317 - New and Old Maps of Hyperspace

Program Notes

This is Tape Number 001 of the Paul Herbert Collection.
Some of the topics covered in this talk:
Two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic
UFOs and aliens
The end of history – the eschaton
The psychedelic experience
Psilocybin allows dialogue with the Other
Death and afterlife
Dreams
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Terence McKenna.]

“The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience. And this has been occluded or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.”

“Experientially there is only one religion, and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.”

“Shamanism, on the other hand, is this world wide, since Paleolithic-times, tradition which says that you must make your own experience the center piece of any model of the world that you build.”

“The content of the dialogue with ‘the Other’ is a content that indicates that man’s horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughn put it, ‘the body is the placenta of the soul’”

“Alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything.”

“Psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin, allow a searchlight to be thrown on these deeper levels of the psyche, as Jung correctly stated. But it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person, so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it, can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.”

[Regarding UFO’s] “A history-stopping archetype is being released into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic Age.”

“But a mature humanity could get into a place where we no longer required these metaphysical spankings from messiahs and flying saucers that come along every thousand years or so to mess up the mess that has been created and try and send people off on another tack. And the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individuals and try to unify them. And I think that psilocybin offers a way out because it allows a dialogue with the overmind. You won’t read about it in “Scientific American” or anywhere else. You will carry it out.”

“Escape into the dream. Escape, a key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists. I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapist.”

“All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere.”

“We are, in fact, hyperdimentional objects of some sort which cast a shadow into matter, and the shadow in matter is the body. And at death, what happens basically, is that the shadow withdraws, or the thing which cast the shadow withdraws, and metabolism ceases, and matter which had been organized into a dissipative structure in a very localized area, sustaining itself against entropy by cycling material in and degrading it and expelling it, that whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.” [From the point of view of the shamanic tradition.]

“In shamanism and certain yogas, Daoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body, in life,

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And to begin with, I’d like to thank Mark C., Sean L., and Akai K. for their donations to the

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salon that help offset some of the expenses associated with distributing these podcasts,

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and also the two people who bought a copy of one of my Kindle books on Amazon,

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Also, the two people who bought a copy of one of my Kindle books on Amazon, proceeds of which also go directly into these podcasts.

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And while Amazon doesn’t tell me who you are, I know you’re out there.

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So thank all of you for your help in keeping the old salon fires burning these past couple of weeks. and another huge thank you goes out to Bill Herr who loaned me the complete set of recordings that his friend Paul Herbert made

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of the many Terrence McKenna lectures and workshops that he attended

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in all there are over 160 tapes in this collection

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and I’m in the process already of digitizing all of them

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so that I can return the originals back to Bill

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and what I’m beginning with today’s podcast is to play the entire collection

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and in the order in which they were recorded.

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Now, if you’re just joining us today for the first time,

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I highly suggest that you go back just one podcast

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and listen to my podcast number 316,

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A Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna.

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I think that it’s really important for you to hear that program

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so as to get a deeper understanding of what this large upload of some old and some new recordings of the Bard McKenna is all about.

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And I expect that along with your commentary in the program notes section of this podcast,

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which, as you probably know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,

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which, as you probably know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

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Well, along with that, you will see links also to program notes for each of the 317 podcasts from the salon so far.

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And in the right sidebar, you’re going to now find, among the other categories,

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a new one that’s titled Paul Herbert Collection.

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And by clicking on that category, you will eventually be able to access this entire

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collection. Of course, it will be in reverse chronological order. Also, I’m going to post a

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photo of each cassette tape along with the program notes for each podcast, so as to give the archivists

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of the future a little easier time in piecing together the interesting thoughts of the Bard Thank you. other programs. The simple fact is that he was just more quotable than others in that he was

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able to keep his thoughts, quotable thoughts, in one or two long sentences rather than in the long

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paragraphs as some of our other guests often do. But the other reason that I’ve added all of these

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quotes to the program notes is to provide more of the thoughts of Terrence McKenna to an audience

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that, well, maybe only would come across him through some kind of a web search.

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And so far as I know, there are currently no search engines that do word searches on audio files.

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And if you’re looking for a podcast with a particular McKenna idea in it,

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quite often using the search box on our program notes page will at least narrow your search down to two or three podcasts or so.

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Well, that’s enough of those kind of details for now. Let’s get on with the show.

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Now, this is the first of what I’m calling the Paul Herbert Collection of the Words of Terrence McKenna.

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And according to the label on the tape, which you can see a photo of if you go to the program notes for today’s podcast,

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well, the label reads, Terrence McKenna, New and Old Maps of Hyperspace, ISC Lecture, November 1982, Berkeley.

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Now, I found a number of things really fascinating when I listened to this lecture for a second time.

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For one, he obviously sounds full of energy and seems really excited about his subject matter. Thank you. one, by the time Terence appeared on the main stage as a headliner, he was intellectually

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already the full-on Terence. And considering the fact that we now know that after 1988

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or 1989, Terence never again had a mushroom experience, I immediately picked up on the

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fact that less than three minutes into his presentation, he says he is going to talk

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about his own experience with

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hallucinogens. And then later he goes into some interesting detail about the mushroom and

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its ability to put one in dialogue with the other. But that’s not all, because less than 30 minutes

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into this talk, he does a really interesting rap about what he calls the UFO disease.

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Now I guess I’m beginning to sound like one of those TV Ginsu knife salesmen

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who keeps saying, but wait, there’s more.

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And so why don’t I just get out of the way right now

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and listen with you to the oldest recording in the Paul Herbert Collection,

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which is this talk given by Terence McKenna in Berkeley, California,

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in November of 1982,

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in which he titled New and Old Maps of Hyperspace.

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And in case you’re wondering, yes, you have heard parts of this recording in some of my previous podcasts,

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particularly in my podcast number 267, which I retitled at the time to one that I thought was more appropriate.

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1967, which I retitled at the time to one that I thought was more appropriate.

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But as I said last week, my reasons for podcasting the complete set of Paul Herbert recordings,

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and in the order in which they were given, has several purposes, including providing a more accurate record of Terrence’s work, and which hopefully will make the work of

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future librarians and archivists a little bit easier.

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of future librarians and archivists a little bit easier.

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So, without any further ado, here is the bard Terence McKenna on a November day in 1982.

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Tonight we’re going to hear Terence McKenna.

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Big issue these days, and nothing to do with this talk,

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big issue these days,

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and nothing to do with this talk,

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is this idea of self-reflection and of things that are self-referential

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and the paradoxes that can come out of that.

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And I find Terence McKenna

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a kind of self-referential person.

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He’s spoken to us at least once.

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Twice.

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Twice, I think, right.

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And each time, I have experienced an almost hallucinogenic experience in listening to him talk.

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listening to him talk.

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And I’m looking forward very much tonight

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to hearing you speak

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on dreams,

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hallucinogens,

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and UFOs,

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new and old maps

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of hyperspace.

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Take off.

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Well, thank you very much.

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I’m very glad to be here.

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Special thanks to Ruth and Arthur in the Institute for asking me back for a third time. Perhaps the third time is the charm, we’ll see here.

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in shamanism and botany and ethnography and my interest is in hallucinogenic drugs especially plant hallucinogens as they’re used in a shamanic context and what impels me to speak to a roomful

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of people like this is the belief that the major important point regarding hallucinogens

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has been largely overlooked, even though we’re now 15 or 20 or 30, depending on how you count

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it, years into the psychedelic age. The central point about the psychedelic experience is the content of the experience, and this has been occluded

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or obfuscated by the behavioral and statistical and scientific methods that have been brought

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to bear to study hallucinogenic experience.

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So what I’m going to address this evening is essentially my own experience with hallucinogens

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and how I extrapolate it into the world based on its own being

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and other people’s psychedelic experiences that I have interacted with.

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Before I get into that, I want to clarify something about shamanism.

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There are two schools about the basis of shamanism, shamanistic experience. One is the

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older school exemplified by Merci Eliade, who holds that all narcotic shamanism is decadent.

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that all narcotic shamanism is decadent.

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He prefers drumming, dancing, self-mutilation,

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even ordeal poisons all precede the efficacy of hallucinogens. He believes they are resorted to when the tradition is vitiated

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and people are grasping at straws.

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is vitiated and people are grasping at straws.

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I take this to be simply a cultural bias of the school of anthropology that he exemplified

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and the time in which his work was done.

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Now, Gordon Wasson has taken the opposite tack

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and takes the position that non-narcotic shamanism is decadent

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because it is on its way to becoming ritual.

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In other words, drumming, fasting, flagellation,

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all these things work to a degree and sometimes,

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and they are not dependable in the same way that hallucinogens are.

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in the same way that hallucinogens are.

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And this has created this plays on Western people’s biases in favor of the idea that you have to work hard to get somewhere

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and if you don’t work hard, it isn’t useful.

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My own experience in looking at non-narcotic shamanism,

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essentially non-narcotic shamanism in Indonesia and in Nepal,

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was that Wasson’s intuition was very correct.

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There is a grasping after,

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and I see that grasping after

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blending into the evolution of all higher religions.

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In other words, experientially there is only one religion

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and it is shamanism and shamanic ecstasy.

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But it is very difficult to maintain in an agrarian context.

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Hunting and gathering societies,

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which have much less structured social hierarchies,

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seem to be able to function

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with the hallucinogenic experience embedded in them.

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As soon as you rise even to the level of primitive agriculturalists,

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it becomes much more important to be able to get up in the morning

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and go to work than it does to have these ecstatic experiences

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because the plants have to be tended, the fields tilled, and so on.

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I formed these opinions about non-narcotic shamanism

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early in my career of looking at this phenomenon.

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I didn’t contact narcotic shamanism

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until I went to the Amazon Basin,

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initially in 1971. And although I was

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familiar with the hallucinogenic state from growing up basically in the counterculture in Berkeley,

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but what I found in South America after sifting through these various experiences, is that the family of drugs constellated around tryptophan,

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specifically DMT, dimethyltryptamine, and psilocybin,

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which is chemically very similar to DMT,

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that these compounds had a relationship to reality

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far different from all the other hallucinogens the scopolamine hyalcyamine

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tropane family that you get in detour and that kind of thing or lsd which laboratory lsd does

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not occur in nature but isomers of it occur in nature although to be taken at hallucinogenic doses, they must be taken

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at hundreds of times the amount.

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So that’s basically the scientific, medical, anthropological basis of what I’m saying.

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A career spent in Asia and more recently in the Amazon looking at this phenomenon.

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And I want to take my conclusions tonight and contrast them with the modern

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predicament and try to make a model using the hallucinogenic experience a model that makes

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some of the anxieties of of being human and especially some of the anxieties of being human in the 20th century context

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more palatable

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and to do that I want to evoke

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a number of abysses

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a number of empty places

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that our minds tend normally to shy

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away from

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first to invoke them and then to integrate them

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through the idea of what is conventionally called

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the UFO or the UFO experience.

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These abysses are basically four embedded in a fifth.

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The four are the biological abyss

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that is represented by death and dying,

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that is the central crisis of every individual existence,

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and almost as a reflection of that crisis on a higher plane,

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the historical abyss represented by the end of history and the apocalypse and

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possibly the millennium but in any case the end of history that western religion whether it be

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judaism christianity or whatever has appointed to our world and made basic to western man’s view of

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things and which now because of the existence of nuclear weapons

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and this kind of thing, poses a terminal threat to the culture.

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So, two abysses, the biological and the historical,

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the latter being symbolized in the apocalyptic crisis.

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A third abyss could be called the psychological, and this is represented by

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dreams, most in general experience, and by hallucinogens. It is this casting off from the

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moorings of the ego, making the night sea journey into the other, and being at the mercy of, call

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it the collective unconscious, the overmind of the species, what have you.

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The fourth abyss, which is one whose emergence is unique in our time, is the actual physical abyss which surrounds this planet for light years in all

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directions because suddenly now because of our level of technology and and scientific mapping

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we realize that it is there and we realize that it is a source of our cosmic loneliness, and we realize that it presents an immense challenge

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of the sort we like to accept as a Western culture,

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challenges of energy, engineering, and distance.

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So these are the four abysses,

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the abyss of space, the abyss of death,

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the abyss of the psychedelic experience,

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and the abyss of death, the abyss of the psychedelic experience, and the abyss of dying.

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And these four general categories have to be seen embedded in a somewhat subtler kind of abyss,

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which is the abyss of the unspeakable.

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In other words, that language, which is the primary tool of cognition of the species,

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casts nets against these other gulfs

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and comes away with different kinds of maps.

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But you cannot put much trust in these maps

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unless you’ve carried out a thorough analysis of language.

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And once you’ve done that,

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for sure you will not put much trust in any of these maps

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because the thinness of the web on which it all is hung

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will be readily apparent.

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Okay.

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My assumption whenever I am confronted with opposites

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is to try to unify them

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to create a coincidencia positorum

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as was done in alchemy

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to not force the system to closure

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but to try and leave the system open enough

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so that the differences can resonate

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and become complementary

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rather than antithetical

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so I would like to unify here not two dualisms,

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but these four oppose these pairs. You could think of them as the quadrapartite

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elements of a kind of mandala. The means to unifying that mandala is integration of the

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psychedelic experience. Specifically, I’m going to make the assumption,

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specifically the psilocybin or tryptamine experience.

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And what it appears to be is something which is much more assimilable

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to the science fiction metaphor of a parallel universe

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than it is to the Freudian metaphor of a parallel universe than it is to the Freudian metaphor

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of the repression of desire

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or even the Jungian metaphor

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of a collective species-wide memory and experience bank.

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It is much more, I think,

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of the character of a parallel continuum.

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And in order to erect the intellectual edifice of the past thousand years,

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this possibility has had to be ignored,

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much in the way that you would apply Occam’s razor to a situation

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and just say, well, we will not admit the more complex phenomenon

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because we should form a theory that is true to the simplest phenomena first

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and then build out from it.

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And this has worked in a demonic kind of way

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in the sense that we have taken command of the atomic world,

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which is a very simple world compared, for instance,

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to the variables that you meet in sociology or biology,

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but at the cost of formulating theories about how the world is put together

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that nowhere come tangential to experience.

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So we have a bizarre situation

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where our best models of reality

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that are kept for us by the priesthood of science

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are like exhibits in a museum

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because they cannot be mapped on

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to the simple fact of individual experience.

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Shamanism, on the other hand, is this worldwide, since Paleolithic times,

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tradition which says that you must make your own experience the centerpiece of any model

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of the world that you build. No amount of readings from meters, whether they’re metering

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cyclotrons or any other kind of instrument are going to satisfy you.

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Once you understand that,

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then what the task becomes

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is one of making sense of these metaphors, so-called,

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or myths, so-called,

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that are the pre-Western, pre-print, pre-literate mappings of the world.

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An example of how this problem distorts other problems is the problem of extraterrestrial

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contact, which is, the way science presents the problem of extraterrestrial contact is that we are alone, and that to assuage our cosmic loneliness, we should build ever larger radio telescopes and million-channel signal analyzers and sift the radio noise coming from the stars. and eventually if a signal is found an immense philosophical turning point

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will have occurred

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and we will then place ourselves

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in the context of the cosmos.

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This is actually a red herring kind of argument

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because outside of the highly technical

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Western societies that have evolved

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in the last 300 years

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people have been talking to the other since man began.

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Angels, demons, fairies, sprites, elves, all of this is as phenomenologically a part of human experience as, we’ll say, birds of paradise,

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which I’m sure none of you have ever had anything to do with,

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but believe inflexibly that such creatures exist because it is allowed by the experts that they

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exist. What psilocybin focuses as a problem that these other hallucinogens do not is it allows a dialogue with the other that is full of give and

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take in other words there are entities in the hallucinogenic world that psilocybin and dmt and

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a few other not well known or widely distributed plant hallucinogens induce.

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I think it was William Blake who said,

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the truth cannot be told so as to be understood without being believed.

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And this is the kind of information that is coming through the psilocybin experience.

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It is information which you have to believe it.

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You have to believe it because it has this ring of authenticity.

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It is the logos.

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It is the word somehow.

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And what is being said is that our alienation, and this word is interesting, alienation,

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our alienation from ourselves

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has caused us to set up a number of straw men

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that are keeping us from building

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actually a mature model

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of how the universe really works.

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The content of the dialogue with the other is a content that indicates that man’s

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horizons are infinitely bright, that death is in fact, well, as Thomas Vaughan put it,

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the body is the placenta of the soul. And this fact has not yet been

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assimilated because it runs counter to Western reductionist, materialist empiricism. But this

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idea that the body is placenta to the soul is not an object of faith or a dogma.

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It’s a program for activity.

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The activity that it implies should be undertaken

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is a familiarization with the soul.

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And the soul has been banned from Western thinking about the self

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for nigh on 400 years, at least in leading

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circles. But I take this concept very seriously, and I think if any of you are familiar with

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the literature of alchemy, alchemy is about the generation of a psychic construct, a wholeness, a thing which has many properties, which is

00:25:47 ►

paradoxical, which is both mind and matter, which can do anything. This is the last gasp of the soul

00:25:56 ►

before it’s submerged completely. In other words, it became trapped in an association with phonic matter in the last historical

00:26:07 ►

epoch before it disappeared completely

00:26:10 ►

from western consciousness

00:26:11 ►

psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin

00:26:15 ►

allow a searchlight to be thrown

00:26:18 ►

on these deeper levels of the psyche

00:26:21 ►

as Jung correctly stated

00:26:24 ►

but it is not a museum of archetypes or psychic

00:26:28 ►

constructs, as he seemed to assume. It is a frontier of wholeness into which any person

00:26:39 ►

so motivated and so courageous as to wish to do it can go and leave the mundane plane far behind.

00:26:50 ►

In other words, it is a dimension of vertical gain that is real and is present in all of our lives

00:26:57 ►

and that we do not acknowledge except as an anomaly because we have been told that it’s an anomaly.

00:27:06 ►

We have been told

00:27:07 ►

that these perceptions

00:27:08 ►

have to be devalued.

00:27:11 ►

The result of this

00:27:13 ►

is to so distort

00:27:15 ►

the psychic life of the species

00:27:17 ►

in the present historical context

00:27:20 ►

that we have this UFO disease

00:27:24 ►

which is essentially a rupture into three-dimensional space

00:27:30 ►

of this archetype of wholeness.

00:27:33 ►

And it haunts time like a ghost.

00:27:36 ►

And it haunts human experience in the 20th century

00:27:39 ►

because it is a symbol of alienation.

00:27:43 ►

And the word alien has, in fact, come to be applied to this thing.

00:27:49 ►

It is alien. It comes from the stars.

00:27:52 ►

It is totally non-human.

00:27:54 ►

It has great potential for mankind,

00:27:56 ►

but it can barely be Englished at all.

00:27:59 ►

And actually, what it is, is the self in the form in which it is most accessible to the ego,

00:28:10 ►

given the ego’s programming with all the scientific garbage about the density of life in the universe,

00:28:17 ►

the distance to the stars, the probability of chemical evolution occurring here and there and yonder.

00:28:23 ►

It is, in other words, something which in order not to alarm us

00:28:27 ►

has disguised itself as an extraterrestrial being

00:28:31 ►

but is in fact the collectivity of the human psyche

00:28:37 ►

signaling a profound historical crisis.

00:28:41 ►

I talked about this before.

00:28:42 ►

I talked about the danger of succumbing to belief in UFO intellectual life of the species that

00:29:05 ►

this automatic mechanism

00:29:08 ►

has been triggered

00:29:09 ►

a history stopping archetype

00:29:11 ►

is being released into the skies

00:29:13 ►

of this planet and if we are

00:29:15 ►

not careful it will halt

00:29:17 ►

all intellectual inquiry

00:29:20 ►

in the same way

00:29:21 ►

that the Christos archetype

00:29:24 ►

halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic age.

00:29:28 ►

I don’t want to go into this too deeply,

00:29:30 ►

but it’s clear to me that Hellenistic science

00:29:34 ►

was destroyed by the Christos archetype

00:29:37 ►

because the Democritian atomists and materialists

00:29:41 ►

who ran Roman civilization

00:29:43 ►

had no patience whatsoever

00:29:45 ►

with this superstition that was being circulated

00:29:49 ►

among the servants about a man who rose from the dead

00:29:52 ►

and all that went with it.

00:29:55 ►

But before they knew what had happened,

00:29:57 ►

their whole civilization was in ruin

00:29:59 ►

because the archetype had frozen the forward thrust

00:30:03 ►

of this masculine

00:30:05 ►

dominant

00:30:06 ►

ethically depotentiated

00:30:09 ►

technologically obsessed

00:30:11 ►

slave built society

00:30:14 ►

and for

00:30:15 ►

a thousand years

00:30:17 ►

hydrostatics, mathematics

00:30:19 ►

metallurgy, you name it

00:30:22 ►

that was nothing

00:30:24 ►

only the words of one Galilean radical

00:30:27 ►

could occupy the time of any intellectual successfully.

00:30:32 ►

Okay, we have now, 2,000 years later,

00:30:35 ►

fought our way somewhat clear of that problem.

00:30:39 ►

But the problem it solved,

00:30:42 ►

which is the problem of this masculine overbalance and

00:30:45 ►

this obsessive technological

00:30:48 ►

thrust

00:30:50 ►

this dehumanizing thrust

00:30:52 ►

has reached an even more

00:30:54 ►

intense peak

00:30:56 ►

and now

00:30:58 ►

appears the flying saucer with the capacity

00:31:00 ►

of undoing that by

00:31:02 ►

again destroying

00:31:04 ►

science by simply being a miracle that’s all that the capacity of undoing that by again destroying science,

00:31:05 ►

by simply being a miracle.

00:31:07 ►

That’s all that is required to wreck science,

00:31:10 ►

is a miracle visible worldwide.

00:31:13 ►

And because scientists say that that can’t happen,

00:31:17 ►

consequently if it does happen, their house is in real disorder.

00:31:22 ►

So I touched on this before, any of you who heard me.

00:31:26 ►

Tonight I want to talk more about the flying saucer, not from the point of view of the

00:31:33 ►

people who are going to get the whammy when it appears unbidden, but from the point of

00:31:38 ►

view of an insider.

00:31:40 ►

In other words, one can do more than simply say, oh yes, I understand what this is,

00:31:45 ►

the overmind is visibly manifest in the skies of Earth

00:31:49 ►

in order to skew history toward an eschatological mode

00:31:54 ►

that will stifle inquiry in order, basically,

00:31:57 ►

to preserve the species from extinction.

00:32:01 ►

But a mature humanity could get into a place

00:32:07 ►

where we no longer required

00:32:09 ►

these metaphysical spankings

00:32:11 ►

from messiahs and flying saucers

00:32:14 ►

that come along every thousand years or so

00:32:17 ►

to mess up the mess that has been created

00:32:20 ►

and to try and send people off on another tack

00:32:23 ►

and the way to do this is to look at the abysses that confront man as species and individual

00:32:31 ►

and try to unify them.

00:32:33 ►

And I think that psilocybin offers the way out because it allows a dialogue with the

00:32:40 ►

overmind that is not, you won’t read about it in Scientific American or anywhere else.

00:32:47 ►

You will carry it out.

00:32:49 ►

And the carrying out of this dialogue will essentially eschatologize you as a person

00:32:58 ►

and lift you out of the historical context.

00:33:02 ►

It’s like Stephan Dedalus said in Ulysses,

00:33:05 ►

history is the nightmare that I am trying to awake from.

00:33:09 ►

Well, I would turn it around a bit

00:33:11 ►

and say history is what I am trying to go to sleep from

00:33:16 ►

in order to get away from it.

00:33:18 ►

In other words, the dream is eschatological.

00:33:21 ►

The dream is zero time and outside of history. Escape

00:33:26 ►

into the dream. Escape.

00:33:28 ►

A key thing charged against

00:33:30 ►

these drugs that they are for escapists.

00:33:32 ►

I think the people who make this charge

00:33:34 ►

hardly dare dream

00:33:36 ►

to what degree they are escapists.

00:33:41 ►

Escape.

00:33:43 ►

Escape

00:33:44 ►

from the planet,

00:33:46 ►

from death,

00:33:47 ►

and from the problem, if possible,

00:33:51 ►

of the unspeakable.

00:33:54 ►

So now, to say a bit about death and dying.

00:33:59 ►

If you leave aside the last 300 years

00:34:01 ►

of historical experience

00:34:03 ►

as it was handled in Europe and America

00:34:05 ►

and examine the phenomenon of death

00:34:07 ►

the doctrine of the soul

00:34:09 ►

in all its ramifications

00:34:11 ►

neoplatonic, Christian

00:34:13 ►

dynastic, Egyptian

00:34:15 ►

etc. I’m sure you’re all familiar with

00:34:17 ►

some or all of these

00:34:19 ►

what you get is the idea

00:34:22 ►

that there is a light body

00:34:23 ►

or a a thing an intellect that is somehow mixed up in the body during life and at death or at dying is involved in a crisis in which these two envelopes separate. and one loses its res indetra

00:34:45 ►

and falls into dissolution,

00:34:47 ►

metabolism stops,

00:34:49 ►

and the other one goes,

00:34:50 ►

we know not where,

00:34:53 ►

perhaps nowhere,

00:34:54 ►

if you believe it doesn’t exist,

00:34:55 ►

but then you have the problem

00:34:57 ►

of trying to explain life,

00:34:59 ►

which, by the way,

00:35:00 ►

though science makes great claims

00:35:02 ►

and has done very well

00:35:04 ►

in systems of nuclear

00:35:05 ►

particles and even simple atomic systems, the idea that science can make any statement

00:35:11 ►

about what life is or where it comes from is preposterous. Science has nothing to say

00:35:18 ►

about how you can decide to close your hand into a fist and it happens.

00:35:28 ►

This is utterly outside the realm of scientific explanation because what we see in that phenomenon is mind as a first cause.

00:35:34 ►

In other words, we see matter.

00:35:36 ►

It’s an example of telekinesis.

00:35:40 ►

Matter is caused by mind to move.

00:35:45 ►

So we need not fear the sneers of science

00:35:49 ►

in the matter of the fate or origin of the soul.

00:35:55 ►

As I say, my thrust into this

00:36:00 ►

has always been the psychedelic experience,

00:36:02 ►

but I’ve been thinking recently more about dreams

00:36:05 ►

because dreams are a much more generalized form of experience

00:36:11 ►

of the hyper-dimension or the mode in which life and mind seem to be embedded.

00:36:21 ►

And looking at dreams and looking at what people with shamanic

00:36:26 ►

traditions say

00:36:28 ►

about dreams, you come

00:36:30 ►

to the realization that

00:36:32 ►

experientially

00:36:34 ►

for those people it is a parallel

00:36:36 ►

continuum. The

00:36:38 ►

shaman accesses it with

00:36:39 ►

hallucinogens or

00:36:41 ►

other things which I mentioned

00:36:43 ►

but most efficaciously with hallucinogens.

00:36:46 ►

But everybody else accesses it through dreams. Now, Freud’s idea about dreams was, I forget the

00:36:53 ►

German term, but he called them day residues. He always felt that you could trace the content of

00:36:59 ►

the dream down to a distortion of something that happened during the day or during waking time.

00:37:07 ►

I think that it’s much more useful to try and make

00:37:12 ►

actually a kind of geometric model of consciousness

00:37:15 ►

and to take seriously the idea of a parallel continuum

00:37:19 ►

and to say that the mind and the body are embedded in the dream

00:37:26 ►

and the dream is a kind, not a kind of, but a higher order spatial dimension

00:37:34 ►

so that in sleep you are released into the real world

00:37:42 ►

of which the world of waking

00:37:45 ►

is only the surface

00:37:46 ►

and in a very literal sense

00:37:50 ►

it’s the surface.

00:37:51 ►

It’s the surface in a geometric sense

00:37:54 ►

that there is a plenum

00:37:56 ►

and recent experiments in quantum physics

00:37:58 ►

tend to back this up.

00:38:00 ►

There is a holographic plenum of information.

00:38:04 ►

Information, all information is everywhere.

00:38:07 ►

Information that is not here is nowhere.

00:38:10 ►

And that information stands outside of historical time.

00:38:15 ►

It’s like Plato said, time is the moving image of eternity.

00:38:20 ►

Eternity does not have a temporal existence,

00:38:24 ►

even the kind of temporal existence where you say it always existed.

00:38:28 ►

It does not have temporal duration of any sort.

00:38:31 ►

It is eternity.

00:38:35 ►

We are not primarily biology

00:38:40 ►

with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence,

00:38:44 ►

a kind of iridescence,

00:38:46 ►

a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology,

00:38:49 ►

we are in fact hyperdimensional objects of some sort

00:38:55 ►

which cast a shadow into matter.

00:38:59 ►

And the shadow in matter is the body.

00:39:03 ►

And at death what happens basically is that the shadow in matter is the body and at death what happens basically

00:39:06 ►

is that the shadow withdraws

00:39:09 ►

or the thing which casts the shadow withdraws

00:39:12 ►

and metabolism ceases and matter

00:39:14 ►

which had been organized into a dissipative structure

00:39:17 ►

in a very localized area sustaining itself against entropy

00:39:21 ►

by cycling material in and degrading it

00:39:24 ►

and expelling it.

00:39:25 ►

That whole phenomenon ceases, but the thing which ordered it is not affected by that.

00:39:35 ►

And when I make these declarative statements, I’m making them from the point of view of this shamanic tradition,

00:39:41 ►

which touches all these higher religions.

00:39:43 ►

Everything, basically, except rationalism, holds to some version of what i’m saying so then the psychedelic uh uh the dream

00:39:53 ►

state and the psychedelic state acquire great import because they there is then a task to life, and the task to life is to become familiar with this thing

00:40:08 ►

which is causing being,

00:40:11 ►

and to be familiar with it at the moment of passing.

00:40:16 ►

In other words, the metaphor is used by several traditions of a vehicle,

00:40:20 ►

an after-death vehicle, an astral body, something like that.

00:40:24 ►

of a vehicle, an after-death vehicle, an astral body, something like that.

00:40:30 ►

And shamanism and certain yogas, Taoist yoga,

00:40:34 ►

claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with this after-death body in life.

00:40:37 ►

And then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

00:40:47 ►

You will recognize what is happening,

00:40:54 ►

you will know what to do, and you will make the clean break. And there does seem to be the possibility of a problem in dying. In other words, what I’m telling you is not that you’re

00:41:01 ►

condemned to eternal life. I’m saying it’s a possibility that you can muff it through ignorance.

00:41:09 ►

In other words, at the moment of death,

00:41:11 ►

there is a kind of a separation.

00:41:14 ►

It’s like birth.

00:41:14 ►

The metaphor is trivial but perfect.

00:41:17 ►

There is a possibility of damage, of incorrect activity.

00:41:25 ►

Again, William Blake, who said that

00:41:28 ►

as you start into the spiral,

00:41:31 ►

there is the possibility of falling

00:41:33 ►

from the golden track into eternal death.

00:41:37 ►

But it is only a crisis of a moment.

00:41:39 ►

It’s a crisis of passage.

00:41:42 ►

And the whole purpose of shamanism

00:41:44 ►

and of life correctly lived

00:41:46 ►

is to strengthen the soul and to strengthen the relationship to the soul

00:41:52 ►

so that this passage can be cleanly made.

00:41:59 ►

Okay, this is not anything earth-shaking or it’s well-known.

00:42:04 ►

It’s a traditional position, actually.

00:42:08 ►

But now I want to assimilate one more abyss into this model,

00:42:13 ►

one less familiar to us as rationalists,

00:42:17 ►

but well familiar to us just one level deeper in the psyche

00:42:21 ►

as Christians and Westerners.

00:42:24 ►

And that is this idea that the world will end, that there will be a final time, that

00:42:28 ►

there is not only the crisis of the death of the individual, there is the crisis of

00:42:32 ►

the death of the species.

00:42:36 ►

What this seems to be about is that from the time that there is an awareness of the existence of the soul, we’ll say circa 50,000 BP,

00:42:47 ►

until the resolution of the apocalyptic potential,

00:42:52 ►

there’s something like 50,000 years,

00:42:54 ►

which in biological time is only a moment,

00:42:57 ►

but it is the entire span of history times five.

00:43:02 ►

In that period, everything hangs in the balance

00:43:05 ►

because it is a mad rush

00:43:07 ►

from monkeydom to starshiphood.

00:43:11 ►

And in the leap

00:43:12 ►

across those 25,000 years,

00:43:17 ►

energies are released,

00:43:18 ►

religions are shot off like sparks,

00:43:22 ►

philosophies evolve and die,

00:43:24 ►

science arises, magic arises, all of these

00:43:28 ►

things which control power with greater and lesser degrees of ethical constancy appear.

00:43:34 ►

There is the possibility, as in the metaphor of dying, there is the possibility of mucking

00:43:40 ►

it up, of aborting the species transformation into a hyperspatial intellect.

00:43:47 ►

We are now, there can be no doubt that we are now in the final seconds of that crisis,

00:43:54 ►

the crisis which involves the end of history, the departure from the planet, the triumph

00:44:01 ►

over death, and the release of the individual from matter. We are,

00:44:07 ►

in fact, closing distance with the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter, which is

00:44:14 ►

the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter. The old metaphor of Psyche as the butterfly is a species-wide metaphor.

00:44:30 ►

We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of the historical forces already in motion.

00:44:34 ►

Well, if you know anything about evolutionary biology,

00:44:37 ►

you know that man is considered to be an unevolving species.

00:44:42 ►

In other words, sometime in the last 100,000 years

00:44:45 ►

with the invention of culture,

00:44:47 ►

the biological evolution of man ceased

00:44:51 ►

and evolution became a cultural phenomenon.

00:44:55 ►

Tools, languages, and philosophies began to evolve,

00:44:58 ►

but the human somotype began to remain the same.

00:45:02 ►

And so we are very much like people a long time ago.

00:45:07 ►

But technology is the real skin of our species.

00:45:11 ►

Man, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years,

00:45:15 ►

is an extruder of a technological shell.

00:45:19 ►

We take in matter that has a low degree of organization.

00:45:32 ►

We put it through mental filters and we extrude Lindisfarne Gospels, space shuttles, all of these things.

00:45:33 ►

This is what we do.

00:45:42 ►

We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects and the tool is the flying saucer

00:45:46 ►

or the soul

00:45:47 ►

exteriorized in three dimensional

00:45:50 ►

space, it’s as James Joyce

00:45:52 ►

said, it’s the problem of how man

00:45:54 ►

may be dirigible

00:45:55 ►

right, and

00:45:57 ►

how man may be

00:46:00 ►

dirigible is basically

00:46:02 ►

by turning himself inside out

00:46:04 ►

in other words, the

00:46:06 ►

body must

00:46:07 ►

become an interiorized hologrammatic

00:46:10 ►

object embedded

00:46:12 ►

in a

00:46:13 ►

solid state hyperdimensional

00:46:16 ►

matrix which is eternal

00:46:18 ►

so that man

00:46:20 ►

wanders through Elysium

00:46:22 ►

in his body.

00:46:24 ►

This is a kind of Islamic paradise that I’m putting out here.

00:46:27 ►

Wanders through Elysium in his body,

00:46:30 ►

experiencing all the pleasures of the flesh,

00:46:33 ►

but not realizing that he is a holographic projection

00:46:37 ►

of a solid state matrix that is micro-miniaturized,

00:46:41 ►

superconducting, and nowhere to be found.

00:46:46 ►

It is part of the plenum.

00:46:48 ►

And all history is about producing prototypes

00:46:53 ►

of this situation with greater and greater closure

00:46:57 ►

toward the ideal so that airplanes,

00:47:01 ►

automobiles, condominiums, space shuttles,

00:47:25 ►

space colonies, starships of the hardware, speed of light, spin dizzy drive type, all of these are, as Mercilion says, self-transforming images of flight that speak volumes about man’s aspiration to self-transcendence so that our wish, our salvation, and our only hope, basically,

00:47:31 ►

is to end the historical crisis by becoming the alien,

00:47:38 ►

by ending alienation,

00:47:40 ►

by recognizing the alien as the self, in fact,

00:47:44 ►

recognizing the alien as the self, in fact, recognizing the alien as an overmind

00:47:49 ►

which holds all the physical laws of the planet intact

00:47:54 ►

in the same way that you hold an idea intact in your mind.

00:47:58 ►

In other words, all these givens

00:48:00 ►

which are thought to be so writ in adamantine

00:48:02 ►

are actually merely the moods of the god, if you will,

00:48:08 ►

which we happen to be.

00:48:10 ►

And the whole thing about human history

00:48:13 ►

is recovering this piece of lost information

00:48:17 ►

so that man may be dirigible.

00:48:20 ►

Or again, to quote Finnegan’s Wake,

00:48:23 ►

Moy Cain is the red light district of Dublin

00:48:27 ►

here in Moy Cain we flop on the seamy side

00:48:30 ►

but up in the end prospector

00:48:33 ►

you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings

00:48:36 ►

so if you want to be phoenixed

00:48:38 ►

come and be parked

00:48:40 ►

it’s that simple you see

00:48:43 ►

but it takes courage to be parked

00:48:46 ►

when the grim reaper draws near

00:48:48 ►

a blessing in disguise, Joyce calls him.

00:48:53 ►

So to me, what psychedelics point out

00:48:57 ►

and where I think society will go

00:48:59 ►

once they are integrated

00:49:01 ►

to the point where large groups of people

00:49:03 ►

can plan research programs without fear of being persecuted for it,

00:49:09 ►

is it models the after-death state.

00:49:12 ►

It may do more than model it.

00:49:14 ►

It may essentially reveal the nature of it,

00:49:19 ►

that our mind, what we each call our mind,

00:49:23 ►

can be, the modalities of appearance and understanding can be shifted

00:49:28 ►

so that we see it within the context of the one mind.

00:49:34 ►

And then problems like the existence of extraterrestrials

00:49:38 ►

and that kind of thing become trivial

00:49:40 ►

because the one mind that I’m talking about

00:49:44 ►

contains all experiences of the other.

00:49:48 ►

All experiences of the other. There is not the Newtonian universe deployed throughout the parsecs

00:49:56 ►

and kiliocosms of physical space and the interior mental universe. They are the same thing. We perceive them as unresolvable dualisms

00:50:08 ►

because of what I call the quality of the code,

00:50:15 ►

meaning the language we use to discuss this problem

00:50:18 ►

has these built-in dualisms.

00:50:20 ►

This is a problem of language.

00:50:22 ►

All codes have code qualities, except the logos. The logos is perfect, and therefore it partakes of no quality other than itself.

00:50:48 ►

be code qualities and the dualism built in to our language makes the death of the species the death of the individual these seem to be opposed things likewise the problems biology and by extrapolation

00:50:56 ►

exobiology pose by examining the physical universe versus the angel and demon haunted world that death psychology is reporting on

00:51:07 ►

is again set up as a dichotomy. All that is needed to go beyond an academic understanding

00:51:17 ►

of what I’ve been saying is to have the experience of this tryptamine-induced ecstasy.

00:51:32 ►

In other words, for reasons which I leave to my brother, the tryptamine molecule has this unique property of releasing the structured self into the over-self, and each person who has that experience undergoes a mini apocalypse,

00:51:47 ►

a mini entry and mapping into hyperspace.

00:51:52 ►

For society to change in this direction,

00:51:55 ►

nothing is necessary except for this experience

00:51:59 ►

to become an object of general concern.

00:52:04 ►

Now, I’m not saying everybody should rush out and take mushrooms,

00:52:09 ►

in case you thought that’s what I was saying.

00:52:12 ►

But I am saying that these fields of information,

00:52:17 ►

which, I don’t know if you’re like me,

00:52:19 ►

but my experience of these things is basically literary.

00:52:24 ►

I read Plotinus, I read Heraclitus, I read all this stuff,

00:52:29 ►

and I try to integrate it intellectually.

00:52:32 ►

But it is a plane of experience that is directly accessible.

00:52:39 ►

And the role that each of us plays in relationship to it determines how we will present ourselves in the final transformation that this hints of.

00:52:53 ►

In other words, in this theory there is a kind of teleological bias.

00:52:58 ►

There is a belief that there is a hyper-object called the over-mind or God or what have you that casts a shadow into time.

00:53:08 ►

And history is the experiencing of this shadow.

00:53:12 ►

And as you draw closer and closer to the source of the shadow,

00:53:16 ►

the paradoxes intensify.

00:53:19 ►

The rate of change intensifies.

00:53:23 ►

Because what is happening is

00:53:25 ►

that this hyper-object is beginning to ingress

00:53:29 ►

into three-dimensional space.

00:53:32 ►

One way of thinking of it is that

00:53:35 ►

the dream and the waking world

00:53:39 ►

and the world of the dream begin to become one.

00:53:42 ►

So that the school of flying saucer criticism,

00:54:06 ►

which has said flying saucers are hallucinations, was in a certain sense correct, in that the laws which operate in the dream, the laws which operate in hyperspace, can at times operate in three-dimensional space, when the barrier between the two modes becomes weak.

00:54:09 ►

And then you have these curious experiences,

00:54:11 ►

sometimes called psychotic breaks,

00:54:14 ►

sometimes called whatever,

00:54:17 ►

but which always have a tremendous impact on the person they’re happening to

00:54:19 ►

because there seems to be an exterior component

00:54:21 ►

that could not possibly be mental.

00:54:23 ►

What I’m talking about is when coincidences begin to build and build and build

00:54:29 ►

until you finally say, you know, I don’t know what is going on,

00:54:32 ►

but it’s preposterous to claim that this is a psychological phenomenon

00:54:37 ►

because these are changes in the world,

00:54:40 ►

what Jung called synchronicity and made a certain model of.

00:54:44 ►

But what it really is, is that an alternative physics

00:54:47 ►

is beginning to impinge on reality.

00:54:54 ►

And it is the physics of light, essentially.

00:54:58 ►

Light is composed of photons.

00:55:01 ►

Photons have no antiparticle.

00:55:03 ►

This means that

00:55:05 ►

there is no dualism

00:55:08 ►

in the world of light.

00:55:10 ►

And if you try to imagine

00:55:11 ►

the experience

00:55:13 ►

from the point of view of a thing made

00:55:16 ►

of light, you realize

00:55:17 ►

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the conventions

00:55:20 ►

of relativity, which say that

00:55:22 ►

time slows down as you

00:55:24 ►

approach the speed of light.

00:55:26 ►

But what is never said about that is that if you move at the speed of light, there is

00:55:31 ►

no time whatsoever.

00:55:33 ►

There is an experience of time zero.

00:55:36 ►

So if you imagine for a moment yourself to be made of light or in possession of a vehicle

00:55:42 ►

which can move at the speed of light you can traverse

00:55:47 ►

from any point in the universe to any

00:55:50 ►

other with a subjective experience

00:55:52 ►

of time zero

00:55:53 ►

this means

00:55:55 ►

that you

00:55:57 ►

cross to Alpha Centauri

00:55:59 ►

time zero

00:56:01 ►

but the amount of time that has passed

00:56:03 ►

in the relativistic universe is whatever it is,

00:56:06 ►

four and a half years. But if you move at very great distances, if you cross 250,000 light years

00:56:14 ►

across to Andromeda, you still have an experience of time zero. The only experience of time that

00:56:22 ►

you have is a subjective time that is created by your own mentation.

00:56:28 ►

But in relationship to the so-called Newtonian universe, there is no time whatsoever.

00:56:34 ►

You exist in eternity. You have become eternal.

00:56:38 ►

Now, of course, the universe is aging at a staggering rate all around you in this situation,

00:56:48 ►

but you perceive it as a fact of the universe,

00:56:54 ►

the way we perceive Newtonian physics as a fact of this universe.

00:57:01 ►

So you have essentially translated into this eternal mode that I mentioned,

00:57:07 ►

time as the moving image of eternity. You are then away from the moving image. You exist in the static mode. I believe that this is what technology pushes toward,

00:57:16 ►

and that there is no opposition between ecological balance and the people who want to leave the planet and the hyper-technologists and the hyper-naturalists, carry to this moment of release and it will always serve as a focus of self-image

00:57:50 ►

but it will exist in a world made by the human imagination.

00:57:56 ►

This is what the return to the father,

00:57:59 ►

the transcendence of physis,

00:58:01 ►

the rising out of the gnostic universe of iron that traps the light, all these metaphors.

00:58:07 ►

This is what it means.

00:58:08 ►

It means release into the human imagination.

00:58:12 ►

Very shortly, as it were, a dry run for this phenomenon will take place in the form of

00:58:23 ►

space exploration and space colonies,

00:58:26 ►

because there the coral reef-like animal called man

00:58:30 ►

that has extruded technology all over the surface of the Earth

00:58:34 ►

will be freed at last from the constraints of anything but his own imagination

00:58:39 ►

and the limitations of materials,

00:58:42 ►

so that, for instance, the earliest space colonies,

00:58:46 ►

of course there will be an effort to duplicate the ecosystem of Hawaii

00:58:50 ►

and this and that, you know, these like exercises in ecological understanding

00:58:56 ►

to prove you know what you’re doing.

00:58:58 ►

But as soon as this is under control, we will be released into the realm of art,

00:59:04 ►

which is what we have always

00:59:06 ►

striven for. We will make our world, all of our world, and the world we came from will

00:59:12 ►

be maintained as a garden. But what Eliade indicated as these endless metaphors of self-transforming

00:59:19 ►

flight will be realized momentarily as the technology of the space colony.

00:59:26 ►

What is lining up right behind that, of course,

00:59:29 ►

is the fact that the transition from Earth to space

00:59:32 ►

is a staggeringly tight genetic filter,

00:59:35 ►

a much tighter filter than any previous frontier ever has been.

00:59:40 ►

Even the filter, the genetic demographic filter

00:59:44 ►

represented by the New World, it’s said that the vitality of America is because only the dreamers and the pioneers and of space will set the stage then for the interiorization of that metaphor

01:00:10 ►

and the conquest of inner space and the collapse of the state vectors

01:00:15 ►

associated with this technology deployed in Newtonian space.

01:00:19 ►

And then man will have become more than dirigible.

01:00:25 ►

I think a break here is maybe in order.

01:00:30 ►

Let’s have a break.

01:00:35 ►

A couple more things, and then there seem to be a lot of questions,

01:00:39 ►

so I’ll throw it open for questions.

01:00:42 ►

But before I do that, I mentioned this book,

01:00:45 ►

The Invisible Landscape,

01:00:47 ►

that my brother and I wrote.

01:00:49 ►

And I’ll say just a bit about it

01:00:53 ►

because it relates to what’s been said.

01:00:56 ►

I spoke in general terms

01:00:58 ►

about the technology

01:01:00 ►

which would interiorize the body,

01:01:03 ►

exteriorize the soul,

01:01:05 ►

spoke of it as a long-term technological goal,

01:01:08 ►

meaning visible within the next hundred or so years,

01:01:12 ►

following on to space travel, that sort of thing.

01:01:16 ►

But what the invisible landscape is about

01:01:19 ►

is an effort to short-circuit that chronology and to actually, in a certain sense, force the issue.

01:01:31 ►

It’s the story, or rather it’s the intellectual underpinnings

01:01:36 ►

of the story of an expedition to the Amazon

01:01:39 ►

by my brother and myself and several other people in 1971

01:01:43 ►

in which my brother formulated an idea that

01:01:50 ►

involved using harming and harmaline.

01:01:54 ►

These are compounds which occur in Banisteriopsis capi, which is the woody vine that is the

01:02:01 ►

basis for ayahuasca. And ayahuasca is one of these plant hallucinogens

01:02:07 ►

that releases you into this dimension I’m discussing.

01:02:11 ►

An effort to use Harmeen in conjunction with the human voice

01:02:17 ►

in what we called the experiment at La Charrera,

01:02:21 ►

which was basically, you can take it as very loose science or very

01:02:26 ►

tight magic, but it was an effort to use sound to charge the molecular structure of these harming molecules metabolizing in vivo in the body

01:02:47 ►

in such a way that they would bind preferentially into certain molecular structures.

01:02:56 ►

Our candidate at the time was DNA.

01:03:01 ►

I think Frank Barr has convinced me that there’s as great a likelihood that it involves binding into melanin bodies.

01:03:11 ►

It is as likely a possibility as that it involves DNA, but it involves binding into a molecular site where information is stored so that this information is then broadcast essentially in the mind in such

01:03:30 ►

a way that you begin to get a readout on the structure of the soul.

01:03:35 ►

In other words, this was an effort to use a kind of shamanic technology to bell the

01:03:40 ►

cat, if you will, to hang a superconducting, telemetric, psychedelic device on the overmind

01:03:49 ►

so that there would be a continuous readout of information from this dimension.

01:03:56 ►

And the success or failure of this you may judge by reading the book

01:04:03 ►

because the first half of the book describes the experiment

01:04:05 ►

the theoretical underpinning of the experiment the second half of the book describes the theory of

01:04:11 ►

the structure of time that derived from the bizarre mental states that followed upon the experiment

01:04:19 ►

i don’t claim that we succeeded i just claim that our theory of what happened is better than any theory

01:04:27 ►

any of our critics have been able to bring forward.

01:04:31 ►

But whether we succeeded or not, that kind of thinking points the way.

01:04:37 ►

In other words, when I speak of the technology of building the Starship,

01:04:42 ►

I imagine it will be done with voltages

01:04:45 ►

far below the voltage of a common flashlight battery.

01:04:49 ►

This is, after all, where the voltages,

01:04:52 ►

where the most interesting phenomenon go on in nature.

01:04:56 ►

Thought is that kind of phenomenon.

01:04:58 ►

Metabolism is that kind of phenomenon.

01:05:01 ►

So I think that, Aquarian science or a science that places the psychedelic

01:05:09 ►

experience at the center of its program of investigation should move toward a practical

01:05:18 ►

realization of this goal, the goal of eliminating the barrier between the ego and the overself so that the ego

01:05:29 ►

can perceive itself as an expression of the overself, so that the anxiety of being cast into

01:05:37 ►

matter, of apparently facing a tremendous biological crisis in the form of death,

01:05:43 ►

of apparently facing a tremendous physical species crisis in the form of death, of apparently facing a tremendous species crisis

01:05:47 ►

in the form of the apocalypse,

01:05:50 ►

the crisis of limitation in physical space

01:05:54 ►

by being planet-bound,

01:05:55 ►

all of these things can be obviated

01:05:59 ►

by cultivating the soul, basically,

01:06:03 ►

by practicing shamanism

01:06:05 ►

using these tryptamine drugs that I’ve described.

01:06:10 ►

And my plea to scientists, administrators, and politicians

01:06:15 ►

who may be listening to my voice is to look again at psilocybin,

01:06:22 ►

to not lump it with the other psychedelics

01:06:26 ►

to realize that it is

01:06:28 ►

a phenomenon unto itself

01:06:30 ►

and it has an enormous potential

01:06:32 ►

for transforming mankind

01:06:34 ►

not simply transforming

01:06:36 ►

the people who take it

01:06:37 ►

but it is like

01:06:39 ►

an art movement or a mathematical

01:06:42 ►

understanding or a scientific

01:06:44 ►

breakthrough, it holds the possibility of transforming the entire an art movement or a mathematical understanding or a scientific breakthrough.

01:06:49 ►

It holds the possibility of transforming the entire society simply by virtue of the information that is coming through.

01:06:54 ►

This is a source of gnosis,

01:06:56 ►

and the voice of gnosis has been silenced in the Western mind

01:07:02 ►

for at least a thousand years.

01:07:04 ►

silenced in the Western mind for at least a thousand years.

01:07:11 ►

I like to think that when these Franciscans and Dominicans arrived in Mexico in the 16th century,

01:07:14 ►

they immediately set about stamping this thing out.

01:07:17 ►

The Indians called it Tienona Cottle, the flesh of the gods.

01:07:22 ►

Well, the Catholic Church has a monopoly on theophagia

01:07:26 ►

and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on.

01:07:32 ►

Now, 300, 400, whatever it is, years after that initial contact,

01:07:38 ►

I think that Eros, which retreated from Greece

01:07:44 ►

and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity,

01:07:47 ►

retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca, essentially,

01:07:51 ►

and then was finally pushed into seclusion there,

01:07:55 ►

it now re-emerges in Western consciousness.

01:07:58 ►

And our institutions, our epistemology,

01:08:03 ►

all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued that with the help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can release thisashed once again and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and

01:08:26 ►

Heraclitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people.

01:08:31 ►

And when it does, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien.

01:08:39 ►

And this is the promise that is held out, and I realize that it may seem to some a nightmare vision,

01:08:48 ►

but all historical changes of immense magnitude have had that quality

01:08:53 ►

because they propel people into a completely new world.

01:08:58 ►

Are there any questions?

01:09:02 ►

Yes. Yes. You indicate that this essentially needs to be done through hallucinogens.

01:09:11 ►

I’m not saying they’re good or bad.

01:09:13 ►

I’m just saying that there are going to be many ways of discovering that,

01:09:20 ►

the inner reality, the ultimate reality.

01:09:25 ►

You want me to comment on that?

01:09:27 ►

Yeah.

01:09:28 ►

I agree with you that this is a strongly held position.

01:09:32 ►

I always in my explorations have recourse to my own experience,

01:09:38 ►

and I’ve not had good luck with any of these other techniques. I spent time in India, practiced yoga,

01:09:48 ►

scoured the various rishis, roshis, geishas, and gurus

01:09:53 ►

that Asia had to offer.

01:09:55 ►

And I believe they must be talking about something,

01:10:01 ►

but in my experience, it is so pale and so far removed

01:10:07 ►

from the actual closure with the intense tryptamine ecstasy

01:10:13 ►

that I don’t really know what to make of it

01:10:15 ►

and I am willing to believe these things are possible.

01:10:18 ►

I just must be a very grounded person.

01:10:22 ►

Maybe it’s a shortcut for a lot of people.

01:10:27 ►

Well, tantra, for instance, claims to be,

01:10:30 ►

that’s what tantra means, is the shortcut path.

01:10:34 ►

And certainly they might be on the right track.

01:10:40 ►

Sexuality, orgasm, these things do have

01:10:43 ►

tryptamine-esque qualities to them.

01:10:46 ►

But the main thing about psilocybin, and I stress it over all these other hallucinogens,

01:10:51 ►

is information, immense amounts of information.

01:10:56 ►

In my experience, a hallucinogen like LSD,

01:11:00 ►

the hallucinations seem largely to be somehow related to the structure of the optic nerve,

01:11:06 ►

or they are essentially trivial.

01:11:09 ►

They are geometric patterns, shifting lights,

01:11:13 ►

but unless synergized by another drug.

01:11:17 ►

The classic psychedelic experience that started it all with Huxley and those people was, I believe, 200 micrograms of LSD

01:11:26 ►

and 30 milligrams of mescaline.

01:11:30 ►

And I would believe that that would deliver

01:11:33 ►

a visionary experience

01:11:37 ►

rather than an experience of hallucinations.

01:11:39 ►

And the difference is,

01:11:41 ►

what psilocybin shows you is not colored lights and moving grids.

01:11:44 ►

It shows you places, jungles, cities, machines, books, architectonic form of incredible complexity.

01:11:56 ►

Just click, click, click.

01:11:59 ►

There is no possibility that this could be construed as noise of any sort

01:12:06 ►

it is in fact the most highly ordered

01:12:08 ►

visual information that you ever

01:12:10 ►

experienced, much more highly

01:12:12 ►

ordered than the visual experience I’m having

01:12:14 ►

at this moment of this room

01:12:15 ►

but

01:12:17 ►

information in the form of a lot of

01:12:20 ►

data, that is gnosis

01:12:22 ►

I mean, could you

01:12:23 ►

spell out what you mean you certainly must mean something more important than the volume of data that is no sense I mean could you spell out

01:12:25 ►

what you

01:12:26 ►

mean

01:12:26 ►

you certainly

01:12:27 ►

must mean

01:12:27 ►

something more

01:12:28 ►

important

01:12:28 ►

well

01:12:28 ►

01:12:30 ►

01:12:31 ►

I think I

01:12:33 ►

talked about

01:12:34 ►

this last

01:12:34 ►

time that

01:12:35 ►

phylogenius

01:12:36 ►

talks about

01:12:36 ►

what he

01:12:37 ►

calls a

01:12:37 ►

more perfect

01:12:38 ►

logos

01:12:38 ►

he says

01:12:40 ►

a more

01:12:40 ►

perfect

01:12:41 ►

logos

01:12:41 ►

would be

01:12:43 ►

beheld

01:12:44 ►

rather than heard.

01:12:47 ►

In other words, the formulation you get in the Gospel of John,

01:12:50 ►

in Principio ad verbum, ad verbum coro factum est,

01:12:52 ►

in the beginning was the word.

01:12:54 ►

Yes, it was the word in the beginning,

01:12:56 ►

but this is a strange kind of word.

01:12:58 ►

It is a word which is visually beheld,

01:13:02 ►

and the language in which the gnosis communicates

01:13:06 ►

is a language of visual forms

01:13:11 ►

such that there is no ambiguity

01:13:13 ►

about meaning

01:13:14 ►

because there is no recourse

01:13:16 ►

to a dictionary

01:13:17 ►

of agreed upon signification.

01:13:21 ►

It is purely beheld.

01:13:23 ►

This is why it’s very hard, one of the main

01:13:26 ►

problems of psychedelic drugs is to bring

01:13:28 ►

back information, because

01:13:30 ►

it is hard to English it.

01:13:32 ►

And the reason it’s hard to English it

01:13:34 ►

is because it’s like trying to

01:13:36 ►

make a three-dimensional

01:13:38 ►

rendering of a fourth-dimensional

01:13:40 ►

object. Only through

01:13:42 ►

the medium of sight

01:13:44 ►

can the true modality of this logos be perceived.

01:13:49 ►

That’s why it’s so interesting, and I should have maybe talked more about it, that psilocybin

01:13:56 ►

and ayahuasca, which is this aboriginal drug which uses tryptamine to make it run, is there’s a telepathic component,

01:14:07 ►

which is there is a shared state of mind

01:14:10 ►

because the unfolding hallucination

01:14:14 ►

is shared in complete silence.

01:14:18 ►

And it’s very hard to prove this to a scientist,

01:14:22 ►

but if four people are having this experience you know one

01:14:26 ►

person can like monologue it and then cease the monologue and another person will take it up

01:14:33 ►

everyone is seeing the same thing uh and this it is the quality of being visual information

01:14:42 ►

to answer your question arthur that seems to make this Logos believable

01:14:48 ►

in the way that I quoted William Blake

01:14:50 ►

when he said the truth cannot be told.

01:14:53 ►

That is very powerful statement.

01:14:55 ►

And you do believe it.

01:14:58 ►

You do believe it.

01:14:59 ►

But I was going to say that you see,

01:15:02 ►

and we say QED

01:15:06 ►

after

01:15:06 ►

a demonstration

01:15:09 ►

in geometry but the Hindus

01:15:11 ►

say behold

01:15:13 ►

now the seeing

01:15:15 ►

involved there I wouldn’t think of

01:15:18 ►

as visual but it does get the

01:15:20 ►

word seeing the name seeing

01:15:21 ►

you somehow

01:15:23 ►

your whole

01:15:24 ►

I wouldn’t say mind, your being

01:15:28 ►

resonates, I like to use the term recognize. You see, let’s say this is the same thing

01:15:36 ►

as the other thing. And I don’t know whether it’s seeing, but seeing is a good word, but

01:15:43 ►

it isn’t, I wouldn’t call it visual.

01:15:45 ►

No, it isn’t exactly visual.

01:15:47 ►

I mean, again, to quote Philo Giudeus on the Logos,

01:15:50 ►

he says that the Logos goes from a thing heard

01:15:55 ►

to a thing seen

01:15:57 ►

without ever crossing through a quantized transition point.

01:16:02 ►

And yet this seems impossible.

01:16:04 ►

It seems a logical uh uh impossibility

01:16:07 ►

because it is either one or the other and yet when you actually have the experience you see

01:16:14 ►

aha it is as though thought which is heard that’s the recognition the thought which is heard becomes

01:16:21 ►

more and more intense until finally its intensity is such

01:16:25 ►

that with there being no jump or glitch,

01:16:28 ►

you now are beholding it in the three-dimensional visual space

01:16:31 ►

and you command it.

01:16:33 ►

And this is very typical of psilocybin.

01:16:38 ►

Yes?

01:16:38 ►

I have two questions.

01:16:41 ►

One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue,

01:16:45 ►

I was wondering if you could

01:16:46 ►

kind of be

01:16:47 ►

more descriptive in that

01:16:50 ►

regard. And the other

01:16:52 ►

thing was, as far as

01:16:54 ►

the effects of this type

01:16:56 ►

of experience, especially

01:16:58 ►

over, say, a prolonged period

01:17:00 ►

of time on the body, and the

01:17:02 ►

body as an energy system,

01:17:04 ►

and how do you balance that or how do you

01:17:07 ►

counteract possible negative effects? Okay, well I’ll take the last part first which is about the

01:17:15 ►

body. I’m not an abuser. It takes me a long time to assimilate each experience and I feel you know I never have lost my respect for

01:17:28 ►

it I mean I really feel dread is one of the emotions that I always feel as I approach it

01:17:33 ►

because I have no faith that my sails won’t be ripped this time I always make the metaphor you

01:17:40 ►

know it’s like sailing out onto a dark ocean in your little skiff and you know you

01:17:46 ►

may view the moon rising serenely over the calm black water or something the size of a freight

01:17:53 ►

train may roar right through your scene and leave you clutching at an oar and i don’t know astrology

01:18:00 ►

is maybe helpful in figuring out when to go and when not to go but there needs to be

01:18:06 ►

a way to figure out

01:18:08 ►

when to go and when not to go

01:18:10 ►

now your question about the dialogue

01:18:12 ►

I mean this very

01:18:14 ►

literally

01:18:14 ►

it speaks to you, you speak to it

01:18:18 ►

it says things

01:18:20 ►

I don’t know how many of you have read

01:18:22 ►

the book that my brother and I wrote

01:18:24 ►

under pseudonyms called Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.

01:18:28 ►

But in the introduction there, there’s a rap which is all about, I am old, 50 times older than thought in your species, and I came from the stars.

01:18:39 ►

Well, that’s verbatim, you know.

01:18:41 ►

I just was writing it furiously.

01:18:43 ►

And sometimes it’s very’s very human i mean my

01:18:46 ►

approach to it is hasidic i rave at it it raves at me we argue about what it’s going to cough up

01:18:53 ►

and what it isn’t and i say well look you know i’m the grower you can’t hold back on me and it

01:19:00 ►

says well but if i showed you if i showed you the flying saucer for five minutes, you would figure out how it works.

01:19:06 ►

And I said, well, you know, come through.

01:19:08 ►

I remember once I asked it, what was it?

01:19:16 ►

It has these many manifestations.

01:19:20 ►

Sometimes it’s like Dorothy.

01:19:22 ►

Sometimes it’s like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker.

01:19:26 ►

And I asked it one time, what are you doing on earth?

01:19:32 ►

And it said, well, you know, you’re a mushroom, you live cheap.

01:19:37 ►

It’s very, this was a quiet neighborhood till the monkeys got out of control.

01:19:51 ►

Yes.

01:19:55 ►

I think there’s some clarification on some of the things you said.

01:19:57 ►

I can understand, at least in my own way,

01:20:02 ►

how this idea about an over-consciousness or casting a shadow,

01:20:10 ►

and that our psychedelic experience or dream experience has to do with getting in touch with that.

01:20:17 ►

But you said that… I’m not really positive about this, this is why I need some clarification, is that in some sense

01:20:26 ►

that those brief experiences,

01:20:33 ►

something about our experience

01:20:35 ►

was in order to get back there,

01:20:37 ►

and that was the reason for us to be.

01:20:43 ►

Let me see.

01:20:47 ►

Well, I think that this object

01:20:49 ►

as a friend of mine said

01:20:51 ►

history is the shockwave

01:20:53 ►

of eschatology

01:20:54 ►

in other words we are living in a very

01:20:57 ►

unique moment 10 or 20

01:20:59 ►

thousand years long

01:21:00 ►

where this immense transition

01:21:02 ►

is happening and the

01:21:04 ►

object at the end of and beyond history long where this immense transition is happening and the object

01:21:05 ►

at the end of and beyond

01:21:07 ►

history which is the

01:21:09 ►

human species transformed

01:21:12 ►

into this eternal superconducting

01:21:14 ►

overmined spacecraft

01:21:16 ►

thing is

01:21:18 ►

casting a shadow back through time

01:21:20 ►

and all

01:21:22 ►

religion, all philosophy

01:21:24 ►

all wars, pogroms, persecutions

01:21:27 ►

are because people do not get the message right.

01:21:31 ►

And that’s because there is both

01:21:33 ►

the forward-flowing casuistry of being,

01:21:37 ►

causal determinism,

01:21:39 ►

and the interference pattern

01:21:41 ►

that is formed against that

01:21:43 ►

by the backward-flowing fact of this eschatological hyper-object

01:21:48 ►

throwing its shadow across the landscape.

01:21:51 ►

So we exist, there is a great deal of noise.

01:21:55 ►

This situation called history is totally unique.

01:21:59 ►

It will only last for a moment.

01:22:01 ►

It began a moment ago, it will only last for a moment.

01:22:04 ►

But in that moment, there is

01:22:05 ►

like this tremendous burst of

01:22:08 ►

static as the monkey goes

01:22:09 ►

to godhood, and there is

01:22:11 ►

this crossing of the

01:22:14 ►

I don’t like to call it the

01:22:17 ►

casuistry, but the efficacy of

01:22:19 ►

the eschaton, this final

01:22:22 ►

eschatological object,

01:22:23 ►

and the forward flow of entropic circumstance.

01:22:28 ►

Does that get it for you?

01:22:32 ►

Maybe.

01:22:34 ►

Well, I have a little bit of trouble thinking,

01:22:38 ►

kind of like, which came first?

01:22:39 ►

Are you saying the chicken or the egg?

01:22:40 ►

Are you saying that this over-consciousness

01:22:43 ►

has something to do with…

01:22:45 ►

Well, I’m certainly saying that life is

01:22:47 ►

necessary. That life is…

01:22:50 ►

It is not the idea that

01:22:52 ►

we are… have been

01:22:53 ►

skewed onto a siding

01:22:55 ►

called organic existence and that our

01:22:57 ►

actual place is in eternity.

01:23:00 ►

No. There is something

01:23:02 ►

about… This is a very

01:23:03 ►

important part of the cycle

01:23:05 ►

it is

01:23:07 ►

a filter

01:23:10 ►

remember I mentioned that I thought

01:23:12 ►

that there was the possibility of extinction

01:23:15 ►

there was the possibility of

01:23:16 ►

falling into physis

01:23:18 ►

forever

01:23:19 ►

so in that sense the metaphor

01:23:22 ►

of the fall is valid

01:23:24 ►

there is a spiritual obligation.

01:23:27 ►

There is a task to be done.

01:23:28 ►

It isn’t, though, simply something as simple-minded

01:23:31 ►

as following a set of somebody else’s rules.

01:23:35 ►

It’s that the noetic enterprise

01:23:37 ►

is a primary obligation of being in this circumstance.

01:23:44 ►

And your salvation is linked to it.

01:23:49 ►

And not everyone has to read alchemical texts

01:23:53 ►

or study superconducting biochemistry

01:23:56 ►

to make the transition.

01:23:58 ►

Most people make it naively

01:24:00 ►

by thinking clearly about the present at hand.

01:24:05 ►

But we and I, we are intellectuals trapped

01:24:09 ►

in a world of too much information.

01:24:13 ►

Innocence is gone for us.

01:24:15 ►

We cannot expect to cross the rainbow bridge

01:24:20 ►

through the act of a good act of contrition.

01:24:23 ►

That won’t be sufficient

01:24:25 ►

we have to understand

01:24:27 ►

and I recall Whitehead said

01:24:30 ►

understanding is the apperception of pattern as such

01:24:33 ►

because to fear death is to not understand

01:24:38 ►

what’s going on

01:24:39 ►

and to even see it as a big deal

01:24:42 ►

is to not understand what’s going on,

01:24:45 ►

although I don’t claim to have reached that exalted plane.

01:24:48 ►

But cognitive activity is the defining fact of humanness.

01:24:57 ►

Language, thought, analysis, art, poetry, myth-making,

01:25:03 ►

analysis, art, poetry, myth-making,

01:25:07 ►

these are the things that point the way toward the realm of being of the eschaton.

01:25:12 ►

That is what Joyce means when he says,

01:25:15 ►

man may become dirigible.

01:25:16 ►

In other words, man may be released into a realm of pure engineering.

01:25:20 ►

The imagination is everything.

01:25:24 ►

This was Blake’s perception

01:25:25 ►

this is where we come from

01:25:27 ►

this is where we’re going

01:25:28 ►

and it is only to be

01:25:31 ►

approached through cognitive activity

01:25:34 ►

I think

01:25:35 ►

laughter

01:25:37 ►

laughter

01:25:39 ►

laughter

01:25:40 ►

yes

01:25:43 ►

comment on the importance of your discussion of the I Ching in your book?

01:25:51 ►

Well, very briefly, because I always have the feeling this part

01:25:55 ►

bores people more than any other because it hinges on tiny details.

01:25:58 ►

But briefly, what the Logos said to me was

01:26:04 ►

that time

01:26:05 ►

is not simply a homogeneous medium

01:26:07 ►

where things occur

01:26:08 ►

you can

01:26:10 ►

think of it

01:26:13 ►

as a fluctuating density

01:26:15 ►

of probability

01:26:16 ►

so that though

01:26:18 ►

science will tell us what can happen

01:26:21 ►

and what cannot happen

01:26:23 ►

we have no theory that explains

01:26:25 ►

why out of everything that could happen

01:26:28 ►

certain things undergo

01:26:30 ►

what White had called the formality

01:26:31 ►

of actually occurring

01:26:33 ►

and this

01:26:35 ►

was what the Logos sought to explain

01:26:37 ►

to me, why out of all the myriad things

01:26:39 ►

that could happen, certain things undergo

01:26:41 ►

the formality of occurring

01:26:43 ►

and it is because

01:26:44 ►

there is a hierarchical

01:26:47 ►

a modular hierarchy of waves

01:26:50 ►

of temporal

01:26:51 ►

conditioning or temporal

01:26:54 ►

density or

01:26:55 ►

in other words

01:26:56 ►

a given moment

01:26:59 ►

it is more likely for a certain

01:27:01 ►

event rated highly

01:27:04 ►

improbable. It is more probable for a certain event, rated highly improbable,

01:27:08 ►

it is more probable at some moments than others.

01:27:10 ►

And taking that simple perception and being led by the hand, by the logos,

01:27:14 ►

we were able to construe maps of time,

01:27:17 ►

which we run on a computer,

01:27:19 ►

and which give a map of the ingression of what I call novelty,

01:27:24 ►

the ingression of novelty into time.

01:27:26 ►

Now, as a general statement,

01:27:28 ►

it’s obvious that novelty generally is increasing.

01:27:32 ►

It has been since the very beginning of the universe

01:27:34 ►

because first there was only the possibility of nuclear interaction

01:27:38 ►

and then as temperatures fell below the bond strength

01:27:43 ►

that the nucleus atomic systems could be formed and then as temperature nucleus, atomic systems could be formed,

01:27:46 ►

and then as temperature fell, molecular systems could be formed.

01:27:50 ►

Then much later life became possible,

01:27:53 ►

and then as very high life forms, complex life forms evolved,

01:27:57 ►

thought became possible, culture was invented.

01:28:01 ►

Then with the invention of printing and language

01:28:04 ►

and then printing and then electronic information movement

01:28:08 ►

and this kind of thing.

01:28:09 ►

What is happening is there is an ingression of novelty

01:28:12 ►

toward what Whitehead, and I took his term, call concrescence.

01:28:16 ►

And this is a tightening gyre.

01:28:19 ►

Everything is flowing together.

01:28:21 ►

And in fact, the man-made lapis,

01:28:24 ►

the alchemical stone

01:28:26 ►

at the end of time occurs

01:28:28 ►

when everything flows together

01:28:29 ►

when the laws of physics are

01:28:31 ►

obviated and

01:28:33 ►

the universe disappears and what

01:28:36 ►

is left is the tightly

01:28:38 ►

bound plenum

01:28:39 ►

the monad if you wish

01:28:41 ►

able to express itself

01:28:43 ►

for itself rather than

01:28:46 ►

able only to cast a shadow

01:28:48 ►

into physis as its

01:28:50 ►

reflection and I

01:28:51 ►

don’t, I speak

01:28:53 ►

I come very close here to classical

01:28:56 ►

millenarian and apocalyptic

01:28:57 ►

thought, my view of

01:29:00 ►

the rate at which change is accelerating

01:29:02 ►

and the way the

01:29:04 ►

gyre is tightening causes me is accelerating and the way the gyre is tightening

01:29:05 ►

causes me to think

01:29:07 ►

and the way it predicts this

01:29:08 ►

that it is not long

01:29:10 ►

it is soon

01:29:11 ►

50 years, 25 years, 35 years

01:29:16 ►

then this event will occur

01:29:17 ►

it is the entry of the species into hyperspace

01:29:21 ►

but it will appear to be

01:29:23 ►

the collapse of the state vector and the end of

01:29:26 ►

physical laws and the release of the mind into itself.

01:29:33 ►

And all these other images, the starship, the space colony, all that, these are precursors.

01:29:39 ►

Again, the idea that history is the shockwave of eschatology.

01:29:43 ►

As you close distance with the eschatological object

01:29:46 ►

the reflections it is throwing off

01:29:48 ►

become more and more true to the thing itself

01:29:51 ►

and in the final moment

01:29:53 ►

God stands revealed

01:29:56 ►

there are no more reflections of the mystery

01:30:00 ►

the mystery in all its nakedness

01:30:01 ►

than is seen

01:30:03 ►

and nothing else exists.

01:30:06 ►

But what this is, decency can safely scarcely hint at.

01:30:14 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:30:16 ►

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

01:30:22 ►

Well, what can I say?

01:30:24 ►

Now do you remember why we so love this gifted bard?

01:30:28 ►

That was as interesting and wide-ranging as most any talk by Terrence that I’ve ever heard.

01:30:34 ►

And even though I had heard it before just a little over a year ago,

01:30:38 ►

it still seemed fresh to me.

01:30:41 ►

In fact, I found it interesting that in May of 2011,

01:30:47 ►

when I first played parts of this talk,

01:30:52 ►

I pulled out 19 of Terrence’s quotations that I posted in the program notes for that podcast.

01:30:57 ►

And on listening to it this time, without first looking at those notes I pulled out,

01:31:02 ►

I pulled out 16 quotes this time, and almost all of them are different.

01:31:05 ►

And as I said, this happened without me even thinking about it, which for me at least confirms what I’ve always said about Terrence’s talks,

01:31:11 ►

and that is that you can listen to them several times and almost always hear something that you

01:31:15 ►

missed the first time. At least that’s the way it is for me. And as for the talk that we just

01:31:22 ►

listened to, well, it was all there, wasn’t it?

01:31:25 ►

There was talk about the two types of shamanism, narcotic and non-narcotic.

01:31:31 ►

He also covered UFOs and aliens, the end of history, the psychedelic experience, dialogue with the other, death and afterlife, and even touched on dreams.

01:31:41 ►

And I’m sure that I’ve missed a few other topics he may have touched on.

01:31:44 ►

touched on dreams, and I’m sure that I’ve missed a few other topics he may have touched on.

01:31:52 ►

Now, keep in mind that this was what I think of as very early McKenna, and it was about six months before he made that impressive debut in the center ring at a conference featuring Albert Hoffman,

01:31:58 ►

Sasha Shulgin, Andrew Weil, and many other psychedelic luminaries as well. But at the

01:32:04 ►

moment in time when Paul

01:32:05 ►

Herbert made the recording that we just listened to, well, it seems to me that Terence was already

01:32:11 ►

at the top of his form. And I also found it quite interesting when near the end of this recording,

01:32:17 ►

Terence talked about how he interacted with the mushroom consciousness with what he called an Hasidic approach, where he said he raved at it.

01:32:27 ►

Well, perhaps from what we now know about his last mushroom trip a number of years later,

01:32:33 ►

well, perhaps raving at the mushroom may not be the best approach to take, but I’ll let you be

01:32:39 ►

the judge of that. Well, there were quite a lot of other things in that talk that I’d like to comment on,

01:32:46 ►

but one of the things that really stuck out to me this time was his treatment of the UFO phenomenon,

01:32:52 ►

and here’s a quote from that section. A history-stopping archetype is being released

01:32:58 ►

into the skies of this planet, and if we are not careful, it will halt all intellectual inquiry in the same way that the Christos archetype halted intellectual inquiry in the Hellenistic age.

01:33:11 ►

Now, if you think that UFO sightings are rare, here’s a kind of fascinating statistic that I found on the net just two days ago. It said, between the year 2000 and 2010, in the United States,

01:33:29 ►

there were 649 million votes cast in general elections,

01:33:32 ►

441 Americans killed by lightning,

01:33:36 ►

13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation,

01:33:40 ►

and 47,000 UFO sightings.

01:33:44 ►

So that phenomena is still very much with us. And since the issue of UFOs is something

01:33:47 ►

that persists through the rest of his career, I think that maybe we might want to put a stake in

01:33:53 ►

the ground here in this talk and keep tracing back to it as the topic of UFOs progresses in his

01:33:59 ►

thought. In fact, you may remember that back in podcast 261, I played what was titled the

01:34:07 ►

Definitive UFO Tape. And the reason I’m mentioning that right now is that while you may want to go

01:34:13 ►

back and re-listen to that podcast now, I can save you the trouble with this little announcement.

01:34:19 ►

In the complete listing of what I’m calling the Paul Herbert Collection, I’ve noticed several titles of talks that I’ve already podcast. So there were two options. I could either just refer you to

01:34:31 ►

those older podcasts when we get to that point, or I could replay the talk. And my decision is

01:34:36 ►

that I’m going to replay them, just as I’ve done with this first one. And there are a number of

01:34:41 ►

reasons why. But two of them are, first, to have an accurate record of Paul’s work

01:34:47 ►

preserved as comprehensively as my amateur status allows.

01:34:52 ►

And secondly, some of those earlier recordings that I played

01:34:55 ►

were made by people in attendance

01:34:56 ►

and not recorded through Terrence’s microphone like all of Paul’s seem to be.

01:35:01 ►

So this will also ensure that we have the best quality recording of each talk that I can find.

01:35:07 ►

And this time I’m not going to edit anything out, as I did sometimes in the past.

01:35:13 ►

Now, getting back to the talk that we just listened to,

01:35:16 ►

do you remember the part where Terence was talking about the psychedelic experience

01:35:20 ►

being about teaching us how to die properly?

01:35:24 ►

For instance, he said, in shamanism

01:35:27 ►

and certain yogas, Taoist yoga, claim very clearly that the purpose is to familiarize yourself with

01:35:34 ►

this after-death body in life, and then the act of dying will not create confusion in the psyche.

01:35:41 ►

You will recognize what is happening, You will know what to do,

01:35:46 ►

and you will make the clean break. End quote. Well, when you heard that, my guess is that you

01:35:53 ►

joined me in remembering that Terrence’s last words were, keep breathing. And I’m sure that

01:36:00 ►

eventually we’ll come to that Q&A session when somebody asks him, what’s the most important

01:36:05 ►

thing to know about smoking DMT? And his answer, in two words, were, keep breathing. Which leads

01:36:14 ►

me to think that maybe there actually is something to the speculation about there being a DMT release

01:36:22 ►

taking place in our brains right at the moment of our death.

01:36:26 ►

Now there’s something worth investigating more closely, don’t you think?

01:36:30 ►

And I just can’t help but to make one more observation about the talk that we just listened to,

01:36:36 ►

and that is the fact that back in 1982, Terence McKenna was already getting up in public and saying things like,

01:36:43 ►

Terrence McKenna was already getting up in public and saying things like,

01:36:45 ►

Escape into the dream.

01:36:46 ►

Escape.

01:36:51 ►

A key thing charged against these drugs, that they are for escapists.

01:36:57 ►

I think the people who make this charge hardly dare dream to what degree they are escapists.

01:36:59 ►

Kind of provocative, huh?

01:37:06 ►

Now, I can remember quite well how uptight the world was about any and all talk about drugs.

01:37:12 ►

And that very year, 1982, was the year during which Nancy Reagan first used the phrase,

01:37:13 ►

Just say no.

01:37:15 ►

And she spelled it N-O.

01:37:19 ►

I think she should have spelled it K-N-O-W, but that’s just my opinion.

01:37:27 ►

But amazingly, Terrence’s rise to prominence actually began during the so-called Reagan years, which was a time of particular terror for lovers of liberty, but that too is another story.

01:37:35 ►

Now, my intention is only to point out the fact that it took an immense amount of courage to do what Terrence was doing back then,

01:37:42 ►

and in many cases it’s still very much like that

01:37:45 ►

in some areas, like working in the corporate world, for example. I can remember actually one

01:37:51 ►

instance when I was still in the corporate world and where someone that I’d worked with,

01:37:56 ►

drunk with, traveled with for almost two years, slipped one night and mentioned the fact that he

01:38:01 ►

smoked pot. And all that time, I’d been hiding the same fact from him.

01:38:06 ►

And all that time, neither of us was just a casual toker.

01:38:10 ►

No, we were both major stoners.

01:38:12 ►

And yet the fear about even talking about drugs in the belly of the corporate beast,

01:38:17 ►

well, now it’s become as dangerous as it was to discuss communism back in the 40s and 50s.

01:38:24 ►

I could, I guess, expand on this right now,

01:38:26 ►

but my guess is that your mind is already racing ahead of me here.

01:38:30 ►

So what do you think they’re up to, those keepers of the culture?

01:38:34 ►

What is it about these non-prescription, freely available,

01:38:37 ►

non-patentable so-called drugs that frightens them so?

01:38:42 ►

Well, in my own case at least,

01:38:45 ►

right at the time Terrence was giving the talk that we just listened to,

01:38:49 ►

at that very point in time, I was an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer

01:38:53 ►

living in Dallas, Texas.

01:38:56 ►

Two years after that talk, which I didn’t hear at the time, of course,

01:39:00 ►

but two years later, I had my first MDMA experience.

01:39:08 ►

And about a year after that, I had my first MDMA experience and about a year after that I had my first cannabis experience followed a year later by my first LSD experience

01:39:11 ►

now here it is a few decades later

01:39:14 ►

I’m living in Southern California and I’m still Irish

01:39:17 ►

but I’m most definitely not Catholic, Republican or a practicing lawyer

01:39:22 ►

so from the standpoint of the ruling class I can see why they’re afraid of our sacred medicines,

01:39:29 ►

because maybe they’re living in fear that one day a majority of people,

01:39:33 ►

including their own children and grandchildren, are going to wake up and begin to occupy the public spaces

01:39:39 ►

and talk about liberty once again.

01:39:42 ►

And with that sly little editorial,

01:39:45 ►

I think that I probably better end

01:39:48 ►

my personal commentary for today.

01:39:51 ►

However, I do look forward to a continuing discussion

01:39:54 ►

about what I’m now thinking of as early Terrence

01:39:57 ►

and to read what your thoughts are about this talk.

01:40:01 ►

And as many of our fellow Saloners have found out,

01:40:03 ►

there is already a good discussion going on both on my Facebook page and in the comments sections Thank you. And I do want to congratulate our entire community for being so courteous in their postings.

01:40:26 ►

It’s nice to have a civilized discussion about these interesting and challenging ideas.

01:40:32 ►

Now, speaking about having a civilized discussion,

01:40:36 ►

I don’t think you will find a more civilized and gentle and peaceful and highly intelligent discussion of topics of interest to our community

01:40:44 ►

than you will find at the 6th Annual Women’s Visionary Congress. peaceful and highly intelligent discussion of topics of interest to our community,

01:40:48 ►

then you will find at the 6th Annual Women’s Visionary Congress.

01:40:54 ►

And that takes place July 27th to the 29th of this year, 2012,

01:40:59 ►

at the IONS Earthrise Retreat Center in Petaluma, California.

01:41:02 ►

And visionaries of all genders are welcome, by the way.

01:41:09 ►

And I’ll put a link to the conference details, including where to get tickets, in the program notes for today’s podcast.

01:41:13 ►

But in case you aren’t familiar with the Women’s Visionary Congress, it’s an annual gathering of visionary women healers, scholars, botanists, activists, and artists who study consciousness in altered states.

01:41:23 ►

artists who study consciousness in altered states.

01:41:27 ►

And the ticket price, which I believe is $350,

01:41:31 ►

includes lodging at the Hilltop Recruit,

01:41:34 ►

yoga classes, and delicious healthy food.

01:41:39 ►

And presenters at the 2012 Women’s Visionary Congress include Michelle Aldrich, Valerie Corral,

01:41:43 ►

Wendy Chavkis, Liz Copeland, Copper Woman, Dr. Michelle Corbin,

01:41:48 ►

Carolyn Ferris, Christina Hunter, Bia Labate, Natalie Metz, Lindsay Robinson, Nikki Scully,

01:41:58 ►

Penny Slinger, Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Keeper Trout, and Bera Yezer.

01:42:07 ►

And while I was at Esalen a couple of weeks ago,

01:42:11 ►

I spent quite a bit of time talking with Diana Slattery,

01:42:13 ►

and in particular about this conference.

01:42:15 ►

And from what I learned about it from Diana, it sounds to me as if this is going to be one of the best

01:42:19 ►

and most important conferences of the year.

01:42:22 ►

So if there’s any way you can make it, my recommendation is to

01:42:25 ►

not miss it. And hopefully we’ll get some reports about the conference later this summer that I can

01:42:30 ►

play here in the salon. You know, on a regular basis, I get requests for more women speakers

01:42:35 ►

here in the salon. But to be honest, many of the women in our community have decided to keep more

01:42:40 ►

of a low profile. And while I certainly understand their position, I’m hopeful

01:42:45 ►

that before long, many of these intelligent and powerful women teachers will also grace us with

01:42:51 ►

their words of wisdom here in the salon. Now, as for the next podcast in this new series from the

01:42:58 ►

Paul Herbert Collection, it’s an interview that Terrence gave in December of 1982, and to the best of my knowledge, this is one

01:43:05 ►

that hasn’t been widely heard before.

01:43:08 ►

So, stay tuned, as

01:43:10 ►

they would say in Radioland.

01:43:11 ►

I guess here in Cyberdelic Space, we

01:43:14 ►

should say, stay connected.

01:43:16 ►

So, for now, this is Lorenzo

01:43:18 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic

01:43:20 ►

Space. Be well, my

01:43:22 ►

friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

317 - New and Old Maps of Hyperspace

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Program Notes

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