Program Notes
Guest speakers: Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna
“Who would talk about the evolutionary mind? Who cares about the good and evil in the evolution of species, and so on? This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of our future.” -Ralph Abraham
“In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for “the snap”, that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. … What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history.” -Ralph Abraham
“The edge of the millennium, any edge of any of the millennia, is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want to make a change in things. It is a special time.” -Ralph Abraham
“Salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension.” -Terence McKenna
“This is a moment of enormous opportunity, and those who find themselves in this moment with power, defined however you care to define it, have a moral obligation to act. … What we must become is clear.” -Terence McKenna
“To the degree that we can change our minds we will escape extinction.” -Terence McKenna
“If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity you’re going to end up with business as usual. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity.” -Terence McKenna
“I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite.” -Ralph Abraham
“I think that grass root research, based on phenomena that are actually common sense, that are part of everyday life for many people, could help to wake us up, to give a greater clarity about what’s really going on, and make us recognize that there’s far more interconnection between us and other species, and us and other people, than is admitted in the scientific view of things, which is the world view which most people feel they have permission to talk about in public.” -Rupert Sheldrake
“What we’re saying is that we must dissolve the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions. Someone once said, ‘If we could feel what we are doing to the Earth we would stop immediately.’ … So we have compartmentalized our lives, and this allows us to do the fateful and lethal work that is destroying the planet, destroying communities, and so forth.” -Terence McKenna
“Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries. It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion.” -Terence McKenna
“As long as we believe in mind and matter, rich and poor, living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman, then we’re inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma, and we’re going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.” -Terence McKenna
“The great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism. And what is relativism? It’s the idea that there is no distinction between shit and Shinola. That all ideas are somehow operating on equal footing.” -Terence McKenna
“The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a w…
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And once again, I have some fellow saloners to thank for their generosity in sending in donations to help with the expenses here in the salon.
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And these fine people are…
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Naomi M., Klaus H., Mark C., J.P. of Vavom, Jason W., Dominic G., and Adam K.
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And Mark, I notice that you’ve been sending in a modest donation every month now,
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and I really appreciate your support.
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Also, let me read a short note I received from Klaus H. when he sent in his donation.
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Here’s what he said.
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Thanks, Lorenzo. I love what you do on the salon.
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I’ve never taken psychedelics and maybe never will.
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My mindset, however, perhaps does not need much of a push in that direction.
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I belong to the tribe nonetheless.
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Born crazy, or alienated, I guess.
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Well, first of all, Klaus, that was a very generous donation, and you should consider
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yourself all donated up for life. And as for your comment about having never used psychedelics,
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I want you to know that you have a lot of company among our fellow salonners.
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You’d actually be surprised at how many people say similar things. And in fact, our longtime supporter of Paul P.
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just sent me a very thoughtful email
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suggesting that I include more non-psychedelic using
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but still psychedelic thinking people
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who are also working on this clarity issue from other directions.
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And as time progresses,
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I most definitely will be including speakers from
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other disciplines as well. But for today, we’re going to have one more experience listening to
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Rupert, Ralph, and Terrence in what I assume was their final trialogue. So today we’re going to
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hear the last part of that 1998 trialogue between Rupert Sheldrake, Terence McKenna, and Ralph Abraham, in which they
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discussed their views on various aspects of what they call the evolutionary mind.
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In each session, one of the participants made a proposal that the others then expanded upon,
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discussed, and in some cases attacked one another’s ideas, but in a very friendly way.
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attacked one another’s ideas, but in a very friendly way.
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Now, today, Ralph Abraham begins the discussion by changing the focus to what he terms the edge of the millennium.
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And rather than have me tell you how that fit into the overall direction of this perhaps
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last trialogue, I’ll just play it for us now, and we can both try to figure out this
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interesting little change of course.
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The call for our gathering, the announcement part of the con which brought you here,
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mentioned the edge of the millennium, the edge of the millennium,
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at the edge of the millennium.
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And so far, the millennium has been present by subtle implication alone.
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So I think to honor our commitment,
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we’ll now try log on the edge of the millennium.
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Is that okay?
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It’s okay.
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Now, in our just appeared new book
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the evolutionary mind there is a chapter near the end called I forget what it’s
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called it’s about utopianism and millenarianism two pretty long isms, which altogether add up to an overdose of different approaches to the future,
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which are more or less classical. And there we spoke extensively of the extant literature and literary tradition and industry of utopian and millenarian genre.
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So that kind of utopian and millenarian stuff is not what we’re going to talk about in this
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trialogue.
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I want to introduce a completely different notion of the millennium, and I’m interested
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more particularly in the edge of the millennium
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and here’s how it goes.
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This is partly, according to me, a mathematical view of history
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that brings up this particular version of the idea of the millennium
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and nevertheless other people have written a similar view of history without
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any explicit recourse to mathematics so i think it’s pretty general it has to do this view of
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history with the approach we’ve taken toward biological evolution, that it goes forward in catastrophes and critical leaps and so on, sudden jumps.
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The punctuated equilibrium approach to history says that history goes along in a kind of a level plateau,
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in a kind of a level plateau, developmentally speaking,
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although there may be a gradual development up or down overall.
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And then every once in a while there is a big leap.
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The first such view of history, I think, that we know about was presented by the ancient Egyptians.
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So this is nothing new.
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Now, in my own work, I have classified some major plateaus,
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including the last one, the one that we’re at the end of now, according to my system of history, began 6,000 years ago or 5,500 years ago with the invention of the wheel and the first city states and stuff like that.
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Talking Schumer, talking Babylonia, talking ancient Egypt here.
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And so that’s a 6,000-year plateau.
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Now, other people, for example, Bill Thompson, somebody we know and talk to about world cultural history,
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he has a similar scheme in which the plateau now ending is only 300 or 400 years old.
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See, there were people who really wrote about this explosion idea in world cultural history was Jakob Burckhardt.
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Burckhardt said the Renaissance was a quantum leap in world cultural history.
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And then other people said, well, what about Giotto?
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What about Patatrio? What about Boccaccio?
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And the truth is that whenever you look at two major milestones in history and consider that between the milestones to be a sort of a level road, then somebody will come along and find a smaller milestone in there.
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Nowadays, we have fractal geometry. So we think that this is natural.
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Between any two big catastrophes, there’ll be 10 smaller ones.
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Between any two of the smaller ones, there’ll be 40 or 50 little or tinier ones and so on.
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The first person I know who put forward such a fractal idea of history that it’s not continuous, it’s discontinuous,
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but the discontinuities are more or less dense as in a fractal for such a person as you, Terrence.
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I give you credit in writing in my entry in the Encyclopedia of Time.
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You maybe have never read that book.
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Never read it.
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Well, there you’ll find your name mentioned in a flattering way by me of all people.
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Immortality at last.
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At last.
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At last.
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At last.
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Well, to make a long story short, it’s these controversial plateaus of history that I’m going to call millennia.
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And then if you want to go back to chapter 10 of the evolutionary mind and to read there about the history of the millenarial concept then you’ll see that the first one wherein the number 1000 was actually mentioned for the length of one of these plateaus gave his
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name to the thing it was a special case of my more abstract idea of millennium it’s the plateau
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of history and what i mean by the edge of millennium is those times when there’s the
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snappo from one equilibrium
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to another
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Cro-Magnon comes out
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of Neanderthal
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or whatever it is
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and oxygen
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comes out of the
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archeobiological background and whatever
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and the interest of this according, is why are we here?
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Who would talk about the evolutionary mind?
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Who cares about the good and evil and the evolution of species and so on?
00:09:37 ►
This must be interesting only to the degree to which it informs us in this very present moment
00:09:44 ►
regarding our choices that we will make in the creation of the future.
00:09:49 ►
So according to chaos theory and its partner theory of bifurcation,
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this is one of the main things that teaches something like the butterfly effect that you’ve heard about in a dynamical system
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or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in,
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when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical math jargon for these snaps,
00:10:13 ►
that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system.
00:10:20 ►
So according to this self-inflating view, we live at a specially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something, it has actually an enormous effect on the future.
00:10:36 ►
Maybe not a direct, determinative effect, but we can’t really say what the outcome will be.
00:10:42 ►
But what we do has some influence on the creation of the future
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more than other times in history
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and the bigger the jump
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the bigger the leverage
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where Archimedes said
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give me a lever and I’ll move the world
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we have a lever now
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and we care about what’s coming next
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so that’s why the edge of the millennium
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any edge of any of the millennia is particularly important to those revolutionary souls who want
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to make a change in things it’s a special time a century or two centuries ago you could struggle
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for the creation of a chaos revolution
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and it would be impossible because there were no computers around
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or there were no movie makers in Hollywood or something, I don’t know
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it takes more than we know about to create these special opportunities
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and anyway that’s what I mean by millennium
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and that’s what I mean by at the edge of the millennium
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and now this is only a hypothesis for the sake of discussion but I kind of think that this is very credible
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that we are now at the edge of a millennium therefore we we have to discuss this and the that I’m going to pose to you, Rupin Ter, if this isn’t too radical,
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is to what degree do you think, actually,
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that what we are doing now matters in the creation of the future?
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And if there is any possibility that what we do matters in the creation of the future,
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is any possibility that what we do matters in the creation of the future.
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What kind of future or what kind of change are we trying to create?
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And to what degree what we are actually doing, for example, what we are talking about today, what we are doing today, to what degree could that possibly be a real effect, a real benefit
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in creating the future that we want to create
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in contrast to other things that we might do, like go to the beach and pray or whatever. and particularly should I stop here?
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well that’s what I’m not sure
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yes well I’m trying to make this easier for you
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because I think this might be too difficult
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as we
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well I mean I think I said this morning
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or maybe I didn’t
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but I believe it
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and have said it many times
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salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension I said this morning, or maybe I didn’t, but I believe it and have said it many times,
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salvation is an act of cognitive apprehension.
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So we do matter.
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Because to the degree that we are ignorant, avidya in the Buddhist lexicon, we retard universal progress towards some kind of enlightenment.
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But the doctrine of avidya, this is standing for all time since 1800 BC.
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Do you agree that this is a special moment?
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Yes, I think so. Not only a special moment,
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but the other thing I would call people’s attention to
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is the fact that no matter whether you scanned your way in here today
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and no matter whether you’re going to go back to an appliance box
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that you live in under a bridge,
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the odds are that you are very close to the top of the pyramid of global empowerment.
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You are mostly white,
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mostly well-educated,
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mostly have enough disposable income
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to come to an event like this.
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It’s worth pointing out that all that rides on the backs
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of those who do not have such privilege.
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And so, yeah, this is a moment of enormous opportunity
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and those who find themselves in this
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moment with power
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define however you care
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to define it have
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a moral obligation
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to act
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and I don’t advocate
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a certain political agenda
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not that we must become Marxists
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or that we must become anything.
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What we must become is clear.
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We have the technologies
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and the informational structures
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and all the necessary abilities
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to create paradise on earth,
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to lift up the least among us
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to at least an acceptable level of comfort and freedom.
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Why do we not do that?
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Because what stands in our way is our own minds, our own habits.
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We must change our minds.
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That’s the most powerful political work people in this room could do.
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And there is nobody who is so enlightened that they don’t need to work on themselves and do this.
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To the degree that we can change our minds, we will escape extinction, marginality, and so forth.
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And to the degree that we cannot change our minds, we will prolong the agony,
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perhaps unto death and extinction, perhaps only making the struggle more difficult.
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But yes, this is a moment of enormous opportunity.
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We have a yes.
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A yes.
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so we uh you agree that it’s a moment of special opportunity over the long and short scales of time according to either mathematics or novelty theory yes and you agree that we have a
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responsibility to do our best. Yes.
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And what you have to tell us is that if the 200 of us here change our minds,
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that that would somehow have an immediate effect on the rest of the world and our creation of the future.
00:16:58 ►
Yes.
00:16:59 ►
How?
00:17:01 ►
How would it have this effect?
00:17:02 ►
Yes.
00:17:03 ►
By telepathic means, by the
00:17:06 ►
romance of photons
00:17:08 ►
no, I think by the
00:17:10 ►
spread of clarity
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the spread of
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clarity, the elimination
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of redundancy in the system
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and
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the spreading of a
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sense of shared purpose and the possibility of achieving that purpose.
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It doesn’t matter what you do beyond changing your mind for a better clarity?
00:17:38 ►
Well, I don’t want to say absolutely it doesn’t matter, but I think that’s the first obligation. If you charge off with some political agenda that is not informed by clarity,
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you’re going to end up with business as usual.
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The road to hell is paved with good intentions, but it is not paved with clarity.
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so you’re for example what you do in life you barnstorm giving lectures you write books and you create a website and the effect of this hopefully will be to promote clarity
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correct promote clarity. Correct.
00:18:33 ►
First of all, I certainly agree that for me personally, psychedelic experience has enhanced clarity, whereas some people think the opposite.
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Well, let us have vigorous debate by informed parties.
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Don’t forget, I’ve given over 300 calculus lectures
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in this room.
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It boggles my mind
00:19:00 ►
to look out and think, well, yeah,
00:19:02 ►
this is Santa Cruz. This must be Santa
00:19:04 ►
Cruz. This is real Santa Cruz.
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What do you think, Rupert?
00:19:09 ►
Well, the question really is, I mean, changing minds,
00:19:14 ►
you were talking about the butterfly wing effect.
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The question is, if we change our minds,
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can it have a larger effect on other people’s minds?
00:19:22 ►
Yes.
00:19:23 ►
Because if we decide to recycle yet more
00:19:25 ►
newspaper and so on, it’s not going to have that much effect. The changing mind
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thing, the butterfly wing analogy, suggests some major change of mind
00:19:35 ►
spreading through our culture. Now I suspect that you think the medium for
00:19:40 ►
this transformation is the World Wide Web? I suspect that Terence
00:19:45 ►
thinks the medium is… Well, I think telepathy is equally powerful. Yes, but… Wait, I want
00:19:52 ►
to hear his suspicion of me. World Wide Web? Yes, I think… No, no, psychedelic drugs.
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World Wide Web, psychedelic drugs. I don’t… I still haven’t understood the psychedelic drug I still haven’t understood
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the psychedelic drug agenda
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Britain has the highest percentage
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of psychedelic drug consumption
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in the western world at the moment
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and it’s not entirely clear
00:20:17 ►
that this has resulted in clarity spreading
00:20:19 ►
through
00:20:19 ►
Britain is the source
00:20:24 ►
and the fountainhead of the worldwide youth culture
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that is creating the new music, the new dance, the new forms of community
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and the new resistance to consumerist values.
00:20:38 ►
So don’t sell the old UK…
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Come to the rave tonight and see Clarity Created.
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Yes, yes, a crucible of clarity is home at last place.
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And Terence takes the microphone.
00:20:56 ►
Well, it’s not always perfectly clear what’s going on when you have your nose in it, you know.
00:21:05 ►
I mean, my own agenda
00:21:06 ►
relies partly on the
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world wide web
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not as strongly as yours
00:21:11 ►
and
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here in this room
00:21:14 ►
is Matthew Clapp
00:21:15 ►
who kindly runs
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my world wide website
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jailbreak.org
00:21:20 ►
yes
00:21:21 ►
so
00:21:24 ►
but my own view is that this clarity involves breaking the spell of rationalism
00:21:32 ►
cartesianism a spell woven more powerfully than ever before this morning by terence
00:21:37 ►
and i mean it took on a new level of spellbinding in the way you described it it’s to recognize that
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we’re far more interconnected we’re far more participatory in our relation with
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world than this cognitive kind of science and cognitive model of the mind
00:21:56 ►
would tell us and so I think the secret to waking us up one of the secrets is psychic pets as you know this is one of my particular themes
00:22:09 ►
And
00:22:10 ►
The purpose of I wrote a book which some of you may have seen called seven experiments that could change the world
00:22:16 ►
The purpose of this was to find simple
00:22:19 ►
Experiments that could give us clarity on issues
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That we know about already which could actually have a transformative effect on our view of the world.
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They’re to do with changing our scientific view of the world.
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And the scientific view of the world is a particularly important part of the spell
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that binds us all and that affects our whole civilization, our whole industrial culture.
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And it’s an exceptionally narrow and dissociated view of the world at the moment.
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The reason I think psychic pets could play this part is, first of all, there’s more of them than psychedelics.
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I mean, they’re everywhere.
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There are lots and lots of dogs and cats that have telepathic bonds with their owners.
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About 50% of Americans feel that they’ve had a telepathic bond with an animal.
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Now, to recognize what so many people already know,
00:23:12 ►
through experiments to test these to see if they’re real,
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and so far the experiments suggest they are real,
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this can give permission for people to recognize what they already know.
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Then all these closet holists
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or most of us are closet holists can come out and um recognize that there’s this kind of
00:23:33 ►
interconnection with other species and with each other that’s been going on all the time but which
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has been suppressed from the level of supposedly rational discourse by the idea that this is all superstition,
00:23:45 ►
it’s not scientific, it’s irrational, and so forth.
00:23:49 ►
I think that one of the big difficulties in our culture
00:23:52 ►
is the split between the rational, educated part of our minds,
00:23:56 ►
which we put on in public,
00:23:58 ►
and the participatory sense of connection which we have at home
00:24:01 ►
with gardens, plants, children, animals, lovers, and our nearest
00:24:06 ►
and dearest. And these are so dissociated that it’s very hard for people to recognize that they’re
00:24:13 ►
related in any way. Lots of dogs know when their owners are coming home in a kind of telepathic
00:24:19 ►
manner and wait at the door for them while they’re on the way home. I calculate that tens of thousands
00:24:24 ►
of American scientists have dogs waiting at the door for them when they get home
00:24:28 ►
from the laboratory, even if they come at unusual times and in an unusual way. Yet
00:24:34 ►
this phenomenon has been so subject to taboo that it’s never been investigated
00:24:39 ►
scientifically at all. It could have been investigated at any time in the last
00:24:43 ►
500 or 5,000 years, but the fact is the first investigations are happening at present.
00:24:51 ►
Here in the room is David Brown who works with me, is based in Santa Cruz and is doing experiments with psychic dogs, cats and cockatiels in Santa Cruz County.
00:25:01 ►
And if any of you have such animals, please let him or me know at the end
00:25:05 ►
because we’d love to investigate your animals.
00:25:09 ►
And you can take part in this research.
00:25:12 ►
So I think that grassroots research
00:25:13 ►
based on phenomena that are actually common sense
00:25:16 ►
that are part of everyday life for many people
00:25:18 ►
could help to wake us up
00:25:21 ►
to give a greater clarity about what’s really going on
00:25:24 ►
and make us recognize that
00:25:26 ►
there’s far more interconnection between us and other species and us and other people
00:25:31 ►
than is admitted in the scientific view of things which is the worldview which most people feel
00:25:36 ►
they have permission to talk about in public so i think that this transition a butterfly wing effect
00:25:42 ►
would be a few dogs and cats that do this
00:25:47 ►
being proved scientifically to be able to do it, shown on TV, would probably overnight
00:25:54 ►
give millions of people permission to recognize and talk about these events in their own lives.
00:25:59 ►
And never again would the subject be able to be stuffed back into the closet.
00:26:04 ►
I think these could lead to a great change in the way we think about the world.
00:26:08 ►
Now, it’s not, of course, it’s several steps from that
00:26:11 ►
to solving the ecological problems of the world
00:26:14 ►
to dealing with the problem of multinational corporations and so on.
00:26:18 ►
But it’s a step towards clarity and it’s one that could spread very quickly.
00:26:22 ►
Well, it seems to me the overarching theme here that unites all
00:26:26 ►
three of our positions is boundary dissolution psychedelic drugs dissolve boundaries the
00:26:34 ►
world wide web dissolves boundaries and certainly the discovery that our pets are communicating
00:26:40 ►
anticipating and understanding us is a boundary-dissolving perception.
00:26:46 ►
So really what we’re saying is we must dissolve
00:26:50 ►
the artificial boundaries that confine our perceptions.
00:26:55 ►
Someone once said if we could feel what we are doing to the earth,
00:27:00 ►
we would stop immediately.
00:27:03 ►
Because a man hitting himself on the head
00:27:05 ►
with a ball-peen hammer
00:27:06 ►
stops immediately
00:27:08 ►
the feedback loop is very short
00:27:11 ►
so we have compartmentalized our lives
00:27:16 ►
and this allows us to do the faithful
00:27:19 ►
and lethal work
00:27:21 ►
that is destroying the planet
00:27:23 ►
destroying community
00:27:24 ►
so forth and so on.
00:27:27 ►
So maybe three answers as diverse as you’ve just heard here,
00:27:31 ►
you might search your own soul and ask what obsession or interest of mine
00:27:38 ►
would contribute to the grand project of boundary dissolution.
00:27:45 ►
Certainly it is not the affirmation of cultural values.
00:27:50 ►
Culture is a scheme for maintaining and creating boundaries.
00:27:55 ►
It replaces reality with a linguistically supported delusion,
00:28:00 ►
and behind that delusion then pogroms programs of genocide arms races
00:28:08 ►
sexism racism all can operate very very comfortably Ralph earlier mentioned love
00:28:17 ►
generally speaking love is a boundary dissolving enterprise so So I think each of us, the three of us, all of you, in our way
00:28:26 ►
should find ways
00:28:28 ►
to express love.
00:28:30 ►
And it’s not treacly,
00:28:32 ►
it’s not woo-woo,
00:28:33 ►
it’s a very practical matter
00:28:36 ►
that has thousands of expressions.
00:28:38 ►
As long as we
00:28:39 ►
believe in mind and matter,
00:28:42 ►
rich and poor,
00:28:44 ►
living and dead, aboriginal and advanced, black and poor, living and dead,
00:28:45 ►
aboriginal and advanced, black and white, man and woman,
00:28:50 ►
then we’re inevitably going to carry on a dualistic analysis of our dilemma
00:28:55 ►
and we’re going to produce incomplete agendas and answers.
00:29:08 ►
Well, this is good I agree with everything
00:29:10 ►
I admire you both for your
00:29:12 ►
revolutionary efforts
00:29:14 ►
nevertheless I can’t help
00:29:16 ►
having a sinking feeling
00:29:18 ►
here we are in the University of California
00:29:21 ►
naturally my thoughts
00:29:23 ►
turn to the educational system.
00:29:26 ►
Now, we have here a group of primates.
00:29:28 ►
I know there are actually a few undergraduates of the University of California at Santa Cruz are here,
00:29:33 ►
by accident, as it were, and that’s cool.
00:29:36 ►
But we have not yet taken over one regularly offered course of the university to enable students to learn science
00:29:47 ►
by doing research projects with psychic pets.
00:29:52 ►
Well, Ralph, the university is the last place
00:29:54 ►
where you would look for this.
00:29:56 ►
The university is the manufacturer
00:29:57 ►
of these cultural values that entrench them.
00:30:01 ►
Well, that’s why I’m bringing up
00:30:03 ►
this subject of education at this time.
00:30:05 ►
I think we’ve discussed the problem of education before,
00:30:08 ►
but my experience is that no amount of clarity in this group of 200 and other like groups is going to matter one whit
00:30:16 ►
when we are all adults.
00:30:19 ►
You see, the next generation will have to face the same butterfly problem with the same lever
00:30:27 ►
because the majority of people will have their paradigm set in K through 12
00:30:33 ►
in some archaic school system that sees its primary business to work against a worldwide cultural revolution.
00:30:42 ►
So the inertia, we have to overcome inertia,
00:30:46 ►
and we can talk about religion and psychedelics and getting clarity and so on.
00:30:51 ►
We know that the scientific establishment is a big obstacle
00:30:54 ►
as far as environmental problems are concerned,
00:30:57 ►
and so Rupert’s work, the ultimate effect will be to deconstruct or revolutionize science,
00:31:02 ►
is very important in making a transformation
00:31:05 ►
among adult scientists worldwide.
00:31:07 ►
How can this matter at all if there is no change in the educational system K through
00:31:12 ►
12, pre-K, pre-pre-K, and back to the womb, the parents, and so on?
00:31:18 ►
That this chicken and egg loop has got to be somewhere in a more sensitive spot than the adult community.
00:31:28 ►
And what do you propose?
00:31:30 ►
Well, you work with youth, I guess.
00:31:33 ►
You’re interested in talking with younger people.
00:31:36 ►
And, Rupert, I know that you’re particularly active in education through the existence of your children who are now subject to the educational system
00:31:47 ►
that does this criminal brainwashing that I’m talking about.
00:31:53 ►
So I’m just posing this now.
00:31:56 ►
Do you have any idea as to the transformation of our school system by a change of curriculum or the entrance of any weird idea into the actual program
00:32:10 ►
which trains most children worldwide.
00:32:13 ►
Well, I ought to have. There’s a story that perhaps not everyone here is familiar with,
00:32:18 ►
which is when I was in New York a couple of years ago, I was asked to visit a school in Long Island.
00:32:26 ►
New York a couple of years ago I was asked to visit a school in Long Island. I was particularly urged to go there. A private helicopter was sent to take me and I was asked to address
00:32:32 ►
the board and the teachers of the school. When I asked them what they’d like me to speak
00:32:38 ►
about they said they wanted me to speak about the rectified Sheldrake principle on which their entire curriculum was based. So when I said what is the rectified Sheldrake principle
00:32:53 ►
they said that that was the very question they were asking that I would
00:32:59 ►
explain. I then asked who had invented the rectified Sheldrake principle on which the curriculum was based,
00:33:07 ►
and they soon revealed that the author of this principle, or at least the author of the documents on which their entire curriculum was based, was Ralph Abraham.
00:33:26 ►
By careful questioning, I was able to find out that the rectified Sheldrake principle meant that because of morphic resonance and habits of learning,
00:33:30 ►
the sequence of events in which people should learn things in school should follow the historical process.
00:33:36 ►
So, in history, you learn first about the Sumerians, Egyptians, etc.
00:33:42 ►
Then you move on to the ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Dark Ages, etc.
00:33:47 ►
That it follows the principle.
00:33:49 ►
And they start in
00:33:50 ►
grade one with ancient
00:33:52 ►
Egypt. I calculated
00:33:54 ►
on this basis that the
00:33:56 ►
invention of the domestication
00:33:59 ►
of fire, which occurred between
00:34:00 ►
400,000 to 700,000
00:34:02 ►
years ago, should mean that
00:34:04 ►
in the toddler play groups they should
00:34:07 ►
be playing with fire. I pointed this out but it didn’t that wasn’t part of the curriculum I was
00:34:22 ►
suggesting. I discovered that there was in fact an entire process of educational reform afoot in this country behind
00:34:29 ►
which is the guiding genius of Ralph Abraham so I think we should ask you
00:34:35 ►
this question Ralph since you’ve more experience than most of us well I’d
00:34:40 ►
rather that people with less experience speak about it.
00:34:49 ►
Because my experience has been very disappointing.
00:34:50 ►
Oh, no.
00:34:50 ►
No, no.
00:35:00 ►
Here is the problem as I perceive it.
00:35:03 ►
Maybe you can help me get through this one. The children are innocent and trusting
00:35:07 ►
and will try any curricular reform experiment. They’ll try anything, which they have done
00:35:13 ►
in different schools around the world with great effect. It was only a couple of days
00:35:18 ►
ago I was at the Intel Farm, they call it, in Oregon,
00:35:25 ►
where 10,000 people work on realizing Terrence’s dream.
00:35:32 ►
Making psychedelic drugs available to them?
00:35:38 ►
Oh, a different dream.
00:35:42 ►
They know what I mean.
00:35:44 ►
Chips, not hips.
00:35:48 ►
Casually over lunch, I revealed my revolutionary program for the schools to the software engineer who was sitting there.
00:35:57 ►
And he said, oh, well, this historical curriculum.
00:36:01 ►
He said, I’m an Armenian.
00:36:02 ►
And Armenian, I went, no, Algerian.
00:36:05 ►
He said, I’m from Algeria. And my school was exactly what you it was wonderful and so
00:36:10 ►
here there are places in the world where even my experiment has been tried the
00:36:16 ►
problem is this the the children or the owners of the school the people
00:36:21 ►
everything is fine the problem is with the teachers and parents
00:36:26 ►
the teachers have been trained that’s one problem and and the parents have been frightened i guess
00:36:36 ►
so the parents absolutely refuse any experiments that would affect their children because the
00:36:42 ►
danger of a failure you see that they they consider the current system which is guaranteed to fail is somehow safer than an
00:36:50 ►
experimental system that might fail the insecurity itself is a source of anxiety well i’m just
00:36:57 ►
analyzing i don’t really know what goes through their mind but what i have discovered is that
00:37:02 ►
groups of parents come in and physically attack the teachers, the administrators and so on to guarantee that the time worn failure proved system as is is performed as it always has been.
00:37:21 ►
You see the problem older people that’s why terence has recommended mushrooms that’s why
00:37:29 ►
rupert has suggested psychic pets you see how revolutionary and psychic pets we’re talking
00:37:35 ►
about the parents here after they it’s proved to them that what they already know is true by
00:37:41 ►
somebody in the authority of the scientific establishment, then the truth will become true for them for the first time due to the fact that they trust authority
00:37:49 ►
more than they trust their own experience.
00:37:58 ►
So I haven’t given up yet with the educational system but i’m i’m still seeking some little way around this uh
00:38:12 ►
very deeply ingrained habit and part of the problem is as the stakes rise the clenching
00:38:21 ►
on the part of the geriatric establishment becomes even more intensified.
00:38:28 ►
So, for example, right now,
00:38:30 ►
the worldwide epidemic of youth bashing
00:38:35 ►
is the most counterproductive thing we could possibly generate.
00:38:41 ►
I mean, we’re leaning on the very people
00:38:44 ►
who are going
00:38:45 ►
to have to save
00:38:47 ►
the situation
00:38:48 ►
why not admit the obsolescence
00:38:51 ►
and bankruptcy of the
00:38:53 ►
old models and
00:38:55 ►
take our foot off the neck
00:38:57 ►
of youth and
00:38:59 ►
honor
00:39:00 ►
an interest in psychedelic
00:39:03 ►
experimentalism,
00:39:07 ►
sexual redefining of roles,
00:39:10 ►
a new look at how we relate to work,
00:39:13 ►
a new look at how we relate to community. Instead of marginalizing youth culture
00:39:16 ►
and defining it as a phase, misguided, naive, foolish,
00:39:21 ►
we should say these are the uncorrupted people
00:39:25 ►
in society
00:39:25 ►
who have not yet
00:39:27 ►
felt
00:39:27 ►
the hammer
00:39:28 ►
of the programming
00:39:30 ►
and the guilt
00:39:31 ►
and the creodes
00:39:33 ►
of economic
00:39:34 ►
necessity
00:39:35 ►
and try to build
00:39:37 ►
upward and outward
00:39:38 ►
from youth culture
00:39:39 ►
rather than
00:39:41 ►
suppressing it
00:39:42 ►
for this reason
00:39:43 ►
I will be appearing
00:39:44 ►
at a rave tonight
00:39:45 ►
that starts after my bedtime.
00:39:55 ►
I wish I could be persuaded by your persuasive rhetoric.
00:40:02 ►
My experience of youth culture is
00:40:04 ►
here are people who from the age of two have
00:40:07 ►
been watching hours a day of television, shaped by commercials cunningly designed to introduce
00:40:13 ►
toddlers to the consumer society, whose music is dominated by a music industry run by cynical
00:40:20 ►
interests, manipulative people, public relations operations and large corporations.
00:40:26 ►
So to see this as uncontaminated, pure, the spirit of tomorrow, untarnished by the vices
00:40:33 ►
of today, seems to me to beg a number of questions.
00:40:37 ►
However, I’ll be there at the rave tonight too, Terence, and there I’ll be able to see
00:40:43 ►
this paradise that’s unfolding before us.
00:40:48 ►
Your point about television is well taken. I totally agree. I think this is the most pernicious programming and propaganda device around.
00:40:58 ►
It’s about to be strangled by the World Wide Web. Well, and you know, you can just turn off your TV. And I don’t, I say that as
00:41:05 ►
someone who did. I raised my children without television because rather than just giving lip
00:41:11 ►
service to the idea that it’s stupid, we actually acted on the perception. Yes, and we do too. But
00:41:17 ►
your other point about the youth culture’s music being in the hands of capitalists and record companies
00:41:25 ►
is slightly out of touch with what’s actually happening.
00:41:28 ►
For $500, you can buy a CDR burner.
00:41:33 ►
Bands do this, and most youth culture music is now put out
00:41:38 ►
in editions of under 1,000 pressings,
00:41:41 ►
and really the corporate middlemen have all been gone around and
00:41:46 ►
the big record corporations are not at all in touch with real tastes and real
00:41:52 ►
creativity in the music business they recycle garbage that they support with
00:41:57 ►
massive public relations programs at the same time that real creativity is alive and well and thriving on a fractalized micro scale
00:42:08 ►
that goes right around the desires of mass consumerism.
00:42:19 ►
Sorry to interrupt.
00:42:23 ►
I don’t, I just, it would be good if there could be an experiment carried out perhaps with
00:42:28 ►
you as the cheerleader for this uh youth culture of tomorrow actually to be able to be permitted
00:42:36 ►
rather than suppressed and so on to see what happens in my i mean there are quite a number
00:42:41 ►
of experiments in this i would have thought going spontaneously. It’s not as if all these people involved in this culture are totally controlled by parents, teachers, etc.
00:42:50 ►
Many of them are not under direct control in this way at all.
00:42:54 ►
So, but you’re still going to have to have educational systems, school systems of one kind or another.
00:43:07 ►
school systems of one kind or another and it’s not clear to me that you know more raves and psychedelics are going automatically to generate that well i would offer as an example i think the
00:43:13 ►
place on the planet where youth culture is most in control of the social agenda in other words
00:43:20 ►
where youth’s preference for psychedelic drugs is honored, where youth’s music is honored,
00:43:26 ►
where microeconomic systems built by youth are honored,
00:43:29 ►
is the Netherlands, Holland, lowest AIDS infection rate in Europe,
00:43:37 ►
lowest heroin addiction rate in Europe.
00:43:40 ►
Heroin is legal.
00:43:42 ►
Prostitution is legal.
00:43:44 ►
There are actually very large-scale
00:43:47 ►
social experiments going on that embody the values of youth culture and they’re producing
00:43:52 ►
saner, less stressful, more life-affirming in human societies than anything going on
00:43:59 ►
inside the high-tech industrial democracies that set the global agenda.
00:44:07 ►
Well, I often visit Holland, and I must say I haven’t quite noticed
00:44:11 ►
such a striking difference between them and the rest of Western Europe.
00:44:15 ►
Well, but that’s really because you come from London,
00:44:18 ►
where also these things are happening.
00:44:20 ►
But if you lived in Berlin or Rio de Janeiro
00:44:25 ►
or Houston
00:44:26 ►
I think the contrast
00:44:28 ►
with the Netherlands
00:44:29 ►
is quite astonishing
00:44:31 ►
didn’t mean to stop the show
00:44:37 ►
Ralph you’re not saying enough
00:44:42 ►
oh
00:44:43 ►
am I guilty then of too much self-indulgence?
00:44:49 ►
No, you posed important problems.
00:44:52 ►
Yes.
00:44:53 ►
You’ve shown how on the edge of the millennium great steps or small steps are needed that
00:44:59 ►
magnify through butterfly effects.
00:45:01 ►
Yes.
00:45:02 ►
You’ve asked me in turns what you think they should be.
00:45:03 ►
Yes.
00:45:04 ►
You’ve told us you’re disappointed by your own experiments with the reform of the educational system yes
00:45:09 ►
so what next well
00:45:12 ►
well as as i say i i think that we’re at uh the edge of a millennium, we’re at a turning point.
00:45:30 ►
What may be coming down the pike could be two or three miracles that will decidedly change the definition of the problem.
00:45:34 ►
And in the meanwhile, I think that we’re more or less stuck in the situation
00:45:38 ►
where we keep trying what we’re doing
00:45:40 ►
and believing that it has at least some chance of having having an effect i think that
00:45:47 ►
the uh the educational system might change itself by a miracle for example and it could do that in
00:45:59 ►
a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with any of our efforts or in fact it may be that some little thing
00:46:05 ►
that we did mattered.
00:46:06 ►
I think that your work in the revolution of science is very important and very promising
00:46:13 ►
and it’s proceeded essentially without funding because the genius of the program that you’ve evolved is that it has this enormous leverage,
00:46:26 ►
and at every crossing of the road, you’ve made the right choice to get more leverage.
00:46:35 ►
And, Terrence, I think that your program also is a good one,
00:46:41 ►
in that it’s over the years changed in the direction of younger people
00:46:45 ►
and that you’ve been, you know, changed your approach to maximize.
00:46:52 ►
And I don’t see in either case that there’s an enormous backlash working against you,
00:46:59 ►
that other revolutionary movements have been stopped by a backlash. And although you don’t have funding, you don’t have groups calling you up and threatening your life and so on.
00:47:13 ►
In my own case, I have felt, I’ve written about this endlessly, besides writing mathematics,
00:47:20 ►
I write that mathematics is important.
00:47:23 ►
mathematics, I write that mathematics is important.
00:47:30 ►
And through the microscopic analysis of the hinges of history, the edges of millennia past, I have pointed out exactly where in each case mathematics had a key role in the
00:47:41 ►
miracle and the bifurcation that happened. I think that a society that rejects mathematics cannot actually successfully deal with these problems,
00:47:51 ►
and therefore I have activated myself against the problem especially prevalent in the United States
00:47:58 ►
and concomitant with other problems that are especially prevalent in the United States, the problem of math, anxiety, avoidance, and misunderstanding.
00:48:12 ►
And here I would say that there is a huge institution,
00:48:18 ►
more or less equivalent to the scientific community,
00:48:22 ►
that’s arrayed against this information that somehow the educational
00:48:28 ►
system has been particularly persistent in the destruction of mathematics in the destruction of
00:48:35 ►
mathematical capability of youth and therefore in disempowerment of the society with is critical
00:48:42 ►
faculty to change i do not believe you can have any clarity of view in the progress of history
00:48:47 ►
with no mathematical training on the part of any of the participants.
00:48:52 ►
I have seen in this society that even Nobel Prize winners in physics
00:48:56 ►
have math anxiety to a very severe degree.
00:49:00 ►
I’m able to detect this because it’s something that is amplified,
00:49:05 ►
it’s behavior that emerges as soon as I walk into a room.
00:49:10 ►
So I guess I feel in some that my own efforts have been rather less successful,
00:49:21 ►
or maybe I haven’t been as clever in turning to the left or right at the crossings of the road.
00:49:30 ►
The problem is already much less severe in other countries, so it seems like we needn’t worry too much.
00:49:36 ►
In Europe, throughout Europe, for example, the problem of the destruction of mathematical capability is far less severe.
00:49:44 ►
problem of the destruction of mathematical capability is far less severe.
00:49:50 ►
The only thing really disturbing there is that it’s growing at an alarming rate,
00:49:54 ►
that it’s becoming, they’re inheriting the disease from the United States,
00:50:01 ►
a spreading disease based on standardized examinations like the SAT and equivalent movements.
00:50:05 ►
So there you have it, a problem that’s so bad that the very mention of the word mathematics produces a version reaction that is paralyzing.
00:50:15 ►
So that much as I hate to and you’ve seen this today, that I can go through an entire day without mentioning mathematics,
00:50:23 ►
that I can go through an entire day without mentioning mathematics,
00:50:26 ►
with mentioning mathematics but not the word mathematics,
00:50:30 ►
in the hopes of tricking people into recognizing that some ideas like this that have to do with perception of space-time patterns in the abstract,
00:50:36 ►
that these skills are useful.
00:50:40 ►
Can I add to that?
00:50:42 ►
I mean, I don’t think what Ralph means is that it’s a tragedy that most people can’t factor a quadratic equation.
00:50:51 ►
I think he speaks as he does because he is so professionally immersed in these issues.
00:51:05 ►
distant from all of this but in agreement from Ralph the failure to teach mathematics in practical social and political terms boils down to a
00:51:12 ►
failure to teach logic and discriminating understanding the great
00:51:20 ►
evil in my humble opinion which haunts our enterprise,
00:51:27 ►
and I say this realizing I’m setting the fox among the chickens,
00:51:31 ►
the great evil that has been allowed to flourish in the absence of mathematical understanding is relativism.
00:51:41 ►
And what is relativism?
00:51:43 ►
It’s the idea that there is no distinction between shit and shinola.
00:51:50 ►
All ideas are somehow operating on equal footing.
00:51:56 ►
So one person is a chaos theorist.
00:52:00 ►
Another is a follower of the revelations of this or that new age guru
00:52:07 ►
someone else is channeling information from the Pleiades
00:52:10 ►
and we have been taught that political correctness
00:52:15 ►
demands that we treat all these things with equal weight
00:52:19 ►
because we have no mathematical ability
00:52:23 ►
no logical ability,
00:52:25 ►
we don’t know how to ask the questions that expose some positions as preposterous,
00:52:32 ►
trivial, insulting to the intelligence, and unworthy of repetition.
00:52:38 ►
So we all are very comfortable bashing science and flailing away at that.
00:52:45 ►
But that isn’t our enemy.
00:52:47 ►
Science is capable of undertaking its own reformation and critique
00:52:52 ►
and has been engaged in that fairly vigorously for some time.
00:52:56 ►
The enemy that will really subvert the enterprise of building a world based on clarity is the belief that we cannot point out
00:53:07 ►
the pernicious forms of idiocy
00:53:10 ►
that flourish in our own community.
00:53:13 ►
And this problem is growing worse all the time.
00:53:17 ►
I mean, just pick up a copy of Magical Blend
00:53:20 ►
or Shaman’s Drum
00:53:22 ►
and you will discover an appeal
00:53:24 ►
to the level of intellect that makes what’s
00:53:28 ►
going on with television advertising look like a meeting of the princeton institute of advanced
00:53:34 ►
study we have tolerated too many loose heads in our community we are not willing to take on the karma involved in argument and discourse
00:53:51 ►
that actually gores somebody’s ox, so that at the end of the day, iridology or Mormonism or some
00:54:01 ►
other form of institutionally supported foolishness lies in shreds on the floor.
00:54:08 ►
We consider this politically incorrect.
00:54:11 ►
I can feel the tension in this room because people sense I might gore their particular thoughts.
00:54:27 ►
We had learned mathematical logic or reason or rules of evidence. When someone approaches us excited to inform us that the ruins of Lemuria have been spotted in the deep sea off Big Sur or something like that,
00:54:39 ►
we would be able to respond to that with the contempt it deserves.
00:54:44 ►
we would be able to respond to that with the contempt it deserves.
00:54:49 ►
I had a conversation about this recently with someone who,
00:54:56 ►
if I had to describe their job category, I would describe them as mafiosa.
00:55:01 ►
And I said, what do you think of the abduction phenomenon?
00:55:05 ►
And without hesitation, this person said,
00:55:09 ►
there are just so many foolish people in the world.
00:55:14 ►
And to me, all of these things are intelligence tests.
00:55:17 ►
And the people who pass the intelligence test are not worrying about pro bono proctologists
00:55:21 ►
from other star systems.
00:55:23 ►
pro bono proctologists from other star systems in their bedroom.
00:55:29 ►
So, you know, we have perfected politeness.
00:55:36 ►
We have perfected the ability to listen to damn foolishness
00:55:41 ►
without betraying by so much as the flick of an eyebrow
00:55:45 ►
that we realize what we’re in the presence of.
00:55:49 ►
Now I think it’s time to refine our mathematical skills,
00:55:54 ►
learn to think straight,
00:55:56 ►
and not be afraid to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness
00:56:02 ►
which are vitiating the energies of our community
00:56:06 ►
and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming society.
00:56:32 ►
Well, I can’t wait to see this laboratory of clarity unfold before me tonight. Well, as all nonsense is dispelled, the scalpel of reason is blown out by terroristic.
00:56:46 ►
Yes, well, it is an ambiguous enterprise and fraught with contradiction,
00:56:52 ►
but forward, ever forward.
00:56:58 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:00 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:04 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:11 ►
And so ended what I think was the last trialogue that they held.
00:57:14 ►
Maybe not, but it’s the last one that I know of.
00:57:18 ►
And as we were listening to the end of this conversation just now,
00:57:21 ►
one of the last things that Terrence said really struck me,
00:57:25 ►
so much so that I’d like to play it again right now.
00:57:33 ►
It’s time to refine our mathematical skills, learn to think straight, and not be afraid to denounce the pernicious forms of foolishness which are vitiating the energies of our community and making us appear marginal and absurd in the discourse about truly transforming society.
00:57:52 ►
Now, I’m one of the worst in the world about this because I go out of my way to accommodate people
00:57:58 ►
who I find too far out in left field for even me to be comfortable with.
00:58:03 ►
And as a result, I probably seem to give my approval for behavior and points of view that
00:58:08 ►
I find, well, ridiculous is the first word that comes to my mind.
00:58:14 ►
I’ll give you an example.
00:58:16 ►
Several years ago at one of the Mind States conferences, just after Sheldon Norberg gave
00:58:21 ►
a presentation of his one-man play, Confessions of a Dope Dealer.
00:58:26 ►
And Sheldon, by the way, can be heard in my podcast number 64,
00:58:30 ►
in case you missed it.
00:58:32 ►
Anyway, after his talk, I joined a crowd of people
00:58:35 ►
gathering around him to give him congratulations.
00:58:38 ►
And one of the people in the crowd was a young woman
00:58:41 ►
with spiked purple hair, strange clothing, and weird makeup,
00:58:46 ►
and she was literally just bouncing around and into people because, well, her sense of
00:58:51 ►
balance was essentially gone, and quite obviously the result of some unknown substance she had
00:58:57 ►
probably ingested.
00:59:00 ►
And then she asked Sheldon a question, something about UFOs and Stonehenge or something all mixed up like that.
00:59:07 ►
And he very politely tried to answer her.
00:59:09 ►
But then she became slightly belligerent and continued on in a different vein and started saying,
00:59:17 ►
And hey, how come my parents and all the old people hate these drugs? I think they’re great.
00:59:23 ►
Now, there wasn’t a person in the group who didn’t feel somewhat uncomfortable
00:59:27 ►
and slightly embarrassed for her,
00:59:30 ►
even though she was oblivious to her own obnoxious behavior.
00:59:34 ►
But Sheldon did exactly what Terrence suggested just now,
00:59:37 ►
and that is tough love for screwballs.
00:59:40 ►
Rather than just trying to ignore her,
00:59:43 ►
Sheldon looked her straight in the eye and very calmly said,
00:59:46 ►
Because they’re afraid that they’ll turn out like you.
00:59:50 ►
Well, there was a hush in the little crowd for a moment, and then this young woman sort of gathered herself together and said,
00:59:57 ►
Thank you, and left.
00:59:59 ►
Hopefully, she’s now given some thought to his answer.
01:00:02 ►
But in any event, I think Sheldon did a lot more to help this person than I would have by simply humoring her.
01:00:09 ►
You know, it’s a fine line between being rude and giving somebody your honest opinion.
01:00:15 ►
That’s something I probably need to focus on more often myself.
01:00:19 ►
Anyway, getting back to the trial log, the first question I’d ask you, as I’m also asking myself,
01:00:26 ►
is whether or not you think we are now still at the edge of a millennium.
01:00:31 ►
Personally, I think we are.
01:00:33 ►
And I don’t think it is just the year 2000 or just the 2012 craziness
01:00:39 ►
or just a change of astrological age from Pisces to Aquarius
01:00:43 ►
or just the advent of the information age and the Internet.
01:00:47 ►
I don’t think it’s just any of those things. I think it’s all of it.
01:00:51 ►
And we are definitely in some kind of an evolutionary snap, as Ralph just now called it.
01:00:57 ►
Or, as is equally possible,
01:01:01 ►
I may be just trying to make our present age have more meaning than it deserves.
01:01:06 ►
But hey, it’s the age that you and I are living in,
01:01:09 ►
and so why shouldn’t we consider it a pivotal age?
01:01:12 ►
It will at least be pivotal for you and me.
01:01:15 ►
But keep in mind, even though we may be at what Ralph calls a hinge in history,
01:01:20 ►
we still have to do something to swing that hinge in the direction we think it should go.
01:01:25 ►
Whatever that is.
01:01:27 ►
So press on, my friend, press on.
01:01:30 ►
Now, before I get out of here, I’ve got a few announcements that you may be interested in.
01:01:35 ►
One is a podcast that I mentioned a week or so ago called In a Perfect World with Rak Rizam,
01:01:42 ►
in which he had an excellent interview with Dennis McKenna.
01:01:46 ►
Well, I went back a bit and listened to his podcast number 23, which is an interview with
01:01:51 ►
the legendary Mark McCloud, who, among many other titles, is the world’s leading expert
01:01:57 ►
on blotter art.
01:01:58 ►
You know, the kind of art that you find on blotter paper dipped in LSD.
01:02:04 ►
Well, Mark is one of the elder elders in our community, and
01:02:07 ►
this interview, I think, will fill you in on a significant amount of
01:02:11 ►
tribal history that would take a dozen or so books to fill you in on
01:02:15 ►
any other way. And so it may be well worth your time
01:02:19 ►
to get to know a little something about Mark McCloud. At least
01:02:23 ►
that’s my opinion for what it’s worth.
01:02:26 ►
And another item that you may be interested in
01:02:29 ►
is a new project that East Forest has begun
01:02:32 ►
called Sound Healing Bites.
01:02:35 ►
And I’m sure you’ll recall the work of East Forest
01:02:38 ►
from some of my previous podcasts
01:02:40 ►
and in quite a few other podcasts as well.
01:02:44 ►
And not only is the music delightful, it’s also free. Thank you. actually a podcast in which he posts short meditative pieces that are free to download.
01:03:06 ►
And his programs run from 10 minutes to 15 minutes or so
01:03:09 ►
and are just perfect for certain times in the day when you need to take a short break and reboot.
01:03:15 ►
And, well, here’s what East Forest has to say himself about the podcast.
01:03:20 ►
I’ve been wanting to release more music into the world outside of the traditional album structure.
01:03:26 ►
Each episode of the podcast features a bite-sized live improvisational soundscape,
01:03:31 ►
robot-free, that goes very well with meditation, yoga, commuting, or just plain relaxing.
01:03:37 ►
It’s super easy to subscribe so that each episode is automatically placed on your computer,
01:03:42 ►
iTunes, and or iPod for convenient listening.
01:03:45 ►
You can always download individual episodes as MP3s, but subscribing simplifies everything into
01:03:51 ►
one click, and you can always unsubscribe in one click as well. Best of all, it’s free.
01:03:57 ►
Well, thank you for that, East Forest, and I know that most of our fellow salonners already know
01:04:02 ►
that stuff about subscribing, but there are quite a few fellow salonners who still wait to manually download a program each week
01:04:09 ►
or just stream it from our RSS feed directly through their cell phones.
01:04:13 ►
But the auto-subscription method is the one that I recommend if you want to be sure to not miss any episodes,
01:04:19 ►
particularly in the case of somebody like me who doesn’t get a program out on the same day of every week.
01:04:26 ►
Now, there’s also a fellow salonner who has put together quite a nifty little website
01:04:31 ►
that you can find at mindofmckenna.com.
01:04:35 ►
And that’s all one word, mindofmckenna.com.
01:04:39 ►
And what he is doing is taking some of the best McKenna sound bites
01:04:42 ►
and pulling them out in short clips that are searchable through the tags he’s associated with them.
01:04:49 ►
And it’s a real dream site for you audio engineers
01:04:51 ►
who are looking for short McKenna clips that you want to add to your work.
01:04:57 ►
Now for an announcement of an event that might be difficult to get to,
01:05:01 ►
but I’m sure it’ll be worth it if you can make it to the big island of Hawaii June 10th through the 13th for the Alchemies Visionary Art Congress.
01:05:11 ►
And if you just do a Google search on that, and that’s A-L-C-H-E-M-E-Y-E-Z, Alchemies,
01:05:17 ►
I guess is how you’d say it, Alchemies Visionary Art Congress, you’ll find a link to the public
01:05:24 ►
Facebook page about it
01:05:25 ►
where there’s a list of confirmed
01:05:28 ►
attendees as well and from what I see
01:05:30 ►
the audience is certainly as stellar
01:05:32 ►
as the presenters.
01:05:34 ►
So if you do attend this event
01:05:36 ►
it sure would be great if you could send us
01:05:38 ►
a report or a soundbite or two.
01:05:40 ►
I really wish I could be there myself.
01:05:43 ►
In fact it was
01:05:44 ►
there on the big island that I last saw Terrence McKenna.
01:05:47 ►
And it was at a similar event, the All Chemical Arts Conference,
01:05:51 ►
which is also where I met Bruce Dahmer.
01:05:54 ►
And I have a feeling that this upcoming All Chemies Visionary Art Congress
01:05:58 ►
is also going to be one of those events that can change many lives.
01:06:03 ►
So, aloha to you all. And now, I’d
01:06:07 ►
better get out of here and get to work on the next two programs, neither of which has been online
01:06:11 ►
before, I might add. So, that’ll do it for now, and so I’ll close by reminding you again that this
01:06:18 ►
and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your
01:06:23 ►
own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution
01:06:26 ►
Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:06:29 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:06:31 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
01:06:33 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:06:35 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:06:38 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy
01:06:40 ►
behind the Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:42 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel,
01:06:44 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:06:46 ►
which is available as an audio book
01:06:48 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:06:51 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:06:54 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:06:56 ►
Be well, my friends.
01:06:59 ►
Yes, well, it is an ambiguous enterprise
01:07:01 ►
and fraught with contradiction,
01:07:04 ►
but forward, ever forward.