373 - Thoughts About Gnosticism, Art, and Music

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKennna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“A single chemist can produce ten million hits [of LSD]. Well this is not some guy getting rich, this is about changing history, when you’re talking about ten million consciousness-expanding experiences.”

“One of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience is to see that it dissolves conventional wisdom. It dissolves adherence to group values, because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax. It shows the provisional nature of syntax.”

“Try and look at consciousness as a resource for want of which we are going mad.”

“And that what we really want, in the domain of planning, is an abandonment of ideology, that ideology is poisonous, all ideology is poisonous.”

“You just can’t go wrong as a heretic, because they’re always vindicated.”

“Permission for heresy is never a bad idea.”

“Television is not reality. Television is the cultural myth about reality.”

Books mentioned in this podcast
The Art of Seeing
by Aldous Huxley
Myth of Invariance: The Origin of the Gods, Mathematics and Music from the RG Veda to Plato
by Ernest G. McClain

Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth
by Giorgio de Santillana, Hertha von Dechen

Previous Episode §

372 - The Intentionality of Meaning

Next Episode §

374 - Bootstrapping Ourselves

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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And with me here in the salon today, at least they are here virtually, I should add, are David S. and Deviata.

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I hope I pronounced that close to right, anyhow.

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But both David and Deviata made donations to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon, and I thank you both very much.

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Thank you. that many people are finding here in the salon is actually not a new mind at all for those of us who have been together here for over eight years now.

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Yet, even after so much time, particularly in listening to Terrence McKenna,

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I still hear things that prompt yet more new ideas for me.

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So, let’s once again join Terrence McKenna, coming to us from the summer of 1989,

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and listen to what he has to say about a wide range of topics,

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including one of my favorites, heresy,

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where he states that permission for heresy is never a bad idea.

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Well, yesterday I talked for two hours uninterruptedly,

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so I’m hopeful that there will be a sufficient response to that that we can have

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some discussion about it today yeah I would bet that what he was intending to indicate by his description of it as a vine that grows close to the ground

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was what’s called sacrostema or ephedra.

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Both of these, you know, the closest thing to what I’m talking about is this native plant

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called Mormon tea in California.

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Do any of you know it? It has a kind of odd habit of growth,

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long and unbranching stems.

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This is one of the things that is always suggested,

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especially in the Kashmiri Shaivite tradition,

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as being the Soma source.

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It was more than that.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And it is a Soma substitute in the reenactment of the Vedic ceremonies.

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Really, it’s pretty unsatisfying to grapple with the Soma problem

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because if you’re true to the evidence

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that it’s hard to make it fit anything very well.

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This book I mentioned yesterday

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when I did the survey

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called Hauma and Harmaline by Flattery

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convinced me that I had been too quick

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to assume that Pergamon harmala alone couldn’t be a reliable hallucinogen.

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I never understood why Naranjo’s patients in his book The Healing Journey reported ayahuasca-like visions

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when he didn’t in fact give them ayahuasca,

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but he gave them harmaline.

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Now I understand that what I was in the dark about before

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was the fact that harmaline is not strongly hallucinogenic

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and that that’s what’s in Banisteriopsis capi,

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activating DMT,

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but not contributing to the hallucinogenic activity really. So it’s entirely possible that Soma was Pergamon harmala. If this is true it will be of great and it will inspire great smugness in certain quarters because when you check back through the Soma controversy,

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the very earliest suggestion by a Western scholar

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was a French character in 1701

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who said it is the giant Syrian roux,

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which so it well may seem to be.

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The thing that is so peculiar about Amanita muscaria is that the active principle passes out in your urine so that you can drink the urine a second time and obtain the intoxication. Well, this is a pretty extreme aspect to a rite.

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So you would expect that if

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this rite were being practiced

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by thousands of people

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and generating an entire literature,

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that this would be explicitly

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somewhere referred to in some way.

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And in fact, it’s impossible

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to torment the text of the Vedas to yield a convincing passage where urine and cattle are explicitly connected to Soma. It just isn’t there. this Avestan, Zend Avestan material, material generated by the religion of Zoroaster,

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that is actually antedates this Vedic material

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and says that all this talk of the pressings

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and the filters and all that

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only makes sense if Pergamon Harmala

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is what is being used.

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And so it may in fact be. Some of you have heard

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me talk about Mandaianism, which is this fascinating, very old cult in the Middle East.

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They say and said different things in their peregrinations through time, but they claimed to be that branch of original Christian intentionality

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that drew itself around John the Baptist.

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They were a baptismal cult pre-Christ, but just like 40 years before. And they then, in the diaspora,

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they were in Lebanon for a long time

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and they eventually made their way

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to the swamps of Iraq and Iran

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and what their fate there was,

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I have not heard.

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The last anthropology was done in the late 30s. but these people, Mandaeans, Sabians, have a mythology and an ontology of being that is very suggestive of the kind of psychedelic conceptions of the soul in the afterlife that is characterized by the

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Harmeen using groups in the Amazon. For instance, they have the notion of the double, the double

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that one meets at the end of life that comes to join with the departing soul. And interestingly, these people have

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this very strongly held notion of a parallel dimension, but not with a lot of value judgment

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on it as to that it is a superior or inferior plane of reality.

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In other words, it is simply accessible and different.

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This seems to me to suggest that there may have been Pergamon-Harmala use all across

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the Anatolian plateau and the Persian plain.

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plateau and the Persian plain. This is where this plant

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is still used in

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Mandaean ceremonies and in

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preparing the

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halma in the

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Parsi

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sacrifice. And that’s

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a very old religion that is

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pre-Zoroastrian. So

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you know the central motif

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of Iranian religion is

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undifferentiated light.

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This is what it’s all about.

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In the Tibetan pantheon, it is manifest as Amitabha, which is boundless light.

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Upame, uh, is light. Upame is boundless light.

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And this Iranian hypostatization of God

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moved out in all directions.

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It infected Mandaianism,

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Mandaian communities in Central Asia,

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in Samarkand and Khotan.

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And it was a major focus

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of the Hellenistic mystical thing,

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especially in certain cults.

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Well, that’s enough about Soma.

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This is all unresolved now, you see, because of Flattery’s book,

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because it was accepted that Soma was Amanita Muscaria simply on the weight

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of Wasson’s reputation and public relations skill, really. But the fact that nobody could

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ever get high from it just was an insurmountable barrier to the theory. So now there’s this

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other idea going around.

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I know LSD comes after all this and there’s something quite different. Can you say anything

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about that at all?

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You mean in its modern manifestation? Well, I talked yesterday about these naturally occurring forms of ergot hallucinogens LSD was invented by Albert

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Hoffman Swiss pharmaceutical chemist he was trying to invent drugs like pitocin, drugs which induce labor, because these ergonamine compounds

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are extremely efficient smooth muscle contractors.

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So they were exploring the possibility

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of a drug patent on a compound that would induce labor.

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And he discovered, and I won’t retell the story

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because I’m sure you all know it,

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it’s enshrined in the annals of psychedelic mythology,

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but of the famous bicycle ride through the streets of Basel

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where he slowly dawned on him that something strange was going on.

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But it was put away.

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This was in 37. It was put away on the shelf basically know, there was a lot of pressure on it.

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So really it only enjoyed 20 years as a legitimate object of scientific research.

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So not enough was found out about it.

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So not enough was found out about it.

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It was all… The astonishing thing about LSD is that it’s active in such small amounts, you know,

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that we talked about this yesterday, that one gamma is a millionth of a gram.

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And what a little bit this is.

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of a gram and what a little bit

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this is when you’re

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accustomed to measuring

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drugs in milligrams

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you know

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one milligram

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is a thousand gamma

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well very few drugs

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are active even at the one

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milligram level

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most drugs

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are active at the five to 15, some at hundreds of milligrams. And this spurred great hope and great imagination in terms of experimental strategies because people said what this appears to be is a it affects the mind

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very strongly in these tiny amounts so

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it appears that this is a doorway into

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understanding neurochemistry and what

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we have here is a either a synthetic

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neurotransmitter or then there was the

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bad guy theory which was that this was the so-called

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psychotomimetic. This was the idea that this metabolism of schizophrenics would be found

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to differ significantly from that of normals, and that the culprit would be found to be

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excess production of an LSD-like compound. Well, this is a reasonable hypothesis,

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and money was spent on it,

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but it never came to much.

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The data did not support anybody’s model

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of what was happening.

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DMT, because it is so spectacularly hallucinogenic

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and so rapidly returns you to the baseline of consciousness

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was early looked at as the possible schizogen

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but what they found was yes people do produce DMT in their brains normally

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and they do when they are institutionalized for schizophrenia

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and some schizophrenics have more than normals

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some normals have more than schizophrenics

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no conclusion can be drawn

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there appears to be no correlation

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between the presence of DMT and schizophrenia

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while this kind of research was going on

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LSD was breaking out of the laboratory

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and creating a social phenomenon

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that, you know, for good or ill,

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wafts its gentle waves against this shore

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to this day and hour.

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The thing about LSD that made it unique in that situation is that because you can theoretically

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get so many doses from a gram, it becomes a tool, a political tool, because a single chemist can

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produce 10 million hits. Well, this is not some guy getting rich.

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This is about changing history

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when you’re talking about 10 million

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consciousness-expanding experiences.

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10 million?

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There were only a million students

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in Tiananmen Square,

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and one guy could make 10 million hits

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in a 72-hour run.

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And there were dozens of these guys with

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different ethics and different levels of sophistication and dedication so it was

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like a situation where social enzymes pheromones signaling change in the hive structure were just overproduced.

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And of course there was a recidivist reaction to that.

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And that killed the goose

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as far as psychedelic research was concerned.

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When talking about these indoles,

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the thing that is important to

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notice that is not very often stressed

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is that the window of opportunity for

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research was so short. I mean, LSD was

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surfaced in the journals in 48. By 68, it

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was illegal worldwide.

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DMT was discovered in 1956 in Czechoslovakia.

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By 1968, it was illegal worldwide.

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Ibogaine was never studied at all

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and was made illegal in 1968.

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I mean, it never was studied by modern pharmacology.

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The last people who looked at it were in the 1920s.

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The LSD history we just covered, psilocybin discovered in 53, illegal by 68, so forth and so on.

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So to pretend, you know, that we fully explored psychedelics is like pretending that we fully explored the moon it is in fact a fairly

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apt metaphor since the curve of exploratory energy in these two dimensions followed each other

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fairly closely and nobody’s been back to the moon in a while and it would take 15 years

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if a decision a command decision were made today.

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And let’s hope that some kind of coming to grips with this psychedelic option is not so hard to reach.

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It doesn’t require the technological retooling, but it requires ideological retooling to be able to face it again.

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That’s the thing.

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It’s created a social revolution, hasn’t it, in a very short period of time?

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Yes, well, it was…

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If my notion that we should view these things as catalysts of means,

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catalysts of language expansion, then though there have been shamans throughout human history using hallucinogens, there’s never been a situation

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where hundreds of millions of people over a decade opened themselves up to that. No, it really put the spin on the situation.

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We’re still reeling from it.

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I don’t know if you’ve been here when we’ve looked at any of these maps,

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but it clearly shows that that’s when the great change came,

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that there was this recidivist upward-moving curve

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of conservative tendencies

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that precisely mirrored the Mycenaean breakup of late Minoan culture

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happening through the late 1960s.

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That that’s where the cultural cascade of effects began

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that we are reacting to

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in the same way that the classical world

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had to react to Hellenism.

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So, yeah, it made a revolution.

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There’s never been anything like it.

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They’ve never stopped congratulating themselves for getting the lid back on that

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one because those of us who were there could not imagine that you could get the lid back

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on it. It was a sobering lesson for those of us who have faith in the power of ideas because it’s just like this thing in China.

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You know, millions of people can march

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and great clarity can be forged in struggle.

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But, you know, when they come with the machine guns,

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the taste for politics turns bitter. And they always do come with machine guns, the taste for politics turns bitter.

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And they always do come with machine guns.

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This is the thing that we seem to have to learn over and over again

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about the hand that governs.

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But again, the thing is, you see,

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one of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience

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Again, the thing is, you see, one of the ways of modeling the psychedelic experience is to see it as that it dissolves conventional wisdom.

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It dissolves adherence to group values because it dissolves all structure, because it dissolves syntax. It shows the provisional nature of syntax.

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It shows the provisional nature of syntax.

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Well, how are you going to hold on to an ideology when the assembly language upon which the convention of ideology depends

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is dissolving before your eyes?

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And I think that was very scary, that kind of accelerated change.

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What I would hope is that we could turn psychology

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toward looking at these things

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and present it as an enhancement of creativity.

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Try and look at consciousness as a resource

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for want of which we are going mad because we clearly

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have the technological might, the computer power, the managerial skill, etc., etc., to

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straighten out the mess we’re in.

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But what we don’t have is the will, you know.

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We are just in the will department, a bunch of cannibals, and can’t seem to get hold of those levers and do anything about it. that has been allowed to go on throughout the whole course of Judeo-Christian civilization

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that has suppressed experiential access to the sacred.

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And in the absence of this experiential access to the sacred,

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then you get ideology and doctrine and dogma, and pontification,

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and do-or-die philosophies across the entire political, religious spectrum.

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And we’re very afraid to contemplate a restructuring of society

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that would actually restructure our own authenticity.

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When we talk about social restructuring, we see it in terms often of planting trees in the Amazon

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or getting, you know, figuring out a way to get a free market happening in the Soviet Union.

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Doubtless all these things need to be

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done, but

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the

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real immediate

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field where something can be done

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is probably in our own

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behavior, in our

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own commitment to some kind of

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authentic activity that

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leads out of this. Well, so

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for me that has meant

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trying to understand

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this hallucinogenic plant option

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because, you know, I take life seriously

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as a problem.

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I view it as a puzzle of some sort.

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I believe, I’ve seen things

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which cause me to believe that it’s

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some kind of a conundrum, a labyrinthine puzzle, a fitted together thing that if properly understood

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will deliver one. And, you know, I don’t know whether it’s my proclivity or my birth sign or whatever it is, but I have the faith that this is essentially an act of understanding.

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That it is not an act of, let us say, surrender or abandonment or fusion or its control.

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It’s an act of understanding that there is a way to break through

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and then say, aha, and I’m illuminated.

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I see what it is.

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How could I have not seen what it is?

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Now I see what it is.

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Well, the only thing which comes anywhere near these places for the common man

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are these relationships to these magical vegetables.

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are these relationships to these magical vegetables. I mean, it’s not satisfying to just read Meister Eckhart

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and Hildegard von Bingen and all these people

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because what their testimony is saying

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is that it is a birthright of us all, you know?

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I mean, we shouldn’t imagine ourselves

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as less than the best

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because if you do that,

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you have some kind of a loser’s scenario

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and who wants to have a loser’s scenario?

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Robert Anton Wilson said something like this.

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He said,

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I believe that the power elite rules the world

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and I define the power elite as myself and my friends.

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If you don’t define the power elite that way, then you have a loser’s scenario, and who wants that?

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So think of yourselves as the ruling elite and central party command structure of the global family,

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then act from there.

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I’ve been thinking about, was it you who asked the question about what should we do

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and is there something to be done?

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Yes, several people asked that.

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Early on.

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Yes.

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Well, I’ve been thinking about it because I wasn’t entirely satisfied with my answer.

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And I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, but here’s the state of play.

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It seems like what the problem is, is it’s a tension between immediacy and the desire to plan. And so I feel all these political obligations

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that it doesn’t seem right to say

00:26:49 ► §

that we should just watch the Tao flower

00:26:52 ► §

of the novelty wave carry us toward the arms

00:26:55 ► §

of the mother goddess at the end of the millennium.

00:26:58 ► §

We know that’s happening,

00:27:01 ► §

but shouldn’t we do something

00:27:03 ► §

while we’re waiting for that to happen and it seems to

00:27:07 ► §

me that maybe the answer is as simple as uh this slogan which somebody made up i don’t know who you

00:27:16 ► §

some of you may know who this slogan uh think globally act locally and that we have a tendency to want to go on crusade

00:27:28 ► §

because the world is in such a state

00:27:31 ► §

but planning is some kind of a demon

00:27:39 ► §

in a way

00:27:42 ► §

because our whole problem

00:27:45 ► §

is that we planned ourselves

00:27:47 ► §

into this situation

00:27:49 ► §

so instead of

00:27:51 ► §

feeding energy to this

00:27:53 ► §

global image

00:27:54 ► §

of a homeostatically

00:27:57 ► §

regulated culture

00:27:59 ► §

atmosphere

00:28:00 ► §

industrial base

00:28:02 ► §

economy so forth and so on

00:28:04 ► §

it seems like those large scale industrial base, economy, so forth and so on,

00:28:10 ► §

it seems like those large-scale control functions can be left to the collectivity,

00:28:14 ► §

to the marriage between the unconscious and the cybernetic coral reef,

00:28:20 ► §

and that what we really want in the domain of planning

00:28:23 ► §

is an abandonment of ideology.

00:28:27 ► §

That ideology is poisonous. All ideology is poisonous.

00:28:32 ► §

And that what we are, I hope, tending toward is a kind of evaporation of culture.

00:29:06 ► §

Evaporation of culture. Evaporation of culture as a product of ideology and its replacement with natural processes. In other words, that there is an obvious way to solve certain problems because it’s energy efficient, waste efficient, so forth and so on. In other words, that pragmatism,

00:29:09 ► §

if looked upon from the point of view of natural selection or something like that,

00:29:12 ► §

is a fairly profound principle.

00:29:16 ► §

So, boiling, I didn’t mean for this to be so long,

00:29:20 ► §

but what it comes out as then

00:29:22 ► §

is where we are most effective,

00:29:39 ► §

where we are most clear-eyed in sending energy correctly from ourselves to the world and receiving it back is in the immediate domain.

00:29:47 ► §

And that means in the immediate temporal domain, in the immediate financial domain, in the immediate spatial domain. And that when we aspire above that to this global control system, then it doesn’t work because it’s not really our role to function like that. And by us, I mean everybody,

00:30:05 ► §

because I was amazed to lie in the hot tubs this week

00:30:08 ► §

and listen to various people

00:30:10 ► §

planning the fates of millions of people,

00:30:14 ► §

discussing, you know,

00:30:15 ► §

where the economic zones in the Soviet Union

00:30:18 ► §

should be opened up,

00:30:19 ► §

how the diplomatic crisis in China should be resolved.

00:30:24 ► §

I mean, people who just routinely take it upon themselves

00:30:27 ► §

to run the world for the rest of us.

00:30:31 ► §

There’s a deeper level, this is a slight turn on this,

00:30:34 ► §

but there’s a deeper level to this idea of pragmatism,

00:30:39 ► §

which I was thinking about because I was thinking about yesterday’s lecture

00:30:44 ► §

and how it was a lot of information.

00:30:49 ► §

And I wondered what other lectures might be like that

00:30:52 ► §

that would be so full of information.

00:30:54 ► §

And then I thought I reviewed in my mind the history of art

00:30:58 ► §

from the point of view of realism.

00:31:02 ► §

You know, realism is this funny thing where people painted on their

00:31:10 ► §

bodies and scarified themselves and painted in styles that have been rediscovered in the 20th

00:31:18 ► §

century. Impressionism, symbolism, abstract expressionism.

00:31:33 ► §

We see all this in the cave paintings in Africa and in southern France and so forth and so on. But once the Greeks got their camp in order, they set off in this funny direction,

00:31:43 ► §

which was they wanted marble to be like flesh.

00:31:49 ► §

They did not want to symbolize the human form

00:31:53 ► §

or evoke it or make an image of it.

00:31:57 ► §

They wanted to find out what it was

00:32:01 ► §

by duplicating it exactly.

00:32:04 ► §

And they were able to do this and produced you know these

00:32:07 ► §

things which I don’t if any of you have visited the museum at the Parthenon or the Metropolitan

00:32:12 ► §

in New York City you get it from this Greek stuff I mean I think even if you’re pretty lumpen you

00:32:19 ► §

suddenly understand what art is about why people pay 11 million dollars for a piece of marble,

00:32:25 ► §

because what real genius is,

00:32:28 ► §

is you have to put out your hand to satisfy yourself

00:32:31 ► §

that this is not real breathing human flesh,

00:32:35 ► §

and these faces have minds behind them,

00:32:39 ► §

and when you stand and look in them,

00:32:40 ► §

you say, so this is what the thing about Greece is all about,

00:32:45 ► §

now I understand that some kind of magical thing.

00:32:50 ► §

Well, you know, Eleusis was this central focus

00:32:55 ► §

for the mystical intentionality of the Greek mind.

00:32:58 ► §

This ties in with this thing that William Blake said

00:33:02 ► §

about attend the minute particulars. Remember we

00:33:06 ► §

talked about that, about

00:33:07 ► §

he said this was the

00:33:08 ► §

basis of poetry and

00:33:10 ► §

understanding reality was

00:33:11 ► §

attention to the minute

00:33:13 ► §

particulars. So there is

00:33:16 ► §

a way of opening beyond

00:33:20 ► §

symbols, beyond language

00:33:23 ► §

and we have, we call it realism, but we don’t recognize it for what it is.

00:33:33 ► §

I mean, realism is thought of as another ism, but it isn’t another ism, it’s an ontos of a completely different order. There are isms and there is realism. And realism seeks to

00:33:47 ► §

go beyond isms, to go beyond language, to go beyond expectation and the forward-moving net

00:33:55 ► §

of language, and to present us with something which is, you know, shocking and infinitely deep and beyond contravention.

00:34:09 ► §

This is the thing.

00:34:10 ► §

And so this thing has been carried forward

00:34:15 ► §

mostly in art, mostly as an intuition.

00:34:19 ► §

It’s not clear to me that it’s ever been exactly articulated

00:34:22 ► §

as a philosophy, but this is what the light

00:34:26 ► §

of Caravaggio

00:34:27 ► §

and you know the recessional

00:34:30 ► §

distances of the brothers

00:34:32 ► §

van Eyck and

00:34:33 ► §

you know Turner and all

00:34:36 ► §

of this stuff it’s going

00:34:37 ► §

into the stuff

00:34:39 ► §

of the world without preconception

00:34:42 ► §

attempting you know the

00:34:43 ► §

great discovery that shadows

00:34:46 ► §

are not always black, you know, somebody had to look to figure that out and then to embody

00:34:55 ► §

it against the flow of all understanding. The discovery of perspective is this peculiar

00:35:03 ► §

episode in the history of western thought

00:35:06 ► §

that is never discussed

00:35:07 ► §

sufficiently

00:35:08 ► §

we are asked to believe

00:35:10 ► §

that somewhere between the death of

00:35:13 ► §

Giotto and the death

00:35:15 ► §

of Michelangelo

00:35:17 ► §

European human beings

00:35:19 ► §

suddenly understood

00:35:21 ► §

that things got

00:35:23 ► §

smaller the further away from you they were

00:35:26 ► §

and therefore

00:35:28 ► §

created the world of pictorial space

00:35:32 ► §

that we have inhabited ever since

00:35:34 ► §

well

00:35:35 ► §

you know in an earlier lecture

00:35:39 ► §

I told the story about how

00:35:41 ► §

Thomas Aquinas

00:35:42 ► §

proved his sanctity by being able to look at open books

00:35:49 ► §

and then later tell what he had read without ever moving his lips. This was silent reading

00:35:56 ► §

and it was viewed as a miracle by his contemporaries because they all had to vocalize while they read

00:36:06 ► §

well this is

00:36:08 ► §

a similar kind of phenomenon

00:36:10 ► §

this sudden

00:36:11 ► §

popping into existence of the

00:36:14 ► §

recessional distance and the

00:36:16 ► §

whole set of understandings that allows

00:36:18 ► §

us to navigate three

00:36:20 ► §

dimensional space what is

00:36:22 ► §

happening here does language

00:36:23 ► §

make way for this stuff is

00:36:25 ► §

it biological is it just happened to happen during the Italian Renaissance

00:36:31 ► §

how can a convention of painters of a courtly class become a way of inhabiting

00:36:38 ► §

space and time for the entire population of an ancient continent. It defies understanding.

00:36:47 ► §

What is actually being tracked

00:36:49 ► §

is some kind of recent readjustment

00:36:54 ► §

of the information processing values

00:36:58 ► §

in the human brain-mind system.

00:37:02 ► §

And these things are very close to the surface

00:37:04 ► §

and very easily perturbed.

00:37:08 ► §

You know, Julian Jaynes in his book

00:37:10 ► §

about the bicameral mind

00:37:13 ► §

felt that there had been a major shift

00:37:17 ► §

in the construction of consciousness

00:37:19 ► §

at the time of Homer.

00:37:21 ► §

That before Homer,

00:37:32 ► §

people didn’t exactly have egos they were sort of like uh soulless beings which when put under pressure by like a tight situation in battle would have a magical

00:37:39 ► §

voice speak to them in their head and tell them what to do and they called this their demon their

00:37:48 ► §

familiar their titillary animal or god and that and then he felt that this autonomous function

00:37:57 ► §

of the psyche later became incorporated into the larger structure of the human mind as the ego and that

00:38:06 ► §

what we use as an ego was once a god this is the depths to which we have

00:38:13 ► §

fallen that we you know have have shackled a god into the service of managing our portfolios.

00:38:26 ► §

You know, it’s a principle that’s very old in nature.

00:38:31 ► §

For instance, mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of the human cell,

00:38:37 ► §

are these little enzymatic engines that were originally free-swimming bacteria that have been, through evolution,

00:38:46 ► §

incorporated into the dynamics of larger structures

00:38:50 ► §

and embedded there,

00:38:52 ► §

and now their energy is all channeled to the purposes of the cell.

00:38:57 ► §

And they have their own genetic material and everything.

00:39:00 ► §

They are clearly relic organisms

00:39:03 ► §

embedded in cytoplasmic material.

00:39:06 ► §

So this principle of incorporation of the autonomous element

00:39:11 ► §

to enrich the original structure is pretty well there.

00:39:16 ► §

An instance of that that I’m interested in

00:39:19 ► §

is the pregnancy of language in these Amazonian tribes

00:39:26 ► §

that are using banisteriopsis-type hallucinogens.

00:39:32 ► §

I mean, something is trying to happen.

00:39:35 ► §

This language is just sub-visible,

00:39:38 ► §

and the whole mystery that haunts the culture

00:39:42 ► §

is that it isn’t always sub-visible,

00:39:46 ► §

that, you know,

00:39:47 ► §

on good Saturday nights when everything is

00:39:49 ► §

clicking, they can actually

00:39:51 ► §

drag out this stuff

00:39:53 ► §

from another dimension and

00:39:55 ► §

play with it.

00:39:57 ► §

And you just wonder, you know,

00:40:00 ► §

the beta-carbolines

00:40:01 ► §

are so closely related to

00:40:04 ► §

endogenous brain chemistry and so is the DMT that it’s running on. processing, human signal-making functions are bubbling together with the potential of a sudden perturbation

00:40:28 ► §

to a higher and previously unanticipated state of order.

00:40:33 ► §

And I think that it has something to do with this

00:40:37 ► §

projective imagination through acoustical sound,

00:40:42 ► §

that this idea has haunted the human mind

00:40:46 ► §

and certainly the Western mind

00:40:48 ► §

through the tradition of Pythagoreanism

00:40:50 ► §

and the Orphic religions,

00:40:52 ► §

this tradition of using sound

00:40:55 ► §

to perform magic and transcend levels

00:40:59 ► §

and see into the fabric of nature.

00:41:05 ► §

And what’s going on in these Amazon situations

00:41:08 ► §

where the conventions of modern physics mean nothing,

00:41:13 ► §

nobody’s speaking English,

00:41:15 ► §

nobody knows about the periodic table or Newton or any of that,

00:41:19 ► §

they’re operating in another world.

00:41:21 ► §

And what they’re doing is in these states of intoxication projecting

00:41:27 ► §

this phenomenon for which we don’t even have a word i mean telepathy is a thin notion telepathy

00:41:36 ► §

is i think you hear me think that’s not what this is this is that these people can project whole scenarios of three-dimensional phenomena that are part of a group perception that is not operating under the will of individuals, but that is somehow the elan vital, the life force of the group itself. I mean, we don’t have a sociological vocabulary for this stuff.

00:42:07 ► §

Anthropologists talk about manas and magic

00:42:10 ► §

and, you know, morphogenetic fields

00:42:13 ► §

and this and that on the other hand.

00:42:15 ► §

But this is reductionism

00:42:17 ► §

because the living fact of this stuff is pretty astonishing.

00:42:22 ► §

So, to change the subject,

00:42:24 ► §

you mentioned

00:42:25 ► §

the heretics

00:42:27 ► §

in your talk this afternoon,

00:42:30 ► §

that Syrian sect, was it?

00:42:31 ► §

The Mandayans.

00:42:32 ► §

The Mandayans.

00:42:33 ► §

And we talked earlier before coming in

00:42:35 ► §

also of the uses of heresy

00:42:37 ► §

and your passion for them.

00:42:41 ► §

I wonder if you’d link that

00:42:42 ► §

to what we should do.

00:42:45 ► §

Link that to what action to take.

00:42:49 ► §

Well, heresy is always safe

00:42:53 ► §

if you’re scripting your life for the history books.

00:42:57 ► §

You just can’t go wrong as a heretic

00:43:00 ► §

because they’re always vindicated.

00:43:03 ► §

The trouble is there can be some rough spots along the way a favorite heretic of mine is Giordano

00:43:10 ► §

Bruno who some of you may know about who was burned at the stake as the price of

00:43:18 ► §

his commitment to heresy Bruno discovered the infinity of the universe. That’s what he discovered.

00:43:26 ► §

He looked into the night sky and was the first person in Europe to say,

00:43:32 ► §

those aren’t adamantine shells of Aristotelian crystalline spheric material.

00:43:42 ► §

Those are stars.

00:43:43 ► §

Those are suns like our sun

00:43:46 ► §

and they must go on forever.

00:43:49 ► §

It opened before him

00:43:50 ► §

and he was burned at the stake.

00:43:53 ► §

The period that is so rich in heresy

00:43:56 ► §

and has been a great inspiration for me

00:43:59 ► §

is the Hellenistic syncretism

00:44:03 ► §

that follows upon the classical period in Greece

00:44:09 ► §

and the rise of Roman power and at the same time ferment in the Jewish end of the Mediterranean

00:44:19 ► §

to create, and all kinds of things were happening actually there were gymnosophists coming from

00:44:26 ► §

india teaching yoga in the second century bc in rome and there were you know egyptian followers

00:44:35 ► §

of thoth and isis and there were docetheans and montanists and followers of Simon the Magician.

00:44:48 ► §

And these were a vast spectrum of cults

00:44:52 ► §

ranging from Orthodox Jewish cults,

00:44:56 ► §

such as the Nabataeans and the Zealots

00:45:00 ► §

and presumably the Mandaeans that I mentioned earlier. And then there were Jewish mysticism infected with Platonic ideas,

00:45:12 ► §

Philo-Judeus, Apollodorus, Museus,

00:45:16 ► §

all these minor philosophers were teaching.

00:45:19 ► §

There were Pythagoreans, there were atomists, and the most interesting of these were proto-Christian,

00:45:30 ► §

neo-Christian, pseudo-Christian, crypto-Christian sects that were competing with what eventually

00:45:36 ► §

became Christianity. Some of you may know of this sect that did some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nabataeans, who lived outside

00:45:50 ► §

of Jerusalem and down in the Dead Sea. These were the people that James Pike was investigating

00:45:56 ► §

when he died in the Negev. A few years ago, well, actually over many years, there was a very important manuscript find in 1948 at a place called, a Greek Orthodox monastery called Chenoboskion in Upper Egypt that was on a much older site called Nag Hammadi. And out of the ground at Nag Hammadi came 43 codices that were, by groups of scholars, coordinated worldwide, translated through the 50s and 60s and 70s. This is now available as the Nag Hammadi Library. And it’s very, very interesting stuff

00:46:46 ► §

because this stuff went into the ground AD 270.

00:46:51 ► §

So the later bishops, the patristic recensionists,

00:46:56 ► §

the diddlers and fiddlers and all of that were kept away from it.

00:47:01 ► §

Nobody had seen this stuff since AD 280.

00:47:07 ► §

So it was very very interesting of the of the 53 texts 41 were unknown in any other version of

00:47:15 ► §

those that were known there were there was some of the late Plato there were

00:47:21 ► §

ghosts there was portions of Matthew but what was interesting were

00:47:28 ► §

these previously unknown texts some of which were very close to gospel type

00:47:35 ► §

material and a gospel according to Philip the second known version of the

00:47:41 ► §

Gospel of Philip a gospel according to Thomas, the doubter, my favorite guy.

00:47:49 ► §

But more interesting is the less pseudo-Christian material,

00:47:55 ► §

this exegetical and mystical material that just takes off,

00:48:00 ► §

that is proto-hermetic.

00:48:02 ► §

Some of it shows traces of Indian philosophies,

00:48:07 ► §

transmigration of souls, yogic practices.

00:48:11 ► §

Some of it reads almost like Maria Sabina’s mushroom chants.

00:48:16 ► §

There’s one text called The Voice of the Thunder

00:48:20 ► §

that has a meter and a rhythm that is precisely Maria Sabina so Gnosticism is the

00:48:30 ► §

general banner under which all of this stuff can be placed Gnostics believe the central tenant of

00:48:37 ► §

Gnosticism and it’s hard to put this across because modern Gnostics are such cheerful people, but they’ve forgotten their real roots.

00:48:47 ► §

The central perception of Gnosticism, no matter how you slice it, is that we don’t belong here,

00:48:55 ► §

that we are strangers, that something terrible happened and that accounts for why we’re here,

00:49:09 ► §

terrible happened and that accounts for why we’re here that we were destined for a much better deal and something went terribly terribly wrong it takes different forms as some gnostic mythologies

00:49:18 ► §

are fairly straightforward some are fairly baroque the one that I enjoy is one of the more Baroque ones. The second century Gnostic bishop Valentinius had this notion that there were 36 archons. demons of progressively lessening power that interpose themselves between man and a true

00:49:52 ► §

vision of God. And the last of the archons, the 36th archon, was Sophia, and the only

00:50:01 ► §

of the archons that was female. There’s a tremendous sexual ambivalence in Gnosticism

00:50:07 ► §

which we can talk about which is resolved in different ways.

00:50:11 ► §

But anyway, the 36th archon is Sophia.

00:50:14 ► §

She looked upward toward the higher God

00:50:17 ► §

and saw him bring forth creation

00:50:21 ► §

of which she was the final manifestation.

00:50:25 ► §

And in her heart an avarice grew,

00:50:28 ► §

a wish to create in the same manner as the highest and hidden All-Father.

00:50:35 ► §

And she brought forth, it’s described as an abortion.

00:50:42 ► §

She self-fertilized herself.

00:50:45 ► §

She did not understand the requisites of creation,

00:50:49 ► §

and she turned inward into herself,

00:50:51 ► §

and she brought forth a monstrosity.

00:50:56 ► §

And this monstrosity is the God of the Old Testament,

00:51:01 ► §

Yahweh, Jehovah.

00:51:04 ► §

And when she saw what she had done,

00:51:07 ► §

that she had brought forth this monstrosity,

00:51:10 ► §

she flashed through a whole bunch of emotions very quickly.

00:51:16 ► §

Horror, guilt, rage, fear, agony, like that.

00:51:23 ► §

And these emotions of the errant Sophia condensed as the

00:51:29 ► §

material world over which he’ll double off was then made Lord so the entire

00:51:37 ► §

material universe is seen as the condensed emotional debris of the horror of the 36th Archon upon witnessing her own creation,

00:51:51 ► §

who is then made God over this universe.

00:51:53 ► §

Well, even though this is this really bad scene, it still nevertheless has this extremely tenuous connection to the highest and hidden All-Father

00:52:06 ► §

in the form of what is called the scintilla,

00:52:10 ► §

the spark, the soul spark of divinity.

00:52:13 ► §

So then the goal of Gnostics born into this unfortunate world

00:52:19 ► §

is to gather the light together, to save the light together to save the light the light is defiled by its

00:52:27 ► §

presence in the world of material existence and the light must be gathered

00:52:32 ► §

well so then the central soteriological concern that means the central

00:52:37 ► §

salvational concern of Gnosticism is how shall we gather the light and their whole theology then is what is the

00:52:47 ► §

light how should we gather it and once we have it what do we do with it and then there

00:52:52 ► §

were various answers I mentioned the sexual tension inside Gnostic hermeneutics

00:53:06 ► §

reasoned along the following lines

00:53:09 ► §

life is defiled

00:53:12 ► §

the light is defiled by the material universe

00:53:16 ► §

therefore we should withhold

00:53:18 ► §

entry of the light into matter

00:53:21 ► §

therefore we must be celibate

00:53:24 ► §

we must have no children and in

00:53:27 ► §

some cases this took the form of saying and we sanction no form of sexual union

00:53:33 ► §

which could lead to procreation so they were kinky in that style the other direction that they took was extreme celibacy just simply no

00:53:50 ► §

sexual contact whatsoever and then the third option and these options had

00:53:58 ► §

differing percentages of loyalty as Roman society underwent exterior transformations the third Gnostic stance was man

00:54:08 ► §

is divine we are of the light and nothing in the universe of ill da Booth can pollute the light for

00:54:19 ► §

it is of a higher order and therefore we can do anything we want yes so so you could be a Gnostic and

00:54:27 ► §

line up for scourges and heavy dieting or you could line up for total libertinism and eating

00:54:35 ► §

and drinking anything you want and any kind so this was the spectrum and this was, of course, very baffling to Christian morality.

00:54:50 ► §

But Christianity has an incredible debt to Gnosticism.

00:54:54 ► §

I mean, the Gospel of John and Revelations.

00:54:58 ► §

I mean, this whole bit, in the beginning was the Word,

00:55:02 ► §

this notion of the going forth of the Word, this is thoroughly Gnostic,

00:55:04 ► §

and the struggle between light and darkness. You know, the light forth of the word. This is thoroughly Gnostic and the struggle between

00:55:06 ► §

light and darkness.

00:55:07 ► §

The light shines in the darkness

00:55:09 ► §

and the darkness comprehended

00:55:12 ► §

not. This is

00:55:13 ► §

essentially

00:55:15 ► §

the Manichean

00:55:18 ► §

thing, which is a

00:55:20 ► §

form of Gnosticism.

00:55:21 ► §

Manicheanism is a

00:55:23 ► §

dualistic Persian religion that had

00:55:26 ► §

great sway in Persia through this slightly later phase Mani was its

00:55:36 ► §

prophet Mani was a Mandyan his father was a priest in the Mandayan faith well why talk about this so much well I don’t

00:55:48 ► §

know permission for heresy is never a bad idea and I think this is an

00:55:54 ► §

important issue which is not resolved I mean we are all love bunnies of one sort

00:56:01 ► §

or another but what do you do about this thing are we of the

00:56:05 ► §

earth is it our charge and our destiny or are we from another place how can you

00:56:13 ► §

can’t have it both ways this is a pretty clear division what are we to be are we

00:56:20 ► §

to integrate with nature or are we to transcend it through an act of conjuration out of the self

00:56:30 ► §

which is what culture is I mean apparently we have made the choice and all we’re doing now is

00:56:35 ► §

the philosophical dotting of the eyes our commitment to technology is thoroughly Gnostic our commitment to we believe that nature is something that withholds secrets

00:56:50 ► §

from us that we must rest the secrets of nature from it in order to somehow complete ourselves ourselves and you know modern Gnosticism plays all this down modern Gnosticism is

00:57:08 ► §

existential and capitalizes more on the idea of abandonment they’re less

00:57:14 ► §

interested in the program for returning to the higher and hidden Allfather and

00:57:19 ► §

much more interested in talking about how we are abandoned by the Allfather

00:57:23 ► §

and therefore what a drag it

00:57:26 ► §

is and what can we do about it so that people like Heidegger are thoroughly Gnostic in their

00:57:32 ► §

thinking I mean anybody who is not because you see what Gnosticism denied was the presence of

00:57:39 ► §

God in the world need to understand that that it was an article of faith of

00:57:45 ► §

Gnostics that this is really a long way from God that we are really off way way

00:57:54 ► §

out over away from it and Christianity preserves this dualism in the eternality of evil, in the idea that, you know, there isn’t a final fusion.

00:58:10 ► §

They preserve the distinction down to the last knell of recorded time.

00:58:18 ► §

So that’s a thoroughgoing dualism.

00:58:21 ► §

But my approach to this kind of thing is basically Jungian. I mean, that’s where

00:58:25 ► §

I got my interest in all of this material. See, I think that what we’re always seeing is psyche,

00:58:33 ► §

that we’re always seeing a mirroring of the intentionality of ourselves to concretize consciousness, to put a name on it.

00:58:46 ► §

And so I have called myself at times a noetic archaeologist.

00:58:52 ► §

What I like to do is go and dig up, not pot shards and glass beads,

00:58:59 ► §

but ideas, old, old ideas that have been under the dirt a long, long time.

00:59:06 ► §

And this is what I essentially did here with the I Ching.

00:59:09 ► §

And Gnosticism is another boneyard.

00:59:13 ► §

And alchemy is another boneyard.

00:59:16 ► §

And the Maya are another boneyard.

00:59:20 ► §

And ancient Hawaii is another.

00:59:22 ► §

And I love to go into these things and draw conclusions, you know.

00:59:28 ► §

It’s all very pregnant with intention

00:59:31 ► §

toward the person who comes to it with an open mind.

00:59:36 ► §

I mean, everything wants to speak.

00:59:38 ► §

Everything wants to guide us.

00:59:41 ► §

I haven’t talked much about it,

00:59:43 ► §

but I always think there are so many ways in which

00:59:46 ► §

it’s true that it would have been

00:59:48 ► §

so much different if Aldous Huxley

00:59:50 ► §

had guided

00:59:52 ► §

things through the

00:59:54 ► §

turmoil of the 1960s.

00:59:57 ► §

Aldous Huxley was

00:59:58 ► §

you know,

00:59:59 ► §

a British intellectual,

01:00:02 ► §

a novelist, a

01:00:04 ► §

social critic.

01:00:05 ► §

But even before he wrote The Doors of Perception,

01:00:08 ► §

he wrote a book called, or an essay called The Art of Seeing.

01:00:14 ► §

And, you know, this was gospel as far as my mother was concerned.

01:00:20 ► §

I mean, my mother was an extraordinary woman.

01:00:23 ► §

I don’t know how she had the intuition to be into the things that she was concerned. I mean, my mother was an extraordinary woman. I don’t know how she had the intuition to be into the

01:00:26 ► §

things that she was into.

01:00:28 ► §

But it’s this thing about

01:00:30 ► §

seeing.

01:00:31 ► §

And this goes back to what I was saying

01:00:33 ► §

about realism.

01:00:35 ► §

Training the eye.

01:00:37 ► §

What these Renaissance people and these Greek

01:00:40 ► §

people were doing with the

01:00:41 ► §

recessional distances and the nudes

01:00:43 ► §

was they were really looking they

01:00:47 ► §

were really seeing they were not painting stories that they were telling in their minds but they

01:00:55 ► §

were actually paying attention to texture and shadow and light and this learning to see taught very early is a tremendous

01:01:07 ► §

inoculation against cultural viruses value viruses and linguistic viruses

01:01:16 ► §

because and you don’t see if you grow up with television you know television is

01:01:22 ► §

something that you look at it’s like it has this flat quality.

01:01:28 ► §

It is undemanding.

01:01:30 ► §

Everything has been stripped of depth

01:01:33 ► §

before it ever reaches you,

01:01:35 ► §

even to be offered for your perception.

01:01:39 ► §

What do you think about the more Cubist…

01:01:44 ► §

What’s…

01:01:44 ► §

Picasso brought in cubism and changed the entire direction of art away from realism and into a different view of seeing things, you know, from many facets and broken down into other, you know, in a sense from other dimensions?

01:02:04 ► §

into other, you know, in a sense from other dimensions.

01:02:09 ► §

Well, I’m surprised at my stirring defense of realism because I’m much more sympathetic to…

01:02:13 ► §

My interest in art history was always 20th century art,

01:02:17 ► §

and what I loved was the upheaval and the screw-you attitude.

01:02:23 ► §

I mean, I was thinking today as I thought about this lecture

01:02:26 ► §

about myself as a 13-year-old kid and who were my heroes.

01:02:33 ► §

You know, it wasn’t baseball players and it wasn’t even astronauts.

01:02:37 ► §

It was Jackson Pollock.

01:02:39 ► §

And, you know, that’s what I wanted to be.

01:02:41 ► §

I wanted to be a kid from Wyoming who went to New York

01:02:44 ► §

and drank hard in bars and produced paintings

01:02:48 ► §

that 99% of everybody hated

01:02:51 ► §

and that I would insist were in fact works of staggering genius.

01:02:57 ► §

And I would triumph.

01:03:00 ► §

And it was this whole thing.

01:03:01 ► §

I mean, I was living in a small town in western Colorado, you have to understand.

01:03:05 ► §

I mean, the notion of a man hurling paint at a canvas,

01:03:09 ► §

it just outraged the inner Amish of the place where I was living.

01:03:16 ► §

No, I think all of this stuff is very important,

01:03:21 ► §

and that art, I didn’t mean to suggest a value judgment in favor of realism

01:03:26 ► §

over other artistic styles

01:03:28 ► §

because I think by the time

01:03:30 ► §

the 20th century

01:03:32 ► §

came around

01:03:33 ► §

realism had grown self

01:03:36 ► §

defeating

01:03:37 ► §

it was something which had to be pried loose

01:03:40 ► §

and perfected

01:03:43 ► §

and for me

01:03:44 ► §

I think it’s probably perfected

01:03:46 ► §

in Jan van Eyck,

01:03:51 ► §

the altarpieces of the van Eyck brothers

01:03:53 ► §

or Caravaggio or, you know,

01:03:57 ► §

by the time you get to Belovkev

01:04:00 ► §

and the Mannerists,

01:04:03 ► §

something else is happening

01:04:05 ► §

it’s like they’ve overshot the mark

01:04:07 ► §

with mannerism it’s getting weird

01:04:10 ► §

it looks at first

01:04:12 ► §

like realism

01:04:13 ► §

but then you realize that

01:04:15 ► §

bizarrely morbid

01:04:17 ► §

distortions are taking place

01:04:20 ► §

and that what is seeping

01:04:22 ► §

upward into the realist

01:04:24 ► §

canvas is the unconscious and that you

01:04:29 ► §

know these odd intimations of sadomasochism and mania and all this stuff that you’re getting off

01:04:36 ► §

of this stuff it’s not you it is there they’re trying to make it like that and the mannerists set the stage for full permission to push off into then

01:04:49 ► §

romanticism really the the evocation of emotion through the manipulation of of image of natural image, but it’s really the thinking is not realistic. The

01:05:07 ► §

thinking is allegorical. Romanticism

01:05:10 ► §

always tends toward allegory. That’s why

01:05:13 ► §

these islands sucked at by blackened

01:05:17 ► §

water and covered over in fallen gardens

01:05:20 ► §

and crumbling ruins, these don’t exist

01:05:23 ► §

anywhere. This is not reportage of the natural world.

01:05:27 ► §

These are dreamscapes of a morbid imagination.

01:05:34 ► §

Okay, well, so then it all runs out in the 19th century.

01:05:38 ► §

I mean, for my money, 19th century art is pretty dismal.

01:05:44 ► §

It’s very much of the academy.

01:05:46 ► §

In France, you’ve got Watteau and Fragonard,

01:05:49 ► §

and in England, you have Reynolds and all of this stuff going on,

01:05:55 ► §

until this romantic morbidity gives rise to,

01:06:01 ► §

out of really the recrudescence of that movement,

01:06:06 ► §

come people like Redon and Moreau, the French symbolists.

01:06:13 ► §

This is consequent upon, interestingly enough, an interest in psychedelic drugs.

01:06:19 ► §

These people are smoking hashish and drinking absinthe

01:06:22 ► §

and are familiar with opium and this kind

01:06:27 ► §

of thing. And they set the stage then for the pre-Raphaelite thing, which I don’t know

01:06:38 ► §

whether you view that as design or art, but simultaneously impressionism is happening and impressionism strangely enough is like

01:06:48 ► §

art in the service of the realist ideal again but in strange clothing because what they

01:06:55 ► §

were trying to do was shed this academic allegorical symbolic stuff and just show light you know

01:07:12 ► §

academic allegorical symbolic stuff and just show light you know it was an effort to do that and it gave permission for well another thing then so there were two simultaneous tendencies

01:07:20 ► §

there the impressionists with their concern with what the eye sees and light

01:07:25 ► §

and then operating in the background stuff like the pata physicians and the

01:07:32 ► §

Dadaists later where it was all about again the unconscious and bringing that

01:07:38 ► §

in the same the same tendency which had infected mannerism then in came in as surrealism in the 20th century

01:07:47 ► §

and because of Freud and Jung and all this stuff.

01:07:50 ► §

So I think that the whole history of 20th century art

01:07:53 ► §

is a reaction against morbid romanticism,

01:07:57 ► §

which was probably a pretty good thing to overthrow.

01:08:02 ► §

But I saw people like Pollock,

01:08:07 ► §

or specifically Pollock,

01:08:10 ► §

as in a sense realists in that what they were showing us was chaos.

01:08:13 ► §

That’s sort of the evolution of an artist

01:08:15 ► §

as you gain more and more ability.

01:08:19 ► §

You get past the symbols and you get into realism,

01:08:22 ► §

but then you take the realism

01:08:24 ► §

and you use it as

01:08:26 ► §

a… you can use it as a fiction in a sense, so you can do what the mannerists did and

01:08:33 ► §

go into a dream state.

01:08:34 ► §

That’s right.

01:08:35 ► §

So it becomes a language, a visual language that can describe things that our words can’t. Well, Pollock made an immense

01:08:45 ► §

intellectual journey

01:08:47 ► §

because he started out

01:08:48 ► §

not, I mean, he was born in

01:08:51 ► §

Cody, Wyoming. This is a strike

01:08:53 ► §

against you in the first place.

01:08:55 ► §

And he studied

01:08:57 ► §

art under Thomas Hart Benton

01:08:59 ► §

who was the absolute

01:09:00 ► §

epitome of the American

01:09:02 ► §

realist school. I mean, if you don’t know Thomas Hart Benton,

01:09:06 ► §

he did WPA murals of women bringing jugs of cider

01:09:12 ► §

to men in the fields at noontime.

01:09:17 ► §

In other words, glorification of the American working class

01:09:22 ► §

in a style almost reminiscent of the Mexican mural style of Diego Rivera.

01:09:29 ► §

Pollock came out of that, you know.

01:09:33 ► §

He used a screwdriver, was his major instrument,

01:09:37 ► §

and he stood back or stood over his canvases on step ladders and whipped paint across them and built up these layered things

01:09:48 ► §

that were just amazing.

01:09:50 ► §

And what they were,

01:09:51 ► §

they were the abstract expressionist equivalent

01:09:55 ► §

of an atomic explosion.

01:09:57 ► §

This is what the 50s was all about.

01:10:01 ► §

So realism came to mean

01:10:03 ► §

looking into many strange parts of reality.

01:10:08 ► §

At what point does the dream get integrated

01:10:10 ► §

to where it’s us?

01:10:12 ► §

At the point where we control it

01:10:14 ► §

like we control our voice and our head?

01:10:17 ► §

Well, we have this admiration

01:10:19 ► §

for the Australian style

01:10:21 ► §

of relating to the dream time.

01:10:24 ► §

But if we continue to develop our technology the way we do,

01:10:30 ► §

we have our own dream time.

01:10:32 ► §

It’s watching television,

01:10:35 ► §

and it’s probably going to deepen.

01:10:37 ► §

I mean, I think that our appetite for sensation

01:10:42 ► §

and entertainment

01:10:45 ► §

is driving that industry to develop itself

01:10:49 ► §

almost more rapidly than any other.

01:10:53 ► §

Because it’s all mythic, what’s on television.

01:10:57 ► §

Television is not reality.

01:10:59 ► §

Television is the cultural myth about reality.

01:11:03 ► §

This is where the archetypes in the American

01:11:07 ► §

unconscious are to be met. Tough cops and jiggle blondes and all these people that are

01:11:16 ► §

in our cultural mass programming are running around in there. Oh, it’s terrible.

01:11:25 ► §

It’s just that we have such a tacky set of images.

01:11:30 ► §

It could be epical.

01:11:32 ► §

Imagine if we were 19th century Germans.

01:11:34 ► §

Television would be like Wagner.

01:11:38 ► §

You just did it.

01:11:39 ► §

I wanted you to switch and do a similar kind of historic analysis that you did

01:11:45 ► §

for Gnosticism and for art

01:11:47 ► §

and music as well.

01:11:50 ► §

Overview and shifts.

01:11:53 ► §

Well, I don’t

01:11:53 ► §

claim to know a lot about music.

01:11:56 ► §

What did Wagner represent?

01:11:59 ► §

Well, Wagner comes late.

01:12:02 ► §

What I would say about this,

01:12:05 ► §

I mean, I think music is very important.

01:12:08 ► §

We said in here on a different day

01:12:10 ► §

that architecture was frozen music

01:12:14 ► §

and therefore music must be unfrozen architecture.

01:12:18 ► §

And what did you mean,

01:12:20 ► §

what could you say about that?

01:12:24 ► §

This Pythagorean thing

01:12:26 ► §

this very old thing

01:12:29 ► §

this discovery

01:12:31 ► §

of these apparently natural relationships

01:12:35 ► §

that are very mysterious

01:12:36 ► §

between the plucked strings

01:12:40 ► §

so that if you stretch gut

01:12:43 ► §

between bone antlers and you pluck certain strings,

01:12:48 ► §

other strings in a perceived to be natural relationship called an octave

01:12:55 ► §

will also vibrate in harmony.

01:13:00 ► §

This is the key concept here, harmony.

01:13:02 ► §

This is the key concept here, harmony.

01:13:09 ► §

People saw this, and Pythagoras, or, you know, apocryphally, what Pythagoras did was he filled glass tubes with water,

01:13:14 ► §

and when he had two glass tubes tuned so that they were an octave apart,

01:13:21 ► §

it was observed that the amount of water in them could be expressed as a mathematical ratio.

01:13:29 ► §

Well, this touches on a very mysterious aspect of things

01:13:36 ► §

that nobody quite understands

01:13:39 ► §

and you don’t even hear people talk about it

01:13:42 ► §

because it’s so problematic.

01:13:44 ► §

And that is this.

01:13:46 ► §

Why does mathematics

01:13:48 ► §

have something to do with nature?

01:13:52 ► §

Why does mathematics have anything

01:13:55 ► §

to do with nature?

01:13:57 ► §

Think about what mathematics is.

01:13:59 ► §

Mathematics is the operations

01:14:01 ► §

you can perform on numbers.

01:14:04 ► §

Well, nature, you don’t see numbers.

01:14:08 ► §

And yet, this has been the fundamental insight of the Western mind

01:14:14 ► §

that has allowed miracle after demonic miracle to be conjured out of nature. The discovery of the curious

01:14:25 ► §

parallelism between

01:14:28 ► §

nature and operations

01:14:30 ► §

performed on numbers.

01:14:31 ► §

Well, it comes out of this

01:14:33 ► §

Pythagorean religious mentality

01:14:36 ► §

which observed, you know,

01:14:38 ► §

these ratios

01:14:39 ► §

and related them to the sounds

01:14:42 ► §

and said, well then

01:14:44 ► §

there can be

01:14:45 ► §

a mathematical theory of music.

01:14:48 ► §

And then they observed regularity

01:14:51 ► §

and other phenomena.

01:14:53 ► §

The stars had long been observed to be regular.

01:14:56 ► §

Well, so then they began to think

01:14:58 ► §

in terms of regular perfect things

01:15:03 ► §

versus irregular mundane things. in this climate platonism was able to

01:15:10 ► §

come into being and platonism makes an absolute division you know between the world of archetypal

01:15:17 ► §

perfect things and then the lower slice of reality music was carrying all of this along. And if you’re interested in ancient music and

01:15:31 ► §

its impact on ancient philosophy, these books by Maclean, The Myth of Invariance,

01:15:41 ► §

is one of them. It’s a study of mathematics in Plato and the Rig Veda

01:15:46 ► §

and it’s all musical mathematics they were studying proportion harmony

01:15:54 ► §

relationship now notice that in this situation where the string is plucked

01:16:01 ► §

and the the other strings in octaves above and below vibrate. This is a very cogent demonstration of action at a distance. It shows that there need not be a connecting medium for force and activity to be transmitted across space. theoric influences and this sort of thing.

01:16:45 ► §

And so then the theory quickly grew that obviously then the way to influence these things

01:16:51 ► §

was through music, through sound, and theories of tone grew up.

01:16:57 ► §

And the seven planetary bodies that were familiar to the astrologers

01:17:04 ► §

were connected to the astrologers were connected

01:17:05 ► §

to seven tones and then

01:17:07 ► §

a correspondence was recognized

01:17:08 ► §

between seven metals

01:17:10 ► §

and a map of the world

01:17:13 ► §

was slowly constructed that

01:17:15 ► §

had music at its

01:17:17 ► §

ultimate basis

01:17:18 ► §

there’s a wonderful book

01:17:21 ► §

that deals

01:17:23 ► §

in part with all of this

01:17:24 ► §

that some of you may know called Hamlet’s Mill. Hamlet’s Mill is the story of this very old myth that occurs all over the world about how somebody has a mill, a little grinder, and somebody else steals it,

01:17:46 ► §

and then the thief rows across a body of water

01:17:50 ► §

with the mill in a boat,

01:17:52 ► §

and the mill sinks the boat,

01:17:55 ► §

and the mill is grinding out salt.

01:17:59 ► §

And this is, in one version,

01:18:00 ► §

the explanation for why the ocean is salty.

01:18:03 ► §

It’s because off the coast of Norway

01:18:07 ► §

in that place called the Maelstrom, that is the mill, and down at the bottom it is grinding

01:18:14 ► §

out salt. And Giorgio de Santayana, who wrote this book, Hamlet’s Mill, with Hilde von Dechend,

01:18:22 ► §

this book, Hamlet’s Mill with Hilda von Dechend, talked

01:18:24 ► §

about it as a myth

01:18:26 ► §

of a movement

01:18:28 ► §

of the stellar machinery

01:18:30 ► §

that

01:18:31 ► §

stars which were near the pole

01:18:34 ► §

moved beneath the

01:18:36 ► §

surface of the sea and the

01:18:38 ► §

mill was lost and a

01:18:40 ► §

whole world age

01:18:42 ► §

was thrown

01:18:43 ► §

into confusion.

01:18:45 ► §

And a lot of the discussion of this hinges on looking at Rig Vedic and Platonic musical theory.

01:18:55 ► §

These ayahuasca songs in the Amazon are visually intended.

01:19:01 ► §

They are to be seen, not to be heard.

01:19:05 ► §

I mean, the people criticize them that way,

01:19:08 ► §

they critique them that way.

01:19:11 ► §

Voice is primarily a vehicle imagined to affect color vision.

01:19:18 ► §

And, you know, if we could see what we meant,

01:19:23 ► §

the ambiguity would leave our intention to communicate with each other.

01:19:28 ► §

This would be a kind of telepathy, the seeing of meaning.

01:19:34 ► §

Well, when you think about what meaning is,

01:19:37 ► §

there’s no reason why it should be processed through hearing.

01:19:42 ► §

It’s not particular. It has nothing particularly to do with hearing.

01:19:48 ► §

Meaning is a much fuller and richer signal than hearing.

01:19:53 ► §

Why shouldn’t it be conveyed visually?

01:19:55 ► §

When I look at this room, I’m not listening to it.

01:19:59 ► §

I’m looking at it.

01:20:01 ► §

And the meaning of what is going on

01:20:05 ► §

comes to me through my eyes.

01:20:06 ► §

This is how the meaning of the world presents itself.

01:20:10 ► §

We don’t listen to the world,

01:20:13 ► §

but we listen to speech for its meaning.

01:20:16 ► §

And this closes us toward many things

01:20:18 ► §

and pushes us in a certain direction.

01:20:22 ► §

We don’t have any medium that we can physically produce,

01:20:26 ► §

you know, other than our electronic medium

01:20:29 ► §

that we can easily produce a visual image to share.

01:20:33 ► §

Print. We read.

01:20:36 ► §

But you mean conversationally and instantaneously, right?

01:20:39 ► §

Yeah, like you can with speech.

01:20:42 ► §

Well, yeah, this is where you have to take drugs

01:20:44 ► §

to push the argument further

01:20:46 ► §

because what you have to hypothesize is

01:20:49 ► §

that it might be possible to generate

01:20:53 ► §

an acoustical hologram with your voice

01:20:56 ► §

or something like that.

01:20:58 ► §

In other words, when you take ayahuasca

01:21:02 ► §

with these people in the jungle

01:21:04 ► §

and you see the songs,

01:21:07 ► §

the reason you see the songs is because you’re loaded.

01:21:11 ► §

Well, how loaded do you have to be to see the songs would be a good question for researchers to ask.

01:21:21 ► §

Maybe you don’t have to be overtly stoned at all.

01:21:26 ► §

researchers to ask. Maybe you don’t have to be overtly stoned at all. Maybe you could have a sub-threshold amount of harmine in your system, and when they started singing,

01:21:31 ► §

lo and behold, here it would appear.

01:21:35 ► §

Is it not possible, theoretically possible at any rate, that once this has happened in

01:21:42 ► §

your system, whatever this has gone through physiologically

01:21:46 ► §

and whatever other way,

01:21:48 ► §

that the path is there,

01:21:49 ► §

that there would be a way to learn that thing,

01:21:53 ► §

that you could do it on Thursday morning

01:21:55 ► §

and not wait until Thursday night.

01:21:57 ► §

Isn’t that what your brother was trying to do

01:21:59 ► §

with the snails and the animals?

01:22:01 ► §

See, there is something going on here

01:22:04 ► §

because in the pineal gland,

01:22:08 ► §

harmin is produced, and DMT is produced in the brain too.

01:22:14 ► §

So the chemical prerequisites for the brain state are there.

01:22:18 ► §

I think the first meeting we held, I talked about the fact that people who have smoked DMT then report months,

01:22:29 ► §

years later, dreams in which they smoke DMT, and it happens in the dream. Okay, this is a major

01:22:38 ► §

piece of evidence. This means it can happen, that it’s not chemically exogenous

01:22:46 ► §

but then the question is

01:22:47 ► §

how the hell do you get

01:22:49 ► §

to the same place as you are

01:22:52 ► §

in a dream when someone passes you

01:22:54 ► §

the glass pipe

01:22:55 ► §

but the very fact that it can happen

01:22:58 ► §

and so then

01:22:59 ► §

so it lies very close to the level

01:23:02 ► §

to the

01:23:03 ► §

level of consciousness, you see.

01:23:06 ► §

And these people who’ve been in the Amazon all these 20,000 years

01:23:11 ► §

that we’ve been calling primitive,

01:23:13 ► §

while we’ve been inventing technology and doing all this other stuff,

01:23:16 ► §

what they’ve been doing is every Saturday night

01:23:20 ► §

exposing themselves to a linguistic catalyst.

01:23:24 ► §

So we think, well, maybe they have a really far-out language.

01:23:27 ► §

No, they don’t have a really far-out language.

01:23:29 ► §

They have an entirely ontically transformed linguistic ability

01:23:34 ► §

that we don’t even have a suspicion of

01:23:37 ► §

that is learnable.

01:23:40 ► §

And, I don’t know, because they put so much stress on this diet

01:23:45 ► §

it’s very clear that they are

01:23:48 ► §

diddling towards something

01:23:50 ► §

they have a goal that they’re trying

01:23:52 ► §

to maximize

01:23:53 ► §

there is something there that they want to get

01:23:55 ► §

and when you meet

01:23:57 ► §

many ayahuasqueros

01:23:59 ► §

and take it with many of these guys

01:24:01 ► §

the guys who make the good stuff

01:24:04 ► §

are all alike they have this weird aura

01:24:09 ► §

they have a voice thing that is hard to describe but you know the concept of voice in dune where

01:24:17 ► §

there was a way to just drop down and register and speak in a way that people could not resist because you set the vibe in a certain way.

01:24:28 ► §

These ayahuasqueros have this.

01:24:30 ► §

And they have…

01:24:33 ► §

Yes, it’s something so outside our cultural value system

01:24:38 ► §

that we can hardly realize what we’re doing with

01:24:41 ► §

because how many of us would go there

01:24:44 ► §

and then how many of us would go there and then how many of us

01:24:46 ► §

would go there and go deep enough and then take the drug with these people and then be enough

01:24:52 ► §

free of your own stuff to pay attention to what they were putting out and then to keep it enough

01:25:00 ► §

together to create a description that you could bring back later. So, you know,

01:25:05 ► §

it’s just, the world is not empty of the new and the novel, these frontiers. This is how

01:25:12 ► §

I ended the lecture yesterday. There are just frontiers and frontiers and frontiers in chemistry

01:25:19 ► §

and anthropology and ethnography. And some of it it we’re actually talking about

01:25:26 ► §

the transformation

01:25:28 ► §

of the human form

01:25:30 ► §

and not through technology

01:25:32 ► §

but in a cleaner

01:25:34 ► §

biologically

01:25:35 ► §

a way which celebrates

01:25:40 ► §

natural process

01:25:41 ► §

and celebrates the vitality

01:25:43 ► §

of the minded portion of the planet.

01:25:47 ► §

It’s an attunement, not this Gnostic thing which I evoked for you,

01:25:52 ► §

which is, you know, people used to say of my grandfather,

01:25:58 ► §

where he’d been was so-so, where he was was hell,

01:26:04 ► §

and where he was going was paradise

01:26:06 ► §

and he lived his whole life that way

01:26:09 ► §

well that’s a Gnostic attitude

01:26:11 ► §

you know, paradise is just ahead

01:26:14 ► §

I think that

01:26:16 ► §

paradise is a frontier of language

01:26:20 ► §

of intentional communication

01:26:23 ► §

the reason for looking at all these things for

01:26:27 ► §

looking at the house in agents and the alchemy and the mythology and all this

01:26:31 ► §

is because these are the materials present at hand for an assault on the

01:26:37 ► §

citadel of true being you know somewhere here there is a clue somewhere here

01:26:44 ► §

there is something that we can use it It’s going to be an obscure sect, a peculiar mantra, a strange drug, a bizarre plant, a forgotten teaching, a lost alphabet, something that we can use so that, you know, I’ve talked about the tantric nature of the point of view

01:27:06 ► §

that I’m putting out

01:27:07 ► §

tantric in the sense of

01:27:09 ► §

the definition of tantra

01:27:11 ► §

as the short path

01:27:14 ► §

taking seriously

01:27:15 ► §

the idea that in a single lifetime

01:27:18 ► §

a human being might be able

01:27:20 ► §

to go vast

01:27:22 ► §

distances

01:27:23 ► §

in the project of spiritual unfolding that you know we are not

01:27:29 ► §

given or fated to simply incrementally advance ourselves it is some kind of a lottery i mean

01:27:39 ► §

there are big winners and i’m just very convinced that the way you enhance your position in the probability

01:27:47 ► §

of all of this is through cognition. It will be an act of understanding. The final act of

01:27:54 ► §

liberation will be an act of understanding. Okay, well that’s it for today, folks.

01:28:08 ► §

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon where people are changing their lives

01:28:10 ► §

one thought at a time

01:28:11 ► §

So, are you ready

01:28:14 ► §

for my excuse about the delay

01:28:16 ► §

in getting out this podcast today?

01:28:19 ► §

Actually

01:28:20 ► §

I think that this one is right up there

01:28:22 ► §

with the dog ate my homework

01:28:24 ► §

You see, after listening to Terrence talk about the Manichaeans Actually, I think that this one is right up there with the dog ate my homework.

01:28:28 ► §

You see, after listening to Terrence talk about the Manichaeans,

01:28:32 ► §

I got out this old book of mine to read a little bit more about them.

01:28:36 ► §

The book is titled Religious Denominations of the World.

01:28:42 ► §

It was published in 1871, and according to a handwritten inscription by my great uncle,

01:28:47 ► §

he purchased it on January 22, 1872.

01:28:52 ► §

And it describes the nature of over 150 different religions,

01:28:57 ► §

which kind of blows me away, since, like most people, I expect, I have never given much thought to the wide variety of religious experience

01:29:01 ► §

that we humans have come up with.

01:29:04 ► §

So, I got hooked on reading

01:29:07 ► §

about these various belief systems, and that led me back to some other old books that I read long

01:29:12 ► §

ago about the origins of Christianity and the historical record about how their Bible actually

01:29:18 ► §

came to be. But don’t worry, I’m not going to get into a religious discussion here in the salon.

01:29:24 ► §

That’s just too slippery of a slope for me.

01:29:27 ► §

Instead, I’ll just repeat two of Terrence’s thoughts from the talk that we just listened to

01:29:31 ► §

and let you do your own thinking about this topic.

01:29:34 ► §

What he said that triggered or tickled my mind, I should say,

01:29:39 ► §

was you just can’t go wrong as a heretic because they’re always vindicated.

01:29:44 ► §

And permission for heresy is never a bad idea.

01:29:49 ► §

But before you go there, it may be advisable for you to first dissolve a few of your cultural

01:29:55 ► §

boundaries so as to better let your mind more fully explore some of the things that you

01:30:01 ► §

may be taking on faith.

01:30:03 ► §

For as you know, faith is simply a belief that doesn’t rest on logical proof or material evidence.

01:30:10 ► §

As someone who’s been accused of having no faith, well, I must admit that I’m actually quite proud of that.

01:30:17 ► §

But that’s enough about superstition for today.

01:30:20 ► §

Right now, I want to pass along something that requires no faith.

01:30:25 ► §

for today. Right now, I want to pass along something that requires no faith. You’ll recall that in my recent podcast featuring the talk that John Gilmore gave at this year’s Palenque Norte

01:30:31 ► §

lectures, he mentioned how deeply Google has its claws in us through their constant tracking and

01:30:37 ► §

cross-referencing of our every click and email on the web. Well, John very kindly spent a fair amount of time analyzing our Program Notes

01:30:46 ► §

blog and a couple of my other websites. And the Program Notes, of course, as you know, you can get

01:30:51 ► §

to via psychedelicsalon.us. And he sent me a list of some of the tracking on that site that I wasn’t

01:30:58 ► §

aware of. And after spending a day or so going through all of my websites, I think that I’ve

01:31:03 ► §

cleared most of it up. And at least for now, I feel reasonably sure in saying that

01:31:08 ► §

Google won’t be tracking you if you go to our program notes page.

01:31:13 ► §

Now, after Psychonaut posted a comment about the Google Translate and Search widgets

01:31:18 ► §

that I had on the site, I deleted them.

01:31:20 ► §

But what I didn’t know until John told me

01:31:23 ► §

is that any page, as in any page that has simply

01:31:27 ► §

just has a Google logo on it, the one that you click and it takes you to Google search. Well,

01:31:32 ► §

if it has a Google logo on it, a message is being sent back to Google, whether or not you click on

01:31:37 ► §

it. And that message is sent the moment you load the page. And the message tells Google who loaded

01:31:42 ► §

the page by their IP address, what time and day they

01:31:46 ► §

were there, what site you were on just before coming there, and if you’ve left that little

01:31:51 ► §

keep me signed inbox checked when you logged into your Google account, well then your name is also

01:31:57 ► §

associated with all of that information. And now, now this is my own thought, but since Google has

01:32:03 ► §

now admitted to capturing every contact list that they can scrape up through your email accounts,

01:32:09 ► §

well, then all of that information is also cross-linked somehow to everyone whose name appears on your contact list.

01:32:16 ► §

Well, no big deal, you say, since you have nothing to hide.

01:32:19 ► §

Well, what about some of these broad sweeps that we’ve been hearing Homeland Security is now doing?

01:32:24 ► §

Well, what about some of these broad sweeps that we’ve been hearing Homeland Security is now doing?

01:32:32 ► §

What if your child, in researching a paper for school, went to some websites that the FBI considers to be terrorist-oriented?

01:32:38 ► §

Then everyone on your contact list, assuming that you use Gmail or Hotmail or one of those others,

01:32:46 ► §

could be indirectly connected to that terrorist site as well, should a massive data mining action take place by Homeland Security.

01:32:53 ► §

And, by the way, did you notice the recent admission, or even announcement, I guess, by the FBI,

01:33:00 ► §

that everyone who does not buy into the official story of 9-11 is to be considered a potential terrorist,

01:33:04 ► §

as is everyone with libertarian leanings.

01:33:05 ► §

So, that’s pretty broad, I think.

01:33:07 ► §

And I can hear you now saying to yourself,

01:33:09 ► §

Oh, that poor Lorenzo has sure gone over the edge of paranoia.

01:33:14 ► §

And, uh, you’re probably correct.

01:33:17 ► §

But just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that nobody’s watching you.

01:33:23 ► §

Maybe I’ve just been listening to the Alan Parsons song,

01:33:26 ► §

Someone is Watching You, from his iRobot album. Listening to that too much. It’s a great album,

01:33:32 ► §

by the way. Okay, time to move on. First of all, in case you are interested in any of the books

01:33:38 ► §

that Terrence mentioned in this talk, I’ve discovered that they are all still available,

01:33:43 ► §

and I’ll put links to them in today’s program notes. Well, once again, I’ve rambled on a little too long and don’t have time to

01:33:50 ► §

get into a couple of other things that I’ve been saving, including a soundbite from TP

01:33:55 ► §

Boys that some of our more esoteric fellow Saloners will get a kick out of. Hopefully

01:34:00 ► §

I’ll get that in next time. But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:34:06 ► §

Be well, my friends.