Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Newton himself was a man with a foot in two worlds. He was a thorough-going occultist. His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous. And yet he was one of the founding members of the Royal Society.”
“History itself is a kind of alchemical process. … History is the catalyst of nature.”
“If we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage, and our heritage in the shamanism of the archaic, then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate, not to enslave, and somehow we’ve lost the thread.”
“You know, Tim Leary used to say, ‘When in doubt, double the dose.’ ”
“Capitalism, I can’t say this enough, is NOT in our interest.”
“The Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell without us triggering a nuclear war.”
“My faith is that we’re just slow to get rolling, and that once the battle is joined, once every person on Earth realizes that we’re in a battle for planetary survival, then people will get with the program, it’s just that things aren’t bad enough yet.”
“We’re lead by jackasses. We [the psychedelic community] don’t bother with our political processes.”
“What we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top, because the least among us makes their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now [1992], those guys are not fit to throw guts down to a bear … ANY OF THEM!”
“What we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a Fascist dictatorship.”
“Know your enemy and they probably will not be your enemy.”
“I think that the Third Reich was a Sunday school picnic compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church. … In a civilized political environment those people would be placed under immediate arrest.”
“The way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history.”
“And so it’s up to the creativity of ordinary people, and the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience, because it allows you to put information together in new and exciting ways. And this is to be then the basis of a new political order. It has to be.”
“The model of human nature which this society has deified makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime to alter your own consciousness. This doesn’t make any sense. We are at war with ourselves, and we’re losing.”
“It’s all about personal empowerment, and personal empowerment means deconditioning yourself from the values and the programs of the society and putting your own values and programs in place.”
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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.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:29 ►
And like you, I’m anxious to hear the last hour of Terrence McKenna’s 1992 workshop that he titled Hermeticism and Alchemy, and I think it took place somewhere in New York City.
00:00:36 ►
But before I play that recording, I would first like to thank
00:00:39 ►
Neda J., Chris T., who I think you might be a Robert Anton Wilson fan, Chris,
00:00:46 ►
and Evan H., who sent in an overly generous donation.
00:00:51 ►
So, Neda, Chris, and Evan, on behalf of all of our fellow slaughters,
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I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
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And now back to the Bard McKenna.
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When we left off, Terrence, way back in 1992,
00:01:06 ►
had just given a pretty good description of today’s cell phone
00:01:10 ►
as he was comparing a future multi-use computer to the legendary Philosopher’s Stone.
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And, by the way, if you haven’t heard the first three parts of this workshop already,
00:01:21 ►
it may be worth your time to do that just now
00:01:24 ►
before we listen to the conclusion of what was billed as a workshop on Hermeticism and Alchemy, Thank you. to cover after his computer as Philosopher’s Stone. Well, if you guessed that it would be a rap about Isaac Newton,
00:01:48 ►
you’d be right.
00:01:49 ►
And so, let’s begin.
00:01:57 ►
Yeah.
00:01:57 ►
Yeah. So what you’re saying now is an interesting thing when you’re talking about these and his adherence to the magical condition.
00:02:09 ►
Could you tell me just a little something about Newton
00:02:13 ►
and the suppression of physical cults?
00:02:16 ►
Yes, well, Newton is an interesting figure
00:02:19 ►
because, you know, Newton is the great father of modern science
00:02:24 ►
and he created, he was the one who figured out that you could use the calculus,
00:02:30 ►
that the calculus not only figured it out, but developed it,
00:02:34 ►
that the calculus was a tool for solving a kind of multivariable problem
00:02:41 ►
that up until the invention of the calculus nobody had a clue and modern science
00:02:48 ►
runs almost entirely on the on the calculus and the various techniques that have been derived
00:02:54 ►
out of it like partial differential equations and that kind of thing but you’re right newton himself
00:03:01 ►
was was a man with a foot in two worlds.
00:03:05 ►
He was a thoroughgoing occultist.
00:03:08 ►
His alchemical experiments and notebooks were voluminous.
00:03:13 ►
And yet he was the founder of the royal,
00:03:17 ►
one of the founding members of the Royal Society.
00:03:20 ►
And it was the Royal Society was really the first think tank.
00:03:25 ►
It was a very modern institution.
00:03:28 ►
And so in the character of Newton, we see the magical mentality and the modern mentality welded into one individual.
00:03:45 ►
There are other cases like this.
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Off and on over my lifetime,
00:03:51 ►
I’m working on a play about Michael Meyer,
00:03:57 ►
who was a great alchemist.
00:04:00 ►
And it’s a complicated story,
00:04:03 ►
but I’ll just give you a little bit of it.
00:04:04 ►
Anyway, Michael Meyer was the greatest alchemist of his age,
00:04:08 ►
and he was implicated in the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and so forth and so on.
00:04:12 ►
And there were a group of people around Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia
00:04:18 ►
who wanted to establish a Protestant alchemical kingdom in Europe
00:04:23 ►
in the early 17th century, around 1619.
00:04:29 ►
And Meyer was part of this group.
00:04:32 ►
Well, they contrived to get this guy,
00:04:35 ►
Frederick the Elector Palatine of Bohemia,
00:04:41 ►
named emperor because at that time the princes of the Hanseatic League chose the emperor
00:04:50 ►
and they were actually able to do this but then when word got back to the Habsburgs in Spain
00:04:56 ►
they raised an army and destroyed this alchemical revolution. If you’re interested, read Francis Yates’ book,
00:05:07 ►
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
00:05:09 ►
But anyway,
00:05:10 ►
this Habsburg army,
00:05:13 ►
which laid siege to Prague
00:05:15 ►
in the summer of 1619
00:05:17 ►
and then destroyed
00:05:20 ►
this alchemical possibility,
00:05:22 ►
there was in that army
00:05:23 ►
a young, a 21 year old soldier
00:05:27 ►
who was basically
00:05:29 ►
soldiering and wenching
00:05:32 ►
his way across Europe
00:05:34 ►
which was something
00:05:35 ►
gentlemen did in those days
00:05:37 ►
and his name was
00:05:40 ►
Rene Descartes
00:05:41 ►
and after the fall of Prague
00:05:45 ►
I can’t remember the exact date
00:05:49 ►
but I think it was in early August of 1619
00:05:52 ►
this Habsburg army was retreating
00:05:55 ►
across southern Germany
00:05:56 ►
returning to Spain
00:05:57 ►
and they pitched their tents at Ulm
00:06:01 ►
in southern Germany
00:06:02 ►
which strangely enough
00:06:04 ►
keep your eye on those coincidences, folks,
00:06:07 ►
would be the birthplace of Einstein
00:06:09 ►
some centuries later.
00:06:11 ►
But anyway, they pitched their tents at Ulm,
00:06:14 ►
and Descartes, who was not the mature philosopher
00:06:18 ►
of science that we know,
00:06:20 ►
but just some punk mercenary,
00:06:24 ►
you know, getting his first taste of life.
00:06:28 ►
That night he had a dream.
00:06:32 ►
And in the dream, an angel appeared to him.
00:06:35 ►
And the angel said, the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measurement and number and Descartes awoke from this dream
00:06:51 ►
and he founded scientific materialism he founded modern science based on the revelation of an angel
00:07:01 ►
that’s the point science was founded by an angel. It’s no different from Mormonism,
00:07:09 ►
for crying out loud. And, you know, they posture and preen about the glory of the rational intellect
00:07:18 ►
and all this malarkey. It’s malarkey. If Descartes had not been given the clue by this angelic visitor probably modern
00:07:27 ►
science would have been delayed for another century or so well you know they don’t talk
00:07:33 ►
about that they don’t even want to hear about it and there are many instances in the history of
00:07:39 ►
science where these kinds of things have gone on the The overarching theme here, the thing which serves to connect
00:07:50 ►
all this together, I think, is we’ve been talking today about alchemy and hermeticism,
00:07:57 ►
which is a fairly dry, you know, it’s an episode in Western history, a proto-scientific movement.
00:08:08 ►
And yesterday we were talking about how time is moving inevitably toward the production of some kind of transcendent object
00:08:19 ►
or the coming into awareness of a kind of transcendent object.
00:08:25 ►
Well, the connection between these two notions is the idea that history itself is a kind of alchemical process.
00:08:58 ►
You see, the idea that lies behind alchemy is that the alchemist can somehow step in as nature’s helper and cause natural processes to occur very quickly.
00:09:07 ►
Because the belief in medieval Europe concerning, for instance, precious metals and stuff like like that was that these things actually grew in the earth and in a sense they do i mean they accrete very very slowly over
00:09:15 ►
time so the idea that lies behind alchemy is the idea that if you could speed time up, then the processes which require millions of years in the earth
00:09:27 ►
could perhaps be achieved in years or months if you knew how to speed up time. Well,
00:09:36 ►
the goal of alchemy was the production of the philosopher’s stone this transcendental material the universal panacea
00:09:47 ►
what i’ve been saying here in all these lectures is that the goal of human history is the same
00:09:55 ►
thing therefore human history is an alchemical process of some sort. Human history is the story of the descent of spirit into matter or the ascent
00:10:10 ►
of matter into the domain of spirit. It’s something like that. And the speeding up quality of it,
00:10:18 ►
that’s what we bring to it. History is the catalyst of nature,
00:10:25 ►
which is interesting because, do you see,
00:10:28 ►
in this metaphor it casts us in the role
00:10:31 ►
of those little elemental tykes.
00:10:33 ►
In the great alchemy of the redemption of the world,
00:10:38 ►
we are the elementals,
00:10:40 ►
and we are causing a process to take place which will accelerate the emergence of the end state before it might ordinarily have happened. and a moving toward a fusion with this alchemical mystery,
00:11:08 ►
which is then a coincidencia positorum.
00:11:13 ►
It means that the words used to describe the alchemical goal
00:11:17 ►
can be used to describe the historical goal.
00:11:21 ►
So the historical goal is then legitimately describable as coincidencia
00:11:28 ►
positorum union of opposites uh universal panacea the diamond body all of these alchemical metaphors
00:11:38 ►
of completion are metaphors which if we would but awaken to the spiritual dynamics of history,
00:11:47 ►
we could enunciate these things as a goal.
00:11:52 ►
I mean, imagine if the stated goal of global society were to produce a universal panacea.
00:12:03 ►
That means peace of mind for everybody,
00:12:06 ►
health and happiness for everybody.
00:12:09 ►
You see, it’s weird.
00:12:13 ►
Millenarian or eschatological thinking
00:12:16 ►
has remained with us
00:12:19 ►
even though ideological styles have changed.
00:12:26 ►
Marxism is a thoroughgoing millenarian cult.
00:12:32 ►
I mean, the withering away of the state
00:12:35 ►
is no less metaphysical a concept
00:12:38 ►
than the universal panacea at the end of time,
00:12:41 ►
and I dare say a good deal less likely.
00:12:49 ►
panacea at the end of time and I dare say a good deal less likely so we may have you know transcended Christian eschatological dreams but we still are infected with utopian aspirations and secular
00:12:57 ►
utopianism has never been more strong it’s just that it’s now couched basically in the terms of christian democrats or
00:13:07 ►
something like that but if we could raise to consciousness our alchemical heritage and our
00:13:17 ►
heritage in the in the shamanism of the archaic then we could actually see that the purpose of technology is to liberate,
00:13:30 ►
not to enslave.
00:13:32 ►
And somehow we’ve lost the thread.
00:13:35 ►
Technology is not being used to liberate.
00:13:38 ►
It’s being used to enslave.
00:13:41 ►
Asking the mushroom, you know, how to save the world and having it say every woman should
00:13:48 ►
have only one natural child because this would uh immediately create a collapsing demographic
00:13:57 ►
you see if every woman had only one natural child in 40 years the population of the earth would fall by 50%.
00:14:06 ►
Without wars, without epidemics,
00:14:10 ►
without displaced people,
00:14:12 ►
it would just happen quite naturally.
00:14:15 ►
A woman in Bangladesh,
00:14:19 ►
let’s put it this way,
00:14:20 ►
a woman on the Upper East Side
00:14:22 ►
who has a child,
00:14:24 ►
that child will have a thousand times
00:14:28 ►
greater negative impact on the resources of the earth than a woman born to a child in Bangladesh
00:14:35 ►
where do we preach population control Bangladesh of course if you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman
00:14:46 ►
who told you that her life’s ambition was to have a thousand children,
00:14:51 ►
you’d think you were confronting a social criminal of some sort,
00:14:57 ►
some kind of complete sociopath.
00:15:00 ►
But in fact, a woman in Beverly Hills or on the Upper East Side who decides to have one child is in that category.
00:15:10 ►
Now, interestingly, if we want to change the world, then we need to reach those women.
00:15:19 ►
And interestingly, they are the women that one would be most likely to reach.
00:15:26 ►
They’re college educated.
00:15:28 ►
They’re socially concerned.
00:15:30 ►
They’re aware of the concept of political correctness.
00:15:34 ►
So forth and so on.
00:15:35 ►
They should be easy to convince.
00:15:38 ►
And you don’t have to have 100% conviction.
00:15:41 ►
If you get 15% compliance, there would probably be an immediate easing on
00:15:47 ►
the pressure on resources and so forth and so on another interesting thing about this possibility
00:15:55 ►
is that it requires remarkably little input from men it’s the first plan for saving the world that I’ve ever encountered that isn’t in the hands of white guys.
00:16:08 ►
You see?
00:16:14 ►
Now, people object to this by saying that you don’t understand.
00:16:21 ►
Numbers are power.
00:16:23 ►
A political power base is defined by numbers
00:16:27 ►
but this can’t be true if that were true china would be the most powerful nation in the world
00:16:34 ►
with india second so that isn’t it i’m in awe of the mushrooms cleverness because what this suggestion seems to imply is that we can serve ourselves and serve
00:16:49 ►
humanity without any kind of conflict because one could go to this hypothetical woman on the
00:16:57 ►
Upper East Side and say, how would you like to have a vastly expanded disposable income
00:17:06 ►
and a tremendously larger amount of leisure time
00:17:11 ►
and authentic status as a political hero
00:17:16 ►
at the forefront of the battle to save the planet?
00:17:20 ►
For crying out loud.
00:17:23 ►
You know, be richer, make your your life easier and be a hero you can hardly miss
00:17:30 ►
now why are we not hearing about this from any quarter of society because i think most people
00:17:36 ►
think actually that there are no solutions they think we’re just going to run this baby right over
00:17:42 ►
the edge of the cliff and that’ll be the end of it well when you point out that something as simple as voluntary as limiting your uh reproductive
00:17:54 ►
replacement to one child would chop the population of the earth in half in 50 years people are
00:18:00 ►
stunned you know they never thought of that uh These kinds of things need to be considered. Now, when I ask myself, why aren’t people embracing this? And this goes back to what I said before the break. I think they’re not embracing it because probably white guys can’t figure out how to make a buck in a situation of collapsing demographics like that
00:18:27 ►
capitalism wants views us all as consumers and it wants more consumers the more consumers there are
00:18:36 ►
the scarcer stuff will be the scarcer stuff is the more you can charge for it the last barrels of petroleum will probably
00:18:45 ►
be sold for $50,000 a throw and another objection that people raise is they say
00:18:53 ►
well it’s a terror it’s terrible to have only one child the child you know
00:18:58 ►
children need other children would you know what the present accommodation is? Most people have two children.
00:19:06 ►
Did you know that no society on earth has ever idealized the having of two children?
00:19:13 ►
It’s a totally synthetic, artificial idea put in place by the Industrial Revolution
00:19:21 ►
so that for the convenience of the managers of the industrial
00:19:27 ►
state having two children i have two children it’s a terrible idea do you know what happens
00:19:33 ►
if you have two children they fight like cats and dogs do you know how many children the average average family had in 1800?
00:19:46 ►
Ten.
00:19:50 ►
So to think that by having two children you have somehow participated in a natural,
00:19:54 ►
ages-old family structure
00:19:57 ►
is just a bunch of malarkey.
00:19:59 ►
It’s absolutely untrue.
00:20:01 ►
Well, if it’s absolutely untrue,
00:20:03 ►
then let’s go to one and save the earth.
00:20:06 ►
This is for those of you who don’t think that the message of just sit back and watch it happen
00:20:13 ►
has any efficacy. Well, then if you really want to do something, no political act you would ever
00:20:20 ►
commit yourself to would have the positive consequences for suffering humanity
00:20:27 ►
that deciding to limit your reproductive
00:20:31 ►
ability would have.
00:20:33 ►
Yeah.
00:20:35 ►
Yeah, also, it seems though that people that I know
00:20:40 ►
who are very, very bright don’t have kids, while
00:20:44 ►
a lot of very, very stupid people, people who are 50 times as old, have tons of kids.
00:20:50 ►
I’m just wondering about it.
00:20:51 ►
Well, now this sounds like a plea for eugenics.
00:20:56 ►
Is it a plea for eugenics?
00:20:59 ►
Well, I…
00:21:01 ►
Anyway, there’s a logical error in your argument, you know,
00:21:05 ►
which is that you think that smart people have smart children.
00:21:09 ►
Genetically speaking, this is not necessarily true.
00:21:13 ►
I mean, there’s a gene reshuffling that happens.
00:21:16 ►
Often smart people attain their smartness
00:21:19 ►
through a kind of accumulation of recessive genes,
00:21:24 ►
and the next generation will be peculiar in that family.
00:21:29 ►
You know, you don’t want it, you can run it off the edge.
00:21:32 ►
See, the thing I like about this suggestion from the mushroom
00:21:37 ►
is that it’s non-coercive.
00:21:40 ►
We can think of many plans to save the world
00:21:43 ►
if they would just give us absolute power to order everybody around.
00:21:48 ►
But here’s a plan where men really recede into the background.
00:21:56 ►
Now women have always, within the context of modern feminism,
00:22:01 ►
have lamented their powerlessness to do anything about the male-dominated world,
00:22:07 ►
here’s something that they could do
00:22:09 ►
that would place them at the cutting edge
00:22:12 ►
of the reshaping of planetary civilization.
00:22:15 ►
And they don’t have to get permission from anybody.
00:22:19 ►
So what about it?
00:22:21 ►
You know?
00:22:22 ►
It’s there to be done. Yeah. I was going to say,
00:22:26 ►
this one has a name,
00:22:27 ►
genetics,
00:22:27 ►
because that is painted
00:22:28 ►
by a pseudoscientific
00:22:30 ►
and racist background.
00:22:32 ►
But these were completely
00:22:33 ►
brought to me
00:22:34 ►
about the possibility
00:22:35 ►
of genetic factors
00:22:36 ►
involved in the
00:22:37 ►
shamanic period’s
00:22:37 ►
division.
00:22:38 ►
And while,
00:22:39 ►
if that proposal
00:22:40 ►
was coming from,
00:22:41 ►
say, new kids on the block,
00:22:43 ►
I’d be very pleased
00:22:44 ►
with it. Coming to a mechanical audience, I’d be very pleased with it.
00:22:45 ►
Coming to a mechanical land,
00:22:47 ►
I don’t know if this is the place to convince people
00:22:50 ►
to extinguish their lives or whatever.
00:22:54 ►
Oh, you mean you think it’s very important
00:22:56 ►
that we all breed as much as possible
00:22:59 ►
so that our superior types will invade society?
00:23:04 ►
It will come. It’s impossible for us to have a reason our superior types will invade society.
00:23:07 ►
It’s impossible to trust our reason just because of the mathematics of it.
00:23:11 ►
But those who can access the shamanic states,
00:23:13 ►
those who can communicate with the mind of Gaia,
00:23:16 ►
if anything is going to save the planet,
00:23:18 ►
it’s going to come from this reservoir of creativity.
00:23:23 ►
Well, when I said that there were certain genetic lines
00:23:28 ►
with a predisposition for shamanism,
00:23:31 ►
I didn’t mean that some people can get high and some can’t.
00:23:35 ►
I just mean some people are a cheap date and some people aren’t.
00:23:40 ►
I really would resist the idea that only some people can access these things.
00:23:50 ►
I think the great power of psychedelics is that they’re democratic.
00:23:56 ►
You know, Tim Leary used to say, when in doubt, double the dose.
00:24:01 ►
And that’ll eradicate any of these genetic predisposition arguments uh in a hurry
00:24:07 ►
i i it would be very it would be a very interesting world where populations were dropping
00:24:17 ►
you see it’s capitalism i can’t say this enough is not not in our interest. I mean, suppose we were to start,
00:24:26 ►
women were to start only having one natural child.
00:24:31 ►
Very, very quickly,
00:24:33 ►
every time you went to your mailbox,
00:24:37 ►
you’d get a letter from a different attorney
00:24:39 ►
somewhere in the world telling you
00:24:41 ►
that a distant cousin you had forgotten about had just died and that
00:24:47 ►
you were his only surviving relative and you’ve just inherited more land more houses more cars
00:24:54 ►
more investments because if we’re gonna if you chop the population of the world in half you don’t
00:25:02 ►
have to be einstein to see that everybody generally
00:25:05 ►
is going to have twice as much
00:25:07 ►
disposable stuff.
00:25:10 ►
Here.
00:25:11 ►
Yeah.
00:25:12 ►
I have a couple of undigested thoughts here
00:25:16 ►
that I’d like to see
00:25:18 ►
if it’s going in that direction.
00:25:20 ►
It’s possible.
00:25:21 ►
One, it seems generally
00:25:24 ►
that the solar population and everything else that we’re doing in the planet, it seems generally to the silver population, everything else
00:25:26 ►
that we’re doing to planet, it’s possible
00:25:28 ►
that Gaia
00:25:29 ►
and the time
00:25:30 ►
thing, whatever it is
00:25:33 ►
that’s got us doing what we’ve been doing
00:25:35 ►
is, well,
00:25:38 ►
having these humans
00:25:39 ►
after the sort of
00:25:41 ►
kiborking issue.
00:25:43 ►
Oh, God.
00:25:46 ►
You mean that we’re the suicide species?
00:25:48 ►
Yeah, yeah, because
00:25:49 ►
let’s say,
00:25:51 ►
well, it sounds like
00:25:53 ►
from what you’re saying
00:25:54 ►
that we have
00:25:55 ►
a breathing idea
00:25:56 ►
and I will believe this
00:25:57 ►
all my life
00:25:58 ►
when we’re looking at
00:25:59 ►
what human beings
00:26:01 ►
do to each other
00:26:02 ►
and not
00:26:03 ►
what we’ve done on the earth.
00:26:07 ►
And I’m going to take a jump, I said this before, it’s not well thought out, but the thing that interests me is the
00:26:16 ►
unmaterialized thought becoming material. Okay, it’s happened, maybe it had to happen because this is life and nothing is impossible to life.
00:26:27 ►
So it happened and then Gaia says, okay, enough.
00:26:31 ►
And it somehow contributed to the relationship.
00:26:36 ►
Well, but in that case, don’t you think then that Gaia must be very alarmed
00:26:42 ►
that every day now in the Soviet Union
00:26:45 ►
more and more thermonuclear weapons are being decommissioned.
00:26:49 ►
Absolutely, because, you know, as we hear, the volcanoes are increasing,
00:26:55 ►
especially on the water of Oregon, 20-some were discovered.
00:27:01 ►
when some were discovered.
00:27:06 ►
Well, yes, the Earth is perfectly capable of raising outrageous hell
00:27:08 ►
without us triggering a nuclear war.
00:27:11 ►
It doesn’t even hurt, you know,
00:27:13 ►
that it must be a sort of displacement.
00:27:18 ►
Well, I’m not sure exactly.
00:27:22 ►
As I said, we don’t know what we’re for.
00:27:24 ►
Maybe we are a suicide machine.
00:27:27 ►
My faith is that we’re just slow to get rolling
00:27:32 ►
and that once the battle is joined,
00:27:37 ►
once every person on Earth realizes
00:27:40 ►
that we’re in a battle for planetary survival,
00:27:44 ►
then people will get with the program.
00:27:48 ►
It’s just that things aren’t bad enough yet.
00:27:51 ►
What about what you showed us yesterday, the graph showing the acceleration?
00:27:57 ►
Well, we don’t know what lies beyond that omega point.
00:28:01 ►
The next question I wanted to…
00:28:02 ►
Yeah, I was hoping to sort of get back to that,
00:28:04 ►
but how do you get here and there? omega point well there are all kinds of possibilities you know there people are
00:28:20 ►
talking about nanotechnology do you all know what that is? That’s this idea that all machines could be made so small that you can’t see them.
00:28:34 ►
And if you could make machines that small,
00:28:38 ►
it’s conceivable that you could actually dematerialize human beings in some way.
00:28:44 ►
And we could all, you know, if we were all the size of a proton,
00:28:48 ►
we could store everybody in a grapefruit buried on the backside of the moon.
00:28:54 ►
There are many different forms of escape.
00:28:57 ►
One of the puzzling things, we’ve talked a little bit about this asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs.
00:29:06 ►
Well, the people who don’t believe
00:29:08 ►
that it happened,
00:29:09 ►
their best argument is that
00:29:12 ►
the fossil record seems to show
00:29:14 ►
that there was a dying off of species
00:29:17 ►
right before the asteroid struck
00:29:20 ►
over quite a long period of time,
00:29:22 ►
like over a million years or so,
00:29:24 ►
there was a dying going on
00:29:26 ►
and then this asteroid struck and i thought wouldn’t it be weird if what the solution to
00:29:33 ►
the 20th century’s problems are is to establish a reservation 65 million years in the past, 25,000 years across, and everybody goes and lives there.
00:29:48 ►
And the whole thing is situated right in front of the asteroid impact so that no record of it survives,
00:29:56 ►
so that we are not confused by its existence.
00:30:01 ►
In other words, your grandchildren may live in a world that existed before you were born.
00:30:08 ►
Do you see how that could be?
00:30:10 ►
We could escape into time.
00:30:12 ►
We could escape into the quantum mechanical realms by becoming the eensy-beensy option.
00:30:30 ►
option. We could, maybe we’re going to invent an engine, the equivalent of the spin dizzy in James Blish’s novel Cities in Flight. If we, it could invent a spin dizzy engine, we could build
00:30:39 ►
a starship and just leave the earth. There are many possibilities the pressure has not yet come on
00:30:46 ►
i mean we’re led by jackasses we don’t bother with our political processes but let the pressure come
00:30:54 ►
on and i think people will make greater demands of their political institutions and the pressure
00:31:00 ►
is going to come on one thing i’m confident of is things are going to get worse before they get better.
00:31:07 ►
I find myself in the position of sort of cheering it on
00:31:11 ►
because it is going to be a forward escape.
00:31:15 ►
There’s no going backward.
00:31:17 ►
Things must get worse before they get better.
00:31:21 ►
I remember when Three Mile Island happened.
00:31:21 ►
before they get better.
00:31:24 ►
I remember when Three Mile Island happened.
00:31:26 ►
I mean, I was saying, you know,
00:31:31 ►
melt down, melt down.
00:31:34 ►
If this thing can vent a toxic cloud that makes Washington, D.C. uninhabitable,
00:31:37 ►
we’ll get action.
00:31:38 ►
You want to see environmental consciousness
00:31:41 ►
move to the top of the agenda?
00:31:43 ►
Wipe out Washington, D.C. with a broken nuclear power plant,
00:31:47 ►
and by God, you’ll see action.
00:31:52 ►
Well, yes, we mustn’t get into these vindictive scenarios.
00:31:58 ►
But, you know, it’s generally credited, if you read the people involved,
00:32:03 ►
that really what turned things around in the Soviet Union was Chernobyl.
00:32:10 ►
It really was.
00:32:11 ►
In the minds of the leadership and the war fighting plans,
00:32:17 ►
and they said, for crying out loud, this thing wasn’t even a bomb.
00:32:21 ►
It was just a power plant.
00:32:23 ►
And 11 days after it partially screwed up,
00:32:27 ►
we’re able to measure increased radiation levels over Auckland, New Zealand.
00:32:35 ►
One power plant.
00:32:36 ►
What if there had been a thermonuclear exchange,
00:32:40 ►
even a pissant exchange involving, say, under 100 weapons?
00:32:45 ►
It’s just weapons it’s just
00:32:46 ►
it’s off the scale
00:32:47 ►
so they looked at that and they said
00:32:49 ►
we’re bankrupt
00:32:50 ►
we’ve had it
00:32:52 ►
these were the male dominators
00:32:55 ►
of the male dominators
00:32:56 ►
I mean if you’ve ever met members of the communist party
00:32:59 ►
of the Soviet Union
00:33:00 ►
my god
00:33:02 ►
talk about people that it’s hard to get a smile out of.
00:33:07 ►
So, you know, what we have to do is stop looking for leadership from the top,
00:33:16 ►
because the least among us make their way into those positions of power. I mean, you can see that now. Those guys are not fit to throw guts down to
00:33:27 ►
a bear, any of them. And so, you know, what we have to do is knock off this fantasy of being citizens
00:33:39 ►
inside a democratic state. I mean, what we are are the propagandized masses inside a fascist dictatorship.
00:33:47 ►
And what people have to do
00:33:49 ►
is begin to form affinity groups,
00:33:52 ►
get their own ship together,
00:33:55 ►
get their own goals defined,
00:33:58 ►
and then move out into it and do it.
00:34:01 ►
It’s not going to come from, you know,
00:34:04 ►
the policy council of the Republican
00:34:06 ►
or Democratic Party. That’s
00:34:08 ►
just silly to think that.
00:34:12 ►
A lot of our
00:34:14 ►
projections on solutions
00:34:15 ►
come from what we think
00:34:18 ►
now, but our
00:34:19 ►
situation is now.
00:34:21 ►
You wouldn’t think
00:34:23 ►
it’s almost like you have to take yourself out of the situation and situation so that you could take this person out and get them to the bottom. And some of you, you know,
00:34:45 ►
you can do some things with them.
00:34:46 ►
For those of you who are friends with Paul,
00:34:47 ►
you can agree that’s not a good idea.
00:34:50 ►
That’s the end of that conflict.
00:34:52 ►
You’ve never thought of that.
00:34:53 ►
That’s right.
00:34:53 ►
Getting to know each other.
00:34:55 ►
Know your enemy,
00:34:56 ►
and they probably will not be your enemy.
00:34:59 ►
We have a very weird political agenda.
00:35:04 ►
I mean, you know, for instance instance i don’t want to get into an
00:35:08 ►
air-clawing rave about this but i feel as a as a person who was raised catholic that i have a
00:35:15 ►
certain license to criticize my own subgroup i think that you know the third re Reich was a Sunday school picnic
00:35:25 ►
compared to the population policies of the Roman Catholic Church.
00:35:30 ►
They will shove millions of people per year into poverty, disease, and death
00:35:37 ►
in the pursuit of a theological doctrine that nobody understands the sense of.
00:35:50 ►
of a theological doctrine that nobody understands the sense of. In a civilized political environment,
00:35:57 ►
those people would be placed under immediate arrest, just like we did the leadership of the Nazis. I do not understand how you can call yourself pro-life when the policies that you espouse mean planetary death.
00:36:07 ►
That’s the program of the pro-life position.
00:36:11 ►
More starvation, more agony, more wars,
00:36:15 ►
more destroyed land, more toxic output
00:36:18 ►
in the name of being pro-life?
00:36:21 ►
What have words come to mean?
00:36:25 ►
I mean, it’s really bizarre.
00:36:27 ►
And we, even us,
00:36:29 ►
in this room,
00:36:30 ►
the thing that was so great
00:36:32 ►
about the 60s
00:36:33 ►
and that is so frustrating
00:36:35 ►
about the 90s
00:36:36 ►
is people do not get pissed off.
00:36:39 ►
I mean, you know,
00:36:40 ►
I can tell you this
00:36:43 ►
and you can nod in agreement, but, you know, I can tell you this and you can nod in agreement,
00:36:45 ►
but, you know, at some point the thing becomes so odious,
00:36:50 ►
so clearly intellectually bankrupt,
00:36:53 ►
so clearly toxic to any kind of human values that any of us can relate to
00:37:00 ►
that you just have to put yourself on the line.
00:37:05 ►
And I don’t know when that moment will come.
00:37:07 ►
It’s not for me to say.
00:37:08 ►
I guess a switch will be turned in the unconscious.
00:37:12 ►
But there’s enough evidence of outrage and muddle-headedness
00:37:19 ►
and outright evil around that sooner or later we’re going to have to confront it.
00:37:25 ►
Otherwise, you know, this is a sinking submarine.
00:37:29 ►
And there is no way out unless people who really understand the gravity of the situation
00:37:39 ►
and the stakes make their voices heard.
00:37:43 ►
If we leave it up to the institutions that have been put in place
00:37:46 ►
over the last 500 years, these are anti-human institutions. These institutions hate the human
00:37:56 ►
race, hate ordinary people. And until we wake up to this, we’re going to be their victims we’re the marks
00:38:06 ►
well how do you like being a mark
00:38:08 ►
you can just take so much of that
00:38:10 ►
and then you just finally have to stand
00:38:12 ►
up and say enough
00:38:14 ►
you know and yeah
00:38:16 ►
JP
00:38:17 ►
I just want to say demographically
00:38:18 ►
Japan comes close to what you’re talking about
00:38:20 ►
they talk about a quiet revolution
00:38:22 ►
among Japanese women but universally
00:38:24 ►
the whole society views it as a disaster
00:38:26 ►
that the demographic rate of increase is so low.
00:38:31 ►
And no one comes out and actually says this might be a good thing
00:38:34 ►
due to the catastrophe that Japanese women are having so many children.
00:38:37 ►
It’s interesting.
00:38:38 ►
I’ll bet, though, that there are sectors in Japanese society
00:38:42 ►
that carry a small smile around on their face
00:38:45 ►
because they know then that while the rest of the world sinks into food riots, epidemics, and propaganda,
00:38:53 ►
that they will probably be able to ride it through.
00:38:56 ►
The genius of the Japanese is that they have been living in an environment requiring careful resource management for centuries.
00:39:08 ►
They’re masters of two things, resource management and long-term planning. We don’t understand
00:39:15 ►
either. Our attitude is chop it down, move on, you know, see what tomorrow brings. Well, you know,
00:39:24 ►
there’s a yawning grave
00:39:26 ►
waiting for people with those attitudes
00:39:29 ►
yeah
00:39:29 ►
you offered some potential solutions
00:39:32 ►
to the growth problem
00:39:33 ►
there’s another problem that’s captivated
00:39:36 ►
public attention and that’s education
00:39:37 ►
and implicitly you seem to be an example
00:39:40 ►
of the opposite of what this culture
00:39:43 ►
cultivates with its education
00:39:44 ►
I mean, here, an oratory is alive and well,
00:39:47 ►
and a lot of this history is alive and well.
00:39:49 ►
And I’m wondering, how did you choose to educate your own children,
00:39:53 ►
and how are your experiences,
00:39:55 ►
what are they going towards as far as the type of educational reform that this society needs?
00:40:02 ►
Well, you’re right.
00:40:04 ►
Education is the key.
00:40:06 ►
And, you know,
00:40:09 ►
it’s just my opinion on this,
00:40:11 ►
but history is,
00:40:15 ►
to not know your history
00:40:17 ►
is to be amnesic.
00:40:20 ►
I mean, if you met a person
00:40:21 ►
who couldn’t tell you
00:40:23 ►
where they were from 1970 to 80,
00:40:26 ►
you would define them as a fairly damaged person.
00:40:29 ►
But how many people do you meet who can tell you where Western civilization was
00:40:34 ►
between 900 and 1600?
00:40:37 ►
People don’t know.
00:40:38 ►
So since they don’t know, they can be fed any shit that is out there and they don’t know they have
00:40:46 ►
no idea so the way to gain power is to reclaim a command of history and then
00:40:53 ►
you can like for instance I remember when the Vietnam War was breaking out
00:40:59 ►
and I was in school at the University of California at Berkeley and the professor said we all
00:41:06 ►
have to read Thucydides. We all have to read about the war against Sparta, not Sparta,
00:41:16 ►
the war against Syracuse which was in Sicily and how it destroyed Greek democracy and how it allowed the ascendancy of the dictatorship
00:41:27 ►
of the 30. And why did this happen? Because the Athenian citizenry could not understand the war
00:41:35 ►
aims because the Athenian leadership didn’t understand clearly what the war aims were.
00:41:41 ►
All the mistakes of the Vietnam War were repeated or occurred in this war
00:41:48 ►
which was fought well before the year zero.
00:41:51 ►
But you tell most people to read Thucydides
00:41:54 ►
and they just give you a strange look.
00:41:58 ►
Well, it’s not because we want to be obscurantists
00:42:01 ►
or we want to carry on conversations
00:42:03 ►
like Cambridge intellectuals. it’s because we want
00:42:07 ►
to know what to do with the future. And the first thing you do with the future is you don’t make the
00:42:14 ►
stupid mistakes that were made in the past. Like this new age thing amazes me. I mean, there are
00:42:21 ►
people who call themselves spiritual thinkers who think that
00:42:26 ►
the spiritual quest began with madame blavatsky for crying out loud well i’ve got news for you
00:42:32 ►
people have been over this ground again and again and again it always amazes me that people will
00:42:38 ►
give their loyalty to a guru who is obviously you know a grab tailor and a tax skate and a jerk,
00:42:48 ►
and you say to them,
00:42:49 ►
well, you know, have you read Plato?
00:42:53 ►
Have you studied Nagarjuna?
00:42:56 ►
Do you know what Moses Mamonides has to say about this?
00:43:01 ►
And say, why do you follow this guy?
00:43:03 ►
He probably hasn’t even read these people do you
00:43:07 ►
know that there have been some fairly bright people around over the last six or seven thousand
00:43:13 ►
years and and yeah they don’t have a white limousine or they won’t invite you up to their
00:43:19 ►
place in the hamptons or something but they’re. And all you have to do is go to the public library
00:43:25 ►
and read this stuff.
00:43:27 ►
And people don’t want that.
00:43:28 ►
They want flash.
00:43:30 ►
This very sincere people come to my workshops
00:43:34 ►
and I realize that they want me to tell them this stuff.
00:43:40 ►
And because I guess this is better
00:43:42 ►
than sitting home on a Saturday afternoon and reading.
00:43:45 ►
But Plato said it a lot better than I’m saying it.
00:43:49 ►
And so did a lot of other people.
00:43:52 ►
Civilization is a vast storehouse of wisdom.
00:43:57 ►
But if you don’t avail yourself of it,
00:43:59 ►
then you have to figure it out based on what’s happened since Nixon or something.
00:44:04 ►
And you’re not going to get very far.
00:44:06 ►
They trap you with that.
00:44:09 ►
I don’t want to rave about this,
00:44:13 ►
but what I saw happen to my own university,
00:44:15 ►
I think that a conscious decision was made
00:44:20 ►
by the American establishment at the close of the 1960s.
00:44:24 ►
And what they said to themselves was,
00:44:26 ►
this idea of universal education and an educated citizenry,
00:44:32 ►
this we don’t like.
00:44:35 ►
We see now what happens when you educate your citizens.
00:44:40 ►
They figure out the game.
00:44:42 ►
And they come to you with their plans for reform and how to make it better.
00:44:48 ►
So I was like among, at least at the University of California, I was among the last people to go through that university where the goal was to inform you about the nature of the enterprise
00:45:06 ►
called Western Civilization.
00:45:09 ►
And after that, what they got into was this MBA,
00:45:15 ►
data entry, all this stuff.
00:45:19 ►
The universities became trade schools.
00:45:23 ►
And what they give you is video games.
00:45:27 ►
They give you TV, video games, and they give you a skill.
00:45:31 ►
And you say, well, now you’re a level three data enterer.
00:45:35 ►
And we’re going to give you $35,000 a year.
00:45:40 ►
And please shut up about it.
00:45:42 ►
That’s it.
00:45:43 ►
You’ve been brought inside.
00:45:44 ►
But we’re not interested
00:45:46 ►
in your opinions. We’re
00:45:47 ►
giving you a life, we’re giving you
00:45:49 ►
a trade and we’ll be giving you some
00:45:51 ►
orders downstream and by God
00:45:54 ►
you better snap too when the moment
00:45:56 ►
comes. This has nothing
00:45:57 ►
to do with democracy.
00:45:59 ►
This is fascism
00:46:01 ►
is what it is.
00:46:02 ►
How much did you earn and how much did you learn? This is fascism, is what it is. Of course it’s containing such things, just like what you said.
00:46:05 ►
How much you earn and how much you learn, it’s the same thing.
00:46:10 ►
Yeah, everything is commoditized.
00:46:14 ►
Everything is, they assume that you, and, you know, people these days want to be secure.
00:46:24 ►
I don’t really understand that.
00:46:26 ►
It’s great.
00:46:27 ►
You need a certain critical mass to give that up.
00:46:30 ►
It’s great when you and all your friends agree
00:46:33 ►
that you don’t care whether you starve or not
00:46:35 ►
because you’re going to have so much fun doing it.
00:46:38 ►
But it’s hard to reach that place by yourself
00:46:41 ►
because it’s not very much fun.
00:46:43 ►
But, you know because it’s not very much fun but you know it it’s um
00:46:46 ►
there is a problem in that we are manipulated and we are not empowered and those who are
00:46:56 ►
empowered it wouldn’t be so bad if they had a plan but their plan is, you know, another house, another Mercedes, a deeper swimming pool.
00:47:07 ►
This is no plan.
00:47:10 ►
And so it’s up to the creativity of ordinary people.
00:47:17 ►
And the strongest weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people
00:47:28 ►
weapon to support and augment the creativity of ordinary people is the psychedelic experience because it allows you to to put information together in new and exciting ways and this is
00:47:36 ►
to be then the basis of a new political order it has to be and if we don’t react then um you know the mushroom said to me once it said uh if you
00:47:50 ►
don’t have a plan you become part of somebody else’s plan because there are only planners
00:47:57 ►
and planees you know so what do you want to do you want to be part of somebody else’s plan or
00:48:04 ►
get your own agenda together?
00:48:06 ►
How would you reduce the psychological experience
00:48:09 ►
of being a person who had education?
00:48:12 ►
Well, you stop lying about it for openers.
00:48:15 ►
I mean, I deal with this with my children.
00:48:18 ►
I mean, we live in an area
00:48:20 ►
where half the population grows dope
00:48:23 ►
and once a month they have anti-drug day at school
00:48:27 ►
and it’s just the level of cultural schizophrenia is just awesome you know so i just tell my kids
00:48:35 ►
the truth and i say here’s here’s what it is there are good drugs and bad drugs but mostly
00:48:41 ►
it’s the monkey doing the drugs and uh you know inform yourself ask me if you don’t believe
00:48:49 ►
me you know all these other people shrinks chemists avail yourself and i’m very pleased with
00:48:55 ►
with how my kids are turning out i mean other people may look upon them with horror
00:49:00 ►
i mean because they’re they don’t take a lot of uh crap from anybody but they are of good
00:49:08 ►
heart and they trust themselves yeah well no the thing to do with the drugs on that level is let’s unshackle psychotherapy and stop having it be this playpen game and actually
00:49:30 ►
get it into play psychotherapists are an incipient shaman class i mean obviously they aren’t all
00:49:37 ►
but that’s the place to start people who want to help people people who have a portion of a medical education, and people who are
00:49:47 ►
interested in the dynamics of the mind.
00:49:50 ►
If we all came up through a series of initiations where, you know, you were exposed first to
00:49:58 ►
this and then to that and then led on and always educated going in and always debriefed coming out,
00:50:06 ►
then these things would be, there would be no problem.
00:50:10 ►
We’re just so weird about human nature.
00:50:14 ►
I mean, the sex thing has just been even mildly dealt with
00:50:19 ►
in the last 50 years.
00:50:21 ►
And we forget, you know, people didn’t, most most I don’t know I mean it’s just
00:50:26 ►
weird people barely knew
00:50:28 ►
where children came from
00:50:30 ►
until the 20th century
00:50:31 ►
I mean sex was very
00:50:34 ►
very chancy
00:50:35 ►
and iffy and occasional
00:50:38 ►
you read the biographies
00:50:40 ►
of the people who created western
00:50:42 ►
civilization and they’re
00:50:44 ►
mostly weirdos of some sort
00:50:47 ►
because they were bent by the sexual mores of the world they were living in.
00:50:53 ►
We have to, you know, the problem which haunted Marxism
00:50:58 ►
and which destroyed it ultimately
00:51:00 ►
was that they had the wrong version of what a human being is they
00:51:06 ►
used to talk about what was called Marxist man well Marxist man is such a
00:51:13 ►
limited concept of what people really are that it was it just collapsed under
00:51:20 ►
its own weight on the other hand western man this concept is also a tremendously limited idea
00:51:28 ►
we deny our roots in the animal body we deny our roots in the life of the imagination
00:51:36 ►
terrified of sex you know you have to do it in one position and it has to be a guy and a woman
00:51:42 ►
and it has to be within the confines of marriage and all this stuff this is what was happening until very
00:51:47 ►
recently and still goes on believe me with enormous vehemence in a lot of
00:51:52 ►
places and now drugs I mean drugs clearly are about human nature and and
00:52:00 ►
the model of human nature which this society has deified
00:52:06 ►
makes it a pathological act, a sin, and a crime
00:52:12 ►
to alter your own consciousness.
00:52:15 ►
This doesn’t make any sense.
00:52:17 ►
We are at war with ourselves, and we’re losing.
00:52:24 ►
Why then not call secular drugs?
00:52:27 ►
If you’re saying that drug is bad,
00:52:29 ►
why don’t you still call it drug?
00:52:34 ►
Well, because I think the word drug
00:52:36 ►
has been pretty thoroughly corrupted by the dominator.
00:52:40 ►
The way you corrupt a word
00:52:42 ►
is you define it so broadly that it means nothing.
00:52:50 ►
And drug, we’re talking about everything from DMT through heroin and on to penicillin and aspirin.
00:53:00 ►
These are all drugs so if we were that’s why I try to say psychedelics
00:53:06 ►
and insist
00:53:08 ►
that these are not drugs
00:53:10 ►
they’re something else
00:53:11 ►
yeah
00:53:12 ►
I also see in the books
00:53:13 ►
you’re sort of intoxication
00:53:15 ►
and I wonder if that’s so
00:53:16 ►
sometimes people ask you
00:53:18 ►
to be a drug
00:53:19 ►
yeah you may be right
00:53:23 ►
I’ve been in this business so long that the word intoxication
00:53:28 ►
doesn’t have that connotation for me but one can never be too careful about the words one uses
00:53:35 ►
because they become realities uh i’m not entirely happy with that book i mean and of course once you
00:53:43 ►
write a book then people come to you, not only with
00:53:45 ►
criticisms, but with suggestions,
00:53:48 ►
and you see how it could
00:53:49 ►
have been a much, much better book.
00:53:52 ►
But on the other hand,
00:53:54 ►
it was right for that moment,
00:53:56 ►
or it was as right as I could make it
00:53:58 ►
for that moment.
00:54:00 ►
Yeah. Did you want to…
00:54:03 ►
Nope.
00:54:04 ►
Anybody? Yeah, back here. Well, there’s real youth phobia.
00:54:45 ►
Youth is regarded as subversive.
00:54:48 ►
It’s almost regarded as a standing army within society that belongs to a foreign power.
00:54:57 ►
The generational gap is not driven by the young.
00:55:01 ►
It’s driven by the old who are nervous about giving up power.
00:55:06 ►
I mean, their attitude is,
00:55:08 ►
we can’t trust you with the keys to the car.
00:55:12 ►
But the problem is,
00:55:13 ►
they’re driving the car over the cliff
00:55:16 ►
at 200 miles an hour.
00:55:18 ►
So I don’t really have an answer for this.
00:55:21 ►
I mean, I feel very, very fortunate in that I have very rarely
00:55:28 ►
and only for brief periods of time ever had to take orders from anybody. Now, in order
00:55:35 ►
to achieve that, I had to do a number of things that prudence dictates I not even mention here but I
00:55:45 ►
you have to be very suspicious
00:55:48 ►
you have to keep clear
00:55:49 ►
they’re always trying to get you down
00:55:52 ►
into the hole that they’re in
00:55:53 ►
you know
00:55:54 ►
and
00:55:55 ►
yeah that we could actually be in or something. Everybody says, well, how do we function in society? Well, the fact that we’re actually in society
00:56:05 ►
is a kind of order to do.
00:56:07 ►
Well, what I’m saying is it’s a construct.
00:56:09 ►
It’s not really a natural reality.
00:56:12 ►
Right, it’s a myth.
00:56:13 ►
It’s a myth.
00:56:14 ►
And all the things that go on, there’s
00:56:16 ►
really just a collection of tales and functions and rules,
00:56:20 ►
which if you try to get people to define and to rule,
00:56:23 ►
if you have to get somebody people to define it, in a room, you’d have to get somebody to write a text.
00:56:26 ►
You wouldn’t be able to get a consistent explanation.
00:56:30 ►
But the idea is that the thing you’re
00:56:32 ►
talking about getting yourself out of is not the society
00:56:35 ►
itself.
00:56:36 ►
It’s the economic continuum.
00:56:39 ►
Why do I have to deny?
00:56:41 ►
I don’t have to answer to my boss.
00:56:43 ►
Or I don’t have to answer to my landlord if he’s’t have to answer to my landlord or I don’t have to
00:56:46 ►
it’s like a chain of command
00:56:48 ►
it’s something like a bunch of people would drop out
00:56:50 ►
if you eliminated that one point
00:56:52 ►
it’s the economic
00:56:53 ►
obviously
00:56:55 ►
instead of somebody else’s economic
00:56:57 ►
being on a police service
00:57:00 ►
you just jump and go astray
00:57:01 ►
the other thing is
00:57:04 ►
we always talk about the future and the past.
00:57:08 ►
But if you will analyze it for a moment, there are many pasts.
00:57:16 ►
I mean, very few of us were probably in the same place last night.
00:57:23 ►
But we’re all here now
00:57:25 ►
so that means that many pasts
00:57:30 ►
lead in to this nexus
00:57:32 ►
of the present and three weeks from now
00:57:35 ►
very few of us will be together
00:57:37 ►
some who came as couples, if they’re lucky
00:57:40 ►
will still be together
00:57:42 ►
so there are many futures and there are many pasts.
00:57:47 ►
And the thing to do is to realize that you’re not being born along on the current of some kind of inevitable thing where you’re embedded in it like a raisin in bread.
00:57:58 ►
You’re able to steer.
00:58:01 ►
You’re able to steer away from things that are bringing you down and you’re able to make alliances and relationships with things which support you.
00:58:12 ►
It’s all about personal empowerment. your self from the values and the programs of the society and putting your
00:58:27 ►
own values and programs in place as long as you define yourself as a citizen as
00:58:34 ►
long as you wait to be informed by NPR as to what the real nature of the world
00:58:41 ►
is you’re not going and I listen to Npr i’m not not they’re the best of the
00:58:46 ►
lot the best of the lot because the rest is such garbage you can’t even get near it but nevertheless
00:58:51 ►
i notice on npr an enormous amount of whining what you have to do is realize that you are what i call
00:59:02 ►
or or that the thing to shoot for is what I call extra-environmentalism.
00:59:08 ►
You know how people sometimes say, I feel like a person from outer space?
00:59:14 ►
That doesn’t sound like such a bad way to feel.
00:59:17 ►
That means that you see what’s going down.
00:59:21 ►
You see the game that’s being run and you don’t buy in.
00:59:26 ►
They can’t buy you with a Mercedes
00:59:30 ►
or business trips to Paris or something like that.
00:59:34 ►
You’re smarter than that.
00:59:36 ►
It’s a kind of controlled alienation
00:59:39 ►
where you actually cultivate extra-environmentalism.
00:59:45 ►
The great thing about an extra-environmental
00:59:48 ►
is that you’re at home everywhere.
00:59:51 ►
Every place is your home.
00:59:54 ►
And therefore you are always comfortable.
00:59:58 ►
And you don’t have to be with people of your class
01:00:01 ►
or your color or your earning capacity
01:00:04 ►
to feel all right.
01:00:08 ►
I think I said this at one point, but my namesake is the Roman poet Terence,
01:00:15 ►
and he wrote these really trashy little social commentary plays,
01:00:21 ►
but one quote of his has come down as fairly memorable he said i am a human
01:00:27 ►
being therefore nothing human is alien to me you see and that’s this thing where you you accept
01:00:38 ►
the human you become the extra environmental but when when you’re with the japanese you’re perfectly able to accommodate
01:00:46 ►
yourself to their values and styles when you’re with folks in lawrence kansas you can come up to
01:00:53 ►
that measure and it’s a kind of shifting it’s a magical thing it’s a shamanic thing you’re a
01:00:59 ►
performer you always move through these things with a sense that this is not who I am. This is not what I am.
01:01:08 ►
This is merely a response to the demands
01:01:11 ►
of the moment. Yeah?
01:01:15 ►
Why is that creation and standing the reality
01:01:19 ►
to achieve that level?
01:01:22 ►
Well, because these realities are that in that understanding,
01:01:28 ►
you know, like people say,
01:01:31 ►
one of the things I once said
01:01:33 ►
to the mushroom,
01:01:34 ►
why me?
01:01:36 ►
Why are you telling me
01:01:38 ►
all this stuff?
01:01:40 ►
And without hesitation,
01:01:41 ►
it said, because you don’t
01:01:43 ►
believe anything.
01:01:44 ►
You don’t believe anything.
01:01:46 ►
You don’t believe anything.
01:01:54 ►
Belief makes it impossible to believe the opposite proposition. And that means you’ve just truncated your freedom.
01:01:58 ►
No matter how noble the belief you have taken on,
01:02:02 ►
you have just rejected and limited your ability
01:02:06 ►
to believe other things
01:02:08 ►
my favorite story
01:02:10 ►
this shows you how perfect I am
01:02:12 ►
my favorite story in the gospels
01:02:15 ►
is the story of the apostle Thomas
01:02:18 ►
because you will recall that
01:02:21 ►
after the crucifixion
01:02:23 ►
this is a good place to end this is an alchemical story after the crucifixion, this is a good place to end, this is an alchemical story. After the crucifixion, Christ appeared to the apostles in the upper room in Jerusalem 40 days after, and Thomas was not there. I don’t know where he was. Somewhere. They’d sent him out for sandwiches or something.
01:02:46 ►
Anyway, he came back,
01:02:49 ►
and they said,
01:02:50 ►
the master was with us.
01:02:53 ►
And he said,
01:02:54 ►
come on, you guys.
01:02:57 ►
He said, you’ve been smoking to red lab
01:03:00 ►
we brought in three weeks ago.
01:03:02 ►
And they said, no, no,
01:03:03 ►
the master was with us. And they said, no, no, the master was with us.
01:03:05 ►
And he said, unless I put my hand into the wound,
01:03:11 ►
I will not believe it.
01:03:13 ►
So then time passed.
01:03:16 ►
And then Christ came again to the apostles.
01:03:21 ►
And Thomas was among them on this second get-go
01:03:26 ►
and Christ walked in
01:03:29 ►
and kicked off his overshoes
01:03:31 ►
and looked around the room
01:03:32 ►
and he said,
01:03:34 ►
Thomas, come forward.
01:03:37 ►
Put your hand into the wound.
01:03:41 ►
Which he did.
01:03:42 ►
Which he did.
01:03:44 ►
Now, people have different interpretations of this story
01:03:47 ►
my interpretation of it
01:03:49 ►
which is what I’m going to deal with
01:03:51 ►
is that alone among all human beings
01:03:57 ►
in all of human history
01:03:59 ►
only one person
01:04:02 ►
was ever so privileged as to be allowed to touch the resurrection body.
01:04:10 ►
It was Thomas the Doubter who was allowed to touch the resurrection body
01:04:15 ►
because he didn’t believe.
01:04:19 ►
And so if you want to touch the resurrection body,
01:04:23 ►
be very careful with where you commit your belief.
01:04:27 ►
Keep your eyes open.
01:04:29 ►
Stay smart.
01:04:31 ►
Take it easy.
01:04:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:04:40 ►
at a time.
01:04:50 ►
And so, if you want to touch the resurrection body, be very careful with where you commit your belief.
01:04:51 ►
Keep your eyes open, stay smart, take it easy, and yes, that is exactly where this recording
01:05:00 ►
cut off.
01:05:01 ►
Now, you can chalk it up to the elves or whatever you want, but nonetheless,
01:05:06 ►
we are left with filling in the rest of that sentence on our own. Now, I don’t know how you’d
01:05:11 ►
do it, but for me, I still hear him ending his workshops by saying, take it easy, keep the old
01:05:17 ►
faith, and stay high. Now, I’ve got an assignment for you. Actually, you’d have to be even more of a geek than me to do this,
01:05:27 ►
but in truth, I’d love to know the answer to this.
01:05:31 ►
We’ve just heard about five hours of Terrence covering an amazingly wide range of information,
01:05:37 ►
complete with references, and all done without the aid of notes.
01:05:41 ►
Now, my question is, if you go back to the beginning of this four-part series
01:05:45 ►
and re-listen all the time,
01:05:47 ►
cataloging each topic and subtopic,
01:05:50 ►
I would dearly love to see an outline of the workshop
01:05:52 ►
just to visually take in the huge number of topics
01:05:56 ►
he seemed to have quite ready at his fingertips.
01:06:00 ►
And if you want to really geek out on this talk,
01:06:03 ►
I’d love to hear one of our fellow salonners tell me in very simple language just what the heck Terrence meant when he was talking about time travel and said,
01:06:13 ►
your grandchildren may live in a world that existed before you were born.
01:06:18 ►
I’ve listened to that part three times now, and I still can’t get a handle on it.
01:06:22 ►
now, and I still can’t get a handle on it.
01:06:28 ►
Now, I guess it must have been well known among Terrence’s close associates that he’d been working on a play about the alchemist Michael Meyer,
01:06:32 ►
but that was the first time I heard about it myself, and
01:06:35 ►
unless there’s a copy on his hard drive, which I understand is still
01:06:40 ►
in existence somewhere, well, it may have tragically been lost
01:06:44 ►
in the fire that
01:06:45 ►
destroyed the entire McKenna archive.
01:06:48 ►
Hopefully, some of his work in progress may still be around on that drive somewhere.
01:06:53 ►
Now, I know that in my last podcast or so, I said I’d give you some of my impressions
01:06:58 ►
from the recent Psychedelic Science Conference, but once again, I’m a little pressed for time
01:07:04 ►
right now, and we’ll have to put that off a while longer.
01:07:07 ►
However, since we’re just finishing this series about alchemy,
01:07:11 ►
I want to be sure to mention that Paul, who is the legendary alchemist behind alchemy,
01:07:17 ►
that’s al-qemi, alchemy.com,
01:07:23 ►
he told me he’s planning on offering a two-part course in alchemy,
01:07:27 ►
and that the first part would be an online course.
01:07:30 ►
And once that’s firmed up, I’ll pass the information along to you.
01:07:34 ►
But you may want to visit his site at www.al-qemi.com
01:07:42 ►
for a little look around.
01:07:44 ►
And from what my friends tell me, Paul is not just another modern alchemist.
01:07:48 ►
He is actually a 17th century alchemist.
01:07:52 ►
And by the way, if you have a wake and bake habit that you’d like to break,
01:07:56 ►
I can recommend his calamus tincture as something you might want to look into.
01:08:02 ►
C-A-L-A-M-U-S.
01:08:05 ►
And one last thing I want to leave you with from the conference
01:08:08 ►
is what for me was the high point,
01:08:11 ►
and that is meeting new friends like J.C. and Shane
01:08:14 ►
and reconnecting with longtime friends like Dave Arnson,
01:08:18 ►
who it seems like I’ve known forever.
01:08:21 ►
Besides being an alumnus of many conferences, festivals, and salons,
01:08:26 ►
Dave is also the founding member of the world’s longest-running modern surf band,
01:08:30 ►
the Insect Surfers. You know, a few weeks ago I played a cut from a new group called Softpack,
01:08:37 ►
a group that includes a shirttail relative of mine, I should add. So now I thought I would
01:08:42 ►
sort of balance that with a well-established West Coast
01:08:45 ►
group featuring some extended family members and fellow salonners. So I’m going to close by playing
01:08:52 ►
a cut from the Insect Surfer CD that’s titled Mojave Reef. And the song I picked is called
01:08:58 ►
Black Sea, and it features my good friend Dave playing an electric saz that he picked up in Istanbul a while back.
01:09:06 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:09:10 ►
Be well, my friends, and I hope you enjoy the surfadelic sounds. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. guitar solo Thank you. I’m I’m I’m I’m
01:13:06 ►
I’m