225 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 3

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“I’ve never met anyone with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself.”

“So what you have to do is just like every other thing, everything you’ve been told is wrong, and you have to take life by the handlebars and figure out what’s really going on, which doesn’t mean that you’re reckless.”

“We’ve been polluted by Disney.”

“We are living inside a 90% Nineteenth Century world view. And a culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place.”

“So in a way, one way of thinking about psychedelics is that they empower language. It’s a way to force the evolution of language. The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language.”

“It was very important, I think, to the Establishment to suppress that [hip phrases from the Hippie culture], because new words are the beginnings of new realities.”

“What holds us together is what holds all sub-cultures together, which is an experience. In this case, the experience of being loaded, and, you know, it’s a very powerful and immediate kind of experience.”

“It’s amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has, the human world, glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises.”

“The whole history of the evolution of the Western mind is in a sense the birth of the Logos. The Logos is making its way towards self-expression, and it’s doing this by claiming dimension, after dimension of manifestation.”

“The mind is not a form of intelligence. The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested. You don’t want to confuse the garage with the car. … Everything goes on within the confines of mind. It’s like the light that you switch on when you walk into a darkened room, and then everything else is the furniture within the room. Mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances. … Mind is the inclusive category, I think.”

“It’s very important to try and make some accommodation to the local language, because in a way, only the local language is appropriate to the place. … Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality.”

“The one thing you learn taking psychedelics is that nothing is straightforward.”

“Anybody who starts talking to you about the grandeur that was Rome, should be reminded: The grandeur of Rome was it was a bargain-basement on three floors masquerading as a military brothel. It was not a great civilization.”

“I’m completely convinced that no one is in control, and that this is very good news.”

“In a sense, the flying saucer is nothing more than a modern rebirth of the philosopher’s stone. The flying saucer is the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the thing which cannot exist, but which does exist, and which if we could obtain it everything would be different.”

Previous Episode §

224 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 2

Next Episode §

226 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 4

Similar Episodes §

• 383 - A Psychedelic Point of View - score: 0.86589
• 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.85832
• 460 - Our planetary birth process - score: 0.85407
• 027 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 1) - score: 0.85118
• Podcast 689 – McKenna at Esalen 1985 Part 2 - score: 0.84994
• 634 - The Birth of a New Humanity – Part 3 - score: 0.84887
• 526 - History Ends In Green – Part 3 - score: 0.84783
• 337 - The World Could Be Anything - score: 0.84010
• 461 - Shake the mud off your shoes, monkey - score: 0.83863
• 349 - A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality - score: 0.83649

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ► §

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:23 ► §

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:29 ► §

And along with me, at least in spirit, are some other co-hosts,

00:00:32 ► §

in that they are fellow salonners who sent in donations recently.

00:00:36 ► §

So let’s all thank Damballa Wedo Productions. That’s D-A-M-B-A-L-L-A-H-W-E-D-D-O.

00:00:43 ► §

So I hope I pronounced that close to right.

00:00:45 ► §

Stephen D., Howard Yu, Brown Rabbit Creations,

00:00:50 ► §

and longtime salonner Mark C.

00:00:52 ► §

for their generosity in these difficult days.

00:00:57 ► §

And thanks to our donors,

00:00:58 ► §

these podcasts will continue winging their way to you for a long time to come

00:01:03 ► §

because a lot of new archival recordings are coming my way every month now,

00:01:07 ► §

and so I’m going to make it my mission to see that I get them all out eventually.

00:01:12 ► §

So without any further ado, let’s get back to the 1992 Terrence McKenna workshop.

00:01:19 ► §

Since we played the first two parts already, as you already know,

00:01:24 ► §

while Terrence titled this workshop Hermeticism and Alchemy,

00:01:29 ► §

it has actually been an eclectic bag of interesting stories and information, I think.

00:01:34 ► §

And he doesn’t disappoint today because we’re about to hear another wide-ranging discussion that took its direction from the questions asked by the audience.

00:01:44 ► §

ranging discussion that took its direction from the questions asked by the audience.

00:01:51 ► §

And among other answers he gives in answers to the questions he’s asked, one of them was,

00:01:55 ► §

what holds our concept of a community together?

00:02:00 ► §

And I’d never heard him ask that before, and his answer, of course, was typical Terrence.

00:02:28 ► §

He said, whatever they’re called in the recording, but again, I don’t think they will seriously slow you down. So let’s travel back in time now to the year 1992, the depths of the

00:02:32 ► §

Reagan-Bush debacle, and join the one and only Terrence

00:02:36 ► §

McKenna once again.

00:02:40 ► §

Okay. Well, there seemed to be a lot of

00:02:44 ► §

hands up

00:02:45 ► §

when we left

00:02:46 ► §

can anybody pick up the thread

00:02:48 ► §

yeah

00:02:48 ► §

yeah

00:02:49 ► §

I mean I’ve heard

00:02:51 ► §

that you speak in a real time

00:02:52 ► §

to self-transforming

00:02:54 ► §

and what

00:02:58 ► §

I recognize you very much

00:03:01 ► §

insist that the DNC realm

00:03:02 ► §

is a very alien realm

00:03:03 ► §

very unlike something like the.

00:03:07 ► §

But when I hear your descriptions

00:03:09 ► §

of these entities, which I have not encountered,

00:03:11 ► §

though I try, I hear a fairly, an image

00:03:18 ► §

of an elemental spirit, which we would call it

00:03:20 ► §

in Western sort of folk mythology, in the sense

00:03:24 ► §

that one, just because you used the word elf,

00:03:26 ► §

though I know they don’t really look like necessarily

00:03:28 ► §

like classical elves, but the sense of a small entity

00:03:33 ► §

doing a lot of work that is neither good nor bad,

00:03:36 ► §

in the sense it’s sort of mischievous, it’s not demonic,

00:03:40 ► §

but it’s not an angel.

00:03:42 ► §

And the sort of sense of them being small

00:03:44 ► §

and doing a lot of work comes to me very much

00:03:46 ► §

as sort of an impression of an elemental.

00:03:49 ► §

And one, if you could just respond to that.

00:03:51 ► §

And also, to me, and I just think

00:03:53 ► §

of your own particular racial heritage

00:03:56 ► §

and the fact that the main elemental spirits that one

00:03:59 ► §

thinks of are often these little Celtic little fairies.

00:04:02 ► §

And whether how you sort of, I’m sure you’ve thought of this to some degree,

00:04:06 ► §

but how you sort of integrated these things.

00:04:11 ► §

Well, some of you may know this book,

00:04:16 ► §

it’s a classic,

00:04:17 ► §

called The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries

00:04:20 ► §

by Evans Vance,

00:04:22 ► §

and it was reprinted recently,

00:04:24 ► §

and I wrote the introduction to it it’s an

00:04:27 ► §

it’s mentions in there when St. when Patrick arrived as a missionary in Ireland to convert

00:04:37 ► §

the pagan Irish the problem that he encountered was this belief in the land of fairies.

00:04:47 ► §

And he, in order to convert the pagan Irish,

00:04:50 ► §

he convinced them that these were souls of the dead

00:05:00 ► §

in an intermediate zone that was neither heaven nor hell,

00:05:04 ► §

which he called purgatory.

00:05:06 ► §

Purgatory was invented to accommodate

00:05:09 ► §

the folk beliefs of the pagan Irish.

00:05:12 ► §

And when it was brought back to Rome,

00:05:15 ► §

it seemed like such a good idea

00:05:18 ► §

for converting all kinds of pagan peoples

00:05:21 ► §

on the fringe of the expanding sphere of Christianity that it’s been in place

00:05:27 ► §

ever since. I’ve wondered, I think I even talked sometime this week to somebody about

00:05:35 ► §

the way in which there’s a kind of a racial or a genetic undertone about some of this stuff.

00:05:48 ► §

I never really felt, I didn’t know until I was 13 years old that I wasn’t a white person.

00:05:58 ► §

Because I grew up in Colorado where everything was white bread culture.

00:06:03 ► §

And my father may have had opinions

00:06:05 ► §

about the IRA and all that

00:06:08 ► §

but we were never told

00:06:10 ► §

that we were Irish

00:06:12 ► §

and some of you who have roots in this city

00:06:16 ► §

know that as recently as 50 years ago

00:06:19 ► §

they used to have signs up along 8th Avenue

00:06:23 ► §

that said no dogs or Irish allowed.

00:06:28 ► §

So I reconnected to that part of the heritage.

00:06:34 ► §

The Irish are stereotypically known to be susceptible to intoxication,

00:06:42 ► §

to be great word spinners,

00:06:44 ► §

to intoxication, to be great word spinners,

00:06:51 ► §

and to have this peculiar relationship to fairyland or something.

00:06:59 ► §

I don’t want to think that I’m just exploring the Celtic collective unconscious.

00:07:03 ► §

It seems to me these things must be there for everybody. Nevertheless, you know, we’re so concerned to suppress racial differences

00:07:09 ► §

because we’re a democracy and because racial problems have haunted American politics

00:07:16 ► §

from the very beginning that we tend to want to believe that everybody is different.

00:07:22 ► §

I mean, everybody is the same.

00:07:27 ► §

to believe that everybody is different I mean everybody is the same but in fact

00:07:33 ► §

you know I took a course once at Cal which was it was interesting it was given by the forensics department the only course I ever took in the forensics

00:07:39 ► §

department and it was called biochemical Markers for Individuality.

00:07:50 ► §

And one of the things we did, it was actually taught by Alexander Shulgin, the great drug designer.

00:07:58 ► §

And one of the things we did is he brought in a little vial of some kind of chemical and he passed it around.

00:08:10 ► §

And out of 200 people in the class, 198 couldn’t smell it at all, and two people were so overwhelmed by the smell of this that they actually became physically sick for a few minutes. Well, what this is, and

00:08:16 ► §

then he explained to us, these people were probably up to 50,000 times more sensitive to this chemical than most people.

00:08:26 ► §

And that this is a gene that you carry for sensitivity to this thing.

00:08:33 ► §

Well, those kinds of compounds, aromatic compounds, compounds with an electronically active ring structure,

00:08:43 ► §

are the very nearest relatives to drugs.

00:08:47 ► §

And so it’s reasonable to suppose

00:08:51 ► §

that there are genetic differences

00:08:53 ► §

in the way we relate to drugs,

00:08:56 ► §

which doesn’t mean racial differences.

00:08:59 ► §

It means from person to person.

00:09:01 ► §

But it also may mean, you know,

00:09:04 ► §

that what a race is,

00:09:07 ► §

is a collection of related genes

00:09:10 ► §

that are more frequently found together than not.

00:09:17 ► §

You know, this is why, technically speaking,

00:09:19 ► §

you can never say so-and-so belongs to a race

00:09:24 ► §

because a race is a quality of a group it’s not

00:09:29 ► §

something an individual is you have to have a bunch of people before you can

00:09:34 ► §

say that you’re confronting a phenomenon of race so it may be that what

00:09:41 ► §

Aboriginal people believe is that there are shamanic lines family lines with a

00:09:48 ► §

greater susceptibility to these things than others so one of the things you learn when you begin to

00:09:54 ► §

explore psychedelic substances is that it isn’t hitting everybody the same way in fact it can hit people radically different ways society misrepresents

00:10:08 ► §

drugs tremendously for example you know we all know the stereotyped image of the

00:10:17 ► §

pothead you know the pothead can’t work can’t. It’s the inarticulate, dumb, hippie image. Well, I’ve never met anyone

00:10:29 ► §

with a deeper devotion to cannabis than myself. And, you know, I’m very proud of my memory

00:10:37 ► §

and my ability to get verbally organized under almost any condition so i completely violate the stereotype of what it

00:10:48 ► §

is to be a pothead well how many people are there like that i mean i’m always amazed when people say

00:10:54 ► §

you know no i i don’t want to smoke any pot it’ll mess with my memory i mean really how peculiar

00:11:02 ► §

so what you have to do it’s just like every other thing,

00:11:07 ► §

everything you’ve been told is wrong,

00:11:09 ► §

and you have to take life by the handlebars

00:11:13 ► §

and figure out what’s really going on,

00:11:16 ► §

which doesn’t mean that you’re reckless.

00:11:19 ► §

There are bad drugs, there are bad politics,

00:11:24 ► §

there are bad drugs there are bad politics there are bad relationships i hope that answered your question

00:11:30 ► §

it was a two-part question

00:11:32 ► §

it still seems to me that these entities are in many ways similar to the sort of

00:11:41 ► §

elemental spirits and whether you think of that as a possible explanation for

00:11:45 ► §

well when you

00:11:46 ► §

say they’re like

00:11:47 ► §

elemental spirits

00:11:47 ► §

is that because

00:11:48 ► §

you spend a lot

00:11:49 ► §

of time with

00:11:50 ► §

elemental spirits

00:11:51 ► §

it’s true they

00:11:55 ► §

are I mean they

00:11:56 ► §

are they don’t

00:11:57 ► §

look like them

00:11:58 ► §

though they don’t

00:11:59 ► §

look like anything

00:12:00 ► §

that there was a really bad

00:12:05 ► §

movie, those of you who don’t have

00:12:07 ► §

kids can tune out here

00:12:10 ► §

but since I have kids I’ve seen

00:12:11 ► §

a lot of bad movies

00:12:13 ► §

because that’s what they make for kids

00:12:15 ► §

and I think it was four or five years ago

00:12:17 ► §

at Christmas time there was this movie

00:12:19 ► §

called Santa Claus

00:12:21 ► §

tune out on

00:12:23 ► §

but there was one scene

00:12:24 ► §

in the elves’ workshop

00:12:26 ► §

where they were making thousands of toys

00:12:29 ► §

and there were all these conveyor belts

00:12:32 ► §

going from level to level

00:12:33 ► §

and these guys rushing around at full speed.

00:12:36 ► §

It was the most DMT-like reconstruction I’ve ever seen.

00:12:42 ► §

So it’s funny, though,

00:12:46 ► §

that the elf mythology doesn’t carry

00:12:48 ► §

the sense of strangeness

00:12:50 ► §

that you get in the DMT flash,

00:12:53 ► §

although I suspect that what that is

00:12:55 ► §

is that we’ve been polluted by Disney,

00:13:01 ► §

that Disney has given us this vision of fairies, number two, harmless.

00:13:08 ► §

You know, it’s the Tinkerbell phenomenon.

00:13:11 ► §

Because if you go back before, you know, is it Andrew Lang who wrote all those books,

00:13:16 ► §

the Blue Fairy Book, the Brown Fairy Book, the White Fairy Book?

00:13:20 ► §

Those are weird, those stories.

00:13:23 ► §

I mean, fairies are weird.

00:13:25 ► §

They steal babies.

00:13:27 ► §

That’s their main way of relating to human beings

00:13:31 ► §

is they steal human infants

00:13:33 ► §

and leave behind wizened, deformed, sickly creatures

00:13:40 ► §

who become very strange and peripheral kinds of human beings.

00:13:45 ► §

And fairies, if you get trapped in fairyland,

00:13:48 ► §

the only way out is through…

00:13:51 ► §

They’re language-oriented.

00:13:53 ► §

They will never do you damage if you can convince them

00:13:58 ► §

that you’re a master of words.

00:14:02 ► §

It’s poetry that they like.

00:14:10 ► §

of words you know it’s poetry that they like and i all over the world there is this persistent motif of these small entities well i’m not suggesting that they’re really there

00:14:16 ► §

but i don’t know what’s going on i mean it’s odd that they should persist and and that they should persist and that they should be experientially available.

00:14:27 ► §

I mean, you have to understand,

00:14:28 ► §

a different person saying this to you,

00:14:32 ► §

it would be a whole different thing

00:14:34 ► §

if it was Madam so-and-so,

00:14:36 ► §

and so forth and so on.

00:14:39 ► §

I’m pushed to this stuff by experience

00:14:43 ► §

because my inclination is toward reason

00:14:46 ► §

you know

00:14:48 ► §

it’s just that

00:14:49 ► §

everybody moves along safe channels

00:14:53 ► §

everybody stays out of the fast lane

00:14:57 ► §

and if you move to the edges

00:15:00 ► §

and drugs are certainly an edge

00:15:03 ► §

and you know a full exploration of one’s sexuality

00:15:09 ► §

is certainly an edge and going off to weird corners of the world and staying long periods

00:15:17 ► §

of time is certainly another edge and if you do these kinds the full affirming world of white bread, European, bourgeois, work hard types

00:15:30 ► §

just looks as weird as any cultural adaptation could possibly be.

00:15:36 ► §

I mean, I have said many times, and you probably agree to some degree, that reality is created by language.

00:15:47 ► §

probably agree to some degree that reality is created by language but we don’t realize how true this is that reality really is created by language and that we are all imprisoned

00:15:53 ► §

in somebody else’s language this isn’t how we want to talk most of the words, I’d say 90% of the words and constructions we use would be great-grandfather.

00:16:09 ► §

We are living inside a 90% 19th century worldview.

00:16:16 ► §

And culture cannot evolve any faster than its language evolves.

00:16:21 ► §

Because what cannot be said cannot be done

00:16:25 ► §

what cannot be said

00:16:28 ► §

cannot be put in place

00:16:30 ► §

so in a way

00:16:31 ► §

one way of thinking

00:16:34 ► §

about psychedelics

00:16:35 ► §

is that they

00:16:37 ► §

empower language

00:16:39 ► §

it’s a way to force

00:16:41 ► §

the evolution of language

00:16:43 ► §

the way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language.

00:16:50 ► §

Everybody, I mean, this happens unconsciously in society.

00:16:54 ► §

You know, Hasidic Jews or Reggae people or whatever,

00:16:59 ► §

the way they create their boundaries is through language.

00:17:05 ► §

You know?

00:17:06 ► §

I mean, the Catholic Church, this is how they do it.

00:17:09 ► §

Speaking Yiddish is a way to do it.

00:17:13 ► §

You create a new reality inside the old one,

00:17:17 ► §

and you can do it by moving backward into a specialized language,

00:17:21 ► §

or you can move forward into a new language.

00:17:25 ► §

I mean, look at how the introduction of the computer

00:17:31 ► §

has transformed our language in the 70s and the 80s.

00:17:37 ► §

I mean, CPU, throughput, output, input, bug, glitch,

00:17:42 ► §

all of this stuff,

00:17:43 ► §

these are words that have been empowered by our involvement with a machine.

00:17:50 ► §

Now before that, the major influence on heaping abuse on hippie talk.

00:18:11 ► §

And it’s even now, it’s sold to you guys as West Coast talk.

00:18:16 ► §

It’s sold on the West Coast as L.A. talk.

00:18:21 ► §

It’s sold where you are.

00:18:22 ► §

You’re close to it, but not of it.

00:18:26 ► §

It’s like they used to say of the watergate scandal linked but not tainted uh the and what lsd did i mean i can remember uh

00:18:36 ► §

i can remember if i can remember uh words like or a concept like ego trip the first time I heard that I didn’t know what

00:18:48 ► §

it meant I couldn’t even I didn’t have the concept well then once somebody explains to you the concept

00:18:55 ► §

then you’ve got it vibes that notion introduced a whole bunch of people to the idea of emotions.

00:19:08 ► §

He said, you know, you walk in the room, it was a bad vibe, man.

00:19:13 ► §

Means that there’s no rational deconstruction of what was going on,

00:19:17 ► §

but you could just tell it was not a place you wanted to be. So it began to empower new realities that were able to emerge.

00:19:23 ► §

And it was very important, I think, to the establishment to suppress that

00:19:27 ► §

because new words are the beginnings of new realities.

00:19:36 ► §

The gay thing is an interesting example of that.

00:19:40 ► §

I mean, it goes from what was it called in the 19th century?

00:19:44 ► §

The love that dare not speak its name

00:19:46 ► §

interesting see it was there but you dare not speak its name somehow to name it was to bring

00:19:55 ► §

it too much into the forefront and and and people who were gay nobody could anybody me was worse than being a communist now it’s empowered and all the various racial groups

00:20:09 ► §

who have had to come up through the american meat grinder have had to create vocabularies of

00:20:16 ► §

community that they were uh proud of you know rather than accepting the vocabulary of the of the dominator culture i mean it’s you

00:20:29 ► §

know a good example is the naacp you know the words colored people is embedded there and yet

00:20:38 ► §

these were the sincerest and most radical people in that movement at a certain date to the dominator designation

00:20:46 ► §

for their subgroup

00:20:48 ► §

and constantly oppressed minorities

00:20:51 ► §

are trying to get the language right.

00:20:54 ► §

And it’s important for us to do this too.

00:20:58 ► §

I mean, are we stoners?

00:21:00 ► §

Are we heads?

00:21:02 ► §

Are we shaman?

00:21:04 ► §

What are we exactly?

00:21:06 ► §

Well, pouring psychedelic substances into that mix

00:21:11 ► §

then opens the doorway for the logos to define you.

00:21:16 ► §

And building community is part of this.

00:21:19 ► §

We are an interesting potential community

00:21:22 ► §

because we tend, unfortunately, toward the lily white but not

00:21:28 ► §

concerned uh i i don’t see any class dominating there are probably people in this room who could

00:21:36 ► §

buy and sell all the rest of us without going past their small change there are also probably

00:21:42 ► §

people who scraped and saved for this weekend and could

00:21:46 ► §

ill afford it. We don’t seem to be embedded in that class structure so much. Maybe we represent

00:21:54 ► §

a level of education. Maybe we’re some kind of generally definable group of people by level of

00:22:01 ► §

education, but I don’t see that either what holds us together is what

00:22:06 ► §

holds all subcultures together which is an experience in this case not the something else

00:22:13 ► §

but the experience of being loaded and you know it’s a very powerful and immediate kind of experience and i’m sure some of us are more loaded than others and

00:22:27 ► §

in any subgroup you’ll get that uh kind of a spectrum yeah

00:22:33 ► §

well this is just i don’t want to harp on this but with the dmp thing what do you go to it now

00:22:42 ► §

for i mean have you gotten familiar with the terrain

00:22:45 ► §

or is it every time a shocking first time?

00:22:50 ► §

It’s always pretty shocking.

00:22:55 ► §

I’ve spent a lot of time on it.

00:22:58 ► §

What happens for me is that these entities

00:23:03 ► §

want me to do what they’re doing and what they’re doing is using

00:23:12 ► §

sound to make objects appear out of the air they can sing objects into existence. And this, I think, that they’re language elves.

00:23:28 ► §

They’re not made of matter.

00:23:32 ► §

Well, then what are they made of?

00:23:34 ► §

It seems as though

00:23:35 ► §

the place you go on DMT

00:23:37 ► §

is made purely of language.

00:23:40 ► §

It’s as though there is

00:23:41 ► §

a syntax hard thing to picture.

00:23:50 ► §

But they are more like, sometimes they, how can, well,

00:23:55 ► §

they’re like sentences rather than organisms.

00:24:00 ► §

The essence of their presentation is like that of a pun.

00:24:08 ► §

And so what they want you to do is they want you to learn to make a better kind of language they want you not more articulate not more clearly defined but they actually believe or suggest

00:24:17 ► §

that there can be an a dimensional breakthrough into a language that is seen with the eyes this is i think that the

00:24:29 ► §

breakthrough that we’re waiting for is not going to come out of a political movement

00:24:34 ► §

or a redistribution of wealth or anything which could be called political it’s going to come out of a shift in the body and these things

00:24:49 ► §

happen I mean it’s very mysterious how it happens like think about language

00:24:55 ► §

ordinary language here you have two people one is mute and the other has the

00:25:03 ► §

ordinary powers of speech.

00:25:07 ► §

They look exactly alike.

00:25:10 ► §

You can’t tell a mute person from anybody else.

00:25:13 ► §

And generally complex behavior.

00:25:17 ► §

Language is a behavior of some sort. And it’s very hard to imagine that it slowly insinuated itself into our being.

00:25:26 ► §

It looks to me more like it was a kind of quantum leap of some sort

00:25:33 ► §

and probably appeared very suddenly.

00:25:38 ► §

And there have been other less dramatic but more recent things like this going on for example you know you go to

00:25:48 ► §

school and they teach you that in the um in the 15th century perspective was the thing for me to

00:25:56 ► §

understand i mean perspective was discovered how could it be discovered? I mean, you just walk, here it is, right? And say, no,

00:26:08 ► §

before 1425, people didn’t know that the part of the house farther from you was smaller than the

00:26:16 ► §

part of the house. You can’t understand. It doesn’t make any kind of sense. Another example is Saint Augustine, who was this great father of the church, and who was,

00:26:33 ► §

by the way, African. And he was known as the most brilliant theologian of his age, and the way he

00:26:50 ► §

of his age and the way he would prove to people that he was an exceptional and holy man was they would open a book of theology in front of him and let him look at it for a few minutes and then they

00:26:57 ► §

would close the book and he would be able to tell them what was written there as far as we can tell saint augustine was the only

00:27:06 ► §

man in europe who could read silently can you imagine this it was a miracle say we don’t know

00:27:15 ► §

how the bugger does it you just show him the book and then he can tell you what’s written there

00:27:20 ► §

meanwhile everybody else has to say and now we’ve completely assimilated

00:27:28 ► §

this although there are still a few among us who move their lips when they read

00:27:35 ► §

vladimir novikov used to cruelly sneer at these people he said said once in an interview, he said, I didn’t write books for

00:27:45 ► §

people who move their lips when they read. So, and a final example, which will indicate that

00:27:54 ► §

we’ve come to the end of the line, in terms of sudden behaviors emerging, is according to my friend Bill Gibson in his book The Difference Engine

00:28:05 ► §

oral sex was virtually unknown in England

00:28:12 ► §

until the middle of the 19th century

00:28:14 ► §

and then it was brought in by French prostitutes

00:28:19 ► §

and it was just a mind-boggling concept

00:28:23 ► §

to these Victorians.

00:28:25 ► §

They could not wrap their mind around it.

00:28:28 ► §

Well, you know, from our vantage point,

00:28:31 ► §

we probably assume people have been into this since the Stone Age.

00:28:35 ► §

Maybe they have, but at least for several centuries in Victorian England,

00:28:40 ► §

it absolutely died out as inconceivable.

00:28:44 ► §

And, you know, breakdancing is another one of these

00:28:49 ► §

where a behavior suddenly emerges,

00:28:52 ► §

completely coherent and formed,

00:28:55 ► §

and then it recedes.

00:28:56 ► §

Or if it has cultural utility, it’s stabilized,

00:29:02 ► §

such as my previous example.

00:29:01 ► §

it’s stabilized such as my previous example

00:29:04 ► §

so what these

00:29:10 ► §

tykes seem to be trying to say

00:29:13 ► §

is there is a way

00:29:15 ► §

for you to use your voice

00:29:18 ► §

in order to activate a language

00:29:20 ► §

which is not culturally taught

00:29:23 ► §

it isn’t that you learn it from your parents,

00:29:26 ► §

but that it’s in the bone.

00:29:29 ► §

A poetic language,

00:29:30 ► §

a language scripted into your genes,

00:29:32 ► §

and not only is it an ursprach,

00:29:35 ► §

an original speech,

00:29:38 ► §

the vehicle of primal poetry,

00:29:40 ► §

it can be seen.

00:29:43 ► §

And, you know know it’s interesting how

00:29:45 ► §

in our culture

00:29:47 ► §

when we talk about how somebody

00:29:49 ► §

is really a gifted speaker

00:29:52 ► §

we always reach for visual metaphors

00:29:56 ► §

we say I see what you mean

00:29:59 ► §

you know

00:30:00 ► §

and in Spanish they say

00:30:02 ► §

if they’re talking to you

00:30:03 ► §

and they want to know if you follow

00:30:04 ► §

they say is it clear? claro? means is it clear it’s a visual metaphor say she paints

00:30:13 ► §

a picture uh or he his words have great clarity what this means is that unconsciously we trust the eyes and we don’t trust the ears.

00:30:27 ► §

And telepathy,

00:30:30 ► §

which most people I think think of

00:30:33 ► §

as being able to hear somebody else think,

00:30:37 ► §

is not that at all.

00:30:38 ► §

What telepathy is,

00:30:40 ► §

is when you see what other people mean.

00:30:43 ► §

Because when you see what somebody means,

00:30:47 ► §

it’s like standing in their shoes.

00:30:50 ► §

Point of view.

00:30:52 ► §

That’s a very visual orientation.

00:30:55 ► §

If you can understand somebody else’s point of view,

00:30:58 ► §

you are that person in that moment for that purpose. And I think that it’s amazing that the world has evolved as far and as fast as it has the human world,

00:31:14 ► §

glued together by nothing more than small mouth noises.

00:31:19 ► §

I mean, that’s what we’re talking here, small mouth noises.

00:31:22 ► §

As monkeys, we’re set up for this i mean you can talk

00:31:30 ► §

longer than just about any other activity that you can do without becoming exhausted i mean i’m the

00:31:37 ► §

living proof of it a very small amount of energy is required to keep the old tongue and lips going with the air moving out.

00:31:49 ► §

I mean, imagine if we had to communicate as deaf people do with sign language all the time.

00:31:56 ► §

This is exhausting.

00:31:58 ► §

I mean, nobody communicates like that for four or five hours at a stretch.

00:32:03 ► §

And yet Castro can give a four hour speech

00:32:06 ► §

at the drop of a hat.

00:32:08 ► §

So we’re set up for this.

00:32:11 ► §

The problem is,

00:32:14 ► §

it requires a congruence of interior dictionaries,

00:32:22 ► §

because what happens is my words go across space as an acoustical signal

00:32:28 ► §

they enter your ear you are very rapidly looking up each word as it comes in and comparing it to

00:32:38 ► §

your definition and as long as we don’t look too closely at this,

00:32:47 ► §

communication seems to be happening.

00:32:52 ► §

The biggest showstopper there is in most situations is to say to somebody,

00:32:55 ► §

now would you explain to me what I just said to you?

00:32:59 ► §

Because then it turns out the definitions are wildly variant.

00:33:04 ► §

I mean, it’s not so wild if you’re saying, you know,

00:33:08 ► §

since you’re up, would you get me a grant?

00:33:11 ► §

Although even that’s ambiguous.

00:33:13 ► §

Maybe they say, why don’t you just have one grant?

00:33:17 ► §

You know?

00:33:18 ► §

But if you get into deep stuff,

00:33:21 ► §

if you’re saying, you know,

00:33:23 ► §

the ontological modalities of the post-renaissance

00:33:26 ► §

mind have issued into a situation of deconstructionist vitality such that all bets are

00:33:34 ► §

off say now would you explain to me what i just said i can’t even do it with myself. I mean, people say, would you repeat what you just said?

00:33:45 ► §

No chance, you know.

00:33:48 ► §

So, and I’ve looked at this,

00:33:54 ► §

and there are models

00:33:56 ► §

for this kind of verbal communication.

00:34:00 ► §

Did we talk yesterday

00:34:01 ► §

about the octopi and all that?

00:34:03 ► §

No, thank God.

00:34:06 ► §

Well, see, whenever you think you’re about to take a step

00:34:12 ► §

that nobody has taken and go a place nobody’s ever been,

00:34:17 ► §

if you look back at Mother Nature,

00:34:20 ► §

you can usually find that you’ve been scooped.

00:34:24 ► §

And a very interesting example of this vis-a-vis language

00:34:28 ► §

is what’s going on with octopi.

00:34:34 ► §

Octopi and squids, as you may or may not know,

00:34:38 ► §

but most people know it because they absorb all these TV shows about nature.

00:34:44 ► §

Somebody once said to me,

00:34:46 ► §

I know you don’t like television,

00:34:48 ► §

but it’s a wonderful way for my children to learn about nature.

00:34:58 ► §

Anyway, what we’ve all learned

00:35:00 ► §

from watching these wonderful shows about nature

00:35:02 ► §

is that octopi can change colors.

00:35:07 ► §

And most people think it’s because they’re into camouflage.

00:35:11 ► §

You know, you move on to green seaweed,

00:35:13 ► §

you turn green, brown rocks, you turn brown.

00:35:16 ► §

It isn’t that at all.

00:35:18 ► §

It’s something much more profound.

00:35:23 ► §

It’s that all over the surface of octopi are these specialized cells called

00:35:31 ► §

chromatophores and they can change into many colors and not only can the octopus change

00:35:39 ► §

colors but the ordinary rubbery smooth surface of the octopus can be made like goose bumps but more dramatically

00:35:49 ► §

wrinkled very suddenly the other thing about an octopus is because they’re soft bodied when

00:35:57 ► §

they’re in water which is their natural element they are very very adept at folding and unfolding various parts of their body

00:36:07 ► §

so they can reveal a part of their body and then fold in and then show another part.

00:36:13 ► §

And they’re like a silk scarf in water.

00:36:16 ► §

Well, what’s going on here is that octopi communicate with each other by the way they look and at first this doesn’t seem so

00:36:28 ► §

profound it just seems interesting but when you analyze what’s happening you realize that this is

00:36:36 ► §

a profound evolution in the project of communication because there is no culturally sanctioned dictionary among octopi and really

00:36:48 ► §

what is happening is the octopus where is its mind on its surface they have a vast repertoire

00:36:56 ► §

of dots blushes traveling patterns that move across their surface and these behavioral displays

00:37:08 ► §

indicate the internal state of the organism it is literally itactical creature its behavior is its syntax and um

00:37:29 ► §

you know some of these octa the octopi as a whole they’re mollusks they’re not even vertebrates

00:37:39 ► §

i mean these things split from the line of development that leads to us 700 million years ago i mean you want

00:37:46 ► §

to talk about an alien form of life an octopus is about as far away from the human experience as you

00:37:54 ► §

can possibly get they evolved in shallow coastal waters but then because so many things were evolving in those shallow waters, some of them evolved into the benthic depths.

00:38:09 ► §

And in those depths, there is no light.

00:38:13 ► §

So in order to preserve their ability to communicate,

00:38:16 ► §

over long periods of time, they evolved phosphorescent chromatophores all over their body and some octopi even have

00:38:29 ► §

eyelid-like membranes put on various places of their skin so that they can blink very rapidly

00:38:38 ► §

and modulate the phosphorescent light So you can imagine in the darkness

00:38:45 ► §

of the benthic depths of the ocean,

00:38:49 ► §

the communication between two octopi

00:38:51 ► §

is just a dance of lights in utter darkness.

00:38:56 ► §

I mean, these are its naked mind in the water.

00:39:01 ► §

And when they are in communication like that,

00:39:04 ► §

they are for all practical purposes one organism this

00:39:08 ► §

is why octopi excrete ink into the water it’s so that they can have a private moment you know

00:39:18 ► §

essentially the octopus ink is the equivalent of correction fluid you know you you just have to erase you say i didn’t

00:39:28 ► §

mean that at all and then you know here’s what i really meant well i this is why i’m interested in

00:39:35 ► §

virtual reality because it seems to me what we’re trying to do is some kind of striptease of the mind. We want to get the mind naked

00:39:47 ► §

because if it can be made naked,

00:39:50 ► §

then we will understand each other.

00:39:54 ► §

We are clothed in flesh and then clothing

00:39:58 ► §

and then class difference, race difference,

00:40:02 ► §

age difference, income difference.

00:40:04 ► §

But if you could see the mind

00:40:07 ► §

naked, the commonality of human beings would be reinforced and the presence of ego among us would

00:40:15 ► §

be diminished. Also, there’s no ambiguity in visible language. It’s interesting that in the book of revelations there is this talk about

00:40:27 ► §

how there is this sword which comes out of the mouth it’s describing a word which can be seen

00:40:35 ► §

and the whole history of the evolution of the western mind is in a sense the birth of the logos the logos is making its way towards self-expression

00:40:49 ► §

and it’s doing this by claiming dimension after dimension of uh uh manifestation and i think that

00:41:01 ► §

electronic media and electronic culture and drugs and the mixing of all our world cultures together, what this is empowering is a visible logos, a logos that is beheld and therefore lacks ambiguity.

00:41:19 ► §

Yeah.

00:41:36 ► §

yeah well mind and soul in my estimation probably not correctly tend to migrate toward each other you know in the late medieval period you get a lot of talk about is the spirit the same thing as the soul? And are these things the same as the intellect?

00:41:47 ► §

I mean, yes, we are soul,

00:41:49 ► §

but I would say mind is the visible manifestation of soul.

00:41:54 ► §

That would be a good Catholic definition

00:41:57 ► §

because you see that keeps soul out of animals.

00:42:01 ► §

If you say mind is the visible manifestation of soul, then you have restricted

00:42:07 ► §

the existence of soul to the human species.

00:42:10 ► §

Well, that seems somewhat more Western scientific ideology. I think Lutin at his construct

00:42:19 ► §

con, was saying cosmic language that the inhib intuition is the higher form of intelligence than the mind.

00:42:28 ► §

Well, the mind is not a form of intelligence.

00:42:31 ► §

The mind is the theater in which intelligence is manifested.

00:42:36 ► §

You don’t want to confuse the garage with the car.

00:42:39 ► §

It’s a very different problem of feeling.

00:42:41 ► §

I mean, there really is a balance of power where you give it heart

00:42:45 ► §

and mind it never just the mind or never just the heart you’re using all the equipment right

00:42:51 ► §

well maybe i sort of hear you associating mind to brain because you’re saying heart and mind i mean

00:42:59 ► §

mind is heart everything goes on within the confines of mind it’s like the light that you switch on

00:43:07 ► §

when you walk into a darkened room and then everything else is the furniture within the room

00:43:13 ► §

mind is simply the light which is shed over the landscape of appearances you know i mean this is

00:43:23 ► §

only my definition i’m aware of the

00:43:26 ► §

neoplatonic emphasis on the mind I think they called it the ends and so forth and

00:43:31 ► §

so on but in modern psychological terms the mind is just the theater of

00:43:37 ► §

cognition in some way mind consciousness, consciousness is something which happens in the mind.

00:43:46 ► §

I mean, there is an unconscious mind as well.

00:43:51 ► §

Mind is the inclusive category, I think.

00:43:55 ► §

Yeah?

00:43:55 ► §

Yeah. Right.

00:44:24 ► §

Yeah, I think that’s very good

00:44:27 ► §

that you know

00:44:29 ► §

the hardest thing to

00:44:32 ► §

figure out

00:44:36 ► §

is a mirror

00:44:38 ► §

because what a mirror shows you

00:44:42 ► §

is yourself

00:44:44 ► §

but a mirror shows you is yourself.

00:44:47 ► §

But a mirror is not yourself.

00:44:52 ► §

A mirror is a piece of glass with silver vapor deposited on the back of it.

00:44:56 ► §

But that’s a very different thing from yourself. And in this psychic domain, in this psychedelic space,

00:45:02 ► §

you are not simply perceiving that space you are creating it with

00:45:09 ► §

your expectations as well so if you have strong expectations of a certain sort that will be the

00:45:18 ► §

character of the thing uh i think we talked about this yesterday, about how here we have peasant A

00:45:29 ► §

chopping wood in the woods,

00:45:33 ► §

and suddenly a ripple of heat

00:45:37 ► §

passes through the forest,

00:45:40 ► §

and a hackle-raising sense of weirdness,

00:45:44 ► §

and this guy throws down his axe and looks over his shoulder,

00:45:48 ► §

and a light is descending from the sky.

00:45:53 ► §

Now, what happens next, interestingly enough,

00:45:57 ► §

depends on the year and the place.

00:46:01 ► §

If the year is, let’s say, 1000 1000 and the place is southern France then the Virgin Mary will be

00:46:11 ► §

descending from the sky if the place is Kansas and the date is 1958 then the space people are descending from the sky. You see, what happens is that

00:46:27 ► §

when there is cognitive dissonance,

00:46:31 ► §

good old psychological phrase,

00:46:34 ► §

when there is cognitive dissonance,

00:46:36 ► §

the mind rushes forward to provide explanation.

00:46:41 ► §

I mean, it’s amazing.

00:46:43 ► §

You just walk with people and walk outside and there’s a little

00:46:46 ► §

light in the star, in the sky. It’s no big deal, just a moving light. And everybody will say,

00:46:52 ► §

oh, I wonder if it’s a UFO. It means, you know, they’ve got something hiding in the back of their

00:46:59 ► §

mind. And if anything gets slightly weird, they will rush this explanation forward.

00:47:06 ► §

And for some people, you know, it’s Jesus, and for somebody else, it’s Maitreya.

00:47:12 ► §

So cultural expectations are inextricably woven in to these strange encounter scenarios there was an interesting ufo theory a few years

00:47:29 ► §

ago that i thought was kind of cute i didn’t exactly believe it but these people michael

00:47:36 ► §

persinger and some lafrenier they wrote a really amusing book called Space-Time Transience and Unusual Events.

00:47:48 ► §

And one of the things they came up with was along earthquake faults, you get the grinding of

00:47:56 ► §

enormous masses of rock together. And if these rock masses have a high percentage of quartz in them,

00:48:06 ► §

you can get what is called piezoelectric phenomena.

00:48:10 ► §

Now, piezoelectricity is simply a peculiar form of static electricity,

00:48:17 ► §

but what it would do is it would create ball lightning in the sky

00:48:22 ► §

which would follow these stress lines in the earth and you

00:48:27 ► §

know there is a connection not understood between earthquakes and and the appearance of ufos but one

00:48:35 ► §

of the interesting things that persinger discovered about piezoelectricity is that if you in the laboratory build piezoelectric generators

00:48:45 ► §

that generate fields of enormous strength,

00:48:49 ► §

then as a person is exposed to these things,

00:48:53 ► §

they actually mess with your mind.

00:48:57 ► §

They actually create people become more and more confused and uneasy

00:49:02 ► §

and ultimately panic-stricken in the presence of these piezoelectric fields

00:49:08 ► §

well once you pass the panic moment then your mind is going to start telling you what’s happening

00:49:14 ► §

it’s going to say you know you’re having an encounter something weird is going on and then

00:49:21 ► §

out of the unconscious comes the projection the flying saucer the virgin

00:49:26 ► §

mary the elf invasion the manifestation of matreya whatever it is so it’s that mind goes to meet

00:49:35 ► §

the unknown but not without a hell of a lot of baggage of its own which it immediately tries to

00:49:42 ► §

unpack and put into the drawers of the other as soon as it

00:49:46 ► §

arrives yeah oh dear

00:49:51 ► §

too fast and too brilliant for me too the mind is not intelligence

00:50:08 ► §

it’s not the soul

00:50:10 ► §

it’s sort of the theater

00:50:12 ► §

in which all these other things take their place

00:50:15 ► §

somebody behind

00:50:18 ► §

yeah

00:50:19 ► §

yes

00:50:19 ► §

in Fool of the Gods

00:50:21 ► §

you mentioned that you’ve seen

00:50:23 ► §

Shaman in the Amazon shooting beams of red lights in magical battles.

00:50:30 ► §

Could you describe a magical shamanic battle, how it would occur?

00:50:35 ► §

Would that be a psychedelic battle where the energy from it shot back and forth?

00:50:40 ► §

Well, all I have is the anecdote, which I’ll tell you. When Kat and I were in the Amazon in 76 taking ayahuasca,

00:50:52 ► §

we got in with this certain group of people in Peru that took it every week.

00:50:59 ► §

And, you know, cultures have different ways of handling hassle.

00:51:04 ► §

And in some cultures it’s confrontational, in other cultures not.

00:51:08 ► §

The way these Peruvian country folk operated was if somebody was screwing up, nobody would ever say so.

00:51:19 ► §

They would just talk about these people behind their back until the morphogenetic field of gossip was so

00:51:27 ► §

strong that you would basically awaken to the problem so there was a complex social situation

00:51:34 ► §

going on in this ayahuasca circle which was there was a master shaman who we were apprenticed to who was beloved by his neighborhood but he had a a nephew a

00:51:49 ► §

sobrino who was a jerk i mean this guy was uh as don fidel said ambitious he dealt a little weed

00:51:59 ► §

he did a little pimping he was just sort of an edge runner type of guy.

00:52:05 ► §

And every Saturday night we would all get together and take ayahuasca.

00:52:09 ► §

About 30 of us.

00:52:11 ► §

Older shamans, our guy, people from the neighborhood, and this sobrino, Don Jose.

00:52:19 ► §

So I don’t know what the real history of it was because I had just arrived on the scene.

00:52:27 ► §

But these old guys would sing these Icaros,

00:52:31 ► §

these magical songs on ayahuasca

00:52:34 ► §

that appear as colored tapestries in front of your eyes.

00:52:37 ► §

And, you know, they had soul.

00:52:40 ► §

They were into it.

00:52:42 ► §

And this guy would sing against them i mean it’s the rudest

00:52:48 ► §

thing you can possibly imagine i mean imagine if if you know lou reed were trying to give a

00:52:55 ► §

performance and the guy in the third row just launched into old man river and kept at it

00:53:02 ► §

you know i mean in this town i’m sure large guys would appear and say,

00:53:07 ► §

Sir.

00:53:10 ► §

In Peru, it didn’t work like that.

00:53:12 ► §

They just kept singing.

00:53:14 ► §

He kept singing.

00:53:16 ► §

And it was clear that this is how it was going to be handled,

00:53:19 ► §

that we had just divided into two separate entities here.

00:53:31 ► §

we had just divided into two separate entities here well um my uh wife was sitting next to me and he was sitting across the room from us the sabrino and i had been watching him for a long

00:53:37 ► §

time and i was loaded to the gills and i could see he would get up on his haunches and he looked like a monkey he he his face it was uncanny i mean

00:53:48 ► §

he looked like a monkey and he also looked kind of like a jackal a dog with long teeth kept going

00:53:54 ► §

through these changes and and cat leaned over to me and said something like this guy is an asshole

00:54:01 ► §

and i just said you know let it slide. What do we know?

00:54:05 ► §

Think of it as anthropology.

00:54:08 ► §

But she wasn’t having it.

00:54:11 ► §

So after a while, he kept doing this.

00:54:15 ► §

And at one point, and everybody in the room,

00:54:19 ► §

every person in the room was bummed out.

00:54:22 ► §

And they were looking at their laps.

00:54:24 ► §

All eye contact was broken.

00:54:26 ► §

It’s actually, when I was a kid, I invented a word.

00:54:30 ► §

The word is fardau.

00:54:33 ► §

And it means the embarrassment you feel when someone else fucks up.

00:54:38 ► §

You know, and you happen to just be there, but somehow the aura of it is so strong.

00:54:43 ► §

So the entire room is just a wash and fardow

00:54:48 ► §

and the old guys are singing and the guy is singing so then at the end of a particularly

00:54:55 ► §

intense clash of these two styles uh my wife just looked across the room at this guy and like put the clammy on him and I saw these red arrows

00:55:08 ► §

leave her eyes and like like dotted lines go across them and they moved fairly slowly you know

00:55:18 ► §

more slowly than you could throw a ball or something. Well, when this line of red arrows got to this guy,

00:55:26 ► §

he was knocked off his feet.

00:55:29 ► §

He fell backwards with his legs in the air

00:55:32 ► §

and there was a big noise

00:55:33 ► §

and all the singing stopped

00:55:36 ► §

and everybody in the room looked up

00:55:39 ► §

and these three old shaman

00:55:41 ► §

who were sitting behind Don Fidel,

00:55:43 ► §

who I, to that point,

00:55:44 ► §

had not heard speak any language

00:55:46 ► §

but Quechua

00:55:47 ► §

one turned to the other and he says in Spanish

00:55:50 ► §

oh

00:55:52 ► §

the gringa sends

00:55:54 ► §

the zabudabara

00:55:55 ► §

you know

00:55:59 ► §

yeah

00:56:01 ► §

you mean becoming a jaguar

00:56:08 ► §

and all that

00:56:09 ► §

yeah

00:56:09 ► §

it’s

00:56:16 ► §

it’s

00:56:17 ► §

everything happens

00:56:19 ► §

I mean they used to

00:56:21 ► §

when I first went to the Amazon

00:56:22 ► §

they used to say to us

00:56:24 ► §

the Indians and the folks who helped us haul our stuff around, they would say, la selva como un sueño.

00:56:44 ► §

a poetic metaphor of some sort, you know, like, it’s not.

00:56:49 ► §

It’s that you need to read various people who’ve written on the boundary between wilderness and settled space.

00:56:55 ► §

When you go into the jungle, language becomes everything.

00:57:01 ► §

And unbelievably bizarre things happen. and they really do happen i’ve seen this in in

00:57:08 ► §

myself because when i first went to the amazon i knew virtually no botany i only knew drug botany

00:57:16 ► §

because i was so focused on that we would row down we would go down these jungle rivers, and there would be hours that would pass

00:57:26 ► §

where no words related to where I was would come to me.

00:57:32 ► §

I called it the big green.

00:57:34 ► §

That’s what it was to me.

00:57:36 ► §

It was the big green,

00:57:37 ► §

and there was a lot of different kinds of green,

00:57:39 ► §

and that was it.

00:57:41 ► §

Well, then the next time I went to the Amazon,

00:57:43 ► §

I was with professional field botanists.

00:57:47 ► §

And we would go out into the jungle,

00:57:50 ► §

and these guys were just like children.

00:57:52 ► §

You know, and say, look at this.

00:57:54 ► §

This is a palachorea.

00:57:55 ► §

Look at these varrola trees.

00:57:58 ► §

Look at this hyalcyanthus.

00:58:00 ► §

Look at this.

00:58:01 ► §

Look at this.

00:58:01 ► §

And soon my mind was filled with language about the green.

00:58:06 ► §

And the green all disappeared.

00:58:09 ► §

And instead there were plants that I knew and that were familiar to me.

00:58:14 ► §

And this coming to terms with a local language is very interesting.

00:58:20 ► §

You see, you speak the language you speak, in most cases, because of where you were born.

00:58:28 ► §

If you were born in Russia, you speak Russian.

00:58:31 ► §

China, Chinese.

00:58:33 ► §

And an interesting thing about these languages is that you really can,

00:58:39 ► §

they say you can never go home again, but in this rap rap you never can leave home you know you go to the amazon

00:58:48 ► §

but if you’re explaining it to yourself in the language of the east village you never leave the

00:58:57 ► §

east village you know you have somehow carried an envelope of local association with you and you can never break through it and so in a way

00:59:08 ► §

you never see the place where you are it’s very important to try and make some accommodation to

00:59:17 ► §

the local language because in a way only the local language is appropriate to the place.

00:59:27 ► §

You know, France is a good example.

00:59:31 ► §

It doesn’t make any sense if you don’t speak French.

00:59:34 ► §

Germany makes no sense if you don’t speak German.

00:59:40 ► §

Somehow the local language is a part of the local reality.

00:59:45 ► §

And we ignore all this and behave as if everything is very straightforward the one thing you learn taking psychedelics

00:59:48 ► §

is that nothing is straightforward

00:59:51 ► §

anybody?

00:59:55 ► §

yeah Uh-huh. No, I think there’s one transcendental object

01:00:51 ► §

that exerts attraction wherever it can.

01:00:56 ► §

You see, evolution,

01:00:59 ► §

what evolution seeks to do is to stop itself.

01:01:03 ► §

What evolution seeks to do is to stop itself.

01:01:11 ► §

Every organism wants to evolve into what’s called a climaxed ecosystem.

01:01:17 ► §

That’s where everybody has their chair and nobody moves.

01:01:20 ► §

So there are no empty chairs.

01:01:23 ► §

You see, everyone has a place to sit, but there are no empty chairs. Where you get evolution is where you have sit but there are no empty chairs where you get evolution is where

01:01:26 ► §

you have a room half full of empty chairs then you have the choice of where to sit most animal

01:01:35 ► §

species and plant species are not evolving or are evolving very slowly because evolution tends to dead-end itself.

01:01:48 ► §

I mean, take cockroaches, for example.

01:01:51 ► §

Cockroaches achieved their present evolutionary status 200 million years ago.

01:02:00 ► §

They haven’t changed an iota.

01:02:02 ► §

We can dig up fossils from the Pennsylvania coal beds of more cockroaches.

01:02:27 ► §

Nevertheless, their cultural accomplishments have been dismal.

01:02:32 ► §

So, until recently, yes.

01:02:36 ► §

I had a friend once who seriously claimed

01:02:41 ► §

that 60% of the structural integrity of new york city

01:02:46 ► §

was contributed by cockroaches between the walls and that if all the cockroaches were to ever

01:02:54 ► §

march out the whole thing would just fall down you see uh it’s thought by the straightest people in the biz that before human beings the major force

01:03:10 ► §

creating evolutionary opportunity were rivers and this happens because the course of rivers will vary over time and that means that rivers expose and inundate a lot of land

01:03:29 ► §

so along rivers you find what is called um well i can’t remember what it’s called i’ll name it

01:03:38 ► §

it’s called unclaimed territory sandbars and and large areas where nothing grows.

01:03:46 ► §

Well, into those kinds of areas, what are called volunteer species or invader species can make their way.

01:03:56 ► §

And these invader species evolve very rapidly for instance in a climax tropical rainforest what you find are enormous trees

01:04:09 ► §

and vines and then the epiphytes and stuff that grow on them but these trees may flower once every

01:04:16 ► §

20 years or so and when they do flower they often produce a very limited amount of fruit. What you find along rivers and places like that

01:04:26 ► §

are what we call weeds.

01:04:29 ► §

And what a weed is,

01:04:31 ► §

is a plant that is number one, annual.

01:04:35 ► §

It dies every year.

01:04:36 ► §

And weeds produce enormous amounts of seeds.

01:04:40 ► §

A weed strategy is a strategy

01:04:42 ► §

for the rapid invasion and claiming of empty land.

01:04:47 ► §

And before human beings, rivers were the major creators of empty land.

01:04:54 ► §

Carl Sauer, who was a biologist and a geographer, he said,

01:04:59 ► §

man found the earth a climaxed rainforest, and we will leave it a weedy lot.

01:05:08 ► §

What that means is we create so much wasteland that these annual heavy seeding rapacious plants

01:05:16 ► §

are replacing the products of climaxed evolution, which are enormous trees and vines and that sort of thing

01:05:25 ► §

anybody else?

01:05:29 ► §

this is your last crack

01:05:31 ► §

I wanted to bring up Jacques Boulay

01:05:33 ► §

and the water learning schedule

01:05:36 ► §

which book does he talk about?

01:05:42 ► §

well I don’t know which particular book

01:05:44 ► §

you’d like me to mention

01:05:45 ► §

Voyage to Magonia

01:05:47 ► §

oh Voyage to Magonia is a good one

01:05:49 ► §

is it the new one

01:05:52 ► §

I haven’t read the new one

01:05:53 ► §

I think Jacques Vallée

01:05:55 ► §

I have a lot of respect for

01:05:58 ► §

most of his work

01:05:59 ► §

I thought that book

01:06:01 ► §

The Messengers of Deception

01:06:02 ► §

was so off the track that I actually went to a book signing of his and leafleted the crowd with an attack on it.

01:06:13 ► §

It shows you what a nut I am.

01:06:16 ► §

For those of you who don’t know, Jacques Vallée had a very interesting approach to understanding flying saucers.

01:06:24 ► §

And I still think this is the best method.

01:06:27 ► §

His argument went something like this.

01:06:30 ► §

He said, it’s not productive to ask where the flying saucers come from

01:06:37 ► §

or what they want.

01:06:40 ► §

He said, the way to understand flying saucers is to analyze their effect if you can

01:06:50 ► §

analyze their effect that’s what they’re doing that’s what they want to achieve so what are

01:06:58 ► §

flying saucers doing well they do talk shows, but what is

01:07:06 ► §

the effect of them doing

01:07:08 ► §

all these talk shows? What they

01:07:10 ► §

are doing is they

01:07:12 ► §

are causing vast

01:07:14 ► §

numbers of people to doubt

01:07:15 ► §

science.

01:07:18 ► §

If you analyze what the

01:07:19 ► §

effect since 1948

01:07:21 ► §

of the flying saucers is,

01:07:24 ► §

is they have caused millions of ordinary people

01:07:27 ► §

to think scientists don’t know what they’re talking about

01:07:31 ► §

that’s right that it offers a new alternative well now uh, here’s an interesting analogy and it’s not mine,

01:07:45 ► §

it’s Jacques Vallée’s.

01:07:47 ► §

But let’s think,

01:07:48 ► §

we’ve been talking so much today

01:07:49 ► §

about the late Roman Empire.

01:07:51 ► §

Here’s another take

01:07:53 ► §

on the late Roman Empire.

01:07:56 ► §

The Roman Empire

01:07:57 ► §

was this immensely successful civilization

01:08:01 ► §

in that it was able to export

01:08:03 ► §

its vision of an imperial center

01:08:07 ► §

over vast parts of the world the problem with the roman empire was that it was an ethical

01:08:15 ► §

disaster uh first of all it ran entirely on the backs of slaves. So anybody who starts talking to you

01:08:25 ► §

about the grandeur that was Rome,

01:08:28 ► §

you know, should be reminded

01:08:30 ► §

the grandeur of Rome was

01:08:33 ► §

it was a bargain basement on three floors

01:08:36 ► §

masquerading as a military brothel.

01:08:38 ► §

It was not a great civilization.

01:08:43 ► §

And what happened to Rome? Well, they had all these people inside the

01:08:49 ► §

empire, among them Jews. And over there in Jerusalem, a long way from Rome where communication

01:08:58 ► §

was difficult, this story got loose among the Jews. And from the point of view of the Roman Imperium

01:09:07 ► §

the Jews were a barbarian people I mean they were Semites and they had some strange religion

01:09:15 ► §

and so forth and so on they were looked upon in other words as primitives and so and and if you were to have sat down to have dinner with a typical Roman bureaucrat of the imperium,

01:09:29 ► §

you would discover that the table talk would be all about democracy anatomism,

01:09:37 ► §

epicureanism, stoicism, and skepticism.

01:09:42 ► §

In other words, they were thoroughly modern people

01:09:45 ► §

and they thought they had very advanced bullshit detectors.

01:09:50 ► §

And so then, you know,

01:09:52 ► §

it comes to the attention of this Roman noble

01:09:56 ► §

that the house slaves,

01:10:00 ► §

the kitchen boys and the gardeners

01:10:02 ► §

are all whispering and all excited about some Galilean magician

01:10:11 ► §

who’s running around the eastern Mediterranean telling people that not only can he rise from the dead,

01:10:21 ► §

but so can you.

01:10:28 ► §

from the dead but so can you and a roman uh sophisticate looking at this would say you know these primitive uneducated colored people that we have to put up with uh you know why don’t these

01:10:36 ► §

people uh step out of their own private idaho and get with the program and study a little Greek philosophy.

01:10:45 ► §

They’re just superstitious.

01:10:47 ► §

Well, hey, in a world where information moved no faster than a horse could gallop,

01:10:56 ► §

within a century, these uneducated superstitious people

01:11:01 ► §

and their irrational religion of magical redemption were hammering at the gates

01:11:09 ► §

of Rome and a century after that the emperor himself a god for political purposes has to

01:11:18 ► §

make Christianity the official religion of the empire in other words what happened was that political and technological

01:11:29 ► §

and architectural accomplishments got way way out in front of ethics and at that point the

01:11:38 ► §

unconscious said i’m gonna pull the rug out from under these roman dominator types i’m going to pull the rug out from under these Roman dominator types.

01:11:46 ► §

I’m going to unleash a religious system in their very midst

01:11:51 ► §

that will be an informational virus

01:11:53 ► §

that they’ll be dead before they ever know what hit them.

01:11:57 ► §

And this is what Christianity is, you know.

01:12:00 ► §

I mean it was a religion of the displaced underclasses of the empire, and within

01:12:06 ► §

300 years, it took over and began its own pogroms and genocidal programs of extermination.

01:12:15 ► §

The flying saucer is a similar thing. We have achieved great things in technology

01:12:22 ► §

and in social organization and in scientific research

01:12:27 ► §

but like the late Roman Empire ethics and morality have lagged far behind and

01:12:35 ► §

so now the same unconscious that sent us the mystery of the virgin birth and the

01:12:43 ► §

resurrection which completely confounded Roman rationalism.

01:12:48 ► §

I mean, what were they to make of that,

01:12:50 ► §

of virgin birth and a resurrection from the dead?

01:12:53 ► §

They send us the flying saucers.

01:12:56 ► §

And the flying saucers are destroying the faith

01:13:01 ► §

in the scientific control systems and managerial theories at the very center of our

01:13:08 ► §

civilization just as surely as the roman imperium was broken by this superstitious religion so what

01:13:17 ► §

it is is that there is a force in this world call it the unconscious call it the cosmic giggle call it whatever you want but when a

01:13:27 ► §

society gets all twisted and out of balance it can pull it down in a hurry and i think the psychedelic

01:13:37 ► §

thing in the 60s was viewed this way it’s that the dominator society is incredibly fragile i mean that’s why whenever

01:13:48 ► §

you see somebody who has to pile up guns and guns and guns it means that they’re not terribly

01:13:54 ► §

confident of their ability to keep control of the scene and we have so many kinds of guns pointed at us propaganda, social engineering

01:14:06 ► §

manipulation of the media

01:14:08 ► §

they do it all to us

01:14:10 ► §

and they still can barely keep ahead of it

01:14:13 ► §

they hate the spread of unreason

01:14:16 ► §

they hate psychedelic drugs

01:14:18 ► §

hell, they don’t even like people to work up a sweat on the dance floor

01:14:22 ► §

anything

01:14:23 ► §

which bespeaks

01:14:27 ► §

anything other than ladylike and gentlemanlike,

01:14:32 ► §

parlor-oriented, English upper-class behavior

01:14:36 ► §

completely drives them into a swivet.

01:14:38 ► §

And yet, you know, they launch horror upon the world

01:14:44 ► §

that makes anything the Roman Imperium undertook look like child’s play.

01:14:49 ► §

I mean, this stunt they pulled with Iraq, you know,

01:14:52 ► §

where they could kill, who knows, 100,000, 200,000.

01:14:56 ► §

They don’t even count the dead when they get pissed off.

01:14:59 ► §

So that’s why I think this archaic revival is in full throttle right now.

01:15:07 ► §

I think the dominator model is doomed.

01:15:11 ► §

And all the things that are coming forward, you know, the assertiveness of racial minorities,

01:15:18 ► §

the assertiveness of sexual and intellectual minorities,

01:15:21 ► §

people are just saying, you know, we’re not going to take it anymore and don’t

01:15:26 ► §

tell us what to believe and don’t tell us what drugs to take and don’t tell us what’s politically

01:15:32 ► §

correct because your record is a nightmare and this general discontent spreading through society

01:15:39 ► §

is i think keeping a lot of these dominator types up late at night

01:15:45 ► §

trying to figure what’s going on.

01:15:47 ► §

I mean, can you imagine being in charge of the planet

01:15:50 ► §

as though, you know, suppose you were the CEO of General Motors

01:15:55 ► §

or something like that.

01:15:57 ► §

I mean, every piece of data that crosses your desk

01:16:01 ► §

says, you know, you’re in trouble, big trouble.

01:16:08 ► §

Somebody had a question yeah no i’m saying they’re coming from another dimension of some sort that actually has a plan for the human race that is larger than the plan

01:16:28 ► §

of the people who seek to run this society their plan it’s a brilliant plan their plan is let’s

01:16:36 ► §

keep everything as much the same as possible i mean since world war ii they have been at war

01:16:42 ► §

with the future they do not want to let the future happen.

01:16:47 ► §

And of course, the future is building up like a log jam in a river.

01:16:52 ► §

And what it means is when the future finally tears loose

01:16:56 ► §

and overwhelms these structures that they have built,

01:17:00 ► §

it’s going to be more dramatic, more sudden, more violent

01:17:04 ► §

than they could ever have dreamed of or imagined.

01:17:08 ► §

The establishment, yeah.

01:17:12 ► §

Who are they?

01:17:16 ► §

No, they’re forcing the evolution of language.

01:17:24 ► §

The real cataclysmic future does not lie in the propagation of the errors of industrial materialism.

01:17:32 ► §

The real transformation of the future is built into the rocks, the ocean, the animals.

01:17:39 ► §

It’s not coming from human beings.

01:17:43 ► §

The people who think they’re running the world are dreaming.

01:17:47 ► §

I’m completely convinced that no one is in control

01:17:51 ► §

and that this is very good news.

01:17:56 ► §

Nobody is in control.

01:17:58 ► §

Not the Communist Party, the Vatican, the World Bank.

01:18:02 ► §

Nobody is in control.

01:18:04 ► §

There may be groups who dream of controlling,

01:18:08 ► §

but their frustration level must be approaching infinity at this point.

01:18:13 ► §

It looks like all of the radios are behind us.

01:18:15 ► §

The radios, that’s it.

01:18:17 ► §

Yeah, that’s right, exactly.

01:18:19 ► §

Yeah.

01:18:20 ► §

For thousands of years, people went to the L.O.C. in mystery, No, no. Why did that happen? Did the El Cisicis ram its folks? Were they somehow corrupted by Rome?

01:18:45 ► §

Were they taken over by Rome?

01:18:47 ► §

Were they elitist?

01:18:48 ► §

No, no, this was a military event.

01:18:52 ► §

Alaric the Visigoth and his folks were moving south through the Peloponnesus.

01:18:59 ► §

And they were burning and destroying everything in their path. I mean, when we say that they burned Eleusis,

01:19:06 ► §

it was in the act of burning Greece that they burned Eleusis.

01:19:11 ► §

It was a case of military conquest.

01:19:16 ► §

See, it wasn’t, people think that these barbarians

01:19:20 ► §

who invaded the Roman Empire were not Christian.

01:19:24 ► §

Most of them were.

01:19:25 ► §

They had converted to Christianity

01:19:27 ► §

long before they breached

01:19:30 ► §

the frontiers of the empire.

01:19:44 ► §

Yeah, he was just prosecuting a military campaign in the classical manner.

01:19:52 ► §

Yes, he killed the priests, he tore down the walls, he leveled it, in other words.

01:20:03 ► §

That’s right, scorched earth.

01:20:05 ► §

Yeah.

01:20:10 ► §

True, yeah.

01:20:15 ► §

The appearance of these UFOs and people’s interpretation and reaction to them,

01:20:22 ► §

and people’s interpretation and reaction to them.

01:20:29 ► §

It’s like some force outside of humanity is trying to guide humanity.

01:20:31 ► §

But now how does that fit in with what you were describing earlier

01:20:35 ► §

about this hermetic tradition and belief

01:20:37 ► §

in which humanity is the brother of God

01:20:40 ► §

and attempting through its own inner forces

01:20:43 ► §

the completion of its… No, this is a good

01:20:47 ► §

question. The way to draw, the way to steer the hermetic question toward the UFO question

01:20:55 ► §

is to look at, and I did want to look at this in the course of the day, this concept of the philosopher’s stone. You see alchemy arises out of hermeticism.

01:21:09 ► §

Essentially, hermeticism is the philosophy that stands behind alchemy, which is the workbench

01:21:16 ► §

activity of this magical system. The Philosopher’s Stone is this, it’s a concept of a universal medicine that cures all diseases, that confers immortality, that brings happiness and understanding.

01:21:41 ► §

But it’s more than that.

01:21:43 ► §

It’s everything you want it to be and uh the flying saucer

01:21:50 ► §

is this same idea the flying saucer you if anyone if you’re really interested in this the best book

01:21:58 ► §

ever written on flying saucers or one of the best was written just a couple of years after the first flying saucers

01:22:05 ► §

were seen it’s by carl jung and it’s called flying saucers a modern myth of things seen in the sky

01:22:13 ► §

and he talks there about how the human mind uh has an appetite for what are called totality symbols.

01:22:29 ► §

The human mind is always trying to complete itself,

01:22:32 ► §

fix itself in some way. And mandalas and certain kinds of symbols

01:22:36 ► §

have the quality of indicating that this completion is underway.

01:22:44 ► §

In the 15th and 16th century,

01:22:48 ► §

before the rise of modern science,

01:22:51 ► §

people didn’t know what matter really was.

01:22:55 ► §

They didn’t really know what was possible with matter.

01:22:59 ► §

So they would get glass flasks

01:23:04 ► §

and combine horse manure and blood and all these things,

01:23:09 ► §

and they would cook it for weeks and weeks, and they would observe color changes,

01:23:15 ► §

and they did not have the kind of very fixed notion of the separation between mind and matter that we have because we have been trained to see

01:23:29 ► §

mind and matter as tremendously separate categories so these alchemists working often day or night

01:23:38 ► §

day and night in remote areas on you know bad food ergot-infested bread and what have you.

01:23:47 ► §

Anyway, eventually they began to enter into a kind of waking hallucination with their alchemical activity.

01:23:57 ► §

And so what you have in these glass retorts, presumably, are swirling chemical mixes.

01:24:02 ► §

presumably are swirling chemical mixes

01:24:04 ► §

but the alchemist looking at these things

01:24:08 ► §

didn’t clearly distinguish

01:24:11 ► §

between what is going on in the alembic

01:24:15 ► §

the alchemical vessel

01:24:16 ► §

and what was going on in their own imagination

01:24:20 ► §

the two categories weren’t separate

01:24:23 ► §

so Jung noticed that these descriptions of chemical procedures

01:24:29 ► §

that are about alchemy are not to be taken seriously as real recipes.

01:24:37 ► §

They are descriptions of psychic processes leading toward individuation.

01:24:46 ► §

Well, in a sense, the flying saucer

01:24:50 ► §

is nothing more than a modern rebirth

01:24:53 ► §

of the philosopher’s stone.

01:24:56 ► §

I mean, the flying saucer is the universal panacea

01:25:00 ► §

at the end of time.

01:25:01 ► §

It’s the thing which cannot exist,

01:25:04 ► §

but which does exist

01:25:06 ► §

and which if we could obtain it

01:25:09 ► §

everything would be different

01:25:11 ► §

you see we’ve swapped out elementals

01:25:13 ► §

for aliens

01:25:15 ► §

and we’ve swapped out the philosopher’s stone

01:25:19 ► §

for the flying saucer

01:25:21 ► §

nevertheless if we were to attain the flying saucer it would be the equivalent of

01:25:27 ► §

the 16th century people obtaining um the the philosopher’s stone it we are so bound in to the

01:25:39 ► §

concept of the fixity of matter and its separateness from us as a mental category that we really rarely exercise

01:25:48 ► §

our imagination in the way that um that these early people uh did for us everything stands

01:25:59 ► §

still i mean it’s a mental exercise you should do for yourself sometime is imagine that you had a material

01:26:08 ► §

that could do anything.

01:26:12 ► §

This is what the philosopher’s stone is.

01:26:14 ► §

It’s a material object and it can do anything.

01:26:17 ► §

Well, what do I mean by anything?

01:26:19 ► §

Well, if you needed to go somewhere,

01:26:22 ► §

you could take this material and stretch it out

01:26:25 ► §

and then sit on it and it would fly.

01:26:28 ► §

If you were hungry, you could eat it.

01:26:32 ► §

If you needed to take a shower, you could stretch it a certain way

01:26:35 ► §

and hold it above your head and water would pour out of it.

01:26:39 ► §

If you needed a piece of information, you could just address it and ask, like a visual telephone.

01:26:47 ► §

See, we have created the Philosopher’s Stone in the diffuse form of technology.

01:26:54 ► §

We can do everything I just described, fly, talk to people at great distances, eat synthetic food, and so on.

01:27:03 ► §

But we have solved each problem separately.

01:27:08 ► §

Now, in a way, the computer is an interesting leap toward the philosopher’s stone, because

01:27:15 ► §

if you analyze what a computer is, it’s a machine which can do anything. You have to tell it what you want it to be.

01:27:25 ► §

If you want it to balance your checking account,

01:27:28 ► §

it can do that.

01:27:30 ► §

If you want it to predict the weather,

01:27:33 ► §

it can do that.

01:27:34 ► §

If you want to play a game with it,

01:27:36 ► §

it can do that.

01:27:37 ► §

It’s mind-boggling to realize

01:27:39 ► §

that anything you can conceive of,

01:27:43 ► §

the computer can simulate.

01:27:45 ► §

The computer is the first in a long line,

01:27:51 ► §

extending into the future from this point in time,

01:27:53 ► §

of omnipurpose machines.

01:27:57 ► §

We’re going to move into a world where you don’t have

01:28:00 ► §

a telephone to call your friend, a fork to spear your meat, and a comb to tease your locks,

01:28:08 ► §

you have one thing. And this one thing does whatever you need to have done. Technology is

01:28:16 ► §

beginning to congress. And it will, of course, be a kind of computer. But it will be voice programmable to do anything. Well, this is a very hermetic ideal

01:28:27 ► §

and we are migrating toward this kind of a fusion of possibilities.

01:28:36 ► §

This is the secret of how to dematerialize culture.

01:28:39 ► §

Make machines which can do more than one thing.

01:28:43 ► §

Make machines which can do more than one thing. Make machines which can do thousands of things,

01:28:47 ► §

but always return to being a little ball or a little box or something.

01:28:55 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:28:57 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:29:03 ► §

Okay, I’ll bet that when Terrence was just now comparing a computer

01:29:08 ► §

to the Philosopher’s Stone, that you thought of the iPhone 2.

01:29:13 ► §

I guess that once you can take a shower under it and then fly it somewhere

01:29:17 ► §

and after that eat a bit of it, that then Steve Jobs

01:29:21 ► §

and those great Apple wizards will have accomplished

01:29:24 ► §

what alchemists have been attempting throughout history.

01:29:27 ► §

Of course, my guess is that if those ancient alchemists arrived on the scene today and saw the current version of the iPhone,

01:29:35 ► §

they’d probably think it was better than any stone they’d been thinking of.

01:29:40 ► §

I don’t know why I’m even talking about an iPhone.

01:29:42 ► §

I don’t even have a cell phone, let alone an iPhone.

01:29:46 ► §

But it seems like all my coolest friends seem to have one,

01:29:49 ► §

so I’m sure the alchemists would like it too.

01:29:53 ► §

Also, I was interested in hearing Terrence talk about

01:29:56 ► §

how the establishment did its best to squash out any new words

01:30:01 ► §

that the hippies came up with,

01:30:03 ► §

and they did that as a way to keep their

01:30:05 ► §

culture from evolving.

01:30:08 ► §

And that reminded me of a conversation I had about five years ago when I was just about

01:30:13 ► §

ready to launch this podcast.

01:30:15 ► §

I was talking with a gay friend of mine, and I mentioned that I was thinking of maybe avoiding

01:30:21 ► §

the word psychedelic and call it the entheogen lounge or something like that,

01:30:25 ► §

because the word psychedelic was so loaded with negative connotations by the mainstream.

01:30:32 ► §

And his reply was that whatever word I decided to use would also be taken away from me,

01:30:37 ► §

unless we claim that for ourselves.

01:30:41 ► §

And his example was the way the gay community took the word queer back

01:30:45 ► §

and then used it with pride.

01:30:48 ► §

And so I stuck with psychedelic, and now that it is once again regaining respectability,

01:30:53 ► §

I’m very thankful for that advice.

01:30:56 ► §

Just now hearing what Terrence had to say about it makes me understand what really good

01:31:00 ► §

advice that truly was.

01:31:03 ► §

Okay, now I’ve got to ask,

01:31:06 ► §

what did you think about Terence’s very detailed description

01:31:09 ► §

of a machine elf being more like a sentence or a pun

01:31:12 ► §

than something material?

01:31:15 ► §

Now, if you can make any sense at all out of that,

01:31:18 ► §

I’d sure like to hear about it.

01:31:20 ► §

I’ve been over his machine elf rap quite a few times

01:31:23 ► §

just before going into DMT space.

01:31:26 ► §

And my experiences, even if I could describe them, were nothing like what Terrence talks about.

01:31:33 ► §

And by the way, and I think I mentioned this before, I actually did have one experience where I encountered real knobby-nosed, bumpy-headed little Disney-like elves.

01:31:43 ► §

They were four of the little buggers

01:31:46 ► §

and we actually conversed for a while

01:31:48 ► §

and had a laugh.

01:31:50 ► §

But that’s another story for another day.

01:31:52 ► §

My only point being

01:31:54 ► §

that we may not want to take

01:31:56 ► §

Terrence’s descriptions too literally

01:31:58 ► §

or you may

01:32:00 ► §

wind up kind of disappointed with an

01:32:02 ► §

experience that otherwise

01:32:04 ► §

you would have thought was awesome.

01:32:06 ► §

Now, rather than chat around here anymore,

01:32:09 ► §

I’m going to get back to reviewing the last hour of this workshop

01:32:13 ► §

and try to get it online for you in the next couple of days.

01:32:17 ► §

It looks like there’s about an hour left that we haven’t heard yet,

01:32:20 ► §

and that’ll give me a little chance at the end to pass along some of my observations about the Psychedelic Science Conference that was held a week or so ago. Thank you. You can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audio book that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:33:10 ► §

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

01:33:16 ► §

Be well, my friends.