Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“You discover that truth is philosophical coinage for the naïve. The ‘banks’ of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.”
“All knowing is incredibly provisional, and this is something which is hidden within the context of the culture, because cultures don’t run around announcing how they haven’t got their act together.”
“What the psychedelic thing is about, or at least for me, is it’s a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.”
“We are, literally, a schizophrenic species. We are at war with our own nature. Civilization, whatever that means, is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it’s constantly refusing to come to terms with the context in which it finds itself, which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy, and so we go outside of those things and create a generalized abstraction and reason backward.”
“The reason psychedelics, I think, are so frightening to the guardians of social order is because they represent a direct addressing of experience.”
“What the psychedelics show, that is a secret that some people don’t want told, is that we can redesign our behavior. We can change very, very quickly.”
“The whole history of humanness is a history of unexpected adaptive response to unusual circumstances.”
“Whatever the imagination is, psychedelics catalyze it, psychedelics enhance it.”
“If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing we would stop doing it… . We’re like someone half-awake inside a burning building.”
“Everywhere where reason has shown its light the greater darkness has been revealed.”
“The truth, for sure, when it arrives, will make you smile. If it doesn’t you should seek a deeper truth.”
“History is the necessary distortion of an animal species to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation.”
“The magic, if that’s the word, or the grandiosity, the power of ecstatic exultation that resides in the psychedelic is because it is literally a change of dimensional perspective.”
“The real test of your psychedelic authenticity is your ability to write a novel.”
“The quintessence of understanding is the ability to occupy other people’s points of view.”
“Not reckless dose but committed dose. Not to see if it works. It works, other people have established that. You don’t need to do research to confirm that it’s psychoactive.”
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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 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And starting on a very happy note, thanks to the generosity of several of our fellow salonners who either bought a copy of one of my books or who made a direct donation to the salon,
00:00:35 ►
well, now that my friend John Jay covered this month’s expenses,
00:00:38 ►
we also now have a really good start on next month as well.
00:00:42 ►
So everything is on schedule and under budget.
00:00:46 ►
Now, what we’re about to hear is the beginning of a weekend event featuring Terrence McKenna
00:00:52 ►
that took place during the month of August 1993.
00:00:57 ►
Maybe you know somebody that was there.
00:00:59 ►
Apparently it was a large crowd, and as usual, the workshop began by going around the room and letting people say a little something about themselves.
00:01:09 ►
Since this is an unedited tape, I’m assuming that none of these people gave their permission to have their names and stories made public, and so I cut all of that out.
00:01:18 ►
However, you’ll be hearing all of Terrence’s opening remarks for the evening, and one of the first things that he brings up,
00:01:25 ►
interestingly, was his own role in the new world of infotainment. He even referred to himself as
00:01:32 ►
a dancing bear, and I think that you’ll find his observations are quite intriguing. So let’s go
00:01:39 ►
back in time to a Friday night in California during the month of August, 1993.
00:01:47 ►
So one of the things that’s really important, I think, about psychedelic get-togethers,
00:01:53 ►
however marginal and contrived, is that everybody gets to see who else is in the community.
00:02:03 ►
You know, most of the time we’re fairly deep in the closet
00:02:06 ►
and can’t be told from a typical convention
00:02:10 ►
of investment bankers
00:02:12 ►
or sports car enthusiasts
00:02:14 ►
or anything else.
00:02:17 ►
Well, I won’t keep you too long tonight
00:02:21 ►
because, as I said,
00:02:21 ►
a lot of people came a long distance.
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I always think about these things
00:02:27 ►
before because I wonder
00:02:29 ►
you know is it changing
00:02:31 ►
and is what’s my
00:02:34 ►
role in relationship to it
00:02:35 ►
is it to have I sort of
00:02:37 ►
fallen into being
00:02:39 ►
some kind of
00:02:41 ►
gatekeeper or
00:02:43 ►
in the worst case dancing bear.
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You know, this issue of infotainment.
00:02:49 ►
And recently I found myself in clubs at four in the morning
00:02:57 ►
raving at people at high decibel with the perfect knowledge
00:03:01 ►
that they couldn’t understand a word I was saying.
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And I wonder, you know,
00:03:06 ►
this is a strange thing to happen to a philosopher.
00:03:11 ►
Is this what my daddy raised me for?
00:03:14 ►
Which clubs are you raving about?
00:03:19 ►
Blow my cover.
00:03:20 ►
Los Angeles.
00:03:21 ►
Well, not in L.A. yet.
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In San Francisco, we did a rave that was it the
00:03:27 ►
Paradise Club but down below market and in the Fox War field I appeared with the
00:03:34 ►
shaman which was insane I mean to they give you a microphone and just push you
00:03:40 ►
on stage and it’s just breathing on one of these
00:03:46 ►
microphones makes the walls
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move back
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and
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megatriplice in London
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I appeared there and knowledge
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the point being
00:03:57 ►
I keep trying to
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understand where to put
00:04:02 ►
the psychedelic
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experience in terms of the available cultural pigeonholes.
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Is it to subvert academic thinking?
00:04:13 ►
Is it to ignore all that constipated bourgeois dominator malarkey
00:04:21 ►
and go for the kids?
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malarkey and go for the kids and then I’ve been here
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as scholar in residence for a week
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and so I’ve given a couple of lectures
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which naturally some of the themes we’ll talk about
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have been anticipated
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and I think what is the point
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of thinking this way
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the way I’m willing to purvey,
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rather than some other way?
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I mean, what is so great about this point of view?
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And I decided that it’s actually,
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the final defense is that it’s the most fun.
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That I don’t, I think it’s,
00:05:04 ►
and this is not normally
00:05:05 ►
how we evaluate ideologies
00:05:08 ►
normally the concern is
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which is true
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and then whatever is decided is true
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no matter how dreary
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and depressing that may be
00:05:20 ►
then somehow because it’s true
00:05:22 ►
some enormous moral obligation
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descends upon you to believe in it
00:05:28 ►
I remember this from my own intellectual journey
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when I was 14, 15 and 16
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the world looked very bleak
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and so I read Camus
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and Sartre
00:05:42 ►
and the lesser lights of that dreary French existential school.
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And because it was true, you had to come to terms with it, supposedly.
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You know, life is a drag.
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But as you mature intellectually or as you spiral off the track into madness whichever my
00:06:07 ►
particular development can be described as you discovered that truth is
00:06:15 ►
philosophical coinage for the naive the banks of philosophy do not trade federal truth certificates.
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That’s for the hoi polloi.
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What’s going on among the professionals is something very different, a sense of the limitations of knowledge.
00:06:39 ►
Cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,
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appeared to be a kind of axiom, a kind of bedrock statement.
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I think, therefore I am.
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Now somehow in the 17th century, this appeared to have some kind of incontrovertible logic about it.
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Like, you know, I am I.
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But when you analyze it,
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it’s an incredibly complex statement
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embedded in assumptions
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that can barely be languished.
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I mean, just look at the connector, therefore,
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and try to wrap your mind around what this actually means and what are the limits of the meaning and what is implied.
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It’s a profoundly intuitive concept, not easily languaged.
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all knowing is incredibly provisional and this is something which is hidden
00:07:47 ►
within the context of a culture
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because cultures don’t run around
00:07:53 ►
announcing how they haven’t got their acts together
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that’s not what culture is about
00:07:59 ►
culture is all about announcing how we do have our act together
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look at this gothic cathedral or look at this Stonehenge
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or look at this wonderful human sacrifice we just put on here.
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We know what we’re doing.
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We know how to run nature and ourselves.
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In the 20th century, at last, the evolution of philosophy
00:08:22 ►
has become sophisticated enough to sort of question this search for truth.
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I studied philosophy from somebody some of you may have read or personally known, Paul Feyerabend,
00:08:36 ►
who was a wonderful philosopher of science and essentially an anarchist.
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an anarchist he wrote a book called against method and he talks in there about the provisional nature of knowing and how naive we are in the ways in
00:08:56 ►
which we manipulate data about the world just as an example we imbibe without question the very complex
00:09:11 ►
philosophical assumptions that lie behind probability theory so that for
00:09:17 ►
instance talking about averages poses no intellectual problem for us. You know, if you measure,
00:09:26 ►
if you want to know how much current is running through a wire
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and you take ten measurements
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and you add them and you divide by ten,
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we then say this is how much current is running through the wire.
00:09:41 ►
Strangely enough, when you go back to your original ten measurements,
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no one of them
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may be the value which you now announce to be the true value for the current running through
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the wire all of our epistemic enterprise all of the effort to understand the world is hedged about by this uncertainty. Wittgenstein was once asked
00:10:06 ►
if a particular proposition was true
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and he said it’s true enough.
00:10:17 ►
And this is modern,
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this is the voice of modern philosophy
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where at last enough simple common sense
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has sunk into the philosophical
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enterprise that we’re now
00:10:31 ►
talking about things being true enough
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rather than
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the revelation of God’s
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truth. I mean good grief
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if you met a termite
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wandering across the floor of the jungle
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and interviewed him on his life’s work
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and he announced that it was the discovery of certain truth
00:10:51 ►
you would be fairly condescending in how you related to that
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well but do you believe that you are greatly different
00:10:59 ►
in your cosmic positioning than that termite
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you know what monkeys are better at this than insects
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i don’t think so so uh the the i i spend a lot of time trying to make my ideas seem rationally
00:11:17 ►
apprehendable but in a way that’s just uh sight of hand the they hand their attraction for me
00:11:27 ►
and I hope for you
00:11:28 ►
is not their rational apprehendability
00:11:30 ►
but that they’re fun
00:11:33 ►
that you can’t top this for fun
00:11:36 ►
I mean if you can I’ll convert to your way of doing it
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because
00:11:43 ►
the phenomenal world
00:11:46 ►
is delightful
00:11:48 ►
it’s humorous
00:11:50 ►
it has locked within itself
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all the adumbrations and reflections
00:11:57 ►
of its aspirations
00:12:01 ►
its past
00:12:03 ►
and its unfulfilled possibilities.
00:12:08 ►
I really think this is what the psychedelic thing is about,
00:12:14 ►
or at least for me,
00:12:16 ►
is it’s a kind of sensual glorification of multiplicity.
00:12:22 ►
That’s why, you know, if we were to look at spiritual
00:12:25 ►
traditions and place
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them into
00:12:28 ►
try and categorize them
00:12:31 ►
into great
00:12:32 ►
or weaning categories
00:12:35 ►
then I think what you would get are
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the minimalist schools
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which are all about
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white lights, nirvanas
00:12:44 ►
satori’s shunyatas,
00:12:47 ►
and things largely unsayable that discourse despairs of describing.
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And those ontologies that glorify the phenomenal world,
00:13:03 ►
ontologies that glorify the phenomenal world.
00:13:06 ►
And that would be paganism,
00:13:11 ►
psychedelic thinking, shamanism.
00:13:16 ►
Notice that these are more nitty-gritty positions,
00:13:20 ►
not driven by a thirst for abstraction, but driven by a thirst for sensation and I the the to my mind the
00:13:28 ►
centerpiece of of the experience of being and the centerpiece of the
00:13:36 ►
psychedelic experience and and the point around which the great issues of modernity revolve is the issue of the felt presence of
00:13:50 ►
experience the relationship of the individual to
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the sensorium of the body
00:13:56 ►
I mean we see it in all kinds of subtle ways and done subtle ways
00:14:02 ►
Unsubtle ways the whole issue about a woman’s right to control
00:14:08 ►
her reproductive processes. Subtle ways, the way in which the entire society is an engine
00:14:17 ►
for producing certain behavioral outcomes in the marketplace. Everybody is being programmed
00:14:21 ►
in the marketplace everybody is being programmed
00:14:25 ►
and manipulated
00:14:27 ►
and I think the antidote to that
00:14:32 ►
in some sense is this wider appreciation
00:14:35 ►
of complexity and experience
00:14:38 ►
experience
00:14:39 ►
the reason the psychedelic thing is so powerful
00:14:43 ►
and can touch so many people of so many different classes and outlooks is that it’s an experience. It’s not an ideology.
00:15:04 ►
with like say Marxism, behaviorism, deconstructionism, this is something which is more operating on the level of sexuality, emotion, devotion.
00:15:16 ►
It’s a feeling and it’s a birthright of the organism
00:15:21 ►
that has been socially restricted and controlled in a very weird way
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we are literally a schizophrenic species i mean we are at war with our own nature civilization
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whatever that means is felt to be so fragile an enterprise that it’s constantly refusing to come to terms
00:15:49 ►
with the context in which it finds itself,
00:15:52 ►
which is the animal body, sexuality, emotion, pain, desire, elation, ecstasy.
00:16:03 ►
And so we go outside of those things
00:16:06 ►
and create a generalized abstraction
00:16:08 ►
and reason backward.
00:16:11 ►
The reason psychedelics, I think,
00:16:14 ►
are so frightening to the guardians of social order
00:16:18 ►
is because they represent
00:16:21 ►
a direct addressing of experience.
00:16:27 ►
And for a very long time I mean one millennia five millennia choose the number experience has been
00:16:34 ►
hierarchically distributed in human society from the top you know you get a
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Christ or a Hitler or a Pope or it’s. It’s a leader of some sort or a visionary.
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And then the exegesis of the vision is passed down through
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and we imbibe it as a product,
00:16:57 ►
coming with the sanction of social correctness.
00:17:03 ►
of social correctness.
00:17:11 ►
This has had a kind of neotenizing effect on us as human beings. What I mean by neoteny is the retention of juvenile characteristics.
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We have allowed ourselves to become more and more childlike to the point where now some considerable percentage of us allow ourselves to be warehoused in a larval condition most of our waking lives watching television and consumer object-based fetishism and the cycle of
00:17:48 ►
production of money for the acquisition of fetish material then the inevitable
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disappointment the reformulation of the fetish so forth and so on this is what
00:18:00 ►
occupies us you know was William James I who said, if we don’t read the books
00:18:07 ►
with which we line our apartments,
00:18:10 ►
then we are no better than our cats and dogs.
00:18:14 ►
And I guess I would say,
00:18:18 ►
and if we don’t take the psychedelic plants
00:18:22 ►
that are in the environment
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that we can avail ourselves of then we are no
00:18:28 ►
better than our cats and dogs there are doorways open to us but they are all experiential and
00:18:35 ►
personal they lie in the realm of sexuality and I guess what you would call experimental psychology,
00:18:50 ►
and areas where we get very nervous and want to follow rote,
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follow tradition, and be assured that we are not deviant, that we are not strange,
00:18:57 ►
that we are not violating any of the canons of the tribe.
00:19:02 ►
But I think because of the social crisis meaning this vast generalized sense that
00:19:10 ►
everyone has that things are out of control uh we are going to have to go back to first principles
00:19:19 ►
and and what that means is a return to the authenticity of the body.
00:19:26 ►
You know, McLuhan wrote about how media distorts human self-images.
00:19:32 ►
One of the reasons that I’m involved in virtual reality and electronic media and all of that sort of thing is because I think that the age of the distortion of the human self-image by media
00:19:46 ►
is coming to an end,
00:19:48 ►
that the medias of the future will be largely transparent,
00:19:53 ►
and that this is very important
00:19:55 ►
because it’s going to allow us to discover who we are.
00:20:00 ►
A person who can read is a person who possesses an ability that is tremendously distorting of their essential relationship to their humanness. that it is, reading is orders of magnitude more bizarre yet, because abstract signs are
00:20:29 ►
being manipulated at close to conversational speed, in some cases faster than conversational
00:20:36 ►
speed. culture is complex behavior and I think that
00:20:47 ►
what the psychedelics show
00:20:49 ►
that is a secret
00:20:51 ►
that some people
00:20:53 ►
don’t want told
00:20:55 ►
is that we can redesign
00:20:57 ►
our behavior
00:20:59 ►
we can change
00:21:01 ►
very very quickly
00:21:03 ►
the image of ourselves as somehow the rigid inheritors
00:21:07 ►
of evolutionary programming,
00:21:10 ►
and therefore doomed like lemmings or monarch butterflies
00:21:15 ►
to enact a programmed pattern of behavior and destroy ourselves
00:21:20 ►
isn’t what I see happening at all.
00:21:22 ►
The whole history of humanness
00:21:25 ►
is a history of unexpected adaptive response
00:21:30 ►
to unusual circumstances.
00:21:33 ►
And I believe that’s because the imagination
00:21:36 ►
has played such an important role
00:21:39 ►
in defining who and what we are.
00:21:43 ►
And whatever the imagination is,
00:21:47 ►
psychedelics catalyze it.
00:21:49 ►
Psychedelics enhance it.
00:21:52 ►
The thin bandwidth of interior self-monitoring
00:21:59 ►
that goes on in normal consciousness
00:22:01 ►
becomes much more clear three-dimensional and intensified
00:22:07 ►
under the influence of psychedelics if you know these things used to be called consciousness
00:22:15 ►
expanding drugs it was just a good old phenomenological description well consciousness description. Well, consciousness or the absence of it is what is pushing our species toward
00:22:28 ►
some kind of crack up. So if there are factors in the rainforests, in the Arctic tundra,
00:22:40 ►
in the toolkits of preliterate and aboriginal people that can act to transform consciousness,
00:22:49 ►
then this is where we have to put our attention.
00:22:53 ►
If we could feel the consequences of what we are doing,
00:22:58 ►
we would stop doing it.
00:23:00 ►
The reason we don’t stop is because we are partially anesthetized
00:23:05 ►
to the consequences of untrammeled population growth,
00:23:11 ►
unregulated capitalist market-oriented behaviors, so forth and so on.
00:23:18 ►
We are semi-conscious.
00:23:21 ►
This is our problem.
00:23:22 ►
We’re like someone half- half awake inside a burning building you know are
00:23:29 ►
we going to suffocate and become a crispy critter or are we going to sufficiently integrate the
00:23:36 ►
situation to grope our way to an entrance and call 9-1-1 in our case I don’t know who comes when you call 911
00:23:45 ►
but it’s something
00:23:48 ►
like that
00:23:49 ►
during the weekend we’ll talk a lot
00:23:54 ►
about human history
00:23:56 ►
because I think human
00:23:58 ►
history is something that we
00:24:00 ►
are far too blase
00:24:01 ►
about we take it
00:24:04 ►
for granted because our own lives are so ephemeral
00:24:08 ►
last 70 years or something.
00:24:11 ►
We think of history as something
00:24:14 ►
that was installed with the rocks,
00:24:17 ►
but in fact it isn’t.
00:24:19 ►
It too is a behavior, very recent,
00:24:23 ►
like language, another behavior, very recent like language another behavior very recent physically human beings have
00:24:31 ►
been about the way we are for a hundred thousand years much the way we are for half a million years
00:24:38 ►
but the behaviors have changed radically you, from nomadic partnership,
00:24:49 ►
from societies based on shamanic intoxication,
00:24:55 ►
orgiastic sexuality, no fixed abode,
00:25:02 ►
to a massive integrated, global, electronically based civilization.
00:25:06 ►
These are extraordinary modifications of behavior.
00:25:11 ►
It’s as though hummingbirds were to begin assembling locomotives.
00:25:14 ►
That’s the kind of radical transformation that we see inside our own species.
00:25:18 ►
Well, then the question is, what’s it about?
00:25:21 ►
What we are doing by replacing one behavior after another,
00:25:27 ►
never resting, never satisfied,
00:25:30 ►
is in practical terms,
00:25:33 ►
we’re accelerating the entire temporal continuum.
00:25:37 ►
We seem to be pushing process
00:25:40 ►
toward some kind of dimensional apotheosis of some sort.
00:25:50 ►
We’re not content to let things rest.
00:25:54 ►
And human history is the record of this process
00:26:04 ►
which begins as a kind of random walk,
00:26:07 ►
I’m sorry, a kind of random walk
00:26:09 ►
across the epigenetic landscape of culture,
00:26:13 ►
but the random walk finds a compass heading,
00:26:18 ►
and this compass heading has many names.
00:26:22 ►
I mean, you can call it unity,
00:26:24 ►
you can call it unity you can call it God you can call
00:26:28 ►
it a chicken in every pot you can call it completion but whatever it is freedom
00:26:40 ►
seems to be its central feature. We want freedom.
00:26:46 ►
We want freedom from the constraints of the cycles of the sun and the moon.
00:26:52 ►
We want freedom from drought and weather,
00:26:55 ►
freedom from the movement of game and the growth of plants,
00:26:59 ►
freedom from control by mendacious popes and kings,
00:27:04 ►
freedom from ideology,
00:27:06 ►
freedom from want.
00:27:08 ►
And this idea of freeing ourselves
00:27:12 ►
has become the compass of the human journey.
00:27:17 ►
That which doesn’t free doesn’t serve.
00:27:21 ►
I mean, this has become almost a kind of universal ideal. No one on earth preaches
00:27:30 ►
the virtues of slavery. I mean, there may be people who practice slavery, but they have
00:27:36 ►
the decency to keep their mouth shut about it because the defense of slavery has become impossible in polite company. Slowly there has been,
00:27:50 ►
I think over time, the growth of an ideal of what human perfection is, first worked
00:27:58 ►
on by the great religions and then sometime I suppose around the time of the Italian
00:28:06 ►
Renaissance handed over to secular forces that begin to say you know
00:28:12 ►
freedom is more than the right to wear wool and pray 24 hours a day freedom
00:28:20 ►
means the acquisition of property of the visible manifestations of wealth the
00:28:30 ►
acquisition of information freedom with the publication of the first books
00:28:35 ►
becomes association becomes associated with accessing the database of the
00:28:42 ►
culture well what we’ve learned through Freud and Jung is that the database of the culture. Well, what we’ve learned through Freud and Jung
00:28:45 ►
is that the database of the culture
00:28:48 ►
goes deeper than we may have anticipated
00:28:51 ►
and that the final keys to the deeper levels
00:28:57 ►
are in fact plants
00:28:59 ►
that were part of our shamanic heritage
00:29:03 ►
millennia ago.
00:29:05 ►
So freedom has become basically a project
00:29:11 ►
in the Blakean imagination.
00:29:15 ►
Blake called it the divine imagination.
00:29:19 ►
We now dream of transcending the constraints
00:29:22 ►
of matter, space, time, and energy themselves.
00:29:27 ►
I mean, this is what stuff like nanotechnology and virtual reality
00:29:36 ►
and this sort of thing is about.
00:29:39 ►
We wish to find ourselves in the imagination well I maintain that this desire is a
00:29:48 ►
kind of nostalgia for a paradisiacal
00:29:54 ►
possibility that actually existed in the past and that to understand the human
00:30:01 ►
predicament we’re going to have to come to terms with the idea that which has been around for a long time but not given much coinage recently that history is a fall that this is a lesser state than we have known in the past that all this material culture and all this exhibition of energy control and so forth and so on
00:30:26 ►
is actually, these are the toys of lesser gods
00:30:31 ►
and that being integrated in nature at peace with the rhythms of life and death
00:30:41 ►
and co-identified with the eternal organism of community that
00:30:48 ►
these were actually higher and nobler ideas that somehow became compromised
00:30:54 ►
with the fall into history and it has to do with our relationship to the lost
00:31:01 ►
continents of our own minds I mean that’s what this psychedelic thing is really about.
00:31:07 ►
I think it’s as profound as the European discovery
00:31:12 ►
of the lost half of the planet 500 years ago.
00:31:17 ►
It’s that half of the human mind became disconnected from the ego.
00:31:24 ►
And for a thousand years or more these things
00:31:28 ►
have drifted in such profound estrangement from each other that when
00:31:33 ►
reunited the only thing we can map it to is a flying saucer invasion or an
00:31:41 ►
descent of angelic intent or something because we have become so alienated
00:31:47 ►
from the collective images of the soul.
00:31:53 ►
And while it’s true that shamanism has existed forever and ever
00:31:58 ►
and that people, some people, midwives, shamans, visionaries, schizophrenics,
00:32:06 ►
have been doing this in all times and places.
00:32:11 ►
Nevertheless, it now has a special poignancy
00:32:16 ►
because the official philosophy of our civilization,
00:32:23 ►
capitalism, materialism
00:32:25 ►
reductionism
00:32:27 ►
I guess that’s it
00:32:29 ►
maybe misogyny is in there
00:32:31 ►
has played
00:32:34 ►
itself out it’s failed
00:32:35 ►
modernism has failed
00:32:38 ►
modernity has failed
00:32:40 ►
the rational analysis
00:32:42 ►
of matter has led to
00:32:44 ►
the revelation of the irrationality of matter.
00:32:48 ►
The attempts to create systems of perfect deterministic prediction
00:32:57 ►
have led to the revelation of the chaos that haunts all systems
00:33:01 ►
and makes all prediction in principle impossible the
00:33:06 ►
prosecution of the dream of a formal edifice of logic to explain mathematical
00:33:14 ►
structures and truth has given way to girdles in commensurability theorem
00:33:19 ►
which shows you that basically nothing makes sense. Everywhere where reason has shown its light,
00:33:28 ►
the greater darkness has been revealed.
00:33:34 ►
And so I think a turning point has come in the human enterprise.
00:33:40 ►
Childhood’s end is upon us.
00:33:51 ►
childhood’s end is upon us we have to drop the naive assumptions of certain truth perfect understanding the conjuring rod of reason turns out to be a fairly weak magic after all. And we have to begin to cultivate a sense of mystery,
00:34:08 ►
a sense of living without closure,
00:34:11 ►
because that, in fact, is how the world is.
00:34:14 ►
The world is a mystery.
00:34:16 ►
It’s not going to yield to the fragile constructs of the human mind.
00:34:21 ►
Some portion may be rationally apprehensible,
00:34:26 ►
but the basic facts of the matter are
00:34:30 ►
that we do not know where we come,
00:34:34 ►
nor why, nor where we’re going,
00:34:37 ►
nor according to what plan.
00:34:41 ►
And instead of seeking a flawed communication
00:34:47 ►
with the intentionality of deity
00:34:50 ►
I think the psychedelic
00:34:52 ►
religious agenda
00:34:56 ►
if that’s how you want to think of it
00:34:57 ►
is a more modest one
00:35:01 ►
it’s a cultivation of a sense of wonder
00:35:04 ►
in the presence of something which
00:35:06 ►
obviously cannot be encompassed by the human mind. I mean, it can no more be encompassed
00:35:13 ►
by the human mind than the ocean can be emptied into a thimble. And once you get that straight you can go back to getting high staying tight with your friends
00:35:28 ►
making love growing your garden and appreciating the the felt presence of
00:35:39 ►
experience and realizing that the abstraction game, the high modeling game,
00:35:46 ►
is in fact simply a game and that there should be no emotional investment in these structures.
00:35:55 ►
I mean, what I’ve learned from the mushrooms ultimately is that ideas are for play
00:36:00 ►
and the final payback from all of this
00:36:05 ►
is a sense of
00:36:08 ►
fun, a sense
00:36:10 ►
of humor. The truth
00:36:11 ►
for sure when it arrives
00:36:14 ►
will make you smile
00:36:16 ►
if it doesn’t
00:36:17 ►
you should seek
00:36:19 ►
a deeper truth
00:36:21 ►
and so
00:36:22 ►
for a long time it troubled me this question of of truth and
00:36:28 ►
falsity and now i think that it’s more like this that the person who has the best idea
00:36:37 ►
or let’s put it this way the best idea and that means the funniest idea, the idea that brings the small smile to the corners of your mouth,
00:36:49 ►
that idea will win.
00:36:52 ►
It will win.
00:36:53 ►
It’s twee, the cheerful.
00:36:56 ►
You know, twee treads on the tail of the tiger.
00:37:00 ►
No blame.
00:37:01 ►
No blame because the cheerfulness of twee overcomes the
00:37:08 ►
inherent reticence of the world the light touch is the right touch and if if
00:37:17 ►
psychedelics don’t give this to you you may be an incurable case you know there
00:37:23 ►
may be no hope for you but Martin Heidegger in high
00:37:27 ►
doses or whatever they do with people who have displaced funny bones the world is truly
00:37:37 ►
a strange place getting stranger all the time it’s more the character of a pun or a an optical illusion than it is the the
00:37:51 ►
the world of humorless scurrying gray atoms and invisible forces that we inherit from nature. The laboratory of being is your own body, your experience. I mean, everything else is
00:38:10 ►
going to come as an unconfirmable rumor, so fraught around with epistemological problems
00:38:16 ►
that you might as well toss it out at the beginning and not even bother with it. The basic thing is the empowerment of experience.
00:38:26 ►
That’s why sexuality has always raised such a ruckus
00:38:31 ►
among authority freaks.
00:38:35 ►
It’s why the psychedelic is so unsettling.
00:38:39 ►
It’s why youth itself is unsettling.
00:38:43 ►
Because these things cause symmetry breaks they cause a shift in
00:38:50 ►
perspective but this is in fact at this point in time exactly what we have to have it may be you
00:38:57 ►
know that we’re going to rack and ruin but it’s not it’s not an unconscious process.
00:39:06 ►
There are the technologies, the information retrieval systems,
00:39:11 ►
the engineering capacities to fight like hell against the dying of the light,
00:39:19 ►
if that’s what’s going on, but the will has to be activated.
00:39:24 ►
And the problem is that the people creating
00:39:28 ►
the problems, which are the people in the high-tech industrial democracies, people like
00:39:33 ►
you and me, are the furthest from the consequences of the problems. You know, I mean, here we
00:39:41 ►
anticipate the apocalypse and it’s a theological discussion. You go to Somalia and the apocalypse is well underway. It’s moved beyond the represent probably the 5% of the world’s people who have some ability to contact, control, and direct the resources and the technologies that are available on this planet.
00:40:25 ►
I mean, if you’re able to sit here at Esalen this evening,
00:40:29 ►
then you automatically are in that 5% classed as the world controllers,
00:40:37 ►
you and your friends.
00:40:39 ►
Why can’t enough people lock into that space of undeniable unity to cause almost an epidemic on
00:40:47 ►
the planet of that well i’m not worried i i think that what is happening is a transformational
00:40:55 ►
process not the bankruptcy of ideology not the spin down of technical civilization I’ll argue through much of tomorrow
00:41:06 ►
and tomorrow evening that history is not
00:41:09 ►
our fault that you
00:41:12 ►
no more can blame us for the
00:41:14 ►
shape of human history than you can blame
00:41:17 ►
a fetus for the unfolding morphology
00:41:21 ►
within the womb that history
00:41:24 ►
is the necessary distortion of an animal species
00:41:29 ►
to lead it to the brink of an ontological transformation. When we get into this issue
00:41:37 ►
of politics, it’s a very tricky issue, I think, to handle from a psychedelic point of view,
00:41:47 ►
tricky issue, I think, to handle from a psychedelic point of view, because the psychedelic point of view, as I read it at a fairly deep level, is that it’s a done deal. It’s okay. You know,
00:41:55 ►
basically we’re going to make it. We’ve been on a straight line vector for millions of years with this transcendental attractor that has shaped us, called us out of matter
00:42:08 ►
and is revealing itself through us.
00:42:12 ►
But knowing that is not permission for sitting on your can
00:42:19 ►
or ceasing to participate in the struggle to create a just and caring society.
00:42:28 ►
It does mean that you shouldn’t worry, that worry is off the menu,
00:42:33 ►
that you don’t know enough to worry is one of the arguments to be made.
00:42:40 ►
So I think it’s basically a case of we need to act locally
00:42:46 ►
and think not simply globally but cosmically.
00:42:50 ►
And in our cosmic ruminations struggle to erase boundaries
00:42:57 ►
and to see that the difference between us
00:43:01 ►
and the next species in waiting in the evolutionary elevator and the
00:43:06 ►
difference between life and death and the difference between pre and post history these are
00:43:11 ►
differences that can be easily erased and when they are uh what comes through is this lost sense of unity and purpose and rightness that we’re trying to recapture.
00:43:31 ►
Well, that’s all I really wanted to say about that tonight. I didn’t want to keep you past
00:43:36 ►
ten. We’ll get together here tomorrow morning. Get a good night’s sleep. The baths are open
00:43:43 ►
24 hours a day thank you very much
00:43:45 ►
bring your questions, controversies and whatever
00:43:48 ►
and we’ll dig into all this
00:43:51 ►
with great gusto on the morrow
00:43:53 ►
thank you very much
00:43:55 ►
it’s only 10am and already
00:44:01 ►
it’s been mighty peculiar
00:44:04 ►
well are there and already it’s been mighty peculiar.
00:44:12 ►
Well, did anybody have any particularly strong reaction to last night or feel that we were started off in a wrong direction or the right direction?
00:44:17 ►
In other words, is there any feedback from all of that last night?
00:44:22 ►
I’m beginning to have the feeling that the need to stoke the furnace
00:44:27 ►
of psychedelic information
00:44:31 ►
is a task that is being generalized
00:44:34 ►
into the culture,
00:44:36 ►
which is a relief for me
00:44:40 ►
because it frees me to discuss
00:44:42 ►
my own private megalomaniacal concerns,
00:44:46 ►
which are this mathematical effort to model history
00:44:52 ►
that will probably be mentioned off and on all day
00:44:55 ►
and then dealt with in detail this evening.
00:45:02 ►
Strangely enough, the novelty wave or my theory about how history is structured
00:45:10 ►
normally leads me into a situation of whipping the horse ever faster toward apocalypse and
00:45:19 ►
millennium.
00:45:20 ►
But very recently, we’ve entered into a phase where it’s more like you should get out your lawn chairs and learn to play solitaire or something. the next couple of years are going to be incredibly repetitious,
00:45:46 ►
mundane, pattern-bound, and ho-hum
00:45:50 ►
compared to what we’ve just been through.
00:45:53 ►
We really have been through,
00:45:56 ►
though from our close perspective it’s hard to tell it,
00:46:00 ►
probably one of the most profound decades or five or six years of the 20th century.
00:46:09 ►
I mean, the whole slow, catastrophic collapse of Marxism
00:46:14 ►
and what it’s meant for Islam and capitalism,
00:46:18 ►
that all is now in the past, but very dramatic.
00:46:22 ►
but very dramatic yeah I like talking about
00:46:26 ►
my
00:46:28 ►
chaotic
00:46:33 ►
notion of time
00:46:36 ►
because it seems to me
00:46:37 ►
the scientific data
00:46:40 ►
that is arising week by week
00:46:43 ►
is supporting
00:46:44 ►
my originally somewhat far-fetched contention
00:46:49 ►
that the universe is getting weirder and weirder and weirder at an extraordinarily asymptotic rate.
00:46:58 ►
I mean, just two examples in the last six weeks, both bizarre.
00:47:04 ►
the last six weeks, both bizarre.
00:47:09 ►
This ice drilling project in Greenland has brought up a 325,000-year continuous record of snowfall.
00:47:17 ►
And because of the decay of isotopic oxygen,
00:47:21 ►
there’s some mumbo-jumbo by which you can determine the temperature of the air at the time
00:47:29 ►
the snow fell so what they’re getting is a continuous temperature record over 375,000 years
00:47:36 ►
and they can hardly believe what it’s telling them it It’s telling them that the climate, the weather has been nuts
00:47:49 ►
for tens of millennia, that there are five-year periods where the world temperature fell 20 degrees
00:47:56 ►
and remained there for 70 years and then bounced back. A picture of completely chaotic climatological fluctuation
00:48:07 ►
has emerged just in the last two months.
00:48:10 ►
I mean, they’re holding congresses and flying people in
00:48:14 ►
and drilling a second core to try to understand this
00:48:18 ►
because it’s always been thought that the planet’s climates
00:48:22 ►
were fairly stable except that the human factor was capable of perturbing it.
00:48:30 ►
Now it looks like these glaciations
00:48:33 ►
are merely macro-physical reflections
00:48:37 ►
of micro-reflections in the climate
00:48:40 ►
that are extremely dramatic.
00:48:42 ►
So that’s one piece of data
00:48:44 ►
that’s arrived in the last six weeks
00:48:47 ►
arguing that the universe is a strange and chaotic place
00:48:52 ►
on an accelerated trajectory toward novelty.
00:48:57 ►
The other is much more peculiar,
00:49:01 ►
and in fact it’s at a level in the scientific literature
00:49:06 ►
where nobody has
00:49:07 ►
panic has not quite
00:49:09 ►
broken out but
00:49:11 ►
are you all aware of
00:49:13 ►
this very large object
00:49:16 ►
which has entered
00:49:17 ►
orbit
00:49:20 ►
around the planet Jupiter
00:49:22 ►
and which has broken
00:49:24 ►
up into between 17 and 25 objects
00:49:29 ►
this is not coming to you from the 14 times and you know the star this is
00:49:36 ►
astronomy sky and telescope this it’s apparently a cometary body, but it’s very large,
00:49:45 ►
and it has broken up and gone into Jovian orbit,
00:49:50 ►
but the orbit is decaying rapidly,
00:49:54 ►
and the whole situation is explicit enough
00:49:58 ►
that they can say with reasonable certainty
00:50:02 ►
that next July 22nd,
00:50:04 ►
these objects
00:50:06 ►
are going to encounter
00:50:08 ►
the Jovian surface
00:50:09 ►
with a greater
00:50:12 ►
release of kinetic
00:50:14 ►
energy than the
00:50:15 ►
extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs
00:50:18 ►
65 million years ago
00:50:20 ►
the
00:50:22 ►
impact as
00:50:24 ►
presently calculated will occur on the side of the planet turned away
00:50:29 ►
from the earth but within six hours that side will swing into view of terrestrial telescopes.
00:50:38 ►
The amount of energy released in the impact it will be possible to calculate it by studying the reflected
00:50:47 ►
flash off the Jovian satellites
00:50:50 ►
so, you know what we’re talking about here is in the words of astronomy magazine a once in a hundred million year
00:50:58 ►
event
00:50:59 ►
But that’s the clue that something weird is going on
00:51:04 ►
once in a hundred million year events
00:51:07 ►
don’t happen in the lifetime of a single human being.
00:51:12 ►
I mean, what are the odds of that?
00:51:14 ►
And we also had Marilyn Monroe,
00:51:17 ►
the Kennedy assassination,
00:51:19 ►
the landing on the moon.
00:51:21 ►
I mean, you know,
00:51:22 ►
how many once in a hundred million year events
00:51:26 ►
can you cram into a single
00:51:28 ►
lifetime
00:51:30 ►
well I don’t know what this thing going on out at Jupiter
00:51:35 ►
is about but it’s bizarre
00:51:38 ►
it’s bizarre that in science
00:51:42 ►
now things like
00:51:44 ►
chaos theory and nonlinear dynamical systems and these
00:51:52 ►
kinds of things these intellectual tools arrive just as the assumed stability of reality established
00:52:01 ►
by Newtonian gentlemen in powdered wigs working through
00:52:06 ►
their brass instruments that all flies
00:52:08 ►
apart and there’s just you know the heaving
00:52:11 ►
oceans of the spaghetti of ambiguity
00:52:14 ►
as string theory and non
00:52:17 ►
localization stretches you from here to
00:52:21 ►
Zenebel Ganubian back again
00:52:23 ►
it’s the feedback
00:52:27 ►
between the perceiver and the object
00:52:29 ►
perceived is tightening
00:52:32 ►
I don’t know if this is a
00:52:33 ►
psychedelic theme, it’s the theme
00:52:35 ►
of my psychedelic
00:52:38 ►
explorations
00:52:41 ►
I think of
00:52:42 ►
the shamanic
00:52:46 ►
model as
00:52:47 ►
inherited from
00:52:48 ►
classical aboriginal shamanism
00:52:52 ►
worldwide which is a model
00:52:53 ►
of levels that the
00:52:55 ►
universe is somehow made of
00:52:57 ►
distinct levels
00:52:59 ►
energetic, geographic
00:53:01 ►
however
00:53:02 ►
but that there is an access, an elevator,
00:53:07 ►
that allows you to move from level to level.
00:53:10 ►
And this is usually some extraordinary technique
00:53:13 ►
of physical stress production,
00:53:15 ►
or in the hipper societies,
00:53:19 ►
a pharmacological intervention of some sort. And the information is deployed differently on each level.
00:53:32 ►
They’re like defined perspectives on the stuff of being,
00:53:39 ►
the raw perceptual input of experience and I really think that
00:53:45 ►
and I don’t understand
00:53:49 ►
you can’t quite wrap language around it
00:53:53 ►
but it has something to do with the fact that we’re
00:53:55 ►
physical creatures at all
00:53:58 ►
that the mind at its deepest
00:54:02 ►
organizational level reflects the
00:54:04 ►
geometric principles of the organization of space and time.
00:54:10 ►
So the mind as present in us at this moment has been folded and sculpted and shaped into a tool
00:54:25 ►
for threat detection in three-dimensional space
00:54:28 ►
because the body is a fragile thing
00:54:32 ►
born along upon the vicissitudes of matter.
00:54:36 ►
But when you take a psychedelic
00:54:39 ►
or when you perturb ordinary brain chemistry
00:54:42 ►
by any means, illness, high fever,
00:54:46 ►
lightning strike, hunger,
00:54:49 ►
prolonged drumming,
00:54:51 ►
grief, you know, all of these ways,
00:54:55 ►
then there is a transition of level.
00:55:01 ►
Or what Mercilliard in this wonderful phrase
00:55:04 ►
called the rupture of plane the
00:55:07 ►
rupture of the mundane plane isn’t that a great you’d almost swore you’d have to
00:55:14 ►
smoke DMT to get together a phrase like the rupture of the mundane plane well
00:55:22 ►
but then the the organization of the information on these different planes
00:55:28 ►
has hitherto been largely thought to be somewhat expressionistic
00:55:35 ►
or haphazard a la the Jungian maps of the unconscious or something like that.
00:55:43 ►
the Jungian maps of the unconscious or something like that. I think that there is actually more to be gained
00:55:48 ►
by making a strict mathematical model
00:55:52 ►
and saying that the shaman is a person
00:55:57 ►
who penetrates to a literal informational hyperspace of some sort
00:56:04 ►
and to take it literally in terms of a
00:56:07 ►
geometric explanation because think about it for me
00:56:15 ►
shamans are primarily in in their Aboriginal setting they function in
00:56:20 ►
three roles they They predict weather.
00:56:28 ►
Weather prediction is very important in shamanic cultures.
00:56:35 ►
They tell where game has gone. In other words, they monitor the food source of the group
00:56:40 ►
and direct the hunting and gathering activities
00:56:43 ►
according to the availability of the food.
00:56:48 ►
And then thirdly, they cure disease.
00:56:51 ►
And this is very important.
00:56:53 ►
And they are incredibly adept at choosing patients who will recover.
00:56:59 ►
This would be a cynical way of putting it.
00:57:02 ►
You know, they are very adept at choosing patients
00:57:05 ►
who make miraculous recoveries.
00:57:07 ►
Some of you may know the tape recordings
00:57:10 ►
of Maria Sabina’s Mushroom Vallada made by Wasson
00:57:14 ►
where an 11-year-old child is brought to her
00:57:17 ►
and she says that she won’t shamanize for this case,
00:57:23 ►
that this kid is not going to make it and then he doesn’t make it
00:57:27 ►
he dies within three weeks well if you’re if you’re a materialist and of the modern stripe
00:57:37 ►
then the only way you can deal with this testimony about shamanism, about the precognitive knowledge of weather and game movement
00:57:47 ►
and the miraculous ability to cure,
00:57:50 ►
is to deny it.
00:57:52 ►
To deny it and say this is some kind of sight of hand
00:57:56 ►
or they are very closely observant of nature.
00:57:59 ►
In other words, some only this argument
00:58:04 ►
that denigrates the thing.
00:58:08 ►
But I think that when you actually look at the ethnographic data
00:58:14 ►
from all parts of the world collected in the field
00:58:17 ►
by people who spent time with the Asande and the Kikuyu and the Witoto
00:58:23 ►
and the Kurgis and so on,
00:58:27 ►
the body of testimony of what we would call paranormal phenomenon
00:58:34 ►
is sufficiently impressive that another model has to be called into play.
00:58:42 ►
And I think it’s that there are ways to push the mind
00:58:45 ►
by extraordinary pharmacological encounters or stress
00:58:52 ►
into a kind of higher dimensional space.
00:58:57 ►
This would be sort of like the idea that the indeterminacy that adheres to matter
00:59:07 ►
at the quantum mechanical level,
00:59:09 ►
the fact that it displays itself as particle or wave
00:59:14 ►
depending on the questions being asked,
00:59:18 ►
that that fundamental indeterminacy
00:59:20 ►
apparently has to be amplified
00:59:24 ►
through every level of nature, including the human level,
00:59:30 ►
so that when you get to ourselves, the mystery of ourselves is wave-like infinite spirit the indwelling
00:59:51 ►
intellect that creates the cohesion of
00:59:54 ►
the nexus of actual occasions that is
00:59:57 ►
the coordinated prehension of an organic
01:00:00 ►
system of an organic system we’ll just stop there
01:00:21 ►
yes
01:00:23 ►
let me see if I’m getting this right.
01:00:29 ►
Somehow I’m getting the image of you mathematically decoding
01:00:35 ►
the language of the gods in a way.
01:00:41 ►
Well, except it isn’t exactly a language.
01:00:43 ►
It’s more like a point of view
01:00:45 ►
yeah I mean what I’m suggesting here is
01:00:48 ►
that the magic if that’s the word
01:00:52 ►
or the grandiosity
01:00:54 ►
the power of ecstatic exhalation
01:00:58 ►
that resides in the psychedelic
01:01:00 ►
is because it is literally a change
01:01:04 ►
of dimensional perspective.
01:01:06 ►
And, you know, well, let’s see.
01:01:10 ►
I hope this isn’t too obscure an example.
01:01:12 ►
But in the 14th century, Petrarch climbed a mountain somewhere in Italy
01:01:19 ►
and wrote a passage about it
01:01:23 ►
and invented the observation of landscape and nature
01:01:29 ►
in this single work of art because people had never done that before it was
01:01:35 ►
a new an entirely new thing to climb a mountain and look at nature and feel the
01:01:43 ►
unity and the grandiosity of it
01:01:46 ►
and write about it.
01:01:47 ►
And it was part of Renaissance humanism.
01:01:50 ►
It was part of getting people out of those dreary,
01:01:53 ►
urine-stenchy cathedrals
01:01:55 ►
that they’d been hanging out in for far too long.
01:01:59 ►
So what I’m suggesting is that in a sense
01:02:05 ►
the shaman is someone who climbs an inner mountain
01:02:08 ►
but a real mountain, a geometric mountain
01:02:11 ►
and then has a higher perspective
01:02:14 ►
that it’s a shift of awareness
01:02:17 ►
I mean we all are body and soul, spirit
01:02:20 ►
but to the degree
01:02:23 ►
that we concentrate on one
01:02:25 ►
we occlude the other
01:02:27 ►
I don’t really like the sound of that
01:02:30 ►
because it sounds like you could turn that
01:02:32 ►
into some kind of asceticism
01:02:34 ►
which in principle
01:02:35 ►
I’m against
01:02:36 ►
but I think the key is
01:02:39 ►
paying attention to mental
01:02:42 ►
life
01:02:42 ►
without bias one of the things I’ve been talking to
01:02:48 ►
the staff here because I’m scholar in residence is Finnegan’s wake and we’ve
01:02:53 ►
been taking it apart and looking at it and noticing that part of the genius of
01:02:59 ►
Joyce in the way the wake is composed is that all terms are transparent you know every
01:03:07 ►
every word you can see through it to other words to other associations to
01:03:14 ►
other connections so nothing is explicit and overt and defined it’s a mental
01:03:22 ►
universe not you see the novel can take two directions it can try to create
01:03:27 ►
what’s called realism which is in a sense an attempt to duplicate the laws of optics
01:03:34 ►
on the printed page in narrative so that you have you know lord and lady so-and-so moving about their country home with the crisis of daughter and servants or whatever.
01:03:49 ►
But then that’s not the world those people are living in.
01:03:53 ►
That’s the world you would see if you were a camera watching them.
01:03:57 ►
The world they’re living in is a much less crystalline and temporally defined world.
01:04:05 ►
It’s a world where memory and anticipation
01:04:08 ►
are in a dysystolic relationship
01:04:11 ►
as the attention of the characters ebbs and flows,
01:04:16 ►
focuses and merges.
01:04:18 ►
This is what a great deal of modern literature is about.
01:04:20 ►
Yeah?
01:04:20 ►
You said that inside of us really there’s a mind-body dualism
01:04:24 ►
and that we’re trapped.
01:04:25 ►
Is that what you’re saying?
01:04:27 ►
Well, trapped in artifice,
01:04:30 ►
trapped in art.
01:04:31 ►
I mean, in a sense,
01:04:32 ►
yeah.
01:04:33 ►
That’s why Proust
01:04:34 ►
and Joyce,
01:04:35 ►
who are so different,
01:04:37 ►
can be seen to be
01:04:38 ►
essentially about
01:04:39 ►
the same thing.
01:04:40 ►
A true rendering
01:04:41 ►
of experience
01:04:42 ►
is very hard.
01:04:45 ►
I mean, this is the great challenge.
01:04:48 ►
I think that’s why somebody asked me recently,
01:04:52 ►
what was I doing with myself or where was I going?
01:04:57 ►
And it seems to me that once you work your way into all of these places,
01:05:05 ►
the real test of your psychedelic authenticity
01:05:09 ►
is the ability to write a novel.
01:05:15 ►
Because what you have to show to yourself,
01:05:18 ►
not necessarily to anyone else,
01:05:20 ►
but what you have to show to yourself is
01:05:22 ►
that you can put yourself into the mother giving birth,
01:05:28 ►
the fascist interrogating a prisoner, the child at play, the gangster plotting the advance of his
01:05:38 ►
career. In other words that the human experience is open to you, that you know what it’s like,
01:05:45 ►
human experience is open to you that you know what it’s like hooker and priest saint and sinner it’s all accessible to you that’s the sign to me that a person
01:05:52 ►
has really dissolved their boundaries and done their inner work because the
01:05:58 ►
quintessence of understanding is the ability to to occupy other people’s points of view.
01:06:08 ►
I certainly make no claims in this area.
01:06:11 ►
In fact, I’m very weak in this area.
01:06:15 ►
I learned a long time ago by watching how I play chess
01:06:19 ►
that my emotional immaturity is right on the surface
01:06:24 ►
because the way I play chess is I make brilliant plans
01:06:28 ►
and then I attempt to carry them out
01:06:32 ►
as though there was me and nobody else there.
01:06:38 ►
And meanwhile, coming at me across the board
01:06:41 ►
is this bewildering series of interruptions which throw off the plan.
01:06:50 ►
I mean this is this is the Via Dolorosa right the the the street of tears and I think there’s
01:07:01 ►
a crying tradition among North American Indians,
01:07:06 ►
you know, stress is what we’re talking about on one level.
01:07:11 ►
I’m not sure that, it may be that there are two ways to attain these places,
01:07:17 ►
stress and psychedelics,
01:07:19 ►
and then we could have a discussion about whether psychedelics are a subset of stress or not.
01:07:25 ►
I mean, that’s sort of like whether you think of surfing as stress.
01:07:29 ►
I mean, obviously it’s strenuous and it can kill you,
01:07:33 ►
but some people think of it as exhilarating.
01:07:37 ►
There are many ways to perturb the mind.
01:07:40 ►
I mean, the reason when we talk about psychedelics we fall automatically
01:07:47 ►
into a vocabulary of travel we talk about journeys and and tripping and that
01:07:55 ►
sort of thing is because travel is how people normally attain this if they
01:08:03 ►
don’t have pharmacological means and that’s always
01:08:06 ►
been respectable I mean even among
01:08:08 ►
very bourgeois societies
01:08:10 ►
like the 19th century
01:08:12 ►
England you know the summer
01:08:14 ►
holiday in Italy was
01:08:15 ►
de rigueur and if you saw
01:08:18 ►
room with a view you know
01:08:20 ►
this was where it all this was where
01:08:22 ►
Eros and the dark
01:08:23 ►
Latinate unconscious was expected to This was where Eros and the dark, latinate unconscious
01:08:26 ►
was expected to swarm over these pale English women
01:08:30 ►
and initiate them into unspeakable pleasures and debauchery.
01:08:37 ►
It doesn’t sound half bad, does it?
01:08:41 ►
Yes.
01:08:42 ►
yes you talked about
01:08:45 ►
I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around it
01:08:50 ►
but my question has to do with
01:08:54 ►
one of the topics of the weekend
01:08:56 ►
which is ethos versus politics
01:08:59 ►
inner versus outer
01:09:00 ►
but also psychedelics are a way of experiencing other planes of reality
01:09:09 ►
or reality in a different way.
01:09:12 ►
But it seems as if you’re also talking about a way of using that that requires some, I I don’t know whether it’s an inner discipline or how do you
01:09:25 ►
use it
01:09:27 ►
so it’s not just
01:09:28 ►
a distraction
01:09:31 ►
a drug
01:09:32 ►
a
01:09:33 ►
you know what I mean
01:09:35 ►
well I think
01:09:36 ►
well
01:09:38 ►
huh
01:09:41 ►
fetish objects
01:09:43 ►
well I think the simple answer to how What about fetishes? Huh? Fetishes, the fetish object.
01:09:51 ►
Well, I think the simple answer to how do you do it without trivializing it is that you do doses that scare you.
01:09:56 ►
You know?
01:09:57 ►
I mean, these things are not physically dangerous.
01:10:12 ►
dangerous and yet they are terrifying at what are pharmacologically completely harmless doses. I mean, the LD50 for psilocybin is hundreds of milligrams per kilogram. And yet if you take anywhere above 25 milligrams of psilocybin, I think
01:10:29 ►
the strongest wayfaring soul reaches for the brake pedal somewhere in there. It’s amazing
01:10:39 ►
how we just skim the surface of this. I mean because and and we can’t go very deep
01:10:45 ►
because language fails I mean most of you who have done committed doses know
01:10:52 ►
that you go into a realm where it gets weirder and weirder and weirder and then
01:10:58 ►
finally the very machinery of explaining to the observer what is happening begins to melt
01:11:05 ►
and then you are
01:11:07 ►
there with
01:11:09 ►
it for a while
01:11:12 ►
and then you descend out
01:11:14 ►
of that and the language mechanism
01:11:16 ►
reactivates and says
01:11:17 ►
we are now leaving the utterly
01:11:19 ►
unspeakable behind
01:11:21 ►
and
01:11:22 ►
so
01:11:24 ►
it’s an extraordinary thing
01:11:28 ►
I mean the motivation of
01:11:29 ►
my career I guess
01:11:32 ►
is I just can’t believe
01:11:34 ►
how this much
01:11:36 ►
strangeness could lay
01:11:38 ►
that close to the surface
01:11:40 ►
and the enterprise of human
01:11:42 ►
history be conducted for
01:11:44 ►
10,000 years
01:11:45 ►
with people running around trying to do weird things,
01:11:49 ►
writing polyphonic music and, you know,
01:11:52 ►
the Rudolfine Court and Hieronymus Bosch and all this stuff,
01:11:55 ►
and right under the surface,
01:11:58 ►
just a Niagara of peculiarity and strangeness
01:12:03 ►
that makes no sense to me when I put on the
01:12:07 ►
hat of the biologist you know why should an advanced animal of some sort have
01:12:16 ►
this curious relationship to an invisible river of imagery running collectively through the brains of all and each.
01:12:27 ►
What is that about?
01:12:29 ►
And the beauty of it, as in Blake’s word, the futurity of it,
01:12:38 ►
the fact that in the glistening of the flowing waters of the unconscious,
01:12:47 ►
glistening of the flowing waters of the unconscious, you glimpse not only the square-topped towers of Ilium and the ruins of Carthage and Petra and all that, but you also see the intimations
01:12:56 ►
of some kind of magnificent future that, you know, is it in the imagination? Is it directly ahead in the time stream?
01:13:06 ►
Is it lost in dream?
01:13:08 ►
The whole circumstance of being alive
01:13:12 ►
and being a self-reflecting, thinking human being
01:13:16 ►
is just too peculiar for words.
01:13:21 ►
Yeah?
01:13:22 ►
Would you say that as far as the terror of this goes
01:13:25 ►
and what makes people
01:13:26 ►
hit the off button,
01:13:29 ►
push the brakes to the floorboard,
01:13:33 ►
is that
01:13:33 ►
something you were saying last night
01:13:36 ►
about lost continents,
01:13:38 ►
remember?
01:13:39 ►
Mm-hmm.
01:13:39 ►
It seems like
01:13:40 ►
this psychedelic experience
01:13:43 ►
isn’t new
01:13:43 ►
in the sense of a cultural endeavor.
01:13:47 ►
Let’s call that the discovery of the unconscious.
01:13:52 ►
And Freud attributed that to the Romantic poets.
01:13:55 ►
So would you say that one could see the whole modern
01:14:00 ►
and postmodern era of this progressive discovery
01:14:04 ►
of this lost haunt of the unconscious and perhaps
01:14:09 ►
it is as Native Americans would put it the purification in the sense that psychoanalysis analysis of the unconscious brings to light hidden aspects of truth, of people’s lives
01:14:29 ►
or their collective lives that no one wanted to face, but these things have been layered
01:14:33 ►
in the unconscious. So it’s a process of bringing things to light or, as Carl Jung said, enlightenment
01:14:41 ►
does not consist of visualizing figures of light,
01:14:45 ►
but making the dark unconscious.
01:14:47 ►
Could you say that?
01:14:49 ►
Well, I’m not sure I understand the question.
01:14:51 ►
If you’re saying how derivative of…
01:14:54 ►
I mean, I basically agree with the premise.
01:14:56 ►
I would just push the thing further back into time.
01:15:02 ►
I think where this all…
01:15:04 ►
I mean, it’s fun to try and
01:15:06 ►
find various break points
01:15:07 ►
I mean was it
01:15:09 ►
Tim Leary was it Alfred
01:15:11 ►
Jarry was it L’Entremont
01:15:14 ►
was it
01:15:16 ►
the French
01:15:17 ►
symbolists
01:15:18 ►
or
01:15:20 ►
I’ve been thinking about this a lot
01:15:23 ►
recently I think think that what’s popularly called the age of the marvelous
01:15:30 ►
indicates the real descent of the Western mind
01:15:35 ►
toward the psychedelic confrontation.
01:15:38 ►
When we look at the time wave tonight,
01:15:40 ►
maybe we’ll get around to talking about this,
01:15:43 ►
but around basically with the invention
01:15:46 ►
of printing in 1440 I now see books as obviously a psychedelic drug of enormous power the early
01:15:59 ►
books were manufactured with chains on them so that they could be bolted to tables so that
01:16:08 ►
addicts would not tear them loose and take them home and the invention of
01:16:15 ►
printing and the seizure of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turk set off an age of scientific advancement
01:16:28 ►
exploration so forth and so on that led to the discovery of the New World only
01:16:34 ►
500 years ago and this had the impact on Europe that flying saucers on the White
01:16:42 ►
House lawn would have on us.
01:16:49 ►
I mean, it was an alien planet that had been discovered with trackless jungles and temperate forests
01:16:54 ►
and people clad in gold practicing strange religions
01:16:58 ►
and enormous trading.
01:17:00 ►
I mean, it was an alien civilization.
01:17:04 ►
And at the same time, the grip of the medieval church was breaking down.
01:17:11 ►
And people had a fascination with the bizarre, with the phantasmagoria of natural existence.
01:17:21 ►
They were bringing back birds of paradise from Bougainville. They
01:17:26 ►
were bringing back carved Incan and Mayan material, codices, all of this stuff. This
01:17:34 ►
is the period shortly then into it of the great flowering of European magic, the establishment
01:17:41 ►
of the Rudolfine court in Prague and all of that that was
01:17:47 ►
the age of the Wunderkammerer the wonder cabinet where you collected together
01:17:53 ►
stuffed birds ammonites Gnostic gems bits of archaic detritus, large insects, narwhal horns, all of this stuff.
01:18:07 ►
You know, it was pre-Linnaean.
01:18:09 ►
It was before the categorical mind had stepped in
01:18:14 ►
and the whole thing was just a maelstrom of individuated data collections.
01:18:22 ►
And I think that’s where the psychedelic thing in the West became explicit.
01:18:30 ►
Back to this man’s question about that actual taking of a psychedelic, I think it’s real
01:18:40 ►
important that it be done with intent and to kind of ask for or put it out there whatever it is that you need or want.
01:18:51 ►
Yes, you have to talk to these things. You do it on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, in a situation where you feel secure, which can mean in your apartment with the phones unplugged and the door locked
01:19:07 ►
or off in some jungle or somewhere,
01:19:10 ►
but it’s very important.
01:19:11 ►
Empty stomach, silent darkness,
01:19:14 ►
and intent, as you say.
01:19:17 ►
And then not reckless dose,
01:19:20 ►
but committed dose.
01:19:22 ►
Not to see if it works.
01:19:24 ►
It works. Other people have established that
01:19:27 ►
you don’t need to do research to confirm that it’s psychoactive you just you know do it and
01:19:35 ►
and then you know there there are techniques for navigating through there the the best is a pure heart but since we can’t always come up
01:19:46 ►
with that
01:19:47 ►
you know sweating blood
01:19:50 ►
also helps
01:19:51 ►
and
01:19:54 ►
in terms of actual physical
01:19:55 ►
techniques
01:19:56 ►
singing this is what I learned
01:20:00 ►
in the Amazon that
01:20:01 ►
you know you don’t always have enough
01:20:04 ►
presence of mind to
01:20:05 ►
breathe but if you will sing the breathing will take care of itself and
01:20:14 ►
the body is an instrument I mean the yogans they got that right the body is
01:20:20 ►
an instrument for tuning through these dimensions.
01:20:26 ►
I don’t know what it all confirms.
01:20:28 ►
Like, I don’t rush to embrace any particular esoteric school.
01:20:35 ►
In fact, I’m fairly scornful of all of that
01:20:38 ►
because I see how it’s used to promote priestly hierarchy
01:20:43 ►
and mumbo-jumbo and that sort of thing.
01:20:47 ►
But certainly science doesn’t have the whole story.
01:20:52 ►
I mean, the human body is an incredible esoteric instrument.
01:20:55 ►
It’s just that I think you need to self-teach yourself.
01:21:01 ►
Yeah.
01:21:03 ►
The shaman’s perception
01:21:05 ►
which is I guess that’s what you’re trying to get to
01:21:08 ►
the ability to see on that subconscious level
01:21:10 ►
starts with pure heart, pure mind
01:21:12 ►
largely because their minds aren’t cluttered
01:21:16 ►
with everything that the rest of ours are
01:21:18 ►
they don’t have to overcome the knowledge, the facts
01:21:21 ►
the awareness of the material life
01:21:23 ►
because they don’t start with that
01:21:24 ►
they start with drugs, they start with purity way back when.
01:21:27 ►
How do you get past that?
01:21:32 ►
It would seem to me, in this case, the more you know,
01:21:36 ►
and the more you know, the more difficult it would be
01:21:39 ►
to reach that pure, second, conscious level
01:21:43 ►
where it’s just a matter of knowing through
01:21:45 ►
the division of what your conscious will do once the barriers are removed
01:21:49 ►
neurotransmitter will be removed well I don’t know about that I mean I see the logic of it I had a
01:21:57 ►
shaman tell me once in the Amazon he said you know it’s not easy for us to do this it’s no easier for us
01:22:07 ►
to do this than for you to do it and I imagine watching giving shamans pure DMT
01:22:16 ►
and stuff like that and watching them go through it that you know they’re macho
01:22:22 ►
they do it but they they’re they at the core are as
01:22:26 ►
sensible and afraid as anybody would be you everybody comes down to a local
01:22:34 ►
language structure and a local set of cultural myths and the shaman’s job is to be outside, behind, and under that.
01:22:46 ►
He’s sort of an archetypal plumber.
01:22:49 ►
And he sees, he knows where the shit goes.
01:22:53 ►
He knows how to repair the system that everybody else, is invisible to everybody else.
01:23:01 ►
I think it’s very challenging to do this stuff in any cultural context.
01:23:06 ►
One thing you find that you may not expect when you go to the Amazon is not all shamans
01:23:13 ►
have the great zest for going as deep as possible. There are a lot of shamans whose attitude
01:23:21 ►
is you get in, you do the work, and you get out fast, and you
01:23:26 ►
take only as much as you need to.
01:23:33 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:23:38 ►
thought at a time.
01:23:41 ►
Well, we’ve just heard quite a lot in the last hour or so.
01:23:45 ►
In fact, I captured more quotes for the program notes than I usually do.
01:23:49 ►
I think 16 in all.
01:23:51 ►
And as you know, you can get to the program notes for today’s podcast,
01:23:55 ►
which is number 356 at www.psychedelicsalon.us.
01:24:01 ►
But of all the quotes there, well, the one that I think is the most right on target at this moment is, and I quote,
01:24:08 ►
Half awake in a burning building.
01:24:21 ►
It’s hard to not understand that metaphor, and I’m afraid it’s close to true.
01:24:26 ►
Well, there’s a lot of other things I’d like to say, but here’s what I’m going to do right now.
01:24:31 ►
If you’re like me, you would really like to hear the next part of this weekend workshop as soon as
01:24:35 ►
you can, and so would I. So I’m going to sign off for now and get started right away on the next part,
01:24:42 ►
which I hope to have out to you quite soon. So, for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:24:46 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:24:49 ►
Be well, my friends.