282 - How Evolution Occurs

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“There is no catalog of psychedelic effects, and so how does one know what the full spectrum is? It’s a very tricky matter.”

“At five dried grams (of magic mushrooms) it’s very easy to invoke a voice, a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant. It’s the teaching voice. It’s Virgil to Dante. It’s a very large and superior force which takes you by the hand and then narrates the various scenarios that you’re conveyed through. … The trick is to get something out of it and get away clean.”

“Human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering small mouth noises.”

“It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man which is evolving. Culture carries along. At the present moment we are able to speak 21st centuries ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.”

“We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language.”

“I believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor. I think that people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity. I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties. And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.”

“We’re very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding. But has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding, necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and larger. It’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there’s an awful lot of darkness.”

“You can discover [using psychedelics] actually that the adventure of being is not a cultural adventure. It’s not a societal adventure. It’s a personal adventure, and that this is what you really need to be involved in.”

“There is always a low level of mutants in a population, but they are of no consequence as long as the selective parameters remain the same. But when the selective parameters change suddenly these individuals, who were previously masked in the general population, the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the fore. And they act very quickly, and critically, to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction… . It’s that the new types were always there but not with any advantage. It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them, and they are moving then into positions of dominance in the population, or the society if we’re talking about human beings. I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level. There is a population of different people in the general population, and as conditions change these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.”

“What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery and put you right up against the human essence.”

“I think there is a potential for immortality, but it isn’t assured. It is something that comes to the courageous. And somehow in the historical experience we’ve gotten the idea, through orthodox religions, that salvation comes to the subservient, and this is totally wrong. It is more like the Greek ideal of the hero, that if you’re heroic enough once you’re dead you’ll be a god. And I think this is what these things summon us all to.”

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Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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And I apologize for not getting a podcast out last week.

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No good reason for it other than the fact that I’ve had another case of the lazies.

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But two of our fellow salonners weren’t lazy like me

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and were kind enough to make donations to help with the expenses here in the salon.

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And those kind souls are Jose D. and Patrizia H. So Jose and Patrizia,

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I thank you ever so much. Your help really means a lot to me. And I guess that I should come clean

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here and also mention the fact that, well, I got involved in a good book that after the first 600

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pages became a real page turner. But since there were still 400 pages left, I wound up putting most everything else aside

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and just kind of got lost in a world of science fiction.

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In case you’re wondering, the book is Anathem by Neal Stephenson,

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and while it’s probably a bit too geeky for many of our fellow salonners,

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those who have read it may want to go back in their minds

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and revisit some of the scenes

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as we listen to the beginning of today’s podcast. And maybe this is a bit too fanciful, but as I

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listened to the beginning of today’s talk by Terrence McKenna, I suddenly felt as if I was in

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a chalk room of a math where a hundreder was just beginning a lecture. And if you haven’t read Anathem, well, I guess what I said just

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doesn’t make any sense at all. And maybe that’s even true if you have read it. I guess I’m just

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trying to rationalize my not getting a podcast out last week. Anyway, here we are, and I think

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you’ll find today’s lecture by Terence McKenna quite interesting. For example, one of the topics he briefly touches on

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is immortality, otherwise known as life after death. And it may surprise you to hear his

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thoughts on that topic, at least his thoughts back in 1984 when this talk was delivered.

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And again, I want to thank Diana Slattery for sending me the cassette tape that this talk was recorded on. Thanks again, Diana. Now, we’re not only going to hear about some of Terrence’s favorite topics,

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like language and culture, but there’s also some interesting discussion about psychedelic

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substances. And the reason I point this out is the fact that back in 1984, when this recording

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was made, there was very little information about psychedelics available to the general public.

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At least, that was the case if you weren’t living on the West Coast.

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Back then, I was living in Dallas, Texas, which at the time was ground zero for MDMA, or ecstasy as it was called, mainly to help with its marketing.

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But 1984 was also the year that I first became acquainted with this scene, and

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after my first few experiences, I went to several bookstores looking for more information about the

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world of psychedelic drugs, even though MDMA isn’t actually a psychedelic, I should add.

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But the only thing that I could find back then were the Don Juan novels by Castaneda,

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and they were better than nothing, but solid information like what you can find at arrowid.org today,

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well, that was non-existent in Dallas back then,

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even though it was home to the Stark Club and was swimming in MDMA.

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So, as we’re listening to Terrence right now,

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if you can, try to keep in mind how groundbreaking this talk was at the time.

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And in fact, it still has some points, I think, that seem to me at least as fresh as if the

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talk was delivered last night.

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So now let’s join Terence McKenna and hear what he’d like to tell us about today.

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What I want to talk about, and I don’t really want want to I would like a discussion about it if that’s possible is those components of the psychedelic experience

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which exceed either the psychedelic paradigm or raise the issue of

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violations of some kind of larger paradigm. And there are two areas where this is noticeable.

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And one is fairly common in the literature,

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and that’s the report of telepathic phenomena

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and that sort of thing,

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which has been persistently a repressed sub-theme in psychedelic research

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ever since Havelock Ellis began experimenting with mescaline.

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And the other thing is a constellation of issues

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that seem to me related, although they may not seem related to you.

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And we touched on this this afternoon in Stan’s talk,

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which is the question of the extraterrestrial connection

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or whatever it is,

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and what do these things mean.

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The first thing I want to say about all this

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is there’s been a phrase used by several people,

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which is the full spectrum of psychedelic effects.

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People will tell you at what dose the full spectrum of psychedelic effects occurs,

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or we heard yesterday that LSD elicits the full spectrum of psychedelic effects.

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But in fact, there is no catalog of psychedelic effects. But in fact, there is no catalog of psychedelic effects.

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And how does one know what the full spectrum is?

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It’s a very tricky matter.

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What I have encountered at fairly high doses of psilocybin

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and on DMT,

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but strangely on nothing else,

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that I find very interesting

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is the whole problem of interiorized voices,

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relationships with hidden agencies of uncertain parameters,

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and related to that, states that I think the vocabulary we inherit

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from the religious systems that we’ve recently overthrown

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leave us with nothing to say about them but that they’re states of possession.

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And the word demonic has been used but not defined and it’s somehow it’s a form of

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negativity that is not seen to be operational but it’s very upsetting nevertheless to people

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so what what I find and what I think is generally part of the shamanic practice of taking mushrooms

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is that at fairly low doses, meaning I can’t speak of pure psilocybin,

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but at five dried grams, it’s very easy to invoke a voice,

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a kind of logos-like phenomenon,

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which operates as the typical hierophant.

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It’s the teaching voice.

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It’s Virgil to Dante.

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It’s a very large and superior force

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which takes you by the hand and then narrates the various

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scenarios that you’re conveyed through and the trick of course is the trick that’s such a

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conundrum of the literature of involvement with demons and devils which is the trick is to get something out of it

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and get away clean.

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And the way that works operationally

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when trysting with the mushroom voice

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is it’s the challenge to get it to tell you something

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that you’re sure you didn’t know already

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so that you can have some validation that you’re not just

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talking to the back of your head. And though this sounds trivial at first,

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as you move into the dialogue with the other, it becomes apparent that it’s going

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to be elusive. Mercurial is a word that suggests itself now another aspect of the of the psilocybin

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intoxication which may or may not be related to this and that i have sort of i guess insisted upon

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more than anybody else is that it triggers phenomena having to do with the language centers.

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Henry Munn, in a book called

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Hallucinogens and Shamanism, edited by Michael Harner,

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talks about this.

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And I went to some lengths to talk to him about it.

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And I found out that,

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though he agreed with my opinions on the subject,

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he didn’t hold them nearly as strongly as I did,

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that for him it had been a fairly elusive and upsetting phenomenon.

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But this is a form of glossolalia

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that I really am convinced is an affect of tryptamines

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that is a psychedelic affect

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that I don’t believe it happens with anything else.

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At least it doesn’t happen in my experience with anything else,

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and the literature doesn’t mention anything like this.

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It does not happen with ayahuasca,

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even though chemically you would think ayahuasca would have the same properties as the other tryptamine hallucinogens.

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And so I want to describe a typical encounter with this phenomenon

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because a client has had this experience over a dozen times,

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and it’s almost always unvarying.

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The problem is the client happens to be myself.

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So getting independent confirmation that this could happen to someone else

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has not been very easy.

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Nevertheless, I operate under the faith that there’s nothing unique about me

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and that anything I could experience is a generally accessible human phenomenon.

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I mean, I think it would be preposterous to operate under any other kind of assumption.

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In giving DMT to people casually over a number of years, only four people have reported the kind of phenomenon that I’m interested in.

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And of course, every single one of them had been primed by me.

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Nevertheless, the experience is of such an ontologically different modality that it’s difficult to see how you could cue it to somebody.

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They would have to have it.

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And what it involves is a transformation of language

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into something which is no longer sound decoded by brain through the consultation of a culturally

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validated dictionary, but instead it becomes sound which is beheld and meaning which is

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and meaning which is beheld and this idea of a visible language when it first came to me or when I first realized that that was the phrase I was going to have to use to describe what was happening

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I had never heard or imagined of such a thing but then I went back into the literature and I discovered that, as usual, the Greeks got there first,

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or at least in this case, the Jewish Greeks or the Greek Jews,

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because in Philo-Judeus, who was a contemporary of Christ, there’s a discussion of what he calls the more perfect logos.

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logos. And he says the more perfect logos will be apprehended through seeing, not through hearing. And yet it will cross from being heard to being seen without ever going through a noticeable

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moment when it shifts from one modality to the other. And this seems to be what is happening

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in the DMT flash when you smoke the free base, not the hydrochloride, but when you smoke the

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free base, you have this spontaneous experience of generating what you identify first as a thought and then as a sound,

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but which eventually becomes some kind of synesthesia,

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linguistic modality for which we don’t have words yet.

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Telepathy I always conceived of as looking into your own mind

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and hearing what someone else was thinking.

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as looking into your own mind and hearing what someone else was thinking. But the notion that telepathy might be someone speaking

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and producing a three-dimensional object in the air

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that could be rotated and mutually beheld by the speaker and the listener

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had never occurred to me.

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the listener, had never occurred to me. But experiment with the DMT showed that this extraordinary kind of state

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is actually potentially triggerable again and again.

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And it is…

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It’s almost as though there is a sensorium of the world

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which in order to be reconstructed in the interior horizon of transcendence

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that is the being of a given individual,

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the sensorium has to be arbitrarily broken down

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into its perceptual components of sound, sight, odor, tactility, etc.

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And normally as it enters the human organism,

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these categories which are arbitrary but as old as the human body itself

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are maintained, but they need not necessarily be maintained.

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The incoming sensory data can be recombined in such a way that no trace of the portal of entry is left upon it. And in that case, you get this freely evolving topology of light and sound that is translinguistic. It has a grammar of form, if you will, so that it is not shorn of meaning.

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It is simply shorn of the kind of particularized meaning that logical necessity imposes on language. Instead, it has an emotional richness, a kind of poetic depth

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that is not like ordinary language at all, and in fact causes one to think of discussions of

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primary poetic languages, such as the one that goes on in the white goddess by Robert

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Graves where he wants to suggest that there is a proto language an ursprach

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that transcends conventionalized dictionaries a language which to hear it

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is to understand it and I think that this kind of organization of information lies at the basis of the psychedelic experience. that are historical adumbrations of an assembly language which is prehistoric and probably in the genes

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and antedates all notion of human conventionalizing of activity

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and is actually biologically the basis of language.

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As I said in the opening remarks,

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that if you want to see the thumbprint of God

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in the world, it seems to me the phenomenon of human language is where you look. I mean,

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human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts in your head by simply uttering certain small mouth noises and the degree of fineness of the

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images that I can produce in your head and you in mind through the use of small

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mouth noises is something which we’re still exploring I think that you know

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it’s well known that the human animal has not appreciably evolved in 50 or 60,000 years possibly much longer

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once culture was established the the soma of the human species was relatively

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stabilized then change was no longer genetic it became epigenetic. And you get, just as the stability sets in in the animal

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form, you begin to get this fantastic proliferation of epigenetic change in the form of the evolution

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of culture, languages, alphabets. It all seems to be related somehow to the encoding of information.

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And the psychedelic state also seems to be about the revelation of kinds of information

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which are normally either not efficacious or unavailable for other reasons.

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And it is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an

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epiphenomenon attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man which is

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evolving. Culture carries along. At the present moment, we are able to speak 21st century ideas to each other, but our culture is carrying along at about the 1950s level.

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Nevertheless, it seems to me that this thing which psilocybin does

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to the language-producing part of the brain

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is not then some mere affect,

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some trivial affect of an obscure hallucinogen

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on a peripheral part of the brain.

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It means that it is in fact a catalyst for evolution because it is a catalyst for the

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evolution of language. We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language.

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And the hardest thing to cause to change is language.

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It has an immense inertia because it is so unself-reflective of itself.

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And this is what we need to inject into it, is an element of self-reflection

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so that the evolution of language can become more

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conscious and less random because it’s the non-randomizing of the evolution of language

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that will give us a real hold on the kinds of social modalities that we want to produce in

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the future. Now I don’t know if the tryptamine-induced glossolalia will have a major role to play in that.

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It may be simply one of the many promising scintillas or sparks thrown off by the psychedelic experience that invites exploration. But certainly all of these things, the chanting,

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the glossolalia, the inner discourses with alien forces,

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the self-examination of one’s own motives,

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all of these things are linguistic activities

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and go on in the context of linguistic action.

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It seems to me that what these drugs synergize is cognitive activities

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of all sorts this is why originally they were called consciousness expanding

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drugs and this synergy of cognitive activity has to be taken very very

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seriously because it’s having a massive effect on our society.

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As individuals, we tend to concentrate on the 6 to 12 hours following the ingestion of a given drug,

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but the real impact is a societal impact that has spread out over decades,

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and I don’t think that there’s any question at all

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but what the best part of the social program of

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the LSD reformers of the 60s has been enacted in large measure it’s simply

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that it’s at a profane level not pleasing to the purest but I see I

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believe that people have deeper and subtler senses of humor.

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I think people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity.

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I think people have a greater sensitivity

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to the mysteries of human interaction

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simply because so much LSD was taken in the 60s.

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And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.

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Our language is largely in the place where it was left by about 1969.

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But from the period of 1959 to 69,

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dozens of concepts and notions,

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Dozens of concepts and notions, ego trip, bummer, flashback, rupture of plane, all of these terms were invented that allowed a handle on the experience.

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And essentially, the whole 20th century cultural experience has been an effort to create languages

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of sufficient power to give descriptions

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of the internal transcendence of being

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as we experienced it in the present at hand.

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And Stan touched on this this afternoon, the Freudian interest in the repression of desire and the placement of the critical period in childhood.

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In other words, out of the present, but still within the context of the life of the experience. And then Jung trying to say,

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well, it’s that, but it’s more than that,

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and bringing in the notion of a collective unconscious.

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But it isn’t that these guys were describing the unconscious

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or limiting or delineating the unconscious.

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It was that they were going through linguistic forms of

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metamorphosis in an attempt to describe what was a black box, which essentially, I think, still

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eludes them. Because though the Jungian model was fairly satisfying, I think, by, we’ll say, the middle 40s.

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It was just at that time that then these psychedelic agents began coming on.

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And what they show is that if we keep the Freudian term, the unconscious,

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then huge portions of the unconscious seem to have very little to do with human beings, individually or collectively. And that large portions of the unconscious present themselves more like

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a topological manifold. In other words, more like a place that is no more interested in

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the traumas or repressed wish fulfillment of human beings than boulders,

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wildflowers and waterfalls are interested in these things.

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In other words, the unconscious began to take on the character of a dimension rather than

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a repository of energy that seemed to be instead something deployed spatially that could be entered

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into and immediately of course the literatures and traditions and mythologies of the world were

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searched and we discovered yes shamanism there is a tradition of a of a therapeutic practitioner who in order to cure his patient or himself goes to a place

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and then there are many descriptions it’s either an ascent through cosmic levels or a descent

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into an inferno or into the center of the earth or into a cavern, but the stress was on the spatial metaphor that it was a place.

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And I think that the psychedelics are beginning to confirm this in a way that’s very hard for us to assimilate.

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In other words, it seems as though the science fiction metaphor of another dimension is actually in some ways more

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applicable than these reductionist models which wanted to say well it’s a

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representation of a certain symptomatology or it’s a representation

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of a certain past event system it doesn’t seem to be like that. And it raises questions about the relationship

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of the mind to the body,

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which I talked about the first night,

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that are very interesting.

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One of the things, again,

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that Stan touched on this afternoon

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was what he called synchronistic events

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attendant upon taking psychedelic drugs.

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And this means that you take a psychedelic drug

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and then someone you’ve been thinking of who lives far away

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shows up at your doorstep, this kind of thing.

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Jung, the word synchronicity was coined by Jung

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and it means a meaningful coincidence.

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But I think it was P.D. Bridgman who said that a coincidence is what you have left over

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when you apply a bad theory.

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And there can be just so many

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of these meaningful coincidences

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before somebody has to stand up and say,

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you know, hell, this can’t be coincidences, meaningful or otherwise.

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Something else is happening here.

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And on psilocybin, and I think it’s based on anecdotal material,

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but I think it’s generally true of other psychedelics in varying degrees,

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the synchronistic component is more like a poltergeist phenomenon

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it’s as though there are small eddies of autonomous psychic energy that disturb the

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periphery of awareness and it’s the it’s the rats in the wall phenomenon that you know the scratchings the rustlings fire flaring need to be

00:28:28 ►

studied the phenomenon of people lying on floors silent for hours and then

00:28:35 ►

sitting up at the very moment that the fire flares the window blows open the

00:28:41 ►

baby cries almost as though there are waves of compression,

00:28:46 ►

of coincidence, connectedness, what is it, I’m not sure.

00:28:52 ►

Coincidence control.

00:28:53 ►

Something like that, that move through a modality.

00:28:58 ►

So all of these things suggest that actually we don’t know

00:29:03 ►

what we’re doing with psychedelics, that because things

00:29:09 ►

that you put into your mouth that are not foods must necessarily be medicines, we have

00:29:16 ►

assigned these things to our doctors to explain to us.

00:29:21 ►

And I noticed in the first talk this afternoon it was said well there’s

00:29:25 ►

the the schizotoxin the theory that you know the psychotomimetic theory then

00:29:34 ►

there’s also the theory that these things induce religious experiences but

00:29:39 ►

so did the psychiatrists who figured this out immediately step aside and make room for priests?

00:29:46 ►

Or what was the conclusion of that model of how it should be done?

00:29:52 ►

So I don’t think they are…

00:29:54 ►

I think it’s odd that our reaction to them was to immediately say,

00:29:59 ►

well, if you’re dying of cancer, we’ll give it to you.

00:30:02 ►

If you’re seriously neurotic, you can be put on the waiting list.

00:30:07 ►

Everybody else hit the streets if you’re interested.

00:30:12 ►

There is this notion, you know,

00:30:15 ►

that what we all experience is mental health

00:30:21 ►

and certainly doesn’t require any drug intervention because it

00:30:27 ►

in fact is normality but but Jung and others have had you know the more the

00:30:34 ►

idea of an open-ended process that there is an unlimited potential for

00:30:40 ►

understanding and for coming to terms with being in the world and for opening up to other people.

00:30:47 ►

And I think that it would be very interesting to take the approach

00:30:55 ►

that these things should be restricted to people of proven exceptional ability,

00:31:02 ►

an exceptional ability,

00:31:07 ►

that going along with winning the Nobel Prize was your license to possess and take psychedelics

00:31:12 ►

and to hand them out to your friends.

00:31:15 ►

It’s interesting that when this was all being hashed out

00:31:21 ►

at the very beginning,

00:31:23 ►

it was Huxley, it was Aldous Huxley’s notion

00:31:26 ►

that this is how it should be done.

00:31:28 ►

He said, you know,

00:31:29 ►

engineers, artists, diplomats,

00:31:32 ►

administrators,

00:31:33 ►

people must be exposed to these things.

00:31:36 ►

And then somewhere along the line,

00:31:38 ►

I think personalities arose

00:31:40 ►

with messianic tendencies

00:31:43 ►

and the notion became that you would count success

00:31:47 ►

in millions of followers

00:31:49 ►

rather than in the quality of the people who were taking it.

00:31:55 ►

And that proved a sad thing

00:31:58 ►

because the society in which that conception arose

00:32:01 ►

had a demographic bulge in the 12 to 30 year old group and it just all ended

00:32:08 ►

rather badly so um as i said at the beginning there’s no conclusion about all of this stuff

00:32:17 ►

it is the frontier there is a very large frontier we’re very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding.

00:32:30 ►

But has anyone stopped to notice

00:32:32 ►

that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding,

00:32:36 ►

necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown

00:32:42 ►

becomes larger and larger.

00:32:46 ►

So, you know, it’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger

00:32:52 ►

to convince yourself that there’s an awful lot of darkness.

00:32:57 ►

So I think, you know,

00:33:03 ►

the key to getting around the cultural momentum that has placed us in this position

00:33:08 ►

is to return to the baconian method which is simply the collection of facts and the examination

00:33:16 ►

of them until patterns emerge and that then the major datum for thinking about the psychedelic experience

00:33:25 ►

should be the experience.

00:33:30 ►

And that the pharmacology and all of these things,

00:33:34 ►

they will elucidate operational details

00:33:39 ►

of how these things function at the wetware level,

00:33:43 ►

but they will never elucidate the component

00:33:47 ►

which is beheld by the experience in confrontation with the drug.

00:33:53 ►

In fact, it’s silly to demand that of them

00:33:55 ►

because that’s not the kind of information that they are able to deliver.

00:34:00 ►

In fact, no system of thought is able to deliver that kind of a description that has to come from

00:34:09 ►

the individual and that’s why i i am fond of speaking of these things as deconditioning agents

00:34:16 ►

because what they show you is that you know each man each woman their own Magellan. You need no longer participate in a pyramid of information

00:34:29 ►

where it’s filtering down to you

00:34:32 ►

from the scientific, medical, governmental, and military elite

00:34:35 ►

being explained by CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time.

00:34:41 ►

You can discover, actually,

00:34:44 ►

that the adventure of being is not a cultural

00:34:47 ►

adventure. It’s not a societal adventure. It’s a personal adventure. And that this is what you

00:34:55 ►

really need to be involved in. And all this is happening. This is why shamanism has gained such a hold because it’s a metaphor for personal

00:35:07 ►

responsibility. And I think we all take personal responsibility for the evolution of our worldviews.

00:35:14 ►

Psychedelic people I’m referring to take responsibility for the evolution of their

00:35:19 ►

worldviews. But still, we operate under the shadow of what’s right to say about it and what’s

00:35:27 ►

Not right to say about it for instance

00:35:30 ►

the UFO thing is a is a cultural taboo and not believed in by

00:35:39 ►

nice

00:35:40 ►

Intellectually nice people. It’s more the province of telephone line repairmen

00:35:45 ►

and that sort of slice.

00:35:50 ►

But the fact of the matter is

00:35:52 ►

that no matter how much it may discomfort

00:35:56 ►

drug researchers and UFO people,

00:35:59 ►

because each is struggling to gain respectability

00:36:02 ►

in an inherently dubious field.

00:36:06 ►

But actually, I think there would be a fertile advance made

00:36:12 ►

if these two groups could talk to each other.

00:36:18 ►

Some people hearing me say that must wonder

00:36:21 ►

what in the world I’m talking about.

00:36:23 ►

How can a problem of unidentified aircraft

00:36:27 ►

be related to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience?

00:36:32 ►

But you see, it isn’t so much a problem of unidentified aircraft,

00:36:36 ►

it’s a problem of not recognizing

00:36:38 ►

that the entire spectrum of existence

00:36:43 ►

is embedded in a linguistic model that is created by the workings of minds

00:36:52 ►

and that mind is an imponderable and yet it’s set at the beginning of the equation in 1978 a very spectacular daylight meteorite

00:37:06 ►

crossed the United States from east to west,

00:37:10 ►

required about 35 seconds for it to go from one side of the country to the other.

00:37:15 ►

There was no warning that this thing would occur.

00:37:20 ►

And in the 35 seconds that it was over the continental United States,

00:37:25 ►

thousands and thousands of people saw it.

00:37:27 ►

But we got 32 very good photographs of it from different points along the ground,

00:37:35 ►

two movies of it from two different points along its pathway,

00:37:40 ►

and it was very well documented.

00:37:45 ►

UFOs have been visiting people and appearing all over the world for 30 years

00:37:51 ►

and the hardware faction can’t come up with anything.

00:37:57 ►

So it seems clear to me that what we’re dealing with

00:38:00 ►

is a kind of mass psychic phenomenon of some sort.

00:38:09 ►

with is a kind of mass psychic phenomenon of some sort. And it’s very interesting that one of the

00:38:15 ►

anecdotal things in circulation about psychedelics is that they are actually catalysts for this kind of thing. And what this means is not clear, but it should certainly be investigated.

00:38:26 ►

I mean, if there’s a chemical agent which can repeatedly trigger a phenomenon that bizarre,

00:38:32 ►

it should be looked at.

00:38:34 ►

Jung very early suggested in a book called Flying Saucers,

00:38:38 ►

a modern myth of things seen in the sky that he published in 1948, that it was in fact a projection of the mass psyche,

00:38:51 ►

that it was assimilable to the goals of alchemical transubstantiation.

00:38:58 ►

He called it the rotunda, the scintilla, the spark, the spinning thing.

00:39:04 ►

the scintilla, the spark, the spinning thing.

00:39:06 ►

And it’s all these things,

00:39:11 ►

but it is the clue that we are somehow trapped inside some kind of artifice,

00:39:14 ►

that the world that we’re inside of

00:39:17 ►

is much more like a work of art

00:39:20 ►

than it is like the smooth-running mechanistic machine that Newtonian science

00:39:27 ►

describes. That description works very well for all low-grade phenomena up to about the level of

00:39:36 ►

the weather. But from there on, the notion that the world is simply probabilistic processes

00:39:45 ►

following these various creodes of least resistance

00:39:49 ►

becomes very untenable

00:39:52 ►

because each of us in our experience of being

00:39:56 ►

lives in a highly theatrical world.

00:40:00 ►

And what I mean by that is that you can see a woman at a great distance from you in class, in opportunity, all of these things, and you fall in love with this woman, and it’s hopeless.

00:40:48 ►

But of course, as we all know, it’s also inevitable. And that inevitability totally violates physics, because it really is hopeless. coincidences and wishes projected onto the world but never spoken and strangely fulfilled in the oddest ways.

00:40:51 ►

I think that it’s because the world is made of language and that if the Eastern conception

00:40:59 ►

that the universe is mind has any operational impact in the world it will be through conceiving of

00:41:07 ►

mind as the underlying self-aware self-active world forming grammar of

00:41:19 ►

being so that the what Freud called the superego, what I call the overmind,

00:41:25 ►

there have been different ways of talking about it,

00:41:27 ►

has to be seen not as a passive homeostatic controlling device

00:41:32 ►

but actually as the most intelligent organization on this planet.

00:41:40 ►

And we are all only components of this,

00:41:43 ►

believing ourselves to be the highest expression of freedom.

00:41:48 ►

But it is actually at the species level that organization is controlled,

00:41:53 ►

and that’s why the emergence of ideas like the calculus or the invention of LSD or the steam engine,

00:42:00 ►

why these things have this curious property of being regulated from above?

00:42:05 ►

It’s because the world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose.

00:42:11 ►

We are actually trapped inside a giant organism.

00:42:14 ►

And it is not Gaia. That’s a much larger organism.

00:42:19 ►

We are trapped inside a large organism which is the human collectivity.

00:42:24 ►

And that’s why we are

00:42:25 ►

such different monkeys because there is this group mind which none of us is

00:42:32 ►

aware of or has ever perceived that is actually mediating the human experience

00:42:39 ►

and it is no more apprehendable to us than the group mind of an anthill is apprehendable to us.

00:42:47 ►

It can’t be seen.

00:42:49 ►

What it is is it’s an interlocking set of conventions,

00:42:53 ►

linguistic directions, genetic components, assumptions,

00:43:01 ►

and what for lack of a better word you would call innate tendencies.

00:43:07 ►

And these things which we wear as the clothing of our specieshood

00:43:13 ►

are actually the constraints directing us first one way and then another.

00:43:19 ►

And if we want to take control of our destiny,

00:43:22 ►

we are going to have to rise into empathy with this overmind,

00:43:28 ►

this superego. And there’s no reason to think this can’t be done. I’m sure you’re all familiar

00:43:34 ►

with Julian Jane’s theory that until very recently, in fact, until Homeric times, everyone

00:43:41 ►

heard voices in moments of crisis.

00:43:45 ►

If you were in a moment of crisis,

00:43:48 ►

suddenly and quite naturally,

00:43:50 ►

a voice spoke in your head and said,

00:43:53 ►

you know, get the hell out of there or do something.

00:43:57 ►

And everyone understood that this was God

00:44:00 ►

or the king or the dead king.

00:44:04 ►

It depended on where you located in the Middle East.

00:44:09 ►

But there were people who traded between these various locations.

00:44:16 ►

And the first cynics is what they were

00:44:18 ►

because they noticed that over at Ur, God spoke to everybody.

00:44:25 ►

But down at Nineveh, it was the dead king

00:44:30 ►

who everybody heard in their head.

00:44:33 ►

And this logical discrepancy cast doubt,

00:44:37 ►

and they became the first people to not hear the voice,

00:44:42 ►

but to assimilate it.

00:44:44 ►

And this is what we call the ego.

00:44:47 ►

It is what we experience as the self.

00:44:51 ►

Something which 2,000 years ago was a god,

00:44:54 ►

which only intervened in human affairs to save lives and give heavy advice,

00:45:01 ►

has become for each of us the central focus through which we mediate

00:45:07 ►

our sensorium and project models of the world so it is not we are far more

00:45:15 ►

plastic than we realize and I think what Stan was saying tonight about how the

00:45:21 ►

goal is to be in the I forget the the term, the hylolytic,

00:45:27 ►

the matter-oriented side of it,

00:45:29 ►

but to have this awareness,

00:45:32 ►

a complete awareness of the other side

00:45:35 ►

so that you are simultaneously locked

00:45:38 ►

in Newtonian space-time

00:45:40 ►

and the parameters of the situation

00:45:41 ►

and you are simultaneously liberated

00:45:46 ►

into a complete awareness of the other potential.

00:45:51 ►

And the way I recognize that state,

00:45:53 ►

and this may be idiosyncratic,

00:45:56 ►

but I can tell I’m in that state

00:45:59 ►

when no matter what I’m doing and no matter where I go,

00:46:02 ►

I can see the earth hanging in space

00:46:06 ►

by simply referencing that image and discovering it present in my head in a way that is not

00:46:13 ►

like a thought or something artificially induced.

00:46:18 ►

It’s a real modality that is present and accessible.

00:46:22 ►

And I think that means, you know, that you have

00:46:25 ►

enough of yourself committed to the overmind that you’re operating in the light of it.

00:46:31 ►

And then many consequences flow from that that are efficacious at the personal level.

00:46:40 ►

For instance, there’s something which has been called the Tao of the ancestors.

00:46:44 ►

For instance, there’s something which has been called the Tao of the Ancestors.

00:46:49 ►

What that means, I think, is simply that for each one of us, there is a way to do the things we must do that is the most energy-efficient way to do it.

00:46:57 ►

And I’m talking about opening a door, picking up a fork.

00:47:01 ►

The best way to do it is to follow the creode that is the Tao of the ancestors,

00:47:08 ►

to recognize that you are a genetic expression, a partial genetic expression of a gene pool which

00:47:14 ►

has received genetic expression at each generation in your family for thousands and thousands of

00:47:20 ►

generations and that you are just the latest recension of this gene pool,

00:47:27 ►

then you release the ego and you act with this awareness. These are psychedelically induced

00:47:34 ►

states of being that I think make it easier to live in the world. And how many of them are there?

00:47:41 ►

Who knows? For instance, under the influence of Silla Simon in the Amazon,

00:47:46 ►

I noticed what I am completely convinced is an atrophied human ability. It’s a very simple

00:47:54 ►

ability, but we have lost it. It’s the ability to know how to walk from point A to point B, not following the shortest distance, but following automatically

00:48:09 ►

the path of least resistance, so that you don’t go down into valleys and then climb

00:48:16 ►

hills.

00:48:17 ►

You automatically stay on ridges, even though you take more circuitous paths to your goal.

00:48:24 ►

And I could feel this sense working.

00:48:26 ►

It was just like a part of the dashboard

00:48:28 ►

that had previously been covered up was uncovered.

00:48:32 ►

Here was a human sense,

00:48:33 ►

which we don’t particularly need

00:48:35 ►

because we’ve erected linear cities

00:48:38 ►

where the path of least resistance usually is a straight line.

00:48:43 ►

But you can imagine people in rugged country,

00:48:47 ►

this is a sense which would confer great survival adaptability

00:48:51 ►

and be tremendously important.

00:48:54 ►

So I think that what we need to do

00:48:58 ►

is tease these human abilities out of the psychedelic experience,

00:49:04 ►

that really the psychedelic experience

00:49:06 ►

is like an intimation of immortality.

00:49:09 ►

And at varying distances in time from the point you occupy,

00:49:14 ►

it shows you ever more vague intimations of the future,

00:49:18 ►

but they are there nevertheless.

00:49:21 ►

Language is probably somehow related to the endogenous hallucinogens in the human brain.

00:49:31 ►

The evolution of culture is probably related to these things. It’s been suggested that DMT in the

00:49:37 ►

brain is mediating what we experience as attention, that when you look and look hard something is happening in the brain

00:49:46 ►

having to do with DMT that it mediates awareness in a very moment to moment way

00:49:53 ►

the future evolution of mankind is going to be based on these states but the last point I want to make is one about how evolution occurs. It isn’t that

00:50:08 ►

a mutation happens and it confers greater adaptability upon an individual and therefore

00:50:17 ►

that individual and his offspring numerically gain over competitor individuals of the same species.

00:50:26 ►

This is not how it works.

00:50:29 ►

The way it works is you have constant mutating of a gene pool

00:50:34 ►

from the influx of cosmic radiation and other factors.

00:50:38 ►

There is always a low level of mutagens, of mutants in a population.

00:50:47 ►

But they are of no consequence

00:50:49 ►

as long as the selective parameters remain the same.

00:50:54 ►

But when the selective parameters change suddenly,

00:50:59 ►

these individuals who were previously masked

00:51:01 ►

in the general population,

00:51:04 ►

the selective advantage that they have now

00:51:08 ►

comes immediately to the fore,

00:51:11 ►

and they act very quickly and critically

00:51:13 ►

to send the evolution of a given species off

00:51:18 ►

in a different direction.

00:51:19 ►

This is why the fossil record progresses in fits and starts,

00:51:26 ►

because sudden shifts of environment cause the apparent emergence of new types.

00:51:33 ►

It isn’t that they cause it, it’s that the new types were always there,

00:51:37 ►

but not with any advantage.

00:51:39 ►

It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them,

00:51:43 ►

It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them and they are moving then into positions of dominance in the population

00:51:49 ►

or in society if we’re talking about human beings.

00:51:52 ►

I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level.

00:51:57 ►

It has conferred, there is a population of different people

00:52:03 ►

in the general population.

00:52:06 ►

And as conditions change, these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.

00:52:16 ►

Without being metaphysical about it, an obvious adaptive advantage is

00:52:22 ►

what I call the deconditioning effect.

00:52:28 ►

That we live in a jungle of propaganda,

00:52:32 ►

you know, buy this, believe this, wear this.

00:52:36 ►

If you have a symbiotic relationship with a deconditioning agent,

00:52:41 ►

you’re much more likely to thread your way through that

00:52:44 ►

with your soul and

00:52:45 ►

your bank account intact. So this is one way of thinking of it. What the psychedelics really do,

00:52:57 ►

I think, is release us from cultural machinery and put you right up against the human essence

00:53:03 ►

and say you no longer have to pretend

00:53:05 ►

that you’re Scotch-Irish or Wetoto or Jewish.

00:53:10 ►

You can actually explore the human modality

00:53:13 ►

independent of the inertia of these exterior labels.

00:53:19 ►

And so it places responsibility,

00:53:22 ►

it raises questions of validity,

00:53:25 ►

places responsibility, it raises questions of validity, existential honesty with oneself,

00:53:31 ►

and I think it promotes the moral life,

00:53:35 ►

which I don’t think happens if you buy deeply

00:53:40 ►

into myths of the tribe,

00:53:42 ►

if you’re a devoted practitioner of Marxism, fascism, capitalism,

00:53:47 ►

I don’t think these things will lead you to the moral life because they are not,

00:53:51 ►

they don’t arise out of experience. Experience is everything. These are drugs of experience.

00:54:00 ►

It’s very important to take the moment seriously, reincarnation and all these things aside.

00:54:07 ►

What if this were your unique opportunity to unravel it all

00:54:14 ►

and not to be caught in dissolution?

00:54:18 ►

Because I think that there is a potential for immortality,

00:54:23 ►

but it isn’t assured.

00:54:26 ►

It is something which comes to the courageous.

00:54:29 ►

And somehow in the historical experience,

00:54:32 ►

we’ve gotten the idea through orthodox religions

00:54:35 ►

that salvation comes to the subservient.

00:54:39 ►

And this is totally wrong.

00:54:42 ►

It is more like the Greek ideal of the hero,

00:54:46 ►

that if you are heroic enough, once you’re dead, you’ll be a god.

00:54:51 ►

And I think this is what these things summon us all to.

00:54:55 ►

And the thing to look at are the things which don’t fit any paradigm,

00:55:01 ►

the anomalies, the paranormal things,

00:55:04 ►

the self-transforming elf machines the ufos all

00:55:09 ►

of these things what you didn’t tell the story the ufo story oh which ufo story

00:55:15 ►

well well I don’t know it has to do with this whole thing see the alien is an

00:55:27 ►

archetype as well as whatever else it may be I mean if aliens didn’t exist or

00:55:34 ►

don’t exist we would still invent them because it’s the other you know I’ve

00:55:41 ►

made the metaphor that we have arrived at some kind of collective puberty

00:55:48 ►

where we now are fascinated by the notion of a non-human partner.

00:55:58 ►

We’re obsessed, as an adolescent is obsessed with sex, we’re obsessed with the notion of alien love

00:56:06 ►

we want this

00:56:08 ►

and yet we have all the feelings about it

00:56:12 ►

that an adolescent brings to the early sexual experiences

00:56:16 ►

it seems like an abyss

00:56:18 ►

a devouring

00:56:19 ►

a kind of giving up

00:56:21 ►

impossible

00:56:22 ►

and yet our historical development

00:56:26 ►

has led us to the place

00:56:28 ►

where we now realize this is possible.

00:56:30 ►

It’s like finding out the facts of life.

00:56:33 ►

The facts of life are

00:56:34 ►

that there could be a girl next door.

00:56:39 ►

Who’s an alien.

00:56:40 ►

Who’s an alien, of course.

00:56:42 ►

What other kind of girl next door could it be?

00:56:46 ►

So then, hmm, there’s a girl next door.

00:56:51 ►

And so it’s not all the talk about the wonderful technical benefits

00:56:54 ►

that we would reap and all this.

00:56:57 ►

And obviously it isn’t that.

00:56:59 ►

It’s an erotic fascination with the notion of the other that drives us.

00:57:05 ►

And perhaps this is why in the psychedelic experience the alien emerges so fully and completely

00:57:12 ►

because it is a repressed notion.

00:57:17 ►

Although I’ve noticed in the history of the phenomenology of UFO contacts,

00:57:25 ►

the theme, it was first a light in the sky,

00:57:29 ►

then we had all these exotic abductions,

00:57:32 ►

and then the last four or five years

00:57:33 ►

there are more and more persistent stories

00:57:35 ►

of sexual relations, pregnancies, this kind of thing.

00:57:42 ►

Well, this obviously means that we’re growing up,

00:57:46 ►

we’re getting older,

00:57:47 ►

the pressure is on to come to terms

00:57:50 ►

with how this thing is going to present itself.

00:57:54 ►

It’s so stupid.

00:57:55 ►

Yes.

00:57:58 ►

So it’s hardly respectable to say these things anywhere.

00:58:03 ►

I mean, fortunately, I work for a living,

00:58:06 ►

so I can say these things.

00:58:10 ►

But the amount of anecdotal material

00:58:14 ►

that would come pouring forth if these things were stressed,

00:58:17 ►

I think, would shock everyone.

00:58:19 ►

And somehow it has to be taken out,

00:58:22 ►

and this is a really sensitive issue that is very hard to talk about.

00:58:27 ►

How can such a screwy notion be taken out of the hands of squirrels?

00:58:34 ►

In other words, we have no shortage of people assuring us

00:58:38 ►

that aliens of all sorts are channeling left, channeling right,

00:58:44 ►

this, that, the other thing. How the

00:58:47 ►

problem is the reverse of the problem in radio telescopy, where they search the skies and

00:58:52 ►

get nothing. Our problem is just a cacophony of hysterical claim making. Where do you begin?

00:59:01 ►

You know, the Urantia book, you’ve got the nine, you’ve got all kinds.

00:59:07 ►

And this is not a new phenomenon.

00:59:10 ►

It’s, well, you could choose your point,

00:59:13 ►

but certainly since the onset of theosophy and Alice Bailey’s school,

00:59:19 ►

and there’s been a lot of channeling in the 20th century.

00:59:22 ►

So the problem is one of filters. Which aliens do you

00:59:27 ►

believe and how do you tell garbage from the real thing? And I think this is a problem for

00:59:35 ►

information theorists. It’s a poker playing problem, essentially, and shouldn’t be difficult

00:59:41 ►

to solve if we apply ourselves to it. It’s just that for us, the notion of a dialogue with an interior other is psychopathy.

00:59:52 ►

So we’re very leery of that, or we’re very something of that.

01:00:01 ►

Albert or Metzner?

01:00:03 ►

Alfred or Metzner?

01:00:08 ►

Anyway, I noticed that Sasha,

01:00:11 ►

when he described the phenomenology of psilocybin,

01:00:15 ►

didn’t say a thing about self-transforming elf machines or whispered messages from gods and demons.

01:00:18 ►

He did mention demons.

01:00:20 ►

So you’re free to believe that this is the raving of an unhinged mind

01:00:26 ►

but being a Jeremiah figure

01:00:29 ►

is a great tradition

01:00:31 ►

and they usually have the last laugh

01:00:33 ►

are there any questions?

01:00:37 ►

I can tell us the story sort of psilocybin

01:00:53 ►

that’s not

01:00:54 ►

any words that are in any cultures

01:00:57 ►

right now

01:00:58 ►

but that has meaning for you

01:01:00 ►

have you ever heard of or have you yourself

01:01:03 ►

communicated with another person

01:01:04 ►

in this language?

01:01:06 ►

You mean while I was loaded and they were loaded?

01:01:08 ►

Yes.

01:01:09 ►

Yes.

01:01:10 ►

And both of you have had this experience of shared meaning?

01:01:13 ►

Yes, but see, how can we check since English won’t flow back and forth?

01:01:19 ►

I mean, I take your word, if you both experienced shared meaning and confirmed it, that’s about as far as you could go.

01:01:24 ►

I think so.

01:01:26 ►

But when I listen to recordings of this glossolalia down,

01:01:31 ►

it makes me very uncomfortable,

01:01:33 ►

and I wonder what could possibly be the matter with me

01:01:35 ►

that I’ve placed so much emphasis on this.

01:01:38 ►

And I’ve noticed it’ll clear most rooms in a hurry.

01:01:43 ►

I mean, it’s all, people are with it, you know,

01:01:47 ►

and they say, oh, it’s far out, all this stuff.

01:01:49 ►

And then you play it, and they say, well, you know,

01:01:52 ►

I’ve got to go do something.

01:01:54 ►

They draw back.

01:01:56 ►

It seems too quirky, too quirky.

01:02:00 ►

So it’s like you do something, and they do something back and forth,

01:02:03 ►

except it’s totally unintelligible to the English ear. forth except it’s totally unintelligible to the English ear.

01:02:07 ►

Yeah, it’s totally unintelligible to the English ear.

01:02:09 ►

What it sounds like when I listen to it down

01:02:12 ►

is it sounds like a language, a human language

01:02:15 ►

very, very far removed from English.

01:02:19 ►

What you’re talking about really could be the language

01:02:23 ►

before we tried to build the Tower of Babel.

01:02:25 ►

We all shared the same language, then it got split up

01:02:28 ►

because we were fast kids or something.

01:02:30 ►

The Urschprach, this is the term for that, Urschprach, the first language.

01:02:34 ►

Yes, that’s what I mean by an assembly language.

01:02:38 ►

But the things that happen on psychedelics with language

01:02:42 ►

just defy rational apprehension. I mean, for

01:02:47 ►

instance, there’s a Celtic saying that poetry is made at the edge of running water. And

01:02:58 ►

I’ve noticed on psilocybin at times that as you approach running water

01:03:05 ►

like a river or a waterfall,

01:03:07 ►

you know, there is,

01:03:09 ►

you begin to think in rhyme.

01:03:12 ►

It’s sprung verse

01:03:13 ►

and it seems preposterous.

01:03:16 ►

You say, you know,

01:03:16 ►

this is too crazy to mention to anyone

01:03:18 ►

and you’re right.

01:03:20 ►

But nevertheless, it’s happening, you know.

01:03:23 ►

I mean, and as you leave the river,

01:03:26 ►

thought becomes perfectly normal.

01:03:28 ►

And people say, well, white noise is doing this.

01:03:32 ►

That’s an explanation.

01:03:37 ►

Or you look at historical phenomena.

01:03:41 ►

Muhammad, it turns out, spoke spoke in verse and it was considered a

01:03:47 ►

sign of election. Glossolalia with shaman is not that rare. Spirit voices.

01:03:54 ►

It happens without drugs all the time.

01:03:57 ►

Yes, although I don’t know if you know this book by Sylvia Goodman called Speaking

01:04:01 ►

in Tongues, which is as far as as I know, the major work in English.

01:04:10 ►

It’s done strictly from the sociological approach, but there is some physiological data. The most interesting being that on the floor of these Costa Rican churches where she did her research,

01:04:16 ►

after these sessions, they would measure pools of saliva 18 inches across deposited by single individuals.

01:04:27 ►

Also what was going on was there was a lot of hyped up, you know, hallelujah type stuff

01:04:34 ►

and then someone would fall into the glossolalia and utter a burst of it and then be like almost

01:04:41 ►

like a post-epileptic situation and they would turn to the people around them and say,

01:04:47 ►

did I do it? Did I really speak in tongues?

01:04:51 ►

This is not what the DMT glossolalia is like.

01:04:54 ►

What it is, and I’ll take a minute and describe it because…

01:04:58 ►

Do you have a recording?

01:05:00 ►

Not with me.

01:05:02 ►

But I’ll describe how it comes,

01:05:04 ►

because I think people often say to me,

01:05:07 ►

well, I took mushrooms and nothing like that ever happened.

01:05:09 ►

Well, the first time it happened to me was the first time I smoked DMT.

01:05:14 ►

And I’m not sure that it would happen on psilocybin

01:05:17 ►

if you didn’t have a lead into it.

01:05:19 ►

You have to invoke it.

01:05:21 ►

In other words, it isn’t that psilocybin causes it,

01:05:24 ►

and this is interesting, it’s that psilocybin causes it, and this is interesting.

01:05:26 ►

It’s that psilocybin carries you to a place where it is possible, given several other things which

01:05:35 ►

seem to be necessary. So psilocybin is necessary, but not sufficient for this phenomenon. What else

01:05:42 ►

is required is a thing which is sort of hard to describe,

01:05:46 ►

but it’s an attitude of expectation.

01:05:49 ►

It’s an attitude of being on the verge of communication

01:05:53 ►

even though nobody else is present.

01:05:55 ►

In other words, you have to invoke it.

01:05:58 ►

And that word, strangely enough,

01:06:01 ►

has a history related to demonic summoning and that sort of thing.

01:06:07 ►

But that’s what you do. You invoke it.

01:06:09 ►

You feel the load of the psilocybin and you say,

01:06:13 ►

Aha, it’s enough now.

01:06:16 ►

And then you test, you try it.

01:06:23 ►

And you do this by consciously speaking gibberish.

01:06:26 ►

In other words, what seems to be happening is that you have to release your brain’s expectation

01:06:33 ►

that sound will have meaning.

01:06:37 ►

Because when we all speak, always the words have a meaning attached to them, or else there’s

01:06:42 ►

something wrong with you.

01:06:44 ►

But if you will speak gibberish for a moment,

01:06:46 ►

just for a moment, it’s like priming the pump.

01:06:49 ►

And the break then is made

01:06:51 ►

with whatever connects language to meaning

01:06:54 ►

and language begins, it begins to flower

01:06:57 ►

and to take off and to develop these abstract modalities

01:07:02 ►

that are free of association, but that are obviously highly

01:07:08 ►

ordered and grammatical and going through complicated, it’s like a sonata. And in fact,

01:07:15 ►

it’s led me to suggest that probably language existed thousands and thousands of years before meaning that this is what?

01:07:26 ►

Monkeys these evolving monkeys on the brink of self-reflection did for each other as a form of entertainment

01:07:34 ►

It’s not as much of an energy drain as chanting and singing. It’s you just carry it on at a

01:07:41 ►

conversational level

01:07:43 ►

But you you know, it’s word music that can, very, very fine nuances of the stuff it’s manipulating, which is not meaning, but whatever it is, this topological manifold, very fine nuances can be imparted to it by these small mouth noises.

01:08:03 ►

can be imparted to it by these small mouth noises.

01:08:08 ►

Is it anything like what babies who are about to learn to speak do?

01:08:10 ►

They carry on these things,

01:08:13 ►

and it sounds like a language that you just don’t understand.

01:08:16 ►

There’s all this inflection, and it sounds very intelligent.

01:08:18 ►

If you could just kind of catch it.

01:08:19 ►

It’s like that.

01:08:23 ►

And it’s very close to actual language. It’s like that, only more so.

01:08:25 ►

Only more complex.

01:08:26 ►

Like one of the things that seems to be going on

01:08:28 ►

is there seems to be more phonemes

01:08:30 ►

than are actually in any human language.

01:08:33 ►

I mean, isn’t it that there are 52 phonemes

01:08:35 ►

and no language known has more than 41 or something like that?

01:08:39 ►

Because if you do this for a while,

01:08:42 ►

and it’s so much fun, it’s a kind of ecstasy to do it,

01:08:46 ►

that there’s no reason to stop if you’re alone.

01:08:49 ►

After you’ve done it for an hour or so,

01:08:53 ►

your face, your mouth is just hanging down to your waist.

01:09:00 ►

I mean, it’s like you’ve just done something to the whole front of your head

01:09:03 ►

and all the musculature has dissolved because you’ve been

01:09:06 ►

Making all these sounds that you never make and the whole front of your face feels different

01:09:14 ►

01:09:15 ►

Every language has a set of coded

01:09:20 ►

mouth positions which are expected and

01:09:24 ►

Easily facilitated through use.

01:09:27 ►

Is it easier if there’s somebody else there to hear it?

01:09:30 ►

No, there’s rarely somebody there to hear it when I do.

01:09:34 ►

I sometimes wish.

01:09:36 ►

Is it easier?

01:09:36 ►

In other words, because I got the impression that there was something about the attention,

01:09:40 ►

the listening of somebody else that facilitated the channeling through?

01:09:46 ►

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, for instance, I’m very shy about it.

01:09:50 ►

I feel like it’s a very personal thing to do, so that I…

01:09:54 ►

It’s hard for me to do it in the presence of other people.

01:09:57 ►

But this is just perhaps my personality or my association with it.

01:10:03 ►

Do you think you’re a better speaker in English

01:10:05 ►

since having these experiences?

01:10:08 ►

Yes, well, this is something…

01:10:09 ►

Is there more fluidity that you have developed,

01:10:12 ►

your face and your expression?

01:10:15 ►

Well, here’s what I think it is.

01:10:17 ►

Henry Munn made this point in his article.

01:10:23 ►

And I said earlier that what we need is the evolution of language and it’s

01:10:27 ►

all about the evolution of language.

01:10:29 ►

Yes, it’s a continuum.

01:10:34 ►

And as I, I guess it was here or somewhere recently, I said, you know, it begins as a

01:10:40 ►

clear thought.

01:10:43 ►

It moves into eloquence.

01:10:47 ►

It then becomes charismatic.

01:10:50 ►

At that point, if it goes any further,

01:10:52 ►

it will be called demonic possession

01:10:54 ►

because it’s happening too much.

01:10:58 ►

You’re not supposed to be that compelling.

01:11:00 ►

You’re not supposed to be that powerful a speaker.

01:11:04 ►

And if you stick with it past demonic

01:11:06 ►

possession, it becomes these objects. It actually crosses over and becomes the topological modality

01:11:17 ►

that I mentioned. Jill and I were talking in the baths the other night because she made her sounds down there.

01:11:26 ►

And I caught it at a certain angle visually.

01:11:30 ►

And I could see these things coming out of her mouth which looked like blue smoke.

01:11:37 ►

And I’ve seen this before.

01:11:39 ►

It looks like heat waves off a highway.

01:11:43 ►

And perhaps it’s nothing more than heated air that’s been in the lungs,

01:11:47 ►

heated by the body, has a different refractive index than the exterior air.

01:11:53 ►

It’s probably expelled in a series of waves.

01:11:56 ►

And so if you have the light just right, what you see is a displacement of light,

01:12:03 ►

a flickering in the vicinity of the mouth.

01:12:06 ►

But I think I’ve also, in a stone state,

01:12:10 ►

watched that condense into this more visible language.

01:12:15 ►

And it’s as though there are finer and finer levels of vibration.

01:12:18 ►

The whole notion of the word becoming flesh,

01:12:21 ►

which occurs in cosmogonic myths as diverse as the Judeo-Christian and

01:12:27 ►

the Australian Aborigine.

01:12:29 ►

It’s always about a word.

01:12:32 ►

A word was uttered, and this word was somehow more than a word.

01:12:36 ►

It adumbrated through dimensions and caused the phenomenon of being.

01:12:41 ►

And this is the sort of thing that’s happening. But to answer your question, yes,

01:12:47 ►

I think that I have verbal facility because I’ve taken so much of this drug and maybe

01:12:54 ►

I had a tendency toward it at the beginning, being Irish and not given to hard work. But work but but nevertheless it definitely does this and it does it temporarily like when you

01:13:09 ►

take psilocybin if you actually try to do what we call raving which is you know a high speed

01:13:17 ►

soliloquy but the raving can just go anywhere and is if it’s true that what we are

01:13:25 ►

are creatures of information,

01:13:28 ►

then this is very interesting,

01:13:29 ►

that it synergizes this ability.

01:13:34 ►

Everything that we are doing

01:13:35 ►

is informational deployment.

01:13:38 ►

I mean, we take in raw materials

01:13:41 ►

and we excrete manufactured objects,

01:13:43 ►

which are essentially ideas. We take in air and we excrete manufactured objects, which are essentially ideas.

01:13:45 ►

We take in air and we expel words.

01:13:50 ►

Everything we do is about stamping higher orders of information

01:13:54 ►

on unorganized lower forms of raw material.

01:13:58 ►

And it’s moving out of us, moving out of our bodies,

01:14:03 ►

this technical engine that we have created of computers and scientific institutions

01:14:08 ►

and rapacious government agencies and commercial concerns.

01:14:14 ►

It has a life of its own.

01:14:16 ►

It’s defining what humanity will be for itself.

01:14:20 ►

It’s a war about language, about, you know,

01:14:25 ►

It’s a war about language, about, you know, Joseph Goebbels was the great 20th century thinker who understood this more clearly than anyone else

01:14:31 ►

and set the tone, set the rules of the game

01:14:35 ►

so that the deconditioning effect of the drugs,

01:14:39 ►

the introduction to alien modalities, the glossolalia,

01:14:44 ►

the accessing of the vision state, all of these

01:14:47 ►

things have to do with information and the life of its own that it is taking on.

01:14:52 ►

And we are like the privileged observers of this.

01:14:55 ►

It’s as though, well, no less a psychedelic voyager, researcher, and bon vivant than William Burroughs said,

01:15:06 ►

English is a virus from outer space.

01:15:10 ►

And that’s what I’ve been trying to say and now I’m finished.

01:15:15 ►

Yeah.

01:15:17 ►

You see, the first thing that comes to mind

01:15:19 ►

when you talk about the creative power of sound or language.

01:15:31 ►

For me, it’s the experience that I had with the holophonic sound,

01:15:36 ►

where you have a sense that qualities in other senses are created through sound.

01:15:37 ►

Right.

01:15:38 ►

And I wonder what would happen if you record this holophonically,

01:15:42 ►

and then people listen to that.

01:15:44 ►

Now that’s an idea.

01:15:46 ►

That’s a very interesting idea.

01:15:48 ►

I heard a lot of things, you know,

01:15:49 ►

it transmits qualities of emotions,

01:15:51 ►

people in unusual states and so on.

01:15:54 ►

But there I came as close as I’ve ever been to

01:15:57 ►

understanding that there’s something special

01:16:00 ►

about the creative power of sound.

01:16:01 ►

Of sound, yes, I think so.

01:16:03 ►

See, I always saw it as a metaphor,

01:16:04 ►

what science has discovered about vibrations and when sound. Of sound, yes, I think so. See, I always saw it as a metaphor, what science has discovered about vibrations,

01:16:07 ►

and when they talk about sound,

01:16:09 ►

they really mean vibrations,

01:16:11 ►

not sound literally.

01:16:13 ►

Well, they talk too much about sound, I think,

01:16:15 ►

and not enough about language.

01:16:18 ►

Most people, when they think about

01:16:19 ►

the creative power of sound,

01:16:21 ►

they think about the mantric approach,

01:16:24 ►

syllables, sustained tones. And

01:16:29 ►

what I’m more interested in is the self-transforming power of grammar, that there is really something

01:16:37 ►

going on there.

01:16:41 ►

Yeah, but there’s, you know, it’s just the next stage.

01:16:44 ►

Yeah, but there’s, you know, it’s just the next stage.

01:16:46 ►

Right. Well, these things, it’s all gradations.

01:16:49 ►

This is all of a piece somehow,

01:16:53 ►

and how the visual cortex and the voice relate to each other is not well understood.

01:16:55 ►

One thing I want to mention, I just thought of it,

01:16:58 ►

because there may be experimentalists in the room.

01:17:01 ►

This appeared three months ago in Scientific American,

01:17:07 ►

and to me it just seems astonishing.

01:17:11 ►

It is that anyone who can sustain a hundred hertz hum,

01:17:13 ►

that’s a hundred cycle per second hum,

01:17:16 ►

can look at an electric fan

01:17:20 ►

and if you can sustain this hundred cycle hum,

01:17:23 ►

you can slow the fan down,

01:17:25 ►

make it appear to stop,

01:17:27 ►

make it go backwards.

01:17:28 ►

You can do this to a phonograph record,

01:17:31 ►

you can do it to a spinning wheel.

01:17:34 ►

This is not stoned.

01:17:35 ►

This is simply using the voice.

01:17:39 ►

Well, it sounds like pure magic.

01:17:41 ►

How can such a thing happen?

01:17:43 ►

The explanation of the Scientific American was

01:17:46 ►

that actually the resonant voice cavity

01:17:51 ►

is imparting vibration to the eyeballs

01:17:54 ►

and that it’s actually the subtle vibration

01:17:57 ►

is breaking up the photon input

01:18:00 ►

and you’re actually getting a stroboscopic effect.

01:18:04 ►

Well, the guy who wrote the article said

01:18:06 ►

that he was no training in music and was tone deaf so to test the theory that it was vibration

01:18:14 ►

of the eyes he built a little machine where he strapped his chin onto a box and by manipulating a dial could make the box vibrate and impart the vibration

01:18:28 ►

to his chin. So then, and he was using, he also used, you can make TV pictures appear

01:18:34 ►

to roll or you can fix rolling without getting out of your chair by doing this.

01:18:42 ►

And he attached his chin to the box and ran it up to 100 hertz

01:18:46 ►

and lo and behold, this effect was happening.

01:18:49 ►

Well, imagine an Amazonian shaman being able to approach a waterfall

01:18:56 ►

or something like that and make the water stop or flow uphill.

01:19:02 ►

Things like this, with no technology except the human voice.

01:19:07 ►

How many things are there like that, you know?

01:19:11 ►

How many human abilities are there that we are just unaware of or have masked?

01:19:18 ►

And what could you do with it?

01:19:19 ►

I mean, I suggest stopping a waterfall,

01:19:22 ►

because I’ve just given it five seconds thought.

01:19:24 ►

But what if you’d given a millennium of thought I suggest stopping a waterfall because I’ve just given it five seconds thought.

01:19:28 ►

But what if you’d given a millennium of thought to social institutions and little tricks

01:19:31 ►

and party games that could be used

01:19:33 ►

if you could stop time with your voice?

01:19:36 ►

And we bring orthodox physics to bear

01:19:39 ►

and say, well, acoustical vibration,

01:19:42 ►

stroboscopic effect, etc., blah, blah.

01:19:44 ►

But what is experientially happening is here’s a man who uses sound

01:19:48 ►

to control the speed of passing time.

01:19:52 ►

If that’s not a magical ability, what is?

01:19:55 ►

And yet it’s all nuts and bolts.

01:19:57 ►

And he hasn’t even taken his first hit of ayahuasca.

01:20:00 ►

This is just on the natch.

01:20:03 ►

Right?

01:20:03 ►

So what happens when you add in, you know,

01:20:06 ►

the exotic psychodynamics of these compounds?

01:20:10 ►

Well, that’s a lot.

01:20:11 ►

One thing that’s come to mind,

01:20:13 ►

one is I understand that Hitler’s generals would go into him,

01:20:16 ►

and they’re going to talk him out of this next invasion

01:20:18 ►

because he’s totally off the wall.

01:20:20 ►

And they came out glassy-eyed and convinced

01:20:22 ►

they’re going to go invade somewhere.

01:20:23 ►

Well, he’d probably been chatting with Joseph Goebbels before they walked in.

01:20:27 ►

And the other thing is Milton Erickson, who just with his voice does all sorts of things to people.

01:20:37 ►

He can’t even speak their language.

01:20:39 ►

He can do it to people that he doesn’t understand them and they don’t understand him.

01:20:43 ►

Totally astounding.

01:20:44 ►

And he moves his head around in real unusual ways

01:20:46 ►

even after he stopped talking.

01:20:48 ►

Who knows what that did?

01:20:50 ►

Ayahuasca arrows are interesting

01:20:51 ►

because when you meet a few of them,

01:20:55 ►

they all have a bunch of mannerisms

01:20:57 ►

which have to do with their voice

01:20:59 ►

and a certain sound that they make

01:21:01 ►

who the only honky I’ve ever met

01:21:04 ►

who came even close to this was Ralph Metzner has a curious they have very smooth, liquid, invasive voices. And

01:21:29 ►

of course, ayahuasca, the way in which it’s taken, it’s very interesting. There’s no drumming,

01:21:35 ►

no, I’ve never seen a musical instrument at an ayahuasca session. Everything is voice,

01:21:41 ►

voice, voice, and that’s what they’re into.

01:21:45 ►

Don Fidel.

01:21:46 ►

Don Fidel is a good example.

01:21:48 ►

Many of you have probably heard his tape, but there are many such practitioners.

01:21:54 ►

They also, in the curing process, use very sharp sounds.

01:22:00 ►

And in fact, when you talk to Don Fidel, he has a very animated style that is not the macho Spanish style at all.

01:22:09 ►

His speech is punctuated with all these aspirations, sharp sounds.

01:22:17 ►

And he obviously has a relationship to sound that’s very different than we do.

01:22:24 ►

We can play it sometime or in an intermission sometime.

01:22:28 ►

And it’s wonderful to trip to.

01:22:30 ►

It’s very good.

01:22:32 ►

So that’s how the boar ate the cabbage.

01:22:40 ►

Thank you very much.

01:22:41 ►

Thank you.

01:22:42 ►

Thank you.

01:22:43 ►

Thank you.

01:22:44 ►

For your tolerance.

01:22:48 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:50 ►

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

01:22:55 ►

Even though I’m sure that you didn’t miss

01:22:57 ►

one of Terrence’s most important points just now,

01:23:00 ►

I’d still like to repeat all of it for you,

01:23:03 ►

even though it’s kind of long.

01:23:04 ►

He said,

01:23:05 ►

There is always a low level of mutants in a population,

01:23:10 ►

but they are of no consequence as long as the selective parameters remain the same.

01:23:15 ►

But when the selective parameters change,

01:23:18 ►

suddenly these individuals, who were previously masked in the general population,

01:23:23 ►

the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the fore,

01:23:28 ►

and they act very quickly and critically to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction.

01:23:35 ►

It’s that the new types were always there, but not with any advantage.

01:23:39 ►

It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them,

01:23:43 ►

and they are moving then into positions

01:23:45 ►

of dominance in the population, or the society if we’re talking about human beings.

01:23:50 ►

I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level.

01:23:54 ►

There is a population of different people in the general population, and as conditions

01:23:59 ►

change, these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.

01:24:03 ►

these people will be seen to have adaptive advantages.

01:24:07 ►

So, do you fit the definition of a mutant?

01:24:14 ►

And not just any kind of a mutant, but one who is just waiting for a few selective parameters to change?

01:24:20 ►

I know that when I used to go back home for the holidays and have to pretend that I still fit into my birth family,

01:24:23 ►

well, I sure felt like a mutant sometimes.

01:24:27 ►

And my guess is that that may have happened to you a few times as well.

01:24:32 ►

But now you know that being the odd one out may not be such a bad thing after all.

01:24:37 ►

Maybe we should form a club with the motto, Mutants of the World Unite.

01:24:44 ►

But now that I think of it, that sounds more like a zombie movie, I guess.

01:24:48 ►

Maybe we should just lay low after all. You know, as Terrence also said, you can discover, by using psychedelics,

01:24:52 ►

you can discover actually that the adventure of being

01:24:55 ►

is not a cultural adventure. It’s not a societal adventure.

01:25:00 ►

It’s a personal adventure, and that this is what you really

01:25:04 ►

need to be involved in.

01:25:06 ►

You know, I think that maybe my favorite part of this talk was when he said,

01:25:11 ►

we’re very fond of the notion of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding.

01:25:15 ►

But has anyone stopped to notice that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding,

01:25:21 ►

necessarily the surface volume of the frontier of the unknown becomes larger and

01:25:25 ►

larger. It’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that there’s an awful

01:25:31 ►

lot of darkness. Now, either I’m getting old enough now to begin forgetting important things

01:25:38 ►

that I’ve heard before from Terence, or in this talk of his just now, he once again added a new

01:25:43 ►

way of looking at things,

01:25:45 ►

in particular, the things that we call psychedelic experiences.

01:25:50 ►

And I’d like to think that it’s the latter, of course,

01:25:52 ►

that he’s just saying new things or old things in a different way.

01:25:56 ►

But I really don’t recall any of his earlier talks where we heard him just so clearly

01:26:02 ►

talk about psychedelic voyages taking you to a certain place.

01:26:06 ►

And that’s the place that I call in Theo space in my book, The Spirit of the Internet,

01:26:11 ►

which, by the way, will be coming out in e-book format next month.

01:26:15 ►

But getting back to the talk we just heard,

01:26:18 ►

I have to admit that even though I don’t completely understand everything that Terrence says sometimes,

01:26:23 ►

he always has a way of putting

01:26:25 ►

things that sparks all new kinds of ideas in my mind. And maybe that’s why we all like listening

01:26:31 ►

to him so much, not for what he’s actually saying, but rather for the thoughts that he is able to

01:26:36 ►

provoke in our own minds as we try to follow what he’s saying. And I guess you might have already

01:26:43 ►

figured this out, but I forgot to tell you in the beginning that,

01:26:46 ►

according to the label on the cassette that this came from,

01:26:50 ►

that it was recorded at Esalen Institute in Northern California,

01:26:53 ►

which isn’t really all that important as far as the talk goes,

01:26:57 ►

but for one reason,

01:26:59 ►

and that is to put in a plug for a workshop to be held at Esalen

01:27:03 ►

next June 15th through the 17th.

01:27:06 ►

And that’s 2012.

01:27:08 ►

You know, I’ve always wanted to go to Esalen.

01:27:10 ►

I’ve never been there myself, but ever since I first heard about it,

01:27:13 ►

I’ve wanted to go there and see what it was like.

01:27:15 ►

So much has happened there.

01:27:17 ►

It was really Terrence’s favorite place to talk.

01:27:19 ►

And so now I finally get to make it next June,

01:27:22 ►

when Bruce Dahmer and I will be leading a workshop there on those dates.

01:27:26 ►

And I’ll give you more information about that in a future podcast.

01:27:29 ►

But for those of you who asked me to let you know as soon as it was added to the Esalen catalog, well, this is your notice.

01:27:38 ►

I think that the class size is going to be limited to about 20 or 24 people or so,

01:27:43 ►

which means that if you want to be sure

01:27:45 ►

to get a spot, you probably should go to the Esalen workshop page and sign up today.

01:27:50 ►

I’ll put a link to that along with the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:27:54 ►

And with a little luck, Bruce and I may be able to record a bit of what we’ll be talking

01:27:58 ►

about even before then and put it out here in a podcast to give you a better idea of

01:28:03 ►

what the Esalen experience will be like.

01:28:06 ►

Well, that’s going to do it for now because, well,

01:28:10 ►

I’ve got to get back to those last 200 pages of this fascinating book that I’m reading.

01:28:15 ►

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

01:28:20 ►

are available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 3.0 license.

01:28:28 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the

01:28:31 ►

bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:28:37 ►

And if you are interested in some of the stories that may or may not have led you and me to

01:28:43 ►

where we’re sharing this moment together right now,

01:28:45 ►

well, you can read a few of them in my novel,

01:28:48 ►

The Genesis Generation,

01:28:49 ►

which is available in Kindle and other e-book formats,

01:28:53 ►

as well as a pay-what-you-can audio book read by me.

01:28:56 ►

And you can find out more about that at genesisgeneration.us.

01:29:01 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:29:06 ►

Be well, my friends. you

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

282 - How Evolution Occurs

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Program Notes

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