Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“History has been the pursuit of a false god, the god of stability, the god of permanence, the god of the unchanging, and we’ve become just neurotic on this subject.”
“What’s being said here is re-claim experience. Do not dwell in the mistakes of the past. Do not lose yourself in the castles of the future, and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions, bosses, wives, mates. Take back your mind and your body.”
“You’re involved in a mysterious engagement where every living moment presents you with mystery, opportunity, and wonder.”
“The suppression of psychedelics has had the unfortunate effect of making it impossible for us to build a linguistically coherent community and have a shared body of experience, because you can’t just say this stuff to everybody.”
“Coming out of the closet on psychedelics should be part of the political agenda.”
“The direct datum for metaphysical speculation should be ones own experience.”
“I believe that the boundary dissolving quality of these psychedelics makes them social dynamite.”
“The real message of psychedelics, I think, is to reclaim experience and to trust yourself. Your perceptions are primary. Your feelings are correct. Everything must constellate out and make sense and parse with what you know. If you don’t start from that assumption then you are off center to begin with. And the psychedelics will dissolve the cultural programming that has potentially made you a mark and restore your authenticity.”
Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth
By Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen
Process and Reality
By Alfred North Whitehead
Childhood’s End
By Arthur C. Clarke
When Prophecy Fails
By Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, Stanley Schachter
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
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So, I guess you may have wondered what happened to me, since in my previous podcast I said that I’d be getting this out in a day or so.
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Well, I did finish the edit of this talk the next day, and as I was preparing to record these remarks,
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the screen on my little Asus computer, my little netbook, well, it just kind of burned out, I guess.
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And in any event, it quit working,
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and that was the machine I was using to FTP these podcasts to the net.
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Now, I’ll spare you all the details,
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but after much investigation and soul-searching,
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it became obvious that I was going to have to reinstall Windows on my main machine
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if I wanted to get back to podcasting.
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However, I decided that if I had to install a new operating system,
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that maybe it was time to dump Microsoft once and for all.
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So I am now very pleased to tell you that while it took me several days to make my decision,
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it took less than an hour for me to install the Ubuntu version of Linux
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and connect my machine to the net.
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I was not only amazed at how simple and seamless the procedure was,
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but I’m completely blown away at how much fun it is to use this machine
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with such a lightweight and extremely fast operating system running it.
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I guess this is probably the first time since I switched from DOS to Windows many years ago
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that I’ve had so much pleasure in using a computer.
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And on top of that,
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my machine is at least twice as fast as it was
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when I was running under Windows.
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So my sincere thanks goes out to our fellow salonners
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who offered to help,
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and in particular to those who have been recommending Ubuntu and Linux
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for some time now.
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I finally see what you mean.
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And with their 13.04 release,
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Ubuntu, to me,
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is the best operating system
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that I’ve ever found.
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So, thanks for sticking around
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while I took care of these little techie details.
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And now it’s time to get back
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to where we left off here in the salon.
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But, why am I still talking, you say?
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Well, you’re right.
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So let’s get on with the final segment of a workshop
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led by Terence McKenna in August of 1993
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and join him and his friends in their Sunday morning wrap-up session.
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The Maya established their own civilization
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in a not very interesting part of their own calendar.
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Not at the beginning but sort
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of two-thirds of the way through so did it looks as though they counted forward to an end date
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rather than just had an establishment date and how they were able to count forward that many thousands of years to a solstice without losing any time or being off
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even by a day is hard to figure I made a sort of interesting discovery just a few weeks ago
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with a program called Voyager I don’t think we discussed this, did we? There’s a program called Voyager
00:03:25 ►
which lets you view anywhere in the solar system
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from 10,000 years in the past
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to 10,000 years in the future.
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So I typed in the longitude and latitude
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of La Charrera, December 21st, 2012 AD.
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I knew that the solstice the exact moment of the
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solstice is 1118 a.m. Greenwich so they knew then that that was 618 a.m. local
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time at La Charrera I put in all these coordinates and saw that the Sun if you
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turn and look east along the equator, the sun has risen just about
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12 minutes before. And I went up to the menu and chose the ecliptic and it slashed down
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through it as it would because the sun defines the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the path the sun follows.
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But then I went up and chose
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define the galactic ecliptic,
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and it drew a line which made crosshairs
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that exactly caught the sun in the crosshairs.
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Now, this is very interesting.
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Those of you who aren’t astrologers or astronomers,
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let me explain
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what this what’s going on this is what’s called a heliacal rising and what is happening is that the
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the galactic center which is where the plane of the ecliptic and the plane of the galactic
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ecliptic cross each other at 28 degrees sagittarius on the cusp of Capricorn. There, that point, the galactic center,
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is rising at the exact moment of the rising of the sun. That’s called a heliacal rising.
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And this heliacal rising is, in this case, occurring on the winter solstice.
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is in this case occurring on the winter solstice.
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And so then you ask yourself,
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as you do with any such astrological configuration,
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how often does this occur?
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Using Newtonian mechanics,
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where you simply propagate Newtonian laws backward through time infinitely,
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the answer is it happens once every 26,000 years
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because it’s a phenomenon that depends on the equinoctial great year of precession
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you all know that this happens?
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now if you use modern mathematics to calculate how often this happens
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where you put in the chaotic factor into these orbits
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You discover that this doesn’t happen once every 26,000 years it happens once
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only in all eternity
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because in orbital calculation back beyond about 20,000 years
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Uncertainty accumulates in these calculations and they are
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not reliable
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the solar system itself
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is chaotic
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I think someone is processing
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as they say around here
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no wait let me see if I want to say
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oh I know.
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So just the last thing on that,
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if any of you are interested in that,
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and it’s an area that I’m interested in because I don’t quite understand what all this means,
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but there’s a book called Hamlet’s Mill
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which deals with this old, old myth of galactic, worldwide myths of the galaxy
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in the Paleolithic era.
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And there’s a lot about this notion in many cultures
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that there are these gates,
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you know, conceptually gates,
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which need to all align themselves.
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And then there’s some kind of
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straight shot
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and you felt
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calendar out of that
00:07:31 ►
lineup so accurately
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well they end
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their calendar on this particular
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solstice oh I know what I wanted
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to say about this because I don’t want it
00:07:41 ►
to leave it it’s a real question
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because the galactic center
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as a concept was not defined
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for Western science until the early 1960s.
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So how could the Maya
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have locked in on a concept
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so abstruse? It means you would have to know
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there is a galaxy and so forth and so on.
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The only explanation I can come up with
00:08:06 ►
for that which maybe shows my ability
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to explain everything by one hypothesis
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is that perhaps
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there is a drug
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which allows you to see at the far
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infrared end of the spectrum
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so that instead of
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hypothesizing that the Maya had a
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super advanced mathematics
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and a radio telescope and all
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this fancy equipment, maybe it was simply
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that they had a drug that
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when you look at the night sky
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in the direction of Sagittarius
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there’s an enormous pulsing
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thing in the sky
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which you then could because you can see it in this drugged state,
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calculate when it would be eclipsed by certain bodies.
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Seems to me a more economical,
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because it’s a real thing to explain how they could have known this.
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And then the question, what does it mean?
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known this and then the question what does it mean
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you know there are in many cultures
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the Norse culture
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and the Hindu and so forth
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this idea that
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the world
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exists for a
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finite time and then
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the stars return
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to like an original setting
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and it’s sort of like
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an alarm clock after it has gone through one complete cycle and it’s sort of like an alarm clock
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after it has gone through one complete cycle
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and it returns to the original setting
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then the world disappears or is destroyed
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or the gods come or anyway
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it points the end of a cosmic cycle
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and I find that this whole thing is
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you haven’t known me my whole life,
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so it’s hard for you to deconstruct it.
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But this is not my style of thinking.
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I mean, I’m repelled by the particularity
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and the messianism
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and the counter-logical nature of it.
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And yet, attempting to objectively describe
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the content of the psychedelic experience
00:10:10 ►
and the map of the human mind that it makes visible,
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this is the message that I get.
00:10:17 ►
It’s as general or as specific as you want.
00:10:21 ►
I mean, it’s as general as
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everything is going to change soon, and it’s as specific as you want. I mean, it’s as general as everything is going to change soon,
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and it’s as specific as, you know,
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these computer programs that show you
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not only the exact moment when it’s going to change,
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but the exact numerical valuation of every moment
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in the entire history of the cosmos
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back a trillion years preceding it.
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So it’s as though in the plants
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or in nature
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or in the human mind
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depending just on where your depth of focus is
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is this pattern
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which can be as generally stated
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as I said
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everything is in the process of transforming
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or is specifically stated as a mathematical formalism.
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And we’ve lost it.
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History has been the pursuit of a false god,
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the god of stability, the god of permanence,
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the god of the unchanging.
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And we’ve become just neurotic on this subject yeah
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you mentioned last night
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one of the big things is
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we sort of understand the whole process of
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our thinking process is off
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it’s like wrong
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and then this morning I have nothing left
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that’s a basic truth
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but we all cling to building visions
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or projects and ideas that we can cling to and hold on to. We try to make reality more
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structured and solid, and what’s happening all around us is it’s like falling down in
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a way. Like the structured society you’re saying in the next I think 1996 will start crumbling
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it is crumbling now
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but all that solidness everyone’s built is
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security
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in a way is
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all you realize is nothing does last
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it’s sort of just
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you’re experiencing life
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in a sense the bottom
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line of this
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from a feeling and a heart place, is that what’s being said here is reclaim experience. of the future and do not give your authenticity away to experts, gurus, government commissions,
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bosses, wives, mates. Take back your mind and your body and begin to engage with the fact that you are alive,
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you are going to die.
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Nobody knows what being alive is.
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Nobody knows what dying is.
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You’re involved in a mysterious engagement
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where every living moment presents you with mystery opportunity and wonder there is no
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mundane dimension really if you have the eyes to see it it’s it’s all transcendental and every
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every object a leaf a bird a pebble everything leads back to the basic questions. Everything
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is the stone. I mean, the stone is present. It’s a matter of you being present for the stone.
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Yeah. I’m not a great spiritual researcher, but I did a vision question once, you know,
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where you traumatize yourself to get into vision. And the thing, one of
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the things that I realized, you hit me home, was that life is chaos and that in the human
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mind, even our walls are built to give ourselves a sense of stability, to protect ourselves,
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our foundations. We created a sense of this stability that really doesn’t exist it’s our need well the quest for permanence
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you know
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and by having children
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this is a pretty good way to do it
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because you’ve actually got a shot
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at a billion years
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with a lot of luck
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but building
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houses on the slopes
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of Hawaiian volcanoes
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is probably not something
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I mean it’s a whole different dimension
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I mean that’s how you imagine it
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well yes I mean I’ve imagined it many different ways
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and according to how recently I’ve been loaded
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I take different positions
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people are pushing me I think because they don’t want me to disgrace myself
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toward a soft version
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something like that we all make nice
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and clean up the earth
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you know
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no, no
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it’s something
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because see
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I’m convinced
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and I think the time wave argues for this
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and like looking at the prediction of the cometary impact on Jupiter Because, see, I’m convinced, and I think the time wave argues for this,
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and like looking at the prediction of the cometary impact on Jupiter next July, how can you argue then that this wave is generated out of human biology or culture?
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It’s not.
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It’s not even generated out of biology.
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If it’s predicting a cometary impact on the Jovian surface
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presumably no biology is involved we’re talking about what we’re seeing is the
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laws of physics themselves beginning to go into some kind of crisis it’s not no
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blame for human beings we are the witnesses and we were somehow called
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forth by this but the laws of physics are
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are going into crisis this is why i urge people to look at alfred north whitehead who was a very
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scientific and mathematically grounded thinker and who talked about what he called sudden shifts of
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epochs his philosophy made a place for sudden shifts of epochs.
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And what that means is, you know,
00:16:29 ►
the speed of light drops by half
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over 24 hours,
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or the charge of the electron
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is rearranged because,
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even though, you know,
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one of the peculiar properties
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of a fractal universe
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is almost all the transitions are very smooth.
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But every once in a while you come around the corner
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and there’s a transition that just sidewinds you
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because you’re crossing over one of these nodes
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at the highest level of the structure.
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And then profound things occur, yeah.
00:17:06 ►
So the shamanic ethos that you talked about
00:17:09 ►
in the description of this weekend,
00:17:12 ►
does that mean by the commitment to direct experience?
00:17:15 ►
Yeah, the commitment to direct experience
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and then the commitment to build a language for this,
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to build a culture.
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The suppression of psychedelics has had the unfortunate effect
00:17:28 ►
of making it impossible for us to build a linguistically coherent community
00:17:34 ►
and have a shared body of experience
00:17:36 ►
because you can’t just say this stuff to everybody.
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So to put it in very simple, understandable terms, coming out of the closet on
00:17:48 ►
psychedelics should be part of the political agenda. Psychedelics should not be classed with
00:17:55 ►
other drugs, and certainly the Schedule I category, which seems to be reserved only for very hard narcotics and all psychedelics.
00:18:08 ►
That’s just a cockamamie categorization.
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And the whole society is phobic of the mind, terrified of the unconscious,
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terrified of dissolving the ego, very anxious if you dissolve your ego.
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You know, it’s a real issue.
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It’s a taboo.
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It’s very thoroughly a taboo.
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Yeah.
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Does a commitment to direct experience
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preclude metaphysical perspective for you?
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No, but the direct datum for metaphysical speculation
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should be one’s own experience.
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If you’ve studied modern philosophy,
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I think you discover that it’s very clear
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that all you can rely on is your senses.
00:19:01 ►
You can’t rely on what anybody tells you.
00:19:03 ►
You can’t rely on what anybody tells you. You can’t rely on anything that you,
00:19:06 ►
you know, the real laboratory bench for philosophy is you looking at your mind and examining it
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and trying to make judgments about it. Reclaiming experience and the political consequences of reclaiming experience are that far more than we realize
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we’re embedded in a
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Hierarchy of declension
00:19:33 ►
Where information is distributed over McNeil-Lehrer and Time magazine and CNN and we
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the surf down in the valleys are are the grateful recipients of the news
00:19:49 ►
and now for all you jerks out there
00:19:53 ►
the news
00:19:54 ►
and so we don’t believe anything
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of our own experience
00:20:01 ►
we wait to be told
00:20:03 ►
that a White House commission
00:20:05 ►
or a blue ribbon group…
00:20:08 ►
Yeah, Barry?
00:20:09 ►
Well, I think of history as this prison.
00:20:13 ►
I mean, I would go with Stephan Dedalus
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who said history is the nightmare
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from which I’m trying to awaken.
00:20:19 ►
That’s the consequence of bad metaphysics.
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You called it a misunderstanding
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and I’m saying that
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you have to deal with
00:20:27 ►
in this sense it is all about
00:20:30 ►
metaphysics
00:20:30 ►
well but that works
00:20:32 ►
if you think of it as a misunderstanding
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then the dissolving
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of the prison of Gnostic
00:20:39 ►
confinement was an
00:20:41 ►
act of contact
00:20:44 ►
with the higher hidden order of things behind appearances.
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I mean, that was the Gnostic epiphany.
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And I would say if history is the prison,
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then the psychedelic experience is the epiphany of dissolution that frees.
00:21:04 ►
And then you see eternity.
00:21:07 ►
You see the platonic time as the moving image of eternity.
00:21:14 ►
The mystery is revealed.
00:21:15 ►
That’s this whole thing about how a shaman is somebody who has seen the end.
00:21:21 ►
That’s all.
00:21:22 ►
And that’s what confers this wisdom, is having seen the end. That’s all. And that’s what confers this wisdom, is having seen the end.
00:21:28 ►
It’s just, it’s kind of ultimate experience. And then you take your place, you go back
00:21:34 ►
to your group and take your place and perform your function.
00:21:38 ►
I’m wondering if you’ve had experiences of talking with other shamanic teachers who also talk about this.
00:21:45 ►
I know Henry Tyler, who is a Arapaho medicine man
00:21:48 ►
and has that 2,000-year-old shamanic tradition,
00:21:52 ►
he says that there’s a time coming.
00:21:54 ►
He doesn’t say 2012, but he says soon,
00:21:56 ►
like in the next decade or so,
00:21:58 ►
when life will not be as we know it at all.
00:22:01 ►
We won’t eat the same food at all.
00:22:03 ►
So I’ve heard that from him
00:22:05 ►
and I’m wondering if you’ve heard it
00:22:06 ►
I made a list of them once
00:22:10 ►
there are about five or six
00:22:11 ►
different sources
00:22:13 ►
of this 2012 thing
00:22:15 ►
there are some Hasids in Israel
00:22:18 ►
who have decided
00:22:20 ►
that July 2012
00:22:21 ►
something is going to happen
00:22:24 ►
the Mayan calendar my thing that July 2012 something is going to happen.
00:22:27 ►
The Mayan calendar,
00:22:28 ►
my thing,
00:22:30 ►
something else,
00:22:33 ►
some of these Indian prophecies.
00:22:35 ►
Of course, you see,
00:22:37 ►
my theory would explain this because what’s happening,
00:22:39 ►
it would say,
00:22:40 ►
is that as we get closer and closer
00:22:41 ►
to the transcendental object,
00:22:44 ►
it gives off what I call scintilla.
00:22:47 ►
They’re like sparks or little reflections
00:22:51 ►
that ricochet backward through time.
00:22:54 ►
And so you take a psychedelic or you have a dream
00:22:58 ►
and then you say, you know, I had this dream
00:23:00 ►
and there were flying saucers and it was the end of the world
00:23:04 ►
and they were taking millions of people off the planet
00:23:07 ►
while there was some kind of an adjustment.
00:23:10 ►
Well, I would call that a typical transcendental object anticipation dream
00:23:16 ►
where your dream is not true.
00:23:19 ►
That isn’t how it’s going to happen.
00:23:22 ►
The human mind cannot encompass how it’s going to happen. The human mind cannot encompass how it’s going to happen. But that’s a little fable about how it’s going to happen. You know, some of you may know Arthur C. Clarke’s wonderful book, Childhood’s End. If you’ve never read this, it’s wonderful. And it’s about the end of the world it’s a believable scenario for
00:23:46 ►
how it could in fact be
00:23:48 ►
transformed and it’s just
00:23:49 ►
spine chilling it’s wonderful
00:23:52 ►
Childhood’s
00:23:54 ►
End by Arthur C. Clarke
00:23:55 ►
and yet I think it’s a very
00:23:58 ►
it too is simply a
00:24:00 ►
fable the real thing
00:24:02 ►
will be beyond your wildest
00:24:04 ►
imaginings literally I mean it’s messianic return
00:24:08 ►
it’s flying saucer invasion it’s guyan revelation it’s all that and more and more and more because
00:24:16 ►
eventually you know the machinery of anticipation fails and you just say you you know, it’s more it’s more than we bargained for
00:24:26 ►
it’s the jackpot
00:24:28 ►
yes, you wanted to say something
00:24:29 ►
I’m interested in your thoughts on
00:24:31 ►
psychedelic drugs and
00:24:33 ►
levels of maturity
00:24:36 ►
in children, for example
00:24:38 ►
are there, to your knowledge, are there cultures
00:24:40 ►
where at a particular age, not three
00:24:42 ►
maybe it’s five, maybe it’s fifteen
00:24:44 ►
when are when are
00:24:45 ►
when are
00:24:48 ►
humans
00:24:48 ►
who are allowed
00:24:49 ►
to be exposed
00:24:50 ►
to these chemicals
00:24:51 ►
and
00:24:52 ►
and
00:24:52 ►
possibly
00:24:52 ►
positively
00:24:53 ►
indoctrinated
00:24:54 ►
well among
00:24:56 ►
the Aguarina
00:24:57 ►
in Ecuador
00:24:58 ►
they put
00:24:59 ►
ayahuasca
00:24:59 ►
on the
00:25:00 ►
mother’s
00:25:00 ►
nipple
00:25:01 ►
the third
00:25:02 ►
day after
00:25:02 ►
birth
00:25:03 ►
so they quickly establish at least a chemical recognition,
00:25:11 ►
you know, in the immune system.
00:25:14 ►
You know, it’s an important question.
00:25:16 ►
What do you tell your kids about drugs?
00:25:18 ►
And I thrashed around about this.
00:25:21 ►
I have two kids, a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl,
00:25:25 ►
and this question comes up in the family and at these groups a lot. I think all you can do
00:25:31 ►
is you have to tell the truth. You have to just lay it out and educate them. It’s, you know,
00:25:39 ►
the one place where you can actually function as a parent because the schools are lying.
00:25:42 ►
where you can actually function as a parent because the schools are lying.
00:25:45 ►
And you just say, you know, this is part of life.
00:25:49 ►
You’re going to have to make choices.
00:25:50 ►
There are dozens of drugs.
00:25:53 ►
They are associated with different lifestyles,
00:25:56 ►
risk levels, sensations, kinds of people.
00:26:01 ►
And the main thing, I think think to avoid is hypocrisy I mean I think it’s really weird
00:26:09 ►
people who say oh we can’t smoke dope told the children go to bed you know I mean this is weird
00:26:16 ►
I mean first of all the children know and what they know is that you’re conflicted and giving
00:26:23 ►
off different signals about it and you know if you
00:26:27 ►
do if there are drugs you do that you wouldn’t want your children to see you doing you shouldn’t
00:26:33 ►
be doing those drugs that’s a perfect litmus test you know when when do they get to is age 12
00:26:41 ►
well what drug are we talking about? Can you talk about mushrooms?
00:26:46 ►
Well, the first thing to recognize
00:26:48 ►
is that it’s not up to you.
00:26:51 ►
That if you wait too long,
00:26:53 ►
then they’ll just present you with feta complete.
00:26:57 ►
So if you say,
00:26:59 ►
you know, I think it would really be good
00:27:00 ►
if you’d wait till you’re 15 to do my…
00:27:03 ►
and say, yeah, right, right okay and then you find out
00:27:06 ►
that it was done, sometime
00:27:07 ►
between 13 and 16
00:27:10 ►
they’re going to sort it
00:27:12 ►
out, it’s right up there with
00:27:13 ►
sex and
00:27:15 ►
the thing to do I think is to
00:27:17 ►
really say, is to say
00:27:19 ►
you know
00:27:20 ►
this is a very adult business
00:27:23 ►
and you can get into trouble of all different kinds
00:27:27 ►
and here’s the kinds of trouble you can get into.
00:27:30 ►
I mean, my son is surrounded by cautionary tales
00:27:36 ►
and try to warn him that the great age of hashish smuggling
00:27:41 ►
lies in the 14th century and shouldn’t be duplicated.
00:27:47 ►
Picture of your thought.
00:27:50 ►
Oh, I’d say we’re pretty tight. I mean, we’re pretty tight. I mean, we live together
00:27:57 ►
as sort of bachelor roommates and try to not get into conflicts over women.
00:28:08 ►
But we like the same kind of music.
00:28:11 ►
And, you know, it’s done me no harm with my son
00:28:15 ►
to get into this rave club,
00:28:18 ►
staying up all night to London, New York, Frankfurt scene
00:28:23 ►
because he just loves that. And it amazes me. I mean, you know, Frankfurt scene because he just loves that
00:28:25 ►
and it amazes me
00:28:27 ►
when I was a kid I was socially terrified
00:28:32 ►
and I remember I used to never go
00:28:34 ►
to the canteen dances
00:28:36 ►
because I knew there were these enormous guys
00:28:39 ►
who would just stomp me
00:28:41 ►
I used to lurk in the park across the street
00:28:44 ►
and watch them going to and from the canteen
00:28:47 ►
because I couldn’t socially show my face.
00:28:50 ►
So it’s a light-flowering adolescence
00:28:53 ►
that is perfectly in synchrony with my son.
00:29:01 ►
Do you believe that theory,
00:29:03 ►
that some people in the 60s will tell you that because they were heads,
00:29:09 ►
that their children have more of a chance to be heads if you think it’s all a social thing?
00:29:14 ►
Well, to me, that’s this issue.
00:29:17 ►
This is a real hard issue, I think, for parents,
00:29:20 ►
and to some degree deeper even and harder than the drug issue.
00:29:23 ►
And that is, I think I can speak for most people here
00:29:27 ►
and say, you know, we are alienated intellectuals
00:29:32 ►
of some sort.
00:29:34 ►
And alienation is ipso facto
00:29:36 ►
not such a cool thing to be.
00:29:38 ►
It means that you’re, you know,
00:29:40 ►
constantly aware of the failings
00:29:43 ►
and the betrayals
00:29:45 ►
it’s alienation and we’re alienated intellectuals
00:29:49 ►
so then you have kids and you see
00:29:52 ►
well there seem to be only two paths open
00:29:55 ►
they can become nitwits or
00:29:58 ►
they can become alienated intellectuals
00:30:01 ►
and which do you want
00:30:04 ►
for your children? Do you want them to be perfectly
00:30:07 ►
satisfied with a house on the cliffs and two cars in the garage and their position at the
00:30:14 ►
advertising agency or do you want them to be like you haunted and always in conflict and never able to come to terms with what, that’s a big problem
00:30:27 ►
I want to come clean and say
00:30:30 ►
I have a 15 year old daughter
00:30:32 ►
who hears all this stuff
00:30:33 ►
about it and I’ve had to come to terms
00:30:36 ►
with that and it’s like
00:30:38 ►
I’ve said this to her and probably
00:30:40 ►
alienated, do you want to be
00:30:41 ►
when she’s totally uninformed
00:30:43 ►
do you want to be another stupid American or do you want to be alienated when she’s totally under the form do you want to be another stupid American
00:30:45 ►
or do you want to be alienated like your father
00:30:47 ►
and she says
00:30:50 ►
I’ll take stupid
00:30:51 ►
well
00:30:53 ►
my daughter
00:30:57 ►
is very
00:30:59 ►
not conservative exactly
00:31:02 ►
but she looks upon me
00:31:04 ►
differently than Finn does does i think although
00:31:06 ►
she’s only 12 we’ll see what it does to her to go go through all that but that’s a real problem i
00:31:13 ►
don’t think i don’t i don’t regret my alienation i it’s hard for people sometimes to understand
00:31:21 ►
where i’m coming from like a lot of people will go through a weekend like this and one of the rare resistances as I get is people
00:31:31 ►
say your vision is so dark which is completely puzzling to me because it’s
00:31:37 ►
the most optimistic vision conceivable but not only by me but by anybody I mean I say that
00:31:46 ►
heaven is 18 years away
00:31:47 ►
and they accuse me of pessimism
00:31:50 ►
I mean
00:31:50 ►
so what that tells me
00:31:53 ►
is that the word transformation
00:31:55 ►
is so threatening
00:31:58 ►
to some people
00:31:59 ►
that no matter yeah change
00:32:01 ►
that no matter how much you talk about how great
00:32:04 ►
it’s going to be all they come away with is, oh boy, big change.
00:32:08 ►
Maybe it’s the way you sort of describe certain analogies.
00:32:12 ►
I mean, you’re talking about some guy falling through a hole for eternity.
00:32:17 ►
It kind of sounds like shit, but that’s not going to hurt.
00:32:23 ►
No, it’s the silver surfer.
00:32:28 ►
That’s what I wanted to say.
00:32:31 ►
You want to impress me?
00:32:33 ►
I’ll be in this eternal one.
00:32:36 ►
Well, this is the question
00:32:38 ►
that gets down to
00:32:40 ►
in all Catholic catechism classes.
00:32:43 ►
Sister, will there be sex in heaven?
00:32:48 ►
Yes.
00:32:49 ►
I think the end is going to be an individual thing,
00:32:52 ►
whether it’s 2012 or, say, the end of Pompeii.
00:32:57 ►
For everybody, for whom it is the end of Pompeii,
00:33:01 ►
for some it may have been ecstatic,
00:33:03 ►
and for others it may have been terrible.
00:33:06 ►
We all face it individually.
00:33:08 ►
You can’t predict.
00:33:09 ►
The bar does.
00:33:11 ►
So what you’re saying is that it’s the accumulation of fate.
00:33:15 ►
It’s really what you did before that ultimate moment.
00:33:20 ►
I’m saying that it doesn’t matter whether it’s the end
00:33:25 ►
and the way
00:33:26 ►
that 2012
00:33:27 ►
will come about
00:33:28 ►
or the way
00:33:29 ►
it came about
00:33:30 ►
in Pompeii
00:33:30 ►
or any other
00:33:30 ►
ending,
00:33:32 ►
it’s all going
00:33:33 ►
to be
00:33:33 ►
individually
00:33:34 ►
and it depends
00:33:36 ►
on what your
00:33:37 ►
situation is
00:33:38 ►
at the moment
00:33:39 ►
because there
00:33:41 ►
will be a
00:33:41 ►
grand moment.
00:33:43 ►
You may
00:33:43 ►
have a beautiful
00:33:45 ►
eye somebody else might be in the depths of depression that sort of thing well so
00:33:53 ►
what you’re saying is it will come like a thief in the night unannounced this is
00:33:58 ►
what Christ told Nicodemus he said I will come like a thief in the blind no
00:34:03 ►
man will know the moment of my coming.
00:34:06 ►
Blake talks about this.
00:34:07 ►
He says, though Satan’s watch fiends
00:34:11 ►
shall search through all eternity for the moment,
00:34:15 ►
they will never find the moment.
00:34:18 ►
Apparently the moment is a very big deal.
00:34:21 ►
That’s why it’s interesting that this all devolves down to a moment.
00:34:26 ►
If you’re interested in this kind of thing
00:34:28 ►
and want to keep your psychological wits about you,
00:34:32 ►
read When Prophecy Failed.
00:34:35 ►
It’s a wonderful book
00:34:36 ►
about a flying saucer cult
00:34:39 ►
that comes to expect the end of the world
00:34:42 ►
and has been infiltrated
00:34:44 ►
by two Stanford sociologists
00:34:47 ►
who then observe what it is like
00:34:50 ►
for this very, very devoted, cultish group of people
00:34:54 ►
to be disappointed,
00:34:58 ►
to have an extraordinary disconfirmation of their theology
00:35:02 ►
and what they do about that and how they react to it.
00:35:05 ►
In 2012, December 23rd or something.
00:35:08 ►
Well, people ask me, you know,
00:35:10 ►
what will you do if nothing happens?
00:35:12 ►
I am not a believer.
00:35:14 ►
I want to keep this tar baby
00:35:16 ►
definitely at arm’s length.
00:35:18 ►
I think it’s very interesting
00:35:20 ►
that I have this idea.
00:35:22 ►
Very interesting that the wave
00:35:24 ►
conforms to history
00:35:26 ►
it’s all weird
00:35:28 ►
I grant you it’s like being trapped
00:35:30 ►
inside a science fiction novel
00:35:32 ►
but I could
00:35:34 ►
go through December 21st
00:35:36 ►
2012
00:35:37 ►
have absolutely nothing happen and say
00:35:40 ►
well that blows it off
00:35:42 ►
let’s go have some coffee
00:35:43 ►
and my 65th birthday will occur and say, well, that blows it off. Let’s go have some coffee.
00:35:51 ►
And my 65th birthday will occur 30 days in front of the date.
00:35:53 ►
So I will just gracefully retire.
00:35:58 ►
I think that would be the decent thing to do at that moment.
00:36:01 ►
You know, it’s been nice. It’s been nice.
00:36:05 ►
Surely you didn’t take it serious.
00:36:12 ►
Yeah.
00:36:13 ►
One of the things that’s really interesting this weekend
00:36:16 ►
has been your kind of encyclopedic knowledge.
00:36:19 ►
And one of the things I’d like to ask you is,
00:36:21 ►
why do you read to get the news?
00:36:25 ►
Oh, what do I read to get the news? Oh, what do I read to get the news?
00:36:27 ►
What do you read?
00:36:28 ►
How do you get all this information?
00:36:30 ►
Well, for instance, the best thing to read
00:36:33 ►
to keep abreast of science is science news.
00:36:37 ►
It’s totally unpretentious.
00:36:39 ►
It’s nuts to subscribe to nature or science.
00:36:42 ►
They cost $100 a year,
00:36:44 ►
and you cannot understand a word of it.
00:36:46 ►
And so you read Science News,
00:36:48 ►
which comes out once a week
00:36:49 ►
and tells you things months in front of everybody else.
00:36:53 ►
I subscribe to Archaeology Magazine,
00:36:57 ►
Astronomy Magazine,
00:36:59 ►
On Our Backs,
00:37:01 ►
just to keep in touch with the lesbian erotic literature front
00:37:06 ►
very important
00:37:09 ►
yeah sure
00:37:12 ►
yeah and let me see
00:37:15 ►
what else
00:37:16 ►
I’ve
00:37:19 ►
for 20 years been a member
00:37:22 ►
of the Society for the Study
00:37:24 ►
of Alchemy and the History of Chemistry
00:37:26 ►
so I get ambics
00:37:27 ►
I don’t know a lot
00:37:32 ►
of information flows through my
00:37:34 ►
scene people send me stuff
00:37:36 ►
there’s a very lively underground
00:37:38 ►
press you know
00:37:40 ►
psychedelic illuminations
00:37:42 ►
reactor out
00:37:44 ►
of Chicago talking ra Raven out of Seattle, a very lively English press, music press and psychedelic press. You know, you shouldn’t read mainstream media particularly because there’s a much interesting,
00:38:06 ►
more interesting strata of information under the surface.
00:38:11 ►
Yeah?
00:38:12 ►
This question of practicality,
00:38:14 ►
how reliable or unreliable is Greek psychedelics?
00:38:18 ►
As reliable or unreliable as the street chemist who made them.
00:38:23 ►
That’s the problem, you know.
00:38:24 ►
When you’re confronted with an off-color powder,
00:38:28 ►
all bets are off
00:38:30 ►
because the motivation for making this powder
00:38:34 ►
nine times out of ten was to make money
00:38:38 ►
and corners can be cut.
00:38:42 ►
That’s why if you really want to liberate yourself
00:38:45 ►
from the illegal and toxic cycle of drug production,
00:38:50 ►
you should grow mushrooms.
00:38:52 ►
My brother and I wrote a book
00:38:54 ►
called Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.
00:38:58 ►
If you want to get into alchemy,
00:39:00 ►
this is real alchemy.
00:39:01 ►
The formula is rye to mold, mold to gold.
00:39:06 ►
You can take a 25-pound sack of rye,
00:39:10 ►
which costs $19.99,
00:39:13 ►
and you can turn it into $22,000 worth of mushrooms.
00:39:18 ►
Not that you would want to do that, of course.
00:39:20 ►
You would want to turn it into an enormous number of mushrooms
00:39:24 ►
which you would give to everybody in your apartment building and neighborhood. But it was one of the most
00:39:30 ►
satisfying things about my career. It doesn’t happen that much anymore because that book is
00:39:34 ►
long in the past. But when I first started public speaking, people would come up to me and say,
00:39:39 ►
we just want to thank you for writing the mushroom book. You kept a family of six off welfare for eight years.
00:39:48 ►
And so, you know,
00:39:51 ►
so growing the mushroom is a wonderful, satisfying thing.
00:39:56 ►
I mean, the mushroom is an incredible workhorse organism.
00:40:01 ►
I mean, it will take dry weight of rye
00:40:03 ►
and transform it into dry weight of mushroom at 12% efficiency. That’s just amazing. And, you know, it’s short supply in these days like cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail responsibility sensitivity to
00:40:26 ►
small shifts of parameters
00:40:28 ►
it teaches you
00:40:30 ►
it literally teaches you
00:40:32 ►
to be the kind of person
00:40:34 ►
that it wants to take the mushroom
00:40:36 ►
and
00:40:37 ►
is it out of print and can’t be found?
00:40:40 ►
no it isn’t out of print it can be found
00:40:42 ►
it can be ordered from a place
00:40:44 ►
in San Francisco called Quick Trade,
00:40:47 ►
and they’ll even take a credit card number.
00:40:51 ►
So Quick Trade has it.
00:40:53 ►
How do you trade electric?
00:40:54 ►
Yeah, some very hip bookstores.
00:40:57 ►
What about Invisible Landscape?
00:40:59 ►
Are you republishing it?
00:41:01 ►
San Francisco, yeah.
00:41:02 ►
The Invisible Landscape, which has been very hard to get for 10 years or so,
00:41:07 ►
will be reprinted next year from Harper on the 15th of April
00:41:11 ►
with considerable new material and revision.
00:41:15 ►
When that’s done, when True Hallucinations, Invisible Landscape,
00:41:24 ►
Archaic Revival, the TimeWave software in the Mac and MS-DOS version, When true hallucinations, invisible landscape, archaic revival,
00:41:25 ►
the time wave software in the Mac and MS-DOS version,
00:41:29 ►
when all that’s out there, that’s essentially the bit.
00:41:33 ►
And I may be considerably less in evidence
00:41:37 ►
because I don’t see myself as it is.
00:41:41 ►
I’ve given every one of these raps 60 times and Paul has
00:41:46 ►
archived it
00:41:48 ►
and I would like to go off to some
00:41:51 ►
jungle or island
00:41:53 ►
somewhere and get back
00:41:55 ►
into stretching the envelope
00:41:57 ►
with these plants and
00:41:59 ►
substances
00:42:00 ►
it’s funny since you just come back from somewhere
00:42:03 ►
it could give us a sense of what’s going on in Europe
00:42:10 ►
is that this very large
00:42:12 ►
intelligent post-modern
00:42:14 ►
youth culture
00:42:15 ►
is sustaining itself
00:42:18 ►
and growing
00:42:20 ►
and it has
00:42:22 ►
more than the dimensions of a fad
00:42:25 ►
the house music scene
00:42:27 ►
has been around since 88
00:42:29 ►
and it’s growing
00:42:31 ►
still and innovating
00:42:33 ►
still and
00:42:35 ►
it’s a very
00:42:37 ►
tribal positive
00:42:39 ►
message and it’s very
00:42:41 ►
critical of establishmentarian
00:42:43 ►
values it started out as an MDMA based club thing and it’s very critical of establishmentarian values it started out as an mdma based club thing
00:42:48 ►
and it’s turned much deeper much more towards psychedelics i’ve given talks like this in
00:42:56 ►
megatripolis which is a london nightclub in charing cross we turned out 300 people I talked from 10 to midnight and then we danced till 4 30
00:43:06 ►
and this kind of thing Sasha and Ann Shulgin took London by storm there’s really a fertilization
00:43:15 ►
going on there’s a similar scene in Berlin a similar scene in Frankfurt and I think common cause can be made
00:43:25 ►
the Europeans have a different attitude
00:43:28 ►
toward all this drug problem
00:43:30 ►
they see it as a social problem to somehow be studied
00:43:34 ►
and solved not that you have
00:43:37 ►
embraced Satanism if you smoke a joint
00:43:41 ►
which seems to be the American attitude
00:43:43 ►
and eventually European attitudes
00:43:45 ►
will just shame us
00:43:47 ►
into changing our…
00:43:49 ►
Pardon me?
00:43:51 ►
No, there is not a drug hysteria there.
00:43:54 ►
You can, in a very good
00:43:56 ►
Berlin restaurant,
00:43:57 ►
after dinner,
00:43:59 ►
make a spliff and pass
00:44:02 ►
it around. And the waiters
00:44:03 ►
bring you a silver ashtray
00:44:06 ►
as they’re clearing the table.
00:44:08 ►
I thought that the legal punishment
00:44:12 ►
for illicit drugs like that
00:44:14 ►
would be a lot more intensive.
00:44:17 ►
No, no.
00:44:18 ►
I mean, the Swiss are talking about
00:44:20 ►
giving heroin to 700 addicts
00:44:23 ►
and they just concluded this free needle thing.
00:44:26 ►
They’re open to experiment,
00:44:29 ►
both social experiments with large numbers of drug users
00:44:32 ►
and clinical medical work is being done there,
00:44:37 ►
being done in Switzerland.
00:44:38 ►
Hans Karl Leuner is doing work.
00:44:41 ►
Yeah.
00:44:42 ►
One they’ve been doing in Amsterdam
00:44:44 ►
where they take
00:44:45 ►
about 200 people,
00:44:47 ►
some are inmates,
00:44:47 ►
some are college students,
00:44:49 ►
some are working class people,
00:44:50 ►
some are hippies,
00:44:51 ►
various groups of people
00:44:52 ►
and they give them
00:44:53 ►
all ecstasy
00:44:54 ►
and somebody will talk
00:44:56 ►
and sort of work
00:44:58 ►
the whole program
00:44:59 ►
or the whole communication
00:45:00 ►
into a oneness
00:45:01 ►
where everyone
00:45:02 ►
experiences that together
00:45:03 ►
and they say
00:45:04 ►
profound things happen
00:45:06 ►
in the psychs of all those people.
00:45:07 ►
Yeah, a lot of things are happening.
00:45:09 ►
The hemp movement is very strong in Germany
00:45:13 ►
and getting stronger in England.
00:45:16 ►
But, you know, I believe
00:45:19 ►
that the boundary-dissolving quality
00:45:24 ►
of these psychedelics
00:45:26 ►
makes them social dynamite
00:45:28 ►
and that the policy makers
00:45:30 ►
figured this out long ago
00:45:32 ►
and that this is not a simple
00:45:33 ►
straightforward issue
00:45:35 ►
like it’s trying to be presented
00:45:36 ►
that they just can’t allow
00:45:39 ►
these drugs to be legal
00:45:40 ►
they will shift social values
00:45:43 ►
too much
00:45:44 ►
they know that alcohol, tobacco, and sugar are
00:45:49 ►
much more detrimental than, let’s say, mescaline, psilocybin, and cannabis. But this is not an
00:45:56 ►
argument about detriment. This is an argument about what social values shall be affirmed and what’s suppressed. And alcohol keeps dominance in place. A very
00:46:10 ►
rote-like, machine-like, assembly line society can be maintained based on alcohol, red meat,
00:46:17 ►
tobacco, caffeine. They don’t want people philosophizing and kicking back and getting
00:46:23 ►
in touch with their feelings about the
00:46:25 ►
system. So I predict that at the very best there will be a kind of permissiveness, but no legal
00:46:35 ►
revolution is in sight, I think, unless it comes through the hemp argument, simply that we can’t afford to let the tax revenue go by
00:46:46 ►
and the resource base that hemp would represent, and so we have to change our attitudes on this.
00:46:54 ►
Did you talk about the women?
00:46:57 ►
We didn’t talk too much about women this time. Sometimes we talk a lot about all that. The major difference
00:47:06 ►
between historical society
00:47:08 ►
and this archaic thing
00:47:10 ►
that I’m so enthusiastic for, I think,
00:47:13 ►
was the position of women,
00:47:15 ►
that women were,
00:47:17 ►
that nature is imaged as feminine
00:47:20 ►
and that in the partnership society
00:47:23 ►
there was role appropriate behavior
00:47:26 ►
obviously women represent the unconscious and the untamed and the wild side of things
00:47:36 ►
and that’s why the control of women is so high up on the agenda of everybody who’s trying to hold the line on what’s happening. The more rapidly
00:47:50 ►
that women can find their place, the better it’s going to be. Then the question is, what is their
00:47:56 ►
place? I think feminism, understandably but nevertheless, did itself no good by deciding that what liberation meant
00:48:06 ►
was that 50% of the country’s CEOs should be women.
00:48:11 ►
I mean, it meant nobody examined the system
00:48:14 ►
into which all these people were going to be liberated
00:48:17 ►
and noticed that it was a horrible, repressive system
00:48:21 ►
itself deserving of radical reformation.
00:48:26 ►
But I think the agenda of women seems to be now
00:48:32 ►
being re-examined and thought about.
00:48:35 ►
I’m amazed at how powerful misogyny is
00:48:39 ►
and how politically incorrect the 90s are from the vantage point of, say, the mid-70s.
00:48:50 ►
I mean, like in media, women have clearly lost ground.
00:48:54 ►
The bimbo is back big.
00:48:58 ►
How this is to be addressed, I don’t know.
00:49:00 ►
I think it’s all related to, you know, well, here this opens up a big issue, but let me just mention it.
00:49:09 ►
Esalen is one of the places which promoted the idea that you can heal various conditions through visualization and imaging, you know.
00:49:45 ►
But one of the consequences of that that has never really been dealt with anywhere is if there are images that can heal, then there are images that can sicken. There are images that can make ill. over sex have led us to substitute for those legitimate domains of human experience
00:49:48 ►
an incredible
00:49:49 ►
plethora of
00:49:51 ►
images of violence
00:49:53 ►
and I don’t, I am
00:49:55 ►
a very very strong
00:49:57 ►
first amendment person
00:49:59 ►
I don’t think anybody should be restricted
00:50:01 ►
in anything but
00:50:03 ►
I’m troubled by the obvious effect of images of violence on society and women.
00:50:14 ►
The woman question is right in there.
00:50:16 ►
As long as we tolerate an unrestrained outpouring of violent images,
00:50:21 ►
we’re undercutting any chance women have
00:50:25 ►
of moving their agenda forward.
00:50:28 ►
And I don’t know how you do anything about this.
00:50:31 ►
It’s a very difficult problem.
00:50:34 ►
Plato, you know,
00:50:36 ►
well, violence without violence to women
00:50:40 ►
is like a circus without lions.
00:50:42 ►
Violence is code word for violence against women.
00:50:48 ►
Violence is no fun without women, is that what you’re saying?
00:50:51 ►
It doesn’t sell particularly.
00:50:54 ►
Yeah.
00:50:59 ►
Well, the number of images.
00:51:02 ►
I mean, see, we try to pretend that we’re not being shaped by our technology,
00:51:05 ►
but an average evening of TV brings you 350 images of violent death and dismemberment.
00:51:14 ►
Well, in a lifetime of hunting people down and hacking their heads off,
00:51:20 ►
you wouldn’t see that much violence if you were in a media free world
00:51:26 ►
so what the hell is going on here
00:51:30 ►
you know
00:51:31 ►
it’s that somehow we’re anxious about sexuality
00:51:35 ►
so no, no there can’t be any of that
00:51:37 ►
and we’re anxious about drugs
00:51:40 ►
that’s not even on the agenda
00:51:41 ►
so then the only pizzazz is left in this violence thing.
00:51:46 ►
And it’s like a drug in that you build up very rapid tolerance. And so then there has to be just
00:51:52 ►
more and more of it piled on. And it’s amazing to me that this is all done in the service of
00:51:59 ►
the ideals of the marketplace. This is all done so people can make lots of money.
00:52:05 ►
It’s an extraordinary abdication of responsibility
00:52:09 ►
on the part of all members of society
00:52:12 ►
that we tolerate this kind of iconoclastic behavior.
00:52:20 ►
Anyway, that’s why I think of television as a drug and a very insidious drug, a drug you can program. I mean, a drug you can buy time on for your message. of mine for years and years out there in the flats just getting those 60 channels nine hours a day
00:52:49 ►
pouring into the area no it’s not
00:52:52 ►
no you’re there are so many levels of programming you see what happened is i mean this is just my take on it, but it was a very traumatic thing
00:53:06 ►
for my parents’ generation
00:53:08 ►
to go through the Depression
00:53:10 ►
and then the defeat of Hitler in Europe
00:53:14 ►
and all that science fiction stuff
00:53:16 ►
about eugenics and what was done to the Jews
00:53:19 ►
and all that.
00:53:20 ►
And people were just fed up
00:53:22 ►
with the 20th century by the time the atom bomb arrived.
00:53:29 ►
And what they wanted and what they had been promised by the New Deal Democrats was a paradise.
00:53:37 ►
Well, the only way you could deliver paradise in that political context was it had to be an ersatz paradise, a paradise of stucco and TV and TV
00:53:49 ►
dinners and tube furniture. And that’s what they got. They got an ersatz paradise. And then out of
00:53:58 ►
that come the discontent of their children who see that howdy-doody and a water sprinkler on the front lawn
00:54:07 ►
doesn’t feel like paradise.
00:54:10 ►
And that is what has driven
00:54:14 ►
American society
00:54:15 ►
deeper and deeper into artificiality
00:54:19 ►
is the need to supply
00:54:21 ►
this synthetic manufactured paradise.
00:54:24 ►
That’s why the cult of the celebrity
00:54:26 ►
and the intense media saturation
00:54:29 ►
and all of this is diversion,
00:54:33 ►
divertissement, substitute for a life.
00:54:36 ►
That’s why what get a life means
00:54:39 ►
is go get stoned, go get laid,
00:54:44 ►
go climb a mountain or kayak a river,
00:54:47 ►
but somehow take back your own authenticity
00:54:50 ►
from the people who are peddling you canned experience
00:54:55 ►
with laugh tracks, with caffeine augmentation,
00:54:59 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:55:01 ►
The real message of psychedelics, I think,
00:55:07 ►
is to reclaim experience and to trust yourself. Your perceptions are primary. Your feelings are correct. Everything
00:55:15 ►
must constellate out and make sense and parse with what you know. If you don’t start from that assumption, then you are off-center
00:55:27 ►
to begin with. And the psychedelics will dissolve the cultural programming that has
00:55:31 ►
potentially made you a mark and restore your authenticity. And, you know, that’s what it’s
00:55:39 ►
all about. Whether the only transformation in life is the personal dying that awaits
00:55:45 ►
each of us, or whether there is a grand opening and opportunity just ahead at the end of history.
00:55:54 ►
That’s all, folks.
00:55:59 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
00:56:04 ►
thought at a time.
00:56:06 ►
So now I guess I have to ask, have you reclaimed experience and come once again to trust yourself?
00:56:14 ►
As Terrence just said, your perceptions are primary and your feelings are correct.
00:56:20 ►
Hopefully you’ve already dissolved the cultural programming that you were subjected to as a child
00:56:26 ►
I can’t say what’s right myself and what’s wrong or you should follow this idea or that
00:56:31 ►
heck I can barely make my own way through this forest of religions cultures languages and ideas
00:56:37 ►
and so I’m not going to be of any help to you in this regard but no matter what some grumpy old
00:56:43 ►
teacher or other person may have told you in the past, but no matter what some grumpy old teacher or other person
00:56:45 ►
may have told you in the past, you have a perfectly good mind yourself and are more
00:56:49 ►
than capable of sorting things out. As I’ve said before, I’ll say again, trust your own
00:56:55 ►
instincts. Listen to them and they won’t lead you astray.
00:56:59 ►
Now I have to admit that even though I’ve never bought into Terence’s time wave ending date
00:57:05 ►
or his idea of the end of human history and the eschaton,
00:57:09 ►
but I did like that comment that he made about Alfred North Whitehead’s concept about a shift in epochs.
00:57:16 ►
Now, that’s an idea that I may be able to get behind once I’ve thought about it a bit more.
00:57:22 ►
once I’ve thought about it a bit more.
00:57:30 ►
So, what did you think about that rap about what and when to tell your children about psychedelic medicines?
00:57:36 ►
I don’t want to get into too many specific details here, but I wound up doing it both ways.
00:57:41 ►
In the early days on my psychedelic path, I was actually a hypocrite and tried to not let my children know about what I was doing.
00:57:45 ►
But eventually I learned that, well, they were on to me.
00:57:49 ►
Kids know everything, you know.
00:57:51 ►
So what I wound up doing near the end of my child raising years
00:57:55 ►
is to lay out the pros and the cons of various substances
00:57:59 ►
and to be sure that they understood the importance of set and setting,
00:58:04 ►
particularly for the first time they used any substance.
00:58:08 ►
And my child that received that information from me was over 21
00:58:13 ►
before he asked me to take him on his first trip with, well,
00:58:17 ►
first several trips with a couple substances, which I did,
00:58:20 ►
and those events remain some of the most important experiences of my life as a
00:58:25 ►
father.
00:58:26 ►
Now, I realize that many of our fellow salonners have never used a psychoactive substance other
00:58:31 ►
than alcohol or caffeine, and might be horrified at the thought of parents and their adult
00:58:37 ►
children tripping together, but trust me here, the experience is phenomenal.
00:58:43 ►
It’s truly beautiful.
00:58:42 ►
Trust me here, the experience is phenomenal.
00:58:44 ►
It’s truly beautiful.
00:58:48 ►
Well, there’s a lot more that I have on my mind right now,
00:58:51 ►
but I’m going to leave these thoughts for another day and get on with previewing a new talk that I just received
00:58:54 ►
and that will hopefully be the focus of my next podcast.
00:58:58 ►
So stay tuned for a new voice that will be coming to the salon in the very near future.
00:59:04 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
00:59:06 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:08 ►
Be well, my friends.