Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0062506137/184-3034615-8894027[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Our best efforts are nothing more than half-completed stories told around the campfire. We don’t actually know what our predicament is. We are up against a phenomenon which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere, and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence”
“These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity are no better than inspired guesses.”
“Science works its miracles by turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined to the category matter and energy.”
“In other words, all these things you might cling to, Catholicism, democratic ideals, Hasidism, Marxism, Freudianism, all of these things are exposed [through use of psychedelics] as simply quaint cultural artifacts, tainted masks and rattles assembled by people of good intent but clearly not great grasp of the situation.”
“To date, the enterprise of thinking has moved us radically away from understanding anything.”
“For me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works, a new model of what the world is.”
“And what is the primary datum? It’s the felt presence of immediate experience. In other words, being here now is the primary datum.”
“We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.”
“Fine tuning the institutions built by powdered wig guys two hundred years ago is a long shot at holding the whole thing together.”
“Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.” [Note: this comment was made a dozen years before the iPhone was released.]
“As I see it, Being, the Cosmos, whatever you want to call it, is a struggle between two implacable forces: Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.”
“The sensory ratios that are being reinforced by the new electronic technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place fifteen thousand years ago… . Print imposes a condition on human mind which is now lifting.”
“History was an incredibly damaging experience, and now it’s over … in a sense.”
“What was created by the era of the proper gentleman was excellent table manners and genocide over most of the surface of the planet.”
“To me, the psychedelic experience is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.”
“If psychedelics are, on any level, to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them, because it’s an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.”
MAPS Psychedelic Science 2013 Conference
Books Mentioned in this podcast
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
By Katie Hafner
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And if you’re like me,
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it’s, well, it’s always a good time to listen to another talk by Terence McKenna. As you will hear him mention in just a minute, this talk was given at a time when the Netscape browser had
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just begun to replace Mosaic. And for those of you who weren’t online back then, well, it was near the end
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of 1994. Now there is no title on this tape as it was the opening session of one of his weekend
00:00:54 ►
workshops, one like the Valley of Novelty workshop that I think I’ve now almost podcasted in full.
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But the way that Terrence did those workshops is to begin first by going around
00:01:06 ►
the room and letting everyone there introduce themselves. And that part I’ve cut out in order
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to preserve the privacy of those who were there that evening. But if I counted correctly, there
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were about 35 people in the room and it was almost evenly divided between men and women.
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I’m now going to pick up right after the last person has just introduced herself,
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and then I’ll play the rest of the recording from that evening.
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Again, if this weekend was like most of his workshops,
00:01:35 ►
well, Terrence’s remarks were all unscripted
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and just sort of flowed as the mood of the group and their questions moved him.
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So now, here again is Terrence McKenna.
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I should say, I guess, a little bit about myself.
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Since this has sort of, over the years,
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turned into a kind of a one-man band,
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I grew up in a small town in Colorado under extraordinarily ordinary circumstances
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and for some reason I don’t know genetic or something in the water or something I was always very prone to obsession.
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And one obsession gave way to another,
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so that rock collecting gave way to butterflies,
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which gave way to rocketry, which gave way to girls,
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which gave way to drugs, which gave way to politics,
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on and on and on. Fascinated with the world
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and as a rock hunter and butterfly collector, it was fairly aesthetically driven and irrational.
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What interested me was the iridescence in certain agates certain pyrite certain tropical butterflies certain
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kinds of reef fish something about the light the visual thrill of of the world and this took me
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through many places by the time I was 14 years old
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and read Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception,
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where he gives a very restrained and gentlemanly description of a masculine experience.
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And I took it at face value and said, you know know if this is even partially true it’s immensely important
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and I began to pursue this vast area of interlocking disciplines that really has no
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name but we can name the disciplines and you know what I’m talking about botany
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ethnography chemistry DNA function cultural dynamics shamanism linguistics
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theories of natural magic relationship of man to the environment, so forth and so on.
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The nexus of concerns that clusters around the question,
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what are we, where did we come from,
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and where are we going?
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And as a 14-year-old, 16-year-old,
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when these questions first form in your mind,
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a reasonable response is to seek the cultural database.
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Surely there are answers to these questions.
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Who are we, where did we come from, and where are we going?
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Well, if you have any kind of intellectual filter at all,
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you quickly can satisfy yourself
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that our best efforts are nothing more than
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half-completed stories told around the campfire.
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We don’t actually know what our predicament is.
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I mean, we are up against a phenomenon
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which we can barely bring into focus in our cognitive sphere
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and it’s the phenomenon of our own existence.
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What does it mean?
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What does it mean, First of all to be a
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Biological creature to be as an animal. What is that and
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then
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What is it to be that?
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embedded then in a culture with it with histories and languages and aesthetic canons and literatures and scientific
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and languages and aesthetic canons and literatures and scientific hypotheses about the cosmos and so forth and so on.
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And my personal journey, if you want to put it that way,
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lay through a successive series of, I almost said disappointments,
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but awakenings could be another word,
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as I realized that nobody has their finger on what’s going on.
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These religions that are so freighted with their own pomposity
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are no better than inspired guesses.
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And science works its miracles by
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turning its enterprise into a kind of parlor game confined
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to the category matter and energy
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so you can live and die inside
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these intellectual structures if you choose to
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but people of curiosity
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people of unusual
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or traveled circumstance
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usually find themselves unsatisfied
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with the conventional answers
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and then
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on top of all that
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you can add the fact that over the last hundred years what has come
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into the toolbox of thinking Westerners is a whole array of consciousness altering substances that that were not there before. And they accelerate, accentuate
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the dissolution of sanctioned paradigms, basically.
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In other words, all these things you might cling to,
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Catholicism, democratic ideals,
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Hasidism, Marxism
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Freudianism, you know
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all of these things are exposed as
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simply
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quaint cultural artifacts
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painted masks and
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rattles assembled by
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people of good
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intent but clearly not
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great grasp
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of the situation well over I thought that
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that process of deconstruction of cultural reality would end in a kind of
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liberation of cynicism where you become sort of really street smart.
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You know, nobody can put anything over on you.
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You’ve been there. You’ve done that.
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It turns out that that existential phase,
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which I reached at about age 18,
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is itself simply a place along the way and that persisting then with pushing into altered states of mind and alien cultures I began to see that there was a landscape of meaning,
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but it was not the meaning that I had ever been told.
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And this was fairly shocking to me
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because part of my intellectual journey
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had been through the psychology of Carl Jung.
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So I was very prepared for the idea that all dreams, all
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religious mythologies are seamlessly connected to each other under the surface. And liberalism
00:09:59 ►
takes the generous position that everybody has a piece of the action.
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You know, the Buddhists understand something,
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the Taoists understand something,
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the Kabbalists understand something.
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I was getting a different message.
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I was getting the message that nobody understands anything.
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That the entire cultural enterprise is 180 degrees cockamamie to the truth
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that we have it absolutely ass backwards that to date the enterprise of thinking has moved us
00:10:36 ►
radically away from understanding anything and over the years I’ve tried to make room for this alternative explanation
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and I suppose this is the proper place in all this to make my standard declaimer against
00:10:58 ►
squirreliness there’s a lot of squirrelirrelingness in this world
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a rising tide of it
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some of it has been fomented not far from where we sit
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this evening
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and I
00:11:17 ►
represent to myself
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and I hope to convince you of this
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radical ideas, innovative ideas, even peculiar ideas, but not loose or preposterous ideas.
00:11:36 ►
And it’s sort of like, as Supreme Court Justice Douglas said of pornography, it’s hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
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And that’s, so as sanctioned paradigms break down, science and religion, which certainly are
00:11:55 ►
breaking down, into that vacuum rushes an incredibly exotic menagerie of intellectual freakery of all sorts.
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And so what you have to call into being to deal with that situation
00:12:16 ►
are rules of evidence, tools for telling shit from Shinola, in other words.
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And though what I will say here may
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sound peculiar none of it is beyond the realm of testability and none of it is
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riddled I hope with contradiction so these weekends serve different functions for different people.
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Just in the course of doing what I’ve done with my scene,
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I know a lot about plants and anthropological use of psychoactives
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and chemistry and anecdotal stuff.
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And I’m very happy to share all that with you,
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right down to recipes and how to do it.
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Because that’s very important
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to empower people’s personal toolkits and technology.
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At first, I had great enthusiasm
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for that part of the teaching process
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because I felt I was alone in trying to get people
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to take high doses of psychedelics and pay attention,
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that this was not a party experience,
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this was something at the edge of metaphysical profundity.
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It now appears that psychedelic exploration is alive and well
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enshrined in the culture as a three percent minority to be tolerated approximately with
00:13:54 ►
the same level of toleration granted to advanced snm practitioners so so that has been taken care of. And so what interests me more now is, for me, what all these years of psychedelic taking came to was a new model of how reality works.
00:14:18 ►
A new model of what the world is. And several people in going around the circle referred to it tonight as the time wave
00:14:27 ►
or talk about time and the I Ching.
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I represent,
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remember when we were kids,
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or it still continues today,
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but there is a genre of cartoon
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of the bearded, corpulent man in the robe carrying a sign
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which says something usually the end is near
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and repent well
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how a rationalist a platonist
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and an admirer of all
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kinds of evidentiary veracity could find
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their way into that position I don’t know but that
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is the position I’m in.
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I really am quite convinced, I wouldn’t say a hundred percent, but that what we are experiencing
00:15:17 ►
here at the end of the 20th century, which we call chaos or cultural speed-up or globalization
00:15:25 ►
or just the concatenation of multiple social crises
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is in fact something far more profound
00:15:34 ►
than a mere crisis in our politics or our management styles
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or something like that, that it is that the cultural world, the has been working on this planet for four
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billion years is also reaching a climax and both of these simultaneous trajectories toward are occurring in a yet larger context where the very laws of physics itself
00:16:29 ►
are undergoing some kind of a local
00:16:32 ►
phase shift or transformation.
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And I am completely aware
00:16:41 ►
of how nutty this sounds at first.
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I mean, any problem you have with this,
00:16:47 ►
I had in spades. First of all, all apocalyptic theory always centers on a moment not far in the
00:16:57 ►
future. There’s never been any percentage in saying the earth is going to end in 50,000 years.
00:17:04 ►
and saying the earth is going to end in 50,000 years.
00:17:08 ►
There’s just no juice in that.
00:17:14 ►
Nevertheless, when you begin comparing ontologies,
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you’ve got to always remember this is not a free-for-all. There are only a certain number of intellectual products on the market.
00:17:22 ►
What is science selling science is selling the idea that
00:17:30 ►
some time ago for no reason the earth sprang from nothing in a single moment
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well now whatever you may think about that idea, notice that it’s the limit case for credulity.
00:17:48 ►
Do you understand what I mean?
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I mean, whether it’s true or not,
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it’s the most outlandish explanation for reality
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possible for the human mind to conceive of.
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And that’s step one with science.
00:18:04 ►
So what does this do?
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What is the consequence of this scientific worldview?
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A progressive marginalization and de-emphasis
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on what it means to be a human being
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because the universe is enormous in space and time.
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Our galaxy is utterly ordinary, one of billions.
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Our star is utterly ordinary, one of trillions.
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Our planet is presumed to be of an ordinary type.
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And biology is presumed to be a necessary consequence
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of certain chemical regimes at certain temperatures,
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and on and on and on.
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So what you get then as the human role in this scientific scheme
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is virtually nothing more than to witness,
00:19:00 ►
to carry out certain measurements that cause the collapse of the state vector
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and to witness
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and the universe is an accident
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and all subsequent processes are accidents
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and we are an accident
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and value is conferred
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and meaning is an illusion of the naive
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and on and on and on
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this is the legacy of positivism materialism the thinking
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that has gone on in the last 200 years in Europe and now dominates the planet the problem is that
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it runs completely counter to the primary datum to use a philosophical buzzword the primary datum, to use a philosophical buzzword,
00:19:45 ►
the primary datum.
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And what is the primary datum?
00:19:49 ►
It’s the felt presence of immediate experience.
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In other words, being here now is the primary datum.
00:19:58 ►
And it doesn’t tell you that this is a series of accidents
00:20:03 ►
and that you are irrelevant and that your pain is not
00:20:08 ►
pain and that your hope is not hope it tells you something else it tells you this counts
00:20:14 ►
somehow it matters i matter my life matters my family culture the human enterprise, this planet, its biota,
00:20:27 ►
this matters, it all matters.
00:20:32 ►
Meaning is intrinsic as a primary datum, and yet it’s denied by the philosophy
00:20:35 ►
which rules this planet and sets its agenda.
00:20:40 ►
How this happened, we can talk about tomorrow.
00:20:43 ►
It’s an interesting story of historical malapropisms
00:20:48 ►
and bad calls and lost opportunities
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and just bonehead stupidity at critical junctures.
00:20:58 ►
But this evening what I want to evoke for you
00:21:02 ►
is what are its consequences.
00:21:09 ►
what I want to evoke for you is what are its consequences we need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being fine-tuning the institutions built built by powdered wigged guys 200 years ago
00:21:25 ►
is a long shot
00:21:26 ►
at holding the whole thing together.
00:21:31 ►
The world is entering into a phase
00:21:34 ►
of progressively more chaotic oscillation.
00:21:39 ►
This is not a consequence
00:21:41 ►
of what human beings have done.
00:21:45 ►
It’s part of the dynamics of the human biological geological matrix
00:21:53 ►
that represents the planet.
00:21:57 ►
Biology never stands still.
00:22:01 ►
It moved from the unicellular phase into the multicellular phase it occupied all niches
00:22:11 ►
it left the oceans it occupied the land it then entered into linguistic phase space
00:22:20 ►
it entered into the domain of meaning and there it erected conscious reflecting societies
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and individuals. Now through the catalytic interaction with technology the human species
00:22:37 ►
is getting set to redefine itself and these phase transitions are major in the life of this planet
00:22:47 ►
which is four billion years
00:22:48 ►
we can probably look back to no more than half a dozen
00:22:51 ►
of these kinds of phase transitions
00:22:55 ►
well now I want to return to a point
00:22:59 ►
which was the unlikelihood of apocalyptic transformation
00:23:03 ►
in our own time
00:23:05 ►
using a kind of reductionist argument
00:23:08 ►
that there is so much time
00:23:10 ►
and a life is so short
00:23:12 ►
that the odds that your life would fall
00:23:15 ►
on the golden moment
00:23:18 ►
is very slight
00:23:20 ►
but that’s not true
00:23:22 ►
if the dice are loaded
00:23:24 ►
and the dice are loaded and the dice are loaded
00:23:28 ►
this melting together of technology
00:23:31 ►
this globalization of culture
00:23:34 ►
this creation of an electromagnetic sea of information
00:23:40 ►
these are phenomenon that only happen
00:23:43 ►
in the terminal moments of the planetary
00:23:47 ►
breakthrough. History itself is the shockwave of eschatology. This is the slogan that I’ve
00:23:55 ►
been building to deliver to you. History is the shockwave of eschatology. If you don’t know what eschatology is, it’s a good old theological word.
00:24:05 ►
It means the final things,
00:24:08 ►
the last things.
00:24:10 ►
And what I have learned from psychedelics,
00:24:13 ►
and I’m convinced of this to the bone,
00:24:16 ►
whether my own mathematics can stand the test or not,
00:24:20 ►
but time is not necessarily driven from the past.
00:24:26 ►
Time is not like an unfolding avalanche of causal consequences.
00:24:32 ►
Time is more like a process drawn toward an attractor.
00:24:39 ►
And the reason evolution happened on this planet
00:24:44 ►
in such a short amount of time,
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the reason the emergence of consciousness happened without following all the blind alleys
00:24:53 ►
that were open to primate evolution,
00:24:56 ►
is because it isn’t a random walk toward nowhere.
00:25:02 ►
toward nowhere. It is in fact
00:25:04 ►
a trajectory
00:25:05 ►
defined by the field
00:25:08 ►
through which we are moving
00:25:10 ►
and the way to think of this
00:25:12 ►
is like a topological
00:25:14 ►
surface.
00:25:16 ►
That time is not featureless.
00:25:19 ►
It is not
00:25:20 ►
invariant as
00:25:22 ►
Newton insisted
00:25:24 ►
and assumed in order to build his calculus.
00:25:28 ►
I mean, it may appear invariant when you’re calculating the orbits of the planets,
00:25:32 ►
but anyone who has ever gone through a bankruptcy, a divorce, a love affair,
00:25:39 ►
the death of a loved one, something like that,
00:25:43 ►
knows that these things are unique phenomena.
00:25:48 ►
Millions of people have died
00:25:49 ►
and nobody has ever died the same way twice
00:25:52 ►
and left the people standing there feeling the same way.
00:25:55 ►
The things that matter are imbued with uniqueness
00:25:59 ►
and that uniqueness is imparted by this invisible medium that science, in order to function, has had to deny. That’s what it basically comes down to. about the I Ching, talk about how cultures become obsessed with certain aspects of nature.
00:26:29 ►
And then, in the act of exploring that obsession very creatively,
00:26:36 ►
other aspects of nature are completely overlooked or forgotten.
00:26:40 ►
For instance, in the West, we are the masters of matter and energy. I mean, when you
00:26:47 ►
think that 100,000 years ago we were chipping flint and that we can trigger fusion, the process
00:26:56 ►
which lights the stars themselves, that we can trigger fusion in our laboratories as an experimental process, that’s absolutely hair-raising.
00:27:06 ►
I mean, that is a long, long journey into the heart of matter to be able to pull off
00:27:14 ►
a trick like that. Meanwhile, our understanding of time is infantile. We have no theory of time.
00:27:47 ►
We have no theory of time. We say that it is in most cases to be treated as invariant and if you’re working with special relativity then in the presence of massive gravitational objects you impart a very slight curvature to the space-time continuum and that’s it for time and yet time is the dimension that hammers at us most persistently
00:27:49 ►
because you know
00:27:50 ►
it’s upon the back of time
00:27:52 ►
that you ride into the world
00:27:54 ►
and it’s grasping for more of it
00:27:56 ►
that you sink into the blackness of death itself
00:27:59 ►
somebody had a question?
00:28:01 ►
yeah
00:28:02 ►
my image is very close
00:28:04 ►
I have to ask.
00:28:06 ►
Do you believe in evolution or development?
00:28:11 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:28:11 ►
One of the words that hasn’t escaped my lips tonight by accident is novelty.
00:28:19 ►
Novelty is the concept that I’ve elaborated over the years,
00:28:24 ►
taking it from Alfred North Whitehead.
00:28:28 ►
But as I see it, being the cosmos, whatever you want to call it,
00:28:34 ►
is a struggle between two implacable forces.
00:28:40 ►
Novelty on the one side and habit on the other side.
00:28:47 ►
And let me describe them for a moment, and then you can see that this is true, I think.
00:28:51 ►
What is habit?
00:28:54 ►
Habit is doing things the way you’ve always done them.
00:28:57 ►
Habit is tradition.
00:29:00 ►
Habit is circular behavior.
00:29:03 ►
Habit is following the creodes
00:29:06 ►
that have already been laid down by past activity.
00:29:09 ►
It’s what Sheldrake calls the morphogenetic field.
00:29:13 ►
What is novelty?
00:29:14 ►
Novelty is self-explanatory.
00:29:17 ►
It’s what breaks the pattern.
00:29:20 ►
New connections, new possibilities.
00:29:25 ►
And the universe is in a state of dynamic tension
00:29:29 ►
between these two tendencies.
00:29:32 ►
Novelty surges forward,
00:29:35 ►
new art movements, new technologies, new inventions,
00:29:38 ►
new social mores, new classes.
00:29:42 ►
And then habit reasserts itself,
00:29:47 ►
close the theaters, kill the Jews,
00:29:51 ►
reestablish the old order,
00:29:53 ►
and this goes on over and over and over again.
00:29:58 ►
But the good news is this is not a Manichean struggle.
00:30:03 ►
This is not an eternal struggle
00:30:07 ►
novelty is winning novelty is winning inch by inch iota by iota over millions
00:30:18 ►
and billions of years the universe grows more novel more connected different temperature regimes new
00:30:29 ►
forms of physical new domains of physical law because at first the universe was very hot
00:30:36 ►
you couldn’t have organic chemistry you couldn’t have societies well Well now, if novelty is, in a sense, what I’ve described to you is what
00:30:50 ►
we could call a novelty conserving engine. The universe is a novelty consuming, conserving engine.
00:30:58 ►
It produces novelty and then it acts to hang on to it. And it uses that novelty
00:31:05 ►
to build the next level of novelty.
00:31:10 ►
So upon matter,
00:31:13 ►
it builds long-chain polymers, DNA,
00:31:17 ►
it builds organic molecular structure.
00:31:21 ►
Upon that, animal life is organized upon that complex sentient
00:31:28 ►
higher animals upon that technology using humans and upon that the global
00:31:34 ►
society that we live in well now notice something interesting has happened by making novelty our value to be conserved.
00:31:47 ►
Suddenly, the human enterprise is not peripheral.
00:31:53 ►
Suddenly, the human enterprise is what it’s all about.
00:31:58 ►
The cosmos has been moving its eggs
00:32:01 ►
closer and closer to one basket for eons
00:32:05 ►
you know the action is not now
00:32:08 ►
in
00:32:09 ►
the bryophytes
00:32:12 ►
or the coleocants
00:32:14 ►
or the reptiles
00:32:15 ►
the action now is in a single
00:32:17 ►
species of primate
00:32:19 ►
all of nature has halted
00:32:22 ►
its activity to turn
00:32:24 ►
and watch as homo sapien sapien the double thinking
00:32:28 ►
monkey takes the stage and begins to work with novelty on a scale like nothing that has ever
00:32:37 ►
been seen before and this this tool building function and i use the word tool in the broadest possible sense
00:32:46 ►
language is a tool social organization is a tool but this is what we do we
00:32:53 ►
build tools and McLuhan very wisely observed these tools are extensions of
00:33:01 ►
who we are they are only distinct from us in our opinion,
00:33:08 ►
but in fact they represent extensions of our humanness.
00:33:14 ►
And now, well, for some time,
00:33:18 ►
let’s say obviously for about 10,000 years,
00:33:22 ►
something really weird has been going on.
00:33:26 ►
Because before that,
00:33:28 ►
time had an entirely different character.
00:33:31 ►
Even in an era when there were people
00:33:34 ►
using fire and practicing rituals
00:33:38 ►
and chipping stone,
00:33:39 ►
my God, the monotony of it.
00:33:42 ►
I mean, try to imagine 10 000 years where what happens is you go from flaking
00:33:50 ►
on one side to flaking on both sides and this is hailed in the archaeological record as a staggering
00:33:57 ►
cultural advance i mean we’re talking major boredom on one level about 10,000 years ago it began to quicken and people
00:34:09 ►
moved into cities and they began to elaborate specialized and social forms
00:34:15 ►
so forth and so on well then about a hundred years ago this went through an
00:34:22 ►
order of magnitude of acceleration and about 15
00:34:26 ►
years ago it underwent another order of magnitude of acceleration so we are now
00:34:33 ►
living in an entirely different kind of time our cultural toolkit is being
00:34:42 ►
replaced approximately every 18 months
00:34:45 ►
there was a time when it was not replaced
00:34:49 ►
every 18,000 years
00:34:51 ►
the tools by which we make our way
00:34:56 ►
into the world
00:34:57 ►
for instance in August I was told
00:35:01 ►
the earth has moved
00:35:04 ►
mosaic is the most powerful tool ever created for
00:35:08 ►
moving human minds around on the web three weeks ago I was told junk mosaic
00:35:15 ►
who needs it Netscape is the most powerful tool ever created and you play
00:35:20 ►
with Netscape and you compare it to Mosaic and you have to admit, yep, it’s better.
00:35:26 ►
Orders of magnitude better.
00:35:28 ►
But the rate at which these tools are being replaced is phenomenal.
00:35:34 ►
The other thing which is going on
00:35:36 ►
is that all kinds of specialties are making breakthroughs
00:35:43 ►
that are not being integrated to other specialties are making breakthroughs that are not being integrated to other specialties the
00:35:47 ►
cultural enterprise is not being managed it’s out of control which is good news i think because if
00:35:56 ►
it were under control it would probably be under the control of someone with plans not terribly pleasant for the rest of us I think the
00:36:06 ►
great good news is that the cultural process is expressing its own dynamic
00:36:13 ►
I’m absolutely phobic of conspiracy theory I just think it’s a silly way to
00:36:19 ►
think about reality God help anybody who tries to seize control of this tiger because, yeah.
00:36:27 ►
I don’t understand. Why you believe in development? Or this is a premise of you that
00:36:35 ►
there is time that there is a development for and evolution. Why you believe in that?
00:36:40 ►
Well, because I think the historical record shows a progressive movement
00:36:46 ►
from simpler to more complex form. And then the question is, how does it happen? And there
00:36:54 ►
are different theories about that. But to my mind, it’s pretty clear that as you go
00:37:00 ►
back in time, the universe becomes a simpler and simpler place
00:37:06 ►
I think we should make clear
00:37:10 ►
if you’re thinking
00:37:14 ►
if there’s time or if there’s not time
00:37:16 ►
we should make it clear
00:37:19 ►
well this is sort of the question of
00:37:22 ►
is there absolute time or is time defined by the systems embedded in it?
00:37:31 ►
It’s a philosophical question.
00:37:33 ►
I suppose if I were pressed, I would say it’s defined by the systems embedded in it.
00:37:39 ►
But I am saying, you see, for science, time is not exactly a thing.
00:37:47 ►
It becomes somewhat thing-like in relativity because it’s mated with space,
00:37:53 ►
which is more thing-like than time.
00:37:56 ►
But I’m suggesting that time is a real thing,
00:38:02 ►
as real as electricity or electromagnetic fields, that time, well, I
00:38:11 ►
didn’t really intend to get off into this, but briefly, here’s the bit. Science uses
00:38:17 ►
probability theory. That’s actually what science is. It’s a kind of expansion of probability theory. And probability theory says
00:38:27 ►
that, you know, the first thing you learn when you study probability is that chance has no memory.
00:38:35 ►
They drum this into you. So they say to you, if you flip a coin 50 times and it comes up heads 50 times,
00:38:48 ►
what are the odds it will come up heads the 51st time?
00:38:55 ►
And the correct answer in probability class is 50-50. The odds are always 50-50.
00:38:58 ►
But a gambler who had flipped that coin 50 times
00:39:02 ►
and seen it come up heads would bet heads and win because there’s something funny about that coin 50 times and seen it come up heads, would bet heads and win,
00:39:07 ►
because there’s something funny about that coin.
00:39:10 ►
If the odds were really 50-50 of a coin coming up heads or tails,
00:39:17 ►
then the most common outcome of a coin toss
00:39:20 ►
would be for the coin to land on its edge.
00:39:24 ►
And that’s the rarest outcome there is in a coin
00:39:28 ►
toss. You can hang out in bars your entire life and never see a coin toss land on its edge.
00:39:36 ►
So probability theory is flawed, but the flaws are of such a nature that once you accept probability theory, you will never
00:39:47 ►
be able to detect the flaw, because in a sense the theory has preceded the observation. And what I’m
00:39:55 ►
saying is that complex systems, human systems, biological systems, do not operate probabilistically. They operate
00:40:08 ►
according to a different rule, which up until recently, the best description we had came from
00:40:18 ►
Chinese philosophy. It was called the Tao. And the idea there is that there is this invisible
00:40:26 ►
force which builds things up empires powerful families you may name it and it
00:40:36 ►
tears these things down according to laws which are very very mysterious and
00:40:43 ►
part of the Tao
00:40:50 ►
Well this time-life thing that I’ve developed is essentially the Tao without
00:40:58 ►
mystery it strips away all that metaphysical baffle garb and says here’s an algorithm
00:41:04 ►
entirely formal and explicit that meets all the criteria of Tao and the point that I want to leave
00:41:09 ►
you with tonight is that the entertaining you don’t even have to
00:41:15 ►
accept these ideas just the entertaining of these ideas is an empowering experience because it places our historical era and each of us individually
00:41:29 ►
at a very critical juncture in the alchemical process of cosmic salvation,
00:41:40 ►
if you want to put it that way.
00:41:42 ►
In other words, a lot is riding on how this all comes out.
00:41:47 ►
Yeah?
00:41:48 ►
Well, you talked about primary experience, one of the things you mentioned. And one of
00:41:54 ►
my primary experiences has been, I guess what I would call community with nature, that which
00:42:00 ►
is not cultural. And I’m wondering how the way you see development
00:42:07 ►
and how you see globalization and all that
00:42:09 ►
ties into what I assume is similar to that experience that I had
00:42:14 ►
that you mentioned, which is the archaic revival.
00:42:17 ►
It seems that there’s some kind of opposites going on there for me,
00:42:20 ►
and I want to know how you tie them together.
00:42:23 ►
Well, yes.
00:42:24 ►
I mean, what’s happening
00:42:25 ►
is that we are headed into
00:42:28 ►
a kind of super technology,
00:42:31 ►
a global information society,
00:42:34 ►
so forth and so on.
00:42:36 ►
But strangely enough,
00:42:39 ►
and you have to go back to McLuhan for this,
00:42:42 ►
the sensory ratios
00:42:44 ►
that are being reinforced by the new electronic
00:42:47 ►
technology are like the sensory ratios that were in place 15,000 years ago. In other words,
00:42:55 ►
if print is in fact a cultural disease or, I don’t want to, no, a condition. Print imposes a condition on the human mind
00:43:08 ►
which is now lifting.
00:43:12 ►
And as the cloud of print-created conditioning
00:43:16 ►
and institutions is lifted,
00:43:19 ►
we discover that we are not Victorian ladies and gentlemen,
00:43:24 ►
model citizens in the Jeffersonian state,
00:43:27 ►
but that we like to trance dance and mess around sexually
00:43:33 ►
and get down and dirty.
00:43:36 ►
In other words, there is an archaic impulse
00:43:40 ►
that comes into this as we reclaim our senses.
00:43:44 ►
Some of you may have read Morris Berman’s wonderful book
00:43:48 ►
called Coming to Our Senses.
00:43:51 ►
Well, I’ve never met Morris Berman,
00:43:53 ►
but I absolutely subscribe to everything said there.
00:43:59 ►
History was an incredibly damaging experience,
00:44:03 ►
and now it’s over, in a sense.
00:44:07 ►
And we’re like the victims of a very long
00:44:10 ►
and prolonged bombardment of some sort.
00:44:14 ►
And now it’s over.
00:44:16 ►
And we can begin to pick up the pieces and say,
00:44:19 ►
well, what Christianity did to our sexuality,
00:44:23 ►
what monotheism did to our gender relationships,
00:44:27 ►
so forth and so on.
00:44:28 ►
Now we can fix all of this.
00:44:32 ►
But it is this paradoxical enterprise
00:44:36 ►
of a neo-archaism taking place
00:44:40 ►
in a cyberdelic, hyper-global society.
00:44:43 ►
That’s why body piercing, tattooing,
00:44:48 ►
trance dance, drug experience,
00:44:52 ►
drumming experiences,
00:44:56 ►
all of these things I take to be
00:45:00 ►
very healthy signs of this archaic impulse
00:45:04 ►
coming out in society I mean the what was created
00:45:09 ►
by the era of the proper gentleman was you know excellent table manners and genocide over most of
00:45:17 ►
the surface of the planet however all of this all of these changes that are going on each one must give way for the next
00:45:29 ►
like we are never going to reach any kind of equilibrium between here and the concrescence
00:45:36 ►
this point ahead of us some 18 years in the future where all these biological, cultural and physical vectors
00:45:46 ►
move into
00:45:47 ►
phase and create
00:45:49 ►
a phase transition
00:45:51 ►
because in a sense
00:45:54 ►
history is
00:45:56 ►
being forced
00:45:58 ►
to repeat itself
00:45:59 ►
at an incredibly
00:46:01 ►
accelerated rate
00:46:03 ►
and I mean this not as a metaphor,
00:46:06 ►
as is ordinarily said.
00:46:07 ►
I mean literally that as we approach the Omega Point,
00:46:12 ►
there are a series of recursive reflections,
00:46:16 ►
almost like passing through shock waves,
00:46:19 ►
where we reiterate past historical episodes.
00:46:24 ►
Right now, I take us to be somewhere in the late 800s.
00:46:29 ►
Rome has fallen
00:46:31 ►
and the hard claw of the Christian church
00:46:37 ►
is just about to close itself over our jugular
00:46:40 ►
for about six years or so.
00:46:44 ►
If you’re of our persuasion,
00:46:46 ►
your best bet now is to probably move to Tartary
00:46:49 ►
till the Renaissance, which comes in 2004.
00:46:54 ►
The point being that we are living through
00:46:58 ►
a kind of mini dark age that is actually related
00:47:03 ►
to the dark ages that descended over related to the dark ages
00:47:05 ►
that descended over Europe
00:47:07 ►
at the fall of Rome
00:47:09 ►
we could not have one
00:47:11 ►
without the other
00:47:13 ►
time is speeding up but nevertheless
00:47:15 ►
we have to live through
00:47:17 ►
these resonances
00:47:20 ►
yeah
00:47:20 ►
let’s go over the time
00:47:23 ►
do you think that we can change history or what we call the past Yeah. Let’s go over the time.
00:47:29 ►
Do you think that we can change history or what we call the past?
00:47:35 ►
If you couldn’t change history, then you would have a determinism.
00:47:42 ►
The problem with determinism is that it makes philosophy impossible.
00:47:45 ►
Because if the universe is determined determined then you think what you think
00:47:47 ►
because you can’t think anything else
00:47:50 ►
and that makes
00:47:51 ►
the notion of truth
00:47:53 ►
rather curious
00:47:55 ►
for truth to exist
00:47:57 ►
there must be the possibility of error
00:47:59 ►
so what I
00:48:01 ►
but
00:48:01 ►
I think that
00:48:04 ►
the future is more determined
00:48:08 ►
than most people think
00:48:10 ►
what is determined in the future
00:48:13 ►
is the levels
00:48:16 ►
of habit and novelty
00:48:18 ►
they are already set
00:48:21 ►
out there ahead of us
00:48:23 ►
what is not set are the events, the people, the inventions,
00:48:30 ►
the catastrophes that will fulfill those abstract levels of novelty and habit. In other words,
00:48:40 ►
the future has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring but the the
00:48:47 ►
surface on which whatever occurs must be laid over already exists that’s why when we look at
00:48:57 ►
the time wave you’ll see people say you’re trying to predict the future not exactly we’re trying to predict the future. Not exactly. We’re trying to predict where in the future
00:49:05 ►
the novelty should be expected.
00:49:08 ►
But we understand that you can never predict
00:49:12 ►
what the novelty will actually be.
00:49:16 ►
But if you could predict where to expect it,
00:49:20 ►
you could remove a lot of the anxiety
00:49:22 ►
from people’s experience of the unfolding of history.
00:49:26 ►
Right now, history is an incredibly anxiety-producing process.
00:49:31 ►
I mean, people are just in despair over where we go from here.
00:49:36 ►
Yes?
00:49:38 ►
I might be getting a little off my head,
00:49:40 ►
because I know you’re going to talk about the time wave tomorrow night.
00:49:44 ►
But it occurred to me that when to talk about the time wave tomorrow night but it occurred to me that
00:49:46 ►
when you
00:49:47 ►
devise the time wave, what it says
00:49:50 ►
is when, basically
00:49:52 ►
what it says
00:49:54 ►
is when, yes, it answers the when
00:49:56 ►
question
00:49:56 ►
I’ve recently gone through a kind of
00:50:00 ►
funny change, I mean this is more addressed
00:50:02 ►
to the people who are fairly familiar
00:50:04 ►
with this material.
00:50:05 ►
But we’ve put a huge amount of emphasis
00:50:08 ►
when we talk about the time wave
00:50:10 ►
into the end point,
00:50:13 ►
which will occur on December 22, 2012 A.D.
00:50:18 ►
And we always discuss, you know,
00:50:19 ►
what will happen at the end point
00:50:21 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:50:23 ►
But I’ve noticed that the curious thing about the time wave
00:50:27 ►
is that it will put itself out of business at that moment.
00:50:32 ►
That regardless of what happens then,
00:50:36 ►
the time wave will be, I hate to use the word,
00:50:39 ►
history at that point.
00:50:41 ►
So in a sense sense we misuse
00:50:46 ►
the time wave if we stand
00:50:48 ►
around waiting for 2012
00:50:49 ►
because where the time
00:50:52 ►
wave is useful is
00:50:54 ►
between here and there
00:50:55 ►
because it gives us an
00:50:58 ►
accurate map of what
00:51:00 ►
I guarantee you is going to be the craziest
00:51:02 ►
18 years this planet
00:51:04 ►
has ever seen.
00:51:06 ►
And if you don’t have a map of some sort through what is about to begin to unpack itself on our doorstep,
00:51:14 ►
you will think that it’s the last days,
00:51:19 ►
because I think everything that is presently in place will be swept away and then whatever replaces
00:51:26 ►
that will be swept away. So part of my motivation in all this is to put the time wave in front
00:51:39 ►
of people and say, look, it’s worked for thousands and thousands of years,
00:51:46 ►
and it only has 18 years to go.
00:51:50 ►
So what intellectual justification is there
00:51:54 ►
for denying its efficacy in the next 18 years
00:51:59 ►
when it has four plus billion years of success under its belt?
00:52:05 ►
And this will all be thrashed out
00:52:07 ►
in the cultural marketplace of ideas.
00:52:11 ►
And I’m completely convinced that best ideas win
00:52:15 ►
because, you know, novelty, God is betting on novelty.
00:52:21 ►
And so if you bet on novelty,
00:52:24 ►
you’ll be carried along in that process.
00:52:28 ►
Yeah.
00:52:29 ►
Am I correct that you predicted
00:52:30 ►
the Republican win in the House?
00:52:34 ►
Well, I said it looked like a good time.
00:52:38 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:41 ►
As far as the election is concerned,
00:52:44 ►
I don’t know.
00:52:48 ►
Hawaii gives one a different perspective I’m living out there now
00:52:50 ►
suddenly we all discovered
00:52:56 ►
that we were born again democrats
00:52:57 ►
just because they all got kicked out
00:53:00 ►
for that a lot of time was spent lashing the democratic party
00:53:04 ►
as a bunch of jerks
00:53:05 ►
I think probably both impulses were good
00:53:08 ►
I think the election just proves
00:53:13 ►
that the world corporate state
00:53:15 ►
has made national governments irrelevant
00:53:18 ►
because while everybody’s yakking about the election
00:53:22 ►
the real news is lowest unemployment in four years,
00:53:31 ►
continuous growth into, what, the 27th month.
00:53:35 ►
I mean, Lloyd Benson retired three days ago and said if he could write the numbers,
00:53:41 ►
they wouldn’t be any different than the numbers he’s able to retire on.
00:53:45 ►
The economists are going berserk.
00:53:49 ►
And I think that what has happened very quietly over the past 10 years
00:53:54 ►
with chaos theory and fractal mathematics and this sort of thing
00:53:57 ►
is that economics has come out of the woodshed.
00:54:01 ►
It is not voodoo anymore.
00:54:04 ►
And the world corporate state is running a very
00:54:07 ►
tight ship. And look at the changes that have gone on just in the past five years. Marxism has been
00:54:16 ►
liquidated. Apartheid has been liquidated. The people in the Middle East have been told to get
00:54:21 ►
their stupid act together. The Irish question comes up for review.
00:54:27 ►
World trade barriers are dropping everywhere.
00:54:30 ►
These are all things on the agenda of the world corporate state
00:54:34 ►
because the world corporate state likes happy, well-paid consumers.
00:54:42 ►
War, an instrument of policy by nation states, is abhorrent to the
00:54:50 ►
world corporate state because it busts up assets and requires reinvestment. So I think, you know,
00:54:58 ►
if you have a United States senator threatening the life of the president. This tells you that these people are a bunch of irrelevant yahoos. It’s like the parliament of Tonga or something. It means they can get up and say anything they damn well please. The president doesn’t matter. The Senate doesn’t matter. None of it matters. It’s a roadshow and we’re all incredibly focused
00:55:26 ►
on it. And why is that? Because an instrumentality of the world corporate state called the media
00:55:33 ►
makes very sure that we speak of nothing else. Meanwhile, in the background, large changes are being put in place. And I am not doctrinaire on this.
00:55:48 ►
What we need to find out at this point
00:55:50 ►
is not what the Republican Party wants.
00:55:53 ►
We need to find out what does the world corporate state believe?
00:55:57 ►
Is it simply a slash and burn operation
00:56:03 ►
and we’re going to pedal ourselves into toxic environmental chaos
00:56:09 ►
or are there smarter heads in there somewhere who realize that the whole
00:56:17 ►
thing has to be managed otherwise it will turn on itself and be inoperable.
00:56:25 ►
But this is what happened a few hundred years ago.
00:56:30 ►
The church lost its steam and nationalism arose
00:56:35 ►
with a whole new vision of the world and politics and polity and power.
00:56:40 ►
And now the world corporate state.
00:56:44 ►
And the most exciting thing going on at the moment
00:56:47 ►
and to my mind extremely psychedelic
00:56:51 ►
is the creation of the web and the net.
00:56:57 ►
This is potentially what can change the culture
00:57:03 ►
and yet the web and the net is a wholly owned asset of the world corporate state.
00:57:10 ►
However, the net was created by a Cold War mentality
00:57:15 ►
and designed to be indestructible.
00:57:19 ►
That’s why it is indestructible.
00:57:21 ►
Otherwise they would have destroyed it.
00:57:23 ►
You may bet your bottom dollar.
00:57:25 ►
But in the era of thermonuclear warfare they designed it to be indestructible and now no one can stop it
00:57:33 ►
and i’m in favor of all these runaway processes i think wherever wherever management is enslaved
00:57:40 ►
to ideology human values are just stomped on.
00:57:47 ►
I mean, that’s what happened with Marxism.
00:57:48 ►
It’s what happens with
00:57:49 ►
piratical capitalism,
00:57:52 ►
so forth and so on.
00:57:55 ►
But I think the psychedelic position
00:57:58 ►
to take on all this
00:57:59 ►
is that it’s one hell of a show.
00:58:02 ►
And don’t get your heart set on anybody
00:58:05 ►
because they’ll be swept away
00:58:07 ►
as fast as you can say Jack Robinson.
00:58:11 ►
We are not going right or left
00:58:13 ►
or any place so conventional.
00:58:17 ►
Processes have been set in motion
00:58:20 ►
that no political theory
00:58:23 ►
can come to terms with, I well we could go yeah last question
00:58:30 ►
oh I think probably there’s a real war going on inside the world corporate state that it hasn’t actually gotten itself together yet.
00:58:50 ►
Victory came with unexpected swiftness.
00:58:55 ►
And very few people, even inside the Fortune 500 or the World Bank or the IMF actually understand the degree to which the corporate
00:59:08 ►
mentality is now in charge of the planet. I imagine that what it is is it’s a struggle
00:59:15 ►
between dinosaurs and a more ecologically recycle-minded kind of mentality. I’m not a Marxist, but I know enough of Marx to
00:59:29 ►
know that in classical capitalistic theory, you can’t have capitalism unless you have unlimited
00:59:37 ►
exploitable natural resources. And, you know, 15 years ago, I would have said capitalism’s salvation is space-based resources
00:59:48 ►
apparently the people who manage the money
00:59:52 ►
decided not to put money into that
00:59:55 ►
and now there is no infrastructure
00:59:58 ►
for the delivery of space-based resources
01:00:00 ►
so apparently we’re going to try
01:00:04 ►
what is called closed cycle capitalism. And that may be
01:00:10 ►
morally dubious because as far as I can understand, it requires a permanent underclass
01:00:18 ►
somewhere. You can’t raise everybody to the level of first world consumers because somewhere there has to be somebody working for peanuts
01:00:27 ►
manufacturing all this junk.
01:00:31 ►
Anyway, these are issues.
01:00:33 ►
To me, none of this is far afield.
01:00:36 ►
I mean, to me, the psychedelic experience
01:00:38 ►
is the experience of trying to make sense of reality.
01:00:43 ►
And it used to be,
01:00:46 ►
although I can’t remember when,
01:00:49 ►
that psychedelic self-exploration
01:00:51 ►
was presented as a kind of do-it-yourself,
01:00:55 ►
courageous psychotherapy.
01:00:57 ►
It was a personal voyage.
01:01:00 ►
It is only if you don’t take it seriously.
01:01:05 ►
If you take it seriously,
01:01:07 ►
then this is not your personal stuff.
01:01:09 ►
This is the stuff.
01:01:12 ►
And that’s how shamans approach it.
01:01:15 ►
They wouldn’t be able to conceive of what you mean
01:01:18 ►
by a personal vision.
01:01:20 ►
I mean, there are only visions.
01:01:23 ►
And if psychedelics are on any level to be taken seriously as catalyzers or expanders of consciousness, then we need them. Because it’s an absence of consciousness that is making this historical transition so excruciating.
01:01:43 ►
is making this historical transition so excruciating.
01:01:46 ►
And to the degree that we can raise consciousness,
01:01:48 ►
our own and other people’s,
01:01:52 ►
we can go through this without a lot of yelling and hollering.
01:01:57 ►
But people who do not understand what’s going on and their numbers will multiply as the chaos spreads
01:02:00 ►
are going to require a great deal of reassurance.
01:02:07 ►
Well, on that thought, I’ll send you to bed.
01:02:11 ►
Let’s get together tomorrow morning here at 10 a.m.
01:02:15 ►
Thank you all very much.
01:02:16 ►
It’s a good group.
01:02:17 ►
I’m happy to be here.
01:02:24 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:26 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:31 ►
Well, the first thing that I feel obliged to say is,
01:02:35 ►
aren’t you pleased that you and I made it through
01:02:38 ►
what Terrence predicted would be the craziest 18 years this planet has ever seen?
01:02:44 ►
I know I’m happy to have made it through.
01:02:48 ►
So, what were you thinking about when, well, I guess it was about 15 minutes into this talk,
01:02:53 ►
that Terence was saying something about time speeding up and having a feeling of imminent crisis?
01:02:59 ►
And, well, when he started talking about that, you know, of course, most people thought of the time wave and all the 2012 hoopla and maybe just discounted what he was saying.
01:03:11 ►
But I didn’t think about his words that way.
01:03:14 ►
For me, whether the year is 2000 or 2012 or 2112, which us Rush fans can resonate with,
01:03:24 ►
2112, which us Rush fans can resonate with.
01:03:31 ►
But to me, it really doesn’t matter how close to predicting the exact date of such a crisis point that Terrence was.
01:03:37 ►
For me, his rap about global ecological crisis and the population explosion and the persecution of people with ideas that don’t exactly fit into today’s version of our cultures,
01:03:44 ►
in various places around the world at least,
01:03:47 ►
well, I think that what Terence had to say back then is still very relevant today.
01:03:52 ►
What do you think?
01:03:54 ►
As I mentioned earlier, this talk was given in 1994,
01:04:00 ►
a moment in time when the web was still in its infancy.
01:04:04 ►
In fact, development of the browser had only begun two years before this talk,
01:04:08 ►
so you can see how tuned in Terrence was to the moment that is now upon us.
01:04:14 ►
However geek that I am, I can’t pass up the opportunity to once again correct the false impression
01:04:21 ►
that the Internet was originally designed to survive a nuclear attack.
01:04:25 ►
That is simply not true.
01:04:27 ►
But you don’t have to take my word for it.
01:04:30 ►
You can now read some of the excellent histories about the early days of the net for yourself.
01:04:35 ►
And one of my favorites is Where Wizards Stay Up Late, The Origins of the Internet.
01:04:41 ►
And it’s by Katie Hafner.
01:04:43 ►
Now, while I was still engaged in the corporate world, I was very fortunate to meet
01:04:47 ►
and work with some of the people that she writes about, and I find that her
01:04:51 ►
reporting is very accurate. So, my point is, I guess, that
01:04:55 ►
we’re all surrounded all day long by these little bits of
01:04:59 ►
misinformation here, there, and everywhere, and when possible, I think we should correct
01:05:03 ►
these little memes as best we can.
01:05:06 ►
You know, like Terrence always said, be sure that you know the difference between the shit and the shy NOLA.
01:05:11 ►
Ah, where was I?
01:05:12 ►
Ah, returning to the talk that we just now listened to.
01:05:16 ►
I want to just quickly replay two very short sound bites that, well, together they total less than 40 seconds.
01:05:25 ►
short sound bites that, well, together they total less than 40 seconds. However, I think that either one of them could provide the basis for an entire weekend conference.
01:05:30 ►
We need a metaphor that can contain the demon of the future that we have conjured into being.
01:05:51 ►
into being. Through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself. And these phase transitions are major in the life of this planet, which is four
01:06:00 ►
billion years. We can probably look back to no more than half a dozen
01:06:05 ►
of these kinds of phase transitions.
01:06:10 ►
So, now do you understand what I mean when I say that as I listen to a talk by Terence,
01:06:16 ►
he’ll sometimes say something that just sends me off on a little brief tangent of my own thoughts,
01:06:21 ►
but shortly I’ll return back to his lecture, however, having
01:06:25 ►
missed something like, well, maybe those two sound bites that I just now played.
01:06:30 ►
And then, when I listen to it again a year or so later, I sometimes hear for the first
01:06:34 ►
time something completely new.
01:06:36 ►
And for me, that’s the true joy of listening to the Bard McKenna.
01:06:42 ►
Now, I have just two quick announcements before I get out of here today. The first is to
01:06:47 ►
remind you that there is now a free psychedelic salon magazine that’s available for you on
01:06:52 ►
Flipboard if you have that app on your tablet or your mobile device and at the present time there
01:06:58 ►
well there’s around 35 articles in it and there have been over 1,500 flips so far. So check it out if you get a chance. The other
01:07:07 ►
announcement is for our fellow salonners who will be attending the
01:07:11 ►
upcoming Psychedelic Science 2013 conference
01:07:15 ►
that’s going to be held in Oakland, California. It’s being produced
01:07:20 ►
of course by MAPS from the 18th through the 23rd of this
01:07:24 ►
month,
01:07:30 ►
which is April 2013 for you time travelers who are joining us in the future.
01:07:34 ►
And by the way, you can find the details about this conference in the Psychedelic Salon magazine that I just mentioned.
01:07:38 ►
But one event that I don’t think is yet listed on the webpage for that conference
01:07:43 ►
is the screening of a movie at 8 p.m. on the Saturday night of the conference.
01:07:49 ►
In fact, it’s going to be a world premiere,
01:07:52 ►
and the co-creators, Tom Huckabee and George Wada,
01:07:55 ►
will be there for a Q&A session after the screening of this 30-minute film,
01:08:00 ►
which is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.
01:08:04 ►
film, which is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.
01:08:11 ►
Now, basically, it’s the story about one of the ways that MDMA got out of the laboratory and hit the streets in Dallas, Texas in a rather big way, which was most visibly seen
01:08:16 ►
in the form of the legendary Stark Club.
01:08:19 ►
But there was also an underground MDMA scene in Dallas, and that is a story that’s partly told in this movie.
01:08:27 ►
And did I mention that the person telling the story is me?
01:08:32 ►
So, if you’re wondering how a straight, narrow, Irish, Catholic, Republican lawyer living in Dallas, Texas,
01:08:40 ►
made it from there to hosting these podcasts, well, I guess you could say that this is the Genesis story of Lorenzo.
01:08:49 ►
And I hope that those of you who get to see it will enjoy it.
01:08:52 ►
I know that Tom and George have really done a wonderful job of making my shady past, well, actually look quite respectable.
01:09:02 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:09:05 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my
01:09:08 ►
friends, and never
01:09:10 ►
forget…
01:09:11 ►
This counts. Somehow
01:09:13 ►
it matters. I matter.
01:09:16 ►
My life matters. My family.
01:09:18 ►
Culture. The human
01:09:20 ►
enterprise. This planet.
01:09:21 ►
It’s biota. This matters.
01:09:24 ►
It all matters matters meaning is intrinsic as a primary datum