336 - 2012 Re-visioned

Program Notes

This podcast features my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl”, also, he is widely known as a speaker and writer about many things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany Seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and his merry band of psychonauts would hold forth each January. In this talk, one that he gave at the Palenque Norte lectures during the 2012 Burning Man festival, Daniel follows the format of other psychedelic luminaries and lets the audience guide the direction of the lecture through their questions. Among other topics that Daniel covers are 2012, consciousness, the Occupy Movement, and possibilities for the future.

Direct link to video of this talk

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And so here we are,

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together in the Psychedelic Salon at the end of this, the 21st day of December in the year 2012.

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So, are you where you thought you would be and doing what you thought you’d be doing 10 years ago? I have to admit that 10 years ago, when some friends suggested renting the Chanca Hotel near the ruins at Palenque, Mexico,

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where we’d all first met years earlier, well, that sounded pretty good back then.

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But as the 2012 meme morphed from a little private inside story into a big Hollywood event,

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we all kind of just lost interest in it, I guess.

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The simple fact was that with all of the

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publicity about 2012 and the Mayans, we figured that the last place we wanted to be for the winter

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solstice of 2012 was in the middle of a mob of new agers and hippies who were sure to find their way

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there as well. However, tonight my wife and I had a much better celebration. We took our two youngest granddaughters to their first drumming circle.

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And while 50 years from now they probably won’t remember anything about the hoopla of 2012,

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well, they may at least remember their first drumming circle.

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Now, as I promised in my previous podcast,

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we’re going to acknowledge the 2012 winter solstice today by

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featuring my friend Daniel Pinchbeck as our guest speaker. As you know, Daniel wrote a book titled

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2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and also he’s widely known as a speaker and writer about many

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things psychedelic and esoteric. However, I know him best as a fellow alumnus of the Entheobotany

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seminars at Palenque, where Terence McKenna and his merry band of psychonauts would hold

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forth each January. Now, after first meeting Daniel in Palenque years ago, the next time

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I bumped into him was at Center Camp at Burning Man, and we actually bumped into one another

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there in Center camp several different

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years running and each time it seemed to be the same. I’d just gotten up and was stopping by for

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my morning cup of coffee and Daniel was just coming in from another all-night party. He had a

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little different schedule than what I had at Burning Man and if I can remember it I’ll post one of those

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pictures that I took of him on one of

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those mornings.

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And as you know, you can find these program notes where I’ll post the picture.

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It’ll be via psychedelicsalon.us is how you get there.

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Now, what I like about the photo that I plan on posting is that in it, Daniel has a great

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big smile.

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And if you know him, you know that Daniel is somewhat serious much of the time.

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But having seen him in action at 3 or 4 in the morning after a night of dancing,

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well, I’m here to attest to the fact that he actually is a really fun guy to be around.

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Now, what we are about to listen to is Daniel’s presentation

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at the 2012 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man Festival. And what I really like about this particular talk is that Thank you. appearances each year, I think that this is probably the best format to keep their message

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up to date and always interesting. So right now we’re going to join Daniel Pinchbeck as he

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discusses topics that range from 2012, consciousness, and the Occupy movement,

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to possibilities for the future. Hi everyone. Welcome to Palenque Norte Day 2 Continued.

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We got a great lineup this afternoon.

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Daniel Pinchbeck’s about to speak, and we’ll have John Allen, Rick Doblin, and others later tonight.

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So thank you for joining us.

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I wanted to say a little note here about this cool chandelier we have in the center

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of the cavern with us. This is actually Timothy Leary’s chandelier that was generously given to

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us to use this week by Bruce Dahmer. We have that to continue more psychedelic discussions under.

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So I’m sure many of you already know who Daniel is.

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Daniel Pinchbeck is a New York Times bestselling author

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of Breaking Open the Head in 2012, Return of Quetzalcoatl.

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He’s also the editorial director of Reality Sandwich

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and an iconic figure in the recent psychedelic movement.

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So without further ado, here’s Daniel.

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Thank you. figure in the recent psychedelic movement. So without further ado, here’s Daniel.

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Hello, does that work? Yeah. So yeah, I was kind of thinking, I was thinking I might experiment and do this more as a largely Q&A or discussion. I think the same ideas will emerge. And you know,

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probably some of you here, I mean, how many people here know my work to some extent?

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So if you’ve thought about the ideas and so on and you have really a question that compelled you or that you kept thinking about,

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I thought I would give you the opportunity to ask that and have a little bit more of a back and forth than is usual for these formats.

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But I’ll start just by introducing myself and my work a little bit.

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as usual for these formats. But I’ll start just by introducing myself and my work a little bit.

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So yeah, I’m the author of a number of books. The two books, Breaking Open the Head,

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came out in 2002, and it was about psychedelic shamanism. I visited different cultures around the world, like the Bwidi tribe in West Africa, who use iboga in their ceremonies, which is now

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being used in the West as an experimental treatment for addictions,

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especially heroin addiction.

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And I wrote about ayahuasca in that book.

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I hung out with a tribe in the Ecuador called the Sequoia tribe, worked with them.

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Went down to Mexico, to Oaxaca, to visit one of Maria Sabina’s descendants

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where the mushrooms were rediscovered in the 50s by Gordon Wasson.

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I also wrote about Burning Man

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in the book. I looked at a lot of ideas

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like Terence McKenna’s ideas

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of the archaic revival.

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The book was really an effort.

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I started as a

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kind of, grew up as a scientific

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materialist in an artistic

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background, but I had no spiritual

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belief system. I thought

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that consciousness was just brain-based, and ultimately this led me to a kind of nihilistic

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feeling of kind of like meaninglessness and emptiness. So I decided to see if I could really

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make an inquiry into my own skepticism and what would be kind of like, you know, the tools that

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I could use for that. And at that point, I remembered my psychedelic experiences from

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college, so I decided to make that my my area of inquiry because those had

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been the most profound you know door opening experiences that i’d ever had um so what happened

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during the course of writing breaking open the head there’s plenty of room guys if you want to

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come up front or whatever you know um maybe leave a little corridor in case people keep coming in

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um what happened during the course of writing Breaking Open the Head

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is I had a series of experiences, personal experiences,

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with psychedelics and shamanism,

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and then also kind of filtering into my dream life, my ordinary life,

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that over time really convinced me that the shamanic worldview had a lot of validity

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and that there were these other realms of the psyche that our modern culture had denied and suppressed.

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And then that really led me to think that that happened through even kind of classically kind of occult experiences of, you know, incredible synchronicities or, you know, things manifesting in strange ways and so on.

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or things manifesting in strange ways and so on.

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So I covered that in the book.

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And as I said, I began skeptically,

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and it was just step by step having an experience,

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kind of measured against things that I read,

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against other people who I met.

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I began to collect so many anecdotes about people who’d had similar type experiences.

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And ultimately, it led me to a profound shift in my worldview,

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where I recognized that the materialist scientific paradigm was a little bit stuck,

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and that we, in a sense, the modern West had kind of neglected, suppressed,

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even violently repressed these other dimensions of the psyche.

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And if you go back through the history of Europe and so on,

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you look at the witch hunts in the Middle Ages, and the witches were like the wise women

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who possessed the knowledge of working with visionary plants and possessed kind of access

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to these like intuitive and visionary domains. They were, you know, hunted out, you know,

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tried to be driven to extinction. And similarly, when we went on our imperialist missions,

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you know, if we found these intact shamanic cultures,

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we would often destroy the cultures, destroy the shamans, even destroy the knowledge

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as we burned all the books of the Aztecs and the Maya, pretty much.

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So while writing Breaking Open the Head, I discovered that a lot of thought had sort of constellated

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around this idea that we were heading towards a kind of transformation

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in planetary consciousness and planetary civilization.

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And Terence McKenna was one thinker around this who threw a whole series of psychedelic experiences

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that he had kind of beamed into this idea that there was acceleration taking place

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of creativity and novelty, technological evolution, destruction of the biosphere,

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that somehow this was going to culminate almost like a change of state, which he called the

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singularity or the eschaton. And I guess one way to think about it, a friend of mine used the

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metaphor recently of like, you know, water sort of slowly heating up, you know, sort of going into

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finally a bubbling state and then turning into gas, you know. So you look at like human history as the warming up phase, you know, perhaps we’re now

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in that bubbling phase. And we don’t really know what the steam phase is like yet, but we’re

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beginning to get like faint intimations, you know. So yeah, so I looked at Terence’s work and

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Jose Arguelles was one of the big thinkers on the Mayan calendar.

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And in a sense, I think much more systemically than McKenna understood that, you know,

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we tend to have this idea that these indigenous civilizations didn’t really possess knowledge.

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They had myth or folktale or legend that somehow they hadn’t really developed, you know, the level of sophisticated thought that we’ve developed.

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And looking at these cultures from a different angle, like Egypt or the Maya, you know,

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it may be that they actually had like a profound spiritual science or even different aspects of a spiritual science.

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And for the Maya, the particular focus of it seems to have been understanding this, let’s say, like spiraling nature of time,

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these cycles that lead to new cycles, what

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they actually call different world ages, or different worlds.

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So they talked about the transition from the age of the fifth sun to the age of the sixth

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sun as a way to think about this time, or the Hopi talk about the fourth world to the

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fifth world.

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So learning about all this stuff really led me to

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think about, you know, really want to study this idea of, you know, was there some type of

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transformation coming? You know, how many people here sort of feel that that’s the case, you know,

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yeah, that we’re kind of in this accelerating, you know, we recognize that it’s unsustainable,

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that either we’re going to crash land and have a desolate scenario, or we’re going to make some rapid transformation or evolution in a direction that we don’t quite

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know or can anticipate yet. So yeah, so my second book was called 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

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And for, you know, four or five years, I really began to, you know, study these indigenous

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prophecies, and then also look at a lot of Western thinkers, because I felt like, you know, study these indigenous prophecies, and then also look at a lot of Western thinkers,

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because I felt like, you know, to take these ideas and make them understandable, comprehensible,

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we had to find ways of articulating them, you know, in our own language, you know, so then

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philosophy became really key to me looking at thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger and Carl

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Jung and Rudolf Steiner and, and a whole bunch of other ones who provided kind of access points,

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ways that we could see these articulations.

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And then you can also sort of integrate the different ways

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people are looking at this transformation process

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and begin to see that they’re actually saying the same things

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from different angles.

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So that was a lot of the work of 2012 was my own personal journey

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exploring the prophecies in different ways,

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which took me, for instance,

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back into psychedelics,

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working with the Santo Daime in Brazil,

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which is an ayahuasca-based religion

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that also has a kind of prophetic understanding

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of this time that’s very similar.

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It took me to the crop circles in england

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uh which was another phenomenon that at first i was extremely skeptical about i wrote a piece

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about them for wired i began to you know interview all these people who’d been researching them

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in great depth and then i was able to then go and spend uh you know a summer down there and visit

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in different formations just as they appeared they appeared interview the whole range of people involved with the phenomenon

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including artists who claim to be making them

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but ending up through really trying to be as diligent

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and scrupulous about the research as possible

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basically convinced that they couldn’t entirely

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be a human made phenomenon

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that some other type of consciousness or intelligence in the cosmos

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was communicating to us through those formations.

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So one thing that’s fun about where I’m at is I’m not connected to the academy

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or the mainstream media, so I have the freedom as a thinker

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to explore stuff that would implode most people’s careers

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or would just not get them allowed to speak.

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So I take that very seriously and keep trying to delve into

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these areas of cultural resistance. And usually when I

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see a certain reaction, almost like a negative or hostile reaction,

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sometimes I’m like, oh, that’s almost a good sign because it means that there’s

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hitting a nerve there because everything should be up for, you know, debate and discussion and inquiry, you know.

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So, yeah. So in 2012, I ended up, you know, developing the theory that what we’re undergoing, you know, is not, you know, the end of the world or some type of cataclysmic destruction.

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We may see some of that.

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We may see more and more of it.

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But really it’s about a transformation of planetary consciousness and planetary civilization.

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I resonate with a lot of the ideas of people like Buckminster Fuller and Barbara Marx Hubbard

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who talks about us making a shift from just being in the inertia of the evolutionary process

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to reaching another level of consciousness where we become co-creative with the evolutionary process,

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which means that we recognize it’s like we move from unconscious to conscious choice.

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And from that position, we can rethink and redesign society

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so that it really supports biodiversity and local communities and kind

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of a whole holistic approach to healing the ills of the planet.

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And that was very much the focus of a documentary that I made also called 2012 Time for Change,

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where we took the kind of philosophical ideas from my book, which we’re looking at kind of these different world incarnations as forms of consciousness and trying to kind

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of identify what this next level of consciousness would be.

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You know, for instance, how it might involve like a shift in our perception of time and

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space, you know.

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And I didn’t want to go that deep.

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I really did want to have questions.

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I’m not going to talk for too much

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longer I mean where that’s led me

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since you know writing that book

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so it’s all been like for me it’s been a very

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logical and rational process you know from

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recognizing you know that

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you know going through the psychedelic

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initiation process recognizing

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that we suppressed all these dimensions

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of psychic and shamanic reality

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really almost the most interesting aspects of being human, maybe.

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And that, you know, we now, you know, potentially could reintegrate, you know,

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the mystical and the shamanic, you know, into our modern scientific technoculture

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as part of a transition in worldview and a transition in how we live on the planet.

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And so having sort of worked through that,

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you know, then the next question for me is like, it no longer seemed to be enough to just be a

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writer or a thinker or whatever. I wanted to figure out how I could assist in this transition

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process. And that led me to start a company, Evolver, which has both a non-profit and a

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for-profit side. And it really began because I began to get so many incredible emails

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from people who had their own stories similar to mine

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or very profound ideas that were mind-blowing.

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And I felt they were just sending them to me directly

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because there was no forum in the media

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that would actually really hold the information well

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and allow for a dialogue to develop

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around it. So we created a web

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magazine, Reality Sandwich, kind of

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just as a prototype and a test and we saw it

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pick up really quickly and that so

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many people had incredible essays

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and articles to publish.

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We never paid anybody for anything.

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And so that blossomed

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very quickly and then we began to realize

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that everybody who was reading the articles

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really wanted to find each other

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so that kind of led us to start Evolver

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as a kind of social networking scaffolding

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and we began to think

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about well how do you

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basically we have

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the biggest problem on earth is I think a consciousness

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problem and people

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aren’t even aware of all

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the types of, most people don’t even know what sustainability is really and people aren’t even aware of all the types of, like most people don’t even

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know what sustainability is really

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and I don’t even like that concept, I think that concept

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is already in the rear view mirror but most people

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haven’t even gotten to that point, so how are we

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going to, we see that the media

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systemically suppresses

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helpful and valuable information

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and the government

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is not going to help us out and the corporations

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are not going to help us out, so corporations are not going to help us out.

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So there would need to be some type of a civil society self-organization to, you know, really raise consciousness to, you know, create to make sure that people were kind of reeducated around a whole set of new principles and ideas.

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You know, so that’s what we started with Evolver, the non-profit, which is called the Evolver Network.

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The tag is building community for the new planetary culture. So it’s kind of using a fractal model where these groups start. We give them some direction from above. We do monthly

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events that are around different themes. But it’s not necessary that every group follow those themes.

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It’s really up to the local organizers to be receptive and responsive to what’s going to work in their community.

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So if somebody’s in Brownsville, Texas, showing a movie like DMT, The Spirit Molecule,

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no one’s even going to have a context for even thinking about that.

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But they could begin an Evolver group where they’re teaching people how to grow some of their own food, you know, or basic nutrition so they’re not always just eating, like, you know, starch

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and junk food and, you know, bad meat or whatever.

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You know, so really trying to meet people where they are and then evolve their consciousness

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and open them to, you know, a whole set of new possibilities and really seeing that,

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you know, as potentially extremely difficult

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this transition is going to be in the next few years,

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it could also be really amazing.

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And in a sense, most people have sort of,

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they’ve gone to sleep or they’ve allowed rust to cover over their souls.

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And it’s only by being forced into this crisis,

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maybe, that we’re all going to be forced to scrub off the rust.

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I’ve seen since coming to Burning Man

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from the beginning that

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in a way what you have of people at Burning Man

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are kind of like the

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ultimately may become kind of like

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the planetary emergency

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recuperation

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society or something.

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The ones who are going to have to go

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to different communities to become ambassadors for these types of ideas and principles

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and practices and really do the work to communicate

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and convey them to people who haven’t yet been exposed or don’t understand

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yet. So let me take a question. I can go in so many

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different directions, but if somebody has something they really want to ask me, they should

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just raise their hand. Yeah, yeah go ahead take the mic take the mic you were saying

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that consciousness consciousness may be one of the most pressing needs right now and it seems to me

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that overpopulation is a major problem and and that is being funded by the corporate religions

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or however you want to call that.

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And you never hear it mentioned anywhere.

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And what can be done about overpopulation and sustainability?

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Well, I mean, probably the best way to begin to address overpopulation is to equalize and liberate women in societies around the world.

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Because as soon as women’s power approaches that of men, the birth rate starts to decline rapidly to below replacement levels.

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And I think that, I mean, I’m a little bit leery around making population the big issue because that can also quickly turn into a kind of elitist thing like, you know, who gets to survive or whatever.

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I mean, at the moment, you know, we’re using the resources of the planet incredibly inefficiently.

00:21:55 ►

You know, like, I mean, this was Buckminster Fuller’s, you know, whole thing was that, you know, we really have the resources to, you know, to create, you know, a decent way of life and being for everybody on earth if the resources

00:22:09 ►

are allocated differently. So for instance, in New York City, we interviewed these aquaponics

00:22:15 ►

people for my film, and they said that if you had green roofs all over New York, you could be

00:22:19 ►

growing like 80% of the food for the city right there. At the moment, the average morsel of food

00:22:24 ►

is traveling 2,000 miles to get to the city.

00:22:27 ►

So that’s just incredibly inefficient.

00:22:30 ►

So we don’t even really know if we had the co-creative capacity

00:22:38 ►

to redesign our systems

00:22:40 ►

so that they were actually functioning efficiently,

00:22:43 ►

maybe we could support 7 billion.

00:22:46 ►

Maybe we would still see that population go down because a lot of those children are being

00:22:50 ►

born out of desperate circumstances which need to be addressed.

00:22:55 ►

One of the ways of thinking about this that I really love is from a book called Spontaneous

00:23:02 ►

Evolution by Steve Berman, a political scientist, and Bruce Lipton, a cell biologist.

00:23:08 ►

And their hypothesis is that, you know,

00:23:12 ►

we’re kind of reaching an evolutionary threshold

00:23:16 ►

where we’re going to self-realize humanity as one collective organism,

00:23:21 ►

you know, in a symbiotic relationship with the earth.

00:23:24 ►

You know, and they look at that in parallel with the evolution of all sorts of ecosystems,

00:23:30 ►

which when they’re immature ecosystems are marked by competition and aggression and territoriality.

00:23:35 ►

But once they find a way to synergize or become symbiotic, they go into a different mode.

00:23:42 ►

And the example they use is our own bodies

00:23:45 ►

which are these vast colonies of microorganisms

00:23:48 ►

that somehow at a certain point in the evolutionary process

00:23:51 ►

instead of competing they began to collaborate

00:23:53 ►

and form these more complex organs

00:23:55 ►

so our bodies are these masterpieces of symbiosis

00:23:59 ►

and you don’t have the liver attacking the lymph nodes

00:24:03 ►

and so on

00:24:04 ►

so the idea would be

00:24:06 ►

that if we were to reach this, attain

00:24:08 ►

the self-realization of humanity as one

00:24:10 ►

singular organism, we would

00:24:12 ►

rethink all the flows

00:24:14 ►

of resources in

00:24:16 ►

an efficient way.

00:24:18 ►

So we can go more into that,

00:24:20 ►

but I think that’s a helpful way to think about it.

00:24:22 ►

Oh, and the other thing I wanted to say about it is

00:24:24 ►

we also don’t know exactly the destiny of what’s up.

00:24:26 ►

I mean, Alan Watts used to talk about how, you know, in a way, just in the same way the apple tree apples,

00:24:33 ►

like it’s natural for the apple tree to create an abundance of apples, you know, the earth peoples.

00:24:38 ►

The earth seems to like peopling.

00:24:40 ►

Well, maybe the earth is peopling in the same way an apple tree apples, because those seeds are ultimately going to go to other fields

00:24:48 ►

and other places. Maybe we are meant to become a space-faring

00:24:52 ►

species and terraform and colonize other worlds. What seems like

00:24:56 ►

a surplus of people now might have a whole purpose in the larger scheme of things.

00:25:02 ►

Any thoughts on consciousness itself,

00:25:04 ►

whether it might be top down or bottom up

00:25:07 ►

or what it is yeah well that’s a great question well i mean i i guess uh my my sort of ultimately

00:25:13 ►

where i arrived in terms of my own mystical you know perspective was was pretty much identical

00:25:18 ►

to you know vedanta which is hindu mysticism and this idea that there’s ultimately one consciousness

00:25:25 ►

that in order to learn about its creative capacities,

00:25:30 ►

fragments itself into these separate individual identities,

00:25:35 ►

which then explore and discover different aspects of the whole.

00:25:41 ►

That would be the opposite of evolution then, top-down.

00:25:44 ►

Well, it’s not really the opposite.

00:25:46 ►

I think also part of the shift in our way of thinking is from dualities to polarities.

00:25:53 ►

Dualities it’s like black or white.

00:25:55 ►

Polarities are like the yin yang symbol where you have the black has some white in it and

00:25:59 ►

the white has some black in it.

00:26:00 ►

So the opposites include each other and mesh with each other.

00:26:04 ►

So you definitely have bottom evolution happening.

00:26:07 ►

But at the same time, yeah, you may have – and this is what Amit Goswami, who’s a physicist and a kind of Indian thinker, wrote a book called The Self-Aware Universe.

00:26:24 ►

Aurobindo’s idea is that there’s like a, you know, a sort of an underlying consciousness,

00:26:31 ►

which is organizing itself back to that kind of original freedom that it had by using kind of like, you know, the hardware imprints of the physical form and the software imprints

00:26:35 ►

of the mind, and then iterating and evolving itself so that it rediscovers its own original

00:26:42 ►

creative freedom, you know.

00:26:44 ►

And Aurobindo talked about that as a shift

00:26:46 ►

into what he called the supramental condition.

00:26:49 ►

So that would be another way of thinking about

00:26:51 ►

what this transition could mean,

00:26:54 ►

which doesn’t mean it’s going to happen December 21st, 2012.

00:26:57 ►

I think we’re seeing the gathering impetus in this area.

00:27:04 ►

And it’s just because we become more aware of it,

00:27:06 ►

we also can help guide it in a way.

00:27:09 ►

One of my favorite quotes is by Alan Watts.

00:27:11 ►

He said, the universe is God playing hide-and-seek with himself.

00:27:15 ►

Yeah, totally.

00:27:16 ►

Question back here?

00:27:21 ►

In your book, 2012 2012 you were talking

00:27:25 ►

I haven’t read it recently

00:27:28 ►

but I remember there were some parts in it

00:27:30 ►

where you were saying well this is going to happen

00:27:31 ►

in 2009 or this is going to happen

00:27:34 ►

in 2011

00:27:35 ►

and maybe it didn’t happen

00:27:37 ►

are you disappointed with some of the things

00:27:39 ►

maybe that haven’t occurred

00:27:40 ►

are you keeping a scorecard

00:27:42 ►

how do you feel about

00:27:44 ►

if you go back and look at the book I talked about Kalamon that haven’t occurred? Or are you keeping a scorecard? Or how do you feel about that?

00:27:46 ►

If you go back and look at the book,

00:27:48 ►

I mean, I talked about Kalaman,

00:27:50 ►

but I actually critiqued his ideas because he was saying that there was going to be this,

00:27:52 ►

you know, that the mind calendar

00:27:53 ►

actually was going to end in November 2011

00:27:55 ►

and there would be collective enlightenment at that point.

00:27:58 ►

And I actually kind of put that down in the book.

00:27:59 ►

But I did end up, you know, kind of resonating.

00:28:03 ►

The book came out in 2006, you know, with the idea that we’d see a financial crash in 2008.

00:28:08 ►

And we did.

00:28:09 ►

And actually a bunch of friends of mine who were, you know, even in finance were actually quite impressed that, like, I, you know, hooked into that.

00:28:14 ►

You know, so I think the book, I stand by it.

00:28:17 ►

You know, I feel that it’s, you know, I, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we’re seeing this evolutionary process accelerating on so many levels.

00:28:28 ►

And we see that even in something like the Occupy movement.

00:28:32 ►

I thought it was a really fascinating piece of this evolutionary process being exposed, in a sense.

00:28:39 ►

Because in New York, Occupy know, was seen as a protest movement.

00:28:46 ►

And the media actually, you know, obviously did a lot of distortion around it and so on.

00:28:51 ►

But actually it was much more a process movement.

00:28:53 ►

And what was happening was really an effort to figure out what is this next level of social organism or social life form that has to emerge, you know, from this over-rigidified structure, you know,

00:29:08 ►

of this capitalist, you know, post-industrial disaster, you know. So in that little square of park, they had, like, you know, recycling, greywater, you

00:29:13 ►

know, decision-making, open decision-making, a library, a meditation and a spirituality

00:29:18 ►

center, you know, music area.

00:29:19 ►

It was like they’d created a new cell, cell you know in some future social organism you know

00:29:26 ►

and and it was like just breaking up through through the crust you know of the of the current

00:29:31 ►

situation and then it was of course stomped down you know brutally you know but that maybe is also

00:29:36 ►

part of part of the process and that is going to somehow that energy maybe under some other name i

00:29:41 ►

don’t even think the name is is important or, you know, whatever. But you could see that this next thing is seeking to constellate, you know.

00:29:48 ►

And I think we’ll see another, you know, push in that direction over the next, you know, who knows, months or years, you know.

00:29:55 ►

Are you working on any books right now?

00:29:58 ►

Yeah, I mean, I have a book that’s long overdue about, you know, pretty much about this whole idea of how this shift into this next phase

00:30:07 ►

of planetary civilization could occur, and even a strategy for it, which is similar to

00:30:13 ►

what I was just talking about with Evolver, which is really you need some kind of civil

00:30:16 ►

society infrastructure that self-organizes and raises consciousness and creates a participatory

00:30:22 ►

mode of engagement where people feel like responsible

00:30:26 ►

agents in a planetary community

00:30:28 ►

rather than ego-based

00:30:30 ►

competitors seeking their short-term gain.

00:30:33 ►

the book got delayed

00:30:36 ►

because of the work on Evolver

00:30:38 ►

which has taken a lot of effort

00:30:40 ►

on my part. Yeah, thanks for Evolver. It’s a great

00:30:42 ►

site. Thank you.

00:30:45 ►

More questions or thoughts or comments? Yeah. for my part. Yeah, thanks for Evolver. It’s a great site. More

00:30:45 ►

questions or thoughts or comments?

00:30:47 ►

Yeah.

00:30:50 ►

So what would you

00:30:51 ►

think about, what would you have

00:30:53 ►

to say on the idea of maybe trying to

00:30:55 ►

step it up a notch and

00:30:57 ►

creating a global

00:30:59 ►

network or organization,

00:31:01 ►

trying to start accumulating property and

00:31:03 ►

creating eco-social homelands for people to live and grow food and do whatever kind of work they love in

00:31:11 ►

order to share with each other and not feel like diaspora on our own home planet yeah i mean that

00:31:19 ►

sounds like a great plan i mean the question is how is, how do you get the, you know, the capital to buy the

00:31:25 ►

land, you know, but I mean, I think we’re moving in that direction. I mean, you know, so many people

00:31:31 ►

from, you know, you know, there’s obviously, you know, a ruling elite, you know, who are trapped

00:31:37 ►

in a certain mindset. And, you know, there’s obviously the whole question of how conspiratorial

00:31:42 ►

that is, which is kind of a deep rabbit wormhole that can be pondered till infinity.

00:31:48 ►

But on the other hand, there’s a lot of people even within the ruling structures who are awakening.

00:31:54 ►

But then there’s a lot who are not.

00:31:55 ►

And even at Burning Man, I see like, you know, some of those people would have the capital and resources to help a movement like you’re describing.

00:32:01 ►

But even at Burning Man, I see right now such a toggling, you in a way like you know coming here for 12 years there’s actually more like social

00:32:08 ►

stratification and class stratification here than there were like 10 years ago you know i have a lot

00:32:14 ►

of people who are you know because it’s become hip you know and cool to be here who come here but

00:32:18 ►

they you know they fly in they have everything set up for them you know their art car is built by like

00:32:24 ►

mexican labor or whatever.

00:32:25 ►

I’m serious.

00:32:26 ►

I was at a camp of all these wealthy people.

00:32:29 ►

I was visiting a friend there.

00:32:31 ►

They looked like Latinos or whatever.

00:32:34 ►

They were clearly hired workers.

00:32:36 ►

They were decorating the art car for the wealthy people.

00:32:39 ►

There’s these shade structures everywhere.

00:32:41 ►

Nobody has come yet, so all the shade structures is empty.

00:32:44 ►

The workers have a tent right in the middle of the sun next to the art car.

00:32:47 ►

So nobody even had the thought or the empathy to say,

00:32:50 ►

you guys could actually have your tent under one of these shade structures that are empty.

00:32:54 ►

So in that way, I feel there’s still a big empathy deficit.

00:33:00 ►

The only thing I can think of doing is keep calling it to people’s attention.

00:33:04 ►

that the only thing I can think of doing is keep calling it to people’s attention.

00:33:10 ►

Because it’s easy to empathize with people who are like yourself.

00:33:13 ►

It takes a little bit more imagination to empathize with those who aren’t. But in a way, it’s like if we’re going to evolve into a higher state of a planetized community,

00:33:22 ►

that’s going to be based on us developing our empathic capacities to a much

00:33:28 ►

greater degree. And it seems like a race against time whether that’s going to happen to me

00:33:33 ►

sometimes. And maybe we could remove some of the financial elitism from the situation by creating

00:33:40 ►

a really powerful gift share network so people could exchange exactly what they have to share

00:33:46 ►

for exactly what they need in order to create what they love.

00:33:49 ►

Yeah, well, I mean, so one of the things we looked at in my film,

00:33:53 ►

we also, through Evolver, we published two books on the subject.

00:33:56 ►

One is an anthology of essays called What Comes After Money?

00:33:59 ►

And the other is a book by Charles Eisenstein called Sacred Economics.

00:34:04 ►

And so really looking at the

00:34:05 ►

cutting edge of thinking around, you know, what would be an alternative financial model, you know,

00:34:11 ►

because, you know, we really have to think about how, you know, when you grow up in capitalist

00:34:17 ►

society, you tend to think that the way money is, is natural and organic, you know, you think,

00:34:22 ►

oh, it’s just like, it’s almost like a, you a you know a plant or something it’s money works in this way i remember that was like my first mushroom trip you know i

00:34:29 ►

went to a store to use money and suddenly i was like horrified i was like you know this is the

00:34:33 ►

stuff that like we care about it’s like you know green and dirty and brown and paper you know um

00:34:39 ►

you know so so you know then we see that because money umrues interest, it creates artificial scarcity.

00:34:48 ►

The stock market enforces competition and enforces kind of maximizing profit for shareholder value,

00:34:56 ►

which means that corporations are almost like forced then to degrade or corrupt or avoid environmental regulations and so on.

00:35:04 ►

So it’s not a sound system.

00:35:06 ►

So the question is, so if we step back and we say, okay, money was a human creation,

00:35:11 ►

what would be the next form of money or the next ways that people could exchange value?

00:35:15 ►

And the first thing you might think is, well, you don’t actually need to just have one way to exchange value.

00:35:20 ►

There doesn’t have to be a monoculture there.

00:35:21 ►

You could actually have a whole set of tools for people to exchange value or ways to do it.

00:35:27 ►

And one of them would be what you’re saying would be a more developed trust and gift network,

00:35:32 ►

but also where there’s like tracings of people’s histories.

00:35:35 ►

So you have that a little bit with something like couch surfing,

00:35:38 ►

which I think is a very profound model for the future,

00:35:42 ►

where you take all these relationships that were monetized and you demonetize them.

00:35:47 ►

Turn them back into trust

00:35:48 ►

relationships.

00:35:50 ►

Another idea would be a currency

00:35:52 ►

that lost value the longer

00:35:54 ►

you tried to hoard it or hold on to it.

00:35:56 ►

So it would have a negative interest charge.

00:35:59 ►

And there were cultures

00:36:00 ►

in the past that used such a currency,

00:36:02 ►

even in the Middle Ages and so on.

00:36:04 ►

So in that sense, if you had a global trading currency that quickly lost value, when you

00:36:10 ►

had a surplus of it, you would be much more inclined to share it with the people around

00:36:15 ►

you because you really wouldn’t be able to hoard it.

00:36:17 ►

So that’s another idea that’s been proposed.

00:36:20 ►

There’s a set of proposals.

00:36:21 ►

Another idea is local credit clearinghouses where a group of manufacturers and businesses that produce products, goods and services can band together and create their own credit and then issue zero interest loans to those who need it in their community.

00:36:38 ►

So there’s a lot of creative thinking. And that’s something we’ve been doing with evolver is um kind of uh you know among

00:36:45 ►

the events we’ve been ideas we’ve been covering is these alternative economic models and we’ve

00:36:49 ►

had a few spores kind of incubate a new currency project so in baltimore there’s one called the

00:36:54 ►

b note which is a local currency that’s designed to keep money circulating in the community rather

00:36:59 ►

than going out to the multinational corporations hi daniel Daniel. Nice to meet you. Hi.

00:37:05 ►

I’ve come all the way from the UK.

00:37:06 ►

I want to move away from the corporation size a little bit.

00:37:09 ►

Sure.

00:37:09 ►

I want to know whether you think that the psychedelics, as in DMT and ayahuasca, help

00:37:14 ►

or accelerate the sort of awakening or the ascension process as a whole.

00:37:19 ►

I mean, years ago, I used to experiment with mushrooms and acid.

00:37:23 ►

I’ve never had a bad trip, but I’m going to Peru over the winter solstice.

00:37:27 ►

I’m looking to have a go with ayahuasca.

00:37:30 ►

I can get DMT back home.

00:37:31 ►

I’ve not tried it yet, but would it accelerate or help my ascension process or the sort of awakening process?

00:37:38 ►

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t be maybe prescriptive for any one individual.

00:37:42 ►

I mean, you might go and have a horrible time. But in general, I think that, yes, for most people,

00:37:47 ►

it’s a huge catalyst for self-discovery and self-healing

00:37:54 ►

and then kind of processing all the stuff that you need to process

00:37:58 ►

so you can get to another level of understanding.

00:38:02 ►

And, yeah, I think that ayahuasca is a major catalyst

00:38:06 ►

for this planetary shift right now.

00:38:08 ►

It’s been very interesting.

00:38:10 ►

The Breaking Open the Head came out in 2002

00:38:12 ►

and at that point when I gave talks, almost

00:38:14 ►

nobody knew what it was. And now

00:38:16 ►

even in

00:38:17 ►

mainstream communities, it’s well

00:38:20 ►

known about and people are seeking it out

00:38:22 ►

for all different reasons.

00:38:24 ►

I met these artists at a party and they were saying that you know then totally much more

00:38:27 ►

straight laced kind of you know background and they were saying now they’re finding a lot of

00:38:31 ►

their friends are doing it because they’ve noticed in the art community that even if somebody’s a

00:38:34 ►

really bad artist if they go and do a bunch of ayahuasca their art gets like much much better

00:38:39 ►

quickly you know so so it’s really having it and it’s amazing it’s you know ayahuasca is a vine and i feel it’s

00:38:45 ►

moving kind of like vine vine like you know sinuously kind of like through our society

00:38:50 ►

you know where like people are bringing it to like hip-hop stars and rock musicians and

00:38:55 ►

you know uh people in the you know major ruling elite families and so on you know and and um yeah

00:39:01 ►

i think i think i think it’s a it’s a it’s a major shifter for sure.

00:39:05 ►

You know, the other thing I would want to say about it, though, is it’s like then there are levels in our own learning process, you know, around how to how to make use of this stuff.

00:39:13 ►

We’re still still quite naive about it.

00:39:15 ►

You know, so, you know, the shaman, you know, in the counterculture has now become lionized as this heroic figure.

00:39:21 ►

And some of them are, you know, but also in a lot of Amazonian cultures,

00:39:25 ►

the shaman and the sorcerer are really not that distinct.

00:39:30 ►

The energies of these,

00:39:33 ►

that you can almost build up an energy battery

00:39:36 ►

of psychic force from using these medicines,

00:39:39 ►

but if you’re not clean in your intentions,

00:39:42 ►

then that can also reverberate negatively around you.

00:39:45 ►

When I first experimented with psychedelics, I was a kid, so I didn’t really understand it.

00:39:52 ►

But it gave me a bigger understanding on the broader picture.

00:39:54 ►

But now I’m sort of coming through this awakening phase.

00:39:57 ►

I like to experiment and go back and dip my toes and see where it leads me now while I’m sort of on this learning curve.

00:40:03 ►

Yeah.

00:40:04 ►

Yeah.

00:40:04 ►

Pass the next question. this learning curve. Yeah. Yeah. You want to pass the next question?

00:40:08 ►

Changing topics again.

00:40:09 ►

Sure.

00:40:10 ►

Do you think, what do you think, has Burning Man had any cultural impacts outside of this

00:40:17 ►

community?

00:40:18 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:40:18 ►

I mean, I think, you know, Burning Man is one of the catalysts, you know, like Ayahuasca

00:40:23 ►

or LSD or Iboga. I mean, you know, it’s, I mean, first of all, it’s kind of a, you know, organic, you know,

00:40:32 ►

rediscovery of these mystery traditions, you know, that you had in ancient Greece

00:40:37 ►

where people would come together for some type of initiatory ritual celebration.

00:40:42 ►

You know, it has aspects of all of those things,

00:40:45 ►

whether it’s like a ritual where you dance for a week and don’t sleep,

00:40:49 ►

or you take lots of substances and dance for a week and don’t sleep,

00:40:52 ►

to try to push yourself into another state of consciousness.

00:40:55 ►

I find there are a lot of things.

00:40:57 ►

Obviously, there’s the gifting culture.

00:41:00 ►

There’s the way that these different communities or tribes form

00:41:03 ►

and then how they learn how to work together, where you see something very organic

00:41:08 ►

happening again. For instance, there are leaders or chiefs

00:41:12 ►

often in the different Burning Man tribes, but that’s

00:41:16 ►

an honorific earned through a rational use of authority. It’s not from

00:41:20 ►

somebody controlling the situation. That won’t work. It’s somebody who’s actually

00:41:24 ►

really good at mediating and problem-solving

00:41:27 ►

and seeing maybe a little further ahead than other people can.

00:41:30 ►

So there’s some kind of, yeah, I think that this is an incredible laboratory

00:41:34 ►

for human interaction, and it’s crucial.

00:41:39 ►

And people come here with such an awakening,

00:41:41 ►

leave here with such an awakening of their sense of how much more is possible for human beings

00:41:45 ►

than they conceived.

00:41:47 ►

I mean,

00:41:47 ►

one of the main things

00:41:48 ►

that really, you know,

00:41:49 ►

always has inspired me about it,

00:41:51 ►

and obviously there are problems

00:41:52 ►

with it,

00:41:53 ►

like the class stratification

00:41:54 ►

and so on,

00:41:55 ►

but, you know,

00:41:56 ►

how simple it is

00:41:57 ►

if you bring people together

00:41:58 ►

and you give them

00:41:59 ►

a set of different game rules,

00:42:01 ►

you know,

00:42:01 ►

from the normal society game rules,

00:42:03 ►

and if their rules are better

00:42:04 ►

or more fun or, you know, and if their rules are better or more fun

00:42:05 ►

or just lead to better outcomes,

00:42:09 ►

how everybody adapts in a moment without even a thought.

00:42:13 ►

And even the difficult parts of it

00:42:14 ►

become part of the pleasure in a way.

00:42:18 ►

So it shows you in a way how easy it would be

00:42:20 ►

to reconstruct society

00:42:24 ►

with a set of

00:42:26 ►

different rules or ideas, you know? Yeah, I was wondering if you could speak to the importance of

00:42:32 ►

shamanic ritual in exploring Antheogens and possibly what are the dangers of it as well?

00:42:40 ►

Or could you be taken advantage of? Are there, aspects or groups that essentially could take advantage of entheogens

00:42:51 ►

as sort of the path to spiritual enlightenment?

00:42:54 ►

Yeah, well, I mean, I generally tend to think that, you know,

00:42:58 ►

if you’re somebody whose propensity is for psychedelic experience

00:43:03 ►

and you have a number of experiences, I think ultimately becomes very important to connect with some type of lineage, like an indigenous elder lineage.

00:43:15 ►

And, you know, it’s not fully like I can’t give you a totally rational explanation, but I think it’s well, I mean, my explanation would be that, you know, in Tibetan Buddhism, for instance, they talk about the importance of lineage,

00:43:25 ►

of connecting with a tradition of past practitioners who’ve done something for a long time and have done it well

00:43:32 ►

and have used it mainly for the best purposes.

00:43:35 ►

I think that that has the same effect.

00:43:37 ►

And it’s almost like there’s a morphinogenic field of protection, you know, around these lineages, you know, so if you connect with

00:43:45 ►

them, yeah, it’s like, it’s, you know, it almost like anchors into your subconscious somehow, like

00:43:50 ►

with Iboga, when I worked with the Bwidi, like ever, ever since that I would have dreams around,

00:43:56 ►

you know, like this, this big African man or somebody like, you know, Oprah Winfrey,

00:44:01 ►

but an African version. And I could just tell, you know, waking up from the dreams that it was almost like the spirit of Iboga

00:44:06 ►

that was still in communication with me

00:44:08 ►

and sort of giving me little hints

00:44:10 ►

and directions and so on

00:44:11 ►

so yeah I think it’s really

00:44:14 ►

it’s really important

00:44:16 ►

to connect with a lineage

00:44:18 ►

whether it’s peyote or ayahuasca

00:44:20 ►

you know

00:44:21 ►

or mushrooms

00:44:23 ►

and I guess I have a little bit of a distinction sometimes between those or ayahuasca, you know, or mushrooms.

00:44:29 ►

And I guess I have a little bit of a distinction sometimes between those people, you know,

00:44:35 ►

in the psychedelic community who still see it almost entirely in a medicalized context or in a self-exploration context.

00:44:38 ►

I think there are other aspects to it, other dimensions to it, you know,

00:44:42 ►

and that the field, you know, that’s created around these practices, you know, really has a tremendous impact, you know, and, you know, I mean, for

00:44:50 ►

instance, yeah, and they can, you know, become a little bit culty, I guess, but everything

00:44:55 ►

is a cult in a weird way, you know, I mean, as soon as we start using language, we create

00:44:59 ►

a myth, and then that becomes a belief structure, which then becomes like a cult. I mean, psychedelics

00:45:03 ►

at least hopefully allow you to keep like breaking down the, you know becomes a belief structure, which then becomes like a cult. I mean, psychedelics at least hopefully allow you to keep breaking down the belief structure

00:45:09 ►

that wants to kind of overtake reality in a way.

00:45:14 ►

Hi.

00:45:19 ►

Hey there.

00:45:20 ►

I’ve been listening to kind of what we’re saying.

00:45:24 ►

By the way, there’s plenty of room up front here.

00:45:26 ►

If you guys make a card or people can come in if they want to.

00:45:29 ►

I wanted to know your thoughts on kind of breaking this, like, 80-20 power structure.

00:45:34 ►

We’ve kind of talked about it in, like, the Burning Man context.

00:45:37 ►

It certainly happened in the Occupy context.

00:45:40 ►

You see it in social networks. You see it in developing countries that, you know, the second it starts to organize,

00:45:49 ►

that you get this very elite power structure that looks down and feels superior

00:45:55 ►

and also will kind of hoard the resources.

00:46:00 ►

And it seems kind of ingrained not just in human nature but in actual physical nature as well.

00:46:07 ►

And just as we collectively try to create these solutions, what are your thoughts on kind of breaking that pattern that you see across the board?

00:46:18 ►

Yeah, well, I mean, I think in a way, like, it really comes down to the sort of like the underlying cultural mythology or something like that.

00:46:29 ►

Like, you know, like in tribal cultures, you know, the chief was generally the person who owned the least possessions because their nobility of spirit was demonstrated by their generosity.

00:46:40 ►

You know, so you wouldn’t have like a chief like Donald Trump, you know, building the biggest towers and casinos and so on, that would be like atrocious, you know, so, you know, because

00:46:49 ►

we began to prioritize and value, you know, material possessions, you know, and then what we,

00:46:55 ►

I guess you could look at why did we do that, and I think like, you know, the excessive desire for

00:47:00 ►

possessions and consumerism, you know, goes back to this kind of spiritual nihilism, you know, because people really don’t think there’s any continuity of the soul or the spirit.

00:47:09 ►

The only value that they have is like, I have to get it all now. Like I gotta, you know,

00:47:13 ►

take out the other guy. I’ve got to like grow as big as I can, but it’s total nonsense really,

00:47:17 ►

because, you know, if they’re still trapped in that, that nihilistic or materialist worldview,

00:47:21 ►

you know, at death, there’s not going to be anything anyway, you know, remaining, you know, so, so, you know, from my perspective, it’s first people, you know,

00:47:29 ►

going through the inner work to recognize that, you know, we’re in a longer cycle, you know, of,

00:47:36 ►

I think, you know, you know, incarnations, you know, like the Tibetan Buddhists talk about,

00:47:40 ►

or Rudolf Steiner talked about in the West. So it’s like,

00:47:50 ►

and that brings about a deep change of value and perspective because then really what you give

00:47:55 ►

is going to be what the value is.

00:47:59 ►

Yeah, I totally understand and I’m on the same level.

00:48:02 ►

I feel like when I read all this stuff,

00:48:04 ►

we talk a lot about how things can be,

00:48:07 ►

and we walk in a lot of circles about how do we actually get there,

00:48:11 ►

how do we break these structures that are in place.

00:48:14 ►

So my best plan for that has been what I’ve been seeking to do with Evolver,

00:48:19 ►

which is create an alternative media to get more people on board,

00:48:22 ►

get people to share information and new ideas,

00:48:25 ►

and then build a community infrastructure so that those ideas are, you know, are anchored

00:48:29 ►

in practicality, too. I mean, like, you know, the Dalai Lama said that, you know, if you want,

00:48:34 ►

you know, if you want people to change, you know, you have to show them the path to a better life.

00:48:38 ►

If they see that path, then they’ll take it. You know, so now we’re seeing these structures,

00:48:42 ►

you know, breaking down, you know, and people breaking down and people are getting sick and poor and miserable and so on.

00:48:47 ►

Well, if an alternative is presented to them where they can live healthily

00:48:51 ►

by learning how to take care of their own water and their own food again, and it’s actually made

00:48:55 ►

through effective media and art into something beautiful

00:48:59 ►

and desirable where they’re actually going to be relocalizing,

00:49:03 ►

reconnecting with their communities and so on,

00:49:06 ►

then that, I think,

00:49:08 ►

provides a way forward.

00:49:10 ►

Thank you. That’s really empowering.

00:49:13 ►

You mentioned earlier

00:49:14 ►

that, and in breaking

00:49:16 ►

open the head, that

00:49:18 ►

you were very disappointed

00:49:20 ►

with scientific materialism

00:49:22 ►

and the skepticism

00:49:24 ►

it kind of fed.

00:49:26 ►

But you just mentioned that the value,

00:49:28 ►

or one of the values of entheogens

00:49:32 ►

is that they can kind of constantly deconstruct

00:49:34 ►

the belief systems that arise out of the experience.

00:49:37 ►

How is that not just another form of the same skepticism

00:49:39 ►

that you were wrestling with earlier,

00:49:42 ►

just in a chemical fashion?

00:49:45 ►

Well, I guess when I get offended by the scientific materialist form of skepticism,

00:49:51 ►

is I generally, having done the deep inquiry like myself that the books represent,

00:49:56 ►

I had that skepticism, then I broke through it kind of phenomenologically,

00:50:00 ►

by having these experiences that, to me, convincingly, irrefutably, in a sense, demonstrate, you know, that there are these other psychic levels of reality.

00:50:10 ►

Now, eventually, I would say that there’s going to be, you know, a more expanded form of science that will encompass, you know, all these other ways of science and technology is an aspect of human evolution and an aspect of the evolution of consciousness.

00:50:31 ►

So you could see that our technological projections really do constantly transform our way of being and our way of thinking you know so and and and you know part of this idea of this this accelerating process around it is that we’re you know that we’re creating tools faster and faster

00:50:49 ►

those tools then reflect us back on ourselves which then make us you know help us to iterate

00:50:55 ►

like the next set of set of tools you know and that and that’s happening like faster and faster

00:50:59 ►

you know so so it’s it’s not like saying you know i’m not you know i’m not against the scientific project i just think that um in a way what it what it what it avoided was the phenomenological

00:51:10 ►

experience you know which is what like some of the philosophers in the 20th century

00:51:14 ►

recognized and it’s really where indigenous thought begins you know like like like even

00:51:19 ►

even our way of what’s that well do you mean something different between empirical data or evidence and

00:51:25 ►

phenomenological i mean do you mean it like in purely the hegelian sense it’s actually taking

00:51:30 ►

yourself in as the primary datum you know because you don’t anything else is just hearsay in a way

00:51:35 ►

you know i just wish to mention um to that very point there there is a talk following this one, which will hopefully expound and explore that area of scientific exploration, investigation,

00:51:53 ►

and its implications on our lives and us in the biospheres.

00:51:57 ►

And I think it ties in very lovely with the direction this question and answer is going.

00:52:04 ►

I was wondering what you thought about the noosphere, what

00:52:07 ►

Jose Arguelles talks about, or talked about.

00:52:12 ►

What do you feel about that? How many people here are familiar

00:52:16 ►

with the concept of the noosphere, first of all? So, yeah,

00:52:20 ►

noosphere is a Greek word that means mind, and this idea that came from

00:52:24 ►

this Russian thinker, Vernadsky,

00:52:27 ►

who we were just talking about,

00:52:28 ►

and a Catholic French paleontologist and mystic,

00:52:32 ►

Teilhard de Chardin,

00:52:34 ►

they came up with this sort of almost simultaneously

00:52:36 ►

or congruently came up with this concept of the Nuisphere.

00:52:38 ►

So the Nuis is a Greek word that means mind.

00:52:41 ►

And the idea is that just as the planet has like a biosphere

00:52:44 ►

and an atmosphere

00:52:46 ►

and a mineral level, which is the lithosphere, there could also be thought of as like an envelope

00:52:50 ►

of mind or of thought or of consciousness around the planet. And that, that, that new sphere has

00:52:55 ►

always been there and it’s been feeding kind of information, you know, through the biosphere.

00:53:00 ►

And it’s been, you know, spurring us along in this evolutionary development that’s included you know up to this point the development of culture and civilizations and technologies and

00:53:09 ►

all this stuff but but it’s still been somewhat unconscious so this idea that that humanity is

00:53:14 ►

going to you know consciously kind of access or realize our relationship to the newest sphere

00:53:21 ►

i mean there are thinkers who even give it a physical correlate. They talk about the Van Allen

00:53:26 ►

radiation belts and potentially

00:53:28 ►

this layer of consciousness or thought

00:53:29 ►

around the planet kind of woven

00:53:31 ►

between these belts.

00:53:33 ►

It’s one way of thinking about it.

00:53:36 ►

So yeah, one idea

00:53:38 ►

that I think is also

00:53:39 ►

for me,

00:53:41 ►

a radical idea

00:53:44 ►

of what

00:53:44 ►

aspect of this transformational

00:53:47 ►

process, you know, would have to do with, you know, our, our latent psychic capacities,

00:53:53 ►

you know. I mean, how many people here recognize that, that we as human beings have psychic

00:53:57 ►

capacities, you know, and have had, you know, somewhat direct, how many people here think that

00:54:01 ►

we don’t have any psychic capacities or are just agnostic on it?

00:54:06 ►

I’ll talk later.

00:54:17 ►

But anyway, a lot of, a lot of, more and more people seem to be coming to this realization that we have these psychic abilities that work in different ways.

00:54:19 ►

I mean, you know, it can be synchronicities.

00:54:21 ►

It can be telepathic foretellings.

00:54:26 ►

It can be even sometimes, you know, objects, objects you know telekinesis objects moving around it can be you know somebody taking a psychic blow from somebody that actually like

00:54:31 ►

hurts them you know if there’s a lot of hatred there or something you know so so you know this

00:54:37 ►

could also be potentially an aspect of the evolution that we’re entering into that that that

00:54:42 ►

you know in a way like these shamanic cultures really lived

00:54:45 ►

in this realm of the psyche and the realm of magic, but they couldn’t, you know, they didn’t

00:54:50 ►

have the scientific and technological infrastructure that, that, that we have, you know, well, maybe,

00:54:55 ►

you know, we could actually begin to access our psychic capacities, uh, you know, in a

00:55:01 ►

cooperative framework, you know, for positive benefits on the earth.

00:55:10 ►

So for instance, in my book I wrote about the Hopi.

00:55:14 ►

And there was a Cambridge anthropologist who lived with the Hopi for years.

00:55:16 ►

And he was a skeptical empiricist.

00:55:19 ►

But he had to admit from his time with them that they were able to do things that he didn’t have an explanation for

00:55:24 ►

in his way of understanding things.

00:55:26 ►

Like sometimes he would go to meet one of the elder Hopi with a list of questions,

00:55:30 ►

and the guy would answer each question in order without him asking any of them.

00:55:34 ►

And he said that sometimes, not all the time,

00:55:36 ►

but sometimes he would go to one of their rain dances,

00:55:39 ►

and clouds would gather after like 20 minutes of dancing

00:55:43 ►

and like a blazing hot sun, you know, rain would fall.

00:55:46 ►

And he said that this happened often enough that it seemed that they were influencing the climate conditions.

00:55:52 ►

You know, we also see things like the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University,

00:55:56 ►

which put random number generators around the planet and began to discover that, you know,

00:56:02 ►

when there were major events of a collective global awareness, like the O.J. Simpson verdict or 9-11, these random number generators would deviate from randomness and they would go into some kind of higher state of coherence.

00:56:16 ►

So they began to see that just observing these generators around the planet, they were beginning to see the emergence of something like a global brain or at least a global nervous system.

00:56:26 ►

And they also noted things that like with 9-11, you know, although the deviation from statistical randomness peaked a few hours after the planes hit the building,

00:56:37 ►

it started a few hours before, you know.

00:56:40 ►

So not only was there, you know, understanding after the fact, it was almost there was like an innate precognition, you know, that something was about to happen in the collective field, you know.

00:57:06 ►

you know, consciously aligned or self-realizing humanity as a collective organism, you know,

00:57:11 ►

in conjunction with this new sphere might be that we are going to go into a conscious use of our psychic capacities. And an analogy for this would be what happened with electricity.

00:57:16 ►

You know, in the 18th century, we discovered, you know, Benjamin Franklin flew the kite,

00:57:20 ►

you know, he got hit by the lightning. You know, they discovered there was this tremendous force,

00:57:24 ►

but for, you know, a number of decades, they didn’t really know what to do with it.

00:57:28 ►

You know, at first you didn’t know how to store it, you didn’t know how to transmit

00:57:30 ►

it reliably, you know, and once humanity figured out how to make use of that energy, you know,

00:57:36 ►

in merely like 100, 150 years, we were able to change the entire biogeochemical environment

00:57:41 ►

of the earth, you know, through the power of thought, power of thought and through this energy that we’d come

00:57:46 ►

into contact with.

00:57:48 ►

So the idea would be

00:57:50 ►

that if we see the tendency,

00:57:52 ►

this is what Vernadsky talks about

00:57:54 ►

in the biosphere, of human

00:57:56 ►

thought having become a geophysical

00:57:58 ►

event on the planet over the last

00:58:00 ►

centuries, there might also

00:58:02 ►

be another leap in that

00:58:04 ►

where our co-creative capacities increase

00:58:07 ►

to a whole other dimension.

00:58:09 ►

So synchronicities and psychic abilities

00:58:13 ►

seem to be enhanced while on psychedelics,

00:58:16 ►

I’ve noticed.

00:58:17 ►

And it’s been pretty profound through my life.

00:58:20 ►

How many people feel that they have more synchronicities

00:58:21 ►

and psychic events on psychedelics?

00:58:24 ►

Okay, we covered that.

00:58:27 ►

So go ahead.

00:58:30 ►

Did you finish your question?

00:58:31 ►

Oh, that was what I was just making a statement more than anything.

00:58:35 ►

But I appreciate the noosphere.

00:58:38 ►

Thank you.

00:58:41 ►

Jose had the idea also that there could be like a you know an event would mark this development of the

00:58:47 ►

new atmospheric consciousness and his idea was to do a

00:58:50 ►

global meditation on creating a circumpolar

00:58:55 ►

rainbow bridge on the date of the last day of the Mayan

00:58:59 ►

long count which is December 21st 2012

00:59:03 ►

and yeah he believed that believed that if enough people were to do this,

00:59:08 ►

it could create this visible rainbow around the earth.

00:59:11 ►

Now, I know that sounds far-fetched.

00:59:13 ►

I have a number of friends who did a workshop with him

00:59:15 ►

in the early 90s in South America,

00:59:17 ►

which was all about the Rainbow Bridge.

00:59:19 ►

And apparently in the last day, as they came out of the last meditation,

00:59:24 ►

there were rainbows all over the sky.

00:59:26 ►

And then recently, we had an Evolver event in Pittsburgh.

00:59:30 ►

And as part of my talk, I was talking about this stuff and the rainbow bridge.

00:59:33 ►

The next day, right after our closing ceremony, we went outside and there was a double rainbow across the sky.

00:59:40 ►

So I mean, I myself don’t exactly know how much credence to place in it, but it seems like there’s something wants to occur.

00:59:50 ►

So, I mean, if you guys want to get involved with the Rainbow Bridge meditation, you know, you can look it up.

00:59:55 ►

I mean, Jose Arguelles, Rainbow Bridge, he gives you the, you know, how to do it and so on.

01:00:00 ►

And Evolver also published a book called Manifesto for the Newest Sphere, which was the last book Jose wrote before he died last year.

01:00:08 ►

And that has a lot of information about the Newest Sphere and the Rainbow Bridge in it.

01:00:14 ►

If we can’t make it for 2012, maybe we can work on it for 2013 or 2014.

01:00:18 ►

Work in progress.

01:00:19 ►

I know Jose talked about the time quake that happens.

01:00:22 ►

What’s that?

01:00:23 ►

Let me see if there’s any other questions for anybody else.

01:00:27 ►

Yeah, back there.

01:00:32 ►

Hi. I was wondering

01:00:33 ►

if you could speak about

01:00:34 ►

with the rise of the use of

01:00:38 ►

shamanic plants and shamanic rituals

01:00:39 ►

just about cultural

01:00:41 ►

reappropriation in the way that

01:00:43 ►

you see these ceremonies being

01:00:46 ►

performed everywhere

01:00:48 ►

and it

01:00:50 ►

almost seemed to me in some of my travels

01:00:52 ►

to be like this parallel

01:00:54 ►

industries or like this industry of

01:00:56 ►

enlightenment that if you have enough money

01:00:58 ►

you can do enough ceremonies

01:01:00 ►

to get there or sort of this

01:01:02 ►

idea that I’ve seen

01:01:04 ►

people have and wondering um with all

01:01:08 ►

these ceremonies taking place uh the dangers of people uh misusing them or not fully understanding

01:01:14 ►

them yeah in a way it’s kind of chaos out there right now but i mean that’s kind of the situation

01:01:19 ►

we’re in we’re still learning about this stuff and i think that’s probably a necessary part of

01:01:23 ►

the process you know people have asked

01:01:25 ►

some people get very negative about the idea of ayahuasca

01:01:27 ►

tourism but from my

01:01:29 ►

perspective it’s actually very

01:01:32 ►

valuable like we’ve done

01:01:34 ►

retreats

01:01:36 ►

now with Sequoia elders

01:01:38 ►

from Ecuador and

01:01:39 ►

you know basically in their own context

01:01:42 ►

you know they’ve got the missionaries

01:01:43 ►

and the oil companies preying upon them.

01:01:46 ►

There’s about 700 of them left.

01:01:49 ►

And whatever’s left of their ayahuasca culture is quickly evaporating.

01:01:53 ►

Actually having comparatively rich white people work with them, care about their knowledge and so on, It actually, you know, keeps the knowledge alive. And even then, if it becomes an economic avenue for them,

01:02:07 ►

then, you know, their grandkids don’t have to go work

01:02:09 ►

for the oil companies.

01:02:10 ►

They could actually train in these indigenous,

01:02:12 ►

you know, their native practices.

01:02:14 ►

You know, so I think actually, you know,

01:02:16 ►

handled properly, it can be a very positive thing.

01:02:19 ►

And, you know, but right now it’s like, yeah,

01:02:20 ►

it’s an open field and a lot of different efforts

01:02:23 ►

are being tried.

01:02:24 ►

And some people are manipulative and, you know, and that’s where you really have to as with anything

01:02:28 ►

you know that that’s so delicate and and crucial you know to your own evolution you know you have

01:02:34 ►

to use great discernment you know you don’t just go to any shaman you know talk to people who’ve

01:02:39 ►

worked with that person you know or research them you them, you know, carefully, you know. I mean, for me, I was really helped by having a journalist background

01:02:47 ►

because it gave me the tools to kind of investigate, you know,

01:02:51 ►

before having these types of experiences.

01:02:54 ►

But I think it has to be a good thing.

01:02:56 ►

I mean, ayahuasca is now becoming like something you need to do

01:02:59 ►

if you’re part of a certain culture in the same way yoga became, you know, 10 or 15 years ago.

01:03:03 ►

And, you know know that’s also

01:03:05 ►

been kind of balderalized and often it’s more of just like an exercise program than you know people

01:03:11 ►

really i mean if you look at the the bodies of the you know the great yogis you know in their 70s or

01:03:16 ►

80s they don’t look like super fit they often have like really strange bellies and you know they’re

01:03:21 ►

you know they’re not they’re not looking for you know a great body they’re looking for to to break the bonds of you know of existence and achieve some

01:03:29 ►

kind of liberation you know so so yes i mean but even so in this transitional phase it’s awesome

01:03:34 ►

you know that that that that that’s become a major cultural trend and i think it’s awesome

01:03:39 ►

that ayahuasca is becoming a major cultural trend and and then also i think often that’s um

01:03:44 ►

yeah i mean i mean i, when something becomes hip,

01:03:47 ►

those people who want to be hip will do it.

01:03:50 ►

But with ayahuasca, once again, it’s a phenomenological experience

01:03:55 ►

that actually transforms you from the inside.

01:03:58 ►

So let’s make that as hip as we possibly can.

01:04:02 ►

So I’m just noticing in this conversation that it when we talk

01:04:06 ►

about donning this new era and the breakdown of social structures and

01:04:11 ►

institutions that are created that we need to rethink I’m just aware that most

01:04:16 ►

of these institutions were created under a patriarchy so as we move towards this

01:04:20 ►

new era particularly when we talk about ayahuasca which is a feminine

01:04:24 ►

representation of this new era how do you we talk about ayahuasca, which is a feminine representation of this new era, how do you see that fitting in? What roles of women and the divine feminine do you

01:04:30 ►

see for helping facilitate that? Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think that we have to,

01:04:37 ►

you know, somehow evolve into a true partnership society. You know, obviously, you Obviously, we’re not going to flip back to matriarchy,

01:04:48 ►

but we’re seeing the disintegration of the patriarchal form

01:04:53 ►

and the ego structure, maybe,

01:04:56 ►

which is kind of the exemplary aspect of that,

01:04:58 ►

or the negative aspect of that.

01:05:02 ►

So how does that look?

01:05:04 ►

I mean, it’s something that i think about a lot

01:05:05 ►

uh and i’m probably going to talk i’m giving a talk on thursday at red lightning at 5 45

01:05:12 ►

i’ve been visiting recently a community in portugal called tamara which is was started

01:05:19 ►

by german philosophers they first had a community near berlin called zeg and then they started to

01:05:23 ►

merit tamar about about 20 years ago. And essentially what they recognized was working in the left

01:05:30 ►

in the 70s in Germany, that these issues around love, gender, sexuality were the core issues

01:05:37 ►

that were core political issues that really weren’t being dealt with. And they were leading

01:05:42 ►

to the breakup of these communities or these movements and so on so they

01:05:48 ►

basically created like a research and development community laboratory to to

01:05:54 ►

break through to different models of relationship and they what they’ve

01:05:57 ►

devised is a sharing and non-possessive model of love and relationship where

01:06:02 ►

it’s like a community structure that has a number of different

01:06:05 ►

social technologies

01:06:07 ►

that

01:06:08 ►

take a lot of stuff that’s private in our world

01:06:12 ►

and make it public and transparent

01:06:13 ►

so everybody can see it and know it

01:06:15 ►

rather than it being like an underground subtext

01:06:18 ►

that feeds envy, competition

01:06:20 ►

and jealousy

01:06:21 ►

so I’ll talk more about that

01:06:23 ►

on Thursday

01:06:24 ►

I think that and jealousy. So I’ll talk more about that on Thursday.

01:06:31 ►

But yeah, I mean, I think that this idea of the rising of the feminine again, the divine feminine, is an aspect of it.

01:06:36 ►

And obviously it’s not just in women, it’s also men contacting

01:06:39 ►

their feminine nature.

01:06:43 ►

We all have both within us.

01:06:45 ►

And if men can go back more

01:06:47 ►

into that receptive mode

01:06:49 ►

rather than always having to be

01:06:51 ►

the ones pushing into oblivion,

01:06:55 ►

that’s part of the shift also.

01:06:57 ►

And you said that’s Thursday at 5.45?

01:06:59 ►

Yeah, at Red Lightning.

01:07:00 ►

Thanks.

01:07:02 ►

Okay, cool.

01:07:02 ►

I think that that is stop time.

01:07:07 ►

Yeah. Thank you so much for listening I’ll hover around outside

01:07:14 ►

so come say hi and talk to me

01:07:16 ►

and I have a little propaganda of various sorts

01:07:18 ►

I can give it to you if you want propaganda

01:07:20 ►

thank you so much. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:07:31 ►

So I think that it’s probably safe to say that at least by last August at Burning Man,

01:07:37 ►

Daniel Pinchbeck didn’t seem to be fearing any kind of a mass calamity to descend upon our beautiful little planet today.

01:07:44 ►

fearing any kind of a mass calamity to descend upon our beautiful little planet today.

01:07:51 ►

And to be fair to Daniel, who I know has been given some grief on occasion about his views of 2012,

01:07:56 ►

well, I suggest that you go way back to my podcast number 57 and listen to the talk that he gave at an oracle gathering in Seattle that night at the end of October in 2006.

01:08:07 ►

Seattle that night at the end of October in 2006. And if you do, I think you’re going to see that even though he had a book just published then with the evocative title of 2012, well, nonetheless,

01:08:13 ►

he wasn’t talking about an apocalypse such as the one that the corporate media has hyped about

01:08:19 ►

today’s date. And if you want to know what my views about today were back in 2006, well, I gave the

01:08:28 ►

talk just preceding Daniel’s at the same event. And the title of my talk was The Other Side of

01:08:34 ►

2012, where in it I suggested that rather than worry about the world coming to an end today,

01:08:41 ►

instead our time would be better spent working on how we’re going to hit the ground

01:08:45 ►

running on the 1st of January in 2013. And my podcast of that talk is number 56, with Daniel’s,

01:08:53 ►

as I said, being 57. And I posted both of those in late November of 2006. Now, before I go, I want

01:09:01 ►

to once again mention Dennis McKenna’s new book, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

01:09:07 ►

And I want to tell you about Dennis’ recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience last Sunday night.

01:09:14 ►

And I’ll link to that in the podcast notes as well.

01:09:17 ►

Now, I’ve just finished reading Dennis’ book myself,

01:09:20 ►

and based on a recommendation he had in it, I reread, for the third time,

01:09:25 ►

True Hallucinations by his brother Terrence, and I just finished that yesterday.

01:09:30 ►

So I’ve been kind of steeped in McKenna lore this past week or so,

01:09:35 ►

and yet even with all of the other McKenna input,

01:09:38 ►

I still found Joe’s wide-ranging interview with Dennis to be exceptionally interesting,

01:09:42 ►

and on several fronts, not the least of which is that, well, it gave Dennis a chance to shine Thank you. technical presentations as closely as I would like to. But in this interview with Joe Rogan, he really shined,

01:10:07 ►

and some of his thoughts were, I think, every bit as insightful and challenging as his brothers once were.

01:10:13 ►

Here’s just one short example.

01:10:15 ►

That’s the cynical point of view.

01:10:16 ►

Yeah, that’s the cynical point of view.

01:10:18 ►

But to that I would reply that what we call ordinary reality,

01:10:28 ►

ordinary consciousness, even consensus reality,

01:10:35 ►

is essentially a hallucination. I mean, right, the reason drugs work is because we’re made of drugs,

01:10:41 ►

you know, and whether or not we’re on drugs or not, our brains are creating, you know, this reality, which we know does not resemble the real world, whatever that is.

01:10:47 ►

I mean, the instruments of our physics and so on tell us that the world is a quantum world.

01:10:52 ►

It’s full of vibration.

01:10:53 ►

It doesn’t look anything like this.

01:10:56 ►

Net atoms are essentially mostly hollow.

01:10:58 ►

So a lot of what our brain does is synthesize a hallucination, essentially,

01:11:02 ►

create a model of the world that we proceed to live in.

01:11:09 ►

You know, I mean, the world that we, you and I share and everyone shared, this is a model of the world.

01:11:14 ►

This is a model reality, not the real reality.

01:11:18 ►

The real reality is completely unknowable and will always remain so.

01:11:23 ►

So for people to say, well, you’ve just,

01:11:25 ►

yeah, you’ve disturbed your brain chemistry in a novel way and you’ve tuned into a different

01:11:30 ►

channel essentially, but you’re still working with a model, whether it’s a model of the

01:11:37 ►

world experienced through the lens of a drug or whether it’s experienced through the lens of,

01:11:44 ►

you know, sober conscious perception,

01:11:46 ►

it’s still a biochemical artifact, in a sense, our brains create this, we live inside of it,

01:11:55 ►

you know, and that’s, so that’s what I would say to those people that it’s not that,

01:12:02 ►

you know, there is some kind of objective reality which we’re

01:12:07 ►

immersed in when we’re not on drugs it’s more that we’re on drugs all the time you know our

01:12:15 ►

brain is a organ that happens to churn out drugs you know which we call neurotransmitters and hormones, and that’s what our brains run on.

01:12:27 ►

So all you do when you take an external drug is you tweak one or more of those sets of

01:12:32 ►

receptors that the neurons are talking to, and you get a slightly distorted signal from

01:12:40 ►

what we have come to accept as ordinary reality.

01:12:44 ►

There is no ordinary reality, or we don’t know what it is.

01:12:48 ►

It’s forever unknowable in terms of our subjective experience.

01:12:54 ►

Does that make sense?

01:12:55 ►

Yes, it does.

01:12:58 ►

The reason drugs work is because we’re made of drugs.

01:13:02 ►

So says the younger McKenna brother.

01:13:05 ►

And, of course, he actually has the scientific chops to back that up.

01:13:09 ►

But then I guess it doesn’t really take a scientist to tell us that,

01:13:13 ►

well, we’re living in some kind of a strange, consensual hallucination.

01:13:17 ►

And since that’s the case, let’s make it a joyous hallucination.

01:13:21 ►

At least that’s what I’m trying to do.

01:13:24 ►

Now, before I go, I also want to let you know that I’m only going to do one more podcast this year.

01:13:30 ►

And I plan on posting it around the 29th or so.

01:13:34 ►

Normally I don’t do anything particularly noteworthy around the end of a year.

01:13:38 ►

But since it’s the end of 2012, and maybe in some ways it’s the end of an era,

01:13:43 ►

I’m going to dig through my backlog of

01:13:46 ►

Terrence McKenna talks and see if I can come up with something fitting, or at least something not

01:13:51 ►

widely heard. After that, I’m going to be away from the net for a few weeks. In fact, as you

01:13:57 ►

are ringing in the new year, you can think of me on a train somewhere between Los Angeles and

01:14:02 ►

Chicago, and that’s where I switch trains and then head to Washington, D.C. for a little family reunion.

01:14:09 ►

As you may know, I’ve been on a personal protest against airline travel

01:14:13 ►

due to the subhuman conditions one must go through

01:14:16 ►

just to get into one of those disease-filled tubes that shoot through the sky

01:14:21 ►

and leave a terrible carbon footprint in their wake.

01:14:24 ►

tubes that shoot through the sky and leave a terrible carbon footprint in their wake?

01:14:30 ►

Well, as a result, I’ve not seen my children and three other grandchildren for several years.

01:14:33 ►

But this is a perfect opportunity for me on several fronts.

01:14:37 ►

First, I’m going to get to see this continent from end to end once again,

01:14:40 ►

but without the hassle of driving this time.

01:14:46 ►

And also, it’ll give me three days each way to spend alone, away from the net and the phone, and where I plan on doing some serious work on my next book.

01:14:51 ►

And also there’s the element of a sentimental journey involved, as my grandfather Charles

01:14:56 ►

was a conductor on the Union Pacific Railroad many years ago, and so I’m going to be able

01:15:02 ►

to give some thought to the sacrifices he and my other ancestors made

01:15:06 ►

so that I can live this wonderful life that’s now underway.

01:15:10 ►

So until next time, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:15:15 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

336 - 2012 Re-visioned

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