Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna … recorded in 1996, however, it is current enough to have been given just last night … maybe it was :-).]

“And these angel-dealing, horoscope-casting, alchemy-pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them, generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present. And in the present moment we, like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins.”

“In our own time, through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reduction centuries of modern science. We’ve re-understood that the world is one thing, and it’s a living thing. It’s a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept [of alchemy].”

“I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding, the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.”

“Shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone but has found the stone.”

“Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena [as alchemy].”

“All of you who have been through high dose psychedelic experiences know that it’s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact you’re lucky if you just get your soul and yourselves through and intact.”

“The psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for dealing with it, shorn of any real living notion of the spirit.”

“Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise.”

“If you look around you, the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort. The prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands, the populations devoid of hope, the populations in threat of infectious and fatal epidemic disease. There is a great deal of prima materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process.”

“In the 60’s, we thought that all that had to happen was that everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. And we expected no opposition to this because its rightness was so obvious. We didn’t realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn’t die.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0415267692“In the 60’s then, LSD was not sufficient, even coupled with rock and roll it only brought repression [oppression?]. It was like a failed alchemy. Instead of the dissolving and recrystallizing at a higher and more angelic level thousands of prisons were built, and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is THE spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself, and it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place. So now again it comes. … It’s a spirit of dissent that says we will not serve the values of materialism, the values of the ego, and the values that separate and break down the community. So here it is again.”

“We are not an army. So our strategy must be stealth. It’s an alchemical strategy, and what do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art,

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

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

00:00:23

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

00:00:31

So, here we are, almost at the end of July, and that’s 2010 in case you’re joining us late.

00:00:35

And I don’t know about you, but this has been a strange month for me.

00:00:39

However, I’ll save those stories for the end of today’s podcast.

00:00:48

But first of all, I’d like to thank four of our fellow salonners for sending in their generous donations to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.

00:00:59

And these wonderful people are Ben P., Jeremy K., Gerono O., and our frequent donor and longtime fellow salonner, Mark C.

00:01:04

So thank you all so very much for helping to keep the salon humming along each month.

00:01:09

And today we’ll be humming along once again with the one and only Terrence McKenna.

00:01:15

Now, the talk I’m going to play has been sent to me by quite a few of our fellow salonners.

00:01:22

In fact, I’ve received over a dozen copies of it, and I believe you can also find it on YouTube and on the Internet Archive.

00:01:26

But I feel this particular talk is so important that I want to mirror it here as well. The copy that I’m actually going to play today

00:01:32

was the one sent to me by Alan Martin, who had this to say.

00:01:37

I’m not sure if you have this already, but I thought I would send it along anyway, just

00:01:41

in case. Here’s a blurb on it.

00:01:47

send it along anyway, just in case. Here’s a blurb on it. Recorded in 1996 in Mannheim, Germany,

00:01:53

this talk was recorded during the time that Terence McKenna and Sheldon Rocklin were filming the documentary for Mystic Fire, which was originally titled Coincidencia Appositorum,

00:02:00

A Union of Opposites. Beyond that, I have no other information on the talk,

00:02:05

but lots of the themes tie in neatly with recent podcasts.

00:02:08

I hope it may be of some use to you.

00:02:11

Well, Alan, you were certainly right about this talk being of some interest to me,

00:02:15

because even though I knew about it, until your email came in,

00:02:19

I hadn’t taken the time to listen to it before.

00:02:22

And now that I’ve already heard it twice,

00:02:24

I’m looking forward to hearing it again one

00:02:26

time more with you.

00:02:28

And I know that I’ve said this not too long ago, in fact, but I’m going to have to say

00:02:33

it again today.

00:02:34

This now is my favorite Terrence McKenna talk.

00:02:37

I guess maybe I was getting a little jaded and thinking that I had maybe heard just about

00:02:42

everything Terrence had to say, but once again, he has come up with a whole range of new material that I hadn’t heard before.

00:02:49

And hopefully it will be as interesting to you as it was to me.

00:02:54

Originally, I believe this talk was called The Winter King.

00:02:58

However, I’ve changed the title to Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century,

00:03:03

which I think better describes it.

00:03:06

But let’s join Terrence now and see whether or not you agree with me.

00:03:14

About five years ago, with Tim Leary, one raucous evening, maybe some of you managed to catch that event.

00:03:24

This is a little more thoughtful and reflective.

00:03:29

I’m not here to talk or to speak or to promote my books,

00:03:35

as I have been in the past.

00:03:37

This is the only public event that I’m doing in these ten days,

00:03:44

and I’m very grateful to David and Petra

00:03:47

for inviting me. This is a wonderful facility

00:03:51

and bringing you plants and books

00:03:55

and information. It’s great to see that

00:03:59

freak community is alive and well in

00:04:03

Mannheim.

00:04:13

What I’m in Europe to do is to be part of a film-making effort,

00:04:18

and I want to describe the project to you a little bit,

00:04:21

simply because it’s what’s on my mind, naturally,

00:04:29

and to discuss the politics behind the making of this kind of a film.

00:04:39

It’s not a film about rave culture. It’s not a film about Albert Hoffman. It’s not a film about body piercing or any of these things that great films need to be done about

00:04:45

and have been done about.

00:04:48

It’s about one of your local heroes who is a great hero of mine

00:04:54

and should be a great hero to all freaks in Germany and everywhere.

00:05:02

in Germany and everywhere.

00:05:06

And I’m talking about Frederick V,

00:05:10

Elector Palatine, Prince of Heidelberg,

00:05:11

King of Bohemia.

00:05:15

Are you all familiar with this guy?

00:05:15

No?

00:05:20

Oh, well, this is your guy.

00:05:24

This is the prototypic freak of this area and a freak who was not content to sit back and let things happen, but was willing to launch a grand alchemical dream of a reformation of human society.

00:05:43

So just to lay in the background for those of you who are not familiar,

00:05:50

the historical incident that we’re here to recreate here and later in Prague has to do with the Prince Palatine of Heidelberg,

00:05:55

a Protestant who wedded the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth I of England,

00:06:04

Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James I of England.

00:06:08

This was an arranged wedding. They were both 16 years old at the time.

00:06:16

Frederick went to England, the wedding was held in England, and then he returned with his very English bride to Heidelberg.

00:06:26

And they were the center of a movement of alchemical reformation and revolution

00:06:35

that sought to take the Protestant Reformation,

00:06:52

Reformation, an enormous leap forward into a new world of spiritual freedom and, to my mind, a very sort of psychedelic world.

00:06:55

They were the heirs, the inheritors of the entire medieval worldview.

00:07:10

entire medieval worldview. It was folded in to this pair of 16-year-olds who were ruling the palatinate of Heidelberg. And Frederick was an elector, meaning he was one of the seven princes

00:07:17

who could choose the emperor of what remained of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. And he conspired to become

00:07:28

the king of Bohemians. Visionaries moved the entire court from Heidelberg, from the small-time

00:07:36

scene of a principality, to Prague to reoccupy the office of the Holy Roman Empire

00:07:47

with an emperor friendly to magic and alchemy

00:07:51

who was the inheritor of a generation-old plan

00:07:55

to create an alchemical reformation

00:07:59

that had been hatched in the mind of the English alchemist

00:08:03

and mathematician John Dee.

00:08:07

And the ending of the story is not a happy ending, or perhaps it is.

00:08:13

I mean, we can talk about that.

00:08:14

On a superficial level, this alchemical dream, this Rosicrucian enlightenment,

00:08:28

alchemical dream, this Rosicrucian enlightenment, ended badly because the Habsburgs back in Madrid quickly got wind of what was going on and got an army together and sent it to Prague and laid siege

00:08:36

to Prague. And Elizabeth fled to the Netherlands with her children. Frederick was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain.

00:08:48

And the alchemical dream died.

00:08:51

And this was really, in some sense, the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War.

00:08:56

And as you know, going into the Thirty Years’ War,

00:09:00

Europe was a place of popes and kings.

00:09:04

At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe was a place of popes and kings. At the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it was

00:09:08

a place ruled by parliaments and peoples, and the

00:09:11

entire medieval world was swept away, and

00:09:15

out of the new political

00:09:19

dispensation of

00:09:22

the situation at the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

00:09:28

Especially in England, modern science took

00:09:32

hold and was born. And these angel

00:09:36

dealing, horoscope casting, alchemy

00:09:39

pursuing visionaries of this

00:09:43

Rosicrucian Renaissance became simply objects

00:09:47

of historical curiosity, completely incomprehensible

00:09:52

to the people who followed them generation after

00:09:56

generation after generation until I

00:09:59

submit to you the present.

00:10:04

And in the present moment, we like they

00:10:08

inherit a world whose

00:10:11

ideologies are exhausted

00:10:16

and can only be refreshed from the margins.

00:10:21

And that was what this whole chemical revolt was about.

00:10:24

It was about a suppressed, marginal minority of deeply pietistic, original thinkers, but heterodox, non-Christian, keeping together a tradition that I think has been reborn or rediscovered in our own time.

00:10:48

And it’s the tradition that nature

00:10:52

is a great

00:10:56

distillery of

00:10:59

complexity, alchemical gold,

00:11:04

novelty, connection,

00:11:06

whatever you want to call it, in our own time,

00:11:11

through integrative sciences like ecology and animal behavior and psychology,

00:11:19

we have re-understood what was forgotten

00:11:23

during the reductionist centuries of modern science.

00:11:28

We’ve re-understood that the world is one thing,

00:11:34

and it’s a living thing.

00:11:37

It’s a thing with an intent and a spirit within it.

00:11:44

And this is the key concept.

00:11:46

The concept that the alchemists and the hermetic dreamers

00:11:51

and the occultists of the alchemical and northern European renaissance,

00:11:56

they were trying to strengthen and condense and distill and make actual this sense of community, this spiritos.

00:12:12

Well, then with the rise of modern science, all of that is anathema.

00:12:21

And rational analysis tells us that matter is simply atoms flinging themselves through space, obedient to certain mathematical laws that are invariant. that we experience as living beings, as members of a society,

00:12:46

as human beings in contemplation of nature,

00:12:49

all of that was denied.

00:12:52

And it reaches its ultimate culmination, just as an example,

00:12:57

in the kind of statement such as was made by Jean-Paul Sartre,

00:13:02

the French existentialist, who said nature is mute.

00:13:10

You understand what I mean?

00:13:11

Nature gives no clue, he tells you.

00:13:15

Man is alone in the cosmos

00:13:18

with his complexes and his obsessions.

00:13:22

He confers meaning.

00:13:21

and his obsessions.

00:13:24

He confers meaning. There is no a priori reality

00:13:30

to which ethics or intent can be attached.

00:13:35

I reject this.

00:13:38

I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience,

00:13:42

which is basically the sine qua non

00:13:46

of the rebirth of alchemical understanding.

00:13:50

The very basis of that understanding

00:13:53

is that nature seeks to communicate.

00:13:56

All being is pregnant with language.

00:14:02

All reality wants to include the human side of nature in its ongoing intent.

00:14:12

The problem lies not with nature, but with ourselves, that we are somehow paralyzed,

00:14:30

paralyzed, disempowered, doubting, cut from the meat of the thing.

00:14:36

Well, so I’m a great believer in propaganda, obviously.

00:14:39

I mean, my whole life is about propaganda.

00:15:12

So to take an incident like the career of Frederick the Elector Palatine of Heidelberg and his bride and make of it a kind of exemplar, a new world and tell that story again in film, backing it with these tremendously powerful alchemical images

00:15:21

that Jung and others showed work inexorably on the psyche, whether you wish

00:15:29

to be part of the process or not, to merely gaze upon the images of alchemy is to, in a sense,

00:15:38

enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process. Because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at

00:15:47

all, alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver.

00:15:58

That was the charlatan’s game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people.

00:16:09

But the body of symbols and of literature that are created around the effort to extract a universal medicine

00:16:19

out of nature for the transformation of societies and human beings

00:16:27

was in those times of what we call epistemological naivete,

00:16:37

meaning that they did not have the strong sense of objective and subjective reality

00:16:44

which we inherit from science. So during those

00:16:48

eras of epistemological naivete,

00:16:51

what was someone’s idea

00:16:55

about how matter behaves, what was someone’s

00:17:00

myth of how psyche behaves, could

00:17:03

become entangled in a projective experience with material in a chemical vessel.

00:17:14

So the processes which we call melting and crystallization and purification and calcinization,

00:17:23

and purification and calcinization,

00:17:31

processes now well understood through a soulless molecular model of matter,

00:17:35

were for them the birth of the red lion,

00:17:39

the coming of the double-headed queen,

00:17:50

the murder of the hermaphrodite dog, and so forth and so on. They had these outlandish images and outlandish vocabulary because they were trying to create powerful symbols,

00:17:55

powerful mnemonic hooks on which to hold the details,

00:18:03

and there are many of them, of this extremely complex worldview

00:18:07

that were it not for people like Carl Jung,

00:18:11

the Swiss depth psychologist,

00:18:13

would have remained completely inexplicable

00:18:15

to modern people.

00:18:17

It is not chemistry,

00:18:20

and it is not myth-building per se,

00:18:23

as we inherit from the Greeks.

00:18:25

It’s a very complicated amalgamation, good alchemical word,

00:18:32

very complicated amalgamation of psyche and matter.

00:18:36

And the reason, I think, it is so resonant with our own times is because our generation,

00:18:49

generations of people confined within the 20th century,

00:18:52

have in a sense, and by an oblique path,

00:18:58

recovered that universal medicine

00:19:01

that the alchemists dreamed of

00:19:03

by going, strangely enough, to some of the

00:19:08

most aboriginal and least culturally assimilated

00:19:12

to European and American values people in the

00:19:16

world. Shamanism is

00:19:19

essentially a living tradition of alchemy

00:19:23

that is not seeking the stone,

00:19:27

but has found the stone.

00:19:30

These shamans, these Hibaro, these Witoto, these Kyubeo,

00:19:36

notice that they have this same epistemic naivete,

00:19:42

this inability to distinguish between subjective and objective world through the intercession of Newton and Descartes, that Frederick the Elector and the alchemists around him and the alchemical vocabulary,

00:20:06

the psychedelic experience as brought to us through plants,

00:20:11

long in the possession of aboriginal people,

00:20:16

appears to be the identical phenomena.

00:20:21

The Hevaro shaman, the Cubeo shaman does not use a glass retort with cycling sulfur and mercury inside it. explicitly understand that the vessel of alchemical transformation is the body and the head of the

00:20:52

experience. This is the alchemical vessel. This is where you will encounter the three-headed dog

00:21:01

and the queen dissolving in her bath and the incestuous couple that combine

00:21:07

soul and Luna to produce the white essence of the panacea of the universal medicine these are

00:21:16

Psycho-mental

00:21:17

processes and

00:21:20

Jung

00:21:21

Strangely enough was he must have been an extraordinary person

00:21:25

because he could approach this without psychedelics.

00:21:30

Through a very careful inspection of the dreams

00:21:34

and the symbol-producing processes of his patients over decades,

00:21:40

he produced a kind of skeletal map of the psyche. But I maintain that map doesn’t fill itself in,

00:21:51

doesn’t become a living experience

00:21:54

until we undergo what is rightly perceived

00:22:00

as the alchemical process of dissolution. Dissolution of

00:22:08

what? Of the lumpen prima

00:22:12

materia of the ego. This

00:22:16

is the shit, the tar,

00:22:20

the coal, the dark earth of Egypt,

00:22:24

the starting material, the loam, the manure, the

00:22:30

night soil, the lowest matter.

00:22:33

And we start with that, the ego, and dissolve it through the intercession of the spirit.

00:22:44

And spirit is a complicated concept.

00:22:47

It’s not naive.

00:22:49

It’s phenomenologically difficult to define.

00:22:52

But through the dissolving spirit of the plants.

00:22:58

And the plants lift the imprisoning structures of the ego,

00:23:06

and the ego flows out into the world.

00:23:10

And for some people, this produces panic.

00:23:15

Panic comes from the god Pan,

00:23:18

whose screams caused people to go mad.

00:23:21

Panic.

00:23:22

For other people, it’s an enormous liberation. In any case,

00:23:30

it is an influx of material previously hidden in the unconscious, dissolving, roiling, liquid state.

00:23:50

That’s part of the process.

00:23:52

But then eventually to be recombined, coagulatio,

00:23:59

the recombining, the coagulation, the coming together at a higher level,

00:24:06

usually through the application of a process analogous to heat,

00:24:11

but psychic heat, which drives off the dross of false assumptions and false attachments.

00:24:22

And all of you who have been through high-dose psychedelic experiences know

00:24:27

that it’s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact, you’re lucky

00:24:34

if you just get your soul and yourself through and intact. So what we have here, through the psychedelics, among certain marginal populations in the 20th century,

00:24:51

freaks of all sorts in all times and places within the 20th century,

00:24:56

a kind of almost accidental rediscovery of these alchemical truths.

00:25:04

Well, okay, so that’s good. That’s one level. We can

00:25:08

do self-directed psychotherapy on ourselves

00:25:12

with psychedelic substances out of plants and we can

00:25:16

use alchemical symbolism to guide this

00:25:20

process and that’s all very interesting. But so what?

00:25:24

I mean, what’s so great about it? Well I think

00:25:28

there’s one of the most famous of all alchemical

00:25:33

axioms is as above so below

00:25:39

meaning always that in every small part of reality, there is a tiny reflection of the great over-structure of reality.

00:25:52

And in the largest structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest and vice versa.

00:25:58

We also have rediscovered this principle in the 20th century through fractal mathematics. But the

00:26:08

psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical

00:26:11

mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for

00:26:15

dealing with it, shorn of any real living

00:26:19

notion of the spirit. And so we have

00:26:23

sought as far afield as the Tibetan Book of the Dead

00:26:28

or Freudianism

00:26:32

or there have been

00:26:35

various efforts to cast the psychedelic experience one way

00:26:40

or another. The hot one now, of course, is shamanism.

00:26:44

And I relate to that because I spent a

00:26:47

lot of time in the Amazon and with these kinds of people with these kinds of concerns. But shamanism

00:26:56

and alchemy are a seamless enterprise. Alchemy, the connecting figure, if you’re interested in this,

00:27:07

between the shaman and the alchemist is

00:27:11

the smith, the worker of metal.

00:27:15

And the shaman and the alchemist, I mean, I’m sorry, the shaman

00:27:19

and the smith in primitive cultures are always

00:27:23

associated as brother figures.

00:27:27

They both work in metals. Well, what all this

00:27:31

means for us beyond the commitment to our own

00:27:35

sort of ordering the wunderkammer of our own

00:27:40

private imagination, what it means is

00:27:43

important because if you look

00:27:48

around you, the entire global

00:27:51

civilization is undergoing some kind

00:27:56

of meltdown. The planet itself

00:28:00

is now to be seen as a kind

00:28:04

of alchemical retort.

00:28:06

The prima materia to be transformed are the nuclear stockpiles,

00:28:13

the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands,

00:28:18

the populations devoid of hope,

00:28:22

the populations at threat of infectious and fatal epidemic disease,

00:28:30

there is a great deal of primal materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process. Trying to manage this rationally with some political ism, fascism, Marxism, capitalism, goes nowhere.

00:28:52

It just digs us deeper into the mire and the muck.

00:28:58

At the fringes, people like yourselves, people like myself, people I associate, offer endless solutions.

00:29:10

Recycling, restraint in childbearing, increased sexual toleration of unusual sexual styles, many, many things are suggested, but nothing happens because the primary agenda of society has not yet been dissolved,

00:29:32

has not yet come into a state of fluidity sufficient where a new imprint can be put upon it. In the 60s, we thought that all that had to happen

00:29:46

was everybody would take LSD

00:29:48

and the obvious right things to do would be done.

00:29:55

And we expected no opposition to this

00:29:58

because its rightness was so obvious.

00:30:02

We didn’t realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into

00:30:07

the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn’t die. It’s interesting, I don’t know how

00:30:17

it’s said in Europe, but in America, we refer, and I’ve always referred to freaks as bohemians.

00:30:26

And I assumed, you know, you hear about the left bank of bohemia of Paris in the 20s.

00:30:33

And then, and I always went, but why bohemia?

00:30:36

What does bohemia have to do with Paris?

00:30:39

Why are freaks called bohemians?

00:30:42

why are freaks called bohemians?

00:30:45

It’s because of Frederick the Elector and the alchemical renaissance that he plotted with his wife.

00:30:50

Since that time to now,

00:30:53

bohemian has meant a marginal political position

00:30:58

involved with bizarre sexual practices,

00:31:02

strange drug use, and funny ideas.

00:31:07

Well, in the 60s then, LSD was not sufficient,

00:31:12

even coupled with rock and roll.

00:31:14

It only brought oppression.

00:31:17

It was like a failed alchemy.

00:31:21

Instead of the dissolving and recrystallizing at a higher and more angelic

00:31:29

level, thousands of prisons were built and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is the spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself and it will not

00:31:48

be suppressed for long

00:31:52

in any time or place. So now again

00:31:56

it comes after 30

00:32:00

years, after many changes and it’s among us again

00:32:04

and I assume looking at all of you that to some

00:32:08

degree you represent this or act it out or because it’s a spirit of dissent that says we will not

00:32:17

serve the values of materialism the values of ego, and the values that separate and break down the community.

00:32:30

So here it is again.

00:32:32

And what is different this time

00:32:35

that we might have some greater hope

00:32:38

of actually coming through to the beginning of the third millennium

00:32:43

without having to hang our heads when we tell the story to our grandchildren.

00:32:50

And I will submit to you this evening that the difference between then, 1965 through 70,

00:32:59

and now, to the turn of the century, two things.

00:33:05

First of all, we have that experience under our belt.

00:33:10

We shall not be so stupid again.

00:33:13

The I Ching says never confront evil directly

00:33:17

and never name it directly

00:33:20

because it finds weapons to defend itself.

00:33:24

We are not an army.

00:33:27

This is what Frederick didn’t understand.

00:33:30

He was a king, but he was not an army

00:33:33

when it came to the White Mountain.

00:33:35

We are not an army.

00:33:37

So our strategy must be stealth.

00:33:41

It’s an alchemical strategy.

00:33:43

And what do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, by vision.

00:34:11

And what is new is that there are massive technologies available to us, not available in the 60s.

00:34:13

They were not designed for us.

00:34:15

They were not intended for us.

00:34:26

It was never, ever thought that such power should flow into the hands of freaks such as ourselves. Nevertheless, through the perverse nature of the unfolding of the world, we have such tools. And I’m referring, as you probably anticipate,

00:34:35

to the World Wide Web and the Internet. No gay kid in Montana, no Chinese scholar in Botswana,

00:34:48

no person anywhere with a specialized interest or predilection

00:34:54

now need feel alone.

00:34:58

There is no aloneness.

00:35:00

You can find your people.

00:35:03

You know, one of the things Tim Leary said in the 60s that I always remembered,

00:35:08

but I never heard anybody talk about or ever really heard him quote,

00:35:13

it was a great rallying cry.

00:35:14

It was much better than turn on, tune in, drop out.

00:35:20

And it was this.

00:35:22

It was find the others. Find the others. And then you will know what to do. Well, now you can find the others. You don’t have to stick a flower in your hair and go to San Francisco.

00:35:43

You just go to the web, find the others. We all need to create affinity groups,

00:35:47

which are subsets of the much larger community that we’re part of.

00:35:52

And then, using this technology, which was designed to keep track of us,

00:35:59

to pick our pockets, and to sell us junk we don’t want,

00:36:04

use this technology to produce art. Massive amounts

00:36:09

of subversive art. And all art is subversive. I’m not calling for an ideological agenda.

00:36:18

All truth which springs from the individual is subversive Because, and this is a theme of mine

00:36:27

that I’m getting more and more into the longer I live,

00:36:32

culture is not your friend.

00:36:37

This is an odd message for the late 90s

00:36:40

because we’re all being told, you know,

00:36:42

you knew you were Jewish,

00:36:45

but you forgot your Sicilian grandmother.

00:36:48

You have to honor all of your family.

00:36:51

You remain in, bring it forward, the dances of this, that, and the other.

00:36:55

I hate all of this stuff.

00:36:57

I’m Irish.

00:36:59

It’s a weird thing to be.

00:37:01

It’s a haunted, twisted people as a people. All peoples,

00:37:08

meaning tribes, have horrible stories to tell about who

00:37:12

they did under and who they screwed over. And when you’re asked

00:37:16

to identify with your culture, you’re asked

00:37:20

to take this on. I reject

00:37:24

it.

00:37:26

My brother, years ago,

00:37:28

invented this term.

00:37:31

He called it extra-environmental.

00:37:34

He said, this is what we want to be.

00:37:35

We don’t want to be Americans or Germans or English.

00:37:37

We want to be extra-environmentalists.

00:37:40

Always feel, wherever you go,

00:37:44

that you are a stranger

00:37:45

the outsider

00:37:47

the one looking in

00:37:49

this is the viewpoint

00:37:51

that makes all places

00:37:54

the same to you

00:37:56

there’s a wonderful English poet

00:37:58

and writer Rudyard Kipling

00:38:00

and he wrote a children’s short story

00:38:02

called The Cat Who Walked By Himself

00:38:04

and it’s a children’s short story called The Cat Who Walked By Himself.

00:38:13

And it’s a story of how the dog came to the cave of man and would lay at the man’s feet.

00:38:15

But the cat would never come.

00:38:18

And when the woman asked the cat why it would never come, it said, I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

00:38:26

And I think transcending our cultures

00:38:29

is going to be extraordinarily necessary

00:38:32

for our survival.

00:38:34

I don’t think we can carry our cultures

00:38:36

through the keyhole of the stretch

00:38:40

of the next millennium.

00:38:42

Well, how do you shed your culture? How do you transcend your

00:38:46

culture? By digging into your soul with the tools that have been given you to make art.

00:38:56

This is how cultures are transformed, by art which flows up and actually submerges the previous cultural forms.

00:39:07

I mean, the Baroque gave way to later periods simply out of exhaustion.

00:39:14

But notice, a style can exhaust itself and still continue as mannerism did out of the Renaissance, for example.

00:39:25

And when these exhausted styles are allowed to continue,

00:39:29

they become toxic.

00:39:31

They become moribund.

00:39:34

It’s like keeping a corpse around the house.

00:39:38

There is an obligation to overthrow that,

00:39:42

to produce the new, to produce the new,

00:39:45

to produce the novel.

00:39:48

And by the novel, I don’t mean the literary form.

00:39:52

I mean all things new.

00:39:55

And then it is not the function of the artist

00:39:59

to be the critic.

00:40:01

The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad comes later.

00:40:08

And that’s a community process. The community

00:40:11

decides what is good and bad art. But the individual

00:40:15

should pour this forth. I mean, this is

00:40:20

what you are. You are some kind of a mystery

00:40:23

suspended between two eternities.

00:40:29

And in that moment, when a

00:40:32

mind looks out at a world and asks

00:40:36

the question, what is it? In that moment,

00:40:40

art can be created. And it

00:40:44

is the only form of immortality

00:40:46

that I have any certainty of.

00:40:49

And it’s available to everyone.

00:40:52

And at the present moment,

00:40:55

I make no distinction between art and technique.

00:40:59

I mean, to my mind, these things are the same thing.

00:41:03

A great turning point is in the offing.

00:41:08

The world is changing.

00:41:11

It’s changed before, but not for a long time in our lives.

00:41:17

Not since before our lives, but now it’s changing.

00:41:22

And there are many, many possibilities.

00:41:27

The English biologist Dawkins invented the word meme.

00:41:33

Do you all know what a meme is?

00:41:35

It’s the smallest unit of an idea.

00:41:39

It’s like what a gene is to biology.

00:41:42

A meme is to ideology.

00:41:46

And so our task is to create memes.

00:41:51

Madonna is a meme.

00:41:53

Catholicism is a meme.

00:41:55

Marxism is a meme.

00:41:57

Yellow sweaters are a meme.

00:41:59

Create memes.

00:42:02

Rainbow-colored dreadlocks are a meme.

00:42:05

Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate,

00:42:10

just like genes replicate,

00:42:13

and infect and move into the organism of society.

00:42:18

And believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy, then I believe these memes

00:42:28

are the key to societal evolution. But unless the memes are released to play the game,

00:42:37

there’s no progress. So I think the obligation on people such as ourselves, and I assume probably without exception,

00:42:46

everybody in this room falls into the upper 5% of the Earth’s population in terms of wealth, education, and freedom.

00:42:57

Even if you’re some poor pierced metalhead from the dark side of Mannheim,

00:43:10

metal head from the dark side of man you have a better situation than most people on this planet a better chance at actually reaching out toward the machinery that shapes reality and having an

00:43:17

impact well so then the question becomes or for some people as well, but I have nothing to say, or I have nothing to paint, or I have nothing to communicate.

00:43:29

Well, clearly you’re not taking enough drugs then.

00:43:34

That excuse simply will not be tolerated.

00:43:48

And if someone finds that decadent or flippant or destructive, then they don’t understand what these psychedelic substances are.

00:43:53

They open the doorway to creativity.

00:43:58

They cleanse the doors of perception.

00:44:03

And then, as Blake said,

00:44:05

reality is perceived as it truly is,

00:44:08

as infinite.

00:44:11

Part of what is wrong with our society

00:44:14

and hence with ourselves

00:44:17

is that we consume images.

00:44:21

We don’t produce them.

00:44:24

We need to produce produce not consume media the media is a huge issue

00:44:31

you can’t escape it so what are you going to do about it the only solution is to drive it

00:44:38

to take charge otherwise you will be poisoned by it And as more and more people are waking up to this,

00:44:47

essentially we are seeing, I think, a huge artistic revolution,

00:44:56

a revolution in values that reaches into science,

00:45:00

that reaches into politics, that reaches into every aspect of life, but that is coming from the imagination,

00:45:08

thoroughly stimulated and activated by the discovery of all these natural and synthetic substances

00:45:17

which perturb the mind.

00:45:21

And I’m not denying that a certain amount of social chaos goes along with this.

00:45:26

But on the other hand, I can point to pretty psychedelically pure centuries like the 13th

00:45:33

in Europe, and there was still plenty of social chaos going on. I don’t think you can lay social

00:45:39

chaos at the feet of psychedelics. I think social chaos is an inimicable part of the system.

00:45:47

What psychedelics do is they give a direction to that chaos,

00:45:54

a dimension of vertical ascent,

00:45:56

because inevitably out of the psychedelic situation emerges not despair,

00:46:03

not self-indulgence,

00:46:05

but wild-eyed idealism.

00:46:09

That’s the inevitable product

00:46:12

of any psychedelically driven social process.

00:46:16

How well that idealistic idea then brokers

00:46:20

its way to the throne, if it does,

00:46:24

is another issue.

00:46:29

I don’t know if I’ve hit this technological thing hard enough.

00:46:33

I hope that you all avail yourselves of the power of the Internet.

00:46:41

In years past, in speaking to audiences in America, it was maddening to me to

00:46:47

find that the environmentalists, the feminists, the gays, the psychedelic people, and I’m not sure if

00:46:58

I got everybody, and the space people, the colonization people, none of these people had anything to say to each other.

00:47:06

They didn’t seem to realize that their marginality united them far more than any difference they

00:47:14

might perceive in their positions. And they didn’t seem to realize that their political

00:47:29

that their political disempowerment was a product of their inability to make common cause with people similarly motivated or similarly motivated toward social change.

00:47:38

So it’s very important to build an inclusive community and a community that has a sense of direction.

00:47:48

And I think the Internet empowers this far more than any other tool that has been handed to us except psychedelics.

00:47:58

And if you take psychedelics and the Internet and music and put all of that together you have the basis for a new

00:48:11

community that is wider and deeper than you know the people who are building the new machines who

00:48:17

are designing the new circuitry who are writing the new code are all freaks. I mean, they work for capitalist dogs, of course,

00:48:27

because we all do.

00:48:29

But the creative thrust of these technologies

00:48:35

is being driven by people just like you and me.

00:48:38

And I think this is all tremendously positive.

00:48:42

So where am I in all of this?

00:48:45

Well, I’m getting there.

00:48:47

I’m getting there.

00:48:51

And then finally, I guess, and I’ll just close on this,

00:48:55

the alchemical return.

00:48:59

All culture is some kind of myth.

00:49:04

All cultural stories, then then have a psychic dynamic to them

00:49:10

which is not suspected by the civilization as it lives, these myths.

00:49:18

It has to be seen from outside.

00:49:21

And there is a consistent myth in, let’s call it just

00:49:27

Western civilization without being too precise, a consistent

00:49:31

myth. In the early Jews

00:49:35

you get it as the idea that God will enter

00:49:40

history. With Christianity

00:49:43

you get it with the idea that man and

00:49:48

God can be consubstantial.

00:49:52

Again, in Islam, the insistence that God

00:49:55

will enter history. And then modern science,

00:49:59

strangely enough, dumps all of this theology

00:50:04

but maintains the idea that man can become as a god.

00:50:11

In other words, the myth that is consistent throughout the entire Western experience is the defining progressive experience. Well, now we have the power to realize this myth

00:50:32

in some kind of, for want of a better word,

00:50:37

an alchemical utopia.

00:50:40

And I think it’s very interesting

00:50:42

that at this very high-tech moment in our adventure,

00:50:48

the plants return, the humblest of all biology.

00:50:55

The plants return and almost stand before us as a beacon and a promise.

00:51:03

as a beacon and a promise.

00:51:10

Have you noticed that plants do all their business with dirt and air?

00:51:16

This is something we only wish we could do.

00:51:21

Build an industrial society based on nothing more than the ambient dirt and the air flowing past.

00:51:24

Building sugars and carbohydrates out of gaseous oxygen.

00:51:29

I mean, this is quite a trick.

00:51:31

The plants stand both in the psychedelic sense

00:51:38

but then in the larger sense of the vegetable kingdom,

00:51:41

they stand for absolute Tao.

00:51:44

of the vegetable kingdom, they stand for absolute Tao. They stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment.

00:51:54

Effortlessly recycling, vegetatively propagating when necessary,

00:52:00

sexually propagating when necessary, immune to pain, patient to the tune of centuries,

00:52:10

always building up structure, always maintaining a leavening effect upon the land,

00:52:18

all of these qualities of caregiving and to, well, notice, for example,

00:52:27

that all the processes of biology occur below the boiling point of water.

00:52:34

If we could build societies that did that,

00:52:37

we work in the range of hundreds of degrees, thousands of degrees,

00:52:43

fusing metals and creating toxicity.

00:52:47

So I think the psychedelic plant revolution, which is leading toward the nanotechnological revolution,

00:52:59

in other words, the imitating of nature at the atomic level in building of machines and the management of processes.

00:53:08

What all of this is leading toward is a rarefaction, a good alchemical word, a rarefaction of the human imprint on this planet.

00:53:31

imprint on this planet, a spiritualization of humanity and a new order of mind, part machine,

00:53:39

part human. Notice that the internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They’re largely metals, silicon, glass, copper, gold, silver.

00:53:49

These are the products of demonic artifice.

00:53:54

These are the things which the alchemists dreamed of.

00:53:58

They transform space and time.

00:54:01

They allow us to speak at a distance.

00:54:04

They allow us to wander through libraries

00:54:07

thousands of miles distant. No fact is too obscure, no person so hidden that you can’t

00:54:15

reach them. It is, in a way, the perfection of the magical ideal that was developed

00:54:25

and unfortunately prematurely launched

00:54:30

by Frederick the Elector and his wife here nearby at Heidelberg.

00:54:36

And so I’m involved, as I said,

00:54:39

in a process of bringing this story to many people who haven’t heard it.

00:54:44

It’s a great story.

00:54:46

It’s a great myth that the underground community should make its own.

00:54:53

And, you know, I used it this evening just as the scaffold for this talk,

00:54:59

but I tried to hit the things that are important to me,

00:55:02

which are psychedelics, recovery of archaic lifestyles, use of

00:55:08

media to subvert existing paradigms, empowerment

00:55:12

of the individual through dissolving the ego through psychedelics,

00:55:17

and, oh, I don’t know, whatever

00:55:20

else. So thank you for your patience and indulgence, and if you

00:55:24

have any questions, I’d be glad to answer.

00:55:25

Thank you.

00:55:38

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:55:41

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

00:55:47

Well, where to begin, huh? Normally, I pull out about a half a dozen or so quotes from each

00:55:54

podcast to post on our program notes page, but for this talk, I must have captured about 20 or so,

00:56:01

and you can find them via psychedelicsalon.org if you’re interested.

00:56:06

But I think that one of Terrence’s key points

00:56:08

was made when he said,

00:56:10

shamanism is essentially a living tradition of alchemy

00:56:13

that is not seeking the stone,

00:56:16

but has found the stone.

00:56:18

And after hearing that,

00:56:20

I’ve now been spending a lot of my time out on the net

00:56:23

searching for other connections

00:56:24

between the world of alchemy

00:56:26

and the world of shamanism.

00:56:28

It’s an interesting area to explore if you’re so inclined.

00:56:32

As I said, though, there is just too much in this talk

00:56:35

for me to even begin making comments about,

00:56:38

but I do want to mention that when Terence was telling the story

00:56:42

about how much he liked Timothy Leary’s mantra of

00:56:44

find the others, that I was reminded of Sancho and Cody’s email address for their Black Light in the Attic podcast, which is findingtheothersatgmail.com, if I remember correctly.

00:56:58

And that further reminded me how disappointed I was that I wasn’t able to get together with the two of them last weekend when I was in the Chicago area for the 50th reunion of my high school class.

00:57:10

And yes, I’m afraid that you heard that right. It was our 50th, and for what it’s worth, I can

00:57:17

still remember what I thought about the dusty old farts who attended their 50th reunions

00:57:22

back in the day when we were only up to our 10th or so.

00:57:26

But now I’m one of those old guys myself, so what can I say, huh? However, I do have to tell you

00:57:33

what a powerful psychedelic trip it was to be completely on the natch, no drugs of any kind,

00:57:39

and then to return to my hometown, one that I hadn’t been back to in the past 50 years but one time,

00:57:45

and that was 25 years ago.

00:57:48

But first I should tell you about what kind of a month it’s been leading up to our reunion a few days ago.

00:57:54

As you may know, at the beginning of this month I posted a notice on my Facebook page

00:57:59

that I was going to be offline for a while and take the month off.

00:58:03

And my plan was to do a little traveling and go visit Gary Fisher, the Stoleroffs,

00:58:08

and some of our other friends up and down the coast.

00:58:12

But the first thing that happened was a computer crash that wiped out most of my email,

00:58:16

including a couple hundred unanswered messages,

00:58:19

and some, I’m afraid, with MP3 files attached that are now gone from my machine.

00:58:25

Then there were a few strange bumps in the night that took place,

00:58:29

which climaxed on the 4th of July when our car was stolen.

00:58:33

And so we canceled our travel plans, and instead I continued podcasting.

00:58:39

By the time our car was recovered a few days later, though,

00:58:42

and by the way, there was no damage, It was just a joyride, I guess.

00:58:46

But by then, we’d kind of lost our enthusiasm for leaving town.

00:58:50

And that’s when a couple of my former high school classmates got in touch with me

00:58:54

and more or less shamed me into coming back to the Midwest for our class reunion,

00:58:59

which I would have had to miss if we’d taken the trip we originally planned.

00:59:03

So, last last weekend I found

00:59:05

myself back in Rochelle, Illinois, where I must admit I had an absolutely marvelous time reconnecting

00:59:11

with about half of our classmates, the ones who are still standing at least. And to me it was

00:59:18

quite amazing to discover that there remains a place I can return to that in many ways still

00:59:24

feels like home.

00:59:26

At least it felt that way when I was in the midst of so many old friends.

00:59:30

In fact, I had such a good time that I stayed until the last minute

00:59:33

and thus had to miss connecting with Sancho and Cody as we’d planned.

00:59:37

But never fear, we’re going to get together yet one day,

00:59:40

and when we do, I’m sure that you’ll be one of the first to hear about it.

00:59:45

But right now, there’s one more thing I’d like you to hear about, and that is the new

00:59:49

program from Alexander Beiner on his Visionary Artist podcast that features an interview

00:59:55

with our good friend Alex Gray.

00:59:57

And I should add that at the end of that program, Alexander plays a song by Michael Bustamante

01:00:03

titled Finally 1994. And I can’t say

01:00:07

why, but it’s become my new favorite song. I guess I’ve probably listened to it a half a dozen times

01:00:12

already. And like I said, I can’t say why exactly, but this particular piece is just something I

01:00:18

really resonate with. So thank you, Alexander and Michael, for bringing those beautiful sounds to my ears.

01:00:33

And, by the way, you can find the Visionary Artist podcast on the Cannabis Podcast Network’s channel at dopetheme.co.uk.

01:00:37

Well, that’s going to have to do it for me today,

01:00:43

and so I’ll close once again by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects Thank you. And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,

01:01:07

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

01:01:12

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

01:01:17

Be well, my friends. Thank you.