Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I still don’t believe that people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is.”
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0932551068
“The evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind. These consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the human mind. And so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape. It is they which generate religions, and physics, and messianic careers, and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment and disgrace.”
“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.”
“It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.”
“It is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug. It is not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution.”
“I think [taking psychedelic drugs] is very dangerous. I do not tell people that it’s safe because I don’t have the faith that it’s safe. I know what the pharmacological literature says, and it says that it’s safe. That at the doses where these effects occur there can’t possibly be a problem, but this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists, and we shouldn’t be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us more comfortable to do so. In other words, it’s saying the drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”
“I think it’s fine to take drugs for pleasure, but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure. And the high doses of psilocybin that are necessary to elicit entry into these places it requires, as it says in Hamlet, ‘You must screw your courage to the sticking place.‘”
“I think that the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain. We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”
“There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyper dimensional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunities for us to be happy hunters and gathers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.”
“The entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey becoming the flying saucer… . And we, for some strange reason, happen to be living through the final moments of that process right now, and it is a turbulent, chaotic, multidimensional metamorphosis.”
“Evil is anything which trivializes a mystery.”
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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 if you’ve visited my Facebook page, you already know that the salon is in kind of a hiatus.
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What’s happened is that our landlord just sold the duplex we live in,
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and so we’re now looking for a new place to live, which will then be followed by packing, moving, and unpacking.
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Now, I know what you’re thinking.
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KMO never misses a program, no matter what’s going on in his life,
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and the same’s true with the Dope Fiend. And then, of course, there’s always Lefty,
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who lately has actually been recording his podcast in his car
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when he’s stuck in a traffic jam.
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Well, the simple fact of the matter is that they’re all better men than I am.
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So, while I hope to get another podcast out in January,
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it could be as late as February or March before I can get back into a routine
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and start cranking out new programs once again.
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Now that’s the bad news, but the good news is that I’ve sure got a lot of new material
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that I’m really looking forward to getting out to you next year.
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And for our wonderful donors, well, I won’t be able to mention your names each week,
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but I will add a section to our notes from the Psychedelic Salon website,
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which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org,
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and I’ll post your first name and initial there unless you tell me not to.
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But since my last podcast, we have received donations from Garth A. and John J.,
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which have covered our expenses through the end of the year.
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So, John and Garth, on behalf of all our fellow slauners, I thank you for your support,
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and I wish you and all of our fellow slauners a joyous and prosperous new year ahead.
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And I guess I should say something here about the current drama about PayPal and WikiLeaks.
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Several people have asked for alternative ways to make donations to the salon,
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and so I’ve been looking into that as my time permits.
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However, there aren’t any across-the-board alternatives I’ve found,
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so I’m going to keep checking into some of them and add them if and when I can.
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But right now, you shouldn’t be worrying about the salon.
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You should be spending your money on toys for the kids.
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And if you happen to not have any children of your own but are going to a family affair
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where the kids get socks and stuff like that for a gift, hey, bring them something fun to play with.
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Be that aunt or uncle or friend.
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The one that the kids will always remember is the fun guy that came to the party.
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You know, it’s probably too late for most of us to convince our relatives that we’re not the crazy one.
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But, hey, the kids will understand perfectly where you’re coming from.
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And, by the way, they’re our future.
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So, hey, treat them well.
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Now, one more thank you.
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So, hey, treat them well.
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Now, one more thank you, and that goes out to our friend and fellow salonner, Sean Duffy,
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who sent me an email that read,
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Hello, Lorenzo. Thank you for all the kind work you have done.
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Your podcasts have truly changed my life.
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Well, you know, that’s nice of you to say, Sean,
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but the truth is that it’s you who did all the hard work to change your life.
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I am glad that the talks by these elders that we’re podcasting here have worked for you,
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but hey, my hat goes off to you for actually doing all the heavy lifting.
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Anyway, Sean goes on.
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I have attached a file entitled Psilocybin in the Sands of Time, McKenna,
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that I believe you have not yet podcast.
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Although the sound quality isn’t the best,
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it is, in my opinion, one of the best of his lectures and interviews. I know you have a lot on your plate, but if you have yet to hear this recording, give it a listen. I think you’ll enjoy
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it as I have. Thanks again. Love, light, and peace, Sean. Well, Sean, you’re right. I really did enjoy
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that recording, and in fact, I enjoyed it so much. I really did enjoy that recording.
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And in fact, I enjoyed it so much that I’m going to play it for us right now.
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I found that this talk actually that we’re about to hear is from a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave at Esalen Institute in California sometime in December of 1982.
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In other words, 28 years ago this month.
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- In other words, 28 years ago this month. In fact, today is actually the winter solstice of 2010, which means that if you are a 2012-er, you don’t have much time to get everything done before
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the big event. On the other hand, if, like me, you assume that 2013 is going to arrive on schedule
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without any magical event first taking place, Well, then maybe we should take to heart
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some of the suggestions that the Bard McKenna has for us.
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So let’s join him now.
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Conscious development of conscious alternatives.
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But it was not until the Amazon
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that I saw that this was possible
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in a way that was accessible to me.
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So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families, and that then became the
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compass for all the work that I’ve done since then.
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And I regard the degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study.
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They don’t really…
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There is no degree in shamanism.
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But my interest was basically one
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in the phenomenology of religious experience,
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religious traditions worldwide,
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and primitive people
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against a background of tropical nature
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and stumbled onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Colombia in 1971
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and was not even particularly interested in mushrooms at the time.
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We were looking for a less well-understood drug
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that is still not discussed much in the literature
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but exists in a very circumscribed area
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among three Indian tribes.
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And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission
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that served these Indians.
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And the priest at this mission had cleared pasture
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and brought in white cows.
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And there were many many many of these
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mushrooms and as soon as we started experimenting with them i realized that what i had been told
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about psilocybin which was that it was analogous to lsd but simply required a larger amount for the effect to be present was a complete simplification of the issue.
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And actually then psilocybin became the focus of my interest and by extrapolation the other
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tryptamine related hallucinogens.
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And a great dream of mine and of my brothers as well
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was that the mushroom must somehow be made accessible to people
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so that they may judge for themselves the difference
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and we worked with this over a number of years
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and in 1975 we succeeded in growing it by a method that had previously been used only in the laboratory
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on commercial grocery store mushrooms to study their genetics, but it turned out to be perfectly
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adapted for growing this mushroom. Within a matter of months, we had written Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide, and the
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information was moving out into society.
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But more important from our point of view was that the mushroom was again accessible
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to us so that we had psilocybin in a form that was certified pure by Mother Nature and that initiated the second phase of our work with these drugs,
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which has carried us up to the present day.
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And it’s basically a project of taking the drugs,
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calling attention to the differences, the uniqueness of the state, and trying to attract other
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people’s attention to it, because I have, we have a very deep intuition of its importance
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for the cultural predicament for mankind generally and this is how we come to where we are
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today basically. You just mentioned that the mushrooms is really important for
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our country right now and you perceive yourself as an advocate to bring in to
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our culture a new element like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousness.
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What can we learn from these experiences?
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Well, the first thing that we can learn is that they exist.
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In other words, that perhaps it’s a truism in the 80s, but at one point it was thought
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that there were two states of consciousness, awake and asleep.
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Now there is a gamut of these states, but I still don’t believe that the people who deal with consciousness realize how mutable consciousness really is there is a prejudice against the use of drugs because there is an
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inherent dualism in built into western thought where people value the experience if it is
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endogenously produced produced through ordeal or personality or dieting but is undervalued if it comes from drugs,
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this has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness
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because, quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.
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And this is heresy to a number of people,
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but the evidence that I lay in favor of that contention
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is the history of human art and literature and music and painting
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is surprisingly empty of the motifs which exist in the tryptamine-induced ecstasy.
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And always when I speak of hallucinogens, I’m speaking of this limited family of drugs,
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not LSD or ketamine or mescaline, but psilocybin and DMT and combinational drugs which utilize strategies for making that effect noticeable.
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And my career is to point at this place in nature which I’ve stumbled upon and to say, what is this?
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What do you make of this?
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What do you, the physicist, you, the psychologist,
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you, the after-death researcher, what do you make of this place?
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And even the most sophisticated consciousness researchers
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tend to hurry over drugs or to focus on one drug to the exclusion of
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others and yet psilocybin has not received this kind of attention and
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treatment and why that is I’m not sure I think that that’s the element of terror involved in doing it. The fact that it does not bathe your ego
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in a cloud of certitude or assurance
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that everything is going to be fine.
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It is much more cut and dried than that.
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And it’s a challenge.
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It is when you are out in the billows as I call it because
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it seems to come in in waves like sets of billows when you’re out in the
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billows you are against the power of mind up against the power of mind to
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such a degree that you know that the entire enterprise hangs in the balance,
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that no matter how much you’ve been told about dosage
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and this kind of thing,
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that the mind actually holds the key to life and death
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and that those parts of your control board
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which are normally masked from you, are suddenly unmasked,
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and the buttons are there for you to manipulate
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to the degree that you understand them.
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And there is an element of risk.
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I never tell people that there isn’t,
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but I think that the risk is worth it
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because I think these bizarre dimensions of beauty and information
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are actually, it is an intimation of these things that gives human history its coherency.
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In other words, this is not a peripheral issue to the general phenomenon of human becoming in time. It is actually because the evolution of the human species
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is the evolution of the human mind,
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these consciousness-expanding agents
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actually anticipate an end state
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in the evolution of the human mind,
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and so they cast enormous reflections
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back over the historical landscape.
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It is they which generate religions and physics
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and messianic careers
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and outbreaks of great psychic accomplishment
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and disgrace.
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And until we understand this,
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until we understand that there is a teleological object
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at the end of human history
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and that it can be known,
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we will continue to live the kind of limited intellectual existence
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that has characterized the last 500 years or so of Western development.
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So acaiben, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future
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by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity,
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which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.
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How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?
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context and future of mankind and the human mind?
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Well, I’ve said many times, the human history is a lunge across 15 or 20,000 years of time from the primitive stone-chipping primate to that creature which will walk into a trans-dimensional vehicle
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and leave the solar system and human history
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and the concerns of the human monkey far behind.
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And this may take a thousand generations of people,
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but as a biological fact,
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as an emergent process of planetary significance,
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that is only a microcosm, I mean a microsecond of cosmic time.
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination
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and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
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The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet
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is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater
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for the exercise of imagination.
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It wrecks the planet.
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The planet has its own ecostemic dynamics
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which are not the dynamics of imagination.
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In space, the physical space that surrounds the planet,
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the modalities of imagination will be the limiting cases of what man can be done.
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So I see man becoming an artist and an engineer, in other words, flowing into our ideas,
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perhaps more than we dare even now suspect, in other words, a possible end state of that kind of technical evolution,
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would be the interiorization of the body,
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of the human body, the individual body,
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and the exteriorization of the soul.
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And this seems to me to be what the recovery from Adam’s fall,
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allegorically, is getting at,
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that the soul must be made manifest and eternal,
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and the body must be incorporealized
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so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination.
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And what I mean by that is something like what William Butler Yeats is getting at
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in his poem Sailing to Byzantium,
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where he speaks of the artifice of eternity
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and talks about how beyond death
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he would hope to be an enameled golden bird
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singing sweet songs to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
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In other words, it’s the image of the human body
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become an indestructible cybernetic object and yet within that indestructible cybernetic object, and yet within that indestructible
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cybernetic object there is a holographic transform of the body, and it is released into the dream.
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In other words, the after-death state is actually the compass of human history,
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that we are attempting to undergo a complete death of the species.
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And as we struggle with this concrescence of thanatos,
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there are problems like nuclear stockpiles and all these things arise
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because the message that we’re trying to read
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is the message we most fear to hear,
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which is that you must die to experience eternal life, essentially.
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But what this death that we’re talking about is
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is an understanding that the human,
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the Dasein, the being of human beings
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desires to be released into the imagination.
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And until we confront death with the attitude
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that it is the after-death state that needs to enter history,
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there will be a great deal of anxiety.
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It’s like a birth.
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A birth is a death. Everything
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you treasure and believe in and love and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the
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womb and you are launched into another modality, a modality that you would not perhaps have
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chosen but that you cannot do anything about so i uh i think these
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drugs anticipate this because i think that time is the moving image of eternity as plato said
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and these drugs place you outside of time now the mechanism of how that’s done, you can invoke Bell’s
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theorem or just call it pure magic, but it does happen in the here and now. It is accessible.
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It is not something remote from us. But somehow the clamor of the modern world and in search for answers, people have feared to place themselves on the line
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and to actually wrestle with life and death out there in those strange bardo-like dimensions,
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not realizing that there is no other way to win true knowledge.
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I mean, it cannot be easily come by.
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There is no knowledge without risk-taking.
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And I see the human future emerging along the lines that the mushroom visions have insisted upon.
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The proliferation of electronic media, the densification of information, the breaking down of consensus reality, the
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breakdown of a coherent dogma at the center of physics, all these things
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indicate that it is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind,
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becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind and once that realization is placed in the center of someone’s thinking about the world
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the importance of these drugs will be seen to be paramount and once that
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culture places that understanding in the center of its model of the world. These drugs will then point the way,
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and we will be much closer to the end of history
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that I think we all desire consciously or unconsciously,
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a cutting of the Gordian knot
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and a release of the human species and individual
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into the dream, basically.
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And primitive people, meaning preliterate people,
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they just have circumvented the entire process of history.
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They have leapfrogged over us.
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They are already in the dream.
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They have accepted the drug on its own terms
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and assimilated it and live with it.
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The problem with that, for them and for us,
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is that we are destroying their world
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and our intellectual equipment is such
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that we can never have that naive epistemological approach to these phenomena
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because we know about technique, we know that energy can be manipulated to achieve effects
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and so it isn’t enough for us to try to recreate the shamanism of preliterate people.
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We have to go into the shaman space
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with the a priori categories of Kant,
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with the edetic reduction of Wittgenstein,
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with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead.
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All the intellectual equipage of our culture
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must be carried with us into that space
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to attempt
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to map it in a way that will be relevant for us and that will point the way toward a shortening
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of this period of shock and the accumulating shock waves, like the bow shock of ionized particles or energetic
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particles meeting the magnetic field of the planet that’s what the chaos at the end of history is
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were you just talking about the belfries no i’m talking about a shock wave which precedes
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eschatology and is modern times basically i. I mean, it has been increasing throughout
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history, but as we grow closer to this moment where the human mind will evolve into hyperspace,
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the confusion, the amount of contradiction, the amount of, well, cue, it’s called in engineering, just the amount of vibration in the system
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is increasing to the point where it seems like the system is about to fly to pieces.
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This signals to me that the onset of the primal crisis, that when we have gone through it,
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we will then live in this realm of altered understanding that psilocybin
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and these drugs anticipate. And it isn’t a coincidence that they anticipate them. It
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is, in fact, what eschatological time is, is what they reveal. That’s why the cultures
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we find using them are eschatological and historical cultures.
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What is the Beltherium you’re talking about?
00:25:30 ►
Well, the Beltherium is simply an interpretation of an experiment in quantum mechanics
00:25:35 ►
which seemed to suggest that information is non-local.
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In other words, that everything about everywhere can be known here and now
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because somehow all information is cotangent to every point in the matrix.
00:25:52 ►
I don’t pretend to have the background to judge the Bell Theorem.
00:25:57 ►
What I would say about it is if it isn’t true,
00:26:00 ►
something like it must be true
00:26:03 ►
to account for the informational content of these drug
00:26:07 ►
experiences. If you just take a simple behaviorist model, what is in your head, if behaviorists
00:26:16 ►
and reductionist evolutionists are correct, what is in your head should be very adapted to the here and now.
00:26:26 ►
It should be efficacious information that bears on your survival.
00:26:31 ►
Instead, what we finally take these drugs is a density of information,
00:26:38 ►
an alienness of information,
00:26:41 ►
an inapplicability of information to the human condition
00:26:45 ►
that suggests that information is available
00:26:49 ►
that has no bearing on the life of the individual
00:26:53 ►
or the success of his evolutionary strategy.
00:26:58 ►
And I just cannot believe that these things are built into the human psyche.
00:27:04 ►
I have, as I say, I was involved with Jungian ideas
00:27:09 ►
and those archetypes and those archetypal processes
00:27:14 ►
are not what I’m talking about.
00:27:16 ►
What I’m talking about are the thing which,
00:27:19 ►
for want of a better word, we call the alien
00:27:22 ►
or the extraterrestrial,
00:27:24 ►
the thing which comes out of
00:27:25 ►
the drug experience that is un-englishable beautiful but so bizarre that it seems to
00:27:34 ►
exceed human categories some people talk about entities yes it can present itself as an entity
00:27:41 ►
it can present itself in a number of different ways. It is the central mystery of our age. We are so alienated, or let me restart that, the relationship of intellectuals alive today who are familiar with the state of modern science and that sort of thing
00:28:05 ►
to a question like the existence of extraterrestrials is approximately in the same
00:28:12 ►
place or degree of closure as the relationship of 15th and 16th century intellectuals to the
00:28:21 ►
real properties of matter in other words they had only a tenuous grip on the real properties of matter. In other words, they had only a tenuous grip
00:28:26 ►
on the real properties of matter.
00:28:28 ►
Consequently, alchemy could exist,
00:28:31 ►
could project the hopes of human psychic transformation
00:28:36 ►
onto inert matter
00:28:38 ►
because so little was known about the real nature of matter
00:28:42 ►
that it seemed a reasonable place
00:28:44 ►
to expect these kinds of things to happen.
00:28:48 ►
The present state of thought today is that it’s highly likely that there are extraterrestrials somewhere out among the stars.
00:28:58 ►
Our state of the development of our chemistry, astrophysics, linguistics, etc., etc., makes it reasonable
00:29:08 ►
for us as moderns to expect that. So then consequently we go into our heads and there
00:29:15 ►
seems to be the extraterrestrial. It may be a true extraterrestrial, but it is odd that it has hidden itself in the place where
00:29:26 ►
we expected to find it.
00:29:28 ►
And this causes me to assume that actually it’s something far more profound than an extraterrestrial.
00:29:37 ►
It’s something which to gain our confidence is disguised as an extraterrestrial because its real nature is so much more devastating than that,
00:29:49 ►
that that is the way in which it insinuates itself into our lives
00:29:53 ►
so that we can dream of a hegemony of organized intelligence out in the galaxy
00:29:58 ►
that we will relate to and be assimilated into.
00:30:07 ►
to and be assimilated into. What I think is going on is that actually the most intelligent life form on the planet is not man and his institutions. It is the overmind of the human species, which is a diffuse organism of technical artifacts like computers and
00:30:31 ►
information transfer and retrieval systems and human beings.
00:30:36 ►
But human institutions are like myths woven by the individual human cells that make up society.
00:30:48 ►
The real controlling modality on the planet is never visible,
00:30:54 ►
and it is this group mind,
00:30:57 ►
and it controls the release of ideas into history
00:31:00 ►
by designating certain people as geniuses,
00:31:04 ►
and if there’s a certain kind of imbalance,
00:31:09 ►
a certain kind of religion will arise to collapse that imbalance.
00:31:14 ►
If technical advancement is outstripping the evolution of ethics,
00:31:20 ►
a religion can step in to freeze these developments so that one can catch up with
00:31:27 ►
the other. And I think the whole consciousness movement that has evolved over the past 20
00:31:34 ►
years is an attempt to map, to verify, and to open a dialogue with this thing, which
00:31:43 ►
is the other, we call it the other, we call it the other we call it the alien but it is
00:31:47 ►
actually the over mind of the species and it seeks this dialogue it has been waiting all these
00:31:54 ►
millennia to uh for us to essentially come to a point of intellectual maturity where we did not then require messiahs, religions,
00:32:06 ►
and these various crude interventions into the human experience
00:32:14 ►
which keep us from destroying ourselves.
00:32:16 ►
This is also what Jung called the collective unconscious.
00:32:20 ►
Right, but he painted it as a very passive kind of thing,
00:32:25 ►
more like a data bank or a place where all myths and all memories were.
00:32:31 ►
I think of it as a god, a kind of god,
00:32:38 ►
and I think it is active in three-dimensional space.
00:32:43 ►
is active in three-dimensional space. It can be active in something as personalistic
00:32:47 ►
and circumscribed as a string of coincidences
00:32:53 ►
which you experience,
00:32:54 ►
which seem to be turning your life in a certain direction
00:32:58 ►
that you may not have expected.
00:33:00 ►
Or it can be active in something like
00:33:04 ►
the worldwide phenomenon of flying saucers.
00:33:07 ►
Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles,
00:33:11 ►
and they occur essentially to bedevil science,
00:33:18 ►
because science is a human institution that has arisen in the last 500 years that is the dreams of displacing the overmind
00:33:29 ►
without ever realizing that it exists.
00:33:31 ►
Science dreams of this place of preeminence,
00:33:35 ►
but science creates alienation,
00:33:40 ►
species survival problems, all of these things.
00:33:44 ►
Now then, the overmind, which can be thought of simply like a cultural thermostat,
00:33:50 ►
it clicks on when the clash of contradiction between the ethics of a society
00:33:58 ►
and some other institution, in this case science, becomes too great.
00:34:06 ►
other institution, in this case science, becomes too great, this governing device clicks on and it begins producing those events most destructive to the institution that is seeking
00:34:13 ►
preeminence, in this case science.
00:34:15 ►
So the inexplicability of the flying saucer phenomenon is its central reason for being and all the effort to reduce it to
00:34:30 ►
something metal ships from far away or anything else is doomed to failure
00:34:36 ►
because it’s very reason for being is to undermine those kind of ontological systems. Why we’re talking about this is because psilocybin
00:34:48 ►
inducts you into the flying saucer experience.
00:34:54 ►
In other words, a metaphor for it would be to say
00:34:57 ►
that psilocybin is a means of triggering the so-called abduction experience
00:35:02 ►
or the close encounter of a third kind.
00:35:06 ►
Once you realize that, once you’ve satisfied yourself that that’s true,
00:35:13 ►
a number of experimental avenues are opened up.
00:35:16 ►
A number of different approaches to what’s going on are suggested.
00:35:20 ►
I mean, here we have alien entities eager to transmit information,
00:35:27 ►
eager to carry on a noetic dialogue,
00:35:31 ►
and we seem to be ignoring the opportunity
00:35:35 ►
because our categories mitigate against us
00:35:40 ►
correctly appreciating it.
00:35:42 ►
Are these entities coming from outer space or are they more part of us?
00:35:47 ►
It’s impossible to tell. This is the game that you must play with them,
00:35:51 ►
is through dialogue trying to figure out if this is the previously unseen human psyche
00:36:01 ►
or whether it is actually a thing coming from the outside and it is not an easy
00:36:06 ►
thing to decide because we are so alienated from self that we don’t really know what it would be
00:36:13 ►
it’s not important to know the context it’s more important to know the content
00:36:18 ►
the content is very interesting yes because even if we were somehow to verify that Bell’s non-locality theorem applied
00:36:29 ►
and that these were real entities around a real sun
00:36:33 ►
somewhere in the universe,
00:36:35 ►
it would make them no more or less real.
00:36:38 ►
In other words, it’s a hang-up to demand
00:36:42 ►
that they appear in three-dimensional space.
00:36:46 ►
I have this hang up, so I don’t put it down.
00:36:53 ►
I always think of the Apostle Thomas,
00:36:57 ►
because you’ll recall Thomas was not present when Christ returned.
00:37:03 ►
When he rose from the grave, he appeared to the Apostles in the upper room, and Thomas was not present when Christ returned after, when he rose from the grave, he appeared to the
00:37:05 ►
apostles in the upper room, and Thomas was not present. Then later he was there, and
00:37:12 ►
the apostles said, listen, the master was here, and it was wonderful, and he said, you
00:37:18 ►
know, you people have been smoking too many little brown cigarettes, that’s preposterous.
00:37:21 ►
too many little brown cigarettes.
00:37:23 ►
That’s preposterous.
00:37:26 ►
And at that point, Christ walked in,
00:37:28 ►
and he said, he said,
00:37:32 ►
Thomas, come put your hand into the wound so that you will believe.
00:37:35 ►
And so he did, and so then he believed.
00:37:38 ►
Well, the moral of the story, as I read it,
00:37:42 ►
is Thomas was the doubter.
00:37:45 ►
Consequently, Thomas was the only one who was allowed
00:37:49 ►
to actually touch the resurrection body.
00:37:53 ►
It was because he doubted that he was vouchsafed
00:37:57 ►
to this position of preeminence.
00:38:00 ►
And I’m like that.
00:38:02 ►
I mean, I would like to touch the incorporeal body
00:38:05 ►
I would like to call the saucer down
00:38:07 ►
and observe all of its workings
00:38:09 ►
but this is a spiritual aspiration
00:38:13 ►
that cannot be advanced
00:38:15 ►
by any human technique or activity
00:38:18 ►
this is just something you pray for
00:38:21 ►
in the meantime
00:38:23 ►
the job is to map it and describe it and explore
00:38:28 ►
it and try to direct the attention of other people more intelligent than myself to this
00:38:34 ►
astonishing fact, really. I mean, I am troubled by the fact that so many strange claims are
00:38:48 ►
the fact that so many strange claims are made today, so many forms of aliens and channeling and voices in the head, that when I began all this ten years ago, I was afraid to speak
00:38:55 ►
because I sounded mad, even to myself, and I sounded like a voice in the wilderness.
00:39:05 ►
myself and I sounded like a voice in the wilderness. Today the situation has changed to the point where I can barely make myself heard amidst the clamor of
00:39:12 ►
people who have various entities from Atlantis and beyond the grave and zeta reticuli and what have you clamoring to be heard.
00:39:26 ►
So I take it on faith, and I ask you to take it on faith,
00:39:34 ►
that I am somewhat more objective
00:39:39 ►
and somewhat more interested in hard facts than these other channelers,
00:39:45 ►
I would like people to take a look at this phenomenon
00:39:48 ►
and then tell me what they think.
00:39:52 ►
And it involves risk.
00:39:55 ►
People fear to do it.
00:39:56 ►
Careers are placed on the line.
00:39:58 ►
It is not easy to make a career out of taking a psychedelic drug.
00:40:02 ►
It is not a thing which mixes well with the politics of any institution,
00:40:10 ►
a university, a research institution.
00:40:12 ►
I think perhaps this is why shaman are the primary sources of the information about it.
00:40:19 ►
Terry, are you a shaman?
00:40:21 ►
Are you an exploring shaman?
00:40:23 ►
I’m an exploring shaman.
00:40:24 ►
I wouldn’t claim to be a shaman? Are you an exploring shaman? I’m an exploring shaman.
00:40:26 ►
I wouldn’t claim to be a shaman,
00:40:28 ►
but I think anybody who takes these things and goes out and tries to navigate through
00:40:32 ►
and make maps and bring back data
00:40:35 ►
is a shaman for sure.
00:40:41 ►
Do you want that everybody takes this drug, Thomas?
00:40:45 ►
I don’t take the drug.
00:40:46 ►
No, I don’t think so.
00:40:48 ►
I think it’s very dangerous.
00:40:52 ►
I do not tell people that it’s safe because I don’t have the faith that it’s safe.
00:41:00 ►
I know what the pharmacological literature says, and it says that it’s safe, that at the doses where these effects occur, there can’t possibly be a problem.
00:41:13 ►
But this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists, and we shouldn’t be in a hurry to believe them, even though it might make us more comfortable to do so.
00:41:26 ►
In other words, it’s saying, you know,
00:41:29 ►
the drug may not be toxic,
00:41:31 ►
but you may be self-toxic,
00:41:33 ►
and you may discover this in the drug experience.
00:41:38 ►
So you have to hone yourself and be clean,
00:41:44 ►
and you never know if you’re clean enough
00:41:47 ►
until it’s too late
00:41:48 ►
because each journey into that dimension
00:41:51 ►
is a total existential commitment
00:41:55 ►
and the element of fear is always there
00:42:02 ►
I mentioned this this morning
00:42:03 ►
but I think the fear validates it.
00:42:06 ►
I’m not…
00:42:07 ►
I think it’s fine to take drugs for pleasure,
00:42:12 ►
but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure.
00:42:17 ►
And the high doses of psilocybin
00:42:20 ►
that are necessary to elicit entry into these places,
00:42:24 ►
it requires, as it says in Hamlet,
00:42:29 ►
you must screw your courage to the sticking place.
00:42:37 ►
Tom, you mentioned earlier about mankind evolving towards a teleological goal.
00:42:45 ►
Would you comment on that?
00:42:46 ►
What is the goal?
00:42:50 ►
Well, I don’t think there is a final goal in the name of history,
00:42:56 ►
but speaking relative to the history of the past 4,000 or 5,000 years,
00:43:01 ►
I think the goal is, as I said,
00:43:04 ►
to invert the relationship of body and soul
00:43:08 ►
so that the body becomes an image in the imagination
00:43:14 ►
and the soul becomes an exteriorized,
00:43:19 ►
solid-state piece of circuitry
00:43:21 ►
which maintains everything else in stasis.
00:43:26 ►
And I’m not sure if people even realize what I picture in my mind when I say this,
00:43:34 ►
but I think that the destiny of man and what man will make be his destiny,
00:43:39 ►
just because of how we are, is released into the imagination.
00:43:41 ►
of how we are is release into the imagination
00:43:43 ►
and this is what all our
00:43:45 ►
after death scenarios
00:43:47 ►
say whether they are true or not
00:43:50 ►
and they may be true
00:43:51 ►
and this is what poetry aspires to
00:43:54 ►
art aspires to
00:43:55 ►
it’s release into the imagination
00:43:57 ►
we are creatures of the dream
00:43:59 ►
and once this is
00:44:01 ►
articulated with sufficient clarity
00:44:04 ►
and it’s happening now
00:44:07 ►
but I think the work we do with these drugs
00:44:09 ►
we are the earliest pioneers
00:44:12 ►
in what over the next hundred years
00:44:14 ►
will lead to an understanding
00:44:17 ►
of consciousness almost as a thing apart
00:44:22 ►
from the monkey body and brain.
00:44:26 ►
We are a consciousness.
00:44:28 ►
We may not always be monkeys.
00:44:32 ►
We fear the dehumanizing effect of so many computers and emotions,
00:44:40 ►
euphoric emotions not related to sex and all these things.
00:44:45 ►
We fear them.
00:44:46 ►
We say we are moving further and further from nature,
00:44:49 ►
deeper and deeper into our own psyche.
00:44:52 ►
But this is a dualism.
00:44:55 ►
Our psyche is nature.
00:44:58 ►
And we cannot move away from nature by exploring these places.
00:45:07 ►
cannot move away from nature by exploring these places. So I believe, you know, that a technological recreation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward, and that
00:45:13 ►
means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and reform from,
00:45:25 ►
but there is also the self
00:45:28 ►
related to the body image,
00:45:32 ►
but in the imagination,
00:45:34 ►
so that we each would become,
00:45:37 ►
in a sense, everyone.
00:45:39 ►
I would live at Versailles,
00:45:41 ►
and you might live at the Taj Mahal,
00:45:48 ►
and someone else might live at Buckingham Palace but what you would see if there were an exterior observer what you would see is
00:45:53 ►
only that man had become a coral reef of circuitry in space and on the planetary surface.
00:46:01 ►
But this is a very extreme view of the history of man because it’s essentially
00:46:07 ►
gnostic. It says we are not now what we yearn to be and are destined to be. We are not…
00:46:20 ►
I don’t see history as a process of accepting and coming to terms with monkeyhood.
00:46:28 ►
I see that it will inevitably seek to transform and transcend monkeyhood.
00:46:35 ►
And this will be very frightening.
00:46:37 ►
I mean, it’s frightening.
00:46:39 ►
Imagine if even a 15th century person were to be in this room with us
00:46:45 ►
and the value systems, the clash of assumptions
00:46:50 ►
about what is important and unimportant.
00:46:53 ►
And this will be a much more intense change.
00:46:57 ►
And whether it is good or bad rests on a question
00:47:01 ►
that I have no answer for.
00:47:03 ►
And the question is, is man good?
00:47:08 ►
And this, I maintain, is the central thing to dig at.
00:47:12 ►
And we cannot know, and there’s evidence pro and con,
00:47:18 ►
I have the faith that man is good.
00:47:22 ►
So I don’t fear this future. But if someone had a doubt, even a
00:47:29 ►
small doubt about that, then they would be repelled by this. And I take all these movements
00:47:35 ►
which want zero-sum growth and reject technology, reject space colonization, reject drug experimentation as artificial,
00:47:51 ►
these people would be very alarmed by this kind of a point of view.
00:47:55 ►
But they do not seem to realize that the momentum toward this kind of thing is now so great
00:48:02 ►
in terms of human culture and that sort of thing
00:48:06 ►
that there can be no turning back.
00:48:09 ►
We are either going to change into this cybernetic, hyperdimensional, hallucinogenic angel
00:48:15 ►
or we are going to destroy ourselves.
00:48:18 ►
The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature that fell away 15 000
00:48:28 ►
years ago and cannot be recaptured i think gerard o’neill made it in answer to this very objection
00:48:38 ►
he said the earth is the cradle of mankind there is no question about that but you do not remain in the cradle
00:48:46 ►
forever and this is a this is a birth crisis that we’re going through
00:48:51 ►
the entirety of human history has been the story of the monkey
00:48:58 ►
becoming the flying saucer and it is taking just that long in geological time but we for some
00:49:08 ►
strange reason happen to be living through the final moments of that
00:49:13 ►
process right now and it is a turbulent chaotic multi-ensional metamorphosis
00:49:25 ►
that is, there’s never been anything like it
00:49:29 ►
on this planet before.
00:49:30 ►
It’s absolutely astonishing information
00:49:33 ►
which was locked for
00:49:36 ►
kilocosms of time
00:49:39 ►
into the DNA of plants and animals
00:49:42 ►
has through the hand and articulate voice of man
00:49:46 ►
been able to bootstrap itself out of the DNA
00:49:52 ►
and into these culturally validated,
00:49:56 ►
rapidly operating electromagnetic codes and languages.
00:50:00 ►
And this is allowing its development, its evolution,
00:50:04 ►
to proceed at a rate so fast
00:50:06 ►
that the transformation is taking place essentially in our lifetime.
00:50:15 ►
And psilocybin is central to this because psilocybin casts a spotlight into the darkness
00:50:22 ►
into which we are moving and shows that this is what lies there.
00:50:28 ►
It is the human soul, essentially, the over-soul of mankind calling history toward itself across the dimensions.
00:50:40 ►
And it’s taking only a moment, but on the other hand it’s taking 20,000 years, and it is the great, great adventure of becoming,
00:50:49 ►
and we are very, very privileged to be in this final ticking out of the last seconds of the third act.
00:51:01 ►
Do you have any comments about the fact that DMT is located in the human brain?
00:51:07 ►
Well, I think that puts, in some sense, is a strong piece of evidence for the argument that I’ve been making.
00:51:14 ►
Not only is DMT endogenous in the brain, but beta-carbolines of the sort that occur in ayahuasca are endogenous in the brain as well. These things, as I mentioned this morning,
00:51:27 ►
the shift of a single atom on the ring structure of one of these molecules
00:51:33 ►
can cause a compound to go from inert to highly active.
00:51:39 ►
Well, that means then that it’s probably very reasonable to say
00:51:45 ►
that we are as close to shifting the level of endogenous hallucinogens in our head.
00:51:52 ►
We are probably only a one-gene mutation away from that happening.
00:51:57 ►
And if you know anything about how biological evolution works,
00:52:02 ►
it isn’t that a change, a mutation occurs, and the mutation
00:52:08 ►
is found to be better adapted than the previous form, and hence the mutation dominates.
00:52:17 ►
That is not the way evolution works.
00:52:19 ►
The way it works is you have the normal expression of the genotype in a population,
00:52:25 ►
and then you have mutations being thrown off all the time,
00:52:29 ►
and they are usually quenched,
00:52:32 ►
except in the situation where the environment shifts
00:52:36 ►
so that new selective pressures are operating in the environment.
00:52:41 ►
When new selective pressures begin to operate,
00:52:44 ►
a gene that was previously
00:52:46 ►
without consequence may suddenly have immense consequences. So then every member of the
00:52:54 ►
population that you’re looking at that has that gene suddenly is in a much more advantageous
00:53:01 ►
position to advance their evolutionary strategy.
00:53:07 ►
And I think that certainly modern existence has changed the selective pressures on the human genome.
00:53:15 ►
And now it is people who are far out that’s simply a gloss. It is the people who are far out who are gaining advantage
00:53:28 ►
in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.
00:53:34 ►
And you’re right, Frank, this is happening on the hardware level,
00:53:40 ►
on the level of endogenous tryptamines and that sort of thing.
00:53:43 ►
I think schizophrenia is essentially, in a way, a disease of modern times,
00:53:49 ►
and it is, though it’s always existed, of course,
00:53:52 ►
but the incidence of it and the incidence of schizoid,
00:53:58 ►
if not schizophrenic, personalities and types is because the modalities
00:54:08 ►
of evolutionary selection
00:54:10 ►
are shifting
00:54:11 ►
it’s as though if you think of a rainforest
00:54:13 ►
that has been above water
00:54:15 ►
200 million years
00:54:17 ►
all evolutionary niches
00:54:19 ►
have become occupied
00:54:20 ►
everything is at steady state
00:54:23 ►
there is not going to be any dramatic
00:54:26 ►
radiation of a new species because everything has been worked out and the
00:54:30 ►
energy flows are so tight nothing can gain a leg up on that situation but if
00:54:37 ►
you clear a thousand acres of forest and reduce it to rubble, essentially open land,
00:54:45 ►
then what are called invader species come in there,
00:54:50 ►
and they very quickly gain dominance,
00:54:53 ►
where in the jungle at steady state, you never see those plants.
00:54:57 ►
You never see weedy, annual, heavily seeding plants in the jungle.
00:55:03 ►
The jungle strategy is for enormous plants
00:55:05 ►
which produce small numbers of seeds. And this is again an analogy to the modern
00:55:12 ►
situation that
00:55:16 ►
modernity is a desert and we are jungle monkeys and so new evolutionary
00:55:23 ►
selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human
00:55:27 ►
situation new ideas are coming to the fore psilocybin is a selective filter for this
00:55:35 ►
the wish to go to space is a selective filter for this just the wish to know your own mind
00:55:42 ►
is a selective filter for this.
00:55:51 ►
But this is part of the picture.
00:55:52 ►
This is what’s happening.
00:55:53 ►
It’s inevitable. It’s a very good thing, I think, if you have faith that man is good.
00:55:58 ►
And I follow the Renaissance Platonists on that.
00:56:04 ►
I think man must be the measure of all things.
00:56:08 ►
What else could possibly serve with certainty?
00:56:15 ►
So that’s all I would say about that.
00:56:18 ►
You stated earlier that psilocybin is coming from outer space.
00:56:23 ►
There’s a possibility that this mushroom is…
00:56:26 ►
There’s a possibility of that.
00:56:28 ►
Fred Hoyle and an associate of his have come to my aid on this,
00:56:35 ►
saying that spore-bearing life forms,
00:56:38 ►
because spores have the capacity to survive in the conditions of outer space,
00:56:47 ►
capacity to survive in the conditions of outer space, that spore-bearing life forms may, over truly large scales of time, percolate out through the galaxy and serve as a basis
00:56:56 ►
for the evolution of life on various planets, or insert themselves into already existing
00:57:01 ►
planetary ecologies and insert themselves there.
00:57:06 ►
On these matters of specific fact, like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial
00:57:12 ►
and that sort of thing, I haven’t the faintest idea.
00:57:16 ►
The mushroom itself is such a mercurial, elusive, zen sort of personality
00:57:24 ►
that I never believe a word it says.
00:57:27 ►
I simply entertain its notions
00:57:30 ►
and try and sort through them.
00:57:33 ►
And I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.
00:57:37 ►
To know that the option of believing that is there
00:57:41 ►
on hard evidence is very exhilarating.
00:57:44 ►
As to what is really going on,
00:57:47 ►
the mushroom assures me that I haven’t got even the faintest grip on what is really going on.
00:57:55 ►
But something is going on.
00:58:01 ►
Can I ask another question?
00:58:04 ►
Sure.
00:58:04 ►
Can I ask another question? Sure.
00:58:05 ►
What do you think is evil and can these mushrooms be misused?
00:58:11 ►
Well, I think anything can be misused.
00:58:17 ►
Most evil is trivial.
00:58:23 ►
And if I could
00:58:25 ►
speak off the top of my head
00:58:27 ►
the only evil
00:58:28 ►
that associates itself with mushrooms
00:58:31 ►
is
00:58:32 ►
taking it
00:58:37 ►
but taking too little
00:58:38 ►
in other words
00:58:44 ►
did you find evil? In other words…
00:58:45 ►
Did you define evil?
00:58:48 ►
Evil is…
00:58:51 ►
There’s a word I want.
00:58:55 ►
It isn’t twiddle, but it’s something like that.
00:58:59 ►
Evil is when you play at things,
00:59:01 ►
not in play in the Hindu cosmic sense,
00:59:09 ►
but where you fiddle with things, you muck with things, because you don’t want to get your feet wet.
00:59:13 ►
You want to be able to say you’ve done these things,
00:59:16 ►
but you never want to really place your validity on the line.
00:59:20 ►
And I am amazed at the number of people who claim familiarity with psychedelic drugs,
00:59:27 ►
who when you actually question them closely,
00:59:30 ►
it’s very clear that they have a sub-threshold dose,
00:59:35 ►
even if they’ve taken it 50 or 100 times.
00:59:38 ►
They have managed through low doses and strong defenses, to always keep the demon at bay.
00:59:48 ►
That’s the demon with the D-A-I, to keep the demon at bay,
00:59:53 ►
and they don’t know what they’re talking about.
00:59:55 ►
You must take a sufficiently large dose so that you enter into these places,
01:00:02 ►
not to knock him personally, because he’s a very nice man,
01:00:07 ►
but as an example, Roland Fisher, whose work you may know, I talked to him, and he has
01:00:14 ►
given psilocybin, he says, to about 15,000 people at NIMH, and now he’s retired to Mallorca.
01:00:23 ►
But…
01:00:24 ►
I mentioned him.
01:00:25 ►
Oh, you do?
01:00:27 ►
Yeah.
01:00:27 ►
And I said to him, I said,
01:00:29 ►
Roland, what do you make of it?
01:00:31 ►
I mean, what do you make of it?
01:00:33 ►
And he said, well, make of what?
01:00:34 ►
And I said, well, what do you make,
01:00:36 ►
just specifically, of the hallucinations?
01:00:38 ►
You say you gave it to all these people,
01:00:40 ►
you took it six times.
01:00:43 ►
What happened when you closed your eyes and
01:00:45 ►
looked at the hallucinations said I never closed my eyes I was highly agitated
01:00:52 ►
throughout and I just realized these things which seemed to me as natural as
01:00:57 ►
breathing just slide right past people I mean of course you do not eat for a few hours before you do it.
01:01:07 ►
Of course you lie down in darkness and compose your mind
01:01:11 ►
and look at the darkness behind your eyelids.
01:01:13 ►
And of course you invoke it through the wish to have it come to you.
01:01:18 ►
These are things as simple as they can be.
01:01:21 ►
Yet here was a man with a lifelong professional involvement
01:01:24 ►
and published dozens of papers, as they can be. Yet here was a man with a lifelong professional involvement, published
01:01:25 ►
dozens of papers, has made contributions in the mapping of consciousness, but he could
01:01:31 ►
never just stop fidgeting long enough to see it. So my idea of that as evil, evil is anything which trivializes a mystery would be evil.
01:01:46 ►
And since this is a mystery, any dismissing of it or constantly taking it at low doses for hedonic purposes,
01:01:57 ►
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not the whole story.
01:02:01 ►
And nobody should think that that gives you a pedestal from which to speak about it.
01:02:08 ►
You really have to do these heroic amounts and integrate them.
01:02:16 ►
This is something I haven’t even talked about in this interview,
01:02:20 ►
but these things are very state-bounded a term which Roland Fisher in fact coined
01:02:25 ►
that simply means that they’re very hard to retain and remember
01:02:30 ►
what exactly happened at the peak of the flash
01:02:32 ►
and you come down and you say well it was very strange
01:02:35 ►
there was information, there were entities
01:02:37 ►
but I just can’t get back to it
01:02:39 ►
the way to overcome that
01:02:42 ►
is to be as psychedelic in your down life as possible.
01:02:48 ►
And by psychedelic, I mean ideas, cognitive activities.
01:02:54 ►
You should dance.
01:02:55 ►
You should read.
01:02:56 ►
You should think.
01:02:58 ►
You should paint.
01:02:59 ►
You should sculpt.
01:03:00 ►
You should converse.
01:03:02 ►
You should constantly involve yourself in cognitive activities because
01:03:07 ►
taking these drugs is one of the major cognitive activities. And then if you have a grip on human
01:03:16 ►
history, where the human enterprise has been, where it’s going, if you have been many places,
01:03:27 ►
going. If you have been many places, it’s easier to map. I’m reminded of there’s an
01:03:35 ►
alchemical aphorism, I think it’s attributed to Athanasius Krishner, where he says, the
01:03:43 ►
oldest books, the farthest countries, the deepest forests, the highest mountains.
01:03:45 ►
This is where you must seek the stone.
01:03:49 ►
And what he means is you simply acquire experience
01:03:53 ►
because it is only in the acquisition of acquired experiences
01:03:57 ►
that you have a reservoir to draw on
01:04:01 ►
when you seek to make metaphors and analogies
01:04:04 ►
about the alien thing.
01:04:07 ►
When you invoke the God, then you can map back onto it
01:04:12 ►
and say, well, it’s like this, it’s like that,
01:04:16 ►
knowing that it is not that or this,
01:04:19 ►
but the fund of analogies is there to give you a grip on it.
01:04:23 ►
So there’s an obligation to experience deeply and richly and thoroughly
01:04:28 ►
and intellectually, I might add.
01:04:33 ►
And then you can map back onto it.
01:04:37 ►
But it’s a dialogue between you and it
01:04:39 ►
where you are discovering new things about yourself and it
01:04:43 ►
and trying to resolve the question,
01:04:46 ►
are we the same thing?
01:04:48 ►
And I haven’t resolved the question.
01:04:51 ►
My suspicions flow one way and then another way.
01:04:54 ►
But I think it is without a doubt a living mystery
01:04:59 ►
existing in the presence,
01:05:02 ►
available to anyone sincere enough to seek it.
01:05:07 ►
And for me, that was a life-transforming discovery and revelation
01:05:12 ►
because I didn’t believe there were any mysteries.
01:05:15 ►
I believe there may have been once, but to discover one right in our midst,
01:05:20 ►
and it cannot be reduced, it cannot be pulled apart into its constituent functions.
01:05:30 ►
It is truly a unitary mystery and it’s accessible in our lives right now
01:05:35 ►
without kneeling at anybody’s feet, without following any regimen of denial or the assimilation of any belief system.
01:05:51 ►
And this is very big news, I think.
01:05:54 ►
The mystery has always been there, I’m sure.
01:05:57 ►
But our society is so bizarre
01:06:00 ►
and has led us so far astray
01:06:02 ►
that we have to rediscover it.
01:06:05 ►
And this process is happening.
01:06:07 ►
This is what the 20th century is all about.
01:06:09 ►
And we are still tiptoeing at the edge of it,
01:06:12 ►
even though great men, great women,
01:06:16 ►
great mappers of consciousness have come and gone,
01:06:21 ►
we are still at the very infancy of this thing.
01:06:24 ►
And it calls out to us, it beckons, it says, do more, see more, know more, and be more
01:06:32 ►
a part of it.
01:06:42 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:48 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:56 ►
Did you catch what Terence said near the end of this lecture when he was talking about the other and whether we are the same as it?
01:07:00 ►
And then he said he hadn’t actually quite resolved that question yet.
01:07:04 ►
Well, that’s where I am as well.
01:07:06 ►
You know, once I quit believing things,
01:07:09 ►
but instead began using what I call working hypotheses about the cosmos,
01:07:13 ►
well, I’ve now gone from a single belief to dozens of working hypotheses.
01:07:19 ►
It certainly is less constricting,
01:07:22 ►
and once you get used to it, it’s kind of nice to just accept the fact that until we die, we simply aren’t going to have any real answers about the next stage of our journey.
01:07:32 ►
And so it seems to me that the only sensible thing to do is to get together with as many friends as we can and dance, and then just keep on dancing for as long as we can.
01:07:43 ►
You know, I’m sure there are other ways to spend a life,
01:07:45 ►
but for me, singing and dancing seem really close to the top.
01:07:49 ►
But maybe the best thing for us to do is simply just to get together more often with friends and family.
01:07:56 ►
And it doesn’t even have to be in person all the time either.
01:07:59 ►
For example, at the recent psychedelic conference in L.A.,
01:08:02 ►
I bumped into my friend Alan, who told me that
01:08:05 ►
up in British Columbia, up around Nelson, where Dustin still holds forth late on Sunday nights,
01:08:11 ►
he’ll sometimes hear cuts from the salon. So that got me to thinking, and late last Sunday night,
01:08:17 ►
I stayed up. I vaped a little BC Bud and then tuned into Kootenai Cooperative Radio over the net and
01:08:24 ►
had a virtual evening knowing that there were other salonners doing the same thing right then.
01:08:29 ►
Plus, I was lurking on the girlreport.com’s forums at the same time, which is about as close to multitasking as I can get anymore.
01:08:38 ►
Anyway, hey, don’t think that you’re alone out there in cyberdelic space, because you aren’t.
01:08:43 ►
There’s a lot of us out there and we’re all connected one way or another.
01:08:47 ►
And as my favorite Canadian comedian, Red Green, says,
01:08:52 ►
keep your stick on the ice. It only gets better.
01:08:56 ►
You know, here we are at the end of the year 2010,
01:09:00 ►
and what a year it’s been, huh?
01:09:03 ►
At this very moment, I think we can all sense
01:09:06 ►
that there is probably a little more sorrow in the world right now than is normal.
01:09:10 ►
Even among the most affluent among us,
01:09:12 ►
those who are financially able to travel home for the holidays,
01:09:16 ►
even the well-off are having a hard time right now.
01:09:19 ►
You know, on top of all the political upheavals going on,
01:09:22 ►
the whole planet, it seems, is experiencing unusually difficult weather.
01:09:27 ►
And travelers everywhere are having a less than pleasant time of it.
01:09:31 ►
Maybe this is nature’s way of letting us know, those of us who are more well-off at least,
01:09:36 ►
maybe we should be able to find a little more empathy for the vast majority of our fellow humans who are having hard days like this every day.
01:09:44 ►
the vast majority of our fellow humans who are having hard days like this every day.
01:09:50 ►
You know, recently there have been a few days when I decided to feel sorry for myself and got depressed about having to move once again,
01:09:53 ►
but then I took a look around and I see how unbelievably fortunate I am.
01:09:58 ►
Sure, there are a lot of problems in my life, just like we all have.
01:10:02 ►
Hey, you know, that’s life.
01:10:03 ►
But you know what?
01:10:05 ►
There are quite literally billions of people who have it significantly worse than I do.
01:10:11 ►
And although it pains me that I’m not in a position to help them all out, there’s something
01:10:17 ►
I can do, and I think you can do too, to make the world just a little bit better. And that is find a
01:10:23 ►
couple of small children and bring a smile to their faces.
01:10:26 ►
Even if it’s only for an instant,
01:10:28 ►
every moment of joy we can bring
01:10:30 ►
to those little innocent beings,
01:10:32 ►
well, the better the world becomes.
01:10:34 ►
And if your holidays aren’t going perfectly well,
01:10:37 ►
well, don’t take it out on the kids.
01:10:40 ►
Hey, we’re the ones who have created everything
01:10:42 ►
in this world right now,
01:10:43 ►
and they haven’t had a chance yet.
01:10:45 ►
So go out of your way to smile and be nice to the little ones
01:10:49 ►
and see if it doesn’t make your world a little better, too.
01:10:53 ►
And so that’ll do it for today.
01:10:56 ►
And again, happy Winter Solstice 2010.
01:11:01 ►
And again, I’ll remind you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:11:06 ►
are available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:11:09 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial
01:11:12 ►
ShareLite 3.0 license
01:11:13 ►
and if you have any questions about that
01:11:16 ►
just click the Creative Commons link
01:11:18 ►
at the bottom of our Psychedelic Salon webpage
01:11:20 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org
01:11:24 ►
and if you’re interested in books that have a little psychedelic orientation Thank you. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:11:46 ►
Be well, my friends.