Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.” [COMMENT by Lorenzo: This statement was made before Terence discovered virtual reality in cyberspace.]
“This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”
“This is the nature of going forward into being: A series of self-transforming ascents of level.”
“I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension.”
“It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate inter dimensionally and telepathically.”
“There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.”
“It’s possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line in the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.”
“I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.”
“The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together.”
“I think there’s a shamanic temperament, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American, and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experiences that are found to be always applicable.”
“I don’t believe that the world is made out of quarks, or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets, or any of these things. I believe that the world is made out of language.”
“The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”
“Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand outside of time is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.”
“ Certainly neoPlatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology, which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.”
“The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will.”
“Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.”
“I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.”
“We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
And to begin with, I’d like to thank Guy, Benjamin, Steve, Timothy, and Reblin for buying a copy of The Genesis Generation,
00:00:34 ►
my pay-what-you-can novel in audiobook format.
00:00:37 ►
Your donations are very much appreciated.
00:00:45 ►
And speaking of appreciation, I think that we should all spend a moment or two sending our love and good vibes out to the legendary alchemist who we simply knew as Owsley. As you already know, Owsley died in an
00:00:52 ►
automobile crash in Queensland, Australia a little over a week ago. And if you aren’t familiar with
00:00:58 ►
Owsley’s work, it might be worth your time to google him. His full name was Augustus Owsley Stanley III,
00:01:06 ►
and I think it’s safe to say that what we call the 60s
00:01:10 ►
wouldn’t have been nearly as interesting without him as it was
00:01:13 ►
thanks to the millions of doses of LSD that he and his assistants produced
00:01:17 ►
in order to help us crack the cosmic egg of the status quo thinking
00:01:22 ►
that prevailed when that era began.
00:01:24 ►
So, happy trails, Owsley, and I hope you come back soon.
00:01:29 ►
Now, speaking of coming back, today at long last we are going to hear yet another talk
00:01:34 ►
by the one and only Terence McKenna.
00:01:37 ►
What I’m going to play for you right now is an interview of his that I found in the big
00:01:42 ►
box of tapes that Diana Slattery sent to me.
00:01:45 ►
And, hey, thank you ever so much, Diana. I really appreciate it.
00:01:49 ►
Unfortunately, the ink on the label somehow became wet and got smeared on this tape,
00:01:55 ►
and so I don’t have any information to give you as to the date or place of this interview,
00:02:00 ►
but I think that you’ll find that, once again, even though he may touch on themes
00:02:06 ►
we’ve heard from him before, that the material somehow seems very fresh. There’s talk of
00:02:12 ►
extraterrestrials and ways that they may be trying to communicate with us, talk of shamanism and
00:02:18 ►
philosophy, and all of which I think can be summed up in his statement when he says,
00:02:23 ►
there is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free.
00:02:27 ►
And this is what the historical crisis is all about.
00:02:31 ►
So in order to help us get today’s historical crisis in a little better perspective,
00:02:36 ►
let’s now join the good bard Terrence McKenna.
00:02:49 ►
Well, do you think we’re in a state of transition?
00:02:51 ►
Are we moving from one culture to another?
00:02:54 ►
Oh, I think we’re definitely in a state of transition.
00:02:58 ►
This is the chaos at the end of history.
00:03:03 ►
However, it’s probably nothing to be alarmed about. I imagine it’s simply the normal situation that
00:03:07 ►
prevails when a species is preparing to depart for the stars.
00:03:11 ►
You think we’re preparing to depart for the stars? Well, on the scale of a hundred
00:03:17 ►
or a thousand years, I think it’s an unavoidable conclusion. And that span of
00:03:23 ►
time in geological terms is hardly the wink of an eye. In fact,
00:03:29 ►
all of human history from that perspective appears as a preparation for human transcendence
00:03:36 ►
of the planetary existence. Do we want to get away from the planet? Well, I think you have to take the view that certainly the planet is the cradle of mankind,
00:03:51 ►
but inevitably one cannot remain in the cradle forever.
00:03:56 ►
The human imagination, in conjunction with technology,
00:04:01 ►
has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed
00:04:07 ►
on the surface of the planet with safety.
00:04:12 ►
The human imagination has gained such an immense power that the only environment that is friendly
00:04:19 ►
to it is actually the vacuum of deep space.
00:04:27 ►
to it is actually the vacuum of deep space. It is there that we can erect the architectonic dreams that drive us to produce a Los Angeles or a Tokyo and do it on a scale and in such
00:04:35 ►
a way that it will be fulfilling rather than degrading. So yes, I think we cannot move
00:04:43 ►
forward in understanding
00:04:45 ►
without accepting as a consequence of that
00:04:47 ►
that we have to leave the planet,
00:04:49 ►
that we are no longer the bipedal monkeys we once were.
00:04:55 ►
We have become almost a new force in nature,
00:04:59 ►
a thing of language and cybernetics
00:05:02 ►
and an amalgam of computers
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and human brains and societal structures
00:05:10 ►
that has such an enormous forward momentum
00:05:14 ►
that the only place where it can express itself
00:05:17 ►
without destroying itself is,
00:05:20 ►
as James Joyce says, up in the end.
00:05:24 ►
So long, long ago in the faraway galaxy,
00:05:27 ►
Star Wars style may be in our future?
00:05:29 ►
Well, as opposed to our past?
00:05:32 ►
It’s in our present, I think.
00:05:34 ►
Our future is probably almost unimaginable
00:05:37 ►
because I think the transformation that leaving the planet will bring
00:05:41 ►
will also involve a transformation of our consciousness.
00:05:47 ►
We are not going as 1950s-style human beings.
00:05:53 ►
We are going to have to transform our minds
00:05:57 ►
before we are going to be able to leave the planet
00:06:01 ►
with any amount of grace.
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This is where I think the psychedelics come in
00:06:05 ►
because they are anticipations of the future.
00:06:09 ►
They seem to channel information
00:06:12 ►
that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality
00:06:17 ►
so that there really is a prophetic dimension,
00:06:22 ►
a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through
00:06:28 ►
these compounds. And no cultural shift of this magnitude can be unambiguous. I mean,
00:06:37 ►
the very idea that as a species we would leave the earth behind us must be as rending an idea
00:06:45 ►
as that a child would leave its childhood home.
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Obviously, it’s a turning away from something
00:06:52 ►
that once left behind can never be recaptured.
00:06:57 ►
However, this is the nature of going forward into being
00:07:02 ►
a series of self-transforming ascents of level.
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And we now simply happen to be
00:07:09 ►
at that moment of ascent to a new level
00:07:12 ►
that is linked to leaving the planetary surface physically
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and to reconnecting with the contents
00:07:20 ►
of the unconscious collectivity of our minds.
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These two things will be done simultaneously.
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This is what the last half of the 20th century, it seems to me, is all about.
00:07:33 ►
Well, by and large, psychedelics have really not been accepted into the mainstream.
00:07:39 ►
Do you see a change in that?
00:07:41 ►
Well, not particularly. They hold a certain fascination for a persistent majority,
00:07:49 ►
and in that way they do their catalytic work upon society, which is to introduce new ideas
00:07:56 ►
and to release a certain kind of creative energy into society. I certainly would not like to see a return
00:08:06 ►
to the psychedelic hysterias of the 1960s.
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I think it’s fine that these things
00:08:14 ►
are now the subject of interest
00:08:16 ►
of a much smaller group of people,
00:08:18 ►
but perhaps a group of people
00:08:19 ►
with a greater commitment
00:08:22 ►
and a better idea of exactly what these things are.
00:08:29 ►
And it’s really the same people, it’s just a smaller group of them,
00:08:33 ►
and they have accumulated experience over the past 20 years.
00:08:38 ►
However, I certainly don’t think all psychedelic frontiers are conquered.
00:08:43 ►
One of the things that I write about and speak
00:08:46 ►
about are the phenomena that many people
00:08:51 ►
confirm with the psilocybin family of
00:08:55 ►
hallucinogens that no one has included
00:08:59 ►
in the standard model of psychedelic
00:09:01 ►
drugs. And by that I refer to the
00:09:04 ►
logos-like phenomenon of an
00:09:07 ►
interiorized voice that seems to be almost a superhuman agency a kind of genus loci and I’ve
00:09:17 ►
been writing recently about alien intelligence which is what I call this, where you have contact with an entity so beyond the normal structure of the ego
00:09:28 ►
that if it is not an extraterrestrial, it might as well be,
00:09:34 ►
because its bizarreness and its distance from ordinary expectations about what can go on is so great
00:09:46 ►
that if flying saucers arrived here tomorrow from the Pleiades,
00:09:50 ►
it would make this mystery no less compelling.
00:09:55 ►
It amuses me that the scientific community has taken over
00:09:59 ►
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
00:10:02 ►
and defined it as they care to define it and have
00:10:07 ►
erected radio telescopes to search the galaxy for these signals and the world’s largest radio
00:10:13 ►
telescope is at Arecibo in Puerto Rico and within the shadow of that installation mushrooms grow in
00:10:22 ►
the fields and the cows munch quietly in the sunshine
00:10:26 ►
and it’s this marvelous inner penetration
00:10:29 ►
of the near and the far away
00:10:33 ►
because I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials
00:10:38 ►
is in the psychic dimension
00:10:40 ►
and there the problem is not the absence of contact
00:10:44 ►
but the volume of contact that must be sifted through, because the fact of the matter is, shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods and demons since the Paleolithic and probably before, that doesn’t mean that we can rule out
00:11:07 ►
this approach to communication.
00:11:10 ►
It seems to me far more likely
00:11:12 ►
that an advanced civilization
00:11:14 ►
would communicate interdimensionally and telepathically.
00:11:19 ►
The amounts of time available for an intelligent species
00:11:24 ►
to evolve these kinds of communication are vast.
00:11:28 ►
So I think that it’s very interesting then that the tryptamines, psilocybin and DMT,
00:11:37 ►
at the 15 milligram level very reliably trigger what could only be described as contact-like phenomena.
00:11:47 ►
And not only the interiorized voice in the head,
00:11:51 ►
but also the classical flying saucer motifs of the whirling disc,
00:11:57 ►
the lens-shaped object, the alien approach.
00:12:00 ►
This seems to be something hardwired into the human psyche.
00:12:08 ►
And I would like to find out why. I think it’s a very odd fact of human psychology, and I don’t buy any of the current theories ranging from that nothing at all is happening to that this is in fact another species with a world around another star that is getting in touch with us.
00:12:27 ►
I think it’s something so bizarre that it actually masquerades as an extraterrestrial
00:12:33 ►
so as not to alarm us by the true implications of what it is.
00:12:38 ►
Well, your statement implies that it’s something external to ourselves, and I wonder about that. Well, this dualism of the interior and the exterior may have to be overcome.
00:12:50 ►
It obviously transcends the individual, but I suspect it is something like an overmind of the species,
00:13:00 ►
that actually the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual.
00:13:07 ►
It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species,
00:13:15 ►
which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. It is no government, no religious group, but actually what we call the human unconscious.
00:13:26 ►
But it is not unconscious,
00:13:30 ►
and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory.
00:13:35 ►
It is an organized intellect of some sort,
00:13:39 ►
and human history is its signature on the primates,
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and it is so different from the primates.
00:13:48 ►
It is like a creature of pure information.
00:13:51 ►
It is made of language.
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It releases ideas into the flowing stream of history
00:13:57 ►
to boost the primates toward higher and higher levels of self-reflection of it.
00:14:03 ►
And we have now reached the point
00:14:05 ►
where the masks are beginning to fall away and we are discovering that you
00:14:12 ►
know there is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free and this is what
00:14:18 ►
the historical crisis is all about and I, for no reasons in particular, very optimistic. I mean, I see it as a necessary
00:14:28 ►
chaos that will lead to a new and more attractive order.
00:14:37 ►
Terrence, you were talking about extraordinary realities, and it occurs to me that there’s an enormous amount of prejudice
00:14:46 ►
against the psychedelics and the use of hallucinogenic substances.
00:14:56 ►
It’s almost as if there’s an inordinate fear to open up the door to the closet
00:15:02 ►
that these substances reveal.
00:15:06 ►
What about that prejudice?
00:15:08 ►
What do you think is, how is that going to be resolved?
00:15:11 ►
What is the resolution of that?
00:15:13 ►
Well, I think it’s more complicated than a prejudice.
00:15:17 ►
It’s a prejudice born of respect
00:15:20 ►
because most people sense that these compounds
00:15:26 ►
probably actually do what their adherents claim they do.
00:15:31 ►
It’s possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s
00:15:35 ►
as a wish to continue the inward quest
00:15:39 ►
without having to put yourself on the line
00:15:42 ►
the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD.
00:15:47 ►
And I think all these other methods are efficacious,
00:15:50 ►
but I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.
00:15:58 ►
You either love them or you hate them,
00:16:00 ►
and that’s because they dissolve worldviews.
00:16:07 ►
you hate them and that’s because they dissolve world views and if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you if you think that’s a thrill
00:16:13 ►
you’ll probably love psychedelics on the other hand for some people that’s the most horrible
00:16:19 ►
thing they can possibly imagine they navigate reality through various forms of faith. And I think
00:16:27 ►
that the psychedelics, the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very, very deeply.
00:16:37 ►
I spent time in India and I would always go to the local sadhus of great reputation,
00:16:51 ►
and I met many people who possessed what I call wise old man wisdom.
00:16:56 ►
But wise old man wisdom is a kind of Tao of how to live. It has nothing to say about these dimensions that the psychedelics reveal,
00:17:03 ►
and for that you have to go to places
00:17:06 ►
where hallucinogenic shamanism is practiced,
00:17:09 ►
specifically the Amazon basin.
00:17:12 ►
And there you discover that beyond simply the wisdom
00:17:16 ►
of how to live in ordinary reality,
00:17:20 ►
there is a gnosis of how to navigate in extraordinary reality.
00:17:25 ►
And this reality is so extraordinary
00:17:28 ►
that we cannot approach what these people are doing
00:17:31 ►
with any degree of smugness
00:17:33 ►
because the frank fact of the matter is
00:17:36 ►
we have no viable theory of what mind is either.
00:17:40 ►
The beliefs of a Waitoto shaman
00:17:43 ►
and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist
00:17:46 ►
have an equal chance of being correct and there are no arbiters of who is
00:17:53 ►
right so it’s the power of these things the fact that here is something we have
00:18:00 ►
not assimilated we have been to the moon We have charted the depths of the ocean, the
00:18:05 ►
heart of the atom. But we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that
00:18:11 ►
here is where all the contradictions flow together. And the same prejudice against psychoanalysis
00:18:19 ►
that characterized the 20s and 30s when it was thought to be superfluous or some kind of fad attends the psychedelics now.
00:18:30 ►
It’s because it touches a very sensitive nerve.
00:18:32 ►
It touches the issue of the nature of man.
00:18:38 ►
And people are uncomfortable with this,
00:18:41 ►
or some people are uncomfortable with this.
00:18:44 ►
What is the value of exploring extraordinary realities?
00:18:49 ►
Well, I guess it’s the same value that attends the exploration of ordinary realities.
00:18:55 ►
There’s an alchemical saying that one should read the oldest books, climb the highest mountains,
00:19:03 ►
and visit the broadest deserts.
00:19:06 ►
I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
00:19:15 ►
And since all primary information about what is going on comes through the senses,
00:19:23 ►
any drug or any compound which alters that sensory input has to
00:19:28 ►
be looked at very carefully. I’ve often made the point that chemically speaking you can have a
00:19:35 ►
molecule which is completely inactive as a psychedelic and you move a single atom on one
00:19:42 ►
of its rings and suddenly it’s a powerful psychedelic.
00:19:46 ►
Well, now it seems to me this is a perfect proof
00:19:49 ►
of the inner penetration of matter and mind.
00:19:55 ►
The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position
00:20:00 ►
changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming.
00:20:07 ►
This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together. This means that in a sense the term
00:20:16 ►
extraordinary reality is not correct if it implies a division of category from ordinary reality. It is simply there is more and more and more of reality,
00:20:29 ►
and some of it is inside our heads,
00:20:31 ►
and some of it is deployed out through three-dimensional Newtonian space.
00:20:38 ►
Most of us, I think, just simply accept the everyday reality as the only one.
00:20:43 ►
except the everyday reality as the only one.
00:20:49 ►
And you’re talking about journeys into the nether regions which are far beyond most people’s conception
00:20:54 ►
or even wanting to conceive of such a reality.
00:20:59 ►
Well, I think there’s a shamanic temperament
00:21:01 ►
which is a person who craves knowledge, Knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. In other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American and it validates what you believe, but immediately, cosmology is constructed out of immediate experience that are found always to be applicable.
00:21:27 ►
You see, I don’t believe that the world is made out of quarks or electromagnetic waves or stars or planets or any of these things.
00:21:36 ►
I believe the world is made out of language and that this is the primary fact that has been overlooked.
00:21:44 ►
and that this is the primary fact that has been overlooked.
00:21:50 ►
The construction of a flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge.
00:21:56 ►
And people find it very hard to imagine exactly what I’m talking about.
00:22:01 ►
What I’m saying is that the leading edge of reality is mind,
00:22:08 ►
and mind is the primary substratum of being. We in the West have had it the wrong way around
00:22:18 ►
for over a millennia, but once this is clearly understood with what we have learned in our little excursion
00:22:28 ►
through three-dimensional space and matter
00:22:30 ►
we will create a new vision of humanity
00:22:35 ►
that will be a fusion of the East and the West
00:22:38 ►
the world being made of language
00:22:41 ►
and I think of these extraordinary realities
00:22:43 ►
which are totally beyond
00:22:45 ►
any language that we use in any ordinary sense yes well they are beyond ordinary language i always
00:22:52 ►
think of philo judaeus writing on the logos he he posed to himself the question what would be a more
00:23:00 ►
perfect logos and then he answered saying it would be a logos which is not heard but beheld
00:23:08 ►
and he imagined a form of communication where the ears would not be the primary receptors but the
00:23:15 ►
eyes would be a language where meaning was not constructed through a dictionary of little mouth
00:23:22 ►
noises but actually three-dimensional objects were generated with a kind of
00:23:28 ►
hyperlanguage so that there was perfect understanding between people and
00:23:33 ►
this may sound bizarre in ordinary reality, but these forms of synesthesia and
00:23:40 ►
synesthesia glossolalia are commonplace in psychedelic states.
00:23:45 ►
Terence, could you identify Phylos for us and tell us who he was? synesthesia, glossolalia are commonplace in psychedelic states.
00:23:48 ►
Terence, could you identify Philo’s for us and tell us who he was?
00:23:52 ►
He was an Alexandrian Jew of the second century who made it his business to travel around the Hellenic world
00:23:57 ►
and discussed all the major cults and religious and cosmogonic theories of his day.
00:24:04 ►
So he’s a major source of Hellenistic data for us.
00:24:08 ►
How would you relate to Socrates’ view of the world?
00:24:12 ►
Well, I think that it’s hard not to be a Platonist,
00:24:18 ►
but it’s something perhaps we should struggle against
00:24:21 ►
or at least struggle to modify.
00:24:24 ►
I think of myself as sort of a white-headian Platonist.
00:24:28 ►
Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas,
00:24:34 ►
these archetypal forms which stand outside of time,
00:24:40 ►
is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
00:24:44 ►
is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience.
00:24:50 ►
And Plato’s formulation of time as the moving image of eternity is another one of these aphorisms that the psychedelic state confirms.
00:24:56 ►
And certainly Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school
00:25:02 ►
are psychedelic philosophers.
00:25:06 ►
Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states
00:25:11 ►
is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology,
00:25:17 ►
which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers
00:25:21 ►
when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
00:25:26 ►
What I think most of us don’t understand
00:25:28 ►
or don’t really know is the fact that
00:25:30 ►
Greek culture and the Eleusinian
00:25:32 ►
mysteries
00:25:33 ►
incorporated the use of
00:25:35 ►
something that’s very akin to psychedelics.
00:25:38 ►
Yes. And essentially
00:25:39 ►
Western civilization is based
00:25:42 ►
on the culture that
00:25:44 ►
had at its core root an experience and a ritual that used, as they say, something akin to psychedelics. and had this experience, which Gordon Wasson and Karl Ruck have argued very convincingly
00:26:06 ►
was a hallucinogenic intoxication on ergot.
00:26:11 ►
But of course, as soon as the church solidified its power,
00:26:15 ►
it closed these platonic academies and moved against pagan,
00:26:23 ►
so-called pagan knowledge and heretical knowledge, and not only the Platonists,
00:26:28 ►
but all the Gnostic sects, all of these people, all of these viewpoints were repressed. I like
00:26:36 ►
to think that the end of that repression came in a very odd way when, in 1953, I guess it was,
00:26:46 ►
Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina
00:26:49 ►
in the village of Huatla de Jimenez
00:26:52 ►
in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca
00:26:55 ►
discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult.
00:26:59 ►
It was as if Eros, who had been martyred in the old world,
00:27:04 ►
was then found sleeping in the mountains of Mexico and resurrected.
00:27:10 ►
And the experience of the mushroom is very much the experience of a genus Loci, a god on the Grecian model, not the god who hung the stars in heaven, but a local god, a pre-Christian Bacchanalian nature power
00:27:30 ►
that is very alien
00:27:34 ►
and yet resonates with our expectations
00:27:37 ►
of what that experience would be like.
00:27:40 ►
Interesting that the mushroom also is a symbol
00:27:42 ►
in our culture of death and destruction,
00:27:45 ►
being the symbol of the nuclear explosion.
00:27:48 ►
Yes, well, my brother has made the point asking,
00:27:53 ►
you know, what mushroom is it that grows at the end of history?
00:27:57 ►
Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenheimer and Teller,
00:28:01 ►
or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman
00:28:05 ►
and Humphrey Osmond?
00:28:09 ►
Well, I think the latter is safer.
00:28:11 ►
Well, it may not only be safer,
00:28:14 ►
it may open the way to escape from the former.
00:28:19 ►
It’s like a pun in physics
00:28:21 ►
that the force of liberation and the force of destruction
00:28:24 ►
could take the same form.
00:28:26 ►
It’s what alchemists call
00:28:27 ►
a coincidencia positorum.
00:28:30 ►
It is an amazing synchronicity, it seems.
00:28:35 ►
Also, I was interested in talking with Andy Weil
00:28:38 ►
some time ago
00:28:40 ►
about the fact that there are new genus of mushrooms
00:28:43 ►
appearing that have psilocybin
00:28:46 ►
in them that have never been seen before, never been tracked before, and it’s almost
00:28:52 ►
as if they’re appearing now.
00:28:54 ►
Well, it’s amazing how many have been discovered since people have bent their attention to
00:28:59 ►
it.
00:28:59 ►
There have been psilocybin mushrooms reported from England, France, localities where, so far as we know,
00:29:06 ►
there is no cultural history of usage at all.
00:29:10 ►
However, it’s interesting that cultural usage
00:29:14 ►
seems to disappear very early in human history.
00:29:18 ►
Hallucinogens are hardly even welcome in agricultural societies.
00:29:23 ►
I think it was Weston Labar
00:29:25 ►
made the point that
00:29:27 ►
once you learn how to grow plants,
00:29:30 ►
your god shifts
00:29:31 ►
from the ecstatic god of the hallucinogens
00:29:34 ►
to the corn god
00:29:36 ►
or the food god
00:29:38 ►
and it no longer is about
00:29:41 ►
divining the hunt and weather
00:29:45 ►
through the ecstatic use of hallucinogens.
00:29:48 ►
It’s about being able to get up every morning and go to work
00:29:52 ►
and hoe the crop.
00:29:54 ►
So you mentioned earlier the prejudice against hallucinogens.
00:29:59 ►
I think it reaches back to the beginning of agriculture.
00:30:04 ►
This competition among plant gods,
00:30:06 ►
which exemplified lifestyles
00:30:09 ►
that must have seemed very, very alien to each other.
00:30:14 ►
Is psilocybin illegal?
00:30:16 ►
Oh, yes. It’s a Schedule I drug.
00:30:18 ►
Without any public debate,
00:30:21 ►
it was placed on the list
00:30:24 ►
at the same time that LSD was, and yet the issue was always
00:30:29 ►
couched in terms of LSD being made illegal, but actually at that point in time, a whole
00:30:34 ►
bunch of things were made illegal, and there was never any public debate. All psychedelics
00:30:40 ►
were viewed as the same drug, and LSD was used as the model.
00:30:45 ►
Actually, these drugs,
00:30:48 ►
there’s a spectrum of psychedelic effects,
00:30:50 ►
and certain drugs trigger some of them
00:30:53 ►
and certain ones others.
00:30:55 ►
But yes, psilocybin is illegal.
00:30:57 ►
Are the mushrooms illegal?
00:30:58 ►
The mushrooms also are illegal
00:31:01 ►
as they contain psilocybin.
00:31:04 ►
I recall Andy Wow saying that he walked along a downtown Seattle residential street
00:31:08 ►
picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of residential homes.
00:31:13 ►
Oh, well.
00:31:16 ►
And English law took the view that it was preposterous to try and outlaw a naturally occurring plant,
00:31:24 ►
and they took the position that only the chemical was illegal,
00:31:29 ►
which I think is a very wise position,
00:31:32 ►
but I noticed that Canada recently chose the American interpretation over the British one.
00:31:40 ►
Interesting.
00:31:41 ►
It turns out, going back to the Andy Weil story,
00:31:44 ►
that the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locales in the Northwest was that their spores were contained in a mail-order company’s mushroom growing product that they sent out mail-order.
00:32:02 ►
product that they sent out mail order and so
00:32:03 ►
this is an interesting phenomenon
00:32:06 ►
you see the spores of the mushroom
00:32:09 ►
are not illegal
00:32:10 ►
because they do not contain psilocybin
00:32:13 ►
they only contain
00:32:14 ►
the message in the DNA
00:32:16 ►
of the mushroom for the production
00:32:18 ►
of psilocybin
00:32:19 ►
so it’s a kind of bizarre catch-22
00:32:22 ►
the mushroom spores can move
00:32:24 ►
anywhere legally, can be bought and sold,
00:32:27 ►
but they are the sine qua non for the production of mushrooms, of course.
00:32:33 ►
The kind of knowledge and kind of information you’re putting forward is not generally available.
00:32:40 ►
It’s not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology curriculum.
00:32:49 ►
And yet it seems to be knowledge that is ever-expanding,
00:32:54 ►
but somehow it’s outside of the cultural institutional entities in some way.
00:33:03 ►
Number one, why do you think that’s the case?
00:33:06 ►
Of course, there’s a logical answer to that one,
00:33:07 ►
but what do you see as the future of this kind of information,
00:33:10 ►
this kind of knowledge?
00:33:12 ►
Well, I think in a sense it signals the rebirth
00:33:15 ►
of the institution of shamanism
00:33:17 ►
in the context of modern society,
00:33:21 ►
and anthropologists have always made the point about shaman
00:33:25 ►
that they were very important social catalysts in their group
00:33:29 ►
but they were always peripheral to it
00:33:32 ►
peripheral to the political power
00:33:34 ►
and actually usually physically peripheral
00:33:37 ►
living at some distance from the village
00:33:39 ►
and I think the electronic shaman
00:33:43 ►
the people who pursue the exploration of these spaces,
00:33:49 ►
exist to return to tell the rest of us about it,
00:33:54 ►
that we are now coming into a period of racial maturity as a species where we can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind or cultural machinery.
00:34:10 ►
We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are.
00:34:19 ►
We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian
00:34:28 ►
tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness, because as man gains power,
00:34:37 ►
he is becoming the defining fact on the planet in the near space area. So the question that looms is,
00:34:46 ►
is man good?
00:34:48 ►
And then if he is,
00:34:50 ►
what is it he’s good for?
00:34:52 ►
And the shaman will point the way
00:34:55 ►
because what they are
00:34:57 ►
are visionaries, poets,
00:35:01 ►
cultural architects, forecasters,
00:35:04 ►
all these roles which we understand in more conventional terms
00:35:08 ►
rolled into one and raised to the nth power.
00:35:13 ►
They are cultural models for the rest of us.
00:35:16 ►
This has always been true.
00:35:18 ►
The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension
00:35:22 ►
and a superhuman condition.
00:35:25 ►
And by being able to do that,
00:35:26 ►
he affirms the potential for transcendence in all people.
00:35:32 ►
He is an exemplar, if you will.
00:35:35 ►
And I see the attention that’s being given to these things
00:35:39 ►
signaling a sense on the part of the society
00:35:42 ►
that we need a return to these models. This is why,
00:35:47 ►
for instance, in the Star Wars phenomenon, Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a
00:35:53 ►
direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism
00:36:00 ►
comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture
00:36:05 ►
are shamanic heroes.
00:36:07 ►
They control a force
00:36:08 ►
which is bigger than everybody
00:36:11 ►
and holds the galaxy together.
00:36:14 ►
And this is true, as a matter of fact.
00:36:16 ►
And as we explore how true it is,
00:36:19 ►
the limitations of our previous worldview
00:36:22 ►
will be exposed for all to see.
00:36:26 ►
I think it was J.B.S. Haldane who said,
00:36:28 ►
the world may not only be stranger than we suppose,
00:36:32 ►
it may be stranger than we can suppose.
00:36:37 ►
I think of the character Yoda.
00:36:41 ►
Certainly he’s a shamanic type character.
00:36:43 ►
Very much so.
00:36:43 ►
Excuse me, the character Yoda certainly is a shamanic type character.
00:36:44 ►
Very much so.
00:36:55 ►
As we talk about shamans and shamanism, again, that brings up cross-cultural currents. Do you see the shaman taking on a new…
00:37:00 ►
Certainly you don’t see Indian shamans walking into the metropolitan areas.
00:37:06 ►
Do you see the shaman taking on a new form?
00:37:09 ►
Well, I believe, along with Gordon Wasson and others,
00:37:13 ►
but in distinction to Marseille Odd, who is a major writer on shamanism,
00:37:18 ►
that it is hallucinogenic shamanism that is primary and that where shamanic techniques are used to the exclusion
00:37:29 ►
of hallucinogenic drug ingestion,
00:37:34 ►
the shamanism tends to be vitiated.
00:37:36 ►
It is more like a ritual enactment of what real shamanism is
00:37:42 ►
so that the shamanism that is coming to be
00:37:48 ►
is coming to be within people in our culture,
00:37:52 ►
the people who feel comfortable with psychedelic drugs
00:37:56 ►
and who, by going into those spaces
00:37:59 ►
and then returning with works of art
00:38:02 ►
or poetic accounts or scientific ideas are actually changing the face
00:38:08 ►
of the culture. I connect the psychedelic dimension to the dimension of inspiration and dream.
00:38:15 ►
I think history has always progressed by the bubbling up of ideas from these nether dimensions into the minds of receptive men and women,
00:38:27 ►
it is simply that now, with the hallucinogens,
00:38:31 ►
we actually have a tool to push the button.
00:38:34 ►
We are no longer dependent upon whatever factors it is
00:38:39 ►
that previously controlled the ingression of novelty into human history,
00:38:46 ►
we have taken that function to ourselves,
00:38:49 ►
and this will accelerate and intensify the cultural crisis.
00:38:55 ►
But I think in the end it will lead that much sooner to its resolution.
00:39:02 ►
So as we continue to move towards the further exploration of these spaces, we can expect that social change as a result, personal change? what is happening is a tendency to what I call turn the body inside out.
00:39:27 ►
We are, through our media and our cybernetics,
00:39:31 ►
we are actually approaching the point
00:39:33 ►
where consciousness can be experienced
00:39:36 ►
in a state of disconnection from the body.
00:39:42 ►
We have changed.
00:39:44 ►
We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys.
00:39:47 ►
We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological
00:39:55 ►
components. We have become a force which takes unorganized raw material and excretes technical objects.
00:40:06 ►
We have transcended the normal definitions of man.
00:40:11 ►
We are like an enormous collective organism
00:40:13 ►
with our data banks and our forecasting agencies
00:40:17 ►
and our computer networks
00:40:19 ►
and the many levels at which we are connected into the universe.
00:40:24 ►
Our self-image is changing.
00:40:26 ►
The monkey is all but being left behind,
00:40:30 ►
and shortly will be left behind.
00:40:32 ►
The flying saucer, again,
00:40:34 ►
I take to be an image of the future state of humanity.
00:40:38 ►
It is a kind of millenarian transformation of man
00:40:42 ►
where the soul is exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology.
00:40:50 ►
And it is that eschatological event which is casting enormous shadows backward through time over the historical landscape.
00:41:01 ►
That is the siren at the end of time calling all mankind across the last
00:41:08 ►
10 millennia toward it calling us out of the trees and into history and through this series of
00:41:14 ►
multi-leveled cultural transitions to the point where the thing within the monkeys, the creature of pure language and pure imagination whose aspirations are entirely titanic in terms of self-transformation, in fact, what the next 50 or so years will be about.
00:41:47 ►
But at the end of it, the species will be off-planet and transformed
00:41:52 ►
and fully wired from the depths to the heights.
00:41:58 ►
Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death, resurrection, ascension into heaven?
00:42:03 ►
Except that it is coming into history.
00:42:05 ►
What is happening is that the paradise promised the soul
00:42:14 ►
is actually going to enter into history
00:42:17 ►
because technological man took the apocalyptic aspirations of Christianity
00:42:23 ►
so seriously that we are going to make it happen.
00:42:26 ►
It has become the guiding image of what we want to be.
00:42:31 ►
And I’m reminded of the poem by Yeats, It’s Sailing to Byzantium,
00:42:35 ►
where he speaks of how after death he would like to be an enameled golden object
00:42:41 ►
singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
00:42:45 ►
And it’s the image of man transformed into eternal circuitry
00:42:50 ►
and released into a hyperspace of information
00:42:54 ►
where you are a thing of circuitry,
00:42:58 ►
but you appear to be walking along an unspoiled beach in paradise.
00:43:09 ►
be walking along an unspoiled beach in paradise. It is that we are going to find the power to realize our deepest cultural aspirations. This is why we must find out what our deepest cultural
00:43:15 ►
aspirations are. Again, another way of phrasing the question, is man good? What about the idea
00:43:22 ►
that these spaces that we’ve been talking about, that you’ve been
00:43:25 ►
illuminating, are spaces that can be achieved without the use of psychedelics?
00:43:31 ►
Well, again, I scoured India, and my humble personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely.
00:43:42 ►
I have always approached people of spiritual accomplishment with the
00:43:47 ►
question, what can you show me? Because, as I said earlier, this wise old man wisdom is
00:43:54 ►
one thing, but only the hallucinogen-using shaman of the Amazon seem to be able to go beyond that. There may be techniques for doing this, but the efficacy
00:44:10 ►
and the dependability of the hallucinogens seems to me to make them the obvious choice. It would
00:44:18 ►
only be a series of cultural conventions that would cause one to want to engineer around that.
00:44:25 ►
It is the obvious path
00:44:28 ►
to transcendence. People must
00:44:29 ►
face the fact that at one
00:44:31 ►
level we are chemical machines.
00:44:34 ►
That doesn’t mean we are
00:44:35 ►
that at every level, but it does
00:44:38 ►
mean that that is a level
00:44:40 ►
where we can intervene
00:44:41 ►
to change the pictures that are
00:44:44 ►
coming in and going out at higher levels.
00:44:48 ►
You’re not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?
00:44:52 ►
Take hallucinogens?
00:44:54 ►
Well, I don’t know about take it by themselves.
00:44:57 ►
Probably not, although I always do,
00:45:01 ►
and I seem to prefer it.
00:45:03 ►
What I am suggesting is they take it in a situation of minimum sensory
00:45:07 ►
input. Lying down in darkness with eyes closed cannot be surpassed and people want music, they
00:45:17 ►
want to walk around in nature, they want all these things but nature and music are beautiful in their
00:45:23 ►
own right. They are the adumbrations of
00:45:25 ►
the psychedelic experience that we deal with in ordinary reality in confrontation with the
00:45:31 ►
psychedelic experience these things are hardly more than impediments the very interesting things
00:45:37 ►
are happening in the utter blackness behind your eyelids lying still in darkness. And that is where the mystery comes from and goes to.
00:45:50 ►
My question had to do with with or without a guide.
00:45:53 ►
Oh, I don’t think people should do it without a guide
00:45:56 ►
unless they feel very confident from experience
00:46:00 ►
that they don’t need a guide.
00:46:02 ►
I like to have these ideas get out.
00:46:05 ►
I think it’s important that we discuss all this
00:46:07 ►
in a way that is only now becoming possible
00:46:10 ►
because of how it was in the 1960s.
00:46:14 ►
Now we need to shed all that
00:46:17 ►
and look back and look forward
00:46:19 ►
and try to make a mature judgment for our culture
00:46:24 ►
based on the facts of the matter.
00:46:30 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:46:32 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:46:38 ►
As Terence said just now in closing,
00:46:41 ►
it’s up to you and me to make a mature judgment
00:46:44 ►
based upon the facts of the matter.
00:46:46 ►
And as we all know, the so-called facts that the governments around the world are putting out
00:46:52 ►
about cannabis and our psychedelic medicines, well, they’re almost all completely wrong.
00:46:58 ►
And anyone who has ever had a few tokes of grass knows full well that this is not a dangerous drug
00:47:04 ►
without any medicinal value.
00:47:06 ►
Yet, that’s what the screwheads in Washington and other world capitals are saying.
00:47:11 ►
However, as Aldous Huxley once said,
00:47:13 ►
facts don’t cease to exist just because they are ignored.
00:47:18 ►
Also, I’d like to be sure to point out that early on in this talk when Terrence said
00:47:22 ►
the human imagination imagination in conjunction with
00:47:25 ►
technology has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface
00:47:31 ►
of the planet with safety. Now I suspect he was talking about things such as nuclear power
00:47:36 ►
and at the present moment of course we can see how dangerous this technology can be when it’s
00:47:42 ►
combined with a profit motive where cost-cutting measures are more important to corporations than is the safety of our people.
00:47:49 ►
But my guess is that by the time of Terence’s death in 2000,
00:47:54 ►
he probably would have revised that statement to reflect his then newly growing fascination
00:48:00 ►
with virtual reality and cyberspace,
00:48:02 ►
thanks to what he was learning from Bruce Dahmer and other cybernetic pioneers.
00:48:08 ►
And so in my next podcast, I’ll be playing part of an interview
00:48:10 ►
that Matt Anderson did with Bruce Dahmer for his fall-winter documentary series.
00:48:16 ►
In it, Bruce expands on his thoughts about what he sees as the coming of a great crescendo.
00:48:21 ►
So in the weeks ahead, we’ll be spending some time with Bruce
00:48:25 ►
and then I’ll probably dip into
00:48:27 ►
the Timothy Leary archive
00:48:28 ►
for a bit more from the good doctor.
00:48:30 ►
And then we’ll get back to some of these
00:48:32 ►
other Terrence tapes that Diane so kindly sent
00:48:35 ►
for me to play for you here in the salon.
00:48:38 ►
And so that’ll do it for now.
00:48:40 ►
And I’ll again close by reminding you
00:48:42 ►
that this and most of the podcasts
00:48:44 ►
from the psychedelic
00:48:45 ►
salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the creative commons
00:48:50 ►
attribution non-commercial share alike 3.0 license and if you have any questions about that just
00:48:56 ►
click the creative commons link at the bottom of the psychedelic salon web page which you can find
00:49:01 ►
via psychedelicsalon.us and if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon which you can find via psychedelicsalon.us. And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind
00:49:06 ►
the salon, well, you can hear a little bit about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
00:49:11 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
00:49:18 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. It is the impossible become possible, and yet remaining impossible.