Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think it’s time to begin to talk very, very frankly about the forced engineering of consciousness, about the re-shamanising of society, about the re-birth of archaic values before it’s too late.”
“Anyone who loves adventure, and who loves life, and who loves the experience of being, has an obligation, I think, to explore this [the psychedelic realm]. It’s as much a part of your identity as your sexuality, your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to choose to play with less than a full deck. Don’t do that. Play with a full deck!”
“People didn’t care for the Holocaust, that was a moral outrage, but the policies of the Roman Catholic Church push more people into early death, disease, and poverty than the Holocaust ever did. And yet, they’re perfectly free to run their bingo games and appear among us. Why? They should have to answer for this outrage.”
“Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. Television is the heroin of the electrified middle class.”
“I think that technology has been obscenely in the service of profit. And science, too, has whored itself to profit. But what kind of world could we build if these things were in the service of art? It’s our cultural values that are out of whack.”
“It’s ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven’t taken. It’s sheer, boneheaded, know-nothingism.”
“DMT is a reliable method for crossing into a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of for 50,000 years. Is there an invisible, nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with which human beings can communicate? You bet your boots there is. And if you don’t think so, then tell me you don’t think so and you’ve smoked 70 milligrams of DMT. Otherwise we just don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Everything has directions. Whether you are ironing your clothes, tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics. If you don’t follow the directions, whose responsibility is it if you screw up? So we have to educate our children, educate ourselves, get these things out of the closet and make them part of the culture. That’s the way to deal with sexuality. That’s the way to deal with drugs. Maturely!
“When I think that I will close my hand into a fist, that’s a miracle. That’s mind over matter. No philosopher in human history has ever been able to explain how that simple act takes place. That tells you that philosophy has been staying well-away from the world of direct experience, because every day we experience willing our body to act, and yet we say mind cannot affect matter. Why do we have this contradiction? It’s because we don’t want to admit the primacy of mind.”
Weekend of June 15-17, 2012
“Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”
Esalen Workshop
with
Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
Previous Episode
308 - In Praise of Psychedelics Part 1
Next Episode
310 - Introduction to the Valley of Novelty Workshop
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
And can you believe it? I’m actually back here in the salon once again for a second day in a row.
00:00:32 ►
Actually, I’m just trying to catch up a bit on these podcasts because last month’s technical problems set us back a little bit.
00:00:41 ►
Anyway, right now I want to play the second half of the Terrence McKenna lecture
00:00:46 ►
that we started listening to yesterday. As you know, this talk was given on the Hawaiian island
00:00:52 ►
of Maui in February of 1994, and it comes to us from fellow salonner Kevin Espison, whose voice
00:01:01 ►
you’ll hear as the second or third questioner here in a few minutes.
00:01:05 ►
And after we listen to this segment, I’ll return with a message that Kevin sent to me the other day.
00:01:11 ►
But now let’s pick up where we left off.
00:01:13 ►
As you recall, I’m sure, Terrence had just finished saying that it is time for us to all start speaking about the unspeakable,
00:01:22 ►
namely the importance of properly using psychedelic medicines
00:01:26 ►
if we are to turn away from our current path, which is really leading our species toward extinction.
00:01:33 ►
So now let’s rejoin Terence McKenna for the end of his lecture and the question and answer session that followed.
00:01:55 ►
So, here we are. Nine times in the last 100,000 years, the ice has moved outward from the poles, destroying everything in its path.
00:02:01 ►
Our people crossed the Straits of Beringia thousands and thousands of years ago.
00:02:05 ►
They didn’t have antibiotics, They didn’t have MTV.
00:02:07 ►
They didn’t have central air conditioning.
00:02:10 ►
But they managed to get us to this point.
00:02:13 ►
Now the ball is in our hands.
00:02:16 ►
We have global databases.
00:02:19 ►
We have the internet. We have systems of communication and data gathering undreamed of even 10 or 15 years ago.
00:02:26 ►
If we drop the ball, all of nature witnesses our failure,
00:02:34 ►
and our unborn children are the recipients of the consequences of that catastrophe. So I think it’s time to begin to talk
00:02:46 ►
very, very frankly
00:02:47 ►
about the forced engineering
00:02:50 ►
of consciousness,
00:02:52 ►
about the re-shamanizing
00:02:54 ►
of society,
00:02:56 ►
about the rebirth
00:02:57 ►
of archaic values
00:02:59 ►
before it’s too late.
00:03:02 ►
If we do this,
00:03:03 ►
I really believe that we primates love a good scrap
00:03:07 ►
and that it’s not too late.
00:03:10 ►
It’s just almost too late.
00:03:13 ►
We are like someone awakening in a stupor in a burning house.
00:03:19 ►
It’s time to stagger out onto the front lawn and sort things out
00:03:23 ►
or we’re going to be
00:03:25 ►
crispy critters if we don’t get our act together so I want to urge each of you
00:03:31 ►
to consider yourself self-selected to be here tonight and therefore potentially
00:03:39 ►
an ambassador for reason on this issue of consciousness expansion
00:03:46 ►
and self-exploration.
00:03:49 ►
This is how religion was practiced
00:03:52 ►
for the first million years of its existence.
00:03:56 ►
It was only later that men wearing dresses
00:03:59 ►
took over the operation
00:04:01 ►
and have been shoving it down everybody’s throat
00:04:04 ►
in a very unpleasant form
00:04:06 ►
ever since the guy in matrix is there psychedelics work we’re not talking about sweeping up around
00:04:14 ►
the ashram for 12 years before somebody gives you the good this stuff works i mean if you had taken
00:04:21 ►
five dry grounds tonight in the confines of your home instead of
00:04:26 ►
coming here, you would be there now. So it is a tool which works. It doesn’t, it isn’t controlled
00:04:34 ►
by any BDI faction with a bunch of mumbo jumbo around it. It is self-directed, self-explanatory, and anyone who loves adventure and who loves life
00:04:50 ►
and who loves the experience of being has an obligation, I think, to explore this.
00:04:58 ►
It’s as much a part of your identity as your sexuality,
00:05:02 ►
your ancestral history, or your hopes and fears. And to ignore it is to
00:05:08 ►
choose to play with less than a full deck. Don’t do that. Play with a full deck. Help launch the
00:05:17 ►
millennium. Let’s save the planet and create a world that we can be proud to hand on to our children.
00:05:24 ►
Thank you very much. and create a world that we can be proud to hand on to our children.
00:05:26 ►
Thank you very much.
00:05:39 ►
We’ll take about a 15-minute break.
00:05:42 ►
I think they’re dealing books and things in the back. And then we’ll do Q&A from the audience which is much more fun
00:05:46 ►
I assure you
00:05:47 ►
thank you very much for coming out
00:05:49 ►
and the first question is
00:06:02 ►
what happened to the dinosaurs?
00:06:04 ►
oh what happened to the dinosaurs? Oh, what happened to the dinosaurs?
00:06:06 ►
An easy question.
00:06:11 ►
Well, I mean, there’s argument about everything,
00:06:15 ►
but I think it’s fairly clear that the dinosaurs were pushed into extinction
00:06:21 ►
by a cometary impact on the earth.
00:06:26 ►
This is an interesting…
00:06:27 ►
I mean, I don’t know what lay behind your question,
00:06:30 ►
but I’m very interested in these kind of cometary impacts
00:06:34 ►
because they create very sudden extinctions.
00:06:40 ►
And those of you who attend the workshop
00:06:43 ►
and some of the rest of you may know,
00:06:45 ►
I have a theory about time that is mathematical and predictive.
00:06:51 ►
And one of the, if you’re going to predict the past anyway,
00:06:56 ►
one of the things your theory has to kick out is this extinction of the dinosaurs.
00:07:06 ►
is this extinction of the dinosaurs and it now appears fairly clear that an object
00:07:16 ►
struck the earth and broke into two pieces if not more and impacted essentially in the gulf of mexico and in a single day they went extinct some of you, I mean, this is not simply something which lies in the distant
00:07:26 ►
past. This July, July of this year, an object of similar size will impact on Jupiter. This object
00:07:39 ►
called Schumacher Levy 9, which has broken into 25 fragments of about two to five kilometers each
00:07:48 ►
Is going to smash down on Jupiter
00:07:52 ►
the week of July 21st
00:07:55 ►
Those of you who follow these things on the time wave will see it there at the bottom of the novelty trough
00:08:03 ►
Lending yet further credence to the idea. Yes. You’re in.
00:08:11 ►
I found some mushrooms the other day. I never found mushrooms before, but I’m pretty pretty darn sure these are psilocybin mushrooms. Do you know anything about drying them?
00:08:29 ►
I dried them in my tent and after about two days they weren’t dry.
00:08:33 ►
Did they turn to slime? No, no, no, no. They were almost all the way dry, but I didn’t think they’d
00:08:40 ►
be dry enough to put into a plastic bag and I sort of want to wait until the full moon.
00:08:42 ►
I mean, they’d be dry enough to put into a plastic bag, and I sort of want to wait until the full moon.
00:08:45 ►
I did a few of them, actually.
00:08:48 ►
And were they the real thing?
00:08:50 ►
Yeah, the sport print and the bruising
00:08:54 ►
and the taste and the smell, everything was there.
00:08:57 ►
It came right out of the ground.
00:09:00 ►
I never picked them up, like I said,
00:09:02 ►
but I’m pretty going to show you today. Well, at the end of the month,
00:09:06 ►
are they fully or bad?
00:09:07 ►
I had to put them in the sun for a couple of hours.
00:09:10 ►
Because I already did that and they dried off real quick.
00:09:13 ►
Well, the key to keeping them is to dry them very, very well.
00:09:19 ►
I mean, they shouldn’t be rubbery at all.
00:09:22 ►
They should be as crisp as a crisp saltine cracker.
00:09:26 ►
So they aren’t bad then?
00:09:27 ►
No, no, they’re not bad.
00:09:29 ►
And then what you do is you put them in a, you know these,
00:09:32 ►
I don’t want to, I should get money for this,
00:09:35 ►
but a daisy seal meal system
00:09:39 ►
where you can suck the air out of the bag
00:09:44 ►
so that there’s no air in it
00:09:46 ►
and so that the bag seals down very tightly around the mushrooms.
00:09:50 ►
If you use that system and then put them in the back of a dark freezer,
00:09:55 ►
they’ll last virtually forever.
00:09:57 ►
What degrades psilocybin is light and moisture.
00:10:01 ►
And so you’ve got to get light and moisture out of the picture
00:10:04 ►
and then it
00:10:05 ►
will last for a really long time if you have a lot of mushrooms that you’re
00:10:09 ►
trying to
00:10:16 ►
no okay I want to tell you a little bit about it because it’s very interesting
00:10:20 ►
I think it follows what you’re talking about. I love your idea of a collective consciousness,
00:10:25 ►
and I think the book describes an aboriginal tribe in Australia
00:10:31 ►
that has been living the way in which you’re speaking, a collective.
00:10:36 ►
And what they’ve come to the conclusion of is that they can no longer procreate
00:10:40 ►
because they have recognized that they can no longer exist on this planet.
00:10:45 ►
And the reason they call the book The Mutant Message
00:10:47 ►
is that they believe we are a mutant life form on this planet
00:10:50 ►
that is destroying it to the extent that they can no longer continue their lineage.
00:10:55 ►
And this is an interesting concept
00:10:57 ►
because it’s the first culture I know that has selectively chosen not to breathe.
00:11:02 ►
And along with your concept of raising our consciousness
00:11:07 ►
so that we understand the destructive nature of ourselves,
00:11:10 ►
what about a parallel vision of reducing our population
00:11:15 ►
as these people are, of consciously choosing
00:11:18 ►
not to procreate at this time?
00:11:21 ►
Well, it’s interesting that you brought this up.
00:11:23 ►
Yes, I’ve been saying for some time
00:11:26 ►
that and the mushroom
00:11:30 ►
pointed this out to me
00:11:32 ►
if every woman had only one child
00:11:36 ►
the population of the planet would fall
00:11:39 ►
50% in 40 years
00:11:41 ►
50% in 40 years
00:11:44 ►
without war, war revolution coercion anything else and
00:11:48 ►
now when you suggest this to people they say well didn’t they try that in China
00:11:53 ►
and it failed yes but you have to think about a couple of things first of all a
00:12:01 ►
child born to a woman in Maui or Malibu or Manhattan,
00:12:07 ►
that child will use between 800 and 1,000 times more resources in its lifetime
00:12:15 ►
than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh.
00:12:19 ►
Why do we preach birth control in Bangladesh?
00:12:23 ►
We should be preaching it on Maui, Manhattan,
00:12:26 ►
and Malibu, because the women in those places are highly educated, socially responsible,
00:12:36 ►
global people, and therefore are the population most likely to respond to this suggestion.
00:12:47 ►
most likely to respond to this suggestion. If 15% of the women in the high-tech industrial democracies were to limit their childbearing to one child,
00:12:54 ►
within 10 years certain pressure indicators on the planet would begin to
00:13:01 ►
move away from the red and into the black. So I think that we have got to
00:13:07 ►
deal with this question of population. There are clearly too many people and one woman, one child,
00:13:15 ►
you know, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a psychedelic advocate to understand the impact
00:13:22 ►
of that. If the population of the earth were cut in half
00:13:25 ►
everybody alive would be twice as wealthy it’s possible in 120 years that we could reduce the
00:13:33 ►
earth’s population to a billion very healthy very comfortable very well educated people
00:13:41 ►
okay that’s part of what the mushroom said and I think it may seem radical in some circles, but not here, perhaps. It also said something else, which I rarely mention, but since you brought it up, there are not only too many people, there are too many men.
00:14:02 ►
there are too many men and I would be very interested
00:14:06 ►
in seeing a set of social policies
00:14:10 ►
tax incentives, medical policies
00:14:13 ►
insurance policies put in place
00:14:15 ►
to limit male birth
00:14:18 ►
it’s very rare in mammal populations
00:14:22 ►
that you have a 50-50 ratio of male to female and in
00:14:27 ►
fact it’s well known that male infants are less robust than female infants and
00:14:35 ►
the reason we have a 50-50 sexual ratio is because we artificially support males and withdraw resources from females.
00:14:46 ►
I suspect that in the high Paleolithic, the ratio was closer to two to one.
00:14:54 ►
And my supposition in thinking about this is probably that the best ratio is about three to one.
00:15:04 ►
This is the way to feminize the human race,
00:15:08 ►
if you’re serious.
00:15:10 ►
This is the way to advance women,
00:15:12 ►
if you’re serious.
00:15:14 ►
Then what you have is less men,
00:15:17 ►
women whose dedication to the reproductive activities
00:15:22 ►
is confined in time
00:15:25 ►
to the amount of time
00:15:26 ►
it takes to raise
00:15:27 ►
only one child.
00:15:29 ►
This would be tremendously
00:15:30 ►
solitary to our problems.
00:15:34 ►
I’ve never heard it advocated,
00:15:36 ►
even by the most radical
00:15:38 ►
lesbian, feminist, yada yada.
00:15:41 ►
I’ve never heard anyone say
00:15:42 ►
male birth should be limited.
00:15:45 ►
But it obviously should.
00:15:46 ►
And through an amniocentesis and this sort of thing,
00:15:49 ►
we can steer ourselves toward a population with the predominance of females.
00:15:55 ►
And those females should have only one child.
00:15:59 ►
And 75% of those children should also be female.
00:16:04 ►
And I don’t consider myself a gung-ho feminist.
00:16:08 ►
I mean, I’m a feminist, but I don’t read the literature
00:16:12 ►
or try to understand all the factions and theories.
00:16:16 ►
As a humanist, I advocate a reduction in male births.
00:16:21 ►
It just seems obvious that that’s the way to go if it doesn’t
00:16:26 ►
seem obvious to you then let’s have a public debate about it and at least make
00:16:30 ►
it part of the rhetoric of the culture that this is an option for people to
00:16:35 ►
think of it I can like to just add one thing I’m
00:16:40 ►
listening to the president’s Council on sustainable development it’s very
00:16:44 ►
interesting when you bring up the population issue
00:16:46 ►
because certain social groups that feel they are not being heard
00:16:49 ►
because their numbers are not large enough
00:16:51 ►
feel that they’re only trump cards at this point.
00:16:55 ►
And that’s real frightening.
00:16:56 ►
I understand the need for social justice,
00:16:59 ►
and that feels like their only alternative is to populate
00:17:01 ►
in order to get the respect that they need.
00:17:05 ►
But if that argument were true, that numbers were political power, then China would be
00:17:12 ►
the most powerful nation on the planet.
00:17:15 ►
I don’t see that.
00:17:17 ►
I think it’s a false analysis.
00:17:19 ►
I think that the quality of life of your citizenry dictates your position in the hierarchy of global societies.
00:17:30 ►
It’s a crazy argument to say that, for instance, the Hawaiians can only gain political power through breeding themselves into ever larger numbers.
00:17:41 ►
I mean, how practical is that?
00:17:43 ►
But people cannot afford large families. It’s a prescription
00:17:46 ►
for further poverty, further overcrowding, and further neurotic family situations.
00:17:55 ►
The child, the objection I hear to the one woman, one child idea is that only children are neurotic but I don’t believe this I
00:18:07 ►
think the post-industrial nuclear family model is extraordinarily neurotic
00:18:14 ►
because the parents model neurosis for the two children who are usually part of
00:18:21 ►
the picture the nuclear family is a product of the Industrial Revolution.
00:18:27 ►
It is not a traditional social unit
00:18:30 ►
rooted in thousands of years of human experimentation.
00:18:36 ►
It’s entirely a social unit
00:18:38 ►
created for the convenience of the factory and the office.
00:18:43 ►
If we are gung-ho to return to archaic social units,
00:18:49 ►
then we have to return to the extended family.
00:18:52 ►
And of course, that’s very difficult
00:18:54 ►
because modern transportation makes it possible
00:18:57 ►
for families to exist, to spread out all over the world.
00:19:02 ►
But whether you’re psychedelic or not,
00:19:05 ►
it’s perfectly clear that if population
00:19:09 ►
is not somehow controlled, all other good works,
00:19:13 ►
all other liberal forward-thinking policies
00:19:17 ►
will come to nothing, because the burgeoning population
00:19:21 ►
simply sucks up the resources that are free so and yes we have to then
00:19:30 ►
take on the Catholic Church and so forth and so on but no group of people should
00:19:36 ►
be free to run around advocating policies that threaten the survival of
00:19:42 ►
the human race I mean that should, if there are ideological crimes,
00:19:47 ►
that should be one of them.
00:19:49 ►
And the idea that you can run around advocating policies
00:19:52 ►
that wreck the land and push millions of people
00:19:55 ►
into poverty, degradation, and death is obscene.
00:19:59 ►
I mean, people didn’t care for the Holocaust.
00:20:06 ►
That was a moral outrage.
00:20:08 ►
But the policies of the Roman Catholic Church
00:20:11 ►
push more people into early death, disease, and poverty
00:20:15 ►
than the Holocaust ever did.
00:20:18 ►
And yet, you know, they’re perfectly free to run their bingo games
00:20:22 ►
and appear among us.
00:20:24 ►
Why?
00:20:29 ►
They should have to answer for this outrage. Of course, I have to tell you, I’m a recovering Catholic, so…
00:20:37 ►
Thank you.
00:20:38 ►
Next.
00:20:41 ►
Well Terence, you’re advocating psilocybin here as a possible key towards the necessary
00:20:48 ►
transformation and consciousness that we need for this culture, this current civilization
00:20:55 ►
to continue.
00:20:56 ►
And you painted a wonderful picture about how we really are at a kind of a break point.
00:21:01 ►
I mean, something has to happen. But I’m just wondering, do you have any kind of scenario, any vision, any way in which it’s possible for the widespread ingestion and usage of this stuff? I mean, it’s currently criminal. It’s, how can this work? How can this happen? I mean, it’s something that you have to take, right? You have to have the experience, and you’re saying that a large number of people have to have it.
00:21:27 ►
Well, there are different answers that range from obvious
00:21:31 ►
to inobvious. I mean, you’re all probably up to speed on
00:21:35 ►
the legalization struggle, how hopeless it seems,
00:21:40 ►
how prolonged the debate. Recently
00:21:44 ►
I’ve been thinking about this
00:21:46 ►
in a slightly different way.
00:21:47 ►
Here’s an idea.
00:21:51 ►
There is a plant called Salvia divinorum.
00:21:57 ►
Probably most of you have never heard of it.
00:22:00 ►
It contains a compound which is not an indole
00:22:05 ►
and which is not scheduled called salvorin alpha.
00:22:11 ►
When you take 20 leaves of this plant
00:22:14 ►
which can be grown in most climates
00:22:17 ►
and everywhere in the world as a house plant very easily
00:22:21 ►
when you take 20 leaves of this plant and chew it up and lie
00:22:27 ►
down in silent darkness, it provokes about 40 minutes of extraordinarily highly colored
00:22:34 ►
three-dimensional hallucinations.
00:22:36 ►
Let’s keep salvia legal.
00:22:42 ►
Salvia is legal.
00:22:44 ►
There are no laws
00:22:46 ►
Against it anywhere on this planet. There are no laws against this substance
00:22:52 ►
anywhere on this planet
00:22:55 ►
Keep salvia divinorum
00:22:58 ►
Legal and go home and plant it and grow it and take it and you will not be disappointed
00:23:04 ►
I am this is not a shock in
00:23:06 ►
other words i test everything anybody tells me works and it never does this works and in fact
00:23:15 ►
chemists in the past six months have isolated the compound it’s called salvarin alpha. It’s an isoquinoline.
00:23:30 ►
It’s absolutely unknown to law enforcement. It has no history of human abuse.
00:23:34 ►
And it’s active in the 200 microgram range.
00:23:39 ►
And it’s smokable.
00:23:41 ►
Salvia divinorum should be kept legal.
00:23:45 ►
It should be propagated everywhere.
00:23:47 ►
It should be widely grown and taken.
00:23:50 ►
Psychotherapists can use it.
00:23:52 ►
You can organize your church around it.
00:23:54 ►
You can do whatever you want with it.
00:23:57 ►
If what we’re trying to do is get the psychedelic experience into the public domain,
00:24:03 ►
this is the way to go.
00:24:07 ►
psychedelic experience into the public domain, this is the way to go. Once we secure that salvia does not cause madness, impotence, whatever, then the issue of these other psychedelics will be seen
00:24:17 ►
in a different perspective. This, by the way, is very new information, and there are people who
00:24:23 ►
will shit a brick when they find out
00:24:25 ►
I said this to you tonight
00:24:27 ►
because there’s a debate going on
00:24:30 ►
in the upper echelons
00:24:31 ►
of psychedelia about
00:24:33 ►
whether or not this should be
00:24:35 ►
public knowledge. I trust
00:24:37 ►
that debate is now
00:24:39 ►
closed.
00:24:50 ►
You heard it here first.
00:25:00 ►
You can order this plant from the ordinary suppliers of psychoactive gardening.
00:25:02 ►
Pardon me?
00:25:13 ►
Spell it. Salvia, S-A-L-V-I-A, space, D-I-V-I-N-O-R-U-M.
00:25:20 ►
Salvia Devinorum, called in Mexico, Ojos de la Pastora, the eyes of the shepherdess.
00:25:21 ►
Go figure.
00:25:23 ►
Yeah. I had an opportunity before I arrived here to speak with Brenda Laurel,
00:25:28 ►
who is the self-proclaimed VR goddess.
00:25:31 ►
She believes that we need to wrestle control of technology
00:25:36 ►
from the scientist to the artist.
00:25:39 ►
Could you extrapolate on that and your views on virtual reality?
00:25:43 ►
Yes, well, I’ve brenda a number of times
00:25:48 ►
yeah i i completely agree i mean i’m very excited about virtual reality which some people think is
00:25:55 ►
this funny thing for a botanist and a jungle bunny to be into but what i see coming out of vr is
00:26:09 ►
into but what i see coming out of vr is a technology by which we can show each other the inside of our own heads that’s what it promises i can imagine a world where
00:26:17 ►
around age six or seven a child begins to build their virtual reality well by the time you’re 25 it would be half the size of
00:26:31 ►
manhattan and it would be your world and it would be more you than your body i mean after all we
00:26:38 ►
don’t really identify do we with 145 pounds of monkey flesh, that is not you. You are your hopes, your fears, your dreams,
00:26:48 ►
the inner soul, the poetry.
00:26:51 ►
So I can imagine a world where
00:26:53 ►
if you were seriously interested in having a relationship with someone,
00:26:58 ►
you would invite them into your reality
00:27:00 ►
and say, this is me.
00:27:03 ►
Stroll around.
00:27:26 ►
Check the levels. Visit the museum and the spa and see what you think. Naturally, virtual reality is potentially trivializable. Millions of people right now are being warehoused by television. I mean television is the heroine of the electrified middle class and you know I’m not sure it’s a bad
00:27:32 ►
thing I mean how would you like all those people out driving around and
00:27:36 ►
shopping and getting in your way. It’s good that they’re off in their
00:27:41 ►
condominiums watching whatever they’re off in their condominiums watching
00:27:48 ►
whatever they’re watching.
00:27:54 ►
I’m not an anti-technologist, in fact quite the contrary. I think technology is a fascinating extension of ourselves
00:27:59 ►
and I think, you know, we’re taking hold of the human image.
00:28:03 ►
We’re beginning to dream the dream of becoming whatever we want to become.
00:28:10 ►
It’s very difficult because we’re emerging from the umbrella of Christian theology
00:28:16 ►
that told us that human nature was sinful, blemished, fallen from its true state.
00:28:24 ►
sinful, blemished, fallen from its true state.
00:28:28 ►
And yet, you know, we really have to return to the point of view of the great Renaissance magicians like Marcello Ficino,
00:28:33 ►
who said, he said, man, but let us say humanity is the measure of all things.
00:28:41 ►
Humanity is the measure of all things.
00:28:44 ►
We are the caretakers of the
00:28:46 ►
earth that’s not something we can choose it’s already a done deal the earth is
00:28:51 ►
now our responsibility and it’s through technology that we dissolve some of our
00:28:57 ►
boundaries and knit ourselves into a community of global management and caring. I think that’s very important. I think
00:29:08 ►
technology has been obscenely in the service of profit, and science too has hoarded itself
00:29:15 ►
to profit. But what kind of world could be built if these things were in the service of art?
00:29:22 ►
if these things were in the service of art.
00:29:26 ►
It’s our cultural values that are out of whack.
00:29:30 ►
There’s no reason to go, you know,
00:29:32 ►
beating on science or technology.
00:29:36 ►
It’s the monkey manipulating and applying these things that needs to be thoroughly looked at
00:29:39 ►
and possibly pharmacologically rewired.
00:29:44 ►
Yeah.
00:29:45 ►
Hi, I’ve read a lot of your stuff about DMT,
00:29:48 ►
and so I just wanted to know what the difference
00:29:50 ►
between DMT and mushrooms are when they’re intoxicated,
00:29:54 ►
because they’ll never be intoxicated with DMT.
00:29:56 ►
Aha.
00:29:57 ►
Well, not so…
00:29:59 ►
Psilocybin and DMT are extraordinary structural near-relatives.
00:30:08 ►
However, in the process of being metabolized in the body,
00:30:10 ►
psilocybin never becomes DMT.
00:30:13 ►
It passes close to it.
00:30:22 ►
DMT is, to my mind, the substance where all of these issues are brought to a white-hot nexus of intensity.
00:30:29 ►
Because DMT is very brief.
00:30:32 ►
It lasts on the order of 500 seconds,
00:30:38 ►
you know, under three, under five minutes for most people.
00:30:41 ►
You return to the baseline of consciousness.
00:30:47 ►
It’s a human neurotransmitter it occurs in many many plants it is the strongest of all naturally occurring hallucinogens
00:30:55 ►
and looking at the physiological profile it is probably the safest of all natural hallucinogens.
00:31:05 ►
And that’s an incredible challenge to everyone in this room.
00:31:09 ►
You know, the strongest and the safest spun into one.
00:31:15 ►
So there’s no excuse not to do it, you see.
00:31:19 ►
It’s also, because of its extraordinary brevity,
00:31:28 ►
also because of its extraordinary brevity an incredible challenge to those who want to criticize psychedelics I mean it’s ridiculous to criticize a drug you haven’t taken I mean it’s sheer
00:31:36 ►
boneheaded no nothing ism so I can respond to the argument of my critics that they can have a lifetime of criticizing psychedelic drugs,
00:31:47 ►
but they can’t spend eight hours to take mushrooms,
00:31:51 ►
but surely they can spend ten minutes to smoke DMT.
00:31:56 ►
Well, once you smoke DMT, I believe we have you.
00:32:03 ►
There is no going back
00:32:05 ►
because it is such an extraordinary
00:32:07 ►
revelation
00:32:09 ►
not of any
00:32:11 ►
any theogony
00:32:13 ►
of white lights or any
00:32:15 ►
Jungian or Freudian
00:32:17 ►
map of the unconscious but rather
00:32:19 ►
the revelation of something
00:32:21 ►
utterly unexpected
00:32:24 ►
overwhelmingly strange,
00:32:26 ►
definitely translinguistic,
00:32:28 ►
and repeatable on demand.
00:32:31 ►
We’re not talking about standing in cornfields here
00:32:34 ►
and praying for flying saucers.
00:32:38 ►
DMT is a reliable method
00:32:42 ►
for crossing in to a dimension that human beings have debated the existence of
00:32:48 ►
for 50,000 years. Is there an invisible nearby world inhabited by active intelligences with
00:32:56 ►
which human beings can communicate? You bet your booties there is. And know if you don’t think so then tell me you don’t think so
00:33:07 ►
and you’ve smoked 70 milligrams of dmt otherwise we just don’t have anything to talk about
00:33:15 ►
yes yes
00:33:20 ►
i love your theory um of the missing link and psilocybin being a possible solution to the missing link there.
00:33:31 ►
And I think of how different we are as a culture now from what the people who lived then would have been,
00:33:40 ►
who were connected to the earth and not breathing smog and didn’t have
00:33:45 ►
their nervous systems blocked by the millions of stressors that we have in our day-to-day
00:33:50 ►
lives now.
00:33:51 ►
And one of the things that concerns me as a long-time observer of psychedelics on people,
00:33:58 ►
not so much psilocybin, specifically the LSD and the more chemically altered ones,
00:34:07 ►
is watching the way that that does sometimes affect
00:34:10 ►
different people different ways,
00:34:12 ►
and sometimes in a not always positive way.
00:34:15 ►
And when I hear people talking about using psychedelics
00:34:20 ►
as a general solution to something,
00:34:23 ►
a lot of alarms go off in me
00:34:25 ►
because I’ve seen so much
00:34:27 ►
temporary and sometimes long-term suffering from it.
00:34:33 ►
And I don’t know, I’d like to look at that kind of thing.
00:34:37 ►
Yeah, well, I agree.
00:34:38 ►
I mean, I think that the problem is not with the psychedelics.
00:34:43 ►
The problem is with educating people.
00:34:47 ►
The way I do psychedelics is fairly infrequently
00:34:51 ►
and at quite high doses and in darkness.
00:34:57 ►
And then this is my preference, but alone.
00:35:02 ►
And the way not to do psychedelics
00:35:05 ►
is frequently and at low doses
00:35:09 ►
and in socially dense and complex situations
00:35:13 ►
because it draws energy from the thing.
00:35:20 ►
There are a lot of people running around
00:35:22 ►
who think they have their psychedelic credentials
00:35:25 ►
in order who have in fact only tickled the tummy of the beast you know there are social subclasses
00:35:36 ►
where you get a lot of respect if you say you’re a psychedelic head and a lot of people simply want
00:35:42 ►
entry into the social club so they say oh yeah i asked that i took a lot of people simply want entry into the social club so they
00:35:46 ►
say oh yeah I took a lot
00:35:48 ►
of acid in my time
00:35:49 ►
but the question is not how much
00:35:52 ►
you took the question is how much
00:35:54 ►
you took any given time
00:35:56 ►
because when I talk
00:35:58 ►
about the psychedelic experience
00:36:00 ►
there are
00:36:01 ►
thousands of altered states
00:36:04 ►
of you know yoga, hyperventilation There are thousands of altered states.
00:36:17 ►
You know, yoga, hyperventilation, toxicity, dreams, uppers, downers, juice.
00:36:20 ►
There are all kinds of altered states.
00:36:31 ►
The psychedelic state is very, very defined in my mind. It’s characterized by boundary dissolution, by visual hallucination. That’s important. The people who say they’ve
00:36:39 ►
taken these things and never hallucinated have to go back for a retread it doesn’t count if you don’t
00:36:48 ►
hallucinate they’re hallucinogens remember so uh it’s a it’s a very specific thing that they do
00:36:58 ►
i don’t even care for the disassociative anesthetics like ketamine I don’t care for opium I don’t care for
00:37:07 ►
cocaine I mean I’ve done all these things but they’re not interesting
00:37:11 ►
what’s interesting is the transformation of psyche which goes on in the presence
00:37:20 ►
of these indoles and we have to educate our children in the schools.
00:37:26 ►
We have to teach them about shamanism.
00:37:28 ►
We have to teach them about risk.
00:37:31 ►
You mentioned the casualties along the way.
00:37:35 ►
There are people among us
00:37:37 ►
for whom boundary dissolution
00:37:39 ►
is not the problem.
00:37:42 ►
Their boundaries are dissolving all the time,
00:37:45 ►
and they are not good candidates for psychedelics.
00:37:50 ►
They are fragile,
00:37:52 ►
made fragile by the same set of traumatic forces
00:37:58 ►
that may have made you not fragile.
00:38:01 ►
But as a general rule,
00:38:03 ►
if you have psychic health psychedelics are not
00:38:08 ►
going to harm you and I’ve always felt that that people know whether they’re at
00:38:17 ►
risk from these things I always believed Tim Leary made this statement but when I
00:38:24 ►
tried to give him credit for it,
00:38:26 ►
he expressed amazement and said he never said such a thing.
00:38:29 ►
But somebody once said, LSD is a substance which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it.
00:38:42 ►
And I certainly found that to be true it caused members
00:38:49 ►
of my family to become psychotic who had not taken it and I’ll bet you that if we
00:38:55 ►
could look at the number of emergency room admissions caused by LSD most of
00:39:01 ►
them are caught were people who didn’t take it, but who had a coronary thrombosis when their child told them they were taking it.
00:39:10 ►
Something like that.
00:39:12 ►
So we have to educate our children.
00:39:16 ►
We have no shamanic tradition.
00:39:19 ►
We don’t initiate our children into sex or anything else.
00:39:24 ►
We need to create a neo-shamanic institution.
00:39:28 ►
And I see modern psychotherapy as a kind of incipient shamanism
00:39:35 ►
that could educate people.
00:39:37 ►
But as long as we tolerate the propagation of media lies,
00:39:43 ►
disinformation, hysteria,
00:39:46 ►
then we’re going to have casualties.
00:39:48 ►
And there are also unstable personalities
00:39:52 ►
who simply do not follow the directions.
00:39:56 ►
Everything has directions,
00:39:58 ►
whether you’re ironing your clothes,
00:40:02 ►
tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics.
00:40:04 ►
If you don’t follow the directions, whose responsibility is it? ironing your clothes, tuning up your car, or taking psychedelics.
00:40:05 ►
If you don’t follow the directions,
00:40:06 ►
whose responsibility is it if you screw up?
00:40:10 ►
So we have to educate our children, educate ourselves,
00:40:14 ►
get these things out of the closet,
00:40:17 ►
and make them part of the culture.
00:40:19 ►
That’s the way to deal with sexuality.
00:40:22 ►
That’s the way to deal with drugs, maturely.
00:40:27 ►
Yeah.
00:40:30 ►
Hi.
00:40:31 ►
Hi.
00:40:31 ►
I agree that education is one of the major importance
00:40:35 ►
of being able to understand what we’re doing
00:40:38 ►
to our minds and to our body.
00:40:41 ►
And what you were talking about with Timothy Dewey,
00:40:44 ►
I remember reading one of his books that he said that
00:40:47 ►
LSD leaves your system in 20 minutes,
00:40:50 ►
or with your first urinary…
00:40:55 ►
Urinary urine.
00:40:57 ►
Your first pee.
00:40:59 ►
Okay, and so without needing to believe that it’s completely your mind
00:41:03 ►
that helps understand what’s going on within you
00:41:08 ►
and not actually the drug itself, it helps open up doors, but then it’s your own mind that keeps doors open.
00:41:16 ►
Well, I think that’s true to a degree. I was thinking about this last night for some reason it has to do with what you bring to it and
00:41:26 ►
You know we all have an obligation to be
00:41:30 ►
Experienced and by that I mean
00:41:34 ►
You know if you’ve always lived in a small town south of Hudson Bay
00:41:38 ►
And you never learned to read and you don’t watch TV
00:41:42 ►
You don’t bring much to the psychedelic experience.
00:41:46 ►
I am filled with a ravenous curiosity for everything. Unexplored countries, ancient
00:41:58 ►
languages, forgotten cultures, abandoned philosophical systems,
00:42:07 ►
the detritus of the human experience through time.
00:42:11 ►
I love all that stuff. I read constantly.
00:42:15 ►
And consequently, I have a lot of data for the thing to manipulate.
00:42:21 ►
It can only communicate with you in words that you already possess so the psychedelic
00:42:29 ►
experience is most dramatic for people who have had a lot of other experiences i think because
00:42:36 ►
they bring something to it i’m just going to say that with my own experiences, I’ve been able to counteract any bad vibes, I guess, that were coming my way through the will of knowing that it’s out of my system and it’s merely my mind.
00:43:09 ►
trip or not may seem that your mind that knowing that it’s not the drug and that it’s your mind that’s doing the evolving that you have the capability of stopping
00:43:15 ►
at any time and going to sleep and waking up the next morning and continuing your life
00:43:19 ►
yeah well I don’t want to knock the prop out from under you, but I don’t know how secure this data is that LSD leaves your body in 20 minutes.
00:43:29 ►
I’d be interested to see the papers that secure that.
00:43:33 ►
It is your mind, but what is mind?
00:43:38 ►
Philosophers have been at this for thousands of years.
00:43:41 ►
Nobody has a clue. Not a clue.
00:43:44 ►
What is mind?
00:43:46 ►
Is it the electrochemical activity of the brain?
00:43:50 ►
Is it where in the body does it originate?
00:43:53 ►
You know, with all the fancy instruments of modern medicine,
00:43:57 ►
no one has ever seen a thought form in brain tissue.
00:44:02 ►
No one has ever been able to make a direct analogy
00:44:05 ►
between an EEG tracing and a thought.
00:44:10 ►
Thought is still very, very mysterious.
00:44:14 ►
When I think that I will close my hand into a fist,
00:44:21 ►
that’s a miracle.
00:44:23 ►
That’s mind over matter. No philosopher in human history has ever been able
00:44:29 ►
to explain how that simple act takes place. That tells you that philosophy has been staying well
00:44:37 ►
away from the world of direct experience, because every day we experience willing our body to act and yet we say mind cannot affect matter
00:44:48 ►
well why do we have this contradiction it’s because we don’t want to admit the primacy of Okay. You? I have a question. I found mushrooms too the other day.
00:45:08 ►
And a very special place on the island. And unfortunately they didn’t turn to mush because it was doing a new experiment with them that didn’t quite work.
00:45:17 ►
I wanted to know if you felt that there was any medicinal properties to psilocybin.
00:45:27 ►
I personally had stomach problems for the last couple days, and after taking a few of the mushrooms,
00:45:36 ►
completely relieved any problems that I had as far as the diuretic or tonic go.
00:45:44 ►
It’s your mind.
00:45:47 ►
But let me say something about this question
00:45:50 ►
because it came up twice.
00:45:52 ►
The reason I asked the question,
00:45:54 ►
did it turn to slime of the mushroom,
00:45:56 ►
is because there are two kinds of mushrooms.
00:46:00 ►
I mean, there are many kinds,
00:46:01 ►
but two categories of mushrooms.
00:46:04 ►
Some mushrooms do what is called
00:46:06 ►
auto digest this is where when you pick them a few hours later they release the lysolytic enzyme
00:46:14 ►
in the cells and they turn to slime and the two kinds of mushrooms that are most common in the Hawaiian Islands are coprinus and
00:46:27 ►
Paniolas both grow undone both blue and both turn to slime and both contain
00:46:37 ►
Chemicals not related to psilocybin which could kick up your stomach a little
00:46:43 ►
So there are other mushrooms much rarer out here
00:46:47 ►
which don’t auto digest
00:46:50 ►
and which have a pure signature for psilocybin.
00:46:53 ►
One of the things that’s always puzzled me about Hawaii
00:46:57 ►
is why there aren’t more mushroom growers out here.
00:47:01 ►
And it’s because when you grow mushrooms here
00:47:04 ►
and then you try to sell them
00:47:06 ►
you’re met with the argument why should i buy your mushrooms when i can pick them in the pastures
00:47:12 ►
the answer is because these are different mushrooms and much superior to what you can get
00:47:19 ►
in the pastures so there’s more to it than just psilocybin mushrooms. You want to get psilocybin mushrooms in a vegetable matrix free from any other physiologically active compound.
00:47:33 ►
Yeah.
00:47:35 ►
This will maybe be the last.
00:47:38 ►
The psychedelic experience and cannabis experience certainly for me has helped me open to wisdom of nature that comes from being in a completely divine atmosphere and allowing wisdom to come. women friends, but men who have balanced their men experience. And there certainly are, we
00:48:07 ►
are everywhere in every culture that I’ve traveled in, and we are opening to this shamanic
00:48:14 ►
experience in white people. And so how do you recommend and how do you see the Gaian
00:48:22 ►
information, the mind,
00:48:29 ►
joining and supporting each other and ourselves to the next level?
00:48:34 ►
Well, it’s basically, as I said, people have to come out of the closet and people have to act from their convictions.
00:48:39 ►
I mean, I think one of the most disturbing things that can go on
00:48:44 ►
is where you go to visit some people and they say,
00:48:48 ►
we can’t smoke till the children go to bed.
00:48:53 ►
This is nuts.
00:48:55 ►
This means that this is a house divided against itself and it can’t possibly stand.
00:49:01 ►
If you don’t have the guts to tell your children you smoke dope,
00:49:05 ►
then you shouldn’t smoke dope for crying out loud. We have to come out of the closet. And
00:49:16 ►
I know, you know, it’s not easy. People are teachers, people are this, people are that.
00:49:21 ►
But on the other hand, what’s the payback for being chicken-shipped? The
00:49:26 ►
payback is continued repression, continued manipulation. If you don’t claim the right
00:49:33 ►
to be able to explore your own mind, then all other rights are potentially to be taken
00:49:40 ►
from you. And I think, you know, there are all kinds of stories going around.
00:49:45 ►
Potheads can’t think straight.
00:49:47 ►
People who use drugs don’t bathe enough.
00:49:50 ►
So forth and so on.
00:49:51 ►
This is a kind of ism.
00:49:54 ►
It’s not sexism.
00:49:56 ►
It’s not racism.
00:49:57 ►
It’s dopism.
00:49:59 ►
And, you know, enough of that.
00:50:02 ►
We pay our taxes.
00:50:03 ►
We hold down top jobs in advertising publishing
00:50:09 ►
media entertainment science compass software writing so forth and so on and
00:50:15 ►
we should have the same respect that is due everybody else in this society the
00:50:22 ►
people who are repressing dope culture have
00:50:25 ►
no agenda. They have no
00:50:28 ►
plan. Their plan
00:50:29 ►
is to keep everybody
00:50:31 ►
in a state of semi-anesthesia
00:50:34 ►
until the shit hits the
00:50:36 ►
fan. That’s the only thing
00:50:38 ►
they can figure out to do. Because
00:50:39 ►
they don’t know how to feed everybody.
00:50:41 ►
They don’t know how to cure AIDS.
00:50:43 ►
They don’t know how to
00:50:44 ►
depopulate these enormous cities. They don’t know how to feed everybody they don’t know how to cure aids they don’t know how to de-populate these enormous cities they don’t know how to generate enough electricity for the
00:50:51 ►
evolving population they have no answers all they have are spin doctors and cosmetics and delay and
00:51:03 ►
delay, and disinformation.
00:51:11 ►
So I do not understand the passivity of people on these issues. The world is slipping through our fingers
00:51:14 ►
because we don’t have the courage to stand up and halt it.
00:51:20 ►
And if we don’t have the courage to stand up and halt it,
00:51:23 ►
we are voting with the dominators.
00:51:26 ►
We are voting with those processes that will make us extinct.
00:51:32 ►
These governments, these institutions exist to serve us.
00:51:37 ►
It’s no big deal to throw down an institution.
00:51:40 ►
It’s not even a big deal to hang a few dominators.
00:51:43 ►
Why are we so polite?
00:51:45 ►
Why are we so willing to go along with this shell game?
00:51:51 ►
It’s only the entire future of the planet that’s at stake.
00:51:56 ►
So do we want to be like the Jews in Europe
00:51:59 ►
who went quietly to the trains to be taken to the camps?
00:52:03 ►
That’s the spectacle that I fear. I think we just
00:52:07 ►
have to say this dope thing is the biggest shock in history. I mean, governments have always made
00:52:14 ►
money off dope. And whenever any particular drug became too odious for them to continue their
00:52:21 ►
practice, then they handed it on to some mafia and took their cut in kickbacks.
00:52:27 ►
And that’s what’s happening now.
00:52:29 ►
Meanwhile, psychedelics,
00:52:31 ►
which unite people,
00:52:33 ►
dissolve barriers,
00:52:35 ►
make us one with each other,
00:52:37 ►
and have never made a lot of money
00:52:39 ►
for anybody compared to
00:52:41 ►
the real drugs of commerce,
00:52:43 ►
heroin and cocaine
00:52:44 ►
and that sort of thing,
00:52:46 ►
these drugs are stigmatized and suppressed.
00:52:50 ►
And we commit our individual acts of civil disobedience
00:52:55 ►
in our fine homes with the front door locked,
00:52:58 ►
but we never can seem to reach out to each other
00:53:02 ►
sufficiently to create a community that says we’ve had enough
00:53:07 ►
we’re not going along with this anymore that’s how human freedom makes progress the magna carta
00:53:15 ►
was signed when the dukes of england told the king to stuff it and women got the vote when they
00:53:22 ►
demanded it and black people got respect when they demanded it
00:53:27 ►
and gays found a place in society when they demanded it
00:53:30 ►
and when we insist
00:53:32 ►
then the dialogue will begin
00:53:35 ►
and not entail
00:53:36 ►
so I think the responsibility is on us
00:53:41 ►
we can whine all we want about the helicopters overhead
00:53:44 ►
and the friends taken
00:53:46 ►
off to jail. But unless we’re willing to stand up and be counted, why don’t I have a hundred
00:53:53 ►
competitors? I’m making good money sitting up here talking to you. You too could have
00:53:59 ►
a life if you would advocate psychedelics from the stage. Everybody needs to come and help me.
00:54:10 ►
Well, I think we’ve beat this horse to death.
00:54:13 ►
I see that it’s getting late.
00:54:15 ►
I hope that you’ll come.
00:54:17 ►
If you aren’t signed up for the workshop,
00:54:19 ►
I hope that you’ll come.
00:54:21 ►
If you can’t come, I appreciate your coming out.
00:54:24 ►
I hope you’ll read my books, the books of my colleagues. There’s a great deal of psychedelic publishing being done now.
00:54:49 ►
my books. Inform yourself. The first stop for a serious psychedelic voyager should be the public library.
00:54:58 ►
Inform your children, talk to your friends, and let’s try to make a better, stonier world out of the world we inherited.
00:55:14 ►
Thank you very much. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:55:20 ►
Well, how was that for a rousing call to arms?
00:55:24 ►
I really can’t ever recall hearing Terrence, or anyone else for that matter,
00:55:29 ►
make such an impassioned plea for our species to begin to discuss and explore
00:55:34 ►
both the uses of psychedelic medicines as well as the outer realms of consciousness,
00:55:41 ►
imagination, and possibility.
00:55:43 ►
But as Terrence just mentioned, it is sometimes easier said than done,
00:55:47 ►
particularly since we are now even deeper into a fascist police surveillance state
00:55:53 ►
than we were back in 1994.
00:55:56 ►
In fact, right now we’re in a spot that, I’m sorry to say,
00:55:59 ►
at least seems to me is much worse than the picture that my grammar school teachers
00:56:04 ►
painted back in the 1950s
00:56:06 ►
of the Soviet Union. You know, just like the old USSR, the USA now has become a country that won’t
00:56:13 ►
hesitate to take your job or your children if you get too far out of line. So while I agree with him
00:56:19 ►
completely, that doesn’t mean that I advocate walking into a police station or a congressperson’s office
00:56:25 ►
and lighting up a joint or something.
00:56:27 ►
That’s not going to do anyone any good,
00:56:29 ►
particularly if you’re held in a cage until you become more docile.
00:56:34 ►
Fortunately, I’m at a point in my life where I don’t really have much to lose.
00:56:39 ►
Soon I’ll be completing my 70th year in this life,
00:56:42 ►
and I realize that I have a lot more yesterdays than I have
00:56:45 ►
tomorrows. And so I have no problem being up front and publicly coming out and agreeing with Terrence
00:56:51 ►
McKenna that the proper use of psychedelic substances, not by everybody, but by those who
00:56:57 ►
are called to this work, well, that and the ideas that are brought back from those exploration of
00:57:04 ►
deep consciousness may be our best hope for the long-term survival of our species.
00:57:10 ►
And if you happen to believe in reincarnation, then you have an even greater stake in keeping this species going for as long as possible.
00:57:20 ►
However, there are many ways to support this line of thinking.
00:57:31 ►
However, there are many ways to support this line of thinking, and they don’t all require that you expose yourself or those around you to some unwanted form of government intrusion.
00:57:45 ►
But no matter what you do decide, by far the most important thing that you can do right now, today, is to continue to read and gather as much information as you possibly can about these magical plants and chemicals.
00:57:50 ►
You know, back in 1994, when this talk was recorded,
00:57:54 ►
Terrence was recommending that you start by going to your public library.
00:58:00 ►
Of course, today it’s much easier, because all you have to do is surf on over to arrowid.org. That’s E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
00:58:04 ►
And from there, you’re going to find all of the links, books, and leads that you’re going to need to get really rolling.
00:58:11 ►
And speaking of gathering more information about ways that others are thinking about the major issues of the day,
00:58:18 ►
I want to let you know that there still are a few spaces left for the Terrence McKenna Beyond 2012 workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I are leading at
00:58:28 ►
the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California. As I’ve
00:58:32 ►
told you before, it’s going to be held over the weekend of June 15th to
00:58:36 ►
the 17th, and I actually recognize many of the
00:58:40 ►
names of those who have already signed up, and I’m here to tell you that
00:58:43 ►
it’s going to be a
00:58:45 ►
very interesting and eclectic crowd indeed. And happily, there are about the same number of women
00:58:51 ►
and men attending, so the energy should be perfect. And I’ll put a link to that event at the bottom of
00:58:57 ►
the program notes for today’s podcast, which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:59:03 ►
As you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:59:11 ►
Now, one final thing that I’d like to mention today comes from a message that I received from Kevin Esperson,
00:59:14 ►
the man who made the recording that we just heard.
00:59:16 ►
And here is part of what he had to say.
00:59:24 ►
Considering the response Terrence gave to the questions asked at about the 1 hour and 23 minute mark, I would ask you to play this
00:59:26 ►
part if possible. I have so much to say about this issue, and it is about time someone shouted out
00:59:33 ►
the need to start a religion around salvia before it is too late. It just became illegal in
00:59:39 ►
Pennsylvania last August 2001, and I have been consuming it since the day after hearing of this news
00:59:45 ►
in the first week of February, 1994.
00:59:49 ►
Anyway, I would jump at the chance to speak about what was said on that Maui magical weekend
00:59:54 ►
and invite all to my Facebook page to begin the dialogue.
00:59:59 ►
I’m looking forward to hearing some sort of response, as I find it to be difficult to
01:00:04 ►
talk about these subjects with most people
01:00:06 ►
and it is hard for me to connect with those few others without egos getting in the way.
01:00:12 ►
Naturally, inertia has a lot to do with this difficulty in connecting,
01:00:16 ►
but then again I think that the struggles in life are a necessary requirement for our development
01:00:21 ►
and to remove them would only cripple us on many levels.
01:00:25 ►
However, my struggle has been going on for almost 44 years now,
01:00:29 ►
and I think it might be time to break out of this cocoon
01:00:32 ►
and spread my wings in the sunlight.
01:00:35 ►
So, if you would like to enter into a dialogue with Kevin,
01:00:39 ►
you can find him on Facebook.
01:00:40 ►
The spelling is K-E-V-I-N-E-S-B-E-N-S-E-N. Thank you. them should be strictly off limits. So far, there’s no law prohibiting other kinds of discussions
01:01:05 ►
about these substances. And that is exactly what I think Terence McKenna was getting at when he
01:01:10 ►
said to come out of the closet. You know, it doesn’t mean that you do or say anything incriminating.
01:01:16 ►
It means that we at least should be able to talk about these issues without fear of reprisals.
01:01:22 ►
And discussions like the one Kevin is promoting are an excellent way to begin.
01:01:26 ►
Already, you know, talk about end-of-life psilocybin studies
01:01:30 ►
and MDMA studies is standard fare in the mainstream press.
01:01:34 ►
So we’ve already begun.
01:01:36 ►
Now it’s up to us to keep the conversation going.
01:01:40 ►
But never forget that anyone that you don’t know really, really well
01:01:44 ►
who asks you if you can help them get something illegal, well, my opinion is the chances are almost 100% that that person is an undercover agent trying to entrap you.
01:01:57 ►
And I hate ending the podcast on such a negative note, but hey, you are an important part of our worldwide community. We need you,
01:02:06 ►
so be careful out there. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:02:14 ►
Be well, my friends.