246 - Elves, Egos, and Avatars

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Bruce Damer and Terence McKenna

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Bruce Damer.]
“In life if you let yourself be ruled by fear life becomes a fearful experience.”
“If you shake the Earth, all of the loose objects end in the West Coast of North America.”

“There’s nothing useful thinking about the same task fifty times. It’s the ego filling the space according to Tolle.”

“Advertising is heavily ego-driven. … So why do we have them creating our thoughts, creating our vision of ourselves? Why do we nominate them?”

“And also say, look kids, it feels good to be online and be doing fifty texts and having 10,000 Facebook members, but your brain is going to be mush. How do you explain to them let’s tone it down and watch the dosage level of technology.”

“It’s the strength of the survivors that’s always going to get you through. So how do we create a critical mass of people ready for the next phase, ready to build that new Earth?”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0201688409

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you’re getting into the contents of you’re hopes, memories, fears, and dreams. It’s much more like a parallel continuum. It’s much more as though you’ve broken through to some alien data space.”

“One of the most puzzling things about DMT is does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world one hundred percent with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in ‘Oh great. The world has just been replaced by elf machinery.’ Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You’re appalled.”

“The psychedelic experience, in the best sense of the word, is a religious activity.”

More about Bruce Damer
A Gigantic Unplanned Experiment … on You
by Bruce Damer
Damer.com
http://www.digibarn.com/
DigitalSpace.com
The Buddhafield Festival
Shamanic Freedom Radio
Bruce Damer’s October Gallery Talk

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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And I want to begin this podcast today by thanking some of our fellow salonners who made donations to help offset the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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And those people are Toby M., Carl K., or should I call you Buck?

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And we also received a donation from David Ke just as I was posting my last podcast.

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So, David, I’m sorry for being so long and thanking you.

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And thank you as well, Toby and Buck. We wouldn’t be here without you and the help of all of our other supporters over the years.

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Thank you all very much.

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Now, this past summer, Bruce Dahmer gave a couple of talks while he was in the UK

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where he was working on his EvoGrid project.

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And the first of those talks was given at the October Gallery

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and was recently recorded and then played by Opaque Lens.

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And it’s now available on his podcast, number 70, on the Shamanic Freedom Radio channel,

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which I’ll link to on the program notes for this podcast.

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And, by the way, Simon, I got the disc that you gave to Bruce to get to me,

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and I plan on listening to it this week.

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So, hey, thanks for thinking of me.

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Now, after the October Gallery Talk,

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Bruce gave a second version of it at the Buddha Field Festival,

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and that’s the one I’ll be playing today.

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As you know, Bruce titled this talk, Elves, Egos, and Avatars.

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And if you’ve been following any of the threads about ego death over on the growreport.com forums,

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I think you maybe will enjoy his personal experience of a full-blown ego death.

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Now, not long after Bruce gave this talk,

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one of our fellow salonners sent me a message saying that he had been just kind of roaming through the festival grounds

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at the Budafield Festival

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when he heard a voice that sounded vaguely familiar

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coming from a nearby tent.

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So he went in and discovered Bruce Dahmer

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giving the talk that we’re about to hear right now.

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And so that’s the image I’d like to hold on to.

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You and I have just walked into the big tent where Bruce is beginning to speak.

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So let’s hear what he has on his mind today.

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What I wanted to talk to you about, how many people were in the first session?

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It was pretty lively, wasn’t it?

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There was a young lady who I think has gone off now,

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and she asked the question,

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why do you need to take these hard, heavy drugs

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to grow in your life when there are so many other ways?

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And she has a very good point.

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I brought up a point that I was a

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very much a hard head very much a guy in my head and my teenagers of years I was

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into computers and things like this so for me to access deeper emotional states

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was was really a challenge so I kind kinda need to be hit on the head

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by a number of things but if you look at

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the world today and who it seems to me that the

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with the number one at least public spiritual

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teacher seems to be a cartel is that a fair

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assessment and if you go to the book shops there’s a

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huge rack to Tolle,

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this whole shelves with stands where the books are presented and the DVD sets are

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presented. So Eckhart Tolle is there. Well why is he there? Well do you know this,

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does anybody know the story of who Eckhart Tolle is? Eckhart, you may have

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heard me in the first session talk about Eckhart Tolle is. Eckhart, you may have heard me in the first session

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talk about Eckhart Tolle, but he’s a curious character.

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This is a talk about three curious characters.

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Eckhart Tolle, Terence McKenna, and Bruce Dahmer, i.e.

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myself.

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I’m a Canadian raised in the mountains the Rocky Mountains of Canada

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and exported myself to the United States in the mid 80s to discover technology

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but also the California alternative thinking scene so that’s just a brief

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background I do work for NASA designing space missions doing simulation and 3d

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modeling of space missions.

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I have a project, very nerdy project, to catalog the history of personal computing.

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And I’ve collected hundreds of personal computers from people all over the world,

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and they fill our barn in Northern California, a barn which also has three pot-bellied pigs.

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So I’m trying to figure out where this digital technology came from

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by collecting and getting working all these machines from the early 60s up.

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And you can see that at digibarn.com.

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I’ve got another project in virtual worlds where for 15 years

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I’ve been doing avatar stuff when it really first began on the Internet.

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It’s a new medium of communication. You know, most most of the stuff on the Internet is just old stuff recycled. So for example, you know, Skype is just as

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this phone call. Text chat is teletype. You know, email is sending a letter. But

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when virtual worlds first came into being on the Internet, and this was in 1995,

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this was before online gaming even, there were chess pieces moving around a virtual space station.

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And I realized when I saw that, because I was hoping that this would come,

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and I set up whole organizations to help this be born this is a brand new medium of communication that isn’t something of

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the 20th century or the 19th century and these multi-user virtual worlds are

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going to have a huge impact on the 21st century so I set up a whole series of

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projects held conferences wrote a book about avatars and avatars are it’s not

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just James Cameron’s movie which

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actually depicts an avatar very well if you’ve seen the film and didn’t get sick

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like Galen my wife got got sick in the theater it depicts the idea of an avatar

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extremely well did you all see the film that everybody see yeah so avatars online

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are much more simple than cartoony, but they’re getting more and more high resolution.

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And in 10 years, there’s going to be something that is I like to call the epiphany system.

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And I call it the epiphany system because a science fiction writer, Werner Wenge, wrote a book about it called Rainbows End. And the epiphany system is literally, I mean,

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now when you hold up your mobile or your iPad,

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it knows where you are in terms of the world and what you’re facing.

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So it will show you the Yelp reviews of the restaurants on the street that

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you’re looking through this portal down the street.

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And that’s called augmented reality now

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you’ve always seen films where people have glasses and fighter pilots have

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heads-up displays and cockpits where they look out and their symbols moving

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around and so data is mapped onto the world well the epiphany system in the

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2020s likely will show you three-dimensional objects and game

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characters and other

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people represented as avatars by projecting it directly on your cornea

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possibly from a direct implant on the back side of your eye you know this is a

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science fiction idea I know everyone grimaces it’s alive now but kids in the

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2020s and 2030s are going to think you’re completely illiterate if

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you’re not wearing this will be called wearing according to bernard vinci it’s a great novel

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to read i mean science fiction writers because the future is coming faster and faster they set

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their novels in the near future now you know because they can figure out if they were right

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and then pick up some credit down the road.

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So I’m also working on a project to simulate the origin of life,

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and more about that in another talk.

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It’s all very nerdy stuff,

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but I met a guy named Terence McKenna in the mid to late 90s,

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and the reason I met him is he was,

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I didn’t know anything really about psychedelics

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and machine elves and things you hear about.

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But I knew a lot about avatars and virtual worlds and stuff like that.

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And he wanted to know about that.

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So we made this deal.

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He came to my house.

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It was a farm in Northern California.

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And I stuck him into Avatar Worlds.

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I sat in front of a great big CRT monitor and said, talk into this microphone.

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And there’s a head that will lip sync.

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It will lip sync your voice.

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And there are other heads floating around that will hear you in kind of a cocktail lounge way.

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Not typing, but voice.

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It was a virtual world called Traveler, which we bought later when it went into bankruptcy, as all good technologies do.

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So Terrence experienced the virtual world.

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We then went to Hawaii, a friend of mine and I, to his house, where we set up.

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And we had a dish that pointed at Kona, South Kona on the Hawaiian island, the Isle of Hawaii.

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And this dish carried this 40 megabit stream through the air.

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And he found it very funny that this was a military technology.

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Here’s this mushroom guy, this guy that promotes the use of psychedelics,

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using Pentagon technology to connect to the world on a generator.

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And then we set him up and we put him, his son Finn built a virtual world,

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and we had this experience where he met people in world,

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in a strange-looking world that someone made up to be like a DMT world.

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And at the time, I didn’t really know much about DMT worlds,

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but we concluded with all-night conversations about,

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is virtual reality connected?

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Is there a connection?

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Are the elves that he sees in virtual reality ever going to connect with the avatars of virtual reality?

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So psychedelic reality is a virtual reality.

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Then a few years later after that, I actually had an experience on a, I call it a dream,

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in which my ego came into the room as a separate being and spoke to me.

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And I spoke to it because I was in a very kind of extreme state.

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And the ego had somehow at some point during this state left my body.

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I was simply dealing with the extreme state.

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And then the ego came into the room and looked up and saw it walking in as an entity.

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And I said, you don’t want to be here.

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You know, this is not safe for you.

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Are you sure you want to do this?

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And the ego came up to me and said, you are dying.

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Or actually, the exact words were, it is dying. I mean, the

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system is dying. And I had decided in going into this extreme state to never let fear come into

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the picture. You know, it just seemed to be a bad idea. In life, if you let yourself be ruled by

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fear, life becomes a fearful experience. So I put that out. I’m a nerd. I can

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like flip a switch and turn off a console and then stuff doesn’t come in. And the ego didn’t

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like this. The ego was dissolving. The ego’s in trouble. And so it showed up to try to get

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control back. And the way it did that was to say it is dying. The system is dying. So I was in that state to experience whatever came.

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So I said, you know what?

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Let’s do it.

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Let’s do the it is dying thing.

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Come on in.

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So the ego came back into my body.

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We became this howling wolf, this thing with a windpipe shooting to the skies.

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And we’re going to do the it is dying thing.

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We’re going to howl it to, it wasn’t an open starry night,

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would have been better, but it was at least

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a ceiling somewhere.

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And we together howled, it is dying.

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The ego was in earnest about this,

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and I was just going along for the ride,

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and the ego blew out the top.

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It blew out to the air

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lock is sort of a good NASA metaphor it was gone like oh it’s gone and then I

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went through the rest of the evening with this experience well something

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weird happened to me at the airport the next day I was just traveling on a

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flight and I was walking into the airport as a nerd and as a kind of slightly Asperger’s nerd.

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Maybe you might say more than slight. I, I really have trouble with eye contact.

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And this may have gone back to being adopted when I was 11 days old.

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Never had the mother’s eye contact. The mother. I was given up.

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But put in a crib and probably swaddling clothes and given up.

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So it was really tough for me to make eye contact.

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And if you know autism and Asperger’s,

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it’s one of the triggers or one of the early indications is the baby doesn’t look at me.

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So my mother always said, my adoptive mother said,

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he’s in his own world.

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That was the 1960s way of saying it so I went on and I developed virtual worlds I did

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the things you would do if you were in your own world but when I contacted when

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I had this extreme experience and I went to that airport I was looking at all the

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people’s eyes I was like everybody I was making eye contact with.

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I said, this is weird.

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I’m making eye contact with a Homeland Security guy in the security line,

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and I’m not afraid of that.

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And he’s not beaming something back to me of, you know,

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you are a criminal and we know it.

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You know, we’re going to be taking you on a all expenses paid trip to Cuba you know

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you’ll be boarding the Havana flight instead of your regular flight I was afraid of that I

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no one and no one’s expression back to me because they’re all neutral the little kids were nice

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expressions and I said you know what something happened last night okay The drums speak up a bit. The drumming is picking up

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their pace. So something

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happened to me

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on that experience.

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And then I didn’t think much more of it.

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I was just enjoying making more

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contact with humanity. Things seemed

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to be softer. They seemed to be

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I wasn’t as worried about

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stuff anymore. I wasn’t

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I was unfazed. I was like, this

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is better. I’ll take this. I’ll really take this. I’m almost 50 and this is what’s supposed

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to happen when you get older. Your ego kind of, as Eckhart Tolle says, expands you out

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and fills your life and you start companies, do all this stuff. And then around 50 or so,

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you should start the

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return where you’re like okay mr ego you’ve got me a long way but i’m going to start crumbling my

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body’s going to start falling apart and my friends are going to start dying and i’m going to get no

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respect after a while when there’s no one around who remembers me so when i’m 90 i better not have

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the ego thing i better be more of a spiritual being so totally talks about going out and coming back and one of the things that tome

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says is the sooner you start your return probably the better for you and those around you especially

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if you have an expansive ego so you know what happens to muhammad ali you know muhammad ali had he was great and he was

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real performing everything he had certainly had an ego to do what he did he needed to have that

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but when he got parkinson’s look what happened so he had he got the big sick and a huge shock

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and decided ego and bravado is not where it’s at anymore. I’m starting my return.

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And he led a beautiful life, a beautiful rest of his life.

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So he got the big sick.

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Some people can get the big God where they turn away from that life.

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There’s many spiritual writings about it.

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For me, it was potentially, it was the big trip that did it,

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at least started the process.

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So it’s this starting of the return.

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And for the planet, what Tolle says,

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and if I get around to it, I’ve got a bunch of excerpts

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on this infernal new machine.

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What Tolle says is that egoic structures that

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are in human minds go into organizations.

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And organizations become fearful.

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They can become competitive.

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And organizations, like a corporation,

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is stupider than the average person.

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It’s like an entity without a whole lot of direction.

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When you look at British Petroleum,

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response to the oil well, well, the blowout,

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there’s like 15 different responses.

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There’s no coordinated brain, and then people get upset and etc etc and it’s it’s a big dumb thing but yeah

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yeah exactly so corporations have this clarity but what totally says is that

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the corporations are tearing the planet apart and we don’t know how to stop them, right?

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Because we inhabit the corporations. We drive them. We buy from them. How do you stop them?

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So Tolle had been thinking about this for a long time.

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Tolle had this experience of the big sad or the big doom where he was a scholar at UCL in London,

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and he was miserable.

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He had a promising career.

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He moved to the west coast of North America.

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If you shake the earth, all of the loose objects end in the west coast of North America.

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So Tolle moves to the west coast of North America,

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made up 10, 15 years ago,

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and then gets so depressed

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that one night he’s thinking of taking his life.

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I’m probably paraphrasing this tremendously,

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but at one point,

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Tole says to himself,

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what am I doing to myself?

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What am I doing to myself?

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I’m so upset.

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Certainly I’m out of money,

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but this is not any reason

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to be doing this to myself

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and then the great yawning revelation opened up for this man which was wait a minute if i’m doing

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something to myself there must be two of me not just one and the voice came yeah you’re there’s

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you and then there’s this ego thing that’s miserable and is fighting with you.

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And he peeled away.

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He delaminated himself from ego and experienced bliss

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sitting on a park bench in Vancouver for months,

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just completely in a state of shock.

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He had separated from that thing that had haunted him his whole life.

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of shock that he had separated from that thing that had haunted him his whole life.

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And then subsequently, bits and pieces had started to reformulate back inside of him.

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And it’s very much like in the Lord of the Rings, you know, when, you know, Sauron has been defeated, but there’s the seeing stone and the palantir, as it’s called, and there’s

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a little light inside of them. You know, Sauron is getting stronger back in that little, that stone,

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and eventually comes to terrorize Middle Earth again.

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And that’s what happened, and that’s the wonderful mythology of Middle Earth.

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And perhaps Sauron is the ego.

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Anyway, so then, of course, Gandalf battling the Balrog

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is the great incomplete human battling his own ego,

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his greatest fear, and coming out as the white wizard.

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There’s beautiful metaphors here.

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So Tolle, being a scholar and being a methodical German guy,

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decided to write notes, to keep

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notes on what is going on when this ego return occurs.

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Because I’m still in my 30s and I have had ambitions in the past and I’ve been miserable,

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so the ego is finding its way back in.

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He would literally carefully take notes about changes and as each change occurred, like

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when he would use the word, I, I want this, I’m buying this, whatever,

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it would be filled and infused with more and more ego each time as the ego returned to him.

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And he’d write these notes, and that became the basis of his entire thinking.

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And also that the ego takes you out of the current moment.

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It has repeating thoughts going in your head over and over again.

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If you have repeating thoughts over and over and over again,

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in programming we call this no ops, no operations.

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There’s nothing useful about thinking about the same task 50 times.

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It’s the ego filling the space, according to Tolle.

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So Eckhart Tolle, so here we have the three things then.

00:21:24 ►

Eckhart Tolle, so here we have the three things then.

00:21:30 ►

Avatars, which are actually other people inhabiting a digital form on the Internet that looks out at you and talks to you,

00:21:33 ►

or it could be an artificial form made by software

00:21:36 ►

but has tricked you into thinking that it’s a thing.

00:21:39 ►

You’ve got elves, and I’ll run this little piece from Terence McKenna,

00:21:45 ►

I’ll explain what elves are, and you have egos.

00:21:48 ►

Now, what all these three things are is non-corporeal entities.

00:21:54 ►

They are characters, they’re meta-characters in the universe,

00:21:57 ►

when with which you have contact, they can transform your life.

00:22:03 ►

Certainly, ego is of you it’s maybe

00:22:06 ►

peeled off from you and seen as a separate thing under certain

00:22:11 ►

circumstances and you have a dialogue with it you can give it love you can

00:22:15 ►

tell it to stay away you can say no that it’s not speaking for you the L’s with

00:22:21 ►

all but Terrence described are another another thing. They’re something you see on high-dose psychedelics, in this case, diamethyltryptamine.

00:22:29 ►

They’re entities that have a message for you.

00:22:33 ►

And so you’ve got these three metacharacters, and how do they interact?

00:22:37 ►

I mean, metacharacters are really important in our lives, especially powerful ones.

00:22:42 ►

These are like spirits.

00:22:44 ►

They’re almost like the 21st century spirits,

00:22:46 ►

the primal troika of 21st century spirits.

00:22:50 ►

But let’s actually run,

00:22:52 ►

let’s try to give you a bit of Terence McKenna on elves.

00:22:57 ►

On DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork.

00:23:01 ►

The strangest things happen on DMT,

00:23:04 ►

the most intense intense and you can

00:23:06 ►

remember them DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that

00:23:12 ►

you’re getting into the contents of your hopes memories fears and dreams it’s

00:23:19 ►

much more like a parallel continuum it’s much more as though you’ve broken through to some alien data space. One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind. You know, it simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected.

00:23:47 ►

But your relationship to that unexpected thing

00:23:51 ►

is not one of exaggerated fear or exaggerated acceptance,

00:24:00 ►

as in, oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery.

00:24:05 ►

Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT.

00:24:10 ►

You’re appalled.

00:24:12 ►

Say, what happened?

00:24:15 ►

Because you don’t feel your mind moving.

00:24:18 ►

You just see that the world has been replaced by something

00:24:22 ►

that you could not have even conceived of or

00:24:25 ►

imagined before and these entities these things which look like dribbling you

00:24:33 ►

know self dribbling jeweled basketballs somebody something that the NBA might take an interest in, you see them and they present themselves to you.

00:24:52 ►

They use language to condense visible objects out of the air.

00:24:58 ►

Now, I don’t know why they’re doing that.

00:25:00 ►

I mean, perhaps on one level I assume that they’re trying to teach you to do that. On another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration of the fact that reality is made of language. They’re saying, you know, if you don’t believe reality is made of language, here, I’ll make you one. And then blibbledye blibble dee blip and there it is and

00:25:25 ►

they hand it to you to be passed around in you know slack-jawed amazement among

00:25:31 ►

the human beings this this technology that they possess of these objects made

00:25:42 ►

of gold and emerald and chalcedony and agate

00:25:47 ►

that are morphing themselves even as you look at them,

00:25:51 ►

are, you know, technological dream come true.

00:25:56 ►

I mean, the lapis as elf excrescence or something like that.

00:26:02 ►

And why they are there?

00:26:04 ►

I don’t know.

00:26:06 ►

And, you know, many, many questions.

00:26:08 ►

Where are they when you’re not stoned?

00:26:12 ►

You know, do they have an autonomous existence somewhere?

00:26:16 ►

Or do they spring into existence a microsecond before you encounter them?

00:26:21 ►

Are they rooted in the dynamics of your psyche?

00:26:24 ►

Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics of your psyche?

00:26:28 ►

Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics of your psyche than the World Trade Center?

00:26:30 ►

It’s not clear.

00:26:33 ►

I mean, I think I mentioned at some point, just briefly,

00:26:36 ►

that the archetype of DMT is the circus.

00:26:41 ►

These things are clowns at one level. They’re clowns. I mean, when you think of the circus, it’s a very complex archetype.

00:26:52 ►

The circus is for children. It’s a delight. But then, you know, and you take a child to a circus and there are three rings and absurd clown

00:27:04 ►

three rings and absurd clown antics going on.

00:27:09 ►

But then you lift your eyes up to the top of the tent and there the lady in the tiny spangled costume

00:27:12 ►

is hanging by her teeth, working without nets.

00:27:17 ►

It’s about Eros and death.

00:27:20 ►

I think my first awareness of Eros was being three or four,

00:27:26 ►

and these women in these tiny costumes spinning around,

00:27:30 ►

and realizing, you know, if she falls, she dies.

00:27:35 ►

And then, away from the center ring and all this action,

00:27:41 ►

there are the sideshows, the-faced boy the thing in the bottle

00:27:46 ►

the Siamese twins and fuzzy Charlie all of that is also very DMT like it is it

00:27:55 ►

really is the archetype of the of the circus so the circus metaphor well it

00:28:00 ►

turns out you know I’m not a proponent or a non-proponent of psychedelic drugs.

00:28:06 ►

I’m just kind of reporting a more scholarly journey through this space.

00:28:12 ►

Well, it turns out that the pineal gland generates DMT in your brain.

00:28:18 ►

The pineal gland is not even part of your brain.

00:28:21 ►

It’s this fold of skin that goes from the upper part of

00:28:25 ►

your nasal cavity up in the very center of your brain and it’s non symmetrical

00:28:29 ►

there are two pineal glands and everything else in the brain is paired

00:28:33 ►

and it just sticks up there and it could be what one might call the philosopher

00:28:39 ►

stone or it’s something really important pineal gland when it turns out that the

00:28:44 ►

pineal gland produces secretes chemicals or one of them it secretes is

00:28:49 ►

dimethyltryptamine now it has been proposed by people like Rick Strassman

00:28:54 ►

and others and I don’t know how much more research has been done since the

00:28:57 ►

90s but the pineal gland DMT the natural endogenous DMT, is for special events in your life.

00:29:07 ►

So, for example, birth, going down the birth canal, the sparking in of consciousness itself.

00:29:15 ►

For high stress times when you don’t have to run away from the cheetah,

00:29:18 ►

because you don’t want to be in this state of reverie as the cheetah is bearing down on you.

00:29:24 ►

Evolution wouldn’t be too kind on you.

00:29:26 ►

So incredible stress.

00:29:29 ►

So maybe the death of a loved one or a near-death experience.

00:29:34 ►

Because people report going down tunnels.

00:29:36 ►

And Strassman did studies, controlled studies of DMT,

00:29:40 ►

where people reported very, very similar experience on injected DMT or administered

00:29:47 ►

DMT versus near-death experiences.

00:29:50 ►

That’s what got him into the whole thing.

00:29:52 ►

And maybe, so then DMT is what takes you out of this life.

00:29:57 ►

So perhaps, and this is why Straussman calls it the spirit molecule, takes you in and out.

00:30:03 ►

But why does it bring you into this elf machinery?

00:30:07 ►

Are these elves only in Terence McKenna’s mind because, one,

00:30:11 ►

he’s Irish.

00:30:12 ►

You’ve got to be Irish to do it.

00:30:13 ►

You just can’t.

00:30:15 ►

You don’t have to give to the Blarney.

00:30:16 ►

He’s always talking about language making the world.

00:30:19 ►

His language is everything to the Irish.

00:30:23 ►

Or is it because he saw the circus come to town

00:30:26 ►

when he was four years old in Colorado

00:30:28 ►

and it became this powerful metaphor?

00:30:30 ►

Because this guy was in search of weird.

00:30:33 ►

And that probably, when he mentioned, I was four

00:30:36 ►

and I saw the lady hanging by her teeth

00:30:38 ►

and then the fuzzy Charlie, that probably

00:30:41 ►

was the igniting moment for Terence McKenna

00:30:43 ►

to go on a quest for weird for the next, well, 49 years till his death when he was 53.

00:30:52 ►

And from that point, he was on to weird.

00:30:55 ►

He wanted to understand weird and experience weird.

00:30:58 ►

And that’s what he devoted his life to. So the ultimate weird for him was this DMT five minute trips, the DMT flash,

00:31:06 ►

where he would tunnel through into this reality and there would be this domed room and there

00:31:10 ►

would be the elves saying, you’re back. You know, you have been here for a while and

00:31:15 ►

convincing him to start doing this strange glossolalia, this strange language to make

00:31:20 ►

shapes in space like we do. You can do it too.

00:31:25 ►

Now this is all happening in a 20 second time span.

00:31:28 ►

It’s vastly sped up.

00:31:30 ►

Now let’s switch over to the science part of things

00:31:33 ►

for a while.

00:31:34 ►

So are these trips real at all?

00:31:36 ►

Well, because people like Terence or others

00:31:40 ►

who’ve been on these experiences would say,

00:31:43 ►

they have to be from another universe. Because I another universe because I don’t have the stock photo library in my head necessary to put together that

00:31:51 ►

production that I just saw.

00:31:53 ►

It is just too weird.

00:31:55 ►

Well, you could say, well, they’re from the morphogenic field.

00:31:59 ►

They’re the galactic civilization figuring out how to communicate to us in these states

00:32:05 ►

and then putting in the movie, you know, shunting it in over the wire.

00:32:11 ►

But science now has got to the point where at the MAPS conference,

00:32:15 ►

and I promised I would tell you a bit about that.

00:32:18 ►

MAPS stands for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science.

00:32:23 ►

And it’s been around for 25 years and they’ve been trying to restart research

00:32:27 ►

into these these medicines drugs etc

00:32:30 ►

and especially for clinical use so returning veterans from Afghanistan and

00:32:35 ►

Iraq

00:32:36 ►

who would take MDMA and in one or two sessions

00:32:40 ►

not go through the 30 years of nightmares that their Vietnam buddies

00:32:44 ►

or Vietnam forebears did.

00:32:47 ►

You know, this is really valuable stuff.

00:32:49 ►

So they’re taking the safe course of getting legal use of this for scientific research.

00:32:56 ►

You know, and more power to them.

00:32:57 ►

You know, Leary and others did quite a bit of damage to the science side of things.

00:33:03 ►

I’m doing a project with Timothy Leary’s papers, so actually includes his papers and his ashes.

00:33:13 ►

Not much you can learn from Leary’s ashes, although I have a friend, Alex Gray, who wants

00:33:17 ►

a bone, a particular bone from the ashes because he used to work in the morgue and he said he wants to ID which bone this is you know and use it for display purposes but the Leary

00:33:30 ►

archives is crammed with a lot of goodies but what what Leary had the

00:33:35 ►

legacy that Leary left in the over enthusiasm of those days is that

00:33:39 ►

scientific research got shut down well it’s back and sort of back with a theory

00:33:44 ►

there’s there’s interest at Johns Hopkins you know you can list the Scientific research got shut down. Well, it’s back, and sort of back with a theory.

00:33:46 ►

There’s interest at Johns Hopkins.

00:33:50 ►

You can list the universities, their major schools, like Johns Hopkins University.

00:33:56 ►

Well, one of the researchers that came gave a talk that just blew my mind, literally,

00:33:59 ►

without taking anything except being at the talk.

00:34:04 ►

He said that they had put patients into some kind of live brain scan. I think it was an fMRI system.

00:34:06 ►

And we call them patients.

00:34:10 ►

But the volunteers were taking ayahuasca.

00:34:13 ►

And so their brains were scanned.

00:34:15 ►

And what they saw was the visual system, which normally is pulsing,

00:34:21 ►

it’s taking in frame after frame after frame so you don’t see jitter when you do this.

00:34:27 ►

And it’s sending it back in a raw pixel thing.

00:34:30 ►

It’s very much like a computer.

00:34:32 ►

And then it’s doing something magical, associating with shapes.

00:34:36 ►

Oh, there’s faces here.

00:34:37 ►

I’ll go to the face processor.

00:34:38 ►

And there’s a tiger jumping here.

00:34:40 ►

I’ll go to the adrenaline unit, you know, that kind of thing.

00:34:43 ►

It’s integrated. Well, his studies showed that this rate of taking in was slowing down,

00:34:51 ►

so that fewer and fewer frames were coming in.

00:34:55 ►

Now, people seem to experience this as they’re on some kind of substance,

00:35:00 ►

and they look around and it goes blip, blipip blip like blibbly blibbly blip like

00:35:05 ►

parents made it and what one of the things that struck me about that is fewer frames are coming in

00:35:12 ►

and there’s a whole lot more activity in the brain so the brain is slowing down the visual system and

00:35:17 ►

we’re primates we use most of what we do is visual we’re just visually driven we have pot belly pigs I know their world’s

00:35:25 ►

olfactory there will the smell their visual make up the visual but they have

00:35:30 ►

smell a thousand times more powerful than us so take on LSD would be having

00:35:36 ►

chemicals all around them and they would be having a chemical trip of some kind

00:35:39 ►

of smell trip now if they could be on LSD but so you slow the frames as they’re coming

00:35:46 ►

in well what does that what does that allow the mind to do I’m a software guy

00:35:51 ►

and I said well you know what if there’s less processing power needed for one

00:35:55 ►

thing the brain can engage in all kinds of tricks and then what they do see is

00:36:00 ►

in the fmris is it’s all kinds of other activity around the visual cortex that

00:36:04 ►

can’t happen before because there’s all kinds of other activity around the visual cortex that can’t happen

00:36:05 ►

before because there’s all these frames.

00:36:07 ►

So the frames slow down and there’s a smearing out of time.

00:36:12 ►

There’s a loss of an understanding of time because perhaps the clock that runs your mind

00:36:18 ►

is tied to the pace of the images coming in.

00:36:22 ►

You’re watching the real clock, it’s going tick, tick, tick, and it’s corresponding to how many frames images coming in, you’re watching the real clock. It’s going to take a ticket.

00:36:25 ►

It’s corresponding to how many frames are coming in.

00:36:27 ►

So fewer frames seem slower time.

00:36:30 ►

Then the brain is grabbing these images.

00:36:33 ►

And for now, it’s in the buffer for longer and it’s doing weird stuff with them.

00:36:37 ►

So instead of saying, quick, I got to figure out where all the faces are in the room.

00:36:41 ►

And if any of them are friend or foe, it’s going, hey, you know,

00:36:46 ►

there’s a lot more processing power.

00:36:51 ►

And I got like a still picture in a frame, like a Leonardo painting.

00:36:53 ►

And we can spend some time on this.

00:36:57 ►

So it decomposes that picture and it makes all kinds of things up. Like you’re a dragon and you’re a plant and let’s play with this.

00:37:02 ►

And there’s willy-nilly activity going on with this one frame.

00:37:06 ►

And it’s long enough that it creates the psychedelic experience.

00:37:11 ►

So in that one session, it was like, wow, you know, science is back looking at this.

00:37:17 ►

Now, it doesn’t answer the question or do the DMPLs come from other star systems or not.

00:37:22 ►

But for the first time, they’re looking in and seeing that mechanism.

00:37:26 ►

Now, it turns out that in the big sad or the near-death experience

00:37:30 ►

or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, perhaps this is happening again.

00:37:35 ►

Perhaps the brain, the pineal gland is releasing a psychedelic

00:37:40 ►

to do the same thing, to slow you down.

00:37:44 ►

Also something to note, if you’re in a car accident or you have a physical accident,

00:37:50 ►

what happens?

00:37:51 ►

Time slows down.

00:37:52 ►

The brain is in hyperdrive.

00:37:54 ►

The brain is able to switch its time frame, and you’ll see things happening very slowly,

00:38:01 ►

and you’ll be able to react faster.

00:38:03 ►

The brain has gone into hyper

00:38:05 ►

drive to respond to an emergency like your falling off a building or something

00:38:08 ►

and you remember it in slow-mo so the brain can do this so perhaps these you

00:38:15 ►

know if we take something like DMT from the outside we experience what we have

00:38:20 ►

the potential of generating from the inside but it’s very hard to get to and

00:38:24 ►

perhaps people who do alternative practices and train

00:38:28 ►

themselves for years they get there you know they get there through incredible

00:38:32 ►

discipline you know what do the Buddhists do they seem to sort of say

00:38:36 ►

you know be still and be empty let the ego go let the voice in the head go and

00:38:43 ►

it’s a very gradual training discipline to do this the voice in the head go. It’s a very gradual training discipline to do this.

00:38:46 ►

The voice in the head is gone and other things flood in.

00:38:50 ►

Perhaps the yogis are triggering the pineal gland.

00:38:54 ►

They’re to that incredible core of the brain where they have reached it.

00:38:58 ►

They have stilled the mind such that they have stilled the visual cortex.

00:39:03 ►

They’ve stilled everything. They’ve stilled their breath. What do they get still the visual cortex. They still everything.

00:39:05 ►

They still their breath.

00:39:06 ►

And what do they get in the end?

00:39:08 ►

Pineal gland now can release and it can release vision.

00:39:12 ►

And this is all just willy nilly theories put together.

00:39:15 ►

But, and it all seems to come down to the ego

00:39:19 ►

is taking up its cycles and the visual cortex and the brain.

00:39:23 ►

And if you can go down to your essence, what you end up with is a trip either produced by your own mind or or what?

00:39:33 ►

Have something that comes from within that you just you’re taking barriers away from it and then it’s flowing in.

00:39:40 ►

Now, this goes to the other question, which was earlier in today’s talk, which is, do you need to take these hard, heavy chemicals?

00:39:48 ►

In a sense, Terrence talks about, and I won’t play you the audio unless you’re really dying to hear more Terrence.

00:39:54 ►

Are you dying to hear more Terrence?

00:39:56 ►

You are.

00:39:57 ►

Well, here’s Terrence on this topic. Psychedelic experience, in the best sense of the word,

00:40:07 ►

a religious activity.

00:40:10 ►

And the intellect or whatever it is that lies behind it

00:40:16 ►

is very sensitive to your needs and your limits.

00:40:22 ►

And unless you approach it with a cavalier attitude

00:40:26 ►

will usually be very gentle with you now this fear of death thing though is a

00:40:33 ►

hard thing to come to terms with because you know it’s we are going to die it’s

00:40:41 ►

scripted into the human experience culturally there’s a great deal of

00:40:46 ►

anxiety around this and basically i think what one has to do is simply ride it out in terms of

00:40:55 ►

advice as to what you do once you have are in the middle of an unpleasant revelation.

00:41:08 ►

You can sing your way through that.

00:41:14 ►

You can smoke cannabis to shake up the pieces on the board.

00:41:20 ►

And you can just wait and put up with it. The real issue you see around fear on psychedelics is a surrender issue the ego

00:41:28 ►

plays a trick on you because the ego begins to dissolve under the influence of the psychedelic

00:41:35 ►

and uh the ego sends you the message you are dying this is its last most desperate ploy to halt what is happening because the ego is dying.

00:41:52 ►

And to the degree that you identify with the ego, you’ll be driven into a state of panic.

00:41:58 ►

So there you have the full circle. You have Eckhart Tolle on his park bench experience thinking why am I

00:42:06 ►

doing this to myself why am I killing myself coming to that split off of the

00:42:12 ►

ego and McKenna who’s you know been gone now these past 11 years or so the same

00:42:20 ►

words different techniques but in a, maybe these two very strange guys have gotten it right.

00:42:30 ►

They’re saying you can’t attack the corporations and do battle with them and try to convince the media to tone it down a bit.

00:42:38 ►

You can’t try to really reform the education system the way it is.

00:42:43 ►

You can’t try to reform the political system and the payola like we have in the U.S.

00:42:47 ►

Everything that you do at that level is downstream from the source root cause that is already exploded out.

00:42:56 ►

And that is the explosion of pathological ego into people and organizations.

00:43:03 ►

into people and organizations, you know. So, for example, I was on the DLR going past a pathologically ego, egoistic part of London called Canary Wharf.

00:43:14 ►

And right there was was a a poster and it showed a lady in a shop and she was looking at one pair of boots or another.

00:43:24 ►

And there was no key. It was like Vodafone or Nokia, and I was saying, she’s on her phone talking

00:43:28 ►

to one of her friends and saying, Nokia, for the most important decisions of your life.

00:43:35 ►

Right? So in one fell swoop, you know, they’re completely denigrating all of human existence,

00:43:42 ►

female existence, and they’re convincing us, you know, this is advertising.

00:43:46 ►

Advertising is heavily ego-driven.

00:43:48 ►

My wife comes from a dual Madison Avenue advertising family.

00:43:54 ►

And I can tell you, I went to the Cooper Union.

00:43:57 ►

This is an ironic thing.

00:43:58 ►

I went to the Cooper Union with my wife’s father-in-law for a funeral of the founder of advertising at CBS,

00:44:06 ►

who founded print advertising in 1946.

00:44:10 ►

And you went into this room and you immediately recoiled

00:44:13 ►

because there were people in this room whose egos had never retreated.

00:44:18 ►

They were angry men.

00:44:20 ►

And they were angry at death.

00:44:23 ►

The daughter of this fellow who had died, like Lou somebody

00:44:27 ►

or other, you know, they’re all Lou, you know, or something. She, in the middle of the eulogy,

00:44:33 ►

after one of the guys had spoken, hammered out at these guys and said, you’re a bastard,

00:44:38 ►

you’re a bastard, you’re a fucking bastard. Right in the middle of it and and that these people had action faces

00:44:45 ►

even before me and you realize this is these are the founders of television

00:44:51 ►

these are the founders of media in the United States and they’re really unhappy

00:44:56 ►

ego filled they’re nasty dudes like maybe the madman stuff I haven’t seen

00:45:02 ►

the show but you know why do we have them creating our thoughts, creating our vision of ourselves?

00:45:09 ►

Why do we nominate them?

00:45:11 ►

Well, we do because the niche of advertising is best served by people like them.

00:45:18 ►

Because they get you to buy those pair of boots or that Nokia phone, and then it makes them more powerful.

00:45:24 ►

pair of boots or that Nokia phone and then it makes them more powerful. So you can’t fight nature in the sense you’re fighting evolution because nature said, oh, good.

00:45:29 ►

And we’ve got culture to work with. Let’s let’s evolve niches.

00:45:33 ►

The madman, you know, the advertising person, you know, and then people are coming up to fill those niches.

00:45:40 ►

And those niches are super powerful. They’re hard to hard to remove the military man a military thinker you know they’re hard to remove you can’t fight the

00:45:49 ►

niches I’m convinced of that you can’t change IBM from within our British

00:45:53 ►

Petroleum from you just can’t do it yeah you’ll never do it the only way to solve

00:45:58 ►

this thing is to go back you know a person by person, like is done here at Buddha Field,

00:46:05 ►

or we as a society decide, we’re our children, that we teach them about ego.

00:46:12 ►

So when there’s a school, I remember going to my first day of first grade in elementary school,

00:46:20 ►

totally terrified, and the terror that did not come from the other kids, it

00:46:26 ►

came from the mean kids. The kids that arrived fresh-faced at that elementary school. And

00:46:32 ►

of course, you’re overwhelmed as an eight-year-old or nine-year-old, however old you are, by

00:46:36 ►

the sheer number of kids. But it’s the mean kids, the kids slightly older than you, the

00:46:43 ►

stares from these mean kids

00:46:45 ►

that just shock and terrorize those incoming kids.

00:46:48 ►

And that’s where it begins.

00:46:49 ►

It may begin earlier because those mean kids became mean for a reason.

00:46:53 ►

Or it’s the crumpled up little shy kid like me that is now traumatized in the opposite

00:46:58 ►

direction by that kind of experience.

00:47:01 ►

And that is where it begins.

00:47:03 ►

And so then the ego is growing, especially in young menholes from that point on.

00:47:08 ►

And you get advertising men, you get military men, you get George W. Bush.

00:47:13 ►

You’re going to get them because you didn’t get to them early enough to say,

00:47:17 ►

you know, we’ve got to control this entity that grows.

00:47:21 ►

It’s a useful entity. Everyone needs to have ego.

00:47:24 ►

But we’ve got to control pathology in our society.

00:47:27 ►

And with technology,

00:47:29 ►

pathology is having a heyday.

00:47:31 ►

For the first time in human history,

00:47:34 ►

when I have my Facebook page,

00:47:36 ►

it’s an expression of my ego to some extent.

00:47:39 ►

What is going on with that?

00:47:41 ►

I’ll tell you one more thing

00:47:42 ►

and then we’ll open it for questions.

00:47:44 ►

Why is technology

00:47:45 ►

so lethal? It’s the final lethal piece in the ego game because where does ego get dangerous?

00:47:53 ►

It gets dangerous when there’s no conscience, when there’s no, you know, when somebody can go out and

00:48:00 ►

be a mass murderer and not think any of it. Well, when does that happen to a human being?

00:48:06 ►

Usually when there’s nothing from here down. There’s no remorse. There’s no emotion.

00:48:14 ►

And serial killers block that out. They make up a story. They make a reality in their heads,

00:48:20 ►

and then they go off and they do their thing, and they don’t feel it. The fellow who trapped his daughter and the children that were raised in the basement

00:48:29 ►

in Austria, remember Fritzl, he was operating in that fix.

00:48:34 ►

He didn’t feel any of it.

00:48:35 ►

But he eventually broke down and said, I did all these terrible things.

00:48:39 ►

And he had a flood of emotion came into that man, and he said, I am guilty.

00:48:45 ►

I committed these crimes.

00:48:47 ►

And there was enough of him left, enough empathy, enough emotional stuff in that man that he said, I don’t want to trial.

00:48:56 ►

I did these things.

00:48:57 ►

And so then the meeting had ended.

00:48:59 ►

You know, he’s where he is, and they’re trying to reconstruct this family.

00:49:04 ►

He’s traumatized people.

00:49:05 ►

Fritzl is a metaphor for humanity, actually, this fellow.

00:49:11 ►

So how does technology play into this?

00:49:13 ►

Well, here’s an example.

00:49:16 ►

If you’re sitting there online on Facebook, Twittering, et cetera, et cetera,

00:49:21 ►

something starts to happen to you.

00:49:23 ►

If you get lots of messages and lots of tweets and everything,

00:49:27 ►

you’re on your mobile and you get a cortisol squirt.

00:49:31 ►

Because why?

00:49:32 ►

This is the strangest thing.

00:49:34 ►

It goes back to the cheetah.

00:49:36 ►

Because if you’re darting your eyes around the screen and looking,

00:49:40 ►

in nature back half a million years ago on the plains of Africa,

00:49:44 ►

if we were out there walking along, darting our eyes around,

00:49:48 ►

that’s the signal to the brain to be highly alert and ready for anything,

00:49:52 ►

because that means there could be prey or predators out there.

00:49:56 ►

So darting around means heightened level.

00:50:00 ►

If you’re sitting at home online darting around,

00:50:03 ►

you’re actually over time generating a cortisol squirt because of an adrenaline.

00:50:08 ►

And over the day, the course of the day, you get wired.

00:50:12 ►

This is what wired means.

00:50:14 ►

It’s this type of thing.

00:50:15 ►

You feel it.

00:50:16 ►

Then you have the crash in the afternoon because you’re in an adrenaline shock situation,

00:50:22 ►

so you’ve got to go for the double latte to just boost yourself up.

00:50:26 ►

And clinical people are treating people now thousands or hundreds of thousands with adrenal.

00:50:32 ►

It’s called adrenal fatigue syndrome or whatever.

00:50:35 ►

People have continually gone on this thing over and over again.

00:50:38 ►

And now they’re so super tired all the time.

00:50:41 ►

And it’s not other conditions.

00:50:43 ►

It’s just from shocking the system. so here’s the second thing it does it it cuts you off from feeling so

00:50:51 ►

it creates a condition called emotional neutrality so if there’s a this goes

00:50:56 ►

back to the clinical research of Antonio Damasio University Southern California

00:51:02 ►

where he showed that the brain operates at two speeds.

00:51:06 ►

The high speed can remember phone numbers.

00:51:08 ►

It can drive cars.

00:51:09 ►

It does all these cognitive things.

00:51:14 ►

The somatic brain is the low speed brain that creates memory.

00:51:16 ►

It creates feeling.

00:51:21 ►

It drives the retrieving of feeling, artistic expression,

00:51:31 ►

things that take a long time to create and a relatively long time to retrieve. If you’re in this high-speed brain all the time, you start to lose the ability to store and retrieve emotional memory.

00:51:36 ►

And in clinical circles, it’s called emotional neutrality.

00:51:43 ►

Now, I’ll tell you one more little side story, which is a totally direct illustration of this. A friend of my wife and I runs one of

00:51:46 ►

the first acupuncture studios

00:51:47 ►

that was using

00:51:49 ►

eastern acupuncture in China

00:51:51 ►

introduced to the west. It’s in New York City.

00:51:54 ►

And one day he came into work

00:51:56 ►

and there was an orthodox

00:51:58 ►

Hasidic Rebbe

00:51:59 ►

sitting in the

00:52:01 ►

receiving room.

00:52:04 ►

And the Rebbe is not like a rabbi.

00:52:06 ►

They’re a patriarch.

00:52:08 ►

They’re a father figure for an entire community.

00:52:10 ►

And most of these folks live in Brooklyn,

00:52:12 ►

although now they’re trying to move elsewhere.

00:52:14 ►

And they’re from Russian villages,

00:52:16 ►

and they wear a specific garb,

00:52:18 ►

and the Rebbe is, they have different hats

00:52:20 ►

depending on the village they’re from,

00:52:22 ►

so big furry ones and little bowler hats and everything.

00:52:29 ►

And Mark said, excuse me, what’s a Rebbe doing sitting in my receiving office? And the Rebbe said, I have a problem, I need to talk to you.

00:52:34 ►

He’d never met this man before, so they came in and Mark is like, this is going

00:52:38 ►

to be something, because these people are really unique. And the

00:52:44 ►

Rebbe said, something is going on with my community.

00:52:47 ►

People aren’t feeling anymore.

00:52:50 ►

They’re feeling less and less.

00:52:51 ►

And you understand, I have to resolve the marital disputes.

00:52:55 ►

I have to resolve the consequences of someone saying, you’re not feeling me or hearing me.

00:53:01 ►

And it’s getting harder and harder.

00:53:03 ►

My job is getting harder.

00:53:10 ►

And I was thinking, what is going on? I’ve been the ready for 45 years I know everyone from birth and I see a change in the last five years and then one day

00:53:15 ►

he was watching in H&R Electronics which is what the electronics store they run

00:53:19 ►

in Manhattan it’s like ah look at all the mobile phones look at that guy’s concentrated on texting and that woman over there she’s like, ah, look at all the mobile phones. Look at, that guy’s concentrating on texting,

00:53:26 ►

and that woman over there,

00:53:27 ►

she’s like been online since 8 o’clock in the morning

00:53:31 ►

when there’s no customers.

00:53:32 ►

They’re doing other things.

00:53:33 ►

It’s the technology.

00:53:35 ►

Oh, boy.

00:53:37 ►

And so he was on a search to figure out

00:53:39 ►

how to reboot people back into feeling.

00:53:42 ►

Now, heavy-duty stuff,

00:53:44 ►

and he came, he was desperate.

00:53:47 ►

He said, I can’t do the coffee thing.

00:53:49 ►

It only seems to make them worse.

00:53:51 ►

Various pills and everything we can’t do religiously.

00:53:55 ►

I thought of sending them to Niagara Falls.

00:53:58 ►

Maybe sending them, this is a New York way of,

00:54:01 ►

that will get them back and it didn’t work.

00:54:04 ►

So what do I do I he’d

00:54:06 ►

heard about acupuncture goes directly in the nervous system can really release a

00:54:10 ►

lot of emotion and here he was I want to experience acupuncture so he strips down

00:54:16 ►

as a man has never been in alternative healing in his life he’s desperate he

00:54:22 ►

gets on the table needles are put, the special ones at the ankle and

00:54:25 ►

everything that completely releases emotion, and he starts to sob, and you know, the man’s caring a

00:54:31 ►

lot, right, the lifetime of being the counselor for these people, and he’s beaming, he’s at the end,

00:54:38 ►

says, this is working. You’ll be getting a lot of my community as customers can we block time

00:54:45 ►

I want to negotiate the lowest price because we’re going to be sending

00:54:50 ►

everyone they are going to come here to get rebooted we’re going to figure out

00:54:55 ►

scientifically how many times a month and I will identify the people who need

00:55:00 ►

to go for a reboot otherwise we’re going to dissipate as a community.

00:55:06 ►

No one’s going to have any feelings.

00:55:09 ►

And so this is another metaphor.

00:55:11 ►

Fritzl’s a metaphor for humanity, but so is the Rebbe.

00:55:15 ►

But they’re lucky.

00:55:17 ►

They have somebody watching over them who’s almost scientific,

00:55:21 ►

saying before and after, before and after, saying,

00:55:24 ►

I need to stop this trend now because I can’t manage this.

00:55:28 ►

We don’t have a Rebbe for humanity.

00:55:30 ►

We’re in this blind, giant, unplanned experiment on humanity where a billion people or two billion or three billion are wired in all the time.

00:55:40 ►

Emotional neutrality, adrenal shock. It’s profoundly huge.

00:55:47 ►

But what comes out of this?

00:55:49 ►

So the ego is scratching its head.

00:55:51 ►

You remember Terry Gilliam’s film, Time Bandits?

00:55:55 ►

Did anyone see Time Bandits?

00:55:57 ►

Remember the devil loves technology, right?

00:56:00 ►

The devil had all these calculators and computers

00:56:04 ►

and was totally excited about technology. the ego is going oh the whole landscape is changing down

00:56:10 ►

there that person has become emotionally neutral his name is George W Bush let me

00:56:16 ►

track he’s a he’s a chronic addict right let me track this guy always just become

00:56:22 ►

governor of Texas let’s see, what can we do?

00:56:26 ►

Oh, he’s now becoming the leader of this great superpower,

00:56:31 ►

which is a huge egoic entity,

00:56:34 ►

which is unconstrained at this point.

00:56:36 ►

So if you were Mr. Ego wanting to have a good time,

00:56:39 ►

you’d say, I’ve got to get into this guy,

00:56:41 ►

because this guy has no emotional,

00:56:44 ►

he is totally emotionally neutral.

00:56:47 ►

That’s why he was called the decider, the great decider,

00:56:50 ►

because he could do something without feeling any consequence.

00:56:54 ►

Why? Because of addiction, because of going through AA.

00:56:58 ►

Everybody I know who had gone through AA looked at W and said,

00:57:03 ►

oh my God, we’ve got someone in recovery in the White House.

00:57:06 ►

What that means is this guy can’t allow disturbing things to come in,

00:57:12 ►

like non-black and white things to come into his psyche

00:57:15 ►

because it always meant in the past on the bottle, right?

00:57:18 ►

Go back to the bottle.

00:57:20 ►

And so the ego playing, you know, he was a brilliant communicator.

00:57:24 ►

He really sold people because he was so sure of himself because he had no tools and mechanisms to to deal with gray areas.

00:57:32 ►

So people were enamored of his great, you know, he won the election in good form and well, they pushed around a bit.

00:57:41 ►

But he really sold people. People were really sold on this guy.

00:57:45 ►

But this guy was emotionally neutral.

00:57:48 ►

He was clinically emotionally neutral.

00:57:50 ►

Everybody that I know watched him and said, yeah, this is dying recovery.

00:57:56 ►

Emotionally neutral.

00:57:57 ►

He wasn’t technology.

00:57:58 ►

But you meet people in technology that are emotionally neutral nowadays.

00:58:01 ►

More and more and more.

00:58:02 ►

And if you start as a kid, if you’re at two years old,

00:58:06 ►

you’re using all these gadgets.

00:58:07 ►

No wonder kids are getting obese.

00:58:10 ►

You know, they’re, you know, attention deficit disorders.

00:58:14 ►

They’re watching television that flashes stuff

00:58:17 ►

every second and a half,

00:58:19 ►

which seems to be inducing this intention problem.

00:58:23 ►

So it’s this gigantic unplanned experiment. But what it leads you up to in the end and I’ll finish with this is

00:58:28 ►

the ego can have a field day because it’s got all these people to play with

00:58:32 ►

now who will do stuff because they saw it on the net they’ll believe in the

00:58:38 ►

religion or a conspiracy theory or something because their head is the

00:58:43 ►

great they’re the great society and their head saw it

00:58:46 ►

and now it believes it,

00:58:47 ►

but they can’t feel the consequences of their actions.

00:58:50 ►

So humanity is, the stakes are even higher

00:58:53 ►

than when Terence died.

00:58:54 ►

And I had conversations with Terence on other things,

00:58:57 ►

but none of us could see the last 10 years since 1999.

00:59:01 ►

The stakes have gotten even higher.

00:59:03 ►

You come to Buddha field to reboot into

00:59:05 ►

feeling right into emotional fullness but you go out into the world and go to get on the london

00:59:11 ►

tube and go to your job and in front of that screen and then you’re booting back into less

00:59:16 ►

emotional fullness so this is why we’re here at buddha field and we have our practices

00:59:22 ►

but we’re ever running that line the

00:59:25 ►

whole of humanity is becoming subject to large ego some crazy future religion

00:59:32 ►

some crazy you know advertising paranoia anxiety and we have to do something

00:59:40 ►

about it and from this point I think I’ve talked myself out and want to open up

00:59:45 ►

the question. The thing we would do about it is it comes back to childhood and how do

00:59:50 ►

we raise children.

00:59:51 ►

You said that we were missing the Rebbe in our society, the ways to rebuild and reboot.

00:59:58 ►

I think perhaps that’s what we should be thinking about. How do you think we can go about creating scenarios

01:00:06 ►

and situations where people can find a way to do this?

01:00:10 ►

No, actually create it.

01:00:12 ►

We make, we change the world.

01:00:14 ►

It’s not what we are that counts.

01:00:15 ►

We’re always gonna be diverse

01:00:17 ►

with many, many different kinds of people

01:00:19 ►

with many different changes.

01:00:21 ►

So on the bottom line, we can change our raison d’etre,

01:00:24 ►

the actual

01:00:26 ►

you know you’ll bottom line what we’re doing

01:00:30 ►

no good about that yet could be about

01:00:33 ►

the year much love

01:00:36 ►

so yeah we can create ready maybe

01:00:40 ►

we can we can one way with people

01:00:43 ►

after it would be and grow their wealth in the world around them rather than within them.

01:00:48 ►

And this can actually eat up the thing that we find ourselves being torn down by

01:00:54 ►

and re-empower us with all of this and all our diversity.

01:00:58 ►

That’s the kind of Rebbi I think we need to find a way to do this.

01:01:01 ►

Many, many ways to do it, maybe.

01:01:03 ►

And just the way you do things, I think, is you picture a future society and you imagine it out in its fullest.

01:01:11 ►

I mean, that’s kind of in a way what’s here. And this is temporary.

01:01:16 ►

You know, this will go away in a few days, but we’re kind of living the world we would rather live in more often.

01:01:22 ►

Right. This world.

01:01:28 ►

But if you pictured a society and you could describe it out,

01:01:32 ►

not in kind of sugary terms, but in real terms,

01:01:36 ►

where you say, imagine a society in which there’s this Rebbe figure,

01:01:37 ►

and he’s not a religious figure,

01:01:41 ►

but he watches over individuals for the following thing and counsels them, counsels young boys who may become bullies, for example.

01:01:47 ►

And we all try to do this informally in our school

01:01:50 ►

programs.

01:01:51 ►

There’s programs and schemes set up to do this.

01:01:54 ►

But if you imagine such a world, does it

01:01:57 ►

have to be a commune of the 21st century

01:02:00 ►

where there’s walls around it and you’re controlling access

01:02:03 ►

to your children and you’re growing all your own food.

01:02:07 ►

Well, if you do it that way, the bubble will pop one day and that community will probably

01:02:13 ►

disappear.

01:02:14 ►

That was the lesson of the 60s and 70s.

01:02:17 ►

So those communities have to be interwoven within.

01:02:20 ►

The homeschooling in the U.S. is kind of an attempt by parents to keep their kids out of very toxic environments in school,

01:02:28 ►

which are very toxic in the U.S.

01:02:30 ►

There’s Christian homeschooling.

01:02:32 ►

There’s kind of blue state new age homeschooling.

01:02:35 ►

It’s huge.

01:02:36 ►

And those parents are exercising choices.

01:02:39 ►

They don’t want the 13-year-old girl to come home after being an excitable, thinking being,

01:02:47 ►

and come home at age 13 with a case of bulimia,

01:02:51 ►

because she’s been so toxified by advertising and other girls and the whole culture

01:02:59 ►

that now she’s going to be sick for about 20 years and then pop back into consciousness.

01:03:03 ►

So parents are taking control of that.

01:03:05 ►

But I think in a sense, it will come down to enlightened parents saying,

01:03:10 ►

we want to raise the next generation of enlightened, powerful beings

01:03:14 ►

without the ego problems, without all the…

01:03:17 ►

And understanding fully the toxic nature of what parents call the dominator culture

01:03:22 ►

or the ego-driven world,

01:03:25 ►

and where these kids come into the world like Denny Gesserit witches,

01:03:29 ►

fully cognizant of, okay, that’s what that,

01:03:33 ►

the ad at Canary Wharf that shows the woman holding the shoes

01:03:36 ►

and saying the big decisions of your life,

01:03:38 ►

that’s part of that toxic culture.

01:03:41 ►

And I can look at it, but I don’t take that internally and say,

01:03:41 ►

that toxic culture. And I can look at it, but I don’t take that internally

01:03:44 ►

and say, I’m not cool if I don’t have the coolest boots.

01:03:51 ►

I’m worth more than that.

01:03:52 ►

And you separate yourself from that egoistic culture that

01:03:56 ►

is all around you.

01:03:56 ►

It’s real hard.

01:03:58 ►

But if the parents, if we train kids to be aware of that,

01:04:02 ►

and also say, look, kids, it feels good to be aware of that and also say look look kids it feels good to be online and

01:04:06 ►

be doing you know 50 texts and having to 10,000 Facebook members but your brain

01:04:11 ►

is going to be mush you know how do you explain to them let’s tone it down and

01:04:16 ►

watch the dosage level of technology how do we create aware beings in our youth

01:04:23 ►

and all young people that like yeah don that don’t take too much of that stuff?

01:04:28 ►

Or, hey, that Facebook page anyway is about trying to sell me advertising.

01:04:35 ►

It’s got a toxic element to it, and we walk around it.

01:04:39 ►

But the more beings that we birth into the world that are able to be this aware of what’s going on

01:04:46 ►

and see a spade for a spade all around them, the better shot we’ve got,

01:04:50 ►

especially if we undergo a crash.

01:04:53 ►

If we undergo a crash, which we’re headed toward, where the ecosystem, Mother Earth just says,

01:04:59 ►

all right, you put enough gases into the atmosphere, you get a big weather change.

01:05:03 ►

Surprise at the end of the thing.

01:05:05 ►

Thank you for the carbon dioxide.

01:05:08 ►

Here’s your surprise weather change.

01:05:11 ►

This happened before in the oxygen holocaust of 2 billion years ago

01:05:16 ►

when life was pumping oxygen in the atmosphere,

01:05:19 ►

and the atmosphere finally said, congratulations,

01:05:22 ►

you now have enough oxygen in the atmosphere that I will diffuse it into the oceans.

01:05:26 ►

And all the little life forms that couldn’t handle the oxygen went extinct.

01:05:30 ►

Now, that was a nice surprise.

01:05:32 ►

We may be heading toward a dislocation.

01:05:35 ►

If the dislocation does happen suddenly, you have mayhem and confusion in what Hollywood shows.

01:05:42 ►

It may happen in staircases.

01:05:46 ►

confusion and what Hollywood shows it may happen in staircases as it happens in a staircase fashion and you can in Africa friend of mine works in Ghana and

01:05:51 ►

he said look this is happening in sub-saharan Africa there’s a crisis

01:05:55 ►

every five years of massive proportions and populations die off and whole whole

01:06:00 ►

areas become arid it is happening you see it in certain zones. So if instead of, we don’t have the day after where, you know, after Tuesday, you know, three quarters of humanity have died off, we probably won’t have that. But we’re going to have these disjoining staircases. And as each staircase we drop down, and this last financial staircase was kind of stupid and it didn’t kill a

01:06:25 ►

hundred million people but for the staircases that kill 50 million people

01:06:30 ►

there will cut that’s a learning event that’s a learning event but who’s going

01:06:36 ►

to be there to learn not the old culture that was driving consume consume

01:06:40 ►

consuming more and more growth because those guys didn’t learn from the last

01:06:43 ►

financial crash.

01:06:45 ►

Not at all.

01:06:47 ►

They’re trying to return to growth.

01:06:48 ►

Well, growth was wrong.

01:06:49 ►

Sorry.

01:06:51 ►

Less consumption is what we need.

01:06:52 ►

They did not learn.

01:06:57 ►

So you have a disjunction, and a bunch of people, unfortunately, are victims.

01:06:58 ►

They fall off.

01:07:00 ►

They will perish.

01:07:05 ►

But the ones that are left are going to be, in the learning experience, the ones that do not learn probably will have a chance to fall off on the next disjunction.

01:07:11 ►

This is the kind of, unfortunately we’ve left it so long that this may be one of the only

01:07:16 ►

scenarios to build a new earth where you can’t change the minds of the people who are on

01:07:22 ►

the old mindset.

01:07:23 ►

They are in a mindset that created the disaster.

01:07:28 ►

Some of us will go with it, but they will go with it.

01:07:30 ►

It’s the strength of the survivors.

01:07:32 ►

It’s always going to get you through.

01:07:34 ►

So how do we create a critical mass of people ready for the next phase,

01:07:39 ►

ready to build that new earth?

01:07:41 ►

How do you do it?

01:07:42 ►

So to you, the audience.

01:07:46 ►

Oh, there’s one right there.

01:07:56 ►

I was just very interested in elves. I head to my Alaska and met some very strange rainforest elves. And lately I’ve been reading about the old ways of these lands and the fairy beings, the fauns and the satires and

01:08:08 ►

others. When you talk about consumption and growth and what’s gone wrong with our society

01:08:18 ►

here is, according to the Mayans and people who still live in a way very close to the

01:08:25 ►

other side and the beings that live on the other side of the veil or whatever

01:08:30 ►

you call it they say that what we’re lacking here is the feeding we’re so busy

01:08:35 ►

consuming that we don’t feed back we don’t make offerings and give to the beings on the other side. And in the old stories here,

01:08:51 ►

when we had wealth,

01:08:53 ►

the other beings had poverty.

01:08:55 ►

And when they had poverty, we had wealth.

01:08:57 ►

And the question was always to maintain a balance

01:08:59 ►

between those who are living now

01:09:01 ►

and those who have gone already,

01:09:03 ►

our ancestors or those who are yet to be born,

01:09:05 ►

who are going to be our children, our descendants, as well as the various beings of all different kinds.

01:09:11 ►

I mean, every tradition you look at has completely different ones,

01:09:14 ►

and then some other ones come out of the blue when you take your DMT or whatever.

01:09:18 ►

But it’s a question about, well, one, whether or not you believe in them or experience them or whatever,

01:09:24 ►

because if you don’t, then you would never even think about the need to feed and relate to and connect

01:09:29 ►

with them.

01:09:31 ►

But then even when you do have some experience with them, I think most people have not really

01:09:37 ►

got much idea of what they need, what they give us, and what we are able to give back

01:09:43 ►

to them if we make that decision.

01:09:46 ►

And that may be an interesting direction to go in,

01:09:50 ►

in terms of recognising they’re there and relating to them in a more meaningful manner

01:09:55 ►

and therefore being able to relate to each other in this dimension in more healthy ways

01:09:59 ►

and helping them to relate to each other more healthily.

01:10:02 ►

Because some say that any war here comes initially from a war on the other side.

01:10:08 ►

You’re making a beautiful point, which is back in the old days

01:10:12 ►

when we believed that spirits inhabited nature,

01:10:15 ►

there was a spirit of a tree and a spirit of rivers.

01:10:19 ►

It really grounded us in nature.

01:10:21 ►

It made nature into a character, Just like we’re talking about elves.

01:10:25 ►

Maybe elves represent all of the spirits of nature just crammed into one little domed room.

01:10:32 ►

And if we revivify the spirits in nature,

01:10:36 ►

it isn’t that we’re believing that the tree can talk to us,

01:10:39 ►

but we’re believing the metacharacter.

01:10:43 ►

So are you going to cut that tree down as quickly as,

01:10:46 ►

or are you going to do something with respect?

01:10:50 ►

Because ancient civilization blessed the soul of the calf

01:10:54 ►

before they slaughtered it for the meal.

01:10:58 ►

They respected that.

01:10:59 ►

We don’t.

01:11:01 ►

And of course, we can slaughter a whole planet.

01:11:03 ►

We don’t respect individual chickens that

01:11:04 ►

are being killed to go you know to Tesco’s you

01:11:08 ►

don’t have any connection with that so you’re absolutely right and it may be

01:11:12 ►

L’s are termed their metaphor for a colleague of mine was a plant biologist

01:11:20 ►

and he took some kind of tryptamine or and or LSD I can’t

01:11:25 ►

remember what probably the former and he understood the process of photosynthesis

01:11:30 ►

mostly from a kind of two-dimensional diagrams chemical diagrams perspective

01:11:35 ►

well a planet revealed itself to him and a plant leaf and he dove down into this

01:11:42 ►

plant leaf in full 3d with all the molecules moving

01:11:46 ►

and into the photosynthetic collector molecule and the plant said to him I

01:11:53 ►

will show you how we feed you and then a photon came in and he was the photon and

01:12:00 ►

the photon ricocheted around and it created various things like ATP

01:12:06 ►

and noticing and he he said all my life I’ve studied this process I’ve never

01:12:11 ►

memorized the chemical diagrams I have never seen it like this never it changed

01:12:16 ►

his whole approach to photosynthesis he said I got the whole picture and the

01:12:22 ►

plants have said during this experience,

01:12:25 ►

no, this is how we feed you.

01:12:28 ►

And then the only other thing was, think about that.

01:12:34 ►

Think about that.

01:12:36 ►

So a spirit, an elf of a sort, was talking to him.

01:12:40 ►

I mean, if high-tech people like us,

01:12:46 ►

the only way that nature can get at us is either by creating a 30% die-off and saying did you hear that

01:12:52 ►

or through these really hefty chemical sledgehammers in the brain you could see

01:12:58 ►

them as not sledgehammers but it’s a door opening but they nature is trying

01:13:04 ►

to get a message through and

01:13:05 ►

maybe we’re generating the message because deep down we know we’re doing

01:13:09 ►

bad stuff we know we’re destroying it with every growing second you know a

01:13:13 ►

rainforest tree goes crash and a species goes away and this stuff is just going

01:13:19 ►

on all the time and deep down we know where perpetrators of mass murder but the the murdered are gracious enough to keep saying hello you know this is what

01:13:32 ►

you’re doing if you stop now it’ll be a little less hard for you later and we

01:13:37 ►

forgive you we forgive you right away we’ve been through this we’ve had

01:13:40 ►

asteroids come in and they weren’t anyone’s fault, and we got through that. So you’re just another asteroid impact, but you’re, you know, hello.

01:13:50 ►

You’re going to go.

01:13:52 ►

And what Terence said was right, the impoverishment,

01:13:55 ►

the fall of civilization into scarcity.

01:13:58 ►

If we go down, we’ve pumped all the oil out down to,

01:14:04 ►

you know, the reason that there’s this blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is because they’re drilling

01:14:08 ►

a mile down because there’s no reservoirs that are any closer to the surface.

01:14:13 ►

So they have to take all these high risks to get those reservoirs out.

01:14:16 ►

And the pressures are terrible and they’ve never done any robotic repairs at a mile down.

01:14:24 ►

And so we’re taking higher and higher risks to get this stuff out. So surface minerals gone,

01:14:30 ►

petroleum gone, easy access to cheap free energy sources is gone, forest denuded

01:14:37 ►

animal populations that will need a half a million years to recover are gone.

01:14:42 ►

You’re going to be wandering around, not exactly on the world of Wali that’s covered in trash from the hypermark, but you’re going to be

01:14:51 ►

in a world where it’s going to be very hard to restart a technological civilization like

01:14:55 ►

this from scratch. It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be very genuineness.

01:15:02 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a

01:15:07 ►

time and so what do you think is that the kind of world we are heading towards even on my more

01:15:19 ►

optimistic days i sometimes think it is and the problems problems that Bruce just outlined seem almost too huge to even think about,

01:15:27 ►

let alone overcome.

01:15:29 ►

However, we humans have bounced back

01:15:31 ►

from many other adversities in the past few millennia,

01:15:34 ►

and I have no doubt but what, at least in some form,

01:15:37 ►

we will continue as a species for as far ahead as we can see.

01:15:41 ►

The question is, of course,

01:15:43 ►

what form our civilization will take as we

01:15:46 ►

move into this new world. My desire is that we evolve our culture into something along the lines

01:15:53 ►

of what may be experienced on the West Coast Festival Circuit, which is only something that

01:15:59 ►

can be experienced to be understood, but hey, you already know that. There is just one thing, though, that I would like to add to this discussion right now,

01:16:09 ►

and that is to once again remind you of one of the ways in which Terence sometimes defined

01:16:14 ►

the ego.

01:16:15 ►

He said that ego is a process, a process that we use to gain advantage over others.

01:16:23 ►

And while you may not agree with that definition,

01:16:26 ►

you might want to try it on for size

01:16:27 ►

the next time you’re talking about ego dissolution

01:16:30 ►

and think of a process you control that’s dissolving

01:16:34 ►

and it isn’t the basic you that is going away.

01:16:38 ►

In fact, my experience has been that

01:16:40 ►

under the influence of psychedelic medicines,

01:16:43 ►

when my ego fades away,

01:16:47 ►

I’m finally left with the core of my being,

01:16:51 ►

shed of all that baggage that’s been slowing me down.

01:16:55 ►

So give it a try a time or two and see what you think.

01:17:01 ►

Now I’m going to end this podcast a little differently today,

01:17:04 ►

and since Bruce is a close friend of mine, I’m sure that he won’t be

01:17:05 ►

upset that I’m going to close today on a somewhat sad note. A little over a week ago today, my

01:17:12 ►

brother died, and so I want to close this podcast with a brief remembrance of him. To his students,

01:17:19 ►

where he was professor at the University of Granada in southern Spain. He was known as Dr. Miguel José Hagerty Fox,

01:17:28 ►

and he was a distinguished member of the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation.

01:17:34 ►

Miguel was an extremely talented linguist,

01:17:37 ►

and he specialized in Arabic to Spanish translations,

01:17:41 ►

and published a number of important books on Arabic-Andalusian themes, as well

01:17:47 ►

as a large number of articles in his field as well, which, I’m told, focus primarily

01:17:52 ►

on the linguistic and sociological aspects of multiculturalism and social integration

01:17:59 ►

in Andalusia, all of which is way over my head, I must admit.

01:18:04 ►

He was the scholar, and I’m the carnival barker.

01:18:08 ►

And Miguel was a scholar extraordinaire.

01:18:12 ►

And not only in Spain, but he was also quite well known in many of the leading academic circles throughout the Middle East.

01:18:19 ►

And from what I gathered on my visits with him in Granada,

01:18:22 ►

he was also well known in and around that ancient city as what I can only call a character.

01:18:30 ►

In professional circles, Miguel was at the top of his field.

01:18:35 ►

But his main focus in life, and the deepest joy in his life, came from his wife and children,

01:18:40 ►

who provided him with the love and caring that ultimately is the highest honor any

01:18:45 ►

of us can achieve. They were the icing on the cake of life that was quite exceptional.

01:18:51 ►

Miguel was many things to many people, but to me he’ll always be my little brother Mike.

01:18:58 ►

And as brothers often do after long separations, they tell stories of some of their grandest

01:19:04 ►

adventures that took place

01:19:05 ►

during their years apart.

01:19:07 ►

My favorite Miguel story is one that he told me late one night while we were sharing a

01:19:11 ►

bowl together at his home in Granada.

01:19:13 ►

And it’s the picture of him that I would like to leave you with, just to give you a little

01:19:18 ►

idea of how large he lived.

01:19:21 ►

It was during the time shortly before he received his Ph.D., sometime in the early 1970s, I think, when he was working in some capacity at the Alhambra.

01:19:32 ►

A huge private event was scheduled one evening on the grounds of that magnificent fortress.

01:19:38 ►

It was to be a concert by the world’s greatest guitarist, André Segovia.

01:19:43 ►

the world’s greatest guitarist, Andrei Segovia.

01:19:46 ►

Everyone in the city who was anyone was there.

01:19:51 ►

All of the important politicians, business people, and society patrons had already assembled when they received word that the bus carrying Segovia

01:19:55 ►

and his backup musicians had broken down several hours away.

01:19:59 ►

And so the concert was canceled.

01:20:02 ►

Somehow, Miguel was delegated to take another bus to pick up the musicians.

01:20:08 ►

Now, I don’t want to claim that I can remember exactly what he told me about that trip back to Granada

01:20:13 ►

after he picked up Segovia and his musicians in a new bus,

01:20:17 ►

but I am quite positive that there were very large amounts of wine and hash involved along the way,

01:20:23 ►

although I’m equally sure that Segovia himself didn’t partake in the party at all

01:20:28 ►

on their three-hour journey back, and I’ll tell you why.

01:20:31 ►

When they finally arrived in Granada,

01:20:34 ►

Segovia insisted that they go directly to the Alhambra.

01:20:37 ►

He intended to proceed with the concert in that magical, mystical place that night,

01:20:42 ►

no matter what.

01:20:43 ►

When they arrived, only the mayor and a few others were still there, just in case that

01:20:48 ►

that was where Miguel would bring them.

01:20:50 ►

Remember, this was long before the age of cell phones.

01:20:53 ►

Well, they all got off the bus and went directly to the area where the performance was to take

01:20:58 ►

place.

01:20:59 ►

The musicians in Segovia set up their instruments and proceeded to play a two-hour concert for about a half a dozen people,

01:21:07 ►

including my brother Miguel, who was sitting just a few feet away from the maestro himself.

01:21:12 ►

What a marvelous experience that must have been.

01:21:15 ►

The Alhambra, the late-night sky, and a private concert by the great Segovia.

01:21:21 ►

So, I’m going to close today by playing a recording,

01:21:26 ►

obviously from vinyl,

01:21:27 ►

which I actually think is perfect for this moment

01:21:30 ►

since Miguel and I grew up hearing our music

01:21:32 ►

on scratchy vinyl records.

01:21:34 ►

It’s a recording that I found on YouTube

01:21:36 ►

of Segovia playing a piece

01:21:39 ►

that’s titled Memories of the Alhambra.

01:21:42 ►

And I’d like to think that

01:21:44 ►

as he was recording this piece, he was remembering that magical night in the Alhambra. And I’d like to think that as he was recording this piece,

01:21:46 ►

he was remembering that magical night in the Alhambra

01:21:49 ►

when he played a private concert for my beloved brother Miguel.

01:21:54 ►

There’s an old Irish blessing that ends,

01:21:57 ►

and when you come to die,

01:21:58 ►

may the only sorrow you leave behind be the weeping of the poor.

01:22:03 ►

And so I gently weep as I remember a great soul who touched my life deeply.

01:22:09 ►

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

246 - Elves, Egos, and Avatars

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