349 - A Higher Dimensional Sectioning of Reality

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Just because you have a nut theory it doesn’t mean that you agree with other nut theories. In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them. After all, there’s a limited pool there that we’re all after.”

“Because I believe psychedelics are a kind of higher dimensional sectioning of reality, I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.”

“Shamanism is about shape shifting. Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a tool kit that works.”

“I think psychedelics are sort of like doing calisthenics in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.”

“[Psychedelic experiences are] beyond the reach of cultural manipulation, and discovering this and exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity. Culture is a form of enforced infantilism. It’s the last nursery, and most people never leave it.”

“It doesn’t matter what your cultural conditioning is, it falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic. And for most people that’s frightening.”

“We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.”

“There is an intelligence in the species that is deeper than the societies and the systems that we erect to rule us, and this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes in the evolution of the mass psyche, such as the Renaissance for example.”

“Impressionism [in painting] is simply twenty minutes into LSD.”

“Belief is a form of infantilism. There is no ground for believing anything.”

“I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe. That’s not the issue with me, but it is not tacky. It is not tacky.”

Previous Episode §

348 - Entheogens and Plant Medicines

Next Episode §

350 - Healing Through Sound and Ayahuasca

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And the first thing that I’d like to do today is to thank our fellow salonners who have either paid for a copy of my

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pay-what-you-can audiobook version of my novel, The Genesis Generation,

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or who made a direct donation to the salon to help pay for our server and bandwidth.

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Usually I send our donors a little thank- you email note, but I’ve been holding off

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this month because I’d hoped to be able to send you a direct link to the documentary that had its

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premiere at the recent Psychedelic Sciences Conference. It’s the one that I’ve mentioned

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before, which is an interview that I gave about the MDMA scene in Dallas in the early 80s, and it’s titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate.

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However, there have been a few delays here in making it available online,

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but as soon as the producers let me know,

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I’ll post the link to the video in the Salon Notes blog and on my Facebook page.

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But in the meantime, like probably tomorrow,

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I’ll at least try to get a little thank you note

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out to all of you wonderful souls who make these podcasts possible. And now for today’s podcast,

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I’m going to pick up on the Terrence McKenna workshop that we heard the first part of two

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podcasts back. As I mentioned back then, this workshop took place in December of 1994,

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As I mentioned back then, this workshop took place in December of 1994, and the session was given no title.

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So I’ve had to pick out one or two things out of a dozen or so possible topics and use one of them for a title today.

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And as you listen to it with me right now, should you come up with a better title,

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why don’t you post it in the comments section of the program notes for this podcast. And if I like it, I may even go to the work of changing the title in the program notes

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and in the MP3 file as well.

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Now, a couple of things that you may want to note as we go along on this little mind trip

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with the Bard McKenna is to pay attention to his sense of humor,

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particularly as it applies right in the beginning to what he calls nut theories.

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And while my tendency was to cut out his discussion of the stoned ape theory,

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this time he approaches it from a different direction

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and allows us how some of his critics maybe have their good points as well.

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But what most caught me in this talk, and it was only a single sentence,

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but when he was talking about culture not being your friend, he also said, and this is the first time that I remember hearing this thought exactly as he said it, but he said that we humans have invented culture and placed it directly between ourselves and nature. Now I don’t know if that’s going to resonate with you, but it sure has given me a

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new way of looking at the issue. But enough of me telling you what you’re about to hear,

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let’s just listen to a few more thoughts from Terrence McKenna on One Morning in the Winter of

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I’m not very keen on the whole abduction shtick. I think that one of the symptoms of cultural disintegration

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is simply that people lose the ability to distinguish between dream and memory.

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between dream and memory and that somehow one’s past,

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one’s real past and one’s dream past

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simply become one’s past

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and then under certain circumstances,

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you know, what was basically dream material

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is presented as reality.

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You know, just because you have a nut theory,

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it doesn’t mean that you agree with other nut theories.

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In fact, it often makes you very hostile to them.

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After all, there’s a limited pool there that we’re all…

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my whole motive my idea with psychedelics at throughout my whole career with them was that they were the purpose was to go out into mind space and hunt ideas and to bring something back

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to show the folks around the campfire

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something that would astonish and amaze us all

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well you know it’s a narrow keyhole

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the mind

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you can’t bring back a flower

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like the time traveler does in Wells’ story.

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So I found the only thing I could bring back,

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not being graphically endowed, was ideas.

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It’s a very mysterious business,

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the revelation to mind of the

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world

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since the last time I talked to any

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audience I

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finally understood an argument

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of my enemies that I had

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never understood before

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enemies in the

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friendly collegial ideological

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sense in other words

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enemies

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the countervailing theory

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to the evolution of consciousness how it came to be so rapidly as opposed to the

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idea that it was stimulated by psychedelic compounds in the early human diet was and I’ve ridiculed this idea to you before the idea that

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human beings throw things and because we were small and weak and we hunted very large animals

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we learned to hurl rocks with great accuracy and that this is a behavior not observed in the animal world

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I mean monkeys hurl feces

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in a generally downward direction

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to indicate displeasure

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but their aim is lousy

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which is a very fortunate thing

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if you’re an Amazon explorer

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but human beings can hit

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with considerable force an object up to 120 feet away

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and evolutionary biologists have fastened on this

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as requiring so much coordination of neural material

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that there would be enough left over to invent western civilization and

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explore the planets once you had this thing down. Well, it always seemed somewhat preposterous to me

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and I pointed out that it would make the big league baseball pitcher the paradigm of evolutionary accomplishment in the human world if that standard were accepted

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but now i understand the argument a little better and it’s it’s slightly deeper than i thought

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because here’s the here’s what they were trying to say the first time

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it isn’t the this neural coordination which is going on is really about planning

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that it is an extraordinary thing to look at a rock in your hand and to make the calculation

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into the forward vector of the future aha if i hope hurl back and impart a certain energy in a certain direction

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with a certain intensity this thing will follow a path through space and will land somewhere with

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benign consequences to me and my side and it’s the key concept in here is plan

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this is a plan

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and animals don’t do this

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there are no plans

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in the animal world

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their consciousness is of the moment

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and doesn’t involve this complex triangulation out of the moment toward future

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consequences in quite this way because you see

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what happens when you let go of the rock

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is that you can no longer control it

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it isn’t like hunting or beating something to death

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with a stick where the strategy is being readjusted moment to moment.

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No, once the projectile is released from your hand,

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that’s all the planning you get to do.

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So it represents a concrescence of intent.

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And this building toward the concrescence of intent,

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and this building toward the concrescence of intent

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this plan

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making then

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is the tiny

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flutter of the butterfly’s wing

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that ripples out

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through the chaotic universe

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and the next thing you know

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the kings of Babylon

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are issuing their codes

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of law and slaves

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under the lash are erecting cities

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and the stars are being brought into a mathematical model, so forth and so on.

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Well, I just wanted to mention that I’m also working on a second book at the moment where

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we’re going to go back into the psilocybin theory

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of the origin of consciousness

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and actually attempt to make a case

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that will demand attack.

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In other words,

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to actually marshal

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all of the anatomical,

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paleontological, primate data

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because the more we research,

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the more it appears true

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that by looking at the psychedelics, in fact,

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they become a kind of key

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to understanding the entire phenomenon of human emergence

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by looking at the larger issue of food as an environmental dimension.

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In other words, our food has shaped us. As omnivores, we have exposed ourselves to a very high input of mutagenic material over the course of our omnivorous behavior.

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And this has accelerated the rate of mutation in our species.

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This is why there are so many cancers.

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Those cancers are maladaptive mutations.

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Most are.

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Most mutations are non-productive.

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But by being

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a creature of the jungle canopy

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who underwent a forced

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migration to an entirely

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different nutritional environment,

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the grassland,

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we opened

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ourselves up to this

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mutagenic influence. And it’s only

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the spectacular effect of the psychoactive compounds

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impacting on neural organization, cognition, and social organization

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that I focused on originally.

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But now the realization is beginning to ripple out

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through the evolutionary community that, yes is the the hidden factor the the

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mutagenic diet and the forced shift in environment there are also ideologically unexpected twists and

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turns in all this I’ve recently met a very interesting person he’s going to be my co-author and this evolution

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book Philippe de Vaugelay some of you may know him and he is a lover of

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animals this guy has made a fortune in publishing books on reptile care and if

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you have a broken iguana he’s the man to see but he pointed out something to me

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very very interesting

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which goes against prevailing political correctness

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for sure

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which is that browsing ungulate animals

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have absolutely no interest

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in the behavior of other animals

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they couldn’t give a hoot who’s interested in the behavior of other animals. They couldn’t give a hoot.

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Who’s interested in the behavior of other animals

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are hunting animals.

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And that in order to successfully hunt an animal,

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you must, in a sense, be able to become it.

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You must be able to transfer your consciousness into it

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and imagine its motivations, its behaviors, so forth and so on.

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And so Philippe has convinced me that on one level, the earliest human consciousness was not human consciousness at all. ability to enter into the behavior patterns and psychologies of other mammals in the grassland

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environment that it was predating upon following vultures as a basis for the beginning of nomadism

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and this sort of thing obviously Obviously, predator animals are aware

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and their evolutionary success is based on environmental awareness

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and being able to act based on inputting the behavior of other animals.

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This is a very complex mental world

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compared to the world of the fruititarian,

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leaf-eating canopy browser

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that we

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came from

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and then it appears

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that in a series of

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coalescing

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involutions

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of culture and neural

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organization driven

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by

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the spatial coincidence of human beings,

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cattle, mushrooms,

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our original primate programming was restructured.

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And I’ve talked a great deal about this.

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I think this is the key to understanding

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at least our sexual politics.

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All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies.

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And this is where the hard-bodied, sharp-fanged males, young males,

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arrange everybody else to suit themselves.

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The elderly, the sexually available females,

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the young, homosexuals, the sick,

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everybody gets told where to stand and what to do.

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This is how primates operate.

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This is how we operate.

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However, I think that for a long period

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in human beings, this was interrupted by nutritional factors

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and drug factors in the environment.

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That in a sense, a human society that is using psilocybin

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on even a lunar cycle of use

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is suppressing the ordinary

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pattern of male dominance

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hierarchical dominance

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it’s not genetically touching it

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it’s still there

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but in the same way that if you

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give a population of aggressive people

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a lot of opium

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aggression disappears

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if you give a population of people a kind of

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psychedelic boundary dissolving aphrodisiac that promotes group bonding

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and erodes monogamy and so forth then you get a different social ambience than

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if that weren’t present and I think the secret to understanding our curious relationship to the

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angelic and animal worlds has to do with the fact that under the influence of this hormone slash

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enzyme, which was suppressing ordinary patterns of male dominance, consciousness underwent an extraordinary series of bifurcations.

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And language, theater, poetry, magic, religion, dance, music, ethical values, altruism, everything emerged, you know, sometime between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago.

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The Paleolithic, the pre-agricultural era, an extraordinary period of novelty being expressed and conserved in the biological world the primate species the hominids

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suddenly just take the stage and through an amazing series of cultural transformations

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become a planet ruling species by 10,000 years ago. And then, not content with that,

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the process doesn’t slow down,

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it accelerates.

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And this has to do with the fact

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that we have somehow created,

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through language,

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a kind of adaptive strategy

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that is so flexible

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that unlike most adaptive strategies

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which sooner or later run into a blind

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box canyon and are just simply trapped there

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butting their heads against the wall

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you see it everywhere, the muscles down on the rocks

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and most evolutionary developmental lines

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are dead ends

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but somehow we broke free of that

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by ceasing to be defined by the physical body

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which is the stuff upon which evolution works

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and placing between ourselves

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and our environment

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a new thing called culture

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we began to mediate evolution

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you know evolution says

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the infirm, the idiot, the lame must die

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culture says we have different values about this

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maybe yes, maybe no

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but we will

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decide

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evolution says you know

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you must be a scattered species

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nomadic and moving

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across the surface of the planet

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like an animal culture says

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no we have strategies for

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food sequestration

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and common defense

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and we will build cities and so forth and so on.

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And so, since about, you know, pick a number,

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10,000 years ago, evolution has not been

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the dominating factor, biological evolution.

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Instead, there is something else,

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which the word epigenetic has been suggested

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meaning change not driven by genes our genes are the same if you were to be

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with a group of people active 10 to 15 thousand years ago they would look and

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just like you and I we haven’t changed that much. We’ve mixed the genes, but we haven’t particularly

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added new ones or lost genes. But in the epigenetic realm, how many languages have been generated

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over the past 10,000 years? How many world religions have come and gone? How many systems systems of government how many theories of polity and society we just furiously

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cast these things off and beginning about 500 years ago this phenomenon

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became was embraced as a permanent aspect of human existence in Western

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Europe and the concept of progress became enshrined.

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And progress is the idea that this process must go on,

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be extended and accelerated everywhere.

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And now it seems to be happening.

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I think, and as a consequence of this acceleration of process, all the contradictions in the old system, and I mean reaching back I think they give the kind of stereoscopic vision necessary to hold the entire hologram of what’s happening in your mind. The old paradigm is gone.

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I mean, we can talk about how different parts of it died.

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Maybe not everybody knows the story of how physics,

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the paradigmatic science of reason,

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turned into a place where nothing makes any sense at all, you know,

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and where stories are told so wild that a surrealist painter

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would flee from the gathering just shaking his head.

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That’s physics.

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The very bedrock of the whole western shtick has turned into a place of

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utter psychedelic contradiction and chaos. And the news hasn’t reached biology and psychology.

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They’re still operating under different paradigms. But what is keeping science alive at this point

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is the fact that it is able to whore itself to the marketplace.

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But in terms of the old program,

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which was providing some kind of metaphysical recitation

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of the nature of the universe,

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it’s pretty clearly out of reach at this point

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the universe has been discovered

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to be stranger than you can

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suppose

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and what this means to

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the troops

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which is you and me

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the citizens of these linear

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print created

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scientism ruled democratic

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industrial states what it means to us is

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you get your mind back. They have no need of it anymore. It’s actually become a

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burden to them. I mean, yes, they struggled like hell to take it, but then they

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discovered that it really wasn’t worth all that much anyhow the

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great thing about living in the twilight of an imperial decline is the permission that exists

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you know incredible resources lay before us and very few people are looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do.

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I mean, the fact that this community has been able to persist and exist, I mean, this is the Orphic community.

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of dissent, ecstasis, sexual ambiguity, so forth and so on,

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that reaches right back to Chalcolithic Greece and beyond.

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Shamanism is about shape-shifting.

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Shamanism is about doing phenomenology with a toolkit that works. And no religion, no philosophy, I think, has ever gone very far down the road of understanding. really a collective enterprise. Understanding is an individual enterprise.

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And you know, you can read Husserl and you can become a Hasid

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or you can assimilate these group understandings

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that are forms of wisdom.

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But ultimately, those are platforms

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for intrepid exploration.

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And now, at the end, I think, of this entire enterprise,

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I mean, I don’t know whether I’m changing or the world is changing or both,

00:25:59 ► §

but it has gotten so rich recently that it’s like an enormous meal at some over-reviewed restaurant

00:26:08 ► §

where you just have to push yourself away and say, you know, the spectacle is endless

00:26:15 ► §

and amazing and apparently it’s all going to come true. My impulse is to distance myself from it all I mean the it is well the

00:26:31 ► §

mushroom sent to me once it said this is what it’s like when a species prepares

00:26:38 ► §

to depart for the stars this is not unusual I mean the earth quakes the oceans boil

00:26:46 ► §

the planet came into existence

00:26:48 ► §

for this

00:26:50 ► §

all life for over a billion years

00:26:54 ► §

has been pointed toward

00:26:56 ► §

taking this step

00:26:58 ► §

you know leaving the oceans for the land

00:27:01 ► §

was dress rehearsal

00:27:03 ► §

for what will now be done.

00:27:06 ► §

And, you know, it’s chilling because it’s so huge.

00:27:11 ► §

I mean, you don’t even know, well, it’s just enormous.

00:27:15 ► §

And yet, apparently, when you look back through the history of the universe,

00:27:20 ► §

this is how it proceeds, incredibly gradually over staggering scales of time

00:27:27 ► §

but then every once in a while

00:27:29 ► §

you come around the corner

00:27:30 ► §

and there it is

00:27:32 ► §

a continent sinks

00:27:34 ► §

an asteroid impacts

00:27:36 ► §

a star explodes

00:27:38 ► §

two intelligent species

00:27:41 ► §

meet somewhere out in the cosmos

00:27:43 ► §

and these things then you know set ripples going for eons.

00:27:50 ► §

Yeah.

00:27:50 ► §

I’m curious what this has to do with psychedelics

00:27:52 ► §

because it seems to me that when you use psychedelics

00:27:56 ► §

to break down perceptual barriers,

00:28:00 ► §

that’s one thing,

00:28:01 ► §

but there’s such momentum going on in the world today

00:28:04 ► §

that things are breaking down

00:28:06 ► §

without psychedelics

00:28:07 ► §

although it may appear psychedelic

00:28:10 ► §

in terms of the way you see it

00:28:12 ► §

do you see what I’m getting at?

00:28:13 ► §

yeah I do

00:28:14 ► §

so at this juncture have we transcended psychedelics?

00:28:18 ► §

well

00:28:18 ► §

my idea is

00:28:21 ► §

that the psychedelic recapitulates

00:28:24 ► §

on the personal scale

00:28:26 ► §

this universal meltdown that is going on without the need of psychedelics.

00:28:32 ► §

But this universal meltdown is very frightening to people.

00:28:38 ► §

Most people are pattern-oriented and nostalgic.

00:28:43 ► §

It scares them.

00:28:45 ► §

And I think psychedelics are a way to,

00:28:49 ► §

it’s sort of like doing calisthenics

00:28:51 ► §

in preparation for the marathon at the end of time.

00:28:56 ► §

You know, people who have taken psychedelics

00:29:00 ► §

should be in a better position to assure,

00:29:05 ► §

reassure everybody else.

00:29:07 ► §

They’ll just say, well, you know, people will say,

00:29:10 ► §

the laws of physics are breaking down.

00:29:12 ► §

And you say, look, I’ve seen it before.

00:29:18 ► §

So, and in a way this thing

00:29:25 ► §

this event which wants to emerge

00:29:28 ► §

we think of it as quantized

00:29:31 ► §

in a single moment where the shift

00:29:34 ► §

will happen and it’s like the glory or something

00:29:37 ► §

but in a way our job if we have a job

00:29:41 ► §

and I’m not sure we do but if we have a job

00:29:43 ► §

then our job is to anticipate this

00:29:48 ► §

and to live it out before it happens.

00:29:51 ► §

Somebody very dear to me said to me 25 years ago,

00:29:54 ► §

my God, I don’t know how they…

00:29:56 ► §

Actually, it was in the same conversation

00:29:57 ► §

where they said history is the shockwave of eschatology.

00:30:01 ► §

How anybody could say that in 1975?

00:30:04 ► §

I do not understand. Anyway, he also said

00:30:08 ► §

we should live as though the apocalypse has already occurred. That’s the only way to transcend

00:30:16 ► §

the historical hysteria, because the historical hysteria is about this thing which it might happen it won’t happen it will happen and no you say it

00:30:26 ► §

did happen it did happen so enough about that already and we are building you know each thing

00:30:37 ► §

that we do anticipates this deeper fall inward into the dream. The dream is what awaits us at the end of history.

00:30:49 ► §

The dream, and you can call it hyperspace or cyberspace

00:30:54 ► §

or the trans-death realm,

00:30:58 ► §

but what it really is is it’s a going into the dream.

00:31:02 ► §

And what is the dream?

00:31:03 ► §

Well, the dream is a place where the laws are set into the dream. And what is the dream? The dream is a place

00:31:05 ► §

where the laws are set

00:31:08 ► §

by the imagination.

00:31:10 ► §

The imagination is God

00:31:12 ► §

in the dream.

00:31:15 ► §

And if there is a way for us

00:31:17 ► §

to mirror our highest aspirations,

00:31:20 ► §

in other words,

00:31:21 ► §

to inculcate the God image

00:31:24 ► §

in ourselves, then it’s by becoming the masters of our dream

00:31:30 ► §

and then creating through drugs, technology, magic

00:31:35 ► §

who cares the details come later

00:31:37 ► §

creating a way to share that

00:31:40 ► §

so that we each then are a god with an open office doorway to all the other gods who wander

00:31:50 ► §

through looking at the the the cosmogonies that we produce as art i was thinking about this this

00:31:58 ► §

morning because i was thinking you know what am i going to say to these folks and I was thinking about the platonic triad

00:32:06 ► §

of the good, the true

00:32:08 ► §

and the beautiful

00:32:09 ► §

and sometimes people have

00:32:12 ► §

dissed me and my obsession

00:32:14 ► §

with hallucination

00:32:15 ► §

because they say you know well LSD

00:32:18 ► §

doesn’t really cause hallucination

00:32:19 ► §

it causes insight

00:32:21 ► §

and complex

00:32:24 ► §

thoughts but why are you so focused on visual It causes insight and complex thoughts.

00:32:29 ► §

But why are you so focused on visual hallucination?

00:32:30 ► §

Which I am.

00:32:33 ► §

I mean, if it doesn’t do that, I’m not interested.

00:32:37 ► §

And then I thought the way into it is Plato talks about the good, the true, and the beautiful.

00:32:43 ► §

But the key concept is beautiful

00:32:47 ► §

because good, it’s abstract.

00:32:51 ► §

True, it’s abstract.

00:32:54 ► §

But beauty is felt, perceived

00:32:58 ► §

with the senses as music, as painting,

00:33:02 ► §

whatever it is.

00:33:02 ► §

And so the bridge to the metaphysical absolutes of truth

00:33:08 ► §

and the good is through the palpable realm of the beautiful.

00:33:16 ► §

And to my mind, this is what these psychedelics achieve.

00:33:22 ► §

You know, they, as Huxley know they they dial open the valve of consciousness

00:33:29 ► §

or as Blake implied you know the the the window of perception is cleansed and then you see through

00:33:37 ► §

into an infinite holographic recursive world of mind and affectionate intelligence.

00:33:48 ► §

And somehow this mystery is in the body,

00:33:53 ► §

and therefore outside of time,

00:33:57 ► §

and therefore beyond, in some sense, the reach of culture.

00:34:02 ► §

Sex is like this to some degree.

00:34:09 ► §

Sex is in the body and outside of time. And culture spends a huge amount of its energy trying to reach sex, trying to contort it, push it one

00:34:18 ► §

way or another, and has produced some pretty bizarre themes and variations, but generally speaking has failed.

00:34:27 ► §

I mean, no society certainly has ever gotten rid of sex,

00:34:30 ► §

even though there have been societies ruled for a thousand years

00:34:34 ► §

by men wearing dresses,

00:34:35 ► §

but it gave us some of the most ribald minstrelsy around.

00:34:48 ► §

So there is this mystery in the body.

00:34:51 ► §

I’m now returning to the subject of psychedelics beyond the reach of cultural manipulation.

00:34:58 ► §

And discovering this and exploring it

00:35:00 ► §

is somehow the frontier of maturity.

00:35:03 ► §

Exploring it is somehow the frontier of maturity.

00:35:10 ► §

Culture is a form of enforced infantilism.

00:35:15 ► §

You know, it’s the last nursery and most people never leave it.

00:35:19 ► §

And they are perfectly happy to interpret the world

00:35:22 ► §

through the reassuring nonsense of their cultural

00:35:27 ► §

values, whatever they may happen to be. The reason psychedelics are so politically dynamite

00:35:36 ► §

is because they cast doubt on this final cultural envelope of insulation.

00:35:46 ► §

And they do it very democratically.

00:35:50 ► §

It doesn’t matter what your cultural conditioning is.

00:35:54 ► §

It falls into question under the influence of the psychedelic.

00:36:00 ► §

And then, for most people, that’s frightening.

00:36:03 ► §

Frightening enough that they not only don’t want to do it

00:36:07 ► §

but they are also keen to see that other people

00:36:10 ► §

don’t do it

00:36:11 ► §

because they realize this is some kind of a doorway

00:36:15 ► §

through which demons come

00:36:17 ► §

disruptive ideologies, strange forms of music

00:36:20 ► §

bizarre behaviors, unpleasant fashions

00:36:24 ► §

it’s all coming from this place

00:36:28 ► §

where these people are messing around.

00:36:30 ► §

And so there is an impulse to close it off.

00:36:34 ► §

And so there is, you know, a tradition 50,000 years old

00:36:39 ► §

of shamanism slash bohemianism.

00:36:44 ► §

People who are deputized

00:36:46 ► §

to be weird

00:36:47 ► §

and are told

00:36:49 ► §

okay you be weird

00:36:51 ► §

we’ll give you a hut

00:36:52 ► §

at the edge of the village

00:36:53 ► §

you be weird

00:36:55 ► §

and if we need you

00:36:56 ► §

we’ll call

00:36:57 ► §

that’s basically the role

00:37:01 ► §

no don’t buy we’ll’ll call you, you know.

00:37:06 ► §

I mean, the political position of shamans

00:37:09 ► §

is fascinating in these societies

00:37:11 ► §

because they share it, but they are not of it, you know,

00:37:14 ► §

and they’re only asked in when things are really desperate.

00:37:20 ► §

And I think, you know, bohemianism,

00:37:23 ► §

this Orphic tradition I’ve talked about

00:37:25 ► §

that goes way way back

00:37:28 ► §

is the continuation of that

00:37:31 ► §

and so we here represent to some degree

00:37:34 ► §

a self-selected group of these

00:37:37 ► §

orphic eccentrics

00:37:39 ► §

who carry this charge of otherness

00:37:43 ► §

in many languages the word shaman means go-between.

00:37:49 ► §

Go-between.

00:37:51 ► §

Shaman moves between levels,

00:37:54 ► §

and the mythologies differ,

00:37:56 ► §

you know, either into a spirit world,

00:37:58 ► §

or an ancestor world,

00:38:00 ► §

or an animal world,

00:38:02 ► §

but the go-between.

00:38:04 ► §

And, now let me see if I can tie this all up oh I know

00:38:08 ► §

I wanted to follow this thing out about the suppression of male dominance through chemicals

00:38:14 ► §

and diet and psilocybin and all that the reason that is fascinating to me aside from the fact

00:38:20 ► §

that it answers some real conundrums in hominid evolutionary arguments,

00:38:26 ► §

is that it then has an implication for the present.

00:38:32 ► §

Because we are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style

00:38:41 ► §

which has been practiced now for about 7,000 years and you know there have

00:38:47 ► §

been various corrective measures all failures I think Christianity Christ a corrective measure

00:38:56 ► §

somebody who comes who says you know don’t do it that way you know and they get rid of him and

00:39:02 ► §

within 50 years the church he founded

00:39:05 ► §

is dealing real estate

00:39:07 ► §

and then you get it in Islam

00:39:10 ► §

another corrective effort

00:39:11 ► §

but these things have not worked

00:39:13 ► §

the cultural style has been too toxic

00:39:16 ► §

and with the rise of modern science

00:39:18 ► §

and the acceleration of the toxic consequences

00:39:23 ► §

of bad ideology

00:39:24 ► §

we now come to the 20th century.

00:39:30 ► §

And throughout the 20th century,

00:39:31 ► §

there has been an impulse…

00:39:33 ► §

Yeah?

00:39:34 ► §

What means bad ideology?

00:39:37 ► §

Ideology that has consequences

00:39:39 ► §

that are bad for the environment

00:39:41 ► §

and the gene pool. Who knows what is bad for the environment and the gene pool.

00:39:45 ► §

Who knows what is bad for the environment?

00:39:48 ► §

Well, nobody knows absolutely,

00:39:51 ► §

but when you think about things like plutonium

00:39:55 ► §

and nuclear weapons stockpile,

00:39:57 ► §

I mean, I agree with you that in the largest picture,

00:40:00 ► §

moral relativism makes it impossible to say anything about good and bad but I’m not that

00:40:08 ► §

morally relativistic I think biology should be preferred over its absence and that intelligence

00:40:18 ► §

should be preferred over its absence so I’m in the, because I think the universe wants to preserve novelty. I mean,

00:40:27 ► §

that could actually be the basis of a kind of ethic. Bad is that which destroys novelty,

00:40:34 ► §

and good is that which promotes it. It sounds awfully progressive. I remember the first time

00:40:41 ► §

I was in Pakistan, and I caught this rickshaw into Lahore

00:40:45 ► §

and this guy was being pulled by a human being,

00:40:50 ► §

you know, muscle power.

00:40:52 ► §

And this guy said, oh, you’re an American, this and that.

00:40:55 ► §

And he said, you know what’s really,

00:40:56 ► §

he said, this country is screwed up.

00:40:58 ► §

This country is really screwed up.

00:41:00 ► §

And I said, well, what’s wrong with it?

00:41:02 ► §

And he said, you want to know what’s wrong with it?

00:41:03 ► §

Progress, too much progress

00:41:06 ► §

and this was a man who made his

00:41:08 ► §

living pulling people around

00:41:10 ► §

in a rickshaw so

00:41:11 ► §

you know it’s a

00:41:13 ► §

relativistic thing but what

00:41:16 ► §

I wanted to say was

00:41:17 ► §

there is an intelligence

00:41:20 ► §

in the species that is

00:41:21 ► §

deeper than the societies

00:41:24 ► §

and the systems that we erect to rule us.

00:41:29 ► §

And this wisdom of the species can make enormous changes

00:41:33 ► §

in the evolution of the mass psyche,

00:41:35 ► §

such as the Renaissance, for example.

00:41:39 ► §

And in the 20th century,

00:41:42 ► §

this has taken the form of what I call the archaic revival.

00:41:47 ► §

And one of my books is called the archaic revival.

00:41:51 ► §

The 20th century, which is a vast stage crowded with different kinds of competing social phenomena,

00:42:00 ► §

art movements, so forth and so on.

00:42:02 ► §

phenomena, art movements so forth and so on

00:42:03 ► §

nevertheless I think the entire

00:42:06 ► §

thing is illuminated

00:42:08 ► §

by the notion

00:42:09 ► §

that what it is about

00:42:11 ► §

is an impulse toward

00:42:14 ► §

archaism

00:42:15 ► §

that in the sciences, the arts

00:42:18 ► §

everywhere

00:42:19 ► §

the archaic ideal is raising

00:42:22 ► §

its protean head

00:42:23 ► §

and it begins with Freud in the early years of the 20th century

00:42:28 ► §

discovering by interviewing these Viennese bourgeois housewives

00:42:33 ► §

that human beings were brutes and that incest, rape,

00:42:40 ► §

all the stuff was right below the surface.

00:42:42 ► §

The rediscovery of the beast.

00:42:47 ► §

And certainly Germany developed that theme up into the 40s.

00:42:52 ► §

Meanwhile, people were bringing African masks to Paris.

00:42:58 ► §

And Cubism was basing its early theory on the deconstruction of primitive art.

00:43:05 ► §

Meanwhile, people like Eric Satie were abandoning the canons of classical composition in music

00:43:13 ► §

and the 12-tone row was being experimented.

00:43:16 ► §

Jazz was being given new attention and for its primitiveness, its rhythm, its sense of something beyond the reach

00:43:28 ► §

of civilization. Meanwhile, the deconstruction of painting that had begun with Impressionism,

00:43:35 ► §

which, you know, Impressionism is simply 20 minutes into LSD, had gone deeper, had developed first of all into the deconstructive spirit of Dada

00:43:48 ► §

where people tore up telephone directories

00:43:52 ► §

and rang bells while they did something else.

00:43:56 ► §

In other words, the absurd appears for the first time.

00:44:01 ► §

An enormous theme in 20th century life.

00:44:04 ► §

Just the incoherent idiocy of it all.

00:44:08 ► §

And then surrealism, taking up the Freudian tune,

00:44:14 ► §

begins to portray these worlds of distorted association and so forth and so on.

00:44:22 ► §

Well, all this is about boundary dissolution.

00:44:24 ► §

It was happening on the Bohem dissolution. It was happening on the

00:44:25 ► §

bohemian left. It was happening

00:44:28 ► §

on the fascist right.

00:44:30 ► §

The rise of Marxism is a

00:44:32 ► §

collectivist theory of society

00:44:34 ► §

very concerned with collectivism

00:44:36 ► §

so forth and so on

00:44:38 ► §

and then

00:44:39 ► §

enormous changes

00:44:42 ► §

Auschwitz, the

00:44:44 ► §

atom bomb, space flight.

00:44:46 ► §

And now where we are is for 10, 15 years,

00:44:52 ► §

there has been this awareness that it is about

00:44:55 ► §

direct experience of the numinous.

00:45:00 ► §

And it’s been hideously marketed and raped

00:45:03 ► §

by the entrepreneurial instinct

00:45:06 ► §

and peddled back to us as dozens of New Age cults diced up

00:45:12 ► §

and presented as different from each other.

00:45:15 ► §

But the impulse toward this authentic dissolving experience is real.

00:45:20 ► §

It was there in theosophy.

00:45:22 ► §

It was there in the beats.

00:45:24 ► §

It came up through the hippies. It survived the trivialization of the new age. And it has now found its way into the youth culture, into rave and house music and that whole thing. And it’s healthy healthy healthier than it ever was well the central figure in all of this

00:45:49 ► §

when you get it down to the idea that a culture must have a culture hero uh meaning a paradigmatic

00:45:57 ► §

uh ideal to constellate around uh the central figure has it has been realized is the shaman

00:46:06 ► §

who is

00:46:07 ► §

this person of indeterminate

00:46:10 ► §

depth

00:46:11 ► §

everyone else has a determinable

00:46:14 ► §

depth

00:46:14 ► §

they are the linear cardboard people

00:46:17 ► §

walking around

00:46:18 ► §

but the shaman is of indeterminate depth

00:46:21 ► §

that’s the secret of

00:46:23 ► §

Carlos Castaneda’s magic.

00:46:26 ► §

He creates a literary character

00:46:28 ► §

that in any other culture would be deemed mythical,

00:46:31 ► §

but because of our attitude toward the depth of the shaman,

00:46:36 ► §

we can’t tell.

00:46:38 ► §

We can’t tell.

00:46:39 ► §

And we deputize this kind of depth

00:46:41 ► §

in rock stars,

00:46:44 ► §

in culture heroes of various sorts,

00:46:49 ► §

and worshipped that for the past 20 years or so.

00:46:53 ► §

Well, then slowly it has dawned that the position of worshipper

00:46:58 ► §

is not the most satisfying position.

00:47:01 ► §

The only position that satisfies is to be that thing and what that and then at that point

00:47:10 ► §

you’re at the psychedelic crossroads I think because you will either make a how do how can I put it? Well, a conservative decision and seek a guru of some sort

00:47:29 ► §

and be lost in that,

00:47:32 ► §

which is a whole shell game.

00:47:34 ► §

Or you will simply cut through the human domain

00:47:40 ► §

and make a pact with a plant, a substance,

00:47:44 ► §

and then you will, at that moment,

00:47:47 ► §

be at the threshold of your adulthood.

00:47:51 ► §

That’s leaving home.

00:47:54 ► §

Home is culture.

00:47:55 ► §

Home is this fabric of imaginary values

00:48:00 ► §

that have been created and maintained

00:48:02 ► §

by a pathological culture.

00:48:05 ► §

And so, you know, it’s a personal thing, ultimately.

00:48:08 ► §

Very controversial, not easy to do.

00:48:12 ► §

And then once done, you know, it has to be integrated, dealt with, thought about.

00:48:21 ► §

And that, as far as I can tell, is a task that extends well beyond the yawning

00:48:26 ► §

grave.

00:48:28 ► §

You talked about the dream. It reminded me of the aboriginal culture, and that’s kind

00:48:34 ► §

of how they lived their lives in the dream time. Is that what you’re talking about,

00:48:39 ► §

living in the dream, being in touch with?

00:48:41 ► §

Yeah, to some degree. I don’t know that much about Aboriginals.

00:48:45 ► §

I’m interested.

00:48:46 ► §

I read Bruce Chatwin’s book, Songlines,

00:48:50 ► §

and I found it absolutely fascinating.

00:48:54 ► §

And if you want an example,

00:48:55 ► §

I mean, I’ll talk about it for a minute

00:48:57 ► §

because it bears on something

00:48:59 ► §

I’m very interested in.

00:49:02 ► §

Part of the transformation

00:49:04 ► §

that I think is going to happen to us

00:49:07 ► §

lies in the way we deal with language

00:49:11 ► §

neurologically.

00:49:12 ► §

Because under the influence of psychedelics,

00:49:15 ► §

especially short-acting tryptamines like DMT,

00:49:18 ► §

you experience phenomena

00:49:21 ► §

which seem to be

00:49:24 ► §

transformations of the language modality. experience phenomena which seem to be

00:49:31 ► §

Transformations of the language modality and I’ve described this stuff as a visible language

00:49:34 ► §

That you can actually sing

00:49:41 ► §

Meaning into visible existence and I’ve seen this on

00:49:48 ► §

Ayahuasca, this is what ayahuasca is about. The famous group states of mind that anthropologists talk about.

00:49:54 ► §

What they really are are three-dimensional acoustical sculptures that are made by groups of people who are loaded.

00:49:58 ► §

And it’s an extraordinary thing.

00:50:01 ► §

It’s an experience you can’t have any other way.

00:50:07 ► §

extraordinary thing. It’s an experience you can’t have any other way. And it’s not quite telepathy or perhaps more than telepathy. And the key concept in communications is bandwidth.

00:50:17 ► §

Bandwidth. The more bandwidth you have, the more detail, color, tone you can impart to your signal.

00:50:28 ► §

Well, a very low bandwidth channel is the small mouth noise channel.

00:50:36 ► §

I mean, this is about as primitive as it gets.

00:50:39 ► §

I mean, short of doing it in Morse code,

00:50:42 ► §

doing it by voice is very, very very it’s amazing that we understand each

00:50:48 ► §

other at all and in fact you may have noticed one of the most uncool things you can do is

00:50:54 ► §

ask somebody would you explain to me what i just said and they say oh well uh oh dear i I’m afraid I was, well, generally, you know, and a lot of floundering around.

00:51:07 ► §

In these ayahuasca states,

00:51:10 ► §

what you see are group-generated acoustical hallucinations.

00:51:15 ► §

And because ayahuasca is composed of psychedelic compounds

00:51:20 ► §

which occur in normal brain chemistry,

00:51:23 ► §

in other words, nothing exotic to human brain

00:51:26 ► §

tissue is present, it raises the question, well, how close is normal metabolic chemistry to having

00:51:34 ► §

an ability to do this? And the answer is, nobody knows, but very, very close. The pineal gland produces adenoglomerotropane,

00:51:46 ► §

which is a beta-carboline.

00:51:48 ► §

A 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan occurs,

00:51:52 ► §

or maybe it is adenoglomerotropane, I can’t remember.

00:51:55 ► §

Anyway, there are active beta-carbolines

00:51:58 ► §

produced in brain metabolism.

00:52:01 ► §

And language is such an odd phenomenon anyway in our species i mean notice that you have

00:52:08 ► §

to have two people to do it which raises a real question about how you get that coordinated the

00:52:16 ► §

first time out uh and uh and it’s a behavior it isn’t organ. It isn’t like my arm, my no.

00:52:27 ► §

It’s a behavior.

00:52:29 ► §

And a learned behavior.

00:52:32 ► §

And yet a behavior so much more complex

00:52:35 ► §

than any other behavior you ever, ever learned.

00:52:39 ► §

I mean, if the average person could walk

00:52:43 ► §

like the average person could talk,

00:52:46 ► §

they would be a prima ballerina of the Russian ballet.

00:52:50 ► §

It’s very interesting that we have such facility for the linguistic enterprise

00:52:56 ► §

and how it evolves.

00:53:00 ► §

It’s changing all the time.

00:53:03 ► §

And, well, is it just changing in a kind of forward lateral direction

00:53:07 ► §

or is there some kind of vertical gain here

00:53:11 ► §

I mean can we actually describe things

00:53:14 ► §

better to each other than the ancient Greeks

00:53:17 ► §

could describe things to each other

00:53:19 ► §

can we say things which they couldn’t say

00:53:23 ► §

or anything of consequence?

00:53:26 ► §

And I maintain yes.

00:53:29 ► §

I maintain that culture, you know, freeways, international airports,

00:53:34 ► §

and so forth and so on, that’s just the trailing edge of evolving language.

00:53:39 ► §

Well, so here’s a story which relates to this

00:53:46 ► §

that is in Bruce Chatelain’s book, Songlines.

00:53:50 ► §

There are these things called songlines which cross Australia

00:53:53 ► §

and they can be thousands of miles long.

00:53:58 ► §

And if you’re a shaman and one of these things crosses your territory,

00:54:05 ► §

and one of these things crosses your territory then you must you are the keeper of the of the song of that part of the line you must learn and keep this

00:54:12 ► §

song there are 137 Aboriginal languages in Australia so these people did the

00:54:21 ► §

following thing they went to a place near one end of the song line and

00:54:25 ► §

they recorded the shaman singing his song of that place and then they went

00:54:33 ► §

2,000 miles to another part of the same song line and they found the song keeper

00:54:40 ► §

of that place and they played the guy’s song for him and it was in a language he

00:54:48 ► §

didn’t speak and he had never been away from his own home he had never been to

00:54:53 ► §

this place so he listened to the song and after a while he began to sing with

00:55:00 ► §

it not the words but the melody and he sang with it the way you could sing with green

00:55:10 ► §

sleeves if you didn’t know the words but you heard the melody and then after it was over

00:55:17 ► §

he said the man who sang this song his place is a butte with three mountains

00:55:27 ► §

and eucalyptus filling the valley and a red rock like a lizard over here.

00:55:35 ► §

So then they tried to analyze, you know, what is happening here?

00:55:40 ► §

Is this telepathy? Is it magic? What is it?

00:56:06 ► §

And I think the key to understanding it lies in, I’ve recently seen, you can actually buy for about $600 a piece of software where you glue electrodes to your head and sit down in front of your computer and you see an undulating landscape of neural redoubts that look, lo and behold, like mountains, valleys, escarpments.

00:56:12 ► §

It’s like a visit to Utah.

00:56:14 ► §

And I am convinced that what’s happening

00:56:18 ► §

is that when the shaman listens to the first shaman’s song,

00:56:25 ► §

he does not process the sound the way we do.

00:56:29 ► §

He processes it the way this computer is processing

00:56:32 ► §

this neurological input.

00:56:34 ► §

And what he’s seeing is an acoustical environment of sound.

00:56:39 ► §

And he can see the place.

00:56:41 ► §

The song is the way it is because the song is not a song.

00:56:46 ► §

The song is a hologrammatic

00:56:48 ► §

acoustigram

00:56:49 ► §

of the topology

00:56:51 ► §

of the land through which the song

00:56:54 ► §

line passes. These people

00:56:56 ► §

are called the most primitive people

00:56:58 ► §

in the world, remember?

00:57:01 ► §

So

00:57:01 ► §

I just recently

00:57:03 ► §

became aware of this

00:57:05 ► §

it’s very exciting to me

00:57:06 ► §

I’m interested in this software

00:57:08 ► §

but this is the kind of thing that lies out there

00:57:12 ► §

because you see the world arrives

00:57:15 ► §

at the surface of your skin

00:57:17 ► §

as one thing

00:57:19 ► §

but the senses

00:57:23 ► §

bifurcate the incoming signal

00:57:27 ► §

the light goes to the eyes

00:57:29 ► §

the acoustical signal goes to the ears

00:57:31 ► §

the tactile signal is conveyed through the skin

00:57:33 ► §

and so then when we reconstruct the world

00:57:38 ► §

the wells are showing rather prominently

00:57:42 ► §

in the model

00:57:44 ► §

and what happens with the psychedelics is

00:57:48 ► §

it seems as though somewhere deep in the brain

00:57:51 ► §

there is an organ or a program

00:57:56 ► §

that can take all of the incoming sensory data

00:58:01 ► §

and actually recombine it into a synesthesia which is neither seen nor felt nor heard,

00:58:09 ► §

but which is, you know, hologrocked or something.

00:58:15 ► §

A sense which unites all of the other senses.

00:58:19 ► §

And that’s what I call going into this informational super space.

00:58:24 ► §

That’s what the psychedelic experience is.

00:58:27 ► §

It reunifies the sensory datum of the world.

00:58:33 ► §

And I might add the whole world, not the surface of the world,

00:58:38 ► §

which is what is conveyed to us by light.

00:58:41 ► §

But the internal dimension of transcendence, which is in the world, is also present.

00:58:50 ► §

Yeah?

00:58:51 ► §

It’s very interesting that you mentioned that binding together of the senses.

00:58:57 ► §

I attended a conference earlier this year called a scientific basis for consciousness

00:59:03 ► §

in Arizona, and a number of the presentations focused

00:59:06 ► §

on the way in which the brain operates when this binding takes place and it turns out

00:59:10 ► §

that different cortical groups start to talk to one another by oscillating together in

00:59:14 ► §

phase.

00:59:15 ► §

Alright.

00:59:16 ► §

And when they’re phase locked like that, then they bind this information into a hole.

00:59:21 ► §

And I’m reminded of the research of Michael Persinger up at Laurentian University in Canada,

00:59:27 ► §

who has been focusing on the electromagnetic field

00:59:30 ► §

of the Earth and its effect on the brain.

00:59:33 ► §

In particular, he’s been interested in the correlation

00:59:35 ► §

between earthquake activity and ghost sightings and such like.

00:59:39 ► §

But he’s pointed out that the Earth’s magnetic field

00:59:42 ► §

is ringing like a bell, and that the main power of oscillation is around 10 Hz, which happens to be the alpha rhythm in the human

00:59:51 ► §

brain. And he’s postulated that in some cases, brains can phase-lock to the geomagnetic field,

00:59:58 ► §

and that the geomagnetic field oscillations can serve as a kind of a carrier frequency to bind these cortical resonances

01:00:06 ► §

basically together for brief periods of time

01:00:09 ► §

and has speculated that this might be

01:00:11 ► §

the source for ESP-like activity.

01:00:15 ► §

Are you familiar with that theory?

01:00:17 ► §

Yeah, he wrote a wonderful book

01:00:19 ► §

called Space-Time Transience and Unusual Events.

01:00:24 ► §

He’s been very creative with using the electromagnetic field

01:00:31 ► §

as an explanation for all kinds of things,

01:00:33 ► §

and I’m totally open-minded to that.

01:00:37 ► §

His work is very interesting.

01:00:40 ► §

It does seem to be true that along earthquake faults

01:00:43 ► §

you do get piezoelectric build-up and release.

01:00:47 ► §

And, you know, the world is full of bizarre phenomena.

01:00:50 ► §

Some of you may have seen in science news last week

01:00:54 ► §

for the first time they have confirmed

01:00:56 ► §

these enormous blue and red lights

01:01:00 ► §

above 75,000 feet in the atmosphere.

01:01:04 ► §

Airline pilots have been seeing these things for years.

01:01:07 ► §

There was no theory.

01:01:08 ► §

Nobody knew what they were.

01:01:10 ► §

Now NASA dedicated an expedition,

01:01:14 ► §

one of their aircraft, to looking at this,

01:01:16 ► §

and they got thousands of images of these things.

01:01:20 ► §

It’s an electrical phenomenon.

01:01:22 ► §

Theory doesn’t account for it.

01:01:24 ► §

Nobody knows what it means. things and it’s an electrical phenomenon theory doesn’t account for and nobody knows

01:01:25 ► §

what it means

01:01:26 ► §

on one level

01:01:29 ► §

I’m sympathetic to Persinger

01:01:31 ► §

and that approach

01:01:34 ► §

to explaining some of these

01:01:35 ► §

things and I do think the

01:01:37 ► §

place has been overlooked

01:01:39 ► §

in importance. On another

01:01:41 ► §

level

01:01:42 ► §

this is a very hard thing to talk about

01:01:47 ► §

but there is like what I call linguistic viruses which infect the effort to

01:01:56 ► §

communicate and they’re very hard to catch at work so and and it has to do with how can people believe things which are absurd and it’s very

01:02:10 ► §

interesting to spend time with people who believe that things are something which is absurd and it’s

01:02:18 ► §

i you know a lot of people bring raps to me that they want confirmation or disconfirmation on. And I

01:02:29 ► §

passed this way last night when I talked about the rules of evidence. The standard of discourse

01:02:37 ► §

has decayed to the point where it’s very hard to get any kind of consensus about anything because most people participating don’t know how the game is played.

01:02:50 ► §

And linguistic viruses really are responsible

01:02:55 ► §

for much more of reality than we suppose.

01:03:00 ► §

I suppose I can’t really talk about this

01:03:03 ► §

without stepping on somebody’s toes.

01:03:06 ► §

So let me pick…

01:03:08 ► §

Well, for example, crop circles.

01:03:15 ► §

Crop circles are important.

01:03:19 ► §

And what was going on at the England end

01:03:22 ► §

was these things were absurd.

01:03:30 ► §

I mean, you had only to see one to understand what was going on

01:03:35 ► §

and to see that a confluence of British eccentricity, ripe grain,

01:03:42 ► §

eccentricity, ripe grain

01:03:43 ► §

a certain ambiance

01:03:46 ► §

in the air was allowing these things

01:03:48 ► §

to come into being

01:03:50 ► §

and then the media

01:03:52 ► §

was fanning it

01:03:54 ► §

into existence. Well now how does

01:03:56 ► §

this work?

01:03:58 ► §

Talking of coupled oscillators

01:04:00 ► §

and Persinger and all that

01:04:02 ► §

Pardon me?

01:04:04 ► §

Would you repeat that law? Pardon me? Would you repeat that law?

01:04:06 ► §

Oh, that the paranormal phenomenon

01:04:10 ► §

has an impact in an inverse square relationship

01:04:14 ► §

to the distance you are from the event.

01:04:17 ► §

You see?

01:04:19 ► §

Because here’s how it works.

01:04:21 ► §

The media is reporting

01:04:23 ► §

the onrushing phenomenon of existence.

01:04:26 ► §

Stock markets, wars, diplomatic meetings,

01:04:29 ► §

gangster killings, so forth and so on.

01:04:31 ► §

Then something weird happens.

01:04:34 ► §

Now, I have a job, you have a job.

01:04:38 ► §

We note that something weird has happened.

01:04:41 ► §

But it doesn’t affect us.

01:04:43 ► §

But scattered through the society society there are people who

01:04:48 ► §

when they open their paper and say strange pattern in Wheatfield near Wiltshire they look and say

01:04:57 ► §

aha I knew it this is what we’ve been waiting for this is the sign and they jump in their car and they drive to Wiltshire

01:05:07 ► §

to look at the crop circle

01:05:09 ► §

and they get there first

01:05:11 ► §

well then comes the press

01:05:13 ► §

and they say well what is this

01:05:16 ► §

well the farmer doesn’t know

01:05:18 ► §

and everybody’s standing around

01:05:21 ► §

and finally the weird person takes courage

01:05:26 ► §

and says

01:05:28 ► §

well actually I’ve been studying

01:05:32 ► §

a peculiar form of biological

01:05:34 ► §

energy for some 30 years

01:05:36 ► §

and my theory

01:05:38 ► §

and you’re off

01:05:40 ► §

and running

01:05:41 ► §

at that point

01:05:43 ► §

and so weirdness attracts weirdos

01:05:47 ► §

who then interpret the weirdness

01:05:52 ► §

very weirdly

01:05:54 ► §

because they came with sharpened axes

01:05:59 ► §

to grind, you see.

01:06:02 ► §

And the crop circle thing was a test case for this this is why I spend

01:06:08 ► §

so much time on it it did no credit to anybody the occult just went sailing

01:06:13 ► §

over the edge and science hardly behaved any better because there was this guy if

01:06:21 ► §

any of you are interested in this there’s a wonderful book called around in circles

01:06:26 ► §

by jim schnabel that goes into all this but there was a fellow named terence meeton who was a

01:06:32 ► §

meteorologist and when the first crop circles appeared and the the weirdos began talking about

01:06:41 ► §

telluric forces messages from at Atlantis and so forth and so on

01:06:45 ► §

he jumped into the fray

01:06:47 ► §

and said nonsense

01:06:49 ► §

this is a meteorological

01:06:52 ► §

phenomenon

01:06:53 ► §

in the warm days of summer

01:06:55 ► §

on the lee side of these certain kinds

01:06:58 ► §

of hills

01:06:59 ► §

a kind of circular

01:07:01 ► §

low pressure wind

01:07:03 ► §

can get going and this is nothing to get

01:07:07 ► §

excited about and we’ve got the statistics and so forth and so on and

01:07:11 ► §

the press loved him they loved him as much as the screwballs and they would

01:07:16 ► §

put him on and first they would interview the mad people and then

01:07:19 ► §

Terence Meaton would come on and poo-poo it away. That was the first year of the crop circles.

01:07:26 ► §

The next year, the crop circles became

01:07:29 ► §

considerably more elaborate with arrows

01:07:32 ► §

coming off of them and zigzags and so forth

01:07:35 ► §

and so on. Bring Terence Meaton

01:07:38 ► §

on to the scene. He says,

01:07:41 ► §

well, the new field of dynamic

01:07:44 ► §

instability indicates that the And he says, well, you know, the new field of dynamic instability

01:07:45 ► §

indicates that the mathematical solutions to these breakdown states

01:07:51 ► §

are very complicated and unusual patterns.

01:07:55 ► §

And so then the next year, it was inconceivably complex, the crop circles.

01:08:02 ► §

Meanwhile, you know, crop circle time is in the

01:08:05 ► §

springtime it’s dead in the winter

01:08:07 ► §

because the fields are empty

01:08:08 ► §

so Meaden had used the winter

01:08:11 ► §

time to go to

01:08:13 ► §

the institute of electrostatic

01:08:16 ► §

physics in Nagoya

01:08:17 ► §

and came back

01:08:19 ► §

full of

01:08:21 ► §

talk about

01:08:23 ► §

plasma roving plasmic fields

01:08:27 ► §

and this sort of thing.

01:08:30 ► §

And armed with the roving plasmic fields,

01:08:34 ► §

no crop circle was too bizarre

01:08:37 ► §

to not be proclaimed the product of natural forces.

01:08:43 ► §

And this went on.

01:08:44 ► §

And finally, BBC Two, and you can think about this what you like, the product of natural forces and this went on and finally BBC

01:08:46 ► §

2 and you know you can think about this what you

01:08:49 ► §

like but they made

01:08:52 ► §

a crop circle in frustration with

01:08:55 ► §

this whole thing they made a crop circle and

01:08:57 ► §

among the crop circle

01:09:01 ► §

cognoscente there are certain

01:09:03 ► §

moves that are the favorite moves that are the

01:09:07 ► §

authenticating moves the no human being could possibly do it moves and so the the bbc two people

01:09:15 ► §

made a very good crop circle and they brought terence meeton out and said you know terence

01:09:22 ► §

we’ve just spotted one over here and get you right to the scene before the tourists get there.

01:09:28 ► §

And they toured with him and he pointed out, you know,

01:09:31 ► §

the distinguishing characteristics, no doubt about it.

01:09:35 ► §

And then they sat him down in the center of this field

01:09:38 ► §

and they said, Terrence, we made it.

01:09:44 ► §

And, you know, it’s a horrible thing, actually,

01:09:47 ► §

to see a grown man cry.

01:09:52 ► §

Because, you know, I mean, he is devastated.

01:09:55 ► §

But, and then, you know, this is just one of moments.

01:09:59 ► §

You know, Rupert, my comrade in arms, Sheldrake,

01:10:04 ► §

was one of the people who sponsored

01:10:06 ► §

the contest

01:10:07 ► §

that basically put the crop circles

01:10:10 ► §

out of business because

01:10:11 ► §

the claims were fantastic

01:10:14 ► §

you know no person

01:10:16 ► §

could do this so forth and so on

01:10:18 ► §

so what they did is they got

01:10:20 ► §

farmers to donate

01:10:22 ► §

10 acre tracts

01:10:24 ► §

of English corn, which is wheat,

01:10:28 ► §

and for 50 pounds you could enter.

01:10:32 ► §

And everybody had to make the same crop circle,

01:10:35 ► §

which was one chosen to have all the difficult little schmiggies in it.

01:10:44 ► §

And you could use no lights

01:10:45 ► §

you had to go into the field at 10pm

01:10:49 ► §

and be out by 4am

01:10:51 ► §

and at dawn the helicopters flew over

01:10:55 ► §

with the video crews

01:10:57 ► §

and then crop circles were toured on the ground

01:11:00 ► §

and awards were made

01:11:02 ► §

and this guy Jim Schnabel who wrote this book I

01:11:05 ► §

mentioned

01:11:06 ► §

by himself

01:11:09 ► §

in total darkness

01:11:10 ► §

in two and a half hours

01:11:13 ► §

made the winning

01:11:16 ► §

entry

01:11:17 ► §

and it was a very

01:11:19 ► §

close tie between him and a helicopter

01:11:22 ► §

crew from a

01:11:23 ► §

nearby air base who also made one.

01:11:27 ► §

So, and yet, and this is to some degree the whole point of the story, and yet there are

01:11:34 ► §

people whose eyes fill with tears when I do this rap because they haven’t heard.

01:11:41 ► §

And it will never die now i’m convinced it’s an informational virus loose

01:11:47 ► §

in the world and you know crop circles will occasionally appear and but it was really a

01:11:54 ► §

breakout that was so predictable from the unconscious that it amazed me while it was going

01:12:00 ► §

on how many friendships were strained over this thing.

01:12:06 ► §

Isn’t that kind of also a recapitulation of the history of the Catholic Church?

01:12:13 ► §

And the fall of the Ming Dynasty.

01:12:19 ► §

I believe.

01:12:21 ► §

I believe.

01:12:21 ► §

I believe.

01:12:30 ► §

I think there’s like a virus embedded within the virus here because part of what happens when these sorts of things erupt onto the media scene,

01:12:35 ► §

and this is true for UFO, you know, whenever one of those outbursts take place,

01:12:39 ► §

is that there’s this incredible elaboration and complexity

01:12:43 ► §

that emerges in the kinds of stories that people are telling.

01:12:46 ► §

The abduction thing would be the latest.

01:12:48 ► §

By the way, Persinger is involved in that too

01:12:50 ► §

by showing that electromagnetic fields to the brain

01:12:52 ► §

can induce these weird out-of-the-body experiences.

01:12:55 ► §

But in the case of crop circles,

01:12:57 ► §

they’ve been reported for many decades,

01:12:59 ► §

but they’ve not received much attention.

01:13:00 ► §

They’re just little circles that have a spiral pattern in them,

01:13:04 ► §

and they’ve been seen around the world. And my personal view is that there’s probably

01:13:09 ► §

a series of different phenomena that have been shuffled into one category, but when

01:13:13 ► §

the media gets a hold of them, all crop circles are the same. And when fractal design starts

01:13:19 ► §

showing up outside the university campus there, you know, the Mandelbrot set, which is one

01:13:23 ► §

of the most ridiculous of the crop circle patterns,

01:13:27 ► §

the media presents the image

01:13:29 ► §

that these are all the same.

01:13:31 ► §

They’re all the same phenomena.

01:13:32 ► §

And so consequently, probably,

01:13:34 ► §

I wouldn’t be surprised

01:13:35 ► §

that Meaden might be right

01:13:36 ► §

at some level

01:13:37 ► §

that there are dust devil-like phenomena.

01:13:39 ► §

No, I agree with you completely.

01:13:41 ► §

I mean, they track down

01:13:43 ► §

a 1733 account

01:13:45 ► §

of something called the Devil’s Mower.

01:13:49 ► §

And, you know, I grew up in western Colorado

01:13:52 ► §

and part of my right of initiation into manhood

01:13:56 ► §

was enforced elk hunting on horseback every autumn.

01:14:02 ► §

And we would come upon these places in the forest

01:14:06 ► §

that had been whirled down.

01:14:09 ► §

And the explanation was just,

01:14:10 ► §

these are deadfalls from whirlwinds,

01:14:13 ► §

but it always seemed to me,

01:14:16 ► §

had anybody ever seen one of these things occur?

01:14:19 ► §

It was a very odd explanation.

01:14:22 ► §

Yes, it’s about informational distortion and decay.

01:14:26 ► §

You’re quite right.

01:14:28 ► §

I went to a flying saucer

01:14:30 ► §

convention against

01:14:32 ► §

my better judgment.

01:14:34 ► §

And I learned more.

01:14:36 ► §

My opinion about

01:14:38 ► §

flying saucers evolved more over

01:14:40 ► §

that weekend than in the previous

01:14:42 ► §

30 years of being interested

01:14:44 ► §

in flying saucers.

01:14:47 ► §

And I was, you know, read all the books,

01:14:50 ► §

all the special cases.

01:14:51 ► §

I knew the data and all that,

01:14:54 ► §

but I had never hung out with flying saucer people. And it was so obviously a private Idaho

01:14:59 ► §

that I just couldn’t wait to get away.

01:15:03 ► §

And I think, I don’t know,

01:15:06 ► §

there are two impulses in the human psyche,

01:15:10 ► §

at least two in this case,

01:15:12 ► §

and I just don’t resonate with believers in anything.

01:15:19 ► §

I mean, I get insulting to Buddhists, for God’s sake.

01:15:24 ► §

I mean, it’s just something about their smugness

01:15:27 ► §

and their whole bit that just brings,

01:15:30 ► §

I just want to squash it.

01:15:32 ► §

So you can imagine how I behave

01:15:35 ► §

in the presence of Scientologists

01:15:37 ► §

and the rest of it.

01:15:42 ► §

Belief is, again, it’s a form of infantilism

01:15:48 ► §

there is no grounds for believing anything

01:15:52 ► §

and the flying saucer thing

01:15:55 ► §

I went to this conference imagining that what I would meet

01:15:59 ► §

would be a whole bunch of really interesting sincere people

01:16:03 ► §

who wanted to discuss the phenomenon of

01:16:07 ► §

unexplained things in the sky and contacting human beings and what i found was you know booth after

01:16:17 ► §

booth of people who had all the answers all the answers Learn how a nearby planet reduced crime by 500%. I got news for you,

01:16:30 ► §

not even God can reduce crime by 500%. Once you’ve reduced it 100%, you’ve got it.

01:16:40 ► §

So I said, you know, this was the quality of thinking that was going on and then there were

01:16:46 ► §

a lot of really scary people in brown leather shoes with thin smiles and and cheap suits who

01:16:54 ► §

were clearly third-rate uh semi-retired intelligence hacks who were there to keep the flock headed

01:17:06 ► §

in the right direction

01:17:07 ► §

and you know people

01:17:10 ► §

wanted to talk about

01:17:11 ► §

experiments on human fetal

01:17:14 ► §

tissue that go on

01:17:16 ► §

in underground laboratories out

01:17:18 ► §

in Arizona through the

01:17:20 ► §

connivance of the CIA

01:17:21 ► §

and the Palladian High Command

01:17:24 ► §

and you just think well I’ve got to call my broker.

01:17:28 ► §

I’ll get back to you on that.

01:17:30 ► §

I mean, I don’t know.

01:17:32 ► §

I have, I, to me, if you can’t, well, it’s an aesthetic thing.

01:17:40 ► §

It’s an aesthetic thing.

01:17:42 ► §

I believe that great weirdness stalks the universe

01:17:46 ► §

that’s not the issue with me

01:17:48 ► §

but it’s not tacky

01:17:50 ► §

it is not

01:17:52 ► §

tacky

01:17:53 ► §

and people who

01:17:56 ► §

wear low cut

01:17:58 ► §

gowns with a lot of sequins

01:18:00 ► §

on them and tiaras

01:18:02 ► §

and pass out

01:18:04 ► §

flying saucer shaped business cards

01:18:07 ► §

that’s tacky and and so it can’t be so I I know this I’ve never been wrong if

01:18:17 ► §

intelligence fails aesthetics will pull you through this is what and you know

01:18:23 ► §

people don’t like this part of me.

01:18:26 ► §

I don’t make it comfortable for other squirrels.

01:18:29 ► §

I don’t share the branch very generously.

01:18:36 ► §

A place where I’ve gotten into lots of trouble

01:18:39 ► §

is with the face on Mars.

01:18:42 ► §

I just have not got enough unpleasant things to say about

01:18:48 ► §

the face on Mars, everybody connected with it, the very idea. I mean, talk about something

01:18:53 ► §

which should never have been let out of the box, that’s it. I mean, the idea of a tchotchke

01:19:00 ► §

17 by 11 miles in size just gives me the heebie-jeebies

01:19:06 ► §

I don’t want to know those aliens

01:19:10 ► §

they should go back where they came from

01:19:12 ► §

and take their tchotchke with them

01:19:15 ► §

we need people who can build in light

01:19:17 ► §

and balance planetary ecologies

01:19:20 ► §

and do really cool things

01:19:24 ► §

massive earth moving projects we’ve been there, we’ve done that and do really cool things. Massive Earth-moving projects.

01:19:27 ► §

We’ve been there.

01:19:28 ► §

We’ve done that.

01:19:30 ► §

We never went to the moon either.

01:19:33 ► §

Books will appear on these subjects.

01:19:36 ► §

One of the interesting things about UFO experience,

01:19:38 ► §

and the other kinds of phenomena that you’re talking about,

01:19:42 ► §

is the potential for the manipulation of belief systems.

01:19:44 ► §

This is something Jacques Vallée talks about

01:19:46 ► §

in his books that

01:19:47 ► §

there’s a kind of a sinister undertone that

01:19:50 ► §

the military

01:19:51 ► §

is bringing people in who are

01:19:54 ► §

UFO diehards and saying look at these

01:19:56 ► §

documents we can prove that there is this majestic

01:19:58 ► §

group and then pulling

01:20:00 ► §

snatching them back and the UFO

01:20:01 ► §

enthusiasts go out and tell the world about it

01:20:04 ► §

and launch

01:20:06 ► §

stories about aliens under the desert

01:20:08 ► §

in Nevada collaborating with the military.

01:20:10 ► §

And the newspapers pick it up.

01:20:12 ► §

They’re completely poo-pooed.

01:20:14 ► §

Meanwhile, there’s tests

01:20:16 ► §

of a new spy plane called

01:20:18 ► §

Project Aurora that travels six times

01:20:20 ► §

the speed of sound and leaves this

01:20:22 ► §

blue, it’s like a traveling

01:20:24 ► §

blue ball of light that’s

01:20:25 ► §

clearly a UFO. And if anybody sees it traveling over the desert and picks up the phone and

01:20:30 ► §

calls the paper, nobody will report it.

01:20:33 ► §

No, it’s clear that those black projects and Aurora is the one is being run out there.

01:20:39 ► §

And that’s very exciting. I mean, a plane that can fly to orbit. Yeah, I am.

01:20:44 ► §

Terrence, what is your opinion on the biosphere?

01:20:47 ► §

Did you get into that at all with John Allen and the whole stick there?

01:20:51 ► §

I knew those people in the early 80s.

01:20:55 ► §

Yeah, I knew all of them.

01:20:57 ► §

83, 81 in the Amazon.

01:21:01 ► §

They said they were headed for Mars.

01:21:06 ► §

I don’t know they are

01:21:08 ► §

derivative of J.G.

01:21:10 ► §

Bennett’s school of

01:21:12 ► §

Gurdjieff

01:21:13 ► §

and I have a

01:21:16 ► §

rule which is

01:21:18 ► §

I’m against any

01:21:19 ► §

group that keeps secrets

01:21:22 ► §

and Gurdjieffians

01:21:24 ► §

keep secrets, I’m not against Gurdjieffians keep secrets, I’m not against

01:21:26 ► §

Gurdjieffians per se, in fact it’s kind of

01:21:28 ► §

too bad they get into the category

01:21:30 ► §

but secret keeping

01:21:32 ► §

is a bad habit

01:21:33 ► §

and if you tell me a secret

01:21:36 ► §

I’ll probably tell it

01:21:38 ► §

nobody ever told me

01:21:40 ► §

not to say anything

01:21:42 ► §

so

01:21:44 ► §

I’ve followed them with interest over

01:21:48 ► §

the years it’s too bad it’s another thing led by a middle-aged white guy but

01:21:55 ► §

you know they seem to have they seem to have the pull but I want to return to

01:22:02 ► §

something you said I mean this can be the last thing about flying saucers

01:22:05 ► §

but let me give you my conclusion from this weekend

01:22:08 ► §

of how the whole flying saucer thing worked

01:22:13 ► §

this is just one person’s opinion

01:22:15 ► §

but this is how I explain it to myself

01:22:18 ► §

as you know, in 1947

01:22:21 ► §

the Rainier lights appeared

01:22:23 ► §

and that was the first big modern flying saucer sighting

01:22:29 ► §

and set off the whole modern flying saucer phenomenon.

01:22:33 ► §

Well, cast your mind back to the ambiance of 1947.

01:22:38 ► §

The atom bomb was in 1945, the defeat of Germany.

01:22:42 ► §

The H-bomb was underdeveloped, underdevelopment, Einstein

01:22:48 ► §

was advising Truman. I mean, people were on the brink of things they could not understand.

01:22:56 ► §

Nobody knew what it really, what the H-bomb really meant. What does it mean that we can

01:23:01 ► §

do this? And they said, well, you know, we don’t know. Maybe

01:23:06 ► §

the universe is monitored. And what we’re doing is so outrageous that maybe it will bring those

01:23:15 ► §

who do the monitoring. And then they began to get these reports of these things in the sky and said,

01:23:20 ► §

my God, this must be it. And there were very high level government secret secret secret commissions set up

01:23:28 ► §

and they began to study the flying saucers furiously

01:23:32 ► §

and they penetrated all those groups

01:23:36 ► §

and they penetrated this flying saucer thing from one end to the other

01:23:40 ► §

and I’m talking 47 to say 54

01:23:43 ► §

and they studied it and they studied it

01:23:46 ► §

and they took Carl Jung was brought in and all kinds of people were brought in

01:23:51 ► §

and at the end of that period they concluded that what it was they actually

01:23:57 ► §

understood it they concluded that it was the cosmic giggle they concluded that it was that un-reducible nub of nuttiness

01:24:09 ► §

that haunts reality and that it was not a threat to the security of North American air defenses

01:24:18 ► §

that was their question is this a military problem for us and And by 54 or so, they had decided whatever this is,

01:24:29 ► §

a linguistic virus, a mass hallucination of whatever it is,

01:24:34 ► §

it is not a problem for the military defense of North America.

01:24:39 ► §

But they had spent millions infiltrating and completely taking over the weirdest group of screwballs you can imagine.

01:24:51 ► §

The flying saucer hardcore cultists.

01:24:55 ► §

And they said, well, these people will believe anything.

01:24:59 ► §

We know that because we’ve been to their meetings, we’ve read their publications.

01:25:04 ► §

What should we do with them?

01:25:06 ► §

shall we just withdraw all our agents

01:25:08 ► §

and let them go back to whatever they were doing?

01:25:11 ► §

and the answer was no

01:25:12 ► §

these people will become a pool

01:25:15 ► §

for experiments

01:25:18 ► §

in manipulation of information

01:25:21 ► §

control of belief systems

01:25:24 ► §

response to propaganda,

01:25:26 ► §

a whole bunch of black box

01:25:28 ► §

psychological and programming

01:25:31 ► §

and informational kinds of research

01:25:33 ► §

will be done on this pool of people

01:25:36 ► §

because they’re so weird

01:25:38 ► §

if they start telling their relatives

01:25:41 ► §

that they’re hearing voices in the head

01:25:44 ► §

or something like that, their relatives

01:25:46 ► §

and friends are just going to say,

01:25:47 ► §

so what else is new? You’ve been talking

01:25:50 ► §

like this for years.

01:25:52 ► §

And I think it was kept like

01:25:54 ► §

that right up until

01:25:55 ► §

the present moment.

01:25:57 ► §

But I think it’s very low budget.

01:26:00 ► §

This is not high priority for

01:26:01 ► §

the CIA. They’re sending, as I said,

01:26:04 ► §

semi-retired guys in scuffed brown shoes

01:26:07 ► §

who are definitely over the hill, but they shepherd the group along.

01:26:13 ► §

And as you said, they release these outlandish documents

01:26:16 ► §

and then they pull them back.

01:26:18 ► §

And some guy comes forward and says,

01:26:20 ► §

it’s all a fraud and I know because I was on the inside

01:26:23 ► §

and I was the one paid to tell you all these

01:26:26 ► §

things and then somebody else comes forward and says

01:26:28 ► §

no he’s a walk-in

01:26:30 ► §

and has an implant and it wasn’t

01:26:32 ► §

that way at all and it’s sort of

01:26:34 ► §

like the JFK assassination

01:26:36 ► §

you know there is no

01:26:38 ► §

bedrock there

01:26:39 ► §

there is no ground zero

01:26:42 ► §

and I find these things

01:26:44 ► §

sort of spooky.

01:26:45 ► §

I think it’s bad mental hygiene

01:26:47 ► §

to spend too much time with squirrels.

01:26:51 ► §

And that…

01:26:52 ► §

They can infect you.

01:26:54 ► §

Yeah, you don’t know…

01:26:55 ► §

Put down that groundhog, baby Elizabeth.

01:26:58 ► §

You don’t know where it’s been.

01:27:01 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:27:04 ► §

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:27:10 ► §

Don’t you just love that?

01:27:11 ► §

Put down that groundhog, baby Lisbeth.

01:27:14 ► §

You don’t know where it’s been.

01:27:18 ► §

I’m not sure where I’m going to be able to use that phrase, but somehow I’ve just got to work it into my conversation.

01:27:25 ► §

use that phrase, but somehow I’ve just got to work it into my conversation. Maybe that’s what I’ll say the next time one of the purple-haired zeta reticulans tells me that they’re just about ready

01:27:31 ► §

to raise the lost city of Atlantis, and all they need is a little money from me to buy the right

01:27:36 ► §

equipment. So, I wonder how many of our fellow slaunters Terrence alienated with his complete

01:27:43 ► §

dismissal of crop circles.

01:27:46 ► §

You know, that’s still a really fascinating area of inquiry, and to tell the truth, I’ve

01:27:50 ► §

come full circle, so to speak, about crop circles, and yes, the puns intended.

01:27:56 ► §

You know, initially I dismissed them as pranks, and then I did a bunch of reading and watched

01:28:01 ► §

a bunch of DVDs until I got to the point where I convinced myself that,

01:28:06 ► §

well, the only thing I could come up with is that they were created by extraterrestrial teenagers

01:28:11 ► §

who were stopping by the earth and, well, they’re just simply screwing with us in much the same way

01:28:16 ► §

that some of our human graffiti artists will tag a space just to see the reactions of the people

01:28:22 ► §

who look at their work. Now today I’m still not sure what causes the 10% or so of them

01:28:28 ► §

that haven’t been explainable with the current scientific knowledge that we have.

01:28:33 ► §

So until someone comes up with a better explanation,

01:28:36 ► §

I’m just going to stick with the teenage extraterrestrial theory of mine.

01:28:41 ► §

Now, moving on.

01:28:44 ► §

Have you read about the the Aboriginal songlines before?

01:28:49 ► §

I’ve heard of them, in fact I’ve heard of that book, but only peripherally when they figure into other stories.

01:28:55 ► §

However, I do have to admit that I like the analogy Terrence made about the way sounds look on a computer when analyzed that way.

01:29:03 ► §

way sounds look on a computer when analyzed that way.

01:29:08 ► §

The reason it intrigues me is that, well, as I prepare these talks each week,

01:29:13 ► §

I do the editing in Audacity, which, as you know, is an open-source sound editing software.

01:29:18 ► §

And as I listen, I’m also seeing what the waveform of those words look like.

01:29:21 ► §

And now, after many years of doing this, I can sometimes even make out words that people are saying just by the shape of the sounds.

01:29:27 ► §

And while that’s not very earth-shaking, I’m now kind of intrigued to think that maybe

01:29:33 ► §

I should be looking even deeper into these shapes.

01:29:36 ► §

Maybe one of our artist friends can do some work with these ideas and get us a little

01:29:41 ► §

closer to Terrance’s idea that words should not be just heard, but they should be beheld as well.

01:29:48 ► §

Now, there are a few other things Terrence said just now that bring comments to my mind,

01:29:54 ► §

but this podcast has already gone on a bit too long.

01:29:57 ► §

However, there is one more thing that I think might be worth mentioning,

01:30:01 ► §

at least for those who sometimes want to grab on to one or two things

01:30:05 ► §

that Terence may have said several decades ago, and that may not be as relevant today with the

01:30:12 ► §

passing of time and the ongoing advances in science and technology. Now, while it’s obvious

01:30:18 ► §

that he could only work with the facts and information at hand while he was alive,

01:30:23 ► §

nonetheless, I find even some of his mistakes to

01:30:25 ► §

be of value in the way I think today. You know, one of the things that Terrence said in his talk

01:30:32 ► §

just now that really resonated with me was, belief is a form of infantilism. So let me explain how I

01:30:40 ► §

see this. Like every other person in the world, during my childhood I was given quite a

01:30:45 ► §

lot of things to believe without question. Things like, it’s your country, right or wrong. Not to

01:30:52 ► §

mention all of the dogma of the Catholic Church and Western philosophy. So as I entered into

01:30:58 ► §

adulthood, I found myself wandering around on this vast bedrock of beliefs that I was taught

01:31:04 ► §

to not question. But after a while it became obvious to me that some of these

01:31:09 ► §

beliefs were just plain stupid, and I’ll let you decide for yourself which ones

01:31:13 ► §

I’m talking about. So I finally decided to attempt to become what was once

01:31:19 ► §

called a free thinker, and I began to question my beliefs. That’s when I

01:31:24 ► §

discovered this huge mountain that’s called consciousness, and I began to question my beliefs. That’s when I discovered this huge mountain

01:31:26 ► §

that’s called consciousness, and it was rising above this plane of my bedrock beliefs.

01:31:32 ► §

So I began following whatever paths I came across that I thought might lead me up the side of this

01:31:38 ► §

mountain. And eventually I came to this wide ledge that, for a lack of another name, I’ll simply call New Age Thinking.

01:31:46 ► §

And I found this ledge on the side of the Mountain of Consciousness to be quite fascinating.

01:31:52 ► §

So for many years, I followed that ledge all around the mountain.

01:31:55 ► §

And believe me, the view from that ledge was wonderful.

01:31:59 ► §

Much better than the view from the ground of my old beliefs.

01:32:03 ► §

But I wasn’t really getting any closer to the top of the mountain. Then I discovered psychedelics

01:32:09 ► §

and decided to quit the ledge. And so I began my ascent to the summit, which

01:32:15 ► §

actually was so far above me that I could only sense it, not see it. And the

01:32:19 ► §

ascent from that ledge was really exciting. That is until the first time I

01:32:24 ► §

slipped and fell back

01:32:25 ► §

down. In fact, there have been more slips down the mountain than I care to recall. But fortunately,

01:32:31 ► §

I came across this guy named Terence McKenna. And while I didn’t understand very much of what he

01:32:36 ► §

was saying, his thoughts provided me with some handholds and footholds that I could use to begin

01:32:43 ► §

my ascent to the summit once again.

01:32:45 ► §

And so that’s how I use the ideas that Terence has given us, as handholds and footholds,

01:32:51 ► §

to help me in my personal assault on the summit of consciousness.

01:32:55 ► §

Now I don’t stay long with any of them, for, as you know, if you’re climbing a mountain,

01:33:00 ► §

the secret is to continue onward and upward.

01:33:02 ► §

Maybe you’ll have to backtrack every once in a while, but the mission is to keep climbing,

01:33:07 ► §

because to remain in one place is definitely not safe.

01:33:11 ► §

Another little trick that I use is something I learned while I was working as a deckhand

01:33:16 ► §

on a square-rigged sailing ship during a Pacific crossing.

01:33:19 ► §

As soon as we cleared the jetty in California and headed west,

01:33:23 ► §

the captain gave the order to go aloft and set the sails.

01:33:27 ► §

One of our crew members was a young man who, well, he got about halfway up the rigging and then just froze.

01:33:33 ► §

And when I say he froze, that’s a real understatement.

01:33:37 ► §

Because two of us went over to where he was and we tried to pry him loose from the rigging that he was clinging to.

01:33:42 ► §

But even with two of us, we couldn’t budge his arm hold.

01:33:46 ► §

You know, it was really amazing.

01:33:48 ► §

I’ve actually never seen anything like it since.

01:33:51 ► §

So our old bosun, Bill Bartz was his name,

01:33:54 ► §

and he was as good a seaman as you’ll ever find.

01:33:57 ► §

He climbed up into the rigging,

01:33:58 ► §

and I figured he would probably just put a line around the kid

01:34:01 ► §

and probably cold cock him with a belaying pin or something

01:34:04 ► §

so that we could lower him to the deck.

01:34:07 ► §

And keep in mind, this is all taking place about 40 feet above the deck and on a mast that was whipping back and forth as our ship rolled from beam to beam in a rather confused sea.

01:34:19 ► §

And Bill Bartz was as tough a character as you’ll ever find, but he had a different tactic in mind.

01:34:24 ► §

He just climbed up to that young sailor and said, what’s wrong, son? And he said it in the most

01:34:30 ► §

calming voice you could imagine. So the kid said, well, he just got up to where he was. He took a

01:34:36 ► §

look down and he just froze from a fear of falling. So Bill said, here’s the trick. Don’t look down, son. Only look up and you’ll be fine.

01:34:46 ► §

And with that, the young man looked up and magically just continued his climb up to where the rest of us were waiting for him.

01:34:54 ► §

And after that, he never had another problem with climbing up into the rigging.

01:34:59 ► §

And so that’s how I look at my ascent to the summit of the Mountain of Consciousness.

01:35:04 ► §

I can’t see the summit, and I might even be shocked if I could.

01:35:08 ► §

But for now, I just keep looking up and taking it one handhold at a time.

01:35:13 ► §

And that’s why the words of Terence McKenna mean so much to me.

01:35:17 ► §

They are my handholds on this exciting journey that you and I are now on.

01:35:22 ► §

So, what do you say? Let’s keep climbing, but don’t forget to

01:35:27 ► §

always look up. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.