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.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:30

And sharing the salon with me today are several people who either made donations directly to the salon,

00:00:34

or who bought a copy of my audiobook, The Genesis Generation,

00:00:38

and who I think of as our virtual hosts today.

00:00:41

And those generous people are… Brock T., who actually bought a book and made a significant donation to the salon,

00:00:47

Gary B, Robert T, Cord M, Revlin J, C Jones, and Michael M, long-time friend, and another

00:00:59

long-time listener and regular donor, Mark C.

00:01:02

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,

00:01:27

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

00:01:40

261 up to the present, and they now have significantly reduced file sizes with

00:01:46

little noticeable degradation in the sound quality at least to my own

00:01:51

tinnitus haunted ears that is so thanks again for your time Xe Velvet and to our

00:01:58

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

00:02:12

forgotten about you. I’ll definitely get back to you eventually, but once again, I’ve overcommitted

00:02:18

on several projects that I’m involved in, and I’m having difficulty setting enough time aside right now to work on the podcast.

00:02:25

But hopefully I’ll be able to remedy that very soon.

00:02:29

Now, for today’s program, which is from this cassette tape

00:02:34

that has been sitting on my desk for over a month now, I guess,

00:02:38

I finally just couldn’t wait any longer to hear it.

00:02:40

And as you’ve no doubt already guessed, it’s another talk by Terrence McKenna.

00:02:44

longer to hear it, and as you’ve no doubt already guessed, it’s another talk by Terrence McKenna.

00:02:51

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

00:02:57

Podcast 261, which at the time was the earliest recording of a Terrence McKenna lecture that I’d come across so far.

00:03:06

But as I was putting that tape away after doing the podcast, another tape slipped out of the box

00:03:11

onto the floor, and that’s the one I’m going to play for you right now. And if the label on the

00:03:17

tape is to be believed, the talk that we’re about to hear is even a little older than the previous

00:03:23

McKenna talk that I played.

00:03:30

And so thank you again, Diana, for sending these tapes for me to share with all of our friends here in cyberdelic space.

00:03:33

Now, the handwriting on the tape says, New and Old Maps of Hyperspace, McKenna, November

00:03:39

1982, First Lecture, which I take to mean that this was perhaps the first lecture in a weekend

00:03:46

workshop series of some kind he was giving at the time. Now a few weeks ago, Bruce Dahmer asked

00:03:53

Diana about the source of these tapes, but since many of them were given to her a long time ago,

00:03:58

she no longer can recall exactly who it was that gave each and every one to her, so we don’t really

00:04:03

know where this tape came from.

00:04:06

I do know that there are some McKenna tapes floating around the net that mention maps of hyperspace or something like that,

00:04:13

and they might be from this same lecture series that he was giving at the time, I guess.

00:04:18

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.

00:04:25

In a few minutes, you’ll see why I decided to change the title a little bit for today’s podcast.

00:04:33

In any event, let’s now give a listen to this November 1982 recording of Terrence McKenna,

00:04:39

in which he still felt the need to introduce himself and explain his qualifications to the audience,

00:04:41

which I actually find quite charming.

00:04:45

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,

00:05:00

is this idea of self-reflection, and of self-referential things that and the

00:05:06

paradoxes that can come out of that and I find Terence McKenna a kind of

00:05:12

self-referential person he’s spoken to us at least once twice I think right and

00:05:21

each time I have experienced

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an almost hallucinogenic experience

00:05:29

in listening to him talk

00:05:30

and I’m looking forward very much tonight

00:05:35

to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens

00:05:38

and UFOs

00:05:40

new and old maps of hyperspace

00:05:43

take off

00:05:44

well thank you very much

00:05:49

I’m very glad to be here

00:05:51

special thanks to Ruth and Arthur in the institute

00:05:55

for asking me back for a third time

00:05:57

perhaps the third time is the charm we’ll see here

00:06:01

my name is Terence McKenna and my training is basically in shamanism

00:06:12

and botany and ethnography and my interest is in hallucinogenic drugs especially plant

00:06:21

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

00:06:37

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

00:07:29

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.

00:07:45

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

00:08:34

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,

00:09:07

and if you don’t work hard, it isn’t useful.

00:09:10

My own experience in looking at non-narcotic shamanism,

00:09:15

essentially non-narcotic shamanism in Indonesia and in Nepal,

00:09:20

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

00:10:01

embedded in them as soon as you rise even to the level of primitive agriculturalists,

00:10:07

it becomes much more important to be able to get up in the morning

00:10:10

and go to work than it does to have these ecstatic experiences

00:10:15

because the plants have to be tended, the fields tilled, and so on.

00:10:21

I formed these opinions about non-narcotic shamanism early in my career of looking at this

00:10:30

phenomenon. I didn’t contact narcotic shamanism until I went to the Amazon basin initially in

00:10:39
  1. And although I was familiar with the hallucinogenic state from growing up basically
00:10:49

in the counterculture in Berkeley, but what I found in South America after sifting through

00:10:55

these various experiences is that the family of drugs constellated around tryptophan, specifically DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and psilocybin,

00:11:07

which is chemically very similar to DMT, that these compounds had a relationship to reality

00:11:16

far different from all the other hallucinogens, the scopolamine, hyalcyamine, tropane family that you get in detour and that kind of

00:11:27

thing, or LSD, which laboratory LSD does not occur in nature, but isomers of it occur in nature,

00:11:36

although to be taken at hallucinogenic doses, they must be taken at hundreds of times the amount.

00:11:43

So that’s basically the scientific, medical,

00:11:47

anthropological basis of what I’m saying.

00:11:49

A career spent in Asia and more recently in the Amazon

00:11:54

looking at this phenomenon.

00:11:58

And I want to take my conclusions tonight

00:12:01

and contrast them with the modern predicament and try to make a model

00:12:08

using the hallucinogenic experience, a model that makes some of the anxieties of being human and

00:12:18

especially some of the anxieties of being human in the 20th century context more palatable.

00:12:26

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

00:12:49

the UFO or the UFO experience

00:12:51

these abysses are basically four embedded in a fifth

00:12:56

the four are the biological abyss

00:13:02

that is represented by death and dying,

00:13:05

that is the central crisis of every individual existence,

00:13:13

and almost as a reflection of that crisis on a higher plane,

00:13:18

the historical abyss represented by the end of history

00:13:23

and the apocalypse and possibly the millennium but in any

00:13:28

case the end of history that western religion whether it be judaism christianity or whatever

00:13:36

has appointed to our world and made basic to western man’s view of things and which now

00:13:42

because of the existence of nuclear weapons

00:13:45

and this kind of thing,

00:13:47

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

00:13:58

in the apocalyptic crisis.

00:14:01

A third abyss could be called

00:14:03

the psychological. And this is represented by dreams, most in general other, and being at the mercy of, call it the collective unconscious,

00:14:29

the overmind of the species, what have you.

00:14:34

The fourth abyss, which is one whose emergence is unique in our time,

00:14:41

is the actual physical abyss which surrounds this planet for light years in all directions

00:14:48

because suddenly now because of our level of technology and and scientific mapping

00:14:54

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

00:15:07

of the sort we like to accept as a Western culture,

00:15:12

challenges of energy, engineering, and distance.

00:15:16

So these are the four abysses,

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the abyss of space, the abyss of death,

00:15:22

the abyss of the psychedelic experience,

00:15:24

and the abyss of death, the abyss of the psychedelic experience, and the abyss

00:15:26

of dying.

00:15:28

And these four general categories have to be seen embedded in a somewhat subtler kind

00:15:36

of abyss, which is the abyss of the unspeakable.

00:15:39

In other words, that language, which is the primary tool of cognition of the species,

00:15:46

casts nets against these other gulfs and comes away with different kinds of maps.

00:15:55

But you cannot put much trust in these maps unless you’ve carried out a thorough analysis of language.

00:16:01

these maps unless you’ve carried out a thorough analysis

00:16:03

of language and once you’ve done

00:16:06

that for sure you will not put

00:16:08

much trust in any of these

00:16:10

maps because the thinness

00:16:12

of the web on which it all is

00:16:14

hung will be readily

00:16:16

apparent

00:16:16

okay

00:16:18

it’s my assumption

00:16:23

whenever I am confronted with opposites

00:16:26

is to try to unify them

00:16:28

to create a coincidencia positorum

00:16:31

as was done in alchemy

00:16:32

to not force the system to closure

00:16:35

but to try and leave the system open enough

00:16:38

so that the differences can resonate

00:16:40

and become complementary

00:16:42

rather than antithetical

00:16:43

so I would like to unify here not two dualisms,

00:16:48

but these four oppose these pairs.

00:16:52

You could think of them as the quadripartite elements of a kind of mandala.

00:16:58

The means to unifying that mandala is integration of the psychedelic experience.

00:17:04

Specifically,

00:17:06

I’m going to make the assumption

00:17:07

specifically the psilocybin

00:17:10

or tryptamine

00:17:11

experience.

00:17:13

And what it appears to be

00:17:16

is

00:17:16

something which

00:17:20

is much more assimilable

00:17:21

to the science fiction metaphor of a

00:17:24

parallel universe than it is to the science fiction metaphor of a parallel universe

00:17:25

than it is to the Freudian metaphor

00:17:29

of the repression of desire

00:17:31

or even the Jungian metaphor

00:17:33

of a collective species-wide memory

00:17:39

and experience bank.

00:17:42

It is much more, I think,

00:17:46

of the character of a parallel continuum.

00:17:50

And in order to erect the intellectual edifice

00:17:55

of the past thousand years,

00:17:58

this possibility has had to be ignored,

00:18:02

much in the way that you would apply

00:18:04

Occam’s razor to a situation

00:18:06

and just say well we will not admit

00:18:09

the more complex phenomenon

00:18:11

because we should form a theory

00:18:13

that is true to the simplest phenomena first

00:18:17

and then build out from it

00:18:18

and this has worked

00:18:21

in a demonic kind of way

00:18:23

in the sense that we have taken command

00:18:25

of the atomic world

00:18:29

which is a very simple world

00:18:32

compared for instance to the variables that you meet

00:18:34

in sociology or biology

00:18:36

but at the cost of formulating theories

00:18:41

about how the world is put together

00:18:43

that nowhere come tangential to experience.

00:18:47

So we have a bizarre situation

00:18:50

where our best models of reality

00:18:53

that are kept for us by the priesthood of science

00:18:56

are like exhibits in a museum

00:18:58

because they cannot be mapped on

00:19:01

to the simple fact of individual experience.

00:19:07

Shamanism, on the other hand,

00:19:09

is this worldwide, since Paleolithic times, tradition

00:19:13

which says that you must make your own experience

00:19:17

the centerpiece of any model of the world that you build.

00:19:21

No amount of readings from meters,

00:19:23

whether they’re metering cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument, are going to satisfy you.

00:19:42

sense of these metaphors, so

00:19:44

called, or myths, so called,

00:19:46

that are the

00:19:47

pre-Western, pre-print,

00:19:50

pre-literate

00:19:51

mappings of the world.

00:19:55

An example

00:19:56

of how this

00:19:58

problem distorts other problems

00:20:00

is the problem of extraterrestrial

00:20:02

contact, which

00:20:04

is, the way science presents the problem of extraterrestrial contact, which is the way science presents the problem of extraterrestrial contact

00:20:09

is that we are alone

00:20:11

and that to assuage our cosmic loneliness,

00:20:16

we should build ever larger radio telescopes

00:20:19

and million-channel signal analyzers

00:20:22

and sift the radio noise coming from the stars and eventually

00:20:27

if a signal is found an immense philosophical turning point will have occurred and we will

00:20:34

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

00:20:48

in the last 300 years, people have been talking to the other since man began.

00:20:56

Angels, demons, fairies, sprites, elves, all of this is as phenomenologically a part of human experience

00:21:06

as, we’ll say, birds of paradise,

00:21:09

which I’m sure none of you have ever had anything to do with,

00:21:12

but believe inflexibly that such creatures exist

00:21:16

because it is allowed by the experts that they exist.

00:21:22

What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not

00:21:30

is it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and take. In other words,

00:21:37

there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin and DMT and a few other not well-known or widely distributed

00:21:50

plant hallucinogens induce. I think it was William Blake who said,

00:21:56

the truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed. And this is the kind of information

00:22:07

that is coming through the psilocybin experience.

00:22:11

It is information which you have to believe it.

00:22:14

You have to believe it because it has this ring of authenticity.

00:22:19

It is the logos.

00:22:21

It is the word somehow.

00:22:34

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

00:22:40

straw men that are keeping us from building actually a mature model

00:22:47

of how the universe really works.

00:22:51

The content of the dialogue with the other

00:22:54

is a content that indicates

00:23:00

that man’s horizons are infinitely bright,

00:23:05

that death is in fact,

00:23:08

well, as Thomas Vaughan put it,

00:23:11

the body is the placenta of the soul.

00:23:16

And this fact has not yet been assimilated

00:23:19

because it runs counter to Western reductionist,

00:23:23

materialist empiricism.

00:23:27

But this idea that the body is placenta to the soul

00:23:31

is not an object of faith or a dogma.

00:23:37

It’s a program for activity.

00:23:40

The activity that it implies should be undertaken

00:23:45

is a familiarization with the soul.

00:23:50

And the soul has been banned from Western thinking about the self

00:23:54

for nigh on 400 years, at least in leading circles.

00:24:00

But I take this concept very seriously.

00:24:04

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

00:24:25

the last gasp of

00:24:28

the soul before it’s

00:24:29

submerged completely. In other words,

00:24:31

it became trapped

00:24:33

in an association

00:24:35

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