Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I have been underwhelmed by the accomplishments of Indian spirituality, personally; overwhelmed by the accomplishments of Amazonian spirituality.”
“I’m also very suspicious of secrets. I mean, if you tell me one it’s finished. I took a pledge long ago to tell all secrets as quickly as possible… . Secrets are a way of controlling other people.”
“Post-historical existence would be non-linear. People would live in time the way now live in space.”
“That’s how I think of psychedelics. When I say boundary dissolution, the real boundaries I’m talking about are the boundaries of dimensionality. The way a shaman is able to do what shamans do is by transcending Newtonian space and time.”
“Here’s my model: The mind is like a crystal growing under pressure, and the pressure is the pressure of Newtonian space/time. And so the crystal grows and takes the shape of its confinement. But when you liquefy the crystal matrix with a psychedelic, it has another preferred geometry. And it unfolds into this second geometry. And the second and alternative geometry is more hyper-spacial. Culturally, our minds are confined by cultural pressure and cultural phase-space to reflect cultural concerns… . When you take a psychedelic and you dissolve the confinement … then it's like taking [the mind] out of its box, and it can configure itself in a more comfortable geometry, and it’s free.”
“In a sense, chess is like good practice for shamanism, because good chess players see deeply into the future. That’s how you win chess games.”
Interview with Shonagh Home on Shamanic Freedom Radio
Podcast 360 with Shonagh Home – “Medicine Oracle & Spellbreaker”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And before we get into today’s program, which is the final session of the Terrence McKenna workshop that we’ve been listening to,
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I first want to give you a little update on our fund drive.
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As you know, for a number of reasons, I’ve decided to no longer accept donations throughout the year. The primary reason being that, well, there are some months during which
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we receive more donations than we need to pay the expenses associated with these podcasts,
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and then there are some months when I’ve got to make up the difference out of my own pocket.
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I actually only began accepting donations after I’d been doing these podcasts for, well, about
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three years or so, and at that point I had to again upgrade my servers in order to keep up with the
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increased number of downloads each month. But eventually we had to upgrade to a dedicated
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server of our own due to the large number of simultaneous connections, since in addition to
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downloading programs there is now also a large number of people concurrently streaming a program to their phones.
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But getting back to my point, it’s been kind of stressful wondering from month to month if I was going to have to come up with some more money out of my own pocket.
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You see, while the number of fellow salonners who have made donations to the salon has actually been increasing,
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this past year’s total of donations was, well, it was about half of
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the previous years.
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So I’ve decided that I’ll have a pledge drive each March and try to raise enough funding
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to make it to the next March.
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And as of today, March 10th, there have been a total of 36 fellow salonners who have made
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a donation to help cover our expenses.
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And because of their generous donations, we already have received enough in donations
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to ensure the continuation of the salon
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through the end of this coming May.
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And this is only the 10th day of our pledge drive,
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so I have high hopes, no pun intended,
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that we’ll reach our goal of another full year of podcasts
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from the Psychedelic Salon.
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And one last thing that I should mention is in regards to the thumb drives
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that I’ll be sending to those donors who contribute $45 or more.
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The question that I’ve been receiving is whether salonners who live outside the U.S.
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will also receive them.
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And the answer is yes.
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No matter where you live, if you make a $45 or more donation,
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you’ll receive a thumb drive with the first 400 podcasts from the salon, along with 100 of my favorite short Terrence
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McKenna soundbites. And I’ll try to remember to tell you about some of them in my next podcast.
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But for now, let’s get on with the show. As you already know, what we’re about to listen to is the final session of a weekend workshop
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that Terence McKenna gave in February of 1994.
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So let’s rejoin Terence and a few of his friends right now.
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It is the impossible become possible, and yet remaining impossible.
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I had the experience one time of dreaming that I smoked
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it was very futuristic
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it looked like little silver pellets
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like a star film or some strange metallic thing
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a little pipe
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but it was like DMT when I went up on it
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it lasted about 45 seconds in tents
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I wondered if this is common
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do you have any theories of what happens?
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yeah, no, that’s an interesting question
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it relates to some of the properties
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of DMT, I mentioned DMT
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occurs in human metabolism
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it does
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and its concentration in cerebral
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spinal fluid fluctuates
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on a circadian or daily
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rhythm the most intense concentration of
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dmt is about four in the morning and this is when the deep rem dreaming is going on when you give
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dmt to somebody as an indices or as an index of their how loaded are, what you look at is, with them stretched out in front of you,
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you look at their closed eyes.
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And if their eyes are darting wildly back and forth under their eyelids,
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then you assume that they have in fact become successfully intoxicated
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because they are then in the realm of the self-transforming elf machines
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and they’re watching all this stuff and many people who have smoked dmt report that later
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they will have a dream where a glass pipe will be introduced into the dream they will smoke it and
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this will happen this is really interesting to me because it argues that
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the physiological capacity for the dmt flash is present at least in deep sleep maybe all the time
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it seems to me that an inspired biofeedback program of research ought to be able to teach people how to do that one thing i’ve talked
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to my brother about in terms of orienting the research programs of these pharmaceutical companies
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is you know how about a drug which just allows you to remember your dreams
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that alone might throw open a whole
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new world of possibility
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Kathleen
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yeah so if you could get in there
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we might
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solve our drug problem
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because I
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think that probably every
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night we go
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deeper than we can remember
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and that the dreams we
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remember are basically at the
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surface and even the deepest dreams
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we remember are fairly near
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the surface but that
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the dissolution back into
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some primal swarm
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state is part of the daily cycle and why why the top level
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can’t remember the bottom level is a real question about our physiological and psychological
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organization i mean maybe there is just simply no efficacy to it. But, yeah.
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It has to do with the brain waves.
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If you’re down in theta, you can still witness what’s going on,
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but when you go down to delta,
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there’s just a total absorption within the process.
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You remember it felt nice afterwards, but you don’t remember…
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Well, what seems to be happening is
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there’s no transcription of short-term memory.
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DNA, I’m sorry, RNA activation of short-term memory isn’t happening.
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And all of these things have physical mechanisms which could be studied.
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But, you know, we spend money in unusual ways.
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I doubt that any drug company would put money into a dream recollection drug drug companies are the
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most bottom line gang around it’s a very cutthroat business and research curves are short because
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you’re in constant competition I don’t know but long term research
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this could be done
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I mean if we’d spent as much money
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on this as we spent to dig the hole
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for the now cancelled
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super collider
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we would probably have the thing in hand
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I’m curious about the parallels
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you drew between the DMT flash
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and the orgasm or the non-parallels that you said, because you expressed you were baffled about that.
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potential for that kind of a powerful mind consciousness expansion?
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Or is it just what you termed as the post-coital, the fog?
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Well, the fog comes afterwards. Well, orgasm is an interesting phenomenon.
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First of all, it’s not necessary.
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And it’s not expressed in lower animals. Sex, as you descend the animal phylogeny, becomes more and more males come along and fertilize them and there’s not even contiguous activity by male and female. So then what is it that as animal complexity increases, there’s this concentration on this burst of boundary dissolving pleasure in the central nervous system i don’t exactly understand
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what the function is there uh i mean obviously we’re all interested in sex but are we interested
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in sex because we pursue orgasm and then you know is that payoff? Couldn’t you build in a more gentle gradient of interest based on biology,
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which must be happening with these other animals?
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There’s a book to be written about all this.
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I have all the questions.
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I just don’t have any of the answers.
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I can see that sexuality is related to consciousness and to the psychedelic state but i can’t and i’ve
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thought about it for years and years and i just haven’t gotten anywhere when you have sex on
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psychedelics you know there’s an incredible enhancement and reciprocal feedback into that
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but um i don’t know. Kathleen?
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I’m thinking of the contract practice where that energy,
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that regenerative energy is conserved.
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So at the moment of orgasm, to concentrate your energy at the base of the spine
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and let it wash the nervous system internally,
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it seems like an evolutionary…
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Well, I was going to mention that.
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One of the things that’s always puzzled me about tantra
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is that if you analyze it,
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it’s a frustrating of the biological drive
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toward ejaculation in the male.
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How strange, then, that at the top of animal organization
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there would evolve a physiological response
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that is contra the biological momentum of the species.
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I mean, you know, a hanging man ej ejaculates but a yogin doesn’t apparently
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and and so I’m I’m skeptical not of the phenomenon but of the interpretation of the phenomenon why that’s encouraged in a book called The Jewel and the Lotus by Bodhi Abhinasa and Sonjata.
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And what it is is that it transmutes that energy,
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whereas the orgasm would send the energy out the bottom of the man,
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that it would come up the spine and accumulate in the, what do you call this, medulla?
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And activate the third eye and promote a superconscious state.
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And that’s actually the physiological thing.
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You may be questioning the philosophical end of it,
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but conserving sperm is something that’s a tradition in many martial arts
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and other spiritual traditions,
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and does seem to have, in my observation and practice, a good effect on spirituality
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and on states of altered consciousness.
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But that means that people with vasectomies should be enlightened.
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No, no, no, no, because it’s a physical practice that comes about by discipline.
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And that’s a cutting of the circuitry, too, with the vasectomy.
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It’s not the sperm, it’s the energetic.
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Men have had accidentally dry orgasms
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that have gotten them to the same place mentally as a wet orgasm.
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I think it’s a mistake to concentrate on the physiological part of it
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and also the pleasure center part of it
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and look at it in the wider context of where and why and how it’s been practiced.
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And there is a lot there.
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I’ve studied that and practiced that a lot.
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So I think it might bear looking at,
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is what I’m saying.
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No orgasm, no life.
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No, but it’s not true.
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I agree with most of what you’re saying.
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I’m not so in agreement
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that it’s not important to understand
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the physiology of it.
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The way to bring these things forward
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is to get some kind of
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handle on it, so it can be
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raised off the level of
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metaphor.
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And I
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suppose they’re trying to do that, but
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it’s freakishly elusive
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considering how
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radical the claims are.
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I’m very suspicious.
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It’s like anything else. Once you get interested in it,
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there are a lot of teachers and there is a lot of literature
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on it. It’s not freakishly
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elusive at all. It’s just…
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Well, I mean to demonstrate to
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someone who is not
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pre-committed to believing it. That’s what I
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mean by elusive.
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Well, it’s been called the secret teachings for a long time, but with
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what tools and media we have now, these methodologies
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and explanations are available.
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Well, yeah, we’re in a situation where all boundaries
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between knowledge systems have dissolved. In the past hundred years,
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like, take something like Dzogchen.
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You know, when I studied Tibetan,
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you didn’t even mention this
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till you’d been with them for years.
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It was inconceivable.
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Now it’s peddled on every street corner,
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which I think is a good thing.
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Oh, it’s an advanced tantric,
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shmantric, something or other.
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It’s just I’m using it as an example of the fact that there are esoteric idea systems
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have all been brought together and we’re sorting it out.
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Over the past hundred years, this has been going on.
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I have been underwhelmed by the accomplishments of Indian spirituality personally,
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overwhelmed by the accomplishments of Amazonian spirituality.
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I suspect priestly hierarchies of unspeakable acts and intentions
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and always try to avoid that.
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I’m also very suspicious of secrets.
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I mean, if you tell me one
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it’s finished as a secret
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I took a pledge long ago
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to tell all secrets as quickly as possible
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because I think that there is
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that everybody is a lot stupider
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than you might think.
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That nobody has a leg up on this stuff.
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Yeah.
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The only secret in his own channel is not to tell it to somebody who’s not interested.
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The idea that it’s a secret has nothing to do with a secret.
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It has something to do with keeping the energy and not going around telling about it.
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Well, what I found, though, is that… It’s a technique. It has nothing to do with keeping the energy and not going around tallying about it. Well, what I found though is that…
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It’s a technique. It has nothing to do with the secret. You know, I tell you, okay, don’t
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boil your egg or something. I tell you not to tell anybody. Now, the hard thing is not
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to tell. It’s, you know, the secret is irrelevant. It’s only a technique for a student to hold
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in the energy. That’s all. Well, real secrets can’t be told.
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Period.
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So that’s not an issue.
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And then secrets which can be told are not secrets.
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Right.
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But secrets are a way of controlling other people.
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Yeah.
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What is your best guess as to what is the outcome of this experience?
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In other words, are there any conceivable other choices besides a reversal or going upward?
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Could time go backwards?
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By this process, you mean this historical spin spin down that we’re caught in?
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Well, there are different ways to think about it,
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like a whole smorgasbord of ways to think about it.
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It could be that we are simply in anticipation of our death as a species.
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This is the downer possibility.
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That what the 20th century is is like a terminal
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delirium we are sinking into coma and all philosophies books teachings points of view
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are now swirling around the deathbed of human culture you know we remember the shattered affairs the failed Crusades the
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ruined dreams that we’re looking back over the wreckage of the last 10,000 years and trying to
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make peace with it and sinking into coma another possibility is you know I mentioned that the time wave seems curiously appropriate to technology,
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that what we’re calling novelty, the evolution of novelty seems linked to the evolution of technology.
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A technology that would fulfill this whole scenario without requiring the intervention of God Almighty
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or something like that would be time travel because if
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if it were possible to travel in time then you would understand what it meant that this linear
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wave of novelty terminates on december 21st 2012. it just literally means that’s the day history ends.
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Because after that day, you have a different kind of time.
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You have a kind of time that is like space.
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Notice that when we look at the evolution of life and human culture,
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it’s a conquest of dimensionality.
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You know, we started as some slime on a rock somewhere,
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and slowly through the coordination of our senses,
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our eyes, and then our limbs,
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we have conquered space.
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Notice that when you decide to walk over yonder,
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this is a journey through space that is volitional,
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but the time is not volitional no human being has ever traveled an inch in time or a moment in time we just can’t change the rate
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we travel in time constantly but we go we’re in the river we’re in the river and the river has a
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speed and we’re carried along but in principle if it were possible to
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travel in time uh you could create an entirely different kind of sociological domain and i have
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talked to the mushroom about this and it says you know that there is that time travel is possible, but only of a certain type. The type that is
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like this. You can travel
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back in time,
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but you cannot travel further
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back in time than the
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invention of the first time machine.
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Because before that
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there were no time machines.
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And if you took a time machine
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there, you would introduce a paradox.
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Memory traveling back in time, like you have a vivid memory of you would introduce a paradox memory traveling back in time
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like you have a vivid memory of something that happened a while ago
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isn’t it in a sense a manipulation of time in that way
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well that’s what’s called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
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I mean the mind can travel in time
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but the mind
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time is a domain of non-mental objects it’s a domain of real objects so
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the mind traveling through time is fairly ineffectual if you could actually move matter
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through time and there’s reason to think you could then and and if you could travel back in time no further than the first time machine
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then the moment the first time machine is created and turned on
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time machines will appear from all points in the future
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visiting the most interesting place in time
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which is the beginning of the era of time travel
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it’s as though if you had an airplane
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that you could fly to Kitty Hawk
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to December 17th, 1905,
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to witness the first flight of the right flyer.
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So, in a sense, what we call a time machine
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is not a technology at all,
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and certainly not a technology for individual travel
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through a temporal medium
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what we call a time machine is a kind of switch
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which when pushed collapses the entire notion
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of future history down into a single moment
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it causes in a sense
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the rest of history to happen instantly
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is this time machine mechanical or non-mechanical?
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Well, it’s a concept at this point.
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I mean, if there were a time machine,
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would it be mechanical or non-mechanical?
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I think you can visualize it any way you like.
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I mean, it’s probably more like a drug than a machine.
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Well, maybe that’s true too, but I often thought about this time travel thing, about the fact that we couldn’t fly, at least in a physical sense, until a few years ago. And I’m thinking
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that maybe we can’t time travel until we get sort of a mechanical prop to help us along
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at first, but then later
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on, maybe we’ll learn how to do it without
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a mechanical prop. Although we’ve never
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learned to fly without mechanical
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props. And in fact,
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the more we learn about flying,
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the less likely that seems.
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Because it’s so easy to fly with a
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mechanical prop.
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And 50 years in
00:23:05 ►
or 70 years into the history of powered flight
00:23:08 ►
we still haven’t a clue as to how you could fly
00:23:11 ►
without mechanical augmentation
00:23:14 ►
I was thinking that every time you do
00:23:17 ►
a really deep psychedelic experience in some ways you time travel
00:23:20 ►
back to the first time shamans interacted with
00:23:23 ►
the plant world because you’re
00:23:25 ►
experiencing basically the same connection
00:23:28 ►
that takes you
00:23:30 ►
out of present time and into something
00:23:31 ►
more ancient and more circular.
00:23:33 ►
The other thing that occurred to me is
00:23:35 ►
if when we were slime on the rock we were
00:23:37 ►
pre-historical, then maybe
00:23:39 ►
after 2012 we become post-historical
00:23:42 ►
and maybe what that means is
00:23:44 ►
that we’re living life so much
00:23:46 ►
that we don’t have time to sit down and record it.
00:23:49 ►
Well, post-historical existence would be non-linear.
00:23:54 ►
You know, people would live in time the way we now live in space
00:23:58 ►
and would spread out.
00:24:01 ►
What was the first part of your thing?
00:24:04 ►
About, yeah, if you’re on psychedelics and you study…
00:24:09 ►
Oh, yes, well, that’s how I think of psychedelics.
00:24:12 ►
I mean, when I say boundary dissolution,
00:24:15 ►
the real boundaries I’m talking about
00:24:17 ►
are the boundaries of dimensionality.
00:24:20 ►
That the way a shaman is able to do what shamans do is by transcending newtonian space and time
00:24:29 ►
that the the here’s my model of it the mind is like a crystal growing under pressure
00:24:37 ►
and the pressure is the pressure of newtoniantime. And so the crystal grows
00:24:45 ►
and takes the shape of its confinement.
00:24:49 ►
But when you liquefy the crystal matrix
00:24:52 ►
with a psychedelic,
00:24:54 ►
it has another preferred geometry.
00:24:59 ►
And it unfolds into this second geometry.
00:25:03 ►
And the second and alternative geometry
00:25:05 ►
is more hyperspatial.
00:25:08 ►
Culturally, our minds are confined
00:25:11 ►
by cultural pressure and cultural phase space
00:25:14 ►
to reflect cultural concerns.
00:25:18 ►
You know, how am I looking?
00:25:20 ►
How much money do I have?
00:25:22 ►
Are my social relations intact?
00:25:24 ►
Is my behavior falling within acceptable, so forth and so on.
00:25:29 ►
When you take the psychedelic and you dissolve the social confinement, the intellectual confinement, the ideological confinement, mind it’s like taking it out of its box and it can configure itself in a more comfortable geometry
00:25:48 ►
and it’s free and the reason shamans know what the weather will be know where the game has gone
00:25:58 ►
know who will recover and who will not recover from serious illness is because they have a relationship to the future
00:26:05 ►
that ordinary people lack.
00:26:09 ►
They can see the vectors of possibility
00:26:12 ►
and propagate them into the future.
00:26:17 ►
In a sense, chess is like good practice for shamanism
00:26:22 ►
because good chess players see deeply into the future that’s how
00:26:28 ►
you win chess games is it’s the person who can see the most moves ahead without obfuscation who
00:26:36 ►
inevitably wins the game that’s all that chess is about so it’s uh and if you’ve ever played chess on LSD you you know that it’s
00:26:48 ►
ridiculous
00:26:52 ►
yes yeah I mean this freedom in time usually comes in a state of trance Because so much of our sense of time is wedded to our embodiment. It’s physiology.
00:27:06 ►
Yeah, I mean, this freedom in time usually comes in a state of trance.
00:27:10 ►
The I Ching says keeping still.
00:27:13 ►
Coma.
00:27:14 ►
But even after, say, 2012,
00:27:17 ►
when there’s this radical transformation of what we know as time,
00:27:22 ►
is that also a radical transformation of what we know as body?
00:27:26 ►
Well, at other times we’ve talked about this.
00:27:28 ►
There are factions who want to do away with the body,
00:27:32 ►
who believe that somehow in some kind of
00:27:36 ►
electrical simulation of the ketamine space
00:27:40 ►
we will all flow like amoeboid energies
00:27:43 ►
from one orgasmic nexus to another
00:27:46 ►
and genital consciousness, body image consciousness, all of this will be left behind.
00:27:53 ►
I suppose I should have an opinion about all this, but I really don’t.
00:27:59 ►
I mean, if it feels good, do it, is my motto. And the choice between extreme artificiality and extreme naturalness,
00:28:12 ►
I think we talked about this the first night, didn’t we, about the Gnostic choice.
00:28:16 ►
On one level, it’s a choice about the body.
00:28:20 ►
I mean, is the body, you know, the glorious instrument of our interfacing with the miracle of creation, or is the body a bag of rotting guts dragging us down ever deeper into Tartaros?
00:28:36 ►
These are just shifts of perspective, and people have vehemently argued both ways. I like the idea of taking the body with you into cyberspace
00:28:48 ►
and creating a virtual body.
00:28:51 ►
I mean, obviously, the body is the product
00:28:54 ►
of many millions of years of evolution
00:28:56 ►
and generally seems well adapted to the mind that inhabits it.
00:29:02 ►
It is meaty, fleshy, and perishable if that could be overcome.
00:29:08 ►
Okay, so the perishability.
00:29:10 ►
The perishability, I think, is what… So it becomes, you know, what I’ve said at times
00:29:15 ►
in the past is that the task of history is the inversion of the human being. Our goal is to get the soul outside
00:29:25 ►
in three-dimensional space
00:29:27 ►
and the body folded inside in mental space.
00:29:32 ►
Now we have it all wrong.
00:29:34 ►
You know, the body protrudes into three-dimensional space.
00:29:37 ►
The most important organ, the mind, cannot be seen.
00:29:42 ►
It’s harder to find than the pancreas
00:29:44 ►
because simply by opening the body
00:29:48 ►
and looking around,
00:29:49 ►
you can find the pancreas.
00:29:51 ►
Opening the body and looking for the mind
00:29:53 ►
won’t give it to you.
00:29:54 ►
It’s obviously in another dimension.
00:29:59 ►
Many religious traditions
00:30:01 ►
have this idea of building
00:30:03 ►
what’s called a light body
00:30:04 ►
and say that you know
00:30:07 ►
life is a preparation for death you’re building an after-death vehicle it’s a it’s a simulacrum
00:30:13 ►
of the living body but it’s made of light and it’s under the control of your higher intentionality
00:30:20 ►
there may be something to this certainly Certainly, we all do build our images
00:30:28 ►
according to how we cut our hair,
00:30:30 ►
according to how we dress,
00:30:32 ►
what particular reconstructive surgeries we elect to have,
00:30:36 ►
so forth and so on.
00:30:37 ►
We sculpt the body.
00:30:41 ►
When the body is made of light,
00:30:43 ►
this will become much easier.
00:30:45 ►
I mean, you know, rather than a boob job, you can become a canary if you want,
00:30:50 ►
or whatever else is your particular, yeah.
00:30:54 ►
Does the idea that time is compressing contradict the idea that the universe is expanding scientifically?
00:31:01 ►
Well, there’s a lot of argument about whether it’s expanding or contracting.
00:31:06 ►
The measurement seems to show that it’s
00:31:08 ►
incredibly close to the limit
00:31:10 ►
case, to the
00:31:11 ►
place where you can’t tell.
00:31:13 ►
It’s either just barely
00:31:16 ►
expanding or just
00:31:18 ►
barely collapsing. And why
00:31:20 ►
it’s so close to the limit
00:31:22 ►
case isn’t clear.
00:31:23 ►
Yeah, this contradicts all of that see the scientific
00:31:27 ►
theory says the universe appeared from nothing for no reason 14 billion years ago it exploded
00:31:35 ►
outward it’s cooling it’s slowing down complex processes are appearing eventually it will reach
00:31:44 ►
the limits of gravitational expansion if will reach the limits of gravitational
00:31:45 ►
expansion. If it reaches the limits of gravitational expansion, it will then re-collapse. If not,
00:31:52 ►
it will just go forward unto entropic heat death. The model that I’m proposing is a little
00:32:00 ►
different. It says that the big singularity lies not at the beginning of the universe, but at
00:32:09 ►
the end. So I call it not the big bang, but the big surprise. What’s happening is the process is
00:32:17 ►
complexifying. The scientists want to say that the entire universe burst from a point smaller than the electron for no reason.
00:32:26 ►
As I said yesterday, this is the limit case for credulity.
00:32:31 ►
You know, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
00:32:33 ►
I had that feeling.
00:32:35 ►
You know, I’m not a physicist anymore,
00:32:37 ►
but I had to feel a sense of a little strength.
00:32:39 ►
Yeah, how is that different from,
00:32:42 ►
and God said, let there be light.
00:32:46 ►
It’s not different at all. It just uses a personal pronoun in one case
00:32:49 ►
and not in the other
00:32:50 ►
but I think that there are singularities
00:32:53 ►
but that they arise in complexity
00:32:55 ►
and that history is the shockwave
00:33:00 ►
of the approach of an animal species
00:33:02 ►
towards such a singularity
00:33:04 ►
in other words that when monkeys
00:33:06 ►
walk toward the mystery
00:33:08 ►
they begin spouting poetry
00:33:11 ►
solving quadratic equations
00:33:13 ►
and manufacturing instruments
00:33:15 ►
to measure the charge of the electron
00:33:18 ►
it’s a sign that you’re getting close
00:33:21 ►
to the source of gnosis,
00:33:25 ►
that the noetic point source
00:33:27 ►
radiates understanding with such an intensity
00:33:31 ►
that the closer you approach it,
00:33:33 ►
the more you understand.
00:33:35 ►
And the closer a species approaches it,
00:33:37 ►
the more it manifests cognitive activity.
00:33:41 ►
So we dance, we paint, we sculpt, we poeticize, we construct complex architectonic structures because we are close to the source. And the way we are narrowing distance between ourselves and the source is by moving toward it through time. It exists at a point in time and we are slowly wandering across
00:34:06 ►
the epigenetic landscape of becoming
00:34:08 ►
and it’s a steep hill
00:34:11 ►
so we are wandering down into this basin of attraction
00:34:15 ►
unconsciously being drawn closer and closer
00:34:18 ►
to the dwell point
00:34:20 ►
and now the walls are so steep
00:34:23 ►
the momentum is so great
00:34:24 ►
that there’s no doubt where we’re headed.
00:34:27 ►
We’re headed toward the point of maximum equilibrium within the system.
00:34:33 ►
Yeah, somebody over here, yeah.
00:34:35 ►
A few minutes ago you were kind of laughing that it would be ridiculous playing chess under LSD.
00:34:43 ►
And I was wondering why would it be because
00:34:45 ►
or what would happen?
00:34:46 ►
Because it would melt in your hands.
00:34:48 ►
Well, the thing is
00:34:50 ►
it depends on how seriously
00:34:52 ►
you took chess.
00:34:53 ►
If you took chess very seriously
00:34:56 ►
it would be perfectly possible
00:34:58 ►
to do it.
00:34:59 ►
Like everything else under LSD
00:35:01 ►
the implications have to be
00:35:03 ►
kept under control.
00:35:05 ►
So if you could just look at the chess board
00:35:08 ►
and see it as a chess problem,
00:35:11 ►
you could probably play chess.
00:35:13 ►
But unfortunately,
00:35:14 ►
everything will become symbolic of other things.
00:35:18 ►
And you will, you know,
00:35:21 ►
it’s very hard to keep your eye on the ball.
00:35:23 ►
You would have to have incredible powers of concentration.
00:35:26 ►
You would have to really love chess.
00:35:28 ►
Some people can do this.
00:35:30 ►
I mean, I know people who cross-country ski on psilocybin.
00:35:33 ►
I find that unimaginable.
00:35:36 ►
I mean, I can’t cross-country open my eyes on psilocybin.
00:35:41 ►
So, something? Yeah, I noticed with acid and chess is that what disappeared so something
00:35:45 ►
yeah I noticed with acid and chess
00:35:47 ►
what disappeared was a complete lack of desire
00:35:50 ►
to beat the other person
00:35:52 ►
yes I think that the killer instinct declines
00:35:56 ►
but if you were looking at it as how deeply can I see
00:35:59 ►
into it
00:36:01 ►
it’s good probably the way to take acid
00:36:05 ►
and play chess
00:36:06 ►
is with a computer
00:36:07 ►
then you don’t get into the personal issues
00:36:11 ►
of you know what is it
00:36:12 ►
on the other side of the board
00:36:14 ►
what I find with psychedelics
00:36:17 ►
is it’s always people
00:36:19 ►
that are the most confounding
00:36:21 ►
I mean people
00:36:22 ►
as nexai of complexity are orders of magnitude more
00:36:28 ►
complex than anything else in the universe and can always throw you for a loop if you’re,
00:36:35 ►
I mean, always they can throw you for a loop. There’s no if you’re anything. Yeah.
00:36:40 ►
This is totally off the wall. Have you ever pointed a video camera at a TV screen and
00:36:44 ►
observed what happens?
00:36:46 ►
Sure, that’s called a hop bifurcation.
00:36:49 ►
That’s the standard thing in chaos theory to demonstrate.
00:36:54 ►
That’s just a feedback loop.
00:36:55 ►
That’s the equivalent of audio feedback,
00:36:58 ►
but that’s visual feedback.
00:37:00 ►
That’s extraordinary.
00:37:01 ►
Well, if you’re making a metaphor
00:37:04 ►
to the act of self-reflection yeah I mean
00:37:08 ►
like you’re seeing into the particle
00:37:10 ►
matter or something that forms but I
00:37:13 ►
couldn’t dig between the molecules
00:37:15 ►
very strange and also if you if you if
00:37:18 ►
you mess around with the contrast and
00:37:20 ►
the the light button at the same time
00:37:23 ►
and you can just get it just right so
00:37:24 ►
it’s pointing in the middle of the screen put on a tripod and stuff and then same time and you can just get it just right so it’s pointing in the middle of the screen
00:37:26 ►
put it on a tripod and stuff and then mess around
00:37:28 ►
and you can actually video it too
00:37:30 ►
you can slug an empty video
00:37:31 ►
if they could make a light show out of that
00:37:35 ►
well Ralph Abraham
00:37:37 ►
when he was studying
00:37:38 ►
dynamical systems
00:37:40 ►
built a device which he called a macroscope
00:37:43 ►
and what it was
00:37:44 ►
was it was two sheets of glass
00:37:46 ►
with a liquid like gel or something in between. And there was a frequency knob and an amplitude
00:37:53 ►
knob. And you play with these two knobs, you illuminate the glass plate with schlieren optics,
00:38:02 ►
which is a polarized light system and projected on a screen and you discover you know that there’s this pulsating pattern but as
00:38:10 ►
you steer with the amplitude and frequency knobs you can stabilize the
00:38:15 ►
pattern but what’s interesting is when you try and when you leave the pattern
00:38:21 ►
and try to steer back to it with the same series of moves again, you can’t find
00:38:27 ►
your way back by repeating your previous action in reverse because it’s a dynamical system.
00:38:35 ►
This is what chaos theory, complexity theory, dynamics is studying now. Very new mathematical tools
00:38:45 ►
are emerging for studying complex systems,
00:38:48 ►
and this is precisely what we need.
00:38:50 ►
You see, all of modern science
00:38:52 ►
up until, let’s say, 1980
00:38:54 ►
was done as an extension of Greek mathematics.
00:38:59 ►
You had the perfect Aristotelian solids,
00:39:04 ►
then you had the multivariable equations
00:39:06 ►
that come out of algebra as it evolves into calculus.
00:39:10 ►
It was interesting that it couldn’t be computed exactly.
00:39:14 ►
Right.
00:39:15 ►
Well, there were all kinds of problems
00:39:17 ►
in nature and mathematics that were called pathological
00:39:21 ►
or a less dramatic term is incommensurate,
00:39:27 ►
meaning that you could tell
00:39:29 ►
that there was a mathematical solution,
00:39:32 ►
but nobody knew how to carry out
00:39:33 ►
the millions of operations necessary to do that.
00:39:38 ►
Well, now with computers,
00:39:40 ►
computers are making a revolution in mathematics
00:39:42 ►
that’s very unwelcome among some mathematicians.
00:39:46 ►
Because, you know, with computers you can perform hundreds of millions of iterative operations a second.
00:39:54 ►
The computer becomes an eye into domains of complexity that previously could only be vaguely indicated.
00:40:03 ►
As an example, fractals.
00:40:05 ►
Fractals have been known since the late 19th century.
00:40:08 ►
They were not called fractals.
00:40:10 ►
They were called pathological curves.
00:40:13 ►
The snowflake curve, the piano curve,
00:40:17 ►
the anti-snowflake curve,
00:40:19 ►
these things were known.
00:40:20 ►
But you could only calculate them
00:40:22 ►
to the third and fourth stage of expression now with
00:40:27 ►
a little program on a PC like fractus sketch you can calculate the eighth ninth and tenth levels
00:40:34 ►
of these complex objects and it only takes it 10 or 15 minutes to draw them for you so this is you
00:40:40 ►
know using technology you specifically technologies which mirror mental functioning
00:40:46 ►
to push us deeper and deeper into the mathematical realm.
00:40:51 ►
Yeah.
00:40:52 ►
There was a composer named Cornelius Cardew,
00:40:56 ►
and he came up with this one composition called Paragraphs.
00:41:01 ►
And it was John Cade style.
00:41:04 ►
It was not musical
00:41:06 ►
locations it had a series of written instructions and there would be 40
00:41:10 ►
people that would perform it anyway say for instance an instruction would be
00:41:15 ►
sing the word if in any note that you hear personally for the for the duration
00:41:23 ►
of a breath and so there would be 40 people that would go,
00:41:26 ►
and so what they would do is he had, at that time,
00:41:30 ►
had all over the country or Europe or America and stuff,
00:41:35 ►
all these different groups of 40 people doing it,
00:41:37 ►
and then the variables would be
00:41:39 ►
that there would be five trained musicians
00:41:41 ►
and 35 people that just walked into the room
00:41:43 ►
and read the instructions.
00:41:44 ►
Anyway, each…
00:41:46 ►
And the piece was maybe 20 minutes long
00:41:49 ►
with a series of instructions.
00:41:50 ►
And there was…
00:41:52 ►
When you played all of these back-to-back,
00:41:53 ►
there was rarely a difference
00:41:55 ►
in the way it sounded and performed.
00:41:58 ►
People would have a tendency to hit A, for instance,
00:42:02 ►
or go…
00:42:03 ►
You mean it reveals an underlying organization
00:42:06 ►
that is not known to be there.
00:42:09 ►
Well, this is how the world is put together, it turns out.
00:42:14 ►
I mean, a story that I occasionally tell
00:42:18 ►
that illustrated for me how this works,
00:42:21 ►
that was very interesting,
00:42:23 ►
was I was on a beach a few years ago in southern
00:42:27 ►
california a very long beach with no people on it and i came upon a black round rock that was
00:42:36 ►
just deposited there and i noticed uh this this rock and i uh kept walking along the beach and then I came to another
00:42:49 ►
black rock exactly like the first one like about 500 yards further on and I
00:42:56 ►
had for some reason probably because I was loaded on mushrooms I had the
00:43:01 ►
prescience of mind to go back to the first rock I’d encountered and count off the steps between the two rocks.
00:43:11 ►
It was like 650 steps.
00:43:14 ►
So when I got to the second rock, I began walking, continuing down the beach, and I counted off 648 more steps, and there was a third black rock, as I knew there would be.
00:43:28 ►
And so you see what’s happening here is that you have a huge bay with this endless beach.
00:43:37 ►
Some kind of incredibly complicated equation is being continuously run on the bay as computer and every 648 to 656 steps it’s
00:43:53 ►
it’s solving this equation by depositing a small black rock on the beach well now if i had had a
00:44:01 ►
naive person around i could have predicted that we would encounter the third black rock
00:44:07 ►
and then they would have deified me or offered sacrifice
00:44:11 ►
or something at this proof of prescient knowledge of the future.
00:44:16 ►
But it wasn’t prescient knowledge of the future.
00:44:19 ►
It was knowledge of how fractals work in space and time.
00:44:22 ►
And, you know, if you get this attitude,
00:44:26 ►
it’s a firm basis for a kind of warm-hearted cynicism
00:44:30 ►
so that when people do something wonderful or terrible to you
00:44:35 ►
that has been done before to you over and over again,
00:44:40 ►
instead of expressing outrage and amazement,
00:44:43 ►
you just notice that aha
00:44:45 ►
it’s happening again
00:44:47 ►
as it has in the past as it surely will in the future
00:44:52 ►
this is how Finnegan’s Wake is written
00:44:55 ►
it’s just within the great fall
00:44:58 ►
are suspended many little falls
00:45:00 ►
and spread through that are many tiny falls
00:45:03 ►
and infinite regress of
00:45:05 ►
repetitious pattern this is how the world
00:45:08 ►
actually works
00:45:09 ►
science would have said it
00:45:11 ►
was incorrect because there was a difference of
00:45:14 ►
three or four paces between
00:45:15 ►
the distances between the rock
00:45:17 ►
therefore nothing was proved
00:45:19 ►
well that’s Greek science
00:45:21 ►
that is trying for a kind
00:45:24 ►
of exactitude.
00:45:25 ►
But it turns out, you know, nature is not deterministic.
00:45:29 ►
There are always…
00:45:30 ►
That’s why, you know, they used to have the idea
00:45:33 ►
that you could run the universe backwards
00:45:35 ►
and that all the particles would eventually rearrange themselves
00:45:39 ►
as they were in the original situation.
00:45:44 ►
This is a… Yeah, that you could run it back to the original situation. This is a…
00:45:45 ►
Yeah, that you could run it back to the Big Bang.
00:45:48 ►
But this is an incredibly naive and simple-minded understanding
00:45:52 ►
of how the laws of nature work,
00:45:54 ►
because the laws of nature are not absolutely determined.
00:45:58 ►
I mean, you can run time backward,
00:46:01 ►
and it will sort of return to where it started from.
00:46:04 ►
run time backward and it will sort of return to where it started from.
00:46:09 ►
But, you know, Columbus will not sail the ocean blue in 1492.
00:46:11 ►
It doesn’t work like that.
00:46:20 ►
Once something has undergone the formality of occurring, it is never to be repeated.
00:46:21 ►
It’s unique.
00:46:25 ►
I mean, that’s what’s happening is there’s this moving wave front of the class of the possible
00:46:27 ►
that slowly at the point of interest
00:46:30 ►
called the now
00:46:31 ►
translates itself into what has actually occurred
00:46:34 ►
but you know just now you said
00:46:36 ►
there’s a
00:46:37 ►
you know the way things are
00:46:38 ►
it’s a repetition
00:46:40 ►
it’s like you know
00:46:41 ►
the fractals
00:46:42 ►
you know like
00:46:43 ►
if it happens to you again and again and now you say nothing is ever repeated so you know the fractals you know like if it happens to you again
00:46:45 ►
and again
00:46:46 ►
and now you say
00:46:47 ►
nothing is ever
00:46:48 ►
repeated
00:46:48 ►
so you know
00:46:49 ►
there is
00:46:49 ►
on one level
00:46:50 ►
there is a
00:46:51 ►
contradiction
00:46:51 ►
on another level
00:46:52 ►
there is some
00:46:53 ►
I don’t understand
00:46:54 ►
well in a fractal
00:46:55 ►
see there is no
00:46:56 ►
contradiction
00:46:56 ►
because you can
00:46:57 ►
these two statements
00:46:58 ►
are both true
00:46:59 ►
here is the first
00:47:01 ►
statement
00:47:01 ►
every day is like
00:47:03 ►
every other day
00:47:04 ►
that’s generally true here is the first statement every day is like every other day that’s generally true
00:47:05 ►
here’s the second statement
00:47:07 ►
but occasionally amazing things happen
00:47:11 ►
that’s also true
00:47:12 ►
you have to round one of the big corners in the pattern
00:47:17 ►
so every day is like every other day
00:47:20 ►
every century is rather like every other century
00:47:24 ►
and every million years is sort of like
00:47:26 ►
the million years that preceded it but then at the fine scale there are incredible surprises
00:47:32 ►
so everything oscillates between its sameness and its uniqueness and and it is uh co-temporaneously both unique and part of a universal plenum.
00:47:47 ►
I mean, this gets close to some kind of Buddhist idea.
00:47:53 ►
Uniqueness is the thing
00:47:55 ►
that hasn’t received enough attention.
00:47:58 ►
That’s why, you know, I’m a Whiteheadian,
00:48:00 ►
because I think Whitehead dealt with uniqueness,
00:48:03 ►
with more care and attention than anybody else has.
00:48:09 ►
Yeah?
00:48:10 ►
You have to follow this path, the student who suffers.
00:48:14 ►
Take that first step and you’re good.
00:48:16 ►
Well, yeah.
00:48:18 ►
Enter into this.
00:48:19 ►
Boolean algebra, which is both-and logic, wasn’t invented until the late 19th century.
00:48:26 ►
So there was this long, long period of where you had to make this choice.
00:48:30 ►
This is, again, what’s called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
00:48:34 ►
the idea that ideas are things, therefore they have to be A or B.
00:48:40 ►
They don’t have to be A or B.
00:48:42 ►
They can exist in a both and situation
00:48:46 ►
yes I had a professor
00:48:48 ►
who seriously
00:48:50 ►
advocated he said you want to know when
00:48:52 ►
the world went wrong
00:48:53 ►
it went wrong when the Greeks
00:48:56 ►
stopped being fishermen and pulled their
00:48:58 ►
boats up on the sand and started
00:49:00 ►
talking philosophy
00:49:01 ►
and the road to hell was
00:49:04 ►
paved broad and straight
00:49:06 ►
from that point on.
00:49:09 ►
Yeah, in alchemical thinking,
00:49:11 ►
which existed as like a countercultural alternative
00:49:16 ►
to all this Aristotelianism,
00:49:18 ►
there is what’s called the coincidencia positorum.
00:49:22 ►
And I found this very useful.
00:49:24 ►
It’s a psychedelic idea, a Jungian idea, an occult idea.
00:49:28 ►
And it’s the idea that you have to practice thinking,
00:49:33 ►
holding two contradictory thoughts in your mind at the same time.
00:49:40 ►
This is a way to snare the mind, and it’s truer to realityuer to reality so like it’s also a great way to name
00:49:49 ►
books by the way I mean if you ever have to title a book this was advice from a New York editor he
00:49:55 ►
said you have to have a title that contains the contradiction true hallucinations or the invisible landscape
00:50:05 ►
or the archaic revival
00:50:08 ►
or black neon
00:50:10 ►
a book I haven’t written
00:50:11 ►
but that will be my foray into pornography
00:50:15 ►
if I haven’t made it already
00:50:17 ►
yes, this is the way to do it
00:50:20 ►
to oppose these things
00:50:22 ►
that’s called a coincidencia positorum
00:50:24 ►
that’s what life is really like.
00:50:27 ►
You know, I really love you.
00:50:28 ►
And if you really knew me,
00:50:31 ►
you would know that I don’t.
00:50:33 ►
And, you know,
00:50:35 ►
you can depend on me
00:50:37 ►
for the next 30 seconds.
00:50:40 ►
And so forth and so on.
00:50:41 ►
I mean, this is what life is really like.
00:50:44 ►
And people hate it
00:50:45 ►
because they want to extrude
00:50:48 ►
this residuum of the uncertain.
00:50:50 ►
They say, you know,
00:50:51 ►
I want you to be dependable,
00:50:54 ►
or I want you to be X, Y, or Z,
00:50:57 ►
when in fact everything is shifting and changing.
00:51:01 ►
I see I’m over time.
00:51:02 ►
I just want to,
00:51:03 ►
this leads me to my final point, which is
00:51:06 ►
first a question I’d like you to think about. We can’t discuss it here, but it’s, are we
00:51:13 ►
psychedelic people different from anybody else? We make the claim that we have found the answer,
00:51:23 ►
that it is suppressed by an ignorant and intolerant world.
00:51:26 ►
We sound very much like the kind of whining that goes on among Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses
00:51:33 ►
or anybody else who has some screwball theory that if the world would but listen,
00:51:39 ►
then everything would be fine.
00:51:41 ►
So I’m very interested in this question.
00:51:43 ►
Are we morally superior? Are we morally superior?
00:51:45 ►
Are we intellectually superior?
00:51:47 ►
Do we treat our children better?
00:51:49 ►
Psychedelic users, that’s what I’m talking about.
00:51:52 ►
Because that’s the bottom line,
00:51:55 ►
is does it inspire better lives, more love, greater care?
00:52:00 ►
That’s the question.
00:52:01 ►
And then the last thought I want to leave you with
00:52:05 ►
which is a sort of coincidencia
00:52:07 ►
positorum thought
00:52:09 ►
because it will bum some and exalt others
00:52:12 ►
is the one thing that I’ve learned
00:52:16 ►
from psychedelics that seems secure
00:52:19 ►
over all the decades
00:52:21 ►
and embracing one idea one ideology after another. The one thing
00:52:27 ►
that seems secure is a truth that is hard to hear in the context of a dominator culture with an
00:52:36 ►
obsession with the material world. And that truth is that nothing lasts. lasts you know your enemies will fade
00:52:49 ►
your friends will fade your fortune your poverty your disappointments your dreams
00:52:56 ►
everything is in the process of changing into something else so your agony is
00:53:03 ►
about to be assuaged on the other hand your agony is about to be assuaged. On the other hand, your happiness
00:53:06 ►
is about to be destroyed. So the obligation that comes out of this realization is an obligation
00:53:15 ►
to the immediate moment, to this thing that I’ve been calling the felt moment of immediate
00:53:21 ►
experience. It isn’t who you were, or what you were, or who or what you were or who you will be or what
00:53:28 ►
you will be it’s the felt moment of immediate experience and this has been robbed from us by
00:53:34 ►
media and by our tendency to denigrate ourselves to see the world in terms of the great ones not here whoever they are Aristotle
00:53:47 ►
Madonna Jesus whatever your particular bent is the overcoming of neurosis of
00:53:55 ►
unhappiness of toxic lifestyles is the felt presence of immediate experience in the body, in the moment. And, you know, psychedelics, sexuality, gastronomy, sport, dance, these are the things which put you in the felt presence of the moment and that’s really all you ever possess your memories are eroding away the futures you
00:54:27 ►
anticipate will mostly not come to pass and the real
00:54:33 ►
richness is in the moment and it’s not necessarily some kind of be here now feel good thing because it doesn’t
00:54:41 ►
Always feel good, but it always feels it is a domain
00:54:46 ►
of feeling its primary language is not primary ideology is not primary the
00:54:54 ►
propagation of future and past vectors is not primary what’s primary is the
00:54:59 ►
felt presence of experience and that is the source of love and that is the
00:55:06 ►
source of community
00:55:08 ►
and if you get that together
00:55:10 ►
as people always
00:55:12 ►
have in the past or we
00:55:14 ►
wouldn’t be here, they to some degree
00:55:16 ►
succeeded with this enterprise
00:55:18 ►
if you get that together
00:55:19 ►
everything will flow with
00:55:22 ►
considerably less resistance
00:55:24 ►
and you will find it in yourself I think
00:55:27 ►
to have enough inner equanimity
00:55:31 ►
and peace of mind to triumph
00:55:33 ►
over whatever life throws your way
00:55:37 ►
whether it be poverty, obscurity
00:55:40 ►
wealth, fame, power
00:55:42 ►
or the absence of power
00:55:44 ►
all of these things should be dealt with
00:55:47 ►
with equanimity
00:55:48 ►
because all are ephemeral
00:55:51 ►
all are in the very act of coming into existence
00:55:55 ►
passing away
00:55:57 ►
Pontet Rea Heraclitus said
00:56:00 ►
all flows
00:56:02 ►
everything is both simultaneously coming into existence and dissolving away to make
00:56:09 ►
room for something else clutching doesn’t work fearing doesn’t work the only thing which works
00:56:17 ►
is a kind of affirmation to the process and psychedelics to my mind
00:56:26 ►
are the medicine
00:56:27 ►
that clears away the obstructions
00:56:30 ►
that make it difficult for us
00:56:33 ►
to touch this existential core
00:56:36 ►
and that’s what life is all about
00:56:39 ►
and that’s the end of the weekend
00:56:42 ►
thank you very much.
00:56:49 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:52 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:57 ►
Clutching and fearing do not work, so says the Bard McKenna,
00:57:01 ►
and I, for one, am inclined to agree with him.
00:57:04 ►
Trust the process, the flow of life,
00:57:07 ►
without clinging to the present or reaching back for the past.
00:57:10 ►
Let go of the rock that you’re clinging to and go with the flow.
00:57:14 ►
Of course, there’s always the little problem of what seems to be all of those rapids along the way
00:57:18 ►
that make going with the flow more difficult
00:57:20 ►
than at other times when the current is more gentle.
00:57:24 ►
So I hope that at this particular
00:57:25 ►
moment it finds you in a smooth flowing current. And even though that infamous 2012 date is no
00:57:33 ►
longer the hot topic that it once was, I nonetheless decided to leave in the brief discussion of that
00:57:39 ►
event, as it is one of, I think, Terrence’s most clear explanations of what he thought would happen after that date.
00:57:48 ►
It’s not something that I feel like continuing to discuss myself, however,
00:57:51 ►
but from the standpoint of better understanding the workings of Terrence’s mind in regards to 2012,
00:57:59 ►
I think that it was quite informative.
00:58:02 ►
Also, I hope that you enjoyed the brief discussion
00:58:05 ►
about playing chess while under
00:58:07 ►
the influence of LSD.
00:58:10 ►
If you recall that famous
00:58:11 ►
video of the British Army troop
00:58:14 ►
that was attempting to conduct a field
00:58:16 ►
exercise while under the
00:58:17 ►
influence of acid, well then,
00:58:19 ►
like me, I’m sure that you can
00:58:21 ►
extrapolate a similarly funny
00:58:24 ►
scene of two chess players on
00:58:25 ►
acid. Of course, you’ve got to be kind of geeky to see the deep humor in that scene, I guess.
00:58:32 ►
Now, I’ve just got a couple of brief announcements before I go, and the first one concerns fellow
00:58:38 ►
saloner, donor, and Palenque Norte speaker, Shona Holm. Ever since I first podcast her Palenque Norte talk from two years
00:58:46 ►
ago, I’ve been receiving requests for more Shona. Well, I’ve got good news for you. There’s a
00:58:52 ►
recording available now of a conversation that she had recently with Niall Murphy,
00:58:57 ►
who is better known as Opaque Lens of Shamanic Freedom Radio in the UK. I haven’t had a chance
00:59:03 ►
to listen to this myself yet,
00:59:05 ►
but that’s the first thing that I’m going to do
00:59:07 ►
as soon as I get this podcast posted.
00:59:10 ►
Here’s a bit of what Shona told me about this conversation.
00:59:14 ►
Niall and I discussed the role of the shaman as individual,
00:59:18 ►
and we touch on, in quotes, instant coffee, unquote,
00:59:22 ►
instant coffee Western culture,
00:59:24 ►
the importance of initiation, a bit about law, and much more.
00:59:29 ►
So I’ll post a link to this talk in today’s program notes, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:59:35 ►
And I’ll also put that link on the page with Shona’s Planque Norte podcast, which is number 360.
00:59:42 ►
And in case you haven’t had a chance to listen to that talk yet,
00:59:45 ►
well, you may want to do so right now.
00:59:49 ►
I’m going to close after I sign off
00:59:52 ►
by replaying that interesting little question
00:59:54 ►
that Terrence asked in this talk.
00:59:57 ►
It’s actually one of the most important questions
00:59:59 ►
that our community can ask of itself,
01:00:02 ►
and it is something that I plan on discussing
01:00:04 ►
in one of the live sessions of the Psychedelic Salon
01:00:07 ►
that I’ll be hosting at the end of next month
01:00:10 ►
at the Arizona Wild Wild West Festival.
01:00:13 ►
This will be the first and most likely the only time
01:00:17 ►
that there’s going to be a live session of the Salon,
01:00:19 ►
so I hope that you can make it and participate in this event,
01:00:23 ►
which I should note also, mainly features a lot of really good music, not just talk.
01:00:30 ►
And I’ll put a link to that festival in the program notes for this podcast.
01:00:34 ►
Again, you can get to it via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:00:37 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:42 ►
Be well, my friends.
01:00:44 ►
First, a question I’d like you to think about.
01:00:47 ►
We can’t discuss it here,
01:00:49 ►
but it’s, are we, psychedelic people,
01:00:54 ►
different from anybody else?
01:00:57 ►
We make the claim that we have found the answer,
01:01:01 ►
that it is suppressed by an ignorant and intolerant world.
01:01:04 ►
We sound very
01:01:06 ►
much like the kind of whining that goes on among Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses or anybody else
01:01:12 ►
who has some screwball theory that if the world would but listen, then everything would be fine.
01:01:19 ►
So I’m very interested in this question. Are we morally superior? Are we intellectually superior?
01:01:25 ►
Do we treat our children better?
01:01:27 ►
Psychedelic users, that’s what I’m talking about.
01:01:30 ►
Because that’s the bottom line,
01:01:33 ►
is does it inspire better lives, more love, greater care?
01:01:38 ►
That’s the question. you