Program Notes
Guest speakers: Michael Garfield & Matt Pallamary
Today we only go back in time a short way, back to December 12, 2012 when Matt Pallmary and Michael Garfield took a break during their work on the stage production of Matt’s novel, “Land Without Evil”, in Austin, Texas. In this wide ranging discussion between salon favorite, Matt Pallamary, and long time saloner, burner, artist, and musician, Michael Garfield, one of my favorite topics was Michael’s very positive take on the long-term impact of the work of Terence McKenna, regardless of the fact that the Timewave theory had obviously been disproven. Michael is also a regular performer on the festival circuit, and his schedule may be found online at
Michael Garfield.net
The Psychedelic Salon Magazine
https://flipboard.com/@lorenzohagerty/psychedelic-salon-beqt65mhy
Degenerate Art: The Art And Culture Of Glass Pipes
“Is Ecstasy the Key to Alleviating Autism Anxiety?”
Horizons 2012: CHARLES S. GROB, M.D - “Why Psychedelics Matter”
Videos from the Festival Circuit
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
Previous Episode
Next Episode
355 - Building a Psychedelic Community
Similar Episodes
- 174 - Pushing the Envelope - score: 0.85496
- 049 - Pharmacology and the Posthuman Phuture - score: 0.84342
- 262 - Terence McKenna’s Last Interview Part 1 - score: 0.84227
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.84050
- 129 - The Imagination and the Environment - score: 0.84044
- 116 - Techno Pagans at the End of History - score: 0.83838
- 508 - Techno-Shamanism - score: 0.83500
- 123 - Opening the Doors of Creativity - score: 0.83368
- 320 - Occupy Yourself - score: 0.82867
- 577 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 5 - score: 0.82757
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:27 ►
space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And after taking a reading of my energy levels, I’d say that I’ve already slipped into that laid-back summer mode that we
00:00:32 ►
all look forward to each year. So I’d better get on with it before I start goofing off again, huh?
00:00:40 ►
Well, to begin with, I want to thank our fellow salonners who have also subscribed to my magazine on Flipboard,
00:00:47 ►
which is a really wonderful app for your web phone.
00:00:51 ►
I won’t try to sell you on the app itself because everybody I know that has tried it gets hooked right away.
00:00:57 ►
However, one of the features that they offer is to let anyone create their own Flipboard magazine for free,
00:01:02 ►
and you don’t even have to register with them in order to read the magazines.
00:01:07 ►
So, a few weeks ago, I created the Psychedelic Salon magazine,
00:01:11 ►
into which I’ve posted now about, I guess, around 150 articles that may be of interest to you.
00:01:18 ►
And I note that there have already been over 16,000 page flips.
00:01:23 ►
And at first I was trying to keep it to about a dozen or so
00:01:26 ►
articles and had been deleting stories each day when I finally realized that I could just leave
00:01:33 ►
them all there as a kind of historical archive of the latest news from the world of psychedelics.
00:01:38 ►
So in addition to some interesting art that I’ve included, you’ll also find articles about the latest psychedelic research,
00:01:46 ►
news from the war on people
00:01:48 ►
who use non-prescription drugs,
00:01:50 ►
videos on topics like
00:01:52 ►
how to grow mushrooms,
00:01:54 ►
and stories about the 280 legal highs
00:01:57 ►
that are now available,
00:01:59 ►
along with some cautionary tales
00:02:01 ►
about these new compounds.
00:02:03 ►
One of my favorite recent links
00:02:05 ►
in the magazine is about this wonderful documentary that’s now streaming on
00:02:10 ►
Netflix and it’s titled Degenerate Art, The Art and Culture of Glass Pipes. And I
00:02:17 ►
highly recommend watching that particular video, even if you’re not a
00:02:21 ►
toker, because you’re going to see some of the most beautiful glass art
00:02:25 ►
that’s ever been created. Also, there are a couple of items that I wanted to add to my flipboard
00:02:31 ►
magazine, but couldn’t figure out how to do it yet. One is an article titled, Is Ecstasy the Key to
00:02:38 ►
Alleviating Autism Anxiety? And it’s about the research that my friend and our fellow salonner Alicia Danforth is doing.
00:02:46 ►
And if you know anyone who is dealing with autism, you may want to put them in touch with Alicia’s work.
00:02:52 ►
One of her early findings seems to indicate that many high-functioning autistic people
00:02:57 ►
don’t actually want to lose some of the intellectual advantages that their condition carries with it.
00:03:03 ►
They would simply just like to be able to fit into the default world a little better.
00:03:08 ►
And I hope I’m getting this right and not misrepresenting her work,
00:03:12 ►
which I’ve mainly heard about recently from our mutual friend, Dr. Charlie Grobe,
00:03:16 ►
who for many years has been one of the world’s leading researchers into psychedelic medicines.
00:03:21 ►
And of course you can hear both Alicia and Charlie in past episodes
00:03:26 ►
here in the salon.
00:03:28 ►
And if you would like to hear
00:03:29 ►
a recent talk that Charlie gave that
00:03:32 ►
includes his personal story
00:03:34 ►
about how he came to the decision
00:03:35 ►
to devote his professional life
00:03:37 ►
to psychedelic research, then
00:03:40 ►
you’re in luck, because now
00:03:42 ►
the Horizon Group has
00:03:43 ►
created a channel on Vimeo where you can
00:03:47 ►
watch not only Charlie’s presentation, but also those of more than 30 other featured
00:03:52 ►
speakers as well.
00:03:54 ►
And these people are major figures in the world of psychedelic research, some of whom
00:03:59 ►
you have also heard here in the salon.
00:04:02 ►
Now, I mentioned this last week also, but if you haven’t
00:04:06 ►
had a chance to watch the documentary slash interview of me that was done by
00:04:10 ►
Tom Huckabee and George Wada, along with a crew of several others, I hope that
00:04:16 ►
you’ll be able to take the time to watch it. Basically in it I tell the story of
00:04:21 ►
what it was like in Dallas, Texas when that city became ground zero for MDMA,
00:04:26 ►
or ecstasy when it hit the streets in a big way. Particularly if you’ve been concerned about the
00:04:33 ►
stories the power elite are putting out about the dangers of excessive use of that substance,
00:04:38 ►
you ought to take a look at this. I won’t give the story away here, but I think that after you
00:04:43 ►
watch that short video you may rest a little easier. And I’ll put give the story away here, but I think that after you watch that short video, you
00:04:45 ►
may rest a little easier. And I’ll put links to all this stuff, by the way, in the program notes
00:04:50 ►
for this podcast, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. Now, my point in bringing up
00:04:57 ►
that interview documentary again this week is that at the very end of the interview, I say a few words about the worldwide dance scene
00:05:06 ►
and particularly the festival culture. Well, after watching the video, my dear friend Seabrook wrote
00:05:12 ►
to me and told me about another video series that I have to admit I’d completely missed.
00:05:18 ►
And the URL to it is www.thebloom, that’s T-H-E-B-L-O-O-M, all one word, thebloom.tv
00:05:28 ►
And right now they have two videos out so far
00:05:32 ►
and the production values of these festival videos
00:05:35 ►
are just wonderful.
00:05:37 ►
This isn’t something that an old grandpa like me
00:05:39 ►
would put together.
00:05:41 ►
And I guess one of the reasons I feel it may be important
00:05:44 ►
for me to mention the bloom.tv
00:05:47 ►
is that after hearing from Seabrook, I watched their two videos, and then the very next thing
00:05:53 ►
that I did was to preview the conversation that we’re about to listen to. And lo and behold,
00:05:59 ►
near the end of it, Michael Garfield also mentions the bloom.tv. So I figure that little synchronicity should be honored.
00:06:09 ►
Actually, there may only be one person that I’m talking to right now,
00:06:14 ►
or maybe there are a dozen or more.
00:06:17 ►
But here’s what I’m thinking, and I’m probably going to tell you more than you want to know,
00:06:21 ►
but back in the spring of 1965, when I was
00:06:26 ►
midway through my second semester of law school, and doing quite well, I should add, I was
00:06:31 ►
second in my class at the time, well, as I was walking out my door one morning on the
00:06:36 ►
way to class, I found a letter in my mailbox.
00:06:39 ►
And I still have this letter, by the way.
00:06:42 ►
And it was from the famous author and sailor, Alan Villiers.
00:06:46 ►
And it was an answer to a letter that I’d written to him five months before,
00:06:50 ►
and which, well, I didn’t have his address, so I just addressed it to Alan Villiers, Oxford, England.
00:06:57 ►
And actually, I never expected my letter to reach him.
00:07:00 ►
But it did, and he wrote back to me, and here’s what he had to say.
00:07:04 ►
At least here’s part of what he said in that letter.
00:07:07 ►
The Barkwandia should be ready about mid-April to sail from San Pedro for Honolulu direct
00:07:13 ►
with a scratch crew mainly of runners.
00:07:16 ►
You can join us provided only that you are physically fit and accept the rough conditions aboard.
00:07:22 ►
You will have to get yourself here.
00:07:24 ►
There won’t be any union conditions.
00:07:26 ►
It will be the manner of sea life aboard deep-water, square-rigged ships.
00:07:31 ►
Two watches only, no refrigeration, fresh water rationing, etc.,
00:07:35 ►
and plenty of work aloft.
00:07:38 ►
Pay offered is $25 a week, no overtime or other such stuff.
00:07:44 ►
Well, after my first class that morning, I went to
00:07:48 ►
visit the assistant dean of the law school who had become a friend of mine during the summer
00:07:53 ►
months when I taught sailing at the Houston Yacht Club. So I showed him the letter and asked his
00:07:59 ►
advice. And he said, well, if you don’t take this opportunity, I’m going to quit my job and take it myself.
00:08:06 ►
Well, needless to say, I dropped out of school that morning, quit my night job,
00:08:11 ►
stored my stuff with some friends, and within two days, caught the train from Houston to Los Angeles,
00:08:16 ►
where I arrived with the grand total of $1.37 to my name, and then I joined the ship.
00:08:24 ►
Now, when I took this big leap, one of the things
00:08:27 ►
that I realized at the time is that doing so would cause me to lose my draft deferment, and that by
00:08:34 ►
the following winter there was little doubt but what I’d be drafted. And so by dropping out and
00:08:39 ►
heading to sea for this crazy adventure, I knew that law school was going to have to wait, because
00:08:45 ►
I knew that I would have to either join the Navy or get drafted into the Army.
00:08:49 ►
And so that was the beginning of what has now turned out to be a wonderful life.
00:08:55 ►
Had I not taken that detour, I have little doubt but what right now, you and I wouldn’t
00:08:59 ►
be here in the psychedelic salon, and if a heart attack hadn’t killed me by now, I’d
00:09:04 ►
probably be
00:09:05 ►
some kind of a conservative jerk of a Texas lawyer. So, what’s your point, Lorenzo, you ask?
00:09:13 ►
Well, my point is that there are one or two of our fellow salonners right now who are out there
00:09:19 ►
at the end of the line. They can’t find any of the others, and their friends just don’t get it.
00:09:28 ►
They may be between boyfriends or girlfriends right now and working in some kind of a dead-end job with few prospects for excitement, no prospects
00:09:33 ►
for adventure ahead of them. Well, after you watch the videos on thebloom.tv
00:09:39 ►
and if the festival circuit appeals to you, then my advice is to cut the cord of your current life and go to the first festival you can get to.
00:09:49 ►
Make some friends there and see where it leads.
00:09:52 ►
Although I’m no longer a fan of him or his work, Walt Disney once said something that is still one of my guiding principles,
00:10:00 ►
and that is, take a chance and march in the parade.
00:10:03 ►
and that is, take a chance and march in the parade.
00:10:10 ►
And so, now at last, I’m finally getting to the introduction of today’s podcast,
00:10:16 ►
which features a conversation between Matt Palomary, or Mateo, and Michael Garfield,
00:10:21 ►
who, if you already don’t know about Michael’s work, you’re going to learn more about in a few minutes.
00:10:25 ►
As you will hear, this conversation took place last year when Michael was part of the troupe who performed a stage version of Mateo’s wonderful novel,
00:10:31 ►
Land Without Evil. Interestingly, Michael has been a fellow salonner for quite a while,
00:10:37 ►
and if I’m not mistaken, I first met him either at Burning Man or one of the MAPS conferences where
00:10:42 ►
he showed me some of the incredible psychedelic hats that he also applies his art to. So now let’s join Mateo and Michael
00:10:50 ►
and hear what they had to say a few weeks before the big 2012 event was due.
00:10:59 ►
Hi, welcome once again to the Psychedelic Salon. It’s Mateo here, and I am happy to be recording this podcast from Austin, Texas,
00:11:07 ►
where the wonderful show Land Without Evil,
00:11:11 ►
and I’m not saying that because I wrote the book, although that doesn’t hurt,
00:11:15 ►
but it’s a wonderful show that’s being played here, put on by Sky Candy of Austin,
00:11:19 ►
and there are 30 cast members, 20 crew members.
00:11:23 ►
It’s at the historic Stateside Theater downtown, Stateside at the Paramount.
00:11:28 ►
And we’re in the middle of the show.
00:11:30 ►
We did three shows this past weekend, and we have five more coming.
00:11:34 ►
And it’s been an awesome experience.
00:11:36 ►
And one of the amazing things about it is all the different talents that have come to bear to make it happen.
00:11:42 ►
And it’s very magical.
00:11:43 ►
The show is magical, and the experience is magical.
00:11:46 ►
And one of the people who is working on the show is Michael Garfield.
00:11:50 ►
He’s a musician and a visionary artist, and he’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a moment.
00:11:57 ►
But I’ve known Michael more by reputation.
00:12:01 ►
We’ve never met, but we know many of the same people as it is with the tribe.
00:12:06 ►
And it was great to run into him and hear his part in the show.
00:12:10 ►
We could talk a bit about that too.
00:12:12 ►
But I’m going to have Michael give a quick little intro spiel,
00:12:17 ►
and he and I are going to have a good show here and a good talk about all things consciousness
00:12:22 ►
and psychedelic and cosmic and art and all that good
00:12:26 ►
stuff i do want to say quickly he was just telling me that he has a background from my interest in
00:12:32 ►
paleontology and now he’s a you know cutting edge visionary artist you know musically and visually
00:12:38 ►
so i told him that he has already done time travel and gone from the Stone Age right into the
00:12:46 ►
Stoned Age.
00:12:46 ►
He’s bridging it.
00:12:48 ►
So I’m going to put Michael on here, and we’re going to talk a little bit.
00:12:51 ►
And then I want to give him, if you would, Michael, give us just a little bio spiel,
00:12:56 ►
you know.
00:12:57 ►
Tell us what you think.
00:12:58 ►
Sure.
00:12:59 ►
Thanks, Matt.
00:13:00 ►
It’s a funny handle, so I want to just riff off of that stone age to stoned age
00:13:05 ►
part of what interests me in the landscape of visionary culture you know transformational
00:13:13 ►
culture people who are consciously and deliberately engaging their communities and their
00:13:20 ►
self-development as a microcosm of a larger evolutionary process,
00:13:26 ►
which is really something new in the human species
00:13:31 ►
in the sense that not only an evolutionary march, a notion of progress,
00:13:39 ►
but something beyond that, an understanding that our own notion of time
00:13:44 ►
is itself part of this process,
00:13:48 ►
and that our concept of time and of evolutionary change only continues to complexify and become
00:13:57 ►
manifold the more we engage it.
00:14:27 ►
But here we are in this culture, and there is something intrinsically erotic about participation in this process in the way that Rich Doyle talks psychotropic plant species, or what he calls ecodelic plant species, in the sense that these medicines make us more aware of the unconscious
00:14:33 ►
ecological context within which we are embedded and from which we precipitate. And he talks about how the benefit of eloquence, the evolutionary advantage of poetry and song that seem to have been augmented by our symbiotic relationships with visionary plants,
00:14:55 ►
is its own kind of seduction in that you have the species barrier being crossed and information and experience being exchanged across phyla, across kingdoms.
00:15:10 ►
So the more we understand this as something that occurs over and over and over again,
00:15:17 ►
for example, in that first endosymbiotic union that created a nucleated cell out of free-living bacteria that now live together
00:15:28 ►
within one of them but functioning all as necessary i hate to use the phrase components
00:15:34 ►
because that’s an elemental thing yeah but that this happens over and over and over again
00:15:40 ►
so you know my interest is in a way to navigate conversations about the emergence of
00:15:47 ►
new layers of selfhood and of community in a way that walks this tightrope between a pathological
00:15:58 ►
and absolutist over-evaluation of the individual or the collective.
00:16:09 ►
You know, I don’t want to see this Ayn Rand objectivism on one hand,
00:16:11 ►
but I also don’t want to see this Borg hive mind on the other. Yeah, yeah.
00:16:13 ►
And so a lot of the oneness conversation these days
00:16:17 ►
seems to be between polarized extremes
00:16:21 ►
that are taking shots at, you know, straw opponents, as far as this thing goes.
00:16:27 ►
I think it’s really important that our art and our entertainment and our sacred and celebratory
00:16:35 ►
media all reflect this understanding that the individual and the collective create one another.
00:16:40 ►
And that’s my interest in this.
00:16:43 ►
You know, when you started talking about the connectedness of all consciousness
00:16:47 ►
and species and, you know, symbiotic relationships,
00:16:52 ►
it just threw me right into the jungle doing ayahuasca dietas.
00:16:57 ►
I’ve really experienced that directly, being one with it all.
00:17:01 ►
And the thing about it is that everything is one
00:17:05 ►
and everything is also unique.
00:17:09 ►
So, you know, anytime you go into the polarities,
00:17:11 ►
anybody, you know, you’re talking about the two polarities,
00:17:14 ►
they’re missing the point. It’s in the middle.
00:17:16 ►
And so we are, you know, we are just as much a collective as we are one.
00:17:20 ►
And I think that, you know, one of the cosmic principles
00:17:23 ►
that I’ve discovered personally for me is that
00:17:25 ►
the best way that you can help other people,
00:17:28 ►
the absolute best way you can help other people
00:17:29 ►
is to love yourself.
00:17:31 ►
Because then your energy spreads out
00:17:33 ►
and how can you love anybody else unless you learn to love
00:17:36 ►
yourself first?
00:17:38 ►
Nobody else will. You won’t.
00:17:40 ►
So my point is that
00:17:41 ►
that makes you
00:17:43 ►
more an individual
00:17:45 ►
in what you have to offer for the gift of who you are
00:17:48 ►
and the energies that you can move.
00:17:52 ►
It’s individual and collective at the same time.
00:17:54 ►
It can be both.
00:17:56 ►
It’s everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
00:17:58 ►
It’s being and not being.
00:17:59 ►
It’s freaking cosmic.
00:18:01 ►
So one of the things I wanted to touch on,
00:18:04 ►
what struck me when I was looking at your webpages
00:18:06 ►
is you have
00:18:08 ►
a quote at the top. By the way, this is
00:18:09 ►
michaelgarfield.blogspot.com
00:18:14 ►
Go there for some
00:18:16 ►
cosmic
00:18:17 ►
cosmic music and art.
00:18:21 ►
But we’ve been
00:18:21 ►
working together for about a week now. We’re having a good
00:18:24 ►
time. It’s great.
00:18:28 ►
So Michael has this saying, which I love. It says,
00:18:30 ►
Everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice.
00:18:34 ►
I want to do a little thing on that
00:18:36 ►
and send you off here on this topic,
00:18:38 ►
but I’ve done a lot with sacred geometry
00:18:42 ►
and studied it extensively.
00:18:44 ►
My new book, The Infinity Zone,
00:18:46 ►
is about that.
00:18:48 ►
And one of the things I discovered,
00:18:50 ►
particularly in ancient Egypt,
00:18:54 ►
in their art and their temples,
00:18:55 ►
where there is very precise artwork and mathematics,
00:18:58 ►
is that in Western culture,
00:19:00 ►
we’ve really tried hard in our
00:19:03 ►
divide and conquer, search and destroy method of intellectual
00:19:06 ►
exploration. And we’ve separated art, and we’ve separated science, and we’ve separated
00:19:11 ►
religion and or spiritual practice. Well, in ancient Egypt, art and science and spiritual
00:19:20 ►
practice were all one and the same. It was all about the beauty and the archetype
00:19:28 ►
and the deeper message that really goes beyond language that’s being given.
00:19:32 ►
The Greeks took much from the ancient Egyptians,
00:19:34 ►
and one of the things they said is that truth is beauty.
00:19:40 ►
That’s why if you look at what’s considered to be the most beautiful female face,
00:19:44 ►
if you do a mathematical analysis, it’s all sacred geometry.
00:19:49 ►
And music is geometry and time and working with time and space and working with energy.
00:19:55 ►
So the point I’m making here is that statement, for me, proves truth is beauty.
00:20:01 ►
And when you’re expressing art that really touches people, whether it’s spoken or or acting that’s what you’re doing it’s a sacred act i think it’s useful for us to
00:20:12 ►
differentiate art and science and spiritual practice and to recognize them as distinct
00:20:18 ►
lenses in a way that a lot of ancient societies did not. There’s something beautiful about a, and I mean this neutrally,
00:20:28 ►
but a naive view in which your process of inquiry and your process of expression
00:20:34 ►
and your process of worship are all bound together into a whole.
00:20:42 ►
But for us in a post-modern world we have this opportunity to choose to look at
00:20:51 ►
anything through just one of those methods you know in yeah in having expanded we have new
00:20:58 ►
opportunities to limit ourselves and focus our method you know know, whether that be, you know, a method of art or science or
00:21:08 ►
spiritual practice, you know, and this is something that, you know, I got out of the
00:21:13 ►
integral philosophy community, you know, which is riddled with its dramas, but also did a lot for me
00:21:22 ►
to help me understand how everything can be examined from multiple
00:21:28 ►
perspectives simultaneously, and how by doing so, we discover new interference patterns between
00:21:36 ►
perspectives that enrich and inform our understanding and increase our efficacy in the world, you know, that integrated practices,
00:21:47 ►
you know, trained on a common goal are more effective in the same way that, you know,
00:21:53 ►
integrated methods of study yield to deeper insight. So I like finding the ways to crystallize
00:21:59 ►
and condense these kind of understandings in the same way that Ednea from the Endymion books by Dan Simmons,
00:22:09 ►
you know, you want to talk about some truly awesome
00:22:10 ►
visionary science fiction that blended science and art
00:22:13 ►
and spirituality together in a really compelling way.
00:22:16 ►
In Dan Simmons’ series, this Messiah,
00:22:22 ►
you know, 600 years in our future,
00:22:45 ►
narrows her Sermon on the Mount down to two words, you know, choose again, which is such a profound distillation in the sense that it expresses the endless reform of the scientific process. It expresses the endless creativity of the artistic process,
00:22:49 ►
and it expresses an endless forgiveness that we recognize in our experience with the divine.
00:22:53 ►
So it’s that kind of thing that I’m trying to capture,
00:22:55 ►
although I haven’t nailed it in as few as two words.
00:23:00 ►
It’s a challenge, you know, as a writer, for me,
00:23:02 ►
trying, always wanting to capture a truly visionary experience,
00:23:10 ►
which is multiple, multidimensional.
00:23:15 ►
It’s more than parallel, it’s multidimensional.
00:23:17 ►
There’s a lot of things happening at the same time.
00:23:20 ►
And then distill it into a serialized language,
00:23:22 ►
in words and sentences,
00:23:24 ►
so that other people can listen to that little transmission and upload it
00:23:28 ►
and hopefully have some sense of what is trying to be conveyed.
00:23:33 ►
But I think most really hardcore artists,
00:23:37 ►
when they get into the zone of playing or performing or creating,
00:23:41 ►
they kind of set their ego aside and just let it flow,
00:23:41 ►
or performing or creating,
00:23:43 ►
they’re kind of set their ego aside and just let it flow.
00:23:45 ►
Really tap into it
00:23:46 ►
and create something that’s greater
00:23:49 ►
than if their ego is involved.
00:23:52 ►
I think there’s a lot to be said
00:23:53 ►
about the letting go and pushing the limits.
00:23:57 ►
You know, I also want to mention
00:23:59 ►
a little bit more about the Egyptians
00:24:02 ►
because this relates to something else
00:24:05 ►
you were talking about in terms of holographic
00:24:07 ►
things.
00:24:09 ►
In Luxor, Egypt is a temple
00:24:11 ►
of the anthropocosmic man,
00:24:13 ►
which is a very precise mathematical
00:24:15 ►
representation of the human body.
00:24:18 ►
And they say that it is also
00:24:19 ►
a representation of the cosmos
00:24:21 ►
that we are within, so that a human body is actually a microcosmos
00:24:28 ►
of the macrocosmos, which I think I tend to believe in when you think of the gazillions
00:24:33 ►
of kinds of different cells and even bacteria and animals that all work together to make
00:24:37 ►
us exist in this moment that we’re passing through together. It’s quite a powerful thing.
00:24:45 ►
So through all that
00:24:46 ►
and through my jungle diets,
00:24:48 ►
now I’m leaning toward
00:24:50 ►
what the Egyptians say
00:24:51 ►
about every day.
00:24:54 ►
Every day is,
00:24:55 ►
everything you do
00:24:56 ►
is sort of an act of
00:24:57 ►
spiritual,
00:24:58 ►
I don’t want to say worship,
00:24:59 ►
but acknowledgement
00:25:01 ►
is probably a better way
00:25:01 ►
to put it.
00:25:03 ►
You know, acknowledging spirit
00:25:04 ►
and if your body is a temple to the divine
00:25:06 ►
and we are truly all connected to the oneness,
00:25:08 ►
then everything you put in your mouth
00:25:10 ►
is an offering to divinity.
00:25:13 ►
But some things you take in
00:25:14 ►
might be an offering to divinity
00:25:15 ►
and they might be a lot of fun,
00:25:16 ►
but they might not be so good.
00:25:17 ►
So there’s a balance there.
00:25:18 ►
But, you know, you don’t have to take things too seriously.
00:25:20 ►
But I mean, it’s the whole point of that.
00:25:22 ►
The being, we are stardust
00:25:24 ►
and we are the microcosm.
00:25:26 ►
Well, if you’re being attentive
00:25:28 ►
and acknowledging
00:25:29 ►
and respectful,
00:25:31 ►
then you’re not likely
00:25:32 ►
to put things
00:25:33 ►
that are bad for you
00:25:34 ►
in your mouth
00:25:35 ►
because you’re honoring
00:25:37 ►
a greater intelligence
00:25:39 ►
than yourself
00:25:39 ►
that expresses itself
00:25:41 ►
through the desires
00:25:42 ►
of your body
00:25:42 ►
and a real deep listening is central to that kind of practice.
00:25:50 ►
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:25:51 ►
Good.
00:25:51 ►
Well said.
00:25:51 ►
Well said.
00:25:53 ►
Interestingly enough, doing this show together,
00:25:56 ►
it’s a bit of that experience with all the multiple contributions from everybody.
00:26:01 ►
Michael does a great acoustic guitar.
00:26:03 ►
And you do this distortion do this electronic distortion thing
00:26:05 ►
on it. Do you want to explain that?
00:26:08 ►
Sure. Very cool.
00:26:11 ►
It’s nice
00:26:11 ►
to get my ego out of the way
00:26:14 ►
with this project and
00:26:16 ►
participate in the body of something greater.
00:26:18 ►
After years as a solo artist,
00:26:20 ►
being able to work with
00:26:22 ►
a group of musicians as
00:26:23 ►
one corner, literally, on the stage just over in
00:26:26 ►
the corner while all of this amazing circus work and musical theater is going on around us
00:26:33 ►
what i’m personally doing is routing an acoustic guitar through a series of hardware effects delays
00:26:39 ►
pitch shifters beat slicersers, filters, and loopers,
00:26:49 ►
and playing it percussively and also with an EBO,
00:26:53 ►
which is an electromagnet that vibrates the magnetic pickup itself.
00:26:54 ►
Is that the black thing?
00:26:54 ►
Yeah.
00:26:55 ►
That’s the thing I was curious about,
00:26:57 ►
because I saw you were doing some really trippy shit with that.
00:27:01 ►
You get some synthesizer tones out of that that you wouldn’t expect out of an acoustic guitar,
00:27:03 ►
so we’ve been playing with that and pitch shifters to give a real uh mysterium tremendum you know sawtooth
00:27:11 ►
low end to some of the music for this play you know in in these moments of uh death and fever
00:27:19 ►
and exhaustion you know visionary jungle experiences it’s been pretty awesomely apropos, I’m going to say.
00:27:28 ►
Yeah, I think too.
00:27:30 ►
I’m getting goosebumps now.
00:27:31 ►
So he’s saying some important shit here in my universe.
00:27:36 ►
But my friend Mick Mashbeer used to be lead guitarist for Alice Cooper.
00:27:41 ►
And he has an all steel acoustic guitar. It’s not a pedal steel, but an acoustic an all-steel acoustic guitar.
00:27:46 ►
It’s not a pedal steel,
00:27:47 ►
but an acoustic guitar,
00:27:48 ►
but it’s all steel.
00:27:49 ►
And he gets these otherworldly sounds out of it.
00:27:52 ►
He does some side stuff.
00:27:53 ►
It’s like the mothership’s coming in, man.
00:27:57 ►
So I get a sense of that,
00:27:58 ►
but you’ve got this little edge
00:27:59 ►
with what you’re doing with the electronics
00:28:01 ►
where you can do this really cool distortion.
00:28:04 ►
In the show, there’s a lot of shamanic experiences
00:28:06 ►
and visionary experiences.
00:28:09 ►
And like one of the characters, Poet, man, he’s awesome.
00:28:11 ►
He’s medicine.
00:28:12 ►
He represents the medicine of the jungle,
00:28:14 ►
and he dances around at certain times
00:28:16 ►
to help heal or have a battle with death.
00:28:19 ►
All these elements that come into play.
00:28:20 ►
So the music that Michael and the other people have been doing
00:28:23 ►
has really added to the whole effectiveness,
00:28:26 ►
the emotional tone of it,
00:28:28 ►
you know, all of it.
00:28:29 ►
So I was really curious about your technique
00:28:31 ►
and what you were doing there.
00:28:33 ►
Yeah, it’s fun.
00:28:34 ►
I’ve got to say also that, you know,
00:28:35 ►
Norm Ballinger,
00:28:37 ►
who is the other acoustic guitarist in the show,
00:28:38 ►
I’m working directly with him
00:28:40 ►
for most of this.
00:28:41 ►
And then also Morgan Sorin.
00:28:44 ►
He’s been doing some vocal looping
00:28:46 ►
and some of his songs are in the show.
00:28:48 ►
And it’s been a real pleasure to work with him.
00:28:51 ►
And then we’re also working with one of the dancers,
00:28:54 ►
one of the actors in the show, the shaman.
00:28:56 ►
Chris.
00:28:56 ►
Yeah, is Chris Lundberg or Wonder Nexus.
00:28:59 ►
And he’s done a lot of the musical percussion programming
00:29:02 ►
and soundtracking for the show as well.
00:29:05 ►
And it’s been a real pleasure to work with all of them.
00:29:07 ►
Amanda Therese has been singing with us
00:29:10 ►
on some of our tracks.
00:29:11 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:29:11 ►
A really, really gorgeous, trippy Ave Maria
00:29:15 ►
that we’re doing while the main character
00:29:18 ►
is falling under the spell of this jungle sickness.
00:29:21 ►
Yeah.
00:29:22 ►
So it’s been a lot of fun.
00:29:25 ►
When I heard her sing that,
00:29:26 ►
I got goosebumps.
00:29:28 ►
One of the fascinating things
00:29:29 ►
for me personally
00:29:30 ►
is that this book
00:29:31 ►
was originally published in 99,
00:29:34 ►
and it’s gone through
00:29:34 ►
lots of different battles,
00:29:36 ►
and it’s been moving steadily,
00:29:38 ►
but not in any big numbers.
00:29:39 ►
And so the power
00:29:41 ►
of having all these
00:29:42 ►
wonderful artists
00:29:43 ►
not only get the message,
00:29:45 ►
but do an interpretation on it
00:29:47 ►
and then put all their hearts into it,
00:29:49 ►
it’s just, I can’t even articulate
00:29:52 ►
how awesome that is.
00:29:56 ►
It’s a wonderful,
00:29:57 ►
truly collaborative experience.
00:30:01 ►
So, Michael and I were talking
00:30:04 ►
about all kinds of different stuff and we
00:30:06 ►
thought we’d hit on a few different topics. But, you know, one of the things about the
00:30:09 ►
show that struck me, the way it all came about, is that we were truly sort of, here we are
00:30:13 ►
doing a stage, acrobatic stage show about visionary experience and death transformation
00:30:18 ►
and rebirth, literally on the eve of 2012, you know. And there’s the whole
00:30:26 ►
all kinds of different
00:30:27 ►
people getting all spun up in all kinds of
00:30:29 ►
different ways all around it.
00:30:31 ►
But one of the key people who
00:30:33 ►
started our
00:30:35 ►
collective thought line that way was
00:30:37 ►
Terence McKenna.
00:30:39 ►
And, you know, he made some predictions
00:30:41 ►
and, you know, prophecies
00:30:44 ►
and things.
00:30:47 ►
I think Michael has some thoughts on Mr. T.
00:30:52 ►
And his impressions of here we are living it right now.
00:30:54 ►
We’re all going through it, whatever it is or isn’t.
00:30:57 ►
Whatever it is or isn’t indeed.
00:31:01 ►
Because by the time you’re listening to this, it’s 2013.
00:31:02 ►
And we’re still here. And we’re all here.
00:31:04 ►
And life is probably crazier than it’s ever been.
00:31:08 ►
But here we are. And I really admire the Bardic mythological narrative that so many people have
00:31:19 ►
presented to us. And that to his credit, I feel that Terrence did a remarkably consistent job of reminding people
00:31:28 ►
was just his own freewheeling free jazz world creation maybe logic I mean he wasn’t quite as
00:31:38 ►
militant about it as Robert Anton Wilson in terms of refusing to allow himself to buy the story that he was selling.
00:31:48 ►
But nonetheless, I think that I never got the impression that an asymptotic approach to infinite
00:31:57 ►
novelty meant anything other than the movement of our actual axis into something that was hidden from that geometrical purview.
00:32:11 ►
By which I mean, I think that when something tends to go over the horizon,
00:32:16 ►
like it has for so many people with respect to the future in general,
00:32:22 ►
and the way that that conversation has constellated around
00:32:25 ►
this particular date. And we’re sitting here having this conversation on 12-12-2012.
00:32:32 ►
That’s right, 12-12-12. We’re speaking to you from the past, past, past.
00:32:35 ►
And it’s a new moon in Sagittarius tonight. And I’ve always considered that, I mean,
00:32:42 ►
being an adult is over the event horizon.
00:32:46 ►
It doesn’t mean the end of the world.
00:32:49 ►
I’m not saying anything new as far as this stuff goes. or giving us a constructive mythology that, having been proven literally wrong,
00:33:08 ►
we can still adapt in its archetypal and symbolic contours to the texture of our own complexifying multidimensional relationship with time.
00:33:25 ►
multidimensional relationship with time. You know, that we can understand that, yes, there are,
00:33:31 ►
you know, that when we’re about to cross over into the completely ineffable, that’s when it’s time for us to add a dimension perspective by which we’ve basically like maxed out on our ability to
00:33:37 ►
mentally understand things as a species is what it comes down to. We now are using supercomputers and crunching big data in such a way that
00:33:47 ►
our new mathematical proofs require a model that cannot be understood by any single person.
00:33:54 ►
And therefore, even though the machines tell us it’s true and it has its physical consequences
00:34:00 ►
in our applied sciences, we have no way of really understanding it or saying
00:34:06 ►
whether it’s right or wrong. It’s a total sea change from the way it used to be when an entire
00:34:11 ►
theoretical construct could be held in the mind of one person. This is really pushing us over the
00:34:17 ►
edge here. And when I talk about the convergence of art and science and spiritual practice,
00:34:22 ►
I’m speaking to this specifically. You know, The asymptotic approach of science to a state of shrugging worship at a mystery that’s growing
00:34:33 ►
faster than our knowledge. And then the total liberation that we experience as a species when, having been stripped of our delusions at total understanding, we’re
00:34:49 ►
free to use science as a way of expressing our acknowledgement, our recognition of that
00:35:00 ►
divine mystery.
00:35:01 ►
Science becomes an art form because we’re no longer attempting to get
00:35:05 ►
the ultimate question answered so much as we are allowing an open-ended exploration to say what it
00:35:12 ►
will about our species. And to what? So in that sense, I think Terrence was right. We are looking
00:35:20 ►
at a major boundary dissolution here between people and each other, between
00:35:26 ►
the organic and the technological, but it’s not in his own extreme sense an ultimate or
00:35:34 ►
a final dissolution. It’s just one that, for whatever reason, he couldn’t see beyond.
00:35:40 ►
And I’ll have my own, and one day I’ll be asking my kids how to use this and that and so
00:35:47 ►
the story goes you know and so it goes and so it goes you know um in my experience i like what you
00:35:57 ►
had to say about sort of our minds taking it as far as we can go sort sort of knowledge. And to me, we’ve been maxed out on the intellectual side,
00:36:08 ►
the dominant male intellectual side,
00:36:10 ►
with our science and with our way of living and all that stuff,
00:36:13 ►
which is why we’re racked out.
00:36:14 ►
And that part of this change that’s coming is really integrating the feminine,
00:36:18 ►
which is tied into the intuition, the conceptual, the visual, the musical.
00:36:25 ►
You know, one of the things like,
00:36:27 ►
I wrote about this in my book,
00:36:30 ►
this new book, The Infinity Zone, about I’m a drummer.
00:36:33 ►
So I have to know about beats and counting and that
00:36:38 ►
with that sort of left intellectual side of my brain.
00:36:43 ►
But then I play with my feeling on my right side,
00:36:45 ►
and so I can learn all those things,
00:36:47 ►
and I can practice my riffs and do everything.
00:36:49 ►
But then when I play, I forget it.
00:36:51 ►
I just play.
00:36:53 ►
And to me, that’s a real merging of both sides.
00:36:56 ►
Anybody who’s very much in touch with their creative side
00:36:58 ►
is because their right and left brains are getting more equal time
00:37:01 ►
as opposed to squishing out the right brain.
00:37:04 ►
So I think that part of the change is that people are adapting more of their right brain.
00:37:11 ►
You know, it’s more balanced, you know, as opposed to just the intellectual side.
00:37:19 ►
I was curious about your thoughts about that.
00:37:21 ►
I was curious about your thoughts about that.
00:37:31 ►
The whole left brain, right brain thing for me is another apparently not entirely true useful metaphor as far as I understand it. One of the things I don’t claim to be is a neuroscientist or even especially well read on that particular topic.
00:37:40 ►
But it’s my understanding that even though this has kind of slipped into the way that we think about and speak about these things, that the whole brain really is involved in most thought, unless you have a stroke and get it knocked out.
00:37:54 ►
And that’s just helpful in terms of a reconceptualization, healing, and internal dissociation. I mean, even though it is anatomically true
00:38:07 ►
that we have these two hemispheres
00:38:09 ►
and then a connective fiber,
00:38:13 ►
the corpus callosum that is bigger in some people
00:38:15 ►
than in others,
00:38:18 ►
and bigger on average in women than it is in men.
00:38:21 ►
So we have this new fodder for conversation
00:38:24 ►
about the physiological,
00:38:26 ►
psychological differences between men and women, etc. I think it’s just really beautiful to remember
00:38:32 ►
that thought is not occurring on one side of the brain or the other. Thought isn’t even occurring
00:38:40 ►
exclusively in the brain. That thought seems to be something that is not only occurring throughout the entire body,
00:38:49 ►
through not just the nervous systems, but their interaction with the immune system,
00:38:55 ►
and biophotonic communications between DNA within the body and then between bodies,
00:39:02 ►
but then also the gestural know, gestural kinesthetic
00:39:07 ►
somatic relationships we have to our environments. Like for example, they found that if people
00:39:13 ►
were required to keep their hands flat on a table, it took them long to come up with
00:39:18 ►
answers to questions in a psychological survey than it did if they were allowed to gesture, that people were able to compute mathematics faster.
00:39:27 ►
And so there’s a sense in which the facial
00:39:31 ►
and the relational are built into our thinking so deeply
00:39:36 ►
that we have to move in order to think.
00:39:38 ►
And that’s not going to be strange to, I think,
00:39:40 ►
most listeners, especially people who recall
00:39:44 ►
the whole thing about getting out of a creative block by taking a walk.
00:39:49 ►
Incidentally, that has another somatic dimension to it because your curiosity and the whole dopamine circuit involved with getting you out of your cave to find a new food source or a new mate, rather than staying within your comfort zone in
00:40:05 ►
order to ensure your security, that circuit is pretty much ubiquitous in animals. And, you know,
00:40:15 ►
the drive to intoxicate, the drive to allow oneself to be seduced into this boundary-dissolving
00:40:22 ►
relationship with some intoxicant species
00:40:25 ►
or another, which occurs in ants and birds and elephants. That seems to be a worldwide thing.
00:40:31 ►
So when you’re going out on a walk to get over a creative block, you see a little bit further than
00:40:36 ►
you would indoors. You know, a lot of people, they get stuck in a rut because you’re in a cubicle or,
00:40:42 ►
you know, 18 inches from a glowing rectangle for your entire day.
00:40:46 ►
Or even worse, the mobile computing thing, you’re just looking down.
00:40:50 ►
I suspect a generation of people with occipital disorders.
00:40:58 ►
It’s almost like we’re a generation of monks walking around with our heads down all the time
00:41:04 ►
and our hands in this
00:41:06 ►
gesture of prayer holding the sacred bauble but at any rate you get out you take a walk and maybe
00:41:12 ►
you you look across the lake or across the hills whatever the case may be there’s a horizon there’s
00:41:19 ►
a suddenly your world is just a little bit bigger and it calls you out of yourself and it calls you out of that reflective thought and into this more expansive discourse
00:41:28 ►
with a greater palette to explore so there’s something about I think
00:41:37 ►
recognizing that thought is distributed throughout yourself and the environment
00:41:44 ►
and your relation with the environment. There are all these
00:41:46 ►
different ways of slicing that,
00:41:49 ►
but it comes down to
00:41:50 ►
I think that is
00:41:52 ►
my
00:41:53 ►
jnana yoga. I don’t know if that’s
00:41:56 ►
exactly how you’d pronounce it.
00:41:58 ►
But jnana yoga is
00:42:00 ►
the use of the mind to transcend the mind.
00:42:03 ►
And for me, that’s how
00:42:04 ►
I come at this understanding of oneness.
00:42:07 ►
By conceptually hacking myself so that I recognize me
00:42:12 ►
as part of this continuity of quantum fields
00:42:18 ►
or gestural somatic conceptual relationships
00:42:22 ►
or electromagnetic exchanges or whatever the case may be.
00:42:28 ►
It’s hard not to be inspired once you’re thinking in that space.
00:42:33 ►
So all the different thoughts that come are all different energies,
00:42:38 ►
whether they’re visual or emotional or intellectual or whatever.
00:42:43 ►
And a mystic philosopher by the name of Gurdjieff,
00:42:47 ►
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Gurdjieff or not,
00:42:49 ►
he and Carl Jung have this concept that I’ve been working with
00:42:56 ►
that works well for me,
00:42:57 ►
and I’ve discovered it throughout cultures.
00:43:02 ►
And it says that we have three bodies,
00:43:06 ►
an intellectual body, a moving body,
00:43:10 ►
and a feeling body, or an emotional body.
00:43:12 ►
And in the Inca tradition, those are manifested as the three worlds.
00:43:16 ►
So the upper world is the condor, which is love.
00:43:19 ►
The middle world is the puma, or the jaguar, which is power.
00:43:22 ►
And the lower world is the serpent, which is gold, which is wisdom.
00:43:25 ►
Okay, so it’s a rose color,
00:43:27 ►
sort of an electric blue color, and then a gold color.
00:43:30 ►
And they all combine it, sort of like this
00:43:31 ►
electric ultraviolet.
00:43:33 ►
So we’re generally,
00:43:35 ►
as we develop in the world, we come in as essence
00:43:38 ►
and we develop into personalities, which is part of
00:43:39 ►
our growth. We follow our
00:43:41 ►
feelings and our instincts and all
00:43:43 ►
those things, and we
00:43:45 ►
develop a personality. And then we identify with the personality, and then we start to
00:43:50 ►
think that we are the personality, but we’re actually not the personality. We are really
00:43:55 ►
the creator of the personality, so things are kind of backwards because the ego is ruling.
00:43:59 ►
So then when you learn to understand how the ego works. Then you shift from being lower directed to higher directed
00:44:06 ►
and you go back to being sort of essence directed
00:44:09 ►
instead of ego directed.
00:44:12 ►
And then you start to really,
00:44:14 ►
it’s kind of like that’s the point where you’ve been knocking on the door
00:44:17 ►
of the spirit in the other worlds and it knocks back kind of a deal
00:44:20 ►
where the synchronicities start to happen and all those things.
00:44:22 ►
But what they say is that we all tend to lean on one of our bodies more than the others. Males tend to lean more on the
00:44:30 ►
intellectual. That’s how we’ve survived in the world. Women tend to rely on their emotions.
00:44:35 ►
So we all tend to lean on one and the other two don’t work out. So when you get stuck artistically
00:44:39 ►
or problem solving, if you do get up and take a walk, it shifts you from that one, moves the energy,
00:44:45 ►
which is shamanism, moving energy, and you go into that one.
00:44:48 ►
And then things seem to work out because by walking,
00:44:50 ►
you rebalance yourself energetically.
00:44:53 ►
So that’s been something I’ve been studying for quite a while and reading,
00:44:56 ►
and it seems to be bearing out true for me so far at this point.
00:44:59 ►
And you get to the point where you’re more aware
00:45:02 ►
than you respond with all three simultaneously.
00:45:07 ►
You’re emotionally there, you’re intellectually there,
00:45:09 ►
and you’re physically there.
00:45:10 ►
You’re really aware in the moment.
00:45:12 ►
That’s like the height of awareness that you can have.
00:45:16 ►
People can get upset and then go running off
00:45:18 ►
and then think about it.
00:45:19 ►
Or people can get upset and think about it,
00:45:22 ►
then go running off.
00:45:23 ►
We tend to go in all these different orders,
00:45:25 ►
but if you get them all happening together,
00:45:26 ►
then it’s boom, it’s a thing.
00:45:28 ►
I’m not sure if that fits in with your perspective of…
00:45:31 ►
I would call that an alchemical movement
00:45:35 ►
towards integrated practice, right?
00:45:39 ►
Where you’re feeling, thinking, doing
00:45:42 ►
with your entire body-mind.
00:45:44 ►
A mind and a body recognized as angles on one
00:45:49 ►
thing that’s firing on all cylinders as it were yeah it’s a very beautiful thing i think that’s
00:45:56 ►
that’s a a notion of human potential that has been dangling before us for some time. And it’s interesting that it seems to be coming to the fore now
00:46:08 ►
in such a way enabled by our interaction
00:46:14 ►
with an increasingly accessible
00:46:17 ►
and increasingly far-reaching collective of the human experience. That’s another thing that,
00:46:27 ►
you know, various psychedelic transhumanist prophets have been on about for, since my
00:46:34 ►
parents were children, really even before. I mean, I’m reading Olaf Stapleton’s Star Maker,
00:46:40 ►
you know, published in 1937. And this is truly visionary work of science fiction that shows
00:46:47 ►
the increasing endosymbiotic inclusion of entities as a kind of i hate to use teleology but you know
00:46:58 ►
to look at it from an evolutionary perspective teams outcompete individuals and there is for the purposes of social adhesion within teams
00:47:09 ►
there is a drive towards ever greater bandwidth and therefore you know intimacy so you have these
00:47:17 ►
ways of looking at the bodies of these beings which over evolutionary time scales come together
00:47:22 ►
into greater and greater bodies that relate to each other with more and more emotional depth because the emotional
00:47:30 ►
layer of this is a very spontaneous and high bandwidth communicative medium then, you know, the increasing diversity of a community creates an increasing
00:47:48 ►
diversity of social niches and a deepening of the self sense and the uniqueness of the individuals
00:47:55 ►
participating in that community, but also a deepening social self as well. So you have this unusual, what seems like a paradox to the modern mind,
00:48:07 ►
which is that, as Pierre-Thierre Deschardins said, that collectivization leads to
00:48:12 ►
hyper-personalization. So we don’t really have to fear from evolutionary dynamics themselves
00:48:20 ►
that we’re moving into ever and ever greater selfishness or ever and ever
00:48:27 ►
greater loss of self into you know in this hive mind i mean the herd mentality has been with us
00:48:35 ►
for millions of years that’s nothing new you know we’re actually growing beyond it into an even
00:48:42 ►
more crystalline form of society, as far as I’m concerned.
00:48:49 ►
But there it is, you know, one in which, you know, the text message is replaced with the
00:48:56 ►
direct induction of a thought from one person to the other, you know, in whatever way that
00:49:02 ►
might be achieved. It’s something that both
00:49:06 ►
the New Age community and the Silicon Valley are converging on this, you know, this idea,
00:49:12 ►
however we believe it will be, you know, the means by which we accomplish it. Telepathy seems to be
00:49:18 ►
right on the cusp for us, you know, and whether that’s a remembrance, you know, of an innate human capacity,
00:49:25 ►
or whether it’s the reactivation of some previously inarticulate set of genetic sequences,
00:49:35 ►
or whether it’s a dermal patch, you know, that is extremely sensitive to the electromagnetic fields of your brain, it’s coming to envelop us in this necessarily new sense of self
00:49:50 ►
because the way in which our own selfhood is constructed
00:49:55 ►
out of the experiences of other people already
00:49:57 ►
is only going to intensify and accelerate.
00:49:59 ►
And so, I mean, if that hasn’t catastrophically cascaded into some radically new form of organization by the time you’re listening to this talk,
00:50:11 ►
then I think it would nonetheless be pretty hard for anyone listening to deny this by looking at the same trends that I do.
00:50:22 ►
Would you consider it? You know what keeps on in my mind is the word blossoming.
00:50:27 ►
Because, you know,
00:50:28 ►
every flower is beautiful
00:50:29 ►
and it’s all right.
00:50:31 ►
And the bush is beautiful.
00:50:33 ►
And so all these things,
00:50:34 ►
like you say,
00:50:35 ►
remembering or coming together.
00:50:39 ►
I like to think of it
00:50:40 ►
almost like activating.
00:50:41 ►
Okay, let’s kick in
00:50:42 ►
the warp drive,
00:50:42 ►
second thrusters now,
00:50:43 ►
you know.
00:50:51 ►
We’re going to hit the crap nebula next or whatever anyway uh you know i want to touch with you yvonne a little bit was uh because i’ve been in and out but not as much as you you’re you
00:50:55 ►
are a member so to speak bad word you’re part of the tribal culture and uh you’ve done a lot of
00:51:04 ►
events and talks and things like that.
00:51:06 ►
You want to touch a little bit on that?
00:51:08 ►
Yeah, I mean…
00:51:09 ►
You have any events coming up? I know you’ve done some. You’ve got some big ones coming, right?
00:51:13 ►
There are a number of small things going on throughout the spring that I’m going to be mixed up in, both locally and regionally.
00:51:21 ►
People can go to my website for that.
00:51:23 ►
But, yeah, as far as transformational culture goes,
00:51:27 ►
you know, I don’t know.
00:51:29 ►
I think all human culture,
00:51:30 ►
and sorry to be such a stickler with words here,
00:51:34 ►
but I do so love playing with them.
00:51:37 ►
You know, I think that tribal culture is something
00:51:39 ►
that I want to generalize
00:51:42 ►
because all human culture is tribal.
00:51:45 ►
You know, we’re all kind of operating on the same primate OS,
00:51:49 ►
as it were, the hierarchical stuff.
00:51:52 ►
Some of us are more tribal than others.
00:51:54 ►
Definitely.
00:51:55 ►
And the beautiful irony of it is that
00:51:58 ►
so many of these tribal dynamics
00:52:01 ►
remain in even the most sophisticated human societies,
00:52:05 ►
not necessarily in an unhealthy form, but nonetheless, they remain.
00:52:10 ►
And so it’s the adult grows out of the child and all that.
00:52:13 ►
The child remains.
00:52:16 ►
It should be a beautiful thing to anybody that we are going to wake up into some planetary supermind
00:52:24 ►
as a uniquely primate-orig some planetary supermind as a uniquely primate origin planetary supermind.
00:52:28 ►
And if we encounter other god minds hailing us from other worlds in a few hundred years,
00:52:36 ►
we’re still going to have something unique to contribute to the dialogue.
00:52:41 ►
But as far as participation in what people like Jeet K. Loong and the Bloom series,
00:52:49 ►
this documentary series on transformational festivals, they call it the transformational
00:52:54 ►
festivals because, again, it’s a specific kind of celebration. And it’s one in which we are rising to the occasion and we make a deliberate effort to challenge ourselves to
00:53:09 ►
confront our daemon you know to reach into and beyond it’s almost like kind of a gene
00:53:17 ►
roddenberry thing really i can see you know a star trek Planetary Federation coming out of these, the noble, nonviolent,
00:53:26 ►
expressive ideals of a maker’s party, people who are really inspired to come together and
00:53:35 ►
literally fabricate their own communities. I think right now, the part of the problem
00:53:40 ►
with transformational culture as it’s been defined is that, and this I guess pegs me
00:53:46 ►
as a particular kind of techno-optimist, but I think there are a few things that are really going
00:53:51 ►
to enable human civilization to take the next step into creative and responsible participation
00:54:00 ►
in the planetary ecosystem. And one of them is home fabrication, the maturation of 3D
00:54:08 ►
printing into a, you know, more or less general service where ideas can be shared freely online
00:54:16 ►
and designs can be shared freely for, you know, recipes and electronics and, you know, whatever
00:54:23 ►
the mind can devise.
00:54:26 ►
And that’s going to take a long time.
00:54:28 ►
But the closer we get to that, the more we’re going to see communities that…
00:54:33 ►
One of the things that William Irwin Thompson, again, talked about,
00:54:36 ►
that we can turn on and off our buildings like lights,
00:54:40 ►
that we move beyond this prototypical ephemeropolis of Black Rock City
00:54:43 ►
that we move beyond this prototypical ephemeropolis of Black Rock City into being able to create these ecological vesicles
00:54:50 ►
and just erect and remove cities on the fly.
00:54:56 ►
That same kind of mind frame that’s going to be looking into things like plastic-eating bacteria
00:55:03 ►
so that wherever we go, we leave no trace. And that’s a really compelling resolution to the Fermi paradox,
00:55:10 ►
you know, why it is that we don’t see traces of alien civilizations. And the really fun
00:55:15 ►
hypothesis about that is that a sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from
00:55:20 ►
its ecology, that we become so thoroughly integrated that our waste signature completely
00:55:29 ►
disappears.
00:55:31 ►
Wouldn’t that be great?
00:55:33 ►
And then the other thing that falls right into that is new energy sources, specifically
00:55:39 ►
zero-point energy sources, whether or not you believe in certain of the unified
00:55:46 ►
theory conceptions from which these ideas are derived, there should be some ability, you know,
00:55:54 ►
on an electrically active body to derive passive electricity from that body, you know, so why
00:56:00 ►
that kind of system hasn’t been more thoroughly implemented on our planet.
00:56:05 ►
It would just be nice to see, and I think you and I may live to see, an age in which industry and energy production, agriculture, have all been miniaturized and are portable.
00:56:27 ►
and you know at that point we by necessity move into an age where we realize transparently that the limiting resource for us has always been our imagination and that the real value that a
00:56:34 ►
person brings to their society is their imagination their real contribution is their vision for what
00:56:40 ►
they can contribute you know and if that’s a little abstract, I mean, well, we live in our imaginations, don’t we?
00:56:48 ►
That’s what Einstein said,
00:56:50 ►
that there’s nothing really without imagination.
00:56:54 ►
Because imagination is sort of the,
00:56:56 ►
for lack of a better word,
00:56:57 ►
it’s kind of the font of creativity.
00:57:00 ►
You know, my friend David Brin
00:57:01 ►
is a science fiction writer.
00:57:03 ►
He wrote the movie,
00:57:07 ►
the book for the movie, The Postman, which he hated it.
00:57:12 ►
Didn’t follow the book, but he’s been around a while.
00:57:13 ►
He’s been a great supporter.
00:57:16 ►
And he told me years ago, he looked at me and he said,
00:57:19 ►
well, we’re living science fiction, aren’t we?
00:57:21 ►
And that really stuck with me.
00:57:24 ►
And the more I see it, more and more and more, it’s really true.
00:57:26 ►
We are living it.
00:57:29 ►
And it all came about out of somebody’s mind.
00:57:30 ►
Somebody had to think about flying in the air before attempting it.
00:57:32 ►
And all these things that have happened technologically,
00:57:34 ►
somebody had to think about it.
00:57:35 ►
Here we are now watching videos on our freaking cell phones.
00:57:40 ►
It’s here.
00:57:42 ►
It was a big deal back when the movie 2001 was made
00:57:44 ►
and you had a video phone.
00:57:45 ►
That was like a really big deal.
00:57:46 ►
That was so cutting edge.
00:57:48 ►
But we are living it now.
00:57:50 ►
While we’re on the whole science fiction writer deal,
00:57:53 ►
William Gibson quote that the future is already here,
00:57:56 ►
it’s just distributed unevenly.
00:57:59 ►
And I like to think that transformational culture
00:58:02 ►
is a skunk works. It’s an experimental island set aside, kind
00:58:09 ►
of off in the corner, so that it has room to breathe and grow and devise new things.
00:58:18 ►
The best ideas always come from the fringes.
00:58:22 ►
I resemble that remark. Not necessarily for the best ideas,
00:58:25 ►
but the ideas.
00:58:28 ►
We’re getting close to
00:58:29 ►
closing the show, but a couple
00:58:31 ►
more things I want to touch on.
00:58:33 ►
I think you just touched on it a little bit.
00:58:35 ►
We’ve been talking about deconstruction
00:58:37 ►
of organic and technology.
00:58:40 ►
I know you were touching upon that.
00:58:42 ►
Is there more you want to add to that?
00:58:44 ►
Yeah. Shout out to Bruce Dahmer on this one.
00:58:48 ►
Yo, what’s up, homie?
00:58:50 ►
I can’t agree with all of his bright-eyed California rhetoric, but Kevin Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, is nonetheless one of the more lucid expositions of this kind of thing that has made itself obvious to me in my life.
00:59:06 ►
He talks about technology as a seventh kingdom of life.
00:59:11 ►
He looks at the world of the made as an epiphenomenon of geology and physics
00:59:20 ►
in the same way that organic life is.
00:59:23 ►
It’s something that seems to be self-organizing on our planet.
00:59:26 ►
It’s from an entropic perspective.
00:59:29 ►
You know, evolutionary processes are a way for energy
00:59:32 ►
to find its most efficient distribution through this environment.
00:59:39 ►
And the machines are a metabolic extension of organic species.
00:59:46 ►
So why should we consider them as a distinct category in that sense,
00:59:53 ►
as a form of non-life?
00:59:55 ►
Which is really interesting because he never really comes out and says it,
00:59:58 ►
but he’s essentially a closet animist who views the entire world as alive and self-organizing.
01:00:05 ►
And personally, I see nothing wrong with that, although it might have been diced out by his
01:00:11 ►
editors. So in that sense, I don’t really think that it’s so much about us approaching a point
01:00:18 ►
where we’re merging with our machines. We’ve never been separate from our machines. We’ve never been separate
01:00:25 ►
from the mineral world. We are made out of rocks. And it’s that continuity, that understanding that
01:00:34 ►
this is one thing that I think provides the grist for the restorative vision we need in order to cooperate as a solidified entity on this planet.
01:00:50 ►
Yeah, I just see it that way.
01:00:55 ►
I love that vision you gave just a little bit ago
01:00:58 ►
about an advanced culture being completely integrated with nature.
01:01:03 ►
That’s really wonderful.
01:01:04 ►
That’s full-on shamanism.
01:01:06 ►
But it’s really a wonderful vision.
01:01:10 ►
Animals do that instinctually, and nature balances things out.
01:01:15 ►
But for us, with all of our, what did you say, waste footprint, however you put it,
01:01:19 ►
all that crap, right, to be able to be integrated into it
01:01:22 ►
and be advanced in that way, I think, is a really wonderful vision.
01:01:26 ►
Well, that’s another William Rowan Thompson thing.
01:01:27 ►
He talks about how at every epical moment in civilization, every moment where we’ve jumped from one type of social organization to the next most intricate type,
01:01:39 ►
whatever was considered evil, in that sense like a moral waste product, or, you know, taboo, or what
01:01:46 ►
have you, the wasted, the rejected, you know, whatever it is that we throw away in that particular
01:01:52 ►
level of society, becomes integrated into a quote, unquote, cradle to cradle, cyclical, self consuming self-consuming flow in the next society. So it’s pretty clear that where we are now
01:02:07 ►
is that we’re on the cusp of learning
01:02:11 ►
to devour our waste products
01:02:14 ►
as we understand them.
01:02:17 ►
We’ve been talking for about an hour,
01:02:19 ►
so we can head to our close-up here.
01:02:22 ►
Yeah.
01:02:23 ►
A couple of things I just want to say is it’s michaelgarfield.blogspot.com.
01:02:30 ►
Michael Garfield, all is one word.
01:02:32 ►
And he’s got some really cool music and some really cool artwork
01:02:35 ►
and there’s some items of clothing which had caught my eye before,
01:02:38 ►
some really cosmic tricked-out hats, man.
01:02:44 ►
Best way I can put it
01:02:45 ►
if you go to
01:02:45 ►
his website
01:02:46 ►
so check him
01:02:47 ►
out
01:02:47 ►
Michael
01:02:48 ►
you have any
01:02:49 ►
more final words
01:02:50 ►
you want to say
01:02:50 ►
that the
01:02:51 ►
cosmic brothers
01:02:52 ►
and sisters
01:02:53 ►
out there
01:02:53 ►
thanks for
01:02:55 ►
listening
01:02:55 ►
and if you
01:02:57 ►
care to get a
01:02:57 ►
hold of me
01:02:58 ►
don’t hesitate
01:02:59 ►
to do so
01:03:00 ►
you all have a
01:03:01 ►
wonderful day
01:03:02 ►
all right
01:03:03 ►
thank you
01:03:04 ►
thank you for this special episode of the Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:08 ►
pre-End of the World, 12-12-12, in Austin, Texas.
01:03:16 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:19 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:23 ►
And now I’m going to close for today
01:03:26 ►
and leave you with some new music that Michael is about to release.
01:03:30 ►
The track that I’m going to play is titled Elusis
01:03:33 ►
and is from an as-yet-unreleased album
01:03:37 ►
that was recorded live in Austin, Texas earlier this year.
01:03:41 ►
And Michael tells me that I can let you know
01:03:43 ►
that you are now hearing this for the
01:03:45 ►
first time here on the salon. And so be sure to check out his website also, which you can get to
01:03:50 ►
via michaelgarfield.net. And besides a lot of music and art, you’re also going to find his
01:03:57 ►
schedule there for some of the appearances he will be making in the near future, which include
01:04:03 ►
Sonic Boom in Colorado in just a
01:04:05 ►
couple of weeks, and the Activation Music and Arts Festival in North Carolina, as well as
01:04:11 ►
Rootwire 2K13 in Ohio, which are both being held in August. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing
01:04:19 ►
off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. so I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure if you can see it, but I’m not sure Bye.