Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“This connection between the cow, and the mother goddess, and the mushroom is some kind of a key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity in early man in that part of the Middle East.”
“This notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness.”
“But it isn’t a missing link, I think, it’s a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency toward symbol formation and self-reflection.”
“A history of the human race could be written analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol, and psychedelics.”
“That these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants.”
“Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipeline for ideas, and the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction.”
“I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself.”
“The imagination may be, in fact, a three dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen.”
“The triumph of Socialism will be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context, that there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of information.”
“You see, what’s going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And thanks to three of our fellow saloners,
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who are Stuart B., Asian Allure, and Yoshi N.,
00:00:33 ►
who sent a very sizable donation.
00:00:36 ►
Thank you, Yoshi.
00:00:37 ►
Thanks to them, I’ve been able to increase
00:00:40 ►
the size of the pipe through which these podcasts
00:00:43 ►
wing their way to you each week.
00:00:46 ►
So, Stuart, Asian Allure, and Yoshi, I can’t thank you enough for your support of the salon.
00:00:53 ►
And that also goes to those fine souls who paid for a copy of my Pay What You Can novel,
00:00:58 ►
The Genesis Generation, whose contributions also go to supporting these programs.
00:01:03 ►
And your help and support is greatly appreciated.
00:01:08 ►
Now, today we’re going to hear the last part of the April 1986 workshop
00:01:14 ►
conducted by Kat Harrison and Terrence McKenna
00:01:17 ►
under the teaching tree at the Ojai Foundation in California.
00:01:22 ►
And once again, I would like to thank Michael DeCircio,
00:01:26 ►
a friend of the salon,
00:01:28 ►
and the producer-director of the recent film, Trip Dussain,
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for sending me the set of recordings from the workshop
00:01:35 ►
so that we could all hear them
00:01:37 ►
without having to cycle through a dozen or more YouTube videos.
00:01:42 ►
And Michael, after listening to this entire workshop,
00:01:45 ►
now I can see why it’s one of your favorites.
00:01:48 ►
It’s also now one of my favorites as well.
00:01:52 ►
But to tell the truth,
00:01:53 ►
I almost didn’t play this last part of the workshop
00:01:56 ►
because, well, I was afraid that it would just be a rehash
00:02:00 ►
of Terrence’s monkey-eating mushroom story.
00:02:03 ►
My thought was to just make this part of the talk available for downloading
00:02:07 ►
through a link in the program notes for the podcast.
00:02:10 ►
But then as I got further into this talk,
00:02:14 ►
well, I realized that this was maybe one of his earliest public accounts of this hypothesis
00:02:19 ►
that was actually first suggested to him by his brother Dennis.
00:02:24 ►
And in fact, a few podcasts back, we heard Terrence giving his brother credit
00:02:28 ►
for first thinking of this as a possibility.
00:02:32 ►
And since it was one of his earlier accounts, he seemed to add a lot more detail.
00:02:37 ►
Maybe you’d call them poetic details, I guess.
00:02:40 ►
But in any event, just like in the last podcast where he gave a clear
00:02:46 ►
explanation of his time wave theory, well, right now, I think you’ll hear what is perhaps
00:02:51 ►
one of his best explanations of how we humans began to expand our consciousness beyond mere
00:02:58 ►
animal consciousness.
00:03:00 ►
I really think you’re going to enjoy this a lot once he at least gets up to speed a little bit.
00:03:05 ►
But the only way we’ll know that for sure is to let’s give him a listen right now.
00:03:13 ►
What I want to talk about this morning is an idea.
00:03:16 ►
I’ve talked about it in a couple of places.
00:03:20 ►
Some of you may have heard it before.
00:03:23 ►
I think it bears repeating
00:03:26 ►
it’s a much more serious idea
00:03:29 ►
than what I put out yesterday
00:03:31 ►
which had a note of whimsy
00:03:35 ►
in its genesis
00:03:36 ►
this idea is important
00:03:39 ►
whatever that means
00:03:42 ►
because it would change
00:03:44 ►
not only the area of its concern
00:03:47 ►
but our view of the world generally
00:03:51 ►
and Easter is an appropriate time
00:03:56 ►
to discuss this
00:03:57 ►
because it concerns the genesis
00:03:59 ►
of man
00:04:01 ►
of consciousness and self-reflection
00:04:04 ►
which is what the Easter mythologium is also an expression of.
00:04:12 ►
So what I wanted to talk about this morning is a new notion of how human evolution occurred and what the critical factors were in it and how to draw a picture for us
00:04:28 ►
that shows how our intellectual complexity
00:04:33 ►
and symbol-manipulating facilities
00:04:36 ►
could have emerged naturally
00:04:39 ►
from a background of animal existence
00:04:43 ►
and over a fairly rapid period of time.
00:04:49 ►
Over the last three to five million years, actually,
00:04:55 ►
the African continent has been growing more dry
00:05:00 ►
and has experienced fluctuations of aridity.
00:05:10 ►
dry and has experienced fluctuations of aridity. Nevertheless, as recently as 2,000 years ago, the Roman historian Pliny called North Africa the breadbasket of Rome, because wheat was being
00:05:18 ►
grown over thousands and thousands of acres. Now, it’s in this same area of northern Africa, the Great Rift Zone,
00:05:28 ►
the Serengeti Plain, where physical anthropologists place the origin of human beings. And it has
00:05:36 ►
to do with the following sequence of events. Arboreal primates living in an unbroken continental rainforest ecology achieve
00:05:51 ►
a close adaptation to existence in the canopy, and this is stabilized for millions of years.
00:05:59 ►
They are insectivores. They have the opposable thumb and binocular or rudimentary binocular vision.
00:06:08 ►
The drying up of the African continent caused the breakdown of this continental rainforest
00:06:16 ►
into a configuration of patches of forest with grassland in between. And in this grassland ecology,
00:06:27 ►
herds of mammals evolved,
00:06:33 ►
proto-cattle, proto-bison,
00:06:36 ►
exotic mammals like giraffes and gazelles of all types.
00:06:41 ►
At the same time, the primate adaptation to this increasing
00:06:46 ►
aridity was to begin to descend from the trees and to hunt in packs and to shift
00:06:56 ►
from a diet of canopy fruits and berries and roots dug from the ground to an omnivorous diet that could include
00:07:07 ►
meat.
00:07:10 ►
So in this situation, these tribal monkeys developed a complicated repertoire of signals
00:07:20 ►
to aid in pack hunting in exactly the same way that wolves are known to do.
00:07:28 ►
Now, into this situation, and their habit was nomadic and to follow behind these great
00:07:36 ►
herds, either killing the animals that were less well and could be killed by the crude means at their disposal or living off the kills of other carnivores.
00:07:52 ►
And this is still the manure of the ungulate animals that have evolved on this plane.
00:08:11 ►
And in this protein-intensive environment where there is pressure on the availability of protein,
00:08:18 ►
these foraging primates are testing every object in the environment for its food value. So,
00:08:30 ►
Roland Fisher, who was a researcher into the effect of psychedelic drugs and the
00:08:36 ►
structure of consciousness, showed that small doses of psilocybin, sub-
00:08:42 ►
psychedelic, sub-threshold doses of psilocybin, sub-psychedelic, sub-threshold doses of psilocybin,
00:08:47 ►
actually increase visual acuity.
00:08:51 ►
And he had a very elegant experiment where two parallel lines could be deformed by turning a dial,
00:08:59 ►
and you would put graduate students in front of this, stoned and unstoned,
00:09:04 ►
And you would put graduate students in front of this, stoned and unstoned, and ask them to press a buzzer when the lines appeared to them to no longer be parallel.
00:09:10 ►
And he showed that consistently a small amount of psilocybin allowed you to detect this change
00:09:17 ►
sooner than an ordinary subject was able to.
00:09:22 ►
And he said to me, he said, you see this proves
00:09:25 ►
that in some cases drugs give you a clearer picture of reality than their
00:09:31 ►
absence. And what it means is that these primates who were inculcating the
00:09:39 ►
mushroom into their diet were gaining a subtle adaptive advantage over their fellows who were avoiding
00:09:47 ►
the mushroom because they were gaining in visual acuity, which is one of the critical parameters
00:09:54 ►
that a pack hunting carnivore would be subject to in that kind of an environment.
00:10:01 ►
So without any teleology being involved, without any
00:10:06 ►
invocation of an extraterrestrial intelligence, we see that a feedback loop
00:10:11 ►
was established in the food chain of these primates very early on. Those who
00:10:19 ►
ate the mushroom tended to survive and outbreed those who did not.
00:10:25 ►
At the same time, the relationship between these animals
00:10:29 ►
and these herd ungulate mammals
00:10:33 ►
was shifting from a hunting situation
00:10:37 ►
to a situation of domestication,
00:10:40 ►
which was bringing the mushroom ever more into the fore.
00:10:45 ►
And if you look back at the archaeological evidence in North Africa,
00:10:50 ►
especially the paintings, the late Neolithic paintings on the Tassili Plateau in southern Algeria,
00:10:59 ►
you see there magnificently portrayed herds of cattle and I mean beautifully painted
00:11:10 ►
more more sensitively portrayed cattle than you find at Altamira and Lascaux
00:11:16 ►
and you see also shamans dancing with mushrooms sprouting out of their body
00:11:24 ►
and with mushrooms clutched in their hands,
00:11:27 ►
groups of them running, holding them on high with geometric matrices of connected dots all around them.
00:11:36 ►
And now, of course, in that area, it’s very similar to this.
00:11:41 ►
It’s an area of sculpted sandstone and cross-cut arroyos with undercut cliffs,
00:11:49 ►
and it’s very dry, but in some places the Neolithic detritus is several meters deep,
00:11:56 ►
and the people who lived in the Tsele Plateau when the aridity of the Sahara further increased are the people who migrated east to the valley of the Nile
00:12:08 ►
and established the proto-Egyptian civilization
00:12:11 ►
of 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
00:12:15 ►
The important point I want to make about this later phase
00:12:19 ►
of the human involvement with the mushroom
00:12:23 ►
was that it was always intimately connected with
00:12:26 ►
cattle. And the goddess religions of ancient North Africa and the Middle East are religions
00:12:35 ►
of cattle goddesses. And this connection between the cow and the mother goddess and the mushroom is some kind of key to understanding the evolution of religious sensitivity
00:12:53 ►
in early man in that part of the Middle East.
00:12:57 ►
It carries forward into historical time with the mysteries that elucis where there is a clear
00:13:08 ►
indication that a psychedelic substance was being used either ergotized rye or a
00:13:15 ►
mushroom of some sort and this this notion that it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical
00:13:29 ►
bifurcation of primate evolution that created
00:13:34 ►
the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness.
00:13:39 ►
Because you see at lower doses the psilocybin is giving increased visual acuity and
00:13:47 ►
at lower doses the psilocybin is giving increased visual acuity and it seems like increased symbol processing ability it’s strange effect on the language centers but of course inevitably they
00:13:53 ►
would have also discovered its higher dose effects which would be to convey them into an inner tremendum that became then the cultural guiding image. In other
00:14:06 ►
words, it was perceived as a god, as a goddess, as the goddess, and became then
00:14:14 ►
the arrow for cultural dynamics and evolution. And the reason I think this is
00:14:21 ►
important is because the spin-off implications of the acceptance
00:14:28 ►
of an idea like this would bring us into much greater harmony with our environment.
00:14:35 ►
We sort of have the anxiety of an orphan about our origins because our best people in physical anthropology don’t give very good accounts,
00:14:47 ►
can’t seem to make sense of how we could have been forced out and emerged out of primate
00:14:55 ►
organization. And so there’s been much talk in the 20th century about the search for the missing
00:15:00 ►
link, which was always conceived of as a physical skeleton of a certain kind
00:15:05 ►
of intermediate hominoid form.
00:15:08 ►
But it isn’t a missing link, I think, it’s a missing factor.
00:15:12 ►
And the factor which accelerated the forward evolution of the brain size of this particular
00:15:20 ►
primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency
00:15:29 ►
towards symbol formation and self-reflection. If this idea gained wide acceptance, some of our
00:15:38 ►
laws and some of our ways of relating to nature and to medicine plants in particular
00:15:45 ►
would have to be altered and brought into line.
00:15:49 ►
This is the source of our humanness.
00:15:51 ►
Apparently the psychoactive compounds being elaborated by plants throughout nature
00:16:01 ►
are regulators of various forms of evolution in animals.
00:16:08 ►
And food chains and all this, which appear very trivial on the surface,
00:16:14 ►
are actually the message-bearing medium of the hand of God,
00:16:22 ►
which is forming and sculpting nature along these various
00:16:26 ►
creodes of development and the thing to understand about this or why this has
00:16:35 ►
impact in the future is because it’s a continuous process which we can foster and husband and help develop in healthy ways if we recognize that it’s
00:16:51 ►
going on. I mentioned Eleusis as this kind of thing going on in historical time. Also, of course,
00:17:00 ►
Soma, the sacrament of the Vedic civilization,
00:17:09 ►
appears to have been a mushroom, was certainly a psychedelic plant.
00:17:11 ►
And it isn’t only psychedelic plants,
00:17:15 ►
it’s all plants which affect and shift consciousness. I mean, a history of the human race could be written
00:17:19 ►
analyzing it not in terms of class struggle or the impact of great personalities,
00:17:25 ►
but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, alcohol, and psychedelics.
00:17:39 ►
So that, you know, we need to understand that chocolate, that these foods, cocaine,
00:17:48 ►
that these foods and drugs and spices are, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted.
00:17:57 ►
They are regulating human history and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look,
00:18:06 ►
how pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation,
00:18:11 ►
all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants in this way.
00:18:18 ►
Now, if we could create a civilization or even a clique within a civilization or even a even a clique within a civilization that understood this
00:18:28 ►
and had its fingers on a vertical monopoly of research from the jungle to the clinical hospital
00:18:36 ►
great things could be understood this is the way to do it, to systematically explore these relationships and see that Gaia
00:18:49 ►
apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation,
00:18:57 ►
and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. the people, the messiahs and the teachers
00:19:06 ►
are merely the pipelines for ideas.
00:19:09 ►
And the metabolic release of these ideas
00:19:12 ►
in the macro environment
00:19:14 ►
is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction.
00:19:19 ►
And so it will be on into the foreseeable future.
00:19:33 ►
And by understanding this, a kind of new science looms into view,
00:19:50 ►
a kind of integrated dynamical understanding of the flux of energy mediated by chemistry in the environment so that the guiding image of culture can be revitalized and realized in a much shorter period of time.
00:19:55 ►
And this whole shortening period of time thing has also been going on for a while.
00:20:01 ►
You see, it isn’t astonishing, I think, that self-reflection could emerge
00:20:06 ►
given basic primate organization. But what is astonishing about it is the speed with
00:20:14 ►
which it happened. I mean, in the last 30,000 to 50,000 years, the human brain has changed more than it changed in the previous three to five million years.
00:20:26 ►
So, you know, a factor has entered, a catalyst is in the mix,
00:20:32 ►
and it must be something in the food chain, or something in the environment,
00:20:38 ►
or the hand of Almighty God, or the extraterrestrials,
00:20:42 ►
or, you know, elf invasion from hyperspace,
00:20:45 ►
that something is causing this accelerated development.
00:20:50 ►
And what I’ve said this morning could be criticized as being reductionist.
00:20:57 ►
I’ve tried to give a very sober account of it.
00:21:01 ►
I haven’t said why the mushroom appeared in the manure or discussed whether it
00:21:08 ►
has awareness or a stake in the catalyzing of this primate evolution. I just introduce it as a
00:21:16 ►
chemical factor, and that’s how it would be written if it were presented to a straight audience, the fact of the matter is that it raises all kinds of questions.
00:21:28 ►
I mean, why is this process being catalyzed in the primates?
00:21:33 ►
Is it just by happenstance?
00:21:37 ►
Where has the mushroom been?
00:21:40 ►
What is its relationship to the evolution of other forms of life on this planet?
00:21:46 ►
Did it drift in from the stars?
00:21:49 ►
If so, long ago or recently?
00:21:53 ►
And with intent or by chance?
00:21:56 ►
And, you know, just a host of questions.
00:22:01 ►
But the thing that puts us in such an existential situation
00:22:07 ►
individually and culturally is this puzzlement over our origins we are not
00:22:16 ►
strictly speaking religious in the 19th century way so that we cannot really I
00:22:23 ►
think accept that you know God sculpted us from clay
00:22:26 ►
and set us down here on a world he created.
00:22:29 ►
And yet, if you were to look for the thumbprint of God on this planet, you would certainly
00:22:36 ►
have to focus in on the human beings and their activities as a special case of natural phenomena,
00:22:44 ►
as a special case of natural phenomena,
00:22:50 ►
perhaps so special a case that it had to be accorded a separate ontological status. We are different.
00:22:53 ►
And why and for what?
00:22:58 ►
I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself, that the planet
00:23:12 ►
itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence. And it’s sort of like the story
00:23:20 ►
of the ant and the grasshopper. You can have a planetary consciousness which says, well, I look forward
00:23:27 ►
to three to five billion years
00:23:29 ►
of sentient existence
00:23:31 ►
and then I’m willing to be extinguished
00:23:33 ►
with the death of my star.
00:23:36 ►
Or you can have a planet
00:23:37 ►
with an ant-like mentality
00:23:40 ►
that says, you know,
00:23:42 ►
I can sense winter coming
00:23:44 ►
three to five billion years down the line
00:23:47 ►
and I’m going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the energy cycle of
00:23:54 ►
one star and I am going to organize biological existence so that energy can be brought, greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under control,
00:24:06 ►
so that eventually a kind of liberation can occur,
00:24:12 ►
where life can burst out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe.
00:24:20 ►
And there are apparently several strategies for this.
00:24:24 ►
One is evolve intelligence and build starships.
00:24:29 ►
Another is, you know, become a mushroom
00:24:32 ►
and produce three to five million spores per minute
00:24:36 ►
during sporulation that are particles small enough
00:24:39 ►
to percolate by Brownian movement
00:24:42 ►
away from the atmosphere of a given planet
00:24:45 ►
and by sheer numbers and the slow gradient of drift by light pressure
00:24:53 ►
and that sort of thing emanate through the universe
00:24:56 ►
and establish yourself in any planetary regime that is suitable.
00:25:03 ►
in any planetary regime that is suitable.
00:25:09 ►
The obvious next great revelation in biology,
00:25:12 ►
and it’s strange that we can state it,
00:25:14 ►
because once it’s stated by Carl Sagan,
00:25:17 ►
it will be headlines everywhere.
00:25:22 ►
But it’s obvious that space is no barrier to life.
00:25:25 ►
It’s a barrier,
00:25:28 ►
in the same way that the Pacific Ocean was a barrier to life’s colonization
00:25:31 ►
of the Hawaiian Islands.
00:25:32 ►
But that’s all.
00:25:34 ►
It’s just a tight filter.
00:25:35 ►
But spores and starships and shamans
00:25:40 ►
probably get through
00:25:43 ►
to other closed topologies in orbit around other stars.
00:25:49 ►
You know, there must be a dimension somewhere
00:25:52 ►
where all surfaces in the universe are contiguous.
00:25:57 ►
And if you could move into that dimension,
00:25:59 ►
you could just walk to Zeta Reticuli.
00:26:12 ►
walk to zeta reticuli. So the means by which life will penetrate these larger dimensions that free it from its dependency on the energy cycles of the material universe are not by any means clear.
00:26:19 ►
I mean, it may be that it’s about organizing the mind and building an inner vehicle that moves off into the imagination.
00:26:29 ►
The imagination may be, in fact, a three-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional universe
00:26:36 ►
that is holding all of this in being and causing it to happen.
00:26:42 ►
The imagination, it’s hard to account for it in evolutionary terms
00:26:47 ►
if it is not somehow mapping a field of data that is important for development. So that’s
00:27:00 ►
that notion, the notion of the importance of psychedelics
00:27:06 ►
in the formation of this species and the continuing formation of the cultural design.
00:27:14 ►
I think what the psychedelics do is they decondition from cultural programming
00:27:21 ►
and allow models to be replaced at a much greater rate of speed so that
00:27:28 ►
the culture that uses psychedelics can trim itself to every historical current. And this is really
00:27:38 ►
the challenge of the future. We are moving as a culture faster and faster through the temporal medium, through the historical space, and this is creating a compression of events, and we have to almost redesign ourselves in mid-flight
00:28:09 ►
in order to push through that barrier
00:28:12 ►
and into the different order,
00:28:15 ►
the different set of laws
00:28:17 ►
that will prevail once we have gotten through that.
00:28:20 ►
But this whole sense of everything accelerating
00:28:24 ►
and of all historical input being
00:28:27 ►
intensified and all previous times being somehow co-present this is the phenomenon of the winding
00:28:36 ►
down of a universe or the building up of an eschatological shockwave in front of a vehicle that is trying to transit
00:28:46 ►
out of history and into some kind of millenarian space that is not
00:28:53 ►
subject to the anxiety that history involves and that’s what the whole
00:28:58 ►
crisis and around the millennium and the whole 20th century really is about, you know, is this effort to create a complete summation that can also be used as the force to propel us beyond everything that we have been or thought before. before because there’s obviously no other escape from the culture crisis it
00:29:25 ►
is that kind of situation is called a forward escape it means the only thing
00:29:33 ►
you can do is move forward into the crisis at ever greater speed because the
00:29:39 ►
only solution is to pass through it and move beyond it. And as we move toward the millennium,
00:29:46 ►
and as the intelligence of our machines,
00:29:49 ►
the size of our databases,
00:29:51 ►
the desperation of our politicians,
00:29:54 ►
the intensity of the visions of our visionaries,
00:29:58 ►
all of this will build to a crazy, concatenatious climax.
00:30:04 ►
It can’t be any other way because christian civilization
00:30:08 ►
has wired us up for these things at the end of every thousand year period i mean in the year
00:30:14 ►
1000 everything just went haywire i mean people stood in the streets for months gaping at the sky
00:30:22 ►
no work got done, you know.
00:30:25 ►
There was such an eminent expectation
00:30:27 ►
of the onslaught of the millennium.
00:30:31 ►
Nevertheless, this archetype of renewal
00:30:34 ►
is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways
00:30:37 ►
to be born.
00:30:39 ►
And I think the rediscovery of psychedelics,
00:30:43 ►
LSD, everything that Wasson did, all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix that is going to gel toward the recognition of the things which we hold as cliches, you know, that the inside and the outside are the same thing,
00:31:09 ►
that the universe can be crossed by thought in an instant,
00:31:17 ►
that all information is somehow co-present, and so on.
00:31:21 ►
Are there any questions about any of this?
00:31:24 ►
Yes, I said that what we take for granted,
00:31:26 ►
that the inside and the outside are the same thing,
00:31:32 ►
these things will be assimilated by the larger culture.
00:31:37 ►
And things like, you know, human-machine interface and the ego identification with the body,
00:31:41 ►
I think all these things are going to be obviated.
00:31:44 ►
But, you see, we don’t know what man is.
00:31:48 ►
And we have a strong association that humanness is related to the monkey body.
00:31:54 ►
But yet our whole historical career has been of projecting ideas into technical accretions.
00:32:02 ►
And now that we have computers and things which mimic intelligence we are beginning
00:32:08 ►
to explore you know what is humaneness ontologically that’s what people are really
00:32:16 ►
talking about when they say can machines think will machines think they mean is what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us
00:32:28 ►
apart from all other things something which we could manufacture and the answer is probably to
00:32:37 ►
some degree yes because much of what is intelligence or appears superficially to be intelligence, is simply data and retrieval.
00:32:47 ►
So that, you know, more and more of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef
00:32:55 ►
that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons.
00:33:02 ►
We all have telephones in our homes, many of us have computer terminals.
00:33:08 ►
These things introduce us to a global skin of information that as the hardware grows more and
00:33:18 ►
more unobtrusive, we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego. We won’t even realize that we’re being charged for thinking about certain questions
00:33:31 ►
because we’re actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data.
00:33:37 ►
So that the commonality of mind is, I think, going to be…
00:33:43 ►
is I think going to be it’s somehow the
00:33:44 ►
the triumph of socialism
00:33:47 ►
will be the commonality of mind
00:33:50 ►
in a capitalist context
00:33:51 ►
that there really will be
00:33:54 ►
an ocean of thought
00:33:56 ►
that you will swim in
00:33:58 ►
and that will be composed
00:34:00 ►
of deeper and deeper levels
00:34:02 ►
of integrated information
00:34:04 ►
perhaps this is all that hyperspace is of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information.
00:34:08 ►
Perhaps this is all that hyperspace is,
00:34:14 ►
is the entirely expressed informational ghost of this physical universe and that it’s in the informational reconstruction of the physical universe
00:34:21 ►
that the mind will eventually come to swim like a fish, you know,
00:34:27 ►
and will come and go from various constellations of aggregation and integration.
00:34:33 ►
I mean, you see, what’s going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics
00:34:41 ►
so that we are going to be able to do and be whatever we can imagine.
00:34:47 ►
Well, none of us have probably ever put in much thought
00:34:51 ►
to what would I be if I could be anything I could imagine.
00:34:57 ►
And just 20 minutes of that meditation will lead you into pretty strange places.
00:35:03 ►
So what would it be like if a culture evolved for a thousand years in that way?
00:35:10 ►
I mean, if you could be anything.
00:35:11 ►
I guess the first step everyone takes is
00:35:14 ►
they imagine themselves as the flying saucer,
00:35:19 ►
the lenticular mind object made of light
00:35:25 ►
that can move at any speed
00:35:27 ►
and become any object
00:35:29 ►
and answer any question.
00:35:32 ►
Well, it’s an archetype of wholeness.
00:35:36 ►
Jung, in his Flying Saucer book,
00:35:39 ►
talked about this thing in alchemy
00:35:42 ►
called the rotundum,
00:35:44 ►
which was the thing which spins, you know.
00:35:47 ►
And it’s also in alchemy called the scintilla, the spark.
00:35:53 ►
And it’s simply because it’s round and spins,
00:35:57 ►
it’s a symbol of wholeness.
00:35:58 ►
But it’s like the exteriorization of the human soul,
00:36:03 ►
the realization that you know expressing
00:36:07 ►
what is within us may culturally eventually mean actually exteriorizing
00:36:13 ►
the human soul and interiorizing the human body so that this world is traded
00:36:19 ►
in for the imagination I mean this is sort of what art has always been trying to do, but we’re
00:36:26 ►
talking about a breakthrough in ways and means on such a scale that you can just march off
00:36:33 ►
into this art.
00:36:34 ►
Oh, Terrence, do you find it reasonable to anticipate that eventually human technology
00:36:40 ►
will succeed in producing computers that are just as conscious as we are and can be able to do anything that we can do.
00:36:47 ►
Oh, yes. Well, Kat and I did that without even a flashlight battery,
00:36:51 ►
just by having children.
00:36:57 ►
I mean, there’s an epigenetic component and a genetic component,
00:37:01 ►
but what I’m saying is the difference between these things may become dim indeed in other words why shouldn’t all you know the way a person
00:37:11 ►
is made is that a DNA message is read by RNA and it’s a it’s a group of codons
00:37:19 ►
nucleotide bases which are then templated and then a ribosome reads it and assembles little pieces
00:37:28 ►
correctly and then the protein is created.
00:37:31 ►
Well, there’s no reason why anything should be made any other way.
00:37:35 ►
All machines should be produced by the transcription of molecular templates.
00:37:41 ►
So then all our machines will become strangely quasi-biological.
00:37:49 ►
Chevrolets will not be manufactured.
00:37:51 ►
They will be grown in yeasty vats.
00:37:55 ►
And when they talk to you,
00:37:57 ►
the question becomes very moot
00:38:01 ►
as to whether this is a pet,
00:38:03 ►
a friend, a colleague.
00:38:08 ►
Because that’s, you see, nature works with very low energies.
00:38:14 ►
DNA can make anything, and there’s no smelting,
00:38:18 ►
no huge release of toxic byproducts.
00:38:23 ►
And the amazing thing about these proteins is that the
00:38:27 ►
ribosome stamps them out and they come out in like a line but they have forces
00:38:34 ►
electrostatic and other kinds of forces scripted into them so that they fold in
00:38:41 ►
very very complicated ways and they always fold the same way.
00:38:46 ►
And their memory of how to fold,
00:38:49 ►
where this comes from,
00:38:50 ►
is one of the great mysteries of molecular biology.
00:38:54 ►
It’s not at all understood.
00:38:56 ►
Well, imagine if we could make machines
00:38:58 ►
which just emerged as a strange form of spaghetti
00:39:03 ►
which then folded itself into jet planes,
00:39:06 ►
refrigerators, automobiles,
00:39:08 ►
color television sets,
00:39:10 ►
lipstick cases, and what have you.
00:39:13 ►
This has to do with my notion
00:39:16 ►
that really the next evolutionary leap is,
00:39:21 ►
well, I shouldn’t call it an evolutionary leap
00:39:23 ►
because it’s a leap in epigenetic development,
00:39:26 ►
but is what I call the genesis of visible language, that there is an ability just under
00:39:35 ►
the surface of human organization waiting to be coaxed out either through yoga or slight genetic engineering or something like that and it is
00:39:48 ►
something that was anticipated by the alexandrine philosopher philo judaeus he talked about the
00:39:57 ►
logos and which is this teaching voice this informing thing which is heard, and he was interested in what he
00:40:06 ►
called the more perfect logos. And he said, what is the more perfect logos? And
00:40:12 ►
then he answered his own question and said, it would be a logos which went from
00:40:19 ►
being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a border of transition. In other words,
00:40:30 ►
it’s a form of synesthesia. Well, using ayahuasca and DMT and compounds like this, which are
00:40:38 ►
very closely related to our ordinary brain chemistry and practice and dedication, you can begin to explore places
00:40:47 ►
where a vocal synesthesia becomes a colored topological manifold. And you can communicate,
00:40:57 ►
you can show someone your thoughts by singing in such a way as to condense visible objects into the air in front of them.
00:41:07 ►
And these objects are, they are hyper words.
00:41:12 ►
They are words which you don’t hear, but which you see.
00:41:15 ►
And they are, and like objects, they have sides and facets
00:41:21 ►
and can be rotated and examined from all sides.
00:41:24 ►
and facets and can be rotated and examined from all sides. Well, now the biases in our language that cause us to say things like,
00:41:30 ►
I see what you mean, when we mean I understand you fully,
00:41:36 ►
shows that we really place a greater emphasis on seeing the truth
00:41:42 ►
than on hearing the truth. So the truth seen is somehow more valid
00:41:48 ►
than truth heard. And ayahuasca is a perfect example of a plant which communicates with a
00:41:56 ►
visible language. The mushroom, you often hear it, and often the hearing evolves into a visible synesthesia field of photonic input.
00:42:10 ►
But the ayahuasca always communicates visually, and it’s like the Mayan glyphs or something.
00:42:18 ►
It’s this fantastically complicated surface which is conveying alien meaning.
00:42:24 ►
After an ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are sticking out of your head
00:42:28 ►
because you’ve just been looking as one looks at the page of a book for hours and hours
00:42:34 ►
as this strange alien three-dimensional language flows through your mind.
00:42:42 ►
But I believe that this is a human ability just under the
00:42:46 ►
surface and that in psychedelic states of mind, this happens to people. This is why all the
00:42:52 ►
fiddling with glossolalia. It’s in the hope of reaching, you know, that concordance of chemistry
00:43:00 ►
and the moment that will allow this to happen because it’s for some reason very satisfying
00:43:08 ►
it’s like an utterly harmless city it seems to have it is true magic and the person doing it
00:43:15 ►
is utterly transported by their ability to project of his visual, but it appears to have no use other than entertainment of oneself and others.
00:43:29 ►
But eventually, when it is integrated as a cultural mode, I think it will be, it is what telepathy will be.
00:43:37 ►
Telepathy will not be hearing other people’s thoughts in your head.
00:43:42 ►
Telepathy will be when you switch into the language
00:43:45 ►
that lets people see what you mean.
00:43:48 ►
It’ll be the see what I mean language.
00:43:51 ►
And I think that the psilocybin from the very beginning
00:43:55 ►
was catalyzing the language centers
00:43:59 ►
and that in fact the kind of language I’m speaking to you right now is a prototypic type of this eventual development in human organization,
00:44:10 ►
and that this is the thing that makes humans unique, is this ability to make small mouth noises which are arbitrarily encoded with conventionally agreed upon meanings,
00:44:23 ►
with conventionally agreed upon meanings,
00:44:27 ►
which allows us then a vast control of a previously invisible linguistic space.
00:44:31 ►
And it’s in that linguistic space
00:44:33 ►
that we have erected our cathedrals
00:44:36 ►
and conducted our pogroms
00:44:38 ►
and gone about all our forms of business
00:44:42 ►
and becoming aware of this, of language as a thing to journey
00:44:49 ►
into and language as a thing to avoid the pitfalls of. To be, you know, the Buddhists
00:44:54 ►
say, awareness of awareness. Maybe it’s easier if one thinks of it as awareness of language. I wanted to
00:45:05 ►
pursue this thing of the visual language
00:45:07 ►
because they’ll have their mouth open
00:45:09 ►
and there will literally be these beautiful
00:45:11 ►
things coming out of their mouth
00:45:13 ►
with flowers and they interpret it
00:45:15 ►
as flowery speech but perhaps
00:45:17 ►
they were in fact doing what you’re talking about.
00:45:20 ►
Well, they don’t interpret it
00:45:22 ►
as flowery speech. They call it that.
00:45:27 ►
But yes, I think that’s what it must have been this is all very puzzling to me
00:45:29 ►
and if anybody knows
00:45:31 ►
if anybody is an acoustics person
00:45:34 ►
or I don’t know what’s going on exactly
00:45:36 ►
but the question of how
00:45:38 ►
what is voice
00:45:40 ►
and what can you do with self-generated sound
00:45:44 ►
how neutral is it to your own organism
00:45:47 ►
in other words any of you who read the invisible landscape the theory in there is that you
00:45:54 ►
take a certain drug a certain plant and you hear an interiorized tone which is not a psychological phenomenon, but rather it is actually the electron spin resonance of this highly biodynamic
00:46:11 ►
molecules by the millions
00:46:14 ►
entering into the synaptic cleft and competing with the endogenous
00:46:20 ►
transmitter there for uptake and that this
00:46:29 ►
transmitter there for uptake and that this is molecularly real and hence can be treated as a variable to be manipulated with the input of other
00:46:37 ►
kinds of sounds such as sound which cancels it or sound which reinforces it, to then manipulate these molecules in one’s body.
00:46:48 ►
And this is really, I think, the frontier of shamanism worldwide,
00:46:56 ►
that everybody is trying to figure out how far you can go with sound and what you can do with it,
00:47:02 ►
and also how dangerous is this, how permanent can some of these brain changes be?
00:47:08 ►
And what is the mechanism?
00:47:11 ►
Is the electron spin resonance thing pretty close to it, or is that just a myth
00:47:16 ►
and an entirely different set of coupling mechanisms are making that happen. But all of the ayahuasca shaman are great hummers
00:47:26 ►
and great controllers of their voice. And, you know, they do operate on your body with light
00:47:34 ►
and sound. And there are sounds which can slice into your body. And it seems to me this is where
00:47:42 ►
experiential and experimental work with these things should concentrate to try and understand just how much of humanness can we take control of? How bound in are we? What do these special abilities mean? And what traditions, if any, have anticipated them.
00:48:09 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:48:11 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:48:18 ►
Now, I think that there was probably more of this workshop
00:48:22 ►
than what was captured on the audio that we have from it,
00:48:26 ►
but that is where the recording that I received ended.
00:48:30 ►
However, there’s something very mysterious, at least to me,
00:48:35 ►
about the tape being cut off at the very point
00:48:39 ►
where Terrence is asking what traditions may have been pointing the way.
00:48:44 ►
Now, this may be a stretch for you, but here’s what happened a few minutes after I listened for the first time to the talk we just heard and where it cut off.
00:48:53 ►
So, I closed the file on the recording we just heard, and then, just on a whim, I decided to quickly preview a possible talk for my next podcast,
00:49:04 ►
even though I still hadn’t finished working on the one we’re listening to right now.
00:49:08 ►
Now, that’s something I’ve never done before,
00:49:10 ►
but there was this little voice in my head that sounded like Terrence
00:49:13 ►
saying something with a smile on his voice, something like,
00:49:16 ►
You really ought to check out that recording that you just downloaded this morning.
00:49:21 ►
Well, the recording was from Dr. Cameron Adams
00:49:24 ►
and was a talk that he had
00:49:26 ►
recently given to the Student Psychedelic Society at the University of Kent in the UK.
00:49:32 ►
And in his note to me, Cameron mentioned that due to some recording equipment problems, the first
00:49:38 ►
few minutes of his talk wasn’t recorded, but that only a brief introduction was missing. So, anyhow, I began playing it, and the first two words of the recording were,
00:49:50 ►
These Traditions.
00:49:52 ►
Now, do you remember the last few words from Terrence just now?
00:49:55 ►
They were, And what traditions anticipated them?
00:49:59 ►
These traditions.
00:50:01 ►
Not such a big deal, you say.
00:50:03 ►
Well, you’re probably right.
00:50:05 ►
But it amuses me to think that a McKenna talk was inadvertently cut short by an equipment
00:50:11 ►
failure or a tape running out in April 1986.
00:50:15 ►
And another equipment failure in October 2010 resulted in a perfect point to edit the two
00:50:22 ►
tapes together.
00:50:23 ►
So Cameron, I know that this is very unscientific of me,
00:50:27 ►
but just for the fun of it,
00:50:29 ►
I have to assume that your equipment malfunction was caused by a friendly elf of some kind.
00:50:36 ►
And so we’ll all hear what you had to say about these traditions in next week’s podcast.
00:50:44 ►
traditions in next week’s podcast.
00:50:53 ►
Now, to continue on with this whimsical note, or corny note if you don’t appreciate my brand of humor,
00:51:00 ►
when Terrence just now was talking about mushrooms being a catalyst in the evolution of the human brain,
00:51:05 ►
and about how the apes were following cattle herds around the plains of Africa,
00:51:10 ►
did it also strike you as kind of funny that we use the word catalyze for the name of something that speeds up a process?
00:51:14 ►
Now, think of these apes following cattle around
00:51:16 ►
and eating the psychedelic mushrooms that grew in their dung,
00:51:20 ►
and couldn’t you also say that was cattle-izing?
00:51:25 ►
Catalyze, catalyze, and of course there are also the possibility, And couldn’t you also say that was cattle-izing? Cattle eyes, cattle eyes.
00:51:27 ►
And of course, there is also the possibility of cattle eyes, but I think those are called cow eyes.
00:51:35 ►
And since I’ve obviously hit a streak of goofiness here in the salon, I’d better sign off before I drive you away forever.
00:51:42 ►
I still get notes from people that say, hey, I like the salon,
00:51:45 ►
but sometimes you really are kind of geeky and goofy.
00:51:49 ►
And, well, you know, even though I’m 68 years old,
00:51:52 ►
sometimes I still enjoy being silly,
00:51:55 ►
and that’s probably why I’m such a big hit
00:51:57 ►
with the five-year-olds.
00:51:59 ►
Okay, that more than does it for now, I think.
00:52:02 ►
And so I’ll close the podcast today again 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.
00:52:20 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find through the psychedelicsalon.org URL.
00:52:31 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon, you can hear something about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us
00:52:46 ►
And for now,
00:52:48 ►
this is Lorenzo, signing off from
00:52:50 ►
Cyberdelic Space.
00:52:51 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.