Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“This nuclear family thing is, I think, part of the root of our problem, that it is an engine for the production of neurotic, dysfunctional people.”
“If guys really got as much sex as they think they want they would probably hand over the machinery of civilization without a fight.”
“I’m interested in the moral consequences of taking psychedelics.”
“Everything that is, is an anticipation of what will be.”
Podcast 380 – “Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And today, after we listen to the next installment of a February 1994 Terrence McKenna workshop,
00:00:34 ►
I’ve got an announcement about a new way that we’ll be covering expenses here in the salon.
00:00:39 ►
But don’t fast forward just to hear it. Nothing exciting there, actually.
00:00:45 ►
However, what we’re going to do is have a once-a-year pledge drive and only accept donations during the month of March.
00:00:51 ►
That way, nobody will have to experience any pangs of guilt when they read the program notes,
00:00:55 ►
because except during the month of March, there’s no longer going to be a donate button on the website.
00:01:02 ►
But before I explain all of that, let’s first get back into the McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to.
00:01:06 ►
As usual, it is questions from the attendees at the workshop who shape the conversation, and this one begins with Terrence’s interesting concept that
00:01:12 ►
the world would be a much better place if there was only one man for every three women.
00:01:19 ►
It’s an obviously over-the-top idea that even Terrence doesn’t believe in, but he says that it’s primarily intended to get people talking about the fact that
00:01:28 ►
our current way of life doesn’t seem to be working out very well.
00:01:32 ►
So let’s join them now and see if he sparks some new ideas in you as well.
00:01:38 ►
Can you maybe briefly go into what your model for how sexual relationships would be in a society like if
00:01:46 ►
you had an ideal like how would you set up the sexual interactions like would you get a
00:01:51 ►
did you weigh with marriage and like how would you do it well that’s an interesting question
00:01:56 ►
certainly because i mean in my own, I’ve gone from incredibly traditional arrangements, you know, long marriage, monogamy, and my early psychosexual existence was, I think, very mainstream in that it was driven by the archetypes of Hollywood. Like I was always amused, or not amused,
00:02:27 ►
but puzzled by the concept casual sex.
00:02:30 ►
Couldn’t exactly put those two concepts together,
00:02:34 ►
because for me, every relationship I ever had
00:02:37 ►
was, you know, Galahad approaching the Grail, or something.
00:02:42 ►
And then I got married, and then I was married for a long time,
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and then my marriage ended,
00:02:48 ►
and so I’ve been single for a number of years.
00:02:51 ►
So I have thought about this.
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I don’t have a prescription,
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but I’ll tell you how I think about it.
00:03:01 ►
My approach to everything tends to be mathematical
00:03:04 ►
in order to not miss any of the cases
00:03:08 ►
you just work through the exhaustive set
00:03:11 ►
and try to understand it like that
00:03:12 ►
so the exhaustive set is first of all
00:03:15 ►
you can be single and celibate
00:03:19 ►
this is out of the question
00:03:23 ►
for me
00:03:24 ►
and in this area all you have to do This is out of the question for me.
00:03:30 ►
And in this area, all you have to do is answer the question for yourself. So while there may be those brave and either highly motivated or completely neurotic or God-inspired, who knows, people who can be celibate, i don’t think i’m one of them and i think you know the
00:03:47 ►
i-ching invades against a kind of uh yeah sterile it says it says ideas not fertilized by friends
00:03:56 ►
or something gross there too then so now moving through the numerical arrangements. The post-Reformation, post-industrial solution
00:04:06 ►
is the nuclear family,
00:04:09 ►
which I’ve attacked at times in the past.
00:04:13 ►
It is not a traditional social unit.
00:04:17 ►
It’s less than 250 years old.
00:04:19 ►
This is the man, the wife, and the two children.
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The traditional social unit is a very large extended family
00:04:26 ►
of cousins, sisters, brothers-in-laws, children, elders, so forth and so on.
00:04:33 ►
This nuclear family thing is, I think, part of the root of our problem,
00:04:39 ►
that it is an engine for the production of neurotic dysfunctional people and you know the entire
00:04:46 ►
industry of psychotherapy is based around trying to straighten out what was done to people by their
00:04:54 ►
family and trying to get them to stop doing equally horrible things to the people within their family structure. And it’s an artifact of capitalism.
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It does not serve human needs.
00:05:11 ►
It serves the needs of the engines of capital.
00:05:14 ►
And it also is based on paranoia.
00:05:16 ►
I mean, monogamy in all forms is based on extraordinary anxiety,
00:05:22 ►
male anxiety about the behavior of females.
00:05:26 ►
And it also denigrates females to the level of property because they have to be controlled and so forth and so on.
00:05:33 ►
So I conclude then from that that certainly marriage doesn’t seem to work and the high levels of divorce and all that seem to support that
00:05:45 ►
marriage is I think
00:05:47 ►
a kind of part of
00:05:50 ►
what has
00:05:52 ►
gone on since the industrial revolution
00:05:54 ►
is what’s called
00:05:55 ►
forced social neoteny
00:05:58 ►
neoteny is the
00:05:59 ►
phenomenon of maintaining
00:06:01 ►
juvenile characteristics into
00:06:04 ►
adulthood and marriage is a kind phenomenon of maintaining juvenile characteristics into adulthood.
00:06:13 ►
And marriage is a kind of neotenous caesura in life’s development,
00:06:17 ►
where you’re just about to cross the great bridge into adulthood, and then it says, last exit before authentic responsibility, get married.
00:06:24 ►
And so people leave the great freeway of life
00:06:27 ►
and they get married
00:06:28 ►
and they form this you and me against the world
00:06:31 ►
us back to back
00:06:32 ►
this basically paranoid unit
00:06:35 ►
and they set off then to acquire
00:06:37 ►
houses in the south of France
00:06:39 ►
and little Miro etchings
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and stuff like that
00:06:43 ►
and then it ends in great unhappiness and bitterness usually
00:06:49 ►
and people say they wasted their time
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and they weren’t understood and so forth and so on.
00:06:53 ►
So two doesn’t work, I conclude, in this monogamous thing.
00:06:59 ►
Okay, so then we come now to the flashy possibilities.
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then we come now to the flashy possibilities. The culture, the subculture in pornography, fashion,
00:07:12 ►
and the advanced sectors of our society,
00:07:16 ►
meaning the people who edit interview magazine or I don’t know, but something.
00:07:21 ►
Anyway, the subliminal message there is that three is far out, a menage a trois of some sort, and that if you get into a relationship like this, you’re really stretching the envelope and quite avant-garde and growth opportunity and so forth and so on my analysis of this is that it is actually
00:07:46 ►
a male dominator fantasy of some sort that it has a sadomasochistic
00:07:54 ►
flavor to it because what you have are two women who are somehow inevitably in competition, inevitably
00:08:06 ►
judged, valued, male
00:08:08 ►
valued judgments are happening
00:08:10 ►
it’s sick
00:08:12 ►
it seems to me, or suspect
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let’s put it that way, I don’t want to
00:08:15 ►
trod on anybody’s arrangement
00:08:18 ►
but
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well
00:08:21 ►
so then, here then
00:08:24 ►
is where I was left with this and then I won’t take it any further, that an interesting social arrangement is the 3-1 arrangement.
00:08:35 ►
It’s almost, in some sense, fair, and it is amoeboid.
00:08:44 ►
No one can control it.
00:08:45 ►
It’s too complicated.
00:08:47 ►
And I don’t think it’s a male fantasy.
00:08:49 ►
I think if you suggest to most males
00:08:51 ►
that they should enter a simultaneous relationship with three women,
00:08:56 ►
that there is a constriction
00:08:59 ►
because it’s over-challenging.
00:09:04 ►
But that, in fact, if we’re talking about future arrangements, because it’s over-challenging.
00:09:09 ►
But that, in fact, if we’re talking about future arrangements that completely replace the ordinary family,
00:09:12 ►
then one thing that would work, I think,
00:09:15 ►
are these 3-1 relationships with a periphery of children around them,
00:09:21 ►
and 75% of those children are female.
00:09:24 ►
Because I think built
00:09:26 ►
into this one woman one child
00:09:28 ►
thing is this
00:09:30 ►
concept that male
00:09:32 ►
birth should be reduced
00:09:34 ►
and that
00:09:35 ►
there should be
00:09:38 ►
far less males
00:09:39 ►
in the society and that
00:09:42 ►
that is the way to change
00:09:44 ►
the ratio of the functions
00:09:45 ►
being expressed. What we need is more
00:09:47 ►
nurturing. We need more
00:09:49 ►
maternalism. And the way to do
00:09:52 ►
that is to get more maternal people.
00:09:54 ►
And since most maternal people seem to
00:09:56 ►
be female, this kind of social
00:09:58 ►
engineering could be done.
00:09:59 ►
This is like a fantasy in answer
00:10:02 ►
to your question because, of course,
00:10:04 ►
none of this will be done because it will be leaped on by hysterical fundamentalists and denounced as Satan’s work and so forth.
00:10:11 ►
But I think the dynamic of three to one is an interesting one.
00:10:22 ►
following Camille Paglia and that kind of rhetoric
00:10:24 ►
what we’re saying here is that
00:10:25 ►
if guys really
00:10:28 ►
got as much sex
00:10:30 ►
as they think they want
00:10:32 ►
they would probably hand
00:10:34 ►
over the machinery of
00:10:36 ►
civilization without a fight
00:10:38 ►
and
00:10:40 ►
so it’s like
00:10:44 ►
you know you want it, here it is.
00:10:46 ►
Is this why prostitution is illegal?
00:10:50 ►
Why? Make it make sense for me?
00:10:52 ►
Because males would spend all of their energy,
00:10:55 ►
would spend all of their resources buying sex.
00:10:58 ►
Well, but the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t make it non-existent.
00:11:03 ►
I don’t know.
00:11:04 ►
But it’s very tightly controlled by males.
00:11:08 ►
Yeah, well, we have to have strategies
00:11:11 ►
for reducing male dominance,
00:11:13 ►
and we have to have strategies for advancing females,
00:11:18 ►
but we can’t tromp on anybody living.
00:11:22 ►
So obviously then what we have to do
00:11:24 ►
are twiddle the demographic dials.
00:11:27 ►
We have to control birth rates overall.
00:11:30 ►
Then we have to control
00:11:31 ►
the sexual ratio of birth rates.
00:11:34 ►
And then I just don’t think
00:11:35 ►
the monogamous marriage
00:11:37 ►
and the family unit,
00:11:40 ►
it’s really dysfunctional.
00:11:42 ►
And I came up with this 3-1 thing because I also don’t see us returning to the traditional extended family of many relatives and generations of people because modern transportation makes that impossible. So a family based on genetic relationships doesn’t seem to me possible.
00:12:07 ►
But what does seem possible is social cohesion based on erotic attachment.
00:12:16 ►
And that’s what this 3-1 thing and then the constellation of people around it would be.
00:12:22 ►
Yeah?
00:12:23 ►
What kind of feedback
00:12:25 ►
are you getting from females
00:12:27 ►
about that kind of thing?
00:12:29 ►
It sounds more like a male fantasy
00:12:31 ►
than a female fantasy
00:12:33 ►
than a three-to-one.
00:12:36 ►
Well, I suppose
00:12:37 ►
to be absolutely fair,
00:12:40 ►
female fantasies might
00:12:42 ►
involve more males,
00:12:43 ►
but that’s not allowed.
00:12:45 ►
We have enough.
00:12:47 ►
So we’re…
00:12:48 ►
Because the overexpression of this dominator tendency
00:12:52 ►
is what’s running us to rack and ruin.
00:12:54 ►
We’re not trying to create these social arrangements
00:12:58 ►
for the titillation of one sex or the other.
00:13:01 ►
We’re in a sinking submarine, for Christ’s sake.
00:13:03 ►
We’re trying to sort this out so we
00:13:06 ►
live, you know,
00:13:08 ►
and then hanky-panky later.
00:13:10 ►
Yes?
00:13:11 ►
Do you mean to mention love or is that outside of the whole thing?
00:13:13 ►
Is that clouding the issue?
00:13:15 ►
No, I don’t think that clouds the…
00:13:18 ►
You mean
00:13:20 ►
that you imagine that
00:13:21 ►
love can only go on
00:13:23 ►
in this dyadic situation?
00:13:29 ►
Well, I don’t know. I mean, I
00:13:31 ►
think that love…
00:13:34 ►
The thing I like
00:13:36 ►
about this 3-1 thing
00:13:38 ►
is that it’s inherently
00:13:39 ►
kind of unstable.
00:13:41 ►
You can tell that the energy
00:13:43 ►
will never settle. it what happens with a
00:13:48 ►
lot of marriages and even extended relationships is people come together there’s all kinds of
00:13:54 ►
excitement they negotiate the arrangement they get the negotiation taken care of and then
00:14:01 ►
everything goes stale as the negotiate as the contract is acted out.
00:14:06 ►
If there were never any stability, if it kept changing all the time,
00:14:13 ►
then keeping track of this complex quadripartite relationship would be a full-time task.
00:14:20 ►
It would almost replace your job as what?
00:14:30 ►
Geoffrey.
00:14:31 ►
This isn’t going to work.
00:14:36 ►
Great.
00:14:36 ►
So you would kick the man out
00:14:38 ►
in no time at all.
00:14:39 ►
Because they get on much better with each other.
00:14:42 ►
Well that’s why the man
00:14:44 ►
has to be inspired
00:14:45 ►
to achieve
00:14:47 ►
indispensability.
00:14:50 ►
But, Karen, what’s the difference between that
00:14:51 ►
and getting the men to fork over the goods
00:14:53 ►
for sex? I mean, it seems like it’s as bold as
00:14:55 ►
Cleopatra. No, wait, I don’t understand.
00:14:58 ►
How did goods enter into it?
00:15:01 ►
I thought, I’m sorry,
00:15:02 ►
I thought you said that this was a way
00:15:03 ►
that women could get men to
00:15:05 ►
hand over the controls by offering them sex, but it seems to me that’s been tried. In fact,
00:15:10 ►
we see, you know, tycoons with beautiful women on their side, you know, at their side.
00:15:17 ►
Well, isn’t this the way, the only way women were allowed to compete to get the men to do what they
00:15:23 ►
wanted through sex? I mean mean that doesn’t seem very new
00:15:26 ►
to me. Well I think
00:15:28 ►
we’re talking though about a new kind of woman
00:15:30 ►
we’re not talking about
00:15:32 ►
submissive
00:15:35 ►
slave
00:15:36 ►
like property
00:15:38 ►
we’re talking about
00:15:39 ►
independent, educated
00:15:42 ►
financially
00:15:43 ►
independent professionals.
00:15:47 ►
It would be, I’m sure, a phenomenon of the high-tech industrial democracies.
00:15:53 ►
I mean, it’s weird to talk about this, but on the other hand, you have two choices.
00:15:57 ►
You can either propose something which sounds outlandish,
00:16:00 ►
or you can stick with what we’ve got,
00:16:03 ►
because what we’ve got we’ve had so long that anything else would sound outlandish, or you can stick with what we’ve got, because what we’ve got we’ve had so long that
00:16:05 ►
anything else would sound outlandish. And, you know, in the messy business of life, what really
00:16:13 ►
happens is that it just is sort of all kinds of things come and go, gel and dissolve, and work
00:16:20 ►
themselves out under the aegis of all kinds of pressures, economic, epidemiological, psychological,
00:16:26 ►
driven by images of media and self-worth fads and so forth.
00:16:33 ►
You have more of an idea of eros.
00:16:36 ►
Well, I was thinking of this earlier today for some reason.
00:16:39 ►
I was thinking that, I don’t know why I was thinking this,
00:16:43 ►
but I was thinking that sex is so intrinsically
00:16:46 ►
a mental activity that the amazing thing is that it’s kept in the body at all and and that normally
00:16:55 ►
this equation is turned upside down and people say you know well it’s so intrinsically of the body. But, you know, the fact that phone sex can be a $9 billion a year industry
00:17:08 ►
is telling us something about how erotic sensitivity is distributed
00:17:14 ►
through the network of the civilization.
00:17:20 ►
Yeah, I mean, it’s a pity that it is linked so closely to biology. I mean, this is why the cult of sexiness is all it is and you know it’s the
00:17:48 ►
permeating erotic sensitivity that characterizes modern civilization in billboards in advertising
00:17:57 ►
in the constant assault of visual images i mean i really notice this when I go up the Amazon because there’s no calendars
00:18:06 ►
there’s no girly pictures there’s no nothing and then when you get back to a ketos you just realize
00:18:13 ►
you know that what civilization is is a notion of of explicit erotic imagery that keeps us all in
00:18:21 ►
a state of probably willingness to consume stuff.
00:18:26 ►
It’s a stimulant, yes, like caffeine, but it’s a sexual stimulant.
00:18:35 ►
That’s right.
00:18:36 ►
I mean, like the bisexuality, which is a characteristic of feminine psychology in this society,
00:18:43 ►
is, I think, directly related to the rise of modern advertising.
00:18:47 ►
There was no reason to reinforce that before 1850 or so.
00:18:53 ►
And then you see this emerging.
00:18:56 ►
Do you think that virtual big wars…
00:18:58 ►
Well, I don’t know. Is there a rage…
00:19:00 ►
I mean, I suppose there is a raging debate about pornography.
00:19:03 ►
There’s a raging debate about everything. There’s a raging debate about everything.
00:19:07 ►
Oh, pornography toward women and children.
00:19:09 ►
Well, I’d make a distinction between…
00:19:13 ►
Oh, God, now do we want to go off into this?
00:19:26 ►
Camille Paglia asked a very interesting question
00:19:29 ►
to which I don’t have the answer
00:19:30 ►
and I don’t even think we need to discuss it
00:19:33 ►
but I think everybody should think about it
00:19:36 ►
and the question was
00:19:37 ►
can sexual liberation end anywhere
00:19:42 ►
but in sadomasochism and that’s a very interesting question and sure it
00:19:51 ►
can well she said maybe not I don’t know I don’t want to mud wrestle over it and then and then you
00:20:00 ►
know what what do we think about this for instance aggression toward women it what do we think about this? For instance, aggression toward women.
00:20:08 ►
What do we think of aggression toward women that is acted out
00:20:13 ►
and no women are actually abused?
00:20:17 ►
And this is where the pornography thing comes in.
00:20:20 ►
You know, is it subliminal?
00:20:22 ►
Is it a cause or a substitute?
00:20:24 ►
If it’s a substitute, we must substitute if it’s a substitute we must surely
00:20:27 ►
agree it’s a good thing if it’s a cause we must surely agree it’s a bad thing or is it both um i
00:20:34 ►
i don’t have burning opinions about all this i’m a i’m a first amendment guy right down the line and and just take a position that nothing should be restricted
00:20:46 ►
by government that they’re whatever the means by which the memes are sorted out it should not be
00:20:55 ►
the wisdom of a benevolent government telling us what kind of images uh we should have the the tough one in is you know images of pain and abuse images of psychological
00:21:10 ►
degradation I don’t know exactly what to do about that you know if you go back to the roots of
00:21:15 ►
Western civilization and read Plato’s Republic Plato was very suspicious of the poets and did not think those people should be just allowed to run
00:21:27 ►
untrammeled over the landscape.
00:21:30 ►
And, you know, here at Esalen,
00:21:33 ►
a great deal of time and effort has been expended
00:21:37 ►
to establish the medical concept
00:21:40 ►
that there are healing images.
00:21:44 ►
You know, Stan’s work, some of Michael Murphy’s work,
00:21:47 ►
some of the continuum work.
00:21:49 ►
Healing images are an article of faith around here.
00:21:53 ►
I believe it.
00:21:54 ►
But has anybody stopped to notice
00:21:56 ►
that if there are healing images,
00:21:59 ►
there are sickening images.
00:22:02 ►
Well, then, then so if you have
00:22:05 ►
tuberculosis
00:22:06 ►
we don’t say you have
00:22:10 ►
a right to mingle
00:22:11 ►
with the rest of us or if you have some other
00:22:14 ►
contagious rampantly
00:22:15 ►
contagious disease
00:22:17 ►
so then if you’re carrying a meme
00:22:20 ►
which is toxic
00:22:21 ►
then you know
00:22:23 ►
do your First Amendment rights
00:22:26 ►
exceed the mental health rights
00:22:29 ►
of the majority?
00:22:31 ►
This is a nightmare issue to discuss
00:22:33 ►
because I heard a discussion on talk radio
00:22:37 ►
and somebody was invading against silence of the lambs
00:22:40 ►
and saying it caused psychotic behavior
00:22:43 ►
and somebody else called in and said well if you want to ban books that cause psychotic
00:22:48 ►
behavior, I think you better start with the Bible.
00:22:51 ►
It’s caused more psychotic behavior among more people than any other book in history.
00:22:56 ►
Certainly true, but we’re not obviously going to do that.
00:23:01 ►
But what is the relationship to to toxic information and
00:23:06 ►
psychedelic people i think can take a more cutting edge role on this because we know
00:23:13 ►
the danger of toxic information because if you encounter some in your trip it can really throw
00:23:21 ►
you for a loop yeah well I think it comes down to
00:23:25 ►
integrating the shadow.
00:23:27 ►
And if you don’t integrate the shadow,
00:23:31 ►
it becomes very toxic.
00:23:33 ►
So we’ve got to deal with our total humanity,
00:23:36 ►
but so far,
00:23:37 ►
what I know, we haven’t.
00:23:39 ►
I mean, I grew up in the most neurotic country
00:23:41 ►
in recent history.
00:23:44 ►
Of course, the United States is catching up fast.
00:23:46 ►
I was born in Germany in 1975.
00:23:49 ►
I had this feeling.
00:23:50 ►
I grew up.
00:23:51 ►
I said, God, what is that about?
00:23:53 ►
I had no words for it.
00:23:55 ►
You know, I was just horrified.
00:23:56 ►
I never wanted to grow up like that.
00:23:58 ►
Then I, you know, I end up in America.
00:24:01 ►
Now it’s going to be like being German twice.
00:24:05 ►
Bad luck for you.
00:24:10 ►
Terrible choices.
00:24:13 ►
But it’s more comfortable in Germany, I would say.
00:24:16 ►
Well, doesn’t that lead you right back to psychedelics
00:24:18 ►
again?
00:24:18 ►
Do you want to straighten all this stuff up?
00:24:20 ►
You’ve got to start with the brain
00:24:22 ►
and you’ve got to start with…
00:24:25 ►
Yeah.
00:24:27 ►
Although a question that interests me
00:24:29 ►
since I’ve been roughly doing workshops like this
00:24:32 ►
since 1983
00:24:33 ►
and I’ve gotten to know everybody
00:24:38 ►
and the psychedelic movement
00:24:40 ►
and all the personalities and shakers
00:24:42 ►
and so forth and so on
00:24:43 ►
and many of you in this
00:24:45 ►
room i’ve known for years and years and a question that’s interesting to me is you know uh like
00:24:52 ►
everybody else on some ideological bender eventually we’re going to have to answer to
00:25:00 ►
uh the bar of public opinion you know what is so great about our thing
00:25:06 ►
or are we just like Mormons
00:25:09 ►
or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Rajneeshis
00:25:12 ►
or something and we have this wonderful thing
00:25:15 ►
which we’re just convinced is the Holy Grail
00:25:18 ►
and yet if you’re not part of our little clique
00:25:20 ►
then it just looks like a bunch of deluded
00:25:24 ►
lost souls reinforcing each other’s
00:25:27 ►
belief in some alchemical nostrum that uh you know so i’m interested in the moral consequences
00:25:34 ►
of taking psychedelics uh time is passing is the meme breaking loose? Is it a positive meme? Do people behave better to each other?
00:25:46 ►
Do they perform acts of charity or whatever, acts of creativity?
00:25:52 ►
Or is it good for the individual but inconsequential in its effects on society?
00:26:00 ►
In other words, when the final catastrophe comes,
00:26:04 ►
you will meet it with great
00:26:06 ►
humor equanimity uh understanding because your psychedelic training has taught you to take it all
00:26:14 ►
with a grain of salt but nevertheless you know the sludge will sweep over and all will be lost
00:26:21 ►
and you just went down without whining or complaining.
00:26:26 ►
I don’t know.
00:26:31 ►
The thing that is so surprising about the psychedelics is how close to the surface the state lies
00:26:36 ►
and yet how dramatically different from ordinary consciousness it is.
00:26:41 ►
I mean, it is dramatically different and it lies very, very close to the surface.
00:26:46 ►
This is why it’s possible to suggest that it’s just a one or two gene mutation away
00:26:52 ►
in the neurochemistry, and then you would be able to slip into these places. I mean,
00:26:57 ►
thinking, what is thinking? Reverie, you know, and where in the animal phylogeny does it begin and how intense is it
00:27:07 ►
mental behaviors with the internal contemplation of language how how broadly based are these
00:27:16 ►
behaviors how many different kinds of them are there we don’t know we don’t even have a vocabulary
00:27:23 ►
for this kind of thing.
00:27:26 ►
Yes, you wanted to say something.
00:27:33 ►
Just an observation after 20 years of studying and experimenting with psychedelics is that one of the things that they do is that they allow a person,
00:27:38 ►
this is assuming that we are not thinking the thoughts that we are identifying with.
00:27:44 ►
And if you do psychedelics, you get to a state where you’re beyond thinking.
00:27:48 ►
You step aside and there’s a common denominator that a lot of people,
00:27:55 ►
yogis and people who have studied for 20 or 30 or 40 years,
00:27:58 ►
that we can assimilate that same state in a relatively short period of time.
00:28:04 ►
And that in history, we can’t really change anybody but ourselves.
00:28:09 ►
And by changing ourselves, we can change everything.
00:28:13 ►
And that what’s going to happen and what’s not going to happen in the future,
00:28:19 ►
if every person can work on being 100% conscious in the moment,
00:28:24 ►
that’s where all the magic happens, That’s where all the magic happens.
00:28:26 ►
That’s where all the miracles happen.
00:28:28 ►
It’s being 100% here, focused.
00:28:31 ►
And by doing that, then whatever is happening,
00:28:35 ►
you’re able to be part of a solution
00:28:38 ►
instead of part of an illusion.
00:28:42 ►
And so, wordly blessed, I feel, to have good psychedelics
00:28:46 ►
and to be able to spend
00:28:48 ►
many years that many people have
00:28:50 ►
experimenting with them.
00:28:52 ►
And that the gift is
00:28:54 ►
to be an example of what
00:28:56 ►
having a brother or sister
00:28:57 ►
and to be able to share that with our children,
00:28:59 ►
how they can grow up and become conscious.
00:29:06 ►
Yeah, one way to think of it is
00:29:08 ►
what you call 100% aware
00:29:12 ►
is to just strive for appropriate activity.
00:29:17 ►
That if everyone in this room
00:29:19 ►
were to suddenly begin behaving
00:29:22 ►
completely appropriately,
00:29:25 ►
it would immediately change the context of things
00:29:28 ►
and set the stage for further appropriate behavior.
00:29:33 ►
And this would be like a cascade of appropriateness.
00:29:38 ►
I mean, enlightenment need be nothing more than that, I think.
00:29:42 ►
Now we’re just getting into that area of almost like religion.
00:29:47 ►
It’s like what you just said.
00:29:51 ►
It sounds like somebody is in an est or somebody behind a pulpit.
00:29:57 ►
It’s really close to that, but it’s good.
00:30:01 ►
Well, let’s hope it’s not too close to that.
00:30:06 ►
It’s contagious
00:30:07 ►
coherence. Well,
00:30:09 ►
appropriate activity. I mean, is somebody
00:30:11 ►
going to speak up for inappropriate
00:30:13 ►
activity? I mean, it’s
00:30:16 ►
a winning
00:30:16 ►
concept.
00:30:19 ►
But the inappropriate activities
00:30:21 ►
ramp it already as it is.
00:30:23 ►
I mean, that’s pretty obvious.
00:30:25 ►
Yeah, well, inappropriate activity stems from bad communication,
00:30:30 ►
you know, bad message transfer.
00:30:34 ►
No, there should be some kind of maximum energy solution
00:30:39 ►
in any given situation that everybody can relate to.
00:30:44 ►
I mean, once when I was in the Amazon,
00:30:48 ►
I discovered a sense that I didn’t know people had.
00:30:54 ►
On psychedelics, I discovered this sense.
00:30:57 ►
And it’s an internal desk accessory
00:31:02 ►
which allows you to calculate
00:31:05 ►
the least energetic path
00:31:07 ►
between two points
00:31:09 ►
not the shortest distance
00:31:11 ►
but the least
00:31:12 ►
the path of least effort
00:31:14 ►
between any two points
00:31:16 ►
and it has to do with following ridge edges
00:31:19 ►
and I just discovered
00:31:21 ►
this ability
00:31:22 ►
in myself
00:31:24 ►
and it’s real,
00:31:25 ►
and I’m sure it was very important for primitive, you know, for people before history.
00:31:31 ►
And who knows how many of these kinds of talents and abilities and behaviors,
00:31:36 ►
because they’re software programs which, when they become inappropriate, they just fade away.
00:31:44 ►
And yet, you know, the hardware is perfectly capable of running these programs.
00:31:50 ►
Yeah.
00:31:50 ►
I wanted to just harken back to this thing that we started out with.
00:31:55 ►
I’m going to ask you, in this, in the dichotomy between history and arrows,
00:32:02 ►
you say that within history is a kind of built-in end point that you can sense.
00:32:09 ►
Right.
00:32:10 ►
So does that mean that is the life in the history a dissolution into arrows?
00:32:18 ►
Is that the conclusion that you draw from that?
00:32:21 ►
I guess it is the conclusion that I draw from it.
00:32:25 ►
I mean, that finally when language fails, as it surely must,
00:32:30 ►
then there will be love.
00:32:33 ►
Love lies beyond all that.
00:32:40 ►
So you can only take ratiocination so far.
00:32:45 ►
You can only model the thing so much.
00:32:47 ►
That’s why always in these wild, far-flung schemes
00:32:53 ►
of modeling the end of history and the end of time and everything,
00:32:57 ►
the fractal key is one’s own experience.
00:33:01 ►
The feeling of being of death, the feeling of being of death the feeling of love these things can be extrapolated
00:33:09 ►
to universal proportion everybody gives um currency to the idea that ontogeny recapitulates
00:33:19 ►
phylogeny right everybody knows what this means correct ah it’s simple it means that the fetus
00:33:27 ►
in the womb the ontology recapitulates the phylogeny it means that the fetus in the womb
00:33:35 ►
goes through all the stages of evolution it begins as a single-celled creature it becomes like a fish
00:33:42 ►
it becomes an amphibian it changes into a mammal it changes
00:33:46 ►
into a primate it changes into a human being but nobody ever then takes the process further
00:33:53 ►
and says well what we’ve learned by observing this we can learn more by further extending
00:33:59 ►
the process the person in the womb now a complete person is born and then they have a life and then
00:34:09 ►
they die so if ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny then what then the entire answer to how does the
00:34:18 ►
world work and what is it is contained in looking at the fractal substructure of an individual history
00:34:27 ►
from conception to death.
00:34:33 ►
And…
00:34:33 ►
When you talk to me about the body,
00:34:35 ►
there’s a considerable difference in opinion
00:34:37 ►
as to whether a consciousness dies or not,
00:34:40 ►
or whether some physical transmutation takes place
00:34:44 ►
that’s beyond living and come this plane that we can perceive.
00:34:48 ►
Sure, no, right.
00:34:49 ►
There’s no certitude about that question by looking at that process.
00:34:53 ►
But everybody can, you can see that for each of us as individuals,
00:34:59 ►
the thing ends in death, which is a big question mark.
00:35:03 ►
So then, as a society, we should not be surprised
00:35:07 ►
that there is built into the superstructure of the society the same kind of dissolving.
00:35:14 ►
It appears to happen even when there is no real good reason for it. Like, for instance,
00:35:20 ►
with the Maya. I mean they their civilization collapsed basically just
00:35:25 ►
because they were stupid in other words they got bad habits there was no
00:35:31 ►
external pressure on them they just made stupid mistakes and then the whole thing
00:35:37 ►
came apart we could be in a similar in a similar situation. But to your question about how nobody knows
00:35:48 ►
what lies beyond death,
00:35:51 ►
nobody knows who is using the sanctioned tools
00:35:56 ►
of scientific investigation.
00:35:58 ►
But if you go next door to the shamans,
00:36:02 ►
they claim all kinds of information on this question they claim
00:36:07 ►
essentially a technology for accessing an ecology of souls where a great deal of power
00:36:16 ►
for potentially good or evil lies as a reservoir that can be brought across by certain kinds of practices and activities.
00:36:27 ►
Now, science says that that’s malarkey, but science says that the primary datum in support of that contention,
00:36:39 ►
which is the psychedelic experience, is also malarkey.
00:36:48 ►
experience is also malarkey and you can satisfy yourself that the psychedelic experience is in fact an ordered perspective on something coherent simply by having that experience so you little old
00:37:01 ►
you can satisfy yourself that science is not dealing from the top of the deck
00:37:08 ►
on this question of the content and meaning of the psychedelic experience.
00:37:13 ►
And I feel like maybe the big news, the truly jaw-dropping news
00:37:21 ►
that will come out of all this re-exploration of the archaic and shamanism
00:37:26 ►
and hallucinogenic plants and so forth and so on is a mapping of this realm of souls
00:37:33 ►
that what we are actually on the verge of securing is that there is something which survives
00:37:42 ►
the physical organism and it’s hard to tell what it is because you know
00:37:48 ►
essentially we’re at the stage with this where people were with electricity in 1700
00:37:54 ►
we have yet to build the technologies establish the standards and create the vocabulary for
00:38:02 ►
talking about this but if the task of Western epistemology
00:38:07 ►
is to integrate all knowledge into its sway,
00:38:10 ►
then shamanism and the experiences of shamanism
00:38:14 ►
have to be brought into the metaphor.
00:38:17 ►
And I think what this may in fact secure
00:38:20 ►
is that biology is the platform for establishing
00:38:25 ►
some more
00:38:28 ►
hyperdimensional structure
00:38:31 ►
that survives
00:38:33 ►
yeah no
00:38:35 ►
yes stretching
00:38:36 ►
pardon me
00:38:38 ►
well it may be you see that in fact what the most pessimistic among us believe is happening is happening.
00:38:52 ►
That in fact there’s no way out.
00:38:55 ►
That in fact we’re all going to die.
00:38:58 ►
Then the question becomes, what is that?
00:39:03 ►
What does it mean?
00:39:07 ►
Is that a good thing or a bad thing borges had a story where the the intellect of the species could not move on until the last
00:39:17 ►
member of the species became extinct there is some kind of relationship to mind across this barrier or shamans have chosen to interpret
00:39:29 ►
a nearby non-physical species of life as somehow related to the human after death and why that
00:39:38 ►
should be and why that error should persist over 50 or 100,000 years is not clear either.
00:39:45 ►
I said earlier today,
00:39:47 ►
science proceeds with the simple cases first.
00:39:51 ►
You know, what is a marble rolling down a slope,
00:39:54 ►
so forth and so on.
00:39:55 ►
But the complex question,
00:39:57 ►
you know, what is my perception of my being?
00:40:01 ►
What is the nature of the inner dialogue
00:40:04 ►
that describes the ontos of being?
00:40:07 ►
This is a very, very complicated question.
00:40:09 ►
It takes 2,000 years of preparing the epistemic ground
00:40:13 ►
before you can even reasonably ask the question.
00:40:20 ►
Yeah?
00:40:20 ►
You were talking about we’re all dying as a species,
00:40:26 ►
they’re all dying as a civilization.
00:40:28 ►
We don’t like the fact that we’re going to die as individuals,
00:40:31 ►
but somehow we grudgingly accept that
00:40:33 ►
and we create a lot of literature and commerce around it.
00:40:36 ►
Why is the idea that we’re all going to die as a species so much worse?
00:40:43 ►
Well, because I think probably as a species,
00:40:46 ►
we’re more neurotic than our individual members.
00:40:49 ►
We’re pretty hysterical about this.
00:40:51 ►
We’re not taking the news well that the doctor is handing out.
00:40:57 ►
But I think as a culture, maybe…
00:41:00 ►
Something lives on.
00:41:02 ►
Right.
00:41:02 ►
Yes, well, we’ve talked about this in the past
00:41:05 ►
in terms simply of technological innovation.
00:41:08 ►
That, for instance, if a technology of time travel
00:41:11 ►
were to be created, historicity would end.
00:41:15 ►
The linear serial unfolding of events
00:41:20 ►
would become an epoch that lasted from 10,000 BC to 1998 or something.
00:41:28 ►
And then following the epoch of serial moments
00:41:31 ►
came the epoch of non-serial moments,
00:41:35 ►
the epoch of simultaneity,
00:41:37 ►
in which people choose where to live in time
00:41:40 ►
the way they choose where to live in space now.
00:41:44 ►
Yeah.
00:41:45 ►
Well, Herod’s now, I guess. time the way they choose where to live in space now yeah well heros now I know
00:41:48 ►
well achieved
00:41:51 ►
through a knitting together
00:41:53 ►
everything that is is an
00:41:55 ►
anticipation of what will be
00:41:57 ►
being
00:41:59 ►
is growing
00:42:01 ►
more
00:42:02 ►
nascent or something.
00:42:06 ►
There is this appetite for becoming
00:42:09 ►
that everything is striving
00:42:13 ►
for manifestation.
00:42:16 ►
And somehow what this boils down to mathematically
00:42:19 ►
is that all points seek cotangency,
00:42:24 ►
which means that in terms of dimensionality,
00:42:28 ►
the phase space of description is collapsing,
00:42:31 ►
and all the points within it are becoming cotangent.
00:42:36 ►
The 16th century anticipated this
00:42:39 ►
in the form of the philosopher’s stone,
00:42:42 ►
the alchemical quintessence the lapis
00:42:45 ►
it’s a zone of space
00:42:48 ►
time that is a singularity
00:42:50 ►
it’s where
00:42:51 ►
matter and imagination
00:42:53 ►
exchange
00:42:55 ►
clothing and matter
00:42:58 ►
behaves as though it is imagination
00:43:00 ►
and imagination
00:43:01 ►
behaves as though it is a material
00:43:04 ►
physics
00:43:04 ►
that’s really I like how you describe it also imagination and imagination behaves as though it is a material physics yeah
00:43:05 ►
it’s like breaking the sound barrier for the first time we were we you know we before we
00:43:17 ►
broke the sound barrier we didn’t know what that was going to be like so when we did it the first
00:43:21 ►
time it was smooth as glass afterward you break break through it, it shakes. And then afterwards, it’s fine.
00:43:26 ►
Well, you know, one of these little aphorisms that the mushroom handed out
00:43:33 ►
was history is the shockwave of eschatology.
00:43:36 ►
What that means is that as the species mind approaches the eschaton,
00:43:44 ►
what is called Q in engineering
00:43:46 ►
circles, vibration
00:43:48 ►
begins to build up
00:43:50 ►
along the leading edges
00:43:52 ►
of the social vehicle
00:43:54 ►
and as it
00:43:56 ►
approaches the eschaton
00:43:59 ►
this Q force
00:44:00 ►
builds and this is where we are
00:44:02 ►
we are literally having our teeth shaken
00:44:04 ►
out as the historical bow Q-force builds, and this is where we are. We are literally having our teeth shaken out
00:44:05 ►
as the historical bow shock of encountering the eschaton builds.
00:44:12 ►
If we can redesign the culture fast enough,
00:44:15 ►
the airframe of culture,
00:44:17 ►
then we can create an airfoil that will distribute the Q
00:44:21 ►
and we will just slide through.
00:44:24 ►
If we can’t do that,
00:44:26 ►
then our airfoil will be ripped to pieces
00:44:29 ►
and we will, you know, back to the drawing board.
00:44:32 ►
Let me ask you this.
00:44:34 ►
Or someone will go through and someone won’t.
00:44:36 ►
You know that abyss we’re talking about,
00:44:38 ►
that 2012.
00:44:40 ►
You know, like, first of all,
00:44:41 ►
how do we go through that together?
00:44:44 ►
Or, you know, some people be on this side. First of all, how do we go through that together?
00:44:47 ►
Some people be on this side.
00:44:51 ►
No, I think it’s a temporal moment of embedded novelty.
00:44:55 ►
They’ve come and they’ve gone, but this is a critical one because it sets the stage for, you know,
00:44:59 ►
it’s a summation of everything that has happened
00:45:02 ►
and it’s an anticipation of everything that
00:45:06 ►
will follow
00:45:07 ►
it is that history
00:45:10 ►
is a kind of psychedelic trip
00:45:12 ►
it’s a kind of alchemical
00:45:14 ►
distillation of the
00:45:18 ►
quintessence and that the stuff
00:45:20 ►
generated out of the
00:45:22 ►
alembic of history
00:45:23 ►
is this trans-dimensional cyber electric
00:45:28 ►
literalization of the imagination you know James Joyce said man will be dirigible what he meant
00:45:38 ►
was that the raw stuff of the unconscious will be downloaded into shimmering silicon and the protein child will be born out of
00:45:51 ►
the chaos of history, something like that. Well, and the other thing is a lot of what is called neurosis, or what is called, less technically, unhappiness,
00:46:06 ►
is actually, I think, caused by performance failure
00:46:12 ►
that is ultimately sort of physical.
00:46:16 ►
In other words, a person who is not operating at their physical optimum
00:46:20 ►
will be mentally depressed.
00:46:23 ►
But it’s crazy to look for childhood trauma or something that
00:46:28 ►
lies behind that because the cause of the depression is physiological not psychological
00:46:33 ►
so um well if you can take a pill and your depression goes away and your depression goes away, and your performance improves,
00:46:45 ►
psychotherapy is not indicated in that case, I would think.
00:46:50 ►
Well, if you delay it long enough, it’s solved.
00:47:00 ►
I’ve always felt that tabling is a great solution for all kinds of problems.
00:47:07 ►
How does the time wave apply to the individual life?
00:47:17 ►
Well, people, you know, it’s a truism to say that the older you are, the faster time moves.
00:47:22 ►
That when you’re seven, a year takes forever.
00:47:22 ►
the older you are, the faster time moves.
00:47:24 ►
That when you’re seven, a year takes forever.
00:47:30 ►
When you’re 77, they just rush past like pages falling from the calendar.
00:47:37 ►
Astrology went through a crisis several hundred years ago where under the emergence of a new class of wealthy people,
00:47:42 ►
there became a demand for personal horoscopes. And so astrology
00:47:47 ►
reconfigured its toolkit to be able to provide that. I’m not very interested in individual
00:47:54 ►
time waves. I don’t even have my own readily accessible. But what you can do is you can take your birth date and add to it one full cycle
00:48:09 ►
which is 67 years 104.25 days
00:48:13 ►
and set that as an end date
00:48:16 ►
and then you do get good correlation
00:48:19 ►
between your life and the wave
00:48:21 ►
a way to think about how this relates to the general time wave
00:48:25 ►
is that the general time wave is simply the average
00:48:28 ►
of all the little time waves.
00:48:31 ►
In other words, it’s additive.
00:48:33 ►
So obviously, we all are at different places in our time wave.
00:48:39 ►
Otherwise, when I’m happy, you’d be happy.
00:48:43 ►
And when I lose money, you’d lose money. And it doesn’t work
00:48:46 ►
that way. I mean, some people are miserable in the presence of other people’s joy, often
00:48:52 ►
causally related. So obviously these people are at different places in the cycle. Yeah. Would you like to say anything about 2CV
00:49:07 ►
since we were talking about drugs?
00:49:09 ►
A more general, certain political question.
00:49:12 ►
You, I think, obviously act as a very strong advocate
00:49:16 ►
for psychedelic drugs.
00:49:17 ►
Has this attracted to you any official attention?
00:49:21 ►
Are you getting audited every year?
00:49:26 ►
Well, actually, I’ve never been audited.
00:49:28 ►
It doesn’t attract any
00:49:30 ►
attention. This is a great
00:49:31 ►
disappointment to the more
00:49:33 ►
delicately poised
00:49:36 ►
of my fans who would like
00:49:38 ►
to assume that we’re at the
00:49:39 ►
barricades, barely
00:49:42 ►
able to evade the long
00:49:44 ►
arm of the law.
00:49:46 ►
I don’t know.
00:49:47 ►
Their strategy, in my case, seems to be incredibly intelligent.
00:49:51 ►
They just completely ignore me.
00:49:54 ►
And why that is is maybe because it just doesn’t matter
00:49:58 ►
or because I use big words.
00:50:02 ►
I’m dismissed as an intellectual,
00:50:04 ►
and we all know how powerful
00:50:06 ►
they are in America
00:50:07 ►
so that’s that
00:50:09 ►
it’s because there’s obviously no money involved
00:50:12 ►
well that’s the other thing
00:50:13 ►
my theory on drugs is if you’re not making
00:50:16 ►
money from it you’re of utterly
00:50:18 ►
no interest to anybody
00:50:19 ►
opinions are free
00:50:21 ►
except for that couple in
00:50:23 ►
Calaveras who got arrested for having the frogs well then there are the occasional
00:50:29 ►
examples
00:50:31 ►
toad ranching
00:50:35 ►
a heinous
00:50:37 ►
and nightmarish crime
00:50:39 ►
they were
00:50:43 ►
extracting 5-methoxy DMT
00:50:46 ►
from Bufo Alvarius
00:50:48 ►
that they had in a domesticated
00:50:50 ►
situation in their home
00:50:52 ►
and I suppose
00:50:54 ►
they were beaten with rubber
00:50:56 ►
truncheons and taken away
00:50:58 ►
their house seized, their children
00:51:00 ►
taken from them, their animals
00:51:02 ►
murdered and so forth
00:51:03 ►
well it just shows how deep taken from them, their animals murdered and so forth. He was a teacher and a Boy Scout leader and a surgeon.
00:51:07 ►
Well, it just shows how deep into the middle class
00:51:11 ►
these nightmarish practices have reached.
00:51:14 ►
I mean, the abuse of amphibians is something our grandparents
00:51:19 ►
never contemplated, and yet here we are, you see.
00:51:23 ►
It’s an ugly ugly business
00:51:26 ►
I think it was the Australian press which
00:51:37 ►
popularized the image of
00:51:40 ►
people nuzzling
00:51:42 ►
the under tummies of toads
00:51:44 ►
in order to attain…
00:51:46 ►
We should talk to 2CB.
00:51:48 ►
Yeah, I know, I haven’t forgotten you.
00:51:51 ►
2CB, you know, I have no opinion about that.
00:51:56 ►
No experience with that.
00:51:58 ►
I mean, I did take 2CB once,
00:52:00 ►
but it didn’t emerge prominently enough for me to form a bunch of opinions. Just as a general rule, but rules are made to be broken, I’m not part of the faction that thinks we need ever more exotic drugs. I think we have a full toolbox if we just would use it.
00:52:28 ►
And, you know, if you have ayahuasca, psilocybin, DMT,
00:52:34 ►
toss in mescaline, ibogaine, and cannabis…
00:52:37 ►
I don’t happen to have any of those, but…
00:52:40 ►
Aha, well, capitalism is searching for you, I’m sure,
00:52:48 ►
in its usual thorough fashion but you know it’s a very individual thing
00:52:53 ►
I mean whatever works use it
00:52:56 ►
people have to come to terms with this
00:52:58 ►
we are very much the product of our genetic and biochemical differences
00:53:03 ►
and some people like things that
00:53:07 ►
other people can’t handle at all and you have to part of your self-education in pharmacology
00:53:15 ►
is learning what you what works for you yeah yeah well outside of the intellectual concerns of science this has been a generally
00:53:32 ►
persistent attitude that time is as important as geography not only astrology, but Mayan divinatory methods, African divinatory methods.
00:53:51 ►
I think that science is running against the flow here
00:53:57 ►
with its attitude that time is not to be differentiated. The reason for that, if you analyze it, is not far be differentiated.
00:54:05 ►
The reason for that, if you analyze it,
00:54:07 ►
is not far to seek.
00:54:10 ►
Science depends on the concept of experiment.
00:54:16 ►
And an experiment, to mean anything,
00:54:20 ►
must be time independent.
00:54:23 ►
And so, in a sense, you could almost say that what science is,
00:54:28 ►
is the study of those phenomena so coarse-grained
00:54:34 ►
that when they occur, doesn’t affect them.
00:54:40 ►
And so that leaves out most interesting things.
00:54:43 ►
You know, all the subtler processes of biology, psychology, sociology are left out of that.
00:54:52 ►
And yet, that’s why this idea I showed you last night, it may appear revolutionary,
00:55:00 ►
but it’s really revolutionary, because science could not operate.
00:55:05 ►
It would be the end of science if this idea were accepted
00:55:10 ►
because it says that experiments are time-dependent.
00:55:14 ►
Therefore, it is not ever possible to perform the same experiment twice.
00:55:20 ►
Therefore, the idea of building up a serial set of observations
00:55:27 ►
of many examples of the same experiment is bogus.
00:55:32 ►
And so, you know, this idea aligns itself with astrology
00:55:36 ►
and with all these other pre-scientific theories of change
00:55:42 ►
that is modulated by both space and time yes question yes growing such items like
00:55:50 ►
I was combined so how does one someone like me you know it’s occidental or in Hawaii can
00:55:59 ►
cry for failure currently does it is it okay or it’s a scotia for someone like us
00:56:06 ►
to also grow it and not be able to be
00:56:08 ►
harassed by some
00:56:10 ►
DEA or somebody that
00:56:11 ►
might know what it is or whatever?
00:56:14 ►
Well, you have to be an excellent
00:56:16 ►
Amazonian field botanist
00:56:18 ►
to recognize these things.
00:56:20 ►
It’s a pretty moot point.
00:56:22 ►
I mean, you do have DMT
00:56:24 ►
in your brain, so you’re potentially
00:56:26 ►
bustable at all times um uh cicotria viridis it’s not easily recognized ayahuasca and cicotria
00:56:36 ►
viridis can’t be grown in occidental for example because it’s too cold they can be grown in hawaii
00:56:42 ►
for example because it’s too cold they can be grown in Hawaii
00:56:44 ►
this conference that I was at in Mexico
00:56:47 ►
the great
00:56:49 ►
alternative technology that those people are excited about
00:56:55 ►
is what are called ayahuasca analogs
00:56:59 ►
meaning that
00:57:00 ►
closer scrutiny
00:57:04 ►
to the flora of the earth
00:57:06 ►
shows that in most environments,
00:57:09 ►
there are plants which produce DMT,
00:57:11 ►
and there are plants which contain MAO inhibitors in them.
00:57:16 ►
In most ecosystems of the world,
00:57:19 ►
there are plants which, if properly prepared,
00:57:22 ►
create a kind of ayahuasca.
00:57:27 ►
And so people are retiring to their kitchens and laboratories
00:57:29 ►
to cook furiously all of these things
00:57:32 ►
if you’re interested in doing this
00:57:34 ►
the way to proceed is
00:57:38 ►
as an MAO inhibitor
00:57:41 ►
you need seeds of pagamen harmala
00:57:43 ►
no more than 2 grams pag Pagamon harmala
00:57:47 ►
seeds are available from seed suppliers. They’re also available in Iranian markets as a product
00:57:54 ►
called Hermal, little hard black seeds. A gram of them, I’m sorry, two grams of them pulverized in a shot of water or alcohol will inhibit your MAO quite thoroughly.
00:58:11 ►
If you then take a DMT source orally, you will have a response to it and people are using Desmanthus
00:58:26 ►
Illinoisensis, the Illinois bundleweed
00:58:29 ►
at this conference letters were read
00:58:32 ►
from people in Australia who were using
00:58:35 ►
Australian acacias
00:58:36 ►
phalaris grasses
00:58:40 ►
can be grown and using
00:58:44 ►
a sprouting device you can grow phalaris sprouts
00:58:49 ►
and then dry them and they have are intense in the sprouting stage with dmt so this group of
00:58:57 ►
people i was with in mexico their great enthusiasm is to provide so many different psychedelic so many different paths to the
00:59:06 ►
psychedelic experience that there’s no way they can all be made illegal dmt i mean we have not
00:59:15 ►
yet hit the crush in terms of the social debate about all this dmt was made illegal when LSD was made illegal, at the height of a media-fanned hysteria in an atmosphere of intense know-nothingism.
00:59:33 ►
It was not known at the time that DMT occurs in human metabolism, nor was the physiological profile of DMT known.
00:59:42 ►
What rationale for keeping a drug illegal is there if it’s not a social problem? It begins to look just like sheer for-your-own-goodism of some sort.
01:00:09 ►
The danger posed by a drug is to look at how many emergency room admissions there have been for that drug.
01:00:16 ►
Well, I dare say in the last five years for DMT intoxication, there have probably been zero emergency room admissions.
01:00:30 ►
By the time anybody could get you to the emergency room, your main anxiety is that nobody find out that you lost it so and the fact that it’s a human metabolite we have to I don’t know what’s gonna happen
01:00:35 ►
it’s a very interesting situation because the arguments for keeping the
01:00:40 ►
psychedelics illegal are becoming weaker and weaker and weaker and more and more flimsy and
01:00:47 ►
more and more people are awakening to what a racket this is and weird forms of co-option
01:00:54 ►
are taking place i mean you know it’s not easy in garberville to advocate the legalization of
01:01:02 ►
cannabis because people all around you are getting $400 an ounce for it.
01:01:07 ►
The thought of legalization strikes terror in their hearts.
01:01:11 ►
They have a kid at Stanford.
01:01:12 ►
They have a house in Saint-Tropez.
01:01:14 ►
They have a sailboat.
01:01:16 ►
Why in God’s name would you want to legalize cannabis?
01:01:20 ►
So this is a factor, you know.
01:01:22 ►
so this is a factor and in the past several years
01:01:29 ►
three years or so
01:01:31 ►
there’s been an enormous surge in psychedelic publishing
01:01:34 ►
I don’t know if you’re all aware of it
01:01:37 ►
you certainly should be
01:01:38 ►
obviously you should buy and read every word I’ve ever written
01:01:44 ►
in addition
01:01:46 ►
to that
01:01:47 ►
Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin’s book
01:01:50 ►
Picard has come out
01:01:52 ►
you should be aware
01:01:55 ►
of Jonathan Ott’s book
01:01:56 ►
Pharmacotheon which
01:01:58 ►
in between the covers of one book
01:02:00 ►
if you just want excellent
01:02:02 ►
scholarship and the longest
01:02:04 ►
bibliography ever
01:02:06 ►
to attend a drug book
01:02:07 ►
this is for you
01:02:09 ►
Eduardo Luna’s book on
01:02:12 ►
ayahuasca has come out
01:02:14 ►
well Schulte’s book
01:02:18 ►
Healing Plants of the Northwest
01:02:21 ►
Amazon has come out
01:02:23 ►
there’s a resurgence of interest in this field,
01:02:28 ►
and I think it’s a very hopeful sign
01:02:31 ►
that people have enough sense to realize
01:02:36 ►
that it has something to do with shamanism,
01:02:38 ►
it has something to do with plants,
01:02:40 ►
it has something to do with taking charge
01:02:42 ►
of your own experience and spiritual growth
01:02:45 ►
and ditching ideologies.
01:02:50 ►
Some of these BDI gurus are being sent back to wherever they came from
01:02:56 ►
to find honest work among their own kind.
01:03:00 ►
This is a fine thing, I think.
01:03:04 ►
Let’s imagine that we’re post legalization
01:03:06 ►
how would you see it
01:03:07 ►
would the money that the government would want to go
01:03:10 ►
toward education
01:03:12 ►
and would it be like the way it is in Amsterdam
01:03:14 ►
in the cellar and cafes
01:03:15 ►
I don’t know
01:03:18 ►
I guess I’m a cynic about this
01:03:21 ►
I believe that the reason
01:03:23 ►
drugs are kept illegal
01:03:24 ►
have nothing to do
01:03:26 ►
with the reasons given
01:03:27 ►
for why they’re kept illegal. They’re kept
01:03:29 ►
illegal because if they were
01:03:31 ►
legal, it would be hard to make a lot
01:03:33 ►
of money off of them.
01:03:35 ►
And, you know,
01:03:36 ►
an enormous part of the world economy
01:03:39 ►
runs on drugs.
01:03:41 ►
So, and always
01:03:43 ►
has. I mean, sugar, coffee, tea, spices, drugs, drugs, drugs. So, and always has. I mean, sugar, coffee, tea,
01:03:47 ►
spices, drugs, drugs, drugs.
01:03:50 ►
So, it would be a much saner
01:03:55 ►
and safer world
01:03:57 ►
if drugs were legalized
01:03:59 ►
because intelligence agencies
01:04:01 ►
would not have these vast sources
01:04:04 ►
of money,
01:04:05 ►
which they then use to finance private armies, murder liberal magazine editors,
01:04:13 ►
set up phony political parties, indoctrinate people, so forth and so on.
01:04:19 ►
So it’s really an issue of covert control.
01:04:30 ►
an issue of covert control drugs are the last bastion of hidden slush funds at the billion dollar and up level if this were not a factor the psychedelics never would have been illegal
01:04:37 ►
I mean the the whole drug scheduling thing is completely cockamamie you have schedule one which is the severest
01:04:47 ►
category and what do we have in this most severe of all categories we have heroin we have cannabis
01:04:55 ►
and we have the psychedelics schedule two is cocaineaine has legitimate medical applications. It’s used in certain kind of
01:05:06 ►
throat and eye operations. So it’s the psychedelics, strangely enough, which are the most
01:05:14 ►
stigmatized of all the non-addictive drugs. This is just pure fear. And it relates to what I talked to last night about the issue of
01:05:25 ►
surrender and how anxious the dominator types become when the issue is loss of
01:05:32 ►
control you know they are absolute control freaks and you know until people
01:05:40 ►
demand that this be changed it won’t be changed and people are not very demanding i mean you know
01:05:48 ►
you give people the four-term governor of arkansas and they think that you know christ is healing in
01:05:55 ►
the marketplace i mean that that’s how pathetic the liberal position in America has become that it can embrace someone like Bill Clinton
01:06:07 ►
as its standard bearer,
01:06:09 ►
not to launch into a knock on that.
01:06:14 ►
I mean, I certainly prefer it over George Bush,
01:06:16 ►
but it’s very minimally important.
01:06:19 ►
It doesn’t impinge on our lives.
01:06:22 ►
All these people are jackasses
01:06:23 ►
and should be hung in a civilized
01:06:26 ►
society. They would be hung before
01:06:27 ►
a howling mob.
01:06:30 ►
Would a civilized society
01:06:32 ►
hang anybody?
01:06:33 ►
Huh?
01:06:35 ►
Certainly it would.
01:06:37 ►
Voltaire said the common people
01:06:39 ►
will know no peace until
01:06:41 ►
the last politician is strangled
01:06:43 ►
publicly in the entrails of the last priest.
01:06:54 ►
But that’s just an opinion of mine. You don’t have to follow me into that, and probably shouldn’t.
01:07:04 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one
01:07:08 ►
thought at a time.
01:07:11 ►
Well, maybe we shouldn’t follow Terence in the direction of Voltaire, as he asked, but
01:07:15 ►
at times, don’t you think that perhaps old Voltaire got it right after all?
01:07:21 ►
Of course, Voltaire died over 200 years ago, and now the politicians even outnumber
01:07:26 ►
the priests, so about the only solution I can come up with is to simply ignore all politicians
01:07:32 ►
and priests as best you can. If you can’t beat them, ignore them. That’s my motto.
01:07:38 ►
By the way, during the talk we just heard, I think you remember hearing Terence, when he was
01:07:43 ►
asked a question about 2C-B,
01:07:45 ►
he said he really had no opinion and little information about it.
01:07:49 ►
However, if you are interested in that compound, you may want to take a look at the reports on arrowid.org,
01:07:55 ►
E-R-O-W-I-D dot org, and or listen to the interview that I gave that’s titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate,
01:08:04 ►
where I pass along a few things that I’ve learned about that substance myself. Now, I need to tell you a
01:08:11 ►
little bit about what I’ve decided to do from a financial standpoint to keep the salon cranking
01:08:16 ►
along indefinitely. If you go to our program notes blog, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us,
01:08:23 ►
you’ll find the following notice.
01:08:25 ►
Here’s part of it, at least.
01:08:27 ►
In order to ensure that the Salon’s podcasts continue uninterrupted for the next 12 months,
01:08:33 ►
every March we’ll conduct a fundraising campaign.
01:08:36 ►
This will be the only time during the year that donations will be accepted.
01:08:41 ►
Now, as you can probably tell, this isn’t going to be a Kickstarter or an Indiegogo or other crowdfunding campaign
01:08:47 ►
And the main reason that I’m keeping it here among us friends is that it’s doubtful that there would be more than a handful of people who would contribute that aren’t already fellow salonners
01:08:58 ►
So I decided to just keep this little campaign here in the family and not pay the 9% or so in fees to the crowdsourcing company.
01:09:08 ►
Of course, one of the things that people like about the public crowdsourcing platforms is that premium gifts are offered to the donors.
01:09:16 ►
Well, not to be completely outdone, I’m also going to give our donors a little something.
01:09:22 ►
It isn’t much, but the point is to raise money to
01:09:25 ►
keep the salon online and not to sell a bunch of premiums. So the two things that I’m going to
01:09:29 ►
offer are these. First of all, the names of everybody who donates one dollar or more will
01:09:35 ►
be displayed on our new sponsors honor roll page, and that’s if they want to be so listed. And all
01:09:42 ►
previous donors, by the way, from january 1st of this year through
01:09:45 ►
the end of february are also going to be automatically included in that honor roll
01:09:49 ►
in in the event that you don’t want your first name and initial or whatever other name you go
01:09:55 ►
by to be posted please let me know via email and send this one to this new email address that so far isn’t getting any junk it’s uh donations at matrixcast.com
01:10:07 ►
that’s m-a-t-r-i-x-c-a-s-t matrixcast.com donations at matrixcast.com those messages will get to me
01:10:16 ►
and if you want your name uh shown some different way or something than it appeared when i read it
01:10:22 ►
previously or uh the ones that just recently came in usually give your full name,
01:10:26 ►
so I’ll just put your first name and initial or other name if that’s what you want.
01:10:31 ►
Also, anybody who donates $45 or more,
01:10:35 ►
I’m going to send them a USB thumb drive that has MP3s of the first 400 podcasts from the salon.
01:10:43 ►
And these are going to be shipped in June of this year, or hopefully before then.
01:10:47 ►
And I’ve also collected about 100 of my favorite Terrence McKenna sound bites
01:10:51 ►
that range from 10 seconds to 2 minutes long.
01:10:54 ►
And I’ll also put those on your thumb drive.
01:10:57 ►
Those will be kind of handy for those of you who are doing sampling and things like that.
01:11:01 ►
Now, one of my friends is developing a logo for the salon,
01:11:08 ►
and if all goes well, we’re going to imprint that on the drive as well.
01:11:10 ►
The thumb drive, that is.
01:11:13 ►
Now, if any of our fellow salonners owns or works for a company that custom prints logos and uploads software to thumb drives,
01:11:18 ►
the ones that are purchased in bulk,
01:11:20 ►
well, please let me know via that email address that I just gave you,
01:11:23 ►
and hopefully we can keep this business in the family as well.
01:11:28 ►
So, for people like me who were raised on Catholic guilt,
01:11:32 ►
the good news is that after the end of this month,
01:11:34 ►
there won’t be a donate button staring you in the face each time you go to our program notes.
01:11:39 ►
And if you’re like me, that might even have caused you to stay away from our blog,
01:11:44 ►
and in so doing, you’re missing some interesting comments that our fellow slaughters are posting.
01:11:49 ►
And by the way, the comments aren’t automatically approved.
01:11:52 ►
I have to read and approve each one, including the grumpy ones that I don’t like or agree with.
01:11:58 ►
I usually approve all of them, too.
01:12:00 ►
I guess the only time I don’t approve a non-spam comment is when personal attacks and name-calling seeps in,
01:12:07 ►
but that only rarely happens.
01:12:09 ►
So that’s about it for now.
01:12:12 ►
During this month, I’m going to try and get a few more podcasts out than I usually do
01:12:16 ►
so that I can keep you updated with our progress.
01:12:18 ►
I’ll first finish this current McKenna workshop in my next podcast,
01:12:23 ►
and after that I plan on podcasting some more of
01:12:25 ►
the Planque Norte talks, as well as an interview I plan to do with Dr. Charlie Grobe and Alicia
01:12:30 ►
Danforth, who have now begun a new research study that I think you’re going to be interested in
01:12:35 ►
learning more about. And so for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:12:41 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.