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.]
“The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling is to fairly and truly convey it. You can’t cut corners. You can’t fake it… . So that this stuff really does blow people’s minds, so that people see, well, human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul. It doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re wearing too tight a pair of shoes.”
“We have no idea how strange the world we can create in the near term will be.”
“Given the circumstances as we find them, what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique and arose on this planet only?”
“I think that’s the question that remains unanswered, you know, that’s the grail of the thing. What is the nature of the Other, is basically what you’re asking. Is it a construct, a projection or a discovery? It’s not clear to me what it is.”
“ You can’t believe everything you hear. They are of many kind, some are made of ions, some of mind, the ones of DMT, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.”
“I think [ketamine] is an inter-uterine memory drug. I think there are things about it that cause you to recapture some kind of inter-uterine state.”
“The psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn’t just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed or something like that.”
“Mathematics is really what it’s all about when you finally get it sliced thin, I think.”
“All doubt means is that ‘I’m shopping, thank you.‘”
[Before I had cancer] I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind were naturally available to people, and non-lethal. In other words that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures and experience very bizarre states of body/mind dislocation and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience is a lot broader than I previously imagined.”
“The mind can adjust to a great deal more than that which simply kills it.”
“Given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death. It’s bound to be mighty strange, life was mighty strange, and I’m curious. … It’s an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life left, because it composes your mind for you, wonderfully.”
“What psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises. I consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle. The fact that that can happen to your mind. So it means that all kinds of things are possible.”
Animations Mentioned in this Podcast
Asparagus [1979]
Quasi at the Quackadero
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
From cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
And here with me, in virtual form at least, are several other salonners who either made donations to the salon,
00:00:37 ►
or who made a contribution for my Pay What You Can audiobook, my M, Joanna S, frequent donor Mark C, David D. C, and my dear friend Seabrook, who not only made an extremely generous donation to the salon, he’s also featured in Podcast 111, Establishing a Tribal Land Base.
00:01:02 ►
Establishing a Tribal Land Base.
00:01:06 ►
And you can also see the beginning of that talk where he does a really great rap,
00:01:11 ►
and I featured that in one of my YouTube videos that I’ll link to in the program notes for this podcast.
00:01:17 ►
Now already there have been some excellent comments about the first part of this interview, which I posted yesterday, and I’m sure that you’ll agree with me
00:01:20 ►
that Eric Davis did a fantastic job of conducting this interview.
00:01:25 ►
agree with me that Eric Davis did a fantastic job of conducting this interview. In fact, listening to Eric’s probing questions has caused me to start thinking of him as
00:01:31 ►
the psychedelic David Frost.
00:01:33 ►
No matter what you may think of Mr. Frost, I suspect that you’ll agree he is one of the
00:01:38 ►
best in the business.
00:01:40 ►
Move over, David.
00:01:41 ►
Eric Davis is now in the house.
00:01:44 ►
One last thing to keep in mind as we listen to the rest of this interview
00:01:47 ►
is the fact that this was conducted around the 1st of November in 1999,
00:01:53 ►
long before Facebook and Twitter were even a gleam in their inventors’ eyes.
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But somehow Terrence seemed to have a curious presentment about where the net was already heading, as you’ll soon hear.
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presentment about where the net was already heading as you’ll soon hear. And now here are Eric Davis and Terrance McKenna at Terrance’s house on the Big Island of Hawaii
00:02:11 ►
one evening just before bedtime.
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If you look at what we’re building with VR, what’s just around the corner
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with these kind of three-dimensional interactive spaces and avatars.
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Imagine a culture that’s more and more based on that kind of interaction.
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And obviously there’s a kind of superficial shamanic
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or imaginative dimension to that.
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But at the same time, it’s clear that at least initially,
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and certainly in many of its guises,
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it will be driven by the same kind of chintziness,
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the same sort of crass, tinkly junk that really drives it.
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Do you think it’s just going to naturally evolve
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such that a kind of deeper shamanic world
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or at least shamanic analog will emerge in virtual reality
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or does it actually require some real creative work to seed it?
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It requires creative work.
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It requires that the people who build these realities
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understand how subtle what they’re up against is
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and not abandon a commitment to realism.
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The trick to making the shamanic virtual world compelling
00:03:40 ►
is to fairly and truly convey it.
00:03:49 ►
So you can’t cut corners you can’t fake it so animation and the rules of all this stuff have to be faithfully executed so that this stuff really
00:03:58 ►
does blow people’s minds so that people see well the human imagination is large enough to accommodate the human soul
00:04:09 ►
it doesn’t leave you feeling like you’re wearing too tight a pair of shoes and that’s the that’s
00:04:16 ►
the dangers it just becomes kind of a formulaic to formulate easy, not that the software couldn’t use some improvement, but I don’t
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want it to become so easy to produce these virtual realities that there’s no attention
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to detail or no sense of accomplishment in doing it. What would the kind of ideal Terence McKenna virtual environment be?
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Well, all of these, I guess you would call them models or explanations,
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beginning with basic chemistry right up to hierarchy and management theory,
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because all these processes can be envisioned
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as interlocking sets of laws and that sort of thing.
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So that’s, I guess, what we’re talking about,
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is how the world should become more visual,
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should ride more on a vocabulary of visual assumptions
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that everybody has learned.
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We all know that a Bugs Bunny cartoon
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is a land of explosions and falling anvils.
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Well, we learned that.
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We were taught that.
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So there needs to be more of this kind of slotting in of, I
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don’t know what you would call them, assumptions or gestalts that can be used as a vocabulary
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to communicate this stuff.
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Like a language, a visual language?
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Yes, exactly. So do you see that some languages from the past,
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the imagery of alchemy or Egyptian art or things like that,
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can be seen as predecessors for a possible new visual language?
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Well, this is where memory palaces and archetypes and all this stuff come in,
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that was always the hope.
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It’s not clear it can be realized.
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And that’s why you go through the Maya, the Egyptian, the alchemical,
00:06:36 ►
looking for these universal gestalts of meaning.
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But they’re spread wide and far
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and it may have to be created de novo.
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Well, that’s part of the, I think,
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more of a skeptic would really say
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the idea of building a universal language
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is an old and crusty dream.
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And when you get into the realm
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of actually having images involved in it
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and a kind of hieroglyphics of virtual space that are linked with meaning,
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it becomes even more challenging to imagine how you can make that kind of thing universal,
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unless it’s the universe of the Nike swoosh.
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It’s the universe of logos and advertising, which actually is somewhat like this, except that its information content is…
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And people spend a huge amount of money to establish these gestalts.
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Exactly.
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Yes, yeah.
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So I don’t, I’m not, many of our discussions have led to this point
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where we seem to say, well, there’s something about the thermodynamics of information that we don’t understand,
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something about lexical categories,
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something about how language wants to emerge from the background of matrix,
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but something about how we process language holds this back.
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So then there’s a negotiation at some kind of fractal edge,
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and that’s where we’re at.
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But not necessarily.
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I mean, that’s why I encourage everybody to think about animation
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and think about it in practical terms,
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to look at objects and pose these things to themselves
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as modelable problems,
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because out of that will come a language rich enough
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to support an actual form of human communication
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that’s been very elusive or maybe never in hand at all.
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Well, it’s really interesting when you talk to people or listen to people
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how many people who take psychedelics
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have cartoon-like encounters with beings or…
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And you say, well, gee, this is weird.
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Cartoons only go back to 1920 or 15 or something.
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How weird that such an out-there technical phenomenon
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could just grab a whole section of human psychology
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and camp there with that kind of tenacity.
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And to me, that indicates it has some kind of archetypal
00:09:29 ►
claim on that territory, and a claim which it can only continue to tighten over time.
00:09:38 ►
Have you ever seen that Scott McCloud book, Understanding Comics?
00:09:42 ►
No.
00:09:43 ►
Oh, that’s worthwhile.
00:09:44 ►
Is that a good one? Yes, it’s a really good one.
00:09:46 ►
Very good.
00:09:48 ►
I mean, it’s just sort of getting at a grammar.
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You know, a lot of cartoonists disagree, and they’re a very irascible lot, and a lot of
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comic people are like, no, it’s bullshit.
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But it’s a very interesting attempt to use the form itself to talk about the specifics
00:10:00 ►
of the form.
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I mean, it’s really about comic art, but it applies to some of these issues of animation and cartooning.
00:10:07 ►
Well, the great genius of Disney,
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I mean, Disney is my idea
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beyond Edison or Ford or anybody,
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of what we really mean by an American genius
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because he had mice who wear gloves
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living inside his head,
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but he was able to create a mechanical technology
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to show people these mice.
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So instead of just being put quietly away
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by his brother or something like that,
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he said, no, no, you don’t understand.
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Money.
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This is worth money.
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If we can show people these glove-wearing mice
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and talking ducks and all this stuff.
00:10:53 ►
And then he was sufficiently a true American Yankee genius
00:10:59 ►
that he saw how to take a flip book
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and put it on cellulid and do all that.
00:11:07 ►
Yeah, I think Disney is a very, very far out person.
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He went to the platonic ideas and came back with baskets full of them
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and released them in American towns and cities and did very well.
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I mean, animation is a great place to see the reflection of things that are happening,
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you know, in the culture at large.
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And certain people take it to incredible heights.
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Have you seen, do you know that animation called Asparagus?
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You should check it out.
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It’s about 20, maybe it’s 15 or 20 years old,
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but it’s very highly detailed,
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as realistic as a van Eyck painting,
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and totally surreal.
00:12:02 ►
And there’s also, do you know that one by Sally Cruikshank called Quasi
00:12:09 ►
at the Quackadero? That’s a D&T extravagance, a carnival, basically, a cartoon about a carnival
00:12:20 ►
that is a carnival crazy enough to convince you you should go take
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drugs, basically. And Max Fleischer was a genius and all these people.
00:12:33 ►
Fleischer was great. I think Fleischer is the true origin of underground comics. I think that you find the most pregnant images of a certain kind of seedy,
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like the way that Rar Krum presents a certain kind of seediness
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and sort of failure of the bodies and spaces.
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And yet that’s infused with a kind of magical eye.
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So you really have that both in flesh,
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and you really have the mania of the Betty Boop,
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but also a certain real kind of quotidian,
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almost proletarian graininess to these characters.
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He’s very immigrant.
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It would be very hard to imagine post-modernity
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without Crumb’s input.
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I consider him an absolute psychedelic genius very few people
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have had the influence without the karma that crumb had he basically did all that stuff, sold the drawings and moved to a chateau in southern France and called it
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quits and got away with those moves.
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That’s one of the things that I found totally fascinating, the magic of modernity.
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What a strange, strange thing this is.
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Yeah, just the relationship of modernity to esoteric religious
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undercurrents and things which are not accounted for in uh enlightenment discourse yeah what if
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it just gets more and more like this in other words what i think that’s what’s actually happening we’re really headed for our own private Idaho, more faster, deeper, and with more panache
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than anybody ever dared suppose.
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In terms of building our own constructed world perspectives
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and communicating them to some degree,
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but not in a way that dominates ideologically.
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Well, and we have no idea how strange the worlds we can create in the near term will
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be, and yet they will be. It’s coming at you.
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Right. But just how far back to go on what’s witnessing this bizarre moment in history? What point is the perspective
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kind of sitting in? That’s the part I find really hard to figure out. Does that make
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sense?
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Well, that’s the question. Because what that boils down to is how real is it? How real
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is it? Yeah, it’s complicated.
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Every age seems to design its own image of its own dissolution.
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And they happen over and over again. I mean, when I think about the 20th century,
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I mean, Europe, which is the source of world civilization,
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stomped flat twice.
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Millions of refugees, Auschwitz, the whole thing.
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Meanwhile, what went on in the far east of Asia
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and the Asian prosperity wars and all this,
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Asian prosperity wars and all this.
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It’s over and over again,
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these cultures create their Ragnarok and act it out way over the top.
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I mean, Germany for crying out loud.
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Yeah, so how would you describe that character?
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What’s the character of our dissolution
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I don’t know
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I guess it was Nietzsche
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who pushed the myth of the
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eternal return
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so it’s some kind of
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it’s like a
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closed cycle of
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Hegelian
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dynamic
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where it just works itself out.
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Then the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis,
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and the darkness, and then it starts over again.
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That Nichols book that I told you about, Living Time,
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what was most impressive about that book was
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he lays out this idea of time,
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and he basically kind of presents a way of thinking about eternal return,
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which is that we’re locked into these repetitive cycles
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that are eternally reiterating themselves.
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The only way of changing their quality
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is to increase consciousness in the midst of them.
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And so you affirm this life, this world,
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not some transcendent world.
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And then try to solve it.
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Like under the sign of this is always this way.
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And how does that mean to relate to the real as it presents itself
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as if there’s no other thing that can be than that.
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But as you do this process,
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you change your relationship to this stream
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and then all this other heady stuff happens.
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But it was very interesting.
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It was like…
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Because up to that point,
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I’d always said of the eternal return
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on a kind of philosophical level.
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And I never thought,
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what does it mean to actually live
00:18:01 ►
in the world of the eternal return?
00:18:04 ►
And that’s pretty heavy.
00:18:05 ►
That’s interesting. Yeah, well I’ve always felt like that reality was a kind of thing,
00:18:14 ►
that the way you made progress was you grasped it in the sense that you grasp a mathematical
00:18:21 ►
or geometric proposition or something like that. That it’s something which once understood on some level
00:18:28 ►
clears the way to advance a very short distance.
00:18:33 ►
So that’s what you’re always trying to do
00:18:35 ►
is create this lexical space of presumed understanding
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and live inside that.
00:18:44 ►
What are some of your wilder ideas understanding and live inside that.
00:18:45 ►
What are some of your wilder ideas about technological situations?
00:18:51 ►
Should there be a technology or lying ahead?
00:18:55 ►
Well the vision I always saw as inevitable, and I still do and I’m very attracted to it,
00:19:02 ►
and shall be sorry to miss it if I do. And that
00:19:06 ►
is, I can imagine the 20th century defined, I mean the next century defined by huge spacecraft
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that cycle from the inner to the outer solar system. That seems to me the way to do it,
00:19:26 ►
to create these worlds which have like, say, 80-year orbits
00:19:32 ►
that carry them clear out to Uranus and all these places,
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and to the inner solar system,
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and that these things are just self-constructed hives of human
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activity and they invent their own raison d’etre at each point in these
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voyages and there’s travel between them but largely they are city-sized or
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larger constructs and that must be how it will work,
00:20:07 ►
powdering down asteroids.
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I would really like to
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see a breakout in the next century.
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How long can we wait for star flight?
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I mean, how long before the contradictions in terrestrial existence
00:20:28 ►
just become too tearing,
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and you either have to go to some kind of fascism
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to really turn the screws,
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or things fly to pieces.
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But I really always felt, as a science fiction fan and all that,
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that star flight, that galactic citizenship
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was what you’re aiming for.
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And even if you’re the only fucking citizen, that’s fine.
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But if you have to go up to the great council of the Tlixilu
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or whatever that shit was in Dune.
00:21:07 ►
But yeah, this fleeing ourselves around the solar system,
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that’s obviously all doable.
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In other words, it doesn’t require any rearrangement of the laws of physics.
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It just requires that we don’t all murder each other
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and we continue to pursue commerce.
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So this is reasonable on some level to expect.
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And there needs to be…
00:21:34 ►
I wish there were a face on Mars or something like that
00:21:38 ►
that would drag the popular imagination.
00:21:41 ►
I see strong movements in some levels for
00:21:47 ►
an imagination of Mars as a place to inhabit. It seems like Mars is happening.
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It’s in the scientific imagination, it’s in the high science fiction imagination. Why
00:22:01 ►
not? It’s a pretty cool idea. I mean, it’s insane.
00:22:06 ►
It’s like, I wouldn’t go first.
00:22:10 ►
Or a 10,000th, probably.
00:22:14 ►
Well, between that and what’s out at the edge of the solar system,
00:22:20 ►
it seems to get quite exotic.
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And as what life is understood to be expands,
00:22:29 ►
it’s all converging. I mean, there is mind under the ice of Europa. I don’t know mind,
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but there’s a lot of complicated and hard to define and edgy shit on the moons of Jupiter
00:22:47 ►
hard to define and edgy shit on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
00:22:49 ►
What do you mean, like edgy shit?
00:22:56 ►
Well, like hot water trapped in methane environments under deep ice.
00:22:58 ►
You know, there’s this lake… Hot water in the air force, okay.
00:23:00 ►
And complicated chemistry.
00:23:03 ►
And, you know, they’re drilling into this lake in Antarctica
00:23:06 ►
that’s under 4,000 meters of ice
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and has been there 20 million years
00:23:12 ►
and utterly undisturbed in total darkness
00:23:15 ►
in this insane geological…
00:23:18 ►
And they’re culturing stuff out of it,
00:23:22 ►
out of the mud that’s been under there.
00:23:32 ►
It’s alive. it’s still alive so yeah isn’t that business yes yes exactly so if I you know would be a great time to be a xenobiologist.
00:23:49 ►
And it could be Europa, it could be Titan, it could be Mars.
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That would just be a fascinating encounter.
00:23:56 ►
Yeah, that’s a great wrap.
00:23:57 ►
But that almost seems more likely,
00:24:00 ►
that we’d encounter some kind of weird life form underneath.
00:24:03 ►
But it’s not, you know… I’m here from Orion!
00:24:04 ►
We’re not interested in you. underneath, but it’s not, you know, I’m here from Orion.
00:24:07 ►
We’re not interested in you.
00:24:08 ►
We have no questions.
00:24:10 ►
We have no answers.
00:24:21 ►
This idea has been gaining strength for 20 years that life is not unique to Earth. It must have drifted in on a chunk of stuff and it’s
00:24:29 ►
it’s an alchemical rule it’s the rule of homogeneity as above so below given the circumstances as we
00:24:39 ►
find them what rational momentum is there to think that life is unique
00:24:46 ►
and arose on this planet only.
00:24:50 ►
It’s much easier for me to imagine
00:24:53 ►
that on a certain level,
00:24:54 ►
but at least the galaxy,
00:24:56 ►
our local part of the galaxy,
00:24:58 ►
has some kind of other mind.
00:25:00 ►
I mean, it may be not true,
00:25:04 ►
but it’s almost the same way of the way that we model,
00:25:07 ►
hopefully model a future.
00:25:10 ►
It’s almost like you kind of imagine it.
00:25:12 ►
So that all the, you know, Star Trek even is kind of this weird dress rehearsal
00:25:16 ►
for a certain phase of this kind of realization.
00:25:21 ►
That’s just a story, just a science fiction story.
00:25:23 ►
Well, but you could have said it of Jules Verne
00:25:26 ►
in 1885
00:25:28 ►
and been right.
00:25:32 ►
Yeah, it is a
00:25:34 ►
rehearsal.
00:25:37 ►
And, you know,
00:25:38 ►
psychedelics kind of seem like, to me,
00:25:40 ►
imaginative rehearsals of
00:25:41 ►
some other event. And whether that event
00:25:44 ►
is merely my own individual
00:25:45 ►
death or some kind of cosmic event I completely suspend judgment on and I don’t know if I will
00:25:53 ►
be able to I don’t think I’ll move from my present position of like well who knows yes it’s the big who knows. So what do you think’s up with the extraterrestrial
00:26:09 ►
imagery that features so heavily in some strands of psychedelic experience? You mean the cat-eyed
00:26:19 ►
that kind of imagery? The cat-eyed alien, gray, pudgy, little, that and just the sense of, I think
00:26:28 ►
it seems like a lot of people just even describe the sense of an extraterrestrial intelligence.
00:26:37 ►
Well, remember we were talking last night about how everything wants to articulate itself, everything wants somehow to communicate
00:26:46 ►
and be perceived as language.
00:26:49 ►
When that impulse is most clearly separated
00:26:55 ►
from its object or from its source,
00:26:58 ►
I guess you’d say,
00:27:00 ►
then maybe that’s what you get, is this Gumby-like pure impulse toward communication
00:27:11 ►
or something like that.
00:27:13 ►
I mean, it seems to me it’s like
00:27:15 ►
looking at a pure function,
00:27:21 ►
a pure psychological function of some sort.
00:27:25 ►
You see what I mean?
00:27:26 ►
No longer rooted in…
00:27:28 ►
In its source.
00:27:29 ►
Source being biology and the evolution of physical form on this particular planet.
00:27:35 ►
Yeah.
00:27:36 ►
And so that once it reaches a certain kind of…
00:27:39 ►
It can actually walk away from itself.
00:27:42 ►
And then there you have it.
00:27:44 ►
And you’re saying,
00:27:45 ►
what is this?
00:27:47 ►
It’s category confounding.
00:27:49 ►
It can’t be.
00:27:50 ►
It’s an essence without an object
00:27:55 ►
or something like that.
00:27:58 ►
Yeah, I’ve had some pretty profound moments
00:28:02 ►
of feeling like contact
00:28:04 ►
with something like extraterrestrial
00:28:08 ►
intelligence without believing it even often in the interior of the trip that it was…
00:28:13 ►
Oh, you mean while loaded?
00:28:14 ►
Yeah, even at the time going, okay, this is…
00:28:17 ►
I’ll let this happen.
00:28:19 ►
Yeah, this is a phenomenon occurring, rather than, oh, I’m finally seeing it. Or maybe you’re just
00:28:27 ►
sort of geared for it with science fiction.
00:28:30 ►
So how real was it?
00:28:33 ►
Well, I mean, maybe it’s just the language that I use for other. If you present me with
00:28:40 ►
some kind of intelligence or communicating force that seems to be other, that’s very high,
00:28:47 ►
you know, very evolved,
00:28:49 ►
that maybe I’m just going to tend to see it more as alien.
00:28:53 ►
But even in terms of those buzzes,
00:28:55 ►
like the kind of weird way that sounds
00:28:56 ►
can form these vibrating matrices,
00:28:59 ►
they often take on a kind of more metallic quality
00:29:03 ►
and become more synthetic.
00:29:05 ►
And with that rising,
00:29:08 ►
begin to enter into an imagery realm
00:29:11 ►
that’s very cosmic.
00:29:13 ►
Peculiarly alien.
00:29:14 ►
It is peculiarly alien and technological often,
00:29:17 ►
as opposed to natural.
00:29:20 ►
That’s the place.
00:29:22 ►
And that’s like a lens or something.
00:29:28 ►
Because if you imagine if you’re on…
00:29:30 ►
If you imagine it pouring forward or moving rapidly forward,
00:29:36 ►
there’s a kind of front edge that’s very weird
00:29:40 ►
because it’s sort of like birthing all sets of new…
00:29:43 ►
Foam.
00:29:44 ►
Yeah, exactly.
00:29:47 ►
Yeah.
00:29:48 ►
I know that place.
00:29:51 ►
Hmm.
00:29:53 ►
What is the nature of the entities?
00:29:56 ►
What constitutes their inherent agency or communicative agency?
00:30:01 ►
Well, I think that’s the question that remains unanswered.
00:30:05 ►
You know, that’s the grail of the thing.
00:30:08 ►
What is the nature of the other is basically what you’re asking.
00:30:12 ►
Is it a construct, a projection, or a discovery?
00:30:17 ►
It’s not clear to me what it is.
00:30:21 ►
Do you feel like you’ve gotten any closer to that? It’s probably a discovery, which is the most radical
00:30:27 ►
conclusion. I mean, I think that’s probably what you
00:30:32 ►
think, too, based on your description of your DMT
00:30:35 ►
trip and all that, that ultimately it is
00:30:39 ►
irreducible. It is too weird
00:30:44 ►
to tell.
00:30:45 ►
I don’t know whether it was a CM Kornbluth story, but it was all about
00:30:48 ►
these aliens come by and contact
00:30:52 ►
the United Nations and all this. But somehow this book,
00:30:56 ►
To Serve Man,
00:30:58 ►
comes to the surface and then it’s slowly realized that it’s a cookbook.
00:31:06 ►
And this really spoils the party.
00:31:12 ►
What about the communications that come in from either the extraterrestrial, quote unquote, or seeming, or the technological world?
00:31:22 ►
technological world?
00:31:26 ►
Well, obviously it requires discrimination to figure out.
00:31:29 ►
You can’t believe everything you hear.
00:31:34 ►
The demons are of many kinds.
00:31:37 ►
Some are made of ions, some of mind.
00:31:41 ►
The ones of DMT you’ll find
00:31:43 ►
stutter often and are blind. Just because something
00:31:49 ►
can talk doesn’t mean it isn’t selling you something you may not want to have.
00:31:54 ►
Now that time in that phrase you said the ones on DMT can be blind. I’ve also heard
00:32:00 ►
you say ketamine there. The ones on ketamine. Have I said that about ketamine?
00:32:06 ►
We need to control me a little more tightly.
00:32:11 ►
What is your opinion on ketamine?
00:32:14 ►
I think it’s an intrauterine memory drug.
00:32:17 ►
I think there are things about it
00:32:19 ►
that cause you to recapture
00:32:21 ►
some kind of intrauterine state.
00:32:25 ►
It’s echoic. It’s echoic.
00:32:27 ►
It’s weightless.
00:32:29 ►
It cancels the sense of gravity
00:32:32 ►
so you don’t feel your lungs rising and falling.
00:32:37 ►
It’s…
00:32:38 ►
I sort of agree with you.
00:32:41 ►
I see its fascination.
00:32:43 ►
I would not want to become embroiled in its tentacles
00:32:47 ►
because it seems to me a little too easy,
00:32:51 ►
a little too fascinating.
00:32:53 ►
Do you think ketamine is hollower,
00:32:56 ►
partly because it’s just a synthetic
00:32:57 ►
and it hasn’t emerged in the ancient matrix of the biosphere?
00:33:04 ►
No, I think one of the big,
00:33:08 ►
one of the interesting unanswered questions is
00:33:11 ►
why do these chemicals have the characters that they do?
00:33:15 ►
Why do they have these personalities?
00:33:17 ►
Why is there mayan imagery inside mushrooms and mescaline and this and that.
00:33:25 ►
And so ketamine’s character is simply somehow conferred
00:33:29 ►
from whatever strange dimension this is
00:33:32 ►
that sends these drugs their personalities.
00:33:37 ►
It certainly is an interesting personality.
00:33:41 ►
And Lily is, you know, John is a juggernaut. Do you know him? No. Oh my God.
00:33:51 ►
John’s such a trip. I mean, some people are just… He seems, but he’s like, I mean, he’s
00:33:57 ►
really kind of out. Oh, definitely. Like me, I mean, this guy’s out yeah this guy is there’s nobody home this guy cannot be
00:34:06 ►
left alone at home and he’s like me
00:34:10 ►
what a trip and such you know an amazing arrogance and an amazing conviction of your own that you’ve got it all figured out.
00:34:30 ►
Yeah, a relentless character.
00:34:34 ►
He told me once,
00:34:36 ►
we were at Esalen,
00:34:38 ►
I don’t remember,
00:34:39 ►
just the two of us standing somewhere,
00:34:42 ►
and he said,
00:34:43 ►
nature loves you ruthlessly. And he said, Nature loves you ruthlessly.
00:34:48 ►
And I thought,
00:34:50 ►
Oh, that’s an interesting observation.
00:34:53 ►
Just ruthlessly aging me.
00:34:56 ►
Was he speaking specifically about you?
00:34:58 ►
Yeah, he and I were the only two people present.
00:35:01 ►
It was just a private conversation.
00:35:04 ►
He used to have this
00:35:05 ►
Obi-Wan Kenobi robe that he wore around Esalen. It was just hilarious. And he would just show
00:35:14 ►
up out of the fog, you know, to lay these wraps on you. They didn’t make too many of John.
00:35:28 ►
Ketamine actually distills a certain element of the psyche and then just lets that element
00:35:35 ►
interact with this whole weird plane. There’s not a lot of connections with the animal body.
00:35:41 ►
The tryptamines are like carrying the animal body all the way through
00:35:45 ►
it all. So it’s all still archaic and there’s sex and there’s fear and all of these animals
00:35:55 ►
in this space. The ketamine is like a little drop of like, awareness, cure awareness, enters
00:36:01 ►
into the zone. It is a bit like that. You’re completely, I mean, you know,
00:36:05 ►
if you remember like things in your life,
00:36:06 ►
they’re all part of these networks of cosmic cause
00:36:09 ►
and they’re so impersonal.
00:36:11 ►
I mean, it’s a very impersonal environment.
00:36:14 ►
Sometimes on ketamine,
00:36:16 ►
I have the impression it’s like this all the time.
00:36:21 ►
I simply don’t notice,
00:36:24 ►
which isn’t a very sense-making perception.
00:36:29 ►
Yeah.
00:36:31 ►
No, it does have an always-already quality to it.
00:36:34 ►
The whole quality is very different than with also with stricter uses, which have a more
00:36:40 ►
kind of propulsive change and transforming.
00:36:42 ►
Yeah, you’re right about how it accentuates the animal body
00:36:46 ►
and just shows you some kind of hyper state of, I don’t know, being.
00:36:55 ►
Or even metabolism.
00:36:57 ►
Yeah, something like that.
00:36:59 ►
Where it’s just 50,000% more powerful than you thought the specs would tolerate.
00:37:09 ►
What do you think of MDMA?
00:37:15 ►
It never spun me like it apparently did other people.
00:37:21 ►
It seemed very pleasant. I didn’t quite ever get the fight to save
00:37:28 ►
MDMA and all that. I figured from what I was hearing around me that it was doing a lot
00:37:35 ►
of good in psychotherapy. And so those people should be supported. But personally, I never…
00:37:50 ►
supported but personally I never it seemed well it seemed like very much like every drug as it’s introduced into society it’s usually claimed to solve problems and then, well that’s the best packaging is to say that a drug solves relationship
00:38:11 ►
problems.
00:38:12 ►
Of course the link to that right on the top was the warning that you could believe
00:38:18 ►
that you were deeply involved with somebody and wind up making stupid decisions.
00:38:23 ►
Well, when was that not true?
00:38:26 ►
Yeah.
00:38:27 ►
No,
00:38:28 ►
I remember the first time
00:38:29 ►
I mean,
00:38:29 ►
that was specifically
00:38:30 ►
one of the stories
00:38:31 ►
that was told around
00:38:32 ►
and that was relatively early
00:38:34 ►
by being married.
00:38:35 ►
You mean people
00:38:35 ►
deciding to marry
00:38:36 ►
the wrong person?
00:38:37 ►
Oh,
00:38:37 ►
whatever,
00:38:37 ►
yeah,
00:38:38 ►
that kind of thing.
00:38:39 ►
Because they
00:38:39 ►
had such an intimate experience.
00:38:42 ►
I only had a few,
00:38:43 ►
I only took it a few times.
00:38:44 ►
I find it extremely taxing in the system,
00:38:48 ►
in a way that I…
00:38:50 ►
Oh, you mean the next day you feel terrible.
00:38:52 ►
Yes, I find it very taxing
00:38:54 ►
in a way that makes me very dubious about it.
00:38:56 ►
It’s an amphetamine.
00:38:58 ►
It’s hard to take the A out of amphetamine.
00:39:02 ►
Yeah, it’s true.
00:39:03 ►
The amphetamine down is really quite a monster. I actually like crystal methadrine,
00:39:09 ►
but it’s not worth it.
00:39:11 ►
It just wears you too hard.
00:39:14 ►
Yeah, it’s too hard. It’s fun, but…
00:39:18 ►
Every gear is flopping on its axle by the time you’re three. Yeah.
00:39:25 ►
Do you have a position about the relationship
00:39:28 ►
of the psychedelic experience to non-psychedelic mysticism?
00:39:32 ►
Oh, I think I see what you’re trying to get at.
00:39:34 ►
Some kind of, what’s the neoplatonic,
00:39:37 ►
what’s the platonic connection to the psychedelic experience?
00:39:40 ►
That’s one way of thinking about it.
00:39:42 ►
Yeah, in that sense, yeah.
00:39:47 ►
I mean, maybe we need to ask the question over again, but the psychedelic vision is of some kind of relevant thing. It isn’t just the equivalent of a dust bunny under your psychic bed
00:40:06 ►
or something like that.
00:40:07 ►
It’s actually a product of the…
00:40:11 ►
Well, I know it’s hard to English it,
00:40:14 ►
but a product of the fractal laws
00:40:18 ►
that govern information theory.
00:40:21 ►
That’s a theme that Neal Stephenson and all these people understand. It really
00:40:30 ►
is all about how everything is put together at the informational level. There’s no deeper
00:40:37 ►
truth. And so all this talk about code and virtual reality and how the portions of our reality might be code running in some way.
00:40:51 ►
And all of this. This is all, I think, trying to get at something about information theory
00:40:59 ►
that needs to be fundamentally understood before we can all together take the next step to the next level.
00:41:08 ►
What’s the relationship between what’s happening with these information networks
00:41:13 ►
and this kind of object or matrix or second hyperdimensional?
00:41:23 ►
How does our own cyberspatial technology relate to the presence of this neoplatonic
00:41:26 ►
er-object of…
00:41:30 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:41:31 ►
Well, that sounds like this dialogue
00:41:35 ►
you want to get in on with the garland of letters
00:41:38 ►
or the Kabbalah or…
00:41:43 ►
I mean, mathematics is somehow this web of something
00:41:49 ►
which holds nature together
00:41:54 ►
and seems to spring out of a higher mind of some sort.
00:42:02 ►
I mean mathematics is really what it’s all about when you finally get it
00:42:07 ►
sliced thin I think. And that makes sense platonically and from this neoplatonic thing.
00:42:21 ►
And by neoplatonic I mean Proclus and Plotinus
00:42:25 ►
and those people who came about 500 years late after Christ.
00:42:33 ►
Have you been to Ravenna?
00:42:37 ►
That’s where they have these mosaics that are…
00:42:43 ►
Because it was basically a theory of pixelation.
00:42:46 ►
It was an elemental theory.
00:42:48 ►
So there were tiny, pure, undividable elements of essence
00:42:54 ►
that went together to produce phenomena.
00:43:01 ►
Well, all those people came out around the end of the sixth or early seventh
00:43:07 ►
century it was
00:43:09 ►
Plotinus
00:43:10 ►
Proclus
00:43:11 ►
Porphyry
00:43:16 ►
yeah Plotinus
00:43:19 ►
he had the right idea
00:43:24 ►
and you know it was late Gnosticism so all this star magic and really wild theories of stellar
00:43:37 ►
well it was when the court of the hermetic corpus was settling nicely into position. All those dogtons of calling down
00:43:50 ►
the voices and all that. Do you think we’re in some sense in these fractal things are just endlessly echoing and re-echoing
00:44:13 ►
inside the structure of time but yeah I mean this is the what we share with that era is a kind of fundamentally existential confusion
00:44:28 ►
about what’s going on.
00:44:31 ►
So doubt itself becomes a philosophical position,
00:44:38 ►
which in fact all doubt means is, I’m shopping, thank you.
00:44:44 ►
So, you know what I mean? means is I’m shopping thank you so about that that sense of this this this matrix this network this
00:44:55 ►
thing you mine for language yeah I sort of see it like that that there’s something you that all the metaphors of alchemy,
00:45:09 ►
which are locating the deposit,
00:45:16 ►
extracting, concentrating, alloying, fabricating,
00:45:21 ►
apply to this enterprise of language and literature and art. And clearly that’s basically what it’s all about
00:45:26 ►
and you have to get in there
00:45:29 ►
somehow to this
00:45:30 ►
to the main vein
00:45:36 ►
and once you’re there
00:45:39 ►
it’s just pure logos
00:45:43 ►
and that’s the way I’ve always gotten at it.
00:45:47 ►
I figure that’s the way the really smart money gets at it.
00:45:53 ►
The Melville, the Joyce, these voices that you find.
00:46:00 ►
Are somehow channeling closer to that, from a position closer to that matrix.
00:46:05 ►
Yeah.
00:46:06 ►
Or whatever.
00:46:08 ►
And that that’s what real channeling is,
00:46:11 ►
is getting close to that kind of… To that fecundity.
00:46:13 ►
Yeah.
00:46:13 ►
I mean, that’s the thing that’s so wrong about the…
00:46:16 ►
I didn’t really get this totally explicitly,
00:46:19 ►
but about a lot of channeled material,
00:46:21 ►
is that I have no doubt
00:46:23 ►
that you can set yourself up
00:46:25 ►
into a psychic information network
00:46:27 ►
wherein you,
00:46:30 ►
human ego at this point in history,
00:46:33 ►
are aware or become aware
00:46:35 ►
of the presence of another personality
00:46:37 ►
and voice which then you bring through
00:46:39 ►
and write down.
00:46:41 ►
I’m not saying nothing about ontology.
00:46:43 ►
Something about perception and psychology.
00:46:47 ►
But the thing is
00:46:47 ►
that the stuff that gets transmitted,
00:46:50 ►
so much of it is so bad
00:46:51 ►
and so literalistic
00:46:53 ►
because it’s not actually close to that.
00:46:57 ►
Because that is so rich.
00:47:00 ►
It’s because, as you say,
00:47:01 ►
it’s too easy.
00:47:04 ►
You have no doubt people can do it.
00:47:06 ►
And you’re right, they can do it.
00:47:08 ►
So then what you get is C plus material.
00:47:15 ►
Have you ever seen an image of the letters that were on the golden plates?
00:47:21 ►
The Mormon books?
00:47:22 ►
Yeah, the Brody book.
00:47:24 ►
They have them reproduced.
00:47:25 ►
Yeah.
00:47:25 ►
It’s just that whole notion of these highly compressed scripts.
00:47:31 ►
I mean, if you imagine like this thing we were talking about in psychedelic space,
00:47:34 ►
of this kind of matrix of possible languages or possible logics,
00:47:40 ►
which then end up kind of fleshing out into all this sort of other stuff,
00:47:44 ►
that there must be languages that are like farther upstream, logics, which then end up kind of fleshing out into all this sort of other stuff, that
00:47:45 ►
there must be languages that are like farther upstream, that we can’t really capture in
00:47:50 ►
full left brain, you know, alphabet parsing mind. It’s a little challenging for that mind.
00:47:58 ►
And yet, it still has the character of a language. It’s like the Hebrew alphabet,
00:48:03 ►
that mystical idea of an alphabet.
00:48:06 ►
No, Ralph and I have talked about stuff like this.
00:48:10 ►
You probably know or have heard of this guy Stan Tannen.
00:48:14 ►
Yes, yes.
00:48:15 ►
Well, he is into this thing where he has this shape
00:48:19 ►
and as you illuminate it from different angles,
00:48:24 ►
you get different Hebrew letters
00:48:27 ►
cast as shadows.
00:48:29 ►
So Ralph said,
00:48:31 ►
this implied then that there was this hyper-object
00:48:35 ►
which cast all these shadows
00:48:37 ►
and he said,
00:48:39 ►
given sufficient computing power
00:48:41 ►
you could compute upstream, as you say,
00:48:45 ►
and toward higher dimensional objects
00:48:48 ►
that would eventually shed all shadows
00:48:53 ►
of all letters in all languages.
00:48:57 ►
And that there would actually be a kind of
00:48:59 ►
like omega object or something
00:49:05 ►
that was the source of all meaning.
00:49:08 ►
So this thing you and I were talking about last night or today
00:49:11 ►
about mining the veins of organized intellect or whatever
00:49:20 ►
relate to this concept of this gnosis-shedding hyper-object
00:49:28 ►
that is somewhere up in the Imperium.
00:49:31 ►
I find the Kabbalistic stuff pretty evocative.
00:49:36 ►
Well, it relates to this Garland of Letters stuff.
00:49:41 ►
I really think, I mean, I had experiences
00:49:44 ►
leading up to the thing at La Charrera, you know, when I was young that just seemed to imply that sound was it and that you could do things with sound, with your voice, that it was all natural stuff, but everything up to probably splitting the atom, if you knew how to do it.
00:50:08 ►
So do you subscribe, at least loosely, to the
00:50:12 ►
idea that behind a lot of religious and mystical literature
00:50:16 ►
at some level of depth
00:50:19 ►
lies psychedelic experience
00:50:23 ►
produced through ingesting
00:50:25 ►
of some kind of psychoactive substance?
00:50:29 ►
Well, I think so.
00:50:30 ►
And I think more so since I’ve had cancer
00:50:34 ►
because I had no idea that such peculiar states of mind
00:50:43 ►
were naturally available to people and non-lethal.
00:50:49 ►
In other words, that you could have fairly frequent brain seizures
00:50:53 ►
and experience very bizarre states of body-mind dislocation
00:51:00 ►
and have it not kill you. So now I see that the spectrum of human experience
00:51:10 ►
is a lot broader than I previously imagined.
00:51:15 ►
Because then you imagine all of the chemical conditions under which people have…
00:51:20 ►
Over a million years.
00:51:22 ►
You know, not just drugs, diet, temperament, genetics.
00:51:28 ►
And now this.
00:51:29 ►
All these various things.
00:51:31 ►
It turns out the mind is
00:51:33 ►
far more malleable than it is…
00:51:37 ►
It’s easier to…
00:51:39 ►
Well, what am I trying to say?
00:51:40 ►
I’m trying to say
00:51:41 ►
the mind can adjust to a great deal more
00:51:44 ►
than that which simply kills it.
00:51:47 ►
And so as people make their way through these states of mind
00:51:52 ►
induced by brain architecture, cancer, diet, drugs, genetics, whatever,
00:52:00 ►
there’s a much broader human database than I realized.
00:52:06 ►
Well, other than the seizure itself that you kind of described to me,
00:52:10 ►
and I guess the drugs you’re on now in terms of waking up with these completely bizarre things,
00:52:15 ►
what are some of the other really unusual mind states that you found yourself in since this all began?
00:52:23 ►
you found yourself in since this all began?
00:52:27 ►
Well, they’re hard to describe.
00:52:30 ►
Like one kind is, I call it, losing categories,
00:52:35 ►
where it will become an enormous effort to decide whether there should be one or two of something,
00:52:40 ►
something completely trivial.
00:52:43 ►
But this one or two thing indicates to me something
00:52:47 ►
of lexical break or some kind of peculiar… I mean it’s hard to… English, but you see
00:52:56 ►
what I mean.
00:52:57 ►
Yeah. I love the idea that you… you work with the idea that there… you had found
00:53:00 ►
another number between…
00:53:02 ►
Oh, I… that I discovered a whole number
00:53:06 ►
between three and five or something
00:53:10 ►
that had previously been overlooked.
00:53:13 ►
That was a funny idea.
00:53:17 ►
But mostly it’s some very hard-to-communicate idea
00:53:22 ►
about how concepts form these things called lexical objects
00:53:30 ►
that are topologically closed, so they can’t really be cross-related.
00:53:39 ►
So all understanding becomes a kind of an illusion of some sort.
00:53:45 ►
Wow, that’s kind of intense.
00:53:47 ►
Yeah, it is a weird idea.
00:53:49 ►
Well, now that I have all these medical problems
00:53:52 ►
with brain and brain function,
00:53:54 ►
I have a much greater appreciation
00:53:56 ►
for the boundaries of eccentricity.
00:54:02 ►
I mean, now I understand.
00:54:03 ►
It doesn’t take drugs.
00:54:05 ►
There are a lot of people running around
00:54:08 ►
who are crazy as shithouse owls
00:54:11 ►
and are achieving it on the natch.
00:54:17 ►
And their testimony now has to be weighed as well.
00:54:24 ►
So this surprises me.
00:54:29 ►
I didn’t realize that a malfunctioning brain
00:54:36 ►
could leave you functioning enough to report to work and tell your story and presumably write
00:54:49 ►
novels and meet deadlines and all these other things that people do. And I don’t know how
00:54:58 ►
many other people realize this either.
00:55:00 ►
Because that’s sort of how I mean how you feel yeah I mean I now live in a world defined by
00:55:11 ►
pretty much by prescribed drugs and my doctors are telling me I have to take this stuff to stay
00:55:21 ►
alive basically so how many people are living in worlds
00:55:26 ►
psychologically defined in that way?
00:55:30 ►
Quite a lot.
00:55:33 ►
But you seem to be largely parents.
00:55:38 ►
Well, I recall who I’m supposed to be.
00:55:43 ►
So we’re not trading that into like… well i recall who i’m supposed to be so
00:55:47 ►
we’re not trading that into like
00:55:52 ►
uh… but in some fundamental sense do you feel like you’re standing on a different ball
00:55:56 ►
i would like to get all these drugs out of my system
00:56:00 ►
the depakote
00:56:02 ►
and the steroids and all that because it makes mentally moving on a level surface
00:56:11 ►
feel like walking uphill.
00:56:15 ►
And these are mild drugs, I take.
00:56:21 ►
These are not…
00:56:23 ►
What about the people who’ve been diagnosed
00:56:26 ►
schizophrenic or bipolar this or something then what are these people taking and what
00:56:34 ►
is it making them think about reality would be you you’ve taken serotonin reuptake inhibitors, haven’t you? You mean like Prozac? Yeah. Yeah, but those are designed to help you out.
00:56:52 ►
These other things, all you’re dealing with is side effects.
00:56:56 ►
Oh, yeah, yeah.
00:56:57 ►
It’s a different thing.
00:56:59 ►
I thought you were talking more about schizophrenia.
00:57:01 ►
Don’t they treat with all sorts of neurotransmitter, modulant drugs which presumably are there to help them out?
00:57:11 ►
Well, they’re there to help them out.
00:57:14 ►
They may be there to help the rest of us out.
00:57:20 ►
Like, for instance, this drug I take, Depakote,
00:57:23 ►
the first thing that it’s
00:57:25 ►
supposedly deals with is mania well I’m taking a drug for mania I don’t have
00:57:33 ►
mania do I did I would I should I will I could I do I want to and so forth and so on. You didn’t feel like you had any bit of mania in you before?
00:57:48 ►
At times I’ve been accused of mania, but by idiots.
00:57:59 ►
And I guess because of the war on drugs,
00:58:02 ►
somewhat concealed in all that is the willingness of the establishment
00:58:07 ►
to allow experimentation with drugs,
00:58:11 ►
the effect of which on tens of thousands
00:58:16 ►
or hundreds of thousands of people
00:58:18 ►
would have social consequences
00:58:21 ►
that were maybe unintended or unmanaged.
00:58:26 ►
Yeah, like’ll say.
00:58:27 ►
Yeah.
00:58:29 ►
Like, I’ve wondered, you know, the statistic you hear,
00:58:34 ►
Prozac is the most prescribed drug in the world now,
00:58:38 ►
and a billion people take Prozac.
00:58:41 ►
Is it really?
00:58:41 ►
It’s something like that.
00:58:42 ►
Oh, God.
00:58:43 ►
So my question is,
00:58:48 ►
when do the rest of us get some of the benefit of this?
00:58:49 ►
In other words,
00:58:54 ►
when is the guy putting my fruit in my sack going to become a more pleasant person?
00:58:56 ►
The guy pumping gas.
00:58:58 ►
All these people on Prozac,
00:59:01 ►
pretty soon it should begin to feed into the body politic as sort of feeling of
00:59:08 ►
goodwill and temperance I haven’t actually seen but yes I would like to live for quite a while but it is very interesting cancer as a metaphor for modern life and how people
00:59:31 ►
live how they think about their politics and diet
00:59:38 ►
money the rest of it and probably my generation was more exposed to toxin
00:59:48 ►
than any other in history
00:59:51 ►
because there were not only all the toxins of the pre-modern world,
00:59:56 ►
but then all the plastics, adhesives, and so forth.
01:00:02 ►
Well, it seems so basic that cancer is a socially,
01:00:08 ►
physically constructed metaphor for all these other processes
01:00:11 ►
that are happening on different levels.
01:00:12 ►
It’s almost like that plane of the real responds
01:00:16 ►
with an appropriate kind of metaphor
01:00:19 ►
for all these processes of inflation
01:00:21 ►
and kind of negentropy burning development.
01:00:28 ►
The revenge of matter or something.
01:00:32 ►
Yeah.
01:00:33 ►
Or the revenge of synthetic matter.
01:00:37 ►
But what is your prognosis?
01:00:39 ►
Oh.
01:00:40 ►
Well, it’s a little hard to figure out.
01:00:45 ►
I think it’s a little hard to figure out. I think it’s…
01:00:49 ►
Well, it depends on the doctor you believe.
01:00:52 ►
The doctor who just did the surgery said he got it all.
01:00:56 ►
He has an incredible reputation,
01:00:58 ►
like third best in the world or something,
01:01:01 ►
with survival rates and all that.
01:01:03 ►
So maybe he did get it all. In which
01:01:07 ►
case I’m the same, we’re the same, I just have to get strong. On the other hand, the
01:01:16 ►
survival rate for this shit is very low. Zilch in some people’s opinion they say there’s no escape there’s always self left they always
01:01:31 ►
return you can only have so many craniotomies so those people say six months to a year of life, which is really a drag to take on board.
01:01:49 ►
My own intuition is I’m not sure.
01:01:53 ►
I can’t tell what’s going on.
01:01:56 ►
It certainly is a weird situation to have fall upon you,
01:02:03 ►
especially a person like myself who’s never had I’ve never been a sick
01:02:10 ►
person or concerned with any of this I had no idea that was so much morbidity around me
01:02:17 ►
as Dante I had not thought death had undone so many,
01:02:26 ►
he says when he looks into the inframed.
01:02:30 ►
It’s a sobering thought.
01:02:38 ►
So that’s it.
01:02:41 ►
What you do is you constantly try to get stronger
01:02:45 ►
and hope that no bad news comes down the pike.
01:02:51 ►
Do you feel more intimate with death?
01:02:58 ►
Oh, absolutely.
01:02:59 ►
No, you spend every waking minute.
01:03:03 ►
Well, I don’t know every waking minute,
01:03:05 ►
but for the past six months, let us say,
01:03:08 ►
death has been a daily accompaniment of my thoughts.
01:03:16 ►
And dying is the more troubling subject.
01:03:22 ►
Death is the great who knows.
01:03:29 ►
more troubling subject death is the great who knows dying on the other hand might be unpleasant prolonged and has a terrible effect on the people around you and full of fear and misapprehension. Misapprehension? Well, people don’t know what it is.
01:03:46 ►
So they don’t know what they’re looking at.
01:03:49 ►
And they…
01:03:51 ►
Are they losing you?
01:03:53 ►
Are you passing to the great…
01:03:57 ►
the meaning culmination and answer to it all?
01:04:00 ►
Or are you on an extended wing downward into darkness?
01:04:05 ►
And it really plays people.
01:04:09 ►
The internal subjective perception of the shutdown of the nervous system at death.
01:04:15 ►
I think that’s a really interesting question.
01:04:19 ►
You mean to what degree are these things different and similar?
01:04:22 ►
Yeah, that in some ways what happens with
01:04:25 ►
both psychedelic and mystical visionary experience
01:04:29 ►
and certain relationships to apocalyptic form,
01:04:33 ►
to the end of the world,
01:04:34 ►
are things all transforming.
01:04:36 ►
There’s a point where the self dies,
01:04:39 ►
and it might happen in a millisecond,
01:04:41 ►
but subjectively would be the end of the world.
01:04:45 ►
Yeah, and because I think everything works basically the same way,
01:04:49 ►
it would have a fair profundity,
01:04:53 ►
because you would be seeing the primal assembly language code.
01:04:59 ►
But the whole idea of psychedelics is a rehearsal for that kind of event.
01:05:08 ►
Yeah, it’s like Buddhism with turbocharged or something.
01:05:13 ►
Now you can…
01:05:15 ►
Run through the bardo, or a bardo.
01:05:17 ►
Take the Diamond Sutra for a spin.
01:05:22 ►
How does one live your life in the shadow of such an event?
01:05:28 ►
What does it mean to live in the shadow of a different kind of culmination?
01:05:35 ►
Or how does one live in a post-human?
01:05:37 ►
Well, maybe that’s how you actually can change your existential mourning.
01:05:42 ►
That’s what you deal with.
01:05:43 ►
That’s the peg you move is this image of your
01:05:48 ►
own fate or end of life or how it’s what exactly all this stuff is worth to you and as you move How has a lifetime of psychedelic use, an adult lifetime, a teenage, sort of set you up for facing death?
01:06:28 ►
Well, I guess it leads you to the idea that things are probably more complicated than you can suppose.
01:06:32 ►
Therefore, supposition is not to be trusted.
01:06:42 ►
So, in other words, given how weird life has been, why rush to prejudge death?
01:06:44 ►
It’s bound to be mighty strange.
01:06:46 ►
Life was mighty strange.
01:06:52 ►
And I’m curious.
01:06:55 ►
I don’t think anybody would be curious.
01:06:58 ►
I mean, it’s an interesting situation to be told that you have a very limited amount of life, death,
01:07:03 ►
because it composes your mind for you wonderfully.
01:07:09 ►
And you start paying attention, asking the questions.
01:07:14 ►
And I have no insight into what it will be,
01:07:20 ►
but I suspect it isn’t what anybody thinks it is.
01:07:23 ►
But I suspect it isn’t what anybody thinks it is.
01:07:36 ►
I mean, the argument that nature has this desire to preserve form is, I think, self-evident on enormous scales of space and time
01:07:42 ►
and very local scales of space and time.
01:07:46 ►
So why fight it?
01:07:48 ►
It must be that somehow matter is spiritualizing itself
01:07:56 ►
or mathematicizing itself or somehow…
01:07:59 ►
Right, becoming virtual forms.
01:08:02 ►
So, and what psychedelics show is that the world is full of surprises I mean I
01:08:08 ►
consider psychedelics a constant and verifiable miracle the fact that that can happen to your
01:08:17 ►
mind so it means all kinds of things are possible nothing is to be assumed or prejudged given a biology, b psychedelics
01:08:32 ►
and culture. Probably that’s a long enough list, but those two things alone secure the
01:08:40 ►
weirdness of being sufficient. We can call it quits.
01:08:45 ►
It’s right to.
01:08:47 ►
You should get your rest here.
01:08:49 ►
Yes, I should. We all should.
01:08:56 ►
And those, I believe,
01:08:58 ►
were among the very last words
01:09:00 ►
of the Bard McKenna that were recorded.
01:09:02 ►
And again, I want to thank
01:09:04 ►
the traveler, Alex Chuckwall, and Eric Davis for making it possible for us to hear a few of the things Thank you. of Suzanne Pitts’ animation titled Asparagus and of the other animation that he mentioned, Quackadero,
01:09:27 ►
well, I’ve found them both on YouTube
01:09:28 ►
and I’ll link to them in the program notes for this podcast.
01:09:33 ►
Well, as much as I’d like to go on right now
01:09:35 ►
and talk about a few more things,
01:09:37 ►
the combination of a very painful arm and a little spring cold
01:09:41 ►
are telling me that I should cut this short for now.
01:09:43 ►
However, I do want to mention that just because the interview we heard just now was Terrence’s last,
01:09:48 ►
that doesn’t mean that we’ve heard the last of him here in the salon.
01:09:52 ►
I’ve still got a pile of cassette tapes of his talks that I haven’t gone through yet,
01:09:56 ►
and my guess is that there’s still a lot of new McKenna that we have left to be heard.
01:10:01 ►
But it won’t be next week, because I’ve got something else in mind for a little change
01:10:06 ►
of pace. So be sure to
01:10:08 ►
stop by the salon again next week, and I’ll see
01:10:09 ►
if I can dig up something that’ll
01:10:11 ►
interest you. Now, before
01:10:13 ►
I go, I would like one more time to remind
01:10:16 ►
you that Terrence’s brother Dennis has
01:10:18 ►
a Kickstarter campaign running right
01:10:20 ►
now, in which he hopes to raise enough
01:10:22 ►
money to be able to write and publish
01:10:23 ►
a definitive biography of Terrence.
01:10:26 ►
And the support from our fellow Saloners for this project has been really great.
01:10:31 ►
In fact, here’s what one of this week’s donors, David D.C., had to say about Dennis’
01:10:36 ►
project.
01:10:38 ►
Lorenzo, I listen to your podcast every night as I fall asleep.
01:10:41 ►
Your show forms the cornerstone of my intellectual life and has for the past couple of years now.
01:10:47 ►
I wanted to particularly thank you
01:10:49 ►
for promoting Dennis’ book,
01:10:50 ►
and I hope you keep on doing so
01:10:52 ►
until the target is reached.
01:10:54 ►
Terrence means a great deal to me
01:10:56 ►
and indeed to most of your listeners, I’m sure.
01:10:58 ►
We can’t afford to let this opportunity go begging.
01:11:02 ►
Thanks again, and remember,
01:11:03 ►
there’s no such thing as too many Terrence McKenna episodes. I agree with you, David. Thanks for the good, kind words
01:11:11 ►
too. And as you know, Dennis’ project is titled The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss,
01:11:19 ►
which is for sure an attention-getting title, don’t you think? Right now, Dennis is almost
01:11:24 ►
halfway to his goal,
01:11:25 ►
and there are still 41 days left to make a pledge, if you can see your way to do so.
01:11:30 ►
So I’ll post a link in the program notes to that Kickstarter webpage
01:11:34 ►
that describes in great detail what the book will be about,
01:11:37 ►
along with the premium offers that are available for the various levels of pledges.
01:11:41 ►
So check it out if you get a chance.
01:11:45 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for today.
01:11:48 ►
But if you want to check out those animations
01:11:50 ►
that Taryn spoke about just now,
01:11:52 ►
you’ll find links to them along with the program notes
01:11:54 ►
for this podcast that you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:11:59 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:12:01 ►
you can hear a little bit about it in my novel,
01:12:04 ►
The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download
01:12:08 ►
at genesisgeneration.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:15 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.