221 - McKenna_ Evolving Times

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“What I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment long before it was meaning. It’s a kind of tuneless singing.”

“Sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence, a situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, all were in dynamic balance. And not in any primitive sense at all. Language was fully developed. Poetry may have been at its climax. Dance, magic, poetics, altruism, philosophy, there’s no reason to think that these things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the boundary-dissolving influence of psilocybin.”

“All the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn’t have a mind that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.”

“What history is, essentially, is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance.”

“We were essentially torn from the Gaian womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it.”

“All of them, if you generalized, what these substances do is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. … Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries.”

“The Germans take quite a knock for the holocaust, but the Catholic church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the holocaust managed in its entire show. And it’s thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are in complicity with mass murder.”

“We need a pharmacological intervention on anti-social behavior or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.”

“There has been no progress in 60,000 years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them.”

“I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying it connects you up to the mind of Nature Herself.”

“I think ideology is toxic, all ideology. It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic, because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.”

“The only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow. … And our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak.”

“I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn’t take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.”

“We don’t want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis, which is the way we may well be headed.”

“It’s inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has.

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And the first thing I’d like to do is to thank some dear friends of the Salon,

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namely Charlie H., Mark T., Zachary M., long-time friend of the Salon, Max T.,

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and once again, Nexus 112 have all sent us some of their hard-earned cash

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to help with the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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And while I don’t have time to cover this story in detail until next week’s program,

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I have taken the liberty of passing along part of your donations this week to Jonathan Ott,

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whose house and laboratory were recently lost to fire.

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So Charlie, Mark, Nexus 112, Zachary, and Max, hey, thanks again for

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your support, and I’m sure that Jonathan also appreciates it. Well, here we are again on what

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has come to be known as Terrence Day, and while 10 years ago today, April 3rd in the year 2000,

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the worldwide psychedelic community was deeply

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saddened by the news of his death. Today the pain has receded and in a way been replaced with the

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joy that we feel as we recall all of the little pieces of brain candy that he left behind for us

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to enjoy. Originally I was going to play a collage of my favorite soundbites from past podcasts of Terrence,

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but the truth is that, like you, I’m still searching for talks of his that I haven’t heard before,

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and this happens to be one of them.

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I can’t say exactly when it was recorded,

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but he does mention that he had only moved away from California about eight months earlier,

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so you can probably figure it out if you want to track that down.

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And I also can’t say exactly where I got this recording, I’m afraid.

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Since I’ve been receiving download links via email, Facebook, Twitter, tribe.net, thegirlreport.com,

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a comment or two on our salon blog, or from some other source.

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Thank you. Filing and organizing just seemed like work to me. And so, before I say anything else, I first want to thank the person that, for now, I’ll have to call the unknown salonner.

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And that’s the person who sent me the recording we are about to hear.

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And I really feel terrible about not being able to thank them right now,

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because I found this talk to be almost as fresh as if it was recorded just last night.

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Before today, if somebody asked me where to start if they’d never heard a Terrence McKenna recording before,

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I always pointed them to podcast number 28, which begins the Valley of Novelty series.

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But from now on, I’m going to suggest the talk that we’re about to hear.

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I really enjoyed it. Now, I’ll warn you that when he first began to talk about the stoned apes coming down from the trees,

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I almost stopped listening myself because I thought I’d heard it all before.

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But something kept me there because this time the story was somehow sounding fresher, fuller,

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or maybe it was just more completely thought through this time. But once he gets his basic hypothesis out of the way,

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boy, the good bard gets on a roll that I can’t wait to hear again,

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which is what I’m going to do along with you right now.

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And since this is a celebration of Terrence Day,

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I decided to play the entire recording rather than put the Q&A in the next podcast.

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So strap yourself in and get ready

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for a two-hour ride with our favorite bard, Terrence McKenna. Well, I like to lead with good

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news, so let me assure you that at no point this evening will I read from or quote the poet Rumi. It’s a pleasure to be in Sacramento.

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It’s a pleasure to be in California. I lived here for about 30 years before moving out about eight months ago, lived over in Occidental.

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So I sort of feel like this is a hometown congregation.

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You may have seen the story in the bee this morning.

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It was a reasonable detailing of my theory of evolution.

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I noticed that one expert wouldn’t even give his name

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to allow his no comment to have attribution.

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Gentlemen, this is no way to behave

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in the face of an ideological revolution.

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Anyway, and plus, it isn’t even my weirdest idea

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but that was left

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unmentioned thankfully in the article

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but

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since the article dealt so specifically

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with evolution and because that probably

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is my best candidate for entree into any kind of

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respectability, something I crave intensely in every atom of my body, I thought I would

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discuss it with you this evening and try and make it seem a little less absurd than my critics might make it

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seem.

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First of all, let me lay out for you the nature of the problem.

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Right now, the nature of the problem is finding the damn phone and shutting it off.

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phone and shutting it off. No, the nature of the problem is that evolutionary theory tells us that we are some kind of advanced animal of some sort, and science has waged

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a noble struggle over the past 150 years to secure this position against all attacks by

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orthodox religious thinking. And yet, there is, after it’s all said and done, the sense that if

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we are an animal, we are a very, very peculiar sort of animal. Indeed, a unique animal,

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an animal capable of language and coordinated planning,

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an animal not bound to a particular social or sexual style.

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We have monogamous human societies, polygamous societies.

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This is very different from animals.

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We have poetry.

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We have mathematics.

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We have drama.

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A whole spectrum of effects that is far from anything that we find in animal organization.

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And this problem has fascinated me for a long, long time as it’s fascinated a lot of

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people. Because obviously, it’s a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution

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that it can’t account for human consciousness. Because after all, human consciousness produced the theory of evolution.

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So you see, it’s a significant failure there.

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So, obviously, if you accept the basic rules of the evolutionary game,

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which are that there is random mutation,

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evolutionary game, which are that there is a random mutation, which means

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gene drift, mixing of genes through sexual reproduction,

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cosmic rays which cause birth defects and mutations, this sort of thing, and

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natural selection. And

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these two factors, natural selection and mutation, are sufficient to account for praying mantises, chipmunks, tropical rainforests, but not us.

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And the reason is that we emerge too quickly from the background of the rest of ordinary nature. In the space of about two billion years, the human brain doubled in size. And Lumholtz, who is an orthodox evolutionary biologist, calls this the most dramatic transformation of a major organ of a higher animal

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in the entire history of life.

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And it happened to us.

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It happened to that very organ that is responsible for the theory of evolution.

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So what extraordinary confluence of factors could have come together there to take essentially an arboreal monkey, an ape of some sort, that had been at an evolutionary climax in the canopy of the rainforest for a couple of million years, what extraordinary

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set of factors could then set that creature marching down the road toward, you know, Elvis,

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the internet, Bill Clinton, and all the rest of it?

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Well, you would imagine, or I imagined when I first started thinking about this,

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that there must be some huge edifice of established theory that we have to go up in there and blow up.

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Surely somebody has staked out this ground and made some kind of an argument about human consciousness. Well, in terms of science, not, or almost not.

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I mean, in terms of religion, it’s simple.

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I mean, God made us from the clay of the earth.

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In terms of science, the best shot is pretty weak soup from my point of view.

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Here’s what science is telling us, that

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when you throw something, you have to plan. Because once you let go of whatever it is you’re

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throwing, you can no longer control it. And so because we were small and weak and hunted in packs, we learned

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to throw like hell at very large onrushing, woolly fellow mammals of

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various sorts. And you had to plan your throw. Consequently, we developed brain capacity to do this and had enough left over to

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invent quantum physics, paint the Mona Lisa, invent the phonetic alphabet, philosophy, religion, and

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all the rest of it. In other words, it was the coordination of the hand and the eye to the

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throwing arm, this is what the orthodox folks tell us,

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that gave us this extra brain capacity

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that we sort of then managed into human civilization.

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Well, notice that this would make the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder

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the gum-chewing big league baseball pitcher.

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gum-chewing, big-league baseball pitcher.

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Because, you know, he can put that pill right across the plate at high speed time after time.

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As somebody who learned everything they know about sadomasochism in P.E. class,

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I’m not really ready to embrace this theory. It definitely runs against my paradigm.

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So I’ve built another story, and it, to my mind, meets the objections, answers the question,

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where did consciousness come from? But instead of doing it very nicely and neatly,

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it raises in the very act of answering this question,

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other questions, maybe more closer to home,

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questions that reflect on our social organization, our politics,

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how we treat each other in the here and now,

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even with implications for the future.

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But we’ll get to that.

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For the moment, let me just run through this for you.

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There’s sort of a basic situation

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that all theories of evolution have to come to terms with. And this is that our remote proto-hominid, primate, ape ancestors lived and developed in Africa.

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If you have a non-African theory of human origin, and there are such things,

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but the evidence is strongly against you.

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If it were stock, I’d sell. The evidence is pretty strong that whatever happened that brought us

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out of the animal body, it happened in Africa. Well, all animals tend to, and plants for that matter, tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche and stabilize in that niche.

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Cockroaches, ants achieved this hundreds of millions of years ago and have not changed greatly since. Most of biology is this iterative occupation of a climaxed niche.

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Very little of biology is the pushing forward into radical new forms, new species, still rarer,

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new genera. For that, there has to be disruption of some sort of the environment.

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And it can be the meandering of a river or an asteroid strike

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or the retreat of a glacier, something which creates open land.

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Well, for five, six million years now, the African continent has been slowly drying.

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And three million years ago, it was covered by rainforest at the equator from east to west. And that was the environment of the human ancestor types.

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They were canopy dwelling.

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They were fruit eating.

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They ate some percentage of insects, composed their diet.

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They had a pack signaling repertoire that was fairly complicated by animal standards.

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And there they were, happily living in the canopy.

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But Africa began to dry up, and they came under nutritional pressure.

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Now, simpler animals, insects, for example, when their food source is withdrawn they usually buy the farm.

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They don’t have much flexibility of diet. If you’ve ever tried to raise caterpillars into

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butterflies for your children you know that if you give the caterpillars the wrong leaves

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they just can’t make any sense out of it and they die.

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More advanced animals, when confronted with dietary pressure or disappearance of ordinary

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food supplies, before they give up the ghost, they will experiment with other food sources

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in the environment.

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experiment with other food sources in the environment.

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Now, the reason this isn’t normally done is thought,

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the reason animals are conservative in their food choices,

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it’s thought to be a way of avoiding mutational influences in the form of tertiary chemicals, toxins, viruses,

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and things like this that would be in unusual foods.

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One of the things that accompanies our acquisition of consciousness

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is gastronomy, the appreciation of flavor,

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the approach to food that makes it an art. Animals don’t do this. They’re just trying

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to get enough protein to keep the old engines running. The notion of flavoring is counterintuitive

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to animals, and flavoring is probably in part a mutagenic influence to our diet. When our remote ancestors came under environmental pressure,

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their environment was shrinking, the rainforest was being replaced by grasslands, and nutritional

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pressure, their ordinary diet of fruit and insects was being restricted, they began exploring this new environment of the grasslands.

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And this is the era of knuckle walking turning into bipedalism.

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It’s the era of the coordination of binocular vision,

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so forth and so on.

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There was a paper published recently,

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which anticipates my point,

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but I can’t wait to hit you with

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it a paper published recently about canopy dwelling monkeys who only leave

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the canopy for the acquisition of one particular food and the food they will

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come to the ground for and risk predation is mushrooms. So it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest

00:19:09 ►

that our remote ancestors exploring the new environment of the grasslands

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would have encountered, as you would if you were to go to the tropics,

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psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of cattle.

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Many dung-growing so-called coprophytic, coprolitic mushrooms produce psilocybin,

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among them Stropharia cubensis, which is one of the largest

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and pandemically distributed of these mushrooms.

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I’m sure that our early ancestors also tested other kinds of food.

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They were testing everything.

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They were digging for corms with pointed sticks.

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And I’m sure there were many ecological and medical disasters as a consequence of this.

00:20:06 ►

For instance, the birth control steroids

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in modern birth control pills

00:20:13 ►

are produced by diascoria vines

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grown on plantations in Mexico.

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Well, diascoria is the family of sweet potatoes.

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Imagine a hungry band of primates that come upon a patch of sweet potatoes

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that are heavy in these steroids.

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It would raise holy havoc with their reproductive cycle.

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It would interfere with menstruation, ovulation, lactation, fertility.

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And, you know, human genetic history is the story of many such encounters with mutagenic influences in the environment.

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Most of them catastrophic, detrimental, lethal, but in some few cases there would have been

00:21:08 ►

solitary results, advantages conferred upon the animals that accept these new

00:21:16 ►

foods into their food chain. And I want to particularly emphasize psilocybin

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because I believe it’s the key. You see, we’re looking for

00:21:26 ►

some kind of factor which could have exploded the human brain size at a rate 10 times faster

00:21:36 ►

than evolution normally takes place. So it’s going to be an unusual situation. Perhaps the need to throw a boulder a distance accurately,

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or perhaps contact with an unusual food item or drug-containing plant.

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But it was something unusual.

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If it weren’t unusual, it wouldn’t have taken this planet a billion and a half years

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to bring forth its first intelligent species.

00:22:08 ►

Well, so let’s look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.

00:22:13 ►

It has a number of properties not specifically related to its psychoactivity that make it an

00:22:21 ►

ideal candidate for a catalyst for the emergence of consciousness in an advanced animal.

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First of all, and at the early stage of human invasion

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of this new grassland environment,

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proto-hominid invasion, I should say,

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we were testing foods.

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We would certainly have tested this food.

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I’ve seen these things the size of dinner plates in the Amazon after a rain,

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and they are silvery with blue and purple shading.

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They are the most dramatic thing in the environment,

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whether you know anything about them as psychoactive agents are not. Certainly they would have been tested

00:23:07 ►

for food. I’ve seen baboons in Kenya investigating cow pies and flipping them over because beetle

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grubs nestle underneath them. So cow pies are a natural vector for hungry baboons so that everything is in place.

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It’s trivial to suggest otherwise, I would maintain.

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Okay, the first quality of psilocybin, which isn’t specifically related to its psychoactivity, activity is that in small doses, doses that are the kind you might obtain if you were just sort of

00:23:48 ►

eating it along with little roots, grass roots, small bugs, you know, so forth and so on, visual

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acuity is improved. Specifically, edge detection is improved.

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Well, now, it seems to me you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’re in a highly competitive evolutionary environment

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in grassland, an environment characterized by large predators hunting cats

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and also characterized by small ungulate prey, that having an increased sensitivity to

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edge movement might make the difference between whether or not you live to tell the tale or you

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become somebody’s dinner, or it would certainly make the difference between going home empty-handed and taking dinner home with you.

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So a factor which enhanced edge detection on those animals accepting that food supply

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into their food chain, they would have a slightly increased chance of evolutionary success

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as opposed to the non-silicidin members of their group.

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And this increased hunting success would tend to outbreed the non-silicidin using members

00:25:17 ►

of the group.

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At slightly higher doses, in highly sexed animals like primates,

00:25:36 ►

all alkaloids are what are called CNS stimulants, central nervous system stimulants. That means that they produce arousal.

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And in sexually extremely active animals like primates,

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And in sexually extremely active animals like primates, arousal means erection, usually in the male, usually followed by hanky-panky, what anthropologists and prim’s a second factor tending to outbreed the non-silocybin-using members of the population.

00:26:13 ►

They’re now definitely moving to the rear of the parade.

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They don’t have as much hunting success.

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They don’t have as much food for themselves and their offspring.

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They’re not having as much sex, so they’re not having as many offspring.

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And, you know, in terms of rising and falling numbers,

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those that have some allergy, prejudice, or fear of the mushroom

00:26:38 ►

are just being shunted out of the breeding population.

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out of the breeding population.

00:26:47 ►

Well, at still higher doses,

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approaching effective doses of 20 milligrams or more,

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in other words, 4 grams dried and up,

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or 45 grams wet and up,

00:27:02 ►

hunting is out of the question.

00:27:09 ►

Sex is something you can consider, but it’s out of the question. Sex is something you can consider, but it’s out of the question. And you are basically nailed to the ground in a state of mind

00:27:16 ►

which we, for all of our sophistication, our logical positivism,

00:27:22 ►

our superconducting supercolliders, and all the rest of it,

00:27:26 ►

haven’t a clue as to what it is, what it means, what its implications are.

00:27:31 ►

The full-blown psychedelic experience of which we can only speak in terms of religious hierophany,

00:27:41 ►

epiphany, apokatastasis, and all those other great Greek words.

00:27:47 ►

Ataraxia, you know, in other words, we like it, but we don’t understand it.

00:27:53 ►

And it is, therefore, the basis for religion.

00:27:58 ►

Well, so right there, you have a three-step process

00:28:04 ►

driven by nothing more than hunger and curiosity that leads remote primate ancestors to a confrontation with what Rudolf Otto called the holy other, the holy, the numinous, the transcendental. And, you know, this is on slightly less firm ground,

00:28:27 ►

but in my own personal experience

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and having collected psychedelic experiences lifelong,

00:28:34 ►

I feel confident in saying that at high doses,

00:28:38 ►

psilocybin causes glossolalia.

00:28:41 ►

Glossolalia is syntactically structured language-like behavior in the absence

00:28:48 ►

of meaning. Speaking in tongues is what Christian fundamentalists call it, but they don’t have

00:28:56 ►

monopoly on it. It’s ancient. It occurs in all cultures. It’s shamanic. And what it is,

00:29:01 ►

occurs in all cultures.

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It’s shamanic.

00:29:07 ►

And what it is is it’s a kind of neurological seizure where linguistic organization spontaneously is verbalized.

00:29:14 ►

No animal does this.

00:29:16 ►

It must have something to do with the acquisition of language by human beings.

00:29:22 ►

of language by human beings.

00:29:25 ►

And what I think is going on is that probably language was entertainment

00:29:30 ►

long before it was meaning,

00:29:33 ►

that it’s a kind of tuneless singing,

00:29:37 ►

and that having discovered

00:29:39 ►

that we could make an almost endless repertoire

00:29:42 ►

of small mouth noises,

00:29:44 ►

we did this for each other, for amusement, for to pass the time.

00:29:52 ►

I mean, God knows there was a lot of it.

00:29:54 ►

And it probably was very late in the evolution of this ability that some very tight-ass rational type said, you know, we could attach a specific

00:30:08 ►

meaning to a specific sound, and then every time I made that sound, you’d know what I

00:30:15 ►

meant, and then you could go and get it for me.

00:30:19 ►

You see?

00:30:22 ►

It’s a sort of, it’s the as long as you’re up, get me a grants theory of language.

00:30:31 ►

So so that’s the basic idea. sometime in the last 50,000 years, before 12,000 years ago,

00:30:47 ►

a kind of paradise came into existence.

00:30:52 ►

A situation in which men and women, parents and children, people and animals,

00:31:01 ►

human institutions and the land,

00:31:09 ►

all were in dynamic balance and not in any primitive sense at all.

00:31:14 ►

Language was fully developed.

00:31:18 ►

Poetry may have been at its climax.

00:31:20 ►

Dance, magic, poetics, altruism,

00:31:27 ►

philosophy. There’s no reason to think that these things

00:31:32 ►

were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them

00:31:35 ►

today. And it was under the

00:31:39 ►

aegis of the boundary dissolving influence

00:31:43 ►

of psilocybin.

00:31:46 ►

We were nomadic.

00:31:48 ►

We were breeders and caretakers of cattle.

00:31:52 ►

We worshipped the great goddess.

00:31:54 ►

We followed a yearly round in a vast grassland

00:31:58 ►

cut by crystal streams that were washing down

00:32:01 ►

out of the higher altitudes.

00:32:04 ►

And we were probably black as your hat, for that matter.

00:32:09 ►

And it was great.

00:32:12 ►

Well, if it was so great, what happened?

00:32:16 ►

Well, the very forces which created this situation,

00:32:24 ►

and you will recall what it was,

00:32:26 ►

it was the drying of the African continent, forcing us out of the trees,

00:32:30 ►

forcing us to change our diet, forcing us to accept a dung-growing mushroom.

00:32:38 ►

And there were other factors forcing us into consciousness as well.

00:32:43 ►

When we became omnivorous,

00:32:49 ►

the first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey.

00:32:54 ►

Predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness,

00:32:59 ►

big cats, but it’s a consciousness of the exterior world.

00:33:02 ►

Psilocybin forced us beyond that into consciousness of the imaginal world,

00:33:07 ►

the world of the imagination inside our heads.

00:33:12 ►

What happened was the mushroom faded.

00:33:17 ►

The climate changed.

00:33:19 ►

What had been everywhere became seasonal, moved into the rain shadows of mountains,

00:33:27 ►

became the prerogative of a special class of people called shamans

00:33:33 ►

who were like the designated hitters for dealing with the hyperspace of the mythos.

00:33:41 ►

In other words, over millennia,

00:33:41 ►

of the mythos.

00:33:43 ►

In other words,

00:33:44 ►

over millennia,

00:33:48 ►

the connection went from available to everyone all the time

00:33:52 ►

to ever more tenuous,

00:33:53 ►

ever more tenuous,

00:33:54 ►

finally faded out entirely.

00:33:58 ►

It’s even more complicated than that

00:34:00 ►

because surely people would have,

00:34:03 ►

as they saw this happening,

00:34:05 ►

make attempts to preserve the mushroom and in a world without refrigeration the only

00:34:13 ►

effective way to do this is preservation in honey you can dry mushrooms but in a

00:34:20 ►

world without hermetically sealed peanut butter jars,

00:34:28 ►

drying is a very short-term strategy for preservation.

00:34:34 ►

The only thing which will really work is preservation in honey.

00:34:38 ►

The problem there is that honey itself,

00:34:41 ►

especially aboriginal honeys,

00:34:42 ►

which have a lot more water in them than what you get in those little plastic bears at the A&P.

00:34:47 ►

Aboriginal honeys are very runny.

00:34:50 ►

And so what do they do?

00:34:52 ►

They themselves have the capacity for turning into a psychoactive substance.

00:34:58 ►

Alcohol.

00:34:59 ►

But alcohol promotes a completely different set of cultural values and attitudes than psilocybin.

00:35:06 ►

Psilocybin is a boundary-dissolving hallucinogen.

00:35:12 ►

Mead alcohol gives an enhanced sense of verbal acuity

00:35:18 ►

in the presence of lowered sensitivity to social cues.

00:35:23 ►

In other words, one can make an ass of oneself.

00:35:31 ►

But now I want to backtrack for a minute.

00:35:34 ►

I will return to this thing about the loss of the mushroom,

00:35:37 ►

but there’s something that I want to go over with you

00:35:39 ►

that’s really important in all this to me.

00:35:42 ►

And that is, this isn’t simply the story

00:35:46 ►

of how an intoxicant promoted consciousness

00:35:50 ►

and then we fell into history by losing that intoxicant

00:35:55 ►

and went on to other intoxicants

00:35:58 ►

with consequences to be evaluated.

00:36:02 ►

It’s that, but it’s more.

00:36:08 ►

consequences to be evaluated. It’s that, but it’s more, because psilocybin had a very, very peculiar effect over and above what I’ve mentioned so far. And it is this over and above effect

00:36:16 ►

that makes my theory so controversial and academics, I think, so phobic of it

00:36:25 ►

because it rips open a whole can of worms.

00:36:30 ►

And this is the problem.

00:36:33 ►

All primates, clear back to squirrel monkeys and old world monkeys,

00:36:41 ►

all primates form dominance hierarchies. This means that the sharp fanged,

00:36:48 ►

hard-bodied young males control everybody else. The women, the elderly, the sick, the children,

00:36:59 ►

homosexuals, everybody finds their place somewhere in this dominance hierarchy run by these dominant alpha males.

00:37:10 ►

We are no different.

00:37:13 ►

We also, as we sit here this evening, operate under this kind of a social organization.

00:37:18 ►

I mean, we complain about it, we analyze it, we are aware of it, but we live under it. It’s how it is. So here is my

00:37:28 ►

suggestion. That what psilocybin did was it changed behavior. It interfered with primate behavior.

00:37:43 ►

It interfered with primate behavior.

00:37:53 ►

Specifically, it interfered with this tendency to form monogamous pairs and dominance hierarchies. And so the ordinary tendency of the primates to organize themselves that way was interrupted,

00:38:07 ►

that way, was interrupted, medicated out of existence, if you like, vaccinated against, if you like, by the presence of psilocybin in the diet.

00:38:15 ►

And this overemphasizing or chemical accentuation of sexuality

00:38:25 ►

occasioned by the arousal of the psilocybin

00:38:29 ►

was sufficient to dissolve the ordinary tendency toward monogamy

00:38:34 ►

and replace it with an orgiastic sexual style

00:38:40 ►

or they coexisted simultaneously.

00:38:43 ►

I mean, who knows? We weren’t there. It’s sort of the way I imagine it is that at every new and full moon, there were group mushroom parties, which basically simply got out of hand regularly.

00:39:07 ►

And so the monogamous pair bond would be under pressure if not completely eliminated.

00:39:11 ►

Many cultures have this, even to this day.

00:39:15 ►

I mean, in a sense, Mardi Gras is a festival where the rules are dissolved and nobody is supposed to go to their spouse the Monday after and say,

00:39:21 ►

you know, was that you I saw dressed as Marie Antoinette?

00:39:26 ►

Because, you know, the rules are, there is permission to break the rules, and many societies

00:39:32 ►

do this.

00:39:33 ►

The result of an orgiastic style like that is men cannot trace lines of male paternity.

00:39:48 ►

And so there is a tremendous social glue,

00:39:55 ►

a tremendous force for the cohesion of community. Men don’t then think in terms of my children.

00:39:59 ►

They think in terms of our children, the children of the group.

00:40:02 ►

of our children, the children of the group.

00:40:07 ►

And under the aegis of this group,

00:40:13 ►

this polymorphic sexual style group,

00:40:18 ►

child care and extended family rearing,

00:40:23 ►

we produced everything that we think of as human,

00:40:24 ►

that we value. Our art, our music, our philosophy, our sense of each other’s worth,

00:40:30 ►

body painting, tattooing, piercing,

00:40:34 ►

all the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence

00:40:39 ►

were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now.

00:40:46 ►

We didn’t have a mind that favored role specialization and male dominance

00:40:51 ►

and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership.

00:40:59 ►

That all came later.

00:41:01 ►

We became human beings in this other world of values and

00:41:08 ►

psychological attitudes. Problem is that, as I say, the mushroom faded, but by the

00:41:14 ►

time it had faded we were no longer the wordless symbiotes of cattle, the barely sentient hunters of the African plain.

00:41:28 ►

By the time we were finished with the mushrooms,

00:41:31 ►

we had language, we had social institutions,

00:41:36 ►

but what we began to lose was, you know,

00:41:41 ►

you can get as wet-eyed as you want about it,

00:41:44 ►

but respect for each other,

00:41:46 ►

a sense of each other’s individuality,

00:41:49 ►

a sense of love, a sense of community.

00:41:52 ►

And it must have been, though it happened over a long period of time,

00:41:58 ►

very much like what we’re living through now.

00:42:02 ►

A sense that people are, you know, no damn good and getting worse.

00:42:07 ►

A sense that, you know, why can’t we be as we once were? Where is our sense of each other? Where is

00:42:14 ►

our ability to care for each other? So forth and so on. I wrote a book called Food of the Gods,

00:42:24 ►

in which I tell this story in the first third of the book that I’ve just told you.

00:42:29 ►

And then I show that what history is, essentially,

00:42:35 ►

is a careening, out-of-control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. One of the things that marks

00:42:49 ►

us as humans that is unique is our obsessions with drugs, our ability to substances, we addict to each other, we addict to ideologies, Marxism, Christianity,

00:43:12 ►

skinkism, as practiced in Washington, whatever, and we addict to each other.

00:43:21 ►

You know, I mean, I am a romantic with the best of them,

00:43:25 ►

but I can’t help noticing that a broken

00:43:27 ►

heart and a heroin

00:43:30 ►

withdrawal show

00:43:31 ►

very similar presentations.

00:43:35 ►

Really.

00:43:36 ►

Insomnia,

00:43:38 ►

sweating, sense of diminished

00:43:40 ►

self-esteem,

00:43:42 ►

hysteria,

00:43:43 ►

you know, it’s very, very similar.

00:43:47 ►

So a psychologist looking at a person with an addictive syndrome will say,

00:43:55 ►

well, you were damaged in childhood.

00:43:58 ►

There is some trauma there that you’re trying to compensate.

00:44:04 ►

You’re trying to compensate. Well, I’m not that keen on all this psychologizing, but I do think that we could apply this model to ourselves on a grand scale. womb, thrust into the birth canal of history and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman

00:44:28 ►

Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism and all the rest of it. And

00:44:35 ►

we have searched the planet for substances which would assuage our sense of pain. And there are things out there,

00:44:50 ►

you know, alcohol, the whole morphine family, so forth and so on. But these things always have

00:44:56 ►

consequences. There’s a price to be paid. The very knowledge of psilocybin was lost to the entire planet except for some

00:45:09 ►

tribes in the Mexican mountains for several millennia until Valentina and Gordon Wasson

00:45:18 ►

went in the early 1950s and found these mushrooms and brought them out.

00:45:27 ►

And then Albert Hoffman, who had earlier discovered LSD, synthesized the compound and made it

00:45:34 ►

available.

00:45:35 ►

That was 55.

00:45:37 ►

Well, by 66, all human research with these things had been forbidden.

00:45:43 ►

all human research with these things had been forbidden.

00:45:50 ►

It’s not that science mowed this field and moved on.

00:45:54 ►

It’s that science has never really been here.

00:46:03 ►

We haven’t looked at the implications of diet on early human evolution. We don’t have a theory

00:46:05 ►

for the evolution of consciousness

00:46:08 ►

of any consequence.

00:46:10 ►

And yet, you know,

00:46:11 ►

the factors I’ve laid out for you,

00:46:13 ►

increased visual acuity,

00:46:15 ►

impact on sexual and social behaviors,

00:46:19 ►

triggering of glossolalia-like phenomena

00:46:22 ►

in the presence of a boundary-dissolving psychedelic experience.

00:46:27 ►

These are catalysts sufficiently dramatic that inculcated into a cultural style.

00:46:33 ►

I think they explain a great deal about where we came from and who we are.

00:46:44 ►

now the irony of all of this is that we live in a society

00:46:47 ►

that has made all practically

00:46:51 ►

any discussion of this illegal

00:46:54 ►

certainly if I were to end this lecture

00:46:57 ►

by handing out doses of psilocybin

00:47:00 ►

I would be gently taken by the elbow

00:47:02 ►

and led away forever

00:47:04 ►

the western mind I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever.

00:47:16 ►

The Western mind is particularly phobic of this subject.

00:47:21 ►

I mean, we have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes

00:47:30 ►

in the pursuit of thrills so that they can bungee cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses.

00:47:35 ►

So concerned are we to fulfill society’s need for thrills.

00:47:39 ►

But this is something else.

00:47:44 ►

It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions.

00:47:48 ►

And perhaps you believe unfairly.

00:47:51 ►

I think that when you examine the situation, it’s possible to understand very clearly why this is such a social issue.

00:47:59 ►

Because what these things do, if you look,

00:48:02 ►

and now I’m slightly broadening my rap to include

00:48:06 ►

other psychedelics besides psilocybin but psilocybin is certainly true in all

00:48:12 ►

cases what these things do if you had to generalize a hundred thousand

00:48:17 ►

psychedelic experiences the ones where people thought they were God the ones

00:48:22 ►

where people had to be taken to the ER room and have their stomach pumps,

00:48:26 ►

all of them,

00:48:27 ►

if you generalize,

00:48:29 ►

what these substances do

00:48:32 ►

is they dissolve boundaries.

00:48:35 ►

They dissolve boundaries.

00:48:37 ►

If you love it, you’ll love it.

00:48:40 ►

If you hate it, you’ll hate it.

00:48:42 ►

But that’s what they do.

00:48:44 ►

They dissolve boundaries.

00:48:46 ►

Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety

00:48:50 ►

is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries.

00:48:58 ►

It doesn’t matter whether you’re, you know, a stockbroker in New York,

00:49:02 ►

a Zen monk in Kyoto, a Hasid in Jerusalem.

00:49:06 ►

Your society is held together by boundaries and definitions,

00:49:11 ►

and anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces relativity into cultural modeling

00:49:20 ►

is felt to be threatening, because we like to believe that our reality is somehow sanctioned,

00:49:28 ►

that this is how it should be.

00:49:31 ►

But in fact, you know, that’s just a cultural judgment.

00:49:35 ►

All cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality.

00:49:40 ►

It doesn’t.

00:49:41 ►

It just represents the current download of their linguistic enterprise.

00:49:50 ►

At the core of the Western anxiety about boundaries is something that we are very proud of,

00:50:01 ►

that we believe we invented.

00:50:04 ►

We call it the ego sometimes we call it the

00:50:08 ►

democratic individual we say no no Eastern society could have produced this

00:50:16 ►

we took this from the Greeks we perfected it through the Romans we

00:50:20 ►

brought it up through the medieval period John Locke and Thomas Hobbes and all those folks fixed it up for us in the 18th century.

00:50:29 ►

Thomas Jefferson ironed out the wrinkles.

00:50:33 ►

And modern America is the shining example of what you can do if you empower the ego, the citizen, the individual. We want nothing of tribalism,

00:50:46 ►

still less of collectivism,

00:50:48 ►

and God forbid, nothing whatsoever to do with communism.

00:50:53 ►

See, all these things set us going.

00:50:58 ►

But in fact,

00:51:01 ►

the ego is appropriate only to a certain point

00:51:06 ►

I mean yes we need egos

00:51:08 ►

so that when you take someone to dinner

00:51:10 ►

at a reasonable restaurant

00:51:13 ►

you place food in your mouth

00:51:15 ►

not their mouth

00:51:16 ►

this is what the ego is for

00:51:19 ►

it tells you who pays

00:51:21 ►

but in fact what the ego is, is the return to consciousness of this psychic

00:51:33 ►

structure related to the patterns of dominance. And the way I think of the ego is it’s like a cyst or a calcareous growth or a tumor that gets going in the personality

00:51:50 ►

and if not treated it becomes chronic and then there is no cure there can only be you know a

00:51:59 ►

certain amount of maintenance and medication of it but it’s’s incurable, except unless we resort to not only

00:52:09 ►

non-prescription drugs, but drugs currently illegal. In other words, the psychedelics,

00:52:17 ►

through this boundary-dissolving function, dissolve that boundary as well. And so they promote a larger sense of the world than the values of capitalism, competitiveness,

00:52:35 ►

object fetishism, property acquisition, and the bottom line, empower.

00:52:42 ►

the bottom line, empower.

00:52:52 ►

So the issue, as was always sensed since the 60s forward, I think, is not simply an issue of religious freedom

00:52:56 ►

or an issue of an eccentric minority social practice

00:53:01 ►

being tolerated by the majority the way they tolerate handing out pamphlets in

00:53:09 ►

airports or something like that. The issue is, in fact, what kind of people shall we be?

00:53:18 ►

And then what kind of society shall we put in place? And that’s why my theory of evolution is not simply a dry footnote on an issue that

00:53:34 ►

involves anthropologists, primatologists, and biologists, but it turns into a political issue. Because our unhappy, addicted,

00:53:48 ►

ego-driven condition

00:53:51 ►

has become not simply the source

00:53:54 ►

of our own unhappiness.

00:53:56 ►

That was bad enough.

00:53:58 ►

But now it’s the source

00:53:59 ►

of great discomfort and dislocation

00:54:03 ►

for all life and human society on the planet.

00:54:08 ►

We are out of control.

00:54:12 ►

We are basically severely addicted to things and cannot stop ourselves.

00:54:30 ►

stop ourselves. And we know, or we should know, that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal,

00:54:39 ►

so forth and so on, in the planet to give all the thing addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy. We have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole,

00:54:48 ►

to Turkmenistan and Barneo,

00:54:51 ►

to the upper Amazon and to the Tajiks.

00:54:54 ►

Everybody wants kids.

00:54:56 ►

Everybody wants the pause that refreshes.

00:55:02 ►

What are we going to do about this?

00:55:05 ►

well so far we’ve been treating it like an endless garden party

00:55:10 ►

there’s no serious plan on the table to deal with this at all

00:55:15 ►

I think that the momentum of human history

00:55:21 ►

is pushing us inexorably toward some kind of day of reckoning and

00:55:28 ►

in which we are either going to have to turn

00:55:31 ►

consciously

00:55:32 ►

toward brutality and

00:55:35 ►

selfishness and say well let

00:55:38 ►

India go

00:55:40 ►

Let Bangladesh go triage

00:55:42 ►

Let Bangladesh go.

00:55:47 ►

Triage costs too much, can’t possibly fix the problem. In order to maintain our locked compounds and our 50 channels of television

00:55:52 ►

and the endless availability of arugula, we have to let India go.

00:56:00 ►

We’re going to have to turn that way.

00:56:03 ►

So we’re going to have to turn that way.

00:56:10 ►

In other words, each consciously participate in a choice to brutalize the human enterprise.

00:56:22 ►

Or we’re going to have to seriously talk about very major restructurings of our society.

00:56:25 ►

And I don’t really know how we do that.

00:56:28 ►

I was living in Northern California a couple of years ago when they wanted to close an air base near here,

00:56:31 ►

and the newspapers were filled with weeks,

00:56:34 ►

for weeks with analysis of whether Western civilization

00:56:38 ►

could absorb this hammer blow at the very heart of its institutions

00:56:42 ►

of closing one friggin’ air base, for crying out loud.

00:56:47 ►

That’s not my idea of major change, you know.

00:56:52 ►

We may have to give up some of our pretty things.

00:56:57 ►

We may have to discipline some of the irresponsible social philosophies

00:57:05 ►

that run amok among us.

00:57:08 ►

And no, I don’t mean the advocacy of psychedelic plants.

00:57:12 ►

I mean the Roman Catholic Church’s position

00:57:16 ►

on population control in the third world.

00:57:20 ►

I mean, the Germans take quite a knock for the Holocaust,

00:57:24 ►

but the Catholic Church manages to push more people into death, disease, and degradation every year than the Holocaust managed in its entire show.

00:57:36 ►

And it’s thought rather crass to even mention the fact.

00:57:42 ►

to even mention the fact.

00:57:46 ►

It seems to me as long as these Catholic bishops can show their face in public

00:57:49 ►

that we are in complicity with mass murder.

00:57:54 ►

It’s not pleasant news,

00:57:56 ►

but what are you going to do about it?

00:58:00 ►

Islamic fundamentalism,

00:58:03 ►

another bunch of knotheads with an anti-human

00:58:06 ►

agenda

00:58:07 ►

what are we going to do about this

00:58:10 ►

are we going to go

00:58:12 ►

gently into that good

00:58:14 ►

night of planetary chaos

00:58:17 ►

extreme

00:58:18 ►

distortion of class structure

00:58:20 ►

defense of what we

00:58:22 ►

have at any cost against

00:58:24 ►

those who have nothing.

00:58:27 ►

There doesn’t seem to be any other plan on the horizon. Arthur Kessler, who probably never

00:58:34 ►

thought he would be quoted by Terence McKenna, a very conservative character. You’ll recall he was

00:58:41 ►

a Marxist who turned on Marxism and led a very interesting intellectual life.

00:58:47 ►

He wrote a book 30 years ago called The Ghost in the Machine.

00:58:52 ►

And he made a case similar to mine, but a little simpler.

00:58:57 ►

He observed human beings are hardwired for homicide.

00:59:01 ►

hardwired for homicide.

00:59:05 ►

This is what we do best because this was something

00:59:06 ►

we had to do apparently

00:59:08 ►

at some point in our past,

00:59:10 ►

at least in Kessler’s view.

00:59:12 ►

He didn’t believe in a mushroom paradise.

00:59:14 ►

But he reached the same conclusion

00:59:16 ►

that I have,

00:59:18 ►

which is we need a pharmacological intervention

00:59:22 ►

on antisocial behavior

00:59:24 ►

or we are not going to get hold of our dilemma.

00:59:31 ►

And there have been dystopias based on drug intervention

00:59:39 ►

on aggressive behavior.

00:59:41 ►

You all remember Brave New World,

00:59:44 ►

where every time anybody raised their voice,

00:59:46 ►

they were given a gram of Soma

00:59:49 ►

and told a gram is better than a damn.

00:59:53 ►

And so nobody ever had a thought in their head.

00:59:56 ►

Well, that’s a terrible drug.

00:59:58 ►

Let’s not introduce that.

01:00:00 ►

Uh-oh, the bad news is we’ve had it for decades.

01:00:04 ►

It’s called television, you know.

01:00:07 ►

We have millions of people in larval, low-awareness lives

01:00:12 ►

in their little condominium apartments

01:00:15 ►

just ladling this garbage into their minds.

01:00:20 ►

The average American watches five and a half hours of TV a day,

01:00:24 ►

so imagine how much time these people watch.

01:00:28 ►

I mean, to think of that as human at all,

01:00:31 ►

if that were a drug, we’d be up in arms.

01:00:34 ►

You know, if people were loaded at home with that level of mental condition,

01:00:39 ►

day after day after day, we would do something about it.

01:00:44 ►

After day after day, we would do something about it.

01:00:52 ►

So I can’t propose a grand solution,

01:00:58 ►

but I do think that it is pregnant with implication that here at the end of the 20th century,

01:01:02 ►

with all of these problems hammering down on us

01:01:05 ►

the news comes

01:01:07 ►

from the rainforests

01:01:09 ►

and the deserts

01:01:10 ►

that these aboriginal people

01:01:12 ►

while we made the descent

01:01:15 ►

into history

01:01:15 ►

and got the top quark

01:01:17 ►

and planted the flag

01:01:18 ►

on the moon

01:01:19 ►

and all that

01:01:20 ►

they kept the faith

01:01:22 ►

and they have

01:01:24 ►

a materia medica, a toolbox,

01:01:31 ►

that can carry us back into a connection with the planet.

01:01:36 ►

Now, the question might be asked,

01:01:39 ►

why do you have such overwhelming faith in what is, after all, a substance, a drug?

01:01:47 ►

I mean, don’t psychedelics just cause you to see pretty pictures and patterns

01:01:53 ►

and tally up your gains and losses and then you come down and that’s it?

01:01:59 ►

And the answer is no.

01:02:01 ►

What is mysterious here, and I mentioned it in the early part of my talk, what is

01:02:07 ►

mysterious here is this thing we call the psychedelic experience. Those people nailed to the ground

01:02:15 ►

around the campfires 50,000 years ago, they didn’t know what it was. And when we go in there armed with our Heidegger

01:02:26 ►

and our Husserl

01:02:27 ►

and our Wittgenstein

01:02:30 ►

and our Merleau-Ponty

01:02:32 ►

we don’t know what it is either

01:02:34 ►

there has been no progress

01:02:36 ►

in 60,000 years

01:02:38 ►

in reducing the psychedelic experience

01:02:40 ►

to a known quantity

01:02:42 ►

it is as terrifying

01:02:43 ►

as awesome

01:02:44 ►

as ecstatic as irreducible to us

01:02:48 ►

as it was to them. Well, what is that? As secular people, we rarely experience religious awe,

01:02:58 ►

especially of the uncontrollable sort. I believe that what makes the psychedelic experience so central is that it is a connection

01:03:13 ►

into a larger modality of organization on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying

01:03:22 ►

it connects you up to the mind of nature herself.

01:03:28 ►

The planet is not just a hodgepodge of competing species.

01:03:35 ►

That’s the old evolutionary model.

01:03:39 ►

That’s been obsolete for decades.

01:03:42 ►

The new evolutionary model is that

01:03:45 ►

where we see species,

01:03:49 ►

nature sees only a gene swarm,

01:03:53 ►

genes moving at various speeds,

01:03:56 ►

being transferred around,

01:03:58 ►

a large percentage of them by sexual propagation,

01:04:02 ►

but a large percentage of them

01:04:04 ►

by asexual and vegetative

01:04:06 ►

propagation, and still others by more exotic methods of propagation, such as go on in the

01:04:13 ►

fungi and the bacteria. The world is a gene swarm, and people like Lynn Margolis and James Lovelock have been suggesting for years

01:04:26 ►

that the earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator.

01:04:30 ►

Well, if you carry that idea far enough,

01:04:33 ►

thermostatic self-regulator is a way of saying

01:04:36 ►

a kind of computational engine,

01:04:40 ►

a kind of computer,

01:04:42 ►

a kind of mind,

01:04:49 ►

a kind of mind. a kind of mind, a kind of mind, the Gaian mind.

01:04:57 ►

The reason those mushroom-eating, orgiastically behaving people worshipped a great horned goddess,

01:05:10 ►

the reason they imaged the numinous other as feminine was because they had a connection into a kind of overarching intelligence that they instinctively and intuitively felt to be feminine. And we retain this in our languages

01:05:18 ►

as the idea of mother nature and the femininity of the land and so forth and so on,

01:05:25 ►

but it’s just become a distant metaphor to us.

01:05:28 ►

I think our intelligence is a source of toxicity to nature

01:05:36 ►

and discomfort to ourselves

01:05:39 ►

unless our values are based on planetary values,

01:05:46 ►

are linked to the values of the rest of nature.

01:05:51 ►

And that means we need to fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things

01:05:58 ►

by limiting our numbers,

01:06:11 ►

our numbers, by limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment, we need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet, not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence.

01:06:27 ►

Intelligence is not a license to trample.

01:06:31 ►

The proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology

01:06:36 ►

is that of gardener, caregiver, and maintainer of balance.

01:06:46 ►

Well, so where do we go?

01:06:50 ►

And what do psychedelics have to say about that?

01:06:53 ►

Well, I believe that psychedelics show us something

01:06:59 ►

which capitalist consumer fetish-oriented society

01:07:08 ►

doesn’t want us to know.

01:07:12 ►

What psychedelics show us

01:07:14 ►

is the incredible richness of our minds

01:07:18 ►

that you, little you,

01:07:24 ►

can produce more art in a 20-minute burst of hallucinatory intoxication

01:07:32 ►

than the Western mind has produced in the last 500 years.

01:07:38 ►

Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished. You know, we have Picasso’s contribution

01:07:46 ►

and Pollock’s contribution

01:07:48 ►

and everybody’s contribution,

01:07:50 ►

but it altogether is as nothing

01:07:54 ►

compared to the richness that resides

01:07:56 ►

in each one of us,

01:07:57 ►

a half inch behind your eyebrows.

01:08:01 ►

We are told, you know,

01:08:02 ►

oh, well, if you want beauty,

01:08:04 ►

you have to own a Lexus. Or, you know,

01:08:08 ►

if you want a sense of satisfaction, then you need a triple car garage. On and on. This is absolutely

01:08:16 ►

not true. These are substitute addictions that will never satisfy for the genuine article. And the genuine article is a connection

01:08:27 ►

into the Gaian mind. Well, I don’t believe or expect for a moment that ever again,

01:08:35 ►

naked, tattooed, and joyous, we will herd our cattle across the grasslands of Africa.

01:08:42 ►

across the grasslands of Africa.

01:08:45 ►

I mean, there are six million of us.

01:08:47 ►

That chance has been blown.

01:08:55 ►

But what can we do to ameliorate our situation?

01:08:59 ►

Well, I have always been an optimist. I’m more optimistic right now than I have been for a long time

01:09:03 ►

because sometimes when you’re an optimist,

01:09:06 ►

you’re an optimist simply on principle.

01:09:09 ►

You believe it’s going to turn out all right,

01:09:12 ►

but you don’t see how it possibly could.

01:09:16 ►

I’m beginning to see how it possibly could turn out all right.

01:09:24 ►

And my notion is, first of all, I follow in my thinking about shamanism,

01:09:32 ►

and I follow the great historian of religion, Mercier Léod, who got it almost all right,

01:09:40 ►

except that he never embraced psychedelics. He thought they were decadent. But that was just his French European education,

01:09:48 ►

and he came too early.

01:09:49 ►

But anyway, Eliade wrote a book called Shamanism,

01:09:53 ►

and then he subtitled it The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

01:09:58 ►

Now, he wrote the book in French.

01:10:00 ►

In French, technique has a connotation that it doesn’t have in English. It means both a

01:10:10 ►

way to do things and it means technology. Later, the French sociologist Jacques Goulul wrote a book

01:10:18 ►

called Propaganda. And the little banner under which his book flew, which is printed right on the frontispiece, is he says, there are no political solutions, only technological ones.

01:10:34 ►

The rest is propaganda.

01:10:36 ►

And then he spends 200 pages explaining what he means by political solutions, technological solutions, and propaganda.

01:10:45 ►

By Elul’s understanding, I agree.

01:10:48 ►

I think ideology is toxic.

01:10:52 ►

All ideology.

01:10:54 ►

It’s not that there are good ones and bad ones.

01:10:57 ►

All ideology is toxic.

01:10:59 ►

Because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking.

01:11:05 ►

I mean, if you adopt some ideology, Leninism, Mormonism, it doesn’t matter,

01:11:12 ►

then you have all the answers.

01:11:15 ►

You just go and look in the catechism.

01:11:17 ►

Well, I don’t know why they issued you a brain.

01:11:20 ►

They could have just given you the catechism.

01:11:22 ►

They could have just given you the catechism.

01:11:35 ►

Technology, as the counterpoint to ideology, is a very different animal.

01:11:38 ►

Now, right now, we’re going through a technophobic phase because people think technology means exploding nuclear power plants

01:11:43 ►

and irradiated food and TV.

01:11:48 ►

But all technology really means,

01:11:51 ►

in the McLuhan sense,

01:11:53 ►

is the extensions of man.

01:11:56 ►

The extensions of man.

01:11:59 ►

And so language is a technology.

01:12:03 ►

Shamanism is a technology. Psilocybin is a technology. Shamanism is a technology.

01:12:06 ►

Psilocybin is a technology.

01:12:08 ►

And certainly the Internet is a technology.

01:12:13 ►

It’s slowly, I think, dawning on a number of people that if we’re talking about how

01:12:19 ►

lisinogens is consciousness-expanding drugs, then the only difference between a drug and a computer

01:12:26 ►

is that one is slightly too large to swallow.

01:12:32 ►

And our best people are working on that problem,

01:12:36 ►

even as we speak.

01:12:38 ►

The drugs of the future will be much more like computers.

01:12:42 ►

The computers of the future will be much more like computers. The computers of the future will be much

01:12:45 ►

more like drugs. And I think what we have to recognize is that we are in a very

01:12:51 ►

brief and low energy technical phase in technology. Basically we’re at the tail

01:12:58 ►

end of the of the petrochemical steam era. And where we are headed is toward the solid state,

01:13:08 ►

fiber optic, global community of the Internet.

01:13:14 ►

And when I was in San Francisco two weeks ago,

01:13:18 ►

the buzz was all about VRML,

01:13:22 ►

the virtual reality markup language whose protocols

01:13:27 ►

are being set now so that we will be able to build websites on the net that you can put on your

01:13:34 ►

helmet and walk around in. Sun Microsystems is about to introduce something called Hot Java,

01:13:41 ►

which will let you build and interact with your website

01:13:45 ►

without going through your server.

01:13:48 ►

Bandwidth is broadening as we speak.

01:13:52 ►

The whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity.

01:13:59 ►

And you may not know it, but Marshall McLuhan thought

01:14:02 ►

that this was the descent of the Holy Ghost.

01:14:06 ►

As a convert to Catholicism, he sort of went the opposite direction of me. As a convert to Catholicism,

01:14:13 ►

he decided that the descent of the third person of the Trinity and the worldwide spread of

01:14:19 ►

electricity were the same event. So I think that what we have to do

01:14:27 ►

is dematerialize culture

01:14:29 ►

in every way possible.

01:14:32 ►

And that means pharmacologize culture,

01:14:38 ►

computerize culture,

01:14:42 ►

network culture,

01:14:44 ►

virtualize culture, network culture, virtualize culture,

01:14:47 ►

and make of it thereby

01:14:52 ►

a tool for the production of our

01:14:56 ►

poetic flights, a technology

01:14:59 ►

for the putting in place of our dreams as exhibits

01:15:04 ►

that we can show each other.

01:15:06 ►

This is what it is.

01:15:08 ►

This is what technology can be

01:15:10 ►

in the service of boundary dissolution.

01:15:14 ►

In the service of boundary maintenance,

01:15:16 ►

you get hydrogen bombs and sarin.

01:15:20 ►

In the surface of boundary dissolution,

01:15:23 ►

you get psychoactive substances and the internet and sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance, and community.

01:15:37 ►

And the choice is to be made on an individual level by each and every one of us.

01:15:45 ►

I don’t advocate a mass outbreak of psychedelic use.

01:15:50 ►

I think these things are a private matter.

01:15:53 ►

The only thing comparable to them in our human experience is our sexuality.

01:15:59 ►

And that’s a private matter.

01:16:01 ►

How we define it, how we express it, how we act it out,

01:16:05 ►

who we do it with, what we think about it,

01:16:07 ►

and what we choose to say in public about it is all in our hands.

01:16:13 ►

I do not think that the government,

01:16:19 ►

under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudoscientific rhetoric,

01:16:27 ►

should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness expanding, it doesn’t

01:16:36 ►

take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

01:16:47 ►

If there is any way to raise consciousness, diet, drug, machine, sexual practice, mantra, yantra,

01:16:59 ►

whatever it is, we should be furiously exploring and applying it because if we should fumble the ball

01:17:08 ►

if we should actually uh where our ancestors over thousands of generations did not fail if we are to

01:17:17 ►

fail the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense because failure is not inevitable.

01:17:26 ►

It is not inevitable that we should fail.

01:17:30 ►

There are ideas, personalities, technologies

01:17:34 ►

available right now which,

01:17:38 ►

if honestly explored and implemented,

01:17:42 ►

could rescue the human enterprise

01:17:45 ►

from the disgrace that hovers over us.

01:17:48 ►

We don’t want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by Nazis,

01:17:54 ►

which is the way we may well be headed.

01:17:58 ►

The Gaian mind has always been there.

01:18:03 ►

Nature originally, through the plants and

01:18:06 ►

shamanism provided the tools for us to access this incredible natural database.

01:18:14 ►

Through the vicissitudes of history previous generations lost the key in Western society. Since the 1960s, the key has been refound. It’s a matter of great social controversy. It’s a matter of great risk to those who take it, how they will be viewed by their peers, but ignorance is no longer an excuse.

01:18:49 ►

Anthropology in the last hundred years has laid at our doorstep

01:18:53 ►

the tools necessary for an archaic reconstruction of society

01:19:00 ►

and human values within that society. It’s inconceivable that Western

01:19:11 ►

industrial capitalism could run on another 500 or a thousand years. It will

01:19:19 ►

not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity

01:19:26 ►

and what few democratic values we have obtained what little space for reasoned

01:19:34 ►

discourse has been created will be the first to be swept away so it So it’s very, very important that people take back their minds and that people

01:19:49 ►

analyze our dilemma in the context of the entire human story, from the descent onto the grassland

01:19:59 ►

to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe, we are at a critical turning

01:20:09 ►

point. And as I say, the tools, the data that holds the potential for our salvation is now

01:20:18 ►

known. It is available. It is among us. But it is mis misrepresented it is slandered it is

01:20:26 ►

litigated against and it’s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in

01:20:33 ►

a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to

01:20:39 ►

us in some point in the future which is what did you do to help save the world? Well, I’ll knock off now.

01:20:50 ►

I’ll sign books. We’ll take like a 10-minute break, and then we’ll come back and do questions.

01:20:55 ►

Thank you very much for your attention. And that, in fact, what we’re involved in here at the end of the 20th century

01:21:17 ►

is some kind of accelerated forward escape into transformation.

01:21:26 ►

And when I lecture that subject,

01:21:30 ►

I more or less imply that it’s inevitable.

01:21:33 ►

In other words, it’s not that we have to do X, Y, or Z,

01:21:37 ►

that it’s on track.

01:21:39 ►

I think it is on track,

01:21:40 ►

but I also think there’s a place for the kind of politics

01:21:44 ►

we discussed this evening,

01:21:45 ►

because as the world gets crazier and crazier, a lot of people are going to get very, very anxious.

01:21:53 ►

This thing in Oklahoma City is an example of people getting anxious. So what needs to be done is to spread the idea that anxiety is inappropriate.

01:22:09 ►

It’s sort of like we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society because

01:22:16 ►

society is going to thrash and resist and think it’s dying and be deluded and regurgitate unconscious material and so forth and so on.

01:22:31 ►

And the goal and the role then for psychedelic people, I think, is to try and spread calm.

01:22:38 ►

I’m very convinced that things are going to get a lot nuttier than they are,

01:22:42 ►

and they’re a lot nuttier now than they have been for a while.

01:22:46 ►

But it doesn’t mean the bad people are winning

01:22:51 ►

or that we’re going to fumble the ball or anything.

01:22:55 ►

The mushroom said to me once, it said,

01:22:57 ►

this is what it’s like when a species departs for the stars.

01:23:03 ►

It’s a birth thing.

01:23:06 ►

It’s complicated.

01:23:07 ►

If you had never seen a human birth

01:23:10 ►

and you came around the corner of a building

01:23:13 ►

in your daily round and it was happening,

01:23:16 ►

it vibrates medical emergency.

01:23:19 ►

I mean, blood is being shed,

01:23:22 ►

tissues stretched.

01:23:24 ►

It doesn’t.

01:23:25 ►

You really have to have your chops together to step back and say,

01:23:30 ►

how wonderful, new life coming into the world.

01:23:35 ►

Because, you know, that’s not the vibe of it.

01:23:39 ►

And I think that’s the circumstance that we’re in.

01:23:43 ►

This is the birth canal to a new order.

01:23:47 ►

And at the moment, it looks like suffocation, constriction, limitation, possible death.

01:23:55 ►

But we need to inform ourselves and get a big perspective.

01:24:03 ►

and get a big perspective.

01:24:06 ►

And there’s no way to get a big perspective like education and psychedelic experiences.

01:24:10 ►

If we can see history for what it is,

01:24:13 ►

it’s a 25,000-year, nearly instantaneous transition

01:24:19 ►

from one state of being to another.

01:24:22 ►

And yes, there are 1,500 generations of people

01:24:26 ►

who live in that paper-thin transition time.

01:24:33 ►

But when it’s over, it’s over.

01:24:36 ►

And we will leave history behind the way you dump a used placenta, I’m sure.

01:24:43 ►

Yeah?

01:24:44 ►

I wonder, is there any reliable information

01:24:46 ►

on the relationship between psychedelics

01:24:49 ►

and early Christianity?

01:24:52 ►

Reliable information on psychedelic use

01:24:55 ►

in early Christianity?

01:24:57 ►

The answer is no.

01:24:59 ►

I mean, there is a book by John Allegro

01:25:03 ►

called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. He was a very respected

01:25:08 ►

Dead Sea scholar until he wrote that book. And that basically finished his career as a classicist.

01:25:17 ►

He says some incredibly provocative things in that book. To judge whether he’s right or wrong, you would have to be an Assyrian philologist,

01:25:29 ►

about which I know nothing. So to the layperson, it seemed to be quite an impressive book.

01:25:37 ►

But apparently to his specialist colleagues, it was sloppy thinking and a travesty and reason to deny tenure

01:25:46 ►

saint augustine was a montanist before he no he was a manichean before he converted to christianity

01:26:01 ►

and he mentions that manicheans forbade the use of mushrooms, the eating of

01:26:09 ►

mushrooms. It doesn’t say the use of mushrooms. But the ancient Middle East, we don’t know very

01:26:15 ►

much about psychedelic sacramentalism. It may have been there. It may not have been there.

01:26:27 ►

been there. It may not have been there. Absence of reference is not proof of absence because of cult secrecy and other factors like that. We do know that, or we feel we’re on firmer ground

01:26:37 ►

in saying that the Greek mystery religions emphatically probably were psychedelic, especially the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries

01:26:49 ►

which were practiced on the plain outside of Athens every year for over 2,000 years.

01:26:56 ►

And everybody who was anybody in the ancient world made the journey to Eleusis to celebrate

01:27:04 ►

the greater mysteries, which

01:27:06 ►

were celebrated in September.

01:27:08 ►

Interesting approach to psychedelics there.

01:27:11 ►

You could only legitimately participate in the mystery at Eleusis once in your life.

01:27:19 ►

So imagine if you had a single high-dose psychedelic experience

01:27:26 ►

under ideal conditions, in other words, in darkness,

01:27:29 ►

under the care of experts,

01:27:32 ►

and then the rest of your life you had to sort it all out

01:27:36 ►

based on what happened that one evening.

01:27:39 ►

It was extraordinarily powerful for the ancient world.

01:27:43 ►

Eventually it was destroyed.

01:27:45 ►

Alaric the Visigoth, who was a barbarian,

01:27:49 ►

but that didn’t stop him from being a convert to Christianity.

01:27:54 ►

Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis

01:27:58 ►

on his way to North Africa to burn other things.

01:28:03 ►

Yeah.

01:28:04 ►

I was wondering, Terrence, if you’d had a chance to read The Emperor’s New Mind by Roger Penrose, I think. It’s an argument against the idea of AI, artificial intelligence. And whether you were able to follow his argument, because I would take it that you’d probably be opposed to his argument.

01:28:23 ►

because I would take it that you’d probably be opposed to his argument.

01:28:25 ►

I haven’t read the book.

01:28:29 ►

I like Roger Penrose’s early work.

01:28:32 ►

He’s saying artificial intelligence is impossible.

01:28:35 ►

Yeah, based on… And he goes through the Turing…

01:28:36 ►

And I heard you bring it up once.

01:28:39 ►

The Turing test.

01:28:40 ►

The Turing test for artificial intelligence.

01:28:43 ►

And he also brings in the incompleteness

01:28:48 ►

theorem. Oh, girdles in commensurability thing.

01:28:51 ►

A little girdle, please.

01:28:58 ►

In 2-4

01:28:59 ►

time. Well,

01:29:02 ►

I don’t have a particularly strong opinion

01:29:08 ►

one way or another on AI

01:29:09 ►

I certainly think computers

01:29:13 ►

can be a lot more intelligent than they are

01:29:15 ►

before we settle the question of whether they can pass the Turing test

01:29:20 ►

you all know the Turing test is this test

01:29:23 ►

Alan Turing was a mathematician.

01:29:26 ►

He figured it out during World War II.

01:29:28 ►

And it’s basically if you call X on a telephone and you can’t tell whether X is a person or a machine, then X passes have Turing tests where judges converse by telephone

01:29:49 ►

with computers and people and try and decide which are the computers and which

01:29:55 ►

are the people and it’s still pretty easy because the people exhibit

01:30:03 ►

exasperation, incorrect information,

01:30:06 ►

misinterpret the question, and so forth and so on.

01:30:14 ►

There are some wild thinkers out there, far wilder than me.

01:30:21 ►

If you want to read a wild book, read Hans Moravec’s book, Mind Children,

01:30:29 ►

The Future of Human and Artificial Intelligence. There’s a book. And I’m having a memory lapse

01:30:39 ►

here. Help me out, Tipler. I said, help me out with a memory lapse. You don’t have to read my mind, for God’s sake.

01:30:46 ►

Yes.

01:30:48 ►

Thank you, Creon.

01:30:51 ►

Tipler’s book is the end of all speculation

01:30:58 ►

where artificial intelligence is concerned.

01:31:02 ►

I think machine-human interfacing

01:31:06 ►

is very important.

01:31:08 ►

I think that the debate

01:31:09 ►

about whether a computer

01:31:11 ►

can think like a human being

01:31:12 ►

is kind of not very interesting.

01:31:14 ►

Computers think like computers.

01:31:17 ►

Already vast amounts

01:31:19 ►

of what we call human society

01:31:21 ►

are entirely run by machines,

01:31:24 ►

including very important financial sectors,

01:31:28 ►

market decisions, resource extraction decisions, inventory resupply decisions that feed clear

01:31:38 ►

back from the warehouse to the mine.

01:31:40 ►

In other words, machines say how much tin should be extracted and at what rate,

01:31:47 ►

and therefore, to a certain degree, say who should come to work and who shouldn’t on certain days.

01:31:53 ►

A lot of design work of circuitry, engineers will simply tell a computer what the circuit should do

01:32:01 ►

and leave the actual architecture of the circuitry to machine decision.

01:32:07 ►

This means more and more parts of the human world are being given over to machines to

01:32:15 ►

design.

01:32:16 ►

But when you see how much of the world looks like the arrival concourse of an international

01:32:21 ►

airport, having computers design the world might not be a bad idea.

01:32:29 ►

Definitely computers figure in our future. I mean, I wasn’t joking when I said drugs and computers

01:32:36 ►

are migrating toward each other. I can imagine a world, and this is not the ultimate world by any means, a world five, six, seven years in the future

01:32:47 ►

where the equivalent of today’s advanced Macintosh

01:32:51 ►

would be something you glue on your thumbnail

01:32:55 ►

and communicate with that way.

01:32:59 ►

And beyond that lie enormous computational and data-accessing abilities

01:33:07 ►

that may be accessed through implants.

01:33:14 ►

We’re going to have to decide how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future.

01:33:21 ►

We don’t want to take the homicidal killer.

01:33:26 ►

We don’t want to take the male dominator.

01:33:31 ►

But it would probably be a mistake

01:33:35 ►

to leave the body entirely behind.

01:33:39 ►

After all, the body gives us our orientation in the world

01:33:44 ►

and our sense of ourselves as somehow coextensive with animal life.

01:33:51 ►

But how much of what we call human is really human

01:33:56 ►

is going to be a major topic for discussion from here to the end of time.

01:34:03 ►

Yeah, in the back.

01:34:05 ►

Two questions on ecstasy.

01:34:07 ►

Number one, what’s your take on MDMA

01:34:09 ►

and what’s the optimum grams to take

01:34:12 ►

to achieve sexual ecstasy?

01:34:15 ►

Sexual ecstasy on ecstasy?

01:34:18 ►

Sexual ecstasy on mushrooms.

01:34:20 ►

Oh, on mushrooms.

01:34:21 ►

Oh, I see.

01:34:23 ►

Well, first about MDMA.

01:34:26 ►

Well, there is no doubt that from here to the end of time,

01:34:30 ►

whether it be 18 years or 1,000 years away,

01:34:34 ►

science is going to produce more and more psychoactive drugs.

01:34:39 ►

There are psychoactive drugs on the shelf now

01:34:42 ►

waiting for human testing and government approval

01:34:46 ►

around the world. We cannot explore the brain. We cannot explore neurochemistry without these

01:34:54 ►

drugs being a natural consequence of this program of research. MDMA is a cycosized amphetamine like MDA, like mescaline, which is a naturally occurring compound of this type.

01:35:13 ►

In the hands of a skilled psychotherapist, MDMA leads to conflict resolution, insights into relationships, this sort of thing.

01:35:26 ►

I’m not entirely convinced that it’s the silver bullet for these conditions.

01:35:32 ►

Every drug that has made its way onto the alternative culture scene

01:35:39 ►

has first billed itself as a love drug.

01:35:42 ►

has first billed itself as a love drug.

01:35:46 ►

That’s an unfailing market ploy to get a drug to the forefront of public attention.

01:35:51 ►

Cannabis was sold to us as a love drug.

01:35:54 ►

LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine, MDMA is no different.

01:36:04 ►

MDMA does promote a certain kind of empathy,

01:36:07 ►

not a whole lot of vigorous sexual activity.

01:36:12 ►

In terms of what dose of psilocybin leads you into a sexual

01:36:19 ►

rather than a visually acute or visionarily extatified situation,

01:36:27 ►

I would say for a 145-pound person,

01:36:31 ►

probably two to three grams is this agitated, sexually active,

01:36:39 ►

or if no sex is happening, maybe dancing and drumming.

01:36:42 ►

In other words, thoroughly aroused, busy, active dose.

01:36:47 ►

As the dose rises, you know, activity slows,

01:36:51 ►

and finally you just want to sit down,

01:36:53 ►

and then finally you just want to lay down,

01:36:55 ►

and then you’re into the other phase.

01:36:59 ►

Behind you, there was another question.

01:37:01 ►

Yeah, I was going to say that John Lilly has an interesting kind of speculation

01:37:05 ►

about the future possibilities of solid-state entities in his autobiography, The Scientist.

01:37:11 ►

But I was really curious if you have anything to say or know about the credibility of the author,

01:37:16 ►

William Cooper, who wrote a book called Behold a Pale Horse.

01:37:20 ►

Do you know that book?

01:37:21 ►

This is the flying saucer debunker.

01:37:24 ►

This is the flying saucer debunker.

01:37:31 ►

And isn’t he the one who said that he was the CIA guy for a long time? He said he was a scientist and he will tell us.

01:37:34 ►

Well, this is slightly off the track,

01:37:37 ►

or might seem to some people to be slightly off the track.

01:37:41 ►

I don’t know William Cooper’s book.

01:37:43 ►

I regard that whole flying saucer thing

01:37:47 ►

as a civil war in a leper colony. But I do think, I do think, having been like probably most of you,

01:37:59 ►

very interested in flying saucers from the time I was a kid and I grew up when it was all happening.

01:38:05 ►

A couple of years ago, I accepted an invitation for the first time to go to a flying saucer

01:38:11 ►

conference. If you’ve never been to one and you’re interested in flying saucers, go. You will

01:38:18 ►

have more insights into the phenomenon in a conference like that than in 10 years of studying it

01:38:26 ►

because what’s perfectly clear

01:38:28 ►

is that these people are self-selected

01:38:32 ►

for gullibility.

01:38:35 ►

And it’s not their fault.

01:38:37 ►

It’s just that the ticket through the front door

01:38:41 ►

is, you know, would you believe this?

01:38:44 ►

Would you believe this? Would you believe this?

01:38:48 ►

I think probably what happened, historically speaking, is that, you know, in 1947, when the

01:38:56 ►

first UFOs were seen, it was a weird world. The explosion of the atom bomb, the work toward the hydrogen bomb, people didn’t know

01:39:08 ►

Einstein and Truman and all this. They didn’t know what it really meant. They thought that it is

01:39:15 ►

conceivable that the solar system is monitored, and it is conceivable that this is the switch

01:39:22 ►

which turns on the monitor and brings attention.

01:39:25 ►

I mean, they were in awe of the atom bomb,

01:39:28 ►

and they realized they were tampering with cosmic forces.

01:39:32 ►

And then, at this moment of cosmic awe and realization of tampering,

01:39:38 ►

they begin to get reports of spacecraft entering the skies of Earth

01:39:43 ►

and interacting with human beings.

01:39:45 ►

Well, what they did, the CIA had just been founded in 1948 and so forth and so on.

01:39:51 ►

What they did is they put a lot of time and effort into infiltrating

01:39:56 ►

all these groups that claimed knowledge of what was going on.

01:40:01 ►

And as a survivor of the new left, I can tell you when the government gets

01:40:06 ►

interested in infiltrating, I mean, two out of every three members of SDS was a government

01:40:15 ►

informant at the height of its membership. So I believe that what happened was these flying

01:40:22 ►

saucer groups were massively infiltrated by the government

01:40:25 ►

in the course of its pursuing its constitutional obligation

01:40:30 ►

to maintain the public welfare.

01:40:34 ►

And by 54 or 55,

01:40:38 ►

the government was perfectly convinced

01:40:40 ►

that whatever flying saucers were,

01:40:44 ►

they did not pose a threat to the integrity of the air

01:40:48 ►

defenses of North America. And that was their real concern. But bureaucracies are weird creatures.

01:40:56 ►

They really exist only to perpetuate themselves. So at some point inside these agencies, they must have had to face the fact that they had massively infiltrated a bunch of very flaky people.

01:41:11 ►

And now their choice was to either end the program, tell the budget people that no, they wouldn’t be needing that $10 million this year,

01:41:21 ►

or keep going with it because they now had a group of people self-selected for

01:41:27 ►

gullibility.

01:41:29 ►

And that group of people became the victims of every chemical experiment, weird technology,

01:41:37 ►

propaganda experiment, and so forth and so on, because their friends and relatives had

01:41:42 ►

already written them off as completely

01:41:46 ►

untrustworthy who would believe them no matter what story they told so i really felt i was among

01:41:55 ►

severely damaged people uh and it wasn’t their fault it’s that they they had become part of

01:42:03 ►

something that had become part of something that had become part of something that had become part of something

01:42:07 ►

and they never really had a fighting chance.

01:42:11 ►

Do strange lights haunt the skies of Earth? You bet their booties

01:42:16 ►

they do. But the flying saucer cults are a social

01:42:19 ►

phenomenon and largely unrelated to whatever this

01:42:24 ►

anomaly is. Yeah.

01:42:28 ►

Dr. Puckminster Fuller often spoke of the femoralization of technology. Do you think

01:42:35 ►

there will come a time when we are indistinguishable from our technology and would that be sort

01:42:39 ►

of apotheosis that you speak about in your books?

01:42:43 ►

No, I think it would go the other way, that we’re moving toward a time when our technology

01:42:47 ►

is indistinguishable from us.

01:42:50 ►

In other words, I don’t want us to all turn into 7,180 AV.

01:42:59 ►

That doesn’t seem like a good idea.

01:43:01 ►

That doesn’t seem like a good idea.

01:43:07 ►

But on the other hand, I could imagine as a hopeful scenario, a future world of, let’s say, 500 or a billion healthy, happy, well-fed people

01:43:16 ►

of all races, political persuasions, gender preferences, and so forth and so on.

01:43:23 ►

gender preferences, and so forth and so on.

01:43:30 ►

And those people would essentially live as our archaic ancestors did,

01:43:36 ►

very little material culture, very nomadic.

01:43:42 ►

But if you could transport yourself into the body of one of these people,

01:43:46 ►

you would discover that when they close their eyes,

01:43:50 ►

there are menus hanging in space.

01:43:55 ►

In other words, the computer that was on the back of the thumbnail,

01:44:01 ►

five years later, that computer moves into being a kind of an implant, a black contact lens that is sewn into your eyelids at age six,

01:44:07 ►

so that when you close your eyes, you’re actually looking at an interface.

01:44:13 ►

And the entire database of the culture could be placed there.

01:44:20 ►

You see, really what computers are doing is they’re making what we call the collective unconscious conscious.

01:44:28 ►

All data, all images are potentially accessible through the network.

01:44:37 ►

And, you know, I’m still getting used to the idea of the network myself.

01:44:42 ►

to the idea of the network myself.

01:44:46 ►

Like I keep thinking, oh, I have this timeline.

01:44:51 ►

I could get somebody’s chronology and put it at my website.

01:44:57 ►

And then I remember, no, no, all I have to do is point to their website.

01:45:01 ►

I don’t have to copy or move anything. If there is one list, that’s all the world needs. Anybody else who needs that list

01:45:08 ►

can point to it from their website. So the speed at which new structures can be created

01:45:17 ►

is astonishing. I mean, it almost literally overnight you can build a website and begin to point at other websites and bring resources into yours.

01:45:31 ►

This is a technology which is going to turn out to not be what people think it is.

01:45:37 ►

It’s going to be a technology for showing each other the inside of our heads, for showing each other our dreams.

01:45:47 ►

You know, one thing I didn’t talk about in the main part of the lecture

01:45:50 ►

is that psychedelics are catalysts for language.

01:45:55 ►

They speed up and catalyze the language formation process.

01:46:00 ►

And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves.

01:46:08 ►

And it cannot be any more glued together is the way in which it will dissolve boundaries

01:46:26 ►

is by making us transparent to each other.

01:46:31 ►

I mean, I can imagine a child of the future.

01:46:34 ►

We all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators

01:46:40 ►

and things like that.

01:46:41 ►

In the future, we won’t stick them on refrigerators.

01:46:44 ►

We will stick them in our website.

01:46:46 ►

And everything will go into our website.

01:46:49 ►

And by the time we’re 25 or something,

01:46:53 ►

our website will be the size of the American Museum of Natural History.

01:46:58 ►

And you can wander through it.

01:47:01 ►

And as a gesture of intimacy, you can invite someone else to wander through it.

01:47:07 ►

Well, that’s who you are. It’s your imagination. And I think, in a sense, I’ve said at times that

01:47:16 ►

the cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination and we want the imagination to

01:47:29 ►

replace the laws of physics. With these technologies, we can probably do that, but it’ll have to

01:47:36 ►

run on psychedelic design principles or it’s certain to be a mess. Yeah.

01:47:42 ►

Yes, what could you tell us about the problems that some people experience

01:47:45 ►

with the digestibility

01:47:47 ►

of the mushrooms

01:47:47 ►

and how it can lead to pain

01:47:50 ►

and some discomfort

01:47:51 ►

and sometimes to a,

01:47:54 ►

like a nightmarish type experience?

01:47:56 ►

Well, first of all,

01:47:57 ►

let me say this.

01:47:59 ►

There are several mushrooms

01:48:00 ►

which contain psilocybin

01:48:02 ►

which grow in cow dung.

01:48:05 ►

What I urge people to do if you’re serious about this is to grow your own.

01:48:12 ►

This is moderately self-serving because I wrote a book about how to grow your own mushrooms.

01:48:18 ►

But there are many such books.

01:48:21 ►

You don’t have to buy mine.

01:48:22 ►

You only need it if you want the best one.

01:48:28 ►

But you see here, and Stamets’ book is excellent. And if you want to go large scale,

01:48:34 ►

Stamets’ book is the one. But let me say something then. After the brain, the stomach is the most heavily innervated organ in the body.

01:48:48 ►

And anxiety has a way of cropping up as a stomach ache.

01:48:54 ►

So a lot of people have anxiety in the first hour of taking mushrooms.

01:49:00 ►

And they believe that something in the mushroom is giving them gastric distress.

01:49:06 ►

It really isn’t. It’s more like a case of butterflies on an empty stomach because you

01:49:13 ►

should take mushrooms on an empty stomach. You can try a suppository. You can try another drug if you want. But there is, in this psychedelic business,

01:49:28 ►

something to be said for simply disciplining your hindbrain.

01:49:34 ►

Also, you can suppress nausea with cannabis.

01:49:38 ►

So, you know, a mixture of self-discipline,

01:49:41 ►

pharmacological steering, so forth and so on.

01:49:48 ►

If you have a severe reaction to the mushroom, you probably shouldn’t take it.

01:49:55 ►

I mean, after all, it is a fungus.

01:49:56 ►

And as mammals, we have developed some pretty strong allergenic reactions to fungi, some of us. And certain reactions to psilocybin are not

01:50:10 ►

psychedelic reactions, like enormous sweating or something like that. That’s more an indication

01:50:18 ►

of an allergy. If you’re going to get into psychedelics, one of the things you have to do is learn your way around.

01:50:27 ►

Psychedelic sophistication doesn’t mean you took everything there is in combination with everything else there is at high doses with your friends at rock concerts, it means that you figured out what worked for you

01:50:47 ►

and then really put the pedal to the metal, you know?

01:50:52 ►

Yeah?

01:50:53 ►

I recently came across David Hudson’s work

01:50:57 ►

on corporately rearranged monatomic elements

01:51:00 ►

and found that these monatomic heavy metals

01:51:04 ►

conduct the act of supeructors, conduct light force

01:51:08 ►

through our nervous system. Are you familiar with this work at all?

01:51:11 ►

No, you’ve stumped the star.

01:51:15 ►

I mean, I’m interested in

01:51:17 ►

organic superconductivity and room temperature

01:51:20 ►

superconductivity, but I don’t know

01:51:23 ►

his work, so I can’t comment on it.

01:51:26 ►

You said he’s going to be coming out with a book in 69 months called Ormes,

01:51:31 ►

O-R-M-E-S, Ormes, which is Ormeley Rearranged Monotonic Elasticity.

01:51:37 ►

I’m sure it will find its way to my desk.

01:51:40 ►

Now all these hands.

01:51:41 ►

Oh, he should be the guy, you tell me.

01:51:43 ►

All right.

01:51:43 ►

Now all these hands, oh, he should be the guy, you tell me.

01:51:44 ►

All right.

01:51:52 ►

How much of our consensus reality do you think is based on inexorable physical laws,

01:51:54 ►

things that aren’t of our own creation?

01:51:59 ►

And how much, if any, is subject to change without notice simply based on a consensus belief of what should be or what is going to be?

01:52:06 ►

How do you think things work?

01:52:09 ►

Well, I mean, this is sort of where I’m at.

01:52:14 ►

I mean, as you were asking the question,

01:52:16 ►

my tendency would be to say none,

01:52:20 ►

that none of our reality is based on inexorable physical law.

01:52:24 ►

But I only want that to be true.

01:52:27 ►

I’m not sure it is true.

01:52:30 ►

Whitehead used to say, he had this thing about what he called stubborn facts.

01:52:35 ►

And he said there are some stubborn facts,

01:52:39 ►

and you can cut your philosophy any way you want,

01:52:41 ►

but if you don’t take account of the stubborn facts, you’ll have a

01:52:45 ►

problem. A lot of reality is made of language. How much, I’m not sure, but my hope is that a great

01:52:58 ►

deal is made of language. Rupert Sheldrake, who’s a good friend of mine, and we sort of think along the same lines,

01:53:07 ►

he believes that there are not inexorable physical laws, that there are just very old habits.

01:53:14 ►

He would think of the speed of light as a very old habit. These physical constants

01:53:22 ►

may be changing.

01:53:25 ►

We don’t know.

01:53:27 ►

I mean, take the speed of light.

01:53:31 ►

We’ve measured it on one planet since 1906 and cheerfully extrapolate it to every corner of the known universe

01:53:37 ►

with no sense that there might be a problem there at all.

01:53:43 ►

Yet, you know, if you’re a critic of this, you can look at the speed

01:53:48 ►

of light as measured from 1906 and you will notice that the values have been

01:53:53 ►

slowly going up. It’s apparently going slightly faster than it was a century

01:54:00 ►

ago. Well, people just dump on that and say, no, no, you poor moron, you don’t understand.

01:54:07 ►

It’s that the instrumentality has become more precise, and so the measurement

01:54:14 ►

may have changed slightly. Oh, yeah? Well, it seems to me in that case the points should cluster.

01:54:22 ►

How come the more recent ones are faster than the earlier ones

01:54:26 ►

consistently? In other words, it’s not that we’re getting measurements which cluster around a value,

01:54:33 ►

it’s that we’re getting measurements which are going out this way toward faster.

01:54:39 ►

I think language is the key to making reality. I think our language is a very weak language.

01:54:48 ►

Computer languages may be more powerful, you know, VRML or mathematics.

01:54:55 ►

But I believe the world is made of language.

01:54:58 ►

That’s the magical belief.

01:55:01 ►

But then the challenge to that belief is, okay, wise guy,

01:55:04 ►

so how come the world isn’t the

01:55:05 ►

way you say it is well that’s ungenerous uh i think because it it doesn’t work quite like that

01:55:17 ►

consensus is set by societies by millions of. Reality is a phenomenon of many linguistically operating subsystems.

01:55:30 ►

Maybe if you and I were stranded on a desert island,

01:55:33 ►

we could get a reality going.

01:55:35 ►

We probably could, but it would surely be shattered

01:55:38 ►

when somebody showed up to take us home again.

01:55:43 ►

Over here.

01:55:44 ►

Why would planets be the only ones that use the mushrooms? to take us home again. Over here.

01:55:48 ►

Why would findings be the only ones that use the mushrooms?

01:55:52 ►

And secondly, is there any written documentation of this mushroom?

01:56:00 ►

The documentation, well, there wouldn’t be anything written, of course.

01:56:01 ►

It’s earlier than that. But the documentation, it is well known that the Sahara was wetter in the past.

01:56:08 ►

Even as recently as Roman times, Pliny called it the breadbasket of Rome.

01:56:14 ►

And we know that human populations were out there.

01:56:19 ►

We, in the Tsele plateau of southern Algeria, there are rock paintings,

01:56:27 ►

ruprestris paintings, that show shamans with mushrooms

01:56:32 ►

sprouting out of their bodies and in their hands.

01:56:37 ►

So we have mushroom use, we have evidence of mushroom use

01:56:42 ►

at the era of the great horned

01:56:45 ►

Paleolithic goddess.

01:56:48 ►

The presence or absence of monogamy

01:56:53 ►

and polygamy is debatable.

01:56:58 ►

However, the archaeology of this area

01:57:03 ►

has not been well studied and won’t be soon.

01:57:08 ►

Thanks to Islamic fundamentalism, Algeria is no place to do archaeology right now.

01:57:15 ►

Now to the first part of your question, why was it human beings who ate the mushrooms?

01:57:21 ►

Well, to use the mushrooms as a doorway to higher intelligence you would

01:57:30 ►

have had to already come a certain distance down the path of higher animal organization

01:57:36 ►

we were bipedal we had a pack signaling repertoire we had binocular vision and the reason we used the mushrooms was because we

01:57:48 ►

were under nutritional pressure. There may have been other animals under nutritional pressure

01:57:55 ►

but they may have been more tightly bound to their original diet or they may simply have had behavioral organization that the mushroom couldn’t dissolve

01:58:08 ►

or break through. There has been talk among evolutionary biologists about if there were

01:58:15 ►

no primates on this planet, what order of animals might occupy the conscious niche or be able to come in there.

01:58:25 ►

And interestingly, raccoons are candidates.

01:58:31 ►

Raccoons have well-positioned eyes.

01:58:36 ►

They have a very complex hand.

01:58:40 ►

And years and years ago, I used to grow mushrooms,

01:58:46 ►

and I grew them by my own method, naturally, in jars.

01:58:50 ►

And I would have waste rye infected with jars,

01:58:54 ►

I mean, jars infected with mycelium-permeated rye,

01:58:59 ►

and I would put it out on the back porch at night, or I did once.

01:59:03 ►

And I awoke in the middle of the night to this terrific racket,

01:59:08 ►

and there were raccoons on the back porch.

01:59:10 ►

They could smell the rye infested with the psilocybin-containing mycelium.

01:59:17 ►

They could unscrew the lids and plunge their mitts into this stuff.

01:59:28 ►

lids and plunge their mitts into this stuff and and as i turned on the lights i saw these little bandit faces with this mycelial crumbs on their little upturned muzzles and they didn’t uh they

01:59:38 ►

don’t they wouldn’t back off they would and the other thing was they were standing up on their hind legs.

01:59:47 ►

So they were standing on their hind legs, holding a jar,

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holding the stuff, and tottering toward me.

01:59:55 ►

So I just took one look and backed off.

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And for the rest of the evening,

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you could tell that they were approaching the orgiastic boundary

02:00:13 ►

because the carrying on the sexual squeaking and squealing

02:00:20 ►

and thumping and pounding going on in the backyard was just incredible.

02:00:27 ►

So, you know, they might be interesting test animals to put through this.

02:00:36 ►

Yeah.

02:00:37 ►

Yeah.

02:00:39 ►

John Allais based his passport to Macedonia largely on the fairy faith in Celtic countries,

02:00:47 ►

which you obviously are familiar with.

02:00:49 ►

I wanted to have your comments on the numinous nature

02:00:54 ►

of the UFO phenomenon with regard to the Celtic faith,

02:00:57 ►

the fairy faith, and the role that this phenomenon,

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which I think you referred to as the other earlier in your talk,

02:01:05 ►

has the transformation that you’re describing as going through at this present time in the future.

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Yes, Jacques Vallée was a UFO researcher,

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and the book that was mentioned, Passport to Magonia,

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was one of his earliest books on the subject.

02:01:21 ►

He’s gone through a lot of changes about it.

02:01:33 ►

The numinous…

02:01:34 ►

I think what’s going on is that, in a sense,

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there is leakage from the future.

02:01:48 ►

This is a broad subject and it’s late in the evening,

02:01:50 ►

so I’ll give it to you in headlines.

02:01:57 ►

But basically, science takes the position that nature is without purpose.

02:02:00 ►

In other words, nature has no goal.

02:02:09 ►

Nature proceeds forward according to the unfolding of chance and necessity. But I don’t believe this. I think nature is an engine for the conservation of novelty and that nature’s purpose

02:02:17 ►

is to generate ever greater novelty. And that in fact history is the dawning realization that we are about to descend

02:02:30 ►

down a very steep novelty sink, as it were, into immense amounts of novelty. And this is why we

02:02:41 ►

image the other in the 20th century as the extraterrestrial,

02:02:45 ►

because out of the unconscious comes this image of the other as the extraterrestrial.

02:02:54 ►

I think we are in the presence of what I call the transcendental object at the end of time,

02:03:10 ►

object at the end of time and that religions call it the Messiah or the Maitreya, secularists call it utopia, millenarians call it something else, mushroom enthusiasts something else, but that we

02:03:18 ►

are in the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time and that it casts an enormous reflection back through history,

02:03:28 ►

especially recent history.

02:03:31 ►

But any person encountering this backward moving shadow of the transcendental object

02:03:39 ►

will attempt to interpret it in cultural terms that they can relate to.

02:03:45 ►

So if they happen to be a French peasant in the 11th century,

02:03:50 ►

they will assume that it’s the Virgin Mary.

02:03:54 ►

If they’re a sexual scientific rationalist in the 20th century,

02:03:59 ►

they will assume it’s a spacecraft of some sort.

02:04:04 ►

assume it’s a spacecraft of some sort.

02:04:12 ►

The Celts and their relationship to little people and an invisible world,

02:04:18 ►

this is a generally held belief that they are exemplifying that is worldwide, which is that the dead are somehow co-present in the space of the living,

02:04:26 ►

dead, are somehow co-present in the space of the living, but invisibly so, except to those who have the gift of second sight or are magically empowered or shamanically adept.

02:04:37 ►

The last thought, I should leave you with this, and it’s an adumbration of this question,

02:04:44 ►

but it also has deeper implications.

02:04:47 ►

The model that you’re usually given of the psychedelic experience

02:04:51 ►

is a religious model, that the mysteries of religion,

02:04:57 ►

Hindu, Buddhist, or something or other,

02:04:59 ►

are somehow illuminated by this boundary-ving experience my model is is a little different a little cooler

02:05:09 ►

and I think a little more formal and it’s this that consciousness is an omnidirectional threat

02:05:18 ►

detection response you’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

02:05:26 ►

where people are changing their lives

02:05:28 ►

one thought at a time.

02:05:33 ►

And yes, I’m wondering just like you

02:05:36 ►

are about what came after Terence’s

02:05:38 ►

comment that he sees

02:05:39 ►

consciousness as an

02:05:41 ►

omnidirectional threat detection

02:05:43 ►

response.

02:05:46 ►

I sure wish I knew what came after that, but that is exactly where the recording stopped. So if you happen to have a

02:05:52 ►

copy of the end of this talk and can either send it or post it somewhere, I’m sure that in addition

02:05:58 ►

to myself that there are a lot of your fellow Saloners who would be most grateful. I guess that I probably should have ended it with his story about the stone dracoons.

02:06:09 ►

What a great image that was, huh?

02:06:12 ►

Well, this has been my longest podcast yet,

02:06:14 ►

and so I’ll close the program today by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

02:06:22 ►

are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

02:06:30 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

02:06:47 ►

And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the psychedelic salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,

02:06:53 ►

which is available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

02:06:59 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

02:07:00 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

221 - McKenna_ Evolving Times

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Program Notes

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