Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
At the end of this talk Terence takes off on an interesting riff wherein he speculates that our life here on Earth may have something to do with us learning how to interact with matter as a preparation for some future existence in dimensions yet unknown. If, he postulates, we are the only intelligent species in the universe, then, he asks, don’t we have an obligation to announce ourselves to destinations that exist beyond the limits of our solar system.
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Being itself is some kind of opportunity.”
“Outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience. It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope, which is that the world is whatever you say it is, if you know how to say it right.”
“We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously.”
“I’m amazed at what thin soup is dished out as spiritual food.”
“It’s hard to take psychedelics. It’s not hard to sweep up around the ashram, but it’s hard to take psychedelics.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And since so many of my friends are about
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to make the trek to the playa and begin building Black Rock City, I thought that I would send this
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Terrence McKenna talk to them to listen to as they head to the burn. I realize that until someone has
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the good fortune to attend one of the Burning Man gatherings, it isn’t really possible to
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completely grok the spirit of the playa.
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However, at the end of this talk, Terence speaks about the delicate place in which we
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now find our species, and the spirit he invokes brings Burning Man and the Planque Norte lectures
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to my mind.
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Now, before I play today’s talk for you, I first want to remind you that I also post
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information that relates to the issues we talk about,
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and I post them in my flipboard magazine of the same name, The Psychedelic Salon.
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One of the articles that I posted discussed a recent world survey of cannabis smokers
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and ranked each country by their per capita amount of marijuana use.
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And who came out on top, do you think?
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Not Holland, not Spain, not the U.S. The number one
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country in per capita pot use is, drum roll here, Iceland. There are a lot of other interesting
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articles in the magazine as well, but I thought that particular item deserves mentioning.
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Way to go, Iceland!
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Another little item I should mention is that while I’ve been mentioning my favorite books from time to time in these podcasts,
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I’ve never actually taken the time to make a list of them.
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But the other day, one of my friends gave me a little push to add some of my favorites to Goodreads.com.
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That’s all one word, G-O-O-D-R-E-A-D-S, Goodreads.com. That’s all one word, G-O-O-D-R-E-A-D-S, Goodreads.com. And I’m experimenting with a little widget that links to some of my favorites. So if you want to give that a try,
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check out the right sidebar in the program notes for this podcast, which you can get to via
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psychedelicsalon.us. And now let’s once again join Terrence McKenna for a workshop that he led during the month of May in 1990, not quite 25 years ago.
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We will, I think, continue this kind of neurotic behavior until it either is our undoing or until we awaken to archaic values.
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And that’s why the weekend is called what it is.
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And the archaic revival
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is a very large cultural wave
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that, you know, can be pushed.
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You could trace the beginnings of it,
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the first swell back to the turn of the century
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with relativity and theosophy and surrealism
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and the work of Freud and Jung on the unconscious.
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But it’s a discovery,
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a moving toward a realization
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that the values that can serve us
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are archaic values,
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that we have to go completely outside of history.
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And we have to make, you know,
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we are going to find out
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the nature of human
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nature we can’t have it
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several ways
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we can’t live in
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obfuscation
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I mean the real question is
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is man good
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because we are going to find out
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because as we move more and more
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into this cultural domain
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that I call the imagination,
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nothing lies between us and the expression of our dreams.
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And so far, our dreams have been, I think, expressed fairly shoddily.
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I mean, our cities are like sores. Our contribution
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to the ecosystem of the planet is plutonium, pesticides, chlorofluorocarbons, so forth and so
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on. An apologist for the human race would say, but we had so many strikes against us, the law of gravity, the cost of materials,
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the resistance of water, air, and so forth and so on.
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Well, fine, then we’re going to get rid of all that.
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We’re going to enter into the imagination
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where the tensile strength of a structure is whatever you say it is.
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This is where language comes in, I think.
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Language is the sort of the CAD CAM,
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the computer-assisted drawing software
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for creating the reality of the imagination.
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I think it’s overwhelming, our situation, the potential and the depth of the strikes against us.
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I mean, it’s really, what’s going on on this planet is absolutely unique so far as we know.
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It’s never happened before on this planet.
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Intelligence emerging out of biological organization
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and actually having a shot at what?
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Who knows?
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I mean, being itself is some kind of opportunity.
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The reasonable expectation is that nothing exists.
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Why should anything exist?
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I mean, it seems to me the most conservative universe
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would be a dimensionless plenum,
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a homogenous, pointless, dimensionless.
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That makes sense.
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Why, then, is there instead, you know,
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multiplicity upon multiplicity?
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I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, stuff like that.
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How in the world do you get from utter emptiness to that kind of thing?
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The richness, the creative force behind it all is awesome.
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And I am not religious in any ordinary sense.
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In fact, I’m violently anti-religious in most senses.
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I mean, I certainly would lead the charge against priestcraft in any form.
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But the picture of the universe as a machine
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subject to a few laws discovered by a bunch of guys in powdered
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wigs, that’s ridiculous
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I mean you’ve got to be
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kidding
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science
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doesn’t deal
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as it’s always a pains to point
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out, with what’s called subjective
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experience
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well that’s really too bad because that’s all
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any of us ever have subjective experience. Well, that’s really too bad because that’s all any of us ever have,
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this subjective experience.
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You know, so we have,
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in the interests of,
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I don’t know what exactly,
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a curious drive,
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an obsession of the Greeks, really,
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an obsession with the physical world
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that we have not been able to disentangle ourselves with
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so that, you know, we can measure the temperature of distant stars,
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but we don’t know what we think about the woman we’re living with.
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Stuff like that.
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Just such a completely overgrown and overdeveloped dichotomous situation
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that it makes no sense.
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So in terms of any kind of conclusion
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or something like that,
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it’s that there is an experience.
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It’s harmless, meaning it can’t kill you.
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That’s the guarantee there.
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There is this experience.
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It is in our cultural heritage.
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It synergizes the most profound and private dimensions of our being. It allows us to recast ourselves in new forms quickly. turn back toward this style of relating to ourselves
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to each other and to the world
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but persist
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instead in the addiction
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to syntactical abstraction
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then I think we’ll just run
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it off the edge
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that
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and it will be a tragedy
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because it is a horse race
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don’t let anybody kid you.
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It’s not that the good guys are miles and miles behind
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and so you just might as well tear your ticket up
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and throw it in the air and go home.
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No, it’s an absolute horse race.
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Neck and neck, photo finish, race between education and disaster.
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I mean, we’re going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and
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decency, or we’re going to toxify the whole thing and just turn it into an ash heap. And the
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responsibility falls largely on us. And we don’t know. I mean, the momentum, the lethal momentum
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of these institutions is terrifying.
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Our position is like that of people
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who are attempting to turn a battleship 180 degrees
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and we’re doing it with an oar.
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You know?
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I mean, the momentum of it is incredible.
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But it is not a closed system.
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And I say this as a reasonable person.
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I mean, I want to keep stressing that,
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that I won’t sit at the same table
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with the channelers
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and the people who have good news
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about Atlantis and all of this stuff.
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I mean, if this is your private thing, it’s okay,
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but the rules of evidence preclude it being taken seriously
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until you get your act more together.
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But in the psychedelic experience,
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there is confounding paranormal material.
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It’s the only place I’ve ever found it.
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I scoured India.
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These guys, as far as I can tell, it’s a skin game.
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But outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience.
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It seems to imply the thing we had hardly dared hope,
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which is that the world is whatever
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you say it is if you know how to say it right and then the whole task becomes
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how do we take control of this language that allows us to say it right we we I
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think I speak for most people here serve the idea that matter is ultimately at the command of mind.
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But we need to move that forward as a demonstrable principle
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because without that, the fear of most people is that we’re imprisoned by physics
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in a sinking submarine.
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And yet when you go into these psychedelic spaces,
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what you discover is that all bets are off,
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that we can’t even tell how weird it is.
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I mean, it may be possible to walk to Arturus
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if you have the right set of coordinates.
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And the whole concern is
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to get the word out,
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to spread this meme,
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to empower people
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to confirm the existence
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of these realities for themselves
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and to begin to form
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a kind of community
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consensus about it.
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You know, it’s only, I guess,
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in 1992
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we will celebrate the 500th anniversary
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of the discovery of the new world.
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500 years ago, people discovered
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the other half of this planet.
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And we’re living there now.
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This is the new world.
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500 years ago, this didn’t exist.
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What existed was a vast cataract patrolled by sea monsters, and the oceans of the world poured off this cataract into the infinite
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abyss, and that was the edge of the world. We, the psychedelic people, are like these early explorers coming back and saying, you know, I sailed west for 16 days and I didn’t go mad. Instead, this is what happened. And It’s a mental world, yes, but we are mental creatures.
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Take note of that. If we could go there, we would go there. And the thing is, we don’t know that we
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can’t go there. We have never taken the imagination seriously. We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously.
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We’ve always sort of thought things should just go along
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like a random walk.
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But now, because of the immense technical power
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that’s come into our hands,
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the design process of the whole planet
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is now on our desk and we’re being asked to
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essentially step into stewardship of the entire planetary environment we have to have then
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a vision we have to have a dream not a vision or or a dream, the vision, the dream.
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And it can’t come from the personality of individual human beings.
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It has to come out of the bones of the planet.
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And this is, I think, what the psychedelic experience is broadcasting.
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It’s broadcasting the hologrammatic, fractal,
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altogether, all at once, image of totality
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that our religions have sensed and called God,
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that the shaman have learned to use
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as a vast kind of computer for extracting information
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and for generating healing energy.
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But it is that there is some kind of controlling,
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minded, integrated thing behind nature.
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And we’re not going to understand that this weekend, next week, or ever.
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This is not a relationship of solving a problem.
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It’s a relationship of being an initiate of a mystery
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and then living your life, you know,
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in the light of that.
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And the task of understanding is endless
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because understanding is simply
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the integrated coordination of pattern.
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And nature is pattern upon pattern
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upon pattern upon pattern
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upon level upon level.
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It has no depth.
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Its measure cannot be taken.
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Everything is infinite
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and everything is animate
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and everything is filled
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with a kind of deep concern for humanity. I mean,
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we are the lame little brother because we seem to be cut off from all the rest of this.
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Well, that’s kind of a Blakey and take on it. The shamanistic cultures themselves having a notion of a fall
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and that
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and this may just be the people that
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we happen to interview in our
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era where we’re actually studying it but
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that the old
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days of shamanism were the
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good days and what we have now is
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diluted.
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Is that just a matter of cultural contact with other cultures
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and that the original Shamanistic cultures were isolated?
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Or is indeed there a different quality to the time of this 20,000 years ago
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that led to a general fall amongst other species of people in general?
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It’s a very complicated question.
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The answer gets pretty technical, or talking about it gets pretty technical.
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The thing that’s so interesting about psilocybin and DMT
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is that they’re so closely related to ordinary brain chemistry.
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is that they’re so closely related to ordinary brain chemistry.
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The brain chemistry of all higher animals runs largely on serotonin.
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Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
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DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine.
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Psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy, NN-dimethyltryptamine,
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but the phosphoriloxy group goes off as it crosses the blood-brain barrier,
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so it’s 4-hydroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine. So it’s very interesting that these powerful naturally occurring hallucinogens
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are in many cases only one molecule away from endogenous neurotransmitters.
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So in answer to your question, it’s possible to suggest
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that we’re as close as one mutation away
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from significant shifts in the chemical mix of the human brain.
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And, for instance, in the pineal gland,
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there’s an enzyme called adenoglomerotropine,
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which is chemically 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan.
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It’s very closely related to the harming alkaloids in ayahuasca.
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Well, the persistent myth about ayahuasca is
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that it creates states of group-mindedness and telepathy.
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The original alkaloid was actually named telepathine
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until it was discovered that it was
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structurally similar to harming which had been previously described by
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Hochstein and Paradis so in other words what’s going on here is the possibility
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that language telepathy and all of these mental abilities that are unique among human beings have to do with a very, very small number of mutations in the brain amine production pathways.
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One of the things that I want to talk about here is the possibility of new forms of communication and that the psychedelics can stimulate new forms of communication among human beings
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even in the way that they created language in the first place.
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In other words, I see language as a model A version of something which could
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be made a lot
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more efficient and better
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and effective.
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You had something?
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You? Go ahead.
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When humankind
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changes direction
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and goes towards
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the
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altered state,
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the self-adhering altered state,
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and that projection.
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What do you think that we will do with science
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and all of the stuff that we’ve created
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that is destroying us?
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Well, science,
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there are different ways to practice science.
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The Greek style was,
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science was a spiritual undertaking the purpose was to know
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the idea being that somehow there was something good about knowing
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I mean I had a philosophy professor who said
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first of all I’ll teach you how to recognize the truth
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secondly I’ll try to teach you what’s so great about it.
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And this is that kind of a situation.
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Science, philosophers of science
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are perfectly aware of the limitations of science.
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It’s the thousands and thousands of workbench scientists who think of themselves as
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servants of a world religion who create the problem. We need to know how matter works,
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and we need to know the things which science tells us, but it is no basis for extrapolating into human values.
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And the culprit there is the concept of social science. This is an obscene idea and we should disabuse ourselves of it immediately.
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Social science, psychology, intellectual history, even linguistics, I would say, and philology,
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all of this stuff. These people should find honest work. They’re not scientists, and they’re
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mucking up. I mean, it was a grand dream of science that it would extend its methods into
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social phenomena, having had such great success in the 19th century
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with Darwin and Wallace and biology,
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they thought, well, Lenin, Herbert, Spencer, and all these people,
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why not just extend it into society?
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But the problem is there are emergent properties in society
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that exceed the descriptive engines of science.
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There are emergent properties in biology.
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I mean, biology is not…
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may also have to be left out of science.
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I mean, biology is classificatory,
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and it works very well there,
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but in terms of mechanism and understanding,
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it’s pretty murky.
00:22:42 ►
DNA was decoded in 1950. The molecular geneticists promised a
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golden age shortly to follow, and it’s 40 years later, and they still don’t understand gene
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expression or what all this stuff is in the DNA. It’s been very disappointing considering what was
00:23:01 ►
promised. I think science is an art.
00:23:06 ►
Everything is an art because we have no sure knowledge of anything.
00:23:09 ►
I mean, maybe mathematics is not an art
00:23:12 ►
because there, you know,
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you work from artificially constructed premises.
00:23:18 ►
I’m very much, very keen on science.
00:23:21 ►
I just don’t like its philosophical pontifications.
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very keen on science I just don’t like its philosophical
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pontifications
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as a method
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it’s been very
00:23:29 ►
effective but it’s bred
00:23:31 ►
great pride in it
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and it’s thought that it could turn
00:23:35 ►
itself to domains where it was
00:23:38 ►
completely inappropriate
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I have a lot of questions
00:23:43 ►
but I want to try to limit them to
00:23:44 ►
maybe a few more or two.
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I haven’t tried mushrooms yet.
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I sent away the kit and let it grow there.
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But a lot of the things that you’ve been explaining and describing to me
00:24:00 ►
have become a reality over the last year.
00:24:04 ►
Just the usage of hashish
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just ingestion of it
00:24:08 ►
on a very, I’d have to say a very
00:24:11 ►
probably limited
00:24:14 ►
because I’m comparing my experience to
00:24:16 ►
the psilocybin prescriptions that you give
00:24:19 ►
and they sound, you know, tremendous
00:24:21 ►
I think the question I’m looking for is
00:24:24 ►
before you, I guess,
00:24:28 ►
got involved with psilocybin and DMT
00:24:30 ►
and things like that,
00:24:31 ►
were you predisposed to saving the planet
00:24:34 ►
and being a humanistic type of person?
00:24:40 ►
And did the DMT and psilocybin
00:24:42 ►
take you to a more profound awareness of what you as a human wanted to do?
00:24:52 ►
Well, I’ve thought about all of this because it’s weird to have the life I have.
00:25:03 ►
You know, it’s so strange
00:25:05 ►
I mean until I went into therapy
00:25:07 ►
I thought I had the most ordinary family in the world
00:25:10 ►
and then once you’re in therapy you discover
00:25:13 ►
no it was the most insane scene you’ve ever heard of
00:25:16 ►
you just didn’t notice
00:25:18 ►
but
00:25:20 ►
I’ve always been interested in nature and I’ve always been interested in nature,
00:25:26 ►
and I’ve always been interested in beauty.
00:25:30 ►
And I think it was the pursuit of beauty that served me best.
00:25:35 ►
Because when I was a kid, first I started out collecting rocks,
00:25:40 ►
and then I collected butterflies.
00:25:43 ►
And then in my emergent phallic phase, I was an amateur rocketeer.
00:25:48 ►
And the major thrill there was setting off these explosive fuels
00:25:53 ►
and watching the possibility of shrapnel and all this stuff.
00:25:58 ►
And then as I got into rockets, I got into science fiction.
00:26:03 ►
And science fiction I really consider a proto-psychedelic
00:26:07 ►
drug, because what science fiction does is it gives permission to imagine. It says, try
00:26:13 ►
it this way, this way, this way. And then you get, as a kid, you get the idea, you know,
00:26:18 ►
that anything is possible. That’s what science fiction teaches you and then uh and i was really obsessive about
00:26:29 ►
science and i wanted to be an astronautical engineer and werner von braun was my hero and
00:26:35 ►
all that and then it sort of flipped at some point and i got in and i decided that i had been
00:26:42 ►
terribly narrow and i was figuring all this out for myself.
00:26:47 ►
I was in some little town in Colorado.
00:26:49 ►
And I decided I’d been terribly narrow and that it was all in the humanities.
00:26:54 ►
And I began reading Henry James and all this stuff.
00:26:58 ►
And I was into Aldous Huxley as an example of an English novelist.
00:27:02 ►
And read Antique, Chrome, Yellow, After Many a Summer Must Die of the Swan,
00:27:06 ►
and so forth and so on,
00:27:07 ►
and then came upon The Doors of Perception.
00:27:11 ►
And just, you know, I was like 14 years old
00:27:14 ►
and it was astonishing.
00:27:17 ►
And I said, if a tenth of this is true,
00:27:23 ►
then this is the most amazing thing there is.
00:27:25 ►
Well, if you’ve read The Doors of Perception, you know it’s actually a terribly conservative gloss.
00:27:31 ►
I mean, it’s all about looking at pictures and seeing the ischite in the folds of your trousers
00:27:37 ►
and thinking about how that relates to Meister Eckhart and all this Huxley-type stuff.
00:27:44 ►
But that gave me the idea.
00:27:46 ►
And then I stuck with it.
00:27:47 ►
I stuck with it somehow and found marijuana,
00:27:53 ►
and that went on to LSD.
00:27:55 ►
And then my great good fortune, I think,
00:27:57 ►
is that just a few months after I took LSD,
00:28:00 ►
somebody brought me DMT.
00:28:03 ►
And, you know, DMT is a miracle I mean DMT is like something that
00:28:08 ►
fell out of a flying saucer I mean it is so strong and so psychedelic I mean I don’t I can’t imagine
00:28:17 ►
being more smashed than that or wanting to be I mean it’s it’s it’s more like a near-death
00:28:23 ►
experience than any near-death experience
00:28:26 ►
I ever heard anybody describe. They sound absolutely pedestrian compared to a DMT trip
00:28:32 ►
where, you know, you’re sure you’re dead. You say, what the hell else could it be? You
00:28:39 ►
know? And then I went to Asia. I was at Berkeley when I had all these drug experiences,
00:28:46 ►
and then I went to Asia
00:28:47 ►
and tried to find it with yogus and all that
00:28:52 ►
and ended up smoking a lot of hashish
00:28:55 ►
and becoming more cynical than ever about spirituality
00:29:00 ►
and just saying, you know, hashish and LSD.
00:29:03 ►
Before I went to the Amazon,
00:29:06 ►
that was what I discovered that really convinced me
00:29:09 ►
you could get somewhere was, you know,
00:29:11 ►
take a bunch of LSD and then smoke great hash on top of that
00:29:15 ►
and really crazy things do go on.
00:29:18 ►
And then I went to the Amazon
00:29:19 ►
and, you know, incredible shamanism is happening there.
00:29:27 ►
I mean, they don’t hold back.
00:29:29 ►
The method I used in India was I would just say,
00:29:32 ►
what can you show me?
00:29:34 ►
I’ve read all these books.
00:29:35 ►
I know how to manipulate all this multisyllabic mumbo-jumbo,
00:29:39 ►
but just one thing.
00:29:42 ►
You say, oh, no, it’s not everything.
00:29:44 ►
It’s very pushy
00:29:45 ►
but then when you go to
00:29:50 ►
South America
00:29:51 ►
then they just say okay
00:29:53 ►
let’s go out in the forest we’ll get the stuff
00:29:56 ►
we’ll cook it up and tonight we’ll show you
00:29:57 ►
our best trick and it
00:29:59 ►
slams you to the wall
00:30:01 ►
you plead for mercy
00:30:03 ►
and it was a vindication because slams you to the wall. I mean, you plead for mercy.
00:30:08 ►
And it was a vindication because the thing I want to stress,
00:30:12 ►
and I don’t know if it’s as important to you
00:30:13 ►
as it is to me,
00:30:15 ►
but you do not have to sell out
00:30:18 ►
to any form of airheadism.
00:30:22 ►
You can be as tight-assed as you want. You can be as tight assed
00:30:26 ►
as you want, you can be as hard
00:30:28 ►
nosed as you want
00:30:29 ►
you can be as demanding, analytical
00:30:32 ►
rational as you want
00:30:34 ►
and the thing is bigger than you are
00:30:36 ►
it’ll just take you apart
00:30:37 ►
it’ll make you weep like a baby
00:30:39 ►
so there’s nothing about faith
00:30:41 ►
and sensitivity and reaching
00:30:44 ►
no, no, no when it comes, it kicks in So there’s nothing about faith and sensitivity and reaching.
00:30:45 ►
No, no, no.
00:30:50 ►
When it comes, it kicks in the front door and takes you prisoner.
00:30:58 ►
And that was what the flying saucer meant when it said,
00:31:00 ►
because you didn’t believe in anything,
00:31:03 ►
this is the way to get somewhere. You’ll never get anywhere if you believe in stuff
00:31:05 ►
because you know
00:31:06 ►
it’ll take you
00:31:07 ►
six months to
00:31:08 ►
work through
00:31:09 ►
Babaji and then
00:31:10 ►
you have to go on
00:31:10 ►
to somebody else
00:31:11 ►
and life is just
00:31:12 ►
not long enough
00:31:13 ►
to give all these
00:31:14 ►
guys a crack
00:31:16 ►
at your
00:31:17 ►
enlightenment
00:31:18 ►
so you know
00:31:20 ►
you sort of have
00:31:20 ►
to goose it
00:31:21 ►
along
00:31:21 ►
and
00:31:23 ►
and the great vindication is then
00:31:26 ►
that when you behave like that,
00:31:28 ►
when you take that stance,
00:31:31 ►
which you would expect would betray you
00:31:33 ►
into nihilism, depression, and so forth,
00:31:36 ►
instead, no, that works.
00:31:38 ►
That’s the method.
00:31:39 ►
Then the gold, you know, reject everything but gold.
00:31:44 ►
And you know what gold is?
00:31:45 ►
It looks like gold.
00:31:46 ►
It feels like gold.
00:31:48 ►
It’s not something that you have to, you know.
00:31:51 ►
I mean, I’m amazed at what thin soup is dished out as spiritual food.
00:31:58 ►
And it’s because we are, as individuals, conflicted, you know.
00:32:03 ►
I feel this in myself.
00:32:06 ►
I mean, it’s hard to take psychedelics.
00:32:08 ►
It’s not hard to sweep up around the ashram,
00:32:11 ►
but it’s hard to take psychedelics.
00:32:14 ►
You know, I read some stuff by Andrew Weil
00:32:17 ►
where he was talking about going in search of,
00:32:20 ►
you know, the ayahuasquero, the curonero,
00:32:22 ►
and he talks a lot about these guys
00:32:24 ►
that are mixing up this sloppy brew you know, the ayahuasquero, the curonero, and he talks a lot about these guys
00:32:25 ►
that are mixing up this sloppy brew
00:32:29 ►
and they’re drunks and they’re just…
00:32:33 ►
You know, I don’t even know if you could go down
00:32:35 ►
to the Amazon and find…
00:32:37 ►
I don’t know what you could find.
00:32:39 ►
I haven’t been there, but it doesn’t…
00:32:41 ►
What his accounts were,
00:32:42 ►
there’s a lot of just slop and drunk stuff happening.
00:32:47 ►
A lot of these guys are alcoholics.
00:32:50 ►
No, you’re absolutely right.
00:32:51 ►
And that’s the main thing happening, was the alcohol.
00:32:54 ►
And Christianity has just kind of pervaded so much of this stuff
00:32:59 ►
that I wonder what’s left and how you find it anymore.
00:33:03 ►
Well, it really helps to do your homework.
00:33:06 ►
It really helps to go down there
00:33:08 ►
knowing as much as you possibly can
00:33:10 ►
about all this meaning.
00:33:11 ►
Because apparently so much of what you get out of it
00:33:13 ►
has to do with how it’s made.
00:33:15 ►
That’s right.
00:33:15 ►
How it makes it, how it’s mixed, and so on.
00:33:18 ►
And if you don’t make it yourself
00:33:19 ►
and you don’t know what’s happening,
00:33:20 ►
then what have you got?
00:33:22 ►
Because ayahuasca is a combinatory drug,
00:33:26 ►
it isn’t like peyote or mushrooms or morning glories where you get the thing and eat it,
00:33:30 ►
and if you eat it in sufficient amounts, it works. This is something where two plants have been
00:33:35 ►
combined, and the proportions must be correct, and the method must be correct. So there’s a huge room for personalities to come into it,
00:33:45 ►
for fast shuffles of all sorts
00:33:48 ►
and mind games of all sorts to take place.
00:33:51 ►
And here, these guys,
00:33:51 ►
a lot of them are very egotistical, too.
00:33:53 ►
It’s true.
00:33:55 ►
No, what you have to do
00:33:56 ►
if you’re into ayahuasca,
00:33:58 ►
or what we did,
00:33:58 ►
was we just, first of all,
00:34:01 ►
we drank a huge amount of swill
00:34:03 ►
and we worked our way slowly through these people
00:34:06 ►
and if somebody appeared to be an asshole
00:34:09 ►
they were so classified and moved on
00:34:12 ►
and eventually we got to good people
00:34:16 ►
but what we did then was we got samples of their stuff
00:34:21 ►
brought it back, put it through mass spectrophotometers
00:34:24 ►
and high pressure liquid
00:34:25 ►
chromatography, saw what
00:34:28 ►
the proportions were,
00:34:29 ►
collected the live plants,
00:34:32 ►
moved them to Hawaii,
00:34:34 ►
grew the plants,
00:34:36 ►
re-concocted the thing,
00:34:38 ►
re-mass specced what we
00:34:40 ►
did and made it as much like the
00:34:42 ►
good stuff as possible. So it was
00:34:43 ►
a project of 15 years
00:34:45 ►
and really maniacal dedication. But I have the faith, you know, I mean, that if given
00:34:54 ►
sufficient time to work on ayahuasca, you could produce a drug out of there so good
00:35:01 ►
that it would be ludicrous to suggest that it was illegal because you see this is brain
00:35:07 ►
soup these are all
00:35:10 ►
neurotransmitters there’s not
00:35:11 ►
a non-endogenous neurotransmitter
00:35:14 ►
in the whole beverage
00:35:15 ►
so really what you’re
00:35:17 ►
a non-endogenous
00:35:20 ►
neurotransmitter meaning everything
00:35:22 ►
in this drug that you’re
00:35:24 ►
about to drink is already in your head.
00:35:27 ►
There’s nothing unusual where drugs like ketamine, mescalinella, there’s none of that in your body.
00:35:34 ►
So what’s it like? What’s the trip like?
00:35:35 ►
It’s like a slow-release DMT trip.
00:35:39 ►
It lasts four to six hours, and it’s intensely visual and unlike
00:35:45 ►
psilocybin it’s not
00:35:47 ►
it doesn’t have this
00:35:49 ►
outer space
00:35:51 ►
science fiction
00:35:53 ►
mega
00:35:55 ►
apocalyptic kind of
00:35:58 ►
take on it which is what psilocybin
00:36:00 ►
does I mean psilocybin shows you
00:36:02 ►
the machines preparing to
00:36:04 ►
transport the faithful away from a burning earth.
00:36:07 ►
That’s not what ayahuasca is about. It’s about nature, water, flow, life, energy.
00:36:19 ►
It’s almost, you know, when MDMA was so hot and people called it an empathy drug and said it makes you empathetic with the people you’re with,
00:36:29 ►
ayahuasca makes you empathetic with the people you’re not with.
00:36:33 ►
And that’s a much more profound experience
00:36:35 ►
because there’s so much more of them.
00:36:38 ►
I don’t understand how you mean that,
00:36:40 ►
empathetic with the people you’re not with.
00:36:42 ►
You feel the poignancy of the human situation.
00:36:48 ►
You feel…
00:36:50 ►
Well, see, I’m usually in a hut somewhere
00:36:52 ►
surrounded by a bunch of Indians,
00:36:54 ►
and suddenly I understand what the songs are about.
00:36:59 ►
And they’re always about the same thing.
00:37:00 ►
They’re about the water and the people and the life and the fish
00:37:07 ►
and lost love and but you you you have this heart opening thing say you know
00:37:14 ►
the folk this is their mystery this is their real I’m getting it now I’m
00:37:19 ►
feeling you know this huge wave of the wisdom of the folk. And they say this
00:37:26 ►
to you in Peru. They say, you know, this is
00:37:28 ►
our university.
00:37:29 ►
You went to Harvard, we went to
00:37:31 ►
Ayahuasca.
00:37:34 ►
Yeah.
00:37:35 ►
I’m wondering if you can comment on
00:37:37 ►
morning,
00:37:39 ►
rather, ginseng wheat, which I believe
00:37:41 ►
is the same thing as morning chloroces.
00:37:43 ►
No, it’s different.
00:37:45 ►
But I’m curious about ginseng weed because it grows wild all over.
00:37:48 ►
It’s on the property, it’s down the highway.
00:37:50 ►
It’s toxic also.
00:37:52 ►
It’s quite toxic.
00:37:55 ►
It’s used shamanically in pre-contact California.
00:38:00 ►
The California Indians had what was called the Tolaq religion and they used Jimson weed seeds to initiate people at puberty
00:38:09 ►
boys mostly
00:38:10 ►
I’m kind of Pollyannish about drugs
00:38:17 ►
I mean I’m after a certain thing
00:38:22 ►
which these tryptamine halicinogens do,
00:38:26 ►
and I tend to not pursue these other things too far.
00:38:30 ►
I didn’t like detour.
00:38:32 ►
It’s very hard to have the degree of clarity
00:38:37 ►
that I think you should have on a drug.
00:38:40 ►
The tryptamine halicinogens don’t interfere with your clarity at all.
00:38:44 ►
You know who you are, where you are, what you’re doing.
00:38:48 ►
I’ve seen people on Datura.
00:38:50 ►
I had an experience with someone on Datura
00:38:52 ►
where in the course of the conversation it came out
00:38:56 ►
that the guy thought we were in his apartment
00:38:58 ►
and I had actually encountered him in the marketplace.
00:39:03 ►
Well, that’s a serious delusion.
00:39:06 ►
You know, that’s a serious problem.
00:39:07 ►
When I took Dutura, all this was in Nepal years ago,
00:39:14 ►
I did have peculiar experiences.
00:39:17 ►
I mean, it is magical. It is delusory.
00:39:20 ►
Reality begins to come apart.
00:39:30 ►
illusory reality begins to come apart uh i these wraith-like ghost-like creatures would come through my window and i was waiting to get high and then i would sort of my attention would drift and these
00:39:35 ►
things would come through my window and they would let loose these sheets of newsprint that would
00:39:41 ►
flutter down over my life and i would like fall forward reading
00:39:46 ►
these things that were and as i read amazement would grow in me and say this is it this is the
00:39:53 ►
answer this is it and then i would pull out and say hello is it working is anything happening
00:40:02 ►
and and that went on so there were several passes of that and then i be and then
00:40:07 ►
it caused me to like throw my leg up around my neck and i got into this kind of thing and i very
00:40:14 ►
carefully unfolded myself and lay back down and then it happened again and i thought to myself
00:40:21 ►
you know i’m very i’m really glad i’m alone because I think this would freak anybody out.
00:40:28 ►
And so I…
00:40:31 ►
But it was definitely strange.
00:40:33 ►
I mean, the guy down the hall from me, I had taken it, he had taken it,
00:40:41 ►
and he had the impression in the night
00:40:44 ►
that this woman that he was scheming on
00:40:47 ►
came to him
00:40:49 ►
and that they made love
00:40:51 ►
and in the middle of the night
00:40:53 ►
I got up to go to the john
00:40:54 ►
and I had to cross through his room
00:40:57 ►
and it was also my impression
00:40:59 ►
that she was in bed with him
00:41:01 ►
well when we sorted it out the next morning
00:41:03 ►
she’d been 30 miles away throughout the whole incident
00:41:06 ►
and had never been there.
00:41:09 ►
So it’s interesting.
00:41:11 ►
There are a lot of altered states.
00:41:13 ►
Maybe that’s a good point to make.
00:41:15 ►
There are all kinds of strange states of mind
00:41:19 ►
and many plant-induced.
00:41:23 ►
From sorting through them,
00:41:22 ►
and many plant-induced.
00:41:24 ►
From sorting through them,
00:41:28 ►
I’ve just become sort of fixated on these tryptamine things
00:41:31 ►
because they seem to me somehow
00:41:34 ►
the most promising and the most real.
00:41:39 ►
The hallucinations of Jimson weed
00:41:41 ►
are curiously related in my mind.
00:41:48 ►
It’s some kind of association schema.
00:41:50 ►
They’re like seances and table tapping and Victorian women in shredded lace dresses.
00:41:58 ►
And that’s about as far from a DMT hallucination as you can get.
00:42:03 ►
about as far from a DMT hallucination as you can get.
00:42:08 ►
I mean, DMT hallucinations are three, if not four-dimensional,
00:42:15 ►
brightly colored, high-tech, organo-insectoid,
00:42:17 ►
so forth and so on.
00:42:23 ►
You talked about the momentum is so strong and then having to change it.
00:42:26 ►
And I think of all the people that are opposed to drugs and they think every drug is the same and so forth.
00:42:29 ►
It just seems like an impossible task to be able to educate
00:42:34 ►
where these drugs would be available
00:42:36 ►
and then people could take them and they’d see the world in a healthier way.
00:42:39 ►
What do you have to say about a question like that?
00:42:42 ►
Well, it’s this struggle about human nature,
00:42:45 ►
defining human nature, you know.
00:42:48 ►
Is it good to take certain drugs?
00:42:50 ►
Is it always bad to take drugs?
00:42:55 ►
Can you always tell a drug from a food, from a spice?
00:43:01 ►
What do these words really mean?
00:43:03 ►
All we can do is
00:43:06 ►
what we are doing
00:43:08 ►
which is replicate the meme
00:43:10 ►
hold these workshops, try to build a core
00:43:15 ►
of consensus about what we’re talking about
00:43:18 ►
and this is itself quite elusive
00:43:21 ►
you see, because what we’re talking about
00:43:24 ►
is a mental event it less focused than let
00:43:28 ►
us say orgasm but even if you’re talking about orgasm here we use this word but it must mean
00:43:34 ►
something different to everybody well it’s even the problem is much worse with the psychedelic
00:43:40 ►
experience because nobody wants to be left out so anybody who’s ever taken anything
00:43:46 ►
thinks they’ve had the psychedelic experience and feels fully qualified to hold an opinion on it
00:43:54 ►
when in fact it’s pretty elusive the real thing you have to take a heroic dose under the right conditions to really smash through.
00:44:07 ►
I mean, yes, there are all kinds of approaches to it.
00:44:11 ►
Insight into childhood trauma, recovery of lost memories, opening to your emotional side,
00:44:20 ►
insights into the dynamics of the life and people around, all of it, but that is not anywhere near the bullseye.
00:44:29 ►
That’s just dancing around the rim of it.
00:44:32 ►
So we have to, as a community, try and build consensus
00:44:36 ►
about what happens at the real center,
00:44:39 ►
what’s happening at the center of the mandala,
00:44:42 ►
what kind of a modality can we describe and create
00:44:46 ►
a shared map of that we
00:44:48 ►
can come back to the rest of the
00:44:50 ►
folks and talk about?
00:44:52 ►
And then the other thing is
00:44:53 ►
well, I’m just banking
00:44:56 ►
on curiosity to do a lot
00:44:58 ►
of the footwork for the revolution.
00:45:00 ►
This is too good to miss.
00:45:08 ►
You know, it’s like placing sex off limits or something and then expecting people not to find out about it.
00:45:12 ►
Now that Marxism has collapsed,
00:45:16 ►
if we don’t substitute something for consumer values,
00:45:23 ►
then we’re just going to rape the earth
00:45:24 ►
in an effort to create
00:45:26 ►
crap for everybody. Well, the only counterpoise to consumer values, to materialism, is spiritualism.
00:45:36 ►
And I don’t mean some bloodless, carol-singing kind of namby-pamby abstraction.
00:45:45 ►
I mean, there has to be as much inner richness
00:45:49 ►
as there previously was outer richness.
00:45:54 ►
And this is why, to the alarm of some people,
00:45:57 ►
I’ve been fairly interested in virtual realities.
00:46:01 ►
Because I think, you know,
00:46:03 ►
if everybody wants to live in Versailles
00:46:06 ►
the only way you’re going to be able to do that
00:46:08 ►
is if you make Versailles a disc
00:46:10 ►
for $3.95 that they can
00:46:12 ►
plug in and then go live in it
00:46:14 ►
so we can’t
00:46:16 ►
preach to the have-nots
00:46:18 ►
the virtue of voluntary simplicity
00:46:20 ►
when we’re riding around in
00:46:22 ►
BMWs and collecting monets
00:46:24 ►
that doesn’t make a lot
00:46:26 ►
of sense
00:46:26 ►
so building a core
00:46:30 ►
consensus
00:46:30 ►
this is still in answer to your question
00:46:33 ►
what can we do and then
00:46:35 ►
replicating the mean
00:46:38 ►
and I introduce
00:46:40 ►
this concept in each of my workshops
00:46:42 ►
because I think it makes
00:46:43 ►
it easier for you to understand what’s happening here.
00:46:49 ►
A meme is the smallest unit of an idea. It’s like a gene is to proteins. Proteins are made by genes and genes code for proteins. Okay, well, ideas are made out of memes.
00:47:08 ►
And you link a few memes together and you have an idea.
00:47:12 ►
Memes, like genes, can be replicated.
00:47:17 ►
You replicate them by either telling the meme to many people
00:47:22 ►
or telling a lot of people all at once,
00:47:27 ►
and then these people you’ve told,
00:47:29 ►
they become potential replicators of the meme.
00:47:34 ►
And there is a domain of culture
00:47:39 ►
that is like an environment of competing ideas.
00:47:44 ►
And the memes go off and live
00:47:46 ►
in this ideological environment.
00:47:49 ►
And some flourish,
00:47:51 ►
and some are consumed by others,
00:47:54 ►
and some are incorporated into others.
00:47:56 ►
And the idea is to keep the psychedelic meme alive
00:48:00 ►
and to make it grow
00:48:03 ►
and to allow its claim to be heard.
00:48:08 ►
It’s not in danger of dying.
00:48:10 ►
It’s a very persistent meme.
00:48:12 ►
It’s been around for about 20,000 years and it’s been highly repressed in many cultures
00:48:17 ►
for the last couple of thousand years.
00:48:19 ►
Yet we’re trying to rebirth it.
00:48:24 ►
So thinking about it that way,
00:48:25 ►
thinking of yourself as a replicator of this thing
00:48:28 ►
which wishes to move through society,
00:48:31 ►
gives a mechanical model for understanding
00:48:33 ►
what is really ideological war, you know?
00:48:38 ►
A war about the definition of human nature.
00:48:42 ►
That’s what’s at stake.
00:48:44 ►
What shall we become? What shall we become?
00:48:47 ►
What can we become?
00:48:50 ►
There’s no question that we need
00:48:54 ►
a greater consciousness of who we are.
00:48:58 ►
And if psychedelic drugs are to be taken seriously at all
00:49:01 ►
as consciousness-expanding agents,
00:49:04 ►
then they have to be given seriously at all as consciousness expanding agents, then they have to be given
00:49:06 ►
their due place in the great dialogue that’s taking place about the future, creating it
00:49:15 ►
and then realizing it, the future of the species.
00:49:20 ►
I wanted to say something further about the
00:49:25 ►
book of Genesis and the notion
00:49:28 ►
of getting to the center there are two
00:49:29 ►
cherubims guarding the gate
00:49:32 ►
with the flaming swords
00:49:34 ►
and that they
00:49:35 ►
represent a pair of opposites
00:49:38 ►
fear and desire and the part
00:49:40 ►
of the
00:49:41 ►
problem of getting a bite of that
00:49:44 ►
tree of immortal life is getting to the realm
00:49:47 ►
beyond pair of opposites, beyond fear and desire. And the other related thing is the
00:49:55 ►
question of why this world is not one of just homogeneous perfection perfection and instead a world of multiplicity of forms and conflicts.
00:50:08 ►
And it’s from a drop of ignorance
00:50:11 ►
that spills into undifferentiated perfection
00:50:15 ►
and from that one drop of ignorance
00:50:17 ►
proceeds the multiplicity of the world we experience.
00:50:21 ►
This is a Gnostic idea,
00:50:23 ►
the drop of ink in the pure glass of water.
00:50:28 ►
Yeah, well, Gnosticism was the idea,
00:50:31 ►
I mean, it had many forms,
00:50:32 ►
but the basic idea was that
00:50:35 ►
light had been scattered through the universe
00:50:40 ►
and that the task of salvation
00:50:43 ►
was to gather this light together
00:50:46 ►
and to somehow transmit it back to its source in some higher dimension,
00:50:53 ►
which is a pretty good metaphor.
00:50:56 ►
One of the issues that comes up in these workshops inevitably,
00:51:01 ►
and I confess I don’t have a real answer for this,
00:51:04 ►
is, you you know are we
00:51:07 ►
a part of nature and the stewards of nature or are we out of nature are we of
00:51:16 ►
another ontos and and sculpted for a different destiny it’s very clear that the the life of the planet and our success as a
00:51:29 ►
conscious species these two things have to either be split away from each other
00:51:33 ►
or one is going to be the undoing of the other and this is a real problem. This problem haunts Western thinking.
00:51:45 ►
It’s nothing new.
00:51:46 ►
Is nature God or is nature the devil?
00:51:51 ►
I mean, that’s the harshest statement of this problem.
00:51:57 ►
One of the ways of detecting breast cancer
00:52:00 ►
is with thermography,
00:52:02 ►
where they look for a hot spot on the breast,
00:52:05 ►
and that’s a suspicious area.
00:52:07 ►
And I think when I’m up in an airplane at night and I look down on Gaia,
00:52:12 ►
I think of this as an organism, a giant organism,
00:52:15 ►
and say, gee, there’s a cancer down there.
00:52:18 ►
It’s hot. You can see it. It’s glowing.
00:52:21 ►
And you go down there, and what you find is, if you look upon
00:52:25 ►
us as sort of the thing, the cells which have gone awry, and the way in which we’ve gone
00:52:34 ►
awry is the nature of our consciousness, in that it’s focused in terms of time and space
00:52:41 ►
and causality. And then the thumb, the prehensile, the ability to do something about it,
00:52:46 ►
because I don’t know for sure,
00:52:48 ►
but I imagine that the little dolphins
00:52:51 ►
could have their consciousness with a sense of time,
00:52:56 ►
and they might have some of the same time-space causality
00:52:59 ►
understanding of the physical world that we do,
00:53:01 ►
but they lack the ability to do anything about it.
00:53:04 ►
To project force into the world.
00:53:07 ►
So that given those two qualities,
00:53:10 ►
this quality of our minds
00:53:12 ►
to look upon the world
00:53:15 ►
through, in this way,
00:53:17 ►
time, space, and causality,
00:53:18 ►
and that thumb,
00:53:19 ►
we have become the cancer
00:53:21 ►
on the organism of the earth.
00:53:25 ►
Well, see, I mean, I…
00:53:26 ►
It’s quite a negative thought.
00:53:28 ►
It is negative, and I’m not sure that I buy into it,
00:53:32 ►
and I’m not sure that I don’t buy into it either.
00:53:34 ►
This is the question.
00:53:36 ►
Is the evolution of historical society and science
00:53:40 ►
and all the ugly adumbrations of that,
00:53:44 ►
sexism, fascism, racism,
00:53:47 ►
is that part of the process or is it a breaking away?
00:53:53 ►
Is there some good in it?
00:53:55 ►
Was history for something or would we have just been better off without it?
00:54:00 ►
And I don’t know.
00:54:02 ►
Sometimes I think of Western civilization as the prodigal son.
00:54:08 ►
You know, we went forth, we left our father’s house,
00:54:12 ►
which was the archaic style of existence.
00:54:14 ►
We left our father’s house and we wandered into matter
00:54:19 ►
and cut deals with demonic forces and millennia have passed
00:54:24 ►
and now the earth is polluted,
00:54:26 ►
and we are back at the longhouse
00:54:31 ►
saying to these people,
00:54:33 ►
do you have any wisdom that can save us from our fate?
00:54:38 ►
Well, they do, to a degree.
00:54:40 ►
I mean, they have this deep insight into natural dynamics and curing,
00:54:44 ►
and maybe more. I mean, they have this deep insight into natural dynamics and curing and maybe more.
00:54:45 ►
I mean, maybe there is magic in this world. But we know some things too. I mean, we can summon
00:54:54 ►
the energy of the stars if necessary down to the deserts of this planet or to the cities of our
00:55:01 ►
enemies if necessary. And this is no small accomplishment.
00:55:05 ►
On any scale, this is quite impressive.
00:55:08 ►
I mean, my God, that cytoplasm
00:55:11 ►
could create a strategy for triggering fusion?
00:55:16 ►
It’s amazing.
00:55:19 ►
So I would like to think that this peregrination
00:55:22 ►
into matter went for something,
00:55:24 ►
that these are skills that we may need out in the universe
00:55:28 ►
when we really get our wings and take off.
00:55:33 ►
And that this deep involvement with matter, it was a kind of an addiction.
00:55:39 ►
And if we can pull out of it, a great deal has been learned.
00:55:45 ►
I mean, after all, if people had stayed in the rainforests,
00:55:49 ►
then we would have been ineluctably linked to the destiny of this planet as an animal species.
00:55:57 ►
And what if this is the only intelligence in the universe?
00:56:02 ►
this is the only intelligence in the universe,
00:56:07 ►
then I would think we have a certain obligation to preserve it past the life of the existence of the solar system.
00:56:11 ►
So if we’re not willing to commit ourselves at any phase of our evolution
00:56:16 ►
to a technical phase that involves mastery over matter,
00:56:21 ►
then we have no more defense against the larger universe
00:56:24 ►
than raccoons and katydids if push
00:56:28 ►
comes to shove. I don’t know. I mean, I stress that there’s no easy resolution on this. It haunts
00:56:35 ►
all thinking about conservation. I mean, I thought throughout the 80s, why aren’t the conservationist space colony enthusiasts why don’t the save the world people
00:56:47 ►
support the high-tech solutions
00:56:50 ►
that would move industry off the planet
00:56:52 ►
why are these various factions unable to make common cause
00:56:57 ►
behind a very large vision
00:56:59 ►
and I don’t know
00:57:02 ►
but I think as pressure mounts for solutions,
00:57:05 ►
this will have to be done.
00:57:07 ►
I mean, I would like to live in a world where the entire Earth was a bioreserve.
00:57:12 ►
I would like to live in a situation where the idea that there would be heavy industry
00:57:17 ►
inside the bioreserve would be thought an abomination.
00:57:21 ►
All that stuff can be done on the moon or in the asteroid belts.
00:57:25 ►
an abomination. All that stuff can be done on the moon or in the asteroid belts. It’s as inappropriate as having a nuclear power plant in the middle of a rainforest to have heavy industry
00:57:32 ►
on the surface of the earth. We need to think on very large time scales and we need to figure out
00:57:41 ►
how to create political machinery to do that
00:57:45 ►
we’ve been living a potlatch existence
00:57:49 ►
just a frenzied consumerist
00:57:52 ►
kind of unthinking
00:57:55 ►
abuse
00:57:58 ►
and I think the best inoculation
00:58:01 ►
for that style of life
00:58:04 ►
is a stiff dose of psychedelics.
00:58:07 ►
You can’t evade it.
00:58:10 ►
It dissolves boundaries.
00:58:11 ►
It allows you to feel what you’re doing.
00:58:16 ►
I mean, the level of denial in this society is incredible.
00:58:20 ►
God, we don’t feel it.
00:58:22 ►
We read the newspaper, but we don’t feel it we read the newspaper but we don’t feel
00:58:25 ►
what it’s telling us
00:58:26 ►
because if we felt it
00:58:29 ►
we would probably be an emotional wreck
00:58:31 ►
but there’s something to be said
00:58:33 ►
for opening up to some of that
00:58:35 ►
there’s a notion in therapy
00:58:40 ►
that if you want the client
00:58:41 ►
to actually make progress
00:58:42 ►
you raise the alarm level.
00:58:45 ►
Guy comes to you for therapy, you say to him,
00:58:48 ►
you think you’ve got problems?
00:58:50 ►
You have no idea what problems you have.
00:58:54 ►
And then work from there.
00:58:56 ►
So it’s very serious business.
00:59:01 ►
It’s trying to steer a society back toward a faith that was lost. And God is like
00:59:08 ►
a lost continent in the human mind. And it’s the only continent where there is safe harbor
00:59:15 ►
in the present historical situation. You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:22 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:59:26 ►
As I was listening to Terrence with you just now, when he was speaking about the fact that we humans seem to be building up to a new pressure point of some sort,
00:59:36 ►
even though those words were spoken almost 25 years ago, I experienced the same feeling of agreement that I did with him back then.
00:59:43 ►
experienced the same feeling of agreement that I did with him back then.
00:59:45 ►
He said those words in 1990.
00:59:50 ►
And my question is, where is this great change he was talking about?
00:59:53 ►
On the one hand, we can look to the rise of the Internet,
00:59:56 ►
the invention of the so-called social media,
01:00:00 ►
the era of the web-enabled phone.
01:00:05 ►
But on the other hand, the situation for the poor and for people of color not only hasn’t improved, in many ways it’s actually become worse.
01:00:10 ►
Having lived through the 60s with the constant television images of America’s war on black people,
01:00:15 ►
particularly in the South, and of the other war, the American war on the people of Vietnam,
01:00:21 ►
I watched those events unfold, and in a small way, I participated in them as well.
01:00:27 ►
I initially hoped that that era in our history was at last behind us.
01:00:31 ►
For a very brief period, I thought that I would be able to enjoy my old age without having to
01:00:36 ►
witness once again the truth about what life is really like for many, if not most people who live in this country. War, once again, is all around us.
01:00:46 ►
Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, and closer to home, Ferguson, Missouri.
01:00:52 ►
In my youth, I saw vicious dogs and powerful fire hoses used to subdue black teenagers,
01:00:57 ►
and now in my old age, I see young black and brown men, hands held high in the air,
01:01:03 ►
being shot down like animals by
01:01:05 ►
the Black Shirts of Homeland Security, our newly militarized police forces.
01:01:11 ►
As a child, I was told that if ever I was in trouble, I should find a policeman.
01:01:15 ►
Yesterday, I heard a black grandmother telling a group of young people to avoid the police
01:01:20 ►
at all costs because they are the enemy.
01:01:23 ►
As a white grandfather, I sadly share her sentiments
01:01:26 ►
and not just for people of color. When the armored vehicles and automatic weapons come out,
01:01:32 ►
you need to realize that you are no longer dealing with a police force. This is an army and they will
01:01:37 ►
crush you at the slightest provocation. During the Occupy movement, this fact became obvious to
01:01:43 ►
everyone who participated in it.
01:01:45 ►
The police in many cities, towns, and villages are in far too many cases no longer the friendly cops on the beat.
01:01:52 ►
Many of them are hardened military veterans who have been trained to deal with the uprisings in Iraq and Afghanistan,
01:01:59 ►
and sadly, many of them are often dealing with PTSD themselves.
01:02:04 ►
Now, in normal times, I wouldn’t be saying anything bad about our policemen and women.
01:02:09 ►
They are doing a job that most of us couldn’t handle, and they’re doing it in extremely difficult circumstances.
01:02:15 ►
A few of my friends are former law enforcement officers,
01:02:18 ►
and you might be surprised at how many officers of the law are also with us here in the salon each week.
01:02:24 ►
Not only are they welcome, they most likely need to stop by the salon each week for a sanity check.
01:02:30 ►
Those aren’t the police that I’m talking about here.
01:02:32 ►
It is this newly militarized version of law enforcement that so disturbs me.
01:02:37 ►
And at long last, we are now hearing something about this situation in the mainstream media.
01:02:42 ►
If you listened to my Occupy podcast from a couple of years ago,
01:02:45 ►
you’ll realize that, well, a good many of us
01:02:48 ►
have been pointing out the militarization of the police
01:02:50 ►
for a long time now.
01:02:52 ►
But for what it’s worth, my personal opinion
01:02:54 ►
is that this situation of being under military control
01:02:58 ►
is going to get significantly worse before it gets better.
01:03:02 ►
With the war on terror, the war on drugs, and all the other wars
01:03:06 ►
now underway, the entire world is once again at war, just as it was on that hot August day 72 years
01:03:14 ►
ago when I was born. I know what I’m going to do about it. My question is, what are you going to
01:03:21 ►
do about it? For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:03:27 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.