Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Why does mathematics describe nature. That’s a deeper question than most.”
“The real justification for psychedelics is that they feed new data into your model.”
“If you go to Paris you know more about reality than people who don’t. If you smoke DMT you know more about reality than people who don’t.”
“So the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world that is not imprisoning. That’s why, second to psychedelics, I think travel is the most boundary-dissolving, educational enterprise that you can get mixed up in.”
“I think the experience over the past thousand years is that ideology is poisonous… . The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.”
“I think what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity, and what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.”
“Television is, to my mind, the most insidious drug that the 20th Century has had to deal with.”
“The Internet is the global brain, the cyberspacially connected, telepathic, collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for.”
“The psychedelic species of visual beauty is something we don’t see in our furniture styles and our architecture. It seems to be coming in, literally, from another dimension, and yet it is undeniably moving. It’s beautiful.”
“Niagaras of beauty are flowing by untapped by ordinary consciousness… . Would that we could send robots who could film these psychedelic realities… . The presence of so much beauty is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.”
“In the Newtonian and print-created social space that we’re walking around in you are like a self-extracting archive that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet. And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.”
Three Halves of Ino Moxo : Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon
by César Calvo (Translated by Ken Symington)
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
by Michael Taussig
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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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space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And I’d like to begin today by thanking some of our fellow salonners who have either purchased a copy of one of my books or who
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made a direct donation to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with
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publishing these podcasts. In particular, I’d like to thank Sajja, who is currently joining us from Germany each week, and whose very generous donation has almost covered the entire month’s expenses.
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As I’ve said before, most of our donations are in the 10 sometimes.
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I’ve been there myself.
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I’ve been there myself.
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So even though your donation may not have been as large as Saja’s,
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please don’t think that your donations aren’t appreciated,
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because, well, that’s how we keep this show going, with a whole bunch of people chipping in a few dollars once in a while.
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So thank you, one and all,
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and I’m sure that all of our fellow salonners are thanking you as well.
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So, as you may have noticed, I’ve been alternating the Palenque Norte lectures from last year’s Burning Man Festival
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with a new Terrence McKenna talk every other week.
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And so today I’m going to play another session from one of Terrence’s workshops for you.
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And this one picks up with the same workshop that we’ve been listening to for a few weeks now.
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This one picks up with the same workshop that we’ve been listening to for a few weeks now.
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It was recorded on a Saturday morning and part of the afternoon in December of 1994,
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and it continues in his usual format of responding to questions from the people in the audience.
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Now, I’m going to warn you ahead of time that there is one riff that you’re going to hear in about 15 minutes from now that, well, maybe you’re going to wonder why I didn’t edit it out.
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What it is, is Terrence telling his audience about this thing called the Internet.
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Now, keep in mind that back in December of 1994,
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most likely there was probably nobody else in the room that was already on the net.
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And what I hope you’ll be able to tune into is the excitement in Terrence’s voice as he’s telling his audience about the potential of the Internet.
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Now, way back then, I was one of the thousands of other geeks who were beginning to build out the net.
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And it was an incredibly exciting time for us.
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was an incredibly exciting time for us. In fact, I can still remember one night when one of the guys who worked for me called me at home in a state of great excitement because he had just seen a
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commercial on television that included a dot-com address in it. And that was many months after the
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same young man came in one morning and told me that he had now visited each of the 38 websites
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that were already available. But he said he figured that he probably now visited each of the 38 websites that were already available.
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But he said he figured that he probably couldn’t keep it up if there were as many as 50 one day.
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Those were exciting days.
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And even several years before then, several years before the web came along in fact,
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I remember one night logging into the card catalog in the library at Trinity University in Dublin.
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It was about 2 o’clock in the morning, but I was so excited to be accessing that far-distant computer
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that I got my then-girlfriend out of bed to watch me search the catalog over my 300-baud modem
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that more or less painted one character on the screen at a time, just sort of like a fast typist.
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Unfortunately for our relationship, well, she didn’t share my amazement.
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But I was really amazed.
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So now when we listen to Terrence in just a few minutes,
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when he goes into really high gear about the revolution that’s about to take place,
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well, when we get there, I hope that you’ll realize
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the full extent of this revolution, including the part that you are playing in it yourself,
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right at this very moment. Well, enough of me. I want to hear Terrence’s internet prophecy
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once again myself. But first, we’ll begin with the question that I’ve used for the title
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of this workshop.
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What is truth, Terrence? Oh, that’s an easier question.
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What one is sure of?
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Very little, I would think.
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Well, I’m getting ready to say nothing.
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I guess that’s what it is.
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Everything is provisional.
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As to, I mean, what I believe in is what I called,
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and I mentioned it last night,
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the felt presence of immediate experience,
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the primary datum.
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I’m very aware that everything else
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is a construct moving out from that.
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And so the primary datum
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is the first level of being.
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But to say I believe in it,
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you know in Western philosophy,
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Descartes, and that would be in like 1625,
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said cogito ergo sum
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I think therefore I am
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and that seemed to make
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sense for 200 years
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it was an effort to get back
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to the most basic statement
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you could make
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I
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the given
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think
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the datum of immediate experience,
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but then the therefore
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is an enormous abyss of assumption
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that may have made sense to Descartes,
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but it does not make sense to modern people.
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I think what we can say is,
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I think, if you’re not thinking, then you are no more than
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the onrush of your metabolism and not greatly different from your cat or your dog. Well,
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thinking, we’re not making here a distinction between thinking and feeling. What I mean
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when I say thinking or the felt presence of immediate experience
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is more like what most people call feeling it’s the awareness of being you know in its most simple
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sense now then there is this curious congruency,
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which is not well understood by anybody, I mean,
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between mathematics and nature.
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So we have now a couple more things to play with.
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We have the felt presence of immediate experience,
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the I which feels,
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and then we have as mental objects
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in the given datum of experience
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both mathematical structures
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and the given natural world
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and there is some deep and profound congruence
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between these two
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and the relationship is not
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understood by anybody
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I mean to me this is really
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the question why does mathematics
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describe nature
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that’s a deeper question than most
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and so I live by questions
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I don’t see how you can live any other way
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I mean you have to remember we’re animals
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we’re meat, we’re specks of
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replicating organic chemistry
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on the surface of a planet
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if we can make a model of our environment
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that seems to us a sufficiently clear mirror
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that is probably about as far as you can go the idea that we
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can actually cognize the dynamic of being is well it’s a noble hope I try to do it I
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mean I actually try to create a complete explanation, but I always call them models
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because you have to throw them away.
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You have to keep adding to the model
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and then throwing it away.
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The real justification for psychedelics
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is that they feed new data into your model.
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You know, what we’re doing is triangulating points
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in some kind of phase space and if you go to Paris
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you know more about reality than people who don’t and if you smoke DMT you know more about reality
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than people who don’t and the so the idea is to triangulate a sufficiently large number of data points
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in your set of experience that you can make a model of the world
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that is not imprisoning.
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That’s why second to psychedelics, I think travel
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is the most boundary-dissolving educational enterprise
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that you can get mixed up in.
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Yeah?
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I think one problem is with everything we experience
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on the outside or with psychedelics
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is that we’re experiencing only more or less
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what we are believing with some variabilities.
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So maybe we can see, yeah, with some variabilities so
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So maybe maybe we can see yeah, it’s there’s an impossible other world There is something more and maybe that’s all maybe I can I can understand the experience in my personal
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Life
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But I can’t take it for real
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It’s it’s in some It’s in some way real,
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but I have to check out if I’m producing this,
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if I believe that, for example, the world is bad,
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and I will experience a bad other world,
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something like this.
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So I never can be sure of this
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because of my belief system.
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I’m producing this.
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Well, in what you say
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there’s a strongly expressed
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dichotomy between self and world
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I mean this question
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of reality, non-reality
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but there is
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you can perform a kind of philosophical
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reduction and satisfy
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yourself that
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the self and world
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distinction is not primary.
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That who looks through your eyes is the world.
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I would probably buy into that.
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That it shows us that there is something else.
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Although I do think that the way ideas emerge into culture,
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which happens naturally without psychedelics,
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is probably accelerated by psychedelics. I think the experience over the past thousand
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years is that ideology is poisonous. You have two kinds of ideologies that we’ve experimented with over the past thousand years, unsuccessful ones, where I would nominate, I suppose, Christianity,
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and successful ones, like science.
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And it turns out whether they’re successful or unsuccessful,
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the consequences for the rest of us are pretty horrendous.
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The world seen through the lens of ideology is a very limited world.
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And the great catastrophes of the past thousand years have been brought on by ideological errors.
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That’s why, you know, I’m very suspicious of this thing I talked about last night that I called the world
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corporate state. But on
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the other hand, the world corporate state
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seems to be less
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ideological than
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any organizing
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entity that we’ve seen in a long
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time. It has
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no real ideology other than it
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wants to do business,
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which is hardly, you know, a cosmic vision.
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Yeah.
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We’ve had a major, major shift as far as this corporate state is concerned in the last 10,
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20, 30 years, and that is the shareholder is wanting more than dividends now. The shareholder
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is also the consumer, wants responsibility to the corporate state. So the management of these corporate states
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are having to adapt themselves
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to provide what their shareholders
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and their consumers want.
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Yeah, well, so what you’re saying is it’s being
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modified from the bottom up.
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Exactly. Yeah.
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But I think we should,
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that what electronic culture
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permits is incredible
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diversity.
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And that that what electronic culture permits is incredible diversity and that what the print-created world demanded and created was tremendous suppression of diversity.
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Print created concepts like the citizen.
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That’s a print-created notion.
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It created concepts like the citizen. That’s a print-created notion. It created concepts like the public.
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There was no public before print.
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That idea didn’t even exist.
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So we now define ourselves as,
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I’m a member of the public.
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I’m a citizen.
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These are very curious categories
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where you discover yourself a member of very large
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organizations that you never remember joining
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you just sort of were born
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into it
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what the electronic culture empowers
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is diversity, eccentricity
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and
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a pluralistic kind of mix.
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And that’s very threatening to the print mind
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because the print mind is all about controlling
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through having groups of people that you can deal with.
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That’s why, in in a sense print or television served a of people watch the same TV programs you
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there is a tendency to overcome the deconstructural impulse in TV and it begins to act like print now
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of course that’s breaking down and you know the only people who watch network TV live in trailer courts. But there was a time when…
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You see, that’s what happened.
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What was everybody’s media 25 years ago
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has become the media of the lower middle class.
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And then everybody else, the lower class,
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has fallen into its own media, you know, underground radio stations,
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boom boxes, and this. And then the upper echelons of society have gone to computer networks,
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email, fiber optics, and to view on-demand TV. Television, I to my mind the most insidious drug that the 20th century has had
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to deal with and you know it is a drug it’s the first of the electronic drugs and its impact if
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it were heroin people would be alarmed I mean that people are
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on average watching six hours
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a day of TV
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and I don’t even think it’s a content
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problem I think television
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itself is toxic
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it’s not how many murders
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you witness it’s the actual
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this is what McLuhan
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was always trying to say
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that people couldn’t understand what he meant when he said that the medium was the
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Message the message is not the message the medium was the message and the effects it had
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I mean we have millions of people who are warehoused in
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almost a larval state
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in their
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apartments watching TV paying for their medical plans and almost a larval state in their apartments,
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watching TV, paying for their medical plans, and glued to this mindless opera of cultural decay
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that is recited day after day in front of them.
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I mean, it’s horrible to imagine.
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And this is a creation to some degree of the world corporate
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state that probably has to be addressed. Yeah?
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There’s a wonderful book that’s just come out called Media Virus by Douglas Rushkoff
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that addresses this problem really very well. Have you read that? I haven’t read that. I know Doug. His other book, Siberia, is a nice
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look at cyber culture. Yeah, yeah, interesting. What do you think is going to happen with this
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video, TV, whatever? No, I think, well, no, I think that the most important cultural event happening right now
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is the rise, the explosive growth of the Internet and the web.
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I mean, the idea that with my $1,200 power book,
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I can access 3,000 computers around the planet
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by just plugging into a telephone jack
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is staggering.
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I mean, this is a revolution of orders of magnitude
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that has happened completely invisibly.
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Nobody’s windows had to be rocked out.
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No camps had to be established nothing appears to
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have changed the people who are not switched on don’t even know anything has happened to them the
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world looks exactly like it looked five years ago to the people who are switched on earth is becoming a distant memory of the internet well the internet is the global brain the cyber
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spatially connected telepathic collective domain that we’ve all been hungering for I mean it is so powerful and it has arisen with incredible speed and by a very
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insidious fashion I mean first of all as I mentioned last night it was a the internet was
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originally called ARPAnet it was the Advanced Research Projects Agency it was this super secret military industrial thing that they wanted to survive a
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thermonuclear attack and so they designed it to be unkillable it has no central switching zone
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if you blow up a part of it it just flows around the part you blow up it is unkillable so that was arpa and now it’s become public domain
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and it’s incredibly empowering for any minority because you can find your peers it doesn’t matter what you’re into. You can play the Shania and join the Shania playing society.
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So no matter how eccentric your interest,
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you can find common ground out there.
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Then the other thing is information
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that I’m not kidding you,
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10 years ago, the director of the CIA
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sitting at his desk in Langley Virginia
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didn’t have these the information processing capacity that you now have plugging into your
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power book at any phone jack in the world because these databases are there and if you know how to
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surf the net if you know how to program your nobots so that while you’re sleeping they’re sorting through and visiting various sites and downloading and looking and looking, you know, not to talk to people,
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but to talk…
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When you go on to the NCSA main page
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in Batavia, Illinois,
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it says available resources.
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You click on that
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and 1,500 computers
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come on, the names of them,
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and you just point and click and now you’re talking to that
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computer and it tells you that the really interesting thing is being stored on another
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computer not in Madrid but in Singapore and you point and click now you’re talking to the main
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menu in Singapore you go out onto the net in the course of an hour of moving on the net,
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you may circle the planet 10 times
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and talk to 50 computers all over the world.
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And you’re downloading files
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and you’re tracing your path
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so that you can go back.
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And this is happening.
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It’s been happening for quite some time 30 million people
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are out there and because it requires literacy and technology and and money those 30 million people
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probably are among probably only 10 percent of the people who rule the planet are not on that net.
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And it’s where the cultural architecture
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is being put in place now.
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And it’s this invisible space,
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which is where we should have been building all the time.
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So I think this is the doorway
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into the new dimension into which we’re going and that these technologies put in place for no reason other than to facilitate bank transfers and do incredibly mundane things are turning out to be the seeds of our electromagnetic body in hyperspace. Can we elaborate on your understanding of virtual cities
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being designed using computer names?
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Well, it’s simply that you want to create an interface
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with a bunch of data.
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And a very crude way to do it
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is to have a page with a list of computers.
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And you click and you go to the computer.
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That works, but it’s not very sexy.
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Well, but what if we made a three-dimensional landscape
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and put buildings in that landscape
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so that the large red rectangle is the AT&T database,
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the low
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violet group
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of integrated triangles
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is the national medical
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database in other words
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you simply make the icons
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three dimensional and
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analogous to buildings
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and then you can build data
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town where
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you know these
00:24:04 ►
instead of a list of computers
00:24:07 ►
they appear to be a long line of skyscrapers
00:24:11 ►
lining a broad avenue
00:24:13 ►
in which you’re driving down in a Ferrari or something.
00:24:16 ►
All this will come.
00:24:18 ►
I mean the engineers will do it.
00:24:20 ►
How it looks is immaterial.
00:24:23 ►
It’s that it can be done anyway.
00:24:25 ►
Yeah. Well from what you’re saying and it feels like this is going to be a very
00:24:28 ►
intellectual snobbish it’s going to be a leetism because there’s only going to be
00:24:33 ►
a certain for a long time a certain level of intellectual capacity of
00:24:38 ►
literacy and literate education so it’s going to absolutely pull apart and make the class system
00:24:48 ►
even more…
00:24:50 ►
No, I think you’re absolutely right that this is happening. This is part of the problem,
00:24:55 ►
that what is happening… You see, part of the illusion of the political history of the past 40 years was the illusion that we were all Presbyterians,
00:25:08 ►
we all ate white bread,
00:25:10 ►
and we all lived in the suburbs,
00:25:12 ►
and we all were white folks.
00:25:15 ►
And now the society is fragmenting.
00:25:19 ►
You’re right.
00:25:20 ►
There are people who can’t read
00:25:23 ►
by the millions in this society.
00:25:26 ►
Meanwhile, other people are reaching for informational technologies
00:25:30 ►
so powerful that they can barely be conceived of.
00:25:34 ►
And this is the consequence of political mismanagement.
00:25:40 ►
I think the American Union is flying to pieces because the notion of polity was betrayed in the 1960s.
00:25:53 ►
And that since the middle of the 1960s, this has been a police state of some sort. You see, after World War II, and they kicked Hitler’s ass and all that,
00:26:06 ►
then everybody came back full of idealism
00:26:10 ►
to raise families, to build America.
00:26:13 ►
They’d been through the New Deal.
00:26:15 ►
There was a modicum of social responsibility
00:26:18 ►
and consciousness hammered into the middle class.
00:26:21 ►
And everybody came back.
00:26:23 ►
And then the American political system went haywire
00:26:28 ►
and basically because we lost our nerve my generation I’m 48 I went to the University
00:26:39 ►
of California at Berkeley in 1965 my generation was the beneficiary of the idea that you should give
00:26:49 ►
a universal education to everybody. And they discovered that if you do that, if you take
00:26:58 ►
everybody and make them read Plato and John Stuart Mill and Voltaire and Hobbes as we did, that you can’t rule such people.
00:27:09 ►
They take it too seriously. They become ungovernable. They pour into the streets
00:27:16 ►
screaming about their rights. And so in the aftermath of the suppression of the counterculture of the 60s it was decided
00:27:26 ►
that the goal of
00:27:28 ►
universal public education
00:27:30 ►
and the building of
00:27:31 ►
a population intelligent
00:27:35 ►
enough to run a democracy
00:27:37 ►
that would all be
00:27:38 ►
abandoned and the
00:27:40 ►
universities would be turned into trade
00:27:42 ►
schools and people would be given MBAs
00:27:46 ►
and incorporated into the corporate state.
00:27:49 ►
But no more John Stuart Mill.
00:27:52 ►
No more of that.
00:27:53 ►
And the consequences of this
00:27:57 ►
have been to create a history-less
00:28:00 ►
and illiterate lower middle class, where before the lower middle class was the pool
00:28:09 ►
of our intellectual creativity. That’s where John Steinbeck came from and Henry Miller and
00:28:15 ►
all of the people who drove the evolution of cultural values know, we could talk endlessly about what went wrong in the 60s or why we were turned into a police state. But now, the impulse of those kinds of repressive states is to forestall change.
00:28:43 ►
in America to the point where now when it comes it’s going to be explosive
00:28:45 ►
uncontrollable, revolutionary
00:28:48 ►
we will be lucky to get through
00:28:52 ►
this political cycle ahead of us
00:28:54 ►
without having to hang some of these people
00:28:57 ►
isn’t this part of the whole point of what’s going on right now?
00:29:01 ►
you mean that there is this tremendous
00:29:02 ►
now we’re going to have the change
00:29:04 ►
the change which should have been
00:29:07 ►
spread out over 30 years
00:29:09 ►
is now going to come in the next five
00:29:11 ►
no matter who it hurts,
00:29:13 ►
no matter how chaotic it is.
00:29:16 ►
Well, I don’t know how we got on that.
00:29:20 ►
The role of psychedelics in all of this
00:29:23 ►
is that it erodes loyalty to the models of the tribe.
00:29:27 ►
And so we are the people who can see,
00:29:30 ►
and there may be others,
00:29:31 ►
I’m not claiming exclusivity for the psychedelic community,
00:29:35 ►
but the psychedelic community loudly proclaims
00:29:38 ►
that the emperor has no clothes.
00:29:40 ►
This is all a con game,
00:29:42 ►
that this junk dealing hyper media
00:29:46 ►
obsessed nitwit society
00:29:48 ►
is an unfit environment
00:29:50 ►
for delinquent 14 year olds
00:29:52 ►
let alone for the rest of us
00:29:54 ►
and this is news they don’t
00:29:56 ►
like to hear
00:29:57 ►
well I think these things are
00:30:00 ►
always more interesting if they’re driven
00:30:02 ►
by the agendas of
00:30:04 ►
the people here.
00:30:05 ►
You got a fairly long hit of me this morning. If there are any areas that you want to bring
00:30:12 ►
into focus, this is a good time to suggest it. Otherwise, I’ll just launch into another
00:30:19 ►
meandering diatribe and like that. Yes?
00:30:24 ►
I’m interested in more on ayahuasca.
00:30:28 ►
There’s a book, which I’m not sure it’s been published yet,
00:30:32 ►
but you should all watch for it.
00:30:34 ►
I hope we’ll make a revolution in ayahuasca awareness.
00:30:39 ►
It’s called The Three Halves of Imo Mosho,
00:30:44 ►
and it was translated by a good friend
00:30:47 ►
of many people in this room,
00:30:49 ►
Ken Symington translated it.
00:30:51 ►
And it’s by the Peruvian poet Cesar Calvo.
00:30:57 ►
And it is a book about ayahuasca
00:31:00 ►
that could easily win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
00:31:04 ►
It’s not some panting anthropological reportage.
00:31:09 ►
It’s art and incredibly rich.
00:31:13 ►
And if you get a chance, you should read it.
00:31:15 ►
If you’re interested in this subject,
00:31:17 ►
another book about ayahuasca that is no easy read
00:31:21 ►
is a book with the unlikely title of
00:31:25 ►
Shamanism, Colonialism
00:31:28 ►
and the Wild Man
00:31:30 ►
by Michael Taussig
00:31:32 ►
and it is an intellectual
00:31:34 ►
journey to places you
00:31:35 ►
never thought you’d pass through
00:31:38 ►
could you spell the title
00:31:40 ►
of the first one, the three halves of what?
00:31:41 ►
Imo
00:31:42 ►
space
00:31:44 ►
M-O-X-O the three halves of what? Imo-Mosho I-M-O space M-O-X-O
00:31:46 ►
the three halves of Imo-Mosho
00:31:50 ►
so I don’t know how much more there is to say about ayahuasca
00:31:56 ►
from a phenomenological point of view
00:31:58 ►
what’s interesting is that
00:32:00 ►
it seems to hover on the edge of
00:32:04 ►
being a telepathic drug of some sort.
00:32:09 ►
And in fact, for the first 30 years of the 20th century,
00:32:13 ►
the active principle was actually called telepathy.
00:32:18 ►
And these German chemists and Theodor Koch-Grunberg
00:32:22 ►
and people like that were very interested in this.
00:32:26 ►
And then it was realized that it was actually harming
00:32:30 ►
a previously discovered substance.
00:32:33 ►
But it isn’t the kind of telepathy
00:32:36 ►
where you see what other people are thinking,
00:32:40 ►
or hear what they’re thinking.
00:32:43 ►
It’s more that you actually see what is meant.
00:32:47 ►
You have an experience of meaning related to seeing
00:32:51 ►
that is like wisdom.
00:32:55 ►
I mean, it’s hard to explain.
00:32:56 ►
But whole societies are guided by people
00:33:00 ►
who are intoxicated by this material.
00:33:04 ►
Yeah?
00:33:08 ►
Have any experiments been published that actually demonstrated those telepathic powers or was it some purely subjective well no I think it’s
00:33:14 ►
slightly in a different realm I don’t think it will show up on like a card turning test or something like that it is not telepathy it’s it’s a different modality of mind is what
00:33:30 ►
it is through song and sound the boundaries are dissolved but I don’t know if if you can set up a scientific scale that can detect this it seems more like
00:33:46 ►
taking on the mind of nature
00:33:48 ►
rather than
00:33:50 ►
that’s right
00:33:51 ►
it’s that there is a shared state of mind
00:33:54 ►
but it is not a sharing
00:33:56 ►
of states of mind
00:33:58 ►
you see what I mean?
00:34:01 ►
yeah
00:34:02 ►
have you done any comparative studying
00:34:04 ►
on other substances in other cultures?
00:34:07 ►
For example, the Haitians and the voodoo
00:34:09 ►
and the substances that they work with
00:34:13 ►
and I suppose other people all over the globe?
00:34:18 ►
Well, see, it’s a very complicated question
00:34:23 ►
because cultural values enter into
00:34:26 ►
the definition of what is an acceptable or desirable intoxication and there’s a whole
00:34:34 ►
smorgasbord of possibilities offered by nature from things which are incredibly pleasant and
00:34:42 ►
i don’t know aphrodisiac and so forth through a range of things which
00:34:47 ►
nobody would ever do more than once but then there’s a kind of an intermediate range I
00:34:53 ►
mean if you can recall your first shot of scotch you know this is a shocking thing to your system. I mean, your body does not readily take to that.
00:35:08 ►
And voodoo is operating on these substances
00:35:13 ►
called tetrodotoxins that come from puffer fish
00:35:17 ►
that are much closer to being poisons
00:35:20 ►
than to being psychedelics,
00:35:22 ►
where people are taken out in the bushes
00:35:26 ►
and given something
00:35:28 ►
and their stomach cramps
00:35:30 ►
and everything turns yellow
00:35:32 ►
and they fall down on the ground
00:35:34 ►
and they twitch and they vomit
00:35:36 ►
and they beg to die
00:35:37 ►
and they want to die
00:35:39 ►
and then ten hours later they’re fine
00:35:41 ►
and they’re brought down to the river
00:35:44 ►
and slapped around and washed off
00:35:46 ►
and given a piece of white cloth
00:35:48 ►
and told now you’re a full-fledged member of society
00:35:52 ►
that’s an ordeal poison
00:35:54 ►
and it acts in some ways
00:35:57 ►
very much like a psychedelic
00:36:00 ►
because if the purpose of a psychedelic trip
00:36:02 ►
is to get you back to your foundation
00:36:04 ►
thinking you’re going to die like a dog in the ditch
00:36:08 ►
is also wonderful for doing that
00:36:11 ►
but see
00:36:14 ►
I think different cultures have made use
00:36:18 ►
of whatever was available to them
00:36:20 ►
and we as a global culture
00:36:24 ►
can look over the entire set of options and say well
00:36:30 ►
here’s a plant which makes you see visions but also sterilizes you for five years and
00:36:37 ►
here’s something else which does something else and we can actually choose the best of these tools. This is the great leg up that we have on the aboriginal cultures.
00:36:49 ►
We are, as it were, a kind of clearinghouse for all of that information.
00:36:53 ►
And out of all of those many, many options, it turns out there are easy ways in.
00:37:00 ►
Not totally easy, but easier ways in. Not totally easy, but easier ways in. And so you have to learn which are the easy
00:37:10 ►
ways in, the paths which can be followed at all. Yeah, Jessie.
00:37:15 ►
I have, you had said something to me over lunch about ayahuasca and vomiting, and it
00:37:21 ►
made the idea of vomiting more tolerable i don’t know what it was
00:37:26 ►
but i have a lot of resistance to ayahuasca because as a child i vomited every day when
00:37:31 ►
my mother forced her to juice it well i think what i said was it gets easier as you take like
00:37:38 ►
the second ayahuasca trip is easier than the first generally and what that implies is that this vomiting that you’re
00:37:46 ►
doing is actually a shedding of toxins and this is certainly how they view it they call it la purga
00:37:55 ►
the purge and they they culturally value and encourage vomiting
00:38:02 ►
another interesting thing about ayahuasca
00:38:07 ►
is that there’s nothing in it that doesn’t occur
00:38:09 ►
in the ordinary human brain.
00:38:12 ►
There’s just more of ordinary brain chemistry there.
00:38:17 ►
So that implies that these extraordinary states of mind,
00:38:21 ►
group-mindedness, three-dimensional hallucinations and so forth, are nevertheless
00:38:28 ►
not that far removed from ordinary states of
00:38:32 ►
brain chemistry. And, you know, in an enlightened
00:38:35 ►
environment of medical research, these things would be studied
00:38:40 ►
as it is. It’s all very messed up by politics.
00:38:44 ►
What’s about the tradition
00:38:45 ►
i know that in these cultures they have mythologies and they have a tradition
00:38:50 ►
so if you transform or transfer these things to for example the states of western europe
00:38:58 ►
there isn’t any mythology a common mythology well, you can never escape your own identity.
00:39:08 ►
I mean, you can never experience what they experience.
00:39:12 ►
Conversely, they can never experience what you experience.
00:39:16 ►
I mean, I’ve been up against this,
00:39:17 ►
where you’re sitting around in a hut on your haunches,
00:39:22 ►
covered with pig grease and waiting for something to come on and inevitably
00:39:27 ►
you know my mind would drift to Husserl’s general phenomenology of ideas and I would try to perform
00:39:35 ►
the eidetic reduction and then I would just make me burst out laughing the idea that you know I
00:39:42 ►
wonder how many people in the room are performing the eidetic reduction at this moment.
00:39:47 ►
Not many.
00:39:49 ►
So I, you know, people have criticized me because I don’t align myself with anthropology.
00:39:57 ►
I’m really interested in these things as tools for understanding experience.
00:40:06 ►
The cultures that have discovered them
00:40:09 ►
often have very narrow interpretations of them.
00:40:14 ►
Another thing is,
00:40:15 ►
some cultures are afraid of the unconscious
00:40:20 ►
and encourage going only a very short distance in.
00:40:28 ►
And I think once you get the idea that it can’t really kill you and you know some sometimes you it’s hard to talk yourself
00:40:34 ►
into this but if you can convince yourself of that then you know just the thrill of it
00:40:41 ►
and in a way that’s possible because we are deprogrammed
00:40:46 ►
from ideology
00:40:47 ►
anyone else except a
00:40:49 ►
anyone else except a
00:40:51 ►
secular late 20th century person
00:40:54 ►
would take a look at this and assume
00:40:55 ►
it was God almighty
00:40:57 ►
and behave appropriately
00:40:59 ►
we look at it
00:41:01 ►
and say well it can’t be God almighty
00:41:04 ►
it must be something else,
00:41:06 ►
and then explore it in an experiential fashion.
00:41:12 ►
Yeah?
00:41:13 ►
So you talk about ayahuasca
00:41:16 ►
as almost like a joyride on some level.
00:41:19 ►
One of the questions I have is,
00:41:27 ►
when you take ayahuasca and psilocybin and acid
00:41:29 ►
those three things
00:41:30 ►
what does each one specifically
00:41:32 ►
if you can take in a nutshell
00:41:33 ►
what direction each one goes
00:41:35 ►
what would you say if you made a sentence
00:41:37 ►
for each one of those
00:41:38 ►
well a sentence
00:41:40 ►
a boundary I may not be able to
00:41:44 ►
tolerate well just roughly the feeling with
00:41:52 ►
ayahuasca is that it’s gaian it’s earth oriented you feel the river you feel the jungle you feel the drama and pain and nobility of life and death and
00:42:10 ►
it’s visceral you know it’s about the meat and and and the jungle and uh it’s feminine and then
00:42:19 ►
the characters the character of the hallucinations is it’s as though it’s like a camera eye.
00:42:26 ►
It’s largely silent,
00:42:29 ►
but it’s just an eye that is moving
00:42:32 ►
through a vast matrix of visual information.
00:42:36 ►
And after a good ayahuasca trip,
00:42:38 ►
you just feel like you want to rub your eyes.
00:42:41 ►
You say, you know, I’ve just been looking and looking.
00:42:43 ►
It’s like a trip to Madison Avenue with money in your pocket. You’ve just been looking and looking it’s like a trip to madison
00:42:45 ►
avenue with money in your pocket you’ve just been looking and looking and looking and looking for
00:42:50 ►
hours at this stuff and it’s in it’s almost invariably beautiful in a in a a jeweled, filigreed, multileveled, transparent, glittering, flowing kind of way.
00:43:11 ►
And it almost always takes place against a black background for some reason.
00:43:17 ►
It goes on against a black background.
00:43:20 ►
Okay, then psilocybin, which is just an atom’s twist away,
00:43:25 ►
is a very different creature.
00:43:28 ►
The most astonishing thing about psilocybin,
00:43:32 ►
and you’re hearing this from a materialist of some sort,
00:43:36 ►
is that it speaks.
00:43:39 ►
It has a voice.
00:43:42 ►
And if you don’t think this is confounding to the rational mind
00:43:47 ►
to come upon this in the detritus of your mind’s attic,
00:43:51 ►
it can talk to you
00:43:53 ►
and astound you with its insight, humor,
00:43:59 ►
ability to connect and make insightful inclusions and so forth and so on.
00:44:07 ►
And the whole thing, the whole psilocybin experience is imbued with this eerie energy,
00:44:15 ►
which has different names, but elfin, gnomic, extraterrestrial.
00:44:22 ►
extraterrestrial you know
00:44:25 ►
they’re shiny eyed
00:44:27 ►
and small
00:44:28 ►
and there’s chattering
00:44:30 ►
and the other thing is there are machines
00:44:33 ►
the psilocybin visions
00:44:35 ►
have a tendency to drift
00:44:37 ►
toward technoscapes
00:44:39 ►
enormous machines
00:44:41 ►
in orbit around alien
00:44:43 ►
planets and strange architectonic forms
00:44:46 ►
where you don’t know whether you’re wandering around
00:44:48 ►
inside somebody’s cathedral or their television set.
00:44:52 ►
And the whole thing has this off world,
00:44:57 ►
we are the galactarian civilization,
00:45:01 ►
we hold the key to the history of this sector of the kilocasm we we you know it’s
00:45:07 ►
this kind of thing almost blast of trumpets and and the ringing up of cosmic curtains it’s very
00:45:15 ►
very dramatic wagnerian and forward looking it’s about the destiny of the race and why planets are put in place and what it’s all for
00:45:25 ►
could hardly be different from ayahuasca
00:45:28 ►
and yet you know
00:45:30 ►
an atom’s twist
00:45:31 ►
away
00:45:33 ►
then DMT
00:45:40 ►
you know
00:45:41 ►
rests in some even weirder
00:45:44 ►
domain of triangulation dmt you don’t only hear the voice
00:45:50 ►
but if you get a sufficiently uh heroic dose it’s like you break through into the control room where
00:45:58 ►
all the secrets are being run from and built and there’s this unbelievable sense of finding out,
00:46:10 ►
finding out beyond your wildest dreams of ever finding out.
00:46:16 ►
And it’s an inhabited mind space of some sort
00:46:21 ►
that is so unexpected and so convincingly real
00:46:25 ►
that you actually, I think a person who doesn’t fear for their sanity
00:46:30 ►
has already lost it at that point.
00:46:33 ►
Because it is without a doubt, you know,
00:46:35 ►
absolutely the last thing you ever expected to have happen to you,
00:46:42 ►
that you would burst into some some place somewhere
00:46:48 ►
where there would be these chattering
00:46:50 ►
self-transforming linguistic creatures
00:46:54 ►
that are made out of light
00:46:56 ►
and punning intentionality
00:46:58 ►
and are trying to get you to perform
00:47:01 ►
some unimaginable task that is somehow caught up with the unravelment
00:47:08 ►
of the space-time continuum and the destiny of the species
00:47:11 ►
and so forth and so on. This is 30 seconds into a trip
00:47:15 ►
that lasts a minute and a half and then you’re returned to
00:47:19 ►
you and your friends and your concerns.
00:47:29 ►
LSD is not animated in this way
00:47:31 ►
it is more like
00:47:33 ►
the classical expectation people have
00:47:37 ►
I think who have not taken these things
00:47:39 ►
of what a psychedelic drug should be
00:47:43 ►
in other words
00:47:44 ►
you think clearer of what a psychedelic drug should be. In other words,
00:47:47 ►
you think clearer,
00:47:49 ►
you see connections,
00:47:53 ►
you can hold very complex ideas in your mind and rotate them and look at them from many angles.
00:47:57 ►
You experience emotional abreactions.
00:48:00 ►
You recover childhood memories.
00:48:02 ►
You are able to straighten your karma out with people
00:48:06 ►
you are undergoing rapid psychological growth
00:48:12 ►
under the influence of LSD
00:48:14 ►
but it doesn’t
00:48:16 ►
the reason I am not so keen on LSD
00:48:19 ►
is that I’m really a plant guy
00:48:23 ►
not a drug guy.
00:48:27 ►
And it’s something about these substances
00:48:29 ►
that have been carried along in the genomes of these plants
00:48:34 ►
for, in some cases, hundreds of millions of years.
00:48:37 ►
And why?
00:48:39 ►
What are these things doing for the plants?
00:48:41 ►
And then how can a molecule so so simple this is another puzzle in all
00:48:48 ►
of this these molecules are planar that means they’re flat they’re simple sometimes 20 30 atoms
00:48:55 ►
and yet uh they totally transform your entire consciousness this is the equivalent of a red ant
00:49:05 ►
who can rip down
00:49:06 ►
the Empire State Building
00:49:08 ►
in an hour and a half.
00:49:10 ►
I mean, why is mind
00:49:12 ►
so delicately poised
00:49:14 ►
that such a tiny amount
00:49:16 ►
of pharmaceutical material
00:49:18 ►
can create such vast changes?
00:49:21 ►
And then another puzzle,
00:49:23 ►
as long as I’m listing
00:49:23 ►
my favorite mysteries, and this is the
00:49:26 ►
one that really got me into this in the beginning because my early inclination was toward art
00:49:33 ►
history and that is a very simple question where do the images come from where does this stuff come from I mean it is so unreferent to the ocean of commercially
00:49:50 ►
produced imagery in which we swim you know we are constantly bombarded by the images of television
00:49:57 ►
and Hollywood and so forth and so on and yet the psychedelic species of visual beauty is not,
00:50:05 ►
we don’t see it in our furniture styles and our architecture.
00:50:09 ►
It seems to be coming in literally from another dimension.
00:50:14 ►
And yet it is undeniably moving.
00:50:18 ►
It’s beautiful.
00:50:19 ►
And I am puzzled why I, as an ordinary person,
00:50:26 ►
under the influence of, let us say, 30 milligrams of psilocybin,
00:50:31 ►
can see more art in an hour
00:50:34 ►
than Western civilization has produced in the past thousand years.
00:50:39 ►
And that tells you how little we’re getting from the art river
00:50:44 ►
back to the village where we can drink it.
00:50:48 ►
Niagara’s of beauty are flowing by,
00:50:53 ►
untapped by ordinary consciousness.
00:50:56 ►
And, you know, would that we could send robots
00:51:00 ►
who could film these psychedelic realities.
00:51:03 ►
Perhaps, you know, virtual reality will develop into a technology
00:51:08 ►
where we are able finally to reconstruct and agree upon
00:51:12 ►
the content of the psychedelic experience.
00:51:16 ►
But to me, that’s almost like the metaphysical stamp of approval
00:51:21 ►
on the psychedelic experience.
00:51:23 ►
Beauty, the presence of so much beauty
00:51:26 ►
is an argument to me that truth cannot be far away.
00:51:32 ►
Yeah?
00:51:32 ►
Are you aware of any spontaneous trips
00:51:34 ►
without the plants?
00:51:41 ►
Well, you know, there’s a whole vast area
00:51:44 ►
of human endeavor called mystical religion,
00:51:48 ►
and there’s a whole other vast area of human endeavor called madness. And many stories
00:51:56 ►
abound and come out of these areas. I think that what we’re talking about here whether we’re talking about madness, mysticism or psychedelics
00:52:07 ►
is a brain state
00:52:10 ►
for the schizophrenic
00:52:13 ►
it is uninvited and terrifying
00:52:15 ►
for the mystic
00:52:18 ►
it’s achieved by excruciating acts of asceticism
00:52:22 ►
in most cases
00:52:24 ►
which certainly have profound
00:52:26 ►
physiological consequences
00:52:28 ►
on the neural
00:52:29 ►
ecology of the brain
00:52:32 ►
and for the
00:52:34 ►
smart money I think
00:52:36 ►
you use a shamanic
00:52:38 ►
technology
00:52:39 ►
I think religion
00:52:42 ►
organized religion
00:52:43 ►
of the high classical sort,
00:52:46 ►
you know, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and so forth,
00:52:49 ►
is very anxious about this whole issue
00:52:53 ►
precisely because religion is always anxious about the issue of direct revelation.
00:53:00 ►
That was what shattered religious consensus in Europe.
00:53:03 ►
That’s what the Protestant Reformation was about doctrinally.
00:53:07 ►
I mean, there were many things going on.
00:53:09 ►
But the doctrinal argument was, is it the job of specialists called theologians
00:53:16 ►
to study scripture called revelation in order to tell the rest of us what God’s plan is?
00:53:24 ►
in order to tell the rest of us what God’s plan is?
00:53:30 ►
Or is it better for each of us to look within the confines of our own souls and have our own dialogue with God and figure it out?
00:53:35 ►
And that was basically the Protestant position,
00:53:37 ►
and it went against hierarchical theology.
00:53:42 ►
Yeah?
00:53:43 ►
I recently read about
00:53:45 ►
a mushroom called fly agaric
00:53:47 ►
can you comment on its role
00:53:49 ►
in history
00:53:50 ►
these are amazingly complicated questions
00:53:54 ►
or either that or I’ve over educated
00:53:56 ►
myself
00:53:57 ►
could be
00:54:00 ►
well
00:54:03 ►
there is a whole domain of controversy and discourse
00:54:09 ►
about the role of mushrooms in human culture
00:54:15 ►
because it was noticed by Gordon Wasson in the 1950s
00:54:20 ►
that there are two kinds, invariably,
00:54:23 ►
there are two kinds of cultural attitudes toward mushrooms.
00:54:27 ►
One is called mycophilic.
00:54:31 ►
And if you want to know what mycophilism is,
00:54:34 ►
go to Russia, go to Poland, go to Czechoslovakia,
00:54:39 ►
where people have hundreds of words for mushrooms.
00:54:42 ►
Several holidays a year are set aside to collect mushrooms
00:54:47 ►
children are named after mushrooms so forth and so on the slavs are into mushrooms well then if
00:54:56 ►
you want to know what a mycophobic culture is go to rural england where there are no mushrooms. There are only toadstools, and don’t touch them, please.
00:55:07 ►
They’re highly poisonous.
00:55:09 ►
That’s the general English attitude toward mushrooms.
00:55:15 ►
So Gordon Wasson wrote about this all through the 50s and 60s,
00:55:19 ►
and he decided that you all probably have seen,
00:55:23 ►
if not the real thing a plastic cast or depicted in schmaltzig
00:55:30 ►
european illustrative style the famous mushroom of fairy tales the red mushroom with the white dots
00:55:41 ►
well that is amanita muscaria and it grows in a symbiotic mycorrhizal relationship
00:55:48 ►
to spruce and birch trees and is used by the shaman of the irkut language group and the amur
00:55:58 ►
river basin and now it just happens that those people in the Amur River Basin were the first people studied by the new science of anthropology
00:56:09 ►
when it wanted to study shamanism.
00:56:13 ►
By chance, I suppose.
00:56:16 ►
And so ever since, the science of shamanism,
00:56:19 ►
whether we’re talking about the shamans of the Amazon Basin,
00:56:23 ►
Central China, South India, or Tierra del
00:56:25 ►
Fuego, has had to labor
00:56:28 ►
within the categories
00:56:29 ►
created by the people who studied
00:56:31 ►
the shamanism of the Amur River
00:56:33 ►
Basin. And
00:56:35 ►
the use of the Amanita Muscaria
00:56:38 ►
was tremendously
00:56:40 ►
overstressed by Wasson,
00:56:44 ►
I think
00:56:45 ►
he wrote a book called Soma
00:56:47 ►
the Divine Mushroom of Immortality
00:56:49 ►
in which he argued that Amanita Muscaria
00:56:52 ►
was the Soma of the Rig Vedas
00:56:54 ►
you may not know it
00:56:55 ►
but the Rig Vedas are largely
00:56:58 ►
these hymns
00:56:59 ►
composed in the Vedic
00:57:02 ►
phase of the Hindu religion
00:57:03 ►
to a mysterious intoxicant, Soma.
00:57:08 ►
Nobody knows what Soma is,
00:57:10 ►
but much scholarly ink and blood has been shed on the question.
00:57:16 ►
And Gordon Wasson argued that it had to be Amanita muscaria
00:57:19 ►
and made a case which impressed some people and not others.
00:57:23 ►
The most damaging evidence against him was,
00:57:27 ►
it’s hard as hell to get off on this stuff.
00:57:31 ►
And when you finally do get off, the experience is extremely ambiguous.
00:57:36 ►
I mean, shivering and salivating and thinking you’re losing your marbles
00:57:41 ►
is not my idea of the ecstatic ascent to the presence of the pleroma
00:57:47 ►
and a lot of other people thought so too so then there there were was lots of hassle about well
00:57:56 ►
then it did seem that wasson had secured the case that the vedic hymns were about a mushroom. That was his breakthrough.
00:58:05 ►
But his mistake was
00:58:07 ►
he got the mushroom wrong
00:58:09 ►
and then created an entire
00:58:11 ►
false cultural history
00:58:13 ►
based on this error.
00:58:15 ►
And, you know, this, I’m not
00:58:18 ►
interested in flaying you with my
00:58:19 ►
theory, but if you’re interested, it’s told
00:58:22 ►
in the book Food of the Gods.
00:58:24 ►
Because, as I mentioned
00:58:26 ►
this morning I think psilocybin
00:58:28 ►
was the catalyst that triggered
00:58:32 ►
the emergence of self-reflecting
00:58:35 ►
consciousness in human beings and so
00:58:38 ►
my mushroom story is not a story
00:58:40 ►
of a sub-arctic toxic mushroom
00:58:44 ►
cult that carried itself into India along with the Indo-European
00:58:49 ►
invasions. My story is an older story about a mushroom that contained psilocybin and flourished
00:58:57 ►
in the grasslands of Africa and was present as nomadism slowly evolved into the domestication of cattle.
00:59:08 ►
And as we talked about this morning,
00:59:09 ►
the suppression of gender dominance with the addition of psilocybin in the diet
00:59:15 ►
created a partnership society that existed up until the invention of agriculture and climatological change
00:59:26 ►
made the mushroom difficult to obtain.
00:59:30 ►
And at that very critical juncture,
00:59:34 ►
after perhaps 50,000 years of mushroom-induced suppression
00:59:39 ►
of hierarchical dominance patterns,
00:59:43 ►
the withdrawal of the mushroom from the human diet
00:59:47 ►
allowed the old pattern to reassert itself but at this point you know we had language
00:59:55 ►
we had agriculture and what did we do we quickly organized monotheistic religions, city-states, warrior castes, god-king-ship,
01:00:07 ►
the world of the lash
01:00:09 ►
and the god-king, basically.
01:00:15 ►
And we are the unhappy inheritors
01:00:19 ►
of that circumstance to the present day.
01:00:23 ►
And that’s why our situation is so bizarre and why we are
01:00:28 ►
so neurotic if you will it’s because human consciousness evolved in an entirely different
01:00:34 ►
cultural milieu than we now exist in it it evolved in a world in which the Gaian logos was absolutely real to every man woman and child in the
01:00:49 ►
society and I believe that the tendency in the hominoids to form monogamous
01:00:57 ►
pair bonding was eroded by the presence of psilocybin because it promoted an orgiastic sexual style.
01:01:06 ►
And the social consequences of that
01:01:09 ►
were that men could not trace lines of male paternity.
01:01:14 ►
And so you have an intense impetus
01:01:17 ►
toward collective bonding in a group like that
01:01:21 ►
because the children are our children,
01:01:25 ►
the children of the group.
01:01:27 ►
The nuclear family is, I think,
01:01:29 ►
a somewhat maladaptive fragmentation
01:01:32 ►
from all of this.
01:01:34 ►
And this is important for us to understand
01:01:37 ►
because we have practiced a neurotic style of culture
01:01:40 ►
for a long, long time.
01:01:42 ►
It has permitted the conquest of matter but that now
01:01:47 ►
is done i mean once you know hydrogen fusion you can put it in a bottle at yale well then you’ve
01:01:55 ►
been there done that and now we have to swing the thing back into balance the tools that we acquired on the journey of the prodigal son through the world
01:02:08 ►
of matter can you cannot redeem the moral cost of that in yet unless those tools are brought to bear
01:02:17 ►
to now redeem the planet i mean if there is any justification for history at all, it must be that it secured a longer evolutionary life for intelligence on the planet.
01:02:33 ►
And, you know, as far as how the psychedelics fit into this in the individual scheme, psychedelics are not flashlights
01:02:45 ►
into the chaos of the Freudian
01:02:47 ►
unconscious
01:02:48 ►
they are tools
01:02:50 ►
for mathematically unpacking
01:02:53 ►
your mind into a higher
01:02:55 ►
dimensional space
01:02:56 ►
in the Newtonian
01:02:58 ►
and print created
01:03:00 ►
social space that we’re walking around
01:03:03 ►
it you are like a self-extracting archive
01:03:06 ►
that hasn’t self-extracted itself yet.
01:03:10 ►
And then you take psilocybin and you self-extract and unfold.
01:03:17 ►
Because think about it.
01:03:18 ►
I mean, I’m very serious about this.
01:03:20 ►
Think about what the shaman’s functions are
01:03:24 ►
in the classical paleolithic
01:03:26 ►
model. The shaman’s functions are to predict weather, to anticipate the movement of game and
01:03:34 ►
enemies, and to heal disease. Well, now, how could you do those three things? Well, the answer is, if you could see into next week,
01:03:48 ►
that would be helpful.
01:03:50 ►
That would allow you to do all three of those things.
01:03:53 ►
Predict the weather, see the movement of game and enemies,
01:03:57 ►
and make very astute choices about who you accepted as your patients.
01:04:03 ►
Uh-huh, you see?
01:04:01 ►
accept it as your patience you see
01:04:04 ►
and so what we see
01:04:08 ►
here is that there’s a kind of
01:04:09 ►
selection going on
01:04:11 ►
for an ability to triangulate
01:04:14 ►
complex systems
01:04:15 ►
into the future and I think
01:04:18 ►
that now the reason the psychedelic
01:04:20 ►
experience is so compelling
01:04:22 ►
to me is because
01:04:23 ►
I always, I took psychedelics for years
01:04:27 ►
with the question, what is it? And then I never could understand what it was. And some people
01:04:34 ►
said, this is the wrong question and on and on. But finally I realized, I see what it is.
01:04:39 ►
It’s everything. It’s, you you know that piece of
01:04:45 ►
doggerel I saw eternity
01:04:48 ►
the other night an endless
01:04:50 ►
golden ring
01:04:51 ►
well that’s it
01:04:53 ►
you simply you just rise out of the
01:04:56 ►
Newtonian spatial plane
01:04:58 ►
and you look back
01:04:59 ►
and there is eternity
01:05:02 ►
hanging in space like a
01:05:04 ►
galaxy and that’s what the psychedelic experience And there is eternity hanging in space like a galaxy.
01:05:10 ►
And that’s what the psychedelic experience is a sectioning of.
01:05:15 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:05:19 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:05:23 ►
So, did you notice the little synchronicity where someone in Terrence’s audience mentioned a book by Douglas Rushkoff?
01:05:28 ►
Although he mispronounced Rushkoff’s name, Terrence responded that Doug was a good friend of his.
01:05:34 ►
And since then, I’ve noticed that Doug has written over a dozen more books, the most recent of which, Present Shock, I covered in some detail a few weeks back in my podcast number 345,
01:05:46 ►
which also happened to be a Terrence McKenna lecture. Now, that may not be much of a
01:05:51 ►
synchronicity for you, but it could also maybe be a little nudge to let you know that maybe Doug’s
01:05:56 ►
new book, Present Shock, is one that you should read. In my opinion, it will most definitely ease
01:06:03 ►
some of the stress that living in this age of unlimited information and instant communication is causing
01:06:10 ►
I know that it helped me get a better handle on things
01:06:13 ►
Now, let me guess, when Terrence was going on about the U.S. becoming a police state
01:06:19 ►
Weren’t you just saying to yourself, well, if he thought he was living in a police state back in 1994,
01:06:26 ►
I wonder what he would think about today’s reality.
01:06:29 ►
Which, of course, makes 1994 look more like the fictional 1984.
01:06:34 ►
But that should be a topic for another day, I think.
01:06:38 ►
Now, I realize that it’s probably beginning to get a little tedious for me to keep reminding you
01:06:44 ►
about how long ago these recordings were made.
01:06:47 ►
This particular conversation, as I said, was held near the end of 1994.
01:06:52 ►
So let’s revisit that year right now and take a look at the level of their tech.
01:06:57 ►
Well, not even two years had passed by then since the web arrived on the scene,
01:07:02 ►
and this was 12 years before the introduction of the first
01:07:06 ►
iPhone. And yet here is Terence saying things like, what the electronic culture empowers is diversity,
01:07:13 ►
eccentricity, and a pluralistic kind of mix. Now, I think that statement alone shows how incredibly
01:07:19 ►
far ahead of his own time he was. Sure, it’s easy to say things like that today, with half of the
01:07:26 ►
humans on the planet walking around and looking down at the little electronic device in the palm
01:07:30 ►
of their hands, but back when a 300 baud dial-up modem was the bleeding edge state of the art,
01:07:37 ►
well, you really had to have a feeling for the future to be as sure as Terrence was about what
01:07:43 ►
was about to be unleashed on us in the form of a
01:07:46 ►
highly digital world. And another point that I don’t want to belabor because, well, I’ve already
01:07:52 ►
done so on several other occasions, but while I agree in a general sense with Terrence’s description
01:07:59 ►
of differences between the experiences on different psychedelic substances, I just want you to know that while I have had visions,
01:08:08 ►
sometimes wild visions on all of the substances that he mentioned,
01:08:11 ►
none of them could be described in the way that Terrence does.
01:08:15 ►
And I’ve had this same conversation with quite a few other psychonauts,
01:08:19 ►
and almost without exception they have also admitted
01:08:21 ►
that their visions were also very unlike Terrence’s.
01:08:25 ►
So, I don’t want you to be disappointed should you ever have one of these experiences, and
01:08:30 ►
they don’t live up to your expectations, at least in a visual sense.
01:08:35 ►
So, did you also enjoy the excitement with which Terrence spoke about the potential of
01:08:40 ►
the internet? And while nobody back then would have predicted how deeply the net has
01:08:45 ►
penetrated the life of our species in such a short time, you do have to admit that Terrence could
01:08:51 ►
already sense what was coming our way. You know, during the 80s and 90s, I was deeply involved,
01:08:58 ►
along with many thousands of others, in the development of the first personal computers and then the internet. And I can still remember our wildest dream back then.
01:09:08 ►
And that was for the internet to become so pervasive that, like electricity and the telephone,
01:09:14 ►
well, people just took it for granted and no longer really gave any thought to what
01:09:18 ►
was actually taking place when they clicked a link on that little machine that they’re
01:09:22 ►
holding in the palm of their hand.
01:09:24 ►
when they click the link on that little machine that they’re holding in the palm of their hand.
01:09:30 ►
But I think that the biggest revolution that has taken place since the net came alive is in the amount of information that is now available to so many people, and instantly.
01:09:36 ►
Twenty years ago, if I wanted to find out what varieties of psilocybin mushrooms grew in Africa,
01:09:41 ►
I would have had to travel to one of the large, specialized
01:09:45 ►
libraries at some university. But just now, with a search of only a few seconds, I found
01:09:51 ►
shroomery.org, where they provide a listing by country of African varieties of psilocybin
01:09:57 ►
mushrooms. As I’ve mentioned before, when I first became involved in the psychedelic community,
01:10:03 ►
I could find nothing in the best
01:10:05 ►
libraries and bookstores in Dallas, Texas, where I was living at the time. Outside of Aldous Huxley’s
01:10:11 ►
Doors of Perception, the main library didn’t have a single thing about psychedelics. Now,
01:10:16 ►
here it is just a few short years later, and I find you and me enjoying ourselves here in
01:10:22 ►
the psychedelic space in the psychedelic salon.
01:10:27 ►
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
01:10:34 ►
However, it’s now time for me to continue my trip and surf over to another part of our world.
01:10:39 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space.
00:00:00 ►
Be well, my friends.