Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project:
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!
The Missing Chapters of The Invisible Landscape
Chapter 20: The Oversoul as Saucer
Chapter 21: Open Ending
This is Tape Number 004 of the Paul Herbert Collection.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“In psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally we actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind reported to accompany the UFO contact, and that these things could somehow be co-mapped, one onto the other”
“Involvement with these tryptamines as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit more than one world at once, as though superimposed over reality there was a super-reality, a hyper dimensional world where information was accessible in magical ways.”
“History is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the last ten to fifteen thousand years. It spread across the planet very quickly. But that mind in man just goes back and back into the darkness.”
“The extraterrestrial is the human over soul in its general and particulate expression on the planet… . The over soul is some kind of field that is generated by human beings, but that is not under the control of any institution, any government, and religion. It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet, and it regulates human culture through the release of ideas out of eternity and into the continuum of history.”
“The myths that are building are like the Messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ.”
“I think that science has betrayed human destiny to some degree. And that we are led to the brink of star-flight, but we’re also led to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust.”
“The political conclusion to be drawn is to preserve your freedom of thought by deconditioning yourself to the flying saucer religion before it happens.”
“I think that the flying saucer experience is tremendously powerful. And that it really is somehow linked to the psychedelic experience in a way that perhaps will not be understood for some time.”
“Well, see what I’m saying is if we would intelligently examine these dimensions that the psychedelic drugs make available, we could as it were get in touch with the over soul and leave the era when man is disciplined by flying saucers and messiahs and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch just because people can’t evolve their ethics and their technology at the same rate of speed.”
“The modern epistemological methods are just not up to dealing with an elf, with chattering, elf-infested spaces. I mean, we have a word for those spaces, we call it schizophrenia and slam the door. But, you know, these dimensions have been with us since ten thousand times longer than Freud. And people just have to come to terms with them.”
“The discs which haunt the skys of Earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever. These things are going to have to be dealt with.”
“The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere.”
“But I think what’s being missed is that a whole dimension of communication is being ruled inadmissible as evidence simply because it doesn’t conform to the epistemological biases of the people who a…
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:39 ►
And what I like to think of as your virtual guest hosts this week are Jared D., Garrett H., Francis V., James M., Zach M., Toby M., and Marco L., all of whom paid for a copy of my Pay What You Can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation.
00:00:44 ►
paid for a copy of my pay-what-you-can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation.
00:00:49 ►
And while I’m thinking of it, Vipal, who was one of our donors last week, Hey, Vipal, I haven’t forgotten about the suggestions you sent,
00:00:52 ►
and I’ll be thinking them over in the weeks to come.
00:00:55 ►
Now, you guys really picked a great week to be my co-hosts here in the salon,
00:01:00 ►
because I think you’re going to be as excited as I am about the tape I’m going to play for you today, which is another from the box of cassettes that Diana Slattery sent me a few weeks
00:01:10 ►
back, or I should say a few months back now. Thank you again, Diana. And I picked this one out of the
00:01:17 ►
box for several reasons. The first one being that it is the oldest recording of a Terrence McKenna talk that I’ve come across so far.
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It’s from December of 1982, and apparently was recorded in someone’s living room, as you’ll soon hear.
00:01:33 ►
Another reason that I’m playing this today is that on his most excellent podcast, The Sea Realm,
00:01:40 ►
well, my friend KMO has featured Larry Lowe on a couple of his recent programs,
00:01:51 ►
Well, my friend KMO has featured Larry Lowe on a couple of his recent programs, and for my money, Larry is the most well-grounded and open-minded reporter on the topic of UFOs that you’re going to find.
00:02:01 ►
Now, if you’re like I was until about five years ago, well, then maybe you have already closed your mind about the UFO phenomena.
00:02:06 ►
However, what opened my mind was that I wound up actually seeing one one night,
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but I’ll save that story for another day. My point that I seem to have drifted away from was that UFOs seem to be on a lot of people’s minds these days. And then, when I started looking through
00:02:18 ►
that box of old tapes and searching for the oldest one I could find, I came across this one that I’m
00:02:23 ►
going to play in a minute. And interestingly, it was in a case that was labeled
00:02:28 ►
Psilocybin and the Sands of Time,
00:02:30 ►
which is a talk we’ve seen all over the net.
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But then the tape inside the box itself was labeled
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The Definitive UFO Tape, Terrence McKenna, December 1982.
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So here’s a recording that somebody made in December of 1982, in which right off the
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bat, the first question to Terrence refers to the two books that he had written at that point.
00:02:53 ►
And he answers by saying that he kept most of his UFO ideas out of the invisible landscape.
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Then he refers to what he calls the second work, titled Psilocybin and the UFOs.
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Now, I have to admit that that was a new reference for me.
00:03:09 ►
I’m sure you might have heard of it already, but I went and googled it and could find no
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bibliography of McKenna, even including the one at Arrowhead.org, that referred to that
00:03:19 ►
book.
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However, at the very well-established Deoxy.org, that’s D-E-O-X-Y in case you haven’t been there, Deoxy.org site,
00:03:28 ►
I found a reference to what they call the missing chapters of true hallucinations.
00:03:34 ►
And I did remember seeing that a long time ago, so if you’re interested, you’ll find a link to it along with the program notes to this podcast.
00:03:41 ►
And you can get to those through psychedelicsalon.us.
00:03:44 ►
notes to this podcast, and you can get to those through psychedelicsalon.us.
00:03:51 ►
And I guess I should mention that lately I’ve received several comments complaining about the audio quality of some of these recordings, and they range from the obvious, which we
00:03:56 ►
can all complain about, to the real picky like this comment about podcast number 259,
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and I quote, this person said,
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I just wanted to point out,
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55 minutes into the podcast, I almost puked.
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The most disgusting sound of drinking
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I have ever heard in my life
00:04:13 ►
was drilled into my brain.
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Close quote.
00:04:17 ►
So I actually took the time to go back
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and listen to that.
00:04:21 ►
But I guess my years of work with ayahuasca
00:04:24 ►
have immunized me to being grossed
00:04:26 ►
out by somebody swallowing a sip of water. Now, the only reason I’m mentioning it here is that
00:04:31 ►
about four and a half minutes into the talk we’re about to listen to, during a question from the
00:04:35 ►
audience, you’re going to hear Terrence also swallowing a sip of water, and it’s even louder
00:04:40 ►
than the one that was complained about. So, and oh by the way, he does that several other
00:04:45 ►
times during the talk. So if something like that bothers you to the point of puking, well,
00:04:49 ►
at least you can’t say you weren’t warned. Personally, it really didn’t bother me at all.
00:04:55 ►
Now with that very strange introduction, let’s join Terrence McKenna and some of his friends on a
00:05:00 ►
1982 December evening and hear what was on his mind way back then.
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In the two books that you have written,
00:05:12 ►
I have read of UFO inferences.
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Would you expand upon those things?
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Yes, well, actually, in the first book,
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the UFO reference is few and far between.
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I think it’s only touched on once.
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I deliberately suppressed it from the invisible landscape
00:05:38 ►
because I thought it was already lit up like a Christmas tree
00:05:42 ►
with bizarre ideas,
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and I would save that particular ornament for its own treatment later.
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But in the second work, Down to Earth, Psilocybin and the UFOs,
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I deal with that directly because it seems to me that in psilocybin and the tryptamine hallucinogens generally,
00:06:09 ►
we actually have a state of mind that is very similar to the state of mind
00:06:15 ►
reported to accompany the UFO contact,
00:06:21 ►
and that these things could somehow be co-mapped one onto the other,
00:06:26 ►
that at active levels of psilocybin there is visionary ideation of spaceships,
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alien creatures, alien information,
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a general futuristic Saussurean kind of quality to the place it conveys you to
00:06:48 ►
that seemed to be coming from the same place as the modern myth of the UFO, if it is a myth.
00:06:59 ►
And we discovered in our exploration to the Amazon in 1971 that this was quite true, that involvement with these tryptamines, as they accumulated in your system, you seem to acquire the ability to inhabit more than one world at once as though superimposed over reality there was a super reality a hyper
00:07:28 ►
dimensional world where information was accessible in magical ways and in the wake of that experience
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I just went through the literature of the mystical experience and the saucer
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experience and
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ideas
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like alchemy and that sort of
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thing
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and
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eventually saw
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that they were all talking
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about the same thing
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that there is an experience which is
00:08:03 ►
gaining ascendancy
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for modern man
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which is called contact with the UFO
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but it is not
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reducible
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to any of the things
00:08:15 ►
that the
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main people who’ve written about it
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have said it could be reduced to
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it is not strictly
00:08:23 ►
speaking a contact from a space-faring race
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that has come from the stars.
00:08:31 ►
It is not mass hysteria.
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It is not delusion either.
00:08:37 ►
There is, in fact, something very odd going on,
00:08:41 ►
something which is as challenging
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to modern epistemological notions as, you
00:08:49 ►
know, a U.S. Air Force jet transport landing on some field outside a village in New Guinea.
00:08:58 ►
In other words, here is an area that is close to the experience of people in that a very large percentage of people
00:09:06 ►
claim to have seen flying saucers,
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an area close to the experience of people
00:09:11 ►
where science is totally helpless.
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It seems as though reality is haunted
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by a spinning vortex that renders science helpless.
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And the spinning vortex is the UFO,
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and it comes and goes on a mass scale,
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haunting history like a ghost.
00:09:33 ►
You mean the records in the Aztec records
00:09:36 ►
or the whole thing about coming,
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the white men coming to the New World in spaceships?
00:09:42 ►
Well, all these cases have been made for saucer intervention,
00:09:46 ►
but no, actually I’m speaking more specifically
00:09:49 ►
of the post-World War II
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spinning silver disc in the sky
00:09:56 ►
and the myth that accompanies it
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of the large pointed-eared cat-eyed.
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It has numerous variations,
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but it’s clearly an idea complex
00:10:08 ►
emerging in the psyche.
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And the question is, what is it?
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Is it prophecy?
00:10:13 ►
Is it a vision of the human future?
00:10:16 ►
What is it?
00:10:17 ►
And the postmodern phase
00:10:24 ►
of flying saucer speculation
00:10:26 ►
is the phase which recognizes
00:10:29 ►
that the saucer is somehow mixed up with human psychology,
00:10:34 ►
that it is no mere light seen in the sky,
00:10:38 ►
that when you go back and question the people who see these things,
00:10:41 ►
that right before they saw it,
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they were thinking something very odd and unusual
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which they didn’t normally think about
00:10:48 ►
or right after it.
00:10:50 ►
In other words, it seemed to be
00:10:52 ►
a kind of ideological catalyst
00:10:55 ►
for some purpose.
00:10:58 ►
And Vallée, in a book called The Invisible College,
00:11:02 ►
was the first person to suggest
00:11:04 ►
what I would call the cultural thermostat theory.
00:11:08 ►
He said that the flying saucer was an object
00:11:11 ►
from the collective unconscious of the human race
00:11:16 ►
that appeared basically to break the force
00:11:20 ►
of any set of ideas
00:11:23 ►
that were gaining dominance in their explanatory power
00:11:27 ►
at the expense of their ethical force in other words that it was like a confounding which would
00:11:35 ►
enter history again and again when history would build to a certain kind of boil the confounding
00:11:41 ►
would occur this is a similar idea, right.
00:11:46 ►
And he suggested that perhaps the career of Christ
00:11:49 ►
was an earlier confounding,
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where Roman technique and Roman militarism
00:11:56 ►
and all these things was unseated
00:11:59 ►
by a peculiar religion
00:12:02 ►
which no educated Roman could take seriously for a moment.
00:12:07 ►
I mean, an educated Roman was a democracy anatomist and well-versed in Epicureanism and Sophism,
00:12:16 ►
and yet the servants were telling stories about a rabbi who had risen from the dead and had somehow reopened a gate that had been closed since creation
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so that the soul of man could again be reunited with God.
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And this stuff made no sense to the Roman authorities,
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and yet it quickly overwhelmed the empire.
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The modern context is very similar to that in that science now can be seen to
00:12:50 ►
have replaced Roman imperial aspirations as a dominant mythos of control and it has these neat
00:13:00 ►
and tidy explanations of the world yet persistently from the folk there come stories of lights in the sky
00:13:08 ►
and strange beings and bizarre encounters
00:13:10 ►
that they cannot quite lay to rest.
00:13:14 ►
And you do have experiences yourself.
00:13:17 ►
Oh, yes. It’s a real, whatever real means.
00:13:20 ►
I mean, it is a real experience.
00:13:22 ►
It is phenomenologically real.
00:13:24 ►
In fact, my contention is that psilocybin induces it and that perhaps on a mass scale it’s as
00:13:32 ►
though there is an event at the end of history of such magnitude that it casts
00:13:39 ►
miniature reflections of itself back into time and these are these apocalyptic
00:13:46 ►
concrescences
00:13:47 ►
which haunt the historical continuum
00:13:50 ►
igniting religions
00:13:51 ►
and various hysterias
00:13:54 ►
and seeping
00:13:56 ►
ideas into highly
00:13:58 ►
tuned nervous systems
00:13:59 ►
How does it do that?
00:14:02 ►
Well, it’s as though
00:14:03 ►
like Plato said,
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time is the moving image of eternity.
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It does it because in its dimension
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all these things are somehow co-existent in time or outside of time.
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They have already happened.
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History is the formality of viewing this hyperdimensional object
00:14:22 ►
in a three-dimensional way by transecting it many, many times
00:14:27 ►
until you’ve built up an entire picture of it.
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But the mushroom evokes
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a profound planetary consciousness
00:14:38 ►
that shows you that history
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is just this froth of artifact production that has appeared in the
00:14:48 ►
last 10 to 15,000 years, spread across the planet very quickly, but that mind in man just goes back
00:14:57 ►
and back into the darkness, you know. And one of the things we were saying in the invisible landscape was that there are powers in the human body or avenues of understanding that have not been followed because of epistemological biases.
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to effect molecular changes in your own nervous system.
00:15:28 ►
It sounds, on one level, preposterous.
00:15:31 ►
On the other hand, it’s simply a formalized way of noting the fact that sound is energy,
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that energy can be transduced in a number of ways,
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and then when you direct it against your body,
00:15:40 ►
you obviously do make changes.
00:15:42 ►
Well, that’s the typical chanting.
00:15:48 ►
That goes on in shamanism worldwide well these people are navigating themselves
00:15:50 ►
in a space which we have lost touch with
00:15:53 ►
that for us
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I’m speaking now as a society
00:15:57 ►
only erupts in the weakened situation
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of a weakened psychic constitution
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where there is the element of panic
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in the mythological sense of pan bursting through from the underworld the emergence of the flying
00:16:14 ►
saucer what it is is it’s an autonomous psychic entity that has slipped from the control of the
00:16:20 ►
ego and is approaching laden with the otherness of the unconscious
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so that you know as you look into it
00:16:27 ►
you behold yourself
00:16:30 ►
your world, your information
00:16:32 ►
field all deployed
00:16:33 ►
in this strange
00:16:35 ►
distant almost
00:16:37 ►
transhumanly cool way
00:16:39 ►
which links it to the myth
00:16:41 ►
of the extraterrestrial
00:16:43 ►
the extraterrestrial is the human oversoul
00:16:46 ►
in its general and particulate expression on the planet,
00:16:52 ►
which doesn’t rule out the possibility
00:16:55 ►
that the mushroom places you in contact with extraterrestrials
00:16:59 ►
somewhere in the galaxy actually circling other suns.
00:17:04 ►
But it probably means that that communication
00:17:07 ►
is mediated through the oversoul.
00:17:10 ►
The oversoul is some kind of field
00:17:14 ►
that is generated by human beings,
00:17:17 ►
but that is not under the control of any institution,
00:17:21 ►
any government, any religion.
00:17:23 ►
It is actually the most intelligent thing on the planet
00:17:27 ►
and it regulates human culture
00:17:29 ►
through the release of ideas
00:17:32 ►
out of eternity and into the continuum of history.
00:17:36 ►
And what the UFO is, is an idea to confound
00:17:41 ►
and its purpose is to confound science
00:17:44 ►
because science has begun to threaten the existence of the human species,
00:17:49 ►
leave alone the ecosystem of the planet.
00:17:52 ►
And at that point, a shock is necessary for a culture,
00:17:57 ►
a shock equivalent to this culture,
00:17:59 ►
to the shock of the resurrection on Roman imperialism.
00:18:04 ►
And the myths that are building are like the
00:18:06 ►
messianic myths that preceded the appearance of Christ. And what they are of is of an intervention
00:18:12 ►
by a hyper-intelligent entity that comes from the stars and reveals the right way to live
00:18:20 ►
and wrecks science by a series of demonstrations
00:18:26 ►
that make it apparent
00:18:27 ►
that the purpose of human history
00:18:29 ►
is nothing less than total immersion
00:18:32 ►
in the teachings of the saucer.
00:18:36 ►
And once this message is slammed home
00:18:39 ►
via worldwide TV hookup
00:18:41 ►
and that sort of thing,
00:18:42 ►
it will just disappear.
00:18:44 ►
And in the wake of that, you see,
00:18:46 ►
what you have is this hysteria of abandonment, similar to the hysteria of abandonment that swept
00:18:54 ►
the Christian communities when, after the crucifixion, the resurrection, the coming of the
00:19:01 ►
millennium was postponed century after century.
00:19:05 ►
And the development of science will cease.
00:19:10 ►
This flying saucer-oriented religion,
00:19:12 ►
which is definitely the emergence of an archetype of enormous power,
00:19:16 ►
will hold sway in the same way that Roman science was stymied for a thousand years
00:19:22 ►
by the immersion in the words of one rabbi.
00:19:27 ►
Scientists are not going to like your opinion.
00:19:30 ►
Well, they should be forewarned.
00:19:32 ►
Vallée was saying this in another book of his
00:19:34 ►
called The Invisible College.
00:19:37 ►
He was more alarmed than I am
00:19:39 ►
because he is of the tradition of French rationalism
00:19:43 ►
and he was quite frightened to think. He didn’t
00:19:47 ►
believe it was, I should say, the oversoul of mankind. He actually believed it was a politically
00:19:54 ►
oriented group of human beings who had an advanced technology that was allowing them to do this. I
00:20:00 ►
reject that as total paranoia, and I am not as concerned with him to pull science’s
00:20:09 ►
chestnuts from the fire. I think that science has betrayed human destiny to some degree,
00:20:17 ►
and that, you know, we are led to the brink of star flight, but we’re also led to the brink of thermonuclear holocaust. But the
00:20:28 ►
conclusion, the political implication that I draw from all this is that scientists will
00:20:35 ►
be swept away by the revelation of the flying saucer. They have always been the ones to
00:20:42 ►
be like the Apostle Thomas and want to put their hand into the wound.
00:20:47 ►
And if the wound is offered, meaning if the saucer comes
00:20:50 ►
and is seen by hundreds of millions of people,
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they would go over immediately.
00:20:58 ►
So the political insulation, the political conclusion to be drawn
00:21:03 ►
is to preserve your freedom of thought
00:21:06 ►
by deconditioning yourself to the flying saucer religion before it happens.
00:21:12 ►
Is this, can we…
00:21:13 ►
Because…
00:21:14 ►
The most inspired scientists might be the most intrigued in this situation.
00:21:17 ►
Oh, they would go over first. But you see, a religion operates by a law of large numbers.
00:21:23 ►
As long as 80% of the people believe, it can transform a civilization.
00:21:29 ►
Therefore, if you’re one of the 13% who don’t believe, it’s okay.
00:21:34 ►
So you always want to stand where the high water won’t reach.
00:21:40 ►
But I think that the flying saucer experience is tremendously powerful and that it really is somehow linked to the psychedelic experience in a way that will not perhaps be understood for some time. the futuristic hyperdimensional world of these tryptamine hallucinogens
00:22:05 ►
and the persistent message from the unconscious
00:22:09 ►
in the form of these spinning idea complexes
00:22:12 ►
with the alien creatures inside
00:22:14 ►
are definitely expressions of the cutting edge
00:22:18 ►
of the evolution of consciousness.
00:22:20 ►
And it’s very interesting.
00:22:22 ►
A voice has been silent
00:22:24 ►
and a voice that guided and
00:22:27 ►
revealed has been a silent phenomenon for about 1700 years now in Western civilization. Before
00:22:35 ►
that, there was such a voice. I mean, it was called the Logos and all philosophers strove
00:22:41 ►
to invoke it. And it was a voice which told you the truth the self-evident truth you had
00:22:48 ►
only to hear it and you knew you were hearing the truth and with the passing of the aeon or
00:22:55 ►
something the death of the pagan gods this phenomenon faded out however it is still available um through the mediation of these compounds now how can you say
00:23:09 ►
these same words how can you say them and have people feel like they want to invite you to dinner
00:23:16 ►
to tell of this doom and destruction of mankind and the toppling of science especially when it
00:23:22 ►
is only right now science scientific people will understand what you’re saying.
00:23:27 ►
Well, see, what I’m saying is
00:23:29 ►
if we would intelligently examine these dimensions
00:23:33 ►
that the psychedelic drugs make available,
00:23:36 ►
we could, as it were, get in touch with the over-soul
00:23:40 ►
and leave the era when man is disciplined
00:23:44 ►
by flying saucers and messiahs
00:23:47 ►
and progress is halted for millennia at a stretch
00:23:50 ►
just because people can’t evolve their ethics
00:23:53 ►
and their technology at the same rate of speed.
00:23:56 ►
If we would have a dialogue with the other,
00:24:00 ►
we would understand all these things
00:24:02 ►
and become in contact with the Tao of the ancestors.
00:24:06 ►
And this is what a shamanic civilization
00:24:09 ►
or a shamanic culture is.
00:24:11 ►
It’s where certain people mediate
00:24:14 ►
the group racial experience
00:24:16 ►
that is available somehow,
00:24:19 ►
deployed in mind space.
00:24:21 ►
Have you done a controlled experiment
00:24:24 ►
whereby you can
00:24:26 ►
bring a number of people
00:24:27 ►
to the College of Psilocybin
00:24:29 ►
or however it is that the message would come across?
00:24:32 ►
Have you done that?
00:24:33 ►
You mean in regard to triggering
00:24:35 ►
these UFO type experiences?
00:24:37 ►
Yes, have you been able to?
00:24:39 ►
Well, only in the sense that
00:24:41 ►
we’ve ascertained by questionnaire
00:24:43 ►
that this is a very frequent motif perhaps the
00:24:49 ►
most frequently mentioned motif even by people who take psilocybin recreationally is that it’s
00:24:57 ►
about outer space and flying saucers and aliens little green man and these are people who are taking you know 15 milligram
00:25:06 ►
type doses sufficient doses to elicit the full spectrum of the compound dmt is similar i mean
00:25:14 ►
it conveys you into an elf infested space where you know wild and zany things are going on. It’s as though there are continually a reality
00:25:27 ►
that is beyond this reality,
00:25:31 ►
linguistically as well as spatio-dimensionally,
00:25:35 ►
so that you have to turn to a different language channel.
00:25:39 ►
And then, with this language pouring through your head,
00:25:43 ►
you observe the other place, the alternate reality.
00:25:48 ►
And it is…
00:25:49 ►
That’s what Sanskrit says, too.
00:25:51 ►
Yes, although this alternate reality is surprisingly far from most traditions
00:25:56 ►
about what alternative realities are like.
00:25:59 ►
I mean, it doesn’t prepare you for its crackling, electronic, hyperdimensional,
00:26:04 ►
interstellar, extraterrestrial, saucerian, mighty peculiar,
00:26:09 ►
all this, these highly polished and curved surfaces
00:26:14 ►
and machines and beings and language transformations
00:26:17 ►
and machines undergoing geometric transformations into beings
00:26:21 ►
and thoughts that condense as visible objects.
00:26:25 ►
This is a theme that’s very interesting to me,
00:26:28 ►
is the hyper-dimensional language,
00:26:32 ►
a language that fulfills Philo Judea’s quest for the more perfect logos.
00:26:40 ►
Philo said that a more perfect logos would be beheld rather than heard and this is what
00:26:47 ►
happens on dmt you hear a language which is very faint and far away and as it gets louder and
00:26:54 ►
louder you realize that without ever going over a quantized transition it is becoming a phenomenon
00:27:01 ►
not of the audio field but of the visual field and that it is in fact
00:27:06 ►
a fully evolving synesthesia
00:27:08 ►
hallucination of
00:27:10 ►
extremely
00:27:11 ►
realistic and utterly
00:27:14 ►
bizarre
00:27:15 ►
proportion
00:27:18 ►
I mean it’s like an Arabian
00:27:20 ►
maelstrom
00:27:22 ►
of color and form
00:27:24 ►
and you somehow sense you know that you’re in the Sistine Chapel you’re
00:27:27 ►
at the Kaaba you’re at Konarak you’re at all these places and but you know it’s a hyperdimensional
00:27:34 ►
infundibulum if you will it’s just a little place to dance and then you see you know that there is alien information
00:27:45 ►
this Saussurean information
00:27:47 ►
is deployed everywhere in this
00:27:49 ►
other space and that the really
00:27:51 ►
astonishing thing is that
00:27:53 ►
human history and art
00:27:55 ►
reflect so little of it
00:27:58 ►
but it does you do see it
00:28:00 ►
oh you see it
00:28:01 ►
but very very faintly
00:28:03 ►
when you see the real thing
00:28:06 ►
you just think
00:28:06 ►
my god
00:28:09 ►
how do they keep the lid on this stuff
00:28:11 ►
this is raging right next door
00:28:13 ►
and
00:28:14 ►
you know
00:28:17 ►
the modern epistemological
00:28:19 ►
methods are just not up to
00:28:21 ►
dealing with an elf
00:28:23 ►
with chattering elf infinfested spaces.
00:28:26 ►
I mean, we have a word for those spaces.
00:28:28 ►
We call it schizophrenia and slam the door.
00:28:32 ►
But, you know, these dimensions have been with us
00:28:35 ►
since 10,000 times longer than Freud,
00:28:39 ►
and people just have to come to terms with them.
00:28:42 ►
Now, it’s because of accidents of botany and history.
00:28:47 ►
European man has been away from the psychedelic dimension
00:28:50 ►
since a while, you know,
00:28:52 ►
from the dimension of the tryptamines and psilocybin
00:28:56 ►
since perhaps the closure of the last glaciation.
00:29:00 ►
So now we’ve accomplished marvelous things
00:29:02 ►
with technique and this and that.
00:29:04 ►
But here it is, you know, many cultures around the world have kept the flame burning.
00:29:10 ►
And the disks which haunt the skies of earth indicate that the unconscious cannot be kept waiting forever.
00:29:20 ►
These things are going to have to be dealt with.
00:29:22 ►
these things are going to have to be dealt with.
00:29:26 ►
And what it seems to me to point out is, you know,
00:29:31 ►
that the imagination really is the ground of being.
00:29:36 ►
And this is the great discovery which will change things. It will be as if man had discovered fire for the second time.
00:29:42 ►
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere. And when we cease to
00:29:51 ►
try and cross to the stars by crude rocket and engineering schemes and realize that deployed
00:29:59 ►
in the imagination is the entire universe.
00:30:03 ►
How do you think you go about instigating uh the launch off the launch
00:30:07 ►
well you have to the i think what the task of history can now be seen to be is what i call
00:30:12 ►
turning man inside out the body has to be uh exteriorized and the soul has to be exteriorized to create a golden disc.
00:30:27 ►
How?
00:30:29 ►
By magic.
00:30:31 ►
Magic.
00:30:38 ►
This matter of the flying saucer gives me an excuse to read a favorite poem of mine,
00:30:43 ►
which answers your question about the future
00:30:45 ►
of man and the psychedelic experience he says once out of nature i shall never take my bodily form
00:30:54 ►
from any natural thing but such a form as grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold
00:31:01 ►
enameling to keep a drowsy emperor awake or set upon a golden bow to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium
00:31:10 ►
of what is past or passing or to come.
00:31:15 ►
And this is the idea of becoming, you know, a golden object after death.
00:31:20 ►
Yates, this is sailing to Byzantium.
00:31:22 ►
Yates, this is Sailing to Byzantium.
00:31:25 ►
Once out of nature,
00:31:29 ►
I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing,
00:31:31 ►
but such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
00:31:34 ►
of hammered gold and gold enameling
00:31:37 ►
to keep a drowsy emperor awake
00:31:40 ►
or set upon a golden bough
00:31:42 ►
to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what is past or passing
00:31:48 ►
or to come in other words a golden bird a hyper-dimensional object of Grecian gold
00:31:55 ►
enameling and the and this is what the flying saucer is it is the soul become object. This is the secret of alchemy.
00:32:09 ►
It’s interesting, you see, that the great flowering of alchemy,
00:32:13 ►
the great last flowering of alchemy in the 16th century, was coincident upon a level of understanding of natural chemistry
00:32:19 ►
approximately equal to our modern understanding
00:32:24 ►
of the role of life in the universe.
00:32:27 ►
In other words, mostly speculation.
00:32:30 ►
So that what for us moves off into the sky
00:32:34 ►
as the flying saucer told to us to be possible by science
00:32:39 ►
but highly unlikely
00:32:40 ►
is like the 16th century mind’s relationship
00:32:43 ►
to the philosopher’s stone,
00:32:46 ►
which was said to be highly unlikely but not impossible. And so all this imaginative effort
00:32:52 ►
was exhausted in trying to produce the philosopher’s stone. And the focus was upon chemical
00:32:59 ►
hardware, heating alembics, watching swirling gases in cloudy glass.
00:33:05 ►
And now in the modern context, it has gone into the sky.
00:33:09 ►
The sky is the dimension of the other for 20th century man.
00:33:14 ►
We feel we understand natural chemical processes.
00:33:17 ►
There is no mystery there.
00:33:18 ►
Miners no longer encounter gnomes when they go into deep mines
00:33:23 ►
the way they did in the 15th and 16th century
00:33:26 ►
those gnomes have been stilled but the sky is still haunted this is where we are told it might
00:33:34 ►
be possible for it to come from and the sea and sea is obviously co-mapped to the unconscious
00:33:41 ►
but the sky because our scientists tell us, you know,
00:33:45 ►
that somewhere out there, just possibly, it might be so. But I think what’s being missed is that the
00:33:53 ►
whole dimension of communication is being ruled inadmissible as evidence simply because it doesn’t
00:34:00 ►
conform to the epistemological biases of the people who are asking the question.
00:34:06 ►
And that is all these voices in the head
00:34:09 ►
that guide shaman, that obsess lunatics,
00:34:14 ►
that make poetry.
00:34:16 ►
And in other words, the muse, the muse is real.
00:34:20 ►
I mean, if you have not experienced the muse,
00:34:23 ►
that doesn’t mean anything.
00:34:24 ►
You may not have climbed Mount Everest either.
00:34:27 ►
But I tell you, out there in life, there are experiences
00:34:30 ►
which cause a need for new definitions.
00:34:38 ►
Everyone has had them, whether they’re willing to admit it.
00:34:40 ►
I think of one sort or another.
00:34:42 ►
An intimation of the other.
00:34:44 ►
Well, so imagine
00:34:46 ►
a compound
00:34:46 ►
which elicits
00:34:47 ►
this
00:34:48 ►
when you
00:34:50 ►
choose to
00:34:51 ►
use it
00:34:52 ►
well one
00:34:53 ►
could talk
00:34:54 ►
endlessly
00:34:54 ►
about this
00:34:55 ►
subject I
00:34:56 ►
suppose
00:34:56 ►
but until
00:34:58 ►
it’s resolved
00:34:59 ►
all of
00:35:00 ►
man’s
00:35:00 ►
epistemological
00:35:01 ►
dealings with
00:35:02 ►
reality
00:35:03 ►
will be
00:35:03 ►
haunted by
00:35:04 ►
this faint spookiness which can’t
00:35:06 ►
be gotten rid of. So to start off this continuation of the discussion of Flying Saucers, I’ll read
00:35:15 ►
Yeats again. O sages standing in God’s holy fire, as in the gold mosaic of a wall come from the holy fire,
00:35:26 ►
purr in a gyre and be the singing masters of my soul, consume my heart away,
00:35:32 ►
sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal, it knows not what it is and
00:35:38 ►
gather me into the artifice of eternity. And it’s that phrase, the artifice of eternity,
00:35:46 ►
which again invokes
00:35:48 ►
this strange mechanistic
00:35:51 ►
yet spiritualistic future
00:35:53 ►
into which the archetype
00:35:55 ►
of the flying saucer
00:35:56 ►
is calling people.
00:35:58 ►
You see, what’s happening is
00:35:59 ►
man is becoming
00:36:01 ►
a transplanetary creature.
00:36:04 ►
And this is something which takes about 10,000 years
00:36:07 ►
from the first to, you know, the earliest machines
00:36:12 ►
to leaving the planet.
00:36:14 ►
I think that was 10,000 years.
00:36:16 ►
Give or take 3,000 years away.
00:36:20 ►
But it is, as H.G. Wells said of history,
00:36:22 ►
it is a race between education and catastrophe
00:36:25 ►
because these more and more destructive chemical and atomic processes
00:36:31 ►
are released as the species realizes its aspirations are alien
00:36:37 ►
to the ecology of the planet and that it and the planet must part.
00:36:42 ►
And the transformation of man into a space-faring race
00:36:47 ►
is, on a biological scale,
00:36:50 ►
the great event that history is about.
00:36:52 ►
I mean, the coming of agriculture,
00:36:54 ►
the coming of urbanization,
00:36:57 ►
these things are peanuts compared to
00:37:00 ►
what is going to happen to this species,
00:37:03 ►
to these monkeys,
00:37:04 ►
as they leave the planet
00:37:06 ►
with their computers
00:37:08 ►
and their atomic physics and all this.
00:37:10 ►
I mean, you see, what is happening
00:37:12 ►
and why the psychedelic experience
00:37:15 ►
is so important
00:37:16 ►
is because information is loose
00:37:20 ►
on planet three.
00:37:22 ►
Some kind of very strange thing is going on. The world is not made of quarks
00:37:28 ►
or electromagnetic wave packets or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language, and language
00:37:36 ►
is replicating itself in DNA, which at its culmination is creating societies of civilized
00:37:44 ►
and intelligent beings which
00:37:45 ►
should possess languages which possess cybernetics which possess machines which
00:37:51 ►
use languages so that standing off a light year or two from this system what
00:37:58 ►
seems to be happening what is unusual about earth is that language literally has become alive. It is infested matter. It is
00:38:08 ►
replicating and defining and building itself, and it is in us. My voice speaking is a monkey’s mouth
00:38:16 ►
making little mouth noises that are carrying agreed upon meaning, and it is the meaning without the meaning you only have little mouth noises
00:38:28 ►
the meaning is a crude form of telepathy
00:38:31 ►
because as you listen to my voice
00:38:34 ►
my thoughts become your thoughts
00:38:36 ►
and we compare them and there is what’s called
00:38:39 ►
communication, understanding
00:38:41 ►
it’s all about codes,
00:38:45 ►
and that’s why I’ve said
00:38:46 ►
at times the flying saucer problem
00:38:48 ►
is like a grammatical problem.
00:38:50 ►
It’s like a dangling participle
00:38:52 ►
in the fourth dimensional language
00:38:54 ►
which makes reality,
00:38:56 ►
and that’s why it’s not reducible
00:38:58 ►
to any of these
00:38:59 ►
very simple-minded approaches.
00:39:02 ►
It is somehow embedded
00:39:03 ►
in the machinery
00:39:04 ►
of epistemic knowing itself.
00:39:07 ►
So we won’t be able to find it
00:39:08 ►
if we go out in rocket ships?
00:39:11 ►
No, it is within.
00:39:14 ►
It is the soul of man.
00:39:17 ►
We won’t be able to find it
00:39:18 ►
until we somehow come to terms
00:39:21 ►
with the hidden part, the know, the unconscious, the collective unconscious,
00:39:28 ►
the overmind, the fact that there is a level of hierarchical control being exerted by the human
00:39:36 ►
species as a whole, that the destiny of man is not in the hands of governments and corporations and communist party apparatchiks. It is in the
00:39:47 ►
hands of a weirdly democratic, amoeboid-like, hyper-intelligent super-organism, which is
00:39:55 ►
called everybody. And as we come to terms with this, as we take our place embedded in the body of everybody
00:40:05 ►
and information flows more freely
00:40:08 ►
and the reality of this informational creature
00:40:11 ►
is seen more clearly.
00:40:12 ►
The fact that we are, it’s an organism.
00:40:16 ►
We are having a symbiotic relationship
00:40:19 ►
with an organism made of information.
00:40:24 ►
And this is what psychedelics reinforces,
00:40:29 ►
I think, very strongly.
00:40:30 ►
It’s in the psychedelic dimension
00:40:31 ►
that you finally can key in
00:40:33 ►
to the voice of the organism
00:40:35 ►
and say, hey, what’s happening?
00:40:37 ►
And then it explains to you
00:40:39 ►
that things are not as you took them to be at all
00:40:42 ►
and that there is, in fact,
00:40:43 ►
layer and layer and layer upon interlocking meaning,
00:40:47 ►
and that there’s very little else other than that,
00:40:50 ►
and that the imagination is the true ground of being,
00:40:54 ►
and that there is a dimension parallel to time, outside of time,
00:40:59 ►
that is accessible to you as much as you want it
00:41:03 ►
to the degree that you can decondition yourself
00:41:06 ►
from the history-bound cognitive systems
00:41:11 ►
that have carried you to that point.
00:41:13 ►
This is why it’s always been said of psychedelics
00:41:16 ►
that they were sociological catalysts.
00:41:22 ►
For the shaman.
00:41:23 ►
Because the shaman brings the message to the tribe.
00:41:26 ►
Yes, but the tribe is a system set up to receive the message.
00:41:32 ►
We have a different way of doing it,
00:41:34 ►
which is that power elites in political control
00:41:38 ►
pass down state-approved philosophies,
00:41:42 ►
which are then applied.
00:41:44 ►
And this runs quite… The state as shaman.ies which are then applied. And this runs quite…
00:41:45 ►
The state as shaman.
00:41:46 ►
The state as shaman.
00:41:48 ►
The state as mediator of God’s holy will
00:41:51 ►
rather than a personal,
00:41:55 ►
a Protestant approach, if you will,
00:41:57 ►
a personal relationship to the overmind.
00:42:00 ►
And the flying saucer,
00:42:02 ►
what it represents basically
00:42:04 ►
is an instance of crisis and the flying saucer what it represents basically is
00:42:05 ►
an instance of crisis
00:42:08 ►
between the individual and the over mind
00:42:10 ►
where the over mind
00:42:12 ►
breaks through
00:42:13 ►
the oppressive screen
00:42:16 ►
thrown around it and comes to
00:42:18 ►
meet the individual
00:42:19 ►
and it is you know like
00:42:22 ►
an interview with an angel or a demon
00:42:24 ►
it’s very very laden with heavy psychological resonances
00:42:30 ►
for the person experiencing it.
00:42:33 ►
It is a numinous experience.
00:42:36 ►
It’s every moment of recognizable creation
00:42:39 ►
and falling into that category of the seepage from the overmind
00:42:44 ►
where you get a synthesis of information which
00:42:48 ►
becomes your creative thought, your discovery? Yes, well our theory of time basically mapped
00:42:53 ►
the idea that novelty was what you call this standing wave of eternity and that it seeps
00:43:00 ►
into time at a variable rate, which can actually be mathematically described
00:43:05 ►
using the I Ching and other techniques.
00:43:09 ►
It’s that sort of thing.
00:43:11 ►
Yes, it’s as though, you know,
00:43:13 ►
where the flying saucers come from is eternity.
00:43:16 ►
They don’t come from the stars
00:43:18 ►
unless space and eternity encompasses the idea
00:43:22 ►
of being able to move instantly to and from the stars.
00:43:26 ►
But the flying saucers come from a dimension, you could almost say they come from beyond
00:43:31 ►
death.
00:43:32 ►
They come from a dimension somehow totally different from our own, but tied up with human
00:43:40 ►
psychology and human psyche in a way that is puzzling and alarming and reassuring.
00:43:49 ►
And shaman, it’s very hard. This is a question to what degree non-participants in 20th century
00:43:58 ►
civilization perceive this, meaning people who take mushrooms but have nothing to do with 20th century society,
00:44:05 ►
whether they accept that always since Paleolithic time, this super futuristic dimension has
00:44:13 ►
been present so that in any century, people could have had this commerce with the end
00:44:19 ►
of time, with the far future, with the place where, as James Joyce said, man becomes dirigible, the place where we have bootstrapped ourselves
00:44:30 ►
to the point where we leave the planet, leave the monkey shell,
00:44:34 ►
leave all earthbound conceptions of ourselves behind
00:44:37 ►
and push off into the pure imagination.
00:44:41 ►
Scary.
00:44:42 ►
Scary. Gnostic, perhaps, as someone said. It sounds like megalomania to me,
00:44:47 ►
Martha. But, you know, the future always. I mean, how mad would the 20th century have sounded
00:44:58 ►
recited to anyone in the 19th? What it comes down to is trying to have faith that man is good
00:45:07 ►
because what’s happening is that
00:45:08 ►
whatever man is,
00:45:10 ►
man is taking control of the definition
00:45:12 ►
of being human.
00:45:14 ►
So that through genetic engineering,
00:45:16 ►
through drug design,
00:45:18 ►
through probing of these weird psychedelic dimensions,
00:45:22 ►
through cybernetic interface,
00:45:24 ►
through activation of information,
00:45:26 ►
man is going to become a mirror
00:45:29 ►
of his deepest aspirations.
00:45:33 ►
And the question then becomes,
00:45:34 ►
what are man’s deepest aspirations?
00:45:37 ►
What will it be?
00:45:39 ►
Is it some kind of Mephistophelian nightmare?
00:45:42 ►
Is it the Nietzschean superman
00:45:44 ►
come back to haunt us
00:45:45 ►
in a way that makes the Third Reich
00:45:47 ►
look like a picnic?
00:45:48 ►
Or is it, you know,
00:45:51 ►
the element of care and control,
00:45:55 ►
the aesthetic element,
00:45:57 ►
the wish to escape into a universe
00:45:59 ►
that is in fact art?
00:46:01 ►
This is what it holds out,
00:46:03 ►
that man could become an inhabitant of his own imagination.
00:46:10 ►
Because with the technology for space,
00:46:13 ►
for building large habitats in space,
00:46:16 ►
it is possible to imagine the complete galaxy of science fiction
00:46:21 ►
created in a sphere less than 12 light hours in diameter with the sun at the
00:46:27 ►
center of it so that you would have 50 or 60,000 independent habitats pursuing social experiments
00:46:34 ►
of every sort, spatially independent, doing very long-term slow orbits from the sun and the outer
00:46:41 ►
planets, but informationally linked in a bubble of
00:46:45 ►
time, 12 light hours in diameter.
00:46:48 ►
The current engineering thinking on building these large habitats is that right now you
00:46:55 ►
could produce the Hawaiian environment up to 14 light hours from the Sun, which is several
00:47:02 ►
light hours further out than Pluto. So that means that
00:47:05 ►
essentially the entire solar system has become habitable real estate. If we can simply transform
00:47:13 ►
the human imagination to realize that getting high is not a metaphor, getting high is what the whole
00:47:20 ►
ball game is about, that it’s true that the earth is the cradle of mankind,
00:47:26 ►
but you don’t remain in the cradle forever.
00:47:30 ►
And this is what beckons the…
00:47:33 ►
It’s been only 25, 30, 50,000 years
00:47:37 ►
since our shamanic ancestors began to munch the mushrooms
00:47:41 ►
and glimpse the vision of man radiating out through the galaxy
00:47:48 ►
as a perfected super intelligent force for light and this is the 15 round slug out
00:47:57 ►
leading to whether or not that happens or not now timothy Leary maintains similar positions from a different…
00:48:06 ►
Similar but different.
00:48:08 ►
But right, he talks
00:48:10 ►
a lot about the DNA.
00:48:11 ►
I’m not…
00:48:13 ►
Well, it’s the DNA on one level.
00:48:15 ►
The genetic information is stored
00:48:17 ►
in DNA where these
00:48:19 ►
visionary worlds, the information
00:48:22 ►
that allows them to be just
00:48:23 ►
shown to you like movies hour after hour.
00:48:27 ►
Where that information is stored is, I think, a very, very interesting question
00:48:31 ►
and certainly a challenge to molecular enthusiasts of molecular memory models.
00:48:38 ►
Well, now, is it not so that the muse is a sort of a catalyzing of the imagination?
00:48:45 ►
Precisely. It’s an ecstasy.
00:48:48 ►
And the claim is made that these things can be attained various ways,
00:48:52 ►
but there are many different kinds of ecstasis.
00:48:55 ►
I think the peculiar, spacey, extraterrestrial dimension
00:49:02 ►
that these tryptamines convey you into
00:49:04 ►
is not the standard ecstasy of the mystics,
00:49:08 ►
or we would have more of a reflection of that
00:49:11 ►
in our literature.
00:49:12 ►
In fact, one of the things most puzzling to me
00:49:15 ►
is why the bizarre motifs of the DMT flash
00:49:20 ►
have not made their way into any culture anywhere,
00:49:24 ►
as far as I’m aware.
00:49:27 ►
Well, would that make either an image of people being fearful of these visions when they have
00:49:36 ►
them and so keeping them undercover or an idea that they might be going insane in some
00:49:40 ►
way? I mean, what is the way out of that?
00:49:45 ►
Well, I think the change is so radical and the implication so hard to digest that you’re
00:49:52 ►
right, people either feel their own sanity is being threatened or they recognize it as
00:49:57 ►
a challenge to the reality myth of their society and so they just repress it.
00:50:05 ►
They have very little to do with it.
00:50:07 ►
It’s very hard to contact
00:50:11 ►
these contradictory realities
00:50:13 ►
which throw into doubt
00:50:15 ►
everything you know about
00:50:17 ►
the reality you’re inhabiting.
00:50:19 ►
I mean, what a strange, strange world it is
00:50:21 ►
if there are these alternative
00:50:23 ►
continue I operating all around us filled
00:50:27 ►
with strange alien information floating around and yet why pose it in the future? It is so
00:50:38 ►
that this is what’s going on. It’s just then how much time you care to spend thinking about
00:50:44 ►
it. on it’s just then how much time you care to spend thinking about it well these are science fiction
00:50:46 ►
theories too i mean one comes across this smattering here and there and um you are saying
00:50:53 ►
that it’s actual and this is the way it is this is your mission basically you’re wrapped yes well
00:50:59 ►
i’m not saying it’s only the way it is but i am am certainly saying that these tryptamine drugs elucidate an experience
00:51:07 ►
that is extremely peculiar,
00:51:10 ►
that has more relationship with the UFO experience
00:51:13 ►
than with classical mystical experience
00:51:16 ►
or other hallucinogenic drugs,
00:51:19 ►
and that societal attitudes and other things
00:51:24 ►
have conspired to keep this under wraps.
00:51:29 ►
It has not been well looked at,
00:51:31 ►
and yet, basically,
00:51:34 ►
because people who are interested in flying saucers
00:51:37 ►
are not interested in drugs,
00:51:39 ►
the great majority of people interested in flying saucers
00:51:41 ►
are hardware nuts,
00:51:44 ►
and just for sure want to prove
00:51:46 ►
that it’s a machine from Zeta Reticuli,
00:51:50 ►
you know, just nuts and bolts.
00:51:52 ►
And the psychological explanation
00:51:56 ►
is not welcome anywhere particularly.
00:51:59 ►
Meanwhile, the community of drug researchers
00:52:02 ►
feels they’re laboring under enough of a stigma to not ally
00:52:06 ►
themselves with flying saucer people which is just like adding an albatross to an anchor
00:52:12 ►
so you know it’s not a popular point of view so since i’m outside of all of that i can just say
00:52:22 ►
you know i read ilad on shamanism
00:52:26 ►
and, you know,
00:52:26 ►
I think these people did a fine job,
00:52:29 ►
but I don’t catch the flavor
00:52:32 ►
from any of this
00:52:33 ►
orthodox anthropological reporting
00:52:36 ►
on shamanism
00:52:36 ►
that anybody has really come to grips
00:52:39 ►
with how strange
00:52:40 ►
the psychedelic experience is
00:52:42 ►
and that it poses problems
00:52:44 ►
not only for these
00:52:46 ►
so-called primitive people
00:52:48 ►
who use it and are being studied
00:52:50 ►
it poses fundamentally
00:52:52 ►
equally
00:52:54 ►
deep problems for our
00:52:56 ►
society. That we can
00:52:58 ►
no more assimilate the content
00:53:00 ►
of the psychedelic experience than
00:53:02 ►
can a villager in the New Guinea
00:53:03 ►
Highlanders or a wetoto in the Amazon.
00:53:06 ►
In fact, we have less of a basis
00:53:09 ►
for coming to terms with it.
00:53:11 ►
So our culture is in a very desperate crisis,
00:53:17 ►
a birth crisis, a terminal crisis.
00:53:21 ►
If we are not fully informed as to the nature of reality,
00:53:25 ►
we should correct that oversight.
00:53:28 ►
And this is my motivation.
00:53:30 ►
Well, I’m disappointed that we can’t greet our other.
00:53:37 ►
Well, I guess you greet your other
00:53:41 ►
when you meet them in that dimension.
00:53:44 ►
Have you ever gone anywhere with another human to these places
00:53:48 ►
and actually been able to, say, have a parallel combined experience?
00:53:54 ►
Well, I think that happens certainly in taking ayahuasca
00:53:57 ►
with groups of people in the Amazon where the shaman is singing.
00:54:01 ►
You definitely have the feeling that you’re all being carried through the same space
00:54:08 ►
and being shown the same things.
00:54:09 ►
And when you take psilocybin just with one other person,
00:54:13 ►
you’re lying together,
00:54:15 ►
be mushroomed, as Gordon Lawson says,
00:54:18 ►
you have the feeling, you know,
00:54:20 ►
that you’re just flowing there together.
00:54:22 ►
And sometimes you can even,
00:54:24 ►
one person can describe and then leave off and the other one can begin to describe and it’s
00:54:28 ►
all flowing together. And yes, I am totally convinced that telepathy occurs on these drugs.
00:54:37 ►
I’m not sure how to go about making it a repeatable phenomenon, but it certainly happens.
00:54:47 ►
repeatable phenomenon, but it certainly happens. You see, psilocybin was made illegal just as an afterthought. In the panic, when everything was being made illegal, it never had any hearing or
00:54:53 ►
was examined by itself. It was just a halluc on the psyche, for catapulting the imagination into
00:55:11 ►
these futuristic spaces, it needs to be looked at very closely.
00:55:17 ►
How do you see it being organized in order to educate people?
00:55:32 ►
educate people well we need to have what’s always been lacking in psychedelic research is an examination of the content of the experiences so we need to give it to very intelligent people who
00:55:41 ►
are willing to work with it not in a clinical setting but in a setting where you ask the
00:55:46 ►
question how does it change people’s lives when they can be involved in it in a open non-stressed
00:55:55 ►
sort of environment we found that going into the Amazon which is not exactly a non stress-filled
00:56:03 ►
environment that as we would go up these jungle rivers
00:56:06 ►
and inevitably contact small villages
00:56:09 ►
where the mushrooms would be available,
00:56:11 ►
that reality is transformed.
00:56:14 ►
Reality truly is made of language
00:56:17 ►
and of linguistic structures
00:56:19 ►
which you hold unbeknownst to yourself in your mind
00:56:23 ►
and which, under the influence of psilocybin just
00:56:26 ►
begin to dissolve and you begin you begin to perceive right beyond the unspeakable you the
00:56:34 ►
contours of the unspeakable begin to emerge into your perception and you can’t say much about the
00:56:41 ►
unspeakable and yet it can color everything you do you live
00:56:45 ►
with it it is the invoking of the other the other has become the self all these
00:56:52 ►
various forms of estrangement are healed that’s why it’s so you know that the
00:56:57 ►
term alien has these many connotations what What’s the next step?
00:57:12 ►
Well, the next step is to confirm some of what I’ve said,
00:57:16 ►
to form a consensus among a group of researchers to then try and figure out a strategy, chemical or otherwise.
00:57:22 ►
Who would you invite?
00:57:24 ►
To work on a problem like that
00:57:25 ►
oh people like Frank Barr
00:57:27 ►
Sasha Shulgin
00:57:31 ►
my brother
00:57:32 ►
John Lilly if he would behave
00:57:35 ►
himself
00:57:36 ►
all these great
00:57:39 ►
people you know
00:57:40 ►
would have a great interest in this
00:57:43 ►
this is the question that has not been dealt with.
00:57:47 ►
The botany has been dealt with, the taxonomy, the chemistry.
00:57:51 ►
How would you set it up?
00:57:54 ►
How would I set it up?
00:57:57 ►
Well, we need to explore this linguistic phenomenon somehow.
00:58:05 ►
Specifically, I think, not by giving drugs to volunteers,
00:58:09 ►
but by giving drugs to the researchers
00:58:10 ►
who are going to actually grapple with the problem.
00:58:13 ►
Because all this talk that orbits around the psychedelic experience
00:58:18 ►
by scientists, how many of them have had a psychedelic experience?
00:58:22 ►
So you would do it with people who have already had,
00:58:25 ►
or you would try to get on them?
00:58:27 ►
I think the early approach with psychedelics,
00:58:30 ►
which was the Baconian approach, the logical approach,
00:58:34 ►
was the correct one, which is very intelligent, thoughtful people
00:58:39 ►
should take psychedelics and try and understand what’s going on.
00:58:43 ►
Not batteries of prisoners and not school
00:58:48 ►
children but intelligent people and share their experiences see i say it’s too early for a science
00:58:57 ►
what we need now are like the diaries of explorers we need many diaries of many explorers so we can begin to get a
00:59:05 ►
feeling. The hit I
00:59:07 ►
get off of it is that it
00:59:09 ►
is very important
00:59:11 ►
for human culture that
00:59:14 ►
it is no coincidence that
00:59:15 ►
this is coming to western man
00:59:17 ►
just as we acquire the technological
00:59:20 ►
capability to leave the planet.
00:59:22 ►
That the
00:59:23 ►
mushroom and the planet that the mushroom and the
00:59:26 ►
transformation of the human image
00:59:28 ►
by going into space
00:59:29 ►
are all things that are spun together
00:59:32 ►
that nothing less is happening than
00:59:34 ►
the emergence of
00:59:36 ►
a new
00:59:37 ►
human order
00:59:39 ►
a telepathic
00:59:42 ►
humane
00:59:44 ►
universalist kind of human culture is emerging,
00:59:48 ►
which will make everything which preceded it be the Stone Age.
00:59:52 ►
Will the overview, monad, oversoul, whatever,
00:59:56 ►
reassume the personality knowledge that’s gained within one lifetime
01:00:01 ►
and therefore that is what you see as a UFO reincarnation?
01:00:06 ►
Or would you say that it’s terminated at that terminal’s termination?
01:00:12 ►
In other words, the personality which inhabits your form
01:00:16 ►
is, when that license is up, it reforms itself
01:00:22 ►
and the form is what the personality is carried by.
01:00:26 ►
Well, when consciousness is finally understood,
01:00:29 ►
it means that the absence of consciousness will be understood,
01:00:32 ►
which means the study of consciousness leads inevitably to the study of death.
01:00:38 ►
Death is both a historical and individual phenomenon
01:00:42 ►
about which we as monkeys have great anxiety. But what the
01:00:47 ►
psychedelic experience seems to be pointing out is that actually the reductionist view of death
01:00:53 ►
has missed the point, and that there is something more. It isn’t simple extinction, that the universe
01:00:59 ►
does not build up such complex forms as our cells without conserving them in some astonishing and surprising way
01:01:09 ►
that is perhaps related some way to the intuitions
01:01:13 ►
that we have from the psychedelic experience.
01:01:16 ►
The UFO comes from this murky region,
01:01:19 ►
beyond the end of history, beyond the end of life.
01:01:23 ►
It is both supra-historical and supra-organic.
01:01:29 ►
It is uncanny, alien.
01:01:33 ►
It raises the hair on the back of your neck.
01:01:36 ►
It is both the apotheosis and the antithesis
01:01:39 ►
of the monkey’s journey toward mind.
01:01:43 ►
It is like the mind revealing itself.
01:01:46 ►
This is what all religion is about,
01:01:48 ►
is shockwaves given off by this event at the end of history,
01:01:53 ►
which we are now very close to
01:01:55 ►
and which psilocybin can help us to understand
01:01:59 ►
because it conveys you into the place
01:02:04 ►
where it is happening constantly,
01:02:06 ►
where the millennium is a standing wave in eternity,
01:02:12 ►
not an anticipation.
01:02:14 ►
And so the mushroom stands at the end of history.
01:02:19 ►
It’s an object that pulls all history toward itself.
01:02:23 ►
It’s a causal force that operates to us backwards through time.
01:02:28 ►
It’s why things happen the way they do,
01:02:30 ►
because everything is being pulled toward a nexus of transformation.
01:02:40 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:42 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:48 ►
And so he ends by saying, everything is being pulled towards a nexus of transformation.
01:02:56 ►
And I guess that even a casual glance around the world right now seems to bear him out, don’t you think?
01:03:01 ►
to bear him out, don’t you think?
01:03:05 ►
You know, I’ve heard quite a few Terence McKenna talks,
01:03:08 ►
but this has to be one of my all-time favorites,
01:03:11 ►
which I think is something I say after every new talk I’ve heard.
01:03:15 ►
Maybe it’s just me, but in no other talk of his where he spoke about complexity,
01:03:17 ►
did I hear him talk about preserving the complexity
01:03:20 ►
that is each and every single one of us.
01:03:23 ►
His exact quote was,
01:03:26 ►
The universe does not build up such complex forms as ourselves without conserving them in some
01:03:32 ►
astonishing and surprising way that is perhaps related some way to the intuitions that we have
01:03:38 ►
from the psychedelic experience. Now, I think I mentioned a while back that in my work to overcome the brainwashing that I experienced as a child in Catholic school,
01:03:49 ►
that I worked really hard for a while at trying to become an atheist.
01:03:53 ►
My only problem was that at the time I was living in Florida,
01:03:57 ►
and I had an almost unlimited free supply of psychedelic mushrooms, which I enjoyed to the fullest.
01:04:04 ►
Now, I’m sure you remember
01:04:05 ►
that old saying that there aren’t any atheists in a foxhole during a war. Well, I’m here to tell you
01:04:11 ►
that it may be even more difficult to be an atheist with a belly full of magic mushrooms,
01:04:16 ►
but I sure did give it a try. What I did succeed at, though, was to rid my thinking of heaven and hell and those mysterious points in
01:04:25 ►
between. In fact, I try so hard to live intensely in the present that I seldom give any thought at
01:04:32 ►
all to the possibility of an afterlife or to reincarnation or anything like that. But now that
01:04:39 ►
quick little thought that Terrence planted in my mind just now has got me thinking about those things again.
01:04:45 ►
Damn it.
01:04:47 ►
You know, I’ve now heard this recording three times,
01:04:50 ►
and I think that maybe I’ll go back one more time and listen again.
01:04:53 ►
Each time I’ve heard it so far, I’ve picked up something that I’ve previously missed,
01:04:58 ►
and to me, it seems to have something for everyone who has ever given any serious thought to the topic of UFOs.
01:05:07 ►
I can see why whomever made this recording labeled it the definitive UFO tape,
01:05:11 ►
and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have.
01:05:15 ►
You know, thanks to the internet and to relatively inexpensive MP3 players,
01:05:21 ►
quite literally millions of people have now heard one or more lectures of Terrence
01:05:25 ►
McKenna. Millions more than did while he was alive, to be sure. And even before he died, though,
01:05:31 ►
his reputation was worldwide. But today, he’s even kind of begun to slip a little bit into
01:05:37 ►
legendary status. And I’ve got no objection to that. However, I also think that it’s very
01:05:42 ►
important to learn as much as we can about our heroes, not so as to reveal their feet of clay, but to give each and every one of us hope in our
01:05:51 ►
own ability to grow and evolve over a lifetime that’s full of ups and downs. And, as I’m sure
01:05:58 ►
you already know, Terrence’s brother Dennis has committed to undertake the momentous task of writing the definitive story of the life of Terrence McKenna as seen from the closest perspective possible, that of a brother who shared many of the adventures that we’ve heard Terrence speak about.
01:06:15 ►
In fact, just now we even heard Terrence include his brother Dennis as one of a very select group of people he would trust to further investigate the world of psychedelics.
01:06:25 ►
Of course, that’s precisely what Dennis has made his professional life all about.
01:06:30 ►
Now, I guess I’d better just lay this out and say something here.
01:06:34 ►
Hopefully it won’t make too many people mad.
01:06:37 ►
But as you know, I get several requests each week to help somebody promote their kickstart request.
01:06:43 ►
And so there are just way too many to sort through and then promote.
01:06:47 ►
As a result, I know that I’ve probably pissed off quite a few people.
01:06:52 ►
And I’m really sorry about that, but I’ve got to try and keep these podcasts as commercial-free as possible.
01:06:58 ►
But now I’m going to break that long-standing rule of mine and promote Dennis McKenna’s Kickstart project.
01:07:04 ►
And I’m doing this for a lot of reasons, but to me, the most important one is that
01:07:08 ►
this is an opportunity for all of us to come together collectively as a worldwide community
01:07:13 ►
and contribute to a project that will preserve the very valuable part of the early history of the
01:07:18 ►
resurgence of the use of psychedelics as what we hope will one day be an acceptable practice
01:07:24 ►
in human society once again.
01:07:26 ►
And this is an opportunity for us to do something that maybe will be of very significant value
01:07:32 ►
to those generations coming after us.
01:07:34 ►
You know, a big part of the reason that I do these podcasts is so that these talks,
01:07:39 ►
this information, will still be available centuries after we are gone.
01:07:43 ►
And thanks to Bruce Dahmer and the good people at the Internet Archive,
01:07:46 ►
that’s archive.org,
01:07:48 ►
these podcasts are all backed up on servers on three continents
01:07:51 ►
and will be available in new formats as technology changes over the years.
01:07:56 ►
And without you coming back each week to hear these podcasts,
01:07:59 ►
well, I probably wouldn’t even be doing this.
01:08:01 ►
So don’t forget that you are every bit as important in this process as I am.
01:08:06 ►
We’re all in this together, you know.
01:08:09 ►
So just a few minutes ago, I went to Dennis’ Kickstarter page myself and made a pledge.
01:08:14 ►
And as much as I had good intentions to just give a pledge
01:08:19 ►
and not accept any of the gifts being offered for the various pledge amounts,
01:08:23 ►
well, Dennis, I have to confess that your offers were just too tempting,
01:08:27 ►
and so I accepted one of them.
01:08:29 ►
So, hey, thanks in advance.
01:08:30 ►
I feel like I’m the one that’s really making out in the deal.
01:08:33 ►
So if you’re interested in his Kickstarter.com project,
01:08:38 ►
it’s titled The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
01:08:41 ►
What a great title.
01:08:43 ►
And there’s also an interesting video there, along with a very detailed description of the Screaming Abyss. What a great title. And there’s also an interesting video there along
01:08:45 ►
with a very detailed description of the project. And here’s a summary of it that he has on that
01:08:50 ►
page. Terence McKenna is a legend in the psychedelic community. He is remembered as a
01:08:57 ►
radical philosopher, futurist, raconteur, and cultural commentator. He was and is one of the
01:09:03 ►
most articulate spokesmen for the post-psychedelic zeitgeist. and is one of the most articulate spokesmen for the
01:09:05 ►
post-psychedelic zeitgeist. He is one of the prime originators of the 2012 mythos,
01:09:11 ►
with all its attendant apoculatarian anxiety. I am the younger brother of Terrence McKenna.
01:09:17 ►
I want to write a memoir telling of the real story of our intertwined life together over the last 60
01:09:22 ►
years, and of the ideas, adventures, and explorations,
01:09:26 ►
both inner and outer, that we shared.
01:09:29 ►
I am Terrence’s only brother.
01:09:31 ►
I am the only one who can tell this tale from this unique perspective.
01:09:35 ►
Terrence died in 2000, but his ideas live on on the net and in his books.
01:09:40 ►
For example, true hallucinations, food of the gods,
01:09:43 ►
the archaic revival,visible Landscape, and others.
01:09:46 ►
The time has come to tell his story.
01:09:49 ►
In reality, it is our story.
01:09:53 ►
So there you have it.
01:09:54 ►
And Tony and my other friends, I hope that you understand why I’m promoting this particular Kickstarter and not your equally important projects.
01:10:02 ►
It’s simply that this podcast probably wouldn’t be anywhere as popular as it is
01:10:06 ►
without all of the public domain talks of Terrence McKenna,
01:10:10 ►
and so this is my small way of giving a little back to his legacy.
01:10:14 ►
And believe it or not, there is one more Terrence McKenna announcement I have for this week.
01:10:19 ►
You know, it’s funny sometimes how things fall into place.
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So next week at long last, I’m finally going to be able to play
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for you the first part of the two hour interview that Eric Davis did with
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Terrence McKenna for Wired Magazine. And as it turned out
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it was also the last interview that Terrence ever granted.
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Although there is a CD set of this interview it’s now out of print.
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So if you have one it’s a real collector’s item.
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But through the kind services of the traveler, Alex Chuck Wall, and Eric Davis himself,
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I’m going to be able to play it for you in the next two podcasts, barring any unforeseen circumstances.
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So I hope you’ll be joining us then as well.
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Well, that’ll do it for now, and so I’ll close today’s podcast again by reminding you
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that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
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are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
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under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
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And if you have any questions about that,
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just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
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which you can find via psychedelicsalon.us
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And if you’re interested in the
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philosophy behind the salon, you can hear
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something about it in my novel,
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The Genesis Generation, which is available
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as an audiobook, a pay-what-you-can
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audiobook that you can download at
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genesisgeneration.us
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And for now,
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this is Lorenzo, signing off from
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Cyberdelic Space
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be well my friends