Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The world is not made of anti-mu mesons, quarks, and photons, and electromagnetic fields. Reality is made of words.”
“Language is something that springs from the biological matrix, and the neurological matrix, within us.”
“Culture is more and more consciously becoming a project carried out in the domain of language by, for instance, propaganda both governmental and commercial.”
“Once they pledge allegiance to a given model of reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought.”
“Television, introduced at the close of World War II, has become a form of electronic heroin, and it isn’t even your trip. They don’t even let you go on your own trip, you get a trip designed by Madison Avenue.”
“I’m not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory. I’m an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia of usage.”
“I’m not an advocate of drugs. I’m an advocate of psychedelics.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And let me begin by saying that for those of you who sometimes skip over the meat of these podcasts,
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which, of course, is the lectures that I play, and first listen to my comments that follow them,
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well, today there isn’t going to be much of that, since I’m still battling a little head cold
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and can’t seem to summon up enough energy to get my thoughts
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together. But nonetheless, if you like listening to Terrence McKenna, well, you’ve got an interesting
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hour ahead of you. But before I play today’s talk, I first want to send my love and thanks to David N.,
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Keech, and to my dear friend Kevin up in the Pacific Northwest. Between them and last week’s donations, we have already covered our expenses for this month,
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so my stress level is back to zero,
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and I thank you and all of our donors and supporters from the bottom of my heart.
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And just a word to Kevin, when I mentioned you in a podcast a few weeks ago,
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well, I hope that you didn’t think that I meant to trick you into sending a donation to the salon.
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I was simply enjoying one of my favorite memories of the past 10 years or so,
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and that was the time that I stayed with you guys and enjoyed the company of you and your friends on the island.
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In one of the family photo albums that my mother kept, there’s a candid picture of me.
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Well, I guess I was about four years old and was dragging a big suitcase behind me.
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It was the day that I decided to run away from home.
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While I can no longer remember why I wanted to do that, my guess is that almost every little kid hits that point at some stage.
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guess is that almost every little kid hits that point at some stage. So when I announced that I was leaving, my mother, well, she simply helped me pack the suitcase and wished me well. Of course,
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she and my grandfather shadowed me as I walked around the block trying to figure out my next
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move. But since I wasn’t allowed to cross the street yet, well, I was only able to walk around
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the block before putting my tail between
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my legs and returning home. Thankfully, my family was kind enough to not laugh at me or even bring
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it up at dinner that night when I was around. However, if I ever get the urge to run away from
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home again, well, I plan on heading to your house, Kevin. So be warned, because I’m now allowed to cross the streets.
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Well, enough of my silly memories. Let’s get on with the show.
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Now, as you listen to this talk, which was recorded in the summer of 1989, try to imagine that it was given instead just last night.
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While I’ve heard several other McKenna raps about language, this one particularly hit home when I listened to it in light of some of the current political events that are taking place right now, not just here in the U.S., but in almost every place on the planet.
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As Michael Brownstein says, the world is on fire.
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So now let’s once again join the Bard McKenna. And this time, by the way, we’re going to begin, he’s going to begin, I should say, with a real treat.
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And you’re going to see what I mean in just a moment.
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So since this is a fairly small group and I’m feeling fairly confident,
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I’m feeling fairly confident. I’d like to talk about language today, and I will attempt to open this with a performance, which is something I rarely, like never, do. and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe all mimsy were the borogoves and the mawny raths outgrabe
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beware the jabberwock my son the jaws that bite the claws that catch beware the jub-jub bird And shun the firmiest bandersnatch
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He took his vorpal sword in hand
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Long time the maxim foe he sought
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So rested he by the tum-tum tree
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And stood a while in thought
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And as in oofish thought he stood,
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the jabberwock with eyes of flame
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came woofing through the tulgy wood
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and burbled as it came.
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One, two, one, two, and through, and through
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His vorpal blade went snicker-snack
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He left it dead, and with its head
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He went galumphing back
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And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
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Come to my arms, my beamish boy
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O, frabjous day, kaloo, calay, he chortled in his joy.
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T’was brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.
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All mimsy were the borogos, the money-wraths
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outgrave.
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That’s worth hours of the other stuff.
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Well, I hope,
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I assume most of you recognize that
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as Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky,
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which was an example of verbal
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intentionality and syntax overcoming absence of ascribed meaning. This is what’s happening here, that the intentionality of meaning is so great that it overcomes the
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absence of conventional definition. And we’ve also been using language in a fairly free
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and in some cases unusual and in some cases outrageous manner.
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So that’s what I meant when I said it made sense to examine the tools. We are particularly neurologically outfitted
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for the production of small mouth noises,
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rapidly modulated small mouth noises.
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We can do this, I’ve proved it myself,
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for hours at a time without exhaustion. And what is going on there is
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that rather than the rippling of plumage or the rubbing of hard body parts against each other,
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since we don’t have any hard body parts to rub against each other
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most of the time, communication in our species has taken the form of neuromodulation of small
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mouth noises. Now these small mouth noises are transduced into acoustical waves, a physical phenomenon which moves from point to point in ordinary
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Newtonian space. The acoustical pressure wave strikes the ear. The ear conveys the particular
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unique signature of that arriving acoustical wave into,
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for lack of a better term, we have to call the mind.
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And the mind takes this acoustical signal and compares it with an imprinted dictionary
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built up out of experience.
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It does this very, very quickly.
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The speed with which the dictionary is consulted and each arriving word is identified, its syntactical class understood, and its intentionality in the domain of meaning recognized is very, very rapid. It represents the most rapid sort of intellectual activity
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that we undertake as human beings.
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Thought is a similar phenomenon,
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but it is an interior dialogue,
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and God help us, let’s hope we understand our thoughts
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better than what people say to us,
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because in the case of our thoughts, we
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are both the one communicating and the one communicated to.
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Language is this double-edged adaptation of the human animal. It is obviously a multifaceted, multipurpose, adaptive advantage
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in all environmental situations,
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because if you can image and linguistically process evolving situations,
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you have a leg up over an organism which is hardwired for reaction along the line of instincts.
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Yet, in the domain of cognition, it’s almost as though language has exceeded its usefulness
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because someone said language was invented to lie.
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was invented to lie.
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Well, perhaps that is too cynical.
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But certainly language obfuscates reality.
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It cannot help but do this. It does it in the following manner.
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A child born into what the psychologist
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William James called a blooming, buzzing confusion. A child born into
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the blooming, buzzing confusion attempts to isolate complexes of activity, complexes of color, sound, and the nurturing parent provides names.
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This is a kitty.
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This is a bird.
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This is a blanket.
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What is happening here is that the blooming, buzzing confusion
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is slowly being tiled over by an interlocking and seamless set of names
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and syntactical structures,
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which literally then stand for reality.
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They stand for reality.
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So unless you’re the kind of very fortunate person
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who speaks many many languages
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fluently
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and has a sense
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of this relativity
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of the intent
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to communicate
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you are barred
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from realizing
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the context dependency
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of your own language.
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And we all are like this.
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This impressed me very much in the Amazon
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because the first time I went to the Amazon,
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I knew nothing about botany.
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And it appeared to me largely to be green.
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And when I returned some years later, having made a fairly thorough study of the
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taxonomic families of tropical plants, it was a vast, intricate, fascinating domain because I had terms for all these exotic floral forms, leaf forms, seed expressions, morphology, you see.
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Nature’s expression in the world of form is called its morph has, we tend to think of it as a platonic concern. After all,
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aren’t the forms somewhere in a platonic hyperspace? Aren’t they somehow above and
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beyond the machinations of language and perception? Well, they are if you’re a Platonist.
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But when we look at natural form,
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the enterprise of science has been to attempt to describe natural form.
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This is essentially a program to be carried out within the domain of language.
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carried out within the domain of language.
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And this has been entirely overlooked by the philosophy of science so far as I can tell.
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I mean, the world is not made of anti-new mesons
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and quarks and photons and electromagnetic fields.
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Reality is made of words.
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magnetic fields reality is made of words reality is made of symbolic interlocking uh linguisto mathematical constructs everything beyond that is pure conjecture i mean that this is what you
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learn in philosophy one the relativity of knowing the impossibility of actually nailing down
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the ontos of what is presented in the theater of perception through an exercise of epistemic
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knowing it cannot be done you can’t brain cannot fully elicit elucidate brain.
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There’s a tautology there.
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So language is something that springs from the biological matrix
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and the neurological matrix within us.
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And the major theme of its siren song to us
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is that it allows us to know the world and to communicate it.
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Well, the truth is it does allow us to know the world to some degree,
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and it does allow us to communicate about it, but a price is paid at every step of the way.
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First of all, because we are
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concrescent entities of feeling.
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This is Alfred North Whitehead.
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We are concrescent entities of feeling,
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yet our language prepares us
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to describe a world of three-dimensional
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spatial relationships
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between solid objects.
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So it is not true to the perceiver, you see.
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There is a kind of break of faith with the world.
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Language betrays.
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Language betrays in order to mean. You know, Archibald MacLeish said,
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a poem should not mean but be. And this is a reasonable statement of a poetic, but it is not
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a basis for a theory of communication. A theory of communication depends on correct mirroring of the
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meme that is being transmitted, no matter how far down the line it has come. Well, we talked earlier,
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we talked in earlier sessions about the impact of biogenically active and psychoactive amines in diet,
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specifically in the diet of early hominids in Africa,
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suggesting that the catalysis of neurological development that has gone on over the last million years in the human species was catalyzed by what was at first a
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random exposure to these things, then a deepening exposure brought on by the consequent synergy of
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increased visual acuity. In other words, some of these biogenic amines were conferring increased visual acuity, and this was shifting the reproductive mathematics in the direction of those individuals that were allowing this psychoactive substance, I mean, let’s be frank about it, into the diet. Then later we saw that sexual arousal was also a concomitant to admitting
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this item into the diet, and at higher doses and deeper exposures, a deepening sense of what we can
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call without defining the other, the other. I read recently an interesting paper called
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The Felt Presence of the Other in Unusual Environments.
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And it was an article about the kind of hysteria
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which overtakes people lost in the wilderness,
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the sense that they are being stalked or followed or observed.
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And in its mildest form, I’m sure we all have experienced this,
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it’s the sense of being observed when you know you’re alone in the wilderness.
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We seem to be, you know, we have very strong fight or flight hard wiring in the organism.
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And we also, when we admit, when we admitted these biogenically active amines into the diet,
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we set ourselves up for a kind of undefined frontier between ourselves and the other.
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Language took its place in that fissure
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and began to create the earliest images of the other.
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But antecedent to the image is the feeling.
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And that was the point that I wanted to make,
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that in all cases, antecedent to the image is the feeling, the felt presence of immediate reality, which is the unique province of the individual. It is not, we choose to attempt to communicate it,
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but it is always and forever, by the nature of the situation,
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ours and ours alone.
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Well, the idea then that language is a double-edged adaptation
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that has both served us and betrayed us on different levels,
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needs now to be looked at in the light of the fact
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that culture is more and more consciously becoming
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a project carried out in the domain of language
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by, for instance, propagandists, both governmental and commercial.
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Reality is more and more in the image.
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And when we talked about virtual realities and the tendency of technology to create the dream utopias of the
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unconscious prehistory and shamanism you see that what is happening is we are as as a global culture
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abandoning ourselves in a way to the image because nothing else can be done. There aren’t enough resources, there aren’t enough metals in the planet
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to give everyone the kind of standard of living
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that is enjoyed by the technocratic elites in the West.
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So instead, there has to be this trade-off in image.
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Now, this is not something new.
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We see it reflected in American life over the whole post-war
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era. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in order to make good on the grand promise
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that was to accrue to the American middle class, consequent upon the defeat of fascism,
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upon the defeat of fascism, this utopia that was to come to be,
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for it to happen, it was done tackily.
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That was the price that was paid.
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You know, Eric Jansch said, the question regarding space colonies is not, is it possible,
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but how will we keep it in good taste?
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And this was a question that was not answered by American culture in the 50s.
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It was essentially a suburban, modular housing, modular products, modular values,
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modular lifestyle paradise that was sold as the consequences
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of the completion of the American dream.
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Part of what we have been living through this period
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is a hallucination of improper language.
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I mean, now, because of the changes going on in the Soviet Union,
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the fiction of this implacable enemy
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bent on putting a tank on every street corner in the world
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is now exposed as a cultural illusion, a fiction.
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And I’m not entirely persuaded that it was simply all a horrible misunderstanding.
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It seems to me these illusions played very strongly into the hands of different factions on both sides.
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Political realism is also a coming to grips with language.
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You know, the French sociologist Jacques Ellul said,
00:23:41 ►
there are no political solutions.
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There are only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.
00:24:11 ►
Well, this, you know, people howl to the high heavens. But in fact, ideology has been just a pervasive cancer on the Western mind ever since the burning of Eleusis. I mean, we just can’t get enough of it. And, you know, we
00:24:17 ►
may look with horror on the funeral of the imam, but believe me, in the history of Western civilization, there have been scenes go down
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that make that look like child’s play. Recall to you, just as an example, the Albigensian
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Crusade, when in order to stamp out a heresy, the Inquisition was turned loose in southern France and the professional killer
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who was put in charge of this operation
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was a career man named Simon de Montfort
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and his lieutenants came to him
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at one point in this campaign
00:24:59 ►
and said we have the city surrounded
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we are laying siege to I believe it was Carcassonne,
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and they said, but there are 7,000 Catholics within the walls.
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He said, kill everybody, God will recognize his own.
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So, you know, the 20th century has not cornered the market on the ways in which language
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can distort and is used for political purposes
00:25:31 ►
to distort reality.
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A very poignant example of that
00:25:36 ►
that I’ve personally had to deal with
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is a lot of my work in the Amazon
00:25:43 ►
has been in an area of the Colombian Amazon called the Lower Putumayo, and I venture very few people here this afternoon have any association to the Lower Putumayo. with the collusion of Peruvian ruling families
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in the early years of this century
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created a mini-Holocaust in the Peruvian,
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it was then Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon,
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in the pursuit of rubber.
00:26:20 ►
And what this was about was going into these tribal areas
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and showing these people how to collect wild rubber
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and then telling them, you know, you bring in this much,
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the first time you don’t bring in this much,
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we remove the soles of your feet with a machete.
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The second time you don’t bring in this much, we kill you.
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And 45,000 Indians were exterminated in the Colombian Putumayo.
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Going there years after this atrocity, I was amazed to see the lingering effects of the misuse
00:27:01 ►
of language. The Colombians, who were not politically associated with this,
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later in the 30s, it was ceded to Peru,
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refer to it as the devil’s paradise.
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And the idea is that savages,
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note this word, savages,
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are savage,
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and therefore we must be more savage in other words preliterate culture
00:27:30 ►
is taken as an excuse for uh the rise of the beast in the colonizer and this is entirely done, how this trick is done,
00:27:49 ►
is through the misuse and abuse of language, where civilization is what is being brought to these people,
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even though what appears to be being brought to them
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is the institution of prostitution, social diseases, slavery, madness, and death. But in fact, no, that isn’t it.
00:28:08 ►
It’s civilization. It’s a set of reasonable values. Well, the consequences of working out
00:28:17 ►
the reasonable values that were exported into the colonial world throughout the 18th and 19th century, the consequence of that is the appalling contradiction presented by modernity,
00:28:32 ►
where the major portion of real wealth of great nations
00:28:39 ►
is shoveled into a standing crop of weaponry,
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which had better never be used, because if it is used,
00:28:48 ►
it spells Armageddon. If it’s not used, it’s simply the worst investment anybody ever dreamed up.
00:28:57 ►
So this kind of betrayal of language and use of scapegoats.
00:29:09 ►
See, that’s what was happening with the United States vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.
00:29:12 ►
The scapegoat, the godless communist.
00:29:18 ►
It’s what was happening in the Putumayo between the rubber barons and the Indians they were exploiting. They thought they were civilizing them.
00:29:21 ►
So the imaging of the world gives permission for various kinds of relationships to it, and people never question.
00:29:33 ►
You know, once they pledge allegiance to a given linguistic model of reality, then that absolves all necessity for further thought. This is what Goebbels understood so perfectly.
00:29:48 ►
You repeat and you repeat and you repeat.
00:29:51 ►
And then when people ask themselves in the privacy of their own mind the moral question,
00:29:57 ►
your answer is on the surface waiting to be heard.
00:30:01 ►
Goebbels was the first person to create a system where sitting in an office in
00:30:07 ►
Berlin, he could throw a switch and speak to the German people. And McLuhan talked a lot about this,
00:30:17 ►
the notion of the creation of the public. What is the public? It’s something that comes out of print culture. It’s post-medieval. It’s a phenomenon that can only exist in the presence of newspapers, essentially. That’s what gave it its boost. from the democratic notion of the people
00:30:45 ►
because the public is this body of quote-unquote informed opinion.
00:30:51 ►
But this informed opinion is tremendously subject
00:30:56 ►
to whim, pressure, propaganda, and distortion.
00:31:02 ►
I mean, I don’t know how many of you have been following
00:31:04 ►
because we’re so isolated here,
00:31:06 ►
but what is going on in China
00:31:08 ►
is right now totally Orwellian.
00:31:12 ►
People, films are being watched in darkened rooms.
00:31:16 ►
People identified,
00:31:18 ►
drag, located, dragged forward,
00:31:21 ►
forced to recant
00:31:24 ►
whatever accounts they gave of the violence.
00:31:26 ►
These film clips are being shown side by side on the evening news,
00:31:32 ►
where three weeks ago we were hearing that the army would never attack the beloved students.
00:31:40 ►
Now the army is patriotically rounding up dissidents, hooligans, bandit elements,
00:31:46 ►
and those who would destroy the compact between the party and the people.
00:31:51 ►
This is just a shift in language.
00:31:53 ►
Remember the scene in 1984 where the party hack is giving the speech,
00:32:01 ►
and midway through the speech he’s handed a telegram on the podium
00:32:05 ►
that tells him that the enemy has changed.
00:32:08 ►
It’s no longer Oceania.
00:32:11 ►
They’ve made peace with Oceania
00:32:13 ►
and have begun bombing Eurasia, the other state.
00:32:18 ►
And in mid-stride, he doesn’t even have to end a paragraph.
00:32:28 ►
stride. He doesn’t even have to end a paragraph. He can just turn the language and plow off in another direction. Well, is there any cure for this, or are we simply the prisoners,
00:32:37 ►
each of us in our own way, of people smarter than ourselves? Well, not really, I think, because outside the domain of language is some kind of domain of authentic feeling.
00:33:05 ►
thousands of words for technological processes, widgets, and what have you, our vocabulary of feeling comprises about ten words.
00:33:11 ►
You know, love, hate, disgust, revulsion, obsession, like that.
00:33:18 ►
Yet, in the same way that we are capable of this very intensely modulated brain state that translates
00:33:28 ►
itself into small mouth noises, we need to be aware of an internal horizon of self-perception
00:33:38 ►
that is extremely rich and complicated and shifting all the time.
00:33:46 ►
Now that’s who we actually are.
00:33:49 ►
That is not the top-down values of the culture that we wear like clothing.
00:33:56 ►
That’s who we are.
00:33:58 ►
This is what McLuhan said when he said we wear culture like an overcoat.
00:34:04 ►
It’s something sold to us.
00:34:06 ►
You go out and buy it and you try it on.
00:34:09 ►
If Time magazine doesn’t fit you, maybe The Economist will.
00:34:13 ►
If neither fits, well, try the Journal of Foreign Affairs.
00:34:17 ►
You’ll find an overcoat that fits,
00:34:19 ►
and then that will become part of your culture.
00:34:23 ►
I saw the cartoon in The New Yorker last night,
00:34:25 ►
the well-dressed man and his wife leaving a party,
00:34:30 ►
and he’s saying to her,
00:34:31 ►
how can we relate to people who belong to the Book of the Month Club?
00:34:36 ►
You know, these are strong cultural disparities.
00:34:44 ►
So to overcome culture, really,
00:34:48 ►
which I view as provisional and semi-toxic,
00:34:54 ►
there has to be a way back to bedrock,
00:34:58 ►
to something that is satisfyingly transcendental
00:35:03 ►
in an immediate sense. in an immediate sense.
00:35:07 ►
In an immediate sense.
00:35:09 ►
So it cannot be a philosophy, as far as I’m concerned.
00:35:14 ►
Maybe philosophies work for the more rarefied among us,
00:35:18 ►
and they have the consolation of, I don’t know,
00:35:23 ►
Episcopalianism, Orthodox Judaism,
00:35:25 ►
Logical Positivism,
00:35:27 ►
whatever trip they’ve got running.
00:35:29 ►
But I’ve always found philosophy to be recreational
00:35:33 ►
and won’t really serve.
00:35:36 ►
Well, so then what is there?
00:35:39 ►
First of all, there is nature.
00:35:43 ►
Nature silently attended is still a modality
00:35:50 ►
that is beyond the reach of the language of most of us
00:35:55 ►
and of those of us who need it most fortuitously
00:36:00 ►
because we have the smallest vocabulary for its description.
00:36:05 ►
So when we go into nature,
00:36:08 ►
it’s a flirtation with a kind of iridescence.
00:36:13 ►
It’s a search for, I mean I blush to use such a word,
00:36:19 ►
but a lost innocence, which most of us associate with childhood.
00:36:24 ►
Some of us had terrible childhood, so we just associate it with the lost paradise of Eden or a utopia.
00:36:33 ►
But in nature, there is an implicate order.
00:36:50 ►
implicate order there is uh the bedrock out of which the human iridescence springs and human culture is an extremely evanescent transitory and uh non-equilibrium kind of condition. I mean, the pulse beat of this planet
00:37:05 ►
is measured in millions of years.
00:37:09 ►
Culture is a phenomenon of the last 40,000 years,
00:37:14 ►
and that’s generous.
00:37:16 ►
So culture has about it
00:37:19 ►
this miraculous, instantaneous,
00:37:23 ►
and almost intrusive quality
00:37:26 ►
against the background of the rest of the body of nature.
00:37:31 ►
But going into nature is not simply a prescription for joining the Sierra Club.
00:37:37 ►
What going into nature means is taking seriously the alchemical faith
00:37:45 ►
that preceded the positivist flowering of science
00:37:50 ►
and looking into the heart of matter
00:37:54 ►
with the expectation of encountering a mystery.
00:37:59 ►
Now, in the most practical sense,
00:38:01 ►
what this has to mean is the psychedelic experience, hallucinogenic plans.
00:38:11 ►
It cannot mean anything else.
00:38:14 ►
Now, of course, we’re in the slightly uncomfortable position of having that be illegal.
00:38:21 ►
But that in itself should be a sufficient indication for most people that
00:38:28 ►
something is going on. I mean, my take on legality is essentially that of Charles Dickens,
00:38:35 ►
who was sort of an Edwardian anarchist, and his famous throwaway line on that was, the law is an ass.
00:38:46 ►
And, you know, it’s sadly true in this case.
00:38:50 ►
But I’m not really interested in it as a legal issue.
00:38:55 ►
I’m interested in it as a human rights issue, if you want to put it that way.
00:39:01 ►
In other words, my assumption is that in the same way that the Western mind reached a
00:39:08 ►
certain place where it recognized that slavery, whether it made economic sense or not, was morally
00:39:17 ►
insupportable, and in the same way then that a universal right to own property, if you’ve got the money, has been more or less institutionalized.
00:39:29 ►
And the oppression of women is now recognized as a kind of self-defeating strategy of male dominance.
00:39:37 ►
In the same way that these things have been signposts in the continuing history of human self-definition,
00:39:46 ►
so shall be the understanding that life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness
00:39:54 ►
in the age of modern pharmacology has to mean the right to control your own state of mind in the appropriate, you know,
00:40:06 ►
subject to the constraints of time, place, and manner,
00:40:09 ►
so forth and so on.
00:40:10 ►
So that’s enough about the sociopolitical end of it.
00:40:14 ►
What is more interesting is the thing in itself,
00:40:20 ►
what it is,
00:40:21 ►
that it is something which our cultural biases,
00:40:26 ►
reaching clear back to the phonetic alphabet,
00:40:29 ►
and to the male dominance, the fear that societies run along the lines of male dominance,
00:40:37 ►
have of boundary dissolution.
00:40:40 ►
I mean, for a thousand years in Western civilization,
00:40:43 ►
the only boundary dissolution that was socially sanctioned was getting plastered.
00:40:50 ►
And that appears to have been specifically for the purpose of getting laid.
00:40:55 ►
I mean, as far as research can tell us, for a thousand years nobody got laid who wasn’t stone drunk because everyone was such a paragon of social rectitude.
00:41:07 ►
Well, I mean, it’s truer than you think.
00:41:11 ►
Alcohol is clearly a medium for permission
00:41:14 ►
in a Calvinist milieu.
00:41:19 ►
Well, I could talk about this in all kinds of different ways.
00:41:23 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:41:24 ►
I talked about scapegoats, and I talked about the misuse of language.
00:41:29 ►
I suppose since I got that deep into it, I might as well say what I’m thinking,
00:41:34 ►
which is that the drug issue now looms as an obvious new horror.
00:41:42 ►
I mean, it has all the trappings of the communist under the bed.
00:41:45 ►
I mean, I have not yet heard crack cocaine referred to as godless, but any day I think
00:41:51 ►
the connection will be made that this is a godless drug. The problem here is,
00:41:59 ►
again, a problem of language. We have one concept, drug.
00:42:05 ►
It moves from aspirin to heroin through LSD and on into television.
00:42:13 ►
These things can all be spoken of as drugs.
00:42:16 ►
So then what this means immediately is somebody has stacked the rhetorical deck
00:42:22 ►
against a reasonable discussion of the matter
00:42:25 ►
because our vocabulary is so impoverished.
00:42:29 ►
I mean, are we to believe that we need the same policy for television as we need for heroin?
00:42:36 ►
Are we to believe that psychedelic psychotherapy is to be treated
00:42:42 ►
with the same hand that resolves the crack cocaine
00:42:49 ►
issue. So while the government squawks
00:42:52 ►
education, no education is taking place. Rather, what is
00:42:56 ►
taking place is a poisoning of the linguistic
00:43:00 ►
domain in which we will then be expected to forge a solution.
00:43:07 ►
So what I’ve tried to say on this issue,
00:43:11 ►
and some of you who saw this month’s Mother Jones may have noticed
00:43:15 ►
that they put me in there, more picture than text,
00:43:20 ►
which tells you something about an age of symbols.
00:43:23 ►
which tells you something about an age of symbols.
00:43:31 ►
But what I’ve tried to say is that we need to define drugs operationally.
00:43:34 ►
We need to say what it is we don’t like,
00:43:40 ►
and then we need to find out what it is that does what we don’t like.
00:43:48 ►
Okay, what is it we don’t like? I submit to you that what we don’t like about drugs is unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior. Unexamined, obsessive, habitual behavior.
00:43:59 ►
Meaning, you know, somebody’s into something and by God, if you get in their way when they’re on their way to
00:44:05 ►
it you’re in trouble they have they do not question their obsession they indulge their
00:44:14 ►
obsession and they will tolerate no discussion of it so unexamined habitual obsessive behavior
00:44:21 ►
is extremely objectionable to all of us i think i mean we we call anything
00:44:27 ►
that we don’t like we call it uh robot like automaton unthinking zombie so forth and so on
00:44:38 ►
well um imagine if uh our partners in the new global materialism, the Japanese, had introduced into this country at the end of World War II a drug which within a few years made such deep inroads into the American population that people were spending an average of five hours a day loaded on this drug.
00:45:07 ►
What would we think?
00:45:08 ►
We would think that it was a crime against a culture on the scale of Auschwitz.
00:45:15 ►
But as a matter of fact, we did this to ourselves.
00:45:19 ►
Television, introduced at the close of World War II,
00:45:23 ►
has become a form of electronic heroin.
00:45:28 ►
And it isn’t even your trip.
00:45:30 ►
They don’t even let you go on your own trip.
00:45:33 ►
You get a trip designed on Madison Avenue
00:45:36 ►
to sell this year’s model of the Crapmobile
00:45:43 ►
or whatever else is being pushed. So unioningly and even as i speak i’m
00:45:50 ►
sure there are people in this audience who are revolted at my lack of patriotism and love for
00:45:55 ►
an american institution of such nobility and depth as tv well you know where I pulled back from TV? Really pulled back from it? It was when I
00:46:07 ►
made a mild knock on TV and someone in the audience said, well, you can say anything you
00:46:14 ►
want about television, but you must admit that it’s given our children a wonderful education education concerning nature, anyway, pursuing the theme of operationally
00:46:27 ►
defining drugs, to give us a little more
00:46:31 ►
linguistic scope,
00:46:34 ►
psychedelics, in contrast to
00:46:39 ►
television and heroin,
00:46:43 ►
dissolve habitual patterns of activity
00:46:48 ►
and promote examination of motives
00:46:54 ►
and allow a restructuring of habit.
00:47:00 ►
Before LSD was made illegal,
00:47:04 ►
back in the 60s, very respectable psychologists such as Humphrey Osmond and Hoffer were obtaining 40% cure rate of chronic alcoholism with one high dose exposure. Well, now understand, this doesn’t mean
00:47:31 ►
that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. I mean, if you think that, you don’t know anything about how drugs
00:47:37 ►
work. That 40% cure on one high dose exposure to LSD of alcoholism means that this person took this psychedelic,
00:47:47 ►
it dissolved their boundaries, it dissolved their defenses, they came face to face with the fact
00:47:53 ►
that they were killing themselves, and when they came down, they reached into their bowels
00:47:58 ►
and found enough intestinal fortitude to chop it off.
00:48:10 ►
Well, this is real, this is the dream of all other therapies.
00:48:16 ►
Now, AA achieves this, but at the cost of closing the mind.
00:48:22 ►
You know, a truly devoted graduate of AA does not have an open mind on the drug issue because they have been taught that
00:48:28 ►
opening your mind even a little bit may lead you back to the bottle. Well, they’re trying to solve
00:48:34 ►
a personal dilemma in the context of neurosis. I’m sympathetic to that. But in the meantime,
00:48:41 ►
the rest of us have to try to make sense of these extremely complex issues
00:48:48 ►
because the transcendent, which is what we cannot seem to find
00:48:57 ►
and what we are strangling for want of,
00:49:01 ►
lies precisely in the direction of this forbidden domain.
00:49:08 ►
What are we going to do about it?
00:49:10 ►
In other words, authentic, boundary-dissolving, internal hierophany
00:49:17 ►
does in fact reliably occur in the presence of these plants and compounds.
00:49:25 ►
But nobody knows what to do about it.
00:49:28 ►
We have become so accustomed to seeking the answer
00:49:31 ►
that even as a community,
00:49:34 ►
we have a lot of trouble figuring out how you just face the answer,
00:49:40 ►
how you come to terms with the options that are actually available.
00:49:47 ►
Well, I’ve talked about it today in a slightly more political context
00:49:51 ►
because when you hang out in the baths with these State Department people,
00:49:55 ►
it’s like a virus in the water.
00:49:58 ►
I mean, you find yourself raving about triage, Saudi uprisings, infrastructures.
00:50:06 ►
There’s just no cure for it.
00:50:09 ►
Are there questions?
00:50:13 ►
Yes.
00:50:14 ►
So the question is about sexuality and the relationship of sex to drugs.
00:50:20 ►
Tim Leary, he made a great case for sex and psychedelics. Every time they would say that LSD breaks chromosomes, he would say that it causes orgasms that last, and then he would add a greater increment of time as the propaganda war required to hold the numbers steady on both sides.
00:50:43 ►
hold the numbers steady on both sides.
00:50:49 ►
Certainly sex under psychedelics is quite astonishing,
00:50:53 ►
although psychedelics without sex is so astonishing, it’s perhaps an embarrassment of riches to pile it on.
00:51:04 ►
The analogy between sex and psychedelics that I think is the cogent one
00:51:09 ►
and is very few people go through life without ever brushing up against sexuality. I mean,
00:51:20 ►
you have to have a truly bizarre biography for it to never come and get you.
00:51:26 ►
On the other hand, it is not only possible,
00:51:29 ►
but millions and millions of people do go from the cradle to the grave
00:51:35 ►
without ever having a psychedelic experience.
00:51:40 ►
Well, to my mind, this is just an instance of an appalling infantilism
00:51:49 ►
that is culturally sanctioned.
00:51:52 ►
I mean, the culture not only doesn’t care if you never find out about this
00:51:57 ►
and remain forever immature, virgin, good word.
00:52:07 ►
The society, not only does it not care,
00:52:09 ►
it’s specifically interested in seeing that you don’t have this experience.
00:52:13 ►
Well, it’s part of the birthright.
00:52:16 ►
This is what religion was
00:52:19 ►
for the first million years
00:52:21 ►
before it fell into the hands of men
00:52:24 ►
who insist on wearing dresses, you know,
00:52:29 ►
it was the celebration of an ecstatic reality that could be coaxed out of a magical relationship
00:52:38 ►
with nature. I mean, and it’s still there. The portals are still there. Your RS-232 outlet into hyperspace is still in place, even though, you know, nobodies may have plugged in in your family line since Alaric burned Elusus. Nevertheless, the hard wiring is there, the self-recognition. We are children without this, and not in the sense of innocent, but in the sense of infantile, because this is part of the birthright. How can anyone else decide for someone else
00:53:26 ►
that access to the transcendental reality shall be barred?
00:53:31 ►
I mean, if somebody somewhere in the world puts a lien on a religion,
00:53:36 ►
people are waving their arms in outrage.
00:53:39 ►
This is deemed to be one of the most fundamental kinds of interference
00:53:43 ►
with the dignity of the individual.
00:53:46 ►
Well, but if your religion involves the practical accessing of the transmundane
00:53:52 ►
through means sanctioned by millennia of usage,
00:53:58 ►
I mean, I’m not an advocate for everything that rolls out of the laboratory.
00:54:03 ►
I’m an advocate for things sanctioned by millennia
00:54:07 ►
of usage and to have a profane government interpose itself between you and that reality
00:54:14 ►
why it’s ludicrous you just have to read your thorough to know what you do in that case and
00:54:20 ►
if you don’t have time for thorough i’ll tell I’ll tell you, you just ignore it. It’s a bunch of baloney.
00:54:26 ►
That’s a completely out-of-hand move on the part of the oppressor-dominator mentality.
00:54:35 ►
So, sex took me on a trip there, but I hope you liked the first part of the answer.
00:54:41 ►
Yeah.
00:54:42 ►
We can’t all be stanley uh you know we can’t all be alfred
00:54:49 ►
russell wallace we can’t all be uh bjorn borg so people opt for vicarious uh sensation i don’t know
00:55:00 ►
where this is going uh because the technology is to carry it a great distance are far advanced.
00:55:09 ►
This comes to a very interesting question,
00:55:12 ►
which boils down to, in its most cogent form,
00:55:19 ►
the question, is man good?
00:55:22 ►
Or, what is man?
00:55:28 ►
Because what we appear to be moving toward is a technological domain where we will be able to be whatever we want to be and you know it’s a litmus test for
00:55:37 ►
what we want to be i mean if you could be whatever you wanted to be, would you watch triple X rated movies
00:55:45 ►
every waking moment?
00:55:47 ►
How many people would?
00:55:49 ►
This is the great fear that the dominators have
00:55:52 ►
about the drugs.
00:55:54 ►
Their position is,
00:55:56 ►
if drugs were legal,
00:55:57 ►
everybody would be a junkie.
00:56:00 ►
A cheerful view of human nature.
00:56:03 ►
You know?
00:56:04 ►
They’re saying, you know, you want to legalize these things?
00:56:06 ►
Don’t you understand what it would be like?
00:56:09 ►
Well, I, as a user of drugs, am insulted by the implication.
00:56:17 ►
The government has never been a major factor in the decisions I made about my program of ingestion. And I think that it’s
00:56:29 ►
preposterous to suggest that the moral rectitude of the government stands between a dope-crazed
00:56:36 ►
population and the object of its fondest desires. I think it’s all in language.
00:56:52 ►
If a gram of cocaine costs what a tube of airplane glue costs,
00:56:58 ►
you don’t see a lot of gentlemen with neatly trimmed gray beards driving Porsches with airplane glue in their fur.
00:57:01 ►
It just doesn’t happen because it’s tacky. It’s tasteless.
00:57:08 ►
Drugs are very subject to the images in language. One of the funny things that goes on in,
00:57:15 ►
it may have changed now, but the last time I was in the Amazon, in the lowland Amazon,
00:57:21 ►
they grow coca, but it’s not part of the huge criminal syndicates that grow the highland
00:57:28 ►
coca, which is much stronger. So we go up these rivers, hundreds of miles up these jungle rivers,
00:57:34 ►
and people are growing coca, and they invite you to chew coca with them. And the moment that there is any rapport established,
00:57:48 ►
they want to go on this rap about how,
00:57:50 ►
this is not a drug.
00:57:53 ►
I know you think this is a drug.
00:57:54 ►
This is not a drug.
00:57:55 ►
This is a food.
00:57:57 ►
This is making us strong.
00:57:59 ►
This allows us to work.
00:58:02 ►
Without this, we would be nothing.
00:58:07 ►
Well, what he’s saying is, you know, adopt my language so that you can see this reality as we see it.
00:58:12 ►
And in fact, they’re quite right.
00:58:13 ►
I mean, you can chew coca for weeks on end,
00:58:17 ►
and when you leave the Amazon and fly home, it’s no big deal.
00:58:22 ►
All this, you know, the most virulent family of addicting drugs is always
00:58:28 ►
presented i mean crack has changed it a little bit the classic virulent addicting drugs are
00:58:35 ►
the opiates well opium was known for 3 000 years before anyone noticed that it was addicting.
00:58:46 ►
The earliest known account of addiction is in 1603, William Playfair.
00:58:54 ►
So for thousands of years, opium had been used and not been recognized as addictive.
00:58:59 ►
Now, you know, you have millions of people running around thinking that if they get within
00:59:03 ►
several feet of it, Satan will sink his claws into them.
00:59:08 ►
This is all a grand silliness.
00:59:11 ►
And not that heroin addiction is not a problem.
00:59:14 ►
I don’t want to imply that.
00:59:16 ►
But what I’m trying to say is the way we see these things, the way we image them, is what gives them their power. Does that do it for you?
00:59:29 ►
Other comments?
00:59:31 ►
Why hadn’t it been shown that it was addictive? Because it was part of the culture?
00:59:37 ►
No, because opium really isn’t terribly addictive. I mean, the only time opium, the only time in history that opium was turned into a
00:59:47 ►
social problem was in the 19th century. Yes, just to review your history for you for a moment,
00:59:56 ►
in the 1840s, a series of international incidents went on in the Far east that have come to be called the opium war well what was the opium
01:00:07 ►
war about the british east india company which was nothing more than the profit making arm of
01:00:15 ►
british imperialism the british east india company had created a huge distribution system for tea.
01:00:30 ►
Tea was grown in Ceylon, and they had very advanced ships for that time,
01:00:35 ►
over 200 of them, and they had coal, they had facilities from Aden and Port Said,
01:00:44 ►
and all of this was maintained at great expense for the tea trade. Facilities from Aden and Port Said,
01:00:49 ►
and all of this was maintained at great expense for the tea trade.
01:00:52 ►
Well, they were so efficient at producing tea that they created an economic collapse of tea around 1840.
01:00:57 ►
So the board of directors of the British India Company got together,
01:01:01 ►
and they said, we have all these ships.
01:01:04 ►
Tea is worth nothing uh what are
01:01:07 ►
we going to do and then someone said well why don’t we grow opium in goa which is in india
01:01:16 ►
south of bombay on the west coast of india why don’t we grow opium in bombay and we’ll sell it
01:01:23 ►
in china and they said well that’s a good idea what does the chinese government think about this raw opium in Bombay and we’ll sell it in China.
01:01:26 ►
And they said, well, that’s a good idea.
01:01:29 ►
What does the Chinese government think about this?
01:01:33 ►
So they inquired and the Chinese government told them to get lost, that they weren’t interested in having raw opium sold at dockside
01:01:38 ►
by British traders in Chinese cities.
01:01:42 ►
Well, they went back to the foreign office and the wheels turned
01:01:48 ►
and gunboat diplomacy
01:01:51 ►
was used to force the Chinese
01:01:55 ►
to open their doors to opium.
01:01:58 ►
Opium had been known in China
01:02:00 ►
for thousands of years
01:02:01 ►
as an obscure item in the Materia medica, but it had never been a
01:02:07 ►
social vice. From 1840 on, tens of thousands of tons of opium at rock-bottom prices were unloaded,
01:02:17 ►
produced by Indian cheap labor at immense profit to the East India Company, and unloaded in China.
01:02:26 ►
So, you know, we think that governments,
01:02:29 ►
this stance of being the keeper of moral values
01:02:34 ►
that is affected by government in the so-called drug war
01:02:38 ►
is just another convenient foil,
01:02:42 ►
because when it suits government’s purpose it deals dope certainly you know the
01:02:51 ►
cocaine trade could only exist with the connivance of the central intelligence agency i mean if you
01:02:58 ►
don’t believe that you don’t understand how it works out there because it’s just as plain as the nose on your face.
01:03:07 ►
I mean, where do you get a half a billion dollars in a hurry
01:03:09 ►
if you’ve got to outfit a rebel army
01:03:12 ►
and topple a socialist,
01:03:16 ►
democratic socialist government somewhere?
01:03:19 ►
Well, the only place you get a half a billion dollars
01:03:21 ►
or a hundred million even in a hurry
01:03:24 ►
is you take a flyer on
01:03:26 ►
drugs the coat the original cocaine epidemic was practically promoted by the media because coke was
01:03:36 ►
thought to be this rather fashionable little upper it wasn’t until people had been doing it for five or six years and exhibiting signs of madness, breakdown, and physical dissolution of the middle of their face that people began to catch on that it’s not such a good thing.
01:03:56 ►
And then, of course, crack cocaine, that was not hatched by the agency.
01:04:00 ►
That was just the perverseness of human ingenuity that could take a problem and
01:04:06 ►
turn it into a real problem. Remember the great heroin epidemics of the past after the Vietnam
01:04:13 ►
War? Well, you should look at the police statistics on crack. Looking at the statistics as they now
01:04:21 ►
stand, it’s like there were no drugs before crack.
01:04:26 ►
Crime levels were so low relative to what they are now.
01:04:30 ►
Burglaries, assaults were so rare.
01:04:34 ►
And yet when those events were going on,
01:04:36 ►
the great heroin epidemic of the 1970s and so forth,
01:04:39 ►
we were asked to believe that society was being ripped apart at the seams.
01:04:45 ►
asked to believe, you know, that society was being ripped apart at the seams. So it’s all very relative and it’s all according to who it serves. How do you choose a drug? Is that
01:04:53 ►
what you’re saying? No, what I would say is, you know, there are three criteria to consider
01:05:01 ►
when you’re thinking about drugs.
01:05:09 ►
Does it have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry?
01:05:13 ►
In other words, drugs, you don’t want it to be invasive. You don’t want it to insult the brain.
01:05:16 ►
You don’t want to insult the brain physically with a toxin.
01:05:21 ►
Well, how do you tell?
01:05:23 ►
Well, a very good way to tell is to ask the question, how long does
01:05:28 ►
a drug last? A drug that lasts 14 hours is clearly more invasive and more toxic than a drug that
01:05:38 ►
lasts two hours, because what this turnaround time to get back to the baseline of consciousness is an indicator of
01:05:50 ►
is how much affinity enzyme systems already present in the brain have for the incoming substance and to what degree they recognize it can de-animate it de-alkalate it and
01:06:07 ►
turn it into harmless and excretable byproducts so you want a drug that is uh that very quickly
01:06:15 ►
returns you to the baseline of consciousness and there should be no hangover no residuum
01:06:21 ►
this is why alcohol is obviously you you know, people feel like danced on
01:06:26 ►
something or other the next day, because this is a systemic poison, you know. And so that’s the
01:06:35 ►
first criteria. How close an affinity to neurotransmitters and neuroregulators does it have? Another consideration is, is it synthetic or natural?
01:06:51 ►
Now, people argue with this one because people are, in my humble opinion,
01:06:58 ►
quite lumpen about granting a distinction between the synthetic and the natural.
01:07:04 ►
I mean, they just say, well, you the synthetic and the natural.
01:07:09 ►
I mean, they just say, well, you know, we’re natural.
01:07:10 ►
That’s what people say.
01:07:12 ►
We’re natural, so anything that comes out of the lab,
01:07:14 ►
that ought to be natural too.
01:07:16 ►
Well, would you mainline plutonium?
01:07:17 ►
I don’t think so. So I’ll make the argument for natural substances on two levels.
01:07:25 ►
One, fairly rational, which is that a substance that occurs in plants
01:07:32 ►
has been use-tested in living systems for millions and millions of years.
01:07:38 ►
It is a constituent of organic life.
01:07:42 ►
The proof of that is that it is present there.
01:07:45 ►
So that alone argues that it has a certain affinity that places it above a synthetic.
01:07:57 ►
The more airy-fairy of my metaphors on this issue is that I think I really, especially in this area,
01:08:09 ►
give great credit to Rupert Sheldrake and his idea of the morphogenetic field.
01:08:14 ►
I really think that, let’s contrast two drugs, a synthetic drug like ketamine,
01:08:30 ►
two drugs, a synthetic drug like ketamine, a pseudo-halocenogen, and a indole-halocenogen,
01:08:36 ►
a true halocenogen like psilocybin. Well, psilocybin has been taken for thousands and thousands of years by tens of thousands, perhaps millions of people. It has a morphogenetic field that it and in a way when you take a drug the
01:08:48 ►
drug takes you i mean the drug is opening and you are opening and there is a dimension of recognition
01:08:57 ►
about which it’s rather difficult to say very much. And the third criteria
01:09:05 ►
in thinking about
01:09:07 ►
the possibility of substances
01:09:10 ►
as a tool for spiritual growth
01:09:14 ►
is does it have a history of human usage?
01:09:19 ►
Does it have a long history of human usage?
01:09:22 ►
That’s in a way the most important of all.
01:09:27 ►
No synthetic has a long history of human usage,
01:09:31 ►
and most things with a long history of human usage
01:09:34 ►
will turn out to come from a plant.
01:09:37 ►
So what you need is all these people who went before.
01:09:42 ►
They proved that substances like psilocybin,
01:09:48 ►
ibogaine, harmaline, mescaline,
01:09:52 ►
the experience of the human community over time
01:09:57 ►
proves that these things do not cause birth defects,
01:10:12 ►
cause birth defects, miscarriages, tumors, blindness, madness, ulcers, so forth and so on.
01:10:18 ►
In other words, since we are not allowed to legally investigate anything, since we are not allowed protocols for human investigation of anything, old or new,
01:10:27 ►
protocols for human investigation of anything old or new, then really the only human data available is ethnographic data, data on obscure Amazonian tribes and rituals conducted in the
01:10:39 ►
Mexican highlands. Well, to my mind, it isn’t. i’m not an advocate of drugs i’m an advocate of psychedelics
01:10:49 ►
i’m drugs that are not psychedelic interest me approximately as much as i assume they interest
01:10:56 ►
everybody else i mean i sometimes do them certain ones i abuse caffeine most notably I can’t abuse alcohol
01:11:07 ►
because I’m a migraineur
01:11:08 ►
but
01:11:09 ►
the psychedelic thing
01:11:12 ►
is a special category
01:11:14 ►
and a special political issue
01:11:16 ►
I read a book recently
01:11:18 ►
I mentioned this to some of you
01:11:20 ►
by Arnold Trebek
01:11:22 ►
who’s one of these think tank
01:11:24 ►
east coast type policy formulating by Arnold Trebek, who’s one of these think tank, East Coast-type policy-formulating,
01:11:29 ►
consultant-to-the-government-type characters.
01:11:32 ►
And clearly a good guy on our side, advocating legalization
01:11:38 ►
and meeting the objections to the legalization of hard narcotics
01:11:43 ►
with a number of interesting arguments.
01:11:45 ►
The book is like over 600 pages long.
01:11:48 ►
Well, when you look in the index,
01:11:52 ►
there’s nothing about LSD,
01:11:54 ►
nothing about psychedelics,
01:11:56 ►
nothing about MDMA, psilocybin, DMT,
01:11:59 ►
DPT, abogaine, STP, none of this.
01:12:04 ►
Apparently, they’re choosing to pretend that the issue of psychedelic therapy
01:12:10 ►
and the issue of the spiritual dimension that is accessible through plant chemistry,
01:12:16 ►
it’s too much even for the liberals to handle.
01:12:21 ►
They don’t even want to talk about it. They want to reluctantly announce that they have
01:12:28 ►
lost the war on drugs, and then, with great hand-wringing, legalize these things with the
01:12:36 ►
sense that now this surely will trigger the end of Western civilization as we know it. There is no sense of a dimension of hope, opportunity,
01:12:48 ►
clinical breakthrough, nothing like that.
01:12:52 ►
Yeah.
01:12:53 ►
Yes, the question is language and the fact that
01:12:58 ►
how does what I said about language relate to what I’ve said previously
01:13:03 ►
about the DMT state and why is it
01:13:06 ►
that some people come back speechless from these dimensions? I’m glad you asked this question,
01:13:13 ►
probably not because I’m going to answer it, but because it reminds me of something.
01:13:19 ►
In a way, it’s answering. I see language as an uncompleted program. Language is something which wants to be beheld, but is only heard. And so there is this tension. many grapplings with the DMT ecstasis,
01:13:46 ►
that I had the feeling that the place you break into there is a playpen.
01:13:57 ►
It’s an environment created by someone very strange
01:14:02 ►
who has a very curious notion of human psychology
01:14:06 ►
and it is an environment that they imagine
01:14:09 ►
would be reassuring to human beings.
01:14:14 ►
And I’ve stuck with this model for many, many years,
01:14:17 ►
the model of the playpen
01:14:19 ►
and that the elf machine,
01:14:22 ►
self-transforming elf machine entities
01:14:24 ►
were like toys.
01:14:26 ►
They were like attention-grabbing, colorful teaching devices
01:14:33 ►
to engage the attention of the human being that has just come across.
01:14:39 ►
Well, strange to say, the other night I was thinking about all of this,
01:14:44 ►
and a little piece was added,
01:14:48 ►
and I’ll try it out on you. I tried it out on somebody who’s quite sophisticated about DMT,
01:14:54 ►
and they said, that’s absolutely wrong. That is not what it is. But undaunted,
01:15:02 ►
but undaunted I’ll try it out on you
01:15:05 ►
as you go into the DMT state
01:15:08 ►
there is this question
01:15:10 ►
about the intent
01:15:12 ►
of these machine elves
01:15:14 ►
they’re funny
01:15:16 ►
they’re zany
01:15:18 ►
but you know how
01:15:20 ►
the Three Stooges
01:15:22 ►
cartoons operate,
01:15:25 ►
where there’s a lot of finger in the eye and mallet on the head stuff?
01:15:31 ►
So in this DMT place, there is this mad zaniness,
01:15:36 ►
this sense of a Bugs Bunny cartoon run amok kind of thing.
01:15:42 ►
And people who’ve had this experience say well you can’t
01:15:47 ►
trust these little guys or you have to be on your toes these are magical entities these are not
01:15:55 ►
love bunnies they’re little you know gnome tending toward demon and you don’t know where to draw the line.
01:16:07 ►
So thinking about this the other night,
01:16:09 ►
I tried to construct emotionally for myself
01:16:13 ►
a picture of a human situation
01:16:16 ►
that would give me the same feeling
01:16:21 ►
about what was going on
01:16:23 ►
as I have when I deal with the entities in the DMT thing.
01:16:28 ►
And it came to me instantly what it was
01:16:30 ►
and what the missing ambiance of it is
01:16:36 ►
that I’ve never included in a lecture.
01:16:39 ►
What’s going on, I’m sure,
01:16:42 ►
is that the aura of these little guys is that they’re sharp. They’re sharp.
01:16:51 ►
They’re funny. They’re zany. But they’re sharp. And I think what they are is they’re traders. And the whole funny emotion
01:17:05 ►
that invades the DMT exchange
01:17:09 ►
has to do with the possibility
01:17:11 ►
of getting screwed.
01:17:14 ►
Not getting killed,
01:17:16 ►
not being driven mad,
01:17:18 ►
but being taken.
01:17:20 ►
Being taken, quite literally.
01:17:23 ►
And these toys, which they offer,
01:17:27 ►
are trade goods, in effect.
01:17:31 ►
And what they are saying in that place is,
01:17:35 ►
what have you got?
01:17:37 ►
What have you got?
01:17:39 ►
Look at this. Look at this.
01:17:41 ►
What did you bring?
01:17:43 ►
What do you have to trade?
01:17:47 ►
Well, the opening lasts only a few minutes, and as the dialogue is getting started, the dimension closes upon itself. But this is,
01:17:55 ►
I think, the lost piece of the puzzle. This realization about the trader
01:18:08 ►
puzzle uh this realization about the trader cast a funny light on a on an incident which i will tell and that will be it for today it’s an example about communication from other dimensions
01:18:15 ►
and how it works it’s a story that i’ve told before but i still get a kick out of it. I was in Los Angeles having dinner at a not terribly fancy restaurant,
01:18:32 ►
but a neighborhood restaurant in Malibu with a bunch of people,
01:18:37 ►
among them my friend Ralph Abraham,
01:18:40 ►
and also among them a woman, a French movie producer.
01:18:47 ►
And we had been earlier at someone’s house talking about psychedelics and mushrooms
01:18:50 ►
and what I did and what my rap was.
01:18:53 ►
And so we were seated at this big table, about ten of us,
01:18:58 ►
and this woman was at my elbow,
01:19:00 ►
and she said,
01:19:02 ►
You say that the mushroom speaks, but I do not understand this speak what
01:19:09 ►
does it mean and I said well the mushroom has many personalities sometimes it uh has a very
01:19:20 ►
it it sort of presents itself like a pawnbroker.
01:19:25 ►
I said, you know that role that Rod Steiger played in the movie of that name?
01:19:31 ►
That irascible kind of personality is a personality of the mushroom.
01:19:37 ►
And she said, oh.
01:19:39 ►
And at that precise moment, Steiger stopped by the table to shake hands with everybody.
01:19:48 ►
I mean, so immediately thereafter that I was horrified that he had heard me make this reference to him.
01:19:57 ►
Well, so I was just, you know, and Ralph, who was sitting across the table and saw this whole thing go on, leaned across the table and said,
01:20:07 ►
You see, the mushroom is showing you that it can touch you anytime, anyplace, in ways that you could never imagine.
01:20:20 ►
That’s all, folks.
01:20:21 ►
That’s all, folks.
01:20:27 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:20:30 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:20:36 ►
Now, if you are unlucky enough to be living in the U.S. right now,
01:20:41 ►
I suspect that you also thought about the screwheads in Washington when Terrence said,
01:20:45 ►
once they pledge allegiance to a given model of reality,
01:20:52 ►
then that absolves all necessity for further thought. And if that doesn’t describe the U.S.
01:20:57 ►
politicians right now, I don’t know what does. And while I have several other comments,
01:21:02 ►
some of which I guess I’ve actually been carrying forward for a couple weeks now,
01:21:05 ►
I’m going to have to let them wait a bit longer,
01:21:09 ►
simply because I just haven’t been able to kick this darn head cold,
01:21:15 ►
and it’s been sapping my energy to where I just don’t want to force myself to keep on talking right now.
01:21:21 ►
But never fear, I plan on being back to you with another podcast quite soon.
01:21:27 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.