Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna and Erik Davis
Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project:
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“But I did [as a child] spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, and the nature of sin, and all of these imponderables. And, of course, what you end up doing is you end up reading scholars of mysticism.”
“To me it’s the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience, it’s when you get the logos coming out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.”
“[Speaking about how to pursue a psychedelic culture.] Well, I’d say the wrongly-packaged version would be something like ‘Castenadaism’, a formulaic cult. Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions and moral obligation will flee from your kin. Nobody can be that foolish. If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff, grow the plants, try to understand it, try to revivify the rituals and figuring out what it’s all about, well, that’s an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality, and probably fruitful.”
“It seems to me that ‘the shamanic drug of the month’ is not a very appealing idea.”
“The basic concept [of alchemy] is that somehow intuition and nature are reflective of each other. Until that hypothesis fails we should probably hang on to it, because look how far we’ve gotten. I mean it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.”
“[I’m hoping] that some lack of resource or vision doesn’t reveal that we can’t give enough people a bearable life. So we [would then] have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil, and struggle for resources. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
“Now let’s see if information can liberate. That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power, information will liberate. And it will be settled in the next ten or fifteen years. Either they’ll get a handle on it, whoever ‘they’ are, whatever a ‘handle means. Or it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and that nothing can stop it, that some kind of Renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.”
Terence McKenna Vs. the Black Hole by Erik Davis
This is Erik Davis’ account of the interview heard in this podcast.
Excerpt: The following are excerpts from interviews that I conducted with Terence McKenna in late October and early November of 1999, in preparation for a profile that appeared in the May 2000 issue of Wired. These interviews have also been edited and released on a CD, Terence McKenna: The Last Interview. Given McKenna’s subsequent demise, I chose selections concerning his feelings about death and dying. The October interview was conducted in San Francisco just a few days before Terence underwe…
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
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.
00:00:45 ►
And to begin with, I would like to thank some of our fellow saloners who made donations either directly to the salon or by buying a copy of my pay-what-you-can audiobook, my novel, The Genesis Generation. Jeffrey S., Joshua M., Franklin H., Paul D., Katua, Paul W., JLR Murals,
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and I’d also like to thank Carl S. and the rest of our fellow salonners
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who have contributed to Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter project,
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which I’ll mention again at the end of this podcast.
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Also, there is one of our fellow salonners who has gone way over and
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above the call of duty, and that is John Jay, whose second donation this year has now made him
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one of our top four all-time donors, someone I think of as a patron. And here’s the note that
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John sent along with his very generous check. I’d like to read that for you now. Hey Lorenzo,
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just finished listening to the last two
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Bruce Dahmer talks that you put up and it certainly helped to snap me out of the bad funk that I was
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in. In gratitude, I’d like to give you another chunk of my corporate slave wages to help cover
00:01:36 ►
your costs because quite honestly, I wouldn’t be the rock star programmer that my company thinks I
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am if I didn’t have the salon to lift my spirits here in my
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gray-walled cubicle. Thanks again for your work and dedication. Sincerely, John. Well, John, your letter
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really touched me, and particularly in view of the fact that I too spent many a long dull year in a
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gray-walled cubicle cutting code, although I never did make it to the Rockstar League, and that’s
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probably why I eventually got sidelined into management. But that’s another story. My point
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in reading John’s letter is to emphasize that we all have to continually find ways to hold
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ourselves together, whether it’s the salon, other podcasts, music, reading, or whatever.
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As world events continue to unravel at an ever-increasing speed,
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it’s you and me and the rest of the psychedelically inclined thinkers on this little planet
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who I think are going to be the ones who are likely leaned upon by our friends and families
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when things get really strange. And most likely that’s going to be sooner rather than later.
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And don’t think that you weren’t meant to be one of the strong ones.
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The fact is that you wouldn’t even be listening to these podcasts
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if you weren’t a long-term survivor.
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Instead, you’d be out chasing that ever-elusive material dream.
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So to John and to all of us current and former cubicle workers,
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factory workers, professionals, farm workers, and military women and men,
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all of which occupations I’ve had at one time in my life or another.
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Well, I guess almost all of them.
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I was a military man, but not a military woman.
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But then I guess you could have figured that out on your own, at least I hope so.
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Anyway, all kidding aside, I want to thank you all for having the courage to get up and go at it again each and every day.
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I know how hard that can be sometimes, and you’re all heroes in my book.
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Now, as promised in my last podcast, today I’m going to play part one of the last interview that Terrence McKenna gave before his untimely death in April of 2000.
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As I mentioned last week, we have three people to thank for the
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opportunity to play this interview. First of all, it began when fellow salonner Alex Chuck Wall took
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it upon himself to get permission to play it here in the salon. And with the help of the traveler,
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they were able to make the two CD set of recordings available for me to play here in the salon.
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So after they contacted me to let me know that, I asked Eric Davis if it was okay with
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him for, as you know, Eric Davis is the one who actually conducted the interview for Wired
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Magazine and here’s what Eric had to say.
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Hey man, go for it.
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I own the tapes.
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The CD we made has long ago sold out, though I still have a few copies, so let it
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fly. Not sure if you’re going to introduce the interviews, but please just mention my
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name and Wired’s name. Let me know when you release them so I can send folks that way.
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I know there are already chopped up versions floating around the MP3 verse, so I’m glad
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that this dude made some continuous tracks. Cheers, Eric.
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I’m glad that this dude made some continuous tracks.
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Cheers, Eric.
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And thank you to the three of you for making this important piece of our tribe’s history available to all of our fellow Saloners.
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And in particular, I do want to again thank Eric Davis, because it was Eric back in 2003 who was the first speaker to agree to talk at my initial Palenque Norte lecture series at the Burning Man Festival.
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And it was Eric who was also very instrumental in helping me to get some of the other speakers
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involved. People like Daniel Pinchbeck and Allison and Alex Gray. You see, it was out of the Palenque
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Norte lectures that this little psychedelic salon project has grown. And so I give Eric a lot of
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credit and thanks for his longtime support of the salon and of our
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Burning Man projects. And now, without any further ado, let’s join Eric Davis and Terrence McKenna
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in Terrence’s home sometime around the end of October 1999. And in about six months time after
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this interview, Terrence would be gone. And as you will now hear, although hope for his survival at the time was still quite high, the effects of his
00:05:48 ►
recent brain surgery and the multiple medications they were giving him seemed
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to have worn him down a bit. But while it isn’t the same old bouncy Terrence that
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we know and love, I think that you’ll be amazed as I am at the power of the mind
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of Terrence McKenna, along with his ability to make complex
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ideas understandable, both of which powers stayed with him right up until the end.
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Now let’s join Eric Davis for an introduction to the last interview of Terence McKenna.
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I’m Eric Davis, and I had the great good fortune of spending a few days with Terence McKenna
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and his girlfriend Christy Silnes in their jungle home on the island of Hawaii in November 1999. Sadly, the occasion was
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not so fortunate. McKenna had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the previous summer, and he was home
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recovering from a recent craniotomy. I was there to profile him for Wired Magazine, and it turned
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out to be the final interview he gave before his death,
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the age of 53, in April 2000. McKenna’s home lay along a rutted road that wound its way up the slopes of Mauna Loa from the south Kona coast. It was a white modernist origami structure topped
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with a massive satellite dish and a small astronomy dome designed to house a telescope
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that McKenna could not yet afford. The house and gardens were surrounded by a riot of vegetation,
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but among the native flora lay thick ropes of Banisteriopsis copy
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and a sprinkling of flowering Salvia divinorum.
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Every morning I ascended a spiral staircase decorated with blue LEDs to get to the study,
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where McKenna spent the bulk of his time,
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either working on his Macintosh or sitting cross-legged on the floor
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before a small oriental carpet surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia,
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and twigs of sage he occasionally lit up and wafted through the air.
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His library was magnificent, thousands of books on alchemy, Tibetan art, Hindu metaphysics,
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systems theory, archaeology, astronomy, and, of course, psychoactive lore.
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During the day, I asked the usual reporter’s questions,
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but in the evening we would relax and follow less quotidian pathways through the cosmos of conversation.
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McKenna rose to the occasion of his own mortal condition,
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and though he tired quickly and occasionally spaced out, he was
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as brilliant and funny as ever. What follows are edited portions of these dialogues.
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So what was your first encounter with psychedelics, either in a strong way or just…
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Well, it was a friend of a friend of mine
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when I graduated from high school.
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They were building that band,
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so he insisted that we eventually smoke pot and take acid.
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And I had never encountered old lefties or acid heads or musicians
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or people who gave a shit about any of this stuff before.
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It was all new to me.
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I had just come from Colorado to the West Coast,
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so I was easily swept into all of this.
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And, yeah, he and his friends were into who was that strange
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heroine-based comedian?
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Lenny Bruce?
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No, no, not Lenny Bruce.
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Stranger, more heroine-based.
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The guy who did the thing
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about Danez.
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Lord Buckley. Oh. Yeah. The guy who did the thing about Dinez.
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Lord Buckley.
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Oh.
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Yeah.
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And they were into all of this stuff.
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And I had been studying the Evergreen Review for a couple of years
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trying to figure out what was going on with the culture.
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But when I finally got to the scene
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and all this acid and all this left-wing politics and all that,
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then I understood.
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So anyway, he basically turned me on.
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Were you kind of fascinated from the get-go?
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Well, I’d been worrying about mescaline since I’d read Doors of Perception three or four years before.
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And I’d also read Havelock Ellis, it’s only a page or so,
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is one of the most seducing passages
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in all of psychedelic literature.
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He was taken, Bailey, at the turn of the century.
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These are the people who really got under the wire.
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People who took it a hundred years ago.
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Can you imagine?
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That is hard to grab hold of.
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But were you always sort of partly
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as much influenced by
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the kind of alchemical, mystical
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historical books you read
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in some way as well as the more primal, evolving?
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Well, I was raised by Catholic rationalists,
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so it’s hard to square that.
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In other words, you would run around
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spending part of your time trying to understand
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the nature of guardian angels,
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and the rest of your time trying to understand the nature of guardian angels, and the rest of the time grappling with fairly rational concepts.
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My family’s basic orientation was mining,
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and not science in the sense of degreed science,
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but my father was an electrician,
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my uncles ran radio and television repair shops,
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and my father flew, navigated, did radio.
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But I did spend a lot of time grappling with shit like the nature of the soul, the nature of sin,
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all of these imponderables.
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And of course what you end up doing is you end up reading
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scholars of mysticism.
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And then I would read about
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what John of the Cross
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or somebody else got hold of
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and then I would try for it.
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And I don’t recall getting too far.
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When you were still…
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Quite young.
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Right.
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So you were still thinking in a Catholic…
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Yeah, because it was all religious mysticism.
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There was no other form of mysticism before I guess before Huxley
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published his books and it was somehow well for Catholics there was no other
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form of mysticism there was a Spence key itis and grid GFianism and all these peculiar…
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But none of that was quite kosher.
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Did you have a break with Catholicism?
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Or did it just mutate into all of your…
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It sort of mutated.
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I read Jung, is what happened I read I first read
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psychology and alchemy and that led me on to the other one which is deeper about all of that it’s
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something about the nature of the Christos and alchemy. And then I saw how these geographically defined religious impulses
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could be part of some broader, deeper thing.
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And alchemy, it was a revelation to me.
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All that…
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I didn’t get religious history from the church the way I got it from Jung.
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Because from Jung I realized it was books. And so you could read these books. It was
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torment, torturous. It was when I was first going to Cal. But on the other hand, I had a library card and I could actually get at this stuff
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in whatever form it can ever be gone at.
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I mean, alchemy makes no sense at all
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if you actually read the literature.
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So when you decided to start speaking
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and doing these conferences and speaking on the radio,
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did you have a sense of a kind of mission?
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Well, I always felt people should know about psychedelics,
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that that was the untold story,
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that if there was anything new to be said
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or brought into the cultural dialogue,
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it was the news that these psychedelics
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were not these very tricky-to- tricky to manufacture drugs like LSD,
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but that it was really about plants.
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And I don’t know if I would say I had a sense of mission.
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I certainly thought it was a fine idea that people realized.
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And I was also interested in feedback.
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It wasn’t that I wanted to enlighten people.
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I wanted to hear what people had to say about this stuff, because to me it was all so confounding,
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the transformations of language, what it did to information. I mean, that’s still what psychedelics are about. It’s what it does to information. I mean, that’s still what psychedelics are about.
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It’s what it does to information.
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Yeah, talk about that a little bit.
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How do you…
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Well, it seems to show some kind of…
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How would you put it?
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Some kind of universality of source
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or some language is not syntax
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it’s not grammar
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it’s none of these things
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it’s some kind of
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divine
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you could almost call energy
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which flows out
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of objects and situations
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everything
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wants to communicate.
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And so then what the chain of being is,
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is somehow handing connectivity on to the next plant, animal, human being,
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work of art, whatever it is.
00:16:43 ►
And I still grapple with what all this means. And to me
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it’s the most psychedelic part of the psychedelic experience is when you get the logos coming
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out of the trees, the rocks, the berries, the water, everything.
00:17:09 ►
And it’s the most Taoist part of it. It’s where nature becomes transparent to its own intent to communicate or something like that.
00:17:17 ►
When you think back of what you felt like you were involved with in the mid-70s
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in terms of propagating the psychedelic experience.
00:17:26 ►
And you sort of felt that this is, in a way, you were being one of a number of Johnny Appleseeds.
00:17:36 ►
When you look now at what happened, emerged from that, are you disappointed in some ways?
00:17:47 ►
No, I don’t think so considering the fact that for the past year or so or maybe longer it’s been legal to grow mushrooms in Holland and
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purvey them I would say goals were met the thing was brought into human cultivation it’ll never leave it
00:18:07 ►
you know it’s a very rare thing to be able to bring an organism into the human
00:18:15 ►
family like that and when we found stropharia commences it was standing standing waist deep in cow shit and now it’s part of the human family
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of agricultural production.
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It’ll never leave it.
00:18:33 ►
It’ll always be part of global culture now.
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And do you have the feeling that in some sense
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it will remain, at least for the foreseeable future,
00:18:42 ►
a somewhat marginal road,
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like a path that certain temperaments or characters
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inside of the social matrix of reality have recourse to,
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but that don’t really dominate.
00:18:59 ►
Sure, because if they really wanted a lot of psilocybin,
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you would do it differently.
00:19:10 ►
You would grow it in enormous vats of liquid that were the size of railroad cars,
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and you would produce millions of hits within days of scaling up.
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So, no, what it is, is it’s a folk technology at the margin of civilization
00:19:29 ►
and an underground technology for the production of these drugs. Like, I understand you can
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make methamphetamine out of Clorox and some other shit, I have no idea, but it sounds very similar, very simple.
00:19:48 ►
Well, so this kind of at-the-edge-of-things knowledge
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is very critical to it.
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And that’s where the shamanism is in the culture,
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the tricks of the trade.
00:20:02 ►
So the shamanism enters because that’s an inevitable…
00:20:06 ►
Well, these are esoteric secrets, how to make drugs.
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And the drugs change minds and make money.
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So inevitably it’s going to be part of
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where some kind of negotiation takes place.
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kind of negotiation takes place. Negotiations like that rearrange the morphology of the
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social or the mind space of the people there. What do you think constitutes a postmodern shaman? Someone who’s legitimately doing shamanic
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a post-modern shaman,
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someone who’s legitimately doing shamanic work and not sort of acting out of fantasy
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or playing some game of identification with the other?
00:20:56 ►
Well, I think you have to know your pharmacology
00:21:00 ►
and trust that you know it
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and then trust it sufficiently that you’re willing to lead people
00:21:08 ►
with confidence through these places these ayahuasca psychiatrists are very courageous
00:21:17 ►
to and have built up sets of metaphors and assumptions that I think are probably true, or true enough,
00:21:29 ►
but it really takes balls to hold your ground with this stuff.
00:21:34 ►
That must have been interesting, the sense that you were propagating the philosopher’s
00:21:43 ►
stone to the brethren.
00:21:47 ►
And it was going many other places.
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A lot of people were interested.
00:21:51 ►
No, that’s what I meant.
00:21:51 ►
I mean, through the whole sort of network of free explorers.
00:21:59 ►
Well, and it wasn’t so much the mushroom.
00:22:04 ►
It was the information, you know,‘t so much the mushroom, it was the information,
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the knowledge of the technique.
00:22:09 ►
It was like the atom bomb or something.
00:22:12 ►
It was not whether you had it or not,
00:22:14 ►
it was whether or not you knew how to do it.
00:22:19 ►
So it’s interesting to see the way that other plants now… the mushroom parasited on print
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pamphlet technology.
00:22:31 ►
Now the more emerging plants that are re-encountered have a different propagation device of information,
00:22:41 ►
if that’s the foreword. Yeah, in one case, Brazilian cults.
00:22:47 ►
In another case, almost landscaping like salvia.
00:22:53 ►
I don’t know if you’ve seen those clumps of salvia on the road,
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but all the blue flowers and all that.
00:23:02 ►
Yeah.
00:23:09 ►
The mushroom is the most insidious and amusing because it seems to associate itself with human beings.
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Like, for instance, one of the densest psilocybin ecologies in the world
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is Oregon and western Washington.
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Well, one of the main industries of those areas
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where these mushrooms are so dense
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is the production of sod
00:23:35 ►
to be shipped all over the country and world
00:23:39 ►
to be pushed into malls and hotel lawns and golf courses.
00:23:47 ►
So it’s essentially an enormous economic engine
00:23:51 ►
for spreading psilocybin spores throughout the planet.
00:23:56 ►
What happens to people that lets them tune in to a deeper level of intent
00:24:01 ►
that wakes them up from the spell of mere consumerism
00:24:06 ►
and the kind of subjectivity that is the manipulation of images and desires
00:24:15 ►
that constitutes consumerism and which dominates many people’s lives.
00:24:20 ►
Well, then they probably head for deeper values,
00:24:24 ►
well, then they probably head for deeper values,
00:24:27 ►
either Buddhism, shamanism,
00:24:36 ►
their own, you know, whatever lies in their own ethnic background.
00:24:40 ►
Because, in fact, civilization is a carnival.
00:24:47 ►
I mean, it’s a cheap, it’s a delusion of a solution.
00:24:50 ►
So anybody who sees past the front door probably wants really real structured values.
00:24:56 ►
And so that’s where all the conservative resistance comes from fundamentalist Christians,
00:25:07 ►
Orthodox Jews,
00:25:09 ►
Buddhists.
00:25:10 ►
All of these people are saying,
00:25:12 ►
well, hey, wait a minute.
00:25:13 ►
We don’t want to go down this path
00:25:17 ►
only so far.
00:25:20 ►
And that’s probably a good break.
00:25:23 ►
Otherwise, we would create a civilization that was essentially a mall,
00:25:28 ►
and there’s enough of that anyway.
00:25:32 ►
So in that sense, that turn towards deeper values,
00:25:35 ►
even if sometimes they take a conservative form,
00:25:38 ►
is ultimately a kind of healthy balance to just the sheer…
00:25:43 ►
Rush toward novelty.
00:25:46 ►
Yeah, I think so.
00:25:48 ►
Do you see psychedelics playing a role in opening up that kind of…
00:25:52 ►
It depends on how it’s presented.
00:25:55 ►
It depends on the psychedelic.
00:26:00 ►
If it comes along with some wizened 90-year-old Indian from South America,
00:26:07 ►
it’s hard to see that we’re abandoning ourselves to the trivial and the concocted.
00:26:16 ►
And so it’s a marketing and packaging issue, basically.
00:26:24 ►
So what would that look like then if you were…
00:26:28 ►
Well, I’d say the wrongly packaged version would be some kind of…
00:26:32 ►
Like Castaneda is a formulaic cult.
00:26:36 ►
Do these things, take these drugs, follow these instructions
00:26:41 ►
and moral obligation will flee from your can,
00:26:47 ►
nobody can be that foolish.
00:26:52 ►
If, on the other hand, you sincerely pursue this stuff,
00:26:58 ►
grow the plants, try to understand it,
00:27:00 ►
try to revivify the rituals and figure out what it’s all about, well,
00:27:06 ►
that’s an authentic push towards spirituality, a very authentic push towards spirituality
00:27:15 ►
and probably fruitful.
00:27:20 ►
Do you think in that process the actual handling of the plants, growing them, getting to know their cycles is necessary?
00:27:31 ►
Yeah, because that’s the level, that’s the speed, that’s the speed on which nature makes this stuff,
00:27:44 ►
brings it to the surface and invites its contemplation.
00:27:49 ►
And it’s also probably the right speed
00:27:51 ►
at which to assimilate this stuff,
00:27:53 ►
to come to terms with it.
00:27:55 ►
So in that sense, part of the problem
00:27:57 ►
with synthetic psychedelics
00:27:59 ►
is that they’ll fit too easily
00:28:01 ►
into a kind of consumerist model.
00:28:06 ►
It’s not a product.
00:28:09 ►
It’s not something you get the drug of the month or something.
00:28:15 ►
Although all these things have been proposed and some have been tried,
00:28:19 ►
it seems to me that the shamanic drug of the month is not a very appealing idea.
00:28:28 ►
What are the emotional, psychological, ethical expressions
00:28:35 ►
of really kind of genuinely long-term good psychedelic people?
00:28:41 ►
psychedelic people?
00:28:47 ►
What is the long-term ethical expression of the good of psychedelic people?
00:28:50 ►
Yeah.
00:28:51 ►
Well, it’s some kind of effort
00:28:56 ►
to separate shit from shinola.
00:28:59 ►
In other words, it’s some kind of effort to distill a truth
00:29:11 ►
from the blooming, buzzing confusion of the universe.
00:29:17 ►
So it’s a branch of, I don’t know what you would say,
00:29:22 ►
cognitive science or something like that.
00:29:25 ►
It’s an effort to define the human essence
00:29:31 ►
away from its content or something like that.
00:29:39 ►
Do you see what I mean?
00:29:41 ►
Explain a little more.
00:29:42 ►
Well, it’s a branch of psychology.
00:29:46 ►
It’s a self-study in psychology.
00:29:49 ►
So anybody who’s taking psychedelics is, I assume,
00:29:53 ►
trying to present a truer image of themselves
00:29:57 ►
to other people and the world
00:30:00 ►
through this process of distillation of understanding. That’s where the connection
00:30:09 ►
to alchemy and all that comes in. This distillation of essence away from the dross confusion and
00:30:18 ►
gnostic muck of the world is a kind of like a union individuation process
00:30:28 ►
or something like that.
00:30:30 ►
And that manifests in the call
00:30:33 ►
even in normal life
00:30:35 ►
to present yourself,
00:30:38 ►
articulate oneself differently.
00:30:41 ►
I think so, yeah.
00:30:43 ►
And causes people to be willing to take chances, both
00:30:49 ►
pharmacological and sociological, by being involved in something so marginal.
00:30:58 ►
Because in the big civilizations this kind of shamanic stuff is definitely very marginal.
00:31:09 ►
Most people just don’t do it.
00:31:11 ►
Do you feel that that characterizes the overall
00:31:14 ►
or in some significant way
00:31:16 ►
the kind of people that you’ve met for the last…
00:31:20 ►
It depends on how often they do it.
00:31:23 ►
Some people are doing it because their friends are doing it
00:31:26 ►
some people are doing it because
00:31:27 ►
some
00:31:29 ►
I don’t know
00:31:32 ►
they’re feeling some kind of social pressure
00:31:34 ►
but the people who are really called to do it
00:31:37 ►
are rare
00:31:39 ►
you know the people who say
00:31:40 ►
well I get loaded ten times a year
00:31:44 ►
on high dose psychedelics or six times a year on high-dose psychedelics
00:31:46 ►
or six times a year.
00:31:48 ►
That’s a lot.
00:31:49 ►
I mean, that means your lifestyle is pretty much defined by all that stuff.
00:31:58 ►
Yeah, I would love to know what the real numbers are.
00:32:02 ►
How many people a year get really loaded
00:32:07 ►
once you get the Amazon Indians out,
00:32:12 ►
the Mexicans out,
00:32:14 ►
and a few of these people out.
00:32:16 ►
It’s hard to even know
00:32:17 ►
how you begin to make an estimate.
00:32:21 ►
Before your sickness,
00:32:23 ►
how often did you do large journeys?
00:32:27 ►
Less and less often. I noticed that through the 90s.
00:32:33 ►
But maybe four or five times a year.
00:32:38 ►
But I always felt never enough.
00:32:42 ►
Never enough. Never enough.
00:32:45 ►
So do you have the sense that the tripping on some level are getting something done?
00:32:52 ►
That tripping is getting something done?
00:32:56 ►
Yes, that there’s something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?
00:33:01 ►
Yeah, I assume that basically the download called history,
00:33:07 ►
meaning all the technology, social innovation, philosophy, art, fashion, architecture,
00:33:12 ►
is some kind of dialogue with this higher mind.
00:33:20 ►
I’m not entirely comfortable with that.
00:33:27 ►
mind, I’m not entirely comfortable with that, but this higher mind that keeps showing these
00:33:34 ►
different facets through the mist. I mean that science and psychedelic and all this
00:33:42 ►
is a dialogue with the mathematical deep structure of nature. And that somehow as you get that out,
00:33:45 ►
there’s this sense of progress,
00:33:48 ►
more than a sense of progress, progress.
00:33:52 ►
And I don’t…
00:33:54 ►
And in terms of what is it all leading toward
00:33:58 ►
or what it’s about,
00:33:59 ►
it must be something about
00:34:01 ►
like the spiritualization of matter.
00:34:04 ►
must be something about the spiritualization of matter. That matter is evolving toward quintessence or essence or something like that.
00:34:15 ►
And we’re the startled witnesses to this thing
00:34:21 ►
because we’re part of this stuff that I called emergent properties or the side
00:34:33 ►
effects you could almost say of the universal emergence of matter into spirit. because that’s what biology is. I think biology is the quantum mechanical magnification of uncertainty
00:34:54 ►
into macro-physical space
00:34:57 ►
so that essentially we’re chemical systems
00:35:01 ►
that by some means, yet to be understood, amplify quantum mechanical
00:35:08 ►
uncertainty into dimensions such as we see. And that’s the trick.
00:35:29 ►
That’s the trick explained on one level.
00:35:33 ►
You know, it’s funny, in your raps you stay away from what to a lot of people would be
00:35:43 ►
what to a lot of people would be would be considered spirituality
00:35:44 ►
in a way
00:35:47 ►
like the way that somebody would present
00:35:50 ►
their
00:35:51 ►
you know
00:35:53 ►
Jewish spirituality
00:35:54 ►
or kind of Buddhist practice
00:35:56 ►
or whatever
00:35:57 ►
you don’t talk
00:35:57 ►
in fact often you sort of
00:35:59 ►
like you slag the guru model
00:36:02 ►
and you kind of
00:36:04 ►
separate yourself from that and you really have a kind of like you maintain slagged the guru model, and you kind of separate yourself from that,
00:36:05 ►
and you really have a kind of,
00:36:07 ►
like you’ve maintained a sort of,
00:36:09 ►
I don’t know, I don’t want to characterize it,
00:36:11 ►
and yet at points, obviously,
00:36:14 ►
you are motivated by something
00:36:15 ►
that in your own language you would call spiritual.
00:36:20 ►
Well.
00:36:20 ►
What comes up around that word?
00:36:25 ►
I guess I believe I’m some form of progressive history,
00:36:31 ►
that history is progressive.
00:36:34 ►
So then the story of evolution and biology and human culture and all this
00:36:41 ►
is assumed to be a story with a happy ending.
00:36:46 ►
So in a way, this belief in telos, which is not philosophically sanctioned,
00:36:54 ►
or this eschatological vein in my personality is what gives it a spiritual impulse.
00:37:02 ►
But it’s the idea that time, It’s an alchemical idea, actually.
00:37:06 ►
It’s the idea that time will perfect matter.
00:37:11 ►
And I think it probably will perfect matter.
00:37:17 ►
What do you think about…
00:37:18 ►
Do you think that postmodern spirituality
00:37:20 ►
is a sort of legitimate term or project?
00:37:24 ►
Modern spirituality is a sort of legitimate term or project.
00:37:30 ►
You mean to believe or involve yourself in?
00:37:32 ►
Believe. It’s not really about belief.
00:37:36 ►
I mean that whatever the kind… I mean, there’s a lot of people now
00:37:37 ►
who are developing a relationship
00:37:39 ►
with all different kinds of spiritual practice.
00:37:41 ►
And they’re not really doing it
00:37:42 ►
even in the way that people did in the 70s
00:37:46 ►
where there was so much more true believing.
00:37:48 ►
It’s a different kind of relationship.
00:37:50 ►
It’s probably on a short spin,
00:37:53 ►
a short cycle,
00:37:55 ►
that a lot of empiricists are taking up Dzogchen
00:37:59 ►
and how long can that go on?
00:38:03 ►
So then there’ll be a lot of revisionism
00:38:06 ►
and rethinking and recasting of all this,
00:38:10 ►
which is the very best thing for it.
00:38:13 ►
Yes, it is.
00:38:14 ►
So were you ever very interested in meditation or yoga?
00:38:18 ►
When I was in India,
00:38:20 ►
and immediately before I went to India,
00:38:22 ►
when I was in the Seychelles the first time,
00:38:26 ►
I was because when I was in Mombasa, Kenya,
00:38:32 ►
I came upon this place called, I can’t remember anyway,
00:38:37 ►
it was a library that was basically having a bargain sale in theosophical literature.
00:38:43 ►
basically having a bargain sale in theosophical literature.
00:38:53 ►
So I took about 50 kilos of yogic Arthur Avalon theosophical literature with me to the Seychelles.
00:38:55 ►
And that was what I read and worked through when I was out there.
00:39:00 ►
How is it that you relate to mysticism, to mystical experience?
00:39:05 ►
Oh, you mean as a source of valid data about what’s going on?
00:39:11 ►
Not even that far.
00:39:12 ►
I mean, that’s one way of saying, of judging it in one way or another.
00:39:15 ►
It doesn’t necessarily be valid data.
00:39:18 ►
It’s just, I mean, you’ve been interested in this library, obviously.
00:39:21 ►
Mysticism is completely surrounding us.
00:39:24 ►
interesting that this library, obviously, mysticism is completely surrounding us.
00:39:31 ►
Well, I guess I would say the more personal the mystical indicator is, probably the more likely I am to take it seriously. In other words, it seems to me if you extrapolate your
00:39:38 ►
mystical insight beyond the personal, you probably enter into the domain of inflation of some
00:39:47 ►
some kind of psychological inflation so was Plato inflated was Plato inflated
00:40:06 ►
No, probably not, but he probably gets a pass as some kind of pioneer.
00:40:18 ►
You could just start out by talking about the relationship between technology and shamanism.
00:40:29 ►
Well, you remember Eliade’s basic book, which is Shamanism, the Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.
00:40:33 ►
That book was originally written in French.
00:40:44 ►
And in French, as I don’t have to tell you, the word technique has this dual meaning of both a way to do something and a technology. So from Miliad’s point of
00:40:48 ►
view, shamanism was always about using techniques to achieve these, what he called ruptures
00:40:58 ►
of plane. And these ruptures of plane were these breakthroughs into these healing spaces.
00:41:07 ►
And for him it was always drugs, yoga or ordeal or maybe yoga slash ordeal.
00:41:19 ►
So in a way pushing on the frontier of language
00:41:26 ►
and pushing on the frontier of technique
00:41:30 ►
always brought some form of breakthrough.
00:41:36 ►
And I suppose the perfect example would be fire,
00:41:40 ►
where fire must have been something…
00:41:43 ►
We talked about the Smith thing yesterday.
00:41:46 ►
So fire technology, the transformation,
00:41:52 ►
the visible transformation of materials through heat,
00:41:56 ►
and all of that leads straight into better weapons,
00:42:02 ►
stronger building materials, and so forth.
00:42:09 ►
So, do you see then that even though the West turns away from the world view of pre-modern,
00:42:19 ►
the enchanted universe, is that there’s still something in that process of technological development
00:42:26 ►
which is linked to those older technologies?
00:42:30 ►
Well, the way chips are made
00:42:32 ►
and the way solid-state objects are assembled
00:42:36 ►
often is just a matter of bringing a mix of materials to a certain temperature
00:42:46 ►
and a certain proportion of materials
00:42:50 ►
and then standing back and letting the laws of physics rearrange the atoms
00:42:55 ►
so that electricity or information or something flows through this in an unexpected way.
00:43:02 ►
So I think we’re still involved in discovering
00:43:05 ►
what can be coaxed from the physical world
00:43:12 ►
just by letting physical laws unravel themselves.
00:43:17 ►
And that seems to you connected with an old…
00:43:20 ►
the operation of doing that goes farther back
00:43:24 ►
than just modern science.
00:43:28 ►
You know, at low temperatures, it’s about psychoactive drugs
00:43:34 ►
and brewing and combining biological materials.
00:43:38 ►
And then at higher temperatures, it becomes about this other thing.
00:43:43 ►
One of my alchemical readings of modernity
00:43:46 ►
is that electricity is a kind of element
00:43:51 ►
in the old sense of element.
00:43:54 ►
And that it has certain properties
00:43:56 ►
that evolve as you develop
00:43:57 ►
almost a shamanic relationship with it
00:44:00 ►
in the sense of using it
00:44:01 ►
and developing a relationship
00:44:03 ►
with electrical potentials.
00:44:05 ►
And that that sets up a kind of,
00:44:08 ►
that interjects a kind of life into the human organism
00:44:10 ►
that fundamentally changes it,
00:44:12 ►
because it’s introducing this element of electricity
00:44:15 ►
which has certain properties of communication.
00:44:18 ►
I mean, electricity is very strange.
00:44:20 ►
It’s pretty far-out stuff.
00:44:21 ►
You just laid out electricity to somebody
00:44:25 ►
and just kind of said,
00:44:26 ►
these are how these fields work
00:44:27 ►
and they’re not actually…
00:44:29 ►
It’s like total science fiction.
00:44:31 ►
We’re just sort of used to that story.
00:44:33 ►
It’s an amazing thing.
00:44:34 ►
And those potentials are being then introduced
00:44:37 ►
into human communication.
00:44:39 ►
So that fundamentally changes them.
00:44:41 ►
And I think spiritualism is like a reflection
00:44:44 ►
in the archetypal imagination
00:44:46 ►
of modernity about the kind of communication that is introduced by electricity.
00:44:52 ►
Interesting. It’s sort of, you know, McLuhan had this idea about the third person
00:45:01 ►
of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, was electricity.
00:45:06 ►
And the covering of the earth by the matrix of the Holy Ghost
00:45:12 ►
had initiated the third world age and all this.
00:45:16 ►
Right. And that picks up a line of thought that’s been carried through since it first starts.
00:45:21 ►
I mean, the idea of electricity is born in an alchemical imagination.
00:45:27 ►
It’s born at a pre-point
00:45:31 ►
to the sort of royal society break
00:45:34 ►
or whatever you want to call it,
00:45:35 ►
the genuine scientific transformation
00:45:39 ►
that split alchemy
00:45:40 ►
into this shadow realm of culture.
00:45:43 ►
But it comes up in that alchemical matrix.
00:45:48 ►
In Mason Dixon, there are scenes in Philadelphia
00:45:52 ►
in the 1770s in coffee houses
00:45:56 ►
where electricity is being sold as a drug.
00:46:02 ►
You pay your money and then you grab onto this thing and they rip
00:46:07 ►
this thing around until it throws you off and you pick yourself up off the floor and
00:46:13 ►
then go back and pay again and get more. Just this insane scene.
00:46:22 ►
It’s funny to say that when you look at 20th century science, even though its story has
00:46:28 ►
nothing to do with alchemy, that it really is this kind of fulfilling of visionary notions
00:46:37 ►
about the way that matter and energy and mind can be stitched together.
00:46:42 ►
Well, and it turns out it’s all true.
00:46:47 ►
I mean, what 20th century science proved is you can actually do almost anything.
00:46:51 ►
And so, you know, you want to change lead to gold,
00:46:54 ►
you want to create life,
00:46:56 ►
you want to store information in crystals,
00:46:59 ►
all these things.
00:47:00 ►
It’s now come to pass,
00:47:02 ►
and much, much more besides,
00:47:11 ►
things it’s now come to pass and much much more besides proving that matter is really magical material that you can pull off all these tricks with soism of it, the shifting imagery,
00:47:27 ►
the associational…
00:47:29 ►
Yeah, the associational schemas
00:47:33 ►
are very attractive.
00:47:36 ►
They are.
00:47:36 ►
What do you mean it’s behind them?
00:47:39 ►
Well, you know,
00:47:40 ►
the basic concept is that somehow
00:47:43 ►
intuition and nature are reflective of each other.
00:47:49 ►
Until that hypothesis fails, we should probably hang on to it.
00:47:55 ►
Because look how far we’ve gotten.
00:47:58 ►
I mean, it is really bizarre how much of nature the human mind seems to be able to understand.
00:48:04 ►
I mean, my god,
00:48:07 ►
instruments are circling around Ganymede based on some guy in a powdered wig looking out
00:48:16 ►
his crenellated window, you know, figuring out this shit. How did they pull that trick
00:48:23 ►
off?
00:48:33 ►
Well, I mean, that gets that whole thing about the sort of destiny of technology or the way that it, I mean, it’s…
00:48:36 ►
Yeah, it’s like a white cane,
00:48:39 ►
and you’re just feeling forward into the universe, you know.
00:48:44 ►
And, you know, what is it all leading toward?
00:48:48 ►
How do you, in your own head, have come to, let’s say, reconcile those two sides?
00:48:57 ►
The side that’s mystical or fascinated by these questions of the soul or the things that are beyond reason and the intuition
00:49:09 ►
and the way that you relate to reason,
00:49:15 ►
at least as it’s sort of expressed through a certain kind of skepticism
00:49:19 ►
and a certain kind of love of science?
00:49:25 ►
Well, I think I still believe what the angel told Descartes,
00:49:29 ►
which is nature is understood through the coordination
00:49:33 ►
of measurement and proportion.
00:49:38 ►
So really nature is the study of proportion
00:49:43 ►
and the making of measurement and there doesn’t seem to be any
00:49:49 ►
problem in any we have very powerful instruments for taking measurements and very powerful
00:49:56 ►
instruments now for modeling and constraining the data and we’re making progress. I mean, I think, you know, in terms of stuff like the Internet,
00:50:11 ►
human longevity, recovery of energy sources,
00:50:15 ►
and all this sort of thing,
00:50:16 ►
that humanity is probably in great shape for the next hundred years,
00:50:22 ►
if anybody gives a shit, but that kind of time scale.
00:50:29 ►
So you’re not as sort of overwhelmed
00:50:31 ►
with the kind of dystopian scenario,
00:50:34 ►
which is obviously an easy thing to do
00:50:35 ►
when contemplating the future?
00:50:37 ►
Yeah, I think that dystopian in the sense of losing control
00:50:41 ►
of primary processes inside civilization
00:50:46 ►
and so having disease, fascism, economic breakdown, problems like that.
00:50:53 ►
No, I’m pretty high faith in systemics.
00:51:00 ►
Do you see the Internet as being both…
00:51:04 ►
Is that more of a hopeful direction,
00:51:06 ►
or can you see it also exacerbating the problem?
00:51:09 ►
No, I think it’s more of a hopeful direction.
00:51:12 ►
My…
00:51:13 ►
The happy story I like to tell myself about the Internet
00:51:17 ►
is someone in some tiny village up in Ontario
00:51:22 ►
or in Kenya or in Brazil somewhere,
00:51:26 ►
who gets next to the Internet and realizes,
00:51:30 ►
I can get out of this preposterous scene by simply,
00:51:35 ►
if I’m ambitious, if I just unleash my own ambition
00:51:40 ►
and the educational power of this,
00:51:43 ►
then I can go to the large city and conquer,
00:51:47 ►
go to the capital and export myself to somewhere else.
00:51:51 ►
And I assume this has happened.
00:51:56 ►
Because you meet in the third world incredibly ambitious people
00:52:00 ►
who only by their circumstance are confined.
00:52:04 ►
Well, if you rearrange their circumstance,
00:52:07 ►
so if they want a degree in electrical engineering, all they have to do is be online night after
00:52:13 ►
night after night. That’s very exciting.
00:52:18 ►
So how do you see that changing the cultural matrix or the emerging global culture?
00:52:29 ►
Well hopefully it gives it a more international flavor and people realize that there isn’t
00:52:35 ►
a natural elite of native intelligence or something like that.
00:52:44 ►
But in fact there is something
00:52:45 ►
like that. I mean smart people would be a fine thing to put them in charge for a while
00:52:52 ►
and see if that does any good. I mean they’re taking charge where the power and the actual morphogenetic intent
00:53:13 ►
was coming from? The design process.
00:53:19 ►
Do you see that happening? If that’s your vision, you must be a little concerned about the evident power of money and pure greed to drive, largely drive development
00:53:32 ►
rather than design principles with an eye towards the future and social equity and ecological
00:53:38 ►
improvement.
00:53:55 ►
improvement? Yes, except to some degree, except that it is a, people who, you know, Mao said or somebody said, to get rich is glorious. I’d say to get rich is modestly affirmable.
00:54:05 ►
Something like that.
00:54:08 ►
There’s no sin in getting rich
00:54:10 ►
as long as what you’re doing is not
00:54:14 ►
making people into lampshades or something like that.
00:54:22 ►
It’s better than a collectivist goal of some sort, it seems to me.
00:54:28 ►
How do you feel about that conjunction of media manipulation,
00:54:32 ►
money, and celebrity that’s so dominant now?
00:54:37 ►
Well, you have to have something to sell.
00:54:40 ►
You have to have something people actually want.
00:54:43 ►
I mean, if you’re selling the Rolling Stones
00:54:45 ►
or you’re selling Charles Manson
00:54:47 ►
or you’re selling something like that
00:54:49 ►
you might get somewhere
00:54:50 ►
but inherently you can’t sell
00:54:53 ►
that which is
00:54:55 ►
eternal
00:54:57 ►
or it becomes
00:54:59 ►
it turns against itself
00:55:01 ►
so
00:55:03 ►
and that’s what defeated fascism nobody wanted it was ugly ultimate it’s
00:55:12 ►
probably what defeated socialism cinderblock housing facilities this rhetoric I don’t know, social planning ran off the cliff in the 20th century.
00:55:27 ►
Maybe because there were too many people, or too much money, or not enough money, but
00:55:34 ►
something defeated all these utopian visions of how people might have lived. That’s what
00:55:43 ►
I’m hoping doesn’t happen in the next 25 years.
00:55:47 ►
What doesn’t happen?
00:55:48 ►
That some lack of resource or vision doesn’t reveal that we can’t give enough people a bearable life.
00:56:07 ►
bearable life. So we have to live forward into an age of revolution, social turmoil
00:56:17 ►
and struggle for resources. It doesn’t have to be this way. Do you see it going in that direction?
00:56:21 ►
Toward that kind of a struggle. That’s my concern,
00:56:31 ►
that people and institutions not respond to need.
00:56:37 ►
And then what you get is a have-have-not situation.
00:56:43 ►
I mean, you wouldn’t want the first half of the 21st century to look like the first half of the 20th century,
00:56:47 ►
you know, with the equivalent of a Bolshevik dialogue,
00:56:53 ►
the equivalent of whatever soft leftism turned out to mean and be,
00:57:02 ►
because it turned out to mean and be not bloody much as far as I think that
00:57:08 ►
went.
00:57:08 ►
There was a lot of labor unrest, some amelioration of some people’s dilemma in the system, but but the world is far richer than it appears to be and that wealth is not being is not trickling
00:57:32 ►
down or flowing down or making nearly as many people’s lives as good as it could be so far
00:57:38 ►
it doesn’t seem to have gotten out of hand I mean most, if you give them a lot of money, they buy second homes
00:57:46 ►
and collect art. Well, this is not exactly like hunting down Serbs with your shotgun
00:57:53 ►
or something. These entrepreneurial capitalists, this is what they’re doing. They’re building
00:57:59 ►
vast wealth downstream for their children.
00:58:14 ►
It’s probably sort of like the invention of very large and stable sailing vessels.
00:58:19 ►
Whenever that happened, 200 or 200, 250 years ago,
00:58:22 ►
where suddenly a whole bunch of people realized,
00:58:26 ►
all we need is some money,
00:58:27 ►
not too much money.
00:58:31 ►
If we buy a ship and send it out to Indonesia and bring back a load of nutmeg,
00:58:33 ►
our children’s children’s children
00:58:35 ►
will never work again.
00:58:38 ►
We need one load of this ship.
00:58:41 ►
And they have to work, of course,
00:58:45 ►
and then they get a certain lifestyle
00:58:47 ►
and a certain amount of social respect out of it.
00:58:50 ►
But I think what they really get out of it
00:58:52 ►
is the satisfaction of knowing
00:58:54 ►
that they’ve secured for their heirs
00:58:58 ►
a comfortable existence
00:59:01 ►
unto the ninth generation or something.
00:59:06 ►
Well, it’s interesting about that because that ties in with the genetics.
00:59:09 ►
If you buy into some evolutionary psychology, certainly at this stage of the game, one of
00:59:16 ►
the forms that that would take is not merely like the logic that guides how you choose
00:59:22 ►
a mate and the fact that your status and money might,
00:59:25 ►
if you’re a male, bring you a foxier, younger babe than the schmo who’s shoveling shit,
00:59:33 ►
that one form that that would take would of course be to maintain your genetic line in
00:59:40 ►
as great a situation as possible. Well, and now people understand
00:59:46 ►
that this is what your genetic line is about,
00:59:50 ►
that to cope or to be in a Darwinian position
00:59:55 ►
of competition in this society
00:59:57 ►
means to have money,
00:59:59 ►
and not a little, not sufficient,
01:00:03 ►
but plenty,
01:00:04 ►
so that when you need to arrive And not a little, not sufficient, but plenty,
01:00:13 ►
so that when you need to arrive and be met by Rolls-Royce limousines or whatever,
01:00:16 ►
that it’s not an issue and this all comes down.
01:00:22 ►
But do you see that there’s also kind of madness to that?
01:00:26 ►
Yeah, I’m not motivated. I mean, as you see, I need a place to keep some books dry.
01:00:30 ►
Having achieved that, my motivation falls to pieces.
01:00:37 ►
What else do we need to keep dry?
01:00:40 ►
Some firewood, a truck, that’s about as far as I can go.
01:00:47 ►
The way that technology, that the internet would allow you to build a different kind
01:00:54 ►
of career, because you don’t like traveling, what are you working towards?
01:01:01 ►
Well, essentially the philosopher’s stone without any draws.
01:01:07 ►
In other words, everything I require of the alchemical quintessence,
01:01:13 ►
the Internet provides except physicality, which I didn’t require.
01:01:18 ►
So that’s what I meant, I think I said to you yesterday or the day before,
01:01:23 ►
that at times these technological developments have taken place
01:01:27 ►
that seem to me designed uniquely for my own satisfaction.
01:01:34 ►
Sputnik couldn’t have worked better for me.
01:01:39 ►
Acid, rock and roll,
01:01:44 ►
small computers, large computers, the internet.
01:01:49 ►
So in my internal story about what’s supposed to happen,
01:01:55 ►
everything is happening right on time, right on schedule.
01:01:58 ►
I mean, this is the thing that if you believe knowledge is power,
01:02:03 ►
which I certainly do, then the internet
01:02:06 ►
is the dispensation. The angels have landed. The aliens have unfurled their banner on this
01:02:17 ►
planet. And now let’s see if information can liberate. That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die
01:02:27 ►
and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition
01:02:34 ►
that knowledge is power, information will liberate.
01:02:41 ►
And it will be settled in the next 10 or 15 years.
01:02:46 ►
Either they’ll get a handle on it, whoever they are, whatever a handle means,
01:02:51 ►
or it will slip from their control and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue
01:02:59 ►
is now going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge and that nothing
01:03:06 ►
can stop it, that some kind of renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge
01:03:14 ►
and possibility is put in place.
01:03:19 ►
The idea you had about, and I’ve heard you mention before, about somehow taking advantage of
01:03:25 ►
the net to allow you
01:03:28 ►
to continue your career
01:03:29 ►
without having to move around
01:03:32 ►
so much. I mean, that seems to be one of the
01:03:34 ►
real weird paradoxes of the scene
01:03:36 ►
we’re in, is that at the same time as we’re creating
01:03:38 ►
all these great communicating
01:03:40 ►
devices, that
01:03:42 ►
people are flying around
01:03:44 ►
to conferences, to talks, even more than they ever have before.
01:03:50 ►
Yeah, well I don’t really understand that. I mean, like this morning I was looking at
01:03:56 ►
the brain tumor list. Well, fully one third of the brain tumor list is people planning get-togethers
01:04:06 ►
at the next brain tumor conference.
01:04:09 ►
Will you be going to Atlanta?
01:04:11 ►
Will you be going to Vermont?
01:04:13 ►
Are you going to London?
01:04:14 ►
So no matter whether you’re in investment counseling or dying of cancer,
01:04:33 ►
cancer you can turn it into a circuit a life a phenomenon of some sort I’m not very interested we’ve done this you’ve done a circuit for a long time I have I
01:04:38 ►
have and I feel like I’ve paid my dues And I feel like you have to be visibly at some of these things
01:04:48 ►
because you’re marketed as a personality.
01:04:52 ►
And I am not William Burroughs, nor was meant to be.
01:04:59 ►
But I am interested enough in being read
01:05:04 ►
that I’m willing to sign books and stand up and
01:05:10 ►
tell stories.
01:05:11 ►
I’m interested in a little bit of how you use the net.
01:05:17 ►
Say you spend maybe four hours a day doing email but then also surfing? Well, basically as an informational resource,
01:05:28 ►
an oracle,
01:05:29 ►
and sometimes even almost like a magical oracle.
01:05:34 ►
I mean, words will come to me
01:05:36 ►
and so I’ll search them
01:05:38 ►
and just follow the stuff
01:05:40 ►
where there it leads.
01:05:43 ►
So, I don’t know, there’s some some term for that I’m not sure what it
01:05:47 ►
is but yeah it’s like a term for what that’s that style yeah surrealists I guess automatic writing
01:05:58 ►
except this is automatic search inquiry or something like that, where you just cast bread upon the waters
01:06:07 ►
and see what comes back.
01:06:10 ►
Do you ever have the sense of,
01:06:14 ►
as you develop that kind of relationship to it,
01:06:18 ►
that it becomes more alive?
01:06:22 ►
Well, it becomes more synchronistic
01:06:24 ►
in the way that people have said
01:06:26 ►
the I Ching seems eerily alive
01:06:29 ►
because it anticipates
01:06:31 ►
and it seems to respond
01:06:34 ►
like a thinking thing.
01:06:36 ►
So in that sense,
01:06:37 ►
it doesn’t become so much more alive
01:06:39 ►
as it becomes more intelligent.
01:06:44 ►
So maybe really the key to bringing the net through is to discover universal grammars
01:06:52 ►
that cause it to appear alive.
01:07:03 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:07:10 ►
Now, I’ve listened to Terence’s last word just now a couple of times, and am I hearing things, or does Terence’s voice sound somewhat unusual here?
01:07:20 ►
I won’t say what it makes me think of, but I’m sure you already have some ideas of your own.
01:07:24 ►
I won’t say what it makes me think of, but I’m sure you already have some ideas of your own.
01:07:30 ►
Also, let me quote what he had to say just before that, because I think it’s really worth hearing again.
01:07:32 ►
He said, and I quote,
01:07:35 ►
Now let’s see if information can liberate.
01:07:42 ►
That’s why I don’t want to do something stupid like die and miss the whole unfoldment of this proposition that knowledge is power.
01:07:44 ►
Information will liberate, and it
01:07:45 ►
will be settled in the next 10 or 15 years.
01:07:48 ►
Either they’ll get a handle on it, whoever they are, and whatever a handle means, or
01:07:53 ►
it will slip from their control, and it will be clear that some kind of dialogue is now
01:07:57 ►
going on between individual human beings and the sum total of human knowledge, and
01:08:03 ►
that nothing can stop it, that some kind
01:08:05 ►
of renaissance, some kind of total new relationship to knowledge and possibility is put in place.
01:08:12 ►
And, you know, it’s now been over 11 years since he said that, which means that if his
01:08:17 ►
prediction is to be considered, then we have to keep up the pressure on all fronts and
01:08:22 ►
in every country to keep internet access inexpensive and widely available to every person on the planet.
01:08:28 ►
By the way, early in this interview, you just heard Terrence mention
01:08:33 ►
the mescaline experiments of Dr. Havlock Ellis.
01:08:37 ►
And if you’re interested, I’ve located an 1898 essay written by Ellis
01:08:41 ►
that is titled, Mescal, A New Artificial Paradise. And
01:08:46 ►
I’ve linked to it in the program notes for this podcast.
01:08:49 ►
It’s a truly interesting
01:08:50 ►
essay in which he documents the
01:08:52 ►
first time he tried mescaline,
01:08:54 ►
which was on Good Friday in 1897.
01:08:57 ►
And this
01:08:58 ►
actually may have been the first use of that
01:09:00 ►
substance outside of the Americas.
01:09:02 ►
In fact, this well may be the
01:09:04 ►
world’s first trip report written in English. So you may find it worth your time to read if things
01:09:09 ►
like that interest you. And as for their discussion about the virtue
01:09:13 ►
of online conferences versus in-person conferences, well, I have to admit to being on both sides
01:09:20 ►
of that issue. When I was working in the corporate world and earning a nice living, I could afford to go to quite a few workshops and conferences. And had I not attended these
01:09:29 ►
events, I seriously doubt if I would even know some of the people who are now my closest
01:09:34 ►
friends. For example, it was at the All Chemical Arts Conference in Hawaii in September of
01:09:39 ►
1999 that I first met Bruce Dahmer, Galen Brandt, John Hanna, and many others.
01:09:50 ►
And it was at the Planca conferences before that even that I met Daniel Pinschbeck, the Shulgens,
01:09:53 ►
and most importantly, my wife, just to drop a few names.
01:09:57 ►
So you can see how important these physical gatherings have been in my life.
01:10:02 ►
Yet, the problem with them is that they’re quite expensive to attend,
01:10:07 ►
particularly if you are unemployed, and even if you are employed but have to travel to get to them.
01:10:11 ►
And that’s not the fault of the conference organizers, by the way.
01:10:16 ►
These things are just plain expensive to produce, and more often than not, they lose money that their organizers have to come up with on their own.
01:10:18 ►
So the concept of online virtual conferences holds great appeal for me as well, and I hope
01:10:24 ►
that some of them will begin to pop up on the same scale as the in-person conferences.
01:10:29 ►
I’ve made virtual appearances at a few of them over the years, and I’m sure that many,
01:10:34 ►
if not most of the speakers on the psychedelic circuit, if there is such a thing, would participate
01:10:39 ►
without charging a speaker’s fee for large, properly organized online events. So put your thinking cap on if the idea excites you,
01:10:48 ►
and maybe go out on the growreport.com’s forums and find some others to work with you
01:10:53 ►
and put some of these online events together to see if a workable format can be found.
01:10:58 ►
But speaking of in-person conferences,
01:11:00 ►
there is one that is being held this coming October 14th to the 16th, to be exact, Thank you. which is this year celebrating its fifth year. And big congratulations go out to all the people who work on that important conference
01:11:27 ►
for keeping the flame burning in the Big Apple for all those years.
01:11:32 ►
I’ll have more to say about that as the date gets closer,
01:11:34 ►
but you can keep up with their listing of speakers at their website,
01:11:37 ►
which you’ll find at horizY-C.org.
01:11:46 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for today, but my plan is that tomorrow I’ll get the second part of this interview out to you and not keep you waiting a week to hear the rest of it.
01:11:54 ►
And I’ll be mentioning this again in more detail in my next podcast.
01:12:01 ►
that there is still time to make a pledge to Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter campaign
01:12:04 ►
in which he hopes to raise funds necessary
01:12:07 ►
to write and publish a definitive biography
01:12:10 ►
of his brother Terrence.
01:12:11 ►
And I’ll again put the link to that campaign
01:12:14 ►
along with the program notes for this podcast,
01:12:16 ►
which you can find via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:12:19 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:12:22 ►
you can hear something about it in my novel,
01:12:26 ►
The Genesis Generation,
01:12:32 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:12:35 ►
And if you can’t afford to pay anything, it’s available there for you for free.
01:12:40 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends!