Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“That’s the core puzzling experience, when you meet the Other organized as a speaking mind.”
“What you call man is time.” [Quoting the mushroom.]
“It’s as though a certain level of intoxication with the mushroom is the precondition for being able to communicate, but is not itself enough.”
“What happens with DMT is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds. Unlike mushrooms where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the Mandela, DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightening.”
“[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It’s so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn’t really like a drug. It’s more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.”
“History is the siren song of the soul.”
“The terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control. This is what people are most alarmed about by psychedelics, is the giving up control.”
“I see the psychedelic experience as both the centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of.”
“The tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between the masculine and the feminine.”
“And psychedelics now, as we de-condition ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
By Riane Eisler
One Foot in the Future
By Nina Graboi
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And, in case you’re wondering if you entered into some kind of a time warp, well, let me put your mind at ease.
00:00:31 ►
You are actually correct in thinking that, hey, didn’t Lorenzo just post a new podcast yesterday?
00:00:37 ►
Because, yes, I am producing two podcasts on two consecutive days.
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And once we’ve listened to today’s talk by Terrence McKenna,
00:00:46 ►
I’ll explain the method to my madness. Now, since this talk is from a question and answer session
00:00:52 ►
at one of Terrence’s workshops, there were several different and often unrelated topics that he
00:00:58 ►
covered. So for a title to this recording, I’m using what seemed to me to be the dominant theme
00:01:04 ►
of communicating with the other. But there were several other titles that I could have also used, and I’m
00:01:09 ►
sure you’ll think of them as you listen to this talk with me. Now, if you’re interested
00:01:13 ►
in listening to the opening remarks that Terrence made at this workshop before he began the
00:01:19 ►
Q&A, you can find the complete recording of this on YouTube under the title, The Light in Nature.
00:01:26 ►
And it runs for over four and a half hours on YouTube.
00:01:30 ►
So what I’ve done is to select certain topics from this 1988 workshop that I hope you’ll find interesting.
00:01:37 ►
Also, I think that you’ll find a really clear and interesting account of exactly what he means by the archaic revival,
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clear and interesting account of exactly what he means by the archaic revival, complete with examples which, I have to admit, have finally cleared this up for me to a point
00:01:50 ►
where I might even be able to explain the concept to someone on my own.
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But of course, I haven’t actually taken that test yet.
00:01:58 ►
So anyhow, let’s join Terrence and a few of his friends and listen to what they had on
00:02:04 ►
their minds way back in 1988.
00:02:08 ►
So, some brave soul has to seize the initiative there is.
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I had a question about yesterday’s talk about hypnagogia.
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From there, okay, first there was phosphenes.
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Right.
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And then hypnagogia. And then you went from hypnagogia to vision. From there, okay, first there was phosphenes. Right.
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And then hypnagogia.
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And then you went from hypnagogia to vision.
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And I thought, where does the dream state come in?
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Well, I think we were talking about visual, the visual field.
00:02:47 ►
The dream state is like a vision, except that it’s not emotionally charged in quite the same way that vision is. It’s almost a difference in emotional quality rather than the visual impression.
00:02:56 ►
Do you agree?
00:02:57 ►
I think so.
00:02:58 ►
When I’m dreaming, I get more of the feeling of a very emotional time,
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but when I’m in vision, it’s more like rapture,
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which I guess is high emotion.
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That’s what my analysis of it is,
00:03:14 ►
that it’s touching you at a deeper emotional level.
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But it’s interesting, this question you raise about dreams.
00:03:21 ►
We were talking last week.
00:03:23 ►
It’s fairly common among people who use psychedelics to have dreams in which the psychedelic actually appears as a motif and then you take it and then you have the experience in the dream.
00:03:46 ►
experience in the dream. And I’ve even had this with DMT, which is to my mind the strongest psychedelic. So it’s very interesting because it’s almost, it’s a perfect case proving that
00:03:54 ►
really you can do it all yourself. In other words, that the chemical precondition is there in deep sleep.
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Yeah, Eric.
00:04:07 ►
Do you think memory is more or less
00:04:10 ►
instead of memory being something you remember
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in the sense of
00:04:13 ►
replaying
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something, but it actually takes you back
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to the moment or something?
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You mean that it could be
00:04:22 ►
an extremely strong memory of a
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psychedelic state?
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That’s a possibility.
00:04:28 ►
It’s pretty interesting.
00:04:30 ►
I don’t know.
00:04:32 ►
I’ve had very puzzling experiences, maybe some of you have as well,
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around the theme of memory and psychedelics.
00:04:42 ►
I remember once in the Amazon,
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I had had a wonderful mushroom trip and I took it again the next night
00:04:50 ►
to try and re-reach the same place again.
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And instead I had this very bizarre trip
00:04:58 ►
in which I recalled with perfect clarity
00:05:02 ►
the basement of my aunt’s house some 20 years before and I saw
00:05:08 ►
myself playing alone in the basement on a certain sunny summer afternoon with a little circus set
00:05:17 ►
that I had and as I played with this circus set DMT stuff began leaking out of the air in front of me.
00:05:29 ►
And here I was 20 years later seeing this as though I were reliving a memory
00:05:33 ►
of a five-year-old child seeing the stuff that he couldn’t tell his parents about,
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couldn’t tell anybody about.
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So, you know, is that a hallucination? Is that a memory? What is it?
00:05:48 ►
It’s interesting in talking all the talk we’ve done about hallucinations to introduce the concept
00:05:54 ►
of a cognitive hallucination. A cognitive hallucination is where you don’t see something that isn’t ordinarily there. You understand something that isn’t ordinarily there.
00:06:10 ►
An example of this is I had a friend in San Francisco
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who I had told him, you know, when you take the mushrooms,
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stay in your apartment in the dark.
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Just be with them.
00:06:23 ►
I told him this maybe ten times so he takes the mushrooms an
00:06:27 ►
hour into it he realizes in such a way that just causes him to laugh aloud that I had been kidding
00:06:37 ►
but that wasn’t what I had meant at all but what I had really meant was to do that because we were preparing a surprise birthday
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party for him at the bar down the street so congratulating himself over the fact that he’s
00:06:55 ►
figured out this cleverness that we’ve launched upon him he dresses himself and gets ready
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goes down to this bar and bursts in the front door and says, I’m here.
00:07:09 ►
The story goes from there, but that’s the part about cognitive hallucinations.
00:07:19 ►
And of course, sometimes a cognitive hallucination will stand up. Then it becomes a new truth and passes into the memores as a competing member.
00:07:35 ►
What else is on people’s minds here?
00:07:38 ►
I’m real curious about the phenomena of when you’re on the mushrooms
00:07:43 ►
and you experience other other entity or this other intelligence.
00:07:46 ►
And I’ve tried dialoguing with this thing, like asking, are you a hallucination? Are you real? What are you?
00:07:51 ►
And it’s like, I just can’t tell. I just cannot tell whether it’s real or whether I’m hallucinating it or whether I’m creating it or whether it’s another part of me that’s separated from me or it’s a cluster of neurons that’s disassociated from the rest of my brain or something.
00:08:04 ►
or a cluster of neurons that’s disassociated from the rest of my brain or something.
00:08:06 ►
It’s just like the most puzzling thing to me.
00:08:10 ►
And on any insight you can give it’s an experience.
00:08:14 ►
Well, I think that’s the core puzzling experience, when you meet the other organized as a speaking mind.
00:08:21 ►
And I’ve wondered these same things
00:08:26 ►
asked it what it is
00:08:28 ►
it seems to be able to present itself many different ways
00:08:32 ►
I mean it can be almost like a robotic
00:08:35 ►
cybernetic disembodied kind of thing
00:08:38 ►
or sometimes it’s like
00:08:40 ►
your girlfriend in hyperspace
00:08:43 ►
it has this very sexy kind of, I don’t know,
00:08:49 ►
these funny vibes to be coming off a pharmaceutical product.
00:08:59 ►
But it might as well be another intellect, because it seems like it.
00:09:08 ►
It seems as different from you as the person sitting next to you, at least that different from you.
00:09:15 ►
So I treat it that way.
00:09:17 ►
I don’t know, you know, perhaps people have always heard voices in states of high agitation or stimulation.
00:09:27 ►
We don’t know what to do with that kind of thing
00:09:30 ►
because it’s not in our tradition.
00:09:33 ►
But it’s a shocking reality.
00:09:36 ►
I mean, for anybody who thinks plants don’t talk,
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it’s a real life reorienting experience
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to have one then harangue you.
00:09:46 ►
And I didn’t think plants talked.
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I had friends who claimed this,
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and my dream was really to reach,
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to figure out what these people could possibly mean.
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Do you actually hear them talking?
00:10:00 ►
Because I don’t hear voices.
00:10:01 ►
It’s more like images and feelings and sensations.
00:10:04 ►
Well, it has many modalities. It’s more like images and feelings and sensations. Well, it has many modalities.
00:10:06 ►
It can be like with ayahuasca.
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It seems to be truly a visual communicator.
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Its mode is vision.
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It shows you what it intends.
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But the mushroom actually speaks.
00:10:21 ►
It delivers itself of little aphorisms you know I’m sure you’ve heard me try to sum them up
00:10:31 ►
for people I mean it said things to me like man must have a plan if you don’t have a plan you’ll become part of somebody else’s plan it’s said nature loves courage the way nature responds to
00:10:50 ►
courage is by removing obstacles well these are things that your middle track zen guru could
00:10:58 ►
probably come up with but then it says other things which are completely puzzling. It says things like what you call man is time. And then sometimes it is humorous. Steiger-esque kind of Jewish persona.
00:11:31 ►
I remember one conversation I had with it where I said,
00:11:34 ►
what are you doing here?
00:11:36 ►
And it said, listen, you’re a mushroom, you live cheap.
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And I said, can I go back to my audiences and report that this is what the extraterrestrials said?
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You’re a mushroom, you live cheap? I said, you know, the neighborhood wasn’t so bad until
00:11:56 ►
the monkeys moved in. I’ll tell a funny story about this thing about the Jewish persona of the mushroom
00:12:05 ►
because it’s a standard
00:12:07 ►
story of mine that I
00:12:09 ►
tell and I was
00:12:11 ►
in a restaurant in Malibu
00:12:13 ►
with Bob Chartoff
00:12:15 ►
and Lou Carlino who some of you
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know, a bunch of fancy
00:12:19 ►
Hollywood type people
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and there was this French
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producer there, this woman
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and she and I had been seated
00:12:27 ►
together at dinner and she said
00:12:30 ►
you say that the mushroom
00:12:32 ►
speaks to you
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but I don’t understand how this can be
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what do you mean it speaks
00:12:38 ►
to you?
00:12:39 ►
and Ralph Abraham was there too
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and I in my sincere way
00:12:44 ►
said well it’s like the part Steiger played in the pawnbroker And Ralph Abraham was there too. And I, in my sincere way, said,
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well, it’s like the part Steiger played in The Pawnbroker.
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It just… And at that moment, Steiger stops by the table
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to shake hands with everybody there.
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And I’m like…
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And…
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True story, true story.
00:13:05 ►
And Ralph, who’s watched this whole thing go down,
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leans across the table to me and says,
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what this proves is the mushroom can reach into our world
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no matter where we are and shake the bars.
00:13:26 ►
Which isn’t a very good answer to your question.
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The answer is, I don’t know.
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It’s a puzzle.
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It’s very strange.
00:13:33 ►
It’s very, very mysterious.
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I guess I should try and describe this.
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You are the people to tell, if anybody is.
00:13:41 ►
What I found about this communicating with it thing
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is that sometimes it’s easy and it just
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comes and that’s what the trip is about. But if it’s elusive for you or if you’ve taken mushrooms
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many times and yet this doesn’t seem to be what happened to you, I couldn’t describe how it works for me anyway. It’s as though a certain level of intoxication
00:14:07 ►
with the mushroom
00:14:08 ►
is the precondition for being able to communicate
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but is not itself enough
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so that I will feel the levels building in my body
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and I will be very stoned
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and then I will come
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into this place where I will say now it is possible to invoke the spirit in the
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mushroom and then I invoke it and it’s a pretty straightforward thing I remember
00:14:43 ►
an old I Love Lucy thing
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where Ethel is asking Lucy
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how she gets in touch with the flying saucers.
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And she says, I just say,
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come in, little green men,
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come in, little green men.
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It’s almost like that.
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In fact, it is like that.
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No, they’re not green.
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What I do is I get the feeling
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which is
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I call it
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it’s almost like
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I’m embarrassed to even tell this kind of stuff
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it’s a feeling
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of being very Irish
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it’s a feeling
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of
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elfin-ness
00:15:24 ►
and then I say aha we’re getting close in they’re near I smell them
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they’re nearby and then I just say you know show show show and there’s this music this tinkling
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stuff and it begins to get stronger so I say you I say, you know, come in, little green man, come in.
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And then it gets louder and louder.
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And then finally, once you get the valve open,
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you don’t have to worry.
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It will pour through
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as long as you can watch it
00:15:57 ►
and be with it and sing with it.
00:16:00 ►
And it is obviously the basis
00:16:04 ►
for the idea of
00:16:06 ►
elves and elfin energy
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and little people who make
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jeweled machines
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and play musical instruments
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and live in the mountains
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Terence, did you
00:16:17 ►
do you know how in the very first instance
00:16:19 ►
that you began to
00:16:20 ►
you must have learned in some way how to invoke
00:16:24 ►
this, to say come in come in, come in you must have learned in some way how to invoke this,
00:16:25 ►
to say, come in, come in, come in.
00:16:27 ►
And you’ve stumbled into it some way.
00:16:29 ►
Can you recount that incident? Do you remember that?
00:16:32 ►
Sure. The way it happened to me was someone in 1967,
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just a few months after I’d begun taking LSD,
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somebody brought DMT to me and said, without any introduction,
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they just said,
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here’s something you might be interested in.
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It’s a drug.
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And I said, how long does it last?
00:16:52 ►
And they said, five minutes.
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I said, okay.
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Thinking, five minutes,
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what can it be, you know?
00:17:00 ►
And what happens with DMT
00:17:03 ►
is you leap over all the barriers in the first few seconds.
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Unlike mushrooms, where over hours and hours on a high dose you might navigate yourself to the center of the mandala,
00:17:19 ►
DMT is like being struck by metaphysical lightning.
00:17:23 ►
I mean, the main question is, what the hell happened?
00:17:27 ►
Because it immediately took me to this place
00:17:33 ►
I had never suspected existed, you know,
00:17:36 ►
this dome-like, brilliantly lit space
00:17:40 ►
where these self-transforming, machine machine organic things were all around me
00:17:47 ►
and leaping through my body and singing and making objects
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and showing all this stuff to me.
00:17:54 ►
And it was like just all the veils were torn away in a single moment.
00:18:00 ►
And then that inspired me to look at the chemistry and then the botany and the shamanism and to try and make my way back to that place at not quite such a super voltage.
00:18:15 ►
And that was the raison d’etre for going to the Amazon because those drugs in the Amazon, those plant combinations are working off the same chemicals. It was the
00:18:26 ►
reason for being into the mushrooms because the mushroom really experientially and chemically,
00:18:33 ►
it’s fair, it’s quite reasonable to call it a slow release DMT trip. DMT is quite an astonishing
00:18:41 ►
thing. I don’t understand how they managed to keep it secret because it’s
00:18:45 ►
the convincer, you know. It’s for the person who thinks these things only work if you’re soft-headed
00:18:52 ►
because it’s just, it raises all the questions in a hurry. It’s so intense and so oriented toward
00:19:01 ►
the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn’t really like a drug.
00:19:07 ►
It’s more like an event that you ran into.
00:19:10 ►
You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.
00:19:15 ►
I don’t know if I would have ever…
00:19:18 ►
I was lucky in that sense.
00:19:21 ►
A lot of people take psychedelics, a lot, I think,
00:19:25 ►
and never quite realize
00:19:28 ►
just what it is that they have their hands on
00:19:31 ►
because you need these ego-threatening,
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if not life-threatening experiences
00:19:37 ►
somewhere along the way
00:19:38 ►
to hip you to just how intense this can be.
00:19:43 ►
There’s nothing any more intense this side of the grave
00:19:46 ►
than a strong psychedelic experience.
00:19:50 ►
Did you begin then to, once you’d done the DMT,
00:19:52 ►
did you begin then to, as you would work with psilocybin or the mushrooms,
00:19:56 ►
did you begin to, and since it’s slower,
00:19:58 ►
you began to have some kind of recognition
00:20:01 ►
that you needed to invoke more and more and you began to, did it
00:20:05 ►
take a ritual form, for example?
00:20:07 ►
Did you do the same thing each time?
00:20:09 ►
What seemed most astonishing to me in
00:20:11 ►
these early DMT trips
00:20:13 ►
was that there was language
00:20:16 ►
that I hadn’t
00:20:17 ►
expected. That what’s going on in the DMT
00:20:20 ►
trip, besides the body
00:20:21 ►
transformations and the visual
00:20:23 ►
hallucinations and the little alien
00:20:25 ►
entities is they are
00:20:27 ►
speaking to you and you
00:20:29 ►
are understanding and yet
00:20:31 ►
they’re speaking in a language
00:20:33 ►
which is visible
00:20:35 ►
which is, it’s pure
00:20:37 ►
magic, it’s pure linguistic
00:20:40 ►
intent which you behold
00:20:41 ►
with your eyes and you
00:20:43 ►
feel like Moses before the burning bush or something
00:20:47 ►
you just say my god I didn’t know humans were wired for this kind of a thing what is it and
00:20:54 ►
then for many years I smoked DMT and contemplated it and on DMT it comes very very fast it’s like spun gold and mercury you know and supremely intricate and supremely worked
00:21:09 ►
and rapid and my dream was to be able to slow it down to be able to do it to be able to show it
00:21:19 ►
to people and i read robert graves the white, and had the notion in there, you know,
00:21:32 ►
he talks about a primary poetic language that he thinks existed before history that was so from the bone and the flesh of people that anyone could understand it.
00:21:40 ►
It wasn’t like Japanese and Iranian and American English.
00:21:44 ►
It was from the bones, not from the place.
00:21:48 ►
And poetry made in this language had the power not only to move people’s hearts and to open their souls,
00:21:56 ►
but to actually cause them to see realities pass before their eyes and that these poets were using sound and language to do something that we
00:22:07 ►
have only the faintest faintest memory of and what the dmt beings seem to be saying was this art can
00:22:16 ►
be brought back this visible language this poetry made manifest is what you should learn to do. And all the trips were about, see what we’re doing? Do this, do this.
00:22:29 ►
And eventually I was able to do it on psilocybin.
00:22:36 ►
And then it was apparent to me that it’s gibberish.
00:22:41 ►
And that I had somehow missed the mark
00:22:47 ►
or that you have to be stoned
00:22:49 ►
or that there are parts still to be learned.
00:22:54 ►
This is a very persistent theme
00:22:57 ►
in these deep psychedelic things, I think,
00:23:00 ►
is something is trying to be communicated
00:23:03 ►
that is not on the love one another level,
00:23:09 ►
but more like fold flap A to flap B,
00:23:14 ►
that kind of thing.
00:23:15 ►
There is concern to communicate the construction of something.
00:23:22 ►
And when I realized this and then looked back through mythology it’s
00:23:26 ►
always been there the Mandai ins who were a Gnostic cult of the even the
00:23:34 ►
pre-christian period had the notion that when the Messiah for them came he would
00:23:41 ►
construct a machine of some sort they call it this that he would construct a machine of some sort. They’d call it this.
00:23:46 ►
That he would construct a machine
00:23:48 ►
and that the machine would then pump all the souls to the moon
00:23:53 ►
and then from there they would be taken care of in some way.
00:23:57 ►
But the missing link was a machine
00:23:59 ►
which the second Adam would come and build.
00:24:04 ►
Cat had this experience of the structure of the flying saucer.
00:24:08 ►
When we were in the Amazon in 71,
00:24:11 ►
it was all about how do you build a trans-dimensional vehicle
00:24:16 ►
with the help of elfin advice.
00:24:20 ►
And it was molecular. It was interiorized.
00:24:23 ►
It had something to do with sound.
00:24:25 ►
You sing it into existence, but it has something to do with DNA.
00:24:29 ►
It’s a technology that is fantasy for us,
00:24:34 ►
except that you can feel that this has always been the Pythagorean faith,
00:24:39 ►
that color, sound, angle of attack, all of these things could go together
00:24:46 ►
to produce a super technology and a vehicle.
00:24:52 ►
And in the deep psychedelic states,
00:24:55 ►
there always seems to be
00:24:56 ►
either the concern with building something,
00:25:01 ►
imparting information about a plan,
00:25:03 ►
or the other persistent motif that people have
00:25:06 ►
is that the world is going to end
00:25:10 ►
and that there will be intervention of some spectacular sort,
00:25:15 ►
the second coming, flying saucers, something like that.
00:25:18 ►
Now, why these motifs exist, I don’t know.
00:25:22 ►
I’ve talked at times about what I call
00:25:24 ►
the transcendental object
00:25:26 ►
at the end of time
00:25:28 ►
and I think maybe what human history
00:25:31 ►
is
00:25:31 ►
is a kind of collective psychedelic
00:25:35 ►
trip where
00:25:36 ►
we’re closing in
00:25:38 ►
on the mystery at the center
00:25:41 ►
of the mandala
00:25:42 ►
sort of the shamanic
00:25:44 ►
gift difficult to obtain and
00:25:47 ►
what it is of course is it’s the human soul realized realized and I almost said
00:25:56 ►
realized as a technology but the realizing of it in any form would
00:26:00 ►
realize it as a technology so that really history is the siren song of the soul
00:26:07 ►
the saucer song of the soul
00:26:10 ►
the group mind coming into existence
00:26:13 ►
through our efforts over several thousand years
00:26:17 ►
something first glimpsed in dreams
00:26:20 ►
and then glimpsed in higher mythologies
00:26:24 ►
and then glimpsed in higher mythologies and then glimpsed in technological visions
00:26:27 ►
and in psychedelic states
00:26:29 ►
and finally actually invoked into history
00:26:33 ►
in such a way that its reality is incontrovertible,
00:26:39 ►
then history ends.
00:26:41 ►
I don’t understand why anyone could be moved
00:26:43 ►
to say such crazy things, but it seems to be the
00:26:48 ►
content of the experience. Now, of course, if any of you are psychologists, you recognize this as
00:26:56 ►
a syndrome, grandiose delusions, messiah complex, misplaced reference.
00:27:06 ►
It has different kinds of names.
00:27:08 ►
It means you think that you’re going to be present
00:27:11 ►
or a part of the most important thing that ever happened.
00:27:15 ►
It’s a serious form of mental illness, unless it’s true.
00:27:20 ►
And you don’t find out until it’s too late.
00:27:27 ►
Yes.
00:27:29 ►
Once the psychoactivity was discovered,
00:27:32 ►
the real visionary potential of the mushroom,
00:27:36 ►
I think it would be connected to the cow.
00:27:39 ►
It would be viewed as a product of the cow
00:27:41 ►
in the same way that the manure, the hide, the milk, the blood, and the flesh was.
00:27:46 ►
And it’s significant that in the Middle East, at the very earliest stratum of culture
00:27:53 ►
that is anything other than the chipping of flint, there are images of cattle.
00:27:59 ►
Cattle everywhere. Cattle at Altamira, cattle at Lascaux, painted very, very sensitively.
00:28:08 ►
What the ancient cave art of North Africa and Southern Europe is, is a celebration of
00:28:14 ►
women and cattle. Men appear as stick figures wielding spears. Women are drawn as filled-in curvilinear structures.
00:28:27 ►
Their fecundity, their pregnancy,
00:28:30 ►
in many cases, their physical beauty.
00:28:33 ►
I don’t know how many of you know the paintings
00:28:35 ►
of the Tasseli frescoes in Algeria,
00:28:38 ►
but there are paintings of seated women
00:28:40 ►
that are as good as anything Monet or Gauguin did.
00:28:45 ►
I mean, where it’s feeling, you know, it’s the curve of the hip
00:28:50 ►
and the incurve of the back and the swell of the belly under the breast.
00:28:55 ►
I mean, this is, it’s figurative drawing as good as we do today.
00:29:11 ►
drawing as good as we do today. So women and cattle at the very earliest stratum of consciousness are mixed together. We always talk about this early level of culture as hunting-gathering,
00:29:18 ►
and I think that we drop our voices. We say it’s a hunting gathering culture if you’ve spent time
00:29:26 ►
in the Amazon you know that what this means is once a month or once every six
00:29:32 ►
weeks the men get their act sufficiently together and they make up enough coca
00:29:38 ►
that they all go get their bows and arrows and they go off for a hunt and leave the women and the children behind
00:29:46 ►
and get all coked up
00:29:48 ►
and hunt and party all night.
00:29:53 ►
And then when the coca is all gone,
00:29:56 ►
because usually women make the coca,
00:29:58 ►
when the coca is all gone,
00:29:59 ►
whatever they’ve captured on the hunt,
00:30:01 ►
they triumphantly carry back to the village and often you know
00:30:06 ►
it’s garbage and the women will be waiting at the village for them to come back and say you know
00:30:12 ►
eight days in the woods and you bring back one maggoty a gutty you know what kind of clowns are
00:30:20 ►
you people but this is the hunt know, and the hunter is the hero
00:30:26 ►
and they’ll tell the story
00:30:28 ►
around the campfire.
00:30:29 ►
Meanwhile,
00:30:30 ►
what is really going on,
00:30:31 ►
as is always the case,
00:30:34 ►
is that women are gathering.
00:30:36 ►
And gathering
00:30:37 ►
is a highly conscious activity
00:30:40 ►
where, you know,
00:30:42 ►
this plant is okay,
00:30:44 ►
that plant is bad, the root of this plant is okay that plant is bad the root of this
00:30:47 ►
plant is poisonous but if pound with pounded with water and washed becomes
00:30:52 ►
edible it’s in it’s an intelligent it’s an activity that demands discrimination
00:30:58 ►
intelligence a body of lore memory powers, powers of observation, so forth and so on.
00:31:08 ►
It is in fact serious business.
00:31:12 ►
While this hunting thing exists almost to keep the men out of the women’s hair.
00:31:19 ►
So you can imagine that the visual acuity thing had as great an impact on the gathering
00:31:27 ►
as it did on the hunting.
00:31:30 ►
Because many plants,
00:31:31 ►
it’s very hard to tell the poison from the non-poison.
00:31:34 ►
And also, you gain…
00:31:37 ►
There are forms of visual acuity
00:31:39 ►
that are so removed from our awareness
00:31:41 ►
that we don’t even recall them,
00:31:44 ►
such as being able to
00:31:45 ►
track an animal or being able to tell where animals have been or being able to
00:31:51 ►
tell just by the color of a landscape where the water is flowing under the
00:31:58 ►
ground and therefore where certain kinds of plants will occur all of these
00:32:03 ►
cognitive activities,
00:32:05 ►
these integrative activities that rely on observation and memory,
00:32:10 ►
were tremendously aided by the presence of an imagination-enhancing enzyme
00:32:17 ►
in the food chain.
00:32:19 ►
And the goddess religions of the ancient Middle East
00:32:22 ►
are nothing more than the tail end of this.
00:32:28 ►
It went on for 15,000 years and then it began to fade out about 5,000 years ago.
00:32:34 ►
The Living in the Imagination Conference we just had,
00:32:38 ►
we were very, very fortunate to have Rianne Eisler come in and talk to us.
00:32:44 ►
If you’re not aware of her work, I urge you to look into it. Rian Eisler wrote The Chalice and the Blade, and she is a brilliant woman not that there was a patriarchy
00:33:07 ►
in prehistory
00:33:09 ►
and then we fell in
00:33:10 ►
I mean a matriarchy
00:33:11 ►
and then we fell into patriarchy
00:33:13 ►
and that this has been the problem
00:33:14 ►
she has managed to de-genderize
00:33:18 ►
the cultural debate
00:33:20 ►
by inventing the terms
00:33:22 ►
partnership culture
00:33:24 ►
and dominator culture we partnership culture and dominator culture.
00:33:27 ►
We live in a dominator culture, and so do the English, in spite of Margaret Thatcher.
00:33:33 ►
It’s not about women, and it’s not about men.
00:33:37 ►
It’s about feminine and masculine attitudes.
00:33:42 ►
And Rian, using the work of Maria Gambutas
00:33:47 ►
and other people,
00:33:48 ►
has made a brilliant case
00:33:50 ►
that the natural equilibrium state
00:33:57 ►
of human society
00:33:58 ►
is to be in a partnership culture
00:34:02 ►
where the only hierarchies are hierarchies of function.
00:34:09 ►
People do what they can do well, but an administrator is not a more advanced member of society than
00:34:17 ►
a gardener.
00:34:19 ►
Nothing is seen to be intrinsically somehow higher or lower.
00:34:23 ►
There are just functions performed by people.
00:34:27 ►
Well, the great hope that she holds out
00:34:29 ►
is that if we recognize that what happened was simply a mistake,
00:34:35 ►
the allowing of the dominator model to come into being,
00:34:39 ►
then recognizing it as a mistake,
00:34:42 ►
we can simply correct the mistake.
00:34:45 ►
So she offers tremendous hope.
00:34:48 ►
It’s not a we are doomed and the selfish gene, that rap,
00:34:53 ►
or the territorial imperative, that rap,
00:34:56 ►
or all of these we’re doomed kind of raps that come out of sociobiology
00:35:02 ►
and that kind of thing.
00:35:04 ►
We’re not doomed at all.
00:35:06 ►
Now, what I’ve hoped to do and want to do
00:35:10 ►
is accept Rion’s premise
00:35:13 ►
that there was a partnership culture
00:35:17 ►
that around 1500 BC died out completely,
00:35:21 ►
its last stand being Minoan Crete,
00:35:25 ►
and that it was then replaced by a dominator culture.
00:35:28 ►
I accept all that.
00:35:30 ►
What I want to know is why?
00:35:33 ►
How could such a thing have happened?
00:35:35 ►
If a model of culture, an adaptation like that,
00:35:41 ►
had been perfected that worked,
00:35:43 ►
what factor could then come into the picture
00:35:46 ►
and overturn it and cause it to be lost?
00:35:51 ►
And I think what it is,
00:35:53 ►
is the partnership culture
00:35:56 ►
was feminized in its approach to society
00:36:02 ►
because it maintained a connection to the psychedelic world through
00:36:09 ►
plants it kept a proper perspective on the true rank of import of the structures of the psyche because as soon as you get the fall of Minoan Crete,
00:36:28 ►
what you get is the beginnings of Greek philosophy.
00:36:32 ►
And when you get formal philosophy
00:36:34 ►
and you get the rise of the Homeric period,
00:36:39 ►
all this happened about the same time.
00:36:41 ►
We’re talking 1100 BC here in the eastern Mediterranean.
00:36:46 ►
You get the glorification of the marauder, the warrior, the glorification of the king,
00:36:53 ►
and the evolution of slavery in the Greek model that we kept up with right up until 1865, the slaves of ancient Egypt were the property of the royal household.
00:37:10 ►
Slaveholding was not something that everybody was into, as it was later where wealth meant slaves. what the psychedelic thing can be seen as
00:37:25 ►
when it’s done with plants
00:37:28 ►
is a return to Gaia,
00:37:31 ►
an immersion in the feminine.
00:37:35 ►
James Joyce talks about what he calls
00:37:37 ►
the mama matrix most mysterious.
00:37:41 ►
That’s what you’re seeing,
00:37:43 ►
those lights against darkness all that stuff it is the
00:37:48 ►
potential for creative exuberance that resides in the phonic feminine matrix it is the body of the
00:37:57 ►
goddess and the ego can only create and maintain its tiny world of self-reflective concerns
00:38:09 ►
if it stifles this connection to the unconscious.
00:38:15 ►
So the terror of drugs that is paralyzing our society is,
00:38:22 ►
there’s really only one terror in our society it’s the terror of the feminine
00:38:29 ►
and the terror of drugs is a terror of giving up control this is what people are most alarmed
00:38:39 ►
about by psychedelics is the giving up control and remember in the 60s it was all about ego loss
00:38:46 ►
and people strove for it and claimed to have achieved it
00:38:50 ►
and this and that.
00:38:51 ►
And it was never couched in this male-female thing.
00:38:55 ►
But I think that’s a male problem
00:38:58 ►
and a male way of sort of setting the table
00:39:04 ►
for the banquet to talk about ego loss. A partnership society
00:39:09 ►
is going to involve a lot of ego loss. It’s going to involve a lot of seeing your brother
00:39:18 ►
and your sister as interchangeable with yourself. It’s going to bring I think a major sexual revolution
00:39:27 ►
because so much of sexuality over the past 500 years
00:39:33 ►
has been based on
00:39:35 ►
it was almost the coinage of the egos
00:39:38 ►
dealings with the world
00:39:40 ►
how many women are under my domination
00:39:44 ►
are you mine am I yours it and people
00:39:50 ►
have always stressed that the problem was in the possession but it’s really in
00:39:55 ►
the casting of the subject and the object there my me and you not the
00:40:01 ►
relationship and so I have
00:40:05 ►
I’m sure you’ve all heard me say this on tape
00:40:08 ►
to me the major metaphor that is operating
00:40:11 ►
in the 20th century
00:40:13 ►
is what I call the archaic revival
00:40:16 ►
our civilization is falling to pieces
00:40:22 ►
its assumptions are no longer any good. It just doesn’t work.
00:40:27 ►
And by our civilization, I mean from Moscow to the Potomac to Tokyo to Sydney to Bangkok and back to Paris.
00:40:37 ►
Global civilization is not working.
00:40:40 ►
They may still be working in the rainforest, but only if we haven’t reached them yet.
00:40:44 ►
They may still be working in the rainforest, but only if we haven’t reached them yet.
00:40:48 ►
And as soon as we reach them, they’ll be sent to work in sawmills and involved in growing coca for the drug trade and be ruined.
00:40:55 ►
When a society is in trouble the way we are in trouble,
00:41:00 ►
what it does unconsciously, just in the same way that a drowning person reaches outward, is it reaches outward for a previous cultural metaphor to stabilize itself.
00:41:37 ►
As the medieval world began to crack to pieces and cynicism about the church and the pope and all of this and cities began to, and the Jews began to be turned loose to make money and trading networks began to be established. All of these new things began to be tolerated.
00:41:42 ►
The Renaissance reached back to Greece and Rome for studying
00:41:46 ►
metaphors and this is what classicism is it’s an effort to be more like Greece
00:41:52 ►
and Rome than Greece and Rome were to have their laws their architecture their
00:42:00 ►
technologies theories of road building, warfare, politics.
00:42:08 ►
In our situation, the culture crisis is much worse
00:42:12 ►
because of the bomb, because it is global,
00:42:16 ►
because of high-speed communication.
00:42:19 ►
We can’t reach back to ancient Egypt
00:42:22 ►
or the Anastasi
00:42:25 ►
or the Maya
00:42:27 ►
it has to be
00:42:28 ►
something further back
00:42:30 ►
it actually has to be something
00:42:32 ►
outside of history
00:42:33 ►
and this is what sets the stage for the
00:42:36 ►
archaic revival
00:42:37 ►
we want to return
00:42:39 ►
to the cultural models of
00:42:42 ►
15 to 20 thousand years
00:42:44 ►
ago
00:42:44 ►
not that we are going to become to the cultural models of 15,000 to 20,000 years ago.
00:42:50 ►
Not that we are going to become Neolithic people, but we need to cultivate the same things they cultivated
00:42:55 ►
for very different reasons.
00:42:58 ►
They were hunter-gatherers with a deep sensitivity to nature
00:43:02 ►
in order that their very small numbers could prosper and spread.
00:43:08 ►
We must become gardeners of the planet and ecologically conscious people,
00:43:15 ►
because otherwise there won’t be any land left to stand on.
00:43:20 ►
Their concern with myth and ritual,
00:43:24 ►
with images from the unconscious expressed in mask making and carving and fetishes, human feelings of the early 20th century
00:43:50 ►
than the romantic fin de siècle art that had come before,
00:43:56 ►
which was really the last tail wagging of the Baroque and Rococo era,
00:44:03 ►
which was the comedown from the Renaissance. So modern art,
00:44:08 ►
the discoveries of Freud and Jung, that there was more to life than being awake or asleep,
00:44:14 ►
but that there were, you know, spirits, the rebirth of a sense of spiritual values. You know,
00:44:22 ►
at mid-century, it looked like we were all going to become
00:44:25 ►
French intellectuals,
00:44:27 ►
existential, atheistic, Marxist,
00:44:32 ►
just this flat, flat, empty thing.
00:44:36 ►
Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement on nature is,
00:44:39 ►
nature is mute.
00:44:41 ►
Nature has nothing to say to man.
00:44:44 ►
Well, this is, to my mind my mind you know a monstrous statement
00:44:48 ►
designed to lead people astray if nature is mute no wonder the existentialists felt lost
00:44:55 ►
they had precluded the one connection to authentic being that was available to them so I see the psychedelic experience as both the
00:45:12 ►
centerpiece of prehistoric life and destined to be the centerpiece of any future that we want to be part of. We can imagine fascist futures,
00:45:27 ►
futures of vast regimentation and machine-like behavior
00:45:30 ►
where everyone is reduced to just being an automaton
00:45:36 ►
within a vaster automaton.
00:45:38 ►
But these are not futures we want to live with.
00:45:41 ►
A humane future is going to, as I said last night, place the expansion of consciousness in its very center. And this means accepting the role of the feminine, not as political night, but I always think of what Chesterton said.
00:46:06 ►
He said, men are men, but man is a woman.
00:46:11 ►
And that’s the fact of the matter.
00:46:15 ►
And by realizing that man is a woman,
00:46:19 ►
there’s no debate, it’s not a discussion,
00:46:23 ►
there’s no convincing, it’s just a discussion. There’s no convincing.
00:46:28 ►
It’s just a fact, like that water runs downhill and you’re going to have to get straight about it.
00:46:31 ►
Then there is a possibility
00:46:33 ►
for fitting ourselves into a partnership future.
00:46:40 ►
Rianne has thought this all out in her head theoretically
00:46:45 ►
I don’t know whether she is a psychedelic traveler or not
00:46:49 ►
but she and I immediately had lots to say to each other
00:46:53 ►
because she has you could say found her way there by another route
00:47:00 ►
the tension in the world is the tension between the ego and the feminine, not between
00:47:09 ►
the masculine and the feminine. And everyone who has an ego, and many women in positions of power
00:47:16 ►
do, has an unresolved problem with this ego-feminine thing. The return to the archaic mode
00:47:27 ►
gives permission for this to happen
00:47:29 ►
and the psychedelic experience stabilizes it
00:47:33 ►
because women are always at home with the mystery
00:47:40 ►
probably because they are the ones who give birth
00:47:44 ►
and they are usually the ones who make
00:47:49 ►
dying ease the way of the dying so I don’t think women have this desire for neatness and closure
00:47:57 ►
that dominates men men want it to be straightforward well organized move on time no mystery science
00:48:08 ►
as the great enterprise of paternalism has come to the end of its road it has not only swept the
00:48:17 ►
kitchen it’s now sweeping the yard and as it sweeps the yard it’s sinking deeper and deeper in the earth
00:48:25 ►
because there’s no floor on reality
00:48:27 ►
there is science
00:48:29 ►
and they are beginning to admit this
00:48:31 ►
and say well there’s something wrong
00:48:32 ►
we thought it would be one more particle
00:48:35 ►
or one more something or other
00:48:37 ►
and it just seems to endlessly recede in front of us
00:48:40 ►
this is not a problem
00:48:41 ►
this is a solution
00:48:43 ►
this is what science has been needing to hear
00:48:45 ►
for 500 years is enough already we now have a science which can do anything or almost anything
00:48:54 ►
we want technologically so that’s its tool making function it’s fulfilled that very nicely
00:49:00 ►
why do we believe that it will elucidate the mysteries of the soul? It won’t. That’s another concern. It’s a concern of individuals. You want to understand the mystery of the soul, you don’t get a five billion dollar budget and a team of six universities linked by computer to attack it. No, you go into the wilderness and you eat mushrooms.
00:49:27 ►
It’s that kind of work. It’s more the work of the poet than the work of the research scientist.
00:49:34 ►
And certainly in the archaic mode, the poet was the model for men and women. I mean, poet has a masculine connotation in our society,
00:49:47 ►
but that’s because we’re so screwed up.
00:49:48 ►
We even had a separate word for women poets, a poetess, you see.
00:49:54 ►
But the making of poetry, the living in the primal world of poetry,
00:49:59 ►
can only be done if you have a direct connection to the mystery.
00:50:04 ►
And that cannot happen as long as
00:50:07 ►
the ego is the god. We were in the conference last week kidding around down at the baths and
00:50:15 ►
I was saying that I had invented the smallest form of memory, that memories were made of
00:50:22 ►
particles and that the smallest particle
00:50:25 ►
of memory was called a
00:50:27 ►
nemon and then
00:50:29 ►
somebody said well if memories are made
00:50:31 ►
of particles then is consciousness
00:50:33 ►
made of particles
00:50:34 ►
he said well maybe it is
00:50:37 ►
well then what shall we name
00:50:39 ►
the smallest unit
00:50:40 ►
of consciousness
00:50:42 ►
and Kat said
00:50:44 ►
how about calling it the ego and I think that’s a good
00:50:53 ►
place to begin let’s get it in its proper perspective the ego is the smallest amount
00:50:59 ►
of consciousness anybody can deal with in the ordinary world but you build outward from the
00:51:07 ►
ego you put two egos together and maybe you’ve either got a conflict which is always interesting
00:51:15 ►
or better yet a love affair well you put three egos together and you’ve got a menage a trois four and you have a corporation
00:51:26 ►
and so forth and so on
00:51:28 ►
so complexity of consciousness
00:51:30 ►
arrives out of
00:51:32 ►
building on the atom
00:51:34 ►
of the ego not trying to
00:51:36 ►
squeeze everything down
00:51:38 ►
into it the
00:51:39 ►
intellectual richness
00:51:42 ►
of our heritage is
00:51:44 ►
unimaginable
00:51:45 ►
it is our greatest
00:51:47 ►
legacy I mean you can
00:51:49 ►
forget your fleets of
00:51:51 ►
Rolls Royces and that
00:51:53 ►
Monet that they’re holding for you
00:51:55 ►
in Paris and your
00:51:56 ►
summer house on Ibiza
00:51:58 ►
it’s nothing compared
00:52:01 ►
to the richness of the
00:52:03 ►
imagination not
00:52:04 ►
William Blake’s imagination
00:52:06 ►
or Donatello or Caravaggio,
00:52:11 ►
but your imagination.
00:52:14 ►
There’s more and better art in your head
00:52:17 ►
than is hanging on the walls
00:52:19 ►
of the great galleries of art of this planet.
00:52:22 ►
That’s what makes history so exciting
00:52:24 ►
because we have just begun.
00:52:27 ►
We really are just shaking the leaves out of our hair and scraping the lice out of our fur and
00:52:34 ►
beginning to talk about how we could have a civilization here. We could have a sane
00:52:41 ►
planet with sane people living on it, leading happy, productive lives with everybody with enough to eat, everybody getting laid enough, everybody getting to be famous enough, everybody getting what they need by abandoning this you know I think it was Freud who compared the the gathering of
00:53:05 ►
money to the retention of shit to the holding of your stuff you know to being
00:53:11 ►
that possessive and that crazed about the products of your own your own psyche
00:53:19 ►
and body the role that psychedelics play in this
00:53:25 ►
if I haven’t made clear enough
00:53:27 ►
is that they caused it
00:53:29 ►
they maintain whatever of it has gone on
00:53:33 ►
through the dark centuries of monotheism
00:53:36 ►
when these things were forbidden
00:53:38 ►
and I put it that way in order to
00:53:41 ►
jibe Muslims, Jews and Christians equally because we all have
00:53:46 ►
shared in the carrying forward of a really odd idea. And psychedelics now, as we decondition
00:53:58 ►
ourselves from the post-medieval world, they are present to hand as tools. And I think people such as yourselves know this.
00:54:08 ►
What we need to do is create a common language. In the 60s, the odd thing was everybody agreed
00:54:16 ►
that LSD was very, very important, but nobody could really say how it was important outside
00:54:23 ►
of the fact that it had been important to them.
00:54:26 ►
And I think if you give permission to look at the role of the plants and of shamanism and of the mystery religions,
00:54:37 ►
do your homework, go back into history and see how it worked,
00:54:41 ►
then you see that the real revolution is going to be the realization
00:54:46 ►
that if it weren’t for psychedelics,
00:54:49 ►
we wouldn’t even be here.
00:54:51 ►
This thing that we’re so concerned to deny
00:54:53 ►
and repress in our society,
00:54:55 ►
which is drugs,
00:54:56 ►
is the sine qua non of being,
00:54:59 ►
not bad drugs.
00:55:01 ►
I’m not advocating cocaine addiction,
00:55:03 ►
heroin use, that sort of thing. We will talk at
00:55:07 ►
some other time about habits and the habit of having habits. But those are creatures of the
00:55:15 ►
laboratory, pernicious imps that have been summoned forth by the scientific establishment and let loose in society to really confuse the issue.
00:55:29 ►
If I could, by an act of fiat, change the linguistic world around, I would make it impossible
00:55:39 ►
to use the word drugs to talk about what we’re talking about. Drugs are things, medicine for ill people,
00:55:50 ►
coming out of the laboratory,
00:55:51 ►
coming out of theories of medicine
00:55:54 ►
that come out of mechanistic science.
00:55:58 ►
Plants are what we’re talking about.
00:56:01 ►
And I used to sort of shy away from the word magic but more and more I come to
00:56:07 ►
I’ve come to like it because it makes the right people so uptight and say just talk about magic
00:56:16 ►
plants who’s going to bust you for magic plants and say you mean drugs no No, just magic. Oh, I see. Well, you’re a near head. So what I’m talking about this morning is my hope that the awareness of psychedelics as a personal force in each of your lives,
00:56:39 ►
I don’t think I have to talk to you about that. You’re self-selected for being here and you know that.
00:56:44 ►
think I have to talk to you about that. You’re self-selected for being here and you know that.
00:56:52 ►
What I want to talk about is how important it is to re-understand our history, to re-understand that this is us. We didn’t get to this place by ourselves. What distinguishes us from the other
00:57:00 ►
primates is that we formed a symbiotic relationship with a mystery and the mystery
00:57:08 ►
is an intelligence on this planet we can’t say how long at least as long as we have been here
00:57:16 ►
may have come from the stars could be an extraterrestrial intellect. It could be the dark recesses of our own mind
00:57:25 ►
that we have evolved so far from
00:57:27 ►
that we cannot recognize.
00:57:29 ►
But we might as well treat it
00:57:32 ►
like an extraterrestrial
00:57:33 ►
because no extraterrestrial
00:57:36 ►
that we are going to meet
00:57:38 ►
is going to be as alien
00:57:39 ►
as this thing that we have found in ourselves.
00:57:44 ►
The aliens of Hollywood
00:57:46 ►
who come in metallic ships
00:57:49 ►
with an interest in our atomic power plants
00:57:52 ►
or our redwood trees or whatever
00:57:55 ►
are just like the guy living next door
00:57:58 ►
compared to the entities
00:58:00 ►
that we find in our own mind.
00:58:03 ►
So it doesn’t do any good
00:58:04 ►
to psychologize the alien
00:58:06 ►
and say, as Jung attempted to say,
00:58:10 ►
well, it’s the autonomous other.
00:58:12 ►
Autonomous psychic components in the human mind
00:58:15 ►
present themselves as elves, fairies, sprites, and aliens.
00:58:20 ►
Once you’ve met an elf, a sprite, a fairy, or an alien,
00:58:24 ►
you realize that waving the wand that says this is a component of your own psyche is just ludicrous. It’s as ludicrous as me waving a wand at you and announcing that that’s gotten rid of your existential validity because you’re a part of my own psyche. You know, it’s madness when applied to another person,
00:58:49 ►
and I think it’s equally appropriate when applied to these entities
00:58:55 ►
contacted in the trance.
00:58:58 ►
To do that, to try to reduce it, to say,
00:59:00 ►
well, it’s just one part of my head talking to another,
00:59:04 ►
is to fall into this paternalistic scientific desire to have it all be very neat.
00:59:10 ►
How would it be if it’s not neat at all?
00:59:13 ►
How would it be if nobody really knows what’s going on?
00:59:18 ►
How would it be if understanding what reality is actually depended for you, upon you.
00:59:26 ►
And that book by Fritjof Capra
00:59:28 ►
that you paid 1895 for
00:59:30 ►
isn’t going to do it.
00:59:33 ►
And neither is sitting at the feet of some guru
00:59:38 ►
that it’s serious business.
00:59:40 ►
And the first thing to understand
00:59:42 ►
is that nobody knows.
00:59:47 ►
That you’re not looking for a teacher it hasn’t been found out it’s not sitting on the shelf of some library it is being
00:59:54 ►
figured out now and your job is to die with the state-of-the-art understanding having emerged
01:00:02 ►
into your mind five minutes before you got there.
01:00:06 ►
And then, you know, that will carry you through. We need to awaken to the adventure and the
01:00:13 ►
richness and the openness of the game. The rules have not yet been forged. We will forge
01:00:21 ►
the rules ourselves, each for ourselves and each for the rest of us by working forward through this thing.
01:00:31 ►
I think we’re at the very beginnings of grappling and dealing with the psychedelic era.
01:00:38 ►
We are like people talking about evolution in 1855.
01:00:42 ►
A few of us have read Darwin’s paper.
01:00:46 ►
Nobody’s sure exactly what it means.
01:00:49 ►
It’s a strong intuition of something.
01:00:51 ►
The species thing is a problem.
01:00:53 ►
Nobody’s quite sure.
01:01:00 ►
There’s a new model of life and culture ahead of us,
01:01:03 ►
and it comes out of exploring with each other the places we have been by ourselves,
01:01:08 ►
the places that we have gone and been taken by the spirit.
01:01:13 ►
I’d like to add something.
01:01:15 ►
Sure, me too.
01:01:15 ►
This wonderful thing that Chesterton said about man being a woman.
01:01:20 ►
I think the essence of the psychedelic experience is surrender.
01:01:24 ►
Yes.
01:01:24 ►
And surrender is a feminine thing.
01:01:27 ►
That’s right.
01:01:27 ►
It’s terribly difficult for most men to surrender.
01:01:32 ►
That’s right.
01:01:32 ►
And women surrender when they give birth.
01:01:36 ►
I mean, you must.
01:01:38 ►
I mean, if it’s natural childbirth, you just realize this tiger has you and there’s no backing out, walking away, postponing, skipping over.
01:01:51 ►
And yes, so it’s the tension between the ego and surrender and the psychedelics mean surrender.
01:01:58 ►
I thought I talked somewhat about the problem of the alien.
01:02:03 ►
I thought I talked somewhat about the problem of the alien.
01:02:06 ►
It’s a rich problem,
01:02:10 ►
and people probably have experiences which weigh upon it.
01:02:13 ►
It’s really in the particulars of meeting this thing.
01:02:17 ►
If someone had never taken psychedelics and had no interest in it,
01:02:19 ►
and had come here because they thought
01:02:21 ►
this was the triggering group,
01:02:24 ►
I think they would be truly alarmed and disturbed by what they hear
01:02:28 ►
because we appear to be mad people,
01:02:31 ►
because we appear to be fully engaged with an unseen, invisible world,
01:02:35 ►
and we’re calling it the cause of history,
01:02:37 ►
the purpose for the future,
01:02:39 ►
and the basis for everything going on between us.
01:02:43 ►
But nobody said life was simple because
01:02:50 ►
every single person who does this is seeing things no human eye has ever
01:02:58 ►
fallen upon and it is a realm of ideas and we do each bring back different souvenirs from that place.
01:03:08 ►
We are all equally qualified.
01:03:10 ►
We don’t know who will spot the whale, but everyone should have their eye peeled because that’s what we’re doing.
01:03:18 ►
We’re searching for an encounter with Leviathan.
01:03:23 ►
Nature is God. That was the informing vision of Moby Dick and
01:03:28 ►
it’s a good one to carry as a metaphor into this into the psychedelic experience. There again was
01:03:36 ►
a perfect example of the male ego unable to release into the matrix of nature until it literally dragged them into the depths.
01:03:46 ►
But thank you very much for your attention.
01:03:53 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:03:57 ►
thought at a time.
01:04:00 ►
And in case you old-timers like me are wondering, I’m quite sure that the woman who made a comment near the end of this recording
01:04:08 ►
was most likely Nina Gerboy,
01:04:11 ►
and she was one of the most remarkable figures in our tribe’s early history.
01:04:16 ►
Her story is quite simply amazing,
01:04:18 ►
and if after reading about her on the web you want some more information,
01:04:23 ►
I highly suggest that you pick up a copy of her autobiography, which is titled One Foot in the Future.
01:04:30 ►
After escaping from Hitler’s death squads, to being a Long Island society woman,
01:04:36 ►
to being one of the key players in the Timothy Leary story,
01:04:39 ►
well, I don’t think you’re going to find many lives more adventuresome and purposeful than that of Nina Grabois.
01:04:47 ►
What a wonderful lady she was.
01:04:50 ►
And I realize that if you’ve been here with us in the salon for a long time,
01:04:55 ►
you are probably getting tired of hearing me say this,
01:04:58 ►
but for the benefit of the newcomers who have recently joined us,
01:05:01 ►
I just want to reiterate the fact that not everybody has the
01:05:05 ►
same kind of experiences as did Terrence McKenna, at least in the way he describes them. So if your
01:05:13 ►
ayahuasca and mushroom experiences are different from those described in this talk by Terrence,
01:05:18 ►
well, don’t despair. I’ve never seen something that I would call a machine elf. Never seen one myself, but it
01:05:26 ►
certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. And I sure did see some other strange things though. Maybe
01:05:32 ►
they were what Terrence was calling a machine elf, and maybe not. We’ll never know. And this is why
01:05:39 ►
it’s so important for the visionary artists among us to continue their work in creating a new visual language
01:05:45 ►
that we can use to continue pushing the dark edges of consciousness into the light.
01:05:52 ►
So, are you still wondering why I’ve done two podcasts in such quick succession?
01:05:58 ►
Well, I’ve been in a somewhat reflective mood lately,
01:06:01 ►
and discovered that until recently I had no inkling that I would
01:06:05 ►
end my days living here in Southern California and podcasting these talks to my friends.
01:06:11 ►
However, looking back on all of the wild and various plans that I once had for my life,
01:06:17 ►
well, I now realize that really there’s nothing that I would rather be doing in my so-called
01:06:22 ►
golden years than spending time with you here
01:06:25 ►
in the Psychedelic Salon. And so, since yesterday was the last day of my 71st year, I thought that
01:06:33 ►
the thing I most wanted to do on that day was to complete another podcast, which means that today
01:06:39 ►
is my birthday, the beginning of my 72nd year in this life. And believe me, even just 15 years ago,
01:06:46 ►
there was no way that I could have envisioned the great life that I now have.
01:06:51 ►
But wait, you say, what’s all this talk about a 71st and a 72nd year?
01:06:56 ►
What’s that all about?
01:06:58 ►
Well, explaining that, my dear friend, is my birthday present to myself,
01:07:02 ►
because I love to tell this story.
01:07:04 ►
And so for the very last time,
01:07:06 ►
thankfully my family and friends will say, I’m going to help you understand this birthday thing.
01:07:12 ►
And it’s really not all that complicated. Let’s say it’s your first birthday. How old are you on
01:07:18 ►
that day, and what year of your life are you in? Well, the day before your first birthday was the last day of your first year,
01:07:26 ►
right? So on what we celebrate as a first birthday is really more correctly understood to be
01:07:32 ►
the first anniversary of your birth. But on that anniversary day, you’re actually beginning your
01:07:38 ►
second year of life. Got it so far? So today, which my friends and family see as my 71st birthday, is actually the first day of my 72nd year.
01:07:50 ►
And thus I ended my 71st year with a podcast, and I have now begun my 72nd year with this podcast.
01:07:57 ►
But more importantly, I have had the opportunity to once explain the misconception people have about birthday celebrations.
01:08:07 ►
In essence, you are always older than what you say is your age.
01:08:11 ►
Okay, I realize this is really anal and I promise to never bring it up again.
01:08:17 ►
But it sure does feel good to now be in my 72nd year,
01:08:22 ►
something that no other male in my family line has been able to achieve
01:08:26 ►
before. And now it is time to once again press on. For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:08:34 ►
Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.