296 - The World and It’s Double Part 2

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“One of the most puzzling things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind. It simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear, or exaggerated acceptance, as in ‘Oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery. Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You’re appalled!”

“[DMT] is a secret of such magnitude that it’s inconceivable how it has ever been kept.”

“When you get to DMT you have hit the main vein.”

“It has to do with your own intelligence. Truly stupid people aren’t interested in psychedelics because they can’t figure out what the point of it is. It feeds off intelligence. It’s a consciousness-expanding drug. If you don’t have any consciousness you can’t expand it.”

“The less intelligent you are, the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.”

“A hallucination is a species of reality.”

“The world is like a novel. It’s a novel in which you are a character.”

“And then I got crossed up with this mushroom, and immediately life became art.”

“If what we’re embedded in is a novel, or some work of art like a novel, then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are.”

“We are trying to find a doorway into a new world for the spirit.”

“And I really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries this is what we will discover, is an unconditional caring, an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter and gives it meaning.”

“You don’t have to wait for the end of the world to get this news. You can just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the use of these hallucinogens They are the doorway that the Gaian mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out, any time they want to, provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the door.”

“Let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together.”

“We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves. Extend the design process to human destiny and produce something that will redeem 10,000 years of pogroms, and migrations, and attempted genocides, and pointless wars, and stupid religions that make people hate themselves, and all the rest of it. If we’re going to redeem that legacy then we have to do something quite spectacular.”

“A concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.”

“Organized religion is as concerned with controlling social groups as organized politics is.”

“The cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”

“We all want our children to be well-adjusted, unfortunately there is nothing to be well-adjusted too. So that’s a real problem.”

“The reason shamans can do their magic is because they are outside the belief system.”

“I think alienation, extra-environmentalism, shamanism, whatever you want to call it, is simply individualism, in the context of cultures that don’t value individualism, and cultures don’t.”

“It’s said nature acts to preserve the species. Cultures act to preserve the illusions of the population.”

“There are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists, but there are no old, bold psychedelicists.”

Download

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And today is day 117 of Occupy Wall Street, and today the barricades are down and the

00:00:31 ►

occupiers are once again in Zuccotti Park, letting the ruling elite know that this movement

00:00:36 ►

has only just begun.

00:00:39 ►

And to begin with today, I want to thank all our fellow salonners who have either made

00:00:43 ►

a donation to the salon or who have bought a copy of one of my books.

00:00:47 ►

Your support is much appreciated, and if you haven’t already heard from me via email, well, you will soon.

00:00:53 ►

And also, I want to thank everyone who has been so good about telling their friends about the salon and posting things on their web and Facebook pages and linking to the program notes for these podcasts, which, as you know,

00:01:05 ►

you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And all those links will help us find more of the others.

00:01:12 ►

And as you will hear Terrence McKenna say in just a few minutes,

00:01:15 ►

let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together. And while that would be a

00:01:22 ►

great segue into another Occupy Movement podcast podcast I’m instead going to do just the opposite

00:01:27 ►

originally I planned on splitting the talk I’m about to play into two more segments

00:01:32 ►

each followed by more news from the Occupy Movement

00:01:34 ►

and as you remember the first part of this talk is what I played last week

00:01:38 ►

but after previewing it just now I decided that it would be best to

00:01:42 ►

just play the remainder of this talk all at once.

00:01:45 ►

It’s a talk that Terence McKenna gave in 1993.

00:01:49 ►

Now, I think that he gave a similar talk on several occasions that year,

00:01:54 ►

and most of them most likely differ in content a little bit,

00:01:58 ►

but he called this series of lectures, The World and Its Double.

00:02:01 ►

And so, without any further ado, let’s rejoin Terence McKenna

00:02:06 ►

for a talk that begins with a discussion of DMT and ends with him saying,

00:02:11 ►

there are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists, but there are no old bold psychedelicists.

00:02:21 ►

Well, I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about,

00:02:25 ►

which is it’s very important to talk to the state or the substance.

00:02:32 ►

If you don’t talk to it, it won’t talk to you.

00:02:37 ►

It follows the rules of ordinary etiquette, and it does not speak to strangers.

00:02:41 ►

etiquette and it does not speak to strangers

00:02:43 ►

but if you will say to it

00:02:46 ►

the simplest

00:02:47 ►

thing like

00:02:48 ►

hello

00:02:50 ►

then it will say hello

00:02:53 ►

and say is someone there

00:02:56 ►

it says yes

00:02:57 ►

ready and willing

00:02:59 ►

what’s up but if you don’t speak

00:03:01 ►

to it it won’t do that

00:03:03 ►

that is to my mind,

00:03:05 ►

the strangest property

00:03:07 ►

of psilocybin is

00:03:09 ►

this speaking in English

00:03:11 ►

business. I mean,

00:03:14 ►

LSD doesn’t do that.

00:03:17 ►

Ayahuasca

00:03:18 ►

doesn’t do

00:03:20 ►

that. Psilocybin does

00:03:22 ►

for some reason. This is not

00:03:23 ►

my illusion. Nearly everybody who’s spent time with this has commented on this. On DMT, you see who you hear on the mushrooms. On the mushrooms, you almost never encounter something that you can see. You see hallucinations,

00:03:45 ►

but you do not see the author of the data stream that’s saying,

00:03:49 ►

did you know?

00:03:51 ►

I’ll bet you did know the standard form of address.

00:03:55 ►

But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork.

00:04:01 ►

The strangest things happen on DMT,

00:04:08 ►

the most intense, and you can remember them.

00:04:17 ►

DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you’re getting into the contents of your hopes,

00:04:31 ►

memories, fears, and dreams. It’s much more like a parallel continuum. It’s much more as though you’ve broken through to some alien data space.

00:04:37 ►

One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind.

00:04:46 ►

You know, it simply replaces the world 100% with something completely unexpected. But your

00:04:48 ►

relationship to that

00:04:50 ►

unexpected thing is not

00:04:52 ►

one of exaggerated

00:04:54 ►

fear or

00:04:56 ►

exaggerated

00:04:57 ►

acceptance

00:04:59 ►

as in, oh great, the world

00:05:02 ►

has just been replaced by

00:05:04 ►

elf machinery,

00:05:05 ►

your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT.

00:05:10 ►

You’re appalled.

00:05:12 ►

You say, what happened?

00:05:15 ►

Because you don’t feel your mind moving.

00:05:18 ►

You just see that the world has been replaced by something

00:05:22 ►

that you could not have even conceived of or imagined before.

00:05:27 ►

And these entities, these things which look like dribbling, you know, self-dribbling jeweled basketballs,

00:05:38 ►

something that the NBA might take an interest in,

00:05:43 ►

the NBA might take an interest in,

00:05:52 ►

you see them and they present themselves to you. They use language to condense visible objects out of the air.

00:05:59 ►

Now, I don’t know why they’re doing that.

00:06:01 ►

I mean, perhaps on one level I assume that they’re trying to teach you to do

00:06:06 ►

that. On another level, they seem to be giving a demonstration of the fact that reality is made of

00:06:15 ►

language. They’re saying, you know, if you don’t believe reality is made of language, here, I’ll

00:06:20 ►

make you one. And then blibbledy, blibbledy,blip, and there it is, and they hand it to you to be passed around in slack-jawed amazement among the human beings.

00:06:47 ►

of these objects made of gold and emerald and chalcedony and agate that are morphing themselves even as you look at them

00:06:51 ►

are, you know, technological dream come true.

00:06:56 ►

I mean, the lapis as elf excrescence or something like that.

00:07:02 ►

And why they are there?

00:07:04 ►

I don’t know. And why they are there?

00:07:06 ►

I don’t know.

00:07:08 ►

And, you know, many, many questions.

00:07:11 ►

Where are they when you’re not stoned?

00:07:16 ►

You know, do they have an autonomous existence somewhere?

00:07:21 ►

Or do they spring into existence a microsecond before you encounter them?

00:07:25 ►

Are they rooted in the dynamics of your psyche? Or are they no more rooted in the dynamics of your psyche

00:07:28 ►

than the World Trade Center?

00:07:30 ►

It’s not clear.

00:07:33 ►

I mean, I think I mentioned at some point, just briefly,

00:07:37 ►

that the archetype of DMT is the circus.

00:07:41 ►

These things are clowns at one level.

00:07:46 ►

They’re clowns.

00:07:47 ►

I mean, when you think of the circus,

00:07:49 ►

it’s a very complex archetype.

00:07:52 ►

The circus is for children.

00:07:54 ►

It’s a delight.

00:07:56 ►

But then, you know,

00:07:57 ►

and you take a child to a circus

00:07:59 ►

and there are three rings

00:08:00 ►

and absurd clown antics going on.

00:08:04 ►

But then you lift your eyes up to the top of the tent,

00:08:09 ►

and there the lady in the tiny spangled costume is hanging by her teeth,

00:08:15 ►

working without nets.

00:08:17 ►

It’s about Eros and death.

00:08:20 ►

I think my first awareness of Eros was being three or four,

00:08:26 ►

and these women in these tiny costumes spinning around and realizing, you know, if she falls, she dies.

00:08:34 ►

And then away from the center ring and all this action, there are the sideshows, the goat-faced boy,

00:08:44 ►

the thing in the bottle, the Siamese twins, and Fuzzy Charlie.

00:08:49 ►

All of that is also very DMT-like. It really is the archetype of the circus. I can remember when I was a kid in this small town in Colorado, every year at the 4th of July,

00:09:09 ►

the carnival would come to town for a week and set up. And we anticipated it throughout the year.

00:09:13 ►

But as soon as the carnival came to town,

00:09:15 ►

then you couldn’t play outside after 9 o’clock at night

00:09:19 ►

because carny people are different, we were told.

00:09:23 ►

And, you know, their means of support, sexual proclivities, and choice of intoxicants

00:09:31 ►

might have run counter to this Midwestern Catholic mining town I was in.

00:09:38 ►

And so then there’s this sense of the disruption, the danger, the drama, the interest, the fun.

00:09:45 ►

And then they go away and life is as if they had never been there at all.

00:09:50 ►

And that’s what DMT is like.

00:09:52 ►

I mean, it’s a secret of such magnitude that it’s inconceivable how it has ever been kept.

00:10:02 ►

Because, you know, in a world where information was fairly weighted,

00:10:08 ►

we would spend as much time talking about DMT

00:10:11 ►

as we spend talking about, I don’t know, the West Bank or something.

00:10:16 ►

And as you see, by studying our newspapers,

00:10:19 ►

DMT is rarely, if ever, mentioned.

00:10:23 ►

I mean, never would be a good rule of thumb.

00:10:26 ►

The Western mind is very queasy around these experiences that cast into doubt

00:10:34 ►

its cherished illusions about how reality is put together.

00:10:39 ►

And when you get to DMT, you have hit the main vein.

00:10:43 ►

I mean, I hold it in reserve as the ultimate convincer. I mean,

00:10:48 ►

that’s for these, there are these people running around, you know, who say, oh, you people who are

00:10:53 ►

into drugs, give me a good branch whiskey and a little TV. I think you’re deluding yourself. Do you?

00:11:05 ►

Well, have you got five minutes to invest in this proposition, my cheerful friend?

00:11:11 ►

Because if you do, have I got news for you.

00:11:16 ►

It also seems to me, you know,

00:11:18 ►

considering the fact that DMT is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter,

00:11:23 ►

that you return to the baseline of consciousness in 15 minutes,

00:11:27 ►

that it’s utterly harmless.

00:11:30 ►

What’s the matter with our critics?

00:11:33 ►

Why are they so phobic of it?

00:11:35 ►

What is it?

00:11:36 ►

Are you tainted forever if you know the position of your enemy?

00:11:41 ►

Why are they so afraid to give it a chance?

00:11:46 ►

Well, I think I can answer

00:11:47 ►

my own question.

00:11:50 ►

Quoting a wonderful thing

00:11:51 ►

Tim Leary said years ago.

00:11:54 ►

He said,

00:11:55 ►

LSD occasionally causes psychotic behavior

00:11:58 ►

in people who have not taken it.

00:12:01 ►

Right.

00:12:02 ►

That is the problem, I believe. That these drugs are causing outbreaks of psychosis among people who won’t get near them.

00:12:12 ►

And they are turned into frightened, paranoid order freaks reaching for, you know, extra legal and extra constitutional means to make your life hell.

00:12:24 ►

Obviously, their minds have been severely bent by the absence of this drug.

00:12:30 ►

However, the knowledge of it seemed to practically undo them.

00:12:35 ►

Yeah, I mean, the first teaching is priceless.

00:12:39 ►

It’s that the world is beyond your ability to conceive or imagine.

00:12:44 ►

The world is beyond your ability to conceive or imagine.

00:12:50 ►

So give up any short-term plan to conceive or imagine.

00:13:00 ►

I think really the worth in these psychedelics is simply that they allow you to triangulate upon reality.

00:13:07 ►

I mean, in other words, if all you’ve got is awake and asleep, you can’t go far with that.

00:13:11 ►

But if you’ve got awake, asleep, and DMT as points,

00:13:17 ►

you can build a much more dimensionally rich model of consciousness.

00:13:22 ►

I think that it has to do with your own intelligence.

00:13:28 ►

Truly stupid people aren’t interested in psychedelics because they can’t figure out what the point of it is.

00:13:31 ►

It feeds off intelligence.

00:13:34 ►

It’s a consciousness-expanding drug.

00:13:37 ►

If you don’t have any consciousness, it can’t expand it.

00:13:40 ►

And I’ve met people who say,

00:13:42 ►

yeah, well, all this stuff and big bugs talk to you and say strange stuff.

00:13:49 ►

You say, yeah, well, you should have paid a little attention.

00:13:53 ►

I mean, it’s amazing to me how people don’t seem to, like, the less intelligent you are,

00:14:04 ►

the less challenging the psychedelic experience becomes

00:14:09 ►

because the less capable of entertaining the implications you are.

00:14:16 ►

Because you just say, well, yeah, a lot of bright lights and there’s some talking bugs and spaceships and I don’t know.

00:14:23 ►

Talking bugs and spaceships and I don’t know.

00:14:33 ►

Well, you know, it’s because they, I guess it’s because those people are so ingrained in cultural values that they assume it’s not real.

00:14:38 ►

They just, they assume it’s a trip, whatever that means.

00:14:42 ►

It means you have permission not to take this experience seriously. It’s a trip, whatever that means. It means you have permission not to take this experience

00:14:46 ►

seriously. It’s a trip. But what I’ve noticed is that based on quantum mechanics need for

00:14:56 ►

an observer as part of any system, that’s big news for our field of study because what it means is

00:15:05 ►

hallucinations are as real as anything else

00:15:09 ►

I mean a hallucination is not like a Chevrolet

00:15:13 ►

but on the other hand a Chevrolet is not like a hallucination

00:15:16 ►

why should we demand that these things co-map over each other

00:15:20 ►

a hallucination is a species of reality

00:15:23 ►

as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.

00:15:32 ►

The question is, does DMT talk to you the way psilocybin does? It’s interesting that these two compounds, so closely related to each other,

00:15:52 ►

both have something to say about language, but they say it in precisely opposite ways.

00:15:59 ►

Psilocybin, it’s a teaching voice that speaks to you in your language.

00:16:05 ►

I had a very interesting experience that was an example of this to me.

00:16:11 ►

When I first started growing mushrooms, I had to do a lot of batch testing.

00:16:14 ►

And so I was taking mushrooms a lot.

00:16:18 ►

And I would get into these places with it where it would say, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da says, da-da-da-da-da-da-ta-ta-ta-ta says, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta says,

00:16:26 ►

it would make these declarative statements

00:16:28 ►

and then it would always put the word says

00:16:31 ►

on the end of the sentence.

00:16:35 ►

I thought, you know, weird,

00:16:37 ►

but what do you expect of a talking vegetable?

00:16:40 ►

What’s weird and what isn’t?

00:16:41 ►

So then I heard Wasson’s publication called Maria Sabina and Her Mushroom Vallada.

00:16:49 ►

It’s a set of six tapes of a mushroom session that Maria Sabina did in 1956.

00:16:57 ►

So here is Maria Sabina raving in Mazatec, and it’s going along like this da da da da da da da da da

00:17:05 ►

00:17:06 ►

da da da da da da da da da

00:17:08 ►

00:17:09 ►

and I look in the interlinear translation

00:17:13 ►

so means says in Mazatec

00:17:17 ►

so she’s hearing it in Mazatec

00:17:20 ►

I’m hearing it in English

00:17:22 ►

so that’s what psilocybin is capable of.

00:17:26 ►

What happens with DMT is it doesn’t speak to you in English.

00:17:31 ►

It speaks to you in Elfish, and you understand.

00:17:36 ►

And under sufficiently hyped-up conditions, you are able to reply.

00:17:42 ►

you are able to reply.

00:17:46 ►

In other words, psilocybin pushes your brain state towards some kind of spontaneous glossolalia.

00:17:50 ►

And I think that this probably is mixed up

00:17:55 ►

with the generation of language itself.

00:17:58 ►

Because what happens on DMT, on high-dose DMT,

00:18:03 ►

is these machine elves,

00:18:06 ►

these dribbling basketball things,

00:18:09 ►

they use this musical sing-sang song language

00:18:13 ►

to make objects,

00:18:16 ►

which they then show you.

00:18:18 ►

They’re like machines or animals or crystals

00:18:22 ►

or crosses between, I don’t know, consomme and something else.

00:18:27 ►

They have these opalescent depths.

00:18:30 ►

They’re neither matter nor mind, neither solid nor liquid.

00:18:36 ►

But they make these things and set them loose in this environment.

00:18:40 ►

And these things themselves are emitting language and making other things.

00:18:46 ►

So they make machines which make machines.

00:18:48 ►

Everybody’s chattering, squeaking, crawling over each other, clamoring for your attention.

00:18:55 ►

And what they’re trying to do is to get you to produce this glossolalia for some reason,

00:19:04 ►

which I cannot imagine

00:19:06 ►

why

00:19:07 ►

when you’re stoned

00:19:08 ►

and you do the glossolalia

00:19:11 ►

it’s an incredibly pleasurable

00:19:14 ►

experience

00:19:15 ►

but so might be

00:19:18 ►

eating an orange

00:19:19 ►

or having sex

00:19:20 ►

if you were to do it

00:19:21 ►

at that moment

00:19:22 ►

you can’t tell

00:19:23 ►

but you can

00:19:24 ►

make this funny pseudo-linguistic stream of syllables

00:19:29 ►

that’s very, very satisfying.

00:19:33 ►

And, you know, it has a bit of art in it.

00:19:37 ►

I think probably we invented language long before meaning

00:19:41 ►

and that it was some very practical person

00:19:45 ►

who got the idea that the music could have words,

00:19:49 ►

and that before that it was simply verbal amusement.

00:19:55 ►

After all, the most readily at hand musical instrument is the human voice.

00:20:01 ►

is the human voice.

00:20:10 ►

I think that language, as we practice it this afternoon in this room,

00:20:13 ►

is an uncompleted enterprise,

00:20:19 ►

that language wants to be visual.

00:20:21 ►

It is in transition.

00:20:28 ►

Remember, it’s from the silence of prehistory to the visual language beyond the eschaton, and the overlapping of silence and visual language gives you audio language.

00:20:36 ►

The more perfect logos would be beheld.

00:20:40 ►

This is what Philo-Judeus taught.

00:20:43 ►

This is what Philo-Judeus taught.

00:20:52 ►

And considering that many of these psychedelic compounds involved in the language phenomena,

00:21:25 ►

like DMT and harming and harming, these all occur as part of human metabolism, ordinarily. And I think that it’s possible that we are on the cusp of an evolutionary transformation of language having to do with an actual change in our physique, in our genetic output. Why is it that monoamine oxidase-inhibiting compounds like harmaline,

00:21:33 ►

specifically 5-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan, occurs in the pineal gland?

00:21:43 ►

And the pineal gland has always been thought of as somehow connected to the soul.

00:21:47 ►

It was the seat of the soul for Descartes. And I think that maybe what history is is the rather muddled situation that

00:21:55 ►

occurs in an animal species while it perfects a true language and that we have

00:22:01 ►

we’re not there yet folks because a true language is beheld.

00:22:07 ►

I think that the real nub of what we’re trying to get at here is that the world is mental

00:22:15 ►

in some way that we do not yet understand, but which we’re edging toward understanding.

00:22:25 ►

And the world is made of language.

00:22:29 ►

I can’t say that enough.

00:22:32 ►

And so whenever we get into these discussions about reality or effects in space and time,

00:22:44 ►

we are operating outside this assumption that the world is made of language.

00:22:49 ►

If the world is made of language,

00:22:52 ►

it’s very hard to figure out just where the edge of it is.

00:22:55 ►

I mean, do we really need to believe in the existence of distant galaxies like NGC 245

00:23:02 ►

if in fact the world is being produced in the human cerebellum as a phenomenon of language?

00:23:10 ►

What exactly is the ontological status of these distant parts of the universe

00:23:16 ►

that register only as the faint tracings on our instruments,

00:23:21 ►

then interpreted through the fishy fiat of a bunch of stacked up theories and formulas.

00:23:28 ►

I mean, did you know that the entire universe of radio telescopes were invented around 1950?

00:23:40 ►

They’ve been used to build up our entire picture of the universe. Did you know that if you took all the energy that has fallen on all the radio telescopes on this planet

00:23:51 ►

since the invention of radio telescopy,

00:23:55 ►

that it would be less energy than is generated by a cigarette ash falling a distance of two feet?

00:24:02 ►

falling a distance of two feet.

00:24:06 ►

So that’s where your data sample is coming from,

00:24:10 ►

that you’ve built up this model of exploding galaxies and colliding quasars and mega this and mega that.

00:24:15 ►

I mean, it’s pretty flimsy stuff, folks,

00:24:18 ►

compared to the meat of the moment in which we find ourselves. Now, magical philosophies,

00:24:26 ►

which have about 50 to 100,000 years under their belt,

00:24:31 ►

as opposed to science, which goes back to the Renaissance,

00:24:35 ►

magical philosophies have always claimed

00:24:38 ►

that the world is made of language,

00:24:40 ►

that the world is a thing of words.

00:24:44 ►

And if you know these words,

00:24:46 ►

you can take it apart and put it

00:24:48 ►

together any old

00:24:50 ►

way you wish. Our entire

00:24:52 ►

Western religious tradition

00:24:54 ►

begins with

00:24:56 ►

the incredibly cryptic

00:24:58 ►

statement,

00:24:59 ►

in principio et verbum et verbo

00:25:02 ►

caro factum est.

00:25:03 ►

It’s fairly obscure even in English.

00:25:06 ►

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh.

00:25:11 ►

What is this making the Word into flesh?

00:25:16 ►

And does it not imply then that eventually the flesh will become Word?

00:25:24 ►

As I descend into mental disintegration and madness,

00:25:29 ►

I become more and more convinced that reality is more like a novel

00:25:34 ►

than a series of integrated tensor equations of the third degree,

00:25:40 ►

which is what physics would have us believe.

00:25:43 ►

The world is like a novel.

00:25:46 ►

It’s a novel in which you are a character.

00:25:49 ►

And there’s dramatic tension, plot, resolution, tragedy, nobility, betrayal,

00:25:55 ►

the whole gamut of emotions and human possibilities.

00:26:01 ►

And what we tend to do is always to marginalize

00:26:04 ►

first our own experience and then all

00:26:08 ►

human experience so we our model of reality is that the universe is a zillion somethings that

00:26:17 ►

direction and a trillion somethings that direction we are tiny and insignificant our star is typical our galaxy is

00:26:27 ►

typical everything is utterly humdrum and there’s nothing going on here at all

00:26:32 ►

well this is an incredibly dreary and disempowering model of reality I would

00:26:39 ►

rather believe that if in fact what the universe is, is a novelty producing and conserving engine,

00:26:48 ►

and if we define novelty as density of connectedness, then guess what?

00:26:57 ►

The human neocortex becomes the center of the cosmic drama.

00:27:03 ►

becomes the center of the cosmic drama.

00:27:12 ►

Because the human neocortex is the most densely ramified and connected material object known to exist in the universe.

00:27:16 ►

So after a thousand years of human marginalization,

00:27:22 ►

suddenly through the injection of science,

00:27:26 ►

there is permission to believe that the cosmic drama really is about us.

00:27:28 ►

That we really do carry

00:27:30 ►

the load

00:27:33 ►

in this play.

00:27:34 ►

That this is a play about

00:27:36 ►

the career and preservation

00:27:38 ►

of novelty and complexity.

00:27:41 ►

And thus, we

00:27:42 ►

are central actors

00:27:44 ►

in that drama. And hence, we are central actors in that drama.

00:27:46 ►

And hence, if something were to happen to us and our enterprise,

00:27:51 ►

the universe would be vastly impoverished by that loss.

00:27:57 ►

Well, now, we’re on the brink of decoding the human genome. And we will use computers to do this

00:28:05 ►

because we’re going to have to keep absolute track

00:28:08 ►

of millions of units of strings of characters.

00:28:12 ►

But the end result of this, I think,

00:28:15 ►

is that the flesh will be made word

00:28:18 ►

and that we are textualizing our reality.

00:28:23 ►

And this may be what all these French people are screaming about

00:28:28 ►

that we can’t understand, the so-called deconstructionists,

00:28:32 ►

because they keep saying, reality, it should be dealt with as a text.

00:28:36 ►

If you don’t treat it as a text, you will entirely miss the point of it.

00:28:42 ►

Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while,

00:28:45 ►

and first of all, my life is very strange,

00:28:50 ►

because when I hit the mushroom at La Charrera in 1971,

00:28:58 ►

Interpol was looking for me.

00:29:00 ►

I had a price on my head.

00:29:02 ►

I had no money.

00:29:04 ►

I had blown my college education. I had no job skills.

00:29:08 ►

I had nothing. And that is, of course, as all folklorists know, the precondition for exaltation.

00:29:19 ►

If you’re not poor and humble, I mean, what’s the point, you know? So I was poor and humble.

00:29:26 ►

And then I got crossed up with this mushroom.

00:29:29 ►

And immediately life became art.

00:29:33 ►

Life became freakishly ordered.

00:29:38 ►

And plot elements began to unfold.

00:29:43 ►

And I have in my mind a picture of the curve of my mission, if you want to call it that. And weirdly enough, reality has not, reality and the curve will depart.

00:30:08 ►

Otherwise, decency forbids that I carry that thought further.

00:30:16 ►

But you do see what I mean, I think. And all of us are beginning to take textual control of our lives and be able to write the plot.

00:30:29 ►

You see, if what we’re embedded in is a novel or some work of art like a novel,

00:30:36 ►

then what you want to do is figure out who in the novel you are.

00:30:40 ►

I mean, if your name is Joe Blow, is the name of this novel the lives and worlds of Joe Blow?

00:30:48 ►

Or do you get to draw a bath for someone on page 230 and never be seen again?

00:30:55 ►

Now, as a character, the more conscious you become, the more you have free will within the context of the plot.

00:31:06 ►

I never understood this.

00:31:09 ►

And I’m not sure most people understand it.

00:31:11 ►

Like I grew up in Berkeley in the 1960s.

00:31:16 ►

You know, I was in Berkeley from 65 to 70, the golden age.

00:31:21 ►

I was so unconvinced of my own uniqueness that I never understood that the

00:31:28 ►

great drama that was unfolding around me, all I had to do was join, and I never joined.

00:31:37 ►

I thought it was spectator sport.

00:31:39 ►

I mean, I marched in the marches, I took acid, I got laid, I did all of those things. But what I mean by I didn’t join is I didn’t realize that the Grateful Dead were a bus ride away

00:31:52 ►

and that I could probably walk into that scene and make a place for myself.

00:31:56 ►

Or the doors, or the stones, or the Beatles, you pick it.

00:32:01 ►

In other words, I defined myself as a spectator rather than an actor.

00:32:06 ►

And we are all doing that far too much.

00:32:10 ►

You can get a lot rowdier than you are.

00:32:13 ►

You can make a lot more waves.

00:32:16 ►

There’s been too much politesse and too much parlor etiquette exercised recently by the counterculture.

00:32:29 ►

It’s perfectly all right to mix things up.

00:32:33 ►

It’s perfectly all right to try and accelerate the plot.

00:32:37 ►

This will move your character nearer and nearer to the center of the action. And people have asked me then,

00:32:45 ►

is the goal to make yourself the novel about you?

00:32:50 ►

Is the goal to make the novel about yourself?

00:32:54 ►

I don’t think so.

00:32:55 ►

The goal is to become the author of the novel.

00:32:59 ►

Then you can write any damn ending you want

00:33:03 ►

for your character or any other.

00:33:05 ►

And this becoming the author is this psychedelic detachment.

00:33:11 ►

And suddenly you go from being a chessman on the board to the chess master looking at the board.

00:33:20 ►

It’s empowering.

00:33:22 ►

It’s self-control. Now, people who don’t know this

00:33:25 ►

are like

00:33:27 ►

made of denser stuff

00:33:30 ►

than the rest of us.

00:33:32 ►

You can just

00:33:33 ►

part them like wheat

00:33:35 ►

and move through them.

00:33:37 ►

Because they have no

00:33:39 ►

sense of

00:33:41 ►

the nature of the game.

00:33:43 ►

They are still embedded in the old Newtonian paradigm and are completely powerless to control their own lives. That’s what happens to you in the Newtonian game. All the power flows to, I don’t know, the White House, the UN, Madison Avenue. It’s not clear, but it certainly doesn’t reside with you.

00:34:06 ►

More and more, I think we need to decondition.

00:34:11 ►

That’s what I mean by following the plot as written.

00:34:16 ►

If you never decondition, you’re just a character in somebody else’s story.

00:34:24 ►

But if you decondition, you can begin to move your life the way you want.

00:34:29 ►

And miracles happen.

00:34:32 ►

Miracles do happen.

00:34:33 ►

They happen even to ordinary people in the realm of falling in love

00:34:39 ►

because there’s something about where the genes go

00:34:43 ►

that is very compelling to the universal logos that’s watching over us all.

00:34:49 ►

So, you know, the stable boy can marry the princess if his heart is pure and the winds of the logos are at his back.

00:34:59 ►

That’s why we love those fairy tales of the stable boy who inherits the kingdom,

00:35:04 ►

why we love those fairy tales of the stable boy who inherits the kingdom,

00:35:09 ►

because we sense that as our story.

00:35:15 ►

The question is, how can you bring back the psychedelic experience, or what can you bring? I know of two techniques, neither very satisfying, both in combination, moderatelyately effective but crude.

00:35:25 ►

The first is a voice-operated tape recorder.

00:35:34 ►

They sell these for a couple of hundred bucks.

00:35:37 ►

I’ve produced some amazing tapes with these. I have one voice activated tape where you hear me clear my

00:35:45 ►

throat 200 times

00:35:48 ►

in the course of an evening

00:35:50 ►

because each time I would clear

00:35:51 ►

my throat, halfway through the throat

00:35:54 ►

clearing, it’s voice activated

00:35:56 ►

the tape recorder, so it would catch

00:35:57 ►

the last half of

00:35:59 ►

ahem

00:36:00 ►

ahem

00:36:01 ►

ahem

00:36:02 ►

however, if you have presence of mind sufficient to speak English

00:36:08 ►

this would be a more informative record of your experience

00:36:12 ►

and then the other technique

00:36:17 ►

which is less technically dependent

00:36:21 ►

is if you have an insight at a certain level of the experience,

00:36:27 ►

you have to repeat it to yourself at another level of the experience,

00:36:33 ►

and then another level.

00:36:34 ►

And by this incremental bucketing method,

00:36:39 ►

you can carry almost any insight out into the realm of the world.

00:36:47 ►

These insights often don’t stand up to scrutiny.

00:36:51 ►

I had a really interesting experience just a week ago.

00:36:56 ►

I’m sure you’ve all had most of this experience, but I finally had it all.

00:37:01 ►

It’s the experience of having a dream, a very, very complicated dream,

00:37:07 ►

the subject of which is the universal secret, which if told would transform everything.

00:37:15 ►

It’s the I’ve got it phenomenon.

00:37:18 ►

And usually what happens is you wake up and it’s gone just before you get consciousness to get…

00:37:28 ►

And you say, my God, I understood everything.

00:37:32 ►

I had it down to a single statement.

00:37:34 ►

If I could articulate it, the world would never be the same.

00:37:38 ►

Well, this happened to me about a week ago, but by some miracle, I actually was able to

00:37:44 ►

hang on to the statement into

00:37:48 ►

consciousness and I and I woke up and yelled this thing my son was appalled I

00:37:55 ►

mean it was 630 in the morning and I was a song is a song. Profound stuff. I mean,

00:38:14 ►

maybe it is profound stuff. The profound stuff usually has that an X is an X construct, because

00:38:22 ►

essentially what it’s telling you is silence would have been an acceptable substitute for this statement.

00:38:29 ►

Well, let me say one more thing here, just sort of to wind this up.

00:38:35 ►

The metaphor that makes sense for what we’re going through,

00:38:39 ►

because it gets the biology of it, it gets the drama of it, it gets the risk of it,

00:38:47 ►

it gets the fun and the joy of it, is the metaphor of birth.

00:38:54 ►

We are about to decamp from three-dimensional space and time.

00:39:00 ►

Yes, the earth is the cradle of mankind, but you can’t live in the cradle forever

00:39:06 ►

and we’re not in this cradle alone

00:39:09 ►

we are squashing and trampling

00:39:13 ►

on hundreds of other species

00:39:15 ►

that have as much right to be here as we are

00:39:18 ►

so through technology

00:39:20 ►

which means pharmacology, art

00:39:23 ►

and the engineering sciences,

00:39:27 ►

we are trying to find a doorway into a new world for the spirit.

00:39:34 ►

And it is going to come out of human-machine interfacing,

00:39:40 ►

pharmacological redesign of the human brain-mind system,

00:39:46 ►

possibly digitalizing and downloading into the micro-physical realm, we don’t know.

00:39:53 ►

I mean, it makes your hair stand on end to think of being downloaded into the digital realm.

00:40:00 ►

There was once a fish who had a great deal of doubts about this plan to conquer the land

00:40:07 ►

and tried to urge everyone to think again that no good could possibly come of it.

00:40:13 ►

But in fact, the forward thrust of evolution is toward higher dimensions,

00:40:20 ►

greater complexity, more information, greater connectedness,

00:40:25 ►

and a deeper and deeper sense of the all-pervasiveness of love and meaning.

00:40:34 ►

That’s what it’s really about.

00:40:36 ►

All these disparate physical elements come to nothing

00:40:40 ►

if they don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts.

00:40:45 ►

And the more than the sum of their parts is this transcendental element which we call love.

00:40:53 ►

That is the part of the eschaton that has never left us,

00:40:59 ►

that accompanied us across the African grassland and into history.

00:41:04 ►

across the African grassland and into history.

00:41:12 ►

I mean, granted, bloodied and battered by the experiences of sexism and racism and so forth,

00:41:19 ►

but never lost as an ideal, never lost as a guiding light and an experience.

00:41:46 ►

And I really think that when we dissolve all the boundaries, this is what we will discover, is an unconditional caring, an unconditional affection that flows through all life and all matter and gives it meaning. have to wait for the end of the world to get this news. You can just short circuit the collective march toward that realization by accelerating your own microcosm of spirituality through the use of

00:41:56 ►

these hallucinogens. They are the doorways that the Gaian mind has installed in the historical process to let anybody out anytime they want to,

00:42:08 ►

provided they have the courage to turn the knob and walk through the door.

00:42:15 ►

I don’t like the part of what I do that is a cult of personality.

00:42:20 ►

I don’t like it that a white guy sits at the front of the room and pontificates.

00:42:27 ►

And I don’t know if you’ve figured out this shuffle,

00:42:31 ►

but I have and I know that I don’t know anything more than you know, really.

00:42:38 ►

And that it’s just a funny circumstance of fate that you sit and listen and I speak because there are no

00:42:46 ►

experts and there is only you know the integrity of doing and having done and

00:42:55 ►

really if you get the message you you will be able to transcend the need for

00:43:02 ►

any more of this because it’s really a message of self-trust and self-empowerment.

00:43:07 ►

And then what I’m also trying to create is a community of shared associations about these weird states

00:43:19 ►

so that we don’t have to all privately think we’re losing our marbles. Let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together.

00:43:30 ►

I am basically a scientist without portfolio

00:43:40 ►

because no academic institution would ever trust me with a portfolio.

00:43:47 ►

But I move in the domain of the gurus, the channelers, the pontificators

00:43:54 ►

and those with secret revealed knowledge from Atlantis and Lemuria.

00:43:58 ►

But I have contempt for all of that, whether it’s true or not,

00:44:04 ►

because they got there the wrong way.

00:44:07 ►

You know, you have to come through the rules of evidence and reason.

00:44:13 ►

Reason is not science.

00:44:15 ►

Don’t confuse them.

00:44:17 ►

I’m very much a critic of science and the scientific method,

00:44:21 ►

but I don’t think reason can be tossed out with that bathwater.

00:44:27 ►

What is being proposed here is that we’re on the brink of the discovery of another world,

00:44:35 ►

a world as potentially transforming of our world as the discovery of the Western Hemisphere

00:44:43 ►

transformed European civilization in the 1500s.

00:44:48 ►

But the world that we’re about to discover is inside the mind.

00:44:53 ►

It’s mental real estate.

00:44:56 ►

We who have made consciousness our game by building cities, elaborating literatures,

00:45:04 ►

tossing up religions and setting armies marching,

00:45:08 ►

we who have made consciousness our game have barely scratched the surface of human consciousness.

00:45:16 ►

And it’s not like we haven’t had a crack at it.

00:45:19 ►

I mean, these yogans have been over there digging away for millennia,

00:45:24 ►

These yogans have been over there digging away for millennia.

00:45:30 ►

Egyptian religion, Kabbalism, alchemy, western traditions of mysticism.

00:45:34 ►

And I am a connoisseur of all that. Don’t get me wrong, but what astonishes me is how embryonic it all is.

00:45:40 ►

We are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization in its twilight,

00:45:49 ►

which is what they’re all telling us.

00:45:51 ►

We are the know-nothing, fresh scrub babes who are the new kids on the block

00:45:57 ►

who haven’t got a clue as to what the human enterprise could really be about.

00:46:03 ►

And we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck

00:46:08 ►

where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years,

00:46:15 ►

the dues now have to be paid.

00:46:18 ►

It ain’t fair. We didn’t do it.

00:46:22 ►

We didn’t bring the slaves from Africa.

00:46:25 ►

We didn’t invent oligarchy. We didn’t do it. We didn’t bring the slaves from Africa. We didn’t invent oligarchy.

00:46:27 ►

We didn’t do all these things.

00:46:29 ►

Nobody’s interested in our whining

00:46:31 ►

about how we didn’t do it.

00:46:34 ►

It’s in your face.

00:46:37 ►

And it’s clearly a crisis of two things.

00:46:41 ►

Of consciousness and of conditioning.

00:46:48 ►

These are the two things that the psychedelics attack.

00:46:57 ►

We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet,

00:47:03 ►

to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war, but we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds.

00:47:12 ►

We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior.

00:47:20 ►

And it’s not easy.

00:47:22 ►

I mean, imagine, I don’t know how many of you have ever confronted the fact that you were addicted to something.

00:47:29 ►

And some addictions are really serious.

00:47:31 ►

If you’ve ever been addicted to tobacco or heroin, I’m sure you know what I mean.

00:47:37 ►

Well, then imagine a global population addicted to a drug, the use of which is killing us,

00:47:47 ►

but we can’t, there’s no doctor saying you should,

00:47:52 ►

there’s no rehab clinic to go to when you’re a species.

00:47:56 ►

We are on an absolutely destructive bender

00:48:00 ►

that will end with the death of the earth,

00:48:03 ►

the impoverishment of its animal and plant population,

00:48:07 ►

and the collapse of our civilization into scarcity

00:48:10 ►

unless we can somehow restructure our psychology

00:48:18 ►

and get hold of ourselves.

00:48:21 ►

And psychedelics are the only thing I’ve ever seen work on an individual level to do that.

00:48:28 ►

You know, in the early 60s, they were curing 75% of chronic alcoholism cases

00:48:36 ►

that they treated with LSD.

00:48:37 ►

They were curing with one dose of LSD, one 500-microgram dose.

00:48:44 ►

Well, now, obviously, LSD is not a magic bullet for alcoholism.

00:48:49 ►

That’s a preposterous idea. It’s simply that you take LSD, and if you’re a chronic alcoholic,

00:48:56 ►

you review your life, and you notice that you’re killing yourself. And then you say, my God, I am killing myself. If I don’t stop what I’m doing, I will be dead.

00:49:08 ►

That’s the strongest motivation to character rehabilitation there is.

00:49:13 ►

And that’s what we have to carry into the domain of public debate.

00:49:19 ►

I can’t believe how constipated American institutions are.

00:49:23 ►

I mean, here we are under the aegis of a great crusading reformer from Arkansas.

00:49:29 ►

A new order in human affairs has dawned,

00:49:33 ►

but they suggest closing an air base out at Sacramento,

00:49:38 ►

and their editorials as to whether we can survive the shock of this massive change.

00:49:45 ►

Well, I’ve got news for you.

00:49:47 ►

You better do your change-related calisthenics if that was heavy lifting

00:49:52 ►

because what you’ve got coming at you is something very, very different.

00:49:57 ►

We are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves, extend the design process to human destiny,

00:50:10 ►

and produce something that will redeem 10,000 years of pogroms and migrations

00:50:20 ►

and attempted genocides and pointless wars and stupid religions that make people hate themselves and all the rest of it,

00:50:29 ►

if we’re going to redeem that legacy, then we have to do something quite spectacular.

00:50:38 ►

Okay, now, I will talk a little bit about what I’ve learned from psychedelics.

00:50:48 ►

I feel self-conscious doing it, but on the other hand,

00:50:52 ►

wouldn’t it be stupid for me to talk about what you’ve learned from psychedelics?

00:50:56 ►

That would add presumption to the sins already arrayed here.

00:51:02 ►

It’s already arrayed here.

00:51:11 ►

There are different models about what the psychedelic experience is.

00:51:13 ►

Here’s a couple.

00:51:18 ►

Building on Western psychotherapy as elaborated by Freud and Jung, one view of what psychedelics are is it’s the part of your mind that you’d rather not do business with.

00:51:27 ►

It’s the memories of childhood neglect or abuse.

00:51:32 ►

It’s repressed kinky fantasies.

00:51:37 ►

It’s, in other words,

00:51:39 ►

the Freudian idea of the unconscious,

00:51:42 ►

that somehow these are drugs

00:51:43 ►

which dissolve the

00:51:45 ►

boundary between conscious and unconscious mind and then you can do

00:51:48 ►

accelerated psychotherapy because resistances have been pharmacologically

00:51:54 ►

overcome that’s one model it’s good as far as it goes it just doesn’t go far

00:52:00 ►

enough then there’s another model which I would call the traditional or shamanic model. vertical routes of access, which can be thought of as simply flights through space,

00:52:28 ►

or magical trees, or magical ladders.

00:52:33 ►

Anyway, there’s an image of ascent.

00:52:36 ►

And ordinary people exist on only one of these levels.

00:52:41 ►

But a shaman is not an ordinary person.

00:52:44 ►

A shaman is a superhuman person

00:52:47 ►

who has the power

00:52:49 ►

of animal allies

00:52:51 ►

behind them

00:52:52 ►

and they can

00:52:54 ►

go up and down

00:52:56 ►

in these elevators

00:52:58 ►

that move between levels

00:53:00 ►

and they can therefore

00:53:02 ►

recover lost souls, see social hanky-panky, theft and adultery,

00:53:12 ►

see the causes behind that, see the causes behind disease, so forth and so on.

00:53:19 ►

That would be the traditional one.

00:53:21 ►

What I have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those ideas have a certain something to recommend them, but that they don’t go far enough, and that we get more to the meat of this if we leave off psychological, the first explanation, or sociological, the second explanation,

00:53:47 ►

and actually go for something a little more formal,

00:53:51 ►

to wit, a mathematical model of what shamanism is.

00:53:57 ►

And what I mean by that is, let’s think about what shamans do.

00:54:04 ►

They cure disease, and another way of putting that is they have a remarkable facility

00:54:11 ►

for choosing patients who will recover.

00:54:15 ►

They predict weather, which is very important.

00:54:19 ►

They tell where game has gone, the movement of game,

00:54:31 ►

and they seem to have a paranormal ability to look into questions,

00:54:35 ►

as I mentioned, who’s sleeping with who, who stole the chicken,

00:54:44 ►

who, you know, social transgressions are an open book to them.

00:54:48 ►

Well, thinking about this from a mathematician’s point of view,

00:54:56 ►

an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness,

00:55:09 ►

his or her consciousness, into a higher dimension.

00:55:15 ►

Not metaphorically, as in Sylvester Stallone has many dimensions.

00:55:28 ►

Not metaphorically, but literally, as in one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions, and four. Because if you could move into the fourth dimension,

00:55:32 ►

the dimension orthogonal to Newtonian space-time,

00:55:39 ►

seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing what the weather is now.

00:55:45 ►

Seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game are.

00:55:53 ►

Knowing who stole the chicken is simply defined by looking to see who stole the chicken. And I have noticed that all of biology, not simply shamanism within the context of human society,

00:56:04 ►

not simply shamanism within the context of human society,

00:56:11 ►

but all of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality.

00:56:18 ►

That as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life,

00:56:25 ►

what animals are, are a strategy for conquering space-time.

00:56:30 ►

And complex animals do it better than simpler animals.

00:56:34 ►

And we do it better than any complex animal.

00:56:40 ►

And we 20th century people do it better than any people in any previous century because we can bind data in so many ways that they couldn’t electronically,

00:56:46 ►

on film, on tape, so forth and so on.

00:56:49 ►

So the progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest.

00:56:56 ►

Well, from that point of view then,

00:56:58 ►

the shaman begins to look like the advance guard of a new kind of human being.

00:57:06 ►

A human being that is as advanced over where we are

00:57:12 ►

as we are advanced over people a million years ago.

00:57:19 ►

Because we have very elaborate strategies for coding the past.

00:57:25 ►

It’s a dimensional conquest.

00:57:28 ►

So that’s part of what I’ve learned about psychedelics.

00:57:32 ►

And I could have left it there, but I never do.

00:57:37 ►

I always want to bring more under the umbrella of whatever metaphor it is that’s being pushed.

00:57:49 ►

And what I have discerned is that time is actually speeding up.

00:57:58 ►

That the universe is not what physics tells us it is.

00:58:04 ►

is not what physics tells us it is.

00:58:09 ►

Physics tells us that the universe is a physical system, an entropic system that was born in immense energy and chaos

00:58:16 ►

and will run down with a bang, I mean with a whimper, not a bang,

00:58:22 ►

run down into heat entropy and dissipation.

00:58:26 ►

The psychedelic data on this is completely different.

00:58:31 ►

The psychedelic data says what that model left out was biology and mind.

00:58:40 ►

Now, biology, you might imagine, is a fairly ephemeral, recent, fragile phenomenon.

00:58:48 ►

It is not.

00:58:49 ►

The average star in this galaxy gutters out after about 700 million years.

00:58:58 ►

Not our star.

00:59:00 ►

We happen to have the good fortune to be around a very stable, slow-burning star.

00:59:05 ►

But there has been biology on this planet at least two billion years.

00:59:12 ►

Three times the average life of a star.

00:59:16 ►

So biology is not some Johnny-come-lately epiphenomena.

00:59:21 ►

Biology is a phenomenon more persistent than the life of the stars themselves.

00:59:30 ►

And biology is not a static thing.

00:59:34 ►

I mean, a star evolving now is not greatly different from a star evolving a billion years ago.

00:59:41 ►

Biology doesn’t work that way. Biology constantly changes the context

00:59:47 ►

in which evolution occurs.

00:59:51 ►

The way I have downloaded this into a phrase

00:59:54 ►

is the universe is,

00:59:56 ►

the biological universe at least,

00:59:59 ►

is a novelty conserving engine.

01:00:03 ►

Upon simple molecules are built complex molecules. Upon complex molecules are built complex polymers. Upon complex polymers comes DNA. Out of DNA comes the whole machinery of the cell. Out of cells comes simple aggregate

01:00:26 ►

colony animals like

01:00:28 ►

hydra and that sort of thing.

01:00:30 ►

Out of that, true animals.

01:00:32 ►

Out of that, ever

01:00:34 ►

more complex animals.

01:00:36 ►

Organs of locomotion.

01:00:37 ►

Organs of sight. Organs

01:00:40 ►

of smell. Complex

01:00:42 ►

mental machinery

01:00:43 ►

for the coordinating of data

01:00:46 ►

in time and space.

01:00:48 ►

This is the whole story of the

01:00:49 ►

advancement of life.

01:00:51 ►

And in our species, it reaches

01:00:53 ►

its culmination

01:00:55 ►

and it crosses over

01:00:58 ►

into a new domain

01:00:59 ►

where change no longer

01:01:02 ►

occurs in the

01:01:04 ►

atomic and biological machinery of existence.

01:01:09 ►

It begins to take place in this world which we call mental.

01:01:15 ►

It’s called epigenetic change,

01:01:17 ►

change which cannot be traced back to mutation of the arrangements of molecules inside long chain polymers,

01:01:25 ►

but change taking place in syntactical structures that are linguistically based.

01:01:34 ►

And people have probably been using language with considerable facility for probably 50,000 years, possibly more.

01:01:41 ►

possibly more.

01:01:48 ►

In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate languages,

01:01:54 ►

ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing, and retrieving language so that we are actually on the brink of being able to give every single one of you

01:02:01 ►

the complete cultural inventory,

01:02:04 ►

the complete database of human beings’ experience

01:02:08 ►

on this planet. That’s what these data highways and networks are all about. The nervous system

01:02:16 ►

is being hardwired. But what I wanted to draw your attention to about this is it is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty

01:02:27 ►

but it’s an advance which in which each successive stage occurs more quickly

01:02:34 ►

than the stage which preceded it so you know once you get the Big Bang then

01:02:41 ►

nothing much happens for a long, long time.

01:02:45 ►

I mean, there’s plasma streaming through the universe.

01:02:49 ►

The universe is slowly cooling, but that’s the most dramatic complex process in the universe, this cooling.

01:02:57 ►

Then, after a certain point, more complex processes come in.

01:03:02 ►

Complex processes come in.

01:03:05 ►

Complexification begins to build. And as it builds, it begins to happen faster and faster and faster.

01:03:11 ►

And the great puzzle in the biological record is the suddenness of our own emergence,

01:03:20 ►

of our emergence, human emergence, out of the primate line.

01:03:26 ►

It happened with enormous suddenness.

01:03:30 ►

Lumholtz calls it the most explosive reorganization of a major organ of a higher animal

01:03:37 ►

in the entire fossil record.

01:03:40 ►

And that’s a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution

01:03:44 ►

because this is the organ which generated the theory of evolution.

01:03:49 ►

We’re not talking an appendix or an eyebrow here.

01:03:53 ►

We’re talking the very organ which generated it.

01:03:56 ►

I think that we have taken far too much responsibility for what is happening

01:04:02 ►

and that what we took to be a staircase we were

01:04:06 ►

climbing is actually an up escalator and if you will stop climbing you will notice that it does

01:04:14 ►

not impede your upward progress because the ground you’re standing on is moving you toward the goal. And I think that this idea,

01:04:30 ►

which may be the proof that I’m bonkers,

01:04:34 ►

requires a fairly radical reorganization of consciousness.

01:04:39 ►

Because what I’m saying is the universe was not born in a fiery explosion from which it has been

01:04:48 ►

being blasted outward ever since. The universe is not being pushed like that from behind. is being pulled from the future toward a goal

01:05:05 ►

that is as inevitable

01:05:07 ►

as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl

01:05:12 ►

when you release it up near the rim.

01:05:16 ►

You know, if you do that,

01:05:17 ►

the marble will roll down the side of the bowl,

01:05:20 ►

down, down, down,

01:05:22 ►

and eventually it will come to rest

01:05:24 ►

in the lowest energy state, which is the bottom of the bowl. That’s precisely my model of human history.

01:05:49 ►

Competition is peddling the idea that the universe sprang from nothing in a single moment for no reason.

01:05:55 ►

Now, whatever you think about that, notice that it’s the limit case for credulity.

01:05:57 ►

Do you understand what I mean? I mean, if you can believe that, it’s hard for me to imagine what you would balk at. If we were to sit down and say, let’s see who can think of the most unlikely thing that could possibly happen, I submit to you, nobody could top the Big Bang. It is the improbability of improbabilities. It is the mother of all improbabilities right there.

01:06:26 ►

So I’m suggesting something different.

01:06:29 ►

I’m suggesting that the universe is pulled toward a complex attractor that exists ahead of us in time

01:06:38 ►

and that our ever-accelerating speed through the phenomenal world of connectivity and novelty

01:06:48 ►

is based on the fact that we are now very, very close to the attractor.

01:06:54 ►

All Western religions have insisted that God would come tangential to history,

01:07:00 ►

but they all lose their nerve when you ask when,

01:07:03 ►

which is the only interesting question about that hypothesis.

01:07:08 ►

I mean, if it’s not now, then what the hell difference does it make?

01:07:12 ►

It’s just pissing in the wind as far as I can see.

01:07:15 ►

I think that the very real social crisis that is upon us, the crisis of population, of resource depletion, of atmospheric degradation,

01:07:30 ►

of epidemic disease, all these crises indicate that we are now down to the short epochs of

01:07:40 ►

this process of universal ingression into novelty, and that in fact it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a human future.

01:07:52 ►

There is no human future. It’s inconceivable, given where we are today, that to speak of the human world a thousand years from now or 500 years from now.

01:08:07 ►

It is literally, it either doesn’t exist or it’s beyond our power of imagining.

01:08:15 ►

It isn’t simply going to be non-polluting cars and smaller hi-fi speakers.

01:08:24 ►

I mean, that’s an idiot’s notion.

01:08:27 ►

Yeah, clearer TV pictures.

01:08:30 ►

It isn’t like that at all.

01:08:32 ►

I mentioned this this morning,

01:08:34 ►

how when you look at only one line of technological development,

01:08:38 ►

automobiles or computers,

01:08:39 ►

it looks like you can rationally anticipate what’s going to happen.

01:08:43 ►

But when you realize that there are thousands of these lines of development,

01:08:49 ►

all transforming themselves, all moving towards some kind of omega point,

01:08:54 ►

then you realize that we’re in the grip of what I call a concrescence.

01:09:00 ►

And I maintain that you don’t have to believe me on this.

01:09:06 ►

You can see it from here.

01:09:09 ►

You just have to climb a high hill.

01:09:12 ►

There’s one. It’s called Psilocybin.

01:09:16 ►

There’s one. It’s called Ayahuasca.

01:09:19 ►

The view from the tops of these hills is of the Contrescence.

01:09:23 ►

from the tops of these hills is of the Contrescence. It lies now closer to us

01:09:28 ►

than the Johnson administration, for God’s sake,

01:09:31 ►

in time. And, you know, I have

01:09:35 ►

an elaborate mathematical theory to back this up, which you

01:09:39 ►

should gratefully learn you are not going to be flayed

01:09:43 ►

with this afternoon, but I think are not going to be played with this afternoon,

01:09:45 ►

but I think it’s going to become more and more important for people to delinearize their view of time,

01:09:55 ►

decondition yourself from the lie of history.

01:10:01 ►

After all, you know, if time were space, history would be a spider web.

01:10:09 ►

So bear that in mind.

01:10:13 ►

What is a concrescence?

01:10:14 ►

Ah, concrescence.

01:10:16 ►

Concrescence is a word that I cribbed from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead.

01:10:22 ►

And in fact, much of what I I say Whitehead provides the foundation for,

01:10:29 ►

he, like myself, had the idea that history grows toward what he called a nexus of completion.

01:10:50 ►

and these next sigh of completion themselves grow together into what he called the concrescence. So a concrescence is a domain of extremely high novelty in comparison to whatever it’s embedded in.

01:11:01 ►

So for instance, you walking in the wilderness, you are a

01:11:08 ►

concrescence because you are more complex than the medium you’re moving

01:11:13 ►

through. A raisin embedded in a cornmeal muffin is a concrescence. It is more

01:11:21 ►

complex than the muffin matrix in which it finds itself.

01:11:26 ►

So a concrescence is a local state of unusually high complexity.

01:11:32 ►

And a concrescence exerts a kind of attraction.

01:11:38 ►

Let’s call it the temporal equivalent of gravity.

01:11:43 ►

So that all objects in the universe are drawn through time, not space.

01:11:49 ►

Gravity draws you through time.

01:11:51 ►

Space, gravity draws you through space.

01:11:54 ►

Time draws you toward the compressions.

01:11:57 ►

This is why the universe is seen to be becoming more and more complex,

01:12:02 ►

faster and faster.

01:12:03 ►

be becoming more and more complex faster and faster.

01:12:12 ►

The idea being, you see, that each epoch being shorter than the one that preceded it, this generates an asymptotic curve of approach.

01:12:16 ►

And it’s become a cliché of our culture that time is speeding up.

01:12:23 ►

It actually is speeding up. It’s not that it seems like it’s speeding up. It looks like it’s speeding up. It is speeding up. We and our entire world are being drawn into confrontation with something that at this level is lost below the event horizon of rational apprehension.

01:12:51 ►

That’s a fancy way of saying you can’t know jack shit about it at this point in time. There will come a moment when it will rise above the horizon of rational apprehension.

01:12:59 ►

But, and I see, I really, I think that history is a set of nested resonances.

01:13:08 ►

This is what I mean when I say nothing is unannounced.

01:13:12 ►

Nothing can take you by surprise if you’ve really been paying attention

01:13:17 ►

because everything is preceded by its harbingers and heralds.

01:13:23 ►

by its harbingers and heralds.

01:13:29 ►

And we are living in an era now where there is a great deal of apocalyptic expectation,

01:13:33 ►

anticipation, and hysteria for several reasons.

01:13:39 ►

First of all, because Christianity just is hysterical in all times and places.

01:13:43 ►

Second of all, there’s a built-in goose in the calendar because we’re approaching a millennial year

01:13:47 ►

and that always exacerbates this Christian thing outrageously

01:13:52 ►

because of the promise made, you know.

01:13:56 ►

Amen, amen, I say to you, this generation shall not pass away

01:14:00 ►

before I return to, you know, clean your plow or whatever it is.

01:14:08 ►

And there is the physical evidence all around us that we are the witnesses to a planetary

01:14:15 ►

crisis that we cannot control or manage.

01:14:19 ►

I mean, it’s very hard to believe that we could manage ourselves back into a steady state.

01:14:28 ►

I mean, yeah, the Jews are talking to the Arabs

01:14:31 ►

and they’re trying to get things straightened out in South Africa,

01:14:34 ►

but what about the global population curve?

01:14:38 ►

What about the degrading atmosphere?

01:14:40 ►

I mean, you know, you don’t necessarily, you’re just as dead

01:14:44 ►

even if you’re not killed by a racist or a fascist.

01:14:49 ►

So we can get certain problems under control, but it seems certain problems are beyond our control. is when you take cores from the Greenland ice or make side-ranging radar maps of the

01:15:08 ►

Canadian shield, you discover that we are not the only force for disruption and chaos

01:15:16 ►

wandering around the universe looking for trouble.

01:15:20 ►

The universe is an incredibly chaotic and unstable place.

01:15:26 ►

Planetesimal impacts on the earth have reset the biological clock at least three times in the last billion years.

01:15:37 ►

What we have been living through for the past 50,000 years is an unusual era of meta-stability.

01:15:45 ►

And it has allowed us to create a global civilization.

01:15:50 ►

But we can’t assume that we have 50,000 years of stability ahead of us

01:15:56 ►

or even 100,000 years of stability ahead of us.

01:16:01 ►

And finally, you know, this curious resistance to the idea of the end of the world

01:16:06 ►

always amuses me because maybe the world will end and maybe it won’t end. But have you ever

01:16:12 ►

noticed that the end of your world is an absolute certainty? You’re going to go into the yawning

01:16:20 ►

grave and rather soon, I should suspect, and possibly sooner than you’re prepared for.

01:16:28 ►

So quibbling over the end of other people’s world seems like a philosophical argument compared to

01:16:35 ►

the certainty of your own finality. And I’ve been thinking about the question is out of Stephen Hawking’s book about parallel worlds and black holes and stuff.

01:16:49 ►

How can these physical oddities or anomalies be related to what I’m talking about?

01:16:56 ►

Well, first of all, we don’t know what a black hole is.

01:17:01 ►

A black hole has at the center of it a singularity. The definition of singularity is you don’t know what it is. This is a fishy way of making theories, by the way. Stephen Hawking is a prime example. At one point in his career, he was very keen for what were called mini black holes.

01:17:26 ►

And these were black holes that were under a centimeter in size.

01:17:33 ►

And a certain reading of his theory required 10 high 16 of these things in the universe.

01:17:42 ►

Well, when you realize that there’s a singularity

01:17:45 ►

at the center of each one of them,

01:17:47 ►

you say, well, hell, what kind of physics are you doing

01:17:51 ►

if you have a physical theory that has 10 high 16 exceptions

01:17:56 ►

to whatever rules it lays down?

01:17:59 ►

This isn’t a theory.

01:18:00 ►

This is a sieve that you’re waving around in the air.

01:18:05 ►

However, the black hole does bear on this

01:18:09 ►

because imagine an observer standing outside the event horizon of a black hole

01:18:18 ►

watching an object approach the black hole.

01:18:22 ►

What you see, and this is similar to the argument

01:18:25 ►

or the example I gave a few minutes ago

01:18:27 ►

of the marble on the edge of the bowl.

01:18:30 ►

What you see is this,

01:18:31 ►

let’s make it a spacecraft.

01:18:32 ►

This spacecraft that approaches

01:18:34 ►

the event horizon of the black hole

01:18:36 ►

and then it’s caught

01:18:38 ►

in the gravitational tidal forces

01:18:41 ►

of the black hole

01:18:42 ►

and it begins to go faster and faster

01:18:44 ►

around and around, faster and faster,

01:18:47 ►

and at a certain point, it disappears into the singularity.

01:18:52 ►

This is from the point of view of an observer outside the system.

01:18:56 ►

Now we flash to the stalwart captain and crew on the bridge of this starship.

01:19:03 ►

What happens from their point of view,

01:19:06 ►

what happens is as they sink below the event horizon of the black hole

01:19:10 ►

and start the descent toward the singularity,

01:19:15 ►

time and space are dilated so dramatically

01:19:19 ►

that the singularity recedes to an infinite distance

01:19:23 ►

and you fall forever toward it.

01:19:27 ►

Well, what I would like to suggest based on, well, here’s what I’d like to suggest.

01:19:35 ►

This is one way of thinking about it,

01:19:39 ►

that our planet is on a collision course with something

01:19:45 ►

which we actually at our present state of knowledge don’t have a word for.

01:19:51 ►

A black hole is simply a gravitationally massive object,

01:19:58 ►

so massive that no light can leave it.

01:20:02 ►

What I’m talking about is something like that, except that it isn’t so much

01:20:09 ►

gravitationally massive as temporally massive. We are being sucked into the body of eternity,

01:20:17 ►

and I think it’s going to happen very soon. Now, an obvious objection that someone would make to this, it’s a probabilistic objection, is they would say, don’t you find it rather unusual that your own very minute and finite life should occur so close to this moment of universal dramatic climax?

01:20:42 ►

universal dramatic climax?

01:20:44 ►

Doesn’t that clue you to the fact that you might be slightly deluded?

01:20:47 ►

To which I reply, not at all.

01:20:52 ►

Because I think of this event horizon

01:20:57 ►

as a series of like ghost horizons.

01:21:02 ►

And once you enter into history,

01:21:05 ►

what history is,

01:21:08 ►

is the outer shell of the gravitational field

01:21:11 ►

of the attractor of the concrescence.

01:21:14 ►

In other words,

01:21:15 ►

history is the disturbance in nature

01:21:22 ►

which precedes the concrescence.

01:21:26 ►

It precedes it by only 50,000 years.

01:21:30 ►

A microsecond.

01:21:32 ►

So a geological microsecond before all life is melted down in the presence of the singularity,

01:21:41 ►

there is a curious interface zone that is not the singularity. There is a curious interface zone

01:21:45 ►

that is not the singularity

01:21:48 ►

and not the absence of the singularity.

01:21:52 ►

It’s the singularity in the act of becoming.

01:21:57 ►

And it only lasts, as I say,

01:21:59 ►

a geological microsecond,

01:22:01 ►

50,000 years.

01:22:03 ►

But if you happen to be born inside that microsecond, 50,000 years. But if you happen to be born inside that microsecond,

01:22:08 ►

then you have a very curious perspective on the phenomenon indeed

01:22:13 ►

because you observe it from inside the shell of the historical vehicle.

01:22:19 ►

Here’s the point I want to make.

01:22:21 ►

If you have a universe like that, 72 billion years in duration, it

01:22:28 ►

will undergo half of its evolution in the last 30 seconds of its existence. Can you

01:22:37 ►

imagine? Now this is what the scientists do, except they spin it around. And that’s why

01:22:41 ►

is what the scientists do except they spin it around.

01:22:44 ►

And that’s why,

01:22:45 ►

I can’t remember who wrote it,

01:22:47 ►

but the book called

01:22:48 ►

The First Three Minutes,

01:22:50 ►

Steven Weinberg’s book,

01:22:51 ►

The First Three Minutes,

01:22:52 ►

a book about the first three minutes

01:22:54 ►

in the life of the universe

01:22:55 ►

where he leads you through

01:22:57 ►

all this complex physics

01:22:59 ►

as matter is crystallizing out

01:23:02 ►

of hyperspace and all this stuff.

01:23:04 ►

All I’m saying is let’s put the complexity in the more likely end of the cycle.

01:23:11 ►

Let’s put it at the end when after billions of years of evolution

01:23:15 ►

and all kinds of complexity and that sort of thing, everything comes together.

01:23:21 ►

So this kind of a cycle, if we were actually living in a universe like this, could completely unfold itself according to its natural laws and yet provide a miracle, the miracle of the concrescence. That’s why I’m so keen on boundary dissolution. The more boundaries that have dissolved,

01:23:47 ►

the closer to concrescence we are.

01:23:50 ►

And when you finally reach it,

01:23:52 ►

there are no boundaries.

01:23:54 ►

You are eternity.

01:23:57 ►

You are all space and time.

01:24:00 ►

You are alive and dead,

01:24:01 ►

here and there,

01:24:03 ►

before and after. The singularity is a coincidencia appositorum.

01:24:07 ►

It can simultaneously coexist in states which are contradictory.

01:24:13 ►

It is, you know, Thomas Aquinas’ vision of God.

01:24:17 ►

It’s something which transcends rational apprehension.

01:24:28 ►

But it gives the universe meaning because all process then can be seen to be a seeking and a moving

01:24:35 ►

and an effort to approximate, connect with, and attend to

01:24:39 ►

this transcendental object at the end of time.

01:24:44 ►

One way of thinking of it is like those bar balls that they hang in discos

01:24:49 ►

that send out thousands of reflections off everybody and everything in the room.

01:24:56 ►

Well, think of the transcendental object at the end of time as that bar ball,

01:25:00 ►

and then those reflected, twinkling, refractive lights are religions, scientific theories,

01:25:09 ►

gurus, works of art, poetry, great orgasms, great soufflés, great paintings.

01:25:17 ►

In other words, anything which has, we even use this phrase, anything which has a spark of divinity in it is in fact

01:25:26 ►

referent to the original source of the sparks of all divinity, which is the

01:25:33 ►

compressed experience of life and mind after billions of billions of years of

01:25:41 ►

unfolding itself within the confines of three-dimensional space.

01:25:46 ►

And you can make this vision your friend through psychedelics,

01:25:53 ►

because as I said at the beginning of this rave, you can see it from here.

01:25:57 ►

Of course, not if you have your face plunged in your stock portfolio.

01:26:02 ►

You’re not going to see it, no.

01:26:03 ►

in your stock portfolio, you’re not going to see it, no.

01:26:09 ►

But if you will go up on the mountain and take five dry grams in silent darkness and pray through the night, you will absolutely, guaranteed,

01:26:14 ►

come into a sense of this thing.

01:26:18 ►

And it’s real. And history is simply a perturbation on the surface of the waters of time

01:26:30 ►

as we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and completion.

01:26:40 ►

And the psychedelics raise you out of the historical matrix and give you a sense of participation in this transcendental reality.

01:26:53 ►

It’s the essence of religion. It’s the essence of psychic balance.

01:26:57 ►

It’s the source of shamanic power and mental health.

01:27:01 ►

and mental health.

01:27:08 ►

Thousands of these molecules are arriving at the synaptic site of activity,

01:27:15 ►

elbowing aside the local population of the endogenous neurotransmitters, getting them out of the way, plugging themselves into the receptor site

01:27:21 ►

and beginning to lift the electron spin resonance level and push them in new directions.

01:27:27 ►

And you can almost hear it doing this.

01:27:32 ►

And then beyond the hypnagogia, there is the actual trip.

01:27:39 ►

And it usually is encountered, you have to go through what Mercier Léod called the rupture of the mundane plane.

01:27:49 ►

This means that the world has to, like, falls information laden, high content hallucinations occur.

01:28:13 ►

And many people have taken psychedelic drugs and never gotten past the hypnagogia.

01:28:18 ►

They don’t know that there’s something out there besides dancing mice and spinning geometric wheels and stuff

01:28:25 ►

like that but beyond that you cross over and that’s the trip the typical model of

01:28:32 ►

a trip now what happens with all of these things to greater and lesser

01:28:37 ►

degrees LSD psilocybin mescaline ayahuasca is and I’ve never actually ever heard an

01:28:48 ►

explanation for this for some reason the experience comes in waves there’s the

01:28:55 ►

first wave that makes sense that’s the drug taking hold but why then, after 20 minutes of unbelievably outlandish hallucination,

01:29:07 ►

will it like all stop?

01:29:10 ►

You know, and it’s like a moment ago you were screaming for mercy.

01:29:14 ►

Now, you look around and you say, I’m down.

01:29:19 ►

Am I down? I seem to be down.

01:29:22 ►

You know, and sometimes you seem to come all the way down, like on LSD.

01:29:27 ►

It’s like it totally turns off sometimes.

01:29:29 ►

And then about five minutes later, it comes again, and you get another wave.

01:29:35 ►

And if you’ve taken a really dedicated hit of ayahuasca, for example,

01:29:42 ►

you will get like as many as five or six of these waves throughout the evening.

01:29:48 ►

And the first one is usually the strongest.

01:29:50 ►

If you take an effective but not strong dose of ayahuasca,

01:29:59 ►

you will get one pass.

01:30:03 ►

And then if you take slightly less, you’ll get one pass and it will be weak.

01:30:08 ►

So if you take ayahuasca, at all times pay attention

01:30:12 ►

because you may be looking at something thinking,

01:30:15 ►

well, this is not so interesting.

01:30:16 ►

I’m sure it’s going to be much better in an hour.

01:30:19 ►

And you may actually be looking at as good as it’s going to get that evening.

01:30:24 ►

And psilocybin also comes in waves like this. be looking at as good as it’s going to get that evening.

01:30:28 ►

And psilocybin also comes in waves like this.

01:30:30 ►

LSD very dramatically.

01:30:37 ►

DMT not, because DMT is one enormous brief wave.

01:30:41 ►

I mean, DMT sort of brings all the issues together. And the way I think of these psychedelics experientially is as a series of concentric circles. Maybe like the outer circle is mescaline and the next circle in is LSD and the next circle in is psilocybin and the next circle in is psilocybin, and the next circle in is DMT.

01:31:07 ►

It’s almost as though the psychedelic experience is whatever drug or whatever substance you take,

01:31:16 ►

it leads you deeper and deeper in the same direction.

01:31:21 ►

And, of course, with DMT, you not only hear the aliens,

01:31:25 ►

you see the aliens,

01:31:27 ►

you not only see the aliens, you become

01:31:30 ►

an alien. It seems

01:31:32 ►

to be the most radical

01:31:33 ►

of all of these things in terms

01:31:36 ►

of the experience. It’s also

01:31:38 ►

the most natural

01:31:39 ►

of all of these things.

01:31:42 ►

It also is the safest.

01:31:45 ►

It stands the ordinary standards of courage and risk on their head

01:31:50 ►

because here it is, it’s the most terrifying,

01:31:54 ►

the most spectacular, and the safest.

01:31:59 ►

None of us, including myself, have fully come to grips with this paradox we would rather

01:32:06 ►

do less safe less scary drugs I think that DMT is is pretty impressive in most

01:32:15 ►

situations well no I just I think they’re completely different realms of human activity. I can’t, I mean, meditation, you don’t hallucinate. You don’t, they say you do, but they aren’t very convincing. And plus, the monks then rush over and explain that you’re doing it wrong. So, you know, what’s the deal?

01:32:42 ►

so what’s the deal I think

01:32:44 ►

if by meditation

01:32:47 ►

you mean lying down

01:32:48 ►

and closing your eyes

01:32:51 ►

or sitting up and closing your eyes a lot

01:32:53 ►

I do that a lot

01:32:54 ►

and I like it

01:32:56 ►

but I would never confuse it

01:32:58 ►

with the psychedelic enterprise

01:33:00 ►

pardon me

01:33:03 ►

it’s only my opinion, but I really don’t.

01:33:11 ►

I think that all of these spiritual techniques are not substitutions for the psychedelic experience, but trade-offs.

01:33:27 ►

You know, I mean, organized religion is as concerned with controlling social groups as organized politics is.

01:33:35 ►

And the visionary or ecstatic experience is unsettling to the religious mentality.

01:33:48 ►

You know, even among fundamentalist Christians,

01:33:53 ►

if you’re not one, they all seem more or less alike. But if you move into that world,

01:33:56 ►

you discover that they are very strongly polarized in two directions.

01:34:01 ►

Those who are scripturalists and those who are experientialists the glossolalia

01:34:08 ►

is the speaking in tongues the holy rollers that sort of thing and the scripturalists are very

01:34:14 ►

uncomfortable around the experientialist because to them it looks like demonic possession and they

01:34:20 ►

get really agitated about that yeah well I think that all of these techniques, like mantra, yantra, tantra, whatever,

01:34:31 ►

they work incredibly well in the presence of psychedelics,

01:34:36 ►

leading me to suppose that what these are are tools that were developed in the paleolithic world of psychedelic magic and all we have now are these tools,

01:34:49 ►

but we don’t have the original engine that drove them.

01:34:53 ►

Yes, I am very bored by spiritual practice

01:34:57 ►

unless I’ve taken a psychedelic

01:35:00 ►

and then, you know, mantric chanting

01:35:03 ►

is beyond the power of mind to

01:35:08 ►

encompass or describe sex isn’t bad either and you know it seems to be a

01:35:17 ►

general functional enhancer is what it isoustical driving is also a tried and true tradition.

01:35:26 ►

But see, it’s not about the exclusivity of method,

01:35:30 ►

but the combination of method.

01:35:33 ►

I mean, what you want to do is beat your drum

01:35:36 ►

while sitting in yab-yum,

01:35:39 ►

while stoned on X,

01:35:41 ►

while at the holy mountain,

01:35:42 ►

while the astrological configuration

01:35:45 ►

is correct and then

01:35:48 ►

line it all up and then push it through.

01:35:52 ►

That’s the way to do it, I think.

01:35:57 ►

Well,

01:35:58 ►

again, it goes back to this function

01:36:00 ►

of boundary dissolution. Creativity,

01:36:03 ►

if you analyze what do we mean when we say that,

01:36:06 ►

it basically means being able to transcend the ordinary.

01:36:12 ►

You see it in a way nobody else ever saw it, whatever it is,

01:36:16 ►

and so that’s creativity.

01:36:19 ►

Psychedelics, by dissolving the boundaries of cultural expectation,

01:36:24 ►

let you see things in new ways.

01:36:28 ►

I was in a situation recently where it was evening

01:36:32 ►

and silhouetted against the sky were flame cypress trees,

01:36:39 ►

but they were all black.

01:36:42 ►

And I was looking at them.

01:36:43 ►

I’ve seen flame cypress trees against twilight skies many times.

01:36:48 ►

You all have as well.

01:36:50 ►

And suddenly it was like there was this shift.

01:36:54 ►

And I didn’t see it as a flame cypress tree anymore.

01:36:58 ►

I saw it as black dust pouring out of a certain point of the sky and cascading like a waterfall.

01:37:07 ►

And I was looking at three waterfalls of micro-fine black powder

01:37:11 ►

pouring out of points about 60 feet above the ground.

01:37:16 ►

Well, I didn’t even mention it to the person I was with,

01:37:19 ►

but I just noticed this psychedelic perception.

01:37:26 ►

The other night, this was really interesting to me.

01:37:29 ►

The other night, just as I was falling asleep,

01:37:31 ►

a phrase came into my mind that I liked, but I didn’t understand it.

01:37:39 ►

In fact, I didn’t think it meant anything.

01:37:42 ►

I just thought it was an interesting phrase.

01:37:44 ►

And I thought about it for about a minute,

01:37:47 ►

and then it did the same thing that the flame cypress tree did.

01:37:50 ►

It went ploink, and this other dimension sprouted out of it.

01:37:55 ►

And I understood it, and I thought this is a very interesting idea.

01:38:00 ►

And I’ve never thought it before.

01:38:02 ►

And I’ve never thought it before.

01:38:11 ►

The thought was, if time were space, then history is a cobweb.

01:38:14 ►

That was all it was.

01:38:17 ►

But I don’t take these leaps very often. So I was delighted because I knew a moment would come

01:38:23 ►

when I could lay it on a group of people like I’ve just done.

01:38:28 ►

So it’s a catalyst for cognitive activity.

01:38:33 ►

That’s what the mushroom is.

01:38:34 ►

Dance, drama, song, painting, body expression, creativity,

01:38:42 ►

and simply the passive act of understanding.

01:38:46 ►

This is what it does for us, and this is what we love to do.

01:38:50 ►

I mean, we are creatures of the mind.

01:38:53 ►

You know, they talk about virtual reality as some future technology that’s going to change everything.

01:38:59 ►

We’ve been living in a virtual reality for the past 6,000 years.

01:39:04 ►

I mean, look at cities like New York and London and Los Angeles.

01:39:09 ►

I mean, every nature has disappeared.

01:39:12 ►

Everything you see is a human idea downloaded into material existence.

01:39:19 ►

It’s entirely virtual.

01:39:21 ►

It doesn’t disappear at the punch of a dial,

01:39:33 ►

It’s entirely virtual. It doesn’t disappear at the punch of a dial, but it is as virtual as the virtual realities that will eventually be made out of light behind goggles. tend to become traps, and yet they can be the platforms for enormous freedom

01:39:48 ►

if you understand what it’s all about.

01:39:55 ►

And what it’s all about is you.

01:39:59 ►

You are the center of the mandala.

01:40:01 ►

You are not marginalized in any way.

01:40:07 ►

And the message

01:40:08 ►

that the culture gives us

01:40:10 ►

is that we are marginal.

01:40:12 ►

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got

01:40:13 ►

a hundred million dollars.

01:40:16 ►

Fortune magazine will inform you

01:40:18 ►

that so do ten thousand other people

01:40:20 ►

on the North American continent.

01:40:22 ►

There’s nothing special about you.

01:40:24 ►

And so we are constantly this is part of the democratic legacy we are constantly

01:40:30 ►

told you’re not special special isn’t special anybody could do it what the

01:40:37 ►

psychedelic and so then when you look for guidance direction mentorship we

01:40:43 ►

always look toward institution.

01:40:46 ►

Well, I’ll go to the university

01:40:47 ►

or I’ll go to the army

01:40:49 ►

or I’ll do something.

01:40:51 ►

Somebody will tell me,

01:40:52 ►

will give me a larger purpose.

01:40:54 ►

But it’s really yourself

01:40:56 ►

that is the final arbiter.

01:40:59 ►

And if you keep yourself as the final arbiter,

01:41:03 ►

you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion.

01:41:09 ►

Now, the problem with this is that it makes you feel bad to not be infected by cultural illusion

01:41:15 ►

because it’s called alienation.

01:41:19 ►

But this is, I can’t solve all problems. The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid.

01:41:31 ►

So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.

01:41:38 ►

I grapple with this because I’m a parent.

01:41:42 ►

And I think anybody who has children, you come to this realization,

01:41:47 ►

you know, what will it be?

01:41:50 ►

Alienated, cynical, intellectual,

01:41:53 ►

or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer

01:41:56 ►

of the horse shit being handed down from on high.

01:42:00 ►

There is not much choice in there, you see.

01:42:04 ►

And we all want our children

01:42:06 ►

to be well adjusted it’s unfortunately there’s nothing to be well adjusted to

01:42:11 ►

so that’s a real problem and I really believe that extra environmentalism

01:42:19 ►

which is a nicer though longer word for alienation, is defensible and shouldn’t be thought of as pathological.

01:42:28 ►

What I noticed in going to the Amazon in Indonesia and these places

01:42:34 ►

is that the person you want to get to is the shaman.

01:42:39 ►

But the shaman is different from everybody else.

01:42:42 ►

Like when you go into an Amazonian tribe that’s way upriver or something,

01:42:47 ►

the people behave the way you would expect naive, untraveled people to behave.

01:42:53 ►

They want to touch your Gore-Tex and, you know, look at your camera

01:43:00 ►

and look through the binoculars and fiddle with the can opener and all that.

01:43:06 ►

No shaman would ever stoop to such behavior.

01:43:10 ►

A shaman knows that cultures are provisional and is interested in you as a person.

01:43:18 ►

The other people don’t even see you as a person because you’re huge, white, strange-smelling and incomprehensible.

01:43:24 ►

The shaman

01:43:25 ►

sees you as a person and it’s because he is alienated the reason shamans can do

01:43:32 ►

their magic is because they are outside the belief system I really think that

01:43:38 ►

that’s true everyone else believes you know that the guy in the other village can send the mojo and mess with

01:43:46 ►

you. The shaman knows that that’s not quite how it works. And so then he, as it were,

01:43:54 ►

can go behind the board and fix the cultural TV that everybody else is just watching. So

01:44:01 ►

I think alienation, extraism shamanism whatever you

01:44:06 ►

want to call it is simply individualism in the context of cultures that don’t

01:44:12 ►

value individualism and cultures don’t you know it said nature acts to preserve

01:44:18 ►

the species cultures act to preserve the illusions of the population.

01:44:29 ►

They’re not interested in you if you’re an Einstein or a Jackson Pollock unless they can fit you in to the pre-established systems of commerce

01:44:34 ►

and canons of aesthetic order and so forth and so on.

01:44:38 ►

And then that’s called being civilized.

01:44:42 ►

The question is, what’s with licking frogs? I’m not sure I got it right,

01:44:49 ►

but well, you know, you kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince and you probably

01:44:56 ►

lick a lot more. Toads, not frogs, let’s give the devil his due here.

01:45:08 ►

Toads of certain species produce a relative of DMT in large glands in their necks.

01:45:18 ►

Why this is, is not clear.

01:45:31 ►

is not clear considering that this exudate or this material will kill a dog if the dog picks up a toad like that in his mouth within minutes.

01:45:35 ►

It’s pretty spectacular.

01:45:37 ►

It’s reasonable to suppose that then this is just a defense that has been evolved.

01:45:43 ►

Some of you may have seen the dinosaur in Jurassic Park that spits poison in your face.

01:45:49 ►

We’re talking something like that.

01:45:52 ►

The toad creates this five methoxy DMT in this gland, and when the glands are squeezed,

01:46:00 ►

it comes out on the surface of the toad’s skin.

01:46:03 ►

It’s a near relative of DMT.

01:46:08 ►

Speaking from my personal battery of many prejudices, I would say I don’t care for it.

01:46:17 ►

It complicates my job enormously because people do this stuff and they think, A, that it is DMT,

01:46:26 ►

or B, if they’re slightly better informed, that it’s just like DMT.

01:46:32 ►

It is, in fact, chemically called 5-methoxy-DMT.

01:46:36 ►

However, it is nothing like DMT.

01:46:41 ►

It’s as much like DMT as radio is like television. And that’s where the difference lies. The 5-MEO does not trigger the most spectacular effect associated with DMT, which is these three-dimensional crawling hallucinations that come out of the woodwork and reveal the true nature of reality to you.

01:47:06 ►

When you take 5-MeO, DMT, you have all of the physical presentation of DMT.

01:47:14 ►

There’s a sense of a kind of light anesthesia through the limbs.

01:47:22 ►

There’s a sense of falling forward into a void.

01:47:27 ►

There’s a sense of losing body boundary.

01:47:30 ►

Now, at that point in DMT, those symptoms would give way to the trip.

01:47:37 ►

At that point in 5-MeO-DMT, those symptoms give way to the beginning of the come down.

01:47:44 ►

those symptoms give way to the beginning of the come down.

01:47:51 ►

And people who have never taken DMT sometimes rave about 5-MeO and say, you know, this is the most astonishing thing I’ve ever happened to.

01:47:54 ►

People who are familiar with DMT can yawn their way all the way through it

01:48:00 ►

because you’re braced for the DMT thing.

01:48:04 ►

I mean, you think, oh my God, it feels just like it. Here it comes. It’s going to be upon me. Five, four, three, two, one, plus one, plus two, plus three, plus four, plus five. It’s not coming in. It doesn’t come in. And then 5-MeO is fatal in sheep as well as dogs, spectacularly fatal in sheep.

01:48:33 ►

And so I guess if you’re a sheep, it’s counterindicated,

01:48:37 ►

doesn’t seem to be harmful in human beings.

01:48:40 ►

But with so little data available, I think maybe we should, you know, there are

01:48:46 ►

old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists, but there are no old, bold psychedelicists.

01:48:56 ►

Have I had any contact with the government?

01:49:00 ►

Not exactly.

01:49:01 ►

Well, up until a week ago, the answer to this question was yes.

01:49:06 ►

I mean, no.

01:49:08 ►

When I got home from Esalen the last time, there was a really funny letter,

01:49:13 ►

which I haven’t quite figured out how to respond to.

01:49:16 ►

Dear Mr. McKenna, I’m an officer of the California State Police,

01:49:26 ►

officer of the California State Police, fascinated with DMT,

01:49:31 ►

and recently read the interview with you in the San Francisco Chronicle.

01:49:35 ►

I wonder if you would be willing to meet with me and have coffee so we can discuss this at your earliest possible convenience.

01:49:41 ►

So, what I did was fairly chicken shit, actually.

01:49:47 ►

I found a copy of Food of the Gods, and I sent it off, and I said,

01:49:53 ►

this is my latest book, or this is a book of mine.

01:49:55 ►

It deals in part with DMT.

01:49:58 ►

Give it a quick read, and if you’re still interested in a get-together, call me.

01:50:04 ►

read and if you’re still interested in a get-together, call me.

01:50:10 ►

So I think, I don’t know exactly how to interpret this.

01:50:15 ►

I’ve always felt that the reason the government left me alone was because I’m an intellectual.

01:50:26 ►

And in the United States, that is the most pathetic, ineffective form of non-entity known to exist.

01:50:33 ►

I think that the greatest period of American creativity in literature and in other areas too, arguably, in the 20th century, was the 20s.

01:50:41 ►

And that’s because an expatriate community conducted the critique of

01:50:45 ►

American society from a foreign vantage point in that case Paris and I I think

01:50:52 ►

that that in spite of the Clinton hiatus that the politics of light have not yet

01:51:00 ►

come to settle on the land of Jefferson and that we should be prepared on a moment’s

01:51:07 ►

notice, basically, to decamp to Prague and conduct all this from there.

01:51:15 ►

Also, Prague was the capital of European civilization before the Thirty Years’ War, before the

01:51:23 ►

rise of modern science.

01:51:25 ►

It’s an Italianate city untouched by either world war.

01:51:30 ►

It’s a beautiful place.

01:51:35 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:51:38 ►

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

01:51:44 ►

So, do we all now decamp for Prague?

01:51:47 ►

I hear it’s a beautiful place.

01:51:49 ►

And all kidding aside,

01:51:51 ►

I’ve always heard nothing but good things about Prague,

01:51:53 ►

and I wouldn’t be surprised

01:51:55 ►

if we had a few fellow salonners there as well.

01:51:58 ►

Now, I don’t know if you noticed this or not,

01:52:00 ►

but it, in fact, may be common knowledge

01:52:03 ►

that I’ve just never been aware of

01:52:05 ►

before now. But at about the 15 or 16 minute mark into the talk we just heard, Terrence very clearly

01:52:12 ►

says, these machine elves, these dribbling basketball things. Now am I wrong or did he

01:52:19 ►

clearly equate the machine elves with the self-dribbling basketballs. Now, I may be the last one to know this, but up until now,

01:52:27 ►

I’d always thought that they were two different entities that he was talking about.

01:52:31 ►

So now I’m going to have to go back and re-listen to a bunch of his DMT talks

01:52:35 ►

and see if this gives me any new ideas about some of the things he talks about.

01:52:40 ►

And, of course, that’s what I love about Terrence McKenna.

01:52:42 ►

Each time I hear him talk, I seem to hear something new, even if I’ve heard the talk before.

01:52:48 ►

Now, since this talk was so long, I’m not going to have time for an Occupy segment this week.

01:52:53 ►

But there is just one little story that I don’t want you to miss.

01:52:57 ►

It seems that last week, a group of senior citizen activists, all women, ages 69 to 82,

01:53:08 ►

and calling themselves the Wild Old Women,

01:53:13 ►

well, they staged a protest at a San Francisco branch of Bank America and succeeded in causing them to close their doors.

01:53:18 ►

Now, the part of this story that tickles my fancy,

01:53:20 ►

actually, I didn’t read or see anywhere,

01:53:23 ►

but I’m just thinking about maybe one of the

01:53:25 ►

young one percenters walking by in an expensive suit and shouting to the women that they were

01:53:31 ►

just a bunch of old hippies who should get a job. That seems to be what most of the one percenters

01:53:37 ►

are shouting at the occupiers. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if there hasn’t already

01:53:41 ►

been some street theater along those lines. Anyway, to close on kind of an Occupy note,

01:53:47 ►

I’m going to suggest that you re-listen to this talk we just heard

01:53:51 ►

and try to put it into the context of the Occupy movement.

01:53:55 ►

And, for example, right now I’ll play you just a little snippet of this talk

01:53:59 ►

to remind you of how in tune with today’s times the thought of Terrence McKenna still is.

01:54:05 ►

You can get a lot rowdier than you are.

01:54:09 ►

You can make a lot more waves.

01:54:12 ►

There’s been too much politesse and too much parlor etiquette exercised recently by the counterculture.

01:54:25 ►

It’s perfectly all right to mix things up.

01:54:28 ►

It’s perfectly all right to try and accelerate the plot.

01:54:33 ►

This will move your character nearer and nearer to the center of the action.

01:54:39 ►

And people have asked me then, is the goal to make yourself the novel about you?

01:54:46 ►

Is the goal to make the novel about yourself?

01:54:49 ►

I don’t think so.

01:54:51 ►

The goal is to become the author of the novel.

01:54:55 ►

Then you can write any damn ending you want for your character or any other.

01:55:01 ►

And this becoming the author is this psychedelic detachment. And suddenly you go from

01:55:08 ►

being a chessman, a chessman on the board, to the chess master, looking at the board. It’s

01:55:16 ►

empowering. It’s self-control. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:55:24 ►

Be well, my friends, and be self-empowered. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:55:28 ►

Be well, my friends, and be self-empowered.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

296 - The World and It’s Double Part 2

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:31 ► §

00:00:36 ► §

00:00:39 ► §

00:00:43 ► §

00:00:47 ► §

00:00:53 ► §

00:01:05 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:15 ► §

00:01:22 ► §

00:01:27 ► §

00:01:32 ► §

00:01:34 ► §

00:01:38 ► §

00:01:42 ► §

00:01:45 ► §

00:01:49 ► §

00:01:54 ► §

00:01:58 ► §

00:02:01 ► §

00:02:06 ► §

00:02:11 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:25 ► §

00:02:32 ► §

00:02:37 ► §

00:02:41 ► §

00:02:43 ► §

00:02:46 ► §

00:02:47 ► §

00:02:48 ► §

00:02:50 ► §

00:02:53 ► §

00:02:56 ► §

00:02:57 ► §

00:02:59 ► §

00:03:01 ► §

00:03:03 ► §

00:03:05 ► §

00:03:07 ► §

00:03:09 ► §

00:03:11 ► §

00:03:14 ► §

00:03:17 ► §

00:03:18 ► §

00:03:20 ► §

00:03:22 ► §

00:03:23 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:49 ► §

00:03:51 ► §

00:03:55 ► §

00:04:01 ► §

00:04:08 ► §

00:04:17 ► §

00:04:31 ► §

00:04:37 ► §

00:04:46 ► §

00:04:48 ► §

00:04:50 ► §

00:04:52 ► §

00:04:54 ► §

00:04:56 ► §

00:04:57 ► §

00:04:59 ► §

00:05:02 ► §

00:05:04 ► §

00:05:05 ► §

00:05:10 ► §

00:05:12 ► §

00:05:15 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:31 ►

00:00:36 ►

00:00:39 ►

00:00:43 ►

00:00:47 ►

00:00:53 ►

00:01:05 ►

00:01:12 ►

00:01:15 ►

00:01:22 ►

00:01:27 ►

00:01:32 ►

00:01:34 ►

00:01:38 ►

00:01:42 ►

00:01:45 ►

00:01:49 ►

00:01:54 ►

00:01:58 ►

00:02:01 ►

00:02:06 ►

00:02:11 ►

00:02:21 ►

00:02:25 ►

00:02:32 ►

00:02:37 ►

00:02:41 ►

00:02:43 ►

00:02:46 ►

00:02:47 ►

00:02:48 ►

00:02:50 ►

00:02:53 ►

00:02:56 ►

00:02:57 ►

00:02:59 ►

00:03:01 ►

00:03:03 ►

00:03:05 ►

00:03:07 ►

00:03:09 ►

00:03:11 ►

00:03:14 ►

00:03:17 ►

00:03:18 ►

00:03:20 ►

00:03:22 ►

00:03:23 ►

00:03:45 ►

00:03:49 ►

00:03:51 ►

00:03:55 ►

00:04:01 ►

00:04:08 ►

00:04:17 ►

00:04:31 ►

00:04:37 ►

00:04:46 ►

00:04:48 ►

00:04:50 ►

00:04:52 ►

00:04:54 ►

00:04:56 ►

00:04:57 ►

00:04:59 ►

00:05:02 ►

00:05:04 ►

00:05:05 ►

00:05:10 ►

00:05:12 ►

00:05:15 ►

00:05:18 ►

00:05:22 ►

00:05:27 ►