Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think that this is the most important fact about our situation on this planet, and it’s discovered over and over again over the past hundred thousand years, that there’s somebody else, something else, somewhere else HERE! And anybody that says they understand it is bullshitting.”
“You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn’t depend on a state of grace. It doesn’t depend on allegiance to a leader. It doesn’t even depend on a special diet or theological predilection The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences is: You don’t have to go to India for ten years. You don’t have to be chosen by Baba-G. This works for most people, and would probably work for you.”
“If you think that you’ve got it all figured out, and you haven’t ever had an intense, boundary-dissolving psychedelic, then you’re absolutely out to lunch. You don’t know what’s going on. It’s like the opinions of eleven year old boys about sexuality.”
“You can actually go from birth to the grave and never experience [a psychedelic trip] if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently idiotic culture.”
“I think that there is some truth to the notion that the reason we are alive is to learn the path out of the labyrinth, and that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.”
“We share this planet with some other kind of entity, and culture is a way of sealing us off from this fact.”
“Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to entertain larger perspectives than the completely piss-ant perspective that they’re being given by the popular media.”
“We must not consume. We must produce, as a community. The psychedelic community must produce art, not consume it. If they get it flowing the other way and we begin to consume it then we are depotentiated.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
The Idea of the Holy by Rudolph Otto
The Essential Kierkegaard by Søren Kierkegaard
Previous Episode
Next Episode
Similar Episodes
- 296 - The World and It’s Double Part 2 - score: 0.90401
- Podcast 707 – After the Escaton - score: 0.89345
- 358 - This Psychedelic Thing - score: 0.88469
- 592 - Understanding Chaos at History’s End – Part 4 - score: 0.87084
- 364 - Communicating with the Mushroom - score: 0.86997
- 383 - A Psychedelic Point of View - score: 0.86753
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.86726
- 391 - Nothing Lasts - score: 0.86428
- 641 - McKenna’s Psychedelic Rhapsody - score: 0.86202
- 460 - Our planetary birth process - score: 0.86154
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I’d like to begin today by first thanking all of those wonderful people,
00:00:29 ►
and you may be one of them,
00:00:31 ►
who during the course of Terrence McKenna’s career
00:00:33 ►
went to one or more of his workshops or lectures or whatever you called them,
00:00:38 ►
because without all those thousands of people who paid to listen to his wonderful raps,
00:00:43 ►
well, he simply wouldn’t have
00:00:45 ►
been able to travel around and give all these great talks. So here’s to all of you lucky souls
00:00:51 ►
who had an opportunity to listen to the Bard McKenna in person, and by doing so, you also
00:00:57 ►
made it possible for hundreds of thousands of others to also have the opportunity to listen to these interesting talks. Wow, I’m waxing
00:01:08 ►
eloquent, right? You know, in a way, I guess that listening to a talk by Terrence that I haven’t
00:01:13 ►
heard before is, well, it’s sort of like listening to a new song by your favorite band. And, you know,
00:01:19 ►
even when they sometimes play one of their older tunes or play a cover of someone else’s music,
00:01:23 ►
well, even then you look forward to hearing from them once again, just to hear the sound of their older tunes or play a cover of someone else’s music, well, even then you look forward to hearing from them once again,
00:01:26 ►
just to hear the sound of their music.
00:01:29 ►
So let us now, once again, sit back and listen to the musical words of the Bard McKenna.
00:01:38 ►
Yeah.
00:01:40 ►
I’m trying to phrase the right question.
00:01:42 ►
It essentially goes,
00:01:42 ►
I’m trying to phrase the right question.
00:01:44 ►
It essentially goes,
00:01:53 ►
do you manufacture this stuff out of whole cloth in your mind?
00:01:56 ►
Is it there in the beginning?
00:01:59 ►
Or is it something you’ve taken in?
00:02:05 ►
Is it new information or something that the brain is remarkable at processing
00:02:07 ►
and creating
00:02:10 ►
images
00:02:10 ►
well
00:02:13 ►
see my
00:02:15 ►
original bent was I wanted to be
00:02:17 ►
an art historian
00:02:18 ►
and so the job of an art historian
00:02:22 ►
is to understand
00:02:24 ►
the evolution of motifs
00:02:26 ►
and how styles are transformed at the hands of certain artists
00:02:31 ►
and over time and in different places.
00:02:34 ►
So it’s this kind of specialized thing with a visual vocabulary.
00:02:41 ►
And I thought you could go into the psychedelic experience and you could perform an
00:02:46 ►
art historical reduction on it and say aha well that’s a Tibetan treatment of a line and that’s
00:02:54 ►
a Maori way of Porter and it was not like that it was like the art that is made on another planet art that arose completely in the absence of human conventions or
00:03:08 ►
values and that convinced me that i it wasn’t being generated from myself and you know and then
00:03:16 ►
i read jung and i realized that there was a very a way to define the self that would allow it to
00:03:22 ►
produce that kind of thing but it’s really accomplished
00:03:25 ►
by a rhetorical trick because the word self means that which is most familiar to me well if that
00:03:35 ►
which is most familiar to me can generate something completely unrecognizable to me to call it the self is to betray the notion of the self
00:03:47 ►
so what i’ve called it over the years from the very very beginning i can’t even remember how
00:03:52 ►
long ago we incorporated this nomenclature is i called it the other and you know the You know, the German historian of religion, Rudolf Otto, defined God as the holy other.
00:04:10 ►
The holy and totally other, he said.
00:04:14 ►
This is somewhat like Nicholas Cusanus’ theology of the late, of the 14th century,
00:04:21 ►
where he said God can only be defined by negative statements
00:04:25 ►
God is not this, God is not that
00:04:27 ►
the wholly other
00:04:31 ►
and the experience of DMT
00:04:33 ►
seems to be that
00:04:35 ►
and I don’t know if it’s just that we are
00:04:37 ►
neurologically set up
00:04:39 ►
that there’s a button in us
00:04:41 ►
the equivalent of a reset button
00:04:43 ►
that just clears all the registers and that’s
00:04:47 ►
why it’s wholly other it’s wholly other because you just dumped your entire memory load off your
00:04:52 ►
disk and you’re now looking at a clean disk for the first time in your life and you don’t have
00:04:57 ►
the faintest idea what it could possibly be it’s something like that. Language fails. Anticipation fails. And naturally, because we
00:05:09 ►
have this sort of metaphysical openness in our ideological systems, we identify this holy
00:05:17 ►
otherness with God, with the transcendent force in our lives and so it seems to be
00:05:25 ►
in fact
00:05:26 ►
you and then you
00:05:28 ►
yes
00:05:30 ►
I’m interested in the idea of
00:05:33 ►
an other that talks to you
00:05:37 ►
and you’ve talked before about
00:05:40 ►
the fact that the mushroom talks
00:05:41 ►
so I have two questions
00:05:43 ►
one is is your experience only with the mushroom talking. So I have two questions. One is, is your experience
00:05:46 ►
only with the mushroom talking
00:05:47 ►
or are there other psychedelics
00:05:49 ►
that have had that effect?
00:05:51 ►
And secondly, can you remember
00:05:53 ►
some things that it said?
00:05:56 ►
Can I remember some things
00:05:58 ►
that it said?
00:05:58 ►
Or your favorites or something?
00:06:00 ►
Well, first of all, yes.
00:06:02 ►
This idea of an other
00:06:04 ►
that you can relate to
00:06:06 ►
it’s interesting it’s fascinating how if you really go to bedrock with these things
00:06:12 ►
there’s some really interesting Christian theology that relates to all this
00:06:16 ►
you know the existential theology of Soren Kierkegaard
00:06:23 ►
Kierkegaard said the defining relationship in life is an I-thou
00:06:29 ►
relationship to Christ. And the I-thou relationship, and Martin Buber made a great deal of this as It’s a profound thing to relate to an other, even if that other is an other human being.
00:06:50 ►
It’s still, you know, an abyss of ambiguity.
00:06:53 ►
I don’t know who you are, where you came from, what your agenda is, what your plans are for me,
00:06:59 ►
whether they’re casual or intense and so forth and so on.
00:07:02 ►
or intense and so forth and so on.
00:07:07 ►
So then, meeting an other that is not a human being,
00:07:11 ►
that is somebody who sits up in your mind and says,
00:07:16 ►
hey, big boy, what’s cooking?
00:07:26 ►
It opens up the possibility for a relationship and it can be explored
00:07:28 ►
and I always thought that you could somehow trap it
00:07:33 ►
that it was sort of like a game in a fairy tale
00:07:36 ►
that if you were clever enough
00:07:38 ►
you could ask a series of questions
00:07:41 ►
where you would then have trapped it
00:07:44 ►
into revealing
00:07:45 ►
aha so you are my amygdala
00:07:48 ►
so forth and so on
00:07:52 ►
this kind of thing
00:07:52 ►
I have never in the presence of the thing
00:07:55 ►
been able to do that
00:07:57 ►
as far as what it has said
00:08:02 ►
basically it’s told me everything I know.
00:08:05 ►
As far as boiling it down to the aphoristic level,
00:08:09 ►
you’ve heard these all through the years.
00:08:16 ►
Well, you know, death by astonishment.
00:08:20 ►
All the best lines come from the thing itself
00:08:25 ►
I mean my talent seems to be
00:08:27 ►
that I’m able to relax
00:08:29 ►
and allow this very ingratiating logos
00:08:34 ►
to take over
00:08:35 ►
it’s a kind of low-key demonic possession
00:08:39 ►
from the point of view of my critics
00:08:41 ►
to speak about this other way of looking at things
00:08:48 ►
in terms of what it has said to me.
00:08:50 ►
It’s this revelation about the nature of time.
00:08:55 ►
And it’s a puzzling revelation
00:08:57 ►
because it’s mathematical.
00:09:00 ►
It’s formal.
00:09:02 ►
It will either be proven spectacularly true
00:09:06 ►
or spectacularly false
00:09:08 ►
there is no escaping
00:09:09 ►
this incredible definitive test
00:09:12 ►
built into it
00:09:13 ►
it’s not something I would ever have thought up
00:09:16 ►
and
00:09:18 ►
it’s just something I was given
00:09:20 ►
and I was sort of at a dead end
00:09:23 ►
I mean I was a good person to give it to
00:09:24 ►
I didn’t really at a dead end I mean I was a good person to give it to I didn’t really
00:09:25 ►
have a job in life and I it’s like a talisman or a key I you know you meet people who are into
00:09:36 ►
astrology and for them it opens up all doorways everything can be explained and i’m not belittling it i’m making an example of it
00:09:45 ►
the time wave is like that for me and i would maintain for anybody who sufficiently involves
00:09:54 ►
themselves in it it’s a rosetta stone into the structure of reality that has an uncanny
00:10:01 ►
correctness about it.
00:10:07 ►
And I’m more aware than most of my critics of where the weaknesses lie.
00:10:10 ►
But nevertheless, I’m also more aware than most of my critics
00:10:15 ►
of where the weaknesses lie in the competition as well.
00:10:19 ►
The whole thing is pretty provisional.
00:10:21 ►
Robert, did you ever get to say what you wanted?
00:10:23 ►
There you are.
00:10:24 ►
When you were talking about the holy other, when you were talking about the entity and
00:10:29 ►
the messages, one of the things that happened to me in my early experiences with EMT was
00:10:34 ►
that I was totally in awe. I was flabbergasted. And until I stopped being flabbergasted and paid attention
00:10:46 ►
I didn’t get that they were signaling me to do something
00:10:49 ►
they wanted me to participate in what was happening
00:10:53 ►
rather than just sit there and go
00:10:55 ►
wow, isn’t this incredible
00:10:57 ►
no, they say to you, or they say to me
00:11:00 ►
do not abandon yourself to amazement
00:11:03 ►
don’t give way to astonishment
00:11:06 ►
try to hold it together fella
00:11:09 ►
which is a strange thing to be being told
00:11:13 ►
by an alien entity inside a hallucinogenic flash
00:11:17 ►
it’s not encouraging you to let it all go
00:11:19 ►
it’s saying pay attention
00:11:22 ►
and then in my case what they’re trying to do is they can make
00:11:28 ►
things out of sound or their words are three-dimensional modalities they’re operating
00:11:37 ►
in a linguistic domain where words are sculptural entities made of light, and they’re singing objects into existence
00:11:46 ►
which are like puns or mathematical formula
00:11:50 ►
or small machines that are cycling
00:11:53 ►
through various kinds of changes,
00:11:56 ►
and they’re singing this stuff into existence
00:11:58 ►
and insisting that you attempt to do the same.
00:12:04 ►
And this is so startling because you have to understand
00:12:08 ►
these trips only last three to five minutes.
00:12:12 ►
So there’s not a lot of time to get used to this.
00:12:14 ►
I mean, there you are sitting in a room with your friends
00:12:17 ►
talking about consciousness exploration
00:12:19 ►
or whatever rhetoric you use to get yourself to the edge of these things.
00:12:23 ►
You fire up the pipe, you take one
00:12:26 ►
enormous hit and the
00:12:28 ►
next thing you know
00:12:29 ►
you’re surrounded by screaming
00:12:32 ►
elves, by the hundreds
00:12:34 ►
that are speaking in this
00:12:36 ►
alien language that is causing
00:12:38 ►
objects to hang in the air
00:12:39 ►
and ricochet off the walls
00:12:42 ►
and these things come
00:12:43 ►
you know it’s a scene of wild confusion.
00:12:47 ►
It’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards.
00:12:50 ►
And these things come bounding up
00:12:52 ►
and they say, look at this.
00:12:54 ►
And out of the air, out of their guts,
00:12:57 ►
out of nowhere, they pull objects
00:13:01 ►
which are the most astonishing things you can imagine. Literally the most astonishing things you can imagine
00:13:06 ►
literally the most astonishing things
00:13:08 ►
you can imagine, jeweled, filigreed
00:13:10 ►
machined, turning
00:13:12 ►
things and you look at it
00:13:14 ►
and you say my god
00:13:15 ►
anybody from my planet
00:13:18 ►
looking at this would not have
00:13:20 ►
to be told what this is
00:13:22 ►
this is an alien artifact
00:13:24 ►
and you’re looking at it and and they say, forget that.
00:13:26 ►
Look at this one.
00:13:28 ►
And then here’s another one.
00:13:29 ►
And they’re tossing them up, and meanwhile,
00:13:31 ►
the objects themselves are able to sing other objects into existence.
00:13:37 ►
And there is this aura.
00:13:40 ►
The word zany comes to mind.
00:13:43 ►
It’s like a Max Sennett comedy
00:13:45 ►
or a Marx Brothers cartoon.
00:13:47 ►
I mean, it’s a land of explosions
00:13:50 ►
and falling anvils
00:13:52 ►
and surprises are popping out of everywhere
00:13:55 ►
and you’re just trying to hang on.
00:13:58 ►
You say, you know, now we’re at,
00:13:59 ►
you know, we’re a minute and a half into it
00:14:02 ►
at this point.
00:14:03 ►
And this intense effort to communicate something.
00:14:08 ►
And we have talked in the past,
00:14:12 ►
we can talk now if you want,
00:14:13 ►
about Celtic fairyland and worldwide tradition of gnomes and elves.
00:14:19 ►
But when you’re there, it doesn’t look like that.
00:14:22 ►
It’s much more pointed ears shining eyes strange machine it’s
00:14:28 ►
much more off planet i mean we’re not seeing leather jerkins and pointed toed little boots
00:14:35 ►
and the plucking of fairy harps it’s not quite like that no no, no, no, no, no. Yeah? What about children who
00:14:45 ►
seem to experience
00:14:48 ►
the phenomena that you’re talking about,
00:14:50 ►
these people who come into their bedrooms
00:14:51 ►
in the middle of the night
00:14:54 ►
and communicate with them?
00:14:56 ►
Children who aren’t…
00:14:59 ►
Well, I think this is where
00:15:00 ►
the abduction thing is coming from,
00:15:03 ►
that I don’t know what these entities
00:15:08 ►
are i don’t when you burst into the dmt place there is an incredible sense of place and yet
00:15:18 ►
the things that you’re witnessing matter is not capable of any matter.
00:15:25 ►
I mean, aliens can be one thing.
00:15:27 ►
They can have tentacles.
00:15:28 ►
They can do this and that and the other thing.
00:15:30 ►
But when there’s no defined form,
00:15:33 ►
then you say, you know, you are like an idea,
00:15:37 ►
I say to the entity.
00:15:39 ►
You are like an idea.
00:15:41 ►
You have no defined form.
00:15:43 ►
You’re continuously amorphous.
00:15:46 ►
And, you know it’s then replies yes i am who am or something like that it’s the face of the abyss i mean i’ve had
00:15:53 ►
conversations with it where i’ve after you know a more zany episode where you then begin to feel a
00:16:01 ►
little confidence with it and then you say well show me what you are for
00:16:06 ►
yourself what are you really i can tell that you’re coming to me through a series of filters
00:16:14 ►
and presentations and masks what are you really and it’s like the temperature falls 10 degrees
00:16:20 ►
in the room and a black curtain begins to rise and there’s an organ note like that thing
00:16:26 ►
in the Bach B minor mass and after about 15 seconds you say you know call it off I’m not
00:16:35 ►
ready for it let’s go back to the little fuzzy bunnies and the alien invasion scenario but I’m not ready and then it’s very
00:16:45 ►
obliging, it says okay
00:16:47 ►
you asked for it
00:16:49 ►
so there is the sense
00:16:51 ►
what is this?
00:16:53 ►
I don’t know, I think that
00:16:55 ►
this is the most important fact
00:16:58 ►
about our situation
00:17:00 ►
on this planet and it’s
00:17:01 ►
discovered over and over again
00:17:03 ►
over the past hundred thousand years
00:17:06 ►
that there’s somebody else something else somewhere else here and anybody who says they
00:17:15 ►
understand it is bullshitting the theosophists don’t understand it the catholics the Kabbalists, nobody understands it.
00:17:26 ►
But it is real.
00:17:30 ►
And I don’t know what it means to find this out.
00:17:34 ►
You see, the amazing thing about psychedelics is it doesn’t depend on a state of grace.
00:17:39 ►
It doesn’t depend on allegiance to a leader.
00:17:43 ►
It doesn’t even depend on a special diet
00:17:46 ►
or theological predilection.
00:17:49 ►
The astonishing news about these psychedelic experiences
00:17:53 ►
is you don’t have to go to India for 10 years.
00:17:57 ►
You don’t have to be chosen by Babaji.
00:18:00 ►
This works for most people
00:18:04 ►
and would probably work for you
00:18:06 ►
and if you think the world has no surprises
00:18:10 ►
if you think that you’ve got it all figured out
00:18:15 ►
and you haven’t ever had
00:18:17 ►
an intense boundary dissolving psychedelic
00:18:20 ►
then you’re absolutely out to lunch
00:18:23 ►
you don’t know what’s going on it’s like the
00:18:28 ►
opinions of 11 year old boys about sexuality you know what do they know that they should hold such
00:18:36 ►
opinions and uh you know sexuality provides a good. We cannot forestall our sexuality.
00:18:45 ►
You know, eventually the roar of hormones
00:18:48 ►
through the bloodstream pushes most people over the edge,
00:18:53 ►
some sooner than others.
00:18:55 ►
This capacity for the psychedelic experience,
00:18:59 ►
which is built into our soma, our body, as well,
00:19:04 ►
you can actually go from birth to the
00:19:08 ►
grave and never experience it if you are sufficiently sold out to a sufficiently
00:19:16 ►
idiotic culture then it’s possible to evade this experience of maturation it’s
00:19:24 ►
like having a Mercedes
00:19:26 ►
and there’s a certain button on the dashboard
00:19:28 ►
and you never pushed it.
00:19:31 ►
You don’t know, you know, what it did.
00:19:36 ►
Because, and yet, it’s as profound as sexuality.
00:19:40 ►
It’s as profound as the forming of relationships,
00:19:44 ►
the birthing of children
00:19:45 ►
birth, death
00:19:47 ►
this is the thing
00:19:49 ►
and many many religions have come to the conclusion
00:19:53 ►
that life somehow needs to be a preparation
00:19:57 ►
for a passing on to some other place
00:20:02 ►
and the metaphor of light vehicle
00:20:04 ►
is used in many different traditions.
00:20:09 ►
And I think that there is some truth to the notion
00:20:13 ►
that the reason we are alive
00:20:15 ►
is to learn the path out of the labyrinth.
00:20:19 ►
And that shamanism is a rehearsal for death.
00:20:24 ►
All this talk about hyperspace and other dimensions and eternity,
00:20:29 ►
what we’re really talking about here is the cultural and personal enterprise
00:20:35 ►
of leaving the body behind.
00:20:38 ►
You started talking about abductions and children,
00:20:41 ►
and you never really got back to that.
00:20:43 ►
Let me do that.
00:20:45 ►
Well, it’s simply that
00:20:46 ►
we share this planet
00:20:49 ►
with some other kind of entity
00:20:50 ►
and culture is a way of sealing us off
00:20:54 ►
from this fact,
00:20:56 ►
which children are not fully acculturated.
00:20:59 ►
Children are barbarians of some sort.
00:21:02 ►
And then as they become acculturated,
00:21:08 ►
their invisible companions fade away and they become as dreary as as the rest of us the abduction phenomenon i think is simply an
00:21:18 ►
inability to tell the difference between dream and memory dream Dream is the fascinating dimension,
00:21:27 ►
and I don’t demean these experiences
00:21:29 ►
by associating them with dream.
00:21:32 ►
I think that probably when we fully understand DMT,
00:21:35 ►
we will realize that every night in deep sleep,
00:21:43 ►
most people go to the meltdown place and actually experience a DMT trip but the
00:21:53 ►
essence of the core of the DMT trip is you cannot remember it a really good DMT trip has a part
00:22:02 ►
always in the center
00:22:05 ►
where you do not lose consciousness.
00:22:07 ►
You are conscious while it’s happening.
00:22:10 ►
But you can never, ever talk about that part of the trip
00:22:15 ►
because within 20 seconds of its ceasing to be the present,
00:22:21 ►
it’s gone.
00:22:23 ►
It lays down no memory trace,
00:22:25 ►
and that’s the moment where you really find out what’s going on.
00:22:29 ►
They show you, you know, you get the hyper-Masonic initiation
00:22:34 ►
of the local galactarian laws at that point,
00:22:39 ►
but then you come out of it and you have no trace of it.
00:22:43 ►
You have the sense of having been in the presence of the pleroma
00:22:46 ►
but what that means, you have the faintest notion
00:22:49 ►
yeah
00:22:51 ►
I’m curious about common elements from person to person
00:22:55 ►
that are repeatable in some way in a particular trip
00:22:58 ►
for example, you’ve talked a lot in past lectures
00:23:02 ►
about your experience with these
00:23:04 ►
self-replicating machine elves.
00:23:07 ►
And I’ve never met them myself under DMT. I go to a vast crystal cave, but there’s some
00:23:13 ►
experiences that repeat with mushrooms for me, like a crystal ball coming down from the
00:23:17 ►
left, and if I can tune it in just right, I pass it into another dimension. I’m wondering
00:23:21 ►
if you have, in speaking to lots of people found common elements
00:23:25 ►
that show up in
00:23:27 ►
entities or whatever.
00:23:29 ►
Well my approach
00:23:31 ►
to that is sort of Jungian
00:23:34 ►
and I’ve talked to a lot of people
00:23:36 ►
who’ve done DMT and tried to build
00:23:38 ►
up a composite image of
00:23:40 ►
what is happening and
00:23:41 ►
a great deal it has a lot to do
00:23:44 ►
with what you bring to it your past education
00:23:47 ►
and experience obviously and it has a great deal to do with just your descriptive powers and your
00:23:53 ►
ability to stay calm i mean some people just go nuts and yell for it to end and carry on from talking to a lot of people the archetype
00:24:06 ►
that rules DMT
00:24:07 ►
I would say is the
00:24:09 ►
archetype of the circus
00:24:11 ►
and
00:24:13 ►
think for a moment
00:24:16 ►
the circus
00:24:17 ►
is about
00:24:19 ►
a focus on a
00:24:21 ►
well lit central area
00:24:23 ►
filled with chaotic activity
00:24:26 ►
first of all the clowns
00:24:28 ►
and the clowns are the self-transforming
00:24:31 ►
machine elves
00:24:32 ►
they arrive in their tiny car
00:24:34 ►
and 15 of them get out
00:24:36 ►
and they have big noses and rubber shoes
00:24:38 ►
and they dance around
00:24:39 ►
clowns
00:24:41 ►
but in the DMT thing
00:24:44 ►
there is a weird and very strong erotic component and i believe from
00:24:52 ►
my own work on myself that i became aware of eros i wouldn’t say had my first erection but maybe the
00:25:00 ►
first one i was ever conscious of or something like that in the presence of a lady acrobat
00:25:06 ►
at a circus wearing a tiny spangled costume
00:25:10 ►
and hanging by her teeth way up
00:25:13 ►
and I got it
00:25:16 ►
death and Eros
00:25:17 ►
and this incredible dynamic
00:25:20 ►
so you have the clowns
00:25:22 ►
the death and Eros thing
00:25:24 ►
at the circus and then you have the clowns, the death and Eros thing at the circus.
00:25:25 ►
And then you have this kinky undercurrent, which is the sideshows.
00:25:36 ►
You know, the rat-faced boy and the thing in the bottle and the two-headed lady and all that.
00:25:43 ►
and the two-headed lady and all that.
00:25:47 ►
Just off the main ring, folks,
00:25:50 ►
the hoochie-coochie dancers and all that.
00:25:55 ►
And then when you think about the concept of the circus generally,
00:25:58 ►
you realize it’s a perfect metaphor for DMT because I grew up in a small town in Colorado
00:26:01 ►
where every 1st of July the carnival would come to
00:26:07 ►
town and we were told we couldn’t stay out after 930 at night playing when the
00:26:14 ►
carnival was in town because these carny people they were just a different stripe
00:26:19 ►
you know some of them probably drank heavy. They were of racially questionable origins and so forth.
00:26:30 ►
And they brought immense excitement to this little town, unpacked their wonders, built their ferris
00:26:37 ►
wheels and rides, bilked all the rubes of their cash, and packed it all up and went away and of course every kid worth his
00:26:47 ►
salt wants to run off with the circus and you know Ray Bradbury in his book The Circus of Dr. Lau
00:26:55 ►
used these motifs Fellini in his films over and over again the circus is a motif for the unconscious.
00:27:07 ►
So over time, and I’ve had people say very interesting things.
00:27:09 ►
I saw a woman do a sub-threshold trip on DMT
00:27:14 ►
and unprompted and never having heard this rap,
00:27:17 ►
when she came down she said,
00:27:20 ►
it was the saddest carnival I’ve ever been to.
00:27:24 ►
She said all the rides were closed
00:27:27 ►
and there were just those little square ice cream papers
00:27:31 ►
blowing in the wind and getting caught up.
00:27:33 ►
And I was the only person there.
00:27:36 ►
Well, that’s about as down a DMT trip as you can have.
00:27:41 ►
And basically, as you do more of it,
00:27:43 ►
you just dial it up until
00:27:45 ►
it becomes
00:27:46 ►
Barnum and Bailey, Ringling
00:27:49 ►
brothers and then it goes on to become
00:27:52 ►
the Star Wars bar
00:27:54 ►
and then it goes on to become
00:27:55 ►
something from which English
00:27:57 ►
cannot even begin
00:27:59 ►
to wrap itself around
00:28:01 ►
but I think that’s the archetype
00:28:03 ►
What do you consider the importance of venue or place
00:28:07 ►
when you’re ingesting psychedelics?
00:28:09 ►
Do you pick up the energy that has been left in that place?
00:28:12 ►
Is that an important component?
00:28:14 ►
I think the main thing is to be in a situation
00:28:17 ►
where you’re not interrupted
00:28:18 ►
and where you are confident.
00:28:22 ►
I do not take psychedelics outside very much because i’ve noticed that
00:28:29 ►
the the synchronicity thing is uncontrollable i mean if you want to have adventures you know
00:28:37 ►
take 200 micrograms of lsd and step out into let’s say the, the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And it’s just terrifying.
00:28:48 ►
And I learned that lesson very early.
00:28:51 ►
So I unplug the phone, bolt the doors,
00:28:54 ►
tell everybody I’ve left town, and then do it.
00:28:57 ►
Sometimes I do it outside, like in the jungle and stuff like that.
00:29:03 ►
But the main thing is I have a real horror of interruption i guess
00:29:08 ►
since you brought this up i should say you know there is a technique for doing these things
00:29:13 ►
correctly i mean the way to do them is on an empty stomach in silent darkness and then also do a good
00:29:21 ►
stiff hit don’t piddle around with it, it won’t hurt you
00:29:25 ►
yeah
00:29:26 ►
have you ever heard about Monroe Institute in Virginia?
00:29:30 ►
the out of body
00:29:32 ►
people, yeah
00:29:33 ►
yeah
00:29:35 ►
they’re exploring these worlds
00:29:39 ►
so what you’re describing
00:29:41 ►
you can read it in the descriptions of their journeys.
00:29:50 ►
But for me, I prefer this way. With an intoxication, I haven’t any control about it.
00:29:57 ►
No, you’re absolutely right.
00:30:00 ►
But for example, it’s the same like lucid dreaming.
00:30:04 ►
From lucid dreaming you can easily go on to an astral journey.
00:30:08 ►
The way to get into this subject is to need to control yourself,
00:30:13 ►
feelings, thoughts.
00:30:15 ►
For example, to be able to be playful in your life,
00:30:20 ►
you have to change totally to get prosperity in this area
00:30:25 ►
so
00:30:27 ►
have you ever
00:30:29 ►
seen the connections
00:30:32 ►
between your work
00:30:33 ►
yes I mean I read
00:30:36 ►
the Monroe Institute books
00:30:38 ►
I was not
00:30:39 ►
sure what the connection
00:30:41 ►
was exactly because many of the
00:30:44 ►
worlds that they describe
00:30:45 ►
are very much like this world except just slight details have been changed
00:30:53 ►
what the psychedelics seem to land you in much more radically transformed places places. This is a big controversy, the can you do it on the natch controversy. And my position is
00:31:10 ►
that I wouldn’t wish to simply because I like, to me, the ultimate control is the decision
00:31:19 ►
yes or no to take the substance. You really have control.
00:31:25 ►
I mean, everybody here has so much control
00:31:28 ►
over the psychedelic experience
00:31:30 ►
that you could have one this evening if you wanted, for sure.
00:31:35 ►
So that’s control.
00:31:36 ►
But where there isn’t control is once you start down the chute.
00:31:41 ►
And I associate this control issue
00:31:46 ►
with the boundary dissolution.
00:31:49 ►
The boundary dissolution
00:31:50 ►
is alarming to the ego.
00:31:54 ►
It doesn’t like that feeling.
00:31:57 ►
And it tells you that you’re dying.
00:32:01 ►
And psychedelic voyagers
00:32:03 ►
have to learn to just, when that red switch goes on you just reach
00:32:09 ►
out and turn it off and say oh no no it’s set wrong we’re not dying but uh it tells you that
00:32:16 ►
you’re dying because the ego very strongly identifies with the equilibrium of the physical body and as the physical body begins to slide
00:32:27 ►
into the intoxication
00:32:29 ►
the ego is saying
00:32:31 ►
what’s happening here
00:32:32 ►
wait a minute
00:32:33 ►
I’m losing coherency
00:32:37 ►
this is not good
00:32:38 ►
you made a mistake Joe
00:32:41 ►
Joe
00:32:42 ►
we need help Joe it’s coming apart they say chill chill it’s going to be all
00:32:51 ►
right uh and and so the the you have to discipline yourself that way uh the dissolving of the ego
00:33:02 ►
that is the dissolving of this maladaptive behavior pattern that has made
00:33:08 ►
our our sexual and social politics so complicated in other words the ego is not a good thing
00:33:15 ►
uh it is a it is a uh its existence in each one of us and so expressed a form is a symptom of neurosis,
00:33:26 ►
a cultural neurosis.
00:33:29 ►
And the psychedelic dissolves the ego,
00:33:33 ►
but the ego protests noisily while this is going on.
00:33:38 ►
And then people who are very ego-dependent,
00:33:44 ►
if they have a psychedelic experience,
00:33:46 ►
they usually only have one.
00:33:47 ►
And then they say, well, that was like going nuts.
00:33:50 ►
I hated it. I just hated it.
00:33:52 ►
It was awful.
00:33:53 ►
Because they are very strongly identified with the ego.
00:33:56 ►
Another person who isn’t so strongly identified with the ego
00:34:00 ►
could look at the identical experience
00:34:03 ►
and say it was a wonderful liberation.
00:34:06 ►
It was just the quintessence of freedom and light and openness. So when I say we are pathological
00:34:15 ►
and that we need to take strong medicine to fix ourselves, I don’t mean the kind of medicine where
00:34:21 ►
you can’t feel it working. I mean the kind of medicine where you can feel it working.
00:34:27 ►
And the suppression of ego has basically was permitted by monotheistic religions
00:34:40 ►
and promoted by the phonetic alphabet.
00:34:44 ►
And there were just a whole bunch of cultural
00:34:46 ►
decisions that had
00:34:48 ►
the unfortunate effect
00:34:49 ►
of reinforcing the ego
00:34:51 ►
and this is why we have such a problem
00:34:54 ►
now because intellectually
00:34:55 ►
we’re united
00:34:57 ►
if we’re you know
00:34:59 ►
enlightened liberals or whatever
00:35:02 ►
but we can’t
00:35:04 ►
feel
00:35:04 ►
the agony of each other.
00:35:08 ►
If we could feel what we were doing,
00:35:11 ►
we wouldn’t do it.
00:35:13 ►
And yet, because each one of us identifies
00:35:16 ►
with our own body very strongly
00:35:19 ►
and checks no further,
00:35:22 ►
so the attitude is basically,
00:35:29 ►
well, I’m all right, and if you’re not too bad and
00:35:39 ►
it’s it’s a very abstract case to move people off of that and but in these early nomadic societies which probably every new and full moon were taking psilocybin and everybody who was capable
00:35:45 ►
was having sex in a heap
00:35:48 ►
with everybody else
00:35:49 ►
and then the children were being reared
00:35:52 ►
in this environment
00:35:54 ►
under the sky with no
00:35:56 ►
material possessions
00:35:57 ►
it was what we were meant for
00:36:02 ►
it’s when we were
00:36:03 ►
happiest, it’s when we were happiest.
00:36:08 ►
It’s when our poetry was at its peak and our dance was at its peak
00:36:11 ►
and our drama and perhaps our philosophy
00:36:15 ►
and certainly our storytelling
00:36:16 ►
and all of those things were at prime
00:36:21 ►
14,000 years ago.
00:36:24 ►
And, yeah.
00:36:27 ►
You mentioned the great attractor earlier in the conversation.
00:36:31 ►
I’ve been observing that there’s a lot of interest in society,
00:36:34 ►
again, it seems, in popular science and so on,
00:36:37 ►
in hyper-dimensionality, the super-string theories.
00:36:40 ►
You know, Michio Kaku’s book on hyperspace became a bestseller.
00:36:43 ►
What these new theories seem to be predicting is that
00:36:46 ►
this universe that we’re embedded in is actually just a cross-section
00:36:50 ►
and some sort of a hyper-dimensional structure
00:36:52 ►
that may have originated with the Big Bang or whatever.
00:36:57 ►
And there’s this proliferation of these hyper-dimensional theories.
00:37:00 ►
Of course, in quantum mechanics, there’s this many-worlds hypothesis
00:37:03 ►
that’s floating around. So my question is, is this a tractor that you’re perceiving embedded
00:37:11 ►
in this space or in a hyperdimensional space, in which case that particular tractor might
00:37:15 ►
only be one outcome? We’re steering our way towards or away from that tractor depending
00:37:21 ►
on what’s happening from moment to moment.
00:37:26 ►
away from that attractor depending on what’s happening from moment to moment well i’ve always before i adopted the vocabulary of chaos dynamics which uses this term attractor i always called it
00:37:37 ►
the concrescence following out of alfred north whitehead’s philosophy. And he said, you know, a concrescence is a nexus of events,
00:37:48 ►
or he also called it a nexus of actual occasions.
00:37:53 ►
And so I regard the temporal surface
00:37:57 ►
as a kind of undulating topology,
00:38:00 ►
and you could think of the attractor
00:38:03 ►
as the lowest point in the temporal landscape.
00:38:08 ►
So then if you think of historical systems as marbles rolling across that landscape,
00:38:17 ►
where are they all going to end up?
00:38:19 ►
They’re all going to end up in the low point because that’s where the attractor lies
00:38:24 ►
and they’re all concentrated in
00:38:26 ►
this uh what i’m suggesting is that the space-time continuum has an attractor for novelty and that
00:38:34 ►
for a very long time the universe of process has been circling around the rim of this attractor and then several hundred million years
00:38:46 ►
ago it began to make its
00:38:48 ►
ever more rapid descent
00:38:50 ►
toward the dwell point
00:38:52 ►
and now
00:38:53 ►
novelty is extraordinarily
00:38:55 ►
concentrated and the
00:38:58 ►
collapse
00:39:00 ►
of the state vector that
00:39:02 ►
moves us into hyperspace
00:39:04 ►
is sort of this umbilical point in the historical process.
00:39:09 ►
See, the most evident fact in nature
00:39:13 ►
that science has overlooked, totally overlooked,
00:39:19 ►
is that nature is speeding up.
00:39:22 ►
It always has been.
00:39:25 ►
And yet you will never hear this discussed.
00:39:29 ►
The early life of the universe,
00:39:31 ►
there were no stars, no planets.
00:39:34 ►
There weren’t even complex elements.
00:39:37 ►
There was only helium and hydrogen.
00:39:40 ►
And, you know, talk about dull.
00:39:42 ►
It was dull.
00:39:43 ►
And over time, helium and hydrogen aggregated together
00:39:48 ►
and formed masses of such size
00:39:51 ►
that the temperatures at the center of those masses triggered fusion
00:39:55 ►
and then outcooked iron, sulfur, carbon,
00:40:01 ►
and the process of star formation began.
00:40:07 ►
The point being, the further back in time you go the less events there are and as I said last night I think we are
00:40:13 ►
the inheritors of this process if nature loves novelty then nature loves us above
00:40:21 ►
all else in the cosmos because we there’s more novelty
00:40:26 ►
in our domain
00:40:28 ►
than anywhere else
00:40:29 ►
and we work
00:40:32 ►
around the clock
00:40:33 ►
to elaborate novelty
00:40:35 ►
human society is almost a pure
00:40:38 ►
novelty production
00:40:39 ►
process and
00:40:41 ►
what all this novelty
00:40:43 ►
one way of thinking of novelty
00:40:46 ►
and Whitehead suggested this
00:40:49 ►
is density of connectedness
00:40:51 ►
well then if you define novelty
00:40:55 ►
as density of connectedness
00:40:57 ►
then you can predict what the ultimate novelty
00:41:01 ►
would be. The ultimate novelty is when
00:41:04 ►
every point is connected
00:41:06 ►
to every other point that is a mathematical definition of a super space
00:41:12 ►
where all points are cotangent you have a super space so apparently culture not
00:41:20 ►
only culture but biology and perhaps even simpler systems seem to be imbued
00:41:29 ►
with a strategy the result of which is the conquest of dimensionality the
00:41:37 ►
earliest organic life was fixed on clays it was like lichen like it was lichen like and fixed and then the whole history of the
00:41:48 ►
evolution of animal life is the history of the evolution of better senses and better organs of
00:41:56 ►
locomotion what are we talking about the conquest of dimensionality uh And in the human world,
00:42:06 ►
this reaches a whole new level
00:42:09 ►
because we are advanced animals,
00:42:13 ►
no doubt about it.
00:42:14 ►
Our binocular vision,
00:42:16 ►
our grasping hand,
00:42:17 ►
our running speed,
00:42:18 ►
we’re a very advanced animal.
00:42:20 ►
But we then add on to that language.
00:42:28 ►
And what is the purpose of language i would submit to you that in bio in evolutionary terms the purpose of language is to talk about the
00:42:35 ►
past that the past ceases to be what it was when you have language because you can pull it back memory memory does something to
00:42:49 ►
time it causes the past to remain in the present as a residuum and as your memory storage technology
00:43:00 ►
advances from storytelling to writing to optical discs, the percentage of the past that you’re
00:43:09 ►
able to hold on to increases. And now with virtual reality and all that, we dream of holding on to as
00:43:17 ►
much of the past as we want. So culture has become the servant of this conquest of dimensionality
00:43:27 ►
and I think that inevitably this leads to a bifurcation
00:43:33 ►
because dimensions occur in quantized form
00:43:39 ►
in other words there is a cusp and then a phase transition
00:43:46 ►
and so what has been going on on this planet
00:43:49 ►
for the past 10,000 years
00:43:51 ►
is an edging toward the cusp
00:43:54 ►
and the vector that is being sought
00:43:58 ►
is greater novelty
00:44:00 ►
so the system keeps automatically correcting itself
00:44:04 ►
to seek ever greater novelty the end result of this will be a kind of instantaneous phase transition where everything passes into another modality.
00:44:25 ►
And exactly how this will occur is not a problem at this point because we’re too far in the past.
00:44:28 ►
Ask me that after 2005 and I should have an answer for you.
00:44:33 ►
But at this point in the historical continuum, nobody knows.
00:44:37 ►
Is it going to be nanotechnological?
00:44:39 ►
Are we going to all become pissant size
00:44:42 ►
and go live in a stratocumulus cloud
00:44:45 ►
somewhere over South America?
00:44:47 ►
Are we going to, you know,
00:44:49 ►
invent the Banducci spin dizzy engine
00:44:53 ►
and build ships the size of Manitoba
00:44:56 ►
and set out for NGC 354
00:45:00 ►
or something like that?
00:45:02 ►
That’s a possibility.
00:45:03 ►
I mean, technology has held surprises before
00:45:06 ►
or are we going to do something
00:45:09 ►
very unexpected
00:45:11 ►
and discover that plants are doorways
00:45:15 ►
into dimensions as alien as other planets
00:45:18 ►
and as nearby as the grass growing at your feet
00:45:22 ►
we don’t know.
00:45:25 ►
But our best people are working on it.
00:45:27 ►
And long before we get to 2012,
00:45:30 ►
it will all be made clear.
00:45:35 ►
Did that answer the…
00:45:36 ►
I saw it.
00:45:37 ►
Good. I’d hate to think that we…
00:45:40 ►
What happens after 2012?
00:45:43 ►
What happens after 2012?
00:45:45 ►
Well, that’s an interesting question.
00:45:47 ►
I’m thinking about it in a different way than I have before.
00:45:50 ►
In the past, we’ve spent a great deal of time
00:45:52 ►
talking about what happens at and after 2012.
00:45:57 ►
Yet, strangely, my theory only addresses
00:46:00 ►
what happens before 2012.
00:46:04 ►
After 2012, the time wave is kaput and you’re back
00:46:09 ►
to existentialism again. I think that, well, it depends on how loaded I am what I think
00:46:18 ►
will happen in 2012. Because I can imagine it all the way from
00:46:25 ►
that the laws of physics fail
00:46:29 ►
that the entire universe
00:46:32 ►
rolls up like a window shade
00:46:37 ►
that’s unlikely or it appears unlikely
00:46:40 ►
but on the other hand who’s estimating the odds
00:46:42 ►
and what do they know
00:46:43 ►
it could be
00:46:46 ►
I’ve noticed that what the time wave seems to track best
00:46:51 ►
is the tool making process
00:46:53 ►
and so one way I think about
00:46:56 ►
concrescence and this enterprise
00:46:59 ►
that we’re involved in is we are trying to make
00:47:02 ►
a tool, not just any tool we are trying to make a tool, not just any tool. We are trying to make the tool.
00:47:09 ►
Now, what is a tool? A tool is something that lets you do something. What therefore would be
00:47:16 ►
the ultimate tool? It would let you do anything. And as William Burroughs says, anything.
00:47:20 ►
Anything.
00:47:23 ►
And as William Burroughs says,
00:47:25 ►
anything.
00:47:28 ►
That’s what it would let you do.
00:47:33 ►
The flying saucer comes into the discussion at this point.
00:47:37 ►
The flying saucer, I believe, is an image of this tool that haunts the human experience of historical concrescence.
00:47:43 ►
It haunts the psyche of human beings and the concrescence. It haunts the psyche
00:47:45 ►
of human beings and the skies of
00:47:48 ►
earth because like the bar
00:47:49 ►
ball spinning in the club
00:47:52 ►
it is a precursive
00:47:53 ►
reflection of the tool
00:47:55 ►
at the end of time. The people who
00:47:57 ►
got this right are the alchemists
00:48:00 ►
of the 15th and 16th
00:48:02 ►
century who believed that
00:48:03 ►
out of matter
00:48:05 ►
you could coax a universal substance
00:48:08 ►
that would be a perfect panacea.
00:48:13 ►
It would be all things to all people.
00:48:17 ►
It would cure all diseases,
00:48:20 ►
confer immortality,
00:48:22 ►
change lead to gold.
00:48:28 ►
The blind would see, the halt would walk,
00:48:36 ►
the dead would rise, and this ideal was immediately in place before the birth of modern science as the goal of the exploration of matter. And I think that we are possibly looking at a technology
00:48:47 ►
which the newspapers will call time travel,
00:48:51 ►
but which the people who create it will explain,
00:48:54 ►
well, it’s not that at all.
00:48:55 ►
You see, it’s actually a redactive doubling
00:48:58 ►
of hyperspatial feedback in a heteroclinic situation.
00:49:03 ►
But it comes off as time travel.
00:49:06 ►
Because one way that I can imagine
00:49:09 ►
linear history ending
00:49:11 ►
is by it just simply ending.
00:49:15 ►
You know, linear history depends
00:49:17 ►
on the past staying what it is.
00:49:21 ►
If you have time travel,
00:49:23 ►
it’s possible to imagine a cultural domain where the past is
00:49:28 ►
constantly being changed, in which case you can’t describe the ebb and flow of novelty with a simple
00:49:36 ►
Cartesian graph. So it could be something like that. Or it could be something somewhat on of a metaphysical type i mean here’s the here’s
00:49:47 ►
the stephen king version of what it could be imagine if on the day of concrescence uh the sun
00:49:54 ►
exploded well now that would certainly put rainforest activism in a quandary the explosion of the sun
00:50:05 ►
would kill all life instantly
00:50:07 ►
on the earth
00:50:08 ►
we don’t know what death is
00:50:11 ►
our secular materialists
00:50:15 ►
cheerfully assure us
00:50:16 ►
that it’s a big nothing
00:50:17 ►
but that’s just their guess
00:50:20 ►
nobody knows
00:50:21 ►
but a mass die off
00:50:25 ►
like that
00:50:26 ►
would instantaneously propel
00:50:29 ►
the entire biota
00:50:31 ►
of the planet into death
00:50:33 ►
whatever that is
00:50:34 ►
and that might be part
00:50:37 ►
of the dynamics of the
00:50:39 ►
solar system
00:50:40 ►
I don’t like that idea
00:50:41 ►
it’s rather morbid
00:50:43 ►
but there are some problems with the sun There are some curious disjunctures between measurement of solar radiation and nuclear theory that suggest that the sun may not be as healthy as we would like it to be. Yeah. Psychedelics catalyze the imagination, inform the population, and allow people to
00:51:10 ►
entertain larger perspectives than the completely pissant perspectives which they’re being given by
00:51:17 ►
the popular media. I mean, the popular media exhibits no imagination at all. That’s why we have no space program.
00:51:26 ►
That’s why we have no advanced research project agency.
00:51:30 ►
No commitment to explore the solar system
00:51:33 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:51:35 ►
It turns out that really was all being done
00:51:37 ►
to beat the Russians.
00:51:39 ►
All that fine talk about space flight
00:51:42 ►
and the outward urge,
00:51:44 ►
that was just Pentagonagon these horseshit so
00:51:46 ►
they could dig into our genes and build intercontinental ballistic missiles we who believed
00:51:53 ►
that we were headed out into the starry universe were as usual shafted well that’s a little coda on that I see it’s time to
00:52:06 ►
knock off for a while
00:52:08 ►
we have time for one more question though
00:52:12 ►
is this working for people?
00:52:14 ►
I mean I wander one way and then another
00:52:16 ►
no no
00:52:19 ►
what you just said about all this space program stuff
00:52:23 ►
why all the…
00:52:25 ►
There seems to be this incredible influx of sci-fi in the media
00:52:30 ►
as far as programming and television, films.
00:52:37 ►
What’s your comment on that?
00:52:40 ►
Well, I think that virtual reality, the entertainment industry, I mean, if you look at the figures, if we spent as much money trying to save the planet as we are spending trying to develop advanced systems of electronic entertainment, hell, we’d fix it overnight. That would just be a done deal.
00:53:10 ►
just be a done deal. I’m suspicious. I’m a techno fan and I use technology and I’m into it. But I was with Howard Rheingold one night actually here at Esalen when we achieved a kind of apotheosis
00:53:18 ►
together. And he said to me, he said, my God, I’ve just realized what virtual reality is for.
00:53:27 ►
me he said my god i’ve just realized what virtual reality is for and i said what’s it for howard and he said it’s to keep us from ever leaving the planet and i i see in the game design and
00:53:35 ►
in the website design and in the look and feel of the net how it’s to be a simulacrum of the great frontier.
00:53:47 ►
You know, it’s going to all be virtual,
00:53:49 ►
the trip to Pluto and the conquest of Mars
00:53:52 ►
and the journey out to Andromeda.
00:53:56 ►
I think that, you know, I don’t fault technology.
00:54:00 ►
You just have to be very aware.
00:54:02 ►
But, you know, it’s like heroin.
00:54:04 ►
And we must not consume
00:54:07 ►
we must produce as a community
00:54:09 ►
the psychedelic community must produce art
00:54:12 ►
not consume it
00:54:14 ►
once if they get it flowing the other way
00:54:17 ►
and we begin to consume it
00:54:18 ►
then we are depotentiated
00:54:21 ►
so what I’ve said you know
00:54:23 ►
the millennial program
00:54:25 ►
is to put the art pedal to the floor.
00:54:29 ►
In virtual reality,
00:54:31 ►
the difference between a 10-story building
00:54:33 ►
and a 100-story building
00:54:35 ►
is one zero.
00:54:38 ►
Enter the zero,
00:54:39 ►
and it’s now a 100-story building.
00:54:41 ►
We can build with light.
00:54:43 ►
The constraints of material and the constraints of
00:54:46 ►
capital investment that have limited us in three-dimensional space are not going to be
00:54:52 ►
present in VR. And I think we’re going to be able to build those castles in the sky.
00:55:00 ►
And what I’ve said this many times, as I see the late 20th century cultural enterprise,
00:55:08 ►
what we’re trying to do here is turn the human body inside out.
00:55:13 ►
We want to take the mind,
00:55:15 ►
which is this invisible hyperspatial organ with its teeming imagination,
00:55:21 ►
and we want to make it literal or virtual.
00:55:24 ►
We want to bring it into existence.
00:55:26 ►
Meanwhile, the body has become, because there are so many bodies, a real drag on the political
00:55:34 ►
system. So the body wants to become something freely commanded in the imagination. And it’s literally like we are turning ourselves inside out and this is an alchemical process
00:55:50 ►
so now i’ve spoken of the alchemical process as something happening to the body as a cultural
00:55:57 ►
enterprise building a tool as an irresistible motion toward an attractor, which can be glimpsed through the hyperdimensional vision conferred by psychedelics.
00:56:11 ►
And then it merely remains to unpack and download these ideas
00:56:16 ►
into the popular and mass culture,
00:56:19 ►
because I think they assuage anxiety.
00:56:23 ►
People feel better about themselves
00:56:25 ►
and the fate and direction of the world.
00:56:29 ►
But, you know, we have painted ourselves
00:56:31 ►
into a hell of a situation here.
00:56:33 ►
The momentum of our past mistakes is staggering.
00:56:37 ►
The good news is we primates love a good fight
00:56:41 ►
and we don’t really get our dander up
00:56:44 ►
until the last possible moment.
00:56:47 ►
This is it.
00:56:48 ►
This is the last possible moment.
00:56:53 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:55 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:00 ►
This is it.
00:57:01 ►
This is the last possible moment.
00:57:04 ►
But since Terrence made that statement way back in 1994,
00:57:08 ►
I think that we may have to revise our concept of a moment.
00:57:13 ►
Because if this is the last possible moment, then it’s certainly one hell of a long moment.
00:57:19 ►
Of course, I jest. We all know what Terrence was talking about.
00:57:24 ►
You know, just spend a few moments going through the news on Flipboard,
00:57:27 ►
just reading the headlines, and in less than a minute you’ll see that the world
00:57:32 ►
is going to hell in a handbasket. And then do the same thing
00:57:35 ►
the next day and the next day and each and every day, and you’ll discover that
00:57:40 ►
well, in a way, it seems to me that the human world has
00:57:43 ►
always been poised on the brink of destruction.
00:57:47 ►
So, if you think about Terence’s closing comment in these terms, well, then it turns into something maybe more positive.
00:57:54 ►
Because if we always do our best work at the moment of crisis, and if every moment is a moment of crisis, well, then we should always be doing our best work.
00:58:07 ►
Okay, I know what you’re thinking.
00:58:09 ►
Lorenzo, you shouldn’t be doing these podcasts so late at night.
00:58:13 ►
And you are probably right.
00:58:17 ►
Somehow time just seemed to slip away from me this past week,
00:58:20 ►
and I didn’t realize how long it had been since my last podcast.
00:58:23 ►
I didn’t realize how long it had been since my last podcast.
00:58:36 ►
So what I’m going to do right now is to sign off and then get right back to work on editing the rest of the recording of this McKenna workshop and try to get it out to you in the next few days.
00:58:47 ►
But as I sign off today, I would first like to pay my respects to a musician who added immeasurably to my own life, Ray Manzarek, the brilliant keyboardist for the Doors. you know the day destroys the night night divides the day try to run try to hide
00:59:16 ►
break on through to the other side break on through to the other side. We’re going to the other side, yeah.
00:59:35 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:37 ►
Be well, my friends.