Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The Dawning paradigm of post modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don’t know what is happening at all, that all of the models we have worked out over the past five hundred years or so have now become recursive, and they can no longer be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed.”
“There is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science.”
“Having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small row boat in a dark ocean, and we are being swept we know not where.”
“Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on.”
“The Growing Transparency, that’s a good idea for what the end of history is. It’s that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer. And as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate, and everything is seen to be of the same stuff.”
“Life is a hyper dimensional object. All hyper dimensional objects are organisms, whether they be societies or animals.”
“There seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps al la Bell’s Theorem or something like that. And that’s what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information, where by sitting still in your room and sending your mind you can cross the universe in an instant.”
“I’ve always thought that Christianity, without making any judgment about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in human history.”
“I think that we are spiritualizing matter. This is what technology is.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today’s podcast by thanking fellow salonners Ed D., Ashley R., and Mark A.
00:00:37 ►
for making donations to the salon to help with our expenses in producing these podcasts.
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And Mark, by the way, also purchased a copy of my novel, which actually makes him a double donor this week. And I also want to thank the other fellow Saloners who purchased a copy of The Genesis Generation,
00:00:51 ►
because that money also goes into funding these podcasts.
00:00:55 ►
And I don’t want to forget Timothy H.,
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who sent a book to me that has been on my wish list for over a year now.
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And it’s funny, I was just thinking about
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finally getting around to ordering that book a few weeks back,
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and then it just showed up in my mailbox, thanks to Timothy.
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So, Ed, Ashley, Mark, and Timothy, and you intrepid souls who have bought a copy of my Pay What You Can novel,
00:01:19 ►
well, thank you all ever so much. I truly appreciate your support.
00:01:23 ►
Well, thank you all ever so much. I truly appreciate your support.
00:01:30 ►
Now, one other salonner who has given us much help over the past few years is Michael DiCircio,
00:01:36 ►
who I also thanked as a donor a few weeks ago and who, along with the check that he sent,
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enclosed a CD with a Terrence McKenna workshop that I hadn’t heard before and which we will begin to listen to in just a minute or so.
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hadn’t heard before, and which we will begin to listen to in just a minute or so.
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Michael, by the way, is also the man behind the new DVD titled Trip to Sane,
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which I’ve mentioned before and will post a link to with today’s program notes.
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In his letter, Michael told me that he hadn’t heard this talk on a salon podcast yet,
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and that it was one of his favorites.
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Well, I’d begun working on another Timothy Leary talk earlier this week, and that was going to be today’s program.
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But to tell the truth, I had a touch of the blues, as we used to call it when I was growing
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up, and for some reason, even though the Leary material was interesting, it just wasn’t
00:02:22 ►
what I needed to get me in the mood to do this week’s podcast.
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So what I did is what I usually do in those circumstances and went back to good old Terrence
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McKenna once I remembered that CD that Michael sent. Now, this talk is also available on YouTube,
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I found, but there’s no video with it. It’s just one of those still images with audio,
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and the YouTube version comes in 22 parts, which is
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somewhat formidable if you just want to kick back and listen to it.
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So the talk on YouTube and the disc that Michael sent
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actually is titled The Rites of Spring. But after
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listening to the first part of this talk, the one I’m going to play right now,
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I’ve changed it to the magic of plants,
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just to confuse later scholars
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and make them work for their grant money
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by digging out these little factoids.
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Now, as best as I can tell,
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this talk was given at the Ojai Foundation in 1986.
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And as I said in his letter
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forwarding the CD with this talk on it,
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Michael said that it was one of his favorite Terrence McKenna talks.
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And after only hearing the first part of it so far,
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I have to agree that this is in many ways a very unique look into the mind of McKenna.
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In fact, when he begins his rap about a parallel earth on which Christianity never took root,
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you may want to mark that spot on your MP3 player.
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Because my guess is that you’re going to want to listen to that particular rap several times.
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No one but Terrence, I think, could come up with a believable version of a mythical, psychedelic,
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Greek-Mayan civilization that split off from us a couple thousand years ago and is now contacting us in the form of UFOs.
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I guess that’s really not a fair description of his tale,
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but after you hear it, you may want to try to describe it to a friend yourself
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and see if it doesn’t come out sounding something like that.
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This is really a classic Terrence McKenna, so let’s get on with it.
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Terrence McKenna. So let’s get on with it.
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Welcome and I hope you feel free to interrupt what’s going on at any time and ask questions or if something needs clarification, please don’t hesitate. My hope for these kinds of retreats
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is that it will quickly become so interesting to everyone
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that the presentational form
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will transform itself into dialogue among many people.
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It seems to me that’s when it happens best.
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And I don’t think people would
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be here if they didn’t have strong opinions and ideas about probably everything which
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is said. So that’s the way the group mind is generated by everyone opening up and to expressing how they relate to these things that we’re going to discuss I guess
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the place to start is sort of with looking at the notion that the dawning paradigm of postmodern consciousness
00:05:48 ►
seems to be the growing awareness
00:05:50 ►
that we don’t know what is happening at all,
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that all of the models
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whose implications have been worked out
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over the past 500 years or so
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have come to a place where they are now recursive and they
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no longer can be pushed forward as models of explanation in other words they are completed
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and ontological analysis of how they work now shows us the limitations of their application to reality. They just simply cannot, there is not more blood
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to be squeezed from the stone of science. There may be further discoveries, but further growth
00:06:36 ►
and understanding along those lines now seems unlikely. What with complementarity principle,
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unlikely what with complementarity principle bell’s theorem the primacy of language in the formation of ontology all these things show the relative power of science to account for reality
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where before it was assumed that science would ultimately give a good account of reality. So postmodern living is living in the light of the fact that that faith
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has dissolved away and that we’re now living in some kind of intellectual free space or fire-free
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zone where everything is up for grabs. And the 20th century’s fascination with the archaic,
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with shamanism and breakdown of perception through modern art,
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exploration of the unconscious through psychoanalysis,
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mass political movements,
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all of these things relate to this fascination with the archaic,
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which is an effort on the part of the culture
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to stabilize itself,
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because we really have,
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having seen the limitations of science,
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we have discovered we are in a small rowboat
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in a dark ocean,
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and we’re being swept we know not where.
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So all past tradition is searched,
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magical traditions, alchemical traditions, lost philosophical traditions, preliterate tribal traditions.
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Everything is frantically searched for a key.
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And while there are consoling perceptions that arise out of this search through all this other extended human knowledge,
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there haven’t yet emerged certain answers about what is going on.
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This is why several people last night referred to how weird the time is,
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how hopeful we are with so little reason on the surface to be hopeful.
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little reason on the surface to be hopeful. And it’s because the gelling out of this historical problem is happening right now, and it’s not clear what it will become. Meetings like this
00:08:59 ►
are efforts to build an understanding of it. It doesn’t appear that it’s going to filter down
00:09:07 ►
through the transformation of institutions of control.
00:09:11 ►
It appears more like it’s going to be
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some kind of proletarian upwelling
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of a shift of point of view.
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Now, the shorthand way of saying
00:09:25 ►
what I just said
00:09:26 ►
is that we now know
00:09:28 ►
that we don’t know anything.
00:09:31 ►
And things like
00:09:32 ►
the psychedelic experience
00:09:34 ►
and the use of psychedelic plants
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throws open doorways
00:09:39 ►
that science was able to successfully
00:09:41 ►
keep closed during its heyday
00:09:44 ►
because they were areas where the number of variables
00:09:49 ►
exceeded science’s power of description,
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and therefore they said, well, we’ll just keep driving straight ahead
00:09:55 ►
and we’ll go up those rivers later.
00:09:58 ►
But now that is all changed,
00:10:25 ►
That is all changed, and the exploration of the existential dimension of not knowingness, which psychedelics makes possible, is what is forming modern people, I think. led lives that were relevant 50 years from now or 100 years from now.
00:10:30 ►
People who had actually figured out the context of the world they were living in and tried to come to terms with it.
00:10:35 ►
And this morning I think we want to talk about plants and how they relate to the planet.
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plants and how they relate to the planet.
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But before we do that,
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I want to paint a picture for you of a mandala,
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which then I will discuss later
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in other meetings.
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But my notion of what the postmodern person’s
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mandalic projection onto the world should be
00:11:02 ►
in terms of a map of understanding is a
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quadrated circle in which psychedelics and feminism and cybernetics and space
00:11:18 ►
travel are the four parts of the circle and in the center of the circle. And in the center of the circle, looking backwards in time,
00:11:26 ►
there is a category that I would call conservation, which means conservation of the planet,
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conservation of traditional and historical knowledge, conservation of values, conservation
00:11:41 ►
in the sense of intelligence husbanding the planet and when the mandala
00:11:48 ►
is flipped over and you look through it into the future conservation has been replaced by art art the ultimate expression of this transformation of unorganized matter into ideas which human beings carry on.
00:12:12 ►
And we carry it on in a technical mode out of necessity, but in the artistic mode out of a kind of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe.
00:12:29 ►
of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe. So conservation is the way we relate to the past and human history is seen as an object of collective artifice making in the notion of the flying saucer.
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To do this, we have to completely redesign our understanding of reality,
00:13:00 ►
which in terms of practical experience will mean that reality itself will appear to be redesigned.
00:13:06 ►
And I touched on this just for a moment last night when I mentioned plants and said how admiring I was of them because they exist on sunlight air and earth
00:13:15 ►
and that this is what we have to learn to do in order to release spirit out of the ape matrix that we’re bound in.
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And strangely enough, the way this is to be done, apparently,
00:13:32 ►
is by a redefining of the nature of the biological world
00:13:37 ►
in relationship to this other kingdom of being, which we call plants.
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Plants represent some kind of entire other dimension
00:13:48 ►
of existence of which we view the topological manifestation of the form but are completely
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occluded as to the network of energy and information that this represents.
00:14:13 ►
And like the zoological kingdom, which has thousands of forms of expression and progressively
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more complex forms which culminate in self-reflecting primates, the vegetable kingdom seems to have intelligent species and gradations of awareness in the world so that we are opening a dialogue
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at the end of history
00:14:33 ►
with this other form in the biosphere
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which we are just beginning to cognize
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as our own understanding about what the world is really about falls into
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focus and certainly a hundred years ago no one would have thought that this was in the direct
00:14:52 ►
line of historical development of the high-tech civilizations that they would have to explore
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the mind of the vegetable plant goddess who was the only force contending with them for
00:15:07 ►
control of the planet that’s what it’s come down to when you take a longer
00:15:13 ►
slice you realize that the individual the existence of the individual is like
00:15:19 ►
an illusion and that really the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene swarming.
00:15:28 ►
And it’s been going on for a billion years with more and more.
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And animals and plants as species and as individuals are just aggregates of genes of varying degrees of permanence.
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The individual is a very impermanent
00:15:45 ►
aggregate of genes.
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The species has a slightly longer duration.
00:15:49 ►
But what’s really happening
00:15:51 ►
is these information-transferring molecules
00:15:53 ►
are just swarming on the surface of the planet
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and controlling, as you mentioned,
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the weather, the chemistry of the soils,
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the rate of heat transfer.
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They’ve discovered now that plankton control weather in the oceans
00:16:09 ►
by controlling the surface reflectivity.
00:16:14 ►
The question, I think, is the peculiar dualism in the world of information.
00:16:19 ►
Why does it seem that reality is not reality?
00:16:23 ►
Why are there co-present, actually, two worlds are co-present in our experience?
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This is the taboo subject that we’re here to talk about.
00:16:35 ►
The weird fact that there are two worlds, one of which our culture doesn’t acknowledge, but we all experience.
00:16:44 ►
That’s a very schizophrenic situation to be in.
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We all exist in both of these worlds,
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but our language, our culture, our institutions tell us,
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no, there’s only one world.
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We have gotten into this lethal cul-de-sac
00:17:01 ►
where by not acknowledging the second world we have have veered off on a tangent
00:17:09 ►
which is threatens our extinction now this obsession with control of world one matter energy
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and the complete ignoring of the world of consciousness which stood in front of it and manipulated it,
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but just taking that as a given
00:17:27 ►
has created this fantastically imbalanced culture.
00:17:32 ►
I think that gets back to the plants as teachers
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because since we do, as in your words,
00:17:39 ►
play with fire as human beings,
00:17:42 ►
perhaps the question you were asking
00:17:44 ►
as to the plants as being
00:17:46 ►
teachers, my feeling was at the time was they’re in communication with us as we are in communication
00:17:53 ►
with them. We’re all transparent beings. You’re talking of genes swarming on the planet. There’s
00:17:58 ►
no safe in which we lock our own human knowledge. We’re transparent to all around us.
00:18:07 ►
If you get into intelligent plants,
00:18:09 ►
which is what we were talking about earlier, perhaps…
00:18:12 ►
I mean, if you follow that logically out,
00:18:14 ►
why not have teachers as chemicals?
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That’s how they can manifest within this particular body
00:18:20 ►
and do…
00:18:21 ►
Use library card, as you were saying.
00:18:24 ►
They realize that we’re doers and shapers.
00:18:26 ►
Well, I think there’s only one life on the planet, though, and to say that we’re separate
00:18:30 ►
from the plants or from this or from the air is a fallacy.
00:18:34 ►
So that’s a great image, the growing transparency.
00:18:39 ►
That’s a good idea for what the end of history is.
00:18:43 ►
It’s that everything becomes clearer and clearer and clearer,
00:18:47 ►
and as it becomes clearer, boundaries disintegrate,
00:18:50 ►
and everything is seen to be of the same stuff.
00:18:57 ►
Well, I think for much of the world,
00:18:59 ►
and still, for instance, in the Amazon and other cultures
00:19:01 ►
who are tuned into nature,
00:19:03 ►
it was very transparent for
00:19:05 ►
very very long progress was the losing of that transparency and the you know forging ahead of
00:19:12 ►
certain parts of it and and almost to the point of just either eliminating uh to extinction or
00:19:20 ►
to the extinction of memory, the lessons.
00:19:30 ►
One day I was just, I think I was doing bookkeeping or something very mundane,
00:19:36 ►
and the little voice that interrupts every once in a while said,
00:19:41 ►
a plant teacher is a teacher who has taken the form of a plant.
00:19:43 ►
And then that raised all these questions for me, you know,
00:19:48 ►
because does that mean there are teachers floating around looking for places to land, right,
00:19:53 ►
and ways to interface with the other species? And, you know, I mean, I’ve always thought of rocks, big rocks in many places in the world. You can sit on them and you can just
00:20:00 ►
hear them, you know, and feel them. Really.
00:20:02 ►
You can just hear them, you know, and feel them.
00:20:04 ►
Really.
00:20:09 ►
I’m sure you know Rupert Sheldrake’s theory.
00:20:15 ►
Well, it’s basically the idea that things of like kind resonate together.
00:20:21 ►
And when I’ve thought about this problem before, about LSD,
00:20:23 ►
and where does it fit into all of this LSD is in is in
00:20:27 ►
the morning glories of central Mexico and the far Pacific and I think that
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what makes a plant teacher complex is how many people it’s taken and that a
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plant that has been used 100,000 years
00:20:45 ►
is filled with all of the contents of the minds of the people who took it over that time.
00:20:53 ►
But I want to introduce the notion that life, the plants and the animals
00:20:59 ►
are intrusions into three-dimensional space
00:21:03 ►
of some kind of topological manifold of a higher order.
00:21:08 ►
You see, the way in which a chair differs from a giraffe
00:21:13 ►
is that if you slice through the chair and then come back and examine it 12 hours later,
00:21:21 ►
it will be the same, but the giraffe will have changed radically.
00:21:26 ►
This is because by cutting into the giraffe, you have intruded into the temporal dimension of its existence.
00:21:34 ►
It is more like a musical note than an object.
00:21:38 ►
It must be born, grow, mature, and die. And that process, growth, maturity, and death,
00:21:46 ►
is how three-dimensional beings like ourselves
00:21:51 ►
describe the intrusion of these hyper-dimensional vortices into our world.
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That’s the mystery of life cannot be encompassed in three dimensions.
00:22:03 ►
Life is a hyperdimensional object.
00:22:06 ►
All hyperdimensional objects are organisms,
00:22:10 ►
whether they be societies or animals.
00:22:13 ►
So the question of what is the plant,
00:22:16 ►
you know, when you ask yourself,
00:22:18 ►
what am I?
00:22:20 ►
What you immediately concentrate on
00:22:22 ►
is what philosophers call
00:22:24 ►
your internal horizon of transcendence.
00:22:26 ►
You look into yourself to understand yourself.
00:22:30 ►
When we try to describe a plant, we inevitably give a topological mapping of it,
00:22:37 ►
how it appears to us, its uptake of minerals, its surface reflectivity, its weight.
00:22:42 ►
But the plant obviously experiences itself very differently.
00:22:47 ►
All life has an internal horizon of transcendence
00:22:51 ►
toward which it aims.
00:22:53 ►
It’s, Whitehead called it appetition.
00:22:57 ►
It’s inclusion of sensory data out of which it maps being.
00:23:03 ►
But what the nature of this higher dimension is,
00:23:07 ►
that these vortices are intruding into our dimension from,
00:23:13 ►
is absolutely anybody’s guess.
00:23:15 ►
I mean, you can call it a mathematical conundrum or a religious mystery,
00:23:20 ►
but it’s what’s making the world happen.
00:23:23 ►
It’s how the mystery of our being will eventually be shed one more level of veil to let us understand it.
00:23:35 ►
You see, an organism is a chemical system which does not run down.
00:23:42 ►
The second law of thermodynamics says that the whole universe
00:23:46 ►
tends toward the dissipation of structure and the release of energy and heat,
00:23:51 ►
and then everything, all structure, all energy is dissipated.
00:23:55 ►
But life has achieved the miracle of, by being an open system
00:24:03 ►
and taking material into it
00:24:05 ►
and extracting energy from it and getting rid of waste,
00:24:10 ►
life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic degradation
00:24:16 ►
and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph
00:24:21 ►
and maintain itself there for at least on this planet alone four billion years.
00:24:28 ►
Now, the average life of a star in this galaxy is on the order of two and a half billion years.
00:24:34 ►
Some last longer.
00:24:36 ►
But that means that biology is no epiphenomenon,
00:24:41 ►
no iridescence off the surface of matter as the 19th century
00:24:46 ►
physicalists wanted to describe it. It means that life is indicative of a
00:24:52 ►
physics of higher dimensions which intrudes into this otherwise
00:24:57 ►
thermodynamically degrading system which we call the physical universe. And information, there seems to be an informational
00:25:08 ►
ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps a la
00:25:16 ►
Bell’s theorem or something like that. And that’s what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologrammatic space of information
00:25:28 ►
where by sitting still in your room
00:25:31 ►
and sending the mind,
00:25:33 ►
you can cross the universe in an instant, you know,
00:25:36 ►
and return.
00:25:37 ►
And the question of, is this real,
00:25:40 ►
is in bad taste.
00:25:42 ►
It violates the two ontological categories, you see.
00:25:48 ►
I mean, it just isn’t done.
00:25:53 ►
But the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions.
00:26:02 ►
shake us out of these cultural conventions.
00:26:06 ►
We have this very bad habit of when we encounter a new experience,
00:26:10 ►
we describe it.
00:26:12 ►
And as we describe it,
00:26:14 ►
we erase its reality
00:26:16 ►
and replace it with a map.
00:26:19 ►
And forever after,
00:26:21 ►
when we encounter that input,
00:26:23 ►
we access the map and overlay it over the thing
00:26:27 ►
and say, aha, I know what this is.
00:26:29 ►
And so by the time a child is five years old,
00:26:33 ►
they have completely entered into a symbolic construct
00:26:36 ►
which hides the real world from them.
00:26:39 ►
And fortunately, these plant teachers
00:26:44 ►
seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language, which for us is the relativity of being.
00:26:53 ►
And then you are freed because you have seen something incontrovertible.
00:26:58 ►
There’s no going back then. That is the great first gateway on the path to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of the world.
00:27:13 ►
Coming out into the desert is typical of people seeking visions.
00:27:19 ►
The first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery and replace it with
00:27:28 ►
a mythology, which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology, whether
00:27:34 ►
they be shamans or priests. This holding back of reality is what Christian theologians call the fall,
00:27:46 ►
our strange alienation from nature
00:27:49 ►
that causes us to crowd into cities and mint money
00:27:52 ►
and put a price on everything.
00:27:56 ►
This is why it’s so important to go back to the Amazon
00:28:00 ►
and eastern Indonesia and these places
00:28:03 ►
and try and understand what spark it was
00:28:07 ►
that those people kept over the millennia
00:28:11 ►
while we became the prodigal son
00:28:14 ►
and wandered into matter
00:28:16 ►
and to hoard in the cities on the plain
00:28:20 ►
and have now come full circle
00:28:22 ►
and returned at the end of history
00:28:25 ►
with the dilemma that we have made such a mess of things
00:28:29 ►
that there’s nothing we can do now but lay.
00:28:32 ►
Each stage is a greater distancing from the wellspring of being
00:28:38 ►
and it’s brought us, you know, to the valley of dry bones,
00:28:43 ►
to the valley of dry bones, to the valley of the apocalypse, and
00:28:48 ►
now the fat is in the fire. Now we’ll find out what stuff man is made of as the chickens
00:28:55 ►
come home to roost.
00:28:56 ►
Jesus.
00:28:57 ►
Well, no, I’m very optimistic.
00:29:01 ►
Metaphors.
00:29:02 ►
Is it my metaphors or my pessimism? Oh, the Metaphors.
00:29:08 ►
Is it my metaphors or my pessimism?
00:29:09 ►
Oh, the horrible metaphors.
00:29:09 ►
The metaphors.
00:29:11 ►
I’m used to the metaphors. Yes, well,
00:29:11 ►
the rhetorical hyperbole.
00:29:17 ►
Unbridled.
00:29:18 ►
I’d like to ask a question
00:29:19 ►
about this two-world thing.
00:29:22 ►
It interests me greatly. Do you think that there’s two worlds or that there’s many, many worlds? this two-world thing, which was an interesting grid.
00:29:25 ►
Do you think that there’s two worlds or that there’s many, many worlds?
00:29:29 ►
Yes, well, I think you’re right.
00:29:31 ►
I mean, but there are different orders of different worlds.
00:29:34 ►
I mean, I guess it was the physicist Wheeler
00:29:37 ►
who thought that every time there was a choice,
00:29:40 ►
the universe took both paths and had always done this
00:29:45 ►
so that the number and kinds of universes was staggering.
00:29:53 ►
Right.
00:29:53 ►
That’s the reality set.
00:29:55 ►
I find that cumbersome.
00:30:02 ►
But there certainly seem to be a number of universes and there seem to be a number of universes,
00:30:06 ►
and there seem to be different kinds of universes.
00:30:09 ►
For instance, you can tune from channel to channel,
00:30:14 ►
but some of them you can’t make heads nor tails out of, you know.
00:30:18 ►
It’s just too far away from your conceptual schema for you to be.
00:30:23 ►
So it’s sort of like watching ideological mandalas or something.
00:30:28 ►
You can’t say much about it afterwards,
00:30:31 ►
but it certainly was compelling while it was going on.
00:30:35 ►
And, well, I don’t know, Robin.
00:30:39 ►
You’re such a skillful questioner.
00:30:41 ►
You’ve brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania.
00:30:46 ►
Maybe I should unburden myself
00:30:48 ►
briefly about it.
00:30:51 ►
One of the weird things
00:30:52 ►
about growth
00:30:54 ►
or trying to make your ideas
00:30:57 ►
always become new
00:30:58 ►
is that you always assume
00:31:00 ►
you’re going to know
00:31:03 ►
what the next step is. That even though you’re going to become what the next step is,
00:31:05 ►
that even though you’re going to become more and more enlightened,
00:31:08 ►
there won’t be any surprises.
00:31:13 ►
So a few weeks ago, I was meditating in my usual fashion,
00:31:19 ►
and I began to get this new idea,
00:31:24 ►
which was so weird that I immediately shifted into,
00:31:29 ►
aha, this is not the truth.
00:31:31 ►
This is not a transmission about the nature of reality.
00:31:33 ►
This is a plot for a science fiction novel that I should write
00:31:39 ►
and tried to hold that as the defense.
00:31:41 ►
That was my shield against the onslaught of this thing.
00:31:45 ►
hold that as the defense. That was my shield against the onslaught of this thing. And I’ve never been one for Atlantis or Lemuria or all these invisible prehistoric lands and places
00:31:54 ►
that people enjoy so much. But I was told a very funny thing, which I will share with you. It’s a funny idea.
00:32:06 ►
Now let’s see, how does it go?
00:32:09 ►
It has two versions,
00:32:11 ►
one of which speaks a scientific language,
00:32:14 ►
the other speaks a mythological language.
00:32:18 ►
Okay, so the scientific language goes like this.
00:32:20 ►
There’s something in the universe called
00:32:23 ►
a fractal soliton of improbability.
00:32:27 ►
This means it’s a unique event.
00:32:30 ►
It only happens once in the lifetime of a universe.
00:32:33 ►
You can think of it as a wavelength with one wave.
00:32:36 ►
That’s why it’s called a soliton.
00:32:39 ►
And if one of these things move, not in ordinary three-dimensional space,
00:32:44 ►
but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold,
00:32:48 ►
and when they collide with a planet,
00:32:51 ►
or when one collides with a planet in a universe,
00:32:54 ►
the time stream of that planet is divided,
00:32:58 ►
and two copies of the entire planet spring into existence
00:33:02 ►
without either having any knowledge of it.
00:33:06 ►
It just is something which happens.
00:33:08 ►
So this voice was telling me
00:33:10 ►
that this had happened to the Earth
00:33:15 ►
and that this was the secret
00:33:18 ►
that we were all striving to understand
00:33:21 ►
was that an event in the past
00:33:30 ►
had actually divided our time stream and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension okay so that’s the scientific explanation
00:33:38 ►
of it so the mythological explanation was that there that the universe it’s Gnostic that the universe
00:33:45 ►
is the creation of a demo urge not the highest expression of divinity but a
00:33:52 ►
kind of demon a fallen creature and that this demo urge was able to coax itself
00:34:01 ►
into being and actually incarnate into history as a human being and that when this
00:34:08 ►
happened this was then the mythological expression of the fractal soliton of improbability and when
00:34:15 ►
it happened the time stream split the universe is the creation of the damage and the damage
00:34:21 ►
impelled itself in in the form of an individual.
00:34:25 ►
Right.
00:34:26 ►
And this is sort of, you know…
00:34:27 ►
Waited a long time.
00:34:28 ►
When you’re a DEMA urge, who can hurry?
00:34:34 ►
Okay, go ahead.
00:34:35 ►
Okay, so the time-splitting event had to do with the career of Christ,
00:34:43 ►
who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time stream,
00:34:48 ►
not to be confused with a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Zoroaster who were great saints.
00:34:55 ►
And it was something else.
00:34:58 ►
It was, in some sense, what it claimed to be.
00:35:02 ►
But in some sense.
00:35:05 ►
Okay?
00:35:06 ►
So now, at the moment of,
00:35:08 ►
and you can choose either the Immaculate Conception
00:35:11 ►
or the Resurrection,
00:35:12 ►
depending on which side of the bed you got up on today.
00:35:16 ►
But at that moment,
00:35:18 ►
the time stream split
00:35:19 ►
and this other place came into being
00:35:24 ►
without having any awareness.
00:35:25 ►
And they were identical at that moment, these two worlds.
00:35:29 ►
Now Christ had no children.
00:35:32 ►
So, oh, what I forgot to say was that the event, the fractal soliton of improbability,
00:35:41 ►
has this quantum mechanical half charge so that in one of the universes it happens
00:35:46 ►
in the other universe it doesn’t happen and so everything about these two worlds was the same
00:35:54 ►
except that in one of them the immaculate conception had not taken place or the resurrection
00:36:00 ►
had not taken place now because christ had no, in the world in which he was absent,
00:36:07 ►
it was not a genetic line which was missing.
00:36:11 ►
It was an ideological line
00:36:14 ►
which never received expression.
00:36:18 ►
And consequently, as time passed,
00:36:21 ►
first decades and then centuries,
00:36:24 ►
the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world
00:36:27 ►
changed the world radically in the following way.
00:36:33 ►
Greek science did not suffer the suppression
00:36:37 ►
that occurred with the conversion of Constantine.
00:36:40 ►
The academies were not closed.
00:36:43 ►
The hermetic knowledge was not repressed. Conversely, the empire was stronger and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the 2nd to the 5th century. in our world at Diophantus proceeded through his disciple Hypatia
00:37:06 ►
to develop a calculus by AD 370
00:37:10 ►
so that the millennium of Christian stasis
00:37:16 ►
that occurred in our world
00:37:18 ►
did not occur in that world.
00:37:22 ►
And as time passed
00:37:24 ►
and engineering advances occurred, by around 850 they had ships
00:37:30 ►
which were able to cross the Atlantic Ocean and they encountered the Mayan civilization reaching
00:37:36 ►
its fullest flower on in Guatemala and on the Yucatan Peninsula and And in fact, in this vision, I saw the Roman emperor Cosmodorus V
00:37:46 ►
make a pilgrimage to Tikal in 920 to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of
00:37:54 ►
Bakhtun 8. Anyway, this Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and astronomy and
00:38:05 ►
and Europe was transformed into an amalgamation a Greco Mayan civilization So let me see.
00:38:28 ►
And this civilization continued to develop.
00:38:31 ►
Now, one of the influences which the Mayans brought into Europe around the year 950
00:38:36 ►
was their extremely sophisticated psychopharmacopoeia and shamanism.
00:38:41 ►
And this mated with neoplatonism and hermeticism
00:38:46 ►
so that rather than science developing as it developed in our world,
00:38:51 ►
a kind of magical psychopharmacolitic technology of thought and understanding
00:38:58 ►
was what was developed over the centuries.
00:39:01 ►
And then in later centuries, centuries before it happened in our world they contacted
00:39:05 ►
the orient and the sung the dynastic influence of the sung poured itself into the creation of a
00:39:13 ►
global civilization such that by around 1200 a.d they were able to land on the moon and create a
00:39:22 ►
cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind
00:39:25 ►
we have now they continued evolving with all this psychotronic and shamanically
00:39:31 ►
derived and now by this time you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic
00:39:36 ►
and alien civilization compared to our own the fruits of their psychedelic and
00:39:43 ►
psychoanalytic investigations into higher space was the discovery of our world. journeys into the psychedelic space they were able to discover our sleeping unconscious with
00:40:05 ►
its repository of the legacy of the christian centuries under the reign of this demoergic
00:40:12 ►
ideology and they conceived of the notion of saving us and it it has to do with this whole thing about the UFOs
00:40:26 ►
and influence in dreams and astral traveling,
00:40:29 ►
and the other side is actually the manifestation
00:40:33 ►
of this bizarre Greco-Mayan post-modern star-faring civilization
00:40:41 ►
trying to reach across the dimensions to save us from the momentum of
00:40:48 ►
our history by making us aware of first of all their existence and also their technology which
00:40:57 ►
is evolving toward a point where i think around the mayan millennium, around 2012, the time island will be, we will flow past the time island and the two time streams will be rejoined and we will make peace with this civilization which is now a thousand years more advanced than us with this totally different cultural history and this completely
00:41:25 ►
different take on reality so this came to me in the space of about 15 seconds and more details
00:41:35 ►
have flowed in and i use it mostly as a meditational device because it’s so interesting to ask to be told about how this other civilization developed.
00:41:48 ►
It’s amazing exoticism.
00:41:52 ►
It’s Neoplatonism.
00:41:53 ►
It’s Taoism.
00:41:55 ►
It’s Mayan influences
00:41:56 ►
melded into a completely different kind of civilization
00:42:00 ►
than the one that we inherited.
00:42:03 ►
I’ve always thought, you know,
00:42:08 ►
that Christianity,
00:42:12 ►
without making any judgment about Christ himself,
00:42:16 ►
that Christianity is hands down the single most reactionary force
00:42:18 ►
in all of human history.
00:42:20 ►
And where would we be
00:42:22 ►
had that 1,200 years
00:42:24 ►
not been given over to this peculiar meditation you know
00:42:31 ►
all the pieces were in place for the kind of civilization that I’ve outlined it was just a coincidence.
00:42:48 ►
Cat does not endorse this idea or even encourage it.
00:42:52 ►
He only told it to me a couple of days ago
00:42:54 ►
in Apache Junction in a truck stop or something.
00:42:58 ►
And he didn’t tell me it’s the plot for a science fiction novel.
00:43:01 ►
He said, this is the truth.
00:43:03 ►
And then I said, let’s get back to it being a good science fiction novel.
00:43:08 ►
Well, the thing is that it would, on our level, explain perhaps the questions you were asking
00:43:13 ►
earlier of why the teaching plans.
00:43:16 ►
Sure.
00:43:18 ►
Another thing I was curious about while you were talking, this is the physics of nowadays.
00:43:22 ►
It’s like if you have an electron on one side of the universe and split it into two and separate them by the universe they’re still in communication
00:43:28 ►
with each other so is that why logically you can bring the time island back together again yeah
00:43:33 ►
this would be a quantum mechanical super macro physical bell’s theorem event a kind of a kind
00:43:40 ►
of hyperdimensional vacuum fluctuation where the two worlds spring apart,
00:43:45 ►
sail along for a period,
00:43:47 ►
and then parity is conserved and they’re rejoined.
00:43:50 ►
Well, this is interesting.
00:43:51 ►
I’ve had dreams that are parallel,
00:43:53 ►
what you’re describing here,
00:43:54 ►
and it’s very interesting that you’re bringing this up.
00:43:56 ►
I’ve not heard of it before.
00:44:00 ►
Another thing I was curious is,
00:44:01 ►
like this takes place,
00:44:03 ►
this would be on a human experience level, what you’re speaking of.
00:44:10 ►
Now, the plant kingdom…
00:44:14 ►
Would they remain in connection between the species?
00:44:21 ►
We’re free to have it any way we like.
00:44:20 ►
species.
00:44:23 ►
We’re free to have it any way we like.
00:44:25 ►
How has Christianity possibly affected
00:44:27 ►
the evolution of plant species in this
00:44:29 ►
time stream, as opposed to the other?
00:44:32 ►
Have they gone on
00:44:33 ►
variating? How does our lack
00:44:35 ►
of, say, 100,000 or a million
00:44:37 ►
species in the last 200
00:44:39 ►
years that the other planet
00:44:41 ►
has, how does that affect the parity
00:44:43 ►
between the two?
00:44:46 ►
You mean how does our destruction and contort?
00:44:49 ►
Well, the part of the myth that I didn’t tell you, which I will now tell you, was that naturally,
00:44:57 ►
well, they were developing and exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago, and they
00:45:02 ►
technical options many hundreds of years ago, and they discovered the theoretics for nuclear fusion and fission,
00:45:10 ►
but they never used it until a few hundred years later,
00:45:16 ►
one of their great theoreticians,
00:45:18 ►
this was after they had discovered our time stream,
00:45:22 ►
made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time stream, made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions
00:45:25 ►
were such that they would cross the time stream.
00:45:30 ►
And so they performed an experiment
00:45:32 ►
by detonating an atomic device
00:45:35 ►
in what is our year, 1907.
00:45:39 ►
And this was the Tunguska event.
00:45:45 ►
And then by monitoring the dreams of Siberian shaman,
00:45:48 ►
which they had in clear focus,
00:45:50 ►
they saw, aha, this explosion which we set off
00:45:53 ►
actually did occur in both time streams.
00:45:56 ►
And at that point, they became very interested in monitoring our time stream
00:46:03 ►
because they were picking up the dreams
00:46:05 ►
of a Swiss telegraph worker
00:46:07 ►
who seemed to be pushing toward
00:46:10 ►
an unimaginable conclusion.
00:46:13 ►
So now there is a certain amount of urgency
00:46:15 ►
because if we explode our atomic stockpiles,
00:46:18 ►
it will wreck the place that they call home world.
00:46:24 ►
Butter.
00:46:26 ►
Yes, yes.
00:46:28 ►
Not self-preservation, because they now have star flight and encompass many systems,
00:46:33 ►
but preservation of home world, which on the other side
00:46:37 ►
is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole.
00:46:42 ►
I mean, it’s a sacred site of pilgrimage.
00:46:45 ►
It’s the home of the species.
00:46:47 ►
It’s the Earth.
00:46:48 ►
And the notion that suddenly great parts of it will be blown apart by leakage from hyperspace
00:46:56 ►
of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now to attempt to open the doorway and rejoin
00:47:04 ►
the time streams
00:47:05 ►
and we’ll be allowed a few years inside the botanical park to acclimate
00:47:11 ►
and then most people will ship off for the stars, I imagine.
00:47:17 ►
The British science fiction writer Ian Watson has a wonderful book called Chekhov’s Journey
00:47:23 ►
in which he talks about
00:47:26 ►
the Tunguska event, and his theory is that it was a catastrophic failure of a Soviet
00:47:32 ►
time travel experiment conducted shortly after the turn of the next century.
00:47:41 ►
Tough one to prove, right?
00:47:43 ►
Obviously. Why didn’t we think of that
00:47:46 ►
well
00:47:49 ►
I mean I’m not sure
00:47:52 ►
I’ve thought of that before
00:47:53 ►
you know it’s the claim of Christian theologians
00:47:56 ►
that Christ comes in the center of history
00:47:59 ►
they speak this same language
00:48:01 ►
before Christ
00:48:03 ►
no souls were entering heaven he freed the
00:48:07 ►
valve and now it’s possible to enter into heaven before his intercession that
00:48:13 ►
was impossible you’re right but that’s where I left them was pre-Vatican Jews
00:48:23 ►
before I had this idea I had another idea which I had another idea, which I’ll tell you,
00:48:28 ►
which is a completely different kind of idea.
00:48:31 ►
And it’s the idea that there is an overmind.
00:48:35 ►
This doesn’t involve other dimensions.
00:48:38 ►
There is an overmind co-present on this planet.
00:48:40 ►
And when technology, when the development of technology exceeds the development
00:48:47 ►
of ethics then this over mind can work miracles and because the over mind is plugged into each
00:48:57 ►
of the individual minds that compose it this miracle always has this unbelievably creepy quality
00:49:05 ►
of being exactly the thing which would convince you to change your mind.
00:49:13 ►
I mean, in other words, it’s like it reads you so perfectly
00:49:15 ►
that it’s able to present the one situation which you cannot refuse.
00:49:21 ►
So in the case of Rome, it was that, you know, Rome was a pigsty. Pastinac called it a
00:49:29 ►
bargain basement on two floors. It ran on slavery, and it ran on brutality and captive populations
00:49:37 ►
and an outrageous garrisoning of military power in foreign lands. And people like Diophantus, this mathematician I mentioned,
00:49:49 ►
and Hero of Alexandria,
00:49:52 ►
these people were on the brink of the calculus and the steam engine.
00:49:55 ►
So the overmind, seeing that, and seeing their appalling ethical state,
00:50:02 ►
sent the miraculous personage
00:50:06 ►
of Christ who
00:50:07 ►
in a world where information could not
00:50:10 ►
move faster than a horse’s gallop
00:50:12 ►
this religion
00:50:14 ►
within 60 years was
00:50:16 ►
beating at the gates of Rome
00:50:18 ►
itself it was like a
00:50:20 ►
fire you know just burned
00:50:22 ►
through the empire and changed everything
00:50:24 ►
and halted technical advance.
00:50:27 ►
And everything stopped.
00:50:29 ►
Now, I created this idea in an effort to explain the UFOs.
00:50:35 ►
Because, you know, the new theory of UFOs or the new school of UFOs says we’ve been wrong to ask what are they.
00:50:43 ►
That has not been fruitful. What we should be doing is ask what are they that has not been fruitful what we should be doing is
00:50:47 ►
asking what are they doing and we can analyze what they’re doing in the same way that we can analyze
00:50:54 ►
what anybody is doing through sociological polling of human populations we can find out what the
00:51:00 ►
flying saucers are doing so they po human populations, and what they discovered is that what the flying saucers are doing
00:51:08 ►
is they are sowing disbelief in science.
00:51:13 ►
They cause people to not believe in scientists
00:51:17 ►
because scientists come up so lame
00:51:20 ►
when asked to explain flying saucers.
00:51:23 ►
It’s like the flying saucer is the confounding of science
00:51:30 ►
in the same way that the resurrection was the complete confounding
00:51:35 ►
of Greek Stoicism and Democratian materialism in the Roman world.
00:51:41 ►
And it’s conceivable that the flying saucer,
00:51:44 ►
I mean the statistics are now something like 12, 11% of the American population have seen a flying saucer, 52% believe flying saucers are real, whatever that may mean, and so forth. So it is a faith which is percolating up from the lower levels. It’s people who
00:52:07 ►
live in trailer courts and read Fate magazine who are the staunchest believers in this thing.
00:52:14 ►
But what it may be is an intercession on the part of the overmind, which it can do anything.
00:52:21 ►
It can do anything from our point of view. And in the most extreme version of this idea, I said, what if enormous spacecraft were to fall into orbit around this planet?
00:52:36 ►
And what if television images of this craft were to be beamed into every home on the planet. And then a teaching revealed some completely mind-boggling thing
00:52:49 ►
which you could have thought of it yourself, but you never did,
00:52:53 ►
which is always how these things are.
00:52:55 ►
And then after 30 days of melting the nuclear arsenals
00:53:01 ►
and causing all cancer to appear and curing all infectious diseases and delivering this message,
00:53:07 ►
the enormous spacecraft disappeared.
00:53:10 ►
30 days.
00:53:12 ►
So then everybody says, my God, we have been abandoned.
00:53:16 ►
We have been abandoned again into time.
00:53:19 ►
And, you know, history would halt.
00:53:22 ►
Everybody would do nothing but study the teachings of the saucer
00:53:26 ►
and try and figure out how we could get right with them to get them to come back.
00:53:31 ►
Dogmatism, theories of communication, priestcraft, the whole thing.
00:53:37 ►
So, you see, though I’m fascinated by the flying saucer
00:53:40 ►
and what it says about the malleability of mind and matter,
00:53:44 ►
saucer and the and what it says about the malleability of mind and matter I think mature civilizations should not be haunted by Messiahs or flying saucers
00:53:51 ►
that these things are like metaphysical spanking imposed from on high that are
00:53:57 ►
designed saying you know here it’s a boot in the tail wake up you know stop
00:54:02 ►
repressing well let’s take your two ideas
00:54:05 ►
neither one of them is that old
00:54:08 ►
and what does the overmind
00:54:09 ►
have to do with
00:54:11 ►
or think of
00:54:11 ►
the double time stream
00:54:13 ►
well now that’s a question
00:54:16 ►
I never would have asked
00:54:17 ►
you mean if that’s true
00:54:21 ►
I sort of think of these
00:54:24 ►
as mutually exclusive well his, it’s two theories.
00:54:26 ►
The earlier one was that the overmind was injecting forces of change or conservatism
00:54:31 ►
into the world. The other, that events that came from, now that was from the demiurge.
00:54:39 ►
Is the demiurge related to the overmind? No, I think the DEMA urge is like a negative expression of the overmind. But created the universe?
00:54:46 ►
How did the overmind
00:54:46 ►
get in there
00:54:47 ►
to be running the earth,
00:54:50 ►
at least?
00:54:50 ►
Well, I think of the overmind
00:54:52 ►
as the logos, you know.
00:54:55 ►
It’s the understanding
00:54:57 ►
and self-existence
00:54:59 ►
which permeates everything.
00:55:01 ►
And the DEMA urge
00:55:02 ►
is the force of matter
00:55:04 ►
and time
00:55:05 ►
and cosmic destiny
00:55:06 ►
that is always trying to lock in the Logos
00:55:09 ►
and condition it
00:55:11 ►
and make it subject to the rules
00:55:14 ►
of the physical universe of space and time.
00:55:19 ►
And the Logos is like something from…
00:55:21 ►
This is all Gnostic theology, by the way.
00:55:24 ►
This is just straight from the book
00:55:25 ►
the logos is trying to
00:55:27 ►
struggle through the labyrinth
00:55:30 ►
of the material universe
00:55:31 ►
to escape, to rejoin
00:55:34 ►
the real source of
00:55:36 ►
itself which is outside of matter
00:55:38 ►
matter is viewed as
00:55:39 ►
an entrapment
00:55:41 ►
if any of you have read
00:55:44 ►
the late works of Philip K. Dick
00:55:46 ►
he was probing
00:55:48 ►
in these areas
00:55:49 ►
he was a genius
00:55:50 ►
his book Valus
00:55:52 ►
is pure exegesis
00:55:54 ►
of his internal
00:55:55 ►
unravelment of what was going on
00:55:59 ►
and he believed
00:56:00 ►
his take on it was
00:56:02 ►
he believed that from
00:56:04 ►
AD 69 until 1948, no time had actually passed.
00:56:12 ►
And that we were living in apostolic time.
00:56:15 ►
And that the crucifixion lay only 75 years in the past.
00:56:21 ►
And that the Dema Urge had inserted a false history, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts,
00:56:28 ►
he believed, were actually the Logos as printed letters, and that when the Nag Hammadi manuscripts
00:56:37 ►
were deciphered, it was like this informational creature would come alive and again be present on the earth,
00:56:45 ►
that the Logos, beginning in 1948,
00:56:48 ►
was beginning to infuse everything
00:56:50 ►
and that shortly it would dissolve the illusion
00:56:54 ►
of the intervening 1860 years or whatever it was,
00:56:59 ►
and then we would realize that the prophecy would be fulfilled
00:57:03 ►
and that the last days were upon us.
00:57:09 ►
That’s right. That’s right.
00:57:12 ►
He didn’t get around to the Antichrist,
00:57:15 ►
to his credit, probably.
00:57:23 ►
You have to distinguish between Christ
00:57:26 ►
the person, the teacher
00:57:29 ►
and this thing called the Christos
00:57:31 ►
which is this archetype
00:57:34 ►
of such power and force
00:57:36 ►
that immediately people of ill intent
00:57:39 ►
could get lined up behind it
00:57:42 ►
and impose their will
00:57:44 ►
sell love and sell forgiveness get lined up behind it and impose their will.
00:57:48 ►
Yeah, sell love and sell forgiveness.
00:57:52 ►
And, you know, what a scam.
00:57:55 ►
And the Christos is the thing.
00:57:59 ►
History is ruled by the archetypes which people can generate.
00:58:03 ►
I mean, most people are very ordinary.
00:58:06 ►
I mean, you’re Mick Jaggers and you’re Henry Kissingers. They are very ordinary. I mean, your Mick Jaggers and your Henry Kissingers,
00:58:08 ►
they’re very ordinary people, but they are able to project an archetype, you know,
00:58:14 ►
and that is the thing which sets them apart.
00:58:18 ►
And when that reaches the kind of super intense focus
00:58:22 ►
that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ,
00:58:24 ►
the kind of super intense focus that you get in a Muhammad or a Christ,
00:58:30 ►
well then, you know, history is just putty in the hands of the force,
00:58:31 ►
not the person.
00:58:34 ►
The person is usually martyred in some horrible way.
00:58:40 ►
But the archetype draws energy to itself,
00:58:44 ►
and we don’t understand how this process works. If there ever is developed by benevolent or malevolent forces
00:58:49 ►
a science of social control,
00:58:52 ►
it will be a science of knowing how to project archetypes
00:58:55 ►
and different archetypes apparently are suitable to different times.
00:59:02 ►
I mean, you could almost posit an astrological theory of archetypes,
00:59:07 ►
but it’s something about how,
00:59:08 ►
you know, what’s appropriate for
00:59:10 ►
the first century A.D.
00:59:13 ►
is not appropriate for the 15th.
00:59:16 ►
But when the archetype is appropriate,
00:59:18 ►
nothing can stop it.
00:59:20 ►
The modern term for archetypes
00:59:22 ►
is paradigm,
00:59:24 ►
and we expect it not to be a person, not a messiah, but an idea which will save us all,
00:59:31 ►
and which then gives us certain affinities with mystical Judaism, where the messiah was seen, was expected in the form of an idea.
00:59:40 ►
And this is sort of our faith. We’re messianic ideologues or something like that.
00:59:48 ►
I agree with you.
00:59:49 ►
I think ultimately all dualisms have to be dissolved in the notion that there is one thing.
00:59:56 ►
That’s the platonic faith.
00:59:58 ►
The problem is all these secondary and tertiary operational levels
01:00:03 ►
where we’re trying to actually operate in a universe of scarcity
01:00:08 ►
in a body which requires energy and all these things.
01:00:12 ►
This is really the central problem in Western thinking, I think,
01:00:18 ►
is the tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit
01:00:23 ►
and how do you handle it.
01:00:26 ►
I think, you know, that we are spiritualizing matter.
01:00:30 ►
This is what technology is.
01:00:33 ►
And that the spiritualizing of matter
01:00:36 ►
is the highest expression of our technological output,
01:00:42 ►
and that this will become more and more what we are about
01:00:46 ►
so that in the next century
01:00:48 ►
the difference between mind and brain
01:00:51 ►
and cell and machine
01:00:52 ►
will all have been subsumed
01:00:55 ►
under a new vocabulary
01:00:56 ►
because we are hardwiring our minds
01:00:59 ►
and we are making the artifacts
01:01:02 ►
of our culture intelligent
01:01:04 ►
and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves,
01:01:08 ►
between ourselves and larger databases and this kind of thing
01:01:12 ►
so that the old I’m an ego inside the skin definition
01:01:17 ►
gives way to some kind of much more malleable and plastic thing.
01:01:22 ►
As an astrologer, one of the images that I like is the symbol for Pisces,
01:01:26 ►
which is two lines with a line going through it,
01:01:28 ►
and it’s the definition of relationship quality by opposition.
01:01:33 ►
It’s polarity, it’s right, wrong, good, bad, male, female, Russians, Americans.
01:01:37 ►
The Aquarian one, which is the two lines of waves over each other,
01:01:41 ►
is one of resonance, and it’s one of dolphins jumping in the water
01:01:46 ►
together it’s one of people coming together and realizing like how I resonate with you and what
01:01:51 ►
I have to give you and you have to give me but you’ll have something to give me that other people
01:01:55 ►
can’t and so on and we need to swim together and that breaks down all of the the dualist bonds that
01:02:02 ►
and I think we’re right at that that crux right at the moment,
01:02:06 ►
that place between Pisces and Aquarius
01:02:07 ►
where we’re kind of two worlds, again,
01:02:10 ►
flipping from one side to the other of opposition,
01:02:13 ►
being torn from life and death
01:02:14 ►
and seeing as the Christ, I feel,
01:02:18 ►
was that prototype, that template
01:02:22 ►
of light and spirit with matter coming together and saying,
01:02:26 ►
I can dance in this and I can leave it and I can come back into it.
01:02:29 ►
I have this power.
01:02:30 ►
It’s my conscious, compassionate love that is just so unbounded
01:02:35 ►
that it gives me the opportunity to play in clay if I choose.
01:02:42 ►
Much of what I say is Alfred North Whitehead
01:02:46 ►
his philosophy
01:02:48 ►
and believe me
01:02:50 ►
if you’re looking around
01:02:51 ►
for a serious ontological foundation
01:02:54 ►
you don’t have to read Sanskrit
01:02:56 ►
Alfred North Whitehead
01:02:58 ►
will serve very admirably
01:03:01 ►
science in the modern world
01:03:03 ►
process and reality. He was, he was and remains
01:03:09 ►
the great psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century in the era of Bergson. You had another
01:03:18 ►
question.
01:03:19 ►
Well, yeah, I’m going to be 84 in the year 2012 and I’m wondering how best to manage my life so that I’ll be ready for that.
01:03:28 ►
I’m crescent.
01:03:30 ►
Well, I don’t know. I think that the canyons of the creode down which we as individuals are moving,
01:03:39 ►
those walls are getting higher and higher too.
01:03:43 ►
A lot of times when I had these intense contacts
01:03:46 ►
with the teaching entity, I would have an anxiety about what should I do? What is it
01:03:55 ►
for me to do? And it always said, nothing. Relax. Your function is to just…
01:04:05 ►
You’ll be present where you’re necessary.
01:04:09 ►
And I really…
01:04:11 ►
This isn’t a fatalism.
01:04:13 ►
This is a kind of recognition of the dynamics of time
01:04:17 ►
that the thing is trying to teach, you see.
01:04:20 ►
It’s trying to say that if you understand how process works,
01:04:24 ►
you will always understand where you are in any given process.
01:04:29 ►
And then you won’t have anxiety about not occupying some other point in that process, you know.
01:04:40 ►
But when I began having these ideas, the only way I could previously relate to the notion of the end of the world was that I had a head full of cartoons of bearded men in sandals carrying signs on street corners saying, repent, repent.
01:04:55 ►
And here was I, you know, former Marxist, former this, former that, espousing these unimaginable things.
01:05:04 ►
But it’s always good to do your homework.
01:05:08 ►
And I discovered there’s a wonderful book
01:05:10 ►
called The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
01:05:14 ►
in which he details the history of millenarianism.
01:05:19 ►
That’s what this phenomenon is.
01:05:21 ►
The belief by a person or a group of people
01:05:24 ►
that the end of the world
01:05:26 ►
is about to occur. And it existed among the Jews of the post-exilic period. It’s part
01:05:35 ►
of the phenomenon or it’s part of the social expectation that gave Christ his entrée.
01:05:43 ►
The early patristic Christians lived in the eminent expectation of the end
01:05:48 ►
of the world. And then during the medieval period, the most utopian, prophetistic, millenarian
01:05:56 ►
movement before Marxism was Floraism, or the people who followed the teachings of Joaquin of Flora,
01:06:06 ►
who was a wandering monk who predicted the end of the world,
01:06:14 ►
let’s see, I think for 1244, and he died in 1222,
01:06:21 ►
but his followers carried on and the pope had to send out armies to for to quell
01:06:28 ►
uprisings as people wanted to distribute the wealth because they felt the end of the world
01:06:34 ►
was upon and why should anybody go to work and you know this sort of thing similarly in the year
01:06:39 ►
1000 there was great expectation that of Christ’s eminent return.
01:06:46 ►
So this is a thing which the human mind, at least in its Western expression, seems to seek to do.
01:06:53 ►
Islam, too, has its apocalypses.
01:06:56 ►
1967 wasn’t that.
01:06:58 ►
1967 wasn’t that. I mean, I thought it was happening.
01:07:01 ►
I thought we were months away from a new secular order for the ages. But my theory of history views these things not as evidence against
01:07:15 ►
such a thing occurring, but as evidence that it will occur, that these uprisings and outbreaks of irrational expectation of the millennium
01:07:26 ►
are in fact temporal reflections.
01:07:30 ►
They are catching the light on the temporal prism
01:07:33 ►
from the object at the end of history,
01:07:36 ►
which contains the apocalyptic scenario.
01:07:41 ►
It’s very important to manage the apocalypse and the millennium
01:07:46 ►
it’s very important that people not
01:07:49 ►
confuse the cleansing flames of transcendence
01:07:53 ►
with the ability to use thermonuclear weapons
01:07:56 ►
against your ideological enemies
01:07:58 ►
it’s a very delicate matter
01:08:01 ►
because our mythologies and our fears run so deeply but I think
01:08:08 ►
that it’s an awareness of this potential of the existence of this law of temporal
01:08:17 ►
compression and of course institutions don’t promote millenarianism because
01:08:23 ►
institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term and have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has.
01:08:45 ►
and years of human history would lead anyone, I think, to the conclusion that everything is going to be swept away, and everything that replaces it is going to be swept away,
01:08:51 ►
and that we are just moving into an era of change which might as well be called apocalyptic
01:08:58 ►
and must be made millenarian. Otherwise, it will just end in some kind of gotterdammerung,
01:09:06 ►
and the worst boogeyman of Western culture will emerge and destroy us.
01:09:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:09:16 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:09:22 ►
Well, ending on a thought about the worst boogeyman of Western civilization
01:09:28 ►
isn’t exactly the cheery ending that I wanted to leave us with,
01:09:34 ►
but since there are a couple more hours left to this workshop,
01:09:37 ►
I’m sure that we’ll get back on a natural high with the next installment,
01:09:41 ►
which, of course, will also be my next podcast.
01:09:45 ►
You know, sometimes I get asked why I call Terence McKenna a bard and a poet.
01:09:50 ►
Well, should someone ever ask me that question again,
01:09:53 ►
I’m just going to point them to that little riff that he did about his vision of a Roman emperor
01:09:58 ►
voyaging to the Yucatan to witness the coronation of a Mayan king,
01:10:03 ►
all in some parallel earth that he envisioned.
01:10:07 ►
You know, just go back and listen to that whole tale once again, and I think you’ll have to agree
01:10:12 ►
with me that when Terence McKenna was on a roll, it was like no one before or since has been.
01:10:18 ►
He was truly one of a kind. And also, I hope that you caught that wonderful little phrase Terrence used in the early part of his talk
01:10:26 ►
when he said that we must learn to release spirit out of the ape matrix.
01:10:32 ►
I can’t say why, but that little metaphor really struck me
01:10:36 ►
and reminded me of one of my favorite Leo Plau paintings, the one he calls Ape to Angel.
01:10:43 ►
It’s one of my favorite paintings, and it sure seems
01:10:46 ►
to fit that metaphor of Terrence’s just perfectly. Now, I’ve got just a couple of announcements, and
01:10:52 ►
then I’ll give you a few of my thoughts about California’s upcoming vote on Proposition 19,
01:10:58 ►
which, if passed, will make cannabis legal in this state. And not to keep you in suspense, of course I’m voting yes on Proposition
01:11:06 ►
- It’d be crazy not to, and so far I’m not that crazy. But before I give you my Prop 19 speech,
01:11:14 ►
I want to give a plug to an interview that I just heard on Doug Lane’s Most Excellent Diet Soap
01:11:19 ►
podcast. Now, this particular program of Doug’s is from a while back, last July, actually.
01:11:26 ►
So, as you can tell, I’m a little behind in some of my podcast listening.
01:11:31 ►
You know, I always stay up to date each week on KMO’s Sea Realm podcast, and also with the dope fiend BB and Lefty.
01:11:39 ►
And then I spot check some of the other great podcasts that I’ve mentioned before, and also quite a few that
01:11:45 ►
I haven’t mentioned. So sometimes I fall behind and stumble across a gem like Diet Soaps program
01:11:51 ►
number 68, in which Doug Lane interviewed one of my favorite writers, Joe Bajent. If you haven’t
01:11:58 ►
yet read Joe’s classic cultural commentary titled, Deer Hunting with Jesus, you owe it to yourself Thank you. today’s podcast in case you want to give it a listen. Also, I received a note from
01:12:26 ►
Louis Gallifaux about the work being done to raise money
01:12:30 ►
to help the distribution and production of a documentary film
01:12:33 ►
that’s based on Dr. Strassman’s book, The Spirit Molecule.
01:12:38 ►
And I have to admit that I had heard about this before, but just
01:12:41 ►
failed to mention it, and I’m sorry about that. So anyhow, I followed the link that Lewis sent to the Kickstarter.com project to raise initial funding
01:12:51 ►
and discovered that it had already gone over the top and that the call for funds was, well, it’ll be ending just about today, I guess.
01:12:58 ►
But what’s more, I have now heard back from Lewis, who told me that the money raised will cover things like manufacturing and distribution,
01:13:06 ►
and that, catch this, it is currently one of the films being featured at the Austin Film Festival.
01:13:12 ►
So a hearty round of congratulations goes out to everyone involved in that project,
01:13:18 ►
especially including the more than 800 people who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign.
01:13:24 ►
And again, I’ll put a couple links to this in the program notes
01:13:27 ►
because I’m sure that there are still ways for you to help
01:13:30 ►
or get involved in publicizing this good project.
01:13:35 ►
I’d like to close today with a few of my thoughts about Proposition 19,
01:13:40 ►
which is the California ballot measure coming up in less than two weeks
01:13:44 ►
that proposes a state constitutional amendment that would allow adults who are at least 21 years old
01:13:51 ►
to possess up to one ounce of cannabis and to have 25 square foot pot gardens for personal recreational use.
01:14:00 ►
And, of course, they can store more than an ounce if they’re storing the pot that they grew themselves.
01:14:07 ►
But it would also authorize city and county governments to regulate and tax commercial cultivation and sales,
01:14:13 ►
which I admit is a huge loophole.
01:14:16 ►
So I agree that there are a lot of loopholes and potential problems with this proposition.
01:14:21 ►
But let me ask you this.
01:14:23 ►
How often have you ever seen the question
01:14:25 ►
of legalizing recreational use of cannabis on a ballot? It’s a first for me, and I’m not going to
01:14:32 ►
miss my, maybe my one and only chance I have in my lifetime to vote to legalize cannabis.
01:14:38 ►
Now, if you think back to 1996, when Californians first voted yes on Proposition 215,
01:14:45 ►
which ushered in today’s medical marijuana laws,
01:14:49 ►
there were and still are a lot of problems with that law.
01:14:53 ►
However, without that beginning,
01:14:54 ►
we wouldn’t even have the current so-called status quo
01:14:57 ►
that some pot smokers seem to be happy with.
01:15:01 ►
And I’m certainly not complaining about the fact
01:15:03 ►
that we have the availability
01:15:05 ►
of medical cannabis here in California.
01:15:07 ►
However, last year alone, there were over 60,000 young people in this state who were
01:15:13 ►
imprisoned for the simple, non-violent possession of a little bag of this plant matter.
01:15:18 ►
These were mainly young people and, overwhelmingly, women and men of color.
01:15:23 ►
The medical exemption status quo isn’t much good to them
01:15:26 ►
because of the costs involved in getting a permit to use cannabis for medical purposes.
01:15:31 ►
So the way I see it, the status quo argument is unknowingly racist.
01:15:37 ►
Let’s face it, cannabis being at the top of the federal empire’s list
01:15:41 ►
of the most dangerous drugs on the planet is a complete joke.
01:15:44 ►
Only the ignorant still think that cannabis is harmful, and so perfect or not,
01:15:49 ►
it’s up to the young people in the state of California to get out and vote yes on this important proposition.
01:15:55 ►
I think somebody, somewhere, finally has to take the big first step.
01:15:59 ►
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not urging you to go out and vote for anything or anybody else on the ballot.
01:16:04 ►
I’m not urging you to go out and vote for anything or anybody else on the ballot.
01:16:10 ►
Frankly, it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are Democrats or Republicans or Tea Party nutjobs.
01:16:16 ►
They’re all in a confederacy against us, and not a single candidate in the three major parties in California,
01:16:22 ►
at least I think deserves my support, since not a single one of them is supporting Proposition 19.
01:16:26 ►
However, almost all of the Green Party candidates have had the courage to back that proposition publicly. And so I’m giving them my vote in every
01:16:31 ►
race where they’re on the ballot. And in races where the Greens aren’t running, I’m writing in
01:16:36 ►
none of the above because I refuse to give my vote to ignorant people like Barbara Boxer and Jerry
01:16:41 ►
Brown. In my opinion, the lesser of two evils is still far too evil to get my vote.
01:16:47 ►
So, even though I’ve tried to keep politics out of these podcasts,
01:16:51 ►
I want to be sure there’s no mistake in how I feel about voting yes on California’s Proposition 19.
01:16:58 ►
I don’t think it’s about raising new revenue or anything else.
01:17:01 ►
To me, the single fact a yes vote is,
01:17:05 ►
it’s a vote to end the prohibition of at least one of our sacred medicines.
01:17:10 ►
There. Now I feel better.
01:17:13 ►
Thanks for listening.
01:17:15 ►
Well, that should do it for now.
01:17:16 ►
And so I’ll again close today’s podcast by reminding you that this
01:17:20 ►
and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:17:23 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects Thank you. through psychedelicsalon.org. And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the psychedelic salon,
01:17:46 ►
you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:17:49 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:17:52 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:17:56 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:18:01 ►
Be well, my friends.