Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The 20th century is a great gathering for a leap, and the 19th century was the century of the gentleman.”
“Whether we can actually make a new world is not clear because the momentum of the past is very great.”
“The bigger you build the bonfire of understanding the more darkness you reveal.”
“Belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn’t to be believed. It’s to be dealt with.”
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388 - Wherever You Are, Be There!
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390 - Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
So, where have you been for the past three weeks?
00:00:27 ►
That’s a joke, in case you’re wondering,
00:00:29 ►
because seeing as how there have been Boku downloads since we were last together,
00:00:33 ►
I know that you’ve been here.
00:00:35 ►
It was me that was away for a bit.
00:00:38 ►
Seems like no matter where you live,
00:00:40 ►
there’s been some kind of disruption in people’s lives,
00:00:43 ►
whether it’s the cold weather in much of the U.S.
00:00:45 ►
or the rain and floods in the U.K. and throughout much of Europe, or the political upheavals in a dozen or more places.
00:00:53 ►
There is some kind of disturbance everywhere to keep you off balance, it seems.
00:00:58 ►
Now, here in Southern California, in the county where I live, we’ve got over 3 million people,
00:01:03 ►
and among us there are quite a few different political and religious differences.
00:01:07 ►
However, at least so far, we’ve been able to settle our differences without any bloodshed.
00:01:13 ►
And our weather is, actually it’s as good as it gets on this little planet.
00:01:17 ►
So I guess that Mother Nature felt that we should have some kind of difficulties out here as well,
00:01:22 ►
and so she let one of her new flu viruses loose on us.
00:01:26 ►
But I don’t want you to think that I’ve been down with the flu. The way I see it, I’ve just been
00:01:30 ►
strengthening my immune system. And now that I’m almost back up to speed, I’m going to post this
00:01:37 ►
podcast right now with only a minimum of talking on my part, and I’ll follow up in a couple of days
00:01:42 ►
with another program and a bit more commentary from me. Right now,
00:01:48 ►
let’s join Terrence McKenna for the next segment of the workshop that we began
00:01:52 ►
listening to a few weeks back. And if I remember correctly, this conversation
00:01:56 ►
took place in February of 1994.
00:02:00 ►
Yeah.
00:02:01 ►
When it comes to Kurt Schwitter’s Dada German poetry
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and Glossolet
00:02:06 ►
to you is there an academic
00:02:08 ►
were they going at it dryly
00:02:10 ►
in Europe as opposed to
00:02:12 ►
well no I mean Dada
00:02:15 ►
pataphysics, surrealism
00:02:17 ►
they were
00:02:18 ►
seriously
00:02:20 ►
into the theoretical
00:02:22 ►
penetration of the unconscious
00:02:24 ►
and you know they had hashish ether into the theoretical penetration of the unconscious.
00:02:29 ►
And, you know, they had hashish, ether, morphine.
00:02:33 ►
I mean, not exactly my menu, but, well, hashish.
00:02:35 ►
You can go with that.
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Ether and morphine, you can have that.
00:02:40 ►
But… Well, but what they did do is they thought deeply about it in a slightly different context you know
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the surrealists they didn’t post 1955 or something anybody who has a good idea thinks they also
00:02:58 ►
have to be a fad or somehow take the stage
00:03:05 ►
of mass media. The Dadaists
00:03:07 ►
and the Surrealists tried to
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manipulate mass opinion
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but it was generally peripheral. It was a
00:03:13 ►
movement for and about
00:03:15 ►
and among intellectuals.
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It had later
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an impact on advertising
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but an imagistic impact that was
00:03:23 ►
fairly superficial.
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The manifesto itself
00:03:29 ►
is almost a 2012 treatise.
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Oh yeah, no, the writing
00:03:33 ►
is very interesting.
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Did the soul make the
00:03:36 ►
inside the manifest and the outside?
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Yes, L’Entremont said,
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I am fascinated with the kind of beauty
00:03:43 ►
that arises when a bicycle meets something or other on an operating table.
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You know, that was modernity.
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Anybody who can’t imagine a horse dancing on the head of a kid is an idiot.
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On a tomato.
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On a tomato, right.
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A horse dancing on a tomato.
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Well, you know, this is a good example of how
00:04:05 ►
within certain time spans
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everything has already
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happened I mean if you
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want to understand 2012
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understand 1905
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when it all
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hit or you know when the
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first when the first
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percussive reflections hit
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and relativity and
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pataphysics
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and all of
00:04:27 ►
this stuff
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was
00:04:29 ►
breaking out
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it’s been possible
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to be very far
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out for a long
00:04:33 ►
time
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I mean since at
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least the death
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of Victor Hugo
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if you were really
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hip
00:04:38 ►
you could be on
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on the edge
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of what was
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happening
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we’re
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the 20th century
00:04:44 ►
is a great gathering for a leap and the 19 of what was happening. The 20th century is a great gathering for a leap.
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And the 19th century was, you know, the century of the gentlemen.
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Science worked. Darkies kept their places.
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Everything was under control.
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The 20th century, the discovery of the unconscious by Freud
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and then Joseph Goebbels.
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All of these things happened which were basically the discrediting of Western values
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and then the looking around for the way out.
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And the way out is this archaic revivalism
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that there are models in the distant past that show how it would work but whether we can actually
00:05:35 ►
make a new world is is not clear because the momentum of the past is very great and i was
00:05:42 ►
also wondering if you could say a couple of words on compressionism.
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Well, compressionism is just the
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idea that as we
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move through history,
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the amount of
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connectivity and the
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density of
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technological effects
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and genetic mixing and everything
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intensifies.
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Field intensity.
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Yeah, I mean that if you make the measure of complexity the density of connection,
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then you can see that what’s happening is the earth is shrinking,
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everybody’s getting knitted together,
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everything is being translated into every other language,
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everything is being put into retrievable databases,
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everything is coalescing toward a point.
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Now, the assumption of cheerful reason
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is that this is just a kind of cultural illusion
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and that it won’t continue past a point
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where it’s uncomfortable.
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But in fact, probably,
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it’s a kind of law of large
00:06:46 ►
systems, this
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point convergence
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phenomena. And
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it probably is not going to arrive a
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moment too soon for us, because we
00:06:55 ►
seem to be sort of spilling out over the…
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It’s showing up in art, man.
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Yeah, it’s like a movement.
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Compressionism? Yeah, it seems like it’s
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going to be the new… It’s like
00:07:04 ►
beyond postmodern. Beyond postmodern. movement compressionism yeah it seems like it’s going to be it’s like post
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beyond
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postmodern
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it’s like
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beyond
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postmodern
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yeah well
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compressionism
00:07:13 ►
is good
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I hope the
00:07:14 ►
check is in
00:07:15 ►
the mail
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we’ve been
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trying to
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start our
00:07:21 ►
own little
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version of
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that
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you know
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we’ve been
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trying to
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so when
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people ask what it is we just go well, well, it’s a terrorist mechanic.
00:07:28 ►
Well, no, see, I mean, the idea here is simply that if you look,
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it is something which science has overlooked completely,
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which is if you look at the universe, the history of the universe on any scale,
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you see that
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it is complexity
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which is conserved
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that when novel
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effects
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are achieved
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they tend to be built in
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to the system and they tend then
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to become the platform
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for further advances
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into novelty
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that’s why you know biology
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arrives somewhat late in the history of the universe in the last 10% of the
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universe biology arrives in the last 10% of the history of biology a complex
00:08:19 ►
animals arrive in the last 10% of, conscious self-reflecting beings arrive. So this is a
00:08:29 ►
general law that has never been discussed scientifically. In fact, science claims there
00:08:38 ►
are distinct causal breaks between the physical and the biological for sure,
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and possibly between the biological and the cultural.
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But there’s no reason to think this.
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And the other thing to notice is that this accumulation of novelty
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that’s going on in time is not simply a constant.
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It is slowly accelerating,
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so that the more novelty there is, the faster novelty
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is produced. And that’s why we’re caught in this kind of inwardly spiraling orbit of attraction
00:09:18 ►
that is taking us toward some kind of a calendrical singularity. That’s why history is a self-limiting process.
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It doesn’t go on for hundreds of thousands of years
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a la Isaac Asimov or somebody like that.
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It just doesn’t.
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It’s a very brief process.
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It speeds up, speeds up, speeds up,
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and then pushes everything through a singularity.
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This is the time wave.
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Yes, this is the time wave. It’s a singularity. This is the time wave. Yes, this is the time wave.
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It’s a mathematical description.
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These 10% moments in history,
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you can see them on the time wave.
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Yeah, and there’s nothing magical.
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And the singularity you can see on the time wave.
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There’s nothing magical about the variables in the time wave.
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It’s simply that they are the fluctuations
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that became embedded in the early history of the universe
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in the same way that the charge of the electron and these constants came into being
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during the symmetry breaks of the early universe.
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When you say singularity, do you mean like collective focus and purpose?
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No, I just use it in the sense of physics.
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A singularity is a place where the laws fail.
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And a singularity usually has point-like dimensions.
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Otherwise, you have too many places
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where the singularity reigns and the laws fail.
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You don’t want the laws to fail.
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If you generate a theory theory you want to have
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as few singularities as possible one of the problems with black hole theory is it demands
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a singularity at the center of every black hole but then when you ask well how many black holes
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are there in the universe it turns out it’s something like 10 high 13 well that’s a lot of singularities if you’re
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you have 10 high 13 singularities in your model of the cosmos what kind of model is this
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you know it’s a model full of holes exactly yes
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singularity well the big bang you know last weekity. Well, the Big Bang, you know,
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last week’s science news brought the news
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that they’re now haggling over 10 billion years.
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Nobody knows whether the universe is 12 billion years old
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or 26 billion years old.
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I think it’s related to some sort of physical mathematics
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having to do with Bell’s theorem again. If you go back to
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a Big Bang sort of conjecture
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and you take a look at Bell’s
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theorem which says that particles that
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loosely interpreted says that particles that have been in
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contact, contact being
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quantum mechanically interpreted,
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will continue to show correlations
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after they have been separated
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if you relate all that back to a Big Bang
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moment where in fact all particles were in contact that says after they have been separated, if you relate all that back to a Big Bang moment
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where, in fact, all particles were in contact,
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that says that those correlations will continue to manifest
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in those particles that have become the physical universe.
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So it provides a quantum mechanical explanation for the magical correlations that we see,
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that we become aware of with psychedelics or other techniques.
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And it implies most definitely something that is very much at odds
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to the reductionist constructions of scientific materialism
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in that it implies very strongly non-local correlations.
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Yeah, well, I think it’s pretty clear that reductionism is at the end of the road.
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The question is…
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Reduce fractal mathematics, for example.
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Well, that’s a kind of reductionism.
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Right, right.
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When you’re talking about reductionism,
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I think there’s an issue here that hasn’t been brought up,
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and forgive me because I can’t remember everything you said,
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but I do remember, because this does relate,
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but I do remember what he said.
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And I’m very limited in asking my question
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because I’m not up on science,
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as probably many people are much better qualified to talk about.
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But I do know something about symbolic consciousness.
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And I think that the thing that’s wrong with these systems is everything you said these systems is limited to,
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including reductionism.
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But I think if we’re talking about something
00:13:27 ►
being banal, I think it’s also the other problem with these predictable things is they’re literalistic.
00:13:34 ►
And if we’re going to talk about how to deal with these, having some sort of structure
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to deal with these highly complex phenomena, then I think that a symbology,
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a symbolic consciousness
00:13:47 ►
can deal with what these
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literalistic systems, both
00:13:51 ►
scientifically and religiously,
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because then we have
00:13:55 ►
what you said,
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when I’m saying symbolical consciousness
00:13:59 ►
or symbolic systems, or
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as Yeats said, metaphors for
00:14:03 ►
poetry, or as even Joseph Campbell said,
00:14:05 ►
metaphor as
00:14:07 ►
myth and as religion.
00:14:10 ►
Don’t imagine
00:14:11 ►
that
00:14:12 ►
literalistic religion
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or science is going to deal with them, because
00:14:17 ►
it has no imagination, then it’s
00:14:19 ►
literalistic.
00:14:21 ►
I’d just like to hear from you
00:14:23 ►
what
00:14:24 ►
how you see psychedelics in terms of what
00:14:29 ►
he called magical correspondences and what I’m calling symbolical consciousness.
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Well, if psychedelics are in fact giving a cross-section of reality that is true.
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And if in fact that’s how reality works,
00:14:50 ►
then the congruence of the two would be what you would expect to see, I think.
00:14:56 ►
I don’t have a problem with that.
00:15:00 ►
But do you agree that these systems,
00:15:03 ►
added to what you’re saying their limitations are are also literalistic?
00:15:08 ►
Well, yes, but how can there not be a literalistic system?
00:15:11 ►
In other words, every formulation of the problem and the solution is going to betray it.
00:15:23 ►
So they’re always going to be literalistic.
00:15:26 ►
The mystery is best served by silence and contemplation.
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The problem is, you know, it’s just hell on your bank account
00:15:38 ►
if you’re a professional lecturer.
00:15:41 ►
So we drop down a level to raving and ranting but all of these
00:15:48 ►
things are provisional and
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literalistic nowhere is it writ large
00:15:53 ►
that the minds of higher primates are
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going to hold a simulacrum of reality
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but it’s as I’ve said you know many
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times this Wittgensteinian idea of things being true enough, provisionally true.
00:16:11 ►
Could you adopt that time wave?
00:16:13 ►
That would help you out of the bind.
00:16:16 ►
Well, no, but it would help me out of a bind by corrupting me with money.
00:16:21 ►
And somehow these gifts of the logos are always self-sealed against that
00:16:26 ►
kind of tampering. You can only
00:16:28 ►
predict a stock crash when it’s big
00:16:30 ►
enough to sweep away a few
00:16:31 ►
national governments and then
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the stock crash turns out to be
00:16:35 ►
a small part of something else.
00:16:38 ►
No, it’s amazing how
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incorruptible
00:16:41 ►
the real thing is.
00:16:44 ►
Yeah, no, that’s an interesting point.
00:16:51 ►
Fundamentalism, which bedevils our political dialogue,
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is a very modern phenomenon.
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They don’t tell you this,
00:17:01 ►
but it is not traditionally sanctioned anywhere
00:17:05 ►
that you give a literalist interpretation to scripture.
00:17:09 ►
That arose in the 1870s in the back country of Baboon Asshole or somewhere.
00:17:18 ►
It’s not…
00:17:21 ►
Well, later than that, though.
00:17:24 ►
It’s later than that.
00:17:25 ►
It’s a uniquely American phenomenon, Christian fundamentalism,
00:17:28 ►
and has no roots
00:17:30 ►
and no sanction in
00:17:32 ►
the history of Christian theology
00:17:33 ►
whatsoever. It’s just, as you
00:17:36 ►
say, idolatry. It’s a
00:17:38 ►
fetishism of literalism
00:17:40 ►
that is preposterous. It’s
00:17:41 ►
part of an American political
00:17:43 ►
tradition called know-nothingism,
00:17:46 ►
which reaches back to the early 19th century
00:17:49 ►
when there was a know-nothing party.
00:17:51 ►
This was a respectable position.
00:17:54 ►
I mean, their attitude was,
00:17:55 ►
our mind is made up, don’t confuse us with facts.
00:17:59 ►
And they, you know, once there was a party in Canada
00:18:02 ►
called the Social Credit Party,
00:18:04 ►
and they ran on the platform, you don’t have to understand social credit Once there was a party in Canada called the Social Credit Party,
00:18:06 ►
and they ran on the platform,
00:18:10 ►
you don’t have to understand social credit to vote for it.
00:18:18 ►
And so what more evidence do you need?
00:18:24 ►
Well, but you see, the counterpoint of view is there have always been people raving on street corners about the approaching doom based on the fact that the rise of Frederick Barbarossa was doing X or Y or the Emperor Rudolf was doing something. the end time scenario over any complex period of history.
00:18:46 ►
Nevertheless, I agree with you.
00:18:52 ►
I think it’s very terminal and that there’s a lot of evidence that the reason the West is so obsessed with the consummation of itself
00:18:57 ►
is because the consummation of the West is actually built into our psychology.
00:19:03 ►
And we keep trying to do it.
00:19:04 ►
We tried in the Thirty Years’ War, not enough technological push, is actually built into our psychology. And we keep trying to do it.
00:19:07 ►
We tried in the Thirty Years’ War.
00:19:09 ►
Not enough technological push.
00:19:11 ►
Hitler tried to do it.
00:19:13 ►
Close, but no banana.
00:19:16 ►
Now, you know, the next try.
00:19:18 ►
We have this Ragnarok, this wish for an operatic conclusion.
00:19:23 ►
It’s a kind of infantilism.
00:19:25 ►
We are so frustrated by how it doesn’t work
00:19:29 ►
that we want a deus ex machina ending
00:19:33 ►
that leaves everyone satisfied
00:19:35 ►
so you can just, you know,
00:19:37 ►
leave the theater completely.
00:19:40 ►
Ah, there it was.
00:19:43 ►
Justice, retribution, denouement, all these things. is the dichotomy between the historical mindset and what I’ve heard my friend Ralph Abraham call eros.
00:20:12 ►
In other words, eros and history is a kind of dichotomy.
00:20:17 ►
These things are like oil and water.
00:20:20 ►
They don’t mix.
00:20:22 ►
They’re incommiserate.
00:20:32 ►
water they don’t mix they’re incommiserate and the the thing about eros is that it is sacral and time transcending it doesn’t take place in time it takes place in in this phase space called in ilio tempore.
00:20:47 ►
Merciliad talks about this.
00:20:49 ►
It takes place paradigmatically outside of the forward flow of ordinary casuistry.
00:20:58 ►
History is the ordinary forward flow of kazoo history and so things that I’ve called habit and novelty have about them
00:21:11 ►
facets that allow them to be discussed in terms of historicity and and eros the the notion of historicity in contrast to this timeless, paradigmatic, ritualistic space of eros, the distinguishing characteristic of historicity is its finiteness and the stress on conclusion, the stress on process that is not open-ended, but that comes to some kind of a
00:21:48 ►
close. And we have been living in a situation of history for about 5,000 years now. I mean,
00:21:55 ►
it’s the unchallenged faith of Western civilization, which has carried that banner everywhere and now wherever the faith in history is resisted the cultural
00:22:09 ►
Alexiames have been redesigned to define that place as
00:22:14 ►
primitive and benighted and
00:22:16 ►
outside the mainstream
00:22:19 ►
Nevertheless this did this descent into history has not been a particularly happy voyage.
00:22:28 ►
It’s been fraught with progressive alienation as we moved away from some kind of dynamic, nomadic, sexually polymorphic relationship to each other and to the planet and to the environment
00:22:49 ►
and progressively into a more sedentary, population-dense, specialized and symbolically involved style of existence and it has made possible a skewing
00:23:05 ►
or a departure
00:23:07 ►
from the main curve
00:23:10 ►
of natural development
00:23:12 ►
as a species
00:23:13 ►
and we’ve gone off on a kind of
00:23:15 ►
random walk into
00:23:17 ►
the great museum of
00:23:19 ►
intellectual artifractria
00:23:21 ►
or something and there
00:23:23 ►
we have
00:23:24 ►
adumbrated culture meanwhile artificial or something and there we have
00:23:28 ►
Adam braided culture meanwhile
00:23:35 ►
Biological change evolutionary change in our species has pretty much halted
00:23:40 ►
Everything is going on in the domain of the rewriting of cultural software
00:23:48 ►
The monkey stays the same, but we trade, you know, Zoroastrianism for Christianity, we trade the differential calculus for algebra. Various cultural obsessions come and go.
00:23:56 ►
Into them, okay, so that’s the characteristic of historicity and the great exhibit
00:24:05 ►
that reinforces this
00:24:08 ►
point of view is
00:24:10 ►
the phenomenon of physical
00:24:12 ►
death
00:24:13 ►
of the termination of the
00:24:15 ►
individual personality and so
00:24:17 ►
that is the argument
00:24:19 ►
for
00:24:20 ►
the existential
00:24:23 ►
bite of this point of view say look here here is so and so once they
00:24:28 ►
were a living person and now they’re a corpse and doesn’t this carry the day for our point of view
00:24:34 ►
it’s uh it’s basically uh a view steeped in mortality the other view this erotic view, is on the upswing into novelty. It’s hopeful. It’s open-ended. It’s connective. And these things exist in a state of dynamic tension. So that’s the take on one level. But then, as I mentioned this morning, there’s also this tendency toward acceleration or implosion, concentration of effect. pitted in eternal struggle are actually not pitted in eternal struggle because one is slowly
00:25:27 ►
incrementally in ascendancy over the other one and always has been and this is uh this uh erotic
00:25:37 ►
element which stands for spontaneity, boundary dissolution,
00:25:47 ►
overwhelmment of social norms.
00:25:48 ►
I mean, it’s an archetype.
00:25:50 ►
It operates on every level.
00:25:54 ►
It operates in the personality, in the society, in physics.
00:25:59 ►
It’s the principle of creative disorder,
00:26:10 ►
you know, hail discordia and all that malarkey. It’s the thing which civilization is very tweaked about and ambivalent toward
00:26:12 ►
because it represents a situation of unpredictability.
00:26:17 ►
It represents the unexpected innocence,
00:26:24 ►
the unexpected hexagram 25. it’s the x factor there’s a famous book in
00:26:30 ►
systems theory called planning on uncertainty this is the one thing people rarely do plan on
00:26:38 ►
and so then their plans are always slightly askew because uncertainty is the one thing that is built into the system.
00:26:46 ►
So psychedelics then are like a periscope out of the cultural submarine back to some kind of reality
00:27:00 ►
that is going on beyond the cultural machinery.
00:27:04 ►
that is going on beyond the cultural machinery.
00:27:09 ►
And apparently this is simply because the neurological programming of the brain
00:27:12 ►
is not so malleable as to be shaped
00:27:16 ►
by something as peripheral as cultural experience.
00:27:20 ►
It just isn’t.
00:27:21 ►
It has to be chemically perturbed.
00:27:24 ►
It’s a chemical engine of some sort. And the perturbation of it causes these categories, which are thought to be God-sent by naive realists, to actually just begin to slip and slide and flow and reveal their provisional nature.
00:27:46 ►
That’s the thing, that it turns out all these models of reality are provisional.
00:27:51 ►
This is the great contribution of 20th century science, I think, to human thinking.
00:27:59 ►
The abandonment of the search for truth
00:28:02 ►
and the satisfaction with what are simply called sufficient
00:28:08 ►
models. You know, if the model accepts the input you are aware of and gives you the output you are
00:28:16 ►
aware of, the model is said to be a close enough approximation to the thing that further questions would be tasteless to pursue
00:28:25 ►
but everybody now
00:28:27 ►
understands that
00:28:29 ►
this is not
00:28:31 ►
truth in any scholastic
00:28:34 ►
sense it’s just
00:28:35 ►
it’s just modeling
00:28:37 ►
but what we need you see and why
00:28:39 ►
I offer this habit
00:28:41 ►
novelty eros history
00:28:44 ►
complexity disorder model is because
00:28:48 ►
it’s a it’s a bipolar concept that is intuitively effective across many levels
00:28:56 ►
the problem with science is that the explanatory power is enormous, but the bottom line is incomprehensible
00:29:07 ►
and does not come tangential to experience.
00:29:12 ►
An explanation that does not come tangential to experience
00:29:16 ►
is some kind of con job.
00:29:18 ►
However mathematically elegant and anchored
00:29:21 ►
in tensor equations of the third degree and so forth.
00:29:25 ►
It means a fast shuffle has taken place.
00:29:28 ►
You started out with gold and now what you have are pieces of paper with some prince’s
00:29:33 ►
picture put on it.
00:29:35 ►
And, you know, hmm, somewhere along the line you were dealt out of the gelt in that game.
00:29:44 ►
Well, you know, you can talk about this in very specific terms.
00:29:48 ►
It’s very interesting that this hormone
00:29:51 ►
called adenoglomerotropane,
00:29:55 ►
which occurs in the pineal gland,
00:29:57 ►
actually, when analyzed,
00:29:59 ►
turns out to be 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan.
00:30:03 ►
It’s a beta-carboline.
00:30:06 ►
DMT occurs naturally in the human
00:30:08 ►
metabolism
00:30:09 ►
and DMT clearly
00:30:12 ►
impacts
00:30:14 ►
consciousness both in its hallucinogenic
00:30:16 ►
intensity but also in the speed
00:30:18 ►
with which the reaction
00:30:20 ►
can be turned on and off
00:30:22 ►
you know it’s very fast
00:30:24 ►
quenching.
00:30:25 ►
Clearly, ordinary consciousness,
00:30:27 ►
the process of thought, of reverie, of recall,
00:30:32 ►
depends on a series of very rapidly expressed
00:30:36 ►
and degraded chemical reactions.
00:30:39 ►
I mean, literally, chemistry going on at the speed of thought.
00:30:43 ►
So, tryptamines play a role there.
00:30:46 ►
It’s also interesting that as you ascend the animal phylogeny,
00:30:51 ►
the concentration of serotonin in brain tissue increases,
00:30:54 ►
and serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
00:30:58 ►
There is a mystery about these tryptamine and serotonergic molecules,
00:31:05 ►
the relationship between eros here,
00:31:10 ►
but more specifically sexuality,
00:31:12 ►
and the DMT flash,
00:31:15 ►
where these two, like orgasm and the DMT flash,
00:31:21 ►
these two physiological phenomena
00:31:23 ►
are very close together in a matrix of experience
00:31:27 ►
where there’s nothing else really around them. And yet orgasm is a generalized human phenomenon.
00:31:33 ►
The DMT flash, extraordinarily rare. One mediated, well, I don’t know that much about orgasm in terms
00:31:41 ►
of the chemistry, but the other clearly mediated by neurotransmitters
00:31:45 ►
probably both are and you know though i’ve read a lot about theories of human emergence and so forth
00:31:53 ►
nobody has satisfactorily dealt with the relationship of our sexuality to the emergence
00:32:00 ►
of consciousness that first of all all monkeys are fairly highly sexed
00:32:06 ►
but many monkeys
00:32:09 ►
have an estrogen cycle
00:32:11 ►
and their bottoms swell up and they go through all that
00:32:14 ►
we don’t do that
00:32:16 ►
we are capable of conceiving children
00:32:21 ►
throughout the annual year
00:32:23 ►
all of these things somehow impinge the sexuality and the consciousness
00:32:28 ►
and the proclivity for symbolic activity
00:32:32 ►
all somehow meet in the psychedelic phenomenon.
00:32:37 ►
But, you know, we’re pre-paradigm here.
00:32:40 ►
We can’t quite put together what it all means.
00:32:43 ►
The paradox of the psychedelic thing at the sociological level, I think,
00:32:49 ►
is that it is old, not news at all.
00:32:54 ►
The general way that human beings have probed the experiential other,
00:33:00 ►
there are two kinds of other, you know.
00:33:02 ►
There is the philosophically other the theoretically
00:33:06 ►
other the world of imaginary numbers and places like that and then there is the experientially
00:33:15 ►
other which is the other as you know it and some people don’t know it at all because they lead very pedestrian lives
00:33:25 ►
or maybe they only encounter it in fevers and dreams
00:33:28 ►
or life-transforming crises that come very rarely.
00:33:35 ►
But it is an accessible dimension.
00:33:41 ►
And one can push and then have these experiences of the other and they they then feed
00:33:53 ►
back into the life of the culture it’s a it’s a paradox you see i mean the bigger you build the bonfire of understanding, the more darkness you reveal.
00:34:07 ►
Because, you know, just necessarily as the sphere of understanding expands, the surface area of ignorance grows ever larger.
00:34:17 ►
The enterprise of knowing is itself defined by the fact of unknowing.
00:34:30 ►
And, you know, the fact that mind is chemically based and the fact that we are beginning now to understand
00:34:33 ►
and take apart the mechanism of cognition
00:34:37 ►
is leading to the obvious conclusion
00:34:41 ►
that in a sense we can design ourselves.
00:34:46 ►
I mean, we’ve always done this,
00:34:48 ►
but by very ineffective and sort of brute methods,
00:34:55 ►
by inquisitions and hortatory religions
00:34:58 ►
and hanging people in the public square as a cautionary example.
00:35:05 ►
But, you know, pharmacology holds out the possibility,
00:35:09 ►
and I mean pharmacology in the broadest sense,
00:35:12 ►
like up to and including these electronic media,
00:35:16 ►
holds out the possibility that we can become
00:35:19 ►
whatever it is that we feel gnawing at our souls
00:35:23 ►
trying to get out.
00:35:25 ►
But then the question is discovering what that actually is.
00:35:31 ►
You know, birthing the angelic, demonic, Faustian soul of the species.
00:35:39 ►
We don’t know exactly what we are when all natural law falls away when you know the design process
00:35:48 ►
when the law of gravity is cancelled when the laws of budgetary constraints are cancelled when
00:35:55 ►
all restraints are lifted then what kind of thing flowers flowers out but if the historical process isn’t conscious and by that i mean
00:36:07 ►
under the aegis of eros i associate eros to consciousness here if the historical design
00:36:16 ►
process isn’t conscious then it will be phonic it will be unconscious as it has been and then
00:36:23 ►
it has the character of a nightmare I mean that’s what the
00:36:26 ►
20th century is like it’s like it’s like a nightmare it’s like lurching from one chaotic
00:36:34 ►
catastrophic unfolding of meaningless concatenations to the next you know my notion of how this worked in the past was that these psychedelics were like pipelines to what I call the Gaian mind.
00:36:51 ►
The Gaian mind being the complete set of superimposed control systems that keep the planet a working organic entity.
00:37:05 ►
And human beings were part of that and very tightly aligned
00:37:10 ►
because control in ecotomes is achieved through signal transfer.
00:37:21 ►
And it can be chemical or auditory or linguistic and for sure the early human
00:37:31 ►
population was embedded in this kind of a control system and psychedelics i think were probably the
00:37:38 ►
way that this was done that actually you know it reminds me of this graffiti I saw once in Colombia it had a picture of a mushroom on a wall and it said without this you
00:37:49 ►
are not yourself well that’s sort of the notion that a person who does not take
00:37:58 ►
psilocybin is slut is dysfunctional because it’s an it’s a necessary part of the way people fit into nature.
00:38:10 ►
And if you don’t have the psilocybin glue interfacing between you and nature,
00:38:16 ►
then there has been a breakdown in mental hygiene.
00:38:21 ►
And the equivalent of psoriasis or something is on the way.
00:38:28 ►
And as soon as that connection was broken with the invention of agriculture,
00:38:34 ►
you see then a very sudden proliferation of neurotic behavior styles
00:38:40 ►
and cultural patterns which are maintained up until the present day.
00:38:47 ►
This thing we hinted at last night about how probably the male percentage of the population
00:38:56 ►
is maintained at artificially high levels and that this has been going on throughout history.
00:39:02 ►
Probably the natural ratio of males to females
00:39:06 ►
is something like 30% to 70%, perhaps even lower.
00:39:11 ►
But agriculture and food supply,
00:39:14 ►
a whole bunch of things conspire to make it possible
00:39:18 ►
to make those numbers closer to 50-50.
00:39:21 ►
It’s unusual in a mammalian species
00:39:24 ►
to have sexual parity of population
00:39:27 ►
like that. And the fact that the dominator cultural style is maintained by an excess of males
00:39:34 ►
points a certain direction toward the way things could politically be re-engineered in the future
00:39:41 ►
to correct that situation. I always think of what Graham Greene said in one of his novels.
00:39:48 ►
He said, I want to be on the progressive side that survives.
00:39:55 ►
That’s sort of where I come down.
00:39:58 ►
Somebody else? Yes.
00:39:59 ►
You keep on saying the monkey stays the same.
00:40:02 ►
Now, if change…
00:40:04 ►
No, I agree.
00:40:06 ►
I’m just a show-me kind of guy.
00:40:08 ►
But, I mean, while we’re waiting for somebody
00:40:10 ►
to get better at guessing cards,
00:40:14 ►
the entire Library of Congress
00:40:16 ►
has become instantaneously available
00:40:18 ►
at the stroke of a few keys.
00:40:20 ►
Where the psychic abilities are increasing
00:40:24 ►
is in the technological excreta of the society
00:40:28 ►
as i said last night we are just like the genitals of our machines the what the power of the hardware
00:40:38 ►
that we are generating around us is yet unplumbed because nobody has written software powerful enough
00:40:46 ►
to take advantage of what the hardware can do.
00:40:50 ►
There’s an ever-expanding horizon of unplumbed freedom
00:40:55 ►
until we figure out what we can actually do
00:40:58 ►
with these technological capacities that have been produced.
00:41:03 ►
Yes, I think that the
00:41:07 ►
precious boundary
00:41:10 ►
between ourselves and our machines
00:41:12 ►
that a certain brand of
00:41:14 ►
anxious humanist is
00:41:16 ►
worried
00:41:18 ►
to preserve is just a bunch of
00:41:20 ►
malarkey and that it’s perfectly
00:41:22 ►
clear now that the human world
00:41:24 ►
means the soft tissue
00:41:29 ►
that runs around having affairs and migraine headaches and it also means you know the hardware
00:41:36 ►
that sits in the basements and in the skyscrapers and in the super cooled air-conditioned rooms where the entire unconscious of the culture is in storage.
00:41:49 ►
That’s what this database is.
00:41:53 ►
It’s the dreaming brain of the over-species.
00:41:58 ►
And the fact that we are the waking, mobile, organic attendants
00:42:03 ►
of this cyber-electric reef of information,
00:42:07 ►
we are easily replaced and we all make our small contribution.
00:42:11 ►
But the thing, it exists all over the world, dispersed.
00:42:16 ►
It sets the price of gold.
00:42:18 ►
It turns on the flow of petroleum.
00:42:20 ►
It moves natural gas futures in Jakarta.
00:42:29 ►
petroleum it moves natural gas futures in jakarta it is largely autonomous and driven by algorithmic input that is on semi-automatic uh mode and so you know we imagine that it’s human civilization
00:42:38 ►
run by human beings no it’s just civilization run by the mysterious forces that get you to join book clubs and take certain drugs
00:42:48 ►
and to watch certain things, buy certain things.
00:42:53 ►
It’s very interesting.
00:42:55 ►
It has a will to its own, a complexification of its own.
00:43:00 ►
And I think unless you psychedelicize yourself,
00:43:04 ►
we tend to be so embedded in its assumptions
00:43:07 ►
that we don’t see it and then when you do psychedelicize yourself you do see it and
00:43:13 ►
then the problem is to not freak out about it about the you know the implications that’s what
00:43:20 ►
I’ve always said about the psychedelic experience the implications are so appalling
00:43:26 ►
because what does it mean
00:43:29 ►
what does it mean
00:43:33 ►
what does it mean Mr. Maturum
00:43:35 ►
don’t mean shit
00:43:37 ►
isn’t that the answer to that
00:43:40 ►
Olaf Stapleton wrote a book called
00:43:42 ►
The Science Fiction Story of the Last and First Man
00:43:44 ►
and he
00:43:45 ►
has a
00:43:46 ►
vision in
00:43:47 ►
there that’s
00:43:48 ►
very close
00:43:49 ►
to what
00:43:49 ►
he just
00:43:50 ►
created
00:43:51 ►
well I
00:43:52 ►
would like
00:43:53 ►
to think
00:43:54 ►
you know
00:43:54 ►
that everything
00:43:55 ►
is knitting
00:43:56 ►
together
00:43:56 ►
that the
00:43:58 ►
entire universe
00:43:59 ►
is an
00:43:59 ►
engine for
00:44:00 ►
producing
00:44:01 ►
ever more
00:44:02 ►
advanced states
00:44:04 ►
of novelty
00:44:04 ►
and connectedness
00:44:06 ►
and that ultimately aesthetic concerns are what will rule
00:44:14 ►
and that a weird kind of beauty is trying to manifest itself
00:44:20 ►
through the process of history, through the design process
00:44:25 ►
but you know I may be
00:44:28 ►
wildly optimistic
00:44:30 ►
but I just can’t
00:44:32 ►
imagine that at the pinnacle
00:44:34 ►
of all this organization
00:44:36 ►
would come then man
00:44:38 ►
the final act and that
00:44:40 ►
it would just be complete chaos
00:44:42 ►
that seems
00:44:43 ►
a bit much.
00:44:45 ►
Since we are the coordination of all the processes which preceded us,
00:44:50 ►
isn’t it then reasonable to suppose
00:44:52 ►
that there is a certain coordination being expressed through us?
00:44:58 ►
I mean, nature does proceed by sudden leaps,
00:45:01 ►
lurches, and transformations.
00:45:04 ►
Sometimes, most of the time, it’s very ho-hum,
00:45:08 ►
but every once in a while, you know,
00:45:10 ►
something outlandish happens, yeah.
00:45:13 ►
I don’t know, it’s an interesting question
00:45:15 ►
because the character of the psychedelic experience
00:45:19 ►
is so futuristic in my experience
00:45:23 ►
and I think in the experience of a lot of people.
00:45:25 ►
Well, that concept, futuristic,
00:45:28 ►
is itself fairly modern.
00:45:31 ►
I mean, as recently as 200 years ago
00:45:34 ►
when Blake was writing,
00:45:35 ►
he didn’t use the word future.
00:45:37 ►
He used the word futurity
00:45:39 ►
and said, you know,
00:45:41 ►
and in far futurity, so forth and so on.
00:45:44 ►
In the Middle Ages, the concept barely existed at all
00:45:49 ►
because it was just everybody assumed that Jesus was coming
00:45:53 ►
and soon, you know, the historical course would be terminated.
00:46:00 ►
It’s interesting, you know, the only, like, example we have
00:46:04 ►
that maybe sheds light on this is Hieronymus Bosch, because Hieronymus Bosch lived from 1450 to 1516 and painted what look like hallucinogenic landscapes, and there is a curious stress on technical innovation in those landscapes.
00:46:28 ►
In other words, wheeled vehicles, primitive artillery pieces, the machinery of siege warfare,
00:46:36 ►
which was being perfected in the lowlands at that time. In a sense, it’s a cyberpunk vision, Hieronymus Bosch.
00:46:47 ►
And so, I don’t know, having taken ayahuasca a fair bit in the Amazon with fairly primitive people,
00:46:55 ►
you always wonder when you’re sitting there watching insects drive spaceships and stuff,
00:47:01 ►
if the guy sitting next to you is also seeing insects drive spaceships,
00:47:05 ►
or if for him that is out of reach in some way.
00:47:10 ►
But in the tryptamine reveries, there is this highly polished, metallic,
00:47:18 ►
you know, the things like the color of sports cars and jet airplanes
00:47:22 ►
and that very high-tech, deeply surfaced kind of thing.
00:47:28 ►
Why this is, you know, I don’t know.
00:47:33 ►
Well, yes, it may be that what it can do,
00:47:35 ►
it’s a continuing carrot phenomenon.
00:47:38 ►
It always communicates to you
00:47:39 ►
wherever you are in human history
00:47:41 ►
with metaphors approximately 50 years ahead of where you’re at.
00:47:47 ►
And by that means it is able to clothe itself in a kind of riveting awesomeness that is
00:47:53 ►
guaranteed to hold your attention because it’s radiating the adumbrations of futurity
00:48:00 ►
throughout the course of the dialogue with it.
00:48:05 ►
And that would be freaky.
00:48:07 ►
That would be very, very freaky.
00:48:09 ►
I mean, you would be hackle-raising to deal with it.
00:48:14 ►
The sharper image catalog.
00:48:17 ►
See, it’s a weird impulse.
00:48:20 ►
It’s somewhat sadomasochistic.
00:48:22 ►
That’s why it’s called the sharper image
00:48:25 ►
you see
00:48:25 ►
because it’s this
00:48:27 ►
again this dichotomy
00:48:29 ►
it’s the erotic but now
00:48:31 ►
ergonomically styled
00:48:34 ►
and resold back to you
00:48:36 ►
as a machine
00:48:37 ►
obviously the ultimate product
00:48:39 ►
we’re already seeing this
00:48:41 ►
the ultimate product is the self
00:48:44 ►
I mean if you could find a way
00:48:46 ►
to deal the self
00:48:48 ►
everybody would be your customer
00:48:50 ►
and that’s what
00:48:53 ►
virtual reality
00:48:54 ►
teledildonics, phone sex
00:48:56 ►
all of these informational
00:48:58 ►
erotic
00:48:59 ►
imaging industries
00:49:02 ►
are all about
00:49:04 ►
the self is big business. It’s also
00:49:06 ►
potentially non-polluting
00:49:08 ►
as a product, provided that
00:49:10 ►
you package it sensitively.
00:49:13 ►
You understand what I’m saying?
00:49:14 ►
Yeah, over here.
00:49:16 ►
I’m not sure if it’s a painting of the screen.
00:49:19 ►
Well, yeah, in the sense that
00:49:20 ►
these experiences cast
00:49:23 ►
doubt on the whole
00:49:24 ►
model of reality that we’re living in.
00:49:27 ►
This is the thing.
00:49:29 ►
See, ideologies seem to be actually like structures more appropriate to large groups of people.
00:49:39 ►
So that we could say reasonably, what do the Germans believe about X?
00:49:45 ►
But we couldn’t say of a given person, you know, what is your ideology?
00:49:52 ►
People don’t have ideologies.
00:49:54 ►
People are just trying to make a buck and stay afloat, you know.
00:49:57 ►
So we have an ideology in this country which says elves can’t happen.
00:50:04 ►
That’s the official word on elves
00:50:07 ►
now we’re all embedded in this official edict on the elf question but nevertheless we all have our
00:50:15 ►
experience and in the same way that a single atom of gold has properties that are different from an aggregate of millions of atoms of gold a single
00:50:28 ►
individual making their way through the world has a far more anomalous set of experiences than any
00:50:36 ►
statistical measuring of the average experience of most people and so then and see now that’s an
00:50:44 ►
example or that gets to what we were talking about this morning about how probability theory of most people. And see, now that’s an example
00:50:45 ►
or that gets to what we were talking about this morning
00:50:47 ►
about how probability theory is screwed up.
00:50:51 ►
There’s something wrong with trying to model the world
00:50:54 ►
with the concept of averages,
00:50:58 ►
composites,
00:51:00 ►
because that’s not what you experience.
00:51:03 ►
What you experience is a single data point called you
00:51:08 ►
moving through the dynamic field of existence
00:51:11 ►
and undergoing bifurcations, catastrophes, transformations,
00:51:17 ►
but never an averaging of any of these things,
00:51:23 ►
never a composite of a larger set of data points.
00:51:26 ►
So somehow the smoothness and hence the boredom
00:51:33 ►
that comes into reality with a concept like statistical mean
00:51:38 ►
is in fact a hallucination or an artifact of the ideology.
00:51:43 ►
It’s not true.
00:51:44 ►
Life is far more interesting than statistics is telling you it is.
00:51:49 ►
I mean, remember the statistic that it was easier to be blown up
00:51:54 ►
in a terrorist attack than for a woman over 40 to remarry
00:51:59 ►
or something like that?
00:52:01 ►
Remember that one?
00:52:03 ►
Well, but obviously women over 40 remarry all the time.
00:52:09 ►
So there’s something wrong with the analysis.
00:52:13 ►
The improbable is far more probable than probability theory would lead you to predict.
00:52:19 ►
That’s what I’m trying to say.
00:52:22 ►
And so making room in our ideology for the surprise is the idea. And I,
00:52:30 ►
you know, have been vehemently accused by people who didn’t understand me of not believing in
00:52:39 ►
anything. I don’t believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness
00:52:45 ►
for which you should light a candle for me at night.
00:52:48 ►
It’s a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip.
00:52:53 ►
After all, what is the basis for believing anything?
00:52:58 ►
I mean, you have to understand you’re a monkey
00:53:00 ►
in some kind of a biological situation
00:53:04 ►
where everything has been evolved to
00:53:06 ►
serve the economy of survival this is not a philosophy course so uh you know belief is a
00:53:15 ►
curious reaction to the present at hand it isn’t to be believed. It’s to be dealt with and experienced and modeled, modeled, modeled,
00:53:28 ►
but not understood.
00:53:29 ►
It can’t be understood.
00:53:31 ►
It must have, and you can quickly satisfy yourself,
00:53:35 ►
that it has dimensions that you cannot model or conceive of.
00:53:40 ►
So that paper that steps towards the way they have to…
00:53:43 ►
No, I’m not anti-science
00:53:45 ►
except that science is a wonderful tool
00:53:49 ►
for answering very specific limited questions
00:53:52 ►
where it goes wrong
00:53:54 ►
is when it becomes a metaphysic
00:53:58 ►
it can’t serve in that way
00:54:01 ►
it’s a method for isolating
00:54:03 ►
operational relationships among different things in that way it’s a method for isolating operational
00:54:06 ►
relationships among
00:54:08 ►
different things
00:54:09 ►
but when you try to extrapolate and say
00:54:11 ►
from that the universe is
00:54:14 ►
this that or the other
00:54:15 ►
it’s too naive
00:54:17 ►
for one thing science takes
00:54:19 ►
material completely seriously
00:54:22 ►
there’s been
00:54:24 ►
linguistics is a science less than a century old,
00:54:29 ►
and linguistics should have preceded metaphysics.
00:54:33 ►
Metaphysics is 2,500 years old.
00:54:36 ►
But if you don’t have a theory of language,
00:54:39 ►
if you don’t understand how meaning is conferred
00:54:42 ►
and what the symbolic enterprise is,
00:54:46 ►
then your metaphysic
00:54:47 ►
is going to be just hopelessly naive
00:54:50 ►
and silly.
00:54:54 ►
Well, it depends on who’s doing the talking.
00:54:58 ►
Yes, the other can only clothe itself
00:55:01 ►
in your nature.
00:55:04 ►
You know, so if you have a set of religious expectations of
00:55:11 ►
some sort and it approaches you it will clothe itself because what it is is it’s a mirrored
00:55:18 ►
surface that as it gets closer and closer to you it becomes clearer and clearer to you that it’s the fulfillment of
00:55:27 ►
all your dreams it’s the fulfillment of all your dreams because it’s a mirrored surface
00:55:31 ►
you are seeing your own self-reflection in it but what you’re trying to do is to get to the
00:55:39 ►
ding on seash of the thing you know the thing in itself you’re trying to break through
00:55:46 ►
the reflective
00:55:47 ►
quality of it
00:55:49 ►
so that like just take the
00:55:52 ►
case of a mirror, a child thinks
00:55:54 ►
a mirror is a window into a room
00:55:56 ►
where its twin
00:55:57 ►
exists, an adult knows
00:55:59 ►
that a mirror is a piece of glass
00:56:02 ►
with a silvered back that casts
00:56:04 ►
light back upon itself.
00:56:06 ►
These two explanations are completely incommiserate.
00:56:09 ►
No part of the first is preserved in the latter.
00:56:13 ►
And if you are naive about the structure of the unconscious,
00:56:18 ►
then when it approaches you, you will adore it
00:56:22 ►
because it is able to take upon itself the raiment of its radiance you know
00:56:28 ►
i mean it’s an archetype it crackles with existential vitality and intensity that’s why i
00:56:36 ►
think the dmt creatures say do not abandon yourself to wonder do not give way to awe you know try and hold back you know enough
00:56:47 ►
with the genuflection already now pay attention because it wants to be
00:56:54 ►
understood to some degree on its own terms I mean I’ve had the experience on
00:56:59 ►
mushrooms of of meeting it in a certain guise and then saying to it, show me what you are
00:57:07 ►
for yourself.
00:57:10 ►
And it’s just like the whole tone of the experience changes and the temperature falls and the
00:57:16 ►
black curtains begin to rise and there’s this organ tone.
00:57:20 ►
And after about 30 seconds of that, you just say that thank you is enough about what you are
00:57:27 ►
for yourself let’s go back to the dancing mice and you know what i was thinking about mayan kingship
00:57:35 ►
and so forth you know the cheerful intellectual furniture of my own private idaho but no more the the no more the abyss of what you are for yourself because
00:57:50 ►
and so then you realize you know it is truly alien it will let you see as much of it as you
00:57:56 ►
can stand I have a friend who that’s what he says about his mushroom trips he says each time i try to stand more you know because it’s there seems to be no limit there
00:58:09 ►
seems to be as much as you and you know and some people look over into that abyss and pull back
00:58:15 ►
and just say okay now i know now i want to knit and and you know work with the poor and do good works
00:58:27 ►
and hope that I never ever see that again
00:58:31 ►
have you had any experience
00:58:34 ►
going through that
00:58:35 ►
or knowing what you’re asking
00:58:37 ►
you mean going through that weird
00:58:39 ►
no I mean I tend to think that’s it
00:58:44 ►
that that is
00:58:46 ►
the message that the message
00:58:49 ►
is that the mind
00:58:51 ►
is poised on
00:58:52 ►
on a precipice
00:58:54 ►
of incomprehension
00:58:56 ►
and that there are
00:58:58 ►
you know as Shakespeare said more things
00:59:00 ►
in heaven and earth than are dreamt
00:59:03 ►
of in your philosophy
00:59:04 ►
Horatio that more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy Horacio
00:59:05 ►
that
00:59:07 ►
the
00:59:08 ►
enterprise of understanding
00:59:11 ►
is dizzying I mean it’s an ecstasy
00:59:14 ►
in itself that’s why
00:59:16 ►
to me what the essence of being
00:59:18 ►
psychedelic is
00:59:19 ►
is a flirtation
00:59:21 ►
with detail
00:59:23 ►
and multiplicity.
00:59:26 ►
I mean, that’s why I’m so fascinated by history,
00:59:28 ►
because it’s such a complex object.
00:59:32 ►
I like complex stuff.
00:59:36 ►
History, art history, philosophy, languages, magic,
00:59:41 ►
all of these things.
00:59:42 ►
I like the well-wrought and complex, the pattern turned in upon itself,
00:59:50 ►
the place where mind has moved across the sand and left a tracing.
00:59:56 ►
And in all of that, then, there is some kind of satisfaction.
01:00:03 ►
You know, in ruins, in old books, in forgotten places, in the places where people haven’t been poking around so long.
01:00:12 ►
I mean, the river of cognition is broad and deep, and many people are, you know, worrying about, I don’t know, the Simpsons or something like that.
01:00:22 ►
I don’t know, The Simpsons or something like that.
01:00:27 ►
But over at the fractal edges of the great river,
01:00:34 ►
the peculiar, the bizarre, the little dealt with is flourishing.
01:00:34 ►
Yeah.
01:00:38 ►
Could you talk a little bit about ego death on psychedelic trips and if it’s related at all to that area of weirdness
01:00:41 ►
that people look at when they say,
01:00:44 ►
you know, show me the experience for itself?
01:00:47 ►
Well, I think the issue for male personalities,
01:00:52 ►
dominator personalities, strong egos, so forth,
01:00:55 ►
with psychedelics is the issue of surrender,
01:00:59 ►
that you really do submit.
01:01:03 ►
You know, the beef that goes on
01:01:06 ►
with these other schools of spiritual aspiration
01:01:13 ►
that psychedelics are too easy
01:01:16 ►
or that it’s not done incrementally,
01:01:21 ►
year after year,
01:01:23 ►
following the strict teachings of the guru.
01:01:26 ►
Well, the real thing is an act of self-abandonment,
01:01:31 ►
an act of giving yourself over to the greater force of the universe.
01:01:37 ►
And this is very hard to do, and it doesn’t get easier, I think, the more you do it.
01:01:41 ►
Maybe it gets harder.
01:01:44 ►
But I think that that’s the way you advance
01:01:47 ►
that you cannot advance by direct frontal assault
01:01:51 ►
on the mystery
01:01:52 ►
and all occult schools suffer from this belief
01:01:58 ►
that it’s an act of cognitive assimilation
01:02:02 ►
it isn’t
01:02:03 ►
it’s an act of boundary dissolution that you achieve
01:02:06 ►
by doing something radical
01:02:09 ►
and that something
01:02:11 ►
radical is getting loaded
01:02:12 ►
that will
01:02:15 ►
turn the trick in most cases
01:02:17 ►
I think it is
01:02:20 ►
I think that all these other things
01:02:23 ►
are hocus pocus
01:02:24 ►
and mumbo jumjumbo I
01:02:26 ►
mean I did say last night you know that I’m interested in this particular family
01:02:31 ►
of indole hallucinogens but I I think you know no method no guru no teacher it
01:02:39 ►
that nobody has a handle on this. Nobody understands. All these esoteric schools are the double-dealing of beady-eyed priests.
01:02:49 ►
Maybe most.
01:02:50 ►
I think all.
01:02:52 ►
I mean, I just figure, you know, if it walks like a duck,
01:02:56 ►
if it talks like a duck, it probably is a duck.
01:02:59 ►
And if there is somebody who actually has superior knowledge,
01:03:03 ►
who’s holding it back, then they really have something to answer for
01:03:07 ►
because, you know, the world is going nuts for the absence of real doorways.
01:03:15 ►
But I think that if somebody breaks through, you’ll know about it.
01:03:20 ►
And that all of these theories are simply encumbrances to direct experience and and direct
01:03:27 ►
experience comes through sexuality built into the biological and social nature of things and
01:03:34 ►
the psychedelic experience not built into the biological and social nature of things at the
01:03:41 ►
moment but in the past it was and we were much happier and in the future
01:03:46 ►
it must be or we probably aren’t
01:03:48 ►
going to survive
01:03:50 ►
modern culture suppresses sexuality
01:03:52 ►
as well as psychedelics
01:03:53 ►
modern culture is very anxious
01:03:56 ►
about any activity
01:03:57 ►
that dissolves
01:04:00 ►
boundaries, sex is
01:04:02 ►
suppressed, you know I mean we come out
01:04:04 ►
we, meaning we the
01:04:05 ►
inheritors of European civilization out of a tradition that within a hundred
01:04:10 ►
years ago women were in curtain and men I suppose were encouraged to dress in
01:04:16 ►
the dark so that their own bodies would not be occasions for sins of thought
01:04:23 ►
well this is the screwiest stuff ever to come down the pike.
01:04:29 ►
I mean, this is weirder than wearing powdered wigs
01:04:31 ►
or having mass human sacrifice or any of the rest of it.
01:04:36 ►
And we’re, you know, the great-great-grandchildren of those people
01:04:39 ►
built hydrogen bombs.
01:04:41 ►
So it’s quite bizarre. bizarre sexuality is the one place where they have not
01:04:52 ►
really though they’ve been able to distort it and manipulate it they haven’t been able to get rid of
01:04:57 ►
it or take it away i mean they’ve tried to force it into matrimony, try to limit it to its biological function,
01:05:06 ►
try to make it a thing of shame and horror, but, you know, at least it survives.
01:05:14 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:05:17 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:05:21 ►
Now, I realize that I don’t need to point this out to you,
01:05:24 ►
but didn’t you find it quite interesting that back in 1994, Terence McKenna was already calling into question the then-current black hole theory?
01:05:34 ►
And if you’ve been paying attention to the news and the world of physics lately, you already know that Stephen Hawking himself has recently said much the same thing as we just heard Terence say.
01:05:44 ►
Stephen Hawking himself has recently said much the same thing as we just heard Terence say.
01:05:51 ►
Of course, that’s my layman’s take on it, and perhaps one of our fellow salonners, who is also a physicist,
01:05:56 ►
will post an explanatory comment about this in the program notes for today’s podcast,
01:06:02 ►
and let us know that most likely I’ve probably misunderstood what Hawkins was saying.
01:06:06 ►
Well, as I said at the beginning of this podcast,
01:06:11 ►
I’m going to save my voice for the next podcast. However, I do want to be sure that you know about the Wild Wild West Festival that will take place in Arizona at the end of April. And at that
01:06:17 ►
festival, I will be hosting the very first live sessions of the salon. And I’ll put a link to it in the program notes for this podcast,
01:06:25 ►
which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from
01:06:31 ►
cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.