Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“There is no scientific truth, or new paradigm, can arrive in a vacuum vis-à-vis the opinions of the general informed public. If it doesn’t fly with the general informed public it doesn’t matter what degree of internal rigor it has, an idea is probably doomed to a kind of , or a kind of obscurity.”
“How are we to relate to the plants which intoxicate? Do they drive us mad, or do they return us to the “religio”, to our own origins? Are we to see the states of mind which they invoke as tremendously alien, or are we to see them as, in fact, a way of going back to the primary situation in which everything that we call human found genesis?”
“If you want to change people’s minds about something you have to get scientists to change their minds.”
“It’s actually cooperation is what nature seeks to consolidate and conserve. And it is the species which can make itself most user-friendly to its neighbor species which actually survives.”
“The de-sacrilizing of natural space is the process of cutting it into grids and erecting flat, planer surfaces along those grids to cut out the influx of energy that is part of the natural world.”
“Whatever Christianity was, it was a historical episode where the most patriarchal wrath extant on the planet was suddenly pumped full of so much energy that everything else was just shoved to the wall.”
“Homeless Land 9” by permission of singer/songwriter John A. Tackett
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
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 while I’m a little late in getting this podcast out this week,
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some of our fellow salonners nonetheless pitched in to help offset a few of our expenses
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by either making direct donations to the salon,
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or who paid for a copy of the audiobook edition of my pay-what-you-can novel,
00:00:40 ►
The Genesis Generation, which you can also download for free if you’d like.
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The Genesis Generation, which you can also download for free if you’d like.
00:00:52 ►
And these special salonners are Jorge S., Stuart P., Timothy W.,
00:00:57 ►
and longtime salonner and supporter ErockX1 of Guyon Botanicals,
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which, by the way, I can also attest to as an excellent source of many high-quality ethnobotanicals,
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herbs, teas, things like that.
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Also, I want to thank Colleen S. And Colleen, please don’t feel like you need to donate again in the future. You’ve already done more than your part. And that also goes for Jake C., who
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both bought a book and also made a direct donation. Hey, thanks for that, Jake. And finally, I want to
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thank John J., who not only sent in a generous donation, but who also sent me a great talk by Eckhart Tolle that I’d love to play here in the salon.
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But unfortunately, it’s copyrighted by a company that once threatened to sue me for playing one of their Robert Anton Wilson recordings, and for which I beg eternal forgiveness from them.
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So thank you one and all ever so much for your continuing support.
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I really appreciate your help.
00:01:51 ►
Now for today’s program, I’m going to play the first tape of a two-tape recording
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of an appearance by Terrence McKenna sometime in 1987,
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if the writing on the cassette is to be believed.
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And since the tape came from the wonderful Diana Slattery,
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who has furnished us with a whole box of McKenna tapes,
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all of which have been properly labeled in the past,
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well, I’m sure that this is the correct date.
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And thank you again ever so much, Diana.
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Now, this first tape, which is what I’m going to play today,
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is the main part of McKenna’s lecture,
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and the other tape that I’ll play in my next podcast includes the question and answer session that followed.
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And, you know, I’ve found that often these Q&A sessions are even more interesting than his
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prepared lectures. So we’ll hear that in the next podcast. But after we hear today’s talk, I’ll be
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back with some more of my thoughts about Occupy Wall Street
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and the other Occupy demonstrations now taking place all over the world.
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But first, here is the one and only Terrence McKenna.
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There is no scientific truth or new paradigm can arise in a vacuum
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vis-à-vis the opinions of the general informed public.
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If it doesn’t fly with the general informed public,
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it doesn’t matter what degree of internal rigor it has,
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an idea is probably doomed to a kind of obsolescence
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or a kind of obscurity.
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So this idea that I want to put forth,
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which is the product of many people’s thought on the subject,
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not the least of which is my brother Dennis,
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and I’ve developed the idea in conversations with Rupert Sheldrake
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and Kat and Ralph Metzner and other people over the years,
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is basically an extension of orthodox evolutionary
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theory as it applies to the question of human origins. And then, having once established that
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part of the theory, going forward to try and see what kind of implications this revisioning of evolutionary mechanisms might have on contemporary
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life and the way in which we relate to ourselves and each other.
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The orthodox theory of human origins takes the position that the evolution of human beings from higher primates
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was an evolutionary process no different than the evolutionary processes
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which had refined the mammalian forms which preceded the primates,
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nor is it thought to be any different from any other evolutionary process.
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There is no ontological difference hypothesized.
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However, I think that using the language
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of the evolutionary biologists,
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we can show that there were factors present
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in the pre-human and early human environment
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that constellated a unique concatenation of events and genetic filtration devices
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which created the phenomenon of self-reflecting language
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using culture creating animals on this planet.
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Orthodox evolutionary theory takes the position
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that as the African continent became subject
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to an increasing period of dryness,
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which may have initially begun as early as 2 million
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to a million and a half years ago,
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that the general tropical forest which covered the continent
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began to retreat in certain areas where water was a constraint,
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and grasslands arose. The arboreal primates,
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which were occupying a kind of climaxed evolutionary niche in the tropical forests before this
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aridity began, suddenly found themselves under pressure because the forests were disappearing.
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under pressure because the forests were disappearing.
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By changing their gait and learning to walk on the surface, by changing their diet and learning to include meat,
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and by refining their symbol processing capability,
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they transformed themselves from tribes of arboreal monkeys
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into creatures much more like the modern baboon.
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In other words, they became omnivorous pack-hunting animals
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capable of moving over the ground at high speed
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and capable of exchanging a large number of vocal signals
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that related to exchange of information about hunting strategies,
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splitting, because, as I neglected to mention,
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simultaneous to these evolutionary changes in the higher primates, other mammals were evolving in an opportunistic situation vis-à-vis the grasslands into the many forms of ungulate animals which graze on the grasslands of Africa not only cattle
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but ibis and giraffes and many forms which are now extinct these the primates
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and the higher mammals then came into a relationship where both were competing
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for the grassland and one became the primary predator on the other.
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Now, one of the curious and unexplained things
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about the major psychotropic plants that occur on this planet
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is that several of them are remarkably involved
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with the human culture
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and the domestication of plants.
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I’m thinking of the ergotized rye, which figures in the Eleusinian mysteries.
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Rye was a domesticated grass that, through selection,
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had been bred into this large kernel cereal grain.
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Similarly, the psychedelic mushrooms which are most noticeable in nature are the so-called
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coprophytic ones, the ones which grow on manure. In the Pacific Northwest, there are numerous
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species of very ephemeral mushrooms which grow in the detritus of the forest floor.
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But as far as we know, the Northwest Coast Indians never noticed them sufficiently to
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utilize them as a shamanic vehicle. However, the coprophytic mushrooms are extremely noticeable in any environment
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because here you have this golden or silvery or golden yellow anomalous object
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standing from four to seven inches high in the grassland
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and because it is coprophytic or manure loving
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they invariably aggregate in the droppings
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of these ungulate animals.
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Well, it’s very clear that they could hardly choose
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a situation more opportune
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for their being encountered
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by these omnivorous primates
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who are preying on these herds of animals.
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So that, and I should mention that there is,
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it’s assumed that there was considerable pressure
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on the availability of protein in this grassland situation.
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In other words, everybody was running hungry and if you’ve
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ever seen films or actually observed the behavior of baboons in the wild they are they pick things
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up and look at them and they sniff the ground and this is their main behavior pattern is sniffing
00:10:43 ►
the ground and picking things up and looking at them and testing them to eat them.
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Well, very almost, I would say,
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coincident upon these factors all converging on the African veldt,
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the mushroom would then become included
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as part of this omnivoric diet of these primates.
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Now, I mentioned when I talked on the radio today
00:11:08 ►
this very important series of experiments by Roland Fisher,
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who is one of the great and really un…
00:11:18 ►
He isn’t given the credit he deserves,
00:11:20 ►
one of the great researchers into altered states.
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He’s retired now and lives in Mallorca. But he did a one of the great researchers into altered states. He’s retired now and lives in
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Mallorca. But he did
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a series of experiments which were
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a model of
00:11:31 ►
behaviorist rigor.
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He had an apparatus
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which had two parallel
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bars which could be
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deformed by rotating
00:11:42 ►
a crank which would
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impart mechanical pressure to one of the bars so that
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it would be torqued and slowly parallelism would be lost between these two bars and he gave
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psilocybin in small amounts to hundreds of people and sat them down in front of this apparatus and told them to watch the situation with the two parallel bars
00:12:10 ►
and to press the buzzer when they felt that the two bars were no longer parallel.
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And he did it with hundreds and hundreds of controls.
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All of this work was done at the University of Maryland in the early 70s.
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And he showed, to the satisfaction of everyone, I think,
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that the people who were given the subthreshold doses of psilocybin
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were able to pick up this deformation faster than the controls,
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the unstoned ordinary subjects.
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And he said to me, jokingly,
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this proves, you see, that drugs give you a truer picture of reality
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than being straight.
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But it was quite so.
00:13:02 ►
He didn’t then make the leap to ask the question,
00:13:09 ►
well, then what impact would this increased visual acuity
00:13:13 ►
have had on an animal which was including this mushroom in its diet?
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And the answer is, if you were, as a matter of course,
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where you were eating all protein available in your diet,
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including this vision acuity improving compound,
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you would gain an adaptive advantage over individuals of your species
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which were not including this item in their diet.
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And this is just as straight an exposition of the evolutionary mechanism
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as could ever be given. There’s nothing wild-eyed about it. And the conclusion is that very
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quickly any primate not including this item in its diet would be written out of the picture by being maladaptive.
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Well, that’s what happens when you take psilocybin in the subacute dose,
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but obviously it would be explored at all dosage levels.
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Now, it has another curious property,
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which a number of researchers have noted a property of the mushrooms, which is that they
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seem to activate or stimulate the language-forming center of the brain, whether that’s a physical
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location or simply a name for a set of functions. It seems clear that psilocybin, by its ability to inspire glossolalia, inner voices, spontaneous shamanic singing, etc.,
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operates on the symbolic processing parts of the brain.
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These were, recall, pack-hunting animals,
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which had already evolved a complex set of signals
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arising first out of their arboreal existence
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and then transferred into this pack-hunting mode.
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So it’s reasonable, I think, to suggest that psilocybin can be seen in that situation
00:15:15 ►
as a catalyst for language.
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It is a catalyst for greater visual acuity and hence hunting prowess, and it is a catalyst for greater hunting prowess
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expressed through a greater facility for the processing of symbols.
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At a still higher level,
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this gives way, of course, to the shamanic experience
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that we associate with psilocybin,
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which is the visionary state
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that does not have any obvious evolutionary efficacy,
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basically because you lie down and close your eyes
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and don’t move around and cease to be an actor
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on the stage of Darwinian competition.
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So I think it’s reasonable to suggest
00:16:08 ►
that the development of language
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and the dominance of this particular adaptation of the primates
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can be put down to the fact that there was a catalytic enzyme in the diet
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which was pumping this to the detriment of all its competitors.
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For instance, the other great apes, the gorillas and the orangutans,
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did not adapt the omnivorous strategy,
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did not adapt the running gait,
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and they are, of course, in danger of extinction
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and never achieved high culture at all, except, of course, in danger of extinction and never achieved high culture at all,
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except, of course, for cocoa.
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So this, I think, is the hidden factor.
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Now, this may not sound revolutionary,
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but ever since the notion of a human descent
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from a primate ancestor has been articulated,
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the search has been for the missing link
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in the form of a transitional skeleton
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which would show that there was no question
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that one had become the other.
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And while skeletons have come to life
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reflective of various stages in this process,
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it’s still unsatisfying to the evolutionary anthropologist
00:17:29 ►
to try and explain the speed with which this process happened.
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The fact that in the last 30,000 to 50,000 years
00:17:39 ►
the brain of human beings has evolved more than in the previous three million years.
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And so what I want to suggest to you and to the community of people
00:17:50 ►
who are concerned with the mechanics of human evolution,
00:17:54 ►
that what we need to be looking for is an exogenous catalyst
00:17:59 ►
to this sudden burst of primate development.
00:18:04 ►
And I think that it can be found
00:18:06 ►
in the presence of these psychoactive compounds
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in the food chain.
00:18:12 ►
Now, at a slightly later stage,
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this, as cognition and self-reflection and language
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are all beginning to template onto reality,
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it seems very clear to me that the cattle
00:18:31 ►
would be seen as the source of the mushroom.
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The mushroom would seem to that mentality
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as obviously a product of the cow,
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as milk, meat, or fuel,
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meaning the dried manure burned as fuel,
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so that the mushroom was a gift of the cow, you see.
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And then the experience of the mushroom
00:18:55 ►
is the experience of this feminine informational matrix
00:19:01 ►
that knits everything together
00:19:04 ►
and infuses it with numinosity, but it is specifically feminine.
00:19:11 ►
So another implication of all this is that the goddess cattle religions of prehistoric Africa and the ancient Middle East are actually Trinitarian religions
00:19:27 ►
of which the esoteric third member of the Trinity
00:19:34 ►
is a psychedelic compound,
00:19:37 ►
probably the psychedelic compounds contained in the mushroom.
00:19:42 ►
In the 19th century, in the first wave of comparative mythology,
00:19:47 ►
which was headed up by Frazier and that school,
00:19:51 ►
much energy was expended
00:19:53 ►
on the notion of the great vegetation goddess
00:19:57 ►
and how this was seen to be evident
00:20:00 ►
in all the cults of the old world,
00:20:03 ►
the cults of Tammuz and Attis
00:20:05 ►
and Sibyl. These were
00:20:07 ►
all seen to be
00:20:09 ►
particularized historical expressions
00:20:12 ►
of the great vegetation
00:20:14 ►
goddess. I want to
00:20:16 ►
suggest that
00:20:17 ►
this vegetation goddess
00:20:20 ►
was not a, they make
00:20:22 ►
it out as a kind of generalized
00:20:23 ►
awareness of the fecundity of nature expressed in the bounty of vegetable nature,
00:20:33 ►
which I’m sure metaphorically it was that,
00:20:36 ►
but I think it’s reasonable to suggest that it was focused quite tightly
00:20:40 ►
on this image of the mushroom.
00:20:52 ►
tightly on this image of the mushroom. Now, the only previous foray into trying to inculcate mushrooms into early human origins is, as I’m sure you’re aware, Gordon Wasson’s effort to show
00:21:00 ►
that the Ayurvedic, or I’m sorry, the pre-Vedic sacrament Soma was Amanita muscaria.
00:21:09 ►
Amanita muscaria is an intoxicating mushroom. It does not contain psilocybin. The spiritual worth
00:21:18 ►
of it seems closely bound to the cultural context. It seems very hard for people who have not been brought up
00:21:28 ►
in the tradition of Arctic shamanism
00:21:31 ►
to actually get a good connection with it.
00:21:33 ►
Nevertheless, Wasson wanted to suggest
00:21:36 ►
that it was Indo-Aryan people
00:21:39 ►
coming out of the Caspian Sea area and into Mesopotamia
00:21:44 ►
carrying with them a mushroom cult out of the Caspian Sea area and into Mesopotamia,
00:21:47 ►
carrying with them a mushroom cult that they then deified as Soma
00:21:50 ►
and then forgot in the Vedic centuries
00:21:53 ►
where they were establishing themselves in India.
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I think that a different view might well be
00:22:01 ►
that these Vedic people,
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when they swept down from the Caspian Sea area, encountered
00:22:07 ►
a mushroom religion that was a goddess cattle religion. You see, Amanita muscaria is not
00:22:16 ►
symbiotic to cattle. It’s symbiotic to birch trees. It has an entirely different kind of symbiotic relationship.
00:22:25 ►
So I want to suggest, based mostly on the fact
00:22:29 ►
that I think it’s clear that psilocybin
00:22:32 ►
is the kind of chemical compound
00:22:35 ►
which could have worked the kinds of changes we’re talking about,
00:22:38 ►
to suggest that psilocybin was the factor in the environment,
00:22:43 ►
but that the story may be that these Aryan peoples
00:22:47 ►
had to accept the mushroom that they found the goddess people using
00:22:52 ►
and then carried that to India.
00:22:56 ►
Now, this tradition occurs as late in the West
00:23:01 ►
as the Eleusinian Mysteries,
00:23:03 ►
which Wasson made a strong case that the Eleusinian
00:23:08 ►
Mysteries were ergotized rye beer, that a non-toxic strain of Claviceps paspali was
00:23:17 ►
actually infecting the rye which grew on the Eleusinian plain, and that a beer was brewed out of this,
00:23:25 ►
which was the intoxicating sacrament of Eleusis,
00:23:29 ►
his case is very convincing.
00:23:31 ►
However, he doesn’t mention the strongest competitor
00:23:36 ►
in terms of an interpretation of the Eleusinian mystery,
00:23:39 ►
which is that Robert Graves
00:23:42 ►
showed that the recipes for the Eleusinian ambrosia
00:23:50 ►
always contained words which could be arranged in such a way
00:23:56 ►
so that the first letters, when read downwards,
00:24:00 ►
would spell out the word mushroom in Greek.
00:24:03 ►
This is called an ogham, O-G-H-A-M,
00:24:07 ►
and I’m sure you’re all familiar with it.
00:24:09 ►
And he showed that the ingredients of the Eleusinian ambrosia,
00:24:14 ►
which were always listed as honey, barley, something else, and water.
00:24:20 ►
And he said, what kind of an ingredient is that?
00:24:23 ►
Everybody knows that water is an ingredient of beer
00:24:27 ►
but he said the word water is always present
00:24:30 ►
in order to provide the letter
00:24:32 ►
which is necessary to form this cryptogram
00:24:35 ►
which explains that it was really mushrooms.
00:24:38 ►
It’s interesting that Greek culture is
00:24:42 ►
there was a school of scholarship
00:24:44 ►
in the early 19th century which held that high Greek culture is, there was a school of scholarship in the early 19th century
00:24:45 ►
which held that high Greek culture was derivative from Mycenae,
00:24:51 ►
the Mycenaean kingdom of which the house of Atreus were the ruling family.
00:24:58 ►
Well, this M-Y-C sound is a mushroom sound.
00:25:06 ►
It’s philologically a clue.
00:25:08 ►
The island of Mykonos,
00:25:12 ►
if you look in a modern Greek dictionary
00:25:14 ►
for the etymology of the island of Mykonos,
00:25:18 ►
you find that it is the island of the little bald-headed man.
00:25:23 ►
Well, now I ask you.
00:25:27 ►
So, mykonos, mysania,
00:25:30 ►
these are words which clue us to the fact
00:25:33 ►
that very early, and the word mucus is also in there
00:25:37 ►
and lays the basis for mycophobia in later languages.
00:25:44 ►
So, what’s so great about all this? Well, what’s so great about it is, first of all, it offers, it provides a kind of mechanism for seeing how something as complex and self-reflecting as ourselves could emerge from the background of animal nature
00:26:11 ►
without a deus ex machina,
00:26:14 ►
without the hand of God intruding into nature.
00:26:17 ►
We see rather that it’s simply a set of very sophisticated mechanisms
00:26:22 ►
of catalysis and filtration which promote certain things,
00:26:27 ►
a certain kind of binocular vision,
00:26:30 ►
certain kinds of information processing,
00:26:34 ►
and certain kinds of experiences
00:26:36 ►
which then language, you see, seeks to template.
00:26:42 ►
And these pack hunting monkeys
00:26:47 ►
once they had the sacrament of mushroom intoxication
00:26:51 ►
had an object for the inner ocean of language
00:26:55 ►
to beat against
00:26:57 ►
in an effort to describe and encompass and communicate it
00:27:01 ►
that laid the basis for religion
00:27:04 ►
the word religion is related and based
00:27:08 ►
in the idea of origins. Religio is the going back to the origins. It also has, this idea also has
00:27:18 ►
an implication for the modern dilemma of attempting to relate to drugs. I mean, what are they?
00:27:25 ►
Are they good? Are they bad?
00:27:28 ►
Are they the scourge of the devil
00:27:30 ►
or the portal to enlightenment?
00:27:33 ►
What are they?
00:27:34 ►
And I’m speaking now of plant compounds.
00:27:37 ►
How are we to relate to the plants which intoxicate?
00:27:41 ►
Do they drive us mad?
00:27:42 ►
Or do they return us to the religio, to our own origins?
00:27:49 ►
Are we to see the states of mind which they invoke as tremendously alien
00:27:55 ►
or are we to see them as in fact a way of going back to the primary situation
00:28:03 ►
in which everything that we call human found genesis.
00:28:08 ►
And I think that because science is the reigning religion of the modern world,
00:28:14 ►
if you want to change people’s minds about something,
00:28:18 ►
you have to get scientists to change their minds. And what evolutionary biology to its detriment has
00:28:30 ►
ignored is the role of all forms of symbiotic relationships in nature. The Darwinian idea
00:28:39 ►
of evolution is, you know, it’s a world of fang and claw,
00:28:51 ►
and the swiftest, the cruelest, the largest, the fastest, these dominate.
00:28:58 ►
The actual situation has been seen to be now for about 30 years, but the implications are making their way very slowly into orthodox evolutionary theory,
00:29:02 ►
are making their way very slowly into orthodox evolutionary theory
00:29:04 ►
is actually cooperation
00:29:07 ►
is what nature seeks
00:29:10 ►
to consolidate and conserve.
00:29:13 ►
And it is the species
00:29:14 ►
which can make itself
00:29:16 ►
most user-friendly
00:29:21 ►
to its neighbor species
00:29:23 ►
which actually survives.
00:29:25 ►
That’s why there is hardly a tree
00:29:27 ►
which grows on this planet
00:29:29 ►
without a mycorrhizal relationship to a fungi.
00:29:34 ►
A mycorrhizal relationship means
00:29:36 ►
that the tree cannot grow and live
00:29:39 ►
unless the roots are covered by a fungus,
00:29:43 ►
which is a completely independent organism,
00:29:46 ►
but which mediates the buffering and transport of mineral salts
00:29:51 ►
and that sort of thing,
00:29:52 ►
and makes the exterior environment palatable to the tree.
00:29:58 ►
Now, I mentioned today on the radio,
00:30:01 ►
many of these relationships start out as parasitic, but a parasite is either an
00:30:09 ►
evolving or unsuccessful symbiote, because there is no percentage in a biological relationship
00:30:18 ►
where you kill the host. And this is what parasites do. They are lethal, and they spoil the host. And this is what parasites do. They are lethal and they spoil the party. They
00:30:28 ►
kill the host and then the guests have nowhere to go. And that’s a crisis for host and guest,
00:30:36 ►
you see. But over time, these lethal parasitic relationships evolve into symbiotic relationships
00:30:46 ►
where each party is contributing something
00:30:49 ►
to the well-being of every other party.
00:30:52 ►
And this is what happened
00:30:53 ►
in the situation with the mushroom,
00:30:56 ►
the human beings, and the cattle.
00:30:59 ►
The domestication of cattle
00:31:01 ►
ensured their survival.
00:31:05 ►
There are numerous ungulate animals
00:31:08 ►
that we can only see in museums,
00:31:11 ►
and it’s because it was easier to kill them
00:31:14 ►
than to domesticate them,
00:31:17 ►
because they were either very wild and unruly or very large.
00:31:21 ►
You do not herd mastodons.
00:31:30 ►
very large and you do not herd mastodons so that the cattle by being taken into the human family then there is a reciprocal relationship human beings are no longer under such pressure to hunt
00:31:36 ►
there is availability of abundant protein the genetic race of the cattle are preserved, and all this is mediated by a mushroom
00:31:47 ►
whose continued existence is dependent on the continued existence
00:31:51 ►
and numerical expansion of the population of cattle.
00:31:56 ►
So this is a relationship where everyone wins,
00:32:00 ►
and consequently it is preserved through time.
00:32:04 ►
We know that in shamanic tradition throughout the world,
00:32:10 ►
human beings are using plants to gain knowledge and to cure disease.
00:32:16 ►
What has escaped our attention because of our anthropocentric point of view
00:32:22 ►
is that the plants which confer these abilities on human beings
00:32:26 ►
are therefore made cultivars
00:32:29 ►
and taken out of the stream of evolutionary selection,
00:32:34 ►
and instead they become objects of culture
00:32:37 ►
and are cultivated and are preserved and even hybridized,
00:32:44 ►
and they, in a sense, become a kind of episome
00:32:49 ►
on the human genetic heritage.
00:32:53 ►
This understanding about how nature works
00:32:56 ►
is what is absent in the modern world
00:32:59 ►
at the top of the pyramid
00:33:01 ►
and is what is making everything so lethal,
00:33:04 ►
because we see nature, we, I mean
00:33:07 ►
the corporate elites, the dominant political ideologies, see nature as an enemy. And this
00:33:15 ►
is why drugs are taboo because drugs are, these plant drugs, are an immersion in this symbiotic field of information.
00:33:28 ►
They are reaching out to this original situation, which is very unsettling.
00:33:34 ►
I mean, we build cities and we put a wall around them.
00:33:37 ►
The desacralizing of natural space is the process of cutting it into grids and erecting flat planar surfaces along those grids
00:33:48 ►
to cut out the influx of energy that is part of the natural world.
00:33:57 ►
Now you know from listening to me go on on this subject
00:34:01 ►
that I believe that this is all a plot of some sort.
00:34:08 ►
In other words, that it is no mere coincidence
00:34:10 ►
that this mushroom was there in those cow pies.
00:34:15 ►
But notice that it need not be a plot.
00:34:19 ►
It could simply be an extremely unlikely concatenation of events
00:34:26 ►
which leads to the production of self-reflective thinking human beings.
00:34:32 ►
However, the visual acuity, even the stimulation of the language center,
00:34:50 ►
center, these things do not address the informational content of the experience of the mushroom,
00:35:00 ►
which seems to be that of an other, an intellect of some sort, which is either the overmind of the species or a very unusual kind of extraterrestrial organism
00:35:05 ►
which drifted in here
00:35:07 ►
millions and millions of years ago
00:35:09 ►
and has somehow inculcated itself
00:35:12 ►
into the environment
00:35:13 ►
or it is
00:35:15 ►
like the
00:35:17 ►
world soul
00:35:19 ►
that there is actually
00:35:20 ►
a controlling
00:35:23 ►
governor of the planetary ecology that can address a species coherently
00:35:32 ►
in its own language. This is not something which orthodox anthropology has to take account
00:35:40 ►
of and certainly is not in a hurry to do so because this challenges the most basic assumptions
00:35:48 ►
about what is possible.
00:35:52 ►
Nevertheless, I think that as we peel away the onion of nature,
00:35:59 ►
things are going to get stranger and stranger and stranger
00:36:03 ►
to the limits of our ability to conceive it
00:36:07 ►
almost. And that because of essentially Christianity, we have been, our connection to the origins,
00:36:19 ►
to the goddess and the planet and what we as moderns call the unconscious,
00:36:26 ►
but that ocean of depersonalized information
00:36:30 ►
that you access with these plant hallucinogens.
00:36:34 ►
Because of Christianity, we have been cut off from this.
00:36:38 ►
Whatever Christianity was,
00:36:40 ►
it was a historical episode
00:36:43 ►
where the most patriarchal rap
00:36:47 ►
extant on the planet
00:36:49 ►
was suddenly pumped full of so much energy
00:36:53 ►
that everything else was just shoved to the walls
00:36:57 ►
and the submergence
00:37:02 ►
the giving up of the ego
00:37:04 ►
that is represented by the worship of the goddess
00:37:07 ►
in the orgiastic and intoxicating rites
00:37:11 ►
that reached back to prehistory
00:37:13 ►
was suppressed very definitely
00:37:17 ►
in favor of structure and order and paternalism
00:37:21 ►
and these sorts of things.
00:37:23 ►
And strive as we might, this is the legacy upon which we must restructure our worldview.
00:37:34 ►
We can’t do anything about the historical momentum that Christianity has imparted to
00:37:41 ►
our expectations.
00:37:47 ►
has imparted to our expectations. All we can do about it is raise it to consciousness, examine it, and then try and think our way around it. But it gives rise, because it was the heir to the
00:37:55 ►
late Hellenistic tradition of dualism, it gives rise to these tremendous divisions between the natural and the human world, between self and world, between
00:38:07 ►
you and me, between life and death. You see, it’s a splitting apart, a conceptual syzygy.
00:38:20 ►
It’s almost a linguistic strategy of conceptual syzygy which leaves you no room to touch your origins.
00:38:30 ►
This lore, this understanding of human-plant interactions
00:38:36 ►
is slipping through our fingers at a tremendous rate.
00:38:42 ►
The last time I was in the Amazon,
00:38:46 ►
I can’t even remember,
00:38:47 ►
I guess it was 83 or 87 or something.
00:38:50 ►
Anyway, we were on the track
00:38:52 ►
of an orally active DMT drug
00:38:55 ►
called Ukuhay.
00:38:57 ►
And it had only been used
00:38:58 ►
by two tribes of Indians
00:39:00 ►
and it was way up this river.
00:39:02 ►
And we got there
00:39:03 ►
at the point where
00:39:06 ►
we could find people who said
00:39:09 ►
I think I know what you’re talking about
00:39:12 ►
and I saw as a child
00:39:14 ►
I saw my father prepare this thing
00:39:17 ►
but I have never done it myself
00:39:19 ►
but I will attempt it for you.
00:39:22 ►
In other words we were
00:39:23 ►
either too late or almost too late.
00:39:28 ►
And this situation is repeated over and over again.
00:39:31 ►
And it’s not only hallucinogens, believe me.
00:39:35 ►
Drugs of medicinal worth in all kinds of areas,
00:39:41 ►
antibiotics, antidepressants,
00:39:49 ►
drugs which control malaria, drugs which control intestinal parasites and knit bones, and all of these things are in danger of being lost
00:39:57 ►
because the cultures are being so spectacularly disrupted by consumer capitalism. No one is taking care to preserve this folkloric medical information
00:40:10 ►
and the physical plants which it addresses.
00:40:17 ►
We can never return to the state of primal innocence
00:40:20 ►
that prevailed on this planet 10,000 years ago.
00:40:24 ►
The best we can hope for is to cover
00:40:28 ►
our tracks and turn the planet into a garden and build machines which will pull all the plastic and
00:40:37 ►
metal and glass out of the soil and restore conserve and, and treasure.
00:40:49 ►
And this applies to the folk knowledge of these aboriginal and preliterate people
00:40:52 ►
who, as we penetrate the implications
00:40:55 ►
of the psychedelic experience,
00:40:58 ►
will be seen to be, in some areas,
00:41:01 ►
in advance of us in their mapping
00:41:04 ►
of what all this means. We are not the most
00:41:08 ►
advanced culture on the planet. We are merely the most silicone technology advanced culture
00:41:17 ►
on the planet. But there’s a great deal that we have to learn. However, we are the most
00:41:22 ►
destructive and corrosive culture on the planet.
00:41:25 ►
It is we who are destroying the Witoto and the Agwaruna Hivaro and the Kikuyu and all
00:41:33 ►
of these coherent human traditions that existed in equilibrium for 20, 30, 50,000 years until the advent of colonial imperialism a couple of hundred years ago.
00:41:47 ►
So I always try to argue from these extreme, people say I’m an escapist or that I just,
00:41:56 ►
it’s, you know, fluff, you can say anything. But really my goal is to change people’s minds and to show that the real situation supports the notion
00:42:09 ►
that we should change our minds,
00:42:12 ►
that we should revision these things,
00:42:14 ►
and that we should try to come to grips
00:42:16 ►
with all of the opportunities and all of the resources
00:42:21 ►
that humanity has amassed
00:42:25 ►
in its journey from the trees to the starship.
00:42:31 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:42:34 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:42:39 ►
Ah, our journey from the trees to the starship.
00:42:43 ►
So ends the Bard McKenna today.
00:42:46 ►
And I’m beginning to think that these starship references by him and Timothy Leary are trying to tell me something.
00:42:52 ►
But the truth is that I still have so many things that I want to do right here on Mother Earth
00:42:57 ►
that if our species heads into space, well, it’s just going to have to leave people like me behind.
00:43:03 ►
You know, there’s been more than one occasion when I set off on some adventure,
00:43:07 ►
only to think better of it about halfway through.
00:43:11 ►
So I certainly don’t want to head out to join some space colony
00:43:15 ►
and have second thoughts right after blast-off.
00:43:18 ►
Of course, that’s obviously a decision that I’ll never have to worry about.
00:43:23 ►
Okay, since it seems like I’m on a light-hearted streak here, I just won’t let this pass.
00:43:29 ►
And my point here is to show my own ignorance, which I blame primarily on focusing my formal studies on science and math
00:43:37 ►
more than I did on arts and literature, where I’ve now discovered is where all the real action is.
00:43:43 ►
But what really gave me a chuckle and a pause to consult the dictionary was when Terrence said,
00:43:49 ►
It’s almost a linguistic strategy of conceptual syzygy.
00:43:54 ►
Now, if I tried to say something like that, it would no doubt sound phony.
00:43:57 ►
But with Terrence, it just seems to roll off his lips.
00:44:01 ►
A true bard he was, or at the very least, he was a most excellent
00:44:06 ►
storyteller with a great vocabulary. Okay, well, I’ve got to be honest here. As much
00:44:12 ►
as I enjoyed hearing Terrence’s talk just now, what I’d really like to talk about is
00:44:17 ►
what’s going on in the world. And I’m talking, of course, about the Occupy movements that
00:44:23 ►
have sprung up all around the planet to express their own versions of the Occupy Wall Street live-in that began on September 17th,
00:44:32 ►
which I guess means that today is day 41, if I’m calculating correctly.
00:44:36 ►
And, by the way, tomorrow is the end of the Mayan calendar, according to the followers of Kalamon’s theories,
00:44:43 ►
which means that if he’s correct,
00:44:45 ►
you probably won’t be listening to this anyway. But if you’re here, then I guess we need to look
00:44:51 ►
ahead to the next end of the world date, December 21st, 2012, which I’m sure will also be followed
00:44:57 ►
by looking forward to yet another date for the apocalypse, if that’s the kind of thing you like
00:45:02 ►
to do. But getting back to my point, I’m not sure how I’m going to do this
00:45:08 ►
to be quite honest, but for the indefinite future, I’m going to include
00:45:12 ►
something in every podcast about this global shift in consciousness
00:45:15 ►
that is now taking place. And please, if you haven’t been following this
00:45:20 ►
closely, please don’t think that just because a few thousand people are
00:45:24 ►
sleeping out in public parks and other public spaces, that this is something small. I can’t tell
00:45:29 ►
you why I have this feeling, but my hunch is that this is the big event. One that comes
00:45:35 ►
along not just once in a lifetime, but something that happens only once in an entire age. And
00:45:41 ►
my gut feeling is that, like it or not, all of humanity is perhaps for the first time ever
00:45:48 ►
beginning a global conversation about how we want to structure our societies for the
00:45:53 ►
next thousand years or so, or at least for the next hundred years. And if this just isn’t for
00:45:59 ►
you right now, hey, that’s okay too. But I want you to know that after we hear each week’s lecture or
00:46:05 ►
interview, just as we’ve been doing for over six years now, instead of me commenting on the talk,
00:46:11 ►
I’m going to do a segment about the latest news from the Occupy movements. And hopefully you’ll
00:46:17 ►
feel moved to add your voice to these podcasts in the form of email or better yet, a little
00:46:23 ►
recorded bit from you about where you stand on what’s going on.
00:46:27 ►
And just to give you a little idea of some of the things that I’ve been hearing from impromptu interviews
00:46:32 ►
by people doing the live stream videos, I’m going to play two clips for you.
00:46:37 ►
The first one I’m going to play is a brief interview that I recorded over one of the livestream.com feeds
00:46:43 ►
from the New York demonstration.
00:46:44 ►
that I recorded over one of the livestream.com feeds from the New York demonstration.
00:46:47 ►
It’s an interview with the journalist Chris Hedges,
00:46:52 ►
who I’ve been following for a long time now and have a very high opinion of his work.
00:46:56 ►
And here’s how he sees the events that are now underway.
00:47:00 ►
Louder! We are the 99%!
00:47:03 ►
The world is watching! We are the 99%!
00:47:06 ►
We are the 99%! Louder! We are the 99%!
00:47:06 ►
Louder!
00:47:10 ►
I’m Chris Hedges. I’m a writer. I write books.
00:47:14 ►
I spent 20 years overseas as a war correspondent.
00:47:19 ►
Came back and realized that corporations had carried out a coup d’etat in my country.
00:47:25 ►
And I’ve been fighting back, although not as effectively as you guys.
00:47:29 ►
Well, I’ve covered movements.
00:47:32 ►
I’ve covered all of the revolutions in Eastern Europe.
00:47:36 ►
I’ve covered the street demonstrations that brought down Milosevic.
00:47:39 ►
I’ve covered both the Palestinian intifadas. And once movements like this start and articulate a fundamental truth about the society that they live in
00:47:51 ►
and expose the repression, the mendacity, the corruption, and the decay of the structures of power,
00:48:04 ►
then they have a kind of centrifugal force. You never know where they’re
00:48:08 ►
going. You know, I was with the leaders of the opposition movement in East Germany, in Leipzig,
00:48:17 ►
on the afternoon of November 9th, 1989, and they said that perhaps within a year there would be free passage
00:48:27 ►
back and forth across the Berlin Wall.
00:48:29 ►
In a few hours, the Berlin Wall didn’t exist.
00:48:32 ►
What happens is, in all of these movements, this was true in Prague as well, is that the
00:48:38 ►
foot soldiers of the elite, the blue uniform police, the mechanisms of control finally don’t want to impede the movement.
00:48:50 ►
And at that point, the power elite is left defenseless.
00:48:55 ►
So where is it going?
00:48:57 ►
No one knows.
00:48:58 ►
Even the people most intimately involved in the organization don’t know.
00:49:09 ►
most intimately involved in the organization don’t know. All of these movements take on a kind of life and color that is in some ways finally mysterious. The only thing I can say,
00:49:17 ►
having been in the middle of similar movements, is that this one is real and this one could take them all down.
00:49:27 ►
Well, let me first say I learn a lot more from the people who are Occupy.
00:49:32 ►
I mean, my critique of the corporate state, I think,
00:49:37 ►
coalesces with the critique that many people in Occupy Wall Street have,
00:49:41 ►
but I never wrote in any of my books about how to bring them down.
00:49:46 ►
This whole non-hierarchical structure is really brilliant, and I didn’t have a clue.
00:49:54 ►
I didn’t have a clue, because they can’t destroy the movement like that.
00:50:02 ►
The fact that you rotate people through positions of leadership
00:50:05 ►
and the fact that you’re completely transparent, the fact that you realize that, you know,
00:50:12 ►
you’ve clearly been provoked. I mean, Anthony Bologna was, I think, trying to provoke people
00:50:18 ►
in that crowd because they want windows smashed. They know how to handle that. They don’t know how to handle this. This is driving them insane. And the fact is that I can guarantee you that huge segments of those
00:50:31 ►
blue uniformed police sympathize with everything that you’re doing. And that is the way you can
00:50:38 ►
shatter the manacles of control that have been placed on the country by the corporate state.
00:50:47 ►
And that’s what scares them.
00:50:49 ►
I mean, the most aggressive figures in the crowds are these white-shirted assholes.
00:50:55 ►
And, I mean, okay, always remember that you only have to deal with them, you know,
00:51:00 ►
once in a while these poor uniformed cops got to deal with them every day.
00:51:04 ►
I think the movement’s really, really, really, really smart, really astute,
00:51:09 ►
and I don’t really think I have much to teach it at all.
00:51:13 ►
I don’t think there’s any danger of this movement being seduced or co-opted by MoveOn.org,
00:51:21 ►
which is a reprehensible organization, or the Democratic Party or anyone else, or the
00:51:26 ►
Teamsters. The fact is, you’ve done what they have not done, which is fight back. And because you’ve
00:51:33 ►
fought back, they’ve been exposed for who they are, i.e. the leaders of this group. That’s why
00:51:37 ►
they’re running to you and attempting to restore what little shredded credibility they have left. You know, I’m a visitor. I come and go.
00:51:46 ►
But I don’t sense that there’s any danger.
00:51:49 ►
I think the sort of political consciousness of this group is so high
00:51:54 ►
that they see through all of these figures who show up at the park.
00:52:01 ►
I mean, I was there when Patterson showed up, Charlie Rangel showed up.
00:52:07 ►
I mean, it’s sort of almost sad in a way,
00:52:13 ►
because the fact is they have offered nothing, done nothing,
00:52:20 ►
except, of course, Mao, this empty rhetoric,
00:52:23 ►
this kind of feel-your-pain language while betraying the very people they purportedly represent.
00:52:28 ►
So I don’t think there’s any danger of this movie being co-opted at all.
00:52:31 ►
I think that even with the Teamsters, the union bosses,
00:52:34 ►
and these union bosses are pulling down five times what the rank-and-file is pulling down.
00:52:38 ►
They’ve done nothing for unions except basically barter away their benefits and rights.
00:52:44 ►
And, in fact, you know,
00:52:45 ►
the union bosses have to get down here because otherwise they’re going to lose their rank and
00:52:48 ►
file. That’s why you’re seeing groups like MoveOn or Teamsters coming down here, because you do
00:52:55 ►
what their leadership has not done, which is stand up. And let me just say something.
00:53:00 ►
I wasn’t here Friday morning. For me, I got kids. And it’s not about me anymore.
00:53:07 ►
It’s about the next generation.
00:53:09 ►
It’s about my children’s generation.
00:53:11 ►
And I think my passion for what you’re doing, and I would even use the word love,
00:53:16 ►
comes from the fact that I look at you as fighting on behalf of my little three-year-old.
00:53:22 ►
And on Friday morning,
00:53:27 ►
of course I was up to find out what happened.
00:53:30 ►
And I did what I do now,
00:53:31 ►
which is start crying.
00:53:33 ►
God bless you all.
00:53:34 ►
Thank you.
00:53:36 ►
Thank you so much.
00:53:42 ►
The 99%!
00:53:43 ►
We are the 99%! The world is watching! We are the 99%!
00:53:46 ►
The world is watching!
00:53:47 ►
We are the 99%!
00:53:49 ►
We are the 99%!
00:53:51 ►
Louder!
00:53:53 ►
And whether you were aware of it or not before now, you are the 99%.
00:53:58 ►
And like you, I’m damn proud of it.
00:54:02 ►
So, just now we heard Chris Hedges say that movements like this that speak a fundamental truth cannot be turned back.
00:54:09 ►
And so what is this fundamental truth, you ask?
00:54:13 ►
Well, that’s kind of a slippery question in some ways,
00:54:16 ►
because my guess is that virtually all of the 99% of us see the objectives slightly different from one another.
00:54:23 ►
For me, the fundamental truth is that
00:54:26 ►
the societies most of us live in just are not fair. They’re not just. They all seem to have
00:54:32 ►
different rules for the rich and the powerful than they do for the 99% of us who are doing all the
00:54:38 ►
heavy lifting. I see us at a magical point in human history right now that is completely
00:54:43 ►
unprecedented. And I’m
00:54:45 ►
talking about the fact that not only are people everywhere losing their fear of saying that the
00:54:50 ►
emperor has no clothes, but they’re also connected to one another through the greatest communications
00:54:55 ►
network that has ever been built, the internet. With the net, we the people have a lever that is
00:55:02 ►
even bigger than all of the armies and guns that kings and dictators and emperors have used to subdue their citizens for centuries now.
00:55:11 ►
Granted, the U.S. has become the most screwed down police state since the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
00:55:17 ►
But with the power of the Internet and all of the tools that are provided there, well, we can’t be lied to anymore.
00:55:25 ►
We can watch the Oakland police attack demonstrators right as it’s happening.
00:55:29 ►
And then we can see that same scene from a dozen different angles on YouTube.
00:55:34 ►
They may have the guns, but we have the tech.
00:55:36 ►
And since it’s a key proviso of the Occupy movement that it be nonviolent,
00:55:41 ►
the cops are soon going to learn that provoking and attacking peaceful demonstrators
00:55:46 ►
will continue to backfire on them, as it already has.
00:55:50 ►
In fact, I think that you’re going to see the movement grow significantly now
00:55:55 ►
after the cowardly attacks on non-violent protesters at the Occupy Oakland demonstration,
00:56:01 ►
not to mention all of the other violent acts by police at other occupations.
00:56:04 ►
demonstration, not to mention all of the other violent acts by police at other occupations.
00:56:10 ►
Now, I know that the Oakland Chief of Police yesterday said that they were attacked by the protesters and were defending themselves, and also that the police didn’t fire flash grenades,
00:56:16 ►
but rather that the protesters were throwing firecrackers. Well, I spent most of that night
00:56:21 ►
watching what went down on several different live video streams,
00:56:29 ►
including the ABC News helicopter, which, along with the other network choppers,
00:56:31 ►
left the scene just before the police began their attack.
00:56:36 ►
And, you know, you can find hundreds of videos of this on the net already,
00:56:40 ►
and see for yourself that those weren’t firecrackers going off,
00:56:43 ►
and that they quite obviously were thrown at the protesters by the police,
00:56:47 ►
as were rubber bullets shot and tear gas shot.
00:56:50 ►
Plus, the cops even had a sound cannon on hand.
00:56:53 ►
I didn’t actually see them use it, but of course, you know,
00:56:57 ►
it’s a military-grade weapon that’s not even supposed to be used in the U.S. or not even in the possession of the police, as far as I know.
00:57:00 ►
So, what’s that all about?
00:57:03 ►
Now, I won’t go on any more about the Oakland story, but you might want to watch some of
00:57:07 ►
the video yourself just to get a feel for how much of a military operation this was.
00:57:12 ►
There were hundreds of police there, and from the air, it even looked as if the cops outnumbered
00:57:17 ►
the demonstrators.
00:57:19 ►
But now I want to play one more audio clip, and this is also from the night before last
00:57:24 ►
at the Occupy Atlanta site,
00:57:26 ►
where the occupiers had been penned in and were waiting for the police to transport them to the police station since they were all under arrest.
00:57:34 ►
The funny part was that the police bus broke down about a mile away,
00:57:38 ►
and so the demonstrators had a good time laughing at the cops while everyone waited.
00:57:43 ►
But on the more serious side,
00:57:45 ►
here’s what one of the people there had to say about why he was involved in this movement.
00:57:51 ►
My name is Benjamin Burchill. I am here because one of those people that had a nice little
00:57:59 ►
corporate job a year ago, living three blocks from the beach, California, working in risk management, learning
00:58:10 ►
how corporations are run from the inside out, yet being quite a camera cultural person myself,
00:58:16 ►
and ended up becoming homeless after losing the job because my company was bought out by three Chinese companies who
00:58:27 ►
decided they didn’t need our subsidiary anymore.
00:58:32 ►
And having spent over $70,000 in medical bills, I simply had no money left.
00:58:41 ►
And I learned that what I thought before about who this kind of stuff happens to was wrong.
00:58:48 ►
I used to think, oh this kind of stuff happens to people that deserve it.
00:58:51 ►
They did something wrong.
00:58:54 ►
They didn’t plan correctly.
00:58:55 ►
They didn’t manage their money right.
00:58:58 ►
And it’s so not the case that so many of us are going through what we’re going through through no
00:59:05 ►
part of our own. So it’s taught me that these things can literally happen to anybody. And
00:59:11 ►
there’s something wrong with that. There’s something wrong with, you know, the American
00:59:17 ►
boy who grew up being told that this was a country for everybody where you can work hard and get ahead and then have the rug snatched
00:59:26 ►
up, snatched from under you after doing what so-called were the right things.
00:59:33 ►
And coming from California before I moved to Atlanta, one of the things that I became
00:59:40 ►
aware of living in the car myself was that this economic collapse
00:59:46 ►
has caused a boom in homelessness.
00:59:49 ►
And the boom is largely invisible
00:59:52 ►
because they don’t necessarily look like the people
00:59:54 ►
that live here in this park.
00:59:56 ►
They look like people like me and like you
00:59:59 ►
that are dressed in regular jeans.
01:00:02 ►
Or some people still get up and put on their suit
01:00:06 ►
and go to their job where they make $8 an hour,
01:00:10 ►
but they couldn’t afford to stay in the house that they lived in anymore.
01:00:15 ►
They call that the mobile homeless,
01:00:18 ►
living in their cars, in their vans,
01:00:20 ►
people even living with pets and children in vehicles, just trying to survive because
01:00:28 ►
they could no longer afford to keep a house because they couldn’t find a job before they
01:00:34 ►
were being foreclosed on. So I’m here because I know there’s something fundamentally wrong
01:00:41 ►
with our economic system, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with the idea that a corporation is a person
01:00:47 ►
and has rights to give money to political parties in whatever amounts they deem fit
01:00:55 ►
to sway our laws in their favor.
01:00:59 ►
They’re not people. We’re people.
01:01:01 ►
They’re not citizens. We’re citizens.
01:01:03 ►
We’re people. We’re people. They’re not citizens. We’re citizens.
01:01:12 ►
And I think most of us who are coming to these movements really do understand that this is about economics,
01:01:16 ►
even if people don’t know how to express it.
01:01:23 ►
And at rock bottom, it’s about people’s inability to put food in their mouths,
01:01:25 ►
make sure their children are clothed,
01:01:28 ►
stay in the home that they have worked hard to pay for,
01:01:33 ►
and keep jobs that they shouldn’t have lost to people in other countries who get paid slave wages to do the jobs that Americans should be doing.
01:01:41 ►
That’s why I’m here.
01:01:44 ►
So, do you know anyone who is
01:01:46 ►
or has been in the same position
01:01:48 ►
as the young man we just heard from
01:01:50 ►
I do and my guess is
01:01:52 ►
that you do too
01:01:53 ►
in a recent essay for truthout.org
01:01:56 ►
Henry Garreau said
01:01:58 ►
about the demonstrations
01:01:59 ►
they are not calling for reform
01:02:02 ►
but for a massive rethinking
01:02:04 ►
and restructuring of the very meaning of politics,
01:02:08 ►
one that will be not only against the casino capitalism,
01:02:11 ►
which through the chimera of free markets rewards the financial and political elites at great social and environmental costs,
01:02:19 ►
but also for a restructuring of the notion of governance, rule of law, power relations, and the meaning
01:02:26 ►
of democratic participation.
01:02:28 ►
The current protests make clear that this is not, indeed cannot be, only a short-term
01:02:33 ►
project for reform, but a political and moral movement that needs to intensify, accompanied
01:02:39 ►
by the reclaiming of public spaces, the use of digital technologies, the development of public
01:02:45 ►
spheres, new modes of education, and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression,
01:02:51 ►
new identities, and collective hope can be nurtured and mobilized. It is important to
01:02:56 ►
recognize that what young people and many others are now doing is making a claim for a democratically
01:03:03 ►
informed politics that embraces the public good,
01:03:06 ►
economic justice, and social responsibility. So, now how about you adding your own two cents,
01:03:13 ►
as the saying goes, about how you see all of this. And I’ll tell you why I think this is so
01:03:19 ►
important to us here in the Psychedelic Salon. Stop and think for a moment about the big what-if questions.
01:03:25 ►
What if, by some miracle, this really is the big shift,
01:03:29 ►
the big transformation of human consciousness
01:03:31 ►
that Teilhard and other mystics have foreseen?
01:03:35 ►
What if this time, thanks in no small part to the Internet,
01:03:39 ►
it really works?
01:03:40 ►
What if we’ve now had a large enough dose of freedom
01:03:43 ►
that it’ll take us over the threshold into that place of awareness many of us know exists because, well, we’ve been there before?
01:03:51 ►
What if we are now at the very beginning of a long process that will eventually restructure how cultures and societies work and interact with one another?
01:04:01 ►
Well, if that’s what’s going on, don’t you want to have a say in it too? After all, we’re
01:04:07 ►
all part of the Genesis generation now, and as Gandhi once said, whatever you do will be
01:04:13 ►
insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. And my personal opinion is that the worldwide
01:04:20 ►
psychedelic community has a lot of fine ideas that should be added into the mix.
01:04:35 ►
So what I’ve done is to set up a new email address just for the purpose of receiving your reports from the Occupy movements that you might be following, either on the net or in person.
01:04:41 ►
I’d like to hear the opinions of as many of our fellow salonners as want to add their voices to the mix.
01:04:45 ►
And the email address you should use is lorenzo at occupysalon.us
01:04:47 ►
That’s lorenzo at, all one word,
01:04:50 ►
occupysalon.us
01:04:52 ►
And depending on
01:04:54 ►
how it goes, we may even set up a blog
01:04:56 ►
at that address that our community can use
01:04:58 ►
to share thoughts on
01:04:59 ►
our objectives in this new global conversation
01:05:02 ►
that has just begun.
01:05:05 ►
Well, that’s going to do it for now,
01:05:07 ►
and so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that
01:05:10 ►
this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:05:13 ►
are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:05:16 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:05:21 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:05:22 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:05:31 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, obviously with a slight head cold,
01:05:35 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends, and to give you a little ride out on
01:05:43 ►
your way out of the salon today I’m going to
01:05:45 ►
play something by one of our fellow salonners John Tackett who wrote and recorded his song titled
01:05:50 ►
Homeless Land number nine and about which John says to me it’s all about the cause
01:05:57 ►
in which I believe we have a tribal goal so let’s give it a listen. This is where I stand Welcome to my world What a hopeless life
01:06:27 ►
All alone
01:06:29 ►
So alone
01:06:31 ►
And I’m looking for my home
01:06:35 ►
I’m all alone
01:06:38 ►
So alone
01:06:40 ►
And I’m looking for my home When politicians meet
01:06:54 ►
I can smell the food
01:06:57 ►
But where our money goes
01:06:59 ►
Only no one knows
01:07:01 ►
Maybe overseas
01:07:03 ►
To end disease But what about this place Only no one knows. Maybe overseas. Doing disease.
01:07:06 ►
What about this place?
01:07:08 ►
Welcome to my world.
01:07:11 ►
Welcome homeless.
01:07:12 ►
I’m all alone.
01:07:15 ►
So alone.
01:07:18 ►
And I’m looking for my home.
01:07:21 ►
I’m all alone.
01:07:26 ►
So alone. for my home I’m all alone so alone and I’m
01:07:27 ►
looking for my home guitar solo Why do we send away
01:08:07 ►
A helping hand
01:08:09 ►
To another world
01:08:11 ►
In another land
01:08:13 ►
Is this a way
01:08:15 ►
For us to say
01:08:17 ►
We hate ourselves
01:08:20 ►
Welcome to my world
01:08:22 ►
What a hopeless
01:08:24 ►
Land All alone So alone Welcome to my world of the homeless I’m all alone
01:08:27 ►
so alone
01:08:29 ►
and I’m looking for my home
01:08:33 ►
I’m all alone
01:08:36 ►
so alone
01:08:38 ►
and I’m looking for my home
01:08:41 ►
I’m all alone
01:08:44 ►
so alone Looking for my hope I’m all alone So alone
01:08:47 ►
And I’m looking for my hope
01:08:50 ►
I’m all alone
01:08:53 ►
So alone
01:08:55 ►
And I’m looking for my hope Thank you.