Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

http://deanchamberlain.com/[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“McLuhan should be looked at more carefully. I think McLuhan was never correctly centered visa vie the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definition, and the drugs have done that to a great extent.”

“The notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion.”

“The fact that we rely on an intellectual method [science] two thousand years old almost precludes our understanding of anything interesting.”

“The present is the interference pattern caused by the forward and backward flowing causitries inherent in time. Where they meet they form an interference pattern, a standing wave if you will, which is what a hologram is. And it’s that which is experienced as the now, and it is half of the past and half of the future.”

“And this is why the drugs are so controversial, because they free you from the myth of the tribe.”

“It’s trying to make sense of our intuitions in the light of the enormous pressure to accept prepackaged ideologies that makes neurotics of us all.”

“And it isn’t necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded. It’s more about participating in a new language of self-reflection. This is what we need to do. Some of us should take drugs. It’s a professional kind of obligation. That’s what a shaman is. He’s a guy whose professional obligation is to take drugs, but we all have an obligation to create a language that values us and the people around us.”

“We cannot afford the unconscious anymore. This is a concept that has to take its place with the high-button shoe. We must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the Earth like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24

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

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And yes, you are correct in thinking that it’s now been two weeks since I’ve posted a podcast.

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And the reason you ask?

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Well, I guess it can be summed up by a single word.

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Sloth.

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I was just goofing off, more or less.

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And I hope you had a little time this summer to do the same.

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But while I was goofing off, some of our fellow salonners went out of their way to provide some funding here to help keep these podcasts winging your way.

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So a huge thank you goes out to Zach M., Eric S., Brian K., Andy W., Jeffrey S., and Jason

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H.

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Andy W Jeffrey S

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and Jason H

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and Jason along with a very generous donation

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sent a note that read in part

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been meaning to donate for a while

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so nice to have such a wealth of McKenna Talks

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and others readily available

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he along with Robert Anton Wilson

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leave me in awe with their insights

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as well as chuckling with their great humor

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thanks again Jason and a huge thank you to you,

00:01:28

Jason, as well as to Zach, Eric, Brian, Andy, and Jeffrey.

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And I also want to thank fellow slaunters like Jason who have encouraged

00:01:36

me to keep posting Terrence McKenna talks. But you should know that

00:01:39

there are others who seem to have had enough of the bard for a while.

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And I promise to take their wishes into account, too.

00:01:47

So, just as soon as I play today’s talk, that is,

00:01:50

which is the last in the series that I began two weeks ago.

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And now, for this final session of this workshop today,

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we’re going to hear Terrence McKenna, waxing eloquent,

00:02:03

about topics that range from Marshall McLuhan to the I Ching

00:02:06

in a workshop that was recorded sometime in 1984.

00:02:20

I’m curious to know how you see the role of the I Ching in all of this.

00:02:24

Ha, ha, ha. Such a question so late in the game. I’m curious to know how you see the role of I Ching in all of this.

00:02:28

Such a question so late in the game.

00:02:36

Well, the I Ching, you asked about stillness concepts.

00:02:40

The I Ching is a very old system of something that was created out of a combination of Taoist yoga techniques and mathematical

00:02:50

curiosity. What was happening, I think, was that in states of deep meditation, modalities

00:02:59

were observed. You know, it says in the Siddharaarika tantra sutra that when the buddha attained

00:03:07

enlightenment through the night he watched the causal uprising and down flowing and this is what

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you see in these deep states of the it’s called stilling the heart meditations, you see the passage of modalities of some kind,

00:03:27

their elements.

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And the Chinese noted that there seemed to be 64 of them,

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or you only needed 64 terms to describe them,

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and they sensed that it was something about time.

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But their linguistical and categorical imperatives were such that they didn’t see

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it the way we would. They assumed these things to be like archetypes. What I suggested was

00:03:59

that they were actually varieties of time. And actually there was a 16th century Chinese philosopher

00:04:06

who pulled this all together out of the ancient sources

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and said, you know, the hexagrams are descriptive of time.

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They’re hierarchically structured at many levels

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so that on one level, hexagrams are influencing a situation

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and passing away at a rate of many a second,

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and on another level at a rate of many a minute,

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and on another level at a rate of many an hour,

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and on another level at a rate of a few per century.

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And it is the interpenetration of these modalities on various levels

00:04:47

that finally issues into what we call the here and now situation.

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And it’s too complicated to go into here,

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but there is a way of looking at the sequence and structuring it

00:05:02

that allows you then to draw maps of novelties and aggression into time

00:05:07

to create a completely non-scientific theory of time

00:05:11

that is nevertheless not occult, meaning has no hidden elements,

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and is completely mathematical and predictable and self-consistent.

00:05:20

This was more my question in that you’re talking about information structures being generated

00:05:24

in new ways through computers

00:05:26

and the effect of the I Ching on our culture

00:05:29

as it enters our culture and restructures our perception of time.

00:05:32

And if there’s a conflict, because the computer structure,

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the logically generated, internally consistent structure,

00:05:39

and the I Ching is an illogical but also in turn a consistent structure.

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Well, like DNA, these very large systems with very large numbers of elements

00:05:51

can have irrational inputs and still have everything end up in the right place at the end.

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I mean, if you read Pagosian’s work, where you discover that global

00:06:06

rules govern

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situations which, when analyzed

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very locally, appear highly chaotic.

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And this is what

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the I Ching is saying. I mean, here we have

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a world which appears highly chaotic,

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but which, when analyzed at higher

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levels, turns

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out to be

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describable by very rigorous methods so the converse is

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true too that what seems to be very orderly structure in a computer network

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is on a higher level actually chaotic that’s right this problem of order and

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constraint is a very difficult one for instance a sociologist can tell you that

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in the next 12 months, I

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don’t know what the number would be, but let’s say 30 people are going to jump off the Golden

00:06:51

Gate Bridge. Well, now, does that, so then someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge,

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not because they’re despondent, they’ve lost their job, they just don’t want to live any longer. Are they free?

00:07:06

How free are they if at the end of the year

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we look at the wreck and say, yes, it certainly is true,

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30 people jumped off the bridge just like you said they would.

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So apparently there was almost no freedom in the total system.

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It came in right on the dot,

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yet every one of the people who jumped off the bridge

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felt they were making a completely independent choice exercising free will. Were they free?

00:07:31

Which goes back to what we were talking about about truth drugs and things like that. Are

00:07:36

we creating that through our beliefs, which is the same sort of thing we’re doing when

00:07:40

we predict statistically?

00:07:41

Perhaps. Or it may be something else. It may have something to do with how probability works.

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It’s not clear that probability is a good way of describing nature.

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The only time we get randomness

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is when you examine the output of a random number generator.

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There is no other process in

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nature that can be relied upon to produce random numbers, yet we use the

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notion of randomness. Our entire physics is probabilistic and statistical with

00:08:17

the notion of randomness, a very unexamined philosophically notion

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centered right in the middle of things and it may be a

00:08:25

kind of fudging what we think is an explanation that things are probabilistic

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is actually a statement of complete ignorance that we don’t know how things

00:08:34

work so we say they’re probable

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well there’s a pattern or there’s a norm but nothing is really nothing really

00:08:42

fits the norm so you always have to describe it by approximation.

00:08:46

That’s right.

00:08:46

And so that’s where the probability of getting close to this approximation

00:08:52

is a useful tool because everything is a dynamic state,

00:08:56

and so you can’t define it in terms of,

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except on a moment-by-moment basis in a static model.

00:09:03

And so you need the probabilities to describe the transition from one stage to another.

00:09:07

But it’s created all kinds of consequences that were not expected,

00:09:12

like the notion of the citizen and the way democracies and the way power is apportioned

00:09:19

because we have these probabilistic and statistical notions about human beings.

00:09:26

Politically, we atomize ourselves.

00:09:29

We say, you know, we live in the fiction that all citizens are equal,

00:09:34

which is absolute pomp and con.

00:09:36

It’s simply that how else can we have the kind of social system we have and have it function?

00:09:47

kind of social system we have and how it functions. So the tools, you have to beware of the tool,

00:09:56

of what the tool does to you as well as, yes. McLuhan should be looked at more carefully.

00:10:03

I think McLuhan was never correctly centered vis-a-vis the psychedelic phenomena the way he should have been. People thought he was

00:10:05

talking about the impact of television and print and this sort of thing. What he was

00:10:09

really talking about is how cultural inputs to sensory modalities change self-definitions,

00:10:20

and the drugs have done that to a great extent.

00:10:26

And so has Li Qing.

00:10:30

I used it for seven years and it stopped because I found that it was… I was starting to live two weeks…

00:10:31

Well, I was living for a long time, two weeks or two months in the future.

00:10:35

And not being right here because I was sort of pre-structuring what was happening.

00:10:41

Although this abolition of the future is a controversial thing.

00:10:44

For instance, I try to this abolition of the future is a controversial thing.

00:10:45

For instance,

00:10:48

I try to produce maps of the future with Li Qing on my computer

00:10:50

and people say,

00:10:52

you want to destroy the future,

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you want to take the surprise

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out of being.

00:10:59

Well, that seems to me rather silly.

00:11:01

I mean, if you tell me

00:11:02

you’re going to South America

00:11:04

and I give you a National Geographic map of South America,

00:11:09

have I destroyed the trip for you?

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Now there’s no point in going.

00:11:13

You know where every capital city is,

00:11:16

where the rivers run, how the mountains lay.

00:11:18

I just ruined it for you, you know.

00:11:22

I don’t think so, because what we are interested in is the details.

00:11:26

Maps don’t

00:11:27

make it unnecessary

00:11:29

to go to the places they portray.

00:11:32

There’s a deeper fear, though,

00:11:34

in your friend’s comments, isn’t it?

00:11:36

I mean, the fear that somehow

00:11:37

the rational conceptualization

00:11:39

will somehow interfere with the intuitive

00:11:41

flow of things. I mean, that’s what I think.

00:11:43

I didn’t pick up the map. People don’t want to feel that freedom has been compromised, you know.

00:11:51

But my theory of time is not a predictive theory of events.

00:11:57

I’ve just quantified one quality, which I call novelty,

00:12:04

and following Alfred North Whitehead and talk about how

00:12:08

history is the career of novelty ingressing into time and sometimes novelty comes fast and

00:12:18

sometimes it comes slow consequently its ingression rate can be portrayed as a line graph.

00:12:25

And in some periods,

00:12:27

there’s very little novelty.

00:12:30

There is disorganization

00:12:31

and

00:12:33

compromise

00:12:35

of connection.

00:12:37

And then in other periods of history, we’ll say

00:12:40

Periclean Athens or

00:12:42

Mogho Delhi or the 20th century or the Nara period in

00:12:49

Japan there is great cohesiveness but then there is this ebb and flow of

00:12:54

something which physics will not will not be found to describe in other words

00:13:00

I like to make the analogy that science describes what is possible.

00:13:07

What is possible.

00:13:09

And what we need is a theory that tells us out of what is possible,

00:13:15

what is it that will undergo the formality of actually occurring.

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We have no theory of what is out of possible sets of things,

00:13:24

why certain things will undergo the formality of occurring.

00:13:29

And this is what we need.

00:13:31

But by placing science as the way of looking at the world,

00:13:36

we’ve decided that that is what will come back.

00:13:40

But science only describes the most trivial kinds of events systems.

00:13:46

What is the most worthy and worthwhile way of forming our reality?

00:13:50

Well, it’s a good first try because it’s the simplest case.

00:13:56

What science tells you is, what science is interested in,

00:14:00

is those situations where if the initial conditions are reestablished exactly,

00:14:07

the process will occur exactly as it occurred every other time.

00:14:13

The initial conditions are the same, the end state will be the same.

00:14:18

But in all experience, this isn’t true.

00:14:24

I mean, if I say that I’m falling

00:14:26

in love and you once

00:14:28

fell in love it doesn’t mean

00:14:30

that the way your love affair

00:14:32

ended is how mine will end

00:14:34

and so there is no guidance

00:14:36

for understanding

00:14:38

by extrapolation of past

00:14:40

cases and this is where

00:14:42

we need help because this is where we

00:14:44

feel and bleed is in the realm

00:14:47

of these processes where initial conditions are no guarantee of final end state but i wonder if

00:14:53

we had that ability to predict that then if we wouldn’t avoid feeling and avoid suffering the

00:15:00

moment and avoid a certain dimension of life

00:15:02

you mean we would fear to be victims in a moment and avoid a certain dimension of life.

00:15:08

You mean we would fear to be victims?

00:15:14

Well, of our own desire to escape unpleasant feelings by saying, well, this is going to happen,

00:15:16

and without staying with the uncertainty.

00:15:18

I don’t think it’s…

00:15:19

Well, presumably, if you have a theory

00:15:21

which will tell you how a situation will evolve,

00:15:24

then you steer it the way you want it.

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You know, it isn’t rote.

00:15:29

It isn’t like a ball rolling downhill.

00:15:32

Then, of course, you have to take your steering of consciousness into account

00:15:35

with the prediction itself.

00:15:37

Well, there’s no escaping the input, the fact that there is a hand on the tiller.

00:15:43

The uncertainty principle has to be expanded to include everything

00:15:48

and to actually the notion of certainty is a culturally naive and unexamined notion.

00:15:56

See, the problem with Western thinking and science especially

00:16:00

is that it’s a historical phenomenon.

00:16:05

The oldest scientists were people like Thales

00:16:08

and these people 2,000 years in the past.

00:16:12

This means that the most epistemologically fundamental

00:16:18

assumptions of science are the least examined

00:16:22

for flaws in their sophistication in the light of experience.

00:16:28

The fact that we rely on an intellectual method 2,000 years old

00:16:32

almost precludes our understanding anything interesting.

00:16:38

That’s why people like Ralph Abraham with his theory of dynamics

00:16:43

and Ilya Prigogine with his non-equilibrium

00:16:47

thermodynamics and Manfred Eigen with his autocatalytic hypercycles these are

00:16:53

interesting new approaches because they they don’t predict end states from

00:16:58

initial conditions they only predict broad target areas where processes can be expected to come to rest.

00:17:08

I think a great deal of anxiety would leave human society if we had this grip on the future.

00:17:18

You can make a biological argument that what life does, leaving aside what it is,

00:17:28

what it does is it conquers dimensionality. The earliest life forms had no impression of the world except that portion of the world

00:17:38

which physically impinged upon them. In other words, they had a tactile sense and then very slowly light sensitive

00:17:46

melanin chemistries were entrapped and light sensitive cells arose so that light and darkness

00:17:55

could be distinguished and then following upon that uh uh motility so that a third dimension

00:18:05

was claimed, the dimension of

00:18:07

space

00:18:08

and then as higher animals evolved

00:18:11

with binocular vision and the ability

00:18:13

to walk into the space

00:18:15

perceived, three dimensions

00:18:17

were gained

00:18:18

intelligence, the unique

00:18:20

human property of being able to command

00:18:23

past experience as though it were present through memory

00:18:27

is like extending this dimension-conquering faculty to time.

00:18:33

And I think that the psychedelic drug shows

00:18:37

that that’s the way the evolutionary arrow is pointing in man.

00:18:41

Again, Marcelliard’s statement about how the images of flight spoke volumes about the internal aspirations of the human psyche. We want to conquer dimensions. Life wants to conquer dimensions. And first it conquers the tactile, then the immediate two-dimensional space, then the immediate three-dimensional space,

00:19:06

and finally, through memory,

00:19:08

the dimension of time is added in,

00:19:10

and then theories of the sort

00:19:13

that the I Ching represents

00:19:14

and that my own ideas represent,

00:19:16

whether or not they’re true,

00:19:18

they represent an effort to do for the future

00:19:22

what the faculty called memory does for the past.

00:19:25

Well, if they work at all,

00:19:26

then in some sense they’re true,

00:19:28

adequately mapping something.

00:19:29

And as you’re talking,

00:19:30

I’m realizing that what I was saying underneath it

00:19:34

is that I have used I Ching and the Thoreau for a long time,

00:19:40

and what I realize now I was dissatisfied with

00:19:43

is that they are to a certain

00:19:45

extent alien philosophic systems to me and that as I stopped using them what’s happened

00:19:50

is that I start to dream more and more what’s going to be happening, you know, one step,

00:19:54

two steps, whatever down the road.

00:19:57

And that’s much more congenial to me and the problem really isn’t do you look ahead in

00:20:00

time but in what way do you look ahead in that.

00:20:03

If you do it through your own

00:20:05

dreams, then you have a philosophy inherent in those systems which is utterly congenial

00:20:10

to your own way of being.

00:20:12

Yes, well, sometimes you’re trying to understand your own life, and sometimes you’re trying

00:20:17

to create a general theory of being, and these things will issue into different sorts of

00:20:23

stances.

00:20:24

Uh-huh. and these things will issue into different sorts of stances.

00:20:32

Would you say that intuition or the imaginal mind is to the future what memory is to the past?

00:20:35

Essentially, yes.

00:20:36

I mean, I believe that eschatological objects,

00:20:43

if you want to put it that way,

00:20:44

eschatological objects, if you want to put it that way,

00:20:50

cast shadows backwards over the landscape of history and that we are drawn towards these things.

00:20:55

They are what C.H. Waddington called creodes.

00:20:58

They are narrow, canalized pathways of development

00:21:02

that it would take an enormous amount of energy

00:21:05

to lift you out of that channel

00:21:08

and drop you somewhere else.

00:21:10

It isn’t impossible,

00:21:11

but it’s highly improbable.

00:21:14

This is why religion cannot be dismissed

00:21:18

because religion is like the mass intuition about fate,

00:21:25

and the religious ontology for the human species

00:21:30

is generally eschatological.

00:21:33

Not always, not in Buddhism,

00:21:36

or, well, there are exceptions,

00:21:38

but it generally is eschatological

00:21:41

in that we are seen to be in the grip

00:21:44

of a backward-flowing

00:21:45

casuistry

00:21:46

that there is something pulling us forward

00:21:49

the telos

00:21:50

so unwelcome in science

00:21:52

science insists on operating

00:21:55

without teleology

00:21:56

and so its explanatory power

00:22:00

is in proportion to that

00:22:02

but the sense of the telos

00:22:05

is very great

00:22:06

and I think that it’s physically there

00:22:08

that what is really happening

00:22:10

is that there is

00:22:11

there are forward moving

00:22:13

meaning from the past to the present

00:22:16

causal chains

00:22:19

and there are causal chains

00:22:21

which operate the other way

00:22:23

from the future into the past

00:22:25

the present is the interference pattern

00:22:28

caused by the backward and flow

00:22:32

the forward and backward flowing casuistries

00:22:35

inherent in time

00:22:36

where they meet they form an interference pattern

00:22:40

a standing wave if you will

00:22:42

which is what a hologram is

00:22:44

and it’s that which is what a hologram is.

00:22:48

And it’s that which is experienced as the now,

00:22:51

and it is half of the past and half of the future.

00:22:54

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed about the future… I want to stop there because I disagree.

00:22:56

And I think that interface with Hitler requires operation of consciousness

00:23:01

that I notice while I’m doing therapy with someone,

00:23:06

that it’s the reinterpretation of the past

00:23:08

that changes causal lines in the past.

00:23:12

It’s not simply something laid down in the past

00:23:14

that comes to the future, into the present,

00:23:16

but it’s our interpretation of what the past was

00:23:19

that makes it real.

00:23:21

But in that sense, the past is a part of the present.

00:23:24

It was Proust

00:23:25

who said

00:23:26

the past

00:23:26

can never be understood

00:23:28

until it is remembered

00:23:30

yeah

00:23:30

and it’s that idea

00:23:32

and it’s remembered

00:23:32

each way

00:23:33

in a different way

00:23:34

it’s restructured

00:23:35

each time

00:23:35

like you remember

00:23:36

yes

00:23:36

nothing

00:23:37

nothing is fixed

00:23:39

this is for sure

00:23:40

and in some ways

00:23:41

it seems to me

00:23:41

working with my clients

00:23:42

that it isn’t the past

00:23:43

they’re really talking about

00:23:44

but they’re symbolizing certain aspects of their perception of present

00:23:49

reality in terms of certain memories, in terms of certain ways of seeing the past.

00:23:54

Well, the past is constantly, constantly changing.

00:23:58

I mean, one could study the changing past.

00:24:01

Did you know that the Renaissance was invented in the 1850s?

00:24:05

It didn’t exist before a German historian decided that’s what had happened.

00:24:11

And now we live in the light of the Renaissance, you know?

00:24:14

It’s just we don’t question…

00:24:17

Nobody was running around Florence talking about how great it is

00:24:21

that we’re living in the Renaissance now, you know?

00:24:25

History is fiction. History is fiction.

00:24:26

History is fiction.

00:24:27

Or Stefan Dedalus said,

00:24:29

history is the nightmare I am trying to awaken from.

00:24:34

I was wondering, in terms of telos,

00:24:36

the psychotropics, the backs of the planets,

00:24:41

could they be analogous to an intelli-q?

00:24:45

At the end of time.

00:24:47

That is drawing us to the future.

00:24:49

Yes, I think so.

00:24:51

I mean, I’m basically on this issue fairly platonic.

00:24:56

I mean, I think that, you know, Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.

00:25:01

is the moving image of eternity.

00:25:05

And that, I think, is probably true,

00:25:10

that eternity is all time,

00:25:15

and it somehow exists in a higher dimensional matrix than what we experience,

00:25:17

so that we can only section that dimension

00:25:20

to create the three- or four-dimensional world that we live in,

00:25:26

but that there is this platonic completeness,

00:25:31

at least in essence, whatever that means.

00:25:34

And that sort of carries me back to my time maps.

00:25:38

They don’t say what will happen.

00:25:41

They only say that certain levels of novelty and its lack

00:25:45

will be

00:25:46

fulfilled at

00:25:47

certain points

00:25:47

in time by

00:25:48

some set of

00:25:50

events

00:25:50

you see the

00:25:52

difference

00:25:53

so you can’t

00:25:54

have an

00:25:54

absolute

00:25:55

determinism

00:25:56

if you have an

00:25:57

absolute

00:25:57

determinism

00:25:58

you preclude

00:25:59

the possibility

00:25:59

of thought

00:26:00

meaning

00:26:01

anything

00:26:02

it just means

00:26:03

I’m saying

00:26:04

what I’m

00:26:04

saying because I have to say it.

00:26:06

You’re thinking what you’re thinking

00:26:08

because you must think it.

00:26:09

So an absolute determinism

00:26:11

is hopeless and indefensible

00:26:13

and destroys the intellectual enterprise

00:26:17

entirely.

00:26:18

So we have to have a free future.

00:26:21

But how free?

00:26:22

Looking at the case

00:26:23

of the Golden Gate Bridge

00:26:24

and the number of people

00:26:25

who will jump off it and certain things are very uh bound the time of sunrise tomorrow morning

00:26:32

you wouldn’t feel great trepidation about making a prophecy about that but nevertheless

00:26:39

forces could be invoked which would make it rise earlier or later,

00:26:46

but it is very much embedded in the matrix of inertia.

00:26:51

But everything interesting is not, is much more up for grabs.

00:26:57

Yeah.

00:26:58

What psychedelics do, and I begin this as a kind of summation,

00:27:09

What psychedelics do, and I begin this as a kind of summation, is they enrich experience, which sounds trivial, except that experience is all that we have.

00:27:16

One of the things, if my career or whatever it is could be said to be about one thing it’s the notion that

00:27:25

your understanding depends upon yourself

00:27:31

in other words

00:27:33

no myth of the tribe

00:27:36

will satisfy these myths

00:27:39

like science and religion and politics

00:27:43

they do not satisfy.

00:27:46

When I talk about this,

00:27:47

I usually mention the notion of the flying saucer.

00:27:51

People who believe in flying saucers

00:27:54

as alien spacecraft

00:27:56

nevertheless so undervalue their own identity

00:28:00

that they believe that contact will come

00:28:04

to the Secretary General of the United Nations

00:28:07

He will assemble Time Newsweek and the reporters from The Economist

00:28:12

They will get together with Carl Sagan and whoever

00:28:18

Explain it to all of us and then we will understand what’s going on. This is a

00:28:28

us and then we will understand what’s going on this is a sold-out point of view you have accepted their definition of you as a citizen the real fact of the

00:28:34

matter is an anarchy of the imagination where each one of us is our own Magellan

00:28:41

we are not living in the age when all frontiers have disappeared,

00:28:47

when all things have been tamed and made mundane.

00:28:50

We are living in the most exciting era

00:28:55

that has ever been

00:28:57

because we are about to turn to the real Terra Incognito,

00:29:02

which is the Terra Incognito in our minds, and it is for us to do.

00:29:09

And this is why the drugs are so controversial, because they free you from the myth of the tribe.

00:29:18

And that single fact, the fact that they decondition you, They don’t decondition you at the chemical level,

00:29:27

like make you forget everything you believe so you have to start over. They decondition you at the

00:29:33

ideological level. So you just look around at the society you’re in and its contradictions and

00:29:41

preposterous assumptions are perfectly visible to you.

00:29:45

And that frees you then to create a new world through self-experience,

00:29:51

not by taking Heidegger’s word for it or somebody else’s word for it,

00:29:56

but creating it through your own experience.

00:29:59

And this is what we should all be involved in,

00:30:01

and this would carry us to psychological balance

00:30:05

it’s trying to

00:30:07

make sense of our intuitions

00:30:10

in the light of the

00:30:11

enormous pressure

00:30:13

to accept prepackaged ideologies

00:30:16

that makes neurotics

00:30:17

of us all

00:30:18

and the only way out

00:30:21

of that is to step back from it

00:30:23

and to say I will only believe what I know.

00:30:27

I will be like someone from Missouri.

00:30:30

You know, show me and I’ll believe it.

00:30:33

This is why I always, my favorite person in the New Testament

00:30:37

is Thomas the Doubter.

00:30:42

Because if you will recall, Christ returned.

00:30:47

The apostles were gathered in the upper room.

00:30:50

And Christ came to them, I think, on the 40th day.

00:30:54

But Thomas was not there.

00:30:57

So then later, and then Christ went away.

00:31:00

And so then Thomas came and they said,

00:31:02

the master was with us.

00:31:04

And he said, you know, you guys have been smoking too many of those little brown cigarettes.

00:31:09

The master has gone from the plane.

00:31:14

Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it.

00:31:19

So then a few days later, Thomas was with them, and Christ came again.

00:31:25

And he said to him,

00:31:27

Thomas, put your hand into the wound that you might believe.

00:31:32

And he did, and he believed.

00:31:34

Okay, so what conclusion do we draw from this story?

00:31:38

The conclusion is that of all of the people,

00:31:43

of all of the disciples,

00:31:48

the only person in all of human history recorded to have actually touched the incorporeal body of the risen Christ

00:31:54

was Thomas the Doubter.

00:31:56

And he was allowed that.

00:31:58

He was vouchsafed that unique blessing because he doubted and that’s yes he insisted on

00:32:09

experiencing it himself and so he touched the incorporeal body the white

00:32:15

stone at the end of time and this is what we are trying to do because you

00:32:21

know if you can get your hand on the doorknob, you can turn it and walk through.

00:32:27

And the Secretary General of the United Nations need not be at your elbow.

00:32:32

Nobody need be at your elbow.

00:32:34

And this is what shaman know.

00:32:36

They have touched the doorknob, turned it, and walked through.

00:32:40

And they are out of time and out of history.

00:32:43

And their immense personal presence, or at and their immense personal presence or at least the

00:32:46

immense personal presence that i have experienced uh among the ones who are genuine is because

00:32:53

they have taken responsibility for their model of the world and have modeled the world

00:33:01

based entirely on their own experience.

00:33:05

Yes?

00:33:05

One question.

00:33:07

I was never exposed to any drugs,

00:33:09

never tried any drugs, no, anything.

00:33:11

And the way you’re talking feels to me like this is the only way

00:33:16

to be aware, to become awareness of our own being our own to me the experience that came to me with the

00:33:28

near-death experience which without any drugs without anything my life changed

00:33:33

after this because I became aware of a different dimension and I never was

00:33:37

aware before but it was without drugs. So why don’t you explain this? No, I don’t think drugs are the only way. I think that they are the most

00:33:50

effective way when you’re talking about transforming an entire society or a planet. But there is, you know, many shaman are not drug users.

00:34:00

We’ve here spoken, because we spoke mostly of Amazonian shamanism, as though the use of hallucinogens and shamanism are always co-present, not necessarily true.

00:34:12

I have often people say, you mean think we are caught in a culture crisis

00:34:27

where there is real immediacy to the notion that we have to get on with it.

00:34:34

But yes, near-death experiences…

00:34:36

How do you compare the two experiences?

00:34:39

Because to me, I became very aware of new dimensions,

00:34:44

and my own truth came. I didn’t have to learn by… of new dimension and my own truth came.

00:34:45

I didn’t have to learn by nobody teaching me, my own truth.

00:34:49

And the world looked at me like it was supposed to be and never changed since then.

00:34:57

But I’d like to know how could you compare the two experiences? Is there any way? Well, I guess you can compare them in their results.

00:35:08

You can’t compare them in their content.

00:35:11

That’s the thing.

00:35:11

In the results.

00:35:12

Yes.

00:35:12

Some people think you can compare them in their chemistry.

00:35:15

That’s true.

00:35:16

So I think that there might be more similarities

00:35:21

when you first consider the appointment.

00:35:27

I’d like to get back to one of your concluding statements

00:35:30

on how the use of the psychedelics will decondition a society through its mythology.

00:35:38

Now, that doesn’t seem to have happened to the Amazonians.

00:35:41

It really seems to have reinforced their mythology.

00:35:45

Well, we’ve based on those experiences.

00:35:47

Yes, that’s right.

00:35:48

Well, we have no record. We find them using this drug. We have no notion of what ideological

00:35:56

transformations may have brought them to that point. There are tribes in the Amazon, right

00:36:02

next door to the people we’re talking about who don’t use drugs.

00:36:05

And so we can’t know what upheavals of ideology they have been through.

00:36:13

When there is a tradition which supports the notion of the deconditioned individual,

00:36:23

then you get the institution of shamanism.

00:36:26

We don’t have any comparable institution.

00:36:30

So that there,

00:36:33

if you are of a shamanic temperament,

00:36:35

you will be selected out

00:36:37

and put in that position.

00:36:41

We do, but we don’t give a credence

00:36:44

within a total unitive sort of context. We have

00:36:48

sports, for example. There’s ample evidence for athletes entering into all sorts of shamanic

00:36:54

experiences and experiencing sitting and everything else and not knowing what in the world’s going

00:37:00

on with them. You know, and that just happens. I mean, marathon runners and droves

00:37:05

have these kinds

00:37:06

of experiences.

00:37:08

Distance swimmers,

00:37:09

anyone who gets

00:37:10

into hyperventilating,

00:37:12

tremendous physical activity,

00:37:14

we do have that

00:37:15

in our culture.

00:37:16

It’s a warrior type ethic

00:37:18

as opposed to

00:37:19

more of a healing one.

00:37:20

But it does exist.

00:37:22

It’s also a question

00:37:23

of how much

00:37:24

you can decondition yourself in the absence

00:37:26

of any other example in other words if you’re part of a nomadic amazonian tribe

00:37:34

there is no model there is the social model of the tribe and the only thing you can decondition yourself into is acceptance of the

00:37:46

secret non-public aspects of the ideology in the men’s societies or

00:37:51

something like that. Well and we have we have pharmacological means for

00:37:56

intervening where and we need them because we’re at such a terminal state

00:38:01

with this problem.

00:38:04

It’s a personal response to it,

00:38:06

but also on a social level we need to have this happen.

00:38:09

That’s right. We need to talk about it.

00:38:11

And it isn’t necessary for everybody to go out and get loaded.

00:38:15

It’s more about participating in a new language of self-reflection.

00:38:21

This is what we need to do.

00:38:22

Some of us should take drugs.

00:38:26

It’s a professional kind of obligation.

00:38:29

That’s what a

00:38:30

shaman is. He’s the guy whose professional

00:38:32

obligation is to take drugs.

00:38:34

But we all have an obligation

00:38:36

to create a language that values

00:38:38

us and the

00:38:40

people around us. And this begins

00:38:42

with a language that values the

00:38:44

self and our experiences

00:38:46

experience

00:38:47

this is the central thing

00:38:49

above and beyond

00:38:50

all else

00:38:51

I wanted to come back

00:38:52

to something

00:38:52

that you were saying

00:38:53

a while ago

00:38:53

and that was

00:38:54

the deconditioning

00:38:55

of the culture

00:38:55

and I just have

00:38:59

a couple of observations

00:39:00

and I’d like to know

00:39:01

if you have any

00:39:02

reaction to this

00:39:02

it’s always been

00:39:03

a curious fact to me that during the 60s,

00:39:07

as we were beginning to move out into space,

00:39:10

we were also taking drugs at a very heavy rate.

00:39:13

There was an inner and outer exploration that was going on there simultaneously.

00:39:17

Out of that experience, I think we have in some ways reconditioned the society

00:39:22

specifically in regards to the psychedelic experience

00:39:25

and the ecology movement and beginning to see things in more whole patterns.

00:39:30

And I wonder if you have any comments about that.

00:39:33

Well, I think all of these things, like the ecology movements,

00:39:37

the hippies, the dietary sensitivity,

00:39:43

diabetes, dietary sensitivity,

00:39:50

all of this stuff arises out of the awareness of the culture crisis,

00:39:52

basically traceable back to the bomb.

00:39:55

I think the bomb has had a wonderful effect in focusing people’s attention wonderfully

00:39:59

on problems that before they just tended to fly off in all directions behind. The thing I

00:40:06

might say about space, I don’t believe that, you know, we will go to space as we are so

00:40:13

that we’re going to create, you know, a South Bronx on Mars and to slavery and the moons

00:40:20

of Jupiter and this kind of thing. I think space is too much like the imagination. This

00:40:27

enfolding velvet darkness that stretches to infinity, that cries out to have artistic

00:40:34

objects dropped into it. It’s like going into the mind, going into the unconscious. The

00:40:41

same thing that we must do here on earth before we go to space. We cannot afford the unconscious the same thing that we must do here on earth before we go to space we must we

00:40:46

cannot afford the unconscious anymore this is a concept that has to take its place with the

00:40:52

high-button shoe we must be entirely conscious because we have the power to shatter the earth

00:40:59

like a rotten apple with a stick of dynamite inside of it. So there can be no more talk of the unconscious

00:41:07

or the freight of the primate body or anything like that.

00:41:12

We have to get our act together because nature is very ruthless

00:41:17

and you cannot rest on the notion that there’s some kind of deus ex machina denouement

00:41:24

which is going to make it all right,

00:41:26

even though we’ve blundered endlessly.

00:41:28

So it’s basically, strangely enough, a call to responsibility,

00:41:33

which is always, what is always charged against psychedelic drug use

00:41:36

is its flagrant irresponsibility.

00:41:40

So it’s a pretty, the lines are drawn.

00:41:44

Sounds like we’ve done a pretty big job of that.

00:41:46

I think so.

00:41:47

Thank you all very, very much for helping me think about all of this.

00:41:55

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:41:57

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

00:42:03

So, what do you think?

00:42:05

Is it true that we can’t afford the unconscious anymore?

00:42:09

I’m not so sure about that myself, but I do see how the Internet today is providing a

00:42:16

great deal of information that was largely unavailable before, at least easily.

00:42:22

But framing it in terms of us being entirely conscious does

00:42:27

have a nice ring to it, even though it may be a bit too intense for me personally to

00:42:32

be entirely conscious, but whatever that may actually mean, of course.

00:42:38

But the concept may also fit the observation of Dr. Spock in Star Trek when he said,

00:42:43

It sounds good, Captain, but it’s not logical.

00:42:47

Anyway, I guess I’m going to have to let you decide these things for yourself,

00:42:51

just as you have had to do with everything else in this life, I might add.

00:42:56

And, of course, how each of us answers what Terrence just now said

00:43:00

is a call to responsibility.

00:43:03

Well, that may well determine our destiny. And my guess is that

00:43:08

you and I are going to answer that call appropriately, whatever that means for each of us.

00:43:14

Now, I have another, I guess you’d call it a call that I’d like to pass along. Hopefully,

00:43:20

it won’t be a call into the void. I a long time friend who is a researcher and cataloger

00:43:26

of music inspired by the painter

00:43:28

Paul Klee

00:43:29

and by the way if you were a geeky

00:43:32

engineering student like me

00:43:33

you may be pronouncing his name Klee

00:43:35

K-L-E-E just as it’s spelled

00:43:38

however I have it on very good authority

00:43:40

that Klee is a proper pronunciation

00:43:42

in any event

00:43:44

my friend has compiled an amazing

00:43:47

list of musical works inspired by clay, significantly more than have been inspired by any other

00:43:53

painter, it appears. But when I asked him about how much electronic music has been inspired

00:43:58

by clay, he said that it was a genre he hadn’t yet researched. And so we’re better to put the word out to a wide range of highly musical and artistic people

00:44:09

than right here in the salon.

00:44:11

So if you have created any music or know of any music,

00:44:15

and it doesn’t have to be only electronic, I should add,

00:44:18

but if you know of any music inspired by one of Paul Klee’s paintings,

00:44:21

I’d love to know about it and pass it along to my friend.

00:44:21

by one of Paul Clay’s paintings,

00:44:24

I’d love to know about it and pass it along to my friend.

00:44:27

Maybe the best way to let me know is through a comment on the program notes for this podcast.

00:44:31

Or you can try sending it to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com

00:44:35

or through my Facebook account.

00:44:38

But I should warn you that email and Facebook mail

00:44:41

are both kind of hit-and-miss things for me.

00:44:44

Otherwise, I wouldn’t have time for anything else.

00:44:48

Which brings me to one last thing I’d like to mention today,

00:44:51

and that is the perpetual problem we have of how to find the others.

00:44:57

For example, here’s part of an email that actually did make it through to me the other day.

00:45:03

Lorenzo, I know you are quite busy these days from listening

00:45:06

to the salon, but hopefully you can help me. My fiancé and I are planning on moving to Beijing

00:45:12

next year, and I’m a little worried that I won’t be able to connect with anyone from the tribe.

00:45:17

I was wondering if you know of any tribe members who live in Beijing or just China in general.

00:45:23

If so, could you put me in contact with them?

00:45:26

It would be very nice to connect with some kindred spirits during our time there.

00:45:30

If not, I understand.

00:45:32

Peace be with you, my not-yet-met-in-person friend, Brian.

00:45:37

And here’s another message I received on Facebook.

00:45:40

Hello, Lorenzo.

00:45:42

If you’re eyeing my profile and wondering why I sent you a friend request

00:45:46

it’s because I’m here

00:45:48

looking for the others

00:45:49

my fellow Chad and I have been silent salon

00:45:52

visitors for years and years

00:45:53

thank you for all your hard work

00:45:56

we’re better people for having your podcasts

00:45:58

available to us namaste

00:45:59

well thank you for your kind

00:46:02

words Brian and Jennifer and

00:46:04

I want you to know that you bring up something that’s bothering a lot of us here in the salon, over on the Grow Report forums, too, and all over the net, for that matter.

00:46:24

Probably 50,000 people here in this valley, maybe more, maybe 100,000 even.

00:46:30

But I’m sure that there are at least 100 or more people who are also trying to find the others.

00:46:32

Yet we don’t know quite how to go about it.

00:46:34

I don’t know them, they don’t know me.

00:46:39

And this isn’t true just here in California, as far as the number of people.

00:46:43

People who think like you and I do are everywhere.

00:46:49

You know, you can’t go to any public space in the world without having been within shouting distance of another member of the tribe.

00:46:53

Yet we are fearful, and with very good reason, I should add. But we’re fearful of making our ideas too public because of the harsh surveillance states that we all live in.

00:47:00

Even here in the U.S., we have to be careful about what we say and who we say it to. But at

00:47:07

least if we’re only exchanging ideas and stories about psychedelic experiences and not exchanging

00:47:13

any drugs themselves, we’re not breaking a law, at least not yet. And so I’m going to suggest that

00:47:20

maybe we should, while we still can, think about getting together more in

00:47:26

full public view, so the world will know that we’re not trying to hide anything, and maybe

00:47:31

we could even use public technology like Meetup to schedule regular get-togethers in various

00:47:36

cities.

00:47:37

I remember when my wife and I were living in the L.A. area, we regularly attended a

00:47:43

monthly Timothy Leary meetup somewhere

00:47:45

near Hollywood. And if I remember correctly, at the time there were dozens of Leary meetups

00:47:51

all around the country each month. But just now I checked and found that they now only

00:47:56

show two groups that come up when searching for Timothy Leary. One of them is in Washington

00:48:01

D.C. with 57 members and the other is in New York City and has 395 members.

00:48:07

And my guess is that if you attended one of those two meetups, you might begin finding one or more of the others.

00:48:14

However, be sure to keep in mind that just because someone sounds cool, they may not be your best friend after all.

00:48:21

No matter what, I would never accept any kind of illegal substance, even as a

00:48:26

gift from somebody that you don’t already know quite well. That was one of the secrets of Kathleen’s

00:48:32

long-running salon. No talk about buying, selling, prices, or anything else about exchanging illegal

00:48:39

substances was allowed. It’s ideas that these salons are about. Psychedelic ideas to be sure, but

00:48:45

just ideas after all. So how do we get more of us together to share those ideas? Well,

00:48:52

even though I’m basically a hermit by temperament, I found when thinking about it, even I would

00:48:58

attend a meet-up here in North San Diego County area. And then I got to thinking that if even

00:49:04

somebody like me would maybe attend one,

00:49:06

that the idea isn’t so far out of line after all.

00:49:10

But if we are going to do something like this

00:49:12

on a large scale to where you knew ahead of time

00:49:15

that the meetup was being organized

00:49:16

by a fellow salonner,

00:49:18

then my opinion is that they should have

00:49:20

some nondescript kind of name for the meetup group.

00:49:24

Definitely don’t use any words that raise flags, words like psychedelic, for example.

00:49:30

So if anybody is interested in working on a project like this

00:49:33

and would want to start a discussion in the comments section of this podcast,

00:49:37

I’ll be sure to pass the ideas along here in the salon and see what we can come up with.

00:49:43

You know, in the lockdown societies that we seem to be heading into, maybe it would do

00:49:48

us well to begin to make more local contacts.

00:49:52

For, as you know, locals always survive empires.

00:49:57

Well, that’s all for now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this

00:50:03

and most of the podcasts from the psychedelic

00:50:05

salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the creative commons

00:50:10

attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just

00:50:15

click the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find

00:50:20

through psychedelicsalon.org and that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for today’s podcast.

00:50:27

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

00:50:32

Be well, my friends.