Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.”
“It’s our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It’s not our political systems.”
“Everything will come true in cyberspace. That’s the whole idea. What cyberspace is, on one level, it’s simply the human imagination vivified, hardwired.”
“In a sense, what’s happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.”
“The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think we are going to be able to use virtual reality to show each other the insides of our own heads.”
“The most beautiful things in the universe are inside the human mind.”
“The human brain is the god of technological innovation.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And to begin with today, I want to let you know about the memorial that will be held
00:00:28 ►
to honor the life and work of Sasha Shulgin.
00:00:31 ►
As you know, Sasha left this planet on the 2nd of June this year, and what is being billed
00:00:38 ►
as the Shulgin Memorial will be held on August 2nd, which is, I guess, about two weeks from
00:00:44 ►
now.
00:00:44 ►
And I’ll put a link to the event in the program notes for this podcast, which is, I guess, about two weeks from now. And I’ll put a link to the event
00:00:46 ►
in the program notes for this podcast,
00:00:48 ►
which, as you know, you can reach
00:00:50 ►
via psychedelicsalon.us.
00:00:52 ►
The memorial is going to take place
00:00:54 ►
in Berkeley, California,
00:00:56 ►
from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.
00:00:58 ►
at the Berkeley Community Theater.
00:01:00 ►
And it’s going to include a potluck dinner
00:01:02 ►
for everybody who attends.
00:01:04 ►
So if you’re in or near the Bay Area and would like to find a few more of the others,
00:01:10 ►
as the saying goes, well, you should be able to find a very large number of the others at this event.
00:01:16 ►
And if you are planning on attending, please be sure to go to the website that I linked to
00:01:22 ►
and there you can RSVP.
00:01:24 ►
There’s going to be plenty of room, but the organizers would like to get as close a head count as possible.
00:01:31 ►
And also, driving and potluck directions are on that website as well.
00:01:37 ►
I’m not going to be able to make it myself, but I am looking forward to hearing about it
00:01:41 ►
from our fellow slaunters who will be attending. I’m sure there’s going to be many of you there.
00:01:47 ►
Okay, so let’s get on with today’s show.
00:01:50 ►
In case you’re wondering, no, I haven’t played all of the 2013 Palenque Norte lectures yet,
00:01:56 ►
but I thought that in the interest of reaching the most people with the announcement I just made about the Shulgin Memorial,
00:02:03 ►
well, a Terrence McKenna talk is always going to get the most listeners.
00:02:06 ►
And see, it worked. Here you are.
00:02:11 ►
So, anyhow, I’m going to play part of a workshop that took place in August of 1989,
00:02:16 ►
which was almost 25 years ago.
00:02:19 ►
And again, I’ve had to pick a title based on what I thought the main thrust of his talk was about,
00:02:24 ►
I’ve had to pick a title based on what I thought the main thrust of his talk was about,
00:02:30 ►
but since he crafts his talks by the questions he receives from the attendees at his workshops,
00:02:33 ►
there’s usually more than one title that can work.
00:02:36 ►
In fact, my first pass at a title for this talk was,
00:02:39 ►
Information is Bootstrapping Itself.
00:02:45 ►
But now that I’ve said that out loud, I can see that the title I use is actually a little bit better.
00:02:52 ►
Now, also, a little heads up for you, because sometimes Terrence, you know, he gets you to thinking about something,
00:02:56 ►
and for a few seconds you miss what he’s been saying in the interim,
00:02:59 ►
because, you know, your thoughts are up there with what he got you to think about.
00:03:11 ►
So, I want to let you know to focus on what he says right after he uses the phrase mansions of our souls, which is a pretty neat phrase come to think of it.
00:03:20 ►
But that’s where he begins his talk about virtual reality and letting people come into the mansion of our soul and see who we really are.
00:03:26 ►
Now, he’s talking about it as a VR program of some kind where you physically or virtually walk through a mansion but now that you at first may be captivated by thinking about how
00:03:33 ►
you would actually decorate your own mansion when he says that but instead just listen to his words
00:03:38 ►
and see if you don’t think that he is actually describing what today we call social media. And this was way back
00:03:45 ►
in August of 1989.
00:03:48 ►
So I can
00:03:49 ►
talk endlessly, but I hope with
00:03:51 ►
this many people in the room, people
00:03:53 ►
arrived with some kind of an
00:03:55 ►
agenda. With only three brief
00:03:58 ►
nights here, we’ll
00:04:00 ►
have to cut to the chase.
00:04:02 ►
So if anyone
00:04:04 ►
came with any particular question in mind this would probably
00:04:08 ►
be the moment to push to the front of the line yeah these extremely exotic fields solid state
00:04:16 ►
physics and nanotechnology and gene transplant and all this stuff, they feel individually that complete breakthrough in their own field
00:04:29 ►
lies just 18 months, two years, three years in the future. They can see their technological and
00:04:37 ►
research dreams converging, but this enormous wave front of knowledge that has risen up out of
00:04:47 ►
the context of human civilization it
00:04:51 ►
doesn’t communicate along its the front
00:04:54 ►
of the wave none of these people in any
00:04:57 ►
of these fields have a very clear grip
00:04:59 ►
on what’s going on in the labs down the
00:05:02 ►
hall or two floors up in different departments.
00:05:06 ►
So what’s happening is the human database has taken on a kind of self-organizing quality.
00:05:20 ►
It’s no longer entirely being coordinated by political decision makers or corporate decision makers.
00:05:29 ►
It’s just simply taken on a life of its own.
00:05:35 ►
And I’ve long thought that one way of thinking about what’s going on on this planet, is that information is just simply bootstrapping itself
00:05:48 ►
to higher and higher levels of self-reflection
00:05:52 ►
and self-coordination,
00:05:54 ►
using whatever means are necessary.
00:05:58 ►
When geology was all there was,
00:06:01 ►
that was the medium.
00:06:02 ►
When biology was all there was, that was the medium. When biology was all there was, that was the medium. When,
00:06:07 ►
you know, chipped flint and ceramic was all there was, that was the medium. And now, the
00:06:15 ►
electronic information transfer technology is so all-pervasive that it’s as though information has come into its own. I mean, it is now very restless in
00:06:27 ►
its relationship with biology as it explores, you know, the new world of silicon into which it seeks
00:06:36 ►
to transform itself. I mean, technology has become prosthesis for the human species. And, you know, it’s our machines and our technologies
00:06:49 ►
that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us.
00:06:54 ►
It’s not our political systems.
00:06:56 ►
It’s these extra-sexual children,
00:07:02 ►
these mind children that we have assembled out of the imagination.
00:07:10 ►
And I find it very promising and very challenging and very interesting.
00:07:16 ►
I think that it is, that somehow the way back to the archaic, to the world of ecological balance and low technology and retraction of toxic infrastructure and all of that good stuff in some kind of Luddite know-nothingism or some kind of fascist program
00:07:46 ►
of limiting population
00:07:51 ►
and this sort of thing.
00:07:54 ►
Although I favor limiting population,
00:07:56 ►
I just can’t figure out a way to do it
00:07:57 ►
that leaves human freedom intact.
00:08:02 ►
Instead, it has to be a forward escape
00:08:05 ►
a forward escape through technology
00:08:09 ►
but technology that serves an agenda
00:08:12 ►
of archaic revivalism
00:08:15 ►
my brother was just here this weekend
00:08:18 ►
and after we presented publicly
00:08:21 ►
then we spent a long night
00:08:23 ►
talking over all of this stuff,
00:08:26 ►
between the spread of the
00:08:31 ►
information transfer technology,
00:08:33 ►
the internet and its promise
00:08:35 ►
of virtual reality soon to come,
00:08:39 ►
and biotechnology,
00:08:43 ►
which is literally taking apart the constituents
00:08:47 ►
of the living world
00:08:48 ►
and using them to produce
00:08:50 ►
all the drugs, all the
00:08:53 ►
foods, all the vitamins
00:08:54 ►
all the nutritional supplements
00:08:57 ►
and then many other
00:08:59 ►
solid state
00:09:01 ►
materials between
00:09:03 ►
those two factors and then nanotechnology, the technology of producing tiny machines made of diamond by the trillions designed to do everything that nature does so that cities can be grown like forests and China can be fed out of matter compilers,
00:09:28 ►
and there is a complete break with the agricultural cycle,
00:09:34 ►
so that the earth need no longer sustain the human population,
00:09:42 ►
and so then the human population,
00:09:46 ►
by breaking its reliance on the agricultural
00:09:48 ►
cycle
00:09:49 ►
you gain some political
00:09:51 ►
breathing room
00:09:52 ►
all of this
00:09:54 ►
is coming very very fast
00:09:57 ►
and
00:09:59 ►
is largely
00:10:02 ►
unanticipated by the political
00:10:04 ►
managerial types.
00:10:08 ►
What it means to me personally, I think,
00:10:12 ►
in terms of my own ideas about the future,
00:10:15 ►
is that I can now see without too much sweat
00:10:20 ►
from here to the eschaton in ten easy steps. I mean, it’s perfectly clear that if novelty is intensifying and locally concentrating, that where it’s probably headed is into cyberspace or some kind of virtual space so that, you know, long before 2012
00:10:46 ►
the various ontologies of world religions
00:10:52 ►
will be peddled as theme parks in virtual space
00:10:57 ►
and, you know, you’ll be hard-pressed to know
00:10:59 ►
whether you’re in heaven or simply in heaven land
00:11:03 ►
which is, you know, a preview of heaven attainable
00:11:09 ►
by paying a $50 entrance fee at the turnstile.
00:11:13 ►
This is going to make it very difficult for all my predictions
00:11:17 ►
to be put in context because they will be both true and untrue.
00:11:23 ►
They will, everything will come true in cyberspace.
00:11:28 ►
That’s the whole idea.
00:11:29 ►
What cyberspace is, on one level,
00:11:33 ►
it’s simply the human imagination
00:11:35 ►
vivified, hardwired.
00:11:40 ►
What we’re doing furiously, as fast as we can, is exteriorizing the human nervous system into a global organism of some sort, which has a weird kind of Husserlian intersubjectivity about it. You know, it is neither subjective nor objective. We are subjective nodes embedded in this domain of technologically created intersubjectivity between other human beings and machines.
00:12:29 ►
machines and what’s happening is a lot of people are being left behind or without even realizing it or just opting out and saying you know i can’t handle it it’s too much to think about
00:12:35 ►
i think i’ll see what’s on daytime tv or i’ll buy a newspaper i’ll walk in the park to attempt to maintain the illusion that things are as they are.
00:12:51 ►
Things aren’t as they are.
00:12:54 ►
Things have already become as they will be.
00:12:57 ►
The future is now not ahead of us.
00:13:00 ►
We’re there. We’re there.
00:13:04 ►
And the only question is where do you position
00:13:06 ►
yourself now in this
00:13:08 ►
multidimensional matrix
00:13:10 ►
you can deny it
00:13:11 ►
which is to become
00:13:13 ►
a conservative
00:13:16 ►
or
00:13:17 ►
even more
00:13:19 ►
reactive to it
00:13:22 ►
you can become a
00:13:24 ►
reprobate if you wish or you can move toward the front of knowledge, position yourself close to these unfolding and empowering technologies.
00:13:45 ►
as all notions of commodity and scarcity and this sort of thing begin, I say, to break down,
00:13:51 ►
it seems to me the sanest place to try and occupy in this whole situation
00:14:00 ►
is that of artist-producer,
00:14:03 ►
is that of artist-producer,
00:14:10 ►
and that it’s very, very important to not consume this stuff,
00:14:15 ►
that the world is being divided into artists and marks to people who are like somehow initiated into a higher level maturity
00:14:22 ►
about what the society is about and how it works.
00:14:27 ►
It’s a kind of street smarts, actually.
00:14:30 ►
And then the poor souls who just take it all for granted,
00:14:35 ►
you know, and actually are concerned
00:14:38 ►
about those families of Flight 800,
00:14:41 ►
the families, the families, the agony of the families.
00:14:45 ►
You know, people so harebrained as to buy horseshit like that
00:14:50 ►
are going to have a very, very hard time
00:14:52 ►
as the crap game of the future unfolds to its full fury.
00:14:58 ►
So I think it’s very important for people to define themselves as artists and learn tools and understand
00:15:11 ►
just how the game is being played in this informational jungle that is being erected
00:15:17 ►
because you will either have a plan or you will become part of somebody else’s plan.
00:15:27 ►
And there are a million plans out there
00:15:29 ►
waiting to ensnare the clueless.
00:15:33 ►
So more than ever, it becomes necessary
00:15:35 ►
to have some kind of anchor into a real modality.
00:15:42 ►
And, you know, it’s too predictable for me
00:15:45 ►
to try and draw out the suspense
00:15:48 ►
I mean as far as I can tell
00:15:50 ►
the only
00:15:51 ►
place where we can touch the earth
00:15:59 ►
in this evolving situation
00:16:00 ►
is through our bodies
00:16:03 ►
into feeling by any means necessary and that would certainly
00:16:10 ►
include psychedelics the two books or two very interesting books that i’ve read in the past year
00:16:19 ►
and maybe some of you have read them one is morris Berman’s Coming to Our Senses
00:16:25 ►
and the other is David Abrams’ book
00:16:29 ►
The Spell of the Sensuous.
00:16:32 ►
And both of these books
00:16:33 ►
are about feelings, essentially.
00:16:37 ►
And Whitehead, who I take as my mentor,
00:16:42 ►
created a very mathematically formal
00:16:46 ►
metaphysic in which
00:16:48 ►
the primary datum of experience is
00:16:52 ►
feelings. That’s a direct quote
00:16:54 ►
from Whitehead. The only thing
00:16:58 ►
you can trust at this point
00:17:00 ►
and some of you have heard me say this before
00:17:03 ►
is the felt presence of immediate experience
00:17:07 ►
otherwise known as feelings and mathematics and mathematics is something that most of you have
00:17:18 ►
been denied in order to keep you marks so so all you have are feelings.
00:17:26 ►
And so it’s very important to empower this dimension,
00:17:33 ►
which Husserl or Merleau-Ponty or somebody called
00:17:37 ►
the felt presence of immediate experience.
00:17:41 ►
Everything proceeds from that.
00:17:43 ►
Even thought is subsequent to feeling and still more removed is any hypothesis about reality and any theory of morality and any theory of action and so forth and so on. And so, you know, psychedelics,
00:18:06 ►
which have traditionally, I now think,
00:18:10 ►
played the role of deculturating people.
00:18:15 ►
I think the anthropologists got it slightly wrong.
00:18:18 ►
When you’re taken out into the bushes
00:18:21 ►
and given some drug by the fellow members of your tribe,
00:18:26 ►
this is not that you are being made a full member of the society.
00:18:32 ►
It’s that you were a full member of the society,
00:18:36 ►
and now what you’re being shown is what’s under the board, the tricks of the trade.
00:18:43 ►
You’re being turned into not a full member of the society,
00:18:47 ►
but what my brother has called an extra-environmental.
00:18:53 ►
You’re coming from outside.
00:18:55 ►
And this is a kind of maturity that many people never,
00:19:01 ►
not only never attain,
00:19:02 ►
it never enters their mind
00:19:05 ►
that such a state even exists.
00:19:08 ►
A state not of alienation exactly,
00:19:11 ►
but of ironical, sophisticated insight
00:19:17 ►
into the mechanisms of one’s own culture
00:19:21 ►
and the cultural games that are being played.
00:19:27 ►
And, you know, this rap would have been applicable at any time that it made sense,
00:19:33 ►
certainly any time in the 20th century.
00:19:36 ►
But with the rise of these technologies and the acceleration of all this novelty, it becomes more and more important
00:19:45 ►
to anchor it in this archaic value pattern
00:19:52 ►
accessible through psychedelics.
00:19:56 ►
And I don’t say this with a sense of urgency.
00:20:00 ►
I think it’s happening.
00:20:02 ►
I don’t think there’s a problem.
00:20:03 ►
I’m just sharing with you how I see it’s happening I don’t think there’s a problem I’m just sharing with you
00:20:05 ►
how I see it going
00:20:08 ►
the people who are running
00:20:11 ►
the internet
00:20:15 ►
at the developmental
00:20:17 ►
and cutting edge level
00:20:23 ►
are very psychedelic
00:20:25 ►
I mean
00:20:26 ►
the connections are not lost
00:20:29 ►
whether it’s consciously
00:20:31 ►
or unconsciously
00:20:32 ►
apprehended
00:20:34 ►
somehow it can be sensed
00:20:36 ►
that
00:20:37 ►
the whole
00:20:40 ►
counter cultural thrust
00:20:42 ►
since the 60’s
00:20:44 ►
has been coherently one thing.
00:20:47 ►
It’s about boundary dissolution and connectivity
00:20:51 ►
and strange pictures in your head, whatever that means.
00:20:58 ►
So it’s the psychedelic experience
00:21:02 ►
from being a clandestine experience,
00:21:06 ►
and I’m speaking of Western culture in the 20th century,
00:21:10 ►
from being a clandestine experience of an individual or of a carass
00:21:15 ►
is becoming the general model for the organization of global society,
00:21:24 ►
whether anybody realizes it or not,
00:21:26 ►
this idea of all information in circulation,
00:21:29 ►
of a never-sleeping global mind
00:21:33 ►
with all…
00:21:35 ►
In a sense, what’s happening is
00:21:37 ►
that the unconscious mind
00:21:39 ►
is a luxury the human species
00:21:42 ►
cannot afford at this point in our dilemma.
00:21:46 ►
And so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness
00:21:51 ►
by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
00:21:58 ►
Well, so that’s my take on it. What’s your take on it?
00:22:03 ►
Does anybody want to say anything yeah well i was wondering what this
00:22:08 ►
list of psychedelic plants was for in terms of
00:22:14 ►
are there differences in one’s experience with these and are there ones that are
00:22:21 ►
more or less readily grown in one’s backyard or greenhouse?
00:22:27 ►
Oh, yeah, well…
00:22:29 ►
What do they do for us?
00:22:32 ►
It’s a big issue.
00:22:38 ►
Yes, I mean, when I talk about psychedelics,
00:22:41 ►
I’m basically talking about alkaloids that occur in plant metabolism and have a history of human usage in Aboriginal shamanism. So that would be things like peyote, ayahuasca, mushrooms, certain snuffs, cannabis, detour although detours are not alkaloids
00:23:06 ►
or maybe they are but the subfamily is tropane
00:23:09 ►
anyway they’re chemically different
00:23:12 ►
the notion here is simply that
00:23:17 ►
there are a lot of problems with accessing
00:23:20 ►
altered states of consciousness
00:23:22 ►
and many of these problems are artificially induced by
00:23:26 ►
frightened
00:23:27 ►
governments
00:23:29 ►
restricting access
00:23:31 ►
so it’s slowly dawned
00:23:34 ►
on people that
00:23:35 ►
these chemicals occur
00:23:38 ►
in most
00:23:40 ►
environments in many plants
00:23:42 ►
and with a little
00:23:44 ►
chemical strategy and a little chemical strategy
00:23:46 ►
and a little cookery
00:23:48 ►
and a little shamanic strategy
00:23:50 ►
out of most environments
00:23:51 ►
you can coax some kind of kick-ass
00:23:54 ►
consciousness
00:23:56 ►
altering a plant
00:23:58 ►
or combination of plants
00:24:00 ►
without
00:24:02 ►
resort to the local criminal
00:24:04 ►
syndicalists who
00:24:05 ►
may be prowling
00:24:07 ►
the streets so
00:24:08 ►
it’s sort of
00:24:09 ►
become a I
00:24:11 ►
don’t know I
00:24:12 ►
don’t want to
00:24:12 ►
demean it but a
00:24:13 ►
fad a hobby an
00:24:15 ►
avocation of
00:24:16 ►
people to grow
00:24:17 ►
these plants if
00:24:19 ►
you want me to
00:24:19 ►
recommend one that
00:24:21 ►
might get you
00:24:22 ►
off not kill you
00:24:23 ►
and keep you out
00:24:24 ►
of jail well the one that might get you off not kill you and keep you out of jail well the one that we’re all very
00:24:30 ►
interested in at the moment is salvia diva norm salvia diva norm is a plant that for years was
00:24:39 ►
carried in the psychedelic literature as possibly hallucinogenic, but nobody could get off on it. It’s a mint that grows in the mountains of Mexico. And then a few years ago, an anthropologist, Brett Blosser, some of you probably know Brett, he’s been to Esalen, he was studying these Mazatec Indians and finally just put it to them and they took him off in the bushes
00:25:05 ►
and
00:25:06 ►
got him so loaded
00:25:09 ►
that he was raving about it
00:25:12 ►
so then the chemists
00:25:14 ►
moved in
00:25:15 ►
the chemists had visited
00:25:17 ►
the situation before
00:25:19 ►
but with a simple alkaloid test
00:25:22 ►
you know you have this thing called
00:25:23 ►
Dragendorff’s reagent you mash it up with a plant and if it turns color it’s got alkaloid test. You know, you have this thing called Dragendorff’s reagent,
00:25:25 ►
and you mash it up with a plant,
00:25:27 ►
and if it turns color, it’s got alkaloids.
00:25:29 ►
Well, you do this in the field.
00:25:31 ►
Well, they had tested salvia divinorum,
00:25:33 ►
and it was negative for alkaloids,
00:25:35 ►
so having never encountered a psychedelic
00:25:39 ►
that wasn’t an alkaloid,
00:25:40 ►
they felt confident in rejecting it.
00:25:43 ►
Once these reports began to come in they went back through and in
00:25:47 ►
fact it was an underground chemist I’m
00:25:50 ►
not sure he wants his name stated but
00:25:52 ►
anyway again someone a frequent visitor
00:25:55 ►
to Esalen and he went back and with
00:26:00 ►
quite simple procedures lo and behold
00:26:03 ►
out comes a crystalline white powder
00:26:06 ►
and
00:26:07 ►
he
00:26:09 ►
following the famous example
00:26:12 ►
of Albert Hoffman with LSD
00:26:14 ►
that you should start a hundred
00:26:16 ►
times smaller than you think
00:26:18 ►
is where the action is
00:26:20 ►
he smoked one
00:26:22 ►
milligram
00:26:23 ►
a thousand
00:26:26 ►
mics I mean that’s a grain of salt
00:26:29 ►
of this stuff and you know
00:26:32 ►
completely lost it
00:26:35 ►
and
00:26:36 ►
so then he went back and
00:26:41 ►
discovered that years previously there had been
00:26:44 ►
analysis done on this plant
00:26:45 ►
and that a compound called alpha-salvinorine
00:26:48 ►
had been isolated and characterized
00:26:50 ►
but never given to test animals or human beings.
00:26:55 ►
So he sent for a chromatographic standard of this compound
00:26:59 ►
and immediately smoked it up upon arrival.
00:27:04 ►
And it did exactly what the stuff he’d gotten out of the plant had done to him
00:27:09 ►
so then he knew that the compound in the plant was alpha-salvanorine
00:27:15 ►
a diterpene
00:27:17 ►
a compound in a chemical family previously unknown to contain psychoactive
00:27:25 ►
material
00:27:27 ►
and word
00:27:30 ►
spread and
00:27:31 ►
people smoke this
00:27:34 ►
roll bombers
00:27:36 ►
out of the dried leaves
00:27:37 ►
eat, put quids
00:27:40 ►
of the fresh leaves in their
00:27:42 ►
mouths and then in some
00:27:43 ►
vanishingly small case, few cases of the truly leaves in their mouths and then in some vanishingly small case
00:27:46 ►
few cases of the truly intrepid
00:27:49 ►
people have extracted the stuff to crystal
00:27:52 ►
and smoked it
00:27:53 ►
I don’t urge you to do that
00:27:55 ►
I mean 500 micrograms of this stuff
00:27:58 ►
this is the first compound found in nature
00:28:03 ►
active at that range
00:28:06 ►
I mean LSD is active at 500 micrograms
00:28:09 ►
but it was thought for decades
00:28:11 ►
to be the only drug active at that range
00:28:15 ►
I mean somebody once said to me
00:28:18 ►
you want to know what a human being
00:28:20 ►
getting loaded on 500 micrograms of LSD is like
00:28:24 ►
he said that’s like one red ant being getting loaded on 500 micrograms of LSD is like?
00:28:27 ►
He said, that’s like one red ant ripping apart the Empire State Building in 40 minutes.
00:28:33 ►
You know, I mean, it’s dramatic
00:28:35 ►
that such a little bit of material can do what it does.
00:28:39 ►
Well, this stuff in Salvia Divinorum
00:28:42 ►
is in the ballpark definitely
00:28:45 ►
and you know
00:28:48 ►
DMT test pilots
00:28:50 ►
return white knuckled
00:28:52 ►
and ashen from
00:28:54 ►
whatever it is that lies
00:28:56 ►
on the other side of
00:28:58 ►
this stuff
00:28:59 ►
as a plant
00:29:00 ►
the good news is
00:29:03 ►
it’s easy to grow
00:29:04 ►
it’s easy to grow, it’s easy to grow
00:29:05 ►
enough to take.
00:29:07 ►
It’s not illegal. It is not
00:29:10 ►
illegal to grow, extract,
00:29:12 ►
transport, advocate,
00:29:14 ►
use in therapy.
00:29:17 ►
It’s just
00:29:18 ►
simply not illegal
00:29:19 ►
in any way. It’ll be very interesting
00:29:22 ►
to see how
00:29:23 ►
the establishment handles
00:29:25 ►
this particular compound
00:29:27 ►
because
00:29:28 ►
this is not the 1960s
00:29:32 ►
when you can just
00:29:33 ►
the way the drug laws are written
00:29:35 ►
for something
00:29:38 ►
to be made illegal
00:29:39 ►
at the pleasure of the attorney general
00:29:42 ►
or someone like that
00:29:43 ►
it has to be a structural near relative of an already illegal compound.
00:29:50 ►
And this isn’t. This isn’t.
00:29:53 ►
So the only way this stuff could be made illegal
00:29:57 ►
is for scientific evidence to be brought into court
00:30:03 ►
that there’s something wrong with it
00:30:05 ►
and causing hallucinations
00:30:07 ►
at this point I don’t think is enough
00:30:09 ►
there has to be some
00:30:10 ►
physical toxicity
00:30:13 ►
or some demonstrable
00:30:15 ►
public health
00:30:16 ►
problem or this will probably
00:30:19 ►
get through
00:30:21 ►
I think really what
00:30:23 ►
salvium means and then there are others I could
00:30:25 ►
talk about but this isn’t a
00:30:27 ►
psychobotany gathering
00:30:29 ►
or maybe it is
00:30:30 ►
but I think what all this means is
00:30:33 ►
that the drug laws are not going
00:30:35 ►
to be repealed they’re just simply
00:30:37 ►
going to become irrelevant
00:30:39 ►
because there are so many
00:30:41 ►
loopholes
00:30:43 ►
chemical exceptions,
00:30:46 ►
local sources of every illegal thing.
00:30:49 ►
I mean, take DMT, for example.
00:30:51 ►
DMT is a Schedule I drug, heavily controlled,
00:30:55 ►
but since all those laws were passed,
00:30:58 ►
it’s come to be realized that every human being has it in them.
00:31:03 ►
Well, so you’re holding.
00:31:05 ►
You are potentially arrestable
00:31:08 ►
for holding and transporting a Schedule I drug.
00:31:12 ►
Well, then that’s obviously absurd,
00:31:16 ►
but on the other hand,
00:31:17 ►
the law has never been fought on those grounds.
00:31:21 ►
So ayahuasca is a perfect example.
00:31:41 ►
those grounds. So ayahuasca is a perfect example. In a sense, ayahuasca is not a drug because everything in it that is working occurs in the human body anyway, just in smaller amounts and in a different ratio. So, you know, unless we propose to make human brains illegal,
00:31:46 ►
which, you know, I’m sure there are some
00:31:48 ►
people who would line up for that with
00:31:51 ►
great enthusiasm, but I think that’s
00:31:53 ►
Buchanan’s 17% that we just have to put
00:31:56 ►
up with. Most people realize, I think,
00:32:00 ►
that the chemistry of consciousness and
00:32:03 ►
the chemistry of nature are co-evolved and equally complex,
00:32:10 ►
and the place where one stops and the other begins
00:32:13 ►
is a fool’s game.
00:32:18 ►
So if any of you are interested,
00:32:20 ►
Salvia, you know, it’s easy to sit here.
00:32:22 ►
I mean, talking about psychedelics
00:32:24 ►
is very, very, very, i mean talking about psychedelics is very very very very different
00:32:26 ►
from taking psychedelics it’s all very well to listen to me spiel my spiel but the most important
00:32:35 ►
thing you could possibly do is actually somehow contort the contents of this evening to the point
00:32:41 ►
where it got you loaded and that’s probably best approached legally, safely,
00:32:48 ►
horticulturally, humbly, through salvia divinorum.
00:32:54 ►
How long does that experience last?
00:32:57 ►
Well, the way I like to do it, people do it different ways.
00:33:01 ►
The way I like to do it is I weigh about 35 grams of it, which is quite a pile, and
00:33:09 ►
then I remove the vein, the mid-vein of the leaf with my fingernail, just to drop the
00:33:15 ►
volume down. And then when it’s all done, I have this very nice soft pile of green leaves,
00:33:22 ►
soft pile of green leaves.
00:33:25 ►
And then I roll it up and fold it up and put it in my cheek
00:33:27 ►
and lie down where I can see a digital clock.
00:33:35 ►
And what I’m waiting for is minute 17 or so.
00:33:40 ►
And right around then, you know,
00:33:43 ►
you get visual streaming
00:33:45 ►
purple and chartreuse blobs of light floating past your eyes
00:33:50 ►
this is not the psychedelic experience
00:33:53 ►
it’s the prodrome of hallucination
00:33:56 ►
you sometimes see this after orgasm
00:33:59 ►
but in the case of the salvia thing
00:34:01 ►
after two or three minutes of this
00:34:03 ►
it doesn’t go away instead it
00:34:06 ►
you know moves on to the next level and this is extremely peculiar plastic stretching folding
00:34:18 ►
machine-like hallucinations it reminds me some of you may may know Salvador Dali’s painting Ode to the Revolution
00:34:27 ►
number 5
00:34:28 ►
construction, soft construction
00:34:30 ►
in baked beans
00:34:32 ►
do you know that painting?
00:34:34 ►
well, yes, it’s like that
00:34:36 ►
and you sort of feel like that
00:34:38 ►
and the hallucinations
00:34:41 ►
are very bright
00:34:42 ►
they are not
00:34:43 ►
like what I always think
00:34:45 ►
when it’s happening is,
00:34:46 ►
my God, I can’t believe this stuff is legal.
00:34:49 ►
It actually is working.
00:34:52 ►
You know, it’s not like it’s almost working
00:34:54 ►
or sort of working
00:34:55 ►
or any of these, you know,
00:34:57 ►
with these other horrible legal things.
00:34:59 ►
This one works.
00:35:03 ►
It works.
00:35:04 ►
And it works and it works enough
00:35:06 ►
that you actually reach a place
00:35:09 ►
with it where you wonder
00:35:11 ►
if it’s not going to work too much
00:35:13 ►
which tells you
00:35:15 ►
just how good it is
00:35:17 ►
of course at that point
00:35:19 ►
you’re probably at the top
00:35:21 ►
of the mountain just as you begin
00:35:23 ►
to have anxiety about
00:35:24 ►
well how strange will this be probably at the top of the mountain, just as you begin to have anxiety about,
00:35:28 ►
well, how strange will this be,
00:35:31 ►
you’re probably coming around the corner.
00:35:37 ►
And then you come down in about 45 minutes and go to sleep.
00:35:38 ►
How long did it take?
00:35:41 ►
An hour.
00:35:44 ►
A rather interesting hour.
00:35:47 ►
If it didn’t taste so bad I could do it three nights a week
00:35:50 ►
in other words
00:35:52 ►
it is
00:35:52 ►
and yet it’s much
00:35:54 ►
it’s like
00:35:55 ►
it’s
00:35:57 ►
I don’t know exactly how to explain it
00:36:00 ►
it is absolutely satisfying
00:36:02 ►
and very powerful
00:36:03 ►
but it doesn’t seem, at that dose, it doesn’t seem like it could become a wild horse. At higher doses, the stories begin to get harder to map. who fiddle with the pure compound, are obviously really intrepid.
00:36:28 ►
It seems to be about some kind of,
00:36:31 ►
my brother described it very well the other night,
00:36:34 ►
he seems to be susceptible to it.
00:36:37 ►
Some people are and some aren’t.
00:36:38 ►
And he was at a conference somewhere
00:36:41 ►
and there was just dried material rolled
00:36:46 ►
and he just took a big hit basically to see how it tasted,
00:36:51 ►
to sort of get the feeling for how it tasted.
00:36:54 ►
And it folded him.
00:36:57 ►
I mean, he came apart, he twitched on the ground
00:37:01 ►
and his description of it was, he said it was like being rotated to the left.
00:37:09 ►
There was this strange counterclockwise twist and then you’re like in this other dimension.
00:37:17 ►
You’ve just been hyper-dextro-rotary homogenized and now you’re in a previously unsuspected
00:37:26 ►
domain of space and time
00:37:28 ►
that is immediately
00:37:30 ►
contingent to this dimension
00:37:32 ►
but only by that means
00:37:34 ►
and people do
00:37:36 ►
people talk about
00:37:40 ►
something folds
00:37:42 ►
something twists or
00:37:44 ►
untwists, there’s definitely a sense of
00:37:47 ►
being moved that’s how and the come on is faster than DMT which is hard to
00:37:54 ►
imagine I mean that the come on in fact is so fast that you don’t act you sort of discover yourself there
00:38:05 ►
you know
00:38:08 ►
you’re waiting for it to come on
00:38:11 ►
and then you realize that
00:38:12 ►
for some time it has actually
00:38:14 ►
been on
00:38:15 ►
and it was your perceptions
00:38:17 ►
that were lagging
00:38:19 ►
no
00:38:22 ►
I mean the taste
00:38:24 ►
if you do it the fresh leaf in the mouth,
00:38:26 ►
it tastes very much like a very large mouthful of very leafy leaf.
00:38:32 ►
It’s bitter. It’s bitter.
00:38:34 ►
But it’s not appalling.
00:38:37 ►
It’s just bitter.
00:38:38 ►
One could probably get used to it, you know.
00:38:41 ►
After the 17 minutes, do you spit it out or do you keep it in your mouth? Well, I used to tell people you spit it out or you keep it in your mind well i used to
00:38:46 ►
tell people to spit it out at minute 17 and then some people couldn’t there were complaints and so
00:38:52 ►
now what i tell people is keep it in your mouth until it works but some unless you’re a hard case
00:39:01 ►
somewhere between 15 and 20 minutes, it’s going to find you.
00:39:09 ►
Yeah.
00:39:10 ►
Two things. One going back is, where do you see technology? Do you see technology playing again the altered state of consciousness. And, or, reading about super strength theory
00:39:32 ►
and probabilities, etc., and listening to you, I can’t help but make this connection of these altered states being shifted into
00:39:46 ►
just a slightly
00:39:49 ►
less probable place
00:39:51 ►
than us being here now
00:39:53 ►
and what is your take on that
00:39:56 ►
well first of all
00:39:58 ►
how technology relates
00:39:59 ►
to altered states
00:40:01 ►
on a
00:40:03 ►
trivial level I mean not trivial, on a trivial level,
00:40:05 ►
I mean, not trivial,
00:40:07 ►
but on an obvious level, I guess,
00:40:13 ►
it’s really knitted the community together.
00:40:17 ►
I mean, the Internet empowers all marginal,
00:40:22 ►
are all marginalia,
00:40:24 ►
and God knows we’re marginal.
00:40:27 ►
So the fact that there are these conferences and email lists
00:40:31 ►
where people feel free to say anything
00:40:34 ►
and to pass on all kinds of botanical, chemical, shamanic information
00:40:41 ►
means nobody need now get into trouble through ignorance
00:40:47 ►
because there are vast FAQ files on the
00:40:52 ►
net and any you know if you’re if you’ve
00:40:55 ►
gotten some DMT and you’re wondering
00:40:57 ►
what it does there’s an afternoon’s
00:41:00 ►
worth of reading on the internet you
00:41:03 ►
know Gracie and Zarkov take a trip, McKenna meets
00:41:07 ►
the basketballs, and on and on and on. So that’s very important, but as I said, somewhat
00:41:16 ►
pedestrian. The thing that excites me about these informational technologies is I think
00:41:23 ►
we’re going to be able to use virtual reality
00:41:25 ►
to show each other the insides
00:41:28 ►
of our own heads
00:41:29 ►
and that this has never
00:41:32 ►
been possible
00:41:32 ►
we know each other by our
00:41:36 ►
surfaces and our symbols
00:41:38 ►
you know
00:41:39 ►
we make small mouth noises
00:41:41 ►
and we assume we share the same
00:41:43 ►
dictionary and by such rickety infrastructure as this we build community and understanding but if everybody worked on a the mansion of their soul in cyberspace and you could invite people in and say, you want to know who I am?
00:42:05 ►
I’m not this, this six foot two inch piece of meat.
00:42:10 ►
That’s not it.
00:42:11 ►
Here’s what it is.
00:42:12 ►
Here’s my hopes, my dreams, my fears,
00:42:15 ►
my past accomplishments, my unfinished projects,
00:42:18 ►
my catastrophes.
00:42:21 ►
Incredible amount of intimacy
00:42:24 ►
and hence mutual appreciation and empathy.
00:42:30 ►
So I think the whole thing is bandwidth.
00:42:35 ►
Bandwidth simply means, on one level it means the speed
00:42:41 ►
at which information is moved from one point to another but
00:42:45 ►
in experiential
00:42:47 ►
terms what
00:42:47 ►
bandwidth means
00:42:48 ►
is how deep
00:42:50 ►
the image
00:42:50 ►
is you know
00:42:52 ►
a telephone
00:42:52 ►
call is very
00:42:54 ►
low bandwidth
00:42:55 ►
a television
00:42:57 ►
assisted telephone
00:42:58 ►
call is higher
00:42:59 ►
bandwidth and
00:43:00 ►
as we expand
00:43:02 ►
bandwidth
00:43:03 ►
between each other we will dissolve our differences.
00:43:09 ►
I mean, this is my faith.
00:43:10 ►
I think it’s amazing that we’ve built a global civilization in an environment of 4,000 languages
00:43:18 ►
and no better mode of communication than small mouth noises and their electronic equivalents.
00:43:27 ►
And so we’re about to take
00:43:29 ►
an enormous leap
00:43:31 ►
toward understanding each other.
00:43:35 ►
What we will understand,
00:43:37 ►
I don’t know.
00:43:39 ►
A friend of mine
00:43:39 ►
who was somewhat speaking ironically,
00:43:44 ►
but I think he meant it
00:43:45 ►
said all decadence is
00:43:47 ►
is finding out what the neighbors are really doing
00:43:52 ►
you know that what society is
00:43:56 ►
is an elaborate structure
00:43:58 ►
to keep us believing certain things about each other
00:44:02 ►
which are in fact not true
00:44:04 ►
and that when we find out they’re not true then we’re going to have to deal with that
00:44:11 ►
Imagining what these truths might be is food for thought certainly
00:44:16 ►
So virtual reality, you know, we’ll show each other the inside of our heads and our dreams and then my own private
00:44:22 ►
the inside of our heads and our dreams and then my own private obsession
00:44:26 ►
I hope we can see simulations of psychedelic states
00:44:31 ►
I mean this is where all this graphics creativity
00:44:34 ►
and three-dimensional graphics power
00:44:37 ►
because anybody who has taken psychedelics much at all
00:44:42 ►
knows that there are realms of beauty in there more astonishing than
00:44:48 ►
the Sistine Chapel or I don’t know Angel Falls for that matter I mean the most beautiful things
00:44:57 ►
in the universe are inside the human mind and you know I was trained at one point as an art historian and if art
00:45:06 ►
is the effort to get
00:45:08 ►
those mental objects
00:45:10 ►
into the shared world of social
00:45:12 ►
space then art
00:45:14 ►
has a lot of catching up to do
00:45:16 ►
I mean the very best
00:45:18 ►
art has been
00:45:20 ►
a very halting
00:45:22 ►
you know you discover
00:45:24 ►
more art in your own
00:45:26 ►
head than the entire
00:45:27 ►
canon of Western art
00:45:29 ►
since the Renaissance.
00:45:31 ►
Who are we? Just ordinary
00:45:33 ►
people.
00:45:35 ►
So, it will be
00:45:37 ►
immensely empowering.
00:45:39 ►
The question about super string
00:45:41 ►
theory, I don’t
00:45:43 ►
claim to understand it.
00:45:45 ►
I also suspect that fashion now rules the physics department
00:45:52 ►
and it’s all changing so quickly.
00:45:55 ►
You know, physics has all, for 200 years or 150 years,
00:46:03 ►
physics was the paradigmatic science.
00:46:06 ►
All sciences aspired to be as scientific as physics
00:46:12 ►
because often in physics,
00:46:15 ►
theory and experimentally derived values
00:46:20 ►
will agree with each other
00:46:22 ►
out to five or six decimal points of measurement.
00:46:26 ►
Well, God, in sociology, if you get within 10%, you hail yourself as rigorous.
00:46:35 ►
And biology sort of falls in between there, but it’s very sloppy compared to physics but physics is once they pushed beyond
00:46:46 ►
the Hamiltonian
00:46:50 ►
model of the atom
00:46:52 ►
and into the domain of the quanta
00:46:54 ►
the phenomena that are
00:46:55 ►
encountered are so counter
00:46:58 ►
intuitive that nobody
00:47:00 ►
knows
00:47:00 ►
exactly how to interpret it
00:47:04 ►
I mean the people who actually do the work of quantum physics on a daily basis
00:47:10 ►
work in a pure mathematical language
00:47:13 ►
and actually make a considerable effort not to try and think about
00:47:17 ►
what does this mean in English,
00:47:19 ►
because it means stuff so crazy that you can’t even,
00:47:24 ►
that it’s just so counterintuitive.
00:47:26 ►
I mean, for instance, a month ago in Science News,
00:47:29 ►
they reported, what was it, a beryllium atom
00:47:33 ►
that they were able to excite into this peculiar quantum state
00:47:36 ►
where, as far as any test they could tell,
00:47:40 ►
it was in two places at one time.
00:47:44 ►
Well, was it in two places at one time well was it in two places at one time
00:47:46 ►
or is it that English is simply inadequate
00:47:49 ►
to say what it was
00:47:51 ►
and this is some kind of deceiving
00:47:54 ►
lower dimensional description of it
00:47:57 ►
non-locality
00:48:00 ►
is this phenomenon that was thought
00:48:04 ►
so squirrelly and improbable
00:48:08 ►
that in the 20s when they formulated the quantum theory,
00:48:13 ►
they had two quantum theories on the table in front of them,
00:48:18 ►
both giving identical predictions mathematically,
00:48:23 ►
but using different assumptions
00:48:25 ►
and one of them had non-locality
00:48:29 ►
built into it
00:48:30 ►
and the other had uncertainty
00:48:32 ►
built into it
00:48:34 ►
and they thought uncertainty
00:48:36 ►
was a smaller outrage
00:48:38 ►
to reason the non-locality
00:48:41 ►
so they chose the Heisenberg-Bohr model
00:48:45 ►
with this uncertainty principle embedded in it.
00:48:48 ►
But now, in the last five years,
00:48:52 ►
non-locality, which previously was just this,
00:48:59 ►
it was sort of a joke
00:49:02 ►
that these equations predicted non-locality,
00:49:05 ►
but some people thought of experiments to actually test this,
00:49:09 ►
and non-locality is as experimentally verifiable
00:49:15 ►
as any other phenomenon in the quantum world.
00:49:18 ►
And what does it mean?
00:49:19 ►
It means that all matter in the universe
00:49:22 ►
is somehow connected to all other matter in the universe
00:49:28 ►
instantaneously,
00:49:31 ►
without subject to the inverse square law
00:49:34 ►
or the speed of light.
00:49:35 ►
And, you know,
00:49:39 ►
this essentially vindicates
00:49:46 ►
mysticism
00:49:48 ►
which has been at loggerheads
00:49:49 ►
with the enterprise of western science
00:49:52 ►
since it began
00:49:53 ►
it also may mean
00:49:55 ►
you know the alchemists like to say
00:49:58 ►
what is here is
00:49:59 ►
everywhere what is not here
00:50:02 ►
is nowhere
00:50:03 ►
what it implies potentially is that all information is immediately available, that we need not go to the Andromeda galaxy or the moons of Jupiter or anywhere else to find out the answer to any question. Somehow information is holographically and fractally and homogeneously
00:50:29 ►
distributed through the space-time matrix. Well, God, if you could get a technology together
00:50:36 ►
based on that, it would be the greatest revolution since the birth of human language or something
00:50:44 ►
like that
00:50:45 ►
yeah
00:50:46 ►
I suspect that life is
00:50:49 ►
a great enough technology
00:50:51 ►
to be able to
00:50:52 ►
yeah I suspect
00:50:55 ►
so too
00:50:56 ►
one of the things
00:50:58 ►
one of the things
00:51:01 ►
I mentioned and one of the things
00:51:03 ►
if I have a one of the things… I’m not going to worry about the…
00:51:05 ►
If I have a concern about the machine part or the hard wiring
00:51:10 ►
is that it can take the attention away from…
00:51:14 ►
The biological…
00:51:17 ►
My being able to do that, you know,
00:51:20 ►
which may mean needing the help of some other minds and stuff also to be able to kind of reach that.
00:51:29 ►
Well, I think technology, the human brain is the god of technological innovation.
00:51:40 ►
In other words, we want to do it that way.
00:51:43 ►
We want to do it that small, that fast, that neatly. So as technology advances, it’s going to look more and more like biology.
00:52:05 ►
this evolving technological field where you work with single atoms. You build up things atom by atom.
00:52:09 ►
Well, this is how biology does it.
00:52:13 ►
DNA is read by ribosomes that specify the assembly of proteins atom by atom.
00:52:23 ►
This is how we will do it.
00:52:22 ►
proteins, atom by atom.
00:52:24 ►
This is how we will do it. So the technologies of the future
00:52:27 ►
will be more and more, quote-unquote,
00:52:31 ►
natural appearing.
00:52:34 ►
And finally, my fantasy is, you know,
00:52:37 ►
a world where when you want to contact the Internet,
00:52:41 ►
you just walk over and put your hand on a tree and you immediately have T6 connection to the global biocybernetic matrix in cyberspace.
00:53:01 ►
that we’re doing like building
00:53:02 ►
the internet
00:53:02 ►
for example
00:53:04 ►
you can build
00:53:06 ►
the internet
00:53:07 ►
you can lay
00:53:07 ►
fiber optic
00:53:08 ►
cable everywhere
00:53:09 ►
and put up
00:53:10 ►
space satellites
00:53:11 ►
or stuff like that
00:53:12 ►
but another way
00:53:13 ►
to do it
00:53:13 ►
would just recognize
00:53:14 ►
that the mycelial
00:53:16 ►
network
00:53:16 ►
already present
00:53:18 ►
in the soil
00:53:19 ►
probably
00:53:20 ►
has room
00:53:21 ►
for you
00:53:22 ►
to run
00:53:22 ►
your messages
00:53:23 ►
through it
00:53:24 ►
while it’s doing the business of being alive.
00:53:28 ►
So, you know, the telephones of the future
00:53:31 ►
may look more like mushrooms than they do today.
00:53:38 ►
I mean, nature is obviously the model.
00:53:41 ►
And see, our technology now is a technology of heavy metals, high temperatures.
00:53:50 ►
I mean, we weld things, we melt things, and when we build, we assemble pieces of things,
00:54:05 ►
of things and then we bring them together under high pressure and high heat to make automobiles and aircraft and this sort of thing.
00:54:10 ►
Nature, notice that nature, meaning organic nature,
00:54:15 ►
not volcanoes and hot springs,
00:54:17 ►
but organic nature accomplishes all of her miracles under 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:54:24 ►
all of her miracles under 115 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:54:30 ►
There’s no welding of beryllium and this sort of thing. So we could do that too.
00:54:33 ►
And when you use cool temperatures like that,
00:54:36 ►
well, then you don’t generate toxic gases
00:54:39 ►
and strange physical byproducts
00:54:43 ►
like sulfur dioxide and mercuric oxide
00:54:46 ►
and all of this toxic material.
00:54:49 ►
So the machine age as we have known it was simply a very brief episode
00:54:56 ►
in human beings’ relationship to the construction of prosthesis.
00:55:05 ►
I mean, I more and more think of it that way.
00:55:09 ►
I mean, the touching a tree to get to the Internet,
00:55:13 ►
that’s pretty far out.
00:55:14 ►
I mean, in other words, there are steps to that
00:55:18 ►
that we don’t know how to take.
00:55:21 ►
But I’ve talked at other times to this group about what I call these black
00:55:28 ►
contact lenses except they’re not
00:55:30 ►
contact lenses they’re actual implants
00:55:33 ►
in the back of your eyelids so that when
00:55:37 ►
you close your eyes there are menus
00:55:40 ►
hanging in space that’s not even
00:55:45 ►
nanotechnology
00:55:46 ►
that’s doable today
00:55:49 ►
I mean it might cost a billion dollars
00:55:51 ►
but if it were a fighter plane
00:55:53 ►
we could deliver it in six years
00:55:55 ►
it’s
00:55:56 ►
easily done
00:56:00 ►
so what I hope will happen
00:56:03 ►
is that we will retract
00:56:05 ►
this
00:56:06 ►
bulky
00:56:09 ►
toxic
00:56:10 ►
archaic
00:56:13 ►
industrially based
00:56:16 ►
infrastructure
00:56:17 ►
and become more and more
00:56:20 ►
aboriginal
00:56:21 ►
in our presentation to
00:56:24 ►
an observer but in fact through implants prosthesis nanosites
00:56:31 ►
crawling around on the surface of our skin and inside our bodies and in the environment and so
00:56:37 ►
forth and so on we will actually be becoming uh at the same time that we make our peace with nature,
00:56:50 ►
we will continue to technologically evolve toward whatever it is that we are evolving toward.
00:56:54 ►
I don’t understand what it is.
00:56:57 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:59 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:04 ►
I haven’t paid any attention to this before, but this talk was given in August of 1989,
00:57:10 ►
and it just may be one of the earliest recordings of Terrence talking about his virtual reality idea of the back of the eyelid implants.
00:57:20 ►
And that story of Terrence’s is also retold in one of my podcasts featuring Fraser Clark.
00:57:26 ►
And I think it’s podcast number 45.
00:57:29 ►
I really had to laugh when Terrence said that if you had a question about DMT,
00:57:34 ►
you could now find enough information on the Internet that would take a whole afternoon to read.
00:57:40 ►
And he made that statement in August of 1989,
00:57:45 ►
which was still a couple of years before the web came into being.
00:57:49 ►
But just now I did a search on DMT,
00:57:52 ►
and there were over 5,490,000 pages that mentioned DMT in some way.
00:57:59 ►
Now, there’s a good example of what is meant by an information explosion.
00:58:05 ►
25 years ago, it took an entire afternoon to read everything about DMT that you could find online.
00:58:11 ►
But today, let’s say you could read a page every 30 seconds.
00:58:15 ►
Well, it would take over five years of 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, it would take over five years of reading at 30 seconds per page to cover
00:58:27 ►
the available online information about DMT today. And of course, by the time that you spent those
00:58:33 ►
five years reading about DMT, well, there most likely will be even more information added to
00:58:39 ►
the pile. So that’s what’s meant by surfing the wave of information that’s growing every day.
00:58:45 ►
You can either surf on the crest of the wave and have an exhilarating ride, or you can let it crush
00:58:52 ►
you with its immensity. You’re just not going to be able to read everything. Get used to it.
00:58:57 ►
And there’s one more thing I should mention, and that’s the fact that during the 25 years that have
00:59:03 ►
passed since this talk was given, well, many states and countries have now passed laws to regulate salvia divinorum.
00:59:10 ►
So if that plant interests you, well then, before you do anything else,
00:59:14 ►
go to arrowid, E-R-O-W-I-D, arrowid.org, and look through their salvia vault.
00:59:21 ►
Among many other things about salvia that you’re going to find there is its
00:59:25 ►
legal status around the world and in the various states of the United States. And also the person
00:59:32 ►
that Terrence mentioned as having done that initial research with salvia is Daniel Siebert.
00:59:38 ►
And Daniel, I interviewed in my podcast number 81. And if you listen to that interview, you may
00:59:44 ►
remember that one of the things
00:59:46 ►
that Daniel and I have in common
00:59:47 ►
is the fact that we both met our wives
00:59:49 ►
the same week and at the same conference in Palenque.
00:59:53 ►
And should John Hanna ever produce
00:59:56 ►
another Mind States conference
00:59:57 ►
where the audience participates
00:59:59 ►
in a huge psychedelic trivia game,
01:00:01 ►
well, now you know the answer
01:00:03 ►
to at least one question.
01:00:06 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:00:08 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:10 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you. you