Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“[It is] a race between education and disaster.
“We’re going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and decency, or we’re going to toxify the whole thing and turn it into an ash heap. And the responsibility falls largely on us.”
“Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is if you know how to say it right.”
“Until I went into therapy I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world, and then once you’re in therapy you discover that it was the most insane scene you’d ever heard of, and you just didn’t notice.”
“Science fiction I really consider a proto-psychedelic drug, because what science fiction does is it gives permission to imagine.”
“We can’t preach to the have-nots the virtue of voluntary simplicity when we’re riding around in BMWs and collecting Monets. That doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:24 ►
Salon.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today by thanking Chris, Adam, Tony, Daniel, Katrina, and Sherilyn,
00:00:38 ►
who either made direct donations to the salon or who made a donation for the Pay What You Can audiobook edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation,
00:00:43 ►
all of which will be used to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:50 ►
And so I thank you all very much for helping out.
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Also, I want to let you know that we’re now accepting bitcoins on our donation page.
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Although with the current price of a single bitcoin,
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I should say that we’re now accepting satoshis, which, as you know, is the smallest unit of a single Bitcoin, I should say that we’re now accepting Satoshis,
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which, as you know, is the smallest unit of a Bitcoin.
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So, for our fellow slawners who have been telling me to accept Bitcoins for the past couple of years,
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well, what can I say?
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You were certainly right in advising me to do so, but hey, better late than never, huh?
00:01:23 ►
Now, today I had hoped to begin playing a few more of the Planque Norte lectures
00:01:28 ►
from this year’s Burning Man Festival,
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but unfortunately the default world has been making some unreasonable demands
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on our volunteers who did the recordings.
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And so while I haven’t forgotten about them,
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I’m afraid that it’s going to be just a little bit longer before we get to hear them.
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So instead, I’ve decided to begin playing another one of the Terrence McKenna workshops that we’ve got here.
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And this is one that was held in May of 1990, almost exactly one year after the series of talks that I just got through playing for you a couple of podcasts back.
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Now the copy of this talk that I have doesn’t give the workshop series any names of any kind.
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It’s just the tapes say Seminar 1, Seminar 2 and like that.
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And so once again I came up with a few different titles for this podcast
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and I finally settled on something that Terrence had to say
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right near the end of this talk.
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So let’s join him now for his opening remarks of the seminar,
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which apparently had been going on for a little bit
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before the recorder got turned on.
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We will, I think, continue this kind of neurotic behavior
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until it either is our undoing
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or until we awaken to archaic values.
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That’s why the weekend is called what it is.
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The archaic revival is a very large cultural wave
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that can be pushed.
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You could trace the beginnings of it,
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the first swell back to the turn of the century
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with relativity and theosophy and surrealism
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and the work of Freud and Jung on the unconscious.
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But it’s a discovery, a moving toward a realization that the values that can serve us
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are archaic values,
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that we have to go completely outside of history.
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And we have to make, you know,
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we are going to find out the nature of human nature.
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We can’t have it several ways.
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We can’t live in obfuscation. I mean, the real
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question is, is man good? You know, because we’re going to find out. Because as we move more and
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more into this cultural domain that I call the imagination, nothing lies between us and the expression of our dreams, you know. And so far,
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our dreams have been, I think, expressed fairly shoddily. I mean, you know, our cities are like
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sores. Our contribution to the ecosystem of the planet is plutonium, pesticides,
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to the ecosystem of the planet is plutonium, pesticides,
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chlorofluorocarbons,
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so forth and so on.
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An apologist for the human race
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would say,
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but we had so many strikes against us.
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The law of gravity,
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the cost of materials,
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the resistance of water, air,
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and so forth and so on.
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Well, fine,
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then we’re going to get rid of all that.
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We’re going to enter into the imagination where you know the tensile strength of a structure is whatever you say it is this is the this is where
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language comes in I begin I think language is the sort of the CAD cam the computer assisted drawing software for creating
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the reality of the imagination I think it’s a very it’s overwhelming our
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situation the potential and the depth of the strikes against us. I mean, it’s really…
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What’s going on on this planet is absolutely unique
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so far as we know.
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It’s never happened before on this planet.
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Intelligence emerging out of biological organization
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and actually having a shot at what?
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Who knows?
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I mean, being itself is some kind of opportunity.
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The reasonable expectation is that nothing exists.
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Why should anything exist?
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I mean, it seems to me the most conservative universe
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would be a dimensionless plenum, a homogenous, pointless, dimensionless.
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That makes sense.
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Why, then, is there instead, you know, multiplicity upon multiplicity?
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I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, stuff like that.
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How in the world do you get from utter emptiness to that kind of thing
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the richness, the creative force behind it all is awesome
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and I am not religious in any ordinary sense
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in fact I’m violently anti-religious in most senses
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I certainly would lead the charge against
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priest craft in any form
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but the
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picture of the universe
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as a
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machine subject to
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a few laws discovered by a bunch of
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guys in powdered wigs
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that’s ridiculous
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I mean you’ve got to be kidding
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science doesn’t deal as it’s always a pain That’s ridiculous. I mean, you’ve got to be kidding.
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Science doesn’t deal, as it’s always a pains to point out, with what’s called subjective experience.
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Well, that’s really too bad, because that’s all any of us ever have, is subjective experience. experience you know so we have in the interests of I don’t know what exactly
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a curious drive
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an obsession of the Greeks
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really
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an obsession
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with the physical world
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that we have not been able to disentangle ourselves
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it’s so that
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you know
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we can measure the temperature of distant stars
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but we don’t know what we think about the woman we’re living with.
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Stuff like that.
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Just such a completely overgrown and overdeveloped dichotomous situation
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that it makes no sense.
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So in terms of any kind of conclusion or something like that,
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it’s that there is an experience.
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It’s harmless, meaning it can’t kill you.
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That’s the guarantee there.
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There is this experience.
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It is in our cultural heritage.
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It synergizes the most profound and private dimensions of our being.
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It allows us to recast ourselves in new forms quickly.
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And if we don’t turn back toward this style
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of relating to ourselves, to each other, and to the world,
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but persist instead in the addiction to syntactical abstraction,
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then I think we’ll just run it off the edge.
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And it will be a tragedy because it is a horse race.
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Don’t let anybody kid you.
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It’s not that the good guys are miles and miles behind
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and so you just might as well tear your ticket up
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and throw it in the air and go home.
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No, it’s an absolute horse race,
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neck and neck, photo finish,
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race between education and disaster.
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I mean, we’re going to either burst out
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into a millennium of freedom and caring and decency,
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or we’re going to toxify the whole thing
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and just turn it into an ash heap.
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And the responsibility falls largely on us.
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And we don’t know.
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I mean, the momentum,
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the lethal momentum of these institutions is terrifying.
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Our position is like that of people
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who are attempting to turn a battleship 180 degrees
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and we’re doing
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it with an oar
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you know
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I mean the momentum of it
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is incredible
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but
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it is not
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a closed system
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and I say this as a
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reasonable person
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I want to keep stressing that,
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that I won’t sit at the same table with the channelers
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and the people who have good news about Atlantis and all of this stuff.
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I mean, if this is your private thing, it’s okay,
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but the rules of evidence preclude it being taken seriously
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until you get your act more together.
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But in the psychedelic experience,
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there is confounding paranormal material.
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It’s the only place I’ve ever found it.
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I scoured India.
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These guys, as far as I can tell, it’s a skin game.
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India, these guys, as far as I can tell, it’s a skin game. But outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope,
00:10:55 ►
which is that the world is whatever you say it is if you know how to say it right.
00:11:01 ►
And then the whole task becomes how do we take control of this language that allows
00:11:07 ►
us to say it right. We, I think I speak for most people here, serve the idea that matter
00:11:19 ►
is ultimately at the command of mind but we need to move that forward as a demonstrable principle
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because
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without that
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the fear of most people is that
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we’re imprisoned by physics
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in a sinking submarine
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and yet when you go
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into these psychedelic spaces
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what you discover is
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that all bets are off
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that we can’t even tell how weird it is
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I mean it may be possible to walk to our tourists
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if you have the right set of coordinates
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and the whole concern is to get the word out
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to spread this meme
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to empower people
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to confirm the existence of these realities for themselves,
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and to begin to form a kind of community consensus about it.
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You know, it’s only, I guess, in 1992,
00:12:18 ►
we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World.
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500 years ago, people discovered the other half of this planet.
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And we’re living there now.
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This is the new world.
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500 years ago, this didn’t exist.
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What existed was a vast cataract patrolled by sea monsters.
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And the oceans of the world poured off this cataract intorolled by sea monsters and the oceans of the world poured off this
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cataract into the infinite abyss and that was the edge of the world we the
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psychedelic people are like these early explorers coming back and saying you
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know I sailed West for 16 days and I didn’t go mad. Instead, this is what happened. And I bring news
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of this, this, and this. And what we’re accumulating are like the diaries of explorers. But there’s a
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world there. It’s a mental world, yes. But we are mental creatures. Take note of that. If we could go there, we would go there.
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And the thing is, we don’t know that we can’t go there.
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We have never taken the imagination seriously.
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We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously.
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We’ve always sort of thought things should just go along
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like a random walk.
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But now, because of the immense technical power that’s come into our hands,
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the design process of the whole planet is now on our desk.
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And we’re being asked to essentially step into stewardship of the entire planetary environment. We have to have then
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a vision. We have to have a dream, not a vision or a dream, the vision, the dream beings. It has to come out of the bones of the planet.
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Yeah. And this is, I think, what the psychedelic experience is broadcasting. It’s broadcasting the
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hologrammatic, fractal, all together,at-once image of totality
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that our religions have sensed and called God,
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that the shaman have learned to use
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as a vast kind of computer for extracting information
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and for generating healing energy.
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But it is that there is some kind of controlling,
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minded, integrated thing behind nature.
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And we’re not going to understand that
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this weekend, next week, or ever.
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This is not a relationship of solving a problem.
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It’s a relationship of being an initiate of a mystery
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and then living your life
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you know in the light of that
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and the task of understanding is endless
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because understanding
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is simply the integrated coordination of pattern
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and nature is pattern
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upon pattern
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upon pattern
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upon pattern upon level upon level.
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It has no depth. Its measure cannot be taken.
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Everything is infinite and everything is animate
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and everything is filled with a kind of deep concern for humanity.
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I mean, we are the lame little brother
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because we seem to be cut off
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from all the rest of this.
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Well, that’s kind of a Blakey
00:16:13 ►
and take on it.
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The shamanistic cultures themselves
00:16:17 ►
having a notion of a fall
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and this may just be the people
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that we happen to interview in our
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era where we’re actually studying it but
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that the old
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days of shamanism were the
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good days and what we have now is
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diluted
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is that just a matter of
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cultural contact
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with other cultures and that
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the original shamanistic cultures were isolated
00:16:48 ►
or is indeed there a different quality to the time of this 20,000 years ago
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that led to a general fall amongst other species of people in general?
00:17:01 ►
It’s a very complicated question.
00:17:04 ►
The answer gets pretty technical,
00:17:06 ►
or talking about it gets pretty technical.
00:17:09 ►
The thing that’s so interesting about psilocybin and DMT
00:17:14 ►
is that they’re so closely related to ordinary brain chemistry.
00:17:20 ►
The brain chemistry of all higher animals
00:17:22 ►
runs largely on serotonin.
00:17:25 ►
Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
00:17:30 ►
DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:17:34 ►
Psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy, NN-dimethyltryptamine,
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but the 4-phosphoriloxy group goes off as it crosses the blood-brain barrier,
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so it’s 4-hydroxy- hydroxy and dimethyltryptamine.
00:17:48 ►
So it’s very interesting that these powerful, naturally occurring hallucinogens
00:17:55 ►
are in many cases only one molecule away from endogenous neurotransmitters.
00:18:03 ►
So in answer to your question,
00:18:05 ►
it’s possible to suggest
00:18:07 ►
that we’re as close as one mutation
00:18:12 ►
away from significant shifts
00:18:17 ►
in the chemical mix of the human brain.
00:18:23 ►
And for instance, in the pineal gland, there’s an enzyme called
00:18:29 ►
adenoglomerotropine, which is chemically 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan. It’s very closely
00:18:39 ►
related to the harming alkaloids in ayahuasca. Well, the persistent myth about ayahuasca
00:18:48 ►
is that it creates states of group-mindedness and telepathy.
00:18:53 ►
The original alkaloid was actually named telepathine
00:18:58 ►
until it was discovered that it was structurally similar to harming,
00:19:03 ►
which had been previously described by Hochstein and Paradis.
00:19:08 ►
So, in other words, what’s going on here
00:19:11 ►
is the possibility that language, telepathy,
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and all of these mental abilities
00:19:20 ►
that are unique among human beings
00:19:23 ►
have to do with a very, very small number of mutations
00:19:27 ►
in the amine, brain amine production pathways.
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One of the things that I want to talk about here
00:19:36 ►
is the possibility of new forms of communication
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and that the psychedelics can stimulate new forms of communication among
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human beings even in the way that they created language in the first place. In other words,
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I see language as a model A version of something which could be made a lot more efficient and
00:20:04 ►
better and effective.
00:20:06 ►
You had something?
00:20:08 ►
Or did you?
00:20:08 ►
You? Go ahead.
00:20:11 ►
When humankind changes direction
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and goes towards the altered state,
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the psilocybin altered state,
00:20:21 ►
and that projection,
00:20:22 ►
what do you think that we will do with science
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and all of the stuff that we’ve created
00:20:27 ►
that is destroying us?
00:20:30 ►
Well, science, there are different ways
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to practice science.
00:20:35 ►
The Greek style was,
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science was a spiritual undertaking.
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The purpose was to know,
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the idea being that somehow
00:20:47 ►
there was something good about knowing.
00:20:51 ►
I mean, I had a philosophy professor
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who said, first of all,
00:20:56 ►
I’ll teach you how to recognize the truth.
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Secondly, I’ll try to teach you
00:21:00 ►
what’s so great about it.
00:21:02 ►
And this is that kind of a situation. Science, philosophers
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of science are perfectly aware of the limitations of science. It’s the thousands and thousands
00:21:17 ►
of workbench scientists who think of themselves as servants of a world religion who create the problem.
00:21:27 ►
We need to know how matter works
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and we need to know the things which science tells us,
00:21:34 ►
but it is no basis for extrapolating into human values.
00:21:39 ►
And the culprit there is the concept of social science.
00:21:45 ►
This is an obscene idea and we should disabuse ourselves of it immediately.
00:21:52 ►
Social science, psychology, intellectual history,
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even linguistics, I would say, and philology, all of this stuff.
00:22:03 ►
These people should find honest work.
00:22:07 ►
They’re not scientists, and they’re mucking up.
00:22:10 ►
I mean, it was a grand dream of science
00:22:12 ►
that it would extend its methods into social phenomena,
00:22:17 ►
having had such great success in the 19th century
00:22:20 ►
with Darwin and Wallace and biology.
00:22:22 ►
They thought, well, then Herbert Spencer and all these people,
00:22:25 ►
why not just extend it into society?
00:22:27 ►
But the problem is there are emergent properties in society
00:22:33 ►
that exceed the descriptive engines of science.
00:22:37 ►
There are emergent properties in biology.
00:22:40 ►
I mean, biology is not…
00:22:44 ►
may also have to be left out of science.
00:22:47 ►
I mean, biology is classificatory and it works very well there.
00:22:52 ►
But in terms of mechanism and understanding, it’s pretty murky.
00:22:57 ►
DNA was decoded in 1950.
00:23:00 ►
The molecular geneticists promised a golden age shortly to follow
00:23:05 ►
and it’s 40 years later
00:23:06 ►
and they still don’t understand gene expression
00:23:09 ►
or what all this stuff is in the DNA
00:23:12 ►
it’s been very disappointing considering what was promised
00:23:16 ►
I think science is an art
00:23:19 ►
everything is an art
00:23:21 ►
because we have no sure knowledge of anything
00:23:24 ►
maybe mathematics is not an art because we have no sure knowledge of anything. I mean, maybe mathematics is not an art
00:23:26 ►
because there, you know, you work from artificially constructed premises.
00:23:33 ►
I’m very much, very keen on science.
00:23:36 ►
I just don’t like its philosophical pontifications.
00:23:40 ►
As a method, it’s been very effective
00:23:45 ►
but it’s bred great pride in it
00:23:48 ►
and it’s thought that it could turn itself to domains
00:23:52 ►
where it was completely inappropriate.
00:23:56 ►
I have a lot of questions
00:23:58 ►
but I want to try to limit them to maybe a few more or two.
00:24:02 ►
I haven’t tried mushrooms yet.
00:24:04 ►
I sent away the kit and it’s been grown now. maybe a few, one or two. I haven’t tried mushrooms yet.
00:24:07 ►
I sent away the kit and it’s been ground down.
00:24:11 ►
But a lot of the things that you’ve been explaining and describing to me have become a reality over the last year.
00:24:19 ►
Just the usage of hashish, just ingestion of it,
00:24:22 ►
on a very, I’d have to say a very,
00:24:28 ►
well, probably limited, because I’m comparing my experience to the psilocybin prescriptions that you give
00:24:34 ►
and they sound, you know, tremendous. I think the question I’m looking for is, before you,
00:24:41 ►
I guess, got involved with psilocybin and DMT and things like that,
00:24:46 ►
were you predisposed to saving the planet and being a humanistic type of person?
00:24:54 ►
And did the DMT and psilocybin take you to a more profound awareness of what you as a human wanted to do?
00:25:07 ►
Well, I’ve thought about all of this
00:25:09 ►
because it’s weird to have the life I have.
00:25:18 ►
You know, it’s so strange.
00:25:20 ►
I mean, until I went into therapy,
00:25:22 ►
I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world.
00:25:25 ►
And then once you’re in therapy, you discover, you know,
00:25:28 ►
that no, it was the most insane scene you’ve ever heard of.
00:25:30 ►
And you just didn’t notice.
00:25:34 ►
But I’ve always been interested in nature.
00:25:41 ►
And I’ve always been interested in beauty.
00:25:44 ►
And I think it was the pursuit
00:25:46 ►
of beauty that served
00:25:48 ►
me best because
00:25:50 ►
when I was a kid
00:25:51 ►
first I started out collecting rocks
00:25:54 ►
and then I collected
00:25:56 ►
butterflies and
00:25:58 ►
then in my emergent phallic
00:26:00 ►
phase I was an amateur
00:26:01 ►
rocketeer and the major
00:26:04 ►
thrill there was setting
00:26:06 ►
off these explosive fuels
00:26:08 ►
and watching the possibility
00:26:10 ►
of shrapnel and all
00:26:12 ►
this stuff and then
00:26:13 ►
as I got into rockets I got
00:26:16 ►
into science fiction
00:26:17 ►
and science fiction I really consider
00:26:20 ►
a proto-psychedelic
00:26:22 ►
drug because what science
00:26:24 ►
fiction does is it gives permission to imagine.
00:26:27 ►
It says, try it this way, this way, this way.
00:26:30 ►
And then you get, as a kid,
00:26:32 ►
you get the idea, you know,
00:26:33 ►
that anything is possible.
00:26:35 ►
That’s what science fiction teaches you.
00:26:38 ►
And then…
00:26:39 ►
And I was really obsessive about science
00:26:45 ►
and I wanted to be an astronautical engineer
00:26:47 ►
and Werner Von Braun was my hero and all that.
00:26:50 ►
And then it sort of flipped at some point
00:26:53 ►
and I decided that I had been terribly narrow
00:26:57 ►
and I was figuring all this out for myself.
00:27:01 ►
I was in some little town in Colorado
00:27:03 ►
and I decided I’d been terribly
00:27:05 ►
narrow and that it was all in the humanities. And I began reading Henry James and all this
00:27:12 ►
stuff. And I was into Aldous Huxley as an example of an English novelist, and read Antique
00:27:18 ►
Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Must Die of the Swan, and so forth and so on. And then
00:27:22 ►
came upon The Doors of Perception. And just, you know, I was like the swan, and so forth and so on. And then came upon the doors of perception.
00:27:26 ►
And just, you know, I was like 14 years old,
00:27:29 ►
and it was astonishing.
00:27:32 ►
And I said, if a tenth of this is true,
00:27:38 ►
then this is the most amazing thing there is.
00:27:40 ►
Well, if you’ve read the doors of perception, you know,
00:27:42 ►
it’s actually a terribly conservative gloss. I i mean it’s all about looking at pictures and seeing the iskite in the folds of
00:27:51 ►
your trousers and thinking about how that relates to meister eckhart and all this huxley and type
00:27:58 ►
stuff but that gave me the idea and then i stuck with it. I stuck with it somehow and found marijuana and that went on
00:28:08 ►
to LSD. And then my great good fortune, I think, is that just a few months after I took LSD,
00:28:15 ►
somebody brought me DMT. And, you know, DMT is a miracle. I mean, DMT is like something that fell out of a flying saucer. I mean,
00:28:25 ►
it is so strong and so psychedelic. I mean, I can’t imagine being more smashed than that
00:28:33 ►
or wanting to be. I mean, it’s more like a near-death experience than any near-death
00:28:40 ►
experience I ever heard anybody describe. They sound absolutely pedestrian compared to
00:28:45 ►
a DMT trip where, you know, you’re sure you’re dead. You say, what the hell else could it be?
00:28:53 ►
You know? And then I went to Asia. I was at Berkeley when I had all these drug experiences.
00:29:00 ►
And then I went to Asia and tried to find it with yogus and all that
00:29:07 ►
and ended up smoking a lot of hashish and becoming more cynical than ever about spirituality
00:29:14 ►
and just saying, you know, hashish and LSD. That was, before I went to the Amazon, that
00:29:21 ►
was what I discovered that really convinced me you could get somewhere was
00:29:25 ►
take a bunch of LSD and then
00:29:28 ►
smoke great hash on top of that
00:29:29 ►
and really crazy things do go on.
00:29:33 ►
And then I went to the
00:29:34 ►
Amazon and
00:29:36 ►
you know, incredible
00:29:39 ►
shamanism is happening there.
00:29:42 ►
I mean, they don’t hold back.
00:29:44 ►
The method I used in India
00:29:46 ►
was I would just say,
00:29:47 ►
you know,
00:29:47 ►
what can you show me?
00:29:49 ►
You know, I’ve read all these books.
00:29:50 ►
I know how to manipulate
00:29:51 ►
all this multisyllabic mumbo-jumbo,
00:29:54 ►
but just one thing.
00:29:56 ►
I said,
00:29:56 ►
oh, no, it’s not happening.
00:29:58 ►
It’s very pushy.
00:30:02 ►
So, but then when you go to South America
00:30:05 ►
then they just say
00:30:07 ►
okay let’s go out in the forest
00:30:10 ►
we’ll get the stuff
00:30:10 ►
we’ll cook it up
00:30:11 ►
and tonight we’ll show you our best trick
00:30:13 ►
and it slams you to the wall
00:30:15 ►
you plead for mercy
00:30:17 ►
and it was a vindication
00:30:23 ►
because the thing I want to stress,
00:30:26 ►
and I don’t know if it’s as important to you
00:30:28 ►
as it is to me,
00:30:30 ►
but you do not have to sell out
00:30:33 ►
to any form of airheadism.
00:30:37 ►
You can be as tight-ass as you want.
00:30:41 ►
You can be as hard-nosed as you want.
00:30:44 ►
You can be as demanding, analytical, rational as you want. You can be as hard-nosed as you want. You can be as demanding,
00:30:46 ►
analytical, rational
00:30:47 ►
as you want.
00:30:49 ►
And the thing is bigger
00:30:50 ►
than you are.
00:30:51 ►
It’ll just take you apart.
00:30:52 ►
It’ll make you weep
00:30:53 ►
like a baby.
00:30:54 ►
So there’s nothing about faith
00:30:56 ►
and sensitivity
00:30:57 ►
and reaching.
00:30:59 ►
No, no, no.
00:31:00 ►
When it comes,
00:31:01 ►
it kicks in the front door
00:31:03 ►
and takes you prisoner.
00:31:07 ►
It’s, uh… no, when it comes, it kicks in the front door and takes you prisoner. And that was what the flying saucer meant when it said,
00:31:13 ►
because you didn’t believe in anything.
00:31:16 ►
This is the way to get somewhere.
00:31:18 ►
You’ll never get anywhere if you believe in stuff
00:31:20 ►
because it’ll take you six months to work through Babaji
00:31:24 ►
and then you have to go on to somebody
00:31:25 ►
else and life is just not long enough
00:31:28 ►
to give all these guys
00:31:30 ►
a crack
00:31:31 ►
at your enlightenment
00:31:32 ►
so you know you sort of have to goose
00:31:35 ►
it along
00:31:36 ►
and the great
00:31:39 ►
vindication is then that when
00:31:41 ►
you behave like that
00:31:43 ►
when you take that stance,
00:31:45 ►
which you would expect would betray you into nihilism,
00:31:49 ►
depression, and so forth.
00:31:51 ►
Instead, no, that works.
00:31:53 ►
That’s the method.
00:31:54 ►
Then the gold, you know, reject everything but gold.
00:31:58 ►
And you know what gold is?
00:31:59 ►
It looks like gold.
00:32:01 ►
It feels like gold.
00:32:02 ►
It’s not something that you have to… I mean, I’m amazed at what thin soup is dished out as spiritual food.
00:32:13 ►
And it’s because we are, as individuals, conflicted.
00:32:16 ►
I feel this in myself.
00:32:20 ►
I mean, it’s hard to take psychedelics.
00:32:23 ►
It’s not hard to sweep up around the ashram, but it’s hard to take psychedelics. It’s not hard to sweep up around the ashram,
00:32:26 ►
but it’s hard to take psychedelics.
00:32:30 ►
You know, I read some stuff by Andrew Weil
00:32:33 ►
where he was talking about going in search of,
00:32:36 ►
you know, the ayahuasquero, the curonero,
00:32:39 ►
and he talks a lot about these guys
00:32:41 ►
that are mixing up this sloppy brew and and they’re drunks and they’re
00:32:48 ►
they’re just you know i don’t i don’t even know if you could go down to the amazon and find i don’t
00:32:54 ►
know what you could find i haven’t been there but but it doesn’t it what his accounts were is there’s
00:32:59 ►
a lot of just slop and drunk stuff happening that most of these, a lot of these guys are alcoholics.
00:33:06 ►
No, you’re absolutely right.
00:33:07 ►
And that’s the main thing happening
00:33:09 ►
was the alcohol throughout,
00:33:10 ►
and Christianity has just kind of
00:33:13 ►
pervaded so much of this stuff
00:33:15 ►
that I wonder what’s left
00:33:17 ►
and how you find it anymore.
00:33:19 ►
Well, it really helps to do your homework.
00:33:23 ►
It really helps to go down there
00:33:24 ►
knowing as much as you possibly can
00:33:26 ►
about all this.
00:33:27 ►
Because apparently so much of what you get out of it
00:33:29 ►
has to do with how it’s made.
00:33:31 ►
That’s right.
00:33:32 ►
How it makes it, how it’s mixed, and so on.
00:33:34 ►
And if you don’t make it yourself
00:33:36 ►
and you don’t know what’s happening,
00:33:37 ►
then what have you got?
00:33:38 ►
Because ayahuasca is a combinatory drug,
00:33:42 ►
it isn’t like peyote or mushrooms or morning glories where you get the thing
00:33:46 ►
and eat it and if you eat it in sufficient
00:33:48 ►
amounts it works. This is something
00:33:50 ►
where two plants have been combined
00:33:52 ►
and the proportions
00:33:54 ►
must be correct and the method
00:33:56 ►
must be correct. So there’s a huge
00:33:58 ►
room for personalities
00:34:00 ►
to come into it, for
00:34:02 ►
fast shuffles of all sorts
00:34:04 ►
and mind games of all sorts to take place.
00:34:07 ►
And in America, these guys, a lot of them are very egotistical, too.
00:34:10 ►
It’s true.
00:34:11 ►
No, what you have to do if you’re into ayahuasca,
00:34:14 ►
or what we did was we just, first of all,
00:34:17 ►
we drank a huge amount of swill,
00:34:20 ►
and we worked our way slowly through these people.
00:34:23 ►
And if somebody appeared to be an asshole,
00:34:25 ►
they were so classified and moved on.
00:34:29 ►
And eventually, we got to good people.
00:34:33 ►
But what we did then was we got samples of their stuff,
00:34:37 ►
brought it back, put it through mass spectrophotometers
00:34:40 ►
and high-pressure liquid chromatography,
00:34:43 ►
saw what the proportions were,
00:34:46 ►
collected the live plants,
00:34:48 ►
moved them to Hawaii,
00:34:50 ►
grew the plants,
00:34:52 ►
re-concocted the thing,
00:34:54 ►
re-mass specced what we did,
00:34:57 ►
and made it as much like the good stuff as possible.
00:34:59 ►
So it was a project of 15 years
00:35:02 ►
and really maniacal dedication.
00:35:04 ►
But I have the faith, you know, I mean,
00:35:08 ►
that if given sufficient time to work on ayahuasca,
00:35:14 ►
you could produce a drug out of there so good
00:35:17 ►
that it would be ludicrous to suggest that it was illegal.
00:35:21 ►
I mean, because, you see, this is brain soup.
00:35:25 ►
These are all neurotransmitters.
00:35:27 ►
There’s not a non-endogenous neurotransmitter
00:35:30 ►
in the whole beverage.
00:35:32 ►
So really, what you’re…
00:35:34 ►
There’s not a what?
00:35:35 ►
A non-endogenous neurotransmitter,
00:35:37 ►
meaning everything in this drug that you’re about to drink
00:35:41 ►
is already in your head.
00:35:43 ►
There’s nothing unusual
00:35:45 ►
where drugs like ketamine, mescaline, LSD,
00:35:48 ►
there’s none of that in your body.
00:35:50 ►
What’s the trip like?
00:35:52 ►
It’s like a slow-release DMT trip.
00:35:55 ►
It lasts four to six hours
00:35:57 ►
and it’s intensely visual.
00:36:01 ►
And unlike psilocybin,
00:36:03 ►
it doesn’t have this outer space science fiction
00:36:10 ►
mega apocalyptarian kind of take on it which is what psilocybin does i mean psilocybin shows you
00:36:18 ►
the machines preparing to transport the faithful away from a burning earth. That’s not what ayahuasca is about.
00:36:26 ►
It’s about nature, water, flow, life, energy.
00:36:35 ►
It’s almost, you know, when MDMA was so hot
00:36:38 ►
and people called it an empathy drug
00:36:41 ►
and said it makes you empathetic with the people you’re with,
00:36:45 ►
ayahuasca makes you empathetic with the people you’re with. Ayahuasca makes you empathetic with the people you’re
00:36:47 ►
not with. And that’s
00:36:50 ►
a much more profound experience
00:36:51 ►
because there’s so much more of them.
00:36:54 ►
You know?
00:36:55 ►
I don’t understand how you mean that, empathetic with the people
00:36:57 ►
you’re not with. I don’t quite get it.
00:36:59 ►
You feel the poignancy
00:37:01 ►
of the human situation.
00:37:08 ►
You feel… Well, will see I’m usually in a hut somewhere surrounded by a bunch of Indians and suddenly I understand what
00:37:13 ►
the songs are about and they’re always about the same thing they’re about the
00:37:18 ►
water and the people and the life and the and the fish, and lost love,
00:37:25 ►
but you have this heart-opening thing.
00:37:30 ►
You say, you know, the folk, this is their mystery.
00:37:34 ►
This is their… I’m getting it now.
00:37:36 ►
I’m feeling, you know, this huge wave of the wisdom of the folk.
00:37:41 ►
And they say this to you in Peru.
00:37:43 ►
They say, you know, this is our university.
00:37:46 ►
You went to Harvard,
00:37:47 ►
we went to Ayahuasca.
00:37:50 ►
Yeah.
00:37:51 ►
I’m wondering if you can comment on
00:37:54 ►
morning, rather, ginseng wheat,
00:37:57 ►
which I believe is the same thing
00:37:58 ►
as morning chlorocese.
00:38:00 ►
No, it’s different.
00:38:01 ►
But I’m curious about ginseng wheat
00:38:03 ►
because it grows wild all over.
00:38:04 ►
It’s on the property, it’s down the highway. It about jimson weed because it grows wild all over it’s on the property
00:38:05 ►
it’s down the highway
00:38:06 ►
it’s toxic also
00:38:08 ►
it’s quite toxic
00:38:09 ►
it’s used shamanically
00:38:13 ►
in pre-contact California
00:38:16 ►
the California Indians
00:38:17 ►
had what was called
00:38:18 ►
the Tolaq religion
00:38:20 ►
and they used jimson weed seeds
00:38:23 ►
to initiate people at puberty
00:38:25 ►
boys mostly
00:38:26 ►
it’s
00:38:28 ►
I’m kind of
00:38:31 ►
Pollyannish
00:38:32 ►
about drugs
00:38:33 ►
I mean I’m
00:38:34 ►
I don’t
00:38:36 ►
I’m after
00:38:37 ►
a certain thing
00:38:39 ►
which these
00:38:40 ►
tryptamine
00:38:41 ►
hallucinogens do
00:38:42 ►
and I tend to
00:38:44 ►
not pursue these other things too far.
00:38:47 ►
I didn’t like Datura.
00:38:48 ►
It’s very hard to have the degree of clarity
00:38:53 ►
that I think you should have on a drug.
00:38:56 ►
The tryptamine hallucinogens don’t interfere with your clarity at all.
00:39:01 ►
You know who you are, where you are, what you’re doing.
00:39:04 ►
I’ve seen people on Datura.
00:39:07 ►
I had an experience with someone on Datura where in the course of the conversation it came out
00:39:12 ►
that the guy thought we were in his apartment and I had actually encountered him in the marketplace.
00:39:19 ►
Well, that’s a serious delusion. You know, that’s a serious problem when i took the torah uh all this was in nepal
00:39:28 ►
years ago uh i did have peculiar experiences i mean it is magical it is delusory reality begins
00:39:38 ►
to come apart uh i these wraith-like, ghost-like creatures
00:39:45 ►
would come through my window
00:39:47 ►
and I was waiting to get high
00:39:49 ►
and then I would sort of,
00:39:50 ►
my attention would drift
00:39:51 ►
and these things would come through my window
00:39:53 ►
and they would let loose these sheets of newsprint
00:39:57 ►
that would flutter down over my life
00:40:00 ►
and I would like fall forward reading
00:40:02 ►
these things that were,
00:40:04 ►
and as I read amazement
00:40:06 ►
would grow in me and say
00:40:08 ►
this is it, this is the answer
00:40:10 ►
and then I would pull out and say
00:40:12 ►
oh
00:40:13 ►
is it working
00:40:15 ►
is anything happening
00:40:18 ►
and that went on
00:40:19 ►
there were several passes of that
00:40:21 ►
and then it caused me to
00:40:24 ►
like throw my leg up around my neck
00:40:27 ►
and I got into this kind of thing.
00:40:29 ►
And I very carefully unfolded myself and lay back down.
00:40:34 ►
And then it happened again.
00:40:35 ►
And I thought to myself,
00:40:37 ►
I’m really glad I’m alone
00:40:39 ►
because I think this would freak anybody out.
00:40:43 ►
because I think this would freak anybody out and so I
00:40:47 ►
but it was definitely strange
00:40:50 ►
I mean the guy down the hall from me
00:40:52 ►
I had taken it, he had taken it
00:40:55 ►
and he had the impression
00:40:59 ►
in the night
00:41:01 ►
that this woman that he was scheming on
00:41:04 ►
came to him and that they made love.
00:41:08 ►
And in the middle of the night, I got up to go to the john
00:41:11 ►
and I had to cross through his room.
00:41:14 ►
And it was also my impression that she was in bed with him.
00:41:17 ►
Well, when we sorted it out the next morning,
00:41:19 ►
she’d been 30 miles away throughout the whole incident
00:41:22 ►
and had never been there.
00:41:26 ►
So it’s interesting.
00:41:27 ►
There are a lot of altered states.
00:41:29 ►
Maybe that’s a good point to make.
00:41:31 ►
There are all kinds of strange states of mind
00:41:36 ►
and many plant-induced.
00:41:39 ►
From sorting through them,
00:41:40 ►
I’ve just become sort of fixated on these
00:41:46 ►
tryptamine things
00:41:47 ►
because they seem to me
00:41:49 ►
somehow the most promising
00:41:52 ►
and the most real
00:41:54 ►
the
00:41:55 ►
hallucinations of Jimson weed
00:41:58 ►
are curiously
00:42:00 ►
related in my
00:42:04 ►
mind it’s some kind of association schema
00:42:06 ►
they’re like seances
00:42:08 ►
and table tapping
00:42:10 ►
and Victorian women
00:42:12 ►
in shredded lace dresses
00:42:14 ►
that’s about as far
00:42:16 ►
from a DMT hallucination
00:42:18 ►
as you can get
00:42:19 ►
DMT hallucinations are
00:42:22 ►
three if not four dimensional
00:42:24 ►
brightly colored high tech I mean, DMT hallucinations are three, if not four-dimensional,
00:42:31 ►
brightly colored, high-tech, organo-insectoid,
00:42:34 ►
so forth and so on.
00:42:38 ►
You talked about the momentum is so strong and then having to change it.
00:42:40 ►
And I think of all the people that are opposed to drugs
00:42:43 ►
and they think every drug is the same and so forth
00:42:45 ►
it just seems like an impossible task
00:42:48 ►
to be able to educate
00:42:50 ►
where these drugs would be available
00:42:52 ►
and then people could take them
00:42:53 ►
and they’d see the world in a healthier way
00:42:55 ►
what do you have to say about a question like that?
00:42:58 ►
well it’s this struggle about human nature
00:43:01 ►
defining human nature you know
00:43:04 ►
is it good to take
00:43:06 ►
certain drugs?
00:43:07 ►
is it always bad to take drugs?
00:43:12 ►
what’s our
00:43:12 ►
can you always tell a drug
00:43:15 ►
from a food, from a spice
00:43:17 ►
what do these words really mean
00:43:19 ►
all we can do
00:43:21 ►
is
00:43:22 ►
what we are doing,
00:43:25 ►
which is replicate the meme,
00:43:27 ►
hold these workshops,
00:43:29 ►
try to build a core of consensus
00:43:32 ►
about what we’re talking about.
00:43:35 ►
And this is itself quite elusive, you see,
00:43:38 ►
because what we’re talking about is a mental event,
00:43:42 ►
less focused than, let us say, orgasm. But even if you’re talking about is a mental event it less focused than let us say orgasm but even if you’re talking
00:43:47 ►
about orgasm here we use this word but it must mean something different to everybody well it’s
00:43:53 ►
even the problem is much worse with the psychedelic experience because nobody wants to be left out so
00:44:01 ►
anybody who’s ever taken anything thinks they’ve had the psychedelic experience
00:44:06 ►
and feels fully qualified to hold an opinion on it
00:44:11 ►
when in fact it’s pretty elusive, the real thing.
00:44:16 ►
You have to take a heroic dose under the right conditions
00:44:21 ►
to really smash through.
00:44:24 ►
I mean, yes, there are all kinds of approaches
00:44:26 ►
to it, insight into childhood trauma
00:44:30 ►
recovery of lost memories
00:44:32 ►
opening to your emotional side
00:44:36 ►
insights into the dynamics
00:44:39 ►
of the life and people around
00:44:40 ►
but that is not anywhere near the bullseye that’s just dancing around, all of it, but that is not anywhere near the bullseye.
00:44:45 ►
That’s just dancing around the rim of it.
00:44:49 ►
So we have to, as a community,
00:44:51 ►
try and build consensus about what happens at the real center.
00:44:56 ►
What’s happening at the center of the mandala?
00:44:58 ►
What kind of a modality can we describe
00:45:01 ►
and create a shared map of
00:45:04 ►
that we can come back to the rest of the folks
00:45:07 ►
and talk about and then the other thing is um well i’m just banking on curiosity to do a lot
00:45:14 ►
of the footwork for the revolution this is too good to miss uh you know it’s like placing sex
00:45:23 ►
off limits or something and then expecting people not to find out about it.
00:45:28 ►
Now that Marxism has collapsed,
00:45:32 ►
if we don’t substitute something for consumer values,
00:45:39 ►
then we’re just going to rape the earth
00:45:41 ►
in an effort to create crap for everybody.
00:45:44 ►
Well, the only counterpoise
00:45:47 ►
to consumer values, to materialism, is spiritualism. And I don’t mean some bloodless
00:45:55 ►
carol-singing kind of namby-pamby abstraction. I mean there has to be as much inner richness
00:46:05 ►
as there previously was
00:46:08 ►
outer richness.
00:46:10 ►
And this is why
00:46:11 ►
to the alarm of some people,
00:46:13 ►
I’ve been fairly interested in virtual
00:46:16 ►
realities. Because
00:46:18 ►
I think, you know,
00:46:19 ►
if everybody wants to live
00:46:21 ►
in Versailles, the only way you’re going to
00:46:23 ►
be able to do that is if you make Versailles a disk for $3.95
00:46:27 ►
that they can plug in and then go live in it.
00:46:31 ►
So we can’t preach to the have-nots
00:46:34 ►
the virtue of voluntary simplicity
00:46:37 ►
when we’re riding around in BMWs and collecting Monets.
00:46:41 ►
That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
00:46:44 ►
So building a core consensus, this is
00:46:48 ►
still in answer to your question what can we do, and then replicating the meme.
00:46:54 ►
And I introduced this concept in each of my workshops because I think it gets, it
00:47:00 ►
makes it easier for you to understand what’s happening here.
00:47:10 ►
A meme is the smallest unit of an idea.
00:47:15 ►
It’s like a gene is to proteins.
00:47:21 ►
Proteins are made by genes, and genes code for proteins.
00:47:24 ►
Okay, well, ideas are made out of memes.
00:47:26 ►
And you link a few memes together and you have an idea. Memes, like genes, can be replicated. You replicate them by either
00:47:36 ►
telling the meme to many people or telling a lot of people all at once. And then these people you’ve told,
00:47:46 ►
they become potential replicators of the meme.
00:47:51 ►
And there is a domain of culture
00:47:56 ►
that is like an environment of competing ideas.
00:48:00 ►
And the memes go off and live
00:48:03 ►
in this ideological environment
00:48:05 ►
and some flourish
00:48:07 ►
and some are consumed by others
00:48:10 ►
and some are incorporated into others
00:48:12 ►
and the idea is to keep the psychedelic meme alive
00:48:16 ►
and to make it grow
00:48:19 ►
and to allow its claim to be heard
00:48:24 ►
it’s not in danger of dying.
00:48:26 ►
It’s a very persistent meme.
00:48:28 ►
It’s been around for about 20,000 years
00:48:30 ►
and it’s been highly repressed in many cultures
00:48:33 ►
for the last couple of thousand years.
00:48:36 ►
Yet we’re trying to rebirth it.
00:48:40 ►
So thinking about it that way,
00:48:42 ►
thinking of yourself as a replicator of this thing
00:48:44 ►
which wishes to move through society, gives a mechanical model for understanding what is really ideological war, you know?
00:48:55 ►
A war about the definition of human nature.
00:48:58 ►
That’s what’s at stake.
00:49:00 ►
What shall we become?
00:49:03 ►
What can we become what can we become
00:49:05 ►
there’s no question that
00:49:09 ►
we need a greater consciousness
00:49:12 ►
of who we are
00:49:14 ►
and if psychedelic drugs are to be taken seriously at all
00:49:18 ►
as consciousness expanding agents
00:49:21 ►
then they have to be given their due place
00:49:24 ►
in the great dialogue that’s taking place about the future, creating it, and then realizing it, the future of the species.
00:49:45 ►
I wanted to say something further about the book of Genesis and the notion of getting to the center.
00:49:50 ►
There are two cherubims guarding the gate with the flaming swords,
00:49:56 ►
and that they represent a pair of opposites, fear and desire.
00:50:02 ►
And the part of the problem of getting a bite of that tree of immortal life is getting to the realm beyond pair of opposites, beyond
00:50:05 ►
fear and desire.
00:50:08 ►
And the other related thing is the question of why this world is not one of just homogeneous
00:50:18 ►
perfection, and instead a world of multiplicity of forms and conflicts. And it’s from a drop of ignorance
00:50:28 ►
that spills into undifferentiated perfection
00:50:31 ►
and from that one drop of ignorance
00:50:33 ►
proceeds the multiplicity of the world we experience.
00:50:38 ►
This is a Gnostic idea,
00:50:40 ►
the drop of ink in the pure glass of water.
00:50:44 ►
Yeah, well, Gnosticism was the idea
00:50:47 ►
I mean it had many forms
00:50:48 ►
but the basic idea was
00:50:50 ►
that light had been scattered through the universe
00:50:56 ►
and that the task of salvation
00:50:59 ►
was to gather this light together
00:51:02 ►
and to somehow transmit it back to its source
00:51:07 ►
in some higher dimension,
00:51:10 ►
which is a pretty good metaphor.
00:51:12 ►
One of the issues that comes up in these workshops inevitably,
00:51:17 ►
and I confess I don’t have a real answer for this,
00:51:21 ►
is, you know, are we a part of nature
00:51:26 ►
and the stewards of nature
00:51:28 ►
or are we
00:51:30 ►
out of nature
00:51:31 ►
are we of another
00:51:33 ►
ontos and
00:51:34 ►
sculpted for a different destiny
00:51:37 ►
it’s very clear
00:51:39 ►
that the life
00:51:41 ►
of the planet and our
00:51:43 ►
success as a conscious species,
00:51:46 ►
these two things have to either be split away from each other
00:51:50 ►
or one is going to be the undoing of the other.
00:51:54 ►
And this is a real problem.
00:51:58 ►
This problem haunts Western thinking.
00:52:01 ►
It’s nothing new.
00:52:03 ►
Is nature God or is nature the devil?
00:52:07 ►
I mean, that’s the harshest statement
00:52:11 ►
of this problem.
00:52:14 ►
One of the ways of detecting breast cancer
00:52:17 ►
is with thermography,
00:52:19 ►
where they look for a hot spot on the breast
00:52:21 ►
and that’s a suspicious area.
00:52:24 ►
And I think when I’m up in an airplane at night and I look down on Gaia,
00:52:28 ►
I think that this is an organism, a giant organism,
00:52:32 ►
and say, gee, there’s a cancer down there.
00:52:35 ►
It’s hot. You can see it. It’s glowing.
00:52:37 ►
And you go down there, and what you find is,
00:52:41 ►
if you look upon us as is sort of the thing,
00:52:46 ►
the cells which have gone awry,
00:52:48 ►
and the way in which we’ve gone awry
00:52:51 ►
is the nature of our consciousness
00:52:54 ►
in that it’s focused in terms of time and space and causality.
00:52:58 ►
And then the thumb, the prehensile,
00:53:00 ►
the ability to do something about it,
00:53:02 ►
because I don’t know for sure,
00:53:04 ►
but I imagine that the dolphins
00:53:07 ►
could have their consciousness with a sense of time.
00:53:12 ►
They might have some of the same time-space causality
00:53:16 ►
understanding of the physical world that we do,
00:53:18 ►
but they lack the ability to do anything about it.
00:53:21 ►
To project force into the world.
00:53:23 ►
So that given those two qualities,
00:53:26 ►
this quality of our minds
00:53:28 ►
to look upon the world
00:53:32 ►
through, in this way,
00:53:33 ►
time, space, and causality,
00:53:35 ►
and that thumb,
00:53:35 ►
we have become the cancer
00:53:37 ►
on the organism of the earth.
00:53:41 ►
Well, see, I mean, I…
00:53:43 ►
It’s quite a negative thought.
00:53:44 ►
It is negative, and I’m not sure
00:53:47 ►
that I buy into it, and I’m not sure
00:53:49 ►
that I don’t buy into it either.
00:53:51 ►
This is the question.
00:53:53 ►
Is the evolution of historical society
00:53:55 ►
and science and all the ugly
00:53:58 ►
adumbrations of that,
00:54:00 ►
sexism, fascism, racism,
00:54:03 ►
is that part of the process? or is it a breaking away? Is there
00:54:10 ►
some good in it? Was history for something or would we have just been better off without it?
00:54:16 ►
And I don’t know. Sometimes I think, I mean, I think of Western civilization as the prodigal son. You know, we went forth, we left our father’s house,
00:54:28 ►
which was the archaic style of existence.
00:54:31 ►
We left our father’s house, and we wandered into matter
00:54:35 ►
and cut deals with demonic forces,
00:54:38 ►
and millennia have passed, and now the earth is polluted,
00:54:43 ►
and we are back at the long house saying to these people
00:54:49 ►
do you have any wisdom that can save us from our fate well they do to a degree i mean they have
00:54:57 ►
this deep insight into natural dynamics and curing and maybe more i I mean, maybe there is magic in this world.
00:55:09 ►
But we know some things too.
00:55:13 ►
We can summon the energy of the stars if necessary down to the deserts of this planet
00:55:16 ►
or to the cities of our enemies if necessary.
00:55:19 ►
And this is no small accomplishment on any scale.
00:55:23 ►
This is quite impressive.
00:55:26 ►
no small accomplishment on any scale. This is quite impressive. I mean, my God, that cytoplasm could create a strategy for triggering fusion. It’s amazing. So I would like to think
00:55:37 ►
that this peregrination into matter went for something, that these are skills that we may need out in the universe when we really get our wings and take off and and that this deep involvement
00:55:53 ►
with matter it was a kind of an addiction and if we can pull out of it a
00:55:58 ►
great deal has been learned I mean all, if people had stayed in the rainforests,
00:56:06 ►
then we would have been ineluctably linked
00:56:09 ►
to the destiny of this planet
00:56:11 ►
as an animal species.
00:56:14 ►
And what if this is the only intelligence
00:56:17 ►
in the universe?
00:56:19 ►
Then I would think we have a certain obligation
00:56:21 ►
to preserve it past the life of the existence of the solar system.
00:56:28 ►
So if we’re not willing to commit ourselves at any phase of our evolution
00:56:32 ►
to a technical phase that involves mastery over matter,
00:56:37 ►
then we have no more defense against the larger universe
00:56:40 ►
than raccoons and katydids if push comes to shove i don’t know i mean i stress that there’s
00:56:48 ►
no easy resolution on this it haunts all thinking about conservation i mean i thought throughout
00:56:55 ►
the 80s why aren’t the conservationist space colony enthusiasts why don’t the save the world people support the high-tech solutions that would
00:57:06 ►
move industry off the planet? Why are these various factions unable to make common cause
00:57:13 ►
behind a very large vision? And I don’t know, but I think as pressure mounts for solutions,
00:57:22 ►
this will have to be done. I mean, I would like to live in a world
00:57:25 ►
where the entire earth was a bio reserve. I would like to live in a situation where the idea that
00:57:32 ►
there would be heavy industry inside the bio reserve would be thought an abomination. All that
00:57:38 ►
stuff can be done on the moon or in the asteroid belts. It’s as inappropriate as having a nuclear power plant in the middle of a rainforest
00:57:46 ►
to have heavy industry on the surface of the earth. We need to think on very large time scales
00:57:55 ►
and we need to figure out how to create political machinery to do that. We’ve been living a potlatch existence,
00:58:06 ►
just a frenzied, consumerist kind of
00:58:10 ►
unthinking abuse.
00:58:15 ►
And I think the best inoculation
00:58:18 ►
for that style of life
00:58:20 ►
is a stiff dose of psychedelics.
00:58:23 ►
You can’t evade it. It dissolves boundaries.
00:58:28 ►
It allows you to feel what you’re doing. I mean, the level of denial in this society
00:58:35 ►
is incredible. God, we don’t feel it. We read the newspaper, but we don’t feel what it’s
00:58:42 ►
telling us. Because if we felt it, we would probably be an emotional wreck.
00:58:48 ►
But there’s something to be said for opening up to some of that, you know.
00:58:54 ►
There’s a notion in therapy that if you want the client to actually make progress, you raise the alarm level.
00:59:02 ►
Guy comes to you for therapy, you say to him, you think you’ve got problems?
00:59:06 ►
You have no idea
00:59:08 ►
what problems you have.
00:59:10 ►
And then work from there.
00:59:13 ►
So it’s very serious business.
00:59:17 ►
It’s trying to steer a society
00:59:20 ►
back toward a faith that was lost.
00:59:24 ►
And God is like a lost continent in the human mind.
00:59:27 ►
And it’s the only continent where there is safe harbor
00:59:31 ►
in the present historical situation.
00:59:36 ►
Well, why don’t we knock off and we’ll meet at 4 o’clock.
00:59:40 ►
Thanks very much.
00:59:45 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:47 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:59:49 ►
one thought at a time.
00:59:52 ►
Well, I don’t know about you,
00:59:54 ►
but he was kind of bumming me out there at the end.
00:59:58 ►
But right after I sign off,
01:00:00 ►
I’ll try to remember to replay a short soundbite
01:00:03 ►
from this talk that will kind of remind us of what it is that we can go about doing in this somewhat strange situation we humans have seemingly gotten ourselves into.
01:00:15 ►
And I’m not sure how to take his comment about family and therapy when he said, and I quote,
01:00:22 ►
Until I went into therapy, I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world.
01:00:28 ►
And then once you’re in therapy, you discover that it was the most insane scene you’d ever heard of,
01:00:34 ►
and you just didn’t notice.
01:00:36 ►
End quote.
01:00:38 ►
Well, I’ve read his brother Dennis’ book about their childhood,
01:00:42 ►
and, well, in many ways it didn’t seem all that different from my own.
01:00:46 ►
However, I’ve never been in therapy, and so I still think of my family as quite ordinary.
01:00:53 ►
But I guess that in a way, it was different in that, well, I had a fantastic family life.
01:00:58 ►
You know, my parents didn’t believe in corporal punishment, and so I was never spanked.
01:01:03 ►
I never even once heard my parents raise their voices at one another.
01:01:07 ►
You know, we were poor. My dad didn’t own a car or things like that.
01:01:11 ►
But we were really happy, I thought, and had a good life together.
01:01:16 ►
And my guess is that maybe Terrence may have been exaggerating a bit when he said that
01:01:21 ►
through therapy he discovered that his family scene was insane.
01:01:26 ►
I think the definition of insane is being kind of used loosely there.
01:01:31 ►
Okay, yeah, well, I guess I better come clean with you.
01:01:34 ►
One of the reasons that this podcast is a bit late in coming out is that,
01:01:39 ►
well, I really didn’t want to admit it that it was time to say ciao to one of my all-time favorite podcasts.
01:01:47 ►
As you most likely know already, the Dope Fiend has put the Dopecast on an indefinite hiatus.
01:01:54 ►
At least, that’s what I gather based on some of his recent tweets and the way he ended his latest program.
01:01:59 ►
You know, it’s kind of strange.
01:02:02 ►
I realize that the Dope Fiend himself is actually a very young man who has a full and exciting life ahead of him.
01:02:09 ►
You know, he’s not dead for crying out loud.
01:02:12 ►
But like many other Dope Tribers, I cried a big no out loud when I heard the news.
01:02:20 ►
Now, I guess for our newcomers here to the salon, you’re probably wondering what the big deal is.
01:02:25 ►
So if you’ve got just a minute or so, I’ll let you know.
01:02:28 ►
It was a little over eight years ago when I began podcasting from here in the salon.
01:02:33 ►
And not long after I started, the Dope Fiend and KMO also came online.
01:02:39 ►
And it was KMO of the Sea Realm and the Psychonautica Podcasts who first told me about the Dope Fiend and that he was forming the Cannabis Podcast Network.
01:02:50 ►
Well, before long, the Dope Fiend, KMO, Queer Ninja, and Lefty were my regular weekly companions in podcast land.
01:02:58 ►
And at some point, I guess it must have been two or three years ago, or I mean two or three years after we all got started, that we all kind of hit a wall.
01:03:09 ►
But fortunately, we were all hitting it at little different times.
01:03:13 ►
So there was a period of several months there where we were taking turns thinking about stopping our podcasts.
01:03:20 ►
And at the same time, the others were providing encouragement to go on, which we all did for a while longer.
01:03:26 ►
Then my dear friend Queer Ninja had to stop his marvelous
01:03:30 ►
Sounds of Worldwide Weed podcast
01:03:32 ►
when the demands of the default world pressed in on him.
01:03:37 ►
And now, for reasons I very much understand,
01:03:40 ►
the Dope Fiend is going to begin to devote more time to other pursuits.
01:03:46 ►
And my guess is that both Lefty and KMO are going to outlast me, with KMO probably being like the bunny in
01:03:52 ►
that battery commercial. He’s just going to still be going on on the day they close the internet.
01:03:58 ►
In other words, there’s just no stopping KMO. You see my problem here? I’m talking about everything except the fact
01:04:06 ►
that, well, the Dope Fiend has
01:04:08 ►
retired, or at least semi-retired,
01:04:10 ►
and I’m really going to miss
01:04:11 ►
his shows. You know, I’ve
01:04:13 ►
heard and read my share of
01:04:15 ►
cannabis advice throughout my years,
01:04:18 ►
but without any exception,
01:04:20 ►
the information that the Dope Fiend put
01:04:22 ►
out week after week,
01:04:23 ►
and always on time, never missing a week.
01:04:26 ►
Well, that was by far, by far,
01:04:30 ►
the best source of cannabis news and information on the web.
01:04:34 ►
You know, it’s a resource that’s still there, by the way,
01:04:36 ►
and so is the World Wide Weed.
01:04:38 ►
All you have to do is go to the archives of their programs,
01:04:41 ►
which you can find at dopefiend.co.uk.
01:04:46 ►
You know, in his last program, the Dope Fiend closed with a song that I’ve always liked.
01:04:51 ►
I think it’s called, Is That All There Is?
01:04:53 ►
It’s a good song, but hey, Dope Fiend, I don’t want you to think that just by signing off
01:04:59 ►
from the Dopecast that that’s all there is, my friend, because there are hundreds of thousands of us
01:05:06 ►
Dope Tribers all around the world who will forever be waking up every Monday morning and
01:05:12 ►
have the first thing they do is check their mp3 players to see if you posted a new show.
01:05:19 ►
And since you said that there’s always a chance that you’ll do another podcast from time to time,
01:05:24 ►
well, I’ll be checking mine. I’ll be one of those dope drivers who will be thinking of you,
01:05:28 ►
and not only on Monday mornings, but much more often than that, for you have contributed more
01:05:34 ►
to this community and this world than you can possibly know. And so, on behalf of everyone
01:05:40 ►
here in the Psychedelic Salon, I want to wish you smooth sailing and the best of
01:05:46 ►
all worlds as your earthly adventure continues to unfold. Be well, my dear friend. And for now,
01:05:54 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.
01:06:05 ►
There is a domain of culture that is like an environment of competing ideas.
01:06:09 ►
And the memes go off and live
01:06:12 ►
in this ideological environment.
01:06:15 ►
And some flourish,
01:06:17 ►
and some are consumed by others,
01:06:19 ►
and some are incorporated into others.
01:06:22 ►
And the idea is to keep the psychedelic meme alive and to make it grow
01:06:28 ►
and to allow its claim to be heard. It’s not in danger of dying. It’s a very persistent meme.
01:06:37 ►
It’s been around for about 20,000 years and it’s been highly repressed in many cultures for the last couple of thousand years.
01:06:49 ►
Yet, we’re trying to rebirth it.
01:06:54 ►
So thinking about it that way, thinking of yourself as a replicator of this thing which wishes to move through society,
01:06:56 ►
gives a mechanical model for understanding what is really ideological war.
01:07:03 ►
You know?
01:07:04 ►
A war about the definition of human nature.
01:07:07 ►
That’s what’s at stake.
01:07:09 ►
What shall we become?
01:07:12 ►
What can we become?
01:07:16 ►
There’s no question that we need a greater consciousness of who we are.
01:07:23 ►
And if psychedelic drugs are to be taken seriously at all
01:07:27 ►
as consciousness-expanding agents,
01:07:30 ►
then they have to be given their due place
01:07:33 ►
in the great dialogue that’s taking place
01:07:36 ►
about the future, creating it,
01:07:40 ►
and then realizing it, the future of the species.