275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It seemed probable to me that this phenomenon encountered in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin actually has a potential historical impact. It is a kind of human ability, which is at present submerged in the psyche, contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace. In other words, of going into that place where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough that you can have an intimation, at least, of what is to come.”

“I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology. In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language. Because what you cannot think you cannot do, and where you cannot imagine you cannot steer your culture and go. So I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulates the evolution of human culture generally.”

“Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”

“This is what magic is. It’s being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language, for us relegated to poetry and that sort of thing.”

“The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of. Just as the history of yourself that you don’t know is what your personal unconscious is made out of.”

“Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.”

Women’s Visionary Congress
Consciousness, Healing, and Social Justice
The Women’s Visionary Congress (WVC) is an annual gathering of visionary women healers, scholars, activists and artists who study consciousness and altered states. The WVC supports the transfer of knowledge among women who apply the insights of their research and spiritual path. We gather on beautiful land in Northern California to renew our community of adventurers and visionaries.

The fifth annual WVC will take place from July 29 - 31, 2011 at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Earthrise Retreat Center, near Petaluma, California. The WVC welcomes interested women and men to join us as we talk, dance, eat delicious food and participate in a series of conversations with wise women.

Presenters include Copperwoman, Valerie Corral, Earth and Fire Erowid, Dorothy Fadiman, Amber Field, Carolyn (Mountain Girl) Garcia, Dorka Keehn, Jessica Lucas, Mariavittoria Mangini, Jean Millay, Eleonora Molnar, Annie Oak, Linnae Ponté, Miss S, Nick Sand, Stephanie Schmitz, Jane Straight, Justine Willis Toms, Keeper Trout, Clare Wilkins and Nina Wise.

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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And if you heard my previous podcast, you know that I said I was going to get this program out the next day.

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Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a few years, you know that I’ve said things like that before,

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but then slipped and didn’t get a new podcast out when I said I would.

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Which, once again, seems to be the case but what’s different this time is that I actually believed myself when I said that a little over a week ago

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so I can’t even trust myself, how’s that?

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Anyhow, here we are with me only getting two podcasts out in over a month

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and I can’t even blame it on the severe heat that most of the U.S. is experiencing right now

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because here in San Diego we’re still having almost perfect weather.

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But instead, I’m going to put all the blame on the summer reading that I’ve been doing.

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It’s been many years since I’ve read so many books, one after the other, but that’s what’s been going on.

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Nothing exciting to report, other than I’ve had my nose stuck in a book, in many books,

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and I’ve been neglecting my number one passion, which is being here with you in the salon.

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But a whole bunch of our fellow salonners haven’t given up on me,

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and they either bought a copy of my novel, The Genesis Generation, or made a direct donation to the salon.

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And I’m sure that you will also recognize the names of some

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longtime supporters here, most of whom I haven’t met yet, but who feel like they are longtime

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friends to me. And these kind souls are Kyle G., Paul W., Timothy H., Olivia S., Hollad R.,

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Wow, that’s the longest list of supporters we’ve ever had here in the salon,

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which means that I’m going to have to go ahead with my plans for a 2012 trip to Burning Man to meet as many of you as I can in person. Plus, there are going to be a few other events

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coming up that you may want to know about, and I’ll tell you all about that right after we hear

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today’s program, which is a talk by none other than Terrence McKenna. The tape that this talk

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was recorded on came to me from our dear friend

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and longtime salonner, Diana Slattery.

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And thank you yet again, Diana,

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for sending all of these great talks to me

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so that I could play them here in the salon.

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The note on this tape indicates

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that it was recorded in October 1983

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in Berkeley, California.

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And as we are about to hear, once again, the Bard McKenna comes up with ever new ways to

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frame some of his ideas so as to make them seem almost new each time we hear them coming

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from yet a different direction.

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And so let’s go back in time to over a quarter of a century ago and see what was on the Bard

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McKenna’s interesting mind way back then.

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century ago, and see what was on the Bard-McKenna’s interesting mind way back then.

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So I’ve spoken about five times about various aspects of the psychedelic experience to audiences here and at Esalen and in Santa Barbara, and one of the things that is a personal interest of mine that stands out from the general background of the psychedelic experience is the way that it throws light on language.

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And I discovered that audiences seem fairly responsive to this question, even though it seemed to me at first fairly hard to articulate it

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and fairly hard to say too much about it.

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So tonight, to indulge myself

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and anybody else who has a particular interest

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in this aspect of it,

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I want to say more about it

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and maybe talk for 40 minutes or so and then

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take questions. And I think it’s by talking, it’s perhaps a tautology to think that by

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talking about a linguistic phenomenon or a linguistic problem, you can illuminate it.

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But I’m interested in how it strikes other people and the kind of dialogue that can be

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generated by talking about it. First of all, to background what I’m saying a little bit,

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I recently ran across a very interesting analogy or metaphor that seemed useful to me,

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which was, it was a historical analogy

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saying that when civilizations come into crisis,

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they inevitably, one of their strategies for survival

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is to cast back to an earlier period of time,

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an earlier cultural ideal,

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and then to try to exemplify its values.

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And as the obvious example

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and the most recent phenomenon of this sort

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on any large scale is the Renaissance,

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in which the breakdown of medieval society and the rise of

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mercantilism generated a need to cast back into time for a set of values and then to realize them

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and the period of time that was chosen was classical g and Rome.

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And so painting, sculpture, poetry reflected an effort to recapture classical values.

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What I think is happening in the present

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and by the present, I mean the whole 20th century,

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is a similar thing, a similar culture crisis, but on a much grander and more global and more threatening scale, and a casting back for a previous cultural model that can, whose ideals, if we could realize them, would save our own civilization,

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the same idea that the Renaissance had about classical Greece.

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But strangely, the period that we have decided,

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that we have fastened on,

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without ever making a conscious decision,

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but as a reflection of decisions made in the mass psyche of the species,

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the period that we have settled on is the archaic period which precedes human history.

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And so cubism and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Pound and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Pound

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and the glorification of barbarism

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and the recovery of the unconscious.

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First, the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud.

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Later, the mass archetypal structure through Jung.

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In other words, the great movements of the 20th century,

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even Marxism, can be seen as efforts to recapture

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prehistoric sacral values.

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And this process has been going on for 50 years or so,

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different adumbrations of it at different times.

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And now, and for the past 10 years or so,

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the theme of shamanism,

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the rediscovery of Paleolithic religion,

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and the rise of the use of hallucinogenic drugs,

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which were the driving force of Paleolithic religion,

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has come into the fore. Well, okay, holding that in your mind for

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a moment, recall Marshall McLuhan’s idea that technologies for conveying information shift

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ratios in the mass psyche and the way that it relates to the world. And he was famous for

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predicting what he called electronic feudalism. He said that the television screen was more like

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a page of manuscript than a page of print, and that as the linearity and uniformity and rational assumptions of grammar were transcended

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in the conveying of information to be replaced by electronic gestalts that were looked at

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rather than read, that the ratios between the senses would shift

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and that this would have profound effects

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on art and the history of ideas

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and this sort of thing.

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What is happening is that

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a kind of super McLuhanistic phenomenon is happening

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where we are collapsing not into the electronic feudalism

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that he discussed

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but into

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the electronic tribalism

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which he discussed

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and it is

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shifting our

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sensory

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ratios away

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from

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the audio and toward the visual. And this brings me now to my subject, which is the transformations of language under the influence of the psychedelic experience the fact that there is a spectrum of vocal and psychological and

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psychomental phenomena that range all the way from the recess the recitation of learned material

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through freely formed speech and into these trance-like religious phenomena

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that go under the category glossolalia.

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And these things are experienced

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by the people who do them

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as having a varying relationship

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to the visual rather than the audio sense.

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We had a discussion a couple of nights ago

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with Ralph Abraham about when you are asked

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to conjure the idea of an orange,

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what is this idea made out of?

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When you close your eyes and think of an orange,

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is what you think of made of language

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or is it made of light?

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And what you say

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in answer to this question,

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what does it say about you

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and the way in which

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you’re embedded in your culture?

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Under the influence of psilocybin,

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particularly,

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the language-forming centers

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are activated

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and they are activated in tandem with the visual cortex

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so that forms of synesthesia are experienced

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which are linked first of all to sound

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so that people singing control the fabric of hallucination through sound

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and we found this to be true of ayahuasca in the Amazon,

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where definitely the shaman’s use of voice controls the fabric,

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the visual fabric of what’s going on.

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But there is yet another level to that phenomenon,

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which is with the addition of meaning,

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the control of the visual surface,

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the topology of meaning, if you will,

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rather than the ongoing decoding from a dictionary

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is transcended.

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Meaning then is able also to work its adumbrations on this topological surface

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and you see into, well, there are different ways of cognizing it.

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The place where the ursprach is coming from,

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the assembly language that lies behind all formalized or culturally validated languages. Wittgenstein called it the

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unspeakable. It’s the place where explication cannot go almost by definition in order to avoid tautology. Well, now it seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens to

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normal metabolites of brain chemistry and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and Julian

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James have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world.

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In other words, that it’s a delicate balance of chemistry

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and language and history and these sensory ratios.

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That given all this, it seemed probable to me

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that this phenomenon encountered in deep psychedelic experiences

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with psilocybin

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actually has a potential historical impact.

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It is a kind of human ability which is at present submerged in the psyche,

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contactable only by the shamanic means of journeying into historical hyperspace.

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In other words, of going into that place

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where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough

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that you can have an intimation, at least,

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of what is to come.

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And I think this is what is to come,

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and it is a kind of telepathy,

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but it’s not telepathy as we imagined it to be

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i when i imagined telepathy i thought of it as hearing another person think and having them hear

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you think this is something where the modality of meaning is shifted out of a common dictionary that is a cultural convention

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and into a shared visual topology

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which is examined by both parties,

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both the speaker who caused this thing to be

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and the audience who shares the space where this is

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happening. It’s interesting that beta-carbolines, which are used to accentuate the hallucinogenic

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effect of DMT in these ayahuasca preparations in Amazonas, is very definitely a part of normal

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human metabolism, brain metabolism. And the

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MAO inhibition that it’s performing on DMT

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that is introduced from the outside

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is a mirror image of the kind of function that it’s performing in the brain. So the shifting

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of these sensory ratios is causing language to become more visual. And at this point, I always

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have to quote Philo Judeus, who was a first century Alexandrine Jew who talked about the logos

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and I have made analogies

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between the phenomenon I’m describing

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and the logos

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but in the critical quote

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what he said was

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that a more perfect logos was possible

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and that it would be a phenomenon

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which would pass from

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the modality of being heard from the modality of being heard

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to the modality of being beheld

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without ever crossing through a quantized point of transition

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where you could say it was one, now it is the other.

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And I think the cultural shock waves that will be generated

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by the emergence of visible language

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will totally transform the culture to the point that the point beyond the end of history,

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the entry into hyperspace, the eschatological monad,

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all these religious or theological constructs about history

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are actually intuitions about language

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undergoing this transformation.

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Now, several things about this transformation.

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It’s obviously not something which the culture is doing as a decision.

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It isn’t like home computers and cable TV.

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It isn’t being brought on as an information utility.

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It’s something which is being imposed from outside.

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And I think it is, I’m sure most of you are familiar

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with the Gaia hypothesis of homeostatic regulation

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of the environment of the earth

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through the interaction of all life acting as a single organism.

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Well, it obviously regulates trigger species such as we are,

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are part of this homeostatic method of regulation.

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And I think the gradual evolution of language is actually the gradual

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lifting of the veil that is imposed between ourselves and meaning by the planetary ecology.

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In other words, the forward thrust of history is actually regulated by the ecology, and it is regulated

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through control of the evolution of language, because what you cannot think, you cannot do,

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and where you cannot imagine, you cannot steer your culture and go. So I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as human macro,

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almost social pheromones

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that regulate the rate

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at which language develops

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and therefore regulate

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the evolution of human culture generally.

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Now one final thought about all this.

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It seems clear to me,

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and I’ve mentioned it in the other lectures,

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that the evolution,

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that another aspect of what psychedelics are doing

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and an aspect of what’s happening to the culture generally

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is its transformation into a space-faring species

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and that the momentum for this has been building for millennia. It is not something that was

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decided in the 1950s. It is in fact what we’re all about. I looked at a book recently by Terry Wilson about Brian Geisen called Here to Go.

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And he asked the question, what are we here for?

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And he answers himself, we’re here to go.

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And I think there’s great truth in that, especially in the current historical moment

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where it’s clear that man as a species and the planet as a unified ecosystem

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have become antagonistic to each other.

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And this is not unusual in nature.

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In fact, it’s a phenomenon

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that occurs between a mother and a fetus.

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When the fetus comes to term,

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when the birth is imminent,

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it must happen. Otherwise, the survival of both parties is threatened,

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even though the birth trauma for the mother and the child

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represents one of the major crises

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that they will face in their sojourn in existence.

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Nevertheless, it is inevitable and necessary,

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and if it comes off correctly, why, it’s to the good of everyone.

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Where psychedelics comes together with that

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is that it is going to require a transformation

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of human language and understanding

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to stop the momentum of the historical process,

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to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare,

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infantile 19th century politics, all these things.

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It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it

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by political means.

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And the I Ching says, you know, you never confront evil directly

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because when it is named, it sharpens its weapons

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and it learns to defend itself.

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So what is called for is this sideways attack through hyperspace.

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God forbid, I think it was

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Tim Leary who said we should become

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ecological secret agents.

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Is that what I’m

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concluding? Maybe.

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Anyway,

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the transformation of language

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is, I think,

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the signal that this archaic,

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that this nostalgia for the archaic world

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is coming to a head

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and that this is its culmination.

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This is the peculiar thing

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that we all sense is coming

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that we can’t quite imagine

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that is synthetic yet natural,

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that is obvious yet hidden.

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And the interesting thing about it

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is that it emerges from an inner personal

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frontier. In other words, you’re not going to hear this on the evening news. The president

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is not going to explain it to you. The secretary general of the UN isn’t going to explain it

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to you. You are only going to advance into understanding this phenomena to the degree that you apply yourself to your being, to attention to being, to reflection on reflection, to attention on attention. it will become clear. And because it is a gradient of evolution,

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it doesn’t come with the force of a revelation.

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It is something which is drawn out.

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Almost in the same way that we move forward into time,

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this thing is drawn out.

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In fact, you could almost say that the act of history

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or the fact of history

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is a macro phenomenon that arises out of the micro physical fact of millions of people evolving their language.

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That is what causes the moving wave front of historical becoming.

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historical becoming. So transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century. My brother is

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working on the theory, putting together the argument for the idea that actually human history has always been mediated

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by man’s interaction with hallucinogenic drugs

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and that this is the pheromonal regulator

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that links us to the rest of the ecology.

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And it’s simply accidents of botany

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and alkaloid distribution and historiography that allowed a culture to arise in Europe, which was an area confined geographically and poor in psychedelic plants, so that the mystery was confined to places like Eleusis and peripheral cults, like possibly the mushroom berserkers or Agaricus. I mean, Amanita using cults in the Arctic regions.

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And because of those accidents of botany and geography,

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a culture was able to get loose from such a tight, the tight constraints that the unconscious imposes. But nevertheless, that culture then was the Promethean culture, the Faustian culture, which claimed the energies which will then send the mind tribes to the stars. If it had not been for this historical episode,

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we would essentially be at the Amazonian level of culture,

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which is suspended in the hallucinogenic dream,

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but oblivious to the historical forces

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which are bearing down on that.

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And tribalism is a social form

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which can exist at any level of technology.

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It’s a complete illusion to associate

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it to with low levels of technology it is probably in fact a form of social organization

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second only to the family and its ability to endure so this must seem very strange to some people and home ground to other people.

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Are there any questions at this point?

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Mary a taker.

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Yes.

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Yeah, my last generalization is real broad.

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Maybe you could expand on how tribalism as a social point can exist at any technological level. hierarchically structured societies that we associate with our own culture,

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which I assume we define

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consciously or unconsciously

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as somehow the superior culture,

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is just inherited

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from a tribal organization

00:27:20 ►

but with a need to abstract

00:27:22 ►

the leadership quality

00:27:24 ►

so that control

00:27:25 ►

could function over wide areas but

00:27:28 ►

electronics actually is you know the

00:27:31 ►

entire human community is enclosed in a

00:27:34 ►

light second of travel so there is the

00:27:39 ►

globalism is real I mean when I first

00:27:42 ►

read McLuhan it seemed to me very true, but a thin voice

00:27:48 ►

crying in the wilderness. It was hard to see if out of all the trends working in society,

00:27:53 ►

that was how it would come to be. But it certainly seems to be so. I think, well, H.G. Wells

00:28:03 ►

said history is a race between education and disaster.

00:28:07 ►

And I think, you know,

00:28:09 ►

that education was losing that race

00:28:11 ►

until electronics came along.

00:28:15 ►

And now I would probably be optimistic.

00:28:20 ►

I think that there is a global commonality

00:28:24 ►

of understanding coming into being, and it is not necessarily fostered by institutions. For instance, the invention of the microchip, which makes possible the personal computer, it was actually thought to be a mistake. It was not fast enough for the Defense Department purposes that it was engineered,

00:28:46 ►

that the research project that produced it was aiming for. And they produced instead

00:28:51 ►

this weird thing, which they couldn’t imagine what to do with because it was too slow for

00:28:56 ►

any military or industrial application. But someone realized, you know, that it was just fine for human beings

00:29:08 ►

and that it would shift the pieces around on the board

00:29:15 ►

in the war between freedom and oligarchy and human individuality

00:29:24 ►

and all these forces which seek to oppress it.

00:29:27 ►

So I don’t believe, you know,

00:29:29 ►

that the historical process is under the control

00:29:32 ►

of any of the many, many institutions

00:29:34 ►

that would wish to control it.

00:29:37 ►

I don’t…

00:29:38 ►

The break between nature and man

00:29:40 ►

has been overstressed, I think,

00:29:42 ►

and that we should realize, you know,

00:29:44 ►

that we are very

00:29:47 ►

strange, but you can find very odd adaptations at many levels. And when you look at the global

00:29:56 ►

ecology, you see that there must be a species like us, or otherwise it would mean that evolution gives up at the planetary level

00:30:06 ►

that somehow when it

00:30:08 ►

encounters the edge of

00:30:09 ►

the atmosphere it just

00:30:11 ►

says okay well that’s it

00:30:12 ►

if the star goes we all

00:30:14 ►

go and there’s no way

00:30:15 ►

around that but actually

00:30:17 ►

the obvious way around

00:30:18 ►

that is a technical

00:30:20 ►

species a minded species

00:30:23 ►

that will open a hole using energy and understanding

00:30:29 ►

through which everything could escape if it had to. Because as the data flows back from

00:30:39 ►

these probes moving out through the solar system and beyond, it turns out that the 19th century intuition of catastrophism

00:30:48 ►

was very correct,

00:30:50 ►

that the universe is in fact a very turbulent place

00:30:54 ►

and that you only have to open your time window a little bit,

00:30:58 ►

like 100,000 years,

00:31:00 ►

for the probability of very turbulent events

00:31:04 ►

that a global ecosystem would react to

00:31:08 ►

and strategies have to be evolved. I mean Francis Crick has come out with his belief,

00:31:16 ►

the panspermia idea, that life actually evolves in a deep space environment and is conveyed then to planetary environments

00:31:26 ►

where it can adapt and evolve evolutionary strategies

00:31:32 ►

by cometary material.

00:31:35 ►

At one point, we suggested that Stropharia cubensis,

00:31:38 ►

the psilocybin mushroom,

00:31:39 ►

was actually an intelligent species

00:31:43 ►

whose method,

00:31:45 ►

whose strategy of evolutionary advance was the spore,

00:31:52 ►

which could actually go into a kind of suspended animation

00:31:55 ►

for hundreds of thousands, millions of years,

00:31:58 ►

and by that means radiate through the galaxy over very long periods of time. And that seemed like a very

00:32:09 ►

radical idea at the time. We hypothesized that spore liberation by an agaricus on the planetary

00:32:17 ►

surface, then through Brownian motion and accumulation of global charge on the surface of the spore

00:32:25 ►

that there would be a small number of these

00:32:28 ►

tending to percolate out of any given atmosphere.

00:32:32 ►

And given the enormous amounts of spores that are released,

00:32:36 ►

you could make an argument for this kind of evolutionary strategy.

00:32:39 ►

But Crick, who discovered DNA, makes a much wilder hypothesis which is that you

00:32:46 ►

don’t even require a planetary ecosystem for DNA and life chemistry to evolve

00:32:53 ►

that it can evolve in ultra cold regimens in interstellar space and then

00:32:59 ►

be conveyed to various planetary chemical regimens where it can respond and grow.

00:33:07 ►

And all of these things,

00:33:12 ►

life, which we know from the rock

00:33:15 ►

that is dug out of the South African chert,

00:33:18 ►

you can date back to at least 3.5 billion years,

00:33:23 ►

that’s longer than the life

00:33:26 ►

of 40% of the stars in the universe.

00:33:30 ►

So life is not an ephemeral process

00:33:34 ►

in an entropic universe.

00:33:37 ►

Life is a process that has a duration

00:33:41 ►

that exceeds that of star life.

00:33:45 ►

And life’s strategy for running against the second law of thermodynamics

00:33:50 ►

and expanding and conserving ordered structure over vast periods of time

00:33:57 ►

is a strategy of encoding information and retaining it.

00:34:02 ►

In other words, languages. And these languages, which are abstract systems of notation

00:34:09 ►

that can be laid onto nucleotides or coconuts

00:34:14 ►

or scratches on clay or whatever,

00:34:18 ►

allow the conserving of complexity.

00:34:22 ►

And the cross into visible language that I see as the culmination of

00:34:30 ►

human historical culture is a similar advance into this information self-expression of the

00:34:38 ►

magnitude similar to the generation of epigenetic information.

00:34:48 ►

In other words, the first writing, the first notation,

00:34:52 ►

that represented a break with genetic information that allowed then culture and memory and self-reflection.

00:34:58 ►

Visible language will allow a similar forward thrust

00:35:03 ►

deeper into human becoming,

00:35:05 ►

but it is also part of the phenomenon

00:35:08 ►

of leaving the planet

00:35:09 ►

and being anticipated now

00:35:11 ►

in these psychedelic drug states

00:35:14 ►

because as we continue to insist

00:35:16 ►

on exploring the archaic

00:35:18 ►

through drugs and music and archaeology

00:35:21 ►

and the whole thrust of 20th century self-explication,

00:35:28 ►

I think we’re going to find that this was the basis of the Ur-Shamanism.

00:35:33 ►

This is what magic is.

00:35:35 ►

It’s being able to speak in a voice which makes things happen,

00:35:40 ►

being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by groups of people

00:35:46 ►

in a way that has been purged from profane language for us relegated to poetry

00:35:53 ►

and that sort of thing.

00:35:58 ►

Would this kind of visual or beheld language have any basic structural units to it like an alphabet?

00:36:06 ►

Or would it be something so abstract that you couldn’t resolve it?

00:36:14 ►

Well, you know, people had to look at language probably 15,000 years

00:36:20 ►

before Noam Chomsky was able to write down the 15 rules of transformational

00:36:26 ►

grammar. It may have, there may be some, a pixel or an alphabet or a reducible unit to it. It

00:36:38 ►

doesn’t seem like that. It seems like, well, no, no, maybe topology, that we could imagine that René Tom’s catastrophes,

00:36:50 ►

of which there are seven, good in three dimensions. But as you add dimensions to any system, the

00:36:59 ►

number of these potential catastrophes increases. And Ralph Abraham has described a number

00:37:05 ►

of the hyperdimensional catastrophe states.

00:37:08 ►

Perhaps they could eventually,

00:37:10 ►

it could eventually be recognized

00:37:12 ►

as a grammar of catastrophe flow

00:37:16 ►

where it changes first into one thing,

00:37:18 ►

then into another.

00:37:19 ►

What you’re asking basically is,

00:37:21 ►

you know, what is the meaning of meaning?

00:37:24 ►

Or put another way, does

00:37:26 ►

language eventually become somehow a mirror of mathematics? And I don’t know, it would

00:37:33 ►

take a lot more analysis than I have done. I think describing this stuff is at the level

00:37:40 ►

of sailing up jungle rivers and sticking to the broad rivers and noting that, you know,

00:37:47 ►

at three in the afternoon you passed a river mouth flowing in. It was a mile and a half wide

00:37:53 ►

and you don’t know where it was coming from or how many thousand square miles it was draining

00:37:57 ►

and you just put a note on your map to return someday and ascend it. In other words, there’s this archaic

00:38:05 ►

area of the mind. It’s going

00:38:07 ►

to take a long time to explicate

00:38:10 ►

it. By the time we have assimilated

00:38:12 ►

our recontact

00:38:14 ►

with the archaic,

00:38:16 ►

there will be colonies on

00:38:18 ►

Alpha Centauri. There will be

00:38:19 ►

thinking machines. There will be

00:38:22 ►

transdimensional vehicles

00:38:24 ►

and out-of-body consciousness via electronics all

00:38:28 ►

these things will arise out of our grappling with an understanding of this shift in the sensory

00:38:35 ►

ratios that will essentially return modern man to the age of miracles and though we won’t put it that way but we will

00:38:46 ►

privately experience it that way I mean that’s what psychedelic drugs are we

00:38:51 ►

don’t put it that way but we all who have been through it you know privately

00:38:56 ►

experience it as a miracle I’ve been voting a fair amount of thoughts

00:39:06 ►

and haven’t gotten very far and that’s the conviction

00:39:08 ►

under certain experiences you’re getting

00:39:10 ►

information from deep within your

00:39:12 ►

psyche yourself

00:39:13 ►

from deep within some sort of

00:39:16 ►

racial or human information

00:39:18 ►

sometimes what you talked about before

00:39:20 ►

forward but yet human information

00:39:22 ►

and yet another experience that you

00:39:24 ►

are just willing to absolutely

00:39:26 ►

back with not human information

00:39:28 ►

that is coming into your brain

00:39:29 ►

or whatever.

00:39:31 ►

Many people talk about this. I just wanted you

00:39:33 ►

to share your thoughts on that division

00:39:35 ►

and any hypotheses whether you feel

00:39:37 ►

that’s after it or not after it.

00:39:40 ►

Well, it seems as though

00:39:42 ►

there is a tuning

00:39:44 ►

mechanism that you must somehow by trial and error find how to twiddle this knob and you move through these very concentrated areas of information.

00:40:07 ►

personal. Some of it appear to be movies of historical periods. Some of it appear to be conformed to Jungian stuff. And then the alien part of it. And I don’t know. I mean, this

00:40:18 ►

is the area I work in. I’ve held all kinds of opinions about this information and finally decided that it’s too early to say what it is.

00:40:29 ►

There’s a school of New Age,

00:40:34 ►

or I don’t know exactly how to put it,

00:40:35 ►

but the Seth books and the Ilse Schwaller de Lubitz

00:40:43 ►

and these people where it’s just nobody asks

00:40:46 ►

any hard questions.

00:40:48 ►

It’s just, oh, you’re channeling

00:40:50 ►

a being from Arturus

00:40:51 ►

and they’re laying the law down.

00:40:53 ►

Fascinating.

00:40:54 ►

What are they saying?

00:40:56 ►

Well, that’s interesting

00:40:57 ►

what they’re saying,

00:40:58 ►

but more interesting

00:40:59 ►

is trying to actually

00:41:00 ►

work up close to the mechanics

00:41:04 ►

involved in this channeling.

00:41:08 ►

And I’m very skeptical,

00:41:10 ►

and yet it hasn’t stopped me at all from doing it.

00:41:14 ►

I mean, I talk to them,

00:41:16 ►

but I don’t give away the barn or the cow.

00:41:20 ►

I just try to engage in dialogue.

00:41:23 ►

And, you know, some traditions are very blase

00:41:27 ►

about this sort of thing

00:41:29 ►

Buddhism for instance

00:41:30 ►

Vajrayana

00:41:31 ►

it’s just oh yes

00:41:32 ►

many worlds

00:41:33 ►

many beings

00:41:34 ►

beings

00:41:35 ►

beings

00:41:36 ►

all kinds of beings

00:41:37 ►

on every level

00:41:38 ►

and you have to learn to deal with them

00:41:40 ►

but that’s well and good

00:41:43 ►

until you actually are doing dealing

00:41:46 ►

with these beings and go through like

00:41:48 ►

that wonderful moment in Rosemary’s baby

00:41:50 ►

where she says my god this is really

00:41:53 ►

happening well there are those moments

00:41:56 ►

where you realize you know that this

00:41:58 ►

doesn’t appear to be a

00:42:00 ►

hypostatization of discriminating

00:42:02 ►

intellect it appears to be some kind of eight-armed schmiggy

00:42:07 ►

which is coming at you with all these implements.

00:42:12 ►

And I don’t know.

00:42:16 ►

See, I think it’s going to take a long time

00:42:18 ►

to sort this all out.

00:42:20 ►

And that in order to learn

00:42:22 ►

what we had to learn about matter

00:42:24 ►

to leave the planet,

00:42:26 ►

we had to really put ourselves through a head trip and close down the imagination

00:42:34 ►

or deputize special people to be imaginative who we called poets and then labeled irrelevant.

00:42:43 ►

It’s going to now come upon us,

00:42:47 ►

and science is flowing into this area

00:42:49 ►

and beginning to recognize

00:42:51 ►

that it must have a romantic component.

00:42:56 ►

This is just the way of things.

00:42:59 ►

Ideas beget their opposites

00:43:01 ►

and then are subsumed by them.

00:43:07 ►

Anyone? Yes. Can you relate this in any way to the crisis of gravity occurring in the art world?

00:43:14 ►

Unless the end of art is what you’re saying.

00:43:18 ►

Could all this be related to the crisis in art? Well, I don’t know whether you mean the crisis since 1905 or 1975,

00:43:27 ►

or which… Well, it’s not exactly a crisis. The goal of art is to be incomprehensible,

00:43:38 ►

or a portion of it has to be incomprehensible. I think that, you know, these paintings at Lascaux and Altamira,

00:43:45 ►

which are now dated

00:43:47 ►

at 19,000 years old,

00:43:49 ►

when the first ones were discovered

00:43:51 ►

in the 1890s,

00:43:53 ►

they were thought to be

00:43:55 ►

400 to 500 years old.

00:43:58 ►

And as it dawned on people

00:44:02 ►

what this was,

00:44:03 ►

and this was like 1905 to 1925 it just the abyss of time and

00:44:10 ►

history that opened up for people who were sensitive to it the realization that you know my

00:44:16 ►

god people have been feeling what i’ve been feeling thinking what i’ve been feeling for at least 20,000 years. And this impacted on Picasso, it impacted on Miró,

00:44:28 ►

it impacted on Clay, it impacted on Marcel Duchamp,

00:44:31 ►

all of these people.

00:44:33 ►

And much of the bad boy antics of modern art

00:44:37 ►

is actually when you bring a primitive home to dinner.

00:44:43 ►

When the 19th century academy

00:44:45 ►

brings home a savage from the South Sea island,

00:44:48 ►

Jarry with the cast of his penis,

00:44:52 ►

Marcel Duchamp insisting on wearing

00:44:55 ►

a toilet thing around his neck

00:44:58 ►

at certain formal occasions.

00:45:00 ►

They were, and for instance in the punk,

00:45:03 ►

the current punk phenomenon of body painting

00:45:06 ►

they would be perfectly at home in the mountains

00:45:09 ►

of New Guinea, people love to paint themselves

00:45:12 ►

this was very big before the last ice age

00:45:15 ►

and if you believe

00:45:18 ►

heavy metal sets fashion, it looks like it’s going to be

00:45:21 ►

very big in the next century

00:45:23 ►

but a more serious answer to your question fashion. It looks like it’s going to be very big in the next century.

00:45:28 ►

But a more serious answer to your question is I think that the crisis is not

00:45:30 ►

it depends. It’s a crisis. It’s an opportunity. What it is is that art

00:45:35 ►

is becoming eschatological. From

00:45:39 ►

Duccio on, from the close

00:45:44 ►

of the medieval period on

00:45:45 ►

art was conceived of a series of self-transcending styles

00:45:49 ►

moving toward various goals

00:45:52 ►

which usually derived from the philosophy of the time

00:45:55 ►

beginning

00:45:58 ►

so that realism or mannerism

00:46:01 ►

these various tendencies would be pursued

00:46:04 ►

what’s happened in the 20th century with the legitimizing of experience or mannerism, these various tendencies would be pursued.

00:46:06 ►

What’s happened in the 20th century with the legitimizing of experience

00:46:09 ►

and the legitimizing of experiment

00:46:13 ►

and the destruction of the patronage system in the academy

00:46:17 ►

is that everything happens.

00:46:19 ►

There are people painting in New York today

00:46:21 ►

in the style of Jan van Eyck

00:46:23 ►

and making a living at it and there are

00:46:26 ►

also people doing all kinds

00:46:28 ►

of things but it’s very very

00:46:29 ►

hard to pick out a new piece of

00:46:32 ►

art if by

00:46:33 ►

I don’t think

00:46:34 ►

well the art

00:46:38 ►

of the last 20 years has been

00:46:39 ►

art outside of time

00:46:41 ►

since the middle 60s

00:46:43 ►

since William Wiley and Funk and all that stuff began,

00:46:48 ►

it’s impossible to date art objects. They can have been made any time in the last 20 years.

00:46:55 ►

This is what eschatological time will be like, a transcendence of style and people simply working in these various modes of self-expression which compete

00:47:07 ►

in a great atemporal carnival wherein unfortunately the values of the marketplace

00:47:14 ►

play too great a role but no other way of mediating it has been found part of what’s

00:47:20 ►

happened to art is that it’s been transformed into an enormous industry that must produce

00:47:26 ►

objects to decorate the apartments of the affluent on all continents who want to, you

00:47:34 ►

know, have art and be involved in art. But they are not, they don’t have enough power

00:47:40 ►

to dictate style. They’ll take whatever is put before which is very liberating for artists

00:47:46 ►

anybody else have anything on their mind not a soul yes my But you could also think of personality structure, that with which the witness consciousness

00:48:05 ►

identifies with, as an information structure, too.

00:48:08 ►

Where do you draw the line between language that is beheld as something other and language

00:48:12 ►

that is, or that, those information structures which are part of the identity experience?

00:48:22 ►

Well, you’re asking what is the difference between self and other?

00:48:25 ►

Yeah.

00:48:26 ►

Well, the…

00:48:27 ►

In terms of language.

00:48:30 ►

What you’re asking is how do you know you’re not talking to yourself?

00:48:34 ►

Yeah.

00:48:35 ►

Aha.

00:48:36 ►

Well, that’s a very tricky question.

00:48:43 ►

I’m surprised that in 3,000 years of philosophizing,

00:48:46 ►

somebody hasn’t figured out a nifty way to always tell this.

00:48:51 ►

It would make a marvelous short story,

00:48:53 ►

some little litmus test that you could perform.

00:48:58 ►

Pretty much you have to go on intuition.

00:49:00 ►

Of course, what you always say is,

00:49:03 ►

I can’t possibly know what I’m being told,

00:49:06 ►

therefore it isn’t myself. But that’s a very naive view of the psyche. On the other hand,

00:49:13 ►

when that reaches excruciating proportions, there’s a tendency to abandon sophistication and just believe in it anyway. But this thing about the shifting boundary

00:49:28 ►

between self and other is very tricky.

00:49:32 ►

When I first smoked DMT, for instance,

00:49:35 ►

I saw an absolute break between self and alien.

00:49:41 ►

I mean, I was myself and they were the aliens.

00:49:44 ►

But then, over years of working out with

00:49:48 ►

it and seeing how it comes on with psilocybin where instead of forming up over 40 seconds or

00:49:55 ►

so it comes together over a half an hour or 40 minutes and you have to breathe and you have to

00:50:01 ►

ease it in then you see how you know it is a kind of it is a kind of thing

00:50:07 ►

which emerges out of myself it’s like i pull a psychic plug and the opaque ink drains away and

00:50:17 ►

there’s this marvelous coral like organism which i didn’t think was a part of me but you know perhaps all through

00:50:25 ►

life and death we keep discovering new

00:50:27 ►

organs capable of amazing things that we

00:50:30 ►

didn’t know we had and but I don’t know

00:50:36 ►

I mean I don’t think you can ask a

00:50:38 ►

single person to know I think this is

00:50:39 ►

the question that shamanism deals with

00:50:42 ►

and and not all it’s a mystery, you know, it’s a mystery.

00:50:48 ►

Not only is the other the self, but is the other God? Is the other the species mind of the planet?

00:50:59 ►

Is the other a genus loci, a kind of God, but a local force of some sort? I mean, these are

00:51:06 ►

wonderful questions to entertain when

00:51:08 ►

they have immediacy. I mean, this is what

00:51:11 ►

people did before history, was religion

00:51:14 ►

was their job, and they worked at it

00:51:17 ►

very hard, but I’m not sure there are

00:51:21 ►

ever answers. More and more recently,

00:51:25 ►

and I’ve always known this on some level,

00:51:29 ►

I think about when I was about 16 or so,

00:51:32 ►

I realized it and briefly pursued it

00:51:34 ►

and never returned to it,

00:51:36 ►

but I think that Taoism,

00:51:38 ►

if I had to pick an ontological vision

00:51:41 ►

that was compatible with what I think

00:51:44 ►

these drugs are about and with what I think

00:51:47 ►

is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism for the following reasons. It’s the only mystical

00:51:54 ►

tradition I know of, possibly with the exception of shamanism, but shamanism doesn’t really reflect

00:52:00 ►

on this. It’s the only mystical tradition I know of that is not anti-scientific.

00:52:06 ►

It has no hostility to science. It is highly experimental. It’s about compounding drugs with

00:52:13 ►

fungi and minerals and doing strange things on the side of fog-swept mountains and looking into

00:52:22 ►

your head and looking into your head and looking into your head and looking into your head

00:52:26 ►

and trying to refine description.

00:52:29 ►

And it is open-ended.

00:52:31 ►

And it is ethno-ecologically sensitive.

00:52:38 ►

It is sensitive to the…

00:52:40 ►

It is not at all antagonistic to drugs.

00:52:43 ►

In fact, on the subject of drugs,

00:52:46 ►

it’s extremely straightforward and practical.

00:52:48 ►

Its stated goal is to compound

00:52:51 ►

the nine-fold elixir of immortality.

00:52:54 ►

And then how you do this,

00:52:56 ►

various methods came and went through the ages.

00:52:59 ►

But it’s stress on technique,

00:53:02 ►

it’s stress on analysis,

00:53:03 ►

it’s stress on contemplation without method.

00:53:08 ►

In fact, it’s general antagonism toward method.

00:53:12 ►

All these things endear it to me a lot,

00:53:15 ►

and I think it’s very compatible with the shamanic stance.

00:53:20 ►

In fact, we are modern people,

00:53:28 ►

and even if you think of yourself as a practicing shaman,

00:53:30 ►

I don’t think of myself that way.

00:53:32 ►

I think of myself as a shamanologist.

00:53:36 ►

But even if you think of yourself as a practicing shaman,

00:53:46 ►

you have to weld it to later traditions that answer more sophisticated questions that were posed later in historical time

00:53:47 ►

and Taoism would be an excellent

00:53:49 ►

vehicle for that I think

00:53:51 ►

yeah

00:53:53 ►

yes in the Hindu

00:53:56 ►

mythology there is a reference

00:53:58 ►

to the state being

00:53:59 ►

dissolved into the absolute

00:54:01 ►

or being one

00:54:04 ►

without a second

00:54:05 ►

not defined by anything

00:54:08 ►

past a strong unlovedness

00:54:10 ►

is that in any way coincidental

00:54:12 ►

with what you’re talking about?

00:54:13 ►

yeah I think it is

00:54:15 ►

this one without a second

00:54:17 ►

caused me to think of Plotinus

00:54:20 ►

one of his definitions

00:54:21 ►

of the mystical experience

00:54:23 ►

was he called it

00:54:24 ►

the flight of the alone to the alone,

00:54:27 ►

which mathematically adds up to the one without a second.

00:54:33 ►

As far as this end of history

00:54:38 ►

that seems to be appointed for history by Western religion,

00:54:42 ►

yes, it is like dissolution,

00:54:44 ►

the dissolution of the cosmos

00:54:47 ►

that goes on in Hindu cosmology.

00:54:49 ►

Hindu cosmology is a set of nested cycles

00:54:53 ►

similar in structure

00:54:56 ►

to the set of nested cycles

00:54:58 ►

that I proposed for time

00:55:00 ►

in the invisible landscape.

00:55:03 ►

And I think we’re running into one of those compression points that

00:55:08 ►

everything that has been going on on this planet for the last billion years has been a series of

00:55:15 ►

telescoping telescoping processes of ever accelerating intensity, connectivity, and momentum, leading finally to the

00:55:26 ►

generation of consciousness, a moment after that historical civilization, a

00:55:32 ►

moment after that modern science, and a moment after that Star Flight. And it is

00:55:38 ►

just, you know, a 10,000 year rush from monkeyhood to star flight,

00:55:46 ►

a geological moment,

00:55:48 ►

but historically a grand opera

00:55:51 ►

that has everybody on the edge of their seat

00:55:53 ►

because if the ball is fumbled, that’s all she wrote.

00:55:57 ►

And there’s nothing that says that we must succeed

00:55:59 ►

or at least we cannot assume

00:56:02 ►

that there’s something which says that we must succeed.

00:56:06 ►

Even if we are the chosen target species of Gaia,

00:56:13 ►

Gaia may not have all fingers on the button.

00:56:19 ►

We don’t know where our own power ends and begins

00:56:23 ►

and where the power of the other begins and ends.

00:56:28 ►

And so we have to make our way carefully

00:56:31 ►

into these dimensions.

00:56:33 ►

Shamanism is thousands of years

00:56:35 ►

of accumulated information

00:56:37 ►

on how to navigate in these spaces.

00:56:41 ►

If we are becoming a shamanic society

00:56:44 ►

through the metaphor of spaceflight we are going

00:56:49 ►

to have to recover this information and there’ll be some chills and spills along the way i’m sure

00:56:58 ►

yeah yeah terence i had a question in the traditional use of substances that you’ve described this ritual around it

00:57:05 ►

the there’s also intention generally from shaman around healing

00:57:10 ►

and focus around hunting real earthly kind of pursuits around survival and that seems to ground

00:57:21 ►

the experience in many ways or provide a focus for it. When we do it by

00:57:25 ►

ourselves, sans ritual, sans this kind of language, sans this kind of training, we’re

00:57:34 ►

afraid of the whole deceptions of the mind. And so my question to you is, what sort of

00:57:40 ►

critical inquiry do you personally use, or what kind of critical language do you personally

00:57:44 ►

use with these forms in front of you? How do you know

00:57:47 ►

we guard against self-deception? Do you use the word critical analysis? What does that

00:57:52 ►

mean when you translate practices?

00:57:56 ►

Well, it isn’t so much in confrontation with the being that you have to have this critical analysis in confrontation with the being you act

00:58:10 ►

from the heart and in the moment but it’s later it’s what do we think about these things as we

00:58:17 ►

sit here now relatively unstoned and your question raises all kinds of issues. I said I didn’t think anyone was

00:58:29 ►

a shaman or that I thought of myself as a shamanologist. This is because a shaman is

00:58:37 ►

educated by other shamans, inculcated, chosen out, educated, and brought along.

00:58:48 ►

In our society, we have to do it all by ourselves.

00:58:54 ►

And I’ve made a comparison to a man walking along the beach and coming upon a fully rigged sailboat.

00:58:57 ►

How likely, comparing the sailboat to the psychedelic drug,

00:59:02 ►

how likely is it that this man can learn to sail without killing

00:59:07 ►

himself where you know it is no great matter to learn to sail if you learn from a sailor so this

00:59:14 ►

is the first barrier that’s posed for us and or was posed I think in the 60s when there were a

00:59:21 ►

lot of casualties to psychedelics because it was assumed that everyone should do it,

00:59:28 ►

and so millions of people did.

00:59:30 ►

And actually, there are few societies where everyone does it,

00:59:36 ►

and those where that is the case,

00:59:39 ►

or where, for instance, all men do it,

00:59:41 ►

are not probably the most advanced shamanisms on the planet.

00:59:50 ►

So it’s a kind of a profession.

00:59:53 ►

It’s almost like clergy.

00:59:58 ►

It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic

01:00:02 ►

for the purpose of introducing back into society

01:00:06 ►

the material that comes from the mystical voyage

01:00:10 ►

for purposes of cultural renewal.

01:00:13 ►

The chief thing which grounds the shaman,

01:00:16 ►

at least in my practical experience with them,

01:00:22 ►

is the curing.

01:00:25 ►

And Merciliad insists on this,

01:00:27 ►

that the primary function of the shaman

01:00:29 ►

is to cure and that all these other

01:00:30 ►

things go toward that.

01:00:34 ►

We all have to cure ourselves in a sense,

01:00:39 ►

in the sense that is contained in the

01:00:42 ►

notion that a psychedelic drug is a

01:00:44 ►

deconditioning agent. Now, I the notion that a psychedelic drug is a deconditioning

01:00:45 ►

agent. Now, I don’t think a psychedelic drug is particularly a deconditioning agent if

01:00:51 ►

you’re Witoto or Bora or Muinani or something like that and you take it. You don’t then

01:00:58 ►

denounce being that and leave for Lima. But in our culture, psychedelics have had this effect

01:01:08 ►

of triggering a very fundamental questioning of values

01:01:13 ►

and intensifying alienation and creating alienated subclasses.

01:01:22 ►

This is a symptom of the general unhealthiness of the society

01:01:27 ►

that you can’t be psychedelic and be 100% of this society

01:01:34 ►

that certain things seem to impose themselves in your way

01:01:38 ►

so I don’t think that there is any easy answer to your question. We have to, what we have over shaman

01:01:47 ►

is our wonderful electronic information retrieval systems. And the way that works is like this.

01:01:56 ►

You go to the Amazon and you’re dealing with a tribe and they say, you know, we need this certain drug plant, and the secret word for it is so-and-so, and we’ll go and get it. And they do, and they know more about that drug plant than you do by a long crack.

01:02:26 ►

know that the people 20 miles further up the river use a different plant called something else and you know this because you read it in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet which tells you that

01:02:32 ►

and they are astonished you know you have this weird overview which they cannot conceive of

01:02:40 ►

they are they are fully informed in a vertical fashion about one tradition, but you, by writing to Boston,

01:02:49 ►

Massachusetts, and getting these leaflets and reading them, are more prepared to discuss the

01:02:55 ►

generalities of Amazon shamanism than most of the people you meet. And this is a great resource not to be sneered at.

01:03:06 ►

There’s a lot of information and like for instance when you read Marseillian shamanism,

01:03:11 ►

the archaic techniques of ecstasy, this is a global overview and you, I’m not saying

01:03:19 ►

you know more than any one single shaman knows about shamanic ecstasy. But you have a certain kind of knowledge

01:03:26 ►

which prepares you,

01:03:27 ►

a generalized cosmology

01:03:29 ►

which prepares you.

01:03:31 ►

And these are the best maps that we have,

01:03:33 ►

so we have to make use of them.

01:03:36 ►

Could you comment on how that issue

01:03:39 ►

relates to the more general one

01:03:40 ►

that seems to contain it,

01:03:42 ►

of the turning towards the archaic, the attempt to

01:03:46 ►

recapture or reintegrate the unconscious forces after a period of deliberately not being able

01:03:54 ►

to do so as a society, and how that’s going to affect both individual and social change

01:04:01 ►

over the next visible and historical horizon? Well, obviously just on the surface of it,

01:04:08 ►

Freud in Civilization and its Discontents

01:04:10 ►

made the point that sexuality is necessarily repressed

01:04:15 ►

for civilization to be possible.

01:04:18 ►

Sexuality is being redefined in this modern context,

01:04:24 ►

in an archaic context,

01:04:26 ►

so that it becomes more generalized.

01:04:32 ►

The romantic ideal gives place to a kind of tribal ideal.

01:04:38 ►

This is obviously happening and related to psychedelics

01:04:43 ►

and this effort to recapture the archaic,

01:04:47 ►

that’s probably the major impact that it will have

01:04:52 ►

because we have no,

01:04:55 ►

our hang-ups are all hung around

01:04:58 ►

the issues that sexuality posed for civilization

01:05:03 ►

and the various solutions that were found in various times,

01:05:07 ►

all of which were, or none of which were ever viable.

01:05:13 ►

This is what makes us feel sort of uncomfortable about ourselves

01:05:17 ►

is there’s never been a set of social rules

01:05:21 ►

that worked so well that most people weren’t involved

01:05:25 ►

in trying to subvert them.

01:05:27 ►

And what does that say about us

01:05:31 ►

and the 10,000 year endeavor

01:05:33 ►

we’ve been involved in?

01:05:35 ►

But I see that giving way

01:05:36 ►

to a more natural order.

01:05:39 ►

In other words,

01:05:40 ►

many constraints have been placed upon us.

01:05:43 ►

We have accepted many constraints.

01:05:45 ►

We’ve accepted a kind of wounding.

01:05:48 ►

The myth of the fall is a statement about our feelings,

01:05:54 ►

about ourselves, you know, that we had to go into history

01:05:58 ►

to recover something which had been lost,

01:06:01 ►

that had been ours in the beginning,

01:06:04 ►

but that we fumbled away and then we

01:06:07 ►

had to descend into history and recover it and it is this Edenic innocence and and the adumbrations

01:06:15 ►

that it will create at all levels of society singing is a ritual act that automatically sets up its own rules

01:06:25 ►

and can be initiated at any time without hardly moving a muscle.

01:06:32 ►

We were saying during the break up here

01:06:34 ►

that it’s possible to imagine a form of psychoanalysis

01:06:39 ►

where what you would do is simply urge people

01:06:44 ►

and go through with them

01:06:46 ►

learning as much about history as possible

01:06:50 ►

so that there were no blank spots,

01:06:54 ►

so that their amnesia about their historical position

01:06:57 ►

was recovered as a way of treating neurosis,

01:07:01 ►

a way of actually, by locating people on the grid,

01:07:04 ►

by forcing them to find

01:07:06 ►

out who they really are in terms of all the other somebodies who have been around and

01:07:12 ►

all the other some places that preceded them. And I think that you can almost see that that

01:07:20 ►

is a recovery of the unconscious, that the history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of.

01:07:31 ►

Just as the history of yourself that you don’t know is what your personal unconscious is

01:07:39 ►

made out of.

01:07:40 ►

However, much of the history of man that you don’t know can probably be found by going and reading a book on the subject.

01:07:48 ►

And this has a tremendous centering, a spiritual efficacy that all out of proportion to the act of studying history,

01:07:59 ►

which seems rather removed from everyday concerns.

01:08:02 ►

Anything else?

01:08:03 ►

Yeah, what about a development of a language of consciousness which we don’t have, like

01:08:08 ►

Sanskrit theoretically, or Maslow was playing around with words that would scientifically

01:08:14 ►

be based on. Would you comment on that?

01:08:17 ►

Well, I think the I Ching is an effort, the most advanced effort to do something like that but it’s a language of gestalt and you know I

01:08:28 ►

I don’t speak Japanese but it’s said of Japanese that nothing which is obvious is ever mentioned

01:08:35 ►

language is reserved for clarifying the unclear so people are not saying it’s a hot day, isn’t it? And that kind of stuff.

01:08:46 ►

They’re reserving language. The other possibility is, you know, that the visual language is this,

01:08:57 ►

and that as more and more of it is experienced and done, it will be realized. It is the visual language, I’m not sure I stressed this this evening,

01:09:08 ►

but it is perhaps non-translatable into English

01:09:14 ►

because it is a language of emotion,

01:09:18 ►

where emotion is seen to be a subtle, a spectrum,

01:09:22 ►

integrated gradients of meaning, or integrated gradients of combination

01:09:29 ►

as meaning has so that there isn’t you know love hate disgust and something else but in fact an

01:09:38 ►

infinitude of emotional states that can be triggered by vocal sound.

01:09:48 ►

And in a way, of course, I’m simply describing singing,

01:09:49 ►

wordless singing,

01:09:54 ►

except that I’m describing how that can rise to an ontologically different level

01:09:56 ►

and become so emotive

01:09:59 ►

that you understand very subtle differentiations of emotion.

01:10:05 ►

I noticed

01:10:06 ►

when we were in the Amazon

01:10:07 ►

taking ayahuasca with these people

01:10:10 ►

and they would sing

01:10:12 ►

these thousand year old songs

01:10:14 ►

and you would eventually

01:10:15 ►

you would get to the place where

01:10:17 ►

you had the absolute conviction

01:10:20 ►

that you understood

01:10:21 ►

because you could stand

01:10:24 ►

off from your mind and say the speed at which I’m

01:10:28 ►

going through emotional changes over what I’m hearing must mean that I understand what I’m

01:10:34 ►

hearing because if I didn’t understand it I would just have a certain generalized emotion about it

01:10:41 ►

but it is changing my interior state so rapidly that it is like the experience

01:10:47 ►

of understanding. That’s the only thing it can be compared to. Yeah.

01:10:53 ►

Could you elaborate more on the effect of the ayahuasca and with the combination with

01:11:00 ►

the incest that you mentioned and the visiblepes, the effect of altering the DNA

01:11:08 ►

and when you mentioned the histone blocks.

01:11:11 ►

Uh-huh.

01:11:12 ►

Yes, well, the core chemical idea in the Invisible Landscape,

01:11:16 ►

for those of you who haven’t read it,

01:11:18 ►

is that it is possible, or it was hypothesized

01:11:23 ►

that it was possible, or it was hypothesized that it was possible, to use sound to cause hallucinogenic drug molecules

01:11:30 ►

that were present in the nucleus of neurons,

01:11:36 ►

having arrived there through axioplasmic transport from the synapse,

01:11:42 ►

to cause them to occupy bond sites in DNA,

01:11:48 ►

the bond sites specifically which lie between the nucleotides

01:11:52 ►

and the molecular dimensions and everything are correct

01:11:57 ►

for this to be possible.

01:11:59 ►

In fact, it’s been shown in vitro that certain hallucinogens

01:12:04 ►

do preferentially bond into DNA

01:12:07 ►

in very elegant experiments in which DNA was exposed to hallucinogenic drug molecules

01:12:15 ►

and then centrifuged and shown that its specific gravity

01:12:20 ►

had increased by precisely the molecular weight of the drug molecule

01:12:24 ►

and no other compounds were

01:12:25 ►

present so there is an affinity for bonding with the DNA on the part of these drug molecules we

01:12:32 ►

hypothesized that the general psychedelic experience the common psychedelic experience

01:12:38 ►

is simply these things displacing normal neurotransmitters such as serotonin at the synapse,

01:12:46 ►

undergoing axioplasmic transport to the nucleus,

01:12:50 ►

intercalating, which is the technical term

01:12:52 ►

for this kind of bonding,

01:12:53 ►

intercalating into the nuclear material there

01:12:56 ►

and shifting the electron spin resonance

01:12:59 ►

of the generalized electron spin resonance signature

01:13:05 ►

of the molecule so that millions of cells

01:13:09 ►

having this happen to them are amplified

01:13:13 ►

into a higher cortical experience,

01:13:15 ►

which is the hallucinogenic experience.

01:13:18 ►

But in answer to your question,

01:13:20 ►

my brother went beyond this and hypothesized

01:13:23 ►

that you could intervene in this

01:13:26 ►

process, which would normally you would expect to be quenched in four to six hours, whatever the

01:13:32 ►

duration of the psychedelic drug was, that it would be possible to intervene in this process

01:13:38 ►

with vocally generated sound, generated in such a way that of these millions of molecules in these bond states,

01:13:48 ►

a very few of them would be oriented in space toward the incoming wavefront of sound in such

01:13:57 ►

a way that they would be cancelled, that they would undergo the kind of harmonic canceling that happens when you

01:14:05 ►

like sound a note on the cello and then quench the string you’ve sounded and you hear the

01:14:10 ►

overtones in octaves above and below it.

01:14:14 ►

And he felt that this could be done with the human voice and performed an experiment to

01:14:20 ►

test this idea, which seemed to indicate that it was possible or at least that some bizarre

01:14:29 ►

drug synergy was prolonged and triggered by vocal sound and we have never proceeded into this any

01:14:39 ►

further it would be easy to do so You would get square wave generators and oscillating

01:14:46 ►

systems and you would try to tune in to this sound because it’s a very specific sound.

01:14:52 ►

Now it sounds at first preposterous that quantum acoustical, acoustically mediated quantum

01:15:02 ►

mechanical chemical changes could be controlled by

01:15:05 ►

the voice but you have to remember populations of millions of molecules are

01:15:11 ►

involved only a very few of which have to fulfill the complete set of special

01:15:18 ►

conditions that would allow this situation to arise and also it isn’t

01:15:23 ►

generally realized at what level the human perceptual

01:15:27 ►

apparatus operates in relationship to quantum mechanical events. For instance, a single

01:15:33 ►

photon can be registered by the human eye. I’m sure some of you who had chemistry sets

01:15:41 ►

when you were children, they threw in a little thing called a spin thoroscope,

01:15:46 ►

which was nothing more than a closed tube with a little lens in the end and at the other end

01:15:52 ►

a speck of radium on the end of a pin and then a phosphorus screen behind it. You would sit in a

01:15:59 ►

dark room for 10 minutes and then look into the spin thoroscope and you would see flashes

01:16:05 ►

of light coming out of the phosphorous screen at the end of it. Those flashes of light were

01:16:11 ►

single photons being released from the phosphorous matrix by the impact of decaying hard radiation

01:16:20 ►

from the radium. In a similar vein,

01:16:28 ►

a single molecule bumping against the tympanic membrane of the human ear

01:16:30 ►

can be distinguished,

01:16:32 ►

and they’ve done this

01:16:33 ►

in very elegant experimental situations.

01:16:36 ►

So actually the human sensory apparatus,

01:16:39 ►

for what a continuous picture of the world it gives us,

01:16:43 ►

is under experimental conditions

01:16:46 ►

shown to be rather closer

01:16:49 ►

to portraying the quantum mechanical nature of reality

01:16:53 ►

than we might expect.

01:16:55 ►

So I don’t think it’s, on the face of it, preposterous

01:16:59 ►

that there could be technologies of vocal sound

01:17:03 ►

and control of physiological states of oneself

01:17:07 ►

and other people through the controlled use of sound.

01:17:12 ►

After all, if you are of the brain theory of consciousness

01:17:16 ►

and believe that every thought that we think

01:17:21 ►

is accompanied by chemical changes,

01:17:24 ►

the breaking and forming of chemical bonds,

01:17:28 ►

well, that means that as I speak to you,

01:17:31 ►

my voice, if you understand me,

01:17:33 ►

or maybe if you even don’t understand me,

01:17:35 ►

is going through a continuing process of generating

01:17:39 ►

and breaking down hundreds of compounds

01:17:42 ►

as your brain takes on a configuration

01:17:45 ►

somewhat analogous to the configuration of my brain

01:17:48 ►

at the moment of speaking.

01:17:50 ►

This is what communication must be seen to be

01:17:54 ►

by people who have a hard brain theory of consciousness.

01:18:00 ►

What if you don’t know anything about any of this?

01:18:03 ►

Well, then you’re probably in better shape than all of us.

01:18:07 ►

You should go to the side of Cold Mountain

01:18:11 ►

and compound mushrooms and draw cold water from a well

01:18:16 ►

and thank lucky stars

01:18:21 ►

that that’s the situation you find yourself in.

01:18:27 ►

In other words, lucky stars that that’s the situation you find yourself in.

01:18:34 ►

In other words, knowledge or verbal facility is no proof of knowing what you’re talking

01:18:44 ►

about. It’s just verbal facility. Now I think the Taoist thing

01:18:46 ►

I’m coming more and more to it

01:18:49 ►

to see that it’s its open-endedness

01:18:52 ►

its insistence on humor

01:18:54 ►

it’s not grinding a bunch of dogmatic knives

01:19:00 ►

and now I’m talking about the cultural ideal of Taoism

01:19:03 ►

Taoism became secularized and, you know, played power politics at various times in the history of China, just like the other Chinese religions. But its ideal remained the psychedelic ideal, I think. And it’s basically a dropped out, a dropped out idea. It isn’t that you should return to the court and take up the

01:19:28 ►

counsel of the king and try to save his ass. It’s that someone else can take care of that.

01:19:35 ►

But these Taoist immortals became strange people. I mean, they were fleetingly glimpsed from the road running naked in the woods

01:19:46 ►

as people passed to and fro

01:19:50 ►

knowledge

01:19:51 ►

I have said this before

01:19:54 ►

made the analogy between understanding and gravity

01:19:57 ►

that you know as something becomes gravitationally

01:20:01 ►

more and more dense

01:20:03 ►

it eventually is so dense that light can’t leave it.

01:20:07 ►

No information can leave it.

01:20:08 ►

It’s said to be a black hole.

01:20:10 ►

It has curved space around itself,

01:20:13 ►

and no information can leave it.

01:20:15 ►

I think as you advance on the path toward enlightenment,

01:20:19 ►

it becomes harder and harder for people to understand you.

01:20:24 ►

And when you finally achieve enlightenment,

01:20:26 ►

you can’t say anything at all.

01:20:29 ►

And anything you say must be misunderstood.

01:20:34 ►

That’s the proof that you’re enlightened.

01:20:38 ►

If you’re a perfect black hole, you must be incomprehensible.

01:20:41 ►

No information must leave you.

01:20:47 ►

So if you understood anything I said tonight it’s a perfect proof that I’m far from but thank you for coming anyway

01:20:56 ►

maybe on that note we should knock off. Is anyone burning?

01:21:06 ►

Good, then let’s knock off.

01:21:18 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:21:22 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:21:26 ►

So, what do you think?

01:21:32 ►

Have we gone even deeper into an archaic revival since Terence gave this talk in 1983?

01:21:36 ►

I found it interesting at how current some of his ideas are yet today about things like electronic tribalism.

01:21:40 ►

And this was long before iPhones and Wi-Fi.

01:21:43 ►

In fact, he said these things 10 years even before the World Wide Web came to life.

01:21:49 ►

So, can you imagine what he’d be saying about today’s world of capturing events on video on a cell phone

01:21:55 ►

and instantly making it available to the rest of the world via YouTube or something like that?

01:22:00 ►

My guess is that it probably would blow his mind just as it does mine whenever I

01:22:05 ►

look back at our tech just a couple decades ago. I do have to take issue

01:22:10 ►

however with his statement that we are a spacefaring species and while that may

01:22:16 ►

ultimately be true it sure isn’t one of the priorities of the American Empire

01:22:20 ►

which last year spent more money on air conditioning the tents of its troops in

01:22:25 ►

Afghanistan and Iraq than it did on the entire NASA space budget.

01:22:30 ►

Looking at that telling figure, it seems to me that the American Empire is more about

01:22:35 ►

blowing things up and killing people than it is about exploring space.

01:22:39 ►

Of course, this behavior is the same that we saw at the end of the Roman Empire.

01:22:44 ►

Aggressive overexpansion and

01:22:45 ►

wars that gobble up the increasing amount of resources required to sustain an ever larger

01:22:51 ►

empire that has already led to the demise of 26 or more earlier empires. So I think it’s only a

01:22:58 ►

matter of time before this one runs out of steam and money as, as we are seeing. Apparently our ruling class has never had the luxury of reading history and learning from it.

01:23:09 ►

But never forget, locals always survive empires.

01:23:13 ►

So become as locally involved as you can.

01:23:16 ►

For example, you might want to find a food growing co-op in your area.

01:23:19 ►

Just search for CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture,

01:23:23 ►

and start buying as much of your food from them as possible.

01:23:26 ►

It may take a year or so to search out all of the good organic food sources nearby,

01:23:32 ►

but it isn’t out of the question for you to be able to have at least 90% of your food

01:23:36 ►

coming from within 50 miles of your home.

01:23:39 ►

And if you want to do something positive to help solve some of our planetary problems,

01:23:44 ►

well, start buying food that’s grown close to home for a start.

01:23:49 ►

Hmm.

01:23:51 ►

I’m not sure how I got off on that tangent while commenting on a McKenna talk,

01:23:55 ►

but I guess the ability to get us to spin off ideas in every direction from his talks

01:24:00 ►

was maybe part of his genius.

01:24:03 ►

Now, as much as I would like to make a few more comments about some of the things we

01:24:08 ►

just heard Terrence say, there are several announcements that are actually more important

01:24:12 ►

than my own musings.

01:24:14 ►

The first thing that I hope you are already aware of is the upcoming Women’s Visionary

01:24:19 ►

Conference that’s taking place next weekend, which is July 29th through the 31st in Petaluma,

01:24:26 ►

California. And I truly apologize for not mentioning this event sooner because they

01:24:32 ►

have an incredible lineup of over 20 great speakers, several of whom you’ve heard here

01:24:38 ►

in the salon. And yes, there will even be a couple of men speakers, so that the men in the audience won’t have to feel completely left out.

01:24:47 ►

However, I should mention that out of the 200 plus podcasts that I’ve done so far,

01:24:52 ►

the response that I’ve received about the two recent podcasts from Cat Harrison has been by far the most overwhelming.

01:25:00 ►

In fact, no other speaker has even come close to gathering as much high praise as I’ve heard about Katz Talks.

01:25:07 ►

So, even though we men seem to do the lion’s share of the talking around here,

01:25:11 ►

it’s the words of wisdom from the women in our community that have the most resonance with us here in the salon, it seems.

01:25:18 ►

So, my best wishes go out to Annie and the other organizers and volunteers of the Women’s Visionary Conference,

01:25:26 ►

and hopefully we’ll be hearing a report from them in the not-too-distant future.

01:25:30 ►

Another announcement comes from my good friend Mark Franklin, who you may also know as Lord

01:25:36 ►

Knows, which is the signature on his famous poster, Zocha Pili Speaks. It’s graced the

01:25:43 ►

walls of my office for many years now. What you may not know

01:25:47 ►

is that Mark is also one of the best portrait photographers and photographers in general that

01:25:52 ►

is still walking around these days. Several years ago he showed me some copies of a few of the

01:25:59 ►

portraits he’d made of some of our famous elders including which including one that I think is maybe the most riveting photograph of Terrence McKenna that I’ve ever seen.

01:26:09 ►

Well, at long last, Mark has finally agreed to exhibit his work, and it’s going to be at a gallery in Culver City, California.

01:26:18 ►

The exhibition is going to take place in November this year, which, if I’m not mistaken, is still 2011.

01:26:24 ►

in November this year, which if I’m not mistaken is still 2011.

01:26:31 ►

And in addition to photographs of notables ranging from Dr. Albert Hoffman to Jerry Garcia,

01:26:35 ►

he’ll also be exhibiting some of his work dealing with nature as a healer.

01:26:41 ►

You know, Mark has photographed rock stars, politicians, artists, poets, writers, scientists,

01:26:45 ►

researchers, peace activists, counter countercultural legends across the world.

01:26:52 ►

And if you ever get a chance, you’ll most definitely want to attend this very rare showing of Mark’s work.

01:26:55 ►

There’s just one little glitch I should mention, and that is that Mark is still looking for one or two patrons of the art

01:26:59 ►

to help with the initial expenses in creating the high-quality prints that the exhibit demands.

01:27:06 ►

And if you are that person or know someone who is willing and able to help a world-class photographer exhibit his work,

01:27:12 ►

you can either let me know and I’ll pass it on to Mark,

01:27:15 ►

or you can contact him directly through his email address, which is thelordknows,

01:27:20 ►

that’s T-H-E-L-O-R-D-N-O-S-E, thelordknows at yahoo.com. And I’ll give you more details about

01:27:29 ►

this exhibit as the date gets closer. Now, one more thing, and I’ll let you get back to the world

01:27:34 ►

once again. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, Bruce Dahmer and I will be leading several workshops

01:27:40 ►

that deal with moving our community beyond the doom and gloom of the 2012 end of the

01:27:45 ►

worlders and in particular moving some of the ideas of Terence McKenna beyond the end time of

01:27:52 ►

his time wave predictions. In 2012 we already have two events scheduled one at Esalen Institute in

01:27:59 ►

June and then a few months later at the Burning Man Festival. But as it turns out, we don’t want to wait that long to get going on this project,

01:28:07 ►

and so the first of these workshops will be held during the last weekend in September of this year, 2011.

01:28:14 ►

And if you are in the Seattle area, we hope that you’ll be able to attend.

01:28:18 ►

In a week or so, we’ll have a website up with all the details,

01:28:21 ►

but for planning purposes right now, I can tell you that the

01:28:25 ►

workshop will be held on Orcas Island over the last weekend in September, and the cost is being

01:28:30 ►

kept to a minimum so as to only cover the expenses associated with the event, which means that

01:28:36 ►

tickets won’t be more than $50, and after the expenses have been covered, the plan is to

01:28:41 ►

send any excess money to the Shulvgens to help with Sasha’s medical expenses. And I’ll say more about this in my next podcast. But for now, I’d better get out of here,

01:28:51 ►

and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the

01:28:56 ►

Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative

01:29:01 ►

Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, Thank you. me to where we’re sharing this moment together. You can read a few of them in my novel, The Genesis

01:29:25 ►

Generation, which is available in Kindle and other e-book formats, as well as a pay-what-you-can

01:29:31 ►

audiobook read by me. And you can find more about that at genesisgeneration.us. And for now, this is

01:29:39 ►

Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience

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