Program Notes
Guest speakers: Timothy Leary & Terence McKenna
Invitation to the opening of the Timoty Leary Archive at the New York Library. (Held on the second anniversary of the Occupy Movement.) :-)
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I know that I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Tim Leary. He was the pathfinder. He cut the way through the woods. He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.”
“Alchemy is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.”
“What ‘psychedelic’ means is getting your mind out in front of you, by whatever means necessary, so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it.”
“Mind conjures miracles out of time.”
“You’ve been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you, fall of man, original sin, and so forth and so on. It’s bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.”
Books mentioned in this podcast
One Foot in the Future
Nina Graboi
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
By Frances A. Yates
Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (Magic in History)
D.P. Walker
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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.
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space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And to begin with,
00:00:33 ►
a big thank you goes out to Izana D. and Jacob H., both of whom made a donation to the salon recently to help us offset some of our monthly expenses. So, Izana and Jacob, I thank you very
00:00:39 ►
much. Well, I’ve got a real treat for you today. Actually, I was just about ready to record a new podcast yesterday,
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but at the time I’d been working on one that featured a continuation of the Terrence McKenna workshop
00:00:54 ►
that we’ve been listening to for a few weeks.
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However, I happened to notice the date and discovered it was already mid-September
00:01:02 ►
and that today would be the 17th,
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which means that today at the New York Public Library, a reception was to be held to celebrate the opening of the
00:01:13 ►
Timothy Leary Papers. In fact, that reception is taking place at this very moment in which I’m
00:01:19 ►
recording this. So a big shout out goes out to Dennis Berry and Donna Scott, who are the trustees of the Timothy Leary Estate, and to the staff at the New York Public Library who have worked so hard to make this happen.
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And what does this have to do with today’s podcast, you ask?
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recording from my friend Steve Marschank,
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who you may remember me mentioning before as the producer of the video Prognosis,
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which featured Terrence McKenna, Ram Dass, and several others,
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parts of which we’ve already heard here in the salon.
00:01:59 ►
Well, Steve was also the producer of an event that we’re going to be hearing from in just a moment.
00:02:04 ►
And what a unique event that was, because as far as I know, it was the one and only time that Timothy Leary introduced Terrence McKenna.
00:02:09 ►
This was actually a benefit for Botanical Dimensions, and it was held at the Wilshire Evil Theatre in Los Angeles.
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I think it was in June of 1991.
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And it may also have been one of the largest live audiences ever to hear Terrence,
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with more than 800 people present. Now, as you’ll hear, Terrence actually titled this talk
00:02:32 ►
Unfolding the Stone, and a few years ago I played another version of this talk by the same name,
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or maybe I didn’t. The truth is that I’ve now podcast over 170 talks by Terrence,
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including the trilogues with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake.
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In addition, I’ve probably previewed another 50 more.
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So the truth is that I can’t actually remember anymore
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whether this ever made it into the salon,
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but it’s making it here today for sure.
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So without any further ado, here very briefly is Steve Marschank, who introduces Tim Leary,
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who in turn introduces Terrence McKenna.
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I think you’re really going to like this one.
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He’s an old friend of all of ours, so I’d like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
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I, for one, am overjoyed to be here.
00:03:50 ►
to be here. This is one of those special, special evenings that we will all treasure.
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You know, as soon as I drove to that parking lot, I saw people getting out of the car,
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many of whom were still carrying uniforms and dazed expressions of Grateful Dead heads.
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How many people are at the Dead concert?
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Yeah.
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And they’re coming over later.
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They’re just ending now, so believe me, we’ll have an infusion of wildness there.
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Terence McKenna, he’s a great deal to me.
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I would say he’s one of the five or six most important people on the planet.
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I can’t even think of any others.
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Short-term memory loss.
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I was talking, by the way, I should tell you, Terrence and I keep meeting in the most wonderful, mythic, adventurous places. I was doing a wild tour through Germany
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about a year ago. We came to Heidelberg and we were being guested by
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some people that came right out of Hermann Hesse.
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I mean, wizards and gnomes
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and, you know, that sort of thing.
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Heidelberg.
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And there in a restaurant
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while I was having a sandwich
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before performing with some cybernetic people,
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there was Terence McKenna.
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And it was just so perfectly Hesse.
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Journey to the East.
00:05:30 ►
And so we meet again here tonight. You know, I was talking to Terence backstage before we began,
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and we both agree that what he will be saying tonight has been said over and over again at all those high moments in human history
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when those who have gone within and understood about the brain and the inner treasures,
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we all come back and pretty much say the same thing.
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The problem is, though, that once you say it, you can’t go on saying it and saying it and saying it.
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The problem is, though, that once you say it, you can’t go on saying it and saying it and saying it.
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And when Terrence came along a few years ago and was saying what I’d been trying to say,
00:06:18 ►
but naturally better, upgraded, up to date, I was so overwhelmed with gratitude, and I publicly thank you for that, Terrence.
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Terrence.
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By the way, the role that Terrence is playing right now is one that takes not only vision,
00:06:32 ►
but it also takes fucking courage.
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We were saying backstage that Terrence and I are a small group of philosophers who make our living, not in the ivory tower, if you call it living, but just speaking it, chanting it, raving it,
00:06:58 ►
ranting it, and no one has ever done it with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight.
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I’m going to say one more thing and then we will have what we’ve all been waiting for.
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Terrence reminds us that all human wisdom, all energy comes from our beloved synergetic partners, the vegetable queendom.
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It all comes from the plants.
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Now, a round of applause to the vegetables.
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Now, we all know that the human body, we have to have food.
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It comes from vegetables.
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We have used vegetables over the years, the essence of vegetables in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, and so forth.
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Oil, by the way, is the number one crack addiction of the modern industrial society.
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But what we forget and what we look to Terrence for tonight is to be reminded that plants
00:08:06 ►
have given us an even more important gift.
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They give us the gift of vision.
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They give us the illumination.
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And throughout human history, there are the Eves and the Pandoras.
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Usually it’s a woman who takes this wonderful vegetable and gives it to humanity and says,
00:08:21 ►
be illuminated.
00:08:23 ►
And now for our illumination and our pleasure, please join me in welcoming Terence McKenna.
00:08:34 ►
Well, I want to thank Tim. That was a wonderful introduction. I’m sure I wouldn’t, I know I wouldn’t be here tonight if it weren’t for Tim Leary.
00:08:48 ►
He was the pathfinder.
00:08:50 ►
He cut the way through the woods.
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He gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight.
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And it’s wonderful that one Irishman can hand it on to another
00:09:03 ►
and that we can keep it in the Bardic tradition.
00:09:11 ►
Before I get started, I want to thank a number of people
00:09:14 ►
who put a lot of energy into this event to make it go.
00:09:19 ►
Steve Marshank promoted and organized this.
00:09:23 ►
He’s been at it for months and months.
00:09:26 ►
Roy, Roy Tuckman, Roy of Hollywood, and Diane,
00:09:31 ►
they have supported me and given generously of hundreds and hundreds of hours of their time
00:09:41 ►
to put these psychedelic ideas across.
00:09:45 ►
And believe me, you hang your ass out to dry when you take this position.
00:09:49 ►
Tim mentioned courage.
00:09:51 ►
Nobody has had the kind of courage that Roy and Diane have had
00:09:55 ►
to push that message into this town.
00:09:59 ►
So we salute them.
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And Eric Alley did the wonderful poster.
00:10:07 ►
He’s done them for these events for years.
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He’s a beautiful artist.
00:10:13 ►
Christian Duffy and Jim Essex are here to see that you find your seat and stay in it.
00:10:20 ►
And we thank them for that and last and certainly most importantly uh cat harrison
00:10:30 ►
mckenna my partner in building the dream of botanical dimensions i sit up here and take the
00:10:39 ►
limelight and the glory it’s cat who fashioned botanical dimensions into the functioning entity that it is. She
00:10:47 ►
manages it from day to day. We had a $51,000 balloon payment that I talked to you about
00:10:54 ►
in Port Hueneme. It’s paid off. It’s finished. The land in Hawaii will forever be dedicated to the preservation of plants with medical significance and significance to the human family, and that credit all goes to Kat.
00:11:14 ►
So let’s hear it for her.
00:11:31 ►
You all know that the rainforests of the world are disappearing at a tragic rate, and maybe that process can be halted through pressure on the World Bank
00:11:38 ►
and the International Monetary Fund and these enormous international agencies.
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But whether or not the clearing of the rainforest is halted,
00:11:48 ►
the loss of folk medicinal knowledge on the part of these tribal societies
00:11:55 ►
that have lived in balance and equilibrium and respect with nature for millennia,
00:12:02 ►
that is tragically going.
00:12:05 ►
There’s no question about it. with nature for millennia, that is tragically going.
00:12:07 ►
There’s no question about it, because you can’t put people into a museum diorama
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and ask them to parade around in jock straps
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while the rest of us drive BMWs.
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They move into the cities, these people work
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in the sawmills, they take jobs in the tourist industry, and 25,000, 50,000 years of medical knowledge is lost.
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And Tim did homage to the vegetables.
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Even in today’s high-tech world, fully 75% of all the drugs, prescription drugs,
00:12:50 ►
of all the drugs, prescription drugs, other kinds of drugs, on the market, above ground, underground, come from plants.
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This is a priceless reservoir of complex chemistry, but it’s meaningless unless the human experiences, the human lore is preserved.
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And this is what botanical dimensions is about we have collectors in Peru in other parts of the world and we bring
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seeds with stock living plants to Hawaii and there these things are grown as in a
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living library toward the day when a more enlightened society will have the wisdom
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and the good sense to team up with the vegetable world and create a more humane medicine,
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a more humane religion that has some real life and light in it.
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So that’s what we’re doing out there.
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Any help any of you can give us, we’re deeply appreciative.
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Spread the word.
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Since we began this project, many imitators have sprung up,
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and this was our intent and our hope,
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and great good work is being done.
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and great good work is being done. So please support the conservation of folk botanical and medical knowledge.
00:14:17 ►
So then before I dig into this, let me just explain how it’ll work.
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I’ll talk for a while, then there’ll be an intermission, and then we’ll
00:14:26 ►
come back and, given however much time is left over, why there’ll be a Q&A, and we’ll have a
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mic for you to line up behind. Okay. All right. First of all, thank you all for being here. I
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know we’re up against the Grateful Dead, my band I’m gonna quote them repeatedly it’s a thousand to one chance
00:14:50 ►
that this would happen and it just shows the world is stranger than you can
00:14:54 ►
suppose so the name of this talk is unfolding the stone and I wanted to talk
00:15:02 ►
about this it’s a departure for me because I think we’ve just
00:15:08 ►
been through a real hammering over the past 10 months. I mean, if you’ve still got your
00:15:13 ►
optimism intact, and believe me, I do, you’ve been through the fire. This has not been an
00:15:21 ►
easy 10 months for the people of this planet or the planet itself. And so I want to
00:15:28 ►
sort of reach back tonight and invoke a banished tradition, get to the heart of it,
00:15:38 ►
and try to show how we can bring this forward in our lives to empower hope in the most dark of situations.
00:15:49 ►
And in fact, to even make these dark situations the raw material of a clearer, stronger hope than might ordinarily be the case.
00:16:12 ►
A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he wanted to tell me the story of sitting in the presence of a 104-year-old Vietnamese monk.
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And the guy had basically kept his mouth shut, the monk, hadn’t said much around the monastery where he just sort of cleans up but then he announced
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he wanted to talk about meditation and he opened his remarks by saying we are
00:16:32 ►
all luminous beings why then do we not appear before each, radiant in our illumination.
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And this is the conundrum of life.
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This is the problem.
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It was T.S. Eliot who said,
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between the idea and the reality,
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between the motion and the act,
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falls the shadow.
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And why is that?
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As psychedelic people, this is the problem that we grapple with in our own lives and when we look out at the world.
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You’ve heard me say many times, we have the vision, we have the money, we have the technology, but why can we not then appear
00:17:28 ►
before each other as radiantly luminous beings? And why cannot we reclaim our planet from
00:17:37 ►
toxification, disease, overpopulation, bonehead politics, you know the list.
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What’s the hangup here?
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What is the problem?
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Why is perfection so distant?
00:17:53 ►
Well, what I’ve learned from life and vegetables
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and travel and books can be summed up in two Greek words.
00:18:08 ►
books can be summed up in two Greek words it’s the central message of of the philosopher Heraclitus and he was always my favorite philosopher but whenever I
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would read about him he was called the crying philosopher and I had to live to
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be 44 years old to understand the poignancy of Heraclitus’ message.
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He said in a nutshell,
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Pante Rea, all flows, all flows, nothing lasts, nothing is permanent.
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And this is the hardest message life has to teach. Because what it says is your joy is transient,
00:18:51 ►
your anguish is transient, your fortune, your home, your dream, your moments of great ecstasy, your moments of great insight, your moments of great empowerment,
00:19:07 ►
everything is flowing through your hands at the moment that you are aware of it.
00:19:14 ►
William Blake, who in a way set this engine going a couple of centuries ago, said,
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going a couple of centuries ago said, what is the price of experience? Is it bought for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street? No. It is bought with all that a man has.
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His wife, his home, his children. Now this is not a pessimistic message and William
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Blake was not a pessimistic guy. He was the same guy who told us that if we could but cleanse
00:19:56 ►
the doors of perception we would perceive the world as it is, infinite in a grain of sand.
00:20:08 ►
infinite in a grain of sand how can we take this poignancy this sense of impermanence and weld it into something which is paradoxically indestructible
00:20:16 ►
and has meaning in our lives and gives us not only the strength to carry on but
00:20:22 ►
the power to be exemplars, the power to
00:20:27 ►
stand up before other people and let them then feel the power of vision in the paradox
00:20:35 ►
of permanence in the face of the need for indestructibility.
00:20:40 ►
Well, to answer that question, I felt that we had to leave the narrow confines
00:20:47 ►
of 20th century thinking
00:20:49 ►
and we had to reach back into
00:20:52 ►
the byways of human thought
00:20:54 ►
that have been by most of us
00:20:57 ►
somewhat passed over and forgotten
00:20:59 ►
because after all modern life
00:21:01 ►
makes great demands on us
00:21:03 ►
it’s enough to just keep your checkbook balanced and your insurance paid.
00:21:07 ►
We can’t all spend our time delving in the libraries of the noetic and gnostic and hermetic and magical traditions.
00:21:19 ►
But I thought it was worthwhile to talk to you about this tonight
00:21:22 ►
because we have been through such a difficult
00:21:26 ►
10 months and it was also Heraclitus, the all flows guy, who said all is war, all is war.
00:21:36 ►
And what he meant was everything occurs in the presence of its opposite, and out of that there is generated the friction, the heat, and the light
00:21:48 ►
that all comes together in an indissoluble package as part of life.
00:21:55 ►
So what I want to talk to you about tonight and how it relates to unfolding the stone
00:22:00 ►
is the notion of alchemy of all things.
00:22:04 ►
is the notion of alchemy of all things.
00:22:08 ►
Alchemy, as I’m sure many of you know,
00:22:14 ►
is really the secret tradition of the redemption of spirit from matter.
00:22:19 ►
But many of you may imagine that alchemy is simply a discredited pre-scientific obsession of unbalanced minds
00:22:49 ►
interested in changing base metals into gold, lead behind the perceptions of the alchemist.
00:22:59 ►
The central conception of alchemy is the conception of the philosopher’s stone.
00:23:06 ►
What is it? It’s the universal panacea at the end of time. It’s the chocolate cake
00:23:15 ►
that your mother made once a week when you were a child, the panas super
00:23:20 ►
substantiales. It’s all things to all men and all women. If you are hungry, you eat it. If you’re dirty, you shower under it. If you need to go somewhere, you sit on it and you fly there. If you have a question, it answers it. It’s something that the human mind senses in itself and related to, invoked, worshipped over centuries
00:23:51 ►
before the slow rise of the patriarchy and rationalism and materialism turned it into a myth, a fairy tale.
00:24:03 ►
It is not a myth, a fairy tale. It is not a myth or a fairy tale.
00:24:07 ►
It is the burning primary reality that lies behind the dross of appearances.
00:24:16 ►
Alchemy is based on a philosophy called Hermeticism
00:24:20 ►
that was developed in the first and second centuries by Gnostic thinkers, Greeks, Jews,
00:24:27 ►
people inside the Roman Empire as it was beginning to show the first signs of degradation and decay,
00:24:35 ►
who felt a profound disaffection with their world, a disaffection that on the scale of those times was as profound as our
00:24:47 ►
own existential disaffection. And the Hermetic philosophers drew back from the rise of Christianity
00:24:56 ►
with its doctrine of the fall of man and original sin and the stain of Adam and Eve and that whole thing and took a different tack and made two points
00:25:07 ►
which I think we need to recover and live out for ourselves.
00:25:14 ►
And the first point was that man, which means men and women, human beings,
00:25:23 ►
are divine beings.
00:25:26 ►
Not lower than the angels, higher than the angels.
00:25:33 ►
The message of the alchemical and hermetic thinkers,
00:25:36 ►
and the Corpus Hermeticum actually uses the phrase,
00:25:40 ►
man is God’s brother.
00:25:43 ►
We have no idea what it would mean in our own lives
00:25:47 ►
if we could throw off the notion of ourselves as fallen beings.
00:25:53 ►
We are not fallen beings.
00:25:55 ►
When you take into your life the gnosis of the life-filled vegetables,
00:26:01 ►
the psychedelic plants that have stabilized the same societies of
00:26:06 ►
this world for millennia, the first message that comes to you is you are a divine being.
00:26:15 ►
You matter.
00:26:16 ►
You count.
00:26:17 ►
You come from realms of unimaginable power and light and you will return to those realms.
00:26:28 ►
The second point that these philosophers wanted to make was that fate can be
00:26:37 ►
overcome. Fate can be overcome. Now for the Greco-Hellenic world, what that meant was the starry engines
00:26:46 ►
of the machinery of fate that they saw strewn across the night sky because they were intensely
00:26:54 ►
aware of the power of the zodiac, the stellar shells inhabited by demons that extended out to the unimaginable imperium of the All-Father that was beyond fate.
00:27:08 ►
And into that world of astrological fatedness, which is such a strong idea for the Greek mind,
00:27:15 ►
the Hermeticists announced fate can be overcome.
00:27:21 ►
And they had a novel answer for how this could be done. It can be done through magic,
00:27:30 ►
a word not often enough heard in the present world. The overcoming of fate is achieved
00:27:37 ►
through magic. And then the stellar machinery becomes not an invasive force into one’s life, but an empowering force.
00:27:50 ►
Now, some of us may believe in astrology and some of us may not.
00:27:54 ►
We are all strongly influenced by the notion of fate, of our powerlessness.
00:28:01 ►
In an existential world, Jean-Paul Sartre said nature is mute and
00:28:07 ►
we embedded in the media dense message dense programming dense matrix of these
00:28:16 ►
hyper societies that we have created often feel I think like hapless atoms
00:28:22 ►
running endlessly according to the blueprints and
00:28:26 ►
programs of unseen masters, whether it’s the banking industry, Madison Avenue, whoever.
00:28:32 ►
We tend to disempower ourselves. We tend to believe that we don’t matter. And in the act
00:28:40 ►
of taking that idea to ourselves, we give everything away to somebody else,
00:28:47 ►
to something else.
00:28:49 ►
So the rebirth of a sense of the stone and its possibility within each of us entails
00:28:57 ►
these two ideas, our divinity and our power to overcome fate. There is no inevitability in our lives
00:29:09 ►
unless we submit to the idea of inevitability
00:29:13 ►
and then give ourselves over to it.
00:29:17 ►
Okay.
00:29:21 ►
I wish there were more jokes,
00:29:23 ►
but it’s just been such a tough go.
00:29:26 ►
It’s been a tough go, I have to tell you.
00:29:30 ►
Where can we look in the world to see some confirmation of what I’m saying?
00:29:37 ►
How can we draw it down from being an airy-fairy rap of a bardic Irishman?
00:29:51 ►
an airy fairy rap of a bardic Irishman. Well, I think that the place to look is history. Now if you go to the academies, to those ivory towers that Tim was talking about, and ask what is history,
00:29:59 ►
they will tell you that it’s a random walk, an endlessly pointless fluctuation.
00:30:07 ►
Empires rise and fall, migrations of people come and go, that it is essentially meaningless.
00:30:16 ►
I don’t believe this.
00:30:17 ►
I don’t even think there’s strong evidence for it.
00:30:21 ►
Because what I perceive when I look at the world not only the world of history but the world of nature which out of which history has emerged I see
00:30:30 ►
novelty something wonderful maddening paradoxical and ever-increasing
00:30:39 ►
evermore conserved every iota of novelty that comes into existence is somehow saved and passed on.
00:30:50 ►
That’s why when we walk or drive down Melrose, we see Egyptian fashion motifs,
00:30:57 ►
we see fashion statements drawn from the 14th century, the 2nd century, Assyria, Egypt, Angkor Wat, all of the novelty of history
00:31:11 ►
coalesces in the living moment. It’s always been that way. Every society in the moment of its
00:31:19 ►
existence has lived as a resonance, a completion, and a distillation, good alchemical word,
00:31:28 ►
a distillation of what has preceded before.
00:31:32 ►
And so the alchemical idea that spirit can be redeemed from matter
00:31:39 ►
begins to get teeth when you connect the idea of spirit up to the idea of novelty,
00:31:47 ►
which has not ordinarily been done.
00:31:50 ►
But, you know, novelty is the life of the party,
00:31:54 ►
and the life of the party is to be high-spirited.
00:31:58 ►
And this is what we need to focus on as the thread in the dark labyrinth of the prison of the material world
00:32:08 ►
that can lead us back to the light.
00:32:11 ►
The universe is an engine for the production of novelty.
00:32:16 ►
It always has been since the first moment of the Big Bang 20, 25 billion years ago.
00:32:23 ►
bang, 20, 25 billion years ago.
00:32:27 ►
Simpler states have been replaced by more complex states, which have then set the stage for yet greater complexity.
00:32:32 ►
Well, the drift of this, then,
00:32:35 ►
is that the emergence of language and tools and culture
00:32:41 ►
and higher ideals like courage and love and self-sacrifice.
00:32:47 ►
These are not flukes, sports, mistakes.
00:32:53 ►
These are further steps along the way in the process of the great alchemical furnace of being heating and casting and dissolving and recasting and purifying and recasting alchemical gold.
00:33:13 ►
And so hard as the world may appear, dark as the hour may appear, in reality we exist in a dimension of greater opportunity, greater freedom, greater
00:33:28 ►
possibility than has ever been.
00:33:31 ►
The challenge then is to not drop the ball, is to know this and to act on it and to slough
00:33:39 ►
off all the leeches and backhandlers and weasels and crypto-fascists who want to deny that
00:33:48 ►
and turn man into a machine for their own purposes.
00:33:56 ►
Alchemy has always perceived this and has delineated stages in the transformational process.
00:34:06 ►
And these stages are worth talking about, not in the details,
00:34:14 ►
but in the two bipolar states which define this.
00:34:20 ►
They used a bastard Latin, and they called them the Negredo and the Albedo.
00:34:27 ►
The Negredo is the precondition for transformation.
00:34:32 ►
And what is it?
00:34:34 ►
It’s shit.
00:34:36 ►
It’s detritus.
00:34:38 ►
It’s flotsam.
00:34:39 ►
It’s debris.
00:34:42 ►
It’s being HIV positive.
00:35:06 ►
It’s being deep into your fourth marriage and sinking fast. It’s bankruptcy. It’s serum hepatitis. It’s the inevitable dark night of the soul that comes upon us and these dark nights of the soul come upon all of us nobody gets through this world without a little dung raining down on
00:35:14 ►
them believe me I mean you may evade it for decades but then there’ll be a knock
00:35:19 ►
on the door you know it’s said that the millstones of fate grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly
00:35:29 ►
fine. So what do we do with that? Well, the answer is we welcome it. This is what the alchemists
00:35:39 ►
awaited. The negredo, the prima materia, the dark matter, the chaos, the chaos that is the precondition then for redemption.
00:35:52 ►
And God knows we’ve got lots of chaos right now.
00:35:55 ►
I mean, we have war, famine, revolution, millions of homeless people on the move.
00:36:01 ►
The nation state is dissolving.
00:36:04 ►
The relief agencies of the
00:36:06 ►
world can’t keep up, the various secret societies, mafias and cabals that have always tried to
00:36:14 ►
tie us into chains, they’re all working overtime. We are in the negredo condition. Hallelujah.
00:36:23 ►
This means… this means that the kissing has to stop, but the fun
00:36:33 ►
can begin, the real fun. The other end of this bipolar condition in alchemy was called
00:36:43 ►
the albedo, or albedbedo depending on whether or not you came
00:36:47 ►
from a coal mining town in Colorado like I did the albedo the whitening and that means
00:36:55 ►
that out of the chaos can come a new beginning a new reality a new hope and then the process is one of and the
00:37:08 ►
you see these alchemists existed in a philosophically more naive we quote more
00:37:16 ►
naive world than we do so they actually projected on to the processes of matter their own interior psychic condition so
00:37:28 ►
they did work with matter and fire and furnaces and retorts and what they would
00:37:34 ►
do is they would take the primal material lead or excrement or something
00:37:41 ►
else and then they would heat it and turn it to ash and then
00:37:47 ►
calcinate the ash or pour solvents through the ash and get an extract and then heat that and
00:37:54 ►
sublimate it and out of this almost as a footnote came modern chemistry
00:38:00 ►
But that was not the important side of it. The important side of it was that they were projecting mental states onto the swirling retorts of their laboratory. It was like a magical mirror for them. It was, in fact, dare we say the P word, it was psychedelic. What psychedelic means is getting your mind out in front of you by whatever means necessary so that you can relate to it as a thing in the world and then work upon it. So from the negredo to the albedo, there were a series of these stages. Now I said a few minutes ago that magic was the key and
00:38:49 ►
by magic I mean the reclaiming and the reconstruction of language to a
00:38:59 ►
sufficient degree that it becomes at first possible then probable then inevitable to each one of
00:39:09 ►
us that miracles can happen miracles can happen the Grateful Dead have a song we
00:39:17 ►
need a miracle every day we do need a miracle every day. Well, is that too tall an order?
00:39:26 ►
I don’t think so.
00:39:28 ►
I don’t think so.
00:39:30 ►
Years ago, one of these talking vegetables said to me,
00:39:35 ►
said, mind conjures miracles out of time out of time time is the prime of material
00:39:51 ►
on which the alchemical process works the alchemists again in their naive way
00:39:58 ►
believed that precious metals diamonds gold, gold, sapphires
00:40:05 ►
actually grew in the earth.
00:40:08 ►
Because for this alchemical point of view,
00:40:09 ►
everything was alive.
00:40:12 ►
And my friend Rupert Sheldrake is leading the charge
00:40:16 ►
to create a new birth of that perception inside science.
00:40:22 ►
The idea that nature, all of nature is alive not simply organic
00:40:27 ►
cellular nature but that the earth itself is a living being so mind
00:40:33 ►
conjures miracles out of time and the proof that this can be done and it’s an
00:40:40 ►
incontrovertible proof and I defy any naysayer or bring down to overcome it,
00:40:46 ►
is ourselves.
00:40:49 ►
We are the proof that mind can conjure miracles out of time.
00:40:54 ►
If it weren’t for us, there would just be birds and foxes and coral reefs and glaciers.
00:41:01 ►
But nature was not content with that level of novelty.
00:41:07 ►
A million years ago, a hundred thousand years ago, nature grew discontented and said, you
00:41:13 ►
know, let’s raise the ante.
00:41:17 ►
Let’s go to higher stakes poker in this planetary game.
00:41:22 ►
Let the monkeys speak.
00:41:26 ►
Let them build fires.
00:41:29 ►
Let them elaborate tools.
00:41:33 ►
Let them march forward onto the stage of creation.
00:41:37 ►
And remember I said the hermetic faith was that humankind was the brother,
00:41:42 ►
could act as the brothers and sisters of God,
00:41:45 ►
not motes in God’s creation,
00:41:48 ►
but co-partners in the invocation out of being of yet greater novelty.
00:41:58 ►
Why?
00:41:59 ►
For play, for fun, just the cosmic madness of it all,
00:42:05 ►
the pure cussedness of it all,
00:42:09 ►
to raise the stakes higher and higher and higher.
00:42:14 ►
Now, I keep going back to this thing of can it be done,
00:42:19 ►
because I want to convince you, because I’m so certain.
00:42:24 ►
I love Herman Melville and his rhetoric
00:42:28 ►
and friends of the whale bear with me. For Herman Melville the whale was not
00:42:36 ►
the endangered creature it is today, it was the dark cosmic God of Christianity
00:42:43 ►
that haunts us and tries to pull us down.
00:42:48 ►
And there’s a wonderful speech in Moby Dick where Starbuck, the first mate,
00:42:53 ►
you remember wimpy little Starbuck, he stood for Christian right reason.
00:42:58 ►
And he says to Captain Ahab, to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy. And Ahab says, blasphemy,
00:43:11 ►
Starbuck? Speak not to me of blasphemy. I would strike out the sun if it insulted me. For for could it do that then could I do the other for there is ever a sort of fair play
00:43:29 ►
and that’s the point of that rap
00:43:32 ►
there is a sort of fair play
00:43:36 ►
you’ve been told from the cradle
00:43:38 ►
that the deck was stacked against you
00:43:40 ►
fall of man, original sin, so forth and so on
00:43:43 ►
it’s bullshit.
00:43:46 ►
It’s absolute bullshit.
00:43:53 ►
There is a sort of fair play.
00:43:57 ►
And if you can get in touch with that in your life,
00:44:01 ►
you know, when Muhammad wouldn’t come to the mountain,
00:44:03 ►
the mountain came to Muhammad.
00:44:08 ►
That’s fair play. And if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you. It will begin to move toward
00:44:15 ►
you as the mountain moved toward Muhammad. The mushroom said to me once, nature loves courage. Nature loves courage. And I said, what’s the payoff
00:44:31 ►
on that? And it said, it shows you that it loves courage because it will remove obstacles.
00:44:38 ►
You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
00:44:47 ►
Dream the impossible dream.
00:44:50 ►
And the world will not grind you under.
00:44:53 ►
It will lift you up.
00:44:55 ►
This is the trick.
00:44:56 ►
This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted,
00:45:02 ►
who really touched the alchemical gold.
00:45:05 ►
This is what they understood.
00:45:07 ►
This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
00:45:10 ►
This is how magic is done.
00:45:12 ►
It’s done by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it’s a feather bed.
00:45:19 ►
And there’s no other way to do it.
00:45:22 ►
This is why I have always taken the position that as modern people,
00:45:28 ►
we can’t go out and set armies marching or launch religions,
00:45:34 ►
and who would want to anyhow?
00:45:36 ►
But to the people who say adventure has fled, it’s all humdrum,
00:45:42 ►
I just know that they have forgotten
00:45:45 ►
the five grams of psilocybin
00:45:47 ►
sitting in their refrigerator
00:45:49 ►
I mean Magellan may have had
00:45:56 ►
excitement rounding the horn
00:45:58 ►
but you in your living room
00:46:01 ►
later tonight
00:46:01 ►
can put him in the shade
00:46:04 ►
if you have the courage to do the things in your living room later tonight can put him in the shade
00:46:05 ►
if you have the courage to do the things
00:46:09 ►
that are necessary to do.
00:46:10 ►
And we know what they are.
00:46:12 ►
And of course the first thing to do is to tell society
00:46:15 ►
to fuck off because they don’t know what’s going on.
00:46:31 ►
This is a matter between the person and the plant, the person and the planet,
00:46:40 ►
and all the detritus of history, all the games that people have tried to lay on you. You know, they just want to get you down in the ditch that they’re in.
00:46:43 ►
You know, they just want to get you down in the ditch that they’re in.
00:46:51 ►
We know this because Aboriginal societies have never broken the faith.
00:47:07 ►
The living gnosis is still there, not for people who paint themselves blue and dance around buck naked, but for us as well. But it takes an act of courage, not a weekend at Esalen,
00:47:16 ►
not a trip to the ashram where they tell you that if you’ll sweep up for a dozen years,
00:47:18 ►
then they’ll hand on a whammy.
00:47:26 ►
No, the speed with which you can reach death is under 45 seconds,
00:47:28 ►
if you know where the elevator shaft is.
00:47:31 ►
And you do. You do.
00:47:33 ►
I don’t have to tell you. I’ve been telling you.
00:47:45 ►
Well, so, there’s one more alchemical metaphor or stage that I want to mention here,
00:47:51 ►
because I think it refers to this psychedelic possibility.
00:48:00 ►
Not all the alchemists included this stage in their recensions of the work,
00:48:03 ►
but for me I think it’s central. Again, in their church, bastardized church Latin,
00:48:08 ►
they called it the cauda pavones, the peacock’s tail. Now, the physical basis of this is,
00:48:16 ►
if you’ve ever played around with metal and fire, you know that there are certain metals that when they pass to a certain temperature range,
00:48:27 ►
iridescent colors play across the surface
00:48:32 ►
and sometimes even freeze.
00:48:34 ►
And in the glazing of pottery at low temperatures in Raku,
00:48:41 ►
what these pottery masters are aiming for
00:48:44 ►
are these wonderful iridescent surfaces
00:48:47 ►
that play across the glaze and then can be frozen into it.
00:48:51 ►
Well, this is the peacock’s tail.
00:48:56 ►
And in alchemy, this was thought to precede the final whitening, the passage into the pure, the goal, really.
00:49:11 ►
And rather than see the present world as exclusively a veil of tears and a black prison,
00:49:22 ►
and none of these metaphors are mutually exclusive,
00:49:25 ►
you see the alchemists, the great strength of alchemical thinking
00:49:29 ►
and the way in which it is completely antithetical to science
00:49:33 ►
and in fact why science has so much contempt for it
00:49:37 ►
is because the alchemists had the wisdom to see
00:49:41 ►
that everything occurs in the presence of its opposite. That it’s not
00:49:47 ►
either or. It’s both and. They call this the coincidencia appositorum. The
00:49:56 ►
coincidence of opposites. The union of opposites. This is a great truth because I think all of us live under the rubrics of am I good, am I bad, am I lazy, am I obsessed?
00:50:14 ►
And the answer is that it is never one or the other.
00:50:19 ►
It does a tremendous injustice to being to ignore the union of opposites.
00:50:28 ►
Now science, in order to do its work, which is essentially a technological work, not a deep philosophical work, it’s a minor art, science.
00:50:40 ►
That’s all it is. It’s a minor art. It’s the art of the physically possible. But it has presumed to be the arbiter of all thought, all feeling, all worth. world into the primary and secondary qualities. And what are the primary qualities? Motion,
00:51:08 ►
mass, spin, momentum. And what are the secondary qualities? Color, feeling, taste,
00:51:21 ►
tactility. It tells you that you’re nothing. You never touch reality. You live in that world of sense and therefore can only aspire to the real world through some kind of mathematical disembowelment of your own, what your own body, what your own feelings are telling you. So in the Caldipa Vones, the Peacock’s Tale, this is where the
00:51:48 ►
contradictions meet and generate heat and light and an excruciating sense of poignancy and meaning
00:52:00 ►
and identity. And our world, as we experience it tonight,
00:52:07 ►
is quintessentially, another good alchemical word,
00:52:10 ►
is quintessentially that coincidencia appositorum.
00:52:15 ►
Now, where do we meet this most dramatically in our own lives?
00:52:20 ►
I think we meet it in the phenomenon of birth.
00:52:25 ►
Of birth.
00:52:26 ►
If you had just parked your flying saucer in the bushes
00:52:31 ►
and came from a world where sexuality was unknown
00:52:36 ►
and people were grown in vats or something,
00:52:39 ►
and you came upon a woman in the act of giving birth,
00:52:44 ►
it would appear to be a catastrophe in progress,
00:52:49 ►
a tragedy at the limit of tragedy. Blood is being shed, anguish is on the surface, agony pervades the situation. And yet, and yet, nature in her wisdom has bound pain and ecstasy,
00:53:12 ►
death and completion, regeneration and dissolution into that experience in such an indissoluble fashion that no woman can miss the point.
00:53:25 ►
No woman can miss the point.
00:53:28 ►
Unfortunately, men have traditionally averted their eyes.
00:53:32 ►
This has gone on in a hut at the edge of the village.
00:53:35 ►
Nobody wanted to be there.
00:53:36 ►
Maybe the shaman would be there, but he was loaded in order to be there.
00:53:41 ►
And the mystery of mysteries goes on outside the sight of men.
00:53:48 ►
Now, in our world,
00:53:51 ►
we are caught in this kind of metaphor.
00:53:55 ►
A cosmic birth,
00:53:57 ►
a birth of planetary scale
00:53:59 ►
is underway.
00:54:03 ►
There is agony. There is no doubt about it I remember an
00:54:09 ►
embryologist who once taught me pointed out that the fetus in the womb is
00:54:15 ►
literally sculpted by the hand of death that the immature hand of the fetal organism is a webbed claw and that it isn’t that the flesh retracts to form the human hand.
00:54:32 ►
It’s that the cells in between die and slough off into the amniotic fluid and are carried away.
00:54:41 ►
The fetal child is literally sculpted into life by the hand of death.
00:54:47 ►
And our world is in this kind of a circumstance.
00:54:53 ►
There are no rational solutions at this point.
00:54:58 ►
We are now in the hands of the miracle makers, the shamans, the mind of the planet, the life of the ocean,
00:55:08 ►
and the atmosphere. And it’s going to get tougher. And so we have to forge the indestructible
00:55:18 ►
adamantine stone of alchemical hope, because heavier challenges lie ahead. A hundred years from now,
00:55:28 ►
200 years from now, I cannot but imagine that this planet will be empty of human beings,
00:55:36 ►
not because we have become extinct, but because we have gone to our fate. And it’s unimaginable at this moment,
00:55:45 ►
because we are in the planetary birth canal.
00:55:49 ►
We are at the peak of transition right now,
00:55:53 ►
and the walls are literally closing in.
00:55:58 ►
We are being suffocated.
00:56:00 ►
We are fighting like a strangled man to try and save ourselves.
00:56:06 ►
And yet we have to believe, and I invite you to educate yourself about the history of the planet.
00:56:14 ►
There is no reason not to believe that we will come through.
00:56:19 ►
We will come through.
00:56:22 ►
There is light at the end of the tunnel.
00:56:28 ►
There is a meaning to history, but it’s an alchemical meaning. History is a vast alchemical engine for the forging of
00:56:37 ►
an alchemical humanity. And I don’t have the answers, believe me. I don’t know whether we go to another star,
00:56:46 ►
whether we become eight angstroms high
00:56:49 ►
and all live in a block of metal underneath Mount Everest,
00:56:53 ►
whether we march off to the heart of the sun.
00:56:57 ►
The scenarios are endless
00:56:58 ►
because the human imagination has such a power
00:57:03 ►
to bootstrap itself to higher and higher
00:57:07 ►
levels what would paleolithic man have made of the religion of pharaonic Egypt
00:57:14 ►
what would the Pharaohs have made of the engines of war and hydraulic machinery
00:57:20 ►
created by the Romans what would the gothic scholastic enlightenment have made
00:57:29 ►
of the age of cybernetics, psychedelics and virtual reality? The imagination is the alchemical
00:57:37 ►
deus ex machina that can lift us out of time, out of the negrado of history, and into higher and higher and higher states
00:57:49 ►
of being.
00:57:50 ►
Now, there is no reason to simply then ride along in this process, because another perception
00:57:57 ►
of the alchemist that is central to getting this all lined up so that it works,
00:58:09 ►
is the idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm.
00:58:11 ►
What does that mean? It means that the world truly is fractal in the most profound sense,
00:58:18 ►
meaning that what is going on on some very large scale
00:58:22 ►
is condensed, intensified, and recapitulated on smaller
00:58:28 ►
scales so that the dynamics of a love affair are the dynamics of an empire.
00:58:35 ►
Both are the dynamics of the evolution, expansion, and extinction of a species.
00:58:42 ►
There is only one way that things can happen and
00:58:46 ►
whether we’re talking about micro physical events or the life of an entire
00:58:50 ►
solar system, the curve of binding energy is going to be the same. So that means
00:58:57 ►
that this redemption of spirit from matter that is the historical process that we are embedded in
00:59:05 ►
We can do our part
00:59:08 ►
By working on our small section of this which is ourself
00:59:15 ►
This is why alchemy was so fascinating to the union
00:59:20 ►
psychologists because they saw
00:59:23 ►
That this work of redeeming spirit from matter is nothing more than the work of redeeming the self from the contaminated dross of the traumatized and damaged psyche that we each inherit from our passage through the parental shit pile. We each have that gift to deal with.
00:59:52 ►
That negrado is within ourselves. And this is why we’re in therapy. And this is why we take
00:59:58 ►
psychedelics and meditate or do whatever we do, because we all have this dross within us,
01:00:05 ►
and this is a great gift.
01:00:07 ►
It means that we can begin consciously the process of distillation
01:00:13 ►
and sublimation and casting of ourselves into that golden being,
01:00:20 ►
that luminous creature that this 104-year-old Vietnamese monk sensed and evoked to my friend.
01:00:31 ►
But it’s more than that.
01:00:33 ►
We do that, we do that alchemical work to perfect our own sense of the union of opposites,
01:00:40 ►
our own sense of the presence of the living alchemical stone within, in order that we
01:00:48 ►
may then participate, act in, and be part of the transformation of the planet. And it is an immense
01:00:58 ►
transformation. And there is no reason to doubt it, because the emergence of organic life from what preceded it is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
01:01:10 ►
The emergence of language from mute bestiality, which is only 100,000 years in the past, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine.
01:01:27 ►
dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine. The emergence of a planet instantaneously
01:01:35 ►
unified by electricity and media is, and this is only 50, 60 years in our past, it’s still going on, is as dramatic a miracle as anyone could imagine. It’s absolutely irrational
01:01:48 ►
imagine. It’s absolutely irrational to not be filled with the fire of consuming hope. You just have to overcome the leveling that we inherit from these empty existential scientific ideas.
01:01:58 ►
And when we do that and lift our eyes to the real, living, spiritually empowered reality
01:02:09 ►
that exists in nature, in society, in our lover, in ourselves,
01:02:16 ►
then you see that the peacock’s tail, the cow de pavones,
01:02:22 ►
is a transcendental object at the end of time.
01:02:27 ►
An enormous unspeakable something that beckons across the historical landscape,
01:02:38 ►
that casts an enormous shadow that reaches clear back to the earliest moments of the universe that we have always
01:02:47 ►
Been in the grip of that iridescent
01:02:50 ►
Strange attractor it has propelled our poetry our art our best moments have always
01:02:58 ►
Been when a tiny scintilla another good al word, a tiny spark of that alchemical completion
01:03:08 ►
burned for a moment in our mind, in our life, in our perception.
01:03:14 ►
And we occupy a special position in regard to this.
01:03:27 ►
to this. Millions, thousands of generations of human beings have come and gone and could only glimpse this in the ecstasy of eroticism and
01:03:34 ►
psychedelic empowerment and ritual magic. But we are the last people.
01:03:47 ►
Beyond us lies the mystery.
01:03:54 ►
If we have but the courage to move forward into that abyss, to believe that nature will reward the dreamer,
01:03:59 ►
then we can complete that wonderful Irish toast which says,
01:04:04 ►
may you be alive at the end of the world.
01:04:07 ►
Because it’s that close.
01:04:09 ►
It cannot wander much longer.
01:04:12 ►
All of the preconditions have been met.
01:04:16 ►
And the peacock’s tail grows daily whiter and more radiant and more brilliant as we sense now, breaking into our dreams,
01:04:28 ►
breaking into our waking lives, the presence of this attractor.
01:04:33 ►
It has always given people meaning, but we are the privileged inheritors of that meaning
01:04:40 ►
and we have then the privilege of putting it all together in one piece
01:04:46 ►
and standing ready at the end of history to go into the mystery and be completed.
01:04:55 ►
So that’s the end of my song. Take a break and we’ll be back in 15 minutes.
01:05:14 ►
And if you’ve got questions, and God, I hope you do, we’ll deal with them.
01:05:18 ►
Thank you very, very much.
01:05:22 ►
Do you know what insomniac dyslexic philosophers do? They sit up all night wondering
01:05:30 ►
if dog really exists. It’s also an intelligence test. Also, I’d like to point out to you
01:05:45 ►
just to keep you current
01:05:46 ►
that Nina Graboi
01:05:49 ►
who is an old friend of mine
01:05:50 ►
and of Tim’s
01:05:51 ►
has a new book out
01:05:53 ►
called One Foot in the Future
01:05:55 ►
and this is a lady who lived a life
01:05:58 ►
that went from the center of Nazi Europe
01:06:01 ►
to Millbrook and beyond
01:06:03 ►
and it’s a wonderful book. It’s out in the
01:06:06 ►
bookstores and I just call your attention to it. Okay, let’s have some questions here.
01:06:13 ►
Yeah. Once one has acquired the bundleweed, how does he consume it?
01:06:46 ►
does he consume it? Technical questions here. Detail freaks, cooks and recipe mongers. For the benefit of those not initiated into this, it’s interesting. You know, aboriginal human beings have searched the world for psychedelic sources and have been, such in the Amazon very successful but not exhaustively successful so that it’s recently become known in the
01:06:54 ►
phytochemical literature that a plant Desmanthus Elenoyensis which this
01:07:00 ►
gentleman is referring to the Elenoyweed, appears to have one of the highest concentrations of dimethyltryptamine
01:07:10 ►
of any plant that’s been looked at, and it has no history of Aboriginal usage.
01:07:17 ►
And the question is how to activate this into a usable psychedelic probably the way to do it would be to attempt to create an
01:07:30 ►
analog to the south american drug plant drug ayahuasca by combining the bundle weed with a
01:07:40 ►
north american source of a beta carboline such as har, which is what’s in ayahuasca.
01:07:47 ►
And that would activate it.
01:07:49 ►
And the obvious candidate for that would be
01:07:53 ►
a succulent plant that grows in the deserts of New Mexico
01:07:58 ►
and Nevada, pergamon harmala.
01:08:03 ►
And pergamon harmala combined with Desmanthus alanoiansis
01:08:08 ►
in the correct proportions
01:08:10 ►
would probably deliver a stunning psychedelic experience.
01:08:15 ►
Would you eat it or smoke it?
01:08:18 ►
Drinking. You would boil them together.
01:08:20 ►
No, smoking you can’t. It’s too diffuse in these things.
01:08:24 ►
No, you would perform
01:08:26 ►
an alchemy you would boil the two for many hours in a large volume of water pour off the wash add
01:08:33 ►
new water boil more hours pour off the wash combine the two fractions get rid of the physical material, and drive it down until it looks like thick coffee.
01:08:46 ►
But, you know, don’t be consumed by your alchemical investigations.
01:08:53 ►
I mean, proceed carefully with this stuff because it’s going to work if you get it right.
01:09:00 ►
In the absence of a scale, how might one measure five grams of dry psilocybin?
01:09:09 ►
Spring for the scale.
01:09:19 ►
Terrence, I was here the last time you were in L.A.
01:09:22 ►
I think it was about a year and a half, two years ago.
01:09:24 ►
I was here the last time you were in LA, I think it was about a year and a half, two years ago. And I mentioned at that time, I felt there was a need for something set up where the in-between times
01:09:34 ►
that you aren’t here, there could be some interaction between we who are here.
01:09:39 ►
And I don’t know what the reaction was, but it finally ended up with you telling me,
01:09:43 ►
somebody please take this lonely guy out for dinner.
01:09:46 ►
But it may come out that I wasn’t.
01:09:47 ►
But the truth is, you know, when you live out in Belplow, California, which is really like, you know, the boondocks,
01:09:54 ►
you’re not in the midst of daily interacting with people, you know, of your nature or like of mine.
01:10:01 ►
Now, I know Roy Tuckman did I have a meeting of listeners for
01:10:06 ►
KPFK I think about two weeks ago which is great this first time I think he’s
01:10:09 ►
done that and I didn’t make it but I really is and what I did last time was
01:10:14 ►
simply volunteer myself as anybody wanting to further get together or
01:10:19 ►
explore something some type of organization or some type of group.
01:10:25 ►
Are you familiar with the Udney Reader?
01:10:27 ►
Uh-huh.
01:10:28 ►
Now, their April, did you see their March-April issue where they were championing salons?
01:10:33 ►
Uh-huh.
01:10:34 ►
They took a lot of heat for that, too, because people said,
01:10:37 ►
what are you talking about salons when the world is aflame?
01:10:40 ►
But I thought it was a good point to push it.
01:10:44 ►
My understanding, I re-suscribed to them that they’re going to match up their readers the flame but I thought it was a good point to push it with my understanding I
01:10:45 ►
resuscribe to them that they’re going to match up their readers in areas in the
01:10:50 ►
country to see if they can ferment some of these salons I think it’s a great
01:10:54 ►
idea for empowering the individuals for that message of hope you know it’s hard
01:11:00 ►
to hang on to hope out in the boondocks and it’s like we need something besides every two years a
01:11:06 ►
shot in the arm type of thing or just listening you know to roy which was great i mean i thank
01:11:10 ►
god for him but some interaction i think with the people well yeah no you make a very good point i
01:11:16 ►
mean what i often say at these kinds of events is it’s a unique moment when you all self-select to be here.
01:11:29 ►
I mean, this is a city of, what, 14 million people, something like that?
01:11:32 ►
And you have self-selected, even over being at the Dead concert, to be here.
01:11:39 ►
And so this is some kind of a core community.
01:11:44 ►
And it is true that we look like everybody else.
01:11:48 ►
There’s no real way to tell.
01:11:51 ►
So whatever you need, somebody in this room has it.
01:11:58 ►
And we’ve reduced the problem from finding them in a city of 12 million to finding them in a crowd of 800.
01:12:08 ►
That’s about the best I can do for you.
01:12:10 ►
But I urge you to look around you and see who’s here and remember.
01:12:22 ►
It’s tricky, of course, know motivations are complex and loyalties
01:12:28 ►
are complex and not everybody knows who they work for but nevertheless we have considerably
01:12:34 ►
simplified the problem of community by gathering ourselves into this room this evening and I don’t
01:12:42 ►
like these big events because I don’t like sitting up here in the light
01:12:46 ►
and looking out over the sea of faces I’m against guruism leader trips and and anyway the whole
01:12:54 ►
point of this message has to be that it’s for everybody nobody is. If it can only happen to some kind of elect, then it’s got no
01:13:06 ►
impact, no ability to save the planet. It’s a human mystery. It doesn’t belong to the intelligentsia.
01:13:13 ►
It doesn’t belong to the wealthy. It doesn’t belong to the Irish, regardless of how we kid
01:13:20 ►
around about that. It’s got to be for everybody. So take this man seriously. Here he is, second
01:13:28 ►
year in a row, pleading for community.
01:13:30 ►
Somebody take him to dinner.
01:13:31 ►
And community is the backbone of the thing. When I first started doing this, one of the
01:13:38 ►
most empowering experiences that I could have after talking to a crowd like this is someone would come
01:13:45 ►
up afterwards and say to me, I thought I was crazy till I talked to you, till I heard you
01:13:52 ►
talk. And what they meant was that they had done psychedelics in the 60s and they had
01:13:59 ►
seen the elves and the machinery of joy, but then it had all, other people had turned to market analysis and international banking
01:14:07 ►
and what have you, and it all seemed to flow away.
01:14:11 ►
And so people need to find like-minded people.
01:14:16 ►
And as I say, this is about as far as I can go for you, and then you have to do the rest.
01:14:21 ►
But this is your affinity group.
01:14:23 ►
This is your family yeah you
01:14:26 ►
you have narrowed it down it still seems to be a little hit and miss what i did last time i didn’t
01:14:30 ►
want to before i sat down i said anybody was interested i was you know i was going to be
01:14:35 ►
somewhere stand here and about 14 people to my surprise came up you know we switched the names
01:14:40 ►
and addresses i mailed out just the names and addresses. I really didn’t follow up. But and then those people are tonight. I need you need someone better to do a newsletter than
01:14:49 ►
me. But I’m willing to support, you know, the people getting together and just be a focus
01:14:54 ►
point of them getting together. So I’ll stand. Yes. This man, he’ll be outside and just
01:15:03 ►
explore, you know, how we can get together more often than once every year and a half or two years,
01:15:09 ►
and whatever that may take.
01:15:10 ►
Sounds good.
01:15:17 ►
Terrence, I was interested in your concept of faith.
01:15:19 ►
It reminded me of a quote by Jung where he says that fate is doing willingly that which I must do.
01:15:26 ►
And I was wondering about this concept of fate.
01:15:29 ►
You were talking about the Greeks thought of fate as the one thing that you couldn’t go beyond.
01:15:33 ►
You know, even Zeus himself was terrified of the fate, the moira,
01:15:38 ►
and the idea of not being able to pass beyond the physical body, not being able to pass beyond boundaries,
01:15:44 ►
that we are bounded by
01:15:45 ►
faith even the gods themselves and yet you were talking about the concept of the alchemist
01:15:49 ►
believing about going beyond one state i find this idea very delicious um you know i thought maybe
01:15:56 ►
you could elaborate on the idea of going beyond one state or this kind of freedom in the yes the
01:16:02 ►
way they did it as i briefly indicated but didn’t get into, was through magic.
01:16:08 ►
And the kind of magic was the following.
01:16:13 ►
It was the styles of Renaissance magic that developed in the wake of the translation of
01:16:20 ►
this hermetic corpus. It previously magic had been sort of as the cartoon image we have of it,
01:16:30 ►
the lonely wizard off in the woods grinding up his pot court, people like Marcello Ficino and Campanello and odors and this sort of thing could all be associated to given zodiacal signs.
01:17:10 ►
And they created a theatrical style of magic, a ceremonial magic, where by, say you wanted to counteract a Saturn aspect of some sort,
01:17:25 ►
well then, by choosing the opposite,
01:17:30 ►
the herbs and gems and perfumes associated with the opposite sort of situation
01:17:38 ►
and gathering them to you, you could make a model of the universe,
01:17:44 ►
a new model of the universe.
01:17:45 ►
And they did this in round rooms and built orreries and practiced a kind of
01:17:51 ►
ceremonial magic that made them then the Companions of Princes. And the the dark
01:17:57 ►
figure of the lonely magician in the woods was replaced by the Renaissance Magus, who was manipulating political realities,
01:18:07 ►
counseling popes, and taking magical power into his hands specifically for the purpose
01:18:15 ►
of counteracting the machinery of fate.
01:18:18 ►
It had to do with this idea of if fate is decreed by God’s’s cosmos but man is the co-creator with
01:18:28 ►
God then by setting up a magical microcosm the ordinary asterisms the
01:18:35 ►
ordinary influences of astrology can be deflected and if you’re interested in
01:18:42 ►
this sort of thing Dame Frances Yates wrote a wonderful book called Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition.
01:18:52 ►
And there’s another book by D.P. Walker called Demonic and Spiritual Magic from Ficino to Campanella.
01:19:00 ►
These are not easy books to find.
01:19:02 ►
Try the Bodhi Tree and William and Victoria Daly down on Melrose can help you out.
01:19:08 ►
If they were easy to find, what fun would it be?
01:19:11 ►
Part of the quest is getting this stuff together.
01:19:14 ►
But that’s the basic theory of Renaissance magic,
01:19:17 ►
is to create a microcosm to counter the fatalistic machinery of the macrocosm.
01:19:24 ►
Yeah.
01:19:26 ►
Hi. Hi.
01:19:26 ►
Hi.
01:19:27 ►
I’ve heard you talk a lot about themes repeating themselves a lot,
01:19:30 ►
and one of the things I’ve thought about…
01:19:31 ►
About what?
01:19:31 ►
Themes in history repeating themselves.
01:19:33 ►
Oh, yeah.
01:19:34 ►
And one of the things I’ve thought about is popular Western music,
01:19:37 ►
how it changes and recreates itself,
01:19:40 ►
and I’m just curious about your insight on that
01:19:42 ►
and its role in using music as a language to communicate things in the future and so forth.
01:19:48 ►
Well, it seems there are a couple of questions here.
01:19:52 ►
I mean, there’s an impulse which comes and goes in music, which is to be evocative of the spirit. I mean you feel it in Van Morrison and you feel it in Locatelli and then you flash
01:20:07 ►
back another 200 years and you get it in Johannes O’Kagan, these people where it’s liturgical but
01:20:15 ►
it’s liturgical because there was no other space in society for that. Music, this question really reflects on the previous question, music
01:20:26 ►
is the divine medium of exchange between man and these higher levels and what
01:20:35 ►
I’ve always felt about rock and roll and I feel about I feel it about what I do
01:20:40 ►
as well is that it’s such a pale reflection of what it wants to be and could be. I mean,
01:20:47 ►
at a dead concert, you know, when they get to noodling, you actually begin to feel the dimensions
01:20:54 ►
shift and you actually feel the possibility of a doorway opening into another dimension.
01:21:02 ►
This is sacral music in the highest sense of the
01:21:06 ►
word. It goes back to the Pythagorean… it goes back to the Pythagorean theory of
01:21:13 ►
octaves and the mysterious relationship of the shortening of a string to the
01:21:20 ►
diminution of the tone and also resonance.
01:21:27 ►
Resonance is a very strange phenomenon,
01:21:33 ►
thinking of it in terms of we pluck the string of a cello here and a piano sitting across the stage emits a sound.
01:21:38 ►
I mean, this is action at a distance, incontrovertibly,
01:21:42 ►
which was always the goal of magic
01:21:44 ►
and always what
01:21:46 ►
was denied by science as a possibility you see we forget that it wasn’t until
01:21:52 ►
the middle of the last century with Helmholtz and Faraday and those people
01:21:58 ►
that fields gained any kind of respectability at all. And the science of the mid-19th century
01:22:06 ►
resisted the idea of fields very furiously
01:22:11 ►
because it looked to them like magic.
01:22:14 ►
The Newtonian model of the cosmos
01:22:17 ►
is all little hard balls moving through empty space
01:22:22 ►
and reacting in absolutely calculable ways. We now
01:22:26 ►
live in a world where, you know, if I had an FM radio beside me I could
01:22:31 ►
demonstrate to you that hundreds of messages are moving through every cubic
01:22:37 ►
centimeter of space and time and we think nothing of this. It seems trivial
01:22:42 ►
but in a way it’s a realization of the magical intent.
01:22:48 ►
One of the things I didn’t say in the main body of my talk is how, in spite of science’s resistance to magical ideas,
01:22:58 ►
how thoroughly it has unconsciously realized the major points on the agenda of magic. For thousands and thousands of
01:23:08 ►
years, electricity was something that you would see if you took an amber rod and a piece of cat
01:23:16 ►
fur and locked yourself in a darkened room and let your eyes adjust to the darkness and then
01:23:23 ►
furiously stroked the cat fur
01:23:25 ►
and then you would see a little static electrical discharge. This was a parlor
01:23:30 ►
trick of magicians from the Hellenistic period on. Well who would have imagined
01:23:36 ►
that you could light cities with that? That you could move pictures and sound
01:23:42 ►
of political activities and theatrical performances and propaganda
01:23:48 ►
from one side of the planet to the other in the wink of an eye with that.
01:23:54 ►
Science did that, but it has in a way created an entirely magical world
01:23:59 ►
which we have grown blasé to because along with it has come some fancy mathematics
01:24:07 ►
that I would wager to say there’s not a person in this room who could fully explicate.
01:24:12 ►
And yet because that mathematics exists, we think that this is all very humdrum.
01:24:18 ►
You know, it took Marshall McLuhan to say that the age of electricity
01:24:22 ►
was nothing less than the descent of the Holy Ghost onto this
01:24:26 ►
planet. I mean, that electricity is the third person of the Trinity. Nothing like dabbling in
01:24:33 ►
a little heresy here, but that’s the fact of the matter, folks. I just want to leave you with one
01:24:40 ►
story because it sort of fills out the theme and shows how peculiarly the spirit moves
01:24:49 ►
and how the coincidencia positorum is present in so many unexpected situations.
01:24:56 ►
I think somewhere in the body of my talk, I got a dig in at Cartesian logic or Cartesian
01:25:02 ►
rationalism as you know modern
01:25:05 ►
scientific materialism was founded by Rene Descartes French philosopher of the
01:25:13 ►
17th century but what the historians of science have been at great pains to keep
01:25:19 ►
from view is the following story which is attested to in Descartes’ own journal.
01:25:27 ►
When he was a young man of about 22 years old,
01:25:31 ►
he decided to go soldiering and wenching around Europe,
01:25:35 ►
which was something young men of that era did.
01:25:39 ►
And he joined a Habsburg army,
01:25:41 ►
which was on a mission to lay siege
01:25:44 ►
to the city of Prague in Bohemia to suppress
01:25:49 ►
What was essentially an alchemical revival?
01:25:52 ►
I won’t go into the details
01:25:54 ►
but a young prince of the Northern Leagues and his
01:25:58 ►
Queen who was the daughter of James of England and was named Elizabeth after her grandmother had
01:26:05 ►
managed to gain control of the Empire had been elected in fact he was called
01:26:11 ►
Frederick the Elector Palatine and this Hapsburg army was sent to destroy this
01:26:17 ►
Protestant alchemical reformation and it did Laid siege to the city and killed this young man
01:26:26 ►
and his queen fled to the Hague.
01:26:29 ►
And then they retreated across Germany.
01:26:33 ►
And on, I believe it was the 17th of August of that year,
01:26:40 ►
which was 1619, the beginning year of the Thirty Years’ War, they made camp at Ulm in southern Germany.
01:26:48 ►
And just as an aside, Ulm later was the birthplace of Albert Einstein.
01:26:54 ►
But that night, Descartes had a dream. In the dream, a radiant angel appeared to him and said,
01:27:07 ►
The conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure.
01:27:16 ►
And in that moment, René Descartes went from being a nobody to being the founder of modern science modern science was founded at
01:27:28 ►
the direction of an angel and the angel showed how it was and to this day modern
01:27:36 ►
science has made all of its strides through the application of number
01:27:42 ►
mathematical analysis and measure that is the secret
01:27:46 ►
of the scientific conquest of nature and it’s a secret that was imparted to Rene
01:27:52 ►
Descartes by an angelic entity so I’d like you to leave this evening wondering
01:27:58 ►
who do we work for
01:28:00 ►
for.
01:28:06 ►
And how does it work?
01:28:08 ►
Thank you very, very much.
01:28:14 ►
Good night.
01:28:20 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:28:22 ►
And before some of our fellow slaughters rush to their computers to set us straight on the history of Frederick the Elector,
01:28:30 ►
let me just say that, yes, I too picked up a couple of incorrect facts about him,
01:28:35 ►
but it’s a minor detail in the story of Descartes which I think he got right.
01:28:41 ►
Now, when we were a little over 30 minutes into this talk, and Terence was reciting
01:28:47 ►
a litany of all the problems of the then world, the world of 1991, I was sure that you were
01:28:54 ►
thinking the same thing that I was. Here it is, 22 years after he listed all of those world problems,
01:29:00 ►
and not only have none of them been solved, not a single one, but in fact they’ve all become worse.
01:29:07 ►
As the great Gildersleeve often said, what a revolting development this is.
01:29:14 ►
Now, like Timothy, Terrence, and myself, and a whole lot of our fellow Saloners, I should add,
01:29:20 ►
you were raised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools.
01:29:23 ►
you were raised a Catholic and went to Catholic schools,
01:29:28 ►
well, you most likely, like me, shouted to yourself,
01:29:32 ►
yes, yes, when Terrence said, and I quote,
01:29:36 ►
you’ve been told from the cradle that the deck was stacked against you.
01:29:40 ►
Fall of man, original sin, and so forth and so on.
01:29:43 ►
It’s bullshit. It’s absolute bullshit.
01:29:45 ►
Having suffered through a Catholic childhood, and by the way, I don’t blame my parents for that at all.
01:29:51 ►
They were raised the same way, and in that age it was next to impossible to leave the church without completely being shunned by everyone you knew.
01:29:59 ►
But for me at least, the thing that first got me to thinking that the priests were full of bullshit was the concept of original sin. I’m sure that I don’t have to go into that here, because
01:30:10 ►
as an intelligent human being, you most likely already agree with what Terrence said.
01:30:15 ►
But still, it was really wonderful to hear him stand up in front of a lot of people and state
01:30:20 ►
the truth. And the truth is that that king is wearing no clothes, so to speak.
01:30:26 ►
One final thing for me to mention is that those three books that Terrence mentioned
01:30:30 ►
are all now available through Amazon. And I’ll link to them in the program notes for this podcast,
01:30:36 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. I’ve actually read two of them, Nina Gerboy’s book,
01:30:43 ►
which I talked about a few programs back
01:30:45 ►
and the Bruno book by Yeats
01:30:47 ►
that particular book in fact was originally published in 1964
01:30:52 ►
it’s out in paperback now
01:30:54 ►
and it’s still considered a primary source on Bruno
01:30:58 ►
so if you’re interested in these topics
01:31:00 ►
well that’s really an excellent place to begin
01:31:02 ►
well that’s going to be it for today,
01:31:05 ►
so for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.