Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“What would you have if you could have anything?”
“I think that life proceeds through time. It’s an effort by organism to map one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a ‘something’, and the ‘now’ is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it. And so what being in time is is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object. And that’s why, hopefully, a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get a whole picture.”
“Yes, well I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history. … Because your history gives you the power of your convictions.”
“I think, better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetime.”
“This is the anguish of the ancestors. This is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed. The pogroms, and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be, somehow, redeemed if we, who are the living wavefront of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do.”
“The ‘other’ is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name spirit, god, demon, void. It’s that there just necessarily is a place off our map. Whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map, and the other, the truly other, lies outside the domain of language. It’s like the unspeakable. All you can do it point at it.”
“That’s the challenge. You see, that’s the weird thing about the psychedelics. It is a path, but in a sense it’s the end of the path. And then what do you do? Now it’s up to you.”
“The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And before I introduce today’s program, let me first give a big salute to the Dope Fiend,
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who is coming up on five years of producing a new podcast on the same day of each and every week for the past five years.
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Had I been that dedicated, then this would be my podcast number 277 instead of 249.
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It’s an amazing job that the Dope Fiend has done,
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and if you haven’t done so yet,
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I highly recommend surfing over to dopefiend.co.uk and checking out some of the great podcasts on his Cannabis Podcast Network.
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But most of all, if you’re interested in the world news and opinion about
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cannabis, then his Dopecast is not to be missed. Even though I live in California, my main source
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of up-to-date information about cannabis comes from the Dope Fiends podcast. So even though it’s
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a bit early, hey, congratulations, my friend. As the Bard McKenna often said, keep the old faith and stay high.
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Now, some other friends of the salon that I also want to thank today are some of our fellow salonners who sent in donations over the past two weeks to help offset the expenses associated with producing these programs. And those wonderful people are… through, just got done listening to number 246. Sorry about your brother, but you still got plenty
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of others. Much love and hugs. Well, hey, thanks for that, Forrest, and it’s a nice thought, and
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also thank you to our other salonners who have written and posted notes about my brother.
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I really appreciate your thoughts. And there was also one more donor who was Alicia Danforth, and she may be the only
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donor whose full name I’ve ever used. As you know, there are still a few reasons that some people
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can’t yet be identified in public as supporting the reintroduction of our sacred medicines into
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society. But as you already know, Alicia has been featured in several podcasts here, as well as being on the psychedelic speaking circuit.
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So, Alicia, hey, thanks ever so much for all you’re doing for our community.
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And also thanks again to Mark, Toby, Wilbert, Cryptic Music, Four Star, and to our other fellow Saloners who have purchased a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook,
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The Genesis Generation, because those donations are also funding the work here in the salon.
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And I can tell you that some of those salonners are also past donors.
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And while I haven’t met many of you in person, I feel like we’re really old friends.
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Now, since we already heard the first hour or so
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of this Terence McKenna workshop
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in my last podcast,
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I won’t spend a lot of time
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on reintroducing it
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other than to once again
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say thank you to Michael DeCircio,
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the producer-director
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of the film Tryptozane,
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who sent me the recording
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of what I think may have been
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a workshop at the Ojai Foundation in California sometime in 1986.
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And while you’ll hear the voices of several of the participants in the workshop,
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the woman whose voice you’ll hear the most from is that of Cat Harrison,
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who was Terrence’s wife and is the mother of his children.
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And if you’re fortunate enough to be near any of the conferences where Kat is speaking,
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I urge you to go meet her.
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She is not only a very charming person, but she’s also one of the world’s leading experts
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in several areas involving our sacred medicines.
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And so now, here is a continuation of a workshop with Terrence McKenna and Kat Harrison.
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Kat.
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I know how the wave all comes together and accelerates toward this transition point.
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I never call it the end, because then the beginning of a new series of many levels of waves is there, right?
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That’s right.
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I guess I believe in flux.
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And so the whole process is one wave. At that moment we begin another process. Sometimes
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you discuss that point as being the end of the universe, which you did a little while
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ago. And sometimes I feel like when you’re as close, when everything is accelerated like
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it seems to have recently, and you’re as close to a moment of transformation of some sort as we seem to be,
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you see great strides forward being made and great slips backwards being made all at the same time, right?
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It seems possible that the transformation will be not so fantastically physical as the end of the universe
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or turning inside out of the whatever this is,
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but actually just a sweep through, you know,
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worldwide peace of mind.
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What if that occurred, you know?
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And that’s large enough to qualify, it seems to me,
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for the changeover in the wave.
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Yeah, I think it’s very…
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The hardest thing to know is the nature
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of what this ultimate compression is.
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The scale.
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What it means.
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I mean, like, one way I imagine it,
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and that’s why I love to quote Joyce about man becomes dirigible, I
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imagine it as the day when your mind becomes your home. You know, and all over the world
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people just realize that now their mind is their home.
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But you feel free to describe that as the end of history or the end of the universe?
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Would you describe that as the end of history or the end of the universe? Not the end of the universe, the end of history, because I think history is some kind of involvement with matter.
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It’s a wrestling with the angel of matter, and the end of history is when you pin the angel of matter to the mat, and then you stand up,
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and you say,
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I am the endemic human being made of light,
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and you leave the realm of matter
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and return to some previously hidden dimension.
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Whitehead called these things epochs,
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these long periods of time,
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and he called transitions from one to the other
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a shift of epochs.
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Well, we’ve only been doing things like measuring the speed of light since 1910 or something like
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that. All the so-called constants of our physics are based on minuscule periods of actually
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monitoring these things to see if they are constants. And so I can imagine it as a shift in the laws of the universe
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that somehow cause consciousness to perceive itself more as it must truly be.
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And I’m always trying to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations.
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And the one which fits this is a few years ago,
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this Scandinavian astronomer Hans Alfven wrote a book called Worlds and Anti-Worlds.
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And in it he talked about what’s called a vacuum fluctuation.
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A vacuum fluctuation is where suddenly,
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out of nothingness,
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there emerges a stream of particles,
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and they are equally particles and antiparticles,
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and they sail along for a period of time,
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and then they collide again,
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and each particle is destroyed by its antiparticle,
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and so what is called parity is conserved,
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meaning that when you add up all the charges, positive and negative, you get zero.
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So it’s okay that this matter came from nothing and returned to nothing.
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This violates no laws as long as parity is conserved.
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But the interesting thing about this
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phenomenon, which is called a vacuum fluctuation, is that there seems in
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quantum mechanics no rule which would limit the size of such a phenomenon as
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this. So it’s conceivable that our entire universe is an enormous vacuum
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fluctuation and it’s just, you know,
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10 high 72 particles have emerged from nothingness and are hurtling through space.
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And in another dimension, a parallel dimension,
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the anti-universe, which is the twin of this universe,
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is also hurtling through space.
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And at some point in future time,
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completely unpredictable from the state given within each universe,
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the two will collide,
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and parity will be conserved,
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and all particles and antiparticles will disappear.
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However, the interesting thing is that photons, which is what light is composed of,
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do not have antiparticles. They’re this one weird exception. So that when the universe
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collided with its antimatter twin, what would be left would be a universe made only of photons.
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What would be left would be a universe made only of photons,
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and those photons would be in the configuration they were in in the moment when the cosmic collapse of the state vector occurred.
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Well, we have no idea what the physics of a photonic universe would be about.
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A limiting case or a good first try would be that it would just be nothing
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and no life and no self-reflection
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and no more but why posit that there’s such a persistence in in the perennial philosophy
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of the notion that spiritual development is somehow related to light and to the cultivation
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of inner light and to the creation of light bodies and the stabilizing of light. So, you know, it’s possible to suggest that the world of the imagination
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is simply the world of internal light,
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that it’s a world where light is manipulated by thought
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in the way that in this world physical organism manipulates matter.
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And so that, you know, you live in the radiant castles of the imagination after a shift of epochs in
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which the the photonic mode predominated that’s just one way of imagining it it’s
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one of the richest meditations there is to try to imagine the Millennium again it, it’s this thing, what would you have if you could have anything?
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I mean, sometimes I imagine it, you know,
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Hieronymus Bosch’s great triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights,
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where men and women of all races mingle among giant wrens and strawberries
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and feed each other palm granites under an autumnal sun
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in an endless rolling park-like world of exotic vegetables and sexual excess and
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hard stuff to be. You can really take a readout on yourself
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by seeing how would you like things to be.
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I mean, sometimes my fantasy is
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I would like to be alone on a starship
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10,000 light years from home
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with all the books in the universe
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and I would dress like Captain Ahab
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and I would stride around the catwalks inside this
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echoing starship and faithful robot slaves would bring me crumbling volumes of ancient lore which
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I would say no this is a little too Vincent Price how about
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I love if any of you are into science fiction,
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the science fiction of Cordwainer Smith is really wonderful. And one of his stories, The Starship,
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is George Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, in New York.
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And it’s all exactly like Mount Vernon in Washington’s time,
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except in the library of the big plantation house there’s one
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room from which the thing is controlled and it’s actually a starship in mid-flight more questions
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about this time theory yes you mentioned yes how the now is flooded with future perception. Yes. And I have just, it’s really part of the Tibetan practices,
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but it’s always something which captures my imagination.
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It’s just, how come it’s now, now?
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And the fact that these future perceptions are so tremendously tangible to us,
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especially while sitting in meditation or while eating a meal even or something.
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And there’s this, how come it’s not yesterday and how come it’s not tomorrow?
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And how come that I’m here now when I just have to flick my mind and I’m in yesterday
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and equally easy in tomorrow?
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I wonder if you have anything to say on that one.
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Well, I think that life proceeds through time. equally easy in tomorrow. I wonder if you have any need to say on that one.
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Well, I think that life proceeds through time. It’s an effort by organism to map something one dimension larger than itself. So it takes a whole life to do it. A life is an effort to map a something, you know, and the now is the moving edge of the mapping process.
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You cannot map it instantly or you would be it. And so what being in time is, is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object.
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And that’s why hopefully a long life would give wisdom
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because a person would begin to get the whole picture.
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So the now is kind of like the edge of the pencil.
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Yeah, that’s what we want to try.
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Yes, well, what did Plato say?
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That the present is the moving image of eternity.
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That’s pure good Platonism.
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What about the projection, much as our shadows are true to now?
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Well, you can think of it as a…
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You can think of the now as a kind of laser
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which is moving over a larger surface and illuminating it,
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you know, scanning it.
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It’s scanning something, and it takes it a while illuminating it, you know, scanning it. It’s scanning something
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and it takes it a while to scan it and then at the end all the data is in place
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and then you say, oh yes, I see now what the object of cognition was and we, our
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faith is, and there’s no reason to doubt it, that this is a great transcendent
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experience. This is the resolution, the peace that passeth understanding as you sink into death.
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It’s just that we like to think that the psychedelic experience gives us a preview.
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No one escapes, you know, the final realization.
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It’s just that some people do postpone it to their last act but there’s no reason for that because it is the the mystery the
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culmination it is the date palm and the wellspring
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I’d like to I’m always interested pursuing things from the mind, so I’d like to ask about how this theory of time
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relates to the individual.
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It’s somewhat related to BJ’s question.
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There’s some sense I have that in their techniques,
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and certainly you’ve experienced,
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and other people have experienced this with the mushroom
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at high doses of traveling through time
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and actually seeing the future or seeing the past.
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And I was wondering if you could say more about that
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and some framework for understanding how that is possible.
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Yes, well, I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history
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and part of its teaching is history.
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It views a person without a history
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as a person with amnesia,
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a person with a diminished capacity
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because your history gives you
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the power of your convictions.
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The way I use the wave
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or the way I’ve been using it recently, is to try and study
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the time immediately ahead of us so that we don’t misjudge what’s going on. And, you know,
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it’s a mathematical process. There’s no indeterminacy about it if we anchor the whole wave system on 2012. And what I see from that anchorage point is
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in the 67-year cycle from 1945 to 2012, we have reached that point which resonates with the larger
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4,306-year cycle at that point which corresponds to the collapse of the Roman Empire around 475 A.D.
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In other words, we have been through a period of imperialist expansionism,
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which has lasted for a number of years, certainly since the beginning of the 80s.
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for a number of years,
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certainly since the beginning of the 80s. But I see a retrenchment of that
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and a recidivist tendency,
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a tendency toward religious fundamentalism,
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rigid social structures,
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and in short, the sorts of things
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which could be seen as valid resonance patterns
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to the early medieval phase of European civilization.
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The period from AD 474, let’s for shorthand call it 500 AD,
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the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD,
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in other words, to the discovery of the New World by Columbus,
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that thousand-year period is the resonance
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that we are going to experience from now to the late 90s.
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are going to experience from now to the late 90s around 1998 we will reach the beginning of the Renaissance and the discovery of the new world but we are
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going to have to endure a period not entirely to our liking we represent the
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pagan Hellenistic spirit which has held full sway within the empire
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for the past 25 years. And we may feel constricted now, but I think that our ideas and our position
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in society has further constriction to undergo before it reflowers downstream a bit.
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So when I first realized that, I felt very pessimistic.
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But then I asked myself, well, what aspects of medieval life could I groove?
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What aspects of that medieval eschatology were solitary to my needs and wishes?
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And I discovered that it was an age of great mystical faith and illumination.
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It was an age of communities of like-minded people seeking transformation
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far from the turbulence of the collapse of the Empire.
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So I am not of that…
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My theory leads me away from those people in the New Age who think we’re about to be
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catapulted into the corridors of power. I think that’s preposterous and the evidence for it is zero.
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I think that’s preposterous and the evidence for it zero
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and I think better we should attend our gardens and
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form
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brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and
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Realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime
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our lifetimes
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you know?
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And every time someone like Dick Price or Tony Lilly moves from the wheel,
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I always wonder, you know, how did it feel to know it wasn’t finished,
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you know, to go with it undone?
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Oh, yes, I have no doubt that when the saucer comes that
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Tony or Dick will be in control one of them what is it Bob Dylan says in his song
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Ezra Pound and TS Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower.
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But yes, so I don’t know if that answered your question, Robin,
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but I wanted to get it in because the real meat for most people
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for this idea about time
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is not the mathematics of it
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and the symmetry of it.
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That’s only pleasing to a certain mentality.
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But really, what does it tell us about the years immediately ahead and what it says is you know consolidation illumination community and self-discipline i can only say thanks a thousand
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times that we don’t have to go through it for a thousand years and only for like 15 years this acceleration seems to me to be very very convenient imagine if we were born in in 500 a.d
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and we had to look forward to that yes well that’s why i say you know imagine the people who lived in
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times when the temporal river was stagnant or even when counter currents swept it backwards this is the
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anguish of the ancestors this is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed
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the pogroms and the invasions and the atrocities conducted across history can
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only be somehow redeemed if we who who are the living wavefront of this
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genetic experience, do not fumble the ball, you know? All our ancestors are watching to
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see how we will do.
00:23:38 ►
Oh.
00:23:38 ►
Kath?
00:23:39 ►
I would like to address Robin’s question as well, because it seemed like you were asking
00:23:42 ►
sort of on a more mechanical, how does this happen?
00:23:47 ►
Well, yeah, how can it be that the Mayans or we on psychedelics
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can travel through time and see these things?
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My image for it that explains that phenomenon to me,
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and I’ve had the same experience past and future,
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is, well, Terence is just referring to the
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temporal river is that it’s a river which flows two ways from the past to the future and from the
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future to the past and if you put yourself out in the middle of it let go of control let go of fear
00:24:17 ►
and maybe you want to choose your orientation or maybe you don’t you can just find out where
00:24:23 ►
you flow or you can sort of face the past or face the future and flow there.
00:24:28 ►
I mean, this is not a physicist’s explanation of how this happens, but it seems to work
00:24:33 ►
that way, you know, and that we think perhaps far too much of the past creating the future,
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and that we should think more, and perhaps other people
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have, of how it’s flowing the other way, and this is how some so-called primitive people
00:24:52 ►
have managed to conserve the very simple, effective beauty of their lifestyle, and that
00:24:59 ►
real strong feeling that every moment is now, because they’re thinking of it simultaneously.
00:25:02 ►
real strong feeling that every moment is now because they’re thinking of it simultaneously.
00:25:07 ►
I think of that and that also sets my mind off.
00:25:15 ►
That’s kind of like the rivers flowing both ways
00:25:17 ►
and if you kind of take a step to the side somehow
00:25:21 ►
that you’ll catch the current from the future.
00:25:24 ►
That’s appealing, but also I always play with these metaphors,
00:25:27 ►
and maybe I’m literalizing them too much.
00:25:30 ►
Is it possible to step out of that stream in some way
00:25:34 ►
and then looking above and sort of choose where you’re going to descend into it?
00:25:39 ►
Or another image that came to mind is,
00:25:41 ►
are there somehow holes in the fabric of time
00:25:47 ►
that you can shoot through,
00:25:50 ►
sort of like in 2001,
00:25:53 ►
the Stargate opening up,
00:25:54 ►
and there’s this hole in between
00:25:58 ►
and where you emerge
00:25:59 ►
is not the other side of it,
00:26:00 ►
but someplace completely different.
00:26:03 ►
If you take the wave seriously
00:26:05 ►
and apply it on these short scales of time you know you can find your way into
00:26:14 ►
yes unique configurations of the moment it’s like astrology in that way, you know. And often the content of a psychedelic experience can be later seen
00:26:28 ►
to be because of the situation of historical resonance that you weren’t perhaps even aware
00:26:34 ►
of at the time.
00:26:36 ►
Or if there are parallel worlds, one or many, which ones happen to be adjacent at that moment
00:26:43 ►
in the cosmic weather weather kind of, you
00:26:46 ►
know.
00:26:46 ►
Sometimes I’ve taken the mushroom just to say, like a weather person, to say, okay,
00:26:53 ►
I just want to see what’s happening out there right now, not with a will in it, you know.
00:26:58 ►
And then, you know, you can find that it’s about knitting in your rocking chair or you
00:27:02 ►
can find that you’re just on some
00:27:07 ►
landscape that you couldn’t have perceived before.
00:27:13 ►
The essence of Tao is the correct apperception of process.
00:27:19 ►
That’s what Taoism is, is to understand process is to be a Taoist. And I think that this is almost a formal rendering of the notion of Tao, almost an effort to create a mathematics, an algebra of the Tao.
00:27:31 ►
And as long as it’s true to the notions which Taoism conserves, which is of flow and determinacy within indeterminacy, it serves. This is what understanding time is,
00:27:46 ►
is to understand process,
00:27:48 ►
but to understand it so well
00:27:50 ►
that it’s like a sense for you.
00:27:53 ►
It’s like seeing.
00:27:55 ►
This is the kind of seeing
00:27:56 ►
that is very important,
00:27:59 ►
to see into time.
00:28:01 ►
It’s what history and culture
00:28:02 ►
have experimented with,
00:28:04 ►
but it’s what we now, by
00:28:06 ►
identifying that as what is going on, can accelerate much faster.
00:28:12 ►
Anything else?
00:28:15 ►
I was, you know, just picking up on a conversation with Michael this morning. Maybe you could
00:28:22 ►
talk more about the other. Oh, the other. Well, I’m not sure exactly what he meant by talking about the other.
00:28:31 ►
I mean, the other is just a way of thinking about all of these things that
00:28:37 ►
we name Spirit, God, demon, void. It’s that there just necessarily is a place off our map.
00:28:48 ►
Whenever you have a map,
00:28:49 ►
it implies the part that is not on the map.
00:28:52 ►
And the other, the truly other,
00:28:55 ►
it lies outside the domain of language.
00:29:01 ►
It’s like the unspeakable.
00:29:02 ►
All you can do is point at it, you know. And
00:29:07 ►
the Gnostic idea of God was that it was totally other, that there was nothing in this universe
00:29:17 ►
that gave any clue whatsoever as to the nature of God, that that was its essence, was to be completely other.
00:29:26 ►
But, you know, the other trickles through and reverberates in our lives in all kinds of dimensions.
00:29:33 ►
I mean, the first other that you meet is the world.
00:29:37 ►
And at a later point in your development,
00:29:41 ►
your attachment to another human being can become a confrontation with the other.
00:29:48 ►
So it’s just a way of shorthand signifying, right, the dimension that carries you beyond yourself
00:29:56 ►
into the things that you previously couldn’t expect or imagine.
00:30:02 ►
expect or imagine yeah that’s one notion of it
00:30:07 ►
or Wittgenstein’s unspeakable
00:30:09 ►
or you know
00:30:12 ►
I always I’m fond of quoting
00:30:14 ►
this poem by Trumbull Stickney
00:30:17 ►
where he says
00:30:17 ►
I lean over your meaning’s edge
00:30:20 ►
and feel the dizziness
00:30:21 ►
of the things you have not said
00:30:23 ►
that’s the other it’s the dizziness of the things you have not said. That’s the other.
00:30:26 ►
It’s the dizziness of the things unsaid,
00:30:29 ►
the things that lie beyond the edge of meaning.
00:30:34 ►
Part of the question has to do with,
00:30:36 ►
specifically in the mushroom experience of high doses,
00:30:40 ►
this sense of alien intelligence or other.
00:30:46 ►
Because I think, you know, it’s like you said,
00:30:48 ►
in some of our systems of conceptions of God,
00:30:52 ►
many psychedelic experiences, at least with LSD and other,
00:30:57 ►
or light dosages, is that I am connected to that,
00:31:01 ►
or that I’m part of that thing.
00:31:04 ►
But somehow on the tryptamines, it’s this alien intelligence.
00:31:08 ►
I mean, what do you make of that?
00:31:10 ►
Do you feel that?
00:31:13 ►
Well, I don’t know quite what to make of that.
00:31:18 ►
LSD is self-reflective and integrative, I think.
00:31:23 ►
and integrative, I think.
00:31:27 ►
These tryptamines seem to be informational and largely unconcerned with the impact
00:31:31 ►
that the information they carry has on the perceiver.
00:31:37 ►
I don’t know.
00:31:38 ►
I think it just must have to do with the fact
00:31:41 ►
that the universe is not all smoothed out and filled in and that this is really
00:31:49 ►
an area of personal exploration where you can penetrate into an area a terra incognito a place
00:31:59 ►
where nobody knows exactly what is going on we We’re not used to that experience.
00:32:05 ►
We expect to have maps of everything we look at and everywhere we go.
00:32:11 ►
And it is strange that in this one area we don’t,
00:32:15 ►
that apparently our taboo against looking at the unconscious
00:32:19 ►
or delving into the mind has made us content to just fence off this area.
00:32:26 ►
Well, then if you climb over the fence and start wandering around out there,
00:32:30 ►
you don’t know what you’re going to find
00:32:32 ►
because the culture has carefully engineered itself to go around all of this stuff.
00:32:38 ►
Even, I think, shamanism is largely concerned with gaining power to protect yourself from the onslaught of the other.
00:32:49 ►
You know, they’re very concerned to hold stuff back.
00:32:54 ►
They don’t really have this let’s hurl ourselves into it attitude that we have.
00:33:01 ►
We found in the Amazon, we were looking for this one plant which had DMT in it and the Iowa
00:33:07 ►
scarrow that we were working with I kept leading the questioning back to the matter of this one
00:33:14 ►
plant and finally he said first he said that it was comida del perro food for dogs
00:33:22 ►
and which seemed like maybe a put-down of some sort.
00:33:28 ►
And so they went back over it again,
00:33:29 ►
and he said, you know,
00:33:31 ►
whoa, it’s mal and bizarro, it’s too strange.
00:33:36 ►
So this was a man whose whole life
00:33:38 ►
was about taking ayahuasca and triggering hallucination,
00:33:42 ►
but he felt, you know, that to go into that plant it was
00:33:45 ►
too weird and you often have the feeling with those people that they involve
00:33:53 ►
themselves in the psychedelic effect like a dancer almost as little as
00:33:59 ►
possible to get the job done, you know. They don’t…
00:34:05 ►
I don’t think that of Don Fidel.
00:34:08 ►
I think that…
00:34:09 ►
Well, in that one case, he certainly was…
00:34:12 ►
Yes, that class he did the line at.
00:34:12 ►
He did also seem to hold the mushroom
00:34:14 ►
in the sort of middle category,
00:34:17 ►
but he would use it on his own.
00:34:20 ►
He would only administer to others
00:34:21 ►
ayahuasca or certain things
00:34:23 ►
that he felt very familiar with.
00:34:27 ►
But then, that was Saturday nights.
00:34:29 ►
Wednesday nights, he would do things on his own, you know, his work.
00:34:33 ►
And he would try out some of these other plants or combinations.
00:34:38 ►
But I think he was pretty intrepid, actually.
00:34:41 ►
He did have boundaries.
00:34:42 ►
In 83, or whenever it was that I was down there last, we were dealing with a different
00:34:48 ►
group of shamans on the upper Ampeyaku, and it was to get this orally active DMT thing
00:34:57 ►
that was made from tree resin.
00:35:00 ►
And we had pure chemical DMT as a trade item, or we weren’t sure why, but just in case we needed it.
00:35:09 ►
You could never go anywhere without it.
00:35:11 ►
Exactly.
00:35:13 ►
And so talking to the shaman who could make the Varroa paste stuff, we said this.
00:35:20 ►
And he said, oh, you have the essencia, you have the essence.
00:35:25 ►
He said, yes.
00:35:26 ►
And he said, so what is that like?
00:35:27 ►
He said, well, you don’t take it orally.
00:35:29 ►
You don’t take it by mouth.
00:35:30 ►
You smoke it.
00:35:31 ►
He said, oh, and what happens?
00:35:33 ►
And so he described a typical DMT trip to him and then said, would you like to try it?
00:35:39 ►
He said, no, thank you.
00:35:41 ►
No, thank you.
00:35:51 ►
So, you know, they’re not thrill crazy by any means.
00:35:56 ►
I’m reminded of him in the latest Castaneda books.
00:36:02 ►
He goes into what he calls the old seers and the new seers.
00:36:05 ►
And the old seers, maybe you’re more aligned with them, I don’t know.
00:36:07 ►
But they would be willing to explore any territory.
00:36:10 ►
And they made a division between the known and the unknown.
00:36:15 ►
The unknowable.
00:36:16 ►
No.
00:36:16 ►
No, it was the new seers who came up with the third category of the unknowable.
00:36:22 ►
In other words, there’s this reality, which is the known.
00:36:26 ►
And then there’s the other realities you go to, which are the unknown.
00:36:30 ►
It’s like they’re not necessarily…
00:36:32 ►
It’s like maybe the ayahuasquero takes you to the unknown.
00:36:35 ►
But this other realm, where they don’t go,
00:36:40 ►
they would probably call the unknowable,
00:36:42 ►
because the impact that it has on you
00:36:45 ►
to go in there could be dangerous.
00:36:48 ►
From the place of the unknown,
00:36:50 ►
they could glimpse very briefly the unknowable.
00:36:53 ►
And it was usually a pretty shattering experience.
00:36:56 ►
A great emphasis on being able to distinguish
00:37:00 ►
the difference between the unknown and the unknowable.
00:37:03 ►
You said that whenever one made an error in judgment,
00:37:07 ►
it wasn’t that dangerous to be up against the unknowable,
00:37:11 ►
but you had to recognize it as unknowable
00:37:13 ►
because whatever one did, it invariably led to disaster.
00:37:17 ►
Of course, that’s Castaneda’s, you know…
00:37:19 ►
That’s his text.
00:37:21 ►
Well, that’s interesting.
00:37:22 ►
I mean, it makes me think of, you know, I mentioned Wittgenstein’s unspeakable.
00:37:28 ►
There is, I think, the unspeakable and the unspoken.
00:37:33 ►
And all these esoteric and initiatory religious numbers are trading in the unspoken.
00:37:42 ►
You know, you come to them and they will whisper in your ear
00:37:45 ►
the previously unspoken teaching they will give you an oral empowerment but
00:37:50 ►
beyond that lies the unspeakable which no teacher can orally impart or impart
00:37:57 ►
any other way because it lies outside the bounds of transmissibility by its nature.
00:38:07 ►
To some degree, I would think so.
00:38:13 ►
And that’s the thing which then you validate.
00:38:16 ►
You can only validate it for itself, in itself, for itself.
00:38:24 ►
It is the private object of being.
00:38:28 ►
It is not something which I can tell you about
00:38:31 ►
or you can tell me about.
00:38:33 ►
It’s the private mystery
00:38:34 ►
that is ontologically private
00:38:37 ►
because it’s unspeakable.
00:38:39 ►
I don’t think that what is unspeakable
00:38:41 ►
is the same as the unknowable.
00:38:43 ►
I think that all of us who have pursued these dimensions
00:38:47 ►
have many experiences that it’s very hard to talk about,
00:38:52 ►
or when you talk about them, you know it sounds so silly
00:38:54 ►
compared to what you experienced, right?
00:38:56 ►
It’s one of the challenges of having this kind of group discussion
00:39:00 ►
or these kinds of workshops is to try to talk about that.
00:39:07 ►
But there is, I think, a big area that just doesn’t language
00:39:09 ►
don’t you think? The ineffable is how I think of it
00:39:12 ►
another word for it
00:39:12 ►
well you can sort of chip away at it
00:39:15 ►
I mean the whole progress
00:39:18 ►
of human development is maybe
00:39:20 ►
slowly eroding
00:39:22 ►
the unspeakable and turning
00:39:24 ►
it into the spoken.
00:39:26 ►
I’d like to speak about that. That’s what’s been going on in my mind. I’m glad you used that.
00:39:32 ►
Because in a way that is the process of everything from the very beginning to the very end.
00:39:39 ►
We as human beings on the planet are just somewhere in the middle of this whole process of the
00:39:45 ►
unknowable becoming the known. And it ties back a little bit to your whole thing of time
00:39:52 ►
yesterday, where you said like the physicists are interested in the first, second, or parts
00:39:57 ►
thereof, whereas you’re interested in this final or coming up moments or years as things
00:40:03 ►
speed up. But what we’re looking at is the physicists are looking at
00:40:07 ►
basically the physics of it, the form,
00:40:11 ►
whatever the matter, the physics.
00:40:12 ►
And what you’re looking at are the ideas
00:40:14 ►
which are coming into being more and more.
00:40:16 ►
This end of time is more and more recognition.
00:40:18 ►
So it’s really like spirit or mind or knowing,
00:40:22 ►
which is accelerating.
00:40:23 ►
So it’s like the opposite ends.
00:40:25 ►
One is the matter coming into form at the beginning,
00:40:30 ►
and then at the end is the knowing of all of this,
00:40:33 ►
which is coming to a point.
00:40:35 ►
And like an ant or whatever lower level of consciousness,
00:40:39 ►
on different levels, I’ll tell you, a cell, an amoeba,
00:40:43 ►
they have their thing, and then there’s the unknowable,
00:40:46 ►
which is what we are acting in.
00:40:47 ►
How can, even inside of our body, the blood cells,
00:40:50 ►
can they know of our world of communications and symbols and knowledge,
00:40:54 ►
such as we are on this unknowable,
00:40:56 ►
is really just a greater universe, a higher level,
00:40:59 ►
which is known by a higher way of being.
00:41:02 ►
And it’s like from each end,
00:41:05 ►
whatever,
00:41:05 ►
the matter here
00:41:06 ►
and then the mind coming into it.
00:41:09 ►
And like this point
00:41:10 ►
coming up shortly,
00:41:12 ►
this 2012,
00:41:14 ►
is significant in that
00:41:15 ►
it’s possibly some sort of,
00:41:18 ►
like I say,
00:41:18 ►
this opposite end of
00:41:19 ►
knowing becoming complete,
00:41:21 ►
like life becoming
00:41:22 ►
completely aware of all life
00:41:24 ►
in and of itself.
00:41:26 ►
But that’s like, is that the end of everything? It seems like that’s just a point,
00:41:31 ►
like a mid-swing of a pendulum. Yes, well then some other process having to do with the career
00:41:38 ►
of spirit instead of matter is initiated, you know. And whether it’s the end of everything is a rather human way of approaching it.
00:41:50 ►
Well, it’s a complete end of one way of being.
00:41:53 ►
Of us as a species, as a life.
00:41:59 ►
It’s not just humans. It’s all of the earth.
00:42:03 ►
Life entity then.
00:42:04 ►
But if that life entity goes through a great metamorphosis,
00:42:08 ►
it’s rather meaningless to say what happens to the rest of the universe
00:42:11 ►
since the rest of the universe right now is a concept in our mind.
00:42:14 ►
Right. Well, that’s the metaphysicality of it.
00:42:17 ►
To say what’s never been said, to do what’s never been done,
00:42:21 ►
to paint what’s never been painted, to paint what’s never been painted, to dance what’s never been danced.
00:42:25 ►
This is, you know,
00:42:28 ►
somehow you’re acting for everybody
00:42:31 ►
when you do that.
00:42:32 ►
It’s an amazing thing to do something
00:42:34 ►
that’s never been done.
00:42:35 ►
It means once you’ve done it,
00:42:37 ►
it’s been done.
00:42:39 ►
You’re pushing the limits out.
00:42:40 ►
That’s right.
00:42:41 ►
Putting the fence,
00:42:42 ►
it’s like a fence going out
00:42:43 ►
bigger and bigger
00:42:43 ►
and like all these great minds that go out there and fends off a big area for all of humanity to run around in
00:42:50 ►
this area of being and knowing and it’s this whole process of… It’s what aeronautical engineers
00:42:57 ►
call stretching the envelope. When you fly a fighter plane, you have the predicted engineering performance characteristics,
00:43:06 ►
but once you validate that it can do that,
00:43:09 ►
then it’s up to the pilot to find out, to stretch the envelope,
00:43:13 ►
to find out what it can really do, how fast it can turn, how fast it can climb.
00:43:19 ►
And that’s what we as creative artists do for the human enterprise.
00:43:24 ►
The lacking ingredient is courage, I think. And that’s what we as creative artists do for the human enterprise.
00:43:28 ►
The lacking ingredient is courage, I think.
00:43:40 ►
I mean, often I have the feeling that it’s no longer, at least in my own life, about seeking the answer.
00:43:43 ►
It’s about facing it.
00:43:49 ►
It isn’t about, you know, is it yoga, is it Taoism, is it this, is it that? I think that now I know, at least for me, what it is, but the answer is so appalling and
00:43:57 ►
requires such courage to execute it and carry it through that I don’t know what to do.
00:44:05 ►
I have no doubt that we could all become the Taoist hermit on Cold Mountain, you know,
00:44:16 ►
and be that person of whom people in the valley say,
00:44:20 ►
Oh him, we see him sometimes when it snows very deeply
00:44:26 ►
because he comes further down for wood.
00:44:29 ►
He comes and goes in the mist and never talks to anybody.
00:44:34 ►
We could all become that person.
00:44:36 ►
There are no barriers to ultimate spiritual attainment. But what about, you know, your mortgage and your lover and your
00:44:48 ►
devotion to French chocolate and all of these things?
00:44:55 ►
I want my cake and meat.
00:44:57 ►
That’s tricky. That’s very, very tricky.
00:45:01 ►
Learn how to bake.
00:45:02 ►
I’m eating these strange plants Because it really all washes out.
00:45:07 ►
Maybe just for an hour of peeking, but it really puts all of that into perspective.
00:45:13 ►
But for instance, like the matter of the flying saucer,
00:45:16 ►
I have no doubt that if you took ten people selected from this group and trekked days east of Death Valley and
00:45:28 ►
you know stayed up all night and then everybody took eight dried grams of
00:45:34 ►
mushrooms and cooped and hollered and waited that something would happen that
00:45:39 ►
would be so appalling and so destructive to our preconceptions of what’s possible in this
00:45:45 ►
universe that you just come out of it, you know, pointing into the desert and saying,
00:45:51 ►
hmm, hmm, hmm. But I’m careful. I don’t doubt that appalling, appalling, appalling things can happen and that reality can be completely pulled to pieces.
00:46:12 ►
And I don’t know what that means, but I want to really try and deal with that on my terms.
00:46:19 ►
And that’s a kind of fear, you know, it’s a kind of holding back.
00:46:27 ►
that’s a kind of fear, you know, it’s a kind of holding back. That’s why, you know, I know people who seem to me superhumanly reckless. I mean, they tell me the things they do and
00:46:34 ►
I just shake my head, you know, because of the power of the vistas, of the energies that they must have laid their hands on.
00:46:49 ►
I don’t, it’s too much for me. I want, I’m a simple scholar and bookish collector type.
00:47:00 ►
I’m like Brother John here.
00:47:04 ►
We like our home and hearth. But that’s the challenge, you see. That’s the weird thing about the psychedelics. It is a path, but in a sense it’s the end of the path.
00:47:25 ►
you do? You know, now it’s up to you. It’s no more about, you know, the guru says in five years you’ll make progress or if you just keep eating the spirulina or fiddling
00:47:32 ►
with your crystals or something. It’s that, no, you’ve arrived. Now what do you do with
00:47:39 ►
it? Are you really want to be a wandering figure at the edge of civilization,
00:47:45 ►
glimpsed occasionally in your tattered cloak with your wild ravings?
00:47:50 ►
Well, that’s not the only option.
00:47:51 ►
We were talking, Mitch and I were talking this morning about…
00:47:54 ►
Thank you.
00:47:59 ►
It’s tough to do that with kids, see, I know.
00:48:01 ►
It’s tough to do that with kids, see.
00:48:02 ►
I know.
00:48:09 ►
We were talking about envisioning something and how these plants help you to generate a vision of something real
00:48:16 ►
that you want to create or organize in the world,
00:48:19 ►
and then they help you to have the discipline and the dedication
00:48:22 ►
to carry them out in the real day-to-day telephone calls and how do I get the money for it kind of way.
00:48:29 ►
And that, I think, is a real strength that all of us have
00:48:32 ►
and that it’s one of the responsibilities of being granted the visions
00:48:36 ►
is to make the visions then as real as you can.
00:48:39 ►
I mean, we do have our bodies here on earth for some time to come.
00:48:43 ►
We do have pleasure, of course, which we should all indulge in.
00:48:45 ►
But we also have responsibility to make it as much like, even if it’s a small step,
00:48:53 ►
as much like that fantastic thing we can see in our visions.
00:48:58 ►
And I think that it gives you the object and then it helps you move toward it.
00:49:03 ►
And then we need to do that work and keep
00:49:05 ►
refreshing our vision if it gets weak or we start to give up on it or or if we need to shift
00:49:11 ►
direction slightly I go back to astrology in Saturn being drawing a ring around the vision
00:49:19 ►
and then Saturn stairway envisioning the steps that it takes to get there. And that you can’t jump 40 steps up without losing part of the foundation.
00:49:29 ►
And that as an artist myself, I’m finally getting to a place of patience
00:49:32 ►
and realizing that the slower it goes, the better it gets.
00:49:36 ►
And the statement that I like is, if I only had more time, I’d use less words to write.
00:49:40 ►
It’s like choosing things carefully and allowing the process.
00:49:46 ►
For years, I was just like, I’ve got to get this out, I’ve got to, you know, but not anymore.
00:49:50 ►
It’s now I’m really seeing that slow, patient steps create a foundation strong enough to
00:49:56 ►
someday, even if it’s not in this lifetime, to manifest that dream.
00:50:02 ►
If you use the quality of your daily life as your currency for how you’re
00:50:06 ►
proceeding towards something, then you know if the quality of your daily life is good,
00:50:11 ►
deep, satisfying, and you have a goal, you’re probably on the right path, right? If you’re
00:50:16 ►
saying, God, it’s just going to be hell for three years until I can get this project together,
00:50:21 ►
you maybe should think about it again. Unless you’ve done process reflected
00:50:25 ►
on a greater scale than just the evolution
00:50:27 ►
of life itself, and that if life were to
00:50:30 ►
very quickly achieve
00:50:31 ►
the knowing pure spirituality,
00:50:34 ►
then what good
00:50:36 ►
is it? And that’s like through humans and through all of our
00:50:38 ►
history and time. And so even
00:50:40 ►
this coming moment, 2012,
00:50:42 ►
that might just be like this reflection of another
00:50:44 ►
even more ultimate. It most likely is.
00:50:46 ►
And it’s just a certain, it’s just that reflection
00:50:48 ►
and it’s really this endlessly
00:50:49 ►
drawn out patient process which is
00:50:52 ►
taking its time as long as possible
00:50:54 ►
so that every aspect will work
00:50:56 ►
into place.
00:50:57 ►
So it’s just…
00:50:59 ►
Well, this quality of
00:51:02 ►
daily life thing is an interesting
00:51:04 ►
point because I think it was yesterday or two days ago we meditated or thought about what would you do if you could do anything and how…
00:51:17 ►
Oh, there it is.
00:51:23 ►
Stretching the envelope.
00:51:26 ►
Yes. stretching the envelope yes and how you imagine
00:51:28 ►
or if a genie were to suddenly
00:51:31 ►
tell you you had not three wishes
00:51:33 ►
but thousands
00:51:34 ►
and you would begin to dabble
00:51:36 ►
in fulfillment
00:51:37 ►
and then of course
00:51:39 ►
in all the trivial and superficial things
00:51:42 ►
I mentioned
00:51:43 ►
palaces and Ferraris and all this.
00:51:45 ►
But then things like that you could move anywhere instantly.
00:51:51 ►
How would you choose to travel if you could move anywhere instantly?
00:51:56 ►
And things like that.
00:51:58 ►
Well, at La Charrera, these possibilities were so real to us
00:52:03 ►
that we actually grappled with it sufficiently
00:52:07 ►
to see how it would develop.
00:52:10 ►
And how it develops is you discover that if you can do anything, the only values which
00:52:17 ►
have any meaning, if you can do anything and have anything are aesthetic values so that if you could travel
00:52:26 ►
anywhere instantly how would you travel you would walk obviously you know
00:52:38 ►
because it’s so tasteful because it’s so completing it’s such a complete
00:52:44 ►
reverence for space and time
00:52:46 ►
and your own body and the correctness of the situation.
00:52:51 ►
And time and time at La Charrera,
00:52:54 ►
someone would be doing something some way
00:52:57 ►
and someone else would say,
00:52:59 ►
well, if you’re omniscient, why don’t you just make it be done?
00:53:03 ►
And the answer is because that’s it’s crass
00:53:08 ►
to do that you know the way to do things if you can do anything is to do them right that’s zen
00:53:17 ►
zen cooking is like that i guess but that that that realization of the total richness and correctness of the moment
00:53:26 ►
is that’s the correct interpretation of the attainment of these cities.
00:53:32 ►
Things would go on at La Charrera as an example of how the Tao works
00:53:37 ►
where I would walk out into the jungle and there would be butterflies circling and I would hold out my hand and
00:53:48 ►
speak to the butterflies with my mind and invite them to come down and land on my hand
00:53:56 ►
and display themselves.
00:53:58 ►
And the butterflies would do this.
00:54:00 ►
They would come and land in my open hand and turn and strut and show me all facets of themselves.
00:54:08 ►
And this would go on for like two or three minutes where I would experience gratitude, reverence, delight, and then this other emotion, the need to show somebody else what I could do. And so then I would walk back
00:54:31 ►
to the camp and smiling with a bizarre inward smile, I would select one of my campmates and
00:54:39 ►
ask them to walk out into the jungle with me. then to their horror I would stand underneath
00:54:45 ►
this tree and gesture and ask for the butterflies to come down and land in my
00:54:50 ►
hand and people would just turn away in a mixture of horror and embarrassment
00:54:57 ►
that anyone could be such a jackass first of all and that anyone could be so
00:55:01 ►
mentally deranged as to operate like that.
00:55:05 ►
And, of course, the butterflies would have nothing to do with me.
00:55:08 ►
And I would just be left just sputtering, you know.
00:55:13 ►
And it happened many times.
00:55:15 ►
Many times? Oh, no.
00:55:17 ►
Oh, many times.
00:55:18 ►
It’s crazy.
00:55:19 ►
I mean, that you took people and were left sputtering?
00:55:22 ►
Well, it was not only the butterflies.
00:55:25 ►
It was that as long as I had no ego, I could work magic.
00:55:33 ►
But it was magic that was the necessary magic.
00:55:38 ►
It absolutely had no use other than to make my life a more perfect work of art. As an example, we had a pot
00:55:48 ►
in which we cooked a veina, oatmeal, every morning. It was our magic pot. And the scrubbing out of
00:55:53 ►
this pot was a major pain in the neck and was consequently a rotating camp duty. So in the
00:56:01 ►
height of this, it became my turn to scrub this pot and i went down to the little
00:56:08 ►
spring where the sand was and squatted down by the water and i picked up the sand and i
00:56:16 ►
rubbed it onto the pot to get ready to scrub it and then i looked and the the black stuff was just flaking off it was like easy off or something
00:56:28 ►
and it was just and i just took the pot holding it by its two little protrusions and immersed it
00:56:35 ►
in the spring like this and looked and all the black stuff was just flaking off and crudding
00:56:41 ►
off and going and i was just amazed you know the magical scouring agent so
00:56:48 ►
then I went back to the camp and got my most severe critic and again smiling with inward
00:56:55 ►
benignness I led them down to the river and and said I’m going to teach you how to wash a pot. The Zen master, you see.
00:57:06 ►
So we squat across from each other by the spring
00:57:09 ►
and I pick up the sand and I put it on.
00:57:15 ►
And she said, so I’m supposed to know that sand can wash a pot?
00:57:20 ►
I said, no, look.
00:57:21 ►
And again it failed me, you know.
00:57:24 ►
And I just was, by then look. And again it failed me, you know.
00:57:29 ►
And I just was, by then I was getting the message. And I stopped.
00:57:33 ►
And there was one other instance which was very puzzling
00:57:38 ►
because I actually saw another person go into it too.
00:57:43 ►
And it had to do with this prophecy
00:57:45 ►
which my brother had made.
00:57:48 ►
One of the motifs which circled
00:57:51 ►
in his mind space during this period
00:57:56 ►
was what he called the good shit.
00:57:59 ►
And this was, he claimed, imagined
00:58:03 ►
that at some time in the past
00:58:05 ►
he had gotten a sample of Afghani hash
00:58:08 ►
that had had cow manure very, very carefully worked into it,
00:58:15 ►
and then the hash had been infected with psilocybin mycelium,
00:58:21 ►
and all of the cow manure had been converted into psilocybin so that he
00:58:26 ►
had the psilocybinated hash and he had this notion that he would invent a
00:58:32 ►
musical instrument like an electric guitar which when you played it it would
00:58:37 ►
cause this stuff to condense out of the air and rain down on great crowds of people. So anyway, there was this thing about the good shit.
00:58:48 ►
And one night he announced that the good shit would appear at a certain time.
00:58:57 ►
And so then I went back to my hammock in this hut in the jungle.
00:59:04 ►
And the woman who was with me came as well and we had no
00:59:09 ►
watches but he had said that 11 that at 11 p.m the good shit would appear so i was settling down to
00:59:15 ►
roll my uh evening joint and it was this columbian weed that we had brought in with us.
00:59:28 ►
And as I lit the joint,
00:59:32 ►
this little thing fell out of the end of it on the floor, burning.
00:59:36 ►
And I picked it up, and I smelled it,
00:59:41 ►
and it was unbelievable hashish.
00:59:44 ►
I mean, hashish to die for and I was just
00:59:46 ►
you know and I put it in the pipe
00:59:48 ►
and I smoked it
00:59:50 ►
and I said to this woman
00:59:52 ►
I said smoke this and she agreed
00:59:54 ►
that it was astonishing
00:59:56 ►
your major critic
00:59:57 ►
no not my major critic
00:59:59 ►
my major critic was back at the river
01:00:01 ►
so then I looked and I opened this baggie
01:00:04 ►
with this stuff and
01:00:05 ►
I started smoking it and it did not, it didn’t change its physical appearance. It still looked
01:00:10 ►
like this Santa Marta gold, but the odor and everything was just the most, the finest hash
01:00:17 ►
I’ve ever smoked. So I thought that the millennium had come.
01:00:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing
01:00:26 ►
their lives one thought at a time. Since we’re already at the one hour mark, I decided to let
01:00:36 ►
Terrence end for today with his good shit story. And if you’ve got a good memory, you may remember
01:00:43 ►
that once before I podcast Terrence telling that story,
01:00:47 ►
a little over a decade after the version he just now told.
01:00:50 ►
And if you want to hear it again, it’s in my podcast number 28 that I posted in February of 2006.
01:00:58 ►
And if I remember correctly, he goes on to tell the rest of the story, which I’m sure you’ve already guessed.
01:01:05 ►
And that is by morning, the good shit had vanished once again. Now, this may only be my impression,
01:01:12 ►
but even thinking back to the view I held of the world back in the mid-1980s, it seems that
01:01:19 ►
back then many of us were much more concerned and interested and fascinated with some unknown 2012 event than we are today,
01:01:29 ►
even though it’s much closer.
01:01:31 ►
I still find it fascinating, but personally I don’t have any expectation
01:01:35 ►
that things are going to be significantly different on New Year’s Day in 2013.
01:01:41 ►
Back in the 80s, I felt differently.
01:01:46 ►
However, right now I’m much more hopeful
01:01:48 ►
about a happy ending someday than I was
01:01:50 ►
when I was expecting a miracle
01:01:52 ►
in 2012. Now,
01:01:54 ►
I can see how literally
01:01:55 ►
millions and millions of us
01:01:57 ►
connecting largely through the Internet
01:02:00 ►
are exchanging ideas
01:02:01 ►
and thoughts about better ways to live
01:02:04 ►
more lightly on this little planet.
01:02:06 ►
And at least for me, the fact that even though it may take several more generations to complete the transformation,
01:02:14 ►
I do think that a fundamental shift in human consciousness has begun.
01:02:18 ►
Even on my bad days, I still think this.
01:02:21 ►
I guess optimism is the best drug I’ve found yet. Now, I suspect that it also hit you
01:02:28 ►
when, after about 15 minutes into this talk, that Terrence was wondering out loud what it would feel
01:02:34 ►
like to die before the task was finished. Essentially before 2012 in his worldview, I would guess. But it was a little haunting to hear him ask
01:02:46 ►
how did it feel to die before whatever it is was finished,
01:02:51 ►
to ask that question about some others who had died
01:02:54 ►
without considering the fact that he too might die before 2012.
01:02:59 ►
In my view, it will never be finished.
01:03:03 ►
Transformation, or change if you prefer, is a constant in this world that we all share.
01:03:08 ►
So, if I were you, I wouldn’t get too hung up on some big change taking place before you die,
01:03:15 ►
unless that big change is the change you bring about in your own life, a change in you.
01:03:21 ►
Now, that actually is something that you have control over.
01:03:24 ►
now that actually is something that you have control over you know as William James once said
01:03:27 ►
you can actually change your life
01:03:29 ►
by simply changing your attitude
01:03:31 ►
but I’ve learned that what old William didn’t mention
01:03:35 ►
is that changing your attitude can sometimes be pretty darn hard
01:03:40 ►
you know it’s so easy to get caught in these mind loops that won’t seem to let go.
01:03:47 ►
But fortunately, I was introduced to our psychedelic medicines a long time ago.
01:03:51 ►
And now I have a sure way to break those endless subroutines of negativity when they take hold.
01:03:58 ►
And that’s why I’d like to see the war on people who use non-prescription drugs come to an end.
01:04:04 ►
So that everybody can have the opportunity to heal themselves with plant medicines
01:04:09 ►
that have shared this planet with us since we first began walking upright.
01:04:14 ►
Now, I do have to admit that since I don’t want to get too heavy here,
01:04:19 ►
that after listening to hundreds of hours of metaphysical theorizing by Terrence
01:04:25 ►
and the other bright lights we’ve heard here in the salon,
01:04:28 ►
well, I have to admit that I’m still no closer to an intelligent, cohesive understanding of life and death
01:04:34 ►
than I was in the beginning, I guess.
01:04:37 ►
Maybe it’s just because I’m getting ever closer to my own expiration date
01:04:40 ►
that, well, these things just don’t seem as important to me as they did
01:04:45 ►
ten years ago.
01:04:46 ►
At this stage of my life, I find that it’s still fun to listen to all of these speculations
01:04:52 ►
about what is really going on, but I no longer spend much of my time chewing on them once
01:04:59 ►
I turn off my MP3 player.
01:05:01 ►
I guess that one of the reasons is that life and death ultimately remain a mystery
01:05:06 ►
until we experience them and right now i’m experiencing life and so i feel it’s kind of
01:05:13 ►
a waste of my time to be wondering too much about what happens after my body dies for one thing i
01:05:19 ►
have no control over what happens in regards to whether there is or isn’t awareness after physical death,
01:05:25 ►
so why should I be concerned about it?
01:05:28 ►
As far as I remember, I didn’t have any say in being born, but it happened, and all things
01:05:33 ►
considered, I’ve had a wonderful life, tragedies and all.
01:05:37 ►
Maybe there’s nothing at all after death, and maybe we begin an even more incredible
01:05:42 ►
experience.
01:05:43 ►
Maybe we come back here for another round.
01:05:46 ►
The simple fact is that I just don’t know, and since I’m going to find out soon enough,
01:05:51 ►
well, right now, while I’m still experiencing a human life,
01:05:55 ►
I’m going to focus as much as I can on doing things that most likely won’t be options after I die.
01:06:01 ►
And what may these things be, you may ask?
01:06:04 ►
Well, for whatever reason, I truly
01:06:07 ►
enjoy watching American football. And since it’s football season right now here in the States, I
01:06:13 ►
find myself choosing to watch football rather than do research on my next book, for example.
01:06:19 ►
A waste of time, I once thought that was, but it brings me more joy right now than reading.
01:06:24 ►
And so I watch
01:06:25 ►
football. Even more fun is to play with my grandchildren who live nearby. You know, time
01:06:30 ►
just simply stops for me then. In fact, in truth, it really does crawl really slowly when I’m
01:06:37 ►
watching another rerun of Dora the Explorer with my youngest one. I’ll probably go to my grave with that damn theme song in my mind.
01:06:46 ►
But what I’m trying to say here is that while all of this heady intellectual stuff is fun to play around with,
01:06:53 ►
it’s not nearly as much fun for me as are some of the physical pursuits that we can only do while we’re in human bodies.
01:07:00 ►
And I suspect you can probably come up with your own list of favorite physical pursuits
01:07:05 ►
that may not include watching football and playing with children.
01:07:09 ►
So, hey, get out there and dance as much as you can.
01:07:12 ►
You know, dance the dance of life on earth as a human being.
01:07:17 ►
Well, that’s more than enough of my preaching for today
01:07:21 ►
and I hope that you don’t take what I say too personally.
01:07:24 ►
You know, these little side notes that spill out like this from me from time to time Thank you. hope that you never forget that you should be the one that comes to your own conclusions about life,
01:07:50 ►
death, and the sometimes joyful experience of being human. We’re all one after all, but we’re also all different, because even identical twins have to walk on different
01:07:56 ►
parts of the path. That’s what makes this life and these times so interesting.
01:08:01 ►
You may not believe me right now if you’re in a tough spot, but should you ever
01:08:06 ►
find yourself in an eternal state of bliss, just remember that I warned you that bliss can become
01:08:12 ►
really boring. And for sure, these are not boring times. And in just about an hour, I’m going to
01:08:21 ►
keep myself from being bored by going down to my local polling place and casting
01:08:26 ►
my vote in favor of legalizing cannabis in the state of California. And casting that vote is
01:08:32 ►
going to make me feel extremely good, no matter what the ultimate outcome. And so that’ll do it
01:08:40 ►
for today. And I’ll close today’s podcast once again by reminding you that this and
01:08:46 ►
most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:08:48 ►
are freely available for
01:08:50 ►
you to use in your own audio projects
01:08:51 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution
01:08:54 ►
Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0
01:08:56 ►
License. And if you have any questions
01:08:58 ►
about that, just click the Creative Commons
01:09:00 ►
link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon
01:09:02 ►
webpage, which you can find
01:09:04 ►
through psychedelicsalon.org.
01:09:07 ►
And if you’re
01:09:08 ►
interested in the philosophy behind
01:09:10 ►
the salon, you can hear all
01:09:12 ►
about it in my novel, The Genesis
01:09:14 ►
Generation, which is available
01:09:16 ►
as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:09:18 ►
that you can download at
01:09:19 ►
genesisgeneration.us.
01:09:21 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:09:24 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.