Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, followed by Terence’s talk.
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?”
“Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know, is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter. … The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone. What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child. … It’s all things to all men and all women. … It is not a myth or a fairy tale. It is the burning, primary reality, that lies behind the dross of appearances.”
“We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings. We are not fallen beings”
“[We] often feel like hapless atoms, running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever. We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves we give everything away to somebody else, to something else.”
“There is no inevitability in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability and then give ourselves over to it.”
“Every society, in the moment of its existence, has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation (good alchemical word), a distillation of what has preceded before.”
“Dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater possibility than has ever been. The challenge then is to not drop the ball.”
“What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.”
“The mushroom said to me once, ‘Nature loves courage. Nature loves courage,’ and I said, ‘What’s the payoff on that?’ And it said, ‘It shows you it loves courage because it removes obstacles.’ You make a commitment, and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up.”
“It is never one or the other. It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites.”
“It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty, existential, scientific ideas.”
“We are the last people. Beyond us lies the mystery if we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer. Then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast that says, ‘May ye be alive at the end of the world.’ ”
Leo Plaw at the Temple of Visions Gallery (Los Angeles)
Fantastic Visions Exhbition Berlin
Previous Episode
210 - From the Shaman’s Circle to the Ivory Tower
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 369 - Timothy & Terence - score: 0.96786
- 239 - Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century - score: 0.86808
- 495 - Our Bridges Have Burned Behind Us - score: 0.85457
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.84517
- 123 - Opening the Doors of Creativity - score: 0.84469
- 439 - A Resolute Optimist of a Complicated Sort - score: 0.83786
- 048 - 2006 Palenque Norte Lectures Sample - score: 0.83545
- 641 - McKenna’s Psychedelic Rhapsody - score: 0.83311
- 261 - The Definitive UFO Tape - score: 0.83182
- 492 - The Dizziness of Things Unsaid - score: 0.83175
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And here I am just getting this podcast out at the end of the week again.
00:00:29 ►
I’m beginning to think that January is to the year what Monday is to the week.
00:00:36 ►
I just seem to have a hard time getting down to business this year.
00:00:40 ►
But some of our fellow salonners who have tended to the business of making a donation to help with the expenses associated with these podcasts are Mark C., Brian T., or maybe I should say from the cult of Brian, which is how you sign your note, and Michael T., also who said,
00:01:02 ►
also who said well at 20 years of age
00:01:04 ►
I decided to
00:01:05 ►
and I better not say move to
00:01:07 ►
where from where
00:01:08 ►
and I have now found myself delivering newspapers
00:01:11 ►
from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. every day
00:01:14 ►
your discussions and recordings
00:01:16 ►
have made the time fly by so much faster
00:01:18 ►
though sometimes slower
00:01:20 ►
because I have to stop the car
00:01:21 ►
to put everything together that I just heard
00:01:23 ►
I love your talks very unbiased and informative.
00:01:28 ►
I really appreciate them. Wish I could donate more, but like I said, I deliver
00:01:32 ►
newspapers. Thanks, Lorenzo. Much appreciated.
00:01:35 ►
That was very cool of you. You know, I don’t expect people to make donations
00:01:40 ►
to the salon who are delivering newspapers for a living. In fact,
00:01:43 ►
I don’t really expect anybody to. It’s kind of a touchy thing here. Thank you. I really appreciate all of your donations, large and small. It’s just so kind of you guys.
00:02:06 ►
And we also received a very generous donation from my friend and fellow grandfather, Robert O.
00:02:13 ►
And although Robert and I have not yet met in person, I feel as if we’re old friends.
00:02:19 ►
So thanks for everything, Robert.
00:02:21 ►
And also thank you, Mark, Michael, and the Cult of Brian for being an integral part of the salon.
00:02:29 ►
And another fellow salonner I want to thank this week is Tor C.,
00:02:34 ►
who is the person who sent me the recording we’re about to hear.
00:02:38 ►
Let me read part of the email in which Tor described this talk.
00:02:43 ►
Hey, Lorenzo.
00:02:44 ►
Here’s the two files of the
00:02:46 ►
McKenna talk I mentioned on Facebook.
00:02:48 ►
From what I know, it’s from
00:02:50 ►
an event in California in 1991.
00:02:52 ►
You may already be familiar
00:02:54 ►
with the introduction by Tim Leary,
00:02:56 ►
which was sampled and used on
00:02:57 ►
one of those CD tributes to Terrence
00:02:59 ►
in the early, and he’s got
00:03:01 ►
zero zeros, I guess we should call
00:03:04 ►
them the naughties?
00:03:06 ►
I don’t know, the aughts?
00:03:14 ►
Anyhow, he goes on, the name of the talk I have here is Empowering Hope in Dark Times,
00:03:17 ►
but I believe it may be floating around on the web under other names.
00:03:23 ►
And actually, not too long into this talk, you’ll hear Terrence say that the name of this talk is Unfolding the Stone.
00:03:26 ►
And the talk is largely about alchemy.
00:03:28 ►
But I decided to stick with Tor’s recommendation of empowering hope in dark times.
00:03:36 ►
And for reasons that I think you’ll understand shortly.
00:03:40 ►
Anyway, Tor goes on.
00:03:42 ►
But I believe it may be floating around on the web under other names, as tends to be the case with many of his talks.
00:03:48 ►
I am sure, however, that you haven’t podcast this talk before.
00:03:52 ►
It was recorded around the time of the big ozone layer scare in 1991,
00:03:57 ►
and Terrence is noticeably disturbed by this and by the war,
00:04:01 ►
giving an astonishing and uplifting talk on making the best out of awful situations,
00:04:06 ►
using alchemical metaphors and inspiring examples.
00:04:10 ►
This is my favorite of all McKenna Talks.
00:04:13 ►
I sampled it briefly on the first Sunblindness record, so am delighted to share this with the tribe.
00:04:19 ►
Love, Tor.
00:04:21 ►
Well, thank you so much for sending this, Tor, and I agree with you. This is one of Terrence’s
00:04:26 ►
more compelling talks. For sure, it’s the most positive and uplifting that I think I’ve ever
00:04:32 ►
heard him. And wait till you hear Terrence’s litany of all that’s going wrong with the world at the
00:04:37 ►
time, which was, of course, 1991, when the first of the Bush Wars in the Gulf was underway.
00:04:50 ►
Yet you can almost recite the same litany today, but with even more intensity.
00:04:53 ►
It certainly makes you think, doesn’t it?
00:04:56 ►
But let’s not listen to me right now.
00:05:02 ►
Let’s listen first to the now legendary introduction of Terence McKenna by Timothy Leary, and then listen to the Bard McKenna as he talks about alchemy
00:05:05 ►
and his thought that, and I’m quoting here,
00:05:10 ►
It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope.
00:05:15 ►
You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty existential scientific ideas.
00:05:31 ►
He’s an old friend of all of ours,
00:05:33 ►
so I’d like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
00:05:42 ►
Thank you.
00:05:44 ►
Yeah.
00:05:56 ►
I, for one, am overjoyed to be here.
00:06:05 ►
This is one of those special, special evenings that we will all treasure.
00:06:12 ►
You know, as soon as I drove to that parking lot, I saw people getting out of the car,
00:06:21 ►
many of whom were still carrying uniforms and dazed expressions of Grateful Dead heads.
00:06:25 ►
How many people were at the Dead concert?
00:06:26 ►
Yeah.
00:06:29 ►
And they’re coming over later.
00:06:30 ►
They’re just ending now,
00:06:31 ►
so believe me,
00:06:35 ►
we’ll have an infusion of wildness there.
00:06:40 ►
Terence McKenna,
00:06:42 ►
he’s a great deal to me.
00:06:46 ►
I would say he’s one of the five or six most important people on the planet.
00:06:53 ►
I can’t even think of any others.
00:06:58 ►
Short-term memory loss.
00:07:04 ►
I was talking… Oh, by the way, I should tell you.
00:07:07 ►
Terrence and I keep meeting in the most wonderful, mythic, adventurous places.
00:07:13 ►
I was doing a wild tour through Germany about a year ago.
00:07:18 ►
We came to Heidelberg and we were being guested by some people that came right out of Hermann Hesse.
00:07:26 ►
I mean, wizards and gnomes and, you know, that sort of thing.
00:07:30 ►
Heidelberg.
00:07:31 ►
And there in a restaurant, I was having a sandwich before performing with some cybernetic people,
00:07:38 ►
there was Terence McKenna.
00:07:40 ►
And it was just so perfectly Hesse.
00:07:42 ►
Journey to the East.
00:07:45 ►
And so we meet again here tonight.
00:07:48 ►
You know, I was talking to Terrence backstage before we began,
00:07:55 ►
and we both agree that what he will be saying tonight has been said over and over again
00:08:03 ►
at all those high moments in human history
00:08:05 ►
when those who have gone within and understood about the brain and the inner treasures,
00:08:13 ►
we all come back and pretty much say the same thing.
00:08:17 ►
The problem is, though, that once you say it, you can’t go on saying it and saying it and saying it.
00:08:23 ►
And when Terrence came along a few years ago and was saying what I’d been trying to say,
00:08:28 ►
but naturally better, upgraded, up to date, I was so overwhelmed with gratitude.
00:08:35 ►
And I publicly thank you for that, Terrence.
00:08:42 ►
By the way, the role that Terrence is playing right now
00:08:45 ►
is one that takes not only vision,
00:08:47 ►
but it also takes fucking courage.
00:08:56 ►
We were saying backstage
00:08:57 ►
that Terrence and I are a small group of philosophers
00:09:03 ►
who make our living, not in the ivory tower, if you call it living, but just speaking it, chanting it, raving it, ranting it.
00:09:18 ►
And no one has ever done it with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight.
00:09:24 ►
with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight.
00:09:30 ►
I’m going to say one more thing, and then we will have what we’ve all been waiting for.
00:09:35 ►
Terrence reminds us that all human wisdom, all energy,
00:09:42 ►
comes from our beloved synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom.
00:09:47 ►
It all comes from the plants. Now, round of applause to
00:09:59 ►
the vegetables. Now, we all know that the human body, we have to have food. It comes
00:10:08 ►
from vegetables. We have used vegetables over the years, the essence of vegetables in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, and so forth.
00:10:14 ►
Oil, by the way, is the number one crack addiction of the modern industrial society.
00:10:25 ►
But what we forget and what we look to Terrence for tonight is to be reminded that plants have given us an even more important gift.
00:10:27 ►
They give us the gift of vision.
00:10:29 ►
They give us the illumination.
00:10:32 ►
And throughout human history, there are the Eves and the Pandoras.
00:10:39 ►
Usually it’s a woman who takes this wonderful vegetable and gives it to humanity and says, be illuminated.
00:10:47 ►
And now, for our illumination and our pleasure, please join me in welcoming Terrence McKenna.
00:10:59 ►
Well, I want to thank Tim. That was a wonderful introduction.
00:11:04 ►
I’m sure I wouldn’t, I know I wouldn’t be here tonight if it weren’t for Tim Leary.
00:11:09 ►
He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods.
00:11:15 ►
He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.
00:11:29 ►
And it’s wonderful that one Irishman can hand it on to another and that we can keep it in the Bardic tradition. Before I get started, I want to thank a number of people who put a lot of energy into this event to make it go. Steve
00:11:36 ►
Marschank promoted and organized this. He’s been at it for months and months. Roy, Roy Tuckman, Roy of Hollywood, and Diane.
00:11:51 ►
They have supported me and given generously of hundreds and hundreds of hours of their time
00:11:58 ►
to put these psychedelic ideas across.
00:12:02 ►
And believe me, you hang your ass out to dry when you take this position.
00:12:06 ►
Tim mentioned courage.
00:12:08 ►
Nobody has had the kind of courage that Roy and Diane have had to push that message into this town.
00:12:16 ►
So we salute them.
00:12:20 ►
And Eric Alley did the wonderful poster.
00:12:24 ►
He’s done them for these events for years.
00:12:27 ►
He’s a beautiful artist.
00:12:30 ►
Christian Duffy and Jim Essex are here to see that you find your seat and stay in it.
00:12:37 ►
And we thank them for that.
00:12:41 ►
But whether or not the clearing of the rainforest is halted,
00:12:46 ►
the loss of folk medicinal knowledge on the part of these tribal societies
00:12:53 ►
that have lived in balance and equilibrium and respect with nature for millennia,
00:13:00 ►
that is tragically going.
00:13:02 ►
There’s no question about it. Because you can’t put people into a museum diorama and ask them to parade around in jock straps while the rest of us drive BMWs.
00:13:15 ►
They move into the cities.
00:13:17 ►
These people work in the sawmills.
00:13:19 ►
They take jobs in the tourist industry.
00:13:22 ►
And 25, 50,000 years of medical knowledge is lost.
00:13:29 ►
And Tim did homage to the vegetables.
00:13:33 ►
Even in today’s high-tech world, fully 75% of all the drugs, prescription drugs, other
00:13:41 ►
kinds of drugs on the market, above ground, underground, come from plants.
00:13:47 ►
This is a priceless reservoir of complex chemistry, but it’s meaningless unless the human experiences, the human lore is preserved.
00:14:01 ►
And this is what botanical dimensions is about we have collectors in Peru in other parts
00:14:08 ►
of the world and we bring seeds rootstock living plants to Hawaii and there these things are
00:14:16 ►
grown as in a living library toward the day when a more enlightened society will have the wisdom and the good sense
00:14:27 ►
to team up with the vegetable world and create a more humane medicine,
00:14:35 ►
a more humane religion that has some real life and light in it.
00:14:41 ►
So that’s what we’re doing out there.
00:14:43 ►
Any help any of you can give us
00:14:45 ►
we’re deeply appreciative spread the word since we began this project many
00:14:53 ►
imitators have sprung up and this was our intent and our hope and great good
00:15:00 ►
work is being done so please support the conservation of folk, botanical, and medical knowledge.
00:15:14 ►
So then before I dig into this, let me just explain how it’ll work.
00:15:19 ►
I’ll talk for a while.
00:15:21 ►
Then there’ll be an intermission.
00:15:26 ►
talk for a while then there’ll be an intermission and then we’ll come back and given however much time is left over why there’ll be a q a and we’ll have a mic for you to line up behind okay all right
00:15:37 ►
first of all thank you all for being here i I know we’re up against the Grateful Dead, my favorite band.
00:15:46 ►
I’m going to quote them repeatedly.
00:15:49 ►
It’s a thousand to one chance that this would happen,
00:15:52 ►
and it just shows the world is stranger than you can suppose.
00:15:56 ►
So, the name of this talk is Unfolding the Stone.
00:16:04 ►
And I wanted to talk about this.
00:16:06 ►
It’s a departure for me because I think we’ve just been through a real hammering over the past 10 months.
00:16:17 ►
And if you’ve still got your optimism intact, and believe me, I do, you’ve been through the fire.
00:16:24 ►
and believe me, I do, you’ve been through the fire.
00:16:31 ►
This has not been an easy ten months for the people of this planet or the planet itself.
00:16:41 ►
And so I want to sort of reach back tonight and invoke a banished tradition,
00:16:47 ►
get to the heart of it and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives to empower hope in the most dark of situations, and in fact to even make these
00:16:56 ►
dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope than might ordinarily be the
00:17:03 ►
case.
00:17:08 ►
stronger hope than might ordinarily be the case. A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he wanted to tell me the story of sitting in the presence of a 104 year old Vietnamese monk
00:17:17 ►
and the guy had basically kept his mouth shut, the monk, hadn’t said much around the monastery where he just sort of cleans up.
00:17:29 ►
But then he announced he wanted to talk about meditation.
00:17:33 ►
And he opened his remarks by saying,
00:17:36 ►
we are all luminous beings.
00:17:40 ►
Why then do we not appear before each other radiant in our illumination?
00:17:51 ►
And this is the conundrum of life.
00:17:54 ►
This is the problem.
00:17:57 ►
It was T.S. Eliot who said,
00:18:00 ►
Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow.
00:18:10 ►
And why is that?
00:18:12 ►
As psychedelic people, this is the problem that we grapple with in our own lives, and
00:18:19 ►
when we look out at the world, you’ve heard me say many times, we have the vision, we have the money,
00:18:28 ►
we have the technology, but why can we not then appear before each other as radiantly
00:18:36 ►
luminous beings? And why cannot we reclaim our planet from toxification, disease, overpopulation, bonehead politics. You know
00:18:48 ►
the list. What’s the hang-up here? What is the problem? Why is perfection so distant?
00:18:58 ►
Well, what I’ve learned from life and vegetables and travel and books can be summed up in two Greek words. It’s
00:19:11 ►
the central message of the philosopher Heraclitus, and he was always my favorite philosopher,
00:19:18 ►
but whenever I would read about him, he was called the crying philosopher. And I had to live to be 44 years old to understand
00:19:28 ►
the poignancy of Heraclitus’ message. He said in a nutshell, Pantit Reis, all flows, all
00:19:39 ►
flows, nothing lasts, nothing is permanent. And this is the hardest message life has to teach.
00:19:50 ►
Because what it says is your joy is transient, your anguish is transient,
00:19:59 ►
your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy, your moments of great insight,
00:20:10 ►
your moments of great empowerment, everything is flowing through your hands at the moment
00:20:17 ►
that you are aware of it. William Blake, who in a way set this engine going a couple of centuries ago, said,
00:20:29 ►
What is the price of experience?
00:20:35 ►
Is it bought for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street?
00:20:42 ►
No.
00:20:43 ►
It is bought
00:20:45 ►
with all that a man has.
00:20:50 ►
His wife,
00:20:51 ►
his home,
00:20:53 ►
his children.
00:20:55 ►
Now this is not
00:20:56 ►
a pessimistic message
00:20:57 ►
and William Blake
00:20:58 ►
was not a pessimistic guy.
00:21:00 ►
He was the same guy
00:21:01 ►
who told us
00:21:02 ►
that if we could but cleanse
00:21:04 ►
the doors of perception,
00:21:06 ►
we would perceive the world as it is, infinite, in a grain of sand.
00:21:11 ►
How can we take this poignancy, this sense of impermanence,
00:21:18 ►
and weld it into something which is paradoxically indestructible,
00:21:24 ►
into something which is paradoxically indestructible and has meaning in our lives
00:21:27 ►
and gives us not only the strength to carry on,
00:21:30 ►
but the power to be exemplars,
00:21:34 ►
the power to stand up before other people
00:21:36 ►
and let them then feel the power of vision
00:21:41 ►
in the paradox of permanence
00:21:44 ►
in the face of the need for indestructibility?
00:21:48 ►
Well, to answer that question, I felt that we had to leave the narrow confines of 20th century thinking
00:21:59 ►
and we had to reach back into the byways of human thought
00:22:05 ►
that have been by most of us somewhat passed over and forgotten
00:22:09 ►
because after all modern life makes great demands on us
00:22:13 ►
it’s enough to just keep your checkbook balanced and your insurance paid
00:22:18 ►
we can’t all spend our time delving in the libraries of the noetic and gnostic and hermetic and magical traditions.
00:22:29 ►
But I thought it was worthwhile to talk to you about this tonight because we have been
00:22:34 ►
through such a difficult ten months.
00:22:37 ►
And it was also Heraclitus, the all-flows guy, who said, all is war, all is war.
00:22:46 ►
And what he meant was,
00:22:48 ►
everything occurs in the presence of its opposite,
00:22:51 ►
and out of that there is generated the friction,
00:22:56 ►
the heat, and the light
00:22:58 ►
that all comes together in an indissoluble package
00:23:02 ►
as part of life.
00:23:05 ►
So what I want to talk to you about tonight,
00:23:08 ►
and how it relates to unfolding the stone,
00:23:11 ►
is the notion of alchemy of all things.
00:23:16 ►
Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know,
00:23:18 ►
is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
00:23:24 ►
the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
00:23:33 ►
But many of you may imagine that alchemy is simply a discredited pre-scientific obsession of unbalanced minds interested in changing base metals into gold, lead into the stuff
00:23:43 ►
of commerce. This is the benighted reputation
00:23:48 ►
that alchemy has acquired in a century
00:23:51 ►
so given over to the literal and the material
00:23:55 ►
and the non-spiritual
00:23:58 ►
that it’s lost all touch
00:24:00 ►
with the adumbrations of meaning
00:24:03 ►
that vibrate behind the perceptions of the
00:24:08 ►
alchemists.
00:24:10 ►
The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone.
00:24:18 ►
What is it?
00:24:20 ►
It’s the universal panacea at the end of time.
00:24:24 ►
It’s the universal panacea at the end of time.
00:24:30 ►
It’s the chocolate cake that your mother made once a week when you were a child.
00:24:33 ►
The panas super substantiales. It’s all things to all men and all women.
00:24:38 ►
If you are hungry, you eat it.
00:24:40 ►
If you’re dirty, you shower under it.
00:24:44 ►
If you need to go somewhere, you sit on
00:24:46 ►
it and you fly there. If you have a question, it answers it. It’s something
00:24:52 ►
that the human mind senses rationalism and materialism
00:25:11 ►
turned it into a myth, a fairy tale.
00:25:15 ►
It is not a myth or a fairy tale.
00:25:19 ►
It is the burning primary reality that lies behind the dross of appearances.
00:25:28 ►
Alchemy is based on a philosophy called Hermeticism
00:25:32 ►
that was developed in the first and second centuries by Gnostic thinkers,
00:25:38 ►
Greeks, Jews, people inside the Roman Empire
00:25:41 ►
as it was beginning to show the first signs of
00:25:45 ►
degradation and decay who felt a profound disaffection with their world a
00:25:53 ►
disaffection that on the scale of those times was as profound as our own
00:25:59 ►
existential disaffection and the her Hermetic philosophers drew back from the rise of Christianity
00:26:08 ►
with its doctrine of the fall of man
00:26:10 ►
and original sin
00:26:12 ►
and the stain of Adam and Eve
00:26:14 ►
and that whole thing
00:26:16 ►
and took a different tack
00:26:17 ►
and made two points
00:26:19 ►
which I think we need to recover
00:26:23 ►
and live out for ourselves.
00:26:25 ►
And the first point was that man, which means men and women, human beings,
00:26:35 ►
are divine beings, not lower than the angels, higher than the angels.
00:26:41 ►
Lower than the angels.
00:26:44 ►
Higher than the angels.
00:26:48 ►
The message of the alchemical and hermetic thinkers and the corpus hermeticum actually uses the phrase
00:26:51 ►
man is God’s brother.
00:26:55 ►
We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives
00:26:59 ►
if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings.
00:27:05 ►
We are not fallen beings.
00:27:07 ►
When you take into your life the gnosis of the light-filled vegetables,
00:27:13 ►
the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the sane societies of this world for millennia,
00:27:20 ►
the first message that comes to you is you are a divine being.
00:27:27 ►
You matter. You count.
00:27:29 ►
You come from realms of unimaginable power and light,
00:27:34 ►
and you will return to those realms.
00:27:40 ►
The second point that these philosophers wanted to make was that fate can be overcome.
00:27:50 ►
Fate can be overcome.
00:27:52 ►
Now, for the Greco-Hellenic world, what that meant was the starry engines of the machinery of fate that they saw strewn across the night sky.
00:28:03 ►
that they saw strewn across the night sky because they were intensely aware of the power of the zodiac,
00:28:10 ►
the stellar shells inhabited by demons
00:28:13 ►
that extended out to the unimaginable imperium of the All-Father
00:28:18 ►
that was beyond fate.
00:28:20 ►
And into that world of astrological fatedness,
00:28:24 ►
which is such a strong idea for
00:28:26 ►
the Greek mind, the Hermeticists announced fate can be overcome. And they had a novel
00:28:35 ►
answer for how this could be done. It can be done through magic, a word not often enough heard in the present world. The overcoming of fate is
00:28:49 ►
achieved through magic, and then the stellar machinery becomes not an invasive force into
00:28:58 ►
one’s life, but an empowering force. Now, some of us may believe in astrology and some of us may not. We are all strongly influenced by the notion of fate, of our powerlessness. In an existential world, Jean-Paul Sartre said nature is mute. And we embedded in the media dense, message dense, programming dense matrix of these hyper societies that we have created
00:29:31 ►
often feel, I think, like hapless atoms running endlessly according to the blueprints and programs of unseen masters,
00:29:41 ►
whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever.
00:29:44 ►
We tend to disempower
00:29:47 ►
ourselves.
00:29:48 ►
We tend to believe that we don’t matter.
00:29:51 ►
And in the act of taking that idea to ourselves, we give everything away to somebody else,
00:29:59 ►
to something else.
00:30:01 ►
So the rebirth of a sense of the stone and its possibility within each of us
00:30:08 ►
entails these two ideas, our divinity and our power to overcome fate. There is no inevitability
00:30:19 ►
in our lives unless we submit to the idea of inevitability
00:30:25 ►
and then give ourselves over to it.
00:30:29 ►
Okay.
00:30:33 ►
I wish there were more jokes, but it’s just been such a tough go.
00:30:38 ►
It’s been a tough go, I have to tell you.
00:30:41 ►
I have to tell you.
00:30:52 ►
Where can we look in the world to see some confirmation of what I’m saying?
00:30:59 ►
How can we draw it down from being, you know, an airy-fairy rap of a bardic Irishman?
00:31:05 ►
Well, I think that the place to look is history.
00:31:12 ►
Now, if you go to the academies, to those ivory towers that Tim was talking about,
00:31:17 ►
and ask what is history, they will tell you that it’s a random walk,
00:31:21 ►
an endlessly pointless fluctuation.
00:31:28 ►
Empires rise and fall, migrations of people come and go, that it is essentially meaningless. I don’t believe this. I don’t even think there’s strong evidence for it
00:31:35 ►
because what I perceive when I look at the world, not only the world of history, but the world of nature out of which history has emerged, I see novelty,
00:31:48 ►
something wonderful, maddening, paradoxical, and ever-increasing, ever more conserved.
00:31:57 ►
Every iota of novelty that comes into existence is somehow saved and passed on.
00:32:05 ►
That’s why when we walk or drive down Melrose, we see Egyptian fashion motifs,
00:32:13 ►
we see fashion statements drawn from the 14th century, the 2nd century, Assyria, Egypt, Angkor Wat.
00:32:23 ►
All of the novelty of history coalesces in the living moment.
00:32:29 ►
It’s always been that way.
00:32:31 ►
Every society in the moment of its existence has lived as a resonance, a completion,
00:32:40 ►
and a distillation, good alchemical word, a distillation of what has preceded before.
00:32:47 ►
And so the alchemical idea that spirit can be redeemed from matter begins to get teeth
00:32:58 ►
when you connect the idea of spirit up to the idea of novelty, which has not ordinarily been done. But, you know, novelty is
00:33:07 ►
the life of the party, and the life of the party is to be high-spirited. And this is what we need
00:33:16 ►
to focus on as the thread in the dark labyrinth of the prison of the material world that can lead us back to the light.
00:33:26 ►
The universe is an engine for the production of novelty.
00:33:31 ►
It always has been since the first moment of the Big Bang
00:33:35 ►
20, 25 billion years ago.
00:33:39 ►
Simpler states have been replaced by more complex states,
00:33:43 ►
which have then set the stage for yet greater complexity.
00:33:47 ►
Well, the drift of this, then,
00:33:50 ►
is that the emergence of language and tools and culture
00:33:57 ►
and higher ideals like courage and love and self-sacrifice,
00:34:02 ►
these are not flukes, sports, mistakes.
00:34:08 ►
These are further steps along the way in the process of the great alchemical furnace of being,
00:34:18 ►
heating and casting and dissolving and recasting and purifying and recasting
00:34:26 ►
alchemical gold and
00:34:28 ►
so hard as the world may appear
00:34:33 ►
Dark as the hour may appear in reality
00:34:37 ►
We exist in a dimension of greater opportunity
00:34:41 ►
greater freedom
00:34:43 ►
greater possibility than has ever been.
00:34:46 ►
The challenge then is to not drop the ball,
00:34:51 ►
is to know this and to act on it and to slough off all the leeches and backhandlers
00:34:59 ►
and weasels and crypto-fascists who want to deny that
00:35:04 ►
and turn man into a machine for their own purposes.
00:35:11 ►
Alchemy has always perceived this
00:35:15 ►
and has delineated stages in the transformational process.
00:35:23 ►
And these stages are worth talking about,
00:35:28 ►
not in the details,
00:35:30 ►
but in the two bipolar states which define this.
00:35:35 ►
They used a bastard Latin,
00:35:37 ►
and they called them the negredo and the albedo.
00:35:42 ►
The negredo is the precondition
00:35:45 ►
for transformation.
00:35:48 ►
And what is it?
00:35:50 ►
It’s shit.
00:35:51 ►
It’s detritus.
00:35:54 ►
It’s flotsam.
00:35:55 ►
It’s debris.
00:35:57 ►
It’s being HIV positive.
00:36:00 ►
It’s being deep into your fourth marriage
00:36:03 ►
and sinking fast.’s bankruptcy it’s uh you know
00:36:10 ►
serum hepatitis it’s the inevitable dark night of the soul that comes upon us and these dark
00:36:19 ►
nights of the soul come upon all of us nobody gets through this world without a little dung
00:36:28 ►
raining down on them believe me i mean you may have vayed it for decades but then there’ll be a
00:36:34 ►
knock on the door you know it’s said that the millstones of fate grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly fine.
00:36:46 ►
So what do we do with that?
00:36:48 ►
Well, the answer is, we welcome it.
00:36:52 ►
This is what the alchemists awaited.
00:36:55 ►
The negrado, the prima materia, the dark matter, the chaos,
00:37:01 ►
the chaos that is the precondition then for redemption.
00:37:08 ►
And God knows we’ve got lots of chaos right now.
00:37:11 ►
I mean, we have war, famine, revolution, millions of homeless people on the move.
00:37:17 ►
The nation state is dissolving.
00:37:19 ►
The relief agencies of the world can’t keep up.
00:37:23 ►
The relief agencies of the world can’t keep up.
00:37:31 ►
The various secret societies, mafias and cabals that have always tried to tie us into chains,
00:37:32 ►
they’re all working overtime.
00:37:36 ►
We are in the negredo condition.
00:37:37 ►
Hallelujah. Hallelujah.
00:37:38 ►
This means, this means that the kissing has to stop, but the fun can begin, the real fun.
00:37:52 ►
The other end of this bipolar condition in alchemy was called the albedo,
00:38:00 ►
or albedo, depending on whether or not you came from a coal mining town in Colorado like I did.
00:38:06 ►
The albedo, the whitening.
00:38:10 ►
And that means that out of the chaos can come a new beginning, a new reality, a new hope. And then the process is one of, and you see these alchemists existed in a philosophically more naive, we quote, more naive world than we do.
00:38:33 ►
So they actually projected onto the processes of matter their own interior psychic condition.
00:38:43 ►
So they did work with matter and fire and furnaces and retorts.
00:38:48 ►
And what they would do is they would take the primal material, lead or excrement or something
00:38:56 ►
else, and then they would heat it and turn it to ash and then calcinate the ash or pour solvents through the ash and get an extract
00:39:07 ►
and then heat that and sublimate it.
00:39:11 ►
And out of this, almost as a footnote, came modern chemistry.
00:39:16 ►
But that was not the important side of it.
00:39:18 ►
The important side of it was that they were projecting mental states onto the swirling retorts of their laboratory.
00:39:27 ►
It was like a magical mirror for them. It was, in fact, dare we say the P word, it was psychedelic.
00:39:37 ►
What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you by whatever means necessary so that you can relate to it as a
00:39:47 ►
thing in the world and then work upon it. So from the negredo to the albedo, there were a series of
00:39:56 ►
these stages. Now I said a few minutes ago that magic was the key. by magic I mean the reclaiming and the
00:40:10 ►
reconstruction of language to a sufficient degree that it becomes at
00:40:17 ►
first possible then probable then inevitable to each one of us
00:40:25 ►
that miracles can happen.
00:40:29 ►
Miracles can happen.
00:40:31 ►
The Grateful Dead have a song
00:40:33 ►
we need a miracle every day.
00:40:36 ►
We do need a miracle every day.
00:40:38 ►
Well is that too tall an order?
00:40:41 ►
I don’t think so.
00:40:43 ►
I don’t think so.
00:40:50 ►
Years ago one of these talking vegetables said to me,
00:41:09 ►
said, mind conjures miracles out of time. Out of time. Time is the primal material on which the alchemical process works.
00:41:14 ►
The alchemists, again, in their naive way,
00:41:20 ►
believed that precious metals, diamonds, gold, sapphires,
00:41:23 ►
actually grew in the earth. Because for this alchemical point of view, everything was alive.
00:41:27 ►
And my friend Rupert Sheldrake is leading the charge to create a new birth of that perception inside science.
00:41:37 ►
The idea that nature, all of nature is alive.
00:41:40 ►
Not simply organic cellular nature, but that the earth itself is a living being so mind
00:41:49 ►
conjures miracles out of time and the proof that this can be done and it’s an incontrovertible
00:41:57 ►
proof and i defy any naysayer or bring down to overcome it, is ourselves. We are the proof that mind can conjure miracles out of time.
00:42:09 ►
If it weren’t for us, there would just be birds and foxes and coral reefs and glaciers.
00:42:17 ►
But nature was not content with that level of novelty.
00:42:22 ►
A million years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, nature grew
00:42:26 ►
discontented and said, you know, let’s raise the ante. Let’s go to higher stakes
00:42:34 ►
poker in this planetary game. Let the monkeys speak. Let them build fires let them elaborate tools let them march forward onto the stage of creation and
00:42:53 ►
remember i said the hermetic faith was that humankind was the brother could act as the of God, not moats in God’s creation, but co-partners in the invocation out of being of yet greater novelty.
00:43:13 ►
Why? For play, for fun, just the cosmic madness of it all, the pure cussedness of it all,
00:43:29 ►
of it all, the pure cussedness of it all, to raise the stakes higher and higher and higher.
00:43:36 ►
Now, I keep going back to this thing of can it be done, because I want to convince you,
00:43:47 ►
because I’m so certain. I love Herman Melville and his rhetoric. And friends of the whale, bear with me.
00:43:54 ►
For Herman Melville, the whale was not the endangered creature it is today. It was the dark cosmic god of Christianity that haunts us and tries to pull us down.
00:44:03 ►
And there’s a wonderful speech in Moby Dick
00:44:06 ►
where Starbuck, the first mate,
00:44:09 ►
you remember wimpy little Starbuck,
00:44:11 ►
he stood for Christian right reason
00:44:14 ►
and he says to Captain Ahab,
00:44:16 ►
to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy.
00:44:23 ►
And Ahab says, blasphemy. And Ahab says,
00:44:25 ►
blasphemy, Starbuck?
00:44:28 ►
Speak not to me of blasphemy.
00:44:31 ►
I would strike out the sun
00:44:34 ►
if it insulted me.
00:44:36 ►
For could it do that?
00:44:38 ►
Then could I do the other?
00:44:40 ►
For there is ever a sort of fair play.
00:45:02 ►
And that’s the point of that draft. There is a sort of fair play. You’ve been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you. Fall of man, original sins, so forth and so on. It’s bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.
00:45:08 ►
There is a sort of fair play.
00:45:13 ►
And if you can get in touch with that in your life,
00:45:16 ►
you know, when Muhammad wouldn’t come to the mountain,
00:45:19 ►
the mountain came to Muhammad.
00:45:21 ►
That’s fair play.
00:45:29 ►
And if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you. It will begin to move toward you as the mountain moved toward Mohammed. The mushroom said to me once,
00:45:37 ►
nature loves courage. Nature loves courage. And I said, what’s the payoff on that
00:45:47 ►
and it said
00:45:48 ►
it shows you that it loves courage
00:45:50 ►
because it will remove obstacles
00:45:52 ►
you make the commitment
00:45:54 ►
and nature will respond to that commitment
00:45:58 ►
by removing impossible obstacles
00:46:02 ►
dream the impossible dream.
00:46:06 ►
And the world will not grind you under.
00:46:08 ►
It will lift you up.
00:46:11 ►
This is the trick.
00:46:12 ►
This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
00:46:18 ►
who really touched the alchemical gold,
00:46:21 ►
this is what they understood.
00:46:22 ►
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
00:46:25 ►
This is how magic is done. It’s done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it’s
00:46:33 ►
a feather bed. And there’s no other way to do it. This is why I have always taken the position
00:46:41 ►
that as modern people, you know, we can’t go out and set armies
00:46:47 ►
marching or launch religions and who would want to anyhow but to the people
00:46:53 ►
who say adventure has fled it’s all humdrum I just know you know that they
00:47:00 ►
have forgotten the five grams of psilocybin sitting in their refrigerator.
00:47:09 ►
I mean, Magellan may have had excitement rounding the horn,
00:47:14 ►
but you in your living room later tonight can put him in the shade
00:47:20 ►
if you have the courage to do the things that are necessary to do.
00:47:26 ►
And we know what they are.
00:47:28 ►
And of course, the first thing to do is to tell society to fuck off
00:47:31 ►
because they don’t know what’s going on.
00:47:40 ►
This is a matter between the person and the plant.
00:47:44 ►
The person and the plant, the person and the planet,
00:47:47 ►
and all the detritus of history, all the games that people have tried to lay on you.
00:47:55 ►
You know, they just want to get you down in the ditch that they’re in.
00:48:00 ►
We know this because aboriginal societies have never broken the faith.
00:48:07 ►
The living gnosis is still there.
00:48:10 ►
Not for people who paint themselves blue and dance around buck naked, but for us as well.
00:48:18 ►
But it takes an act of courage.
00:48:29 ►
act of courage, not a weekend at Esalen, not a trip to the ashram where they tell you that if you’ll sweep up for a dozen years, then they’ll hand on a whammy. No, the speed with
00:48:37 ►
which you can reach death is under 45 seconds if you know where the elevator shaft is. And you do.
00:48:46 ►
You do.
00:48:47 ►
I don’t have to tell you.
00:48:48 ►
I’ve been telling you.
00:48:51 ►
Well, so, there’s one more alchemical metaphor or stage that I want to mention here.
00:49:03 ►
Because I think it refers to this psychedelic possibility. Not all the alchemists included this stage in their recensions of the work, but for me I think it’s central.
00:49:28 ►
Again, in their church, bastardized church Latin, they called it the cauda pavones, the peacock’s tail.
00:49:36 ►
Now, the physical basis of this is, if you’ve ever played around with metal and fire,
00:49:41 ►
you know that there are certain metals that when they pass to a certain temperature range, iridescent colors play across the surface and sometimes even
00:49:49 ►
freeze.
00:49:50 ►
And in the glazing of pottery at low temperatures in Raku, what these pottery masters are aiming
00:49:59 ►
for are these wonderful iridescent surfaces that play across the glaze and then can be frozen into it.
00:50:07 ►
Well, this is the peacock’s tail.
00:50:11 ►
And in alchemy, this was thought to precede the final whitening,
00:50:20 ►
the passage into the pure, the goal, really.
00:50:27 ►
And rather than see the present world as exclusively a veil of tears and a black prison,
00:50:37 ►
and none of these metaphors are mutually exclusive,
00:50:41 ►
you see the alchemist, the great strength of alchemical thinking and the way in
00:50:46 ►
which it is completely antithetical to science, and in fact why science has so much contempt for it,
00:50:53 ►
is because the alchemist had the wisdom to see that everything occurs in the presence of its opposite, that it’s not either or, it’s both and. They call this the
00:51:09 ►
coincidencia appositorum, the coincidence of opposites, the union of opposites. This
00:51:16 ►
is a great truth, because I think all of us live under the rubrics of, am I good? Am I bad? Am I lazy? Am I obsessed?
00:51:30 ►
And the answer is that it is never one or the other.
00:51:35 ►
It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites.
00:51:44 ►
to ignore the union of opposites.
00:51:47 ►
Now science, in order to do its work,
00:51:50 ►
which is essentially a technological work,
00:51:53 ►
not a deep philosophical work,
00:51:55 ►
it’s a minor art, science.
00:51:56 ►
That’s all it is.
00:51:58 ►
It’s a minor art.
00:52:00 ►
It’s the art of the physically possible. But it has presumed to be the arbiter of all thought, all feeling, all worth. My
00:52:10 ►
God, the hubris of Rene Descartes to divide momentum. And what are the secondary qualities? Color,
00:52:34 ►
feeling, taste, tactility. It tells you that you’re nothing. You never touch reality. You
00:52:42 ►
live in that world of sense and therefore can only aspire
00:52:46 ►
to the real world through some kind of mathematical disembowelment of your own, what your own body,
00:52:55 ►
what your own feelings are telling you. So in the Calde Pavones, the peacock’s tale,
00:53:08 ►
the Pevones, the Peacock’s Tale, this is where the contradictions meet and generate heat and light and an excruciating sense of poignancy and meaning and identity. And our world, as
00:53:21 ►
we experience it tonight, is quintessentially, another good alchemical word,
00:53:26 ►
is quintessentially that coincidencia appositorum.
00:53:31 ►
Now, where do we meet this most dramatically in our own lives?
00:53:36 ►
I think we meet it in the phenomenon of birth.
00:53:41 ►
Of birth.
00:53:42 ►
If you had just parked your flying saucer in the bushes and came from a world where
00:53:50 ►
sexuality was unknown and people were grown in vats or something, and you came upon a woman
00:53:57 ►
in the act of giving birth, it would appear to be a catastrophe in progress,
00:54:08 ►
a tragedy at the limit of tragedy.
00:54:14 ►
Blood is being shed, anguish is on the surface,
00:54:18 ►
real agony pervades the situation. And yet, and yet, nature in her wisdom has bound pain and ecstasy, death and completion, regeneration and dissolution into that experience in such an indissoluble fashion that no woman can miss the point.
00:54:41 ►
No woman can miss the point.
00:54:44 ►
Unfortunately, men have traditionally averted
00:54:47 ►
their eyes. This has gone on in a hut at the edge of the village. Nobody wanted to be there.
00:54:52 ►
Maybe the shaman would be there, but he was loaded in order to be there. And the sight of men. Now, in our world,
00:55:06 ►
we are caught in this kind of metaphor.
00:55:11 ►
A cosmic birth.
00:55:13 ►
A birth of planetary scale
00:55:15 ►
is underway.
00:55:19 ►
There is agony.
00:55:22 ►
There is no doubt about it.
00:55:24 ►
I remember an embryologist who once taught me pointed out that the fetus in the womb is literally sculpted by the hand of death.
00:55:35 ►
That the immature hand of the fetal organism is a webbed claw.
00:55:42 ►
And that it isn’t that the flesh retracts
00:55:46 ►
to form the human hand.
00:55:48 ►
It’s that the cells in between die
00:55:51 ►
and slough off into the amniotic fluid
00:55:55 ►
and are carried away.
00:55:56 ►
The fetal child is literally sculpted into life
00:56:01 ►
by the hand of death.
00:56:03 ►
And our world is in this kind of a circumstance. There are
00:56:10 ►
no rational solutions at this point. We are now in the hands of the miracle makers, the
00:56:18 ►
shamans, the mind of the planet, the life of the ocean, and the atmosphere.
00:56:27 ►
And it’s going to get tougher.
00:56:37 ►
And so we have to forge the indestructible adamantine stone of alchemical hope because heavier challenges lie ahead.
00:56:42 ►
A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, I cannot but
00:56:47 ►
imagine that this planet will be empty of human beings. Not because we have
00:56:53 ►
become extinct, but because we have gone to our fate. And it’s unimaginable at
00:57:01 ►
this moment because we are in the planetary birth canal. We are at the peak
00:57:07 ►
of transition right now and the walls are literally closing in. We are being suffocated.
00:57:15 ►
We are fighting like a strangled man to try and save ourselves. And yet, we have to believe,
00:57:30 ►
and I invite you to educate yourself about the history of the planet. There is no reason not to believe that we will come through.
00:57:35 ►
We will come through.
00:57:38 ►
There is light at the end of the tunnel.
00:57:41 ►
There is a meaning to history,
00:57:49 ►
but it’s an alchemical meaning. History is a vast alchemical engine for the forging of an alchemical humanity. And I don’t have the answers, believe me.
00:57:58 ►
I don’t know whether we go to another star, whether we become eight angstroms high
00:58:05 ►
and all live in a block of metal
00:58:07 ►
underneath Mount Everest,
00:58:09 ►
whether we march off
00:58:11 ►
to the heart of the sun,
00:58:13 ►
the scenarios are endless
00:58:14 ►
because the human imagination
00:58:17 ►
has such a power
00:58:19 ►
to bootstrap itself
00:58:21 ►
to higher and higher levels.
00:58:24 ►
What would Paleolithic man have made of the religion of pharaonic Egypt?
00:58:30 ►
What would the pharaohs have made of the engines of war and hydraulic machinery created by the Romans?
00:58:38 ►
What would the Gothic scholastic enlightenment have made of the age of cybernetics, psychedelics, and virtual reality.
00:58:49 ►
The imagination is the alchemical deus ex machina that can lift us out of time,
00:58:58 ►
out of the negrado of history, and into higher and higher and higher states of being.
00:59:06 ►
Now there is no reason to simply then ride along in this process,
00:59:12 ►
because another perception of the alchemist that is central to getting this all lined up so that it works
00:59:23 ►
is the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
00:59:28 ►
What does that mean?
00:59:30 ►
It means that the world truly is fractal in the most profound sense,
00:59:36 ►
meaning that what is going on on some very large scale is condensed, intensified,
00:59:48 ►
scale is condensed, intensified, and recapitulated on smaller scales so that the dynamics of a love affair are the dynamics of an empire. Both are the
00:59:54 ►
dynamics of the evolution, expansion, and extinction of a species. There is only
01:00:01 ►
one way that things can happen. And whether we’re talking about micro-physical events or the life of an entire solar system,
01:00:10 ►
the curve of binding energy is going to be the same.
01:00:14 ►
So that means that this redemption of spirit from matter,
01:00:20 ►
that is the historical process that we are embedded in, we can do our part by working on our small section of this,
01:00:31 ►
which is our self.
01:00:33 ►
This is why alchemy was so fascinating to the Jungian psychologists,
01:00:39 ►
because they saw that this work of redeeming spirit from matter is nothing more than the work of redeeming the self
01:00:49 ►
from the contaminated dross of the traumatized and damaged psyche
01:00:56 ►
that we each inherit from our passage through the parental chick pile. We each have that gift to deal with. That
01:01:11 ►
negrado is within ourselves and this is why we’re in therapy and this is why we
01:01:16 ►
take psychedelics and meditate or do whatever we do because we all have this
01:01:21 ►
dross within us and this is a great gift. It means that we can begin
01:01:27 ►
consciously the process of distillation and sublimation and casting of ourselves into
01:01:36 ►
that golden being, that luminous creature that this 104-year-old Vietnamese monk sensed and evoked to my friend. But it’s
01:01:50 ►
more than that. We do that. We do that alchemical work to perfect our own sense of the union
01:01:58 ►
of opposites, our own sense of the presence of the living alchemical stone within, in order that we may then participate,
01:02:10 ►
act in, and be part of the transformation of the planet.
01:02:14 ►
And it is an immense transformation.
01:02:18 ►
And there is no reason to doubt it, because the emergence of organic life from what preceded
01:02:24 ►
it is as dramatic a miracle
01:02:27 ►
as anyone could imagine. The emergence of language from mute bestiality, which is only
01:02:35 ►
100,000 years in the past, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine. The emergence of a planet instantaneously unified by electricity and media
01:02:49 ►
is, and this is only 50, 60 years in our past, it’s still going on,
01:02:54 ►
is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
01:02:59 ►
It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope.
01:03:06 ►
You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty existential scientific ideas.
01:03:17 ►
And when we do that and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered reality
01:03:27 ►
that exists in nature, in society, in our lover, in ourselves,
01:03:35 ►
then you see that the peacock’s tail, the cow de pavones,
01:03:40 ►
is a transcendental object at the end of time,
01:03:45 ►
an enormous, unspeakable something
01:03:50 ►
that beckons across the historical landscape,
01:03:56 ►
that casts an enormous shadow
01:03:59 ►
that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe
01:04:04 ►
that we have always been
01:04:06 ►
in the grip of that iridescent, strange attractor that has propelled our poetry, our art, our
01:04:14 ►
best moments, have always been when a tiny scintilla, another good alchemical word, a tiny spark of that alchemical completion
01:04:27 ►
burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception.
01:04:33 ►
And we occupy a special position in regard to this.
01:04:39 ►
Millions, thousands of generations of human beings have come and gone
01:04:46 ►
and could only glimpse this in the ecstasy of eroticism and psychedelic empowerment and ritual magic.
01:04:56 ►
But we are the last people.
01:05:02 ►
the last people.
01:05:06 ►
Beyond us lies the mystery.
01:05:08 ►
If we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss,
01:05:12 ►
to believe that nature will reward the dreamer,
01:05:17 ►
then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast
01:05:21 ►
which says,
01:05:22 ►
may you be alive at the end of the world.
01:05:25 ►
Because it’s that close. wonderful Irish toast which says, may you be alive at the end of the world.
01:05:27 ►
Because it’s that close.
01:05:30 ►
It cannot wander much longer.
01:05:35 ►
All of the preconditions have been met and the peacock’s tail grows daily,
01:05:39 ►
whiter and more radiant and more brilliant
01:05:42 ►
as we sense now, breaking into our dreams,
01:05:47 ►
breaking into our waking lives,
01:05:49 ►
the presence of this attractor.
01:05:51 ►
It has always given people meaning,
01:05:53 ►
that we are the privileged inheritors of that meaning,
01:05:59 ►
and we have then the privilege of putting it all together in one piece and standing ready
01:06:06 ►
at the end of history to go into the mystery and be completed. So that’s the
01:06:15 ►
end of my song.
01:06:32 ►
Okay, let’s have some questions here.
01:06:33 ►
Hi.
01:06:39 ►
Once one has acquired the bundle weed, how does he consume it?
01:06:42 ►
Technical questions here.
01:06:46 ►
Detail freaks, cooks cooks and recipe mongers for the benefits
01:06:50 ►
of those not initiated into this
01:06:53 ►
it’s interesting
01:06:54 ►
you know aboriginal human beings
01:06:57 ►
have searched the world
01:06:59 ►
for psychedelic sources
01:07:01 ►
and have been
01:07:02 ►
such as in the Amazon
01:07:04 ►
very successful but not
01:07:07 ►
exhaustively successful so that it’s recently become known in the
01:07:13 ►
phytochemical literature that a plant Desmanthus ellinoyensis which this
01:07:19 ►
gentleman is referring to the Illinois bundle weed, appears to have one of the highest concentrations of dimethyltryptamine
01:07:29 ►
of any plant that’s been looked at, and it has no history of aboriginal usage.
01:07:36 ►
And the question is how to activate this into a usable psychedelic.
01:07:50 ►
into a usable psychedelic, probably the way to do it would be to attempt to create an analog to the South American drug, plant drug, ayahuasca,
01:07:56 ►
by combining the bundle weed with a North American source of a beta-carboline,
01:08:02 ►
such as harming, which is what’s in ayahuasca and that would activate it
01:08:08 ►
and the obvious candidate for that would be a succulent plant that grows in the deserts of
01:08:16 ►
new mexico and nevada pagamon harmala and pagamon Harmala combined with Desmanthus alanoiensis
01:08:27 ►
in the correct proportions
01:08:29 ►
would probably deliver a stunning psychedelic experience.
01:08:34 ►
Would you eat it or smoke it?
01:08:37 ►
Drinking. You would boil them together.
01:08:39 ►
No, smoking you can’t. It’s too diffuse in these things.
01:08:43 ►
No, you would perform an alchemy.
01:08:46 ►
You would boil the two for many hours in a large volume of water,
01:08:50 ►
pour off the wash, add new water, boil more hours,
01:08:55 ►
pour off the wash, combine the two fractions,
01:08:59 ►
get rid of the physical material,
01:09:00 ►
and drive it down until it looks like thick coffee.
01:09:05 ►
But, you know, don’t be consumed by your alchemical investigations.
01:09:12 ►
I mean, proceed carefully with this stuff because it’s going to work if you get it right.
01:09:19 ►
In the absence of a scale, how might one measure five grams of dry psilocybin?
01:09:28 ►
Spring for the scale!
01:09:36 ►
And I don’t like these big events because I don’t like sitting up here in
01:09:42 ►
the light and looking out over the sea of faces.
01:09:45 ►
I’m against guruism, leader trips. And anyway, the whole point of this message has to be that
01:09:55 ►
it’s for everybody. Nobody is special. If it can only happen to some kind of elect,
01:10:02 ►
then it’s got no impact, no ability to save the planet.
01:10:06 ►
It’s a human mystery.
01:10:08 ►
It doesn’t belong to the intelligentsia.
01:10:11 ►
It doesn’t belong to the wealthy.
01:10:13 ►
It doesn’t belong to the Irish, regardless of how we kid around about that.
01:10:19 ►
It’s got to be for everybody.
01:10:22 ►
So take this man seriously.
01:10:24 ►
Here he is, second year in a row, pleading for community.
01:10:27 ►
Somebody take him to dinner.
01:10:28 ►
And community is the backbone of the thing.
01:10:32 ►
When I first started doing this, one of the most empowering experiences that I could have after talking to a crowd like this
01:10:40 ►
is someone would come up afterwards and say to me,
01:10:44 ►
I thought I was
01:10:45 ►
crazy till I talked to you till I heard you talk and what they meant was that
01:10:51 ►
they had done psychedelics in the 60s and they had seen the elves and the
01:10:57 ►
machinery of joy but then it at all other people had turned to market
01:11:02 ►
analysis and international banking and what-have you, and it all seemed to flow away. And so people need to find like-minded people.
01:11:18 ►
Yeah, Terrence, I was interested in your concept of faith. It reminded me of a quote by Jung
01:11:22 ►
where he says that faith is doing willingly
01:11:25 ►
that which I must do. And I was wondering about this concept of faith. You were talking
01:11:30 ►
about the Greeks thought of faith as the one thing that you couldn’t go beyond. You know,
01:11:35 ►
even Zeus himself was terrified of the faith, the moira. And the idea of not being able
01:11:41 ►
to pass beyond the physical body, not being able to pass beyond boundaries,
01:11:47 ►
that we are bounded by fate, even the gods themselves.
01:11:53 ►
And yet you were talking about the concept of the alchemist believing about going beyond one’s fate.
01:11:54 ►
I find this idea very delicious.
01:12:02 ►
You know, I thought maybe you could elaborate on the idea of going beyond one’s fate or this kind of freedom in the… Yes, the way they did did it as I briefly indicated but didn’t get into
01:12:07 ►
was through magic and the kind of magic was the following it was the styles of renaissance magic
01:12:17 ►
that developed in the wake of the translation of this herm Corpus. Previously magic had been sort of as the cartoon
01:12:29 ►
image we have of it, the lonely wizard off in the woods grinding up his potions and toads or
01:12:37 ►
that sort of thing. But in the Renaissance, in the courts of the Medici court,
01:12:48 ►
people like Marcello Ficino and Campanello and these people
01:12:54 ►
took the idea of astrological associations,
01:13:00 ►
in other words, that plants and minerals and odors and this sort of thing
01:13:06 ►
could all be associated to given zodiacal signs,
01:13:12 ►
and they created a theatrical style of magic, a ceremonial magic,
01:13:18 ►
where by, say, you wanted to counteract a Saturn aspect of some sort,
01:13:26 ►
well then, by choosing the opposite,
01:13:31 ►
the herbs and gems and perfumes associated with the opposite sort of situation,
01:13:40 ►
and gathering them to you, you could make a model of the universe,
01:13:45 ►
a new model of the universe.
01:13:46 ►
And they did this in round rooms and built orreries
01:13:50 ►
and practiced a kind of ceremonial magic that made them then the companions of princes.
01:13:57 ►
And the dark figure of the lonely magician in the woods
01:14:01 ►
was replaced by the Renaissance Magus,
01:14:07 ►
lonely magician in the woods was replaced by the Renaissance Magus, who was manipulating political realities, counseling popes, and taking magical power into his hands specifically
01:14:15 ►
for the purpose of counteracting the machinery of fate.
01:14:19 ►
It had to do with this idea of if fate is is decreed by God’s cosmos but man is
01:14:27 ►
the co-creator with God then by setting up a magical microcosm the ordinary
01:14:35 ►
asterisms the ordinary influences of astrology can be deflected and if you’re
01:14:42 ►
interested in this sort of thing Dame Frances Yates
01:14:46 ►
wrote a wonderful book called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic tradition and
01:14:52 ►
there’s another book by DP Walker called demonic and spiritual magic from
01:14:58 ►
Ficino to Campanella these are not easy books find. Try the Bodhi tree and William and Victoria
01:15:06 ►
Daly down on Melrose can help you out. If they were easy to find, what fun would it
01:15:11 ►
be? I mean, part of the quest is getting this stuff together. But that’s the basic theory
01:15:16 ►
of Renaissance magic, is to create a microcosm to counter the fatalistic machinery of the macrocosm.
01:15:25 ►
I just want to leave you with one story
01:15:28 ►
because it sort of fills out the theme
01:15:30 ►
and shows how peculiarly the spirit moves
01:15:36 ►
and how the coincidencia positorum is present
01:15:40 ►
in so many unexpected situations.
01:15:44 ►
I think somewhere in the body of my talk,
01:15:46 ►
I got a dig in at Cartesian logic or Cartesian rationalism.
01:15:51 ►
As you know, modern scientific materialism was founded by René Descartes,
01:15:57 ►
a French philosopher of the 17th century.
01:16:02 ►
But what the historians of science have been at great pains to keep from
01:16:07 ►
view is the following story, which is attested to in Descartes’ own journal. When he was a young man
01:16:15 ►
of about 22 years old, he decided to go soldiering and wenching around Europe, which was something young men of that era did. And he joined
01:16:27 ►
a Habsburg army, which was on a mission to lay siege to the city of Prague in Bohemia to suppress
01:16:35 ►
what was essentially an alchemical revival. I won’t go into the details, but a young prince of the Northern Leagues and his queen,
01:16:46 ►
who was the daughter of James of England and was named Elizabeth after her grandmother,
01:16:52 ►
had managed to gain control of the empire, had been elected, in fact.
01:16:58 ►
He was called Frederick the Elector Palatine.
01:17:01 ►
And this Hapsburg army was sent to destroy this Protestant alchemical reformation.
01:17:08 ►
And it did so.
01:17:10 ►
It laid siege to the city and killed this young man and his queen fled to the Hague.
01:17:16 ►
And then they retreated across Germany.
01:17:29 ►
Germany. And on, I believe it was the 17th of August of that year, which was 1619, the beginning year of the Thirty Years’ War, they made camp at Ulm in southern Germany. And
01:17:36 ►
just as an aside, Ulm later was the birthplace of Albert Einstein. But that night Descartes had a dream. And the dream, in the dream, a radiant angel
01:17:51 ►
appeared to him and said, the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure.
01:18:10 ►
number and measure. And in that moment, Rene Descartes went from being a nobody to being the founder of modern science. Modern science was founded at the direction of an angel,
01:18:18 ►
and the angel showed how it was. And to this day, modern science has made all of its strides
01:18:26 ►
through the application of number,
01:18:29 ►
mathematical analysis, and measure.
01:18:32 ►
That is the secret of the scientific conquest of nature.
01:18:36 ►
And it’s a secret that was imparted to Rene Descartes
01:18:40 ►
by an angelic entity.
01:18:42 ►
So I’d like you to leave this evening wondering who do we work for
01:18:48 ►
and how does it work thank you very very much
01:18:56 ►
good night Good night. Actually, I think I’ve got an answer to that question, but you’ll have to wait for my next book.
01:19:27 ►
It’s a long answer.
01:19:29 ►
You know, carrying on with Terrence’s idea that we heard just now of moving beyond fate with a kind of magic
01:19:36 ►
got me to thinking that as a species, perhaps, we can move beyond our fate of over-consuming and polluting ourselves into extinction.
01:19:46 ►
Perhaps we can use the magic of this marvelous electronic nervous system we now have evolved
01:19:52 ►
to move beyond the fate of a tightly controlled hierarchical society
01:19:56 ►
and into more of a human hyperarchical web of interconnectivity
01:20:02 ►
that is more in resonance with the voice of the planet.
01:20:06 ►
Or something like that.
01:20:09 ►
Now, I was going to read part of an email from Cameron Adams that he sent in response to last week’s program,
01:20:16 ►
but I’m going to save that for my next podcast,
01:20:19 ►
which I’ll talk about some of my ideas about university education in general
01:20:24 ►
and the floating salons that KMO and Neil Kramer have started.
01:20:29 ►
So I’ll hold Cameron’s comments and read them next week in a better context.
01:20:35 ►
But here is something that came in from Joe Green Go that you may be interested in.
01:20:40 ►
He writes,
01:20:42 ►
Hello, Lorenzo. I just wanted to let you know that I recast your talk, Living Under the Radar, Surviving in a Control Culture. He writes, Best wishes and keep up the excellent work. Oh, and thanks for your reversal on your no leery policy a few years ago.
01:21:07 ►
And I’ve listened to the Genesis generation four or five times now, and it’s marvelous.
01:21:11 ►
I so desperately hope that there is a lot of truth to much of it, notably the undercover agents of this community.
01:21:19 ►
Thanks a million, Lorenzo.
01:21:20 ►
All the best for 2010.
01:21:22 ►
Blessings, Joe Green Joe.
01:21:24 ►
And he’s got a new podcast. and Lorenzo. All the best for 2010. Blessings, Joe Greenjoe.
01:21:26 ►
And he’s got a new podcast. It’s at
01:21:27 ►
florafungiandfuture.podomatic.com
01:21:31 ►
and I’ll put a link
01:21:32 ►
there. He’s up to seven
01:21:34 ►
episodes already and like I tell everyone
01:21:36 ►
who sends me a link to their new
01:21:37 ►
podcast, I look forward to
01:21:39 ►
hearing your episode number
01:21:41 ►
ten because
01:21:42 ►
unfortunately not many people make it up to their 10th program.
01:21:47 ►
And I think we’re all looking for longevity in our podcasts.
01:21:52 ►
Plus, by the 10th or 20th program, you finally get the hang of it a little better.
01:21:57 ►
To tell the truth, I dearly would like to take down my first 50 or so programs, because
01:22:02 ►
they sound so cheesy to me.
01:22:04 ►
But for now now i’m leaving
01:22:06 ►
them up there i suppose at some point the rss feeds that itunes accept will be limited in
01:22:12 ►
length hopefully not but you never know so i’m going to leave everything up there for now and
01:22:17 ►
those of you that have podcasts and new podcasts in particular once you get a number of episodes
01:22:24 ►
up there under your belt,
01:22:25 ►
I’ll be happy to help promote them.
01:22:27 ►
I haven’t been too good about that lately.
01:22:29 ►
I know I mainly talk about KMO and all of them over on the Dopamine Network, but, oh,
01:22:36 ►
gee, you know, there’s diet soap, there’s biota, there’s Tom Barberle’s ape reality,
01:22:43 ►
there’s, oh, I wish I could think of them all off the top of my head right now,
01:22:47 ►
but there’s a long list of them.
01:22:50 ►
And you should search around and go over to the girlreport.com forums
01:22:55 ►
and look at some of the reports of podcasts over there.
01:22:59 ►
I think you’ll see that it’s a huge world out here now.
01:23:03 ►
Anyhow, another email comes from fellow salonner and visionary artist Leo Plau, who says in part,
01:23:11 ►
Hi Lorenzo, this year is off to a good, if not busy, start.
01:23:16 ►
You may or may not know about some big things that are happening.
01:23:20 ►
2010 is shaping up to be a year of coming together as a community and building our visions.
01:23:25 ►
January is not even finished, and I have my artwork in two group shows.
01:23:30 ►
The first was the Temple of Visions in L.A., and it’s a long link, and I’ll put it in our program notes for today’s program.
01:23:38 ►
The second is a group show that I’ve organized here in Berlin with two friends of mine,
01:23:43 ►
Dennis Constantine and Mika Kalori-Krebs.
01:23:47 ►
And I’ll link to that announcement as well.
01:23:50 ►
This exhibition marks an important milestone.
01:23:54 ►
For a long time, we have looked to other places where the action is at.
01:23:58 ►
Now we will set the gears in motion and start with our own fantastic and visionary art events here in Berlin. A part of this greater plan to create more opportunities for artwork
01:24:08 ►
is the publication of a catalog of our paintings.
01:24:11 ►
It’s the first book I’ve designed and printed,
01:24:14 ►
and I’ll also provide a link where you can view an interactive preview of the book,
01:24:20 ►
which is filled with images that I find particularly compelling.
01:24:26 ►
Leo goes on, to Leo Plau, Visionary Fine Art, and you can find him at leoplaw.com.
01:24:48 ►
So if you want to see some art that really inspires me,
01:24:52 ►
surf by Leo’s websites and see what you think.
01:24:56 ►
And I’m sure he would appreciate your comments also.
01:25:00 ►
Now one last email for today comes from Espen in Norway, who says,
01:25:04 ►
Dear Lorenzo, thank you for being.
01:25:07 ►
You are a true gentleman, and I believe that the example you set,
01:25:11 ►
through your compassionate, insightful, respectful, humble, yet critical thoughts and comments,
01:25:16 ►
will serve as a strong inspiration for many generations ahead of what it means to be a good person.
01:25:22 ►
You have brought me the most enlightening days at work,
01:25:21 ►
of what it means to be a good person.
01:25:24 ►
You have brought me the most enlightening days at work,
01:25:30 ►
as I surely sparkle while listening to the salon in my car while at work in… Oh, I can’t pronounce the name of this town, but it’s in Norway.
01:25:34 ►
Thank you.
01:25:35 ►
And, Josh, thank you for that.
01:25:38 ►
That’s a little over the top, but he goes on and says,
01:25:41 ►
I know you probably won’t be able to read this email,
01:25:45 ►
hence I made it purposely short in order to heighten my chances of getting my mail across.
01:25:50 ►
And by the way, thanks for doing that, Espen.
01:25:52 ►
As you guessed, I usually don’t get around to the really long life story kind of emails.
01:25:57 ►
Not because I’m not interested, but because I just don’t have that much time to allocate to email these days.
01:26:03 ►
Anyhow, Espen goes on.
01:26:05 ►
There are two points I would like to bring to your attention.
01:26:08 ►
It would be interesting to hear what you think of the work of Paul Stamets,
01:26:12 ►
who has some great lectures of hope on how mushrooms can save the world, etc.
01:26:16 ►
He knew Terence McKenna for the last couple of years, as I have come to understand it.
01:26:21 ►
Well, actually, I have had the pleasure of meeting Paul on several occasions,
01:26:27 ►
including the great mushroom conference that he organized in 1991,
01:26:31 ►
and photos of which are on one of my websites, I think.
01:26:35 ►
But in my opinion, Paul is one of the top two or three fungi experts in the whole world,
01:26:41 ►
and his TED Talk is one of the best of that series, I think.
01:26:46 ►
However, several years ago, Paul made kind of a break with the psychedelic community
01:26:51 ►
in order to focus better on his work with the government where they’re neutralizing toxic waste,
01:26:56 ►
like mustard gas, with some of the mushroom species that Paul has worked with.
01:27:01 ►
And so I want to respect his wishes and not link him too tightly to the psychedelic community.
01:27:07 ►
Now that said, if you’re only going to buy one book about psychedelic mushrooms,
01:27:12 ►
Paul’s book titled Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World
01:27:15 ►
is sort of the gold standard in that field, I think.
01:27:19 ►
But let me get back to Espen’s email. He goes on,
01:27:23 ►
The Amanita Muscaria mushroom has received little
01:27:26 ►
notice in the salon, and I was wondering
01:27:28 ►
why this is so.
01:27:29 ►
Probably the easiest psychedelic mushroom to
01:27:32 ►
find, yet very few lectures are
01:27:34 ►
given on this mushroom.
01:27:36 ►
Well, Espen, your kind
01:27:38 ►
words have made me blush, and
01:27:40 ►
that isn’t easy to do.
01:27:42 ►
But in regards to the Amanita
01:27:44 ►
Muscaria mushroom,
01:27:45 ►
what little I know about it actually does come from Paul Stamets.
01:27:49 ►
I can still remember his really hilarious story
01:27:53 ►
about an experiment he did with Amanita one time,
01:27:57 ►
and I hope that one day we can get him to tell it in public.
01:28:01 ►
But the most important bit of information he gave us
01:28:04 ►
about that particular
01:28:05 ►
species was that, at least at the time he thought this, and that was what he saw as a very uneven
01:28:12 ►
distribution of the psychoactive ingredients in the Amanita. As I recall, he said that there may
01:28:19 ►
be cases where you could eat three quarters of one of them without any effects at all,
01:28:23 ►
but the last quarter was a doozy.
01:28:26 ►
Now, as I just said, I don’t know if this holds true across the board,
01:28:30 ►
but it does point out the fact that this particular variety of mushroom
01:28:34 ►
is one of the trickiest to use.
01:28:37 ►
So be very careful out there if your research takes you in that direction.
01:28:41 ►
I’ve never worked up the courage to try them myself.
01:28:44 ►
In fact, I’m perfectly content
01:28:46 ►
to just look at them
01:28:47 ►
in the new 3D version
01:28:48 ►
of Alice in Wonderland
01:28:49 ►
that’s about to come out.
01:28:51 ►
I guess my courage is waning
01:28:53 ►
in my older years, huh?
01:28:55 ►
Well, that’ll do it for now.
01:28:57 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast
01:28:59 ►
by reminding you that this
01:29:01 ►
and most of the podcasts
01:29:03 ►
from the Psychedelic Salon
01:29:04 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Thank you. find at psychedelicsalon.org. And that’s also where the program notes are for this
01:29:26 ►
podcast. And if you’re
01:29:27 ►
interested in the philosophy behind the
01:29:29 ►
Psychedelic Salon, you can hear all about
01:29:32 ►
it in my novel, The Genesis
01:29:33 ►
Generation, which is available
01:29:35 ►
as an audiobook that you can download at
01:29:37 ►
genesisgeneration.us.
01:29:40 ►
And for now,
01:29:42 ►
this is Lorenzo, signing off
01:29:43 ►
from Cyberdelic Space
01:29:45 ►
be well my friends