Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.”
“What I always hoped for out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt, and still feel, that that is the attitude with which you should go into these things.”
“I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.”
“Life, carefully examined, is actually a form of allegorical literature with a very tight constructural grid laid over it.”
“The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds. They are always right and with it each moment.”
Terence’s List (1987)
Psychedelics Encyclopedia
Peter Stafford
Hallucinogens : Cross-Cultural Perspectives
Marlene Dobkin De Rios
Hallucinogens and Shamanism (Galaxy Books)
Michael J. Harner
The Hallucinogens
A. Hoffer; H. Osmond
Science and Romance of Selected Herbs Used in Medicine and Religious Ceremony
Anthony K. Andoh
Narcotic Plants
William A. Emboden
The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series)
Richard Evans Schultes
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance
Rupert Sheldrake
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler
Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide: A Handbook for Psilocybin Enthusiasts
O. T. Oss, O. N. Oeric
Codex Seraphinianus
Luigi Serafini
True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise
Terence McKenna
The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching
Terence McKenna, Dennis McKenna
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
Terence McKenna
A few more suggestions from Lorenzo
Previous Episode
365 - Effects of Psychedelics on Society
Next Episode
367 - The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And here with me in virtual cyberdelic space are William F., Max P., who’s up in Canada, and Yori S., all of whom are fellow salonners who made donations this past week to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon.
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And I thank you all very much for helping us to keep the show going.
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And I thank you all very much for helping us to keep the show going.
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Now, today I’m finally going to get around to doing something that our fellow Saloners have been asking about for several years now.
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And that is to put together a psychedelic reading list.
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Actually, it was the fact that Terrence began this segment of his 1987 workshop by mentioning the titles of several books that he thought were essential for any psychedelic library. Thank you. Amazon store. And I guess that this is a good place to also thank our fellow saloners who have shopped there over the past year. It’s not a huge source of revenue. I think that the total
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of last year’s commissions came to about $150. But hey, that’s half of our monthly expenses here in
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the salon. So if you happen to be one of those kind souls who shop there, I thank you very much for your contribution to the salon as well.
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Because all of our commissions from Amazon go directly to paying our hosting bills.
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As I mentioned in my previous podcast, this workshop was held in 1987.
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And in today’s segment, we learn that, in fact, it was Easter weekend in that year.
00:02:06 ►
Now, when he got to where he wanted to talk about the time wave, I got ready to cut that out.
00:02:11 ►
Because, as I’ve said before, now that the magic of 2012 is over and the time wave is mute, I just didn’t want to go through it again.
00:02:20 ►
But I always listen to those raps before editing them out, just to be sure that we don’t miss something of interest.
00:02:27 ►
Well, what interested me in the time wave rap that we’ll be hearing shortly,
00:02:31 ►
is that it is the first time that I can remember him explaining in great detail
00:02:36 ►
how that concept actually came into his mind during those legendary days at La Charrera.
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That said, I did cut out his very lengthy description of the I Ching
00:02:46 ►
and the rest of the technical details of his idea.
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However, I think that the parts that I left in are worth your time listening to
00:02:54 ►
because, well, I think it gives us a better look into the mind of McKenna
00:02:58 ►
and how he, at least on Easter Day in 1987,
00:03:02 ►
believed in the time wave and its 2012 end date.
00:03:06 ►
But let me put this talk on and then you can judge for yourself.
00:03:11 ►
At each of these weekends we usually update people on books on the subject that are available.
00:03:19 ►
One of the things that people don’t do enough of when they do psychedelic work is spend time in the library.
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I mean, there’s a great deal of published literature on these things, historical, chemical, so forth and so on.
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And it’s good to be informed.
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I know that I often, I use reference books.
00:03:43 ►
I use Schulte’s Botany and chemistry of hallucinogens for those aspects
00:03:49 ►
Peter Stafford’s psychedelic encyclopedia is good for a kind of social history overview
00:03:56 ►
Marlene de Rios has a book called cross-cultural perspectives Perspectives on Hallucinogens.
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Probably one of the books that I recommend most to people
00:04:08 ►
is Michael Harner’s anthology
00:04:10 ►
Shamanism and Hallucinogens
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where he gathered a bunch of
00:04:14 ►
very good articles together there.
00:04:18 ►
Hoffer and Osmond’s old classic
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Hallucinogens,
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even though it was last updated in 68, still on the major
00:04:27 ►
hallucinogens is the best source. And in addition to those, which I just mentioned but don’t
00:04:34 ►
have here to show you, I want to show you some of the newer or more interesting stuff
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in the field. This is a book that has not been widely distributed at all this fellow might be a candidate for teaching at Esalen, I don’t know
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it’s the science and romance of selected herbs
00:04:54 ►
used in medicine and religious ceremony
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by Anthony Ando
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and Ando has his own institute in San Francisco.
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He runs a nursery on Taravelle.
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He’s, judging by this book,
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an extremely knowledgeable person
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with a worldwide education in herbs
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and a special stress on folk usage.
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So there are, for instance, here’s an Egyptian illustration
00:05:32 ►
of Sanofre, the royal gardener and his sister Marit.
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And there’s a lot of plant lore in here
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that you just don’t get anywhere else.
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And another book like that is William M. Bowden’s book, Narcotic Plants.
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Terrible title, but a tremendous amount of information that doesn’t seem to appear anywhere else.
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Macmillan was the publisher.
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So he’s a Bay Area resource that we certainly were not aware of until very recently,
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and maybe some of the rest of you were not aware of him either.
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This guy, he’s one of us.
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He should be part of the party.
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Then in terms of publications,
00:06:47 ►
the publications on psychedelics that you may be familiar with, such as High Times and High Frontiers, are sort of addressing this trying to restart the youth rebellion or… or anyway, it’s not a full spectrum or deep look at psychedelics.
00:06:52 ►
This magazine, which was previously called Psychozoic Press and has been renamed Psychedelic Monographs and Essays.
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Are you a psychedelic monograph, Eric?
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Oh, an essay.
00:07:44 ►
It’s published out of Florida, and it’s very, very lively. It has a woman, psychedelics and lucid dreaming, doorways in the mind, also by a woman, and Tom Reidlinger, who some of you may know from Chicago, an article by him on psychedelic schooling.
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It’s simply printed, but it’s from the heart, it’s scholarly,
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the tone, I think, is very good.
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I would actually urge you to support these people by subscribing. We have nothing personally
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to do with it. It’s just that they’re
00:08:07 ►
on a good trip.
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And I’ll hand this around and you can get the
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I’ll hand them all around
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and you can get addresses
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off of them if you want.
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This is Rupert’s new book.
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Rupert is
00:08:20 ►
Rupert Sheldrake. It’s just
00:08:24 ►
begun to be distributed.
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He is going to make a revolution in thinking about resonance and form,
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and it has an aspect in it that is very kind to our concern.
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The psychedelics are much more centrally important to understanding
00:08:44 ►
in a morphic resonance theory of nature.
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So Rupert is just a brilliant writer, even more brilliant than he is a talker.
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And this is a delicious book to just read 10 or 15 pages at night before you go to bed.
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This is a reference…
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I’ll send this one this way.
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This is a reference book
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that in terms of getting a lot of information
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between the covers of one book
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with a massive amount of color illustration,
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this is Richard Evans Schultes,
00:09:47 ►
the leading light of ethnobotany. He spent over 15 years in the Amazon and has led hundreds of graduate students into careers in ethnobotany and really has put the field on the map. And his co-author is Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD. In terms of one book about psychoactive plants that is in print and
00:09:56 ►
readily available, I would go with this one, I think. Alfred Vandermark? Vandermark Vandermark I guess did this edition it was originally done by Macmillan
00:10:06 ►
this is Rian Eisler’s book
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The Chalice and the Blade
00:10:11 ►
it may not immediately appear
00:10:14 ►
to have anything to do with psychedelics
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but it has to do with
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revisioning society
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by looking at ancient models
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of how men and women arranged social structure in the past.
00:10:31 ►
And like Rupert, this is a book with a secret agenda.
00:10:35 ►
This book is a tracking horse for a new respectability for psychedelics
00:10:43 ►
because when you begin asking the question
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why was there a partnership society for so long
00:10:50 ►
and why did it give way to a dominator culture,
00:10:54 ►
the answer lies, I think,
00:10:56 ►
in changing patterns of plant utilization
00:11:00 ►
and a changing relationship to the psychedelic experience.
00:11:07 ►
This is a wonderful book,
00:11:13 ►
maybe the most important book of archaeological scholarship in the last ten years or so.
00:11:22 ►
Rian lives in Carmel Valley. She is a local person and a great resource, and I’m sure that you’ll be seeing more of her in the Esalen catalog and around. She speaks very
00:11:28 ►
well. If you have a chance to hear her speak, why
00:11:31 ►
I would urge you to do it. Send that this way.
00:11:37 ►
This is just to remind you of our little book on cultivating
00:11:41 ►
mushrooms. I think that if you have the time
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and the focus,
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this is really the way to do it shamanically,
00:11:50 ►
to get out of the dealing cycle
00:11:53 ►
and the not knowing what you’ve got cycle.
00:11:56 ►
And also, as I said earlier,
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this trains you to punctuality, cleanliness,
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attention to detail, all, cleanliness, attention to detail,
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all of these qualities which,
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in fact, I used to say to people,
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once you’ve grown the mushroom,
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you know you’re ready to take it
00:12:15 ►
because it has imbued in you
00:12:19 ►
the qualities you need to take it
00:12:21 ►
through the act of growing it.
00:12:23 ►
Don’t be fooled.
00:12:24 ►
It isn’t easy.
00:12:26 ►
And it isn’t that the process is difficult.
00:12:29 ►
It’s that you have bad habits
00:12:31 ►
that will get in the way of the process.
00:12:34 ►
Habits like leaving your apartment occasionally.
00:12:38 ►
You can’t do that anymore if you do this.
00:12:43 ►
And it’s definitely much more
00:12:45 ►
than a grower’s guide.
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It contains a lot of,
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as Kat mentioned,
00:12:50 ►
a chronology and a lot of discussion
00:12:52 ►
about what the mushroom is.
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It also is the first place
00:12:57 ►
where these images
00:12:59 ►
from the African plateau,
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the Tsele Plateau in Algeria,
00:13:05 ►
have been reproduced from,
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and they are strong evidence
00:13:10 ►
for the use of mushrooms in Neolithic Africa.
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This is evidence which Wasson did not include in his books,
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new evidence,
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and both of the major the major
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rock paintings that argue
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for this point of view are in here
00:13:30 ►
the next
00:13:32 ►
issue of revision
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will have a drawing by
00:13:36 ►
Kat on the cover
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and an article by me about
00:13:40 ►
mushrooms and the goddess
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an article, it will be a psychedelic
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issue, everything in it will be a psychedelic issue.
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Everything in it will be psychedelic,
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so you might watch for that.
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And then last, and just sort of as a fun thing,
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in case you’re not aware of this book,
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some people aren’t,
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it’s called the Codex Seraphimius,
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and it is written in an unknown language. It contains hundreds and hundreds of colored drawings, and since it’s written in an unknown language, it’s impossible to figure out what it’s about, because the drawings are all of objects which don’t exist in this world. So it’s great fun.
00:14:25 ►
It’s stimulation for the imagination.
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It shows, I think,
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one person’s response
00:14:31 ►
to the psychedelic experience.
00:14:36 ►
This book was originally published
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at $75.
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It’s obviously a labor of love.
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It could not have been conceived of as a money-making proposition.
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Consequently, now it’s being remaindered in most places.
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You can pick one of these up for 19 bucks, at least at Moe’s in Berkeley and probably any other large volume bookstore like that.
00:15:02 ►
You can spend hours with this thing. I mean, it’s more than you can
00:15:07 ►
take in at one go. Well, I thought this morning, because we don’t have too much time and I have,
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several people have asked me to talk about our personal visions and some people specifically the time wave and all that.
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And I’ll sort of work my way into it.
00:15:29 ►
I did want to take account of the fact that today is Easter.
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There are workshops who would have fallen upon the coincidence of Easter
00:15:40 ►
with themselves as an excuse for an orgy of oval ceremonialism.
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But somehow it slipped past here.
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But I will…
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Well, it’s an excellent excuse for me
00:15:56 ►
to talk about what seems to me
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one of the most mysterious
00:15:59 ►
of all passages in the New Testament.
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And I’m not a New Testament scholar,
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but I’ve puzzled over this passage
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for years and years,
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and I think it relates to what we’re doing.
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I’m not sure.
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I believe it’s in Matthew
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when the women come to the tomb
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on Easter morning
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looking for Christ.
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Now, I think the two aun the two Anne’s and Margaret,
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it’s Mary Magdalene comes first and she’s alone I believe. And Christ is there. She sees him. She, it is the two Margaret’s who come later. And she starts toward Christ because she thought he was dead
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and she sees him standing by the tomb.
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She starts toward him and he stops her
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and he says, touch me not
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for I am not yet completely of the nature of the Father.
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And I’ve always thought that this was just
00:17:03 ►
a fascinating passage because what is being said here? What’s going on here?
00:17:42 ►
He has come through the crucifixion. Nevertheless, in some sense, he is not yet completely transubstantiate. And it suggests a process, a physical change in the body that requires time to complete itself. So this morning I thought I would talk a little bit about time
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and insights into it that have come to me out of psychedelics. What I always hoped for
00:17:58 ►
out of the psychedelic voyaging was to bring back something. I always felt and still feel
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that that is the attitude
00:18:08 ►
with which you should go into these things,
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to bring something back.
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I mean, it could be something,
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a personal insight into a personal dilemma
00:18:17 ►
or a more generalized idea.
00:18:23 ►
Because I really think that the psychedelic realm is the realm of ideas, and that ideas which change the world come first from that place.
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from that place.
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And I’m always a little reluctant to get into this because when I speak about my own ideas,
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I feel much more how much I’m asking from you as an audience.
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In other words, it’s like an ego trip
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because it’s my ideas
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and why spend an hour on my idea instead of talking about all these facts,
00:19:13 ►
careers, and established concerns.
00:19:18 ►
But you asked for it.
00:19:21 ►
You asked for it.
00:19:32 ►
So in 1971, when we went to the Amazon to look into DMT and all of these things,
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we really had no clear conception of what we were after.
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We just knew that we wanted to get more time in that dimension, more hands-on experience.
00:19:48 ►
Well, if any of you have read The Invisible Landscape,
00:19:49 ►
you know that my brother conceived
00:19:51 ►
of a certain kind of project
00:19:55 ►
where he thought that the psychedelic molecules
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could actually be bonded in
00:20:01 ►
to the physical body,
00:20:04 ►
into the DNA, using sound,
00:20:07 ►
and that they could be made
00:20:09 ►
briefly superconducting.
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And it’s interesting that
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that was a word that no one knew
00:20:15 ►
what it meant back then.
00:20:16 ►
He predicted room temperature
00:20:19 ►
superconductors in 1971
00:20:23 ►
at La Charrera.
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Well, now room temperature superconductors
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are a huge concern of a vast part
00:20:30 ►
of the scientific research establishment.
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A whole new technology is promised by this stuff.
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He had this notion that you could bond
00:20:42 ►
psychedelic molecules into the DNA and that then the trip
00:20:48 ►
would sustain itself indefinitely and could be analyzed as a kind of waveform signature
00:21:00 ►
of the totality of the organism.
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In other words, he felt that the ordinary psychedelic trip is a fleeting photograph,
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almost an x-ray, you could say,
00:21:14 ►
that comes into the mind
00:21:17 ►
when the psychedelic molecules occupy these bond sites
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and then flash to the higher cortical processing area of the brain
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a kind of gestalt of the state of the organism.
00:21:32 ►
And he felt that if you could stabilize and permanentize this,
00:21:37 ►
that it would be worth doing.
00:21:40 ►
I mean, it wasn’t clear whether he thought he would become a Taoist sage
00:21:44 ►
or turn into a flying saucer or what it was. I mean, it was a shifting image of totality
00:21:51 ►
that he was projecting. Well, I was very skeptical of this because it seems unreasonable and
00:22:01 ►
basically I’m a reasonable person. But on the other hand, going to the center of the Amazon basin had been our purpose
00:22:09 ►
and here we were and now somebody seemed to be coming up with something very interesting.
00:22:15 ►
So we let the experiment run since it seemed to me it would either work as he said it would work
00:22:22 ►
or it would fail utterly
00:22:25 ►
because what was proposed was
00:22:27 ►
that you saturate your body with psychedelic molecules
00:22:31 ►
and then sing in a certain range
00:22:36 ►
and in a certain way
00:22:38 ►
and I thought either nothing will happen
00:22:41 ►
99 chances out of 100
00:22:44 ►
or since he’s so impassionately convinced something will happen, 99 chances out of 100, or, since he’s so impassionately convinced something will happen,
00:22:49 ►
the thing he’s convinced will happen, will happen.
00:22:52 ►
So we performed this experiment,
00:22:55 ►
and if you’ve listened to True Hallucinations,
00:22:57 ►
you know what a riot it was and what chaos it set off.
00:23:03 ►
And I won’t really review that except for those who didn’t
00:23:07 ►
read True Hallucinations. What he said would happen didn’t happen. But on the other hand,
00:23:13 ►
my expectation that nothing would happen was completely frustrated. And instead,
00:23:21 ►
he seemed to initiate what at first brush looked like a psychotic break.
00:23:28 ►
He became unaware of the people around him.
00:23:31 ►
He would talk right through other people’s talking as though he couldn’t hear them.
00:23:36 ►
He began to make less and less sense.
00:23:40 ►
He lost motor control.
00:23:42 ►
he lost motor control and everyone assumed
00:23:47 ►
that he was slipping into some kind of psychosis
00:23:51 ►
what complicated this
00:23:54 ►
was I who had been cast in the role
00:23:58 ►
of the skeptic and the witness
00:24:00 ►
had noticed that the moment he had
00:24:03 ►
forged the joint as he called it,
00:24:07 ►
something began to happen for me, something very unusual.
00:24:12 ►
What it was was the teaching voice familiar from psilocybin experiences,
00:24:20 ►
but with none of the ambiguity and difficulty of connection
00:24:24 ►
that I had associated with the psilocybin experiences, instead it just came on and appeared to be locked in place.
00:24:34 ►
And he was saying, that’s it.
00:24:37 ►
We’ve succeeded.
00:24:39 ►
This is what it is.
00:24:41 ►
And all the hallucinations, I wasn’t even on mushrooms. He had taken ayahuasca,
00:24:46 ►
but there were no hallucinations. There was no feeling of being stimulated or depressed.
00:24:53 ►
There was nothing but this voice. And it was talking at such a speed that I would walk these jungle trails like this.
00:25:05 ►
Uh-huh, uh-huh, yes, yes, yes.
00:25:10 ►
And it was just, you know, at that speed,
00:25:14 ►
not for minutes, but for months, you know.
00:25:19 ►
And what it was concerned to convey
00:25:23 ►
is what I now call the time wave.
00:25:28 ►
And I will attempt, without blackboards or mathematics or being boring, I hope,
00:25:35 ►
to explain what this is.
00:25:37 ►
And that’s a formidable problem because this is an idea as rigid as the kind of ideas that run subway trains and send submarines
00:25:48 ►
back to their bases. I mean, it’s a formal, tight idea. But the way it was taught to me
00:25:56 ►
was in a steady process of self-amplifying parables or teachings, you could almost say.
00:26:07 ►
So how it began was it said to me,
00:26:10 ►
Have you noticed that every day is like every other day?
00:26:16 ►
Somewhat.
00:26:17 ►
I said, Yes, I’ve noticed that.
00:26:19 ►
And have you noticed that every week is more or less like every other week?
00:26:28 ►
Yes.
00:26:30 ►
Well, did you know that, and this is a typical mushroom construction,
00:26:35 ►
this did you know, I’ll bet you did know, and then the whammy.
00:26:41 ►
So did you know, I’ll bet you did know,
00:26:40 ►
and the whammy.
00:26:43 ►
So did you know,
00:26:44 ►
I’ll bet you did know,
00:26:49 ►
that every day has a relationship to four other days.
00:26:52 ►
And they are not the four days preceding it.
00:26:55 ►
They are scattered back through time.
00:26:59 ►
One of them may be six months in the past.
00:27:02 ►
One of them may be thousands of years in the past.
00:27:06 ►
But each day is actually an interference pattern
00:27:11 ►
caused by the resonant,
00:27:16 ►
the coming together of the resonances of other times.
00:27:23 ►
And so it never occurred to me, I mean it’s a weird And so it never occurred to me,
00:27:25 ►
I mean, it’s a weird idea,
00:27:27 ►
it never occurred to me
00:27:29 ►
that that was a possibility.
00:27:32 ►
And so then it said,
00:27:34 ►
go get your I Ching.
00:27:38 ►
And I went and got my I Ching,
00:27:40 ►
and it said,
00:27:41 ►
we’re going to look
00:27:42 ►
at the first order of difference. I said, look at the first order of difference.
00:27:45 ►
I said, what’s the first order of difference?
00:27:48 ►
It said, oh, you don’t know what the first order of difference is.
00:27:50 ►
The first order of difference is how many lines change
00:27:54 ►
as you go from one hexagram to another.
00:27:59 ►
Now, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with I Ching,
00:28:01 ►
but I assume most somewhat, right?
00:28:06 ►
Okay, the I Ching is composed of structures which have six levels called hexagrams. They are either broken or
00:28:12 ►
unbroken lines. The first one, called the creative, is all solid lines. The second one, called the
00:28:19 ►
receptive, is all broken lines. Who can tell me the first order of difference
00:28:25 ►
between the first and second hexagram?
00:28:28 ►
Here’s a clue.
00:28:29 ►
It’s the number of lines that break.
00:28:32 ►
No fair.
00:28:35 ►
Six.
00:28:37 ►
I don’t know why you’re not leaping forward with this.
00:28:39 ►
It makes me wonder how far we can go.
00:28:43 ►
Six.
00:28:50 ►
Anyway, to try and shorten this story what this teaching voice was concerned with was structure in the I Ching previously hidden structure so I it said
00:29:00 ►
we can’t go forward with this conversation until you get some graph paper,
00:29:06 ►
because this is going to be not only conversation,
00:29:09 ►
this is going to be diagram.
00:29:11 ►
So I got graph paper, and it said,
00:29:13 ►
draw the hexagrams in a descending line
00:29:16 ►
in the King-Wen sequence,
00:29:19 ►
and then make a graph of the first order of difference,
00:29:23 ►
the number of lines that change as you go
00:29:25 ►
from hexagram to hexagram. I did this and I got a wavy line, obviously. You can tell
00:29:33 ►
that the values will lie between 1 and 6. In some cases 6 will change, in some cases only one, never none because each hexagram is different.
00:29:47 ►
I was puzzled as to why an Amazonian mushroom wanted to talk about the archaeology of ancient China.
00:29:55 ►
And so what that this resonance calendar existed?
00:30:00 ►
But then it said, no, no, you don’t understand.
00:30:03 ►
We are now in the atrium of what it is I want to reveal to you. I want you to go back and look at the first order of difference wave, and I want you to understand that, and I already knew this, but I hadn’t done much with it that the reason the I Ching is based on 64 is because 64 are the number of codons
00:30:30 ►
that DNA runs on
00:30:32 ►
the I Ching is not an arbitrary construction
00:30:36 ►
it is something that comes out of a deep
00:30:40 ►
formal inspection of what the human organism is
00:30:44 ►
the human organism is.
00:30:48 ►
The human organism is a molecular machine that runs on an iterative program of 64.
00:30:53 ►
And the proteins which compose our bodies are like this,
00:30:57 ►
so forth and so on.
00:30:58 ►
And then I said, well, I understand about DNA,
00:31:03 ►
I understand how the I Ching mirrors that,
00:31:06 ►
but I don’t understand how then it’s also a calendar.
00:31:11 ►
And the voice said, well, don’t you see,
00:31:14 ►
perception can be only organized out of the matter which composes it.
00:31:21 ►
Time appears to you in your psychological perception of it in the way that it does because
00:31:29 ►
time is a property of matter that is being amplified by biology into the theater of awareness.
00:31:41 ►
So in other words, and this is now me speaking, not it, my interpretation of what it was saying was life is a phenomenon of quantum mechanical amplification. And because we are organized on the blueprint of this quantum mechanical pattern that is very deep at the sub-molecular level of matter, then all our institutions,
00:32:09 ►
languages, religions, love affairs, everything has this pattern as the base embedded in it,
00:32:18 ►
almost like these fractals which give rise to endless amounts of a certain kind of beauty.
00:32:26 ►
But if you were to see the equation which generates the fractal,
00:32:29 ►
you know, it has six terms.
00:32:31 ►
It can be written in 15 seconds.
00:32:35 ►
So then there were years passed,
00:32:39 ►
and a great leap had to be made
00:32:42 ►
because I was like non-functional.
00:32:47 ►
Because I worked with this wave,
00:32:49 ►
I felt I had the signature of the universe
00:32:52 ►
that a great gift of truth had been given to me.
00:32:57 ►
But when I tried to tell people,
00:32:59 ►
they just backed to the wall and said,
00:33:02 ►
you know, get help.
00:33:10 ►
Now. Now get help. And here’s where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the wheat from the chaff.
00:33:15 ►
The conclusion that I reached was that this universal wave, which has been operating for several billion years
00:33:25 ►
will reach its maximum
00:33:27 ►
concrescent
00:33:29 ►
state of enfoldment
00:33:31 ►
at dawn
00:33:33 ►
on the 22nd of December
00:33:36 ►
2012 A.D.
00:33:39 ►
This immediately puts me in
00:33:42 ►
the nut category
00:33:44 ►
this is what’s called messianic delusion,
00:33:48 ►
millenarian grandeur, so forth and so on.
00:33:52 ►
Nevertheless, it’s a persistent intuition
00:33:56 ►
of most religious ontologies,
00:33:59 ►
perhaps not the Buddhists,
00:34:01 ►
but the Hindus, the Jews, the Muslims, the Christians,
00:34:04 ►
all appoint an end to their world.
00:34:08 ►
And I really, I’m a little shy about this because it’s so personally mine.
00:34:17 ►
Nobody has ever made a contribution to this idea that was substantial.
00:34:24 ►
I just, it seems to be mine alone
00:34:27 ►
and welcome to it.
00:34:28 ►
And yet, I want you
00:34:32 ►
and historians
00:34:34 ►
and paleontologists
00:34:36 ►
and primatologists
00:34:37 ►
and people who are experts on time
00:34:39 ►
in different sizes
00:34:42 ►
to look at this wave.
00:34:45 ►
It’s working, ladies and gentlemen.
00:34:47 ►
It does, in fact, describe
00:34:50 ►
the ebb and flow of this thing called novelty.
00:34:54 ►
Now, when I question the mushroom about this,
00:34:57 ►
it almost makes it trivial.
00:34:59 ►
For it, it’s an of course.
00:35:02 ►
You, of course, you are made of DNA. DNA is made out of matter. Matter has to have time as a
00:35:11 ►
precondition of its existence. The signature of time embedded in the atomic structure is amplified to the molecular
00:35:19 ►
structure, then is amplified to the organismic structure, and that’s called a human life
00:35:27 ►
well-lived. Then it’s amplified to the societal structure, that’s called the birth, growth,
00:35:34 ►
and senescence of empire. And then it’s magnified to the global structure, and that’s called the coming of the hyperspatial object at the end of time.
00:35:48 ►
It’s also a theory of resonance. It’s saying that large scales of time have their themes and concerns
00:35:59 ►
condensed and revivified in the smaller components.
00:36:07 ►
Now this is somewhat hard to understand, but rich enough to pursue.
00:36:11 ►
It’s this idea.
00:36:13 ►
And now I’m going to use James Joyce’s classic example.
00:36:16 ►
Joyce wrote a book called Ulysses.
00:36:18 ►
Ulysses is a book about a man who rises on a morning,
00:36:23 ►
a bright morning day in June in 1905 or 6.
00:36:28 ►
He wants to fry some kidneys for breakfast.
00:36:31 ►
So he gets his wallet and heads out into Dublin
00:36:34 ►
to score some kidneys to bring back.
00:36:37 ►
And he has all these adventures.
00:36:39 ►
But Joyce understood that this man on this day was also Ulysses with his brave component of man journeying to the end of the Mediterranean, laying siege to Troy for nine years, winning the Trojan War, returning to their homelands. In other words, he understood that in each of us,
00:37:07 ►
we are acting out larger and larger scales of time
00:37:11 ►
that give color and precision and depth and interest to our being.
00:37:17 ►
So if you find yourself on a Saturday night in a place in San Francisco
00:37:22 ►
called Hadrian’s Hamburger Joint,
00:37:25 ►
it has something to do with the Emperor Hadrian
00:37:30 ►
and his conquest of Britain
00:37:32 ►
and his effort to hold back the barbarians.
00:37:36 ►
Life, carefully examined,
00:37:39 ►
is actually a form of allegorical literature
00:37:43 ►
with a very tight
00:37:45 ►
constructural grid
00:37:47 ►
laid over it.
00:37:50 ►
This is a rich idea
00:37:52 ►
and as I say,
00:37:52 ►
I’ll be giving a five-day workshop
00:37:54 ►
on this only
00:37:55 ►
because this is the only
00:37:57 ►
psychedelic idea
00:37:58 ►
I’ve ever brought back
00:38:00 ►
other than, you know,
00:38:01 ►
idiotic realizations
00:38:03 ►
such as
00:38:04 ►
everyone’s little finger precisely fits their nostril.
00:38:10 ►
You know, there’s no market for that.
00:38:12 ►
But this, this would actually create a revisioning of time.
00:38:19 ►
And had we more time this morning,
00:38:21 ►
I would tell you how it could be turned into a calendar
00:38:25 ►
of the goddess, how by living
00:38:28 ►
with a solar year
00:38:29 ►
that always puts Christmas
00:38:31 ►
on the same, with the same
00:38:34 ►
slant of sunshine coming
00:38:36 ►
in, that we have locked ourselves
00:38:37 ►
into a paternalistic
00:38:40 ►
masculine dominated
00:38:41 ►
structure, what the universe
00:38:43 ►
is, is flux
00:38:45 ►
nothing lasts
00:38:46 ►
nothing abides
00:38:48 ►
everything moves on
00:38:49 ►
women know this
00:38:50 ►
men don’t
00:38:52 ►
and we’re living
00:38:52 ►
under a solar masculine calendar
00:38:55 ►
the reason our ideas
00:38:57 ►
and by our ideas
00:38:59 ►
I’m now speaking of the entirety
00:39:01 ►
of the new age
00:39:02 ►
and all of this stuff
00:39:04 ►
the reason our ideas meet resistance is because the framing around the entire discussion of the spirit and feminism and transformation,
00:39:16 ►
the frame is always the masculine solar time frame.
00:39:22 ►
solar time frame.
00:39:24 ►
As long as we operate under that calendar,
00:39:26 ►
we will have a very difficult
00:39:28 ►
time advancing our ideas.
00:39:30 ►
The Chinese understood this.
00:39:32 ►
This was why when great reforming
00:39:34 ►
emperors arose,
00:39:36 ►
the first thing they did
00:39:37 ►
was change the calendar.
00:39:40 ►
If you want food for thought,
00:39:42 ►
look at hexagram 49.
00:39:44 ►
It’s revolution.
00:39:46 ►
You open it up expecting sage political advice.
00:39:51 ►
It talks only about the calendar.
00:39:54 ►
And it talks about the magician as a calendar maker.
00:39:58 ►
In fact, it says the magician is a calendar maker.
00:40:03 ►
So I think that what this teaching that came out of this experience in the Amazon was all of translinguistic matter that would become
00:40:25 ►
showerhead pizza or Mercedes, depending on what you needed at the moment. He thought it would
00:40:32 ►
become matter in the act of appropriate activity. Instead, what emerged was a totality symbol.
00:40:42 ►
And Jung talks about how in the individuation process
00:40:45 ►
you always hope that the patient or the client
00:40:48 ►
will generate a totality symbol.
00:40:50 ►
But he usually means a kind of individual
00:40:54 ►
and wavering totality symbol like a mandala
00:40:57 ►
or a cohesive structure or something.
00:41:01 ►
I think we got, and I try to say this without hubris
00:41:05 ►
because I felt like I was nothing more
00:41:07 ►
than the vessel into which
00:41:08 ►
this thing was being poured.
00:41:10 ►
What we got was the totality symbol
00:41:14 ►
in a complete version,
00:41:18 ►
certainly not a total version
00:41:20 ►
because I don’t think the human mind
00:41:22 ►
can encompass the total version,
00:41:24 ►
but we got a skeletal
00:41:25 ►
blueprint of what totality is in the world. What it is, is knowing how things happen, knowing that
00:41:36 ►
all processes, the firing of a nerve, the culmination of a love affair, the fall of an empire, has a pattern.
00:41:46 ►
And if you know the pattern,
00:41:49 ►
you will be at ease with any process
00:41:52 ►
in all or any of its stages.
00:41:56 ►
Because you will just say,
00:41:56 ►
ah, this is the time of resistance.
00:41:59 ►
It will soon be followed by
00:42:01 ►
the time of forward motion.
00:42:03 ►
That will be followed by the time of re-enfoldment.
00:42:08 ►
And what this does is it eliminates anxiety, ultimately. That’s the bottom line. Our anxiety
00:42:16 ►
about death and our anxiety about the future and our relationships and money and all this
00:42:22 ►
stuff can be boiled down to anxiety about the unknowable aspects of the future.
00:42:29 ►
If we could assimilate a model like this, we would be Taoists.
00:42:35 ►
The future holds no terrors for a person who knows how process inevitably unfolds.
00:42:43 ►
They are always right and with it in each moment.
00:42:47 ►
So I think that we’ve always talked about
00:42:51 ►
the I Ching, Taoism, all this sort of thing
00:42:53 ►
as sort of the culmination of mysticism.
00:42:56 ►
But to make it a living faith in our own lives,
00:43:00 ►
there should be nothing mystical about it.
00:43:03 ►
And I maintain to you,
00:43:05 ►
there is nothing mystical about it and I maintain to you there is nothing mystical about it it’s simply that we are at a such a primitive stage
00:43:11 ►
of culture that we haven’t yet understand understood what time is a
00:43:16 ►
hundred years ago we were at such a primitive stage of culture that we
00:43:21 ►
didn’t understand what time was Einstein had to come along and say,
00:43:26 ►
you know, time is not an abstraction necessary to have a place to put objects that you want to
00:43:32 ►
examine. Time itself is an object. It is curved in the vicinity of massive gravitational fields.
00:43:40 ►
It has a topology. It has a surface. I think what we need to understand out of this idea,
00:43:47 ►
ultimately what the psychedelic experience is teaching, ultimately what Taoism is trying to say
00:43:53 ►
is that time is a topological manifold. It is a surface. Events flow across it like water over land. And like water flowing over land,
00:44:05 ►
when the land is flat,
00:44:06 ►
the water becomes reflective and moves slowly.
00:44:11 ►
When the landscape becomes disrupted,
00:44:14 ►
the water moves faster and chaotic attractors appear
00:44:18 ►
and new kinds of activity emerge.
00:44:21 ►
And out of that new activity
00:44:23 ►
then comes the new states that define the future. Well, I’m going to stop there. I haven’t shown you a graph or written a number or drawn a hexagram and I think that’s remarkable.
00:44:47 ►
The feeling tone, this is the good stuff that you get if you go through those graphs, numbers, and time on at the computer. But this is the totality symbol that I was able to get out of living a psychedelic life.
00:44:56 ►
And I believe that there are as many of these kinds of totality symbols as there are people willing to trip.
00:45:04 ►
And each one of them is different.
00:45:08 ►
You know, we create them for each other,
00:45:11 ►
they complete our lives,
00:45:13 ►
they assuage anxiety
00:45:15 ►
and they give us a tremendous appetite then
00:45:18 ►
for the adventure of being
00:45:21 ►
rather than the ordeal of being
00:45:24 ►
and they arise out of using psychedelics to amplify and. It’s because they are tools
00:45:46 ►
for understanding and revisioning the reality in which we all live. The personal growth
00:45:55 ►
is a wonderful thing and will naturally follow along further stages of completion lying into the future.
00:46:19 ►
That’s where the mystery, the transcendental object,
00:46:29 ►
the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is waiting.
00:46:32 ►
And I think that’s the job of each of us, to show our best toys and our best tricks
00:46:36 ►
that lift us and our friends to higher and higher levels.
00:46:41 ►
And there is no end to this bootstrapping process.
00:46:47 ►
The future of the human mind and body
00:46:48 ►
and the future of humans together
00:46:51 ►
is endlessly bright
00:46:54 ►
keep the faith
00:46:57 ►
recognize each other
00:46:59 ►
and maybe I should close
00:47:02 ►
with a little line
00:47:03 ►
from Gary Snyder,
00:47:05 ►
if I can remember it.
00:47:06 ►
He said,
00:47:07 ►
Learn the flowers,
00:47:11 ►
travel light,
00:47:13 ►
stay together.
00:47:21 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:47:24 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:47:28 ►
Learn the flowers, travel light, and stay together.
00:47:34 ►
That’s as good advice as I can remember ever hearing.
00:47:37 ►
Learn the flowers, travel light, and stay together.
00:47:42 ►
I really like that.
00:47:44 ►
So, how many of those books that Terrence mentioned just now
00:47:48 ►
do you have in your own library?
00:47:50 ►
The one book he mentioned that really intrigues me
00:47:53 ►
is the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini.
00:47:58 ►
Unless I miss my guess,
00:48:00 ►
that first edition that Terrence paid $75 for
00:48:03 ►
is now selling for over $5,000.
00:48:06 ►
But the good news is that there’s a new hardcover reprint due out in October of 2013.
00:48:13 ►
And while the publisher’s price is 82.
00:48:19 ►
And I think that’s in hardback.
00:48:21 ►
However, that still seems a bit steep for a book written in a language that
00:48:25 ►
no one can understand and presents drawings of things that can’t exist in our universe.
00:48:32 ►
However, my guess is that one or more of our fellow salonners are going to be picking up a copy.
00:48:38 ►
It’s a little too pricey for me, and so I hope that one day somebody will post a better
00:48:42 ►
description of it in the comments section of the program notes for today’s podcast.
00:48:47 ►
Now, I was going to say a few words about how I now see the time wave theory,
00:48:53 ►
without its 2012 end date,
00:48:55 ►
as possibly yet giving us some insights into this thing we so casually call time.
00:49:00 ►
But the truth is that I’m still trying to formulate my thoughts in a way that, well,
00:49:05 ►
that makes some sense to somebody other than myself. And so I’m going to leave those thoughts
00:49:10 ►
for another day. Hopefully you and some of our other fellow slaunters will add your thoughts
00:49:15 ►
to the program notes today and further our thinking along this track. What I am going to
00:49:21 ►
do right now is to add a few more book titles to the ones that Terrence just mentioned.
00:49:26 ►
Considering the fact that over a quarter of a century has passed since Terrence gave this workshop,
00:49:31 ►
my guess is that he would now want to add a few more titles to this list himself.
00:49:36 ►
So, I picked out a few books in my own library that have been of great use to me,
00:49:41 ►
and I’m going to read those titles now.
00:49:45 ►
great use to me, and I’m going to read those titles now. But don’t worry about writing this all down, because if you go to www.psychedelicsalon.us, well, that’ll take you to our
00:49:52 ►
program notes blog, where you can find a listing of all the books mentioned in this podcast,
00:49:57 ►
along with links that will conveniently take you to my own Amazon bookstore.
00:50:03 ►
So here are a few more books
00:50:05 ►
that you may want to add to your own library
00:50:07 ►
in the event that they aren’t already there.
00:50:10 ►
First one is by Timothy Leary
00:50:12 ►
and it’s The Psychedelic Experience,
00:50:14 ►
a manual based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
00:50:17 ►
Then there’s Pablo Amaringo and Luis Luna,
00:50:21 ►
Luis Eduardo Luna, I believe.
00:50:24 ►
His coffee table book called Ayahuasca Visions,
00:50:27 ►
The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman.
00:50:31 ►
Be Here Now by Ram Dass,
00:50:35 ►
Entheogens and the Future of Religion,
00:50:37 ►
that was edited by our friend Robert Forte.
00:50:41 ►
Then two books by Dr. Charles Grobe,
00:50:44 ►
Hallucinogens, a Re reader, and Higher Wisdom, Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.
00:50:53 ►
Also, of course, if you don’t already have this, you really, really ought to add it, and it’s LSD, My Problem Child, Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science by Dr. Albert Hoffman.
00:51:06 ►
The book I mentioned a couple weeks ago is Nina Grabois’ autobiography, One Foot in the Future.
00:51:13 ►
Then there’s Persephone’s Quest in Theogens and the Origins of Religion by R. Gordon Wasson, Stella Kromish, and Dr. Carl Ruck, and Jonathan Ott. And then from Park Street
00:51:28 ►
Press is Sisters of the Extreme, Women Writing on the Drug Experience, and that’s a very valuable
00:51:35 ►
book. You really ought to pick it up. Another book that’s well worth reading is The Cosmic Serpent,
00:51:41 ►
DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.
00:51:50 ►
And of course, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley.
00:51:55 ►
And then Christian Rasch, with some help from Dr. Albert Hoffman,
00:52:02 ►
has prepared the Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, Ethnopharmacology and its Applications.
00:52:05 ►
And finally, one that really shouldn’t be missed is Paul Devereaux’s brilliant book, The Long Trip, A Prehistory of Psychedelia. And while I realize
00:52:12 ►
that I’ve left out a lot of books that you probably think should be included in this list,
00:52:16 ►
I hope that you’ll go to our program notes and add your selections in the comments for this podcast,
00:52:22 ►
this podcast being number 366, by the way. And in closing, I’d like to answer a question that Thank you. His question is, how do you, personally, remain hopeful and positive living in this 21st century, living in this world we have helped to create?
00:53:11 ►
And as I say, my kind of weaselly answer is, well, I try to focus as much of my attention as possible on things that actually affect my life directly, like spending time with my family and reading.
00:53:26 ►
affect my life directly, like spending time with my family and reading. These days, of course,
00:53:32 ►
when I watch and read the news, I think of it as a fictional soap opera, sort of like the movie The Truman Show. Earlier in my life, I was very active politically, but after spending quite a
00:53:39 ►
few years and a lot of money on activism, nothing had changed. We had absolutely no effect on our issue,
00:53:46 ►
which at the time was the prisoner of war issue from the Vietnam War.
00:53:50 ►
So I’m now focused on changing the culture, one mind at a time.
00:53:55 ►
And I truly believe that once the culture changes,
00:53:59 ►
well, our politics will then follow.
00:54:01 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:06 ►
Be well, my friends.