Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The Gaian process is more than a process. It is s self-reflecting entelechy of some sort.”
“It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas… . And that this is how culture moves forward. That culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections. So this is precisely what these compounds are doing.”
“What is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state, is how weird it is.”
“I finally realized that this ‘place’ that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody’s idea of a playpen.”
“We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it’s too early for us to be anything else. There’s no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That’s why it’s so important to try and share [our stories].”
“The world isn’t this unbelievably strange thing which is ‘out there’. The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out. That means nothing can be taken for granted. It can be taken apart. It can be put together many, many ways.”
“[DMT] is pure, one hundred per-cent magic. MAGIC. It’s not a drug. It’s an event. It’s not something you do. It’s something that happens to you.”
McKenna also describes a DMT experience as, “A collision with another modality.”
Books Mentioned in this podcast
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler
The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (Cornell paperbacks)
The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens (American Lecture Series)
Richard Evans Schultes
Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, Christian Rätsch
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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 I hope that I’m not overloading you with these Terrence McKenna podcasts,
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but there are several reasons for it.
00:00:31 ►
Well, one of which is that I’ve been given an encouragement to keep them coming
00:00:35 ►
by Peter L., Mark B., and Gottfried H.,
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all of whom made donations to the salon recently, and who I thank very much.
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The other reason is that, well, it’s been so hot here lately,
00:00:49 ►
getting into the mid-90s in our un-air-conditioned little house,
00:00:53 ►
that I’ve been so lethargic that even reading doesn’t seem to interest me very much.
00:00:59 ►
The only thing that gets me up and going in this heat is to listen to something from Terrence McKenna that I haven’t heard before.
00:01:07 ►
And so, right now, I’m going to play the next part of the June 1989 workshop that I began a few days ago.
00:01:14 ►
And, by the way, for those who have been pinging me about this, I’ll be making a few personal comments about where I stand on the time wave, at least once we’ve finished today’s talk,
00:01:25 ►
which I guess I should mention doesn’t go into the time wave at all. Now that I think about it,
00:01:32 ►
I guess this is kind of a strange podcast to add my thoughts to about this, but what the heck, huh?
00:01:39 ►
Anyway, getting on with today’s program, Terrence begins by talking about one of the books that we previously learned were on his recommended reading list.
00:01:49 ►
And then he goes on to talk about a few other things as well, like comparing a DMT trip to an automobile accident.
00:01:58 ►
Also, for the first time that I remember hearing it, he gives a very interesting opinion about where you go when you smoke DMT.
00:02:06 ►
And I’m not talking about where to go in this physical universe, but about where the place
00:02:12 ►
is and what the place is that you seem to be in while you’re in the thrall of that particular
00:02:19 ►
experience.
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I have a smile on my face right now just thinking about it.
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So let’s get on with the show and see if you don’t smile at this as well
00:02:29 ►
I was going to just mention three books
00:02:34 ►
I might mention more as time goes on
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but these three are central to understanding what I’m going to be saying this month.
00:02:46 ►
And they’re very different books.
00:02:48 ►
Some of you, many of you may have read this one,
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which is The Chalice and the Blade by Rianne Eisler.
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And this is the book that talks about the partnership
00:03:00 ►
versus dominator model of society
00:03:05 ►
and gets the gender tension
00:03:09 ►
inherent in the matriarchy-patriarchy way
00:03:13 ►
of framing that problem,
00:03:15 ►
it gets that out of the way
00:03:17 ►
because it just says dominator and partnership.
00:03:20 ►
And she believes and offers evidence
00:03:23 ►
that there never was a matriarchy that that whole
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notion of a pendulum moving between patriarchy and matriarchy is not valid and she
00:03:37 ►
and i are in agreement in that we both see something very important happening to human beings
00:03:46 ►
around the emergence of pastoralism,
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around the time when the domestication of cattle
00:03:54 ►
became a major concern of human beings.
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This great goddess religion that was worldwide in prehistory is inevitably a cattle religion.
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And she talks a lot about this, and she talks a lot about early cultural accomplishments.
00:04:28 ►
early cultural accomplishments. She’s trained as an archaeologist. Early cultural accomplishments such as Çatalhöyük, a civilization in southern Turkey that is important for my argument too,
00:04:36 ►
because it was very, very early and achieved a sudden and extreme flowering of culture like nothing would rival it for several thousand years.
00:04:52 ►
Mary Setgast calls it a premature burst of complexity and brilliance.
00:04:58 ►
And Rian Eisler uses dynamic theory borrowed from modern mathematics, borrowed from Ralph Abraham, who I’m sure many of you know, to make cultural models.
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about this book among feminists,
00:05:24 ►
but what has been sort of overlooked is that this is the first time
00:05:26 ►
there was ever a mathematical application
00:05:29 ►
of dynamics to human history.
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So this is a good book.
00:05:34 ►
She is not psychedelic.
00:05:36 ►
She and I did a weekend together at Ojai,
00:05:40 ►
where she was wonderfully generous
00:05:42 ►
and tolerant of my dancing around in the middle of her parade ground.
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Because I’m saying, you know, that the dynamic that drove this cultural transition had to do with psychedelics,
00:05:57 ►
and that this goddess cattle religion had to be also a mushroom religion.
00:06:03 ►
And later today even maybe we’ll talk more about that
00:06:08 ►
the second book which i think you’d enjoy and i don’t know maybe they have they have this at the
00:06:15 ►
bookstore they should have this it’s called the creative explosion aniry into the Origins of Art and Religion. Now, notice that both of these books that I’ve recommended
00:06:28 ►
contain long passages about sudden outbursts of creative brilliance on the cultural level.
00:06:37 ►
This is very interesting to me because this is this stuff called novelty
00:06:44 ►
that we talked about a little bit yesterday.
00:06:48 ►
And tracking these outbursts of brilliance and complexity
00:06:52 ►
in cultures and in our own lives
00:06:55 ►
is the way we confirm for ourselves
00:06:59 ►
the existence of this topological manifold
00:07:05 ►
over which probabilistic
00:07:07 ►
or previously thought to be probabilistic events
00:07:11 ►
are flowing.
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What John Pfeiffer is saying in this book
00:07:17 ►
is it’s a study of the cave art
00:07:21 ►
of Spain and southern France.
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And what he’s saying about it is that, you know,
00:07:29 ►
some of these things are hundreds and hundreds of feet underground,
00:07:32 ►
down very narrow passages,
00:07:34 ►
and you have to go through all these contortions to get to them.
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Anyway, he’s saying that this was a manipulated environment,
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that these were created and placed in this way
00:07:49 ►
to evoke very strong emotional responses from people.
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And certainly, even today,
00:07:57 ►
with very high-powered flashlights and nylon ropes
00:08:01 ►
and all of this stuff,
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it’s a very big deal to descend
00:08:04 ►
hundreds and hundreds of feet
00:08:06 ►
into the ground. You can imagine people who had tallow lamps. And it appears that they went into
00:08:15 ►
these places and made these things and then only returned very briefly on a cyclical basis afterwards. In other words, they didn’t inhabit these places.
00:08:30 ►
These were ceremonial places. And what he’s talking about is the High Magdalenian, which is
00:08:37 ►
19,000 to 17,000 years ago, when for the first time there was bone and antler technology.
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In other words, the Stone Age is ending, and there’s a bone antler technology, and there
00:08:57 ►
is this tremendous outpouring of creativity, mostly vented on a depiction of these animal images of animals that
00:09:09 ►
were in a state of semi-domestication or balanced upon the probability of domestication. So what we’re seeing are herds of deer and cattle and primitive sheep and this sort of thing.
00:09:30 ►
So both of these books point to unexplained outbursts of creativity in the human past
00:09:39 ►
and document them very well, but without offering a causal mechanism.
00:09:45 ►
them very well, but without offering a causal mechanism. Now, on a more practical, partly more practical bent, and this directly addresses the psychedelic
00:09:57 ►
issue, if you’re at all interested in psychedelic plants. This is the Bible. It occurs in several different
00:10:07 ►
forms. This is the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens by Richard Evans Schultes and
00:10:13 ►
Albert Hoffman. Schultes was the Harvard botanist who basically single-handedly created the
00:10:22 ►
field of ethnopharmacology and
00:10:29 ►
early on Schultes understood that what
00:10:38 ►
Native peoples were saying about disease and plants was very
00:10:43 ►
touched with folklore and
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cultural factors, but what they said about psychoactive plans you could rely upon.
00:10:52 ►
And so he oriented his career toward the psychoactives,
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and through the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s,
00:11:01 ►
he and his graduate students basically shed light on a previously completely unexplored
00:11:10 ►
area of botany.
00:11:12 ►
And we now, through books like this, and you may have seen his more popular book, Plants
00:11:16 ►
of the Gods, these basically list and discuss the major psychoactive plants of the third planet from the sun.
00:11:28 ►
And if you need information, this is where you go.
00:11:34 ►
And there are extensive bibliographies.
00:11:36 ►
This is the first edition. It’s now been issued in a second edition.
00:11:41 ►
But this is pretty indispensable.
00:11:48 ►
edition, but this is pretty indispensable. Then there are a few other books too, but this is the one to start with. Well, so that’s just sort of business. People should be directed
00:11:56 ►
toward books that then expand the basis of what’s being said. Does anybody want to say anything about yesterday?
00:12:06 ►
And go back over any of that?
00:12:10 ►
I thought I would talk a little bit today about…
00:12:15 ►
See, the way I imagine this happening
00:12:18 ►
is that if there’s nothing else going on,
00:12:21 ►
then there are facets to this thing.
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And they may not even appear to be connected to you at first, but I will just then choose one of these facets and talk about it. So
00:12:35 ►
a facet that was brushed on yesterday that needs to be really brought forward and understood clearly is it kind of comes under the general
00:12:51 ►
banner of the feminine but from several different points of view I want to talk
00:12:58 ►
about how the psychedelic experience reflects on and relates to the feminine.
00:13:07 ►
First of all,
00:13:08 ►
a lot of this has to do with how I think of the origin situation.
00:13:16 ►
I think everything was set then.
00:13:21 ►
And women, I think, well, it happened like this, that there was specialization in these early proto-hominid and hominid populations. of that the women, because they almost always had babes at breast,
00:13:51 ►
were more collectivized and more traveled less.
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The men hunted, and the women kept the children and all that together.
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And the women were gatherers.
00:14:03 ►
This is the important thing, that the women were gatherers,
00:14:09 ►
and that what they were gathering was food, and what they were gathering was plants, primarily. So see, before the era of color lithography,
00:14:30 ►
botanists had this need to be able to exactly describe and differentiate plants one from another.
00:14:39 ►
So here is just a bit of a description of a plant.
00:14:43 ►
The plant is Mothistica dendrum armonizium,
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and this is what is called the taxonomic description.
00:14:51 ►
Tree, up to 25 feet in height,
00:14:54 ►
leaves membranaceous, dark green,
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very narrowly ligulate,
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apically acuminate,
00:15:01 ►
basically long atenionate,
00:15:04 ►
marginally, commonly subundulate or undulate, 20 to 26
00:15:08 ►
millimeters long, 1.3 to 2 centimeters wide, minutely and irregularly pylose on both surfaces,
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flowers up to 28, usually about 23 centimeters long, apically 10 to 13 centimeters in diameter,
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very strongly sweet-scented at sundown,
00:15:29 ►
Calyx spathiasius, green, papriaceus or membranaceus,
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two to five-fid with acute teeth,
00:15:38 ►
three-fifths as long as corolla, very minutely pylos.
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Corolla divided two-thirds to four-fifths its length,
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usually with five lobes, but often four or six.
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Membranaceous, white, spathulate or subspathulate,
00:15:58 ►
rhumbidia form, long, acuminate, and circinate.
00:16:03 ►
That’s half of the description.
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Now, the point of this is acuminate and circinate that’s half of the description
00:16:05 ►
now the point of this is
00:16:08 ►
the need to describe a plant
00:16:12 ►
puts tremendous pressure on language
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to accommodate itself to difference
00:16:19 ►
that’s what they’re doing there
00:16:21 ►
they’re attempting to create a word picture
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that will make it possible to tell this thing from any other thing.
00:16:29 ►
Well, women who were gatherers in this early situation
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were under tremendous pressure to elaborate a vocabulary of visual distinctions.
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You know, you eat the thorny one, not the smooth one.
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You eat the one with the leaves that have the crinkle on the edge,
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but not the one with the leaves that have the furry underside.
00:16:55 ►
And this kind of need put on real pressure for language.
00:17:00 ►
Men in the hunting situation had, strangely enough,
00:17:27 ►
Men in the hunting situation had, strangely enough, the pack signaling repertoire that we came down from the trees with is pretty sufficient direct a complex hunting operation you don’t have to have this tremendous stress on adjectives you know uh and then the major stress in hunting often is stoicism and silence
00:17:36 ►
you know i mean it’s not a rappy undertaking and in to this day uh you know it’s thought to be a sexist observation but when you
00:17:48 ►
go into villages of native people i mean they always speak of the chattering of the women
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and this is true i mean women chatter a lot about the details of ordinary existence
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this is what they are heavily linguistically programmed to be into is the details of ordinary existence. This is what they are heavily linguistically programmed to be into,
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is the details of ordinary existence,
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and especially in this matter of food.
00:18:13 ►
Well, the way in which the mushroom fits into all this
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is that when the African continent began to dry up,
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this happened over a very long period of time,
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and it wasn’t just a gradual phenomenon.
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There were glaciations and there were interglacial periods.
00:18:36 ►
But generally speaking, over the past half a million years,
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Africa has experienced a progressive aridity.
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And this forced our remote ancestors down onto an evolving grassland situation.
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Simultaneously with all these changes going on in the proto-hominids,
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a lot of ungulate mammals were evolving in this sudden rich grassland environment.
00:19:07 ►
And in the dung of these particular mammals,
00:19:11 ►
the psilocybin-producing mushrooms found a suitable environment.
00:19:16 ►
They are that kind of mushroom which is called coprophytic,
00:19:19 ►
means likes dung.
00:19:22 ►
And the mushrooms used in the Indian cults of central Mexico are not
00:19:28 ►
coprophytic mushrooms with one exception they are ephemeral deep forest mushrooms an indemnified
00:19:36 ►
community of species that seem to have evolved there but the exception is in the genus Stropharia,
00:19:48 ►
where you get these coprophytic mushrooms,
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Stropharia cubensis and its conspecific species,
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and they appear wherever there are cattle
00:20:01 ►
of the Bos indicus type,
00:20:04 ►
which is the Cebu, the humped white cattle.
00:20:08 ►
This is a very primitive form of Asian cattle,
00:20:14 ►
probably the nearest living relative to boss primogensis,
00:20:19 ►
which was the prototypic Ice Age cattle.
00:20:26 ►
So the mushroom occurs then in this situation in the manure.
00:20:32 ►
Well, the pressure on the environment for protein is intense.
00:20:39 ►
And I saw myself in Kenya, tribes of baboons on the veldt, and they would go over and examine
00:20:47 ►
cow pies and flip them over, looking for grubs underneath them.
00:20:53 ►
So it’s in the repertoire of the behavior of these apes to associate these things.
00:21:01 ►
And the mushroom presents itself as a completely startling phenomenon in the natural
00:21:07 ►
environment i mean i’ve seen them in pastures in the amazon the size of small dinner plates and
00:21:13 ►
on stocks 11 inches high you know so we’re talking a hefty uh a hefty piece of protein the question is can you eat this thing?
00:21:27 ►
And the
00:21:27 ►
what happens you see
00:21:34 ►
when you
00:21:35 ►
when you eat a little bit of psilocybin
00:21:39 ►
and this was shown by experiments
00:21:42 ►
by Fisher years ago
00:21:44 ►
is that there’s an increase in visual acuity and this was shown by experiments by Fisher years ago,
00:21:48 ►
is that there’s an increase in visual acuity.
00:21:51 ►
Very slight, but measurable.
00:21:56 ►
Well, this means that this gives you an evolutionary adaptation in the hunting situation.
00:21:59 ►
You have better eyesight than other members of your group
00:22:04 ►
and than you yourself had before you admitted this
00:22:08 ►
item into your diet well you know this is a self-reinforcing situation on a scale of thousands
00:22:15 ►
and thousands of years very quickly those not availing themselves of this quote-unquote artificial augmentation to sensory clarity will be bred out because there’s just no percentage in poor vision.
00:22:33 ►
At slightly higher doses, the psilocybin causes sexual arousal.
00:22:41 ►
Well, again, you don’t have to be an evolutionary biologist to understand that
00:22:46 ►
the number of successful calculations that you complete has a direct bearing on the success of
00:22:53 ►
your reproductive strategy and these are all numbers games you know i mean those who fuck Fuck more, have more children is what it comes down to. So if a certain dietary item is causing sexual activity,
00:23:13 ►
well then we’re going to see more and more of the children,
00:23:16 ►
of the people who indulge in that dietary item.
00:23:19 ►
And this can be very unconscious, you see.
00:23:23 ►
And then the third thing is, of course, that at yet
00:23:26 ►
higher doses it gives way to this mystical tremendum, this entry into hyperspace. What
00:23:34 ►
this has to do with the feminine is that I think the women would have been the gatherers
00:23:42 ►
of the mushrooms. The women were the keepers of the reproductive mysteries anyway.
00:23:49 ►
This cow cult that got going,
00:23:52 ►
it’s very clear to me that from the primitive,
00:23:56 ►
from the point of view of a preliterate person,
00:23:59 ►
the mushroom comes from the cow.
00:24:02 ►
I mean, you can’t explain it any other way.
00:24:05 ►
It has no seeds.
00:24:07 ►
I mean, this was puzzling to people
00:24:08 ►
up until the 16th century.
00:24:10 ►
They couldn’t figure out
00:24:11 ►
where these things ever came from.
00:24:13 ►
They were accustomed to the notion
00:24:15 ►
of plants having seeds,
00:24:17 ►
but these mushrooms which sprang up overnight
00:24:19 ►
just seemed mysterious.
00:24:22 ►
So I think very early in prehistory
00:24:25 ►
there was a religion
00:24:28 ►
which was
00:24:30 ►
a celebration of the feminine,
00:24:37 ►
a psychedelic religion,
00:24:39 ►
an orgiastic religion
00:24:41 ►
to take account of this arousal factor
00:24:44 ►
in psilocybin.
00:24:45 ►
And that it was in this environment, over thousands and thousands of years,
00:24:50 ►
that humanness emerged.
00:24:53 ►
An environment of boundary dissolution,
00:24:57 ►
of where erotic connection was actually the basis of community,
00:25:08 ►
and where there was a constant exposure to this unlanguageable,
00:25:14 ►
unassimilable, mystical tremendum,
00:25:19 ►
and the psilocybin was acting then as a tremendous catalyst for language.
00:25:26 ►
Because remember, I think I said this,
00:25:28 ►
that its primary role in prehistory and in the present, possibly,
00:25:34 ►
is as to catalyze linguistic shifts.
00:25:38 ►
Because linguistic shifts then give culture permission to follow
00:25:43 ►
and erect whatever edifices it wants.
00:25:47 ►
Now, throughout prehistory,
00:25:51 ►
this vegetable goddess is a horned goddess,
00:25:57 ►
a goddess of the moon,
00:25:59 ►
a goddess of cattle,
00:26:00 ►
and a goddess of plants.
00:26:03 ►
And what I’m suggesting in this book I’m writing,
00:26:07 ►
and I should try it out on you because I won’t, you know,
00:26:11 ►
you’re my best shot,
00:26:13 ►
is the notion that, and I said this before,
00:26:18 ►
but I repeat myself and also things make more sense sometimes when heard again,
00:26:23 ►
and also things make more sense sometimes when heard again,
00:26:29 ►
that the natural human condition is actually a condition of symbiosis
00:26:32 ►
with this hallucinogen,
00:26:37 ►
this particular hallucinogen,
00:26:39 ►
that the mystery of who we are
00:26:42 ►
and the mystery of why we are so bereft
00:26:45 ►
and why history and why all this malarkey
00:26:49 ►
is because things went on 15,000 to 25,000 years ago
00:26:57 ►
that we have repressed and never faced the implications of, that we actually had a symbiotic relationship on the mental level
00:27:10 ►
with some kind of feminine overmind.
00:27:16 ►
And, you know, never mind all the questions which this raises
00:27:20 ►
about where is it, what is it, how does it do it, but just that the Gaian process is more than a process.
00:27:31 ►
It is a self-reflecting intellect of some sort.
00:27:37 ►
How can we pass judgment on this?
00:27:40 ►
What do we know?
00:27:41 ►
The earth is five billion years old.
00:27:43 ►
Intelligence may come in many forms. Self-reflecting awareness may come in many forms.
00:28:05 ►
and there was balance and there was wholeness and there was a way of being which, well, it was paradisical.
00:28:12 ►
That’s why we are so haunted by the loss of it.
00:28:16 ►
That’s why all of our ontologies are the story of how something was taken from us,
00:28:22 ►
something was lost.
00:28:24 ►
And it’s nobody’s fault, exactly.
00:28:29 ►
I mean, it really has to do with the processes of the planet,
00:28:33 ►
that this partnership paradise that arose as we came to consciousness in the cradle of Africa was dependent on the continuation of this extremely
00:28:48 ►
rich grassland environment, which was in fact a transient phenomenon. So that by 8, 10, 12,000
00:28:58 ►
years ago, visible pressure was being felt by these populations in Africa. And you see, each time there has been an interglacial period
00:29:09 ►
over the last 100,000 years,
00:29:12 ►
human populations and in the older strata,
00:29:17 ►
proto-hominid populations bottled up in Africa
00:29:20 ►
have radiated out across the Eurasian continent.
00:29:24 ►
But only in the last interglacial,
00:29:28 ►
20,000 years ago, were those people leaving Africa true pastoralists. They had flocks.
00:29:36 ►
They had skin tents. They had a religion. They had language. We know this. I mean, there’s just no doubt about it.
00:29:50 ►
Before that, they were nomadic hunter and gatherers.
00:29:56 ►
So this relationship to the mushroom and the relationship to the cattle,
00:30:02 ►
actually the first payoff was an entirely new order of civilization. The symbiotic relationship with the cow,
00:30:07 ►
which made life much, much easier,
00:30:10 ►
either fueled by or fed into
00:30:13 ►
the symbiotic relationship with the mushroom,
00:30:17 ►
which gave more successful hunting,
00:30:19 ►
better sex and religion.
00:30:22 ►
So there were all these factors feeding into this situation. Now,
00:30:29 ►
when these people got out of the Middle East, I mean, got out of Africa and settled in the
00:30:36 ►
Middle East, it was a much dicier situation. And if you know anything about Middle Eastern archaeology in Palestine,
00:30:46 ►
there is a great puzzle because before 9,500, it’s virtually empty. This is the interglacial.
00:30:57 ►
Ice reached as far south as Sidon in Lebanon, and this area was all frozen up but that
00:31:05 ►
as the glaciers
00:31:08 ►
retreated suddenly there are
00:31:10 ►
people at
00:31:11 ►
Ain Sabah and later at Jericho
00:31:14 ►
and at several places
00:31:15 ►
and it’s always been assumed
00:31:18 ►
by
00:31:19 ►
archaeologists on basically
00:31:22 ►
chauvinistic
00:31:24 ►
grounds that this must have been an outpost of old Europe
00:31:29 ►
that the Balkan Yugoslavian area that Maria Gimbutas has written so much about because these
00:31:36 ►
people are so advanced they’re called Natufians and they appear very suddenly in the archaeological record, 9,500. A thousand years later, they build Jericho,
00:31:48 ►
which is at that time the most advanced city site on the planet.
00:31:56 ►
But before they built Jericho,
00:31:59 ►
their habit of building was under rock escarpments.
00:32:04 ►
And this is the same style of Neolithic building
00:32:09 ►
that existed in the Tasseli Plateau of Algeria.
00:32:14 ►
So in the absence of much archaeology to support either side,
00:32:19 ►
I think it’s reasonable to think that these people may have come out of Africa.
00:32:24 ►
And in fact, there is some evidence of this
00:32:26 ►
because there is what’s called
00:32:28 ►
burnished Sudanese wherefore
00:32:32 ►
is found in these Natufian places.
00:32:37 ►
And burnished Sudanese wherefore
00:32:40 ►
comes from deep in what is now Ethiopia.
00:32:45 ►
So there was at least trade,
00:32:48 ►
and I think based on…
00:32:50 ►
And the people who write about all this
00:32:53 ►
have commented on the African motifs
00:32:57 ►
because while we don’t have much art from Jericho,
00:33:02 ►
these people, a thousand years after Jericho,
00:33:04 ►
by now it’s 7,500, they build
00:33:08 ►
Chatal Hiayuk in southern Anatolia. And this is truly a science fiction civilization. I mean, 7500 BC, the pyramids lie 3,000 years in the future.
00:33:30 ►
So what about that?
00:33:32 ►
Well, we don’t know.
00:33:34 ►
But one of the questions that will remain unanswered in this month is why.
00:33:49 ►
remain unanswered in this month is why why is there this synergy between the plants and the human beings is it chance is it just that this is how it works out and now we are self-reflecting
00:33:58 ►
enough to be able to unravel the threads that went into the confluence of
00:34:05 ►
influences that created us?
00:34:08 ►
Or is it plotted somehow?
00:34:11 ►
And this is then the extraterrestrial gene theory.
00:34:15 ►
Is this thing somehow strewn in our way?
00:34:19 ►
Because you see,
00:34:20 ►
I don’t buy any of the extraterrestrial intervention theories
00:34:24 ►
that have them landing on the White House lawn
00:34:27 ►
or projecting images into the minds of people who live in trailer courts
00:34:32 ►
or all these things they’re accused of doing.
00:34:36 ►
The one thing I grant extraterrestrial intelligence is great subtlety
00:34:41 ►
and probably a long timescale to do whatever they want to do.
00:34:48 ►
It’s possible to reach a point of deconditioning.
00:34:55 ►
It’s a kind of reconditioning, but it’s also deconditioning,
00:35:00 ►
where it seems obvious that the planet must be monitored.
00:35:06 ►
It is, after all, such an interesting planet.
00:35:09 ►
It seems that if anyone could monitor, they would.
00:35:13 ►
I mean, we’ve already now, through the probes we’ve sent into our own solar system,
00:35:18 ►
seen about 33 worlds, and they all fall into various classes,
00:35:23 ►
and not one comes anywhere near to what
00:35:27 ►
we are we are what astrophysicists have given the charming acronym we are a whore a whore is a water
00:35:36 ►
heavy oxygen rich world and water heavy oxygen rich is rare, rare, rare, rare, rare.
00:35:46 ►
So it may very well be that every one of these is closely monitored.
00:35:51 ►
Well, once you allow that notion, then the presence of the psychedelic genes,
00:35:59 ►
the psychedelic activator in the environment,
00:36:03 ►
begins to look more like a sort of
00:36:05 ►
biogenic engineering.
00:36:08 ►
It is curious that what these psychedelics do
00:36:12 ►
on a scale of a community
00:36:16 ►
is they release new ideas.
00:36:20 ►
You become the bearer of new ideas
00:36:22 ►
or new tools, new techniques, new ways of doing things,
00:36:27 ►
and that this is how culture moves forward,
00:36:31 ►
that culture is a phenomenon dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections.
00:36:41 ►
Well, this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
00:36:45 ►
So is that a coincidence?
00:36:48 ►
Or is that part of the regulator?
00:36:54 ►
Are we, in fact, somehow managed towards some point?
00:36:58 ►
And then the question becomes, of course, for what?
00:37:02 ►
And then it devolves into the realm of science fiction.
00:37:07 ►
I had a professor once who had a fairly grim view of things,
00:37:12 ►
and his notion of what human history was all about
00:37:16 ►
was that it was a radioactive minerals mining project,
00:37:25 ►
and that when we finally had all these nuclear weapons stacked up like cordwood,
00:37:30 ►
somebody would come from another world and say,
00:37:33 ►
Thank you very much.
00:37:35 ►
This is what we wanted, and you’ve done a good job.
00:37:41 ►
That all of human history was simply to get people to stockpile plutonium
00:37:46 ►
for somebody else’s very good reasons.
00:37:49 ►
Well, I don’t think it’s anything quite so Jack Armstrong-ish as that,
00:37:53 ►
because what I sense in the mushroom is a tremendous heart,
00:37:59 ►
a tremendous, you know, it’s well beyond all of that. It’s an emotional, intellectual, feeling-toned kind of thing.
00:38:13 ►
But is it a benevolent galactic monitor?
00:38:17 ►
Is it the beating heartbeat of Gaia?
00:38:20 ►
Is it this entelechy that I spoke of at the beginning of the hour
00:38:24 ►
that is somehow
00:38:25 ►
the sum total of process
00:38:27 ►
on the earth? Or is it
00:38:29 ►
possible that I have been
00:38:31 ►
remiss
00:38:33 ►
in my assessment of the
00:38:35 ►
capacity of human beings
00:38:37 ►
and that this is nothing more
00:38:39 ►
than us?
00:38:42 ►
It doesn’t seem to me like
00:38:43 ►
us. It doesn’t look like that to me.
00:38:48 ►
I got into this game originally as kind of an art historian.
00:38:53 ►
And art historians are, you track
00:38:56 ►
motifs over centuries or decades, depending on your bailiwick.
00:39:01 ►
And what it really is, is it’s the exploration
00:39:04 ►
of the human unconscious viewed as
00:39:07 ►
the as art art you learn what people have made can make do make in the realm of images well the
00:39:15 ►
thing that was most astonishing to me about these high high gain psychedelic states is how unfamiliar it is how totally unfamiliar it is even if you’ve made a
00:39:27 ►
study of the productions of the human mind in the visual dimension so that it to me and again this
00:39:37 ►
may be my own psychology what is always left out of descriptions of the psychedelic state, the deep psychedelic state,
00:39:46 ►
is how weird it is.
00:39:49 ►
I mean, a hair-raising oddness that adheres to it
00:39:54 ►
that is, I call, being in the presence of the other.
00:39:59 ►
The other wants to be as acceptable to us as possible. doesn’t want to frighten us it doesn’t want to
00:40:08 ►
appall us but it’s very hard for it to perceive what our parameters of expectation and bearability
00:40:15 ►
are i mean that’s very very clear uh one of the things after years of smoking DMT and trying to form a metaphor for it,
00:40:27 ►
I finally realized that this place that I kept bursting into was the equivalent.
00:40:35 ►
It was somebody’s idea of a playpen.
00:40:39 ►
It was somebody very weird.
00:40:43 ►
This was their notion of what a human being would feel most comfortable with
00:40:47 ►
and so it was you know rounded and enclosed and there’s a low hum and it’s white and these
00:40:56 ►
uh language elves that come hopping out of the woodwork to transform themselves
00:41:02 ►
those are the equivalent of what you hang over a baby’s cradle.
00:41:07 ►
You know, bright colors, moving lights, that’ll keep them busy.
00:41:12 ►
Wow.
00:41:13 ►
And it was a shock to me to realize this, because I realized it profoundly.
00:41:20 ►
It’s true.
00:41:21 ►
That’s what it is.
00:41:22 ►
It’s some kind of environment designed for a human being who has just been transported across hyperspace and is going to be observed for two minutes and 15 seconds and then sent back. And why should it be that way? does this really have anything to do with the spiritual life, or is this some skewed-off other tack entirely?
00:41:48 ►
I don’t know.
00:41:49 ►
There are suggestions, there are hints,
00:41:52 ►
but it by no means has the support of a broad river of tradition.
00:41:57 ►
For instance, the 56th fragment of Heraclitus,
00:42:04 ►
who’s a great guy. I mean, Heraclitus, who’s a great guy.
00:42:06 ►
I mean, Heraclitus was one of us.
00:42:08 ►
He’d be comfortable with this situation, I’m sure.
00:42:12 ►
The 56th fragment of Heraclitus says the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.
00:42:23 ►
This saying is 2,600 years old.
00:42:26 ►
What is it talking about?
00:42:28 ►
Who knows?
00:42:29 ►
But then you break into this place,
00:42:31 ►
and you see the Aeon,
00:42:33 ►
and it’s a child,
00:42:34 ►
and it’s playing with colored balls.
00:42:36 ►
And you say, my God,
00:42:38 ►
it’s like you’re not meant to know this stuff.
00:42:43 ►
The Kabiri in alchemy
00:42:46 ►
are the children
00:42:48 ►
that are generated
00:42:50 ►
in the alchemical process,
00:42:52 ►
not the homunculi,
00:42:54 ►
but these are the little elves
00:42:55 ►
of the metals
00:42:56 ►
that come out of the retort
00:42:58 ►
and can be seen dancing
00:43:00 ►
in the fire.
00:43:02 ►
This archetype, motif, whatever it is, is hair-raising when you encounter it, because it doesn’t look like an archetype or a motif. It looks like a little man, 11 inches high, or a self-transforming jeweled basketball, or an object from another dimension.
00:43:23 ►
object from another dimension.
00:43:27 ►
Very puzzling.
00:43:29 ►
The parameters cannot be known,
00:43:31 ►
or at least are not yet known.
00:43:35 ►
I mean, perhaps it’s foolish to say the parameters cannot be known.
00:43:37 ►
We are like explorers.
00:43:40 ►
We, anybody who goes into the psychedelic dimension,
00:43:47 ►
we are all going to go into the books as pioneers because it’s too early for us to be anything else. There’s no maps, no finished database, just anecdotes of the
00:43:55 ►
crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That’s why it’s so important to try and share this stuff.
00:44:03 ►
Doesn’t your comparison of…
00:44:05 ►
It sounds to me that the DMT experience,
00:44:08 ►
and you’ve said other people have had very similar experiences
00:44:10 ►
with the language and the Ls and all this.
00:44:12 ►
Does your comparison with that and other hallucinogenics
00:44:15 ►
help you draw a conclusion as to maybe this particular one
00:44:19 ►
is more off the wall and more…
00:44:23 ►
No, I think it’s a place
00:44:26 ►
that you approach by different strategies
00:44:30 ►
because a high dose of psilocybin
00:44:35 ►
will eventually put you into a place
00:44:38 ►
where you have to say,
00:44:39 ►
my God, I can’t tell it from a DMT flash.
00:44:44 ►
And a high dose of ayahuasca
00:44:47 ►
will eventually carry you exactly to the same place.
00:44:52 ►
The difference is that the DMT,
00:44:55 ►
the only way you can evade the DMT is mechanically.
00:45:02 ►
That means only if you take too small a toke will it fail.
00:45:07 ►
If you can take a big enough toke,
00:45:10 ►
it will deliver the goods.
00:45:12 ►
While with the psilocybin mushrooms, with the ayahuasca,
00:45:16 ►
you have to be a navigator.
00:45:18 ►
You have to know how to tack and breathe and descend and level
00:45:24 ►
and maybe a little mantric flash and dash.
00:45:28 ►
It’s trickier.
00:45:30 ►
But with the DMT, you know, by God,
00:45:36 ►
it has you if you get enough of it.
00:45:40 ►
You know, they used to say during the Mughal dynasty,
00:45:45 ►
they used to say of the city of Isfahan in Persia
00:45:48 ►
that it was half the world
00:45:50 ►
because of the beauty of the vaulted ceilings of its mosques.
00:45:55 ►
Isfahan is half the world.
00:45:57 ►
Well, DMT is half the world.
00:46:00 ►
It’s just, I would be totally despairing if it didn’t exist, because it holds back the premise of the mundane. The premise of the mundane is shown to be ludicrous beyond belief and not worth a moment’s trouble.
00:46:26 ►
you know. The world is, I’m sure you’ve heard me say this, the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose. I mean, think about that. It is stranger than we can
00:46:35 ►
suppose. And when you sit down with a notion like that and let it sit in, you realize that any
00:46:42 ►
conservative habit of thought is totally skewing you away
00:46:46 ►
from the quintessence of…
00:46:49 ►
And it’s personal.
00:46:52 ►
That’s the other thing.
00:46:54 ►
The world isn’t this unbelievably strange thing which is out there.
00:47:00 ►
The world is this stranger-than-we-can-suppose thing which begins from the core of us out.
00:47:07 ►
That means nothing can be taken for granted.
00:47:11 ►
It can be taken apart.
00:47:13 ►
It can be put together many, many ways.
00:47:15 ►
I mean, I really…
00:47:16 ►
You know, a short definition of tantra…
00:47:21 ►
You probably all have some notion of what tantra is.
00:47:24 ►
But a short definition of it is,
00:47:27 ►
it’s the shortcut. That’s what they say in India. They say the premise of tantra is that a single
00:47:35 ►
being can attain enlightenment in a single lifetime. That’s the premise of tantra,
00:47:41 ►
that in a single lifetime you could attain enlightenment.
00:47:48 ►
Well, imagine if you took that seriously,
00:47:54 ►
how much more engaged you would be with the problem of figuring it out. Because what if the only place you can figure it out from is a living body?
00:48:02 ►
And so you get 80, 90 years in a living body. And if you haven’t figured it out
00:48:07 ►
by that time, well, then you’re dead and that’s it. But during that time, you had a crack at the
00:48:14 ►
big one. There was nothing holding you back from figuring it out and then transcending such absurd
00:48:22 ►
notions as life and death and here and now.
00:48:25 ►
So it’s like an opportunity.
00:48:27 ►
You get to walk out on the court, they pitch you the ball,
00:48:33 ►
and you have a chance to make an 80-foot set shot.
00:48:36 ►
And if you don’t, into the bin with that one.
00:48:42 ►
Os Yanniger and I, who was a great old LSDd researcher and runs the albert hoffman library in la when he
00:48:50 ►
and i first met we were sort of testing each other and he has a famous reputation for being
00:48:57 ►
irascible and we just sort of were fiddling around and then i mentioned dmt and he just beamed and lit up and said now that’s something my god
00:49:09 ►
and this is what everybody says when you push them they it’s like they admit that it is what it is
00:49:17 ►
but it never occurred to them to go further to look into it to see what could be done with it
00:49:22 ►
and of course it’s sneered at from two directions it’s called the businessman’s trip because it’s so short the old thing in the 60s
00:49:30 ►
was oh you can do it on your lunch hour well what i want to know is what business are these
00:49:36 ►
businessmen in because and then the other thing that was said of it was it fries your brain.
00:49:45 ►
Well, that’s a subjective statement about what it is like to have it happen to you.
00:49:50 ►
It doesn’t fry your brain.
00:49:51 ►
The fact that it reverses itself in seven minutes shows that it probably can compete with the world’s five or six most innocuous drugs.
00:50:01 ►
Because that’s a way of thinking about how your body handles a drug. My God, if it
00:50:06 ►
can return you to the baseline of consciousness in seven minutes, then it’s just immediately
00:50:11 ►
turning this stuff into harmless byproducts that go into the urine. It means it’s safe. Well, you
00:50:17 ►
see, we’re reaching scary conclusions here. We’re reaching the conclusion that the strongest of all
00:50:27 ►
conclusions here. We’re reaching the conclusion that the strongest of all hallucinogens is the safest of all hallucinogens.
00:50:30 ►
That would carry with it a certain
00:50:38 ►
implication about doing these things and yet what is on the line when you do DMT is not your body,
00:50:41 ►
but your
00:50:49 ►
maps, your structure structure your belief system i i don’t i’ve never seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me but i was transformed in a moment from a marxist skeptic scientist
00:50:57 ►
i just it was then and i will say it still is now. It is pure, 100% magic.
00:51:08 ►
It’s magic.
00:51:09 ►
It’s not a drug.
00:51:10 ►
It’s an event.
00:51:12 ►
It’s not something that you do.
00:51:13 ►
It’s something which happens to you.
00:51:15 ►
And people come out of it saying,
00:51:17 ►
What happened?
00:51:18 ►
What happened?
00:51:20 ►
Saying, you did it.
00:51:22 ►
Say, that’s what happened?
00:51:25 ►
I did it?
00:51:25 ►
I just smoked?
00:51:26 ►
That’s it?
00:51:28 ►
Say, yes, calm down.
00:51:29 ►
The trip is over.
00:51:31 ►
You say, trip?
00:51:32 ►
You must be crazy to call it a trip.
00:51:35 ►
It’s not a trip.
00:51:36 ►
It’s an event.
00:51:40 ►
It’s like being struck by lightning.
00:51:43 ►
Have you ever had one of these things?
00:51:44 ►
It’s a lot like an automobile accident.
00:51:47 ►
An automobile accident is a very interesting thing
00:51:50 ►
because you’re going along and everything is ordinary
00:51:53 ►
and then reality just begins to unpeel.
00:51:58 ►
It just begins, and you have this very,
00:51:59 ►
oh my God, I can’t believe it.
00:52:04 ►
And it continues to go on, you know.
00:52:06 ►
I say, wow, it’s really happening.
00:52:12 ►
It’s exactly like that, you know.
00:52:15 ►
I mean, it’s just a collision with another modality.
00:52:19 ►
I have on DMT made sounds
00:52:25 ►
the intensity and purity of which
00:52:31 ►
are immediately convince you that no human being could do this
00:52:35 ►
I mean it’s just not the way humans do it
00:52:38 ►
it has this synthesizer steady
00:52:41 ►
I mean I’ll bet the wave is absolutely flat
00:52:44 ►
down as far as you care to look into it.
00:52:47 ►
It’s as though we don’t know what we are.
00:52:50 ►
It’s as though this is the control panel
00:52:53 ►
in the human animal.
00:52:55 ►
And you discover, you know, the monkey form,
00:52:58 ►
the third planet from the sun,
00:52:59 ►
all that was a mere fiction.
00:53:02 ►
And the reality is this other thing.
00:53:04 ►
And then why is it it why does it have
00:53:07 ►
the character that it does for instance both ayahuasca and mushrooms approach this place
00:53:16 ►
from different directions but the the dmt and the psilocybin have this unexpected science fiction-y aspect to them.
00:53:26 ►
This is what the art historians left out.
00:53:29 ►
This is what you don’t get in Hildegard von Bingen.
00:53:32 ►
You don’t get the machines, the deep, iridescent, highly polished surfaces
00:53:40 ►
that are clearly made somewhere, manufactured.
00:53:44 ►
surfaces that are clearly made somewhere, manufactured,
00:53:48 ►
you don’t get this cosmic viewpoint where the history of the solar system
00:53:51 ►
and the local history of the galaxy
00:53:53 ►
is being called upon to validate what is being said.
00:53:58 ►
In short, why is it so cosmic?
00:54:01 ►
It’s different from ayahuasca.
00:54:04 ►
Ayahuasca is a heart-opening, earth-centered, earth-tones,
00:54:13 ►
pastel, flowing water, organic form, fish in the river, mothering, canoe, animal animal type thing.
00:54:26 ►
It’s that even in Hawaii or British Columbia
00:54:28 ►
isn’t the Amazon,
00:54:30 ►
unless the morphogenetic field is amplified
00:54:33 ►
without subject to the inverse square law.
00:54:36 ►
Well, this is really mysterious stuff
00:54:39 ►
that human cultural forms
00:54:42 ►
should be scripted into plants?
00:54:45 ►
What exactly is going on here?
00:54:47 ►
One of the things you can do with psilocybin and ayahuasca
00:54:53 ►
that’s very puzzling and should be studied
00:54:56 ►
is you can, when you get equilibrium in the state,
00:55:02 ►
project a motif. Let’s say art deco, suddenly there will be thousands and
00:55:13 ►
thousands of art deco objects, water pitchers, cigarette lighters, automobiles, hood ornaments,
00:55:22 ►
sculpture, grill work, and then you can just instantly, you can say Italian Baroque.
00:55:29 ►
And in a single moment, you know, you’re at the church at Santa Maggiore
00:55:35 ►
and seeing all this gold work and all this stuff.
00:55:38 ►
And then you can say, surprise me.
00:55:42 ►
So, you know, what kind of a dialogue is this and what kind of an
00:55:46 ►
entity is this? Is this part of the
00:55:48 ►
spiritual quest? Is this
00:55:49 ►
often its own
00:55:51 ►
domain? The language
00:55:54 ►
of ayahuasca, a way in which
00:55:56 ►
ayahuasca and psilocybin
00:55:57 ►
slice it differently, is
00:56:00 ►
psilocybin actually
00:56:02 ►
speaks. There’s an
00:56:03 ►
informing voice.
00:56:05 ►
It tells you.
00:56:06 ►
The language of ayahuasca is visual.
00:56:09 ►
It shows you.
00:56:10 ►
You become like the eye of a cinemascopic camera.
00:56:15 ►
And after a good ayahuasca trip,
00:56:18 ►
you just feel like your eyes are sticking out of your head.
00:56:20 ►
I mean, it’s like going to Madison Avenue to buy art or something.
00:56:24 ►
You’ve looked at so many prints, and you’ve just looked and looked, and you’ve been looking and
00:56:29 ►
looking, because that’s how it does it. And you know what I said on Friday about the more perfect
00:56:36 ►
logos, this thing which is visually beheld. See, what we’re doing is we’re mucking about in the domain of profound mystery.
00:56:47 ►
And I really can’t help you.
00:56:49 ►
I don’t have answers.
00:56:55 ►
My one answer is my little time wave, which I’m willing to share with you.
00:57:00 ►
But ideas in this domain are a dime a dozen. I mean, my dream was always to catch an idea,
00:57:04 ►
because I saw that that’s what the psychedelic thing was.
00:57:07 ►
And some of the ideas are tiny ideas, amusing and preposterous, but utterly worthless.
00:57:15 ►
And then the large ideas leave you just little, little, little, little like that,
00:57:21 ►
because they go by and tear your nets to shreds and your main concern at that point is
00:57:26 ►
to row for sure but every once in a while there comes one of manageable size that you can actually
00:57:33 ►
wrestle into your little boat and take back to astound I have the feeling that in the DMT
00:57:45 ►
ecstasis, that
00:57:48 ►
the time wave
00:57:49 ►
gets about
00:57:50 ►
three seconds because they say
00:57:53 ►
look at this.
00:57:55 ►
Oh wow, that’s amazing. Say look at this.
00:57:58 ►
Say, my God, I’ve never seen
00:57:59 ►
anything. But look at this.
00:58:01 ►
And each one of these are
00:58:03 ►
your amazement is genuine and your reaction is correct.
00:58:09 ►
You are being shown the most amazing things you’ve ever seen.
00:58:12 ►
It’s simply that you cannot retain what they are.
00:58:16 ►
So the goal is, first of all, to be there, to know about it,
00:58:22 ►
to draw strength from the evidence for magic.
00:58:29 ►
But then the higher calling is to be a hunter,
00:58:35 ►
to find something, to bring it back.
00:58:38 ►
I mean, if that’s a little too meaty a metaphor for you,
00:58:41 ►
well, then think of yourself as a noetic archaeologist.
00:58:44 ►
We want to bring back an object,
00:58:47 ►
a flower from hyperspace,
00:58:49 ►
a machine from another world.
00:58:51 ►
And apparently the easiest things
00:58:54 ►
to bring back are ideas.
00:58:57 ►
And so we have to pay
00:58:58 ►
a lot of attention
00:58:59 ►
because ideas can cross the barrier.
00:59:03 ►
Very little else can.
00:59:05 ►
But if we pay sufficient attention,
00:59:08 ►
I think much of these ideas can be brought across.
00:59:12 ►
And we can bring all…
00:59:13 ►
Nothing is unfair.
00:59:15 ►
I mean, computer graphics,
00:59:17 ►
voice-operated tape recorders,
00:59:20 ►
anything that works.
00:59:22 ►
I mean, this is…
00:59:24 ►
We’ve hit the main vein of ideas
00:59:27 ►
out there in hyperspace,
00:59:29 ►
and the goal is just to fill our knapsacks as full as we can
00:59:33 ►
and then get back to base with this stuff.
00:59:39 ►
I guess really, I mean, I’m about to wind it down now.
00:59:42 ►
The real point of this month,
00:59:44 ►
and I have to keep clearing it back
00:59:46 ►
and reminding myself and you,
00:59:48 ►
is that we’ve discovered something
00:59:51 ►
and that we don’t know what it is
00:59:53 ►
and that we’re like the monkeys in 2001
00:59:56 ►
dancing around the monolith.
00:59:58 ►
But this is important.
01:00:00 ►
I mean, that’s almost all we can say at this point, but it’s very, very important.
01:00:07 ►
The world will never be the same once the implications of this are worked out.
01:00:13 ►
And since I believe a lot of its impact is going to be in psychotherapy,
01:00:17 ►
and I see you guys, as probably many of you will be psychotherapists or therapists or doctors,
01:00:24 ►
you’re going to have an impact and be involved in this.
01:00:28 ►
But basically, we’re just clearing a space for a discovery.
01:00:33 ►
And it’s a hard discovery to announce because we don’t know what we’ve discovered.
01:00:37 ►
We just know we’ve really discovered something.
01:00:41 ►
Fire must have hit with this kind of impact.
01:00:44 ►
And look how long it took to work out what you could do with it.
01:00:49 ►
Well, that’s it for today.
01:00:51 ►
Thanks very much.
01:00:54 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:00:56 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:01:01 ►
Ideas can cross the barrier.
01:01:04 ►
Did you catch that? Ideas can cross the barrier. Did you catch that?
01:01:06 ►
Ideas can cross the barrier.
01:01:08 ►
And while I’m only speaking for myself here,
01:01:11 ►
I think that little mantra might be something worth saying to oneself
01:01:14 ►
as the barrier is being crossed.
01:01:17 ►
I know that I’m not the only one here in the salon
01:01:20 ►
who has had what Sasha calls a plus-five experience
01:01:23 ►
where almost unimaginable amounts
01:01:26 ►
of really wondrous information unfold. But when you come back down, then you wind up telling your
01:01:32 ►
friends that, well, you just had the greatest experience of your life, but you just can’t
01:01:37 ►
remember anything about it. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean. But, what if you went in there hunting only for ideas,
01:01:47 ►
so that when you returned, you could say,
01:01:49 ►
I can’t tell you how I got this idea, but here’s the idea that I’ve returned with.
01:01:55 ►
And maybe that’s a good way to approach these inexplicable experiences.
01:02:00 ►
After all, we know for a fact that at least one of the ideas
01:02:04 ►
that has been brought back from a psychedelic experience was the first understanding of the DNA molecule.
01:02:12 ►
That’s not bad for starters. Now it’s your turn.
01:02:16 ►
And I’m not just talking about ideas in science here.
01:02:20 ►
Remember what Terrence also said just now, and I quote, It is curious that what these psychedelics do, on a scale of a community, is they release new ideas,
01:02:31 ►
and that this is how the culture moves forward.
01:02:35 ►
The culture is a phenomena dependent on the generation of ideas, plans, notions, connections,
01:02:42 ►
so this is precisely what these compounds are doing.
01:02:47 ►
After just now listening with you to Terrence’s rap about how women are programmed to talk more than men,
01:02:53 ►
well, I can’t help myself from telling this little story.
01:02:57 ►
Although some men aren’t willing to admit this, but for most of us,
01:03:01 ►
the two words that strike the most terror in our hearts when they come from a woman are,
01:03:07 ►
Let’s talk.
01:03:09 ►
I need not say any more about that particular fact.
01:03:12 ►
But I was completely taken aback about six years ago when I was playing with one of my granddaughters.
01:03:19 ►
She was about two and a half years old at the time, and the two of us were having a tea party.
01:03:24 ►
two and a half years old at the time, and the two of us were having a tea party.
01:03:30 ►
We had just pretended that we’d finished eating, and then she pretended to pour each of us a cup of tea.
01:03:32 ►
But next, she pushed her little chair back a bit, looked me in the eye, and then said,
01:03:37 ►
let’s talk.
01:03:40 ►
I still laugh when I think about it, so if you are one of our younger male members in the salon,
01:03:47 ►
it might be good for you to keep that in mind, because even if you’re gay,
01:03:51 ►
there’s going to come a time when some woman says that to you.
01:03:54 ►
But now, instead of having your stomach begin to turn in knots,
01:03:58 ►
you can simply smile to yourself, and be sure that you only smile inside.
01:04:04 ►
But you can relax now, because you know that this is just one of the interesting little ways
01:04:09 ►
in which us men and women, well, we’re just wired a little differently.
01:04:13 ►
But hey, isn’t that what makes it all so much fun?
01:04:17 ►
And I do hope that I haven’t offended any of our women salonners here
01:04:21 ►
because I surely don’t mean to.
01:04:24 ►
of our women salonners here, because I surely don’t mean to.
01:04:29 ►
Now, next week I hopefully will be able to bring you some more news about this year’s Palenque Norte lectures at the Burning Man Festival,
01:04:34 ►
and there’s quite a lot to talk about.
01:04:36 ►
But since we’ve again gone a little long,
01:04:39 ►
I’m only going to cover one more topic,
01:04:42 ►
and that is for me to give my opinion about Terrence’s time wave idea, now that 2012 has come and gone.
01:04:50 ►
First of all, I’m going to read part of a recent comment that was posted on our program notes, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:04:59 ►
And the author is someone who goes by the handle HiddenPlace, and here is part of the comment.
01:05:04 ►
author is someone who goes by the handle Hidden Place, and here is part of the comment.
01:05:09 ►
Hey Lorenzo, I would love to hear your thoughts about the time wave sometime soon.
01:05:16 ►
I think about it a lot, and I think most people will agree that where Terrence went wrong is in predicting an end date.
01:05:21 ►
It’s an incredibly tempting thing to do and makes the whole story much more exciting, but I think it represents a misunderstanding of the basic idea. I think there is something to the idea of interconnected fractal time,
01:05:30 ►
but the problem is that a true fractal never actually reaches a singularity. If you zoom
01:05:35 ►
into a spiral in the classic Mandelbrot set, something I’ve spent a lot of time doing,
01:05:41 ►
the arms of the spiral never actually converge. So my interpretation is,
01:05:47 ►
if there is a transcendental object at the end of time, we’ll never reach it in this reality,
01:05:52 ►
because fractals are endlessly self-repeating, with infinite variations, and don’t actually
01:05:58 ►
have an end point. So, what do I think about all of that? Well, first of all, I completely agree that the major flaw in his work was to predict an end date.
01:06:10 ►
And most likely everyone else can agree with that too.
01:06:14 ►
As for the fractal nature of time, if that’s actually the case, then what you say follows quite logically.
01:06:21 ►
I must admit, however, that I’ve always had difficulty in accepting the idea of a
01:06:27 ►
transcendental object at the end of time. That reminds me of some of the hocus-pocus that I was
01:06:33 ►
taught in Catholic school. You know, if it’s transcendental, then what does it mean by it
01:06:39 ►
being an object, for example? And since we know so little about time, how can we even say that it has an end?
01:06:46 ►
Do light and gravity
01:06:48 ►
have endpoints?
01:06:49 ►
But these are just rabbit trails, in my opinion.
01:06:52 ►
And while I truly
01:06:54 ►
respect the discussion about the relationship
01:06:56 ►
between the I Ching and time,
01:06:58 ►
and DNA as well,
01:06:59 ►
I simply can’t comment on it at all,
01:07:01 ►
because, well, I only have the vaguest notions
01:07:04 ►
about the I Ching.
01:07:06 ►
But I most definitely think that a further exploration of Terence’s concept of time being a waveform of some sort,
01:07:13 ►
whether it’s shaped by the I Ching or some other algorithm,
01:07:17 ►
isn’t, to me at least, as important as actually understanding what time really is.
01:07:22 ►
Here’s how I’ve been trying to get my head around these things lately.
01:07:27 ►
Over the past few months, I’ve read quite a few historical novels.
01:07:32 ►
And as an aside here, the reason I like to get my history from novels
01:07:36 ►
is that by adding a human story to the line to kind of hang the historical events on,
01:07:42 ►
well, it just makes it more real to me and easier to read.
01:07:42 ►
kind of hang the historical events on,
01:07:43 ►
well, it just makes it more real to me and easier to read.
01:07:45 ►
And I realize that many historians
01:07:48 ►
hold historical novels in great contempt.
01:07:50 ►
But, hey, since history is always written by the winners,
01:07:54 ►
well, some of those acceptable histories
01:07:56 ►
maybe should also be held in contempt
01:07:58 ►
because a lot of what we’ve been fed
01:08:01 ►
in our public school history books
01:08:02 ►
is simply a pack of lies.
01:08:04 ►
Just try reading the wonderful book by historian Howard Zinn,
01:08:08 ►
his brilliant book, A People’s History of the United States.
01:08:12 ►
And once you’ve read that book, I think you’re going to understand better what I’m talking about.
01:08:16 ►
But getting back to understanding time,
01:08:19 ►
I’ve now read all of Edward Rutherford’s historical novels, and I highly recommend them.
01:08:24 ►
I’ve now read all of Edward Rutherford’s historical novels, and I highly recommend them.
01:08:30 ►
What he’s done that I like so much is that he tells this really sweeping story of history,
01:08:34 ►
but mainly all from a single place in each of his books, a different place, of course.
01:08:38 ►
And in some books, he begins over 2,000 years in the past,
01:08:43 ►
and from there he weaves the story of history of the passing ages up to the present. But we get to see how the people in each age, in a particular location,
01:08:48 ►
understood what was going on, and at the same time, I think,
01:08:52 ►
to better understand what ships we are who pass in the night, as the saying goes.
01:08:59 ►
Because sometimes a chapter is going to end after bringing some event
01:09:03 ►
that is central to a particular fictional character to a close.
01:09:07 ►
And then the next chapter begins in the same town, but maybe several centuries later.
01:09:13 ►
And we see how the descendants of various earlier characters are completely ignorant of the trials and tribulations of those who have paved the way for them.
01:09:21 ►
Or, in some cases, who it was in their ancestry that lost the family fortune.
01:09:28 ►
Now, I know that I’m not doing a very good job of saying how this has brought me to focus
01:09:32 ►
on the waveform of time that Terrence came up with,
01:09:36 ►
but somehow, whenever one of those aha moments in a novel hits me,
01:09:41 ►
I stop and think how, in either a cyclical way or a fractal way, our minds are
01:09:47 ►
embedded in something really strange, and for now we call it time. But deep down, I
01:09:53 ►
suspect that we all know that time isn’t what it seems to be.
01:09:58 ►
Well, that’s enough heavy lifting for today. Time being what it is, I think that it’s now time for me to sign off.
01:10:06 ►
But I guess in the interest of honesty, I should tell you that there actually is one other thing
01:10:12 ►
that I sometimes do when it’s really hot. And these past few days, I’ve been really mindlessly
01:10:18 ►
re-watching a few episodes from one of my favorite television programs, although it’s one that I’ve only seen on Netflix and never on TV.
01:10:27 ►
I’m not going to tell you what the name of the program is,
01:10:30 ►
but as soon as I sign off, I’m going to play a few seconds of the theme song from it.
01:10:35 ►
And I’m sure that quite a few of our fellow slauners
01:10:38 ►
will have a big smile on their faces when they hear it.
01:10:41 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:11:29 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.