Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Basically, for me the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation. It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work.”
“What I like to talk about, and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about, is the content of the psychedelic experience.”
“I have a skeptical and cranky side, and I’m forever puzzled why people believe the, seeming to me, dumb things that they choose to believe.”
“Psychedelics are actually a kind of miraculous reality that can stand the test of objective examination.”
“Actually, these things [psychedelics] reveal scenarios, modalities hierophanies of emotional and poetic power that are very emotionally moving, and sometimes leave in their wake powerful ideas, ideas as powerful as any of the ideas that have moved and shaped civilization.”
“The good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic. Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.”
“History, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration, is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal, becoming conscious.”
“One has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available.”
“The reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques is, you will need techniques if you go into the deep water. And they can make your life very simple and save you from unnecessary suffering. Not all suffering is necessary. Maybe no suffering is necessary.”
“The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man’s whim, which is not how it’s supposed to work.”
“Part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of your life without answers. Just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer. That’s why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great elder systems like Christianity, to the latest cult out of Los Angeles.”
“So part of what being psychedelic means, I think, is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.”
“Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on the edge of terror sometimes.”
“Once you get to this place on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest, once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics, the issue is no longer then about where is the gas peddle on the spiritual vehicle. The issue suddenly becomes, where is the brake? Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go. This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.”
Terence McKenna and Ralph Abraham discuss
“The World Wide Web and the Millennium”
Podcasts of
Into the Valley of Novelty Workshop
<style=“text-align: center;”> Weekend of June 15-17, 2012
“Terence McKenna: Beyond 2012”
Esalen Workshop
with
Bruce Damer and Lorenzo
Previous Episode
309 - In Praise of Psychedelics Part 2
Next Episode
311 - The Spirit of the Internet
Similar Episodes
- 030 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 4) - score: 0.94396
- 573 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 1 - score: 0.91033
- 381 - A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics - score: 0.91027
- 367 - The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker - score: 0.90690
- 411 - Our Involvement With Matter - score: 0.90026
- 028 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 2) - score: 0.89053
- 254 - Psilocybin and the Sands of Time - score: 0.88787
- 484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program - score: 0.88681
- 421 - Personal Implications of a DMT Flash - score: 0.88530
- 592 - Understanding Chaos at History’s End – Part 4 - score: 0.88526
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And first of all, I’d like to thank
00:00:27 ►
our fellow saloners who either bought a copy of one of my books or made a direct
00:00:31 ►
donation to the salon. Your donations came in at a perfect
00:00:35 ►
time and I’m happy to announce that we have now successfully transferred
00:00:39 ►
all of our web hosting to a single dedicated server and
00:00:43 ►
that all of the expenses associated with
00:00:45 ►
that work have also been covered, so thanks again for everything.
00:00:50 ►
Now, I do have to admit that originally I had another plan for today’s program, but
00:00:56 ►
what happened was that I promised Bruce Dahmer that I’d digitize the first tape in that old
00:01:01 ►
Valley of Novelty series that I began podcasting back in episode 27.
00:01:07 ►
This one, by the way, I think is number 310.
00:01:11 ►
Now, the reason that I never podcast that one before is that it was what I call the get-to-know-you session
00:01:17 ►
that Terrence began his workshops with.
00:01:20 ►
And in my memory, it consisted mainly of a lot of quiet spots where we went around the room, introduced ourselves, and made a comment if we wanted to.
00:01:29 ►
And those quiet spots occurred because we didn’t have a mic to pass around, so we couldn’t pick up everybody’s voice.
00:01:36 ►
Now, this particular session took place on a Friday evening on the last day of July in 1998.
00:01:43 ►
Friday evening on the last day of July in 1998.
00:01:49 ►
And since Bruce and I are planning on doing something like this at our Esalen workshop next month,
00:01:52 ►
I wanted to let Bruce hear how Terrence did it.
00:01:58 ►
However, once I got it digitized, I remembered that when I did the first Valley of Novelty podcast,
00:02:02 ►
I wanted to be sure that it would begin with all Terrence and not just him commenting on what those of us
00:02:05 ►
in attendance had to say. You see, at the time, there were somewhere between 100 and 200 people
00:02:11 ►
who were already downloading these podcasts each week, and I was afraid that maybe I’d lose one of
00:02:17 ►
them if I started off too slowly. And by the way, I still worry about doing or saying something stupid that would drive one of our fellow slaughters away.
00:02:27 ►
I think of us as a family, so it’s okay if we have little squabbles and disagreements.
00:02:32 ►
I just hope that you never go away.
00:02:36 ►
Now, where was I?
00:02:38 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:02:39 ►
My original thought for the Valley of Novelty series was to end it with the part that I’m going to play for you right now.
00:02:46 ►
But, as you can tell, I’m
00:02:48 ►
kind of late getting around to it.
00:02:50 ►
Anyway, what we are
00:02:52 ►
about to hear is how Terrence opened
00:02:54 ►
and closed that first session of his
00:02:56 ►
workshops. So, there’s still
00:02:58 ►
some really good old pure Terrence
00:03:00 ►
in parts, but what I had forgotten
00:03:02 ►
about was that there was also
00:03:04 ►
some good commentary that
00:03:05 ►
took place as we went around the room and introduced ourselves.
00:03:09 ►
Commentary by Terrence, that is.
00:03:11 ►
Not to mention that there’s probably some good commentary by the people as well, it’s
00:03:15 ►
just that, well, it didn’t make it to the recording.
00:03:18 ►
So the problem I was faced with is that this recording not picking up the voices of the
00:03:23 ►
people who were farthest away from the microphone, and no matter how much I amplified those sections, I still couldn’t
00:03:30 ►
make out what they were saying.
00:03:32 ►
So what I’ve done for those comments that were simply too quiet to hear is I cut that
00:03:38 ►
section out and replaced it with one and a half seconds of silence.
00:03:43 ►
That way you’ll figure out that Terrence is now commenting on something that someone else had just said.
00:03:49 ►
Now, it was interesting to me to see what kind of things there were that Terrence was responding to.
00:03:56 ►
You know, some people simply said their first names and not much else,
00:04:00 ►
while a few gave long orations about something or other.
00:04:04 ►
And as I sat there with about 60 other people,
00:04:07 ►
I tried to figure out what to say myself that maybe would get him to make the comment.
00:04:11 ►
Because, well, the truth is, I think we were all like a bunch of little school show-offs
00:04:16 ►
trying to get our teachers’ attention.
00:04:18 ►
And I had plenty of time to think of something provocative to say
00:04:22 ►
since I was sitting close to the end of the large circle that we were sitting in,
00:04:27 ►
and on pillows, of course.
00:04:29 ►
And interestingly, it was also close enough to the microphone
00:04:32 ►
that you’re going to be able to hear my goofy question.
00:04:36 ►
But my favorite parts are the comments from a woman calling herself Linda,
00:04:40 ►
and who has now become a close friend of my wife and I.
00:04:44 ►
In fact, we’ve had many adventures together since then,
00:04:47 ►
including going to the Palenque and Theobotany conferences and on to Burning Man.
00:04:53 ►
Fortunately, most of our wildest adventures came before the age of digital photography,
00:04:58 ►
so there’s little record left of them, but I digress.
00:05:04 ►
However, one of the real funny parts was when a man who was there more or less,
00:05:09 ►
he just stumbled into the workshop and he spoke up and said he was shocked
00:05:12 ►
to discover that people could and were talking about psychedelics.
00:05:17 ►
He was a real riot all weekend.
00:05:20 ►
Anyway, let’s get on with it and I’ll be back right after we hear this session.
00:05:24 ►
And anyway, let’s get on with it, and I’ll be back right after we hear this session.
00:05:32 ►
Well, welcome to In the Valley of Novelty.
00:05:39 ►
I understand we’ll meet here all of our sessions,
00:05:44 ►
and tomorrow’s session begins at 9 and runs till noon.
00:05:47 ►
Correct me if any of this is not the case.
00:05:53 ►
And then tomorrow afternoon’s session runs from 2 to 5, is that it? 2.30 to 5.
00:05:55 ►
And then a Sunday morning session.
00:05:58 ►
So I see familiar faces, unfamiliar faces.
00:06:04 ►
I see familiar faces, unfamiliar faces.
00:06:10 ►
These things are most interesting, at least to me,
00:06:14 ►
when they’re directed by the agendas of whoever’s present.
00:06:19 ►
I have a number of things on my mind,
00:06:22 ►
more than a weekend’s worth of stuff.
00:06:25 ►
All of it is very familiar to me.
00:06:29 ►
I know what I think, mostly, most of the time.
00:06:35 ►
So don’t be afraid to interrupt, to ask questions. If you’re not getting what you want,
00:06:37 ►
it’s fine to take it another direction.
00:06:42 ►
The way I conceive of these things and how they’ve evolved over the years is
00:06:48 ►
originally my enthusiasm was for informing people about the psychedelic experience, especially
00:06:57 ►
plants, and how that arose out of shamanism and how it was evidence for Jungian models of the psyche.
00:07:11 ►
And basically, for me, the psychedelic experience was the path to revelation.
00:07:21 ►
It actually worked on somebody who thought nothing would work
00:07:25 ►
and then and and that’s still a large part of what gets talked about in these
00:07:33 ►
weekends simply because there’s an endless crop of new people who are
00:07:39 ►
interested in using these botanical materials for purposes of self-exploration
00:07:46 ►
and doing that safely, sanely,
00:07:50 ►
and in a fully aware manner
00:07:55 ►
involves coordinating a lot of detail,
00:07:59 ►
botanical, chemical, ethnographic,
00:08:02 ►
geographical, evolutionary,
00:08:08 ►
biological, pharmacological detail,
00:08:15 ►
which we can spend as much time on as the group will tolerate.
00:08:27 ►
What I like to talk about and what I have very little competition in terms of talking about is the content of the psychedelic experience which is very difficult to English or or to bring into
00:08:34 ►
any other language and which is not predictable or is confounding of the expectations of students of mystical experience.
00:08:49 ►
And so that was sort of my core specialty, if you will,
00:08:54 ►
was the ethnopharmacology of consciousness
00:08:57 ►
and the phenomenology of the states there derived.
00:09:02 ►
they’re derived but
00:09:05 ►
after 25 or 30 years
00:09:09 ►
of doing this
00:09:10 ►
it bleeds into
00:09:12 ►
all kinds of larger categories
00:09:14 ►
like what is art
00:09:17 ►
what is human history
00:09:19 ►
what is the religious impulse
00:09:22 ►
what is the erotic impulse
00:09:24 ►
what is mathematics?
00:09:28 ►
And then somehow these concerns,
00:09:34 ►
shamanic, oracular, ecstatic,
00:09:37 ►
always garner to themselves a prophetistic aura.
00:09:42 ►
What is the future?
00:09:45 ►
And can it be known?
00:09:47 ►
And is it mundane or is it transcendental?
00:09:50 ►
And on what scale and on what schedule?
00:09:55 ►
So all of these things are interesting to me.
00:09:59 ►
My personal history, if it matters,
00:10:28 ►
My personal history, if it matters, I grew up in a very middle class family in a very small town on the western slopes of Colorado, which is about as white bread culture as you can possibly achieve was a very stable environment to be brought up in. It was the 50s. It was all
00:10:31 ►
tube furniture and bad television.
00:10:37 ►
But the ground I happened to be
00:10:40 ►
fortunate enough to walk around on
00:10:42 ►
had clamshells 150 million years old scattered through it,
00:10:50 ►
dinosaur bones, extinct fishes.
00:10:54 ►
And I, as a kid, I was a loner
00:10:57 ►
and I spent a lot of time in these dry arroyos
00:11:01 ►
and washes where these fossils and stuff could be found. And then, you know, people informed
00:11:08 ►
me of the age of these things. And I can remember when I found out that a million years is a thousand
00:11:18 ►
years, a thousand times. It was like I got it. I mean, it was the largest thing I could get at that stage of
00:11:28 ►
my conceptualizing reality. But then I suddenly, the reality of the size and scale of nature
00:11:37 ►
snapped into focus for me. And I’ve been thinking about this recently because
00:11:47 ►
focus for me. And I’ve been thinking about this recently because one of the things you’ll find out about me if we get to know each other is I have a skeptical and cranky side and I’m forever
00:11:56 ►
puzzled by why people believe some of the seeming to me dumb things that they choose to believe.
00:12:07 ►
And I spend a lot of time thinking about what is a dumb thing to believe
00:12:12 ►
and how do you judge in a shrilly competing ideological marketplace
00:12:20 ►
the various claims, counterclaims, nostrums, ideologies, therapies, insights,
00:12:28 ►
revelations that are being peddled. And so my intellectual development, if you want to put it like that, was sort of scientific
00:12:46 ►
in the sense that it was always about looking at phenomena,
00:12:51 ►
testing it, trying to define its limits.
00:12:54 ►
The strange thing that happened to me,
00:12:58 ►
because I guess I eventually became involved with psychedelics,
00:13:03 ►
was this method of testing, demanding proof,
00:13:08 ►
never taking anything for granted.
00:13:11 ►
Normally what that does is it deflates reality.
00:13:16 ►
It flattens it.
00:13:17 ►
It makes it industrial and existential and post-romantic and horrifying.
00:13:24 ►
But in my case, it didn’t
00:13:26 ►
because psychedelics are actually
00:13:30 ►
a kind of miraculous reality
00:13:37 ►
that can stand the test of objective examination.
00:13:43 ►
I mean, in other words, there’s nothing woo-woo about it.
00:13:47 ►
It has to do with perturbing states of brain chemistry
00:13:51 ►
and standing back and observing the effects,
00:13:54 ►
their rot thereby.
00:13:58 ►
And it’s extremely dependable.
00:14:01 ►
And from a medical point of view,
00:14:03 ►
it’s extremely safe and non-invasive.
00:14:07 ►
I mean, one of the paradoxes of pharmacology is that the substances which most dramatically affect the mind do so at tiny doses and with very little sequela.
00:14:21 ►
This is extraordinary.
00:14:23 ►
I mean, it’s almost as though the mind in this case is
00:14:27 ►
a phenomenon very different from the body, where, you know, to achieve major effects
00:14:33 ►
in the body, often massively invasive procedures or large doses of invasive chemicals have to be used. Someone once said to me,
00:14:47 ►
referring to LSD,
00:14:51 ►
that if you wanted a picture at the molecular level of the power of LSD,
00:14:53 ►
imagine an ant that can rip the Empire State Building apart
00:14:58 ►
in 30 minutes.
00:15:00 ►
One ant.
00:15:02 ►
In terms of the scales and the sizes of what’s going on
00:15:05 ►
that’s a reasonable analogy
00:15:08 ►
to the power of LSD
00:15:10 ►
so I explored all kinds of
00:15:15 ►
fringe areas
00:15:18 ►
when I was a kid
00:15:19 ►
magic and telepathy
00:15:23 ►
and Ouija boards
00:15:26 ►
and various invocations
00:15:29 ►
some of which interrupted my career as an altar boy
00:15:33 ►
couldn’t have it both ways
00:15:36 ►
it turned out
00:15:37 ►
and one by one these things fell
00:15:40 ►
in the same way that as you
00:15:43 ►
go through life,
00:15:46 ►
you close the door on Santa Claus and the Easter bunny and so forth and so on
00:15:53 ►
as you move along toward adulthood.
00:15:56 ►
But then I discovered that the psychedelic dimension seemed to be an exception,
00:16:02 ►
dimension seemed to be an exception
00:16:04 ►
that it was
00:16:06 ►
as though the tidy
00:16:08 ►
world of European
00:16:09 ►
positivist culture derived
00:16:11 ►
from Calvinism and Greek science
00:16:14 ►
and so forth and so on had this
00:16:16 ►
umbilical point
00:16:18 ►
this place
00:16:19 ►
where it was all tied together
00:16:21 ►
and if you untied it
00:16:24 ►
it completely deflated
00:16:27 ►
and you were left staring into something analogous
00:16:30 ►
to William James’ description of an infant’s world.
00:16:35 ►
You were left staring into a blooming, buzzing confusion.
00:16:40 ►
Well, you know, what is that?
00:16:44 ►
What are the implications of that?
00:16:46 ►
It wasn’t a confusion chaotic enough to be simply mind dissipated into thermodynamic noise.
00:16:55 ►
I think a lot of people who have never taken psychedelics have the idea that it’s thermodynamic noise, that it’s just the brain isn’t working right,
00:17:06 ►
it’s firing randomly,
00:17:08 ►
and then some portion of it is trying desperately
00:17:11 ►
to lay gestalts of meaning onto this random firing,
00:17:16 ►
and so you get this kind of surreal careening
00:17:19 ►
from one supposed illusionary perception to another.
00:17:24 ►
Anybody who’s taken psychedelics knows this is not a very apt or cogent description, that
00:17:31 ►
actually these things reveal scenarios, modalities, hierophanies of emotional and poetic power that are very emotionally moving
00:17:47 ►
and sometimes leave in their wake powerful ideas,
00:17:53 ►
ideas as powerful as any of the ideas
00:17:55 ►
that have moved and shaped civilization.
00:18:01 ►
So my motivation in talking about these things is that I do not say that this is
00:18:10 ►
the only path out of the mundane coil of blind casuistry and tropic degradation. I don’t say
00:18:21 ►
it’s the only path out. It’s the only path I found. And I checked some of
00:18:27 ►
the other major players, but checking doesn’t mean I exhausted them. I mean, perhaps yoga can deliver
00:18:35 ►
this. Perhaps my honest metaphysics can deliver these things. Perhaps I was impatient or lumpen or simply not intelligent enough.
00:18:46 ►
But the good news about psychedelics is that they are incredibly democratic.
00:18:53 ►
Even the clueless can be swept along if the dose is sufficient.
00:18:59 ►
Hmm.
00:19:06 ►
Yes. yes well so
00:19:08 ►
that’s just a little bit about it
00:19:12 ►
and other things that are very interesting to me as I said
00:19:15 ►
are the future but the future in some
00:19:18 ►
specificity both the rationally apprehendable
00:19:22 ►
future that we get when we extrapolate current technologies
00:19:26 ►
current tendencies and the not so
00:19:29 ►
rationally apprehendable future
00:19:31 ►
when we actually turn on all the bells
00:19:35 ►
and whistles of the historical process
00:19:37 ►
and realize that it is inevitably ramping up
00:19:41 ►
into more and more hypersonic
00:19:44 ►
states of self-expression and that this is what is
00:19:48 ►
creating this end of history phenomenon or this eschatological intimation that now haunts the
00:19:57 ►
cultural dialogue. There is something deep and profound moving in the mass psyche
00:20:05 ►
driven by historical forces long in the process of unfolding,
00:20:10 ►
but now exacerbated and focused by new communications technologies
00:20:17 ►
that are essentially prostheses, extensions of the human mind and body of enormous and unpredictable power
00:20:29 ►
or with unpredictable consequences.
00:20:32 ►
So in a sense, what began for me as the psychedelic experience,
00:20:38 ►
a personal experience triggered by a relationship with a plant
00:20:43 ►
based on certain definable pharmacological phenomena
00:20:49 ►
has become like a general metaphor for understanding being in the world
00:20:55 ►
and our historical dilemma.
00:20:58 ►
Because in a way they’re fractal adumbrations of each other.
00:21:05 ►
I mean, history, call it 15,000 or 25,000 years of duration,
00:21:13 ►
is the story of an animal, some kind of complex animal,
00:21:18 ►
becoming conscious and staring out then
00:21:23 ►
into a kind of universe of infinite possibilities based on
00:21:28 ►
what consciousness can do in the realm of energy, matter, light, time, and space. Well, so in a way,
00:21:38 ►
the psychedelic experience is like a microcosmic reflection of that. You start from baseline, which is your ordinary lumpen or
00:21:48 ►
not so lumpen, depending on who you are, state of consciousness. But wherever you start from,
00:21:54 ►
it lifts you up in a process of evolutionary unfoldment that is squeezed into ours.
00:22:03 ►
And it goes on entirely in the evolution of thoughts,
00:22:06 ►
feelings, and perceptions. And it seemed to me for a long time, at least since I read McLuhan
00:22:14 ►
and assimilated his notion of tools as things which have a feedback into how we see the world,
00:22:24 ►
things which have a feedback into how we see the world,
00:22:29 ►
it seemed to me that the psychedelic state was then like a predictive model
00:22:31 ►
for what human history wanted to do.
00:22:34 ►
Human history wants to break through all boundaries,
00:22:39 ►
to somehow have a realized collective relationship
00:22:43 ►
with deity or that which orders nature or some fairly large concept like that.
00:23:07 ►
benefit and for the benefit of the group it’s useful to move around the circle and just hear who’s here and what their professional interest or just some
00:23:13 ►
something that we can hang a tag on so we know if we’re half psychotherapists
00:23:20 ►
and half advertising executives or how many hackers are here, how many molecular biologists,
00:23:26 ►
something like that.
00:23:28 ►
So with your indulgence,
00:23:30 ►
and please don’t talk long in a situation like this,
00:23:33 ►
lack of brevity is considered proof of psychosis.
00:23:40 ►
You laugh.
00:23:44 ►
Why don’t you say some little thing about yourself
00:23:47 ►
that keys us?
00:23:50 ►
Yeah, the implications.
00:23:51 ►
It’s all in the implications.
00:23:54 ►
It has to do with how much intelligence
00:23:56 ►
you bring to it at the beginning.
00:23:59 ►
If there’s no mind behind the retinal screen,
00:24:04 ►
then it’s just pyrotechnics, mental pyrotechnics.
00:24:09 ►
But it’s how much we can make of the phenomenon
00:24:13 ►
that makes it so rich.
00:24:19 ►
Yeah, you mentioned the gratuitous grace.
00:24:22 ►
This is based on a famous comment by Aldous Huxley.
00:24:26 ►
He was asked at one point,
00:24:29 ►
what is the psychedelic experience?
00:24:33 ►
And he said it’s a gratuitous grace.
00:24:36 ►
And then he explained it is neither necessary for salvation
00:24:41 ►
nor sufficient for salvation.
00:24:46 ►
But it certainly makes it easier.
00:24:49 ►
It’s like an aid.
00:24:51 ►
It’s a cul-de-sac.
00:24:53 ►
I mean, we can’t suppose that it’s necessary for salvation
00:24:57 ►
because too many people have gone from birth to the grave without it.
00:25:01 ►
But one has attained a very fortunate incarnation, I think, to be in a culture, in a
00:25:09 ►
place, in a time when psychedelic knowledge is available. And it’s a kind of paradox that in our
00:25:17 ►
own time, meaning in the last hundred years, all this information has arrived in our laps as the hubristic enterprise of white man anthropology carried back all these medicine kits and mojo bags and sacred plants and so forth and grew them in university botanical gardens and kept the stuff in lock drawers. It was like a Trojan horse brought inside the city
00:25:47 ►
walls of Calvin’s Troy. And now the
00:25:51 ►
genie is out of the bottle. I’ll have to
00:25:55 ►
restrain myself for these long exegetical comments
00:25:59 ►
on each person’s…
00:26:03 ►
Yeah.
00:26:04 ►
Yeah.
00:26:03 ►
on each person’s… Yeah.
00:26:07 ►
Yeah, I’m interested in all of this too,
00:26:10 ►
the rising paranoia and what it means
00:26:14 ►
and how to come to terms with what I call
00:26:18 ►
the balkanization of epistemology,
00:26:20 ►
the fact that the world is…
00:26:23 ►
Large groups of people no longer demand that the world even make sense.
00:26:28 ►
They’re operating on synthetic ontologies that have risen above the concept of mere sense.
00:26:36 ►
But there’s a whiff of fascism about that that has to be fully deconstructed before we want to sign up.
00:26:48 ►
Well, I have answers for all three of your questions,
00:26:52 ►
but it would take a while to unfold it.
00:26:56 ►
But as far as this last question is concerned,
00:26:58 ►
the official answer is because it came with the conquest,
00:27:04 ►
that the Strophera Cubensis, the Psilocybe cubensis,
00:27:08 ►
only prefers the dung of boss Indica’s cattle.
00:27:13 ►
So it was so associated with the cultural genocide
00:27:19 ►
brought by the Spanish conquerors.
00:27:21 ►
And this is the same reason given why in Mexico, though
00:27:25 ►
there are, in the Mexican situation it’s a little
00:27:29 ►
different. You actually have an indigenous population
00:27:32 ►
of native mushrooms, but you also have the
00:27:34 ►
San Isidro, the Cubanses.
00:27:38 ►
But it’s considered inferior when
00:27:41 ►
it isn’t by any chemical
00:27:42 ►
index.
00:27:49 ►
So I think it’s a deep association to the conquest is the only thing I can figure.
00:27:51 ►
The other thing may be, and this is more that I gave you the official answer,
00:27:56 ►
then here’s an answer based on my own experience.
00:28:00 ►
Though I know that some people combine harming with psilocybin, when I have done it, it has scared the socks off me.
00:28:11 ►
It seems an unfriendly combination for me.
00:28:16 ►
Now, the way I did it was I took half a dose of ayahuasca and half a dose of mushrooms.
00:28:22 ►
Do not do this.
00:28:22 ►
and half a dose of mushrooms.
00:28:24 ►
Do not do this.
00:28:28 ►
If you must combine these two compounds,
00:28:30 ►
I think the way you want to do it is take a fairly substantial dose of an MAO inhibitor,
00:28:35 ►
either pregamin harmala seeds or the banisteriopsis,
00:28:39 ►
and a very light amount of mushrooms.
00:28:43 ►
But the 50-50 combination was one of the longest evenings I’ve ever spent.
00:28:50 ►
And if I seem not to be going to answer your other two questions in the course of the weekend,
00:28:55 ►
remind me, because, yeah, I’m keen to get to both of those. Yeah.
00:29:00 ►
Both of those.
00:29:02 ►
Yeah.
00:29:07 ►
Community and connection.
00:29:13 ►
Yeah, it’s important for all of you to notice everyone who’s here because our agenda has triumphed so completely culturally
00:29:19 ►
that we can’t tell ourselves from the rest of the population
00:29:23 ►
as we could in the 60s.
00:29:25 ►
So it’s only at moments like this
00:29:28 ►
when we emerge out of the darkness
00:29:31 ►
and show ourselves to each other.
00:29:34 ►
And I will sail on to the next New Age watering hole
00:29:39 ►
or institute or whatever.
00:29:42 ►
But you should all realize
00:29:44 ►
that probably whatever you’re looking for someone in this room
00:29:48 ►
could help you out if you could but figure out exactly who it is
00:29:52 ►
and what it is you’re looking for
00:29:54 ►
yeah
00:29:56 ►
it may come to that
00:30:02 ►
yeah well we need to think It may come to that, yeah.
00:30:09 ►
Yeah, well, we need to think this seating thing through.
00:30:13 ►
This is how we came in, and probably I will do it tonight. But if you spontaneously reorganize yourselves, I won’t say anything about it.
00:30:19 ►
It’s interesting that you mentioned the Kundalini thing,
00:30:23 ►
because those of you who’ve read my book,
00:30:25 ►
The Invisible, I know, True Hallucinations,
00:30:29 ►
know that my brother and I got into something
00:30:33 ►
that was triggered by psychedelics
00:30:37 ►
and started out as a psychedelic trip
00:30:39 ►
but then developed into either an episode of schizophrenia or a revelation,
00:30:48 ►
or it depended on who was voting.
00:30:51 ►
And this can happen.
00:30:52 ►
These things are…
00:30:55 ►
The path goes further than most sojourners wish to travel I think. I mean the power is
00:31:06 ►
immense and once you find the way
00:31:11 ►
it isn’t a matter of
00:31:15 ►
it can be overwhelming.
00:31:19 ►
Someone once said the yogin and the schizophrenic are divers
00:31:23 ►
in the same ocean,
00:31:25 ►
but one of them has learned how to use scuba equipment
00:31:29 ►
and the other is simply drowning.
00:31:32 ►
So the reason for the emphasis on shamanism and on other techniques
00:31:38 ►
is you will need techniques if you go into the deep water.
00:31:43 ►
techniques if you go into the deep water and they can make your life very simple
00:31:48 ►
and save you from unnecessary suffering
00:31:53 ►
not all suffering is necessary
00:31:56 ►
maybe no suffering is necessary
00:31:59 ►
yeah
00:32:00 ►
yeah one of the things that I’m keen to talk to you about is,
00:32:07 ►
you know, there are various models of the psychedelic experience,
00:32:12 ►
that it’s the Jungian unconscious, that it’s the ancestor world,
00:32:16 ►
that it’s this or that.
00:32:18 ►
The one that I’m most struck by is it’s the world of the platonic ideals.
00:32:25 ►
It’s a world very closely related to mathematics.
00:32:30 ►
And in a way, the shaman is a hyper-mathematician,
00:32:36 ►
not in that he proposes theorems and solves them,
00:32:40 ►
but that he perceives hyper-dimensionally.
00:32:49 ►
And the magical power of the shaman, the power to predict weather, to tell where the game has gone, to cure, to have deep insight into
00:32:59 ►
social problems within the tribal group, all these so-called magical powers become completely
00:33:07 ►
understandable if you believe that the shaman actually attains a kind of hyper-dimensional
00:33:13 ►
perception. And, you know, also teaching here this weekend is my old buddy Ralph Abraham, who’s one of the world’s leading exponents of chaos dynamics. And he has told me many times
00:33:30 ►
that the DMT flash for him is simply and straightforwardly a perception of hyperspace,
00:33:38 ►
a coordination. And this is why metaphors like inner eye and inner seeing make sense.
00:33:46 ►
Because, of course, in hyperspace, the inside of the body is no more secret from perception than the outside of the body.
00:33:54 ►
So, yeah, mathematics is one of the few things I still trust at this point.
00:34:03 ►
few things I still trust at this point.
00:34:08 ►
Yeah, that’s my motivation is based basically on curiosity.
00:34:12 ►
I mean, I’m fascinated that we’ve gotten this
00:34:15 ►
far. I mean, given that the most economical
00:34:19 ►
situation would be pure nothingness,
00:34:23 ►
what is this?
00:34:25 ►
I mean, why is nature doing these things?
00:34:30 ►
And why does organization have such a tenacity?
00:34:35 ►
And what does it mean that we appear so late in the process and represent such a difference
00:34:44 ►
in the rest of nature.
00:34:49 ►
It’s very mysterious.
00:34:52 ►
We get used to reality because it’s so stable,
00:34:59 ►
but in fact it’s an absolutely confounding situation.
00:35:05 ►
Besides the DMT flash,
00:35:07 ►
the only other thing that I know that’s as confounding as that
00:35:11 ►
is ordinary consciousness and incarnate being in a body.
00:35:16 ►
It’s just so improbable.
00:35:19 ►
Yeah.
00:35:22 ►
Yeah, well, I was very resonant with the person over here
00:35:26 ►
who mentioned Evelyn Underhill’s book on mysticism
00:35:29 ►
because I also read it at about that age
00:35:32 ►
and I wanted these mystical experiences.
00:35:38 ►
The problem is that the thing that is so powerful
00:35:42 ►
about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand,
00:35:46 ►
which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience
00:35:51 ►
because that would be essentially man ordering God at man’s whim,
00:35:57 ►
which is not how it’s supposed to work.
00:36:01 ►
Similarly, waiting for UFOs to come by.
00:36:05 ►
You spend a lot of cold nights in the cornfield.
00:36:09 ►
But if you were to take five dried grams of Strophera cuvensis
00:36:13 ►
and spend the night in the cornfield,
00:36:15 ►
I don’t know whether you would get UFOs,
00:36:17 ►
but I guarantee you by morning your notebook would be full of something.
00:36:23 ►
So the fascinating thing about the psychedelic
00:36:26 ►
is of all of the, it seems
00:36:29 ►
magical in the sense that it
00:36:32 ►
seems to respond to human will.
00:36:35 ►
One decides whether this is
00:36:38 ►
the evening or not. And sometimes people
00:36:41 ►
have said to me, well, don’t you want to achieve these
00:36:44 ►
things on the natch?
00:36:46 ►
Well, to me, that suggests a certain degree of out of control-ness.
00:36:51 ►
In other words, if I were sitting here suddenly to notice that I appeared to have taken 20 milligrams of psilocybin,
00:37:00 ►
I would be alarmed.
00:37:02 ►
I would be concerned.
00:37:02 ►
and I would be alarmed.
00:37:04 ►
I would be concerned.
00:37:09 ►
I would want to know the casuistry of why I felt this way,
00:37:11 ►
whether somebody had dosed me at dinner or I was losing my mind or what was going on.
00:37:14 ►
On the other hand, if I had initiated the experience,
00:37:18 ►
I would be perfectly at ease with it
00:37:21 ►
and see the unfolding signposts and know what it was.
00:37:28 ►
Yeah, it’s a difference of sort of waiting
00:37:32 ►
in an attitude of the supplicant, the expectant supplicant,
00:37:37 ►
or being the hierophant with all the Faustian echoes
00:37:43 ►
that that carries with it,
00:37:44 ►
and being able to call down the power
00:37:47 ►
or go up to the power at will.
00:37:53 ►
And that’s a fantastic thing and a responsibility.
00:37:59 ►
Yeah.
00:38:02 ►
Yeah, one of the things that inevitably downloads out of all this psychedelic stuff is because it’s
00:38:11 ►
central to understanding our nature anyway is how do we relate to our sexuality to our
00:38:19 ►
relationships to our obligations to biology and romanticism and so forth and so on.
00:38:26 ►
And you mentioned monotony, monogamy, and monotheism.
00:38:32 ►
Was that the one?
00:38:34 ►
Yeah, well, part of what happens with a career like mine
00:38:37 ►
is everything you ever say is taped.
00:38:40 ►
So then your ideas may change over time,
00:38:45 ►
but people will listen to an eight-year-old tape,
00:38:48 ►
a six-year-old tape,
00:38:49 ►
and so you’re like imprisoned or liberated.
00:38:52 ►
I haven’t figured out which,
00:38:55 ►
because you must account for every opinion you ever held,
00:39:00 ►
even if you no longer hold it.
00:39:03 ►
The toughest thing to figure out is relationships.
00:39:08 ►
It is the yoga of the West,
00:39:10 ►
but it’s harder than yoga.
00:39:14 ►
And I’m 52 nearly,
00:39:19 ►
and I don’t feel greatly wiser in this area
00:39:24 ►
than I felt at 24.
00:39:27 ►
And, you know, I’ve had a marriage, I’ve had a divorce, I’ve been single,
00:39:31 ►
I’ve had long-term relationships, short-term relationships, on and on and on.
00:39:36 ►
This is, well, part of what I’ll say in a larger context is we shouldn’t seek for closure we shouldn’t
00:39:50 ►
part of what the psychedelic point of view represents is living a certain portion of
00:39:57 ►
your life without answers just accepting that certain dilemmas will never resolve themselves into some kind of a complete answer.
00:40:09 ►
That’s why psychedelics are so different from any system being sold, from one of the great
00:40:18 ►
elder systems like Christianity to the latest cult out of Los Angeles. These cults, these cultic answers
00:40:27 ►
always invariably provide a complete set of answers to life’s dilemmas at the price of being absurd,
00:40:36 ►
but this doesn’t seem to bother people. So part of what being psychedelic means, I think,
00:40:42 ►
is relentlessly living with unanswered questions.
00:40:47 ►
And this relationship thing,
00:40:48 ►
this is the heart of the alchemical furnace.
00:40:52 ►
This is where the coincidencia positorum
00:40:54 ►
is a fact in your life and my life.
00:41:00 ►
And I don’t know whether psychedelics make it easier or harder to come to terms with that
00:41:07 ►
they certainly reveal its many facets with with incredible and sometimes bewildering clarity yeah
00:41:19 ►
I think it works faster you’re right I never have said much about it because my own style was always to weigh the dose. I mean, I guess I’m just that much of an engineering type to weigh the dose. With the tea, you don’t know exactly how much you’ve taken. I had an experience in
00:41:49 ►
London one time where I went to these people’s house and they were serving mushroom tea.
00:41:55 ►
And I think it must, the miscible portion of the psilocybin must have been floating on the surface because the hit I got from this cup of almost clear broth was staggering and
00:42:09 ►
nobody else got loaded at all. I think I got 90% of the thing. So I think if you didn’t emulsify it,
00:42:19 ►
the tea delivers an uneven dose. Of course, if you’re drinking the entire dose, it’s just a habit.
00:42:29 ►
There’s nothing wrong with doing it that way. Usually in my mushroom taking career, I was the grower.
00:42:36 ►
And so I was, I somehow, I just wanted to eat it directly. Like usually that’s how I do it.
00:42:44 ►
I just don’t even, it doesn’t for me require honey or anything to wash it down.
00:42:51 ►
They get a little rasty, that’s right.
00:42:56 ►
And if they’re rubbery, then they can have secondary bacteria and stuff growing in them.
00:43:02 ►
So in that case, adding adding hot water giving them a
00:43:05 ►
splash of boiling water probably isn’t a bad idea yeah the you know it’s a frustrating situation
00:43:15 ►
because the literature tells you that dmt occurs widely throughout nature, distributed through grasses, mammalian brain tissue,
00:43:28 ►
leguminous trees,
00:43:32 ►
rubaceous plants, but when you actually go to try
00:43:35 ►
and get it out, you encounter two problems. Either it’s
00:43:39 ►
spread very thin, or
00:43:42 ►
if it’s spread thin by simply gross
00:43:49 ►
overwhelmment, you can get it out. But the other problem is, it often occurs
00:43:54 ►
complexed with other tryptamines of very nearly the same molecular weight, and
00:44:01 ►
they have activity you don’t want, cardioactive activity or like that. So practically
00:44:08 ►
speaking, in my own experience, the cleanest source of DMT is Socotria viridis. And if you
00:44:18 ►
can get hold of it and grow it, you will obtain a clean source of DMT but basically you need five acres
00:44:26 ►
in a tropical country to do it right
00:44:29 ►
that’s why I have five acres
00:44:33 ►
in a tropical country
00:44:34 ►
what?
00:44:41 ►
well it is schedule one
00:44:43 ►
pardon me? Well, it is Schedule 1.
00:44:47 ►
Pardon me?
00:44:50 ►
Yeah, all DMT is Schedule 1,
00:44:53 ►
but there’s a weird catch-22 around that.
00:44:55 ►
I mean, we all contain DMT.
00:44:59 ►
So, you know, it’s like the universal holding law.
00:45:01 ►
Everybody’s holding. Everybody is potentially out from under the umbrella.
00:45:07 ►
Probably, though you may not wish to hear this,
00:45:10 ►
the shortcut, the easier path is to just tighten your belt
00:45:16 ►
and learn organic chemistry and make it then from scratch
00:45:22 ►
or from tryptophan or indole or something
00:45:25 ►
but it’s a puzzle why there is so little dmt because as a synthetic process it’s not that
00:45:36 ►
difficult it’s certainly far less difficult than making lsd or something like that. But it’s vanishingly rare in the underground.
00:45:47 ►
One reason for that may be, you know,
00:45:50 ►
if you sell somebody a gram,
00:45:53 ►
they may leave a significant portion of it
00:45:55 ►
to their great-grandchildren.
00:45:58 ►
This is not a drug of abuse,
00:46:00 ►
where what people like are drugs
00:46:02 ►
where you sell somebody a gram at 8 in the evening
00:46:05 ►
and at 11 o’clock they’re beating on your door to buy two more.
00:46:09 ►
This is not like that.
00:46:13 ►
You know, it is…
00:46:14 ►
You mean what is it doing there?
00:46:20 ►
It’s not really well understood.
00:46:22 ►
The people who identified it, their best guess was that it had something to do with very rapid shifts of short-term attention. In other words The fact that it is so dramatic as a psychedelic experience
00:46:51 ►
but goes away so quickly makes it an ideal chemical to use
00:46:57 ►
in these kinds of short-term reactions where something spikes
00:47:01 ►
and then very rapidly returns to its baseline.
00:47:06 ►
But what it’s really doing in human metabolism, we don’t know.
00:47:11 ►
DMT, like many psychedelics,
00:47:14 ►
competes with serotonin for the serotonergic bond site.
00:47:20 ►
Interesting then that drugs like Prozac and Zoloft,
00:47:24 ►
these new antidepressants,
00:47:26 ►
they also relate to, though in a different way, the serotonergic system,
00:47:33 ►
one of the four major neurotransmitter systems that operates in the human brain.
00:47:39 ►
It’s no surprise to me that these extremely effective antidepressants
00:47:45 ►
are emerging out of meddling with serotonergic chemistry.
00:47:54 ►
DMT, many people experience it as orgasmic or ecstatic.
00:48:03 ►
Ecstasy is not simply joy. Ecstasy is an emotion of great complexity that hovers almost on
00:48:11 ►
the edge of terror sometimes but you know we could speculate that the orgasm is an interesting phenomenon and what is the chemical basis of orgasm
00:48:26 ►
and why does it occur at all
00:48:28 ►
since in many animals it doesn’t occur
00:48:31 ►
and in fact as you advance in the animal phylogeny
00:48:35 ►
orgasm becomes more common
00:48:38 ►
well it’s
00:48:39 ►
I would bet that the chemistry of orgasm
00:48:44 ►
the chemistry of DMT the chemistry of orgasm, the chemistry of DMT,
00:48:46 ►
the chemistry of mood alteration,
00:48:49 ►
in the next five or ten years,
00:48:52 ►
this will all be pieced,
00:48:55 ►
deconstructed and understood.
00:48:59 ►
I mean, the recent flap about Viagra
00:49:03 ►
will be as nothing when a drug is discovered which causes orgasm.
00:49:10 ►
And chemically, this is probably not far out of reach.
00:49:13 ►
Orgasm is a pretty general spectrum chemical response
00:49:18 ►
that you ought to be able to pharmacologically mimic
00:49:21 ►
with reasonable facility.
00:49:24 ►
I’m sure some of our best people at our pharmaceutical companies
00:49:28 ►
are hard at work on this.
00:49:30 ►
Yeah, but I digress.
00:49:37 ►
That sounds fine.
00:49:39 ►
I mean, I’m not commenting on the price.
00:49:42 ►
I’m commenting on the pharmacology.
00:49:50 ►
If you take two grams of Pegamen harmala seeds well-ground and a sufficient amount of the root scrapings of Mimosa ostiles,
00:49:57 ►
which is the Brazilian species,
00:49:58 ►
and then the conspecific Mexican species is Mimosa Tanibifolia
00:50:06 ►
Taniflora
00:50:08 ►
as far as we can tell
00:50:10 ►
chemically these things are equivalent
00:50:12 ►
that works
00:50:13 ►
basically if you’re serious about pursuing
00:50:16 ►
this you need to get into the
00:50:18 ►
habit of growing things
00:50:20 ►
and gardening or you need
00:50:22 ►
to sharpen up your
00:50:24 ►
chemistry chops
00:50:25 ►
and actually become a synthetic chemist.
00:50:30 ►
Well, the jungle ayahuasca, you know,
00:50:33 ►
you don’t need that much harming or harmaline
00:50:36 ►
to inhibit your monoamine oxidase.
00:50:39 ►
People tend to overkill on that.
00:50:42 ►
I think that the jungle ayahuascas,
00:50:45 ►
they have a cultural value system
00:50:48 ►
that places emphasis on vomiting.
00:50:51 ►
They even call this stuff lapurga.
00:50:53 ►
They want to vomit violently and dramatically.
00:50:59 ►
We’re not so keen for that.
00:51:01 ►
So we don’t need such an amount of harmin or harmaline. So you can,
00:51:07 ►
you know, if you’re fiddling with this, you can cut it back. Most people use begum and
00:51:13 ►
harmless seeds to inhibit their MAO. You don’t need more than two grams of that. At two grams,
00:51:21 ►
90% of the MAO in your body is fully inhibited for four to six hours.
00:51:27 ►
And more than that is simply kicking up your gastric response.
00:51:32 ►
But these things are available legally by now.
00:51:35 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:51:36 ►
There’s been a whole revolution.
00:51:38 ►
There are seedsmen who sell the makings of all of these things and
00:51:46 ►
Jonathan Ott’s book
00:51:48 ►
Ayahuasca Analogues
00:51:50 ►
I guess what I’m
00:51:52 ►
saying is it’s not as easy as
00:51:54 ►
it sounds right off the bat
00:51:56 ►
you may spend a few evenings
00:51:58 ►
not getting off or a few evenings
00:52:00 ►
wandering in some fairly
00:52:02 ►
peculiar mind states
00:52:04 ►
before you finally grab the brass ring.
00:52:08 ►
But it’s out there.
00:52:10 ►
It’s out there.
00:52:12 ►
Yeah.
00:52:14 ►
I had no idea.
00:52:19 ►
You mean you had no idea that this was a category of human pursuit
00:52:26 ►
and that people came to workshops like this
00:52:29 ►
and talked botany chemistry and all this stuff?
00:52:36 ►
Yeah, well, I agree that it’s a weird subset.
00:52:41 ►
It’s a weird…
00:52:42 ►
You can really get into this.
00:52:51 ►
subset it’s a weird well maybe bong making thank you my name is Nicholas Jeff I’m here to do my job.
00:53:10 ►
And I can tell that many of you are hard on the schedule of a substances at this moment.
00:53:11 ►
Probably all of you.
00:53:14 ►
We can do this easy, we can do this hard.
00:53:15 ►
The easy way is this.
00:53:19 ►
Tonight I’m going to cover a darkness.
00:53:22 ►
You bring these substances to my room, I’ll… I’m warning you,
00:53:27 ►
there will be no questions asked.
00:53:30 ►
Yes, I’m looking for them.
00:53:33 ►
You will not be pretty.
00:53:36 ►
Thank you, Karen.
00:53:37 ►
Very good.
00:53:42 ►
So, you were warned. You were warned.
00:53:45 ►
You were warned.
00:53:50 ►
Well, Wallace Stevens was an insurance adjuster
00:53:53 ►
and he managed to get good mileage out of it.
00:53:57 ►
So you just can’t tell, you know,
00:53:59 ►
God is in the cabbages.
00:54:04 ►
My name is Birgi.
00:54:05 ►
I went to the jungle in Peru
00:54:08 ►
and I was getting mushroom
00:54:09 ►
germs by myself.
00:54:11 ►
It was one of your books.
00:54:14 ►
I’m here to hear
00:54:15 ►
what you have to say.
00:54:17 ►
Doubtless some Amazonian shaman
00:54:19 ►
had lost it for you to stumble
00:54:22 ►
over.
00:54:25 ►
I’m Larry. I manage a group of internet products for you to stumble over. Yeah.
00:54:26 ►
I’m Larry.
00:54:28 ►
I manage a group of internet products for a large film company.
00:54:30 ►
And I’ve been involved in the net since the late 80s
00:54:32 ►
and have been struck for years
00:54:34 ►
by the fact that a very significant percentage
00:54:37 ►
of the people who have been building the infrastructure
00:54:39 ►
for the last 20 years
00:54:41 ►
are also very deeply involved in psychedelics.
00:54:44 ►
And I’m here to learn a little bit more about possible ways
00:54:48 ►
we can maybe leverage the net for the archaic concepts
00:54:53 ►
that you’ve espoused in the books.
00:54:55 ►
Yeah, it’s incredible the connection between the psychedelic culture
00:55:01 ►
and high technical culture and how this is rarely discussed.
00:55:06 ►
But the people who built the Internet, who conceive of these complex machine architectures,
00:55:13 ►
the people at the cutting edge in AI and chaos theory and dynamics are all graduates of these experiences.
00:55:23 ►
are all graduates of these experiences.
00:55:29 ►
Yeah, there’s a new book.
00:55:32 ►
I see it’s in the bookstore here.
00:55:35 ►
The Maya Cosmogenesis 2012,
00:55:37 ►
John Jenkins’ book about Maya and archaeoastronomy.
00:55:41 ►
If you’re interested in all that,
00:55:42 ►
his book pretty much lays it out in greater detail
00:55:49 ►
and in a more scholarly fashion than anybody else has done, because there is a lot of loose-headedness
00:55:56 ►
around when it comes to talking about the Maya. But this guy is a very good scholar and is,
00:56:02 ►
as always the case, the real truth is more astonishing
00:56:06 ►
than any myth. So if you’re interested in all that, check it out. And we will talk about
00:56:12 ►
the Maya and the time wave and the millennium and all of that stuff in the course of the
00:56:18 ►
weekend.
00:56:21 ►
Yeah, all this is fascinating. I mean, I’ve pursued the paranormal my whole life. And, you know, out of 52 years, I’ve been in its presence for maybe five minutes. But those five minutes were absolutely real. at least under some conditions you can understand what another person is thinking
00:56:47 ►
you can even look into their memories
00:56:50 ►
but what those conditions are
00:56:54 ►
how to return to it
00:56:55 ►
but having seen it only once or twice in my life
00:57:01 ►
that’s enough
00:57:02 ►
miracles are not bought cheaply.
00:57:07 ►
I mean, some people would have you believe otherwise
00:57:10 ►
and that there’s telepathy all around you.
00:57:12 ►
Well, maybe there is, but not that I could see.
00:57:15 ►
But on the other hand, functioning as a skeptic,
00:57:18 ►
there still were encounters at certain points
00:57:22 ►
that were uncanny by any rational standard.
00:57:28 ►
Yeah.
00:57:31 ►
What do you mean exactly by experience of the primordial?
00:57:37 ►
Well, I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival where the idea there is that we are discomforted.
00:57:53 ►
Civilization has made us uncomfortable with our humanness
00:57:56 ►
because these various technologies and phonetic alphabets
00:58:01 ►
and things like that have rearranged our sensory ratios from what they were
00:58:08 ►
in paleolithic times and that in a sense what psychedelics do is they hit your reset button
00:58:17 ►
they address the animal body they address a deeper level than cultural conditioning. And so you feel and experience these atavistic images and feelings
00:58:30 ►
that civilization has repressed or transmuted in you.
00:58:36 ►
And the whole premise of that book was that the 20th century
00:58:46 ►
in many of its cultural
00:58:47 ►
manifestations from
00:58:49 ►
cubism to
00:58:51 ►
da-da, abstract
00:58:53 ►
expressionism, jazz, sexual
00:58:56 ►
permissiveness, hallucinogenic
00:58:57 ►
drugs, youth culture,
00:58:59 ►
whole bunch of things were
00:59:01 ►
all impulses
00:59:04 ►
toward the primitive, toward a return to a primal state of
00:59:10 ►
social organization. And that really this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century.
00:59:16 ►
The 19th century saw the triumph of hierarchical order, gentlemanly values, class structure, all that constipated
00:59:27 ►
European stuff. And then the 20th century is experienced as chaos, you know.
00:59:35 ►
Cubism is created when Picasso brings African masks to Paris and begins
00:59:41 ►
painting them. Freud announces that we are not just
00:59:47 ►
Christian ladies and gentlemen, but right beneath the surface
00:59:51 ►
the incest drive, cannibalistic drives,
00:59:54 ►
extremely violent primitive impulses are there.
01:00:00 ►
Jazz introduces syncopation
01:00:03 ►
into music.
01:00:10 ►
Women begin to display more of their animal nature through flapper dancing.
01:00:13 ►
I don’t know.
01:00:13 ►
You can figure it all out for yourself.
01:00:15 ►
The point is the whole of the 20th century
01:00:18 ►
is a turning back toward these values
01:00:24 ►
that had been repressed for millennia, not only by Christianity, but by
01:00:29 ►
the Greek scientific philosophy, the phonetic alphabet, urbanism, agriculture itself.
01:00:37 ►
There was a very long period in the human adventure when all of those things lay in our future
01:00:46 ►
and we were far happier
01:00:48 ►
I think then
01:00:51 ►
judging by our lack of need to make
01:00:55 ►
egoistic statements by building vast
01:00:58 ►
religious monuments or enslaving
01:01:01 ►
each other or setting down codes of laws
01:01:04 ►
so forth and so on.
01:01:06 ►
And, of course, we’ll never be like that again,
01:01:09 ►
but there is an impulse in modern society to recapture those values,
01:01:14 ►
and psychedelics are hugely effective at doing this.
01:01:19 ►
I mean, all this talk of shamanism and Native Americanism
01:01:23 ►
and getting in touch with your body and honoring
01:01:26 ►
gender shifts and all of this stuff is basically rooted in a more psychedelic attitude, a less
01:01:36 ►
categorical and constipated and print defined, McLuhan would say, attitude toward social
01:01:44 ►
roles and social polity.
01:01:47 ►
Yeah. I teach literature and mythology and I’ve been experimenting with my own forms of exploration for many, many years.
01:02:06 ►
But as many of you have said here,
01:02:10 ►
much of that for me
01:02:11 ►
has been a kind of individual quest,
01:02:15 ►
a kind of…
01:02:17 ►
And I just thought
01:02:18 ►
that the opportunity to meet you
01:02:23 ►
and to interact with the rest of you who shared some of the same kind
01:02:30 ►
of interests in opening up our minds and our experience and of course the quintessential
01:02:40 ►
expression of that through language that you bring to that. And along with that, the kind of interacting
01:02:47 ►
as several of you have mentioned on
01:02:50 ►
looking at some of the same
01:02:53 ►
areas that we’re
01:02:58 ►
intending to explore. As I’ve watched us
01:03:03 ►
go around the group and heard and felt in myself the resonance with
01:03:08 ►
the number of the experiences and expressions that many of you have had, I realized how at some
01:03:17 ►
other level we all seem to have a kind of shared experience that is somehow coming into a focus here and that
01:03:28 ►
is perhaps being given expression most eloquently through you.
01:03:33 ►
But I think through our need to be here, that’s how I felt about it, just the need to come
01:03:40 ►
and somehow just be part of this experience with you.
01:03:45 ►
And I’m glad to be here.
01:03:51 ►
It’s not really a coincidence.
01:03:53 ►
It’s sort of hard to avoid me on the Internet.
01:03:56 ►
There’s just so much stuff, not all put there by me, by a long shot.
01:04:03 ►
Well, did we touch everybody? Did everybody have their say? Well, it’s always
01:04:10 ►
interesting to me to do these around in the circle things. First of all, it seems to me,
01:04:17 ►
I mean, maybe this is self-congratulatory, but it seems to me that people are extraordinarily serious and together.
01:04:28 ►
I have a real nose for nuttiness,
01:04:32 ►
and I didn’t so much as twitch this evening.
01:04:37 ►
And this is a large group,
01:04:40 ►
so don’t loosen your chains too much,
01:04:51 ►
but congratulations for impressing me anyway as very sane.
01:04:56 ►
This is an area where I think sanity counts.
01:05:03 ►
There’s no points gained for being fanatical or maniacal. This isn’t an area where you have to push the process.
01:05:08 ►
The process can push you harder and faster
01:05:12 ►
than you may wish.
01:05:14 ►
So it’s, once you get to this place
01:05:18 ►
on what we might metaphorically call your spiritual quest,
01:05:23 ►
once you get to the place where you hear about psychedelics,
01:05:29 ►
the issue is no longer then about where is the gas pedal
01:05:35 ►
and the spiritual vehicle.
01:05:37 ►
The issue suddenly becomes where is the brake?
01:05:42 ►
Because this is the fuel to go where you want to go.
01:05:47 ►
This is the power to lift you where you want to be lifted.
01:05:52 ►
Those issues are somehow now overcome.
01:05:55 ►
It becomes a very different game now, a much subtler game.
01:06:00 ►
The doorway stands open and all it requires is courage
01:06:05 ►
which is not to say it doesn’t require a lot
01:06:09 ►
it does require a lot
01:06:10 ►
but what it is is courage
01:06:12 ►
very few people go to the ashram
01:06:15 ►
for their daily meditation
01:06:17 ►
with their knees knocking in terror
01:06:20 ►
over what is about to sweep over them
01:06:23 ►
they are pretty confident that they’ve got it confined and nailed down.
01:06:28 ►
It isn’t so with this.
01:06:32 ►
I mean, I’ve done it many times.
01:06:34 ►
There are many people here who’ve done it many times.
01:06:37 ►
And the survivors are not confident.
01:06:41 ►
It doesn’t build hubris in you.
01:06:43 ►
It doesn’t promote bravado because you know how
01:06:47 ►
quickly and horrifyingly it can cut you down to size if you presume it, or if you presume
01:06:57 ►
you understand it, or if you presume to use it. So sometimes the issue of magic and power comes up. I wouldn’t get near that.
01:07:10 ►
My goal is to see more, to understand more. And what I do on a trip is damn near absolutely
01:07:20 ►
nothing. I have two or three J’s rolled in front of me.
01:07:25 ►
If I can get through them in the course of the evening,
01:07:28 ►
all goals have been met.
01:07:32 ►
To see, to understand, to remember.
01:07:38 ►
It’s an incredible statement about our humanness.
01:07:43 ►
It’s a double-edged statement about our humanness. It’s a double-edged statement about our humanness that within us,
01:07:49 ►
under the influence of these plants, we have literally Niagara’s of alien beauty.
01:07:57 ►
I mean, when I go to Manhattan, I go to the Met and the Guggenheim and I haunt the galleries of Soho. When I take mushrooms, I see more art
01:08:07 ►
in 20 minutes of behind-the-eyelids hallucination
01:08:11 ►
in total darkness than the human race
01:08:14 ►
seems to have produced in the last thousand years.
01:08:18 ►
Well, so on one level, that’s an incredible statement
01:08:21 ►
about the human capacity to generate and be in the sense of this
01:08:51 ►
potential for beauty. And when I was young, you know, in my early 20s, wandering around India,
01:08:59 ►
trying to sort all this out, having taken some psychedelics, but reading yogic texts and Mahayana texts and
01:09:09 ►
all this, I discovered in every culture there is what I call wise old man wisdom or wise old woman
01:09:19 ►
wisdom. You know, in every culture at evening you you see sitting on porches, men smoking pipes, old men. And these guys know something. They know something about life, how to till the soil, how to raise a family, how to, you know, shepherd children through their marriages and so forth and so on.
01:09:48 ►
But what I did not find in these cultures was any knowledge of this gratuitous grace.
01:09:57 ►
This is like a secret of some sort.
01:10:01 ►
And it’s a true secret in that telling it does not give it away. I know
01:10:08 ►
this because I’ve been trying to tell the secret for 25 years to anyone who
01:10:13 ►
would listen as you listen tonight and I don’t know how many people hear, at what level people hear me and there are many problems first of all
01:10:29 ►
there’s the problem of dose it’s a physical problem you can take a little
01:10:36 ►
of a psychedelic substance or an effective dose or or a lot, or too much, and medically not be in any particular danger.
01:10:48 ►
The LD50 of these substances is such.
01:10:52 ►
Let’s take psilocybin as an example.
01:10:55 ►
Psilocybin is effective at 15 milligrams
01:10:58 ►
for a 145-pound person.
01:11:01 ►
But the LD50, the lethal dose,
01:11:10 ►
145 pound person, but the LD50, the lethal dose, is something like 110 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. In other words, hundreds of times more than a dose that you would swear you were
01:11:20 ►
melting down, you were becoming the earth, you would never live to tell the tale. And actually
01:11:25 ►
you’re in no medical danger at all. So people have experiences of different dose levels.
01:11:34 ►
I’ve always been interested in what the literature describes as effective doses. What this means is
01:11:42 ►
that you’re so loaded that a guy standing there with a clipboard looking
01:11:47 ►
at you is completely convinced you’re totally loaded. You know, all pretense dissolves.
01:11:56 ►
At these higher doses, the machinery of phenomenological description begins to come to pieces on you.
01:12:08 ►
And in my experience,
01:12:10 ►
someone mentioned the difference
01:12:11 ►
between mystical experiences and psychedelics.
01:12:14 ►
There are enormous similarities
01:12:16 ►
and enormous differences.
01:12:19 ►
If you study the mystical literature
01:12:21 ►
of Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism,
01:12:24 ►
it all triangulates toward unitary states.
01:12:29 ►
The, you know, bodhi mind, the white light, the ineffable, the unnameable, the radiance.
01:12:39 ►
Vocabularies like this, which indicate some kind of homogeneity.
01:12:43 ►
like this, which indicates some kind of homogeneity. Well, in my experience, though, when you push LSD,
01:12:48 ►
there is something somewhat like that.
01:12:50 ►
LSD is not my idea of the paradigmatic hallucinogen.
01:12:57 ►
It’s different in many ways.
01:13:00 ►
Psilocybin is more the paradigmatic hallucinogen.
01:13:04 ►
And when you push it,
01:13:05 ►
there seems to be not this merging into the radiance,
01:13:10 ►
but a revelation of multiplicity,
01:13:14 ►
of detail,
01:13:15 ►
of complexification within complexification.
01:13:19 ►
Everything gives way to everything else.
01:13:22 ►
Everything is interconnected to everything else. Everything is interconnected to everything else.
01:13:25 ►
But the impression is one of an overwhelmingly bewildering
01:13:31 ►
perfusion of phenomena.
01:13:36 ►
And I’ve discussed this with lamas and these sorts of people
01:13:40 ►
and they say, well, you’re in the realm of samsara.
01:13:44 ►
You’re in the realm of the multiplistic.
01:13:47 ►
Perhaps, but the sense of a hierarchy of judgment doesn’t feel right.
01:13:55 ►
Somehow this all and everything, this teeming multiplistic universe that is revealed
01:14:02 ►
seems to carry a message of ecstatic and transcendental import.
01:14:15 ►
It’s all and everything in Gurdjieff’s phrase. And one of the ideas that I want to explore with
01:14:24 ►
you in the course of the weekend is you know most
01:14:26 ►
discussions of psychedelics orbit around what will it be like when I take it well that’s very
01:14:33 ►
interesting and of course important to the individual but to me an equally interesting
01:14:39 ►
question is what has been the impact of this experience on the evolution of human beings
01:14:47 ►
over hundreds of thousands of years in other words what is it that we share with this planet
01:14:56 ►
a kind of co-evolution not only with another order of being, which it certainly is, but the great confounding
01:15:08 ►
fact that I’ve brought back from my excursions into these places is that there is an organized
01:15:17 ►
intelligence in there, out there, over there, far more alien than the cheerful pro bono proctologists that haunt the trailer courts of the less fortunate.
01:15:31 ►
A truly alien presence, not interested in our gross industrial output or in imparting, you know, salutary technology upon us.
01:15:47 ►
Well, then what does it mean that our culture has sealed us off from this information?
01:15:57 ►
I mean, our culture claims under the aegis of science to bring us news of quasars,
01:16:03 ►
to bring us news of quasars,
01:16:08 ►
heliocasms of time and space away,
01:16:12 ►
news of the activities at the nucleus of the cell,
01:16:14 ►
at the heart of the atom. And yet, here’s a world that begins right behind your eyebrows
01:16:18 ►
that any mention of it either brings talk of mental pathology
01:16:24 ►
or how you’ve transgressed certain laws of the village.
01:16:30 ►
In other words, this culture has reared the edifice
01:16:35 ►
of empirical understanding and modern science
01:16:40 ►
and existential philosophy.
01:16:43 ►
This edifice has all been put in place
01:16:46 ►
in complete ignorance and denial
01:16:49 ►
of a fact of experience
01:16:51 ►
that is approximately as easy to access
01:16:55 ►
as orgasm.
01:16:59 ►
I mean, by different means,
01:17:01 ►
but nevertheless, not far away.
01:17:04 ►
And yet we in the West have navigated for 1,500
01:17:09 ►
to 2,000 years with this simply an easily repressed rumor. How did we get into this situation?
01:17:19 ►
In other words, if there was a primordial era of shamanism and plant symbiosis
01:17:25 ►
and a mediated relationship with nature through the Gaian intelligence,
01:17:32 ►
how did we fall then into the domain of post-Renaissance, post-medieval, post-industrial culture?
01:17:49 ►
industrial culture and then what is the implication for the future of in this dark hour of complete
01:18:05 ►
over commitment to technology economic solutions rational reductionism materialism so forth and so on. In the darkest hour of our commitment to these things, this news arrives from these repressed Aboriginal people
01:18:12 ►
that we have marginalized and humiliated
01:18:18 ►
in the process of building our own version
01:18:21 ►
of a global culture.
01:18:23 ►
Well, obviously I’m not to try to answer these questions
01:18:26 ►
tonight. But this, to my mind, you know, in the 11th century, when the Islam swept across Asia
01:18:36 ►
Minor, in Isfahan, in Iran, they built these immense mosques with mosaic vaulted roofs.
01:18:47 ►
And one of the great historians of Islam said of the city of Isfahan in the 10th century,
01:18:54 ►
he said, it is half the world, a single city, half the world.
01:19:00 ►
In a way, psychedelics are half the world.
01:19:06 ►
And yet, how few people have ever visited these sites,
01:19:10 ►
have ever stared into these particular vistas of beauty.
01:19:17 ►
And as was said in going around the circle,
01:19:21 ►
the impact of these psychedelics,
01:19:26 ►
where they hit us hardest,
01:19:30 ►
is in the domain of visionary imagining and the effort to communicate
01:19:32 ►
about our visionary imaginings.
01:19:36 ►
In other words, where they hit us hardest
01:19:37 ►
is in the domain of art and invention and novelty.
01:19:43 ►
And we have built a culture that,
01:19:47 ►
however hostile it may be to the psychedelic experience,
01:19:52 ►
it is incredibly friendly toward novelty, innovation,
01:19:59 ►
creativity, cultural evolution, celebration of difference, so forth and so on.
01:20:07 ►
So I would like to believe that the long prodigal journey of Western humanity
01:20:16 ►
to a well-nigh perfect understanding of the nature of matter and energy and space and time,
01:20:28 ►
that that prodigal journey can only be redeemed and made meaningful
01:20:30 ►
if the things learned in the shamanic descent into history,
01:20:37 ►
which it is a shamanic descent.
01:20:38 ►
I mean, we have achieved what the alchemists only dreamed of,
01:20:42 ►
and we’ve achieved it, strangely enough,
01:20:44 ►
by abandoning their illusions.
01:20:47 ►
They were epistemologically naive.
01:20:50 ►
You do not discover fusion
01:20:53 ►
by endlessly rarefying mercury.
01:20:56 ►
You do not disentangle DNA
01:20:59 ►
by heating chemical vessels in horse dung.
01:21:03 ►
We had to abandon the naivete of alchemy
01:21:07 ►
to achieve its goals,
01:21:10 ►
which were mastery of space and time,
01:21:13 ►
control of human longevity and health
01:21:17 ►
and psychological well-being.
01:21:20 ►
Well, at the center of the alchemical ideal
01:21:22 ►
was the idea of the stone,
01:21:26 ►
something part mineral, part mental, part spiritual,
01:21:31 ►
something drawn out of nature but perfected by human artifice
01:21:37 ►
and then reflecting back upon man a perfect world created through magic. This is the faith of the Renaissance magi,
01:21:49 ►
Marcello Ficino and Campanella and these people. It’s a different idea than the idea of man as a
01:21:59 ►
fallen creature or science’s notion of man as a mute witness to a meaningless universe.
01:22:06 ►
The magical ideal that these things fertilize and support is the idea that humanity is somehow
01:22:16 ►
the co-partner, a full partner in creation.
01:22:26 ►
in creation, and that what God has brought into being,
01:22:30 ►
the human imagination can perfect.
01:22:34 ►
And it’s a necessary faith for our time because the power that we have is so great.
01:22:40 ►
If the power that science has given us
01:22:42 ►
does not serve a transcendental ideal,
01:22:45 ►
then it will serve some kind of fascist ideal,
01:22:50 ►
and most people will be reduced to equations and parts of a machine
01:22:58 ►
that does not serve the human individual or the human community.
01:23:09 ►
Psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination.
01:23:30 ►
They raise the ante in the historical poker game will probably put the stamp on whether humanity and
01:23:38 ►
this planet are made or broken as a cosmic concern. Well, consciousness is the key.
01:23:48 ►
What is dragging our boat is an absence of consciousness.
01:23:55 ►
We have one foot in angelhood
01:23:58 ►
and one foot in the identity of a carnivorous ape.
01:24:03 ►
And the tension between these two
01:24:06 ►
on a global scale is excruciating.
01:24:10 ►
So if psychedelics,
01:24:13 ►
if there is one chance in a thousand
01:24:15 ►
that they contribute an increased measure
01:24:19 ►
of consciousness to this situation,
01:24:21 ►
then they are a precious gift,
01:24:25 ►
a resource, an option are a precious gift,
01:24:29 ►
a resource, an option, a possibility to be explored.
01:24:33 ►
I don’t advocate these things because I think it’s a sure thing or a safe path to the eschaton.
01:24:39 ►
I advocate them because they’re the only game in town.
01:24:43 ►
If hortatory preaching could have done the
01:24:46 ►
trick, then the Sermon on the Mount would have been the turning of the corner. But we have Buddha,
01:24:52 ►
we have Christ, we have these examples of enormously insightful spiritual beings who
01:24:59 ►
have delivered their message, and humanity has continued to flop on the seamy side. So it’s not about an idea.
01:25:09 ►
An idea is not sufficient to transform us. It’s about an experience. And this is the only
01:25:18 ►
experience I know that in the time given to us, on the scale given to us, we have a hope of actually
01:25:29 ►
cutting through the detritus of our historical experience and building a true human community.
01:25:39 ►
Well, that’s all I really want to say this evening. I’ve gone over my time. Thanks for
01:25:43 ►
being so patient.
01:25:50 ►
All of these issues and many more will be reprised in the course of this weekend.
01:25:56 ►
Get a good night’s sleep and do not attempt to detain me in my attempt to do this.
01:26:02 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:26:08 ►
And so that was how Terence McKenna began his weekend workshops.
01:26:13 ►
You know, last week when I posted that 1994 talk by Terence, I was thinking that perhaps that was maybe about the time that he was really reaching the peak of his intellectual powers.
01:26:24 ►
Perhaps that was maybe about the time that he was really reaching the peak of his intellectual powers.
01:26:28 ►
But after re-listening to the talk that we just now heard,
01:26:33 ►
I’ve come to think that he was constantly on his way to ever more intellectual clarity.
01:26:39 ►
In particular, I hope that you picked up on his lament that everything that he had said in the past was recorded and available somewhere on the net,
01:26:42 ►
and that on some topics he’d changed his mind and come
01:26:45 ►
to different conclusions, but that he felt imprisoned by some of his old and now outmoded
01:26:51 ►
ideas. So I hope that we can all keep that in mind when we’re criticizing some of his ideas we don’t
01:26:57 ►
agree with, particularly when listening to one of the talks in which maybe more current scientific
01:27:03 ►
information is available today,
01:27:05 ►
and so his ideas may obviously seem outdated, and they probably would to him too.
01:27:11 ►
Also, I want to remind you that over that same weekend in which this talk was given,
01:27:17 ►
the following evening, Terrence and Ralph Abraham did a two-hour talk about the World Wide Web and
01:27:22 ►
the Millennium. And while I haven’t listened to that conversation myself in a long time,
01:27:27 ►
it still is available in my podcast.
01:27:30 ►
It’s numbers 19 and 20 in the event that you want to listen to it again.
01:27:35 ►
Now, as much as I’d like to hang around here with you for a little while longer,
01:27:39 ►
I’m going to take off for now and continue to follow the events in Chicago, Quebec,
01:27:45 ►
and other cities where the Occupy movement is making itself known this weekend.
01:27:49 ►
And while I realize that there are some of our fellow salonners who now think that the Occupy movement is over,
01:27:56 ►
well, the simple truth of the matter is that it’s only just begun.
01:28:00 ►
And the fascist authorities in the U.S., Canada, and other places,
01:28:04 ►
well, they know it hasn’t finished yet because they seem to be scared to death of it.
01:28:09 ►
In fact, at this very moment, the rulers of the city of Chicago
01:28:13 ►
seem to be blocking Tim Pool’s cell phone
01:28:17 ►
so that he can’t video stream the demonstrations taking place.
01:28:21 ►
And I know in Quebec, where the students have been protesting tuition hikes
01:28:24 ►
for the past hundred days, well, instead, where the students have been protesting tuition hikes for the past
01:28:25 ►
hundred days, well, instead of addressing the students’ concern, the powers that be in that
01:28:31 ►
province have simply passed new laws forbidding the use of free speech in assembly. And I understand
01:28:38 ►
in Minnesota that the fascist police have been caught drugging demonstrators. So you can see that things are beginning to get really weird.
01:28:47 ►
But when the going gets weird, as Hunter S. Thompson used to say,
01:28:51 ►
well, the weird get going, or something like that.
01:28:55 ►
So press on, dear friends, press on.
01:28:58 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:29:03 ►
Be well, my friends.