Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Even a billion people is too much. There’s no way back to the simplicity we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew.”
“The human imagination, which is our great glory, has grown so powerful that we can barely unleash it on the surface of the planet.”
“Ideologies are cultural memes. They are the most confining of the cultural memes. That’s where culture gets real ugly. It is when you rub up against its ideologies.”
“What we now have is the freedom which attends decadence, or the decadence which attends freedom.”
“For me it’s an issue of are we afraid of ourselves? And we inherit a huge bunch of idealogical baggage, not only Christianity, but Freudianism, and Marxism … We inherit all kinds of idealogical baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.”
Book mentioned in this podcast
The Movement of the Free Spirit
By Raoul Vaneigem
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:32 ►
Now first, a quick mention about the USB thumb drives that I’ve now shipped to almost everybody who made a donation of $45 or more during our pledge drive.
00:00:45 ►
The last three are going to go out on Monday, at least the last three that I still have addresses for, because I’m still waiting for a few more addresses. So if you think that you should have had your drive by now, but it hasn’t arrived,
00:00:53 ►
well, please send me your address to donations at matrixmasters, all one word, matrixmasters.com.
00:00:58 ►
And on that thumb drive, of course, are 128 little sound bites of Terrence,
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plus the first 400 podcasts.
00:01:06 ►
And I’ll have a little bit more to say about the Terrence McKenna soundbites in a future podcast.
00:01:12 ►
Now, before I introduce the talk today, I need to let you know that I was mistaken in my previous podcast when I said that this series of talks was given in 1989.
00:01:17 ►
I don’t, well, I really don’t know what I was thinking when I said that, because the
00:01:22 ►
talk in my previous podcast, and the one we are about to listen to right now were actually recorded in August of 1996, which means that it was only 18 years ago and not 25, as I mistakenly said last week.
00:01:36 ►
Sorry about that.
00:01:38 ►
So, if you’ve been with me here for a while, you’ve heard me say that I was never really taken, very much taken with Terence McKenna’s time wave theory.
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Of course, that’s really easy to say now that 2012 has come and gone.
00:01:51 ►
I realize that.
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But in any event, in the past I’ve elected to not play some of his hour,
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multi-hour long, day long discussions about it.
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However, I am leaving in a bit about the time wave
00:02:04 ►
and the talk that you and I are about to listen to. Thank you. My guess is that I think you’re probably going to find it quite interesting. So now let’s rejoin Terrence McKenna and some of his friends
00:02:27 ►
on what I assume was a beautiful August day in 1996.
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What did you make of it?
00:02:35 ►
I mean, that’s the basic question.
00:02:36 ►
What do you make of this?
00:02:38 ►
Well, someone asked me to explain what you talked about,
00:02:44 ►
or what psychedelics…
00:02:48 ►
Yeah, I guess in a sense I was trying to say something about how I feel,
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why would I come back today and listen to you.
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It wasn’t a sense of hope, but it’s more of a sense of understanding I don’t know
00:03:12 ►
deepening of some sort of understanding of like sometimes I’ll contemplate well
00:03:16 ►
how come oh I know what I was saying I was saying that how come humans think
00:03:23 ►
that they’re more aware than the whole rest of everything else?
00:03:28 ►
And I was sitting, squatting down on the bath floor with a squirrel,
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I guess giving him a nut.
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And I was eating a nut, and we were just both there eating nuts
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and looking at each other, eating a nut.
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And I thought…
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I noticed a lot of squirrels in the bath.
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Yeah, it’s because of the cornmeal.
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I should have known.
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But it’s like, I felt like we were just sitting there
00:03:54 ►
eating nuts together, and we’re on the same level.
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It was like I was raising my eyebrows, going, good luck, you know.
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And the squirrel was like doing this thing with his jaw,
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you know, I guess it didn’t have eyebrows,
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you know, kind of just answering that
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and my thought was
00:04:10 ►
well
00:04:10 ►
the whole
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part of psychedelics is
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you start to feel like you’re
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in oneness with
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all the other atoms around
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whether it’s a tree or rock or
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another human being or an animal or whatever.
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And it’s that feeling of oneness that rather than that thinking,
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oh, I’m more conscious than anybody, all the other animals on the planet,
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that you go, aha, and you feel really good about it.
00:04:41 ►
And that’s kind of that feeling with psychedelics, is you feel more connected with everything. And so in a sense, all of a sudden I thought, well, maybe this
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is a flip back. Now we take psychedelics and we feel the separation of, oh yes, I’m more
00:04:57 ►
of higher consciousness rather than the original, which was the union with everything.
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Well, one of the things my brother mentioned this weekend to me
00:05:10 ►
was the idea that maybe we could come to a place
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where every eye that looks out at nature
00:05:17 ►
had intelligence behind it,
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and the concept of human intelligence,
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you know, that dead song, You Are the Eyes of human intelligence you know that dead song you are the eyes of the world
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if we could somehow disperse intelligence into nature i mean maybe this is what the human
00:05:35 ►
mission is is to bring intelligence into focus and then have somehow give it back
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and awaken the natural world not to say that it isn’t
00:05:47 ►
awakened, who can presume to know.
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Yeah, one of the nice things about being in Manhattan is you never have to worry that
00:05:56 ►
you’re the smartest person in the room, because you never are.
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You know, in other places you might be able to get this together
00:06:05 ►
through intense social management,
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but there it fails,
00:06:11 ►
sort of like being in a rainforest in that sense.
00:06:15 ►
I was intrigued by some of the things you just mentioned
00:06:19 ►
in pathing, like seeds from which cities would grow,
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and I want to know where I could learn more about those ideas.
00:06:26 ►
That’s pretty out there.
00:06:28 ►
Well, visit Eric Drexler’s webpage
00:06:33 ►
or read his book, The Engines of Creation.
00:06:38 ►
Yeah, this idea that the O’s,
00:06:44 ►
which we talked about last night
00:06:45 ►
were bio, techno, nano,
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and I don’t think we talked about fungo,
00:06:51 ►
but we certainly could.
00:06:54 ►
Spaghetti-O’s.
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Spaghetti-O’s, Cheerios.
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Nanotechnology is moving so quickly,
00:07:04 ►
not because the army wants it or capitalism wants it,
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it’s moving so quickly because all the best people refuse to work on anything else
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simply because it’s so cool.
00:07:17 ►
And, you know, why you should have 10,000 steam engines on a one centimeter chip? And what can you do with a steam engine
00:07:27 ►
that produces one ten thousandth of a millinewton of force
00:07:31 ►
and costs, you know, 0.0 mil to produce?
00:07:38 ►
It remains to be seen.
00:07:40 ►
I mean, it’s an entirely different way of thinking about what machines are. I mean,
00:07:46 ►
not only, as I talked about last night, getting away from toxic high temperatures, but just the
00:07:53 ►
power over matter that that represents is some kind of arrival at the end of a long technological road that we’ve been pursuing since the first flint was chipped
00:08:08 ►
maybe half a million years ago.
00:08:11 ►
The holy grail of nanotechnology
00:08:15 ►
is this thing called a matter compiler.
00:08:19 ►
And a matter compiler does to matter
00:08:23 ►
what an SGI Indigo does to graphic images. In other words,
00:08:29 ►
anything you can imagine. And it builds three-dimensional objects essentially out of air, out of mud,
00:08:40 ►
out of slurry, seafloor, some rich, heavy metal-rich slurry of material
00:08:47 ►
is coming into this thing, and out of it are coming sewing machines,
00:08:52 ►
mandarin oranges, bicycles, electronic components, SpaghettiOs,
00:08:58 ►
and in Neil Stephenson’s novel, The Diamond Age, rice.
00:09:04 ►
They’re feeding China out of matter compilers.
00:09:08 ►
That’s what I referred to last night when I said how revolutionary it would be to break the human agricultural cycle
00:09:17 ►
and what a relief this might be for the earth if we didn’t have to produce our food by agricultural methods
00:09:25 ►
vast amounts of the earth could be
00:09:27 ►
reclaimed or turned fallow
00:09:30 ►
there have been
00:09:31 ►
revolutions like this before
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that have forestalled
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human
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and
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ecological catastrophe
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for example
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cities themselves the decision of human beings about
00:09:48 ►
10,000 years ago to aggregate very tightly into fixed settlements probably gave the earth a great
00:09:57 ►
deal of breathing room for a long time. If we had continued with our system of nomadic pastoralism.
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It required thousands and thousands of square miles to support very small populations.
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So, in a sense, there have been in the past episodes
00:10:15 ►
where we took steps to slow our impact on the environment.
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One of the funny things that emerges out of nanotechnology
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from my point of view is, you know, I’m very gung-ho for the idea that there isn’t much time
00:10:32 ►
left and that 2012 represents this huge phase shift and it’s only now 16 years away. But a funny thing, with nanotechnology you can stretch time by a factor of a million.
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Even though 2012 is only 16 years away, with the correct technological approach we can
00:10:59 ►
forestall it forever by simply scaling down, you know, scaling down,
00:11:07 ►
so that when you live in the domain and at the speed of microbes,
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16 years is 50 million generations in the distant far-flung future.
00:11:21 ►
It’s weird how time is plastic and subject
00:11:26 ►
to scale
00:11:27 ►
in that way
00:11:29 ►
what is it about
00:11:31 ►
if what the universe is doing
00:11:34 ►
is generating and then
00:11:36 ►
conserving and then
00:11:37 ►
novelty and then building
00:11:40 ►
further novelty upon it
00:11:42 ►
well then in some sense we represent
00:11:44 ►
the novelty of
00:11:47 ►
novelties of novelty. We are where nature’s eggs have tended to all roll to
00:11:55 ►
the bottom of the basket and we’re it. And so then our role in transforming the planet, the ecosystem, our social systems and technologies and everything
00:12:09 ►
becomes much more part of the cosmic drama, a continuation of the evolutionary drama.
00:12:17 ►
And then the question, but the really weird part of this whole rap is the nearness of this date.
00:12:22 ►
weird part of this whole rap is the nearness of this date
00:12:24 ►
I think you could peddle
00:12:26 ►
this pretty easily if you were
00:12:28 ►
just vague about the date and
00:12:30 ►
said something like sometime in the next
00:12:32 ►
thousand years
00:12:33 ►
and then people would see
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who couldn’t line up for that
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it’s this
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it is now
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thing sort of the guy with the
00:12:44 ►
beard on the corner,
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repent and be saved.
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I don’t know what led into that,
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but time is a very interesting problem
00:13:02 ►
and not well dealt with, I think, in Western science.
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Probability theory is very fuzzy.
00:13:11 ►
And as the answers required or the questions asked in science become more precise,
00:13:20 ►
it becomes less satisfying.
00:13:25 ►
Albert, are you ready to go?
00:13:28 ►
No, no.
00:13:30 ►
Launch when ready.
00:13:32 ►
No, I’ll ask just sort of a query,
00:13:36 ►
just sort of tying back to something you were talking about with the nanomachines.
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You were saying that we could sort of stretch out time by scaling down.
00:13:44 ►
Uh-huh.
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And the fact that sort of this great thing that was going to happen in 2012, you know,
00:13:51 ►
it was okay, that’s the flavor of it.
00:13:56 ►
It was okay because we could sort of scale time up for us.
00:14:00 ►
We could learn to stretch it out.
00:14:02 ►
And I’m just curious, and I’m bringing this up again
00:14:07 ►
or going back to this just because it sounds relevant
00:14:09 ►
how
00:14:11 ►
how time can be
00:14:13 ►
stretched out in that way
00:14:15 ►
if you could talk more about that
00:14:18 ►
is it just about more events happening
00:14:20 ►
well that’s one thing
00:14:23 ►
it’s just simply more events happening in Well, that’s one thing. It’s just simply more events happening.
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In other words, at that nano-level,
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activity is so furious
00:14:33 ►
that in terms of events per second,
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there are millions of them
00:14:40 ►
at the quantum mechanical level,
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but there is a deeper level than that, and that
00:14:46 ►
is the attractor in the phase space, in the novelty theory, is somewhat like a black hole.
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Well, a black hole has this thing called an event horizon, And so to an observer exterior to the system,
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let’s think of a spaceship approaching a black hole,
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to an observer outside the system,
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the spaceship appears to eventually disappear down the drain
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and is sucked into the hole.
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But because of relativistic stretching inside the hole, for the people
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on the spaceship, essentially they fall forever.
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They never reach, they never move beyond the event horizon, and so time is very plastic
00:15:42 ►
and slippery, and you cannot assume that what one observer is assuming is general for the system.
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That’s why, you know, I’m very sort of tongue-in-cheek about all these apocalyptic prophecies
00:15:57 ►
and when we get there and what will it be like and those kinds of questions
00:16:01 ►
because it is a singularity,
00:16:05 ►
it’s bound to be hideously slippery
00:16:08 ►
and difficult to actually confront.
00:16:13 ►
So falling forever,
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like for instance,
00:16:16 ►
one way to think of the time wave
00:16:19 ►
because it,
00:16:21 ►
and for the group I’ll say,
00:16:23 ►
the assumption that is operating in novelty theory is that you have a series of nested cycles and that each cycle is one sixty-fourth as large as the cycle that preceded it. So let’s say we start, just for purposes of example,
00:16:50 ►
with a universe whose age is 72 billion years.
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That’s a lot longer than is thought to be the age of this universe, which is somewhere between 12 and 16 billion years.
00:16:59 ►
They’re fighting over it now in the Captain’s Tower.
00:17:03 ►
But let’s imagine a universe of 72 billion years with a built-in collapse factor of 64 and a nested set of cycles of natural law well then 1.8 divide 72 by 64 and it’s a number like 1.3 or something so 1.3 billion years before you got
00:17:31 ►
to the end of this 72 billion year universe there would be a transition into a new regime of natural
00:17:38 ►
law maybe it’s biology well then divide 1.3 billion years by 64
00:17:45 ►
and you get, I don’t know what, let’s take a guess,
00:17:48 ►
275 million years.
00:17:51 ►
Well, that’s the…
00:17:53 ►
So a new set of emergent phenomena
00:17:57 ►
come into the picture at that point.
00:17:59 ►
Let’s call them advanced higher animals, land animals.
00:18:03 ►
Well, then the next cycle is 1.4 million years.
00:18:09 ►
Well, that’s, or 2.5 million years. Well, so let’s call that the emergence of the higher
00:18:15 ►
primates. And the next is 175,000 years. Let’s call that the emergence of Homo sapien. And the next is 4,500 years.
00:18:28 ►
Let’s call that the history of the world.
00:18:31 ►
And the next is 67 years.
00:18:33 ►
Let’s call that World War II to 2012.
00:18:38 ►
And the next is 384 days.
00:18:41 ►
And that’s the year of the jackpot that begins late in 2011. Now notice that at this point
00:18:49 ►
we have gone through six or seven levels. In order to get to the domain of Planck’s constant
00:19:00 ►
6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds,
00:19:05 ►
technically known as a jiffy.
00:19:08 ►
In order to get down to the realm of the jiffies,
00:19:11 ►
which is the grain of the universe in quantum mechanical terms,
00:19:16 ►
it’s going to take 13 more involutions of that cycle.
00:19:24 ►
So what we’re saying is a universe structured
00:19:27 ►
like this, with this collapse factor in
00:19:31 ►
it, a universe 72 billion years old, would
00:19:35 ►
undergo two-thirds of its morphological
00:19:41 ►
unfolding. In other words, two-thirds of
00:19:44 ►
its developmental processes
00:19:46 ►
would occur in the last six days of its existence.
00:19:52 ►
Do you see what it is?
00:19:53 ►
It’s the spin-in.
00:19:56 ►
It spins faster and tighter.
00:19:58 ►
So half of the evolutionary unfolding of that kind of universe
00:20:05 ►
would occur in the last few days of its existence.
00:20:10 ►
Most of it would occur in the last few milliseconds
00:20:14 ►
as it transited level after level after level.
00:20:18 ►
That’s the kind of situation that I think we’re in.
00:20:21 ►
And each epoch becomes a dimension for the expression
00:20:29 ►
of feeling and complexity in some kind of white-headian sense each one of
00:20:34 ►
these is in and of itself a universe of feeling and intentionality in the
00:20:42 ►
history of the universe as it makes its way toward the point singularity
00:20:48 ►
where all things are cotangent
00:20:51 ►
and all limitations are overcome.
00:20:57 ►
So trying to feel where we are in that process,
00:21:02 ►
saying there are only 16 years left
00:21:05 ►
is one way of thinking of it.
00:21:08 ►
Another way of thinking of it
00:21:10 ►
is that the universe still has two-thirds
00:21:13 ►
of all of its development ahead of it in the future.
00:21:18 ►
Does that address your thing?
00:21:20 ►
Yeah, no, that’s helpful. Thank you.
00:21:22 ►
I’m curious if you have any ideas
00:21:24 ►
about what happens at that singularity.
00:21:26 ►
I mean, does time lose meaning?
00:21:28 ►
Is it just kind of like asking the question,
00:21:30 ►
where’s the point south of the South Pole?
00:21:33 ►
Yeah, I mean, I’m just curious what happens to time at that point.
00:21:36 ►
Is there something like 2013, or are we just sort of in a…
00:21:40 ►
I mean, what I guess I could imagine is that just because, I mean,
00:21:45 ►
I’m just… Well, it seems to me what
00:21:47 ►
happens is that
00:21:49 ►
this
00:21:51 ►
cotangentiality phenomenon
00:21:53 ►
is happening now. In other words, what’s
00:21:55 ►
happening is that three-dimensional space
00:21:57 ►
and time is becoming more and more
00:21:59 ►
connected. Everything is becoming
00:22:01 ►
more connected. Well, then
00:22:04 ►
so the logical extrapolation of that process
00:22:07 ►
is that you will approach a point in time
00:22:10 ►
where everything is connected to everything else
00:22:14 ►
well so then the question becomes
00:22:16 ►
or the question that’s being asked is
00:22:18 ►
what happens after that
00:22:20 ►
and I think the answer is
00:22:23 ►
that the process of connectivity somehow bursts out of the dimensional confinement and somehow then it bursts the bounds of the
00:22:47 ►
system in some kind of, you know, a Gerdelian explosion of some sort, and then it begins
00:22:57 ►
to define itself in a higher dimension. And life, we see that nature does this we just can hardly imagine what it
00:23:07 ►
is like to experience it a and what it
00:23:11 ►
is like in a regime of conscious
00:23:14 ►
intelligence one thing that I’ve thought
00:23:20 ►
about trying to imagine all this
00:23:22 ►
happening without you know the direct
00:23:24 ►
descent of God
00:23:25 ►
Almighty into the stream of history
00:23:28 ►
and such
00:23:28 ►
imponderable and difficult to picture
00:23:31 ►
scenarios as that
00:23:33 ►
is there
00:23:35 ►
something that could arise out of us
00:23:38 ►
which would fulfill this
00:23:40 ►
and somehow
00:23:41 ►
everybody could say yeah well they were
00:23:43 ►
right and that did happen,
00:23:45 ►
but nevertheless we can still have sausage for breakfast.
00:23:51 ►
Well, one thing that I’ve thought of,
00:23:53 ►
and I’ve talked in these groups about it a little bit,
00:23:57 ►
is what the vicissitudes of the wave seem to describe most accurately
00:24:05 ►
when all the shouting is done
00:24:09 ►
is technological and intellectual advance.
00:24:14 ►
And so is it possible that this bursting out
00:24:17 ►
of the Newtonian three-dimensional space-time continuum
00:24:22 ►
could be a technological breakout.
00:24:25 ►
And it could take the form of
00:24:28 ►
a very, very powerful engine of some sort,
00:24:36 ►
like that could push a large mass
00:24:38 ►
close to the speed of light.
00:24:40 ►
But more appealing and easier to understand,
00:24:43 ►
I think, is a time machine but it occurs to me that
00:24:51 ►
there there may be something else happening here and again to understand it here’s a metaphor
00:25:01 ►
notice that we live in an extremely high tech world
00:25:05 ►
with the internet and
00:25:07 ►
you know potential AIDS
00:25:09 ►
vaccines and
00:25:10 ►
interplanetary probes and all
00:25:13 ►
that but some people
00:25:15 ►
in this world are
00:25:17 ►
bare ass naked in the rainforest
00:25:19 ►
trying to decide if they’re going
00:25:21 ►
to go with boats
00:25:23 ►
which they’ve been observing and have now decided are here to stay.
00:25:28 ►
Well, if you ask the question, who’s influencing who?
00:25:34 ►
Clearly, we have an overwhelming influence on these rainforest people.
00:25:41 ►
Their lifestyles are crumbling under an onslaught of transistor radios, packaged food, pornography, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, I don’t see anything happening around here except maybe an occasional shaman is brought through that indicates that they’re having much of an impact on us. Well, so imagine if it were possible
00:26:05 ►
to have a technology of time travel.
00:26:11 ►
I think that what would happen in that case
00:26:14 ►
is that what one would think of as time travel
00:26:21 ►
would instead turn into a technology
00:26:23 ►
for causing the rest of history
00:26:25 ►
to happen instantly
00:26:27 ►
in other words to avoid
00:26:30 ►
all of these paradoxes
00:26:32 ►
you would initiate
00:26:35 ►
you know
00:26:36 ►
the temporal equivalent of a chain
00:26:38 ►
reaction
00:26:39 ►
and the rest of history
00:26:42 ►
would just unravel
00:26:44 ►
on the real very quickly
00:26:46 ►
so that the most technologically advanced state
00:26:51 ►
would spread backward through the temporal medium
00:26:56 ►
in the same way that the most advanced cultural state in the world today
00:27:00 ►
is spreading through the spatial medium of the planetary geography. Do you see what I mean?
00:27:07 ►
It’s a kind of a god whistle. You think you’re building a time machine, but what you discover
00:27:13 ►
the moment you turn the time machine on is that you have brought the final evolutionary
00:27:20 ►
achievement of the universe appears right on your front step
00:27:27 ►
in the next millisecond.
00:27:29 ►
Yeah.
00:27:30 ►
You were talking about dissipative structures before,
00:27:33 ►
and how I understood it is
00:27:35 ►
that you’re taking negative entropy in it,
00:27:39 ►
more structure,
00:27:40 ►
but you give waste out all the time too.
00:27:43 ►
And if you see the globe,
00:27:48 ►
or like all the human societies on the earth, like a dissipative structure, there needs to be the waste somewhere.
00:27:54 ►
Like, and you need to create a distance between these structured systems and the waste somewhere
00:28:03 ►
around. And I wonder how you put that together
00:28:06 ►
with your theory of time or of normality
00:28:09 ►
well the entire planetary environment
00:28:13 ►
is an open system because it’s being run
00:28:16 ►
off extraterrestrial energy delivered by the sun
00:28:19 ►
if it weren’t for the sun
00:28:21 ►
the earth would quickly go into
00:28:24 ►
crisis If it weren’t for the sun, the earth would quickly go into crisis.
00:28:28 ►
There is no problem with the generation of waste
00:28:32 ►
as long as the generation of waste cycle
00:28:35 ►
doesn’t exceed the capacity of the system to absorb it.
00:28:42 ►
And this is our problem.
00:28:43 ►
Not that we produce waste, but that we produce it too fast
00:28:47 ►
one of the things my brother pointed out was if you were if you really believe nanotechnology is
00:28:56 ►
coming then the shrewdest investment that you can make are landfills because landfills are filled with metal, glass, plastic,
00:29:09 ►
rare elements, rare chemicals, all these things
00:29:13 ►
which these little nanocytes,
00:29:15 ►
these flea-sized and smaller robots,
00:29:19 ►
are going to go after.
00:29:21 ►
I mean, those will be the great mining
00:29:24 ►
and extraction sites of the future,
00:29:28 ►
quite logically, because you’ll be using all of that material. It’s already in a highly
00:29:35 ►
refined state. In fact, the great thing about nanotechnology is because these machines are so small the current standing crop
00:29:46 ►
of metals presently on the earth is
00:29:51 ►
probably enough for the rest of human
00:29:54 ►
history if it’s a nanotechnological
00:29:57 ►
history there would be no need to
00:29:59 ►
extract more gold more platinum more
00:30:02 ►
iridium we we have enough for nanotechnological purposes,
00:30:07 ►
probably by orders of magnitude we have enough.
00:30:12 ►
The point, see, the goal is to take nature as the model
00:30:17 ►
and to say, okay, we want to build things.
00:30:21 ►
Well, who’s been building longest?
00:30:28 ►
Nature. Who’s been building most efficiently nature who’s been building with the least toxic output and so forth so on nature nature nature
00:30:36 ►
so we are builders so let us learn then from the master builder. And of course, until we can do it perfectly,
00:30:48 ►
we will do it imperfectly.
00:30:51 ►
But more perfectly than we’re doing it now.
00:30:54 ►
We finally at last sort of cited what the deal is with building stuff.
00:31:00 ►
Oh, it’s supposed to be biodegradable, non-toxic,
00:31:12 ►
oh, it’s supposed to be biodegradable, non-toxic, user-friendly, nutritious, brightly colored, you know, whatever.
00:31:17 ►
And so the way nature does it is atom by atom.
00:31:27 ►
And using, you know, molecular long-chain polymers with molecular transcription to run through ribosomes which read these things.
00:31:33 ►
I mean, as you descend into the molecular and the sub-molecular realm, it becomes startlingly machine-like.
00:31:37 ►
I mean, nature is the perfect machine.
00:31:42 ►
There is no difference.
00:31:41 ►
the perfect machine.
00:31:44 ►
There is no difference.
00:31:47 ►
Our machines are hideous and run at high temperatures,
00:31:51 ►
are toxic.
00:31:53 ►
That’s part of the question I have.
00:31:55 ►
Nature’s already made like you put this little seed in the ground
00:31:58 ►
and it turns into a huge tree.
00:32:00 ►
How can we improve on that?
00:32:01 ►
It seems like it’s already a perfect system that’s been developed.
00:32:06 ►
Well, it is a perfect system developed for the ecosystem in which it inserts itself.
00:32:14 ►
I mean, it’s a product of evolution.
00:32:17 ►
We, by being minded, we can use the techniques of nature to serve the design agendas of culture or of human society.
00:32:33 ►
That’s the difference.
00:32:35 ►
I mean, really, my vision is of a partnership.
00:32:40 ►
I think that I talked last night about what I call the forward escape,
00:32:44 ►
where there’s no way back to simplicity. I think that I talked last night about what I called the forward escape,
00:32:49 ►
where there’s no way back to simplicity,
00:32:56 ►
not without slaughtering four out of all five people. I mean, even a billion people is too much.
00:32:59 ►
There’s no way back to the simplicity that we once knew,
00:33:03 ►
but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew, but there may be a way forward to the simplicity that we once knew. But we have to become fully responsible and entirely capable, you know, not half responsible and half capable, which is the present situation.
00:33:25 ►
Capability means power, immense power.
00:33:31 ►
But power means responsibility.
00:33:34 ►
In other words, we can’t evade
00:33:36 ►
the curious moral dimension that attends our enterprise
00:33:41 ►
given the fact that we are conscious beings.
00:33:45 ►
But we can be responsible.
00:33:49 ►
Like my notion is, really, in a sense,
00:33:53 ►
the human imagination, which is our great glory,
00:33:58 ►
has grown so powerful
00:34:00 ►
that we can barely unleash it
00:34:03 ►
on the surface of the planet.
00:34:06 ►
I mean, it’s like trying to drive a fire truck around the nursery.
00:34:11 ►
The nursery can’t handle this.
00:34:13 ►
The nursery is small and confined.
00:34:17 ►
So responsibility means respecting nature,
00:34:29 ►
but also making a place for the novelty that is resident in the human possibility,
00:34:34 ►
because nature also did that.
00:34:37 ►
I mean, nature risked everything on this planet,
00:34:40 ►
on this particular experiment.
00:34:43 ►
And I imagine nature is well pleased.
00:34:48 ►
I mean, we’re as successful as everything else nature ever attempted to do.
00:34:54 ►
I mean, when she wanted to make octopi, she made them.
00:34:57 ►
When she wanted to make machine-building, neurotic, tormented human beings,
00:35:04 ►
she made them in spades.
00:35:06 ►
Well, what if something like the Cultural Revolution in China were to occur?
00:35:11 ►
There you had a group of people who decided to destroy
00:35:15 ►
everything that was old and traditional in that culture.
00:35:20 ►
What if humans came to the point where they realized
00:35:23 ►
that all our technology was so grossly unsatisfying
00:35:27 ►
that we just kind of went on some kind of rampage
00:35:31 ►
to destroy everything that was modern and technological
00:35:34 ►
in some kind of self-destructive mode
00:35:39 ►
in order to get back to a more nature-based, satisfying lifestyle.
00:35:46 ►
Well, this could probably be done,
00:35:48 ►
but I would bet you that as soon as people pick themselves up off the floor,
00:35:53 ►
they’d start the long march forward again.
00:35:56 ►
Because I think tool-making is what we do,
00:36:01 ►
and it’s just irrepressible.
00:36:01 ►
what we do.
00:36:04 ►
And it’s just irrepressible.
00:36:07 ►
We are the creature, you know,
00:36:11 ►
in the same way that abalones make abalone shells,
00:36:14 ►
we construct technologies.
00:36:18 ►
It’s irrepressible, I think.
00:36:21 ►
I mean, it might take different directions.
00:36:23 ►
Like, maybe you’re thinking of Dune,
00:36:27 ►
where, and this was in Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel they had a rule thou shalt make no machine in the image of the human mind and
00:36:35 ►
in the name of this rule they had destroyed all computers and consequently they were telepathic and they had powers of language and telepathy.
00:36:49 ►
But on the other hand, it was a startlingly primitive world.
00:36:57 ►
I mean, our thing is not, I don’t think we can,
00:37:00 ►
our machines are such a basic part of our cultural toolbox now.
00:37:09 ►
For instance, you know, the world price of gold is set every day by machines.
00:37:16 ►
The decisions as to how much titanium and silver should be extracted from mines
00:37:22 ►
to enter the pipeline of the manufacturing process.
00:37:26 ►
This is all determined by machines.
00:37:30 ►
Now in Silicon Valley, when they want to design a chip
00:37:33 ►
to meet certain engineering specifications,
00:37:38 ►
they don’t design the architecture of the chip.
00:37:42 ►
They tell machines what they want the chip to do, and machines
00:37:46 ►
actually make the design decisions.
00:37:51 ►
But I don’t find this horrifying at all.
00:37:54 ►
I mean, I remember in the 50s, one of the fantasies was that in the future we would
00:38:00 ►
live in a world run by machines.
00:38:02 ►
would live in a world run by machines.
00:38:07 ►
Well, instead we live in a world run by politicians, mafias, advertising
00:38:11 ►
conspiracies, pharmaceutical companies
00:38:14 ►
and political pressure groups. I take
00:38:17 ►
machines any day against that crowd and
00:38:21 ►
their wonderful impartiality.
00:38:25 ►
Yeah.
00:38:26 ►
I mean, when you’re listening, that’s the question I ask myself,
00:38:31 ►
is this radical change of psychology with the power base,
00:38:37 ►
with our concept of what power is, our egos hanging on. Is it the return to this pre-ego state
00:38:47 ►
with the technology to assist us?
00:38:50 ►
In a sense, I think it is,
00:38:51 ►
because I think you’re right
00:38:53 ►
that power has always before meant ideology.
00:38:58 ►
The Christians had the power,
00:39:00 ►
or the Marxists had the power,
00:39:01 ►
or the Nazis, or the Communists.
00:39:04 ►
Now, I feel like we have come to the end of ideology,
00:39:10 ►
that the bankruptcy of ideology
00:39:12 ►
is displayed for all to see
00:39:15 ►
and that the business of government and destiny,
00:39:21 ►
which used to be in the hands of ideologues,
00:39:24 ►
has moved over into the hands of
00:39:27 ►
managers. And it’s all become rather humdrum. It’s all about, you know, will the investment
00:39:35 ►
policies support the health care promises made to the population? will the production of drugs meet the demands created
00:39:45 ►
by the ebb and flow of epidemic diseases.
00:39:49 ►
It’s all about management.
00:39:51 ►
I think our exhaustion with ideology
00:39:53 ►
is very healthy.
00:39:55 ►
I don’t think there are good and bad ideologies.
00:39:58 ►
All ideology is bad,
00:40:01 ►
and it’s taken us a thousand years
00:40:04 ►
to sort this out, and we had to have Auschwitz
00:40:06 ►
and we had to have Stalingrad
00:40:08 ►
and we had to have just how many times
00:40:11 ►
did you have to have your nose
00:40:13 ►
rubbed in it before you
00:40:15 ►
realize that ideologies
00:40:16 ►
are cultural means
00:40:19 ►
they are the most
00:40:21 ►
confining of the
00:40:23 ►
cultural means, I mean that’s where culture gets real ugly,
00:40:27 ►
is when you rub up against its ideologies.
00:40:30 ►
So by turning a lot of these middle management
00:40:34 ►
and bureaucratic functions over to machines,
00:40:38 ►
we’re signaling that we’re not interested in that anymore.
00:40:42 ►
And yet the ego,
00:40:42 ►
We’re not interested in that anymore.
00:40:44 ►
And yet the ego,
00:40:50 ►
I see ego as alive and well as it’s ever been in my lifetime.
00:40:54 ►
Well, ego is not the same thing as ideology.
00:40:56 ►
I agree with you. What we now have,
00:40:58 ►
and this is this question that keeps coming up
00:41:01 ►
in so many different forms,
00:41:03 ►
what we now have is the freedom which attends decadence,
00:41:08 ►
or the decadence which attends freedom.
00:41:12 ►
By being liberated from ideology,
00:41:15 ►
we essentially are invited to be all we can be,
00:41:19 ►
but we are free, in James Joyce’s phrase,
00:41:23 ►
to flop on the seamy side
00:41:25 ►
and you know without
00:41:27 ►
Christianity without democracy
00:41:30 ►
without you know these great
00:41:32 ►
inspiring and so this is
00:41:33 ►
the question why does all
00:41:35 ►
freedom end in sadomasochism
00:41:38 ►
why do all efforts
00:41:40 ►
at liberation
00:41:41 ►
end in
00:41:43 ►
recidivism and repression.
00:41:47 ►
Is this a natural law or this is,
00:41:50 ►
we’ve had a bad string of experiences with this,
00:41:53 ►
but it’s not written adamantine?
00:41:58 ►
I still, I, for me it’s an issue of
00:42:02 ►
are we afraid of ourselves?
00:42:04 ►
For me, it’s an issue of are we afraid of ourselves?
00:42:10 ►
And we inherit a huge bunch of ideological baggage,
00:42:15 ►
not only Christianity, but Freudianism and Marxism,
00:42:18 ►
which requires a dictatorship of the proletariat and so forth and so on.
00:42:24 ►
We inherit all kinds of ideological baggage designed to make us fear ourselves.
00:42:29 ►
I mean, what is held against any theory of excess freedom is that it will bring chaos and anarchy.
00:42:35 ►
Well, this may be precisely what the doctor ordered.
00:42:40 ►
Beyond ideology lies chaos and anarchy.
00:42:44 ►
The fact that the Internet is so chaotic Beyond ideology lies chaos and anarchy.
00:42:51 ►
The fact that the Internet is so chaotic is, I think, its great charm.
00:42:58 ►
It seems like a frontier, you know, no law west of the modem yet,
00:43:01 ►
and hopefully not for a while.
00:43:06 ►
I mentioned in another context, but not to this group but I guess this is in the air
00:43:08 ►
this French
00:43:09 ►
historian and I don’t know
00:43:12 ►
exactly how to pronounce his name
00:43:14 ►
but Raoul
00:43:15 ►
Weningen
00:43:16 ►
who wrote this thing called
00:43:20 ►
The Movement of
00:43:22 ►
the Free Spirit
00:43:23 ►
and it discusses a heresy called The Movement of the Free Spirit.
00:43:28 ►
And it discusses a heresy that had great currency in the Middle Ages.
00:43:33 ►
And the heresy had many names and different forms,
00:43:37 ►
but it always revolved around the proclamation
00:43:40 ►
that human beings are perfect.
00:43:44 ►
Human beings are perfect. Human beings are perfect.
00:43:47 ►
And it was fascinating to feel my own reactions
00:43:52 ►
as I read this,
00:43:53 ►
because I certainly am,
00:43:56 ►
I don’t consider myself Catholic in reflex,
00:44:01 ►
and I’m trying to be a good anarchist,
00:44:03 ►
and I lean toward the idea that man is perfect
00:44:07 ►
but reading about a group of people
00:44:09 ►
who absolutely believed and acted this out
00:44:14 ►
pushes you up against it
00:44:18 ►
because, you know, if man is perfect
00:44:20 ►
theft is alright
00:44:22 ►
murder is alright
00:44:24 ►
murder of your own children
00:44:26 ►
is alright
00:44:27 ►
on and on and on
00:44:29 ►
so then you think
00:44:29 ►
well then so
00:44:30 ►
so apparently I don’t think
00:44:33 ►
man is perfect
00:44:34 ►
well then so where do I
00:44:36 ►
draw the line
00:44:37 ►
the fact that people
00:44:40 ►
in the 1200s
00:44:43 ►
could make this leap to proclaim this
00:44:46 ►
and then to live it.
00:44:48 ►
They lived it.
00:44:49 ►
So they didn’t work and they didn’t stay in the villages
00:44:52 ►
and no one would have anything to do with them
00:44:55 ►
except people who agreed with them.
00:44:58 ►
And so there was this counterculture in medieval Europe
00:45:03 ►
of these large camps of people outside major towns
00:45:07 ►
where everybody who was there, by being there,
00:45:12 ►
was committed to the idea that anyone could have sex with anyone else,
00:45:17 ►
that anyone could take anything by anyone else and use it as their own,
00:45:22 ►
that no one had to answer to anyone else,
00:45:25 ►
that there was no authority, so forth and so on. Well, the church burned these people with endless zeal,
00:45:33 ►
you can imagine. And even for us, reading this, it shows you how deeply we carry the idea of our shadow and how profoundly convinced
00:45:52 ►
we are that we pose a great danger to each other and that we must mitigate this with
00:45:58 ►
law and rules and psychotherapy and drugs and high walls and so forth and so on.
00:46:07 ►
This bombing of these airplanes and then the Olympics and the stuff on and on and on
00:46:14 ►
is so clearly designed to replace the rather, I imagine,
00:46:21 ►
unviolent and humdrum world you live in.
00:46:25 ►
I mean, when was the last time you saw several people
00:46:27 ►
blown apart by plastique?
00:46:30 ►
Not recently, I’m willing to bet,
00:46:32 ►
unless you just shipped in from Algeria.
00:46:35 ►
But you’re asked to give up your experience
00:46:39 ►
and replace it with a media-created world
00:46:43 ►
of exploding airliners, sinister international
00:46:47 ►
organizations, and so forth and so on. This ability to use the deaths of what are trivial
00:46:57 ►
numbers of people, I mean, in the same week that these 200 people were blown out of the
00:47:03 ►
sky, 6,000 people died on the American highways,
00:47:07 ►
and there was not a mention of that.
00:47:10 ►
So the exaggerated focus on certain situations
00:47:16 ►
and the deaths of certain designated high-profile groups of people
00:47:21 ►
permits an incredible paranoia
00:47:25 ►
and an incredible erosion of any effort to create community.
00:47:33 ►
These are decisions not made by machines.
00:47:40 ►
Machines would never act with so deep an insight into human psychology.
00:47:47 ►
These are decisions initiated by human managers playing the old-style game.
00:47:57 ►
Well, it seems like it’s not just managers, designists, individuals who love this kind of news,
00:48:06 ►
whose favorite type of entertainment
00:48:11 ►
that they pay to see
00:48:12 ►
is these violent movies
00:48:14 ►
of people being blown out.
00:48:17 ►
Well, we are all guilty
00:48:20 ►
to the degree that we tolerate
00:48:22 ►
and consume this stuff.
00:48:24 ►
I mean, prurience has always been the path to riches.
00:48:29 ►
Was it P.T. Barnum who said,
00:48:31 ►
nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people?
00:48:37 ►
I’m sure that that’s quite true.
00:48:41 ►
So what do you ascribe to this desire that seems to arouse from individuals? Well,
00:48:48 ►
I personally, and I’m willing to extend it to my friends and my enemies, I personally
00:48:55 ►
do not enjoy seeing violence or people being tormented or children being abused or this sort of thing.
00:49:06 ►
When I was in Boulder,
00:49:07 ►
I met a friend of mine
00:49:08 ►
that I hadn’t seen for 25 years
00:49:10 ►
and asked him what he was up to.
00:49:13 ►
And what he’s doing is
00:49:15 ►
he’s founded a company
00:49:16 ►
called Rocky Mountain Media Watch.
00:49:19 ►
And what they do
00:49:20 ►
is they have 150 people
00:49:23 ►
who work for them in 150 cities,
00:49:26 ►
and once a week these people make a video cassette off the TV of the evening news,
00:49:33 ►
the local evening news hour, and they ship all these tapes to Boulder
00:49:38 ►
and they have rooms full of people watching these things on screens
00:49:42 ►
and scoring how much of this hour went to ecological
00:49:48 ►
stories, how much went to lost pet stories, how much went to toxic waste stories, how much went
00:49:55 ►
to the circuses in town stories. And I said, well, Paul, what is the deal with violence and
00:50:03 ►
what’s going on?
00:50:05 ►
And he said, whoa, it’s very simple.
00:50:07 ►
We’ve seen it thousands and thousands of times.
00:50:11 ►
In a half-hour show, the most violent part of the show
00:50:16 ►
occurs immediately before the longest commercial.
00:50:23 ►
And you are brought to this state of adrenal excitement.
00:50:29 ►
And I said, well, do people enjoy watching people shot and blown up?
00:50:34 ►
And he said, no, no, you can put electrodes on them
00:50:37 ►
and you can tell that it raises anxiety
00:50:40 ►
and it raises adrenaline levels.
00:50:43 ►
But he said the whole point is
00:50:45 ►
then you cut to the commercial,
00:50:49 ►
you bring on images of sexuality,
00:50:53 ►
of flesh, of soft music,
00:50:55 ►
and of the product.
00:50:57 ►
And the product then becomes
00:51:00 ►
associated with security.
00:51:04 ►
It’s all about,
00:51:05 ►
look at this horrible death,
00:51:07 ►
manglement, horror,
00:51:08 ►
and this wonderful soap
00:51:11 ►
which will give you social confidence
00:51:14 ►
and make your hair shiny
00:51:15 ►
and your underarms inoffensive.
00:51:19 ►
And this game is played
00:51:23 ►
three or four hundred times a night
00:51:26 ►
with monkeys on the receiving end,
00:51:29 ►
you know, people who, you know,
00:51:33 ►
take Ross Perot seriously
00:51:35 ►
and fear visits by alien proctologists.
00:51:38 ►
That population are, you know,
00:51:43 ►
being subject to this hammering stimulus response thing.
00:51:47 ►
Well, it’s no wonder that people are just totally clueless.
00:51:52 ►
The cultural engines are becoming
00:51:54 ►
almost unmanageably dangerous for the unsophisticated.
00:52:00 ►
This is what I meant last night when I said
00:52:02 ►
there are two kinds of people.
00:52:03 ►
There are artists and marks.
00:52:06 ►
Not in a tone of superiority,
00:52:09 ►
we’re the artists and we’re on the inside and so we’re immune
00:52:13 ►
and the marks, fuck them, they’re all lost souls.
00:52:16 ►
No, every one of us every day is tested to see,
00:52:20 ►
are you an artist or are you a mark?
00:52:22 ►
In this moment, are you an artist or are you a mark? In this situation, are you an artist or are you a mark in this moment are you an artist or are you a mark in
00:52:25 ►
this situation are you an artist or are you a mark and you know everybody tumbles both ways
00:52:32 ►
several times a day because and uh i don’t know exactly what to do about it i mean joseph gerbils
00:52:42 ►
really turned it loose inside the 20th century
00:52:47 ►
I mean this has all been developed since the 30s you know advertising techniques
00:52:53 ►
techniques of behavior modification ways of insinuating complex messages into people and getting them to respond.
00:53:06 ►
The antidote is, in that environment you cannot flee from it, you cannot avoid it.
00:53:16 ►
What you have to do is produce output, output into this ocean of competing means.
00:53:27 ►
Output and subversion and sophistication.
00:53:33 ►
You have to be, I think, very, very…
00:53:37 ►
This is no environment for the credulous, the epistemologically naive,
00:53:55 ►
the epistemologically naive, those driven by inner imbalances to adoration and belief.
00:54:06 ►
I mean, I really believe, I think I said last night, salvation through skepticism, hope through skepticism,
00:54:14 ►
because it’s too difficult to tell what’s going on.
00:54:19 ►
The only reliable indicators in this world are feelings and mathematics.
00:54:23 ►
And mathematics has been torn from you as an option
00:54:26 ►
in the process of infantilization that we’re denouncing here.
00:54:31 ►
So all you have left are your feelings, 90% of us.
00:54:37 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:54:40 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:54:44 ►
Am I mistaken, or at the beginning of this talk,
00:54:47 ►
was Terrence talking about a Star Trek replicator,
00:54:51 ►
but he was calling it a matter compiler?
00:54:54 ►
Maybe I shouldn’t have binge-watched that Star Trek series, I guess.
00:54:59 ►
And anyhow, didn’t you find it interesting when he went off on that writ
00:55:03 ►
about how the then-current terrorist activities were conveniently being planned to keep humans in a constant state of fear as a means of control?
00:55:12 ►
And keep in mind the fact that Terrence died before the 9-11 events, of which I will only say that while magicians use misdirection to pull off their magic,
00:55:22 ►
While magicians use misdirection to pull off their magic,
00:55:26 ►
haven’t you always wondered what magic took place while we were all looking at those two high-rise office buildings implode?
00:55:30 ►
And moving on.
00:55:32 ►
I guess that since I’m in this group, though,
00:55:34 ►
I should also add my two cents about what Terrence was saying
00:55:37 ►
about not watching scenes of violence.
00:55:40 ►
I couldn’t agree more.
00:55:42 ►
I’ve had dozens of friends, not to mention my own children, who can’t understand why I’ve never seen the Game of Thrones or the Hunger Games. I haven’t even watched the trailers for those shows.
00:56:06 ►
I saw close up, and it isn’t as easy to deal with as it maybe seems in the movies.
00:56:12 ►
So I miss a little of what the current culture is all about, but hey, I miss Tiny Tim too,
00:56:14 ►
and I’m not really feeling too left out.
00:56:20 ►
Anyhow, I guess I’m just becoming a grumpy old curmudgeon, but after sampling what passes for, well, I don’t even know what it passes for, but whatever they are now showing on
00:56:26 ►
the Fox channel, it sure does confirm that P.T. Barnum quote that Terrence just recited.
00:56:32 ►
And while I’m still on my high horse, my horse is not high, no. But while I’m at it, I just want to
00:56:41 ►
add that it really does pain me to say anything negative in a
00:56:45 ►
sentence with the word Fox in it. You see, my mother’s maiden name was Fox, Ruth Fox,
00:56:50 ►
and the dominant male influence during my first four years of life was my grandfather,
00:56:55 ►
Dan Fox. So, just as not all conservative Republicans are bad, well, not everything
00:57:01 ►
named Fox is all bad either. Now, where do I go from here?
00:57:07 ►
How do I segue somewhere? Let’s try a new direction.
00:57:11 ►
I realize that one of the things that so endeared Terrence to us all was his sometimes wild predictions.
00:57:18 ►
For example, a while back he was speculating that perhaps a highly disruptive technology would change everything,
00:57:26 ►
and as he often did, he picked time travel as his disruptive technology. Well, what if we lower the
00:57:33 ►
rhetoric a bit and think about a technology that, well, while not able to move us forward and
00:57:38 ►
backward in time, it could do something just as disruptive? What if on a smaller but no less disruptive scale,
00:57:46 ►
there was a technology that eliminated the necessity for institutions of trust
00:57:51 ►
so that we no longer need a court system to determine who owns what?
00:57:55 ►
What if we had a technology that eliminated the need for banks,
00:57:59 ►
for credit card companies, and even eliminated national boundaries?
00:58:04 ►
What if there was a technology where you knew for sure whether the stranger you just met
00:58:08 ►
was who he or she says they are and not a narc?
00:58:12 ►
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg that’s called Bitcoin.
00:58:16 ►
You know, I’m just saying.
00:58:18 ►
Now, this doesn’t have anything to do with, well, I guess it doesn’t have anything to do with anything, other than the fact that in the past I’ve promised to let you know about any curious
00:58:29 ►
synchronicities that happen. So I’ve been listening to the recording that I just now played, and I was
00:58:35 ►
amplifying the parts where people ask questions, you know, and cutting out things you couldn’t hear.
00:58:39 ►
But after a while, I got up and walked around a bit so as to keep my back from hurting by sitting
00:58:44 ►
too long.
00:58:45 ►
And when I came back to the computer, there was an email message waiting for me from John,
00:58:50 ►
who is a fellow salonner from New Zealand.
00:58:52 ►
And he sent a link to an article about how Frank Herbert, the author of Dune,
00:58:57 ►
had been influenced by psilocybin mushrooms.
00:59:00 ►
It was a really interesting article, and so I posted it in my Psychedelic Salon online magazine,
00:59:06 ►
and then I sent a note to John thanking him for sending me the link.
00:59:10 ►
That message was sent at 1.43 p.m.
00:59:13 ►
At 1.49 p.m. I returned to listening to the talk that we just heard,
00:59:17 ►
and only ten seconds or so after I hit play was when Terrence McKenna said,
00:59:23 ►
Maybe you’re thinking of doom.
00:59:27 ►
a hit play was when Terrence McKenna said, maybe you’re thinking of Dune. Now the reason that comment stopped me in my tracks was that at that very moment I actually was thinking about the fact
00:59:33 ►
that Timothy Leary’s personal copy of Dune, inscribed and autographed by the author, was now
00:59:39 ►
safely in the library of my friend Bruce Dahmer. So do you get the picture? I’ve just turned on the
00:59:44 ►
player.
00:59:45 ►
My thoughts are still focused on Bruce’s book,
00:59:47 ►
so I missed the first couple of words that Terrence said.
00:59:51 ►
And as my focus turns to Terrence’s voice, he says,
00:59:54 ►
maybe you’re thinking of Dune.
00:59:57 ►
And that’s why this podcast is a day late.
01:00:00 ►
When that happened, I decided to turn off my computer for the day
01:00:04 ►
and revisit Dune.
01:00:05 ►
But so far I haven’t come up with anything of importance to me about that little synchronicity.
01:00:11 ►
So maybe this is a message for you.
01:00:14 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:00:19 ►
Be well, my friends. friends?