Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
This is Tape Number 002 of the Paul Herbert Collection.
Some of the topics covered in this talk:
Repression of psychedelic drugs
Element of risk in taking psychedelics
The imagination
Interiorization of the body/exterization of the soul
Death
The importance of psychedelics
Bell’s Theorem
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I regard [my] degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don’t really; there is no degree in shamanism.”
“This [repression of psychedelic drugs] has, in my opinion, held back the Western development of understanding consciousness because quite simply, these states, I do not believe, are accessible by any means other than drugs.”
“There is an element of risk [in using psychedelics]. I never tell people that there isn’t, but I think that the risk is worth it.”
“Psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history, essentially.”
“The immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own Eco-systemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.”
“A birth is a death. Everything you treasure, and believe in, and love, and relate to is destroyed for you when you leave the womb. And you are launched into another modality, a modality that perhaps you would not have chosen but that you cannot do anything about.”
“There is no knowledge without risk taking.”
“It is slowly becoming understood that the modality of being is the modality of mind.
“Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles, and they occur essentially to bedevil science.”
“The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.”
“I think with the work we do with these drugs we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next 100 years will lead to an understanding of consciousness almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.”
“We are consciousness. We may not always be monkeys.”
So I believe that a technological re-creation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward. And that means a kind of eternal existence where there is an ocean of mind into which one can dissolve and re-form from, but there is also the self, related to the body image but in the imagination. So that we each would become, in a sense, everyone.”
“There can be no turning back. We are either going to change in to this cybernetic, hyperdimentional, hallucinogenic angel, or we are going to destroy ourselves. The opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance of nature, that fell away 15,000 years ago and cannot be recaptured.”
“It is the people who are ‘far out’ who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for efficacious strategies.”
“Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:37 ►
And I’d like to begin today by thanking Barbara G. and Itamar S., both of whom made donations to the salon to help with the expenses associated in distributing these podcasts.
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So, Barbara and Itamar, I thank you both ever so much. And one other announcement I’d like to make here up front
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is to let you know of a conference being held
00:00:49 ►
on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania
00:00:51 ►
this coming September 27th through the 30th.
00:00:54 ►
The conference is titled
00:00:56 ►
Psychedemia, Integrating Psychedelics in Academia.
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And I either know or have heard or read the works
00:01:04 ►
of many of the presenters, and so it
00:01:07 ►
looks to me like this is going to be one wonderful event. So if you’re anywhere in that area or can
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get there this September, well, it should be a good place to come into contact with a few of the
00:01:18 ►
others and to soak up a lot of really important new information. Now, for today’s program, which is the second of my podcasts of the Paul Herbert Collection of the Words of Terence McKenna,
00:01:31 ►
as far as I know, this is the first time this particular talk has made it to the Internet.
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But I could be wrong about that, of course.
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In any event, the cassette tape itself is labeled, I’ll try to say this,
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Cilogen, Cilogen in the Sands of Time.
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But my guess is that the first word is a misspelling.
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They spelled it P-S-I-L-O-C-Y-G-I-N instead of psilocybin,
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which I think is what it should be.
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Anyhow, the label also says that this was the SIN, S-E-N, interview, but I’m not aware of what that means.
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So maybe someone can let us know by adding a comment in the Salon’s program notes for this podcast.
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And so this talk, or the interview I guess it is, was recorded at the Esalen Institute near Big Sur, California, in December of 1982.
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And if you’d like to see a photo of the cassette that I got this from,
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I’ve included one along with the program notes for this podcast,
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which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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Now, there are several quite interesting comments that Terrence makes in this interview or conversation,
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quite interesting comments that Terence makes in this interview or conversation,
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and I suspect they’d have much less meaning without our knowing what happens later in the story of Terence McKenna.
00:02:58 ►
For example, at one point he’s being very careful to point out the dangers from a psychological standpoint of using psychedelic medicines, because, as he says, and I quote,
00:03:04 ►
each journey into that dimension is a total existential commitment,
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and the element of fear is always there, close quote.
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And by the time we get a half hour or so into this interview,
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we’re treated to some really poetic, almost prophetic,
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and certainly beautiful, eloquent riffs,
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some of which are the best I’ve heard Terrence deliver
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concerning the importance of humanity
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and the extraordinary times in which we now live.
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And in my mind here,
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I was just about to tell you about another thing
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that struck me about this talk,
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but it would quite obviously be better
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if I just kind of shut up and play the tape for us both to listen to right now.
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Welcome, Terrence McKenna.
00:03:52 ►
Thank you very much.
00:03:56 ►
What I’m, you know, first of all interested in is your education.
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Like, you know, how come that you developed this very particular kind of interest well i received a degree in shamanistic studies from the university of california
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but that was more in response to my interest in this kind of thing i I traveled widely in the East as an art historian when I was very young.
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And then later I went to the Amazon basin.
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And I had always had an interest in plant hallucinogens and drug experiences generally
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and conscious development of conscious alternatives.
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generally and conscious development of conscious alternatives.
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But it was not until the Amazon that I saw that this was possible in a way that was accessible to me.
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So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families,
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and that then became the compass for all the work that I’ve done since then.
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And I regard the degree more or less as a joke
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because it was self-directed study.
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They don’t really… there is no degree in shamanism.
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But my interest was basically one in the phenomenology of religious experience,
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religious traditions
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worldwide, and primitive people against a background of tropical nature, and stumbled
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onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Colombia in 1971, and was not even particularly interested in mushrooms at the time.
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We were looking for a less well-understood drug
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that is still not discussed much in the literature,
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that exists in a very circumscribed area among three Indian tribes.
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And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission that served these Indians.
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And the priest at this mission had cleared pasture and brought in white cows.
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And there were many, many of these mushrooms.
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And as soon as we started experimenting with them, I realized that what I had been told about psilocybin,
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which was that it was analogous to LSD,
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but simply required a larger amount
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for the effect to be present, was a complete simplification of the issue.
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And actually then psilocybin became the focus of my interest, and by extrapolation the other tryptamine related hallucinogens and a great dream
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of mine and of my brothers as well was that the mushroom must somehow be made
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accessible to people so that they may judge for themselves the difference and
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we worked with this over a number of years. And in 1975, we succeeded in growing it
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by a method that had previously been used
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only in the laboratory on commercial grocery store mushrooms
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to study their genetics.
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But it turned out to be perfectly adapted for growing this mushroom within a
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matter of months we had written psilocybin the magic mushroom growers guide and the information
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was moving out into society but more important from our point of view was that the mushroom
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was again accessible to us so that we had psilocybin in a form that was certified pure by Mother Nature
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and that like initiated the second phase of our work with these drugs which has carried us up to
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the present day and it’s basically a project of taking the drugs, calling attention to the differences, the uniqueness of the
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state, and trying to attract other people’s attention to it, because I have, we have a
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very deep intuition of its importance for the cultural predicament for mankind generally.
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And this is how we come to where we are today, basically.
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You just mentioned that the mushroom is really important for our culture right now,
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and you perceive yourself as an advocate to bring into our culture a new element,
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like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousness.
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What can we learn from these experiences?
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Well, the first thing that we can learn is that they exist.
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In other words, that perhaps it’s a truism in the 80s,
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but at one point it was thought
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that there were two states of consciousness,
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awake and asleep.
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Now there is a gamut of these states,
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but I still don’t believe
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that the people who deal with consciousness
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realize how mutable consciousness really is,
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there is a prejudice against the use of drugs
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because there is an inherent dualism
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built into Western thought
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where people value the experience
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if it is endogenously produced,
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produced through ordeal or personality or dieting,
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but is undervalued if it comes from drugs,
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this has, in my opinion,
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held back the Western development
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of understanding consciousness
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because, quite simply,
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these states, I do not believe,
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are accessible by any means other than drugs.
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And this is heresy to a number of people,
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but the evidence that I lay in favor of that contention
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is the history of human art and literature and music and painting
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is surprisingly empty of the motifs which exist in the tryptamine-induced ecstasy.
00:10:32 ►
And always when I speak of hallucinogens, I’m speaking of this limited family of drugs,
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not LSD or ketamine or mescaline, but psilocybin and DMT and combinational drugs which utilize strategies for making that
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effect noticeable and my career is to point at this place in nature which I’ve stumbled upon
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and to say what is this what do you make of this what do you the physicist you the psychologist
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you the after-death researcher what do you make of this place and even the most sophisticated
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consciousness researchers tend to hurry over drugs or to focus on one drug to the exclusion of others.
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And yet psilocybin has not received this kind of attention and treatment.
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And why that is, I’m not sure.
00:11:33 ►
I think that the element of terror involved in doing it,
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The fact that it does not bathe your ego in a cloud of certitude or assurance that everything is going to be fine.
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It is much more cut and dried than that.
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And it’s a challenge. challenge it is when you are out in the billows as I call it because it seems to come in in waves like sets of billows when you’re out in the billows you are
00:12:14 ►
against the power of mind up against the power of mind to such a degree that you
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know that the entire enterprise hangs in the balance that no matter how much you’ve
00:12:27 ►
been told about dosage and this kind of thing that the mind actually holds the key to life and death
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and that those parts of your control board which are normally masked from you are suddenly unmasked
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and the buttons are there for you to manipulate
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to the degree that you understand them and
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There is an element of risk. I never tell people that there isn’t
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But I think that the risk is worth it because I think these bizarre
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dimensions of beauty and information are actually
00:13:09 ►
dimensions of beauty and information are actually it is an intimation of these things that gives human history its coherency in other words this is not a peripheral issue
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to the general phenomenon of human becoming in time it is actually because the evolution of the human species is the evolution of the human mind,
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these consciousness-expanding agents actually anticipate an end state in the evolution of the
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human mind, and so they cast enormous reflections back over the historical landscape.
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It is they which generate religions and physics and messianic careers and outbreaks of great
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psychic accomplishment and disgrace. disgrace and until we understand this
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until we understand that there is
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a teleological object at the end
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of human history
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and that it can be known
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we will continue
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to live the kind of limited
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intellectual existence that has characterized
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the last 500 years
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or so of western development
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psilocybin,
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tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by
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becoming cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and
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causing history, essentially.
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How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?
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Well, I’ve said many times,
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human history is a lunge across 15 or 20,000 years of time
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from the primitive stone-chipping primate
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to that creature which will walk into a trans-dimensional vehicle
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and leave the solar system and human history
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and the concerns of the human monkey
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far behind and this may take a thousand generations of people but as a biological fact as an emergent
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process of planetary significance that is only a microcosm I mean a microsecond of cosmic time.
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The immediate future of man lies in the imagination
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and in seeking the dimension where the imagination can be expressed.
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The present cultural crisis on the surface of the planet
00:16:03 ►
is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise of imagination.
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It wrecks the planet.
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The planet has its own ecostemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.
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In space, the physical space that surrounds the planet,
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the modalities of imagination will be the limiting cases of what man can be done.
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So I see man becoming an artist and an engineer,
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in other words, flowing into our ideas,
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perhaps more than we dare even now suspect.
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In other words, a possible end state of that kind of technical evolution
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would be the interiorization of the body, of the human body, the individual body,
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and the exteriorization of the soul.
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individual body and the exteriorization of the soul.
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And this seems to me to be what the recovery from Adam’s fall, allegorically, is getting at, that the soul must be made manifest and eternal, and the body must be incorporealized
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so that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination
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and what i mean by that is something like what william butler yates is getting at in his poem
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sailing to byzantium where he speaks of the artifice of eternity and talks about how beyond
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death he would hope to be an enameled golden bird singing sweet songs to the lords
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and ladies of Byzantium in other words it’s the image of the human body become a an indestructible
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cybernetic object and yet within that indestructible cybernetic object there is a holographic transform of the body and it is released into the dream.
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In other words, the after-death state is actually the compass of human history, that we are
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attempting to undergo a complete death of the species and as we struggle with this concrescence of thanatos
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there is there are problems like nuclear stockpiles and all these things arise because
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the message that we’re trying to read is the message we most fear to hear which is uh that
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you must die to experience eternal life, essentially.
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But what this death that we’re talking about is,
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is an understanding that the human, the Dasein,
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the being of human beings,
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desires to be released into the imagination.
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And until we confront death with the attitude that it is the after-death state
00:19:08 ►
that needs to enter history, there will be a great deal of anxiety. It’s like a birth, you know,
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a birth is a death. Everything you treasure and believe in and love and relate to is destroyed
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for you when you leave the womb and you are launched into another
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modality a modality that you would not perhaps have chosen but that you cannot do anything about
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so i uh i think these drugs anticipate this because i think that
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that time is the moving image of eternity, as Plato said,
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and these drugs place you outside of time.
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Now, the mechanism of how that’s done,
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you can invoke Bell’s theorem or just call it pure magic,
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but it does happen in the here and now. It is accessible.
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It is not something
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remote from us but somehow the clamor of the modern world and in the search for answers
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people have feared to place themselves on the line and to actually wrestle with life and death
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out there in those strange bardo-like dimensions not realizing that there is no other way to win
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true knowledge i mean it cannot be easily come by there is no knowledge without risk taking
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and i see the human future
00:20:38 ►
emerging along the lines that the mushroom visions have insisted upon.
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The proliferation of electronic media,
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the densification of information,
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the breaking down of consensus reality,
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the breakdown of a coherent dogma at the center of physics,
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all these things indicate that it is slowly becoming understood
00:21:09 ►
that the modality of being is the modality of mind.
00:21:13 ►
And once that realization is placed in the center
00:21:16 ►
of someone’s thinking about the world,
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the importance of these drugs will seem to be paramount.
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And once a culture places that understanding
00:21:26 ►
in the center of its model of the world these drugs will then point the way
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and we will be much closer to the end of history that i think we all
00:21:39 ►
desire consciously or unconsciously a cutting of the Gordian knot and a
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release of the human species and individual into the dream basically and
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primitive people meaning pre literate people they just have circumvented the
00:22:01 ►
entire process of history they have leapfrogged over us. They are already in the dream. They have accepted the drug on its own terms and assimilated it and live with it. and for us is that we are destroying their world and our intellectual equipment is such that we can
00:22:28 ►
never have that that naive epistemological approach to these phenomena because we know
00:22:35 ►
about technique we know that energy can be manipulated to achieve effects. And so it isn’t enough for us
00:22:46 ►
to try to recreate the shamanism of preliterate people.
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We have to go into the shaman space
00:22:54 ►
with the a priori categories of Kant,
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with the edetic reduction of Wittgenstein,
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with the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead.
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All the intellectual equipage of our culture must be carried with us into that space to attempt to map it in a way that
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will be relevant for us and that will point the way toward a shortening of this period of shock
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and the accumulating shock wave.
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It’s like the bow shock of ionized particles
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or energetic particles
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meeting the magnetic field of the planet.
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That’s what the chaos at the end of history is.
00:23:39 ►
Were you just talking about the bell theory?
00:23:41 ►
No, I’m talking about a shock wave
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which precedes eschatology
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and is modern times, basically.
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I mean, it has been increasing
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throughout history,
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but as we grow closer to this moment
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where the human mind
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will evolve into hyperspace,
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the confusion,
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the amount of contradiction,
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the amount of, well, Q it’s called in engineering,
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just the amount of vibration in the system
00:24:12 ►
is increasing to the point where it seems like
00:24:14 ►
the system is about to fly to pieces.
00:24:16 ►
This signals to me that the onset of the primal crisis,
00:24:23 ►
that when we have gone through it,
00:24:25 ►
we will then live in this realm of altered understanding
00:24:31 ►
that psilocybin and these drugs anticipate.
00:24:34 ►
And it isn’t a coincidence that they anticipate them.
00:24:38 ►
It is, in fact, what eschatological time is, is what they reveal.
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That’s why the cultures we find using them
00:24:46 ►
are eschatological and historical cultures.
00:24:51 ►
What is the Bell theorem you’re talking about?
00:24:53 ►
Well, the Bell theorem is simply an interpretation
00:24:56 ►
of an experiment in quantum mechanics
00:24:58 ►
which seemed to suggest that information is non-local.
00:25:02 ►
In other words, that everything about everywhere
00:25:06 ►
can be known here and now
00:25:08 ►
because somehow all information is cotangent
00:25:13 ►
to every point in the matrix.
00:25:15 ►
I don’t pretend to have the background to judge the Bell theorem.
00:25:20 ►
What I would say about it is, if it isn’t true,
00:25:23 ►
something like it must be true to
00:25:27 ►
account for the informational content of these drug experiences if you just take a simple behaviorist
00:25:34 ►
model what is in your head if behaviorist and reductionist evolutionists are correct, what is in your head should be very adapted to the here and now.
00:25:49 ►
It should be efficacious information that bears on your survival. Instead, what we find when we
00:25:55 ►
take these drugs is a density of information, an alienness of information, an inapplicability of information to the human condition
00:26:07 ►
that suggests that information is available,
00:26:11 ►
that has no bearing on the life of the individual
00:26:14 ►
or the success of his evolutionary strategy.
00:26:19 ►
And I just cannot believe
00:26:22 ►
that these things are built into the human psyche.
00:26:26 ►
I have, as I say, I was involved with Jungian ideas,
00:26:31 ►
and those archetypes and those archetypal processes are not what I’m talking about.
00:26:37 ►
I’m talking about the thing which, for want of a better word,
00:26:42 ►
we call the alien or the extrater which, for want of a better word, we call the alien or the extraterrestrial,
00:26:45 ►
the thing which comes out of the drug experience that is un-Englishable,
00:26:51 ►
beautiful, but so bizarre that it seems to exceed human categories.
00:26:57 ►
Some people talk about entities.
00:27:00 ►
Yes, it can present itself as an entity.
00:27:02 ►
It can present itself in a number of different ways.
00:27:06 ►
It is the central mystery of our age.
00:27:10 ►
We are so alienated…
00:27:13 ►
Let me restart that.
00:27:16 ►
The relationship of intellectuals alive today
00:27:22 ►
who are familiar with the state of modern science
00:27:25 ►
and that sort of thing
00:27:26 ►
to a question like the existence of extraterrestrials
00:27:30 ►
is approximately in the same place
00:27:34 ►
or degree of closure
00:27:35 ►
as the relationship of 15th and 16th century intellectuals
00:27:40 ►
to the real properties of matter.
00:27:44 ►
In other words, they had only a tenuous grip on the real properties of matter. In other words, they had only a tenuous grip
00:27:46 ►
on the real properties of matter.
00:27:48 ►
Consequently, alchemy could exist,
00:27:51 ►
could project the hopes of human psychic transformation
00:27:55 ►
onto inert matter
00:27:57 ►
because so little was known about the real nature of matter
00:28:01 ►
that it seemed a reasonable place
00:28:04 ►
to expect these kinds of things to happen.
00:28:08 ►
The present state of thought today
00:28:11 ►
is that it’s highly likely that there are extraterrestrials
00:28:15 ►
somewhere out among the stars.
00:28:17 ►
The state of the development of our chemistry,
00:28:21 ►
astrophysics, linguistics, etc., etc.,
00:28:25 ►
makes it reasonable for us as moderns to expect that.
00:28:30 ►
So then consequently we go into our heads
00:28:33 ►
and there seems to be the extraterrestrial.
00:28:37 ►
It may be a true extraterrestrial,
00:28:40 ►
but it is odd that it has hidden itself
00:28:44 ►
in the place where we expected to find it
00:28:46 ►
and this causes me to assume that actually it’s something far more profound than an extraterrestrial
00:28:54 ►
it’s something which to gain our confidence is disguised as an extraterrestrial because
00:29:01 ►
its real nature is so much more devastating than that,
00:29:07 ►
that that is the way in which it insinuates itself into our lives
00:29:11 ►
so that we can dream of a hegemony of organized intelligence out in the galaxy
00:29:16 ►
that we will relate to and be assimilated into.
00:29:20 ►
What I think is going on is that actually the most intelligent life form on the planet is not man and his institutions. is a diffuse organism of technical artifacts like computers and information transfer and
00:29:50 ►
retrieval systems and human beings.
00:29:53 ►
But human institutions are like myths woven by the individual human cells that make up
00:30:04 ►
society.
00:30:04 ►
woven by the individual human cells that make up society,
00:30:11 ►
the real controlling modality on the planet is never visible.
00:30:13 ►
And it is this group mind.
00:30:17 ►
And it controls the release of ideas into history by designating certain people as geniuses.
00:30:20 ►
And if there’s a certain kind of imbalance,
00:30:27 ►
a certain kind of religion will arise to collapse that imbalance if uh if uh technical advancement is outstripping the evolution of
00:30:36 ►
ethics a religion can step in to freeze these developments so that one can catch up with the other. And I think the whole consciousness movement
00:30:47 ►
that has evolved over the past 20 years
00:30:50 ►
is an attempt to map, to verify,
00:30:54 ►
and to open a dialogue with this thing,
00:30:59 ►
which is the other, we call it the other,
00:31:01 ►
we call it the alien,
00:31:02 ►
but it is actually the overmind of the species
00:31:05 ►
and it it seeks this dialogue it has been waiting all these millennia to uh for us to essentially
00:31:13 ►
come to a point of intellectual maturity where we did not then require messiahs religions and these various crude interventions
00:31:27 ►
into the human experience
00:31:29 ►
which keep us from destroying ourselves.
00:31:32 ►
This is also what Jung called the collective unconscious.
00:31:35 ►
Right, but he painted it as a very passive kind of thing,
00:31:40 ►
more like a data bank
00:31:41 ►
or a place where all myths and all memories were.
00:31:46 ►
I think of it as a god, a kind of god,
00:31:53 ►
and I think it is active in three-dimensional space.
00:31:58 ►
It can be active in something as personalistic and circumscribed
00:32:04 ►
as a string of coincidences which you experience
00:32:09 ►
which seem to be turning your life in a certain direction
00:32:12 ►
that you may not have expected.
00:32:14 ►
Or it can be active in something like
00:32:18 ►
the worldwide phenomenon of flying saucers.
00:32:21 ►
Flying saucers are nothing more than miracles and they occur
00:32:27 ►
essentially to bedevil science
00:32:31 ►
because science is a human institution
00:32:34 ►
that has arisen in the last 500 years
00:32:36 ►
that is the dreams of displacing the overmind
00:32:42 ►
without ever realizing that it exists.
00:32:45 ►
Science dreams of this place of preeminence,
00:32:49 ►
but science creates alienation, species survival problems, all of these things.
00:32:58 ►
Now then the overmind, which can be thought of simply like a cultural thermostat. It clicks on when the clash of contradiction
00:33:08 ►
between the ethics of a society and some other institution,
00:33:13 ►
in this case science, becomes too great.
00:33:17 ►
This governing device clicks on
00:33:19 ►
and it begins producing those events most destructive
00:33:23 ►
to the institution that is seeking preeminence,
00:33:27 ►
in this case science.
00:33:28 ►
So the inexplicability of the flying saucer phenomenon
00:33:33 ►
is its central reason for being.
00:33:39 ►
And all the effort to reduce it to something,
00:33:43 ►
metal ships from far away or anything else,
00:33:47 ►
is doomed to failure
00:33:48 ►
because its very reason for being
00:33:51 ►
is to undermine those kind of ontological systems.
00:33:56 ►
Why we’re talking about this
00:33:58 ►
is because psilocybin
00:33:59 ►
inducts you into the flying saucer experience.
00:34:06 ►
In other words, a metaphor for it would be to say
00:34:08 ►
that psilocybin is a means of triggering
00:34:11 ►
the so-called abduction experience
00:34:14 ►
or the close encounter of a third kind.
00:34:17 ►
Once you realize that, once you’ve satisfied yourself
00:34:21 ►
that that’s true,
00:34:24 ►
a number of experimental avenues are opened up,
00:34:28 ►
a number of different approaches to what’s going on are suggested.
00:34:32 ►
I mean, here we have alien entities eager to transmit information,
00:34:38 ►
eager to carry on a noetic dialogue,
00:34:42 ►
and we seem to be ignoring the opportunity
00:34:46 ►
because our categories mitigate against us correctly appreciating it.
00:34:53 ►
Are these entities coming from outer space, or are they more part of us?
00:34:57 ►
It’s impossible to tell. This is the game that you must play with them,
00:35:01 ►
is through dialogue, trying to figure out if this is
00:35:06 ►
the previously unseen human psyche or whether it is actually a thing coming from the outside and
00:35:15 ►
it is not an easy thing to decide because we are so alienated from self that we don’t really know
00:35:22 ►
what it would be it’s not important to know the context,
00:35:26 ►
it’s more important to know the content.
00:35:28 ►
The content is very interesting, yes,
00:35:31 ►
because even if we were somehow to verify
00:35:34 ►
that Bell’s non-locality theorem applied
00:35:39 ►
and that these were real entities around a real sun
00:35:42 ►
somewhere in the universe,
00:35:48 ►
it would make them no more or less real.
00:35:55 ►
In other words, it’s a hang-up to demand that they appear in three-dimensional space. I have this hang-up, so I don’t put it down.
00:36:02 ►
I always think of the apostle Thomas
00:36:05 ►
because you’ll recall Thomas was not present
00:36:09 ►
when Christ returned after,
00:36:12 ►
when he rose from the grave,
00:36:14 ►
he appeared to the apostles in the upper room
00:36:16 ►
and Thomas was not present.
00:36:18 ►
Then later he was there
00:36:20 ►
and the apostle said,
00:36:22 ►
listen, the master was here
00:36:23 ►
and it was wonderful and he said
00:36:25 ►
you know you people have been smoking too many little brown cigarettes that’s preposterous
00:36:31 ►
and at that point christ walked in and he said he said thomas come put your hand into the wound
00:36:40 ►
so that you’ll believe and so he did and so then he believed well the moral of the
00:36:48 ►
story as i read it is thomas was the doubter consequently thomas was the only one who was
00:36:56 ►
allowed to actually touch the resurrection body it was because he doubted that he was vouchsafed to this position of preeminence.
00:37:08 ►
And I’m like that. I mean, I would like to touch the incorporeal body. I would like to call the
00:37:13 ►
saucer down and observe all of its workings. But this is a spiritual aspiration that cannot be
00:37:22 ►
advanced by any human technique or activity. This is just something you
00:37:27 ►
pray for. In the meantime, the job is to map it and describe it and explore it and try to direct
00:37:36 ►
the attention of other people more intelligent than myself to this astonishing fact, really. I mean, I am troubled by the fact
00:37:47 ►
that so many strange claims are made today,
00:37:50 ►
so many forms of aliens and channeling
00:37:54 ►
and voices in the head,
00:37:56 ►
that when I began all this ten years ago,
00:37:59 ►
I was afraid to speak because I sounded mad, even to myself,
00:38:07 ►
and I sounded like a voice in the wilderness.
00:38:10 ►
Today the situation has changed to the point where
00:38:13 ►
I can barely make myself heard amidst the clamor of people
00:38:19 ►
who have various entities from Atlantis and beyond the grave
00:38:25 ►
and Zeta Reticuli and what have you clamoring to be heard.
00:38:32 ►
So I take it on faith, and I ask you to take it on faith,
00:38:39 ►
that I am somewhat more objective
00:38:44 ►
and somewhat more interested in hard facts
00:38:48 ►
than these other channelers.
00:38:51 ►
I would like people to take a look at this phenomenon
00:38:53 ►
and then tell me what they think.
00:38:57 ►
And it involves risk.
00:39:00 ►
People fear to do it.
00:39:01 ►
Careers are placed on the line.
00:39:03 ►
It is not easy to make a career
00:39:05 ►
out of taking a psychedelic drug.
00:39:07 ►
It is not a thing which
00:39:09 ►
mixes well with the politics
00:39:12 ►
of any institution,
00:39:15 ►
a university, a research institution,
00:39:17 ►
that kind of thing.
00:39:17 ►
Perhaps this is why shaman
00:39:19 ►
are the primary sources
00:39:21 ►
of information about it.
00:39:24 ►
Terry, are you a shaman?
00:39:25 ►
Are you an exploring shaman?
00:39:27 ►
I’m an exploring shaman.
00:39:29 ►
I wouldn’t claim to be a shaman,
00:39:31 ►
but I think anybody who takes these things and goes out
00:39:34 ►
and tries to navigate through and make maps and bring back data
00:39:39 ►
is a shaman for sure.
00:39:42 ►
is a shaman for sure.
00:39:48 ►
Do you want that everybody takes his drug and goes out and takes the drug?
00:39:50 ►
No, I don’t think so.
00:39:52 ►
I think it’s very dangerous.
00:39:56 ►
I do not tell people that it’s safe
00:39:58 ►
because I don’t have the faith that it’s safe.
00:40:04 ►
I know what the pharmacological literature says,
00:40:08 ►
and it says that it’s safe,
00:40:11 ►
that at the doses where these effects occur,
00:40:14 ►
there can’t possibly be a problem.
00:40:16 ►
But this seems to me to be the naivete of materialists,
00:40:22 ►
and we shouldn’t be in a hurry to believe them even though it might make us
00:40:27 ►
more comfortable to do so in other words it’s saying you know the drug may not be toxic but
00:40:34 ►
you may be self-toxic and you may discover this on the drug in the drug experience so you have to you have to hone yourself and be clean and you never know if you’re
00:40:48 ►
clean enough until it’s too late because each journey into that dimension is a total existential
00:40:57 ►
commitment and the element of fear is always there. I mentioned this this morning,
00:41:06 ►
but I think the fear validates it.
00:41:09 ►
I’m not…
00:41:10 ►
I think it’s fine to take drugs for pleasure,
00:41:14 ►
but it should be labeled as taking drugs for pleasure.
00:41:19 ►
And the high doses of psilocybin
00:41:21 ►
that are necessary to elicit entry into these places.
00:41:26 ►
It requires, as it says in Hamlet,
00:41:30 ►
you must screw your courage to the sticking place.
00:41:34 ►
You mentioned earlier about mankind evolving towards a teleological goal.
00:41:41 ►
Would you comment on that? What is the goal?
00:41:44 ►
logical goal. Would you comment on that? What is the goal?
00:41:54 ►
Well, I don’t think there is a final goal and an end to history, but speaking relative to the history of the past four or five thousand years, I think the goal is, as I said, to invert the relationship of body and soul so that the body becomes an image
00:42:09 ►
in the imagination and the soul becomes an exteriorized solid state piece of circuitry
00:42:17 ►
which maintains everything else in stasis.
00:42:22 ►
And I’m not sure if people even realize what I
00:42:26 ►
picture in my mind
00:42:28 ►
when I say this
00:42:29 ►
but I think that the destiny of man
00:42:31 ►
and what man will make
00:42:33 ►
be his destiny
00:42:34 ►
just because of how we are
00:42:37 ►
is release into the imagination
00:42:39 ►
and this is what all our
00:42:41 ►
after death scenarios say
00:42:43 ►
whether they are true or not and they may be true and this is what all our after-death scenarios say, whether they are true or not, and they may be true.
00:42:47 ►
And this is what poetry aspires to, art aspires to.
00:42:51 ►
It’s release into the imagination.
00:42:53 ►
We are creatures of the dream.
00:42:55 ►
And once this is articulated with sufficient clarity,
00:42:59 ►
and it’s happening now,
00:43:02 ►
but I think the work we do with these drugs,
00:43:04 ►
we are the earliest pioneers in what over the next hundred years
00:43:09 ►
will lead to an understanding of consciousness
00:43:15 ►
almost as a thing apart from the monkey body and brain.
00:43:20 ►
We are consciousness.
00:43:23 ►
We may not always be monkeys
00:43:25 ►
we fear the dehumanizing effect
00:43:29 ►
of so many computers
00:43:31 ►
and emotions
00:43:33 ►
euphoric emotions not related to sex
00:43:38 ►
and all these things
00:43:39 ►
we fear them, we say
00:43:40 ►
we are moving further and further from nature
00:43:43 ►
deeper and deeper into our own psyche.
00:43:46 ►
But this is a dualism.
00:43:49 ►
Our psyche is nature,
00:43:52 ►
and we cannot move away from nature by exploring these places.
00:43:58 ►
So I believe that a technological recreation of the after-death state
00:44:04 ►
is what history pushes toward, and that means technological recreation of the after-death state is what history pushes toward.
00:44:07 ►
And that means a kind of eternal existence
00:44:09 ►
where there is an ocean of mind
00:44:13 ►
into which one can dissolve and reform from,
00:44:19 ►
but there is also the self related to the body image, but in the imagination, so that we each would
00:44:29 ►
become, in a sense, everyone. I would live at Versailles, and you might live at the Taj
00:44:37 ►
Mahal, and someone else might live at Buckingham Palace, but what you would see, if there were
00:44:43 ►
an exterior observer, what you would see, if there were an exterior observer, what
00:44:45 ►
you would see is only that man had become a coral reef of circuitry in space and on
00:44:51 ►
the planetary surface.
00:44:53 ►
But this is a very extreme view of the history of man because it’s essentially Gnostic.
00:45:00 ►
It says we are not now what we yearn to be and are destined to be.
00:45:09 ►
We are not, I don’t see history as a process of accepting and coming to terms with monkeyhood.
00:45:20 ►
I see that it will inevitably seek to transform and transcend monkeyhood.
00:45:27 ►
And this will be very frightening.
00:45:30 ►
I mean, it’s frightening.
00:45:31 ►
Imagine if even a 15th century person were to be in this room with us
00:45:36 ►
and the value systems, the clash of assumptions
00:45:42 ►
about what is important and unimportant.
00:45:45 ►
And this will be a much more intense change.
00:45:48 ►
And whether it is good or bad
00:45:51 ►
rests on a question that I have no answer for.
00:45:55 ►
And the question is, is man good?
00:45:59 ►
And this, I maintain, is the central thing to dig at.
00:46:03 ►
And we cannot know
00:46:05 ►
and there’s evidence pro and con
00:46:09 ►
I have the faith that man is good
00:46:12 ►
so I don’t fear this future
00:46:16 ►
but if someone had a doubt
00:46:18 ►
even a small doubt about that
00:46:21 ►
then they would be repelled by this
00:46:24 ►
and I take all these movements
00:46:25 ►
which want
00:46:27 ►
zero sum growth
00:46:31 ►
and
00:46:32 ►
reject technology
00:46:35 ►
reject space colonization
00:46:37 ►
reject drug experimentation
00:46:40 ►
as artificial
00:46:41 ►
these people would be very
00:46:44 ►
alarmed by this kind of a point of view,
00:46:46 ►
but they do not seem to realize that the momentum toward this kind of thing
00:46:51 ►
is now so great in terms of human culture and that sort of thing
00:46:56 ►
that there can be no turning back.
00:46:59 ►
We are either going to change into this cybernetic, hyperdimensional, halluc hallucinogenic angel or we are going to destroy
00:47:07 ►
ourselves the opportunity for us to be happy hunters and gatherers integrated into the balance
00:47:14 ►
of nature that fell away 15 000 years ago and cannot be recaptured i might just end by recalling a statement
00:47:25 ►
I think Gerard O’Neill made it
00:47:28 ►
in answer to this very objection.
00:47:31 ►
He said, the earth is the cradle of mankind.
00:47:34 ►
There is no question about that.
00:47:37 ►
But you do not remain in the cradle forever.
00:47:41 ►
And this is a birth crisis that we’re going through.
00:47:44 ►
The entirety of human history
00:47:47 ►
has been the story of the monkey
00:47:51 ►
becoming the flying saucer
00:47:54 ►
and it is taking just that long in geological time
00:47:58 ►
but we, for some strange reason
00:48:02 ►
happen to be living through the final moments
00:48:06 ►
of that process right now.
00:48:08 ►
And it is a turbulent, chaotic,
00:48:14 ►
multidimensional metamorphosis
00:48:18 ►
that is…
00:48:20 ►
There’s never been anything like it on this planet before.
00:48:23 ►
It’s absolutely astonishing.
00:48:25 ►
Information which was locked for
00:48:29 ►
kilocosms of time into the DNA of plants and animals
00:48:34 ►
has through the hand and articulate voice of man
00:48:39 ►
been able to bootstrap itself out of the DNA
00:48:45 ►
and into these culturally validated, rapidly operating
00:48:49 ►
electromagnetic codes and languages.
00:48:53 ►
And this is allowing its development, its evolution,
00:48:56 ►
to proceed at a rate so fast that the transformation
00:49:02 ►
is taking place essentially in our lifetimes
00:49:05 ►
and psilocybin is central to this
00:49:09 ►
because psilocybin casts a spotlight
00:49:12 ►
into the darkness into which we are moving
00:49:15 ►
and shows that this is what lies there
00:49:19 ►
it is the human soul
00:49:23 ►
essentially the over soul of, calling history toward itself across the dimensions.
00:49:32 ►
And it’s taking only a moment, but on the other hand, it’s taking 20,000 years.
00:49:36 ►
And it is the great, great adventure of becoming.
00:49:41 ►
And we are very, very privileged to be in this final ticking out of the last
00:49:47 ►
seconds of the third act.
00:49:50 ►
Do you have any comments about the fact that DMT is located in the human brain?
00:49:56 ►
Well, I think that puts, in some senses, a strong piece of evidence for the argument
00:50:01 ►
that I’ve been making.
00:50:03 ►
Not only is DMT endogenous in the brain,
00:50:06 ►
but beta-carbolines of the sort that occur in ayahuasca
00:50:09 ►
are endogenous in the brain as well.
00:50:13 ►
These things, as I mentioned this morning,
00:50:16 ►
the shift of a single atom on the ring structure of one of these molecules
00:50:22 ►
can cause a compound to go from inert to highly active.
00:50:28 ►
Well, that means then that it’s probably very reasonable to say
00:50:33 ►
that we are as close to shifting the level of endogenous hallucinogens in our head,
00:50:40 ►
we are probably only a one- one gene mutation away from that happening.
00:50:46 ►
And if you know anything about how biological evolution works, it isn’t that a change, a
00:50:53 ►
mutation occurs, and the mutation is found to be better adapted than the previous form,
00:51:01 ►
and hence the mutation dominates.
00:51:05 ►
That is not the way evolution works.
00:51:07 ►
The way it works is you have the normal expression of the genotype in a population
00:51:13 ►
and then you have mutations being thrown up all the time
00:51:17 ►
and they are usually quenched except in the situation where the environment shifts
00:51:24 ►
so that new selective pressures are operating in the environment.
00:51:28 ►
When new selective pressures begin to operate,
00:51:32 ►
a gene that was previously without consequence
00:51:36 ►
may suddenly have immense consequences.
00:51:39 ►
So then every member of the population that you’re looking at
00:51:43 ►
that has that gene suddenly is in a much more
00:51:48 ►
advantageous position to advance their evolutionary strategy and i think that certainly modern
00:51:56 ►
existence has changed the selective pressures on the human genome And now it is people who are far out, that’s simply a gloss,
00:52:09 ►
it is the people who are far out who are gaining advantage in the evolutionary jostling for
00:52:19 ►
efficacious strategies. And this, you’re right, Frank, is happening uh on the hardware level on the level
00:52:27 ►
of endogenous tryptamines and that sort of thing i think schizophrenia is essentially in a way
00:52:33 ►
a disease of modern times and it is though it’s always existed of course but the incidence of it and the incidence of schizoid, if not schizophrenic, personalities and types is because
00:52:53 ►
the modalities of evolutionary selection are shifting. It’s as though if you think of a
00:52:59 ►
rainforest that has been above water 200 million years. All evolutionary niches have become occupied.
00:53:07 ►
Everything is at steady state.
00:53:09 ►
There is not going to be any dramatic radiation of a new species
00:53:14 ►
because everything has been worked out
00:53:16 ►
and the energy flows are so tight,
00:53:18 ►
nothing can gain a leg up on that situation.
00:53:22 ►
But if you clear 1 thousand acres of forest and reduce it to
00:53:27 ►
rubble, essentially open land, then what are called invader species come in there and they
00:53:36 ►
very quickly gain dominance where in the jungle at steady state you never see those plants.
00:53:42 ►
You never see weedy, annual, heavily seeding plants in the jungle.
00:53:48 ►
The jungle strategy is for enormous plants
00:53:51 ►
which produce small numbers of seeds.
00:53:54 ►
And this is, again, an analogy to the modern situation
00:53:58 ►
that modernity is a desert and we are jungle monkeys and so new evolutionary selective pressures are
00:54:10 ►
coming to bear upon the human situation new ideas are coming to the fore psilocybin is a selective
00:54:18 ►
filter for this the wish to go to space is a selective filter for this just the wish to know your own mind
00:54:27 ►
is a selective filter for this
00:54:29 ►
but this is part of the picture
00:54:35 ►
this is what’s happening
00:54:36 ►
it’s inevitable
00:54:37 ►
it’s a very good thing I think
00:54:39 ►
if you have faith that man is good
00:54:42 ►
and I follow the
00:54:46 ►
Renaissance Platonists
00:54:47 ►
on that. I think man must
00:54:50 ►
be the measure of all things.
00:54:52 ►
What else could possibly
00:54:53 ►
serve with certainty?
00:54:58 ►
So that’s all I would
00:55:00 ►
say about that.
00:55:01 ►
You stated earlier that
00:55:03 ►
psilocybin is coming from
00:55:05 ►
outer space, and that there’s a
00:55:07 ►
possibility that this mushroom is…
00:55:09 ►
There’s a possibility of that. Fred
00:55:11 ►
Hoyle and an associate
00:55:13 ►
of his have
00:55:14 ►
come to my aid
00:55:17 ►
on this, saying
00:55:19 ►
that spore-bearing life forms,
00:55:22 ►
because spores have the capacity
00:55:23 ►
to survive in the conditions of outer space,
00:55:28 ►
that spore-bearing life forms
00:55:30 ►
may, over truly large scales of time,
00:55:34 ►
percolate out through the galaxy
00:55:36 ►
and serve as a basis for the evolution of life
00:55:40 ►
on various planets,
00:55:40 ►
or insert themselves into already existing planetary ecologies
00:55:45 ►
and insert themselves there.
00:55:49 ►
I don’t, on these matters of specific fact,
00:55:52 ►
like is the mushroom an extraterrestrial
00:55:54 ►
and that sort of thing,
00:55:56 ►
I haven’t the faintest idea.
00:55:59 ►
The mushroom itself is such a mercurial,
00:56:02 ►
elusive, Zen sort of personality
00:56:07 ►
that I never believe a word it says.
00:56:10 ►
I simply entertain its notions and try and sort through them.
00:56:15 ►
And I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.
00:56:19 ►
To know that the option of believing that is there on hard evidence
00:56:24 ►
is very exhilarating.
00:56:26 ►
As to what is really going on, the mushroom assures me that I haven’t got even the faintest
00:56:33 ►
grip on what is really going on.
00:56:37 ►
But something is going on.
00:56:39 ►
Can I ask another question?
00:56:44 ►
This is the last one. Sure. Can I ask another question? Sure
00:56:46 ►
What do you think is evil?
00:56:49 ►
Can these mushrooms be misused?
00:56:52 ►
Well, I think anything can be misused
00:56:55 ►
Most evil is
00:57:00 ►
trivial
00:57:03 ►
and if I could
00:57:06 ►
speak off the top of my head
00:57:08 ►
the only evil
00:57:09 ►
that associates itself with mushrooms
00:57:12 ►
is
00:57:13 ►
taking it but taking too little
00:57:19 ►
in other words
00:57:24 ►
did you define evil? in other words evil evil is uh well there’s a word i want to it isn’t twiddle but it’s something like that
00:57:38 ►
evil is when you play at things not in play in the Hindu cosmic sense, but where you fiddle with
00:57:47 ►
things, you muck with things because you don’t want to get your feet wet. You want to be
00:57:53 ►
able to say you’ve done these things, but you never want to really place your validity
00:57:58 ►
on the line. And I am amazed at the number of people who claim familiarity with psychedelic drugs
00:58:06 ►
who, when you actually question them closely,
00:58:10 ►
it’s very clear that they had a sub-threshold dose
00:58:14 ►
even if they’ve taken it 50 or 100 times.
00:58:17 ►
They have managed through low doses and strong defenses
00:58:23 ►
to always keep the demon at bay.
00:58:27 ►
That’s a demon with a D-A-I,
00:58:30 ►
to keep the demon at bay,
00:58:32 ►
and they don’t know what they’re talking about.
00:58:35 ►
You must take a sufficiently large dose
00:58:38 ►
so that you enter into these places.
00:58:41 ►
Not to knock him personally,
00:58:44 ►
because he’s a very nice man, but as an example,
00:58:48 ►
Roland Fisher, whose work you may know, I talked to him, and he has given psilocybin,
00:58:53 ►
he says, to about 15,000 people at NIMH, and now he’s retired to Mallorca.
00:59:02 ►
I met him in Cush, recently.
00:59:04 ►
Oh, you did?
00:59:05 ►
Yeah.
00:59:06 ►
And I said to him,
00:59:07 ►
I said,
00:59:07 ►
Roland, what do you make of it?
00:59:09 ►
I mean, what do you make of it?
00:59:11 ►
And he said,
00:59:11 ►
well, make of what?
00:59:12 ►
And I said,
00:59:13 ►
well, what do you make
00:59:14 ►
just specifically
00:59:15 ►
of the hallucinations?
00:59:16 ►
You say you gave it
00:59:17 ►
to all these people,
00:59:18 ►
you took it six times.
00:59:21 ►
What happened
00:59:21 ►
when you closed your eyes
00:59:23 ►
and looked at the hallucinations?
00:59:32 ►
He said, I never closed my eyes. I was highly agitated throughout. And I just realized these things, which seem to me as natural as breathing, just slide right past people. I mean, of course
00:59:41 ►
you do not eat for a few hours before you do it. Of course you lie down in darkness and compose your mind
00:59:48 ►
and look at the darkness behind your eyelids.
00:59:51 ►
And of course you invoke it through the wish to have it come to you.
00:59:55 ►
These are things as simple as they can be.
00:59:58 ►
Yet here was a man with a lifelong professional involvement
01:00:01 ►
and published dozens of papers,
01:00:04 ►
has made contributions in
01:00:06 ►
the mapping of consciousness, but he could never just stop fidgeting long enough to see
01:00:13 ►
it. So my idea of that as evil, evil is anything which trivializes a mystery would be evil. And since this is a mystery,
01:00:30 ►
any dismissing of it or constantly taking it at low doses for hedonic purposes,
01:00:34 ►
I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that,
01:00:36 ►
but that’s not the whole story,
01:00:37 ►
and nobody should think that that gives you a pedestal
01:00:41 ►
from which to speak about it.
01:00:44 ►
You really have to do these heroic amounts
01:00:47 ►
and integrate them.
01:00:52 ►
This is something I haven’t even talked about in this interview,
01:00:56 ►
but these things are very state-bounded,
01:00:59 ►
a term which Roland Fisher, in fact, coined.
01:01:01 ►
That simply means that they’re very hard to retain and
01:01:05 ►
remember what exactly happened at the peak of the flash and you come down you
01:01:09 ►
say well it was very strange there was information there were entities but I
01:01:13 ►
just can’t get back to it the way to overcome that is to be as psychedelic in
01:01:21 ►
your down life as possible and by psychedelic i mean ideas cognitive activities
01:01:28 ►
you should dance you should read you should think you should paint you should sculpt you should
01:01:36 ►
converse you should constantly involve yourself in cognitive activities because taking these drugs is one of the major cognitive activities.
01:01:46 ►
And then, if you have a grip on human history,
01:01:51 ►
where the human enterprise has been,
01:01:54 ►
where it’s going,
01:01:55 ►
if you have been many places,
01:01:58 ►
it’s easier to map.
01:02:01 ►
I’m reminded of there’s an alchemical aphorism,
01:02:04 ►
I think it’s attributed to Athanasius Kirchner,
01:02:07 ►
where he says,
01:02:09 ►
the oldest books,
01:02:13 ►
the farthest countries,
01:02:16 ►
the deepest forests,
01:02:18 ►
the highest mountains,
01:02:20 ►
this is where you must seek the stone.
01:02:23 ►
And what he means is you must simply acquire experience
01:02:27 ►
because it is only in the acquisition of acquired experiences
01:02:31 ►
that you have a reservoir to draw on
01:02:35 ►
when you seek to make metaphors and analogies
01:02:38 ►
about the alien thing.
01:02:41 ►
When you invoke the god,
01:02:43 ►
then you can map back onto it and say well
01:02:46 ►
it’s like this it’s like that knowing that it is not that or this but the fund of analogies
01:02:55 ►
is there to give you a grip on it so there’s an obligation to experience deeply and richly and thoroughly, and intellectually, I might add.
01:03:06 ►
And then you can map back onto it.
01:03:10 ►
But it’s a dialogue between you and it,
01:03:13 ►
where you are discovering new things about yourself and it,
01:03:17 ►
and trying to resolve the question,
01:03:19 ►
are we the same thing?
01:03:21 ►
And I haven’t resolved the question.
01:03:24 ►
My suspicions flow one way and then another way
01:03:27 ►
but i think it is without a doubt a living mystery existing in the presence available to anyone
01:03:36 ►
sincere enough to seek it and for me that was a life-transforming discovery and revelation
01:03:45 ►
because I didn’t believe there were any mysteries.
01:03:47 ►
I believe there may have been once,
01:03:49 ►
but to discover one right in our midst,
01:03:53 ►
and it cannot be reduced,
01:03:54 ►
it cannot be pulled apart into its constituent functions.
01:04:02 ►
It is truly a unitary mystery,
01:04:04 ►
and it’s accessible in our lives right now
01:04:07 ►
without kneeling at anybody’s feet,
01:04:10 ►
without following any regimen of denial
01:04:16 ►
or the assimilation of any belief system.
01:04:23 ►
And this is very big news, I think.
01:04:26 ►
The mystery has always been there, I’m sure.
01:04:29 ►
But our society is so bizarre and has led us so far astray
01:04:33 ►
that we have to rediscover it.
01:04:37 ►
And this process is happening.
01:04:38 ►
This is what the 20th century is all about.
01:04:41 ►
And we are still tiptoeing at the edge of it,
01:04:43 ►
even though great men great
01:04:46 ►
women great mappers of consciousness have come and gone we are still at the very infancy of this
01:04:54 ►
thing and it calls out to us it beckons it says do more see more know more and be more a part of it.
01:05:07 ►
Well, during the talk, I thought about one experience
01:05:10 ►
Vida and I had in India when we were in the phantom caves.
01:05:14 ►
We were looking at the lingam,
01:05:16 ►
and when you look out of the caves,
01:05:18 ►
you could see across the bay, you could see an atomic plant.
01:05:21 ►
And these two things just looked really identical.
01:05:21 ►
an atomic plant and these two things just look really identical
01:05:24 ►
well
01:05:26 ►
the mushroom
01:05:27 ►
could any symbol be more
01:05:30 ►
appropriate of the ambiguity
01:05:32 ►
of human transformation
01:05:33 ►
what mushroom is it that grows
01:05:36 ►
at the end of history
01:05:38 ►
is it Stropharia Cubensis
01:05:40 ►
or is it the creation of Edward Teller
01:05:42 ►
this is an unresolved
01:05:44 ►
problem or is it the creation of Edward Teller? This is an unresolved problem.
01:05:54 ►
What a group!
01:06:00 ►
Is that good?
01:06:02 ►
Oh, that’s perfect.
01:06:03 ►
Good. Is that good? Oh, it’s perfect.
01:06:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:06:17 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:06:24 ►
Now, in case you haven’t had a chance to visit our Notes from the Salon blog, you may want to surf over there and begin sorting through all of the comments to Program 316,
01:06:30 ►
which was actually the prelude to me podcasting this complete Paul Herbert collection of the words of Terrence McKenna.
01:06:38 ►
And then, considering that podcast and the comments resulting from it,
01:06:44 ►
I’m hoping to continue our
01:06:46 ►
group’s discussion of topics from today’s
01:06:48 ►
podcast. It seems to me that
01:06:50 ►
there’s a lot to discuss.
01:06:52 ►
For example, about 50
01:06:54 ►
minutes or so into this conversation,
01:06:56 ►
Terrence made the following statement,
01:06:58 ►
and I quote,
01:06:59 ►
On these matters of specific fact,
01:07:02 ►
like, is the mushroom an
01:07:04 ►
extraterrestrial and that sort of thing, I haven’t the faintest idea. Now, just that statement alone makes me want to continue listening to these them, and I found that to be the most enriching approach to it.
01:07:30 ►
Now, just that statement alone makes me want to continue listening to these talks in the order they were given in order to see if we can figure out what kind of a change may have
01:07:35 ►
gone through his mind from saying that he never believed a word the mushroom said to
01:07:40 ►
letting a later experience with it turn into a confrontation that may have lasted for most of the rest of his life.
01:07:49 ►
And if that statement alone isn’t enough to make you want to add your own thoughts about this,
01:07:54 ►
what do you think about Terrence’s comment or his statement about 36 minutes into this interview
01:07:59 ►
when he said, in relation to the dangers involved in taking psychedelics that, and I quote,
01:08:05 ►
The drug may not be toxic, but you may be self-toxic, and you may discover this in the drug experience.
01:08:14 ►
Close quote.
01:08:16 ►
Well, I think that I’ll let you and the other salonners add your own comments about that quote in the comments on the program notes for this podcast, but it certainly, to me at least, speaks volumes. And do you remember early on in the
01:08:32 ►
interview when Terrence was talking about the importance of finding a way for imagination to
01:08:38 ►
flourish? Again, the exact quote is, the immediate future of man lies in the imagination and in seeking the dimension
01:08:46 ►
where the imagination can be expressed. The present cultural crisis on the surface of
01:08:52 ►
the planet is caused by the fact that this is not a fitting theater for the exercise
01:08:56 ►
of imagination. It wrecks the planet. The planet has its own ecosystemic dynamics, which are not the dynamics of imagination.
01:09:07 ►
Is it just me, or are you thinking what I’m thinking?
01:09:11 ►
And that is the fact that with the amazing expansion of games and other tools on the net,
01:09:17 ►
that here is exactly the place that Terrence was maybe seeking for an outlet to test and stretch the imagination.
01:09:24 ►
Terrence was maybe seeking for an outlet to test and stretch the imagination.
01:09:29 ►
You know, already there are quite a large number of online communities of gamers who are not just all playing shoot-em-up games,
01:09:32 ►
but there are also games that are designed to test various philosophies of existence, for example,
01:09:39 ►
and at a high speed in cyberspace before they get let loose on the ground to,
01:09:44 ►
as Terrence says, wreck the planet.
01:09:47 ►
But maybe I’m reading more into all this than is actually there.
01:09:52 ►
Now, this isn’t a criticism because maybe I’m just really dense,
01:09:56 ►
but can you tell me in easily understandable language what Terence is talking about when he said, and I quote,
01:10:05 ►
psilocybin, tryptamine, is in my opinion the means to eliminating the future by becoming
01:10:12 ►
cognizant of the architecture of eternity, which is modulating time and causing history,
01:10:19 ►
essentially, end quote. Well, the first thought that came to me when I heard him say that,
01:10:26 ►
and that was somewhere in the first ten minutes or so of this interview,
01:10:29 ►
well, when he said that, the first thing that popped into my mind was that quote from Star Trek,
01:10:35 ►
where Spock says to Kirk,
01:10:37 ►
That sounds good, Captain, but it’s not logical.
01:10:41 ►
But in this case, I never even got to the logic part,
01:10:45 ►
simply because I just don’t know what it means
01:10:48 ►
if the architecture of eternity is modulating time to cause history.
01:10:54 ►
I just don’t know what that means.
01:10:57 ►
Of course, that is exactly why I so love listening to Terrence
01:11:01 ►
when he gets on one of his poetic roles.
01:11:04 ►
And I have no doubt that if the interviewer had pressed him to explain that statement more clearly,
01:11:10 ►
that Terrence no doubt would have.
01:11:12 ►
So I’m not saying that he wasn’t talking about something that he couldn’t see very clearly.
01:11:16 ►
It’s just that my internal dictionary actually hasn’t yet been fully synchronized with whatever one Terrence was using.
01:11:24 ►
But isn’t that why we listen to songs whose words remain somewhat obscure?
01:11:30 ►
I’ve never actually seen A Night in White Satin, but I really like that song.
01:11:35 ►
And for me at least, that’s also how it goes sometimes with the bard Terrence McKenna.
01:11:42 ►
While I don’t always agree with some of his lyrics
01:11:45 ►
and I can’t understand some of the others,
01:11:48 ►
well, there were some songs that he sang
01:11:50 ►
that reached straight into my heart,
01:11:52 ►
and I do dearly love the singer.
01:11:55 ►
So I listened to them all
01:11:57 ►
and somehow managed to learn a little more
01:11:59 ►
about my own self each time.
01:12:01 ►
As I’ve said before, what I like best about Terrence
01:12:04 ►
is the fact that
01:12:05 ►
he really got me to thinking. Not necessarily thinking about anything in particular, but
01:12:10 ►
that he just got me to spend some time each day to simply sit down and think. And the
01:12:17 ►
thing that I’m still thinking about from the last podcast, the one just before this one,
01:12:21 ►
was when he said, the body is the placenta of the soul.
01:12:27 ►
Now, maybe that doesn’t resonate with you.
01:12:31 ►
In fact, several people have told me that it had little or no meaning for him.
01:12:37 ►
However, for me, that’s something I want to spend a little quiet time thinking about.
01:12:42 ►
And in closing, I’ve got to add a final comment about his rap where he spoke about a latent gene that may be lying in wait,
01:12:46 ►
somewhere at the bottom of the gene pool, I guess,
01:12:49 ►
but waiting for some advantageous circumstance to arise in which to give that gene the chance to add great value to the rest of the gene pool.
01:12:58 ►
Of course, he said it much more eloquently than that,
01:13:01 ►
but when he was saying that, my guess is that you were at that
01:13:05 ►
moment joining me in thinking that, yeah, and right now that special gene is called the psychedelic
01:13:12 ►
gene, and I’ve got it. Anyway, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:13:22 ►
Be well, my cosmic genie friends.