Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
This is the first part of an evening lecture given by Terence McKenna in early February, 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
“Our [Western] civilization touches everyone on this planet. We are involved in a species-wide crisis, and it’s a crisis of adaptation and intelligence. If we can meet the crisis, if we can re-design the cultural machinery so that it can glide in to the new value systems that a limited Earth, and an electronically activated population demands, then we can use the crisis as a stepping stone to further exploration of the universe, further evolution, further unfolding.”
“Nature is an engine for the production of extinct species.”
“The contradiction that history confronts us with is a deeper exploration of the psychedelic experience. And the psychedelic experience is something incredibly alien to the Western mind. It is, in fact, taboo.”
“The psychedelic experience is not built in to your biology the way orgasm, or sleep, or hunger, or something like that is. It’s a physiological option that involves forming a symbiotic relationship with a plant.”
“We seem to be the creature that can download the ideas, the Platonic perfect forms of a higher dimension, into the world of matter. And so where we are there is an interfacing between the world of ordinary nature and some kind of transcendent force.”
“Speaking about the unspeakable means stretching the envelop of what can be said. When new things can be said new plans can be laid, new directions can be found out of a crisis.”
“Science has steered us deeply into the notion that nature is soulless and spiritless. And the practice of this idea has led us to the brink of catastrophe, global and species and ecological catastrophe.”
“Psychedelics are catalysts for the human imagination. That very simply is what they are.”
“[Biological] nature is a seamless community of intentionality. Nature is a gene-swarm covering the surface of the planet.”
“I believe that shamanism without psychedelics is shamanism on its way to becoming religion.”
“So we are like dysfunctional children. Something terrible happened to us in the childhood of our intelligence. We lost our connection to the Gaian matrix, to the goddess mother of the Earth who gives coherency to life, and when the connection was lost we fell into history.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:25 ►
And I am happy to announce that all of our websites have now been moved to a dedicated server at a new hosting company.
00:00:33 ►
And hopefully things will now settle out a bit on the technological front so that I can get back to doing these podcasts.
00:00:40 ►
And I want to be sure to thank those fellow salonners who either bought one of my books
00:00:45 ►
or who made a direct donation to the salon in these past weeks.
00:00:48 ►
Your support at this time was very crucial in helping me get all this done,
00:00:53 ►
and I cannot thank you enough.
00:00:56 ►
So in celebration of being back online and in my podcasting mode,
00:01:00 ►
I’m going to kick it off with a new recording of Terrence McKenna,
00:01:04 ►
one that’s
00:01:05 ►
never been on the net before, at least as best as I can tell. This talk came to me from our
00:01:11 ►
fellow salonner, Kevin Esperson, who actually made a video recording of the event and sent me a copy
00:01:17 ►
of it. And in the follow-on podcast to this, I’ll have more to say about Kevin. So anyway, I’ve
00:01:24 ►
stripped out the audio part and
00:01:26 ►
we’ll be playing it in just a moment, at least the first hour of it, and the second hour will
00:01:31 ►
be coming out in my next podcast, which I’ll get out as quickly as I can, hopefully tomorrow.
00:01:37 ►
I think that this talk was actually a free lecture that Terrence gave on the evening before the second annual Prophets Conference,
00:01:46 ►
which was held in early February of 1994 on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
00:01:52 ►
In the talk itself, Terrence says that the title is Speaking the Unspeakable,
00:01:58 ►
but as you can already see, I have changed the title to better reflect the actual topic of this talk.
00:02:05 ►
And while I’ve heard him praise the value of these sacred medicines before,
00:02:09 ►
this may be his most hard-hitting promotion of the importance of properly using these catalysts for the imagination at this particular time in human history.
00:02:20 ►
Now, in the interest of keeping these MP3 files to a manageable size, as I said, I’m breaking this recording into two podcasts, but I’m going to keep my own commentary to a minimum so as to get it out to you as quickly as I can.
00:02:34 ►
Therefore, without any further ado, here once again is Terrence McKenna.
00:02:43 ►
Well, it’s a pleasure to be with you in Maui.
00:02:48 ►
I’ve been trying to figure out since the first of the year whether I was dead or not,
00:02:52 ►
because I seem to be living in heaven.
00:02:55 ►
I just go from one wonderful thing to the next.
00:03:01 ►
I was in Portugal the first two weeks of January doing a science fiction film,
00:03:08 ►
flew from there to the revolt in Chiapas, home to do the mail, and then back to my home
00:03:17 ►
on the nearby larger and more volcanically active island to the east. And now I’m here with you this evening.
00:03:28 ►
Thanks to Robin Johnson and Gary
00:03:31 ►
who did the wonderful introduction,
00:03:34 ►
pleasant in its brevity.
00:03:38 ►
And I’m here to talk to you this evening
00:03:41 ►
about speaking about the unspeakable,
00:03:45 ►
which seems to leave the field fairly broadly open
00:03:49 ►
for the last-minute adjustments.
00:03:54 ►
Speaking about the unspeakable,
00:03:57 ►
it’s both a joke and a pointer
00:04:00 ►
toward a very serious set of subjects.
00:04:06 ►
First of all, the unspeakable is that which lies beyond the domain of language.
00:04:13 ►
And when I titled the lecture, I was thinking of Wittgenstein,
00:04:17 ►
who mentioned the unspeakable, the things which exceed our grasp.
00:04:23 ►
The other meaning of the unspeakable is the things we’d rather not speak about,
00:04:29 ►
our dilemma, our history,
00:04:33 ►
and how hard it will be to create solutions to our dilemma.
00:04:39 ►
So I thought with those two understandings of the meaning of the unspeakable in place,
00:04:48 ►
I would launch myself into a kind of meandering diatribe,
00:04:54 ►
which will go on for a while, and then we’ll take a break,
00:05:00 ►
and then we’ll entertain questions from the floor.
00:05:04 ►
So that’s the basic, that’s the formula.
00:05:08 ►
I’m sure it’s no news here that we are approaching the third millennium,
00:05:15 ►
that a thousand years of Christian civilization is percolating to its end, that we are on the brink of some kind of turning in the cosmic machinery.
00:05:31 ►
And though historians think of history as an endlessly fluctuating and trendlessly fluctuating process. In fact, I think for anyone with half an eye,
00:05:47 ►
it’s clear that history is some kind of
00:05:51 ►
self-consuming process that occurs
00:05:56 ►
in geological and biological time
00:06:01 ►
in a kind of instant.
00:06:04 ►
It is not something that can be built into the life
00:06:08 ►
of a planet for endless eons.
00:06:10 ►
It’s a phase transition, and it has the character
00:06:16 ►
of creating ever-expanding adaptive effectiveness
00:06:23 ►
for the species that practices it, usually through technology.
00:06:28 ►
But this adaptive effectiveness ultimately becomes toxic, no longer serves the endless expansion of population,
00:06:49 ►
the endless expansion of population, the endless subduing of nature becomes counterproductive.
00:06:57 ►
And at that point, the feedback signals from the process of global civilization become signals indicating danger and time to shift to another gear, time to change the paradigm by which the society
00:07:10 ►
has directed itself. And Western civilization, through technological success, has become
00:07:20 ►
the dominant global civilization. So unlike the rise and fall of the Maya
00:07:28 ►
which occurred in a kind of cultural and historical vacuum our civilization
00:07:36 ►
touches everyone on this planet we’re involved in a species-wide crisis, and it’s a crisis of adaptation and intelligence.
00:07:50 ►
If we can meet the crisis, if we can redesign the cultural machinery so that it can glide in to the new value system that a limited earth and an electronically
00:08:07 ►
activated population demand then we can use the crisis as a stepping stone to
00:08:17 ►
further exploration of the universe further further evolution, further unfoldment. If we can’t meet the challenge, then the fossil record makes clear that there is a place and
00:08:31 ►
a plan for those who can’t cut the mustard.
00:08:36 ►
95% of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct.
00:08:44 ►
Nature is an engine for the production of extinct species.
00:08:49 ►
And if we are to evade that fate,
00:08:53 ►
then we have to rise to the challenge
00:08:56 ►
that our history deposits in our laps
00:09:00 ►
because we have been practicing maladaptive technologies, maladaptive ideologies for about 12,000 years now.
00:09:13 ►
Well, this is not news to anybody. This just sets the stage.
00:09:48 ►
My perspective on this is a little different from many futurists or planners or people who grapple with this, because I believe that the answer to this dilemma and the answer to the contradictions that history confronts us with is a deeper exploration of the psychedelic experience and the psychedelic experience is something incredibly alien to the Western mind it is in fact taboo it is in fact
00:09:57 ►
one of these unspeakable subjects promised in the lecture title It’s possible to go from birth to the grave
00:10:09 ►
without ever having a psychedelic experience.
00:10:14 ►
It’s not built into your biology
00:10:16 ►
the way orgasm or sleep or hunger
00:10:21 ►
or something like that is.
00:10:23 ►
It’s a physiological option
00:10:26 ►
that involves forming a symbiotic relationship
00:10:30 ►
with a plant
00:10:32 ►
or, post high technology,
00:10:36 ►
with a substance either derived from a plant
00:10:39 ►
or probably structurally related to substances
00:10:43 ►
within plants.
00:10:45 ►
Consciousness appears to be, on one level, a materialistic phenomenon
00:10:52 ►
in that it springs from the physical brain.
00:10:59 ►
It springs from the electrochemical processes that go on within organism.
00:11:07 ►
On another level, consciousness and the psychedelic experience
00:11:12 ►
seem to be a kind of angelic descent into the domain of matter,
00:11:18 ►
a kind of iridescence from another dimension that infuses materiality. This is a great paradox and it’s a
00:11:29 ►
paradox that persists right down to the molecular level. Psychopharmacologists know, for example,
00:11:38 ►
that by shifting a single atom on the ring structure of a chemically active molecule it can be
00:11:48 ►
changed from being extremely psychoactive to being completely inert
00:11:54 ►
now if this is not a proof that consciousness springs from the quantum
00:12:01 ►
mechanical level I don’t know what would be.
00:12:09 ►
So what that means then, to me,
00:12:11 ►
is that matter itself has what Alfred North Whitehead called
00:12:14 ►
an appetition for completion.
00:12:17 ►
Everything in the universe
00:12:19 ►
strives to transcend itself.
00:12:23 ►
Everything in the universe has what Whitehead called
00:12:27 ►
an internal horizon of transcendence.
00:12:32 ►
And in the human organism,
00:12:34 ►
this internal transcendent horizon within historical times
00:12:40 ►
has been frustrated by ideologies,
00:12:44 ►
has been channeled in negative directions
00:12:48 ►
towards such phenomena as urbanism,
00:12:54 ►
male kingship, monocultural agriculture,
00:12:59 ►
fanatic alphabets, so forth and so on.
00:13:03 ►
These cultural institutions, one by one,
00:13:07 ►
are the bricks that we have used to build ourselves
00:13:11 ►
into an impossible prison.
00:13:16 ►
Now, into this situation, about a hundred years ago,
00:13:23 ►
comes the news
00:13:25 ►
that there are aboriginal people
00:13:28 ►
in various parts of the earth
00:13:30 ►
who are using plants
00:13:32 ►
to journey into invisible dimensions
00:13:37 ►
where divination, curing
00:13:41 ►
and apparent violations of natural law
00:13:44 ►
are possible.
00:13:46 ►
You’ll recall that in, I think it was 1888,
00:13:50 ►
Lewis Lewin, the German pharmacologist,
00:13:53 ►
went to, of all places, Cincinnati
00:13:56 ►
and scored 120 pounds of peyote,
00:14:02 ►
which he dutifully took back to Berlin
00:14:06 ►
and set to work upon
00:14:08 ►
and quickly isolated the active principle,
00:14:12 ►
or it was isolated by a colleague of his.
00:14:16 ►
That initiated the modern era
00:14:18 ►
of psychopharmacology
00:14:20 ►
and quickly
00:14:22 ►
Harmelin in the 20s lsd in the 40s psilocybin and dmt in the 50s
00:14:33 ►
and then more exotic compounds were discovered but as quickly as they were discovered they were
00:14:41 ►
made illegal and they were professionally stigmatized so that scientific careers were ruined if people chose to involve themselves in these substances. which claims a kind of universal objectivity
00:15:06 ►
which claims a kind of God-given right
00:15:11 ►
to probe into all dimensions and domains of nature
00:15:16 ►
actually grew very queasy
00:15:19 ►
at the possibility of chemical agents
00:15:24 ►
being used to study and elucidate consciousness and i think
00:15:30 ►
that when we analyze this modern institutional reluctance to deal with these compounds
00:15:38 ►
what we uncover is in fact the lost history of the human race
00:15:45 ►
and the secret of our transcendent nature,
00:15:50 ►
our difference from the rest of animal nature
00:15:55 ►
is linked to the psychedelic compounds.
00:15:59 ►
And so is our sexuality.
00:16:02 ►
And so is our peculiar adaptive intelligence. This is the situation you see
00:16:11 ►
that we are half angels, half animals, half in the dimension of the rest of nature and
00:16:20 ►
half in a dimension which can barely be described,
00:16:25 ►
the dimension of globe-girdling information transfer networks,
00:16:33 ►
high technology, the elucidation of the inner structure of stars and atoms,
00:16:39 ►
a world created by mind,
00:16:43 ►
a world created by the operation of abstraction.
00:16:48 ►
And this is the great thing which we do.
00:16:51 ►
We take data and matter and we elaborate these things into constructs.
00:17:00 ►
Either physical artifacts, machines, art galleries, cities, or ideological constructs, Marxism, feminism, Catholicism, Zoroastrianism. can download the ideas,
00:17:28 ►
the platonic perfect forms of a higher dimension into the world of matter.
00:17:31 ►
And so where we are,
00:17:33 ►
there is an interfacing
00:17:35 ►
between the world of ordinary nature
00:17:38 ►
and some kind of transcendent force.
00:17:42 ►
And I really believe that history
00:17:45 ►
is the trail in the snow,
00:17:52 ►
if you will,
00:17:53 ►
of this journey
00:17:55 ►
toward a fusion of spirit and matter
00:18:00 ►
that the alchemical dream of the 16th century,
00:18:04 ►
which was the fusion of spirit and matter,
00:18:07 ►
was naively believed to be something that a single individual could achieve
00:18:12 ►
working alone in some Bavarian laboratory.
00:18:17 ►
This is not what it is, I think.
00:18:20 ►
I think human history is the alchemical process.
00:18:26 ►
The human organism is the prima materia.
00:18:31 ►
And our dreams are the goals that guide this process.
00:18:38 ►
And we have pursued this path for so long
00:18:45 ►
that there now is no going back.
00:18:49 ►
The only possibility now
00:18:51 ►
is what I call a forward escape.
00:18:55 ►
That means where you just put the pedal to the floor
00:18:57 ►
and close your eyes and go for it
00:19:00 ►
because there’s no going back.
00:19:02 ►
And my interest in psychedelics arises from two sources number one
00:19:10 ►
the clear evidence available to everyone that societies that use psychedelics
00:19:17 ►
practice a kind of dynamic equilibrium with the earth and with the environment. They are stable. That’s one factor
00:19:28 ►
arguing for the psychedelic experience. The other factor, a much more personal factor, is that it’s
00:19:35 ►
the only thing I’ve ever seen which would turn people around as fast as we have to turn around if we’re to avoid the fatal momentum of our past mistakes
00:19:49 ►
because we inherit essentially a runaway freight train on a downhill slope and you know they take
00:19:57 ►
and place us in the driver’s seat and say do something about human history. Well, no society can evolve faster
00:20:10 ►
than it can change its mind and its language. So speaking about the unspeakable means stretching the envelope of what can be said.
00:20:25 ►
When new things can be said, new plans can be laid,
00:20:31 ►
new directions can be found out of a crisis.
00:20:36 ►
And science has steered us deeply into the notion
00:20:44 ►
that nature is soulless and spiritless.
00:20:49 ►
And the practice of this idea has led us to the brink of catastrophe,
00:20:58 ►
global and species and ecological catastrophe.
00:21:12 ►
species and ecological catastrophe. Meanwhile, these aboriginal societies have been journeying freely to and from the spirit realm through the use of plants for as many millennia as
00:21:21 ►
we have been wandering in the deserts of abstraction. Now, these two halves of the human
00:21:29 ►
family have to make common cause because the rainforest shaman and the Manhattan stockbroker
00:21:38 ►
are essentially in the same lifeboat with the same set of problems a dissolving atmosphere toxic oceans
00:21:49 ►
overpopulation commercialization of violence uh sexism racism you name it these problems
00:22:01 ►
are global problems and they are problems that will not be solved without an incredible leap of imagination.
00:22:13 ►
Psychedelics are catalysts for the human imagination.
00:22:18 ►
That very simply is what they are.
00:22:21 ►
It doesn’t say they’re good. it doesn’t say they’re bad. They will catalyze the perverse imagination with the same effectiveness that they will catalyze the Gaian responsible imagination. do not avail ourselves of these tools, I think the cultural enterprise is in quicksand and
00:22:52 ►
sinking quickly, or a kind of sinking submarine. So how can we change our minds, redesign our value systems,
00:23:08 ►
redesign our languages quickly enough
00:23:11 ►
to avert some kind of global degradation of the quality of life
00:23:19 ►
that will leave our children the poorer?
00:23:23 ►
that will leave our children the poorer.
00:23:28 ►
Well, the way to do this, I think,
00:23:33 ►
is to get connected up with the rest of nature.
00:23:39 ►
Nature is a seamless community of intentionality.
00:23:49 ►
Nature is a gene swarm covering the surface of the planet. Biological nature,
00:23:59 ►
I’m talking here, is a set of interlocking strategies and intents, the sole purpose of which is to one, survive, and to two, maintain creative openness.
00:24:08 ►
It’s not the case.
00:24:09 ►
I mean, things have gotten considerably worse since the Sermon on the Mount, for my money.
00:24:15 ►
The only way back is through a direct experience of the sacral and unitary nature of being this is a very difficult
00:24:29 ►
problem for us because experience is something that we have given away we are
00:24:38 ►
consumers of experience handed down through a hierarchy
00:24:45 ►
that begins somewhere near Madison Avenue
00:24:48 ►
a hierarchy of image production
00:24:51 ►
that causes all our values
00:24:54 ►
to be brought in from the outside
00:24:58 ►
as religions
00:24:59 ►
as product fetishism
00:25:02 ►
brand loyalty
00:25:04 ►
ideologies.
00:25:06 ►
We consume these things the same way we consume petroleum and rice.
00:25:12 ►
What we have to do is begin to concentrate
00:25:16 ►
on the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:25:22 ►
This is what Western civilization has lost,
00:25:26 ►
is a sense of the felt presence
00:25:28 ►
of immediate experience.
00:25:30 ►
In other words, we have to live in the body.
00:25:35 ►
Ideology must serve feeling.
00:25:39 ►
Technology must serve intuition.
00:25:43 ►
What we’re talking about here
00:25:44 ►
is a complete inversion of social values.
00:25:48 ►
We’re talking about a feminizing of culture, a greening of culture, and a de-emphasis on goals, the achievement of goals, over the style with which these goals are achieved.
00:26:12 ►
One of the books that I wrote was called The Archaic Revival.
00:26:18 ►
And I called it that because I can discern, or I delude myself in thinking I can discern,
00:26:27 ►
throughout the 20th century a very large cultural pattern,
00:26:33 ►
which is what I call the nostalgia for the archaic.
00:26:37 ►
It touches phenomena as diverse as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis,
00:26:47 ►
jazz, body piercing, rock and roll,
00:26:54 ►
new age therapy,
00:26:57 ►
scarification and tattoos, house music,
00:27:02 ►
what all these things have,
00:27:03 ►
abstract expressionism, surrealism, da-da, what all these things have in common is a reverence for the irrational and the experiential beginning to at least debate the possibility of setting off
00:27:28 ►
from Aristotelianism and the world of the Edwardian gentleman. And it’s about time,
00:27:36 ►
I would say. It’s the last possible moment before we will have any choice in the matter.
00:27:43 ►
before we will have any choice in the matter.
00:27:49 ►
And what I left off that list was shamanism and psychedelic plants.
00:27:55 ►
Because when you begin to think about archaic life,
00:27:59 ►
about what it really meant,
00:28:03 ►
the shaman emerges as the paradigmatic figure. The shaman cures. The shaman travels
00:28:10 ►
in invisible dimensions. The shaman can rescue the center of shamanism
00:28:26 ►
is the psychedelic
00:28:28 ►
experience
00:28:29 ►
now there’s a lot of haggling about this
00:28:31 ►
in anthropology but just to let you know
00:28:34 ►
where I’m coming from
00:28:35 ►
I believe shamanism without psychedelics
00:28:38 ►
is shamanism on its way
00:28:40 ►
to becoming religion
00:28:41 ►
not all shamanisms in the world
00:28:44 ►
are psychedelic.
00:28:46 ►
Some rely on ordeal.
00:28:48 ►
Some rely on quote-unquote abnormal personalities.
00:28:55 ►
These are forms of shamanism
00:28:58 ►
that are drifting toward institutional religion.
00:29:02 ►
Shamanism is not, strangely enough, the product of cultural values alone. It’s a series of ideas that have been built up around an experience, an experience which most people in our society have never had. It’s the experience of boundary dissolution, of the collectivity
00:29:29 ►
of planetary life, of the presence of strange and alien dimensions filled with intelligence
00:29:37 ►
and intent toward humanity. It is, in short, the world of pagan natural magic and this is the
00:29:48 ►
world that beckons in the light of the failure of the cultural models of the
00:29:54 ►
last couple of thousand years now it’s a matter of great political controversy. Somehow, the changing of consciousness
00:30:05 ►
is deemed to be threatening to the state.
00:30:11 ►
Now, why is that?
00:30:13 ►
Is the state somehow playing a shell game
00:30:17 ►
that would be exposed
00:30:19 ►
if people were to actually open their eyes?
00:30:23 ►
In what way does the expansion of consciousness
00:30:27 ►
threaten industrial democracies?
00:30:32 ►
I think we need real answers to this.
00:30:35 ►
We like to believe we’re a free society,
00:30:38 ►
but in fact, this is a game of puppet and puppeteer,
00:30:44 ►
no different from the game that was played
00:30:47 ►
inside the Marxist society so recently deceased
00:30:51 ►
it is irrational
00:30:53 ►
for people to addict themselves
00:30:57 ►
to the consumption of products
00:30:59 ►
to money fetishism
00:31:02 ►
and to linear ideologies.
00:31:05 ►
All of this is irrational, but it’s practiced with a vengeance
00:31:09 ►
inside the high-tech industrial democracies.
00:31:13 ►
I maintain that we have drifted very, very far from a viable social system,
00:31:21 ►
and that in order to return to a viable social system we’re going to have to
00:31:27 ►
revivify our archaic styles this is going on all around us throughout the 20th century as i said
00:31:35 ►
in an unconscious fashion but i’m suggesting that we do it in a conscious fashion and that we admit
00:31:49 ►
we do it in a conscious fashion and that we admit that hegemony, monotheism, print-created culture, obsession with stuff, that all of these things have played us false.
00:31:56 ►
They do not satisfy.
00:31:59 ►
And what satisfies is authentic experience. And authentic experience has been made almost impossible
00:32:08 ►
inside the world of media-manipulated symbols
00:32:13 ►
and manufactured ideologies that constitutes the modern world.
00:32:18 ►
So what’s required then is a radical act of disassociation
00:32:23 ►
from these value systems and what that means is
00:32:28 ►
boundary dissolving psychedelic intoxication allowing the guy in the agenda to manifest
00:32:37 ►
itself by dissolving the ego and by standing outside the structures of consumerist society. When this is done
00:32:48 ►
by large numbers of people, and I think the fact that we’re here this evening means that
00:32:54 ►
the agenda is proceeding on time, under budget. When this is done, people will not tolerate the kind of human societies
00:33:06 ►
and the kind of allocation of resources that we’re witnessing today.
00:33:14 ►
The obscenity of great wealth in the presence of great poverty,
00:33:19 ►
the obscenity of further destruction of the earth
00:33:23 ►
in the presence of spreading deserts and cities.
00:33:27 ►
The obscenity of the destruction of our educational system
00:33:31 ►
with the knowledge that our children require education more than anything else.
00:33:37 ►
All of these failures of will can be overcome if we can connect to our feelings. Because what we are is a person
00:33:50 ►
sitting in the corner of a room hitting themselves repeatedly on the head with a hammer.
00:33:55 ►
If we could feel what we were doing, we would stop instantly. But we cannot feel what we’re doing. We have ideologies, we have excuses, we have
00:34:07 ►
government spokesmen, committees, commissions, study groups, white papers, so forth and so on.
00:34:14 ►
It’s perfectly obvious that Western civilization has shot its wad. It’s perfectly obvious that Christianity has produced a nightmare of repression, of anti-human intolerance.
00:34:30 ►
It’s perfectly obvious that the nuclear family is a cauldron for the production of neurosis and the employment of psychotherapists.
00:34:39 ►
It’s perfectly obvious that the most destructive drugs we have discovered
00:34:45 ►
are peddled freely in every shopping center.
00:34:48 ►
It’s perfectly obvious that the drugs of transcendence that connect us up to the earth
00:34:55 ►
are the drugs that those who govern us are most interested in repressing.
00:35:02 ►
We are living inside an impossible set of contradictions,
00:35:07 ►
no less impossible than the set of contradictions the people of the Soviet Union were asked to live
00:35:14 ►
under until very recently. How long can we tolerate business as usual? How long can people
00:35:22 ►
who drive Mercedes and send checks to Greenpeace twice a year
00:35:27 ►
content themselves with the idea that that is a sufficient response to a burning and
00:35:33 ►
dying planet? What we have to do, I think, is radicalize our point of view and what that means is first of all a telescoping back a
00:35:47 ►
telescoping back most people can’t tell whether Joseph Goebbels served in the
00:35:53 ►
first or second Nixon administration most people have no sense of history at
00:35:59 ►
all but when you and this is a failure of education plain and simple but when you, and this is a failure of education, plain and simple, but when you pull back 10,000 years, 100,000 is not recognized by science, that is never discussed
00:36:30 ►
and never mentioned. And that is that the further back in time you go, the simpler the universe
00:36:38 ►
becomes until finally you reach the extraordinary improbability of the Big Bang.
00:36:47 ►
This is a moment where the universe for no reason sprang from nothingness, according to science.
00:36:55 ►
Now notice that whatever you think about that hypothesis, it’s the limit test for credulity.
00:37:02 ►
Do you understand what I mean?
00:37:03 ►
I mean, if you believe that,
00:37:05 ►
you can believe anything.
00:37:07 ►
That is the most unlikely proposition
00:37:10 ►
the human brain can generate.
00:37:13 ►
And yet, science holds its forth
00:37:16 ►
as axiom one.
00:37:18 ►
Axiom one.
00:37:19 ►
The universe sprang from nothing
00:37:21 ►
for no reason.
00:37:23 ►
Well, from that moment on, the universe has been
00:37:30 ►
complexifying itself as it cooled. First, it’s a plasma of pure electrons. Then, as it cools, atoms form electrons can settle into stable orbits
00:37:46 ►
around atomic nuclei
00:37:48 ►
as atomic systems
00:37:50 ►
aggregate into stars
00:37:52 ►
fusion occurs
00:37:54 ►
heavier elements are cooked out
00:37:56 ►
among them carbon
00:37:58 ►
four valent carbon
00:37:59 ►
allows a new world of complexity
00:38:02 ►
to emerge
00:38:03 ►
the world of organic chemistry.
00:38:07 ►
Out of that possibility emerge long-chain polymers.
00:38:13 ►
Out of that possibility emerge self-replicating molecular systems,
00:38:18 ►
and out of that comes primitive life,
00:38:21 ►
and out of that complex life,
00:38:23 ►
and out of that land-based life, and out of that mammals, and out of that, complex life, and out of that, land-based life, and out of that,
00:38:26 ►
mammals, and out of that, primates, and out of that, human beings sitting around the campfire
00:38:32 ►
chewing on reindeer hides and chipping flint, and out of that, our own immensely complex,
00:38:40 ►
planet-girdling, planet agonizing civilization.
00:38:45 ►
Okay, but now notice something about this,
00:38:50 ►
notice something about this set of declensions
00:39:00 ►
that I just ran through.
00:39:02 ►
It’s that each advance into complexity
00:39:05 ►
occurs more quickly
00:39:08 ►
than the process which preceded it.
00:39:12 ►
So that, you know,
00:39:14 ►
it took a long, long time for stars to aggregate.
00:39:18 ►
And then it took a long, long time
00:39:21 ►
for life to appear.
00:39:23 ►
Once life appears, the cosmic machine quickens its pace. Once the
00:39:30 ►
conquest of the land appears, it turns another turn of the spiral and quickens its pace.
00:39:37 ►
Once you arrive at human beings, you arrive in the domain of very rapid processes even from the point of
00:39:47 ►
view of biology you know some people have a great enthusiasm for believing
00:39:53 ►
that there were high civilizations 50,000 years ago a hundred thousand
00:39:58 ►
years ago on the earth I don’t buy into that at all I think the miracle of the human adventure is how new everything is.
00:40:08 ►
There are people teaching in respectable universities who believe language is 35,000
00:40:14 ►
years old. I mean, try to wrap your mind around that. That means it’s as artificial a thing as the electric toothbrush, language we’re talking about here,
00:40:27 ►
we are apparently the cutting edge
00:40:32 ►
of an ever-accelerating,
00:40:34 ►
contrescent process.
00:40:37 ►
And this is what I was referring to
00:40:39 ►
at the beginning of the talk
00:40:40 ►
when I said history cannot go on forever.
00:40:44 ►
History represents a phase in the development
00:40:48 ►
of something, and the conquest of the land represented an earlier phase in the development
00:40:55 ►
of that same thing. The long, the hundreds of millions of years of life in the ocean, yet a longer, earlier phase of this same process of emergence.
00:41:07 ►
Now, the pace of the cosmic drama has quickened.
00:41:11 ►
It rests in us.
00:41:13 ►
In the last hundred years, there has been more scientific and cultural advance,
00:41:19 ►
let’s make that scientific advance, than in the previous hundred thousand years. This acceleration leads any
00:41:30 ►
rational person to the conclusion that eventually we are going to enter into domains of novelty of
00:41:38 ►
such short duration that they will consume history. And I believe that this is what the psychedelic experience
00:41:47 ►
actually reveals, that you can talk about
00:41:51 ►
the Jungian unconscious, you can talk about the maps
00:41:54 ►
of the Witoto or the Warane, but that really
00:41:58 ►
the most effective map of the psychedelic domain
00:42:01 ►
is, strange to say say a mathematical map that consciousness is the conquest of
00:42:09 ►
dimensionality biology is the conquest of dimensionality the evolution of organs of
00:42:16 ►
locomotion and coordinated eyesight and so forth these are devices to propel us through three-dimensional space.
00:42:25 ►
The mind, in its ability to coordinate data and anticipate situations, is a kind of trans-temporal organ.
00:42:35 ►
It is coordinating us in time as well as space.
00:42:40 ►
We are growing toward a kind of hyperspatiality. And this is a drama of universal import
00:42:48 ►
because it is all biology that participates in this.
00:42:54 ►
Now this represents a radical change of view
00:43:00 ►
to what the myth of our civilization is.
00:43:04 ►
The myth of our civilization is. The myth of our civilization is
00:43:06 ►
that the universe began a long time ago.
00:43:09 ►
It will be consumed in entropic heat death
00:43:12 ►
a long, long time in the future.
00:43:16 ►
We are on an ordinary planet,
00:43:19 ►
around an ordinary star,
00:43:21 ►
in an ordinary galaxy,
00:43:23 ►
in a universe of hundreds of millions of such galaxies.
00:43:26 ►
In other words, it’s put down, put down, put down, put down. A minimalizing of our
00:43:33 ►
importance. We are no more, in the view of science, than fortunate spectators to a
00:43:39 ►
cosmic drama that knows and cares nothing about us. I don’t believe this. I don’t think the evidence
00:43:48 ►
of the psychedelic experience supports it. I think that the universe is an engine for the
00:43:55 ►
production of novelty, ever quicker, ever faster, ever denser. And that at this moment, so far as we know,
00:44:06 ►
so far as we know,
00:44:07 ►
in this universe,
00:44:09 ►
we, the human species,
00:44:12 ►
our civilization,
00:44:13 ►
this evening, right now,
00:44:15 ►
is the most complex organization,
00:44:19 ►
system, organism,
00:44:21 ►
in existence.
00:44:23 ►
Therefore, somehow, the fate of the cosmic intent rests with us.
00:44:32 ►
We are not without responsibility in this situation. Somehow the next step, the next advancement into novelty depends on our being a smooth and dowelful conduit for its emergence.
00:44:59 ►
And so, as a global civilization, we can no longer afford the luxury of an unconscious mind.
00:45:09 ►
I mean, when you can pull down the fusion processes that light the stars,
00:45:14 ►
when you can pull that down on the cities of your enemies,
00:45:17 ►
when you can sequence the DNA, when you can map the heart of the atom,
00:45:25 ►
then it is entirely inappropriate
00:45:27 ►
to have an unconscious mind
00:45:30 ►
because the power that is given unto you
00:45:33 ►
is a kind of godlike Promethean power.
00:45:39 ►
So how can we switch on the lights
00:45:42 ►
on our animal nature
00:45:44 ►
and draw ourselves toward the angelic
00:45:48 ►
destiny that wants to happen? Well, I think it’s very simple. We have to decondition ourselves
00:45:57 ►
from culture. We are sick. We require medical intervention,
00:46:06 ►
immediate medical intervention
00:46:08 ►
to attempt to intervene
00:46:12 ►
on what is a galloping cancerous state of neurosis,
00:46:18 ►
the growth and spread of ego.
00:46:20 ►
Ego is like a calcareous growth
00:46:23 ►
in the psyche of human beings
00:46:27 ►
and if it is not treated
00:46:30 ►
it creates the kind of society that we have
00:46:35 ►
a society based on hierarchy
00:46:38 ►
male dominance
00:46:40 ►
accumulation of physical goods
00:46:43 ►
suppression of the weak by the strong.
00:46:46 ►
This is the kind of society that is created when those values are pushed.
00:46:52 ►
This is why the psychedelics are so socially sensitive.
00:46:57 ►
Because they dissolve deconditioning.
00:47:01 ►
And every culture is a scam. Every culture is it is a scam
00:47:12 ►
Every culture is a lie a shell game run by weasels for the amusement of ruse
00:47:16 ►
And if you don’t want to be a weasel or a rube
00:47:25 ►
Then you need to inform yourself of how the shell game works and what lies beyond the carnival midway of civilized values.
00:47:28 ►
And the way to do that
00:47:30 ►
is to go back to the plants,
00:47:32 ►
to go back to the original gnosis.
00:47:35 ►
Because it isn’t simply
00:47:37 ►
that there is some magic
00:47:39 ►
in perturbing the chemistry of the brain
00:47:42 ►
with psychedelics.
00:47:44 ►
Why should that confer wisdom or insight or anything else?
00:47:51 ►
It only can do that if beyond the deconditioning
00:47:57 ►
there is a wholeness waiting.
00:48:00 ►
There is a mystery to be revealed.
00:48:04 ►
And I think it’s the mystery of the guy in mind
00:48:07 ►
history is what happens to you
00:48:10 ►
when you lose touch with the guy in mind
00:48:13 ►
with the feminine, nurturing, planetary matrix
00:48:17 ►
that is the atmosphere
00:48:19 ►
and the ocean currents
00:48:21 ►
and the biota of the earth
00:48:24 ►
well, how could we have fallen so far?
00:48:29 ►
How could we have gotten into a mess like this?
00:48:34 ►
I spent a lot of time thinking about this.
00:48:37 ►
Man’s fall, what is it?
00:48:40 ►
Is it real?
00:48:41 ►
Are we still a pristine expression
00:48:45 ►
of the will and beauty of nature?
00:48:47 ►
Or have we somehow sullied ourselves,
00:48:50 ►
somehow fallen from the track?
00:48:53 ►
And trying to think as a biologist,
00:48:56 ►
an evolutionary thinker, so forth and so on,
00:48:59 ►
here’s my conclusion
00:49:01 ►
based on a lifetime of thinking about this,
00:49:04 ►
traveling around, getting loaded
00:49:06 ►
reading, dealing
00:49:08 ►
with the data
00:49:09 ►
all primates
00:49:12 ►
and we are primates
00:49:14 ►
all primates have what are called
00:49:16 ►
dominance hierarchies
00:49:18 ►
this means the
00:49:20 ►
long fanged, hard bodied
00:49:22 ►
young males
00:49:23 ►
kick everybody around.
00:49:26 ►
The females, the youngs, the juveniles,
00:49:30 ►
the homosexuals,
00:49:31 ►
everybody takes their marching order
00:49:34 ►
from the male dominators.
00:49:37 ►
And we, as we sit here in this room,
00:49:39 ►
are deeply and terribly afflicted
00:49:42 ►
with these attitudes.
00:49:45 ►
But, I maintain this has not always been the case,
00:49:49 ►
and our peculiar position in nature has to do with a kind of evolutionary accident.
00:49:56 ►
Here’s what it is, and as I go through it, I hope you understand.
00:50:00 ►
It’s an effort to solve one of the great problems of evolutionary biology which is
00:50:07 ►
why was it that within a period of time no more than two and a half million years the human brain
00:50:14 ►
size doubled uh lumholtz who is an evolutionary biologist of the academic mold, calls the evolution of the human brain
00:50:25 ►
the most explosive transformation of a major organ
00:50:29 ►
of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
00:50:34 ►
Well now this is a great embarrassment
00:50:36 ►
for evolutionary theory,
00:50:38 ►
because notice this is the organ
00:50:40 ►
which created the theory of evolution in the first place.
00:50:44 ►
So for it to be inexplicable within the terms of that theory
00:50:49 ►
is a little alarming to those who have a big stake in all of this.
00:50:54 ►
I maintain that by analyzing objectively what psychedelics do to us,
00:51:00 ►
we can understand not only our origins, but our predicament. And here’s the scenario.
00:51:09 ►
Like all animal species, we reached a kind of evolutionary climax in the canopies of the
00:51:15 ►
rainforests of tropical Africa five to six million years ago. Our ancestors, fruititarian insect eating complex packs signaling as an antecedent to language
00:51:28 ►
and there we rested except that the dynamics of the planet dictated that those rainforests
00:51:36 ►
would shrink in size and be replaced by grasslands and we came under nutritional pressure when an animal comes under nutritional pressure
00:51:48 ►
it has two choices it can starve to death and go extinct or it can begin to experiment with
00:51:54 ►
new foods the reason most animals don’t ordinarily experiment with foods is because that kind of experimentation leads to exposure to mutagenic
00:52:07 ►
chemicals and that creates mutation which is generally lethal faced with extinction and
00:52:15 ►
starvation we began to experiment with the new vegetables that we encountered in the grasslands of Africa. And in that same grassland environment,
00:52:26 ►
ungulate mammals, bison, primitive cattle,
00:52:31 ►
so forth and so on, were also evolving.
00:52:34 ►
And the dung of those animals
00:52:36 ►
is the preferred environment
00:52:38 ►
for certain species of mushrooms
00:52:41 ►
that elaborate psilocybin.
00:52:44 ►
I maintain psilocybin is the missing key
00:52:49 ►
to understanding human emergence.
00:52:52 ►
The missing link is not a transitional skeleton.
00:52:55 ►
The missing link is an environmental factor of some sort.
00:53:01 ►
And here’s how I think it worked.
00:53:04 ►
Psilocybin in small doses increases
00:53:09 ►
visual acuity this has been shown in laboratory situations with graduate
00:53:14 ►
students and other test animals visual acuity is improved with small doses of
00:53:21 ►
psilocybin you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that an improvement in visual acuity
00:53:27 ►
would have a tremendous impact
00:53:29 ►
on a hunting-gathering animal
00:53:31 ►
in a situation of nutritional stress.
00:53:34 ►
It means more successful hunting.
00:53:37 ►
It means more nutrition and protein
00:53:40 ►
available for offspring.
00:53:42 ►
It means raising one’s offspring
00:53:44 ►
to reproductive age with
00:53:46 ►
greater success than other members of the group that are not using psilocybin.
00:53:52 ►
So there is the thin wedge in that psilocybin, perhaps unconsciously
00:54:01 ►
integrated into the diet, gives a slightly increased success at
00:54:07 ►
food acquisition at higher doses psilocybin creates what’s called an all
00:54:14 ►
CNS stimulants create what’s called arousal this means this is how you feel
00:54:21 ►
after you have two double cappuccinos. You know, pacing around, scanning the environment.
00:54:27 ►
And in highly sexed animals like primates, in the male it means erection.
00:54:33 ►
So it becomes then a promoter of increased sexual activity.
00:54:40 ►
What primatologists like to call more successful instances of copulation.
00:54:46 ►
That’s a second factor tending to outbreed members of the group not using psilocybin.
00:54:55 ►
Then, at still higher levels, hunting is out of the question.
00:55:03 ►
Whoopee is out of the question. Whoopee is out of the question.
00:55:06 ►
And you’re just nailed to the ground by the firelight,
00:55:10 ►
writhing in the ecstasis of hallucinogenic visions
00:55:14 ►
that unfolds around you.
00:55:17 ►
A situation that, to us, with all our sophistication,
00:55:21 ►
Husserl, Heidegger, Michael Jackson, the whole thing,
00:55:24 ►
all our sophistication, Husserl, Heidegger, Michael Jackson, the whole thing,
00:55:31 ►
we are as in awe of that as those proto-human beings must have been.
00:55:34 ►
So there it is. It’s a three-stage process.
00:55:39 ►
Better success at hunting, greater expression of sexuality and out-breathing of non-pilocybin-using members of the population,
00:55:44 ►
and then dissolution of boundaries
00:55:48 ►
into ecstasy and this is the important one
00:55:52 ►
because the thing that distinguishes our civilization
00:55:57 ►
and our lifestyle and our telos is ego.
00:56:03 ►
We believe that the free democratic individual is the highest expression of human
00:56:12 ►
evolution on this planet. We have deified the ego. But notice that the ego is one, fragile, and two, it exists by definition of boundaries.
00:56:27 ►
My house, my job, my lover, my fortune, your house, your lover, your fortune.
00:56:34 ►
Ego means we define boundaries, the very thing that the psychedelics erode.
00:56:41 ►
And I believe that the sexual arousal and the boundary dissolution when poured together
00:56:49 ►
in a social context in the high paleolithic created a society based on orgiastic sex and
00:56:57 ►
incredibly tight community values because one of the consequences of an orgiastic style
00:57:06 ►
is men cannot trace lines
00:57:09 ►
of male paternity.
00:57:11 ►
Therefore, men do not have children
00:57:14 ►
in the ordinary sense.
00:57:16 ►
Children belong to the group.
00:57:19 ►
And loyalty, then,
00:57:21 ►
is transferred to the group.
00:57:24 ►
It is not transferred to the family unit.
00:57:27 ►
And there was a moment,
00:57:31 ►
10,000 years, 20,000 years, 100,000 years,
00:57:34 ►
a window when on the plains of Africa,
00:57:39 ►
under the influence of psilocybin
00:57:42 ►
and a non-hierarchical, orgiastic, nomadic society, we created poetry,
00:57:53 ►
drama, philosophy, higher values, altruism, courage, self-sacrifice, all of the values that we call human
00:58:06 ►
and transcendental
00:58:08 ►
were created in that environment.
00:58:13 ►
And then,
00:58:14 ►
and then,
00:58:16 ►
no more than 15 to 20,000 years ago,
00:58:23 ►
the very forces which created that partnership paradise destroyed it.
00:58:31 ►
And what were those forces? Nothing more than the continued drying of the African continent.
00:58:38 ►
And the mushrooms began to disappear, began to become seasonal, began to be located only in the
00:58:47 ►
rain shadows of mountains. And when the availability of psilocybin began to
00:58:54 ►
decline, the old primate programming, which had never been removed from the
00:59:02 ►
animal, reemerged. The formation of dominance hierarchies reemerged.
00:59:08 ►
It must have been an awful, awful time.
00:59:11 ►
I mean, if many, many generations could be compressed into one,
00:59:16 ►
it would have been a time where people would have said,
00:59:19 ►
we don’t seem to love each other anymore.
00:59:22 ►
We seem to have no spirit of community.
00:59:26 ►
We seem to have become competitive.
00:59:29 ►
We’re now struggling over land and food and women and social position.
00:59:34 ►
A brutalizing of life occurred at that critical juncture
00:59:40 ►
when agriculture was invented as a response to further drying, when the huge
00:59:47 ►
database about nature that the hunter-gatherers had created was dumped in favor of the very
00:59:55 ►
limited database of the monocultural agriculturalists, and male hierarchy, male dominance, kingship, walled cities, an end to nomadism, slavery,
01:00:13 ►
all of these institutions emerged in roughly 1,000 to 1,500 years in the Middle East and across North Africa.
01:00:22 ►
And that is the sad set of circumstances
01:00:26 ►
of which we are the heirs many generations removed.
01:00:31 ►
So we are like dysfunctional children.
01:00:36 ►
Something terrible happened to us
01:00:39 ►
in the childhood of our intelligence.
01:00:43 ►
We lost our connection to the Gaian matrix, to the
01:00:47 ►
goddess mother of the earth who gives coherency to life. And when the connection was lost,
01:00:54 ►
we fell into history. It was a perverse thing. People became frantic to preserve the mushrooms
01:01:02 ►
and they created strategies such as pickling them in honey.
01:01:08 ►
The problem with that is honey itself can change into a psychoactive compound,
01:01:14 ►
fermented alcohol.
01:01:16 ►
This creates a completely different set of cultural values.
01:01:21 ►
Alcohol promotes an inflated sense of verbal
01:01:25 ►
facility at the same time that it
01:01:27 ►
lowers boundaries to social
01:01:30 ►
queuing. Go to
01:01:31 ►
any singles bar on a Friday
01:01:33 ►
night and you will see this in
01:01:35 ►
action. It
01:01:37 ►
promotes a further brutalization
01:01:39 ►
of culture.
01:01:42 ►
So this to my mind
01:01:43 ►
explains our obsession with substances. Why it is that we
01:01:48 ►
addict and addict and addict. It’s because we are looking for something. Just like a kitten that
01:01:55 ►
will suck on your armpit or your gloves because it was weaned too early, we’re willing to try
01:02:01 ►
anything to try and get a certain satisfaction.
01:02:06 ►
So, you know, heroin, hang gliding, ketamine,
01:02:09 ►
you name it, it’s all out there.
01:02:11 ►
Marxism, sexism, sadomasochism, whatever.
01:02:15 ►
None of it will satisfy
01:02:17 ►
because none of it is the original thing
01:02:20 ►
that we’re looking for.
01:02:21 ►
The original thing we are looking for, I think,
01:02:27 ►
thing that we’re looking for. The original thing we are looking for, I think, is the state of mind induced by endohalacinogens, specifically psilocybin. And we need to have a cultural dialogue
01:02:35 ►
about this. There is no other point of view. In other words, nobody has a good story about how we got here, how we emerged out of human prototypes so quickly. It must have been a dietary factor. It must have been a dietary factor that put extraordinary pressure on the neuro-linguistic systems of the evolving human brain psilocybin fits the profile it was available
01:03:08 ►
in that environment at the right time in the right quantity and i maintain you know we’re not simply
01:03:15 ►
solving here a kind of abstract question about human origins we are also pointing the way toward answers.
01:03:26 ►
Because until we return to these archaic folkways,
01:03:31 ►
shamanism, hallucinogenic intoxication,
01:03:34 ►
honoring of the feminine, dissolution of boundaries,
01:03:39 ►
so forth, retribalizing of social relations, so forth and so on,
01:03:44 ►
we are going to continue
01:03:45 ►
to drift toward extinction.
01:03:48 ►
So it’s time to start speaking about the unspeakable.
01:03:53 ►
It’s time to articulate these options.
01:03:57 ►
It’s possible that we’re going to sink into the quicksand of extinction with the answer
01:04:03 ►
clutched in our hand.
01:04:08 ►
That would be a tragedy too much to bear.
01:04:14 ►
I mean, it’s one thing to think there are no answers. It’s quite another to die with the answer in your hand. I mean, that’s just sheer shit brain stupidity. So what must be done is the psychedelic meme must be given respectability.
01:04:27 ►
It must be outed. It must be surfaced.
01:04:30 ►
People of intelligence whose lives have been touched by these things have to begin to witness it.
01:04:37 ►
This is how gay people got respect. It’s how people of color got respect.
01:04:42 ►
They’re not handing rights out in this society
01:04:46 ►
in case you didn’t notice.
01:04:48 ►
The only way you are given your rights
01:04:51 ►
is if you demand them.
01:04:53 ►
And the idea that plants should be illegal
01:04:55 ►
and that the evolution and exploration of one’s own mind
01:05:00 ►
should be of interest and regulated by the state
01:05:05 ►
is obscene, absurd, ridiculous,
01:05:09 ►
and intolerable.
01:05:21 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:05:23 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:05:29 ►
Well, there’s really not much you can add to that last statement.
01:05:34 ►
And when you think of all the politicians who are still very much fighting a war against the consciousness of people who use non-prescription, non-corporate controlled medicines,
01:05:44 ►
well, those politicians
01:05:46 ►
are just gutless obscenities, I guess.
01:05:49 ►
At least they are in my book.
01:05:51 ►
But hey, that’s just my opinion, and I realize that yours may be different, which is what
01:05:56 ►
makes the world go around, as my sainted mother used to say.
01:06:00 ►
Now, as I said in my introduction, I’m going to keep these closing remarks to a very brief minimum in this podcast,
01:06:06 ►
so that I can get the next part of this talk out to you right away.
01:06:11 ►
However, for all of my compatriots in the Occupy movement,
01:06:14 ►
I first want to say well done on all of the actions everywhere around the world on May Day,
01:06:20 ►
and I’m glad that our activities are more out in the open once again.
01:06:24 ►
and I’m glad that our activities are more out in the open once again.
01:06:31 ►
But I would also be remiss not to mention the fact that about midway in the part of the talk that we just now listened to,
01:06:38 ►
it seemed to me that Terrence was giving a speech that would fit right into any general assembly in the movement. You know, he saw the big picture quite early back in 1994,
01:06:42 ►
and fortunately now more people are waking up to that same reality every
01:06:46 ►
day so press on and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends