Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as almost as social pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops, and therefore regulate human culture generally.”
“Where psychedelics comes together with that is that it’s going to require a transformation of human language and understanding to stop the momentum of the historical process, to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics, all these things. It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political means.”
“Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.” (quote from 1983)
“Tribalism is a social form which can exist at any level of technology. It’s a complete illusion to associate it with low levels of technology. It is probably, in fact, a form of social organization second only to the family in its ability to endure.”
“I think there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being. And it is not necessarily fostered by institutions.”
“If I had to pick an ontological vision that was compatible with what I think these drugs are about, and with what I think is trying to happen, I would pick Taoism.”
“So it’s [shamanism] a kind of a profession. It’s almost like clergy. It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage for purposes of cultural renewal.”
“The history of man that you don’t know is what your unconscious is made out of.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present
By Howard Zinn
Burr: A Novel
By Gore Vidal
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated
By Gore Vidal
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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So, are you ready for a little more Terrence McKenna?
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I’ve actually received several comments about my new approach of presenting edited versions of Terrence’s talks, thousands of which, by the way,
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seem to be all over the net now in case you can’t get enough of them here in the
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salon. Now, some people seem to really hate the idea
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of my editing out parts of his talks where
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he goes over things that we’ve heard him talk about quite a bit already and yet others have
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recommended that I cut out everything everything that Terrence has said in another talk. Well I
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don’t really know if that would be possible even if my memory was that good. But one of the best
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suggestions I received was to only
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podcast the question and answer parts of his talks. But even there, we still occasionally hear one of
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the main riffs that I’ve grown tired of hearing, namely the time wave and the apes eating mushroom
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stories. As an interesting side note, one person posted a comment on our salon blog saying that
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since the world didn’t
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end last December, he was through with Terrence because in that person’s opinion, the only thing
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that Terrence talked about that was interesting was the time wave. But my guess is that you don’t
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feel that way yourself. For me, just because the time wave didn’t work out, I still think that some
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of Terrence’s intuitions about time seeming to become more and more compressed
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and that we do somehow seem to live at a very transformative time in human history,
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well, I think both remain valid topics for conversation.
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And yes, I realize that similar thoughts have occurred to humans during every major change of ages
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and that these times that we’re in aren’t necessarily all that different from those
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in the past. But there is one major difference between today and any former age that we know of,
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and that is the incredibly rapid growth in the number of people being connected to the internet.
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If you don’t think that the net has a powerful impact on humanity, well, just try going for seven days
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without using the net yourself, and only
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interacting with those others who are also taking seven days off.
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My guess is that you will have a pretty lonely and boring
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week if you do. Now, getting back to
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today’s program, while we may have heard some of these
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ideas in other talks, I still find them, well, fresh, fascinating, and worthy of the questions
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that follow. So let’s roll back the clock to the last century and join the Bard McKenna to see if
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we think that any progress has been made in the last 30 years or so since this talk was given.
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has been made in the last 30 years or so since this talk was given.
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One of the things that is a personal interest of mine that stands out from the general background of the psychedelic experience
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is the way that it throws light on language.
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And I discovered that audiences seem fairly responsive to this question,
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even though it seemed to me at first fairly hard to articulate it
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and fairly hard to say too much about it.
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So tonight, to indulge myself and anybody else
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who has a particular interest in this aspect of it.
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I want to say more about it
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and maybe talk for 40 minutes or so
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and then take questions.
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And I think it’s by talking,
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it’s perhaps a tautology to think that
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by talking about a linguistic phenomenon
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or a linguistic problem,
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you can illuminate
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it but I’m interested in how it strikes other people and the kind of dialogue
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that can be generated by talking about it first of all to background what I’m
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saying a little bit I recently ran across a very interesting analogy or metaphor that seemed useful to me,
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which was, it was a historical analogy saying that when civilizations come into crisis,
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they inevitably, one of their strategies for survival is to cast back to an earlier period
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of time an earlier cultural ideal and then to try to exemplify to exemplify its values and as
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the obvious example and the most recent phenomenon of this sort on any large scale is the Renaissance in which
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the breakdown of medieval society and the rise of mercantilism generated a
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need to cast back into time for a set of values and then to realize them. And the period of time that was chosen was classical
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Greece and Rome. And so painting, sculpture, poetry reflected an effort to recapture classical
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values. What I think is happening in the present, and by the present I mean the whole 20th century,
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and by the present I mean the whole 20th century is a similar thing, a similar culture crisis
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but on a much grander and more global and more threatening scale
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and a casting back for a previous cultural model
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whose ideals, if we could realize them, would save our own civilization,
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the same idea that the Renaissance had about classical Greece. But strangely, the period
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that we have decided, that we have fastened on without ever making a conscious decision, but as a reflection of decisions made in the
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mass psyche of the species, the period that we have settled on is the archaic period which
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precedes human history.
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And so cubism and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Pound and the things that were done for literature by Joyce and Pound
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and the glorification of barbarism
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and the recovery of the unconscious,
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first the sexual nature of the unconscious through Freud,
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later the mass archetypal structure through Jung.
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In other words, the great movements of the
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20th century, even Marxism, can be seen as efforts to recapture prehistoric
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sacral values. And this process has been going on for 50 years or so, different adumbrations of it at different times.
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And now, and for the past 10 years or so,
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the theme of shamanism,
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the rediscovery of Paleolithic religion,
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and the rise of the use of hallucinogenic drugs,
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which were the driving force of Paleolithic religion,
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has come into the fore.
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Well, okay, holding that in your mind for a moment,
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recall Marshall McLuhan’s idea that technologies for conveying information
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shift ratios in the mass psyche and the way that it relates to the world and he
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was famous for predicting what he called electronic feudalism he said
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that the television screen was more like a page of manuscript than a page
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of print and that as the linearity and uniformity
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and rational assumptions of grammar
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were transcended in the conveying of information
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to be replaced by electronic gestalts
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that were looked at rather than read,
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that the ratios between the senses would shift
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and that this would have profound effects on art
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and the history of ideas and this sort of thing.
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What is happening is that a kind of super McLuhanistic phenomenon is happening
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where we are collapsing not into the electronic feudalism that he discussed but into the electronic tribalism which he discussed. sensory ratios away from the audio and toward the visual.
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And this brings me now to my subject,
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which is the transformations of language
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under the influence of the psychedelic experience.
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under the influence of the psychedelic experience, the fact that there is a spectrum of vocal and psychological and psychomental phenomena
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that range all the way from the recitation of learned material
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through freely formed speech and into these trance-like religious phenomena that go
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under the category glossolalia. And these things are experienced by the people who do them as
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having a varying relationship to the visual rather than the audio sense I we had a
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discussion a couple of nights ago with Ralph Abraham about when you are asked
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to conjure the idea of an orange what is this idea made out of when you close
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your eyes and think of an orange is what you think of made of language or is it
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made of light and what you say in answer to this question what does it say about you and your the
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way in which you’re embedded in your culture under the influence of psilocybin particularly particularly the language forming centers are activated
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and they are activated in tandem with the visual cortex
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so that forms of synesthesia are experienced
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which are linked first of all to sound
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so that people singing control the fabric of hallucination through sound.
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And we found this to be true of ayahuasca in the Amazon,
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where definitely the shaman’s use of voice controls the fabric,
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the visual fabric of what’s going on.
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But there is yet another level to that phenomenon which is with the addition of meaning
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the control of the visual surface the topology of meaning if you will rather than the ongoing
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decoding from a dictionary is transcended meaning then is able also to work its adumbrations on this topological surface and
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you see into well there are different ways of cognizing it the place where the Ursprach is
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coming from the assembly language that lies behind all formalized or culturally validated languages
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Wittgenstein called it the unspeakable it’s it’s the place where explication
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cannot go almost by definition in order to avoid a tautology. Well, now it seemed to me that the nearness of these tryptamine hallucinogens
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to normal metabolites of brain chemistry and the fragileness that people like McLuhan and
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Julian Jaynes have shown to be a part of the way we construct our world.
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In other words, that it’s a delicate balance
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of chemistry and language and history
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and these sensory ratios.
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That given all this,
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it seemed probable to me
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that this phenomenon encountered
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in deep psychedelic experiences with psilocybin
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actually has a potential historical impact.
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It is a kind of human ability
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which is at present submerged in the psyche,
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contactable only by the shamanic means
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of journeying into historical hyperspace.
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In other words, of going into that place
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where the adumbrations of the future are intense enough
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that you can have an intimation, at least,
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of what is to come.
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And I think this is what is to come,
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and it is a kind of telepathy,
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but it’s not telepathy as we imagined it to be
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i when i imagined telepathy i thought of it as hearing another person think and having them hear
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you think this is something where the modality of meaning is shifted out of a common dictionary that is a cultural convention
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and into a shared visual topology
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which is examined by both parties,
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both the speaker who caused this thing to be
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and the audience who shares the space where this is happening
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it’s interesting that beta carbolines which are used to accentuate the
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hallucinogenic effect of DMT in these ayahuasca preparations in in Amazonas is very definitely a part of normal human metabolism, brain metabolism.
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And the MAO inhibition that it’s performing on DMT that is introduced from the outside
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is a mirror image of the kind of function that it’s performing in the brain. So the shifting of the sensory ratios is causing language to become more visual.
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And at this point I always have to quote Philo Judeus,
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who was a first century Alexandrian Jew,
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who talked about the logos,
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and I have made analogies between the phenomenon
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I’m describing and the logos,
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but in the critical quote,
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what he said was that a more perfect logos was possible
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and that it would be a phenomenon
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which would pass from the modality of being heard to the modality of being beheld
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without ever crossing through a quantized point of transition where you could say it was one,
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now it is the other. And I think the cultural shock waves that will be generated by the emergence of visible language
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will totally transform the culture
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to the point that the point beyond the end of history,
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the entry into hyperspace, the eschatological monad,
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all these religious or theological constructs about history
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are actually intuitions about language
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undergoing this transformation.
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Now, several things about this transformation.
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It’s obviously not something which the culture is doing as a decision.
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It isn’t like home computers and cable
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TV. It isn’t being brought on as an information utility. It’s something which is being imposed
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from outside. And I think it is, I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Gaia hypothesis of
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homeostatic regulation of the environment of the earth
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through the interaction of all life acting as a single organism.
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Well, it obviously regulates trigger species such as we are,
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are part of this homeostatic method of regulation.
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And I think the gradual evolution of language
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is actually
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the gradual lifting of the veil
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that is imposed between ourselves
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and meaning
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by the planetary ecology.
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In other words,
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the forward thrust of history
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is actually regulated by the ecology,
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and it is regulated through control of the evolution of language,
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because what you cannot think, you cannot do,
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and where you cannot imagine, you cannot steer your culture and go.
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So I’m proposing on one level that hallucinogens be thought of as human macro, almost social
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pheromones that regulate the rate at which language develops and therefore regulate the the evolution of human culture generally. Now, one final thought about all this.
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It seems clear to me,
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and I’ve mentioned it in the other lectures,
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that the evolution,
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that another aspect of what psychedelics are doing
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and an aspect of what’s happening to the culture generally
00:19:02 ►
is its transformation into a space-faring species
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and that the momentum for this
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has been building for millennia.
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It is not something that was decided in the 1950s.
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It is, in fact, what we’re all about.
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I looked at a book recently by Terry Wilson
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about Brian Gison called Here to Go,
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and he asked the question, what are we here for? And he answers himself, we’re here to go.
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And I think there’s great truth in that, especially in the current historical moment where it’s clear that man as a species and the planet as a unified ecosystem
00:19:49 ►
have become antagonistic to each other. And this is not unusual in nature. In fact, it’s a phenomenon
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that occurs between a mother and a fetus. When fetus comes to term when the birth is imminent
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it must happen otherwise the the survival of both parties is threatened even though the birth trauma
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for the mother and the child represents one of the major crises that they will face in their sojourn in existence.
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Nevertheless, it is inevitable and necessary,
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and if it comes off correctly, why, it’s to the good of everyone.
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Where psychedelics comes together with that
00:20:39 ►
is that it is going to require a transformation of human language and understanding
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to stop the momentum of the historical process,
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to halt nuclear proliferation, germ warfare, infantile 19th century politics,
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all these things.
00:21:00 ►
It cannot be accomplished through a frontal assault upon it by political
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means and the I Ching says you know never you never confront evil directly
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because when it is named it sharpens its weapons and it learns to defend itself
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so what is called for is this sideways attack through hyperspace. God forbid, I
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think it was Tim Leary who said we
00:21:30 ►
should become ecological secret agents.
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Is that what I’m concluding? Maybe.
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Anyway, the transformation of language is
00:21:41 ►
I think the signal that this archaic, that this nostalgia for the archaic world is coming to a head and that this is its culmination.
00:21:52 ►
This is the peculiar thing that we all sense is coming, that we can’t quite imagine, that is synthetic yet natural, that is obvious yet hidden.
00:22:09 ►
natural, that is obvious yet hidden. And the interesting thing about it is that it emerges from an inner personal frontier. In other words, you’re not going to hear this on the evening news.
00:22:17 ►
The president is not going to explain it to you. The secretary general of the UN isn’t going to
00:22:22 ►
explain it to you. You are only going to advance into understanding this phenomena
00:22:27 ►
to the degree that you apply yourself to your being,
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to attention to being,
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to reflection on reflection,
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to attention on attention.
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And then it will become clear.
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And because it is a gradient of evolution,
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it doesn’t come with the force of a revelation.
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It is something which is drawn out.
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Almost in the same way that we move forward into time,
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this thing is drawn out.
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In fact, you could almost say that the act
00:23:06 ►
of history or the fact of history is a macro phenomenon that arises out of the
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micro physical fact of millions of people evolving their language that is
00:23:19 ►
what causes the moving wave front of historical becoming.
00:23:26 ►
So transformation of language through psychedelic drugs
00:23:30 ►
is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix
00:23:37 ►
of the rest of the century.
00:23:41 ►
My brother is working on the theory,
00:23:50 ►
putting together the argument for the idea that actually human history has always been mediated by man’s interaction with hallucinogenic drugs and that
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this is the pheromonal regulator that links us to the rest of the ecology. And it’s simply accidents of botany and alkaloid distribution
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and historiography that allowed a culture to arise in Europe,
00:24:16 ►
which was an area confined geographically and poor in psychedelic plants
00:24:22 ►
so that the mystery was confined to places
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like Eleusis and peripheral cults
00:24:28 ►
like possibly the mushroom berserkers
00:24:32 ►
or Agaricus, I mean
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Amanita using cults in the Arctic regions
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and because of those accidents
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of botany and geography
00:24:44 ►
a culture was able to get loose from such a tight, the tight constraints that the unconscious imposes.
00:25:06 ►
which claimed the energies which will then send the mind tribes to the stars if it had not been for this historical episode we would essentially be at the
00:25:11 ►
Amazonian level of culture which is suspended in the hallucinogenic dream
00:25:16 ►
but oblivious to the historical forces which are bearing down on that and
00:25:23 ►
tribalism is a social form
00:25:25 ►
which can exist at any level of technology.
00:25:28 ►
It’s a complete illusion to associate it
00:25:31 ►
with low levels of technology.
00:25:35 ►
It is probably, in fact,
00:25:37 ►
a form of social organization
00:25:39 ►
second only to the family
00:25:42 ►
and its ability to endure.
00:25:45 ►
Are there any questions at this point?
00:25:49 ►
Yeah, my last generalization
00:25:50 ►
sounded real broad that you could expand
00:25:53 ►
on how tribalism is a social point
00:25:55 ►
that can exist at any technological level.
00:25:57 ►
Well, I think it’s an attitude
00:25:59 ►
toward genes and property
00:26:02 ►
and information.
00:26:06 ►
The institutional, hierarchically structured societies
00:26:12 ►
that we associate with our own culture,
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which I assume we define consciously or unconsciously
00:26:20 ►
as somehow the superior culture,
00:26:22 ►
is just inherited from a tribal organization
00:26:28 ►
but with a need to abstract the leadership quality
00:26:32 ►
so that control could function over wide areas.
00:26:36 ►
But electronics actually is, you know,
00:26:39 ►
the entire human community is enclosed
00:26:42 ►
in a light second of travel. So there is, the globalism
00:26:48 ►
is real. I mean, when I first read McLuhan, it seemed to me very true, but a thin voice
00:26:56 ►
crying in the wilderness. It was hard to see if out of all the trends working in society, that was how it would come to be. But it certainly seems
00:27:05 ►
to be so. I think, well, H.G. Wells said, history is a race between education and disaster.
00:27:14 ►
And I think, you know, that education was losing that race until electronics came along.
00:27:29 ►
electronics came along and now I would probably be optimistic I think that there is a global commonality of understanding coming into being and it
00:27:34 ►
is not necessarily fostered by institutions for instance the invention
00:27:39 ►
of the microchip which makes possible the personal computer, it was actually thought to be a
00:27:47 ►
mistake. It was not fast enough for the Defense Department purposes that it was engineered,
00:27:54 ►
that the research project that produced it was aiming for. And they produced instead
00:27:59 ►
this weird thing, which they couldn’t imagine what to do with because it was too slow for any military or industrial application. But someone realized, you know, that it was just
00:28:12 ►
fine for human beings and that it would shift the pieces around on the board in the war between, you know, freedom and oligarchy and human individuality and all these forces which seek to oppress it.
00:28:34 ►
So I don’t believe, you know, that the historical process is under the control of any of the many, many institutions that would wish to control it.
00:28:44 ►
I don’t, the break between nature and man
00:28:47 ►
has been overstressed, I think,
00:28:50 ►
and that we should realize, you know,
00:28:51 ►
that we are very strange,
00:28:55 ►
but you can find very odd adaptations
00:28:59 ►
at many levels.
00:29:01 ►
And when you look at the global ecology,
00:29:06 ►
you see that there must be a species like us or otherwise it would mean that evolution gives up at
00:29:12 ►
the planetary level that somehow when it encounters the edge of the atmosphere it
00:29:18 ►
just says okay well that’s it if the star goes we all go and there’s no way
00:29:22 ►
around that but actually the obvious way around that is a technical species,
00:29:29 ►
a minded species that will open a hole using energy and understanding
00:29:37 ►
through which everything could escape if it had to.
00:29:41 ►
Because as the data flows back from these probes
00:29:48 ►
moving out through the solar system and beyond,
00:29:50 ►
it turns out that the 19th century intuition of catastrophism was very correct,
00:29:59 ►
that the universe is, in fact, a very turbulent place,
00:30:02 ►
and that you only have to open your time window a little bit,
00:30:07 ►
like a hundred thousand years, for the probability of very turbulent events
00:30:12 ►
that a global ecosystem would react to and strategies have to be evolved. I mean, Francis
00:30:21 ►
Crick has come out with his belief, the panspermia idea, that life actually evolves in a deep space environment and is conveyed then to planetary environments where it can adapt and evolve evolutionary strategies by cometary material.
00:30:47 ►
strategies by cometary material. At one point we suggested that Stropharia cubensis, the psilocybin mushroom, was actually an intelligent species whose method, whose strategy of evolutionary
00:30:56 ►
advance was the spore, which could actually go into a kind of suspended animation for hundreds of thousands, millions of years,
00:31:08 ►
and by that means radiate through the galaxy over very long periods of time.
00:31:16 ►
And that seemed like a very radical idea at the time.
00:31:21 ►
We hypothesized that spore liberation by an agaricus on a planetary surface, then
00:31:28 ►
through Brownian motion and accumulation of global charge on the surface of the spore,
00:31:35 ►
that there would be a small number of these tending to percolate out of any given atmosphere.
00:31:40 ►
And given the enormous amounts of spores that are released, you could make an
00:31:46 ►
argument for this kind of evolutionary strategy. But Crick, who discovered DNA, makes a much
00:31:53 ►
wilder hypothesis, which is that you don’t even require a planetary ecosystem for DNA and life
00:32:02 ►
chemistry to evolve, that it can evolve in ultra-cold regimens
00:32:05 ►
in interstellar space
00:32:08 ►
and then be conveyed
00:32:09 ►
to various planetary chemical regimens
00:32:13 ►
where it can respond and grow
00:32:16 ►
and all of these things
00:32:20 ►
life which we know from the rock
00:32:23 ►
that is dug out of the South African chert you can date back to
00:32:27 ►
at least 3.5 billion years that’s longer than the life of 40% of the stars in the universe so life
00:32:39 ►
is not an ephemeral process in an entropic universe. Life is a process that has a duration that
00:32:49 ►
exceeds that of star life. And life’s strategy for running against the second law of thermodynamics
00:32:58 ►
and expanding and conserving ordered structure over vast periods of time is a
00:33:06 ►
strategy of encoding information and retaining it in other words languages
00:33:12 ►
and these languages which are abstract systems of notation that can be laid on
00:33:19 ►
to nucleotides or coconuts or scratches on clay or whatever,
00:33:27 ►
allow the conserving of complexity.
00:33:30 ►
And the cross into visible language
00:33:37 ►
that I see as the culmination of human historical culture
00:33:41 ►
is a similar advance into this information self-expression of the magnitude
00:33:48 ►
similar to the generation of epigenetic information. In other words, the first writing,
00:33:55 ►
the first notation, that represented a break with genetic information that allowed then culture and memory and self-reflection.
00:34:07 ►
Visible language will allow
00:34:10 ►
a similar forward thrust
00:34:13 ►
deeper into human becoming,
00:34:15 ►
but it is also part of the phenomenon
00:34:17 ►
of leaving the planet
00:34:19 ►
and being anticipated now
00:34:21 ►
in these psychedelic drug states
00:34:23 ►
because as we continue to insist on
00:34:26 ►
exploring the archaic through drugs and music and archaeology and the whole thrust of 20th
00:34:36 ►
century self-explication, I think we’re going to find that this was the basis of the Ur-shamanism. This is what magic is. It’s being able to speak in a voice which
00:34:48 ►
makes things happen, being able to speak in a voice which causes facts to be beheld by
00:34:55 ►
groups of people in a way that has been purged from profane language for us relegated to
00:35:02 ►
poetry and that sort of thing.
00:35:07 ►
Would visual or beheld language have any basic structural units to it like an alphabet?
00:35:14 ►
Or would it be something so abstract that you couldn’t…
00:35:20 ►
Well, you know, people had to look at language probably 15,000 years before Noam Chomsky was able to write
00:35:27 ►
down the 15 rules of transformational grammar it may have there may be some a pixel or an alphabet
00:35:39 ►
or a reducible unit to it it doesn’t’t seem like that. It seems like,
00:35:46 ►
well, no, no,
00:35:48 ►
maybe topology
00:35:49 ►
that we could imagine
00:35:51 ►
that René Tom’s catastrophes,
00:35:56 ►
of which there are seven,
00:35:58 ►
good in three dimensions.
00:36:02 ►
But as you add dimensions
00:36:03 ►
to any system,
00:36:04 ►
the number of these potential
00:36:06 ►
catastrophes increases. And Ralph Abraham has described a number of the hyperdimensional
00:36:12 ►
catastrophe states. Perhaps they could eventually, it could eventually be recognized as a grammar
00:36:18 ►
of catastrophe flow, where it changes first into one thing then into another what
00:36:25 ►
you’re asking basically is you know what is the meaning of meaning or or put
00:36:31 ►
another way does language eventually become somehow a mirror of mathematics
00:36:37 ►
and I don’t know it would take a lot more analysis than I have done. I think describing this stuff
00:36:45 ►
is at the level of sailing up jungle rivers
00:36:49 ►
and sticking to the broad rivers
00:36:51 ►
and noting that, you know,
00:36:53 ►
at three in the afternoon
00:36:54 ►
you passed a river mouth flowing in.
00:36:57 ►
It was a mile and a half wide
00:36:59 ►
and you don’t know where it was coming from
00:37:01 ►
or how many thousand square miles it was draining
00:37:03 ►
and you just put a note on your map to return
00:37:06 ►
someday and ascend it in other words, there’s a
00:37:10 ►
This archaic area of the mind. It’s going to take a long time to explicate it by the time we have
00:37:18 ►
assimilated our
00:37:19 ►
Recontact with the archaic, you know, there will be colonies on Alpha Centauri,
00:37:25 ►
there will be thinking machines, there will be trans-dimensional vehicles
00:37:30 ►
and out-of-body consciousness via electronics.
00:37:35 ►
All these things will arise out of our grappling with an understanding
00:37:40 ►
of this shift in the sensory ratios that will essentially return modern man
00:37:47 ►
to the age of miracles and though we won’t put it that way but we will privately experience it
00:37:55 ►
that way I mean that’s what psychedelic drugs are we don’t put it that way but we all who have been through it, you know, privately experience it as a miracle.
00:38:06 ►
Information that is coming into your brain, or whatever, many people talk about this.
00:38:12 ►
I just wanted to hear you share your thoughts on that division or any hypotheses,
00:38:16 ►
what you feel that that’s accurate, not accurate.
00:38:19 ►
Well, it seems as though there is a tuning mechanism,
00:38:29 ►
It seems as though there is a tuning mechanism that you must somehow by trial and error find how to twiddle this knob and you move through these very concentrated areas of information
00:38:36 ►
and some of it can be blindingly personal, some of it appear to be movies of historical periods. Some of it appear to be conformed to Jungian stuff.
00:38:49 ►
And then the alien part of it.
00:38:53 ►
And I don’t know.
00:38:57 ►
I mean, this is the area I work in.
00:38:59 ►
I’ve held all kinds of opinions about this information
00:39:03 ►
and finally decided that it’s too early to say what it is.
00:39:09 ►
There’s a school of New Age,
00:39:13 ►
or I don’t know exactly how to put it,
00:39:15 ►
but the Seth books
00:39:18 ►
and the Ilse Schwaller de Lubitz and these people
00:39:24 ►
where it’s just nobody asks any hard questions.
00:39:28 ►
It’s just, oh, you’re channeling a being from Arturus
00:39:31 ►
and they’re laying the law down.
00:39:33 ►
Fascinating. What are they saying?
00:39:36 ►
Well, that’s interesting what they’re saying,
00:39:38 ►
but more interesting is trying to actually work up close
00:39:44 ►
to the mechanics involved in this channeling.
00:39:48 ►
And I’m very skeptical, and yet it hasn’t stopped me at all from doing it.
00:39:54 ►
I mean, I talk to them, but I don’t give away the barn or the cow.
00:40:00 ►
I just try to engage in dialogue.
00:40:04 ►
And, you know know some traditions are very
00:40:07 ►
blase about this sort of thing Buddhism for instance of Vajrayana it’s just oh
00:40:12 ►
yes many worlds many beings beings beings all kinds of beings on every
00:40:19 ►
level and you have to learn to deal with them but it that’s well and good until you actually are doing dealing with
00:40:27 ►
these beings and go through like that wonderful moment in rosemary’s baby where she says my god
00:40:33 ►
this is really happening well there are those moments where you realize you know that this
00:40:39 ►
doesn’t appear to be a hypostatization of discriminating intellect it appears to
00:40:45 ►
be some kind of eight-armed Schmincke which is coming at you with all these
00:40:51 ►
implements and I don’t know see I think it’s going to take a long time to sort
00:41:00 ►
this all out and that in order to learn what we had to learn about matter to leave the planet
00:41:07 ►
we had to really put ourselves through a head trip and close down the imagination or deputize
00:41:17 ►
special people to be imaginative who we called poets and then labeled irrelevant it’s going to now come upon us
00:41:28 ►
and science is flowing into this area
00:41:31 ►
and beginning to recognize that it must have
00:41:34 ►
a romantic component
00:41:35 ►
this is just the way of things
00:41:40 ►
ideas beget their opposites
00:41:42 ►
and then are subsumed by them
00:41:44 ►
anyone of things ideas beget their opposites and then are subsumed by them anyone could could all this
00:41:50 ►
be related to the crisis in art well i don’t know whether you mean the crisis since 1905 or 1975
00:41:57 ►
or which well i i’m not it’s not exactly a crisis.
00:42:08 ►
The goal of art is to be incomprehensible,
00:42:11 ►
or a portion of it has to be incomprehensible. I think that, you know, these paintings at Lascaux and Altamira,
00:42:16 ►
which are now dated at 19,000 years old,
00:42:20 ►
when the first ones were discovered in the 1890s,
00:42:24 ►
they were thought to be 400 to 500 years old.
00:42:29 ►
And as it dawned on people what this was,
00:42:34 ►
and this was like 1905 to 1925,
00:42:38 ►
it just, the abyss of time and history
00:42:41 ►
that opened up for people who were sensitive to it the realization that you know
00:42:46 ►
my god people have been feeling what I’ve been feeling thinking what I’ve been feeling for at
00:42:52 ►
least 20,000 years and this impacted on Picasso it impacted on Miro it impacted on clay it impacted
00:43:01 ►
on Marcel Duchamp all of these people and much of the of the bad boy antics of
00:43:08 ►
modern art is actually it’s when you bring a primitive home to dinner you know when the 19th
00:43:15 ►
century academy brings home a savage from the south sea island jari with the cast of his penis, Marcel Duchamp insisting on wearing
00:43:26 ►
a toilet thing around his neck
00:43:29 ►
at certain formal occasions.
00:43:32 ►
They were, and for instance,
00:43:34 ►
in the punk, the current punk phenomenon
00:43:36 ►
of body painting,
00:43:38 ►
they would be perfectly at home
00:43:40 ►
in the mountains of New Guinea.
00:43:42 ►
People loved to paint themselves.
00:43:44 ►
This was very big before the last Ice Age.
00:43:48 ►
And if you believe heavy metal sets fashion,
00:43:52 ►
it looks like it’s going to be very big
00:43:54 ►
in the next century.
00:43:57 ►
But a more serious answer to your question is
00:43:59 ►
I think that the crisis is not…
00:44:03 ►
It depends.
00:44:05 ►
It’s a crisis. it’s an opportunity.
00:44:06 ►
What it is is that art is becoming eschatological.
00:44:11 ►
From Duccio on,
00:44:15 ►
from the close of the medieval period on,
00:44:17 ►
art was conceived of a series of self-transcending styles
00:44:21 ►
moving toward various goals
00:44:24 ►
which usually derived from the philosophy of the time,
00:44:28 ►
beginning, you know, so that realism or mannerism, these various tendencies would be pursued.
00:44:37 ►
What’s happened in the 20th century with the legitimizing of experience and the legitimizing of experience and the and the legitimizing of experiment and the destruction of the patronage system in the
00:44:48 ►
Academy is that everything happens and there are people painting in New York today in the style of Jan van Eyck and
00:44:55 ►
Making a living at it and there are also
00:44:59 ►
People doing all kinds of things, but it’s very very hard to pick out a new piece of art if by I don’t think well
00:45:09 ►
the art of the last 20 years has been art outside of time since the middle 60s since William Wiley
00:45:17 ►
and funk and all that stuff began it’s impossible to date art objects. They can have been made any time in the last 20 years.
00:45:28 ►
This is what eschatological time will be like,
00:45:31 ►
a transcendence of style
00:45:33 ►
and people simply working in these various modes of self-expression
00:45:38 ►
which compete in a great atemporal carnival
00:45:42 ►
wherein, unfortunately,
00:45:45 ►
the values of the marketplace
00:45:46 ►
play too great a role,
00:45:48 ►
but no other way of mediating it
00:45:50 ►
has been found.
00:45:52 ►
Part of what’s happened to art
00:45:53 ►
is that it’s been transformed
00:45:54 ►
into an enormous industry
00:45:57 ►
that must produce objects
00:46:00 ►
to decorate the apartments
00:46:02 ►
of the affluent on all continents
00:46:05 ►
who want to, you know, have art
00:46:09 ►
and be involved in art.
00:46:10 ►
But they are not,
00:46:11 ►
they don’t have enough power to dictate style.
00:46:14 ►
They’ll take whatever is put before them,
00:46:16 ►
which is very liberating for artists.
00:46:23 ►
Anybody else have anything on their mind?
00:46:26 ►
Information structures?
00:46:27 ►
Uh-huh.
00:46:28 ►
But you could also think of personality structure, that with which the witness consciousness
00:46:33 ►
identifies with, as an information structure, too.
00:46:36 ►
Where do you draw the line between language that is beheld as something other and language
00:46:41 ►
that is, or that, those information structures which are part of the identity,
00:46:49 ►
the experience.
00:46:51 ►
Well, you’re asking what is the difference between self and other.
00:46:55 ►
Yeah.
00:46:56 ►
Well, the…
00:46:57 ►
In terms of language.
00:47:01 ►
What you’re asking is how do you know you’re not talking to yourself?
00:47:05 ►
Yeah. Aha. Well, that’s a very tricky question.
00:47:12 ►
I’m surprised that in 3,000 years of philosophizing,
00:47:16 ►
somebody hasn’t figured out a nifty way to always tell this.
00:47:21 ►
It would make a marvelous short story,
00:47:23 ►
some little litmus test
00:47:25 ►
that you could perform.
00:47:28 ►
Pretty much you have to go on intuition.
00:47:31 ►
Of course, what you always say is,
00:47:32 ►
I can’t possibly know
00:47:34 ►
what I’m being told,
00:47:36 ►
therefore it isn’t myself.
00:47:38 ►
But that’s a very naive view
00:47:41 ►
of the psyche.
00:47:42 ►
On the other hand,
00:47:43 ►
when that reaches
00:47:44 ►
excruciating proportions,
00:47:46 ►
there’s a tendency to abandon sophistication and just believe in it anyway. But this thing
00:47:56 ►
about the shifting boundary between self and other is very tricky when i first smoked dmt for instance i mean i i saw an absolute break
00:48:08 ►
between self and alien i mean i was myself and they were the aliens but then you know over years
00:48:17 ►
of working out with it and seeing how it comes on with psilocybin where instead of forming up over 40 seconds or so
00:48:26 ►
it comes together over half an hour
00:48:28 ►
or 40 minutes
00:48:29 ►
and you have to breathe
00:48:30 ►
and you have to ease it in
00:48:32 ►
then you see how
00:48:34 ►
it is a kind of thing
00:48:37 ►
which emerges out of myself
00:48:40 ►
it’s like I pull
00:48:41 ►
a psychic plug
00:48:44 ►
and the opaque ink drains away and there’s this
00:48:48 ►
marvelous coral-like organism which I didn’t think was a part of me but, you know, perhaps
00:48:55 ►
all through life and death we keep discovering new organs capable of amazing things that
00:49:01 ►
we didn’t know we had. And, but I don’t know we had. But I don’t know.
00:49:07 ►
I mean, I don’t think you can ask a single person to know.
00:49:09 ►
I think this is the question that shamanism deals with.
00:49:13 ►
And not all, it’s a mystery.
00:49:17 ►
You know, it’s a mystery.
00:49:18 ►
Not only is the other the self,
00:49:22 ►
but is the other God? Is the other the species, but is the other God?
00:49:25 ►
Is the other the species mind of the planet?
00:49:29 ►
Is the other a genus loci, a kind of God,
00:49:33 ►
but a local force of some sort?
00:49:36 ►
I mean, these are wonderful questions to entertain
00:49:39 ►
when they have immediacy.
00:49:41 ►
I mean, this is what people did before history,
00:49:44 ►
was religion
00:49:45 ►
was their job.
00:49:47 ►
And they worked at it very
00:49:49 ►
hard. But I’m
00:49:52 ►
not sure there are ever answers.
00:49:54 ►
More and more recently
00:49:55 ►
I’ve, and I’ve always
00:49:58 ►
known this on some level.
00:50:00 ►
I think about
00:50:01 ►
when I was about 16 or so, I realized
00:50:04 ►
it and briefly pursued it and never returned to it. But I think about when I was about 16 or so I realized it and briefly pursued it
00:50:05 ►
and never returned to it
00:50:07 ►
but I think that Taoism
00:50:09 ►
if I had to pick an ontological vision
00:50:12 ►
that was compatible with what I think
00:50:16 ►
these drugs are about
00:50:17 ►
and with what I think is trying to happen
00:50:20 ►
I would pick Taoism
00:50:22 ►
for the following reasons
00:50:24 ►
it’s the only mystical tradition I know
00:50:26 ►
of, possibly with the exception of shamanism, but shamanism doesn’t really reflect on this.
00:50:32 ►
It’s the only mystical tradition I know of that is not anti-scientific. It has no hostility to
00:50:40 ►
science. It is highly experimental. It’s about compounding drugs with fungi and
00:50:46 ►
minerals and doing strange things on the
00:50:50 ►
side of fog-swept mountains and looking
00:50:53 ►
into your head and looking into your
00:50:56 ►
head and looking into your head and
00:50:58 ►
trying to refine description and it is
00:51:01 ►
open-ended and it is open-ended and it is
00:51:07 ►
ethno-ecologically sensitive it is sensitive to the it is not at all
00:51:13 ►
antagonistic to drugs in fact on the subject of drugs it’s extremely
00:51:19 ►
straightforward and practical its stated goal is to compound the ninefold elixir
00:51:25 ►
of immortality.
00:51:27 ►
And then how you do this,
00:51:28 ►
various methods came and went
00:51:30 ►
through the ages.
00:51:32 ►
But it’s stress on technique,
00:51:34 ►
it’s stress on analysis,
00:51:36 ►
it’s stress on contemplation
00:51:38 ►
without method.
00:51:40 ►
In fact, it’s general antagonism
00:51:43 ►
toward method.
00:51:44 ►
All these things endear it to me a lot and I think it’s general antagonism toward method all these things endear it
00:51:46 ►
to me a lot and I think it’s very
00:51:48 ►
compatible
00:51:49 ►
with the shamanic
00:51:52 ►
stance in fact you know we cannot
00:51:54 ►
we are
00:51:56 ►
modern people and even if you
00:51:58 ►
think of yourself as a practicing
00:52:00 ►
shaman I don’t think
00:52:02 ►
of myself that way I think of myself as
00:52:04 ►
a shamanologist but even if I think of myself as a shamanologist.
00:52:06 ►
But even if you think of yourself as a practicing shaman, you have to weld it to later traditions
00:52:14 ►
that answer more sophisticated questions that were posed later in historical time, and Taoism
00:52:21 ►
would be an excellent vehicle for that, I think.
00:52:26 ►
Yeah.
00:52:34 ►
Yes, in the Hindu mythology, there is a reference to the state being dissolved into the absolute,
00:52:40 ►
or being one without a second, not defined by anyone.
00:52:43 ►
And we have to struggle with that.
00:52:46 ►
Is that in any way coincidental with what you’re talking about?
00:52:49 ►
yeah I think it is this one without a second
00:52:51 ►
caused me to think of Plotinus
00:52:53 ►
one of his definitions of the mystical experience
00:52:56 ►
was he called it the flight of the alone to the alone
00:53:00 ►
which mathematically adds up to
00:53:03 ►
the one without a second
00:53:04 ►
as far as the
00:53:08 ►
the this end of history that seems to be
00:53:13 ►
appointed for history by Western
00:53:15 ►
religion yes it is like dissolution the
00:53:19 ►
dissolution of the cosmos that goes on
00:53:21 ►
in Hindu cosmology Hindu cosmology is a set of nested cycles
00:53:27 ►
similar in structure to the set of nested cycles
00:53:32 ►
that I proposed for time in the invisible landscape.
00:53:37 ►
And I think we’re running into one of those compression points
00:53:41 ►
that everything that has been going on on this planet
00:53:44 ►
for the last
00:53:45 ►
billion years has been
00:53:48 ►
a series of telescoping
00:53:50 ►
processes
00:53:52 ►
of ever
00:53:53 ►
accelerating
00:53:54 ►
intensity, connectivity
00:53:57 ►
and momentum leading
00:54:00 ►
finally to the generation of consciousness
00:54:02 ►
a moment after that
00:54:04 ►
historical civilization a moment after that historical civilization
00:54:06 ►
a moment after that
00:54:07 ►
modern science
00:54:09 ►
and a moment after that star flight
00:54:12 ►
and it is just
00:54:13 ►
a ten thousand year
00:54:16 ►
rush
00:54:16 ►
from monkeyhood to star flight
00:54:20 ►
a geological moment
00:54:22 ►
but historically
00:54:24 ►
a grand opera that has everybody on the edge of their seat,
00:54:28 ►
because if the ball is fumbled, that’s all she wrote.
00:54:31 ►
And there’s nothing that says that we must succeed,
00:54:34 ►
or at least we cannot assume that there’s something which says that we must succeed.
00:54:41 ►
Even if we are the chosen target
00:54:45 ►
species of Gaia Gaia may not have all
00:54:51 ►
fingers on the button we don’t know
00:54:55 ►
where our own power ends and begins and
00:54:59 ►
where the power of the other begins and
00:55:02 ►
ends and so we have to make our way carefully into these
00:55:07 ►
dimensions shamanism is thousands of
00:55:10 ►
years of accumulated information on how
00:55:13 ►
to navigate in these spaces if we are
00:55:16 ►
becoming a shamanic society through the
00:55:20 ►
metaphor of spaceflight we are going to
00:55:24 ►
have to recover this information
00:55:27 ►
and there will be some chills and spills along the way, I’m sure.
00:55:33 ►
Yeah.
00:55:34 ►
Yeah, Terrence, I had a question.
00:55:35 ►
In the traditional use of substances that you’ve described,
00:55:40 ►
there’s ritual around it.
00:55:42 ►
There’s also intention generally from the shaman
00:55:45 ►
around healing and focus around hunting,
00:55:50 ►
real earthly kind of pursuits around survival.
00:55:54 ►
And that seems to ground the experience in many ways
00:55:58 ►
or provide a focus for it.
00:56:00 ►
When we do it by ourselves,
00:56:03 ►
sans ritual, sans this kind of language,
00:56:07 ►
sans this kind of training,
00:56:09 ►
we’re prey to the whole deceptions of the mind.
00:56:12 ►
And so my question to you is,
00:56:14 ►
what sort of critical inquiry do you personally use,
00:56:18 ►
or what kind of critical language do you personally use
00:56:20 ►
with these forms in front of you?
00:56:22 ►
How do you know you guard against self-deception?
00:56:25 ►
Do you use the word critical analysis? What does that mean when you translate practices?
00:56:32 ►
Well, it isn’t so much in confrontation with the being that you have to have this critical analysis. In confrontation with the being,
00:56:49 ►
you act from the heart and in the moment,
00:56:51 ►
but it’s later.
00:56:53 ►
It’s what do we think about these things as we sit here now, relatively unstoned.
00:57:01 ►
Your question raises all kinds of issues.
00:57:04 ►
I said I didn’t think anyone was a shaman
00:57:06 ►
or that I thought of myself as a shamanologist.
00:57:09 ►
This is because a shaman is educated by other shamans,
00:57:16 ►
inculcated, chosen out, educated, and brought along.
00:57:21 ►
In our society, we have to do it all by ourselves.
00:57:26 ►
And, you know,
00:57:26 ►
I’ve made a comparison
00:57:28 ►
to a man walking along the beach
00:57:31 ►
and coming upon
00:57:32 ►
a fully rigged sailboat.
00:57:34 ►
How likely,
00:57:36 ►
comparing the sailboat
00:57:37 ►
to the psychedelic drug,
00:57:39 ►
how likely is it
00:57:40 ►
that this man can learn to sail
00:57:43 ►
without killing himself?
00:57:47 ►
Where, you know, it is no great matter to learn to sail if you learn from a sailor. So this is the first barrier that’s
00:57:53 ►
posed for us, or was posed I think in the 60s, when there were a lot of casualties to
00:58:00 ►
psychedelics because it was assumed that everyone should do it.
00:58:05 ►
And so millions of people did.
00:58:08 ►
And actually, there are few societies where everyone does it.
00:58:13 ►
And those where that is the case, or where, for instance, all men do it,
00:58:19 ►
are not probably the most advanced shamanisms on the planet. So it’s a kind of a profession. It’s
00:58:30 ►
a it’s almost like clergy. It’s to be deputized by the society as an ecstatic for the purpose
00:58:41 ►
of introducing back into society the material that comes from the mystical voyage
00:58:48 ►
for purposes of cultural renewal.
00:58:51 ►
The chief thing which grounds the shaman,
00:58:54 ►
at least in my practical experience with them,
00:59:00 ►
is the curing.
00:59:03 ►
And Merciliad insists on this,
00:59:05 ►
that the primary function of the shaman is to cure
00:59:07 ►
and that all these other things go toward that.
00:59:12 ►
We all have to cure ourselves in a sense,
00:59:18 ►
in the sense that is contained in the notion
00:59:21 ►
that a psychedelic drug is a deconditioning agent.
00:59:26 ►
Now, I don’t think a psychedelic drug is particularly a deconditioning agent if you’re Witoto or Bora or Muinani
00:59:34 ►
or something like that, and you take it. You don’t then denounce being that and leave for
00:59:40 ►
Lima. But in our culture,
00:59:46 ►
psychedelics have had this effect of triggering a very fundamental
00:59:48 ►
questioning of values
00:59:52 ►
and intensifying alienation
00:59:56 ►
and creating alienated subclasses.
01:00:00 ►
This is a symptom
01:00:03 ►
of the general unhealthiness of the society,
01:00:06 ►
that you can’t be psychedelic and be 100% of this society,
01:00:14 ►
that certain things seem to impose themselves in your way.
01:00:18 ►
So I don’t think that there is any easy answer to your question.
01:00:22 ►
any easy answer to your question we have to
01:00:23 ►
what we have over shaman
01:00:26 ►
is
01:00:27 ►
our wonderful electronic
01:00:30 ►
information retrieval systems
01:00:32 ►
and the way that works
01:00:34 ►
is like this
01:00:35 ►
you go to the Amazon
01:00:36 ►
and you’re dealing with a tribe
01:00:38 ►
and they say you know
01:00:40 ►
we need this certain drug plant
01:00:42 ►
and
01:00:43 ►
the secret word for it is so-and-so and
01:00:49 ►
we’ll go and get it. And they do. And they know more about that drug plant than you do
01:00:54 ►
by a long crack. But you ask them, did they know that the people 20 miles further up the
01:01:02 ►
river use a different plant called something else.
01:01:05 ►
And you know this because you read it
01:01:07 ►
in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet,
01:01:10 ►
which tells you that, and they are astonished.
01:01:15 ►
You have this weird overview
01:01:18 ►
which they cannot conceive of.
01:01:20 ►
They are fully informed in a vertical fashion
01:01:24 ►
about one tradition,
01:01:26 ►
but you, by writing to Boston, Massachusetts,
01:01:30 ►
and getting these leaflets and reading them,
01:01:32 ►
are more prepared to discuss the generalities of Amazon shamanism
01:01:37 ►
than most of the people you meet.
01:01:39 ►
And this is a great resource not to be sneered at.
01:01:45 ►
There’s a lot of information.
01:01:47 ►
And like, for instance, when you read Marseillian shamanism,
01:01:51 ►
the archaic techniques of ecstasy,
01:01:53 ►
this is a global overview.
01:01:56 ►
And you, I’m not saying you know more
01:02:00 ►
than any one single shaman knows about shamanic ecstasy,
01:02:04 ►
but you have a certain kind of knowledge which prepares you,
01:02:08 ►
a generalized cosmology which prepares you.
01:02:11 ►
And these are the best maps that we have,
01:02:13 ►
so we have to make use of them.
01:02:16 ►
Could you comment on how that issue relates to the more general one
01:02:21 ►
that seems to contain it, of the turning towards the archaic,
01:02:25 ►
the attempt to recapture or reintegrate
01:02:28 ►
the unconscious forces
01:02:31 ►
after a period of deliberately
01:02:33 ►
not being able to do so as a society,
01:02:37 ►
and how that’s going to affect
01:02:39 ►
both individual and social change
01:02:41 ►
over the next visible historical period?
01:02:48 ►
Well, obviously, just on the surface of it Freud in
01:02:49 ►
civilization and its
01:02:50 ►
discontents made the point
01:02:52 ►
that sexuality is
01:02:54 ►
necessarily repressed for
01:02:56 ►
civilization to be possible
01:02:58 ►
sexuality is being
01:03:01 ►
redefined in this modern context,
01:03:05 ►
in an archaic context, so that it becomes more generalized.
01:03:13 ►
The romantic ideal gives place to a kind of tribal ideal.
01:03:19 ►
This is obviously happening and related to psychedelics
01:03:24 ►
and this effort to recapture the archaic,
01:03:28 ►
that’s probably the major impact that it will have because we have no, our hang-ups are
01:03:37 ►
all hung around the issues that sexuality posed for civilization
01:03:45 ►
and the various solutions that were found in various times,
01:03:49 ►
all of which were, or none of which were ever viable.
01:03:55 ►
This is what makes us feel sort of uncomfortable about ourselves
01:03:59 ►
is there’s never been a set of social rules
01:04:03 ►
that worked so well
01:04:05 ►
that most people weren’t involved in trying to subvert them.
01:04:09 ►
And, you know, what does that say about us
01:04:12 ►
and the 10,000-year endeavor we’ve been involved in?
01:04:16 ►
But I see that giving way to a more natural order.
01:04:21 ►
In other words, many constraints have been placed upon us. We have accepted many
01:04:26 ►
constraints. We’ve accepted a kind of wounding. The myth of the fall is a statement about our
01:04:35 ►
feelings about ourselves, you know, that we had to go into history to recover something which had
01:04:42 ►
been lost, that had been ours in the beginning but that we
01:04:46 ►
fumbled away and then we had to descend into history and recover it and it is this Edenic
01:04:53 ►
innocence and and the adumbrations that it will create at all levels of society. Singing is a ritual act that automatically sets up its own rules and can be initiated
01:05:09 ►
at any time without hardly moving a muscle. We were saying during the break up here that
01:05:17 ►
it’s possible to imagine a form of psychoanalysis where what you would do is simply urge people and go through with them
01:05:28 ►
learning as much about history as possible so that there were no blank spots so that their amnesia
01:05:38 ►
about their historical position was recovered as a way of treating neurosis, a way of actually, by locating people on the grid,
01:05:47 ►
by forcing them to find out who they really are
01:05:51 ►
in terms of all the other somebodies
01:05:53 ►
who have been around in all the other some places
01:05:57 ►
that preceded them.
01:05:58 ►
And I think that you can almost see
01:06:02 ►
that that is a recovery of the unconscious.
01:06:06 ►
The history of man that you don’t know
01:06:10 ►
is what your unconscious is made out of,
01:06:14 ►
just as the history of yourself that you don’t know
01:06:19 ►
is what your personal unconscious is made out of.
01:06:23 ►
However, much of the history of man that you don’t know
01:06:27 ►
can probably be found by going and reading a book on the subject.
01:06:31 ►
And this has a tremendous centering,
01:06:36 ►
a spiritual efficacy that all out of proportion
01:06:40 ►
to the act of studying history,
01:06:42 ►
which seems rather removed from everyday concerns.
01:06:46 ►
Anything else?
01:06:47 ►
What about a development of a language of consciousness
01:06:50 ►
which we don’t have, like Sanskrit, theoretically,
01:06:53 ►
or Maslow was playing around with words that were scientific?
01:06:57 ►
Would you comment on that?
01:06:59 ►
Well, I think the I Ching is an effort,
01:07:02 ►
the most advanced effort to do something like that,
01:07:07 ►
but it’s a language of gestalt.
01:07:10 ►
And, you know, I don’t speak Japanese,
01:07:13 ►
but it’s said of Japanese that nothing which is obvious is ever mentioned.
01:07:19 ►
Language is reserved for clarifying the unclear.
01:07:24 ►
So people are not saying, it’s a hot day, isn’t it, and that
01:07:29 ►
kind of stuff. They’re reserving language. The other possibility is, you know, that the visual
01:07:38 ►
language is this, and that as more and more of it is experienced and done
01:07:45 ►
it will be realized
01:07:47 ►
it is the visual language
01:07:49 ►
I’m not sure I stressed this this evening
01:07:51 ►
but it is perhaps non-translatable into English
01:07:57 ►
because it is a language of emotion
01:08:00 ►
where emotion is seen to be a subtle,
01:08:05 ►
a spectrum of integrated gradients of meaning,
01:08:11 ►
or integrated gradients of combination, as meaning has.
01:08:16 ►
So that there isn’t love, hate, disgust, and something else,
01:08:21 ►
but in fact an infinitude of emotional states
01:08:25 ►
that can be triggered by vocal sound.
01:08:28 ►
And in a way, of course, I’m simply describing singing, wordless singing,
01:08:33 ►
except that I’m describing how that can rise to an ontologically different level
01:08:40 ►
and become so emotive that you understand very subtle differentiations of emotion.
01:08:49 ►
I noticed when we were in the Amazon taking ayahuasca with these people, and they would
01:08:55 ►
sing these thousand-year-old songs, and you would eventually, you would get to the place
01:09:01 ►
where you had the absolute conviction that you understood because
01:09:07 ►
you could stand off from your mind and say the speed at which I’m going through emotional changes
01:09:14 ►
over what I’m hearing must mean that I understand what I’m hearing because if I didn’t understand
01:09:21 ►
it I would just have a certain generalized emotion about it.
01:09:25 ►
But it is changing my interior state so rapidly that it is like the experience of understanding.
01:09:33 ►
That’s the only thing it can be compared to.
01:09:36 ►
Yeah?
01:09:37 ►
Could you elaborate more on the effect of the ayahuasca
01:09:42 ►
and the combination with the defensesahuasca and in combination with the differences
01:09:45 ►
that you mentioned in invisible landscapes,
01:09:48 ►
the effect of altering the DNA
01:09:53 ►
and when you mentioned the histone block.
01:09:56 ►
Aha.
01:09:57 ►
Yes, well, the core chemical idea
01:10:00 ►
in the invisible landscape,
01:10:01 ►
for those of you who haven’t read it,
01:10:03 ►
is that it is possible,
01:10:07 ►
or it was hypothesized that it was possible
01:10:09 ►
to use sound to cause hallucinogenic drug molecules
01:10:15 ►
that were present in the nucleus of neurons,
01:10:21 ►
having arrived there through axioplasmic transport
01:10:26 ►
from the synapse to cause them to occupy bond sites in DNA, the bond sites specifically which lie between the
01:10:37 ►
nucleotides and the molecular dimensions and everything are correct for this to be possible. In fact, it’s been shown in vitro that certain hallucinogens do preferentially bond into DNA
01:10:53 ►
in very elegant experiments in which DNA was exposed to hallucinogenic drug molecules
01:11:00 ►
and then centrifuged and shown that its specific gravity had increased by precisely
01:11:07 ►
the molecular weight of the drug molecule and no other compounds were present. So there is an
01:11:14 ►
affinity for bonding with the DNA on the part of these drug molecules. We hypothesize that
01:11:19 ►
the general psychedelic experience, the common psychedelic experience, is simply these things displacing normal neurotransmitters such as serotonin at the synapse,
01:11:33 ►
undergoing axioplasmic transport to the nucleus,
01:11:36 ►
intercalating, which is the technical term for this kind of bonding,
01:11:40 ►
intercalating into the nuclear material there and shifting the electron spin resonance
01:11:45 ►
of the generalized electron spin resonance signature
01:11:51 ►
of the molecule
01:11:52 ►
so that millions of cells having this happen to them
01:11:58 ►
are amplified into a higher cortical experience,
01:12:02 ►
which is the hallucinogenic experience.
01:12:05 ►
But in answer to your question, my brother went beyond this
01:12:09 ►
and hypothesized that you could intervene in this process,
01:12:14 ►
which normally you would expect to be quenched in four to six hours,
01:12:18 ►
whatever the duration of the psychedelic drug was,
01:12:22 ►
that it would be possible to intervene in this process with
01:12:25 ►
vocals vocally generated sound uh generated in such a way that of these millions of molecules
01:12:34 ►
in these bond states a very few of them would be oriented in space toward the incoming wave front of sound in such a way that they would be
01:12:47 ►
cancelled that they would undergo the kind of harmonic cancelling that happens
01:12:52 ►
when you like sound a note on the cello and then quench the string of sound and
01:12:57 ►
you hear the overtones in octaves above and below it and he felt that
01:13:02 ►
this could be done with the human voice and performed an experiment
01:13:06 ►
to test this idea
01:13:09 ►
which seemed to indicate
01:13:11 ►
that it was possible
01:13:15 ►
or at least that some bizarre drug synergy
01:13:19 ►
was prolonged and triggered
01:13:21 ►
by vocal sound.
01:13:24 ►
And we have never proceeded into this
01:13:27 ►
any further it would be easy to do so you would get square wave generators and
01:13:32 ►
oscillating systems and you would try to tune into this sound because it’s a very
01:13:38 ►
specific sound now it it sounds at first preposterous that quantum acoustically mediated
01:13:49 ►
quantum mechanical chemical changes
01:13:52 ►
could be controlled by the voice.
01:13:55 ►
But you have to remember
01:13:56 ►
populations of millions of molecules are involved,
01:14:00 ►
only a very few of which have to fulfill
01:14:04 ►
the complete set of special conditions that would
01:14:07 ►
allow this situation to arise. And also, it isn’t generally realized at what level the human
01:14:15 ►
perceptual apparatus operates in relationship to quantum mechanical events. For instance,
01:14:21 ►
a single photon can be registered by the human eye.
01:14:26 ►
I’m sure some of you who had chemistry sets when you were children,
01:14:30 ►
they threw in a little thing called a spinthoroscope,
01:14:34 ►
which was nothing more than a closed tube with a little lens in the end,
01:14:40 ►
and at the other end, a speck of radium on the end of a pin,
01:14:44 ►
and then a phosphorous screen behind it.
01:14:47 ►
You would sit in a dark room for 10 minutes
01:14:50 ►
and then look into the spin thoroscope
01:14:52 ►
and you would see flashes of light
01:14:54 ►
coming out of the phosphorous screen at the end of it.
01:14:59 ►
Those flashes of light were single photons
01:15:01 ►
being released from the phosphorous matrix by the impact of decaying
01:15:07 ►
hard radiation from the radium. In a similar vein, a single molecule bumping against the
01:15:17 ►
tympanic membrane of the human ear can be distinguished, and they’ve done this in very elegant experimental situations.
01:15:25 ►
So actually the human sensory apparatus,
01:15:28 ►
for what a continuous picture of the world it gives us,
01:15:33 ►
is under experimental conditions shown to be rather closer
01:15:38 ►
to portraying the quantum mechanical nature of reality than we might expect.
01:15:45 ►
So I don’t think it’s, on the face of it, preposterous
01:15:49 ►
that there could be technologies of vocal sound
01:15:52 ►
and control of physiological states of oneself and other people
01:15:58 ►
through the controlled use of sound.
01:16:02 ►
After all, if you are of the brain theory of consciousness
01:16:06 ►
and believe that every thought that we think
01:16:11 ►
is accompanied by chemical changes,
01:16:14 ►
the breaking and forming of chemical bonds,
01:16:18 ►
well, that means that as I speak to you,
01:16:21 ►
my voice, if you understand me,
01:16:23 ►
or maybe if you even don’t understand
01:16:25 ►
me, is going through a continuing process of generating and breaking down hundreds of
01:16:31 ►
compounds as your brain takes on a configuration somewhat analogous to the configuration of
01:16:38 ►
my brain at the moment of speaking.
01:16:41 ►
This is what communication must be seen to be by people who have a hard brain
01:16:47 ►
theory of consciousness.
01:16:49 ►
What if you don’t know anything about any of this?
01:16:53 ►
Well, then you’re probably in better shape than all of us. You should go to the
01:17:00 ►
side of Cold Mountain and compound mushrooms and draw cold water from a well
01:17:07 ►
and to thank lucky stars
01:17:11 ►
that that’s the situation you find yourself in.
01:17:17 ►
In other words,
01:17:18 ►
knowledge or verbal facility
01:17:23 ►
is no proof of knowing what you’re talking about.
01:17:31 ►
It’s just verbal facility.
01:17:35 ►
Now, I think the Taoist thing,
01:17:37 ►
I’m coming more and more to it
01:17:40 ►
to see that it’s its open-endedness,
01:17:43 ►
its insistence on humor,
01:17:46 ►
it’s not grinding a bunch of dogmatic knives.
01:17:51 ►
And now I’m talking about the cultural ideal of Taoism.
01:17:55 ►
Taoism became secularized and played power politics
01:17:59 ►
at various times in the history of China,
01:18:02 ►
just like the other Chinese religions.
01:18:04 ►
But its ideal remained the psychedelic ideal, I think.
01:18:10 ►
And it’s basically a dropped-out, a dropped-out ideal.
01:18:15 ►
It isn’t that you should return to the court
01:18:17 ►
and take up the counsel of the king and try to save his ass.
01:18:23 ►
It’s that, you know, someone else can take care of that but these
01:18:27 ►
Taoist immortals became strange people I mean they were fleetingly glimpsed from the road running
01:18:37 ►
naked in the woods as people passed to and fro and knowledge, I have said this before,
01:18:46 ►
made the analogy between understanding and gravity
01:18:50 ►
that, you know, as something becomes gravitationally
01:18:53 ►
more and more dense,
01:18:55 ►
it eventually is so dense that light can’t leave it.
01:18:59 ►
No information can leave it.
01:19:00 ►
It’s said to be a black hole.
01:19:02 ►
It has curved space around itself and no information can leave it. It’s said to be a black hole. It has curved space around itself and no information
01:19:06 ►
can leave it. I think as you advance on the path toward enlightenment, it becomes harder and harder
01:19:14 ►
for people to understand you. And when you finally achieve enlightenment, you can’t say
01:19:21 ►
anything at all. And anything you say must be misunderstood.
01:19:27 ►
That’s the proof that you’re enlightened.
01:19:31 ►
If you’re a perfect black hole,
01:19:33 ►
you must be incomprehensible.
01:19:34 ►
No information must leave you.
01:19:38 ►
So if you understood anything I said tonight,
01:19:41 ►
it’s a perfect proof that I’m far from enlightened.
01:19:48 ►
But thank you for coming anyway
01:19:49 ►
maybe on that
01:19:54 ►
note we should knock off
01:19:55 ►
is anyone burning
01:19:57 ►
good, then let’s knock off
01:20:00 ►
applause
01:20:02 ►
applause
01:20:04 ►
applause applause You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon
01:20:11 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:20:13 ►
one thought at a time
01:20:14 ►
Before I say anything else
01:20:18 ►
I guess that maybe I’d better moderate
01:20:20 ►
my hardline stand about humans in space
01:20:23 ►
While I still don’t think that we have the technology,
01:20:26 ►
let alone the psychological profiles required to make multi-year space explorations,
01:20:32 ►
what I do have to acknowledge, though,
01:20:34 ►
in reference to what Terence said a little while back about humans being a space-faring race,
01:20:39 ►
well, now that private companies are doing things like replenishing the space station,
01:20:45 ►
I have to agree with Terence that whether or not we ever have a colony of humans on Mars,
01:20:50 ►
nonetheless, we are certainly infatuated with going into space.
01:20:55 ►
And I’ll leave it up to you to come up with your own reasons why that may be.
01:21:00 ►
I suspect that you were thinking the same thing I was back when Terrence was talking about how brain functions may be shifting in favor of the visual as opposed to the written word.
01:21:11 ►
And all we have to do is take a look at almost any household in the U.S. to see that reading is no longer valued.
01:21:18 ►
Instead, everyone seems to be focused on what is taking place on their iPhones and other tech gadgets.
01:21:24 ►
But I can’t say that this is necessarily a bad thing either.
01:21:28 ►
It’s just what is.
01:21:30 ►
And there really isn’t anything that you or I can do to stem the tide
01:21:34 ►
of an overwhelming amount of new visual information reaching us every day.
01:21:38 ►
You know, just think, YouTube alone gets another 35 hours of video uploaded
01:21:44 ►
each and every minute of the day. 35 hours of video uploaded each and every minute of
01:21:46 ►
the day. 35 hours of new video every minute coming online. So where do you
01:21:53 ►
think we’re going to be in another 20 years? You know there were a few times
01:21:59 ►
while we were listening to Terence just now that I thought that maybe I’d
01:22:03 ►
already heard part of what he was
01:22:05 ►
saying, and maybe I’d already played this recording here in the salon. But then I’d hear something
01:22:09 ►
that I didn’t remember him saying before, like the point near the end where he suggested that
01:22:14 ►
perhaps an interesting way to perform psychoanalysis might be to deeply study history
01:22:20 ►
so that there are no blank spots. In fact, that sounds like a great idea to me.
01:22:26 ►
Of course, whose version of history are we going to use to conduct this study?
01:22:31 ►
To my mind, until you’ve read Howard Zinn’s magnificent book, The People’s History of the
01:22:37 ►
United States, well, you most likely won’t have even the faintest clue about the true history of
01:22:42 ►
the U.S., as opposed to the propaganda taught in
01:22:45 ►
the public schools, which is really just designed to freeze the minds of our children into blind,
01:22:51 ►
little, unthinking patriots. And while I’m on this soapbox, I guess I should add that the other
01:22:57 ►
author whose work will provide you with some valuable insights into history, both U.S. and
01:23:02 ►
ancient history, I should add, is actually my favorite author of all,
01:23:06 ►
Gore Vidal. His American Empire series of novels and his collections of essays are,
01:23:12 ►
well, they’re just not to be missed if you are at all interested in history.
01:23:16 ►
And I should also add that his work is also mixed with some wonderfully entertaining gossip.
01:23:23 ►
Well, that should be enough lecturing for today, don’t you think?
01:23:27 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:23:31 ►
Be well, my friends.