382 - The Psychedelic Option

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“And now the task changes. It’s a completely different kind of spiritual universe that you live in after you found the answer, because the task becomes facing the answer. Facing it!”

“What we call history is the fall out of a dynamic hear-and-now, feeling-toned relationship with our environment.”

“Gradual change was a luxury of the past.”

“The politically most potent thing you can do for somebody is to educate them. To give them the facts.”

“The spiritual realm in practical terms means the imagination.”

“The frontier of our species is the imagination.”

“The spiritual realm, in practical terms, means the imagination. The frontier of our species is the imagination.”

“And, in fact, the evidence is building that our style of society is the historical equivalent of a temper tantrum.”

“A shaman is someone who has seen the end. A shaman is somebody who has seen it all.”

Previous Episode §

381 - A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics

Next Episode §

383 - A Psychedelic Point of View

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And greetings to the following fellow salonners,

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all of whom either made a donation to the salon or made a donation for the audio edition of my novel, The Genesis Generation.

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And all of your donations will be going directly to help offset

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some of this month’s expenses that are associated with these podcasts.

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And these wonderful souls are Yori S., Gregory G.,

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Raymond R., Sean M., David M., Penny R., Kevin P., and Michael W. Also, I want to thank the

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four Bitcoin donors who, by virtue of the way that the currency works, must remain anonymous.

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who, by virtue of the way that the currency works, must remain anonymous.

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And in particular, I want to thank the two Bitcoin donors who made rather large donations to the salon.

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As I’ve mentioned before, the majority of our donations usually range from $5to$10,

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and so those two Bitcoin donations are quite significant.

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So a big thank you goes out to all of our donors for helping us keep these podcasts coming your way. And I also want to thank someone who I’ll just have to call a secret Santa. You see,

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a little while ago I received this package in the mail, and in it was a Pax, P-A-X, Pax vaporizer

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that is distributed by Plume, P-L-O-O-M dot com.

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Well, I’ve now contacted those of my friends whom I think might have sent it to me,

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but they all claim to have no knowledge of it.

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But since I have no financial connections to Plume,

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I feel that, well, perhaps I should let you know

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a little something about this device,

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seeing as how the Dope Fiend isn’t podcasting his reviews

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of the latest

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vaporizer technology anymore.

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I’m not going to make it a habit to review vaporizers, but this one is so cool that,

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well, I want to let you know about it.

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After visiting their website, I see that the price falls somewhere in the middle range.

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It’s more expensive than a Magic Flight, which I also have and like quite well,

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and it’s less expensive than a Volcano, which I still think is tops. However, I’ve now burned

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out the switches on my Volcano, and well, I haven’t used it in several years. I also have

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an Iolite, but that quit working several years ago also. So for the past two years, my mainstay

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in the vaporizer world has been the Arizer Solo,

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which is truly a great piece of kit, as my Brit friends would say, and it’s worked flawlessly for

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several years of heavy use, and actually I didn’t think that anything could top it.

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But this little Pax vaporizer is now my favorite. Sure, there are a few things that if I was doing

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a real review, I’d point out

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as potential downsides, but overall, this little thing is a true joy to use. You know, it’s small

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enough to fit in the palm of your hand and has a retractable mouse piece, which means that it

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will easily slide into your pocket. And for family gatherings, where you have to sneak into the bathroom for a quick toke,

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well, this vaporizer can’t be beat.

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At least that’s my opinion.

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The bottom line is that the design is truly excellent, as only an engineer can appreciate, I guess.

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Here’s how I’d describe it.

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If you were a patient in sickbay on the Starship Enterprise,

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and the doctor prescribed medical marijuana for you,

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well, this is the delivery device that you’d find there.

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It’s really that slick.

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Of course, since I’m more easily pleased than most people, you may have a different opinion of this little gem.

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But whomever it was who sent this to me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

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who sent this to me, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. And as soon as I finish recording this podcast, I’m going to spark that little baby up and join you for a listen to the Terrence

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McKenna workshop segment that I’m about to play. Now, sometimes when I mention the date that a

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particular talk was given on, I fail to actually think about what the world was like at that time.

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And in just a moment or so, you’re going to hear Terence talk about a world population

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of 3.5 billion to 4 billion people.

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And you can tell by his voice that the size of our global population at the time deeply concerned him.

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But today, in a world of 7 billion people,

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about double of what it was in May of 1990, if Terence’s numbers are correct.

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Well, today, if the world population was only three and a half to four billion people, well,

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it sounds quite manageable. That doubling in such a short time span gives you something to think

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about, doesn’t it? So let’s join Terence now to hear what he has to say about this, as well as a host of other issues that seem to freely pop into his mind,

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and then from his mind into our minds as well.

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Well, I’ll just say a little bit about myself and how I relate to this.

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I don’t really like to talk about it in those terms,

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but since this is the getting to know each other thing it’s very important to

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the to what I understand that everybody else understand that there’s nothing special about it or me.

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In other words, for what I’m trying to do to make sense,

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this access to this transcendental realm

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has to be democratically available.

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It can’t depend on your spiritual accomplishment

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or your mastery of a technique or something like that.

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It isn’t like that.

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It’s something that is as much a part of us as ordinary people,

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as our sexuality is.

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And sexuality is not something that is dispensed by gurus

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it’s just something you figure out and do

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you know and this is

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much more along those

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lines

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how I explain to

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myself what I’m doing

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in this position

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is that I was just simply

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incredibly

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lucky

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incredibly fortunate to be at certain is that I was just simply incredibly lucky,

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incredibly fortunate to be at certain places at certain times when they were handing out the good stuff.

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And then I sort of, I see you in the same way.

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Someone over here, Fred, said he was looking for the answer to the mystery of life.

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Well, the weird thing about taking that position is that you can fall into positions where you find it, where you find the answer.

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where you find the answer.

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And I sort of feel like that’s the situation that the deep plant psychedelic community is in.

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It’s a sense of having found the answer,

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and now the task changes.

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It’s a completely different kind of spiritual universe

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that you live in after you’ve found the answer because the task becomes

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facing the answer facing it you now have it it’s no more about disciplining the passions and

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no no it’s now been handed over and so what are you going to do with it and this this is uh to my mind

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in a way uh the the problem and the challenge that we face globally as a species you know if the holy

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grail of the western mind was the ability to release energy and form

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matter and to control

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nature then

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this is now achieved

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the goal so now

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the whole context of the problem

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changes

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and the problem becomes

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changing our own minds

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controlling the hand

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that controls the energy.

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And this is an entirely different kind of problem.

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It is not to be solved with the analytical knife

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plunged again and again into the body of nature.

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That whole approach is seen to be,

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at best, passé, at worst bankrupt. So instead it’s about trying to edge

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up close to nature and feeling as individuals and as a society very peculiar about this.

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You know, it’s like going back to your rape victim and pleading for their forgiveness

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and yet as i’ve tried to make sense of these psychedelic experiences first in a general way

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saying you know what are these molecules for or is that a proper question to ask what are they doing for the plant what are they doing for

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me as I’ve tried to come to terms with what this might all be about I’ve come more and more back that it all lies in the plants,

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that our peculiar restlessness,

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which in modern circumstances has evolved into a rapacious appetite

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for addictive substances of all sorts,

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our peculiar inappropriateness in all contexts.

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We are not quite simply complex mammals.

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We are certainly not angels.

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And we just seem to occupy a very uncomfortable

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place in the hierarchy

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of creation.

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I think this has to do with the fact that we are

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the traumatized inheritors of a dysfunctional relationship, a relationship that grew relationship with our environment and into this anticipation of the future, worry about the past, basically ego.

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worry about the past, basically ego.

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And I recently spoke in New York,

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and New York is a very nuts and bolts kind of town,

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and people there took issue with the notion that all of our problems can be boiled down to a single problem.

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can be boiled down to a single problem.

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If you trace the thread of every screw-up back into the maze,

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it all comes back to a single issue, which is excess of ego.

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We all have excess of ego,

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and our entire situation,

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legalistic, psychological, religious, everything is about this.

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That it doesn’t work.

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It’s maladaptive.

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And yet we have it.

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And why do we have it?

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If it’s maladaptive, if it doesn’t promote human values,

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then how in the hell did it get started

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and what is it that’s maintaining and sustaining it?

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Well, this is what I want to talk about over the course of the weekend.

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When I pushed the analysis of what the psychedelic experience meant to the limits, I was surprised

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to discover that it left the domain of my personal relationship to the mystery.

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You know, what is it, what does it want for me, what is it trying to say?

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All that had to also make room for another issue, which is there’s a political issue here.

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I think most people in this room, most people who have had the psychedelic experience,

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will agree that the most profound, the most open-hearted, the most moving moments of their lives,

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some of them have been tied in with those experiences.

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But we seem unable or unwilling or afraid to extrapolate that conclusion

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to the notion that this is a general panacea for society because we cannot conceive that our

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That the the solution to a spiritual dilemma could lie in matter in other words we ourselves

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have been effect

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infected by the inside-outside

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matter spirit

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dichotomies of the of the dominator culture. But the notion that man,

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notice the gender thrust here, the notion that man could somehow bootstrap himself to Godhead

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without reference to nature seems to me highly peculiar.

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And simply nothing more than an expression of hubris,

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pride,

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a belief, you know, that we can do it our way and alone.

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So,

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all of this is very…

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The shelf life is short on all of these issues

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because the planet is in a state of terminal crisis.

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Does that have anything to do with the psychedelic experience?

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Or are these separate issues how can they

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be separate issues if the psychedelic experience is a mirror of the state of

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the individual and and collective psyche and if the planet is on a collision course with some kind of terminal crisis it seems to

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me then that what you know nature is struggling to write this

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disequilibrated planetary ecosystem so in a, there is nothing to be done except to watch and wait.

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But on the other hand, we are not apart from nature. We are, in some sense, a portion of nature

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which is the most reactive and energetic, because we are reactive and energetic in the domain of

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epigenetic codes we can foment rapid change until recently it was a it was a truism of thinking

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about society that all change had to be gradual this myth has now been exploded we know that you

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know you just take them all out and hang them,

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and then that’s not gradual, and then you’ve got a new world.

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And this has been done in several places with excellent success recently.

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So change need not be gradual.

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And in fact, I think we’re entering into a historical domain

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where very little change will be gradual.

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Gradual change was a luxury of the past.

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Well, how to come to terms with these processes, patterns, forming and reforming in our lives, in our relationships, in our families, in in our businesses in the extended

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relationships we have with people it’s what is needed you see is a kind of

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collective breakthrough in apperception I was thinking in the hot tub today the

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the most politically potent thing you can do for somebody is to

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educate them, to give them the facts. The facts are now so horrifying and the means

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of delivering the facts so effective that there is no excuse for everyone not beginning to act in an informed

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manner. And I think this is happening. For instance, a few months ago I was in Belize,

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which is an extremely poor country, a little chip of land in the armpit of the Yucatan

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that used to be British Honduras. I didn’t know there were countries of land in the armpit of the Yucatan that used to be British Honduras.

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I didn’t know there were countries this funky in the Western Hemisphere.

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I thought you had to go, you know.

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They have the fortune, good or ill,

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of speaking English as a national language.

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So when the British left, they just simply pointed dishes to the sky

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and they get 270 channels of American television.

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It has completely educated

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the entire population of the country

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into an extremely sophisticated strategy

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for surviving in the real world of the present moment.

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They understand that their only resource is their nature,

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so they have made the entire country into a nature reserve.

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They understand that tourism is their only hope

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and that for tourism to work,

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they must halt the destruction of their environment.

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This informing people at distant points of the value systems operating at the centers where

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values are being created allows people to position themselves for success I

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mean a lot is being lost you cannot pretend that the situation we’re in is unambiguously rosy. It isn’t. It’s extremely complicated. Marxism dissolves. What does this mean? 21 language groups and 16 tribal groups are open to exploitation, homogenization, leveling of cultural values.

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Everybody will be turned into a kind of white bread consuming citizen in a beige fascist world.

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And this is the alternative to Armageddon.

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We hail this as a great step forward.

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What is happening is that all restrictions

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are being done away with

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against the expression of completely rapacious drives

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for immediate self-gratification

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until 18 months ago,

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only half the world had permission to behave like assholes now this permission is

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being extended to everyone as quickly

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as possible as a right

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you know your right

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to join in the looting of the planet

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well

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certainly Stalinism is a bad

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thing but is the only

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ideological counterpoise to

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that to be high tech

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mindless consumer fascism?

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I don’t think so. In fact, I know not, because there isn’t enough metal in the planet to put a Volvo in every driveway of three and a half billion or four billion people.

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So the search for a serious revolution in values is on it cannot

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it must come from the spiritual realm and the spiritual realm in practical terms means the

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imagination the the the frontier of our species is the imagination now we have to take that

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slogan and somehow turn it into a technology how can we go to the place

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where ideas come from how can we somehow separate our architectonic fantasies

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from the ongoing momentum of the planet both Both are valid, you see, but we have to recognize

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that what we are is almost an ontological transformation of life. We are to life what

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life is to the inorganic realm, And we need to separate ourselves from the planet.

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The planet, the entire planet, should be a bioreserve.

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How many of these oxygen-rich, water-heavy worlds are there?

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Now, of course, it’s pie in the sky to talk about moving all heavy industry into space

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or to the asteroid belt or something like that.

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But on the other hand,

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when you extrapolate

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a visionless future,

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even as much as three or four decades

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into the future,

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you see the accumulation of problems

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on such a scale

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that then there will be no pulling out

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of the power dive. because once a society passes a

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certain point in the process of dissolution you just don’t make a decision to change i mean it’s

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too late you don’t have the engineering skills you don’t have the technical community you don’t

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have the resource extraction ability it’s all slipped through your fingers. Well, I think psychedelics are catalysts

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to thought, to imagination, to understanding. And we are like somebody who has been dead drunk while

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the house was burning down around us. And now we have awakened to the sound of falling timbers and the smell of smoke,

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and we have a certain limited amount of time to figure this situation out.

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We don’t have 500 years or 100 years.

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Anybody who speaks in terms of solutions that require 100 years or even 50 years to implement

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doesn’t understand the dynamics of the situation.

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History has some kind of will for its own transcendence,

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and I think we are now so close to the dropping of the mask

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and the realization of what the game was all along

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that the sense of this nearby revelation

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informs all of our lives.

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I mean, drives our dreams, our thoughts,

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the choices we make,

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why we’re here in this room this evening.

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It’s very big news, I think.

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The world is not at all as we suppose it to be.

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I find that very amazing. I mean, that’s the bottom line for me. I always think of these things

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in reference to that scene in 2001 when the anthropoid apes are leaping up and down

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and screaming and pointing at the monolith.

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That’s what we’re doing here in this room.

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I mean, the subject of this weekend is unspeakable.

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It can only be obliquely indicated.

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Whatever you say about it is not true.

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And yet it is somehow the informing mystery of being and it is not remote that’s

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the big news that the previous human model which is that we are all poor groveling sinners and that

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gnosis will trickle down to us from the wonderful folks up on top of the steep building nearby

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where they’re conducting mysterious business with liver readings and stargazing.

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That model is insufficient and insulting considering the situation we have been brought to

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by those very stargazing men wearing dresses.

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So I think what we have to do now is just take the machinery into our own hands.

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It’s a matter of personal responsibility to find out what the world is really doing,

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what it is, what do you think’s going on,

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what do you think this is all about,

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who do you think you are, what do you think’s going on? What do you think this is all about? Who do you think you are? What do you

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think English is? How do you really cognize notions like the future, the past, where I’ve been,

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what I want? I mean, you know, it’s in Moby Dick, Melville says, if you would strike, strike through the mask.

00:26:28 ► §

Everything is a mask.

00:26:30 ► §

And just behind that mask lurks, well, what?

00:26:35 ► §

That’s the question.

00:26:37 ► §

I mean, it’s the thing which informs every individual existence,

00:26:41 ► §

and that’s fine, and people have always lived in the shadow of that mystery.

00:26:46 ► §

But it is our weird privilege to live in an age

00:26:50 ► §

where there is also to be a collective dropping of the mask,

00:26:54 ► §

a moment of melting and recasting of what reality itself is to be.

00:27:04 ► §

So, you know, discussing this, convincing ourselves of it, and then working

00:27:09 ► §

out the minute details of how it all is inevitable and couldn’t be any other way, is how we will

00:27:18 ► §

occupy ourselves this weekend. I’m really conflicted in, in these situations because I feel for some reason,

00:27:27 ► §

I suppose it’s an ego trip, that I want to be correctly perceived. I as a person want to be

00:27:34 ► §

correctly perceived. And I think of myself as a reasonable person, a person sensitive to concepts like evidence, causality, so forth and so on.

00:27:48 ► §

And yet what I have to say is like completely unreasonable.

00:27:53 ► §

I mean, a messenger bearing news of complete madness approaching from all directions. So, and I got into that position by staying pretty close to the principle of skepticism. I’m not a believer. In fact, when the aliens draped the mantle over my shoulders, they said, it’s because you don’t believe in anything.

00:28:23 ► §

they said it’s because you don’t believe in anything this is why you get

00:28:25 ► §

that’s why you got this far

00:28:28 ► §

because you didn’t believe in anything

00:28:30 ► §

and it’s a good method

00:28:35 ► §

normally it’s a method spawned out of futility

00:28:38 ► §

you say well fuck it

00:28:40 ► §

I don’t believe in anything

00:28:42 ► §

but it’s also very good for getting rid of a lot of crap

00:28:46 ► §

because the real stuff can take the test of skepticism.

00:28:54 ► §

The real stuff doesn’t have to be bowed down before

00:28:57 ► §

and it works, it’s on its own.

00:29:01 ► §

The news is

00:29:05 ► §

and it’s very hard news to get out

00:29:07 ► §

because it’s news about the structure of reality

00:29:11 ► §

the news is

00:29:13 ► §

coming back from

00:29:15 ► §

50, 60, 100 years of anthropologists

00:29:20 ► §

ethnographers, geographers, botanists

00:29:24 ► §

dealing with the most quote-unquote primitive people

00:29:29 ► §

in the most remote parts of the world, the news is that reality is not at all as we imagined it to be

00:29:39 ► §

and that our prowess in the technical sciences is simply a cultural artifact, an accomplishment of ours.

00:29:51 ► §

Some people do great tattoos. We send spacecraft to the stars.

00:29:57 ► §

But it doesn’t mean we understand anymore.

00:30:01 ► §

anymore and in fact the evidence

00:30:04 ► §

is building that

00:30:06 ► §

our style

00:30:07 ► §

of society

00:30:09 ► §

is the historical equivalent

00:30:12 ► §

of a temper tantrum

00:30:13 ► §

you know that it has no

00:30:15 ► §

viability

00:30:16 ► §

it’s completely self limiting

00:30:19 ► §

it’s destructive

00:30:21 ► §

and it hands nothing on

00:30:23 ► §

to its receivers.

00:30:27 ► §

So I sort of talk to this group, and all the groups that I talk to,

00:30:35 ► §

from two points of view.

00:30:37 ► §

I’m trying to convince you of something,

00:30:40 ► §

and yet reason dictates that I assume that you’re already convinced pretty much.

00:30:47 ► §

So then it’s also an effort to figure out what it is we’re so convinced of

00:30:52 ► §

and then what is so great about it.

00:30:55 ► §

Because I think some kind of a…

00:30:58 ► §

This is a real mystery.

00:31:01 ► §

The only one I know this is the thing

00:31:05 ► §

that you hope exists

00:31:08 ► §

and assume

00:31:09 ► §

doesn’t if you’re a reasonable

00:31:11 ► §

person

00:31:12 ► §

because it’s

00:31:14 ► §

that all the dreams

00:31:17 ► §

of childhood

00:31:18 ► §

all the sense of magic

00:31:21 ► §

and the

00:31:23 ► §

dissolvability and transcendability

00:31:26 ► §

of boundaries

00:31:27 ► §

is

00:31:28 ► §

returned, is

00:31:31 ► §

affirmed in this

00:31:33 ► §

experience. Well,

00:31:36 ► §

yet here we are having

00:31:37 ► §

this on

00:31:39 ► §

the brink of a planetary

00:31:41 ► §

meltdown of culture

00:31:44 ► §

and ecosystem. So So is this just some kind of

00:31:48 ► §

dancing on the brink? Is it a kind of ultimate self-indulgence? Does it feed back into the

00:31:59 ► §

central moral problem of the age, which is what is to be done? What are we to do? How can we be

00:32:10 ► §

effective, whatever that means? Is there a discernible role for each of us to play in the

00:32:19 ► §

metamorphosis and near death of the planet that we are now experiencing?

00:32:26 ► §

Or are we simply to witness it?

00:32:30 ► §

Well, I don’t think there’s any point in thinking about these kinds of questions

00:32:35 ► §

unless you draw back to the big picture, to first premises.

00:32:42 ► §

You know, a good example of what I

00:32:46 ► §

mean is suppose we save

00:32:48 ► §

the rainforests and stabilize

00:32:50 ► §

the population and so forth

00:32:52 ► §

and so on and then 50 years down

00:32:54 ► §

the line the sun

00:32:56 ► §

explodes

00:32:57 ► §

means we didn’t get it

00:32:59 ► §

we were not reading correctly

00:33:02 ► §

the message nature was

00:33:04 ► §

trying to hand to us.

00:33:06 ► §

And so we did the wrong thing and are going to be blown out of the water for such churlishness.

00:33:13 ► §

So what’s important is to figure out what is going on before you start pushing in the process.

00:33:23 ► §

And I don’t think you can do it from within a culture.

00:33:29 ► §

In other words, if you’re a person of decent intent

00:33:32 ► §

and moderate intelligence,

00:33:35 ► §

and you read the great minds of your culture

00:33:39 ► §

and study their thought,

00:33:41 ► §

it’s insufficient because everybody is bound

00:33:44 ► §

within an illusion of

00:33:45 ► §

language the entire enterprise of culture is this illusion of language

00:33:50 ► §

Homer was as sick with it as Heidegger so there’s no going back or getting and

00:33:56 ► §

you know no classic recension what we have to do is reach past to some kind of experience. It must be anchored in an experience. But there is

00:34:11 ► §

this thing about being human, which we as a culture have ignored, repressed, don’t want to

00:34:18 ► §

talk about, face, or think about, which is you can get loaded and nobody knows quite what to make of this.

00:34:27 ► §

We dance around it with the same kind of furious ambiguous intensity that we also reserve for

00:34:35 ► §

sex which is also a boundary dissolving momentary loss of self into some kind of greater whole.

00:34:49 ► §

And it also just drives us into a frenzy.

00:34:51 ► §

I mean, we establish boundaries, we have hierarchies, we push it this way and that.

00:34:56 ► §

It just drives us up the wall.

00:34:59 ► §

You know, whoever she was who designed this system

00:35:03 ► §

had the good sense to connect this whole

00:35:06 ► §

sexual impulse very tightly

00:35:08 ► §

into the generative

00:35:10 ► §

process

00:35:11 ► §

so that there’s no way

00:35:14 ► §

you can get sex out of

00:35:16 ► §

the human experience

00:35:17 ► §

I mean people have tried in all times and places

00:35:20 ► §

in many strange ways

00:35:21 ► §

150 years ago they were putting pants

00:35:24 ► §

on pianos

00:35:25 ► §

because it was thought that young men should not see pianos unclothed

00:35:30 ► §

because it might excite them to impure thoughts.

00:35:34 ► §

This is real in England, in our culture, not New Guinea or the moon,

00:35:39 ► §

but in England pianos wore pants. But the psychedelic option is sort of like an appendix.

00:35:52 ► §

You can have it, but you don’t need it, apparently.

00:35:58 ► §

Apparently, that’s the key thing.

00:36:00 ► §

In other words, whether or not you have the psychedelic experience does not stand

00:36:05 ► §

between you and the ability to pass on your genes into time. It does not stand between you and

00:36:12 ► §

continued existence like the reflex, the autonomic reflex of breathing. It’s a kind of potential loop in development

00:36:25 ► §

which we can, as culturally coordinated creatures,

00:36:32 ► §

choose to follow or choose not to follow.

00:36:38 ► §

But this development is very recent.

00:36:43 ► §

Until, pick a number

00:36:45 ► §

10,000 years ago

00:36:47 ► §

the onset of puberty

00:36:50 ► §

which was

00:36:51 ► §

a wave of hormonal

00:36:54 ► §

release basically

00:36:56 ► §

the onset of puberty was the

00:36:58 ► §

signal to the social mechanisms

00:37:00 ► §

of the people to

00:37:02 ► §

begin the administration

00:37:04 ► §

of psychedelic plants,

00:37:07 ► §

to carry people into adulthood,

00:37:11 ► §

to carry them into a feeling-toned relationship

00:37:15 ► §

with the mythological material that they had learned as children,

00:37:19 ► §

but that they now would be expected to exemplify as realized adults within the gung or shi culture

00:37:29 ► §

or whatever it is that they are.

00:37:32 ► §

We, in our anxiety about all this,

00:37:36 ► §

and I’ll talk about why I’m sure it will come out,

00:37:39 ► §

but for the present just to say,

00:37:41 ► §

we have interfered with this

00:37:42 ► §

and we have enforced upon ourselves a

00:37:46 ► §

kind of infantile ism now this is a phenomenon that’s well known it’s called

00:37:53 ► §

neoteny neoteny is the preservation of adult characteristics into adulthood

00:38:03 ► §

into adulthood childhood characters or

00:38:07 ► §

infantile characteristics of fee even fetal characteristics so for instance

00:38:12 ► §

all all primate fetuses are hairless but only the human being retains this fetal

00:38:20 ► §

characteristic throughout life the very large head of the human infant,

00:38:29 ► §

the percentage relationship to body mass

00:38:33 ► §

remains very much in the fetal end of the statistics

00:38:40 ► §

throughout life for human beings.

00:38:42 ► §

We have large heads.

00:38:43 ► §

The very prolonged period in which skills,

00:38:48 ► §

cultural skills are acquired, up to 16 years.

00:38:52 ► §

Well, this tendency toward biological neoteny,

00:38:56 ► §

which was reinforced by mutagenic influences in the diet,

00:39:03 ► §

is carried over into culture as a cultural characteristic.

00:39:07 ► §

Have you noticed that every generation views the generation it spawns as more childish than itself?

00:39:17 ► §

And we look back to our rugged grandparents who slogged across the plains,

00:39:22 ► §

and I suppose they look back to people in chain mail

00:39:25 ► §

who were only four feet high

00:39:26 ► §

who could go without eating for six months or something.

00:39:30 ► §

And it just gets…

00:39:32 ► §

We become more and more soft,

00:39:35 ► §

more and more infantile.

00:39:37 ► §

And the final phase of this was just the decision

00:39:40 ► §

that we never needed to grow up at all.

00:39:44 ► §

We never needed to find out about the nature of our relationship to being at all.

00:39:50 ► §

And so the psychedelics were suppressed.

00:39:54 ► §

And what you have in the pre-adolescent child is an extreme expression of ego.

00:40:04 ► §

is an extreme expression of ego.

00:40:09 ► §

And this is, you know, the 11-year-old child, let’s take as the example,

00:40:12 ► §

is the supreme egoist.

00:40:17 ► §

And in a sense, we got hung up at that place because we didn’t get hung up in it, we fell into it.

00:40:23 ► §

We were in balance, But the suppression of psychedelics

00:40:26 ► §

created the precondition

00:40:28 ► §

that allowed the generation of ego.

00:40:32 ► §

And it’s very complicated.

00:40:34 ► §

A lot of factors were at work, you see.

00:40:38 ► §

The mushroom style,

00:40:40 ► §

the shamanic style of the nomadic hunter-gatherer

00:40:46 ► §

is a style of goddess

00:40:48 ► §

worship and

00:40:50 ► §

psychedelic shamanism

00:40:54 ► §

and

00:40:56 ► §

orgiastic religion

00:40:58 ► §

and the shamanism and the religion

00:41:00 ► §

overlap each other

00:41:02 ► §

considerably

00:41:03 ► §

the style that replaced that

00:41:06 ► §

was a style of domination,

00:41:12 ► §

hierarchy,

00:41:14 ► §

with alpha males,

00:41:16 ► §

with powerful males controlling females

00:41:18 ► §

at the center of these hierarchies.

00:41:20 ► §

And to my mind,

00:41:21 ► §

the concern that caused the shift was the accumulation in the psyche of these hominids of enough ego that there became concern for the line of male paternity.

00:41:40 ► §

In other words, men wanted to know who their children were. And that made the orgiastic style of religion in conflict,

00:41:50 ► §

because that was all about the children were the children of the group,

00:41:55 ► §

and sex was a shared activity, even though there might be bonding.

00:42:00 ► §

But once people got men, once men got it into their heads

00:42:04 ► §

that they wanted to know

00:42:06 ► §

who their offspring were

00:42:08 ► §

then females had to be controlled

00:42:10 ► §

very rigidly and there had to be

00:42:12 ► §

control of sexual

00:42:13 ► §

and the whole thing just turned into

00:42:16 ► §

a nightmare

00:42:17 ► §

my women, my property

00:42:19 ► §

my children, my food

00:42:21 ► §

my territory, so on

00:42:24 ► §

and so forth well you see, what territory, so on and so forth.

00:42:25 ► §

Well, you see, what had been going on before was a true incipient symbiosis.

00:42:33 ► §

And this is, I think, the new idea that I want to communicate

00:42:36 ► §

and that I’m absolutely, one, serious about and two, literal about that the our glory and our uniqueness and why we are

00:42:51 ► §

as we are is because we are a plant animal symbiotic species our ordinary

00:43:02 ► §

state our state of nature the way in which we existed until

00:43:07 ► §

10,000 years ago, was in a very tightly bound symbiotic relationship with plants.

00:43:14 ► §

They were, we domesticated them and we spread them and we created environments for them

00:43:23 ► §

through the use of burning.

00:43:25 ► §

And in return for this, this mysterious connection opened up

00:43:31 ► §

where real information couched in humanly cognizable terms,

00:43:38 ► §

information about where the reindeer went, who you should marry,

00:43:43 ► §

what the weather’s going to do, stuff like that.

00:43:46 ► §

Real information began to be traded back and forth. Now, biologists are familiar with the

00:43:54 ► §

notion of pheromones, message-bearing chemicals that regulate behavior within a species. But

00:44:02 ► §

we’re just getting ready to go to the next level and recognize the possibility of what have been called exo-pheromones, pheromones that regulate behavior between species. such as the equatorial tropics of this planet,

00:44:31 ► §

exo-pheromonal interactions become the major mediating force in all the evolutionary exchanges going on.

00:44:34 ► §

The old notion of competition and survival of the fittest

00:44:39 ► §

is now seen to be bankrupt.

00:44:42 ► §

The way nature works is it’s the species that can make itself most

00:44:47 ► §

necessary to other species, the one that can cut energy deals with the most of its neighbors

00:44:55 ► §

that is the successful one. So you maximize cooperation, you maximize dependency, you

00:45:02 ► §

maximize integration. This is the successful evolutionary strategy.

00:45:07 ► §

I mean, of course you can be a jaguar

00:45:10 ► §

and crash around in the forest

00:45:12 ► §

and eat things immediately smaller than you,

00:45:15 ► §

but jaguars will be a memory

00:45:17 ► §

in the fossil record of this planet

00:45:19 ► §

when the plants will still exist,

00:45:22 ► §

given that man were not part of the picture

00:45:26 ► §

so

00:45:27 ► §

the dynamic

00:45:31 ► §

of life

00:45:34 ► §

dictates that these

00:45:36 ► §

energy levels be held

00:45:38 ► §

very close

00:45:39 ► §

well no I think

00:45:43 ► §

nothing is outside of the natural but Well, no, I think nothing is outside of the

00:45:46 ► §

natural, but

00:45:47 ► §

all of this can be explained

00:45:49 ► §

in terms of

00:45:51 ► §

climatological flux on the

00:45:53 ► §

African continent.

00:45:55 ► §

Very briefly,

00:45:58 ► §

the primates

00:46:00 ► §

evolved in Africa. Out of the

00:46:02 ► §

primates came the hominids,

00:46:04 ► §

which were these gray seal, upright,

00:46:08 ► §

opposable thumb, binocular vision. And there were a number of these, and they existed for, you know,

00:46:14 ► §

over the past six million years. But Africa and the planet, because of repeated glaciation,

00:46:20 ► §

is subject to cycles of drying. And every time the ice moved south,

00:46:28 ► §

primate populations were bottled up in Africa.

00:46:31 ► §

And we know there have been four glaciations.

00:46:34 ► §

Immediately the last one, the ice melted 20,000 years ago.

00:46:38 ► §

And out of Africa that last time came pastoralists,

00:46:43 ► §

people who had domesticated

00:46:45 ► §

cattle and had a style

00:46:48 ► §

of following cattle around

00:46:49 ► §

rather than being just strictly

00:46:51 ► §

hunter-gatherers. Well,

00:46:53 ► §

I maintain what happened was

00:46:55 ► §

these

00:46:58 ► §

arboreal, tree-canopy

00:47:00 ► §

living apes came under

00:47:01 ► §

pressure as the continent

00:47:03 ► §

dried up to expand their diet

00:47:06 ► §

because the forests were disappearing and being replaced by grassland well

00:47:11 ► §

most animal species eat only one or two kinds of food this is a general rule in

00:47:17 ► §

nature and it’s in order to hold down exposure to mutagenic influence but when

00:47:23 ► §

an animal population is in a situation of

00:47:26 ► §

food scarcity the logical thing to do is to begin to test food sources and to

00:47:31 ► §

expand your repertoire of food well that’s what these primates coming out of

00:47:37 ► §

the trees did number one they began eating meat which gave them a real

00:47:42 ► §

interest that they had never had before in these ungulate

00:47:45 ► §

mammals that were evolving in the grasslands. And they began to test all kinds of other

00:47:50 ► §

foods in the environment. Well, when you do that, you are exposing your population to

00:47:55 ► §

mutation. And mutation rates soar. And it was during this period that the human brain size doubled

00:48:08 ► §

in like a million and a half years

00:48:11 ► §

someone said it was the

00:48:13 ► §

the most rapid evolutionary expansion

00:48:17 ► §

of a major organ ever seen

00:48:21 ► §

in the fossil record

00:48:22 ► §

nothing like it ever happened.

00:48:26 ► §

Why? What was making this happen?

00:48:30 ► §

Well, it looks like probably huge numbers of mutations

00:48:34 ► §

were taking place in this population

00:48:36 ► §

because people were literally eating anything they could get their hands on.

00:48:40 ► §

And in this environment of the grasslands,

00:48:44 ► §

the mushrooms were growing on the dung of these ungulate animals

00:48:47 ► §

well now a weird thing about psilocybin

00:48:50 ► §

is that in very low doses

00:48:53 ► §

doses so low that you don’t feel anything

00:48:57 ► §

your vision improves

00:49:00 ► §

they’ve done tests with this

00:49:04 ► §

and there is an improvement in visual acuity

00:49:07 ► §

on psilocybin at low doses. Well you can imagine the evolutionary impact of something like this

00:49:14 ► §

on a hunting gathering population where visual acuity is all that stands between you and grim

00:49:21 ► §

starvation. It means a population of animals,

00:49:25 ► §

a population of these evolving hominids

00:49:27 ► §

that accept the mushroom into their diet

00:49:30 ► §

have just been given a tremendous leg up

00:49:34 ► §

on nearby competing troops that don’t have it.

00:49:39 ► §

It’s like chemical binoculars.

00:49:42 ► §

So immediately then there is a reason, an evolutionary reason for mushrooms to be eaten

00:49:49 ► §

and for the spread for mushrooms to be accepted into the diet as an item and so forth and so on

00:49:54 ► §

well so then you take slightly more mushrooms and like all alkaloids and seeing it’s a CNS arousal. It means you feel alert, you feel interested, you want a boogie.

00:50:10 ► §

And also, if you’re male, you can sustain an erection.

00:50:15 ► §

So arousal means arousal.

00:50:18 ► §

So then this stuff is an enzyme promoting sexual activity at that level.

00:50:24 ► §

this stuff is an enzyme promoting sexual activity at that level.

00:50:26 ► §

Well, sexual activity,

00:50:31 ► §

the number of copulations that occur within a population is directly related to the number of successful impregnations.

00:50:35 ► §

So suddenly you have these horny primates

00:50:39 ► §

be a lot of more interest in sexual contact and partners and all that.

00:50:43 ► §

This means that these

00:50:45 ► §

psilocybin using creatures that are now more successful at hunting and more

00:50:50 ► §

interested in sex have all kinds of pressures on them that will force them

00:50:54 ► §

to outbreed the dull uninteresting folks who don’t use mushrooms at this point well so then high yet yet higher doses it changes and

00:51:09 ► §

it’s no longer about sexual activity or clarity of vision it becomes about the

00:51:14 ► §

psychedelic trip this tremendous which is as awesome to you and me as it was to

00:51:21 ► §

these so-called primitive folks 20,000 years ago. We don’t know what to make of it.

00:51:26 ► §

They didn’t know what to make of it.

00:51:28 ► §

They founded a religion about it.

00:51:30 ► §

We’re trying to start the engine of the same religion all over again.

00:51:35 ► §

And the way in which this religious ecstasis manifests itself

00:51:42 ► §

is in language activity, in cognition, but in glossolalia,

00:51:48 ► §

in spontaneous outbursts of syntactically organized vocal activity. Well, the great

00:51:54 ► §

mystery of human emergence, of course, is language. What is it? Where did it come from?

00:51:59 ► §

How did it ever get going on such a scale? So forth and so on. But it looks to me like what we’re seeing in psilocybin

00:52:06 ► §

is a kind of neurological enzyme,

00:52:11 ► §

a catalyst in the environment that could take

00:52:14 ► §

an evolving primate population

00:52:16 ► §

and put it through a series of forced changes

00:52:20 ► §

that produce ultimately a self-reflected, minded creature practicing a shamanic mother

00:52:30 ► §

goddess religion in this nomadic context. And that was paradise, and that was the ideal

00:52:38 ► §

for the archaic revival. In other words, that Eden actually actually existed that we are made for better things than what we’ve

00:52:47 ► §

got you know it says in finningham’s wake here in moy cane moy cane was the red light district of

00:52:54 ► §

dublin here in moy cane we flop on the seamy side but up in the yentor, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.

00:53:05 ► §

That’s a promise for the future.

00:53:08 ► §

Upnayent, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.

00:53:11 ► §

But also, antes, we sprouted our worth and woofed our wings.

00:53:17 ► §

And this whole nostalgia for a perfected shamanism in prehistory is reasonable, I think.

00:53:25 ► §

I mean, I think we had something, an unimaginably precious gift.

00:53:30 ► §

We had consciousness and dynamic order.

00:53:37 ► §

Consciousness as we experience it now within the confines of history

00:53:41 ► §

is most analogous to cancer.

00:53:47 ► §

I mean, it’s just, you know, replicating,

00:53:55 ► §

spreading, but it once was a dynamic, ordered thing. People lived, they died, they made love,

00:54:01 ► §

they had children, they herded their flocks, they had ecstatic flights into dimensions which we cannot even conceive of, and they felt no need to break into the earth,

00:54:07 ► §

to divert the rivers, to do all of this stuff.

00:54:12 ► §

And even if we’re not aesthetically attracted to that,

00:54:19 ► §

we have to make a value judgment on it

00:54:21 ► §

because it was not a runaway process.

00:54:23 ► §

It did not push everything

00:54:27 ► §

toward crisis. Okay, well then so what happened? What the hell happened if that’s how it was?

00:54:33 ► §

Well, you know, nature is just an ongoing story. The very drying processes that created

00:54:41 ► §

those grasslands, that created those pressures on diet,

00:54:45 ► §

that created that mother goddess religion, that evolved those ungulate animals.

00:54:49 ► §

That process continued.

00:54:51 ► §

And the grasslands dried up.

00:54:54 ► §

And the winds began to blow.

00:54:56 ► §

And the water holes got further and further apart from each other.

00:55:00 ► §

And the mushroom festivals went from every Saturday night

00:55:03 ► §

to the first Saturday of every month,

00:55:07 ► §

and then to four times a year, and then to once a year, and then to once every five years, and then to never.

00:55:13 ► §

And in the absence of the psychedelic experience, this ego thing gets going.

00:55:22 ► §

I mean, it is literally like a calcareous growth

00:55:25 ► §

in the bloodstream of the psyche

00:55:27 ► §

if you don’t inoculate

00:55:30 ► §

yourself against

00:55:31 ► §

it, it will begin to

00:55:33 ► §

take root and grow

00:55:35 ► §

and the world

00:55:37 ► §

the boundaries

00:55:39 ► §

of the world begin to move inward

00:55:41 ► §

you know and you no longer see

00:55:43 ► §

things on a planetary scale or a

00:55:46 ► §

millennial scale or it’s just about, you know, my women, my money, my land, my children, all of this

00:55:55 ► §

stuff. And at that point, you get the appearance of historical civilizations. You have kingship, kingship, you know, the age of Gilgamesh.

00:56:09 ► §

I mean, my God, when you read the story of Gilgamesh,

00:56:12 ► §

you just wonder what’s going on.

00:56:15 ► §

Gilgamesh spurned the goddess,

00:56:19 ► §

and the goddess sent a bull,

00:56:23 ► §

which to me is symbolic of

00:56:26 ► §

the mystery of the mushroom, the ungulate herding horned

00:56:29 ► §

animal, the crypto symbol for the goddess

00:56:31 ► §

the goddess sends a bull and he

00:56:33 ► §

rejects the bull, he rejects the goddess

00:56:37 ► §

he rejects the bull, then he takes Enkidu

00:56:40 ► §

the shaman figure and forces him

00:56:44 ► §

to go with him into the wilderness.

00:56:47 ► §

And what do they do in the wilderness?

00:56:49 ► §

This oldest of all myths, this story of the first men, what do they do?

00:56:55 ► §

They cut down the tree of life.

00:56:58 ► §

That’s what they do.

00:56:59 ► §

They cut down the tree of life and then it goes forward.

00:57:03 ► §

cut down the tree of life, and then they, you know, it goes forward.

00:57:09 ► §

The earliest stratum of mythology that comes out of these Middle Eastern civilizations is full of this male-female nature artificial tension.

00:57:16 ► §

The story of Genesis is a similar thing.

00:57:20 ► §

I mean, what’s happening in Genesis is history’s first drug bust.

00:57:24 ► §

What’s happening in Genesis is history’s first drug bust.

00:57:34 ► §

A woman is involved with a plant, and the plant opens their eyes,

00:57:39 ► §

and they see that they are naked, which happens to be the case.

00:57:40 ► §

They are naked.

00:57:46 ► §

So in other words, they see, they grok their true existential condition.

00:57:51 ► §

And Yahweh, wandering around, mumbling to himself in the garden,

00:57:56 ► §

says, this thing that these people have done, what if they eat of the fruit of the tree of life?

00:57:59 ► §

Then they will be as we are.

00:58:02 ► §

So it’s very clear that there is concern to withhold knowledge

00:58:09 ► §

that human beings are to be held in an inferior position.

00:58:15 ► §

Otherwise, if they were to eat of the fruit of the tree of life, of knowledge,

00:58:19 ► §

they would be as we are.

00:58:21 ► §

So there’s this whole tension.

00:58:23 ► §

And in the story in Genesis Genesis you’ll recall Adam and Eve

00:58:26 ► §

are cast out of Eden and an angel is set at the east of Eden with a burning sword well what I

00:58:34 ► §

take this to be about is the it’s a story from a strata where already the shift to the dominator culture has taken place

00:58:45 ► §

but they’re looking backward

00:58:47 ► §

at the partnership

00:58:48 ► §

society

00:58:50 ► §

on the grasslands of Africa

00:58:53 ► §

and the angel

00:58:55 ► §

with the burning sword is nothing more

00:58:57 ► §

than the sun

00:58:58 ► §

they literally were cast out of Eden

00:59:01 ► §

Eden disappeared around them

00:59:03 ► §

it dried up and blew away

00:59:04 ► §

and there was nowhere to go but the Nile Valley and Palestine. And these people who appear in the Nile Valley and Palestine at about 9,800 BC called Natufayan come out of nowhere with a very high culture and a tremendous ability to exploit plant resources.

00:59:26 ► §

And I think they are the remnants of this partnership culture.

00:59:31 ► §

And you see, the way in which all this ties into the present

00:59:37 ► §

and attempts to be more than just a kind of cultural reconstruction of prehistory

00:59:44 ► §

is we’re trying to understand who we are,

00:59:48 ► §

why we are the way we are.

00:59:50 ► §

Well, the major thing that now that we have transcended ideology,

00:59:55 ► §

and nobody gives a hoot whether you’re a Marxist or any of that anymore

00:59:58 ► §

because we’ve all seen through that,

01:00:00 ► §

the new issue is human nature.

01:00:04 ► §

And it evolves around this drug thing

01:00:07 ► §

is it the true and purest expression of human nature

01:00:15 ► §

that you should drink nothing but cold water

01:00:18 ► §

and eat nothing but raw vegetables

01:00:20 ► §

and any departure from this is an abomination

01:00:23 ► §

and then when you get to drugs this this is an abomination and then when you get

01:00:25 ► §

to drugs you know this is really an abomination how what should be our

01:00:30 ► §

relationship to substances and why are we the addictive creatures that we are I

01:00:36 ► §

mean I know that elephants intoxicate on papayas and bumblebees get loaded on sugar water and this and that but human beings

01:00:46 ► §

addict to dozens of substances to behaviors i mean all kinds of things guy goes out in the morning

01:00:55 ► §

to pick up his paper off his porch and it’s not there and he has a heart attack you know he has

01:01:02 ► §

to sit down my god you, what am I going to…

01:01:06 ► §

And he has to have instant relief from the traumatic crisis

01:01:10 ► §

of the non-presence of the morning information fix

01:01:14 ► §

and the phenomenon of falling in love,

01:01:18 ► §

which doesn’t really happen with other animals.

01:01:21 ► §

I mean, other animals bond,

01:01:21 ► §

with other animals.

01:01:23 ► §

I mean, other animals bond,

01:01:26 ► §

but they don’t go bananas in the way that we do on this issue.

01:01:30 ► §

We’re chemically highly cued

01:01:34 ► §

in a way that a lot of animals around us aren’t.

01:01:38 ► §

So then history, because of this,

01:01:40 ► §

because of this addictive drive within us

01:01:43 ► §

that we have because of this disrupted symbiotic relationship in prehistory.

01:01:49 ► §

See, we’re looking for the score, but we can’t quite find it.

01:01:54 ► §

Imperialism doesn’t do it.

01:01:56 ► §

Heroin doesn’t do it.

01:01:58 ► §

Sadomasochism doesn’t do it.

01:02:00 ► §

Nothing quite does it.

01:02:01 ► §

But we keep trying stuff.

01:02:03 ► §

Cocaine, money, fascism, mercantilism, ideology, all of this stuff.

01:02:10 ► §

We are very, very restless.

01:02:13 ► §

And the path of our restless, frantic peregrinations

01:02:17 ► §

across the intellectual landscape is what we call history.

01:02:21 ► §

It’s our effort to try and get straight,

01:02:26 ► §

get back to something which we feel we deserve

01:02:31 ► §

and that we lost,

01:02:33 ► §

and that we don’t know quite what it was.

01:02:35 ► §

Well, meanwhile, in the rainforests,

01:02:39 ► §

in the Arctic tundra,

01:02:41 ► §

these little brown people have been keeping the gnosis going, never

01:02:47 ► §

questioning, never doubting, millennia after millennia going into these hyperdimensional

01:02:54 ► §

mind spaces and operating there. While this has been going on, we have been elaborating

01:03:01 ► §

positivism, scientific philosophy, building atom smashers, so forth and so on.

01:03:06 ► §

We have created then, out of our infantile cultural style, what Eric Fromm would call

01:03:15 ► §

a fecal cultural style, because we just excrete stuff, you know, all kinds of stuff.

01:03:23 ► §

excrete stuff, you know, all kinds of stuff.

01:03:27 ► §

They have held this mystery.

01:03:31 ► §

But they, to my mind, the mistake that has been made is that it’s been thought that they understood it,

01:03:34 ► §

that we now go to the shamans and they will explain to us

01:03:38 ► §

what the inner skinny is on all this.

01:03:41 ► §

That isn’t it. There’s no explaining this.

01:03:44 ► §

Once you’ve been there, you know

01:03:46 ► §

the futility of a notion

01:03:47 ► §

like understanding the

01:03:50 ► §

psychedelic experience. It’s like

01:03:52 ► §

understanding the ocean

01:03:53 ► §

or understanding a planetary

01:03:55 ► §

ecology. We think that

01:03:58 ► §

things are to be understood,

01:04:00 ► §

but some things are simply

01:04:02 ► §

to be, you know,

01:04:04 ► §

what’s the word, appreciated, imbibed

01:04:06 ► §

to be in the darshan of them

01:04:09 ► §

well

01:04:10 ► §

let’s talk a little bit

01:04:12 ► §

more as we were this morning

01:04:14 ► §

I talked more than I intended to this morning

01:04:17 ► §

what is anybody’s take on this

01:04:20 ► §

or did anybody not get their licks in

01:04:23 ► §

this morning

01:04:23 ► §

yeah you mentioned the odd and the strange and the weird take on this or did anybody not get their licks in this morning yeah

01:04:25 ► §

you mentioned the odd and strange and the weird

01:04:27 ► §

other than

01:04:29 ► §

hallucinogens

01:04:30 ► §

how can we fool this brain

01:04:33 ► §

away from the ego

01:04:34 ► §

it’s pretty

01:04:38 ► §

pretty difficult

01:04:39 ► §

I think that’s why we’re in the

01:04:41 ► §

situation we’re in

01:04:43 ► §

talking about things we could do every day, not once a month.

01:04:50 ► §

Well, there’s no substitute for awareness in any situation.

01:04:55 ► §

I mean, part of the work, I think,

01:04:58 ► §

is the spectacular episodes of intoxication

01:05:03 ► §

that break down the boundaries of our personality

01:05:06 ► §

and reorient us and recast it.

01:05:08 ► §

But then the other thing is just living that out

01:05:11 ► §

from day to day.

01:05:13 ► §

And there’s no substitute for hard work.

01:05:16 ► §

I mean, people say,

01:05:17 ► §

how can psychedelics be real?

01:05:19 ► §

You’re saying it’s some kind of shortcut

01:05:21 ► §

to spiritual wisdom.

01:05:23 ► §

Well, it may be a shortcut, but nobody said it’s easy.

01:05:27 ► §

It isn’t easy. No.

01:05:31 ► §

It just is that it’s ultimately effective.

01:05:37 ► §

I don’t know. I find myself preaching a doctrine

01:05:41 ► §

that is hardly welcome in the touchy feely circles

01:05:46 ► §

that I’m usually teaching in

01:05:48 ► §

which is stifle it

01:05:50 ► §

now there’s a doctrine

01:05:52 ► §

to take home from the new age

01:05:54 ► §

stifle it

01:05:56 ► §

you know the ego is much too

01:05:58 ► §

large I mean we

01:06:00 ► §

need an ego yes

01:06:01 ► §

that’s so that if you take somebody to dinner

01:06:04 ► §

you know whose mouth to put food in.

01:06:07 ► §

That’s having an ego.

01:06:09 ► §

But above and beyond that,

01:06:11 ► §

it becomes sort of superfluous.

01:06:15 ► §

It’s a habit.

01:06:18 ► §

It’s a bad habit.

01:06:20 ► §

It’s an infantile response

01:06:22 ► §

that has been culturally supported to the point where it’s become institutionalized.

01:06:30 ► §

Do you believe a person needs a strong enough ego

01:06:34 ► §

before they can transcend or transform it, though?

01:06:38 ► §

The reason I’m saying that is because I’ve seen a lot of teenagers in the city

01:06:43 ► §

and they experiment a lot with drugs

01:06:46 ► §

and especially with psychedelics.

01:06:48 ► §

And sometimes I wonder

01:06:49 ► §

if they’re really getting anything out of that early experimentation.

01:06:54 ► §

I didn’t get into psychedelics until my late 20s.

01:06:58 ► §

Well, see, it’s a real complicated question.

01:07:03 ► §

Civilizations evolve folkways complicated question civilizations evolve

01:07:05 ► §

folkways to deal with the

01:07:07 ► §

drugs that they’re interested

01:07:09 ► §

in and this takes hundreds

01:07:11 ► §

thousands of years

01:07:12 ► §

part of the question I hear you asking

01:07:15 ► §

is you say that

01:07:17 ► §

these drugs dissolve the ego

01:07:19 ► §

but aren’t some of the people in a weakened

01:07:22 ► §

ego condition when they

01:07:24 ► §

come upon them?

01:07:27 ► §

And I think probably you’re right.

01:07:32 ► §

It’s not clear that the onset of puberty,

01:07:35 ► §

when there’s a good deal of psychosexual and endocrine confusion going on anyway,

01:07:39 ► §

is the precise right moment

01:07:41 ► §

that you want to drop these psychedelics on somebody,

01:07:45 ► §

although this is done in many traditional societies.

01:07:49 ► §

But the problem is that in societies where there is shamanism,

01:07:54 ► §

there’s an understood way to do it.

01:07:57 ► §

There’s an understood way to initiate somebody.

01:08:00 ► §

Kids growing up on the streets taking drugs of all sorts in doses of all sorts it’s

01:08:06 ► §

very hard to sort it out you know i mean people don’t have intent they don’t have focus they don’t

01:08:16 ► §

have information they’re just everything is so fragmented in modern life. Part of what all this yammering about shamanism might eventually

01:08:28 ► §

lead to is the reformation of psychotherapy along the lines of a shamanic style so that

01:08:39 ► §

then people could have these voyages, could have the insight into their problems

01:08:47 ► §

that you get from psychedelics.

01:08:51 ► §

Also in those cultures and societies

01:08:55 ► §

where they do use the psychotropic drug at puberty,

01:09:00 ► §

I think those societies support the individual, the child growing up, in very positive ways

01:09:08 ► §

and feed their ego in a very constructive, positive way

01:09:11 ► §

so that they are not filled with a lot of self-consciousness and self-hatred and lack of self-worth and so forth,

01:09:19 ► §

a lot of the critical nature that I think, and the lack of nurturing and attention that a lot

01:09:26 ► §

of the adolescents grow up in our society with, that then get weak egos from adolescence

01:09:33 ► §

on into adulthood. And I think the developmental quality of life in different cultures has

01:09:40 ► §

a lot to do with one’s ability to utilize the drug, the plants, effectively.

01:09:49 ► §

Cooperation is just an automatic response

01:09:54 ► §

among many of these rainforest-hunting, gathering people.

01:09:59 ► §

When you finish a job, it isn’t your job.

01:10:03 ► §

When you finish a job, you go on and you do another job until all the jobs are done.

01:10:09 ► §

And this is clearly a learned response because these are human beings just like us, but under the extreme pressure of being, you know,

01:10:18 ► §

twenty people trying to hold it together in the rainforest through gathering, they have accepted that the tribal unit

01:10:26 ► §

is the lowest common denominator

01:10:29 ► §

and that everything has to operate in the light of that.

01:10:35 ► §

Back here.

01:10:37 ► §

I felt that part of what was being discussed here

01:10:40 ► §

was the difference between discursive and one-pointed meditation.

01:10:44 ► §

And discursive meditation is likepointed meditation. And discursive

01:10:45 ► §

meditation is like meditating on the stations of the cross if you’re Catholic, or the seven

01:10:51 ► §

sheaths of the self if you’re a Hindu. And it sort of serves years of doing that as establishing

01:10:57 ► §

a ladder that can take you to the transcendent. And that one-pointed meditation, and even

01:11:04 ► §

more profoundly, the use of psychedelics can suddenly put you into a transcendent. And that one point of meditation, and even more profoundly the use of psychedelics,

01:11:06 ► §

can suddenly put you into a transcendent state. And whether you’ll have the capacity to get

01:11:12 ► §

back is the question. And so that there might be a role for a period of discursive meditation

01:11:22 ► §

or an education along that way before something instantly propelled you

01:11:27 ► §

into an experience of the transcendent.

01:11:33 ► §

Yes, although this difficulty getting back

01:11:39 ► §

is an interesting thing to talk about

01:11:41 ► §

because I certainly know what you mean.

01:11:44 ► §

I think everybody

01:11:45 ► §

who takes psychedelics a lot

01:11:47 ► §

eventually has a trip that

01:11:49 ► §

stands their hair on end

01:11:51 ► §

and

01:11:52 ► §

the reasonable

01:11:55 ► §

fear I’ve always felt

01:11:57 ► §

about psychedelics was not

01:11:59 ► §

that it would kill you

01:12:00 ► §

that’s not reasonable

01:12:02 ► §

but the somewhat murkier question, could it drive you mad,

01:12:10 ► §

is a little harder to just, of course not, because hell, why not? I mean, it’s definitely

01:12:18 ► §

rubbing up against those areas. But I have real faith that it is it’s like getting it’s like flipping a

01:12:26 ► §

coin and getting it to land on its edge the psychedelic experiences it such

01:12:32 ► §

represents such a state of disequilibrium that in almost all cases

01:12:37 ► §

the entire system is striving to return to normal and will do so very quickly.

01:12:46 ► §

My life is built around one spectacular exception

01:12:50 ► §

where my brother took a bunch of things and had a theory

01:12:55 ► §

and proceeded to sail off for the better part of three weeks.

01:13:00 ► §

And this sort of brings up another issue.

01:13:04 ► §

We sit here relatively down and calm,

01:13:08 ► §

and we can talk about the LD50 of psilocybin.

01:13:13 ► §

That’s how much you would have to give to 100 mice for 50 of them to die.

01:13:19 ► §

This is what pharmacologists are all about.

01:13:22 ► §

But when you’re actually stoned in these places,

01:13:25 ► §

you realize or you have the apparent realization

01:13:29 ► §

that of course the mind is in control.

01:13:33 ► §

And talking about safety,

01:13:36 ► §

you’re only as safe as you think you are, literally.

01:13:40 ► §

And if for a moment you decide you’re not safe,

01:13:43 ► §

the state is very fragile.

01:13:46 ► §

It’s skittery.

01:13:48 ► §

Get it going too fast in one direction

01:13:51 ► §

and it will be very hard to run around and get in front of it

01:13:54 ► §

and get it halted and moving off in some other direction.

01:13:58 ► §

Is that what you meant by self-toxicity?

01:14:01 ► §

Did I use that phrase this morning?

01:14:03 ► §

No, in a past tape you did mention about self-toxicity and negative effects,

01:14:10 ► §

possible negative effects.

01:14:12 ► §

Well, yeah, I think this is what people fear, that they are self-toxic.

01:14:17 ► §

And we have all been disempowered.

01:14:20 ► §

To some degree we are self-toxic.

01:14:22 ► §

That’s a real tragedy.

01:14:23 ► §

It means we have been made our own enemies

01:14:26 ► §

and then whether we are or not

01:14:28 ► §

we all fear self-toxicity

01:14:31 ► §

this is why in the 60s

01:14:33 ► §

when LSD first began to appear

01:14:36 ► §

people had such violent reactions to it

01:14:40 ► §

you know Tim Leary said

01:14:42 ► §

LSD is a psychedelic drug which causes

01:14:46 ► §

psychotic behavior in

01:14:48 ► §

people who haven’t taken it.

01:14:52 ► §

This is absolutely

01:14:54 ► §

true. Well, why

01:14:56 ► §

would a drug that you don’t take

01:14:58 ► §

cause you to become psychotic?

01:15:00 ► §

It’s because the mere

01:15:02 ► §

fact of its existence is

01:15:04 ► §

so threatening to you

01:15:05 ► §

because you know that you’re self-toxic

01:15:08 ► §

that’s what I always felt in the 60s

01:15:11 ► §

these people all know they’re crazy

01:15:13 ► §

and they don’t want to get near anything

01:15:16 ► §

which would perturb their psychic dynamics

01:15:18 ► §

they know beyond a shadow of a doubt

01:15:21 ► §

that they’re certifiably insane

01:15:23 ► §

and they don’t want to hear about it

01:15:24 ► §

so they’re not goingably insane and they don’t want to hear about it.

01:15:28 ► §

So they’re not going to be delving into something which shines a Klieg light on the mechanics of the psyche.

01:15:31 ► §

It’s the last thing that they are interested in.

01:15:37 ► §

If the definition of ego is the reality testing mode of the psyche,

01:15:45 ► §

the psyche’s ability to perceive reality,

01:15:47 ► §

that it almost seems that the psychedelic experience

01:15:51 ► §

augments the ego to a new level

01:15:54 ► §

rather than extinguishes the ego,

01:15:56 ► §

that it gives a truer picture of reality.

01:16:02 ► §

Well, you know, Freud had this concept

01:16:05 ► §

that he called the superego.

01:16:07 ► §

And this term has somewhat fallen out of use

01:16:11 ► §

because we all tend to be a little more Jungian than that.

01:16:15 ► §

And we talk about the collective unconscious.

01:16:19 ► §

But in a way, though I’m more sympathetic to Jung,

01:16:23 ► §

I like the phrase supere I like the phrase super ego

01:16:25 ► §

because the phrase collective unconscious

01:16:29 ► §

is a kind of blah concept

01:16:33 ► §

it’s like a data bank, a repository

01:16:36 ► §

where super ego seems to imply

01:16:38 ► §

organization, intelligence, focus, awareness

01:16:42 ► §

and what seems to emerge from these psychedelic experiences

01:16:48 ► §

is that where we expected disorder or the absence of organization,

01:16:55 ► §

we find order and we find mindedness.

01:16:58 ► §

The superego seems to be everywhere.

01:17:03 ► §

So in a way, it is like that.

01:17:05 ► §

It is that you’re becoming more informed,

01:17:10 ► §

but it diminishes your personal importance,

01:17:15 ► §

the physical atom of your body.

01:17:19 ► §

You know, I mean, we believe, and it may be true,

01:17:25 ► §

but the question is how important is it,

01:17:27 ► §

that we are each unique

01:17:29 ► §

and that somehow in this uniqueness is our worth

01:17:33 ► §

and that if something were to happen to you,

01:17:36 ► §

we can’t replace you with me

01:17:38 ► §

and you can’t stand in for me.

01:17:42 ► §

But back off to where you’re looking at a scale of a thousand years

01:17:47 ► §

of this stuff and you see that each one of us actually is expendable and that the general

01:17:56 ► §

processes in which we are embedded are so large that it probably doesn’t matter who

01:18:02 ► §

you are. And I could have been you, and you could have been me.

01:18:07 ► §

Well then, once you’ve got that nailed down,

01:18:11 ► §

being becomes a whole different project.

01:18:14 ► §

Being is something out there that you do.

01:18:19 ► §

You garden well, you bear and raise children,

01:18:22 ► §

you feed people, you build objects, you know, it becomes

01:18:27 ► §

something outside of yourself rather than something interiorized. And I think, you know,

01:18:33 ► §

thousands and thousands of generations of people were born and lived and went into the ground

01:18:38 ► §

with this kind of a psychology. And we are all imprisoned by our cultural expectations to such a degree that the

01:18:49 ► §

real problem is to is to make ourselves realize how blind we are how much what we’ve been taught

01:18:56 ► §

the words we use the expectations we have hem us in and the psychedelics show that

01:19:05 ► §

cultural relativism

01:19:07 ► §

not as an exercise

01:19:09 ► §

not as something that you’re convinced of

01:19:11 ► §

by rational argument

01:19:12 ► §

but that you just

01:19:14 ► §

see it immediately

01:19:17 ► §

see I think we are very

01:19:19 ► §

malleable creatures

01:19:21 ► §

and

01:19:23 ► §

have held many positions in the last 10,000 years vis-a-vis these structures

01:19:30 ► §

which we call the ego, the superego, the self, the unconscious. It’s more fluid than we imagine.

01:19:44 ► §

language may have emerged only 40,000 years ago.

01:19:46 ► §

Well, imagine that. Language is the software without which we wouldn’t be people.

01:19:55 ► §

You know?

01:19:56 ► §

I mean, language allows us to explore realms of subtlety

01:20:01 ► §

and inclusive understanding that so exceed the animal grasp that they

01:20:09 ► §

can barely be compared. I think probably in the beginning that language was something

01:20:16 ► §

that women held almost as a magical power. The reason for this is that there was greater selective pressure

01:20:26 ► §

on women than on men to develop language

01:20:30 ► §

because the physically larger male,

01:20:35 ► §

when there began to be role specialization,

01:20:39 ► §

the physically larger male was made a hunter

01:20:42 ► §

and hunting places a premium on

01:20:45 ► §

such values as stoicism

01:20:48 ► §

patience

01:20:49 ► §

and an ability to keep your mouth

01:20:52 ► §

shut

01:20:52 ► §

the women were

01:20:55 ► §

involved in gathering

01:20:57 ► §

and

01:20:59 ► §

because the children

01:21:01 ► §

were physically with the women

01:21:03 ► §

this area in which the gathering went on

01:21:07 ► §

was more tightly related to the living space.

01:21:11 ► §

Well, if you know anything about the science of botany,

01:21:15 ► §

you know that it is a science of the coordination of detail.

01:21:20 ► §

Everything is about the detail.

01:21:22 ► §

Here you have 50 species of grasses.

01:21:27 ► §

To Joe Blow, they all look exactly the same to a specialist in the Grimini

01:21:30 ► §

here is a whole rich universe of taxonomic diversity

01:21:34 ► §

to be combed over and milked for years

01:21:37 ► §

as you advance through the academic machinery

01:21:40 ► §

so women had to learn all these differentiations

01:21:47 ► §

women had to be able to make statements like

01:21:51 ► §

it’s the small bush at the bottom of the draw

01:21:54 ► §

with the wrinkled leaves and the sticky white berries

01:21:57 ► §

with the silver hairs on them

01:21:59 ► §

see, it’s all color, shape, form, and relationship words.

01:22:05 ► §

Well, this kind of language is the kind of language

01:22:09 ► §

that gave us a leg up on animal organization.

01:22:13 ► §

After a passage of time, I think this linguistic thing

01:22:16 ► §

generally established itself.

01:22:19 ► §

But it was originally a thing that women were into.

01:22:25 ► §

Even to this day, when you go into villages

01:22:28 ► §

in third world parts of the planet,

01:22:32 ► §

there’s this phrase in all travel books,

01:22:36 ► §

which is the chattering of the village women.

01:22:38 ► §

And it’s true, they really do chatter.

01:22:41 ► §

And it’s because they are more collective creatures.

01:22:43 ► §

The male is this proud, lonely

01:22:46 ► §

hunting figure

01:22:47 ► §

and the females represent

01:22:50 ► §

the village

01:22:51 ► §

values and they held

01:22:54 ► §

the knowledge of the plants.

01:22:56 ► §

They discovered all this

01:22:58 ► §

stuff. You even get that in the Eden

01:23:00 ► §

story. It’s a woman who’s blamed.

01:23:02 ► §

Somehow these women

01:23:03 ► §

have a deeper insight and

01:23:05 ► §

the poor guy is just led to slaughter because he’s trying to get some chow

01:23:16 ► §

perhaps an appropriate image would be one of climbing a temple I think always think of Bor-o-dur,

01:23:25 ► §

which is probably the most impressive temple

01:23:27 ► §

that I’ve ever visited.

01:23:28 ► §

But there, as you walk up the temple,

01:23:32 ► §

if you pay attention,

01:23:33 ► §

you hear a whole experience of Buddhism

01:23:35 ► §

and different symbologies,

01:23:36 ► §

but also just basically your vision

01:23:38 ► §

of the surrounding jungle expands

01:23:41 ► §

and your sense of self diminishes.

01:23:46 ► §

Because you see the larger world.

01:23:48 ► §

You see the larger world from up on top.

01:23:50 ► §

Yeah, from the center of the mandala.

01:23:52 ► §

The same psychology is operating on the Mayan buildings.

01:23:57 ► §

I mean, the Mayan buildings are barely buildings at all.

01:24:01 ► §

They’re more like pedestals.

01:24:03 ► §

I mean, this thing is, you know, 230 feet high,

01:24:06 ► §

but when you climb to the top of it, there’s room for 12 guys to stand shoulder to shoulder,

01:24:12 ► §

and that’s the building. And it’s clearly entirely to elevate them above the social space.

01:24:19 ► §

It was literally a machine for lifting the priesthood into another dimension.

01:24:26 ► §

And the dimension into which it lifted them was an aerial dimension.

01:24:30 ► §

They could see then the whole world.

01:24:32 ► §

They could see the sock bays stretching out to the next pyramid.

01:24:36 ► §

They could see the next pyramid five or ten miles away on the horizon

01:24:40 ► §

and could see the life of the city and all this.

01:24:45 ► §

You know, there’s a funny thing.

01:24:49 ► §

It’s almost as though biology

01:24:54 ► §

and then its ancillary tack-on phenomenon culture

01:24:59 ► §

is a kind of conquest of dimensions

01:25:03 ► §

that has been going on for a very long time.

01:25:07 ► §

And this aids me, anyway,

01:25:09 ► §

in understanding the transformation

01:25:11 ► §

that I think lies ahead for this planet.

01:25:14 ► §

The earliest forms of life

01:25:16 ► §

had only a tactile sense.

01:25:22 ► §

That means all they knew

01:25:23 ► §

was what they were bumping up against

01:25:26 ► §

and they would move around

01:25:28 ► §

and what was edible was eaten

01:25:30 ► §

and what wasn’t wasn’t

01:25:31 ► §

and then a long time passed

01:25:34 ► §

you know 100 million 200 million years

01:25:36 ► §

and certain specialized cells

01:25:39 ► §

aggregated

01:25:44 ► §

and these cells were light sensitive cells

01:25:48 ► §

they could send an on off signal

01:25:50 ► §

based on whether or not photons were falling on them

01:25:55 ► §

so eye spots developed

01:25:57 ► §

and eye spots are just these sensors

01:26:00 ► §

which tell you if it’s light or dark

01:26:02 ► §

and suddenly these creatures could move off after a light source

01:26:07 ► §

or could retreat from danger into a dark spot.

01:26:11 ► §

Well, then eventually these eye spots evolved

01:26:15 ► §

into the kinds of very finely coordinated optical systems

01:26:20 ► §

that we have and octopi have and so forth.

01:26:23 ► §

At the same time, motility was developing,

01:26:28 ► §

the ability to move through space.

01:26:31 ► §

Well, have you ever noticed that when you look at something

01:26:36 ► §

and at a place a few feet from where you’re sitting

01:26:40 ► §

and then go there, physically move there,

01:26:44 ► §

that what you have really done is you have coordinated a short trip into the future

01:26:52 ► §

because you have looked at a spot and you have said, this is how the brain computer works,

01:26:58 ► §

it has said, I am not in that place.

01:27:01 ► §

I want to be in that place.

01:27:04 ► §

I am in this place. I want to be in that place. I am in this place now. To get from this place

01:27:08 ► §

now to that place then, I have to move through the following points. And when animals began

01:27:16 ► §

to move, another dimension was added to their repertoire of control. And when they began to coordinate vision,

01:27:27 ► §

another dimension was added to their repertoire of control.

01:27:30 ► §

Well, we made then a great and fundamental break

01:27:35 ► §

in our neurological organization.

01:27:38 ► §

All animal life, as far as we can tell,

01:27:41 ► §

is imprisoned between very steep temporal canyons

01:27:47 ► §

having to do with the present moment.

01:27:51 ► §

Animals are in the present moment

01:27:54 ► §

in a way that would be very frightening to us, I think.

01:27:58 ► §

If you could suddenly enter the mind of an animal,

01:28:02 ► §

the immediate thing that you would notice

01:28:05 ► §

that would really unnerve you

01:28:07 ► §

was the absence of the past and the future.

01:28:10 ► §

That just, you know, you talk about be there now,

01:28:14 ► §

an animal has that down pat.

01:28:16 ► §

Well, when we, through language,

01:28:21 ► §

that was the great…

01:28:22 ► §

Language is a strategy for binding time.

01:28:27 ► §

Language is a strategy for taking the animal mind

01:28:31 ► §

locked in the present moment

01:28:33 ► §

and pushing it back conceivably

01:28:37 ► §

to the creation of the universe as we do

01:28:40 ► §

and forward conceivably to the end of the universe.

01:28:44 ► §

So culture is a strategy for

01:28:47 ► §

intensifying the dimensionality of an animal species and the the uh when you then get into

01:28:57 ► §

what’s called epigenetic coding not simply being able to recall the past neurologically

01:29:06 ► §

and project the future neurologically

01:29:08 ► §

but to actually write down the past

01:29:11 ► §

and calculate the future

01:29:14 ► §

well then what is happening is mind is spreading out

01:29:18 ► §

through the dimensions available to it

01:29:21 ► §

and this whole cultural intensification that we call the 20th century, the spinning down and interconnecting of technologies and animal ecosystems and philosophical systems, all this knitting together is a going hyperdimensional

01:29:45 ► §

of our species

01:29:47 ► §

that yet more

01:29:49 ► §

of the future and more of the past

01:29:52 ► §

is apparently to be realized

01:29:54 ► §

and if you know anything about

01:29:56 ► §

virtual reality

01:29:57 ► §

thinking

01:29:59 ► §

there time is to be

01:30:02 ► §

homogenized completely

01:30:03 ► §

I mean you will not be able to tell whether it’s next week or last week

01:30:08 ► §

because they will be approximately equally accessible.

01:30:14 ► §

And somehow the psychedelic experience is related to this bootstrapping process of climbing organizationally from one

01:30:29 ► §

dimension to another, deeper and deeper into complexity. It’s almost as though the psychedelic

01:30:36 ► §

experience is a viewing of the process from the highest dimension in the plane.

01:30:47 ► §

One way of putting this that isn’t so mathematical is to say what you experience in the psychedelic experience

01:30:51 ► §

is eternity.

01:30:54 ► §

All of time.

01:30:56 ► §

You leave the slowly revolving torus of time

01:31:01 ► §

just as one would leave the galaxy in a spaceship and you go

01:31:06 ► §

outside and then you

01:31:08 ► §

look back and you see

01:31:10 ► §

all of time

01:31:12 ► §

you see the beginning of life

01:31:14 ► §

the end of life, the fiery

01:31:16 ► §

death of this planet

01:31:17 ► §

millennia hence, whatever

01:31:20 ► §

it is

01:31:20 ► §

and I think

01:31:24 ► §

that this is

01:31:25 ► §

a true vision

01:31:27 ► §

that this is what shamans

01:31:30 ► §

have achieved, this is what

01:31:32 ► §

we with all our

01:31:33 ► §

sophistication are

01:31:36 ► §

confounded by

01:31:37 ► §

a shaman is someone

01:31:40 ► §

who has seen the end

01:31:42 ► §

a shaman is

01:31:44 ► §

somebody who has seen it all they’ve run

01:31:47 ► §

the movie and run the movie and run the movie and they’ve satisfied themselves

01:31:52 ► §

that they understand the movie then they go back to their place in the movie and

01:31:57 ► §

they live it with a small smile because they know the end they know how things work they know what life is and when you

01:32:09 ► §

have even a piece of that action you can get a real handle on peace of mind on true authenticity

01:32:19 ► §

because it’s in the tumbling forward forward-rushing chaos of the lower-dimensional slices of time that we lose it, that we become confused.

01:32:33 ► §

Who am I? What do I want? Where am I? Who should I be with? What should I give myself to?

01:32:39 ► §

This is a voice speaking from chaos.

01:32:44 ► §

This is a voice speaking from chaos.

01:32:49 ► §

I remember once at a period of turmoil in my life, I took mushrooms to try and resolve my personal difficulties.

01:32:55 ► §

And I said, I’ll think of a question.

01:32:58 ► §

You know, they say you should think of a question.

01:33:00 ► §

So I said, I’ll think of a question.

01:33:02 ► §

The question was, am I doing the right thing?

01:33:06 ► §

And it’s in the point in the trip I posed this question to it.

01:33:09 ► §

And the answer was, what kind of a chicken shit question is that?

01:33:15 ► §

To ask an extraterrestrial infilecky.

01:33:19 ► §

So then I got it, you know, that that was a chicken shit question

01:33:23 ► §

and that I had been completely misunderstanding

01:33:25 ► §

the nature of the relationship.

01:33:28 ► §

This wasn’t some kind of little glass ball

01:33:30 ► §

that gives yes or no when you turn it upside down.

01:33:34 ► §

This is, I don’t know, words fail,

01:33:37 ► §

but nobody to expect psychotherapy for free from anyway.

01:33:43 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:33:48 ► §

thought at a time.

01:33:50 ► §

So, do you think that Terrence was right about the psychedelic experience being an experience

01:33:56 ► §

of eternity?

01:33:58 ► §

Of course, it all depends upon your definition of eternity, I guess.

01:34:03 ► §

Interestingly, most common definitions of eternity seem to include the concept of timelessness on one hand

01:34:10 ► §

and infinite time as another definition.

01:34:14 ► §

So, what is it? What does eternity mean to you?

01:34:17 ► §

Does it mean existing without any notion of time?

01:34:20 ► §

Or does it mean stepping out of time but being able to see what Terence calls all of time? Or does it mean stepping out of time, but being able to see what Terence calls

01:34:25 ► §

all of time? And of course, then the difficulty increases when we ask what is meant by all of

01:34:32 ► §

time? Is that only human time? Or is it all time that this physical universe appears to have

01:34:39 ► §

included? Basically, while I first liked and agreed with the thought that a psychedelic experience is an experience of eternity,

01:34:48 ► §

well, for me, the bottom line is that I don’t really know what that actually means.

01:34:54 ► §

As Spock said, it sounds good, Captain, but it isn’t logical.

01:34:58 ► §

However, please keep in mind that this is only my own opinion.

01:35:02 ► §

For you, it may be much more clear.

01:35:05 ► §

in mind that this is only my own opinion. For you, it may be much more clear. All that I’m trying to point out here is that ultimately we are still kind of groping in the dark when it comes to

01:35:10 ► §

trying to explain a psychedelic experience to someone who has never had one.

01:35:16 ► §

Also, I hope that the purists among us are pleased that I didn’t cut a thing out of this talk,

01:35:22 ► §

even though he told the ape and the mushroom

01:35:25 ► §

story again. For some reason, I just really enjoyed this particular telling of it. I guess the context

01:35:31 ► §

in which he told the story this time worked better than some past tellings of that wonderful tale.

01:35:38 ► §

Well, I think that we’ve probably done enough deep thinking for one day.

01:35:43 ► §

Now let’s kick back and maybe put on some of our favorite music,

01:35:48 ► §

maybe have a toke or two,

01:35:50 ► §

and let’s spend a few moments thinking about how absolutely incredible it is

01:35:54 ► §

that we now find ourselves stuck in these animal bodies here

01:35:58 ► §

on this beautiful little planet that we call Earth.

01:36:01 ► §

No matter where you find yourself at this moment,

01:36:04 ► §

I’m sure that if

01:36:05 ► §

you look hard enough, you can find at least one thing right now that makes your life worth living.

01:36:11 ► §

So let it bring a smile to your face, and then share that smile with the first stranger that

01:36:16 ► §

you meet. It may not be much, but that little smile of yours may just be the best thing that

01:36:22 ► §

happened to that stranger all day, and it may be the most important thing that you do today.

01:36:27 ► §

So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:36:32 ► §

Be well, my friends, and don’t forget to smile.