Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“That’s the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don’t know: How do you live in equilibrium so that your children may live in equilibrium, because otherwise you get a cycle started that’s going to shove somebody over the cliff. And that somebody in the present case is either ourselves, our children, or their children. It’s no further away in time than that.”

“We love to congratulate ourselves on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in, and the truth is it’s a bunch of rattle snake-handling fundamentalists that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR or anybody else like that.”

“If you look at the fossil record, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on the Earth are extinct. From that point of view it looks as though biology is a process for producing extinction.”

“You talk about a well-kept secret that’s only two tokes away? How do they keep the lid on this? That’s the miracle to me. How do they keep the lid on this?” [smoked NN-DMT]

“These chemicals, these plant hallucinogens, are pheromones laden with messages for humanity, but you have to pick up the telephone.”

“I think the world is growing more psychedelic every day. I’m completely hopeful… . This is how it should be. This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.”

Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael J. Harner
The Terence McKenna Experience by Ken Adams
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Transcript

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon.

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And I want to begin by thanking some of our

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fellow saloners who have recently made contributions to help offset some of our monthly expenses here

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in the salon. And these nice people are Owen H, Auden H, Adam B, Floris M, and another anonymous

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Bitcoin donor.

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Whomever you are, I thank you and all of our other supporters.

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I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

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And for those who have been warning me away from Bitcoin,

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well, I hear you, but there’s a lot of activity now taking place in what I choose to call the Bitcoin aftermarket,

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which is beginning to service businesses.

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While we all know that the Feds took down Silk Road,

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of course it only took a couple of days for it to get back online in the deep web,

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but we also have now learned that the government is going to convert that huge cache of Bitcoins

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that they stole in their raid of Silk Road, and they’re going to convert it into U.S.

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dollars. So in a sense, the U.S. government has already begun using bitcoin itself. On top of

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that, I’ve also read that the porn industry has begun accepting bitcoin. Plus, there are now at

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least two Las Vegas casinos that are accepting it. So now that the U.S. government, the porn industry, and Las Vegas are all on the Bitcoin bandwagon,

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I have a hunch that Bitcoin is here to stay.

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It’s going to be interesting to see how this all plays out.

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Now in response to some comments that have been posted and emails that I’ve received,

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I’m going to play another one of the Terrence McKenna workshop recordings

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that we’ve been listening to.

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In fact, this is the last session from that workshop that I’ll be playing.

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It is, in fact, the Sunday morning wrap-up

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where Terrence would cover anything that the participants brought up.

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And for anyone who is new to the world of McKenna,

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this will give you a good idea, I think, of what a fascinating mind Terence McKenna had in order to be able to answer such a wide range of questions with detailed and well-thought-out answers without first having to even look at any notes or other materials.

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This is all ad lib, as were almost all of his talks.

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And just one little tip here for the newcomers to Terence McKenna.

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When he speaks about something being imminent, we should always keep in mind the fact that he quite often thought and spoke about things in a geological sense of time.

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And so something imminent for him could easily be maybe a thousand years in the future.

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So don’t be too hard on him thinking that he missed his predictions, because he may still be

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right. It just may take a few more millennia to get there. So let’s now join Terrence McKenna and a

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small group of workshop attendees for a Sunday morning wrap-up session that took place during the month of May in 1990.

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What I thought we would do this morning,

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because these things are so brief,

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is again return to the form of going around in a circle,

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and this time it’s your last chance to ask a question,

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make a statement statement voice a complaint

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whatever you want to do

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but just to try and

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in other words it’s loose ends

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time as rapidly

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as we can

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to tie up loose ends

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things people didn’t understand

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things

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people feel they need to

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hear more about that sort of thing.

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And why don’t we just start as we did before on this side and go around.

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I’d like to hear a more satisfactory explanation of what archaic revival means.

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I haven’t got it straightened out.

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I suspect it means a return to a more stable state

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when there’s too much chaos in the present.

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And I’m sure that’s not what you mean.

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Well, that’s partially what it is.

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It’s based on the idea that when societies get into trouble,

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an unconscious response seems to be

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they search back through their own history

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to find a model that they can revivify or revitalize.

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The strongest example in our own history was when the medieval world broke apart and didn’t make any sense anymore, the new middle class went back to classicism, to the Greeks and the Romans,

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to Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Greco-Roman architecture and mechanics and that sort of thing,

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and created classicism. Classicism was invented in the 14th century.

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invented in the 14th century.

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But our problems are deeper than this.

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We can’t go back to ancient Rome or ancient Egypt or something like that

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and expect to have real answers.

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We have to go back further

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to prehistory, to this archaic state.

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And there, in partnership, in genderless, self-organizing society,

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we begin to see the kinds of models that we have to somehow recreate in the modern world.

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somehow recreate in the modern world obviously we can’t in the modern world become mushroom eating nomadic pastoralists but we can study that approach to reality to try and learn from it

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how you live in equilibrium that’s the key thing that the archaic world knew that we don’t know

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how do you live in equilibrium

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so that your children may live in equilibrium

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because otherwise you get a cycle started

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that’s going to shove somebody over the cliff

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and that somebody in the present case

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is either ourselves

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our children or their children

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it’s no further away in time

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than that so the archaic

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revival is the idea that all

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of the and I see the whole

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of the 20th century

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you know the discovery of the

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unconscious by Freud

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and Jung the

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dissolving of the naturalistic image at the hands of the

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cubists, the probing of the dream state by the surrealists, the exploration of mass ritual by

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the fascists. I mean, it wasn’t all good, this stuff. But what all these things had in common was they were a return, an appeal to a level of the mass psyche that had been ignored and denied for a long, long time.

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The LSD taking of the 60 that as the emphasis, as the ratios of the mix of media in a society changes, the sensory ratios and values of the society change. And we’re living in a post-literate,

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post-linear kind of world now

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where a whole different set of assumptions make sense.

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And they’re archaic assumptions.

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You know, the archaic world was a non-linear,

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pre-literate, ideal, all at once kind of world.

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And the fact that our sensory ratios

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have shifted back in that direction

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makes us very sympathetic,

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very susceptible

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to this re-archaicization

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that wants to go on.

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Thank you.

00:08:42

Paul.

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Yeah. I guess the ultimate to go on. Thank you. Paul.

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I guess the ultimate psilocybin question

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is can you envision

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in your wildest

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imagination that we as a society

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instead of individuals

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taking mushrooms

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and gaining some enlightenment

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that we will ever be able to do it in an

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organized mass way.

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Do you have that vision?

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You mean that someday it will be legal?

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Legal and encouraged, you know, the mass taking over.

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Well, obviously it would take a total revolution.

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The current thinking is that the big revolutions in the world

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have to do with the internal contradictions

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of Marxist-Leninism

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but it may actually be

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that Marxist-Leninism was a kind of

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partner in a codependent relationship

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with consumer capitalism

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and maybe revolution is just going to become something that

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everybody is into. God knows we could use a perestroika. I mean, we too are ruled by constipated,

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lying bureaucrats who, you know, what are the statistics that 97% of all incumbents are re-elected,

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that there is less turnover in the United States Congress than there was in the higher echelons of the Communist Party of East Germany

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until the wall came down.

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I mean, we love to congratulate ourselves

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on the forward-leaning liberal society that we live in.

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And the truth is, you know,

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it’s a bunch of rattlesnake-handling fundamentalists

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that are much closer to Stalin than they are to FDR

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or anybody else like that.

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Still, I think that the culture crisis

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is going to become so intense

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and the world is going to become so weird as we

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saw on the graph last night

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novelty is going to intensify

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and intensify and

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intensify and even last year when

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Eastern Europe was falling to pieces

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very straight people were

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saying gee it seems as though

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history itself is

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accelerating well

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then there was a lull, so that talk was dropped.

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But I think history is accelerating,

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and the next time it accelerates,

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the talk that this is happening will come around again much louder.

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And pretty soon, by the turn of the century,

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I think it’s going to be hard to hide from anybody who’s paying attention

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the fact that the entire social

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evolution of the planet seems to be caught in some kind of evolutionary meltdown that is imminent

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you know and in that environment uh psilocybin has a chance the the whole drug thing, leave alone psychedelics, the whole drug thing is

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properly understood as a civil rights issue. I mean, people should be able to take whatever

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drugs they damn well please in the same way that they should be able to express their

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sexual preferences, in the same way that women should be allowed to vote, people of low incidence of light reflectivity

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should be treated like everybody else.

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I mean, all these things which are perfectly obvious.

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You cannot have a free society and regulate people’s drug use.

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Any society which sets out to call itself free and democratic

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with the footnote that certain states of mind are forbidden

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is headed down the slippery slopes of totalitarianism.

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There ain’t no way this can be avoided.

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So aside from our belief as a group

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in the wonderful healing and teaching potential of psychedelics, even if psychedelic drugs

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didn’t exist, I would favor the legalization of all drugs because I just think that you

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cannot treat people as though they were infantile. That’s called paternalism. That’s the old

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dominator game. We have to just admit, you know, that we’re all in this together and that nobody

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has cornered the market

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on the truth for sure.

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Yeah.

00:13:13

Could you talk a little bit more about

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seeing language?

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Well, this is

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to my mind, you know,

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the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow of the psychedelic experience.

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These experiences get stronger and stronger and stronger,

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and then language becomes visible.

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And then if they become any stronger, you fall asleep.

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That seems to be about the outer limit of what the internal

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processors can tolerate.

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Seeing language,

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you know, it’s a mystery, it’s a miracle,

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it’s, I don’t know what it is, it’s

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the thing which keeps me going with

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all of this, because it’s

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the idea that we’re just

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on the brink of some kind of

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transformation of how we communicate with each other

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that will change not only how we communicate

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but who we are

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because see if you could see what I mean

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rather than hear me and run to your internal dictionary

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and look up all my words and then reconstruct my meaning

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but if you could just

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see what i mean then you and i would be very much like the same person because we would be looking

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at the same thing so it’s a tremendous if obviously language is what has knitted us together

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and made us social creatures i mean creatures of our body weight and so forth

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have styles where, you know, the males and the females

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get together only for sex and once a year,

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like mountain lions or something like that.

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But obviously the presence of language

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and our social history as primates

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set us up for living as we do.

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And we have managed to create, through language,

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a monkey troop of five billion people.

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You know, a monkey troop of five billion individuals

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united through the glue of language.

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So it’s an intensification.

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And it’s something shamans do.

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And I think it’s, you know, the real

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social magic

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of shamanism, at least in the Amazon,

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is based around these

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visible

00:15:34

communication.

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I wanted to

00:15:40

make a comment about the difference

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between seeing

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and hearing. And comment about the difference between seeing and hearing.

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And it’s the difference between sculpture and music.

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And music and language take place in a succession of elements through time,

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so it requires a duration to understand. But sculpture

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and seeing things, it’s all

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in a single moment.

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At least

00:16:12

the sculpture that the objects beheld in a

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single moment.

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The aesthetics of an object,

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of a sculptured object, is the relationship

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of part to part and part to the whole in a single

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moment. But music is this

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succession of elements in time.

00:16:26

And somehow I think that relates to your…

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When you talk about seeing language,

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you’re almost like seeing…

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I remember you talking about seeing little creatures,

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the words being creatures.

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And so then you’re observing these creatures.

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And are they coming out like music through time,

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or can an idea, a sentence be seen all at once?

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They’re coming out through time,

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and a sentence can be seen all at once,

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because in a way your analogy is not apt,

00:17:03

because sculpture is static.

00:17:06

But these visible statements are like sculpture made of some magical substance

00:17:14

which has an internalized program of change.

00:17:19

The analogy I always make is to the eggs of Fabergé.

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These things are like machines,

00:17:26

jewels,

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but you can also tell while you’re looking at

00:17:30

them that they’re statements.

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They’re like, you know how

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people talk about

00:17:35

beautifully crafted sentences?

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Well, these are beautifully

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crafted sentences, but they’re like

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explicit, interlocking,

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mechanized things

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made out of ivory and glass

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and topaz and chrome

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and just

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and they’re carrying on at a furious

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rate they have a life in time

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I would like to write a

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computer program

00:18:01

that would be like a

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full paint type program but it would be like a full paint type program

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but it would be for the purpose of

00:18:08

generating these kinds of objects

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because I’ve seen them a fair bit

00:18:12

and analyzed what’s going on

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and here’s how it works

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you have a dodecahedron

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or some other complex

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regular polygon

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so that it’s made of surfaces

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and then to each surface you assign complex regular polygon so that it’s made of surfaces.

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And then to each surface you assign a set of color and frequency changes.

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And then each surface can run its program independent of all the other surfaces.

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So you slowly build up a program on each surface.

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But then you can also cut into this polygon

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and remove chunks of it to reveal another polygon inside it

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that can have different programs written for each of its surfaces.

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And then you set these things slowly rotating,

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one within another on several levels,

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and you’re beginning to approach a really shoddy example of what these things are like

00:19:09

that you see in this space.

00:19:13

Beats me, you know.

00:19:15

Most of this stuff is repertoid.

00:19:19

I’ve heard you speak often about these incredibly complex images

00:19:24

that you’ve received on psilocybin or DMT.

00:19:28

I’m just wondering if you’ve ever had an experience of total emptiness or voidness.

00:19:36

The most profound experience I’ve ever had on psilocybin

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was actually being void of any content at all,

00:19:44

but not being blanked out or something like that,

00:19:48

just being aware of it.

00:19:49

Well, I think this may have something to do

00:19:52

with philosophical bent and proclivity.

00:19:55

I never got any of these zenny states,

00:19:59

the white light, the black light.

00:20:03

And it’s probably in my personality

00:20:06

I really stress visual hallucinations

00:20:10

and people have hassled me about this

00:20:13

and said you know but psychedelics open your heart

00:20:16

they do this, they do that

00:20:18

and all you ever talk about is visions

00:20:20

it’s because to me the vision

00:20:24

is the proof,

00:20:27

and I guess I’m still a skeptic after all these years,

00:20:30

the vision is the proof that it’s not me.

00:20:35

Because if I’ve never seen it before,

00:20:38

hell, I’m willing to grant it’s not me

00:20:40

if I’ve never seen it before.

00:20:42

How difficult a character do you have to be, you know? So when there’s things I’ve never seen it before how difficult a character do you have to be you know

00:20:45

so when there’s things I’ve never

00:20:47

seen before that are absolutely amazing

00:20:50

streaming past

00:20:52

my closed eyelids

00:20:53

I have to grant that it isn’t

00:20:56

coming from me

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and that

00:20:58

thin thread can be the

00:21:01

basis of a bridge to faith

00:21:03

if it isn’t me then there’s something out there.

00:21:08

God, the devil, who knows?

00:21:09

But at least somebody, now we can begin to have a serious spiritual quest.

00:21:15

There is a signal.

00:21:16

We’re getting a signal from the other.

00:21:19

And it can be pursued.

00:21:21

But it’s the task of a lifetime.

00:21:25

Well, now I hear you mention faith, and it seems like yesterday morning you said something

00:21:30

along the line of, you know, I’m not a believer in any sense of the word.

00:21:33

But what I wanted to ask you is, in the context of the chemicals in the brain and the pinning

00:21:38

up land and so forth, what do you think of fasting as a way of altering consciousness?

00:21:44

Fasting, I think, is probably very effective.

00:21:47

If you analyze this whole rap here about the early mushrooms and the primates and all that,

00:21:53

really what’s being said is that diet is the key, that foods are very important.

00:21:59

And this is what they’re saying about ayahuasca in the Amazon.

00:22:02

They say half of it is ayahuasca in the Amazon. They say half of it is ayahuasca,

00:22:06

but the learning of the shamanism

00:22:09

and the becoming of this superhuman type of personality

00:22:13

is all in the diet.

00:22:16

And shamans in the Amazon,

00:22:18

when they’re trying to establish their credentials with each other,

00:22:22

do it by saying how long they kept the diet

00:22:25

somebody will say well I did it for

00:22:27

two years or something like that

00:22:30

I just thought of something about the

00:22:32

shamans in the Amazon

00:22:33

you know this magic phlegm that they bring up

00:22:35

what do they do with it

00:22:37

do they spit it out finally or swallow it back down

00:22:39

or what

00:22:40

what do they ultimately do with it

00:22:42

it’s hard to find out stuff like this

00:22:44

when you’re a guest at the camp.

00:22:48

I don’t know.

00:22:49

I didn’t see where it went.

00:22:50

Did you see it?

00:22:51

I’ve seen it.

00:22:54

Because if they use this

00:22:55

to pull a disease out of somebody

00:22:57

or poison or some kind of

00:23:00

illness-causing thing,

00:23:01

if it’s like a magnet

00:23:03

that pulls this out,

00:23:04

then if they just keep this inside of them,

00:23:06

that wouldn’t be very safe, I wouldn’t think.

00:23:08

Well, talking about what it is and judging whether it’s safe or not,

00:23:13

I mean, what is this flam in the first place?

00:23:16

I mean, when you’re really there, really dealing with it,

00:23:19

you’re pushed toward ideas like that it’s a zone,

00:23:23

it’s a zone of space-time which repels English.

00:23:30

What?

00:23:31

You know, I mean, in other words, it’s a magical substance.

00:23:35

It comes out of their body.

00:23:37

Calling it phlegm is because we’re following some anthropologist in the 1920s

00:23:42

who, you know, went back to his tent scratching his head

00:23:46

and tried to figure out what the nearest analogy to this was.

00:23:49

But what they do is they also, in some of these tribes,

00:23:54

the story goes that they can force this stuff out on the surface of their skin.

00:24:01

And I don’t know what this is about,

00:24:02

but I have had ayahuasca visions

00:24:05

where it’s like a black field

00:24:09

and suddenly there’s a huge, huge black hand

00:24:13

and I can see in the lines of this hand jewels

00:24:17

and it’s just there, this black hand.

00:24:21

It’s not your hand.

00:24:22

It’s not my hand, it’s a black hand.

00:24:23

Where does it come from?

00:24:24

I mean, is it on your hand?

00:24:26

No, it’s like in a vision.

00:24:29

And then I see in the lines

00:24:31

that this, what I thought were jewels,

00:24:33

is some kind of sweat,

00:24:35

which is seeping out.

00:24:37

And you look deeper into this stuff

00:24:39

and you see, you know,

00:24:40

that wonderful line from 2001.

00:24:44

My God, there are stars

00:24:46

in here.

00:24:48

It’s completely

00:24:49

disoriented.

00:24:51

No, the magic, the magic

00:24:53

is real. I have no idea

00:24:55

how far you can go.

00:24:57

One of the paradoxes of what

00:24:59

we’re doing here in this room is

00:25:01

you know, here I sit.

00:25:04

I have two children, a wife, a mortgage, book contracts, lawyer, all this.

00:25:09

Here you sit with whatever you brought to this.

00:25:13

And we’re talking about this stuff.

00:25:17

If any one of us cared to,

00:25:20

we could turn ourselves into something that none of the rest of us could relate to at all.

00:25:26

We could become a sage.

00:25:29

You know, you could go up onto Cold Mountain

00:25:32

and those of us left down in the valley would say,

00:25:34

oh yes, I saw him three years ago up in the mist,

00:25:39

naked as a jaybird hauling firewood out of the woods.

00:25:43

These places,

00:25:46

there’s no barrier between you and these places,

00:25:50

except you’re, is that what you want?

00:25:53

Do you want to become utterly incomprehensible to the community

00:25:57

because you are so deep into the unspeakable?

00:26:01

Maybe.

00:26:02

And that’s what a shaman is.

00:26:04

A shaman is somebody who’s just on the edge.

00:26:08

They just have one finger back in the world of the rest of us and then they’re in this stuff.

00:26:14

Well, seeking that used to be called the spiritual quest. But as I said to you, you know, we found

00:26:21

the means to do that. We found the answer, you the answer you just go and live in the wilderness

00:26:26

and take mushrooms

00:26:27

and kohang, move over

00:26:30

but what to do about that

00:26:36

I don’t know

00:26:37

I really don’t know

00:26:38

because I’m attracted to it

00:26:40

I want to go as far as I can go

00:26:42

but when you realize that you can go so far

00:26:45

that nobody will even remember that you ever existed,

00:26:50

the other can close over you so utterly.

00:26:54

The reason I ask this is because a lot of times they say

00:26:56

that gurus and different people take on the karma

00:26:59

of the people that they heal or they work with.

00:27:02

You’ve probably heard this theory before.

00:27:04

So I wondered when these shamans were healing,

00:27:06

if they magnetized out some kind of illness or something,

00:27:13

where does that go?

00:27:14

Well, they have, yes.

00:27:15

They’re very concerned about the power of this illness

00:27:18

and they have techniques.

00:27:20

And many times after a big curing,

00:27:23

a shaman will fall sick.

00:27:25

And if you want to understand this,

00:27:28

read Jung’s book called On the Psychology of the Transference.

00:27:31

It’s the same in all cultures.

00:27:33

You must be able to turn back the transference if you’re a healer.

00:27:38

Otherwise you’ll be killed ultimately.

00:27:42

And all psychiatrists, psychotherapists understand this, or if they

00:27:47

don’t, they’re at great peril.

00:27:51

Did anyone happen to see a film called From Beyond? And the premise was that there was

00:27:56

a machine that induced visions into the spiritual realm and stimulated the pineal gland. And

00:28:03

what happens is a couple people, the inventor

00:28:06

and someone else, on the machine, and the pineal gland started growing out of their

00:28:11

forehead.

00:28:13

Ah, Hollywood.

00:28:15

It was big on special effects. And the one guy, his whole body was just like totally

00:28:20

transformed, you know, and he was always, you know, on this machine and so forth.

00:28:25

It reminded me of what your, you know,

00:28:27

kind of electronic…

00:28:29

Version.

00:28:30

Artificial version of…

00:28:31

Yeah, well, this is also coming, you know,

00:28:34

artificial technologies.

00:28:37

Where are we in this process?

00:28:39

Yeah.

00:28:41

Well, I’m quite satisfied with questions at the moment,

00:28:44

but I’m commenting on that with respect to the pineal gland and visions.

00:28:52

You know, the pineal gland feeds directly from the ocular nerve

00:28:58

with no interceding brain tissue.

00:29:01

It’s just a direct connection.

00:29:02

So the colors that one takes in are directly

00:29:05

responsible for the particular secretions of that gland, which is one of the reasons

00:29:13

why television is described as being difficult on people and causes real hormonal problems

00:29:19

if you watch it enough because you’re dealing with a very restricted spectrum of colors and that sort of thing. The additional thought occurred to me that everyone who’s watching television

00:29:30

at the same time, their nervous system is being pulsed at 30 times a second, even though

00:29:37

they’re not conscious of it. But every TV set in the whole United States is exactly

00:29:43

in sync with each other all at 30 times a second.

00:29:45

It’s like this sub-audible dial tone that’s going through everyone’s brains,

00:29:50

which has kind of an ominous tone to it.

00:29:56

The one comment I wanted to make was,

00:29:59

having recently read a book by Gurdjieff called Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson,

00:30:06

which is about the only book I’ve ever read

00:30:08

that even pertains to the sort of cosmic timescale

00:30:13

that Terence talks about enough.

00:30:17

And one of the warnings in the beginning of the book

00:30:19

was that if you read this with enough attention

00:30:22

that you’ll eventually lose the taste for your favorite dessert

00:30:27

and the particularly attractive person across the street

00:30:33

that you like to watch won’t seem nearly so interesting anymore.

00:30:35

So be forewarned, you may not want to read this stuff.

00:30:40

And to a certain extent, I feel that’s quite possible.

00:30:46

You think the cosmic view kills the trivial, the joy of trivial?

00:30:53

The joy of trivial.

00:30:56

The curse of mysticism.

00:30:57

Well, I don’t know.

00:30:59

Your thing about television and everybody being in sync,

00:31:03

one of the most creative and eccentric explanations

00:31:07

ever dreamed up for flying saucers

00:31:10

rested on the fact that the guy said,

00:31:15

in the United States, you know, on an average evening,

00:31:18

40 million people are all in sync watching TV.

00:31:25

And if there then is a storm on the sun,

00:31:29

it acts as a kind of coherent energy beam

00:31:32

which illuminates these millions of psyches

00:31:36

that are all synchronized by watching television.

00:31:40

And it causes an image of an archetype

00:31:43

to be projected into space on the other side of the planet.

00:31:48

Not my theory.

00:31:51

Well, definitely in image processing,

00:31:54

when you want to, you know, computer image processing,

00:31:57

when you want to draw a very fuzzy sort of pattern,

00:32:00

quite often what you do is interfere with that,

00:32:03

another regular pattern on top of it, and see how these two patterns co-mingle such that you’ll get an accentuated thing

00:32:11

as a result.

00:32:12

And this 30 Hz dial tone is definitely sort of illuminating this other aspect of the imagination,

00:32:18

it would seem.

00:32:19

Maybe?

00:32:20

You ought to read A Wrinkle in Time.

00:32:21

Have you read that?

00:32:22

No.

00:32:23

Read A Wrinkle in Time.

00:32:24

It’s supposed to be a children’s story. It’s almost exactly what you just in Time. Have you read that? No.

00:32:25

Read A Wrinkle in Time.

00:32:26

It’s especially a children’s story.

00:32:27

It’s almost exactly what you just said.

00:32:28

Uh-huh.

00:32:29

It’s a great story.

00:32:30

By?

00:32:31

Madeline Lingo.

00:32:32

Read the whole trilogy.

00:32:33

It’s great.

00:32:34

Yeah.

00:32:35

It’s almost exactly what you just said.

00:32:36

It’s great.

00:32:37

Back there.

00:32:38

I’m interested in what you feel your relationship is with these children.

00:32:39

I think that’s a good question.

00:32:40

I think that’s a good question.

00:32:41

I think that’s a good question.

00:32:42

I think that’s a good question.

00:32:43

I think that’s a good question.

00:32:44

I think that’s a good question. I think that’s a good question. I think that’s a good question. I think interested in what you feel

00:32:46

your relationship is with these,

00:32:50

you know, whatever you’re calling beings that come to you.

00:32:53

Are you, are we, you know, their offspring somehow?

00:32:58

Or, you know?

00:33:02

Well, I don’t know.

00:33:03

I mean, this has puzzled me for a long long time

00:33:06

when it first happened

00:33:08

I just thought that they were straight out

00:33:11

extraterrestrials

00:33:13

and that this was some kind of weird technology

00:33:16

where this was a contact between a species

00:33:20

that evolved off planet

00:33:21

and then

00:33:23

they’re like

00:33:28

interdimensional dwellers

00:33:32

of some sort

00:33:34

and

00:33:35

so then I thought well maybe they’re

00:33:38

just hyperspatial creatures

00:33:40

of some sort in some other

00:33:41

dimension that I can’t even imagine

00:33:44

and then I thought maybe they’re actually from the future.

00:33:50

It’s like maybe this is a future state of humanity,

00:33:54

that we’re actually going to look like this in 10 million years,

00:33:57

and they’re doing some kind of weird experiment with time,

00:34:00

and I’m the Neanderthal that they’re checking out.

00:34:04

And then the other possibility

00:34:07

which I mentioned here

00:34:09

which is really unsettling

00:34:12

but in a lot of ways fills the bill

00:34:15

better than any of these

00:34:17

which is they’re souls of some sort

00:34:21

they’re human beings

00:34:23

and when you try that on for size,

00:34:28

it’s pretty hair-raising

00:34:30

because it feels right

00:34:32

and yet your mind boggles.

00:34:34

I am not ready to believe

00:34:39

that you can smoke a drug

00:34:41

and cross over the great divide

00:34:45

and return ten minutes later.

00:34:47

That really strains my credulity.

00:34:50

Nevertheless, if you ask shamans, this is what they would say.

00:34:55

After having many DMT trips,

00:34:57

I came to realize that this place that you break into,

00:35:02

where the gnomes greet you with this huge hooray

00:35:06

and all this linguistic machinery is happening and so forth,

00:35:11

that alien as that place is,

00:35:15

it’s somebody’s idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.

00:35:21

It’s somebody’s idea of the equivalent of a playpen. And these colored machine linguistic object things are the equivalent of colored rattles and things strung on a string. And you’re just sitting there, you know, gaping. And they’re saying, don’t freak out, pay attention, learn to do this.

00:35:47

I don’t know.

00:35:48

Maybe, I mean, first of all, nothing is impossible.

00:35:53

No possible speculation is for both, right?

00:35:59

So maybe it is that we’ve gone too far.

00:36:04

And maybe it is that this planet is doomed.

00:36:08

And maybe it is that somehow that too is part of the plan.

00:36:15

Borges had this idea.

00:36:18

He said that he believed in what he called the soul of the species.

00:36:23

He believed in what he called the soul of the species.

00:36:34

And he said the soul of the species is not released into the higher dimensions until the last individual member of the species dies.

00:36:40

As long as there is a single member of the species alive,

00:36:44

the soul of the species is somehow in some kind of transient zone

00:36:49

but when the last member of the species died

00:36:52

then it goes off

00:36:53

well if you look at the fossil record

00:36:56

95% of all the species

00:36:59

that have ever lived on the earth

00:37:02

are extinct

00:37:03

from that point of view it looks as though biology

00:37:07

is a process for producing extinction.

00:37:14

Well, then what is it?

00:37:16

Is it that in the world of three-dimensional space and time and matter and energy,

00:37:20

the DNA rears a form which inhabits a region of time and space called the body,

00:37:29

and then at a certain point, this form withdraws into something, and what the matter that it

00:37:39

had previously organized just falls to pieces. I don’t know, but the entities in the DMT place are a real

00:37:48

challenge. They either are the dead, extraterrestrials, or interdimensional dwellers. Any one of these

00:37:57

is a headline in the supermarket checkout line, I assure you.

00:38:03

Yeah.

00:38:04

I’m not exactly sure what I wanted to ask you,

00:38:06

but I did recently have a

00:38:08

dream that we were all linked together.

00:38:11

And it seemed like

00:38:12

you had the same experience, I’m not sure

00:38:13

I’m feeling that.

00:38:15

To know if you have anything else

00:38:18

to say about that in relationship

00:38:20

to affecting others.

00:38:22

I mean, you are…

00:38:24

Well, I think that, you know,

00:38:26

the link that we cannot evolve,

00:38:29

we can’t change the world

00:38:31

any faster than we can change

00:38:33

the language we use to talk about it.

00:38:37

And changing language is a collective activity.

00:38:40

You empower means.

00:38:43

I talked about this.

00:38:44

I mean, you create a concept and then you empower it

00:38:47

by spreading it

00:38:48

and by communicating it clearly enough

00:38:51

that in the act of spreading it

00:38:53

it doesn’t get badly copied

00:38:55

and get all mushed up

00:38:58

so that after it’s been copied ten times

00:39:00

you can’t recognize it

00:39:02

I mean I sometimes have this experience

00:39:04

people quote me to myself ten times, you can’t recognize it. I mean, I sometimes have this experience.

00:39:08

People quote me to myself,

00:39:11

and I’m just amazed, you know.

00:39:14

And sometimes it turns out it’s verbatim,

00:39:15

and I’m still amazed.

00:39:19

But the linking together is through the evolution of language,

00:39:21

and we’ve never, ever attempted

00:39:24

to engineer language. We’ve always ever attempted to engineer language we’ve always

00:39:27

let it just grow like topsy not realizing that certain language habits are very toxic

00:39:34

certain language patterns give permission for very detrimental ways of thinking I mean for instance the subject object relationship

00:39:45

in English or

00:39:48

the assignment

00:39:50

of gender to

00:39:52

things that goes on in a lot of languages

00:39:54

these are habits

00:39:56

of language that then become

00:39:58

tremendous

00:39:59

social problems

00:40:02

for their inheritors

00:40:03

the use of the word it

00:40:05

it’s raining

00:40:07

it’s sunny

00:40:08

what is sunny

00:40:10

or the I

00:40:12

there are languages where there is no first person pronoun

00:40:16

the only way you can refer to yourself

00:40:18

is by the extremely clumsy form

00:40:20

this person

00:40:22

this person thinks

00:40:24

yeah yeah yeah clumsy form this person. This person thinks.

00:40:25

Yeah.

00:40:27

Yeah.

00:40:29

I was curious.

00:40:31

You’ve mentioned DMT and visions of,

00:40:34

I think you said,

00:40:35

dodecahedrons and things like that.

00:40:38

And then you mentioned

00:40:39

they’re saying to you

00:40:41

to kind of stay with it

00:40:42

and just hang in there.

00:40:44

I’m kind of curious about this dialogue

00:40:48

between the logos in psilocybin.

00:40:52

I mean, do they sound the same?

00:40:53

How do you know that it’s just not your own…

00:40:58

How would Cosell comment in the back of your mind?

00:41:03

How do you know it isn’t your own mind?

00:41:05

Yeah, and is there a way to break through

00:41:07

to begin a dialogue,

00:41:08

or does it just start going like a tape loop?

00:41:10

No, it doesn’t start going.

00:41:12

You have to invoke it.

00:41:13

This is an interesting thing

00:41:15

if you’re practically inclined.

00:41:18

It won’t speak to you.

00:41:21

You have to speak to it.

00:41:23

And you come into a certain place on the

00:41:25

mushroom which I now based

00:41:27

on having done it a number of times

00:41:29

recognize the territory and

00:41:31

say aha it’s now

00:41:33

possible to

00:41:35

communicate with the thing

00:41:37

and then I

00:41:39

well

00:41:41

you must

00:41:43

know the old I love Lucy episode where they do the thing about,

00:41:49

come in, little green men, come in, little green men, Ethel and Lucy are into this.

00:41:56

Well, I tried that, and you hear this thing, which sounds like the tinkling of bells,

00:42:04

you hear this thing which sounds like the tinkling of bells,

00:42:06

the distant tinkling of bells.

00:42:11

And what it is, is it’s literally, it’s the elf troop or the elf troop marching band and chowder society.

00:42:17

And you can hear them getting nearer and nearer.

00:42:19

And it’s like…

00:42:20

And it gets louder and louder

00:42:25

and at a certain point

00:42:26

you begin not to hear it

00:42:29

but to see it

00:42:30

and it gets brighter and brighter

00:42:31

and clearer and clearer

00:42:32

and finally they’re all around you

00:42:34

and jumping up and down

00:42:36

and saying, you know,

00:42:38

how do you like it, McKinney?

00:42:39

and all this other stuff that they say

00:42:43

and, you know, they’re gnomes.

00:42:48

I mean, you couldn’t miss it.

00:42:51

And I’m still me, of course.

00:42:55

I’m still just as I would be sitting here.

00:42:57

And it’s so hard to assimilate.

00:43:01

That’s why I say, you know, sitting here in a room

00:43:03

talking about this stuff is nothing as to being

00:43:06

out there signing

00:43:07

treaties with the folks.

00:43:10

It’s…

00:43:11

That to me is what may be part

00:43:14

of following up a little bit on the question.

00:43:17

When you say logos, is this

00:43:19

the machine elves, are they the logos?

00:43:22

No.

00:43:23

No, the logos is something a little subtler

00:43:27

that is a…

00:43:30

that’s actually stuck with me ever since Lacharere.

00:43:33

It’s just a quality of thinking

00:43:35

that I recognize to be clearer and deeper than my own.

00:43:40

And it usually takes the form of

00:43:43

why don’t you try this with regard to some problem?

00:43:48

Why don’t you try this?

00:43:50

And I know immediately it’ll work, it’s got the tone,

00:43:53

that’s the real thing, I just go and do it and it always works.

00:43:57

And it’s these, you know, evolved ideas.

00:44:00

Okay, so I can understand that, you know, that’s your subjective experience

00:44:04

and some people don’t get the machine elves and things like that that I’ve talked to, but you mentioned the mark of this was some of these trips were terrorizing for you, but I’m trying to understand.

00:44:26

There must be something else going on that’s enabling you to feel terror.

00:44:30

It’s the implications are what’s terrifying.

00:44:33

Because you know that amazing moment in Rosemary’s Baby

00:44:37

where she’s in the dream and then she sits up and she says,

00:44:42

my God, this is really happening.

00:44:46

Well, that happens to you in the DMT thing.

00:44:49

You realize at the center of it,

00:44:52

this is not a drug.

00:44:55

That’s preposterous.

00:44:57

A drug? Are you kidding me?

00:44:59

Drugs make you feel good or bad or fall down or disgrace yourself.

00:45:04

This is not a drug.

00:45:05

It’s something masquerading as a drug.

00:45:08

I mean, it’s as appalling as if they were about to give you

00:45:12

the umbilical examination that Whitley Strieber specializes in.

00:45:17

I mean, you’re inside a flying saucer.

00:45:20

You’re with things that in a moment before

00:45:23

you would have laughed at the possibility that they even existed and now you’re there and you feel completely normal.

00:45:31

You don’t feel drugged or dulled or distanced or high or low. at what has happened to reality and how it’s all been replaced by this thing

00:45:45

that not only did you never suspect its existence,

00:45:48

but nobody ever suspected its existence.

00:45:51

You talk about a well-kept secret that’s only two tokes away.

00:45:55

How do they keep the lid on this?

00:45:58

That’s the miracle to me.

00:46:00

How do they keep the lid on this?

00:46:04

Well, they have.

00:46:07

Well, I’m not sure what my question is,

00:46:09

but in the experience last night

00:46:12

with the computer time program,

00:46:16

that was real exciting to me.

00:46:19

It kind of made me almost have the experience

00:46:23

of traveling through time

00:46:24

and having that awareness of history.

00:46:27

And wondering now that you brought that out and we have the awareness,

00:46:34

what do we really use it for?

00:46:35

I mean, what is your vision for how it can truly be used?

00:46:39

If you understand history, you will see it in the present

00:46:45

it’s an amazing tool for enriching your own experience

00:46:51

if you when you go to get a hamburger

00:46:54

at Hadrian’s Hamburger Joint

00:46:56

know that this is happening

00:46:58

because you’re caught in a resonance

00:47:00

related to the expeditions of the Roman emperor Hadrian to Scotland.

00:47:07

I mean, you’re totally schizophrenic, of course, to entertain thoughts like this,

00:47:11

but it makes life a lot more interesting.

00:47:15

Instead of seeing a linear thing with a fading past and an unpredictable future. You live in a super rich kind of baklava style of time

00:47:28

where time is folded and folded and folded

00:47:31

and the layers are very thin

00:47:32

and the stuff between is very sweet.

00:47:38

How have you used that personally in your life?

00:47:42

Well, the other way you use it is,

00:47:44

of course, it predicts the future.

00:47:46

We saw the line going off into the future.

00:47:48

Well, I’ve had it in my possession since 1972.

00:47:52

So after you’ve watched it correctly predict the future

00:47:56

for a while, months or years, however long it takes,

00:48:00

you gain confidence in it.

00:48:02

And as you gain confidence in it,

00:48:04

you discover that it gives you permission

00:48:07

to let go of anxiety about the future.

00:48:11

You’ve got a map of the future.

00:48:13

You know that August 91 is going to be a pain in the ass.

00:48:18

You know that great triumph will come to you in January of 93,

00:48:23

so why worry about it?

00:48:25

You just then go and live your life.

00:48:27

And as you watch the wave unfold,

00:48:30

confidence grows and grows and grows.

00:48:33

And what’s happening, you see,

00:48:35

is without any fanfare or alien symbiosis,

00:48:41

you’re becoming a hyperspatial person.

00:48:44

You’re adding a dimension

00:48:45

to your view of the

00:48:48

world. The future is changing

00:48:50

from a question mark

00:48:52

into a map that you’re

00:48:54

quite confident is working for you.

00:48:56

And anxiety about

00:48:58

the future is a major thing

00:49:00

twisting people around.

00:49:02

So if you could get agreement

00:49:04

on this, it’s the Tao

00:49:06

live in the perception of the Tao

00:49:09

it’s just people didn’t ever think that would mean

00:49:11

you’d go and look at a printed output

00:49:14

from a computer

00:49:15

but the exhortation is the same

00:49:17

live according to the constraints

00:49:20

of the Tao

00:49:21

I thoroughly enjoyed

00:49:26

this weekend.

00:49:27

It has really

00:49:28

given me

00:49:29

much room for thought

00:49:30

eons and eons

00:49:32

and years from now even.

00:49:34

And

00:49:34

I’m very interested in

00:49:38

in

00:49:38

how you

00:49:39

what the best

00:49:41

set up is

00:49:43

for taking the mushrooms.

00:49:45

The amount and time of day, condition, whatever.

00:49:52

I think there must be, in your experience,

00:49:54

I’m sure you’ve tried all of them,

00:49:56

there must be one way that perhaps lends itself better

00:50:02

to the mushroom than others.

00:50:04

How to get into the tree.

00:50:06

Yes.

00:50:07

Well, yes, I haven’t said it this weekend,

00:50:09

but it’s practically a battle cry of mine.

00:50:12

It’s five grams in silent darkness on an empty stomach.

00:50:18

And I’ll explain it.

00:50:20

Five grams.

00:50:21

Now, when you must weigh it,

00:50:24

a lot of people take mushrooms, and when you show them what five grams. Now, when you must weigh it, a lot of people take mushrooms,

00:50:26

and when you show them what five grams is, they pale visibly.

00:50:32

Dry?

00:50:33

Yeah, five dried grams.

00:50:34

And it’s, you know, several mouthfuls.

00:50:39

So, and I’m speaking for a 145-pound person.

00:50:42

Obviously, if you weigh 90 pounds, you back it up a little.

00:50:46

And if you weigh 230, you might go a little up.

00:50:50

But five dried grams on an empty stomach,

00:50:55

all that means is don’t eat for six hours.

00:50:59

Silent darkness. Silent.

00:51:02

And a lot of people disagree with me about this

00:51:04

and they want to listen to the moody blues

00:51:06

and they want Bach and they want this.

00:51:09

Forget it.

00:51:10

Nobody’s going to listen to you

00:51:12

if you come out of this experience

00:51:13

saying Johann Sebastian Bach is God.

00:51:17

We know that.

00:51:19

So, you know, and it’s very confusing

00:51:22

because the music becomes everything

00:51:24

if you listen to it.

00:51:26

I mean, you cannot separate it from the trip.

00:51:28

And people will not believe that the trip without music

00:51:33

will be just as rich as the trip with music

00:51:36

because they’ve already decided they’re inadequate,

00:51:40

that out of their own depths they couldn’t possibly produce a psychedelic experience. So let’s have the B minor mass thrown in just to help it along a little here.

00:51:51

So silence, silent darkness, and then darkness.

00:51:56

Why darkness?

00:51:57

Because the hallucinations actually need darkness in order to form.

00:52:02

They form behind closed eyelids.

00:52:05

And so what I do is I clear the decks

00:52:09

and I try to pick a point in my life

00:52:11

when I don’t feel too anxious and oppressed by trivia.

00:52:15

I unplug all the phones.

00:52:18

I get rid of every obligation.

00:52:21

I roll up three or four bombers

00:52:24

and I

00:52:26

then wait on an

00:52:28

empty stomach and about nine o’clock at night

00:52:30

I take it

00:52:32

and I just sit as I’m sitting now

00:52:34

waiting for it to come on

00:52:36

once I’ve taken it

00:52:38

I am completely in the sacral

00:52:40

space even though I don’t

00:52:42

feel anything for an hour and

00:52:44

twenty minutes

00:52:45

some people do the ironing

00:52:47

and you know

00:52:48

chop up some stock or something

00:52:51

but I just sit

00:52:52

and then it begins to come on

00:52:55

some people say it comes on very quickly

00:52:57

and so forth and so on

00:52:58

for me it usually doesn’t really come on

00:53:01

until the hour and twenty minute mark

00:53:03

there may be a surge of nausea

00:53:06

at forty minutes or a need to take

00:53:08

a leak or something like that but

00:53:09

then I get back and resettle

00:53:11

and at an hour and twenty minutes

00:53:13

it comes and it comes as a

00:53:16

wave it’s literally

00:53:17

it’s almost like a very

00:53:19

sheer silk

00:53:21

scarf just

00:53:23

drops over me,

00:53:25

just settles over, and I think,

00:53:26

oh my God, here it comes, here it comes.

00:53:29

And then it comes,

00:53:31

and it’s a wave of hallucination.

00:53:37

And if I, well, I gauge it,

00:53:41

but at that point I smoke.

00:53:43

And something about the cannabis synergy meeting the psilocybin,

00:53:48

I mean, it is spectacular.

00:53:51

I mean, you think that everybody from Vancouver to Tijuana

00:53:55

must have just thrown themselves on the ground as this thing.

00:54:00

I mean, it feels like the sun exploded.

00:54:03

It feels like you’re watching through 11 feet of quartz crystal

00:54:08

a hydrogen furnace on the other side.

00:54:11

You cannot believe the release of energy.

00:54:14

It’s like a siren comes on, a siren which you hear and feel,

00:54:18

a siren which shakes your body and the building that you’re in and everything else.

00:54:23

And then it just, you out into, who knows,

00:54:30

long periods of time where not a word of it

00:54:33

will ever be reported to any other human being.

00:54:36

I mean, you see things that nobody has ever seen and will ever see again.

00:54:42

You’re into it, it you know and it’s

00:54:46

an infinite matrix

00:54:47

in all directions and it means

00:54:50

something it doesn’t just look

00:54:51

pretty you know it’s playing

00:54:53

on the harp of your soul

00:54:56

with the emotional

00:54:57

overtones

00:54:58

have you ever taken it and gone outside

00:55:01

yes and

00:55:03

I don’t do that very much

00:55:06

because I really try to control the setting

00:55:12

because the freakiest things happen.

00:55:15

I mean, if you in any way lift your foot off the pedal

00:55:19

of controlling the parameters of the setting,

00:55:22

the damnedest things will happen.

00:55:25

I mean, grizzly bears will break into your house.

00:55:29

Motorcycle gangs will arrive.

00:55:32

Foxers will attack.

00:55:34

It’s weird to go outside.

00:55:36

Do you eat the mushrooms or just drink the tea?

00:55:38

No, I eat the mushroom.

00:55:39

Do you have eye shade on?

00:55:41

No, I just sit in darkness,

00:55:43

but I really pursue total darkness.

00:55:47

What specific species of mushroom is the best?

00:55:50

Are there several different species?

00:55:51

There are many species,

00:55:53

but the only one you’ll ever encounter

00:55:55

unless you’re a specialist is Stropharia cubensis.

00:55:59

That’s the one that people grow

00:56:01

and that is an item of underground commerce.

00:56:04

And it’s the one that grows

00:56:05

in the dung of the white cows

00:56:07

and it’s the one that I’m implicating

00:56:09

in the evolution of

00:56:11

a human being

00:56:13

over here

00:56:15

just back to language for a minute

00:56:17

I don’t really have a question, just to reiterate

00:56:19

a couple of things I said yesterday

00:56:21

with you

00:56:22

I’m trying to break into my own computer

00:56:25

and stop habitual behavior, um, a long way to go. Um, starting with language, um, just

00:56:34

picking the phrases or words that you use the most when you’re lazy. It could be profanity

00:56:39

or outrageous, amazing, very interesting. Awesome. Awesome. There’s a long, long list.

00:56:42

outrageous, amazing, very interesting.

00:56:43

Awesome.

00:56:44

Awesome. There’s a long, long list.

00:56:46

Those are all cop-outs, I think.

00:56:51

And if you can stop yourself at that moment and say,

00:56:55

wait a minute, that’s not really expressing an articulate thought.

00:56:58

I think it sends a message.

00:57:00

It does break into the computer and says,

00:57:01

things are changing.

00:57:04

Yeah, paying attention.

00:57:07

I think we said in here at some point that the key to everything is paying attention.

00:57:12

Awareness of awareness, the Buddhists call it.

00:57:15

But your point is very good.

00:57:17

If you truly have awareness of awareness,

00:57:19

the best place to manifest that

00:57:21

is in, I guess the Buddhists call it, right speech, yes?

00:57:26

So that it’s always appropriate and sufficient and so forth. There’s a book that some of

00:57:36

you may know and you might be interested if you don’t know it. It’s called Hallucinogens

00:57:40

and Shamanism. It’s edited by Michael Harner, but it has articles by a number of people.

00:57:46

And it has really one of the most wonderful articles

00:57:49

ever written about the mushrooms by Henry Munn

00:57:52

called The Mushrooms of Language.

00:57:55

And he talks about how they are an inspiration to articulation,

00:58:01

how even in these Mazatec villages

00:58:03

when people are not taking mushrooms

00:58:05

the way you can tell a shaman

00:58:08

is by a speech style

00:58:10

and I saw this in the Amazon with the Ayahuasqueros

00:58:14

they have a diction

00:58:16

a psychedelic diction

00:58:19

that is careful, appropriate

00:58:23

always sensitive to the context of the listener is careful, appropriate,

00:58:29

always sensitive to the context of the listener,

00:58:30

and so forth and so on.

00:58:34

In other words, they are great teachers, educators, communicators, and I think it’s the residual effect of this empowerment of speech.

00:58:41

What was the name of the book?

00:58:45

Hallucinogens and Shamanism by Michael

00:58:47

Harner. It’s in paperback from Oxford

00:58:49

University Press.

00:58:52

It’s an excellent

00:58:53

anthology. It has articles about

00:58:55

ayahuasca, about ibogaine,

00:58:58

San Pedro.

00:58:59

It’s a good world survey of

00:59:01

folk usage of hallucinogenic

00:59:03

plants and extensive bibliographies that will lead you on

00:59:07

if you’re interested in some particular area.

00:59:10

How long is your five-grain trip last night?

00:59:13

If I take it around 8.30 at night,

00:59:17

by midnight I’m ready to call it an evening.

00:59:20

I always eat before I sleep

00:59:22

because otherwise you’ll wake up in the morning feeling really wasted and sort of hollow.

00:59:28

But if you’ll eat something fairly substantial right before you sleep at one in the morning,

00:59:35

then you wake up the next morning, you feel great.

00:59:38

Any difficulty getting to sleep?

00:59:41

Oh, well, your mind is just roiling with thoughts.

00:59:44

But on the other hand, you’ve come so far down

00:59:46

from where you were an hour, an hour and a half before

00:59:49

that’s when you smoke the third bomber

00:59:51

that usually shoves you into unconsciousness

00:59:56

one of the things

01:00:04

there have been many revolutions in geology and paleontology,

01:00:08

such as plate tectonics and the original discovery of deep time.

01:00:13

I mean, 150 years ago, you could consider yourself an intellectual

01:00:17

and believe that the Earth was 5,000 years old.

01:00:20

The discovery of deep time made a real difference

01:00:26

then plate tectonics created a whole new vision

01:00:30

well now the latest wrinkle is the

01:00:32

growing awareness that repeatedly

01:00:35

in the life of the earth

01:00:36

objects have come down that have just raised holy hell

01:00:41

I mean this thing that came down

01:00:43

65 million years ago

01:00:45

you can’t even conceive

01:00:48

I mean it’s like

01:00:49

pardon me?

01:00:50

the 1904 Siberian

01:00:52

the Tunguska explosion

01:00:54

but that was a very small object

01:00:56

this thing which came down

01:00:58

65 million years ago

01:01:00

they estimate that a wall

01:01:03

of earth

01:01:04

three miles high

01:01:06

moved out at three times the speed of sound

01:01:09

from the impacts

01:01:10

can you imagine a mile high wall of stone

01:01:15

moving at twice the speed of sound

01:01:18

I mean it’s the kind of thing that tears planets to pieces

01:01:22

and it’s happened before

01:01:24

it happened 220 million years ago and then when you get back, way back that tears planets to pieces. And it’s happened before.

01:01:27

It happened 220 million years ago.

01:01:29

And then when you get back, way back,

01:01:32

there’s a scar on the Canadian shield that’s 750 miles across.

01:01:35

It’s as large as Copernicus on the surface of the moon.

01:01:40

50,000 years ago, something fell in Arizona

01:01:44

that created a crater half a mile wide.

01:01:47

They estimate that everything within 800 miles of the epicenter died instantly.

01:01:53

And that was only 50,000 years ago.

01:01:55

So the Earth is a chaotic place.

01:02:01

It’s all very provisional.

01:02:04

Where did you get that information?

01:02:07

What you just described.

01:02:09

Describing the explosions?

01:02:10

The explosions, 50,000.

01:02:12

You mean all the dates and all that?

01:02:14

Yeah, I mean, you subscribe to some…

01:02:17

My secret sources?

01:02:19

As well as the glaciation.

01:02:21

I mean, you’re talking about times that I’ve never read any of this

01:02:24

in any books anywhere that I’ve seen.

01:02:25

Well, I’ve discovered that there’s a hierarchy of information

01:02:31

in the United States and that you get it from journals.

01:02:36

It’s all in journals.

01:02:38

I subscribe to Science News, to Astronomy, to Archaeology,

01:02:43

to Scientific American, andology, to Scientific American.

01:02:46

And those are just the science.

01:02:48

And then I get all the other stuff too as well.

01:02:52

No, science is in total crisis.

01:02:54

Cosmology.

01:02:55

I mean, did you know that they are seeing structure in the universe

01:03:01

on scales so large that no laws of physics can account for.

01:03:08

I mean, the galaxies are arranged like trees in an apple orchard

01:03:12

out to recessional distances,

01:03:16

three quarters the life of the universe.

01:03:19

There’s obviously a great deal that we don’t know.

01:03:24

Did you know that Alpha Centauri,

01:03:26

which is 4.5 light years away,

01:03:29

is the most sun-like star in 50 light years?

01:03:36

Nice coincidence, isn’t it?

01:03:38

That the nearest star to the Earth

01:03:40

is the most Earth-like star for quite, quite a distance.

01:03:44

It is a binary,

01:03:46

but it’s loosely bound.

01:03:47

There could be a stable planetary

01:03:49

system there.

01:03:51

Yeah.

01:03:53

I’ve been coming here since 1974,

01:03:55

which is the first one that is about the meaning of life.

01:03:58

And then also, all my work…

01:03:59

All my workshops, I’ve been, like,

01:04:03

concerned with my own growth and enjoying my life and expressing my feelings.

01:04:07

And this workshop, I really have not got into my heart or anything,

01:04:11

but it’s really interesting.

01:04:12

I’m aware I’ve kind of been lopsided in the other direction.

01:04:15

So this has kind of been a big influence on me.

01:04:18

It’s really got my curiosity going.

01:04:20

And then also, I’m aware that I don’t want to go to Harvard.

01:04:23

I want to go to University of Ayahuasca.

01:04:28

I have two questions. One, how do you apply, better yet, how do I get some ayahuasca to partake of?

01:04:36

And then the second question is, I’ve taken ecstasy a number of times and it’s been wonderful.

01:04:42

What’s bad about ecstasy for

01:04:45

the body as a whole and so forth? I don’t know much

01:04:48

about it and I would like to know

01:04:49

what you think. Well, there’s a lot of

01:04:51

ecstasy, you all know, is MDMA.

01:04:54

There’s a lot of… Which one?

01:04:56

MDMA. Is it

01:04:58

kind of a speed? Well, it was

01:04:59

made out, it’s in the

01:05:02

same family as MDA.

01:05:04

So it’s a kind of cyclicized amphetamine.

01:05:06

But it was used very successfully in directed psychotherapy

01:05:10

to get people to talk about their feelings and that sort of thing.

01:05:15

And then there was sort of a scare about it

01:05:19

because it became known that you could physically see neural damage

01:05:26

in the brains of rats that had taken it.

01:05:31

But then it was discovered that a drug called finfluramine,

01:05:38

which is a diet drug that has existed for 25 years

01:05:43

and is freely prescribed by physicians causes exactly the same

01:05:49

kind of signature of neuro damage as the MDMA. Well, fenfluramine, nobody’s ever suggested it

01:05:58

should be banned. So the decision has been made to just keep looking at this.

01:06:06

There’s no doubt that it shows gross structural deformation of synaptic tissue,

01:06:12

but on the other hand, no behavioral sequelae have been demonstrated for this.

01:06:19

In other words, the rat doesn’t stagger or isn’t aggressive or anything,

01:06:26

but it has this.

01:06:28

So my advice on MDMA would be basically to go slow and wait.

01:06:34

They are working on it.

01:06:35

This is my brother’s.

01:06:36

Well, he’s left Stanford now,

01:06:38

but this is what he was doing at Steve Perutka’s lab.

01:06:43

Hi.

01:06:44

Last fall when I was here, I had the opportunity to watch some of the video clips of your residence

01:06:50

last year, and that excited me a lot. So I did some inquiring and found a person who

01:06:56

would guide me through a McKenna-style mushroom experience. And I did that once. It was the first time in my life I’d ever done anything like that.

01:07:06

And it was a major experience for me. And I’m curious now and frightened by that experience,

01:07:15

my recollection of that experience. And I suspect that’s part of the reason why I’m back this weekend

01:07:20

is because it’s coming up for me again. And I guess if I have a question, it’s sort of along the lines of,

01:07:26

do you suspect that because of whatever the control issues

01:07:31

or my anxiety going into it,

01:07:32

that that gave that particular experience a specific flavor

01:07:36

which is not likely to be duplicated again?

01:07:40

Well, not exactly, but it is true,

01:07:44

and it’s reassuring, I hope, to you to know this, that the first, it’s like sex.

01:07:51

The first time can be anything, and no judgments can be made based on the first time, because you’re just figuring it out. Also, repeated studies have shown that the first time there is personal material,

01:08:10

usually, that has to be released,

01:08:14

that we do carry traumatic and repressed material.

01:08:18

And the first trip and the second trip

01:08:22

sometimes is about working through this.

01:08:24

But eventually you get to this part of the trip trip sometimes is about working through this.

01:08:29

But eventually you get to this part of the trip which isn’t about you.

01:08:33

And most of us are not very screwed up.

01:08:36

I mean, you just blow your tubes out and then you’re all right.

01:08:39

And it’s okay from then on.

01:08:48

There’s no way of getting around it that the first timer has an advantage on everybody else because they don’t know what they’re getting into.

01:08:51

It makes me very anxious to do it.

01:08:55

And I say in my talks,

01:08:58

if it doesn’t make you anxious to do it,

01:09:01

increase the dose until it does.

01:09:05

Because it’s the ego that needs to be dissolved.

01:09:10

And, you know, it’s no good to go through an ambiguous trip.

01:09:16

You really want to get it to happen.

01:09:18

But for men especially, and certainly for me, it’s a surrender issue.

01:09:26

You just think, oh God, to submit to it again,

01:09:30

to have it totally take me out of control,

01:09:33

to have it be totally in charge.

01:09:37

And then you just have to take the plunge.

01:09:42

And I always Leo

01:09:46

used to have a prayer

01:09:48

which I can’t do the prayer

01:09:50

but I got the idea

01:09:51

and the basic idea is

01:09:54

here I am

01:09:55

I trusted you enough to do this

01:09:58

please don’t hurt me

01:09:59

you know

01:10:01

I mean you have to humble

01:10:04

yourself I mean I know people

01:10:06

who are very

01:10:07

well I’m thinking of a certain person

01:10:10

who’s a very

01:10:12

strong masculine

01:10:14

ego type, pushy

01:10:16

talks too loud, has made a lot

01:10:18

of money, is used to being

01:10:20

taken seriously

01:10:21

and God when this guy took mushrooms

01:10:24

he absolutely

01:10:25

hated it and because it told

01:10:28

him it said you know

01:10:29

you’re a jerk

01:10:31

and I’m going to make you feel it

01:10:33

and he hated it

01:10:35

and yet and he was telling me

01:10:37

the story as though I

01:10:39

should say to him

01:10:41

lucky for you you escaped

01:10:44

from the claws of this vicious mushroom. And I was of

01:10:48

course thinking to myself, my God, it’s exactly what this guy needed to hear. It’s amazing. But

01:10:54

the surrender thing is an issue and it doesn’t get easier, I think. And I’ve talked to shamans

01:11:01

in the Amazon about this. And they say, you think this stuff is easy for us to do?

01:11:08

You think just because I run around with a penis sheath on my ding-dong

01:11:13

that this is any weirder or any less weird for me than for you?

01:11:18

It isn’t. It isn’t.

01:11:21

It says, if you’re a human being, this is a tough swallow.

01:11:25

And yet we do it because we need to cure

01:11:28

and we need to understand.

01:11:30

But you must be strong.

01:11:32

You must have your weapons,

01:11:34

whatever your weapons are,

01:11:36

your inner fortitude,

01:11:38

your chi, your tsinsak, all of this.

01:11:43

So it’s a call to courage.

01:11:44

This is why I think that gurus do such a brisk business,

01:11:49

even among people who know about psychedelics,

01:11:52

because this takes courage.

01:11:54

How many people ever walked to the meditation hall

01:11:57

with their knees knocking in fear

01:12:00

over what was going to happen in their meditation?

01:12:03

But, you know, this is the thing.

01:12:06

Oh, you have.

01:12:11

Oh, shit, I’ve got to sit down with my mind again.

01:12:14

But that was after, so I could know it.

01:12:18

The stakes are the same.

01:12:20

This is very useful, I imagine.

01:12:22

Yeah, this is good stuff.

01:12:24

Well, you know, I came to this workshop on Friday

01:12:28

and I said that the old vision wells were completely dry

01:12:32

and I feel like I’ve come to the well and I’m really refreshed.

01:12:37

And I would think that the Buddha of the new century

01:12:41

would be a psychedelic guru.

01:12:42

after the new century would be a psychedelic guru.

01:12:50

And yet, I realize, I’ve grown up in India.

01:12:58

And I realized, and I was heavy into hash and opium and things like that, and doing a lot of experimentation

01:13:03

and that stuff.

01:13:03

And I realized this weekend weekend I came to the West

01:13:07

because I wanted to partake of the psychoactive juices, you know.

01:13:12

It’s been nine years, and I’ve sort of skirted around it, you know.

01:13:16

It’s like, oh, yeah, I dropped some acid and some mescaline

01:13:20

and, you know, peyote button here and there,

01:13:22

but it’s never been, you know, the way you described it.

01:13:25

Full-on.

01:13:26

Yeah, full-blown.

01:13:27

And the conflict I have is along the realms of, you know,

01:13:37

psychedelic experiences leading to a fully cerebral virtual reality

01:13:42

kind of a situation, and that makes the body obsolete.

01:13:47

And the fact that, you know,

01:13:48

more recently I’ve been focusing on

01:13:51

in my meditations and yogas and stuff

01:13:54

on the brain, studying the brain,

01:13:56

and, you know, boy, how do I get there?

01:13:59

And I have this intuition

01:14:00

that I need to be put into a situation of danger,

01:14:04

just like you were talking a couple of minutes ago,

01:14:07

of being, you know, faced with the stark whatever it is,

01:14:13

and sort of like just coolly, casually,

01:14:15

hoping to stumble onto it is not the good.

01:14:20

So it’s the conflict of, you know, where does the body come into this?

01:14:25

This is this choice that I talked about,

01:14:28

about we can’t be both high-tech and nature children.

01:14:34

Are we going to download half of us into a black box

01:14:38

that will be kept on the moon?

01:14:41

This kind of thing.

01:14:43

Is the body becoming obsolete? Does living in the imagination mean the obsolescence is the body becoming obsolete

01:14:45

does living in the imagination

01:14:47

mean the obsolescence of the body

01:14:49

and how much of what we are

01:14:51

is in the body

01:14:53

I mean we know that theories

01:14:55

have ranged from all to none

01:14:57

but it would be a good idea

01:14:59

to get this a little nailed down

01:15:01

before we go much further

01:15:03

with this

01:15:03

you know that mushrooms are forbidden to Brahmins by the Mahabharata,

01:15:09

but these Santali people have hundreds of words for mushrooms in their language,

01:15:15

and there’s some suggestion that they may have connections back to rituals and traditions

01:15:26

that are pretty much

01:15:27

unchanged from Vedic times

01:15:30

and they have a mushroom

01:15:32

that they’re very big on

01:15:33

it isn’t a psychoactive mushroom

01:15:35

but they venerate it and they hold a festival

01:15:38

for it and nobody knows

01:15:40

quite why and I’ve always been

01:15:42

interested in

01:15:43

going to India and looking into this because

01:15:46

the question of Soma in India relates very much to the presence or absence of the Stropharia

01:15:53

cubensis.

01:15:54

Well, how, how, can you describe it all, your own settling in or what, how is this progressing what’s the

01:16:05

ongoing

01:16:06

learning or

01:16:09

seeing or whatever, however you want to put this

01:16:12

into words with the

01:16:14

continuation of this study

01:16:15

well

01:16:18

it’s interesting to me

01:16:22

that the ayahuasca

01:16:24

has begun to appear from many sources.

01:16:28

It’s not just one group.

01:16:30

There are several groups who are bringing ayahuasca to this country

01:16:35

and holding sessions with it.

01:16:38

Now, for some reason, the Amazon is becoming the focus of both our problems and our potential solutions to our problems.

01:16:49

The Amazon is where all the cocaine is coming from.

01:16:53

The Amazon is where the ayahuasca is coming from.

01:16:56

And the Amazon is the place where the issue of the clearing of the rainforest

01:17:01

and the destruction of the vegetation cover

01:17:05

is most intense.

01:17:07

So it’s almost as though

01:17:08

the rainforest itself is sending the ayahuasca.

01:17:14

And the message of the ayahuasca

01:17:16

is different from the mushrooms.

01:17:18

The mushrooms have this science fiction,

01:17:21

let’s depart for the stars kind of thing.

01:17:24

And the ayahuasca has its feet in the mud

01:17:28

and says, you know, life, children, balance, affirmation.

01:17:35

So I don’t know if this addresses your question.

01:17:40

I’m amazed at what’s happening to me and to this issue

01:17:46

the mushroom said many years ago

01:17:49

just keep saying what you’re saying

01:17:52

and I will clear the way

01:17:54

and it seems to be clearing the way

01:17:57

and I just keep saying what I’m saying

01:17:59

but what this is all for

01:18:03

I haven’t gotten any new orders for a while.

01:18:06

I assume that it’s a struggle for the soul of this species,

01:18:13

and then maybe everything is tied up in that.

01:18:16

But these chemicals, these plant hallucinogens,

01:18:20

are pheromones laden with messages for humanity.

01:18:27

But you have to pick up the telephone.

01:18:29

It’s telling us how to do it.

01:18:32

And I don’t mean some airy-fairy trip like love one another.

01:18:37

I mean it’s supplying technical data

01:18:39

on how to manage ourselves out of this mess

01:18:43

with things like the time wave.

01:18:46

And, you know, I don’t want to name names

01:18:49

because they prefer their privacy,

01:18:51

but I know of a number of major ideas

01:18:54

moving around on the intellectual landscape

01:18:57

whose inventors entirely credit them to psychedelics.

01:19:02

These ideas are there

01:19:03

because the planetary soul

01:19:05

is seeding them.

01:19:07

And it’s up to us to cultivate.

01:19:10

Cultivate our intuition,

01:19:12

our social relationships,

01:19:14

our sensitivity,

01:19:16

and our sense of

01:19:17

decency, you know,

01:19:19

so that nobody puts anything over on us.

01:19:22

And I think the world is growing

01:19:24

more psychedelic every day.

01:19:26

I’m completely hopeful.

01:19:27

The trends I look for, the indicators I watch,

01:19:31

are all moving in the right direction.

01:19:34

This is how it should be.

01:19:36

This is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for hyperspace.

01:19:42

Nothing’s wrong.

01:19:44

You’re listening to

01:19:45

The Psychedelic Salon, where people

01:19:47

are changing their lives one thought

01:19:49

at a time.

01:19:52

Nothing’s wrong.

01:19:55

Nothing’s wrong.

01:19:57

Maybe those are two words that

01:19:59

we need to keep reciting to ourselves

01:20:02

over and over these days.

01:20:04

It’s so easy with all of the terrible

01:20:06

news we hear and read, to become despondent and feel hopeless about the future of our species.

01:20:12

But on the other hand, what Terrence just said about the world becoming more psychedelic is,

01:20:17

I think, measurably true. When I first became involved in the psychedelic community, I only

01:20:23

knew a handful of others who were also interested in exploring the upper reaches of consciousness.

01:20:30

And even ten years after that, having moved to a new state, I still knew only four other people in that area who were so inclined.

01:20:38

For the first year of these podcasts, in fact, from the salon, we were only averaging around 100 downloads a month

01:20:45

and from three or four countries. But now, only eight years later, we have reached around a

01:20:52

million people in over 150 countries. Through contacts that I’ve made as a result of these

01:20:57

podcasts, I’ve become aware of the fact that there now must be millions and millions of us

01:21:03

psychedelically inclined people here on Earth.

01:21:06

And what good is it, you ask, if psychedelic consciousness continues to grow?

01:21:12

Well, I can’t really say for sure.

01:21:14

All that I can say for sure is what happened to me as I became more involved with the study of psychedelic medicines.

01:21:23

And what happened, over time, is that before I began an active exploration of my own consciousness,

01:21:29

I was considered an Irish Catholic Republican lawyer.

01:21:34

Today, the only one of those labels that applies to me is that I retain my Irish roots.

01:21:40

I’m still Irish, but the other three have faded away.

01:21:44

And since we’re tying up loose ends here,

01:21:46

I guess that I should also point out that on two occasions I have kissed the Blarney Stone,

01:21:52

so please don’t take what I say too seriously.

01:21:57

Well, getting back to the talk that we just listened to,

01:22:01

Terrence certainly did tie up a lot of loose ends.

01:22:06

Of course, many more still remain, but never fear, there are still more recordings of his lectures that I’ve been sent,

01:22:12

but I haven’t had a chance to hear yet myself. So there’s still more McKenna coming soon, and

01:22:17

once again I feel obliged to point out how coherent and detailed his answers were to such a wide range of questions.

01:22:26

He was truly a remarkable person.

01:22:29

In fact, I’ve got to go back and re-listen to one remark that he made about finding structures

01:22:35

in the universe on scales so large that scientists haven’t been able to account for them.

01:22:40

And the reason why I want to go back and re-listen to that is that in today’s edition of Physics World, physicsworld.com, there’s a story that has the headline, Quasar Shines a Bright Light on Cosmic Web.

01:22:55

And here’s the beginning of that story, and I quote,

01:23:27

End quote. universe, a network of filaments thought to connect all matter, including galaxies and gas clouds,

01:23:34

end quote. Now, I don’t know about you, but my guess is that this is precisely what Terrence was talking about almost 25 years ago. I’ll link to that article in the program notes for

01:23:40

today’s podcast in case you want to check that out on your own.

01:23:49

And as you know, you can get to the program notes via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:23:56

Now for the synchronicity watchers among us, besides the coincidence of stumbling on a talk in which Terrence mentions the cosmic web, the superstructure of the cosmos, and that news of

01:24:03

actually seeing it coming in the same week.

01:24:05

Well, do you remember the part where Terence was talking about writing a computer program

01:24:10

to generate the objects that he saw in psychedelic space?

01:24:14

Actually, I’ll just play it for you right now to remind you.

01:24:17

I would like to write a computer program that would be like a full paint type program

01:24:25

but it would be for the purpose of generating these kinds of objects

01:24:29

because I’ve seen them a fair bit and analyzed what’s going on

01:24:33

and here’s how it works.

01:24:35

You have a dodecahedron or some other complex regular polygon

01:24:40

so that it’s made of surfaces and then to each surface you assign a set of color and

01:24:49

frequency changes and then each surface can run its program independent of all the other surfaces

01:24:58

so you slowly build up a program on each surface but then you can also cut into this polygon and remove chunks

01:25:07

of it to reveal another polygon inside it that can have different programs written for

01:25:13

each of its surfaces.

01:25:15

And then you set these things slowly rotating one within another on several levels and you’re

01:25:21

beginning to approach a really shoddy example

01:25:26

of what these things are like that you see in this space.

01:25:31

So I took that soundbite and sent it to Ken Adams,

01:25:35

who, as you know, is the creator of the new Terrence McKenna Experience video,

01:25:40

which I’ll also link to in the program notes.

01:25:43

Anyway, what Terrence said reminded me of

01:25:46

Ken’s work. So I sent him the soundbite that we just listened to, and Ken wrote back and said that

01:25:53

the afternoon that he received the email attachment with the soundbite in it, at that very time that I

01:25:59

sent it, he and another video producer were working out a way to do exactly what Terrence was talking about.

01:26:05

I really like it when little things like that happen.

01:26:10

And by the way, if any of the video artists here in the salon create something along the lines of what Terrence was talking about,

01:26:18

just send me a link and I’ll link to it from the salon’s blog.

01:26:22

Now, once again, I’m going to save the rest of my comments for the

01:26:26

next podcast, because even though I’ve got some stuff I want to pass along, well, there’s this

01:26:31

good book waiting for me right now, and I’m right at a crucial point in the story.

01:26:36

So please forgive me, once again, this early exit from the salon. But to make up for it,

01:26:43

I’ll see if I can’t come up with another

01:26:45

McKenna talk for the next podcast. So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:26:51

Be well, my friends.