Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“History is like self-reflection through the medium of language propelling itself into self-recognition.”
“Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.”
“The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.”
“We are caught in a tremendous historical crisis. And what we lack, in this crisis, is consciousness, whatever that means, the ability to integrate data about the situation we are in.”
“We are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state data transfer.”
“Notice that the whole story of Eden is the story of the struggle over a woman’s relationship to a psychoactive plant.”
“The reason I am so passionately committed to the psychedelic thing is because I see it as radical, and if this is not the moment for radical solutions, what is?”
“What we need to change is our minds, that’s the part that’s doing us dirt and dragging us under. How can we change our minds.”
Book mentioned in this podcast
The Great Drug War: And Rational Proposals To Turn The Tide
Arnold S. Trebach
Previous Episode
Next Episode
371 - Civil Rights In Cyberspace
Similar Episodes
- 275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience - score: 0.91059
- 483 - Catalysts of Consciousness - score: 0.91023
- 197 - McNature - score: 0.90521
- 387 - February 1994 Workshop Introduction - score: 0.90497
- 344 - A Global Cultural Crisis - score: 0.89466
- 356 - The Psychedelic ‘Religious’ Agenda - score: 0.89192
- 439 - A Resolute Optimist of a Complicated Sort - score: 0.88729
- 136 - A Few Conclusions About Life - score: 0.88551
- 119 - A Crisis of Consciousness - score: 0.88486
- 416 - McKenna_ Psychedelics Are The Way Out - score: 0.88483
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 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:34 ►
And with me virtually here in Cyberdelic Space are some fellow salonners who have recently sent a donation to the salon to pay for our monthly expenses.
00:00:47 ►
And these wonderful people are, first of all, our frequent donor, Stabila, and Tom, Jose, William, Michael, and we also received a very nice donation from Nicholas M.
00:00:52 ►
So collectively, you have all covered the entire month’s expenses for the month of September,
00:00:53 ►
and I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
00:00:57 ►
So now, here at long last,
00:00:59 ►
is the podcast that I started working on, well, several weeks ago,
00:01:04 ►
and then I first put it aside for the Timothy and Terrence program that I podcast just before this one.
00:01:11 ►
But on the day that I planned on posting this program, I came down with another one of those head colds.
00:01:16 ►
And I’m only kind of getting over it today.
00:01:19 ►
So, well, that’s my excuse.
00:01:22 ►
Sorry about that.
00:01:28 ►
well, that’s my excuse. Sorry about that. Anyway, the talk that I’m about to play right now is the next talk that Terrence McKenna gave in a series that I started posting a few weeks back.
00:01:34 ►
And if I’m not mistaken, this talk must have taken place on or about the evening of June 5th, 1991.
00:01:41 ►
5th, 1991.
00:01:49 ►
Modeling, mathematical modeling of process.
00:01:54 ►
And, of course, if you’re a modeler of process, the most challenging process there is to model is human history,
00:02:01 ►
because it is the sum total of a vast number of consciously manipulated variables.
00:02:10 ►
So modelers look at human history. They have for a long, long time Herodotus had a theory
00:02:19 ►
of history, Hesiod had a theory of history, Marx, Vico, so forth.
00:02:27 ►
I think what moves me to talk about this this evening
00:02:31 ►
is the fact that the world just seems quite crazy at the moment.
00:02:40 ►
We seem to have gone over some kind of cusp or some kind of tightening of the gyre
00:02:49 ►
in terms of the human collectivity
00:02:54 ►
just beginning to come apart
00:02:56 ►
on the New York Times this morning
00:03:00 ►
there’s a picture of Khomeini’s funeral in Tehran
00:03:03 ►
a picture of three million people involved in mass mourning.
00:03:09 ►
And if you can’t get 100,000 people into the streets for your point of view,
00:03:14 ►
you must not be trying these days.
00:03:18 ►
Crowds of less than a million hardly count in the last few weeks.
00:03:29 ►
a minion hardly count in the last few weeks. So, you know, philosophy is supposed to ask the question, what is going on? And then possibly shed some light on that or create probes which
00:03:40 ►
somehow act to illuminate some part of the historical process.
00:03:47 ►
So I wanted to talk about this this evening
00:03:51 ►
and make a couple of points initially
00:03:56 ►
and then sort of overview the situation
00:04:01 ►
and see if there’s a reason for hope
00:04:03 ►
or a reason for concern. And just to
00:04:11 ►
try and decondition ourselves for a moment from some of our ordinary assumptions about
00:04:18 ►
history and planetary crisis and try and think about it
00:04:26 ►
from a slightly larger point of view.
00:04:28 ►
The first point to consider
00:04:31 ►
is the brevity of history.
00:04:38 ►
There’s a kind of recidivist faction
00:04:42 ►
in occult thought
00:04:43 ►
that is tremendously impressed
00:04:46 ►
by how old everything is
00:04:49 ►
and they want to push back the dates on everything
00:04:53 ►
and say that the pyramids are 50,000 years old
00:04:57 ►
Lake Titicaca 135,000
00:05:01 ►
this is occult archaeology the truth
00:05:07 ►
that is revealed by
00:05:11 ►
you know consistent scientific analysis
00:05:15 ►
of sites around the world
00:05:17 ►
poses the question of
00:05:19 ►
how did it all happen so quickly
00:05:22 ►
the brevity of human history,
00:05:27 ►
that it’s happened in basically 1,500 generations.
00:05:33 ►
It’s happened in the last 35,000 years,
00:05:37 ►
most of it in the last 10,000 years.
00:05:40 ►
It’s some kind of breakaway process in our species
00:05:46 ►
which we, because we only live 80 years
00:05:50 ►
tend to take for granted
00:05:54 ►
or at least tend to struggle to come to terms with
00:05:57 ►
I mean, what else can you do?
00:06:00 ►
but the overwhelming fact of it
00:06:05 ►
is that it is, on the scale of the life of the planet,
00:06:11 ►
a process as ephemeral as a lightning strike.
00:06:16 ►
You know, it’s just a flash, 35,000 years.
00:06:20 ►
I mean, life has been around 3.5 billion years.
00:06:25 ►
That’s a million times longer.
00:06:29 ►
So here we are, embedded in what must then be seen
00:06:35 ►
as an extremely improbable set of circumstances, human history.
00:06:42 ►
So what is it? it’s some kind of
00:06:48 ►
breakaway process
00:06:50 ►
in the language forming capacity
00:06:53 ►
of the species
00:06:55 ►
that somehow command of symbols
00:07:00 ►
and expansion of recall
00:07:03 ►
and coordination of imagery and all of these high-grade manipulations
00:07:09 ►
of data are taking place to create for the first time a new kind of order in the universe.
00:07:20 ►
It’s epigenetic order. That means it is not coded into DNA
00:07:26 ►
it is not carried along by biology
00:07:29 ►
it is
00:07:31 ►
ephemeral
00:07:34 ►
epiphenomenal to biology
00:07:37 ►
dependent on it but in some sense more enduring
00:07:40 ►
it’s alphabets, codes, language
00:07:44 ►
graven stone, magnetic tape, books, speech,
00:07:50 ►
dance, ritual. All of these things are epigenetic information transfer. This began to tear loose. We have a flute that’s 25,000 years old.
00:08:10 ►
Some modern thinkers on the emergence of language put it at about 35,000 years ago, yesterday.
00:08:15 ►
And that adaptation began a cascade of cultural effects
00:08:24 ►
that we have yet to come to grips with.
00:08:28 ►
I mean, we are propelled by it.
00:08:30 ►
It’s as though, you know,
00:08:32 ►
the very slow-rising, smooth-surfaced wave
00:08:36 ►
of the hominid ontogeny
00:08:39 ►
that had moved forward for millions of years
00:08:42 ►
suddenly began to encounter turbulence and to
00:08:46 ►
break apart into this much more complex situation that required coding and
00:08:54 ►
reinforced coding and so set us up for this phenomenon which is taken over the
00:09:02 ►
planet and which has knitted everything together now
00:09:05 ►
and that’s the next major point that I want to talk about
00:09:09 ►
that when you stand off
00:09:13 ►
from this planetary process
00:09:15 ►
and try to get a generalized
00:09:19 ►
objective handle
00:09:23 ►
on what is going on
00:09:25 ►
you have to speak in very general terms
00:09:28 ►
and for me it comes down to saying
00:09:30 ►
what appears to be going on
00:09:33 ►
is that there is what I call
00:09:36 ►
borrowing the term from Whitehead
00:09:38 ►
concrescence
00:09:39 ►
that everything is being pushed
00:09:43 ►
toward a state of greater and greater density, compactedness, connectedness, integration into itself.
00:09:54 ►
You see this as you look at the whole history of the universe. if we believe the myth of science, is born in an explosion of such power
00:10:06 ►
that there are not even atomic systems
00:10:09 ►
because the basic constituents of matter
00:10:13 ►
cannot settle down around and form orbital systems.
00:10:18 ►
Only after the universe has cooled substantially
00:10:21 ►
do you get atomic chemistry.
00:10:24 ►
Still later, after more cooling, you get atomic chemistry. Still later, after more cooling,
00:10:27 ►
you get molecular chemistry.
00:10:30 ►
And then, after a long period
00:10:32 ►
in which molecular chemistry
00:10:33 ►
works its permutations,
00:10:35 ►
you get life.
00:10:38 ►
But each one of these stages
00:10:40 ►
of advancing complexity
00:10:43 ►
occurs more rapidly
00:10:45 ►
than the stages which preceded it.
00:10:48 ►
In other words, the universe viewed in total
00:10:52 ►
can be seen as a kind of
00:10:55 ►
condensing apparatus for something
00:10:58 ►
which I’ve so far called complexity
00:11:01 ►
or novelty. And life is the most
00:11:04 ►
recent manifestation of it
00:11:06 ►
on a three billion year scale.
00:11:09 ►
Culture is the most recent manifestation of it
00:11:12 ►
on a million year scale.
00:11:14 ►
And electronically integrated global culture
00:11:17 ►
is the 20th century manifestation of it.
00:11:20 ►
Well, it means that history is like
00:11:25 ►
self-reflection
00:11:27 ►
through the medium of language
00:11:30 ►
propelling itself
00:11:32 ►
into
00:11:33 ►
self-recognition.
00:11:36 ►
And this process happens very
00:11:37 ►
quickly. What does it
00:11:40 ►
lead to? This is the
00:11:41 ►
question, and I think
00:11:42 ►
in looking at what’s
00:11:46 ►
going on this week it seems that
00:11:48 ►
we have turned a corner
00:11:51 ►
in terms of this density of
00:11:54 ►
complexification and that
00:11:57 ►
sooner or later or slowly and
00:12:00 ►
bit by bit people are beginning to realize
00:12:04 ►
that there is some kind of global,
00:12:09 ►
integrated global process of unfolding
00:12:13 ►
that is taking place,
00:12:15 ►
that human history is not owned by anybody,
00:12:19 ►
not the major banks,
00:12:21 ►
not the Japanese,
00:12:23 ►
not CBS.
00:12:24 ►
It is actually out of control or not in the control of any integrated group of human beings.
00:12:34 ►
But that it is not the existential model of history that is taught in the universities
00:12:46 ►
which is, I mean wrap your mind around this
00:12:49 ►
the model of history taught in the universities is
00:12:52 ►
that history is what they call trendlessly fluctuating
00:12:57 ►
the only phenomenon they are willing to admit
00:13:03 ►
is trendlessly fluctuating.
00:13:07 ►
But it isn’t.
00:13:08 ►
Clearly what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.
00:13:21 ►
order and it’s
00:13:25 ►
here there is a phenomenon
00:13:27 ►
that is very brief and short
00:13:29 ►
lived I think called the new age
00:13:32 ►
but it
00:13:33 ►
is a part of
00:13:35 ►
this global
00:13:37 ►
unfolding and what this
00:13:39 ►
global unfolding is about
00:13:41 ►
well if we
00:13:43 ►
had to create a name for it which you have to have a banner if
00:13:47 ►
you’re going to March is the archaic revival so I wanted to present the notion of the archaic
00:13:58 ►
revival as a kind of metaphor into which you can pour the events of the daily paper and have it perhaps make a
00:14:07 ►
little bit more sense. The notion is this. It’s that when cultures hit moments of great crisis,
00:14:18 ►
they go into a kind of spasm because the old decision-making processes,
00:14:26 ►
the old solutions don’t deliver the goods.
00:14:30 ►
And by reflex, without reflection,
00:14:35 ►
the response of societies in crisis when this happens
00:14:39 ►
is to reach backward into time for an older model.
00:14:44 ►
When we see this in so-called primitive societies,
00:14:48 ►
i.e. preliterate societies,
00:14:51 ►
anthropologists call it a revitalization movement.
00:14:54 ►
It means you look back into the past
00:14:56 ►
and you choose a set of circumstances in the past
00:15:01 ►
that seem to shed light on your predicament
00:15:03 ►
and then you culturally work to realize them.
00:15:08 ►
The last time this happened for us was
00:15:10 ►
at the breakup of the medieval world
00:15:14 ►
when the church was seen through the wars of religion
00:15:19 ►
to no longer be a direct pipeline to God
00:15:22 ►
and people were sort of at loose ends about all this
00:15:26 ►
they reached back to classical Greece and Rome
00:15:35 ►
and created classicism
00:15:38 ►
I mean classicism is a creation of the 15th century
00:15:41 ►
it comes a thousand years
00:15:44 ►
you know 1500 years
00:15:46 ►
after the civilizations
00:15:47 ►
it apes
00:15:48 ►
and yet they created then
00:15:51 ►
classic architecture
00:15:52 ►
neo-roman law
00:15:54 ►
so forth and so on
00:15:56 ►
and that worked up until
00:15:58 ►
the 20th century
00:16:02 ►
and sometime in the 20th century or late in the 19th century and sometime in the 20th century
00:16:05 ►
or late in the 19th century
00:16:07 ►
depending on how keen and nose you have
00:16:11 ►
there was the smell of burning flesh
00:16:15 ►
in the air and it was clear
00:16:17 ►
that the ideals of the enlightenment were
00:16:20 ►
not going to serve people like Alfred Jury
00:16:24 ►
in 1885
00:16:25 ►
and L’Entremont who said that he thirsted for the kind of beauty
00:16:32 ►
that arises when a bicycle meets a sewing machine on an operating table.
00:16:39 ►
And, you know, there were anticipations of the 20th century.
00:16:46 ►
The surrealists are not given their due in all of this.
00:16:53 ►
Freud gets a lot of credit, but he was cribbing from the surrealists like crazy, you may be sure.
00:17:01 ►
In fact, major portions of the cultural adventure of the 20th century, I’m suggesting to you, can be seen as obeying these rules that I’ve just laid out for you about a revitalization movement. movement and that the archaic revival so great is the paralysis
00:17:25 ►
of our society so appalling
00:17:28 ►
the contradictions that have been unleashed
00:17:31 ►
by 500 years of the unrestrained
00:17:34 ►
practice of science that
00:17:37 ►
in order to
00:17:39 ►
advance a metaphor which has
00:17:43 ►
even a hope of commanding the attention of the global mind
00:17:49 ►
we have to reach back far back not to dynastic egypt not to uh you know the mussolini like
00:17:58 ►
states of ur and chaldea none of that but actually back to the dawn, to a period before the entire set of institutions and psychological ratios that characterize our personalities and our civilizations had had a chance to arise. Now McLuhan, who is much discredited and sneered at but very few people
00:18:29 ►
actually read or understand him, was keen to make the point that electronic culture
00:18:37 ►
would be tribal culture, that it would be symbol-ruled culture, that it would be culture of the immediate image,
00:18:48 ►
the integration of human-machine interfacing,
00:18:56 ►
the progress in what is called virtual reality technology,
00:19:01 ►
which is technologies that create the illusions
00:19:04 ►
of artificial modes of existence
00:19:07 ►
the in short migration together of the uh two great manichaean opposites in our society cybernetics and pharmacology this is hard upon us
00:19:25 ►
we are
00:19:27 ►
this compressence
00:19:30 ►
this compression of novelty that I spoke of
00:19:34 ►
seems to me to be a process
00:19:37 ►
which is beginning to slam doors
00:19:40 ►
on all kinds of cheerful
00:19:42 ►
futurist scenarios that have emerged from the rationalist side of management
00:19:50 ►
because, you see, their tendency to extrapolate trends into the future
00:19:57 ►
is completely bedeviled by the tendency of everything to be influenced by everything else,
00:20:05 ►
everything to be self-reinforcing,
00:20:08 ►
things to proceed not asymptotically but logarithmically,
00:20:12 ►
and in short, the timescales seem too compressed
00:20:17 ►
for any sort of ordinary management solution to come into play.
00:20:34 ►
Well, what then is going on well being an optimist and also a a sort of a weekend dabbler in shamanism and that sort of thing.
00:20:50 ►
What you have to rely on in the face of a question like that is a vision.
00:20:54 ►
What is going on?
00:21:00 ►
Or how can it work in this situation and have a happy ending?
00:21:02 ►
That’s the thing and what I’ve come up with
00:21:06 ►
is the notion that
00:21:08 ►
we need to construct
00:21:13 ►
a model that operates
00:21:15 ►
on many different levels
00:21:17 ►
it should be able to operate as an elbow in the ribs
00:21:22 ►
it should be able to operate
00:21:24 ►
as a set of
00:21:25 ►
integrated mathematical formulae
00:21:28 ►
it should be able to operate as an obscene joke
00:21:31 ►
I don’t have an obscene joke
00:21:36 ►
but I’ll stop and tell you
00:21:39 ►
a story which amused me
00:21:40 ►
do you know what you get when you cross the godfather
00:21:44 ►
with a professor of semiotics?
00:21:48 ►
No one knows.
00:21:50 ►
You get someone who makes you an offer
00:21:53 ►
that you can’t understand.
00:22:00 ►
I hope I’m not that person.
00:22:03 ►
Anyway, what I’ve come up with on the one-hour lecture to the community at Esalen level
00:22:12 ►
of the distillation of the quintessence of the essence of the alchemical, whatchamacallit,
00:22:20 ►
is basically goes something like this.
00:22:24 ►
basically goes something like this.
00:22:31 ►
There is, there was, there always has been something which has been called many things,
00:22:35 ►
but in order to avoid misunderstanding,
00:22:39 ►
I will use new words for it,
00:22:43 ►
and I’ll call it the transcendental object
00:22:46 ►
in hyperspace
00:22:48 ►
and what it is
00:22:51 ►
is it is your heart’s desire
00:22:54 ►
it is your heart’s desire
00:22:57 ►
but it is the transcendental object in hyperspace
00:23:01 ►
and you don’t even know what your heart’s desire is and it is fractal which
00:23:08 ►
means it is multi-leveled self-integrating refracting reflecting it has many densities it
00:23:15 ►
has many aspects so it is not only you but it is your dyad, it is your class, race, country, whatever.
00:23:28 ►
It can be cut any of these ways.
00:23:32 ►
The transcendental object in hyperspace, and it imparts telos.
00:23:39 ►
Telos is a fancy Greek word that means purpose.
00:23:43 ►
It imparts telos to being.
00:23:48 ►
It acts as an attractor,
00:23:51 ►
to use a word which is now current in dynamics.
00:23:56 ►
It acts as an attractor,
00:23:59 ►
meaning everything swivels toward it in its vicinity.
00:24:04 ►
And it is a way of thinking of human history
00:24:09 ►
is to think of it as a kind of shockwave
00:24:14 ►
which precedes the eminence of this transcendental object.
00:24:20 ►
Now in Christian theology,
00:24:21 ►
this transcendental object is called the eschaton.
00:24:26 ►
It means the end thing.
00:24:28 ►
The end thing.
00:24:32 ►
It is a mystery beyond knowing.
00:24:34 ►
It has to be.
00:24:35 ►
It’s the umbilicus.
00:24:40 ►
It’s where the whole linguistic thing is tied together. together it’s the shockwave of the
00:24:46 ►
presence of this thing in the history of
00:24:49 ►
the planet is what is causing human
00:24:53 ►
history it’s as though there were
00:24:55 ►
leakage from the future event backward
00:25:02 ►
in time one percent, something like that.
00:25:05 ►
It’s basically, you know,
00:25:07 ►
the feeling before an electrical storm
00:25:09 ►
when the air is still
00:25:11 ►
and the sky turns yellow
00:25:13 ►
and everything is,
00:25:14 ►
and you know it’s coming.
00:25:16 ►
Well, that’s human history.
00:25:18 ►
But it lasts 10,000 years
00:25:20 ►
and within it, the monkeys go nuts
00:25:23 ►
because the nearness of the transcendental object
00:25:28 ►
is shedding symbols into the unconscious which are causing religious systems dreams messianic careers, dynastic visionaries, empire builders,
00:25:47 ►
all kinds of people who are in tune with this transcendental object
00:25:56 ►
are attempting to manipulate their own time and space,
00:26:00 ►
their own lives, their own armies and what have you,
00:26:09 ►
to create the paradisical end state,
00:26:11 ►
which they can feel as eminent,
00:26:16 ►
but which they just can’t quite get a handle on,
00:26:19 ►
the provinces or the intellectuals or somebody,
00:26:20 ►
to make it happen.
00:26:30 ►
All religions, all governmental schemes, all of our personal dreams are reflections,
00:26:46 ►
micro-reflections, micro-tonal resonances and echoes of the sum total of this transcendental object. And we can’t say what it is.
00:26:50 ►
And I’m not, by leaving that question open,
00:26:52 ►
trying to suggest that it’s God,
00:26:57 ►
at least not God in the ordinary sense I understand it,
00:27:03 ►
which is that force which hung the stars like lamps in heaven.
00:27:06 ►
I don’t believe it must be that.
00:27:11 ►
But I can entertain the notion that biology,
00:27:16 ►
somehow life, in order to be what it is,
00:27:22 ►
operates in dimensions that are completely hidden to us in our particular slice of the energy flow
00:27:26 ►
and the time matrix and everything.
00:27:29 ►
We do not understand what we are.
00:27:32 ►
We do not understand what life is.
00:27:36 ►
We do not understand what mind is.
00:27:40 ►
We haven’t the faintest notion what time is.
00:27:43 ►
Don’t think that because some guy in a sweater
00:27:46 ►
can write some fishy equations on the blackboard
00:27:50 ►
that anybody has a grip on what is going on.
00:27:54 ►
This cold fusion thing
00:27:58 ►
should have been a real lesson to us peasants
00:28:02 ►
because the lords of the high castle still haven’t gotten their desks
00:28:08 ►
straightened up and you know there was an ugly scramble there i mean it turns out that if you
00:28:16 ►
claim with enough force then well nobody really does know what the laws of the universe are so what are you going to do? Well, this notion that we are caught up
00:28:29 ►
in the emergence of some kind of transcendental
00:28:32 ►
something or other
00:28:34 ►
into the space-time stream of the planet
00:28:37 ►
the major evidence for it, you see
00:28:41 ►
is ourselves
00:28:43 ►
that we have
00:28:46 ►
after only a thousand years of science
00:28:49 ►
a reasonable handle on
00:28:52 ►
the notion that there may be planets
00:28:55 ►
with meadows and rivers and brooks
00:28:58 ►
and birds and locusts and seals
00:29:00 ►
but we are the aliens
00:29:04 ►
here, we are the aliens here we are the apparent artifacts of a higher order of
00:29:10 ►
intelligence we are the active force on the planet that is carrying out its program in dimensions
00:29:20 ►
completely ontologically different from everything else that is going on.
00:29:28 ►
Well, what does this mean? How are we to take ourselves? What is it all about? Well, I think
00:29:36 ►
that why the archaic revival notion works is because all this
00:29:45 ►
was pretty well understood
00:29:48 ►
and in place and in the bone
00:29:52 ►
before anybody moved out of stonework
00:29:55 ►
and into chip dantlers.
00:29:58 ►
This has to do with the organization
00:30:01 ►
of ourselves.
00:30:03 ►
It is primary and precedes
00:30:08 ►
all the affectations of history.
00:30:13 ►
So this is what we primarily are.
00:30:18 ►
And this, what it boils down to,
00:30:23 ►
is a relationship to the planet that has been somehow perturbed, somehow perturbed, probably because the language-forming thing was some kind of experiment on the part of nature and, you know, the judgment isn’t in yet.
00:30:47 ►
I mean, it is this omni-adaptive sort of ability
00:30:53 ►
that allows you to grapple with any situation,
00:30:57 ►
but perhaps too well
00:30:59 ►
because you exceed the bounds of the context
00:31:01 ►
and then begin to wre wreck havoc over things.
00:31:06 ►
The central figure in the archaic revival is the shaman.
00:31:12 ►
And my interest in all of this led me to spend a lot of time in the Amazon basin
00:31:19 ►
where there is a highly evolved hallucinogenic plant shamanism.
00:31:25 ►
And the power and peculiarity of those experiences
00:31:31 ►
convinced me that this probably was the primary source
00:31:38 ►
of the impulse to religio in the human being.
00:31:43 ►
That these ecstasies, these synesthesia states of boundary dissolution,
00:31:51 ►
these visionary transformations of eidetic material seem to me the only phenomenon in nature that could bear the weight of the claims made by the practitioners of the shamanic experience.
00:32:14 ►
That there is in fact in human beings some kind of appalling, vast dimension of transcendental otherness
00:32:27 ►
that is as baffling to a 20th century psychotherapist
00:32:34 ►
as it was to a Magdalenian shaman or a shaman of the Amazon basin today.
00:32:39 ►
I mean, we are the great mystery.
00:32:49 ►
And this sort of brings me full circle because I mentioned that my other concern
00:32:51 ►
was rescuing Indos for psychotherapy.
00:32:54 ►
You know, we are caught in a tremendous historical crisis
00:32:59 ►
and what we lack in this crisis is consciousness, whatever that means, the ability to integrate data about the situation that we are in.
00:33:15 ►
You know, Whitehead said, understanding is the apperception of pattern as such.
00:33:21 ►
I mean, if you see a pattern and how people are seated in this room you
00:33:25 ►
understand something if you see another pattern you understand yet more a
00:33:30 ►
perception of pattern is what understanding is these how the
00:33:37 ►
synaginic in dull plants that were integrated into the human diet as human populations developed on the grasslands of Africa
00:33:51 ►
actually acted as catalysts for the language-forming ability in human beings.
00:34:00 ►
Small mouth noises linked to a rapid fire ability
00:34:05 ►
to control and exchange syntax
00:34:08 ►
becomes a kind of telepathy
00:34:11 ►
you know
00:34:12 ►
and people say wow what is this
00:34:15 ►
and what can we do with it
00:34:17 ►
and then you’re just off and running
00:34:19 ►
a possible transformation of language
00:34:23 ►
that the psychedelic research in the 1960s hinted at before it was all closed down
00:34:31 ►
is the idea of some kind of visualized synesthesia.
00:34:39 ►
This isn’t a new idea.
00:34:41 ►
This isn’t a new idea.
00:34:46 ►
Philo-Judeus, who was a second century Alexandrian Jew,
00:34:50 ►
wrote about what he called the more perfect logos.
00:34:53 ►
The logos was an informing voice that Hellenistic spiritualism took very seriously
00:35:00 ►
and Plato had a demon
00:35:03 ►
and it was an informing voice
00:35:06 ►
but Philo-Judeus said
00:35:08 ►
what would be the more perfect logos
00:35:11 ►
and then he answered his own question
00:35:14 ►
and said a more perfect logos would be
00:35:17 ►
a language that passed from being heard
00:35:21 ►
to being beheld
00:35:23 ►
without ever passing over a moment of transition.
00:35:29 ►
Well, this kind of thing is part of the human psychedelic legacy.
00:35:38 ►
This is the kind of stuff which shamans have been manipulating for each other’s amusement and mental health care for a long, long time.
00:35:50 ►
And it’s what technology will inevitably seek to mimic and create.
00:35:58 ►
If the molecular pharmacologists, the true reductionists of pharmacology are to be believed
00:36:06 ►
then it should be possible to make
00:36:09 ►
a psychoactive compound
00:36:12 ►
that causes you to whistle the first eight
00:36:15 ►
bars of Dixie and that’s it
00:36:17 ►
you know, I mean their claim
00:36:21 ►
is that the atom to the thought is
00:36:24 ►
linked that closely.
00:36:26 ►
Well, we’ll see.
00:36:28 ►
But culture is moving off planet and into this era of very dense compression of effects
00:36:40 ►
so that everything that happens is linked to everything else.
00:36:44 ►
And we are literally almost becoming our data.
00:36:48 ►
I mean, we speak of environments that are completely machine-created.
00:36:55 ►
We occupy these environments some of as many hours a day,
00:36:59 ►
interfacing with word processors and data-searching computers
00:37:04 ►
and this sort of thing.
00:37:05 ►
Consciousness and the drive to self-reflect may,
00:37:10 ►
you know, the monkey body is now almost ancillary.
00:37:15 ►
I mean, we are like coral animals in a vast reef
00:37:19 ►
of excreted technological material
00:37:22 ►
that is wired for solid state data transfer.
00:37:28 ►
And within that we scurry around
00:37:31 ►
doing our little tasks.
00:37:33 ►
But we come and go.
00:37:35 ►
The instrumentality remains
00:37:38 ►
and replicates and grows.
00:37:43 ►
And since we don’t know what this process is about
00:37:46 ►
we hardly know what kind of a stance
00:37:48 ►
to take
00:37:50 ►
I believe, again because I choose to be an optimist
00:37:55 ►
that we could not
00:37:57 ►
be experiencing these kinds of
00:38:01 ►
tidal forces on the structure
00:38:04 ►
of our historical matrix
00:38:06 ►
if it weren’t so that we must be very close to some kind of cusp
00:38:12 ►
or some kind of phase transition
00:38:16 ►
where it all becomes something else rather suddenly.
00:38:21 ►
And, you know, anticipating this is the great joy of futurists.
00:38:27 ►
I think that it may spell, it may really blow our minds.
00:38:36 ►
It may spell the breakup of the entire male-dominated,
00:38:50 ►
entire male-dominated, rational, linear, phonetic alphabet shell game that’s been going on for a while.
00:38:52 ►
The major motif that characterizes the dawn-age shamanic stance is partnership as opposed to dominator styles of culture and a greatly enhanced
00:39:13 ►
role for women. And in fact, the whole thing can be seen as a struggle over, in the broadest sense, the feminine.
00:39:29 ►
In other words, the boundary-dissolving archetype versus the square-it-off-and-hold-it archetype,
00:39:33 ►
which, as human populations moved out of the African cradle
00:39:41 ►
15,000 to 20,000 years ago,
00:39:43 ►
these being the first pastoral populations, they
00:39:50 ►
fell away from this partnership model, probably for climatological reasons, perhaps because
00:39:57 ►
psychoactive plants that they had grown dependent on were no longer available in the new zones.
00:40:02 ►
we’re no longer available in the new zones notice that the whole story of Eden
00:40:05 ►
is the story of the struggle
00:40:08 ►
over a woman’s relationship
00:40:11 ►
to a psychoactive plant
00:40:13 ►
because you know
00:40:16 ►
and it specifically says they will become
00:40:20 ►
Yahweh says they will become as we are
00:40:24 ►
if they get into this.
00:40:27 ►
So, you see, this is a lot on my mind at the moment
00:40:32 ►
because I’m doing a book on the history of the impact of plants over the millennia.
00:40:39 ►
And it seems to me that what happened and what our story is,
00:40:42 ►
it seems to me that what happened and what our story
00:40:44 ►
is, is
00:40:45 ►
that we
00:40:48 ►
had something very
00:40:49 ►
close to a
00:40:51 ►
symbiotic relationship
00:40:53 ►
with a goddess
00:40:55 ►
of some sort.
00:40:58 ►
I mean, it’s hard from our
00:41:00 ►
position to try and understand
00:41:01 ►
this too much, too clearly,
00:41:03 ►
but it lies but it lays through the plants,
00:41:09 ►
and a religion of ecstasy and probably orgy, and it’s the religion of the great horned goddess at
00:41:18 ►
the dawn of prehistory, but that we don’t take seriously enough or we don’t realize how important this symbiosis was
00:41:28 ►
that it was actually regulating psychological tendencies in us
00:41:36 ►
which unregulated become detrimental.
00:41:42 ►
And what I mean by that is
00:41:44 ►
if you have a situation where every Saturday night
00:41:48 ►
or every new moon, your whole group
00:41:52 ►
just goes totally bananas on some kind of
00:41:56 ►
very powerful, visionary plant
00:42:00 ►
hallucinogen, the characteristic of this from the point of view
00:42:06 ►
of an anthropologist is
00:42:08 ►
all boundaries are
00:42:10 ►
dissolved
00:42:11 ►
boundaries are dissolved
00:42:13 ►
and this dissolving of boundaries
00:42:16 ►
is a
00:42:17 ►
psycholitic function
00:42:19 ►
that keeps ego
00:42:21 ►
from forming
00:42:23 ►
almost like a gallstone in the social body.
00:42:28 ►
People are not egotistical in a situation
00:42:32 ►
where that kind of orgiastic psychedelic religion
00:42:36 ►
is being practiced
00:42:37 ►
because they know the relativity of self.
00:42:41 ►
They see it completely come apart.
00:42:44 ►
They know that they are their kin and the animals and the
00:42:49 ►
earth and the land. There’s identification, not this retreat and the beginning of strategies based
00:42:56 ►
on gain for the center of this body. That kind of thing doesn’t happen. And when these populations in Africa,
00:43:07 ►
where this kind of thing I am hypothesizing went on,
00:43:14 ►
when those populations moved away,
00:43:17 ►
there then became a frantic search for substitutes.
00:43:23 ►
And our inner restlessness over the centuries
00:43:26 ►
and our tendency to addict frantically to everything,
00:43:32 ►
to each other, to all kinds of things,
00:43:34 ►
it’s because we are the inheritors of an abused childhood, essentially.
00:43:43 ►
That an extremely traumatic thing happened to us.
00:43:47 ►
We were parted from this governing relationship
00:43:51 ►
with a kind of planetary mind.
00:43:54 ►
And anybody who takes these hallucinogens will tell you
00:43:59 ►
calling it a planetary mind, calling it X, Y, or Z
00:44:02 ►
doesn’t do justice to the ineffable, mysterious depth of it.
00:44:10 ►
It’s still there, this thing, whatever it is.
00:44:14 ►
And when you voyage into it, you discover, you know,
00:44:17 ►
my God, the cosmos is alive.
00:44:19 ►
It’s not only alive, it’s intelligent.
00:44:22 ►
It’s not only intelligent, it’s now looking at me.
00:44:22 ►
It’s not only alive, it’s intelligent.
00:44:24 ►
It’s not only intelligent, it’s now looking at me. And, you know, you have a whole series of assumption-dissolving realizations.
00:44:34 ►
So the archaic revival, again, I think will seek,
00:44:41 ►
when it finally gets its options sorted out,
00:44:44 ►
will seek, when it finally gets its options sorted out, to kind of center-piecing this relationship
00:44:48 ►
to this female planetary thing.
00:44:52 ►
I thought it was just off the wall
00:44:54 ►
that these people in Tiananmen Square
00:44:57 ►
built a statue to a goddess,
00:45:00 ►
to a goddess of democracy
00:45:02 ►
that they literally just raised out of the rubble i mean
00:45:06 ►
if you don’t think we live in an age of myths and symbols uh this was uh this was powerful stuff
00:45:14 ►
so um it’s coming to the end of my hour the only other thing i want to say before we take a break and then maybe have questions
00:45:26 ►
is I think that the kind of things that I’m saying to you this evening have more
00:45:35 ►
cogency than ever before as a kind of a developing point of view among a number of people
00:45:44 ►
as a kind of a developing point of view among a number of people simply because there is more data on the table.
00:45:49 ►
We’re finding out more and more about the situation in which we’re in
00:45:54 ►
to be specific, stuff like the ozone hole
00:45:58 ►
and the depletion of the rainforest,
00:46:02 ►
the spread of epidemic disease
00:46:05 ►
the clear breakdown
00:46:07 ►
of centralized
00:46:10 ►
myth-making
00:46:13 ►
authority
00:46:14 ►
at all levels
00:46:15 ►
in China and the Soviet Union
00:46:18 ►
here we do it through cynicism
00:46:20 ►
there they do it through idealism
00:46:22 ►
but it comes to the same
00:46:24 ►
thing, everybody’s just sick of their governments There they do it through idealism, but it comes to the same thing.
00:46:25 ►
Everybody’s just sick of their governments.
00:46:29 ►
So what I want to say about this is that for the first time since the Greeks advanced the four, Aristotle used the five basic solids to explain
00:46:49 ►
the structure of the universe, there are new mathematical cards on the table which seem
00:46:56 ►
to hold promise that the most complex kinds of natural phenomena are going to yield to mathematical analysis,
00:47:06 ►
which means linguistic analysis,
00:47:08 ►
which means, and I’m referring here to fractal mathematics,
00:47:15 ►
which uses very simple codes,
00:47:19 ►
very short equations to produce coastlines,
00:47:26 ►
thousands and thousands of ferns,
00:47:28 ►
millions and millions of orchids,
00:47:32 ►
natural form of great complexity and beauty,
00:47:36 ►
but that’s only a small class of what it produces.
00:47:40 ►
It also produces an infinity of worlds of alien beauty like nothing that we have ever seen before. the amplified power of mind and imagination, we are discovering infinitudes of sensory delight
00:48:09 ►
and food for thought
00:48:13 ►
in these electronically generated places.
00:48:16 ►
Well, I don’t know if this is where the culture is pointing,
00:48:20 ►
but I said in this talk
00:48:22 ►
doors were being closed
00:48:24 ►
by the onrushing momentum
00:48:26 ►
into concrescence
00:48:27 ►
this is true
00:48:29 ►
but other doors are being flung open
00:48:32 ►
doors, some of them into bizarre realms
00:48:35 ►
of alien beauty
00:48:37 ►
that may yet become real estate
00:48:40 ►
well, so that’s just sort of an overview
00:48:44 ►
of my take on the situation. So
00:48:47 ►
then are there questions? Usually that’s more interesting.
00:48:50 ►
Can you, is it appropriate to speak some about the work that you’re doing in the computer?
00:49:08 ►
Part of what I do involves a particular kind of modeling of time that involves the I Ching.
00:49:12 ►
And looking at historical data,
00:49:16 ►
the I Ching is as good a barometer of historical change
00:49:23 ►
as any other of these tools
00:49:27 ►
that depend on synchronicity
00:49:29 ►
for the way they work
00:49:30 ►
but that’s not really how I use it
00:49:33 ►
I’m more interested in structure
00:49:35 ►
in the King Wen sequence
00:49:37 ►
and have construed out of that
00:49:41 ►
a kind of a time wave
00:49:43 ►
a map of novelty
00:49:46 ►
much of what I said this evening
00:49:48 ►
presupposed this idea
00:49:50 ►
but you don’t have to know this
00:49:52 ►
to listen to me
00:49:55 ►
but there is the idea
00:49:57 ►
that part of what’s wrong
00:50:01 ►
with how we see the world
00:50:02 ►
or why there’s a certain problem
00:50:05 ►
and it doesn’t always work for us the way we want it to
00:50:08 ►
is because there is a factor left out
00:50:12 ►
that we have failed to take account of.
00:50:16 ►
It’s that science has taught us
00:50:21 ►
to pay a great deal of attention
00:50:23 ►
to the kinds of phenomena
00:50:26 ►
such that when you recreate the initial conditions,
00:50:32 ►
the process happens the same way again.
00:50:36 ►
You know, they’re very big on that.
00:50:39 ►
But all the more interesting phenomenon
00:50:42 ►
in our lives,
00:50:55 ►
falling in love, making a career, having children, living, dying, are non-repeatable and unique events.
00:51:00 ►
They’re not amenable to this kind of intellectual game what I tried to do was
00:51:06 ►
take the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching
00:51:10 ►
and the notion of Tao
00:51:13 ►
which is always presented as the most
00:51:16 ►
slippery of concepts
00:51:18 ►
that’s the major thing you come away with
00:51:21 ►
when you deal with Tao
00:51:22 ►
boy is this hard to understand
00:51:24 ►
but I just thought well there are all these statements about Tao
00:51:29 ►
in the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching
00:51:31 ►
statements such as in the Weili translation
00:51:35 ►
the way that can be told of
00:51:38 ►
is not an unvarying way
00:51:40 ►
well in spite of the double negative you can tell
00:51:44 ►
that what it’s saying is that it’s a variable
00:51:46 ►
way well if it’s a variable way it can be pictured on a Cartesian coordinate it can be treated as a
00:51:54 ►
graph well when you begin to look at the Taoism and the intellectual preconceptions of the I Ching
00:52:02 ►
from this point of view you begin to see that what you’re dealing with
00:52:06 ►
is not the quaint aphorisms of primitive proto-Han so-and-sos,
00:52:14 ►
but actually an extremely sophisticated understanding of time
00:52:20 ►
as experienced,
00:52:23 ►
an understanding that actually exceeds
00:52:27 ►
anything up to the present day
00:52:29 ►
that we’ve been able to come up with
00:52:31 ►
and why is this?
00:52:33 ►
it’s because we took a wrong turn
00:52:37 ►
in our modeling of time
00:52:39 ►
and this happened with Newton
00:52:44 ►
it is treated as what is called pure duration We, and this happened with Newton,
00:52:51 ►
it is treated as what is called pure duration in Western philosophy.
00:52:56 ►
It simply means that you have to have this stuff in order to have processes because they need it.
00:53:03 ►
It’s like a dimension into which you make available
00:53:08 ►
for then these things to manifest.
00:53:11 ►
But the conception which lies behind the I Ching is
00:53:15 ►
that time is composed of elements
00:53:20 ►
in the same way that Western science understands matter
00:53:28 ►
to be composed of 108, 110, whatever it is, elements.
00:53:34 ►
And that these temporal elements are like gestalts or archetypes. They somehow enclose and configure
00:53:48 ►
the space-time matrix in which they reside.
00:53:52 ►
They have quality, in other words.
00:53:54 ►
That’s what I’m trying to say.
00:53:55 ►
They impart a quality
00:53:57 ►
so that not all time is alike.
00:54:01 ►
Some times have the quality of openness.
00:54:04 ►
Some times have the quality of openness.
00:54:07 ►
Sometimes have the quality of closure.
00:54:10 ►
And so forth. They had the perspicacity to pay sufficient attention to their own experience that they noted this.
00:54:21 ►
this and what I’ve tried to do with the computer
00:54:24 ►
is carry forward
00:54:25 ►
this notion
00:54:27 ►
that time
00:54:29 ►
is not simply something which is
00:54:31 ►
either running down or
00:54:33 ►
getting harder, some people think of time
00:54:36 ►
as a hill that gets steeper
00:54:38 ►
and steeper, but that
00:54:39 ►
it actually is a complex topological
00:54:42 ►
manifold over
00:54:44 ►
which
00:54:44 ►
events flow.
00:54:48 ►
And that this quality that I’ve referred to several times in the talk tonight called novelty is conserved in the, let’s call it the low points of the manifold.
00:55:01 ►
points of the manifold and that habit
00:55:03 ►
or recidivist tendencies
00:55:06 ►
tend to
00:55:07 ►
probabilistically cluster
00:55:09 ►
at high points in this manifold
00:55:12 ►
well then this is
00:55:13 ►
sort of like a
00:55:15 ►
feng shui of time
00:55:17 ►
what we’re saying
00:55:19 ►
and it’s like astrology
00:55:21 ►
except astrology says
00:55:23 ►
in my opinion too much because it has so
00:55:28 ►
many concepts or idea actual occasions
00:55:38 ►
of ideational intention which it brings
00:55:41 ►
together in clusters to create its
00:55:43 ►
interpretation well what this
00:55:46 ►
simply says is there is a quality to being. Sometimes that quality is retrogressive and
00:55:54 ►
takes apart, and sometimes that quality is progressive and integrative and connects and
00:56:01 ►
moves forward. And the essence of Tao is knowing when it is one
00:56:07 ►
and when it is the other and where the changeover points are.
00:56:10 ►
Well, small computers are very useful for modeling
00:56:14 ►
these kinds of flow processes.
00:56:17 ►
I’ve been reading this guy talking about agriculture and ecology
00:56:21 ►
and that sort of stuff.
00:56:23 ►
And his thought was that more at this point
00:56:26 ►
will come from discovery of what is
00:56:30 ►
rather than invention of something new.
00:56:34 ►
And I just wondered what you thought.
00:56:36 ►
Well, I don’t know if you can really distinguish
00:56:38 ►
between discovery and invention
00:56:40 ►
with what we’re involved in.
00:56:44 ►
I agree that more now is known
00:56:47 ►
see we have now actually what has changed
00:56:54 ►
is that we have the power to remake the
00:56:59 ►
world and we have the information and we
00:57:05 ►
have the contending strategies the
00:57:07 ►
contending design strategies what we
00:57:10 ►
lack is the will we have a heart problem
00:57:18 ►
all else has been given unto us all
00:57:23 ►
other ages in history
00:57:25 ►
stood by helplessly
00:57:27 ►
and watched disease
00:57:28 ►
pogrom, madness
00:57:31 ►
whatever was current
00:57:33 ►
overtake them
00:57:34 ►
helplessly
00:57:35 ►
we actually
00:57:38 ►
could form a response
00:57:40 ►
but we are paralyzed
00:57:42 ►
by the momentum of our past
00:57:45 ►
or are we?
00:57:47 ►
and that then becomes the
00:57:49 ►
question
00:57:50 ►
because we’re in a sinking submarine
00:57:53 ►
does anybody know how to
00:57:56 ►
start this thing for the surface
00:57:57 ►
or are we just all going to
00:57:59 ►
go down Captain Nemo
00:58:01 ►
style? It’s not at all
00:58:04 ►
clear. The reason I am so passionately committed
00:58:08 ►
to the psychedelic thing
00:58:11 ►
is because I see it as radical
00:58:14 ►
and if this is not the moment
00:58:18 ►
for radical solutions, what is?
00:58:21 ►
I mean, you can preach
00:58:23 ►
a new paradigm and cultural reformation and caring society till
00:58:29 ►
you’re blue in the face, but the only time in this century that we have seen massive social change
00:58:38 ►
in the industrial democracies was under the onslaught of psychedelics in the 1960s.
00:58:45 ►
And granted, there was a war and this, that, and the other,
00:58:47 ►
and a baby boom, but nevertheless,
00:58:49 ►
that’s the only case we’ve seen.
00:58:52 ►
What we need to change is our minds.
00:58:56 ►
That’s the part that’s doing us dirt
00:58:59 ►
and dragging us under.
00:59:01 ►
How can we change our minds?
00:59:03 ►
And, of course, here at Esalen,
00:59:05 ►
we indulge ourselves because everyone is extremely enlightened
00:59:09 ►
and they’ve been flown in
00:59:10 ►
and they’re part of problem-solving task forces anyway,
00:59:14 ►
and like that.
00:59:16 ►
But, you know, my God, I toured,
00:59:19 ►
I did some magazine work
00:59:21 ►
and went to Thailand and India fairly recently,
00:59:25 ►
and the feeling that you get on the Asian continent
00:59:29 ►
is just that planet three is approaching the omega point.
00:59:34 ►
I mean, the rate at which metals are being ripped from the ground,
00:59:38 ►
forests cut down, people displaced, propaganda manufactured,
00:59:44 ►
machines produced, it’s a pretty furious scene and no one
00:59:50 ►
is in control. These are all integrated processes. There has to come at some point a deeper dialogue.
01:00:00 ►
We have not been slammed to the wall I mean we talk crisis
01:00:05 ►
but even the people in this room who come from Europe
01:00:09 ►
know what a soft scene this is
01:00:13 ►
because twice or three times
01:00:16 ►
depending on how you’re counting
01:00:18 ►
in this century Europe has been smashed to bits
01:00:21 ►
and they’re not little brown people
01:00:24 ►
off on the other side of the world.
01:00:26 ►
They are the same civilization as we are
01:00:30 ►
and smashed to bits
01:00:32 ►
by the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment.
01:00:36 ►
So it’s all about changing our minds,
01:00:40 ►
getting hold of ourselves.
01:00:42 ►
The first thing is an abandonment of cultural pretension.
01:00:46 ►
We have nothing to teach anybody.
01:00:48 ►
My God, if there’s anybody out there
01:00:50 ►
who has any ideas on how to steer us out of this,
01:00:54 ►
this is why we’re importing every shaman from the Amazon,
01:00:59 ►
every Tibetan lama, every Mongolian goat herder
01:01:03 ►
is being brought here and
01:01:06 ►
shaken by the lapels and said
01:01:08 ►
you know for God’s sake man do you have
01:01:10 ►
answers? We have answers.
01:01:16 ►
I would like to hear you
01:01:19 ►
make a case for
01:01:22 ►
in what way
01:01:24 ►
the psychedelics could
01:01:26 ►
help us, in what way are they a radical
01:01:28 ►
solution, you cite the 60s
01:01:30 ►
and still that was put down
01:01:32 ►
and generally speaking
01:01:34 ►
drugs are not held to in very
01:01:36 ►
high regard. I think
01:01:38 ►
that the drug issue
01:01:40 ►
which is not
01:01:42 ►
which until
01:01:44 ►
fairly recently I, like maybe many of you assumed was this kind of
01:01:49 ►
side issue on the social agenda of what was happening it now appears that actually this is
01:01:57 ►
directly in front of us as a civilization that we’re going to go through some kind of convulsion
01:02:06 ►
over this issue.
01:02:08 ►
And I don’t mean that there are going to be a lot of people addicted
01:02:11 ►
or a lot of people not addicted.
01:02:13 ►
I mean that it will be a financial convulsion.
01:02:17 ►
What has happened is that international criminal syndicates
01:02:21 ►
largely put in place by intelligence agencies in the 40s and 50s,
01:02:31 ►
and more recently in the case of cocaine, that these criminal syndicates have grown
01:02:39 ►
more powerful in many cases than entire nations, such nations as Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru. These
01:02:50 ►
nations are bought and sold by an industry that measures its profits in fractions of a trillion These drug cartels were put in place out of historical bad habit.
01:03:09 ►
I mean, I don’t know how many of you are aware of it,
01:03:12 ►
but in the 1840s a war was fought along the coast of China
01:03:18 ►
that was called the Opium War.
01:03:21 ►
And the issue that the opium war was fought over
01:03:25 ►
was the British government’s desire to sell opium
01:03:30 ►
freely in the ports of China
01:03:32 ►
and the government of China telling them to forget it
01:03:37 ►
and so they sent naval gunpower
01:03:40 ►
and forcibly offloaded tonnage of opium. See, we think, or I thought until I looked into it,
01:03:49 ►
that opium was grown in China. Well, it was a part of the Chinese Materia Medica for thousands
01:03:57 ►
of years, but it was a very minor part. But the opium that addicted China was grown in Goa under British mandate. Now why were
01:04:07 ►
the British insisting that they be
01:04:09 ►
allowed to sell opium in the ports of
01:04:12 ►
China? Because another drug market that
01:04:16 ►
they had created, tea, had undergone a
01:04:21 ►
financial collapse and they were stuck
01:04:24 ►
with 200 ships
01:04:27 ►
and port facilities that stretched from Liverpool to Macau,
01:04:32 ►
and they were taking a bath financially.
01:04:36 ►
And then somebody had the brilliant idea,
01:04:38 ►
we’ll plant Goa into opium,
01:04:41 ►
and China is weak,
01:04:43 ►
we can force our way into Chinese ports and addict the Chinese
01:04:47 ►
population. And this was done. So as recently as the 1840s, so-called civilized governments
01:04:55 ►
were using military power to push opiates on populations that wanted none of it.
01:05:01 ►
So understand that the holy sanctimoniousness
01:05:07 ►
of the government’s attitude on drugs
01:05:09 ►
is entirely situational
01:05:12 ►
and tailored for very short-term consumption.
01:05:18 ►
You don’t have to be a wild-eyed radical
01:05:21 ►
to know that opium heroin production in Southeast Asia soared during the
01:05:29 ►
Vietnam War as a CIA strategy to pacify the black ghetto in the United States. I mean, that’s how
01:05:40 ►
you do it. I mean, you flood the ghetto with junk and then nobody’s interested in fomenting for civil rights at that point.
01:05:51 ►
Now, the problem is that the cocaine thing got completely out of hand.
01:05:58 ►
Cocaine was originally imaged as a relatively harmless stimulant
01:06:05 ►
that you could sell for big bucks
01:06:07 ►
to the white middle class
01:06:09 ►
and support all kinds of dirty little covert operations
01:06:14 ►
with the rake-off
01:06:15 ►
but have virtually no social consequences.
01:06:22 ►
The problem was they didn’t reckon with the perverseness of human
01:06:27 ►
nature that could take a hundred and
01:06:30 ►
twenty dollar gram of fluffed flake
01:06:32 ►
cocaine and turn it into five hundred
01:06:35 ►
dollars worth of super addictive crack.
01:06:39 ►
Well you know the major addiction
01:06:42 ►
wherever there are poor people
01:06:45 ►
is money
01:06:46 ►
and the notion then of
01:06:49 ►
overturning the relationship of the ghetto
01:06:51 ►
to crack is impossible
01:06:53 ►
so the government
01:06:55 ►
is grappling now
01:06:57 ►
with demons which it unleashed
01:06:59 ►
throughout the 20th century
01:07:01 ►
and
01:07:02 ►
I firmly believe that, you know,
01:07:07 ►
if cocaine cost, if a gram of cocaine cost
01:07:12 ►
what a tube of airplane glue costs,
01:07:16 ►
then you wouldn’t see fashionable and chic gentlemen
01:07:20 ►
driving Porsches with airplane glue in their beards.
01:07:24 ►
It just wouldn’t happen, you know.
01:07:28 ►
It’s the cost.
01:07:31 ►
It’s the cost and the illicitness.
01:07:34 ►
The belief that everyone will become a dope fiend if drugs are legalized
01:07:40 ►
is once again the dominator culture stepping in and acting as the enforcing arm
01:07:49 ►
for religious fundamentalism.
01:07:52 ►
I mean, eventually the drug issue will take its place
01:07:56 ►
along with the right to own property,
01:08:00 ►
the right of women to equal role in society
01:08:06 ►
the abolition of slavery
01:08:08 ►
it’s part of
01:08:12 ►
a mature definition
01:08:15 ►
of human beings
01:08:17 ►
it’s preposterous to set yourself at war
01:08:21 ►
with nature like that
01:08:23 ►
now where the psychedelic thing comes into this
01:08:26 ►
is not yet defined.
01:08:29 ►
There’s a very interesting book
01:08:30 ►
called The Great Drug War by Trebek.
01:08:34 ►
And it’s a 500-page book,
01:08:36 ►
has multiple appendices and indices
01:08:38 ►
and this and that,
01:08:40 ►
and he’s a policymaker.
01:08:42 ►
And he’s a good guy.
01:08:44 ►
He advocates legalization and so forth and so on
01:08:47 ►
yet you look in the index of this book
01:08:50 ►
and you look up LSD and there’s nothing
01:08:53 ►
you look up psychedelics, nothing
01:08:56 ►
MDMA, nothing, psilocybin, nothing
01:08:58 ►
well you realize that
01:09:00 ►
that’s not even an issue to these people.
01:09:05 ►
They are so fixated on these multibillion-dollar industries
01:09:12 ►
that even the advocates of legalization treat it like an unwanted guest.
01:09:21 ►
But what is really, I I think behind all this is that
01:09:27 ►
this restless search through
01:09:29 ►
nature for stimulants
01:09:33 ►
aphrodisiacs, uppers, downers, sideways
01:09:36 ►
trips is a legacy
01:09:39 ►
of this
01:09:40 ►
symbiosis of the origin period
01:09:44 ►
and that when we finally find our way this symbiosis of the origin period and
01:09:45 ►
that when we finally find our way back
01:09:48 ►
to those substances then there will be a
01:09:52 ►
measure of peace of mind you have to
01:09:55 ►
realize that even in the West which is
01:09:58 ►
the most anti-psychedelic of all
01:10:00 ►
societies even in the West the
01:10:04 ►
connection has only been broken
01:10:06 ►
since Alaric the Visigoth
01:10:08 ►
burned Eleusis sometime
01:10:10 ►
in the 4th century
01:10:11 ►
so it’s been less than 2000
01:10:14 ►
years that even the
01:10:16 ►
wellsprings of Western
01:10:17 ►
spirituality were
01:10:20 ►
refreshed by
01:10:22 ►
this particular tradition
01:10:24 ►
and the shamanism then
01:10:26 ►
is an effort to recapture it
01:10:28 ►
to no
01:10:30 ►
less a degree than
01:10:32 ►
Eleusis was also
01:10:34 ►
an archaic revival they were looking
01:10:36 ►
back to the great
01:10:38 ►
mother religion of Minoan
01:10:40 ►
Crete I mean it was always
01:10:42 ►
said in the classical
01:10:44 ►
text that what was done in secret at Eleusis was Minoan Crete I mean it was always said in the classical text
01:10:45 ►
that what was done in secret
01:10:47 ►
at Eleusis was done
01:10:49 ►
openly
01:10:49 ►
at Gnosis
01:10:53 ►
on Crete
01:10:54 ►
so it’s
01:10:57 ►
even in our tradition
01:10:59 ►
not that long ago
01:11:01 ►
but it is thoroughly
01:11:03 ►
suppressed by the confluence of dominator styles that emerged
01:11:11 ►
with the triumph of Christianity and the emergence of that patriarchal and then the the real nail in
01:11:20 ►
the coffin was the the phonetic alphabet evolving in Greece and then printing.
01:11:27 ►
And by then the walls were so high and the forces propelling us towards scientific industrialism
01:11:35 ►
so undeniable that we had to undergo this.
01:11:40 ►
But we are like a prodigal child I mean we made a descent into historical time
01:11:48 ►
to learn the secrets of matter apparently a kind of Faustian obsession
01:11:55 ►
that we played out to the end the end meaning until that moment when we could
01:12:00 ►
bring the light of the stars to the surface of the earth to exterminate our
01:12:04 ►
enemies and then the contradictions and the consequences of the stars to the surface of the earth to exterminate our enemies.
01:12:14 ►
And then the contradictions and the consequences of that kind of madness made us either extinct or unrecognizable to ourselves.
01:12:17 ►
I mean, that’s really the choice.
01:12:21 ►
The change that must come has to be radical.
01:12:26 ►
We are well set up for radical change
01:12:30 ►
at the physiological level,
01:12:34 ►
but at the cultural level,
01:12:36 ►
we have a terrific kind of constipation
01:12:39 ►
that threatens to become fatal.
01:12:42 ►
These boundary-dissolving techniques
01:12:46 ►
are what we need.
01:12:48 ►
And, you know, all of them are
01:12:50 ►
but a mere gesture at the problem
01:12:54 ►
except these very powerful
01:12:58 ►
visionary hallucinogens.
01:13:00 ►
So, you know, it’s an emergency situation.
01:13:03 ►
Do you see geomancy as part of the
01:13:06 ►
radical solution?
01:13:08 ►
well I think that
01:13:09 ►
what we’re becoming aware of
01:13:12 ►
is
01:13:13 ►
that boundary dissolution
01:13:18 ►
that the
01:13:20 ►
vanishing of the difference
01:13:22 ►
between self and world
01:13:24 ►
means that we’re catching up to the changes that went on in physics
01:13:32 ►
in the early 20th century.
01:13:36 ►
Everything is being replaced by fields.
01:13:38 ►
Everything is seen now as a transient interference pattern rather than something with an integrity that
01:13:48 ►
persists in time to the degree that geomancy accentuates and stresses this field phenomenon,
01:13:59 ►
the wave mechanical nature of Gaia. I think so.
01:14:05 ►
I don’t know what is to become of us.
01:14:08 ►
The really odd thing about all this
01:14:11 ►
is that apparently we are
01:14:13 ►
unable to continue to live here.
01:14:18 ►
Whether we want to or not.
01:14:20 ►
It’s almost gotten to the place
01:14:22 ►
that it’s just become too much.
01:14:27 ►
The place is bursting at the seams. the whole thing should be turned into a park
01:14:29 ►
but where are you going to put all the people
01:14:32 ►
and so the new age can
01:14:36 ►
dissolve I think
01:14:39 ►
most dichotomies
01:14:41 ►
but what are you going to do about the question of whether or not we are strangers in this universe
01:14:47 ►
or whether this is our only and native home
01:14:51 ►
to which we must devote great care and attention.
01:14:57 ►
I mean, we have both tendencies.
01:14:59 ►
If you look at what culture is doing,
01:15:02 ►
it appears to be giving us no choice.
01:15:07 ►
We have to leave the planet if we love it if you love it leave it because to stay is to toxify so you know there we it cannot be
01:15:21 ►
denied that the earth is the cradle of humanity the question is simply can we remain
01:15:27 ►
in the cradle forever and I am ambivalent about this I I no longer have my youthful enthusiasm
01:15:37 ►
for an unambiguous migration to Alpha Centauri. I entertain it still,
01:15:45 ►
but, you know,
01:15:47 ►
that was pre-Challenger.
01:15:49 ►
Now we know too much
01:15:51 ►
about the worms
01:15:52 ►
who run these things
01:15:53 ►
and what it’s really all about
01:15:56 ►
and how slow it’s moving.
01:15:59 ►
I mean, it’s moving slowly.
01:16:01 ►
It’s moving so slowly.
01:16:03 ►
Even the Russians.
01:16:07 ►
I mean, I felt like I should write a letter to gorbachev in the interests of perestroika they’re cutting back on the space program
01:16:13 ►
said my god this is the one thing you have which nobody else has why don’t you just go for it
01:16:19 ►
but there is you know ambivalence And I don’t think you conquer the universe
01:16:26 ►
with an attitude of ambivalence.
01:16:29 ►
So we’re on hold.
01:16:32 ►
Nobody knows what’s going on.
01:16:34 ►
And do you have to just surrender to the irrational
01:16:37 ►
and put your faith in that friendly flying saucers are on the way?
01:16:42 ►
I mean, this is a response of many people.
01:16:42 ►
flying saucers are on the way.
01:16:44 ►
I mean, this is the response of many people.
01:16:51 ►
Or is it within the power that we have within ourselves to change our minds?
01:16:53 ►
Well, to the best of my knowledge,
01:16:56 ►
having toured the world and met a lot of strange people
01:16:59 ►
and spent a lot of time on this and read a lot of books,
01:17:03 ►
the only thing which looks like it holds a chance in hell
01:17:06 ►
is some configuration of the psychedelic experience.
01:17:11 ►
Because it alone sufficiently perturbs assumptions
01:17:15 ►
that you can begin to see how there might be a possible dialogue.
01:17:22 ►
So our relationship
01:17:25 ►
to matter
01:17:26 ►
to plutonium
01:17:28 ►
to heroin
01:17:31 ►
to cocaine
01:17:32 ►
to psychedelics
01:17:34 ►
to consumer goods
01:17:36 ►
all of these things
01:17:38 ►
you see we are an addictive animal
01:17:40 ►
we are
01:17:41 ►
bereft
01:17:43 ►
and on the bounce
01:17:45 ►
and willing to settle
01:17:48 ►
for almost anything
01:17:49 ►
and half crazy
01:17:51 ►
in the process
01:17:52 ►
and the notion
01:17:56 ►
is and it
01:17:57 ►
emerges comes from the unconscious
01:18:00 ►
I think as I look at the
01:18:01 ►
20th century that the only
01:18:03 ►
thing which can steady us in this situation
01:18:06 ►
Is that long long backward reach to the campfires of the Magdalenian?
01:18:12 ►
when
01:18:14 ►
Religion was an experience
01:18:17 ►
You see that’s what they’ve taken from us
01:18:20 ►
We are entirely disempowered in our own self experience of the immediacy of being we are always
01:18:29 ►
we want to wait and see what the New York Times says about it or the evening news and it’s not
01:18:36 ►
true until it comes that way validated that way and we have no vocabulary for our emotions we have thousands of words for the
01:18:49 ►
chemical structure of the soil of Mars or you know the interior processes of the Sun but we
01:18:58 ►
have a very impoverished emotional vocabulary and this is culturally accumulated over thousands of years one of
01:19:07 ►
the great boons of psychedelics is that they are catalysts for language permission to send the mind
01:19:16 ►
where it’s never gone before and leave a linguistic map that others can use so we’re trying to stretch the envelope shed the monkey abandon the cultural
01:19:32 ►
the thanatoptic drive to ruin really that has characterized this Faustian relationship to the world. It’s been all wrong.
01:19:45 ►
It’s not working.
01:19:46 ►
I mean, you don’t have to be very bright to see this.
01:19:51 ►
So now we need to talk about ways out.
01:19:55 ►
I do not think of myself as an expert or a teacher.
01:20:01 ►
I think of myself as a wayfarer who happened upon these extremely intense experiences that are the legacy of this kind of shamanism worldwide. be something which they are saving for us and keeping for us
01:20:25 ►
if we are willing to come in out of the rain.
01:20:31 ►
Anybody else?
01:20:32 ►
Yeah.
01:20:34 ►
And I think the critical mass of consciousness
01:20:40 ►
will bring it like that when it happens.
01:20:44 ►
It’s a filter and a control, but it will emerge,
01:20:47 ►
and I agree with you.
01:20:49 ►
It could be instantly.
01:20:52 ►
I mean, this thing in China crystallized with appalling speed.
01:20:58 ►
I mean, the CIA, nobody understood what was going on.
01:21:01 ►
They still don’t understand what’s going on.
01:21:04 ►
It just, there comes a time and the switch is turned
01:21:08 ►
and the morphogenetic field comes on and people begin to act.
01:21:13 ►
And, you know, the things that we are seeing,
01:21:17 ►
we have a great deal of difficulty getting in perspective
01:21:21 ►
because it’s moving so quickly.
01:21:23 ►
And I venture to say you ain’t seen
01:21:26 ►
nothing yet I mean it’s just beginning to pull and tear and reconfigure itself and it has a mind
01:21:35 ►
of its own it has a will of its own it is we are atoms within the organizational plan of this thing.
01:21:46 ►
And so then the task becomes, really, to witness this,
01:21:52 ►
to be with it, to see it, to replicate the means associated with it
01:21:58 ►
and pass them around linguistically,
01:22:01 ►
and to empower people to believe in their intuition empower them to go with the
01:22:11 ►
the whole yeah well he worked basically in the realm of one class of these things
01:22:28 ►
because he was fascinated with certain shapes,
01:22:30 ►
but the qualities that he was able to get out of his structures
01:22:36 ►
reside in the fact that they were taking advantage
01:22:40 ►
of these kinds of natural principles.
01:22:45 ►
Nature, modeling nature.
01:22:49 ►
This is what we haven’t done.
01:22:51 ►
See, we’ve always gone for the big flash,
01:22:55 ►
the high heat release,
01:22:56 ►
and nature does her most interesting tricks
01:23:03 ►
with voltages below that of a
01:23:06 ►
flashlight battery I mean that’s where it’s
01:23:09 ►
happening like in your head for instance
01:23:11 ►
I mean our
01:23:15 ►
method was to start with the
01:23:18 ►
grossest phenomena and work downward
01:23:21 ►
and we’ve been doing it for 500 years
01:23:24 ►
now we think we understand how two billiard
01:23:28 ►
balls theoretically relate to each other but not three this is called the three body problem and
01:23:36 ►
there are similar problems i mean our biology is a fiction we do not understand how you can think i will close my hand into a fist
01:23:46 ►
and it happened mind over matter a miracle still totally beyond the can of science because you see
01:23:56 ►
what’s happening is intentionality is somehow affecting gross matter. And you can talk about quantum mechanical junctions
01:24:07 ►
and this and that and the other thing,
01:24:09 ►
but it’s all guesswork.
01:24:10 ►
Well, then when you turn to psychology,
01:24:13 ►
it’s smoke signals plus guesswork.
01:24:17 ►
You know?
01:24:18 ►
So since abstraction has served us so ill,
01:24:24 ►
why not return to feeling? Since abstraction has served us so ill,
01:24:27 ►
why not return to feeling?
01:24:30 ►
Why not return to symbols?
01:24:36 ►
Why not return to rituals, gestalts, archetypes, analogy?
01:24:41 ►
Analogical reasoning is extremely powerful, has worked very well in the past for sophisticated societies
01:24:46 ►
we we have fatal styles of thought that we are fatally addicted to and
01:24:53 ►
unless we break out of
01:24:56 ►
That kind of unexamined
01:24:59 ►
Eco, which is what it is. Then we have a pretty much
01:25:07 ►
appointment in Samara, I’m afraid.
01:25:15 ►
But if we’re willing to examine that, then the human horizon is endlessly bright.
01:25:23 ►
I mean, we represent some kind of ontological experiment on the part of something that is either calling us home or going toward its deepest self
01:25:29 ►
or I mean there’s love here there’s some kind of love there’s some kind of other there’s some kind
01:25:37 ►
of caring across the project of being and this is know, the grand task of philosophy to witness and to unravel
01:25:48 ►
and to make immediate in people’s lives. Well, that’s it for this evening. Thank you very much.
01:26:02 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:26:08 ►
Now, before I forget it, since I’m still just kind of a little kid
01:26:13 ►
who, when he learns something new, he wants to tell you all about it
01:26:16 ►
before he actually understands what he’s talking about,
01:26:19 ►
and, well, that’s me.
01:26:22 ►
But close to the end of this talk that we just heard,
01:26:25 ►
Terence was saying something about modern physics
01:26:27 ►
and that he thought everything arises out of fields,
01:26:31 ►
which I’m sure was probably the current thought at the time.
01:26:34 ►
But I’m sure you probably noticed the recent announcement of the amplithedron.
01:26:39 ►
I think I’m saying that about right.
01:26:42 ►
But physicists have recently postulated this thing as a jewel-like geometric object
01:26:48 ►
that dramatically simplifies the calculations of particle interactions
01:26:53 ►
and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.
01:27:00 ►
So now, even though I’ve read the article about it, and I’ll link to it in the program notes, well, even though I’ve read that article, now you know as much about it as I do.
01:27:10 ►
But, hey, I’m just the carnival barker, remember?
01:27:13 ►
And did you catch Terrence’s comment that we are becoming our data?
01:27:19 ►
Well, I guess that at least as far as the government spies are concerned, that’s probably how they think of us.
01:27:25 ►
Just big blobs of data that continue to grow in their memory vats.
01:27:30 ►
And by the way, if you are interested in the current story about all of the spying that the U.S. government has been doing on us,
01:27:37 ►
well, you won’t want to miss my next podcast because it features a talk by John Gilmore,
01:27:41 ►
who is one of the co-founders of EFF, the Electronic Frontier
01:27:46 ►
Foundation, which is one of the primary organizations that’s begun suing the federal
01:27:51 ►
government over all this. You know, it’s really too bad that we’re never going to learn what
01:27:56 ►
Terrence’s views would have been about the unbelievable extent that we’re all now being
01:28:03 ►
spied upon.
01:28:06 ►
Ghosts in the machine, I think.
01:28:10 ►
That’s what we’re probably all morphing into, ghosts in the machine. So, hey, let’s go haunt somebody, huh?
01:28:13 ►
Anyway, Terrence certainly wasn’t very far off way back over 20 years ago
01:28:19 ►
when he said, we are like coral animals in a vast reef of excreted technological material that is wired for solid state transfer.
01:28:29 ►
Don’t you just love it when he comes out with a riff like that?
01:28:34 ►
Well, since in my previous podcast I already mentioned the fact that I have some issues with this concept of a transcendental object at the end of time,
01:29:08 ►
Transcendental Objects in my opinion, I should say, Terrence was, at heart, a poet. And that by considering some of these raps from the perspective of poetic license, well, to me, it makes them even more enjoyable.
01:29:12 ►
Of course, you shouldn’t go by what I say about all this, because
01:29:15 ►
I am in no way qualified to hold forth about the nature of things
01:29:20 ►
transcendental. One last thing that I’d like to
01:29:24 ►
mention before I leave you for today is that
01:29:26 ►
recently one of our fellow salonners named Mark posted a question in our program notes,
01:29:31 ►
which as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And his question caused me to
01:29:37 ►
remember that, well, it’s been too long, quite a while since I mentioned this. And the question is,
01:29:42 ►
what is the track at the beginning of the podcast?
01:29:47 ►
And, of course, it’s the track that’s being played in the background right now.
01:29:50 ►
Well, you know, I really feel bad
01:29:51 ►
for not mentioning this more often
01:29:53 ►
because, well, it’s from a friend of mine.
01:29:56 ►
The theme song that you hear each week
01:29:57 ►
here in the salon is El Alien
01:29:59 ►
by Shatul Hayuk.
01:30:01 ►
And if you go to their website,
01:30:03 ►
which is shatulhayuk.org,
01:30:05 ►
and you better get the spelling on that one.
01:30:07 ►
I have to look it up every time myself.
01:30:09 ►
It’s C-A-T-A-L-H-U-Y-U-K.
01:30:15 ►
Chetulhayuk.org.
01:30:17 ►
And you can listen to the transmix of it there.
01:30:20 ►
Anyway, the group is led by my friend Jacques,
01:30:22 ►
who is backed up by Cordell and Wells,
01:30:24 ►
who are also really great guys.
01:30:27 ►
And Jacques, by the way, makes a cameo appearance as Paloka in my novel, The Genesis Generation.
01:30:34 ►
So, Jacques, Cordell, and Wells, I thank you once again for what has now become a very recognizable theme song for the salon.
01:30:46 ►
theme song for the salon. And finally I want to give a shout out to all of our fellow saloners who participated in the recent Symbiosis Festival. My friend Jade sent me some pictures of the event
01:30:53 ►
and well I was really blown away. It’s been a couple of years since I was last able to make
01:30:59 ►
a Symbiosis event and wow I’m really impressed at the quality of the art and the scale of what everybody pulled off this year.
01:31:06 ►
So bravo to you all.
01:31:09 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:31:13 ►
Be well, my friends.