Program Notes
Guest speaker: Bruce Damer
Today’s program consists of ten separate pieces from a June 2012 workshop at the Esalen Institute, eight of which are by Bruce Damer. Here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks:
—Are we all becoming autistic astronauts?
—On our dual bonobo and chimp nature
—The things I loved about Terence
—Esalen @ 50
—“Procreate only once” (and we will have a future)
—The wellspring of human consciousness
—Terence’s greatest Rap: Its all about Love, and where to now, Butterfly Hunter?
Following that we will be hearing the two closing segments of the workshop. The first is the “Rap for Terence” by Earth Girl and following that comes Galen Brandt singing her tribute to Terence titled “Aho Terence floating in the sky”
2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at Burning Man
Podcasts featuring Fraser Clark
“Rave Culture And the End Of The World…as we know it”
“Monkey’s Trip, A Short History of the Human Species”
Previous Episode
323 - Searching for a New Paradise Myth
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 246 - Elves, Egos, and Avatars - score: 0.84142
- 414 - The Entheogenic Singularity - score: 0.83326
- 174 - Pushing the Envelope - score: 0.83093
- 034 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 8) - score: 0.82906
- 323 - Searching for a New Paradise Myth - score: 0.82225
- 577 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 5 - score: 0.81718
- 349 - A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality - score: 0.81504
- 215 - McKenna Under the Teaching Tree Part 1 - score: 0.81423
- 683 - Psychedelics & Genius &+ Love - score: 0.81242
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.81185
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And I had planned on getting this podcast out several days ago because I thought it would be fun for all the people who are heading to Burning Man in the next few days to have something new to
00:00:35 ►
listen to on their way there. But the forces of nature had other plans for me and I wound up
00:00:41 ►
getting rather ill. In fact, this is the first day I’ve been out of bed in several days.
00:00:46 ►
I guess that one of the features of getting old is that things like the common cold
00:00:50 ►
have more serious effects than they do on the young.
00:00:53 ►
But in any event, I’m on the mend, and I’m feeling well enough to get this out to you,
00:00:58 ►
although it’s somewhat later than I’d planned.
00:01:02 ►
Also, I want to thank those wonderful salonners
00:01:05 ►
who either purchased a copy of one of my books
00:01:07 ►
or who made a direct donation to the salon over the past week.
00:01:11 ►
Normally, you’d have received a personal thank you from me by now,
00:01:15 ►
but that too has been postponed by my summer cold.
00:01:18 ►
I guess it’s the second one of the summer.
00:01:21 ►
However, I plan on getting those thank yous out in the next few days,
00:01:24 ►
and I just
00:01:25 ►
wanted to let you know that your gifts were a nice surprise when I turned on my computer this morning
00:01:30 ►
for the first time in almost a week. Now, what we’re about to listen to in this podcast is
00:01:36 ►
a collection of several topics that Bruce Dahmer covered in our June workshop at the Esalen
00:01:42 ►
Institute at Big Sur, California. As you know, over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing recordings of some of the topics that I covered in that workshop,
00:01:52 ►
along with many of the things that were said by our other attendees who also participated in that little weekend adventure.
00:02:00 ►
And I played those recordings in the order in which they occurred during the weekend.
00:02:04 ►
and I played those recordings in the order in which they occurred during the weekend.
00:02:10 ►
However, Bruce requested that his raps be split out and all put into a single podcast,
00:02:13 ►
which is what we’re about to hear in just a moment.
00:02:18 ►
Of course, the one exception was the first of the Esalen recordings,
00:02:23 ►
which was my podcast number 316, the Deep Dive into the Mind of McKenna,
00:02:27 ►
which, as you know, I’ve had to temporarily remove from circulation here in the salon at the request of Dennis McKenna.
00:02:32 ►
However, once Dennis’ book is published later this year, I’ll again be posting that recording
00:02:37 ►
for you.
00:02:38 ►
And as you know, that also featured Bruce Dahmer.
00:02:41 ►
Now, what we’re going to be hearing right now are ten separate pieces, eight of which are by Bruce.
00:02:47 ►
And while I’ll not be introducing each one individually, you won’t have any trouble figuring out where one ends and the next one begins.
00:02:55 ►
And here are the titles that Bruce has given to these short talks.
00:02:59 ►
Are We All Becoming Autistic Astronauts?
00:03:03 ►
On Our Dual Bonobo and chimp nature?
00:03:07 ►
The things I loved about Terrence?
00:03:10 ►
Esalen at 50?
00:03:12 ►
Procreate only once and we will have a future.
00:03:15 ►
The wellspring of human consciousness?
00:03:18 ►
And Terrence’s greatest rap,
00:03:21 ►
It’s all about love and where to now, butterfly hunter?
00:03:25 ►
Following that,
00:03:26 ►
we’ll be hearing the two closing segments of the workshop.
00:03:29 ►
The first is the rap for Terrence by earth girl.
00:03:34 ►
And following that comes Galen Brandt singing her tribute to Terrence titled a
00:03:39 ►
whole Terrence floating in the sky.
00:03:43 ►
I’ve been a collector of computer technology
00:03:47 ►
for the last 15, 20 years.
00:03:50 ►
And I have a barn crammed with vintage computers
00:03:53 ►
back to the 19th century, actually,
00:03:56 ►
some of these hand-cranked things.
00:03:58 ►
And the birth of the Ethernet,
00:04:01 ►
the birth of personal computing, all this stuff,
00:04:03 ►
I can watch this thing develop. And I can tell you that the inventors of Ethernet, the birth of personal computing, all this stuff, so I can watch this thing
00:04:05 ►
develop.
00:04:06 ►
And I can tell you that the inventors of Ethernet and the Internet in the 60s, ARPANET and all
00:04:11 ►
that, personal computing, had no idea that it was going to become so pervasive so fast.
00:04:19 ►
And one of the things that isn’t really even being studied by science is,
00:04:30 ►
what happens if you have a human being who 300 times a day or more looks at a little box and then comes back to some other kind of consciousness
00:04:35 ►
and then looks at a little box, feels stimulated for whatever it is,
00:04:40 ►
you know, work, thing buzzes in their pocket,
00:04:43 ►
the need for not feeling alone, to fill space,
00:04:47 ►
they look at the box, they get wrapped up in that box.
00:04:51 ►
Terence, in one of his talks, talks about that it was actually in Dream Awake.
00:04:57 ►
I don’t know if you remember that podcast, but he says,
00:04:59 ►
well, half the human race or a third of the human race at any one time are asleep.
00:05:05 ►
And a chunk of those are going into sleep.
00:05:08 ►
So they’re going through sort of a hypnagogia.
00:05:10 ►
Some of them are in REM sleep.
00:05:12 ►
And so that is the total consciousness of human beings is the wake state and the sleep state.
00:05:17 ►
But now there’s another state, which is the interrupt state, where you’re interrupt.
00:05:23 ►
You’re in this space.
00:05:25 ►
You’re really completely absorbed,
00:05:26 ►
and you can drive yourself off a cliff this way.
00:05:29 ►
People have these fatal car crashes and things like that.
00:05:32 ►
Then you come out, in and out, in and out.
00:05:34 ►
When you start doing this when you’re two or three years old,
00:05:37 ►
this is a huge reengineering of the human mind and consciousness.
00:05:42 ►
It is huge.
00:05:43 ►
And a person like Terence McKenna,
00:05:46 ►
who would sit and read a thousand books
00:05:48 ►
and absorb and absorb,
00:05:51 ►
he’s like living in Neil Stephenson’s
00:05:53 ►
anathem planet, if you’ve read that one,
00:05:56 ►
where it’s a planet in the future
00:05:58 ►
where they isolate this planet
00:06:00 ►
and it’s sort of all monks
00:06:01 ►
and nobody can watch media
00:06:04 ►
and they sit and contemplate ideas of all monks and nobody can watch media and they’re kind of, they sit and
00:06:06 ►
contemplate ideas and they read and deeply
00:06:08 ►
think for their 200 year
00:06:10 ►
lifespan or whatever it is.
00:06:11 ►
And this is Neil Stevenson’s
00:06:13 ►
last gasp of civilization
00:06:16 ►
to preserve this capability.
00:06:18 ►
Whereas the rest of the galaxy
00:06:20 ►
everyone’s glued to their
00:06:22 ►
epiphany embedded, epiphany
00:06:23 ►
retinal displays,
00:06:25 ►
and who knows what they’re doing, but they’re skipping along the surface of reality,
00:06:29 ►
and these people are sunk in the deep depths of reality.
00:06:32 ►
So I think that is the big story of our time, is this interrupt culture.
00:06:38 ►
And you watch it happening to yourself.
00:06:42 ►
But can you imagine the cognitive development of a young person that is affected by this?
00:06:47 ►
And we don’t even have it.
00:06:48 ►
We don’t have wearables.
00:06:49 ►
We don’t have embedded stuff yet, which is coming in 20 or 30 years.
00:06:54 ►
I mean, you read Werner Wenge’s Rainbow’s End, written about North San Diego County.
00:06:59 ►
But people have this embedded system that’s directly lasering their retina,
00:07:07 ►
and they look out.
00:07:08 ►
When they look out, the world is filled with creatures and data
00:07:12 ►
and weather patterns and menus and mods, you’d call them, in World of Warcraft,
00:07:20 ►
and characters coming up to them and gameplay and avatars of real people and stuff.
00:07:25 ►
In fact, the fascinating thing about this book is the hero, the non-hero,
00:07:33 ►
is a Stanford English professor who gets Alzheimer’s in 2006.
00:07:39 ►
He’s completely in the Alzheimer’s fog.
00:07:41 ►
And in 2026 or 20 29, they bring him back.
00:07:46 ►
They have a way to recover him, which also reverses his age down to,
00:07:52 ►
so he looks like a teenager, a teenager with very tired eyes.
00:07:57 ►
You know, he’s a Stanford English professor, a teenager with a real cranky attitude.
00:08:01 ►
But he’s come into a world where he doesn’t wear.
00:08:05 ►
He’s illiterate.
00:08:07 ►
So they have to send him back to junior high school.
00:08:11 ►
And he’s illiterate.
00:08:13 ►
He’s considered an idiot.
00:08:15 ►
Because he gets the epiphany system implanted eventually.
00:08:19 ►
And this one young boy adopts him and shows him how to wear,
00:08:23 ►
how to be literate in this new world.
00:08:26 ►
But I mean, these are the things that Terrence would have loved to talk about in the Khajit.
00:08:30 ►
And I would have loved to have these conversations.
00:08:33 ►
And we started having conversations like this because I introduced him to avatars and stuff.
00:08:38 ►
But the virtual world is going to come and wrap around the real world.
00:08:42 ►
It’s going to merge and blend together.
00:08:44 ►
But what does this do to cognitive development?
00:08:47 ►
So you people out there who go into worlds through psychedelics,
00:08:51 ►
and you see these fantastical rapid-changing rapid fire,
00:08:58 ►
you have to react quickly, you have to keep your center
00:09:01 ►
in the midst of this maelstrom of stuff.
00:09:04 ►
You have to keep your center in the midst of this maelstrom of stuff.
00:09:10 ►
You know, you’re, in some sense, you are prepared for this onslaught that is coming that’s going to affect everyone cognitively.
00:09:14 ►
Everyone’s going to be in this state in the future with tech,
00:09:19 ►
and they’re going to go to the limits of their cognitive abilities.
00:09:22 ►
And one last little point.
00:09:24 ►
I’m doing a, I’m sorry I’m doing a longer rap, but in this, working with NASA for 10
00:09:29 ►
years, what happens, we actually, my wife and I, Galen, she’s done work with autistic
00:09:36 ►
children.
00:09:37 ►
Now, autistic children, one of the things, they live in another world.
00:09:41 ►
They live in a world of pure, raw pixels in some ways.
00:09:45 ►
live in another world. They live in a world of pure, raw pixels in some ways. So if reality changes and a car pulls up to a stop, there’s so many pixels that have changed that it’s an
00:09:51 ►
overload situation. They’re not unique in this. Astronauts, when they go outside working on the
00:09:58 ►
space station construction and whatnot, they have to stand down after about two or three hours of
00:10:04 ►
work because they have learned that with the channels,
00:10:07 ►
there are two or three voice channels coming into their helmet,
00:10:10 ►
they’ve got a heads-up display, they’re navigating in space,
00:10:14 ►
tools are floating and tool bags are floating away out of reach.
00:10:18 ►
Shit is happening.
00:10:20 ►
The sun is coming up and down every 90 minutes,
00:10:22 ►
lighting is changing, and they have a really complex task list.
00:10:26 ►
You know, if they can’t get that bolt off, then they have five ways to do it.
00:10:29 ►
They get cognitively overloaded, and they can black out.
00:10:34 ►
So like an autistic child, we all have a limit.
00:10:37 ►
We all have an upper range.
00:10:38 ►
And I think what is happening with this tech is it’s pushing whatever the intent of the the bolus of guy and tech
00:10:48 ►
monster that is coming up it is pushing the whole of humanity toward that outer limit of cognitive
00:10:54 ►
overlap we’re just being pushed pushed pushed why you know why the experiment you know so in in some
00:11:01 ►
sense um you know what we’ve done mean, we’ve cut out all,
00:11:05 ►
we don’t watch TV at all, period.
00:11:07 ►
We don’t have that anxiety.
00:11:08 ►
You have to titrate that dose because if you get the full dose of Fox News
00:11:14 ►
and World of Warcraft and blogs and you’re doing Facebook and you’re doing Twitter
00:11:19 ►
and you have your mobile phone and you have an angry boss,
00:11:22 ►
can you imagine?
00:11:24 ►
I mean, these people are so close to cognitive overload and crashing.
00:11:28 ►
Damasio talks about adrenal collapse or adrenal fatigue.
00:11:32 ►
And where over time, you’re so stimulating response that your brain structure changes
00:11:38 ►
and you can no longer store and retrieve somatic memories, which is emotion, empathy, etc., etc.
00:11:47 ►
So everyone becomes this kind of Woody Allen movie-type robotic responder,
00:11:52 ►
very good at doing the high-speed stuff,
00:11:54 ►
but you can’t do the low-speed stuff.
00:11:56 ►
You can’t appreciate art, you can’t taste food,
00:11:58 ►
you can’t, you know, etc., etc.
00:12:00 ►
So this is a force that is pushing all of humanity.
00:12:04 ►
And I think the people in this room, you have some insights to offer
00:12:09 ►
as your fellows are pushed to their absolute cognitive limits.
00:12:14 ►
Ever since I was a kid, I was living in imaginal worlds.
00:12:18 ►
I mean, you saw in the movie the cartoons and the planets scapes and stuff that I was drawing as an
00:12:26 ►
early teen and into my teens.
00:12:29 ►
And these worlds, I mean, it’s partly from being bored at school, but they were vivid,
00:12:35 ►
absolutely vivid realities of a waking state.
00:12:39 ►
Adventures were happening, ships were crashing into each other, planets were being formed.
00:12:45 ►
I would draw maps that would take six months in detail.
00:12:50 ►
And actually, in particularly boring classes that I didn’t take notes in for a period of time,
00:12:55 ►
I would be drawing this map of a civilization that would layer on top of itself.
00:13:00 ►
And then I would remember what the teacher said.
00:13:03 ►
If I looked at a patch of the map, the whole lesson would come to my head
00:13:06 ►
because I’d associated what she said with these complex civilization maps.
00:13:13 ►
And it’s kind of like you get caught doodling in class.
00:13:17 ►
But I kind of approach psychedelics from the reverse
00:13:21 ►
because in some ways I kind of have a psychedelic scent. I load
00:13:27 ►
my brain up with a hard problem. For instance, there was a problem that NASA had. They wanted a
00:13:33 ►
concept study for how do we put a moon base together. This is a really, it’s a chicken and
00:13:39 ►
egg problem, because you can’t build a moon base with people working on it, because it gets too hot and cold and there’s too much radiation and they can’t survive.
00:13:50 ►
So you need a base there ready-made when they get there.
00:13:54 ►
But it’s really tough because this equipment, no one’s ever done anything like it.
00:13:58 ►
It’s a chicken-egg problem.
00:13:59 ►
And I loaded my brain for over a year.
00:14:02 ►
And for Raytheon, Raytheon was the sponsor of the study, one morning
00:14:06 ►
it all came to me and this vivid, this rack with all this robotics loaded into it and it was an
00:14:13 ►
ion drive and it’s completely formed how to do this and that became a project and there’s a
00:14:19 ►
history channel segment on that for dreaming because it came as a waking dream.
00:14:28 ►
And I do this for my Origin of Life work.
00:14:31 ►
But these are on-the-natch experiences.
00:14:36 ►
And if I have the right intention, you know, and bad airline coffee,
00:14:41 ►
and Bose noise-canceling headphones on a very long flight,
00:14:46 ►
I will close my eyes, go in, and I will pose a problem. And some of them, some of these Nash trips are so powerful, and tears are running down my face at the end of
00:14:51 ►
it. And I’ll come out about every 30 to 45 minutes, open up the notebook, and start drawing.
00:14:58 ►
Take the notes, and then I’ll close the notebook, and I’ll go back in. And the trip is further along.
00:15:03 ►
It’s continued to go, and I have to kind of
00:15:05 ►
catch up. And then like I was the molecule that was being formed into a living system. And when
00:15:12 ►
I went back in, it was suddenly it was out in the cold water in little vessels out in the cold
00:15:18 ►
water. And I had to kind of catch up on what lesson is being taught by this. So maybe there’s a gradation of ways in to these experiences.
00:15:30 ►
Maybe this community can do the job of almost creating like a chart of fine cheeses.
00:15:38 ►
You know, there’s all these different ways to satisfy the palate, and some of them are
00:15:43 ►
not the medicines.
00:15:45 ►
And there’s ways to come in.
00:15:47 ►
And of course, holotropic breath work and a lot of other alternatives.
00:15:51 ►
And Terence poo-pooed them pretty much.
00:15:54 ►
But I think joining these techniques together, joining Kriya breath work with a psychedelic state of mind and creating combined techniques
00:16:06 ►
is a worthy enterprise for our group.
00:16:12 ►
So then you’re not always talking, well, I’m taking something to get somewhere.
00:16:16 ►
No, you can get there on your own steam.
00:16:20 ►
Bringing a little bit of an element of sort of fun history in here,
00:16:29 ►
there’s a story recently in a paper that really struck me,
00:16:32 ►
or it’s not who reads the paper, but it’s a story online,
00:16:37 ►
and it was about the bifurcation of our ancestral line at the bonobos and the chimps.
00:16:41 ►
And you all know that from Jane Goodall’s work and other people’s work,
00:16:44 ►
they’ve discovered that chimps fight wars, you know, chimps. And you all know that from Jane Goodall’s work and other people’s work, they’ve discovered that chimps fight wars.
00:16:47 ►
You know, chimps murder.
00:16:49 ►
Chimps have male aggressive dominance.
00:16:51 ►
Well, it turns out that chimps come…
00:16:54 ►
So there was a common ancestor to chimps and bonobos
00:16:58 ►
that was in the Congo Basin.
00:17:02 ►
The Congo River, I guess, was forming then,
00:17:05 ►
and it got wide enough that it broke through this community.
00:17:09 ►
The South ancestors became the Bonobos,
00:17:12 ►
and the Bonobos resolved conflict by coupling,
00:17:16 ►
by sexual coupling, by joining together.
00:17:19 ►
It’s an amazing thing.
00:17:20 ►
They’re sort of fading out, but they’re an active community.
00:17:23 ►
The chimps on the north side of
00:17:25 ►
the river, for some other reason, went into a male bonding patriarchal structure, and they
00:17:31 ►
became quite successful with this. But here’s the fun thing. Our ancestor with the bonobo and chimps
00:17:40 ►
is before. We branched off before they branched off. So we come from stock that is both bonobo and chimps is before. We branched off before they branched off.
00:17:45 ►
So we come from stock that is both bonobo and chimp.
00:17:51 ►
So when you think of this, this is primal stuff, people,
00:17:53 ►
because look at our nature.
00:17:57 ►
You talk about smoking a lot of pot and becoming very mellow,
00:18:03 ►
very sensual, very group inclusive, and you talk
00:18:07 ►
about knocking back caffeine or alcohol and going to the office, you become cerebral and
00:18:14 ►
aggressive and working in male dominator hierarchies and working in competitive ways.
00:18:19 ►
Isn’t this just sort of the bonobo and the chimp nature competing. So in the long view, what this probably or possibly is about is a battle between these
00:18:30 ►
two fundamental natures that are really, you’re talking 20, 30, 40 million years of nature
00:18:37 ►
until that division.
00:18:38 ►
But we have both.
00:18:40 ►
The bonobos are sort of pure one thing and the chimps are maybe pure the other thing,
00:18:44 ►
but we are a mixture of them.
00:18:47 ►
Now, so if that’s the case, then everything around you, maybe you can frame in that.
00:18:53 ►
So what’s happening at Esalen?
00:18:56 ►
You know, you’re mentioning the things that are happening at Esalen.
00:18:58 ►
So Esalen’s 50 years old this year, but there was a firing of some beloved people from the staff who have been
00:19:07 ►
here for years as sort of the heart and center by the management.
00:19:11 ►
I don’t really know the details.
00:19:12 ►
There’s a site called Essaleaks where people are putting WikiLeaks.
00:19:18 ►
So there’s a debate about whether Esalen goes into a future and becomes more of a spa and
00:19:24 ►
people are saying all this yoga and there’s BMWs in the parking lot,
00:19:28 ►
and it’s rich people, and the pull to pull toward the spa,
00:19:32 ►
the pull toward profitability.
00:19:35 ►
And this is a nonprofit organization,
00:19:37 ►
but there’s a certain kind of mindset that comes in.
00:19:41 ►
And, you know, things are too dirty, and we want them polished marble this and we need a new bar
00:19:47 ►
and that kind of thing.
00:19:48 ►
This is what spas is.
00:19:49 ►
This is what Ventana is like and Post Ranch and all that sort of stuff.
00:19:53 ►
This pull.
00:19:55 ►
And so maybe Esalen was more of a bonobo place,
00:19:58 ►
but we have a chimp nature.
00:20:01 ►
And as management and as people change, this chimp nature and as management and as people change this chimp nature comes in and so there’s
00:20:07 ►
a fight even here at esalen about what the future is so all of humanity may be engaged in this
00:20:13 ►
in this struggle and yet it’s it’s all within us we each have the bonobo and the chimp inside
00:20:19 ►
and so each one each of us personally and in comes. And tech is the ultimate in the two-edged sword department
00:20:28 ►
because it can slice and dice.
00:20:31 ►
It can allow you to create Burning Man.
00:20:34 ►
Burning Man would never have come about without the Internet.
00:20:36 ►
Burning Man is an emergent phenomena.
00:20:39 ►
People come, they build their camps.
00:20:42 ►
It’s a phenomenal thing, and it allows people to get in touch, I think,
00:20:47 ►
with their bonobo nature more, to get rid of the tech,
00:20:50 ►
to get rid of all that aggressive work in that cubicle air,
00:20:54 ►
blow it out of their lungs.
00:20:56 ►
But it came through tech.
00:21:00 ►
And so then you have all these substances and psychedelic substances
00:21:04 ►
and non-psychedelic substances and controlled substances
00:21:07 ►
and non-controlled substances that are changing our personality
00:21:10 ►
or they’re calming us down or they’re solving headache problems.
00:21:16 ►
This chemical onslaught is occurring.
00:21:19 ►
This tech onslaught is also occurring.
00:21:22 ►
And in there are our children and our grandchildren that are just in this massive onslaught is also occurring. And in there are our children and our grandchildren
00:21:25 ►
that are just in this massive onslaught of cell phones and this stuff.
00:21:31 ►
And they’re now trying to navigate.
00:21:32 ►
So this thing is way bigger than psychedelic questions.
00:21:36 ►
Psychedelics are, they are in a sense,
00:21:39 ►
the clearest magnifying glass on the problem.
00:21:43 ►
Probably as ever.
00:21:44 ►
And they are laser-like on this problem.
00:21:47 ►
But the whole of human civilization is fighting this one.
00:21:51 ►
And in some sense, as more tech comes in, more chemicals come in,
00:21:57 ►
more work frenzy, more anxiety, more pushing back,
00:22:01 ►
because you can see the young generation that push back.
00:22:04 ►
They don’t watch network news and stuff like that.
00:22:06 ►
They’re creating their own freaking media.
00:22:08 ►
And it’s vibrant.
00:22:09 ►
It’s powerful.
00:22:10 ►
They’re saying, that’s shit stuff.
00:22:12 ►
We don’t watch Fox TV.
00:22:14 ►
We have our own.
00:22:14 ►
We make our own stuff.
00:22:16 ►
So they push back.
00:22:18 ►
But it’s a huge, this is a huge, huge struggle.
00:22:22 ►
And at the same time, this wonderful thing called science is saying to us,
00:22:27 ►
guess what, monkeys?
00:22:29 ►
We figured out where you come from, bonobo and chimp.
00:22:32 ►
Look, and there’s still some bonobos left.
00:22:35 ►
You can actually go and study them, and that’s part of your ancestry.
00:22:38 ►
They are part of you.
00:22:40 ►
That’s a potential alternate future for you.
00:22:42 ►
And here’s your other guys, or it’s a blend, or maybe you need both.
00:22:46 ►
And then it says, chimps, take a look.
00:22:48 ►
We’ve seen how the cosmos began.
00:22:50 ►
We’re about to launch a half-a-football-sized James Webb telescope
00:22:56 ►
into a distant spot in space where it’ll see when the universe ionized,
00:23:01 ►
when electrons first formed around nuclei,
00:23:05 ►
and you could see the structure of the universe 300,000 years after the Big Bang,
00:23:10 ►
chimps take a look at that.
00:23:11 ►
What an amazing time.
00:23:13 ►
You know, it’s all happening at once.
00:23:15 ►
And I think of it as kind of like a great crescendo.
00:23:19 ►
In a crescendo in an orchestra, that’s when the instruments all play at once.
00:23:24 ►
It’s like when everybody in the orchestra gets to do their thing.
00:23:27 ►
The chorus gets to, everybody gets a chance to play at once.
00:23:30 ►
And this is the time we’re in.
00:23:32 ►
Everyone’s playing at once.
00:23:34 ►
And after a crescendo, what happens is the composer decides what they want to do.
00:23:41 ►
It’s this enormous explosion of all the voices,
00:23:44 ►
and then there’s one instrument left at the end.
00:23:47 ►
It could be the oboe.
00:23:49 ►
It could be a sad sort of pastoral sound.
00:23:53 ►
It could be a voice of hope.
00:23:56 ►
So there will be one instrument that comes out of this crescendo.
00:23:59 ►
But in some ways, I wouldn’t sit here feeling bad or anxious or torn apart about this.
00:24:07 ►
It’s a glorious time.
00:24:08 ►
Species probably don’t go through these kinds of crescendos more than a few times in their existence.
00:24:15 ►
And this is one of them.
00:24:16 ►
So if 2012 is anything, it’s about that.
00:24:19 ►
And I would say, you know, what I’m trying to do, I know what Galen’s trying to do,
00:24:24 ►
we’re trying to expose ourselves to as many of the scenes that we can.
00:24:29 ►
You know, we go to all kinds of weird conferences of academics studying original life,
00:24:35 ►
space weenies that are launching private vehicles, and we go to a military think tank thing.
00:24:41 ►
Then we go to a music festival, and we go to Bulgarian grandmothers eating yogurt
00:24:46 ►
in their kitchens. And the, you know, the Hmong hill tribes of go everywhere. Everyone
00:24:53 ►
experienced this great crescendo and absorb it. I go to Pakistan, you know, I get in natural gas
00:25:00 ►
powered vans and we bump up into the tribal area of the Northwest Frontier
00:25:06 ►
Province.
00:25:07 ►
You know, go and talk to those people, get their point of view.
00:25:11 ►
You know, because they’re in a hot spot and you find they’re the most incredibly hospitable,
00:25:16 ►
decent, trustable people in the world, the Pashtuns.
00:25:22 ►
So this crescendo is happening and I think don’t stay in one corner of it and
00:25:27 ►
develop a worldview, a defensive worldview about it. Go out and do the ultimate in trip exercise,
00:25:35 ►
which is to be in the skin and in the shoes of many other people and see the world from their
00:25:40 ►
perspective. It’s a kind of a Canadian approach. I’m a Canadian. So it’s a Canadian
00:25:46 ►
approach is to get inside
00:25:48 ►
the skin of your conservative
00:25:49 ►
relative. Get inside
00:25:52 ►
the skin of a Pashtun
00:25:53 ►
tribes person and see their
00:25:56 ►
world. It’s actually
00:25:57 ►
if you can do this and if you can reabsorb
00:26:00 ►
who they are and try to see the world the way
00:26:02 ►
they are, that’s one of the most ultimate
00:26:04 ►
trip experiences I’ve ever had.
00:26:06 ►
I put myself on the shelf and now I’m inside of Naim
00:26:10 ►
and I now understand Naim’s world.
00:26:13 ►
It is so refreshing and so powerful to be inside that other person.
00:26:19 ►
And perhaps somewhere in there is a way then to talk to that person
00:26:23 ►
if you truly have stepped in their shoes.
00:26:27 ►
So it’s a bit of a long piece,
00:26:29 ►
but maybe that’s the bonobo and the chimp.
00:26:32 ►
And both are beloved.
00:26:34 ►
I mean, both are powerful.
00:26:36 ►
And they are ours.
00:26:37 ►
We are them.
00:26:39 ►
We can see them in the wild and how they split apart,
00:26:43 ►
but we have both of them.
00:26:46 ►
And the monkeys are pretty darned impressive.
00:26:50 ►
They’re doing some amazing things.
00:26:53 ►
But I just want to acknowledge again that we’re here to, in a sense, conjure the spirit.
00:27:03 ►
We did a lot of work on Terrence McKenna this morning,
00:27:06 ►
but it was often sort of about his personal life
00:27:10 ►
and revealing more about that,
00:27:11 ►
his humanness pulling down the cartoon.
00:27:14 ►
But I wanted to sort of swing back
00:27:16 ►
and say the things for me personally
00:27:18 ►
that I just absolutely loved about Terrence.
00:27:23 ►
And I’m a sort of cosmology geek.
00:27:27 ►
You know, I’m interested in the origin of life,
00:27:29 ►
but I’m interested in the origin of everything.
00:27:31 ►
And there’s a cadre of cosmology geeks around the world.
00:27:36 ►
And these are crazy people, some with training and some without.
00:27:39 ►
And I need desperately more training.
00:27:42 ►
But they try to figure out from the simplest possible model
00:27:47 ►
for the origin of the universe,
00:27:50 ►
and how that, from some very simple rules,
00:27:52 ►
and you remember chaos theory and Ralph Abraham,
00:27:54 ►
he talked about from simple rules you get really complex behaviors.
00:28:00 ►
This is Stephen Wolfram’s ideas and Chris Langton.
00:28:02 ►
But can you come up with a simple way the universe began with a few little twists,
00:28:09 ►
and that’s the only twist you’re allowed,
00:28:11 ►
and can you unravel everything from that point to the matter,
00:28:16 ►
the emergence of star systems and organic molecules and planets and life,
00:28:20 ►
and then consciousness as a smooth transition?
00:28:24 ►
I’ve been working on one of these models for the last two years.
00:28:27 ►
I call it the golden universe.
00:28:29 ►
It’s based on the golden ratio.
00:28:31 ►
But why I love Terence was because he inspired this.
00:28:35 ►
He would go on several long raps where he would talk about
00:28:39 ►
concrescence of novelty or talk about complexification.
00:28:43 ►
He would start from the Big Bang.
00:28:44 ►
He poo-pooed the Big Bang
00:28:46 ►
and thought it was ludicrous
00:28:47 ►
in some of his arguments.
00:28:49 ►
But then he would own it again
00:28:51 ►
and then he would just in literally
00:28:53 ►
in a minute and a half,
00:28:55 ►
he would take you all the way up
00:28:56 ►
through in the most beautiful poetic language
00:28:58 ►
through the organic molecules
00:29:00 ►
and the self-assembly
00:29:01 ►
and the swimming creatures
00:29:03 ►
and the emergence of things on land, et cetera, et cetera, to us
00:29:08 ►
and then our Bing insight.
00:29:11 ►
And so I just loved that, and it’s inspired about 10 years of work.
00:29:16 ►
You know, one of the, he was also a geek about space flight,
00:29:21 ►
and we had long conversations about could you mine asteroids.
00:29:25 ►
And look what’s happening now with these billionaires who put together this this whole consortium to do that
00:29:30 ►
i’m not sure how far they’re going to get but it’s you know he would just love the fact that we’re
00:29:36 ►
we’re that human beings are still thinking about these visionary projects despite everything else
00:29:42 ►
that we’re doing you know wrong or the time we’re wasting on other things.
00:29:47 ►
And I just want to acknowledge me before we take the break that maybe something personally
00:29:51 ►
with you, whether it be an idea or just an approach to living, what really deeply reached
00:29:59 ►
you from Terrence that you’ve continued to work on in your life, whether it be in intellectual pursuit,
00:30:05 ►
and I know where you’ve gone since then.
00:30:10 ►
And it’s just in an inappreciation moment.
00:30:15 ►
And then maybe when we come back after the break,
00:30:18 ►
is that something we could…
00:30:21 ►
I’m the boss.
00:30:23 ►
I thought there was no one in charge
00:30:25 ►
that’s the scary part
00:30:29 ►
it’s scary to be in charge
00:30:32 ►
you don’t want to be in charge
00:30:33 ►
thanks
00:30:36 ►
something is going on here around this workshop
00:30:40 ►
that I thought was important to share with you
00:30:42 ►
the moment that I arrived or Gail and I arrived,
00:30:46 ►
and we checked in, someone came out and said,
00:30:51 ►
oh, you’re the McKenna workshop.
00:30:53 ►
And there’s a whole buzz about this here.
00:30:57 ►
Now, the backdrop here at Esalen, of course,
00:30:59 ►
is there’s this kind of struggle between the management
00:31:01 ►
and there’s this huge psychological struggle that’s going on.
00:31:05 ►
And it’s funny because I thought, you know, we’re doing this workshop at a critical time.
00:31:10 ►
I mean, two weeks ago there was on EsaLeak, somebody was calling for barricading the entry
00:31:16 ►
to this place.
00:31:17 ►
And there’s a group of nine people who have been protesting and meeting in circles by
00:31:22 ►
the pond.
00:31:23 ►
And it’s heavy, what’s going on.
00:31:26 ►
And what we’re doing, I realize,
00:31:28 ►
we scheduled the movie as an open program a year and a half ago
00:31:31 ►
and I put the submission in.
00:31:33 ►
Of course we’ll do an open program
00:31:35 ►
and it became Ken Adams’ movie.
00:31:38 ►
There’s such a buzz about this.
00:31:41 ►
The kitchen staff are coming.
00:31:43 ►
The front people are coming.
00:31:46 ►
Management people are coming, the front people are coming, management people are coming. And somebody just told me that, look, you know, this is back to the tap roots of how
00:31:56 ►
Esalen started, the human potential movement. You guys are referencing, you know, the human drama,
00:32:01 ►
the human circumstance, history, the future of civilization, inner vision.
00:32:10 ►
No pressure.
00:32:11 ►
So, no pressure.
00:32:14 ►
These words are echoing again at Esalen, and I asked John, this wonderful guy, John,
00:32:20 ►
that helps set up all the workshops.
00:32:22 ►
He said, yeah, when Stan Groff left here 10, 12 years ago,
00:32:26 ►
it all went away like a flock of birds.
00:32:29 ►
And I said, well, what’s been going on here since?
00:32:32 ►
And he said, well, we do some nice needlework and cooking classes.
00:32:37 ►
I think that’s a little harsh, but this is old-timers sort of remembering
00:32:41 ►
the incredible intensity and importance
00:32:47 ►
that Esalen felt that it was it was server number one in the human potential
00:32:52 ►
New Age movement server number one it was coming booting up in 1962 50 years
00:32:58 ►
ago and incredible people if you read the story of this place and it didn’t
00:33:04 ►
occur to me I so I asked the person who’s attending the workshop,
00:33:08 ►
she’s here right now, she’s working at the front desk,
00:33:11 ►
and she said, you could propose another one.
00:33:14 ►
I said, well, are we too late for 2013?
00:33:16 ►
She said, no, no, no, it’s pretty flexible.
00:33:18 ►
Why don’t you send it in to Cheryl?
00:33:21 ►
And I said, well, could we expand the program?
00:33:23 ►
We have Terrence as one part of it.
00:33:26 ►
Could we expand the program?
00:33:27 ►
She said, look, if you can get 24 people,
00:33:29 ►
if you can keep getting 24 people in programs,
00:33:34 ►
you can get a second program.
00:33:36 ►
And we really love this kind of thing.
00:33:39 ►
And you’ve included us.
00:33:40 ►
You gave five spots to include Esalen people in your workshop,
00:33:44 ►
and that means so much to us.
00:33:46 ►
We’re almost never
00:33:47 ►
offered that because the workshop
00:33:50 ►
presenters are worried about that extra
00:33:52 ►
money that they would lose.
00:33:54 ►
I said, of course,
00:33:55 ►
this is
00:33:58 ►
done for the Esalen community as well.
00:34:00 ►
So there’s something
00:34:02 ►
very special about this workshop for
00:34:04 ►
Esalen itself
00:34:05 ►
there’s a bridging going on between
00:34:08 ►
the older ones that are in their kind of last workshops
00:34:12 ►
and then there’s kind of middle people
00:34:15 ►
they’re trying to bridge their legacy and we have to be able to hand it off to people in their 20s and 30s
00:34:21 ►
and that’s what Burning Man has done
00:34:23 ►
I want to bring something up that just occurred to me people in their 20s and 30s. And that’s what Burning Man has done.
00:34:28 ►
I want to bring something up that just occurred to me that was in a beautiful Terrence quote
00:34:33 ►
that I pulled out somewhere from a podcast last week.
00:34:37 ►
And Terrence, he said,
00:34:39 ►
I almost never ask the mushroom a question.
00:34:44 ►
But this one time I asked the mushroom a question. But this one time I asked the mushroom,
00:34:48 ►
how can we survive as a species?
00:34:51 ►
How can we make it? And he got a clear answer.
00:34:56 ►
You should procreate only once.
00:35:01 ►
And what the mushroom was telling him is, you have a couple.
00:35:05 ►
The mushroom said, for a time, procreate only one time.
00:35:10 ►
Have one child, as China has done all these years.
00:35:16 ►
And so Terence came out of that and realized it’s so simple, because all these other problems
00:35:22 ►
are driven by one thing thing and one thing alone,
00:35:25 ►
which is increasing population pressure.
00:35:28 ►
When I go to Pakistan, which I’m doing quite frequently these days,
00:35:33 ►
there you are in the Indus Valley, the cradle of civilization,
00:35:37 ►
the oldest complex civilization.
00:35:40 ►
It is a total ecological wasteland, just like Iraq.
00:35:46 ►
And if Egypt didn’t have the Nile it would be just like that
00:35:48 ►
so what human civilization does
00:35:50 ►
is absolutely denude the land
00:35:52 ►
but what has replaced that
00:35:53 ►
is 180 million people
00:35:56 ►
that are still living on this denuded land
00:35:59 ►
running out of water and what not
00:36:00 ►
the strangest thing is though
00:36:03 ►
they’re building apartment complexes,
00:36:07 ►
shopping malls, all the same model we have. Even a country like that that’s under such pressure,
00:36:13 ►
they are building out infrastructure to carry more population because everyone has three,
00:36:18 ►
four, five kids. It’s just what they do. Carry more population, carry more population. So the
00:36:23 ►
land gets more diluted, denuded.
00:36:25 ►
People get into the consumer.
00:36:28 ►
If they’re in the consumer society, they’re more embedded in it.
00:36:32 ►
There’s more machine production of food and goods coming out of China,
00:36:36 ►
et cetera, et cetera, to carry more population.
00:36:38 ►
So these people are now living in less humane, less naturalistic,
00:36:42 ►
more denatured environments.
00:36:44 ►
Look at Shanghai.
00:36:46 ►
500 million people out of poverty in China in the last 30 years.
00:36:51 ►
What that means is they’re living in 50-story apartment blocks.
00:36:55 ►
And they go down, and this is the first generation,
00:36:57 ►
and they go into the shopping mall on the weekend.
00:36:59 ►
They love it.
00:37:00 ►
I mean, everybody’s got a smile on their face that I can see in the big cities in China.
00:37:05 ►
They’re like, it’s fresh and new, but they’re now disconnected.
00:37:09 ►
They’re in this machine world. They’re living in this Azure civilization.
00:37:13 ►
They’ve left the emerald behind, the forest behind.
00:37:16 ►
So if you did, if the mushroom was right and you said one child one one procreation that means each generation
00:37:27 ►
you have the number of people that are pressure on the planet and I think that
00:37:32 ►
we’ve not lived in a time when this happened but in the Black Plague you
00:37:38 ►
know Europe lost between one-third and two-thirds of the population and so
00:37:42 ►
European cities before the Black Plague were veritable rabbit warrants of complex streets,
00:37:49 ►
lack of planning and sanitation, big overpopulation problems.
00:37:54 ►
After the Black Plague, they basically created avenues,
00:37:59 ►
they created sewage systems, plate glass was invented,
00:38:04 ►
kitchen utensils were used, all these transformations.
00:38:08 ►
The scientific revolution happened in the fallout from the Black Plague
00:38:14 ►
because the pressure had been taken off.
00:38:16 ►
There were just fewer people, and for a moment,
00:38:19 ►
they had tremendous new resources that they didn’t, fallow lands.
00:38:24 ►
It was an enormous safety valve that was released.
00:38:29 ►
And so we don’t know what it is like to be in a declining population.
00:38:34 ►
Perhaps Denmark is in that.
00:38:35 ►
I don’t know some European countries, but Italy is.
00:38:40 ►
But even if you have a slowly declining population,
00:38:43 ►
if you have increasing consumption,
00:38:46 ►
it still doesn’t give you the pressure release.
00:38:49 ►
You actually have to have a fairly steep declining population, which is half every generation.
00:38:55 ►
You could do that for four or five generations,
00:38:58 ►
and you’ll see a regeneration of the earth and a whole lot of options open up.
00:39:03 ►
And a lot of wars not fought over declining resources,
00:39:06 ►
water regenerated.
00:39:08 ►
No one has to die for this revolution to happen.
00:39:14 ►
You mentioned mystery experience.
00:39:18 ►
And I thought I’d offer something that kind of
00:39:21 ►
is sort of the source of a myth for me.
00:39:26 ►
And it’s a story that I wrote
00:39:28 ►
in a kind of reverie in the aircraft
00:39:32 ►
flying over Afghanistan about three weeks ago.
00:39:37 ►
And I was leaving a work assignment in Pakistan.
00:39:41 ►
And we were looking down
00:39:42 ►
at the most rugged landscape on the planet. It was
00:39:46 ►
just spectacular landscape. And sometimes when I’ve had that kind of profound experience as I’ve
00:39:54 ►
had in that trip in Pakistan, I just close my eyes and a whole story comes. And so this is the story.
00:40:01 ►
And I think there’s some things we can mine in this for the myth.
00:40:06 ►
Last month I was in Pakistan.
00:40:08 ►
And while leaving on the airplane at dawn, we turned west from Islamabad
00:40:13 ►
and flew high over Afghanistan, the most rugged landscape you can ever imagine,
00:40:19 ►
the graveyard of empires.
00:40:22 ►
Of course, our empire is well situated there. I then closed my eyes and was
00:40:28 ►
overwhelmed by a flash and a visionary journey unfolded. I will now relate to you that journey.
00:40:36 ►
I was with Naim, our Pashtun cook and head of house, and he was at the wheel of the house van.
00:40:43 ►
We were driving out of Islamabad far to the north
00:40:46 ►
into the tribal lands of his family. As he is a Pathan, as they’re called in Pakistan, you would
00:40:54 ►
trust your life to this man. This is what they’re like. We left the chaos of the grand trunk highway
00:41:02 ►
and bumped along the hard through hard scrub and villages, stopped for
00:41:06 ►
tea, as it’s always offered,
00:41:08 ►
and continued higher
00:41:10 ►
and higher. I was tracking
00:41:12 ►
our progress on our iPad’s
00:41:13 ►
GPS map.
00:41:15 ►
I then looked up and was taken aback
00:41:18 ►
by a young man in a green shirt
00:41:19 ►
appearing suddenly in front of
00:41:22 ►
our van. And in this kind of
00:41:23 ►
countryside, you don’t, you know, if somebody’s standing in front of your vehicle,
00:41:27 ►
you’ve got to consider what you’re going to do.
00:41:31 ►
We came to a grinding stop.
00:41:34 ►
He beckoned us out and reached out his hand for my iPad,
00:41:38 ►
saying, that thing can’t take you any further.
00:41:41 ►
Give it to me.
00:41:43 ►
His T-shirt said, Apple genius.
00:41:47 ►
So I thought, well, he’s the man,
00:41:49 ►
so must know, and I gave it up.
00:41:53 ►
The iPad blipped out of existence
00:41:55 ►
like a crashed app.
00:41:57 ►
In its place appeared
00:41:58 ►
a hand-embossed silver cup.
00:42:02 ►
The genius handed this to me wordlessly, and then he himself blipped out of existence.
00:42:10 ►
Naim glanced at the cup and said, get back in van. I now know where we are going.
00:42:17 ►
We climbed higher and higher until the van’s transmission was on the edge of giving out
00:42:22 ►
and we got out to walk. We seemed to walk for days, or was it just a few minutes?
00:42:31 ►
We passed by monkeys fighting over dry berry bushes.
00:42:36 ►
We heard the sound of a stream.
00:42:38 ►
Naeem’s sandaled feet took me to the toe of this stream,
00:42:42 ►
where it seemed to disappear into the ground.
00:42:46 ►
Naeem said, this is seemed to disappear into the ground. Naim said,
00:42:54 ►
this is the water that feeds the world. Feel it on your tongue. I looked down. I did not see flowing water. Instead, there was a rivulet of what seemed like cold, molten white porcelain
00:43:01 ►
rippling over the rocks. I bent down and put my eye just above this snake-like
00:43:07 ►
ribbon and it resolved into flowing liquid tiles, clearly of the Multani style from Multan in
00:43:15 ►
Pakistan. Deeply etched within these turquoise bands was the lettering of the swirling, sacred, shamukati style.
00:43:26 ►
This is what you see on mosques when they have tiles on the mosques,
00:43:30 ►
swirling, swirling, beautiful letters.
00:43:34 ►
I said, I am thirsty, but of this water I cannot partake.
00:43:38 ►
I said, looking back at Naim, then we move on, he said, and walked away.
00:43:48 ►
back at Naim. Then we move on, he said, and walked away. We lost the way of the stream and climbed what now appeared above us as a mountain. We soon rediscovered our water, which was now flowing
00:43:56 ►
wider and faster. Naim stood back as I reached my hand into it, cool molten white tiles flowed past my fingers,
00:44:07 ►
but this time the lettering jostling in the turbulence was Greek.
00:44:12 ►
Iskander, your Alexander, was here, Naim said.
00:44:18 ►
I said, I am now very thirsty, but of this I cannot imbibe.
00:44:24 ►
To which Naim replied, then we must climb very high. I am now very thirsty, but of this I cannot imbibe.
00:44:26 ►
To which Naim replied,
00:44:28 ►
Then we must climb very high.
00:44:33 ►
High on cliffs, Naim paused to look down at the ruins of a village that lay far below us.
00:44:36 ►
He seemed momentarily sad, and I asked,
00:44:39 ►
Where are your people, Naim?
00:44:43 ►
My family are all gone.
00:44:45 ►
Your people sent a hellfire missile,
00:44:48 ►
and the tip found its way under the ribcage of my son
00:44:51 ►
and lifted him to heaven.
00:44:54 ►
We walked on in silence.
00:44:57 ►
The stream now ran fast and wide
00:45:00 ►
like a sheet of blank paper
00:45:02 ►
with an aquamarine border,
00:45:05 ►
no longer carrying words,
00:45:08 ►
but a human figure or a running animal would often flicker past.
00:45:13 ►
Rumi has shaken the rug, says Naim.
00:45:17 ►
Come further if you can, we are coming to the source.
00:45:21 ►
I was becoming very weak by this time,
00:45:24 ►
so I gripped the cup to draw strength from it and
00:45:27 ►
noticed that the engraving was gone. It was now as smooth as skin. Naim stopped before me, turned
00:45:34 ►
and said, still your monkey mind. The source lies behind me. The upwelling source of a pure white liquid brilliance,
00:45:45 ►
the milk of the earth.
00:45:47 ►
No mind inscribed it.
00:45:49 ►
No beliefs colored it.
00:45:52 ►
It was pure emotion, pure love, and pure consciousness in one.
00:45:56 ►
It was the coming to full awakening of our ancestors
00:45:59 ►
before they descended into history.
00:46:02 ►
I looked into Naim’s eyes
00:46:05 ►
and saw that in him
00:46:07 ►
the strength and purity
00:46:08 ►
of that first awakening flowed still.
00:46:13 ►
Naim, are you the last human being
00:46:15 ►
left in the world?
00:46:18 ►
I asked him.
00:46:20 ►
Drink, but do not think, he said,
00:46:24 ►
and I knelt down as if in prayer.
00:46:34 ►
So this is a visionary story in honor of Terence
00:46:39 ►
because, in a sense, is it a new myth
00:46:44 ►
that before we had language,
00:46:47 ►
we had some kind of unity, some kind of purity?
00:46:52 ►
Before we put, and we talked about this this weekend,
00:46:54 ►
before we put symbols on things, we came awake.
00:46:59 ►
Without that, what was human life like?
00:47:03 ►
What was the human spirit like and the mind like when it was all
00:47:07 ►
integrated without the divisions and the taxonomy of words to describe things and separate people
00:47:16 ►
and describe positions and hierarchies? What was it like before we had language, but we had language, we had mind, and we had heart, and we had soul. We did not have language.
00:47:28 ►
And I think of this as this pure, bubbling brilliance.
00:47:32 ►
And this must have been an extraordinary time.
00:47:36 ►
Did it last a thousand years, or a hundred thousand years, or five hundred thousand years?
00:47:41 ►
It must have been an extraordinary time before language or as
00:47:45 ►
language was just coming on. But there’s a thought also that the language of that time
00:47:52 ►
was different. The language of that time was emotion. It was almost like animal sounds,
00:48:00 ►
animal calls. It was a reflection of the natural environment,
00:48:05 ►
but it didn’t describe culture,
00:48:08 ►
because culture was so integral to being
00:48:11 ►
and to the natural environment
00:48:13 ►
that culture hadn’t emerged as a separation from that being.
00:48:18 ►
So is there, this is sort of,
00:48:20 ►
it’s not the stoned ape period,
00:48:22 ►
because in a sense,
00:48:24 ►
if you were so connected to the
00:48:28 ►
savanna, the rainforest, so intimately connected with no barrier, no cultural barrier, no language
00:48:34 ►
barrier between you, you’re in a psychedelic state. You’re in a stone state. You’re high
00:48:40 ►
on that. And the haunting image that was taken last year of the undiscovered tribe in
00:48:46 ►
the Amazon, you probably saw that. Aircraft flew over this three or four thatched huts on a slope
00:48:55 ►
and they came back. Nobody had a camera and they came back and they started shooting pictures. And
00:49:02 ►
by the time they’d come back and then they flew back back it was a few hours later the men were all painted in red ochre
00:49:10 ►
in warrior gear and they were pointing the spears at this aircraft and the women were hidden away
00:49:16 ►
because they had seen the women before are these people existing in that state? Are they, you know, are they in, you can read Matt Palomary’s book, which kind of takes
00:49:30 ►
you there.
00:49:31 ►
You know, how much, how much of a glass veil is between them and their world?
00:49:38 ►
So perhaps we don’t need the stoned ape theory to explain the expansion of consciousness
00:49:44 ►
and the coming to awareness
00:49:45 ►
the natural world was enough to do it just being in the natural world so as soon as you you you
00:49:54 ►
got a little mind and the spark of consciousness you started to notice and to be present more and
00:49:59 ►
more and the world can fill that presence the The world is powerful. It’s more powerful than a trip being totally present in nature.
00:50:08 ►
So our ancestors came to the full flowering of consciousness
00:50:13 ►
in that environment.
00:50:15 ►
And then we invented all this other stuff
00:50:18 ►
and we’ve descended into history in honor of Terence.
00:50:23 ►
So this little parable, this little story
00:50:26 ►
kind of represents that.
00:50:28 ►
And I have to tell you,
00:50:30 ►
there’s something fundamental behind this.
00:50:33 ►
In Pakistan, when you’re in Islamabad,
00:50:36 ►
you’re in this power center
00:50:37 ►
because it sits on the Indus plain
00:50:41 ►
where civilization began.
00:50:44 ►
And two miles north of where we stay
00:50:46 ►
is where the Buddha sat under the tree
00:50:49 ►
in that very spot.
00:50:52 ►
But the whole place is an ecological disaster.
00:50:55 ►
The whole place is denuded.
00:50:56 ►
You’ll drive for miles,
00:50:58 ►
and then you’ll come to a university,
00:51:01 ►
and there’s a single banyan tree.
00:51:03 ►
And it’s the only one left for 100 square miles. And it’s a single banyan tree and it’s the only one left you know for a hundred
00:51:07 ►
square miles and it’s a survivor it’s three thousand years old and you realize this is it
00:51:12 ►
was the garden of humanity and it’s gone and when we did go up to the northwest frontier province
00:51:19 ►
the higher you got and this is an environment where it is the tribal world and they aren’t connected
00:51:27 ►
but they’re being rained on by drone attacks from the sky but in in the middle of all this is is
00:51:35 ►
springs it’s it’s just fantastic and life is still there despite the the deprivations and the denuded
00:51:42 ►
landscape below and the pollution and the wars and the B-52s
00:51:46 ►
and all that stuff that is moving in and out of there,
00:51:50 ►
there’s something there that is so profound.
00:51:53 ►
And these Pathan people, who are the last survivors,
00:51:56 ►
they’re like the jungle people in the Amazon.
00:51:59 ►
They’re holding on.
00:52:00 ►
There’s no electricity in their village.
00:52:03 ►
They’re living in the most hard scrabble you can imagine
00:52:06 ►
but they’re holding on to something that we let go a long time ago
00:52:09 ►
and that’s just a thought
00:52:13 ►
as far as my creation myth
00:52:17 ►
that creation is still going on in these places
00:52:20 ►
these people are still in that original state
00:52:23 ►
and perhaps by visiting them and by taking
00:52:27 ►
ourselves into nature, it’s the ultimate psychedelic high to really be in nature and be in the earth.
00:52:35 ►
And that perhaps is what the plant medicines are telling us. They said, just go back to the forest,
00:52:43 ►
but be present, be aware, and let it in,
00:52:47 ►
and let everything else go, let mind go, let culture go, let words go,
00:52:52 ►
all that, let it go, and just be in nature.
00:52:55 ►
And you’ll find where you came from, and that exquisite time,
00:53:01 ►
the ultimate experience of humanity that we moved away from when all this stuff got invented.
00:53:09 ►
I guess that’s my myth for the day.
00:53:15 ►
And this is something that Terrence would have most prized.
00:53:22 ►
And in fact, we know, can you see it?
00:53:25 ►
If I turn this way, this is a blue morpho.
00:53:31 ►
And I took this photo when I arrived in Peru in October,
00:53:37 ►
and I looked out from my tombo,
00:53:40 ►
and this enormous butterfly was sort of standing there,
00:53:43 ►
and I kind of ignored it.
00:53:44 ►
I was setting up for living there for two weeks.
00:53:48 ►
I looked back, it was still there.
00:53:50 ►
And it had this kind of gray model pattern on the outside
00:53:54 ►
but it was standing there like a sentinel saying, notice me.
00:53:59 ►
And I finally did and then it would do this dance.
00:54:03 ►
It stayed there for over an hour.
00:54:05 ►
And then I realized the forest is teaching me.
00:54:08 ►
The forest is communicating.
00:54:10 ►
So I asked permission, can I take a flash photograph of you?
00:54:15 ►
And it turned this way, and so I did.
00:54:17 ►
And you can see these incredible patterns,
00:54:21 ►
sort of psychedelic patterns, these eyes.
00:54:24 ►
And then I asked it, because what it would do is it would just sort of almost turn its
00:54:31 ►
back to you and then crack the wings.
00:54:34 ►
And inside was this incredible iridescent blue, as Terrence would have called it, this
00:54:43 ►
kind of a color.
00:54:45 ►
I think it’s about ready to go.
00:54:47 ►
There we are. Can you see?
00:54:51 ►
I believe that this blue morpho was saying
00:54:53 ►
there is the common experience of the patterns,
00:54:59 ►
the geometries, etc.,
00:55:02 ►
of what you can experience is most often seen, but rarely seen is the opening,
00:55:08 ►
the full opening to this blue power. It’s the power of the heart, it’s spirit, it’s nature,
00:55:15 ►
it’s the world. It doesn’t have the symbology, it’s just pure, pure blue power. And I think that
00:55:21 ►
pure blue power.
00:55:28 ►
And I think that as we’ve been through our own hero’s journeys here,
00:55:30 ►
and we’ve been through Terrence’s,
00:55:38 ►
we sort of relived a more full, in-depth telling of Terrence’s hero’s journey,
00:55:43 ►
we realize Terrence did, he did open to this blue,
00:55:46 ►
and that that is the promise for all of us.
00:55:50 ►
And since his final message, it’s all about love,
00:55:53 ►
was his greatest ever rap,
00:55:58 ►
it just lasted less than a second or a second and a half.
00:56:02 ►
And it was just a few words, but that was Terrence’s greatest rap.
00:56:08 ►
And it was his last one, and it’s what he gave to us.
00:56:13 ►
And so, Terrence, you ordered the Blue Morpho in the mail when you were 11 years old, and one came,
00:56:16 ►
and it was in the Butterfly Collection,
00:56:18 ►
and it came from a Colombian distributor.
00:56:21 ►
And certainly when he was on this trek,
00:56:24 ►
this is something he would
00:56:25 ►
have wanted to get. You know, he got it in the mail, but that didn’t really count, right?
00:56:32 ►
And in fact, and he did get it, he did find it. So the final, I was going to do a little
00:56:41 ►
thing called where to Now Butterfly Hunter,
00:56:47 ►
and I think this is what it is.
00:56:54 ►
So just honoring Terrence McKenna and honoring his journey,
00:56:56 ►
and it’s a model for our journeys.
00:57:02 ►
And we have now a huge new archive of Terrence McKenna that has never been heard,
00:57:07 ►
so you have perhaps a couple of years of new.
00:57:11 ►
But don’t forget, I think, this image,
00:57:14 ►
because this man, by hook or by crook,
00:57:16 ►
to use an Irish expression,
00:57:19 ►
he made it to the blue. He made it to the heart.
00:57:23 ►
Wonderful. This is coming.
00:57:24 ►
I was hoping this would come out.
00:57:28 ►
When I was in England,
00:57:30 ►
I worked for a magazine
00:57:31 ►
called Encyclopedia Psychedelica,
00:57:33 ►
which was run by a man
00:57:34 ►
named Fraser Clark,
00:57:35 ►
who was definitely a visionary
00:57:36 ►
who saw all of this.
00:57:38 ►
And I got to be in,
00:57:41 ►
Terrence was one of our contributors
00:57:42 ►
to our magazine,
00:57:43 ►
and so I got to have
00:57:44 ►
correspondence with him. And then when I came to America and became Earth Girl, be in uh terrence with one of our contributors to our magazine and so i got to have correspondence
00:57:45 ►
with him and then when i came to america and became earth girl um or i became earth girl in
00:57:50 ►
wales thanks to the mushrooms and um then i went and met him and got to have with mark healy and
00:57:57 ►
got to have a full download about uh zero g and um and it was also then that he’s breaking up with
00:58:03 ►
his wife and so i got to spend a lot of time with him and with finn as that transition was going on and i think the last
00:58:10 ►
time i saw him was we stayed here in the little house right before he was going to do a trilogues
00:58:14 ►
and he was just having these headaches you know that wouldn’t go away but he didn’t really know
00:58:18 ►
what it was yet and just in honor of father’s day in a huge way. And to all the fathers and Los Padres, we are here with the fathers,
00:58:29 ►
meeting the mother, the great ocean of devotion.
00:58:34 ►
So this, when he passed, I started, I do a lot of,
00:58:38 ►
I seem to come through with a lot of songs.
00:58:40 ►
I have a lot of Celtic energy in me, very energy.
00:58:43 ►
So a song and a poem came, but I don’t
00:58:47 ►
have any of those archives with me at this moment. So I just remembered them all and spent yesterday
00:58:51 ►
when I realized you were here in the art barn. And this would be loosely entitled Fabergé Omelettes.
00:58:57 ►
So this is its cover. Okay, so just tuning into the heart, this is an ode.
00:59:01 ►
Let’s cover.
00:59:03 ►
Okay, so just tuning into the heart.
00:59:04 ►
This is an ode.
00:59:08 ►
And I’ll go slow because I can think a bit fast.
00:59:12 ►
Terrence, majestic.
00:59:14 ►
Lightning quick.
00:59:16 ►
Mythopoetic.
00:59:18 ►
Alpha, beta, metamistic.
00:59:21 ►
Mysterium’s messenger.
00:59:24 ►
Captain, pioneer,
00:59:26 ►
far-flung flight seer,
00:59:28 ►
inquiry, nearsight bombardier,
00:59:32 ►
velvet heralding trumpeteer,
00:59:35 ►
thou art so dear.
00:59:37 ►
I know you’re here.
00:59:39 ►
Clear light, high commander,
00:59:43 ►
rebel yell, oh, echo, echo.
00:59:48 ►
Sonar, simulacrum, stimulatum.
00:59:52 ►
Portal, doorway, tubular bells, level swells.
00:59:56 ►
Breaching time wave zero G.
01:00:00 ►
Fairy phenomenally free.
01:00:02 ►
Proclamation prophecy,
01:00:06 ►
where we now be.
01:00:10 ►
Swimming in dream essence,
01:00:12 ►
precious sentience,
01:00:14 ►
lost and found in time-dripping,
01:00:16 ►
coin-candy-flipping elegance,
01:00:19 ►
intelligence agent
01:00:21 ►
source sent you in
01:00:22 ►
on special assignment.
01:00:25 ►
Space elf bard, vocal vanguard, crystal shard, illuminated sun,
01:00:32 ►
thank you, masterful one, for all you’ve done.
01:00:37 ►
Compatriot, astroturf, smurf-a-not,
01:00:41 ►
overmind adventurer, tongue-twisting traveler,
01:00:50 ►
smurf-a-not, overmind adventurer, tongue-twisting traveler, angel dust of ages, he sages the pages of the new mystery, world’s wide word wizard’s guide to ride the millennial on the ball,
01:01:00 ►
transmutational, soul-celebrational, vava-v vibrational love field of extra plenty
01:01:07 ►
twist twix the year 12 meets 20
01:01:11 ►
ah
01:01:15 ►
cuneiformulator genuine
01:01:19 ►
regenerative
01:01:19 ►
genesis generator spaced in syntaxing
01:01:23 ►
spaghetti zones sublingual linguine linguistics tricks,
01:01:28 ►
confronting contextual conceptual conundrums and quirky quantum quandaries, deeply dissolving
01:01:35 ►
boundaries. His winger-lipped, finger-tripped fractal poetries reached out to me. I felt the melt of a priori teas as logos philosophies and neo-neon
01:01:50 ►
novelties surrealisms through the centuries. Resonating brilliance breeze flowed flowering
01:01:57 ►
fresh air of inspiration. Weirdness from worlds of wonder bolts and thunder crack dawn’s awakening
01:02:06 ►
nested birds sing and quietly
01:02:10 ►
question everything
01:02:11 ►
cryptogrammatophonic hooked on phonics
01:02:16 ►
words dribbling from his mouth foaming
01:02:18 ►
forming pictures scent tense cascading
01:02:22 ►
morphing, moving pictures.
01:02:26 ►
Alphabet surfing safari, surprise, talking pictures.
01:02:31 ►
Language, angles, you gauge, Nagualinga, next age.
01:02:38 ►
Ever changing, changeling, channeling, challenging,
01:02:41 ►
glosso alia into the fifth dimension.
01:02:44 ►
Did I mention he’s a magician?
01:02:47 ►
On an exploratory multi-story revival glory expedition, hyperspace monkeys transformed,
01:02:55 ►
transformation, transfer information, launching memes from laser beams into the dream sphere of here. Taking root, they shoot, sprout, blossom, and fruit in fertile flatland. What a grand plan. Well executed indeed.
01:03:22 ►
gracious gardener enchanter
01:03:24 ►
seed planter
01:03:25 ►
thank you for your wonder lust
01:03:28 ►
beyond the
01:03:30 ►
beyonder thrust
01:03:31 ►
catalyzing a chain reaction
01:03:34 ►
of curiosity
01:03:35 ►
in me
01:03:37 ►
mind food, head space
01:03:40 ►
heart truth
01:03:42 ►
your face
01:03:43 ►
onyx eyes blissed the abyss and live to tell the tale, all to scale
01:03:51 ►
from caterpillar to killer whale. Your voice tone, E.T. phones home, butterscotch roller coaster down a toffeed country lane. Rice crispy, piper pan, pen, paper, man as emissary from the fairy kingdom.
01:04:12 ►
Gaia Alliance, vegetalis, devic delivery service, chose you to speak on behalf of the imaginal realm.
01:04:20 ►
At the helm with clean humility, star mapping uncharted territory. Ahoy, matey.
01:04:29 ►
Cheers to your bravery. Thank you for gifting, uplifting, leaving a legacy. Thank you for
01:04:38 ►
enlightening and inviting us to see. We miss and kiss thee.
01:04:48 ►
Blessings on your journey.
01:04:49 ►
Aum.
01:05:33 ►
It’s about five minutes left, and Galen had a song for us. A whole time floating in the sky Blessing all the mushrooms
01:05:40 ►
Blessing butterflies Like a blue-eyed butterfly We feel you in the air
01:05:52 ►
We see you in the light love we
01:06:05 ►
meet you
01:06:07 ►
in
01:06:09 ►
the beauty
01:06:11 ►
we know
01:06:15 ►
you
01:06:16 ►
in the
01:06:19 ►
stream
01:06:20 ►
in our
01:06:23 ►
hearts floating in the Feel in our hearts
01:06:25 ►
Floating in the sky
01:06:31 ►
Blessing all the sisters
01:06:37 ►
Blessing all the brothers I hope they’re floating way up high
01:06:50 ►
Blessing all the allies
01:06:57 ►
Blessing all the others
01:07:01 ►
We feel you in this air.
01:07:11 ►
We see you in this life.
01:07:20 ►
We feel you in our dreams
01:07:28 ►
We know you in the dreams in our hearts
01:07:51 ►
Our hope turns floating in the sky
01:08:07 ►
A hotel’s floating in the sky A hotel’s floating way up high
01:08:17 ►
A hotel’s floating in the sky.
01:08:29 ►
A whole dance floating in the sky.
01:08:43 ►
Thank you all for being here.
01:08:46 ►
I feel like you are family.
01:08:49 ►
We are a clan of the larger tribe, and I hope we stay in touch.
01:08:54 ►
Be well. Safe journey.
01:08:56 ►
Thank you for being here.
01:08:58 ►
Hope.
01:09:01 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:09:03 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:09:09 ►
Well, there’s not much that can be said to add to the tributes by Earth Girl and Galen.
01:09:15 ►
It was a lovely way to close our weekend workshop,
01:09:18 ►
and I really appreciate the work that went into both of those pieces.
01:09:22 ►
And, of course, all of the work that Bruce did to make the entire weekend possible.
01:09:27 ►
In my next podcast, I’ll hopefully have more to say about the comments that have started
01:09:32 ►
coming in regarding our FindTheOthers.net project that I mentioned in my previous podcast.
01:09:39 ►
Hopefully, you’ll be able to add your own thoughts about that before long.
01:09:42 ►
But if you surf on over to the Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us, and
01:09:50 ►
check out the comments for my previous podcast, number 323, you’ll see that some interesting
01:09:56 ►
ideas and offers of help are already taking form. One final thing I’d like to mention
01:10:02 ►
is that just now you heard Earth Girl talk about
01:10:05 ►
spending some time in the UK
01:10:07 ►
with Fraser Clark
01:10:08 ►
and in my opinion Fraser was
01:10:10 ►
one of the key people who carried
01:10:13 ►
the torch all the way from the hippies through the
01:10:15 ►
rave scene sadly
01:10:17 ►
Fraser died a couple of years ago
01:10:19 ►
but you can still hear two of his talks
01:10:21 ►
here in the salon and I’ll link
01:10:23 ►
to them in the program notes for this podcast
01:10:24 ►
and in fact in the talk that Fraser gave at Stanford University, which
01:10:30 ►
is my podcast number 45, and it’s titled Rave Culture and the End of the World as We Know
01:10:36 ►
It, well, in that talk, Fraser also mentions the other person that Earth Girl spoke about,
01:10:41 ►
Mark Healy. In his talk, Fraser credits Mark with being one
01:10:46 ►
of the key people who brought raves from the UK to San Francisco. And Mark has promised me that
01:10:52 ►
he’ll be sending a recording of one of the talks that he’s been traveling around and giving lately,
01:10:56 ►
and I can play it here in the salon. And I’m really looking forward to hearing it myself,
01:11:01 ►
because Mark has an extremely broad range of experience, not just in the rave community, but in a host of other areas as well. Every time I’ve
01:11:11 ►
talked with Mark, spent some time with him, I have come away with a whole raft of new information
01:11:15 ►
about many topics that I suspect will also be of great interest to you. Oh, and I should also
01:11:22 ►
mention that I’ve been promised a copy of a recording
01:11:25 ►
that Terrence McKenna made at Fraser’s Megatriplice Club in London, and I think that was made on the
01:11:32 ►
night that Earth Girl first met the bard McKenna. So we’ve got some interesting new material heading
01:11:37 ►
our way. Now, depending on when you are listening to this podcast, if the Burning Man Festival is
01:11:44 ►
still underway, you might want to check
01:11:45 ►
the links on my Planque Norte webpage,
01:11:48 ►
which I’ll link to in today’s
01:11:50 ►
program notes, because
01:11:51 ►
there may be some live video feeds
01:11:54 ►
of a few of the Planque Norte talks,
01:11:56 ►
and if it looks like that’s going to happen
01:11:58 ►
and I hear about it in time, I’ll be announcing
01:11:59 ►
it on that webpage.
01:12:02 ►
And finally, if you’re going to the
01:12:04 ►
burn and make it to camp above
01:12:06 ►
the limit at 915 and B,
01:12:08 ►
B as in Bravo,
01:12:10 ►
you might even be able to catch
01:12:12 ►
me Skyping in for a question and answer
01:12:14 ►
session or something like that.
01:12:16 ►
Right now, it looks like that will take place
01:12:18 ►
at 7pm on Thursday,
01:12:20 ►
which will be August 30th,
01:12:22 ►
2012, in case you’re
01:12:24 ►
hearing this in some sort of a time warp.
01:12:26 ►
But I’ll post that on the Palenque Norte webpage of mine also as soon as it’s finalized.
01:12:32 ►
If I get the word actually right now that I think of it.
01:12:36 ►
Everybody’s out there on the playa.
01:12:37 ►
It’s Sunday morning, and I know the burn starts tomorrow,
01:12:40 ►
but most of the people involved in Camp Above the Limit have been there for almost a week
01:12:44 ►
setting up all the structures.
01:12:46 ►
So I don’t know if I’ll hear from them or not, but I’ll be ready to Skype in whenever
01:12:51 ►
they find me.
01:12:52 ►
Anyway, I wish I could be there in person, but I’ll be watching the live video feed from
01:12:57 ►
the Playa every day.
01:12:59 ►
And you can go to BurningMan.com and you’ll be able to find a link to that feed, I think.
01:13:04 ►
And hopefully I’ll even be there via Skype for a bit.
01:13:08 ►
But in any event, I wish you all a wonderful burn, whether you are there in person
01:13:12 ►
or only in spirit, like me. And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:13:16 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.