357 - Fungi Questions

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The culture cannot evolve faster than the language. The language is the flashlight that shows the path.”
“The psychedelic universe, whatever it is, is the major datum of experience. It’s larger than this planet. Nobody knows how large it is. The further in you go the bigger it gets. We don’t know what to make of something like that. It’s the reverse of our expectations.”
“Psychedelic telepathy is you ‘see’ what I mean.”
“The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls.”
“Look at the reputation they gave him. [Giordano] Bruno without the pyre is a whiskey priest laying waste to the maids of Umbria.”
“The fungi became, or is for some mysterious reason still to be
discovered, a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy, which we can only image as feminine and can only associate somehow to the environment, to the ecosystem. This is the Gaian mind. This is what the goddess really is. The goddess is a network of connective intelligence that is operating on this planet.”

Complete Listing of Salon Podcasts at Archive.org
Dennis McKenna on the Dr. Future show

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:23 ►

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:34 ►

So, let me ask you, do you think that it’s strange for a grown man to get depressed just because his computer can no longer access the internet?

00:00:41 ►

Don’t laugh, I know that it’s silly, but nonetheless, that’s the state I’m in right now.

00:00:45 ►

And here’s why I find myself being ridiculous.

00:00:52 ►

It isn’t that my computer doesn’t work, and, well, it isn’t even because of all the dental work that I’ve got to go through this summer.

00:00:57 ►

It’s only because my main computer will no longer access the net.

00:01:05 ►

Actually, I’m even embarrassed to mention it, since compared to the problems being faced right now by over 6 billion people,

00:01:12 ►

well, my problems are lackably trivial. I’ll spare you the details, but what has me smiling to myself right now is thinking back to a conversation that I had years ago with Scott

00:01:18 ►

McNeely when he was still the president of Sun Microsystems. He told me that one day,

00:01:24 ►

the day would come when

00:01:25 ►

people would think that their computers were worthless if they couldn’t access the internet

00:01:29 ►

with them. And I didn’t tell him this, but I thought he’d lost the plot. You see, that was

00:01:36 ►

still back in the days of Windows 2.0, and the net wasn’t yet widely used. But now, here I am, sitting in front of this incredible machine that actually does wonders

00:01:49 ►

when compared to the PCs of 15 or so years ago.

00:01:53 ►

It’s a truly amazing device.

00:01:56 ►

Yet, since I can’t get to the net with it, I’m having difficulty seeing all its other

00:02:01 ►

wondrous features.

00:02:03 ►

So, you ask, how is it that you are now listening to a new podcast then?

00:02:09 ►

Well, first I created this podcast on what I once called my good computer,

00:02:14 ►

the one that doesn’t reach the net.

00:02:16 ►

Then I transferred it to my MP3 player, well, it will be shortly,

00:02:21 ►

and that thing is a little 8-year-old iRiver that the dope team gave me

00:02:24 ►

way back when

00:02:25 ►

these podcasts were just getting started. And from there, I’m going to load it onto my seven-year-old

00:02:32 ►

little Asus EEE netbook, something that I’ve hardly used in several years. And from there,

00:02:40 ►

I will upload this podcast. Like most geeks, I find the workaround to be my best friend.

00:02:47 ►

But it looks like I’ve got a lot of work to do to get my main machine back online,

00:02:52 ►

including either reinstalling Windows 7 or switching to the Ubuntu version of Linux.

00:02:59 ►

However, thanks to several of our fellow salonners who have made donations in the past two weeks,

00:03:04 ►

I’m now able to do something that’s long overdue,

00:03:08 ►

and that is to buy a good backup drive and back this hog up before I start messing with the operating system.

00:03:15 ►

So, hey, thank you all so very much.

00:03:18 ►

You have saved my sanity.

00:03:21 ►

Well, I guess that’s really the wrong way to begin a podcast,

00:03:25 ►

but I just wanted to let you know why these podcasts may have a few gaps between them in the weeks ahead.

00:03:32 ►

I guess that it’s because I’m getting older that I seem to have lost my patience for doing this tedious tech support,

00:03:39 ►

and so I only work on it for an hour or so at a time.

00:03:41 ►

Then I treat myself to some more reading.

00:03:45 ►

work on it for an hour or so at a time. Then I treat myself to some more reading. In fact,

00:03:51 ►

I’ve been reading so much lately that my wife thinks maybe I should do one whole podcast of nothing but summaries of some of the latest books that I’ve read. I’ll have to think about that.

00:03:57 ►

But let me move now to something more interesting to you, and that is the fact that, thanks to our

00:04:03 ►

good friend Bruce Dahmer, you can now

00:04:05 ►

download the entire archive of these podcasts from a single page at archive.org.

00:04:11 ►

And I’ll put a link to it in the program notes, but if you want to go there before I get today’s

00:04:15 ►

notes posted, the URL is archive.org slash details, all that’s lowercase so far, slash psychedelicsalon, all one word, but a capital P and a capital S,

00:04:28 ►

then a hyphen in lowercase, A-L-L, and another hyphen.

00:04:34 ►

Also, you might want to check out a recent interview with Dennis McKenna that my friends Al and Son have released as their June 17, 2013 podcast on the Dr. Future show.

00:04:48 ►

The URL is a little long for me to read right here, but I’ll put a link to that in the program

00:04:53 ►

notes as well.

00:04:54 ►

And as you know, you can get to our program notes via psychedelicsalon.us.

00:05:00 ►

Now let’s get on with this longer than normal program for today.

00:05:04 ►

I’m going to pick up where we left off with my previous podcast, and that was with the Saturday session of a workshop that Terrence McKenna led one August day in 1993.

00:05:15 ►

And I wish that I could give you the exact date, but I can’t find any record of it anywhere.

00:05:25 ►

record of it anywhere. I had hoped maybe that it would have landed on the 11th of August since that’s my birthday, but alas, the 11th was on a Wednesday that year. So we’ll just have to wait

00:05:31 ►

for someone who was actually there that weekend to post the date in the comments section of our

00:05:36 ►

program notes for the podcast. So now sit back, relax, and get ready for a two-hour dose of the bard mckenna it’s a question i mean which is more

00:05:48 ►

important to the content of your psychedelic experience the books you’ve read in your life

00:05:54 ►

or your genetic heritage that kind of thing teasing this apart the only way we’ll ever know

00:06:01 ►

and this is why i tend to encourage and hang out with

00:06:05 ►

the technical crowd on one level virtual reality is a technology that might

00:06:13 ►

allow you to show somebody the inside of your head and if I could you know spend

00:06:20 ►

six months building a virtual reality which was my DMT trip, then escort someone into it and show it, and then they would say, that’s exactly what happens to me.

00:06:34 ►

Or they would say, you know, that was the damnedest thing. I mean, nowhere does that come tangential to anything familiar to me well then this would be wonderful in either case you would either have confirmation

00:06:47 ►

of a generally recognized reality or a breakthrough to an immense domain of potential creativity

00:06:53 ►

where every individual could create their own equally personally compelling metaphysical joy

00:07:00 ►

ride of some sort it’s the I I mean, I think, you know,

00:07:06 ►

on one level, what we’re doing here

00:07:09 ►

is something that’s never been done before

00:07:12 ►

in Western society that I’m particularly aware of,

00:07:16 ►

which is we are talking about

00:07:19 ►

the psychedelic experience.

00:07:22 ►

This is the first step toward understanding it. I guess the first step

00:07:27 ►

is having it. The first step is having it. But then so many people have had it who don’t attempt

00:07:35 ►

to English it. And it’s quite respectable to do that. I mean, too much has been made of the

00:07:45 ►

Too much has been made of the indescribability of it.

00:07:47 ►

I mean, it’s fine to say that,

00:07:51 ►

but then decency demands that you go forward and describe it. You’re pushing there against the envelope of language.

00:07:56 ►

The culture cannot evolve faster than the language.

00:08:01 ►

The language is the flashlight that shows the path. And so if we don’t talk about

00:08:07 ►

something, race, homosexuality, drug experiences, then no cultural progress takes place on that

00:08:16 ►

front. It’s like it just doesn’t exist. So part of what we’re trying to do here is to create

00:08:22 ►

a dialogue that is not necessarily politically confrontational.

00:08:27 ►

Too much of the public dialogue about drugs is all about whether they should be legalized or not.

00:08:33 ►

I mean, you can take care of that in one sentence.

00:08:36 ►

Yes, they should and they won’t be.

00:08:39 ►

So now let’s move on with that.

00:08:41 ►

Let’s move on with that.

00:08:45 ►

But experience,

00:08:49 ►

this is probably the richest domain of experience that we have.

00:08:51 ►

I mean, you may go on your vacation to Benares

00:08:54 ►

and I may go to Argentina

00:08:56 ►

and we will get back and talk about the restaurants,

00:09:00 ►

national parks and museums that we visited.

00:09:04 ►

But far more interesting conversation could take place

00:09:10 ►

if I do psilocybin and you do mescaline and then we get together and talk about the places we have

00:09:16 ►

seen in other words this psychedelic universe whatever it is is the major datum of experience. It’s larger than this planet.

00:09:26 ►

Nobody knows how large it is.

00:09:29 ►

You know, the further in you go, the bigger it gets.

00:09:32 ►

We don’t know what to make of something like that.

00:09:35 ►

That’s the reverse of our expectations. Yes?

00:09:38 ►

You seem to use sound a lot as like a key issue.

00:09:41 ►

Like you were mentioning in South america you uh sang songs were those

00:09:46 ►

songs um like ayahuasca songs or inca songs or little ditties you were doing in your own self

00:09:53 ►

they were in some cases ayahuasca songs that that don fidel taught and and in some cases just taking ayahuasca I learned

00:10:05 ►

and to call them songs

00:10:08 ►

but you know one of the

00:10:10 ►

things that’s so interesting about ayahuasca

00:10:12 ►

is that it promotes a

00:10:13 ►

synesthesia that’s very

00:10:16 ►

dramatic you seek

00:10:18 ►

sound and

00:10:20 ►

when you make it

00:10:21 ►

you have an experience which is

00:10:24 ►

beyond English by several leaps.

00:10:27 ►

The experience of generating colors out of a vibration so that you go, you know,

00:10:36 ►

and a chartreuse line like a neon light descends and hangs there.

00:10:43 ►

And then you can move it off

00:10:45 ►

and it goes from chartreuse to lemon yellow.

00:10:48 ►

And then you just begin playing with this

00:10:51 ►

and within 30 seconds you’re doing something

00:10:55 ►

that it seems to you only intelligent insects

00:10:59 ►

on other planets do.

00:11:01 ►

It’s true for everyone you know

00:11:02 ►

who you’ve talked to about ayahuasca.

00:11:05 ►

I think if you can come through, yeah, I mean

00:11:07 ►

you have to sort of get your wits about

00:11:09 ►

you because ayahuasca sweeps

00:11:12 ►

over you. There’s stomach

00:11:14 ►

stuff. There’s

00:11:15 ►

waves of hallucination.

00:11:17 ►

But once you sort of get your sea

00:11:19 ►

legs

00:11:20 ►

you can do this.

00:11:23 ►

It’s very clear when you’re with these shamans

00:11:26 ►

that these performances are pictorial

00:11:28 ►

and you know

00:11:31 ►

originally the active principle

00:11:35 ►

of Banisteriopsis Capi was called

00:11:37 ►

telepathy when Theodor Hochgrinberg

00:11:41 ►

and those people went in there in the early years of the 19th century.

00:11:45 ►

They collected samples, took it back to Berlin, and characterized it, called it telepathine.

00:11:51 ►

And then it was later realized that the compound had been earlier isolated from Pagamon harmala and called harmoline.

00:12:00 ►

And the rules of chemical nomenclature give the early discovery precedent.

00:12:06 ►

But it was called harmaline because,

00:12:10 ►

I mean, it was called telepathy

00:12:11 ►

because the tribal groups using it

00:12:14 ►

seemed to have this extraordinary group-mindedness.

00:12:19 ►

This is one of the things that I’m keen to talk about

00:12:23 ►

is the fact that telepathy

00:12:27 ►

of a sort we didn’t conceive of

00:12:33 ►

seems to lie very close to the surface in these states.

00:12:38 ►

I think most people think of telepathy

00:12:40 ►

as you hear what I think.

00:12:44 ►

That’s telepathy. That is not what psychedelic telepathy as you hear what I think that’s telepathy that that is not what

00:12:47 ►

psychedelic telepathy is psychedelic telepathy is you see what I mean you see

00:12:54 ►

what I mean and there is a way to use a voice and inflection and tonality to edge people’s transduction of the language experience

00:13:10 ►

out of the audio, out of the ear mode

00:13:13 ►

and into the visual mode.

00:13:17 ►

This is something which is neurologically very fragile in us it’s as though the land is very flat and the river flows

00:13:33 ►

one way through the audio processing channel of the neocortex but just a very slight shift of the

00:13:42 ►

inner stratigraphy and the river would flow another way it

00:13:46 ►

would flow into the visual cortex and language would become a thing beheld and

00:13:52 ►

and the one of the things that’s so interesting about ayahuasca is that it

00:13:58 ►

contains DMT and harmaline and these are both brain neurotransmitters occurring in normal

00:14:06 ►

metabolism suggesting

00:14:08 ►

that you know there is

00:14:10 ►

simply a

00:14:11 ►

one or two gene

00:14:13 ►

mutation or the intensity

00:14:16 ►

of the expression of a gene already

00:14:18 ►

present that would switch brain

00:14:20 ►

chemistry toward

00:14:21 ►

visual processing

00:14:23 ►

meanwhile in the culture, simultaneously,

00:14:28 ►

there is this tendency going on, the culture is becoming more and more imagistic. You know,

00:14:34 ►

the invention of photography, high-speed color printing, film, we see and we relate through the image much more. So I think psychedelics and media and the

00:14:50 ►

predisposition of the neural landscape is setting us up for a kind of ontological transformation

00:14:57 ►

of the project of communication, yes.

00:14:59 ►

You know, as you’re saying this, I’m observing the way that I’m listening to you,

00:15:05 ►

and I’m seeing what you mean.

00:15:09 ►

Because through your language, like when you say neurological,

00:15:14 ►

I see a picture, it goes really fast, but I’m seeing what you mean.

00:15:20 ►

And I’m not, that’s how I’m comprehending you.

00:15:29 ►

you mean I’m not that’s how I’m comprehending you yes well you’re embarrassing me by turning the the magnifying glass upon the current project of communication but that’s the name of the game

00:15:37 ►

maybe it evolves as we evolve that seeing what you mean. Yes, I mean, one reason people have,

00:15:46 ►

some people have criticized me because I use big words,

00:15:50 ►

but I’ve always had the feeling that if you use big words right,

00:15:56 ►

your listener understands perfectly what you mean.

00:16:02 ►

And I don’t know how that works exactly,

00:16:04 ►

or it may just be an illusion of mine

00:16:07 ►

but it’s a very satisfying one.

00:16:11 ►

It seems like in a way

00:16:13 ►

you’re working with sound

00:16:14 ►

and you’ve got in touch with that sound

00:16:17 ►

on different levels

00:16:18 ►

but you express it in a conscious communication

00:16:22 ►

which anyone’s consciousness is somewhat alive

00:16:25 ►

it becomes more conscious

00:16:28 ►

they hear communication or understanding

00:16:30 ►

it all clicks right

00:16:31 ►

language is a behavior

00:16:36 ►

it was acquired 50,000 or 100,000 years ago

00:16:41 ►

and I think people don’t use it enough.

00:16:47 ►

90% of spoken communication is trivial

00:16:51 ►

and it’s very interesting to try and use

00:16:55 ►

the descriptive blade of voice.

00:17:01 ►

It’s like Manjushri.

00:17:03 ►

It’s the sword of discriminating wisdom. Communication

00:17:06 ►

is about discrimination. It’s about finally delineating difference. And with this sword

00:17:17 ►

of discriminating wisdom, you make your way into the world. And, you know, granted, it’s an image of penetration

00:17:25 ►

and cleavage and so forth and so on.

00:17:28 ►

But what you’re left with then

00:17:29 ►

is the cognitive enterprise.

00:17:32 ►

Yeah, Jim.

00:17:33 ►

After all these years,

00:17:34 ►

what is it these days

00:17:36 ►

that would make you want to hit the brakes?

00:17:39 ►

Out in the state, you mean?

00:17:43 ►

Well, it does this thing on me

00:17:46 ►

occasionally

00:17:46 ►

which I call going all Halloween-ish

00:17:51 ►

where

00:17:54 ►

and I just

00:17:57 ►

and I say you know why are you doing this

00:18:00 ►

to me

00:18:01 ►

it’s scary

00:18:05 ►

it’s probably just my own

00:18:07 ►

inner demons

00:18:08 ►

I ride this stuff through

00:18:12 ►

but I always

00:18:14 ►

feel like

00:18:15 ►

you should never take the sea

00:18:17 ►

for granted

00:18:18 ►

and the metaphor we’re dealing with here

00:18:21 ►

is the sailing of small ships

00:18:23 ►

over great and turbulent

00:18:25 ►

depths and and I’ve also noticed you know my god if an iota of pride lodges

00:18:33 ►

in your character it can rub your face in it like you just don’t want to know so I respect it I fear it and the strangeness of it

00:18:47 ►

somebody near and dear to me

00:18:51 ►

I won’t name them

00:18:53 ►

but just recently described taking ayahuasca

00:18:57 ►

and the dose was somewhat low

00:19:01 ►

so after a couple of hours

00:19:04 ►

they smoked some DMT on top of it and with your MAO inhibited like

00:19:10 ►

that this is a pretty hairy chested thing to undertake don’t try this at home folks

00:19:16 ►

with your with your MAO inhibited like that it just settled in and he said you know it is strange I mean when you get the trim you know

00:19:29 ►

when you get the tabs trimmed and you get the focus right and you can just look at it you know

00:19:35 ►

it he said it just says you know behold if you can oh mortal the essence of and you’re just saying

00:19:47 ►

oh my god

00:19:49 ►

you know

00:19:51 ►

once it

00:19:52 ►

because it is clear

00:19:53 ►

that it presents itself

00:19:55 ►

through a series of veils

00:19:57 ►

and it’s so

00:19:59 ►

it’s so kind

00:20:01 ►

to first timers

00:20:02 ►

and second timers

00:20:03 ►

you know

00:20:03 ►

it’s like a series of Disney-esque images and

00:20:06 ►

but God once you’re into it it begins to part the veil and you realize you know that the human mind

00:20:14 ►

is just like the mind of a gnat falling into the Sun of peculiarity and you say you know how did i mean you know and then you come back and try and talk about it yeah i have two questions one after all of

00:20:32 ►

your psychedelic experience and these experiences of other capacities and abilities in the brain

00:20:38 ►

uh when you come back to the mundane plane do, have you found yourself developing the ability to use your brain in the mundane plane

00:20:48 ►

the same way that you have experienced its capacity

00:20:52 ►

in a psychedelic plane?

00:20:54 ►

And also, do you think that all of this

00:20:56 ►

is just kind of like the tip of the iceberg

00:21:01 ►

in terms of leaving this dimension

00:21:03 ►

like maybe a near-death experience,

00:21:06 ►

leaving the body ultimately through death,

00:21:08 ►

and is this all just kind of like just the beginning of that?

00:21:12 ►

And you seem to feel that the fear component is important to you.

00:21:19 ►

And is it more like a fear of dying ultimately when you get too far?

00:21:24 ►

I think in my case it’s a fear of dying ultimately when you get too far i think in my case it’s a fear of

00:21:26 ►

madness i’ve convinced myself that dying is highly unlikely the madness question is a totally open

00:21:34 ►

book i mean who knows and yeah and you do get into places where they’re only the only reassurance is that it won’t last. As far as the tip of the iceberg

00:21:51 ►

question and death and all that, I have a lot of intellectual resistance in this area

00:21:59 ►

myself. I was raised Catholic. I fought my way free of that as I said toward Camusian existentialism

00:22:07 ►

and then I got hooked into all this

00:22:09 ►

and was just swerved back into a more spiritually

00:22:12 ►

teeming universe than I ever would have thought possible

00:22:16 ►

it’s hard to talk about

00:22:20 ►

it may be that what the psychedelic thing is

00:22:23 ►

is that it is some kind of look over the edge.

00:22:27 ►

Out of, let’s say, 50,000 years of conscious human experience,

00:22:33 ►

49,500 of those years has been lived in the assumption that something survives physical death.

00:22:46 ►

And only in the last 500 years in Europe

00:22:49 ►

has this become a gradually less and less popular assumption.

00:22:55 ►

We don’t understand what biology is.

00:22:59 ►

We understand some of the details

00:23:01 ►

of how form maintains itself,

00:23:04 ►

but we don’t understand the mystery of the descent of form into matter and we don’t understand

00:23:14 ►

you know where mind fits in to the loop of causality so the testimony of DMT for me is that there is a nearby dimension

00:23:29 ►

teeming with intelligence

00:23:30 ►

that from one perspective

00:23:33 ►

one of the more conservative perspectives

00:23:36 ►

seems like an ecology of souls

00:23:39 ►

it seems as though

00:23:41 ►

what the shamans always said they were doing was in fact precisely what they’re talking about here, apparently,

00:24:08 ►

is that beyond the train of mortal care,

00:24:12 ►

there is this super space

00:24:15 ►

where apparently everything is made out of mind.

00:24:20 ►

And so, in James Joyce’s wonderful phrase,

00:24:23 ►

if you want to be phoenixed

00:24:25 ►

come and be parked

00:24:27 ►

up nient prospector

00:24:31 ►

you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings

00:24:35 ►

is that perfectly clear?

00:24:39 ►

well, if you want to be phoenixed

00:24:42 ►

come and be parked means if you want to be transformed and reborn as an angel,

00:24:46 ►

you have to die.

00:24:49 ►

And upnient prospector, prospector means rock hunter,

00:24:53 ►

as in searching for the philosopher’s stone,

00:24:56 ►

you’re a prospector.

00:24:58 ►

You sprout all your worth and you woof your wings,

00:25:01 ►

meaning you make your own body out of the imagination.

00:25:11 ►

and you woof your wings meaning you make your own body out of the imagination and I don’t know what this means I mean one of the things that interests me is the fact that we seem to be moving toward a

00:25:18 ►

transformation more radical than any that has ever occurred to our species before. So radical that in the interests

00:25:27 ►

of intellectual fairness, one of the possibilities that has to be put on the list is that we’re about

00:25:34 ►

to go extinct 100%. And we don’t know what that means because we don’t know what death is.

00:25:48 ►

means because we don’t know what death is. When you look at the record of biology on this planet,

00:25:58 ►

95% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. This is what nature produces,

00:26:05 ►

are fossils of extinct species. And so then the question then is, question then is we’re down here to ultimate values

00:26:08 ►

are we trying to have

00:26:12 ►

what the Catholic Church

00:26:13 ►

with an utter lack of irony calls a happy death

00:26:18 ►

or are we trying to seize

00:26:21 ►

the levers of the cultural machinery

00:26:23 ►

and pull out of the power

00:26:26 ►

dive at the last minute and get

00:26:28 ►

this baby back up to altitude

00:26:30 ►

and sort it out here

00:26:31 ►

what’s going on

00:26:33 ►

or are there in fact any

00:26:36 ►

controls in front of us

00:26:37 ►

at all or are we the

00:26:39 ►

hapless passenger in this strange

00:26:42 ►

vehicle that he

00:26:43 ►

you know yeah

00:26:44 ►

seeing all the soul searching and people

00:26:48 ►

getting in touch with what you might call the source that the messages will be coming down

00:26:53 ►

as to what you might call the way to go well that’s what i think i think that that

00:26:59 ►

it’s it well it’s what i think it’s also possibly delusional

00:27:06 ►

so be forewarned

00:27:07 ►

but it appears to me

00:27:09 ►

that history

00:27:12 ►

00:27:13 ►

ever more rapidly

00:27:15 ►

vindicating the notion

00:27:17 ►

that it is building towards some kind

00:27:20 ►

of apotheosis

00:27:21 ►

some kind of

00:27:22 ►

apocalyptic

00:27:24 ►

apocatastasis anyway something in Greek

00:27:28 ►

and and that the people who project the the human future thousands of years they don’t

00:27:40 ►

understand the asymptotic speed I mean you talk to somebody in like let’s just

00:27:46 ►

take a field gene transplant you talk to somebody who’s tops in gene transplant they tell you

00:27:52 ►

things which just drop your jaw then you walk over here to another laboratory and talk to somebody in

00:27:59 ►

in parallel processing computation and they tell you astounding things

00:28:06 ►

well you realize these two people don’t know each other

00:28:08 ►

all of this information

00:28:10 ►

is vectoring together

00:28:12 ►

and the connections are being

00:28:14 ►

made and it’s

00:28:17 ►

out of control

00:28:18 ►

no company, no government

00:28:20 ►

no religious group

00:28:22 ►

nobody is in control of this.

00:28:25 ►

And yet there is a plan.

00:28:27 ►

It isn’t a chaos.

00:28:29 ►

There is a morphology being expressed

00:28:32 ►

that won’t wait.

00:28:35 ►

And we all are simply the cells

00:28:38 ►

being directed into this

00:28:41 ►

archaeological expression of mind.

00:28:46 ►

Yeah.

00:28:48 ►

When you were talking before about the Enlightenment period

00:28:52 ►

where artifacts would be brought, displayed, enjoyed,

00:28:56 ►

and I’m wondering about the time in 1986,

00:29:01 ►

what kind of cultural manifestations

00:29:05 ►

we might be involved in

00:29:07 ►

as an incorporation of that

00:29:09 ►

if that’s making any sense

00:29:11 ►

no that makes sense

00:29:13 ►

it might make more sense to other people

00:29:15 ►

this evening

00:29:17 ►

but the answer to the question

00:29:20 ►

is the parallel

00:29:21 ►

resonance between

00:29:24 ►

now and then or between now and then,

00:29:25 ►

or between 96 and the past,

00:29:29 ►

was the great flowering of the Umayyad caliphate at Baghdad,

00:29:35 ►

which was the birth of modern science

00:29:38 ►

through the codification of algebra.

00:29:42 ►

And so two things to keep your eye on in 96

00:29:46 ►

are the political fates of Islam worldwide

00:29:50 ►

and breakthroughs of a major sort

00:29:55 ►

in abstract systems of description

00:29:59 ►

like algebra and that sort of thing.

00:30:02 ►

Or it could…

00:30:05 ►

Well, certainly there were technological breakthroughs under those caliphs as well.

00:30:10 ►

I mean, they were the great patrons. They preserved all this.

00:30:13 ►

You know, they don’t get any credit. We talk about our heritage

00:30:17 ►

from the Greeks, but we never talk about how that

00:30:21 ►

heritage comes through the Arabs there’s a great book

00:30:26 ►

called how Greek science passed to the Arabs yeah you said this last night

00:30:31 ►

makes you forget that straight you said that the mushroom said that don’t worry

00:30:35 ►

everything’s gonna be okay I think worry is preposterous. That was Weepo Yang,

00:30:48 ►

a 6th century Chinese Taoist sage,

00:30:49 ►

said that.

00:30:52 ►

Worry presupposes that you understand what’s going on.

00:30:54 ►

And I think it’s safe to say

00:30:56 ►

that we do not have a clue

00:30:59 ►

as to what is going on.

00:31:01 ►

We can’t even tell whether it’s a happy ending

00:31:04 ►

or a catastrophe. We can’t tell whether whether it’s a happy ending or a catastrophe.

00:31:05 ►

We can’t tell whether we’re slamming into the wall of our cultural limits

00:31:09 ►

at 50,000 miles an hour,

00:31:11 ►

or we’re about to go hand-in-hand off to the galactic center

00:31:17 ►

with the human soul as companion and vehicle.

00:31:22 ►

We just do not know what’s going on I think it’s safe

00:31:26 ►

to say that we’re approaching a symmetry break that whether you’re a horrified

00:31:32 ►

pessimist or a gung-ho optimist everybody can see that the the the

00:31:38 ►

maker breakpoint is coming up because life is either going to get a lot drearier suddenly or there’s

00:31:49 ►

going to be some kind of a breakthrough. I don’t think cosmetic management of the cultural crisis

00:31:55 ►

will work much past the current Clinton administration. This is apparently the last go at spin-doctoring the apocalypse.

00:32:08 ►

No?

00:32:09 ►

I was just wondering how you feel about the technology behind the AIDS crisis

00:32:17 ►

as an artifact or a fetish of certain areas from leaguerd ivory covered towers.

00:32:25 ►

So what do you mean exactly by the technology behind the AIDS crisis?

00:32:30 ►

Well, I mean, what does it represent to us now?

00:32:35 ►

A truth or not?

00:32:39 ►

Well, in a sense, I mean, I see AIDS as the inevitable consequence

00:32:43 ►

of the ocean crossing airliner.

00:32:48 ►

You know, always sites of pilgrimage were sites of disease conveyance.

00:32:58 ►

And any virus worth its salt would jump into this situation and exploit it

00:33:05 ►

now as to the darker side of the AIDS

00:33:08 ►

thing in terms of you know was this a product

00:33:10 ►

of human engineering or human

00:33:12 ►

intent or so forth and so on

00:33:14 ►

that’s

00:33:16 ►

an interesting question but in a

00:33:18 ►

way

00:33:18 ►

it really doesn’t matter

00:33:22 ►

it’s a product of human

00:33:24 ►

behavior and I don’t mean simply It really doesn’t matter. It’s a product of human behavior.

00:33:25 ►

And I don’t mean simply sexual or homosexual behavior.

00:33:32 ►

I mean such behaviors as travel, pilgrimage,

00:33:35 ►

the wish to mix it all up.

00:33:37 ►

I mean, think of the gene streaming

00:33:39 ►

that is taking place in the 20th century.

00:33:44 ►

I mean, I know a Tibetan married to an Egyptian woman

00:33:47 ►

and stuff like that’s going on all over the map.

00:33:52 ►

So there’s all kinds of crises.

00:33:58 ►

When we were a nomadic community,

00:34:01 ►

the transmission of disease was retarded

00:34:03 ►

by the fact that human groups didn’t

00:34:05 ►

really come into that much contact with each other. I mean, when you’re in a place like Terminal One

00:34:12 ►

at Heathrow, and you just look around you, I mean, my God, you know, I mean, Muslim priests,

00:34:20 ►

Tibetan lamas, Botswana, dignitary,

00:34:25 ►

I mean, and people are just swarming

00:34:27 ►

and swarming and swarming

00:34:29 ►

and using the bathrooms and coughing.

00:34:31 ►

And in these airliners,

00:34:33 ►

when they fly over the ocean,

00:34:35 ►

when they fly above 30,000 feet,

00:34:38 ►

they recycle the air in such a way

00:34:40 ►

that if there’s one person who has a problem,

00:34:43 ►

275 people are having their immune systems on red

00:34:48 ►

alert by the time you get to tokyo or new york not to rave but yeah i’m not sure but it sounds

00:35:00 ►

like you’re talking about i’m thinking about about early Christianity, the abstract. That almost sounds

00:35:05 ►

hallucinatory, like a look back toward

00:35:07 ►

paradise or something like that.

00:35:10 ►

Well, in a

00:35:12 ►

sense, one way of analyzing

00:35:13 ►

Christ, if we keep

00:35:15 ►

pretty much to the strict orthodoxy

00:35:18 ►

and accept the

00:35:19 ►

gospels and so forth, is

00:35:21 ►

he presents

00:35:24 ►

a shamanic figure.

00:35:27 ►

And the unique claim of Christianity was this bizarre doctrine of the resurrection of the body.

00:35:36 ►

That was the part that was the joss dropper.

00:35:41 ►

Christianity, working from the primary text looks very much like some strange

00:35:46 ►

kind of biological

00:35:48 ►

magical invocation

00:35:50 ►

of some sort

00:35:51 ►

there is that amazing passage

00:35:53 ►

in one of the gospels where

00:35:56 ►

the three Marys

00:35:58 ►

Mary the mother of James

00:36:01 ►

Mary Magdalene and the other one

00:36:02 ►

go to the tomb

00:36:04 ►

and Christ is go to the tomb.

00:36:07 ►

And Christ is standing outside the tomb.

00:36:11 ►

And one of the women starts toward him.

00:36:14 ►

And he says, touch me not,

00:36:18 ►

for I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father.

00:36:20 ►

Well, good grief.

00:36:23 ►

What’s going on here?

00:36:24 ►

He is resurrected.

00:36:27 ►

He has overcome death. But but he says touch me not i am not yet completely of the nature of the father i my interpretation i mean it’s maybe

00:36:34 ►

too much to get into at this point but my notion of what religions are is that this dwell point at the end of history,

00:36:45 ►

which is acting as an attractor for the temporal process

00:36:50 ►

and drawing and sculpting and shaping everything

00:36:54 ►

as it is brought into its light, as it were,

00:36:59 ►

has a kind of reverse causality operating. And what Wordsworth called intimations of immortality

00:37:11 ►

haunt time like a ghost.

00:37:15 ►

And so if you’re a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Christ, a Mohammed,

00:37:19 ►

you get essentially, again, it’s a geometric theory.

00:37:24 ►

You are simply geometrically positioned

00:37:26 ►

vis-a-vis the object at the end of time

00:37:29 ►

that you become a false reflector of its light.

00:37:35 ►

And these false reflectors always distort it in some way.

00:37:41 ►

It’s the nature of it.

00:37:42 ►

It’s no rap on them.

00:37:44 ►

It’s just the nature of it that they distort it.

00:37:47 ►

And some distort it horribly.

00:37:50 ►

A Hitler, a David Koresh.

00:37:53 ►

And some distort it, maybe we like to think less,

00:37:57 ►

a Buddha, a Mahavira.

00:37:59 ►

But the point is they all distort it.

00:38:03 ►

Marshall McLuhan said, you know,

00:38:04 ►

our mistake is that we’re

00:38:06 ►

driving the vehicle of culture into the future using only the rear view mirror. And that’s sort

00:38:14 ►

of what we do. But then each one of us, you see, we are like Christ and Buddha and Mahavira, we also have a perspective on the transcendental object at the

00:38:27 ►

end of time, on the divine. And we work it out in our life, in our psychedelic experiences,

00:38:34 ►

our sexual epiphanies, our whatever it is that moves us. And I think really,

00:38:45 ►

And I think really, well, it’s just what Blake said.

00:38:50 ►

Psychedelics are window-washing equipment for cleansing the glass of perception

00:38:53 ►

that allows you to then perceive the world as infinite.

00:38:58 ►

And also, because this transcendental object

00:39:01 ►

lies ahead of us in time,

00:39:04 ►

to know it

00:39:05 ►

is in some sense

00:39:07 ►

very woo woo very tricky

00:39:09 ►

to English in some sense

00:39:11 ►

to know the future

00:39:13 ►

and that this is I think where the

00:39:15 ►

existential power

00:39:17 ►

or the

00:39:18 ►

quality of

00:39:21 ►

mimosheness of realness

00:39:24 ►

comes into the shaman’s personality.

00:39:28 ►

The shaman knows the future.

00:39:31 ►

And in the same way that

00:39:32 ►

I, as a 46-year-old man,

00:39:36 ►

can advise my 12-year-old daughter

00:39:40 ►

and have an immense kind of position of existential authenticity in her world it’s because

00:39:49 ►

i know the future you know i know that the first love will not be the last love and i know that

00:39:56 ►

heartbreak lies along the way and all this i’m wise from her perspective well a shaman is a wise person and they are wise because they know the

00:40:08 ►

future not of the individual only but also of of the culture and and that’s why you know when the

00:40:16 ►

tv cameras arrive in the ecuadoranian village and they boot the medicine man out of his thing

00:40:22 ►

say well jose what do you think of the fact that the forest is being cleared?

00:40:27 ►

The usual reply is,

00:40:30 ►

eh.

00:40:32 ►

You know.

00:40:35 ►

Barry.

00:40:36 ►

Blake, as you know, also said religion and politics

00:40:39 ►

are the same thing.

00:40:42 ►

Right.

00:40:42 ►

And this is a political seminar.

00:40:44 ►

I’ve been waiting to ask you this

00:40:46 ►

when I was wondering

00:40:46 ►

if you would entertain a question

00:40:48 ►

on what religions are and viruses.

00:40:52 ►

I want to talk about

00:40:53 ►

the dark side of Christianity,

00:40:55 ►

if I could,

00:40:55 ►

and go get you to talk about it

00:40:57 ►

if I could frame it this way.

00:41:00 ►

On psychedelics,

00:41:01 ►

which books?

00:41:03 ►

The Christianity,

00:41:04 ►

or I think a better word is Christianism,

00:41:07 ►

as a spiritual ideology,

00:41:09 ►

looks like a warfare,

00:41:13 ►

a protracted warfare, if you will,

00:41:15 ►

against the earth, against the body,

00:41:17 ►

against our very humanness.

00:41:19 ►

And I think we accept

00:41:20 ►

that there are these invisible things called viruses

00:41:23 ►

that attack your organic body.

00:41:26 ►

But would you be willing to entertain the possibility that there can be a spiritual virus that attacks the planetary body, in fact, attacks Gaia?

00:41:36 ►

And the reason I ask that is because you remember Porphyry, long ago when Christianity was on the rise,

00:41:42 ►

the neoclatonic philosopher said that he thought Christianity was a disease of the soul

00:41:46 ►

and I think Freud and Jung had pretty much proved the same thing

00:41:49 ►

well long before the viral metaphor

00:41:53 ►

somewhat before the viral metaphor became

00:41:56 ►

au courant

00:41:58 ►

Jung talked about what he called psychic epidemics

00:42:01 ►

he in I think 1934,

00:42:06 ►

wrote an essay on the return of Wotan

00:42:09 ►

as an archetype of the German soul

00:42:13 ►

and very presciently picked up

00:42:17 ►

on what National Socialism was all about.

00:42:22 ►

Well, I’m talking about monotheism now

00:42:23 ►

when I say Christianism.

00:42:24 ►

Ah, well now that’s an interesting… Patri talking about monotheism when I say Christianism patriarchy and monotheism

00:42:28 ►

and Christianism as the apotheosis

00:42:30 ►

I get to use that word too

00:42:32 ►

in western history

00:42:34 ►

western society

00:42:35 ►

Christianity or Christianism

00:42:37 ►

being the apotheosis

00:42:38 ►

of the patriarchy

00:42:40 ►

well I am

00:42:42 ►

I’m on one level not keen about monotheism.

00:42:49 ►

I think it gives a distorted map for the psyche to emulate.

00:42:55 ►

But I also see Christianity as a pretty radical betrayal of the monotheistic agenda.

00:43:03 ►

of the monotheistic agenda.

00:43:09 ►

Monotheism, whatever its social consequences,

00:43:12 ►

makes sense.

00:43:17 ►

It’s a drive toward philosophical economy.

00:43:20 ►

And so you get down to the idea, well, not many gods but one god,

00:43:22 ►

and it works like this.

00:43:24 ►

Christianity is a Gnostic cult of physical redemptionism

00:43:29 ►

grafted on to this Jewish theology

00:43:34 ►

by Alexandrian controversialists

00:43:39 ►

who had a very curious notion of what they wanted to do

00:43:43 ►

I see Islam as a reclaiming of the of

00:43:47 ►

the pure intent of Judaism to conduct a philosophical discussion of the

00:43:53 ►

consequences of monotheism and that all becomes really murky with the mystery of

00:44:00 ►

the Trinity and the nature of the Father and the Son.

00:44:05 ►

Christianity is an incredibly exotic religion.

00:44:09 ►

I mean, other religions are just absolutely straight ahead.

00:44:13 ►

They’re metaphysical systems with moral consequences.

00:44:17 ►

Christianity is about the absolute worship

00:44:21 ►

of the irrational and the incredible.

00:44:23 ►

You know, Origen, who was one of the irrational and the incredible you know, Origen

00:44:26 ►

who was one of the great patristic

00:44:29 ►

writers, great Christian fathers

00:44:33 ►

they said your religion is

00:44:36 ►

absurd, it’s preposterous

00:44:39 ►

and he said credo te absurdum

00:44:42 ►

I believe it because it is absurd

00:44:45 ►

that’s the foundation of the western mind

00:44:49 ►

all this mumbo jumbo about reason

00:44:52 ►

and evidence I mean when you strip it away

00:44:55 ►

you know it’s ultimately a faith

00:44:58 ►

in the absolutely incontrovertibly

00:45:01 ►

incredible the resurrection

00:45:05 ►

and all three

00:45:08 ►

see the permission for this belief

00:45:10 ►

it’s true

00:45:10 ►

comes out of the earlier stratum of Judaism

00:45:14 ►

where an earlier unlikely promise is made

00:45:19 ►

the promise that God would enter history

00:45:22 ►

that’s what set them up for this later deal.

00:45:25 ►

God will enter history, they were told.

00:45:28 ►

And then, so then if you’re a theologian of this faith,

00:45:33 ►

the question obviously arises,

00:45:36 ►

how will God enter history?

00:45:39 ►

And, you know, you ruminate on that for five or six hundred years

00:45:43 ►

and eventually what you come up with is

00:45:46 ►

he will send his own son.

00:45:48 ►

He will send a divine manifestation.

00:45:51 ►

There will be an absolute union of spirit and matter.

00:45:55 ►

There will be a descent of the paraclete into our midst.

00:45:59 ►

And the idea of the Messiah is born,

00:46:02 ►

which is an incredibly peculiarly Western idea.

00:46:08 ►

I mean, Buddha, Lao Tzu,

00:46:10 ►

Mencius, Confucius,

00:46:11 ►

these were guys, you know.

00:46:14 ►

A Messiah is a horse of a different feather.

00:46:18 ►

A Messiah is not exactly a human being, you know.

00:46:22 ►

A Messiah is a coalescence of historical

00:46:25 ►

force of of great energy so I don’t know where are we with all of this I think

00:46:37 ►

there’s just another way of looking at it also these are the same guys we have

00:46:40 ►

to remember the white you know male guys that when we see the Pope over here we

00:46:44 ►

see the medieval page these are the male guys that when we see the Pope over here we see the medieval

00:46:45 ►

these are the same guys that burned

00:46:47 ►

Giordano Bruno, the great

00:46:50 ►

poet, visionary and scientist of the

00:46:52 ►

state because he wouldn’t recant

00:46:53 ►

probably a stubborn Calabrian, I’m not sure

00:46:56 ►

about that though. Well but look at the

00:46:58 ►

reputation they gave him

00:46:59 ►

Bruno without the

00:47:01 ►

pyre is

00:47:03 ►

a whiskey priest

00:47:06 ►

laying waste to the maids of Umbria

00:47:09 ►

no I mean

00:47:12 ►

here is my point on this

00:47:13 ►

I agree that history has been

00:47:18 ►

a nightmare

00:47:21 ►

and if

00:47:23 ►

it could have been

00:47:26 ►

any other way

00:47:28 ►

then probably there’s some

00:47:30 ►

answers have to be

00:47:32 ►

given and some debts paid

00:47:34 ►

I’m saying it might have been another way

00:47:36 ►

if they hadn’t burned all the libraries

00:47:38 ►

sought to destroy knowledge

00:47:40 ►

to the point where in the middle

00:47:42 ►

ages when the

00:47:43 ►

Christians so-called liberated

00:47:46 ►

places like Toledo

00:47:47 ►

and found these Arabic

00:47:49 ►

writings about the Greek

00:47:51 ►

lost science, they couldn’t even

00:47:53 ►

translate it because they didn’t even have a concept of

00:47:56 ►

zero. It’s like the barbarians

00:47:57 ►

won in our society.

00:47:59 ►

Well, they, yeah, no, they won.

00:48:01 ►

Would they have won if they closed down the

00:48:03 ►

philosophical schools and didn’t destroy all the knowledge?

00:48:06 ►

Would it have been different?

00:48:09 ►

Well, we’ll never know because we didn’t have the chance.

00:48:12 ►

Well, what I hear you saying is life is tough.

00:48:17 ►

Especially for pagan philosophers.

00:48:19 ►

Yes, you know, you have to make your career choices carefully here.

00:48:23 ►

you know you have to make your career choices carefully here

00:48:24 ►

is your belief in this one

00:48:33 ►

dwell point to which history is moving

00:48:35 ►

a form of monotheism

00:48:36 ►

well I guess it’s a form of

00:48:42 ►

neoplatonism

00:48:44 ►

I had digested

00:48:46 ►

all that, you know,

00:48:48 ►

porphyry, proklys, platinus.

00:48:50 ►

I do feel

00:48:51 ►

the power of the argument

00:48:54 ►

that when all boundaries are

00:48:55 ►

dissolved, there will only

00:48:57 ►

be the plenum,

00:48:59 ►

the one.

00:49:01 ►

It has different, it’s a very long,

00:49:03 ►

an idea with a very long history in Western philosophy.

00:49:07 ►

It goes back to the Timaeus.

00:49:10 ►

See, my idea of how this thing is working is that boundaries are dissolving.

00:49:19 ►

If you want to make one prediction that you can take to the bank that would be it

00:49:25 ►

boundaries are dissolving

00:49:27 ►

so any scheme that involves

00:49:30 ►

setting up new boundaries

00:49:32 ►

is probably doomed

00:49:34 ►

well so yes so it is a kind

00:49:38 ►

of impressionistic

00:49:40 ►

pastiche that we

00:49:42 ►

are trying to anticipate

00:49:44 ►

the other thing is you know

00:49:47 ►

and this goes slightly more to the guts of the mathematics of my theory but I

00:49:53 ►

think that time is wrapping itself in an involuting spiral where each cycle is

00:50:01 ►

1 64th as long as the cycle that

00:50:05 ►

preceded it well if you

00:50:07 ►

accept that premise

00:50:09 ►

then you have a

00:50:11 ►

cosmogonic scheme

00:50:13 ►

where half

00:50:15 ►

of the unfolding

00:50:17 ►

of the manifestation

00:50:19 ►

of the cosmos

00:50:21 ►

will occur in the last hour

00:50:23 ►

and 35 minutes of its existence so attempting to

00:50:28 ►

anticipate what it will be like as we go down the maelstrom towards the lapis at the end of

00:50:37 ►

history it can only be conceived psychedelically and wordlessly I I mean, I really think history is a psychedelic experience.

00:50:47 ►

And, you know, this old saw

00:50:49 ►

about how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

00:50:56 ►

If you carry that through to completion,

00:50:59 ►

then all organic process ends in the big question mark of death and we individually recapitulate that

00:51:10 ►

journey we each will end in death one of the things that always amuses me is that people are

00:51:16 ►

so resistant to the idea of the end of the world never apparently having noticed that it’s a fairly academic question when played against the fact of the certainty of their own death.

00:51:30 ►

You know, their world is going to end,

00:51:33 ►

so what’s with all this altruistic concern about all the rest of us?

00:51:37 ►

We’ll take care of our own apocalypse, thank you.

00:51:40 ►

You just need to come to terms with your own because it’s inevitable

00:51:45 ►

somebody, yeah

00:51:47 ►

what do you think will happen to Islam

00:51:50 ►

when the east

00:51:51 ►

hits the west and fundamentalists

00:51:53 ►

I know it’s struggling to survive

00:51:56 ►

and to reclaim its old territories

00:51:57 ►

well I think that

00:51:59 ►

as this

00:52:01 ►

post-modern, post-communist

00:52:04 ►

thing unfolds,

00:52:07 ►

for several reasons,

00:52:10 ►

Islam is poised to make the greatest steps forward

00:52:15 ►

since the 10th century for two reasons.

00:52:19 ►

First of all, because out there in Central Asia,

00:52:23 ►

Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, an enormous chunk of real estate is poised and rightfully toward moving toward fundamentalist Islam.

00:52:37 ►

If those states become Islamic states, Islam will effectively double the amount of land that it controls on this planet.

00:52:47 ►

The other thing is, as time accelerates, as the weirdness spreads, the global networking,

00:52:56 ►

the simulacra, the teledildonics, the virtual reality, as all this stuff becomes more and more prevalent, a lot of people

00:53:07 ►

are going to freak out and reach for the button marked return to traditional values. And on a

00:53:17 ►

global scale, this is Islam. Christianity is a horror to capitalism. Christianity is not traditional values.

00:53:26 ►

Islam is not kidding.

00:53:28 ►

And I can imagine millions and millions of people alive today

00:53:32 ►

who can’t imagine that they would ever entertain conversion to Islam,

00:53:38 ►

who will, before the end of their lives, make it part of what they’re about.

00:53:44 ►

their lives make it part of what they’re about because there is no other traditional system available.

00:53:51 ►

I mean, it’s either that or what I call consumer object fetishism,

00:53:56 ►

which means, you know, the Mercedes, the house in Saint-Tropez,

00:54:00 ►

the Rolex watch, all of that.

00:54:11 ►

That’s it. Diamonds on the soles of her shoes. Yeah. How about Orthodox Judaism? I don’t think it, well, Judaism is not a converting religion.

00:54:23 ►

You know, you say you want to become a Jew,

00:54:28 ►

they send some guy three times to convince you it’s a bad idea.

00:54:31 ►

You’re not going to.

00:54:36 ►

Yes?

00:54:39 ►

In between, you can have the Islam and you have Christianity,

00:54:44 ►

but in the society it doesn’t seem there’s like much words of what you call like the word of truth

00:54:46 ►

coming out of the music

00:54:47 ►

or out of the society

00:54:49 ►

there’s like bits and pieces and fragments

00:54:51 ►

but there’s no basic

00:54:53 ►

like word of

00:54:56 ►

it’s like

00:54:57 ►

what you might call hope or truth

00:54:59 ►

you mean out of popular culture

00:55:01 ►

right out of it, there’s nothing really

00:55:03 ►

maybe this to some degree is coming up but there’s not a lot coming up you could fragments in music

00:55:08 ►

well I mean this is why I’m trying why I associate myself with rave culture and

00:55:15 ►

house and ambient music and all that because that you all know what this is right well see that’s part of the problem

00:55:26 ►

no for years and years

00:55:30 ►

youth has just been wandering in the desert

00:55:33 ►

of nihilism and industrial noise

00:55:36 ►

bands and that sort of thing

00:55:38 ►

so now out of England there is a new kind of music

00:55:42 ►

which has different kinds of names

00:55:44 ►

it’s called houseave it’s called

00:55:48 ►

trance dance tribal rap it comes out of hip-hop it doesn’t come out of rock and

00:55:54 ►

roll in fact it’s quite consciously not rock and roll and it’s very optimistic. The people who are 18 to 28 are the most with it generation in a while.

00:56:13 ►

And they are not buying into the consumer object fetishism.

00:56:18 ►

And they don’t seem to be converting to Islam in large numbers either.

00:56:22 ►

converting to Islam in large numbers either

00:56:22 ►

and so

00:56:25 ►

I think that you’ll

00:56:28 ►

be amazed that popular

00:56:29 ►

culture will take a very positive

00:56:32 ►

turn in the next few years

00:56:34 ►

there’s immense energy

00:56:35 ►

under the surface

00:56:36 ►

most of these bands

00:56:38 ►

produce CDs

00:56:41 ►

in pressings of two or three

00:56:43 ►

thousand copies

00:56:44 ►

but it’s a very vital and alive thing produce CDs in pressings of 2,000 or 3,000 copies.

00:56:48 ►

But it’s a very vital and alive thing.

00:56:51 ►

In that way, it would seem they might come out with a wave of conscious lyrics that are true.

00:56:55 ►

And like somehow in the 60s,

00:56:57 ►

you had Pink Floyd, Palm Up, The Beatles,

00:56:59 ►

all the groups were coming out,

00:57:01 ►

but there was a basic movement

00:57:02 ►

and everyone at that time could relate to those words.

00:57:07 ►

Well, I think we’re just slightly premature.

00:57:09 ►

If the 90s or the 60s turned upside down,

00:57:12 ►

then we probably have to wait till 96,

00:57:16 ►

and that the energy is gathering.

00:57:18 ►

I mean, I’ll show you on the time wave tonight,

00:57:20 ►

not that that’s gospel,

00:57:22 ►

but it does appear that there is a kind of gathering charge under

00:57:26 ►

the atmosphere of you know this southern white boy eschaton that’s attempting to be created

00:57:36 ►

but when that’s all over and the hard lesson is learned that you know Christ himself couldn’t write the American

00:57:45 ►

government as presently constituted then I think we’ll get down to a more serious

00:57:51 ►

dialogue it probably involves electing a fascist president but what’s new about

00:57:58 ►

that yeah

00:58:02 ►

the media likes to hold up to popular cultural mass movements,

00:58:06 ►

and what kind of distortion happens when people start looking in that mirror?

00:58:12 ►

How do you plan to avoid, I guess, what you could call the Timothy Leary syndrome,

00:58:16 ►

wherein you allow something good and just a few people in the know

00:58:23 ►

to become trivialized, banal, and totally commercialized.

00:58:28 ►

How do you plan to escape the rave movement?

00:58:30 ►

Me personally?

00:58:33 ►

Yeah, I mean, if you’re connected with the rave movement,

00:58:36 ►

how do you…

00:58:36 ►

Oh, well, I will pursue what I call

00:58:39 ►

the Salinger Pension Strategy.

00:58:44 ►

This is where, you know,

00:58:46 ►

I’m going to become progressively more remote,

00:58:50 ►

hard to reach, legendary,

00:58:53 ►

and sort of just fade off.

00:58:59 ►

But I don’t really have any complaints about the media.

00:59:02 ►

I mean, if I could get the kind of consideration from Mondo 2000

00:59:09 ►

that I get from the New York Times, all would be rosy in my world.

00:59:14 ►

It’s your friends who scare you to death in the media.

00:59:19 ►

I think it was Colin Wilson who said when he published The Outsider

00:59:21 ►

that there was two ways that the society could totally destroy one’s creativity.

00:59:29 ►

One was by totally ignoring you and the other one was by recognizing you.

00:59:34 ►

Yes, that’s right. You become a cliché.

00:59:38 ►

I have a question about the 18 to 28 group.

00:59:47 ►

My concern is how, what’s going to happen to them? And that’s where politics come into it.

00:59:54 ►

Well, what’s going to happen to all of us?

01:00:01 ►

We’re all in the same…

01:00:02 ►

What are you thinking about doing for them so that what happened in the 60s doesn’t

01:00:03 ►

happen where there’s this life that’s incredible?

01:00:04 ►

Or being particularly critical of the people who all in the same I think we don’t

01:00:18 ►

I don’t think we want to get into a wrangle with the establishment over some

01:00:23 ►

life-or-death issue like the Vietnam War

01:00:26 ►

that that permitted

01:00:28 ►

an incredible penetration

01:00:30 ►

of the underground

01:00:31 ►

the great middle class

01:00:33 ►

who was maybe not interested in the war

01:00:36 ►

but also not interested in tearing their clothes off

01:00:38 ►

and smoking pot in the panhandle

01:00:40 ►

they were willing to

01:00:42 ►

stand by and watch

01:00:44 ►

while the establishment really did

01:00:49 ►

a job I think also a stealth strategy is best you know you don’t want to

01:00:55 ►

manufacture 10 million hits of LSD in the dormitory on the weekend and then go for the jugular of society.

01:01:06 ►

Obviously, this alarms ordinary people.

01:01:10 ►

I mean, remember when Ken Kesey used to tour the country

01:01:14 ►

with the bus further?

01:01:16 ►

Well, they had a big banner which was on the front of it

01:01:20 ►

which said, we have come for your daughters.

01:01:23 ►

Now, this is great for a laugh,

01:01:27 ►

but it doesn’t reassure the folks out there in baboon wazoo

01:01:32 ►

when you roll into town.

01:01:34 ►

It’s a very teaching discretion,

01:01:36 ►

since the general tendency of youth is to be kind of…

01:01:39 ►

Well, and a lot of survivors of the 60s

01:01:42 ►

are now in position to help.

01:01:45 ►

A fifth column within

01:01:47 ►

all the years of guilt

01:01:49 ►

you’ve built up over how you

01:01:51 ►

betrayed the revolution could be

01:01:53 ►

redeemed in a single moment

01:01:56 ►

down

01:01:56 ►

the road a few years because you

01:01:59 ►

can intervene

01:02:01 ►

at some crucial point

01:02:04 ►

Stoning Bob Dole Stoning Bob Dole?

01:02:06 ►

Stoning Bob Dole?

01:02:08 ►

Dosing Dole?

01:02:10 ►

No, I think the Republicans,

01:02:12 ►

their only hope of survival is

01:02:13 ►

to nominate Perot,

01:02:15 ►

which they probably will do.

01:02:18 ►

Yeah?

01:02:20 ►

I wish I believed in

01:02:22 ►

your

01:02:22 ►

writing off of fundamental Christianity,

01:02:26 ►

but I kind of see it as such a strong irrational force

01:02:30 ►

that I’m really worried about it,

01:02:31 ►

and I’m wondering why you think it’s…

01:02:33 ►

Well, again, when we look at the time wave tonight,

01:02:37 ►

you’ll see that we’re in a period

01:02:39 ►

which has a very strong resonance with the dark ages.

01:02:46 ►

You’ve probably noticed anyway.

01:02:49 ►

So I think that fundamentalist Christianity is rising in its power,

01:02:56 ►

but that that power doesn’t extend much beyond the turn of the century,

01:03:01 ►

that there is going to be a last gasp and a final bubble in their attempt to

01:03:07 ►

influence the political agenda but in a sense their grip is already broken but there are enormous

01:03:16 ►

battles which lie ahead by the turn of the century I don’t see it as particularly a problem.

01:03:26 ►

It’s only, you know, in America that this whole horrible business goes on.

01:03:30 ►

Europe is a truly secular society.

01:03:33 ►

I mean, they are just absolutely baffled

01:03:35 ►

that our political agenda can be influenced so strongly

01:03:39 ►

by what they perceive as crazy people, you know.

01:03:45 ►

Yeah,

01:03:46 ►

rattlesnake handling

01:03:47 ►

ecstatics from the hills of

01:03:49 ►

Tennessee. I mean, you have to go to

01:03:51 ►

Bengal to get stuff like

01:03:54 ►

that.

01:03:54 ►

I heard

01:03:55 ►

something about things in the Bering again

01:03:58 ►

and they’re like taking apart our

01:04:00 ►

sacred constitution.

01:04:02 ►

And you’re standing here, sitting here, talking

01:04:04 ►

about bullshit. Yeah, you said crypto-fascism

01:04:06 ►

in the brochure, but there’s also

01:04:08 ►

would you admit there’s also

01:04:10 ►

Christo-fascism and we need to be worried

01:04:12 ►

about that just as much?

01:04:14 ►

Well, for instance, this

01:04:15 ►

Supreme Court decision on

01:04:18 ►

animal sacrifice

01:04:19 ►

is alarming to

01:04:22 ►

animal rights people,

01:04:24 ►

but the larger issue, to my mind,

01:04:27 ►

is that it’s an invitation for eccentric religious practices to get constitutional protection.

01:04:34 ►

And the Supreme Court even re-invited the submission of the Oregon peyote case based on that. I think, you know, that the election was about this

01:04:47 ►

and that cut it how you may,

01:04:50 ►

those people got their asses whooped.

01:04:53 ►

They just keep screaming about it

01:04:55 ►

because they’re bad sports.

01:04:56 ►

But, you know,

01:04:58 ►

the election basically turned into a referendum

01:05:01 ►

on this family values crapple

01:05:04 ►

that they assumed everybody would rally

01:05:07 ►

around. And instead, that was the final evisceration. So I think they are very poor sports,

01:05:17 ►

but they are not controlling the political agenda of this country. Of course, give the Democratic Party enough rope,

01:05:26 ►

and I’m sure they can sufficiently fumble the ball

01:05:29 ►

to probably get Herman Goering elected.

01:05:34 ►

I’m just wondering if you’re in as much disbelief as I am

01:05:38 ►

that in the anti-papist country of Thomas Jefferson,

01:05:42 ►

the Pope could come here and draw a crowd

01:05:44 ►

that looks like the Beatle visit of Thomas Jefferson, the Pope could come here and draw a crowd that looks like

01:05:45 ►

the Beatle visit of the 1960s

01:05:47 ►

in this stadium full of all these people

01:05:50 ►

crying and tearing at him.

01:05:52 ►

This is supposed to be a secular society.

01:05:54 ►

Why does this guy get this kind of reaction

01:05:57 ►

from the American populace?

01:05:59 ►

Doesn’t that disturb you?

01:06:01 ►

Well, what disturbed me about the papal visit

01:06:04 ►

is I could see that some very, very sly public

01:06:08 ►

relations people are going for the same demographic I’m interested in.

01:06:14 ►

The way in which it was presented as an outreach to youth and how, you know, he’s in the hood,

01:06:21 ►

he’s our guy, you know, he’s my man, the hood, he’s our guy he’s my man

01:06:25 ►

the pope, my man

01:06:27 ►

I just thought this is bizarre

01:06:29 ►

but also

01:06:30 ►

a measure of desperation

01:06:32 ►

I just think

01:06:34 ►

this too will pass away

01:06:37 ►

let’s check the time wave

01:06:38 ►

I think it has more to do with the

01:06:41 ►

captivity

01:06:43 ►

at Avignon

01:06:45 ►

than the politics of Denver

01:06:47 ►

I think

01:06:48 ►

help me out here somebody

01:06:51 ►

where are we yes

01:06:52 ►

this is my latest pitch

01:06:55 ►

the latest pitch is that the

01:06:57 ►

second generation

01:06:58 ►

are really beautiful kids

01:07:01 ►

they’ve had really good

01:07:03 ►

strict spiritual training

01:07:05 ►

for 18, 20 years.

01:07:07 ►

And they don’t have anything to do with the institution

01:07:09 ►

or strict rules and regulations.

01:07:11 ►

And they have a very nice appreciation for drugs

01:07:14 ►

and chanting, dancing, and feasting.

01:07:16 ►

I think when the Raves get with the second generation

01:07:19 ►

Hare Krishnas, it’ll be a nice combination.

01:07:22 ►

Well, see, in a sense, the rave is an attempt to be second generation

01:07:26 ►

freaks to actually learn

01:07:28 ►

from the 60s

01:07:30 ►

I’m pretty positive

01:07:32 ►

about

01:07:33 ►

well

01:07:36 ►

it’s just going to be a smorgasbord

01:07:41 ►

the evidence is going to come in

01:07:43 ►

faster and faster

01:07:44 ►

supporting all positions you know things are going to get a smorgasbord the evidence is going to come in faster and faster supporting all positions

01:07:47 ►

you know things are going to get a lot worse and a lot better and it’s all going to happen

01:07:52 ►

simultaneously i really believe that since 19 from from 1945 to 2012 we are reliving in a compressed form about 4,300 years of human history very

01:08:09 ►

literally this is not a metaphor and if if you take that seriously then we have

01:08:17 ►

reached 765 AD you know that’s as far as we’ve come from 1945 and ahead of us lies the

01:08:28 ►

establishment of Gothic Europe the Black Plague Newton’s laws the Italian

01:08:37 ►

Renaissance the Machine Age the European Enlightenment the discovery of atomic power, DNA.

01:08:46 ►

I mean, all that lies beyond the turn of the century.

01:08:49 ►

So when people are frustrated by the fact that we can’t see

01:08:53 ►

what the transcendental object at the end of time is going to look like,

01:08:58 ►

I can’t say here’s what it’ll be like on the great day when it comes.

01:09:02 ►

It’s because it lies literally below the horizon of rational apprehension.

01:09:09 ►

But that doesn’t mean that when you look east,

01:09:12 ►

the sky isn’t streaked with the blush of rosy dawn.

01:09:16 ►

It is. It has been for centuries.

01:09:19 ►

We’re moving toward this thing.

01:09:22 ►

It has to do with the idea of human freedom.

01:09:24 ►

It has to do with the idea of human freedom. It has to do with the idea of the dignity,

01:09:28 ►

the inherent dignity of human beings.

01:09:30 ►

It has to do with the idea of everybody

01:09:32 ►

should have four square meals

01:09:34 ►

and a roof over their head.

01:09:35 ►

I mean, it stretches from the sublime

01:09:37 ►

to the mundane.

01:09:39 ►

It’s an idea of how it should be.

01:09:42 ►

And sometimes it resides in the secular domain

01:09:45 ►

through the schemes of Marxism

01:09:48 ►

or even of National Socialism.

01:09:50 ►

And sometimes it resides in the domain of religion

01:09:56 ►

as some kind of great cleansing

01:09:59 ►

or the descent of the glory

01:10:01 ►

or the coming of the matreya. But human history is the outer shell of the phenomenon.

01:10:14 ►

That’s one way of thinking of it.

01:10:16 ►

So if you find yourself inside human history,

01:10:20 ►

then you are inside the attractor field of the transcendental object

01:10:27 ►

and then you just have to find where you are

01:10:30 ►

in the historical galaxy

01:10:32 ►

are you just about to escape its influence

01:10:36 ►

and drift off into the interstellar darkness

01:10:39 ►

or are you closer in to the core

01:10:42 ►

and therefore irrevocably locked

01:10:45 ►

and irrevocably being moved slowly but with great certitude

01:10:51 ►

toward the confrontation and revelation of this thing?

01:10:55 ►

And of course it happens to us individually with death.

01:11:00 ►

There’s no escaping it.

01:11:02 ►

But then we choose,

01:11:06 ►

in the same way that we’re a little dodgy

01:11:09 ►

about facing our own death,

01:11:11 ►

we’re even more dodgy about thinking about

01:11:14 ►

the fate of the species.

01:11:17 ►

Science has tried to tell us

01:11:19 ►

that human history is purposeless.

01:11:22 ►

Well, this is a very odd contention

01:11:24 ►

because if it is purposeless. Well, this is a very odd contention, because if it is purposeless,

01:11:27 ►

it’s the only purposeless and disordered process that’s ever been observed. And there it is,

01:11:34 ►

right smack in the middle as the sum total of the activity of the most conscious entities known to

01:11:41 ►

exist in the cosmos. A strange place for purposelessness to crop up with such a vengeance yeah

01:11:49 ►

you talk about how the psilocybin mushroom is responsible for that big cranial leap from the proto-homo into the homo sapiens

01:11:58 ►

do you think it’s possible that again the psilocybin mushroom can play a role for the next evolutionary leap

01:12:05 ►

of some form, may not be physical

01:12:08 ►

yeah, well that’s a good question

01:12:11 ►

I don’t think I’ve talked too much about this

01:12:14 ►

because it has a sort of funny vibration to it

01:12:17 ►

but sort of following Isaac Asimov’s

01:12:20 ►

style of writing, foundation

01:12:22 ►

foundation and empire empire second foundation

01:12:26 ►

if you haven’t read these books

01:12:27 ►

these are huge science fiction

01:12:30 ►

histories of the future

01:12:33 ►

it seems to me

01:12:34 ►

you could make a case

01:12:35 ►

that there is something called

01:12:37 ►

the strophariad

01:12:38 ►

it’s great that this Latin word

01:12:41 ►

works out this way

01:12:42 ►

and the first strophariad was established on Earth

01:12:47 ►

half a million years ago

01:12:50 ►

and lasted until 12,000 years ago.

01:12:54 ►

And then it ended.

01:12:55 ►

Then there was the historical era,

01:12:58 ►

the imperial era,

01:13:00 ►

the era of ego, kingship,

01:13:02 ►

phonetic alphabets, exteriorized technologies, standing armies, urbanism, architecture, hierarchical structure, forced social role playing, so forth and so on. zero of the second Strophariad that when the Abraham

01:13:25 ►

and Sarah of the

01:13:27 ►

new order Gordon

01:13:30 ►

and Valentina Wasson

01:13:31 ►

discover the mushrooms

01:13:33 ►

in the mountains of Mexico

01:13:35 ►

and then of course in the 70s

01:13:38 ►

the brothers McKenna

01:13:39 ►

propagate the method

01:13:41 ►

for cultivation

01:13:43 ►

which turns it from a rare tropical endemic

01:13:47 ►

into a denizen of every attic and cellar

01:13:51 ►

from Nome to Calcutta.

01:13:54 ►

And the symbiosis between human beings

01:13:57 ►

and the fungi is re-established.

01:14:02 ►

And it’s a symbiosis that leads directly back to a connection into the guy

01:14:08 ►

and mind of the planet it would be great i mean i’m it’s a little grandiose for me to claim it

01:14:16 ►

but it would be wonderful if technology would miniaturize itself if sexuality would generalize itself if nomadism electronically sustained through

01:14:29 ►

universal issuance of power books and fax modems were to come into vogue and an entirely new

01:14:39 ►

social isn’t that what it says on the dollar bill? A new social order for the ages would be born

01:14:46 ►

and we could all become an eye floating above our own pyramidal database

01:14:52 ►

of uniquely sculpted, virtually real, personal bric-a-brac.

01:15:01 ►

I think that the mushroom has an immense role to play in the human drama.

01:15:09 ►

What do you mean symbiosis? What do we give the mushroom?

01:15:12 ►

We give it hands.

01:15:14 ►

It has no power to manipulate the environment.

01:15:19 ►

It touches the environment as lightly as…

01:15:23 ►

Are you saying you think it’s an intelligent thing

01:15:24 ►

that needs expression through human mind and body?

01:15:29 ►

Well, that’s one idea that I have entertained,

01:15:32 ►

that it’s some kind of thing that blew in here

01:15:35 ►

a long, long time ago.

01:15:37 ►

And it, as I was saying earlier this morning,

01:15:40 ►

we will come to live in the imagination.

01:15:44 ►

If you look at the mushroom

01:15:45 ►

it looks like an organism

01:15:47 ►

that engineered itself that way

01:15:50 ►

and said you know let’s

01:15:51 ►

de-emphasize our bodies

01:15:53 ►

let’s reproduce by spores

01:15:55 ►

let’s be primary decomposers

01:15:58 ►

let’s get out of the food chain

01:16:00 ►

let’s spread ourselves

01:16:02 ►

as lightly as cobwebs

01:16:04 ►

through the ecosystems we inhabit

01:16:06 ►

and see who eats us first but it seems to have a like a database of intelligence that is

01:16:16 ►

transplanetary and we don’t know what kind of a barrier space represents

01:16:25 ►

to the drift of life

01:16:26 ►

we’ve only known about DNA since 1950

01:16:30 ►

presumably any civilization

01:16:33 ►

with a full understanding of DNA

01:16:36 ►

could design itself

01:16:37 ►

and create a carmal-less body

01:16:41 ►

an eternal style

01:16:44 ►

an enormous telepathic capacity harmless body, an eternal style,

01:16:48 ►

an enormous telepathic capacity.

01:16:52 ►

So, you know, the mushroom hood may be something that we’re headed for,

01:16:54 ►

or at least it may serve as a natural model

01:16:57 ►

for a new style of organic existence

01:17:01 ►

as the shedding of the monkey

01:17:03 ►

begins to be progressively

01:17:06 ►

accelerated it’s perfectly clear that I don’t think we can go to the stars as

01:17:13 ►

hairless monkeys, it’s just bad packaging. It was great for the conquest of a terrestrial environment

01:17:21 ►

But if we’re serious about taking our place in the hegemony of galactarian civilization

01:17:28 ►

then i think considerable downsizing and repackaging is uh is going to be necessary

01:17:37 ►

for that and the spores offer a good a good blueprint for that, I see that it’s noon. To your scattered bodies go. We’ll meet

01:17:51 ►

back here at four o’clock and I’ll probably be in the tubs part of the afternoon. I’ll be giving an

01:17:58 ►

interview part of that time, but I’m happy to talk to you anytime I’m around untrammeled, feel free

01:18:06 ►

well, let’s see

01:18:10 ►

it was suggested to me

01:18:14 ►

that maybe

01:18:16 ►

we should confine questions

01:18:18 ►

to designated periods

01:18:20 ►

so as not

01:18:22 ►

to break

01:18:24 ►

what was perceived by some as the forward thrust of rhetorical momentum

01:18:29 ►

and perceived as others by others as the unmitigated exhibition of megalomania oh I’m for that so maybe we’ll do that

01:18:49 ►

in that which

01:18:50 ►

I was sorry to hear that

01:18:53 ►

because questions are such an easy way out

01:18:57 ►

let’s talk a little bit

01:19:01 ►

about any loose ends of this morning

01:19:03 ►

and then I’ll talk for a while

01:19:05 ►

and then we’ll entertain discussion at the end of that.

01:19:10 ►

Is anybody disappointed?

01:19:12 ►

Are we not getting to your favorite subject

01:19:15 ►

or somehow slighting some side of it

01:19:19 ►

that you’re afraid isn’t going to get its full treatment?

01:19:23 ►

Or any comment on what went on this morning?

01:19:27 ►

Anybody? Yes.

01:19:29 ►

I was just talking to some people in the bookstore

01:19:32 ►

and I was aware that my experiences are not,

01:19:36 ►

I thought everybody had pretty much the same experiences,

01:19:38 ►

that with me and mushrooms I have profound teachings

01:19:43 ►

and teachings of things that I wasn’t consciously aware of,

01:19:48 ►

you know, and like giving really good advice, and sometimes instructions, as well as just

01:19:55 ►

kind of awarenesses. So I don’t know if this would be boring, because I know you’ve done

01:20:02 ►

this a lot, but I would like to sort of hear a little bit of some of your stories.

01:20:07 ►

So you like stories?

01:20:10 ►

I mean, I agree.

01:20:12 ►

I just never know, you know, I’m always trying to calculate.

01:20:15 ►

There’s such a limited number of hours.

01:20:18 ►

So is it okay to swap stories and never mention the Paleolithic

01:20:23 ►

or what gets sacrificed for what.

01:20:27 ►

But I agree.

01:20:28 ►

I think stories are great,

01:20:29 ►

and I certainly don’t discourage them.

01:20:33 ►

As you were talking about before,

01:20:37 ►

the intelligence in these substances,

01:20:42 ►

the intelligence that seems to be in the substances.

01:20:46 ►

So that’s what interests you.

01:20:49 ►

Yeah.

01:20:50 ►

Well, yeah, it’s what interests me.

01:20:53 ►

What I keep going back to is how confounding it is,

01:20:58 ►

how confounding it is to rational expectation

01:21:01 ►

that a plant can, exactly as you say you say I mean it gives you specific advice

01:21:09 ►

can color coordinate your wardrobe if this is a major concern of yours I mean it has no snobbery

01:21:18 ►

and what it will deal with it’s it’s eerily like a companion I mean I can’t

01:21:26 ►

no other even psychedelic

01:21:28 ►

does that

01:21:29 ►

it’s in a sort of a category by itself

01:21:32 ►

as an intellect

01:21:33 ►

I mean on DMT you encounter

01:21:36 ►

these

01:21:37 ►

self transforming machine elves

01:21:40 ►

or the gnomes of hyperspace

01:21:42 ►

but these things are drenched

01:21:44 ►

with the peculiar

01:21:46 ►

and the outre, often in the mushroom thing it’s very approachable and friendly and manageable

01:21:55 ►

at least on a certain level, I mean it’s like anybody, any personality, it has depth I never know

01:22:05 ►

I mean is this news to people

01:22:07 ►

or is this ho-hum

01:22:09 ►

and we’ve been over all this many times

01:22:11 ►

before

01:22:12 ►

the mushroom as mind

01:22:16 ►

the mushroom as

01:22:17 ►

historical

01:22:20 ►

something which is

01:22:23 ►

penetrating human history,

01:22:26 ►

changing what it means to be a human being.

01:22:32 ►

In my book, Food of the Gods,

01:22:37 ►

I argue that it actually shaped human organization

01:22:44 ►

out of primate organization

01:22:46 ►

that are

01:22:47 ►

bizarre situation

01:22:52 ►

in nature

01:22:53 ►

that of being half primate

01:22:57 ►

and half archangel

01:22:59 ►

is explainable only if you assume

01:23:03 ►

some extraordinary catalytic agent

01:23:07 ►

coming into our environment around the time when we were descending from the trees

01:23:15 ►

and becoming omnivorous and switching over to becoming nomadic grassland animals.

01:23:22 ►

And, you know, the human brain size doubled

01:23:27 ►

in two million years.

01:23:30 ►

The most extraordinary transformation

01:23:32 ►

of the major organ of a higher animal

01:23:35 ►

in the entire paleontological record.

01:23:40 ►

This is an extraordinary,

01:23:42 ►

would in any circumstances

01:23:43 ►

be an extraordinary challenge to the theory of evolution. The fact that the theory of evolution was generated by this very organ under discussion makes its inability to explain it particularly embarrassing, if you follow my logic.

01:24:05 ►

so there was some extraordinary catalytic action that in terms of the geological record

01:24:08 ►

was like a bolt of lightning

01:24:10 ►

a species, a primate

01:24:14 ►

an arboreal creature transformed into a grassland forager

01:24:18 ►

suddenly stands upright

01:24:22 ►

begins to perform symbolic activities.

01:24:29 ►

Our peculiar relationship to our sexuality

01:24:33 ►

and to dominance hierarchies, I believe,

01:24:35 ►

has to do with the fact that as primates

01:24:39 ►

we are genetically scripted to have male dominance hierarchies.

01:24:46 ►

But for a very long time, the presence of psilocybin in the human diet

01:24:53 ►

pharmacologically interrupted that maladaptive behavior

01:24:58 ►

and created an orgiastic social style

01:25:03 ►

that was very strong glue for group consciousness because

01:25:10 ►

man could not trace lines of male paternity under those circumstances and so a very old

01:25:18 ►

primate behavior was for a couple of million years, perhaps, overwhelmed by a dietary factor.

01:25:25 ►

Then, fairly recently,

01:25:29 ►

with the drying of the African continent,

01:25:32 ►

the mushroom religion and the society

01:25:35 ►

that had gathered around it

01:25:37 ►

and the social and sexual style

01:25:39 ►

that had gathered around it collapsed.

01:25:43 ►

And these ancient people around 10,000 BC

01:25:46 ►

migrated in yet another wave of migration out of Africa

01:25:52 ►

into the Middle East and established the early human stratigraphy

01:25:56 ►

that we see in the Nile Valley and in Jericho and other places.

01:26:01 ►

And that’s the fall into history

01:26:04 ►

because in the absence of the mushroom

01:26:07 ►

the old primate program reemerges

01:26:14 ►

and it’s right at that moment

01:26:18 ►

as we break with the African grasslands

01:26:21 ►

and as we become sowers of cereal grains across Asia Minor, it’s right at that moment that a whole series of maladaptive institutions spring into being simultaneously. armies, urban concentrations, canonized law, suppression of a goddess religion in favor

01:26:50 ►

of a religion of male warrior figures, the age of Gilgamesh, all of the agriculture, All of that comes at once. And I think it represents a break with the Gaian mind

01:27:10 ►

previously maintained through this quasi-symbiotic,

01:27:14 ►

shamanic, psychedelic mushroom connection.

01:27:19 ►

A break with that and a profound alienation then

01:27:23 ►

from the natural world that issues into history

01:27:27 ►

i mean gilgamesh for crying out loud the earliest piece of literature out of that area that we have

01:27:33 ►

is a story about a guy who gets a hold on the loyalty of the shaman and co-opts his loyalty

01:27:42 ►

and gets him to help him cut down the world tree. They

01:27:46 ►

go off into the wilderness, Enkidu, the shaman figure, and Gilgamesh, the wily king figure,

01:27:53 ►

and they cut down the world tree. This our own liturgical tradition a story of that

01:28:11 ►

antiquity is the whole Bible story of Genesis which is the story of a drug bust essentially a whole hassle about a forbidden plant, a plant that conveys knowledge,

01:28:28 ►

that is, the owner of the garden has decided

01:28:32 ►

this knowledge is not for the human beings.

01:28:36 ►

And then the woman, the woman, the gatherer,

01:28:39 ►

the one who represents the old religious strata,

01:28:43 ►

the now being suppressed heretical

01:28:45 ►

fungal connection the woman eats of the

01:28:49 ►

plant then she corrupts her roommate

01:28:51 ►

the landlord goes berserk the lease

01:28:55 ►

is cancelled and

01:28:57 ►

in the final fade on

01:29:01 ►

that story what we get

01:29:04 ►

is and God set an angel at the eastern gate of Eden

01:29:08 ►

with a flaming sword that they might not find their way back

01:29:12 ►

well that’s simply an image of the

01:29:15 ►

desiccating African sun

01:29:18 ►

driving these people out of the cradle

01:29:21 ►

the Saharan cradle

01:29:23 ►

of this mother goddess,

01:29:26 ►

psilocybin-based, nomadic, cattle-centered religion,

01:29:31 ►

which was a kind of style that had arisen there and flourished for 100,000 years,

01:29:37 ►

and then the fall into history is real.

01:29:41 ►

We are like the children of a kind of a dysfunctional relationship. There really is a

01:29:49 ►

trauma of some sort in our past. History really is a kind of pathological bereavement because,

01:29:58 ►

you know, we were dropped on our heads 12,000 years ago and we’ve been like trying to sort it out ever

01:30:05 ►

since it explains to my mind our fascination with drugs why you know it

01:30:13 ►

is true that many animals yes you know elephants trample down fences to get to

01:30:20 ►

rotting papaya and butterflies hang out at dishes of sugar until their little legs are

01:30:27 ►

clawing the air but human beings are of a different order when it comes to addictions

01:30:33 ►

i mean we physically addict to several dozen substances psychologically addicted dozens more

01:30:41 ►

addicted to behaviors political ideologies each other each other, artworks, you name it.

01:30:48 ►

I mean, people go bananas in some cases if deprived of any of these things and show all

01:30:54 ►

the symptoms of heroin withdrawal, you know, insomnia, palpitating heart, irritability,

01:31:08 ►

ability irrational decision-making delusion so forth and so on this is because what our you know the extraordinary confluence of events

01:31:15 ►

necessary to call us into being as a thinking species was this kind of quasi-symbiotic relationship that evolved between us, cattle, and fungi,

01:31:30 ►

where the fungi became or is,

01:31:36 ►

for some mysterious reason still to be discovered,

01:31:40 ►

a pipeline into a mind, an entelechy,

01:31:47 ►

which we can only image as feminine

01:31:50 ►

and can only associate somehow to the environment,

01:31:55 ►

to the ecosystem.

01:31:56 ►

This is the Gaian mind.

01:31:58 ►

This is what the goddess really is.

01:32:01 ►

I mean, the is a a network of

01:32:08 ►

connective intelligence

01:32:09 ►

that is operating on this planet

01:32:12 ►

and I think it’s

01:32:14 ►

not in its

01:32:15 ►

essence mysterious, it’s simply

01:32:18 ►

that what the psychedelic does

01:32:20 ►

is it dissolves boundaries

01:32:22 ►

and one of the boundaries

01:32:24 ►

that it dissolves boundaries. And one of the boundaries that it dissolves

01:32:25 ►

is the boundary between community,

01:32:28 ►

which is a behavioral boundary

01:32:29 ►

maintained by the convention of language

01:32:32 ►

and therefore not as set in concrete

01:32:36 ►

as you might wish to be congealed.

01:32:39 ►

Between that boundary and nature,

01:32:42 ►

there comes a dissolution.olution and then there is lo

01:32:47 ►

and behold not the barren howling atoms of democracy and materialism but instead

01:32:55 ►

nature pulsating minded alive caring threaded into the human enterprise, willing to advise you on your fashion choices and investments.

01:33:10 ►

And it’s an astonishing thing.

01:33:12 ►

And we were the great celebrants of, if you will, because our glory was the neocortex,

01:33:27 ►

the language processing capacity that we brought into the game

01:33:32 ►

because we had been primates in the canopy of trees,

01:33:36 ►

you know, with a pack signaling repertoire

01:33:39 ►

at the level of dogs or something like that.

01:33:42 ►

And then under the stimulation of the glossolalias

01:33:47 ►

brought on by ecstatic doses of psilocybin

01:33:50 ►

in this context of orgiastic boundary-dissolving sexuality,

01:33:58 ►

this mystery was connected with.

01:34:02 ►

And it is exactly the same mystery that you hit at 5 grams

01:34:07 ►

in silent darkness

01:34:08 ►

and it’s still mysterious

01:34:11 ►

you know

01:34:12 ►

Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger

01:34:15 ►

they don’t really shed much light on this

01:34:19 ►

we haven’t in 25,000 years

01:34:22 ►

learned anything

01:34:23 ►

that makes this trivial or dismissible,

01:34:26 ►

it still raises the hair on the back of your neck.

01:34:30 ►

It still feels like the true indwelling

01:34:34 ►

of a metaphysical essence.

01:34:39 ►

It turns out that all the careful deconstruction

01:34:43 ►

of living nature by materialism was in vain.

01:34:48 ►

I mean, nature is alive and minded.

01:34:52 ►

I don’t know what this means.

01:34:54 ►

I myself, you know, as I sit here,

01:34:57 ►

not loaded particularly,

01:35:00 ►

cannot grasp the implication of a minded nature.

01:35:07 ►

It means that we’re living in a world much closer

01:35:10 ►

to the spirit of early Greek mythology

01:35:12 ►

than the spirit of our own materialist philosophies.

01:35:18 ►

And I suppose that’s why there’s an argument

01:35:19 ►

for being au courant in your philosophical biases

01:35:23 ►

because from places in our cultural canon

01:35:27 ►

like quantum physics and chaos mathematics,

01:35:33 ►

places which are very like early Greek philosophy,

01:35:36 ►

I mean, Heraclitus speaks for chaos

01:35:40 ►

and I suppose Parmenides or Thales

01:35:45 ►

speaks for

01:35:47 ►

some of these other points of view

01:35:50 ►

quantum physics, the discrete

01:35:52 ►

nature of the world

01:35:54 ►

these

01:35:58 ►

things, if you can

01:36:00 ►

assimilate them, are

01:36:01 ►

very close to what is perceived

01:36:03 ►

with psychedelics but very

01:36:07 ►

very far from the models that are being inherited from the past and at the very

01:36:13 ►

center you put your finger on it to bring it back around to that that at the

01:36:18 ►

most confounding center of this mystery is the presence, you know, the voice, the companion, the ally. I mean,

01:36:28 ►

it’s crazy. It literally is impossible within the context of the cultural expectation.

01:36:36 ►

And yet it’s real. I mean, this was what got me on to all this years and years ago, because somehow

01:36:41 ►

I had friends early on who said you know these plants talk to

01:36:47 ►

you and I just thought you know my god they’re losing their marbles and I would take LSD and

01:36:54 ►

smoke cannabis and do these things and but it never and have all kinds of strange experiences

01:36:59 ►

but I never got what this thing was about how the plants talk to you until I got to psilocybin.

01:37:06 ►

And then it’s just like, but you have to invoke it.

01:37:12 ►

You have to speak to it.

01:37:14 ►

It doesn’t speak until spoken to.

01:37:17 ►

They’re shy.

01:37:19 ►

They’re like fairies.

01:37:21 ►

Hell, they may be fairies.

01:37:23 ►

Who knows?

01:37:24 ►

You have to coax it

01:37:27 ►

out and then it will just come forward it’s the damnedest thing I mean as I sit

01:37:32 ►

here a man of 46 earning a living by telling people how you coax fairies out

01:37:38 ►

from under invisible bushes I wonder myself at what the cultural crisis has come to

01:37:46 ►

nevertheless it’s true

01:37:48 ►

it’s as true as anything and it’s

01:37:52 ►

more confounding than most things I mean I don’t know

01:37:54 ►

what it means I’ve been through the possible explanations

01:37:58 ►

you know young autonomous psychic

01:38:00 ►

entities escaped from the controlling influence of the

01:38:04 ►

super ego yes but when you’re talking Autonomous psychic entities escape from the controlling influence of the superego, yes.

01:38:05 ►

But when you’re talking to a gnome, saying that to them is absurd as suggesting to a Javanese person

01:38:13 ►

that they’re an autonomous portion of the psyche that has escaped from the control of the ego.

01:38:19 ►

It doesn’t wash.

01:38:30 ►

doesn’t wash, I think that somehow we, unlike shamans, we haven’t taken these worlds seriously enough.

01:38:35 ►

Because we have a materialist basis.

01:38:41 ►

You know, one of the things, this is maybe a point worth making and then I’ll stop raving about this, but one of the things that quantum mechanics has secured

01:38:46 ►

is the necessity of the observer

01:38:49 ►

for the ongoing unfoldment of phenomena.

01:38:54 ►

And to me, that means that hallucinations

01:38:59 ►

have undergone an ontological shift of status.

01:39:03 ►

Hallucinations are now part of reality. They are primary

01:39:10 ►

data for theory making in the same way that the movement of the stars is or the changing

01:39:18 ►

of the tides. Quantum mechanics secures the mind as the necessary agent in all process

01:39:28 ►

and so hallucinations are no longer off the table

01:39:32 ►

or out of evidence

01:39:33 ►

in terms of trying to understand

01:39:36 ►

what’s going on with reality

01:39:39 ►

that brings up the question I’ve heard posed before

01:39:42 ►

and sometimes it’s on people’s minds

01:39:43 ►

and they don’t want to say it

01:39:44 ►

and that is why should people believe this Irish raving tall tale of human evolution?

01:40:01 ►

a guy talking about stories a guy that can convince his girlfriend

01:40:04 ►

to bring his lover on a trip

01:40:06 ►

down the Puchamayo could

01:40:08 ►

talk a whole generation into anything

01:40:10 ►

your powers of persuasion

01:40:14 ►

are fantastic

01:40:15 ►

thank you

01:40:18 ►

I appreciate that

01:40:20 ►

are you saying

01:40:25 ►

what is your question

01:40:27 ►

I mean I’m trying

01:40:31 ►

I agree I think the best idea

01:40:33 ►

will win in a sense you’re right

01:40:35 ►

the person who can tell the best story

01:40:38 ►

that story

01:40:39 ►

will win but

01:40:41 ►

best story is a complex

01:40:44 ►

concept it also

01:40:45 ►

means you know best formal

01:40:47 ►

mathematical underpinning you get

01:40:49 ►

high points for that

01:40:51 ►

most people come up rather short

01:40:53 ►

in that department

01:40:55 ►

I’m

01:40:57 ►

I come out of the

01:40:59 ►

Berkeley tradition of

01:41:01 ►

all night conversations

01:41:03 ►

I think often in arguments you don’t make

01:41:06 ►

progress till the ninth hour and I’m willing to debate all this stuff as far

01:41:13 ►

as my theory of evolution is concerned first of all you might suppose there is

01:41:18 ►

a large and established body of theory that has to be exploded you know what

01:41:24 ►

the straight people say about how

01:41:26 ►

we doubled our brain size and got

01:41:28 ►

culture and mathematics

01:41:30 ►

it turns out no they haven’t got

01:41:32 ►

a clue

01:41:33 ►

there is no big theory which has to be

01:41:36 ►

blown up the best shot

01:41:38 ►

the straight people can give it

01:41:40 ►

is they say that we were

01:41:42 ►

puny and small in a world

01:41:44 ►

of the large and the lumbering and so

01:41:47 ►

we learned to throw rocks with great precision and accuracy they would essentially make the big

01:41:54 ►

league baseball player the pinnacle of human evolutionary development and then say and then

01:42:01 ►

once we’d done that we had so much brain capacity left over that the plays of Shakespeare and modern mathematics were no problem.

01:42:10 ►

Well, this seems, I say, this is hokum, you know.

01:42:14 ►

And that obviously they’ve done these experiments where they raise identical rats in environments which are very rich in experience

01:42:27 ►

and then poor in experience and the ones raised in the rich environment when, hang on folks,

01:42:35 ►

sacrificed, exhibit in the brain slices a much more complex arborization than the ones that were in the learning poor environment. So I think,

01:42:48 ►

you know, that one way of thinking about these psychedelics, and especially the psilocybin

01:42:54 ►

family coming out of these mushrooms, is that they were catalysts for the human imagination. They catalyze cognitive activity, whatever it is.

01:43:06 ►

Counting your toes, painting on your friend,

01:43:11 ►

playing around in anthills,

01:43:13 ►

making funny noises in your off hours,

01:43:18 ►

arranging the roots you’ve collected in different categories.

01:43:22 ►

I mean, it just promotes cognitive activity,

01:43:27 ►

which you then take back into the group.

01:43:30 ►

Yeah.

01:43:31 ►

Well, is there a different effect,

01:43:33 ►

a catalytic effect,

01:43:34 ►

between the fresh mushroom,

01:43:36 ►

let’s say that the promo-holo

01:43:37 ►

has picked the heat right off,

01:43:39 ►

the dumb patties and the dried mushroom?

01:43:42 ►

I don’t think particularly.

01:43:46 ►

I think you mean like

01:43:47 ►

is the spiritual intelligence

01:43:49 ►

present in the dried stuff?

01:43:51 ►

Or is the effect more potent?

01:43:53 ►

Well, the fresh ones

01:43:55 ►

definitely are kickeroo

01:43:57 ►

just simply because

01:43:59 ►

the psilocybin isn’t bound up

01:44:02 ►

in dried cellulose matrix.

01:44:04 ►

It dissolves much quicker that’s probably

01:44:07 ►

what that’s about one of the things that i think happened you know i’ve spent a lot of time trying

01:44:14 ►

to understand this scenario of transition from what i call the mushroom partnership paradise to the historical bummer that came

01:44:27 ►

down when all that blew up

01:44:29 ►

and I can imagine

01:44:31 ►

you know as Africa grew

01:44:33 ►

drier it became

01:44:35 ►

the mushroom would have

01:44:37 ►

perhaps over millennia

01:44:39 ►

slowly faded in availability

01:44:41 ►

it would have instead

01:44:43 ►

of being all the time everywhere,

01:44:46 ►

it would go to being seasonal

01:44:48 ►

and then to be only in the rain shadows of mountains

01:44:52 ►

and stuff like that.

01:44:54 ►

And I’m sure a certain amount of cultural specialization

01:44:58 ►

would take place, i.e. you would appoint shamans

01:45:01 ►

to be the people who take the mushrooms

01:45:04 ►

in order to keep the connect open.

01:45:07 ►

And the other thing that would go on is there would be anxiety about preservation

01:45:11 ►

to try and keep a supply available for human use.

01:45:16 ►

Well, perversely, the most obvious method of preserving mushrooms

01:45:22 ►

or any other delicate foodstuff in that

01:45:25 ►

kind of an environment is to desiccate it in honey put it into a crystalline

01:45:32 ►

honey and the sugar will draw the water out of it this is why you hear about the

01:45:37 ►

Romans eating hummingbird tongues pickled in honey it was because the

01:45:41 ►

honey made the whole process possible the problem there in our scenario where we’re talking about how drugs shape

01:45:49 ►

culture is that honey itself has the perverse ability to become a psychoactive

01:45:57 ►

substance to ferment into mead and if you’ve ever been in the tropics and

01:46:04 ►

experienced aboriginal honeys,

01:46:06 ►

they have a much higher water content

01:46:08 ►

than what you’re getting at the ANP.

01:46:11 ►

And they would quickly,

01:46:12 ►

they quickly do ferment.

01:46:14 ►

When you’re offered honey,

01:46:16 ►

it’s often a completely baffling

01:46:19 ►

and horrible thing

01:46:20 ►

that you can’t really associate

01:46:22 ►

to what you know at home.

01:46:27 ►

And as an example there of how cultural, how drug styles shape cultural styles, alcohol, the fermented meads and early

01:46:38 ►

cereal beers of the ancient Middle East, they create a completely different set of cultural values

01:46:45 ►

gone is the orgies

01:46:47 ►

gone the connection to the Gaian mind

01:46:50 ►

now what you have is an increased sense of verbal facility

01:46:55 ►

and a lowering of sensitivity

01:46:59 ►

to social cueing

01:47:01 ►

the kind of behavior you see in singles bars

01:47:05 ►

on a Friday night.

01:47:07 ►

And a lot of negative imprinting

01:47:12 ►

goes on around alcohol

01:47:14 ►

or in the past has gone on around alcohol.

01:47:19 ►

And this thing I was talking about earlier,

01:47:22 ►

the itch we can’t scratch,

01:47:25 ►

this fascination with drugs,

01:47:26 ►

once the umbilical connection was broken

01:47:30 ►

into the Gaian mind in this African situation,

01:47:34 ►

then it was just a series of insufficient substitutes.

01:47:41 ►

The early beers and meads,

01:47:50 ►

substitutes the early beers and meads opium appears to come into the picture of shortly after this time cannabis we have no idea how old it is to my mind cannabis it is the closest

01:47:59 ►

substitute for the glue the social glue and provides the same

01:48:05 ►

kinds of social functions

01:48:07 ►

that

01:48:08 ►

the mushroom may have

01:48:11 ►

provided and it may have

01:48:13 ►

later across Central

01:48:16 ►

Asia played a

01:48:17 ►

somewhat similar but subsidiary

01:48:20 ►

role and then you know

01:48:21 ►

the vast, we have explored

01:48:24 ►

nature frantically in search of intoxicants

01:48:27 ►

of all kinds this continues to this day the the old style primate dominance hierarchy

01:48:36 ►

re-emerged and what it brings with it is moral cruelty is what it brings with it. And an insensitivity to suffering

01:48:46 ►

and a willingness to sacrifice others

01:48:50 ►

for grandiose political schemes

01:48:54 ►

and a willingness to let dogma rule over common sense

01:48:59 ►

and so forth and so on.

01:49:02 ►

And 10,000 years of letting that run rampant,

01:49:06 ►

and as an engine of cultural destruction,

01:49:10 ►

it can’t be beat.

01:49:11 ►

The pygmies in the rainforest are no match for it,

01:49:15 ►

nor is anybody else.

01:49:16 ►

After 10,000 years of letting that run rampant

01:49:19 ►

over the landscape, here we are.

01:49:23 ►

And strangely enough then, here we are and strangely enough then in the here we are gathered

01:49:28 ►

for the deathbed scene of Western civilization and as every text is

01:49:33 ►

published every archaeological site excavated every occult system explored

01:49:40 ►

every drug injected so forth and so, comes the news from ethnography,

01:49:46 ►

this minor branch of anthropology,

01:49:49 ►

that people are taking these drugs,

01:49:52 ►

these plants in the rainforest

01:49:53 ►

and making extraordinary claims

01:49:56 ►

about its ability to transport you

01:49:59 ►

into other dimensions and heal and so forth.

01:50:01 ►

And it’s like the Ouroboric snake

01:50:03 ►

taking its tail in its mouth

01:50:05 ►

and the energy just runs around the circle.

01:50:09 ►

History is somehow redeemed, I think,

01:50:13 ►

by this return to the archaic.

01:50:16 ►

The question of what history was for,

01:50:18 ►

I’m not sure,

01:50:21 ►

but what caused it, I’m pretty clear on.

01:50:24 ►

It’s a pathology or it’s a series of behaviors

01:50:28 ►

that are a response to the tremendous trauma and stress

01:50:33 ►

of the breakup of the symbiotic relationship with nature.

01:50:38 ►

It’s like a crisis of adolescence or a temporary psychosis or something like that and now strangely enough

01:50:47 ►

we have gained through the peregrination of history and that vast knowledge about forbidden

01:50:56 ►

and dark subjects the control of matter the control of the genetic units of life itself

01:51:02 ►

the building of instrumentalities that can

01:51:05 ►

survive flight to the stars, so forth and so on. But to this point, this has all been

01:51:10 ►

in the service of some weird Faustian conqueror complex. Now all these tools have to be put at the service of a kind of ethos of planetary caregiving

01:51:28 ►

and ecological maintenance.

01:51:32 ►

It has all fallen into our responsibility.

01:51:36 ►

In a sense, we have come of age.

01:51:39 ►

You know, child of the earth, now here is the inheritance.

01:51:42 ►

child of the earth now here is the inheritance and

01:51:44 ►

you know there are a few dents

01:51:46 ►

in the Ferrari from some of

01:51:48 ►

the little

01:51:49 ►

episodes we took before

01:51:52 ►

we settled down but it’s

01:51:54 ►

all ours to make

01:51:56 ►

of what we will and

01:51:58 ►

and then behind that

01:52:00 ►

this

01:52:01 ►

you know what is it that

01:52:04 ►

Andrew Marvel says in his poem?

01:52:06 ►

Always at my, the grave’s a lovely quiet place,

01:52:11 ►

but none do there, I think, embrace.

01:52:14 ►

For always at my back I hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near.

01:52:20 ►

And of course, behind this level I’m talking about

01:52:22 ►

is time’s chariot hurrying near.

01:52:25 ►

The fact that rising over our world is the black sun of the incomprehensible event of our cultural transformation

01:52:35 ►

that has been built into our cultural mythology since Abraham hesitated to slay his son I mean this is our thing the finite

01:52:49 ►

apotheosis of of the world and we’ve met all these integrate on as yet

01:52:56 ►

unintegrated but soon to be integrated technologies control languages

01:53:02 ►

understandings are are leading to the transformation of the human self-image.

01:53:08 ►

And really the psychedelic experience is just inoculating yourself for the onslaught of transformation that is going to be rolling toward you through 3D.

01:53:20 ►

It’s not going to come entirely through drugs, you know.

01:53:24 ►

It’s going to come through the culture

01:53:25 ►

it already is

01:53:27 ►

it’s batshit weird out there

01:53:29 ►

you don’t have to have

01:53:31 ►

a bone through your nose

01:53:34 ►

to pick up on that

01:53:35 ►

did you have a question?

01:53:36 ►

I’ve read a theory that primates rose

01:53:39 ►

from four legs to two

01:53:40 ►

exactly why

01:53:43 ►

I don’t remember

01:53:44 ►

but once up in this higher air to exactly why I don’t remember,

01:53:47 ►

but once up in this higher air,

01:53:56 ►

the brain enlarged and prospered more rapidly,

01:54:03 ►

and the number of neurons in the brain increased so that we now have 100 billion neurons

01:54:05 ►

and that was the real origin of civilization

01:54:09 ►

the complexification

01:54:12 ►

and no mushrooms

01:54:14 ►

oh I see what you’re saying

01:54:16 ►

well it is true that if you’ve ever observed even squirrel monkeys

01:54:21 ►

which are a fairly primitive primate

01:54:24 ►

squirrel monkeys if they a fairly primitive primate. Squirrel monkeys

01:54:26 ►

if they want to run quickly will

01:54:29 ►

rise up off their front legs.

01:54:33 ►

There’s a lot of

01:54:35 ►

question about bipedalism and when it

01:54:38 ►

came in. Some people think it didn’t come in

01:54:40 ►

until we leave the trees.

01:54:43 ►

We were a complex animal. There’s no doubt about it when we were in until we leave the trees. We were a complex animal.

01:54:46 ►

There’s no doubt about it

01:54:47 ►

when we were in the arboreal canopy.

01:54:50 ►

But we were probably no more complex

01:54:53 ►

than the prosimians that exist in the world today.

01:54:58 ►

You see, the real challenge for evolutionary theory

01:55:02 ►

is not that the human brain could evolve at all

01:55:06 ►

that seems reasonable and somewhat inevitable

01:55:10 ►

but the speed is really shocking

01:55:14 ►

a transformation of a major organ like that

01:55:19 ►

when charted in some other animal order

01:55:22 ►

occurs on a scale of 50 million years.

01:55:27 ►

In the human beings,

01:55:28 ►

it occurred in a million and a half years.

01:55:31 ►

And if you’re just going to limit yourself

01:55:34 ►

to the rules of ordinary evolutionary theory,

01:55:38 ►

then when you look at that transformation

01:55:40 ►

of that major organ in a million and a half years,

01:55:43 ►

then you have to say,

01:55:44 ►

there was

01:55:45 ►

an extraordinary selective pressure operating there that apparently operated on no other species

01:55:51 ►

at no other time in the history of the earth and i my i think to generalize a bit here that that the undiscussed dimension of evolution is diet.

01:56:09 ►

You see, if you study evolution without great depth,

01:56:14 ►

what they tell you is that mutation is acted upon by natural selection

01:56:23 ►

and that mutation is caused by gene breakage and modification.

01:56:30 ►

And that gene modification is caused by radiation,

01:56:35 ►

cosmic radiation reaching the earth.

01:56:37 ►

Now that part of the story is a gross simplification.

01:56:42 ►

Gene breakage is actually caused by stress

01:56:45 ►

of all sorts.

01:56:48 ►

And incidental cosmic radiation

01:56:50 ►

reaching the surface of the earth is only

01:56:52 ►

one kind of stress.

01:56:53 ►

Another kind of stress is

01:56:56 ►

chemical toxins

01:56:57 ►

in the environment.

01:57:00 ►

Especially chemical toxins

01:57:01 ►

in the diet.

01:57:04 ►

And so if you have an animal, a species,

01:57:08 ►

which comes under nutritional pressure,

01:57:11 ►

it has two options.

01:57:13 ►

It can either go extinct

01:57:15 ►

or it can begin experimenting with its diet.

01:57:19 ►

And if it begins experimenting with its diet,

01:57:22 ►

there’s many a slip before it gets it sorted out.

01:57:26 ►

Many exposures to toxic and poisonous substances or quasi-toxic substances that skew the ovulation cycle or affect expression of body hair or cause the retention of juvenile characteristics.

01:57:48 ►

So when an animal is undergoing dietary transformation,

01:57:53 ►

it’s in a situation of extraordinary mutational flux.

01:57:57 ►

An example that I think makes this perfectly clear

01:58:00 ►

is sweet potatoes are a big part of human diets in many tropical parts of the world and

01:58:08 ►

many primates are keen for sweet potatoes but orthonovum and birth control drugs like that

01:58:17 ►

are made from those same sweet potatoes from diasc vines, which are grown on huge mechanized plantations in northern Mexico,

01:58:28 ►

that’s where the birth control hormone comes from.

01:58:30 ►

Well, now, here’s the scenario.

01:58:33 ►

A hungry band of foraging primates comes upon a big patch

01:58:39 ►

of looks like our favorite food, sweet potatoes,

01:58:43 ►

and everybody chows down,

01:58:45 ►

and it turns out it’s jammed with these hormones,

01:58:49 ►

and lactation, ovulation, menstruation, fertility, fetal formation,

01:58:58 ►

all of these things you just shuffle the deck, folks.

01:59:01 ►

You don’t know what you’re going to get out of that.

01:59:04 ►

And if the animals are sensitive enough

01:59:07 ►

to the situation to stop eating it,

01:59:09 ►

well, then it’s just a localized catastrophe.

01:59:11 ►

But if they persist,

01:59:13 ►

they will be mutational or extinct

01:59:15 ►

within several generations.

01:59:18 ►

So I think, you know,

01:59:19 ►

I’m suggesting that at this moment

01:59:22 ►

when we left the trees,

01:59:24 ►

there was a great deal of dietary experimentation going on.

01:59:30 ►

And psilocybin was a factor in there.

01:59:35 ►

You know, looking at us and trying to understand

01:59:38 ►

our relationship to the other primates,

01:59:41 ►

one of the things that evolutionary primatologists have always noted is that human beings exhibit what is called neoteny do you all know what

01:59:50 ►

this is neoteny is the preservation of juvenile characteristics into adulthood

01:59:57 ►

we all do this if you look at our skull proportion to our bodies, it’s an infantile proportion when you compare us to other primates.

02:00:10 ►

We look, human adults look like the fetuses of other primate species.

02:00:17 ►

Our hairlessness, that’s a fetal and juvenile characteristic in other primates that fades in adulthood.

02:00:24 ►

We retain it and so forth and so on.

02:00:28 ►

This is the kind of thing that we see in other species

02:00:31 ►

that are reacting to toxic episodes in their earlier evolutionary history.

02:00:37 ►

And we are a funny-looking monkey, you have to admit,

02:00:41 ►

and ugly suckers too.

02:00:48 ►

have to admit and ugly suckers too you know i mean thank god the estrous reddening of the bottom was suppressed before we got down to the business of civilization and public masturbation seems to

02:00:57 ►

be under control but otherwise if you’ve ever looked at those prosimians and the proboscis monkeys of Southeast Asia

02:01:05 ►

they’re just like very ugly people

02:01:08 ►

anyway

02:01:11 ►

enough about that

02:01:13 ►

any other predators that were likely or subject

02:01:17 ►

to happen upon these civil crimes

02:01:19 ►

in the same conditions as we find these primates

02:01:24 ►

well no well possibly appropriate to the same conditions as we want to discover next?

02:01:26 ►

Well, no.

02:01:28 ►

Well, possibly.

02:01:29 ►

I mean, see, the thing is,

02:01:33 ►

animals tend to specialize their food supply.

02:01:36 ►

An animal will not explore a new food unless it’s under nutritional pressure.

02:01:39 ►

I don’t know if there were other animals,

02:01:42 ►

you know, being pushed out of that same

02:01:45 ►

environment a sort of parallel family that if the primates hadn’t seized the

02:01:53 ►

golden ring might have gotten somewhere I forget what they’re called but the

02:01:58 ►

raccoons the raccoons have a pretty advanced optical system, a pretty adaptable hand,

02:02:06 ►

a reasonable level of socialization,

02:02:09 ►

and, you know, would make a cute movie, I suppose.

02:02:16 ►

What?

02:02:17 ►

Or maybe bears, wouldn’t they be omnivorous?

02:02:20 ►

Bears also have been suggested as one of the lines

02:02:25 ►

from which an intelligent species

02:02:27 ►

might emerge

02:02:28 ►

what’s the natural history

02:02:30 ►

of these mushrooms in the wild

02:02:32 ►

do they just decompose

02:02:35 ►

eventually or

02:02:36 ►

insects eat them

02:02:37 ►

well they persist

02:02:40 ►

they are not the kind of

02:02:42 ►

mushrooms that auto digest

02:02:44 ►

some kinds of mushrooms

02:02:46 ►

just turn into slime. Most of the psilocybin mushrooms, especially the more palatable ones,

02:02:53 ►

persist. And, well, you should understand the mushroom that you see, which mycologists call a carpa for, is just a small part of what a mushroom is.

02:03:08 ►

A mushroom is really a very fine network

02:03:12 ►

of spider-like material, cobwebby material,

02:03:15 ►

that’s under the soil.

02:03:17 ►

And it can stay like that for decades, no problem,

02:03:21 ►

growing, vegetatingly propagating itself

02:03:24 ►

the way a house plant is vegetatively propagated

02:03:28 ►

no sexual reproduction involved there

02:03:31 ►

just an individual getting bigger and bigger

02:03:34 ►

last year you may recall they reported

02:03:37 ►

some of these mushroom clones that were acres in size

02:03:40 ►

and weighed more than a sperm whale

02:03:43 ►

and were in fact the world’s largest organisms were these

02:03:47 ►

enormous fungal individuals sleeping in the Oregon forest for uncounted eons dreaming

02:03:56 ►

you know nightmarish dreams that were or no I’m sorry what I know the mind boggles to the point where I lost my thread in the thing

02:04:13 ►

oh the natural history of the mushroom so then what I was saying the mushroom is something is

02:04:19 ►

like something that happens when this fungal mat this mycelial network gets in the mood for

02:04:25 ►

sunbathing and sexual thrills and and so then it undergoes it undergoes

02:04:33 ►

dikaryotic self-expression the the genetics of fungi are somewhat complex

02:04:41 ►

to the point where I never really have understood it myself.

02:04:45 ►

They’re not like you and me, let’s just put it like that.

02:04:49 ►

And then it fruits, it fruits.

02:04:52 ►

That’s what the carpa-4 is, or it’s also called a fruiting body.

02:04:56 ►

And in a Stropharia cubensis mushroom,

02:04:59 ►

a single mushroom can shed up to three million spores a minute for 6 weeks

02:05:05 ►

and so it’s a truly astonishing deal

02:05:10 ►

and they’re at the bottom of the food chain

02:05:13 ►

they’re primary decomposers

02:05:15 ►

if you were a Buddhist

02:05:18 ►

with a hyper degree in molecular biology

02:05:22 ►

you were trying to design a karma-free body, you would have

02:05:27 ►

to become a fungus because they are the only blameless members of the food chain because

02:05:34 ►

they exist on dead matter. They don’t destroy anything. They don’t live off living material. And the spore is this tiny microscopic capsule of genetic material

02:05:51 ►

that is surrounded by an organic layer of material

02:05:55 ►

that’s as electron-dense as many metals.

02:05:59 ►

And I maintain that these spores, in fact fact percolate through space, that they can survive the conditions

02:06:08 ►

of extraterrestrial environments. If you want to store mushroom spores, you essentially

02:06:14 ►

store them in liquid nitrogen. It’s about as outer space-ish as it gets. And you can

02:06:21 ►

calculate, you know, if a single mushroom sheds three million spores a minute for six weeks, I’m telling you, there are a lot of spores being shed into the terrestrial environment.

02:06:35 ►

And then they percolate and some percolate out into the outer atmosphere where they become involved in highly energetic events that actually detach them from the terrestrial environment.

02:06:48 ►

And I think one of the easy predictions you can make,

02:06:54 ►

it’s like a knockoff,

02:06:56 ►

and yet it would be the cover of Time magazine,

02:07:00 ►

it’s perfectly obvious that space is no barrier

02:07:04 ►

to certain viruses and spores

02:07:07 ►

and that one of the future

02:07:10 ►

revolutions of biology will be

02:07:12 ►

this will somehow be proven

02:07:14 ►

it’s always puzzled me

02:07:18 ►

and some of you have heard me talk about it

02:07:20 ►

that psilocybin is an indole

02:07:25 ►

which is phosphorylated in the four position.

02:07:29 ►

This is chemist talk,

02:07:32 ►

but the important thing for our discussion is

02:07:35 ►

it is the only four-substituted phosphorylation

02:07:39 ►

of an indole on this planet.

02:07:43 ►

And that’s very weird.

02:07:45 ►

Why?

02:07:47 ►

You know, the way it would expect chemical evolution to work

02:07:51 ►

is if you have molecule A,

02:07:53 ►

then you should find molecule sort of A

02:07:57 ►

and nearly A and A plus 1 and A plus 2.

02:08:02 ►

But here’s a molecule just boing.

02:08:04 ►

It has no near relatives

02:08:06 ►

I think

02:08:08 ►

one kind of mentality

02:08:09 ►

looks for extraterrestrial life

02:08:11 ►

by sifting for radio signals

02:08:14 ►

with the telescope

02:08:15 ►

I think if you

02:08:17 ►

one way to look for an

02:08:19 ►

extraterrestrial thumbprint

02:08:21 ►

would be to search

02:08:23 ►

make a thorough molecular

02:08:25 ►

category of the molecule categorizing of the molecules on this planet to see if

02:08:30 ►

there’s anything that looks like it blew in from somewhere else and psilocybin

02:08:36 ►

would be a strong candidate what is it doing in some 40 species of mushroom

02:08:43 ►

there are hundreds of species of mushrooms

02:08:45 ►

which do not contain psilocybin,

02:08:48 ►

proving, therefore, that psilocybin is not somehow

02:08:51 ►

a necessity for fungal existence.

02:08:55 ►

Well, then, if you believe that evolution operates

02:08:57 ►

with a certain economy,

02:08:59 ►

then why do these 40 species furiously dedicate a major portion of their metabolic budget

02:09:07 ►

to making a metabolite that seems to have no purpose?

02:09:15 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

02:09:17 ►

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

02:09:21 ►

Well, I wasn’t going to make any comments after such a long program, but I can’t

02:09:27 ►

resist just this one. Do you remember, I guess it was about halfway through this talk where Terrence

02:09:33 ►

said, people who are 18 to 28 are the most with it generation in a while. Now, need I point out that

02:09:41 ►

since Terrence said that in 1993, this means that he was talking about the generation whose age range is now 38 to 48.

02:09:50 ►

In other words, the age group of the majority of people seemingly in charge of things right now.

02:09:56 ►

So, hey, you middle-aged ravers, why don’t you stand up and be counted?

02:10:01 ►

You know, there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of people who are really on your side.

02:10:07 ►

They think like you, and they’re either younger or older than you,

02:10:09 ►

but they have either a past or prime like me,

02:10:13 ►

or they’re still trying to find a position or work their way into the society somehow.

02:10:18 ►

And I have no idea what you can do to begin making a difference

02:10:22 ►

for the seven generations that will be following us.

02:10:25 ►

But you do, I’m sure of it.

02:10:27 ►

So let’s get going, as Terrence often said, and not a moment too soon.

02:10:34 ►

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

02:10:37 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

357 - Fungi Questions

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:20 ► §

00:00:23 ► §

00:00:34 ► §

00:00:41 ► §

00:00:45 ► §

00:00:52 ► §

00:00:57 ► §

00:01:05 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:24 ► §

00:01:25 ► §

00:01:29 ► §

00:01:36 ► §

00:01:49 ► §

00:01:53 ► §

00:01:56 ► §

00:02:01 ► §

00:02:03 ► §

00:02:09 ► §

00:02:14 ► §

00:02:16 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:24 ► §

00:02:25 ► §

00:02:32 ► §

00:02:40 ► §

00:02:47 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:59 ► §

00:03:04 ► §

00:03:08 ► §

00:03:15 ► §

00:03:18 ► §

00:03:21 ► §

00:03:25 ► §

00:03:32 ► §

00:03:39 ► §

00:03:41 ► §

00:03:45 ► §

00:03:51 ► §

00:03:57 ► §

00:04:03 ► §

00:04:05 ► §

00:04:11 ► §

00:04:15 ► §

00:04:28 ► §

00:04:34 ► §

00:04:48 ► §

00:04:53 ► §

00:04:54 ► §

00:05:00 ► §

00:05:04 ► §

00:05:15 ► §

00:05:25 ► §

00:05:31 ► §

00:05:36 ► §

00:05:48 ► §

00:05:54 ► §

00:06:01 ► §

00:06:05 ► §

00:06:13 ► §

00:06:20 ► §

00:06:34 ► §

00:06:47 ► §

00:06:53 ► §

00:07:00 ► §

00:07:06 ► §

00:07:09 ► §

00:07:12 ► §

00:07:16 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:20 ►

00:00:23 ►

00:00:34 ►

00:00:41 ►

00:00:45 ►

00:00:52 ►

00:00:57 ►

00:01:05 ►

00:01:12 ►

00:01:18 ►

00:01:24 ►

00:01:25 ►

00:01:29 ►

00:01:36 ►

00:01:49 ►

00:01:53 ►

00:01:56 ►

00:02:01 ►

00:02:03 ►

00:02:09 ►

00:02:14 ►

00:02:16 ►

00:02:21 ►

00:02:24 ►

00:02:25 ►

00:02:32 ►

00:02:40 ►

00:02:47 ►

00:02:52 ►

00:02:59 ►

00:03:04 ►

00:03:08 ►

00:03:15 ►

00:03:18 ►

00:03:21 ►

00:03:25 ►

00:03:32 ►

00:03:39 ►

00:03:41 ►

00:03:45 ►

00:03:51 ►

00:03:57 ►

00:04:03 ►

00:04:05 ►

00:04:11 ►

00:04:15 ►

00:04:28 ►

00:04:34 ►

00:04:48 ►

00:04:53 ►

00:04:54 ►

00:05:00 ►

00:05:04 ►

00:05:15 ►

00:05:25 ►

00:05:31 ►

00:05:36 ►

00:05:48 ►

00:05:54 ►

00:06:01 ►

00:06:05 ►

00:06:13 ►

00:06:20 ►

00:06:34 ►

00:06:47 ►

00:06:53 ►

00:07:00 ►

00:07:06 ►

00:07:09 ►

00:07:12 ►

00:07:16 ►

00:07:19 ►

00:07:22 ►

00:07:27 ►