rejoin Terence McKenna and his friends on a day late in 1997 on the vast, seething, messy, baroqueness of being
00:03:12 ►
is put through some kind of rasher of language
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and comes out grossly simplified.
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And because it’s grossly simplified,
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it becomes like a kind of algebra of idiocy,
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where now you can set up these little equations
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and they solve themselves,
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and you get a feeling of satisfaction from that.
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But in fact, the whole thing betrays the human enterprise.
00:03:45 ►
And to give you a graphic example of what I’m talking about,
00:03:49 ►
I’m thinking of a scene from a novel called Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bonaire,
00:03:55 ►
where a guy who’s a communist in the Greek partisans during the war beats a villager to death who has given shelter and food to some non-communist
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partisans fighting in the mountains. And the protagonist of this particular part of the novel
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says to this guy, as he’s beating this old man to death, he says, why are you killing this old man?
00:04:29 ►
He is harmless. And the guy, without even missing a stroke, turns to him and says,
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it’s a matter of historical necessity. This is the voice of absolute fanaticism speaking, and this is the voice of pure ideology.
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In other words, unconscionable acts, the Holocaust, up to that level of unconscionable acts, become intellectually defensible in the presence of a complete corruption of language. And so ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.
00:05:12 ►
Well, ideals and ideology are not quite the same thing.
00:05:17 ►
Ideals are simple and don’t knit themselves into vast intellectual structures.
00:05:27 ►
In other words, an ideal of mine is to do as little harm as possible.
00:05:33 ►
I may not meet this ideal, but it is an ideal of mine
00:05:37 ►
to try and do as good a job as I can.
00:05:48 ►
But in the name of that ideal,
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it doesn’t lead on, there isn’t a therefore.
00:05:58 ►
Therefore what?
00:06:00 ►
Therefore I should become a Mormon?
00:06:03 ►
Therefore I should no longer eat meat? therefore I should no longer have sex,
00:06:06 ►
therefore, no, there isn’t that kind of implication. But ideology always implies
00:06:13 ►
implication. If man is, as Marxists say, an economic creature, then the following must
00:06:21 ►
follow and the following must follow from that.
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So I think ideals are very close to our emotions. They’re things that spring from the heart and their boundaries are not well defined
00:06:36 ►
and the implications are not clear.
00:06:40 ►
I mean, if I say my ideal is to do good for mankind, the next step is not at all clear.
00:06:52 ►
But if I profess an ideology, the next step is always deceptively clear.
00:07:00 ►
So I think ideologies flatten complexity. You know, people don’t like paradox.
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I’m not sure why this is.
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I think it’s a quality of print culture.
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People want closure.
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They want every program or every intellectual argument
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or every examination of a phenomena to end with a conclusion.
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Q-E-D.
00:07:35 ►
Therefore, this is what it is.
00:07:38 ►
But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist
00:07:41 ►
to notice that this betrays the complexity of the world.
00:07:46 ►
The world is never one thing or even several things. The world always has dimensions which
00:07:54 ►
exceed the descriptive machinery that you’re applying to it. And I don’t know who it was,
00:08:00 ►
George Bernard Shaw or Nietzsche or some other 19th century bad boy, but it has been said
00:08:07 ►
that the essence of intellectual maturity is being able to simultaneously hold two contradictory
00:08:14 ►
thoughts in your mind at the same time. Now you are actually approaching the beginning of
00:08:21 ►
intellectual maturity, but if you’re always saying,
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well, if it’s this, then it can’t be that,
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and if it’s this, it can’t be that,
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then you have been hoisted on the petard of dualism.
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And it’s more than a joke to say
00:08:38 ►
that dualism is the root of all evil.
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Of course it is.
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It’s the root of all evil. Of course it is. It’s the root of all good. And what really we are given
00:08:48 ►
is a seamless continuum of phenomena that we are asked to not to understand. That’s preposterous.
00:08:58 ►
Why should talking monkeys understand reality? But to feel. we can feel. We have an extremely complex body and nervous system
00:09:09 ►
and perceptual apparatus which ushers us into feeling. So you have not mastered a situation
00:09:17 ►
when you understand it. When you understand the situation, you are probably on the road to catastrophe.
00:09:26 ►
When you feel the situation, you are probably moving into a good position then to act in that situation.
00:09:37 ►
And often we, in fact usually, we do not understand our feelings.
00:09:43 ►
That’s a strange thing to ask of one’s feelings
00:09:45 ►
If we understand our feelings, it’s simply a footnote on our intellectual housekeeping
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It is neither necessary nor sufficient
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What is necessary and what is sufficient is?
00:10:01 ►
Feeling into the moment. I think this is where we got to
00:10:04 ►
At some point earlier in this,
00:10:06 ►
that the felt presence of immediate experience
00:10:09 ►
is the defining phenomenon of being.
00:10:15 ►
If you don’t, if you can’t reach it,
00:10:18 ►
you are in trouble.
00:10:21 ►
You need some kind of help, psychedelics, therapy, loving-kindness,
00:10:27 ►
something. And if you can reach it, then you have contacted the authentic domain of being.
00:10:38 ►
I almost said of humanness, but it goes deeper than that that because the animal world is living in
00:10:46 ►
that in that space well I think because of the good offices of quantum physics
00:10:55 ►
and some other things we are beginning to realize that things like chaos, like paradox, these are not names for intellectual black holes.
00:11:08 ►
These are names for the sources of life’s richness
00:11:14 ►
and its advance, its creative advance lies in these things.
00:11:22 ►
Reducing, as we have done over the past 200 years,
00:11:26 ►
the universe to a machine,
00:11:29 ►
some kind of a machine,
00:11:32 ►
then robs it of meaning.
00:11:34 ►
And then we stand back and look at our lives
00:11:37 ►
and our societies and say,
00:11:38 ►
how come they have no meaning?
00:11:41 ►
It’s because we labored like demons
00:11:43 ►
to make sure that they didn’t have meaning, and now
00:11:47 ►
we have no one to blame but ourselves for the gross simplification of reality and the betrayal
00:11:54 ►
of experience that we achieved in that process.
00:12:16 ►
you know years ago in Canada there was a political party called the Social Credit Party and they had a very complex scheme that nobody could understand and they ran on the platform under the motto, you don’t have to understand social credit in order to vote for it.
00:12:31 ►
So this is sort of what you’re talking about.
00:12:34 ►
Carol, that’s a great thing.
00:12:37 ►
Carol, that’s a great thing.
00:12:38 ►
Why not?
00:12:39 ►
Why not?
00:12:40 ►
Yes.
00:12:44 ►
Feelings are primary.
00:12:46 ►
The primary datum of experience is feeling.
00:12:51 ►
And then out of that comes a logical reframing of experience.
00:13:00 ►
And then still lower on the rung,
00:13:04 ►
and I maintain low enough on the rung that one shouldn’t go that low, is an ideological recasting of experience.
00:13:16 ►
And it’s a delicate thing.
00:13:20 ►
I mean, I’m not offering a simple answer here.
00:13:23 ►
It requires constant fine-tuning and intelligence.
00:13:27 ►
And every day, I think, we have to…
00:13:31 ►
It’s almost like we need…
00:13:32 ►
What is it that the Marxists used to do?
00:13:35 ►
Criticism, self-criticism.
00:13:37 ►
We need to be alert to ideology.
00:13:42 ►
It’s constantly seducing us.
00:13:46 ►
Yeah, dialectic, but the idea of criticism, self-criticism,
00:13:50 ►
that you constantly, you and your colleagues or comrades,
00:13:54 ►
constantly search your behavior for betrayal of the ideology.
00:14:00 ►
I think we need to constantly search ourselves,
00:14:03 ►
not for the betrayal of ideology, but for the embracing of it.
00:14:07 ►
And say, oh dear, I’m starting to believe something.
00:14:11 ►
Slap, slap.
00:14:12 ►
Ah, that feels better.
00:14:17 ►
Because these ideologies are incredibly draining and distracting. They get in the way between us and true feeling.
00:14:30 ►
On the other hand, if you don’t apply logical razors to experience, then feeling is open to interpretations that become somehow themselves springboards to ideology. I think it’s really
00:14:51 ►
important to try to keep things as simple as possible, because they will still be hellaciously
00:14:58 ►
complex if you are true to experience. The simplest explanation of what is going on here
00:15:06 ►
is still maddeningly Baroque.
00:15:10 ►
So throwing on flying saucers and papal plotting
00:15:15 ►
and the plans of great Atlantis
00:15:18 ►
only further exacerbate the problem.
00:15:22 ►
If you just deal with the given of the fact of your history and
00:15:29 ►
your destiny, things are quite complex enough. And of course, again, what the psychedelics do
00:15:37 ►
is provide a reference point in organism. It’s like a reset button. It says beyond ideology, beyond cultural programming,
00:15:49 ►
beyond language, beyond hope, beyond fear, beyond expectation, there is the raw datum
00:15:57 ►
of experience here. Have a dose. Didn’t work? Have a bigger dose. And if we keep returning to the raw datum of experience,
00:16:09 ►
then these other things, they will recrystallize around us, but not with the imprisoning
00:16:18 ►
intensity that they have for straight people. We know that behind all this constipated social stability
00:16:28 ►
lies the chaos of the psychedelic experience.
00:16:32 ►
It’s important to keep it in mind in very unpsychedelic situations.
00:16:38 ►
But people who have never broken through the cultural dream
00:16:44 ►
take it to be reality
00:16:46 ►
and to commit crimes based on delusions
00:16:53 ►
about what is and isn’t reality.
00:16:59 ►
Well, not to speak of whales and dolphins specifically,
00:17:16 ►
Well, not to speak of whales and dolphins specifically, but nature as a dynamic field of activity beyond the reach of politicians, image makers, and so forth and so on.
00:17:25 ►
Nature is the constant psychedelic companion of the human experience. I think, you know, we know this.
00:17:28 ►
That’s why we crowd into cities and build walls and keep nature at bay.
00:17:35 ►
If you go into nature alone and don’t eat much and don’t speak much.
00:17:45 ►
Within 72 hours, you know, the hills speak and the winds confer with you
00:17:54 ►
and you are conveyed into an animate, caring, living, natural dynamic.
00:18:02 ►
But it’s threatening to the ego. This is the first time in two hours I’ve used
00:18:11 ►
this word, but the ego is a maladaptive tumor-like growth in the personality that has been inculcated into you by the toxicity of culture.
00:18:31 ►
It is literally the response to toxic culture is the growth of ego. The more toxic the culture,
00:18:38 ►
the more the ego is revered as a natural value within that culture.
00:18:46 ►
So responding to dolphins and whales and anthills and termite swarms
00:18:53 ►
and these kinds of things is an opening to the natural dynamic that’s all around us.
00:19:00 ►
Many people never observe nature except when psychedelics force it
00:19:07 ►
upon them. But this is a very… I think if you feel afraid of psychedelics
00:19:16 ►
but you want the juice that you may sense there, you know, take up wilderness camping and do it assiduously. And though it’s a slower process
00:19:30 ►
and you may not have specifically colored hallucinations, the conclusions that you will
00:19:38 ►
emerge with are essentially the same as the psychedelic voyager emerges from. Nature is deep, ordered, dynamical,
00:19:49 ►
and caring for the project of being, and so should we be. And the order that we seek is
00:19:58 ►
the natural order of our bodies and our minds in interface with the world, not the unnatural order of
00:20:11 ►
ideology, commodification, propaganda, and a misuse of communication.
00:20:28 ►
communication. No, I think it’s very difficult because the process of education without anybody quite knowing where the crime was committed has turned
00:20:36 ►
from a handing on of cultural values to a handing on of this neurotic behavior around commodification.
00:20:45 ►
And people are clueless, and they’re being used and abused.
00:20:55 ►
People, seemingly intelligent people, behave in incredibly stupid ways.
00:21:09 ►
people behave in incredibly stupid ways. The phenomenon of the respectability of aimless shopping. Shopping is unconscionable. It’s stupid. It’s tasteless. It’s murderous toward the earth. And yet people who teach at Esalen
00:21:31 ►
will suddenly drop their guru persona
00:21:35 ►
and whip out the charge plate and head for Robinson’s.
00:21:40 ►
What kind of thinking is going on here?
00:21:44 ►
They are clearly not alienated enough. Alienation may be for them just a stance, but where they’re really comfortable is down at Barney’s, racking up the charge card.
00:22:14 ►
Somehow the message has to be put across that there are no exceptions to the obligation to decommodify experience. And anybody who feels alienated from this orgy of consumerism is going to have to look elsewhere for their values. I don’t quite, I feel blessed
00:22:31 ►
because I guess I’m just so alienated that it doesn’t touch me. But recently, for some reason, and I had to lay out my income for an attorney
00:22:46 ►
and say how much I spent every month
00:22:50 ►
on things like entertainment and so forth and so on.
00:22:53 ►
So he called me on the phone.
00:22:55 ►
He said, you declared $15 a month for entertainment.
00:23:02 ►
He said, based on your income, do you know how much would be a standard deduction
00:23:07 ►
for entertainment? And I said, how much? He said, $700 a month. I said, that’s inconceivable to me.
00:23:16 ►
What kind of idiot would I be? And I said, and I put down the $15 because I knew you wanted something.
00:23:30 ►
But in fact, I don’t think I spend $15 a month on entertainment.
00:23:33 ►
What is entertainment anyway?
00:23:43 ►
So, you know, I suppose it just sounds like preaching a kind of monkishness. But what is the charm of all this crap?
00:23:47 ►
Can anybody explain it to me?
00:23:49 ►
I heard a story about the Dalai Lama.
00:23:54 ►
I mean, let this ricochet around in your mind.
00:23:58 ►
The Dalai Lama came to Los Angeles,
00:24:01 ►
and so the committee that was there to receive him
00:24:04 ►
and make his visit comfortable
00:24:06 ►
wanted to do something with him in L.A. that would be uniquely L.A., but that would
00:24:13 ►
be amusing for Dolly. So they decided to take him to Rodeo Drive.
00:24:22 ►
And basically, they just turned him loose with his translator and said, you know, we’ll
00:24:29 ►
meet you back here in an hour and a half and check it out. This is a unique place in American culture.
00:24:37 ►
So then after it was over and they were all having their double espresso or the Campari or whatever they were having, the Dalai Lama said,
00:24:47 ►
I want to thank you so much for making this experience available to me. I feel I understand
00:24:55 ►
Americans so much better now. I saw so many things I wanted.
00:25:07 ►
This is the Dalai Lama talking.
00:25:09 ►
He saw so many things he wanted. Well, if the Dalai Lama is not immune,
00:25:14 ►
my God, what chance have you and I?
00:25:18 ►
If the Dalai Lama can’t hold this stuff back,
00:25:23 ►
you might as well buy that Hermes scarf.
00:25:26 ►
Just give up.
00:25:28 ►
Give them the $200 for the damn thing and enjoy it.
00:25:32 ►
Yeah.
00:25:37 ►
Well, as an old anarchist, I can tell you. Efforts to organize anarchists
00:25:46 ►
are so fraught with
00:25:47 ►
contradiction
00:25:48 ►
that I wish you
00:25:51 ►
luck, and I’ll make a
00:25:53 ►
small donation.
00:25:56 ►
But I don’t
00:25:57 ►
think it can be done that way.
00:25:59 ►
I think…
00:26:02 ►
Yes.
00:26:04 ►
You will definitely give me $15 worth of entertainment per month.
00:26:11 ►
I’m listening to this and I’m thinking what my father would say if I told him.
00:26:15 ►
Yeah.
00:26:16 ►
Well, I hate to tell you this, but I would never do what you are doing.
00:26:23 ►
This may be the ultimate teaching.
00:26:27 ►
Do not ever again spend money to see me.
00:26:34 ►
My God, how much income is going down the drain
00:26:38 ►
as the ultimate oral empowerment is given.
00:26:42 ►
This is entertainment.
00:26:43 ►
Yeah, you run it off as entertainment.
00:26:45 ►
Okay, as long as you take it as entertainment,
00:26:48 ►
that’s fine.
00:26:50 ►
I have one more little story.
00:26:52 ►
I didn’t tell you the story
00:26:54 ►
about the two rabbis, did I?
00:26:56 ►
Good.
00:26:56 ►
This is my ending story for the afternoon.
00:26:59 ►
I don’t present it as a summation,
00:27:02 ►
but it amuses me.
00:27:05 ►
For those of you who don’t like Jewish jokes,
00:27:08 ►
you will notice as this joke is told that it is easily translated into a Zen mode,
00:27:15 ►
a Sufi mode.
00:27:17 ►
I just like the Jewish flavor.
00:27:21 ►
There were two rabbis, extremely advanced high rabbis,
00:27:26 ►
Talmudists, great men of accomplishment.
00:27:30 ►
And they were at temple.
00:27:32 ►
And one of them prayed.
00:27:37 ►
And he said, Lord.
00:27:39 ►
He stood up and he spoke aloud and he said, Lord, I am nothing.
00:27:44 ►
And then he sat down and the other guy got up,
00:27:47 ►
and he said, Lord, I am nothing.
00:27:52 ►
And there was a guy there sweeping the floor,
00:27:55 ►
a custodial person.
00:27:57 ►
And he thought, well, people are praying.
00:28:00 ►
Get a prayer in here.
00:28:03 ►
So he stood up and said, Lord, I’m praying. I get a prayer in here. So he stood up and said,
00:28:06 ►
Lord, I’m nothing.
00:28:10 ►
And the first rabbi looked at the second rabbi and he said,
00:28:15 ►
So look who thinks he’s nothing?
00:28:22 ►
That’s it. That’s a story about the imagination
00:28:26 ►
the time wave is a is a variable wave scaled against time and can be scaled against very
00:28:40 ►
large amounts of time even amounts of time larger than the life of the universe,
00:28:48 ►
thousands, millions of times larger than that.
00:28:52 ►
And you might ask, what’s the point of scaling a temporal description over periods of time
00:28:59 ►
so vast that there is no reason to assume they ever existed? Well, the answer is that at these transition points,
00:29:08 ►
these dramatic shift points,
00:29:11 ►
the software automatically,
00:29:14 ►
as in the course of running the algorithm,
00:29:19 ►
keeps track of days to end,
00:29:22 ►
days until you get down here to a hypothetical end point. Even if this is not
00:29:29 ►
billions of years, but trillions of years, it will keep track of this day count number.
00:29:38 ►
And what we discovered to our bewildered amazement was these day counts were almost always prime
00:29:47 ►
numbers or the product of two primes.
00:29:53 ►
Well, I’ll answer your question, but it isn’t relevant to what I’m talking about.
00:29:58 ►
What I’m measuring, what this is measuring is the ebb and flow of novelty and habit.
00:30:07 ►
And you’ve actually led me back to the main track,
00:30:11 ►
so we’ll get serious and get out a pointer.
00:30:15 ►
That’s always a sign that we’re really serious.
00:30:19 ►
I don’t want to give my ordinary time wave lecture
00:30:24 ►
because I’ve given it enough that the meme is actually established in the culture
00:30:29 ►
and there are dozens of tapes of it and written versions and fights on the internet.
00:30:36 ►
And so why should I explain it to you all over again?
00:30:39 ►
I’ll just assume that in the course of talking about specific issues that relate to it,
00:30:46 ►
you will pick up the rules of the game.
00:30:50 ►
And then if you’re just too excruciated by your confusion,
00:30:53 ►
you can ask a question and I’ll try and answer it.
00:30:58 ►
The basic assumption is there is a quality to reality which science has overlooked. Some people in the East have
00:31:09 ►
called it Tao. I want to divorce myself from the freight of that tradition, and I want
00:31:18 ►
to call it novelty. Novelty is the quality in nature that seeks complexity. That’s what it is.
00:31:30 ►
And its countervailing force is called habit. So what I’m proposing to you is that we live
00:31:39 ►
in a universe ruled by two fundamental forces that are larger than physics and electromagnetism
00:31:48 ►
and all of those good things.
00:31:50 ►
And these two forces are habit and novelty.
00:31:56 ►
And in every situation, whether it lasts a millisecond or a billion years, the struggle between these two tendencies of the universe
00:32:08 ►
can be discerned. Now, it’s pretty self-explanatory what these terms mean, but I’ll run through it.
00:32:17 ►
Habit means repetition of previously established pattern. Continuation of an equilibrium situation.
00:32:28 ►
A tendency for a system to degrade entropically under the aegis of the second law of thermodynamics.
00:32:37 ►
A conservative tendency.
00:32:40 ►
A preservationist tendency.
00:32:43 ►
Habit, right? for crying out loud.
00:32:46 ►
Okay, the other thing is novelty, the opposite of habit.
00:32:52 ►
What is novelty?
00:32:53 ►
It’s the new, the untried, levels of complexification previously,
00:33:00 ►
unachieved, unusual connectivity, creativity, surprise, novelty.
00:33:09 ►
And these two things are locked in struggle over vast scales of time.
00:33:18 ►
Notice I did not say eternally locked in struggle.
00:33:24 ►
They are not eternally locked in struggle. They are not eternally locked in struggle
00:33:26 ►
because the good news is novelty is winning.
00:33:32 ►
Novelty is winning.
00:33:35 ►
If you get big enough chunks of time,
00:33:39 ►
though there may be vicissitudes,
00:33:43 ►
ups and downs,
00:33:45 ►
ultimately the situation ends up more novel than it started out.
00:33:54 ►
Ilya Prigozhin, who got the Nobel Prize for work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics,
00:34:00 ►
called this the principle of order through perturbation,
00:34:04 ►
Thermodynamics called this the principle of order through perturbation,
00:34:09 ►
a counterintuitive phenomenon in physical chemistry, because for a very long time,
00:34:13 ►
one of the strongest held faiths in physics
00:34:17 ►
was that the universe is undergoing thermodynamic degradation.
00:34:23 ►
In other words, everything is tending to fall apart.
00:34:27 ►
Prigogine showed that this is not true, that even in physical systems, there can be,
00:34:32 ►
simple physical systems, there can be spontaneous mutation to higher states of order.
00:34:40 ►
So what’s really going on in the universe is a struggle between these two tendencies.
00:34:47 ►
Biology represents the emergence of a very novel set of chemical strategies
00:34:55 ►
for the preservation and maintenance of novelty.
00:35:00 ►
The emergence of higher animals and culture and language and technology, these things are also novel strategies building on previous achievements in the novelty department, building toward our dear selves. And one of the interesting things about this kind of thinking is it
00:35:26 ►
gives a new importance to the human world. Science will tell you that we’re
00:35:32 ►
lucky to be here and we’re simply the awestruck witnesses to some kind of
00:35:37 ►
incomprehensible thing that has nothing to do with us anyway. Novelty theory would say, no, no, human complexity represents at this point
00:35:49 ►
the apex of accomplishment in the domain of novelty, and hence somehow the cutting edge
00:35:57 ►
of universal evolution in this moment in space and time has come to rest in ourselves. So what else do I want to say about
00:36:14 ►
this? Well, let’s look at this screen for a minute, and I’ll sort of explain the rules of the game.
00:36:30 ►
This is a span of time portrayed along the horizontal axis, as you’re used to seeing.
00:36:37 ►
In this case, it’s seven billion years, simply because we set it to be so. And this represents the ebb and flow of novelty.
00:36:41 ►
Now, here’s one moment in the next two hours, if you pay attention, this is the moment.
00:36:48 ►
When the wave moves up, habit is increasing, not decreasing. It’s counterintuitive if you’re
00:36:58 ►
into the stock market. In the stock market, we always want it to go up unless we’re selling short but none of you would do that I’m sure
00:37:06 ►
so in this case
00:37:09 ►
the excitement is where the wave moves down
00:37:13 ►
and if this is 7 billion years
00:37:17 ►
notice that what I said is true of this screen
00:37:22 ►
we end up in a far more novel position than we started. We started
00:37:27 ►
out up here. Habit 1 was winning the battle for at least 700 million years along here. Then it
00:37:36 ►
lost its foothold, and novelty surged forward almost uninterruptedly, although this is quite a hiccup.
00:37:45 ►
It probably lasted 200 million years, this hiccup.
00:37:50 ►
And if you want to get a notion of the scale
00:37:53 ►
of what we’re looking at,
00:37:55 ►
then life emerged from the primordial oceans
00:37:58 ►
at the top of this pimple.
00:38:01 ►
All this is what’s called the archaeozoic and the prebiotic phase of the
00:38:06 ►
Earth’s existence. Yes? Good question. It derails my plan for economy, but since
00:38:16 ►
you had the intelligence to ask it, you should probably be told. The basic data and I don’t want anyone to laugh
00:38:27 ►
my god you laugh before I tell you
00:38:31 ►
so that it doesn’t hurt so much
00:38:36 ►
the basic data comes out of the Qing
00:38:40 ►
and oh thank you for being so polite
00:38:44 ►
if somebody had told me
00:38:46 ►
This is the most powerful attack on this idea and it begins like this
00:38:53 ►
so
00:38:55 ►
You want to make a revision in physics based on a Chinese occult?
00:39:03 ►
Divinatory system.
00:39:05 ►
Are we getting this correct?
00:39:07 ►
Well, in spite of the sneering,
00:39:09 ►
let me see if I can make it make a little bit more sense to you.
00:39:15 ►
I’m not going to review what the I Ching is
00:39:18 ►
in an environment as exotic as this.
00:39:21 ►
That would insult our intelligence.
00:39:28 ►
The interesting thing about the I Ching, even its skeptics agree, is that it seems to work very puzzling. Other forms of sortilage seem
00:39:37 ►
much less certain. Here’s what I think is happening. First of all, let’s look at the Western notion of time
00:39:48 ►
as we derive it from Newton.
00:39:52 ►
The Western notion of time is that time is what is called pure duration.
00:39:58 ►
All time is in Western physics
00:40:01 ►
is the place where you put process so that it doesn’t all happen at once.
00:40:09 ►
Time has no quality. It’s pure duration. Think of it as a perfectly smooth surface.
00:40:18 ►
The only modification to this doctrine in the past 500 years is Einstein came along 100 years ago
00:40:27 ►
and said, in the presence of massive gravitational fields,
00:40:32 ►
this perfect smoothness is slightly distorted
00:40:38 ►
over very large scales.
00:40:41 ►
So we go from perfectly smooth, pure duration to very slightly curved space-time.
00:40:50 ►
But the main idea, which is contiguous through all of these intellectual evolutions, is the
00:40:58 ►
idea that the local fine structure of time can be portrayed as a zero-dimensional space. If that’s too technical
00:41:08 ►
for you, it means that locally it is okay to think of time as perfectly smooth.
00:41:16 ►
I say it isn’t. Why should it be? This has to do with a form, remember we talked about sentimentality
00:41:27 ►
and how it can distort thinking.
00:41:29 ►
This adherence to the idea that time is perfectly smooth
00:41:33 ►
is a sentimental notion left over from our infatuation
00:41:39 ►
with perfect geometrical shapes
00:41:42 ►
when Greek science kicked off about 2,500 years ago.
00:41:48 ►
It took Kepler and Copernicus to demonstrate that the orbits of the planets were not perfect
00:41:56 ►
spheres because God loves perfect circles, because God loves perfect circles. And one by one, the perfect objects of Greek mathematical and geometric theorizing
00:42:12 ►
have been laid aside.
00:42:14 ►
The planets do not move in perfect circles.
00:42:18 ►
Nothing else has been found to have mathematical perfection
00:42:22 ►
except that this idea of pure duration
00:42:27 ►
has been hung on to.
00:42:30 ►
And there’s a reason for this,
00:42:32 ►
and I apologize for the digression,
00:42:34 ►
but it’s very hard to snip the loose ends
00:42:37 ►
on a thing like this.
00:42:38 ►
The reason this idea of pure duration
00:42:41 ►
has been hung on to
00:42:43 ►
is because science, modern science, does its business
00:42:50 ►
through a series of hat tricks called probability theory. And probability theory is the idea that
00:43:01 ►
you can learn something useful about a phenomenon.
00:43:08 ►
Let’s say, for instance, you want to know how much voltage is running through a wire.
00:43:11 ►
Strange thing about this value that you come up with is this.
00:43:17 ►
It is not necessary that it correspond to any one of the
00:43:21 ►
thousand measurements that you took.
00:43:24 ►
It’s entirely possible you will get a value
00:43:27 ►
that is not congruent with any one of your measurements.
00:43:31 ►
But we say with confidence,
00:43:33 ►
well, it’s the average.
00:43:36 ►
It’s the average.
00:43:38 ►
Lurking behind this notion, average,
00:43:44 ►
is the unexamined assumption that time is completely
00:43:49 ►
uniform, that it does not matter when the measurement is made. And now why do we
00:43:59 ►
assume that? Is there any reason to assume that? Well, not looking at nature, no, there is no reason to
00:44:09 ►
assume that. Looking at science, hell yes, there’s a reason to assume that. You can’t do science
00:44:17 ►
unless you assume that, because science depends on what is called the experimental method. And experiment is you arrange a funny little unusual situation
00:44:31 ►
which is designed to cause some phenomenon normally lost in the noise of being
00:44:38 ►
to be thrown into high relief.
00:44:43 ►
And basic to the idea of experiment is what is called the restoration
00:44:49 ►
of initial conditions. In other words, we’re going to roll a ball bearing down a ruler and
00:44:57 ►
measure its velocity. And we do this. And then we say, restore initial conditions.
00:45:05 ►
That means pick up the ball bearing and move it back to the top of the ramp.
00:45:10 ►
But now notice that time has passed since the first time the ball bearing rolled down the ramp.
00:45:19 ►
If time is not uniform, then you cannot restore initial conditions.
00:45:28 ►
If you cannot restore initial conditions, you cannot make sense of probabilistic data.
00:45:35 ►
So we have assumed and preserved this sentimental notion of Greek science
00:45:42 ►
because it makes it possible to do modern science. If we were
00:45:48 ►
intellectually honest about what’s going on, then what we really should say is that probability
00:45:56 ►
theory and modern science is the study of those natural phenomena so coarse-grained that an assumption of a restoration of initial conditions
00:46:09 ►
does not destroy the integrity of the phenomenon.
00:46:13 ►
In other words, it’s a lens that can be focused
00:46:17 ►
only to a certain depth.
00:46:18 ►
And beyond that, it begins to give false data.
00:46:31 ►
Of course, ball bearings always roll down ramps the same way.
00:46:39 ►
Of course, two liquids always mix together in the same way. But who cares about these things?
00:46:48 ►
What we’re interested in are love affairs, dynastic transitions, corporate takeovers,
00:46:53 ►
political revolutions, family feuds.
00:47:00 ►
And the interesting thing about these things is they never happen the same way twice.
00:47:06 ►
Have there ever been two identical births, divorces, love affairs, corporate takeovers?
00:47:10 ►
Of course not. We would not even expect such a thing.
00:47:17 ►
We understand that the complexity of those phenomena ensures their uniqueness.
00:47:24 ►
Well, when it comes to talking about the uniqueness of something, I think it is safe to say that the mind of Terence McKenna was about as unique as anything this universe has produced so far.
00:47:32 ►
And we’ll have more of Terence in this workshop about imagination in my next podcast,
00:47:36 ►
but first I want to do a little something different.
00:47:40 ►
As I mentioned at the beginning of today’s program,
00:47:42 ►
I’m going to play another little conversation for you, but it is much more recent, just about a month ago to be exact.
00:47:50 ►
And the reason I feel compelled to play it for you right now is simply to let you know that whenever you get together with a few friends, maybe have a toke or two, and then get involved in a rather heady discussion, then you are doing the same thing that fellow psychonauts are doing all over the planet these days. Thank you. recording was made was the recent Luscious Libra Live Sushi and Birthday Party, which
00:48:25 ►
also included DJs, a fire circle, hot tubbing, and the ever-popular Hookah Lounge.
00:48:30 ►
So, as you can tell, it was just your average California weekend get-together.
00:48:35 ►
Now, at one point during this little event, which included a bunch of experienced trippers
00:48:40 ►
ranging in age from 28 to 71, and many of whom were uber geeks, I should add.
00:48:47 ►
Well, when one of them brought up the topic of neutrons, Alan grabbed the famous physicist
00:48:52 ►
Nick Herbert from the hookah lounge and brought him into the conversation that was taking
00:48:56 ►
place around the fire circle.
00:48:58 ►
And that’s about where the following audio recording begins.
00:49:02 ►
Now, my guess is that about the only difference between this conversation
00:49:06 ►
and one that you might have with your friends in a college dorm room tonight
00:49:09 ►
is that Nick Herbert is one of the world’s top physicists,
00:49:13 ►
and the other people in this conversation are also at the top of their professions.
00:49:18 ►
My point here is to show you that your ideas are probably as good as the next person’s ideas.
00:49:24 ►
It really doesn’t matter if you’ve got a dozen degrees
00:49:26 ►
or if you’ve educated yourself by reading, going to lectures, and other ways.
00:49:32 ►
Because once you’ve picked up a few bits and pieces of ideas here in the salon
00:49:36 ►
or over on KMO’s Sea Realm podcast or on one of the Dope Fiends series of programs
00:49:41 ►
or any of the many other great podcasts that are out there right now, Thank you. who happen to be considerably better informed about most things than I am.
00:50:10 ►
So now let’s sit in on a typical California conversation among a few fellow psychonauts.
00:50:15 ►
Maybe we’ll see how many of the world’s problems can be solved in just a few short minutes.
00:50:19 ►
And for sure, we’re going to learn that even among the tribe, there are generational gaps and shocks about the ways in which our sacred medicines are sometimes used.
00:50:30 ►
Nick, I wanted you to meet a fellow mad scientist from the mountains.
00:50:33 ►
You probably know. I don’t know.
00:50:35 ►
He’s talking to me. He’s mumbling some serious physics shit.
00:50:39 ►
And I thought, you know, you might see if this could be for real.
00:50:42 ►
I’m talking about neutrons being exactly equal.
00:50:47 ►
Hi.
00:50:47 ►
Hi.
00:50:48 ►
My name is Nick.
00:50:49 ►
Hi, Nick.
00:50:50 ►
Michael Nick.
00:50:51 ►
Andy.
00:50:51 ►
Andy.
00:50:52 ►
Yeah.
00:50:54 ►
I want to ask you to moderate this discussion.
00:50:56 ►
Yeah, I’m just kind of curious what you think of this.
00:50:58 ►
Yeah, I am too.
00:50:59 ►
This is something you think about all the time, sir.
00:51:00 ►
I think it would be…
00:51:01 ►
I’m a real specialist.
00:51:03 ►
My specialty is quantum physics.
00:51:04 ►
Excellent. Oh. Excellent.
00:51:06 ►
And you were saying about neutrons?
00:51:07 ►
Well, I was saying that from what I’ve understood,
00:51:09 ►
and I was an undergraduate physics major, not a
00:51:12 ►
Floyd,
00:51:14 ►
I actually scattered them
00:51:16 ►
myself on my experiment.
00:51:18 ►
I took deuterons
00:51:19 ►
and hit them in their carbon target.
00:51:22 ►
A deuteron is a neutron in the proton.
00:51:23 ►
And this carbon, it just, we were trying to graze the target
00:51:26 ►
so it would minimally separate the two.
00:51:30 ►
And then we were going to study the properties of a deuteron
00:51:32 ►
by looking at an almost deuteron.
00:51:35 ►
That was our hope.
00:51:36 ►
So I was looking at, we couldn’t measure the neutrons.
00:51:38 ►
They just went through everything.
00:51:40 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:51:40 ►
But we did measure the protons.
00:51:41 ►
Sure.
00:51:41 ►
And I was trying to measure the polarization.
00:51:43 ►
That was my thesis.
00:51:45 ►
Fantastic. And you’re the first person I’ve And I was trying to measure the polarization. That was my thesis. Fantastic.
00:51:45 ►
And you’re the first person I’ve ever talked to about this in 50 years.
00:51:51 ►
Once I got done with that experiment, I wanted nothing to do with it.
00:51:54 ►
I was so bored.
00:51:56 ►
Is that when you took acid?
00:51:58 ►
Well, yeah, I took acid too, but it helped me realize what priorities were,
00:52:03 ►
that physics was just, you know, that way down at the bottom of where the mysteries were.
00:52:08 ►
The real mystery is up here.
00:52:11 ►
But I couldn’t think of anything to do.
00:52:13 ►
I mean, except take more drugs.
00:52:15 ►
You get a degree in doing that?
00:52:16 ►
Just imagine taking acid right after an AI final, when in AI you’re trying to replicate up here in the brain.
00:52:25 ►
It just made your job a hundred times harder, didn’t it?
00:52:29 ►
I don’t know.
00:52:30 ►
That was just the best trip of my life, though.
00:52:31 ►
That’s all I’ll say.
00:52:34 ►
But you realize what a problem, well, not what a problem, what a gift or what a puzzle
00:52:38 ►
of consciousness is after you take an acid.
00:52:40 ►
Yeah.
00:52:40 ►
I mean, before, you know, you’re living a life, you’ve had some experiences down here and up here.
00:52:46 ►
You’ve had that experience.
00:52:47 ►
You think you know what life is all about.
00:52:49 ►
You take acid.
00:52:50 ►
Wow.
00:52:51 ►
Now you see all kinds of possibilities that could be, you know, up here.
00:52:55 ►
Before then, you thought, fondly thought that you were actually seeing things with your eyes.
00:52:59 ►
Well, that, and I thought I was pretty arrogant.
00:53:04 ►
I thought I knew, you know, not only what I knew, but what I didn’t know.
00:53:08 ►
I thought I knew all the areas.
00:53:10 ►
But acid showed me that there were a zillion things that I don’t know, especially about the mind.
00:53:15 ►
The mind is really big and hard to understand.
00:53:20 ►
I wasn’t too disappointed on my first acid trip.
00:53:24 ►
It’s just that I was kind of expecting more.
00:53:26 ►
You were expecting more?
00:53:28 ►
I did about…
00:53:30 ►
Second generation.
00:53:31 ►
You were expecting more on your first acid trip?
00:53:33 ►
I did at least 350 bikes.
00:53:35 ►
It was probably like Owsley acid because I was getting all of that.
00:53:39 ►
I was getting Owsley stuff.
00:53:41 ►
But you had heard something that was even greater that you thought you might experience?
00:53:44 ►
No, it was just that there was a lot of hype about it.
00:53:47 ►
It was like the pre-experience hype.
00:53:50 ►
I thought that acid is supposed to be an hallucinogen, right?
00:53:55 ►
Therefore, you should hallucinate.
00:53:57 ►
And when I looked, I just saw what was ordinarily there, except when you close your eyes.
00:54:02 ►
But then later, I learned that everything that you see is a hallucination.
00:54:07 ►
So that showed that really my expectations were way off at the beginning.
00:54:14 ►
Well, just the fact that most of the time we don’t see any auras on each other,
00:54:18 ►
that itself is a hallucination.
00:54:21 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:54:23 ►
Well, because we see things the way an issue. Yeah, absolutely. Well, because, you know, we see things
00:54:25 ►
the way a,
00:54:26 ►
you know,
00:54:27 ►
an ape,
00:54:28 ►
we see things
00:54:29 ►
that apes need to see,
00:54:31 ►
you know,
00:54:31 ►
and,
00:54:31 ►
you know,
00:54:32 ►
slightly advanced apes.
00:54:34 ►
But all the other shit,
00:54:35 ►
what I would like,
00:54:35 ►
we were talking about
00:54:36 ►
what we’d like,
00:54:37 ►
you know,
00:54:38 ►
technology.
00:54:39 ►
I’d like some tech
00:54:40 ►
that would help me
00:54:40 ►
smell like my dog.
00:54:42 ►
You know,
00:54:42 ►
a nose that,
00:54:43 ►
where I could
00:54:44 ►
amplify things about
00:54:45 ►
a hundred times. Or a million times.
00:54:47 ►
Or a million times. Wouldn’t that be something
00:54:49 ►
to perceive that world?
00:54:51 ►
Talk about a different world. Yes.
00:54:53 ►
And
00:54:54 ►
I’ve
00:54:56 ►
read hypotheses
00:55:00 ►
why we don’t have a sense like that.
00:55:01 ►
We never get anything done.
00:55:05 ►
All these scents going around, you know, you follow, you follow.
00:55:09 ►
Isn’t that where the robots come in?
00:55:11 ►
Maybe we didn’t need it way up in the trees.
00:55:14 ►
We are wired for survival.
00:55:16 ►
Our perceptions are narrowed down to what we need.
00:55:18 ►
That’s right, to what we need to survive.
00:55:21 ►
And so acid, in a way, is an anti-survival thing.
00:55:26 ►
Right.
00:55:26 ►
Except for the researchers.
00:55:28 ►
Except for,
00:55:28 ►
in LSD,
00:55:31 ►
My Problem Child,
00:55:33 ►
by Hoffman.
00:55:33 ►
I love that book.
00:55:34 ►
Yes.
00:55:35 ►
My favorite scene in there
00:55:36 ►
was where he’s walking
00:55:37 ►
with some other German professor
00:55:38 ►
and they’re walking
00:55:39 ►
in the black forest.
00:55:40 ►
There’s stone to the gills
00:55:41 ►
and they say,
00:55:41 ►
this is too good
00:55:43 ►
for the peasants.
00:55:44 ►
Only minds like ours can really enjoy LSD.
00:55:49 ►
There’s some truth to that.
00:55:51 ►
There is.
00:55:52 ►
A lot of people treat it like a party drug and don’t look for any particular insights and therefore don’t find any.
00:55:57 ►
But the more mind you have, the more fun you have when it’s fucked up.
00:56:02 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:56:02 ►
I mean, that’s another thing, I think.
00:56:05 ►
I was certainly glad I didn’t take acid when I was a teenager.
00:56:08 ►
Because, you know, now I had really an amazingly complex thing to screw up with.
00:56:12 ►
Well, the thing is, I was already reading books by, you know, Alan Watts and R.D. Lang and, you know, all of them, really.
00:56:20 ►
Leary and all that stuff, way before I did LSD when I was a teenager.
00:56:24 ►
So when I finally got around to it like at age 15 15 my first ass i don’t know i took hoffman’s advice and waited
00:56:33 ►
until i was like well i waited until i was 20 uh late comer good boy that was about anyway
00:56:38 ►
yeah me too but anyway it was 15 years old. That’s statutory rape.
00:56:45 ►
No, no, we were all teenagers.
00:56:47 ►
We all had it.
00:56:48 ►
And we were New Yorkers.
00:56:49 ►
We were all sophisticated kids.
00:56:51 ►
We were all playing electric guitars and stuff.
00:56:54 ►
And I remember listening to The Who.
00:56:56 ►
Before we went out, I was with a couple of friends in Brooklyn,
00:56:59 ►
and the three of us went out at night.
00:57:02 ►
It was at night, and before we left, we listened to The Who.
00:57:05 ►
He actually put on…
00:57:06 ►
What, you took acid and walked into New York City?
00:57:09 ►
I lived in New York City.
00:57:10 ►
Yeah, I know, but…
00:57:11 ►
Let me finish.
00:57:12 ►
Anyway, go on.
00:57:13 ►
Go on.
00:57:14 ►
No strangers in Amsterdam.
00:57:15 ►
This is very interesting.
00:57:17 ►
So, anyways, what happened was, you know, this friend of ours, he had already done acid,
00:57:21 ►
and he had already…
00:57:22 ►
He was already, like, up to the West Coast and back, and I had another friend that was an acid dealer that went you know from the hate to here and
00:57:29 ►
you know and and so anyway uh he was programming us with music and he played uh every song that
00:57:36 ►
he played he just kept changing records for hendrix are you experienced the who i can see
00:57:42 ►
for miles you know moody blues you know in search Can See For Miles, you know, Moody Blues, You Know, In Search Of A Lost World,
00:57:45 ►
whatever, you know, all this stuff specifically designed to prep us.
00:57:49 ►
And they said, okay, let’s go out.
00:57:51 ►
And we took the subway to Manhattan,
00:57:55 ►
and it was late at night, and I remember the subway turned into a serpent.
00:57:59 ►
Wow, we’re inside the esophagus of a serpent, you know.
00:58:03 ►
And I remember at one point, there was this group of people that
00:58:06 ►
walked by because people pass through cars you know and they walk through and and they all looked
00:58:11 ►
really deformed and and like extremely deformed like certain limbs were out of kilter with the
00:58:18 ►
length of other limbs and just really weird you know and they were walking through and i remember
00:58:23 ►
the feeling i had wasn’t so much shock as semi-social embarrassment because I didn’t want to say anything to make
00:58:30 ►
them feel embarrassed. They really were that way. It was really funny. That’s good thinking.
00:58:37 ►
And for the whole train ride, one guitar solo was going through my brain on a loop. And it was John Cipollino’s solo for a song called
00:58:46 ►
Joseph’s Many-Colored Coat on the album Shady Grove.
00:58:50 ►
And if you ever get a chance to listen to that solo,
00:58:52 ►
think of me, man.
00:58:53 ►
That was a nice moment.
00:58:56 ►
But anyway, so we went to Central Park,
00:58:59 ►
and we spent a lot of the afternoon.
00:59:01 ►
Was this during the day?
00:59:01 ►
No, at night.
00:59:02 ►
At night.
00:59:02 ►
It was probably about 10 p.m. or something.
00:59:04 ►
Nobody was in the park. It was really dark. this during the day? No, at night. At night. It was probably about 10 p.m. or something. Nobody was in the park.
00:59:05 ►
It was really dark.
00:59:06 ►
Nobody but the muggers, you know.
00:59:08 ►
But you were, how many of you?
00:59:09 ►
They were afraid of you.
00:59:10 ►
Well, how many were?
00:59:11 ►
A little too weird.
00:59:13 ►
How many were there of you?
00:59:14 ►
Three?
00:59:15 ►
Yeah.
00:59:15 ►
Three, uh-huh.
00:59:16 ►
And it was great, because I remember we’d walk up these little hills,
00:59:19 ►
and it almost felt like night vision.
00:59:21 ►
Maybe the moon was full.
00:59:22 ►
And as I’m walking up the hill,
00:59:24 ►
the feeling of, like, pressure under my feet from gravity
00:59:27 ►
as I’m walking up the hill
00:59:28 ►
made my body feel smaller and smaller and smaller.
00:59:31 ►
So I felt like I was shrinking and shrinking.
00:59:33 ►
Then I got to the top of the hill,
00:59:34 ►
and gravity was releasing,
00:59:35 ►
and I felt like I was growing.
00:59:38 ►
Wow.
00:59:38 ►
I do remember that.
00:59:41 ►
Did you check to see if you were deformed?
00:59:45 ►
It’s not that easy.
00:59:46 ►
If you looked in the mirror, you might have seen.
00:59:49 ►
Well, no, this is what shocked me most of all.
00:59:51 ►
I looked in the mirror and I looked normal.
00:59:54 ►
The mind is amazing, isn’t it?
00:59:57 ►
But maybe they could see you in the park, you know, the muggers and all.
01:00:00 ►
They were like, whoo.
01:00:01 ►
Speaking of shrinking, that brings us back to the original topic,
01:00:04 ►
which is, you know, turtles all the way down, basically.
01:00:09 ►
You know, there is this theory in physics that there are worlds within worlds
01:00:13 ►
and that it just continues to infinity, turtles all the way down.
01:00:17 ►
But it seems to me, from what I’ve read of quantum mechanics,
01:00:19 ►
that there’s reason to think that that’s not true,
01:00:22 ►
that at a certain level, below the level of the neutron, maybe quarks and electrons,
01:00:26 ►
you come to a point where there isn’t any inner world,
01:00:29 ►
that things like Fermi-Dirac statistics and Bell’s theorem
01:00:35 ►
indicate to us that there’s no inner structure beyond a certain point,
01:00:39 ►
that if there were, you wouldn’t have Fermi-Dirac statistics.
01:00:43 ►
You would have statistics like we have in the macroscopic world,
01:00:46 ►
where when you throw two coins, for example,
01:00:48 ►
you have a 50-50 chance of getting heads, tails, and tails, heads,
01:00:52 ►
because the two coins are different.
01:00:54 ►
You can distinguish between them.
01:00:56 ►
And that down in the submicroscopic quantum world,
01:01:00 ►
you have like a one-third chance of that.
01:01:03 ►
One-third chance of all, heads, tails, and head, ends, that. One-third chance of all. Heads, tails, and head and tails.
01:01:05 ►
One-third for each of them.
01:01:07 ►
One-third for heads, tails, and tails, heads
01:01:10 ►
because you can’t distinguish between them.
01:01:13 ►
And the reason why you can’t distinguish between them
01:01:14 ►
is that all subatomic particles of a given type
01:01:17 ►
are absolutely identical.
01:01:18 ►
Wouldn’t that be something if all of a sudden
01:01:20 ►
our kind of coins did that?
01:01:22 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
01:01:23 ►
Wouldn’t that be something?
01:01:24 ►
Change money.
01:01:25 ►
On a primal level.
01:01:26 ►
Doesn’t that make a case for a crazy wisdom school of Buddhism?
01:01:30 ►
Well, it would seem like there’s a lot of resemblance
01:01:32 ►
between things like Buddhism and Hinduism and physics.
01:01:36 ►
I only use coins.
01:01:38 ►
In my view, science has been invented twice.
01:01:40 ►
Science was invented once back in ancient India,
01:01:47 ►
and they looked at an inner world,
01:01:52 ►
and again in, let’s say, Galileo 400 years ago,
01:01:53 ►
looking at an outer world.
01:01:55 ►
What did they discover?
01:01:58 ►
I mean, what is Indian inner physics?
01:02:00 ►
You know, I kind of wish there was such a thing that you could read about in books,
01:02:02 ►
where they would talk about the structure of the mind
01:02:04 ►
and funny little things you can
01:02:06 ►
do, like if you close your eyes
01:02:08 ►
and inhale two or three times, you travel to Mars.
01:02:10 ►
Real inner technology.
01:02:13 ►
Well, supposedly,
01:02:14 ►
in the Yoga Sutras, for example,
01:02:16 ►
you have this phenomenon of
01:02:18 ►
Samadhi, where
01:02:19 ►
the brain can focus in
01:02:24 ►
in a type of total concentration
01:02:28 ►
and basically identify itself with things in the external world or the internal world.
01:02:35 ►
And it’s at least claimed that that’s another route to knowledge
01:02:39 ►
than external scientific experimentation.
01:02:43 ►
Now, whether it’s true or not, I don’t know.
01:02:45 ►
It could be checked.
01:02:46 ►
I think it’s a perceptual validation of science.
01:02:49 ►
I’ve heard that some Hindu texts were very helpful when…
01:02:56 ►
Who was the guy who was inventing the bomb?
01:02:59 ►
I’ve heard it, but I don’t know.
01:03:00 ►
It’s not confirmed.
01:03:02 ►
The atomic bomb?
01:03:03 ►
Yeah, the atomic bomb.
01:03:04 ►
That they consulted Hindus to design?
01:03:08 ►
No, the text.
01:03:09 ►
Oh!
01:03:12 ►
When the bomb went off, he was standing in the desert,
01:03:16 ►
and he says, I have become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds.
01:03:21 ►
That’s what he quoted.
01:03:23 ►
And then when you look at Vishnu, for example,
01:03:25 ►
the other over-god of Hinduism,
01:03:28 ►
in Vishnu,
01:03:29 ►
Vishnu is asleep, dreaming,
01:03:32 ►
and the dream is the world,
01:03:33 ►
which is basically a simulation of reality
01:03:35 ►
as far as I can tell.
01:03:37 ►
He is simulating our world by
01:03:39 ►
dreaming it. People that do DMT
01:03:41 ►
claim that they see that.
01:03:43 ►
It’s an inner hydrogen bomb.
01:03:45 ►
But they claim to see the mechanisms of the world, People that do DMT claim that they see that. It’s an inner hydrogen bomb, you know? Yeah.
01:03:46 ►
But they claim to see the mechanisms of the world, and they are kind of dreamlike.
01:03:50 ►
Definitely an inner detonator.
01:03:53 ►
What’s that?
01:03:54 ►
At least an inner detonator.
01:03:57 ►
DMT.
01:03:57 ►
DMT. I’ve never had it.
01:03:59 ►
Oh, I didn’t either.
01:04:01 ►
You know Will, right?
01:04:03 ►
Sure, yeah.
01:04:03 ►
Is Will going to be here tonight?
01:04:04 ►
I invited him. I haven’t, right? Sure, yeah. Is Will going to be here tonight? I invited him.
01:04:05 ►
I haven’t seen him for a long time.
01:04:07 ►
Well, he presented me to my first full-on DMT experience.
01:04:11 ►
Now, did that meet your standards?
01:04:13 ►
Yeah.
01:04:16 ►
That’s what I’ve heard.
01:04:17 ►
I’ve heard that.
01:04:18 ►
He put me in a room, and the room had posters of Tron and all these things.
01:04:24 ►
It was kind of high-tech.
01:04:25 ►
And there was something about the things in the images that kind of affected my hallucination.
01:04:31 ►
So I felt like I was in a real comfortable leather chair, and you gave me a pipe load of it.
01:04:37 ►
A pipe?
01:04:38 ►
A whole bowl full.
01:04:39 ►
Yeah, you smoke it.
01:04:41 ►
And I felt like I was an astronaut.
01:04:44 ►
I was in there, and I was feeling this g-force you know
01:04:46 ►
and i’m like looking and all of a sudden i closed my eyes for a minute and and i saw hallucinating
01:04:51 ►
i was going through this long tunnel and it was like a fellini movie there were these little
01:04:55 ►
alcoves on either side with these strange people and their faces but as soon as i tried to look
01:05:00 ►
it was going so fast you know it’s really weird. And the thing is, I started seeing that with my eyes closed,
01:05:08 ►
but then I opened my eyes and I kept seeing it.
01:05:11 ►
Oh, my.
01:05:11 ►
Yeah, that’s an interesting thing.
01:05:15 ►
There’s no reason why not.
01:05:18 ►
Inner reflecting the outer and vice versa.
01:05:20 ►
It kind of mixed in a little and blended in.
01:05:22 ►
When you see with your eyes, you’re really seeing with your brain,
01:05:24 ►
and your brain can project anything on the inner projection screen.
01:05:27 ►
If it wants to line the two up, it can easily do that.
01:05:29 ►
Whatever is occupying your attention more.
01:05:32 ►
I did 5-MeO-DMT, but I didn’t get a strong experience.
01:05:35 ►
I just kind of tripped for a minute or two.
01:05:38 ►
Ah, well, you’ll know when you do.
01:05:41 ►
That’s kind of like the…
01:05:42 ►
Well, I think it was just a combination of things.
01:05:44 ►
I did a pretty large bowlful.
01:05:48 ►
What do you have to take before you see big luminous things connecting all of us?
01:05:56 ►
And these things shimmer and make noise.
01:05:58 ►
I’ve seen that.
01:05:59 ►
My heart and you and my lower chakras.
01:06:01 ►
On mescaline.
01:06:02 ►
On mescaline, that happened?
01:06:02 ►
You take mescaline and you begin to see the things that connect people together.
01:06:06 ►
When I was like 16 years old,
01:06:09 ►
and I had a Mescaline trip with Moondog’s daughter upstate New York.
01:06:14 ►
We were on a camping trip with my sister and her fiancé and some people having fun.
01:06:19 ►
The four of you took it?
01:06:20 ►
A few of us did, my sister and I.
01:06:22 ►
But we were up all night, and I remember it was warm,
01:06:25 ►
and there was all this grass all around us,
01:06:26 ►
and we were sitting in lotus positions or whatever.
01:06:29 ►
And I remember I was looking at her, and she was really trippy,
01:06:31 ►
because I don’t know who you remember Moondog was,
01:06:34 ►
but he was a pretty fantastic character at Googling.
01:06:37 ►
Anyway, we looked, and she said she saw something around me.
01:06:42 ►
She saw colors around me.
01:06:44 ►
And when she said that, it looked at her,
01:06:47 ►
and her saying that, all of a sudden, it opened it up,
01:06:49 ►
and I saw it all around her, too.
01:06:51 ►
Were you connected with colors, too?
01:06:53 ►
Yeah.
01:06:54 ►
It was kind of like a ripple, ripples, you know, coming out of each of us.
01:06:58 ►
That’s pretty good.
01:06:58 ►
I mean, my experience was more of a reboot.
01:07:02 ►
Reboot?
01:07:03 ►
Yes, sir.
01:07:03 ►
Mr. Tech Head over here.
01:07:04 ►
You totally got it. was more of a reboot. Reboot? Yes. You’re missing a tech head over here.
01:07:07 ►
You totally got it.
01:07:08 ►
It dissolves your ego or any identity
01:07:09 ►
of being alive
01:07:10 ►
like dirt clods in water.
01:07:12 ►
You know, just…
01:07:13 ►
A hydrogen bomb
01:07:15 ►
is not a bad analogy.
01:07:17 ►
Are you still there?
01:07:18 ►
You come back.
01:07:20 ►
You come back.
01:07:20 ►
You come back.
01:07:21 ►
You recall us.
01:07:22 ►
Yeah, you recall us.
01:07:23 ►
This is like
01:07:23 ►
you must trust in your wet wear.
01:07:25 ►
Whoa. Whoa. This recall us. Yeah, you recall us. This is like you must trust in your wet wear. Whoa, whoa, whoa.
01:07:26 ►
This is surrender.
01:07:27 ►
Right.
01:07:28 ►
But you always come back, you know.
01:07:30 ►
Isn’t that something?
01:07:31 ►
I mean, that’s one of the most amazing.
01:07:33 ►
It’s like a reboot, I tell you.
01:07:34 ►
It’s a reboot of our bodies.
01:07:36 ►
But that’s one of the most amazing things about psychedelics.
01:07:39 ►
Almost all of us have reached a point and say, I’m never coming back.
01:07:42 ►
I’ve destroyed my mind completely. I’m never coming back. I’ve destroyed my mind completely.
01:07:45 ►
I’m never coming back.
01:07:46 ►
You always do.
01:07:47 ►
Yeah.
01:07:47 ►
Most of it.
01:07:48 ►
Yeah.
01:07:48 ►
And it is so amazing.
01:07:50 ►
At least you think you do.
01:07:52 ►
That’s what’s significant.
01:07:53 ►
It all depends on how wise you are.
01:07:55 ►
You think you do, you do.
01:07:56 ►
It all depends on how wise you are.
01:07:57 ►
You think you come back.
01:07:58 ►
You do extremely high dosage and go back.
01:08:00 ►
Set and say.
01:08:01 ►
But if you’re lucky, you remember some of those.
01:08:03 ►
Some of those, yeah.
01:08:04 ►
So anyway, you actually came back from the reboot.
01:08:08 ►
Yeah, it took a while.
01:08:09 ►
It took at least five minutes.
01:08:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:08:15 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:08:21 ►
Well, there’s really not much to say about that,
01:08:25 ►
other than to say that my guess is that you’ve been involved in discussions just like that yourself.
01:08:30 ►
Or at the very least, you’ve had some of these ideas pop into your head from time to time.
01:08:36 ►
So, you see, it doesn’t really matter if your next-door neighbor is a quantum physicist or just your token buddy.
01:08:42 ►
You can still have as much fun kicking around these strange ideas
01:08:46 ►
as anyone. And didn’t you just
01:08:48 ►
love it when Nick Herbert said,
01:08:49 ►
the more of a mind you have,
01:08:52 ►
the more fun you can have when it’s
01:08:54 ►
fucked up.
01:08:56 ►
It’s those little sound bites
01:08:57 ►
in our everyday bull sessions that I love
01:09:00 ►
to collect. So to
01:09:02 ►
further this cause along, I’ve added
01:09:04 ►
a Skype button for you to click on to leave
01:09:06 ►
a voicemail on our salon blog, which you can find by going to www.psychedelicsalon.org. I don’t know
01:09:15 ►
how or if this is even going to work out, but my thought was that if any of our fellow saloners
01:09:20 ►
wanted to leave an interesting message that I could play a few of them here in the salon.
01:09:28 ►
So if you’re in the mood to Skype us a message, well, please be one of the first to do so. Another little thing that came in this week was a question
01:09:34 ►
from Where’s Glasses Has Dog, which is a handle that would have fit me a few years ago until
01:09:40 ►
my beloved dog Igor died. And in case you’re wondering, Igor was a big old
01:09:46 ►
lovable Rottweiler who played with the children in my neighborhood. Good old Igor. I still miss
01:09:52 ►
him today. Anyway, where’s glasses has dog rights? Lorenzo, I just finished Terrence McKenna’s True
01:09:59 ►
Hallucinations and wonder if you know anything about Vanessa’s photography. In the book it states she was documenting the adventure and I think it would be cool
01:10:08 ►
to see the places and people described. Well,
01:10:11 ►
I don’t know Vanessa myself. In fact, I didn’t even remember that part of the book.
01:10:16 ►
So, if any of our fellow salonners knows Vanessa or can point us
01:10:20 ►
to some of the pictures she took, I’ll pass that along. I sure would
01:10:24 ►
like to see some of those photos myself from that now legendary expedition.
01:10:29 ►
And speaking of legends, in last week’s podcast from the Sea Realm,
01:10:34 ►
KMO interviews the legendary Bruce Dahmer,
01:10:36 ►
who gives an update on the Evolution Grid, or the Evo Grid,
01:10:40 ►
the story of which has now even been picked up by the New York Times.
01:10:44 ►
The story of which has now even been picked up by the New York Times.
01:10:51 ►
And over at dopefiend.co.uk, you can hear a recording of an evening with Dr. David Nutt,
01:11:02 ►
who, as you know, created a great stir over in the UK after he was summarily dismissed from his scientific advisory post that was dealing with drug classification. Now, while this isn’t a normal podcast from the Dope Fiend,
01:11:06 ►
I did find it extremely interesting to hear what some of the world’s top minds are thinking about
01:11:12 ►
regarding the ways in which governments so cavalierly disregard scientific information
01:11:17 ►
when it doesn’t suit their needs.
01:11:19 ►
So, thanks for going out of your way to record that and podcast it, Dope Fiend.
01:11:23 ►
It really was eye-opening for me.
01:11:26 ►
Or I guess I should say it was ear-opening.
01:11:29 ►
I don’t know.
01:11:31 ►
What I do know is that I should close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:11:38 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 License.
01:11:46 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:11:48 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
01:11:50 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon web page,
01:11:52 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:11:55 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy
01:11:58 ►
behind all that goes on here at the Psychedelic Salon,
01:12:01 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel,
01:12:04 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:12:05 ►
which is available as an audio book
01:12:08 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:12:11 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:12:13 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:12:16 ►
Be well, my friends.