Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1591844762/177-4150437-1084401[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“We now know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like, and I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.”
“By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.”
“The question is being asked, ‘Are we alone?’ ” And though we now focus on that question we need to think beyond that to what if we’re not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question?”
“People are, in the confines of their own apartments, becoming Magellans of the interior world and reaching out to this alien thing and beginning to map it and bring back stories that can only be compared to the kind of stories that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.”
“Actually, this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state, it’s that we haven’t demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works.”
“In the last eight years we have undergone like a second Neolithic revolution. The first Neolithic revolution was the invention of agriculture. The second Neolithic revolution was the invention of home fungus cultivation.” (from a November 1983 lecture)
“I don’t think that mass drug taking is a good idea. But I think that we must have a deputized minority, a shamanic professional class if you will, whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water and show them off to the rest of us and perform for our culture some of the cultural functions that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.”
“The word ‘self’ is as great a mystery as the word ‘other’. It’s just a polarity between two mysteries.”
“For all we know, we know nothing.”
“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Against the Grain [Kindle Edition]
Joris-Karl Huysmans (Author)
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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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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And with me, well, virtually that is, as co-hosts are a few of our fellow salonners who have either bought one of my Kindle books or who made a direct donation to the salon
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to help offset some of our expenses.
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And your continuing support means a lot to me, so I thank you from the very bottom of my heart.
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Now, I don’t want to say too much in the way of introducing today’s talk by Terrence McKenna,
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because, well, it’s got something for everybody, and if I focus on just one aspect of this
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kind of wide-ranging lecture, I’m afraid that, well, maybe I might predispose some of our fellow salonners to
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skip today’s program. But I think that would be a mistake, because my guess is there’s at least
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one new idea for you here, and most likely it’s going to be one that’s kind of fun to think about.
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So, now that we’ve got all of that 2012 hype behind us, I thought that this would be a good time to revisit
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some old ideas that Terrence once had, but well, maybe they got lost in the hype of the time wave
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and some of those other things. And while this talk was given almost 30 years ago, why don’t we
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try to imagine that it was just given last night, and so Terrence was speaking to us in the here and now and not to an audience somewhere back in time.
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And if you can imagine that,
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then, well, I suspect that there are going to be a few parts
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where, like me, you say,
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wow, hey, that guy was really way ahead of his time.
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At least that’s still my impression
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of our dearly beloved bard, Terrence McKenna.
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The idea of sexual relationships between human beings and non-human beings
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is a persistent sub-theme through much of mythology.
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In the Old Testament it says,
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and the gods found the daughters of man fair.
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And the Persephone myth is a good example of this
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where the platonic demo or ghosts of the underworld ensnared persephone oh and another example that
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should be mentioned are the inkaby and succubi of medieval mythology these were male and female
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spirits which were thought to come to people in the night and have intercourse with them of medieval mythology. These were male and female spirits
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which were thought to come to people in the night
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and have intercourse with them.
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And it was very bad, very bad for health
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and general wasting away diseases
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were often explained by invoking this phenomenon.
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But what I want to talk about is something similar but with a uniquely modern cast which is the
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flying saucer phenomenon has begun to take on this new character this erotic dimension. There’s no hint of this kind of thing in the earthly
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literature of flying saucers, meaning from 1947 through 1960, but now it seems to be a rising
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theme, and I would like to talk about it, because though it, it You know is the darling of a screwball fringe when it’s in this form. I
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Think that it represents an interesting
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Developing folk way that we can learn from so what about it?
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It’s only in the last
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60 years since the discovery of DNA and the discovery of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram so that we began to get an idea
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of the true size of the universe that the notion of extraterrestrial life and
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extraterrestrial intelligence could even be coherently framed. Before that time, man’s
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relationships with transhuman intelligences tended to be demonic or
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angelic and to fall into those categories of beings which occupied
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hierarchical levels above and below us in the structure of being, but all basically terrestrial,
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or in some sense terrestrial. But science, by explicating the non-uniqueness of biology
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and giving us an idea of what’s going on in the galaxy and beyond has validated the notion that life is ubiquitous
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and that intelligence is a property which accompanies life
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and is also, therefore, probably very common in the universe.
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This legitimizes fantasy about the existence of extraterrestrial life,
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so that what is happening in the last half of the 20th century
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is that the mythological outlines of what the alien must be
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are being cast now.
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The expectations of people living now
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who have been given the rudimentary knowledge
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of biology and astronomy
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that allows the thing to be conceived,
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their expectations are casting
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the extraterrestrial archetype into a mold
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that it will hold
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until it is disconfirmed or confirmed by true extraterrestrial contact,
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whatever that means. In other words, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. We now
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know enough to fantasize realistically about what the alien would be like.
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And I think that this then sets up polarities in the collective psyche
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that previously we have only seen at the level of the individual.
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And this is why I call the lecture Alien Love, because love is a unique expression of individualism. But what the
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developing archetype of the other, if you will, the extraterrestrial, because for us the away from
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the earth is the other, what the developing archetype of the other means and our fascination
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with it is that collectively for the first time or perhaps for the first time in a long
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time, we are beginning to yearn. That’s what it’s all about. And I think that what’s happening in religion on a very broad scale is that the previous concerns
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of salvation and redemption are shifting into the background for the great majority of people and what is driving religious feeling is a wish for contact, a relationship to the other,
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and the alien then falls into place in that role. The alien fulfills it, and I believe that if
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religion survives into the long centuries of the future,
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this is what will be its compelling concern,
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an attempt to define a collective relationship with the other
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that assuages our yearning and our feeling of being cast out, as Heidegger says,
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cast into matter, alone in the universe.
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In other words, it’s as though
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by passing into the psychedelic phase,
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the space-faring phase,
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the entire species is passing into adolescence
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and becoming aware of the possibility of something like a sexual completion with an other,
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with a species which is not human, an idea which had previously been masked for us in our collective prepubescence,
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where we were self-absorbed.
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collective prepubescence, where we were self-absorbed. Freudians call it polymorphically perverse, meaning occupied in the exploration of the ego and the body. And so this culture crisis,
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which I’ve talked about in many different ways, but never this way, has this dimension too. It has this psychological erotic drive for a connection with the other.
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And to sum up what I’ve said about religion, it’s as though the father-god notion were
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being replaced by the pure alien notion. And the pure alien is like the tetramorph it is you know androgynous hermaphroditic
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transhuman it is all these things which the unconscious chooses to project upon it until
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we have more information to define what it might actually be for itself, you see.
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Eventually this contact will occur and this is, you know, we are now in the pubescent stage of
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forming the yearning, forming an image of the thing desired. And this image of the thing desired will eventually
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cause that thing to come to be. In other words, man’s cultural direction is being touched by this
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notion of alien love. And it comes, I think, through the rebirth of the use of plant hallucinogens, because
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they seem to be the carriers of this pervasive intellect key which speaks and which can present
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itself in this particular way. The appetite for this fusion is what is propelling the energy toward an apocalyptic transformation.
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It isn’t recognized as that in the culture yet, but it is this fascination with the other which propels us forward.
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But it’s not an inevitability.
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propels us forward. But it is not, it’s not an inevitability. In other words, it’s like having the potential to fall in love. But then, you know, if there is no one to love, this potential can
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turn to rancor and disillusionment. So what it is, is that we’ve embarked on the exploration of a unique historical moment, which is that for the first time, the issue of the other is being fully constellated and dealt with by the species. alone? And though we now focus on that question, we need to think beyond that to what if we
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are not alone? Then what becomes the next imperative question? It is obviously the exploration
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of this relationship, and it has this erotic character because we will discover
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as soon as communication is even remotely possible
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that we are obsessed with it
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because it becomes very important to know
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whether or not we are alone.
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It becomes very important to open a dialogue
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if any dialogue is possible.
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And I think that at this stage in what’s happening,
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the facts are secondary to the description of what’s going on.
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In other words, this could slip away from us.
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It is a potential which has swum near to the historical continuum,
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and if it is invoked by enough people, it will become a fact. But it could also slip away.
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We could harden. There are fascist hyper techno futures that we could sail toward and realize that would eliminate this possibility
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of opening to the other. And I’m always trying to define for myself what the historical importance
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of psychedelics is, because we know, of course, that shaman have used these things for millennia
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and have plumbed these depths as individuals.
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But still, I always had this intuition that there was a historical impact of some sort,
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and I think this is it, that actually we are positioned to attempt something
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which has never been attempted before,
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which is to open a dialogue as a collectivity
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with the other and to use that synergy
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to bootstrap ourselves to some kind of new cultural level.
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And I think in the blurb which preceded this talk in
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the folio I mentioned that this potential was hidden now in the psyche there isn’t a great
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deal of talk about it it only arises that this totally screwball folkloric level. None of the managerial or analytical elements in the society
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are looking at this at the moment,
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but I think it is forming and crystallizing,
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and I think that the peculiar animate quality of psilocybin
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that I’ve discussed in other talks is probably a major synergy for this. I mentioned on the radio today that contact with extraterrestrials and voices in the head and logos-like phenomena is not part of the general mythology of LSD. I mean, certain exceedingly
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intense individuals on a combination of heroin, methadrine, and LSD may have achieved this
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intermittently, but it is not something which is attached to the notion of what LSD does to you.
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With psilocybin, on the other hand, it definitely is.
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I mean, our survey showed that as people’s doses increased,
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their susceptibility to this phenomenon increased markedly.
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And so I think the issue of contact with the extraterrestrial for large numbers of people has been broached
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by that phenomenon. And it’s very puzzling to people because our expectations are always
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that we are cells in a vast societal animal and that the news of anything truly important will be conveyed electronically
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to us and that if flying saucers land the president and the secretary general of the
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united nations and to somebody will convey the word to us but the challenge of uh of the
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psychedelics is to realize that the potential for the hyper-collectivity,
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the alien, the alchemical wedding with the alien, though it is a collective phenomenon,
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it’s inherently tribal, and it will happen as an experience for individuals at the individual level. And this is what’s happening.
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People are in the confines of their own apartments
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becoming magellans of the interior world
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and reaching out to this alien thing
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and beginning to map it and bring back stories
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that can only be compared to the kind of stories
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that the chroniclers of the New World brought back to Spain at the close of the 15th century.
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I mean, cities of gold, insect gods, spaceships, vast wisdom, tremendous wealth, endless wastelands. We’re just beginning to map this area
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and many times I’ve spoken of it as a landscape and many times I’ve spoken of it as a confidant,
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a kind of Girl Friday who tells you things. But another facet of it is this erotic element,
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and there’s no other word for it
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because it inspires this feeling of opening and merging
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that that is, in our cultural conditioning,
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what we associate it with.
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To distinguish it from ordinary love,
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I always think of it as L-U-V. conditioning what we associate it with to distinguish it from ordinary love I
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always think of it as LUV it’s you know it’s the kind of love that you get with
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the alien and what it means is that the relationship to the alien can be thought of as modeled on the micro-relationships to the other
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that each of us form through relating to other people.
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In other words, if you’re familiar with the Jungian notion of the kyunyuntio,
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this is where two people get together and try to function as alchemical mirrors for each other. And tantra
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and Taoist sexual practices, all these things have to do with fusing into dyads. And
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what is happening in that situation is that each party to the fact is taking on the quality of the other.
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In a non-erotic context,
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that’s called becoming what you behold.
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And we are uniquely susceptible
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to becoming what we behold.
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This is why we have always been led into the future
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by the no’s, by our imaginations,
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because we dream and then we realize the dreams. This fact about our monkeyhood, when put in
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combination with a relationship with an alien mind, means that we will become what we behold.
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And this is, in fact, I think, what is happening.
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The curious intimations of the deepening contact with the other
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make it seem probable to me that we are in love,
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but we’re just slowly realizing it because we’ve never been in love
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before. So that articulating this kind of stuff, one person saying it to another and discussing it,
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is actually an attempt to conjure this into being, to call it forth, to make this supposition become fact, because all facts are,
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are the suppositions of very large numbers of people. And this archetype now hangs in the balance. There is much tension about the flying saucer aside from the erotic
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connotation, because the flying saucer represents a tremendous challenge to science, perhaps the
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ultimate challenge to it. It may be as confounding to science as the resurrection of Christ was to Greek empiricism and Roman imperialism.
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In other words, the flying saucer is definitely an agent of cultural change. On the level of the
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machine, it bids distress for our most cherished explanatory schema but on the level of the alien as flesh
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it presents a much more basic and fundamental challenge because the erotic complex is being redefined by this phenomenon. I was talking to someone and we came up with the idea
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that we were talking about how many people take LSD
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and how it’s very difficult to get precise numbers
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on this matter because people don’t talk about it.
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But that in the last 15 years sexual researchers have had a field day
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because people are very, very willing to discuss their bizarre sexual peculiarities and to just
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pour out their hearts to people with clipboards and we know now a great deal
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about human sexuality and we were suggesting that the taboo is moving the
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taboo is moving so that as we become more sexually a polymorphic and open with each other and less identifying our ego with
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our sexuality we become very private and constrained and secretive and religious
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and all these things about our psychic experiences,
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the drug experiences particularly. And he was suggesting this to me as an explanation
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for why it is so hard to get people
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to describe their drug experiences,
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why the literature is so barren
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of any richness of description
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when the experience is, you know, the culmination of richness
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and intricacy and beauty. And though I don’t take this idea as gospel, I think it’s very
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interesting. We are much more open with each other sexually and in our process of examining our libidinal consciences in the confines of our own minds.
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But the taboo now has moved to this interior world
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where we have this adolescent sensitivity
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about this developing relationship to the other.
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Now, all these things are elements
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which are going together
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to make the emerging human future.
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And it is a human future
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that is proceeding exponentially.
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It is not a mere linear propagation of the present
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because these peculiar factors are impinging on it.
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Things like psychedelic drugs, the ability to erect large structures in deep space, the presence of
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the alien logos in the mind of the collectivity, the presence of the cybernetic network that is developing. All these things are going toward a release of man into his imagination.
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And so far, the cultural engineers have not stressed enough that the erotic element be included in the engineering of the human future.
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in the engineering of the human future.
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Eric Jansch was a good friend of mine,
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and many of you may know his books.
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He and I used to argue about space colonies and whether this was a viable way to go.
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And he sensed this problem by saying to me,
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but Terence, where will they get nature spirits? How will they induce nature
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spirits to inhabit the space colonies? Well, another way of saying it, a way that brings it
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much more close to home, is how can Eros be invoked in space and carried with us and expanded?
00:26:09 ►
with us and expanded. I tried to do my part to help this process along by spreading the rumor that the Soviet lady cosmonauts sustained five 40-minute orgasms in weightlessness
00:26:17 ►
and that they were sitting on this information because they didn’t want to panic.
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on this information because they didn’t want to panic but maybe it’s true I’ll say it’s true it’s true when the monkeys find out what sex in zero gravity is
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like I won’t have to make hard pitches like this one anywho so let me sum this up by saying that there’s an emerging zeitgeist of hyperspace which has to do,
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and I call it a zeitgeist of hyperspace because as man leaves the earth, another dimension is added,
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and that crude metaphor will reverberate at every cultural level because we will begin to live in a hyper-dimensional
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collectivity not only of earth and space but of information of past and future of
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conscious and unconscious by navigating between these places on psychedelic drugs and
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eventually the
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technological culmination of this is the projection of
00:27:26 ►
human consciousness into whatever form it seeks to take and the zeitgeist of
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hyperspace which is emerging which is heavily freighted with technology and
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cybernetics and all these things requires that it be consciously tuned to an erotic ideal
00:27:48 ►
and I as I said before it’s important to articulate the presence of this erotic ideal of the other
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in or early in order that this process not go sour or slip away from us and leave us with one of the barren futures that some
00:28:08 ►
kind of very flat behaviorist or Marxist analysis of history could leave us with. This is a chance,
00:28:19 ►
an opportunity, a chance to fall in love with the other and get married and go off to the stars,
00:28:27 ►
but it’s only an opportunity and it is not evolutionarily necessary. In other words,
00:28:37 ►
if we only live with the ideal of the other and never find and fuse with the other,
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other and never find and fuse with the other, we will still evolve along whatever pathways lie ahead of us. But if the opportunity is seized, if we take seriously the experience of the last
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10 millennia and complete the modern program of realizing the ideals of the archaic, recognizing that what the 20th
00:29:06 ►
century really is about is an effort to establish and perfect the ideals of late
00:29:12 ►
Paleolithic shamanism, then we will have integrity in relating to this opportunity and we will have a very peculiar historical adventure which I cheer
00:29:31 ►
for. Thank you very much. And I’ll answer questions if anybody dares to ask a question.
00:29:41 ►
Yes? ask a question. Yes. Comment on it. A large number of people
00:29:45 ►
taking the helicopter
00:29:47 ►
since it’s used for a job like this.
00:29:48 ►
Versus the dearth of
00:29:50 ►
powerful artistic or literary
00:29:53 ►
creations coming from that.
00:29:56 ►
Ellen and I were talking about this
00:29:58 ►
at some length over the last month
00:30:00 ►
and one suggestion that we had
00:30:02 ►
that I might want to comment on
00:30:05 ►
is that the intensity and depth and beauty of the experience
00:30:09 ►
often far outweighs the technical capability
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in terms of literature, painting, sculpture
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of the individual who has them.
00:30:19 ►
Could not that be a great contribution
00:30:23 ►
as opposed to the unwillingness of someone to discuss them,
00:30:27 ►
the inability for someone to be able to relate anything but a mere shadow
00:30:31 ►
of what he or she has seen or experienced?
00:30:34 ►
Well, yes. I mean, I think you’re right that if you do your best,
00:30:38 ►
you can only convey a mere shadow of what’s going on.
00:30:41 ►
But I don’t see people doing their best.
00:30:44 ►
I see them doing very little at all.
00:30:47 ►
That’s the problem.
00:30:48 ►
The other thing is,
00:30:49 ►
once we were to set ourselves the task
00:30:53 ►
of describing the psychedelic experience,
00:30:58 ►
it would become more accessible
00:31:00 ►
because, you know,
00:31:02 ►
if we each gave our best metaphor and then we all
00:31:07 ►
used that metaphor and used it to produce a better metaphor we would
00:31:13 ►
eventually retool our language so that we were able to handle these modalities
00:31:17 ►
and this will happen historically the the psychedelic experience is a new object for Western languages. It will be very interesting to see what English, the language of Milton Chaucer and Shakespeare, will be able to things with the psychedelic experience places
00:31:46 ►
in Andrew Marvel but all this remains to be to be done there are certain the relationship of
00:31:57 ►
the psychedelic experience to literature is a whole field unto itself I mean there are certain
00:32:03 ►
moments where great literature has passed near it.
00:32:07 ►
I don’t know how many of you have read
00:32:09 ►
Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony,
00:32:12 ►
but that touches very…
00:32:15 ►
I mean, he got it.
00:32:16 ►
He got it very, very succinctly.
00:32:22 ►
Huysmans, J.K. Huysmans, Against the Grain, is an amazing novel about an
00:32:28 ►
esthete des assants, a man who is so sensitized to perception that he can’t
00:32:35 ►
leave his apartments. He has his walls covered in felt and he keeps the lights
00:32:41 ►
very low. He collects redon when nobody had ever heard of red dawn
00:32:46 ►
he buys turtles
00:32:48 ►
and puts jewels
00:32:50 ►
has jewels affixed to their backs
00:32:52 ►
and then he sits in a half-lit room
00:32:55 ►
and smokes hashish
00:32:56 ►
and watches the turtles crawl around
00:32:59 ►
on his Persian rugs
00:33:00 ►
and
00:33:01 ►
let’s all go home and do this
00:33:06 ►
it’s called against the grain by jk huisman oh if you’ve never read huisman h-u-y-s-m-a-n-s
00:33:19 ►
he’s against nature sometimes it’s called against nature. There are several translations. Yeah. If you read
00:33:25 ►
French, it’s called avobour.
00:33:27 ►
Yes.
00:33:29 ►
Are there any other questions?
00:33:32 ►
Surely.
00:33:34 ►
Surely you’re challenged
00:33:36 ►
by this. Yes.
00:33:39 ►
I’m curious about
00:33:41 ►
entering the world and letting in
00:33:43 ►
more of the world’s imagination.
00:33:47 ►
If the chemical induction is so necessary.
00:33:51 ►
I’ve been growing for vision through dream work.
00:33:56 ►
It seems like it’s possible, or in sleep,
00:34:01 ►
you see a lot of things in time formed
00:34:04 ►
and that there’s kind of a slow movement
00:34:06 ►
where that seems synchronous with life
00:34:10 ►
or that I can almost feel like that while awake
00:34:13 ►
or hear it or have it going in my mind and be guided.
00:34:20 ►
I wondered if that’s the kind of connection you see?
00:34:24 ►
Well, I think, yes, I think dreaming and states of psychedelic intoxication,
00:34:30 ►
possibly the after-death state,
00:34:32 ►
possibly the post-apocalypse state for the collectivity,
00:34:36 ►
all these things are related to each other.
00:34:39 ►
And certainly dreaming is the natural access point
00:34:44 ►
because it’s a part of your experience every day.
00:34:49 ►
But these places are what’s called state-bounded.
00:34:53 ►
It’s very hard to bring back information.
00:34:56 ►
You have to have a natural inclination or a technique.
00:35:01 ►
And it doesn’t matter whether you’re using drugs or yoga or dream manipulation but
00:35:06 ►
yes it’s just a matter of exploring the mind by whatever means work uh but i’m i’ve seen studies
00:35:17 ►
which show that in the deepest part of sleep uh the is the high point of the production of endogenous hallucinogens in the human brain,
00:35:28 ►
like DMT and that sort of thing. And nevertheless, it’s only in the wildest dreams, which are
00:35:39 ►
necessarily the most difficult to recover, that you pass into places which are like these DMT
00:35:46 ►
and psilocybin intoxications.
00:35:49 ►
Yoga makes the claim
00:35:51 ►
that it can deliver you
00:35:53 ►
into these spaces.
00:35:55 ►
I spent some time looking into that,
00:35:57 ►
not a lot of time,
00:35:59 ►
but people have different proclivities
00:36:02 ►
for these altered states of consciousness.
00:36:05 ►
I don’t have,
00:36:07 ►
it’s very hard to move me
00:36:09 ►
off the baseline of consciousness.
00:36:11 ►
I am very stolid and set
00:36:14 ►
in the here and now.
00:36:16 ►
And so drugs work better than anything for me.
00:36:20 ►
I scoured India
00:36:22 ►
and I could not convince myself that it wasn’t a shell game of some sort or that
00:36:29 ►
it was as real as the states manipulated by the various schools of new age psychotherapy and that
00:36:36 ►
sort of thing but in the Amazon and in other places where the use of plant hallucinogens is understood and used,
00:36:46 ►
I mean, you are conveyed into worlds that are appallingly different from ordinary reality
00:36:52 ►
and extremely vivid.
00:36:55 ►
The vividness of them cannot be stressed enough.
00:36:59 ►
I mean, they are more real than real.
00:37:03 ►
And that’s something which you sense intuitively
00:37:06 ►
they establish an ontological priority they are more real than real and once
00:37:13 ►
you get that under your belt and let it rattle around in your mind then the
00:37:18 ►
compasses of your life begin to spin and you realize that you know you’re not looking in on it it’s looking in on you
00:37:26 ►
and this is a tremendous challenge to the intellectual structures that have carried us
00:37:34 ►
so far the last thousand years i mean we can do tricks with atoms there’s no question about that, except that these tricks immolate us. But higher order structure, molecules, and leave alone organelles and that kind of thing are just intellectual terra incognito to us. of how these things work and what is going on. And yet it is from those levels
00:38:05 ►
that the constituent modalities of reality
00:38:08 ►
are being laid down.
00:38:10 ►
Now, what do I mean by that?
00:38:12 ►
I mean that you can understand
00:38:14 ►
all this fine nuclear chemistry about the atom,
00:38:17 ►
and where does it put you if your intellectual,
00:38:22 ►
the story you tell yourself about how the world works can’t explain
00:38:26 ►
to you how forming the wish to close your open hand into a fist makes it
00:38:33 ►
happen and this is the true status of present science they cannot offer so
00:38:41 ►
much as a clue how that happens they They know how muscles contract and ATP, AD, all that they know.
00:38:49 ►
It’s the initiating phenomenon.
00:38:53 ►
What is it that decides I will close my hand and it happens?
00:38:59 ►
There is, you know, they know as much about that,
00:39:02 ►
perhaps less than Western philosophy knew in the 12th century.
00:39:07 ►
And it is at that level, at the level of the body experienced
00:39:11 ►
and the mind experienced, that we operate.
00:39:16 ►
I mean, you can live in the social and religious system
00:39:20 ►
of Hellenistic Greece and offer sacrifice to Demeter,
00:39:27 ►
or you can live in 20th century America and watch the evening news
00:39:29 ►
but you should have no faith
00:39:31 ►
that you’re getting the true story on reality.
00:39:34 ►
These are just historical contexts
00:39:37 ►
that can only be transcended
00:39:41 ►
by the acquisition of gnosis, of knowledge that is experienced as true and it’s
00:39:51 ►
hard for people to even realize what I might be talking about because they believe that something
00:39:57 ►
like logical consistency or ability to be reduced to mathematical formalism is how you judge the efficacy of an idea.
00:40:07 ►
But actually this is what has led us into this extremely alienated state. It’s that we haven’t
00:40:14 ►
demanded that the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works confirm our direct experience of how it works and the psychedelic drugs by focusing
00:40:27 ►
attention on the mind-body-brain interaction are reframing these
00:40:34 ►
questions and not a moment too soon because the cybernetic and technical
00:40:40 ►
capabilities of the society demand that this all be looked at very clearly or we’re just going to sail right off the
00:40:48 ►
moral edge of things into the abyss
00:40:53 ►
Well that wanders from the alien love theme, but as I said all these factors are going to make up
00:41:01 ►
the the
00:41:04 ►
Adam bration of the present that will become and be the future.
00:41:08 ►
Yeah, I wanted to…
00:41:11 ►
Could you comment further on the interaction between the various sexual yogas and the psychedelic
00:41:17 ►
experience or intoxication as tools, I mean as an effect, potential tools for approaching the kind of extraterrestrial
00:41:28 ►
eroticism you’re talking about?
00:41:31 ►
Well, certainly, I mean, you have all kinds of things going on. When people are having
00:41:39 ►
sexual intercourse, the physiological state is very hyped up.
00:41:48 ►
There’s production of pheromones, all this sort of thing.
00:41:54 ►
How far into this can one go?
00:41:57 ►
It’s interesting, well, this far.
00:42:13 ►
One thing I’ve noticed on psilocybin is that skin contact there is like a a disappearance of the normal resistance across a membrane especially if if there is perspiration so that two people with large amounts of skin
00:42:20 ►
in contact when both people are loaded on psilocybin the flow of ions or you know the
00:42:27 ►
electrophoretic transfer of salts or whatever the proper incantation is uh you become one
00:42:36 ►
one thing and and i’m convinced enough of this that i would suggest to Masters and Johnson or whoever has license
00:42:45 ►
to do these kind of things that this be tried, that if you’re serious about validating telepathy,
00:42:53 ►
here is a very simple experiment and I think that you’d be amazed. Taoist sexual practices
00:42:59 ►
lay a lot of stress on the generation of unusual substances in the genitals or in the perspiration
00:43:09 ►
or which is a theme absent from from indian yoga but a theme picked up in amazonian shamanism
00:43:19 ►
where there is a lot of stuff about magical forms of perspiration,
00:43:26 ►
magical objects that are generated out of the body
00:43:29 ►
or put into the body of other people.
00:43:33 ►
It’s interesting.
00:43:34 ►
It’s not clear to what degree in the matter of Taoist alchemy
00:43:43 ►
it appears that there was an erotic control language so that much of what
00:43:48 ►
appears to be prescriptions for sexual practices are actually recipes for plant combinations
00:43:59 ►
because words which were used with sexual connotations were also code words for plants and fungi.
00:44:09 ►
The association in the Taoist mind
00:44:11 ►
between fungi and feminine genitalia
00:44:16 ►
and all this stuff, it all runs together.
00:44:20 ►
The words and the concepts are the same,
00:44:22 ►
and this is a prevailing motif of the so-called esoteric schools of Chinese eroticism, meaning the schools where nothing actually appears to be going on, but the presence of certain plants and certain objects in a composition indicate that it actually is an erotic cryptogram of some sort.
00:44:49 ►
Yeah. Could it be seen perhaps that the natural psychedelics that exist on the planet are a kind
00:44:56 ►
of love offering from the other to us, which when we accept them as it were we can develop that bond in other words something
00:45:08 ►
which is being sought by the other yes well I in at this conference in Washington I spoke about
00:45:16 ►
extraterrestrial contact and the relationship to the psilocybe. I’ve mentioned before that psilocin, which is what psilocybin quickly becomes
00:45:28 ►
as it enters your metabolism, is psilocin is 4-hydroxyn and dimethyltryptamine. It is the only
00:45:39 ►
4-substituted indole to occur in all of organic nature.
00:45:46 ►
Now let this rattle around in your mind for a moment.
00:45:49 ►
It is the only for substituted indole
00:45:52 ►
known to exist on Earth.
00:45:54 ►
And it happens to be this psychedelic drug
00:45:58 ►
which occurs in about 81 species of fungi,
00:46:02 ►
most of which are native to the New World.
00:46:06 ►
What I was suggesting to that group of people was that its uniqueness is a chemical signature
00:46:13 ►
saying, you know, I am artificial, I have come from outside.
00:46:17 ►
And I was suggesting that it was a gene, an artificial gene,
00:46:27 ►
a gene, an artificial gene, carried perhaps by a space-borne virus or something which had been brought artificially to this planet and that this gene had insinuated itself into
00:46:34 ►
the genome of these mushrooms.
00:46:39 ►
It’s an unresolved problem in botany why there is such a tremendous concentration of plant hallucinogens
00:46:48 ►
in the New World in North and South America. Africa, which is the continent where man is
00:46:55 ►
generally thought to have arisen and gone through his formative cultural development, is the poorest of all continents in hallucinogens. The new world is very, very rich,
00:47:09 ►
and this is why shamanism is so, narcotic as it’s called, hallucinogenic shamanism,
00:47:15 ►
is so highly developed in the new world. So yes, it seems to me that the fact that the gene,
00:47:22 ►
or that the psilocybin compound is chemically unique,
00:47:25 ►
the fact that it induces this logos-like experience,
00:47:29 ►
makes me at least entertain the possibility that this is an extraterrestrial contact,
00:47:38 ►
that extraterrestrial contact as we have previously conceived it,
00:47:43 ►
which is that someone from far away would come in ships and get in touch with us. It doesn’t work like that. What it is, is that as human history goes forward, we develop the linguistic discrimination to be able to recognize the extraterrestrials that are already insinuated into the planetary
00:48:06 ►
environment around us some of which may have been here millions and millions of
00:48:12 ►
years in other words space is not an impermeable barrier to life but there
00:48:17 ►
are there is slow seepage there is genetic material that is transferred across space and time over vast distances and I
00:48:29 ►
operationally I deal with the mushroom that way I it may well be an adumbration or some slice of the
00:48:39 ►
human collectivity but since it presents itself as the other I treat it as the other
00:48:46 ►
and I treat with it as the other
00:48:48 ►
and sometimes as I said it’s my colleague
00:48:52 ►
and sometimes it’s my Jewish godfather
00:48:55 ►
and sometimes it is my
00:48:57 ►
what Jung called the sore mystica
00:49:02 ►
or what my brother Dennis called the sore mistress.
00:49:07 ►
It is, you know, has this erotic connotation to it.
00:49:12 ►
But this is all part of the picture,
00:49:15 ►
and it all has to do with changing
00:49:17 ►
our preconceptions of things,
00:49:20 ►
so that an idea such as that a mushroom
00:49:23 ►
could be an intelligent extraterrestrial,
00:49:26 ►
which is preposterous by one point of view,
00:49:30 ►
can be seen to move from possible to highly probable
00:49:35 ►
by simply shifting your language around.
00:49:40 ►
And the evidence has been left untouched.
00:49:43 ►
The evidence is equally friendly to either point of view
00:49:47 ►
because the evidence is so personal.
00:49:51 ►
Science is totally impersonal.
00:49:53 ►
The empirical evidence that the mushroom is an extraterrestrial is zilch.
00:50:00 ►
But the subjective experience of those who have formed a relationship with it
00:50:07 ►
is overwhelmingly slanted in the other direction.
00:50:13 ►
And this is, you know, here we have then ideas and competition,
00:50:17 ►
the evolution of points of view through time.
00:50:20 ►
And that’s why I say the opportunity should not be missed
00:50:35 ►
to open a cultural dialogue about this phenomenon with ourselves, among ourselves, and with the thing itself.
00:50:38 ►
It’s a unique opportunity.
00:50:40 ►
Yes?
00:50:43 ►
I’m going to ask you to speculate just for a minute.
00:50:45 ►
I never speculate.
00:50:47 ►
Just try.
00:50:54 ►
Given that we’re led by our imaginations into the future and that facts are indeed suppositions
00:50:58 ►
that are agreed on by a large group of people,
00:51:01 ►
how many people do you suppose it would take
00:51:04 ►
to agree on these facts
00:51:07 ►
and what sort of rituals or ceremonies
00:51:09 ►
would be required to
00:51:11 ►
align everybody’s thinking
00:51:13 ►
to agree on specific elements
00:51:15 ►
of the invisible landscape
00:51:16 ►
to the point where
00:51:17 ►
it would be possible to retool
00:51:21 ►
the language
00:51:22 ►
to accommodate the new visions
00:51:25 ►
and to take advantage of this opportunity
00:51:32 ►
to perfect the Paleolithic ideals of shamanism?
00:51:40 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:51:42 ►
Maybe there’s a critical 5% or something like that. I mean, political revolutions, they say, are made by 10%. I think the change, what I put it down to, is the emanation of these psilocybin mushrooms throughout society that in the last eight years,
00:52:09 ►
we have undergone like a second Neolithic revolution.
00:52:15 ►
The first Neolithic revolution
00:52:17 ►
was the invention of agriculture.
00:52:20 ►
The second Neolithic revolution
00:52:21 ►
was the invention of home fungus cultivation.
00:52:30 ►
And suddenly, you know, 20 or 30 species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, which were previously rarely met forest endemics,
00:52:35 ►
or the coprophytic kinds of mushrooms, the ones which grew on the dung of cattle,
00:52:40 ►
these things, all of which had restricted endemic zones of occupation, have become ubiquitous.
00:52:50 ►
Stropharia cubensis, the most ubiquitous in the natural state, was before the invention of human cultivation, a rare tropical mushroom. Now it grows from Nome to Tierra del Fuego in every attic, basement,
00:53:08 ►
and garage around. And the strategy by which the mushroom conquers society is exactly the
00:53:19 ►
same strategy by which the mycelium spreads across a petri dish it just moves out in all directions and
00:53:27 ►
my brother and I wrote the book psilocybin the magic mushroom growers guide in 1975 it sold a
00:53:37 ►
hundred thousand copies we had stiff competition from Bob Harris he wrote a book called Growing Magic Mushrooms or something. Jonathan Ott wrote a book. Gary Menser,
00:53:48 ►
Stephen Pollock,
00:53:50 ►
Spore companies sprang up. It’s very hard to imagine how many people are doing this.
00:53:59 ►
For the delight of my mycological
00:54:03 ►
crowd last weekend,
00:54:05 ►
I posed the question,
00:54:09 ►
if the mycelium spreads through society
00:54:12 ►
the way it spreads through bulk substrate or a petri dish,
00:54:15 ►
then what phenomenon can we expect in society
00:54:20 ►
when the mushroom fruits?
00:54:23 ►
Meaning when it goes through the ontological transformation
00:54:26 ►
where it ceases to manifest its homogenous,
00:54:31 ►
hyphal network form
00:54:34 ►
and instead manifests its form
00:54:37 ►
which is devoted to sunbathing and sex thrills,
00:54:41 ►
which is the mushroom which emerges above the ground.
00:54:45 ►
So I’m very bullish on psilocybin.
00:54:51 ►
I think that the word drug is inappropriate,
00:54:56 ►
that the model of hallucinogenic drugs that we have inherited from our experience with LSD
00:55:04 ►
is completely
00:55:05 ►
inadequate that the fact that LSD is our model hallucinogen for doctors and
00:55:13 ►
researchers and that kind of thing is only a historical accident the fact that
00:55:18 ►
it was discovered first or characterized first in the laboratory and then
00:55:23 ►
millions and millions and millions of people took it because of course it’s
00:55:27 ►
active in the 100 gamma
00:55:30 ►
range where psilocybin is active at the 15 milligram range, so
00:55:36 ►
millions and millions of people were able to be touched by LSD. I don’t think that mass drug taking is a good idea
00:55:45 ►
but I think that we must have a deputized minority,
00:55:50 ►
a shamanic professional class, if you will,
00:55:54 ►
whose job is to bring ideas out of the deep black water
00:55:59 ►
and show them off to the rest of us
00:56:01 ►
and perform for our culture
00:56:03 ►
some of the cultural functions
00:56:06 ►
that shaman perform in pre-literate cultures.
00:56:11 ►
I like the plant hallucinogens.
00:56:13 ►
I think that a true symbiosis is happening there.
00:56:17 ►
You see LSD was a creature of the laboratory.
00:56:21 ►
It was not a creature of the laboratory.
00:56:23 ►
It was a thing of the laboratory it was a thing of the laboratory
00:56:26 ►
psilocybin is a creature of the forests and fields
00:56:31 ►
when man propagates it
00:56:36 ►
when we spread it
00:56:38 ►
when it stones us
00:56:40 ►
there is this reciprocal relationship
00:56:44 ►
transfer of energy and information.
00:56:47 ►
This is a true symbiosis.
00:56:50 ►
Both parties are gaining.
00:56:52 ►
Nobody is giving up anything.
00:56:55 ►
And we have domesticated many plants and animals.
00:56:59 ►
That’s not big news.
00:57:01 ►
But this is not a bean or an apple.
00:57:06 ►
It isn’t even a cat or a dog.
00:57:09 ►
It may be smarter than we are.
00:57:11 ►
And so the implications of this relationship have to be couched in at least human terms.
00:57:19 ►
And that’s why the erotic metaphor is not inappropriate.
00:57:23 ►
erotic metaphor is not inappropriate.
00:57:31 ►
If psychedelic substances were legal, and this were a class in, say, introductory psychedelic appreciation, what do you suppose our first assignment would be?
00:57:37 ►
From me?
00:57:51 ►
Well, I guess I would have you plant some seeds and read some history.
00:57:56 ►
And when you had read the history and grown the seeds, and I don’t know what they would be.
00:57:58 ►
They would be morning glories or the spores of mushrooms or something.
00:58:03 ►
When you had assimilated the history and cared for the plant and brought
00:58:08 ►
it to its fullest self-expression of fruitful production of alkaloids, why then you would
00:58:17 ►
be at the threshold of your career and I would adjourn the class.
00:58:31 ►
But not to be facetious or to follow up that point.
00:58:37 ►
History is very important to doing well in the psychedelic experience,
00:58:40 ►
at least psilocybin, because it shows you movies of history.
00:58:44 ►
It sees us as historical creatures.
00:58:48 ►
It has this above-everything kind of point of view where it isn’t dealing with you in the slice of the moment. It’s dealing with the phenomenon of
00:58:54 ►
the monkeys over the last millennium, and that’s how it sees us. And you can assimilate some of its viewpoint by having a real feeling for, you know, the ancestors, all the people who are dead, the people who went before. I mean, it’s really a strange, long, what a long, strange trip it’s been, you know. from the cave paintings at Altamira to the doorway of the starship.
00:59:26 ►
And now we stand on that threshold,
00:59:31 ►
hand in hand with this strange new partner,
00:59:34 ►
not expected.
00:59:36 ►
In the nature of historical change
00:59:38 ►
comes the unexpected.
00:59:40 ►
And this is what we have on our hands.
00:59:43 ►
The problem of the other, the need for the our hands the problem of the other the need for the other
00:59:47 ►
the presence of the other the nature of the other these are the questions and the concerns
00:59:54 ►
that will drive the next uh order of human becoming
01:00:01 ►
you don’t preclude at all the possibility that this, the yearning for the other is just
01:00:07 ►
really the yearning for the self, that the other really is an undisclosed self, that
01:00:14 ►
the robotic urge is to unite it.
01:00:16 ►
No, I don’t.
01:00:17 ►
In fact, I said at the beginning that the nature of the archetype is being set now in the light of scientific knowledge about how it’s possible
01:00:26 ►
that there is other intelligence in the universe and it’s a combination of our need for connection
01:00:35 ►
and science giving its blessing to this form of expressing that need that is creating the phenomenon of the potential for alien love.
01:00:46 ►
But you see, we don’t know what the self is. I mean, you know, if you take seriously Buddhism,
01:00:58 ►
which says that everything is bodhi mind, well then that means that there could be extraterrestrials and if
01:01:06 ►
it’s true that everything is Bodhi mind they are an aspect of the self this
01:01:12 ►
word self is as great a mystery as the word other there’s just a polarity
01:01:19 ►
between two mysteries and then you know the the thin thin myths that are spun to hold you there
01:01:29 ►
without freaking out the myths of science and religion and the horoscopes and the shamanizing
01:01:36 ►
all these things but a polarity between the mystery of the self and the mystery of the other. And a mystery is not to be confused with an unsolved
01:01:46 ►
problem. A mystery is by its nature mysterious. It will not collapse into solution. And we’re
01:01:56 ►
unfamiliar with that kind of thing. We think that if there’s a mystery, why you just hire a bunch of
01:02:02 ►
people, whatever kind of people, and they get it straightened out and issue a report and that’s that.
01:02:09 ►
But this only works for trivia.
01:02:11 ►
And what’s important, our hearts, our souls, our hopes, our expectations
01:02:16 ►
are completely mysterious to us.
01:02:21 ►
And so how must they appear then to the other if it truly is other so we need to cultivate
01:02:28 ►
a sense of mystery the mystery is not only in the other it is in us and this reverberates again
01:02:34 ►
with what i said about how we become what we behold history is turning suddenly mysterious mysterious here in the post quantum physics postmodern phase this was not
01:02:47 ►
expected the 19th century the early 20th century they didn’t realize this is what
01:02:52 ►
they were pointed into although some people the path of physicians the
01:02:56 ►
surrealists they saw what was coming but here we are yeah um the discussion earlier of uh how the mushroom was likely seeded
01:03:08 ►
from afar reminded me of directed panspermia the idea that life itself was here yeah i
01:03:15 ►
i should have mentioned that theory because it’s the best support i have for the idea i was putting
01:03:22 ►
forth what’s being mentioned is a theory,
01:03:26 ►
the panspermia theory, which was formulated by Suropanampurama and Crick, who was the
01:03:36 ►
discoverer with James Watson, Francis Crick, of DNA. And they are proposing a much more radical theory than what I put forth at
01:03:46 ►
least in terms of relative to biology they’re saying that prebiotic molecules
01:03:52 ►
arise in the greatest numbers in deep space not on the surfaces of planets
01:04:00 ►
that planets are only secondarily and at a late stage in the development of complex
01:04:07 ►
polymers and prebiotic compounds do the surfaces of planets become where the action is i am not
01:04:18 ►
saying that what i’m harking back to is i’m sure you all know the old adage that we each are made of stars,
01:04:28 ►
that the atoms in your body were once cooked in the hearts of stars. This is true,
01:04:35 ►
but an unremarked accompanying necessity of that fact
01:04:45 ►
would be that there must therefore be
01:04:47 ►
some atoms in your body
01:04:49 ►
which were not cooked in the hearts of stars
01:04:51 ►
but which were part of the planets
01:04:54 ►
which circled around those stars
01:04:56 ►
before they exploded.
01:04:59 ►
My point being that not all of this material
01:05:02 ►
that is circulated in the galaxy
01:05:04 ►
has been through something as violent as nuclear burning at the heart of a star.
01:05:10 ►
When stars go nova, their planets are blown to pieces,
01:05:15 ►
and biotic material that has evolved on those planets
01:05:19 ►
is injected into the general cosmic soup of circulating material.
01:05:24 ►
into the general cosmic soup of circulating material.
01:05:29 ►
And that is more my idea of what the spore strategy may have originally been about.
01:05:31 ►
It was forms of life which evolved in very harsh environments
01:05:37 ►
where a spore could survive, but seeds, for instance, couldn’t.
01:05:43 ►
And we were talking at this mushroom conference this weekend
01:05:45 ►
about how if you have some mushroom spores
01:05:49 ►
and you want to preserve them
01:05:51 ►
the way you do it is you create an atmosphere
01:05:54 ►
as much like that of deep space as possible
01:05:57 ►
ideal is total vacuum at minus 60 degrees centigrade
01:06:03 ►
and then they’ll last virtually forever at any
01:06:09 ►
at any lower temperature they will slowly degrade so i envision mushrooms or or spore bearing life
01:06:18 ►
forms antecedent to mushrooms evolving in very harsh environments where then actually space was a medium
01:06:28 ►
through which they could migrate.
01:06:30 ►
And of course this happens over very long periods of time.
01:06:34 ►
But if you think that the galaxy is roughly
01:06:37 ►
a hundred thousand light years from edge to edge,
01:06:41 ►
if something were moving only 1,undredth the speed of light, which now
01:06:49 ►
that’s not a tremendous speed that presents problems to any advanced technology. If something
01:06:57 ►
were moving one one-hundredth the speed of light, it could cross the galaxy in ten million
01:07:05 ►
it could cross the galaxy in 10 million years.
01:07:11 ►
Well, there’s life on this planet a billion point eight years old.
01:07:19 ►
That’s 1,800 times longer than 10 million years.
01:07:29 ►
So looking at the galaxy on those timescales, you see that the percolation of spores between the stars is a perfectly viable strategy for biology.
01:07:33 ►
And we know that the casing of spores is a very electron-dense material.
01:07:39 ►
It’s as electron-dense as many metals.
01:07:42 ►
Global currents form generating
01:07:46 ►
sub superconducting
01:07:48 ►
or superconducting states on the
01:07:50 ►
surface that make them even more
01:07:51 ►
resistant to radiation
01:07:53 ►
and we know that
01:07:56 ►
spores are light enough that
01:07:57 ►
Brownian motion and
01:08:00 ►
convection
01:08:02 ►
and this sort of thing
01:08:03 ►
definitely they percolate even into the high stratosphere,
01:08:07 ►
and there highly energetic events are going on
01:08:15 ►
at a fairly regular pace,
01:08:17 ►
sufficient that we can calculate
01:08:19 ►
that a certain number of these,
01:08:21 ►
small for each spore shedding,
01:08:23 ►
but large in the total context
01:08:25 ►
of fungi on the planet, these spores
01:08:28 ►
percolate right out of the gravitational
01:08:31 ►
field and then are subject to larger
01:08:34 ►
forces. So it’s radical to suggest this,
01:08:39 ►
but it’s only because the empirical
01:08:42 ►
evidence is thin, the logic of the case is well-founded.
01:08:48 ►
What is on much shakier ground, of course, is the idea that the mushroom is an intelligent
01:08:53 ►
life form, and that’s my special obsession and province, and most people say I’m welcome welcome to it. But it’s very interesting in a book called Perspectives on Scientific
01:09:10 ►
Communication with Extraterrestrials or something like that. Anyway, a book by Poonam Purama.
01:09:16 ►
There’s an article by R. N. Bracewell, who’s an astrophysicist, talking about the logic
01:09:22 ►
of searches for intelligent life.
01:09:25 ►
And he concludes that no matter what kind of life form you are,
01:09:30 ►
no matter what kind of technology you have,
01:09:33 ►
if you are seriously going to search space
01:09:36 ►
by physically sending probes from one star to another,
01:09:41 ►
then the only strategy which would work
01:09:44 ►
would be what’s called a van Neumann machine,
01:09:47 ►
meaning a machine which can reproduce itself so that the machine leaves its parent star
01:09:56 ►
and then it or four of these machines are sent out in four opposed directions from a parent star.
01:10:07 ►
are sent out in four opposed directions from a parent star. At a certain distance from the parent star,
01:10:13 ►
each machine replicates. Then you have eight machines, and at double that distance
01:10:21 ►
they replicate again, and you have 16 machines, and so on. The notion being that only by this process of
01:10:25 ►
replication can you cover all bets, and that probably then what you do
01:10:28 ►
is you send a message
01:10:31 ►
which says we are searching the galaxy
01:10:35 ►
by an exhaustive means
01:10:37 ►
and if you read this message
01:10:41 ►
please call the following toll-free number
01:10:44 ►
and we will then initiate contact.
01:10:48 ►
And only by this means could you hope to have contact with all the worlds in the galaxy.
01:10:54 ►
And this makes it very important to understand what the message is that the mushroom conveys.
01:11:09 ►
message is that the mushroom conveys. The Mandaeans, who were an obscure religious cult of Gnostics in the Middle East of very long survivability, have this very interesting
01:11:15 ►
idea. They believe that at the end of time, what they call the secret Adam will come to earth.
01:11:22 ►
And the secret Adam is a messiah-like figure but what he does is he builds
01:11:28 ►
a machine which then transmits all the souls back to their hidden source in the all-father outside
01:11:38 ►
of the machinery of cosmic fate this notion of the mess Messiah building a machine is very interesting. It’s conceivable
01:11:46 ►
that if there is an extraterrestrial message in our environment, it is a message to build
01:11:53 ►
some kind of device so that a less tenuous form of communication can be opened up. And
01:12:02 ►
Bracewell makes this case. To him, this is just inherent in the logic of the
01:12:06 ►
situation. And I suppose it would be an interesting branch of logic, the logic and the protocols of
01:12:13 ►
extraterrestrial contact. What can we define about contact that is so basic that whatever form of
01:12:22 ►
life and intelligence you were, you would have to flow along those creodes.
01:12:28 ►
This is probably an undeveloped field at this point,
01:12:31 ►
but it certainly could be done.
01:12:34 ►
It’s like alternative physics.
01:12:37 ►
We need alternative theories of social contact
01:12:41 ►
and social contract making in the event that we meet an extraterrestrial. This is a fertile
01:12:49 ►
theme in science fiction, the logic of contact, how to make it without giving away too much
01:12:57 ►
and yet not get anything out of it. It’s poker, but the stakes are very high we’re talking about the survivability viability and
01:13:07 ►
evolutionary fates of species if not entire planet yeah you talked about the collapse of
01:13:14 ►
the distinction between inner and outer space right and what would how would you go into that more? Well, the distinction of inner and outer space
01:13:29 ►
is rooted in association of the self with the body.
01:13:33 ►
And I think as the self moves out into the ocean of electronic consciousness,
01:13:43 ►
and also as we explore
01:13:45 ►
the erotic dimensions
01:13:47 ►
with the others that I’ve indicated
01:13:49 ►
tonight
01:13:49 ►
this identification between self
01:13:53 ►
and body will become secondary
01:13:55 ►
in a way that
01:13:56 ►
identification between
01:13:58 ►
king and self
01:14:01 ►
has become rather secondary
01:14:03 ►
over the last 5,000. I mean, we don’t
01:14:06 ►
even have a king. We seem to manage without one. It’s conceivable we could manage without
01:14:13 ►
a body as well. These are just ways that loyalty is transferred toward forms of cultural uh concrescence validated by local languages
01:14:25 ►
anything else
01:14:29 ►
yes
01:14:30 ►
um
01:14:30 ►
it seems that
01:14:31 ►
that
01:14:32 ►
you talk as if
01:14:33 ►
a humanity’s on
01:14:34 ►
like a threshold
01:14:35 ►
of a new age
01:14:36 ►
and that
01:14:37 ►
um
01:14:38 ►
maybe through
01:14:39 ►
contact
01:14:40 ►
the aliens will help us
01:14:41 ►
like cross
01:14:42 ►
this threshold
01:14:43 ►
maybe you might
01:14:44 ►
want to elaborate more
01:14:46 ►
well i definitely think we’re on that that there is a process that has been long underway
01:14:55 ►
that has been gaining momentum since its very beginning uh it’s the process which formed the planet which called life out of the
01:15:06 ►
ocean which called higher animals out of lower animals which called humanity out
01:15:13 ►
of the primates and which called history out of tribal sacral timeless existence and what it is leading toward is some kind of
01:15:29 ►
apocalyptic transformative flowing together of everything that is beyond
01:15:36 ►
our language system it’s the umbilicus of being it’s where it’s all tied
01:15:43 ►
together and therefore it’s very hard to describe
01:15:45 ►
it i think that all of our science and our religion and our history these are patterns thrown
01:15:55 ►
across a limited set of dimensions by the hyperdimensional fact of a certain object at the end of history toward which we are moving, to which we are being
01:16:07 ►
drawn. I think that most things about man are mysterious and that what is happening to us is
01:16:15 ►
mysterious. The sudden explosive development of the neocortex is entirely out of context with
01:16:23 ►
what we know about the rates of evolution that go
01:16:26 ►
on in other species and previously went on in the primates now it’s been very fashionable in the
01:16:33 ►
past you know i don’t know 50 years or something to uh think that it’s all very humdrum somehow. And yet, this is just everybody,
01:16:46 ►
every ideological system
01:16:48 ►
that has been granted the status
01:16:50 ►
of being the official view of reality
01:16:53 ►
has always proclaimed
01:16:55 ►
that it had everything nailed down
01:16:57 ►
but the last 5%
01:16:58 ►
and their best people were working on that.
01:17:02 ►
But I think that we are,
01:17:04 ►
for all that we know,
01:17:07 ►
we know practically nothing.
01:17:09 ►
And that, though I am not
01:17:12 ►
in any sense of the,
01:17:14 ►
well, not in any sense,
01:17:16 ►
but in most senses,
01:17:17 ►
I am not religious.
01:17:19 ►
I think that religious thinking
01:17:21 ►
about the transformation of the world
01:17:23 ►
is more on the right track than the
01:17:28 ►
notion that the laws of physics will always be what they are the laws of biology will always be
01:17:33 ►
what they are and we’re all just going to go along and things are going to get worse and worse
01:17:37 ►
or better and better but that there are no surprises i think that we do not see what’s going on.
01:17:47 ►
One of the reasons I like to make this argument
01:17:50 ►
about the mushroom and the extraterrestrial and all that
01:17:53 ►
is just to show people that maybe this isn’t true,
01:17:56 ►
but look how you can see things differently.
01:18:01 ►
If things can be seen that differently,
01:18:03 ►
how many ways can they be
01:18:06 ►
seen differently and to try and get people to realize to stop waiting for
01:18:11 ►
the president to enlighten you in other words stop waiting for history and the
01:18:20 ►
stream of historical events to make it clear to you, you have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility,
01:18:31 ►
because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your understanding.
01:18:38 ►
It doesn’t do you any good to know that somewhere in some computer there are tensor equations which perfectly model
01:18:48 ►
or perfectly don’t model something that’s going on. And we have all tended to give away
01:18:54 ►
ourselves to official ideologies and to say, well, I may not understand, but someone understands.
01:19:03 ►
But the fact of the matter is only your own
01:19:05 ►
understanding is any good to you i mean because it’s you that you’re going to live with and it’s
01:19:11 ►
you that you’re going to die with and as the song says you know the last dance you do you do alone
01:19:18 ►
and you want to be in good company then so uh it’s very important to cultivate this aspect of yourself and to
01:19:33 ►
be with it. I don’t know what the transformation means, this rushing together of everything,
01:19:43 ►
but I think without knowing what it means,
01:19:45 ►
you can convince yourself that it’s there,
01:19:48 ►
it’s just nobody has chronicled it,
01:19:50 ►
or no official agency has pointed out
01:19:53 ►
that things are developing faster and faster,
01:19:57 ►
things are growing together faster and faster,
01:20:00 ►
connections are being formed faster and faster,
01:20:02 ►
the evolution of language, technology, understanding of the self, these things are just spinning into a tizzy, and it will not go away, it will go through, it will break through to something else, and we may have to shed the present human guiding image, we may have to shed the monkey body we have to
01:20:26 ►
be open very open what is happening on this planet if you stand off by a nearby
01:20:33 ►
star and look at it is there is information loose on this planet a swarm
01:20:40 ►
a gene swarm of replicating information, which has become so complexified
01:20:46 ►
that it now generates swarms of epigenetic information,
01:20:50 ►
meaning books, architectures, mythologies,
01:20:54 ►
all of these things.
01:20:57 ►
And information is liberating itself.
01:21:01 ►
And what is that?
01:21:03 ►
And what does that mean?
01:21:06 ►
You know, the Gnostics had the idea that God’s body had been scattered through the universe as light and that
01:21:13 ►
the purpose the salvational imperative was to gather the light together and get
01:21:21 ►
it out of this universe and transmit it back to the modality of its essence
01:21:28 ►
and that’s a good metaphor for for what is going on but no one understands it i think but we can
01:21:37 ►
understand aspects of it we are lagging there is enough visible that we should be saying more
01:21:46 ►
about what’s happening
01:21:47 ►
and I don’t hear that being said
01:21:50 ►
maybe it’s being said privately
01:21:53 ►
maybe it’s a taboo subject
01:21:55 ►
perhaps the attraction for some people of these lectures
01:21:59 ►
is that they somehow violate taboos
01:22:02 ►
that impossible things are being said.
01:22:06 ►
Maybe, maybe not, but impossible things need to be said
01:22:09 ►
because impossible things are happening
01:22:12 ►
and you don’t want to miss it.
01:22:15 ►
Thank you very much.
01:22:17 ►
It was a pleasure to talk to you about this.
01:22:20 ►
I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
01:22:25 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:22:27 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:22:32 ►
As I was listening to this fascinating rap with you just now,
01:22:36 ►
it dawned on me that there really isn’t much that I can add to this
01:22:40 ►
Niagara of interesting new ideas with, well,
01:22:43 ►
at least without us spending a lot more
01:22:45 ►
time here today. So I think I’ll just pass on any specific comments about this particular talk.
01:22:52 ►
You know, I just checked and there are now over 170,000 Terrence McKenna videos on YouTube.
01:23:01 ►
And while I do have a YouTube channel of my own, the only thing
01:23:05 ►
that I’ve posted there are some pictures
01:23:08 ►
that I took while I was in the Navy
01:23:09 ►
and some others that I took back
01:23:11 ►
when I was working as a stuntman on the movie
01:23:14 ►
Hawaii. But none of the
01:23:16 ►
McKenna material on YouTube has
01:23:17 ►
been posted by me, in case you’re wondering.
01:23:20 ►
So if you still want to
01:23:21 ►
listen to more of the Bard McKenna right
01:23:23 ►
now, you can always just surf on over to YouTube and keep yourself entertained all night.
01:23:30 ►
Also, we just heard Terrence mention what sounded like an interesting book, Heisman’s Against the Grain.
01:23:38 ►
Well, here’s some good news. That book is now available for free in Kindle format from Amazon.
01:23:43 ►
And if you don’t have a Kindle, you can still download a free Kindle reader
01:23:47 ►
for almost any device that you have.
01:23:50 ►
So in case you’re interested, you can do what I did and download it
01:23:53 ►
and read it for yourself.
01:23:56 ►
And speaking of books, let me just now replay a short soundbite
01:24:01 ►
from the talk that we just heard.
01:24:03 ►
And in particular, pay attention to what Terrence says
01:24:06 ►
about the fact that while things seem to be going faster,
01:24:09 ►
no one has chronicled it.
01:24:11 ►
I don’t know what the transformation means,
01:24:15 ►
this rushing together of everything.
01:24:18 ►
But I think without knowing what it means,
01:24:20 ►
you can convince yourself that it’s there.
01:24:23 ►
It’s just nobody has chronicled it or no official
01:24:27 ►
agency has pointed out that things are developing faster and faster things are growing together
01:24:34 ►
faster and faster connections are being formed faster and faster the evolution of language
01:24:39 ►
technology understanding of the self these things are just spinning into a tizzy,
01:24:46 ►
and it will not go away.
01:24:49 ►
It will go through.
01:24:53 ►
Now, Terence made that statement in December of 1983,
01:24:58 ►
and until today, that has pretty much been true.
01:25:02 ►
Although there have been a few books that I’ve seen
01:25:04 ►
that kind of touch on the subject somewhat obliquely,
01:25:07 ►
until now I haven’t come across one that is specifically aimed
01:25:10 ►
at the issue of the increasing pressure we seem to find ourselves in
01:25:14 ►
as this digital age continues to dawn.
01:25:18 ►
But now I have found a book that not only investigates
01:25:22 ►
the underlying causes of stress in our deeply
01:25:25 ►
interconnected world, but it also, well at least for me, it’s also helped to relieve some of the
01:25:31 ►
pressure that I feel from an always full email inbox and never seem to have enough time to even
01:25:38 ►
glance at many of the waves of new information that seem to roll over me each day? The book I’m talking about is by Douglas Rushkoff
01:25:48 ►
and is titled Present Shock, When Everything Happens Now.
01:25:53 ►
First off, let me say this to any of our fellow salonners
01:25:57 ►
who may be saying to themselves that no matter how great a book this is,
01:26:02 ►
they still don’t have time to read it.
01:26:04 ►
Well, then you are precisely the person for whom this book was written.
01:26:09 ►
And I think you’ll do yourself a great service if you disconnect from the net for a few hours
01:26:14 ►
and take a look at the big picture of what is actually driving you these days,
01:26:19 ►
and what may be the source of much of the stress that you’re feeling.
01:26:23 ►
Unless, of course, you happen to be one of the people who are totally relaxed these days
01:26:28 ►
and are living a stress-free life.
01:26:31 ►
And if you are one of those people, well, you’re quite rare
01:26:34 ►
and probably shouldn’t even be listening to these podcasts.
01:26:38 ►
But getting back to Douglas’ book,
01:26:41 ►
I’ll mention just a few things that I got from it that are already helping me
01:26:45 ►
carry on with a, well, with a much more relaxed frame of mind. And one of the topics that he
01:26:51 ►
covers is, well, it’s a real hot button of mine. It’s about kids and the internet. And let me just
01:26:57 ►
quote one sentence or two here. How are our children affected by always being connected to
01:27:03 ►
the net? Even when they’re on vacation at Disney World, they haven’t disconnected from their
01:27:08 ►
world back home, so vacations are no longer the same for
01:27:12 ►
children as they once were. End quote.
01:27:16 ►
And what about the constant stress of knowing that
01:27:19 ►
you have email waiting? How are you going to reconcile yourself
01:27:24 ►
to the fact that you will never, as in never, have an empty email inbox?
01:27:29 ►
So when you think about it, there really should be no guilt in letting your email ferment for a day or two before responding.
01:27:36 ►
And then keep in mind the fact that when you send an email to somebody else, you’re adding to the pressure of that person that you sent it to.
01:27:44 ►
Have you ever thought about that? Or probably you’re
01:27:48 ►
just like me and you send off a reply and say to yourself,
01:27:52 ►
well, now that’s somebody else’s problem for a while.
01:27:55 ►
But besides helping me get over my guilt about unanswered and unread
01:28:00 ►
email, in present shock, Rushkoff has also
01:28:03 ►
passed along a little tip that increased his
01:28:06 ►
creative output by 40%, which is something that I’ve already begun trying myself. So in addition
01:28:14 ►
to an excellent look at the big picture that is now in the background of our lives, there are also
01:28:21 ►
many hints and examples of how to deal with the world as we find it.
01:28:25 ►
And here’s how he sums up what he calls present shock.
01:28:29 ►
And again I quote,
01:28:31 ►
Present shock provides the perfect cultural and emotional pretexts for apocalyptic thinking.
01:28:38 ►
It is destabilizing.
01:28:40 ►
It deconstructs the narratives we use to make meaning.
01:28:43 ►
It leads us to completely overwind, magnifying the stakes of any given moment.
01:28:49 ►
It leads us to draw paranoid connections where there are none.
01:28:53 ►
And finally, its lack of regard for beginnings and endings,
01:28:57 ►
its focus on the perpetual now, drives us to impose order and chaos.
01:29:02 ►
As Douglas says, well, it’s not about how digital technology changes us,
01:29:08 ►
but how we change ourselves and one another now that we live so digitally.
01:29:13 ►
So right now, why not let’s press the pause button
01:29:17 ►
and order a copy of Present Shock,
01:29:20 ►
and then give some time and some thought to ways in which you can regain control over
01:29:25 ►
your own hectic life and begin to make some sense about this digital world that you and
01:29:30 ►
I are living in.
01:29:33 ►
Okay, that was long enough.
01:29:34 ►
Now I’ve got to go check my email.
01:29:38 ►
How about you?
01:29:40 ►
Anyhow, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:29:44 ►
Be well, my very busy friends.