Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.”
“Actually, the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history… . It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates.”
“I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that’s because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you, if you think that’s a thrill, you’ll probably love psychedelics.”
“The leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being.”
“We can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind, or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness.”
“Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.”
“The way I think of the psychedelics is, they are catalysts to the imagination.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And to get things started today, I want to be sure first to thank the three fellow salonners who made donations to the salon
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during the past week or so. Hopefully you have all received a personal thank you email from me by now.
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And also a big thank you goes out to the kind souls who have written a review of one of my books on Amazon.
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And you should know that your encouragement is, well, it’s pushing me onward with work on my new novel.
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And one last group of wonderful fellow salonners I’d like to thank are those who have taken the time to write a few kind words about the salon on iTunes.
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And all of this is a big help in keeping the salon alive, and I deeply appreciate your
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support.
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And speaking of support, well, last week I played a tribute to Myron Stolaroff, who,
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once he had experienced LSD for the first time, well, he essentially devoted the rest
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of his life to promoting the investigation
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and use of psychedelic medicines. Now, most of us are never going to be in a position to
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do something so drastic, but there now is a way for you to participate in the important work of
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psychedelic research, and yet you only have to invest about, well, about 45 minutes of your time
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to do so.
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You probably already know what I’m talking about, and that is the ongoing research that
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Dr. Roland Griffiths and his colleagues are conducting at the Johns Hopkins University
00:01:58 ►
School of Medicine.
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As you know, there have been several important studies conducted at Johns Hopkins in the past few years,
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and now Dr. Griffiths has asked me to directly contact you and our other fellow salonners
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to see if you would be willing to take part in a new online study that they’re conducting.
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Here’s what he said in his email.
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Dear Lorenzo, although we have not met, I feel I know you through your
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interesting podcast. I’m writing to ask for your assistance. My Hopkins colleagues and I are
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conducting an anonymous web-based study to characterize the difficult or challenging
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experiences that people sometimes have on psilocybin mushrooms, that is, bad trips, whether the person later regards them negatively
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or positively. I’m writing to ask if you would link to the survey on your website and or mention
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the survey on your podcast. We got a terrific response to our first online web survey on
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mystical experiences occasioned by psilocybin. We are expecting that people may be less enthusiastic
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about a survey of difficult experiences, which may not be as uplifting to think about. But I’m
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sure you would agree that the topic is an important one. We’ll be probing set and setting, personality,
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dose, and various other factors that may contribute to difficult experiences. We will also be able to characterize the nature of these challenging experiences.
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Anything you can do to help spread the word will be appreciated.
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It would make a significant contribution to our scientific study of this fascinating substance.
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Keep up the good and interesting work on the podcast.
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Sincerely, Roland
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Now, if you’re like me,
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well, you may say that you’ve never had a bad trip.
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In fact, that’s what I said to a friend of mine
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when I was telling her about this survey.
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And then she reminded me of a trip of mine
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that, well, it was in fact quite difficult,
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but I’d very conveniently forgotten all about it.
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So now I’ve taken the survey myself, and I’m really glad that I did,
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because it helped me to go through that experience once again,
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and actually learn a lot about what took place.
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To me, it was really interesting, in fact, to consider some of the aspects of that experience
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that I hadn’t thought about before.
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Maybe, instead of trying to think of terms of a bad trip,
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you might want to recall some really difficult trip
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that, well, maybe you still haven’t quite figured out yet.
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And maybe taking this survey can help you sort it all out.
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In any event, I think that it’d be really cool of you
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to devote part of your life to psychedelic research,
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even if it’s only 45 minutes.
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It’s kind of our way of giving a little something back to a community of researchers who are
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working against great odds to push scientific inquiry of our sacred medicines, well, a little
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further along the road to enlightenment, I guess.
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So I’ll put a link to that request for research in the program notes for this podcast,
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which as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. But the URL directly to the
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research is quite easy to remember. ItE-Y shroomsurvey.com
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Quite a nice URL, don’t you think?
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So, now for today’s program.
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And yes, it’s more from my favorite speaker here in the salon,
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Terrence McKenna.
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But I’ve decided to change my mind a little
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about podcasting new Terrence McKenna talks here, and here’s why.
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On my seven-day train ride across the country and back a few weeks ago, I spent a lot of time going through a whole bunch of McKenna talks that I either hadn’t heard before or hadn’t heard for a long time.
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hadn’t heard for a long time. And as I listened, I found myself kind of fast-forwarding every time he began to talk about his time wave hypothesis or his story about how the apes became self-aware
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through eating mushrooms and things like that. You’ve heard the stories yourself many times.
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And to tell the truth, well, I think that I’ve played those stories over enough times already here in the salon.
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So I’m going off on a little new tack.
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What I’ve decided to do is, well, from time to time,
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I’m going to put together a little audio collage of Terrence’s talks by cutting out those stories that we’ve heard over and over.
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And if that means that a talk is too short, I’ll splice in another short piece.
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But without having to get through some thoughts that we’ve, well, I think we’ve heard enough by now,
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I think you’re going to find some fresh new ideas springing into your mind
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in a few new looks at the mind of McKenna.
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So today I’m going to play an edited version of one of the interviews that Terrence gave to New Dimensions Radio.
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This one on June 10th, 1983.
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And you can also find other of these New Dimensions Radio interviews on YouTube.
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And I should say along with almost every other utterance Terrence ever made.
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In case you’ve never searched YouTube for Terrence McKenna Talks, you’re in for a really big surprise, I think.
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Because, well, there’s more Terrence out there than probably most of us will ever have time to listen to,
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even though it sure would be fun to try.
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So, to save you a little time, and to save me from listening to yet another one more time of Terrence’s raps
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about apes and mushrooms or the time wave or some of his other frequently repeated stories,
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I’m going to play just the parts of this interview that I found most interesting.
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And then I’m going to follow that with another short rap of Terrence’s that I found.
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And I do realize that if you’re a historian,
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well, you’re going to find my cutting up these bits and pieces of Terrence’s talks,
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well, I don’t know, I guess you’ll probably find them to be a desecration of some kind.
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But the simple fact of the matter is that this podcast was never meant to be any kind of a
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historical record as such. As I’ve said many times, well, I only see myself as a carnival barker,
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and all of the action is in the tent.
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So my role is to get people interested in Terrence and the other speakers here in the salon,
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but the action is all in the big tent, and the speakers here in the salon are in the center ring.
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I’m just here to enjoy myself, and I hope that you get as much enjoyment out of listening to these cut-up talks as I do.
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and I hope that you get as much enjoyment out of listening to these cut-up talks as I do.
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Now, one more thing, and that is to let me get my personal biases out of the way.
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Unless and until some new laws of physics are discovered,
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well, in my opinion, we humans in our earthly bodies are not going to be leaving this planet in any large numbers
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or for prolonged explorations of distant planets. Unless, of course,
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it’s done as we’re already doing on Mars, you know, exploring
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remotely by using robots. But I just can’t buy
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into this science fiction world of interstellar space travel
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in human bodies. Sorry about that, Trekkies.
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So, you ask, why include in the beginning of this
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Terrence’s talk of such things, then? Well, even though I can’t buy into Terrence’s vision of
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humanity leaving the planet as a purely physical concept, what I can imagine is one day our
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species collectively lifting its consciousness to a higher plane, maybe a place where war and ignorance and poverty no longer exist.
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And should that ever happen,
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then I guess you could say that humanity itself has left this world,
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and so the poetry of Terence McKenna’s vision of that departure into higher realms,
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well, holds, at least for for me a great deal of charm.
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The human imagination in conjunction with technology has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety.
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The human imagination has gained such an immense power
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that the only environment that is friendly to it
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is actually the vacuum of deep space.
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It is there that we can erect the architectonic dreams
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that drive us to produce a Los Angeles or a Tokyo and do it on a scale
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and in such a way that it will be fulfilling rather than degrading. So yes, I think we cannot
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move forward in understanding without accepting as a consequence of that that we have to leave the planet that we are no longer the bipedal monkeys we once were we have become almost a new force
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in nature a thing of language and cybernetics and an amalgam of computers
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and human brains and societal structures that has such an enormous forward momentum that the only place where it can express itself without destroying itself is, as James Joyce says, up in the end.
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So long, long ago in the faraway galaxy, Star Wars style may be in our future?
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Well. As opposed to our past? may be in our future? Well…
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As opposed to our past?
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It’s in our present, I think.
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Our future is probably almost unimaginable
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because I think the transformation
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that leaving the planet will bring
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will also involve a transformation of our consciousness.
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We are not going as 1950 style human beings. We are going to
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have to transform our minds before we are going to be able to leave the planet with any amount
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of grace. This is where I think the psychedelics come in, because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that
00:12:28 ►
is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality so that there really is a prophetic
00:12:36 ►
dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds.
00:12:50 ►
And no cultural shift of this magnitude can be unambiguous.
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I mean, the very idea that as a species
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we would leave the earth behind us
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must be as rending an idea
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as that a child would leave its childhood home.
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Obviously, it’s a turning away from something an idea as that a child would leave its childhood home.
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Obviously, it’s a turning away from something that once left behind can never be recaptured.
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However, this is the nature of going forward into being a series of
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self-transforming ascents of level and
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we now simply happen to be at that moment of ascent to a new level that is linked to leaving the planetary surface physically and to reconnecting with the
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contents of the unconscious collectivity of our minds these two things will be done simultaneously. This is what the last half of the 20th century,
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it seems to me, is all about.
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Well, by and large, psychedelics have
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really not been accepted into the mainstream.
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Do you see a change in that?
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Well, not particularly.
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They hold a certain fascination
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for a persistent majority, and in that way they do their catalytic work upon society, which is to introduce new ideas and to release a return to the psychedelic hysterias of the 1960s.
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I think it’s fine that these things are now the subject of interest of a much smaller group of people,
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but perhaps a group of people with a greater commitment and a better idea of exactly what these things are.
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And it’s really the same people,
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it’s just a smaller group of them,
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and they have accumulated experience
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over the past 20 years.
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However, I certainly don’t think
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all psychedelic frontiers are conquered.
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One of the things that I write about and speak about
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are the phenomena that many people confirm with the psilocybin family of hallucinogens that no one has included in the standard model of psychedelic drugs. I refer to the logos-like phenomenon of an interiorized voice
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that seems to be almost a superhuman agency,
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a kind of genus loci.
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And I’ve been writing recently about alien intelligence,
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which is what I call this,
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where you have contact with an entity
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so beyond the normal structure of the ego that if it is not an extraterrestrial, it might as well be because its bizarreness and its distance from ordinary expectations about what can go on is so great that if flying saucers arrived here tomorrow
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from the Pleiades, it would make this mystery no less compelling, because I believe that the place
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to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension, and there the problem is not the absence of contact, but the volume of contact that must be sifted through,
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because the fact of the matter is, shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices
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and talking to gods and demons since the Paleolithic and probably before.
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That doesn’t mean that we can rule out this approach to communication.
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It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate interdimensionally and telepathically.
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The amounts of time available for an intelligent species to evolve these kinds of communication are vast.
00:17:06 ►
So I think that it’s very interesting then that the tryptamines, psilocybin and DMT,
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at the 15 milligram level, very reliably trigger what could only be described as contact-like phenomena, and not only the
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interiorized voice in the head, but also the classical flying saucer motifs of the whirling
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disc, the lens-shaped object, the alien approach. This seems to be something hardwired into the human psyche, and I would like to find out why.
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I think it’s a very odd fact of human psychology,
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and I don’t buy any of the current theories
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ranging from that nothing at all is happening
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to that this is in fact another species
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with a world around another star
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that is getting in touch with us.
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I think it’s something so bizarre
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that it actually masquerades as an extraterrestrial
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so as not to alarm us
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by the true implications of what it is.
00:18:17 ►
But I suspect it is something like
00:18:20 ►
an overmind of the species
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that actually the highest form of human organization like an overmind of the species,
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that actually the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual.
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It is realized in a dimension
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none of us have ever penetrated,
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which is the mind of the species,
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which is actually the hand at the tiller of history.
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It is no government, no religious group,
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but actually what we call the human unconscious.
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But it is not unconscious,
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and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory.
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It is an organized intellect of some sort,
00:19:10 ►
memory. It is an organized intellect of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates,
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and it is so different from the primates. It is like a creature of pure information. It is made of language. It releases ideas into the flowing stream of history to boost the primates toward higher and higher levels
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of self-reflection of it.
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And we have now reached the point
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where the masks are beginning to fall away
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and we are discovering that, you know,
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there is an angel within the monkey
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struggling to get free.
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And this is what the historical crisis is all about.
00:19:46 ►
And I’m, for no reasons in particular, very optimistic.
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I mean, I see it as a necessary chaos
00:19:55 ►
that will lead to a new and more attractive order.
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Terrence, you were talking about
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extraordinary realities,
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and it occurs to me
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that there’s an enormous amount of prejudice
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against the psychedelics
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and the use of hallucinogenic substances,
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and it’s almost as if there’s an inordinate fear to open up the
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door to the
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closet that these substances
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reveal.
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What about that prejudice?
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What do you think is, how is that going to be resolved?
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What is the resolution of that?
00:20:40 ►
Well, I think
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it’s more complicated
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than a prejudice. It’s
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a prejudice born of respect
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because most people sense that these compounds
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probably actually do what their adherents claim they do.
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It’s possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s
00:21:02 ►
as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on
00:21:08 ►
the line the way you had to when you took 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods
00:21:16 ►
are efficacious, but I think it’s the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off.
00:21:25 ►
You either love them or you hate them.
00:21:28 ►
And that’s because they dissolve worldviews.
00:21:32 ►
And if you like the experience
00:21:34 ►
of having your entire ontological structure
00:21:37 ►
disappear out from under you,
00:21:39 ►
if you think that’s a thrill,
00:21:41 ►
you’ll probably love psychedelics.
00:21:44 ►
On the other hand, for some people, that’s the
00:21:46 ►
most horrible thing they can possibly imagine. They navigate reality through various forms of
00:21:52 ►
faith. And I think that the psychedelics, the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very, very deeply. I spent time in India,
00:22:07 ►
and I would always go to the local sadhus of great reputation,
00:22:13 ►
and I met many people who possessed
00:22:15 ►
what I call wise old man wisdom.
00:22:19 ►
But wise old man wisdom is a kind of Tao of how to live.
00:22:24 ►
It has nothing to say about these dimensions that the psychedelics reveal.
00:22:31 ►
And for that you have to go to places where hallucinogenic shamanism is practiced,
00:22:37 ►
specifically the Amazon basin.
00:22:41 ►
And there you discover that beyond simply the wisdom of how to live in ordinary reality, there is a gnosis of how to navigate in extraordinary reality.
00:22:53 ►
And this reality is so extraordinary that we cannot approach what these people are doing with any degree of smugness.
00:23:02 ►
Because the frank fact of the matter is we have no
00:23:05 ►
viable theory of what mind is either the beliefs of a we Toto shaman and the
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beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct
00:23:18 ►
and there are no arbiters of who is right so it’s the power of these things, the fact that here is
00:23:28 ►
something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted
00:23:32 ►
the depths of the ocean, the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking
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inward to ourselves because we sense that here is where all the
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contradictions flow together. And the same prejudice against
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psychoanalysis that characterized the 20s and 30s when it was thought to be superfluous
00:23:53 ►
or some kind of fad attends the psychedelics now. It’s because it touches a very sensitive nerve. It touches the issue of the nature of man, and people
00:24:09 ►
are uncomfortable with this, or some people are uncomfortable with this.
00:24:13 ►
What is the value of exploring extraordinary realities?
00:24:18 ►
Well, I guess it’s the same value that attends the exploration of ordinary realities.
00:24:31 ►
There’s an alchemical saying that one should read the oldest books, climb the highest mountains, and visit the broadest deserts.
00:24:36 ►
I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on,
00:24:44 ►
some kind of obligation to find out what’s going on.
00:24:50 ►
And since all primary information about what is going on comes through the senses,
00:24:52 ►
any drug or any compound which alters that sensory input
00:24:57 ►
has to be looked at very carefully.
00:25:00 ►
I’ve often made the point that, chemically speaking,
00:25:04 ►
you can have a molecule which is completely inactive as a psychedelic,
00:25:09 ►
and you move a single atom on one of its rings,
00:25:13 ►
and suddenly it’s a powerful psychedelic.
00:25:16 ►
Well, now it seems to me this is a perfect proof
00:25:19 ►
of the inner penetration of matter and mind,
00:25:24 ►
of the inner penetration of matter and mind.
00:25:27 ►
The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position
00:25:30 ►
changes an experience from nothing to overwhelming.
00:25:35 ►
This means that mind and matter
00:25:37 ►
at the quantum mechanical level
00:25:39 ►
are all spun together.
00:25:42 ►
This means that, in a a sense the term extraordinary reality is
00:25:48 ►
not correct if it implies a division of category from ordinary reality. It is
00:25:55 ►
simply there is more and more and more of reality and some of it is inside our
00:26:01 ►
heads and some of it is deployed out through three-dimensional Newtonian space.
00:26:08 ►
Most of us, I think, just simply accept the everyday reality as the only one.
00:26:14 ►
And you’re talking about journeys into the nether regions,
00:26:20 ►
which are far beyond most people’s conception
00:26:25 ►
or even wanting to conceive of such a reality.
00:26:30 ►
Well, I think there’s a shamanic temperament,
00:26:32 ►
which is a person who craves knowledge,
00:26:38 ►
knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis.
00:26:41 ►
In other words, knowledge not of the sort
00:26:43 ►
where you subscribe to Scientific American
00:26:46 ►
and it validates what you believe, but immediately cosmology is constructed out of immediate
00:26:53 ►
experience that are found always to be applicable. You see, I don’t believe that the world is made
00:27:01 ►
out of quarks or electromagnetic waves or stars or planets
00:27:06 ►
or any of these things. I believe the world is made out of language and that
00:27:12 ►
this is the primary fact that has been overlooked. The construction of a flying
00:27:18 ►
saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge.
00:27:27 ►
And people find it very hard to imagine exactly what I’m talking about.
00:27:32 ►
What I’m saying is that the leading edge of reality is mind,
00:27:40 ►
and mind is the primary substratum of being.
00:27:47 ►
We in the West have had it the wrong way around for over a millennia.
00:27:52 ►
But once this is clearly understood,
00:27:56 ►
with what we have learned in our little excursion
00:28:00 ►
through three-dimensional space and matter,
00:28:03 ►
we will create a new vision of humanity
00:28:07 ►
that will be a fusion of the East and the West.
00:28:11 ►
The world being made of language,
00:28:13 ►
and I think of these extraordinary realities
00:28:15 ►
which are totally beyond any language
00:28:17 ►
that we use in any ordinary sense.
00:28:21 ►
Yes, well, they are beyond ordinary language.
00:28:24 ►
I always think of Philo-Judeus writing on the logos.
00:28:29 ►
He posed to himself the question,
00:28:31 ►
what would be a more perfect logos?
00:28:33 ►
And then he answered saying,
00:28:35 ►
it would be a logos which is not heard but beheld.
00:28:41 ►
And he imagined a form of communication
00:28:43 ►
where the ears would not be the primary receptors,
00:28:47 ►
but the eyes would be. A language where meaning was not constructed through a dictionary of little mouth noises,
00:28:55 ►
but actually three-dimensional objects were generated with a kind of hyper language,
00:29:01 ►
so that there was perfect understanding between people. And this may
00:29:06 ►
sound bizarre in ordinary reality, but these forms of synesthesia and synesthesia glossolalia
00:29:14 ►
are commonplace in psychedelic states. Terence, could you identify Philo’s for us and tell us
00:29:21 ►
who he was? He was an Alexandrine Jew of the second century
00:29:25 ►
who made it his business
00:29:27 ►
to travel around the Hellenic world
00:29:29 ►
and discussed
00:29:31 ►
all the major cults and
00:29:33 ►
religious and cosmogonic theories
00:29:36 ►
of his day. So he’s a major
00:29:38 ►
source of Hellenistic
00:29:39 ►
data for us.
00:29:41 ►
How would you relate to Socrates’ view
00:29:43 ►
of the world?
00:29:46 ►
Well, I think that it’s hard not to be a Platonist, but it’s something perhaps we should
00:29:53 ►
struggle against, or at least struggle to modify.
00:29:57 ►
I think of myself as sort of a Whiteheadian Platonist. Certainly the central Platonic idea, which is the idea of the ideas, these
00:30:08 ►
archetypal forms which stand outside of time, is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic
00:30:16 ►
experience. And Plato’s formulation of time as the moving image of eternity is another one of these aphorisms that the psychedelic state confirms.
00:30:31 ►
And certainly Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Porphyry and that school
00:30:36 ►
are psychedelic philosophers.
00:30:40 ►
Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states
00:30:45 ►
is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology,
00:30:52 ►
which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers
00:30:55 ►
when they involve themselves with psychedelics.
00:31:00 ►
What I think most of us don’t understand or don’t really know
00:31:03 ►
is the fact that Greek culture and the Eleusinian mysteries incorporated the use of something that’s very akin to psychedelics.
00:31:12 ►
Yes.
00:31:13 ►
And essentially, Western civilization is based on the culture that had at its core root an experience and a ritual that used, as they say, something akin to psychedelics.
00:31:26 ►
Yes, well, for over 2,000 years,
00:31:28 ►
everyone who was anyone in the ancient world
00:31:31 ►
made the pilgrimage to Eleusis
00:31:34 ►
and had this experience,
00:31:36 ►
which Gordon Wasson and Karl Ruck
00:31:38 ►
have argued very convincingly
00:31:40 ►
was a hallucinogenic intoxication on ergot.
00:31:45 ►
But, of course, as soon as the Church solidified its power,
00:31:50 ►
it closed these platonic academies
00:31:53 ►
and moved against pagan,
00:31:58 ►
so-called pagan knowledge and heretical knowledge.
00:32:01 ►
And not only the Platonists, but all the Gnostic sects, all of these people,
00:32:07 ►
all of these viewpoints were repressed. I like to think that the end of that repression
00:32:15 ►
came in a very odd way when, in 1953, I guess it was, Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina in the village of Huatla de Jimenez in
00:32:27 ►
the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It was as if Eros,
00:32:36 ►
who had been martyred in the old world, was then found sleeping in the mountains of Mexico and resurrected.
00:32:46 ►
And the experience of the mushroom is very much the experience of a genus loci,
00:32:52 ►
a god on the Grecian model, not the god who hung the stars in heaven,
00:32:58 ►
but a local god, a pre-Christian Bacchanalian nature power
00:33:06 ►
that is very alien
00:33:09 ►
and yet resonates with our expectations
00:33:12 ►
of what that experience would be like.
00:33:16 ►
Interesting that the mushroom also is a symbol
00:33:18 ►
in our culture of death and destruction
00:33:21 ►
being the symbol of the nuclear explosion.
00:33:24 ►
Yes, well, my brother has made the point asking,
00:33:29 ►
you know, what mushroom is it that grows at the end of history?
00:33:33 ►
Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenheimer and Teller,
00:33:37 ►
or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman and Humphrey Osmond?
00:33:46 ►
Somehow I think the latter is safer.
00:33:49 ►
Well, it may not only be safer,
00:33:52 ►
it may open the way to escape from the former.
00:33:56 ►
It’s like a pun in physics
00:33:58 ►
that the force of liberation and the force of destruction
00:34:01 ►
could take the same form.
00:34:03 ►
It’s what alchemists call a coincidencia
00:34:06 ►
positorum.
00:34:08 ►
It is an amazing synchronicity,
00:34:10 ►
it seems.
00:34:12 ►
Also, I was
00:34:13 ►
interested in talking with Andy Weil
00:34:16 ►
some time ago
00:34:18 ►
about the fact that there are new
00:34:20 ►
genus of mushrooms appearing that
00:34:22 ►
have
00:34:24 ►
psilocybin in them that have never been seen before,
00:34:26 ►
never been tracked before, and it’s almost as if they’re appearing now.
00:34:31 ►
Well, it’s amazing how many have been discovered since people have bent their attention to
00:34:37 ►
it. There have been psilocybin mushrooms reported from England, France, localities where, so far as we know, there is no cultural history of
00:34:46 ►
usage at all. However, it’s interesting that cultural usage seems to disappear very early
00:34:55 ►
in human history. Hallucinogens are hardly even welcome in agricultural societies. I
00:35:02 ►
think it was Weston Labar made the point that once you learn how to grow plants,
00:35:08 ►
your god shifts from the ecstatic god of the hallucinogens to the corn god or the food god,
00:35:17 ►
and it no longer is about divining the hunt and weather through the ecstatic use of hallucinogens. It’s
00:35:27 ►
about being able to get up every morning and go to work and hoe the crop. So you
00:35:35 ►
mentioned earlier the prejudice against hallucinogens. I think it reaches back to
00:35:40 ►
the beginning of agriculture. This competition among plant gods,
00:35:45 ►
which exemplified lifestyles
00:35:48 ►
that must have seemed very, very alien to each other.
00:35:52 ►
Is psilocybin illegal?
00:35:54 ►
Oh, yes. It’s a Schedule I drug.
00:35:57 ►
Without any public debate,
00:36:00 ►
it was placed on the list at the same time that LSD was,
00:36:06 ►
and yet the issue was always couched in terms of LSD being made illegal,
00:36:11 ►
but actually at that point in time, a whole bunch of things were made illegal,
00:36:15 ►
and there was never any public debate.
00:36:18 ►
All psychedelics were viewed as the same drug,
00:36:22 ►
and LSD was used as the model.
00:36:27 ►
Actually, these drugs,
00:36:30 ►
there’s a spectrum of psychedelic effects,
00:36:32 ►
and certain drugs trigger some of them and certain ones others.
00:36:34 ►
But yes, psilocybin is illegal.
00:36:37 ►
Are the mushrooms illegal?
00:36:38 ►
The mushrooms also are illegal
00:36:40 ►
as they contain psilocybin.
00:36:44 ►
I recall Andy Weil saying that he walked along a downtown Seattle residential street picking
00:36:48 ►
up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of residential homes.
00:36:54 ►
Well, English law took the view that it was preposterous to try and outlaw a naturally
00:37:03 ►
occurring plant, and they took the position that only the chemical was illegal,
00:37:09 ►
which I think is a very wise position,
00:37:12 ►
but I noticed that Canada recently chose the American interpretation over the British one.
00:37:20 ►
Interesting.
00:37:21 ►
It turns out, going back to the Andy Weil story,
00:37:24 ►
that the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locales in the Northwest was that their spores were contained in a mail-order company’s mushroom growing product that they sent out mail-order.
00:37:42 ►
growing product that they sent out mail order.
00:37:47 ►
Yes, this is an interesting phenomenon.
00:37:50 ►
You see, the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do not contain psilocybin.
00:37:54 ►
They only contain the message in the DNA of the mushroom
00:37:58 ►
for the production of psilocybin.
00:38:00 ►
So it’s a kind of bizarre catch-22.
00:38:03 ►
The mushroom spores can move anywhere legally, can be bought and sold,
00:38:08 ►
but they are the sine qua non for the production of mushrooms, of course.
00:38:15 ►
Terence, the kind of knowledge and kind of information you’re putting forward is not generally available.
00:38:21 ►
It’s not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology curriculum.
00:38:30 ►
And yet it seems to be a knowledge that is ever-expanding,
00:38:36 ►
but somehow it’s outside of the cultural, institutional entities in some way.
00:38:45 ►
Number one, why do you think that’s the case?
00:38:47 ►
Of course, there’s a logical answer to that one,
00:38:49 ►
but what do you see as the future of this kind of information,
00:38:52 ►
this kind of knowledge?
00:38:54 ►
Well, I think in a sense it signals the rebirth
00:38:57 ►
of the institution of shamanism
00:38:59 ►
in the context of modern society,
00:39:03 ►
and anthropologists have always made the point about shaman
00:39:07 ►
that they were very important social catalysts in their group,
00:39:12 ►
but they were always peripheral to it,
00:39:14 ►
peripheral to the political power,
00:39:16 ►
and actually usually physically peripheral,
00:39:19 ►
living at some distance from the village.
00:39:22 ►
And I think the electronic shaman,
00:39:26 ►
the people who pursue the exploration of these spaces,
00:39:31 ►
exist to return to tell the rest of us about it,
00:39:37 ►
that we are now coming into a period of racial maturity
00:39:42 ►
as a species where we can no longer have forbidden areas of the
00:39:49 ►
human mind or cultural machinery.
00:39:53 ►
We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand
00:40:00 ►
what we are.
00:40:09 ►
understand what we are, we cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
00:40:12 ►
We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness because as man gains power, he is becoming
00:40:21 ►
the defining fact on the planet in the near space area. So
00:40:27 ►
the question that looms is is man good and then if he is what is it he’s good for and
00:40:37 ►
the shaman will point the way because what they are are
00:40:43 ►
Visionaries
00:40:44 ►
poets cultural architects, forecasters, all these roles which we understand
00:40:51 ►
in more conventional terms rolled into one and raised to the nth power. They are cultural
00:40:58 ►
models for the rest of us. This has always been true. The shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a
00:41:06 ►
superhuman condition. And by being able to do that, he affirms the potential for transcendence
00:41:15 ►
in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will. And I see the attention that’s being given to
00:41:22 ►
these things signaling a sense on the part of the society that we need a return to these models.
00:41:30 ►
This is why, for instance, in the Star Wars phenomenon, Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from.
00:41:46 ►
So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture
00:41:50 ►
are shamanic heroes.
00:41:51 ►
They control a force which is bigger than everybody
00:41:56 ►
and holds the galaxy together.
00:41:58 ►
And this is true, as a matter of fact.
00:42:01 ►
And as we explore how true it is,
00:42:04 ►
the limitations of our previous worldview
00:42:07 ►
will be exposed for all to see.
00:42:11 ►
I think it was J.B.S. Haldane who said,
00:42:14 ►
the world may not only be stranger than we suppose,
00:42:17 ►
it may be stranger than we can suppose.
00:42:22 ►
I think of the character Yoda.
00:42:26 ►
Certainly he’s a shamanic type character.
00:42:29 ►
Very much so.
00:42:32 ►
As we talk about shamans and shamanism,
00:42:36 ►
again, that brings up cross-cultural currents.
00:42:40 ►
Do you see the shaman taking on a new…
00:42:44 ►
Certainly you don’t see Indian shamans walking into the metropolitan areas,
00:42:49 ►
but do you see the shaman taking on a new form?
00:42:52 ►
Well, I believe, along with Gordon Wasson and others,
00:42:57 ►
but in distinction to Marseilliat, who is a major writer on shamanism,
00:43:02 ►
that it is hallucinogenic shamanism that is primary
00:43:08 ►
and that where shamanic techniques are used
00:43:12 ►
to the exclusion of hallucinogenic drug ingestion,
00:43:18 ►
the shamanism tends to be vitiated.
00:43:20 ►
It is more like a ritual enactment of what real shamanism is, so that the shamanism that is coming to be is coming to be within people in our culture, the people who feel comfortable with psychedelic drugs and who, by going into those spaces and then returning with works of art or poetic accounts or scientific ideas, are actually changing the face of the culture. history has always progressed by the bubbling up of ideas from these nether dimensions into
00:44:09 ►
the minds of receptive men and women. It is simply that now, with the hallucinogens, we
00:44:16 ►
actually have a tool to push the button. We are no longer dependent upon whatever factors it is that previously controlled the ingression
00:44:28 ►
of novelty into human history. We have taken that function to ourselves, and this will
00:44:35 ►
accelerate and intensify the cultural crisis. But I think in the end it will lead that much sooner to its resolution.
00:44:47 ►
So, as we continue to move towards the further exploration of these spaces, we can expect
00:44:57 ►
that social change as a result? Personal change? Tremendous social change. I see, in fact, what is happening is a tendency to what I
00:45:10 ►
call turn the body inside out. We are, through our media and our cybernetics, we are actually
00:45:17 ►
approaching the point where consciousness can be experienced in a state of disconnection from the body.
00:45:28 ►
We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys.
00:45:33 ►
We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef
00:45:37 ►
of organic components and inorganic technological components.
00:45:43 ►
We have become a force which takes unorganized raw material and
00:45:48 ►
excretes technical objects. We have transcended the normal definitions of man. We are like an
00:45:58 ►
enormous collective organism with our data banks and our forecasting agencies and our computer networks
00:46:06 ►
and the many levels at which we are connected into the universe.
00:46:10 ►
Our self-image is changing.
00:46:13 ►
The monkey is all but being left behind and shortly will be left behind.
00:46:19 ►
The flying saucer, again, I take to be an image of the future state of humanity. It is a kind of millenarian
00:46:27 ►
transformation of man where the soul is exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology,
00:46:37 ►
and it is that eschatological event which is casting enormous shadows backward through time over the historical
00:46:47 ►
landscape that is the siren at the end of time calling all mankind across the last 10 millennia
00:46:56 ►
toward it calling us out of the trees and into history and through this series of multileveled cultural transitions to the point where the thing within the monkeys,
00:47:10 ►
the creature of pure language and pure imagination
00:47:13 ►
whose aspirations are entirely titanic
00:47:19 ►
in terms of self-transformation,
00:47:22 ►
that thing is emerging,
00:47:24 ►
and it will emerge as man leaves the planet.
00:47:27 ►
And it’s not something quantized and clearly defined.
00:47:31 ►
It is, in fact, what the next 50 or so years will be about.
00:47:35 ►
But at the end of it,
00:47:37 ►
the species will be off-planet and transformed
00:47:40 ►
and fully wired from the depths to the heights.
00:47:46 ►
Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death, resurrection, ascension into heaven?
00:47:51 ►
Except that it is coming into history.
00:47:54 ►
What is happening is that the paradise promised the soul
00:48:02 ►
is actually going to enter into history because technological man took the
00:48:08 ►
apocalyptic aspirations of Christianity so seriously that we are going to make it happen.
00:48:15 ►
It has become the guiding image of what we want to be, and I’m reminded of the poem by Yeats,
00:48:22 ►
it’s Sailing to Byzantium, where he speaks of how after death
00:48:26 ►
he would like to be an enameled golden object
00:48:30 ►
singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium.
00:48:34 ►
And it’s the image of man transformed
00:48:37 ►
into eternal circuitry
00:48:39 ►
and released into a hyperspace of information
00:48:43 ►
where you are a thing of circuitry, but you appear to be walking
00:48:49 ►
along an unspoiled beach in paradise. It is that we are going to find the power to realize our
00:48:59 ►
deepest cultural aspirations. This is why we must find out what our deepest cultural aspirations are. Again, another
00:49:06 ►
way of phrasing the question, is man good? What about the idea that these spaces that we’ve been
00:49:13 ►
talking about, that you’ve been illuminating, are spaces that can be achieved without the use of
00:49:19 ►
psychedelics? Well, again, I scoured India, and my humble personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely.
00:49:31 ►
I have always approached people of spiritual accomplishment with the question, what can you show me?
00:49:40 ►
Because, as I said earlier, this wise old man wisdom is one thing, but only the hallucinogen-using shaman of the Amazon seem to be able to go beyond that.
00:49:54 ►
There may be techniques for doing this, but the efficacy and the dependability of the hallucinogens seems to me to make them the obvious choice.
00:50:07 ►
It would only be a series of cultural conventions
00:50:11 ►
that would cause one to want to engineer around that.
00:50:15 ►
It is the obvious path to transcendence.
00:50:19 ►
People must face the fact that at one level
00:50:22 ►
we are chemical machines.
00:50:24 ►
That doesn’t mean we are that at every level,
00:50:27 ►
but it does mean that that is a level where we can intervene
00:50:31 ►
to change the pictures that are coming in and going out at higher levels.
00:50:38 ►
You’re not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?
00:50:43 ►
Take hallucinogens?
00:50:44 ►
Well, I don’t know about take it by themselves.
00:50:47 ►
Probably not, although I always do,
00:50:51 ►
and I seem to prefer it.
00:50:54 ►
What I am suggesting is they take it
00:50:56 ►
in a situation of minimum sensory input.
00:50:59 ►
Lying down in darkness with eyes closed
00:51:02 ►
cannot be surpassed, and people want music, they want
00:51:08 ►
to walk around in nature, they want all these things. But nature and music are beautiful
00:51:13 ►
in their own right. They are the adumbrations of the psychedelic experience that we deal
00:51:18 ►
with in ordinary reality. In confrontation with the psychedelic experience, these things are hardly more than impediments. The very interesting things are happening in the utter blackness behind your eyelids lying still in darkness, and that is where the mystery comes from and goes to.
00:51:41 ►
My question had to do with with or without a guide. Oh, I don’t think people should do it
00:51:46 ►
without a guide
00:51:47 ►
unless they feel very confident
00:51:49 ►
from experience
00:51:51 ►
that they don’t need a guide.
00:51:53 ►
I like to have these ideas get out.
00:51:56 ►
I think it’s important
00:51:57 ►
that we discuss all this
00:51:59 ►
in a way that is only now
00:52:01 ►
becoming possible
00:52:02 ►
because of how it was
00:52:04 ►
in the 1960s.
00:52:06 ►
Now we need to shed all that and look back and look forward
00:52:11 ►
and try to make a mature judgment for our culture based on the facts of the matter.
00:52:19 ►
Well, someone asked when we first went around to try and talk about the future.
00:52:24 ►
I don’t know if I made the point strongly enough.
00:52:28 ►
I wasn’t sure I felt it click.
00:52:30 ►
And I think it’s a strong one and it’s somewhat new with me.
00:52:34 ►
It’s this idea that we represent some kind of singularity, or that we announce the nearby presence of a singularity.
00:52:51 ►
That the evolution of life and cultural form and all that is clearly funneling toward something fairly unimaginable.
00:53:01 ►
I mean, I really don’t think we can imagine our future, because when we try to project
00:53:07 ►
some little science fiction scenario of our future, we inevitably select a very small number of trends
00:53:14 ►
and then we propagate them forward without integrating the forward propagation of everything
00:53:21 ►
else that is going to be happening simultaneously.
00:53:26 ►
You know, there are options such as nanotechnology, the building of super tiny machines.
00:53:36 ►
Space migration was once an option.
00:53:39 ►
This seems to be fading.
00:53:41 ►
It seems to have been written off the menu by the powers that be. As the Soviet
00:53:46 ►
Union cracks to pieces, the human race’s ability to leave this planet becomes a memory of ancient
00:53:54 ►
times. I mean, we could not return to the moon in less than 15 years if we committed ourselves to it
00:54:01 ►
tomorrow. So the space thing seems to have been taken off the agenda. There’s nanotechnology, there’s virtual reality. The present solution seems to be this enforced larval neoteny on the consuming blue-collar masses in the high-tech societies and triage through epidemic disease
00:54:28 ►
and mismanagement in the third world.
00:54:35 ►
I, you know, it’s a huge mix,
00:54:38 ►
this problem of saving the world
00:54:41 ►
or halting the forward thrust
00:54:43 ►
into catastrophe. I don’t, People say, well, why do you
00:54:48 ►
worry about saving the world? You just said it’s going to end in 2012. I don’t see that wrap as
00:54:57 ►
any sort of permission for political irresponsibility or a lack of attention to world problems. If it’s true, great, we’re golden.
00:55:08 ►
If it’s not true, and what a long shot it is, then we should still keep our eye on the ball
00:55:15 ►
with all of this stuff. It is overpopulation is what’s driving us crazy. All other problems,
00:55:21 ►
what’s driving us crazy.
00:55:23 ►
All other problems,
00:55:25 ►
toxic waste disposal,
00:55:26 ►
epidemic disease,
00:55:28 ►
resource extraction,
00:55:30 ►
degradation of the environment,
00:55:32 ►
collapse of the atmosphere,
00:55:35 ►
inability to satisfy third world aspirations,
00:55:37 ►
all of these problems
00:55:39 ►
are population problems.
00:55:42 ►
And capitalism doesn’t want
00:55:44 ►
to talk about it
00:55:45 ►
because capitalism is not a human being.
00:55:48 ►
Capitalism is a Moloch, a god,
00:55:52 ►
a god of bloody sacrifice
00:55:55 ►
that sees human beings as ants.
00:55:58 ►
And the more ants there are,
00:56:00 ►
the more offerings there can be to Moloch.
00:56:03 ►
But this is not a good situation for us ants.
00:56:08 ►
And, you know, capitalism is a gun
00:56:12 ►
pointed at the head of global civilization.
00:56:18 ►
If you read the theoreticians of capitalism,
00:56:21 ►
Adam Smith and so forth,
00:56:23 ►
capitalism assumes an unlimited,
00:56:27 ►
exploitable frontier.
00:56:29 ►
There is no such creature.
00:56:31 ►
So it has turned pathological.
00:56:34 ►
The only frontier now left to exploit
00:56:37 ►
is not a frontier in space,
00:56:40 ►
but a frontier in time.
00:56:43 ►
We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt. But this frontier, the end is in sight. And when we hit that wall, you know, we will join the eastern block in a fundamental reappraisal of our situation.
00:57:04 ►
in a fundamental reappraisal of our situation.
00:57:07 ►
Democracy, I believe in.
00:57:12 ►
I mean, I think democracy is the psychedelic form of government because I don’t see it as a product of rational thought.
00:57:17 ►
I see it as institutionalized anarchy.
00:57:20 ►
Democracy is biology managed
00:57:25 ►
for human purposes
00:57:27 ►
it honors the biological unit
00:57:30 ►
it takes the biological unit
00:57:34 ►
and gives it a vote
00:57:35 ►
and that’s a way for mother nature
00:57:38 ►
to then enter into human history
00:57:41 ►
I’m fairly mystical about democracy,
00:57:45 ►
sort of like William Blake.
00:57:47 ►
So how are you preparing for 2012 yourself personally?
00:57:54 ►
Well, by going way out on a limb, I guess.
00:57:58 ►
People ask me, what will you do if nothing happens in 2012?
00:58:03 ►
Well, by God-sent coincidence, you do if nothing happens in 2012 well by god sent coincidence my 65th birthday occurs a month before
00:58:09 ►
the date so then i think i’ll just steal away and disgrace and find myself a girl on an island who
00:58:17 ►
runs fish traps and disappear forever. As to what I do in the meantime,
00:58:27 ►
I don’t, I should make it clear,
00:58:30 ►
you know, I don’t believe this stuff.
00:58:34 ►
I find believing in these
00:58:39 ►
high-flown, complicated,
00:58:41 ►
synthetic systems to come off
00:58:44 ►
sort of like pathology.
00:58:46 ►
So I entertain ideas,
00:58:49 ►
but I don’t give belief over.
00:58:52 ►
I’m very amazed by the time wave.
00:58:56 ►
It continuously surprises and delights me.
00:59:01 ►
And I don’t know,
00:59:02 ►
very few people are obviously as into it as I
00:59:06 ►
am but it’s proof
00:59:08 ►
enough as far as I’m
00:59:10 ►
concerned I mean it’s all I ever
00:59:12 ►
would have asked for
00:59:14 ►
you know it’s a gem
00:59:16 ►
from the other it’s Aladdin’s
00:59:18 ►
lamp it’s what I wanted and I
00:59:20 ►
got it at one point
00:59:22 ►
in La Charrera
00:59:23 ►
naturally this question arose in our group, why us? You know,
00:59:30 ►
why us? Why are the aliens revealing the unified field theory of space and time to us? And the
00:59:38 ►
mushroom just replied without hesitation, because you don’t believe in anything.
00:59:45 ►
You know?
00:59:49 ►
And that apparently is what’s required.
00:59:53 ►
Do you all know that Van Morrison song about no guru, no method, no teacher,
00:59:58 ►
just you and me and nature
01:00:00 ►
in the garden?
01:00:02 ►
In the garden?
01:00:04 ►
I think that’s actually where it’s at so what I
01:00:09 ►
do between now and 2012 is I I’m a meme a meme spreader a meme replicator and
01:00:18 ►
the purpose of these teaching things is to turn you into fellow replicators of the meme I mean I see it
01:00:27 ►
all in the metaphors of molecular biology you know I have a new sequence
01:00:32 ►
of codons here and I want to insert it into each one of you without error in
01:00:39 ►
copying and then you should go forth and tell other people and copy it into their head
01:00:46 ►
and this meme will spread because we cannot evolve faster than our language.
01:00:53 ►
The edge of being is the edge of meaning
01:00:57 ►
and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning.
01:01:01 ►
We have to extend it because if we appear to be confronted
01:01:07 ►
by insoluble problems, it’s because we have the wrong language for dealing with this problem.
01:01:14 ►
You know, you learn that with computers. Certain languages are good for certain kinds of problems. And we have to constantly evolve language and push it forward. And the way I think of the psychedelics is they are catalysts to the imagination which was just this glimmering, this iridescence
01:01:46 ►
on the surface of
01:01:48 ►
ape cognition
01:01:49 ►
was under the influence
01:01:52 ►
of the
01:01:54 ►
reciprocal feedback of self
01:01:56 ►
reflection, you know, that
01:01:58 ►
is created by watching
01:01:59 ►
your own mind because it has suddenly
01:02:02 ►
become interesting, because it has
01:02:04 ►
suddenly been flooded by a psychoactive
01:02:06 ►
amine that
01:02:08 ►
iridescence has been
01:02:10 ►
coaxed into language
01:02:12 ►
art, architecture, music
01:02:13 ►
poetry, the whole
01:02:15 ►
the whole ball of wax
01:02:17 ►
but now we know these things
01:02:20 ►
it’s no longer
01:02:21 ►
a sort of
01:02:24 ►
haphazard process. We can, by analyzing different kinds of cultures existing in the world today and cultures that existed in the past, we can uncover, reveal, unravel the lost secret of our origins.
01:02:47 ►
And I think, you know, I haven’t talked too much this weekend,
01:02:50 ►
but I’m very keen for the notion of what I call the archaic revival.
01:02:56 ►
And the archaic revival is this overarching metaphor
01:03:01 ►
that is the way for us to go to save our necks at this point it when a culture
01:03:09 ►
gets into trouble instinctively what it does is it goes back through its own past until it finds a
01:03:20 ►
moment where things seem to make sense and then it brings that moment forward into the present.
01:03:27 ►
The perfect example is when medieval Christianity no longer made sense to a major proportion or
01:03:39 ►
percentage of the people of Western Europe because of the rise of new kinds of classes, new forms of wealth,
01:03:47 ►
new information about the world outside Europe. When the medieval vision lost its power,
01:03:56 ►
the intellectuals of that time instinctively reached backwards into the past looking for a stable model and finally they
01:04:07 ►
reached the golden age of Periclean Athens and there they found Plato, Aristotle, the dramatists
01:04:15 ►
so forth and they created classicism. Now notice that we’re talking here about the 1400s.
01:04:29 ►
notice that we’re talking here about the 1400s. Classicism was brought to birth in the 1400s,
01:04:40 ►
2,000 years after the death of Plato. And we are still, to a tremendous degree, we are the children of this classical revival, which we call the Renaissance.
01:04:46 ►
Our theories of law, our theories of government,
01:04:50 ►
our notion of justice, our notions of city planning,
01:04:54 ►
of architecture, of military planning,
01:05:00 ►
and so forth and so on,
01:05:01 ►
are all drawn from classical Greek and Roman models that were brought back
01:05:06 ►
from the dead 500 years ago by a bunch of Italian investment bankers who thought this was a good
01:05:17 ►
model to build on, to hang their civilization on. And now this has run out. The contradictions are too extreme. This classicism, I don’t want to say it’s failed, but it has just taken us as far as it can go. confusion. We confront cultural values completely different from our own, such as rainforest
01:05:46 ►
aborigines and so forth.
01:05:48 ►
We confront the toxic
01:05:49 ►
legacy of modern science,
01:05:52 ►
the retreating
01:05:54 ►
species counts of the earth,
01:05:56 ►
the decaying atmosphere, all
01:05:58 ►
these things. So we must now
01:06:00 ►
reach far back
01:06:02 ►
into time for a new
01:06:04 ►
cultural model. Our crisis is so great that we have to
01:06:11 ►
reach back to uh the high paleolithic to the moment immediately before the invention of agriculture
01:06:19 ►
and the creation of the dominator ego and i see you know people talk about the new age and the creation of the dominator ego. And I see, you know, people talk about the new age
01:06:27 ►
and the new paradigm and this and that.
01:06:29 ►
Well, it’s larger than that.
01:06:32 ►
It’s been going on throughout the 20th century.
01:06:35 ►
The discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1897.
01:06:42 ►
Freud begins to publish around the turn of the century.
01:06:46 ►
Jung, they are discovering
01:06:49 ►
the primitive unconscious.
01:06:51 ►
They are revealing to
01:06:53 ►
Edwardian and Viennese
01:06:55 ►
ladies and gentlemen
01:06:57 ►
of great culture and breeding
01:06:59 ►
that they have inside them,
01:07:01 ►
you know, brawling, incestuous,
01:07:04 ►
violent, lust-driven animal natures.
01:07:08 ►
In other words, they are reintroducing an awareness of the primitive into this tremendously
01:07:14 ►
constipated, male-dominated, late 19th century, post-Victorian cultural milieu.
01:07:21 ►
And then, following hard upon them, the Impressionists in the 1880s giving way to analytical Cubism and all the… Cubism arose as a result of the fascination of a few artists with primitive African masks.
01:07:42 ►
Picasso and his circle and when they brought this stuff back to Paris
01:07:44 ►
in 1905 through 15
01:07:46 ►
nobody had ever seen this kind of thing
01:07:49 ►
and these guys began trying to deconstruct
01:07:53 ►
the pictorial space of people like Degas
01:07:57 ►
and those people
01:07:58 ►
into the pictorial space of the primitive mentality
01:08:02 ►
meanwhile
01:08:03 ►
anthropologists
01:08:06 ►
were bringing in,
01:08:07 ►
and Fraser published
01:08:09 ►
The Golden Bough,
01:08:10 ►
which laid before
01:08:12 ►
the European intellectual community
01:08:14 ►
this vast repository
01:08:16 ►
of integrated mythology.
01:08:19 ►
National socialism, surrealism,
01:08:23 ►
all of these things,
01:08:24 ►
some negative, some positive, are all aspects of this, the 20th century fascination and revivification of the primitive. the rise of styles of dancing
01:08:45 ►
which were not this
01:08:47 ►
the minuet and so forth
01:08:50 ►
all of this signals this fascination with the primitive
01:08:54 ►
but at the center of it stand
01:08:56 ►
two phenomena or two integrated
01:09:00 ►
phenomena
01:09:01 ►
the personality of the shaman
01:09:04 ►
and the fact of the psychedelic experience.
01:09:09 ►
And we’ve come late to that. You know, the 1960s is when this theme was first announced for any
01:09:16 ►
large number of people. And I think, you know, that we have to deconstruct consciously deconstruct this constipated
01:09:26 ►
classical industrial linear dominator civilization that we’re trapped inside because it’s a vehicle
01:09:36 ►
we can’t steer it’s glued to the tracks which run right over the cliff. If we cannot alter the assumptions of this society,
01:09:47 ►
if the George Bushes and Helmut Kohls of this world
01:09:51 ►
are going to continue to run things,
01:09:53 ►
then, you know, head for the bunkers, folks,
01:09:56 ►
and pray because the bunkers aren’t going to be any consolation.
01:10:02 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:10:08 ►
time so i’ve got a quiz for you do you remember my introduction a few minutes ago to that june
01:10:18 ►
1983 interview that terence did with new dimensions Well, in the second piece that I played, which actually was recorded almost ten years later,
01:10:30 ►
did you notice that he was then saying that space migration seemed to now be off the table?
01:10:36 ►
Well, my point in playing those two bits back-to-back was to reinforce the fact that almost everyone,
01:10:43 ►
at least everyone who thinks for themselves and questions authority,
01:10:47 ►
you know, people like you and me,
01:10:50 ►
well, from time to time, most of us probably wind up changing a position or two.
01:10:55 ►
So let’s all be careful about making claims that so-and-so believed or said such-and-such.
01:11:02 ►
Granted, what you say may be true, but unless you’re sure that
01:11:07 ►
this was the latest position a person took on that issue, well, be sure to be clear about
01:11:12 ►
when that person took a position, because maybe she or he changed their mind, or something like
01:11:19 ►
that. I think you know what I’m saying. Now, I don’t know about you, but there were a couple of times there
01:11:27 ►
when Terrence got off on one of his beautiful poetic riffs
01:11:30 ►
that I once again, well, I remembered what it was that so draws me to his talks.
01:11:36 ►
If you go back and re-listen to that little bit,
01:11:40 ►
maybe it was about a little over 30 minutes into his interview,
01:11:44 ►
where he begins talking about
01:11:46 ►
exteriorizing the soul and the apotheosis of technology. Remember that part? Well, just have
01:11:54 ►
a little toke, and as you listen to him, keep in mind that he wasn’t reading these beautifully
01:11:59 ►
worded paragraphs that had been well crafted and only came out after editing.
01:12:06 ►
He was actually just talking without notes, and that may have been a big part of the wonder
01:12:12 ►
of the man, because he could sit on the floor cross-legged and for hours and just regale
01:12:18 ►
everyone there with what seemed very little effort.
01:12:22 ►
In short, his was always a brilliant performance on every level,
01:12:27 ►
even perhaps to the level of being a reluctant mystic, dare I say.
01:12:33 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:38 ►
Be well, my friends.