323 - Searching for a New Paradise Myth

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Lorenzo and Friends

This podcast features the final community discussions at the June 2012 Esalen workshop led by Lorenzo and Bruce Damer. Among the topics discussed were:
-Creating a new myth for our community
-The genesis of the Occupy Movement
-Are psychedelic “mutants” among us?
-Cultural Creatives
-Freeing our food supply from money
-Timebanks
-What the mushroom has to say about the future
-The Importance of myth
-Developing a “Medicine Circle” app
-Building new cultures through shared global experiences
-The ‘superfood’ revolution and our connection to the Earth
-Indra’s Net
-The Temple at the Burning Man Festival

FindTheOthers.net

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 why is today’s podcast a bit late, you ask? Well, here in Southern California, we finally got

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a little of that hot summer weather that most of the country has been suffering through for months

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now. Of course, it was only about 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside and compared to what it’s like

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in places like, say, Granada, Spain right now,

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well, we really don’t have it very bad. But with that temperature outside, my little office gets

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really hot once I turn my computer on. So instead of podcasting, well, I’ve just been sitting in

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front of a fan and reading all day, so there’s really no reason to feel sorry for me. Anyway, getting to today’s program, I’m going to feature the Sunday morning session at the Esalen workshop that Bruce Dahmer and I led last June.

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And to tell the truth, there’s one segment that I almost didn’t include in today’s podcast.

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It’s the part from the workshop where I came up with a truly cockamamie idea for a new creation myth.

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Actually, I dealt fast and loose with the facts, and overall it was something that maybe

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a 12-year-old might come up with.

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Anyway, I’ve included it just for the heck of it here to prove that although my body

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may be 70 years old, I’m still very much a kid at heart.

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Although my body may be 70 years old, I’m still very much a kid at heart.

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But to be honest, after listening to myself put out that goofy story, I’m kind of wondering about my own sanity.

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However, I’ll let you be the judge of that in just a few minutes.

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So what we’re going to hear in just a minute begins with my closing remarks from the Saturday afternoon session, where I comment on what one of our participants said,

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had just recently said about finding an alternative currency.

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And you can actually hear his comment at the close of podcast number 321, which was my podcast before the last.

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Then, after about 20 minutes, the afternoon session ends and the recording picks up with the Sunday morning session.

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minutes the afternoon session ends and the recording picks up with the Sunday morning session.

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So I hope you’ve got all that straight now because there may be a pop quiz later.

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Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, all of Bruce Dahmer’s segments from that workshop are being combined into a single podcast and it’ll be the next one after this, which I hope to get out by

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the time our troops are landing on the playa for Burning Man next week.

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Also, about 48 minutes from now, you’ll begin hearing some comments from Earth Girl,

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who begins by saying that she loves the topic of paradise.

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And you may want to mark that spot where she begins,

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because I’m pretty sure that you’ll want to hear what she has to say more than once.

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she begins because I’m pretty sure that you’ll want to hear what she has to say more than once.

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These are very wise words from one of our elders, whose physical age, by the way, isn’t even half of mine. But nonetheless, this is one of our very enlightened elders speaking here. So let’s get on

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with the show. Let me put something out here now

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that I want to talk about tomorrow.

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I don’t want to talk about it.

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I’d like to hear your opinions

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because I came here to get something myself.

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And I mentioned this last night

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that we, and when I say we,

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the psychedelic community,

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which is not just people who have used psychedelics,

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but people who are interested in the type of thinking that comes from their use,

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that we are sort of a tribe.

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We like to think of ourselves as a tribe.

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But a group of people without a myth is a group of people with an ideology, but it’s not a

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people.

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You know, the Jewish people have done an incredible job of staying together, and they think of

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themselves as a people.

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I’m Irish, and I love being Irish, but I don’t think of myself as part of a people.

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But the psychedelic community, I think, is best positioned of

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anybody in the world to live under what essentially is a fascist police state that we’re in and

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the rest of the world is in because we’ve been living under the law forever. We know

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how to do these things and move around and communicate and when not to talk and et cetera.

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So I think that we’ve got a community, if we can kind of bond and stay together as a community

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and then spread this out, but I think we need some myths that we create, some new stories.

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You know, the old myth that we’ve been living with for a couple thousand years now,

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it just doesn’t wash.

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You know, the old man with the long white beard sitting on a throne

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creating a world in seven days, you know, it’s, you know, who’s buying that anymore? But the whole

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human race doesn’t have any new myths based on new science. And so if you look at myths, there’s

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really three different phases of myth that Joseph Campbell and people like that talk about.

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There’s the creation myth, the paradise myth, and the myth of the fall.

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Well, I don’t think we need a new myth of the fall because we’ve been falling for a long time because after the fall comes the hero’s journey back to the paradise.

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And so our position, I think, is that we are in a position to start the hero’s journey,

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or actually we’ve all been on it, but to help other people get on the hero’s journey.

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But what is the paradise myth we’re going back to?

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Now, I’ve come up with a real cockamamie creation myth that I’ll just start tomorrow morning in two or three minutes,

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and for a scientist like Bruce, it’ll be like fingernails on the blackboard.

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and for a scientist like Bruce, it would be like fingernails on the blackboard.

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But it’s something based on a few little tidbits of fact,

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and I’m not going to let the fact get in the way of this good story I put together.

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But I don’t think a creation myth is that important to us as far as where are we going?

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You know, where are our cave paintings? What are we going to leave behind for future generations to see that if a thousand years or two thousand years from now

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there’s still people sitting around in Esalen having these talks, they’re going to say, you know,

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how did this all get, how did we pull out of this dive that we were in at 2012, because there’s a lot of distressing things

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happening in the world.

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So what I would hope tonight in the baths and conversations and all, either on your

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own or in a couple of groups, come up with a couple of new paradise myths.

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What are some, what’s a paradise that we can head to that doesn’t require us to drop

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out of society and move to a commune or something?

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How can we have a golden city on the hill that we’re heading to without relocating or quitting

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our jobs or whatever? You know, what is our dream? Where are we going? And this is a very selfish

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thing I’m asking because my next novel in the series I’m writing, I’m stuck right now because I can’t come up with great ones myself.

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Devious plans to get everyone else to come up with them.

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So I’m hoping that I’ll hear some tomorrow

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that will help me out of this little block I’m in.

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And I think this is a perfect group to come up with a new paradise myth.

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So that’s something I’d like to just set the stage for tomorrow morning.

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So does anybody have any direction they’d like to go, or do for tomorrow morning. So does somebody, anybody have any direction

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they’d like to go or do you want me to

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push it in another direction?

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Well, I’ll push it in a

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direction that I’m getting a lot of flack for

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and I’ve gotten a lot of nasty emails

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because of my

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support for and talking

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about the Occupy movement.

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And that word Occupy

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and Occupy Wall Street is convenient,

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it’s handy to say that word,

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but the genesis, the roots of that,

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go back a lot farther than a bunch of kids

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camping in Zuccotti Park in New York City.

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Some would say the indignados in Spain,

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which they were putting a half a million people in demonstrations

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before Zuccotti Park got occupied,

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and in Italy, the Arab Spring.

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Some would say the battle for Seattle at WTO in 1999 was a big one.

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But where I see the really first big change in human consciousness,

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saying that to the status quo and the powers that be,

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saying enough, we’ve just had enough,

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was the statement from the Lacandon Jungle in January 1st, 1994,

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in the Chiapas, when the people,

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the people that lived in the mountains there,

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said enough with NAFTA.

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Now, I only have learned this recently, but before NAFTA, in the Mexican Constitution,

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there was a provision for community lands, and approximately half the land in Mexico was community held.

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And because of NAFTA, they got rid of that.

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And so the community lands went to the oligarchs. And that’s what started the whole movement there. To me, one of the interesting connections is that all took place within a few

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kilometers of where the Entheobotany seminars were held in Palenque. And it’s the consciousness that

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Terence and a lot of people came out of there. So there is some magic in that Lacandon jungle.

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And I think that if you look at what the Zapatistas started,

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that the Occupy movement is carrying on.

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And I say Occupy movement because it’s a good handle.

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And it’s so much bigger than Occupy Wall Street.

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Look at what’s going on in Quebec right now, the student strike that is huge.

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And the student strike started out as just, you know, they got up to like 300,000 students,

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so they closed the school and locked them out.

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And it was all dying away and fading until the powers that be said, you know, we can’t have this.

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And so they came in with, I think it’s called Law 78,

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where you can’t have assemblies of more than 50 people.

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You have to file permits for parades.

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And that got the entire citizenry essentially of Canada now.

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Every night there are thousands and thousands of people on the streets

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in many cities banging their pots and walking around until midnight.

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This has been going on for months now.

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So there’s a huge, and that’s a change in consciousness,

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to get people out of their houses to do that.

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So some of the things that, going way back to the Zapatista beginning,

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they were opposed to hierarchical organizations.

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These were people who have been living in communal settings for millennia, really.

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They’re opposed to hierarchical organizations.

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They prefer stateless voluntary associations rather than being forced into cities, etc.

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They oppose aggression and support nonviolence.

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They oppose the privilege and the authority of the state.

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And they support the free and spontaneous organization of labor.

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Those are essentially their principles.

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And there’s a philosophy that all of those principles are embedded in that comes from what is considered by most people a dirty word.

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And the philosophy is anarchism.

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is considered by most people a dirty word.

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And the philosophy is anarchism.

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And anarchy was the original concept before democracy in Greece. That in anarchy, not capital A anarchy, burn down the village, etc.,

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but the little a anarchists, the philosophers, their thought was consensus.

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Not mob rule by the majority

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in the democracy

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which you know

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if we call this country a democracy

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it’s a democracy of the people who have the most money

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to buy the votes because

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kids have been dumbed down

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there’s a viral video on YouTube

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that it’s funny

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and it’s also sad

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where they’re asking these high school seniors questions

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like, what war did the U.S. fight to win its independence? The Korean War, the Civil War,

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the Revolutionary War? And not one of them said the Revolutionary War. And some of them said,

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no, it was World War II. Who is the know, who is the vice president of the United States?

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Not one knew.

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Name one Democrat running for president.

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Not one knew.

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This is how our students have been so dumbed down.

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Now, granted, they probably know a lot of math and science and geeky stuff like that,

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and maybe even literature, but they don’t know about society.

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And so they’re going to be very susceptible to massive campaigns of voters, etc.

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And that’s why I don’t really see any more, a lot of hope for political activity.

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I think the hope is that we need to start taking psychedelic consciousness,

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our type of thinking, outside the box to the rest of the world.

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In fact, I think I have this quote of Terence’s written down that I just love.

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It gave me a lot of hope.

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He said that there is always a low level of mutants in a population,

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and when the selective parameters change suddenly,

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these individuals have a selective advantage.

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It’s that the new types were always there but not with any advantage.

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It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage of them.

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I think that the psychedelic experience is like that at the present level.

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And so I think that without us getting involved in political actions,

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we don’t have to go to marches, demonstrations, we don’t have to camp in the park,

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but just by talking to not even our children, but to our peers, our friends, our relatives, our neighbors,

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at Thanksgiving dinner, since we’re already the freaks at the table,

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why not just speak up for change instead of laying low,

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and voice our opinions and get some discussion going.

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And I think the cultural creatives, that book that Ray and Anderson wrote probably a decade or more ago now,

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they did a lot of research over 20 or 30 years about what they called cultural creatives,

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the people who are really changing

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the culture. And when they started their research, I think it was in the late 50s or early 60s,

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it was only like 1 or 2 percent of the population that passed this list of questions. And by

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the time they finished it, maybe 10, 15 years ago, 25 percent of the people fit in that category,

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and hardly any of them thought that they were, they all thought they were alone.

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They thought they were the only ones thinking that way.

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They didn’t connect, which isn’t that very similar to the psychedelic community.

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You know, that, you know, we think that the person living two doors down from us

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would freak out if they knew that we’d taken acid or smoked pot.

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And they’re probably doing the same thing in their house.

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And so it’s time to stand up and be counted in a very small way.

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We don’t have to go out and get newspaper press conferences and stuff.

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But I think that it’s time that we, as a community, should think about coming together a little bit more because it’s global.

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It’s not just

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a few people in California. As I told you earlier, there’s, you know, people from over 100 countries

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are downloading these podcasts. And in China, in the Middle East, in South Africa, in many African

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countries, in all of Europe and Scandinavia and Russia, former Soviet Union, everywhere

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I’m getting downloads from things.

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And this has been going on for years.

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So there is a huge group of people that think just like we do.

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And now, how can we come together?

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And so that’s why I’d like to get some kind of a myth that we can hang, and not just one,

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but maybe four or five or more.

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And then I don’t know how this would happen or how we could do it,

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but I’d be more than happy to get involved if somebody wanted to set up

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keeping this group together in ways online,

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and we could Skype together and have some more of these conferences,

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have some conversations.

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We’ve got the tech.

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We ought to use it. And I think that if we can kind of maybe stay together, you know, just getting

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together online once a month, once a quarter, something like that, so we don’t lose the energy

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that we build by being here in person. Because as important as the tech is, I don’t think there’s

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anything more important than physically getting together like we’re doing right now.

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And so we’ve built a little community here.

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I’d love to see it being able to seed many more communities and bring this together.

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And I haven’t asked Bruce before, but I think he would be willing to Skype into some of these things too.

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So maybe tomorrow we can kick around some of these types of ideas too.

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So that’s really all I

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have to say about it. And now I’d hope that you would either think about it, discuss it, or whatever.

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Yeah. By the way, we have a mailing list called Levity, and it’s at Google Groups. But if you just

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reply to my email to you, just say, add me to Levity, and I’ll put you on it.

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And there’s about 35 people on it.

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There’s another list called Terrence McKenna, and it’s at Google Groups.

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And it’s for people who are really doing serious work with Terrence’s legacy.

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And Dennis is there.

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John, I think you’re on that list.

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And so it’s projects around the McKenna legacy.

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But Levity is about this kind of

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discussion and you know just about the human future and about history and and that kind of

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thing so you can join it there there’s two things i’ve been thinking about along these lines one

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is as you touched on right now none of us could stay alive without having some money to get food.

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And it seems like one of the first things to do is to get a food supply that is independent of dollars.

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And Esalen growing their own food, classes in gardening and growing your own food, without getting involved in

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dollars.

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Because the way, and I don’t think you could vote for this guy or that guy, and I don’t

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see how we can, as just individual people, bring down the Fed Reserve and stuff like

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that.

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But the way to bring down the one-tenth of one percenters is to make their

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money worthless to us. So if we didn’t need money for food, that’s step one. And one of the things

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that started in England in the 90s and is growing over here now, they are called time banks. And

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that’s where, and the IRS has approved these as non-taxable transactions.

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Everybody’s hour, every human hour is worth exactly the same.

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If you’re a neurosurgeon or a gardener or a cab driver, your time is worth the same.

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And these have become very successful in a lot of places.

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There’s two of them now down in North County in San Diego. And people are putting their

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time in so that I could teach somebody how to do blogging or podcasting and give me some hours.

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And if I could trade those for somebody who’s gardening, I could trade those for somebody who

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I could give some to our daughter who could use them for a babysitter.

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In Madison, Wisconsin, people have donated cars and fuel, just donated it to them.

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And so other people…

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How do you translate commodity to the top?

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Well, that’s what they’re in the…

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This is a ground-up evolutionary organic thing.

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So there’s nobody has said, here’s how it works.

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You know, it’s all jiggling, here’s how it works. You know, there,

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it’s all jiggling and trying to get it to go. But the first step is to get rid of money. So if,

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if none of us thought money, dollars were worth anything, what if the whole country all of a

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sudden said, well, you billionaires, enjoy your digits in your bank account, but we don’t want any of your money.

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We can live without it.

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And so changing the money, and there’s no, again, Occupy doesn’t have a leader.

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Occupy is a thousand different ideas.

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It’s a change in consciousness more than a movement.

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It’s a movement of consciousness.

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And so I think those are the kind of things

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that would be worthwhile to get together

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and talk about, where you

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can get people from a dozen

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or two dozen time banks to come here

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and say, here’s what we’ve learned, here’s what worked,

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here’s what didn’t work, and

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get gardeners to come and say, here’s

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a way you can build a garden in your apartment,

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a hanging garden

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outside the wall.

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There’s a lot of things that I think we, the people,

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us little people can do on our own to start becoming less dependent on the Federal Reserve and stuff like that

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rather than trying to just politicize and knock it out.

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I was just going to make the obvious note

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that I think Mao Tse-tung came up with that idea.

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But the thing is,

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if the mushroom has something to say to us about the future,

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now you’re going to get my opinion.

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It has to do, and this to me is one of the prime lessons

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that I learned in wrestling around with Terence McKenna’s ideas.

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And not only saying,

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oh, that’s kind of wild and wacky and interesting,

00:22:28 ►

but actually tracing some of these down.

00:22:31 ►

Okay, let’s take the stone date theory

00:22:33 ►

and what’s the anthropology and archaeology

00:22:37 ►

and rock art information and all that.

00:22:40 ►

And there’s a lot of, you can actually look at some of these things.

00:22:43 ►

But what I learned from him and what I think is the way out at this particular juncture, because things are

00:22:52 ►

moving so fast, is the ability to open the imagination and think outrageous ideas and then

00:23:02 ►

use some very fine discrimination as to which ones should be acted on and which ones should not.

00:23:09 ►

And develop the ability to do that.

00:23:11 ►

But if there’s anything that Terrence McKenna teaches is that, hey, think outrageous ideas

00:23:18 ►

because you’ll still never get how crazy it is when you’re out there in the hinterlands.

00:23:27 ►

I agree.

00:23:28 ►

I agree, and I think maybe do we all agree with that?

00:23:31 ►

That’s a beautiful statement to end this full day.

00:23:35 ►

The heavy lifting day has been concluded.

00:23:39 ►

It’s not just think outside the box, think there is no box.

00:23:43 ►

Right.

00:23:50 ►

What I want to do is to kind of kick off.

00:23:55 ►

I hope last night some of you have thought of an idea of a new paradise myth. And the reason I’m into myths is that, you know, what do we have to get us out of this funk we’re in?

00:24:03 ►

You know, I used to be really politically active,

00:24:07 ►

and I’ve given speeches from farmhouse porches in Illinois farmland

00:24:12 ►

to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and demonstrated at the White House,

00:24:16 ►

and nothing did any good.

00:24:19 ►

It’s just too big a monster.

00:24:21 ►

It’s like trying to turn an aircraft carrier with a canoe. You know, it’s just,

00:24:26 ►

we’re too small to do that. So I think we have to come up with new ways to create a new civilization

00:24:33 ►

within the shell of the old. Because I don’t think it’s about changing a system. I think it’s about

00:24:39 ►

changing a culture. And we change a culture one mind at a time, starting with our own minds.

00:24:47 ►

What kind of a culture do we want to create?

00:24:51 ►

And I call us the tribe, the psychedelic community,

00:24:56 ►

and it’s kind of not a great idea to call it a psychedelic community because most of the people who we really want to reach out to

00:24:59 ►

aren’t really interested in using psychedelics even.

00:25:04 ►

However, I’ve been amazed at how many people come to the psychedelic salon

00:25:08 ►

and say, you know, I’ve got some friends that have used them.

00:25:11 ►

I’m not interested in doing it, but boy, these talks are interesting.

00:25:14 ►

And that’s what psychedelic thinking is.

00:25:17 ►

It’s not thinking about drugs.

00:25:19 ►

It’s thinking about manifesting a new mindset to the world.

00:25:23 ►

So I’m a big fan of Joseph Campbell,

00:25:26 ►

and he’s got some great programs that are streaming on Netflix,

00:25:33 ►

the Mythos 1 and Mythos 2 series.

00:25:36 ►

And the first series of Mythos is a five-program series,

00:25:39 ►

and the first four programs, he talks about the rise of humanity for 200,000 years,

00:25:47 ►

he’s going back, and he goes through all the myths that have evolved

00:25:51 ►

from the ancient prehistoric times.

00:25:54 ►

And he ends that series saying the pinnacle of human consciousness

00:25:59 ►

during that 200,000-year period of time were the rites of Eleusis,

00:26:04 ►

which Hoffman and Ruck have written the rites of Eleusis,

00:26:10 ►

which Hoffman and Ruck have written, The Road to Eleusis, which is a brilliant book,

00:26:16 ►

that pretty much convinced me that we know that there is some sort of mind-altering substance they were using. And so it definitely was a psychedelic of some sort.

00:26:20 ►

And even Joseph Campbell admits that that was sort of the pinnacle.

00:26:24 ►

And even Joseph Campbell admits that that was sort of the pinnacle.

00:26:32 ►

And so I’ve studied a lot of these myths, and they have a creation myth, a paradise myth, the fall myth, and then the hero’s journey return.

00:26:43 ►

And it doesn’t matter what culture you study, from the Aborigines in Australia to Africa to even Eskimo myths have the same structure to them.

00:26:47 ►

And to me, what we are lacking now is a new paradise myth.

00:26:53 ►

Paradise, I think we’ve discovered, isn’t buying the latest version of the iPad and isn’t working in a cubicle.

00:26:57 ►

Well, maybe for some people.

00:26:59 ►

I found it not very paradisical myself.

00:27:03 ►

The cubicle hell. But, and you know, right now we have so many

00:27:09 ►

young people that have spent a lot of work going through college and getting a good education,

00:27:16 ►

but they’re so far in debt and their only jobs available are flipping burgers. And so,

00:27:21 ►

and in Spain, 50% of the young people are unemployed.

00:27:25 ►

50% of the people from 25 and under are unemployed.

00:27:29 ►

And that’s a pretty big number.

00:27:33 ►

And in this country, I think it’s already up to about 20-some percent.

00:27:37 ►

So we have a huge bubble coming up of intelligent, educated people with nowhere to go, no future.

00:27:46 ►

And I don’t think any of us really can say, well, the future is to do this or that

00:27:52 ►

or go back to land or grow your own food.

00:27:53 ►

I think all of these things come into play, and it’s not one size fits all.

00:27:58 ►

I personally am not somebody who would want to live in a commune,

00:28:00 ►

and I haven’t seen many successful ones.

00:28:03 ►

But I think that there are ways

00:28:06 ►

that we can create a

00:28:07 ►

picture of a future of some kind

00:28:09 ►

and that’s what I said I’m personally

00:28:11 ►

blocked on that myself so I hope you guys

00:28:13 ►

will have some ideas for me but I

00:28:15 ►

wanted to kick it off with a new

00:28:17 ►

creation myth you know how did humans

00:28:20 ►

get to where we are

00:28:21 ►

you know and

00:28:23 ►

we don’t have time to go back to the whole consciousness thing

00:28:26 ►

and the ruling elite and how they’ve instilled fear in us

00:28:30 ►

and put us in the spot we’re in.

00:28:32 ►

But my creation myth is one that I put this together in honor of Terrence

00:28:38 ►

because I’m not letting any facts get in the way of a good story.

00:28:44 ►

Some of these parts of this, it’s a short story,

00:28:47 ►

and it’ll be like fingernails on the blackboard for people like Bruce probably.

00:28:51 ►

But here are some foundational facts that are real.

00:28:56 ►

First of all, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA,

00:29:00 ►

admitted that he used LSD, and that was part of the process.

00:29:05 ►

So I think it’s nice to bring him in here.

00:29:07 ►

And then for years, I couldn’t believe people talking about junk DNA.

00:29:13 ►

You know, 97% or so of all the DNA they had been calling junk

00:29:17 ►

because the chromosomes are only in that bottom little part

00:29:21 ►

that really create our bodies, et cetera.

00:29:23 ►

And I can’t remember the book this was in.

00:29:27 ►

Mary C. will remember.

00:29:28 ►

Supernatural by Graham Hancock.

00:29:31 ►

He wrote about a scientist who studies linguistics,

00:29:36 ►

and they ran the so-called junk DNA through this test

00:29:40 ►

that tests for human languages,

00:29:42 ►

and it meets all of the criteria for a language.

00:29:45 ►

Well, about two weeks ago, one of the researchers at the Human Genome Project has published

00:29:53 ►

a paper saying that the DNA, the so-called junk DNA, is of extraterrestrial origin.

00:30:00 ►

Now, Francis Crick, who was the co-discoverer of DNA, actually was trained as a statistician.

00:30:06 ►

And he once stated that the odds of DNA coming together just at random, as the science has been trying to say,

00:30:16 ►

the odds of that happening are higher than a tornado going through a junkyard and creating a complete 737 aircraft.

00:30:23 ►

Just statistically speaking.

00:30:26 ►

747? Okay.

00:30:28 ►

See, somebody else has some of these good facts. Great.

00:30:32 ►

I’m not alone.

00:30:34 ►

I knew I’d find one of the others.

00:30:38 ►

So, you know, but now the Human Genome Program is a project

00:30:44 ►

is saying that it is definitely of extraterrestrial origin.

00:30:49 ►

Not definitely, but they suspect it is.

00:30:52 ►

Now think about this.

00:30:53 ►

Every cell in our body has not one copy of this,

00:30:57 ►

but two copies of all this long string of information in every cell.

00:31:08 ►

long string of information in every cell. And the junk DNA in our cells is very, very closely similar to that in a gnat or a fly or a possum or a little raccoon that I thought was a cat last

00:31:15 ►

night and almost petted. That was a psychedelic experience in the dark, let me tell you.

00:31:21 ►

like experience in the dark, let me tell you.

00:31:27 ►

So there’s one part of the story.

00:31:32 ►

Somewhere this came from, and I’m saying in my creation myth,

00:31:34 ►

it came from off-planet.

00:31:41 ►

Now let’s shift gears a little bit to a project that Bruce and Rusty Schweikart, the astronaut, have proposed at NASA that’s now gaining a lot of momentum,

00:31:45 ►

and that is to capture an asteroid and bring it in Earth orbit and harvest it.

00:31:50 ►

Now, to me, I can’t understand why NASA, since day one,

00:31:55 ►

hasn’t been working on a project to at least go out to an asteroid and push it away,

00:31:59 ►

if it’s heading this way.

00:32:01 ►

And this Tuesday, we’re having a close flyby, like 14 moon distances of a city block-sized asteroid, LZ1,

00:32:09 ►

that’s going to come by.

00:32:09 ►

And you’ll be able to watch it on the web, by the way, to see this.

00:32:13 ►

So that’s taking place, that the technology is being developed

00:32:17 ►

to bring an asteroid in Earth orbit and control it.

00:32:20 ►

Now, let’s say in a part of this galaxy a long time ago far far away there were some people that

00:32:27 ►

looked like us and they learned to do this and they wanted to populate the galaxy well

00:32:33 ►

as bruce has firmly convinced me sending humans into space is just not practical i mean there’s

00:32:40 ►

so much of the energy required to keep a body alive needs to be done other things with.

00:32:46 ►

So the way to populate space is to send DNA out there and maybe a little DNA robot that could land someplace safely and then create little human like robots.

00:32:57 ►

But, you know, sending DNA out into space, you know, there’s a lot of risks and all.

00:33:06 ►

DNA out into space, you know, there’s a lot of risks and all. So what if these people like us,

00:33:11 ►

maybe only a hundred years ahead of where we are right now, because technology is going fast,

00:33:19 ►

decided to put some DNA inside these little asteroids so they’d be safe and then send them out into space. And then what if they really got really good at this, and instead they kept getting bigger and bigger asteroids to send out with these little biological, potential biological robots in it,

00:33:31 ►

until they had one that was the size of the planet that we’re on.

00:33:35 ►

And this was actually just an asteroid, and they put all this stuff in the center of it.

00:33:48 ►

it. Now here’s the next little factoid that again don’t hold me to all the facts too strictly because it’ll ruin my story. But in the deep ocean technology today, in these vents where the

00:33:57 ►

really hypothermal vents, a lot of life is coming up from inside the Earth and forming.

00:34:05 ►

At least in some instances, they don’t know for sure exactly,

00:34:08 ►

but it looks like perhaps some of this stuff that these ancient ancestors of ours,

00:34:14 ►

maybe five billion years ago, put inside are now bubbling up

00:34:18 ►

because life started in the ocean, allegedly, and then made it there.

00:34:22 ►

And that’s where these little biological robots came from.

00:34:25 ►

So maybe there are hundreds of other planets like this

00:34:29 ►

with people that actually look like us, that have our same DNA,

00:34:33 ►

and what is going on is the game, because I think it’s a game,

00:34:41 ►

is to translate and interpret this so-called junk DNA.

00:34:46 ►

And the first group that figures it out wins the game.

00:34:52 ►

And actually what’s going on right now is these are avatars that we’re in.

00:34:59 ►

We’re all sitting in a big game room somewhere controlling these avatars. And I like to think of myself as a

00:35:08 ►

player in the Earth game, and I’m not in line to discover, I’m not going to win the game because I

00:35:14 ►

don’t think I’ll interpret that, but I want to find the people and help the people who are trying

00:35:19 ►

to figure out what that code is, because once they win it, game over, then we all get together and

00:35:24 ►

have a big party in

00:35:25 ►

our game room and say, hey, remember that time we were at Esalen and that part of the game,

00:35:29 ►

the Earth game? So that’s where I see us now. And it just lightens my load to think it wasn’t an

00:35:33 ►

old man and a long white beard that created this place in seven days. That story just doesn’t wash

00:35:38 ►

with me anymore. So I’m into the Earth game idea. And so that’s my creation myth. You don’t have to build on that, but what’s our paradise myth?

00:35:47 ►

We’re on a hero’s return right now.

00:35:50 ►

We’ve been through the fall, or maybe the fall is still going on.

00:35:53 ►

It’s the fall from the nature-loving…

00:35:57 ►

We’ve lost our connection to both the sky and the earth for the most part,

00:36:01 ►

and we’re all trying to reconnect to both of those.

00:36:03 ►

This place is great to connect with the sky, you know, and the earth. So how do we, what are we returning to? What can

00:36:11 ►

we take home with us that we can, in our little communities where our neighbors might be grumpy

00:36:18 ►

and might think we’re nuts or whatever, but we’ve got friends that we can ride a bicycle to almost, hopefully. What can we take back in the way of a new paradise myth?

00:36:28 ►

Somebody’s got to have one.

00:36:31 ►

I think that the paradise actually is that community that the hero goes back to

00:36:37 ►

and the reforming of that community to accept the knowledge that the frontiers people have, you know, and

00:36:47 ►

the explorers have brought back. And in

00:36:50 ►

fact, it’s probably a community of

00:36:51 ►

explorers. And I mean this in the most

00:36:55 ►

nitty-gritty sense because there’s a

00:36:57 ►

huge amount already going on along this

00:37:00 ►

line that we’ve talked about this

00:37:02 ►

weekend. And there’s a huge necessity for that.

00:37:08 ►

I tend to see the whole thing, I’ve made a kind of a symbol out of it

00:37:12 ►

when I think about it.

00:37:16 ►

And it’s actually, it’s a piece of software.

00:37:20 ►

It’s like the beginning of something.

00:37:23 ►

And I call it the medicine circle.

00:37:26 ►

Because a medicine circle can be, you know,

00:37:30 ►

obviously it has its psychedelic implications,

00:37:33 ►

but, you know, it’s much broader than that.

00:37:35 ►

And it’s about healing, it’s about creativity,

00:37:38 ►

it’s about whatever it’s about.

00:37:40 ►

And I imagine it as something,

00:37:44 ►

a place you can go to on the web

00:37:46 ►

or download it for your iPad, your latest iPad, of course,

00:37:49 ►

and your iPhone or whatever.

00:37:53 ►

And all it is, it’s like you say, you just tune in.

00:37:58 ►

You just click and you say, I am entering the medicine circle.

00:38:04 ►

And this image, you’re looking at an image of a circle,

00:38:08 ►

and there’s a bunch of flocking dots or whatever,

00:38:12 ►

you know, that represent whoever has said,

00:38:15 ►

I’m in the medicine circle right now.

00:38:17 ►

So I always imagine it as, you know, I’m going to trip.

00:38:21 ►

Okay, I’m going to click in, and there’s my dot,

00:38:23 ►

and it goes, bing, you know, in the medicine circle.

00:38:26 ►

And I can go there at any time or day or night,

00:38:28 ►

and I can say, look at all my community

00:38:31 ►

swirling around like little stars in this circle together.

00:38:35 ►

But I think it’s actually kind of practical

00:38:37 ►

because I think communitarian software like that can be used

00:38:41 ►

just so any community can say,

00:38:45 ►

we identify with each other and we just want to see each other,

00:38:50 ►

that we’re here.

00:38:51 ►

It’s like a way of going ping and touching bases.

00:38:55 ►

And it’s a very simple notion.

00:38:58 ►

I like that a lot because it also doesn’t abandon the tech.

00:39:04 ►

I think that, like I said earlier,

00:39:08 ►

that Evan Moglen pointed out that the World Wide Web and the

00:39:11 ►

connectivity is, in his opinion, and I agree with him, the most

00:39:16 ►

significant technological development since writing, because it

00:39:19 ►

is person-to-person communication. And I love the thought that

00:39:23 ►

I could click into a medicine circle

00:39:26 ►

any time, night or day, and find some friendly people there

00:39:29 ►

to interact with and learn from, like that.

00:39:33 ►

So I think that’s a great idea.

00:39:35 ►

And, in fact, you said an explorer, bring back,

00:39:41 ►

I just happen to have a quote about that from,

00:39:44 ►

I just finished reading a book called Memories and Visions of Paradise by Richard Heinberg.

00:39:50 ►

It’s, I think, about five years old.

00:39:51 ►

It’s a good book.

00:39:52 ►

And he said,

00:39:54 ►

An explorer must linger in unfamiliar surroundings and have enough courage to brave the disorientation that inevitably results from his sojourn.

00:40:04 ►

to brave the disorientation that inevitably results from his sojourn.

00:40:09 ►

Then, once he is reoriented, he must have the openness of heart and mind to see significance in what he has encountered

00:40:12 ►

and the generosity of spirit to transmit that significance to others less adventurous than he.

00:40:20 ►

And I think that’s a good definition of a psychonaut.

00:40:27 ►

And I think that’s a good definition of a psychonaut, you know, the people that go into psychedelic experiences.

00:40:34 ►

I can’t speak for everybody here, only myself, but I got into it because it was fun.

00:40:36 ►

It was pleasurable. I enjoyed it.

00:40:51 ►

And I stayed because it was, you know, who I am, and it opened up the spiritual aspects of me. I had spent a large part of my adult life trying to distance myself from what I thought of spiritualism because I conflated it with religion.

00:40:54 ►

You know, I’m a recovering, well, I’m a recovered Catholic.

00:40:56 ►

I’m no longer recovering.

00:40:58 ►

I finally made it through the portal.

00:41:00 ►

But I think that a mistake a lot of people are still making is equating spirituality with

00:41:07 ►

religion. And, you know, religion is just sort of a dogmatic spirituality, and it’s hearing what

00:41:13 ►

the priests say about their experience, and spirituality is a personal experience. And there

00:41:18 ►

again, that’s to me what Terence was preaching about, is the psychedelics are, it’s a psychedelic experience.

00:41:27 ►

It’s not something you can talk about or read about or write about that will 100% convey having an experience.

00:41:41 ►

Here’s a recipe from Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel, 2312.

00:41:47 ►

Take an asteroid at least 30 kilometers long on its long axis.

00:41:50 ►

Any type will do.

00:41:52 ►

Solid, rock, rock and ice, metallic, even ice balls.

00:41:57 ►

Later on, he says,

00:41:58 ►

begin with a light dusting of heavy metals and rare earths

00:42:02 ►

as specified for the bio you’re trying to create.

00:42:11 ►

After that, string the axis of the cylinder with your terrarium sun lines. After that, you need biomass. Pull all the ice gathered in your scraping, except for enough to, when melted, will make your

00:42:19 ►

crumbled rock matrix moist. Then add your bacterial inoculant and turn up the heat.

00:42:26 ►

The matrix will rise like yeasted dough as it becomes that most delicious and rare substance, soil. Then it goes on.

00:42:33 ►

Make a marsh. Add some animals, plants, fish, amphibians, etc. Thus, over time, you can transform

00:42:41 ►

the interior of your terrarium into any of the 832 identified Terran biomes,

00:42:47 ►

or design an ascension of your own making.

00:42:51 ►

Later on, each terrarium functions as an island park for the animals inside it.

00:42:56 ►

Ascensions cause hybridization and ultimately new species.

00:43:00 ►

The more traditional biomes conserve species that on earth are radically endangered or extinct in

00:43:05 ►

the wild and it goes on we cook up our little bubble worlds for our own pleasure the way you

00:43:12 ►

would cook a meal or build something or grow a garden but it’s also a new thing in history in

00:43:16 ►

the heart of the accelerando i can’t recommend it too highly the initial investment is non-trivial

00:43:22 ►

but there are still many unclaimed asteroids out there.

00:43:29 ►

I like that. What’s the name of that book again?

00:43:31 ►

Oh, 2312.

00:43:34 ►

I like that.

00:43:36 ►

Hey.

00:43:45 ►

I have been trying to figure out a new paradise myth and the core elements of it for me are that we’re living through culturally

00:43:49 ►

a shaman’s journey and that

00:43:51 ►

you encounter terrifying things

00:43:54 ►

in the underworld and

00:43:55 ►

by turning and facing them you

00:43:57 ►

acquire knowledge

00:43:59 ►

or power from these formerly

00:44:02 ►

terrifying situations

00:44:03 ►

and I think 9-11 in this culture has become that dark beast,

00:44:12 ►

and we’re turning around and facing it,

00:44:14 ►

but I think connected to it is all these catastrophes and traumas

00:44:21 ►

that the planet’s going through,

00:44:23 ►

and all these people that are living through hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, they’re building empathy in our hearts.

00:44:30 ►

And we’re sharing for the very first time in the human history, 9-11 was the first thing that everyone essentially shared while it was happening.

00:44:39 ►

If you were paying any attention at all, 99% of the planet was hip to the fact that this is going on and that it’s a catastrophe.

00:44:49 ►

So for the first time, we have the basis, an experiential, shared experiential basis to start creating a planetary culture based on actual experience

00:44:58 ►

and not on trying to force somebody into accepting your ideology along with its creation myths and all the other stuff.

00:45:04 ►

somebody into accepting your ideology along with its creation myths and all the other stuff.

00:45:12 ►

And every time I see a father holding some injured child in a catastrophe, my heart breaks. And no longer is that black guy or that Japanese guy or that other or whatever. It’s a father with a hurt

00:45:18 ►

child. And my heart feels it. My head doesn’t matter anymore. It gets overwhelmed. So I think we’re acquiring

00:45:26 ►

the basis of a new culture by sharing all this suffering and acknowledging it and learning that

00:45:33 ►

we’re all one. And that’s sort of the challenge for us as a culture now is to become a collective

00:45:40 ►

messiah rather than waiting on brilliant individuals to show up.

00:45:50 ►

We’re creating a collective love and embodiment of community just by living through all this trauma.

00:45:53 ►

So that’s kind of where I think we are.

00:45:56 ►

Let me see if I had any other note on this.

00:46:04 ►

Oh, just that the media plays this crucial role in bringing us this imagery of empathy.

00:46:05 ►

We can’t just throw it out and live without it.

00:46:09 ►

It’s here, but that’s one of the unanticipated benefits

00:46:12 ►

that I see accruing around this moment,

00:46:15 ►

is that we are becoming aware of each other as humans,

00:46:19 ►

where the boundaries to inclusion are just melting.

00:46:23 ►

We’re very quickly becoming one being.

00:46:26 ►

I grew up in a family of racists,

00:46:28 ►

really hardcore, nutty, southern Ku Klux Klan type people.

00:46:34 ►

And by the time I was one of the elders in that family,

00:46:38 ►

either all the racists had died off

00:46:40 ►

or they had met interesting black people

00:46:43 ►

or worked at a job with a Chinese guy they really like

00:46:45 ►

and it had all gone away.

00:46:47 ►

I mean, the South I grew up in doesn’t exist at all.

00:46:51 ►

I mean, there are still nasty people out there, but it’s over.

00:46:55 ►

It doesn’t work anymore for anyone to be racist

00:46:58 ►

and have all that kind of implicit elitism.

00:47:02 ►

So again, I think that the suffering we’re living through has a place.

00:47:05 ►

If we walked into a room and there was a woman on the floor having a baby,

00:47:10 ►

I don’t know how many of you have gone through that,

00:47:12 ►

but it’s a pretty harrowing thing,

00:47:13 ►

and it can look very violent and very scary if things don’t go just right.

00:47:19 ►

And I think it’s something like that.

00:47:21 ►

We’re shocked.

00:47:22 ►

We’re like, oh, my God, what was that that just came out?

00:47:24 ►

You know, and what’s that part? And, you know, all this stuff going on that we’re shocked we’re like oh my god what was that that just came out you know and what’s that part and you know all this stuff going on that we oh but i think we’re

00:47:30 ►

going we’re learning to accommodate to that and we’re learning to be planetary beings really as

00:47:35 ►

we speak this is part of why we’re here in this building and this esalen still exists for all of us. That’s my new kind of redemption myth

00:47:48 ►

and a way to paradise, I think.

00:47:50 ►

I think paradise is just a sustainable way of living without war.

00:47:55 ►

We can get there if we just want to.

00:48:02 ►

First of all, on that alien thing, I think there’s also a story that the alien came here and loved our woman

00:48:13 ►

and just mate with them, and then we got that DNA from them.

00:48:19 ►

And then from it, backward, homoien, he came, he got this intelligence.

00:48:27 ►

So there is that thing.

00:48:29 ►

As far as paradise, I think I’ll start with actually a parable of this guy going to heaven.

00:48:41 ►

And they wanted to, they asked him, you know, just give me a tour of the heavens.

00:48:47 ►

You know, you have a choice actually.

00:48:50 ►

You could go to heaven or hell.

00:48:52 ►

Do you want to pay a visit to hell

00:48:54 ►

before you go to heaven?

00:48:56 ►

And he said yes.

00:48:57 ►

So they take him to hell.

00:49:00 ►

So the scene is this big, massive table

00:49:04 ►

with all kinds of food.

00:49:08 ►

Anything you want, in hell.

00:49:11 ►

And then these people sitting around this table with an arm that doesn’t have this bowl.

00:49:21 ►

So they try to reach and have the food.

00:49:27 ►

And they’re frustrated by the fact

00:49:33 ►

that they can’t put it in their mouth, their own mouth. And everybody’s angry and they’re yelling and screaming and they’re just frustrated by the fact that they can’t put the food into

00:49:40 ►

their own mouth. So it’s not only, take me out of here and take me to heaven.

00:49:46 ►

And then they go and take him to another room.

00:49:51 ►

There is a similar table,

00:49:52 ►

exactly like the other table,

00:49:54 ►

full of all kinds of colorful, delicious food.

00:49:58 ►

And then people sitting around that table

00:50:01 ►

that similarly have arms

00:50:06 ►

that doesn’t have this

00:50:07 ►

elbow

00:50:11 ►

but no one is nervous or upset

00:50:15 ►

everybody is picking food from the table

00:50:18 ►

and putting in the mouth of the other person

00:50:21 ►

in the other side and everything is calm

00:50:24 ►

so in the mouth of the other person in the other side, and everything is calm.

00:50:27 ►

So,

00:50:30 ►

so heaven,

00:50:32 ►

and a picture of heaven,

00:50:33 ►

is really what,

00:50:37 ►

what we can make in our own mind,

00:50:40 ►

whenever, wherever,

00:50:42 ►

and whatever is happening.

00:50:45 ►

There are a generation of Indian people

00:50:47 ►

that are building roads, that live on the roads,

00:50:51 ►

and never see anything other than that road.

00:50:56 ►

Children are being born, raised,

00:50:59 ►

while this road is advancing, and they’re building this road.

00:51:03 ►

So, I guess heaven and hell is in our own mind.

00:51:10 ►

And that’s the picture.

00:51:13 ►

I think if you want to live heaven, you got to create it.

00:51:27 ►

Hi, I love the topic of paradise.

00:51:32 ►

I’m living there most of the time in my own mind because I got moved from Santa Cruz to Joshua Tree,

00:51:35 ►

which to me was like a Martian landing

00:51:38 ►

and the worst thing that could have possibly happened

00:51:40 ►

until I realized that there wasn’t, okay, there’s no water.

00:51:43 ►

I’m from the ocean.

00:51:44 ►

And I understood that I realized that there wasn’t, okay, there’s no water, you know, I’m from, I’m from the ocean.

00:51:45 ►

And I understood that I had to become the water, you know, that I was the bag carrying

00:51:49 ►

the water.

00:51:50 ►

And what the water meant was, um, just purity, emotion, love, presence, um, that, and, and

00:52:00 ►

to be able to bring that, that in a place, sometimes we’re spoiled for choice.

00:52:03 ►

I mean, blessed Northern California, but wow, can there be a level of entitlement and, uh, and judgment,

00:52:10 ►

you know, that’s amazing when you go somewhere that none of this bounty is, you know, when you

00:52:16 ►

go to, I call it lost America, when you go see how the rest of America is actually living.

00:52:21 ►

Um, so I began to understand that I had to become the oasis, you know, that we, it’s our,

00:52:28 ►

part of our responsibility to become the walking oasis and not expect it and depend on it and rely

00:52:33 ►

on it from everything else. So one of the traditions that I study with are about the

00:52:39 ►

Leka, which are the high mountain shamans in Peru who never really had to, much like the Kogi,

00:52:44 ►

they never had to really give up their original connection.

00:52:48 ►

They never got colonized.

00:52:50 ►

And so the basic, the crux is that mythologically we left the garden.

00:52:55 ►

We got kicked out of the garden.

00:52:57 ►

We had to live with thistles and everything had to be painful and disgusting and difficult.

00:53:01 ►

And they never left.

00:53:03 ►

In their world, they’re like, no,

00:53:05 ►

actually in our mythos,

00:53:07 ►

God got us all it is.

00:53:09 ►

Creator gave us the keys

00:53:11 ►

to that basically

00:53:13 ►

creation wasn’t done.

00:53:15 ►

And so they were meant to co-create

00:53:17 ►

and be the caretakers

00:53:20 ►

and the

00:53:21 ►

stewards.

00:53:25 ►

You’re the stewards, right?

00:53:26 ►

You’re the stewards of the garden here.

00:53:27 ►

This is your planet.

00:53:29 ►

You’re responsible for it.

00:53:31 ►

Take care of it.

00:53:33 ►

And this is where we’ve definitely gone wrong.

00:53:35 ►

We haven’t taken care of ourselves.

00:53:38 ►

Ourselves, our connections, our relationships,

00:53:40 ►

our kids, our world.

00:53:41 ►

It’s just like, whoa.

00:53:46 ►

So forgive me if I segue into other places, but essentially earth is, you just take earth, you take the age, you recycle it into the front and it’s heart.

00:53:51 ►

And so the key is that we’ve like, we’ve actually left the heart. You know, the heart is where

00:53:55 ►

paradise always lives. So going back to the Laker, going back to this whole shamanic reality,

00:54:01 ►

it’s a vibrational thing. They’re still there. They’re living there.

00:54:05 ►

They’re amazed. They don’t even, they’re like, wow, like you don’t get it. You’re,

00:54:09 ►

you’re living in another, like you said, who said octave last night? You know,

00:54:13 ►

there’s another octave reality. I was octave. Terrence said octave. Um, and we have the

00:54:21 ►

opportunity because it does exist and we, we are all made of the same stuff.

00:54:26 ►

So you can reattune your whole system to vibrate in that capacity.

00:54:32 ►

What I’m also, I’ve been involved with the food and the kind of biochemical revolution for a long time,

00:54:39 ►

along with the psychedelic thing.

00:54:40 ►

I created the first smart bar in San Francisco.

00:54:43 ►

So I brought smart drinks into raving

00:54:45 ►

and house acid house culture because I realized as a drug experimenter that that was unsustainable,

00:54:52 ►

you know, and for my culture, they were going to get so hooked on that and they were going to just

00:54:56 ►

burn out really quickly. So I wanted to create a way that if you didn’t want to take drugs,

00:55:00 ►

you could still stay up all night. You could still, you know, communicate and be alive and

00:55:04 ►

vital. Or if you did take drugs, you wouldn’t have a bad trip because your body would

00:55:08 ►

be totally fed so that’s always strangely enough and i give a lot of credence to um to to ultra

00:55:14 ►

dimensionals as i call them and also to mushrooms and to you know all consciousness tools for

00:55:20 ►

putting me on this path and for you know making, making this one of my, my divine appointments was to come in as, as I was earth girl at the time. So I was definitely, you know, like,

00:55:30 ►

and still am rocking the earth vibe to, to remind and to remember and to kind of reseed

00:55:36 ►

consciousness with this. So that was like the Dirk and Sandy blessed, you know, life extension,

00:55:41 ►

super scientists. I worked with them. And as I’ve done my journey and kind of gone,

00:55:46 ►

and that was hyperspace style.

00:55:49 ►

They’re rock and roll scientists from another galaxy,

00:55:52 ►

and bless them.

00:55:53 ►

So they’re working with all,

00:55:55 ►

with like the deep molecular stuff,

00:55:57 ►

but we go back to all these ancient cultures

00:55:59 ►

and what they’ve used,

00:56:00 ►

the original energy drink,

00:56:01 ►

the original energy,

00:56:02 ►

maca, cacao.

00:56:04 ►

I mean, right now we’re having this huge superfood

00:56:06 ►

revolution where these

00:56:08 ►

paradise food

00:56:10 ►

stuffs are assisting us

00:56:12 ►

because what did you say about being nature

00:56:14 ►

but you can

00:56:16 ►

we have to be responsible to let nature be in us

00:56:18 ►

so to actually take the items

00:56:20 ►

take the foods, the things that we’ve evolved

00:56:22 ►

that have been here before we have

00:56:24 ►

and that nature, God got us all that is, created for us to evolve in, you know, in, oh, back to,

00:56:31 ►

there’s another woman I study with. Her name is Jasmine Heen. She’s a breatharian. We love Jasmine.

00:56:37 ►

She’s definitely from another place. Australian mom who just, you know, got the word from the

00:56:42 ►

ascended masters to stop eating and has been going around the world showing people it’s possible.

00:56:47 ►

But her thing, she has a lot of little mantra codes,

00:56:50 ►

and one of hers is Divine DNA Paradise Grid Match Now.

00:56:54 ►

So we’re presupposing that there was an original plan for creation,

00:56:57 ►

which has been enacted and is still occurring in certain cultures and peoples,

00:57:02 ►

where there’s a Divine DNA Paradise Grid Match.

00:57:04 ►

It’s a grid match. It’s a grid match.

00:57:05 ►

It’s matching the grid

00:57:06 ►

that was laid for this paradise plan.

00:57:08 ►

So we are on our way back to the garden.

00:57:11 ►

But the garden actually lives within the heart.

00:57:13 ►

It’s just we’ve gotten so top-heavy

00:57:15 ►

and so heady

00:57:17 ►

and so thought-obsessed

00:57:19 ►

that it actually, you know,

00:57:21 ►

yet again last night,

00:57:22 ►

it’s like, is anyone actually in reality?

00:57:24 ►

Like, what reality are you in? Because you are ready. You’re bringing so much with you that it’s,

00:57:30 ►

the sieves are so thick. It’s like, you can barely experience. I see this all the time.

00:57:34 ►

I’m a healer. So I’m, it’s amazing. I’m like, whoa. I’m trying to get through layers of people.

00:57:38 ►

It’s like, ah, so now I’m just like, let’s just bypass that. Eat this, you know, drink this. This will actually reattune your form and, and, uh,

00:57:48 ►

revibrate you to the paradise.

00:57:50 ►

I call it Paradisa, like Paradisa, um, to get, to get home.

00:57:54 ►

You know, we all want to go home and it’s like, can we get,

00:57:57 ►

can we get home?

00:57:58 ►

And that’s the original plan.

00:57:59 ►

That’s like the Terrence’s reality.

00:58:00 ►

All of it is like, come on, like the way home.

00:58:03 ►

It’s like the breadcrumb path, the signage, let’s go.

00:58:06 ►

So we are at a critical juncture right now.

00:58:08 ►

So I would say be the oasis.

00:58:11 ►

Be the wave.

00:58:12 ►

Don’t wait for the wave.

00:58:12 ►

Be the wave.

00:58:13 ►

Be the oasis and start to tune in to all of these paradise foodstuffs.

00:58:18 ►

We’ve got coconut oil.

00:58:19 ►

All this stuff’s available.

00:58:20 ►

It’s never been the way it is right now.

00:58:22 ►

So have a spoon of coconut oil. Return to where paradise, where this stuff’s growing. It’s like, oh way it is right now. So have a spoon of coconut oil.

00:58:25 ►

You know, return to where these, where paradise, where this stuff’s growing.

00:58:28 ►

It’s like, oh, it’s from paradise.

00:58:30 ►

Bring paradise, bring paradise in, bring it with you.

00:58:34 ►

Yeah.

00:58:35 ►

So that’s one doable, that’s like a doable factor.

00:58:38 ►

And we’re watching this.

00:58:38 ►

We’re watching this, this revolution.

00:58:41 ►

It’s, it’s like, it’s a food thing.

00:58:43 ►

Oh, and I actually, I call it, um, and

00:58:45 ►

this is, no one can use this without giving me royalties. Um, no, it’s called, uh, I call it

00:58:49 ►

Edenism. Edenism. Yeah. Because I’ve been witnessing my culture. I’ve watched my culture for 20 years.

00:58:55 ►

I’m definitely like the OG raver from London. And it’s like, it’s gone, it’s beautiful and it’s

00:59:01 ►

gone, but it’s gone into a narcissistic hedonism you know it’s like wait

00:59:05 ►

a second in the guise of all of this consciousness and geo eco and i’m like but the the it’s still

00:59:11 ►

like everyone’s still veiled there’s still a mental process and a program and an ego trip you

00:59:16 ►

know that’s kind of clouded and obscured and all this matt you know magical consciousness stuff and

00:59:22 ►

it’s like blessed is that and it’s closer than ever but it’s like Eden

00:59:26 ►

so we’re all on the return

00:59:28 ►

to the garden and it really is

00:59:30 ►

it starts here, it totally

00:59:32 ►

starts in the heart, whatever you can do to reconnect

00:59:34 ►

with your heart, which is reconnect with the

00:59:36 ►

earth as well, just like whether it’s

00:59:38 ►

notice that everything is alive, even if it’s

00:59:40 ►

your house plan or the food you’re eating or just have

00:59:42 ►

that level of intention and respect

00:59:44 ►

and like, aha you know, consciousness, bliss, grace,

00:59:49 ►

like, thank you.

00:59:50 ►

And be in that state of gratitude

00:59:52 ►

because that’s really an earth thing too

00:59:53 ►

for every breath, for every moment.

00:59:55 ►

And for how, you know, like I said about the spoiled thing,

00:59:57 ►

for how much we have access to

00:59:58 ►

and use it in that capacity.

01:00:00 ►

I think that’s a big one

01:00:02 ►

because then you change your vibration

01:00:03 ►

and then that changes everything and you start to turn people on.

01:00:15 ►

I’m going to take a sharp right turn, a left turn, back to the DNA.

01:00:21 ►

I just wanted to say that. I totally share the DNA

01:00:25 ►

idea

01:00:29 ►

because

01:00:30 ►

those

01:00:32 ►

the

01:00:35 ►

mushroom

01:00:37 ►

more than anything else

01:00:39 ►

has put me down

01:00:41 ►

into that level of the DNA

01:00:43 ►

and the biomechanical linguistic machine elves

01:00:47 ►

or whatever the hell you want to call them.

01:00:50 ►

But that’s totally real to me.

01:00:54 ►

And that McKenna’s initial crazy speculation in La Charrera

01:01:00 ►

about the fact that they were influencing

01:01:03 ►

or at least tuning into or reading

01:01:05 ►

or in some way communicating with their DNA

01:01:08 ►

is a very real possibility to me.

01:01:12 ►

I don’t call it a fact.

01:01:13 ►

I call it an experience.

01:01:16 ►

And somehow developing,

01:01:20 ►

this is part of my communitarian vision,

01:01:23 ►

is it’s a really large community in each one of us,

01:01:26 ►

which has to do with the entire line of ancestors.

01:01:31 ►

And if it goes back extraplanetary,

01:01:35 ►

I mean, in a way, it just pushes the problem

01:01:38 ►

of how did DNA get assembled in the first place

01:01:41 ►

and who was smart enough to do that.

01:01:43 ►

Which brings me to the game theory of the universe, which I also

01:01:47 ►

happen to subscribe to. And I personally think that

01:01:52 ►

the first thing we have to do is, you have to realize

01:01:54 ►

and this is a psychedelic realization, that this is a game.

01:02:01 ►

Before you can get out of a game that you’re playing, you have

01:02:04 ►

to realize that you’re in it. And you’re in it a game that you’re playing, you have to realize that you’re

01:02:05 ►

in it, and you’re in it in what role you’re playing in it.

01:02:10 ►

We’re all embedded in a lot of different games, and we call them culture.

01:02:16 ►

I don’t happen…

01:02:18 ►

That’s what I was pointing out there. I don’t happen to subscribe too much to the noble savage mythology

01:02:29 ►

that somewhere there are these perfect tribes

01:02:32 ►

who have preserved an Edenic consciousness.

01:02:37 ►

It just doesn’t…

01:02:39 ►

That’s an old colonialist myth, actually, from the 18th century.

01:02:44 ►

And we’re moving on. We’re moving on in one way

01:02:48 ►

or another. And we have to learn everything

01:02:51 ►

beautiful and wonderful we can from the past, but we also have to deal with our

01:02:55 ►

current situation, which is so radically, radically different.

01:02:59 ►

And I don’t know anything other to do in terms of creating

01:03:03 ►

paradise other than to take care of each other,

01:03:08 ►

to take risks,

01:03:12 ►

and to share our most outrageous ideas.

01:03:17 ►

And to find the others.

01:03:19 ►

Find the others, continue the dialogue.

01:03:22 ►

Create your own medicine circle.

01:03:24 ►

We’re all part of one

01:03:25 ►

or another already. Just keep it going.

01:03:27 ►

I like that addition, find the others and continue the dialogue. That’s, I like

01:03:34 ►

a lot too. And you’re as strange as I am, Diana.

01:03:38 ►

I really appreciate what you said. That moved me deeply and reminded me sort of what you started,

01:03:47 ►

we spoke about yesterday about the bonobo part of ourself

01:03:52 ►

that’s more around community and sharing and kind of connection,

01:03:58 ►

as you said, the way that they would sort out conflict.

01:04:01 ►

And I really, I feel like this new age and this new step is a lot about,

01:04:06 ►

you know, the re-empowerment, the re-embodiment of the feminine in all of us. It’s the earth

01:04:13 ►

energy. It’s the mother energy. It’s the sitting in circle. It’s the living from that heart space.

01:04:18 ►

You know, there are actually brain neurological cells that surround our hearts. And just like

01:04:24 ►

you said, whatever I can do to live from my heart and to really know what

01:04:28 ►

that is and to kind of clear the blockages in my own life and in my emotions and in my

01:04:34 ►

stories that prevent me from living from that place, like that’s my work.

01:04:38 ►

And that’s how I’m going to get myself toward paradise.

01:04:41 ►

And if I live in that space, then I attract those people around me and I shine that out

01:04:46 ►

and let people know that this is possible.

01:04:50 ►

And if I’m living in a way

01:04:53 ►

that I’m taking care of my body

01:04:55 ►

and taking care of myself

01:04:56 ►

and being kind to others

01:04:57 ►

and living in that space of gratitude,

01:05:00 ►

that just ripples.

01:05:03 ►

And there’s so much that can happen from that place. And it affects every single person that I interact with. that just ripples and, you know,

01:05:05 ►

and there’s so much that can happen from that place

01:05:07 ►

and it affects every single person that I interact with

01:05:09 ►

and thereby, you know, hopefully can move forward.

01:05:15 ►

And so I think that’s the way to paradise.

01:05:20 ►

It’s all in us and it is that remembering, you know,

01:05:22 ►

it’s anything I can do to kind of

01:05:31 ►

start to shed some of these layers of culture and the programs and all the the shit that’s kind of

01:05:40 ►

bogged down my organism for so many years that that really i really don’t need and and um so that’s you know that that’s my work and that’s what I hope to kind of move forward.

01:05:48 ►

And I feel like it’s so possible.

01:05:52 ►

There’s so many brilliant minds and hearts and beings alive right now

01:05:58 ►

doing really incredible things and to just join together.

01:06:02 ►

And I so appreciate the circle and you two creating the space

01:06:06 ►

and really continuing this conversation that feels so essential right now.

01:06:12 ►

Thank you.

01:06:14 ►

What you said about when you live in paradise yourself,

01:06:17 ►

you do attract other people to you, and that’s how it really spreads out and grows.

01:06:21 ►

I like that.

01:06:27 ►

My only addition to this kind of paradise myth thing is I spend a little time

01:06:31 ►

thinking about hierarchies and how to

01:06:35 ►

do away with hierarchies because I think hierarchies are

01:06:38 ►

some of the basis for insecurity and aggression and various things.

01:06:44 ►

And what I came to from thinking about it was the only structure that is truly non-hierarchical

01:06:52 ►

that can not be hierarchized or a hierarchy created is a structure in which every single

01:07:02 ►

node is connected to and aware of every single other node within the structure.

01:07:10 ►

You know, every node is aware that it’s connected to every node

01:07:14 ►

and is connected to every node.

01:07:16 ►

And so you can’t create a hierarchy from that

01:07:18 ►

because every node knows that it is the everything

01:07:21 ►

and a part of the everything.

01:07:23 ►

And so I wonder if we as humans

01:07:25 ►

wouldn’t be able to create this kind of system where we were not like always constantly streaming

01:07:32 ►

everybody’s thoughts into us. But if we had our own individual identities and we had our own

01:07:38 ►

individual thoughts, but then we also had this kind of outer layer where we were aware of the loving energy or the pain energy

01:07:47 ►

of those around us and of those distant from us, such that if somebody was in intense suffering,

01:07:54 ►

we could find them because it would be prickling at us. It would be hurting us.

01:08:00 ►

And we wouldn’t necessarily know why they’re suffering because we can’t read their thoughts.

01:08:05 ►

But we would feel that there is some pain in the system.

01:08:10 ►

And if everybody was connected in this way, we would obviously have a desire to correct that pain because it’s causing all of us discomfort.

01:08:21 ►

Thank you.

01:08:22 ►

Thank you.

01:08:27 ►

I’m going to go right in the face of… I’m going to talk about a Catholic symbol,

01:08:31 ►

which is very meaningful to me.

01:08:35 ►

And I never recovered.

01:08:39 ►

But it’s a symbol of the sacred heart.

01:08:43 ►

And it’s a gory symbol, as many of the Christian symbols are,

01:08:48 ►

because they do talk directly about suffering.

01:08:51 ►

And the symbol of the sacred heart is a sacred heart surrounded by a crown of thorns.

01:08:59 ►

So that every time that heart expands, it digs the thorns deeper and it feels more of

01:09:07 ►

the pain and then it expands further and it expands further.

01:09:12 ►

So it’s the extraordinarily difficult process of taking in pain and suffering and being

01:09:20 ►

present with it, which is if we’re headed for anything in this world

01:09:26 ►

for the next umpteen days, months, years, decades,

01:09:31 ►

it’s not a pretty scene in many cases.

01:09:35 ►

And our hearts have to get really big,

01:09:38 ►

and they have to also be able to withstand the pain

01:09:41 ►

and grow at the same time.

01:09:45 ►

And that’s a tough one,

01:09:46 ►

because it’s not all peace, love, and brown rice out there.

01:09:50 ►

We need peace, love, and brown rice.

01:09:53 ►

We need to emanate as much of that as we can.

01:09:55 ►

We also need to absorb that pain

01:09:58 ►

in a way that doesn’t destroy us,

01:10:01 ►

but that makes us stronger.

01:10:15 ►

I just want to give you a link to another possible paradise.

01:10:20 ►

I don’t know, how many of you have read the autobiography of Yogi? All right, so you all know the chapter where Swami Sri Yukteswar comes back, resurrects

01:10:32 ►

himself for Yogananda, right? So he talks about where he is and where he was. I think Steve Job read the autobiography of Yogi every year, once every year.

01:10:48 ►

And I think so many of his chapters have so much gift.

01:10:52 ►

And where Sri Yukteswar, this man, returns to flesh to satisfy the desire of Yogananda

01:11:05 ►

and talks about where he is. I think it’s really

01:11:09 ►

you know, at least that

01:11:13 ►

chapter is something that can give you a lot of different ideas about

01:11:17 ►

whatever paradise you’re looking for or you may be

01:11:21 ►

looking for. So I just wanted to give you a link to that. If you are looking for other possibilities, just read that chapter.

01:11:33 ►

That book is available for free on Project Gutenberg to download as a Kindle reader.

01:11:38 ►

Yeah.

01:11:40 ►

The autobiography of a yogi.

01:11:45 ►

I want to tell you a story from Burning Man.

01:11:52 ►

Probably many of you here have been there,

01:11:55 ►

and for those who have and those who haven’t,

01:11:57 ►

some years ago, well, every Saturday night,

01:12:01 ►

amidst great revel and celebration, there’s the burning of the man. And the idea

01:12:11 ►

is that one would burn away perhaps regrets, sorrows, intentions of the past so as to create the new. It tends to resemble a kind of

01:12:27 ►

somewhere between a Dionysian and a Bacchanalian revel.

01:12:33 ►

But some years ago came the creation of a temple.

01:12:40 ►

And the temple every year is made of

01:12:44 ►

hundreds of thousands of pieces of jigsawed wood,

01:12:50 ►

about this big, all glued together.

01:12:53 ►

Extraordinary structure, and it’s out further than the man.

01:12:56 ►

The city is created in a semicircle, and here’s the man,

01:12:59 ►

but way out in the farthest reaches of the gray-white playa is this temple.

01:13:07 ►

And this first year when the temple was created, all throughout the week,

01:13:11 ►

you would find people from the city going out to the temple.

01:13:15 ►

They had been invited to write on a piece of the temple

01:13:19 ►

the name of someone or some people that they had loved who had died.

01:13:26 ►

And so all through the week, in the midst of this great party,

01:13:30 ►

this great revel, this great act of, yes, communal love and celebration

01:13:35 ►

and feeding of the other, and in a certain sense,

01:13:38 ►

created paradise on earth, an alternate science fiction,

01:13:43 ►

internally consistent reality, all of those

01:13:46 ►

things, in the middle of that was this place where you could go any time of day or night

01:13:50 ►

and find people writing names and weeping, sometimes silently by themselves, sometimes

01:13:59 ►

comforted by others, sometimes in the full light of the sun, sometimes in the filtered

01:14:05 ►

light of the moon.

01:14:08 ►

And Saturday night this first year, there was the burning of the man, and there was

01:14:12 ►

a wild party, and there were fire dancers, and there was drinking and madness and revolution.

01:14:18 ►

And then come Sunday, everything got very quiet, and the dust began to blow. And all day long, a fierce

01:14:29 ►

wind came up and it blew this great white dust of the playa so that you would look out

01:14:34 ►

at the temple and it was there and then it was gone. And it was there again, and then it was gone. So that this great symbol of evanescence, of transcendence,

01:14:49 ►

was here and then not here.

01:14:53 ►

And this particular year, it had been constructed

01:14:55 ►

so that it looked like a Gothic cathedral,

01:14:58 ►

it looked like a Jain temple, it looked like East meets West,

01:15:01 ►

it looked like the meeting of every possible culture.

01:15:08 ►

like east meets west. It looked like the meeting of every possible culture. And at about twilight,

01:15:16 ►

six, seven at night, without even speaking to one another, because there had been no ritual that had been prescribed top down that had been communicated about, but just from an internal sense, all the

01:15:21 ►

inhabitants of the city began to gravitate out toward this temple,

01:15:26 ►

until finally, just as the sun was setting, all of the inhabitants of the city were gathered

01:15:32 ►

silently around this temple.

01:15:36 ►

And the fire dancers appeared, and they moved toward it, and they lit the torch, and they

01:15:41 ►

were just about to set it aflame when the wind came.

01:15:45 ►

And it blew, and it blew, and it to set it aflame when the wind came. And it blew and it blew and it blew and it blew

01:15:47 ►

and the temple disappeared.

01:15:50 ►

And the fire dancers stepped back and the wind blew

01:15:53 ►

and it blew and it blew

01:15:56 ►

and we were there gathered silently in this circle

01:15:59 ►

and we began to be coated with this gray white ash

01:16:04 ►

like a ring of elders and we began to be coated with this gray-white ash,

01:16:09 ►

like a ring of elders staring at one another,

01:16:14 ►

red-rimmed eyes coated in ash, silent, just waiting.

01:16:19 ►

And I looked up and realized that the moon was full.

01:16:24 ►

And just as suddenly, the wind wind stopped the temple appeared

01:16:26 ►

the fire dancers moved forward

01:16:28 ►

they lit the torch

01:16:29 ►

it burst into flame

01:16:31 ►

and suddenly I was seized by a kind of grief

01:16:36 ►

just ripped open

01:16:37 ►

and began to scream

01:16:39 ►

and the grief had nothing to do with me

01:16:41 ►

it was some huge grief for something unnameable,

01:16:48 ►

something so huge.

01:16:51 ►

And I wondered, what is it that we as a species

01:16:55 ►

are gathered here now to learn

01:16:58 ►

that has to do with the communal witnessing

01:17:02 ►

of a building that looks like East meets West,

01:17:10 ►

that has to do with fire and dust and a whole race of people with red eyes,

01:17:18 ►

screaming and coated in gray-white ash?

01:17:21 ►

What is it that we as a people need to understand and witness about communal

01:17:26 ►

grief?

01:17:29 ►

About

01:17:29 ►

shared witnessed

01:17:31 ►

grieving and

01:17:34 ►

expiation? About truth and

01:17:35 ►

reconciliation?

01:17:38 ►

About

01:17:38 ►

release of grief

01:17:42 ►

on a planetary level?

01:17:44 ►

So that this movement of the heart that you’re talking about,

01:17:49 ►

so that this heart pierced with thorns can really grow

01:17:52 ►

and as Ken is talking about, embrace the whole planet

01:17:55 ►

so that we can feed one another,

01:17:58 ►

so that we can feed ourselves.

01:18:00 ►

What’s so important in this moment

01:18:02 ►

that the whole planet is collaborating to teach us this lesson

01:18:06 ►

give us this image of this building on fire

01:18:09 ►

and people who have all week comforted one another

01:18:13 ►

coming together now in this final moment of grief

01:18:15 ►

and release and celebration

01:18:18 ►

so that the winds blow and the moon is full

01:18:21 ►

well of course that was September 4th, 2011. And a week later,

01:18:29 ►

there was an image, another image of a building, a building on fire, a building and the gray white

01:18:35 ►

ash raining down and the people screaming. But what did we do with that image that we saw again

01:18:41 ►

and again and again and again? As you said, Ken, as a planet, what did we do?

01:18:47 ►

We took that in as immense trauma.

01:18:50 ►

And yes, we all, I’m convinced, as nodes,

01:18:53 ►

we know we are all screaming pierced hearts right now

01:18:57 ►

because it’s impossible not to be collective planetary witnesses

01:19:01 ►

for one another at this moment on this planet.

01:19:04 ►

That’s why we’ve developed the media we have.

01:19:07 ►

It’s why we’ve developed the neurophysiology that we have.

01:19:11 ►

It’s why we have the coding that we have.

01:19:13 ►

It’s why we have all of these senses at once.

01:19:15 ►

It’s why we’re all taking the journeys that we are and having the experiences that we are.

01:19:20 ►

It’s because telepathy is our birthright, and we all know that,

01:19:23 ►

and that’s what we are clearly through our media, through our images,

01:19:28 ►

through our experiences, through our circles, through our journeying,

01:19:31 ►

through our storytelling, in our hearts, experiencing together,

01:19:34 ►

telling each other over and over again, in our eyes, in our stories.

01:19:40 ►

And so, we can have images of building burnings,

01:19:47 ►

and we can be traumatized by them, they can lodge in us,

01:19:49 ►

we can use them as an excuse for fear, collective hate, revenge, all of those things.

01:19:58 ►

We can go into the closet, Americans have, they’ve been deeply traumatized,

01:20:02 ►

we are in a post-traumatic state.

01:20:03 ►

And we are afraid that if we came out of the closet and said,

01:20:06 ►

yes, we know what we’ve done, that no one would catch us.

01:20:11 ►

That’s why scared children go into closets

01:20:13 ►

when they know that their parents are having terrible problems.

01:20:16 ►

Because they think if they came out and said,

01:20:18 ►

Daddy’s hitting Mommy, nobody would catch them.

01:20:21 ►

But it’s not true.

01:20:22 ►

The world knows anyway.

01:20:24 ►

Everybody knows everything about one another.

01:20:27 ►

We all know that.

01:20:29 ►

And if we, I believe, were able to come out and say,

01:20:32 ►

yes, I own both what I have created and what I can create,

01:20:39 ►

what my past has been and what my future can be,

01:20:42 ►

I know that the whole world would catch us,

01:20:44 ►

individually would catch us as a country, and I know that the whole world would catch us, individually

01:20:45 ►

would catch us as a country, and I know that we would hold each other. So I believe that

01:20:51 ►

we need to, yes, grow those pierced hearts, that we need to offer each other images of

01:20:57 ►

acknowledged suffering and grieving, but images that like the one in the desert, as opposed to the one that the media gave us of the burning building, that the one in the desert offered the possibility of fire and release into paradise.

01:21:16 ►

That’s my myth going forward.

01:21:24 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:21:26 ►

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

01:21:32 ►

And there is obviously no way to improve upon those closing thoughts about myth that we just heard.

01:21:39 ►

And by the way, that was Galen Brand speaking,

01:21:41 ►

and Galen also happens to be Bruce Namer’s wife.

01:21:45 ►

Also, I think that Galen’s story is well worth listening to once again, and maybe right now, in fact.

01:21:54 ►

So, have you now gone back and listened to both Galen’s and Earth Girl’s comments once again?

01:22:00 ►

And if not, why don’t you do it right now?

01:22:03 ►

Then I won’t feel like I’ve got to go back over their thoughts for you again, and if not, why don’t you do it right now? Then I won’t feel like I’ve got to go back over their thoughts for you again.

01:22:07 ►

And there’s really no way I could improve on what they’ve had to say.

01:22:11 ►

And just to give you a little preview of my next podcast, the one that’s going to be featuring Bruce Dahmer.

01:22:18 ►

Well, one of the things that it will also feature is a beautiful remembrance poem to Terrence McKenna by Earth Girl.

01:22:47 ►

I’m once again losing my energy or let’s just say that I’m still in

01:22:54 ►

kind of a lazy summer mood. However there is one more topic to cover and I’m not going to be able

01:23:00 ►

to do it justice right now but I want to at least plant the seed and we’ll take it up again

01:23:05 ►

later. As you recall, in today’s program from Esalen, we heard Diana Slattery talking about

01:23:12 ►

the need for someone to develop what she was thinking of as a medicine circle app of some kind

01:23:18 ►

that we could log into and join a few of the others in a real-time global gathering of some sort.

01:23:24 ►

and join a few of the others in a real-time global gathering of some sort.

01:23:31 ►

Now, in a similar vein, I’ve received a couple of wonderful offers of technical help for the salon.

01:23:36 ►

But I have to confess that I’ve fallen way behind on my correspondence once again and have seemingly been ignoring these fellow salonners who are so kindly offering help.

01:23:42 ►

It isn’t that I don’t appreciate it.

01:23:44 ►

It’s just that I’m only spending as little time as possible

01:23:47 ►

in front of this computer right now,

01:23:49 ►

and so I haven’t taken the time to really think through

01:23:52 ►

the several proposals for help that I’ve received.

01:23:55 ►

But here’s the situation.

01:23:57 ►

Right now, I’m in pretty good shape on the bare essentials,

01:24:01 ►

which is basically posting a podcast and program notes.

01:24:04 ►

And now that we’ve shifted to our own dedicated server, Bare Essentials, which is basically posting a podcast and program notes.

01:24:08 ►

And now that we’ve shifted to our own dedicated server,

01:24:13 ►

my hosting company is giving me unlimited bandwidth, so that’s no longer a problem.

01:24:16 ►

And expenses for this are also manageable.

01:24:21 ►

It’s only costing about $250 a month to keep this show up and running.

01:24:24 ►

And between my book sales and donations,

01:24:25 ►

those monthly expenses are pretty close to being covered on an annual basis.

01:24:29 ►

But what a lot of us would like to see is more ways for all of us to interconnect in

01:24:34 ►

real time, or at least maybe in our own little social site of some kind.

01:24:40 ►

So here’s my idea.

01:24:41 ►

I’ve gone ahead and purchased a URL for us to use if those offers of technical help

01:24:47 ►

can be translated into setting up our own gathering place on the net.

01:24:52 ►

The URL is findtheothers.net.

01:24:57 ►

And if you go there right now, you’ll see that it’s just a placeholder page.

01:25:01 ►

However, I’d like to turn that URL over to a group of our fellow salonners who

01:25:06 ►

are interested in building it into some place where we could maybe hang out. Maybe something

01:25:11 ►

like what Diana was talking about. Also, Bruce and I would be more than willing to join in,

01:25:17 ►

say, a group Skype-like chats once or twice a month or something like that.

01:25:22 ►

In fact, one of our fellow salonners mentioned there’s some software called TeamSpeak

01:25:28 ►

that could also be used for large group voice chats.

01:25:32 ►

And I’m sure there are other things like that out there as well.

01:25:36 ►

Now, I personally don’t have the time to become directly involved in this project myself,

01:25:41 ►

other than to participate on a regular basis, once something’s up and running, that is. Thank you. and if that can come about, I’d be more than happy to give that URL to whomever wants to take the lead on a project like this.

01:26:08 ►

Now, one more thing.

01:26:10 ►

The offers to help that I’ve been receiving have come in via email,

01:26:15 ►

Facebook mail, Twitter mail, and comments on my website, among other things.

01:26:19 ►

And to be honest, I just can’t keep it all straight.

01:26:22 ►

So to discuss this particular idea, the only place that I’ll be focusing on is in the comments section for this podcast, podcast number 323.

01:26:33 ►

As you know, you can get to the program notes for this podcast via psychedelicsalon.us or.com,.net or.org.

01:26:42 ►

At least I think I’ve still got all of those covered.

01:26:41 ►

dot com, dot net, or dot org.

01:26:44 ►

At least I think I’ve still got all of those covered.

01:26:49 ►

But the comments section is the best way for me to keep all of these discussions straight.

01:26:53 ►

Since I’ve got to personally approve all comments,

01:26:55 ►

they can’t slip through without me seeing them.

01:26:59 ►

And I’ll also put my personal additions to your comments in there too.

01:27:02 ►

And that way we can have a community discussion of sorts between people with ideas, tech chops, resources, and just plain old group encouragement.

01:27:10 ►

So let’s give this a try and see if there’s enough enthusiasm to get something in the way of a place to find the others and get it established yet this year.

01:27:19 ►

After all, we’ve got the tech, it’s very close to free, and so we ought to use it.

01:27:24 ►

After all, we’ve got the tech, it’s very close to free, and so we ought to use it.

01:27:36 ►

Anyway, that’s the beginning of my little idea, and hopefully in the weeks ahead I’ll find the energy to pass along some more of the ideas that have already come in from some of our fellow salonners.

01:27:45 ►

And actually I’d planned to talk about several more of your ideas in this podcast, but that’s one reason I’m already late getting it out. I get lazy when I’m hot, and right now it’s getting really hot here in the salon.

01:27:51 ►

So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:27:56 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

323 - Searching for a New Paradise Myth

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Program Notes

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