Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“A psychedelic point of view means a point of view which honors consciousness.”
“You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.”
“Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.”
“It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality, because we don’t even know where we want to go.”J
“We extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane.”
“Once nature is taken as the ground of being then permission to inflate the image of the ego is denied.”
“Intuition must be given prominence in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.”
“Science is really the, it’s the plumbing level of reality. It doesn’t catch the integrated nature of language, the evolution of fairy tales, the dynamics of love affairs, the quintessence of genius, these are the things, that as human beings, structure and constellate and guide and inform our world. And science has nothing to say about these things.”
“Intuition is the unifying of experience into a gestalt image of the world.”
“We are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And you’re probably wondering why I’m putting out this podcast just a couple of days after my previous one,
00:00:34 ►
particularly since sometimes I go for more than a week or more.
00:00:41 ►
But, well, the main reason is that in the event that you didn’t listen to the end of that podcast,
00:00:46 ►
you missed the announcement that I’m going to make again right now. Tomorrow,
00:00:53 ►
which is November 19th, 2013, for you time travelers who are hearing this in the future,
00:00:59 ►
well, tomorrow I’ll be a guest on the Joe Rogan Show, Joe Rogan’s most excellent podcast. And while you can always watch and or listen to it at your leisure. If you want to watch it live, you can catch it on Ustream, ustream.tv, at 3 p.m. Pacific time.
00:01:10 ►
And for right now, there’s a link to that video feed at the top of the program notes for this podcast,
00:01:15 ►
which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:01:20 ►
Now, for the talk that we’re about to hear, it is from a workshop that Terrence McKenna led in June of 1989, and it ties in closely with the talk that I podcast just before this one.
00:01:32 ►
And while it starts off kind of slow, by the time he’s about 40 minutes into it, you’ll think that he’s on a soapbox in the town square trying to incite us citizens to a revolt.
00:01:42 ►
trying to incite us citizens to a revolt.
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Well, actually it’s not quite that strong,
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but it is a more animated talk than we usually hear from the Bard McKenna,
00:01:51 ►
so let’s join him now.
00:02:04 ►
Well, this is the third opportunity that I’ve had to talk to the community at these Wednesday night lectures.
00:02:07 ►
Well, I figure we have about 25 years before this information will be completely assimilated
00:02:14 ►
into the encroaching consumer society, the leveling of values that seems now to be an inevitable part of the globalizing of society on one level it’s
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very good when we recognize ourselves in our enemies and there’s a commonality of values
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generated but on another level it’s tremendously destructive of novelty and uniqueness.
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I mean, we’re turning the whole planet into a white bread mall shopping culture
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and the values of every other way of doing things is being subsumed to that.
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I talked a lot in these Wednesday night lectures and with the section
00:03:05 ►
about
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the importance of partnership
00:03:10 ►
societies in the
00:03:12 ►
human past and
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how the nostalgia
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for these kinds of social
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arrangements have driven us
00:03:20 ►
throughout our experience
00:03:22 ►
of history. Well,
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it is nevertheless true that even today in the Amazon
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and perhaps in a few other relic environments,
00:03:34 ►
partnership societies exist.
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Partnership societies thrive and regulate themselves
00:03:43 ►
through a symbiotic relationship to plants
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that we call hallucinogenic plant shamanism but which is actually an almost a welding of the
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social organism into the natural surround in a way that feeds back into the psyches of these people and the structures of their
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society in a way that is very very much promotes the conservation of equilibrium something we have
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sadly lost touch with so it’s very important to preserve the options that have been discovered by
00:04:28 ►
people over the millennia the options that allow a recreation of the sensory
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and psychic ratios that characterize the partnership society in contrast to the kind of dominator society that we’ve lived under for such a long time.
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So it isn’t a matter simply of preserving plants for medicines.
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It’s really much more philosophically deep than that. that a relationship to the vegetable matrix of the planet
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is what constitutes a Gaian resurgence,
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that it is plants that regulate the composition of the atmosphere,
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the temperatures of the oceans, so forth and so on,
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and that it is our lack of integration into that system
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that has precipitated the crisis of toxic 20th century potlatch civilization.
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By potlatch, potlatch was a custom of the northwest coast Indians
00:05:41 ►
where they would, to show their wealth destroy
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huge amounts of material
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so that houses
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would be burned, feathered blankets
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burned, totem poles
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burned in the potlatch
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in an orgy
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of destruction
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which proves your wealth
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and we have assimilated
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and perfected this custom
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so that it is second nature to us
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and the whole planet is a vast potlatch
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we are robbing our children
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and their children of any sort of recognizable
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future by basically
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grabbing it all for ourselves
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no other society in history has been so callous to human values
00:06:29 ►
that it condemned generations unborn of its own children
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to live in a desert.
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The main thing, I think, that comes out of an effort
00:06:42 ►
to formulate a psychedelic point of view and I take it
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this is what we have been involved in
00:06:51 ►
a psychedelic point of view means a point of view which
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honors consciousness, consciousness is seen
00:07:00 ►
as the value to be maximized
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that’s what we want
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we want more consciousness
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better integration
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better information
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better models
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we don’t want to petrify ourselves
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or commit ourselves to a model
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that somehow then is found to be obsolete
00:07:24 ►
and inadequate.
00:07:26 ►
So what chiefly constitutes the psychedelic point of view, I think,
00:07:30 ►
is its open-ended and provisional nature,
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as opposed to every other ideology or point of view that’s running around.
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What the psychedelic point of view is
00:07:45 ►
is a kind of cultural relativism.
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We’re trying to get a grip
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on who and where we are
00:07:53 ►
in the cosmos
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from a point of view
00:07:56 ►
not that of the American consumerist citizen,
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something else,
00:08:03 ►
something larger, deeper, broader, more touched by the
00:08:08 ►
cosmic, more touched by a sense of the past and of destiny. So I have said this many times,
00:08:17 ►
but I want to say it now in a slightly different context and discuss it. the statement of the British enzymologist J.B.S. Haldane
00:08:27 ►
who discovered enzymes, so he became an enzymologist
00:08:32 ►
a logical move. Haldane said
00:08:36 ►
the world is not only
00:08:39 ►
stranger than we suppose, it is stranger
00:08:44 ►
than we suppose. It is stranger than we can suppose.
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And this is something that we have not entertained very
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seriously as a possibility, especially the cheerful
00:08:56 ►
characters in the white coats with the clipboards. The
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assumption has always been that man’s mind
00:09:03 ►
notice the gender slant, man’s mind is sufficient
00:09:10 ►
for the cognition of the cosmos. This is not all that surprising, though it is patently idiotic.
00:09:19 ►
It is not all that surprising when you think about the fact that as recently as, let’s say, 1830, people believed the Earth was 4,000 years old.
00:09:31 ►
As recently as 1480, the New World was unsuspected to exist, or it was suspected by a few wild-eyed map makers and mad sailors but conventional knowledge
00:09:48 ►
held that you know the Eurasian landmass in connection with Africa that that was it so when
00:09:56 ►
we look back into our recent past we discover tremendous epistemic naivete that means people didn’t know what was going on
00:10:06 ►
they weren’t even close
00:10:10 ►
and yet we are asked to believe
00:10:14 ►
that somewhere after Darwin
00:10:17 ►
and before now
00:10:20 ►
it was all figured out
00:10:23 ►
and now we view the universe
00:10:27 ►
from a lofty pinnacle of integrated
00:10:30 ►
understanding now
00:10:32 ►
the physics explains biology
00:10:35 ►
biology explains culture, culture explains
00:10:39 ►
sociology so forth and so on
00:10:41 ►
well you know this is
00:10:44 ►
this is really whistling past the graveyard because
00:10:50 ►
meanwhile the visible consequences of this understanding are spreading chaos dissolution
00:10:58 ►
of values and inability to control technology and inability to set reasonable political goals such as moderation
00:11:07 ►
of population growth and carry them out. Instead, somehow this deep insight into how everything
00:11:16 ►
works has left everything a mess. And, you know, what does that mean about us why is that and what can be done about it
00:11:26 ►
well I think the problem is that we have
00:11:29 ►
too long ignored the possibility that
00:11:32 ►
reality is stranger than we
00:11:35 ►
can suppose I mean let this
00:11:38 ►
reverberate in your mind not
00:11:41 ►
that means no model will
00:11:44 ►
ever work it means it will always be
00:11:48 ►
provisional. That the understanding of what it is
00:11:51 ►
will always recede ahead of any epistemic
00:11:55 ►
program to describe and close
00:11:59 ►
explain. This is all a fallacy
00:12:04 ►
if you believe that you
00:12:06 ►
are embarked on a finite project
00:12:08 ►
where eventually you will issue
00:12:10 ►
a white paper and that will explain
00:12:12 ►
how the boar ate the cabbage.
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It’s not to be explained.
00:12:17 ►
And we have
00:12:18 ►
I think because of
00:12:20 ►
unique characteristics
00:12:22 ►
of the male ego
00:12:23 ►
chosen to operate with the assumption
00:12:26 ►
that we can understand
00:12:29 ►
that the human mind can in fact grok
00:12:32 ►
larger and larger levels of embeddedness
00:12:36 ►
and make sense of them
00:12:37 ►
what the psychedelic experience
00:12:42 ►
number one and point of view
00:12:44 ►
number two is saying is that we have the means present at hand to completely explode this nonsensical fiction of certitude.
00:12:57 ►
And yet we choose not to confront it.
00:13:00 ►
This is why I first proposed calling this facing the answer. Because the answer
00:13:07 ►
about how you understand the universe is the same
00:13:12 ►
answer that you get when you ask the question, how am I
00:13:16 ►
to understand my own life? It can’t be
00:13:20 ►
understood. It is a receding mystery.
00:13:23 ►
It is a continuing carrot. It cannot be
00:13:28 ►
brought under the aegis of rational apprehension.
00:13:33 ►
It says in Moby Dick,
00:13:35 ►
reality outran apprehension. It always
00:13:39 ►
outruns apprehension because apprehension
00:13:43 ►
is the primitive functioning of the primate neural
00:13:47 ►
network and reality who knows who would even care to take a guess you know it’s uh it’s a mystery
00:13:57 ►
you do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate
00:14:04 ►
of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate.
00:14:07 ►
Our role is not to understand but to appreciate.
00:14:11 ►
To appreciate. We have an immense capacity for
00:14:15 ►
resonance with beauty, aesthetic awareness,
00:14:20 ►
appreciation of form, appreciation of how
00:14:24 ►
things go together
00:14:25 ►
notice this word appreciation
00:14:28 ►
if you don’t know what’s going on
00:14:33 ►
at a dinner party
00:14:35 ►
in a corporation
00:14:37 ►
in an environment
00:14:39 ►
then the best course is to keep your mouth shut
00:14:43 ►
and pay attention and try to appreciate the situation.
00:14:47 ►
It’s ridiculous to attempt to seize the tiller of reality
00:14:51 ►
because we don’t even know where we want to go.
00:14:55 ►
So the notion that by creating these models of reality
00:15:01 ►
which are not acknowledged as models
00:15:04 ►
but which are called scientific truth we
00:15:08 ►
betray ourselves down the primrose path that leads to dreary dusty death because what we do is we
00:15:16 ►
take the poetry out of being we extract the poetry from being by the assumption of the mundane
00:15:26 ►
the banality of modernity
00:15:30 ►
is what I call this
00:15:32 ►
the banality of modernity
00:15:34 ►
the steady flattening of values
00:15:38 ►
so that nothing means much
00:15:41 ►
the sense of outrage over political mistreatment of the underprivileged
00:15:48 ►
or the sense of outrage as a society slips toward the abyss
00:15:52 ►
or the sense of outrage when people mistreat you is muted.
00:15:58 ►
Everything is flattened by the banality of modernity.
00:16:03 ►
This is the heritage of all the bad little boys of the 19th century.
00:16:08 ►
Nietzsche and Darwin and Hegel and Schopenhauer.
00:16:13 ►
These clowns were on a bad trip.
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And they were loud about it.
00:16:20 ►
And what they give us is a universe devoid of soul.
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Man looms larger and larger.
00:16:29 ►
Notice the gender slant.
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Man looms larger and larger in the picture.
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And what this ushers into is fascism, pure and simple.
00:16:42 ►
And it’s not surprising,
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pure and simple and it’s not surprising
00:16:44 ►
because this
00:16:45 ►
calling forth of the image of man
00:16:49 ►
into larger and larger perspective
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has been the program of monotheism
00:16:54 ►
for three thousand years
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it has been a relentless
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accentuation
00:17:00 ►
of the centrality of the human image
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the male dominant human image
00:17:07 ►
and in the
00:17:09 ►
transmutation of Hellenistic
00:17:13 ►
Judaism that becomes Christianity
00:17:16 ►
the final apotheosis of this
00:17:19 ►
point of view
00:17:21 ►
is created in the notion that man can be God
00:17:26 ►
that’s it and it is
00:17:29 ►
hailed as a tremendous
00:17:31 ►
infusion of existential validity into the human
00:17:35 ►
image the greatest stride ever
00:17:38 ►
the greatest single stride ever taken in the
00:17:40 ►
definition of human ontology well
00:17:43 ►
I would like to suggest to you it was the greatest
00:17:46 ►
backward step ever taken because what it did was it shoved nature further and further into
00:17:56 ►
the background nature is something from which we torment her secrets this is Francis Bacon we we torture nature to obtain her secrets the world is created
00:18:11 ►
for man it is for man to remake in his image all this gender stuff and it is then no wonder that building on that foundation, 19th century rationalism, which thought it was putting these things behind it,
00:18:31 ►
it conceived itself as anti-clerical, as anti-monotheism and Christianity in some sense.
00:18:39 ►
And yet what it really did was it just stripped away the Baroque trappings.
00:18:47 ►
did was it just stripped away the Baroque trappings Hans Jonas was very acute in pointing out that third century Hellenistic Gnosticism and Heideggerian philosophy are essentially the
00:18:55 ►
same thing it’s just that in the in the Gnostic recension you know you get all these sexy you get demons and angels and levels and the emanation from the
00:19:08 ►
pleroma and the clash of the archons opera opera in the heideggerian recension they’ve just gotten
00:19:16 ►
down to the nitty-gritty but the message is the same Man is thrown into the unknown.
00:19:28 ►
Man is in the abyss, lost.
00:19:31 ►
All meaning must come from within.
00:19:34 ►
All order must come from an inner vision.
00:19:37 ►
We are abandoned.
00:19:39 ►
This is Heideggerian language.
00:19:40 ►
We are abandoned. Well, this is permission then for pathology because it is a point of
00:19:49 ►
view purchased at the cost of ignoring the facts of the matter and that is in
00:19:55 ►
my definition a delusion a point of view purchased at the expense of the facts of
00:20:01 ►
the matter you know Whitehead said there are stubborn facts.
00:20:06 ►
You can reduce and reduce all you want,
00:20:09 ►
but there are certain stubborn facts.
00:20:11 ►
Well, one of them is the primacy of nature,
00:20:16 ►
a stubborn fact which was ignored by this tradition.
00:20:21 ►
Once nature is taken as the ground of being then the permission to inflate the image of the ego is
00:20:33 ►
denied and I think that this is happening globally very slowly under pressure under duress, because our backs are to the wall.
00:20:50 ►
We are seeing a planetary crisis unfold before our eyes.
00:20:55 ►
And, you know, blame has not yet come into the rhetoric,
00:20:59 ►
but eventually it’s going to be understood who’s to blame. And it isn’t the tribesmen of New Guinea
00:21:02 ►
or the Indians of Siberia.
00:21:05 ►
It is Western, male, scientific, technological hubris that has claimed center stage like a noisy drunk to hold us all prisoner while it acted out a process that is rooted in its own traumatic birth,
00:21:30 ►
in the sundering of the symbiotic relationship to the vegetable matrix that characterized prehistory.
00:21:40 ►
Well, so what I’m offering as a counterpoise to that is this notion of provisional models. Nature is not mute. This is what Sartre intentionality toward humankind.
00:22:07 ►
But intuition must be given prominence
00:22:12 ►
in the rearrangement of our relationship with the world.
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And I talked the other night about induction and intuition,
00:22:25 ►
and I want to say just a little bit more about it tonight.
00:22:29 ►
Different things.
00:22:30 ►
Science runs on induction, which is a very low-grade form of logic.
00:22:36 ►
It means you do something over and over again,
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and if it happens the same way a hundred times,
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you have confidence that the hundred and first time it will happen the same
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way intuition doesn’t work like that intuition as i said the other night leaves no trail and most of
00:22:54 ►
us are accustomed to thinking of intuition as something feminine mysterious unexplainable, and sort of magical.
00:23:07 ►
And also I think because we live in a male-dominant society,
00:23:10 ►
we undervalue it.
00:23:13 ►
If someone claims intuition,
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our position is probably one of prove it,
00:23:20 ►
doubt in the face of the assertion, you see.
00:23:24 ►
But there’s an interesting thing about intuition
00:23:27 ►
that I don’t think many people understand
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or have bothered to look at
00:23:32 ►
which is, did you know
00:23:34 ►
I’ll bet you did know
00:23:36 ►
mathematics is based on intuition
00:23:41 ►
now half of mathematics would rise
00:23:46 ►
with a screech of horror at this statement,
00:23:49 ►
but the other half of mathematics
00:23:51 ►
calls itself intuitional mathematics.
00:23:55 ►
Okay, well now, what’s going on here?
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Probably if you are not a professional philosopher of science,
00:24:02 ►
you are accustomed to associating mathematics with science
00:24:05 ►
rather closely. This is
00:24:07 ►
because science, in
00:24:09 ►
order to give itself legitimacy,
00:24:12 ►
has very slyly
00:24:14 ►
appropriated mathematics,
00:24:16 ►
especially in the 20th
00:24:18 ►
century, to its purposes.
00:24:20 ►
But if we talk about
00:24:22 ►
what is called pure mathematics,
00:24:24 ►
which is the great love of mathematicians
00:24:26 ►
the other kind of mathematics is applied mathematics
00:24:29 ►
and that’s for engineers and technologists
00:24:32 ►
and is not what moves them to the edge of their chair
00:24:36 ►
but if we think about
00:24:38 ►
pure mathematics
00:24:41 ►
it is an activity carried on in the mind based on deductive truth.
00:24:53 ►
Deductive, not inductive.
00:24:55 ►
In other words, a statement is made.
00:24:59 ►
It can be anything.
00:25:01 ►
All grays are non-X. This is just a statement. We don’t yet know what this is going
00:25:09 ►
to be about. All grays are non-X. All greens are F sub 1. What we’re putting in place are a set of
00:25:20 ►
statements that appear nonsensical, but what we will assert is that we should seek a relationship between them
00:25:30 ►
and that that will then show us something.
00:25:33 ►
And this is how mathematics really works.
00:25:36 ►
It has very little to do with number.
00:25:37 ►
It has to do with the conceptualizing of relationships, conceptualizing them,
00:25:50 ►
of relationships, conceptualizing them, and then exploring your intuition about these conceptions.
00:25:52 ►
And then the third and very late stage is you write a formal statement of your cognitive
00:26:00 ►
activity around these assumptions.
00:26:03 ►
So you see, mathematics is entirely intuitional.
00:26:07 ►
It leaves no track.
00:26:09 ►
It is drawn from this other domain.
00:26:11 ►
Well, why has it been appropriated by science?
00:26:17 ►
Well, for a very funny and not well understood reason.
00:26:23 ►
Mathematics has been appropriated by science
00:26:26 ►
because mathematics has an uncanny ability
00:26:30 ►
to describe nature.
00:26:33 ►
Completely uncanny.
00:26:35 ►
Now you may have never asked yourself
00:26:38 ►
why is mathematics such a powerful tool
00:26:42 ►
for the description of nature?
00:26:44 ►
Maybe you thought that somebody else can answer this
00:26:49 ►
and that it’s not a problem.
00:26:51 ►
Well, I’ve got news for you.
00:26:53 ►
It is a problem.
00:26:55 ►
Nobody has any good ideas about why mathematics describes nature.
00:27:00 ►
But notice that mathematics is an intuitional activity. An intuitional
00:27:08 ►
activity describes nature without the
00:27:12 ►
intercession of inductive science. Inductive
00:27:16 ►
science is a kind of naive holdover from
00:27:20 ►
Greek democratean theories
00:27:24 ►
where everything is conceived of as clearly from Greek democratian theories, where
00:27:25 ►
everything is conceived of as
00:27:27 ►
clearly conceivable
00:27:28 ►
and operating according to known
00:27:31 ►
laws. But in fact,
00:27:34 ►
the deeper structure
00:27:35 ►
of nature is not
00:27:37 ►
modeled out of an
00:27:39 ►
examination of data
00:27:41 ►
obtained by measurement.
00:27:43 ►
That isn’t how it works these days.
00:27:46 ►
The deeper description of nature
00:27:48 ►
is achieved by taking weird objects
00:27:52 ►
from the frontiers of mathematics,
00:27:56 ►
these things dreamed up in the confines
00:27:58 ►
and depths of the human mind
00:28:00 ►
and inside computers,
00:28:02 ►
and then laying them over nature and seeing my gosh there’s a one-to-one
00:28:09 ►
correspondence between let us say uh the uh multi-dimensional catastrophes described by
00:28:18 ►
renee tom and uh the dripping of a faucet the turbulence in a brook
00:28:26 ►
the voting patterns in a ghetto
00:28:28 ►
all of these things are seen to be
00:28:32 ►
easily modeled by
00:28:34 ►
extremely exotic mathematical objects
00:28:39 ►
discovered through intuition within the mind
00:28:42 ►
well what does this mean
00:28:44 ►
well it means if it means anything i mean
00:28:51 ►
before we draw the deeper conclusion what is the conclusion on the surface it must be that the
00:28:55 ►
unaided human mind is more capable of correctly modeling nature than the human mind that works through the methodological inductive approach called science
00:29:07 ►
and in fact this is clearly true because the world described by science a scientific description of
00:29:16 ►
this room would say very little about all the important things going on in it. A scientific description of this room
00:29:26 ►
would leave out personality, would leave out linguistic intent, would leave out the uniqueness
00:29:36 ►
of each of us. For science, we are merely members of the human species. Again, this flattening, this reductionism, this betrayal
00:29:47 ►
of the quintessence of the phenomenon in a desperate effort to achieve closure in the
00:29:54 ►
modeling process. And so then you do achieve closure, but the model is always inadequate.
00:30:01 ►
It’s always inadequate. So then there’s this sense of frustration.
00:30:14 ►
We can’t get closure with the model unless we tell a lie, unless we deny the complexity,
00:30:25 ►
the interrelatedness, the soul-ness, the spirit-ness, the mindfulness. All of these things are for science what are called secondary properties
00:30:28 ►
they are epiphenomenal
00:30:31 ►
they are only an aspect
00:30:34 ►
of your point of view
00:30:36 ►
like an iridescence on a butterfly’s wing
00:30:41 ►
or something like that
00:30:42 ►
in fact that is the classic reductionist definition of
00:30:45 ►
consciousness it is an iridescence that appears on the surface of neural processing that we mistake
00:30:54 ►
for true being and yet somehow we are embedded within this iridescence and it is from within this iridescence that we launch the descriptive
00:31:05 ►
models that then deny our existential validity well so this has been a an onanistic exercise
00:31:15 ►
is one way of putting it and there must be others okay so then what is the path of intuition in relationship to nature that is different from the path of science?
00:31:30 ►
In a way, it’s only a shift of emphasis.
00:31:35 ►
William Blake said, attend the minute particulars.
00:31:41 ►
Attend the minute particulars.
00:31:43 ►
attend the minute particulars this is very good
00:31:45 ►
advice for science
00:31:49 ►
and it is very good advice for mathematics
00:31:52 ►
and what I’m suggesting here tonight is that
00:31:55 ►
we have misconstrued mathematics
00:31:57 ►
and have bought the notion that it is a part of science
00:32:01 ►
when actually it stands ready
00:32:04 ►
to empower intuition and to sweep science
00:32:09 ►
if not away at least into a more proper role more befitting its extremely limited application
00:32:18 ►
to the higher orders of reality that we really care about i mean science is really it’s the plumbing
00:32:26 ►
level of
00:32:28 ►
reality it doesn’t
00:32:29 ►
catch you know the integrated
00:32:31 ►
nature of language
00:32:33 ►
the evolution of fairy tale
00:32:35 ►
the dynamics of love affairs
00:32:38 ►
the quintessence
00:32:40 ►
of genius
00:32:41 ►
these are the things that as
00:32:44 ►
human beings
00:32:45 ►
structure and constellate and guide and inform our world and
00:32:50 ►
Science has nothing to say about these things
00:32:53 ►
Mathematics on the other hand is like the bedrock
00:32:56 ►
celebration of
00:32:58 ►
These things it empowers intuition it discovers intuition to be the most powerful epistemic tool that we have.
00:33:10 ►
More powerful than induction, more powerful than deduction. Intuition is the unifying of experience
00:33:18 ►
into a gestalt image of the world. A coming together within the organism of a correct imaging of the world now what do I
00:33:29 ►
mean by correct imaging all I mean is a provisional image that carries you to the next moment this is
00:33:37 ►
all we can hope for at this stage we are much more suited for dancing than for whatever it is that we have been doing you know
00:33:48 ►
whatever it was it wasn’t dancing we are a part of nature we are a part of light we are a part of the
00:33:56 ►
energy field of the planet we are not its keeper in the sense that it is not given unto us to understand it. That was all a horrible
00:34:09 ►
Misunderstanding the idea that we should understand reality and then somehow make something of it
00:34:16 ►
Alfred North Whitehead
00:34:19 ►
said
00:34:20 ►
that understanding is the apperception of pattern as such.
00:34:28 ►
As such.
00:34:30 ►
That’s all.
00:34:32 ►
So here we have a room full of people.
00:34:35 ►
Well, it’s a pattern.
00:34:37 ►
It’s many patterns.
00:34:39 ►
It’s the pattern of how men and women are mixed together statistically
00:34:43 ►
as we scan from left to right if
00:34:47 ►
I see a pattern there I know something about the crowd I understand something about the crowd the
00:34:56 ►
pattern tells me something and I call that understanding but we could analyze the crowd
00:35:01 ►
from the point of view of the distribution of young people and old people
00:35:05 ►
or people in colors in the red-blue spectrum
00:35:09 ►
as according to the yellow-white spectrum.
00:35:12 ►
Each one of these things is a way of analyzing
00:35:15 ►
the pattern in the room
00:35:17 ►
and each one of these patterns tells the perceiver
00:35:21 ►
more about what is going on in the room
00:35:24 ►
because the room is not a distribution of
00:35:27 ►
young people and old people a distribution of men and women or a distribution of garment colors the
00:35:35 ►
room is a mystery a recessional mystery that presents itself as a series of interlocking patterns of infinite depth. And so in building collective epistemologies,
00:35:50 ►
this is what we must ask of these epistemologies,
00:35:55 ►
that they give us the experience of understanding.
00:35:59 ►
And the experience of understanding is largely intuitional.
00:36:05 ►
How much of an experience of understanding do you have
00:36:08 ►
when you examine what modern physics is saying about the origin of the universe?
00:36:15 ►
I submit not much because it is so clearly the product of abstraction,
00:36:24 ►
the product of the phonetic alphabet,
00:36:26 ►
the male ego.
00:36:28 ►
They’ve set all the interesting stuff back
00:36:31 ►
in the first three minutes.
00:36:32 ►
Who can go and look?
00:36:34 ►
It’s all stacked against empowering the perceiver.
00:36:39 ►
It’s all stacked against empowering the perceiver.
00:36:42 ►
You can’t even check the statements
00:36:43 ►
these people are making unless you happen to have a 125 million dollar colliding Bevatron or something and the
00:36:54 ►
understanding to use it and interpret the results. So what we have is a priesthood off on the edge of things propounding great profundities
00:37:05 ►
that nowhere touch the heart,
00:37:08 ►
nowhere empower the individual,
00:37:12 ►
nowhere strengthen the dyad or reinforce the family
00:37:16 ►
or give support to the downtrodden.
00:37:20 ►
It doesn’t seem to be about that.
00:37:24 ►
In other words, the explanation of the world is not a human
00:37:29 ►
explanation a
00:37:31 ►
Human explanation must come from intuition it must come from poetry it must come ultimately from
00:37:40 ►
experience and by experience, I don’t mean
00:37:44 ►
experience. And by experience, I don’t mean the experimental method
00:37:48 ►
of science, which is that things are pulled apart,
00:37:52 ►
taken down to their lowest common denominator, and then
00:37:56 ►
described. I mean, if you do, that’s like
00:38:00 ►
believing that you understand Los Angeles
00:38:03 ►
if you have the telephone directory.
00:38:08 ►
You know? I mean, this is the level of genetics
00:38:11 ►
today. They say they understand life
00:38:16 ►
and they have the telephone directory and they’re talking
00:38:20 ►
about Los Angeles because they can look up
00:38:22 ►
where the genes are are the coding for the
00:38:26 ►
proteins you know does this tell us anything about a broken heart or a messiah or a Hitler I don’t
00:38:34 ►
think so so what we are trying to do is return the focus of attention to individual experience.
00:38:51 ►
We have been slaved too long to ideology transmitted hierarchically and based on a tremendously alienating instrumentality.
00:38:57 ►
That’s what science depends on now,
00:39:00 ►
a tremendously alienating instrumentality.
00:39:02 ►
What we need to do is empower experience well
00:39:07 ►
this is where the psychedelics come in because citizens don’t take psychedelics because it’s
00:39:17 ►
illegal neither do marionettes neither do robots none of these well behaved and mechanistic reductionist
00:39:27 ►
images of humanity take psychedelics
00:39:31 ►
because it’s misbehaving
00:39:33 ►
misbehaving is a great sin
00:39:36 ►
in fact it’s enshrined as the first sin
00:39:39 ►
you’ll regard that the psychedelic issue was there in Eden
00:39:42 ►
and somebody misbehaved and then they got
00:39:46 ►
tossed out forever and their children’s children into the chaos of history. It’s interesting to
00:39:53 ►
read in Genesis why this was. It was because they will become as we are, says Yahweh. They will
00:40:02 ►
become as we are if they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge
00:40:06 ►
I suggest to you that this is precisely
00:40:09 ►
what we should seek to do
00:40:11 ►
and that this we
00:40:12 ►
is the voice of hierarchy
00:40:15 ►
the voice of paternalism
00:40:18 ►
the voice of the male ego
00:40:20 ►
finally right up into the storm god
00:40:23 ►
the volcano god who lies uh back there in the origins
00:40:28 ►
of monotheism we empower our experience by insisting on our authenticity it’s a wonderful
00:40:38 ►
thing to learn to be able to stand up and yell bullshit it I did it first when I was about 18 years old
00:40:49 ►
and it was the meme of the hour
00:40:51 ►
and it blew their minds.
00:40:55 ►
It did blow their minds.
00:40:58 ►
It was uncivil.
00:41:00 ►
It was uncivil.
00:41:02 ►
It lacked polity.
00:41:05 ►
It was rude and crude and correct.
00:41:09 ►
Correct.
00:41:11 ►
Because so much is being slung
00:41:14 ►
and nobody is talking about the primacy of experience
00:41:18 ►
and the dignity of the individual.
00:41:21 ►
The dignity of the individual.
00:41:24 ►
We went a long way with this in America before
00:41:27 ►
we betrayed it. And it wasn’t only betrayed by the
00:41:32 ►
clowns in Washington. It’s also betrayed by anybody
00:41:35 ►
who clusters themselves around the feet of some self-proclaimed
00:41:39 ►
nabob. Because the fact of the matter is
00:41:44 ►
nobody knows what’s going on nobody knows nobody has
00:41:49 ►
the faintest idea the best guesses are lies you may be sure of it and so to pretend that one human
00:41:58 ►
being will lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous absolutely
00:42:09 ►
grotesque a product of this empowering of the human image that has gone on through several
00:42:18 ►
thousand years of dominator culture if you want a teacher try a waterfall or a mushroom or a mountain wilderness or a storm
00:42:31 ►
pounded seashore. This is where the action is. It’s not back in the hive. It’s not in the anthill.
00:42:40 ►
It’s not knocking your head against the floor in front of somebody who claims that because of their lineage and whose feet they washed and whose feet they
00:42:49 ►
washed that you should give credence to them knowledge is provisional and we we
00:42:56 ►
are yet to approach even the first moment of civilized understanding the way it is to be done is by trusting yourself trusting your
00:43:08 ►
intuition reject authority authority is a lie and an abomination authority will lead you into ruin
00:43:17 ►
it’s not real and it isn’t don’t get the idea that it’s this liberal rap about how everybody has a piece of the action.
00:43:29 ►
You know, the Jews know something, the Buddhists know something, the Huichol know something.
00:43:34 ►
Nonsense. Rubbish. Nobody knows anything.
00:43:38 ►
These are different kinds of shell games that have been worked out by priestly castes of people
00:43:43 ►
to keep things under control.
00:43:48 ►
Institutions seek to maximize control, control, control. That’s what they’re into. Did you think
00:43:54 ►
they were in the business of enlightening you, saving your soul? Forget it. Control is what this is all about and to the degree that we commit ourselves to ideology we
00:44:07 ►
are poisoned any ideology Marxism Catholicism objectivism you name it rubbish all rubbish
00:44:18 ►
what is real is experience what is real is this moment And so then what it becomes about is what are the
00:44:27 ►
frontiers of experience? How much of that has been taken away from us by these dominators,
00:44:36 ►
by these priesthoods, by these cults, by these philosophical shell games? Well, a lot.
00:44:47 ►
That’s the whole story of history.
00:44:49 ►
Our growing unease,
00:44:52 ►
our growing dis-ease,
00:44:53 ►
our malaise,
00:44:56 ►
is all about the fact that we are kept from the wellspring of experience.
00:44:59 ►
We are sexually repressed.
00:45:02 ►
You may not feel it,
00:45:03 ►
but look back a hundred years to a world where pianos
00:45:07 ►
wore pants you know we maybe we’ve made a little progress on the sexual thing maybe not maybe more
00:45:14 ►
or less than we think but we are repressed in all of these areas and we are particularly repressed in the area that relates to the psychedelic experience because it
00:45:29 ►
is it is raid to the dominator insect invasion they can’t take it they can’t stand it because
00:45:39 ►
it empowers the individual it dissolves the cheerful model of science.
00:45:45 ►
It’s just exposed as, you know, a nice story.
00:45:49 ►
It enriches the accessible universe tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold.
00:45:57 ►
It makes the individual complete within his or herself.
00:46:03 ►
within his or herself and this completion of the individual
00:46:05 ►
is extremely destructive
00:46:07 ►
to the plan of the dominators
00:46:10 ►
which is that you will be a cog in a machine
00:46:13 ►
you will participate in the life of an organization
00:46:16 ►
not your life, the life of an organization
00:46:19 ►
you will go to some bullshit job
00:46:21 ►
you will pour the best years of your life
00:46:24 ►
and your genius and your hopes into this.
00:46:27 ►
You will serve an institution.
00:46:30 ►
You will serve, serve, serve, serve.
00:46:34 ►
Well, it’s a bad idea for free people
00:46:37 ►
to go along with this.
00:46:39 ►
A much better idea would be
00:46:42 ►
to insist on the dignity of human beings to recognize
00:46:48 ►
that the freeing of slaves the giving of the vote to women the ending of public
00:46:57 ►
whippings that this program of political enlightenment must also then include hands-off on how
00:47:07 ►
people want to relate to changing their minds.
00:47:12 ►
We are not interested in being sexually
00:47:16 ►
regulated by the state, and we are not interested in being
00:47:20 ►
intellectually, spiritually, emotionally
00:47:23 ►
manipulated by the state.
00:47:26 ►
The state should stand down in this issue.
00:47:31 ►
The state is acting as the enforcing arm of the dominator culture,
00:47:37 ►
specifically of fundamentalist screwballs,
00:47:41 ►
who, you know, are horrified by all all this by the notion that people would claim the
00:47:48 ►
authenticity of their own minds that people would stand in the light of nature and reject
00:47:53 ►
original sin and the guilt from eden and you know the sins of the fathers and all this rubbish
00:48:01 ►
which is handed down what the archaic revival is going to
00:48:06 ►
have to mean if it has teeth is a re-empowering of the individual and a
00:48:15 ►
consequent lowering of the of the profile of institutions especially
00:48:21 ►
government we need to think about these things
00:48:25 ►
because we have bought into the idea
00:48:28 ►
that we have to serve and behave
00:48:31 ►
and be enslaved,
00:48:33 ►
else chaos will engulf the world.
00:48:37 ►
We need to carry out our analysis
00:48:40 ►
of the situation to the point
00:48:42 ►
where we can embrace chaos and see that chaos is the
00:48:48 ►
environment in which we all thrive that’s how i’ve done it for years you think i could have lived you
00:48:55 ►
think i could have gotten away with this in the soviet union i don’t think so i require a society
00:49:01 ►
on the brink of social breakdown to be able to do my work and and i think a society on the brink of social breakdown to be able to do my work
00:49:06 ►
and I think a society on the brink of social breakdown
00:49:11 ►
is the healthiest situation for individuals
00:49:15 ►
I don’t know how many of you have ever had the privilege
00:49:18 ►
of being in a society in a pre-revolutionary situation
00:49:22 ►
but the cafes stay open all night and there’s music in the streets
00:49:28 ►
and you can breathe it you can feel it and you know what is happening the dominator is being
00:49:36 ►
pushed it never succeeds it never uh it never is able to claim itself but on the other hand history is young
00:49:46 ►
we may have
00:49:48 ►
we may have a crack at this
00:49:51 ►
a global society is coming into being
00:49:55 ►
a global society made out of information
00:49:58 ►
that was not intended to be ours
00:50:01 ►
but which is ours
00:50:04 ►
through the mistaken invention and distribution of
00:50:08 ►
small computers the printing press all of this stuff information is power and
00:50:14 ►
information has been spilled by the clumsy handling of the cybernetic
00:50:19 ►
revolution by the dominator culture in so that it is everywhere never has the situation been more fluid never have
00:50:29 ►
the opportunities for infiltration insurrection and hell-raising been more present at hand but
00:50:40 ►
we have to seize the opportunity we have to seize the opportunity because the world doesn’t have that much more to run
00:50:48 ►
unless somebody begins to shake the apple cart.
00:50:51 ►
If we don’t begin to shake the apple cart,
00:50:54 ►
then the apple cart is just going to sail over the cliff
00:50:57 ►
and be lost.
00:50:58 ►
So the psychedelics are very hot in this
00:51:03 ►
because they dissolve boundaries.
00:51:05 ►
They dissolve assumptions.
00:51:09 ►
And our task, our being everyone who seeks self-empowerment through experience,
00:51:21 ►
our task is to dissolve the assumptions of the dominator culture and make it
00:51:27 ►
impossible for it to work. This, I think, is already happening. We have nature on our side,
00:51:33 ►
you see. Nature is beginning to kick up. And, you know, it may alarm you that they’re cutting down
00:51:41 ►
the Amazon rainforest, but imagine if you were the clown who owns it how alarmed he is he sees it as an investment he thinks he
00:51:52 ►
owns it and when he sees that it’s being destroyed he’s extremely alarmed the
00:51:58 ►
fact that nature is itself being seen as a limited resource is a tremendous tilt to our side
00:52:07 ►
because the provisional model,
00:52:11 ►
psychedelic, open-ended partnership way of doing things
00:52:16 ►
is the only style
00:52:22 ►
that can perhaps seize the controls of this sinking submarine
00:52:27 ►
and get it back to the surface so that we can figure out what should be done.
00:52:32 ►
If we continue as we have, then we’re doomed.
00:52:37 ►
And the judgment of some higher power on that will be they didn’t even struggle.
00:52:47 ►
power on that will be they didn’t even struggle you know they went to the boxcars with their suitcases and they didn’t even struggle this is too nightmarish to contemplate we’re talking about
00:52:55 ►
the fate of a whole planet why are people so polite why are they so patient why are they so patient? Why are they so forgiving of gangsterism and betrayal?
00:53:07 ►
It’s very difficult to understand.
00:53:11 ►
I believe it’s because the dominator culture
00:53:13 ►
is increasingly more and more sophisticated
00:53:16 ►
in its perfection of subliminal mechanisms of control.
00:53:20 ►
And I don’t mean anything grandiose and paranoid.
00:53:24 ►
I just mean that
00:53:25 ►
through press releases and sound bites and the enforced idiocy of television the
00:53:35 ►
the the drama of a dying world has been turned into a soap opera for most people
00:53:42 ►
and they don’t understand that it’s it’s their story and
00:53:48 ►
that they will eat it in the final act if somewhere between here and the final act they don’t stand up
00:53:55 ►
on their hind legs and howl so this whole effort
00:54:05 ►
to bring the psychedelic
00:54:07 ►
experience back into prominence
00:54:09 ►
is an effort to empower
00:54:11 ►
individuals and to get
00:54:13 ►
them to see that we are
00:54:15 ►
bled of our authenticity
00:54:17 ►
by vampirish
00:54:19 ►
institutions
00:54:20 ►
that will never of their own accord
00:54:23 ►
leave us alone.
00:54:25 ►
There must be a moment when the machinery
00:54:29 ►
and the working of the machinery becomes so odious
00:54:33 ►
that people are willing to stride forward
00:54:36 ►
and throw sand on the track
00:54:39 ►
and force a re-evaluation of the situation.
00:54:45 ►
And it’s not done through organizing.
00:54:48 ►
It’s not done through vanguard parties
00:54:50 ►
or cadres of intellectual elites.
00:54:53 ►
It’s done through just walking away from all of that.
00:54:57 ►
Claiming your identity.
00:54:59 ►
Claiming your vision, your being, your intuition,
00:55:05 ►
and then acting from that without regret,
00:55:10 ►
cleanly, without regret.
00:55:14 ►
Okay.
00:55:15 ►
Well, I want to thank you all again,
00:55:17 ►
not only for this evening, but for the month.
00:55:20 ►
And Esalen is a wonderful second home to me
00:55:24 ►
and my wife and
00:55:26 ►
my children. I’m very
00:55:27 ►
concerned about free speech
00:55:30 ►
freedom of thought
00:55:32 ►
these things are
00:55:33 ►
endangered
00:55:35 ►
means. Esalen
00:55:37 ►
has always tolerated
00:55:40 ►
and even encouraged me
00:55:41 ►
and I think this is extremely
00:55:43 ►
laudable
00:55:45 ►
and brave
00:55:46 ►
they don’t have to do that
00:55:48 ►
somebody else could sit here and amuse you
00:55:51 ►
and it wouldn’t cause any ripples
00:55:53 ►
so I’m very appreciative to Esalen
00:55:56 ►
for its commitment to free speech
00:55:58 ►
I’m appreciative to you
00:56:00 ►
this may have outraged some of you
00:56:02 ►
you were very noble about it.
00:56:07 ►
Civilized dialogue is our last best hope.
00:56:11 ►
And we must preserve theaters and opportunities for civilized dialogue.
00:56:19 ►
The best idea will win.
00:56:22 ►
The best idea will win.
00:56:25 ►
Thank you very much.
00:56:33 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:35 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:39 ►
So let’s pause for just a moment here
00:56:43 ►
and think back to what Terence said at the end of this talk.
00:56:47 ►
And I’m referring here to his comment about just walking away from what I guess we would call the system.
00:56:54 ►
Let me play it for you one more time.
00:56:57 ►
So this whole effort to bring the psychedelic experience back into prominence is an effort to empower
00:57:07 ►
individuals and to get them to see that we are bled of our authenticity by vampirish
00:57:15 ►
institutions that will never of their own accord leave us alone there must be a moment when the machinery
00:57:26 ►
and the working of the machinery
00:57:28 ►
becomes so odious
00:57:29 ►
that people are willing to stride forward
00:57:32 ►
and throw sand on the track
00:57:35 ►
and force a re-evaluation
00:57:39 ►
of the situation
00:57:41 ►
and it’s not done through organizing
00:57:44 ►
it’s not done through vanguard parties
00:57:47 ►
or cadres of intellectual elites.
00:57:49 ►
It’s done through just walking away
00:57:52 ►
from all of that.
00:57:54 ►
Claiming your identity.
00:57:56 ►
Claiming your vision,
00:57:59 ►
your being,
00:58:00 ►
your intuition,
00:58:02 ►
and then acting from that
00:58:04 ►
without regret. Cleanly, without regret.
00:58:11 ►
Now, I know that I’m most likely not the only one here who, before they accumulated enough
00:58:18 ►
insight to understand what a horribly insidious book Atlas Shrugged is, well, we were enamored with Rand’s concept of dropping out.
00:58:28 ►
But interestingly, when Tim Leary suggested dropping out,
00:58:32 ►
he was mercilessly attacked.
00:58:34 ►
Yet the Randians still love John Galt’s strategy
00:58:37 ►
of having only the very top people, the rich, the CEOs,
00:58:41 ►
to be the ones who walk away from the system
00:58:44 ►
and leave us poor slobs to fend for ourselves.
00:58:47 ►
But what Terrence here is suggesting, I think, is what I like to think of as the common man’s approach to John Galt, John Galtism, if you will,
00:58:58 ►
which is to detach from the system as much as possible and not give away their labor to the rich and powerful.
00:59:04 ►
as much as possible and not give away their labor to the rich and powerful.
00:59:11 ►
That soundbite that I just played is, to me, the ultimate anti-Randian approach.
00:59:17 ►
In other words, hey, let’s walk away and leave this corrupt and unsustainable system,
00:59:18 ►
get along without us.
00:59:23 ►
It’s not going to be easy, but hey, already you can see it happening all around you if you only look closely. There is
00:59:26 ►
most definitely a better way to organize a society than the way that it is today. So what are we
00:59:32 ►
waiting for? Let’s get started. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:59:39 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.