Program Notes
Guest speakers: Terence McKenna & Edward Snowden
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Everything flows. Nothing lasts.”
“Language is like an informational creature of some sort.”
“This problem of language is central, I think, to understanding the psychedelic experience.”
“Language is something unfinished in us. It is something that was catalyzed out of animal organization by hallucinogenic activation of brain states, and it is something that is in the act of perfecting itself.”
“When you go into a culture, you’re going to make a choice. And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.”
“We’re about to have a chance to create a global culture, to essentially clean our basement and decide what we’re going to save and what we’re going to keep.”
“It’s the monotheistic religions that have to take a real knock for the present situation.”
“Monotheism, as a philosophical reflex, is understandable but simple minded. It’s what an eight year old would get to.”
“Taking a psychedelic is an experiment. It’s not an act of religious devotion.”
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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 I am pleased to begin by thanking Bruce W., Christoph, Paul M., Neil M., Francios Y., David J., Martin M., Orion,
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and I’d also like to thank the three new anonymous Bitcoin donors. Thanks to all of you, we covered our expenses
00:00:45 ►
for this month, and we are continuing to grow as new fellow salonners join us each week.
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And we’re now joined by fellow salonners from, I guess, almost 150 countries. Of course,
00:00:57 ►
maybe we’re all just in one country and using Tor. Sorry for the geek joke.
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Anyway, while you may think that you’re near the end of the line when it comes to finding some others in the psychedelic community,
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the simple fact is that you most likely already know some of the others,
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but they’re being as careful as you are about coming out of the psychedelic closet.
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However, I am happy to announce that over the last few weeks,
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I’ve received several messages from fellow salonners
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who have begun family discussions about psychedelic medicines
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with great success and no arguments.
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At least, no arguments were reported, I should say.
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So, now let’s get back to the Terrence McKenna workshop
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that we’ve been listening to.
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But I should let you know that beginning with my next podcast, I’m going to be alternating between Terrence recordings and the 2013 Palenque Norte lectures, which have now come into my hands for podcasting.
00:02:08 ►
And while I haven’t had a chance yet to listen to the one I’m planning on playing for you, my guess is that it’s going to be something that we all find quite interesting.
00:02:14 ►
So keep watching your RSS feed for that next podcast title, and I think you’ll see what I mean.
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Now, before I play the recording of this May 1990 Terrence McKenna workshop session, I want to alert any of our fellow slaunters who have read Greg
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Egan’s most excellent science fiction novel, Permutation City. I want to let you know that
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Terrence not only read that novel, but also recommended it quite highly. However, this
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particular workshop recording that we’re going to hear was made four years before Egan published
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that book, and two years before Egan published that book and two years before Egan published
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the short story that the book was based on. Permutation City, as you’ll recall, has a subplot
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where some human-like life forms have evolved inside a computer simulation and have become
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sentient. Well, the dilemma for the humans that are operating the computer was whether to let
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these artificial intelligences, these AIs, know that they’re just code. I know this is kind of
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long-winded, but just bear with me for a few more seconds. So these AIs are having a discussion
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among themselves that, if you use your imagination, sounds very much like what Terence is saying
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about 41 minutes from now
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when he says that all of these things
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that we see as mysteries
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can actually be answered
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if we just accept the existence
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of a higher dimension of reality.
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In other words,
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someone outside the quantum computer
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we are holographically experiencing reality in.
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Oh well, I’m never going to be able
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to explain this very well, so let’s just listen to Terrence now, and if you are a Greg Egan fan,
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well, I hope that this makes you smile as much as it obviously did for me. The problem with
00:03:57 ►
determinism is it says everything can’t happen any way except the way that it’s happening.
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Now the problem with that is that it makes the concept of thinking irrelevant.
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Because you’re thinking what you’re thinking because you couldn’t think anything else.
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Therefore the notion of truth or judgment or all of that is completely shot down.
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So a totally determined universe is the most ultimately uninteresting that there can be.
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Nevertheless, the universe clearly is, to some degree, highly determined.
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I mean, we know to within nanoseconds the time of the sunrise
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tomorrow, and unless
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there’s a serious instability, it will be
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on time. So there is a
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degree of predictability.
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My rap is
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sort of divided into two parts,
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and I’m very shy
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about the second half. The first
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half is easy for me.
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It’s that psychedelics are wonderful, you should take them,
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this is the way to save the world, so forth and so on.
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The second part of the rap is,
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here’s what I’ve learned from psychedelics
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and then not some general kind of feel-good thing
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but something that requires a blackboard
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and tensor equations
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of the third degree and so forth and so on, and I’m very shy about putting that out.
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My personal approach to psychedelics before I realized that you could save the world with
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them, when I just thought that this was some kind of thing, self-exploration.
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My notion was what it’s good for is ideas.
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It’s for generating ideas.
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And I don’t really like the word generating because you don’t generate them, you hunt them.
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You get in your little boat and you paddle out onto the dark water
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and then you put your feet, and you paddle out onto the dark water,
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and then, you know, you put your feet up and you wait,
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and you set your nets, and you wait,
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and, you know, sometimes you pull up your nets and something the size of a freight train has gone through them,
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and you just row for sure, shitting white.
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And sometimes, you know, minnows, trivia, through them and you just row for sure shitting white and sometimes
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minnows, trivia
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why does
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our little finger just fit
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our nostril
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the mysteries of the animal
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body or all kinds of stuff
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but occasionally
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and it’s worth fishing a lifetime
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occasionally
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something will come into the nets
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that is not so small as to be trivial
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and not so large as to be incomprehensible.
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And this thing can be wrestled with for hours
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and eventually brought home
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to show the startled folks back on shore.
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And this showing the startled folks back on shore is makes
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history all these ideas come out of interaction with these plants the number
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of ideas which when you pick up a straight encyclopedia art should be
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traced back to herders and people who kept animals.
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People say, you know, astrology, astronomy,
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it was invented by people watching their flocks.
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The calendar, time,
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was invented by people watching their flocks.
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All of a sudden, well, they weren’t only watching their flocks,
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they were also watching the cow pies of their flocks for mushrooms
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and music, all of these Pythagorean insights into order
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I think come out of this herding domesticated animal husbandry
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we call it husbandry
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because it’s a model of caring for nature.
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And these ideas are the inspiration
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and the purpose to my mind.
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I mean, the social purpose,
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because I can get rid of my stuff
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and feel better about how I was abused in childhood
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and this and that and the other thing
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with psychedelics.
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But that’s all personal growth stuff.
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But an idea can be shared.
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You can take it and you can lay it at somebody’s feet.
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And where do they come from? When you ask the question, where where do they come from?
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When you ask the question,
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where do the ideas come from?
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This is Platonic philosophy 101, ladies and gentlemen.
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This is why the Greeks gave up fishing,
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to discuss this problem,
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where do the ideas come from?
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And we are no closer to understanding that,
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and yet the ideas
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are the signposts of our destiny
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they guide us
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forward and yet we know
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not from whence nor whither
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well I think now
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you know so
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Plato’s take on that was
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he said well there must be
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a perfect world somewhere
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where all these things exist and the numbers and there must be a perfect world somewhere where all these things exist
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and the numbers and everything.
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There’s a perfect form for everything
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in a higher dimensional world called the archetypes.
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Well, 2,000 years of philosophical sophistication
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have shown certain problems with that point of view,
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but fewer than you might think.
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I mean, the mystery of form,
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the problem of form, what is it?
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Where does it come from?
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What sustains it?
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We are nothing more than form.
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If it weren’t for form,
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we would be no different than the dirt under our feet.
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And form intrudes into matter,
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and then it withdraws.
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And when it withdraws,
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they put you in a hole and put dirt on top of you.
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So it’s very important to understand
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what is this coming and going of form.
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If we take this pillow and saw it in two,
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it’s a pretty undramatic event if
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we take one of us and saw us in two it’s an extremely dramatic event and what is
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the difference there it’s that this object is three-dimensional and this
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object is four-dimensional this object has a quality about it called being alive.
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Being alive, also technically known as metabolism,
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means that material is moving along temporal gradients
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within the confines of this organism.
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Material is not moving along any gradients within this thing.
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It’s just where it is.
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There it sits.
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But in here, a form is being maintained from within.
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And if I were to die, the form would collapse.
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Here, no form is being maintained except the form imposed.
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This is an imposed form.
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It has no sense of itself and it doesn’t sustain itself from any kind of internal integrity.
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But higher dimensional objects like animals and plants and human beings have this quality.
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Well, so then what we’ve been talking about here albeit sloppily is
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the fact that we seem to
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occupy a higher dimension
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in the natural order
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than other things
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and this higher dimension has to do
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with the fact that we have a little piece
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of mind a little chunk
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of this higher order
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organization
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well then going toward that,
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as visionaries, as users of psychedelics,
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society keeps adjusting its trim tabs, as it were,
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to mirror this transcendental goal.
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This is what we want to become.
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We want to become like the sensed object in our imagination.
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And shamanism is a pipeline about this. It’s almost as though the end state, well here’s
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a model for it. It’s almost as though the ordinary causal flow of information from the past to the future must make a place for like a three
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to five percent backward flow and this is what we call intuition it’s that vague unformed
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knowing that comes without any baggage of causal mechanism but it’s true knowledge. You know how it’s going to be.
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Well, it may be that time is somehow information permeable,
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that future potential states of existence
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are actually somehow in resonance
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with states of existence in the present and in the past.
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Our models of how the world works are very, very simple.
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I mean, basically we operate with mechanical push-pull models
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that are appropriate to very simple mechanical systems.
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And yet we know that we are far more complex
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even than the most complex physical systems.
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This last 15,000 years has been something,
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and the last 500 years has really been something.
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It’s so close now, the transcendental object,
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that it informs everything.
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The metaphor, the model to hold in your mind
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as you gaze at
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the earth in its travail
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is the metaphor
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of birth
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not death
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that
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a gestation process
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of 20,000 years
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is coming to an end
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culture using, language using,
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minded creatures
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are coming to some kind of
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fermentative climax
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and we cannot extrapolate
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the human career on this planet
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centuries into the future.
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It ain’t going to be like that.
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It’s an absurd question to ask the question,
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what will the world be like in 500 years?
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What the world will be like in 500 years is unimaginable
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because in the next 40 years,
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we are going to pass through this quantized transition where we actually
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become insiders
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and players in the game
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history is a state of becoming
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it’s a state of moving
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from the inarticulate
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unreflecting animal
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style of organization
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to the
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self-reflecting
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minded conscious energy controlling to the self-reflecting, minded, conscious,
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energy-controlling style.
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But to get from one to the other
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takes about 20,000 years,
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and it’s a bitch.
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You don’t know where you are.
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You don’t know up from down.
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You cannot tell what is happening.
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There’s just migrations and warfare
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and pogroms and gene mixing
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and hysteria of every sort
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and messiah this and religion that
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and they’re slaughtering these people
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and these people are doing that.
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And it’s like a bad dream.
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It’s like a psychedelic trick is what it’s like.
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It’s a 15 to 25,000 year dash
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to authentic being from the animal body
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and it would have been a lot
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easier to understand if
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10,000 years ago we
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hadn’t cut the telephone wire
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to nature
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because from then on we haven’t been able
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to figure out what’s going on
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and it’s been left to men
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with large egos
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to figure out what was going on.
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And what they figured out was going on was that there was a lot of free women, land, animals and money that needed to be organized for their pleasure.
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Because they lost the connection to this planetary birth process.
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Now, and like a birth process
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I mean the metaphor is worth pursuing
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because a birth
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is violent
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blood is shed
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there’s moaning and groaning
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and thrashing around
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and yet this is not
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an automobile accident
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this is not a human tragedy
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this is how life works.
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This is centrally scripted in
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to how human beings operate.
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If this didn’t happen,
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we wouldn’t be here.
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Well, that’s the…
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And yet, you know,
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if you’ve ever been pregnant
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or been around a pregnant person,
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this is a wonderful state of equilibrium
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of self-satisfaction
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of completion
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and yet the very fact that it exists
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ensures that it’s going to be rent
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it’s going to be torn
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it’s going to end violently
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in separation
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of these two beings
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but then there are all kinds of births.
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There’s stillbirth, the most disturbing and unsettling of all.
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There’s, you know, breach.
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There’s cesarean.
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There’s bad presentation.
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There’s all, there’s easy labors, hard labors. And I think this is the choice that we are,
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we still have some choices left.
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And a choice still to be made is,
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is it going to be a hard labor or an easy labor?
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It’s how fast we educate ourselves.
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That’s the lubrication in the birth canal of this pup.
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How fast we educate ourselves.
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Are we going to fight it or are we going to go with it?
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And it’s really frightening I mean
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because what we want is first of all forgiveness for what we’ve done which
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ain’t likely to come and then we want to go back and paint ourselves blue and be
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tribal and turn our back on all of this but I don’t
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think it’s going to be like that it’s propelling us to some kind of higher
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order I the faith is that history must have been for something and that
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everything is to be knitted together and everything is to be reborn anew
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and I don’t think this
00:19:08 ►
is not a religious
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doctrine exactly
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it’s more like the biological
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faith
00:19:15 ►
I mean we see it everywhere
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we see it in the birth that I was
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just describing, we see it
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in the metamorphosis
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of insects you know, Heraclitus said
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all flows and I think that this is the the hardest thing to learn it certainly has been the hardest
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thing for me to learn in my life and I assume then by extrapolation maybe this is one of the hard things to come
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to terms with.
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Everything flows, nothing lasts.
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I mean not the travail, not the horror, not the women you love, not the women who drive
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you crazy, not the children you love, not the children that drive you crazy.
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Everything is in the process of changing into something else,
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even at the very moment that you recognize its coherence as an entity.
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And this is the bad news that the ego doesn’t want to hear.
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This is what the ego is created to deny because the ego
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is you know it’s the effort of flesh to make diamond and it can’t be done you
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cannot make an indestructible adamantine clear substance it can’t be done
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but
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it’s all tied up with our fear
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of death
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we assume that if we release
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ourselves into this flow
00:20:55 ►
we will be swept away
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that our identity will cease
00:21:00 ►
to exist, that we will somehow
00:21:02 ►
not be there
00:21:03 ►
this is an artifact of language.
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It’s a horrible misunderstanding about who we are
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and how the whole system is working.
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Are you using language as a better word
00:21:18 ►
more than just the syntactics, you know, symbols that we’re using?
00:21:23 ►
Well, no, that’s all I mean.
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But I’m really aware of what a funny thing it is.
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You know, you talk about other dimensions.
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Language is like an informational creature of some sort.
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I mean, languages live.
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They reproduce themselves.
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It’s a virus.
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Yes, it’s a kind of virus.
00:21:46 ►
William Burroughs said this.
00:21:47 ►
He said English is a virus from outer space.
00:21:50 ►
I have no quarrel with this.
00:21:52 ►
This seems entirely reasonable.
00:21:55 ►
It’s a very strange thing.
00:21:57 ►
Reality is made out of language.
00:22:01 ►
And for most of the people in this room, it’s made out of English.
00:22:07 ►
language. And for most of the people in this room, it’s made out of English. And yet we spend a great deal of time worrying about quarks and new mesons and electromagnetic radiation. And all this is
00:22:16 ►
entirely a fiction. None of this stuff exists. All that exists are words.
00:22:26 ►
And we play a game,
00:22:28 ►
a really fairly insidious game with ourselves.
00:22:31 ►
We all,
00:22:32 ►
I suppose here, give great
00:22:34 ►
credence to what is called quantum
00:22:36 ►
physics. Is there
00:22:38 ►
anyone here who would care
00:22:40 ►
to explain to the group
00:22:42 ►
several of the core
00:22:44 ►
doctrines of quantum physics,
00:22:46 ►
or any core doctrine.
00:22:48 ►
And by explain, I don’t mean a verbal gloss.
00:22:50 ►
I mean, give us the hardcore equations.
00:22:54 ►
Well, no one seems to be coming forth.
00:22:58 ►
And yet, this is our truth.
00:23:01 ►
How crazy are you if your truth
00:23:03 ►
is something you can’t even understand
00:23:05 ►
and that’s the situation that we’re in
00:23:08 ►
we believe that somewhere among us
00:23:12 ►
somebody understands these tensor equations
00:23:15 ►
of the third degree
00:23:16 ►
and that if it got real tight
00:23:19 ►
we could go to them and they would then explain
00:23:22 ►
what reality is
00:23:24 ►
well this is a head full of shit
00:23:26 ►
this kind of thinking what you are actually dealing with is what wittgenstein called the
00:23:31 ►
present at hand the present at hand good phrase because it implies that only that which can be
00:23:41 ►
grasped matters and the quark cannot be grasped,
00:23:46 ►
the new mason, the electromagnetic field, none of this.
00:23:49 ►
These things need to be understood for what they are,
00:23:52 ►
which is little shingles,
00:23:55 ►
little shingles which we epoxy onto the face of the universal mystery.
00:24:01 ►
And once you have a bunch of these little shingles
00:24:04 ►
epoxied onto the face of the mystery,
00:24:07 ►
then you can’t see the mystery at all anymore,
00:24:10 ►
and you call that an explanation.
00:24:12 ►
Say, well, that’s taken care of.
00:24:14 ►
We’ve explained it.
00:24:16 ►
By the time a child is eight or nine or five or six,
00:24:20 ►
they have covered the entirety of reality
00:24:23 ►
with these interlocking little linguistic tiles
00:24:27 ►
and nowhere now is reality to be found
00:24:31 ►
between ourselves and reality
00:24:33 ►
as quickly as we possibly can
00:24:35 ►
we erect a lie
00:24:38 ►
we erect a false set of assumptions
00:24:42 ►
that are culture bound
00:24:44 ►
and this has always impressed me,
00:24:46 ►
the culture bound nature of language.
00:24:50 ►
That in a way, you can never leave the place you’re raised in
00:24:55 ►
because you acquire a local language.
00:24:59 ►
And the local language is all you ever really have.
00:25:04 ►
I had an experience of this that brought it home to me very strongly
00:25:07 ►
because when I first went to the tropics,
00:25:11 ►
I was there as a professional butterfly collector
00:25:14 ►
and it was pretty important to make a living.
00:25:17 ►
And my impression of the jungle was that it was green.
00:25:23 ►
That was my impression.
00:25:26 ►
Well, then three years later, I went back with botanists. Well, if you know anything about botany and taxonomy,
00:25:33 ►
what it is, is it’s an orgy of language. I mean, you know, leaves are lanceolate, cremelate,
00:25:43 ►
Leaves are lanceolate, cremelate.
00:25:49 ►
They have bracts, which are sessile, umbilate, and indentified, and so forth.
00:25:53 ►
These are specialized words to describe structure. You go with a botanist into the jungle, and the jungle becomes unbelievably rich.
00:26:01 ►
Here are melanostomes, malfigs, varolas uh all kinds of things and as soon as you put
00:26:10 ►
words to it reality emerges so you see here is language as a double-edged sword out of the
00:26:18 ►
undifferentiated it creates miraculous new realities to which we immediately habituate, undervalue, and profane.
00:26:32 ►
In other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
00:26:35 ►
But somewhere between silence and the familiarity that breeds contempt
00:26:41 ►
is the living essence of the word and its meaning.
00:26:47 ►
This problem of language is central, I think,
00:26:53 ►
to understanding the psychedelic experience.
00:26:57 ►
What I see happening on these tryptamines
00:27:01 ►
is the project of language goes from being something which
00:27:09 ►
you hear to something which you see without ever crossing over a quantized
00:27:15 ►
moment of transition well this is to my mind absolutely astonishing and I think I’m a pretty tough nut to crack. When you see
00:27:26 ►
language
00:27:27 ►
you’re
00:27:28 ►
it’s amazing because
00:27:31 ►
it’s a paranormal thing
00:27:33 ►
or it’s like it cheats
00:27:35 ►
it achieves paranormal
00:27:37 ►
intensity without
00:27:39 ►
violating any of the
00:27:42 ►
laws of physics that I’m familiar
00:27:44 ►
with. What I’m talking about is that in these shamanic performances in the Amazon
00:27:50 ►
and on psilocybin, language goes from something beheld to something seen.
00:27:59 ►
There’s precedent for this.
00:28:02 ►
In the Hellenistic world of Greco-Romanism
00:28:05 ►
the be all
00:28:07 ►
and the end all of spiritual accomplishment
00:28:10 ►
was what’s called the Logos
00:28:11 ►
and the Logos
00:28:14 ►
was an informing voice
00:28:16 ►
a voice in the head
00:28:18 ►
that told you the right
00:28:20 ►
way to live
00:28:21 ►
and Plato and all of these
00:28:24 ►
heavies cultivated and achieved connection with the logos.
00:28:29 ►
Well, there was an Alexandrian Jew named Philo Judeus
00:28:33 ►
who was a great commentator on the religions of his period.
00:28:37 ►
And he wrote about what he called the more perfect logos.
00:28:43 ►
The more perfect logos.
00:28:44 ►
And he said, what is the more perfect logos. The more perfect logos.
00:28:48 ►
And he said, what is the more perfect logos?
00:28:50 ►
And then he answered his own question.
00:28:53 ►
The more perfect logos goes from being heard to being seen without ever crossing over
00:28:58 ►
a quantized moment of transition.
00:29:00 ►
Language is something unfinished in us.
00:29:25 ►
It’s something that was catalyzed out of animal organization by hallucinogenic activation of brain states, and it is something words will be seen not heard
00:29:27 ►
the whole way in which we
00:29:30 ►
organize our language
00:29:32 ►
around
00:29:33 ►
visual metaphors
00:29:35 ►
when we talk about clarity
00:29:37 ►
so if someone is able
00:29:39 ►
to communicate, we say
00:29:42 ►
she spoke
00:29:44 ►
clearly, that’s a visual metaphor we say, she spoke clearly. That’s a visual metaphor. We say, I see what you mean.
00:29:50 ►
I see what you mean. That means I understand you. I see what you mean. He painted a picture.
00:29:59 ►
It means unconsciously, at the unconscious level, we connect visual metaphors and the visual sense with clarity of understanding.
00:30:09 ►
And what’s happening in the ayahuasca cults, in the mushroom intoxications and so forth, is an invocation of the visible logos.
00:30:20 ►
It comes into being in the shared space.
00:30:24 ►
You control it with sound.
00:30:27 ►
I mean, you discover that sound is something that you can see.
00:30:33 ►
And this is, I referred to this this morning
00:30:34 ►
when I talked about how we may be a one gene mutation away
00:30:38 ►
from a transformation of language.
00:30:40 ►
You can sit, feel perfectly normal,
00:30:44 ►
not feel wired or depressed, not have visual
00:30:48 ►
activity in the visual field, and then you generate a tone like…
00:30:55 ►
And you see that it’s a certain shade of lemon yellow with a chartreuse edge running on it.
00:31:04 ►
And then you… And it shifts to pink blue
00:31:08 ►
well you begin to experiment with this and you discover very quickly that you can do more than
00:31:15 ►
just generate colors you can generate modalities you can generate shapes as you begin to relax into an unconscious expression of syntax form begins
00:31:29 ►
to behave itself in the space in front of you and that language may have existed a very
00:31:34 ►
long time before anybody got the idea that you could use a certain sound like glass to mean a certain complex object
00:31:45 ►
because on psilocybin,
00:31:49 ►
glossolalia is frequently triggered.
00:31:53 ►
Glossolalia is normally presented as speaking in tongues,
00:31:57 ►
a religious phenomenon of fundamentalism,
00:32:00 ►
and the fundamentalist spin on it
00:32:03 ►
is that these are ancient biblical languages
00:32:06 ►
and that you’re being possessed by an angel or something.
00:32:10 ►
But in fact, at the primitive level of religion worldwide,
00:32:14 ►
glossolalia is frequently met with.
00:32:17 ►
And all of us have an ability to relax away from meaning
00:32:24 ►
and still retain syntax.
00:32:27 ►
It’s just something you would never do
00:32:29 ►
because we’re programmed to always mean something when we speak.
00:32:37 ►
But in fact, babies don’t do this at all.
00:32:40 ►
They love to babble, and they only late in the process learn to attach meaning well
00:32:48 ►
so then under the under language in the humble service of meaning there is language
00:32:57 ►
for itself sort of the ding on seash of, well, I’ll give an example of it
00:33:07 ►
and then discuss what’s going on.
00:33:30 ►
Okay, now what’s happening here?
00:33:36 ►
First of all, ordinarily we associate this speed of vocal noise with words.
00:33:39 ►
Words are small mouth noises.
00:33:41 ►
That’s all they are. You see, if you’re going to have a creature which communicates among members of its species,
00:33:46 ►
you have to have a low-energy form of communication.
00:33:50 ►
Otherwise, you’d be exhausted from the effort to communicate.
00:33:55 ►
Well, small mouth noises are great.
00:33:58 ►
A person can talk for about 12 hours
00:34:01 ►
without stopping fairly effortlessly.
00:34:05 ►
I mean, if you’ve got water and a little dope rolled,
00:34:09 ►
it’s not a problem.
00:34:11 ►
Well, do you know how much information a person could convey in 12 hours
00:34:15 ►
if they were, say, reading the telephone book aloud?
00:34:18 ►
It’s pretty amazing.
00:34:21 ►
So this thing I just did, it had syntax, but it had no meaning.
00:34:28 ►
In other words, if you listen to it, you hear that sounds repeat, rhythms repeat,
00:34:33 ►
there appear to be prefixes, suffixes, certain kinds of declensions.
00:34:38 ►
It’s all there, folks. It just doesn’t mean anything.
00:34:41 ►
But it turns out that the activity of language feels like language,
00:34:47 ►
whether it means anything or not. Well, in the psychedelic state, you discover this same set of
00:34:55 ►
tinker toys that was used to create the little speech I just did, can be used to create sculptures that are free form that this this he why waxy q vini
00:35:10 ►
malhakti kipipit it looks a certain way what’s important is not how it sounds what’s important
00:35:17 ►
is how it looks in the amazon in these ayahuasca cults, they have what they call Icaros, magical songs.
00:35:27 ►
Icaros are visual art.
00:35:32 ►
They are intended that way, and they’re criticized that way,
00:35:36 ►
and their success or failure is judged entirely in the visual domain,
00:35:42 ►
and yet they are made out of sound.
00:35:51 ►
in the visual domain and yet they are made out of sound and what they convey are very complex
00:36:07 ►
feelings you could almost say three-dimensional feelings feelings so complex that they won’t lay down and be a sound like hate, fear, revulsion.
00:36:08 ►
They won’t do that. They can only be laid out as grammatical objects of a higher order.
00:36:14 ►
And I think that this process is happening in human beings,
00:36:22 ►
the push toward visible language.
00:36:24 ►
But it’s being accelerated by the psychedelics
00:36:27 ►
and that we are trying to become, for each other, visual objects
00:36:33 ►
and we are trying to become capable of generating these things.
00:36:38 ►
Now, why I hold these conclusions is because in the DMT flash
00:36:46 ►
which is the most intense
00:36:48 ►
quintessence
00:36:50 ►
most quintessential distillation
00:36:53 ►
of this kind of stuff
00:36:54 ►
you encounter
00:36:56 ►
the shamanic
00:36:57 ►
entities
00:36:59 ►
the spirits
00:37:01 ►
the ancestors
00:37:02 ►
and this is really confounding
00:37:05 ►
I mean we can put up with shifting cobwebs of color
00:37:08 ►
and weird insights about our nostrils and our little fingers
00:37:12 ►
but not entities
00:37:14 ►
and yet in that space these things exist
00:37:18 ►
and they’re preaching
00:37:20 ►
this ontological transformation of language
00:37:23 ►
this is how entities in hyperspace communicate.
00:37:29 ►
It’s as though everything has had one dimension added on to it.
00:37:34 ►
It’s as though we are existing in some kind of squashed version
00:37:39 ►
of a larger superspace that can simply be mentally unfolded
00:37:44 ►
through the act of encountering a psychedelic substance.
00:37:49 ►
I think it’s big news that these entities exist.
00:37:55 ►
Now, if you were to go to a shaman in a classical culture
00:38:01 ►
and say, what’s it about?
00:38:04 ►
What’s going on here?
00:38:06 ►
They would unhesitatingly tell you that these are the ancestors.
00:38:10 ►
Oh, yes, these are the ancestors.
00:38:13 ►
We cure using the ancestors.
00:38:16 ►
And this is, I think, very unsettling for us as Westerners.
00:38:22 ►
We’d much rather accept the notion of friendly
00:38:26 ►
extraterrestrials communicating
00:38:28 ►
through the mushroom than that
00:38:30 ►
this is the dearly departed
00:38:31 ►
I mean that really
00:38:33 ►
you can feel your boundaries beginning
00:38:36 ►
to quake against that
00:38:38 ►
possibility
00:38:38 ►
it’s very interesting recently
00:38:41 ►
there was a new edition
00:38:43 ►
of Evans-Vence’s
00:38:48 ►
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries,
00:38:51 ►
which if you’ve never read it, it’s quite an interesting book.
00:38:53 ►
Y.E. Evans-Vence was an American
00:38:56 ►
who became a great scholar of Mahayana Buddhism
00:38:59 ►
and wrote the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
00:39:01 ►
the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation,
00:39:04 ►
Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines and so forth.
00:39:07 ►
But his doctoral thesis
00:39:08 ►
when he was a young folklore student at Cambridge in 1911
00:39:12 ►
was he wanted to study the fairy faith.
00:39:16 ►
And he went to Brittany and Wales and Ireland
00:39:19 ►
and interviewed the oldest people in the districts,
00:39:24 ►
the crones and the old, old people.
00:39:27 ►
And it’s a wonderful book to read
00:39:31 ►
because these people just tell these stories
00:39:33 ►
and it’s absolutely convincing.
00:39:35 ►
I mean, the fairies are real, the fairy faith is real.
00:39:38 ►
And when you asked, when Evan Svans asked these people,
00:39:43 ►
you know, what’s going on,
00:39:45 ►
they said, well, these are the dead.
00:39:49 ►
When you die, you stay around,
00:39:51 ►
but you’re in an invisible realm,
00:39:53 ►
and it’s an ecology of souls.
00:39:56 ►
My phrase, not his, an ecology of souls.
00:40:00 ►
But this is what is revealed on DMT, is entities that are so strange
00:40:11 ►
that they could easily pass for extraterrestrials.
00:40:17 ►
What’s puzzling about them is their tremendous humor
00:40:22 ►
and affection and intense involvement in us as human beings.
00:40:30 ►
Why are they there?
00:40:31 ►
What do they want?
00:40:33 ►
And they’re not, if they are ancestors,
00:40:38 ►
they are not my ancestors.
00:40:40 ►
In other words, when I broke in there,
00:40:42 ►
I didn’t find my mother and my grandparents
00:40:45 ►
it wasn’t like that
00:40:45 ►
it isn’t like that
00:40:48 ►
but there is this sense
00:40:50 ►
of
00:40:52 ►
affection
00:40:55 ►
interest, caring
00:40:58 ►
well
00:41:00 ►
we have the doctrine of purgatory
00:41:03 ►
in western theology in the Catholic Church.
00:41:06 ►
I had always assumed, thinking about it, that purgatory must have been a doctrine
00:41:11 ►
that the church fathers, Irenaeus and Eusebius and that crowd,
00:41:17 ►
had written into the gospel message for their own purposes.
00:41:24 ►
I discovered, to my amazement, that that isn’t what happened at all,
00:41:28 ►
that St. Patrick is the person responsible for purgatory
00:41:34 ►
because he wrote purgatory into Christian doctrine
00:41:40 ►
in order to convert the Celtic peasantry of Ireland
00:41:45 ►
to the idea that fairyland and the Christian afterlife were the same place.
00:41:52 ►
And it was thought such a good idea in Rome
00:41:55 ►
that the doctrine became canon law generally for the church.
00:42:01 ►
So purgatory is a spruced up cleaned up version of Irish fairyland to make it a little more palatable
00:42:10 ►
well you see we this is where our anxieties come in and where it’s hard to push it much further than this
00:42:19 ►
an extraterrestrial contact I think we could probably ride that through,
00:42:25 ►
and it would be amazing, but it would be tolerable.
00:42:28 ►
But if what’s happening is that at the end of history are waiting the dead
00:42:34 ►
and that our notion of reality is so skewed
00:42:37 ►
that we don’t even know the most basic facts
00:42:40 ►
about the cycles of life and death and rebirth,
00:42:44 ►
then it’s going to be
00:42:45 ►
quite astonishing for us
00:42:48 ►
I think to come to terms with this
00:42:49 ►
and yet this is what
00:42:51 ►
shamans live with
00:42:54 ►
this is what they tell you
00:42:56 ►
they say a shaman is a person
00:42:58 ►
who can pass
00:42:59 ►
daily through
00:43:01 ►
the gates of death and return
00:43:04 ►
we see into the other realm.
00:43:07 ►
We see into hyperspace.
00:43:10 ►
As inheritors of the rational tradition,
00:43:14 ►
this is pretty hard for us to swallow
00:43:16 ►
because I think,
00:43:19 ►
maybe it’s not true anymore,
00:43:20 ►
but in my personal process of rejecting Catholicism,
00:43:24 ►
I did manage to convince
00:43:26 ►
myself that when you dead it’s over with and it’s been very hard for me to fight my way back
00:43:33 ►
to the notion that that might be just a hundred percent malarkey and nothing more than a conservative
00:43:39 ►
first try and now i think much more in terms of dimensionality
00:43:45 ►
and that I don’t know what a form is
00:43:49 ►
but the process of the fertilization of an egg
00:43:55 ►
of any organism, it doesn’t have to be a human being
00:43:58 ►
the life of that organism
00:44:00 ►
and then its death and dissolution
00:44:02 ►
is the process of a form
00:44:05 ►
descending from hyperspace,
00:44:08 ►
clothing itself in matter,
00:44:11 ►
and then withdrawing from matter,
00:44:15 ►
returning to hyperspace.
00:44:17 ►
And this concept of hyperspace
00:44:20 ►
is very, very necessary to understanding this stuff.
00:44:24 ►
Because if you look at what shamans do that is so confounding,
00:44:29 ►
they find lost objects, they cure disease, they rescue lost souls,
00:44:38 ►
they discern secret acts, infidelities, thefts, poisonings, stuff like that.
00:44:47 ►
All of these magical things that they do
00:44:50 ►
are completely non-mysterious
00:44:54 ►
if we grant the idea of a higher spatial dimension.
00:45:00 ►
I mean, if there’s a higher spatial dimension,
00:45:02 ►
then this section is not zipped.
00:45:07 ►
There’s a part of it which is completely open to the world.
00:45:09 ►
This room is not closed.
00:45:12 ►
There’s one direction in which it’s absolutely open to the air.
00:45:16 ►
In other words, in hyperspace, nothing is hidden.
00:45:21 ►
Yeah.
00:45:22 ►
Give yourself a chance to breathe for a moment
00:45:25 ►
why do you think it is
00:45:27 ►
I mean we as human beings
00:45:28 ►
have evolved with pretty much all the equipment
00:45:31 ►
we need to get along and do things
00:45:33 ►
why do you think it is that we have evolved
00:45:35 ►
with such a poor understanding
00:45:36 ►
or no understanding
00:45:38 ►
of these matters of which you speak
00:45:41 ►
the
00:45:42 ►
afterlife
00:45:43 ►
the rebirth,
00:45:46 ►
I mean, we hear it.
00:45:48 ►
Many people, they hear it and they have a curiosity
00:45:50 ►
and they go towards it.
00:45:52 ►
But few people understand it.
00:45:54 ►
Well, I think this is a very recent phenomenon.
00:46:00 ►
Culture is a narrowing, obviously.
00:46:04 ►
I mean, if a man can have ten wives, two wives, no wives, one wife,
00:46:09 ►
well, then you go into a culture, you’re going to make a choice.
00:46:13 ►
And all cultures represent narrowing of choices.
00:46:20 ►
We don’t know how we could be.
00:46:23 ►
We don’t know what we could be. We don’t know what we could be
00:46:25 ►
if we were free to evolve ourselves.
00:46:28 ►
I think that’s the starting line that we’re edging up on.
00:46:32 ►
We’re about to have a chance to create a global culture,
00:46:36 ►
to decide, to essentially clean our basement
00:46:39 ►
and decide what we’re going to save
00:46:42 ►
and what we’re going to keep.
00:46:45 ►
This sense of not being connected is, to my mind,
00:46:50 ►
entirely rooted to what I’ve said here several times,
00:46:53 ►
the problem of the ego,
00:46:55 ►
but then to get a little more specific and maybe slightly more offensive,
00:47:01 ►
it’s the monotheistic religions that have to take a real knock for the present situation.
00:47:10 ►
Monotheism as a philosophical reflex is understandable but simple-minded.
00:47:20 ►
I mean, it’s what an eight-year-old would get to.
00:47:23 ►
One God, reasonable, economical,
00:47:27 ►
seems to fit the situation pretty well.
00:47:30 ►
So what’s wrong with that?
00:47:32 ►
Well, what’s wrong with it is you’ve got to be a little more sensitive.
00:47:38 ►
Philosophy is not practiced in a void.
00:47:41 ►
And as Jungians know well
00:47:45 ►
we mirror
00:47:48 ►
ourselves in our gods
00:47:50 ►
our religions
00:47:51 ►
are a set of permissions
00:47:53 ►
for how we
00:47:55 ►
as individuals can be
00:47:58 ►
and monotheism
00:48:00 ►
presents us with a notion
00:48:02 ►
that God should be
00:48:03 ►
omnipresent,
00:48:06 ►
omnipotent, omniscient, and unforgiving.
00:48:12 ►
And male.
00:48:13 ►
And male.
00:48:15 ►
Well, this is nobody you would invite to a garden party.
00:48:19 ►
This is what we call an asshole.
00:48:21 ►
Somebody who corners you, who’s never never wrong who’s totally full of their
00:48:26 ►
opinion who just wants to tell you how the boar ate the cabbage and never doubts them a boar
00:48:33 ►
so we have enshrined at the center of our cultural machinery the archetype of the unbearable boar
00:48:39 ►
and then we’ve gone out to realize it and And we try to fine-tune it.
00:48:47 ►
You know, we say, okay, well, this Old Testament religion
00:48:49 ►
with all this ritual and dietary, this isn’t it.
00:48:53 ►
So then along comes Christ and tries to fine-tune it.
00:48:56 ►
But, you know, he’s working in the most women-repressing,
00:49:03 ►
male-dominator, hierarchical structure on the planet. women repressing male dominator
00:49:05 ►
hierarchical structure
00:49:07 ►
on the planet
00:49:08 ►
and whatever good he does
00:49:11 ►
is quickly wiped out
00:49:13 ►
150 years later by these clowns
00:49:15 ►
I mentioned Eusebius
00:49:17 ►
Irenaeus and the rest of those
00:49:19 ►
guys and then
00:49:21 ►
Islam comes along
00:49:23 ►
to twist the screws yet tighter on this monotheistic ideal.
00:49:29 ►
And it doesn’t serve.
00:49:33 ►
And it was put in place because people tried to figure it out on their own.
00:49:39 ►
Monotheism is what you come to if full of sincerity you try to figure it out on your own
00:49:45 ►
but if you will just forget being full of sincerity
00:49:48 ►
and take mushrooms
00:49:50 ►
you will never come to this monotheistic conclusion
00:49:54 ►
it just appears preposterous
00:49:57 ►
because the multiplicity, the shifting
00:50:00 ►
unpredictable, boundaryless
00:50:03 ►
maternal nature of things
00:50:06 ►
is what forces its presence into your consciousness.
00:50:11 ►
We are born in the mystery.
00:50:14 ►
It’s all around us.
00:50:15 ►
Everything is provisional.
00:50:19 ►
And this is something worth talking about, I suppose,
00:50:21 ►
because it’s a psychedelic point of view.
00:50:24 ►
is something worth talking about, I suppose, because it’s a psychedelic point of view.
00:50:31 ►
Every society has always believed that it possessed 95% of the truth and that the next 5% would fall into place in the next 15 years. And yet these societies have just been all
00:50:38 ►
over the map, you know, and we don’t understand anything. And in in fact we have taken a more perverse turn than most
00:50:48 ►
we have substituted the incomprehensible
00:50:52 ►
that’s why we get these quarks and mu mesons
00:50:56 ►
and tensor equations of the third degree
00:50:58 ►
we actually worship incomprehensibility
00:51:01 ►
as the highest form of explanation of what’s going on
00:51:04 ►
say well I don’t of what’s going on.
00:51:07 ►
Say, well, I don’t know what’s going on.
00:51:10 ►
Somebody must understand it.
00:51:12 ►
Well, I’ve got news for you.
00:51:16 ►
If you don’t understand it, what good is it that somebody understands it somewhere?
00:51:19 ►
I mean, you’re responsible for yourself.
00:51:35 ►
And yet I think that all this technology, two and a half billion dollars worth of atom smashers, at some level is being inspired by something transcendental.
00:51:41 ►
And they’re trying to achieve love and Godhead and all that stuff.
00:51:45 ►
We want to know. We do want to know.
00:51:46 ►
And to science’s credit,
00:51:49 ►
and this is what I love about science, is that it’s not kidding itself.
00:51:55 ►
I mean, the thing that I go back to over and over again
00:51:59 ►
and that makes psychedelics different
00:52:01 ►
and that makes what I’m doing different
00:52:03 ►
is you’re not asked to believe anything.
00:52:08 ►
You just have to do something.
00:52:11 ►
In other words, you’re invited to perform an experiment,
00:52:14 ►
not accept a belief.
00:52:17 ►
And taking a psychedelic is an experiment.
00:52:22 ►
It’s not an act of religious devotion.
00:52:25 ►
I mean, you may do it in a devoted and religiously sensitized way,
00:52:30 ►
but it’s an experiment to see what happens.
00:52:34 ►
And if it works, it can be repeated.
00:52:38 ►
Delusion is a terrible thing.
00:52:41 ►
And there’s a lot of it in the world and probably
00:52:46 ►
psychedelics have to take the blame
00:52:48 ►
for some of this
00:52:50 ►
I mean all these rishis, roshis
00:52:52 ►
geishis and gurus that are
00:52:54 ►
running around with their hands out
00:52:56 ►
this is largely
00:52:57 ►
can be put at the feet
00:52:59 ►
of psychedelics
00:53:01 ►
but
00:53:02 ►
you mean why should we blame psychedelics for this?
00:53:07 ►
I don’t think anybody would have given any of this a thought
00:53:11 ►
if they hadn’t had psychedelic experiences
00:53:14 ►
to show them that the mind is not what they assume it to be.
00:53:19 ►
I mean, the great impetus to Eastern religion
00:53:22 ►
came in the 60s when all of this stuff was happening.
00:53:27 ►
I wanted to ask a little further about the animal experience of time and that they
00:53:34 ►
are stuck in the point present. They don’t have a sense of future or past. And my own
00:53:40 ►
experience with marijuana is that I lose my short-term memory.
00:53:45 ►
In my foolish days when I used to try to drive after getting really stoned,
00:53:49 ►
I remember looking to the right and it’s clear,
00:53:52 ►
and I look to the left and it’s clear, but I forgot what it is on the right.
00:53:56 ►
I look to the right and it’s clear, but I forgot what it is on the left.
00:54:00 ►
And I’m going like this, and I can’t hold anything in my mind for even that long.
00:54:05 ►
And it’s terrible, you know, when you’re driving, it’s awful.
00:54:09 ►
But I don’t find it pleasant in any sense.
00:54:13 ►
You know, when you read, you forget a paragraph,
00:54:15 ►
you move on to the next paragraph.
00:54:17 ►
And I wondered if that’s somewhat like the animal experiences life.
00:54:23 ►
And also I wondered if that was an attribute of mushrooms and ayahuasca,
00:54:29 ►
that loss of short-term memory.
00:54:31 ►
I don’t particularly like that experience.
00:54:33 ►
I don’t like that either.
00:54:35 ►
I really don’t like it when it’s acute.
00:54:39 ►
But I don’t think that’s necessarily a part of it.
00:54:42 ►
I mean, you don’t want to try and pigeonhole the psychedelic experience
00:54:48 ►
because what it is is it’s everything.
00:54:50 ►
I mean, once you think you’ve got it figured out
00:54:53 ►
and that it’s always going to be this,
00:54:55 ►
and then the next time it’s completely something else,
00:55:01 ►
so much can be done, so much can be structured and learned. I mean, I think basically
00:55:07 ►
the kind of psychedelic experiences most of us have been having have been just reconnoitering.
00:55:13 ►
You know, we sail over the territory and photograph the landscape and take it back and study it.
00:55:19 ►
But what you could do if you landed down there, what you could do if you actually learned the way of it,
00:55:26 ►
is I think it’s very inviting.
00:55:29 ►
In spite of the fact that psychedelics have been around for 50,000, 100,000 years,
00:55:36 ►
I still can’t shake the impression that it’s going to have a historical impact,
00:55:48 ►
to have a historical impact that that you know they’re going to eventually get around to noticing how odd it is and noticing that it’s right in the center of ourselves the the real problem is
00:55:57 ►
getting the word out about what it is so many people have taken a little bit of LSD or a little bit of psilocybin or something, and then they think they know what the psychedelic experience is.
00:56:11 ►
But you have to spend time poking around, and you have to take chances.
00:56:16 ►
And eventually the ice will break underneath you, and to your absolute horror, the thing you have been trying to cause to happen will then happen. But you
00:56:26 ►
almost always have to trick yourself, trap yourself into it. I don’t know what the limit
00:56:31 ►
of this stuff is. I certainly have been as stoned as I ever want to get. I mean, I said
00:56:37 ►
at the time, let it be noted, I don’t ever want to be more loaded than this.
00:56:49 ►
Let me make a comment about language.
00:56:58 ►
The film that I’m trying to produce, in its message side,
00:57:02 ►
it deals with the issue of what do we let go of and what do we hold on to in this shrinking world of our own ethnic heritage.
00:57:08 ►
And as the world shrinks,
00:57:09 ►
there’s a move towards homogeneity.
00:57:12 ►
And what’s really happening right now
00:57:13 ►
is people are really pulling back into their in-group.
00:57:16 ►
I mean, the Muslims have done this most profoundly
00:57:18 ►
because it’s very frightening.
00:57:20 ►
They have to all become one.
00:57:22 ►
And the idea of all being a consumer white
00:57:25 ►
bread homogeneity is a horrible image. But the thing that people are willing to share,
00:57:33 ►
I find, is their cuisine. Everybody’s willing to eat and explore and relish in each other’s
00:57:39 ►
food. But the thing that nobody’s willing to give up, or few are willing to give up, are their languages.
00:57:50 ►
And you can see they’re talking about Quebec seceding again from Canada.
00:57:54 ►
But there’s something about our attachment to language that’s really potent.
00:57:57 ►
And you’re giving up not just…
00:58:00 ►
I mean, it’s a world view.
00:58:02 ►
It is really ourself.
00:58:04 ►
I mean, we also are made. It is really ourself.
00:58:07 ►
I mean, we also are made of language.
00:58:09 ►
I said the world is made of language.
00:58:12 ►
Note that you are part of that world and are made of language.
00:58:14 ►
I don’t know whether the appetite for stuff
00:58:17 ►
will drive people to abandon their fear of merging.
00:58:22 ►
I think a lot is going to be lost.
00:58:26 ►
A lot has been lost.
00:58:28 ►
I mean, the extinction of the mammals
00:58:31 ►
that began 50,000 years ago,
00:58:34 ►
it was 50,000 years ago
00:58:35 ►
that was the greatest number of mammal species on Earth.
00:58:40 ►
There’s been steadily falling species since about that time,
00:58:43 ►
mostly due to human predation.
00:58:46 ►
And, you know, we’re not going to bring back the giant ground sloth
00:58:50 ►
and the woolly mammoth and the glyptodont.
00:58:53 ►
They’re gone for good.
00:58:56 ►
And there’s no getting away from the poignancy of this process.
00:59:04 ►
The cruise is over
00:59:05 ►
we’re in the lifeboats
00:59:08 ►
the ship is going to sink
00:59:10 ►
the question is
00:59:11 ►
how does this adventure end
00:59:13 ►
but there’s no question that there’s going to be
00:59:15 ►
a lot of loss and redefinition
00:59:18 ►
I mean usually in these weekends
00:59:19 ►
we get to a place where it comes down
00:59:22 ►
to being this thing about
00:59:23 ►
the space issue
00:59:26 ►
because people love it and they hate it and it has a lot to do with how you relate to the male ego
00:59:32 ►
because it’s the engineering dream come true you know that and nature disappears you replace it
00:59:41 ►
with black vacuum and you say here we will erect the
00:59:46 ►
the palaces and whorehouses of the human imagination
00:59:50 ►
We can make them the size of moons we can do this and that but
00:59:57 ►
and
00:59:58 ►
The beauty that is within us gives me a lot of hope for that
01:00:03 ►
My god the the expression of the design process in this world is certainly awful.
01:00:10 ►
I mean, our world is visually hideous, the part of it touched by human beings.
01:00:16 ►
And that’s very puzzling to me, because when you take psychedelics,
01:00:19 ►
you discover within the human body-mind
01:00:24 ►
the same kind of transcendent beauty that you see in the human body-mind the same kind of transcendent beauty
01:00:27 ►
that you see in the rainforest and the Arctic tundra and all that.
01:00:33 ►
I mean, immense beauty,
01:00:35 ►
and yet we seem to have a very hard time
01:00:38 ►
translating it into the design process.
01:00:42 ►
Art is, you know, we haven’t really talked that much about art
01:00:46 ►
in relationship to all this but
01:00:48 ►
the politics
01:00:50 ►
of the situation
01:00:51 ►
here in this millennial
01:00:54 ►
crisis
01:00:54 ►
I think the reasonable
01:00:57 ►
response is to push the art pedal
01:01:00 ►
right through the floor
01:01:01 ►
the way to escape
01:01:03 ►
the present cul-de-sac
01:01:06 ►
is an enormous outbreak of creativity of all sorts.
01:01:11 ►
We just need to overwhelm ourselves with creative expression.
01:01:17 ►
This could be very easily done.
01:01:19 ►
We’ve been in the habit of binding about 60% of our social energy
01:01:23 ►
into a standing crop of weapons.
01:01:27 ►
And whatever creativity is expressed in the production and design of these weapons,
01:01:32 ►
it goes on behind closed doors in the most excessively testosterone-festered environment
01:01:39 ►
you can possibly imagine, which is a military weapons research laboratory.
01:01:42 ►
possibly imagine, which is a military weapons research laboratory.
01:01:44 ►
But if we weren’t
01:01:46 ►
caught up in that,
01:01:48 ►
if we could really direct the
01:01:49 ►
resources the way we want,
01:01:52 ►
we have no idea how
01:01:53 ►
rich we are
01:01:55 ►
and how perverse
01:01:57 ►
our distribution of
01:01:59 ►
resources is.
01:02:01 ►
I mean,
01:02:02 ►
a single F-16 fighter plane, standard equipage, costs $120 million. One of these
01:02:16 ►
fighter planes. They order them in lots of 500. If somebody were to give 120 million dollars
01:02:25 ►
to the new age
01:02:26 ►
define that any way you like
01:02:29 ►
or to me or to you
01:02:31 ►
but that’s a lot of money
01:02:33 ►
but if you spend it on a fighter plane
01:02:36 ►
it’s not a lot of money
01:02:37 ►
you can park a fighter plane in an area
01:02:39 ►
twice the size of this room
01:02:41 ►
and there it sits
01:02:42 ►
useless unless Armageddon should come along
01:02:45 ►
it’s about the most useless
01:02:47 ►
thing you could do with 120 million
01:02:50 ►
dollars and yet if you
01:02:51 ►
gave that to
01:02:53 ►
the sincere
01:02:55 ►
the insincere
01:02:57 ►
the half sincere
01:02:59 ►
and let them all go off and do with it
01:03:01 ►
what they want society would be a much
01:03:03 ►
richer place and many more. Society would be a much richer place
01:03:05 ►
and many more interesting possibilities would be developed.
01:03:09 ►
So part of saving the world, I think,
01:03:13 ►
is to make people angry,
01:03:15 ►
to make people absolutely furious
01:03:19 ►
with the way we are being managed.
01:03:22 ►
The human enterprise is being managed by idiots.
01:03:27 ►
And, you know, I don’t say they’re vindictive idiots,
01:03:30 ►
but the case could certainly be made.
01:03:33 ►
But give or take that, they’re idiots.
01:03:36 ►
And we don’t have forever, you know.
01:03:40 ►
In fact, we have, I think, a very short amount of time to take hold and to insist that human values, which none of us have much trouble accessing.
01:03:52 ►
I mean, I’m not saying we’re all Albert Schweitzer, but we know what it means to be Albert Schweitzer.
01:03:58 ►
Why are our institutions unable to project the human values that we personally are able to feel?
01:04:06 ►
And then why do we tolerate that?
01:04:07 ►
Why are boys in charge of everything?
01:04:10 ►
It just doesn’t make
01:04:12 ►
any kind of sense.
01:04:16 ►
Working our way
01:04:18 ►
out of this is just going to require
01:04:20 ►
shock treatment.
01:04:23 ►
And that’s
01:04:24 ►
what this shamanic option represents
01:04:26 ►
I mean I wouldn’t preach this
01:04:29 ►
if I didn’t think the situation were fairly desperate
01:04:32 ►
it’s a radical option
01:04:34 ►
it’s not a reasonable option
01:04:36 ►
it’s a quick fix
01:04:38 ►
because quick is the only fix that counts now
01:04:43 ►
this is not a debating society,
01:04:45 ►
the crisis confronting this planet.
01:04:48 ►
It’s a life or death situation.
01:04:52 ►
I don’t see any other option.
01:04:55 ►
Yeah.
01:04:56 ►
Charles, is there any value
01:04:57 ►
in looking at the dichotomy
01:04:59 ►
of the natural evolutionary self-destruction
01:05:02 ►
of the planet,
01:05:03 ►
the toxicity of volcanic eruptions,
01:05:07 ►
the ice ages,
01:05:08 ►
the shifting of the axis of the polar axis
01:05:12 ►
and plate tectonics,
01:05:14 ►
all that is going on
01:05:15 ►
and we seem to be a minor player
01:05:17 ►
in the rearrangement of matter on the planet
01:05:19 ►
compared to what it naturally does itself.
01:05:23 ►
And what about that?
01:05:24 ►
What about that?
01:05:25 ►
Well, you’re right.
01:05:27 ►
The Earth is now understood to be an extremely dynamic environment,
01:05:33 ►
locally and globally.
01:05:36 ►
As a local example that some of you can relate to,
01:05:40 ►
in the last 100,000 years,
01:05:42 ►
tidal waves up to 2,000 feet high
01:05:45 ►
have occurred locally in the Hawaiian Islands
01:05:47 ►
because of sloughing off the face of those islands into deep-sea trenches.
01:05:52 ►
The International Geophysical Congress has held meetings about this.
01:05:57 ►
I’ve seen the physical evidence of it myself.
01:06:00 ►
A 2,000-foot tidal wave, you would shit white if you saw that coming.
01:06:05 ►
It’s just inconceivable.
01:06:08 ►
A 50-foot tidal wave is appalling.
01:06:11 ►
On a global scale, 65 million years ago,
01:06:15 ►
something crashed down on this planet,
01:06:18 ►
and nothing on this planet larger than a chicken walked away from it.
01:06:28 ►
Dramatic? You bet. planet larger than a chicken walked away from it you know dramatic you bet this happened between breakfast and lunch one day uh so yes i think the the earth is a very dynamic place and part of
01:06:38 ►
this psychedelic message is uh you know shake the mud off your shoes monkeys
01:06:45 ►
you can’t always
01:06:48 ►
count on it to be
01:06:50 ►
like it is
01:06:51 ►
the mushroom has a kind of
01:06:53 ►
a hortatory
01:06:54 ►
personality and it sometimes says
01:06:57 ►
things which I don’t necessarily agree with
01:06:59 ►
that are slightly alarming
01:07:01 ►
I mean one of its favorite themes
01:07:03 ►
is if you don’t have a plan,
01:07:07 ►
you’re going to end up part of somebody else’s plan.
01:07:10 ►
And it’s speaking to me as a person,
01:07:13 ►
it’s speaking to human beings as a species.
01:07:16 ►
If you don’t have a plan,
01:07:17 ►
you’re going to end up being part of somebody else’s plan.
01:07:21 ►
The sun has a limited lifespan.
01:07:28 ►
There are serious problems with the sun that are not discussed at all, much, except in the scientific literature. It would take major revisions of
01:07:36 ►
nuclear theory, which has been in place without revision for nearly 50 years. It would take major
01:07:43 ►
revisions of nuclear theory
01:07:45 ►
to explain why there isn’t something wrong with the sun.
01:07:49 ►
The sun is not emitting neutrinos
01:07:53 ►
at nearly the rate it should be
01:07:55 ►
if it’s a healthy atomic furnace.
01:07:59 ►
Is it possible that sometime in the last 100,000 years
01:08:04 ►
the nuclear fires of the sun have actually slipped off the main sequence?
01:08:11 ►
This is an appalling possibility.
01:08:13 ►
You see, if that were to happen,
01:08:16 ►
the neutrino flux from the nuclear furnace at the center of the sun
01:08:21 ►
would instantly drop.
01:08:25 ►
It would be measured within eight minutes on the earth,
01:08:29 ►
the drop in the neutrino flux.
01:08:31 ►
But all physical manifestations of this process
01:08:36 ►
would not appear for about 70,000 years,
01:08:40 ►
the period of time it takes for core solar material
01:08:44 ►
to percolate to the surface.
01:08:47 ►
So the neutrino drop would be registered virtually instantly,
01:08:50 ►
but it would take 70,000 years for any other thing.
01:08:53 ►
Well, you know, if that’s what’s happening,
01:08:56 ►
if the sun is going into some state of instability,
01:08:59 ►
well, then we look back in the geological record, and what do you see?
01:09:04 ►
Nine times in the past five million years,
01:09:08 ►
ice five miles deep has moved south from the poles.
01:09:12 ►
What the hell is that about?
01:09:15 ►
And you go further back in the record and you don’t find this.
01:09:20 ►
People don’t realize this.
01:09:22 ►
This planet existed for close to 5 billion years
01:09:26 ►
before there was glaciation.
01:09:29 ►
Glaciation is a brand new phenomenon on this planet.
01:09:34 ►
Why is it happening?
01:09:36 ►
Well, the obvious place to look is the energy dynamics of the home star.
01:09:41 ►
Is it possible then that we’re riding an edge more precarious than we know? Is it possible
01:09:47 ►
that bios, life on this planet, actually senses limitations and constraints and that we are,
01:09:57 ►
we have been summoned. We are a, we, I mentioned stopgap solutions. We are a stopgap solution.
01:10:07 ►
About two million years ago,
01:10:09 ►
the biospheric mind of the planet said,
01:10:12 ►
My God, the sun has just gone off the main sequence.
01:10:17 ►
We have approximately a million years
01:10:19 ►
to organize some kind of arc out of here.
01:10:25 ►
A species must be deputized to release
01:10:28 ►
energy and to manipulate
01:10:29 ►
matter. This species must
01:10:32 ►
be brought forward and made dominant
01:10:34 ►
species over the earth.
01:10:35 ►
And out of that technology, we
01:10:37 ►
can perhaps fashion an
01:10:39 ►
escape. In other
01:10:41 ►
words, you know,
01:10:43 ►
we are something that has been called forth out of nature because
01:10:47 ►
of unusual dynamics on a very large scale. Well, this is a possibility. Sure.
01:10:57 ►
I’ve had a fantasy since I heard your first, heard your take about the evolution of the brain, the next evolution.
01:11:06 ►
I mean, it doesn’t make any rational sense,
01:11:09 ►
but we don’t always make rational sense of it.
01:11:13 ►
What about the mushroom growing within the brain?
01:11:16 ►
I mean, actually not taking it in, but…
01:11:19 ►
You mean becoming physically symbiotic?
01:11:21 ►
Being, yeah.
01:11:23 ►
Well, yeah, I mean,
01:11:26 ►
Brian Aldiss wrote a book
01:11:28 ►
called The Long Afternoon of Earth
01:11:30 ►
in which he envisioned
01:11:33 ►
a human-fungal symbiosis
01:11:35 ►
that was so close
01:11:37 ►
that people actually had a lump
01:11:39 ►
on their shoulder
01:11:40 ►
and it went directly into the head.
01:11:43 ►
I find this kind of thing a little too creature feature-ish.
01:11:51 ►
But I mean, I have had the notion,
01:11:59 ►
not a notion, it was more like a delusion at certain times,
01:12:03 ►
and I can’t explain
01:12:05 ►
it to you I will just tell it to you that there are that the really the big
01:12:11 ►
secret about human beings is that there are three sexes male female and mushroom
01:12:18 ►
and this third sex is some I mean I haven’t worked out the genetics of it
01:12:25 ►
or how in the world we could have gotten so far without understanding this.
01:12:30 ►
But it’s that notion that it’s wedded into us at that level.
01:12:35 ►
And, of course, the mushroom, I don’t know if it’s this way for women too.
01:12:40 ►
It’s subtle. It’s smart. It’s tricky.
01:12:43 ►
Tricky, tricky, tricky.
01:12:49 ►
And it uses you against yourself, not viciously.
01:12:53 ►
It’s just very matter-of-factly knows a hundred times more about you than you do yourself.
01:12:55 ►
And it presents itself as this 4D girlfriend, you know.
01:13:00 ►
It’s the sorer mystica of alchemy.
01:13:04 ►
It’s the invisible female companion.
01:13:08 ►
Yeah.
01:13:08 ►
I had a dream a few months ago that, I don’t know if I gave birth or someone gave birth to these children who were like part mushroom, you know, and they were part fungus.
01:13:22 ►
And I felt very loving towards them, but they were actually like, you know, beings, you know, and they were part fungus, and I felt very loving towards them, but they were actually like, you know, beings, you know,
01:13:29 ►
but they were like part mushroom, part human.
01:13:32 ►
It was all very sweet, you know, it wasn’t ghoulish or anything.
01:13:34 ►
Well, yeah, I mean, the symbiosis is coming together.
01:13:40 ►
One of the funny insights that I had
01:13:43 ►
that I don’t try to make sense of, that I in fact don’t believe, but I thought it, and it was an emotionally opening thought, though it’s absurd on the face of it, was when I was in the Amazon in these pastures, looking at these pastures full of these mushrooms, I kept thinking, you know, it’s the lost part of the human brain.
01:14:04 ►
I kept thinking, you know, it’s the lost part of the human brain.
01:14:11 ►
It’s that part of us is in these fields.
01:14:17 ►
That this mushroom, this is human flesh, this flesh.
01:14:19 ►
It’s a strange kind of human, but hell, we’re about to give legal rights to fetuses.
01:14:22 ►
We might as well extend legal rights to mushrooms
01:14:25 ►
and make them voting citizens.
01:14:29 ►
Because, you see, it’s intelligent.
01:14:32 ►
It’s intelligent.
01:14:34 ►
It loves you.
01:14:36 ►
It can blow your mind.
01:14:37 ►
It can make you laugh.
01:14:39 ►
It can make you cry.
01:14:41 ►
There’s no other way to relate to something like that except to love it in spite of yourself.
01:14:49 ►
I mean, you know, this is how you seduce someone. You make them laugh. You make them cry. You move
01:14:56 ►
them. You get them to drop their barriers. You get them to not be afraid. This is what it does to us. It seduces us back into this relationship
01:15:09 ►
and I think we return to it with an immense sense of relief.
01:15:13 ►
It’s just like, ah, you know.
01:15:18 ►
When I was in Guatemala,
01:15:20 ►
I did not take a deep breath for three weeks
01:15:25 ►
because I could feel the oppression,
01:15:30 ►
the artificiality of it.
01:15:32 ►
It’s in the air, the evil,
01:15:35 ►
and you don’t even get used to it.
01:15:37 ►
But when you cross back into Mexico,
01:15:39 ►
you just say, my God, what was that?
01:15:44 ►
And that’s what history is for us.
01:15:48 ►
We’re living under siege conditions here.
01:15:51 ►
No wonder it’s a little hard to connect up with your higher self.
01:15:56 ►
We’re living in a foxhole, for God’s sake.
01:15:59 ►
But, you know, if we could realize our situation,
01:16:04 ►
then there would be a possibility of change.
01:16:08 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:16:15 ►
And my guess is that you have actually realized the foxhole that we’re in.
01:16:20 ►
You’ve realized the situation.
01:16:23 ►
Otherwise, it’s really quite doubtful that you’d
01:16:25 ►
even have found the salon and be with us right now. And the good news is that while you may not
01:16:31 ►
have found many of the others yourself, there are so many of us out there that, well, one day people
01:16:37 ►
won’t be able to understand what our big deal was about finding the others. I had to smile to myself
01:16:44 ►
when Terrence was going on about the fact
01:16:46 ►
that nobody in his workshop group was willing to come up and explain the core concepts of quantum
01:16:52 ►
physics so that we could better understand what reality actually is. I don’t think I would have
01:16:59 ►
volunteered that either. I know I wouldn’t. You know, if I’m not mistaken, he said that people who
01:17:05 ►
think that quantum physics defines reality have a head full of shit. Well, I think that’s probably
01:17:12 ►
a bit harsh, because I don’t think that at all myself. Of course, just recently, the world of
01:17:19 ►
physics had another little shake-up. The story that I read about this new theory began like this,
01:17:25 ►
little shake-up. The story that I read about this new theory began like this, and I quote, a team of physicists has found evidence to support an idea long theorized by philosophers
01:17:32 ►
and stoners alike that the universe might actually be one big holographic projection,
01:17:39 ►
end quote. And then the article went on to say that, and again I quote,
01:17:57 ►
Put even more simply, it’s possible that what we call reality is actually a hologram projected onto the surface of a black hole in which our universe exists.
01:18:04 ►
Now for me, that fits the J.B.S. Haldane quote that Terence often cites, that goes,
01:18:06 ►
It is my supposition that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
01:18:13 ►
And for me, existing in a hologram, projected onto the surface of a black hole, is most definitely stranger than I can imagine.
01:18:23 ►
Heck, I didn’t even know that black holes had a surface.
01:18:27 ►
It’s a hole, isn’t it?
01:18:28 ►
So you know how much I know about this stuff.
01:18:31 ►
You know, on quite a few occasions,
01:18:34 ►
we’ve heard Terence talk about a transition of language
01:18:37 ►
from something heard to something beheld.
01:18:39 ►
At times, he seems to imply that words themselves will be beheld.
01:18:44 ►
And to tell you the truth, I can’t quite get my mind around that in a literal sense. At times, he seems to imply that words themselves will be beheld.
01:18:49 ►
And to tell you the truth, I can’t quite get my mind around that in a literal sense.
01:18:54 ►
However, it does seem to me that we are steadily moving away from the written word and more into a space dominated by the visual and audio.
01:18:59 ►
Let me ask you a question.
01:19:01 ►
When you want to learn how to use some new computer hardware or software,
01:19:05 ►
do you go right to the user manual, or do you go to YouTube to find the help you need?
01:19:10 ►
I admit to going to YouTube first myself, which kind of pains me in saying it,
01:19:16 ►
because I spent more time than I’d like to remember working as a technical writer.
01:19:22 ►
RTFM was what we’d say whenever someone asked us a question
01:19:25 ►
about the systems we were working on.
01:19:28 ►
But I guess that acronym is going to be fading away.
01:19:32 ►
And by the way, for any non-geeks who may be with us today,
01:19:36 ►
RTFM means read the fucking manual.
01:19:40 ►
I guess that nowadays we have to say watch the fucking manual.
01:19:43 ►
So in a way, our language is now blending with video and audio,
01:19:48 ►
but the video element seems to be growing.
01:19:51 ►
In fact, just in the short time now,
01:19:54 ►
the last few moments that I’ve been talking about YouTube,
01:19:57 ►
well, another 150 or so videos have been posted in just this short time.
01:20:01 ►
You know, I think it’s well over 200,000 new videos a day that are added now.
01:20:05 ►
And, by the way, I’d like to give a shout out to anyone here in the salon who has ever
01:20:10 ►
taken the time to post a short YouTube tutorial about something or other.
01:20:14 ►
I’ve watched a lot of them and maybe one of them was yours. So hey, thank you very much for your
01:20:19 ►
help. Now, right after I sign off in just a moment, I’m going to play the short Christmas message
01:20:27 ►
that Edward Snowden broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK.
01:20:31 ►
As you no doubt already know,
01:20:33 ►
the focus of his brief message was the importance of privacy in our lives
01:20:37 ►
and the fact that a child born today will never understand
01:20:41 ►
what it is to have a private moment
01:20:42 ►
if we don’t do something about it right now, today.
01:20:46 ►
So, after listening to Edward Snowden’s message, well, you may want to return to the salon and re-listen to Podcast 371,
01:20:55 ►
which features John Gilmore’s talk from this year’s Palenque Norte lectures.
01:21:00 ►
It’s titled, Civil Rights in Cyberspace.
01:21:03 ►
And John, as you know, is a co-founder of the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
01:21:09 ►
And if you haven’t already heard that podcast, I think it would be worth your time to do it now.
01:21:14 ►
Because John puts out a lot of good information, tips and tools that you can use.
01:21:19 ►
And while using tools like Tor to enhance your own privacy may seem like a bit of a pain and slow things down just a bit,
01:21:27 ►
well, in the long run, you’re going to be helping us all by demanding ever more privacy in your own life.
01:21:34 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:21:38 ►
Be well, my friends.
01:21:43 ►
Hi, and Merry Christmas.
01:21:46 ►
I’m honored to have a chance to speak with you and your family this year.
01:21:50 ►
Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert,
01:21:54 ►
have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we do.
01:22:00 ►
Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information.
01:22:06 ►
The types of collection in the book, microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us, are nothing compared to what we have available today.
01:22:14 ►
We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.
01:22:19 ►
Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.
01:22:23 ►
A child born today will grow up with no conception
01:22:28 ►
of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves,
01:22:34 ►
an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters. Privacy is what
01:22:42 ►
allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
01:22:47 ►
The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the
01:22:53 ►
technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better
01:23:00 ►
balance, end mass surveillance, and remind the government that if it really wants to
01:23:06 ►
know how we feel, asking is always cheaper than spying. For everyone out there listening,
01:23:14 ►
thank you and Merry Christmas.