Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we’re trapped, and realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation.”
“Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds.”
“When we really understand time travel we may find out it’s as common as dirt and has been going on all around us is all kinds of physical processes.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:23 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And you’re probably wondering where I’ve been.
00:00:28 ►
Well, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, you already know part of the story.
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And after we’ve first listened to this talk by Terrence McKenna, I’ll be back to fill you in.
00:00:37 ►
But first, let’s get to this interesting talk about time travel.
00:00:41 ►
And just one bit of a warning here, and that is that while Terence’s grasp of particle
00:00:47 ►
physics and black holes may have been current in August of 1991, a lot of advanced research has
00:00:53 ►
taken place since then, and that may greatly alter some of the things that he was saying.
00:00:58 ►
However, I think that I know the physicist that was present at this talk and whom Terrence called Paul. And if he’s
00:01:05 ►
who I think he is, then we can rely on the fact that this information was as current as possible
00:01:10 ►
as of 1991. And actually, now that I think of it, Paul was one of the first listeners to these
00:01:17 ►
podcasts, if I remember correctly. So hi, Paul, if you’re still out there. Oh, and here’s a spoiler alert.
00:01:30 ►
The prediction that Terrence McKenna makes about happenings on December 22, 2012,
00:01:33 ►
well, they did not, in fact, take place.
00:01:39 ►
And that’s for those of us who haven’t been paying too much attention to the current date lately.
00:01:42 ►
An elf told me that…
00:01:47 ►
Now, there’s a fine thing for a scientist to say. An elf told me that time travel is possible, but it is constrained in ways which are not normally part of our expectation of time travel.
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which are not normally part of our expectation of time travel.
00:02:06 ►
The way in which it’s constrained is,
00:02:09 ►
once time travel is discovered,
00:02:15 ►
you can travel as far into the future as you wish,
00:02:19 ►
but you can’t travel into the past any further than the moment
00:02:23 ►
of the invention of the
00:02:26 ►
first time machine
00:02:27 ►
the reason for this is that
00:02:29 ►
before the invention of the first time
00:02:32 ►
machine there were no time machines
00:02:34 ►
and how can you take a time
00:02:36 ►
machine into a domain where
00:02:37 ►
there aren’t any
00:02:38 ►
you see it’s just to preserve logical
00:02:41 ►
consistency
00:02:42 ►
that’s right you can’t take a car where there hasn’t been a car driven before.
00:02:46 ►
That’s right. You can’t take a car where there are no roads.
00:02:49 ►
When cars were first invented, the main objection to them was,
00:02:55 ►
what are you going to do with this thing?
00:02:57 ►
You know, there’s nowhere to, you know, it can’t go where a horse can go,
00:03:01 ►
so what good is it?
00:03:04 ►
So here’s a fantasy scenario,
00:03:08 ►
which for a while I liked very much.
00:03:12 ►
It’s that quantum physics and nanotechnology
00:03:17 ►
and all this malarkey is refined and focused
00:03:23 ►
toward the notion of building a time machine
00:03:26 ►
so that then
00:03:28 ►
on the morning of December 22, 2012
00:03:32 ►
at the World Time Institute
00:03:35 ►
in the Amazon
00:03:37 ►
the first time journey is about to be taken
00:03:42 ►
and the whole world is watching
00:03:44 ►
on holographic television
00:03:47 ►
as the lady Temponaut
00:03:50 ►
is strapped into the machinery
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that will hurl her centuries into the future
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and there’s a countdown
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and a button is pushed
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and off she goes.
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Now most people’s interest would be to follow this woman wherever
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she’s going, but let’s forget her for a moment. The point has been made. She disappears. We assume
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she went off into the future. But what happens right there, right then? It seems to me in the very next millisecond
00:04:26 ►
thousands of time machines
00:04:29 ►
would begin arriving from the future
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simply because they had driven
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to the end of the road.
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They had come back in time
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to witness the first journey
00:04:40 ►
into the future.
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It’s as though you could take
00:04:43 ►
your Piper Cub
00:04:45 ►
and fly it to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1906
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to see the right flyer take off.
00:04:53 ►
You see?
00:04:54 ►
Are you all with me so far?
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Oh yeah, right.
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Now, there’s a problem with this,
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which some of you I’m sure are thinking, I hope anyway, which is what’s called the grandfather paradox, which is the old conundrum that haunts all time travel schemes, which is, if time travel were possible, you could go back in time and kill your own grandfather.
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Well then you wouldn’t exist. Well so then this sets up a logical impossibility.
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Either you exist or you don’t exist and some science fiction authors have
00:05:40 ►
assumed that somehow massive influxes of synchronicity
00:05:46 ►
would preserve your grandfather.
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You would approach him with your Saturday night special,
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but it would blow up in your hand,
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or it would ricochet off the St. Christopher medal he always wore,
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or something like that, because he cannot be killed by you,
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because in that case you wouldn’t exist,
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in which case he couldn’t be killed by you.
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And this troubled me for a long time then.
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What exactly would happen in this situation?
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Because according to hans moravic of the robotics institute of
00:06:28 ►
carnegie mellon university i mean time travel is no big deal the first paragraph
00:06:34 ►
of this paper the last few years have been good for time machines kip Thorne’s renowned general relativity group at Caltech
00:06:45 ►
invented a new quantum gravitational approach
00:06:48 ►
to building a time gate,
00:06:50 ►
and an international collaboration
00:06:52 ►
gave a convincing rebuttal
00:06:54 ►
of the grandfather paradox arguments.
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Another respected group suggested time machines
00:07:00 ►
that exploit quantum mechanical time uncertainty.
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The technical requirements for these
00:07:06 ►
suggestions exceed
00:07:07 ►
our present capabilities,
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but each new approach seems less
00:07:12 ►
onerous than the last.
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There is hope yet that time travel will
00:07:15 ►
eventually become possible, even
00:07:18 ►
cheap.
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So I
00:07:22 ►
then saw
00:07:23 ►
another possibility, and this is the way we can fulfill the expectation of Christian hermeneutics, but not require the second coming of Christ or the intercession of God Almighty into history or all these other extreme unlikelihoods. And to understand it, we have to have recourse to a physical model
00:07:50 ►
in a very simple realm of chemistry and physics,
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which is the Bernoulli gas laws.
00:07:57 ►
Some of you, I’m sure, are familiar with these,
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and they’re very intuitive and easy to understand.
00:08:04 ►
and they’re very intuitive and easy to understand.
00:08:11 ►
We have a cylinder and it contains a vacuum.
00:08:15 ►
And at one end of the cylinder we have a valve and the valve is connected to a line
00:08:18 ►
which is connected to a tank of some inert gas, say nitrogen.
00:08:23 ►
to a tank of some inert gas, say nitrogen.
00:08:31 ►
So we open the valve to let the nitrogen rush into the cylinder that previously was a vacuum.
00:08:35 ►
Now, what happens inside that cylinder,
00:08:39 ►
I think is intuitively obvious to all of us.
00:08:43 ►
The pressure equalizes over all points equally.
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In other words, you can’t have 50 pounds of pressure
00:08:52 ►
at one end of the cylinder
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and 5 pounds of pressure at the other.
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We understand that in a gas,
00:08:59 ►
pressure distributes itself evenly
00:09:01 ►
in order to achieve equilibrium.
00:09:05 ►
Okay, hold that notion in your mind.
00:09:08 ►
Now think of our world in the late 1990s as a sphere or a cylinder of that sort and think of cultures as gases at various pressures. And let’s assign low pressures to the bare-ass folks in the Amazon and eastern Indonesia. And let’s assign high pressures to the folks in Manhattan and at Caltech and Cambridge and Los Angeles and London.
00:09:49 ►
Well, then we can predict correctly, in fact, what is happening sociologically on this planet.
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What is happening is that the high-tech cultures are totally overwhelming the traditional cultures.
00:10:04 ►
are totally overwhelming, the traditional cultures.
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The values of Manhattan and Los Angeles are flooding everywhere,
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and in spite of the tiny lip service we give to shamanism and body painting,
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the truth of the matter is Amazon cultures are not really making a major contribution at this point to the evolution of
00:10:28 ►
high-tech, global
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information-dense
00:10:31 ►
electronic culture.
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Okay, that’s the second level of
00:10:36 ►
this Bernoulli metaphor.
00:10:38 ►
So now let’s go back to the
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situation where we send the
00:10:41 ►
Lady Temple Knot off into
00:10:43 ►
the future.
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I’m not familiar with how they overcame
00:10:48 ►
the grandfather paradox
00:10:49 ►
so we’ll pretend that the grandfather
00:10:52 ►
paradox is very strong
00:10:54 ►
I want to say something to the grandfather paradox
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Okay, you’ll, let me, I’m close
00:10:58 ►
to question time, let me
00:11:00 ►
press forward relentlessly
00:11:02 ►
because the coffee
00:11:04 ►
is running out, I can feel it
00:11:06 ►
the equilibrium density
00:11:08 ►
is dropping
00:11:09 ►
okay
00:11:12 ►
so we send the lady temple knot
00:11:14 ►
off into the future but now
00:11:16 ►
with what we know
00:11:17 ►
about the equalization
00:11:19 ►
of high cultures
00:11:21 ►
versus low in a
00:11:23 ►
temporal medium,
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what happens, from our point of view,
00:11:30 ►
is that the rest of the history of the universe happens instantly.
00:11:39 ►
That even if it’s billions of years of human culture
00:11:46 ►
and downloading into machines
00:11:49 ►
and claiming star system after star system and so forth and so on,
00:11:54 ►
somehow the state vector of all of those event systems collapses.
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I call this the God Whistle principle.
00:12:06 ►
It’s that we
00:12:08 ►
can actually call God
00:12:10 ►
into history.
00:12:11 ►
We can summon the
00:12:13 ►
end state of human evolution
00:12:16 ►
to appear
00:12:17 ►
a millisecond
00:12:19 ►
after we successfully achieve
00:12:21 ►
the implementation of this technology
00:12:24 ►
of time travel,
00:12:25 ►
in order to avoid all the paradoxes that would prevail
00:12:30 ►
if there was any extension to the post-time travel era beyond the moment of its inception.
00:12:38 ►
So this is a way of, in a sense, forcing the evolution of the universe,
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and it creates the phase transition of the eschaton,
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and is, to my mind, a practical…
00:12:58 ►
It creates the basin of attraction within the domain of our own lives.
00:13:05 ►
Now, is there any kind of precedent for something like this,
00:13:09 ►
even metaphorically in our own experience?
00:13:13 ►
Well, it turns out, yes, there is,
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in a kind of bizarre anecdote
00:13:17 ►
which should sober us considerably
00:13:20 ►
as we think about these things.
00:13:22 ►
When the first atomic weapon was built
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by the Manhattan Project in the desert of New Mexico,
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Fermi and Oppenheimer and all these people got together
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the night before the test at Trinity,
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and Fermi had a pad like this
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on which he had scrawled some equations and he had reached the conclusion
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in the week before that they were not sure how high the temperature would go when they triggered
00:13:57 ►
this device and Fermi had some back ofvelope calculations, which caused him to believe
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that the nitrogen in the atmosphere of the planet
00:14:09 ►
would begin to burn if they tested this thing,
00:14:13 ►
and that they would, in effect,
00:14:14 ►
ignite the atmosphere of the planet,
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and the fireball would spread around the entire planet
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and destroy everything.
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And they spent half the night going over these things
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and they finally decided that the information necessary
00:14:32 ►
to make the decision was not available.
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And so they said, well, hell, throw the switch.
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At least it’ll show those Japs and Germans
00:14:44 ►
that we mean
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business so and then of course it the
00:14:51 ►
test was carried out the eye of the
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nitrogen did not burn and instead we
00:14:56 ►
were ushered into the glorious era of
00:14:59 ►
weapons of mass destruction so let me see
00:15:06 ►
I’ve got some notes here
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I think I covered everything
00:15:08 ►
what’s interesting about this
00:15:13 ►
is that for the first time
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in this article by Frank Tipler
00:15:17 ►
called The Omega Point as Eschaton
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he seems
00:15:23 ►
and this is why Paul is here
00:15:25 ►
and I couldn’t really get into it
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because it’s crazy to repeat
00:15:29 ►
what you can’t understand
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but by
00:15:32 ►
analysis
00:15:35 ►
and interpretation of quantum
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mechanics
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Tipler reaches the conclusion
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that there is an omega
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point and that it does represent the funneling together
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of all the what are called world lines.
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And he, for purposes of mental comfort,
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sets it far in the future.
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But in principle, there is no reason to do that.
00:16:06 ►
Twelve or thirteen years ago,
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the Swedish cosmologist Hans Alfven
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wrote a wonderful little book
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called Worlds and Anti-Worlds
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in which he made the suggestion
00:16:21 ►
that the entire universe is what’s called a vacuum fluctuation.
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Ex nihilo, literally out of nothingness.
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However, there’s a caveat, which is this creation, ex nihilo,
00:16:44 ►
can only occur if what’s called parity is conserved.
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Now what this means is that these particles which come into being out of nothingness
00:16:57 ►
must come into existence paired with their antiparticle.
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paired with their antiparticle.
00:17:06 ►
And so it comes into being,
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let’s say an electron and an antielectron,
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and they divide on separate trajectories,
00:17:19 ►
and then they reconnect and collide with each other, and parity is conserved.
00:17:22 ►
In other words, nothing really happened.
00:17:25 ►
No laws of physics were violated
00:17:27 ►
because they annihilated each other.
00:17:31 ►
Now, for a long time, a while,
00:17:33 ►
this was thought to be entirely a kind of a theoretical construct,
00:17:38 ►
but then it was noticed that the theoretical models of black holes,
00:17:44 ►
which we referred to a few days ago,
00:17:46 ►
seemed to imply that no radiation could leave a black hole,
00:17:51 ►
and yet certain kinds of black holes were observed
00:17:54 ►
to be giving off hard radiation in the form of X-rays.
00:17:59 ►
And it was realized that what was happening was vacuum fluctuations were taking place
00:18:08 ►
in the vicinity of the black hole
00:18:10 ►
and because one particle went one way
00:18:13 ►
and one the other
00:18:14 ►
the black hole interfered with the conservation of parity
00:18:19 ►
and one of the particles was being sucked into the black hole
00:18:23 ►
and the other particle was flying off into the ordinary universe
00:18:27 ►
and being seen by astronomers as hard radiation.
00:18:31 ►
So the fact that this process goes on has now been confirmed.
00:18:38 ►
Well, now an interesting thing about these vacuum fluctuations, is that quantum physics places no upper limit
00:18:47 ►
on the size of a vacuum fluctuation.
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What it says is that the smaller the vacuum fluctuation,
00:18:57 ►
the fewer particles that are involved,
00:19:00 ►
the more likely the vacuum fluctuation is.
00:19:04 ►
And obviously, from observing black holes
00:19:06 ►
we can see that very small vacuum fluctuations
00:19:09 ►
occur quite frequently
00:19:12 ►
well, Alf then took all this
00:19:15 ►
and said, well then, is it not possible
00:19:18 ►
that the entire universe
00:19:20 ►
our entire universe
00:19:22 ►
is simply a very large vacuum fluctuation. A vacuum fluctuation involving something like 10 high 50 particles this way, and another one went off in the other direction. And what this sets us up for is the possibility allowed by this interpretation of quantum physics
00:20:08 ►
that the entire universe could disappear instantly, not gradually.
00:20:16 ►
You wouldn’t see the stars going out because this is all happening in a hyperspace of some sort
00:20:23 ►
which treats this manifold as a point-like
00:20:28 ►
entity. So what you would have is just click and all particles in the universe would disappear
00:20:37 ►
and the original unflawed nothingness would be restored. Actually, no. There’s a further caveat to all this, which is
00:20:47 ►
all particles have their anti-matter, anti-particle twin, except the photon. The photon is this
00:21:00 ►
mysterious particle which is different from all other particles.
00:21:06 ►
It either has no antiparticle
00:21:08 ►
or somehow it has its own antiparticle
00:21:12 ►
embedded within it.
00:21:14 ►
So what would happen in the case of a universe
00:21:17 ►
which was a vacuum fluctuation
00:21:20 ►
which encountered its ghost image
00:21:22 ►
and conserved parity
00:21:24 ►
and cancelled all particles except photons
00:21:28 ►
is that you would suddenly have a universe made of nothing but light.
00:21:34 ►
Nothing but light.
00:21:37 ►
And we then have to model the physics of a universe
00:21:41 ►
where the only kinds of particles that exist are light.
00:21:45 ►
Well, it’s interesting that all these human traditions of transcendentalism
00:21:54 ►
make a big deal about light.
00:21:57 ►
I mean, light is the metaphor for spirit.
00:22:02 ►
And the supposition is that the rarefaction of matter
00:22:07 ►
and of the flesh releases us into a realm of light.
00:22:13 ►
And I am not physicist enough by a long shot
00:22:17 ►
to say what the behavior of a universe made of light would be,
00:22:21 ►
but I do know enough to say that if you or I were made of light would be, but I do know enough to say that if you or I were made of light,
00:22:29 ►
our subjective experience of the universe would be ruled by relativistic physics, and
00:22:37 ►
we would have the impression that we could go anywhere instantly, and we would have the
00:22:43 ►
impression that the universe was aging around us
00:22:46 ►
at a tremendous rate, because you see the time dilation of the general theory of relativity
00:22:54 ►
says that as you approach the speed of light, time slows down. Now, it’s assumed that you can’t reach the speed of light because as you approach the speed
00:23:06 ►
of light, your mass asymptotically increases so that to push a single atom to the speed of light
00:23:16 ►
would require more energy than there is in the entire universe because this particle would have become so massive that there isn’t enough energy to propel it.
00:23:26 ►
But a photon never moves slower than the speed of light.
00:23:32 ►
It never moves faster than the speed of light either.
00:23:35 ►
So the photon, if you were made of photons
00:23:39 ►
and you went from here to Zenebul Ganubi, let’s say,
00:23:44 ►
a star in our galaxy with a wonderful name,
00:23:48 ►
your impression of the travel time would be zero.
00:23:54 ►
You wouldn’t…
00:23:55 ►
And so, again, here is a way, without invoking God Almighty,
00:24:01 ►
where physics seems to lay into our hands metaphors for the anticipation of the eschaton.
00:24:11 ►
Paul, do you want to say something at this point?
00:24:12 ►
It’s fascinating to hear you playing with physics.
00:24:18 ►
You know, everything has to be conserved.
00:24:19 ►
It’s not just parity in the vacuum fluctuation.
00:24:22 ►
I mean, matter, antimatter, charge the whole,
00:24:26 ►
parity is just one of the conservation, one of a dozen.
00:24:29 ►
Conservation has to be conserved in those phenomena.
00:24:33 ►
And they’re happening all the time from the point of view of physics.
00:24:36 ►
Inside our body, there’s trillions of these virtual reactions
00:24:43 ►
occurring all the time.
00:24:44 ►
And they can be intercepted.
00:24:46 ►
I mean, you can have a gamma ray break into a particle and antiparticle,
00:24:54 ►
and you can intercept them before they come back together again.
00:24:58 ►
And that’s how they’re detected on photographic plates or cloud chambers.
00:25:03 ►
But everything you say is right.
00:25:07 ►
One thing, I don’t think this notion of the Big Bang,
00:25:10 ►
I mean, I’m not sure whether I subscribe to the Big Bang model,
00:25:13 ►
but it’s not so far-fetched,
00:25:14 ►
because if there was something in the universe,
00:25:19 ►
then we’d have a real problem explaining how it got here.
00:25:23 ►
So the simplest thing to assume is that there’s nothing here.
00:25:27 ►
You mean that we are
00:25:28 ►
in a vacuum fluctuation?
00:25:30 ►
Well, no, just that there’s nothing here.
00:25:31 ►
I mean that there was nothing before the Big Bang
00:25:34 ►
and there’s nothing after.
00:25:35 ►
That’s right, because the vacuum fluctuation
00:25:38 ►
includes everything, good and evil,
00:25:40 ►
male, female, the whole thing
00:25:42 ►
added together as a zero,
00:25:44 ►
just like it always was.
00:25:45 ►
Well, then what are the complex appearances
00:25:51 ►
that impinge upon our senses, and what are we then?
00:25:55 ►
Because we choose to pay attention to only half of the situation,
00:25:59 ►
but if we will let ourselves be and experience the whole,
00:26:04 ►
then it’s all unified.
00:26:06 ►
It cancels.
00:26:07 ►
It all cancels to zero.
00:26:08 ►
Well, this refers back to something you and I were talking about at dinner.
00:26:15 ►
We all assume that there is one past and one future.
00:26:21 ►
But it’s not clear why we assume that.
00:26:24 ►
I mean, think about it for a moment.
00:26:26 ►
We’re all here gathered in this room
00:26:28 ►
sharing this moment,
00:26:31 ►
but we all have different pasts.
00:26:33 ►
Not one of us has the past of another.
00:26:37 ►
And so what we have in this room
00:26:39 ►
is a convergence of pasts.
00:26:42 ►
And when this meeting is over,
00:26:43 ►
we will go our separate ways
00:26:45 ►
into a variety of
00:26:48 ►
futures so the
00:26:49 ►
assumption that there is
00:26:52 ►
one past and one future
00:26:53 ►
is just some kind of convenient
00:26:56 ►
mental bookkeeping
00:26:57 ►
we could and we
00:27:00 ►
are tremendously under the
00:27:02 ►
spell of this illusion
00:27:04 ►
I mean we worry about the future all the time.
00:27:08 ►
Well, notice that you could just move to an island somewhere
00:27:12 ►
and get a brown-skinned girl,
00:27:14 ►
and then you wouldn’t have to worry about anybody else’s future
00:27:16 ►
because you would have made your own future.
00:27:19 ►
We can step out of the assumption of a universal history
00:27:24 ►
in which we’re trapped. And I think realizing this
00:27:29 ►
is the beginning of a kind of liberation. Our assumptions are the edges of our worlds. And this
00:27:40 ►
is one of our strongest assumptions, the assumptions that there is a past and a future,
00:27:46 ►
and our destinies are all caught up in that.
00:27:50 ►
But actually, you can, a word that rarely passes my lips,
00:27:55 ►
you can deconstruct that assumption,
00:27:59 ►
and then you’re given back a whole different way of looking at the experience of being,
00:28:07 ►
which is empowering,
00:28:08 ►
because somehow when we are embedded in the future,
00:28:13 ►
we feel we have no control whatsoever.
00:28:15 ►
We’re like corks in a raging river.
00:28:19 ►
But in fact, that’s a false model, I think.
00:28:24 ►
Anybody want to get in on this?
00:28:27 ►
Terrence?
00:28:27 ►
Yeah.
00:28:29 ►
Sometimes when I’m listening to you,
00:28:33 ►
I have sort of the troubling thought
00:28:36 ►
that I think Terrence hasn’t done enough psychedelics.
00:28:40 ►
I think that you’re too straight in some way.
00:28:43 ►
When you get onto some of your scientific tracks,
00:28:48 ►
and as you put it, you’re a rationalist,
00:28:51 ►
I start thinking, why get lost?
00:28:56 ►
And I start thinking,
00:28:59 ►
I start referring to experiences I have had of being altered, where a lot of this seems
00:29:08 ►
incidental to the experience, say, of one experience of eternity, or, which I know you’ve
00:29:14 ►
had, and how do you reckon with yourself sometimes, and think, when you say doubt yourself and think, this is just my ego concocting
00:29:28 ►
things to make me feel good, and etc., etc., whatever, would be the worst case scenario
00:29:32 ►
for you. I, um, it’s, it’s hard for me to express this sort of well, but there’s something
00:29:42 ►
about when you, you’re, the way that you often refer to a scien-, sort of well, but there’s something about when you the way that you
00:29:45 ►
often refer to a
00:29:47 ►
sort of what seems to be a scientific model
00:29:50 ►
that
00:29:51 ►
is very linear
00:29:53 ►
even as you talk, you know
00:29:55 ►
Well, I would
00:29:58 ►
certainly agree that I haven’t taken enough
00:30:00 ►
psychedelics
00:30:01 ►
reading these people
00:30:04 ►
it seems like I mean, I doubt these guys are real psychedelic heads, and they’re much further out than I am.
00:30:32 ►
The real truth is, and I’ve said it many times, that the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.
00:30:41 ►
And in a way, that’s either permission to suppose anything you want or to just stop supposing, you know.
00:30:45 ►
These things are models the real
00:30:47 ►
nowhere
00:30:49 ►
is it writ large
00:30:51 ►
that bipedal
00:30:54 ►
apes
00:30:55 ►
should be able to understand how the
00:30:57 ►
universe works
00:30:58 ►
still less likely is it written
00:31:01 ►
anywhere that Terence McKenna should be
00:31:03 ►
able to understand how the universe works.
00:31:06 ►
Were you here the other night when we talked about the black hole theory of enlightenment?
00:31:14 ►
It was two nights ago.
00:31:15 ►
I was here.
00:31:16 ►
Yeah.
00:31:19 ►
Well, that’s the idea that the real truth can’t be told.
00:31:23 ►
Well, that’s the idea that the real truth can’t be told. I’m very aware that all of this is just stuff to support me,
00:31:34 ►
to make a living, in other words.
00:31:40 ►
That, in fact, what’s really going on defies rational apprehension.
00:31:48 ►
I hope.
00:31:50 ►
I mean, I would hate to think,
00:31:52 ►
I would hate to think that we could understand what’s going on.
00:31:57 ►
Nevertheless, there’s something to be said for this modeling process.
00:32:02 ►
And I agree, I think I’m getting old
00:32:05 ►
you can
00:32:08 ►
only push yourself so far
00:32:09 ►
I mean when I read one of these things
00:32:12 ►
today and he was off on some
00:32:14 ►
tear and I just realized
00:32:16 ►
you know, it struck fear in my
00:32:18 ►
heart and I said
00:32:19 ►
my God, you know, and I actually
00:32:22 ►
did a mirror mirror on the
00:32:24 ►
wall, who’s the weirdest one of all?
00:32:27 ►
And it said, Hans Moravec is the weirdest one of all.
00:32:31 ►
I said, shit, you know, what am I, you know, I should bring him here and sit at his feet.
00:32:39 ►
I don’t know, am I talking about what you’re talking about?
00:32:41 ►
Oh, good.
00:32:41 ►
Am I talking about what you’re talking about?
00:32:42 ►
Oh, good.
00:32:47 ►
I mean, I find a fantastic parallel between the psychedelic experience and physics.
00:32:50 ►
I mean, I haven’t found anything in the psychedelic experience
00:32:52 ►
that would be any problem
00:32:54 ►
to relate to from the point of view of a physicist.
00:32:58 ►
And actually, I think that all this stuff in physics
00:33:00 ►
got out of the bag because of the psychedelic breakthroughs in the 60s. Fritjof Kepler and others had psychedelic experiences and then started to
00:33:10 ►
ferret it out. In the 1920s, people were puzzling about these things and having the spiritual
00:33:16 ►
crises and throwing away all of their assumptions about reality and having these types of breakthroughs
00:33:22 ►
and then it got lost because we started to bag physics to use for the military and it was only with an environment that opened
00:33:29 ►
up because the psychedelics that had come out but i don’t think that science that the purpose of
00:33:36 ►
science is to understand reality this may go to what you’re saying I think the purpose of science is to advance technology
00:33:45 ►
which is a heresy
00:33:47 ►
I don’t think reality can be
00:33:50 ►
understood and that it’s
00:33:51 ►
absolute hubris for science
00:33:53 ►
to you know
00:33:55 ►
cloak itself in the mantle
00:33:58 ►
of philosophy
00:33:59 ►
all it’s for is
00:34:02 ►
to make better toys
00:34:04 ►
or if you’re nuts, better weapons.
00:34:12 ►
And ultimately, there’s not going to be any closure in the effort to understand.
00:34:21 ►
And I think that the real, the thing that you take away from psychedelics, finally,
00:34:28 ►
is that all models are provisional,
00:34:31 ►
that there is no truth.
00:34:34 ►
We talked at one point in here about Wittgenstein’s phrase,
00:34:39 ►
true enough, true enough,
00:34:42 ►
true enough to get you to the gas station
00:34:45 ►
true enough to get your taxes paid
00:34:47 ►
but there’ll be no
00:34:51 ►
there’ll be no closure
00:34:53 ►
on this stuff
00:34:54 ►
we have to live in the light of the mystery
00:34:58 ►
but I think we also said in here
00:35:01 ►
it’s the death of conversation
00:35:03 ►
if we glorify the mystery too much.
00:35:06 ►
Because then, you know, I’ll be just like everybody else here and I’ll announce that we’re now going to have a meditation, which I’ve never done to you, I want to point out.
00:35:20 ►
Somebody wanted to say something.
00:35:21 ►
Well, with that in mind, I wonder how you can project an end to eternity at a certain time.
00:35:30 ►
Well, I didn’t mean to imply a nothingness beyond.
00:35:35 ►
It isn’t like that.
00:35:37 ►
I think it’s an everythingness.
00:35:41 ►
That when I talk about what I envision it as as boundary dissolution
00:35:46 ►
if all boundaries dissolve
00:35:48 ►
then I am you and you are me
00:35:53 ►
and we are all together
00:35:56 ►
it’s an exfoliation
00:36:00 ►
of the human experience
00:36:03 ►
the great boundaries are,
00:36:06 ►
you know, the small boundaries are
00:36:09 ►
man, woman, self, world,
00:36:14 ►
and then the big boundaries are
00:36:16 ►
life, death, past, future.
00:36:20 ►
All of these will be dissolved
00:36:22 ►
into something like William Blake’s divine imagination. And we will become, you know, our grandest dreams. And so the whole challenge is to dream a dream worthy of that dimension.
00:36:45 ►
I mean, it’s a very interesting exercise.
00:36:48 ►
I don’t know if you’ve ever done it.
00:36:50 ►
God, it comes close to being a visualization, I’m sorry to notice.
00:36:54 ►
But have you ever played the game,
00:36:57 ►
what would I do if I could do anything?
00:37:02 ►
First of all, you have to wrap your mind around the concept, anything. What would I do if I could do anything? First of all, you have to wrap your mind around the concept, anything. What would
00:37:08 ►
I do if I could do anything? And I used to think about it in terms, for some reason, for me, it
00:37:14 ►
takes the form of an architectural fantasy. You know, first of all, I just locate myself in the
00:37:21 ►
house featured in last month’s architectural digest.
00:37:28 ►
Then from there I would begin to work it out. Well, if you could do anything,
00:37:30 ►
within a few minutes of entering into that exercise,
00:37:35 ►
you’re unrecognizable to yourself.
00:37:38 ►
I mean, you don’t even have to exist in a forward-flowing casuistry of three dimensions.
00:37:41 ►
in a forward-flowing casuistry of three dimensions.
00:37:45 ►
You can be
00:37:46 ►
a number of species,
00:37:50 ►
all possible sexes.
00:37:53 ►
You can be translocated
00:37:55 ►
at many points in time.
00:37:58 ►
You begin to realize
00:38:02 ►
that you are tremendously limited
00:38:04 ►
by your assumptions.
00:38:06 ►
And this is sort of what I imagine death is.
00:38:11 ►
It’s release into the divine imagination.
00:38:14 ►
And if you’re blown up in an airliner or something,
00:38:18 ►
then immediately after dying, you’re just a dead person. But then you begin to unfold and test the boundaries.
00:38:32 ►
And, you know, as James Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake, up nient prospector, you sprout all your
00:38:41 ►
worth and woof your wings. And that’s just in the first 30 seconds that you woof your wings.
00:38:48 ►
And then you are able to assume, to divide your consciousness,
00:38:52 ►
to assume any form, to be any place, to know anything.
00:38:57 ►
Anything recognizable as human, I think, would quickly drop away
00:39:03 ►
or would just become a tiny and familiar touchstone that
00:39:08 ►
you would occasionally return to to touch. And somehow the dying, which occurs to each one of us,
00:39:18 ►
that’s the microcosm of the planetary and historical process that we’re caught up in.
00:39:26 ►
It’s the thing that we hate most of all. We fear it.
00:39:31 ►
We really get agitated when death
00:39:34 ►
is raised as an issue. James Joyce called it
00:39:38 ►
the grim reaper, a blessing in disguise.
00:39:43 ►
If you want to be phoenixed
00:39:45 ►
come and be parked
00:39:46 ►
meaning you have to die
00:39:49 ►
to fully exfoliate into this dimension
00:39:52 ►
and sometimes I think
00:39:54 ►
and I don’t often say it to groups
00:39:56 ►
because I fear I’m misunderstood
00:39:58 ►
and I don’t want people to go out of here depressed
00:40:01 ►
but sometimes I think
00:40:03 ►
that what human history pushes for
00:40:06 ►
is the extermination of all
00:40:08 ►
life on the planet
00:40:09 ►
for the simple reason that we’ll
00:40:11 ►
never be free till then
00:40:14 ►
that we are in
00:40:16 ►
some kind of hell world
00:40:17 ►
and we are locked
00:40:19 ►
in a world of matter and energy
00:40:22 ►
and space and time
00:40:23 ►
and that it is not, you know, my God, this sounds like, you know, Southern Baptists,
00:40:30 ►
but we are living death at this moment,
00:40:36 ►
and that we must die in order to be born again.
00:40:39 ►
In other words, that somehow what we are has become trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and our
00:40:46 ►
greatest delusion is to cling to this most tenaciously. Jorge Luis Borges in one of his
00:40:53 ►
stories has this idea that the species, any species is somehow not completed in eternity
00:41:06 ►
until the last member of that species dies.
00:41:11 ►
And it is interesting that if you think about biology,
00:41:15 ►
95% of all species that have ever lived on this planet
00:41:20 ►
are extinct.
00:41:23 ►
This is what happens to species,
00:41:26 ►
is they go extinct.
00:41:28 ►
And yet, you know, we’re driven to pursue immortality.
00:41:32 ►
It pains us greatly to imagine the death of all life on this planet,
00:41:37 ►
and particularly the death of our individual selves or our species.
00:41:42 ►
But the fact of the matter is we don’t know what death is. I mean, one of the puzzling things about the DMT trance is, you know, these creatures made of light in the mind that are so different from us but have such affection and love for us,
00:42:06 ►
they seem like relatives.
00:42:09 ►
They seem like, dare we whisper the word,
00:42:13 ►
they seem like ancestors.
00:42:16 ►
And yet, you know, we would rather believe
00:42:20 ►
that they were aliens from Zeta Reticuli
00:42:24 ►
or elves in a
00:42:26 ►
parallel continuum
00:42:27 ►
then apply Occam’s
00:42:30 ►
razor to the phenomenon
00:42:32 ►
and say since we
00:42:34 ►
are the only intelligent
00:42:36 ►
entities that we have
00:42:38 ►
ever contacted in this universe
00:42:40 ►
these things which we
00:42:42 ►
contact in our minds in the
00:42:44 ►
center of the DMT flash, they must be
00:42:47 ►
human beings of some sort. But they don’t look like human beings. But they love us so much and
00:42:55 ►
understand us so well. Well, is it possible that the kind of human being they are is a dead human being, that we’re actually breaking through into an ecology
00:43:07 ►
of souls. I mean, if we say that the psychedelic experience is an experience of boundary dissolution,
00:43:15 ►
and if we say that DMT is the strongest of all psychedelics, then may it not be that it is dissolving the most resistant of all barriers,
00:43:27 ►
which is the barrier between the living and the dead, and that what you actually come into is the
00:43:35 ►
antechambers of eternity, for a brief glimpse. If you were to take that rap and properly translate it into Witoto or
00:43:45 ►
Muinani or something like that
00:43:47 ►
and go to the Amazon and query
00:43:50 ►
those folks
00:43:51 ►
they’d say of course
00:43:53 ►
I mean your own
00:43:55 ►
tells you that
00:43:57 ►
shamanism depends on
00:43:59 ►
the spirit ancestors
00:44:02 ►
and for all the
00:44:04 ►
credit we give shamanism,
00:44:06 ►
we’ve never actually come to grips
00:44:08 ►
with the possibility that shamans really do work
00:44:14 ►
with the spirit ancestors,
00:44:16 ►
that there really is an ecology
00:44:18 ►
of transmaterial human beings
00:44:24 ►
in a nearby continuum
00:44:26 ►
that can be approached
00:44:28 ►
by a boundary-dissolving drug.
00:44:32 ►
And it’s because, you know,
00:44:35 ►
we, and certainly I,
00:44:37 ►
and certainly proven by this rap tonight,
00:44:39 ►
are obsessed with technological explanations of it
00:44:44 ►
and how it’s going to be the flying saucers,
00:44:46 ►
it’s going to be the time machine
00:44:48 ►
or the collapse of the quantum vector
00:44:50 ►
or something like that.
00:44:51 ►
But because the forward thrust of our technology
00:44:56 ►
is toward immortality,
00:44:59 ►
I mean, that’s what’s gnawing at the back of our minds.
00:45:02 ►
And yet what may actually be coming toward us
00:45:05 ►
orthogonal, meaning at right
00:45:08 ►
angles to the historical
00:45:10 ►
process is the dissolving
00:45:12 ►
of the barrier
00:45:14 ►
between the living and the dead
00:45:16 ►
which is so
00:45:18 ►
unsettling and mind-boggling
00:45:20 ►
to us that we’d take a flying saucer
00:45:22 ►
invasion any day
00:45:24 ►
over having that happen to us.
00:45:28 ►
And yet it’s very, very late in the game.
00:45:32 ►
You know, human nature is going to have to undergo a radical, vertical translation of some sort
00:45:40 ►
if we are to avoid the extinction of ourselves and all life on the planet.
00:45:47 ►
Well, so then, you know, maybe that’s what it was for.
00:45:52 ►
If we believe that we were always embedded in the machinery of nature,
00:45:57 ►
that we could never act outside the purposes of nature, then this must be what it’s for.
00:46:05 ►
It’s very interesting in embryology.
00:46:09 ►
I think most people think of a fetus in the womb.
00:46:15 ►
As you all know, we begin as very fish-like creatures in the womb,
00:46:22 ►
and then out of what are essentially little paddle mitts the human hand
00:46:28 ►
appears and i think most people think that the tissue retracts tightly and and that the human
00:46:37 ►
being emerges but if you’ve seen fetal stages in bottles in medical schools,
00:46:45 ►
what’s actually going on is that cells die off.
00:46:50 ►
A massive amount of dying goes on in the womb
00:46:55 ►
in order that the human form may emerge out of the fetal form.
00:47:01 ►
The webbing between the fingers doesn’t retract.
00:47:05 ►
Those cells die and are released into the amniotic fluid.
00:47:09 ►
The growth of the fetus involves the death of millions and millions and millions of cells.
00:47:16 ►
So we are born, we are, you could almost say, sculpted into life by the hand of death.
00:47:23 ►
I don’t, I mean, I feel as nervous about all this as you must.
00:47:29 ►
But, you know, this is what we’re here for, right?
00:47:31 ►
To stretch the envelope. Yeah.
00:47:34 ►
Terrence, I would like to go back to something that you said about
00:47:37 ►
the beings of light and the shamanic capacity to see and to interact
00:47:43 ►
with these beings, and they could be the ancestors
00:47:45 ►
thinking in terms of those individuals who refined their senses to being able to see more
00:47:55 ►
than the average ability to see and to be able to hear more than just the normal ability to hear, where there’s a growing awareness of almost like inner penetrating
00:48:07 ►
planes of beings that are actually coexisting with us, but we just can’t hear them or see
00:48:14 ►
them because we haven’t refined those senses enough.
00:48:18 ►
And the more psychically sensitive individuals have an increasing ability in a non-drug state to be aware.
00:48:27 ►
It’s just they can see more and hear more.
00:48:30 ►
And I haven’t heard you say that.
00:48:32 ►
Well, yeah. I mean, that’s a very good point.
00:48:35 ►
The perfect example of it in terms of a cultural tradition
00:48:38 ►
is Fairyland.
00:48:42 ►
Fairyland.
00:48:45 ►
Fairyland is the pre-Christian Celtic peoples
00:48:51 ►
believed that dead souls
00:48:55 ►
stayed around in the immediate vicinity
00:48:58 ►
and that there were thousands of them all around.
00:49:02 ►
The accumulated dead
00:49:04 ►
very much in the way that when you smoke DMT, then there are thousands of these things.
00:49:10 ►
And it raises the question, were they always there or what’s going on?
00:49:14 ►
St. Patrick, who brought Christianity to Ireland, found this belief, and also Anita makes the point about sensitivity.
00:49:26 ►
In Irish folklore, there’s the idea that if you have the eye,
00:49:31 ►
you can see these things, and no drugs are required.
00:49:36 ►
It’s a psychic ability, which the country Celtic people have sometimes claimed.
00:49:44 ►
So when Patrick came to Ireland on his mission of conversion,
00:49:49 ►
he found this belief in fairyland so powerfully entrenched in these people that he invented
00:49:58 ►
purgatory. Purgatory was invented by St. Patrick to convert the Irish.
00:50:05 ►
And then when word was carried back to Rome
00:50:09 ►
that Patrick, who was this great bishop of the early church,
00:50:14 ►
that he had made this doctrinal concession to Celtic folk thinking,
00:50:21 ►
the Pope thought it was such a fine idea that they just wrote it into dogma. So
00:50:28 ►
purgatory, which as you all know is neither heaven nor hell, but a place where you expiate your sins
00:50:37 ►
for some amount of time before you pass on to heaven, is nothing less than a cleaned up version of fairyland written in to christian
00:50:49 ►
theology now i don’t know why the celtic people would have a not a monopoly but a firm grip
00:50:57 ►
on this i mean it may be their innate gloominess their obsession with death
00:51:05 ►
it’s called the agenbite of inwit
00:51:10 ►
it’s that we just chew on ourselves
00:51:13 ►
till we dissolve
00:51:15 ►
but there was something about that character
00:51:18 ►
that set it up for perceiving these entities
00:51:23 ►
although in all traditions all over the world,
00:51:26 ►
if you dig deep enough,
00:51:28 ►
you can usually find a tradition of small people
00:51:31 ►
that live in the hills or under the hills,
00:51:35 ►
meaning graves, right, under the hills.
00:51:38 ►
And they are the ancestors.
00:51:40 ►
And the best that straight folklorists can tell is they have some weird law that as a people recedes into time, they shrink, which seems to me preposterous.
00:51:55 ►
I mean, I just don’t understand that.
00:51:58 ►
I think that the evidence is pretty good that this is going on. The fact that DMT is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter
00:52:09 ►
is very suggestive.
00:52:11 ►
Rupert Sheldrake has made the suggestion
00:52:14 ►
that dying is a unique chemical experience,
00:52:21 ►
and he calls DMT a necrotic hallucinogen that you actually
00:52:28 ►
if you are truly dying your brain will be flooded
00:52:32 ►
with DMT and then you will see the ecology
00:52:36 ►
of souls waiting to receive you
00:52:39 ►
I once questioned a very well known
00:52:44 ►
Tibetan teacher about what was going on in DMT,
00:52:52 ►
and he said, yes, these are the lesser lights.
00:52:56 ►
He said, you can’t, if you go further than that, you will break the thread of connection and be unable to return.
00:53:04 ►
you will break the thread of connection and be unable to return.
00:53:10 ►
And so, you know, I think this is the most challenging idea to us on the conscious and unconscious level,
00:53:12 ►
because we may, you know, I mean, I’m only speaking for myself,
00:53:17 ►
but it seems to me true that we really have, at a profound level,
00:53:23 ►
accepted the scientific lie
00:53:26 ►
that death is non-entity
00:53:28 ►
you know
00:53:29 ►
and it gives us
00:53:32 ►
it’s a permanently weakening
00:53:34 ►
idea
00:53:35 ►
because it makes us each
00:53:37 ►
such a finite being
00:53:39 ►
I mean it means that no matter what you do
00:53:42 ►
eventually
00:53:43 ►
you know
00:53:44 ►
it will all end in the cold, cold ground.
00:53:50 ►
You know, always at my back I hear
00:53:52 ►
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
00:53:55 ►
This coyness, lady, would be no crime
00:53:59 ►
Had we but whirled enough in time.
00:54:02 ►
The grave’s a lovely private place,
00:54:06 ►
But none do there I think embrace
00:54:07 ►
well maybe Andrew Marvel was
00:54:10 ►
wrong maybe there’s more fun
00:54:12 ►
on the other side
00:54:14 ►
than you might wish
00:54:16 ►
to be congealed
00:54:17 ►
anybody
00:54:20 ►
save me
00:54:22 ►
from myself
00:54:23 ►
laughter
00:54:24 ►
I’m wondering Anybody, save me from myself.
00:54:34 ►
I’m wondering, I have the impression what comes to mind is a world that you project where everybody is schizophrenic. So that today I can be Napoleon, tomorrow Jesus, and I can meet somebody else who also believes that he is Napoleon Jesus,
00:54:45 ►
Buddha, or whatever,
00:54:49 ►
and back and forth in time,
00:54:53 ►
I’m just wondering what kind of a place that’s going to be.
00:54:57 ►
Well, I would buy into that.
00:54:59 ►
I mean, I think schizophrenia is the absence of cultural expectations,
00:55:05 ►
you know, in the most profound sense.
00:55:10 ►
I mean, the casuistry doesn’t even apply.
00:55:13 ►
I mean, I speak, I consider myself schizophrenic,
00:55:18 ►
and I have observed schizophrenia in other members of my family
00:55:22 ►
close up in great detail.
00:55:22 ►
and other members of my family close up in great detail
00:55:24 ►
and what it is
00:55:25 ►
is it’s simply
00:55:26 ►
the breakdown of casuistry
00:55:31 ►
and then ordinary people
00:55:33 ►
imprisoned in the hallucination
00:55:35 ►
of culture, language
00:55:37 ►
and linear time
00:55:38 ►
lock you up
00:55:40 ►
and put you away
00:55:42 ►
because you’re reporting
00:55:44 ►
from outside the cultural
00:55:46 ►
envelope and carrying
00:55:48 ►
information that terrifies
00:55:50 ►
alarms, disturbs
00:55:52 ►
and just you drive
00:55:54 ►
other people crazy
00:55:55 ►
is what it is
00:55:56 ►
I’m talking now about process
00:56:00 ►
schizophrenia which is the
00:56:01 ►
spectacular kind where you
00:56:04 ►
bring back information that is absolutely
00:56:07 ►
incommiserate with the models of your culture. No, I think it’s been said that the world is
00:56:15 ►
becoming more schizophrenic. Well, that’s just because they didn’t have the word psychedelic.
00:56:22 ►
A psychedelic experience is essentially a kind of schizophrenia.
00:56:27 ►
And the people who in the early phase of psychedelic research,
00:56:31 ►
they wanted to call it a psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics psychosis.
00:56:37 ►
It doesn’t mimic psychosis.
00:56:39 ►
It’s a schizomimetic of some sort.
00:56:41 ►
Psychosis is a whole different pathology. But schizophrenia
00:56:47 ►
is simply a category
00:56:51 ►
for behavior and
00:56:56 ►
insight that the rest of society is unable to
00:57:00 ►
do anything with, I think. Yeah, no, that doesn’t
00:57:04 ►
trouble me at all.
00:57:07 ►
I like talking about how I’m schizophrenic.
00:57:09 ►
Maybe this answers your criticism
00:57:12 ►
that I’m linear and running down and old.
00:57:15 ►
I can always go nuts.
00:57:18 ►
You know, if all else fails,
00:57:20 ►
you can go bananas, I suppose.
00:57:28 ►
The schizophrenics return with the great
00:57:29 ►
aesthetic visions
00:57:31 ►
and the scientific breakthroughs
00:57:34 ►
and the poetic understandings
00:57:36 ►
I mean and it’s
00:57:37 ►
almost as though
00:57:38 ►
they have been aided by
00:57:41 ►
the demon artificers
00:57:43 ►
they have taken into their retinue supernatural helpers.
00:57:51 ►
And a shaman would say, of course, allies.
00:57:54 ►
And I’m sure you all know the way in which schizophrenia and shamanism map together.
00:58:00 ►
I mean, our own Julian Silverman is the great pioneer
00:58:04 ►
in the one-to-one mapping of shamanism and schizophrenia.
00:58:08 ►
And years ago, when I was completely bananas, every time they would approach from three sides with nets,
00:58:15 ►
I had Julian’s paper called Shamanism and Schizophrenia,
00:58:21 ►
and I could quote it chapter and verse and back them off
00:58:25 ►
because what is called the initiatory crisis in shamanism
00:58:33 ►
is nothing more than a schizophrenic break with ordinary reality.
00:58:39 ►
The problem is we freak out completely and rush to drug people and give them electroshock and tie them down and slap them around.
00:58:49 ►
Well, so then the unfolding of the process is interrupted.
00:58:55 ►
And it’s as though you were to, you know, perform surgery on a fetus or something
00:59:01 ►
and then be amazed when it turns out a monstrosity. When if you would just
00:59:06 ►
have left it alone for crying out loud, it was unfolding along its own creodes of morphological
00:59:14 ►
development. This is why people like R.D. Lange seem to me to be the ones who thought most deeply
00:59:20 ►
and correctly about schizophrenia. To become schizophrenic is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity.
00:59:28 ►
The trick is to make sure that you’re nowhere where straight people can get at you.
00:59:34 ►
And my schizophrenic episode occurred in the Amazon basin.
00:59:43 ►
And, you know know it was five days
00:59:45 ►
march to just a mission
00:59:48 ►
and I’ve always felt that evading
00:59:51 ►
modern mental health care facilities
00:59:54 ►
saved my mind absolutely
00:59:57 ►
and in a traditional society
01:00:00 ►
it’s supported
01:00:02 ►
you know if someone shows signs
01:00:05 ►
because they’re dreamy or they
01:00:08 ►
hallucinate or they’re epileptic or something
01:00:11 ►
like that, then this is encouraged
01:00:14 ►
and they’re put under the care of shamans
01:00:17 ►
and drugs are used to initiate the crisis
01:00:21 ►
in some cases. And it’s
01:00:23 ►
a cause for great rejoicing
01:00:26 ►
to have these personalities
01:00:27 ►
because in the
01:00:30 ►
culture because they’re the antennas
01:00:32 ►
for the culture
01:00:34 ►
that are contacting
01:00:35 ►
the raw
01:00:38 ►
stuff of real being
01:00:40 ►
and transducing it down
01:00:42 ►
into cultural
01:00:44 ►
artifacts and institutions that then are useful.
01:00:50 ►
Anything else?
01:00:52 ►
Grandfather paradox.
01:00:54 ►
Oh yeah, what did you want to say?
01:00:56 ►
I don’t think, I mean, your idea of the end point makes perfect sense to me.
01:01:02 ►
I don’t think the grandfather paradox is an objection.
01:01:05 ►
It’s not really a paradox.
01:01:07 ►
No, I don’t think it’s a paradox.
01:01:11 ►
It’s a self-consistent universe.
01:01:13 ►
You’re here, so you didn’t kill your…
01:01:14 ►
If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn’t be here to ask the question.
01:01:18 ►
I think that’s the way to handle that.
01:01:20 ►
I think when we finally really understand time travel,
01:01:24 ►
we may find out that it’s common as dirt and has been going on all around us in all kinds of physical processes.
01:01:31 ►
The human mind likes to make up stories, so if you came back and killed your grandfather and you’re still here, then we’d have to make up a story.
01:01:40 ►
Like somebody else got into your grandmother instead of your grandfather or something like that.
01:01:44 ►
But since that isn’t how it works…
01:01:47 ►
Well, it may be working that way.
01:01:48 ►
I mean, people disappear mysteriously
01:01:51 ►
and all sorts of things happen
01:01:53 ►
and we just fit them into a framework that makes sense to us
01:01:56 ►
and when we’re in a realm of time travel
01:01:59 ►
then maybe we’ll have to reinterpret all that weird stuff that occurred in history.
01:02:02 ►
That’s an excellent point,
01:02:04 ►
that all kinds of stuff goes on around us
01:02:07 ►
that may be, in fact, the collapse of paradoxical situations
01:02:11 ►
that we don’t understand,
01:02:13 ►
like, you know, all these well-documented cases
01:02:16 ►
of spontaneous human combustion and stuff like that.
01:02:20 ►
I mean, unless you just flat-out deny that this goes on, which is a kind of cop-out,
01:02:28 ►
I think, because it just means you don’t believe large bodies of evidence. I mean, not everything
01:02:35 ►
weird that’s claimed goes on. But on the other hand, I don’t think God is a Republican. I think
01:02:42 ►
there’s plenty of weird shit flying around. And as I said, nowhere is it
01:02:47 ►
writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality. And every culture that’s ever existed
01:02:54 ►
has operated under the illusion that it understood 95% of reality and that the other 5% would be
01:03:02 ►
delivered in the next 18 months. And from Egypt forward,
01:03:07 ►
they’ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things. And yet we look back at
01:03:13 ►
every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well,
01:03:20 ►
it never occurs to us then that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too, that the universe is stranger than you can suppose, and that that openness, that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor,
01:03:48 ►
but in service to the living mystery,
01:03:52 ►
the fact that you’re not going to understand it.
01:03:56 ►
It is not going to yield to logic or magic or any other technique that’s been developed.
01:04:00 ►
It’s bigger.
01:04:01 ►
You know, the novelist John Crowley has this wonderful aphorism,
01:04:06 ►
the further in you go, the bigger it gets.
01:04:10 ►
And I think this is true of most things.
01:04:15 ►
That’s all, folks.
01:04:18 ►
We got through another one of these.
01:04:27 ►
Okay, thank you all for coming.
01:04:29 ►
I do not understand why you put up with this.
01:04:33 ►
But I appreciate it.
01:04:35 ►
I do appreciate it.
01:04:38 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:04:40 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:04:42 ►
one thought at a time.
01:04:45 ►
Well, it’s not very often that I have the feeling that during parts of this talk that
01:04:50 ►
we just listened to that Terrence, well, he maybe got a little too geeky for all but the
01:04:55 ►
most battle-hardened geeks among us.
01:04:58 ►
But since you’re still here, I guess that you made it through the maze of amateur physics
01:05:03 ►
that I have to admit to enjoying myself,
01:05:05 ►
but in small quantities and preferably in science fiction novels.
01:05:10 ►
And speaking of science fiction, if you’ve ever watched some of the Star Trek television series,
01:05:16 ►
then you’re familiar with the thing called the holodeck.
01:05:19 ►
So when Terrence was talking about what would happen if our universe collided with its antimatter twin,
01:05:24 ►
Terence was talking about what would happen if our universe collided with its antimatter twin.
01:05:31 ►
Well, what if when that happened, it was like being involved in an adventure on the holodeck when somebody gives the order, computer, end program.
01:05:35 ►
And then we’d all be standing in a black room with white grids painted on the walls and floor.
01:05:41 ►
Then what? Would we still be?
01:05:49 ►
If so, where would we be? Where would we go? And what would we do next? Don’t you just love playing around with scenarios like that?
01:05:55 ►
Now, another one of the thoughts that I had as we were listening to Terrence just now
01:06:00 ►
was, and my guess is that you had the same thought. And that was where he said that while high-tech cultures were seeping into indigenous cultures,
01:06:10 ►
he didn’t see Amazonian culture making any impact on high-tech culture.
01:06:14 ►
My thought was that while this was true enough in August of 1991, when this talk was given,
01:06:21 ►
it may not still be the case today.
01:06:24 ►
There’s really no way of knowing, but considering all of the anecdotal evidence I’ve been gathering
01:06:29 ►
about the use of ayahuasca as a regular spiritual practice in the world,
01:06:33 ►
I’d say that Silicon Valley, at least, is becoming deeply soaked in the culture of the vine.
01:06:39 ►
And if you’ve had the privilege of participating in an ayahuasca ceremony yourself,
01:06:44 ►
you most likely agree with me that this is a very good thing indeed.
01:06:49 ►
So, now for you and the rest of our fellow salonners who are still with us,
01:06:54 ►
I should let you know why it’s taken me so long to get this podcast out to you,
01:06:58 ►
and for our fellow salonners who made a donation during our pledge drive,
01:07:02 ►
the reason that not all of you have heard from me via email yet.
01:07:07 ►
Well, I wish that there was some really good reason for my procrastination,
01:07:12 ►
but I guess laziness and the inability to deal with some unusual, at least for us, unusual hot weather.
01:07:20 ►
While for 99% of the time our weather here in Southern California is the best on the planet,
01:07:25 ►
there are times when we get a Santa Ana wind coming in from the desert that cancels out our normal cool ocean breeze.
01:07:33 ►
So last week it was over 90 degrees, and that’s Fahrenheit for you Celsius people, by the way.
01:07:39 ►
But when it’s that hot in my office here, my computer begins acting quite strange.
01:07:44 ►
And as you guessed, we don’t have air conditioning since it’s so seldom called for out here.
01:07:50 ►
But that was last week, the week before this.
01:07:53 ►
And that heat wave continued into this week.
01:07:56 ►
However, it was followed by a rash of fires.
01:08:00 ►
In fact, at one time a couple days ago, there were nine major fires burning all at the same time here in our county.
01:08:07 ►
And amazingly, very few homes were lost, and so far there’s only been one reported death,
01:08:12 ►
which is really quite amazing considering the large-scale evacuations and firestorms that swept through our many beautiful canyons.
01:08:20 ►
As I said on Twitter, it was quite surreal watching the fires on television and at the same time being able to look out our windows and watch it live.
01:08:29 ►
And I have to say that the men and women who fought these fires, along with the tens of thousands of their support staff, deserve more than just high praise.
01:08:39 ►
They deserve our eternal gratitude.
01:08:42 ►
For without them, much of the residential sections of Carlsbad would be gone today.
01:08:47 ►
And most of these people worked around the clock for several days.
01:08:51 ►
How they did it, I have no idea.
01:08:53 ►
I was tired just watching them.
01:08:55 ►
They are truly amazing people.
01:08:58 ►
And as big a critic of government agencies as I am,
01:09:01 ►
I’ll be the first to admit that the coordination among dozens of normally
01:09:05 ►
competing governmental bodies out here in San Diego County was, well, in a word, astounding.
01:09:11 ►
For a week at least, all of the differences of opinion and personal grievances between
01:09:16 ►
competing factions out here were simply put aside, and in a show of unity, yet without a single
01:09:22 ►
overall authority running the show,
01:09:29 ►
tens of thousands of people came together and gained control of nine raging fires in this county.
01:09:34 ►
They aren’t all completely contained yet, but the worst is over,
01:09:37 ►
and the heat wave is forecast to start letting up today.
01:09:42 ►
So, all is well once again, and it looks like I’m not going to have any more excuses about getting my next podcast out on time.
01:09:46 ►
So, thanks for understanding.
01:09:48 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:09:53 ►
Be well, my friends.