Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”
“It seems to me that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.”
“It’s meanings that we need to coax into our lives.”
“And the whole schtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is reclaim immediate experience, realize that you out vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet because, who knows, they may be illusions.”
“The world could be anything, you know, It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean it really could be a dream.”
“In cyberspace things are built out of light.”
“Apparently, in the Avesta classical period [early Iron Age and before] no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs.”
“To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.”
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS PODCAST
Starmaker
The Phenomenon of Man
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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So, here we are, together again for the last time in the year of 2012.
00:00:39 ►
And while I think that it’s probably normal for an end-of-the-year program to look back at significant events of that year,
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well, I’m not going to do that.
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My guess is that, well, you’ve probably already had your fill of the best and worst of 2012.
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So instead, I thought that we should get started on creating the best of 2013.
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And so I’m going to end off 2012 and kick off 2013 with a talk given in the summer of 1990 by the one and only Terrence McKenna.
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1990, by the one and only Terence McKenna.
00:01:13 ►
Now, in a few moments, when you hear Terence talking about the possibility of pouring all of our information into a global database,
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well, keep in mind that this talk was given a year before CERN first announced this little thing called the World Wide Web,
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which makes it almost two years before Marc Andreessen released the first browser into the wilds of the net. So if you can, try to think of what your own technical situation was
00:01:32 ►
like back then. Did you even have a computer then? And if so, were you able to envision the tech of
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today with all kinds of handheld and wireless devices and oceans of data to capture and turn into information
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and maybe even turn into some kind of knowledge.
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We’ve certainly come a long way in the technological area since this talk was given,
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but I think that you’ll still find that much of what Terrence has to say is still relevant today.
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And among other things that I found noteworthy about this talk is a reminder of
00:02:06 ►
what it was often like at Terrence’s workshops. After about 40 minutes, Terrence comes to the
00:02:12 ►
end of his prepared remarks and opens the floor for questions. Now, as you’ll discover in just
00:02:18 ►
a moment, the terrain that Terrence covers before this first question was truly remarkable for the wide variety of esoteric and metaphysical topics that he covered.
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Yet, the first question he got was about how to best use Anamida muscaria mushrooms.
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Poor Terrence.
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While he had so many exciting things to talk about,
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he still had to spend a lot of his time simply giving advice about the use of psychedelics,
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well, because at the time he was really about the only source of this information that was
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publicly available. It must have taken a tremendous amount of courage for Terrence to
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stand up and, well, be almost the only public spokesperson for the psychedelic experience at
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the time. Even today, most people are afraid to even bring this topic up among friends that aren’t also on this path.
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So my hat is off to the Bard McKenna, not just for his mind, but for his courage as well.
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And so now let’s join Terrence McKenna on a July evening in 1990
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and hear what was on his mind at that time.
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1990 and hear what was on his mind at that time.
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We closed last night, or we discussed yesterday, a bumper sticker that I saw driving down here.
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And the bumper sticker said, man thinks God knows.
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And then someone had bought a second copy of the bumper sticker and cut it apart and reversed it and put it under it so it said man thinks God knows
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God knows man thinks now it seemed to me there was a lot going on in what was attempting to be expressed here.
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First of all, something about God that God knows,
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that God exists in a superior state of inflection.
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Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
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My notion of God’s cognition is simply the regarding of all points in the space-time
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continuum with equal clarity. God knows. The limited program of knowing is thought, cognition.
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man thinks this is what man can do in imitation of the all-knowing and omniscient example of God but implicit Pascal that man is a reed bent by the wind
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and then Pascal added, but a thinking reed.
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So then the second half of the conundrum
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was that God knows, man thinks.
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Now this, I thought, was very interesting,
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because it seems to imply a relationship
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between the limited project of knowing, which is human thought,
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and the completed project of knowing, which is omniscience.
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God knows, man thinks.
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In a way, what this is saying is that God knows that man is making his way toward God.
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God knows, man thinks.
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God knows that man is participating in the same project of being
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that God regards from this higher dimensional space.
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And so then this meditation on these four lines closes with the recurso
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which returns you then to this realization that what we are talking about is the project of
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knowing heidegger called it carried out on two levels on the level of omniscience and on the
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level of limited being so then i meditated on this after we discussed it yesterday, and I thought tonight it might be interesting then to talk about the thinking project that is the essence of, I call it concrescence following Whitehead’s
00:07:10 ►
neoplatonism. One could call it God. Teilhard de Chardin called it the omega point. But process by which knowing transforms itself from
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some kind of
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aboriginal
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apperception of the possibility
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of God into
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union with God
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and the process that lies between these two
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points is the
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story of the evolution
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of human consciousness
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or more properly speaking, human history.
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And the interesting thing, I think, about the Western religions generally
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is their insistence on the tangentiality of God and history,
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that God was something to be realized in the life of each individual,
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but that there was also somehow a collective drama of redemption
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that was stretched out over a very large period of time,
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and history then becomes the theater, you see,
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of time and history then becomes the theater you see of the struggle between good and evil for the redemption of the human soul and from the modern point of view or let’s be more frank
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from my point of view this is primarily something to be analyzed
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within the context of language
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and our myths about it
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and its evolution
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and its potential future evolution.
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So I…
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And this is in my personal life
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the great mystery to me,
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because I feel that my intellectual style is that of a scientist,
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and I take very seriously science,
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and yet not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy,
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that that mapping is insufficient, that the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct.
00:09:46 ►
It is more in the nature of a sentence or a novel or a work of art
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than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law
00:09:59 ►
that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.
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The world only behaves as science says it should
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when we confine our engagement with it
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to information that is at a great distance from us,
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like reading the New York Times every day.
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If you read the New York Times every day,
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few miracles will occur while you are engaged in that activity.
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Essentially what is happening is you are getting your cultural programming for the day,
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all your switches, if any need to be reset by cultural values,
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are reset at that point.
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But when we recede into what I call
00:10:50 ►
the primacy of immediate experience,
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the rules and models that we’ve been handed
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by science and what’s called common sense
00:11:04 ►
are just totally found to be inadequate.
00:11:08 ►
And I don’t mean when we perturb ordinary consciousness
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with psychedelic drugs.
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I’ll speak about that in a moment.
00:11:16 ►
But I simply mean when we go into solitude,
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when we go into wilderness,
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when we endure great travail in our lives,
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or when we put ourselves in extraordinary alien circumstances,
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then it’s as though the membrane between the ego and something else,
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which we could call our guardian angel or the Jungian unconscious or the overmind,
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something like that,
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the membrane grows thin
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and the world loses its…
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What do I want to say?
00:12:07 ►
Its mundane character.
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And instead, things previously mundane begin to become charged with psychic energy.
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They become carriers of meaning.
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They become carriers of meaning.
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This is very peculiar.
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At a low level, it’s not so astonishing. It’s a kind of generalized opening to the world because everything is imbued with significance. That tree, that person,
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that greeting, that conversation is imbued with a kind of depth and significance that is satisfying.
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It’s like living deeply, living deeply.
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But this phenomenon can proceed to a deeper level of introspection and relationship to the exterior.
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And in that case then, this significance,
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which everything was previously seen to have,
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begins to congress or densify,
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and the world begins to dissolve into animate intelligence.
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Now, at this point,
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if you didn’t bargain for this,
00:13:29 ►
you’re probably very concerned about your mental condition.
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And if you aren’t, your friends are.
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Because what you’re saying at this point is,
00:13:37 ►
the rivers talk to me,
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the trees whisper in my ear.
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What you’re recovering is the meaning.
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That’s all.
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The meaning that is self-evident in nature,
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but that we block.
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The meaning is so pregnant in everything
00:13:59 ►
that it can actually articulate itself
00:14:02 ►
in your native English tongue.
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And, you know, talking rocks, talking trees, talking boulders,
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we define this as pathology.
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It means, in technical jargon,
00:14:17 ►
a severely diminished ego is in danger of overwhelmment
00:14:22 ►
by material from the inchoate and disorganized unconscious.
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Well, but what’s actually happening is that for the first time in somebody’s life or experience,
00:14:35 ►
they are meeting the resident meaning in reality with its force unblunted by conditioning and denial.
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And this is some kind of a linguistic process.
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We, and all nature, I think,
00:15:01 ►
swims in some kind of sea of signification
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of which we are, in the same way that the amphibians
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were able to drag themselves out of the primitive oceans of this planet
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into air and exist in a completely different dimension,
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we, whether grandly or perversely, the verdict is not yet in,
00:15:27 ►
we dragged ourselves out of the sea of telepathic interconnected signification that united all life
00:15:36 ►
and we exist, panting and pop-eyed, in this other dimension called history, ego awareness,
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presence of self, sense of loss, anticipation of gain.
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All of these dimensions of experience really have been added
00:15:57 ►
to what was previously the animal Tao,
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just the howling at the moon Tao of animal existence. And to this we have added, you know,
00:16:07 ►
a dimension of future anticipation, a dimension of regret, a dimension of how do I make choices,
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and so forth and so on. There is not a, I don’t put a moral judgment on this,
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but it has to be said that in the tradition of the West,
00:16:33 ►
this has been viewed classically as the fall.
00:16:37 ►
This is the fall into names instead of realities,
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names instead of realities into
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constructs of reality
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rather than reality
00:16:50 ►
itself
00:16:51 ►
and this has now been inculcated
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into each and every one of us
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as you know
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both the glory and the
00:17:00 ►
trauma of human existence
00:17:02 ►
which is our extraordinary
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ability to reside in and be in language.
00:17:11 ►
So, for instance, you know, I’ve made this example before.
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A child lying in a crib, and a hummingbird comes into the room,
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and the child is ecstatic
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because this shimmering iridescence of movement
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and sound and attention, it’s just wonderful.
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I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle
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when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper
00:17:41 ►
of the nursery and so forth.
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But then mother or nanny or someone
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comes in and says, it’s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird. And this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and places it over the miracle
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and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum.
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And from now on, the miracle is confined
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within the meaning of the word.
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And by the time a child is four or five or six,
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no light shines through.
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They have tiled over every aspect of reality, or five or six, no light shines through.
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They have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it,
00:18:33 ►
limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.
00:18:39 ►
But this doesn’t mean that this world of signification
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is not outside, still existent,
00:18:47 ►
beyond the horizons, the foreshortened horizons of a culturally validated language.
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Well, so then classically the path through this has been through use of psychedelic plants or some form of ascetic practice
00:19:08 ►
or fasting or prayer and meditation, whatever,
00:19:11 ►
some way of breaking through.
00:19:14 ►
And it is literally presented as a breaking through,
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a penetration to another level,
00:19:21 ►
that culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions that are like a collective hallucination.
00:19:34 ►
I mean, I hate to say it because it’s a recursive metaphor, but culture is like a delusion of some sort because it isn’t true of Course it isn’t true if you’re a we toto
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It isn’t true that you came from the piss of the anaconda
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God when he had to get out of his canoe at the first waterfall
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That’s not really true
00:19:59 ►
But that’s your cultural myth and you live inside it cultural myths, that the world is made of things called
00:20:06 ►
new mesons and anti-protons, is of course not true either.
00:20:12 ►
But it’s a linguistic construct that we culturally validate and live inside.
00:20:18 ►
And these cultural myths give permission for certain things.
00:20:24 ►
Basically, they give permission to ignore certain kinds of realities.
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So our language is uniquely set up to ignore, for example,
00:20:35 ►
the suppression of femininity.
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It’s also uniquely set up to suppress the statistically infrequent. We really have no patience with that. We have
00:20:50 ►
an assembly mind mentality. What we’re interested in is that things run smoothly. One can imagine
00:20:58 ►
a completely different mentality that cared nothing for statistical norms and only pursued the miraculous.
00:21:06 ►
I mean, India, in a way, is that society.
00:21:09 ►
They don’t give a hoot for, you know,
00:21:11 ►
how it works on the humdrum level,
00:21:14 ►
but the alien, the peculiar, the other,
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the unexpected is revered, adored even.
00:21:22 ►
So these kinds of cultural values shift
00:21:25 ►
but now, now
00:21:27 ►
we are in a global culture
00:21:30 ►
with the combined understandings
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of 5, 6, 7 hundred language groups
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and half that many literatures
00:21:40 ►
being poured into a global database
00:21:43 ►
where some people are assimilating enough of this to begin to play their part in the creation of a kind of global meta-program for language.
00:22:07 ►
and I think it’s interesting to talk about the form that this may take because I see this as our…
00:22:11 ►
This is not our salvation
00:22:14 ►
but this is the angel of our salvation.
00:22:18 ►
If we can transform and remake language
00:22:21 ►
then we can have the conversation that we must have in order to
00:22:26 ►
save ourselves. But we cannot save ourselves until we have a language adequate to the problem
00:22:33 ►
that we’re facing. And English just won’t do it, because English is a language of subject
00:22:39 ►
object opposition. It’s a language
00:22:45 ►
of a past, present and future
00:22:47 ►
and the kind of world we’re living in
00:22:49 ►
is not that kind of world
00:22:51 ►
now toiling in the
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background, misunderstood
00:22:55 ►
and unnoticed
00:22:57 ►
for centuries have been mathematicians
00:23:00 ►
laboring to
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create what they call
00:23:03 ►
meta-language of description that seem to them
00:23:07 ►
very satisfying, to the rest of us very bewildering. And a question worth asking is, why is it that
00:23:16 ►
this language, mathematics, which we have so much trouble understanding, seems so tremendously powerful when it comes to the description of
00:23:27 ►
nature. This is not a trivial question. Why should numbers, in a sense the most abstract
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quintessence of the human mind, have anything whatsoever to say about the topology of three-dimensional space and time.
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It isn’t clear.
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What I believe is happening,
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and we talked about this last night,
00:23:53 ►
generally in the form of a conservation of novelty
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throughout the history of the universe.
00:24:01 ►
But I tended last night to present the universe
00:24:03 ►
as a material thing thing I spoke of atoms
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compressing into molecules into organic creatures into thinking beings with civilizations and so
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forth but another way to think of this is a kind of take a spiritual x-ray of the material universe and then say if matter is merely the vehicle of the
00:24:29 ►
transformations that we call the life of the universe well then what is the inner dynamic
00:24:36 ►
composed of what is it that is striving what is it that bootstraps itself forward? What is it that self-reflects? Well,
00:24:47 ►
I think what it is, is it’s actually information. Information is some kind of
00:24:54 ►
ontological modality that is capable of organizing any system in which it inhabits into
00:25:05 ►
self-reflection
00:25:07 ►
so you pour information into matter
00:25:10 ►
and you get back
00:25:11 ►
DNA capable of making
00:25:14 ►
life but
00:25:15 ►
you know there is a persistent spiritual
00:25:18 ►
tradition backed up by
00:25:19 ►
psychedelic and shamanic
00:25:21 ►
experience that says that there are
00:25:24 ►
also hierarchies of incorporeal
00:25:28 ►
and disincarnate intelligence
00:25:31 ►
that is nevertheless highly organized.
00:25:34 ►
Well, until the advent of the computer,
00:25:37 ►
I think we were just pretty much at a loss
00:25:40 ►
to form any conception whatsoever
00:25:42 ►
of how you could have consciousness without a body.
00:25:49 ►
But the computer shows us
00:25:51 ►
that you can have large-scale systems
00:25:54 ►
which have degrees,
00:25:57 ►
and then there’s a long philosophical wrangle
00:25:59 ►
which we can just stamp as for another time,
00:26:03 ►
degrees of sentience in operating systems
00:26:08 ►
so then it seems to mean
00:26:10 ►
that information is the thing which uses matter
00:26:16 ►
uses light
00:26:17 ►
uses spirit
00:26:20 ►
uses whatever it can put its hands on
00:26:22 ►
to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.
00:26:28 ►
Well, then, to what end?
00:26:30 ►
I mean, what is all this?
00:26:32 ►
Is it just an innate drive toward totality?
00:26:36 ►
Or is it a process which exists completed in some higher dimensional space
00:26:43 ►
and we are somehow trapped in a higher dimensional space and we are somehow trapped
00:26:46 ►
in a lower dimensional matrix
00:26:48 ►
and we have to endure
00:26:50 ►
the illusion that it is incomplete
00:26:52 ►
I mean
00:26:54 ►
I don’t have answers for these things
00:26:56 ►
this is the business of theologians
00:26:58 ►
basically to tell us where we are
00:27:00 ►
in this universal machine
00:27:02 ►
but I think that
00:27:04 ►
what we can do to enrich our experience
00:27:11 ►
and to feed data into our heuristic models
00:27:16 ►
is to begin to think in terms of language
00:27:20 ►
as the material that we need to work with instead of public opinion or matter
00:27:31 ►
or even energy.
00:27:34 ►
It’s meaning that we need to coax into our lives.
00:27:38 ►
Number one, as meaning enters our lives individually, we become more capable of raising our voices,
00:27:50 ►
both in joyous song and in political protest, if necessary.
00:27:56 ►
My whole shtick, and the whole shtick of the psychedelic experience, I think,
00:28:02 ►
is reclaim immediate experience.
00:28:05 ►
Realize that you outvote all parliaments,
00:28:10 ►
police forces, and major newspapers on the planet
00:28:14 ►
because, who knows, they may be illusions.
00:28:17 ►
Complicated phenomenological forms of analysis
00:28:20 ►
can be carried out to show that their existence
00:28:23 ►
is in considerable doubt. But if you
00:28:26 ►
carry out this phenomenological reduction, you will discover that it reinforces the notion that
00:28:31 ►
you must actually exist and be real. So therefore, you start from that, that nub of immediate
00:28:41 ►
experience and real being, and extrapolation outward should be very provisional.
00:28:49 ►
I mean, I don’t know how Buddhism handles this.
00:28:52 ►
I grant you all a strong possibility of existing,
00:29:01 ►
but I’m not nearly as sure about you as I am about
00:29:06 ►
me and I don’t think
00:29:08 ►
any of you should be
00:29:09 ►
more sure of the rest
00:29:12 ►
of us than yourself
00:29:13 ►
I mean the world could be anything
00:29:16 ►
you know it could be a solid
00:29:18 ►
state matrix of some sort
00:29:20 ►
it could be an illusion
00:29:21 ►
it could be a dream
00:29:23 ►
I mean it really could be a dream
00:29:25 ►
so it pays to stay on your toes I think
00:29:32 ►
in practical terms
00:29:33 ►
what does all this come down to
00:29:35 ►
besides that we should speak from the heart
00:29:39 ►
clearly and with our minds engaged
00:29:43 ►
well I think that remember I said we should see language
00:29:48 ►
as the stuff with which we work rather than matter.
00:29:53 ►
And that means creating a technology of the sayable,
00:29:58 ►
making the complete understanding of new puns
00:30:02 ►
a national priority on a par with weapons development.
00:30:08 ►
It means exploring the real implications
00:30:12 ►
of substituting Finnegan’s Wake for the Constitution,
00:30:16 ►
this sort of thing.
00:30:17 ►
Because what we’re doing, you see,
00:30:20 ►
is pulling the beard of the linear printheads
00:30:25 ►
who really believe all
00:30:27 ►
of this stuff, who really are
00:30:29 ►
lost in the labyrinth
00:30:32 ►
of the political
00:30:33 ►
errors of the last 500
00:30:36 ►
years.
00:30:37 ►
We can’t
00:30:39 ►
overwhelm them by force
00:30:41 ►
of arms, nor should we wish
00:30:43 ►
to.
00:30:48 ►
They can actually be teased out of existence because they themselves feel their position to be so ridiculous. It’s very interesting
00:30:56 ►
how the way the collapse of our enemy in the Soviet Union has exposed the absurdity of our previous positions.
00:31:08 ►
All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd, but people don’t draw the obvious
00:31:15 ►
conclusion. It must also mean then that our present position is absurd. And so it’s tremendously liberating
00:31:25 ►
our culture is ruined
00:31:27 ►
it’s a disgrace
00:31:30 ►
from which we can now
00:31:31 ►
simply walk away
00:31:33 ►
well then the question is
00:31:34 ►
into what
00:31:35 ►
and I believe
00:31:38 ►
that our persistent fascination
00:31:41 ►
with psychedelic
00:31:42 ►
states of mind
00:31:44 ►
since prehistory forward has been because in the psychedelic state from the very beginning there was an anticipation of the very end and the very end still lies ahead of us. What it is, is that our nervous system is in the process of evolving us
00:32:09 ►
through a linguistic transformation where language, which at the beginning of the process was
00:32:19 ►
something that you heard, at the end of the process, becomes something that you actually see.
00:32:28 ►
And this simple shift from seeing to hearing
00:32:32 ►
is the key to our being able to finally recognize each other
00:32:38 ►
and communicate.
00:32:40 ►
Print and linearity and what’s called ear bias for language is what has shattered our sense of ourselves as a collectivity.
00:32:52 ►
A positive way of putting it is to say it’s also what created the idea of democracy, individual freedom, labor unions, the vote.
00:33:02 ►
All of these atomized notions of human obligation and political participation arise out of print.
00:33:10 ►
But so do ideas like that we’re all alike, because letters from printing presses on pages are all alike.
00:33:18 ►
The idea that products should be mass-produced out of mass-produced subunits.
00:33:25 ►
This is a printhead notion.
00:33:27 ►
It could never have occurred to anyone outside of a printing press culture
00:33:30 ►
and never has.
00:33:33 ►
These ideas have imparted to our existence
00:33:36 ►
a tremendous material opulence
00:33:39 ►
and intellectual poverty and spiritual uniformity. And now, literally, we have to illuminate our civilization.
00:33:50 ►
We have to take its shoddy, spiritually emptied,
00:33:54 ►
Bauhaus skeleton and illuminate it,
00:33:59 ►
psychedelicize it, let a thousand paisleys bloom.
00:34:04 ►
In other words, release the design process from a commitment to material values.
00:34:12 ►
Well, how can you do that?
00:34:14 ►
Because the bottom line of material values is the bottom line.
00:34:18 ►
It costs.
00:34:20 ►
The reason we build in the Baha’i style for whatever reason we got into it,
00:34:25 ►
we now build in that style because it’s the cheapest around.
00:34:30 ►
And once you start adding filigrees and changing things,
00:34:34 ►
costs soar.
00:34:35 ►
How can you do that in a civilization
00:34:38 ►
with a cult of democratic values, individualism,
00:34:42 ►
and created linear uniformity?
00:34:44 ►
Well, the only way you can do it
00:34:46 ►
is you have to drop design
00:34:48 ►
costs to zero.
00:34:50 ►
The only way you can do that is
00:34:52 ►
if you build virtually.
00:34:54 ►
This means you
00:34:56 ►
build in an electronic dimension
00:34:58 ►
that is added on
00:35:00 ►
to ordinary cultural space
00:35:02 ►
like an orthogonal
00:35:04 ►
dimension.
00:35:05 ►
In other words, it’s like a TV that you walk into.
00:35:08 ►
It’s called cyberspace.
00:35:10 ►
And in cyberspace, things are built out of light.
00:35:14 ►
So it costs as much to build Versailles
00:35:19 ►
as it costs to build a hamburger stand
00:35:22 ►
because Versailles and the hamburger stand are just two programs that look exactly the same on disk.
00:35:30 ►
So what this means is that the previous set of class-created values based on the acquisition and control of matter begin to break down.
00:35:42 ►
begin to break down.
00:35:45 ►
This is already happening in America on one level where to live as a middle class person
00:35:49 ►
is to live on a better level than the Mughal emperors ever dreamed of.
00:35:54 ►
I mean, what Mughal emperor could stride to his refrigerator
00:35:57 ►
and see cases of French mineral water,
00:36:01 ►
juices from the South Seas, pomegranates from South America.
00:36:06 ►
Eat your heart out, Mughal Delhi.
00:36:08 ►
No chance.
00:36:10 ►
So, in a sense, we’re beginning to create this leveling,
00:36:15 ►
but we have created it by looting the material resources
00:36:19 ►
of the rest of the world.
00:36:21 ►
Conceivably, it can be created in a virtual space where we would all uh live in this
00:36:28 ►
world a rather monkish existence but you know there’s that wonderful passage in finningham’s
00:36:36 ►
wake where he says he’s speaking of the red light district of dublin which called Moy Cane and he says here in Moy Cane we
00:36:46 ►
flop on the seamy side but up in the end prospector you sprout all your worth and
00:36:54 ►
you woof your wings if you want to be phoenixed come and be parked well he was
00:37:02 ►
advocating death as a solution to life’s problems
00:37:05 ►
if you want to be phoenixed come and be parked
00:37:08 ►
my solution is not so radical
00:37:11 ►
I think if you want to be phoenixed come and be parked
00:37:14 ►
at your local virtual reality arcade
00:37:17 ►
and then you can be phoenixed in several ways
00:37:21 ►
well some of what I’m saying here is facetious.
00:37:27 ►
We talked last night about Stan Tenen’s wonderful object.
00:37:32 ►
For those of you who weren’t here,
00:37:34 ►
this is a man, a Kabbalistic scholar,
00:37:37 ►
who has developed a piece of sculpture
00:37:40 ►
such that when you illuminate it from a certain angle,
00:37:44 ►
such that when you illuminate it from a certain angle,
00:37:50 ►
the Hebrew letter Aleph appears as a shadow,
00:37:53 ►
and then you move the light slightly,
00:37:56 ►
and Aleph turns into Bet,
00:37:59 ►
and then you move the light slightly, and so on.
00:38:06 ►
In order, his sculpture produces all of the Hebrew letters as shadows from this beautiful form which he calls the lily.
00:38:12 ►
And it ties in with an experience that I had.
00:38:18 ►
Well, first let me talk a little bit more about this lily thing that Tenon has discovered.
00:38:24 ►
He also made one for Demotic Greek,
00:38:27 ►
which, you know, for those of us who thought it was proof positive
00:38:31 ►
that Hebrew was the language of God,
00:38:33 ►
this was a real blow to the chest,
00:38:35 ►
because he did one for Demotic Greek, too,
00:38:38 ►
and it works just as well,
00:38:40 ►
implying, and he’s working on Arabic,
00:38:44 ►
implying that perhaps such forms exist for all alphabets.
00:38:52 ►
And so then I was thinking about this last night and I said,
00:38:54 ►
well, if there’s a sculpture in three dimensions that throws the two-dimensional alphabets,
00:39:03 ►
that throws the two-dimensional alphabets,
00:39:06 ►
then obviously in a higher dimension there must be a form which throws into lower dimensions
00:39:10 ►
the sculptures that make the alphabet.
00:39:13 ►
So that means all alphabets, all letters,
00:39:17 ►
lead back to a hyper-dimensional surface of some sort,
00:39:22 ►
which can probably then be described
00:39:24 ►
with some kind of weird fractal algorithm.
00:39:28 ►
And so then I thought, wow, this is a pretty Hebraic vision of what’s going on here.
00:39:34 ►
We have the alphabets of local languages being generated from higher dimensional objects that are three dimensional that are then referent to still higher dimensional objects
00:39:47 ►
that through which the light of God’s love
00:39:51 ►
passes scattering out into the radiance
00:39:54 ►
of what can be said
00:39:56 ►
and in a way this is sort of my vision
00:40:00 ►
of the millennium
00:40:01 ►
that we will be resorbed into the word
00:40:04 ►
you know the whole story begins my vision of the millennium, that we will be resorbed into the word.
00:40:07 ►
You know, the whole story begins in Principio ad verbum,
00:40:08 ►
ad verbo carufactum est.
00:40:10 ►
In the beginning was the word,
00:40:12 ►
and the word was made flesh.
00:40:15 ►
The whole cosmic drama
00:40:17 ►
is the mystery of what it is
00:40:20 ►
for the word to be made flesh.
00:40:23 ►
Language is seeking to birth itself
00:40:26 ►
into the domain of concrete existence.
00:40:29 ►
That’s obviously what the word made flesh means.
00:40:36 ►
And it seems to me that if the word can be made flesh,
00:40:44 ►
this implies a reciprocity.
00:40:47 ►
It implies that the flesh can be made word.
00:40:52 ►
And this brings us back to what I was talking about at the very beginning this evening,
00:40:56 ►
which is the curiously literary nature of reality.
00:41:01 ►
of reality that it’s much more like
00:41:03 ►
a novel
00:41:05 ►
by Thomas Pynchon
00:41:07 ►
than it is like an equation
00:41:09 ►
by Ilya Prigogine
00:41:10 ►
and why is that?
00:41:13 ►
is it because in fact
00:41:14 ►
the flesh is word
00:41:16 ►
and that understanding
00:41:19 ►
this is the
00:41:21 ►
real task
00:41:23 ►
of uncovering our spirituality.
00:41:26 ►
Somehow it’s a riddle, it’s a conundrum, it’s a koan.
00:41:30 ►
If we could correctly understand this,
00:41:33 ►
if the world did not disappear immediately,
00:41:35 ►
at least it would roll around in the palm of your hand
00:41:38 ►
like a spinning marble, as the I Ching promises.
00:41:42 ►
It’s something about the recognition
00:41:45 ►
of the primacy of the word
00:41:47 ►
that history is the
00:41:49 ►
process of the descent
00:41:52 ►
of the word into
00:41:53 ►
concrete expression
00:41:55 ►
I didn’t say matter
00:41:57 ►
and that our relation to this
00:42:00 ►
retroflexive process
00:42:01 ►
is an ascent
00:42:04 ►
into the word,
00:42:06 ►
a going toward the approaching mystery,
00:42:10 ►
and a meeting there in a domain of unknowability, essentially.
00:42:16 ►
I mean, this is the casting into being that Heidegger talked about.
00:42:20 ►
This is the going to meet the stranger.
00:42:21 ►
This is the flight of the alone to the alone
00:42:25 ►
that is the driving force of Plotinus’ mysticism.
00:42:30 ►
Well, that’s really all I have to say about that.
00:42:33 ►
So let me see what time…
00:42:35 ►
How am I doing?
00:42:37 ►
Question and answer.
00:42:38 ►
Yeah, let’s take some questions if there are any.
00:42:43 ►
Do you know how to use Amanides’ muscaria medicinally and shamanistically without killing yourself?
00:42:48 ►
I can tell you were following my argument with bated breath.
00:42:54 ►
Carefully, because it’s dangerous.
00:42:58 ►
It’s dangerous because it’s seasonally variable, geographically variable and
00:43:11 ►
Genetically variable and that’s enough variables that you should be very careful with what you’re doing
00:43:15 ►
Generally, I don’t recommend it
00:43:20 ►
It’s the attention that has been given to that mushroom is to my mind
00:43:25 ►
Entirely out of proportion to its cultural importance.
00:43:33 ►
This is because Gordon Wasson fastened in on it with a tenacious will as Soma.
00:43:36 ►
He decided that it was Soma.
00:43:38 ►
Are you all up to speed on what we’re talking about here? Soma was this mysterious, ecstatic, hallucinogenic plant
00:43:45 ►
that the Rig Vedas were basically composed about,
00:43:51 ►
the major subject of the Rig Vedas is Soma.
00:43:55 ►
The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda is a paean of praise to Soma
00:43:59 ►
that it exalts it above all the other gods.
00:44:03 ►
And no one knows what Soma was.
00:44:07 ►
The descriptions are puzzling.
00:44:11 ►
It seems to have been…
00:44:13 ►
It didn’t have leaves.
00:44:15 ►
It had yellow flowers.
00:44:17 ►
It grew in mountains.
00:44:19 ►
And they speak of pressing it.
00:44:22 ►
It was prepared some way.
00:44:25 ►
It was pressed. It was prepared some way. It was pressed.
00:44:26 ►
It was filtered.
00:44:27 ►
And then they talk about this golden liquid which they drank.
00:44:31 ►
And Gordon Wasson, because of the importance of the Indo-Aryan people who wrote the Vedas
00:44:39 ►
for connecting up all of the history of what archaeologists call Old Europe
00:44:44 ►
with the
00:44:45 ►
Neolithic Middle East and India
00:44:48 ►
it was very important to try and
00:44:49 ►
understand what Soma was
00:44:51 ►
but
00:44:52 ►
the problem that has bedeviled
00:44:55 ►
everyone who was an enthusiast
00:44:58 ►
for Amanita muscaria
00:44:59 ►
as Soma is that
00:45:01 ►
it’s a bad trip
00:45:03 ►
it is not reliably an ecstatic intoxicant.
00:45:08 ►
In fact, it’s fairly reliably a bellyache.
00:45:12 ►
And people have pounded it with milk curd.
00:45:16 ►
There was a whole school of thought which said
00:45:18 ►
that the enzymes active in raw milk
00:45:21 ►
would decarboxylate muscarine, the poison,
00:45:26 ►
into muscamol, the hallucinogen.
00:45:30 ►
But, you know, this didn’t stand the test of human trials.
00:45:36 ►
It didn’t appear to be true.
00:45:38 ►
Then other people said you have to dry them for months or smoke them over a fire.
00:45:43 ►
Again, this doesn’t seem to be reliable. So,
00:45:48 ►
Wasson went to the grave. He, in his last book, Persephone’s Quest, he referred to
00:45:54 ►
Amenita muscaria as the supreme entheogen of all time, which was just a completely wrong-headed
00:46:02 ►
judgment, I believe. And this was from the man who discovered
00:46:05 ►
the true psilocybin mushroom cult in Mexico.
00:46:10 ►
There was an angle on all this
00:46:12 ►
which Wasson completely overlooked
00:46:14 ►
because of his bias towards certain languages.
00:46:19 ►
And that is that along with all this
00:46:21 ►
Indo-European Vedic Hindu material,
00:46:25 ►
there was a Zendavestan literature based around Hauma,
00:46:31 ►
the same stuff, same word.
00:46:33 ►
And from there, Flattery argues that it was Pagamon harmala,
00:46:40 ►
that it was harmaline, that it was not a mushroom,
00:46:42 ►
that it was a higher plant in the zygophilaceae.
00:46:48 ►
And I think probably he’s right, actually.
00:46:52 ►
It’s a very interesting book.
00:46:54 ►
Apparently, in the Avestan classical period,
00:47:00 ►
no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience
00:47:03 ►
without resort to drugs
00:47:06 ►
they just put it very plainly
00:47:08 ►
they’re the most matter-of-fact people
00:47:10 ►
these texts are fascinating
00:47:13 ►
but they don’t devalue it
00:47:15 ►
they say, you know, here’s our map of the spirit world
00:47:19 ►
entirely based on our drug experiences
00:47:22 ►
and here are the drugs we use
00:47:24 ►
and to see these angels you must use this drug
00:47:26 ►
and to see these angels
00:47:28 ►
this drug and so forth
00:47:30 ►
we don’t really know what these drugs
00:47:32 ►
were because the
00:47:34 ►
etymologies
00:47:36 ►
are lost but
00:47:38 ►
Harmaline figures very strongly
00:47:40 ►
in all of this and of course Harmaline
00:47:42 ►
is a
00:47:43 ►
neurotransmitter
00:47:45 ►
present in human metabolism.
00:47:48 ►
In fact,
00:47:48 ►
I didn’t get into it tonight
00:47:50 ►
because I was trying to keep it
00:47:52 ►
off the biochemistry
00:47:54 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:47:55 ►
But this transformation of language
00:47:58 ►
from something heard to seen
00:48:00 ►
that I was talking about,
00:48:02 ►
I believe,
00:48:03 ►
is a one or two gene mutation. That’s all it would
00:48:07 ►
take because in the human pineal gland, there is a compound called adenaroglomerotropine.
00:48:16 ►
That’s what the enzymologists call it. But when you show it to a plant biochemist, he says it’s 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan,
00:48:27 ►
and so it is.
00:48:28 ►
A deneroglomerotropine and 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan
00:48:31 ►
are the same thing.
00:48:33 ►
Well, it’s a psychedelic harmine alkaloid
00:48:36 ►
similar to what’s in pergamon harmala.
00:48:38 ►
It could be converted to DMT by a simple methylation.
00:48:45 ►
Well, a one-gene mutation would make a methylation possible.
00:48:50 ►
Attention, consciousness, cultural values,
00:48:54 ►
we don’t know how many times since the invention of language
00:48:58 ►
there have been significant mutations in the chemistry of the nervous system
00:49:04 ►
that have created
00:49:06 ►
significant changes in cultural
00:49:08 ►
programming. I mean
00:49:10 ►
doesn’t anyone find it a little
00:49:12 ►
odd that the
00:49:14 ►
laws of perspective were discovered
00:49:16 ►
less than 400 years ago?
00:49:18 ►
I mean what the hell was wrong with
00:49:20 ►
people before that? How can you
00:49:22 ►
discover the laws of perspective?
00:49:24 ►
I mean I find that not credible
00:49:27 ►
for somebody to say that the laws of perspective
00:49:30 ►
were discovered.
00:49:32 ►
It’s always seemed weird to me.
00:49:34 ►
It’s as though, you know,
00:49:37 ►
there was a shift,
00:49:39 ►
a very subtle tweaking
00:49:40 ►
of the processing of visual space itself
00:49:43 ►
necessary to be able to do that.
00:49:45 ►
Yeah.
00:49:47 ►
You’ve spoken about the word and the word made flesh.
00:49:53 ►
And Dorothy Sayers wrote a book called The Mind of the Maker,
00:49:58 ►
in which she discusses the Trinity as really an image of what the creative process is all about.
00:50:09 ►
And when the Father is having a great idea for a play, he is the Father.
00:50:15 ►
The Son is making the thing happen on stage, bringing it into the world and having it made flesh.
00:50:22 ►
And then the Spirit is the response that you have
00:50:26 ►
to that completed product
00:50:28 ►
and how all three of them really beget one another
00:50:32 ►
and they nurture one another.
00:50:36 ►
And she talks about people who have these problems
00:50:39 ►
with scalene trinities where there’s someone
00:50:43 ►
who, let’s say, may have have only the father only have a great
00:50:46 ►
idea but be unable to
00:50:48 ►
make it into something
00:50:50 ►
that’s physically real
00:50:52 ►
on a stage and I wonder
00:50:54 ►
if you could pick that up
00:50:55 ►
well
00:50:56 ►
yeah I mean speaking to it generally
00:51:00 ►
I think if you think of history
00:51:02 ►
as this kind of a process
00:51:04 ►
western history as this kind of a process,
00:51:10 ►
Western history as the manifestation of the Demaurgos,
00:51:13 ►
Ildaboa, Jehovah,
00:51:17 ►
and then you get this middle declension in the Christos,
00:51:22 ►
and then this peculiar and misunderstood promise
00:51:25 ►
of the redemption by the Holy Ghost.
00:51:30 ►
McLuhan, who’s a very interesting figure as, you know,
00:51:35 ►
a radical thinker in communications theory and a devout Catholic,
00:51:43 ►
believed that the manifestation of the Holy Ghost was electricity.
00:51:48 ►
And to him, the ringing of the planet by electronic media was the enfolding arms of an archangel.
00:51:52 ►
I mean, he literally saw electricity as God’s love made manifest.
00:51:58 ►
And he may not, he hasn’t been proven wrong yet.
00:52:02 ►
I mean, it may yet knit us all together
00:52:05 ►
and make us one
00:52:07 ►
and lift us off
00:52:08 ►
and send us to the stars
00:52:11 ►
it’s some wonderful stuff
00:52:13 ►
electricity
00:52:13 ►
I like to talk about it
00:52:17 ►
because for thousands of years
00:52:20 ►
electricity
00:52:22 ►
was this stuff
00:52:24 ►
which some people
00:52:26 ►
knew about and what they knew
00:52:28 ►
was that you skinned a cat
00:52:30 ►
and you
00:52:32 ►
dried its skin in the wind
00:52:35 ►
and then you got an
00:52:36 ►
amber rod
00:52:38 ►
a polished rod of
00:52:40 ►
amber and then you would go
00:52:42 ►
into a dark room with your
00:52:44 ►
cat skin and your amber rod and you would go into a dark room with your cat skin
00:52:45 ►
and your amber rod
00:52:47 ►
and you would rub it back and forth like this
00:52:49 ►
and then you would pull the amber rod
00:52:51 ►
away from the fur and you would see
00:52:53 ►
miniature lightning storms
00:52:55 ►
of static electricity
00:52:57 ►
and that was it
00:53:00 ►
for thousands of years
00:53:02 ►
that was it
00:53:03 ►
and then in the 17th century
00:53:05 ►
make it the 18th century
00:53:07 ►
people invented what were called
00:53:09 ►
Leiden jars
00:53:10 ►
which were this tricky way of
00:53:13 ►
storing this stuff
00:53:15 ►
so that you could store up
00:53:17 ►
a lot of it and then in the dark room
00:53:19 ►
you could discharge it across
00:53:21 ►
a gap with this snap
00:53:23 ►
and from that, you know, I mean, you talk about a shamanic invocation.
00:53:30 ►
From that, you know, we light cities, we smelt steel,
00:53:35 ►
we sink shafts miles into the earth.
00:53:38 ►
And it’s just this little elemental that we were able to coax into becoming our friend.
00:53:44 ►
Well, who knows how much of this sort
00:53:46 ►
of thing there is. According to McLuhan, that’s the major thing. And the electrification of the body,
00:53:54 ►
you know, this is a theme you get as early as Whitman. I sing the body electric. You get it in
00:54:00 ►
Stephen Vincent Binet in his poem John Brown’s Body, where he says, I see the human body, cold electric rage,
00:54:10 ►
and he pictures it as a superstructure.
00:54:15 ►
Electricity as information, as the logos,
00:54:21 ►
as the freeing and rarefaction of thought,
00:54:27 ►
it all, it’s credible.
00:54:29 ►
It’s credible.
00:54:31 ►
I mean, when you think about electricity,
00:54:33 ►
in and of itself, as modern inventions go,
00:54:38 ►
it must be the most benign there is,
00:54:40 ►
because other than seating criminals in electric wire chairs it is not a weapon of mass
00:54:47 ►
destruction you cannot rain it down on your enemy’s cities it’s pure energy in the service
00:54:57 ►
of light one thing and information and it’s generated i don’t know how many of you know this
00:55:05 ►
but it’s generated out of stable magnetic fields
00:55:09 ►
when we were in the 5th grade
00:55:11 ►
we made engines by wrapping nails with wires
00:55:15 ►
and setting them delicately balanced
00:55:18 ►
between permanent magnets
00:55:20 ►
you coax this stuff into being
00:55:24 ►
we take it for granted because we don’t understand it.
00:55:28 ►
But if you’re down close to where it’s coming into being,
00:55:31 ►
it’s like coaxing some kind of demon out of the matrix
00:55:36 ►
and into the service of thought and light.
00:55:40 ►
Very psychedelic.
00:55:42 ►
So how do you see the body being coaxed back into the word?
00:55:47 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:55:48 ►
It’s a hard thing to picture, isn’t it?
00:55:52 ►
Well, maybe it’s like those Tibetan letters
00:55:54 ►
that start becoming real and vibrating.
00:55:57 ►
Well, there are a number of…
00:55:59 ►
I think we have like pieces of the puzzle,
00:56:02 ►
but we don’t know quite how to arrange them.
00:56:05 ►
One is virtual reality.
00:56:08 ►
Do you all understand this concept?
00:56:10 ►
Because I mention it and it’s quickly becoming central to my references.
00:56:16 ►
Virtual reality is this technology now being developed
00:56:19 ►
where they give you a helmet and a body glove
00:56:23 ►
and when you look in the helmet
00:56:25 ►
you see another world
00:56:27 ►
and you’re in it
00:56:29 ►
and you can walk around and pick things up
00:56:32 ►
and open doors
00:56:33 ►
and it’s all sustained by
00:56:35 ►
computers but the illusion
00:56:37 ►
is very real and they’re only
00:56:40 ►
at the beginning of the process
00:56:42 ►
of creating this illusion
00:56:43 ►
so that’s a technology sitting off
00:56:46 ►
there with a potential
00:56:47 ►
application another
00:56:49 ►
is nanotechnology
00:56:51 ►
nanotechnology is
00:56:53 ►
making things very
00:56:55 ►
small
00:56:56 ►
and there’s a whole enthusiasm
00:56:59 ►
for this and people
00:57:02 ►
who you know
00:57:03 ►
I talked yesterday about being down at the
00:57:08 ►
baths and watching the stratocumulus clouds move over the ocean the number of
00:57:15 ►
water droplets in a stratocumulus cloud exceeds the number of people in the world. Therefore, if we were the size of water droplets,
00:57:28 ►
we could simply exist in that kind of a cloudscape.
00:57:34 ►
Well then, okay, so that’s another technology that’s sitting there.
00:57:38 ►
Another is this wonderful fantasy that I told some of you about a few days ago
00:57:45 ►
where we see a man walking on a beach
00:57:48 ►
and the man, his planet is perfect.
00:57:52 ►
Its oceans and its atmosphere and its glaciers
00:57:55 ►
and its equatorial forests are all in balance.
00:58:00 ►
And this man is naked except for a thread,
00:58:04 ►
like a Hindu thread that crosses him
00:58:08 ►
and on this thread there’s sufficient space for as much as a thousand or more small beads.
00:58:14 ►
Each bead is a doorway into a technological potentiality
00:58:22 ►
that is entirely suppressed in three-dimensional space.
00:58:27 ►
In three-dimensional space, there is just man and nature.
00:58:31 ►
But when this man closes his eyes,
00:58:34 ►
there are menus, and these menus lead to other menus.
00:58:38 ►
In other words, the culture, the entire culture,
00:58:41 ►
has become virtual.
00:58:43 ►
This is one possibility, that the culture be made virtual.
00:58:47 ►
Another possibility, which is sort of the reverse of that,
00:58:52 ►
and there’s a company on the peninsula trying to do this,
00:58:55 ►
is to place a textual reality behind apparent reality,
00:59:03 ►
so that everything is a button, you know?
00:59:07 ►
It is what it is, but it’s also a button.
00:59:10 ►
So I look at this, the question forms in my mind,
00:59:13 ►
what is this?
00:59:16 ►
The what pushes a button,
00:59:18 ►
and textual accompaniment informs me
00:59:21 ►
that this is cypress wood cut three years ago.
00:59:26 ►
Do you see what this would do
00:59:28 ►
to the world?
00:59:29 ►
Now we’re well on our way
00:59:31 ►
in the project of making
00:59:33 ►
the word flesh
00:59:34 ►
and the flesh word.
00:59:36 ►
We at least have them lined up
00:59:38 ►
with the word behind the flesh
00:59:40 ►
and in some cases
00:59:41 ►
the flesh behind the word.
00:59:44 ►
Embedded. Emb, embedded, ontologically arranged in a situation of mutual reinforcement.
00:59:50 ►
Okay, another technology is some kind of severing from the physical connection.
01:00:09 ►
And then there’s a lot of debate about,
01:00:10 ►
is this possible, the old consciousness without an object riffraff?
01:00:15 ►
Well, it has to be explored.
01:00:19 ►
It can’t be known.
01:00:20 ►
The other thing is the persistence of the intuition of non-material worlds inhabited
01:00:31 ►
by self-organizing intellecties of one sort or another seems to imply that some kind of
01:00:38 ►
dematerialization is at least theoretically possible. I’ve talked a lot in these circles
01:00:46 ►
about the questions raised by the ecstasis
01:00:51 ►
that comes with DMT,
01:00:53 ►
where you actually break into a world
01:00:56 ►
where there are what I call
01:00:59 ►
autonomous self-transforming machine elves,
01:01:03 ►
but what we have discussed in terms of are these the sprites of classical European mythology? Are they dwellers in some parallel continuum unsuspected by any of our sciences or ontologies? And then a still more unsettling possibility, is this somehow an ecology of souls?
01:01:29 ►
Is the eerie connectedness to the human dimension
01:01:33 ►
that these things have,
01:01:35 ►
because in fact this is a stage of some sort in human existence?
01:01:42 ►
If what God can bring tangential to history
01:01:45 ►
means is
01:01:47 ►
human beings unraveling
01:01:49 ►
the mystery of physical death
01:01:52 ►
then I think that would be
01:01:54 ►
a sufficient fulfillment
01:01:56 ►
of the
01:01:56 ►
sort of dramatological demands
01:02:00 ►
of a denouement
01:02:01 ►
that we stride toward the mystery
01:02:03 ►
the mystery strides towards us,
01:02:06 ►
and everything is resolved in a revelation of the understanding
01:02:11 ►
and meaning of death.
01:02:14 ►
This kind of thing makes me very uncomfortable,
01:02:17 ►
perhaps because it’s fairly feeling-toned and emotion-laden.
01:02:23 ►
feeling toned and emotion laden it doesn’t trouble me to imagine
01:02:27 ►
contacting informational beings
01:02:31 ►
in a parallel continuum
01:02:33 ►
but the notion of encountering an ecology of souls
01:02:37 ►
I think is hair raising if you take it seriously
01:02:41 ►
because even the most spiritual of us
01:02:47 ►
are so deeply programmed
01:02:48 ►
by the assumptions of scientific materialism
01:02:51 ►
that I think
01:02:52 ►
something like that on the short term
01:02:55 ►
here and now
01:02:56 ►
really gives us pause
01:02:58 ►
Brother David
01:03:01 ►
in this process of
01:03:03 ►
breaking through to the worldly flesh,
01:03:06 ►
where do you see the function of the poets?
01:03:10 ►
Well, you know, people have talked, Robert Graves and others,
01:03:16 ►
about what he called an ursprach, an original speech,
01:03:21 ►
and Celtic poetics somewhat assumes this
01:03:25 ►
I think this language
01:03:27 ►
that is seen
01:03:29 ►
is a project
01:03:32 ►
that the poets should take
01:03:33 ►
very seriously
01:03:34 ►
we need to not simply
01:03:38 ►
make better poetry
01:03:39 ►
we need to make poetry of an
01:03:41 ►
entirely different order
01:03:43 ►
and we will recognize it when we see it,
01:03:47 ►
not when we hear it.
01:03:49 ►
It will not be heard, it will be seen.
01:03:51 ►
To carry language from two dimensions into three
01:03:56 ►
is the task of the poet and the rebel in the 20th century.
01:04:04 ►
And there is a model for this which I will explain to you so that it doesn’t seem so outlandish and so we can see that nature once again has sanctioned this move. 700 million years ago more or less the great tree of life
01:04:26 ►
made a primary division
01:04:28 ►
between the vertebrates
01:04:30 ►
the creatures with backbones
01:04:31 ►
and the invertebrates
01:04:33 ►
evolving along the invertebrate line
01:04:36 ►
and reaching the greatest
01:04:38 ►
brain size
01:04:40 ►
and complexity of nervous system
01:04:43 ►
on the invertebrate side of things were the cephalopods.
01:04:47 ►
These are the squids and the benthic octopi, the eight-armed ones and the ten-armed ones.
01:04:55 ►
You may not realize it, but they are actually mollusks related to escargot. So they are an
01:05:02 ►
extremely primitive creature from the point of view of those of us
01:05:08 ►
with backbones and binocular vision and frontal lobes and so forth and so on nevertheless the
01:05:14 ►
interesting thing about benthic octopi is that they can change their color over a wide range. Now you may have heard this fact
01:05:26 ►
and assumed that it had to do with camouflage
01:05:29 ►
against their surroundings
01:05:31 ►
so that they can avoid predators.
01:05:34 ►
This is not what it’s about at all.
01:05:38 ►
Octopi change color
01:05:40 ►
and they can also change the shape of their skin
01:05:44 ►
from smooth to rugose and wrinkled
01:05:47 ►
and then what’s called pileate, little points all over it. They can go through all these color
01:05:53 ►
changes and texture changes. And octopi have extremely well-evolved eyes. In fact, evolutionary
01:06:02 ►
biologists always compare the eyes of octopi to human eyes as
01:06:08 ►
an example of what is called parallel non-convergent evolution, because clearly the two are not
01:06:14 ►
related, but the argument is made, you see they solve the problem the same way in two
01:06:20 ►
different places. So it’s a very neat example of convergent evolution.
01:06:31 ►
But what is interesting for our discussion
01:06:34 ►
is the mode of communication of these things.
01:06:38 ►
They become their linguistic intent.
01:06:44 ►
This repertoire of blushes, dots, stripes,
01:06:49 ►
traveling fields, color changes,
01:06:51 ►
and then, because they are soft-bodied,
01:06:55 ►
they can quickly reveal and conceal
01:06:58 ►
all parts of their body very quickly.
01:07:00 ►
So if you watch an octopus in communication,
01:07:04 ►
its surface texture is changing, its color is changing, and it is hiding and revealing, it’s dancing, and it’s a dance of pure meaning perceived visually by the object of its intention, which is other octopi. So compare this for a moment
01:07:25 ►
to our method of communication.
01:07:28 ►
We use rapidly modulated small mouth noises.
01:07:35 ►
As primates, we have an incredible ability
01:07:37 ►
to make small mouth noises.
01:07:40 ►
We can do this for up to six hours at a stretch
01:07:43 ►
without tiring.
01:07:45 ►
No other thing that we can do this for up to six hours at a stretch without tiring. No other thing that we can do approaches the level of variation
01:07:52 ►
with low energy investment that the small mouth noises do.
01:07:57 ►
A person using a deaf and dumb language is exhausted after 45 minutes.
01:08:02 ►
But the problem with the small mouth noises form of communication
01:08:07 ►
is I have a thought.
01:08:10 ►
I look in a dictionary that I have created out of my life experience.
01:08:14 ►
I map the thought onto the dictionary.
01:08:17 ►
I make the requisite small mouth noises.
01:08:21 ►
They cross physical space.
01:08:23 ►
They enter your ear. You look in your dictionary,
01:08:29 ►
which is different from my dictionary, but if we speak what we call the same language,
01:08:36 ►
it will be close enough that you will sort of understand what I mean. Now if I don’t
01:08:41 ►
of understand what I mean. Now if I don’t
01:08:44 ►
say to you, what do I
01:08:46 ►
mean? You and I will
01:08:48 ►
go gaily off in the assumption
01:08:50 ►
that we understand each other.
01:08:52 ►
But if I say to you,
01:08:54 ►
did you understand what I said then?
01:08:56 ►
You say, yes, you meant that
01:08:58 ►
you don’t want to sit with Harry and Sally
01:09:00 ►
because their pending divorce
01:09:02 ►
makes you uncomfortable. You say, no, that’s not
01:09:04 ►
what I meant.
01:09:07 ►
I meant, so there’s misunderstanding because the dictionaries are not matched.
01:09:10 ►
Now, notice what’s happening with the octopi.
01:09:14 ►
There is no dictionary.
01:09:16 ►
Both parties are seeing the same thing
01:09:21 ►
because my body is my meaning.
01:09:24 ►
I become my meaning.
01:09:27 ►
I become my meaning and you behold the meaning I have become.
01:09:31 ►
I am like a naked thought,
01:09:33 ►
not even a naked nervous system,
01:09:36 ►
more naked than that.
01:09:37 ►
I am like a naked thought in aqueous space
01:09:41 ►
unfolding in time.
01:09:43 ►
I maintain this is why octopi eject clouds of ink.
01:09:48 ►
It’s so they can have private thoughts.
01:09:51 ►
Because if you can be seen, you can be understood.
01:09:56 ►
Well, this is a perfect model, condoned by nature,
01:10:02 ►
for the kind of transformation that we want to lead our culture toward.
01:10:06 ►
And I don’t think it’s that outlandish.
01:10:08 ►
Our previous animal totems were chosen unconsciously
01:10:12 ►
and were rather unfortunate, I think.
01:10:15 ►
I take the totem of the 19th century to be the horse,
01:10:22 ►
expressed as the steam engine.
01:10:52 ►
And the totemic animal of the 20th century is the raptor, the bird of prey, expressed as supersonic high-performance fighter aircraft, which is just the leanest, meanest machine you can get together these days but these mammalian and avian images are too close to the rapacious heart of the primate inside us embracing an image of the soul like that of the octopi is a permission
01:11:03 ►
for a strange and alien kind of beauty to be
01:11:06 ►
led into our lives and these things are strange and alien let me tell you the
01:11:11 ►
situation I described with these octopi was coastal shallow water octopi so
01:11:18 ►
called circle literal octopi but they have also evolved into the depths, the so-called abyssal octopi that exist below 1500 meters in the sea where there is absolute darkness. the past 700 million years they have evolved phosphorescent organs and have covered themselves
01:11:47 ►
with lights with eyelid-like membranes that can be rapidly blinked and flickered so that when you
01:11:55 ►
descend into the abyss you then see pure linguistic intentionality among the cephalopoidea because they have become
01:12:06 ►
what we aim to become
01:12:09 ►
under the wise leadership
01:12:11 ►
and stewardship of George Bush
01:12:13 ►
namely a thousand points of light
01:12:17 ►
is this guy for real?
01:12:24 ►
is this guy for real was it a w.h. arden line
01:12:32 ►
was it flanders fields armies clash by night and that whole business
01:12:39 ►
are they only beholding one another or is there maybe a mechanism at work like when
01:12:46 ►
yawning is contagious
01:12:49 ►
that it’s not only
01:12:51 ►
watching but actually
01:12:52 ►
what happens to your body
01:12:54 ►
is transmitted to mine
01:12:55 ►
well this is fascinating
01:12:58 ►
stuff to study
01:12:59 ►
the biologists who are studying these things
01:13:02 ►
are actually creating a grammar
01:13:04 ►
and a syntax
01:13:06 ►
and they are beginning to understand
01:13:10 ►
what certain things mean
01:13:13 ►
and the level of meaning.
01:13:16 ►
There’s a wonderful book called
01:13:18 ►
Communication and Non-Communication
01:13:22 ►
among the Cephalopods
01:13:23 ►
and it makes the point that
01:13:26 ►
communication is a very double-edged thing.
01:13:30 ►
You want to communicate to somebody,
01:13:34 ►
but usually your message is…
01:13:38 ►
It’s also important that your message
01:13:39 ►
not be picked up by other somebodies.
01:13:42 ►
So there can’t be just a full-on drive
01:13:46 ►
toward apprehendability.
01:13:48 ►
There also is a countervailing force
01:13:51 ►
toward concealment, obscurantism,
01:13:56 ►
double entendre, so forth.
01:13:59 ►
You know, someone said language was invented to lie.
01:14:02 ►
Well, in a way, that’s true
01:14:04 ►
because of the problem of non-communication.
01:14:08 ►
As soon as you have something to communicate,
01:14:11 ►
there are places you don’t want the message to go.
01:14:14 ►
And so this creates a very interesting problem.
01:14:18 ►
If I were 20 years old,
01:14:20 ►
I’d go back into marine biology
01:14:22 ►
just to spend time with these things.
01:14:26 ►
They’re quite amazing amazing and they have very
01:14:28 ►
large brain capacity
01:14:29 ►
I could be I think John
01:14:31 ►
Lilly was all mixed up to
01:14:34 ►
look for mind in the water
01:14:35 ►
in that it was mammalian
01:14:37 ►
chauvinism that drove them
01:14:39 ►
to dolphins and whales
01:14:42 ►
that maybe they are
01:14:44 ►
intelligent but the language feats when you see videotape of to dolphins and whales, that maybe they are intelligent,
01:14:47 ►
but the language feats,
01:14:50 ►
when you see videotape of these cephalopods,
01:14:54 ►
you realize you’re in the presence of an opera.
01:14:56 ►
What kinds of things are they communicating,
01:14:58 ►
besides maybe fear or… Well, they have elaborate sexual displays,
01:15:03 ►
and it’s a very tricky thing,
01:15:06 ►
sexuality among cephalopods
01:15:09 ►
because the male usually doesn’t survive the encounter.
01:15:13 ►
So a lot of time is spent getting it right
01:15:17 ►
before you commit yourself.
01:15:19 ►
So they have a very complicated courtship thing.
01:15:23 ►
And one of the things
01:15:25 ►
that’s always said about them
01:15:27 ►
is that
01:15:28 ►
every child’s book will tell
01:15:32 ►
you this about octopi
01:15:33 ►
they’re shy creatures
01:15:35 ►
well guess why
01:15:37 ►
it’s because they wear their heart on their sleeve
01:15:40 ►
everywhere they go
01:15:41 ►
other octopi can tell exactly
01:15:43 ►
what they’re thinking and feeling
01:15:45 ►
so they live alone
01:15:46 ►
and they only get together
01:15:48 ►
on special occasions
01:15:49 ►
for communication basically
01:15:52 ►
and the repertoire
01:15:55 ►
is as complex as human language
01:15:58 ►
so that they could be discussing
01:16:02 ►
the equivalent of
01:16:03 ►
Spencer’s epithalamium or something.
01:16:07 ►
I mean, we don’t know what they’re talking about.
01:16:09 ►
Do we have a sort of Rosetta Stone you know about?
01:16:12 ►
We have a primitive grammar, but it’s only for one species.
01:16:18 ►
And I’m not really interested in what they’re saying
01:16:22 ►
because I think it would only make sense if you were an octopus.
01:16:27 ►
But I’ll bet that…
01:16:29 ►
You see, it’s a model for us.
01:16:32 ►
Wouldn’t we like to dance for each other and be perfectly understood?
01:16:37 ►
And wouldn’t we like to see someone dance
01:16:40 ►
and to know that this was their mind and their body somehow at one.
01:16:47 ►
In a way, God, does everything go back to everything?
01:16:50 ►
In a way, this is the theme of Skinny Legs and All.
01:16:54 ►
This is the theme of the Dance of the Seven Veils.
01:16:58 ►
Octopi do it.
01:17:00 ►
Nubile Hebrew princesses do it.
01:17:03 ►
Everybody dances toward the truth,
01:17:07 ►
dropping veils as they go,
01:17:09 ►
and then, of course, the nakedness of truth is a cliché.
01:17:14 ►
Well, you mentioned, to bring it to a practical level…
01:17:19 ►
Do that, yes.
01:17:22 ►
You mentioned the hallucinogenic experiences being um one one way that um i don’t
01:17:30 ►
think i accelerate anything in my life i feel that i just align with and move in a freer way so
01:17:36 ►
i wouldn’t i wouldn’t seek out a hallucinogenic experience in order to to accelerate or to get more transformed or anything, I do it because it’s enjoyable.
01:17:47 ►
It’s truly exciting and passionate,
01:17:50 ►
and I do seem to transform in the process and grow.
01:17:55 ►
Are there any ways or other ways that you might suggest?
01:17:59 ►
And also, I’m interested in sound,
01:18:02 ►
which is, you’re talking about going from sound to light.
01:18:07 ►
And I have a way of starting where I am, or again, following my excitement,
01:18:12 ►
which happens to be in making tones.
01:18:14 ►
And I’ve reproduced experiences such as, very simply, like a hot tub,
01:18:20 ►
where I make a tone and another person has an experience of being in a hot tub.
01:18:23 ►
They go from being cold to being very comfortable, very vulnerable, very open, very loving.
01:18:29 ►
And it occurred to me that I could reproduce a mushroom experience
01:18:35 ►
or some of these drugs you mentioned that are in the Amazon.
01:18:40 ►
That you could reproduce it with sound?
01:18:42 ►
I could make tones, such as in Tibet,
01:18:45 ►
they can, you know, tones can bring physical objects into being
01:18:51 ►
and move energy and such, and that’s my exploration.
01:18:56 ►
I was wondering if you had any ideas of…
01:18:58 ►
Well, something sort of along that line
01:19:01 ►
that I’ve worked with for years and observed for years
01:19:06 ►
and I find very interesting
01:19:08 ►
is you know in South America
01:19:09 ►
there is this drug, plant
01:19:12 ►
drug, shamanic tradition
01:19:14 ►
of great age called
01:19:15 ►
ayahuasca or yahey
01:19:17 ►
and what seems
01:19:19 ►
it’s chemically a little different
01:19:22 ►
from anything we’ve discussed
01:19:23 ►
and consequently neurologically a little different from anything we’ve discussed and consequently neurologically a little different.
01:19:28 ►
When this drug was first discovered in the 20s,
01:19:33 ►
they isolated a white crystal from it
01:19:38 ►
and they named it telepathy
01:19:40 ►
because they believed that these deep forest Indians
01:19:45 ►
were having some kind of state of group-mindedness behind this.
01:19:51 ►
Well then, and that was all very exciting,
01:19:54 ►
that there was a drug called telepathyne,
01:19:56 ►
but then later they found out that the drug had already been discovered
01:20:00 ►
in another plant in Pergamon Harmala, the Soma plant I mentioned,
01:20:04 ►
and had been named Harmin
01:20:06 ►
so that the
01:20:07 ►
rules of nomenclature
01:20:09 ►
that took precedent
01:20:11 ►
but persistently
01:20:13 ►
since then there had been reports of
01:20:15 ►
group states of mind caused
01:20:18 ►
by this drug
01:20:19 ►
so we explored this in the 70s
01:20:22 ►
fairly thoroughly
01:20:23 ►
in 71, in 72 again again in 76, and again in 81.
01:20:29 ►
And different things are going on.
01:20:34 ►
First of all, the people down there who take this drug are into what they call Icaros.
01:20:42 ►
Icaros are magical songs, I-C-A-R-O-S, Icaro. the culture is criticized as a work of visual art.
01:21:10 ►
It is not thought of as a song.
01:21:13 ►
It is not listened to.
01:21:15 ►
It is looked at.
01:21:17 ►
And when people criticize it, they criticize its form and its color.
01:21:22 ►
And in taking this drug,
01:21:27 ►
we discovered that there is something about it.
01:21:32 ►
It seems to dissolve a cultural barrier between the synesthesia of sound and light
01:21:36 ►
so that you can make a tone like…
01:21:40 ►
and it emerges as a streak of cyan blue
01:21:46 ►
that just stands there in space as long as you…
01:21:50 ►
And clearly, this stripe is related to the sound.
01:21:54 ►
When you stop the sound, the stripe disappears.
01:21:57 ►
Well, then you discover that when you modulate the sound,
01:22:01 ►
the color is modulated.
01:22:04 ►
Well, then you begin breaking it up
01:22:06 ►
and you discover that voice
01:22:08 ►
has become transformed into
01:22:10 ►
an instrument for manipulating light.
01:22:13 ►
And again,
01:22:14 ►
it has to do with these drugs, which are
01:22:16 ►
very close to neurotransmitters,
01:22:18 ►
just one
01:22:19 ►
gene away from being
01:22:22 ►
naturally produced.
01:22:23 ►
It’s as though this is the biochemical place
01:22:27 ►
where what we experience as the evolution of language
01:22:31 ►
and our abilities, our cognitive abilities
01:22:35 ►
to integrate and express language are happening.
01:22:38 ►
So that, you know, I think this should be looked at.
01:22:43 ►
I think maybe the path to the kind of visually beheld form of communication
01:22:49 ►
that I’m talking about is to look at shamanic cultures
01:22:54 ►
where this may have been happening all along and people assume it.
01:22:58 ►
It is true when you go up these jungle rivers to the really bare-ass people,
01:23:10 ►
that the elders do get together and take this stuff,
01:23:16 ►
and they do have a collective, complex collective image of what should be done for the good of the group.
01:23:20 ►
It’s not exactly a vision of the future.
01:23:23 ►
It’s more complicated than that, because they also exactly a vision of the future it’s more complicated than that
01:23:25 ►
because they also have a vision
01:23:27 ►
a three-dimensional vision of the kinship structure of the village
01:23:32 ►
of a whole bunch of clan and sib group associations
01:23:39 ►
to plants and animals in the forest
01:23:41 ►
which are hidden from the eyes of the casual visitor.
01:23:46 ►
They are…
01:23:47 ►
It isn’t so much that they predict the future
01:23:49 ►
as that they go into a higher dimension
01:23:52 ►
of their own cultural information space,
01:23:55 ►
and from there they make decisions.
01:23:58 ►
Where should we hunt?
01:24:00 ►
Who should we make war on or not make war on?
01:24:03 ►
Where should we make war on or not make war on? Where should we move?
01:24:07 ►
You know, and even decisions about triage of children
01:24:12 ►
and this sort of thing, because this does go on.
01:24:14 ►
So, you know, how much of human navigation through history
01:24:20 ►
has been done by processing ordinary cultural information
01:24:25 ►
on a higher dimensional level by perturbing neurological functioning.
01:24:31 ►
I mean, if there is any angle that would have given us an edge,
01:24:38 ►
we would have found it and we would have used it.
01:24:41 ►
And I’ve discussed in other lectures the way in which small doses of psilocybin improve vision and how this would have fed back into a primitive hunter-gatherer
01:24:51 ►
system. Very simply, they would have just outbred everybody not using mushrooms because
01:24:57 ►
a pair of chemical binoculars in a hunting environment is an adaptive advantage that could not be ignored.
01:25:07 ►
And so forth and so on.
01:25:09 ►
Yeah.
01:25:09 ►
By copying your hand movements,
01:25:12 ►
it helps me see what you’re talking about,
01:25:14 ►
like in a virtual reality.
01:25:16 ►
And that’s what they do in neuro-linguistic programming.
01:25:19 ►
And the people who made firewalking popular,
01:25:22 ►
like Tony Robbins in this country,
01:25:24 ►
were neuro-linguistic programmers.
01:25:26 ►
Maybe neuro-linguistic programmers could study octopi.
01:25:31 ►
If I had eight hands, I could really get gestural.
01:25:36 ►
A funny experience involving octopi.
01:25:40 ►
I know a woman.
01:25:41 ►
I’m sure she would not begrudge me this description of her.
01:25:46 ►
She is a very frank exhibitionist.
01:25:51 ►
I mean, this is the woman who at every party takes her clothes off
01:25:55 ►
and dances on the tabletops and so forth.
01:25:58 ►
She is an inveterate exhibitionist.
01:26:00 ►
She’s totally frank about it.
01:26:01 ►
And I had been to the Monterey Aquarium
01:26:08 ►
and seen the octopus there.
01:26:11 ►
They have a giant octopus.
01:26:13 ►
Well, most of the time, this guy just hunkers low,
01:26:17 ►
and he’s sort of off in a corner, one beady eye, checking you out.
01:26:22 ►
But, of course, because octopi have this
01:26:26 ►
mode of communication
01:26:27 ►
they’re very set
01:26:30 ►
up to respond to visual
01:26:32 ►
display so
01:26:34 ►
this woman
01:26:34 ►
walked past this tank
01:26:38 ►
and this
01:26:40 ►
octopus practically leaped
01:26:42 ►
into the air
01:26:43 ►
it came down out of the tunnel.
01:26:46 ►
It was pressing against the glass.
01:26:47 ►
It was beating against the glass.
01:26:49 ►
And what it was was one exhibitionist recognizing another.
01:26:55 ►
I mean, it was just clear across the species lines.
01:26:59 ►
The power of neurosis knows no barrier.
01:27:04 ►
She also had almost orange hair, very red, bright hair that the sunlight had hidden.
01:27:10 ►
That’s true. It was probably sending a message to this octopus that was obscene in the very least.
01:27:18 ►
Was she dancing?
01:27:20 ►
No, she was just trying to be unobtrusive, but this woman being unobtrusive is a showstopper.
01:27:27 ►
Terrence, when you talk about language,
01:27:30 ►
or the word you said people talk,
01:27:33 ►
to me you left out the whole body language.
01:27:37 ►
When you go into print,
01:27:39 ►
I’m making all these unconscious assumptions of values
01:27:43 ►
of what you’re saying is true,
01:27:44 ►
partly based on your body language.
01:27:47 ►
True, but body language has really faded for us
01:27:54 ►
probably because of the telephone.
01:27:55 ►
I mean, the telephone really staunches that.
01:28:00 ►
And, yes, it would be…
01:28:04 ►
And yes, it would be… We probably were much more linguistically rich in the past.
01:28:10 ►
Well, he just said…
01:28:11 ►
We’ve muted ourselves.
01:28:13 ►
I think he could understand you better by watching your hand.
01:28:15 ►
Yeah.
01:28:15 ►
Terrence, just to let you know what happens
01:28:17 ►
when you discover sparks nowadays.
01:28:19 ►
When I was a kid, I was a science buff
01:28:21 ►
and I made a Tesla coil and so on.
01:28:24 ►
Before that, I accidentally induced a spark in a transformer.
01:28:30 ►
Unexpectedly, the spark jumped,
01:28:32 ►
and it was sort of my first religious experience.
01:28:34 ►
I saw this spark and all sorts of things burst loose in my 10-year-old head.
01:28:40 ►
Two years later, the FCC triangulated my house
01:28:42 ►
for emitting superior radiations
01:28:46 ►
because, you know, you have to regulate all that sort of thing.
01:28:49 ►
Uh-huh.
01:28:50 ►
And I felt sort of like someone put a big pot lid over my head,
01:28:56 ►
and between that and being suckered in by the Moody Bible Institute
01:29:00 ►
with their big Tesla coil movie…
01:29:02 ►
Yeah, right.
01:29:03 ►
…it just left a bad taste in my mouth.
01:29:05 ►
I’m glad we’re on to other things now besides sparks and amber.
01:29:09 ►
Oh, okay.
01:29:10 ►
A bitter experience.
01:29:13 ►
There is a notion, you know, in Latin, spark is scintilla.
01:29:19 ►
This word exists only in English in the legal phrase,
01:29:23 ►
there was not a scintilla of
01:29:25 ►
evidence against him but in alchemy this idea lived on for a long long time and
01:29:32 ►
there’s a whole literature of causing the scintilla and seeing it like you did
01:29:38 ►
so you were unconsciously caught up in an alchemical archetype.
01:29:47 ►
Well, why don’t we knock off?
01:29:49 ►
I think that’s enough for this evening.
01:29:53 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:29:56 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:30:01 ►
Before I forget to mention it, and maybe this is because my undergraduate university degree
01:30:04 ►
was in
01:30:05 ►
electrical engineering, but I thought that Terrence’s rap about electricity being a benign
01:30:11 ►
elemental that we coaxed into helping us was as beautiful a poetic riff as I’ve heard him do.
01:30:17 ►
I’d never really thought about electricity in quite the same way as he was able to personify
01:30:22 ►
it just now. You know, it’s riffs like that that cause me to call him the Bard McKenna.
01:30:29 ►
And now I don’t want to belabor this to the point of absurdity,
01:30:33 ►
but when Terrence was talking about language being transformed
01:30:36 ►
from something heard into something that’s seen,
01:30:40 ►
well, I don’t know if this is simplistic,
01:30:42 ►
but isn’t that what takes place in a book or on a web page full of text?
01:30:47 ►
Isn’t that language that can be seen?
01:30:49 ►
It now seems an obvious implication, and I’m sure that Terence must have addressed this at some point,
01:30:55 ►
but I can’t recall him ever talking about it myself.
01:30:59 ►
And yes, I realize that he was talking about synesthesia,
01:31:02 ►
but I don’t see how we can deny that a book consists of language that can be seen.
01:31:08 ►
And as for synesthesia, I do realize that a lot of people who write about ayahuasca tell of not just hearing the Icaros, but seeing them as well.
01:31:18 ►
In fact, Terrence talked about that on many occasions.
01:31:26 ►
on many occasions. But after having been in quite a few ayahuasca circles myself, and over a period of more than a dozen years, I have never once had that experience. There were a few times when one
01:31:33 ►
of the other people in our circle told of being able to see the songs, but those times I can count
01:31:39 ►
on the fingers of one hand. Maybe it’s more common than I think, but in my own experience, it’s a very rare phenomena,
01:31:46 ►
and unfortunately, it isn’t something that can be scientifically examined.
01:31:51 ►
At least, I don’t know of any such experiments. So, and this is just me now, but you’ll have to
01:31:58 ►
come to your own conclusions based on your own experience. But for me, I’m now of the opinion
01:32:03 ►
that I won’t personally be experiencing
01:32:05 ►
synesthesia myself, and so I’m now engaged in another way of making language visible,
01:32:11 ►
and that’s on the printed page. Of course, now that I’m doing most of my reading on a Kindle,
01:32:17 ►
I guess that, I guess the phrase printed page will also soon become obsolete. And don’t get me wrong, I dearly love old-fashioned
01:32:27 ►
printed books. Although I’ve already given away well over a thousand books that I collected and
01:32:32 ►
read during my life, I’m still surrounded by, well, hundreds of others that I just can’t seem
01:32:37 ►
to part with, so I don’t mean to put down on the paper form of books. That said, however,
01:32:43 ►
I have to admit that now, whenever I read a print
01:32:46 ►
book, which I still do, I find them much more difficult to use. For one thing, late in the day,
01:32:53 ►
as my eyes get tired, it’s really nice on a Kindle to be able to increase the font size from what was
01:32:59 ►
more comfortable in the morning. In fact, I’ve had to adjust my reading schedule so that I read my print books early in
01:33:05 ►
the day before my eyes get tired. You know, it’s funny, until a few years ago, I hadn’t really
01:33:11 ►
noticed how small the print is in many paperback books and even for some of the hardcover ones.
01:33:18 ►
So, while I’m on the topic of books, let me point out the obvious about books and the McKenna brothers. It was books,
01:33:25 ►
not drugs, that shaped their lives and careers. Let me say that again in case you happen to see
01:33:32 ►
yourself as a budding bard or psychonaut. It was books, not drugs, that truly shaped the lives and
01:33:40 ►
the careers of the brothers McKenna. And this has recently been brought home to me quite clearly
01:33:45 ►
after reading one of the books that Dennis McKenna mentions in his new memoir, The Brotherhood of the
01:33:51 ►
Screaming Abyss. In it, Dennis describes his early youth with Terrence and how they were both
01:33:57 ►
fascinated with the future and the nature of time. Then he goes on to say that the greatest impact on their early thinking wasn’t Carl Jung or H.G. Wells or Jules Verne, but it was Arthur C. Clarke’s novels Childhood’s End and The City in the Stars.
01:34:23 ►
they were very brief conversations with Terrence about his favorite books.
01:34:26 ►
The two that I remember him mentioning are The Phenomena of Man by Teilhard and Star Maker by Stapleton.
01:34:31 ►
In fact, when he told me that he’d lost his copy of Star Maker,
01:34:34 ►
I went out and found a used copy and sent it to him.
01:34:37 ►
And in case you’ve never read that book, I highly recommend it.
01:34:40 ►
It’s available for free at Project Gutenberg, by the way.
01:34:44 ►
Now, getting back to my story,
01:34:46 ►
after reading Dennis’ statement about the importance of Clark’s books on their thinking,
01:34:51 ►
well, I downloaded copies of both of them, and I’ve just now finished reading Childhood’s End.
01:34:57 ►
Wow! If you’ve already read it, you’ll know what I mean. Not only does Clark incorporate some of
01:35:03 ►
the main elements of both Star Maker and the phenomena of man into his masterfully told story,
01:35:09 ►
he basically provides a high-level outline of the thought of Terence McKenna.
01:35:14 ►
At least that’s the way I see it, but I realize that you may not agree with me.
01:35:18 ►
However, Childhood’s End has the eschaton and the global transformation of consciousness that Terence attempted to catalyze through the experiment at La Charrera.
01:35:29 ►
And it also has a transcendental object at the end of time reflecting back into the present
01:35:34 ►
and other concepts that Terence went on to develop into ideas
01:35:38 ►
that, well, we’ve all gravitated to at one time or another.
01:35:42 ►
Now, I’m not saying that Terrence simply lifted his ideas
01:35:45 ►
from Clark’s books. That’s not what I mean at all. What I’m trying to say is that if you are already
01:35:51 ►
familiar with Terrence’s ideas, then you can, at least if you have an imagination like mine,
01:35:57 ►
you can definitely see how the little seeds of these ideas that Clark obviously synthesized
01:36:03 ►
from Teilhard and from Stapleton, how they’d
01:36:06 ►
grown and blossomed into a wide range of truly fantastic concepts that became the main features
01:36:12 ►
of Terrence’s shtick, as he called it. So why am I spending so much time on this, you ask? Well,
01:36:20 ►
it’s because I want to make it clear, particularly to our younger members of this salon,
01:36:27 ►
how important it is to keep reading.
01:36:31 ►
And it really doesn’t matter what you read, as long as you read something every day,
01:36:35 ►
even if it’s only a couple of pages in the latest graphic novel that interests you.
01:36:40 ►
You see, long before Terrence ingested his first psychoactive substance,
01:36:45 ►
he’d already done a significant amount of preparation by reading all kinds of things, as Dennis has documented so well in his book. It’s my assumption that at the time Terence
01:36:52 ►
was first getting into these books, he had no idea about what he would do in life. But over time,
01:36:58 ►
and obviously on a subconscious level, the thoughts that he put into his head through the reading that
01:37:03 ►
he was doing eventually gained a life of their own and led him on what turned out to be a splendid journey.
01:37:10 ►
And looking back on my own life, well, I can see how some of my early reading must have
01:37:16 ►
also shaped my life through the decisions I made at various crossroads.
01:37:20 ►
The first book of this sort that I remember having a major impact on me was Kerouac’s On the Road,
01:37:27 ►
which I read more than once during my last two years of high school.
01:37:30 ►
In college, it was The Phenomena of Man that first let me know that there was a lot more to the life of the spirit than my teachers were letting on.
01:37:39 ►
Other books that have had a major influence on me are Persig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
01:37:46 ►
and Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy. I’ve now read each of those books several times,
01:37:52 ►
and to be honest, they don’t all speak to me in the same way that they did when I first read them.
01:37:57 ►
But then I’ve changed a lot since then. Well, changed utterly, as Yates would say.
01:38:03 ►
Nonetheless, at the time I read each of these books,
01:38:06 ►
they made an indelible imprint on me,
01:38:09 ►
and without them, I doubt if I’d be with you here in the psychedelic salon right now.
01:38:15 ►
Without what I’ve learned, felt, and experienced through all of the books that I’ve read,
01:38:20 ►
well, I shudder to think of what I’d be like,
01:38:23 ►
particularly if my only input came from
01:38:25 ►
cable television. So, if you’re still with me, well, thanks for listening, and now how about
01:38:32 ►
doing a little reading before you go to sleep tonight? In case you haven’t figured it out,
01:38:36 ►
I highly recommend reading as often as you can. It’s really worth making some time for.
01:38:43 ►
But right now, I’ve got to make some time to pack for a
01:38:46 ►
cross-country trip that I’ll begin on the 31st, and that’s the day that I catch the Southwest
01:38:52 ►
Chief, bound from Los Angeles for Chicago, where I’ll then catch the Capital Limited,
01:38:57 ►
bound for Washington D.C., and where I’ll be attending a family reunion for a few days before
01:39:03 ►
catching the return trains and heading back to the West Coast, where I’ll be attending a family reunion for a few days before catching the return trains
01:39:05 ►
and heading back to the West Coast, where I’ll arrive once again in mid-January.
01:39:09 ►
So, as you ring in the New Year, you can think of me rolling along the rails on my little sentimental journey,
01:39:16 ►
safely away from the Internet, email, the telephone, and any other modern convenience
01:39:20 ►
that I can distance myself from for a few days of old-fashioned travel.
01:39:25 ►
So, don’t give up on me or think that I’ve closed the doors to the salon,
01:39:29 ►
because I’ll be back with you as soon as I can after my return.
01:39:34 ►
And now, as you and I close out this interesting year of 2012,
01:39:38 ►
I wish you the best for the coming year and beyond.
01:39:41 ►
As I say, this is Lorenzo, once again signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:39:47 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.