Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“It is not that culture is evolving. The evolution of culture is an epiphenomena attendant upon the evolution of language. Language is the part of man that is evolving. Culture carries along.”
“I think people have a greater sensitivity to the mysteries of human interaction simply because so much LSD was taken in the Sixties.”
“The world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose. We are actually trapped inside a giant organism. And it is not Gaia. That’s a much larger organism. We are trapped inside a large organism which is the human collectivity, and that’s why we are such different monkeys.”
“But really the psychedelic experience is like an intimation of immortality. And at varying distances in time from the point you occupy it shows you ever more vague intimations of the future, but they are there nevertheless.”
“What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery.”
“There is a potential for immortality, but it isn’t assured. It is something which comes to the courageous.”
Previous Episode
Next Episode
397 - Art and Other Disruptive Technologies
Similar Episodes
- 282 - How Evolution Occurs - score: 0.97386
- Podcast 690 – Terence McKenna at Esalen June 1984 - score: 0.97312
- 344 - A Global Cultural Crisis - score: 0.90160
- 275 - The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience - score: 0.89496
- 483 - Catalysts of Consciousness - score: 0.88503
- 027 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 1) - score: 0.87328
- 367 - The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker - score: 0.86153
- 241 - Philosophical Gadfly Part 2 - score: 0.85767
- 270 - Tryptamine Consciousness - score: 0.85611
- 267 - Exploring the Abyss - score: 0.85550
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And today we’re going to get to hear
00:00:26 ►
a Terence McKenna talk that took place in June of 1984. And while I heard some familiar
00:00:33 ►
ideas discussed here, I also found it interesting to hear how he discussed some of what became
00:00:39 ►
his favorite topics, but way back at what was, well, it was the earlier part of his more public career.
00:00:47 ►
If I’m correct, this talk was given less than one year after his first major public appearance,
00:00:53 ►
which you can also listen to in my podcast number 100. Also, this is one of his earliest takes that
00:01:00 ►
I’ve heard on his idea that the psychedelic community is actually a community of mutants
00:01:06 ►
who will one day, soon, discover that they have an evolutionary advantage and take over.
00:01:13 ►
Personally, I’m not in favor of that just yet.
00:01:17 ►
From my point of view, although I do consider myself to be a voluntary member of the global psychedelic community.
00:01:25 ►
I still can see that while it is my favorite group of people to be involved in,
00:01:30 ►
nonetheless, we’ve got just as many internal social problems as most other cultures.
00:01:36 ►
You know, face it, we’ve still got a long way to go to become more human
00:01:39 ►
than our base animal instincts prepare us for.
00:01:43 ►
We all have a shadow side, and well, most of us control
00:01:46 ►
them quite well, but I suspect that I’m not the only one who has difficulty controlling my rage
00:01:52 ►
sometimes when I see an image of, oh, say, a political figure that I despise, which is most
00:01:59 ►
of them these days. But I’m rambling now. All that I’m trying to say is that none of us has all of the answers.
00:02:06 ►
In fact, I’m not even sure of the questions anymore. So let’s not get up on our high horses
00:02:11 ►
and begin thinking that we are any better than any other group of mutants these days.
00:02:16 ►
So I’ll shut up now and we can join Terrence McKenna and some fellow mutants on a cool summer day in June, way back in 1984, 30 years ago,
00:02:28 ►
which is before most of our fellow salonners were born, I should mention.
00:02:35 ►
What I want to talk about, and I don’t really want to, I would like a discussion about it, if that’s possible, is those components of the psychedelic experience
00:02:47 ►
which exceed either the psychedelic paradigm
00:02:52 ►
or raise the issue of violations of some kind of larger paradigm.
00:03:00 ►
And there are two areas where this is noticeable,
00:03:05 ►
and one is fairly common in the literature,
00:03:11 ►
and that’s the report of telepathic phenomena and that sort of thing,
00:03:16 ►
which has been persistently a repressed sub-theme in psychedelic research
00:03:23 ►
ever since Havelock Ellis began experimenting with mescaline.
00:03:27 ►
And the other thing is a constellation of issues
00:03:34 ►
that seem to me related,
00:03:37 ►
although they may not seem related to you.
00:03:41 ►
And we touched on this this afternoon in Stan’s talk,
00:03:44 ►
which is the question of the extraterrestrial connection
00:03:48 ►
or whatever it is
00:03:50 ►
and what do these things mean
00:03:54 ►
the first thing I want to say about all this
00:04:00 ►
is there’s been a phrase used by several people
00:04:03 ►
which is the full spectrum of psychedelic
00:04:06 ►
effects people will tell you at what dose the full spectrum of psychedelic effects occurs or
00:04:13 ►
we heard yesterday that lsd elicits the full spectrum of psychedelic effects but in fact there is no catalog of psychedelic effects and how does one know what the full
00:04:27 ►
spectrum is?
00:04:29 ►
It’s a very tricky matter.
00:04:33 ►
What I have encountered at fairly high doses of psilocybin and on DMT but strangely on nothing else
00:04:46 ►
that
00:04:47 ►
I find very interesting
00:04:49 ►
is the whole
00:04:51 ►
problem of
00:04:53 ►
interiorized voices
00:04:55 ►
relationships with hidden
00:04:58 ►
agencies of
00:05:00 ►
uncertain parameters
00:05:02 ►
and related to that
00:05:04 ►
states that I think uncertain parameters and related to that states
00:05:06 ►
that I think
00:05:07 ►
the vocabulary we inherit
00:05:10 ►
from the religious systems
00:05:12 ►
that we’ve recently overthrown
00:05:14 ►
leave us with nothing
00:05:16 ►
to say about them but that they’re
00:05:18 ►
states of possession
00:05:19 ►
and the word demonic has been used
00:05:22 ►
but not defined
00:05:24 ►
and it’s somehow it’s a form of negativity that does not seem to be operational,
00:05:32 ►
but it’s very upsetting, nevertheless, to people.
00:05:37 ►
So what I find and what I think is generally part of the shamanic practice of taking mushrooms is that at fairly low doses, meaning I can’t speak of pure psilocybin, but at five dried grams,
00:06:01 ►
but at five dried grams,
00:06:07 ►
it’s very easy to invoke a voice,
00:06:10 ►
a kind of logos-like phenomenon, which operates as the typical hierophant.
00:06:17 ►
It’s the teaching voice.
00:06:18 ►
It’s Virgil to Dante.
00:06:21 ►
It’s a very large and superior force
00:06:24 ►
which takes you by the hand
00:06:26 ►
and then narrates the various scenarios
00:06:29 ►
that you’re conveyed through
00:06:31 ►
and the trick of course is the trick that’s
00:06:35 ►
such a conundrum of the literature
00:06:38 ►
of involvement with demons and devils
00:06:42 ►
which is the trick is to get something out of it and get away clean.
00:06:49 ►
And the way that works operationally when trysting with the mushroom voice
00:06:56 ►
is it’s the challenge to get it to tell you something that you’re sure you didn’t know already
00:07:02 ►
so that you can have some validation that you’re not
00:07:07 ►
just talking to the back of your head.
00:07:11 ►
And though this sounds trivial at first, as you move into the dialogue with the other,
00:07:17 ►
it becomes apparent that it’s going to be elusive.
00:07:23 ►
Mercurial is a word that suggests itself. Now another aspect of the
00:07:31 ►
psilocybin intoxication, which may or may not be related to this, and that I have sort
00:07:37 ►
of, I guess, insisted upon more than anybody else, is that it triggers phenomena having to do with the language centers.
00:07:48 ►
Henry Munn, in a book called
00:07:50 ►
Talos Cynogens and Shamanism,
00:07:52 ►
edited by Michael Harner,
00:07:53 ►
talks about this.
00:07:55 ►
And I went to some lengths to talk to him about it.
00:07:59 ►
And I found out that,
00:08:02 ►
though he agreed with my opinions on the subject, he didn’t hold them nearly
00:08:07 ►
as strongly as I did, that for him it had been a fairly elusive and upsetting phenomenon.
00:08:14 ►
But this is a form of glossolalia that I really am convinced is an affect of tryptamines that is a psychedelic affect
00:08:27 ►
but I don’t believe it happens with anything else.
00:08:30 ►
At least it doesn’t happen in my experience with anything else
00:08:33 ►
and the literature doesn’t mention anything like this.
00:08:37 ►
It does not happen with ayahuasca
00:08:41 ►
even though chemically you would think ayahuasca, even though chemically you would think ayahuasca would have the same properties as the other tryptamine hallucinogens.
00:08:53 ►
And so I want to describe a typical encounter with this phenomenon,
00:09:01 ►
with this phenomenon because a client has had this experience
00:09:06 ►
over a dozen times
00:09:08 ►
and it’s almost always unvarying.
00:09:11 ►
The problem is the client happens to be myself.
00:09:15 ►
So getting independent confirmation
00:09:19 ►
that this could happen to someone else
00:09:22 ►
has not been very easy.
00:09:23 ►
Nevertheless, I operate under the faith that there’s nothing unique about me
00:09:28 ►
and that anything I could experience is a generally accessible human phenomenon.
00:09:34 ►
I mean, I think it would be preposterous to operate under any other kind of assumption.
00:09:40 ►
In giving DMT to people casually over a number of years, only four people have reported the kind of phenomenon that I’m interested in. nevertheless the experience is of such an ontologically
00:10:07 ►
different modality
00:10:08 ►
that it’s difficult to see how you could cue it
00:10:13 ►
to somebody
00:10:14 ►
they would have to have it
00:10:16 ►
and what it involves is
00:10:18 ►
a transformation of language
00:10:22 ►
into something which is no longer sound decoded by brain
00:10:31 ►
through the consultation of a culturally validated dictionary, but instead it becomes sound which is beheld
00:10:45 ►
and meaning which is beheld
00:10:49 ►
and this idea of a visible language
00:10:52 ►
when it first came to me
00:10:54 ►
or when I first realized that that was the phrase
00:10:57 ►
I was going to have to use to describe what was happening
00:11:00 ►
I had never heard or imagined of such a thing. But then I went back into
00:11:07 ►
the literature and I discovered that, as usual, the Greeks got there first, or at least in
00:11:14 ►
this case, the Jewish Greeks or the Greek Jews, because in Philo-Judeus, who was a
00:11:21 ►
contemporary of Christ, there’s a discussion of what he calls the more perfect logos.
00:11:27 ►
And he says the more perfect logos will be apprehended through seeing,
00:11:37 ►
not through hearing.
00:11:38 ►
And yet it will cross from being heard to being seen
00:11:42 ►
without ever going through a noticeable moment when it shifts from
00:11:48 ►
one modality to the other and this seems to be what is happening in in the DMT flash when you
00:11:57 ►
smoke the free base not the hydrochloride but when you smoke the freebase, you have this spontaneous experience of generating
00:12:09 ►
what you identify first as a thought and then as a sound, but which eventually becomes some
00:12:17 ►
kind of synesthesia linguistic modality for which we don’t have words yet. Telepathy I always conceived of
00:12:27 ►
as looking into your own mind
00:12:29 ►
and hearing what someone else was thinking.
00:12:32 ►
But the notion that telepathy
00:12:35 ►
might be someone speaking
00:12:37 ►
and producing a three-dimensional object in the air
00:12:41 ►
that could be rotated and mutually beheld by the speaker and the listener
00:12:49 ►
had never occurred to me. But experiment with the DMT showed that this extraordinary kind of state
00:12:59 ►
is actually potentially triggerable again and again. And it’s almost as though there is a sensorium of the world
00:13:11 ►
which in order to be reconstructed in the interior horizon of transcendence
00:13:18 ►
that is the being of a given individual,
00:13:21 ►
the sensorium has to be arbitrarily broken down into its perceptual components
00:13:28 ►
of sound, sight, odor, tactility, etc. And normally as it enters the human organism these
00:13:36 ►
categories which are arbitrary but as old as the human body itself are maintained. But
00:13:43 ►
as old as the human body itself, are maintained,
00:13:46 ►
but they need not necessarily be maintained.
00:13:51 ►
The incoming sensory data can be recombined in such a way that no trace of the portal of entry is left upon it.
00:13:57 ►
And in that case, you get this freely evolving topology
00:14:02 ►
of light and sound that is translinguistic. It has a grammar of form,
00:14:14 ►
if you will, so that it is not shorn of meaning. It is simply shorn of the kind of particularized meaning that logical necessity imposes on language.
00:14:29 ►
Instead, it has an emotional richness, a kind of poetic depth that is not like ordinary
00:14:39 ►
language at all, and in fact causes one to think of discussions of primary poetic languages such
00:14:48 ►
as the one that goes on in The White Goddess by Robert Graves where he wants to suggest
00:14:55 ►
that there is a proto-language, an ursprach that transcends conventionalized dictionaries, a language which, to hear it, is to understand it.
00:15:08 ►
And I think that this kind of organization of information
00:15:13 ►
lies at the basis of the psychedelic experience.
00:15:18 ►
In other words, you can think of cultural conventions
00:15:22 ►
and human languages as software languages
00:15:27 ►
that are historical adumbrations
00:15:30 ►
of an assembly language
00:15:32 ►
which is prehistoric
00:15:34 ►
and probably in the genes
00:15:36 ►
and antedates all notion
00:15:41 ►
of human conventionalizing of activity
00:15:44 ►
and is actually biologically the basis of language.
00:15:49 ►
As I said in the opening remarks,
00:15:52 ►
that if you want to see the thumbprint of God in the world,
00:15:56 ►
it seems to me the phenomenon of human language is where you look.
00:16:02 ►
I mean, human language is a psychic ability. I can make thoughts
00:16:07 ►
in your head by simply uttering certain small mouth noises. And the degree of fineness of
00:16:16 ►
the images that I can produce in your head and you in mine through the use of small mouth
00:16:21 ►
noises is something which we’re still exploring.
00:16:28 ►
I think that it’s well known that the human animal has not appreciably evolved
00:16:32 ►
in 50 or 60,000 years, possibly much longer.
00:16:36 ►
Once culture was established,
00:16:40 ►
the soma of the human species was relatively stabilized,
00:16:47 ►
then change was no longer genetic.
00:16:51 ►
It became epigenetic.
00:16:53 ►
And you get, just as the stability sets in in the animal form,
00:16:58 ►
you begin to get this fantastic proliferation of epigenetic change in the form of the
00:17:06 ►
evolution of culture, languages
00:17:08 ►
alphabets
00:17:10 ►
it all seems to be related
00:17:12 ►
somehow to the encoding
00:17:14 ►
of information
00:17:15 ►
and the psychedelic
00:17:18 ►
state also
00:17:20 ►
seems to be about the revelation
00:17:22 ►
of kinds of information
00:17:24 ►
which are normally
00:17:25 ►
either not efficacious
00:17:27 ►
or unavailable for other
00:17:30 ►
reasons and it
00:17:32 ►
is not that culture
00:17:33 ►
is evolving
00:17:35 ►
the evolution of culture is an epiphenomenon
00:17:38 ►
attendant upon the evolution
00:17:40 ►
of language
00:17:41 ►
language is the part of man
00:17:44 ►
which is evolving. Culture carries along.
00:17:50 ►
At the present moment, we are able to speak 21st century ideas to each other, but our culture is
00:17:56 ►
carrying along at about the 1950s level. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this thing which psilocybin does to the language-producing part of the brain
00:18:07 ►
is not then some mere affect, some trivial affect of an obscure hallucinogen on a peripheral part of the brain.
00:18:20 ►
It means that it is in fact a catalyst for evolution because it is a catalyst for the evolution of language.
00:18:29 ►
We are not going to move into the future until we create that future through language.
00:18:37 ►
And the hardest thing to cause to change is language.
00:18:42 ►
It has an immense inertia because it is so unself-reflective
00:18:48 ►
of itself. And this is what we need to inject into it, is an element of self-reflection
00:18:54 ►
so that the evolution of language can become more conscious and less random, because it’s
00:19:01 ►
the non-randomizing of the evolution of language that will give us a real hold on the kinds of social modalities
00:19:10 ►
that we want to produce in the future.
00:19:13 ►
Now, I don’t know if the tryptamine-induced glossolalia
00:19:19 ►
will have a major role to play in that.
00:19:22 ►
It may be simply one of the many promising
00:19:26 ►
scintillas or sparks thrown off by the psychedelic experience that invites
00:19:33 ►
exploration but certainly all of these things the chanting the glossolalia the
00:19:40 ►
inner discourses with alien forces the self-examination of one’s own motives,
00:19:46 ►
all of these things are linguistic activities
00:19:49 ►
and go on in the context of linguistic action.
00:19:54 ►
It seems to me that what these drugs synergize
00:19:58 ►
is cognitive activities of all sorts.
00:20:01 ►
This is why originally they were called consciousness expanding drugs.
00:20:06 ►
And this synergy of cognitive activity has to be taken very, very seriously because it’s having a
00:20:15 ►
massive effect on our society. As individuals, we tend to concentrate on the 6 to 12 hours following the ingestion of a given drug
00:20:26 ►
but the real impact
00:20:28 ►
is a societal impact
00:20:29 ►
that is spread out over decades
00:20:31 ►
and I don’t think that there’s
00:20:33 ►
any question at all but what
00:20:36 ►
the best part
00:20:38 ►
of the social program
00:20:39 ►
of the LSD reformers
00:20:42 ►
of the 60s has been
00:20:44 ►
enacted in large measure.
00:20:47 ►
It’s simply that it’s at a profane level,
00:20:50 ►
not pleasing to the purest.
00:20:53 ►
But I see, I believe that people have
00:20:56 ►
deeper and subtler senses of humor.
00:21:00 ►
I think people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity. I think people have more refined aesthetic sensitivity.
00:21:06 ►
I think people have a greater sensitivity
00:21:09 ►
to the mysteries of human interaction
00:21:12 ►
simply because so much LSD was taken in the 60s.
00:21:17 ►
And these are permanent changes that will not be wiped out.
00:21:21 ►
Our language is largely in the place where it was left by about 1969. But from the
00:21:31 ►
period of 1959 to 69, dozens of concepts and notions, ego trip, bummer, flashback, rupture of plane, all of these terms were invented that allowed a handle on the experience. has been an effort to create languages of sufficient power to give descriptions
00:22:10 ►
of the internal transcendence of being
00:22:13 ►
as we experienced it in the present at hand.
00:22:16 ►
And Stan touched on this this afternoon.
00:22:18 ►
The Freudian interest in the repression of desire
00:22:27 ►
and the placement of
00:22:29 ►
the critical period in childhood
00:22:32 ►
in other words out of the present
00:22:35 ►
but still within the context of the life
00:22:38 ►
of the experience
00:22:39 ►
and then Jung
00:22:40 ►
trying to say well it’s that
00:22:44 ►
but it’s more than that,
00:22:46 ►
and bringing in the notion of a collective unconscious.
00:22:50 ►
But it isn’t that these guys were describing the unconscious
00:22:55 ►
or limiting or delineating the unconscious.
00:22:59 ►
It was that they were going through linguistic forms of metamorphosis
00:23:03 ►
in an attempt to describe what was a black box
00:23:07 ►
which essentially i think still eludes them because though the jungian model and was fairly
00:23:15 ►
satisfying i think by we’ll say the middle 40s it was just at that time that then these psychedelic agents began coming on. And
00:23:27 ►
what they show is that if we keep the Freudian term, the unconscious, then huge portions of
00:23:38 ►
the unconscious seem to have very little to do with human beings, individually or collectively, and that large
00:23:48 ►
portions of the unconscious present themselves more like a topological manifold, in other
00:23:54 ►
words more like a place that is no more interested in the traumas or repressed wish fulfillment
00:24:01 ►
of human beings than boulders, wildflowers, and waterfalls
00:24:06 ►
are interested in these things.
00:24:08 ►
In other words, the unconscious began to take on
00:24:11 ►
the character of a dimension
00:24:14 ►
rather than a repository of energy
00:24:20 ►
that seemed to be instead something deployed spatially
00:24:25 ►
that could be entered into.
00:24:27 ►
And immediately, of course, the literatures and traditions
00:24:30 ►
and mythologies of the world were searched.
00:24:34 ►
And we discovered, yes, shamanism.
00:24:36 ►
There is a tradition of a therapeutic practitioner
00:24:40 ►
who in order to cure his patient or himself goes to a place
00:24:46 ►
and then there are many descriptions
00:24:48 ►
it’s either an ascent through cosmic levels
00:24:53 ►
or a descent into an inferno
00:24:57 ►
or into the center of the earth
00:24:58 ►
or into a cavern
00:24:59 ►
but the stress was on the spatial metaphor
00:25:03 ►
that it was a place.
00:25:07 ►
And I think that the psychedelics are beginning to confirm this
00:25:12 ►
in a way that’s very hard for us to assimilate.
00:25:16 ►
In other words, it seems as though the science fiction metaphor
00:25:21 ►
of another dimension is actually in some ways
00:25:26 ►
more applicable than these
00:25:28 ►
reductionist models
00:25:32 ►
which wanted to say, well, it’s a
00:25:34 ►
representation of a certain symptomatology
00:25:37 ►
or it’s a representation of a certain past event system.
00:25:41 ►
It doesn’t seem to be like that.
00:25:43 ►
And it raises questions about the relationship
00:25:46 ►
of the mind to the body,
00:25:48 ►
which I talked about the first night,
00:25:51 ►
that are very interesting.
00:25:52 ►
One of the things, again,
00:25:54 ►
that Stan touched on this afternoon
00:25:56 ►
was what he called synchronistic events
00:25:59 ►
attendant upon taking psychedelic drugs.
00:26:03 ►
And this means that you take a psychedelic drug
00:26:07 ►
and then someone you’ve been thinking of who lives far away
00:26:10 ►
shows up at your doorstep, this kind of thing.
00:26:14 ►
Jung, the word synchronicity was coined by Jung
00:26:17 ►
and it means a meaningful coincidence.
00:26:21 ►
But I think it was P.D. Bridgman who said that a coincidence is what you have left over
00:26:29 ►
when you apply a bad theory
00:26:31 ►
and there can be just so many
00:26:37 ►
of these meaningful coincidences
00:26:40 ►
before somebody has to stand up and say
00:26:44 ►
hell, this can’t be coincidences,
00:26:47 ►
meaningful or otherwise,
00:26:49 ►
something else is happening here.
00:26:51 ►
And on psilocybin,
00:26:53 ►
and I think it’s, you know,
00:26:56 ►
based on anecdotal material,
00:26:58 ►
but I think it’s generally true
00:26:59 ►
of other psychedelics in varying degrees,
00:27:03 ►
the synchronistic component
00:27:04 ►
is more like a poltergeist phenomenon.
00:27:08 ►
It’s as though there are small eddies of autonomous psychic energy
00:27:13 ►
that disturb the periphery of awareness.
00:27:18 ►
It’s the rats-in-the-wall phenomenon.
00:27:21 ►
in the wall phenomenon the scratchings, the rustlings
00:27:25 ►
fire flarings need to be studied
00:27:30 ►
the phenomenon of people lying on floors
00:27:34 ►
silent for hours
00:27:36 ►
and then sitting up at the very moment
00:27:39 ►
that the fire flares, the window blows open
00:27:42 ►
the baby cries
00:27:43 ►
almost as though there are waves of compression
00:27:47 ►
of coincidence, connectedness, what is it, I’m not sure.
00:27:53 ►
Coincidence control.
00:27:54 ►
Something like that, that move through a modality.
00:28:00 ►
So all of these things suggest that actually we don’t know what we’re doing with psychedelics.
00:28:08 ►
That because things that you put into your mouth that are not foods must necessarily be medicines,
00:28:17 ►
we have assigned these things to our doctors to explain to us.
00:28:23 ►
And I noticed in the first talk this afternoon it was said well
00:28:27 ►
there’s the uh the uh schizotoxin the theory that you know the psychotomimetic theory then there’s
00:28:36 ►
also the theory that these things induce religious experiences but so did the psychiatrists who figured this out immediately step aside and make
00:28:47 ►
room for priests? Or what was the conclusion of that model of how it should be done?
00:28:55 ►
So I don’t think they are, I think it’s odd that our reaction to them was to immediately say, well,
00:29:02 ►
if you’re dying of cancer, we’ll give it to you.
00:29:05 ►
If you’re seriously neurotic,
00:29:08 ►
you can be put on the waiting list.
00:29:10 ►
Everybody else hit the streets
00:29:12 ►
if you’re interested.
00:29:15 ►
There is this notion, you know,
00:29:18 ►
that what we all experience
00:29:23 ►
is mental health
00:29:24 ►
and certainly doesn’t require any drug intervention
00:29:29 ►
because it in fact is normality.
00:29:33 ►
But Jung and others have had more the idea of an open-ended process,
00:29:41 ►
that there is an unlimited potential for understanding and for coming to terms
00:29:46 ►
with being in the world and for opening up to other people. And I think that it would
00:29:55 ►
be very interesting to take the approach that these things should be restricted to people of open exceptional ability. That going along with
00:30:09 ►
winning the Nobel Prize was your license to possess and take psychedelics and to hand
00:30:17 ►
them out to your friends. It’s interesting that when this was all being hashed out at the very beginning,
00:30:28 ►
it was Huxley, it was Aldous Huxley’s notion that this is how it should be done.
00:30:32 ►
He said, you know, engineers, artists, diplomats, administrators,
00:30:38 ►
people must be exposed to these things.
00:30:41 ►
And then somewhere along the line, I think personalities arose with messianic
00:30:47 ►
tendencies and the notion became that you would count success in millions of followers
00:30:54 ►
rather than in the quality of the people who were taking it. And that proved a sad thing because the society in which that conception
00:31:05 ►
arose had a demographic bulge
00:31:08 ►
in the 12 to
00:31:10 ►
30 year old group and
00:31:11 ►
it just all ended
00:31:13 ►
rather badly
00:31:16 ►
so
00:31:17 ►
as I said at the beginning
00:31:20 ►
there’s no conclusion about all of
00:31:22 ►
this stuff, it is
00:31:24 ►
the frontier.
00:31:25 ►
There is a very large frontier.
00:31:28 ►
We’re very fond of the notion
00:31:31 ►
of an ever-expanding sphere of understanding.
00:31:35 ►
But has anyone stopped to notice
00:31:37 ►
that if you have an ever-expanding sphere of understanding,
00:31:41 ►
necessarily the surface volume
00:31:44 ►
of the frontier of the unknown becomes
00:31:49 ►
larger and larger.
00:31:52 ►
So, you know, it’s like building a bonfire bigger and bigger to convince yourself that
00:32:00 ►
there’s an awful lot of darkness.
00:32:02 ►
that there is an awful lot of darkness.
00:32:06 ►
So I think, you know,
00:32:12 ►
the key to getting around the cultural momentum that has placed us in this position
00:32:15 ►
is to return to the Baconian method,
00:32:19 ►
which is simply the collection of facts
00:32:21 ►
and the examination of them until patterns emerge
00:32:26 ►
and that then the major datum
00:32:29 ►
for thinking about the psychedelic experience
00:32:32 ►
should be the experience
00:32:35 ►
and that the pharmacology
00:32:39 ►
and all of these things
00:32:40 ►
they will elucidate
00:32:43 ►
operational details of how these things, they will elucidate operational details of how these things function at the
00:32:49 ►
wetware level, but they will never elucidate the component which is beheld by the experience
00:32:57 ►
in confrontation with the drug. In fact, it’s silly to demand that of them because that’s not the kind of information
00:33:05 ►
that they are able to deliver.
00:33:08 ►
In fact, no system of thought
00:33:11 ►
is able to deliver that kind of a description.
00:33:15 ►
That has to come from the individual.
00:33:18 ►
And that’s why I am fond of speaking of these things
00:33:22 ►
as deconditioning agents
00:33:24 ►
because what they show you is that, you know,
00:33:27 ►
each man, each woman, their own Magellan.
00:33:31 ►
You need no longer participate in a pyramid of information
00:33:37 ►
where it’s filtering down to you
00:33:39 ►
from the scientific, medical, governmental, and military elite
00:33:43 ►
being explained by CBS, NBC, Newsweek, and Time,
00:33:50 ►
you can discover actually that the adventure of being
00:33:54 ►
is not a cultural adventure.
00:33:57 ►
It’s not a societal adventure.
00:33:59 ►
It’s a personal adventure.
00:34:03 ►
And that this is what you really need to be involved in.
00:34:07 ►
And all this is happening.
00:34:09 ►
This is why shamanism has gained such a hold
00:34:12 ►
because it’s a metaphor for personal responsibility.
00:34:18 ►
And I think we all take personal responsibility
00:34:20 ►
for the evolution of our worldview.
00:34:23 ►
Psychedelic people, I’m referring to, take responsibility for the evolution of our worldview. Psychedelic people, I’m referring to, take
00:34:26 ►
responsibility for the evolution of their worldviews. But still, we operate under the
00:34:32 ►
shadow of what’s right to say about it and what’s not right to say about it. For instance, The UFO thing is a cultural taboo and not believed in by nice, intellectually nice people.
00:34:51 ►
It’s more the province of telephone line repairmen
00:34:55 ►
and that sort of slice.
00:35:00 ►
But the fact of the matter is that
00:35:03 ►
no matter how much it may discomfort drug researchers and UFO people,
00:35:09 ►
because each is struggling to gain respectability in an inherently dubious field,
00:35:16 ►
but actually, you know, there would be a, I think there would be a fertile advance made
00:35:22 ►
if these two groups could talk to each other.
00:35:28 ►
Some people hearing me say that
00:35:30 ►
must wonder what in the world
00:35:32 ►
I’m talking about.
00:35:33 ►
How can a problem
00:35:34 ►
of unidentified aircraft
00:35:37 ►
be related to the phenomenology
00:35:39 ►
of the psychedelic experience?
00:35:42 ►
But you see,
00:35:43 ►
it isn’t so much a problem of unidentified aircraft,
00:35:46 ►
it’s a problem of not recognizing that the entire spectrum of existence
00:35:54 ►
is embedded in a linguistic model that is created by the workings of minds
00:36:02 ►
and that mind is an imponderable
00:36:05 ►
and yet it’s set at the beginning of the equation
00:36:08 ►
in 1978
00:36:11 ►
a very, a spectacular
00:36:15 ►
daylight meteorite
00:36:17 ►
crossed the United States from east to west
00:36:20 ►
required about 35 seconds for it to
00:36:24 ►
go from one side of the country to the other.
00:36:26 ►
There was no warning that this thing would occur. And in the 35 seconds that it was over the
00:36:34 ►
continental United States, thousands and thousands of people saw it. But we got 32 very good
00:36:42 ►
photographs of it from different points along the ground
00:36:46 ►
two movies of it from two different points
00:36:50 ►
along its pathway
00:36:51 ►
and it was very well documented
00:36:55 ►
UFOs have been visiting people
00:36:59 ►
and appearing all over the world
00:37:01 ►
for 30 years and the hardware
00:37:04 ►
faction can’t come up with anything all over the world for 30 years and the hardware faction
00:37:05 ►
can’t come up with anything.
00:37:08 ►
So it seems clear to me
00:37:10 ►
that what we’re dealing with
00:37:12 ►
is a kind of mass psychic phenomenon
00:37:14 ►
of some sort.
00:37:17 ►
And it’s very interesting
00:37:18 ►
that one of the anecdotal things
00:37:24 ►
in circulation about psychedelics
00:37:26 ►
is that they are actually catalysts for this kind of thing.
00:37:32 ►
And what this means is not clear,
00:37:35 ►
but it should certainly be investigated.
00:37:38 ►
I mean, if there’s a chemical agent
00:37:39 ►
which can repeatedly trigger a phenomenon that bizarre,
00:37:44 ►
it should be looked at.
00:37:46 ►
Jung very early suggested in a book called Flying Saucers,
00:37:51 ►
a modern myth of things seen in the sky that he published in 1948,
00:37:57 ►
that it was in fact a projection of the mass psyche that it was assimilable to the goals
00:38:07 ►
of alchemical transubstantiation.
00:38:11 ►
He called it the rotunda, the scintilla,
00:38:14 ►
the spark, the spinning thing.
00:38:17 ►
And it’s all these things,
00:38:19 ►
but it is the clue that we are somehow trapped
00:38:24 ►
inside some kind of artifice,
00:38:27 ►
that the world that we’re inside of is much more like a work of art
00:38:33 ►
than it is like the smooth-running mechanistic machine that Newtonian science describes.
00:38:41 ►
That description works very well for all low-grade phenomena up to
00:38:48 ►
about the level of the weather.
00:38:51 ►
But from there on, the notion that the world is simply probabilistic processes following
00:39:00 ►
these various creodes of least resistance, becomes very untenable
00:39:06 ►
because each of us, in our experience of being,
00:39:11 ►
lives in a highly theatrical world.
00:39:14 ►
And what I mean by that is that
00:39:16 ►
you can see a woman at a great distance from you
00:39:24 ►
in class, in opportunity, all of these things,
00:39:29 ►
and you fall in love with this woman,
00:39:32 ►
and it’s hopeless.
00:39:34 ►
But of course, as we all know,
00:39:37 ►
it’s also inevitable.
00:39:39 ►
And that inevitability totally violates physics
00:39:43 ►
because it really is hopeless. How is it then that each of
00:39:47 ►
our lives is a work of art of unbelievable chance encounters, coincidences, and wishes projected
00:39:59 ►
onto the world but never spoken and strangely fulfilled in the oddest ways. I think that it’s because
00:40:08 ►
the world is made of language and that if the eastern conception that the universe is
00:40:15 ►
mind has any operational impact in the world, it will be through conceiving of mind as the underlying self-aware self-active
00:40:32 ►
world forming grammar of being so that the what Freud called the superego what
00:40:39 ►
I call the over mind there have been different ways of talking about it, has to be seen not as a passive homeostatic controlling device,
00:40:48 ►
but actually as the most intelligent organization on this planet.
00:40:56 ►
And we are all only components of this,
00:40:59 ►
believing ourselves to be the highest expression of freedom.
00:41:03 ►
But it is actually at the species level
00:41:06 ►
that organization is controlled,
00:41:09 ►
and that’s why the emergence of ideas
00:41:12 ►
like the calculus or the invention of LSD
00:41:14 ►
or the steam engine,
00:41:16 ►
why these things have this curious property
00:41:18 ►
of being regulated from above,
00:41:21 ►
it’s because the world is not nearly as chaotic and random as we suppose we are actually
00:41:27 ►
trapped inside a giant organism and it is not gaia that’s a much larger organism we are trapped
00:41:36 ►
inside a large organism which is the human collectivity and that’s why we are such different monkeys because there is this a
00:41:46 ►
Group mind which none of us is aware of or has ever perceived that is actually mediating
00:41:55 ►
The human experience and it is no more apprehendable to us than the group mind of an anthill is
00:42:03 ►
Apprehendable to us. It can’t be seen.
00:42:06 ►
What it is is it’s an interlocking set of conventions,
00:42:10 ►
linguistic directions, genetic components, assumptions,
00:42:18 ►
and what, for lack of a better word,
00:42:22 ►
you would call innate tendencies. And these things which we wear as the clothing of our specieshood
00:42:31 ►
are actually the constraints directing us first one way and then another.
00:42:36 ►
And if we want to take control of our destiny,
00:42:40 ►
we are going to have to rise into empathy with this overmind, this superego.
00:42:47 ►
And there’s no reason to think this can’t be done.
00:42:51 ►
I’m sure you’re all familiar with Julian Jayne’s theory
00:42:54 ►
that until very recently, in fact, until Homeric times,
00:42:58 ►
everyone heard voices in moments of crisis.
00:43:03 ►
If you were in a moment of crisis suddenly and quite naturally
00:43:07 ►
a voice spoke in your head and said you know get the hell out of there or do something and
00:43:15 ►
everyone understood that this was god or the king or the dead king it depended on where you located in the Middle East
00:43:26 ►
but
00:43:27 ►
there were people who traded
00:43:30 ►
between these various locations
00:43:33 ►
and the first
00:43:35 ►
cynics is what they were
00:43:37 ►
because they noticed
00:43:38 ►
that over at Ur
00:43:41 ►
God spoke to
00:43:43 ►
everybody
00:43:43 ►
but down at Nineveh,
00:43:47 ►
it was the dead king who everybody heard in their head.
00:43:51 ►
And this logical discrepancy cast doubt.
00:43:56 ►
And they became the first people to not hear the voice,
00:44:01 ►
but to assimilate it.
00:44:03 ►
And this is what we call the ego it is what
00:44:07 ►
we experience as the self something which 2,000 years ago was a god which
00:44:14 ►
only intervened in human affairs to save lives and give heavy advice has become
00:44:21 ►
for each of us the the central focus through which we mediate our sensorium
00:44:28 ►
and project models of the world.
00:44:32 ►
So it is not…
00:44:33 ►
We are far more plastic than we realize.
00:44:37 ►
And I think what Stan was saying tonight
00:44:39 ►
about how the goal is to be in the…
00:44:43 ►
I forget the term, the hylolytic, the matter- to be in the, I forget the term,
00:44:45 ►
the hylolytic, the matter-oriented side of it,
00:44:49 ►
but to have this awareness,
00:44:51 ►
a complete awareness of the other side
00:44:54 ►
so that you are simultaneously locked in Newtonian space-time
00:44:59 ►
and the parameters of the situation
00:45:01 ►
and you are simultaneously liberated into a complete
00:45:07 ►
awareness of the other potential and the way I recognize that state and this may
00:45:13 ►
be idiosyncratic but I can tell I’m in that state when no matter what I’m doing
00:45:20 ►
and no matter where I go I can see the earth hanging in space
00:45:26 ►
by simply referencing that image and discovering it present in my head in a way that is not
00:45:33 ►
like a thought or something artificially induced.
00:45:38 ►
It’s a real modality that is present and accessible.
00:45:43 ►
And I think that means, you know, that you have enough of yourself committed
00:45:47 ►
to the overmind that you’re operating in the light of it.
00:45:51 ►
And then many consequences flow from that
00:45:55 ►
that are efficacious at the personal level.
00:46:00 ►
For instance, there’s something which has been called
00:46:02 ►
the Tao of the Ancestors.
00:46:05 ►
What that means, I think, is simply that for each one of us,
00:46:10 ►
there is a way to do the things we must do
00:46:13 ►
that is the most energy-efficient way to do it.
00:46:18 ►
And I’m talking about opening a door, picking up a fork.
00:46:22 ►
The best way to do it is to follow the creode
00:46:27 ►
that is the Tao of the ancestors
00:46:28 ►
to recognize that you are a genetic expression
00:46:31 ►
a partial genetic expression
00:46:33 ►
of a gene pool
00:46:35 ►
which has received genetic expression
00:46:37 ►
at each generation in your family
00:46:40 ►
for thousands and thousands of generations
00:46:42 ►
and that you are just the latest recension of this gene pool,
00:46:48 ►
then you release the ego and you act with this awareness.
00:46:53 ►
These are psychedelically induced states of being
00:46:57 ►
that I think make it easier to live in the world.
00:47:00 ►
And how many of them are there?
00:47:02 ►
Who knows?
00:47:03 ►
For instance, under the influence of Silla Simon in the Amazon,
00:47:08 ►
I noticed what I am completely convinced
00:47:11 ►
is an atrophied human ability.
00:47:15 ►
It’s a very simple ability, but we have lost it.
00:47:19 ►
It’s the ability to know how to walk from point A to point B, not following the shortest distance,
00:47:29 ►
but following automatically the path of least resistance, so that you don’t go down into
00:47:37 ►
valleys and then climb hills. You automatically stay on ridges, even though you take more circuitous paths to your goal.
00:47:46 ►
And I could feel
00:47:47 ►
this sense working.
00:47:48 ►
It was just like
00:47:49 ►
a part of the dashboard
00:47:50 ►
that had previously
00:47:52 ►
been covered up
00:47:53 ►
was uncovered.
00:47:54 ►
Here was the human sense
00:47:55 ►
which we don’t
00:47:56 ►
particularly need
00:47:57 ►
because we’ve erected
00:47:59 ►
linear cities
00:48:00 ►
where the path
00:48:03 ►
of least resistance
00:48:04 ►
usually is a straight line. But you can imagine
00:48:06 ►
people in rugged country, this is a sense which would confer great survival adaptability and be
00:48:14 ►
tremendously important. So I think that what we need to do is tease these human abilities
00:48:25 ►
out of the psychedelic experience,
00:48:27 ►
that really the psychedelic experience
00:48:29 ►
is like an intimation of immortality.
00:48:32 ►
And at varying distances in time from the point you occupy,
00:48:37 ►
it shows you ever more vague intimations of the future,
00:48:41 ►
but they are there nevertheless.
00:48:43 ►
intimations of the future, but they are there nevertheless.
00:48:53 ►
Language is probably somehow related to the endogenous hallucinogens in the human brain.
00:48:59 ►
The evolution of culture is probably related to these things. It’s been suggested that DMT in the brain is mediating what we experience as attention,
00:49:01 ►
that the DMT in the brain is mediating what we experience
00:49:03 ►
as attention,
00:49:05 ►
that when you look and look hard,
00:49:08 ►
something is happening in the brain
00:49:10 ►
having to do with DMT,
00:49:12 ►
that it mediates awareness
00:49:13 ►
in a very moment-to-moment way.
00:49:18 ►
The future evolution of mankind
00:49:21 ►
is going to be based on these states,
00:49:24 ►
but the last point I want to make is one about how evolution occurs. It isn’t that a mutation happens and it is, confers greater adaptability upon an individual and therefore that individual and his offspring numerically gain over competitor individuals of the same species.
00:49:51 ►
This is not how it works.
00:49:53 ►
The way it works is you have constant mutating of a gene pool
00:49:59 ►
from the influx of cosmic radiation and other factors.
00:50:03 ►
There is always a low level of mutants in a population.
00:50:11 ►
But they are of no consequence
00:50:14 ►
as long as the selective parameters remain the same.
00:50:19 ►
But when the selective parameters change suddenly,
00:50:23 ►
these individuals who were previously masked
00:50:26 ►
in the general population, the selective advantage that they have now comes immediately to the
00:50:35 ►
fore, and they act very quickly and critically to send the evolution of a given species off in a different direction.
00:50:50 ►
This is why the fossil record progresses in fits and starts,
00:50:53 ►
because sudden shifts of environment cause the apparent emergence of new types.
00:50:58 ►
It isn’t that they cause it,
00:51:00 ►
it’s that the new types were always there,
00:51:02 ►
but not with any advantage.
00:51:05 ►
It’s that the new situation has conferred a sudden advantage on them and they are
00:51:10 ►
moving then into positions of dominance in the population or in society if we’re
00:51:16 ►
talking about human beings I think that the psychedelic experience is like that
00:51:22 ►
at the present level it hasred, there is a population of
00:51:28 ►
different people in the general population. And as conditions change, these people will
00:51:37 ►
be seen to have adaptive advantages. Without being metaphysical about it.
00:51:46 ►
An obvious adaptive advantage is what I call the deconditioning effect.
00:51:53 ►
That we live in a jungle of propaganda, you know, buy this, believe this, wear this.
00:52:00 ►
If you have a symbiotic relationship with a deconditioning agent,
00:52:05 ►
you’re much more likely to thread your way through that
00:52:09 ►
with your soul and your bank account intact.
00:52:13 ►
So this is one way of thinking of it.
00:52:18 ►
What the psychedelics really do, I think,
00:52:22 ►
is release us from cultural machinery
00:52:24 ►
and put you right up against the human essence What the psychedelics really do, I think, is release us from cultural machinery and
00:52:25 ►
put you right up against the human essence and say, you no longer have to pretend that
00:52:31 ►
you’re Scotch-Irish or Wetoto or Jewish.
00:52:35 ►
You can actually explore the human modality independent of the inertia of these exterior labels. And so it places responsibility,
00:52:47 ►
it raises questions of validity,
00:52:50 ►
existential honesty with oneself,
00:52:56 ►
and I think it promotes the moral life,
00:53:00 ►
which I don’t think happens
00:53:02 ►
if you buy deeply into myths of the tribe if you’re
00:53:07 ►
a devoted practitioner of Marxism fascism capitalism I don’t think these
00:53:13 ►
things will lead you to the moral life because they are not they don’t arise
00:53:18 ►
out of experience experience is everything These are drugs of experience.
00:53:29 ►
It’s very important to take the moment seriously.
00:53:33 ►
Reincarnation and all these things aside,
00:53:37 ►
what if this were your unique opportunity to unravel it all
00:53:40 ►
and not to be caught in dissolution?
00:53:44 ►
Because I think that there is a potential for immortality,
00:53:49 ►
but it isn’t assured.
00:53:52 ►
It is something which comes to the courageous.
00:53:55 ►
And somehow in the historical experience,
00:53:59 ►
we’ve gotten the idea through orthodox religions
00:54:02 ►
that salvation comes to the subservient and this is totally
00:54:07 ►
wrong it is more like the greek ideal of the hero that if you are heroic enough once you’re dead
00:54:16 ►
you’ll be a god and i think this is what these things summon us all to. And the thing to look at are the things which don’t fit any paradigm.
00:54:28 ►
The anomalies, the paranormal things,
00:54:31 ►
the self-transforming elf machines,
00:54:34 ►
the UFOs, all of these things.
00:54:37 ►
I don’t know, it has to do with this whole thing.
00:54:39 ►
You see, the alien is an archetype,
00:54:42 ►
as well as whatever else it may be.
00:54:45 ►
I mean, if aliens didn’t exist or don’t exist, we would still invent them
00:54:51 ►
because it’s the other.
00:54:53 ►
You know, I’ve made the metaphor that we have arrived at some kind of collective puberty where we now are fascinated by the notion of a non-human
00:55:10 ►
partner we’re obsessed as an adolescent is obsessed with sex we’re obsessed with
00:55:18 ►
the notion of alien love we want this and yet we have all the feelings about it that an adolescent brings to the early
00:55:29 ►
sexual experiences it seems like an abyss a devouring a kind of giving up impossible and
00:55:37 ►
yet our our historical development has led us to the place where we now realize this is possible. It’s like finding out
00:55:46 ►
the facts of life. The facts of life are that there could be a girl next door. And now…
00:55:54 ►
Who’s an alien.
00:55:55 ►
Who’s an alien, of course. What other kind of girl next door could it be?
00:56:01 ►
So then, hmm, there’s a girl next door. and so it’s not all the talk about the wonderful technical
00:56:09 ►
benefits that we would reap and all this and is obviously it isn’t that it’s an erotic fascination
00:56:16 ►
with the notion of the other that drives us and perhaps this is why in the psychedelic experience the alien emerges so fully and
00:56:27 ►
completely because it is a a a repressed notion although i’ve noticed in in the in the history of
00:56:36 ►
the the phenomenology of ufo contacts the theme it was first a light in the sky, then we had all these exotic abductions,
00:56:47 ►
and then in the last four or five years
00:56:49 ►
there are more and more persistent stories
00:56:51 ►
of sexual relations, pregnancies, this kind of thing.
00:56:57 ►
Well, this obviously means that, you know,
00:57:00 ►
we’re growing up, we’re getting older,
00:57:03 ►
the pressure is on to come to terms
00:57:06 ►
with how this thing is going to present itself.
00:57:10 ►
So sweet.
00:57:11 ►
Yes.
00:57:14 ►
So it’s hardly respectable to say these things anywhere.
00:57:19 ►
I mean, fortunately, I work for a living,
00:57:23 ►
so I can say these things
00:57:25 ►
but
00:57:27 ►
the amount of anecdotal material
00:57:31 ►
that would come pouring forth
00:57:32 ►
if these things were stressed
00:57:34 ►
I think would shock everyone
00:57:35 ►
and somehow it has to be taken out
00:57:38 ►
and this is a really sensitive issue
00:57:41 ►
that is very hard to talk about
00:57:43 ►
how can such a screwy notion be taken out of the
00:57:48 ►
hands of squirrels? In other words, we have no shortage of people assuring us that aliens of
00:57:56 ►
all sorts are channeling left, channeling right, this, that, the other thing. How the problem is the reverse of the problem in radio
00:58:07 ►
telescopy, where they search the skies and get nothing. Our problem is just a cacophony
00:58:14 ►
of hysterical claim making. Where do you begin? You know, the Urantia book, you’ve got the nine, you’ve got all kinds, and this is not a new phenomenon. It’s,
00:58:29 ►
well, you could choose your point, but certainly since the onset of theosophy and Alice Bailey’s
00:58:36 ►
school, and there’s been a lot of channeling in the 20th century. So the problem is one of filters. Which aliens do you believe
00:58:45 ►
and how do you tell garbage from the real thing?
00:58:51 ►
And I think this is a problem for information theorists.
00:58:54 ►
It’s a poker-playing problem, essentially,
00:58:58 ►
and shouldn’t be difficult to solve if we apply ourselves to it.
00:59:02 ►
It’s just that for us us the notion of a dialogue with
00:59:06 ►
an interior other is psychopathy. So we’re very leery of that or we’re very something
00:59:15 ►
of that.
00:59:20 ►
Alfred or Metzner?
00:59:26 ►
Anyway, I noticed that Sasha,
00:59:29 ►
when he described the phenomenology of psilocybin,
00:59:34 ►
didn’t say a thing about self-transforming elf machines or whispered messages from gods and demons.
00:59:37 ►
He did mention demons.
00:59:39 ►
So you’re free to believe
00:59:41 ►
that this is the raving of an unhinged mind,
00:59:45 ►
but being a Jeremiah figure is a great tradition,
00:59:50 ►
and they usually have the last laugh.
00:59:54 ►
Are there any questions?
00:59:57 ►
Tell us the story.
01:00:09 ►
this really could be the language before we tried to build the Tower of Babel
01:00:11 ►
we all shared the same language
01:00:13 ►
then it got split up
01:00:14 ►
this is the term for that
01:00:17 ►
Urschbrach, the first language
01:00:19 ►
yes
01:00:20 ►
that’s what I mean
01:00:23 ►
by an assembly language
01:00:24 ►
but the things that happen on psychedelics with language Yes, that’s what I mean by an assembly language.
01:00:28 ►
But the things that happen on psychedelics with language just defy rational apprehension.
01:00:32 ►
I mean, for instance,
01:00:35 ►
there’s a Celtic saying that poetry is made at the edge of running water.
01:00:48 ►
And I’ve noticed on psilocybin at times that as you approach running water,
01:00:52 ►
like a river or a waterfall,
01:00:54 ►
you know, there is, you begin to think in rhyme.
01:00:59 ►
It’s sprung verse.
01:01:01 ►
And it seems preposterous.
01:01:03 ►
You say, you know, this is too crazy to mention to
01:01:05 ►
anyone and you’re right, but nevertheless it’s happening, you know. I mean, and as you
01:01:11 ►
leave the river, thought becomes perfectly normal and now, and people say, well, white
01:01:18 ►
noise is doing this. That’s an explanation.
01:01:29 ►
Or you look at historical phenomena.
01:01:32 ►
Mohammed, it turns out, spoke in verse.
01:01:36 ►
And it was considered a sign of election.
01:01:40 ►
Glossolalia with shaman is not that rare.
01:01:42 ►
Spirit voices.
01:01:44 ►
It happens without drugs all the time.
01:01:47 ►
Yes, although I don’t know if you know this book by Sylvia Goodman called Speaking in Tongues,
01:01:49 ►
which is, as far as I know, the major work in English.
01:01:52 ►
It’s done strictly from the sociological approach,
01:01:56 ►
but there is some physiological data.
01:01:58 ►
The most interesting being that
01:01:59 ►
on the floor of these Costa Rican churches
01:02:03 ►
where she did her research,
01:02:05 ►
after these sessions,
01:02:07 ►
they would measure pools of saliva
01:02:09 ►
18 inches across,
01:02:11 ►
deposited by single individuals.
01:02:15 ►
Also, what was going on was
01:02:17 ►
there was a lot of hyped up,
01:02:19 ►
you know, hallelujah type stuff,
01:02:22 ►
and then someone would fall in
01:02:24 ►
to the glossolalia and
01:02:26 ►
utter a burst of it, and then be like, almost like a post-epileptic situation, and they
01:02:33 ►
would turn to the people around them and say, did I do it? Did I really speak in tongues?
01:02:39 ►
This is not what the DMT glossolalia is like. What it is, and I’ll take a minute and describe it because…
01:02:47 ►
Do you have a recording?
01:02:49 ►
Not with me.
01:02:51 ►
But I’ll describe how it comes
01:02:53 ►
because I think people often say to me,
01:02:56 ►
well, I took mushrooms and nothing like that ever happened.
01:02:59 ►
Well, the first time it happened to me was the first time I smoked DMT.
01:03:03 ►
And I’m not sure that it would happen on psilocybin if you didn’t have a lead into it.
01:03:09 ►
You have to invoke it.
01:03:11 ►
In other words, it isn’t that psilocybin causes it.
01:03:14 ►
And this is interesting.
01:03:15 ►
It’s that psilocybin carries you to a place where it is possible,
01:03:21 ►
given several other things which seem to be necessary.
01:03:26 ►
So psilocybin is necessary, but not sufficient for this phenomenon.
01:03:31 ►
What else is required is a thing which is sort of hard to describe,
01:03:36 ►
but it’s an attitude of expectation.
01:03:39 ►
It’s an attitude of being on the verge of communication,
01:03:43 ►
even though nobody else is present.
01:03:45 ►
In other words, you have to invoke it.
01:03:48 ►
And that word, strangely enough,
01:03:51 ►
has a history related to demonic summoning
01:03:57 ►
and that sort of thing.
01:03:58 ►
But that’s what you do.
01:03:59 ►
You invoke it.
01:04:00 ►
You feel the load of the psilocybin
01:04:03 ►
and you say, aha, it’s enough now.
01:04:07 ►
And then you test, you try it,
01:04:13 ►
and you do this by consciously speaking gibberish.
01:04:17 ►
In other words, what seems to be happening
01:04:19 ►
is that you have to release your brain’s expectation
01:04:24 ►
that sound will have meaning because when we all speak
01:04:29 ►
we always the words have a meaning attached to them or else there’s something wrong with you
01:04:34 ►
but if you will speak gibberish for a moment just for a moment it’s like priming the pump
01:04:40 ►
and the break then is made with whatever connects language to meaning and language begins, it begins to flower and to take off and to develop these abstract modalities that are free of association but that are obviously highly ordered and grammatical and going through complicated, it’s like a sonata.
01:05:06 ►
And in fact, it’s led me to suggest that probably language existed
01:05:12 ►
thousands and thousands of years before meaning.
01:05:16 ►
That this is what monkeys, these evolving monkeys on the brink of self-reflection
01:05:22 ►
did for each other as a form of entertainment
01:05:25 ►
it’s not as much of an
01:05:27 ►
energy drain as chanting
01:05:29 ►
and singing
01:05:30 ►
you just carry it on at a conversational
01:05:33 ►
level
01:05:34 ►
it’s word music
01:05:37 ►
that can
01:05:39 ►
very very fine nuances
01:05:41 ►
of
01:05:42 ►
the stuff it’s manipulating,
01:05:46 ►
which is not meaning, but whatever it is,
01:05:48 ►
this topological manifold, very fine nuances,
01:05:52 ►
can be imparted to it by these small mouth noises.
01:05:56 ►
Is it anything like what babies who are about to learn to speak do?
01:06:00 ►
Do they carry on these things?
01:06:02 ►
It sounds like a language that you just don’t understand.
01:06:05 ►
There’s all this inflection
01:06:07 ►
and it sounds very intelligent.
01:06:09 ►
If you could just kind of catch it.
01:06:11 ►
It’s like that.
01:06:12 ►
It is very close to actual language.
01:06:16 ►
It’s like that, only more so.
01:06:18 ►
Only more complex.
01:06:19 ►
Like one of the things that seems to be going on
01:06:21 ►
is there seems to be more phonemes
01:06:23 ►
than are actually in any human language. I mean, isn’t it that there are 52 phonemes and no language known
01:06:29 ►
as more than 41 or something like that? Because if you do this for a while and it’s so much
01:06:36 ►
fun, it’s a kind of ecstasy to do it, that there’s no reason to stop if you’re alone.
01:06:42 ►
there’s no reason to stop if you’re alone.
01:06:45 ►
After you’ve done it for an hour or so,
01:06:49 ►
your face, your mouth,
01:06:53 ►
is just hanging down to your waist.
01:06:55 ►
I mean, it’s like you’ve just done something to the whole front of your head
01:06:57 ►
and all the musculature has dissolved
01:06:59 ►
because you’ve been making all these sounds
01:07:02 ►
that you never make.
01:07:04 ►
And the whole front of your face
01:07:06 ►
feels different
01:07:07 ►
so every language
01:07:10 ►
has a set of
01:07:12 ►
coded
01:07:13 ►
mouth positions which are
01:07:16 ►
expected and
01:07:17 ►
easily facilitated
01:07:20 ►
through use
01:07:21 ►
is there somebody else there to hear it?
01:07:24 ►
no there’s rarely somebody there to hear it? No, there’s rarely somebody there
01:07:26 ►
to hear it when I do it.
01:07:28 ►
I sometimes wish.
01:07:30 ►
Is it easier, in other words,
01:07:31 ►
because I got the impression…
01:07:32 ►
Oh, I don’t know.
01:07:33 ►
I mean, for instance,
01:07:34 ►
I’m very shy about it.
01:07:36 ►
I feel like it’s a very personal thing to do
01:07:39 ►
so that it’s hard for me to do it
01:07:41 ►
in the presence of other people.
01:07:43 ►
But this is just perhaps my personality or my association with it.
01:07:48 ►
I think you’re a better speaker than he is.
01:07:51 ►
Well, here’s what I think it is.
01:07:53 ►
Henry Munn made this point in his article,
01:07:59 ►
and I said earlier that what we need is the evolution of language,
01:08:03 ►
and it’s all about the evolution of language yes it’s a very it’s a continuum and as I I guess
01:08:11 ►
it was here it was somewhere recently I said you know it begins as clear thought
01:08:18 ►
it moves into eloquence. It then becomes charismatic.
01:08:26 ►
At that point, if it goes any further,
01:08:28 ►
it will be called demonic possession
01:08:30 ►
because it’s happening too much.
01:08:34 ►
You’re not supposed to be that compelling.
01:08:37 ►
You’re not supposed to be that powerful a speaker.
01:08:40 ►
And if you stick with it past demonic possession,
01:08:44 ►
it becomes these
01:08:48 ►
objects it actually crosses over and becomes the topological modality that that i mentioned
01:08:56 ►
jill and i were talking in the baths the other night because she made her sounds down there and I caught it at a certain angle
01:09:06 ►
visually and I could see
01:09:08 ►
these things coming out of her mouth
01:09:11 ►
which looked like blue smoke
01:09:14 ►
and I’ve seen this before
01:09:16 ►
it looks like heat waves off a highway
01:09:20 ►
and perhaps it’s nothing more than heated air
01:09:24 ►
that’s been in the lungs heated
01:09:25 ►
by the body has a different refractive index than the exterior air.
01:09:30 ►
It’s probably expelled in a series of waves and so if you have the light just right what
01:09:36 ►
you see is a displacement of light flickering in the vicinity of the mouth but I think I’ve also in a
01:09:46 ►
stone state watch that condense into this more visible language and it’s as
01:09:53 ►
though you know there are finer and finer levels of vibration the whole
01:09:57 ►
notion of the word becoming flesh which occurs in cosmogonic myths as diverse as the Judeo-Christian and the Australian Aborigine.
01:10:07 ►
It’s always about a word. A word was uttered, and this word was somehow more than a word.
01:10:14 ►
It adumbrated through dimensions and caused the phenomenon of being.
01:10:20 ►
And this is the sort of thing that’s happening.
01:10:24 ►
And this is the sort of thing that’s happening.
01:10:29 ►
But to answer your question, yes, I think that I have verbal facility because I’ve taken so much of this drug.
01:10:33 ►
Maybe I had a tendency toward it at the beginning,
01:10:35 ►
being Irish and not given to hard work.
01:10:42 ►
But nevertheless, it definitely does this,
01:10:46 ►
and it does it temporarily.
01:10:48 ►
Like when you take psilocybin,
01:10:50 ►
if you actually try to do what we call raving,
01:10:53 ►
which is a high-speed soliloquy,
01:10:58 ►
but the raving can just go anywhere.
01:11:01 ►
And if it’s true that what we are are creatures of information then this is very
01:11:08 ►
interesting that it synergizes this ability everything that we are doing is informational
01:11:16 ►
deployment I mean we take in raw materials and we excrete manufactured objects which are essentially ideas. We take
01:11:26 ►
in air and we expel
01:11:28 ►
words. Everything
01:11:30 ►
we do is about stamping
01:11:32 ►
higher orders of information
01:11:34 ►
on unorganized lower
01:11:36 ►
forms of raw material
01:11:37 ►
and it’s
01:11:38 ►
moving out of us, moving
01:11:42 ►
out of our bodies. This technical
01:11:44 ►
engine that we have created
01:11:46 ►
of computers and scientific institutions
01:11:48 ►
and rapacious government agencies and commercial concerns.
01:11:54 ►
It has a life of its own.
01:11:56 ►
It’s defining what humanity will be for itself.
01:12:00 ►
It’s a war about language,
01:12:03 ►
about Joseph Goebbels, the great 20th century thinker who understood this more clearly than anyone else and set the tone, set the rules of the game so that the deconditioning effect of the drugs, the introduction to alien modalities, the glossolalia, the accessing of the vision state,
01:12:27 ►
all of these things have to do with information and the life of its own that it is taking on.
01:12:33 ►
And we are like the privileged observers of this.
01:12:36 ►
It’s as though, well, no less a psychedelic voyager, researcher, and bon vivant
01:12:45 ►
than William Burroughs said,
01:12:47 ►
English is a virus from outer space.
01:12:52 ►
And that’s what I’ve been trying to say,
01:12:54 ►
and now I’m finished.
01:12:59 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:13:01 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:13:04 ►
to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:13:12 ►
Well, I don’t quite get what Burroughs meant about English being a virus from outer space,
01:13:17 ►
but I do agree with what Terrence just said about us being privileged observers.
01:13:24 ►
Observing a change in human behavior, a change in ages, I don’t know what, but just this morning I was listening to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Dennis McKenna and Josh Wickram.
01:13:30 ►
And in case you don’t know who Josh is, well, I actually mentioned him in my podcast number one, which was a talk that I gave at the MindStates conference in May of 2001.
01:13:41 ►
So Josh isn’t exactly a newcomer to the table. He’s been paying his dues for a long
01:13:47 ►
time now. Anyway, Dennis and Joe got talking about Terrence’s time wave and how unfortunate
01:13:53 ►
it was that the idea got attached to the 2012 solstice date, and that’s something that I’ve
01:14:01 ►
always thought, that there definitely is something to the novelty theory and to Terrence’s ideas about the nature of time.
01:14:10 ►
As I’ve said on many occasions, should there still be self-reflective life on this planet a thousand years from now,
01:14:16 ►
my guess is that they may actually see Terrence’s concept of the end of history taking place actually in the decades bracketing 2012.
01:14:27 ►
Now keep in mind also that the way Terence defined his concept of the end of history
01:14:31 ►
was that it would be the end of human-only history,
01:14:36 ►
and the beginning of a new history in which humans and their machines became inseparable.
01:14:42 ►
Well, just look around you.
01:14:43 ►
Have you noticed how many people are walking
01:14:47 ►
around these days looking down at their hands? Well, the web-enabled phone hadn’t yet been
01:14:53 ►
released just seven years ago today. And for anyone with a web-enabled phone, well, your history is no
01:14:59 ►
longer a human-only history. From now on, like it or not, your life is going to be significantly impacted
01:15:05 ►
by your machines, so you’d better get control of them soon, otherwise they’re going to be
01:15:11 ►
controlling you before you know it. Which reminds me, I need to get away from this computer myself
01:15:16 ►
for a bit, so for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.