Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I think if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we’ll discover is it’s an inter-species communication system.”
“I’m at war with the keepers of the secrets.”
“One of the motivations for my career is to get other people to check [DMT] out, because here is truly confounding data that you don’t have to make an expedition to the heart of the Amazon, or battle your way through hours of waves of nausea and dark spaces, chanting your mantra obsessively. I mean, when you smoke DMT, 30 seconds later you’re in the presence of the unspeakable, and the show is going full blast.”
“It really frustrates me when people have psychedelic experiences and don’t talk about them, because to me, that’s what they’re for. They’re to fertilize the enterprise of communication. It’s to be talked about. And if it’s not talked about it’s sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground.”
“I think that the world is held together by a misunderstanding.”
“The real trick with an extraterrestrial is to know when you’re in the presence of one.”
“If you want the real thing, it’s just five dried grams away. The REAL THING!”
“The New Age, generally I find, is somewhat obnoxious, because it’s a flight from the psychedelic experience.”
“I love science. I just think it’s incredibly pretentious and has claimed too much.”
“It’s astonishing the cul de sacs into which the human mind has wandered.”
“The psychedelic thing speaks to freedom, and so you can shine that on a number of issues.”
Contact in the Desert
“The Planet’s Premier UFO Convention”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Now, first of all, I’d like to apologize to any of our fellow salonners who may have had trouble downloading my last podcast.
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As you might have guessed, my server crashed.
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You know, I’d actually just checked it before I went to bed that night, but by morning it was offline and had to be rebooted.
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And this sometimes happens, well, simply because of the large number of simultaneous connections being made.
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At any given moment, there are several hundred people downloading one or more of these podcasts,
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and sometimes when I post a new program, particularly a long one like my last podcast, the additional
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load on the server brings it down.
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But since right now we aren’t in a position to get a
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bigger server, I’ve decided to follow the advice of, well, several of our fellow salonners over the
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last months have suggested that I process these talks in mono format rather than stereo. And while
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this may distort my own voice a little in these sections here because I add background music,
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it should have no effect on the main talk, and in the process it hopefully will reduce the file size of
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these programs enough so that it will make it a little easier for you to download, particularly
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on a low bandwidth connection.
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So I’ll give this a try for a little while and we’ll see how it works.
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Also I’m not going to do such long programs anymore if I can help it,
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and what that means is that I’m going to break the remaining part of the workshop that we’ve
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been listening to into two parts and put one out today and hopefully one more tomorrow.
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But before I get to today’s program, there are a couple of important announcements that I think
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you might be interested in. The first one is about a conference that is going to take place
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and is called Contact in the Desert.
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It’s going to be held at Joshua Tree, California,
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in August from the 9th to the 11th, and that’s this year, 2013.
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I’ll put a link to it in the program notes for this podcast,
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which you know you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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And in my next podcast, I’ll tell you a little bit more about it. But in brief, it’s going to
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be a three-day conference that covers such interesting topics as the possibility of ancient
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aliens here on Earth, human origins, crop circles, alien abductions, and of course, UFOs. Not only,
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of course, are there going to be a lot of well-known researchers into these topics that will be speaking at the conference,
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but I already know several of our fellow salonners who are going to be there.
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And since the next podcast is going to be a bit shorter than this one, I’ll tell you more about it then.
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However, if you are interested, you may want to make your reservations now,
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because I understand that it looks like it’s going to be a very well attended conference.
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Actually, the URL for this event is quite easy to remember. It’s
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contactinthedesert.net. That’s C-O-N-T-A-C-T-I-N-T-H-E-D-E-S-E-R-T.
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.net.
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Contactinthedesert.net. All one word. Now the other announcement that I want to make
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concerns the upcoming Palenque Norte lectures that will be held at this year’s Burning Man
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Festival. A few weeks ago I read a list of the confirmed speakers so far, and I’ll update that
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again in another few weeks so that you know some of what to expect in the way of talks from the salon this
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fall and winter when I’ll be podcasting most of the more than 30 lectures that will be held there.
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However, there’s one small difficulty between here and there, and while the theme camp that
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is hosting the talks will be raising a substantial amount of money in the form of
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contributions from people who’ll be camping there to pay for their infrastructure,
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in the form of contributions from people who will be camping there to pay for their infrastructure,
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they aren’t going to be able to quite raise enough money to purchase the large circus tent that’s going to be needed to house the lectures.
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And for that, the camp organizers have launched an Indiegogo campaign
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that, well, I’m afraid it hasn’t started off as well as we’d hoped.
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So, if you want to be a part of this year’s Palenque Norte lectures,
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even if you can’t make it to Burning Man yourself,
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a small contribution to the infrastructure
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would be most welcome.
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And again, I’ll put a link to that campaign
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in today’s program notes,
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but the URL, if you want to go to it now,
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slash projects slash
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and here’s a long one.
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It’s a whole bunch of words that you can remember.
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Returning vision to the human enterprise Planque Norte.
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But there’s a dash between each one of those words.
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Returning dash, vision dash, to dash, the dashuman-Enterprise-Planque-Norte.
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I think that’s the longest URL that I’ve ever read here in a podcast.
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But if you go there, even if you aren’t able to make a donation,
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you’ll be able to watch an interesting little video about Planque Norte.
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But don’t delay too long, because I think there’s only about two weeks left in the campaign.
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Now, let’s get on with the show and pick up with the next-to-last part of a weekend workshop
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that Terrence McKenna led in August of 1993.
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And we’ll join the Bard McKenna as he begins to talk about what he calls this psychedelic thing.
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to Bard McKenna as he begins to talk about what he calls this psychedelic thing.
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I think when we finally, if we ever tease apart this psychedelic thing, what we’ll discover is it’s an interspecies communication system, that life is a seamless web of signal transduction,
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web of signal transduction and that we somehow have become isolated from this process by our historical pathology and so for us the voices have grown mute we can’t get the signal and
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consequently you know it’s a it’s a pretty grim row to hoe.
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There’s a curve with the introduction of every drug of great expectation.
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I mean, once it was Miltown and then, you know, Valium and then something else.
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And usually once as your data sample swells, you begin to see the negative effects of these things.
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I’m sort of not the person to ask this because I’m very, some people have said, blindly prejudiced in favor of plants.
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But I just think human beings have evolved in the presence of living systems and that that’s a very good filter to pass drugs through.
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The question, do they occur in living systems? I mean, God knows there’s enough stress built
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into modern life. It’s like a stress production machine. I’m constantly trying to tell myself
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that we’re having a good time now
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and that this is what it’s all about.
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If I may go off on a tear here,
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I followed with interest the crop circle phenomenon in England.
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And recently a book has been written by an American called Around
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in Circles and it basically it buries the crop circle phenomenon if your metaphysic
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was hanging on this you better head for cover in a hurry But the most interesting figure to me in the controversy was this British
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meteorologist Terence Meaton, who at the beginning his position was, this is the wind. These
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things are vortices caused by heat convection and they are capable of swirling the wheat
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Into these patterns he was you see a reductionist. He was saying there’s nothing unusual going on here
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so forth and so on well then as
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the phenomenon got rolling
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the the circles became more and more elaborate and
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the circles became more and more elaborate.
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And Meaton, always being asked by the media to explain these things,
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came to insist that
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once he eventually electrified his vortices
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and they became plasma vortices,
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a rare natural phenomenon
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disputed by some
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whether it even exists or not
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and once he had in place
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the concept of the plasma vortex
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no matter how elaborate
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the crop circles became
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straight lines, triangles, triangles
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in triangles
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Meaton could always explain
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that if you were cognizant
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of the higher mathematics
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which ruled the world of plasma physics,
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this was all perfectly straightforward
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and in fact predictable from theory.
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And this went on until the BBC
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made a crop circle
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and then took him out to it
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and got him to certify it as genuine
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and to lecture on the various features
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which made it impossible for human beings
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to create such a structure
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and then revealed to him
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that it was in fact artificial
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now if you’ll repeat your question,
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I’ll connect this up to it.
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Well, that’s an interesting question.
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So far we’ve had this cheerful little scenario
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where the monkey descends to the bottom of the tree,
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empty of tummy,
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and lo and behold, here is this mushroom.
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And I called it, I I think an extraordinary confluence
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of events or some weasel term like that what I was skirting around is the issue of was this
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simply a wonderfully fortuitous confluence of events or was this a thickening of the plot was
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this a bringing together of two elements that had been designed to meet each other
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in the councils of the galactarians
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eons before somewhere else?
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I don’t know.
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It does appear to be a viral catalyst
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for technological civilization.
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You know, you give it to a monkey
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and 15,000 years later
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they’re landing instruments
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on their nearest planetary neighbor.
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I had a professor in college
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who said what he thought it was all about
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was that someday flying saucers
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would visit the earth
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and they would take all the fissionable material away.
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And they would just then explain that human history
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was a project to concentrate fissionable material
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for their purposes.
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And now thank you very much.
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And you people can go back to picking fleas
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and beating each other’s brains out as far as we’re concerned.
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We do that.
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There’s a technique for extracting gold
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out of very low-grade gold ore
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where what you do is you crush the gold
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into a watery slurry
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and then you infect this gold,
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muddy gold-laden water
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with a kind of bacterium that concentrates gold in its body tissues.
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And then you stir this up and cook it up
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and then you just skim off the bacteria
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and harvest the gold out of their body tissues.
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So, you know, yeah, I actually lost the thread of that
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my point was that if you’re committed enough to a hypothesis
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no matter how the data can twist and turn
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you can fit it to the hypothesis
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I find it possible
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to entertain the idea
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that the mushroom actually is some kind of extraterrestrial thing.
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I mean, after all, we don’t really know what the nature of the cosmic situation is.
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We don’t know whether life arises wherever conditions are okay.
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We don’t know how chaotic the universe is.
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Like, do most planets get
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10 hundred million year shots
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at stability where they can
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get higher animals together
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before some comet or
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geomagnetic reversal or something
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flips it over?
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I do think that if,
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you know, if you wanted, if you were an extraterrestrial and you had an ethos of non-invasiveness and you wanted to have a very low-key interaction with an intelligent species, the way to do it would be to come at it through an intoxication. You know, you don’t appear with trillion-ton beryllium ships
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over major cities.
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We have been studying you for 50,000 years.
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I don’t think it’s done like that.
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I think it’s more like
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you find a dimension
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in the cultural world of the species you’re trying to study
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where weirdness is sanctioned
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and then you set up your lemonade stand
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in that world.
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In this case, the world of psychedelic intoxication.
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Well, I’m not sure it’s all about their purpose.
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Like everybody assumes their purpose
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is to communicate with us. It seems to me if their purpose is to communicate with us,
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they could have just communicated with us. Their purpose appears to be to influence or
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to observe. My purpose is to tell all secrets. I’m at war with the keepers of the secrets it’s one way of
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looking at it I don’t think they’ve done it to another species it seems that you
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know what they are is they’re mean traders on one level and they come they
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blown in here and they have this intentionality to communicate.
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The content of the DMT experience is where this contact becomes much more explicit,
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more puzzling, more alien, and more strange.
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What’s happening with psilocybin usually is a voice,
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and a voice you can handle,
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because if it doesn’t speak in English, you can’t understand it. So it must operate within a certain
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narrow band of rational apprehendability, or you lose it and it makes no sense. On the other hand a visual input can go off the beam of rational apprehendability and
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you’re still looking at it you know as it loses coherency and tentacle sprout and chelicery snap
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and hexagonal eyeballs roll by and then it gets its fix back on. Oh, excuse me for a moment. I nearly lost my face, as it were.
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And the content of the DMT thing is really puzzling.
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I mean, one of the motivations for my career
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is to get other people to check it out
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because here is truly confounding data that you don’t have to make an expedition to
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the heart of the Amazon or battle your way through hours of waves of nausea in dark spaces chanting
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your mantra obsessively I mean when you smoke DMT 30 seconds later you’re in the presence of the unspeakable and the show is going full blast
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I mean these tyke-like self-transforming machine-elf things
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that rush forward to exhibit their rhetorical skills
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in a three-dimensional language that you look at rather than hear.
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And they offer you, you know, the technological artifactory of another dimension. Fabergé eggs
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and Ming dynasty ories and just the most amazing fabricated objects which they make out of language.
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They demonstrate language in another dimension.
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That’s why I really think that part of what we’re moving toward
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is technological only in the most fundamental sense.
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It’s going to arise out of the body.
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The project of language in human beings
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is only partially completed.
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It doesn’t have to stop at little mouth noises.
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There’s a way to pass over into something more grandiose,
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more enclosing, more boundary dissolving,
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more emotionally intense.
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What I always tell to people who are really dedicates and it’s deep
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advice is, you know, go to the Amazon. And the mere act of placing yourself in the Amazon is
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pretty psychedelic in and of itself. And then, you know, as you make your way through these
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colorful personalities that are the Peruvian people and their medical
00:18:26 ►
practitioners. All kinds of adventures happen and then eventually if you’re lucky you actually
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get to the good brew and it will sweep you, just knock your pins right out from under
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you, sweep you screaming into the cataracts of perturbability well it may be
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it may be
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I mean you have to take a number
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if you want to accuse me
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you just don’t elbow your way to the front of the line like that
00:19:01 ►
I don’t have any problem with the idea that dance is the primary,
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is the primary language. What it’s all, cognitive activity is the term that I prefer. Clearly we had
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an animal existence of a very limited number of concerns, know not to be killed to feed our children
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to get sufficient sex and like that and then we broke through to something else and
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self-expression and i think people danced for each other did glossolalia for each other, did glossolalia for each other, body painted, made faces, did all of these things.
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And for a long, long time before meaning was invented.
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And the reason language got a special position in all this is that it’s easier to make
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small mouth noises than it is to dance.
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It’s easier to make small mouth noises
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than it is to make faces
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or gestures.
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So it was an energy economy thing.
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But self-expression comes out of the body.
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And dance, you’re probably right very well was
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primary I think where my fetish lies if there’s a genuine accusation in all of
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this but I it’s as like any fetishist I will defend it is it is for the visual
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people say you know,
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why do you always insist that you have to have hallucinations?
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Why are you so bent
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about the visual connection?
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Well, the answer is
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a voice in the head
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or a funny bunch of thoughts.
00:21:00 ►
Like for me, that’s what LSD was.
00:21:02 ►
It was for very odd kinds of thinking but it all of
00:21:07 ►
these things could be generated out of my own psyche but i am pretty familiar with the inventory
00:21:14 ►
of my psyche as far as its image bank is concerned and because it’s drawn like yours is from the
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culture you know it only stretches so far from Hieronymus Bosch to Andy Warhol
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and all the themes in between.
00:21:30 ►
Well, so then when you turn on psilocybin
00:21:33 ►
and you get these bursts of the,
00:21:36 ►
I’ve never seen anything like that before,
00:21:40 ►
then that convinces me that this is the real McCoy
00:21:45 ►
so the fetish for the visual
00:21:49 ►
is pretty real I think
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the object fetishism
00:21:54 ►
these things aren’t exactly objects
00:21:57 ►
you have to understand that we download
00:22:00 ►
through many levels of compression
00:22:03 ►
in order to sit in this room
00:22:05 ►
and talk about such outlandish things.
00:22:09 ►
I mean, I describe them as objects
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like Fabergé eggs made of agate,
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chalcedony, and ivory,
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but I could just as easily have described them
00:22:19 ►
as ponds interlocking
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in a dance of casuistry, reflexive meaning,
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and filiological entendre of great satisfying depth.
00:22:38 ►
Something like that.
00:22:41 ►
You see, I mean, because they’re both and.
00:22:43 ►
I mean, things are exist in
00:22:45 ►
another dimension and if I don’t do the best job I mean if I if I could make it
00:22:53 ►
weirder for you I would people say you know you evoke images very well to
00:23:00 ►
sometimes that’s the defeat of rhetoric because what we’re really talking about is in fact so hard to invoke.
00:23:08 ►
We’re really pushing the envelope of language.
00:23:12 ►
It really frustrates me
00:23:14 ►
when people have psychedelic experiences
00:23:16 ►
and don’t talk about them
00:23:18 ►
because to me that’s what they’re for.
00:23:22 ►
They’re to fertilize the enterprise of communication it’s to be talked
00:23:28 ►
about and and if it’s not talked about it’s sort of like seeds which fall on sterile ground yeah
00:23:37 ►
well I’ve heard I’ve heard it this is also said about the Maya it was said even about the dinosaurs which doesn’t it doesn’t mean
00:23:48 ►
it can’t happen I don’t know if it I don’t know if I believe it ever has happened obviously I
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believe in principle it can happen I believe you know it has always seemed to me that this we used to be the motivation for my LSD taking it seemed
00:24:07 ►
to me that you could sit down in a room with someone and begin to this is maybe what I’m
00:24:13 ►
trying to do with you but we never get there sit down in a room with someone and begin to conversation that would take it apart take it apart and leave no nothing there you know at the
00:24:31 ►
end no guru no method no teacher and no nothing else either uh i think that the world is held
00:24:40 ►
together by a misunderstanding and that if you could overcome
00:24:45 ►
that misunderstanding
00:24:47 ►
it would just fold up
00:24:51 ►
and deconstruct
00:24:53 ►
and that in a sense
00:24:55 ►
this is what the concept of enlightenment is
00:24:57 ►
I think it’s a series of insights
00:25:01 ►
or thoughts
00:25:02 ►
or revelations
00:25:04 ►
one which projects forward into another, which
00:25:07 ►
leads you to just say, oh, it’s not this, and it’s not that, and it’s not this, and
00:25:14 ►
then, yeah. Well, I guess the mundane plane is the misunderstanding. It’s, And I guess then if we analyze the mundane plane, we see what constitutes the
00:25:29 ►
misunderstanding. A belief in three-dimensional space and time, a belief in the finite life of
00:25:39 ►
the organism, and then the rupture of the mundane plane leads to this kind of platonic super space
00:25:50 ►
where there seems then to rest incontrovertible truths.
00:25:57 ►
They are not truths approached by logic and argument.
00:26:01 ►
They are self-evidently true. So they’re either true for you or they’re not true
00:26:09 ►
and shamanism then sort of views all this very optimistically takes the existence of this transmundane world as a higher world,
00:26:28 ►
a world in which healing can be done and the community can be made to cohere.
00:26:36 ►
And the shaman is essentially a technician,
00:26:42 ►
wiring and repairing and moving behind the board of culture
00:26:49 ►
keeping all these lines open
00:26:51 ►
and together
00:26:53 ►
is that where your interest lies?
00:26:55 ►
yes I see
00:26:57 ►
so apparently
00:26:59 ►
it seems to me that it looks like
00:27:02 ►
mind is something
00:27:03 ►
that if we were to make an analogy,
00:27:06 ►
it’s somewhat like sulfur in that sulfur has this weird quality of having two melting points.
00:27:14 ►
You have solid yellow sulfur and you heat it and it melts.
00:27:20 ►
But then you keep heating it and it turns back into a solid.
00:27:26 ►
And you continue heating it and it turns back into a solid and you continue heating it and it melts again
00:27:28 ►
this is a curious property of sulfur
00:27:30 ►
but not magical
00:27:32 ►
the human mind
00:27:34 ►
seems to me to be like that
00:27:36 ►
it’s something that in the mundane plane
00:27:38 ►
it has collapsed
00:27:40 ►
down into a tool for threat
00:27:42 ►
detection and
00:27:44 ►
social account keeping, basically.
00:27:48 ►
But when you go alone or with your nearest and dearest
00:27:53 ►
to wilderness or places where you feel secure
00:27:58 ►
and you perturb the chemical foundations of consciousness,
00:28:03 ►
then this is the equivalent of heating the sulfur.
00:28:07 ►
And lo and behold, a new geometry is cast
00:28:11 ►
out of the fluid mercury of the psychedelicized mind.
00:28:18 ►
And I think I said this morning,
00:28:22 ►
I really favor a geometric model.
00:28:24 ►
I think that the shaman’s power
00:28:26 ►
comes from the fact that the shamans
00:28:28 ►
really are seeing things
00:28:31 ►
from a higher dimensional perspective.
00:28:33 ►
That that’s not a metaphor or an analogy,
00:28:36 ►
that that’s the voice of mathematics speaking.
00:28:39 ►
And because as I analyze
00:28:43 ►
the history of biology
00:28:46 ►
and higher animals and culture and so forth,
00:28:50 ►
what I see as a continuous theme from the very beginning
00:28:53 ►
is the conquest of dimensionality.
00:28:58 ►
Life conquers dimensions.
00:29:01 ►
Life begins as a fixed slime in one place
00:29:04 ►
with no eyes, no ears, no nothing,
00:29:07 ►
and it evolves tactile awareness. Then it slowly becomes through the sequestering of pigment
00:29:16 ►
sensitive cells onto its surface. It acquires the notion of a gradient of light and darkness.
00:29:22 ►
And then through the formation of lenses it’s able to stabilize
00:29:27 ►
an impression of the exterior world it evolves progressively more advanced forms of locomotion
00:29:34 ►
eventually it evolves memory and complex cognitive interior maps for anticipating the future. This is a description of a strategy for the conquest
00:29:46 ►
of dimensionality. And I think really the shamans are the people among us who represent
00:29:53 ►
the next evolutionary level. They are people who have learned to do what we can’t do, to come and go from hyperspace,
00:30:06 ►
whatever it is,
00:30:07 ►
an informational superspace
00:30:09 ►
that exists inside the psychology
00:30:13 ►
of the individual and the group
00:30:16 ►
that we can’t even see
00:30:18 ►
because we’re materialists
00:30:20 ►
fixated on the topological surfaces
00:30:23 ►
of the three-dimensional manifold, which is only one level in the onion of reality. These shamans have moved over to another level, but I think they are the paradigm for a new authentication of the human of the human experience and it’s all about
00:30:48 ►
experience this is what we clearly have wandered too far from we are two in our
00:30:53 ►
heads the consequences of a phonetic alphabet monotheism modern science Greek
00:31:00 ►
aesthetics yada yada yada is just to move us too far from experience.
00:31:06 ►
And so then this compensating thing is coming back in,
00:31:11 ►
and the shaman is the paradigmatic figure.
00:31:14 ►
And when you analyze what shamanism is,
00:31:17 ►
the psychedelic experience is revealed to be the sine qua non of this lifestyle.
00:31:25 ►
I fiddled with screenplays.
00:31:28 ►
My objection to most visions of extraterrestrials
00:31:32 ►
is people don’t understand.
00:31:34 ►
Extraterrestrials are not mundane.
00:31:37 ►
They don’t want our beautiful women.
00:31:42 ►
They don’t have a fascination with our gross industrial
00:31:46 ►
output
00:31:46 ►
the real trick with an extraterrestrial
00:31:50 ►
is to know when you’re in the
00:31:52 ►
presence of one because it is
00:31:54 ►
going to be so strange
00:31:55 ►
and of such a different order of
00:31:58 ►
magnitude in many
00:32:00 ►
parameters that
00:32:01 ►
the trick is recognition
00:32:04 ►
I think I mean eventually we may come to see that many
00:32:08 ►
life forms, that we are not all to be traced back to one blob of germplasm, that, you know,
00:32:16 ►
the warm pond theory. I think the warm pond theory is in for serious revision. I think interesting genes have blown
00:32:26 ►
in here every once in a while
00:32:28 ►
over the millennia
00:32:30 ►
as the earth has ground forward
00:32:32 ►
and of course those genes get
00:32:34 ►
embedded in living systems.
00:32:36 ►
The mitochondria
00:32:38 ►
which power the animal cell
00:32:40 ►
were originally free
00:32:42 ►
swimming bacteria that
00:32:44 ►
got into a symbiotic relationship
00:32:46 ►
with some kind of membrane-like matrix
00:32:49 ►
and before they knew it
00:32:51 ►
they had been incorporated
00:32:52 ►
as subcellular organelles
00:32:54 ►
of a larger system.
00:32:57 ►
Mind that this doesn’t happen to you.
00:33:03 ►
Yeah.
00:33:10 ►
Well, isn’t it it’s the role of the artist it’s to stretch the envelope it’s to bring the news from the edge i mean the musician the shaman the smith the physician these were all originally
00:33:19 ►
combined you know because the mystery of creation and the mystery of the human body this was all spun
00:33:26 ►
together that’s why when people say you know what is the proper response to the culture crisis I
00:33:33 ►
think the response is to shamanize and that means you know to help with the healing, to explore the invisible world, and to make art, to try to make art,
00:33:50 ►
to try and anticipate the revelatory process
00:33:56 ►
by which the transcendental other is drawing the historical matrix
00:34:01 ►
into an ever clearer reflection of its identity whatever it is
00:34:07 ►
I mean it’s going to come through us somehow we invoke it it’s we’re boring toward it through
00:34:14 ►
the mountain of human history it’s boring toward us we can anticipate it it senses us this is a real relationship
00:34:26 ►
here but it’s a relationship
00:34:28 ►
where illusion must be
00:34:30 ►
shed and shed and shed
00:34:32 ►
about what the other is
00:34:34 ►
well it’s not clear
00:34:38 ►
as I say it’s not clear
00:34:40 ►
what the intent is
00:34:42 ►
after all
00:34:44 ►
what we now take to be
00:34:46 ►
the great canon of Western art
00:34:48 ►
were basically a fairly self-indulgent
00:34:52 ►
bunch of courtly types
00:34:54 ►
spiraling around,
00:34:57 ►
producing public relations flackery
00:35:00 ►
for royal families.
00:35:02 ►
There are different ways of looking
00:35:04 ►
at the artistic enterprise in each time and place.
00:35:11 ►
Well, I maintain history is a self-limiting process
00:35:14 ►
and that you can see the end from here.
00:35:20 ►
You know, you have to have a pretty complicated rap
00:35:23 ►
to deny that we are in some kind of unusual situation here, folks.
00:35:30 ►
Well, that suggests to me that this is awfully close
00:35:35 ►
to the surface of ordinary metabolism,
00:35:38 ►
considering what a shocking shift of consciousness it is.
00:35:44 ►
I mean, millions of people go to the
00:35:46 ►
grave without ever having a DMT trip
00:35:49 ►
unless they have it at the brink of the
00:35:51 ►
grave. That we don’t know about. But the
00:35:53 ►
idea that in a dream such a shockingly
00:35:57 ►
extreme physiological response could be
00:36:01 ►
elicited means, I’ll bet if we could do
00:36:04 ►
human work with DMT unfettered
00:36:08 ►
in an environment of biofeedback and that sort of thing that you could teach people
00:36:14 ►
to have this experience. Well, that may be what it’s all about is, you know, a non-invasive,
00:36:25 ►
is a non-invasive, non-drug technique for just opening up a portion of your brain
00:36:29 ►
that somehow cultural abuse has closed off to us
00:36:37 ►
and that if we could access it, that would be the dream time
00:36:40 ►
and that would be the entry into the domain outside of history yeah the Seth material well I
00:36:50 ►
used to say if you can do this without drugs you’re probably mentally ill I tend to take a
00:36:57 ►
hard view of it I don’t exactly understand the the the the razzmatazz that surrounds it I mean I’ve talked with many
00:37:10 ►
entities I’ve never felt the need to establish the spelling of their English name or you know
00:37:19 ►
this wish to name the entity puzzles me. Or whatever, or whatever.
00:37:27 ►
But I didn’t then write a book and go on Opry
00:37:32 ►
and say that I was channeling Dorothy
00:37:35 ►
and that the world should pay attention.
00:37:38 ►
It seems to me a curious relationship
00:37:40 ►
to your own mental life
00:37:42 ►
that you would say you were a channeler.
00:37:45 ►
I mean, it’s just, these are the things we think,
00:37:49 ►
and it’s a way of casting it.
00:37:54 ►
For instance, it never occurs to me,
00:37:56 ►
or it doesn’t seem to me a very interesting question
00:37:58 ►
to say of the mushroom, is it the same person each time?
00:38:03 ►
I mean, what a joke.
00:38:02 ►
is at the same person each time.
00:38:04 ►
I mean, what a joke.
00:38:12 ►
It’s some kind of enormous intellectual agency.
00:38:15 ►
It’s not a human being.
00:38:17 ►
That’s the thing.
00:38:23 ►
The channeling, I guess my take on channeling is,
00:38:24 ►
and it will come out maybe tonight when we talk about the time wave
00:38:26 ►
is that the real skinny is
00:38:29 ►
that you have a connection
00:38:31 ►
to everybody
00:38:32 ►
who ever lived
00:38:34 ►
and there’s a way of tuning
00:38:36 ►
your internal machinery
00:38:38 ►
in such a way
00:38:40 ►
that you know
00:38:41 ►
here comes Marie Antoinette
00:38:44 ►
or here comes Beethoven but it isn’t that beethoven
00:38:48 ►
is a relative of yours or still less that you were beethoven i mean how likely is that for crying out
00:38:57 ►
loud it’s simply that they’re all there in some cultural super space and can be reached and called down I
00:39:06 ►
mean they’re an idea Beethoven is an idea you know his grumpiness the hands
00:39:13 ►
behind the back the daughter of how we know Beethoven and so he lives in some
00:39:20 ►
kind of super space and I think people are just much too literal
00:39:27 ►
I have this trouble with channeling
00:39:30 ►
and with flying saucer people
00:39:33 ►
and with the fans of great Atlantis
00:39:36 ►
and the people who believe that
00:39:38 ►
you know, lantern-jawed Neanderthal visages
00:39:42 ►
ten miles high are gracing the deserts of Mars.
00:39:47 ►
All of this, the attraction of this kind of thing
00:39:50 ►
completely puzzles me because it’s so hokey.
00:39:55 ►
And if you want the real thing,
00:39:58 ►
you know, it’s just five dried grams away.
00:40:01 ►
The real thing.
00:40:04 ►
I mean, so so that you know
00:40:06 ►
you will have done with
00:40:08 ►
anecdotes by the denizens
00:40:10 ►
of trailer camps in Florida
00:40:12 ►
about
00:40:12 ►
or all of this other stuff
00:40:16 ►
I mean it’s not that the woo woo
00:40:18 ►
isn’t out there
00:40:19 ►
it’s that it’s so much more
00:40:22 ►
woo woo than the
00:40:23 ►
beady eyed peddlers of it assume
00:40:26 ►
that they just have no idea
00:40:29 ►
of what they’re playing with.
00:40:31 ►
The New Age generally I find
00:40:34 ►
somewhat obnoxious
00:40:36 ►
because it’s a flight from the psychedelic experience.
00:40:41 ►
I mean, what you can safely say about the New Age is
00:40:44 ►
if a technique doesn’t work they’ll
00:40:46 ►
proclaim it and it’s certain and I you know I’m very much in favor of anything which breaks down
00:40:58 ►
the conceptions of ordinary medical practice. That’s the most important part of the new age the attack on
00:41:06 ►
the medical fascism
00:41:08 ►
of the hierarchy
00:41:10 ►
but a great
00:41:11 ►
people confuse science
00:41:14 ►
with reason
00:41:15 ►
and think that if you’re anti-science
00:41:18 ►
then you’re somehow
00:41:19 ►
just permitted to go bananas
00:41:22 ►
no
00:41:23 ►
you can be anti-science
00:41:25 ►
but nobody gets released from stuff
00:41:28 ►
like the rules of evidence
00:41:29 ►
you have to make
00:41:32 ►
sense
00:41:33 ►
your position whatever it is
00:41:35 ►
just can’t be sky blue
00:41:37 ►
and you should
00:41:40 ►
then expect to be treated with the
00:41:42 ►
same respect as somebody
00:41:44 ►
who’s gotten themselves
00:41:45 ►
epistemologically together and ontologically oriented i mean there are flaky ideas in this
00:41:54 ►
world and that you know people associate me with the new age because that was the only place where
00:42:00 ►
i was originally tolerated but i really want my ideas to be tested in the ordinary
00:42:08 ►
way by the ordinary methods I mean I offer a mathematical formalism and then surrounding that
00:42:16 ►
a bunch of arm-waving verbal exegesis the core thing is the mathematical algorithm to be tested by the ordinary rules of evidence and falsification.
00:42:29 ►
And, you know, you can read Karl Popper to figure out what all that’s about.
00:42:33 ►
I love science. I just think it’s incredibly pretent conservatism is maddening because what it deals with
00:42:47 ►
is the most interesting thing there is nature nature is very very interesting
00:42:54 ►
complex and permits all kinds of radical speculation about what has happened it’s
00:43:01 ►
just that science is also a business and also a priesthood and also a men’s
00:43:07 ►
club and also the the play thing of certain classes so all that has to be overcome my method
00:43:17 ►
i suppose if method is the word which i would share with you since this question about the new age came up is not to embrace
00:43:28 ►
things which are simply
00:43:31 ►
outrage bourgeois sensibilities
00:43:34 ►
but to explore edges
00:43:37 ►
to test edges yourself
00:43:41 ►
that’s the important, yourself
00:43:43 ►
you don’t learn about tantra
00:43:45 ►
by reading about tantra
00:43:48 ►
or ibogaine
00:43:49 ►
by reading about ibogaine
00:43:51 ►
you have to go and do these things
00:43:54 ►
and what you will discover
00:43:56 ►
is you will be fleeced
00:43:59 ►
a few times in your youth
00:44:01 ►
with this method
00:44:02 ►
you’ll get in with some flying saucer cult
00:44:06 ►
or some beady-eyed guru
00:44:08 ►
and his fanatical devotees,
00:44:11 ►
but eventually you’ll learn the neighborhood
00:44:14 ►
and you’ll become street smart
00:44:16 ►
and you won’t be a mark.
00:44:19 ►
That’s the goal of a real spiritual method
00:44:23 ►
is to not be a mark.
00:44:25 ►
And then when you get that together,
00:44:27 ►
lo and behold,
00:44:30 ►
you would think this would lead to cynicism.
00:44:34 ►
Because you say,
00:44:34 ►
well, I went and I stayed with Babaji
00:44:37 ►
and he was a jackass
00:44:38 ►
and then I joined the Unitarian,
00:44:42 ►
Uniformitarian,
00:44:44 ►
Unifunctionalists
00:44:46 ►
and that was just a scam and so forth and so on.
00:44:48 ►
You would think it would lead to cynicism.
00:44:51 ►
Not if you keep to the edges.
00:44:54 ►
Because eventually you’re going to come to psychedelics.
00:44:58 ►
And then, lo and behold, jackpot!
00:45:02 ►
The real thing.
00:45:04 ►
Weirdness beyond all possibility to comprehend.
00:45:08 ►
You have just won the publisher’s clearing sweepstakes of peculiarity.
00:45:15 ►
I had this happen in the 60s.
00:45:18 ►
I got into a place with LSD where I had this LSD
00:45:21 ►
and I would give my friends one and I would excuse myself and give my friends one, and I would excuse myself,
00:45:26 ►
and I would take one,
00:45:27 ►
and then I would excuse myself to the bathroom
00:45:29 ►
and take five more.
00:45:31 ►
And then I would end up holding their hand all night long,
00:45:35 ►
and I felt weird about it.
00:45:37 ►
I felt like, you know, where is all this stuff going?
00:45:40 ►
It’s like it’s not working.
00:45:41 ►
And when that happened to me,
00:45:43 ►
I just said, it’s time to dry out for a while
00:45:46 ►
and I did and then everything worked normally later one of the weirdest things I’ve encountered
00:45:53 ►
is about one in 20 people don’t react to DMT and you and it looks genetic to me I mean I can’t
00:46:02 ►
believe you could resist that if it’s coming at them the way it comes at me,
00:46:07 ►
nothing could stop it.
00:46:08 ►
And yet they will do it
00:46:10 ►
and take, you know, enormous inhalations
00:46:13 ►
and then say, is this it?
00:46:15 ►
Or, I don’t know, it’s kind of strange,
00:46:17 ►
but it doesn’t seem,
00:46:18 ►
and you’re just like, oh my God, what is this?
00:46:22 ►
So, and one thing to bear in mind in all of this
00:46:26 ►
is that we talk a lot about the mental effects of drugs,
00:46:30 ►
but these drugs are tiny objects.
00:46:34 ►
They are molecules,
00:46:35 ►
and they won’t work unless they find their way
00:46:38 ►
to your synaptic cleft
00:46:40 ►
and find waiting for them there
00:46:43 ►
what are called drug receptors. Think of them as
00:46:47 ►
little outlet holes into which the drug can plug itself. And how many of these little
00:46:55 ►
receptors you have is part of your genetic inheritance. And so some people have a lot
00:47:04 ►
and some people have a lot and some people have
00:47:05 ►
a little and some people have some for some and some have some for others and you have
00:47:09 ►
to learn what works for you and and what your alvarius a large southwestern toad no no no no it is not dmt it’s
00:47:32 ►
five methoxy dmt and it doesn’t cause the same thing that dmt causes it causes an intense void-like emotion that is very dissolving
00:47:46 ►
but it is not accompanied
00:47:48 ►
by the kind of visual activity
00:47:51 ►
that DMT…
00:47:52 ►
The visual activity on DMT
00:47:54 ►
is astonishing.
00:47:56 ►
I mean, it conveys you
00:47:57 ►
into a world more complex
00:47:59 ►
than the world we’re living in.
00:48:01 ►
A world of brilliant colors
00:48:04 ►
and faceted surfaces.
00:48:07 ►
How long is the world?
00:48:08 ►
Yes, but on ayahuasca, unless it’s really horrendously strong,
00:48:13 ►
you will never reach the kinds of places you reach on a DMT flash.
00:48:17 ►
Oh, smoking it.
00:48:19 ►
Smoking it.
00:48:19 ►
No, there is nothing like that, this side of the yawning grave, I hope.
00:48:28 ►
I mean, I don’t know is everybody cognizant
00:48:30 ►
of what that’s like
00:48:31 ►
about how fast the world can be rearranged
00:48:34 ►
and how totally replaced
00:48:36 ►
it can be by something
00:48:38 ►
that you not only hadn’t
00:48:40 ►
imagined until
00:48:42 ►
30 seconds before that
00:48:43 ►
you couldn’t imagine and now here it is and you just
00:48:48 ►
gaze you gape in slack-jawed disbelief at what has happened to reality oh no it doesn’t induce
00:48:56 ►
it it somebody asked you know is it dangerous the danger with dT is death by astonishment this is an entirely possible outcome
00:49:09 ►
of your involvement with it especially if you’re intelligent I think the more intelligent you are
00:49:15 ►
the more at risk you are for death by astonishment because you just say you know good grief but I see that it’s
00:49:27 ►
6.04 and time to knock off
00:49:30 ►
we’ll do the time
00:49:31 ►
wave tonight it’s a kind of
00:49:33 ►
indulgence of me because it’s
00:49:35 ►
the only original idea I’ve ever
00:49:38 ►
had
00:49:38 ►
so you’re forewarned
00:49:42 ►
if you have something better to do
00:49:44 ►
the hardcore will assemble here at 8 and will there be a So you’re forewarned if you have something better to do.
00:49:48 ►
The hardcore will assemble here at 8.
00:49:51 ►
And will there be a technician to boot the disk?
00:49:55 ►
Is there somebody here who’s DOS cool?
00:49:56 ►
Good, okay.
00:50:01 ►
Well, I’m pro-virtual reality just in the sense that I don’t think it should be made illegal and stamped out.
00:50:05 ►
I think it should be a legitimate area of research. I certainly don’t think most people
00:50:11 ►
should plan on decamping to virtual reality land for the rest of much of their lives.
00:50:18 ►
That wouldn’t be a good idea. I see it primarily as a tool for studying language and communication.
00:50:25 ►
You never know where a technology is going to lead.
00:50:29 ►
When Edison invented the phonograph record, his sincere belief was that its major application
00:50:36 ►
would be in the making of wills, because you would have an incontrovertible record of the
00:50:43 ►
person’s voice speaking,
00:50:45 ►
and so it wouldn’t be legally contestable in court.
00:50:48 ►
Well, I don’t know if anybody has ever made a will on a phonograph record, you know.
00:50:52 ►
It clearly had an entirely different use and application.
00:50:58 ►
So here we’ve arrived at Sunday morning.
00:51:01 ►
arrived at Sunday morning this is basically
00:51:03 ►
loose ends
00:51:06 ►
complaints
00:51:09 ►
resolution
00:51:10 ►
that whole
00:51:12 ►
bit
00:51:14 ►
so let’s work
00:51:18 ►
our way into it and then if need
00:51:19 ►
be I’ll harangue
00:51:21 ►
so anybody have anything they want
00:51:24 ►
to yeah
00:51:24 ►
I like understanding i think
00:51:30 ►
you know whitehead said that understanding is the apperception of pattern as such that’s all as such
00:51:39 ►
and so you can look at any situation and see different patterns.
00:51:47 ►
I mean, like in this room, if we were sociologists,
00:51:51 ►
we could analyze where the women are and where the men are,
00:51:55 ►
and that would be a pattern, and we could talk about that.
00:51:58 ►
Then we could switch our field of interest and talk about
00:52:02 ►
where the men and women over 40 are and
00:52:06 ►
the men and women under 40 an entirely different pattern where the people
00:52:11 ►
wearing socks are and the barefoot people and you realize that in any
00:52:16 ►
assemblage of objects there’s an infinite number of patterns of
00:52:22 ►
connection and the more of them you see the more you have this feeling
00:52:28 ►
which we call understanding and it’s a it’s a feeling of having assimilated the object to
00:52:34 ►
yourself and and the great mysterious assemblage the the the mother of all weird assemblages is history
00:52:46 ►
you know
00:52:48 ►
the peregrinations of our species
00:52:51 ►
through time
00:52:52 ►
and the detritus of that journey
00:52:57 ►
I have a friend in London
00:53:00 ►
who’s a rare book dealer
00:53:02 ►
and when I’m in London
00:53:04 ►
I’m usually able to contrive
00:53:06 ►
a situation where
00:53:08 ►
he has to have some errand
00:53:10 ►
out and so then I’m
00:53:12 ►
left alone for hours with
00:53:14 ►
the books inside these multiple
00:53:16 ►
concentric circles of
00:53:17 ►
security and I can
00:53:19 ►
open up all the cases
00:53:21 ►
and pour through
00:53:24 ►
this stuff.
00:53:25 ►
And it’s astonishing.
00:53:27 ►
I mean, just the cul-de-sacs
00:53:31 ►
into which the human mind has wandered, you know,
00:53:36 ►
phlogiston theory,
00:53:39 ►
the Chaldean oracles,
00:53:42 ►
the Wunderkammer,
00:53:44 ►
the hollow earth thing,
00:53:46 ►
and then all this literature of exploration.
00:53:49 ►
I mean, the stratigraphy of the human experience is maps and machines
00:53:56 ►
and diaries and blueprints.
00:54:00 ►
And out of all this, if there can be a pattern,
00:54:04 ►
then there’s a kind of an epiphany,
00:54:07 ►
a kind of a sense of order of,
00:54:10 ►
aha, it does make sense.
00:54:12 ►
It isn’t simply a chaos.
00:54:18 ►
Well, that’s a Hindu notion of this same thing, essentially.
00:54:24 ►
This platonic super dimension where all and
00:54:28 ►
everything is is suspended and in place if you ever want to have a very bizarre sub psychedelic
00:54:38 ►
experience when you’re in Oxford go to the Pitt Rivers Museum everybody goes to the Ashmolean and of
00:54:46 ►
course you should to see the cellos and all that but on the kinkier side the Pitt
00:54:52 ►
Rivers Museum Pitt Rivers was an early ethnographer in England and and into one
00:54:59 ►
of those Victorian cast metal and glass ceilinged buildings he gathered hundreds of millions of
00:55:08 ►
objects classified by category so you know there are like 50,000 needles from
00:55:16 ►
all over the world in drawers 10,000 pairs of pliers from all over the world
00:55:25 ►
from all times
00:55:26 ►
and on and on
00:55:27 ►
and you just
00:55:28 ►
and they’re in drawers
00:55:29 ►
which you can open
00:55:30 ►
and the stuff is stacked up
00:55:32 ►
20 feet high
00:55:33 ►
and you realize
00:55:35 ►
that it’s a concentration of manas
00:55:37 ►
it’s a concrescence
00:55:39 ►
there’s one section
00:55:40 ►
where there are over 200 drawers
00:55:42 ►
labeled magical amulets
00:55:44 ►
and you open these drawers drawers labeled magical amulets and you open these
00:55:46 ►
drawers and look magical amulets southern Iraq magical amulets Syria and on and on very bizarre
00:55:56 ►
that to me is you know searching for pattern through the detritus of human history because I really think that we are
00:56:05 ►
caught up in a relationship with something very, very mysterious. I don’t like religious
00:56:13 ►
vocabularies, but an epiphany is taking place. Something, consciousness is really important and it is using the stuff of biology to create some kind of new order in nature.
00:56:34 ►
And technology, I’m convinced, has something to do with it. are more than they appear to be. And the machine as we have known it
00:56:46 ►
is to a possible technology
00:56:52 ►
what the chipped flint is to the technology that we possess today.
00:56:58 ►
The concept of a machine,
00:57:01 ►
which is downloading of a function into matter,
00:57:09 ►
is a concept of immense profundity. Life may be able to extend its career by orders of magnitude through this means and life is now
00:57:20 ►
seen to be I think clearly central in the evolution and the career of the universe.
00:57:27 ►
Most stars gutter out of existence after 500, 600 million years. That’s the average lifetime
00:57:37 ►
of a star. We happen to be on a planet around an extraordinarily slow-burning and smooth-burning star that has lasted a long time.
00:57:48 ►
But life on this planet has been here for at least two billion years. That’s three times the life of
00:57:57 ►
the average star. Biology is persistent. Biology is a major player and biology
00:58:06 ►
is not entropic
00:58:08 ►
you know
00:58:09 ►
a star no matter how smooth
00:58:11 ►
burning and self-sustaining
00:58:14 ►
is on a downward
00:58:15 ►
energy curve toward heat
00:58:17 ►
death and extinction
00:58:19 ►
biology on the other
00:58:21 ►
hand it pumps itself
00:58:24 ►
to higher and higher levels of complexity
00:58:27 ►
faster and faster.
00:58:29 ►
And it uses the dying stars as stepping stones from one to another.
00:58:36 ►
The way, you know, for instance, in the Hawaiian islands,
00:58:40 ►
there’s 30 million years of evolution visible,
00:58:44 ►
There’s 30 million years of evolution visible,
00:58:50 ►
but no island out there has been above water more than 6 million years. The islands keep slipping beneath the sea
00:58:54 ►
and rising at the western edge of the complex,
00:59:00 ►
and the life keeps stepping from island to island and perpetuating itself.
00:59:08 ►
Hans Moravec has done calculations of the kinds of computational simulations
00:59:16 ►
that could be carried out if you had a computer where every atom was a switch
00:59:22 ►
and the computer was the size of the solar system
00:59:26 ►
with a computer of that size
00:59:28 ►
you could resurrect every DNA sequence
00:59:32 ►
that has ever existed on this planet
00:59:34 ►
and he feels that you would feel a moral obligation
00:59:38 ►
so to do
00:59:39 ►
and that the resurrection of the dead
00:59:43 ►
would become a social project
00:59:46 ►
pursued with government funding.
00:59:48 ►
Yeah.
00:59:51 ►
Well, I don’t think Rupert would agree that biology is entropic.
00:59:56 ►
The way biology works is by being what’s called an open system far from equilibrium.
01:00:04 ►
by being what’s called an open system far from equilibrium.
01:00:10 ►
You see, a closed system, like a star or a fire,
01:00:14 ►
will always drift toward equilibrium, which is entropic. But the miracle of biology is that by taking in matter,
01:00:22 ►
by being an open system and allowing matter to come into the
01:00:27 ►
system and then breaking down that matter and extracting energy from it the
01:00:34 ►
the the biological organism achieves the miracle of evading equilibrium it
01:00:41 ►
hovers off the main curve of equilibrium so people who talk about the third
01:00:47 ►
what?
01:00:49 ►
well this is debatable at the highest level
01:00:52 ►
there’s a problem there
01:00:55 ►
because for some weird reason
01:00:57 ►
the identifiable amount of matter in the universe
01:01:01 ►
falls so close to the cusp of whether of of either it is open or it’s closed
01:01:10 ►
that they can’t tell and why this is probably means there’s something wrong with the theory
01:01:16 ►
you know the bridgeman said if a coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory but I want
01:01:26 ►
to go back for a moment to this question of the open system far from equilibrium
01:01:32 ►
the second law of thermodynamics which was thought to be inviolate states that
01:01:37 ►
all systems run down into entropy but in terms, given the facts I just stated about how life
01:01:48 ►
is three times as persistent than the average star, and that if you view life on this planet
01:01:54 ►
as a single unified system of genes, then we have to say that there has been a dissipative structure far from equilibrium for two billion years.
01:02:11 ►
It’s been able to maintain itself well off the entropic curve.
01:02:15 ►
So I think the second law of thermodynamics
01:02:18 ►
looks much more provisional from that light.
01:02:23 ►
Well, but see, it’s been the third law
01:02:25 ►
that has been the downer.
01:02:27 ►
I mean the second law
01:02:29 ►
because it seems to dictate
01:02:31 ►
some existential terminus to everything.
01:02:35 ►
But see, that’s when you view the universe as matter.
01:02:40 ►
Here’s another thing you have to lay over this.
01:02:44 ►
That all comes out of a materialistic view of
01:02:47 ►
the universe if you view the universe as information the picture becomes much more
01:02:53 ►
complicated we don’t really understand what this process is of symbolic signification of arbitrary assignment of significant association
01:03:08 ►
and it’s not simply something done in human language the codons of the DNA
01:03:13 ►
that code the the three nucleotide codons that code for amino acids that
01:03:21 ►
build proteins are arbitrarily assigned at the molecular level. There is no inherent logic
01:03:29 ►
that says that guanine, guanine, guanine, that codon should code for what it does.
01:03:39 ►
It’s entirely arbitrary and yet out of that leap to arbitrary signification comes life itself
01:03:48 ►
so we shouldn’t assume and it’s a natural tendency to fall back into it that we know what we’re
01:03:55 ►
talking about you know that our intellectual journey through time has taken us to the level
01:04:01 ►
where we can actually glimpse what the basic ordering principle is.
01:04:06 ►
It may lie in language, not matter.
01:04:08 ►
I keep waiting for you to get to the political implications of all this.
01:04:13 ►
Oh, well, I think I passed through it lightly,
01:04:15 ►
but let me take another stab at it.
01:04:20 ►
If my picture of things is correct or even close, then the future is going to become considerably more dramatic from the middle 90s on.
01:04:34 ►
What we have directly in front of us is sort of the long golden garden party afternoon before the news arrives.
01:04:50 ►
afternoon before the news arrives and as the world gets predict more and more peculiar and improbable and given the kind of things going on out at Jupiter that I talked about this seems to
01:04:56 ►
be arriving on schedule all this chaotic activity there’s going to be various political stances arise
01:05:07 ►
in relation to all of this stuff. For instance
01:05:11 ►
one faction will say that nothing
01:05:15 ►
at all is wrong. This is I think
01:05:19 ►
what we see going on now, that there’s a kind of collusion by
01:05:23 ►
governments and institutions
01:05:25 ►
to manage apocalyptic awareness and to say, well, you don’t need to worry about the fact that
01:05:33 ►
ozone is disappearing from the atmosphere because by 2000, we will have a 7% reduction in output of CFCs
01:05:45 ►
and by 2050
01:05:47 ►
we’re planning a further 7%
01:05:50 ►
and you say
01:05:52 ►
no no these are crazy people
01:05:53 ►
obviously
01:05:54 ►
there’s a lot of arranging
01:05:57 ►
the deck chairs on the Titanic
01:06:00 ►
going on
01:06:01 ►
and
01:06:04 ►
but I think eventually that fluctuations, as the fluctuations become more
01:06:13 ►
violent, they will burst through and political dialogues will start on various fronts. It’s
01:06:21 ►
hard to say where it will come. For instance, you know,
01:06:27 ►
historians of the breakup of the Soviet Union
01:06:29 ►
can reasonably argue
01:06:32 ►
that what actually,
01:06:35 ►
the hole in the dike there
01:06:37 ►
was the Chernobyl explosion.
01:06:41 ►
And that actually set off
01:06:43 ►
a series of thoughts of awareness people’s minds changed it was like
01:06:51 ►
a psychedelic drug this radiation spreading through Soviet society because they realized
01:06:59 ►
my god you know this was a power plant. It was at ground level.
01:07:05 ►
It wasn’t even a designed explosion.
01:07:08 ►
And eight days after it happened,
01:07:11 ►
above Auckland, New Zealand,
01:07:13 ►
you could sample the radiation in the air.
01:07:17 ►
So there was a whole crisis of faith
01:07:19 ►
in the command economy,
01:07:21 ►
in everything.
01:07:29 ►
And this could happen, this will happen. The one thing you can be sure of is that the 90s will be shaped by the unexpected. Could be anything, a hot
01:07:37 ►
day in August in Mexico City and a million people die when finally all of these toxic levels come together as they potentially could or it
01:07:48 ►
could be a nuclear failure or it could be an assassination or it could be the outbreak of
01:07:56 ►
a synthetic disease or anything you know and what this will bring home to people is that the meta stable
01:08:11 ►
nature of society is beginning to break down that the shock waves of the future are
01:08:15 ►
building up and what you you know in engineering an airfoil
01:08:20 ►
engineers have to take account of what is called Q forces
01:08:23 ►
vibration If you don’t design the airfoil correctly as you approach the
01:08:27 ►
speed of sound the wings of the airplane will be torn off and so you have to
01:08:32 ►
redesign the airplane to move through this barrier what we have to do is
01:08:38 ►
redesign the cultural airfoil so that we slip what what you mean that it shouldn’t support wrecking the third world
01:08:47 ►
pardon me no see i think that that kind of thing is is like talking about closing air bases near
01:08:55 ►
sacramento and whether western civilization can survive the shock of these this loss of jobs we’re turning into an information society
01:09:08 ►
and managers are trying to meet the crisis
01:09:11 ►
but if my faith rested with human managers
01:09:15 ►
I’d be frantic
01:09:16 ►
the main thing is that the design process
01:09:20 ►
is being imposed by nature itself
01:09:23 ►
just in the way that a supersonic aircraft has
01:09:27 ►
its design imposed by nature itself the nature of the medium is dictating uh the shape of the
01:09:37 ►
society that is coming into being the main thing is to uh try to make this through with as little bloodshed and hysteria as possible.
01:09:48 ►
It’s a very hard call.
01:09:49 ►
I mean, looking at something like Bosnia,
01:09:52 ►
the impulse to use F-18s to correct the problem
01:09:59 ►
is very great.
01:10:01 ►
And yet, in the past,
01:10:03 ►
this has not brought joy and Thanksgiving
01:10:05 ►
where it was used and also the hubris of thinking that you’re you know your job
01:10:13 ►
is to separate these people on the other hand we can’t have people running around
01:10:19 ►
trading nuclear weapons in the red-light district of Frankfurt and which is going
01:10:25 ►
on this is actually going on there is a great potential for chaos on the
01:10:32 ►
Eurasian landmass right now how should that be managed and you know a lot of
01:10:38 ►
people have nuclear weapons who have no business having nuclear weapons. I think we need to disarm from the top.
01:10:46 ►
That’s a political agenda.
01:10:48 ►
And one thing that has to be understood
01:10:52 ►
is that what is going on is a process of fragmentation.
01:10:57 ►
And that is what is supposed to happen
01:10:59 ►
at this cultural stage, I think.
01:11:02 ►
McLuhan talked about what he called electronic feudalism.
01:11:05 ►
Wherever fragmentation is resisted, violence and war and horror will break out. For instance,
01:11:15 ►
five years ago, there was great anticipation of a federal Europe. That ran against the current
01:11:23 ►
of dissolution. And now we see there won’t
01:11:27 ►
be any federal Europe I mean there’ll be something on paper in Brussels to keep
01:11:31 ►
the diplomats shuttling back and forth and there’ll be no unified psychology
01:11:37 ►
they’re going tribal the great political force shaping the 90s on one level is ethnicity and turf battles as
01:11:45 ►
these huge ideologies withdraw their Imperium all these local satrapies and
01:11:54 ►
warlords begin to exercise their historical claims Islam is set to make
01:12:02 ►
enormous gains this has to be accepted in the West. It shouldn’t be resisted. The historical momentum is too great.
01:12:13 ►
And, you know, it’s 700 million people and it represents the only reservoir of tradition of significance left on the planet in terms of a political agenda I mean it’s it’s pretty
01:12:27 ►
clear the psychedelic thing speaks to freedom and so you can shine that on a
01:12:33 ►
number of issues women’s rights abortion legalization of drugs but but I don’t
01:12:43 ►
but not absolute libertarian anarchy because I
01:12:48 ►
don’t think we want to get rid of the Food and Drug Administration we may want
01:12:54 ►
to execute the top echelon and replace it but the concept of you know I mean
01:12:59 ►
I’ve lived in a country without a pure drug act, and it’s a nightmare. In India, you can’t buy pepper
01:13:07 ►
without being afraid that it’s been contaminated
01:13:10 ►
with lead flakes to make it way more
01:13:13 ►
when you buy it in the market.
01:13:15 ►
You have to be more and more unsafe.
01:13:18 ►
Well, but we’ve all had,
01:13:19 ►
none of us ever had a psychedelic experience
01:13:23 ►
in a safe environment.
01:13:24 ►
I mean, we come out of the nightmare ages. None of us ever had a psychedelic experience in a safe environment.
01:13:28 ►
I mean, we come out of the nightmare ages.
01:13:33 ►
I took psychedelic drugs under the aegis of Richard Milhouse Nixon.
01:13:37 ►
I mean, I’ve stared archetypal danger in the face. I took psychedelics under Indira Gandhi.
01:13:41 ►
That was…
01:13:42 ►
Well, see, here’s the bottom line on this.
01:13:50 ►
It’s exactly, and I’ve said this ad nauseum,
01:13:53 ►
but I can’t think of another metaphor for it.
01:13:57 ►
It’s exactly like a birth.
01:14:00 ►
And so what you have when you have a birth is
01:14:04 ►
it’s going to happen
01:14:06 ►
and then the only option you have
01:14:09 ►
is it going to happen smoothly
01:14:12 ►
and with skillful pain management
01:14:16 ►
and quickly brought to a conclusion
01:14:21 ►
or is it just going to be an opera
01:14:23 ►
of agony and hysteria and pleading and so forth and so on?
01:14:28 ►
And the way to ease the historical crisis is by spreading awareness.
01:14:37 ►
And you’re right, the psychedelic is the primary catalyst.
01:14:40 ►
And then what follows along is this vocabulary of relax for crying out loud and if hearing the word
01:14:49 ►
relax is enough then so be it if you have to have the time wave and you know all this mathematics
01:14:56 ►
to prove to yourself that you should relax then that’s fine too but the bottom line is that we’re in the roller coaster the little pipe has
01:15:09 ►
now been dropped into your lap please do not stand up scream if you want hang on and and we’ll come
01:15:18 ►
through it but we have to reassure people and the way you reassure people is by getting them to transcend the systems
01:15:28 ►
which are spreading the anxiety I mean if you’re a fascist if you’re a capitalist if you have some
01:15:35 ►
vested interest in the system then you’re going to be sweating blood and you have to divest yourself of a commitment to the system
01:15:48 ►
because it’s in the process of transformation.
01:15:51 ►
Everything, dig what the fact,
01:15:53 ►
here’s this hard psychedelic truth, actually.
01:15:56 ►
You want to boil it down to the bottom line.
01:15:59 ►
This is the one thing I’ve learned, maybe, from psychedelics,
01:16:04 ►
which is, and this is the
01:16:06 ►
message of the time wave and this is the message of your life and my life it’s
01:16:10 ►
that nothing lasts Heraclitus said it Pantit Rhea ever all flows nothing lasts
01:16:19 ►
you know not your enemies not your, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children.
01:16:31 ►
Nothing lasts. And to the degree that you avert your gaze from this truth, you build the potential for pain into your life.
01:16:45 ►
And everything is this act of embracing the present moment,
01:16:51 ►
the felt presence of experience,
01:16:54 ►
and then moving on to the next felt moment of experience.
01:16:58 ►
It’s literally psychological nomadism is what it is.
01:17:03 ►
And that’s what we evolved to do,
01:17:05 ►
and that’s what we’re happiest doing.
01:17:07 ►
But we’ve fallen into this object fetishism,
01:17:10 ►
sedentary, agriculture-based style,
01:17:13 ►
and then we’re frustrated.
01:17:16 ►
So a recovering of this ability to surrender and release,
01:17:22 ►
and it’s very hard for me,
01:17:24 ►
and it’s very hard for anybody who
01:17:25 ►
has an ego. And it’s why the psychedelic experience is so challenging.
01:17:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives
01:17:39 ►
one thought at a time. Ah, the challenges of surrender and release. Well, right now I’m going to, I’m going to surrender
01:17:49 ►
to the challenge of laziness and release you to go do something fun. And since today is a holiday
01:17:55 ►
in the States, I’m going to go do something fun myself right now. Well, as soon as I get this file
01:18:00 ►
processed and posted on the net, that is. And then tomorrow, I hope, I’ll be up to the challenge of podcasting the final part of
01:18:08 ►
this workshop.
01:18:10 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:18:14 ►
Be well, my friends.