Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project: The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!
This lecture was recorded in November 1982. A more complete version of this talk may be found in Podcast 317.]
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites is to try to unify them, to create a coincidentia oppositorum as was done in alchemy, to not force the system to closure but to try and leave the system open enough so that the differences can resonate and become complimentary rather than antithetical.”
“Shamanism, on the other hand [as compared with science], is this world wide, since Paleolithic times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.”
“What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is that it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin, and DMT, and a few other not well-known or widely distributed plants, hallucinogens, induce.”
“Our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model of how the universe really works. The content of the dialogue with the Other is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright.”
“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”
“[UFOs are], in other words, something which in order not to alarm us has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche signaling a profound historical crisis.”
“A mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack.”
“Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity.”
“We are not primarily biology with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are in fact hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter. And the shadow in matter is the body.”
“The whole purpose of shamanism, and of life correctly lived, is to strengthen the soul and strengthen the relationship to the soul, so that this passage [death] can be cleanly made.”
“Technology is the real skin of our species.”
“There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliacosoms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing.”
“An Aquarian science, or a science that places psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation, should move toward a practical realization of the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego can perceive itself as an expression of the overself.”
Previous Episode
266 - Interview with Dennis McKenna
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268 - Leary vs. Liddy – 1990 Debate
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And sharing the salon with me today are several people who either made donations directly to the salon,
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or who bought a copy of my audiobook, The Genesis Generation,
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and who I think of as our virtual hosts today.
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And those generous people are… Brock T., who actually bought a book and made a significant donation to the salon,
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Gary B, Robert T, Cord M, Revlin J, C Jones, and Michael M, long-time friend, and another
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long-time listener and regular donor, Mark C.
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Also, I’d like to thank Xe Velvet, who has given me some help in reducing the size of Thank you. tinny and ghosting a bit, but since my technique with audio is actually just one of hit and miss,
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trial and error, and I seem to come in on the error side a little more than I’d like.
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Anyway, I’ve gone back after I’ve got this help from XC Velvet and recompiled the podcast from
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261 up to the present, and they now have significantly reduced file sizes with
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little noticeable degradation in the sound quality at least to my own
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tinnitus haunted ears that is so thanks again for your time Xe Velvet and to our
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fellow salonners on low bandwidth connections I give you my sincere
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apologies for those big files and I’ll do my best to keep
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that from happening again. And also, George, Jason, and Laura, hey, please don’t think that I’ve
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forgotten about you. I’ll definitely get back to you eventually, but once again, I’ve overcommitted
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on several projects that I’m involved in, and I’m having difficulty setting enough time aside right now to work on the podcast.
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But hopefully I’ll be able to remedy that very soon.
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Now, for today’s program, which is from this cassette tape
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that has been sitting on my desk for over a month now, I guess,
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I finally just couldn’t wait any longer to hear it.
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And as you’ve no doubt already guessed, it’s another talk by Terrence McKenna.
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longer to hear it, and as you’ve no doubt already guessed, it’s another talk by Terrence McKenna.
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Now this tape is also another one from the box of tapes that Diana Slattery sent to me sometime last year, and the last tape that I pulled out of that box is the one I played in
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Podcast 261, which at the time was the earliest recording of a Terrence McKenna lecture that I’d come across so far.
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But as I was putting that tape away after doing the podcast, another tape slipped out of the box
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onto the floor, and that’s the one I’m going to play for you right now. And if the label on the
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tape is to be believed, the talk that we’re about to hear is even a little older than the previous
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McKenna talk that I played.
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And so thank you again, Diana, for sending these tapes for me to share with all of our friends here in cyberdelic space.
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Now, the handwriting on the tape says, New and Old Maps of Hyperspace, McKenna, November
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1982, First Lecture, which I take to mean that this was perhaps the first lecture in a weekend
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workshop series of some kind he was giving at the time. Now a few weeks ago, Bruce Dahmer asked
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Diana about the source of these tapes, but since many of them were given to her a long time ago,
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she no longer can recall exactly who it was that gave each and every one to her, so we don’t really
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know where this tape came from.
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I do know that there are some McKenna tapes floating around the net that mention maps of hyperspace or something like that,
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and they might be from this same lecture series that he was giving at the time, I guess.
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But as you’ll hear in a few minutes, you’ll see why I decided to change the title a little bit for today’s podcast.
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In a few minutes, you’ll see why I decided to change the title a little bit for today’s podcast.
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In any event, let’s now give a listen to this November 1982 recording of Terrence McKenna,
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in which he still felt the need to introduce himself and explain his qualifications to the audience,
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which I actually find quite charming.
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So, let’s now join Terrence and friends one day,
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back in November of 1982,
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and listen to how they saw the world situation back then.
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The big issue these days, and it has nothing to do with his talk,
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is this idea of self-reflection, and of self-referential things that and the
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paradoxes that can come out of that and I find Terence McKenna a kind of
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self-referential person he’s spoken to us at least once twice I think right and
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each time I have experienced
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an almost hallucinogenic experience
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in listening to him talk
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and I’m looking forward very much tonight
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to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens
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and UFOs
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new and old maps of hyperspace
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take off
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well thank you very much
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I’m very glad to be here
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special thanks to Ruth and Arthur in the institute
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for asking me back for a third time
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perhaps the third time is the charm we’ll see here
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my name is Terence McKenna and my training is basically in shamanism
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and botany and ethnography and my interest is in hallucinogenic drugs especially plant
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hallucinogens as they’re used in a shamanic context.
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And what impels me to speak to a room full of people like this is the belief that the major important point regarding hallucinogens
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has been largely overlooked, even though we’re now 15 or 20 or 30,
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depending on how you count it, years into the
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psychedelic age, the central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the
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experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods
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that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.
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So what I’m going to address this evening
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is essentially my own experience with hallucinogens
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and how I extrapolate it into the world
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based on its own being and other people’s psychedelic experiences
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that I have interacted with. Before I get into that, I want to clarify something about shamanism.
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There are two schools about the basis of shamanism, shamanistic experience.
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One is the older school exemplified by Mercier Léod, who holds that all narcotic shamanism is decadent.
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He prefers drumming, dancing, self-mutilation, even ordeal poisons, all precede the efficacy of hallucinogens.
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He believes they are resorted to
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when the tradition is vitiated
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and people are grasping at straws.
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I take this to be simply a cultural bias
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of the school of anthropology that he exemplified
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and the time in which his work was done.
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Now, Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack and takes the position that non-narcotic
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shamanism is decadent because it is on its way to becoming ritual. In other words, drumming, fasting, flagellation, all these things work to a degree and sometimes, and they are not dependable in the same way that hallucinogens are. plays on Western people’s biases in favor of the idea that you have to work hard to get somewhere,
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and if you don’t work hard, it isn’t useful.
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My own experience in looking at non-narcotic shamanism,
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essentially non-narcotic shamanism in Indonesia and in Nepal,
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was that Wasson’s intuition was very correct.
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There is a grasping after, was that Wasson’s intuition was very correct.
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There is a grasping after,
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and I see that grasping after blending into the evolution of all higher religions.
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In other words, experientially,
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there is only one religion,
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and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.
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But it is very difficult to maintain in agrarian
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context hunting and gathering societies which have much less structured social
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hierarchies seem to be able to function with the hallucinogenic experience
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embedded in them as soon as you rise even to the level of primitive agriculturalists,
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it becomes much more important to be able to get up in the morning
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and go to work than it does to have these ecstatic experiences
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because the plants have to be tended, the fields tilled, and so on.
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I formed these opinions about non-narcotic shamanism early in my career of looking at this
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phenomenon. I didn’t contact narcotic shamanism until I went to the Amazon basin initially in
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- And although I was familiar with the hallucinogenic state from growing up basically
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in the counterculture in Berkeley, but what I found in South America after sifting through
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these various experiences is that the family of drugs constellated around tryptophan, specifically DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and psilocybin,
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which is chemically very similar to DMT, that these compounds had a relationship to reality
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far different from all the other hallucinogens, the scopolamine, hyalcyamine, tropane family that you get in detour and that kind of
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thing, or LSD, which laboratory LSD does not occur in nature, but isomers of it occur in nature,
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although to be taken at hallucinogenic doses, they must be taken at hundreds of times the amount.
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So that’s basically the scientific, medical,
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anthropological basis of what I’m saying.
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A career spent in Asia and more recently in the Amazon
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looking at this phenomenon.
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And I want to take my conclusions tonight
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and contrast them with the modern predicament and try to make a model
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using the hallucinogenic experience, a model that makes some of the anxieties of being human and
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especially some of the anxieties of being human in the 20th century context more palatable.
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And to do that, I want to evoke
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a number of abysses,
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a number of empty places
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that our minds tend normally to shy away from.
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First to invoke them,
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and then to integrate them
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through the idea of what is conventionally called
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the UFO or the UFO experience
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these abysses are basically four embedded in a fifth
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the four are the biological abyss
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that is represented by death and dying,
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that is the central crisis of every individual existence,
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and almost as a reflection of that crisis on a higher plane,
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the historical abyss represented by the end of history
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and the apocalypse and possibly the millennium but in any
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case the end of history that western religion whether it be judaism christianity or whatever
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has appointed to our world and made basic to western man’s view of things and which now
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because of the existence of nuclear weapons
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and this kind of thing,
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poses a terminal threat to the culture.
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So two abysses,
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the biological and the historical,
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the latter being symbolized
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in the apocalyptic crisis.
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A third abyss could be called
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the psychological. And this is represented by dreams, most in general other, and being at the mercy of, call it the collective unconscious,
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the overmind of the species, what have you.
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The fourth abyss, which is one whose emergence is unique in our time,
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is the actual physical abyss which surrounds this planet for light years in all directions
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because suddenly now because of our level of technology and and scientific mapping
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we realize that it is there and we realize that it is a source of our cosmic loneliness, and we realize that it presents an immense challenge
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of the sort we like to accept as a Western culture,
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challenges of energy, engineering, and distance.
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So these are the four abysses,
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the abyss of space, the abyss of death,
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the abyss of the psychedelic experience,
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and the abyss of death, the abyss of the psychedelic experience, and the abyss
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of dying.
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And these four general categories have to be seen embedded in a somewhat subtler kind
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of abyss, which is the abyss of the unspeakable.
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In other words, that language, which is the primary tool of cognition of the species,
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casts nets against these other gulfs and comes away with different kinds of maps.
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But you cannot put much trust in these maps unless you’ve carried out a thorough analysis of language.
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these maps unless you’ve carried out a thorough analysis
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of language and once you’ve done
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that for sure you will not put
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much trust in any of these
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maps because the thinness
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of the web on which it all is
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hung will be readily
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apparent
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okay
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it’s my assumption
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whenever I am confronted with opposites
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is to try to unify them
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to create a coincidencia positorum
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as was done in alchemy
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to not force the system to closure
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but to try and leave the system open enough
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so that the differences can resonate
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and become complementary
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rather than antithetical
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so I would like to unify here not two dualisms,
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but these four oppose these pairs.
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You could think of them as the quadripartite elements of a kind of mandala.
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The means to unifying that mandala is integration of the psychedelic experience.
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Specifically,
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I’m going to make the assumption
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specifically the psilocybin
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or tryptamine
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experience.
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And what it appears to be
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is
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something which
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is much more assimilable
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to the science fiction metaphor of a
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parallel universe than it is to the science fiction metaphor of a parallel universe
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than it is to the Freudian metaphor
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of the repression of desire
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or even the Jungian metaphor
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of a collective species-wide memory
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and experience bank.
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It is much more, I think,
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of the character of a parallel continuum.
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And in order to erect the intellectual edifice
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of the past thousand years,
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this possibility has had to be ignored,
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much in the way that you would apply
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Occam’s razor to a situation
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and just say well we will not admit
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the more complex phenomenon
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because we should form a theory
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that is true to the simplest phenomena first
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and then build out from it
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and this has worked
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in a demonic kind of way
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in the sense that we have taken command
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of the atomic world
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which is a very simple world
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compared for instance to the variables that you meet
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in sociology or biology
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but at the cost of formulating theories
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about how the world is put together
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that nowhere come tangential to experience.
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So we have a bizarre situation
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where our best models of reality
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that are kept for us by the priesthood of science
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are like exhibits in a museum
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because they cannot be mapped on
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to the simple fact of individual experience.
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Shamanism, on the other hand,
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is this worldwide, since Paleolithic times, tradition
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which says that you must make your own experience
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the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build.
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No amount of readings from meters,
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whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.
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sense of these metaphors, so
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called, or myths, so called,
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that are the
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pre-Western, pre-print,
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pre-literate
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mappings of the world.
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An example
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of how this
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problem distorts other problems
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is the problem of extraterrestrial
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contact, which
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is, the way science presents the problem of extraterrestrial contact, which is the way science presents the problem of extraterrestrial contact
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is that we are alone
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and that to assuage our cosmic loneliness,
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we should build ever larger radio telescopes
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and million-channel signal analyzers
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and sift the radio noise coming from the stars and eventually
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if a signal is found an immense philosophical turning point will have occurred and we will
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then place ourselves in the context of the cosmos this is actually a red herring kind of argument because outside of the highly technical Western societies that have evolved
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in the last 300 years, people have been talking to the other since man began.
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Angels, demons, fairies, sprites, elves, all of this is as phenomenologically a part of human experience
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as, we’ll say, birds of paradise,
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which I’m sure none of you have ever had anything to do with,
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but believe inflexibly that such creatures exist
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because it is allowed by the experts that they exist.
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What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not
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is it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words,
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there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin and DMT and a few other not well-known or widely distributed
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plant hallucinogens induce. I think it was William Blake who said,
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the truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed. And this is the kind of information
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that is coming through the psilocybin experience.
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It is information which you have to believe it.
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You have to believe it because it has this ring of authenticity.
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It is the logos.
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It is the word somehow.
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the logos it is the word somehow and what is being said is that our alienation and this word is interesting alienation our alienation from ourselves has caused us to set up a number of
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straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model
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of how the universe really works.
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The content of the dialogue with the other
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is a content that indicates
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that man’s horizons are infinitely bright,
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that death is in fact,
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well, as Thomas Vaughan put it,
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the body is the placenta of the soul.
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And this fact has not yet been assimilated
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because it runs counter to Western reductionist,
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materialist empiricism.
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But this idea that the body is placenta to the soul
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is not an object of faith or a dogma.
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It’s a program for activity.
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The activity that it implies should be undertaken
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is a familiarization with the soul.
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And the soul has been banned from Western thinking about the self
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for nigh on 400 years, at least in leading circles.
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But I take this concept very seriously.
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And I think if any of you are familiar with the literature of alchemy, alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything. This is
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the last gasp of
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the soul before it’s
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submerged completely. In other words,
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it became trapped
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in an association
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with thonic matter
00:24:37 ►
in the last historical
00:24:39 ►
epoch before it disappeared
00:24:42 ►
completely from Western consciousness.
00:24:45 ►
Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin,
00:24:49 ►
allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche,
00:24:54 ►
as Jung correctly stated,
00:24:57 ►
but it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs,
00:25:03 ►
as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which
00:25:11 ►
any person so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it can go and leave the mundane plane
00:25:22 ►
far behind. In other words, it is a dimension of vertical gain
00:25:26 ►
that is real and is present in all of our lives
00:25:31 ►
and that we do not acknowledge except as an anomaly
00:25:35 ►
because we have been told that it’s an anomaly.
00:25:40 ►
We have been told that these perceptions have to be devalued.
00:25:44 ►
We have been told that these perceptions have to be devalued.
00:25:54 ►
The result of this is to so distort the psychic life of the species in the present historical context that we have this UFO disease, which is essentially a rupture into three-dimensional space of this archetype of wholeness.
00:26:07 ►
And it haunts time like a ghost.
00:26:11 ►
And it haunts human experience in the 20th century
00:26:14 ►
because it is a symbol of alienation.
00:26:18 ►
And the word alien has, in fact, come to be applied to this thing.
00:26:24 ►
It is alien. It comes from this thing. It is alien.
00:26:25 ►
It comes from the stars.
00:26:27 ►
It is totally non-human.
00:26:29 ►
It has great potential for mankind,
00:26:32 ►
but it can barely be Englished at all.
00:26:35 ►
And actually what it is,
00:26:37 ►
is the self
00:26:41 ►
in the form in which it is most accessible to the ego,
00:26:46 ►
given the ego’s programming with all the scientific garbage
00:26:50 ►
about the density of life in the universe,
00:26:53 ►
the distance to the stars,
00:26:55 ►
the probability of chemical evolution occurring here and there and yonder.
00:26:59 ►
It is, in other words, something which in order not to alarm us
00:27:04 ►
has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being
00:27:08 ►
but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche
00:27:13 ►
signaling a profound historical crisis.
00:27:17 ►
I talked about this before.
00:27:19 ►
I talked about the danger of succumbing to belief in UFOs
00:27:24 ►
because of the damage it did to free will.
00:27:28 ►
And that, yes, the UFO is a…
00:27:32 ►
It is making war on science
00:27:34 ►
because science has created such a masculine overbalance
00:27:39 ►
in the intellectual life of the species
00:27:42 ►
that this automatic mechanism
00:27:45 ►
has been triggered
00:27:46 ►
a history stopping archetype
00:27:49 ►
is being released into the skies
00:27:51 ►
of this planet
00:27:52 ►
and if we are not careful it will halt
00:27:55 ►
all intellectual inquiry
00:27:57 ►
in the same way
00:27:59 ►
that the Christos
00:28:01 ►
archetype halted intellectual
00:28:03 ►
inquiry in the Hellenistic age.
00:28:06 ►
I don’t want to go into this too deeply,
00:28:08 ►
but it’s clear to me that Hellenistic science was destroyed by the Christos archetype
00:28:15 ►
because the Democritian atomists and materialists who ran Roman civilization
00:28:21 ►
had no patience whatsoever with this superstition
00:28:26 ►
that was being circulated among the servants
00:28:28 ►
about a man who rose from the dead
00:28:31 ►
and all that went with it.
00:28:33 ►
But before they knew what had happened,
00:28:36 ►
their whole civilization was in ruin
00:28:38 ►
because the archetype had frozen
00:28:41 ►
the forward thrust of this masculine,
00:28:45 ►
dominant,
00:28:53 ►
ethically depotentiated, technologically obsessed, slave-built society.
00:29:01 ►
And for a thousand years, hydrostatics, mathematics, metallurgy, you name it,
00:29:03 ►
that was nothing. Only the words of one Galilean radical
00:29:06 ►
could occupy the time of any intellectual successfully.
00:29:11 ►
Okay, we have now, 2,000 years later,
00:29:14 ►
fought our way somewhat clear of that problem.
00:29:19 ►
But the problem it solved,
00:29:22 ►
which is the problem of this masculine overbalance
00:29:25 ►
and this obsessive technological thrust, this dehumanizing thrust,
00:29:32 ►
has reached an even more intense peak.
00:29:37 ►
And now appears the flying saucer with the capacity of undoing that
00:29:42 ►
by again destroying science,
00:29:46 ►
by simply being a miracle.
00:29:48 ►
That’s all that is required to wreck science
00:29:50 ►
is a miracle visible worldwide.
00:29:54 ►
And because scientists say that that can’t happen,
00:29:58 ►
consequently if it does happen,
00:29:59 ►
their house is in real disorder.
00:30:03 ►
So I touched on this before, any of you who heard me.
00:30:07 ►
Tonight I want to talk more about the flying saucer,
00:30:10 ►
not from the point of view of the people who are going to get the whammy
00:30:16 ►
when it appears unbidden,
00:30:18 ►
but from the point of view of an insider.
00:30:21 ►
In other words, one can do more than simply say,
00:30:25 ►
oh yes,
00:30:25 ►
I understand what this is.
00:30:27 ►
The overmind
00:30:28 ►
is visibly manifest
00:30:30 ►
in the skies of earth
00:30:31 ►
in order to skew history
00:30:33 ►
toward an eschatological mode
00:30:36 ►
that will stifle inquiry
00:30:38 ►
in order, basically,
00:30:40 ►
to preserve the species
00:30:41 ►
from extinction.
00:30:44 ►
But a mature humanity
00:30:46 ►
could get into a place
00:30:50 ►
where we no longer required
00:30:51 ►
these metaphysical spankings
00:30:53 ►
from messiahs and flying saucers
00:30:57 ►
that come along every thousand years or so
00:31:00 ►
to mess up the mess that has been created
00:31:03 ►
and to try and send people off on another tack.
00:31:07 ►
And the way to do this
00:31:08 ►
is to look at the abysses that confront man
00:31:13 ►
as species and individual
00:31:15 ►
and try to unify them.
00:31:17 ►
And I think that psilocybin offers a way out
00:31:21 ►
because it allows a dialogue with the over mind
00:31:25 ►
that is not, you won’t read about it in Scientific American or anywhere else.
00:31:31 ►
You will carry it out.
00:31:34 ►
And the carrying out of this dialogue will place,
00:31:38 ►
will essentially eschatologize you as a person
00:31:43 ►
and lift you out of the historical context.
00:31:47 ►
It’s like Stephan Dedalus said in Ulysses,
00:31:50 ►
history is the nightmare that I am trying to awake from.
00:31:54 ►
Well, I would turn it around a bit
00:31:56 ►
and say history is what I am trying to go to sleep from
00:32:01 ►
in order to get away from it.
00:32:04 ►
In other words, the dream is eschatological.
00:32:07 ►
The dream is zero time and outside of history.
00:32:11 ►
Escape into the dream.
00:32:12 ►
Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs,
00:32:16 ►
that they are for escapists.
00:32:18 ►
I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream
00:32:21 ►
to what degree they are escapists.
00:32:27 ►
Escape.
00:32:29 ►
Escape from the planet, from death,
00:32:33 ►
and from the problem, if possible, of the unspeakable.
00:32:40 ►
So now, to say a bit about death and dying.
00:32:45 ►
If you leave aside the last 300 years of historical experience
00:32:48 ►
as it was handled in Europe and America,
00:32:51 ►
and examine the phenomenon of death,
00:32:53 ►
the doctrine of the soul in all its ramifications,
00:32:57 ►
Neoplatonic, Christian, dynastic Egyptian, etc.,
00:33:02 ►
I’m sure you’re all familiar with some or all of these.
00:33:06 ►
What you get is the idea that there is a light body
00:33:10 ►
or a thing, an intellect
00:33:14 ►
that is somehow mixed up in the body during life
00:33:19 ►
and at death or at dying
00:33:21 ►
is involved in a crisis
00:33:23 ►
in which these two envelopes separate and one
00:33:28 ►
loses its res and detra and falls into dissolution metabolism stops and the other one goes we know
00:33:37 ►
not where perhaps nowhere if you believe it doesn’t exist, but then you have the problem of trying to explain life,
00:33:46 ►
which, by the way, though science makes great claims
00:33:50 ►
and has done very well in systems of nuclear particles
00:33:53 ►
and even simple atomic systems,
00:33:56 ►
the idea that science can make any statement
00:33:59 ►
about what life is or where it comes from is preposterous.
00:34:04 ►
Science has nothing to say about how you can
00:34:07 ►
decide to close your hand into a fist and it happens. This is utterly outside the realm
00:34:15 ►
of scientific explanation because what we see in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause. In other words, we see matter, it’s an example of telekinesis. Matter
00:34:29 ►
is caused by mind to move. So science, we need not fear the sneers of science in the matter of origin of the soul there and as I say my my thrust into this has always been the
00:34:50 ►
psychedelic experience but I’ve been thinking recently more about dreams
00:34:55 ►
because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience of the hyper-dimension or the mode in which life and mind seem to be embedded.
00:35:11 ►
And looking at dreams
00:35:13 ►
and looking at what people with shamanic traditions say about dreams,
00:35:19 ►
you come to the realization
00:35:21 ►
that experientially for those people
00:35:25 ►
it is a parallel continuum.
00:35:28 ►
The shaman accesses it with hallucinogens or other things,
00:35:33 ►
which I mentioned, but most efficaciously with hallucinogens.
00:35:37 ►
But everybody else accesses it through dreams.
00:35:40 ►
Now Freud’s idea about dreams was, I forget the German term, but he called them day residues. He always felt that you could trace the content of the dream down to a distortion of something that happened during the day or during waking time.
00:36:26 ►
And it’s much more useful to try and make actually a kind of, but a higher order spatial dimension.
00:36:32 ►
So that in sleep you are released into the real world
00:36:34 ►
of which the world of waking
00:36:37 ►
is only the surface.
00:36:40 ►
And in a very literal sense,
00:36:42 ►
it’s the surface.
00:36:43 ►
It’s the surface in a geometric sense
00:36:46 ►
that there is a plenum,
00:36:49 ►
and recent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this up.
00:36:53 ►
There is a holographic plenum of information.
00:36:57 ►
Information, all information is everywhere.
00:37:00 ►
Information that is not here is nowhere.
00:37:04 ►
And that information stands outside of historical time. It’s like Plato said, time is the moving image of eternity. Eternity does not have a temporal existence, even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed. It does not have temporal duration of any sort.
00:37:25 ►
It is eternity.
00:37:28 ►
We are not primarily biology
00:37:34 ►
with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence,
00:37:38 ►
a kind of epiphenomenon
00:37:40 ►
at the higher levels of organization of biology.
00:37:44 ►
We are in fact hyperdimensional objects
00:37:48 ►
of some sort which cast a shadow into matter and the matter the shadow in matter is the body
00:37:57 ►
and and at death what happens basically is that the shadow withdraws or the thing which casts the shadow withdraws
00:38:07 ►
and metabolism ceases and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very
00:38:13 ►
localized area sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and
00:38:19 ►
expelling it that whole phenomenon ceases but But the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.
00:38:30 ►
And when I make these declarative statements,
00:38:33 ►
I’m making them from the point of view of this shamanic tradition
00:38:36 ►
which touches all these higher religions.
00:38:38 ►
Everything basically except rationalism holds to some version of what I’m saying.
00:38:43 ►
except rationalism holds to some version of what I’m saying.
00:38:54 ►
So then the psychedelic, the dream state and the psychedelic state acquire great import because they, there is then a task to life.
00:38:59 ►
And the task to life is to become familiar with this thing which is causing being and to be familiar
00:39:10 ►
with it at the moment of passing. In other words, the metaphor is used by several traditions
00:39:17 ►
of a vehicle, an after-death vehicle, an astral body, something like that. and shamanism and and certain yoga’s Taoist yoga claim very clearly
00:39:30 ►
that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body in life and then
00:39:37 ►
the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche. You will recognize what is happening,
00:39:46 ►
you will know what to do,
00:39:48 ►
and you will make the clean break.
00:39:51 ►
And there does seem to be
00:39:53 ►
the possibility of a problem in dying.
00:39:58 ►
In other words, what I’m telling you
00:39:59 ►
is not that you’re condemned to eternal life.
00:40:02 ►
I’m saying it’s a possibility that you can
00:40:05 ►
muff it through ignorance.
00:40:08 ►
In other words,
00:40:09 ►
at the moment of death there is a kind
00:40:12 ►
of a separation. It’s like
00:40:13 ►
birth. The metaphor is trivial
00:40:16 ►
but perfect.
00:40:17 ►
There is a possibility
00:40:19 ►
of damage,
00:40:22 ►
of incorrect
00:40:23 ►
activity.
00:40:27 ►
Again, William Blake, who said that as you start into the spiral,
00:40:31 ►
there is the possibility of falling
00:40:33 ►
from the golden track into eternal death.
00:40:37 ►
But it is only a crisis of a moment.
00:40:40 ►
It’s a crisis of passage.
00:40:42 ►
And the whole purpose of shamanism
00:40:44 ►
and of life correctly lived is to
00:40:48 ►
strengthen the soul and to strengthen the relationship to the soul so that this this
00:40:57 ►
passage can be cleanly made okay this is not anything earth-shaking or it’s well-known.
00:41:05 ►
It’s a traditional position, actually.
00:41:09 ►
But now I want to assimilate one more abyss into this model,
00:41:15 ►
one less familiar to us as rationalists,
00:41:19 ►
but well familiar to us just one level deeper in the psyche
00:41:23 ►
as Christians and Westerners.
00:41:26 ►
And that is this idea that the world will end,
00:41:28 ►
that there will be a final time,
00:41:30 ►
that there is not only the crisis of the death of the individual,
00:41:33 ►
there is the crisis of the death of the species.
00:41:38 ►
What this seems to be about
00:41:41 ►
is that from the time that there is an awareness of the existence
00:41:46 ►
of the soul, we’ll say
00:41:47 ►
circa 50,000 BP
00:41:49 ►
until the
00:41:52 ►
resolution of the apocalyptic
00:41:53 ►
potential, there’s something
00:41:56 ►
like 50,000 years
00:41:57 ►
which in biological time is only
00:42:00 ►
a moment but it is the
00:42:01 ►
entire span of history times
00:42:04 ►
five in that period everything hangs in
00:42:08 ►
the balance because it is a mad rush from monkeydom to starship hood and in the leap
00:42:16 ►
across those 25,000 years energies are released religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve
00:42:27 ►
and die, science arises, magic arises, all of these things which control power with greater
00:42:35 ►
and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear.
00:42:39 ►
There is the possibility, as in the metaphor of dying dying there is the possibility of mucking it up of aborting
00:42:48 ►
the species transformation into a hyperspatial intellect key we are now there can be no doubt
00:42:56 ►
that we are now in the final seconds of that crisis the crisis which involves the end of history, the departure from the planet,
00:43:07 ►
the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from matter.
00:43:12 ►
We are, in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter,
00:43:20 ►
which is the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter.
00:43:31 ►
The old metaphor of psyche as the butterfly is a species-wide metaphor. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum
00:43:37 ►
of the historical forces already in motion.
00:43:42 ►
Well, if you know anything about evolutionary biology,
00:43:44 ►
you know that
00:43:45 ►
man is considered to be an
00:43:47 ►
un-evolving species. In other
00:43:50 ►
words, sometime in the last
00:43:51 ►
100,000 years with the invention
00:43:53 ►
of culture, the
00:43:55 ►
biological evolution
00:43:58 ►
of man ceased and
00:43:59 ►
evolution became a cultural
00:44:02 ►
phenomenon. Tools,
00:44:03 ►
languages, and philosophies began to evolve,
00:44:06 ►
but the human somotype began to remain the same. And so we are very much like people a long time
00:44:14 ►
ago. But technology is the real skin of our species. Man, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years is an extruder of a technological shell
00:44:28 ►
we take in matter that is uh has a low degree of organization we put it through mental filters and
00:44:36 ►
we extrude lindisfarne gospels space shuttles all of these things things. This is what we do. We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef
00:44:47 ►
of extruded psychic objects.
00:44:53 ►
And the tool is the flying saucer
00:44:56 ►
or the soul exteriorized in three-dimensional space.
00:45:01 ►
As James Joyce said,
00:45:03 ►
it’s the problem of how man may be dirigible.
00:45:07 ►
And how man may be dirigible
00:45:11 ►
is basically by turning himself inside out.
00:45:16 ►
In other words, the body
00:45:17 ►
must become an interiorized hologrammatic object
00:45:22 ►
embedded in a
00:45:25 ►
solid state hyper dimensional matrix, which is eternal
00:45:30 ►
So that man wanders through Elysium in his body
00:45:35 ►
This is a kind of Islamic paradise that I’m putting out here wanders through Elysium in his body
00:45:42 ►
experiencing all the pleasures of the flesh
00:45:42 ►
through Elysium in his body experiencing all the pleasures
00:45:44 ►
of the flesh but not
00:45:46 ►
realizing that he is
00:45:48 ►
a holographic projection of a
00:45:50 ►
solid state matrix that is
00:45:52 ►
micro-miniaturized, super
00:45:54 ►
conducting and
00:45:56 ►
nowhere to be found
00:45:58 ►
it is part of the plenum
00:46:00 ►
and we
00:46:02 ►
all history is about
00:46:04 ►
producing prototypes of this situation
00:46:07 ►
with greater and greater closure toward the ideal
00:46:12 ►
so that airplanes, automobiles, condominiums, space shuttles, space colonies,
00:46:20 ►
starships of the hardware, speed of light, spin-dizzy drive type.
00:46:26 ►
All of these are, as Mercier Léon says,
00:46:29 ►
self-transforming images of flight
00:46:33 ►
that speak volumes about man’s aspiration to self-transcendence
00:46:39 ►
so that our wish, our salvation, and our only hope, basically,
00:46:45 ►
is to end the historical crisis by becoming the alien,
00:46:52 ►
by ending alienation, by recognizing the alien as the self, in fact,
00:46:58 ►
recognizing the alien as an overmind
00:47:03 ►
which holds all the physical laws of the planet
00:47:06 ►
intact in the same way
00:47:09 ►
that you hold an idea intact in your mind.
00:47:13 ►
In other words, all these givens
00:47:15 ►
which are thought to be so writ in adamantine
00:47:17 ►
are actually merely the moods of the God,
00:47:22 ►
if you will, which we happen to be.
00:47:25 ►
And the whole thing about human history
00:47:28 ►
is recovering this piece of lost information
00:47:32 ►
so that man may be dirigible.
00:47:35 ►
Or again, to quote Finnegan’s Wake,
00:47:40 ►
Moy Cain is the red light district of Dublin.
00:47:43 ►
Here in Moy Cain we flop on the seamy side
00:47:46 ►
but up Niant Prospector
00:47:48 ►
you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings
00:47:52 ►
so if you want to be phoenixed
00:47:54 ►
come and be parked
00:47:56 ►
it’s that simple you see
00:47:59 ►
but it takes courage to be parked
00:48:02 ►
when the grim reaper draws near
00:48:04 ►
a blessing in disguise Joyce calls him But it takes courage to be parked when the grim reaper draws near.
00:48:09 ►
A blessing in disguise, Joyce calls him.
00:48:16 ►
So, to me, what psychedelics point out,
00:48:20 ►
and where I think society will go once they are integrated to the point where large groups of people can plan research programs
00:48:24 ►
without fear of being persecuted for it,
00:48:28 ►
is it models the after-death state.
00:48:31 ►
It may do more than model it.
00:48:33 ►
It may essentially reveal the nature of it
00:48:38 ►
that our mind, what we each call our mind,
00:48:42 ►
can be…
00:48:44 ►
The modalities of appearance
00:48:46 ►
and understanding can be shifted
00:48:48 ►
so that we see it
00:48:50 ►
within the context
00:48:52 ►
of the one mind
00:48:53 ►
and then problems
00:48:56 ►
like the existence of extraterrestrials
00:48:58 ►
and that kind of thing become trivial
00:49:00 ►
because the one
00:49:02 ►
mind that I’m talking about
00:49:04 ►
contains all experiences of the other.
00:49:07 ►
There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs and kiliocosms of physical
00:49:15 ►
space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing. We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms
00:49:26 ►
because of what I call the quality of the code,
00:49:32 ►
meaning the language we use to discuss this problem
00:49:36 ►
has these built-in dualisms.
00:49:38 ►
This is a problem of language.
00:49:40 ►
All codes have code qualities except the logos.
00:49:46 ►
The logos is perfect and therefore it partakes of no quality other than itself.
00:49:52 ►
But so long as you deal, so long as you map with something other than the logos,
00:49:58 ►
there will be code qualities.
00:50:00 ►
And the dualism built into our language makes the death of the species,
00:50:06 ►
the death of the individual,
00:50:08 ►
these seem to be opposed things.
00:50:10 ►
Likewise, the problems biology
00:50:14 ►
and by extrapolation exobiology pose
00:50:17 ►
by examining the physical universe
00:50:20 ►
versus the angel and demon haunted world
00:50:24 ►
that death psychology is reporting on
00:50:26 ►
is again set up as a dichotomy.
00:50:30 ►
All that is needed to go beyond an academic understanding
00:50:37 ►
of what I’ve been saying
00:50:38 ►
is to have the experience of this tryptamine-induced ecstasy.
00:50:45 ►
In other words, for reasons which I leave to my brother,
00:50:49 ►
the tryptamine molecule has this unique property
00:50:54 ►
of releasing the structured self into the over-self.
00:50:59 ►
And each person who has that experience
00:51:04 ►
undergoes a mini-apocalypse,
00:51:07 ►
a mini-entry and mapping into hyperspace.
00:51:13 ►
For society to change in this direction,
00:51:16 ►
nothing is necessary except for this experience to become an object of general concern.
00:51:27 ►
experience to become an object of general concern now what I’m not saying everybody should rush out and take mushrooms in case you thought that’s what I was saying but I am saying
00:51:35 ►
that these fields of information which I don’t know if you’re like me, but my experience of these things is basically literary.
00:51:45 ►
I read Plotinus, I read Heraclitus,
00:51:50 ►
I read all this stuff,
00:51:51 ►
and I try to integrate it intellectually.
00:51:53 ►
But it is a plane of experience that is directly accessible.
00:52:00 ►
And the role that each of us plays in relationship to it
00:52:08 ►
determines how we will present ourselves
00:52:12 ►
in the final transformation that this hints of.
00:52:16 ►
In other words, in this theory,
00:52:17 ►
there is a kind of teleological bias.
00:52:20 ►
There is a belief that there is a hyper-object
00:52:24 ►
called the over-mind or God or what have you
00:52:27 ►
that casts a shadow into time. And history is the experiencing of this shadow. And as
00:52:35 ►
you draw closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify the rate of change intensifies the because what is
00:52:47 ►
happening is that this hyper object is beginning to ingress into three
00:52:52 ►
dimensional space one way of thinking of it is that the dream and the waking
00:53:02 ►
world and the world of the dream begin to become one so that the school of
00:53:07 ►
flying saucer criticism which has said flying saucers are hallucinations was in a certain sense
00:53:13 ►
correct in that the laws which operate in the dream the laws which operate in hyperspace
00:53:22 ►
can at times operate in three-dimensional space
00:53:26 ►
when the barrier between the two modes becomes weak.
00:53:31 ►
And then you have these curious experiences,
00:53:34 ►
sometimes called psychotic breaks,
00:53:36 ►
sometimes called whatever,
00:53:39 ►
but which always have a tremendous impact
00:53:42 ►
on the person they’re happening to
00:53:43 ►
because there seems to be an exterior component that could not possibly be mental.
00:53:48 ►
What I’m talking about is when coincidences begin to build and build and build
00:53:54 ►
until you finally say, you know, I don’t know what is going on,
00:53:57 ►
but it’s preposterous to claim that this is a psychological phenomenon
00:54:01 ►
because these are changes in the world,
00:54:05 ►
what Jung called synchronicity
00:54:06 ►
and made a certain model of.
00:54:09 ►
But what it really is,
00:54:11 ►
is that an alternative physics
00:54:12 ►
is beginning to impinge on reality.
00:54:19 ►
And it is the physics of light, essentially.
00:54:23 ►
Light is composed of photons.
00:54:26 ►
Photons have no antiparticle.
00:54:29 ►
This means that there is no dualism in the world of light.
00:54:35 ►
And if you try to imagine the experience
00:54:39 ►
from the point of view of a thing made of light,
00:54:42 ►
you realize, I’m sure you’re all familiar with the conventions of relativity,
00:54:46 ►
which say that time slows down as you approach the speed of light.
00:54:51 ►
But what is never said about that is that if you move at the speed of light,
00:54:56 ►
there is no time whatsoever.
00:54:59 ►
There is an experience of time zero.
00:55:02 ►
So if you imagine for a moment yourself to be made of light or in possession of a vehicle
00:55:08 ►
which can move at the speed of light, you can traverse from any point in the universe
00:55:15 ►
to any other with a subjective experience of time zero.
00:55:20 ►
This means that you cross to Alpha Centauri
00:55:26 ►
time zero
00:55:27 ►
but the amount of time that has passed
00:55:30 ►
in the relativistic universe
00:55:31 ►
is whatever it is
00:55:33 ►
four and a half years
00:55:34 ►
but if you move at very great distances
00:55:38 ►
if you cross 250,000 light years
00:55:41 ►
across to Andromeda
00:55:43 ►
you still have an experience of time zero.
00:55:47 ►
The only experience of time that you have is a subjective time that is created by your
00:55:53 ►
own mentation.
00:55:55 ►
But in relationship to the so-called Newtonian universe, there is no time whatsoever.
00:56:00 ►
You exist in eternity.
00:56:03 ►
You have become eternal.
00:56:29 ►
whatsoever. You exist in eternity. You have become eternal. Now, of course, the universe is aging at a staggering rate all around you in this situation, but you perceive it as a fact of the universe, the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe so you have essentially translated into this eternal mode that i mentioned
00:56:36 ►
time as the moving image of eternity you are then away from the moving image you exist in the static mode i believe that this is uh is what technology pushes toward and that there is no opposition
00:56:45 ►
between ecological balance
00:56:48 ►
and the people who want to leave the planet
00:56:51 ►
and the hyper-technologists
00:56:52 ►
and the hyper-naturalists.
00:56:55 ►
All of these are red herrings.
00:56:57 ►
The real historical entity
00:57:03 ►
which is becoming imminent
00:57:04 ►
is the human soul, and the monkey body has served to carry to this moment of release, and it will always serve as the focus of self-image, but it will exist in a world made by the human imagination. This is what the return to the Father,
00:57:27 ►
the transcendence of physis,
00:57:30 ►
the rising out of the Gnostic universe of iron
00:57:33 ►
that traps the light, all these metaphors,
00:57:36 ►
this is what it means.
00:57:37 ►
It means release into the human imagination.
00:57:41 ►
Very shortly,
00:57:42 ►
a, as it were
00:57:47 ►
a dry run for this phenomenon
00:57:49 ►
will take place in the form
00:57:51 ►
of space exploration
00:57:53 ►
and space colonies
00:57:54 ►
because there the coral
00:57:57 ►
reef like animal called man
00:57:59 ►
that has extruded technology
00:58:01 ►
all over the surface of the earth
00:58:03 ►
will be freed at last from the constraints of anything
00:58:06 ►
but his own imagination and the limitations of materials.
00:58:11 ►
So that, for instance, the earliest space colonies,
00:58:15 ►
of course there will be an effort to duplicate the ecosystem of Hawaii
00:58:19 ►
and this and that, you know,
00:58:21 ►
these like exercises in ecological understanding to prove
00:58:26 ►
you know what you’re doing. But as soon
00:58:28 ►
as this is under control
00:58:30 ►
we will be
00:58:32 ►
released into the realm of art
00:58:34 ►
which is what we have always striven for.
00:58:36 ►
We will make our world,
00:58:38 ►
all of our world,
00:58:40 ►
and the world we came from will be maintained
00:58:42 ►
as a garden. But
00:58:44 ►
what Iliad indicated as these endless metaphors
00:58:48 ►
of self-transforming flight will be realized momentarily
00:58:52 ►
as the technology of the space colony.
00:58:56 ►
What is lining up right behind that, of course,
00:58:59 ►
is the fact that the transition from Earth to space
00:59:02 ►
is a staggeringly tight genetic filter,
00:59:05 ►
a much tighter filter
00:59:07 ►
than any previous frontier ever has been.
00:59:10 ►
Even the filter,
00:59:13 ►
the genetic demographic filter
00:59:15 ►
represented by the New World,
00:59:17 ►
it’s said that the vitality of America
00:59:19 ►
is because only the dreamers
00:59:22 ►
and the pioneers and the schemers made the trip across.
00:59:27 ►
This will be even more true of the transition to space,
00:59:32 ►
and the technological conquest of space will set the stage then
00:59:37 ►
for the interiorization of that metaphor and the conquest of inner space and the collapse of the state vectors
00:59:46 ►
associated with this technology
00:59:48 ►
deployed in Newtonian space
00:59:50 ►
and then
00:59:51 ►
man will have become more than
00:59:54 ►
dirigible
00:59:55 ►
I think a break here
00:59:58 ►
is maybe
00:59:59 ►
in order
01:00:01 ►
let’s have a break.
01:00:12 ►
I’ll just say a couple more things and then there seem to be a lot of questions
01:00:14 ►
so I’ll throw it open
01:00:16 ►
for questions. But before I
01:00:18 ►
do that, I mentioned
01:00:20 ►
this book, The Invisible Landscape
01:00:23 ►
that my brother and I wrote
01:00:24 ►
and I’ll say just a bit about it because it relates to what’s been said.
01:00:47 ►
the soul, spoke of it as a long-term technological goal, meaning visible within the next hundred
01:00:55 ►
or so years following on to space travel, that sort of thing. But what the invisible landscape is about is an effort to short-circuit that chronology and to actually, in a certain sense, force the issue.
01:01:08 ►
It’s the story, or rather it’s the intellectual underpinnings
01:01:13 ►
of the story of an expedition to the Amazon
01:01:16 ►
by my brother and myself and several other people in 1971
01:01:21 ►
in which my brother formulated an idea that involved using harming and harmaline.
01:01:32 ►
These are compounds which occur in Banisteriopsis capi, which is the woody vine that is the
01:01:40 ►
basis for ayahuasca.
01:01:42 ►
And ayahuasca is one of these plant hallucinogens
01:01:46 ►
that releases you into this dimension
01:01:48 ►
I’m discussing
01:01:49 ►
an effort to
01:01:51 ►
use harming
01:01:53 ►
in conjunction with the human voice
01:01:56 ►
in a
01:01:57 ►
what we call the experimented
01:01:59 ►
which was basically
01:02:01 ►
you can take it as very loose
01:02:04 ►
science or very tight magic.
01:02:07 ►
But it was an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of these harming molecules metabolizing in vivo in the body in such a way that it involves binding into melanin bodies is as likely a possibility as that it involves DNA. is stored so that this information is then broadcast in essentially in the mind in such
01:03:11 ►
a way that you begin to get a readout on the structure of the soul.
01:03:16 ►
In other words, this was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the
01:03:20 ►
cat, if you will, to hang a superconducting, telemetric, psychedelic device
01:03:27 ►
on the overmind
01:03:29 ►
so that there would be a continuous readout of information
01:03:34 ►
from this dimension.
01:03:37 ►
And the success or failure of this,
01:03:41 ►
you may judge by reading the book
01:03:44 ►
because the first half of the book describes
01:03:45 ►
the experiment, the theoretical underpinning
01:03:48 ►
of the experiment. The second half of the book
01:03:49 ►
describes the theory
01:03:51 ►
of the structure of time
01:03:53 ►
that derived from the
01:03:55 ►
bizarre mental states that
01:03:57 ►
followed upon the experiment.
01:04:01 ►
I don’t
01:04:02 ►
claim that we succeeded.
01:04:04 ►
I just claim that our theory of what happened is better than any theory any of our critics have been able to bring forward.
01:04:12 ►
But whether we succeeded or not, that kind of thinking points the way. when I speak of the technology of building the starship, I imagine it will be done with voltages
01:04:27 ►
far below the voltage of a common flashlight battery.
01:04:31 ►
This is, after all, where the most interesting phenomenon go on in nature.
01:04:38 ►
Thought is that kind of phenomenon.
01:04:40 ►
Metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.
01:04:43 ►
So I think that an Aquarian science or a science that places the psychedelic experience at the center of its program of investigation should move toward a practical realization of this goal, the goal of eliminating the barrier
01:05:08 ►
between the ego and the over-self
01:05:10 ►
so that the ego can perceive itself
01:05:13 ►
as an expression of the over-self
01:05:16 ►
so that the anxiety of being cast into matter,
01:05:21 ►
of apparently facing a tremendous biological crisis
01:05:24 ►
in the form of death, of
01:05:26 ►
apparently facing a tremendous species crisis in the form of the apocalypse, the crisis
01:05:35 ►
of limitation in physical space by being planet-bound, all of these things can be obviated by cultivating the soul, basically, by practicing shamanism using
01:05:50 ►
these tryptamine drugs that I’ve described.
01:05:54 ►
And my plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians who may be listening to my voice, is to look again at psilocybin,
01:06:05 ►
to not lump it with the other psychedelics,
01:06:09 ►
to realize that it is a phenomenon unto itself
01:06:14 ►
and it has an enormous potential for transforming mankind,
01:06:18 ►
not simply transforming the people who take it,
01:06:21 ►
but it is like an art movement or a mathematical understanding
01:06:27 ►
or a scientific breakthrough.
01:06:29 ►
It holds the possibility of transforming the entire society simply by virtue of the information
01:06:36 ►
that is coming through.
01:06:39 ►
This is a source of gnosis, and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind for at least a
01:06:47 ►
thousand years I like to think that when these Franciscans and Dominicans arrived in Mexico in
01:06:57 ►
the 16th century they immediately set about stamping this thing out. The Indians called it Tienona Kotel,
01:07:05 ►
the flesh of the gods.
01:07:07 ►
Well, the Catholic Church has a monopoly on theophagia
01:07:11 ►
and was not pleased by this particular approach
01:07:16 ►
to what was going on.
01:07:18 ►
Now, 300, 400, whatever it is,
01:07:21 ►
years after that initial contact,
01:07:24 ►
I think that Eros, which retreated from Greece
01:07:29 ►
and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity,
01:07:33 ►
retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, essentially,
01:07:37 ►
and then was finally pushed into seclusion there,
01:07:40 ►
it now re-emerges in Western consciousness.
01:07:50 ►
And our institutions, our epistemology all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued that with the help of shamanic
01:07:59 ►
ly inspired personalities we can release this thing once again.
01:08:05 ►
I mean, the logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides
01:08:12 ►
and Heraclitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people.
01:08:18 ►
And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien
01:08:25 ►
and this is the promise that is held out
01:08:31 ►
and I realize that it may seem to some
01:08:34 ►
a nightmare vision
01:08:35 ►
but all historical changes of immense magnitude
01:08:39 ►
have had that quality
01:08:41 ►
because they propel people into a completely new world
01:08:44 ►
are there any questions yes whether they’re good or bad. I’m just saying that there are, there appear to be many ways of discovering that,
01:09:08 ►
that inner reality, the ultimate reality.
01:09:13 ►
Do you want me to comment on that?
01:09:15 ►
Yeah.
01:09:15 ►
I agree with you that this is a strongly held position.
01:09:20 ►
I always, in my explorations,
01:09:24 ►
have recourse to my own experience
01:09:26 ►
and I’ve not had good luck with any of these other techniques.
01:09:32 ►
I spent time in India, practiced yoga,
01:09:37 ►
scoured the various rishis, roshis, geishas and gurus that Asia had to offer
01:09:44 ►
and I believe they must be talking about something roshis, geishas, and gurus that Asia had to offer.
01:09:49 ►
And I believe they must be talking about something,
01:09:52 ►
but in my experience,
01:09:56 ►
it is so pale and so far removed from the actual closure with the intense tryptamine ecstasy
01:10:02 ►
that I don’t really know what to make of it
01:10:05 ►
and I am willing to believe these things are possible
01:10:08 ►
I just must be a very grounded person
01:10:11 ►
well maybe it’s a shortcut
01:10:13 ►
for a lot of people
01:10:16 ►
well tantra for instance claims to be
01:10:20 ►
that’s what tantra means is the shortcut path
01:10:23 ►
and certainly they might be on the right track.
01:10:30 ►
Sexuality, orgasm, these things do have tryptamine-esque qualities to them.
01:10:35 ►
But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens,
01:10:42 ►
is information, immense amounts of information.
01:10:46 ►
In my experience, a hallucinogen like LSD,
01:10:50 ►
the hallucinations seem largely to be
01:10:53 ►
somehow related to the structure of the optic nerve,
01:10:56 ►
or they are essentially trivial.
01:10:59 ►
They are geometric patterns, shifting lights,
01:11:04 ►
but less synergized by another drug. They are geometric patterns, shifting lights, this and that,
01:11:08 ►
but unless synergized by another drug.
01:11:13 ►
The classic psychedelic experience that started it all with Huxley and those people was, I believe, 200 micrograms of LSD and 30 milligrams of mescaline.
01:11:21 ►
And I would believe that that would deliver a
01:11:25 ►
visionary experience
01:11:28 ►
rather than an experience of
01:11:30 ►
hallucinations and the difference is
01:11:31 ►
what still Simon shows you is not
01:11:34 ►
colored lights and moving grids
01:11:35 ►
it shows you places
01:11:38 ►
jungles, cities
01:11:40 ►
machines, books
01:11:42 ►
architectonic
01:11:44 ►
form of incredible complexity.
01:11:48 ►
Just click, click, click.
01:11:51 ►
There is no possibility that this could be construed
01:11:54 ►
as noise of any sort.
01:11:58 ►
It is, in fact, the most highly ordered visual information
01:12:01 ►
that you ever experience.
01:12:03 ►
Much more highly ordered than the visual experience
01:12:06 ►
I’m having at this moment of this room.
01:12:10 ►
But information in the form of a flood of data,
01:12:13 ►
that is no sense.
01:12:15 ►
I mean, could you…
01:12:17 ►
You certainly must mean something more important
01:12:21 ►
than a flood of data.
01:12:22 ►
Well, no, no.
01:12:26 ►
I think I talked about this last time,
01:12:28 ►
that Philo-Judeus talks about
01:12:30 ►
what he calls a more perfect logos.
01:12:32 ►
He says a more perfect logos
01:12:35 ►
would be beheld rather than heard.
01:12:40 ►
In other words, the formulation you get
01:12:42 ►
in the Gospel of John,
01:12:43 ►
in Principio ad Verbum,
01:12:44 ►
ad Verbum caro factum est,
01:12:46 ►
in the beginning was the word.
01:12:47 ►
Yes, it was the word in the beginning,
01:12:50 ►
but this is a strange kind of word.
01:12:52 ►
It is a word which is visually beheld,
01:12:56 ►
and the language in which the gnosis communicates
01:13:00 ►
is a language of visual forms, such that there is no ambiguity about meaning
01:13:08 ►
because there is no recourse to a dictionary of agreed upon signification it is purely beheld
01:13:18 ►
this is why it’s very hard one of the main problems of psychedelic drugs is to bring back
01:13:23 ►
information because it is hard to English it
01:13:27 ►
and the reason it’s hard to English it
01:13:29 ►
is because it’s like trying to
01:13:31 ►
make a three-dimensional rendering
01:13:34 ►
of a fourth-dimensional object
01:13:36 ►
only through the medium of sight
01:13:39 ►
can the true modality of this logos be perceived
01:13:43 ►
that’s why it’s so interesting
01:13:47 ►
and i should have maybe talked more about it that psilocybin and ayahuasca which is this aboriginal
01:13:54 ►
drug which uses tryptamine to make it run is there’s a telepathic component, which is there is a shared state of mind
01:14:06 ►
because the unfolding hallucination
01:14:10 ►
is shared in complete silence.
01:14:14 ►
And it’s very hard to prove this to a scientist,
01:14:19 ►
but if four people are having this experience,
01:14:22 ►
one person can like monologue it
01:14:25 ►
and then cease the monologue and another
01:14:27 ►
person will take it up
01:14:29 ►
everyone is seeing the same
01:14:31 ►
thing
01:14:32 ►
and this
01:14:35 ►
it is the quality of being
01:14:38 ►
visual information to answer
01:14:40 ►
your question Arthur that seems
01:14:42 ►
to make this logos
01:14:43 ►
believable in the way that I quoted
01:14:46 ►
William Blake when he said, the truth cannot be told.
01:14:50 ►
That is very powerful statement.
01:14:53 ►
And you do believe it.
01:14:55 ►
You do believe it.
01:14:56 ►
But I was going to say that you see, and we say QED after demonstration in geometry, but the Hindus say behold. Now
01:15:12 ►
the seeing involved there, I wouldn’t think of as visual, but it does get the word seeing,
01:15:18 ►
the name seeing. You somehow, your whole, I wouldn’t say mind, your being resonates.
01:15:28 ►
I like to use the term recognize.
01:15:31 ►
You see that, let’s say, this is the same thing as the other thing.
01:15:36 ►
And I don’t know whether it’s seeing, but seeing is a good word,
01:15:41 ►
but it isn’t, I wouldn’t call it visual.
01:15:43 ►
No, well, it isn’t exactly visual.
01:15:45 ►
I mean, again, to quote Philo Giudeas on the Logos,
01:15:48 ►
he says that the Logos goes from a thing heard to a thing seen
01:15:55 ►
without ever crossing through a quantized transition point.
01:16:01 ►
And yet this seems impossible.
01:16:02 ►
It seems a logical impossibility
01:16:06 ►
because it is either one
01:16:08 ►
or the other and yet
01:16:09 ►
when you actually have the experience
01:16:12 ►
you see, aha
01:16:13 ►
it is as though thought
01:16:16 ►
which is heard
01:16:17 ►
the thought which is
01:16:20 ►
heard becomes more and more intense
01:16:22 ►
until finally its intensity is
01:16:24 ►
such that with there being no jump or glitch,
01:16:27 ►
you now are beholding it
01:16:28 ►
in the three-dimensional visual space
01:16:31 ►
and you command it.
01:16:33 ►
And this is very typical of Sula Sarpana.
01:16:37 ►
Yes?
01:16:38 ►
I have two questions.
01:16:40 ►
One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue,
01:16:43 ►
I was wondering if you could kind
01:16:47 ►
of be more descriptive in that regard.
01:16:50 ►
And the other thing was, as far as the effects of this type of experience, especially over,
01:16:58 ►
say, a prolonged period of time on the body and the body as an energy system and how do you
01:17:05 ►
balance that or how do you
01:17:07 ►
counteract
01:17:08 ►
possible negative effects?
01:17:12 ►
Okay, well I’ll take the last part
01:17:13 ►
first which is about the body.
01:17:16 ►
I’m not an abuser.
01:17:19 ►
It takes me a long time to assimilate
01:17:22 ►
each experience
01:17:23 ►
and I feel I never have lost my respect for it.
01:17:28 ►
I mean, I really feel dread is one of the emotions that I always feel as I approach it
01:17:34 ►
because I have no faith that my sails won’t be ripped this time.
01:17:39 ►
I always make the metaphor, you know,
01:17:41 ►
it’s like sailing out onto a dark ocean in your little skiff.
01:17:46 ►
And, you know, you may view the moon
01:17:49 ►
rising serenely over the calm black water
01:17:52 ►
or something the size of a freight train
01:17:54 ►
may roar right through your scene
01:17:57 ►
and leave you clutching at an oar.
01:18:00 ►
And, I don’t know,
01:18:01 ►
astrology is maybe helpful
01:18:03 ►
in figuring out when to go and when not to go,
01:18:06 ►
but there needs to be a way to figure out
01:18:09 ►
when to go and when not to go.
01:18:12 ►
Now your question about the dialogue,
01:18:14 ►
I mean this very literally.
01:18:17 ►
It speaks to you, you speak to it.
01:18:20 ►
It says things.
01:18:22 ►
I don’t know how many of you have read the book
01:18:24 ►
that my brother and I wrote
01:18:26 ►
under pseudonyms called
01:18:27 ►
Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower’s
01:18:30 ►
Guide, but in the introduction
01:18:31 ►
there, there’s a
01:18:34 ►
rap which is all about
01:18:35 ►
I am old, 50 times older
01:18:38 ►
than thought in your species
01:18:39 ►
and I came from the stars. Well, that’s
01:18:42 ►
verbatim, you know. I just
01:18:43 ►
was writing it furiously.
01:18:46 ►
And sometimes it’s very human.
01:18:48 ►
I mean, my approach to it is Hasidic.
01:18:50 ►
I rave at it.
01:18:51 ►
It raves at me.
01:18:53 ►
We argue about what it’s going to cough up
01:18:55 ►
and what it isn’t.
01:18:57 ►
And I say, well, look, you know,
01:18:58 ►
I’m the grower.
01:19:00 ►
You can’t hold back on me.
01:19:02 ►
And it says, well, but if I showed you
01:19:04 ►
the flying saucer
01:19:06 ►
for five minutes you would figure out
01:19:08 ►
how it works and I said well
01:19:10 ►
you know come through
01:19:11 ►
I remember once
01:19:16 ►
I asked
01:19:18 ►
what was it
01:19:19 ►
it has these many
01:19:21 ►
manifestations sometimes it’s
01:19:24 ►
like Dorothy sometimes it’s like Dorothy.
01:19:29 ►
Sometimes it’s like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker.
01:19:32 ►
And I asked it one time,
01:19:35 ►
what are you doing on earth?
01:19:39 ►
And it said, well, you know, you’re a mushroom.
01:19:40 ►
You live cheap. It’s very…
01:19:42 ►
This was a quiet neighborhood
01:19:45 ►
until the monkeys got out of control.
01:19:54 ►
Yes.
01:19:57 ►
I need some clarification
01:19:59 ►
on some of the things you said.
01:20:01 ►
I can
01:20:02 ►
understand, at least in my own way,
01:20:06 ►
how this idea about an over-consciousness
01:20:11 ►
or casting a shadow,
01:20:14 ►
and that our psychedelic experience or dream experience
01:20:19 ►
has to do with getting in touch with that.
01:20:22 ►
But you said that…
01:20:24 ►
I’m not really positive about this, this is why I need some clarification on it, has to do with getting in touch with that. But you said that…
01:20:26 ►
I’m not really positive about this,
01:20:28 ►
this is why I need some clarification on it,
01:20:30 ►
is that in some sense that
01:20:36 ►
those brief experiences,
01:20:38 ►
something about that our experience was
01:20:41 ►
in order to get back there,
01:20:43 ►
and that was the reason for us to be let me see
01:20:50 ►
well I think that
01:20:53 ►
this object
01:20:55 ►
as a friend of mine said
01:20:57 ►
history is the shock wave of eschatology
01:21:00 ►
in other words we are living in a very unique moment
01:21:04 ►
10 or 20,000 years long, where this immense transition is happening.
01:21:10 ►
And the object at the end of and beyond history, which is the human species transformed into this eternal, superconducting, over-mined spacecraft thing thing is casting a shadow back
01:21:26 ►
through time and
01:21:27 ►
all religion, all
01:21:29 ►
philosophy, all wars,
01:21:31 ►
pogroms, persecutions
01:21:34 ►
are because people do not
01:21:36 ►
get the message right
01:21:37 ►
and that’s because there is both
01:21:39 ►
the forward flowing
01:21:41 ►
casuistry of being,
01:21:43 ►
causal determinism,
01:21:45 ►
and the interference pattern
01:21:48 ►
that is formed against that
01:21:50 ►
by the backward-flowing
01:21:51 ►
fact of this eschatological
01:21:53 ►
hyper-object throwing its
01:21:56 ►
shadow across the landscape.
01:21:58 ►
So we exist,
01:22:00 ►
there is a great deal of noise.
01:22:02 ►
This situation
01:22:03 ►
called history is totally unique.
01:22:06 ►
It will only last for a moment.
01:22:08 ►
It began a moment ago.
01:22:09 ►
It will only last for a moment.
01:22:11 ►
But in that moment, there is like this tremendous burst of static
01:22:15 ►
as the monkey goes to godhood,
01:22:18 ►
and there is this crossing of the, I don’t like to call it the
01:22:25 ►
casuistry, but the efficacy of
01:22:27 ►
the eschaton, this
01:22:29 ►
final eschatological object
01:22:31 ►
and the forward flow
01:22:33 ►
of entropic
01:22:35 ►
circumstance. Does that
01:22:37 ►
get it for you?
01:22:40 ►
Maybe.
01:22:42 ►
Well, I have
01:22:43 ►
a little bit of trouble
01:22:45 ►
you know thinking
01:22:46 ►
kind of like which came first
01:22:48 ►
are you saying the chicken or the egg
01:22:49 ►
are you saying that this over consciousness
01:22:51 ►
has something to do with
01:22:53 ►
well I’m certainly saying
01:22:56 ►
that life is necessary
01:22:57 ►
that life is
01:22:59 ►
it is not the idea that we are
01:23:01 ►
have been skewed onto
01:23:04 ►
a siding called organic
01:23:06 ►
existence and that our actual place
01:23:08 ►
is in eternity
01:23:09 ►
no, there is something about
01:23:12 ►
this is a very important
01:23:13 ►
part of the cycle
01:23:15 ►
it is
01:23:17 ►
it is a filter
01:23:20 ►
remember I mentioned
01:23:21 ►
that I thought that there was the possibility
01:23:24 ►
of extinction, there was the possibility of extinction.
01:23:25 ►
There was the possibility of falling into physis forever.
01:23:30 ►
And so in that sense the metaphor of the fall is valid.
01:23:35 ►
There is a spiritual obligation.
01:23:37 ►
There is a task to be done.
01:23:39 ►
It isn’t though simply something as simple minded as following a set of somebody else’s rules.
01:23:45 ►
It’s that the noetic enterprise
01:23:48 ►
is a primary obligation of being
01:23:51 ►
in this circumstance.
01:23:54 ►
And your salvation is linked to it.
01:23:59 ►
Because if you do…
01:24:00 ►
And not everyone has to read alchemical texts
01:24:04 ►
or study superconducting biochemistry
01:24:07 ►
to make the transition.
01:24:09 ►
Most people make it naively
01:24:11 ►
by thinking clearly about the present at hand.
01:24:17 ►
But we and I, we are intellectuals
01:24:20 ►
trapped in a world of too much information.
01:24:24 ►
Innocence is gone for us.
01:24:26 ►
We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge
01:24:32 ►
through the act of a good act of contrition.
01:24:35 ►
That won’t be sufficient.
01:24:37 ►
We have to understand.
01:24:40 ►
And I recall Whitehead said,
01:24:42 ►
understanding is the apperception of pattern as such,
01:24:46 ►
because to fear death is to not understand what’s going on.
01:24:52 ►
And to even see it as a big deal is to not understand what’s going on,
01:24:57 ►
although I don’t claim to have reached that exalted plane.
01:25:14 ►
plane but cognitive activity is the defining fact of humanness language thought analysis art poetry myth-making these are the things that point the way toward the realm of being of the eschaton.
01:25:26 ►
That is what Joyce means when he says man may become dirigible.
01:25:30 ►
In other words, man may be released into a realm of pure engineering.
01:25:34 ►
The imagination is everything.
01:25:38 ►
This was Blake’s perception.
01:25:40 ►
This is where we come from.
01:25:41 ►
This is where we’re going.
01:25:42 ►
And it is only to be approached through cognitive activity, I think.
01:25:57 ►
Can you comment on the importance of your discussion of the I Ching in your book?
01:26:02 ►
of your discussion of the I Ching in your book?
01:26:09 ►
Well, very briefly, because I always have the feeling this part bores people more than any other
01:26:11 ►
because it hinges on tiny details.
01:26:13 ►
But briefly, what the Logos said to me
01:26:18 ►
was that time is not simply a homogeneous medium
01:26:22 ►
where things occur.
01:26:24 ►
Time is not simply a homogeneous medium where things occur.
01:26:32 ►
You can think of it as a fluctuating density of probability so that though science will tell us what can happen and what cannot happen,
01:26:39 ►
we have no theory that explains why out of everything that could happen,
01:26:44 ►
certain things undergo what Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring.
01:26:51 ►
And this was what the Logos sought to explain to me.
01:26:54 ►
Why out of all the myriad things that could happen,
01:26:57 ►
certain things undergo the formality of occurring.
01:26:59 ►
And it is because there is a hierarchical,
01:27:07 ►
a modular hierarchy of waves of temporal conditioning
01:27:09 ►
or temporal density
01:27:12 ►
or in other words,
01:27:14 ►
a given moment,
01:27:17 ►
it is more likely for a certain event
01:27:20 ►
rated highly improbable.
01:27:22 ►
It is more probable at some moments than others.
01:27:26 ►
And taking that simple perception
01:27:28 ►
and being led by the hand, by the logos,
01:27:32 ►
we were able to construe maps of time
01:27:35 ►
which we run on a computer
01:27:37 ►
and which give a map of the ingression
01:27:40 ►
of what I call novelty,
01:27:42 ►
the ingression of novelty into time.
01:27:46 ►
Now, as a general statement,
01:27:52 ►
it’s obvious that novelty generally is increasing. It has been since the very beginning of the universe, because first there was only the possibility of nuclear interaction, and then
01:27:58 ►
as temperatures fell below the bond strength of the nucleus, atomic systems could be formed.
01:28:05 ►
And then as temperature fell,
01:28:07 ►
molecular systems could be formed.
01:28:09 ►
Then much later, life became possible.
01:28:12 ►
And then as very high life forms,
01:28:14 ►
complex life forms evolved,
01:28:16 ►
thought became possible,
01:28:18 ►
culture was invented.
01:28:20 ►
Then with the invention of printing and language
01:28:23 ►
and then printing and then electronic information movement
01:28:28 ►
and this kind of thing.
01:28:29 ►
What is happening is there is an ingression of novelty
01:28:32 ►
toward what Whitehead, and I took his term, call concrescence.
01:28:36 ►
And this is a tightening gyre.
01:28:39 ►
Everything is flowing together.
01:28:41 ►
And in fact, the man-made lapis,
01:28:44 ►
the alchemical stone
01:28:46 ►
at the end of time,
01:28:47 ►
occurs when everything flows together.
01:28:50 ►
When the laws of physics
01:28:51 ►
are obviated and
01:28:53 ►
the universe disappears
01:28:55 ►
and what is left is
01:28:57 ►
the tightly bound
01:28:59 ►
plenum, the monad if you
01:29:02 ►
wish, able to express itself
01:29:04 ►
for itself
01:29:05 ►
rather than able only to cast a shadow
01:29:09 ►
into physis as its reflection.
01:29:12 ►
And I don’t, I speak,
01:29:15 ►
I come very close here to classical millenarian
01:29:18 ►
and apocalyptic thought.
01:29:20 ►
My view of the rate at which change is accelerating
01:29:24 ►
and the way the gyre is tightening
01:29:26 ►
causes me to think
01:29:28 ►
and the wave predicts this
01:29:30 ►
that it is not long
01:29:31 ►
it is soon
01:29:33 ►
50 years, 25 years, 35 years
01:29:38 ►
then this event will occur
01:29:39 ►
it is the entry of the species into hyperspace
01:29:42 ►
but it will appear to be the collapse of the state vector
01:29:47 ►
and the end of physical laws
01:29:49 ►
and the release of the mind into itself.
01:29:55 ►
And all these other images,
01:29:57 ►
the starship, the space colony, all that,
01:30:00 ►
these are precursors.
01:30:02 ►
Again, the idea that history is the shockwave of eschatology.
01:30:06 ►
As you close distance with the eschatological object,
01:30:09 ►
the reflections it is throwing off
01:30:11 ►
become more and more true to the thing itself.
01:30:14 ►
And in the final moment, God stands revealed.
01:30:19 ►
There are no more reflections of the mystery.
01:30:23 ►
The mystery in all its nakedness then is seen,
01:30:26 ►
and nothing else exists.
01:30:29 ►
But what this is, decency can safely, scarcely hint at.
01:30:38 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:30:41 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:30:44 ►
Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:30:53 ►
I don’t know about you, but I kind of like that part back there where Terrence was talking about the body being the placenta of the soul. And to be honest, in my long battle to rid myself of the
01:31:00 ►
stories that had been drilled into my brain in Catholic school, well, I’ve more or
01:31:05 ►
less quit thinking in terms like soul. But when Terrence made that statement a while back, it
01:31:11 ►
somehow resonated with the old memories or something, and then it immediately combined
01:31:17 ►
with the thought of how old I seemed to be getting. So my first thought after that was,
01:31:22 ►
hell, if that’s true, I’d better get to work pretty soon,
01:31:25 ►
or a very rough-edged soul is going to pop out of this body slash placenta.
01:31:31 ►
But when I think about it, my soul, or whatever we want to call it,
01:31:36 ►
is probably in its best shape when I’m having a good time doing things like having a few tokes and listening to Terrence McKenna.
01:31:43 ►
So if that’s what it takes, then I’m not only up to it, I’m all for it.
01:31:49 ►
But, you know, back before that, at least for me,
01:31:53 ►
I think that Terrence made the clearest statement about death that I’ve heard from him yet.
01:31:58 ►
You remember what I’m talking about?
01:32:00 ►
It was when he said that there may be a problem about death
01:32:03 ►
that the psychedelic
01:32:05 ►
experience helps to prepare you for. And to tell the truth, that’s something that I’ve felt very
01:32:10 ►
deeply about for a long time now. And while only a very few of my experiences were dark,
01:32:16 ►
they all could be called explorations in the land after death, I think, something like that.
01:32:22 ►
And I’ve also found that the transition from the time that you
01:32:25 ►
ingest the substance until you’ve reached the plateau, well, it can often be quite tricky and
01:32:31 ►
sometimes even brutal. But after having gone through a wide range of these experiences,
01:32:36 ►
I have to say that I’ve really lost all fear of dying to, at least to the point where I’ve
01:32:42 ►
convinced myself that when my time comes I’ll
01:32:45 ►
be able to sail on through that experience quite gently. Of course it’s much easier for me to say
01:32:52 ►
that it doesn’t bother me to think about dying because you know I’ve already had a life that’s
01:32:57 ►
been really filled with fun and adventure and while I’m planning on being active for another
01:33:03 ►
25 years or so I don’t have the feeling that I really have to cling to life
01:33:08 ►
rather than just enjoy each day I have
01:33:11 ►
and I sure wish that I’d had this attitude earlier in life
01:33:14 ►
because it’s a lot more enjoyable just taking it day to day
01:33:18 ►
and not trying to plan for a future that, at least for me, never actually got here the way I planned early on
01:33:24 ►
and I guess that after I think about it though I plan for a future that, at least for me, never actually got here the way I planned early on.
01:33:36 ►
And I guess that after I think about it, though, the future that actually did get here for me is several orders of magnitude better than the one I originally planned for myself.
01:33:40 ►
And I hope that holds true for you in your life as well. Now was it just me or near the end of this talk when Terrence was going into his rap about
01:33:47 ►
how the universe has constantly been increasing its novelty content that he began to sound almost
01:33:54 ►
like that crackpot preacher who recently and quite wrongly predicted that the end of the world would
01:34:00 ►
take place on May 21st. Here’s part of what Terence said at the end of
01:34:06 ►
that rap, and I quote, it’s not long, it is soon, 50 years, 25 years, 35 years, then this event will
01:34:14 ►
occur, end quote. And the event that he was talking about, of course, was his somewhat poetic version
01:34:21 ►
of the Eschaton. Now, since this talk was given in 1982,
01:34:26 ►
I guess that means his prediction for the Eschaton
01:34:29 ►
is sometime between 2007 and 2032.
01:34:34 ►
So, I guess 2032 is the next end of the world date
01:34:38 ►
that Hollywood will be focusing on once we get to the end of 2012.
01:34:43 ►
However, my wish for you is that you don’t latch on to any of these end-time prophecies,
01:34:49 ►
no matter what their source.
01:34:51 ►
Unless I miss something,
01:34:53 ►
never in the entire history of humanity has a prediction about the end of the world come true.
01:34:58 ►
So, I’m going to go along with the odds in accepting the fact that
01:35:01 ►
the only eschaton that I’m ever going to experience is my own personal eschaton.
01:35:06 ►
And outside of exercising and watching my diet, I don’t see a lot more that I can do
01:35:11 ►
about that one.
01:35:15 ►
Now, on a little happier note, I’m pleased to report of a recent return from the dead.
01:35:22 ►
And that is the wonderful news that Xandor and Mrs. Z have got the GrowReport.com forums
01:35:28 ►
back online. Unfortunately, the company where
01:35:32 ►
Zandor was hosting the forums didn’t do proper backups, and so
01:35:36 ►
all of the postings from last July until now have been lost.
01:35:39 ►
It’s really a tragedy because there was a lot of very excellent discussion that took
01:35:43 ►
place in the forums in that time. But past is past and now we can get back to those wonderful and very robust but
01:35:51 ►
without flaming discussions that thegrowreport.com is so famous for. Another positive announcement
01:35:59 ►
is that if, like me, you enjoy podcasts that aren’t all talk, but which also include music and comedy,
01:36:06 ►
there are two that I highly recommend.
01:36:10 ►
One is a relatively new podcast by the host of the weekly
01:36:14 ►
Planet London Radio Live and Interactive Sunday Smoking Sessions
01:36:18 ►
that you can find online, and that’s the one and only Scooby Snacks.
01:36:22 ►
He’s been podcasting for a few months, and already by his podcast number five,
01:36:26 ►
he has reached what I think is a really high level of professionalism,
01:36:30 ►
and that got me to go back and listen to his latest show more than once even.
01:36:35 ►
Now, fast forward another hundred podcasts,
01:36:38 ►
and we get to my longtime variety podcast favorite, Lefty’s Lounge.
01:36:43 ►
And if you look at Lefty’s listing on iTunes, you’ll
01:36:46 ►
see only 105 podcasts of today for Lefty’s Lounge, but I’ve been listening to Lefty even before the
01:36:52 ►
lounge, way back when he was doing a show called Storytime with Lefty. In fact, I think I even
01:36:58 ►
called in and told a story or two on that one. Now, if my memory serves me right, I forgot to congratulate Lefty on his 100th program
01:37:07 ►
with his current Lefty’s Lounge show, but I’m here to tell you 101, 102, 103, and onward each keep
01:37:14 ►
getting better. So a belated congratulations Lefty, and keep them coming, particularly the comedy,
01:37:20 ►
which I think of as intellectual music for the soul. You know, I just couldn’t
01:37:25 ►
imagine a world without comedy. It would be a bleak world without music, to be sure, but
01:37:30 ►
who would want to live in a world without laughter? Not me. And Lefty always has a lot
01:37:36 ►
of good comedy, which lately has been featuring some more clips from Joe Rogan, who is one
01:37:41 ►
of my all-time favorite comedians. And I think I’ve mentioned this before,
01:37:46 ►
but Joe also has a podcast that you probably would like.
01:37:50 ►
So check out Lefty Joe and Scooby Snacks’ podcast
01:37:53 ►
if you want some more really feel-good time each week.
01:37:57 ►
Finally, I want to also point you to my friend KMO’s podcast number 258,
01:38:02 ►
which is titled Navigating the Screaming Abyss,
01:38:06 ►
and features an interview that KMO did with Dennis McKenna. In fact, it was KMO who inspired
01:38:12 ►
me to title today’s program with that interesting word abyss in it. For as you know, Dennis McKenna,
01:38:19 ►
Terrence’s younger brother, is about to begin writing a biography of his brother and is nearing the end of
01:38:25 ►
a Kickstarter campaign titled The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. And I just checked Dennis’s
01:38:31 ►
Kickstarter website and see that in the past week another 121 people have made pledges for this
01:38:36 ►
campaign, but with only 11 days left before it closes, he’s still somewhat short of the target
01:38:41 ►
amount. So if you happen to get a little cash as a graduation present or something,
01:38:46 ►
you might want to pay a little of it forward,
01:38:48 ►
so that years from now, when Dennis and the rest of the elders of that period are long gone,
01:38:54 ►
their stories will still live on in our collective tribal memory.
01:39:00 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for now,
01:39:02 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:39:17 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:39:28 ►
And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,
01:39:31 ►
you can hear something about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,
01:39:35 ►
which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook
01:39:38 ►
that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:39:42 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. I’m an alien