Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The people who take that position that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis don’t realize that the cultural momentum of the last five hundred years has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we have become a menace not only to ourselves but to the planet.”
https://ehphex.bandcamp.com/track/liberation?auto=mp3-320“Civilization is a ten thousand year dash to space with the potential to destroy yourselves. History is the departure of a species for the stars, but it takes ten to fifteen thousand years, a moment of biological and geological time.”
“We are creatures of information and the imagination. The monkey we are already beginning to transform and shed. We don’t look like the other monkeys, and we look less like them all the time.”
“Humanness may not even be a monkey quality. It may be something that was synergized in the monkeys but that has an inner life of its own.”
“So we have become a toxic force in planetary biology. We feel it, and the planet feels it.”
“Our imagination is really the sail of the soul, and the question is, where will that sail take us if we will but let it?”
“That’s why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology, because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us. We really do sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural tenancies does not give a true picture of the future. That the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty.”
“We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious but we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race, which is not passive, it’s not just the storage place of old memories and myths and that kind of thing. It is more like an entelechy, it guides, it opens avenues to certain choices and precludes avenues to other choices.”
“One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality. People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them they will work, and this is not true at all, especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you’re attempting to conjure.”
“I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness and always have been.”
“So it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship between certain plants and certain monkeys, and that you don’t have humanness unless you have the plants and the monkeys together. This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture.”
“And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing, it’s providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor.”
“The word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined, but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids, and supports consciousness is psychedelic if we take the word down to its Greek roots.”
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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 can you believe it? I’m getting this part of the 1984 McKenna Workshop out to you,
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just, I guess, about two days after our podcast part one.
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There are a couple reasons for it, including a somewhat timely announcement that I forgot to make two days ago,
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and the fact that I think there’s really some interesting material here that I just listened to, and I think you might want to hear it right now yourself.
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Also, I want to send a big thank you out to David M., who just now sent in a generous donation to help with the expenses here in the salon.
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So, hey, thank you very much, David. Your help is most appreciated.
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Now, if you can remember where we left off in the last podcast,
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Terence McKenna was leading a small workshop sometime in 1984
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and somewhere in Northern California.
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When we left him, he was just commenting on the need to integrate
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the scientific research with ayahuasca with the spiritual dimensions of the work.
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But you probably aren’t expecting
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what he’s about to come out with right now.
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Into the light, into the light of the naked truth.
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A dialectical process where both the ayahuasca experience
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and the scientific experience can be integrated.
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Yeah, I don’t regard…
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I’m not one of the noble savage people.
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I mean, I’ve spent too much time in the Amazon
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and things go on that would curl your hair.
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There are people whose idea of a hilarious joke
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is to toss a dog in the fire.
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But I think there is something to be learned you know I mean
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you can stand off and watch somebody tossing a dog in the fire for their own amusement and say
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what what these people are barbarians on the other hand we carpet bomb Asian cities from 30,000 feet
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in the air and in the name of. We don’t even call it fun.
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We’re so alienated from what we’re doing.
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So, you know, what’s to make of it?
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Good point.
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There are a couple of things which interest me,
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and they follow very nicely on this.
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One is that I would like to hear you
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talk very briefly, perhaps,
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about the highlights of what you’ve called the invisible landscape.
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What are some of the things that stand out in that?
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And the other is that I get the impression
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that you have a very distinct idea of where we,
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of the direction in which we can evolve.
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And I wonder if you would say something about that direction
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and perhaps those two topics sort of converge.
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Well, without trying to solve the problem once and forever,
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let’s just say man has a very strong Gnostic bent
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and Gnosticism, dualism,
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the idea that you don’t belong where you are,
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that you belong somewhere else,
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that this is not your world,
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that you’re a stranger in it,
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is symptomatic in modern parlance
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of what’s called alienation.
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You’re supposed to like where you are.
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You’re supposed to see yourself
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as part of the seamless fabric of being
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and that sort of thing.
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However, the people who take that position,
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that alienation is symptomatic of neurosis,
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don’t realize that the cultural momentum of the last 500 years
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has made the Gnostic myth a reality. In other words, we
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have become a menace not only to ourselves, but to the planet. And the only way that both
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parties can save themselves is by a separation. And this, on one level,
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is the greatest crisis
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that biology has faced
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since animals left the ocean for the land.
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On another level,
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it appears inevitable
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in the present social context
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that we are going to go to space.
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But we are…
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The birth pains of doing this
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are very destructive.
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For instance,
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and I’m sure you’ve heard me say this,
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that civilization is a 10,000-year dash
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to space
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with the potential to destroy yourselves.
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History is the departure of a species for the stars,
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but it takes 10,000 to 15,000 years,
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a moment of biological and geological time.
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But in that 10,000 to 15,000 year period,
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if you happen to be unlucky enough to be born somewhere in there,
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it’s going to look like it’s all up for grabs.
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We are creatures of information and the imagination.
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The monkey, we are already beginning to transform and shed.
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We don’t look like the other monkeys,
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and we look less like them all the time.
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We are humanness.
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It may not even be
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a monkey quality.
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It may be something that was synergized
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in the monkeys but that is taking
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that has an inner life
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of its own. In other words
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we
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since the early 1950s
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have had a notion of the structure
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of DNA and this sort of thing.
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Well it’s perfectly obvious that within a century of the structure of DNA and this sort of thing. Well, it’s perfectly obvious
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that within a century of the discovery of DNA, any species which makes that discovery takes
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possession of its own form. And we are going to do that in the next 50 years. We are going to design
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the kind of people that we want to be. And if we don’t want to be people, we will design that out of the picture.
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I think of the picture that the mushroom has
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of the human species is much more like a coral reef.
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In other words, it sees our artifractria
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as contiguous with our flesh.
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We make a distinction.
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But what it sees is an animal
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which takes in raw material
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and excretes it in ideological moles.
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That’s what we do.
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We turn ideas into facts on all levels.
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This cannot go on any longer
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on the surface of the planet
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with the levels of
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energy and control that we have brought to bear because we are now in a position
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to destroy the whole earth or to sculpt to turn it into a Disneyland which is a
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kind of destroying of the earth so we have become a toxic force in planetary
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biology we feel it and the planet feels. What must happen is there has to be a cleavage
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and a birth is a good metaphor
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because an infant being born
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can hardly face the experience
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with anything other than trepidation,
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the weightless state,
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the effortless nurturing,
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the complete immersion in a support system, all that is ending in earthquakes and spasms and pain and anguish, which looks, it must look like a death process. And yet it’s a life process.
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It is necessary for the mother and the child that this cleavage take place. And this is now happening on a mass cultural level for us. We, to be who we want to be, we have to leave the planet. As Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake, up in theant, prospector, you sprout all your worth
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and woof your wings.
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Then could you say that
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all of the higher forms
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are in all of the lower forms
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simultaneously?
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Yes, what’s the word for that?
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Implicate.
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They are implicate in the lower forms.
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That’s right.
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But,
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I don’t know, it’s a great challenge to us
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to fulfill the things that we can imagine we are capable of.
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Our imagination is really the sail of the soul.
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And the question is, you know, where will that sail take us if we will but let it
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well what is the imagination
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or what is its relationship to the unconscious
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of which you’ve spoken
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well its relationship to the unconscious
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I suppose it is the unconscious
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made conscious
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in other words
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all the mythologies
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I think
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it’s
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Marcelli
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in
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dreams and
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mysteries
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he talks
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about the
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evolution
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of human
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flight
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and says
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it talks
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about first
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about shamanic
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flight
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and then the
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notion of
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the dirigible
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and the
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right flyer
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and the
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spaceship
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and he
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says
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these
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ontologically
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self-transforming images of flight
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say far more about the nature of the human soul
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than they do about technology.
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This is again this idea of James Joyce’s
00:09:56 ►
that man would become dirigible.
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I haven’t mentioned the flying saucer here this morning,
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but this is one of the things that I think is very interesting.
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I think flying saucers have been the province
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of very dubious intellectual cadres for probably long enough,
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and that it really should be looked at as a totality symbol
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which haunts human history in the same way that Alfred North Whitehead
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thought that the color dove
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gray haunted human history
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in other words it’s a
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thing always present
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it is the symbol
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of the ontological transformation
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of the human species
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and always takes upon itself
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the
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accoutrements of the current cultural myth
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so that it can be seen as the intersection
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of the immaculate conception
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or the descent of an angel
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or the current myth is
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that there are probably advanced civilizations
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somewhere in the universe
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and so that this is what it is.
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It’s really nothing so trivial
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you know, it is the
00:11:07 ►
alchemical object, it is
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the blind spot
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in the
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in the consciousness
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of the race, and it has to be
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the blind spot because it is a mystery
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all appetition
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for the future is an
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appetition for this modality of super freedom
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that comes from transcending the limitations of dimension.
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That’s why we are so riddled with apocalyptic mythology,
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because we really do have a prescience about what is going to happen to us we really do
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sense at a very deep level that the linear extrapolation of our historical and cultural
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tendencies does not give a true picture of the future that the major factor which will shape the future is uncertainty and that we have never yet created a method for integrating that uncertainty
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and planning for it.
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Novelty is the thing that continually overturns all efforts
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to project toward a given end state.
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So is it correct to say then that our evolution will be
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or can be seen as
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a reclaiming more of the
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landscape of the unconscious?
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Yes, absolutely.
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That’s what it is.
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That is our world.
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Our world is in our minds.
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You know, the kingdom of God
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is within you.
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That’s the
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wrap but the point is
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then you know
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to get a lease nailed down
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somewhere in the world
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of the imagination so that you can
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be part of it yes the planet
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is simply a
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precursor of
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what we will project
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outward when we have the ability to do so,
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and this is coming soon.
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How would you propose to accelerate the evolution of language?
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I think that we have to make a very reasoned case
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to the establishment that the psychedelic drugs have to be looked at
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in a non-hysterical manner by experts.
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And we don’t know who the experts are.
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They may not be pharmacologists.
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They may turn out to be linguists
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or they may turn out to be jugglers.
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But we have to recognize that what we’re talking about
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when we’re talking about the advancement of human evolution
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is the evolution of the human mind
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and these drugs
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and before the argument was
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whether it should be called a hallucinogen
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or a psychedelic or an entheogen
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they were just called consciousness expanding drugs
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and that really
00:14:10 ►
as a phenomenological description
00:14:13 ►
is more useful than these other things
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they expand consciousness
00:14:17 ►
well therefore
00:14:18 ►
we should be really bearing down on them
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because the problem is
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we don’t have enough consciousness
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and we don’t know how to direct it
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and sculpt it
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and orient it toward our own salvation.
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So we can’t just take
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our mental states as given
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as somehow sacrosanct
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and therefore not to be tampered with.
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We have to actually begin to engineer them. and Arthur Kessler has made this point this is not big news but
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there’s some resistance to it again I think a a recursion of dualism in a more
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dangerous form the dualism of the natural and the unnatural yoga is natural drugs are
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unnatural all these dichotomies I mean who can argue with the notion that
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dualism is the root of all evil how could it be other points a question
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relating to this is that there’s something…
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We have all this choice, we have all this power,
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and yet we are also prone to a great many powerful mistakes.
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And there’s the element of that which happens spontaneously through us.
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And this is part of that dichotomy too where do we leave off engineering and let
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let
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that which is beyond us
00:15:50 ►
do it through
00:15:50 ►
you mean the thing which is leading
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well we need to open a more coherent
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dialogue with the thing
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which is leading
00:15:58 ►
again the reason I don’t
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I am somewhat immune
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to political anxiety
00:16:05 ►
and that sort of thing
00:16:06 ►
is because I really do believe
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there is a control system
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that is larger than any human institution.
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I don’t believe that the evolution of faith
00:16:16 ►
on this planet is in the hands of
00:16:19 ►
the Communist Party, the Catholic Church,
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the Jews, Wall Street.
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It isn’t, no one is in charge.
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What is in charge is the most intelligent life form on the planet,
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which happens to be transhuman, not human.
00:16:34 ►
We have had for some time now the concept of the collective unconscious.
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But we need now to think in terms of the collective consciousness of the race
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which is not passive
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it’s not just the storage place of old memories and myths
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and that kind of thing
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it is more like an intellect key
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it guides
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it opens avenues to certain choices
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and precludes avenues to other choices
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you know I think it was
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in Mysterium Conjunctionis
00:17:07 ►
that Jung said
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the unconscious has a thousand ways
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of terminating a life
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that has become meaningless.
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A chilling notion.
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And what he meant was, you know,
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you’ll step off a curb
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and be hit by a bus
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because you didn’t look.
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But the real analysis is
00:17:25 ►
that a decision had been made
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at a higher control level
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to just fling you away.
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Well, how much more disturbing it is
00:17:32 ►
to think that that could be possible
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on a global level.
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So we have to open a dialogue
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and no longer, you know,
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all these words,
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intuition, artistic vision,
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trance, means like poetry,
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these are all ways of trying to have a dialogue with the control mechanism.
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And the psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, I think lay that open. We need to have professional facilitators of dialogue.
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We need to understand who is speaking
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we only now have possibilities
00:18:08 ►
you know that the voice
00:18:10 ►
that speaks on psilocybin is
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an out and out extraterrestrial
00:18:14 ►
you know with its own
00:18:16 ►
history, its own evolutionary
00:18:18 ►
standards, etc
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that it is what Jung would call
00:18:21 ►
an autonomous portion of the psyche
00:18:24 ►
that has slipped beyond the ego’s control,
00:18:27 ►
meaning that you’re crazy,
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or at least that you are experiencing a form of consciousness
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not validated by this society.
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I want to stick something in there, too.
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I agree with your analysis, but I don’t share the same faith
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that we will inevitably make it as a species,
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because what I see happening in the collective conscious-unconsciousness or that unconscious becoming conscious
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is a struggle over whether to live or to die.
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And although I believe and hope certainly it decides or we decide for life,
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I don’t see that as inevitable.
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Well, this is the question, is God mad?
00:19:06 ►
You know,
00:19:06 ►
are we living in a universe
00:19:07 ►
run by a mad God
00:19:09 ►
where the choice for death
00:19:10 ►
could be made
00:19:11 ►
as easily as
00:19:12 ►
the choice for life?
00:19:13 ►
This is what the Gnostics
00:19:14 ►
of the Hellenistic era feared.
00:19:15 ►
This is quite what I’m saying,
00:19:16 ►
though, really,
00:19:17 ►
because I think that,
00:19:18 ►
yeah,
00:19:19 ►
a superordinate consciousness
00:19:20 ►
was made up of all of us.
00:19:23 ►
So our individual decisions
00:19:24 ►
and consciousnesses, I think, are irrelevant to the totality.
00:19:29 ►
Well, is it built up of, is it a bottom-up thing or a top-down thing?
00:19:34 ►
I think it’s a both.
00:19:36 ►
I don’t see how, in this level of talking about it, it can really separate out all the elements.
00:19:43 ►
I mean, if you’re talking about cells in your body,
00:19:45 ►
yeah, they don’t go off and live a life of their own.
00:19:48 ►
It’s all coordinated, but it isn’t coordinated by one thing in the body.
00:19:51 ►
The whole body coordinates itself.
00:19:54 ►
And each cell is part of that coordination.
00:19:56 ►
Can you say the same thing?
00:19:57 ►
Yes, that’s right.
00:19:58 ►
Yes, I see what you’re saying.
00:20:01 ►
How do we find a local ayahuasquero?
00:20:03 ►
Ha, ha, haero these are not the ones
00:20:08 ►
well I’ll tell you
00:20:09 ►
a few years ago we bought
00:20:14 ►
ten acres in Hawaii
00:20:17 ►
and moved
00:20:18 ►
as many of these Peruvian
00:20:20 ►
drug plants as we could get
00:20:23 ►
in there.
00:20:28 ►
So that was four or five years ago.
00:20:30 ►
Now those plants are grown,
00:20:32 ►
and hopefully the next time we go back to Hawaii,
00:20:35 ►
we’ll be able to produce ayahuasca.
00:20:38 ►
We’re calling it Hawaii-ahuasca.
00:20:43 ►
Other than that, I don’t know what to tell you
00:20:45 ►
these things
00:20:46 ►
botanists don’t think in terms of
00:20:50 ►
live plants, they always make
00:20:51 ►
voucher specimens
00:20:52 ►
so we were in 1982
00:20:55 ►
or 1, whenever it was
00:20:57 ►
we were really the first expedition
00:20:59 ►
looking at Amazonian
00:21:01 ►
psychobotany that really put emphasis
00:21:04 ►
on live plants.
00:21:06 ►
And we got out hundreds of them, you know.
00:21:11 ►
But then growing them,
00:21:13 ►
they can only be grown in greenhouses
00:21:14 ►
or in a subtropical environment.
00:21:17 ►
But eventually we’re hoping that
00:21:19 ►
researchers who need,
00:21:24 ►
who want to grow the plants
00:21:26 ►
can buy stock from a place like that
00:21:29 ►
and not have the expense of having to send an expedition to the Amazon.
00:21:35 ►
I was trying to get a harness as well,
00:21:36 ►
but it’s a shamanic institute in Ecuador.
00:21:41 ►
It was just an interesting idea that we were passing back and forth.
00:21:42 ►
it was just an interesting idea that we were passing back and forth
00:21:44 ►
well when we originally conceived this
00:21:47 ►
idea of a psychobotanical farm
00:21:50 ►
we bought land near Florencia
00:21:54 ►
in the state of Caquetá in Colombia
00:21:57 ►
and then it became politically unfriendly
00:22:00 ►
to foreign scientists
00:22:02 ►
and so we stayed away for years
00:22:04 ►
and then I just read last week
00:22:06 ►
13 tons of cocaine
00:22:08 ►
was busted in Colombia
00:22:10 ►
and it was all in Kakita
00:22:11 ►
so I assume it’ll be years
00:22:14 ►
before it’s cooled down
00:22:17 ►
enough to do it there
00:22:18 ►
and I like the idea of doing it in Hawaii
00:22:21 ►
the Amazon is so difficult
00:22:23 ►
an environment to carry out even minimal
00:22:26 ►
field studies in that it’s very hard to do much other than interview the
00:22:32 ►
informants, collect the vouchers, collect the drugs and get out because after two
00:22:39 ►
or three weeks you’re really beginning to show the strain i mean it’s hard to sleep in hammocks so you go
00:22:47 ►
into a kind of never asleep never awake and the strange diet the intestinal problems insect toxins
00:22:56 ►
people are not always a hundred percent cooperative and honest.
00:23:06 ►
Numerous problems.
00:23:12 ►
And since we were not ethnographers or anthropologists per se,
00:23:16 ►
our real focus was on the plants and the drugs.
00:23:18 ►
So hopefully in Hawaii,
00:23:22 ►
a more commodious and low-key atmosphere can be created for experimenting with these things.
00:23:25 ►
This relates to your question, which is how can a group of people create an experimental context
00:23:34 ►
for doing these drugs with an eye toward making some kind of progress or getting something out of it?
00:23:41 ►
And it’s a real challenge.
00:23:43 ►
We were amazed
00:23:45 ►
when we went to Peru
00:23:47 ►
and began taking ayahuasca.
00:23:49 ►
We had never taken drugs
00:23:50 ►
with groups of 30 people, you know.
00:23:53 ►
We had either taken them alone
00:23:57 ►
or one or two people
00:23:58 ►
or occasionally with 100,000 other people
00:24:01 ►
at a rock concert.
00:24:03 ►
But the notion of 30 or 40 it’s very intense and without
00:24:07 ►
a tradition uh it will be even more demanding but it’s important to do the whole problem in
00:24:16 ►
psychedelic research is the um reluctance to have human subjects in the picture
00:24:25 ►
as soon as that begins
00:24:28 ►
happening the
00:24:29 ►
institutions and the government
00:24:32 ►
and people’s wish to make
00:24:34 ►
careers rather than to actually
00:24:36 ►
do original work
00:24:37 ►
a whole bunch of factors come into play
00:24:40 ►
that make it very very frustrating
00:24:42 ►
and yet the LD50
00:24:44 ►
and rats, the absolute structural determ yet, the LD50 in rats,
00:24:45 ►
the absolute structural determinations,
00:24:47 ►
the botany, the chemistry,
00:24:50 ►
the linguistic studies,
00:24:52 ►
you can only go so far with this stuff.
00:24:54 ►
The real thing is, what does it do?
00:24:57 ►
I think that’s partly because
00:24:59 ►
in science and human experience
00:25:03 ►
it’s considered a valid subject of study
00:25:05 ►
and so
00:25:05 ►
that’s
00:25:06 ►
you know
00:25:07 ►
so
00:25:08 ►
people don’t ask
00:25:10 ►
those questions
00:25:10 ►
because well
00:25:11 ►
you can’t
00:25:11 ►
quantitate it
00:25:12 ►
and you can’t
00:25:13 ►
that’s right
00:25:13 ►
well
00:25:14 ►
why don’t you
00:25:15 ►
get both
00:25:15 ►
and get the
00:25:16 ►
mental health
00:25:16 ►
ground to do it
00:25:17 ►
well I think
00:25:18 ►
this is
00:25:19 ►
Dennis’s notion
00:25:20 ►
what he wants
00:25:21 ►
to do really
00:25:22 ►
and I think
00:25:22 ►
he has
00:25:22 ►
Frank Barr
00:25:23 ►
interested
00:25:24 ►
and some other people,
00:25:25 ►
is return one more time, at least, to the Amazon and study them taking it
00:25:33 ►
and actually take blood samples and study diet and get a full biomedical study of what’s going on and that should be sufficient data then that you could
00:25:46 ►
Could get a grant for human experimentation in this country all this remains to be done that
00:25:53 ►
The work is just beginning to be done in psychedelics
00:25:57 ►
Essentially the botany is now well in hand there are only botanical details now
00:26:03 ►
but the chemistry the pharmacology,
00:26:06 ►
the neurophysiology, the psychology,
00:26:09 ►
these are just wide-open areas.
00:26:15 ►
I’d like to take the opportunity to thank you
00:26:17 ►
for doing what you’re doing today.
00:26:20 ►
I can’t remember since sitting like this in India
00:26:23 ►
being so enlivened by what’s going on
00:26:26 ►
today. Oh, thank you very much.
00:26:29 ►
I would
00:26:29 ►
like to hear from some of you who have been
00:26:31 ►
so silent.
00:26:34 ►
People who have
00:26:35 ►
are either appalled that
00:26:37 ►
we’re this deep in today.
00:26:43 ►
Let me preface the question.
00:26:48 ►
From my own meditative experience,
00:26:52 ►
I feel like I’m just beginning to get to a point
00:26:56 ►
where I can feel how energy and stillness are both necessary.
00:27:01 ►
And like the existential phenomenological sense,
00:27:04 ►
they co-constitute one another. They
00:27:06 ►
cannot be one without the other. And by energy I mean all its forms too, including mind.
00:27:15 ►
For me it was good to hear another way of saying that the idea of mindfulness or citta
00:27:19 ►
in the yoga philosophy is a reality to someone else too. It’s comforting.
00:27:28 ►
Including the intellectual stuff,
00:27:31 ►
all that form.
00:27:32 ►
In your experience with these cultures,
00:27:35 ►
these different cultures,
00:27:36 ►
is there a…
00:27:37 ►
I hear a lot about the energy side,
00:27:39 ►
the form, etc.
00:27:41 ►
Is there any stillness work?
00:27:44 ►
Is there any… Is stillness sacred? Is there any stillness sacred?
00:27:47 ►
Is there a meditative, quote-unquote,
00:27:50 ►
tradition or…
00:27:51 ►
Warm dark brain.
00:27:53 ►
Oh, yeah, for sure.
00:27:55 ►
Yes, it doesn’t call itself that.
00:27:57 ►
It calls itself trance.
00:28:00 ►
But trance is not a state of unconsciousness.
00:28:04 ►
It’s, in fact, a state of full alertness, but you can’t move.
00:28:09 ►
And you don’t experience this as paralysis because you don’t care to move.
00:28:13 ►
But yes, I think that there must be stillness for these things to manifest.
00:28:20 ►
One of the most puzzling things about psychedelic drugs
00:28:24 ►
is trying to teach people how to invoke the modality.
00:28:29 ►
People have the attitude toward drugs that if you take them, they will work.
00:28:35 ►
And this is not true at all,
00:28:38 ►
especially with drugs where a modality like mind is what you’re attempting to conjure
00:28:45 ►
so that a drug will potentiate you for a vision state,
00:28:52 ►
but a number of other things have to be present.
00:28:55 ►
Energy and stillness being, I think, the two most important ones.
00:29:01 ►
And then a third factor, which is the invocation you must invoke it in
00:29:11 ►
some way and it’s hard to explain what that is it’s sort of like you know the
00:29:18 ►
difference between being alone and with someone you though you are alone taking the drug
00:29:25 ►
you have to assume the I-thou
00:29:28 ►
tension
00:29:29 ►
and then you will discover
00:29:31 ►
the thou on the other end
00:29:34 ►
of the equation
00:29:35 ►
and so the stilling
00:29:37 ►
will allow this
00:29:38 ►
it’s almost
00:29:39 ►
sensory deprivation
00:29:43 ►
is what’s required.
00:29:45 ►
Not in the formal sense of a tank or anything like that.
00:29:49 ►
But you must sit still in darkness.
00:29:53 ►
And you must look at your closed eyelids
00:29:57 ►
with the expectation of seeing something.
00:30:00 ►
And then you will.
00:30:03 ►
Within the culture a spoken discipline
00:30:05 ►
about mental stillness
00:30:07 ►
and the importance of that
00:30:08 ►
or talking about the drugs
00:30:10 ►
or plants in terms that
00:30:12 ►
that would be a positive thing
00:30:14 ►
I’m just curious
00:30:15 ►
I think the context is isolation
00:30:18 ►
that’s what they would say about this
00:30:21 ►
they say well we go into isolation
00:30:23 ►
we put ourselves away.
00:30:26 ►
We put ourselves into a tree
00:30:27 ►
or a cult hut
00:30:29 ►
or something like that
00:30:31 ►
and do not move around a lot.
00:30:33 ►
I think it could be compared
00:30:36 ►
to a completely different culture
00:30:37 ►
and to not typically
00:30:39 ►
work in this hallucinogen
00:30:41 ►
work. Well, this question, though,
00:30:44 ►
of the role of hallucinogens in Taoist practice
00:30:47 ►
is not well understood.
00:30:50 ►
If you know James Ware’s book, the number, the attention given to fungi
00:30:56 ►
is out of all proportion.
00:30:59 ►
I mean, their pharmacopoeia was largely fungal.
00:31:03 ►
There are no known psilocybin mushrooms from China reported.
00:31:09 ►
However, this is a place for somebody to make a quick reputation, I bet.
00:31:15 ►
If you chose carefully where you went to look, I’ll bet you would find it,
00:31:20 ►
because we know Staphylocubensis is in Thailand, Laos,
00:31:25 ►
and there is no reason at all that it shouldn’t be in southern China.
00:31:28 ►
And it was in southern China that the Taoist pharmacopoeia was evolved and elaborated.
00:31:34 ►
And Strickman is working on it, and he wrote a couple of papers.
00:31:37 ►
I have a copy.
00:31:39 ►
Strickman.
00:31:39 ►
Strickman, yes.
00:31:40 ►
Oh, yes.
00:31:41 ►
Yes, he’s doing very interesting work in all of this.
00:31:45 ►
He’s in Germany presently.
00:31:48 ►
I think that hallucinogens are basic to humanness, and always have been.
00:31:58 ►
You know, Karl Ruck and Wasson wrote a very convincing book to show that the Eleusinian mysteries
00:32:05 ►
were an ergot, a cult of ergot intoxication.
00:32:10 ►
I thought that sounded totally crazy before I read the book.
00:32:14 ►
I thought that it was going to be some flung-together case
00:32:18 ►
that would convince nobody.
00:32:20 ►
Actually, I can’t believe that it’s anything else.
00:32:24 ►
Having read the book
00:32:25 ►
the evidence is overwhelming
00:32:27 ►
well Eleusis was the central wellspring
00:32:31 ►
of mystery for the western mind
00:32:34 ►
for 2000 years
00:32:35 ►
everybody who was anybody
00:32:37 ►
went to Eleusis
00:32:39 ►
and had the experience
00:32:41 ►
and there were times
00:32:43 ►
when the mystery was profaned to the point
00:32:46 ►
that writers can speak of wealthy Athenians who had the mystery in their
00:32:53 ►
house were able to offer it to their guests after dinner what kind of mystery John Allegro wrote a much less convincing book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, trying to say that Christianity itself was a mushroom cult.
00:33:16 ►
In fact, going much further than that, saying that Christ himself was in fact no person at all, but a code code a system of coded epigrams for a
00:33:28 ►
mushroom his case is harder to judge because it depends on a knowledge of
00:33:35 ►
Aramaic philology but my brother has suggested to me and in fact has set an outline for a book
00:33:45 ►
he believes that consciousness itself
00:33:49 ►
arose in the higher primates
00:33:51 ►
in a feedback relationship
00:33:53 ►
with hallucinogenic plants
00:33:56 ►
in other words
00:33:56 ►
he would go much further than Wasson
00:33:59 ►
who’s saying religion
00:34:00 ►
was caused by a relation
00:34:02 ►
he’s saying thought itself
00:34:04 ►
was caused by monkeys relating to these plants.
00:34:08 ►
And we know from laboratory experiments that if you set monkeys in a situation where they can smoke DMT by just walking up to a pipette and taking a hit,
00:34:23 ►
that 20% of the monkeys
00:34:25 ►
will refuse food and water
00:34:26 ►
in preference to that
00:34:28 ►
well now
00:34:30 ►
so yes that’s us
00:34:34 ►
we’d rather be stoned
00:34:40 ►
and so having this predilection
00:34:44 ►
apparently it’s simply
00:34:45 ►
the shift is what they like
00:34:47 ►
they like the thrill
00:34:49 ►
the shift of modality
00:34:51 ►
from down to up and up to down
00:34:53 ►
but you stretch that out
00:34:55 ►
over a hundred thousand years
00:34:56 ►
and the next thing you know
00:34:57 ►
you have the integral calculus
00:34:59 ►
and the 384 byte chip
00:35:02 ►
and all the rest of it
00:35:04 ►
so it may be that humanness is a symbiotic relationship
00:35:09 ►
between certain plants and certain monkeys,
00:35:11 ►
and that you don’t have humanness
00:35:14 ►
unless you have the plants and the monkeys together.
00:35:18 ►
This is why we may be the heirs of an inhuman culture.
00:35:22 ►
In Colombia, once I saw a graffiti,
00:35:27 ►
and I’m my Spanish, I can’t get it right,
00:35:30 ►
but there was a picture of a mushroom,
00:35:33 ►
and it said,
00:35:33 ►
Without this, you are not yourself.
00:35:39 ►
So this is, you know, Arthur Kessler,
00:35:42 ►
I think it was in The Ghost in the Machine,
00:35:45 ►
said very clearly that he felt there was no hope for the human species without chemical intervention,
00:35:52 ►
that we cannot be the sharp-fanged monkey and the possessor of atomic weapons,
00:35:58 ►
and that we’re going to have to chemically intervene to mute the monkey proclivities. And it may be true, but the
00:36:09 ►
depth of their influence upon us, our
00:36:12 ►
thought systems, language, I hold the
00:36:15 ►
peculiar opinion that language preceded
00:36:20 ►
meaning by millennia, that long before
00:36:24 ►
people could communicate
00:36:25 ►
they discovered how interesting
00:36:27 ►
the small mouth noises were
00:36:30 ►
and made them for each other
00:36:32 ►
as a form of entertainment which then
00:36:34 ►
bifurcated into chanting and
00:36:36 ►
singing but it was very late
00:36:38 ►
in this experimenting
00:36:39 ►
with small mouth noises
00:36:41 ►
that someone got the idea that you could
00:36:44 ►
assign a meaning
00:36:46 ►
to a certain mouth noise
00:36:47 ►
and everybody would agree
00:36:48 ►
that that’s what that noise meant
00:36:50 ►
and then you could discuss things.
00:36:53 ►
So, you know,
00:36:54 ►
we are creatures of language
00:36:55 ►
and thought
00:36:57 ►
and probably because
00:36:59 ►
these drugs,
00:37:01 ►
these plants
00:37:01 ►
first kicked that over in us.
00:37:04 ►
I’d like to go back to the drugs and consciousness idea.
00:37:08 ►
I’m going to stop right there for a minute.
00:37:10 ►
That’s the development of it.
00:37:11 ►
Are you…
00:37:14 ►
There’s several ways that a person could take that notion, really,
00:37:17 ►
and several different directions that you could go with it.
00:37:19 ►
On the one hand, you could be suggesting
00:37:22 ►
that the experience itself of a hallucinatory state
00:37:25 ►
is such a different experience from normal waking consciousness
00:37:32 ►
that it demands thought to come to terms with it.
00:37:35 ►
I don’t think that’s a very tenable line,
00:37:37 ►
because the dream state itself would have similar experiences.
00:37:40 ►
We know that chimpanzees and lower primates are dreaming,
00:37:44 ►
so that doesn’t seem to be too far. The other way would be to say it’s the actual communication
00:37:50 ►
with more developed intelligence that is inducing thought in our species, the way we’re doing
00:37:56 ►
it now with chimpanzees and teaching them sign language and they’re starting to develop
00:38:00 ►
humor and things like that. If you want to go that way too, then you have to then get to
00:38:06 ►
how did that being itself develop consciousness
00:38:09 ►
and start to…
00:38:12 ►
It’s an interesting line,
00:38:13 ►
but I don’t think it would stop there.
00:38:14 ►
I’m wondering where you want it to go.
00:38:15 ►
The way I think of it is a third possibility,
00:38:19 ►
a kind of a geometric model,
00:38:21 ►
which is just to say,
00:38:23 ►
here you have a grid called experience of the world,
00:38:27 ►
and then we have waking, so that’s a dot on the grid. Then we have dreaming, that’s another dot
00:38:33 ►
on the grid. But you can’t construct a three-dimensional reality until you have a third
00:38:39 ►
dot. And this is what the psychedelic experience is providing. It’s providing a reference point for the production of new metaphor.
00:38:48 ►
So that it isn’t really, it isn’t, and you really notice this with acid,
00:38:52 ►
it isn’t the taking of LSD that is so important.
00:38:56 ►
It’s the talking about it.
00:38:59 ►
That having, in other words, the reference point.
00:39:01 ►
Remember when we were all freaks and all we talked about was how in the light of acid
00:39:07 ►
everything was thus and so and thus and so and thus and so,
00:39:11 ►
and it took about five years, longer for some of us, to assimilate that,
00:39:17 ►
so we no longer had to run around saying how everything was in the light of LSD.
00:39:23 ►
We had integrated that point on the grid.
00:39:27 ►
And I think that’s what it is,
00:39:28 ►
is we tap into worlds of experience.
00:39:34 ►
And each world of experience
00:39:35 ►
taps, stretches our metaphors,
00:39:39 ►
is a boot in the tail
00:39:41 ►
for further evolution of language.
00:39:44 ►
And that’s all the evolution we have now.
00:39:46 ►
I said this earlier, but it’s a point worth making again.
00:39:49 ►
It isn’t culture that’s changing and carrying everything with it.
00:39:52 ►
It’s language that’s changing, and it carries culture with it.
00:39:56 ►
Culture lags far behind.
00:39:58 ►
But the evolution of language is the evolution of reality.
00:40:02 ►
This is a cliché, but the challenge of the cliché
00:40:06 ►
is to make it operational
00:40:07 ►
so that, like God,
00:40:09 ►
when you utter a word,
00:40:11 ►
it becomes so, you know.
00:40:15 ►
Do you see…
00:40:16 ►
What do you reflect on
00:40:17 ►
in terms of the origins
00:40:19 ►
of the use of hallucinogens
00:40:21 ►
and that whole, you know, scheme,
00:40:23 ►
sort of the negative,
00:40:28 ►
literally, we’re talking a great deal about the sort of evolutionary potentials,
00:40:31 ►
and I’m curious about the examples.
00:40:34 ►
Negative potentials.
00:40:35 ►
Yeah, negative potentials,
00:40:36 ►
and how we deal with those and foresee them.
00:40:39 ►
Well, the only answer I can give
00:40:44 ►
is probably not a very good one.
00:40:48 ►
The forces of…
00:40:51 ►
Let me put it a different way.
00:40:53 ►
The government gets to everything first.
00:40:57 ►
And they have been at the problem, you ask, for 20 years
00:41:02 ►
with an amazing little success
00:41:05 ►
I worked for the
00:41:06 ►
Department of Interior
00:41:06 ►
for a while
00:41:07 ►
I can tell you why
00:41:08 ►
well there are many
00:41:10 ►
reasons why
00:41:11 ►
but it doesn’t seem
00:41:13 ►
very pervertable
00:41:14 ►
they were very excited
00:41:16 ►
at first
00:41:17 ►
you know
00:41:18 ►
but then
00:41:20 ►
and I think
00:41:21 ►
what they got into
00:41:22 ►
although perhaps
00:41:23 ►
you can say more
00:41:24 ►
about this
00:41:24 ►
because you probably follow the literature,
00:41:26 ►
they like to give psychedelic drugs to people
00:41:29 ►
and then hypnotize them
00:41:31 ►
and then get them to do terrible things
00:41:34 ►
which they wouldn’t remember later.
00:41:37 ►
And claims were made that this was possible or being done,
00:41:41 ►
but it certainly didn’t seem to come into wide application.
00:41:45 ►
They also looked, during the Vietnam War,
00:41:48 ►
they built artillery
00:41:50 ►
shells which would deliver
00:41:52 ►
aerosol DMT.
00:41:54 ►
They
00:41:55 ►
envisioned dropping
00:41:57 ►
one of these aerosol DMT bombs
00:42:00 ►
on a Vietnamese town.
00:42:02 ►
Everyone
00:42:03 ►
falling into this intense hallucinogenic state,
00:42:07 ►
and they could just roll right in.
00:42:09 ►
But like plans in the 1960s, radicals,
00:42:14 ►
there was the fantasy of poisoning water supplies with LSD.
00:42:19 ►
Well, it just turns out that there are chemical factors
00:42:22 ►
and buffering problems,
00:42:24 ►
and it just is not very easy to do these things I suppose maybe I’m too sanguine about
00:42:33 ►
it and irrationally so because when I asked this question of the mushroom
00:42:39 ►
entity the perversion of this I was told that it was good
00:42:48 ►
in such a platonic sense
00:42:50 ►
that you could only approach it
00:42:53 ►
if you were good
00:42:54 ►
so that it was like ethical mercury
00:42:57 ►
the grasping hand
00:42:59 ►
would find that it flowed right through it
00:43:02 ►
and there was nothing left
00:43:03 ►
but I may be God’s fool, you know.
00:43:07 ►
Certainly we know the Nazis used scopolamine
00:43:11 ►
as a truth serum.
00:43:13 ►
Although now when you look at the down on scopolamine
00:43:15 ►
it’s not very impressive.
00:43:17 ►
People don’t, they lie as much as they tell the truth.
00:43:20 ►
So it’s a little puzzling as to why.
00:43:23 ►
But definitely… It’s language. It’s called the truth serum. That’s right puzzling as to why but definitely
00:43:25 ►
it’s called the truth
00:43:27 ►
that’s right
00:43:29 ►
that’s right
00:43:30 ►
also I have
00:43:33 ►
something to do
00:43:33 ►
with what
00:43:33 ►
James calls
00:43:35 ►
the cognitive imperative
00:43:36 ►
that things happen
00:43:37 ►
because we believe
00:43:39 ►
that things happen
00:43:39 ►
that’s right
00:43:40 ►
and so a lot of
00:43:42 ►
the use of
00:43:44 ►
all these things
00:43:46 ►
may depend a great deal on what people believe will happen.
00:43:50 ►
And also technology is the production,
00:43:53 ►
you could think of it as the residue of the workings of the imagination.
00:43:59 ►
And the imagination is under the control of the superego or the overmind.
00:44:05 ►
So that I think technology has a weird way of always escaping the intentions of those who are working with it.
00:44:15 ►
A perfect example would be the chip which makes possible the personal computer.
00:44:22 ►
That thing was developed under contract to the Air Force by I think
00:44:25 ►
Sperry Rand
00:44:26 ►
and when it was finally finished
00:44:29 ►
it didn’t work
00:44:31 ►
right, it was far too slow
00:44:33 ►
they wanted it for guidance systems
00:44:35 ►
of missiles and this kind of thing
00:44:37 ►
said this thing is a thousand times too slow
00:44:39 ►
it’s just baloney, it’s worthless
00:44:42 ►
toss it in the wastebasket
00:44:44 ►
but somebody said but wait a minute.
00:44:46 ►
You know what you could do with this?
00:44:49 ►
And created, you know, an information revolution
00:44:52 ►
that must be absolutely appalling
00:44:54 ►
to the forces that wish to control.
00:44:57 ►
I have an Apple II computer
00:44:59 ►
and a $350 modem,
00:45:02 ►
and I can access the Defense Department databases.
00:45:08 ►
I can access the complete shelf list
00:45:13 ►
of the Library of Congress,
00:45:15 ►
all chemical abstracts.
00:45:17 ►
In short, all information in the world
00:45:20 ►
I can access from my living room in Sonoma County,
00:45:23 ►
and so can anyone else
00:45:25 ►
who buys a thousand dollars worth of equipment
00:45:28 ►
this was not part of the plan
00:45:31 ►
this is in fact a terrifying thing
00:45:35 ►
and my god, these computer networks
00:45:39 ►
where, as an example, a few years ago
00:45:42 ►
someone invented a device
00:45:44 ►
this is an anecdote that will give you the idea.
00:45:47 ►
Someone invented a little device which looked like a ballpoint pen.
00:45:52 ►
And it was a small cybernetic device that could be programmed with a category,
00:45:58 ►
like, let’s say, stamp collector or saddle massacre. And when you wore this pin,
00:46:06 ►
if you got near anyone else who was wearing a similar device
00:46:10 ►
programmed with the same word,
00:46:13 ►
your pen would begin flashing a little light.
00:46:16 ►
The notion was that these things could be sold to people
00:46:20 ►
who hang out in singles bars
00:46:22 ►
and would create a dimension neither public nor private,
00:46:28 ►
a new dimension where people of similar interests could get together completely.
00:46:36 ►
So isn’t that interesting? And this thing had a range of 20 feet.
00:46:42 ►
So now comes the $1,000 worth of cybernetic equipment
00:46:46 ►
and the telephone,
00:46:47 ►
and it’s the same device.
00:46:49 ►
It doesn’t clip into your shirt pocket,
00:46:52 ►
but we’ve extended the range
00:46:53 ►
to include the entire planet.
00:46:56 ►
You can have a search program on it, too.
00:46:58 ►
Oh, you do?
00:46:59 ►
You go into these computer networks
00:47:02 ►
and you say, you know,
00:47:04 ►
who listed that they were interested in?
00:47:07 ►
Mushrooms, psychedelics, psilocybin, consciousness-altering drugs, hallucinogens.
00:47:13 ►
And then out of 70,000 users on the network, in four and a half seconds, it tells you that 12 people listed one or some of those words. You immediately type a little letter to each one,
00:47:26 ►
shoot it off through the system,
00:47:28 ►
and you’re in contact with those people.
00:47:30 ►
This makes
00:47:31 ►
conspiracy
00:47:33 ►
on a level almost
00:47:36 ►
impossible to conceive
00:47:37 ►
a form of liberation.
00:47:40 ►
And these kinds
00:47:42 ►
of hardwired technologies
00:47:44 ►
are simply patriarchal follow-ons
00:47:49 ►
to the feminizing of consciousness that is happening in drugs.
00:47:53 ►
In other words, you can almost think of drugs as the software
00:47:59 ►
and cybernetics as the hardware of what is being done.
00:48:03 ►
But vast areas are being opened up for human interaction,
00:48:08 ►
completely unregulated by any kind of institution.
00:48:12 ►
And these will create new kinds of social realities.
00:48:17 ►
And the computer has a psychedelic experience.
00:48:19 ►
Right.
00:48:20 ►
It is a psychedelic.
00:48:22 ►
It’s a hardwired psychedelic experience
00:48:25 ►
people tend to think of computers as masculine
00:48:29 ►
I guess because
00:48:30 ►
the first generation of people who built them were male
00:48:34 ►
but what they actually are
00:48:36 ►
are the mysterious mama matrix of information
00:48:39 ►
it is like the unconscious made conscious
00:48:44 ►
the unconscious is ceasing to be unconscious.
00:48:48 ►
All information is rising into this dimension of accessibility
00:48:52 ►
so that you need not wonder how many people died of tuberculosis in western Nepal last year.
00:49:00 ►
You just key into the biomedical index and you find out.
00:49:04 ►
You just key into the biomedical index and you find out.
00:49:07 ►
And this seems to me, you know,
00:49:13 ►
the word psychedelic has been attached to the drugs and confined,
00:49:16 ►
but many things are psychedelic. Anything which expands, adumbrates, aids,
00:49:20 ►
and supports consciousness is psychedelic
00:49:24 ►
if we take the word down to its Greek roots.
00:49:27 ►
So this is very exciting.
00:49:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:49:36 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:49:43 ►
While I realize that there was a wealth of interesting ideas in this talk that I could comment on,
00:49:48 ►
the geek in me just has to go back to when Terrence was describing an Internet experience back in 1984.
00:49:55 ►
And I know that there are quite a few of our fellow slaughters who were also hacking their way around the net back then as well.
00:50:02 ►
With the high-definition streaming of videos to an iPhone these days, though,
00:50:07 ►
to hear an old-timer talk about the days before the web came around
00:50:10 ►
are like my stories of walking to school every day in blizzards and uphill both ways, right?
00:50:18 ►
I actually do still have a very vivid memory of one night
00:50:22 ►
that doesn’t seem like it was actually over 20 years
00:50:25 ►
ago. But around two o’clock in the morning, I remember waking up my then girlfriend to show
00:50:30 ►
her what a spectacular thing I’d just accomplished. And there on my 15-inch black and white screen was
00:50:37 ►
the login screen for Trinity Library in Dublin. And then I proceeded to show her that I could
00:50:43 ►
access the card catalog as words filled the screen one letter at a time over my little 300 baud dial-up modem.
00:50:51 ►
And like you right now, I suspect that she was less than impressed.
00:50:56 ►
But if you were there back then when the net was just coming alive, you know exactly how
00:51:01 ►
exciting those days and late nights were.
00:51:04 ►
you know exactly how exciting those days and late nights were.
00:51:09 ►
There is one thing I feel the need to comment about, however,
00:51:11 ►
and that is when Terrence said,
00:51:15 ►
to be who we have to be, we have to leave the planet.
00:51:20 ►
Now, a few years ago I was on board with the space migration people,
00:51:25 ►
but I no longer hold any hope that we humans are going to be able to physically populate other planets.
00:51:30 ►
And I can already hear some of our fellow salonners screaming that I’m wrong,
00:51:34 ►
but once you spend some time studying the problem,
00:51:40 ►
it becomes pretty obvious that the requirements for human life support are simply too massive to be practical.
00:51:44 ►
But I have another problem with space migration as well.
00:51:47 ►
You see, when I think of going on a holiday,
00:51:50 ►
I dream of a Pacific island,
00:51:53 ►
not taking a long ride in a metal tube hurling through space.
00:51:56 ►
And in my wildest dreams,
00:51:58 ►
I can’t conceive of a planet I could travel to that would be more desirable than a trip to New Zealand.
00:52:02 ►
So, at least for me,
00:52:04 ►
any thoughts of leaving the planet
00:52:05 ►
will be confined to trips into entheospace,
00:52:08 ►
psychedelic voyages, if you will,
00:52:10 ►
which, by the way, can be as harrowing and chanting and captivating
00:52:15 ►
as any physical space adventures could be.
00:52:18 ►
And I do find it interesting, though,
00:52:20 ►
that both Terence and Timothy Leary
00:52:22 ►
had dreams and fantasies about space migration.
00:52:26 ►
Which is why I think that solid down-to-earth minds like those of Bruce Dahmer
00:52:31 ►
are so important right now because they fuse the reality of hard-nosed science
00:52:36 ►
with the flights of poetic fancy of people like Terrence McKenna.
00:52:41 ►
And in case you weren’t able to attend one of Bruce’s recent talks in the UK
00:52:45 ►
you’ll still be able to hear him here in podcast land
00:52:48 ►
first of all in September when Shamanic Freedom Radio returns
00:52:52 ►
I believe now I’ll be playing the October Gallery talk
00:52:55 ►
and later this fall in the salon here
00:52:58 ►
I plan on playing Bruce’s Budafield Festival talk
00:53:01 ►
also some of our EU salonughters will have a chance to
00:53:06 ►
catch Bruce live, where he
00:53:08 ►
will be presenting the opening
00:53:10 ►
keynote of the Cognitive
00:53:12 ►
Intelligence and Games conference
00:53:14 ►
in Copenhagen, Denmark, on the
00:53:16 ►
18th of August.
00:53:18 ►
Following that, he’ll be co-chairing
00:53:20 ►
sessions on the Origin of
00:53:22 ►
Life and the EvoGrid at the
00:53:24 ►
Afterlife 12 conference in Odense, Denmark,
00:53:28 ►
on the 19th through the 23rd of August.
00:53:31 ►
So if you’d like to meet up with Bruce in Denmark,
00:53:34 ►
you can reach him through his website, www.damer.com, D-A-M-E-R,
00:53:40 ►
or on Facebook and make some arrangements to get together.
00:53:45 ►
So if you want to debate the possibilities and the hows and whys of human spaceflight,
00:53:51 ►
you ought to get in touch with Bruce,
00:53:53 ►
because he’s spent a lot of time working with NASA and even some former moonwalking astronauts,
00:53:58 ►
and they’ve had a big influence on his thinking about these things.
00:54:03 ►
And talking about how we see things in this world,
00:54:06 ►
I want to mention the work of one of our fellow slaunters, FX.
00:54:11 ►
And I hope I’m pronouncing that right.
00:54:12 ►
He spells it E-H-P-H-E-X.
00:54:16 ►
And he has a new CD of his poetry out that’s titled
00:54:19 ►
Life, Dreams, and Poetic Beats,
00:54:22 ►
which is, I think, just now being released today.
00:54:26 ►
And FX has posted a link to one of the tracks
00:54:29 ►
titled Liberation to listen to for free,
00:54:32 ►
and I highly recommend it.
00:54:34 ►
When you hear this piece,
00:54:36 ►
you may think it’s the short McKenna rap at the end
00:54:38 ►
that caught my attention,
00:54:40 ►
but that’s not really what drew me into the piece.
00:54:43 ►
You see, FX, at least I think when he wrote and recorded this poem,
00:54:48 ►
and maybe you’re writing out today, is 33 years old.
00:54:51 ►
And even though he and I have had completely different lives, different backgrounds,
00:54:56 ►
I’m struck at how very similar our emotional lives were at age 33.
00:55:01 ►
I still have some things that I wrote when I was 33, and they sound very much like
00:55:06 ►
FX’s work. My point being that underlying the cultures we’re embedded in here,
00:55:13 ►
there are some very fundamental human values or emotions or states of mind that are
00:55:18 ►
really universal. There really is no difference between us at our most basic selves, and
00:55:24 ►
I find that very encouraging.
00:55:27 ►
So if you go to the program notes for this podcast,
00:55:29 ►
you’ll find a link to Liberation by FX,
00:55:32 ►
and I hope you get a chance to check it out.
00:55:36 ►
Finally, I want to once again mention the new album by Chantal Hayouk,
00:55:41 ►
whose song El Alien is our theme song here in the salon.
00:55:44 ►
As I mentioned in my last podcast, Chateau Hayouk, whose song El Alien is our theme song here in the salon.
00:55:50 ►
As I mentioned in my last podcast, my dear friend Jacques Oliver is the man behind the Chateau Hayouk music, and due to some bad luck, Jacques has to raise some money in a
00:55:56 ►
hurry, and is trying to do so by selling his new CD titled Nature Loves Courage.
00:56:02 ►
That’s all one word.
00:56:04 ►
And just now we heard Terrence McKenna
00:56:06 ►
talking about his botanical preserve in Hawaii
00:56:08 ►
and his hope for it to be a place
00:56:10 ►
where some of these rare and exotic plant species
00:56:13 ►
could be grown and propagated.
00:56:16 ►
And for a while, after Terrence died,
00:56:18 ►
the garden wasn’t tended as well as it should have been.
00:56:21 ►
But now Jacques is working with Terrence’s family
00:56:24 ►
to restore it to its pristine state.
00:56:27 ►
And so he’s become a caretaker gardener at Terrence McKenna’s old house in Hawaii.
00:56:32 ►
So if you can, it would be really cool if you can give Jacques a helping hand.
00:56:36 ►
And I’m sure you’ll enjoy his music as well.
00:56:39 ►
And I’ll link to all that on the program notes for this podcast as well.
00:56:43 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for today.
00:56:46 ►
And so again, I’ll close by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the salon
00:56:50 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
00:56:54 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
00:56:59 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link
00:57:02 ►
at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org. Thank you. can download at genesisgeneration.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:57:28 ►
Be well, my friends.