Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Kat Harrison
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled. And that’s why it’s so important to find out what our real wishes are.”
“A delusion of grandeur is when you’re a hell of a lot happier than other people think you should be.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1453760172
“The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have.”
“We feel the dizyness of the things not said.”
“The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter. They can deliver their message all by themselves.”
“Imagination is the real frontier. This is why the poets and the artists are so important.”
“The interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go ‘through’ space to other worlds, that will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space means going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves.”
“Outer space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It’s a vast, unfilled void into anything whatsoever can be projected.”
“The hallucinations of the individual are the cultural artifacts of the species five hundred years from now.”
“The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know, and, of course, it has facets that they never imagined.”
“It is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself, and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are consciousness-expanding agents (this is what they were originally called, consciousness-expanding drugs) if you that that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean, obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible, at all costs, in all times and places, because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace, and so it has to be cultivated by any means available.”
“The thing that really interest me, or draws me back, to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there is something you can learn that would somehow have an impact on society at large.”
“Time is not simply the dimention of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words.”
“The culmination of man’s god-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it’s not that we are ‘doing’ it, you see. It’s that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding.”
“The richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful.”
“And this is the task of the next hundred or five hundred years, to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being, and have everything fused into a super numinous concrescence that is time.”
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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 our virtual hosts today, along with me, are several fellow salonners who have sent us some of their hard-earned cash to help with the expenses here in the salon. Leonard D and also a Pixie from Sweden who made an outrageous donation
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for my Pay What You Can audiobook
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The Genesis Generation
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as you know all of the
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proceeds from my book sales also go into
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the salon and so
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a huge thank you to everyone who has
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donated in that way as well
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so thanks again Damien
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Jason, Leonard and Pixie
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it’s great to have you with us here in the salon each week.
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Now, today we’re going to return to the Terrence McKenna and Cat Harrison workshop that was held in the spring of 1986 at the Ojai Foundation in California.
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California. We’ll pick up with Terence McKenna in the middle of his good shit story, and then we’re going to be rewarded with his telling of the origin of the fable of the good shit, and that it first
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originated in Java. And from there, the topics were determined by questions from the participants, but
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about midway through this talk, Terence gives one of the most beautiful descriptions of the psychedelic experience that I can ever remember hearing.
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The final topic in this segment has to do with time,
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and even though I’ve heard him talk about his time wave hypothesis quite a few times,
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this is the very first time that he’s been able to explain it sufficiently simple enough for me to actually feel like I finally understand how he came up with the concept.
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So if you’re tempted to quit listening when he gets to that part because you think you’ve already heard enough about that subject,
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well, I encourage you to hang on and give it another listen.
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I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
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Especially when he builds up to the end with the rousing thought that, and I quote,
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the culmination of man’s God-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul.
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And it’s not that we’re doing it, you see.
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It’s a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding.
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In other words, don’t worry, be happy, and let the world unfold on its own.
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As my favorite song from Jesus Christ Superstar goes, try not to get worried and try not to turn
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on to problems that upset you. Don’t you know everything’s all right? Everything’s fine.
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And we want you to sleep well tonight. Let the world turn without you tonight.
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If we try, we’ll get by, so forget all about us tonight.
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I don’t know where that came from.
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I just felt like reciting those lines,
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even though they don’t actually have a whole lot to do with what we’re about to hear,
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other than the fact that those sentiments are also what I come back from a plus-five experience with.
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And at least you’re lucky I didn’t try to sing it.
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I love to sing, but if you heard me, you’d wonder why.
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Anyway, back to the reason we’ve gotten back together here today
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is the continuation of a McKenna Harrison workshop.
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And I’m going to begin today’s part of this workshop
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by first playing the last 30 seconds or so from my last podcast
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just to remind you of where he was in his good shit story and then we’ll pick up the tempo from
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there so then i looked and i and i opened this baggie with this stuff and i started smoking it
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and it did not it didn’t change its physical appearance. It still looked like this Santa Marta gold,
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but the odor and everything was just the most, the finest hash I’ve ever smoked.
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So I thought that the millennium had come, that forever after we would all trash.
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Yes, the end of the world is when all trash is Mazar-e-Sharif hash.
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When trash becomes hash.
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But at the crack of dawn the next morning,
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I went tearing down to my harshest critic
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and knelt beside her hammock and woke her up
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and said, you know, you’ve got to smoke this.
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And of course, you know, garbage was back.
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So I don’t know why I got off into this.
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I guess it was the life is art thing
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and this thing about what would you do if you could do anything.
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You should just enhance that little story with the myth.
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Isn’t it from New Guinea about the good ship?
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Do you remember that one where they generated…
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You mean the thing about the resin, where the resin bar grew longer?
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I’m not sure how this relates to it, but I’ll tell it.
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In the study of messianic movements, in fact, you can read about this
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in Sylvia Thrupp’s book, Millennial Dreams in Action, where she talks about a number of millennial religious groups.
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There was a movement around 1910 in Java called the Kalupan Movement.
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And it was some guy was sitting on his porch one day in a hut off in the jungle and he was playing his flute.
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in a hut off in the jungle and he was playing his flute and they collect kopal in the forest there and sell to traders and as he was playing his flute
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he noticed that this bar of rolled out kopal multiplied to twice its size right
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in front of him and not only did this happen but at the same moment it
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happened his mind was flooded with the
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sudden realization that the meaning of this event was that all human lives were now going to be
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twice as long as they had previously been before and he started he told people in his village and
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he had the proof because they had this bar of copal that was twice as long than anybody ever rolled them in that village
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so it spread from village to village and before long people from all over Java
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were vectoring in on this place and eventually the army had to be sent to put up roadblocks and turn people back and
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it all had to do with this piece of resin which had doubled in length while this guy was playing
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his flute and that is what’s called a cognitive hallucination a cognitive hallucination where an
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idea becomes so real to you that you see it, but then there’s this funny border where maybe it becomes so real that other people see it,
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and maybe that’s actually how we keep enlarging and complicating reality,
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is by having consensual cognitive hallucinations of what’s possible.
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That’s right.
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The Iowa scarrow that Kat mentioned that we like so much and worked with in Peru, Don Fidel,
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that we like so much and worked with in Peru, Don Fidel.
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He lived off this road when we knew him a few miles down this trail,
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and we would go over there often and walk with him back and forth between his house and where we could catch these little jitney buses into town.
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And he said one afternoon as we were walking along through the Amazon jungle,
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apropos of nothing, he said one afternoon as we were walking along through the Amazon jungle, apropos of nothing, he said, this is the path that Christ walked when he lived on earth.
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And it became so.
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You saw that somehow this was not a logical statement. This was a statement about the transposition of time and dimensionality and that he was living in the light of Christ
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That he was living in the presence of the Master through being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination
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And I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive
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Hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled.
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And that’s why it’s so important to find out what our real wishes are.
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One of the most powerful forms of yoga,
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one of the highest yogas is what’s called the Anuttatara Yoga Tantra.
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And it involves a series of visualizations.
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and it involves a series of visualizations, and they say, imagine your home as a splendid palace,
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and imagine the common utensils of your everyday life as golden vessels,
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vessels of beaten gold encrusted with jewels.
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Imagine your raiment as being made of the finest silk.
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And imagine yourself as a god
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centered in the midst of all of this splendor.
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Well, this is like trying to induce
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what in Western psychotherapy is called a delusion of grandeur.
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A delusion of grandeur is when you’re a hell of a lot happier
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than other people think you should be.
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You know?
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And they say, what do you have to be so happy about?
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And it’s all about infusing the quality of life with greater purity.
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We were saying around the fire last night
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that the way to relate to
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the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become
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a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well, the way to make it happen in your life
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is to not transcend desire, but transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have, you
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know?
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Oh.
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I find on these plants, on the mushroom particularly, I found it effective to will choose to become
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an archetype that I both, of course, have to be able to identify as an archetype,
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but then also one that I can relate to and wish to be
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and become as large,
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a thousand times larger than we are,
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and as smooth,
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and as everything is right.
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You can practice being in the Tao so deeply in those states
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and knowing that everything you do, no matter how minuscule it is,
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you’re doing most gracefully
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and everything you say, you’re saying most eloquently.
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You know, even I’ve used the mending sock thing
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because sometimes I feel like that’s what I’m doing
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is that level of work
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but then I’m doing it perfectly
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and that’s a great feeling
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if you indulge in that
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feeling of being the goddess
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or a god or goddess
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or one of whatever
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you identify with
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one of the kachinas, whatever
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then you can carry it back.
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It’s a really good way to carry it back into your daily life
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and learn to practice it,
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either in moments when you’re wobbly
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and you suddenly need to grow into the situation,
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or in moments of ecstasy, you know.
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I mean, to be archetypes making love is pretty good
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well that’s the technique of tantric practice of imagining these gods in union with their union. I guess the people burning to speak should speak.
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I have maybe one comment. That in different parts I keep hearing people saying that we
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don’t know anything, but I think we’re all dancing around it very well. And I think you’re
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dancing around it really well. And so i think we do know something
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not a lot perhaps but we do know something if words are that important and do have that
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meaning meanings whether it’s what we’re saying that is true or just the sound of our voice that is true. Something is true.
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We’re here.
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I think we’re beginning to say the unsayable.
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I just have that feeling.
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And what a feeling it is! And then you move on until it keeps forming. It’s like a creation of words, thoughts, ideas.
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They attach themselves to this larger structure and keep getting larger and larger.
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Pieces fall off.
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People add.
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But just trust that that leap of faith to the other side of what you can’t see,
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what you can understand, to trust it as you trust your lover, as you trust a friend.
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And it doesn’t always work out, but trust is the only way.
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Because otherwise there is only fear.
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Fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of ideas.
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I think this community is part of that, of building trust among people who fear of ideas.
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I think this community is part of that, of building trust among people who have different ideas.
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I’d like to say something about learning and teaching
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with regard to the psychedelic experience.
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That you can use a lot of verbiage in trying to explain to people what that search is about
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and what that adventure will yield.
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But in the end, probably the best communication is to just dispense the sacrament.
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I think it’s very holy work, and I just want to express my appreciation to those who are involved in that work
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with great respect for the sacrament and for those to whom they dispense it.
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And I’m just very happy to be associated with you folks.
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I think that’s something I’ve missed for a long time since the days of the 60s.
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The last time I was around people who knew about that work and approached it with the kind of reverence that I see here.
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The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves. So they need no priest, no interpreter.
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They can deliver their message all by themselves.
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So my question has to do with
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is there some sense of the re-emergence
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or in the Joyce sense, here comes everybody,
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the democratization of that ability in future culture?
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Yes, well, I think so.
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I think that the way these hieroglyphic languages,
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especially Mayan and Egyptian, differ from alphabetic languages
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is that etymology remains on the surface
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in a hieroglyphic language
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so that thousands of meanings
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are immediately visibly present
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and so it’s more like an ideogram
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rather than a word with a dictionary meaning.
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You couldn’t really… I doubt that a Mayan could conceive of a dictionary of Mayan glyphs
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because they infinitely shade off one into another.
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And that kind of sensitivity to the depth of language and to the presence of the past in the present in a word
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is what Joyce is trying to do in Finnegan’s Wake.
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And that’s why if you read it carefully,
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you feel many historical layers of meaning in the same passage
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because he wrote it with almost a
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pictographic consciousness of the meaning of the words rather than a linear and literary sense of
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it so yes it’s in in that sense it’s like that how this will be achieved in the future in our culture, I’m not sure.
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The control of the Macintosh through an internationally understood set of control glyphs is very weird.
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And if any of you have worked with a Macintosh, you immediately see this idea which seems very odd could in fact,
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I could learn this very quickly and anyone can do it kind of thing,
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maybe presages a world of illiterate computer users
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who communicate with computers through symbols because literacy has been lost.
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But it’s very interesting yeah
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actually Bruce when you asked your question about will computers become
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intelligent in life I’ve heard you talk about it more that the technology of computers will become available to us as almost a biological extent.
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Yes, that’s what I think will happen. I mean, my vision of a perfect world is where, you know, the earth is restored to its prehistoric Edenic perfection but technology has not
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been eliminated it’s merely been micro miniaturized to the point where the
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computers which maintain the history of the race and the governance of the
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planet have all been secreted in a certain pebble which lies on a certain beach somewhere
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on the planet and we walk around in perfect harmony with nature and in perfect and complete
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touch with an imaginary holographic world that is our self-expression as a city is our
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self-expression to then be simultaneously, you know, in the world of technique and in the world of nature,
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but with neither violating the other.
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And I think that’s reasonable.
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In fact, I think perhaps in a sense this is what so-called preliterate cultures in the Amazon and places have achieved.
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That’s how it looks to them from the inside.
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They have an extremely rich inner life.
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It isn’t maintained by vast computer networks
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and projected into holographic space
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and taped onto magnetic tape and all of that.
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But it’s still, in feeling,
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it’s the notion that the richest world is within and that you promote a balance with the exterior world but then the purpose of the leisure
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created when you have achieved balance is not then to accumulate things but to explore the interior horizon of transcendence through the recitation
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of myth and ecstasis and and this sort of thing Terence in connection with the question conjunction
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with it could you further elaborate this idea of the material externalization of the soul and the internalization of the body
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as a definitive thing in evolution well i think imagination is where we want to go
00:20:53 ►
that this has become the arrow of our epigenetic development because everybody says in the future
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you’ll have everything you want well if, if we believe this, then we have to think seriously about what everything you want is.
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I mean, obviously, you want plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of money, plenty of friends.
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But then if you get all that, and then they say, well, you still, you haven’t even dented your credit account.
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Well, then it says, well, I want to live at Versailles,
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surrounded by brilliant robots who… and I want great writers and artists to have lunch
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with me every day, and the Hope Diamond, and Rembrandts, and eventually this becomes very silly, and instead there is an ascent toward truly grandiose aspirations,
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truly bodhisattvic calling.
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And I think that the imagination is the real frontier.
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This is why the poets and the artists are so important. And this is why I think one of the aspects of the space thing
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that is never mentioned by the L5 Society
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or any of these engineering types who are so into it
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is the interesting thing about outer space.
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We are not going to go through space to other worlds.
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That will be very incidental to going into space.
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Going into space means going into space,
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that space itself is a medium with unique properties
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for a species such as ourselves.
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And one of those unique properties is that engineering,
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which on the surface of the planet
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has to always be cognizant of stress and bearing loads and the limitation of materials,
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engineering is just going to become like ballet.
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And objects, miles in extent, can be created that are obedient only to the laws of the human imagination.
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And, of course the the the
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funding available to create these things but in other words the constraints of
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nature are pretty much lifted outer space is very much like what you see
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when you close your eyes in a dark room it’s a vast unfilled void into which
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anything whatsoever can be projected the The hallucinations of the individual
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are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now. I mean, all these visions and
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dreams that we have will be realized, I mean, in ways that we cannot imagine, but realized
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nevertheless. This has been consistently what has been going on.
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The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know.
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And, of course, it has facets that they never imagined.
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But going into space and going into the imagination is the same thing and in the same way that
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The New World presented a tremendously tight genetic filter to immigrants
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so that only the soldiers of fortune the religious fanatics and
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Exiles came to this place and that created a unique gene mix
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Space is going to be a much tighter genetic filter
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I mean most people who go are going to be very smart and very healthy and
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and
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Very quickly I think a space type
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Will arise but I don’t think you can create a space-based
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civilization without recourse to psychedelic plants and the psychedelic experience because it’s too much the same thing
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you know without if you don’t integrate psychedelics into the leap to space and realize
00:24:59 ►
that what is happening is that more and more we perfect the aspiration to vertical ascent.
00:25:07 ►
In the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, you get this.
00:25:10 ►
Then in the brothers Montgolfier and their gas-filled balloon,
00:25:15 ►
and then the Wright brothers, and then the Apollo project.
00:25:18 ►
All of these things are, you know, this aspiration to ascension.
00:25:23 ►
And it is apparently a biological drive.
00:25:27 ►
I mean, some people have suggested it’s a nostalgia for the canopies of the rainforests that no longer exist.
00:25:34 ►
But whatever it is, it’s going to take us eventually out to the stars and inward to the stars,
00:25:40 ►
because the real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of
00:25:47 ►
mind and we do not know what mind is and yet everything goes on upon the stage that is
00:25:56 ►
conditioned by and assumes mind as a given and every society has assumed that it had the answers that just 15
00:26:07 ►
years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it and no society has
00:26:14 ►
ever been right about that so why should we be right we are hurtling toward an
00:26:19 ►
unimaginable future in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people
00:26:26 ►
200 or 500 years ago but it is it is the imagination because it is consciousness
00:26:36 ►
that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself and if we take the notion that these psychedelic plants are
00:26:47 ►
consciousness expanding agents this is what they were originally called
00:26:52 ►
consciousness expanding drugs if you take that seriously for a moment how can
00:26:58 ►
you not Center it in your life I mean obviously consciousness is what must be
00:27:03 ►
expanded as fast as possible at all costs in all times and places
00:27:08 ►
because it is a lack of consciousness that will be toxic to our species and the planet
00:27:16 ►
consciousness is the saving grace and so it has to be cultivated by any means available.
00:27:28 ►
You’re saying that this urge to go to space is something like a biological urge and also
00:27:33 ►
maybe something relating to the rainforest.
00:27:36 ►
Well, I think we’re like the trigger species.
00:27:39 ►
The point I want to make is that when we think of going to space, we’re so human-centered
00:27:44 ►
and it’s like, yes, us as humans can exist in space and exist there.
00:27:47 ►
But I think what’s really important about going away from this planet’s surface is it’s not just a human-centered thing.
00:27:54 ►
It’s a totally biological thing in that we are just the implements of it.
00:27:57 ►
We are the thinking, conscious, creative tool makers that will be able to implement this getting off of this gravity trap this gravity well
00:28:05 ►
but it’s not just for humans it’s for all life and we have to it’ll be a complete synthesis oh yes
00:28:10 ►
all biological life that will exist away from the planet if we go to space we will take everybody
00:28:16 ►
with us like just like in a rainforest it’s not just it’s everything that’s right we are the
00:28:21 ►
species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet.
00:28:28 ►
That’s why I’m not pessimistic about history, and I don’t see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature. by which the monkeys attain enough understanding of physical processes
00:28:45 ►
to build the habitats into which all life on the planet can then migrate.
00:28:52 ►
That’s what I was talking about this morning when I said I think the planet senses
00:28:56 ►
the finiteness of its existence and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars, for dispersal of life.
00:29:10 ►
And you’re right. No, we have great hubris and believe we are doing this and man will go to the stars.
00:29:17 ►
It’s more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on earth and the entire bird will emerge and
00:29:29 ►
fly but it was man with his atomic weapons and his radar and all this who can break the
00:29:37 ►
shell and then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space and escape the cycle of energy degradation
00:29:46 ►
that will eventually turn this solar system into a group of cold cinders rotating around a red
00:29:54 ►
giant or something yes well we’re trying to compare our maps. Everybody has seen different pieces
00:30:05 ►
of a geography whose total size we don’t know.
00:30:09 ►
So we don’t know, maybe none of our maps overlap,
00:30:13 ►
or maybe some do and some don’t.
00:30:16 ►
And maps which don’t overlap are not invalidated.
00:30:20 ►
It just means nobody has been there but you.
00:30:24 ►
I mean, I often have the feeling that I’m seeing things that no one has ever seen before.
00:30:31 ►
Often.
00:30:34 ►
Leon asked me to talk about time.
00:30:37 ►
Leon is off on alone time, so he’ll miss this.
00:30:52 ►
miss this the thing that really interests me or draws me back to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there’s something
00:30:58 ►
that you can learn that would somehow be
00:31:09 ►
that would somehow have an impact on society at large, that when you have the psychedelic experience,
00:31:13 ►
it’s like you’re a sailor on some kind of a vast ocean
00:31:18 ►
where you let down your net into the deeps,
00:31:30 ►
your net into the deeps and the hope is that you will snare an idea of some sort and of some size and it may be you know that you come up with the equivalent of
00:31:37 ►
tuna which is many small ideas or and perhaps you bring up your nets and see that they have just been shredded
00:31:46 ►
by something so large that you scarcely fully explore and understand
00:32:08 ►
when you go into that ocean as a swimmer.
00:32:12 ►
You see these things passing in review,
00:32:17 ►
things of such beauty and intricacy and complexity
00:32:22 ►
that you are literally speechless and even speechless in terms
00:32:28 ►
of an interior dialogue about what you’re seeing you can’t it just blows your mind and washes past
00:32:37 ►
you in such profusion that there seems to be the notion of capturing, it seems to be like the notion of a child emptying the ocean with a cup.
00:32:49 ►
But if you have a net, and I’m not sure what a net is exactly,
00:32:56 ►
but it’s a way of somehow capturing these psychedelic ideas and then bringing them back for examination.
00:33:17 ►
And I think part of it rests on a technique of cyclical recitation to yourself of what you’ve seen
00:33:26 ►
so that you carry a vision to a level of reflection in memory as you pull away from it.
00:33:30 ►
And then 10 minutes later, you tell yourself again what has just happened. And then 20 minutes later again, so that you get a series of telescoping images, which
00:33:36 ►
are granted a compression of the original event, but nevertheless, they bear the stamp of what the thing was.
00:33:49 ►
So the thing of this class that has happened to me
00:33:57 ►
is a very peculiar idea about time,
00:34:01 ►
which was developed fairly suddenly as I would imagine ideas develop
00:34:10 ►
in me in the early and mid 70s and then it was pretty much formulated in my head but it took
00:34:20 ►
the invention of small computers to make it possible to write software so that I could
00:34:28 ►
actually talk to other people about this idea.
00:34:32 ►
Well, since we have no computers and not even a blackboard, this will be a kind of feeling excursion into talking about this theory of time.
00:34:46 ►
It has an abstract foundation and a practical foundation.
00:34:54 ►
Its abstract foundation is the notion that time is different
00:35:02 ►
than we have come to conceive of it as the legacy of Western science.
00:35:09 ►
The legacy of Western science is that time is duration,
00:35:16 ►
that time is a dimension necessary for process,
00:35:21 ►
and it’s usually thought of as a flat plane against which some other
00:35:27 ►
fluctuating variable can be plotted. This is called, you know, linear time. And
00:35:36 ►
Newton’s physics took the same view of space. The Newtonian view of space was that it was essentially emptiness. It was something
00:35:49 ►
which you had to have if you wanted to put something somewhere. So it was a kind of an
00:35:55 ►
abstract plenum. But Einstein showed that space is actually some kind of thing.
00:36:05 ►
It has properties of thingdom.
00:36:08 ►
It is distorted in the presence of a large magnetic field.
00:36:13 ►
And so it rose out of the realm of abstraction
00:36:19 ►
and then was cognized as an objectifiable entity,
00:36:22 ►
a topological manifold that was real.
00:36:26 ►
This is, I think, the same step that has to be taken for time.
00:36:31 ►
Time is not simply the dimension of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions.
00:36:41 ►
It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold.
00:36:47 ►
We can think of it as a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words.
00:36:56 ►
In some places the river is very broad and shallow and meanders because the pitch of the incline over which it’s moving is so slight
00:37:08 ►
that it can barely discern which way to move. You see this often in the Amazon. In other situations,
00:37:16 ►
the incline increases and the speed of the flow increases and the depth of the channel increases
00:37:22 ►
and the distance between the banks decreases.
00:37:26 ►
So time runs slowly and it runs quickly.
00:37:30 ►
It has a kind of modulated speed.
00:37:35 ►
Well, it’s been a commonplace of Western cosmology since Darwin,
00:37:44 ►
although it’s never been elevated to the status of a law or even a principle,
00:37:49 ►
that steady complexification has occurred in the universe since its very beginning,
00:37:57 ►
that this is something that we see in the very first moments of physics
00:38:04 ►
and proceeding right up into our own day.
00:38:07 ►
In other words, in the era before physics, that period of time so short that it’s the period of time,
00:38:15 ►
it’s less than the amount of time necessary for the photon to cross the radius of the nucleus of the atom.
00:38:23 ►
There was absolute chaos and a complete absence of physics.
00:38:29 ►
And then what sprang into being was a physics of pure electrons, of pure energy. And it was not
00:38:37 ►
for many seconds that temperatures fell to a point such that other factors could come into play,
00:38:48 ►
such that free electrons could fall into atomic orbitals and this sort of thing.
00:38:56 ►
And at each successive level of cooling, new forms of order became possible.
00:39:04 ►
At first, everything was just this plasma of
00:39:07 ►
particles and energy and then atomic systems sprang into being and then at
00:39:14 ►
still lower temperatures these atomic systems were able to form molecular
00:39:18 ►
systems. The energy level in the general medium dropped below the level at which
00:39:23 ►
it would disrupt the molecular bond.
00:39:26 ►
So then molecules came into being and
00:39:29 ►
then at that point there was the aggregation of stars and the cooking out of the heavier elements
00:39:36 ►
through the process of cooking hydrogen so that iron and carbon, these things
00:39:42 ►
then arose and by this time the universe is much cooler than it was at the beginning.
00:39:49 ►
And then finally, you get temperature regimes and environmental situations where very large colloidal molecular species can come into being.
00:40:03 ►
Large polymerized molecules. And this sets the stage for DNA,
00:40:10 ►
which once it emerges, and the thing to notice at each of these stages of complexification is that it requires a shorter time then the process is preceding it. If the universe is, let’s take the long view and
00:40:29 ►
say 20 billion years old, then the first 10 billion years not very much happened
00:40:37 ►
that was interesting in the realm of complexity. There was star formation and
00:40:42 ►
the percolation of heavy chemistry, but not life, or it’s doubtful that life occurred in the early universe.
00:40:51 ►
So what we see then is the emergence of more and more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed, and then finally the emergence of self-reflection in the primates, and then epigenetic methods
00:41:08 ►
of encoding information, in other words, writing and storytelling and language.
00:41:14 ►
And at each point, what is happening is there’s a progressive time-binding of energy and a
00:41:22 ►
progressive intensification and speed up of the
00:41:25 ►
complexification of certain parts of the universe. Right now the most complex part
00:41:31 ►
of the universe that we know is the human brain mind situated in its network
00:41:37 ►
of computers and cultural conventions and social obligations and expectations
00:41:43 ►
and hopes and fears and historical aspirations,
00:41:47 ►
etc. I mean, this is the realm of the densely packed that the Buddhists are talking about.
00:41:54 ►
So it seems to me that this should be seen as the operation of a general law, and we are not
00:42:01 ►
outside of this. We are, in fact, the cutting edge of it. Somehow, of all the animal species on the earth, the human beings are carriers of this temporal speeding up process, which is now engulfing the entire planet.
00:42:28 ►
entire planet. And so that’s the general law or the general perception upon which this idea I elaborated was based. The notion that complexification is being
00:42:34 ►
conserved through time and being built up as some quality that the universe is very interested in maintaining.
00:42:50 ►
And then I looked at the Qing,
00:42:53 ►
which I hope is familiar to most of you.
00:42:55 ►
I’m sure it probably is.
00:42:59 ►
It’s a very ancient Chinese oracle system that uses what are called hexagrams,
00:43:02 ►
which are six-leveled ideograms of broken or
00:43:06 ►
unbroken lines and the possible subset of these things is 64 which is an
00:43:13 ►
interesting number because it’s the number which DNA operates on because it
00:43:17 ►
uses 64 codons and in fact I came to see that as no coincidence, that actually life was organized around this number and the I Ching as well, because both were subject to a set of rules which was surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organization and the organization of a Chinese oracular theory
00:43:46 ►
for understanding past and future time.
00:43:50 ►
And I looked at what is called the sequence,
00:43:55 ►
which is the way in which you move from one hexagram to the next,
00:44:00 ►
and I sought order there and found order that I think had been lost since pre-Han, perhaps pre-Zhou time.
00:44:12 ►
And I came to see the I Ching as we possess it today as an archaeological artifact, a piece of broken machinery.
00:44:22 ►
It’s like the turbine of a jet plane. You puzzle over it and you see
00:44:28 ►
that it could be used for something and you do use it for things and it’s very effective,
00:44:32 ►
but it’s really a piece of broken machinery from a very ancient technology which ceased to exist before the rise of the Han Dynasty. And what it was, was it was like a Taoist technology of understanding time,
00:44:53 ►
that by the practice of certain techniques whose historical echoes I think you get
00:45:01 ►
in the stilling of the heart techniques of Vajrayana Buddhism.
00:45:06 ►
These people were able to see into the quantum mechanical foundations of thought and consciousness,
00:45:14 ►
and they noticed there a flux, which they called the Tao,
00:45:20 ►
and it was a thing which came and went.
00:45:22 ►
The Tao Te Ching says the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way.
00:45:28 ►
And they stilled their body functions and they looked inward with a cataloging analytical mentality.
00:45:36 ►
And they noticed that while this flux was variable, it seemed to be not infinite in its contributing factors,
00:45:47 ►
but that in fact it seemed to have a pattern.
00:45:50 ►
And they discerned the pattern as revolving around the number 64.
00:45:56 ►
In other words, they discerned through this process of meditation
00:46:01 ►
temporal elements that had a kind of ontological validity
00:46:07 ►
that the material elements of the periodic table have for matter,
00:46:13 ►
that there is not one kind of time or two kinds of time,
00:46:17 ►
but actually 64 facets of the possible temporal jewel.
00:46:30 ►
facets of the possible temporal jewel and they saw that any moment in time was the combination and the overlay of uh this wave system which they called dao and it was a harmonic wave system. It had periods of self-expression which were
00:46:50 ►
very short in duration on the order of seconds or hours or microseconds. It had levels of
00:46:57 ►
expression which were cognizable in the human world as years and decades and centuries and it had vast resonant
00:47:07 ►
periods which were as large as history and then larger many times periods of
00:47:13 ►
historical or periods of temporal resonance which could only be referenced
00:47:18 ►
to the life of the planet and this is I you know, part of the Chinese notion of the Tao of heaven, earth, and man.
00:47:31 ►
These are different speeds at which these temporal waves of conditioning of the world of phenomenal appearance are moving.
00:47:51 ►
are moving. And if you take an idea like this seriously, even as a personal discipline of thought, to picture it, to visualize it in a Vajrayana spirit,
00:47:57 ►
then you see that what’s really being offered is a map of time.
00:48:05 ►
It’s saying that the condition of knowing a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future
00:48:18 ►
is not an ontologically given necessity of existence,
00:48:24 ►
an ontologically given necessity of existence,
00:48:30 ►
that it is possible to imagine an existence in which one saw into time the way we as animals see into the space in front of us
00:48:36 ►
so that we are able to run and leap and dance among the rocks.
00:48:40 ►
It’s because we can see into space.
00:48:43 ►
A creature or a culture we can see into space. A creature that or a culture that
00:48:46 ►
could see into time could anticipate where the river of time would flow
00:48:51 ►
quickly, where it would broaden out and move slowly with a rich sense of the
00:48:56 ►
conservation of accomplishments achieved, where it would cascade and break up its
00:49:03 ►
previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty,
00:49:07 ►
a civilization which knew these things, or a person which knew these things about their own life,
00:49:14 ►
would claim a new dimension of existential freedom for being.
00:49:20 ►
And, you know, I was having this whispering entity, this demon, this logos, show me these things.
00:49:30 ►
And it was expressed on a very, very practical level.
00:49:34 ►
I mapped what is called the first order of difference in the sequence of the I Ching.
00:49:40 ►
That means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another.
00:49:44 ►
And I discovered that it looked like a random wave. That means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another.
00:49:49 ►
And I discovered that it looked like a random wave. It looked like a stochastic slice, except that at the beginning and the end,
00:49:54 ►
there were tongue and groove points of fit if you rotated the thing 180 degrees and brought it down against itself,
00:50:04 ►
so that the thing achieved closure at
00:50:06 ►
the beginning and the end. This satisfied me that I was dealing with an artifact of nature,
00:50:13 ►
you know, that I was dealing with an organized structure either of nature or created by
00:50:18 ►
intelligence. And then using the principle of hierarchical resonance and stacking of modules into hierarchies,
00:50:28 ►
which is really the principle by which all Chinese metaphysics has operated from the very beginning,
00:50:34 ►
I created a cosmic calendar where each level was a resonance of the level below it,
00:50:47 ►
but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64.
00:50:52 ►
I discovered a very, well, recall that
00:50:56 ►
because the I Ching is 64 hexagrams with six lines in each hexagram, it’s composed basically of 384
00:51:08 ►
Yao or lines. And I discovered that this number, 384, has a very interesting
00:51:16 ►
property. The cycle of the moon is 29.5 days. so that if you take 29.5 times 13, it’s something like 383.93.
00:51:34 ►
And it seemed to me then immediately obvious that part of what the machinery of the I Ching was describing in the humanly cognizable phenomenal world was
00:51:45 ►
the cycle of the moon using a 384 day lunar calendar which precessed 19 days a
00:51:53 ►
year against the solar calendar and when you take that 384 day unit and multiply it times 64, you get 67 years and some months and days.
00:52:09 ►
This is exactly six 11-year sunspot cycles.
00:52:15 ►
And China is the first place where we have historical records of the observation of sunspots.
00:52:21 ►
So that’s one sunspot cycle for each line in the six line hexagram.
00:52:27 ►
Also sunspot cycles have a greater peak every third cycle. So that’s one large
00:52:34 ►
sunspot cycle for each hexagram in that trigram. And I saw then that there were
00:52:41 ►
these resonances. When you take that number, 67 years, again times 64,
00:52:48 ►
you get 4,306 years.
00:52:52 ►
And that works out to, let’s see, 4,306,
00:53:00 ►
200, 150 years for each zodiacal sign.
00:53:07 ►
So it’s like each zodiacal sign is slotted to one trigram.
00:53:12 ►
And these are all, notice that all these things that this resonance calendar
00:53:16 ►
is predicting are things visible to the naked eye.
00:53:19 ►
We’re talking about movements of constellations, sunspots,
00:53:24 ►
and the moon.
00:53:28 ►
So I saw then that this was a tremendously powerful natural calendar
00:53:35 ►
that was a technology developed by proto-daoist Central Asian shamanism very, very long ago. But it had this
00:53:47 ►
curious property of when the wave was mathematically analyzed in modern
00:53:54 ►
mathematical, by modern mathematical methods so that we could draw these maps
00:54:00 ►
of novelty, we could see then that it showed us the map of the temporal river from
00:54:09 ►
earliest beginnings to the collapse of the state vector at some time in the future.
00:54:15 ►
And so it was obvious then that if we could lay the map over the portion of reality we had already experienced, we could then propagate
00:54:26 ►
the map forward into the future and know and begin to take hold of ourselves in this other
00:54:34 ►
temporal dimension.
00:54:37 ►
And so it became a question of what is the best fit of this undulating wave of novelty.
00:54:44 ►
what is the best fit of this undulating wave of novelty?
00:54:50 ►
And I used the word novelty out of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy because he had this notion that novelty was the compressing of a force
00:54:56 ►
which knits things together.
00:54:59 ►
And I like that.
00:55:01 ►
That’s what I felt it was, that the Tao is making itself.
00:55:05 ►
And that this compression of novelty through the speeding up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to everything else.
00:55:16 ►
And this is, you know, the universe’s self-birthing of itself.
00:55:21 ►
of itself.
00:55:30 ►
Well, you must be aware of all these very straight studies which say if we keep increasing how fast we go, by the year 2020 we’ll go ten times the speed of light.
00:55:36 ►
If we keep increasing how much energy we release, by so and so we’ll release the energy in the
00:55:42 ►
sun.
00:55:42 ►
The propagation of all these curves of development become asymptotic and then nobody knows how to interpret what
00:55:49 ►
they mean. They just seem to mean that the whole culture is going to go
00:55:54 ►
kazowie, you know. And this is sort of the idea that this theory implies. It implies that far from the universe being a steady state entity
00:56:08 ►
uninfluenced by the existence of the human mind,
00:56:11 ►
which is going to go on and exist for billions of years
00:56:15 ►
until the stars burn out
00:56:17 ►
and the second law of thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death,
00:56:22 ►
that that’s all wrong, a hundred percent wrong, and that
00:56:26 ►
actually the universe is made by mind within and without organism, and that
00:56:33 ►
mind is capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression and that we are privileged to be the witnesses of
00:56:48 ►
the final act of life going through some kind of immense transformative
00:56:57 ►
unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been building on this
00:57:04 ►
planet for billions of years but which has been building on this planet for billions of years,
00:57:05 ►
but which has been accelerating to, you know, such excruciating intensities over the last 25,000 years
00:57:13 ►
that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence from the monkeys
00:57:17 ►
and the invention of quantum physics and space flight and shamanism. And it is novelty upon novelty, novelty so intensified
00:57:29 ►
that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it
00:57:33 ►
and it bubbles out into the epigenetic, into art and language and poetry and religion
00:57:38 ►
and religious mania and romanticism and all of these things.
00:57:47 ►
mania and romanticism and all of these things. It is a progressive knitting together and expression of the universe’s will to become that causes me
00:57:53 ►
to think that we may be in the shorter gyres, as William Butler Yeats called
00:57:59 ►
them, the shortening spirals of this vortex of novelty and compression.
00:58:05 ►
You see a curious quality about this kind of cosmology that I’m describing,
00:58:11 ►
a cosmology where each epoch is preceded by an epoch
00:58:18 ►
which is 64 times greater in duration.
00:58:23 ►
The curious thing about that is
00:58:25 ►
that you only need about 20 instances of multiplication
00:58:31 ►
before you go from a period of time
00:58:35 ►
smaller than the duration of Planck’s constant,
00:58:38 ►
which is 1.55 times 10 to the minus 23,
00:58:44 ►
which is a very short period of time,
00:58:47 ►
then by 20 multiplications of 64,
00:58:52 ►
you reach a period of time in excess of the required time for the age of the universe,
00:58:59 ►
a period of time on the order of 72 billion years.
00:59:10 ►
time on the order of 72 billion years. Well, if each time the spiral goes into a state of collapse at the end of one of its cycles, then in the last 384 days of the existence of a universe like that,
00:59:20 ►
it would transit through half of its epochs of transition.
00:59:25 ►
Do you see what I mean?
00:59:26 ►
It’s like a screaming Mimi.
00:59:28 ►
It really winds up.
00:59:31 ►
And instead of the vision which physics gives us
00:59:35 ►
is that the really rapid transitions of phase and state
00:59:40 ►
occurred at the beginning of the universe.
00:59:44 ►
They, whole professional lives are given over to discussing the first ten picoseconds of
00:59:51 ►
the physics of the universe, right?
00:59:54 ►
Well, I’m saying it’s, I don’t care about that.
00:59:58 ►
I think that the really interesting stuff will happen in a big hurry at the end of the universe.
01:00:11 ►
That the picture that the second law of thermodynamics gives us of just, you know,
01:00:18 ►
tumescence, maximum detumescence is what it’s picturing, is all wrong. And that actually this strange hyperdimensional force in the universe called life and information transfer is
01:00:25 ►
in the process of working itself up into a real tizzy and wrapping all space and
01:00:31 ►
time around itself and what was startling and what made me think that
01:00:39 ►
maybe I was losing my marbles was that when you look at time that way and push these novelty
01:00:47 ►
graphs against the historical continuum I reached the conclusion that we entered
01:00:54 ►
the last 67 year period before the collapse of the state vector at 8 30 in the morning on august the 6th 1945 when the atomic bomb went off over
01:01:10 ►
hiroshima you see it was a temporal reflection of the birth of the universe it was actually a
01:01:19 ►
you could call it an event which was a reincarnation of the Big Bang because each cycle begins
01:01:26 ►
with a bang and that cycle initiated the fact that human beings had used atomic
01:01:32 ►
weapons on other human beings meant that we had entered a new era a new epoch of
01:01:40 ►
moral danger and the stakes had been raised, you know, by a power of 64 to a
01:01:47 ►
new level. Now, using the mathematics inherent in the cycle, if you propagate
01:01:54 ►
forward from that date, 67 years 104.25 days, you reach late November of 2012 A.D.
01:02:08 ►
And I concluded, based on all kinds of factors, personal and historical and so forth,
01:02:16 ►
that that was the fit, that if Hiroshima was day one,
01:02:23 ►
then the place where it all came together was this date in 2012.
01:02:28 ►
And I worked with that for several years before some kind soul, Henry Munn, I think,
01:02:35 ►
pointed out to me that the Mayan calendar, which is a cycle of three,
01:02:41 ►
the long count calendar I’m now talking about, is a cycle of three, of the long count calendar I’m now talking about,
01:02:45 ►
is a cycle of 13 time periods which are called baktuns.
01:02:50 ►
And the baktun is 396 years in duration.
01:02:55 ►
After 13 baktuns, the world ends completely.
01:02:59 ►
And the 13th baktun of the classical Mayan long count calendar
01:03:04 ►
is the winter solstice of A.D. 2012.
01:03:09 ►
Within 30 days of the date that I had fastened in on using a completely different path of analysis.
01:03:20 ►
And so this raised all kinds of questions.
01:03:49 ►
And so this raised all kinds of questions, one of which is, is it simply that individuals and civilizations who take mushrooms become, I want to say, privy slash engulfed by a certain mathematical secret about the cosmic machinery. What is so important about this date in 2012? You know, the Mesoamerican cultures have the most uncanny history of successful prophecy in the world.
01:03:58 ►
I mean, the Aztecs anticipated the coming of the Spanish.
01:04:06 ►
the coming of the Spanish, the day, the book of Chilambelum gives the day when the Spaniards would weigh anchor off the coast of Mexico.
01:04:11 ►
And of course, the fact that it happened exactly as prophesied
01:04:15 ►
was a major undoing of that civilization.
01:04:19 ►
So, I put this out.
01:04:47 ►
I put this out. This was a very confusing experience for me to channel or transmit this idea, because I was interested in the I Ching. I had carried it with me in India. I used to throw it at each full moon, but I was not mathematically inclined. And when reading the philosophy of science and people like Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos and reading the history of science and Thomas Kuhn and all of
01:04:53 ►
those people trying to understand, you know, well, what is a true idea? What is true and what is
01:05:01 ►
false? And when you have an idea which makes claims as sweeping as
01:05:06 ►
these then you want to try to understand just what the limits of knowability are.
01:05:13 ►
And I discovered that all you can require of any idea is that it be self-consistent, that it not generate any contradictions within its own set of rules, you see.
01:05:32 ►
And that’s why astrology is beyond criticism,
01:05:36 ►
because astrology is a mathematical theory with an interpretive exegesis attached to it.
01:05:45 ►
And who can quibble with the mathematical theory?
01:05:48 ►
Well, then the interpretational exegesis has to do with the sensitivity and subtlety of the interpreter.
01:05:59 ►
Well, isn’t this true of mathematical data in science exactly the same way?
01:06:04 ►
true of mathematical data in science exactly the same way. So I discovered that what I had created was a self-consistent idea
01:06:11 ►
that appears to be sealed beyond refutation in some weird and uncanny way,
01:06:20 ►
which makes it seem very non-human,
01:06:26 ►
canny way, which makes it seem very non-human, because you can’t really find your way into telling whether it can be answerable to the notion of objective truth.
01:06:34 ►
So what I’ve decided about it is that it’s a teaching, or it’s an exemplary model about how all process goes on.
01:06:49 ►
And it’s a way of learning how things happen.
01:06:54 ►
To see time as a modulated flux of elements.
01:07:01 ►
To see it as a series of waves moving at different speeds
01:07:06 ►
through which you are taking a vertical slice and then stacking that slice.
01:07:13 ►
And that gives rise to the multiplistic ever-changing flux that is called the now.
01:07:20 ►
It is actually made up of reflections and adumbrations of the past.
01:07:28 ►
And it’s made up of anticipatory shock waves and intimations of the future.
01:07:37 ►
The past and the future are co-present in the now.
01:07:42 ►
They are, in fact, what’s making it happen.
01:07:47 ►
You can almost think of it as a hologram where you have two, or a standing wave,
01:07:51 ►
where you have two wave systems,
01:07:54 ►
one from the past, one from the future,
01:07:56 ►
and where they cross and interference pattern forms,
01:08:01 ►
which has a curious stability as a system in and of itself,
01:08:07 ►
and yet it’s almost a ghost created by these other two realities.
01:08:13 ►
And that is the moving present.
01:08:17 ►
And mathematically, this notion of time that I evolved
01:08:24 ►
delivers the map of novelty,
01:08:27 ►
a two variable flux, a wandering line graph that’s very pleasing for arguing with formalists.
01:08:37 ►
But what lurks behind it and what is so rich for the romantic and the shaman and the poet, is this wandering line graph is the composite of the overlay of certain historical time periods,
01:08:55 ►
which are in a state of flux at various speeds,
01:09:00 ►
so that they give rise to an endless kaleidoscopic unfolding in what we call three-dimensional space and of what we call reality.
01:09:11 ►
And this is why I often mention Finnegan’s Wake in my lectures, because Joyce understood this.
01:09:18 ►
He understood that every moment is caused by everything that happened in the past and everything that happened in the future.
01:09:26 ►
And I like to give the trivial example that you find yourself in Hadrian’s hamburger joint.
01:09:37 ►
This is because the Emperor Hadrian invaded England in a certain year and conducted a campaign.
01:09:46 ►
We are ghosts of past and future events. And what the chaos at the end of history that
01:09:54 ►
we are now living through is that for thousands and thousands of years people people have felt a vague thing calling across time to humanness, calling us to be a certain way,
01:10:13 ►
to practice certain rituals, to observe the stars, to observe the plants, to observe birth and observe death, a calling and that thing which some people have called
01:10:27 ►
God, whatever it is, is throwing a gigantic shadow over human history now
01:10:34 ►
because now the creode of development that leads to our merging with this
01:10:39 ►
thing, the walls are very steep, the water is moving very swiftly. And it’s almost as though
01:10:48 ►
the future event is throwing off great sparks that are themselves faceted, contradictory
01:10:56 ►
epitomizations of this mystery. This is what Muhammad and Christ and Buddha are. They are human personalities that were situated in time in such a way that they became macrocosmic reflections of the superordinate endemic humanity that is going to be generated at the end of history.
01:11:23 ►
And we are close.
01:11:26 ►
We are close.
01:11:28 ►
It is…
01:11:29 ►
All of history can be seen
01:11:32 ►
as the shockwave of this eschatological event.
01:11:36 ►
This is what the prophets were anticipating.
01:11:38 ►
The culmination of man’s God-making effort in time
01:11:44 ►
will be the perfection and the release of the human soul.
01:11:50 ►
And it’s not that we are doing it, you see.
01:11:54 ►
It’s that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding.
01:12:07 ►
inexorably unfolding and that is what all this cross-connectedness of man into matter, plant into animal, earth into space, all of this flowing and
01:12:15 ►
interconnectedness, this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet. This
01:12:19 ►
is not simply a phenomenon of biology, This is the unfolding of a general law of which biology
01:12:27 ►
is only the cutting edge of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being and reaches right down
01:12:34 ►
into the neutrinos. And it is, you know, to be a being in time is to share in the immense flood of precognitive anticipation
01:12:49 ►
that fills the universe in anticipation of this event.
01:12:55 ►
And that’s what being is, and that’s why it’s so rich and so complete within itself,
01:13:01 ►
and yet always somehow pointing beyond itself.
01:13:09 ►
in itself and yet always somehow pointing beyond itself because the the richness of the matrix through which we are moving is incomparable and beautiful and and so I this is the basis of my
01:13:19 ►
extreme optimism is I think that everything is under control that we are in the grip of
01:13:26 ►
a force so powerful that the notion that we could jeopardize or overthrow it is
01:13:34 ►
completely preposterous because we are acting in accordance with a resonance
01:13:43 ►
that was set going millions and millions of years ago.
01:13:46 ►
And of course, being is fraught with danger,
01:13:51 ►
but the stakes are to be at play in the fields of the Lord,
01:13:59 ►
to be at rest in the mansions of the goddess.
01:14:03 ►
And it’s soon, I think.
01:14:09 ►
At least the historical mimicking of it is clearly soon.
01:14:14 ►
Because the thrust toward the millennium of this society
01:14:19 ►
will not be turned aside.
01:14:24 ►
If it is not a law of the universe,
01:14:27 ►
then it will become a myth of human beings
01:14:29 ►
and be created anyway.
01:14:32 ►
So since we are human beings,
01:14:34 ►
I see us as the central actors in that mandala.
01:14:38 ►
I mean, this is the task of the next 100 or 500 years
01:14:43 ►
to realize the alchemical nature of humanity and being
01:14:49 ►
and have everything fused into a supernuminous concrescence
01:14:56 ►
that is time, Joyce said, all space in a nutshell.
01:15:01 ►
You know, all time bound into a lenticular vehicle, which is both everyone’s
01:15:08 ►
and mine alone, and yours alone, and yours alone.
01:15:16 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:15:21 ►
thought at a time.
01:15:46 ►
Now there was that happy ending I’ve been looking for. their lives one thought at a time. but once again I feel obligated to say just a word or two about this whole 2012 thing.
01:15:52 ►
Now remember the talk we just heard took place in 1986, and a lot has changed since then.
01:15:59 ►
One of the things that may or may not have changed, but should at least be looked into more closely,
01:16:05 ►
is the recent news that several Mayan scholars are now questioning the interpretation of the long-count calendar as having an ending date in 2012, and that the end date could be off
01:16:12 ►
by as much as 50 to 100 years.
01:16:15 ►
So maybe what Terence was feeling when he just now said that he felt this great transformation
01:16:19 ►
of consciousness was near, was that he was feeling the closeness of the end of his own
01:16:25 ►
history that took place just 14 years later, which of course adds a lot of weight to an
01:16:31 ►
earlier point in this talk when he also said, and again I quote,
01:16:36 ►
The way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your
01:16:40 ►
life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomena.
01:16:46 ►
Well, the way to make that happen in your life is to not transcend desire, but to transmute
01:16:51 ►
it so that what you really want is what you actually have.
01:16:56 ►
And I find that to be excellent advice.
01:17:00 ►
Also, I hope you’ll go back and re-listen to Terrence’s description of the psychedelic experience
01:17:05 ►
and the need for a net to capture a few of the ideas that swim by.
01:17:11 ►
It’s around 30 minutes or so into this podcast, and I also hope that you find a way to create your own net.
01:17:17 ►
I’ve used quite a few different ones over the years,
01:17:20 ►
and I’ve found that they all work as long as I decide ahead of time what kind of net to use.
01:17:26 ►
You see, the problem, at least for me, is that there’s such an incredible flood of fantastic ideas
01:17:32 ►
that you have to be very selective and focus on the ones that most closely relate to the intention
01:17:39 ►
that you established before going into Entheospace.
01:17:43 ►
And that means that you often have to let a lot of really interesting things pass by
01:17:47 ►
without focusing on them for any length of time
01:17:51 ►
if you want to come back with a few goodies in your net.
01:17:55 ►
At least for me, I found that the intention I set before any psychedelic journey
01:17:59 ►
is the most important part of my pre-experience preparation.
01:18:05 ►
Now, two quick announcements before I go.
01:18:08 ►
The first is that James Kent’s wonderful new book,
01:18:12 ►
Psychedelic Information Theory, Shamanism in the Age of Reason,
01:18:17 ►
is now available in hard copy.
01:18:19 ►
Previously, James has been offering this book in electronic versions
01:18:23 ►
for whatever you could donate,
01:18:25 ►
but for the serious psychonauts among us, a printed copy has been much wanted.
01:18:30 ►
If you get the chance, you may want to follow the links in the program notes for this podcast
01:18:35 ►
and see for yourself what I mean when I say that if you only have room for a dozen books about psychedelics,
01:18:41 ►
then for sure this should be one of them.
01:18:44 ►
And should you be in a position to influence the selection of speakers to come to your college campus on a book tour or whatever,
01:18:52 ►
you may want to give serious consideration to inviting James Kent to speak.
01:18:56 ►
I’ve known James for 10 years or so, mainly from getting together with him at various and sundry psychedelic conferences.
01:19:03 ►
mainly from getting together with him at various and sundry psychedelic conferences.
01:19:08 ►
As you will see if you visit his website or buy his book,
01:19:12 ►
James is one of the best informed people you’re going to find in our community.
01:19:16 ►
And from the standpoint of a university audience, you couldn’t find a better person to present our point of view
01:19:19 ►
simply because he doesn’t come across as a freak,
01:19:22 ►
like I sometimes do with my long hair
01:19:25 ►
and my refusal to ever again wear a coat and tie.
01:19:28 ►
For James, a coat and tie are part of his persona.
01:19:32 ►
He’s a very serious scholar
01:19:34 ►
and will fit in perfectly at any college function you can think of,
01:19:38 ►
so keep him in mind.
01:19:40 ►
Also, if you live in the Los Angeles area
01:19:43 ►
or can get there for the weekend of December 10th, 11th, and 12th of this year, and that’s 2010 for our time travelers, there’s going to be another MAPS conference featuring a wide range of the leading lights in professional psychedelic research, including at least two of our featured speakers here in the salon, Alicia Danforth and Charlie Grobe.
01:20:05 ►
I’ll put a link to it with the program notes,
01:20:08 ►
and we’ll be talking more about it in my next podcast.
01:20:11 ►
But right now, I’ve got to hurry up and get out of here,
01:20:14 ►
or I’ll be late for my play date with one of my granddaughters.
01:20:17 ►
And as most men know, no matter what,
01:20:21 ►
you should never be late for a date with a young lady.
01:20:24 ►
So that’ll have to do it for now, and I’ll again close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
01:20:40 ►
3.0 license.
01:20:43 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:20:46 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
01:20:48 ►
which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:20:51 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon,
01:20:55 ►
you can hear a lot about it in my novel,
01:20:57 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:20:59 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:21:02 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:21:06 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.