Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
NOTE: This podcast is a “companion” to KMO’s podcast #224 “Viral Disclosure”, which you may also find quite interesting.
[September 27, 2010 PRESS CONFERENCE UPDATE: Aliens ‘hit our nukes’: They even landed at a Suffolk base, claim airmen
Read more: Google News Search UFOs
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The more serious contenders [for explanations of UFO phenomena] as explanations, I think, fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?”
”… and there always seem to be loose ends that argue against whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive… . If the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron. In other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure.”
“So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it, and what is it for?”
“I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems, is haunted by our own naivete concerning language.”
“There is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness.”
“To my mind, if the UFO phenomena is something arising out of the super-ego of the human psychic organization, then we should ask why. What is it doing?”
“[UFOs] are an antidote to the scientific paradigm that has evolved over the past 400 years and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe.”
“The fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts.”
“I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO, to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic, rational, solar myth under which we are suffering.”
“[Science] is not some meta-theory at whose feet every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.”
“What assurance do we have that the several million life forms that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here? Do we have any assurance?”
“I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential, the possibility, of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves, and this raises for us all the tensions, all the issues, that accompany an adolescent love affair.”
“What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting genesis of communication for itself. It is language, somehow, that is loose in our species, on our planet, within and without the flying saucer.”
“So, communication, which we take astonishingly for granted considering the very basic kinds of needs that we communicate to each other, is actually the great frontier of our spiritual becoming.”
“Radical freedom doesn’t mean giving someone the vote. Radical freedom means the right to take over and control our own destiny and the destiny of this planet. Radical freedom means recovering our birthright.”
“What would you think if somebody attempted to take your sexuality away from you. In the suppression of the psychedelic experience the ma…
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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.
00:00:33 ►
And along with me, virtually at least, are several fellow salonners who have made donations to help with the expenses here in the salon.
00:00:40 ►
So a great big thank you goes out to Edgar A., Anomi, I think I’m pronouncing that right,
00:00:44 ►
our regular monthly donor, Mark C., who writes, Lorenzo, I appreciate the diversity and featured speakers that you’ve included lately and was wondering if you have any talks from Robert Anton Wilson, Marshall McLuhan, Aldous Huxley or Andrew Weil.
00:00:55 ►
Thanks, Mark. Well, thank you again, Mark. I agree that we could use some more talks by those great minds that you just mentioned, but as of now, I don’t have anything available from any of them,
00:01:08 ►
anything that’s not copyrighted at least.
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So if you or any of our fellow salonners can find some of those talks for us to use,
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I’ll be sure to play them here.
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Also, I want to mention that my Pay What You Can audiobook has now sold 21 copies
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since I announced that in August.
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And I’m putting your contributions to good use here in the salon
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and on another little project that I hope to be able to announce next week.
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So a big thank you goes out to all of you as well.
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And then there is longtime salonner Michael DeCircio,
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whose movie Tryptocene is now available in DVD.
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And he sent me a copy along with the following letter. Thank you. or better yet, through www.triptozane.com.
00:02:12 ►
I have also enclosed a copy of my novel, Milky Way Marmalade, an hysterically funny off-the-wall romp about how rock music saves the universe from an anti-music fascist.
00:02:19 ►
It has very psychedelic undertones and some overtones.
00:02:24 ►
Also enclosed is a Terrence McKenna lecture you may have heard,
00:02:27 ►
but I have not heard it on your show.
00:02:29 ►
It is called The Rites of Spring, and it is one of my favorites.
00:02:33 ►
And finally, a small donation to the show.
00:02:36 ►
Your podcasts have been so inspirational to me, as was your book,
00:02:40 ►
and I wish I could do more. Thanks.
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One day soon, we will meet in person and chat about life, the universe, and everything.
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Peace, Michael DiCircio.
00:02:49 ►
Well, Mike, I can’t thank you enough for all of those goodies,
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which also included a very generous donation to the salon as well.
00:02:58 ►
And I’ve got a link to the Tryptosone trailer on my personal blog and on my Facebook page as well.
00:03:04 ►
Plus, I’ll put one with the program notes here.
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So if you get a chance, you may want to check it out and give Mike some of your support as well.
00:03:13 ►
Now, getting on with today’s program, if you were paying attention in my last podcast,
00:03:18 ►
you heard me say that today I would be playing one of the talks that Bruce Dahmer gave in the UK last summer,
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followed by another talk by Terence McKenna.
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Well, I’ve decided to do them in reverse order and play the McKenna talk first.
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And while I’ve got some good reasons for doing this,
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rather than waste your time with my rationalizations, why don’t we just get to it?
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I’m actually going to play two McKenna talks.
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One is about 40 minutes long, and the other one lasts only about nine minutes.
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The first talk has floated around the torrent sites for a while,
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and at one time was broken into several YouTube videos,
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although they don’t seem to be there anymore.
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The talk is titled Angels, Aliens, and Archetypes.
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is titled Angels, Aliens, and Archetypes.
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And as you may guess, it is largely about the phenomena of unidentified objects in the sky,
00:04:12 ►
or UFOs if you prefer.
00:04:17 ►
The copy of this talk that I’m going to play right now is from a box of cassette tapes that Terrence McKenna left with a friend of mine not long before dear Terrence took leave from our little planet.
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And my friend has digitized them
00:04:26 ►
and given me copies to play but he prefers to remain anonymous himself so anyway a huge thank
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you goes out to him now should you have already closed your mind about these unexplained events
00:04:38 ►
you may want to hold your opinion open until this coming Monday, which will be the 27th of September, 2010,
00:04:46 ►
when there’s going to be a press conference in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club,
00:04:52 ►
where six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence
00:04:57 ►
about an alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, and as recently as 2003.
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In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously malfunctioned
00:05:11 ►
while disc-shaped objects silently hovered nearby.
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In all, there has been witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel
00:05:21 ►
about these unexplained intrusions into our nuclear stockpiles.
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And the notice I read about this press conference came from Reuters.
00:05:30 ►
And so I expect that this news is beginning to get a little traction,
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so you might want to keep an eye out for it.
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And what do I think about all this?
00:05:39 ►
Well, right now I have a number of different working hypotheses about it, but no firm belief.
00:05:45 ►
However, in a few minutes, we’re going to hear some of Terence McKenna’s ideas on the subject.
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And my favorite one of his is when he says, or maybe there is another tenant in our building that we are unaware of.
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I like that one.
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And we’ll hear his ideas about that possibility.
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So without any further ado, here once again is Terrence McKenna.
00:06:12 ►
I’m aware of how late in the day it is and I know some of you must be double parked,
00:06:18 ►
so I’ll make this as succinct as possible.
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make this as succinct as possible. This morning’s discussion caused me to wonder how much we would understand about electricity if our method of studying it was to stand on the
00:06:36 ►
tops of high hills and wait to be struck by lightning. It seems to me that’s sort of the position that we’re in vis-a-vis the UFOs.
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We have no real theory.
00:06:51 ►
We have conjectures.
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We have fiercely defended hypotheses, but we have very little that is concrete to go on.
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It’s almost as though the issue of the UFO were an onion and as we peel the layers
00:07:10 ►
of the onion we discover when we get to the center that there is nothing there whatsoever left.
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It reminds me that if you cross an onion with a UFO, what you get is a flying saucer that brings
00:07:29 ►
tears to your eyes.
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And so what I would like to do is, just based on the notes I took today, to review what the options available to us are in terms of trying to get some kind of intellectual
00:07:49 ►
handle on this phenomenon and I’ll move through them rather quickly one possibility that I suppose
00:07:58 ►
is now out of fashion because it wasn’t mentioned here today other than what Jacques said about ball lightning and plasmas
00:08:07 ►
is that the UFOs are somehow natural phenomena,
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perhaps piezoelectric forces that have an ability to interact
00:08:18 ►
with the delicate electrochemical machinery of the human nervous system
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to create an impression of hallucination
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or visitation or abduction. That’s one possibility. The more serious contenders,
00:08:36 ►
as explanations, I think, fall into three categories. Is it us? Are we being visited? Or is there another tenant in the building that we are unaware of?
00:08:51 ►
And my own feeling about this tends to vacillate.
00:08:58 ►
I have had contact experiences. I have seen a UFO very close. I have met with entities from other dimensions
00:09:11 ►
and it has not impelled me to take a strong position. I paid very close attention when these experiences were happening to me. And there always seem to be loose ends that argue against
00:09:30 ►
whatever hypothesis seems currently most attractive.
00:09:35 ►
And though Jacques didn’t mention it today, I recall in his book, The Invisible College,
00:09:40 ►
he stressed the absurdity that seems to attend the contact experience,
00:09:47 ►
that if the contactee will truly tell the unvarnished truth,
00:09:54 ►
then there will be elements in the story which will make the contactee look like a moron.
00:10:01 ►
In other words, the invalidation of the experience is an inimical part of its structure,
00:10:09 ►
almost as though the entities were saying, well, you may tell this story if you wish,
00:10:15 ►
but if you tell it truthfully, you’ll be taken for a fool. Well, there’s nothing wrong with being
00:10:22 ►
taken for a fool, except that it does seal the phenomenon
00:10:27 ►
rather nicely away from the very sober ladies and gentlemen who are making their careers
00:10:33 ►
in some branch of science.
00:10:36 ►
They are not interested in investigating the kinky, the anecdotal, the possibly pathological.
00:10:52 ►
In preparation for this conference, I re-read Carl Jung’s book, published in 1954,
00:10:56 ►
called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky.
00:11:01 ►
And to my mind, no one has really gone beyond Jung. He understood very clearly that saying that something is a denizen of the psychic realm
00:11:09 ►
no way precludes its also having efficacious force in the physical realm through the phenomenon
00:11:18 ►
which he called synchronicity. Some of the points which Jacques made today about the nature of the medical
00:11:26 ►
examinations that are reported, they are absurd. They are unnecessary to be performed at our level
00:11:33 ►
of technology, let alone any future more advanced level that we might be asked to believe in.
00:11:49 ►
to believe in. So if the UFO phenomenon is something that is coming from us, then what is it and what is it for? And I’ve given a good deal of thought to this question over
00:11:56 ►
the years because I tend to lean toward the notion that the UFO problem, like many subtle problems,
00:12:05 ►
is haunted by our own naivete concerning language.
00:12:11 ►
If I were to randomly choose, and don’t worry, I shan’t,
00:12:16 ►
five of you to come up here,
00:12:19 ►
and each one of you would have 40 seconds
00:12:21 ►
to explain to the rest of us what an atom is,
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it would be preposterous.
00:12:28 ►
None of us know.
00:12:30 ►
I doubt there’s a person in this room who can give an account of the atom
00:12:34 ►
that tallies with the quote-unquote orthodox description of the atom.
00:12:40 ►
So there is a curious fuzziness about the most mundane parts of reality when we really attempt to magnify and understand them in the clear light of consciousness. then, naturally, attendant upon the examination of any kind of phenomenon,
00:13:06 ►
which are rare or tend to be fringy.
00:13:11 ►
So it isn’t a matter of achieving consensus over the UFO.
00:13:17 ►
We can’t even achieve consensus about what constitutes a decent souffle.
00:13:29 ►
a decent souffle. So this passionate desire to drag us all under the umbrella of a single psychic organization, then we should ask why.
00:13:49 ►
What is it doing?
00:13:51 ►
And I don’t want to sound like a public relations agent for Jacques Vallée, but to my mind,
00:13:57 ►
with the exception of Jung, Jacques is the only commentator on the phenomenon who has
00:14:04 ►
really pushed the frontier back.
00:14:07 ►
To my mind, in The Invisible College,
00:14:10 ►
when Vallée says,
00:14:12 ►
in looking at the effect,
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not asking the question, what is it,
00:14:16 ►
but what does it do,
00:14:18 ►
you very quickly see what the flying saucers are doing.
00:14:22 ►
What they are doing is eroding faith in science.
00:14:29 ►
They are an antidote to the scientific paradigm
00:14:33 ►
that has evolved over the past 400 years
00:14:37 ►
and which has led us to the brink of global catastrophe.
00:14:41 ►
of global catastrophe.
00:14:54 ►
So the notion being developed here is that within the structure of the human psyche, there is something like a governor, something like a monitoring circuit, which when a society begins to evolve in a pathological or lethal direction, phenomena
00:15:09 ►
can be induced not by the egos of men and women, not by their institutions, but by the
00:15:17 ►
overmind, the collectivity of the human species.
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Phenomena can be induced which are so corrosive to the ideologies currently
00:15:28 ►
in place that their underpinnings are cut away, their validity is called into question,
00:15:35 ►
and their programs for social development and control are invalidated and destroyed.
00:15:42 ►
Now, a perfect example of this is the rise of infant Christianity.
00:15:47 ►
If you’ll cast your mind back to the situation in the early years of the Christian era
00:15:53 ►
and imagine the mentality of a Roman aristocrat, a person of power in Roman society,
00:16:08 ►
of power in Roman society. Their physics is drawn from democracy and atomism. In other words,
00:16:14 ►
they are thoroughgoing materialists. Their social theory is drawn from a tictetist and Plato.
00:16:30 ►
They are, in fact, extremely modern people by our own standards. However, among the gardeners and kitchen help and stable boys, there is news of a momentous event in the Middle East.
00:16:37 ►
A Jewish rabbi has triumphed over death and risen after three days in the tomb.
00:16:46 ►
Should the master of a Roman household have caught wind of this kind of superstitious talk among the health,
00:16:49 ►
he would have just dismissed it with a sneer.
00:16:51 ►
What a preposterous idea.
00:16:53 ►
And it is a preposterous idea.
00:16:58 ►
Nevertheless, the fact that an idea is preposterous has never held it back from making zealous converts.
00:17:03 ►
And within 120 years after the enunciation of the birth of
00:17:07 ►
Christianity, its missionaries were beating on the gates of Rome attempting to convert the emperor.
00:17:15 ►
Now I see a similar situation in the modern context, that rationalism, scientific technology, which began and came out of the scholasticism of the Middle Ages
00:17:32 ►
and the quite legitimate wish to glorify God through an appreciation of his natural world
00:17:40 ►
turned into a kind of demonic pact, a kind of descent into the underworld,
00:17:47 ►
a necheia, if you will, leading to the present cultural and political impasse
00:17:54 ►
that involves massive stockpiles of atomic weapons,
00:17:57 ►
huge propagandized populations cut off from any knowledge of their real histories,
00:18:03 ►
cut off from any knowledge of their real histories,
00:18:11 ►
male-dominated organizations plying their message of lethal destruction and inevitable historical advance.
00:18:15 ►
And into this situation comes suddenly an anomaly,
00:18:20 ►
something which cannot be explained.
00:18:23 ►
I believe that that is the purpose of the UFO,
00:18:27 ►
to inject uncertainty into the male-dominated, paternalistic, rational, solar myth
00:18:36 ►
under which we are suffering.
00:18:44 ►
So, I suppose if you had to categorize this point of view,
00:18:48 ►
you would say I’m taking a depth psychological, psychoanalytic point of view.
00:18:53 ►
What I’m saying is that the UFO is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the goddess into history,
00:19:06 ►
saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations,
00:19:14 ►
you have gone far enough.
00:19:16 ►
We are going to turn the world upside down.
00:19:20 ►
Your science is going to be shown up for what it is,
00:19:23 ►
nothing more than a pleasant metaphor
00:19:26 ►
usefully extrapolated into the production of toys for healthy children.
00:19:31 ►
That’s what science is good for.
00:19:34 ►
It is not some meta-theory at whose feet
00:19:38 ►
every point of view from astrology to acupressure to channeling
00:19:43 ►
need be laid to have the hand of science announce thumbs up or thumbs down.
00:19:55 ►
Now there is another possibility which can be dovetailed into the first.
00:20:02 ►
It is that it is not so much the overs-soul or the super-ego of the human species,
00:20:09 ►
which is responsible for stopping scientific masculine paternalism in its tracks, but rather
00:20:17 ►
that, unbeknownst to self-absorbed and myopic human beings, we have always shared, or at least for a very long period
00:20:27 ►
of time, have shared this planet with another, another intelligent species, another entity,
00:20:35 ►
which may have been perfectly content to allow us to abide in our ignorance of its presence until the point where it came to its awareness
00:20:47 ►
that our style was toxifying, ruining, raping, and perverting the planet.
00:20:57 ►
And at that point, this thing springs into action with similar end results as the previous scenario, the invocation of the super
00:21:08 ►
ego.
00:21:08 ►
It’s astonishing to me that in the 45 years that the UFO, are we being visited question
00:21:16 ►
has been kicked around, I have never seen in any UFO book or publication, the suggestion made that if we believe we are being visited by organic
00:21:29 ►
intelligent life forms from some other dimension or place in the galaxy, then we should very,
00:21:36 ►
very thoroughly examine the ecology of this planet for traces of its presence. What assurance do we have that the several million life forms
00:21:48 ►
that we know to exist on this planet all evolved here?
00:21:53 ►
Do we have any assurance?
00:21:55 ►
There are ways to gain that assurance
00:21:57 ►
by doing comparative DNA sequencing and this sort of thing.
00:22:02 ►
Some of you may know my own position, or one of my positions,
00:22:07 ►
which is that plants and fungi containing psychoactive compounds
00:22:15 ►
are extremely viable candidates for extraterrestrial intruders
00:22:21 ►
into the environment of this planet.
00:22:24 ►
And this is not to put down
00:22:26 ►
Whitley’s story, which is a very interesting story, but had he prefaced
00:22:31 ►
his story with the comment that before it all happened he took five grams of
00:22:37 ►
mushrooms, I doubt he could have sold it to his mother. Because in the world where
00:22:43 ►
mushrooms and other psychedelic plants are imbibed,
00:22:47 ►
such stories are commonplace.
00:22:50 ►
No big deal.
00:22:52 ►
So I’m always amused by UFO investigators and compilers of data who will tell you,
00:23:00 ►
well, the first thing we did is we got rid of all the stories told by anybody who was intoxicated on anything.
00:23:08 ►
It seems to me that move has probably absolutely precluded
00:23:13 ►
any possibility of understanding what is going on.
00:23:21 ►
You see, culture is something that we wear like clothes.
00:23:27 ►
We’re very much at ease with culture.
00:23:30 ►
Our mind is very much at ease with culture.
00:23:33 ►
And we gather the language of a given culture around us.
00:23:37 ►
Culture is the mind unperturbed.
00:23:41 ►
When a shaman or an ecstatic visionary goes into the wilderness and through ordeal or yogic practice or breath control or the taking of a psychoactive substance perturbs the mind, then we see what the mind is out naked, undressed from the clothing of language and convention.
00:24:07 ►
That’s why I’ve made this point over and over again.
00:24:11 ►
There cannot, there will not be a serious discussion of the origin of UFOs
00:24:19 ►
or for that matter of the nature of consciousness itself until we leave the utterly culture-bound, provincial, and hick-like attitude
00:24:31 ►
that science has foisted on us about perturbing the mind.
00:24:37 ►
Without the use of psychedelic substances,
00:24:39 ►
I think solving the UFO dilemma is going to be as thankless a task
00:24:44 ►
as attempting to understand the nature of the universe
00:24:47 ►
without availing yourself of the use of a telescope.
00:24:51 ►
It is simply tying our hands behind our backs.
00:24:57 ►
Now there is a third possibility,
00:25:00 ►
which is the one that is the more commonly entertained notion,
00:25:06 ►
which is simply that we are being observed by intelligent life forms
00:25:11 ►
that evolved somewhere else in the galaxy.
00:25:14 ►
They have quarantined our planet to keep us from being agitated by their presence,
00:25:21 ►
and they will eventually reveal themselves. I find this an extremely odious
00:25:29 ►
notion, especially the part about how much chaos there will be if the truth is ever revealed.
00:25:37 ►
This is nothing more than the reassertion of masculine paternalism. it’s right to keep secrets from the rest of us.
00:25:45 ►
It’s belief that there is a privileged all-male class
00:25:50 ►
of people who can be let in on what’s really going on
00:25:53 ►
and the rest of us, poor dears,
00:25:55 ►
have to be shielded from these tremendously shocking facts.
00:26:01 ►
I discussed this once with an entity
00:26:04 ►
and it said to me, well, you know,
00:26:08 ►
we’ve disguised ourselves as an extraterrestrial invasion so as to not alarm people with what’s
00:26:14 ►
really going on. We’re getting close to the end, folks. There is a fourth possibility, which I mention only in the interest of thoroughness,
00:26:28 ►
which is that these entities and their vehicles are not spacecraft at all,
00:26:35 ►
but are in some sense timecraft,
00:26:39 ►
and that we may be the tremendous sense of empathy with these quite physically unusual beings may arise out of the fact that we’re looking into the faces of our great, great, great grandchildren,
00:26:53 ►
who may be emanating back through time, carrying the message, a message, about some sort of future event or situation that lies many centuries downstream from us,
00:27:08 ►
but that is of such import that from that point,
00:27:13 ►
agents are moving backward and possibly forward through time,
00:27:18 ►
spreading the news of some kind of mode shift.
00:27:22 ►
This doesn’t seem to me to be impossible.
00:27:26 ►
However, based on my own experience,
00:27:31 ►
which is what I think this thing really comes down to,
00:27:34 ►
because what we have in the UFO issue
00:27:37 ►
is an official position supported by scientists,
00:27:41 ►
whether they be Neanderthal right-wingers
00:27:43 ►
or doctrinaire Marxists or whatever,
00:27:46 ►
a conspiracy of consensus against the personal experiences of individual human beings who
00:27:58 ►
are told, well, what you’re saying happened to you can’t have happened.
00:28:02 ►
You are insane.
00:28:03 ►
You are mentally ill, you are mistaken. So what we
00:28:07 ►
really have here is a political issue. Which do you believe? Your perceptions, memories,
00:28:17 ►
and expectations aided by your intellect, or some kind of utterly abstract, official, doctrinaire, sexist philosophy
00:28:28 ►
laid on from above.
00:28:30 ►
So I think really what the saucers do, if you accept their presence, is they empower us.
00:28:38 ►
They empower us to see science for the shell game that it is,
00:28:43 ►
see science for the shell game that it is,
00:28:48 ►
to see the past 400 years of Western culture for the pathetic narrowing of the spectrum of allowable phenomena that it is
00:28:55 ►
to the point where people think that if you can’t bang on something with a hammer,
00:29:00 ►
it isn’t real, which to me is just wild talk. I can’t even imagine where that kind of
00:29:08 ►
thing is coming from. So I think, and I’ll just leave you with this final thought, that in lieu
00:29:18 ►
of the repression, and it is a repression throughout this century of legitimately available ways of exploring the modalities of consciousness,
00:29:31 ►
and by that I mean psychoactive compounds,
00:29:36 ►
the repression of those compounds and their use by science has created a neurotic energy dynamic in the mass psyche.
00:29:47 ►
And the mass psyche has begun to hallucinate
00:29:51 ►
because the destiny of human beings is to live in the imagination
00:30:01 ►
in the hands of the goddess.
00:30:10 ►
And wherever that thrust is impeded,
00:30:13 ►
psychopathy will result.
00:30:15 ►
There will be neurosis.
00:30:17 ►
There will be psychic epidemic.
00:30:19 ►
There will be confusion. So I believe that until we form a resolution to conduct an unfettered and mature exploration of the human psychology
00:30:31 ►
using all the tools available to us, that the skies of Earth will continue to be haunted by flying saucers.
00:30:40 ►
They will continue to be haunted by flying saucers and their denizens because they are symbols of our infantilism, of our sense of loss, of our incompleteness. heal that breach by simply recognizing that the true mystery lies within us.
00:31:07 ►
The true mystery is in the mind and its historical promise is the transformation of our society
00:31:16 ►
through the abandonment of reason as it has been narrowly defined by this extremely solar,
00:31:28 ►
as it has been narrowly defined by this extremely solar, masculine, paternalistic, materialistic legacy that we are the victims of.
00:31:31 ►
Well, I could talk for a long time, but I think that’s it in a nutshell.
00:31:36 ►
Thank you. Thank you.
00:31:48 ►
Well, it is late, and my voice is fading,
00:31:54 ►
but my talk this afternoon was fairly brief and there were a couple of points I didn’t cover.
00:31:57 ►
The area that I want to just spend a few minutes on tonight
00:32:01 ►
that I didn’t touch on this afternoon is
00:32:04 ►
what then is to be done?
00:32:08 ►
Tolstoy’s question.
00:32:10 ►
Once we reach this level
00:32:12 ►
of admitting the phenomenon,
00:32:14 ►
experiencing the phenomenon,
00:32:16 ►
trying to talk with each other about it,
00:32:19 ►
what is to be done?
00:32:21 ►
How are we to translate
00:32:23 ►
the message coming from the other side
00:32:26 ►
into a concrete reality that works for all of us?
00:32:30 ►
Or is that a good thing?
00:32:33 ►
And my take on this, which is nothing more than my take on it,
00:32:40 ►
is that what we are involved in and with in the UFO phenomena is an
00:32:48 ►
extremely poignant and intense effort to end our alienation from the unconscious
00:32:57 ►
that we can no longer have the luxury of an unconscious portion of the human psyche, that that is an artifact of the childhood of our species, and that in fact the ending of childhood, anticipated brilliantly in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End, the ending of childhood is what we are experiencing in relationship to the alien archetype. As a species, we are coming into a kind of
00:33:31 ►
pubescent awareness of the presence of the other. Our childish historical concerns that were self-directed and self-indulgent, no longer satisfy, and a deep kind of yearning has come upon the species,
00:33:51 ►
a yearning for the confirmation of the presence of an other,
00:33:57 ►
in the same way that an adolescent child becomes aware of and develops an extremely intense,
00:34:04 ►
highly charged and ambivalent attitude toward the opposite sex.
00:34:09 ►
I think we are discovering in our own psychic structure the potential, the possibility of a relationship with an intelligent species outside ourselves.
00:34:29 ►
species outside ourselves and this raises for us all the tensions, all the issues that accompany an adolescent love affair. How are we to eliminate the human unconscious and come into our birthright
00:34:39 ►
as fully conscious enlightened beings? What is to be done? done again my opinion is that what we need to do
00:34:50 ►
is to concentrate on the phenomenon of communication and the evolution of language we have been far
00:34:57 ►
too naive about the role that language has played in the construction of reality at its center,
00:35:11 ►
let alone off on the fringes with the elves and the fairies and the UFOs.
00:35:15 ►
We need to test the envelope of language. We need to perfect the fine idea of being able to communicate with each other.
00:35:22 ►
At the moment, and I think we proved it at this conference,
00:35:26 ►
it’s nothing more than a fine idea.
00:35:29 ►
I felt before I came to this meeting that we would all sit down in a room
00:35:33 ►
and make great progress in about an hour toward understanding the phenomenon.
00:35:39 ►
And then I discovered that we were all, including myself,
00:35:43 ►
heavily freighted with linguistic momentum,
00:35:47 ►
the power of our own metaphors to carry us past the opportunity to listen to what other people were saying.
00:35:56 ►
And so I think that what we are dreaming of is a common language. And what the saucers are attempting to teach is the modality of a linguistic
00:36:07 ►
transformation in the direction of a kind of communication that is not dependent on culturally
00:36:15 ►
sanctioned dictionaries, but that is in the bones, in the neurons, in the synapses, so that the ambiguity which attends all our discussions about reality
00:36:28 ►
will be purged from our worldview.
00:36:32 ►
This is the essence of falling in love.
00:36:35 ►
One definition of falling in love is nothing more than
00:36:38 ►
lifting the veils of misconception between two entities
00:36:42 ►
and still being able to go forward towards some kind of union.
00:36:47 ►
So I really believe that we have moved so far from an awareness of the feminine portion of our
00:36:56 ►
psyche that now the thing dearest to us and closest to us must present itself in consciousness under the guise of an extraterrestrial or interdimensional invader.
00:37:10 ►
It’s a comment on the alienation of our era.
00:37:14 ►
And the way this schism can be breached,
00:37:18 ►
the way this psychic wound can be healed
00:37:21 ►
and a kind of species-wide individuality emerge is through taking control,
00:37:28 ►
conscious control of the evolution of language. This means paying a great deal more attention
00:37:34 ►
to what we say to each other, to linguistic intent. I think that the main legacy of the 1960s into the 80s was a legacy of language transformed
00:37:47 ►
in the direction of feeling.
00:37:50 ►
To me, the most shocking part
00:37:52 ►
of the male dominance of our worldview
00:37:55 ►
is the paucity in our language
00:37:58 ►
of terms that convey emotion.
00:38:02 ►
We have 500 words
00:38:04 ►
for the components of a steering mechanism.
00:38:08 ►
We have five words for emotion.
00:38:13 ►
Each one of us is a swim
00:38:15 ►
in a concatenation
00:38:17 ►
of emotionally subtle wave phenomena
00:38:20 ►
that come and go
00:38:21 ►
just below the surface of our awareness.
00:38:24 ►
But if any one of us turns to
00:38:26 ►
another and says how are you doing the answer is fine fine yourself this is presenting a tremendous
00:38:34 ►
barrier to us to the expression of our wholeness and i’m completely willing to line up behind Carl Jung on the notion that the UFO is an expression of
00:38:48 ►
our longing for wholeness. In Principio et Verbum, et verbo caro facta mest,
00:38:55 ►
in the beginning was the Word and the Word was made flesh.
00:39:00 ►
In other words, if you were an actual
00:39:13 ►
In other words, if you were an actual extraterrestrial standing off in a spaceship looking down on this planet, you would not see the strivings of individual species.
00:39:30 ►
You would not even see the great classes of organized organic life. would see instead is a gene swarm, a language frenzy, the coding of meaning in genes, in words, in architectonic productions, in poetry. What is happening on this planet is the self-reflecting
00:39:39 ►
genesis of communication for itself. It is language, somehow, that is loose in our species, on our planet, within and without the flying saucer.
00:39:53 ►
So, communication, which we take astonishingly for granted,
00:39:58 ►
considering the very basic kinds of needs that we communicate to each other,
00:40:03 ►
is actually the great frontier of our spiritual
00:40:07 ►
becoming. It seems to have passed right by us that we already possess a form of telepathy.
00:40:15 ►
The miracle of communication involves the fact that I make small mouth noises and you instantaneously consult
00:40:25 ►
the culturally sanctioned dictionary
00:40:28 ►
and out of your dictionary
00:40:30 ►
you construct a map of my linguistic intent
00:40:35 ►
and then through a series of grunts and nods
00:40:38 ►
we assure each other that we know what we mean.
00:40:42 ►
So, in a sense,
00:40:49 ►
I said this afternoon that the UFO was here to confound us, to confound science. On another level, like the psychedelics, it is here to catalyze
00:40:58 ►
a finer evolution of communication, to goose us toward a little tighter epistemic and ontological definition
00:41:09 ►
of the business of communicating with each other. If we could refine our channels of communication,
00:41:17 ►
we would coalesce into the kind of omnipotent, extra-worldly organism that we anticipate in our vision of the flying saucer.
00:41:28 ►
So I think, really, the flying saucer has become the guiding image of our own cultural evolution.
00:41:36 ►
We are going to live in the imagination.
00:41:40 ►
This planet is involved in a birth process.
00:41:44 ►
There is nothing unnatural about what is going on on this planet, This planet is involved in a birth process.
00:41:48 ►
There is nothing unnatural about what is going on on this planet,
00:41:53 ►
and there is nothing unnatural or inappropriate about us.
00:41:58 ►
It’s simply that the planet has carried us to term.
00:42:01 ►
We are now ready to leave the womb,
00:42:07 ►
and the womb is in danger of toxemia if we in fact do not leave it.
00:42:14 ►
We have passed into a new kind of time where the separation of our species from the planet that gave us birth is a necessity for the survival of both parties.
00:42:20 ►
And like any birth, it is a moment of crisis.
00:42:23 ►
And like any birth, it is a moment of crisis.
00:42:26 ►
It can end in catastrophe,
00:42:32 ►
and perhaps the saucers stand off to perform a necessary cesarean if things really turn into chaos.
00:42:34 ►
Many contactees report an apocalyptic scenario
00:42:38 ►
involving the saucers taking everybody away in the wake
00:42:42 ►
or in the eminence of a thermonuclear exchange.
00:42:47 ►
However, the mature way, the self-reflective way, the dignified way out of this cultural impasse,
00:42:58 ►
out of this global standoff, is for us to take seriously, on a personal level,
00:43:05 ►
the possibility of evolving our communications with each other
00:43:09 ►
so that we actually become the loving family of the goddess,
00:43:15 ►
the planetary organism that we all feel ahead of us in the future,
00:43:21 ►
casting an enormous shadow back over the historical landscape.
00:43:27 ►
Eventually, and when is up to us, it will no longer be a higher dimensional object
00:43:35 ►
throwing a shadow into the flat dimensions of history.
00:43:38 ►
It will be instead a transcendental object made manifest.
00:43:44 ►
We are, in fact, on the brink of great changes.
00:43:48 ►
Yes, the UFO phenomenon has been around for hundreds of thousands of years, possibly.
00:43:53 ►
But nevertheless, it is somehow spun into the fate of our species.
00:44:15 ►
And the overwhelming image of self-transcendent flight, of return to a mandalic unity that transcends space and time, is the guiding archetype of our peregrination through history. So I believe that the UFO waits at the end of time in the same way that the individuated personality waits at the end of the ontological development of the individual.
00:44:29 ►
And if we act in good conscience and with great faith in each other,
00:44:35 ►
we can in fact realize the hope of the Irish prayer which says,
00:44:42 ►
May you be alive at the end of the world. Thank you.
00:44:55 ►
And good night.
00:45:06 ►
Wow. So where can I go from there?
00:45:11 ►
That has to be one of Terrence’s more dramatic closing comments, I think.
00:45:15 ►
I’ve been told that a great speaker never leaves an audience on their highest note,
00:45:20 ►
but in this case I’ll have to disagree because I really like the way he ended this talk.
00:45:26 ►
But as a podcaster, particularly since I don’t feel up to adding my own comments after that rousing close by the Bard McKenna,
00:45:29 ►
I still don’t want to end on such a high note.
00:45:31 ►
Now, I’ve studied some of the great West Coast DJs
00:45:34 ►
over the past few years,
00:45:35 ►
and I noticed how they kind of magically were able
00:45:38 ►
to change the intensity of the night
00:45:40 ►
by making a few subtle changes in their mix.
00:45:44 ►
However, I’m not that good, so what I’m going to do, rather than change the mix, is that
00:45:50 ►
I’m just going to change the Terrence.
00:45:52 ►
In other words, I’ve got a short bit that he did one night that I’ve just been waiting
00:45:56 ►
for a chance to slip in here.
00:45:59 ►
It was sent to me by our fellow salonner, Brian Pitkin, and it was in a folder labeled
00:46:04 ►
1991 Mannheim Psychedelic
00:46:07 ►
All-Stars. And in that folder, I found 20 MP3 files that averaged in time from 13 seconds to
00:46:15 ►
48 seconds and put them all together. And it only runs about nine minutes. So
00:46:20 ►
I’ve kludged these files together for you. And here’s how they came out.
00:46:24 ►
So I’ve kludged these files together for you, and here’s how they came out.
00:46:32 ►
An hour ago, I didn’t know I would stand on this stage.
00:46:40 ►
So before you give your attention to me, I’d like you to give your attention to the person sitting next to you,
00:46:49 ►
to the person sitting behind you. You see, political circumstances have forced us to camouflage ourselves.
00:46:52 ►
We look pretty much like everybody else.
00:46:56 ►
But an event like this brings us out of the woodwork.
00:46:58 ►
This is your community.
00:47:01 ►
This is your affinity group.
00:47:07 ►
Whatever you need, somebody in this room knows how to get it.
00:47:16 ►
So… So it’s not necessarily the four dicks on the stage
00:47:20 ►
that are going to lead you into a new world.
00:47:23 ►
It’s what you do for yourself to make
00:47:26 ►
this inner journey. As Tim’s mentioned, we’ve all been down in Linz thinking about virtual reality.
00:47:35 ►
And of course, for an American to come to Germany is to think about the great changes that are
00:47:41 ►
happening here. And I kept asking myself, what is the uniting theme
00:47:47 ►
between psychedelics, virtual reality, and Germany?
00:47:53 ►
And the answer is radical freedom.
00:47:58 ►
Radical freedom.
00:48:01 ►
Radical freedom doesn’t mean giving somebody the vote. Radical freedom means the
00:48:07 ►
right to take over and control our own destiny and the destiny of this planet. Radical freedom
00:48:16 ►
means recovering our birthright. What would you think if somebody attempted to take your sexuality away from you?
00:48:25 ►
In the suppression of the psychedelic experience,
00:48:29 ►
the masters who make the rules have taken away a major slice of what it is to be a human being.
00:48:38 ►
This is intolerable.
00:48:40 ►
We have been robbed of our birthright by the frightened, the constipated, the narrow-minded, the stupid, and the afraid.
00:48:52 ►
Take back your mind.
00:48:56 ►
Take back your mind.
00:48:59 ►
That is the message.
00:49:01 ►
is the message.
00:49:10 ►
Now, the psychedelic experience is always criticized, irrelevant, narcissistic, self-indulgent. No, the psychedelic experience is the replay of human history in the individual mind.
00:49:18 ►
If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.
00:49:27 ►
where you came from, you don’t know who you are. Part of this movement into the future
00:49:34 ►
is a recapturing of the archaic, the ancient, the prehistorical. And Tim said it right.
00:49:42 ►
That’s the Cro-Magnon religion of orgy, psychedelic ecstasy, and group sex. Well, how do we get from where we are to where we want to be,
00:49:53 ►
and why is it so difficult? Well, I think it’s difficult because we have a lousy way way of communicating. We communicate with words. Words are small mouth noises.
00:50:09 ►
Small mouth noises are a very low grade channel of communication. What virtual reality holds out
00:50:18 ►
is the possibility that we can create a language where we see what we mean.
00:50:25 ►
that we can create a language where we see what we mean.
00:50:31 ►
If we could see what we mean, we would have a kind of telepathy.
00:50:38 ►
Anyway, the last point I want to make, because I think this is very important,
00:50:48 ►
we all talk about psychedelics, the impact on ourselves, the individual experience. But what are they when you look at a million psychedelic trips? What does it do to society? What it does is it dissolves
00:50:56 ►
boundaries. It dissolves the ultimate boundary, which is the ultimate fakka, which is ego.
00:51:10 ►
Ego is something invented by frightened people 20,000 years ago as a way to suppress women, as a way to suppress sexuality,
00:51:14 ►
as a way to suppress the wonder inherent in the world.
00:51:20 ►
Psychedelics are catalysts for the human imagination.
00:51:24 ►
We were called forth out of monkey existence by the fact that we had strange eating habits.
00:51:32 ►
And the consequence of those strange eating habits is now a monkey can dream of transforming its collective soul into a flying saucer.
00:51:43 ►
This is the goal that lies ahead at the end of history.
00:51:48 ►
History doesn’t go on endlessly fluctuating centuries into the future.
00:51:54 ►
History is leading toward the transformation of this planet in our lifetime.
00:52:01 ►
A cybernetic, biological, psychedelic being, the collectivity not only of humanity
00:52:08 ►
but of all life on earth is struggling to be born.
00:52:13 ►
The entire universe of matter is the womb of mind and it is the task of human beings
00:52:21 ►
to lead the collectivity of humanity out of the labyrinth of matter and into the
00:52:28 ►
realm of the imagination.
00:52:30 ►
The imagination is where we’re all going to live.
00:52:34 ►
The imagination is the only place where the human soul is at home.
00:52:40 ►
Well, listening to Tim, one thing occurred to me that I wanted to leave with you, and that is what this is all about in political terms is the empowerment of direct experience.
00:53:07 ►
Maybe you remember the Bob Dylan song where he says, it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.
00:53:10 ►
This is what psychedelics teach you.
00:53:16 ►
We’re not going to learn it from Der Spiegel, from Time magazine.
00:53:18 ►
It doesn’t come like that.
00:53:30 ►
Direct experience, your experience, your opinion, your feelings, your sexuality is the only real thing in your universe.
00:53:39 ►
Don’t transfer loyalty to ideology, to money, to party, to friends.
00:53:45 ►
All of these things are outside of the core of your reality. And centuries of programming have been laid on to all of us to take away the power of our own direct experience.
00:53:56 ►
This is why psychedelics are illegal.
00:53:59 ►
They don’t care whether people jump out of windows or any of that.
00:54:02 ►
They’re not interested in public health.
00:54:05 ►
They do not want people to take back their minds. And we’re going to take back our minds. Soon.
00:54:16 ►
The sooner the better. That’s really, to my mind, the bottom line. That’s why this thing has potential world consequences, because
00:54:26 ►
an empowered individual in touch with their own existential core can do what that guy
00:54:34 ►
did with the 18 tanks. It was an idea that stopped the tanks, and it was an idea expressed not over state radio, not through the newspapers, but by one person taking a stand.
00:54:50 ►
You know, a great American philosopher, and I hope it was Emerson, said,
00:54:55 ►
No, no, it was Emerson, said,
00:55:00 ►
If you are right, you are a majority of one.
00:55:05 ►
You are a majority of one.
00:55:08 ►
And this is what we all need to realize.
00:55:10 ►
We are responsible for ourselves, and we will set the agenda for the human future.
00:55:19 ►
The mushrooms once said to me, you must have a plan.
00:55:28 ►
said to me, you must have a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you will become part of somebody else’s plan. You’re listening to the psychedelic salon, where people are changing their lives
00:55:38 ►
one thought at a time. So do you have a plan of your own or are you part of somebody else’s plan in my case i guess it’s a
00:55:50 ►
little bit of both i like to think that i have my own plan but i seem to have to keep adjusting it
00:55:56 ►
to fit the plans of quite a few other people as well but that’s okay because he also said we are
00:56:03 ►
responsible for ourselves and we will set the agenda for the human future.
00:56:08 ►
And although I’m not sure I’m actually up for such a big challenge, we’ll have to think about that for a while.
00:56:14 ►
But at least we can do something on a one-on-one basis with the people we touch each day, huh?
00:56:19 ►
However, I can’t help adding one more little thought here about the concept of culture,
00:56:25 ►
since Terence always seems to use culture as one of his main talking points,
00:56:30 ►
particularly in pointing out that culture is a cult.
00:56:34 ►
Now, I’ve had several exchanges with people who take great offense at that idea,
00:56:39 ►
mainly because they are quite attached to what they consider their own very sacred cultures.
00:56:45 ►
So here’s another way that you may want to look at it.
00:56:48 ►
And I’m taking this idea directly from an essay by Aldous Huxley,
00:56:52 ►
in which he expanded on a comment by Edwin Hubble in his own essay,
00:56:56 ►
The Role of Science in Education.
00:56:59 ►
And there Hubble said,
00:57:01 ►
Our only assets, both for ourselves and our children, are the faculties with which we were born And then it was Huxley who went on to explain that he thought what Hubble meant was
00:57:17 ►
the accumulated experience of past generations is the thing that we call culture.
00:57:23 ►
past generations is the thing that we call culture.
00:57:30 ►
Now taken in that light, is it any wonder that the accumulated experience of past generations of our ancestors in one part of the planet haven’t always migrated very easily and taken
00:57:36 ►
root in the middle of the accumulated experience of some others who have accumulated their
00:57:41 ►
own experience of how to best live in that particular geographic spot.
00:57:45 ►
Now, I realize that this is a way of oversimplifying things,
00:57:49 ►
but I found that by thinking of culture as accumulated experience
00:57:54 ►
and not some holy right to be preserved at all costs,
00:57:58 ►
and regardless of whether that experience is still valid in a networked world,
00:58:02 ►
well, for me at least, it helps me better to come to grips
00:58:05 ►
with Terrence’s concept
00:58:06 ►
that culture can sometimes be a cult.
00:58:10 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for today,
00:58:13 ►
and so I’ll close once again
00:58:15 ►
by reminding you that this
00:58:17 ►
and most of the podcasts
00:58:18 ►
from The Psychedelic Salon
00:58:19 ►
are freely available for you to use
00:58:20 ►
in your own audio projects
00:58:22 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution
00:58:24 ►
Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, Thank you. You can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audio book that you can download through genesisgeneration.us.
00:58:51 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:58:56 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.