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

00:00:00

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

00:00:22

Salon.

00:00:23

And since so many of my friends are about

00:00:26

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

00:00:50

now find our species, and the spirit he invokes brings Burning Man and the Planque Norte lectures

00:00:56

to my mind.

00:00:58

Now, before I play today’s talk for you, I first want to remind you that I also post

00:01:02

information that relates to the issues we talk about,

00:01:06

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?

00:01:23

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!

00:01:51

Another little item I should mention is that while I’ve been mentioning my favorite books from time to time in these podcasts,

00:01:54

I’ve never actually taken the time to make a list of them.

00:02:00

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,

00:02:12

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.

00:02:29

We will, I think, continue this kind of neurotic behavior until it either is our undoing or until we awaken to archaic values.

00:02:42

And that’s why the weekend is called what it is.

00:02:45

And the archaic revival

00:02:47

is a very large cultural wave

00:02:51

that, you know, can be pushed.

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You could trace the beginnings of it,

00:02:56

the first swell back to the turn of the century

00:02:59

with relativity and theosophy and surrealism

00:03:03

and the work of Freud and Jung on the unconscious.

00:03:06

But it’s a discovery,

00:03:08

a moving toward a realization

00:03:11

that the values that can serve us

00:03:16

are archaic values,

00:03:18

that we have to go completely outside of history.

00:03:21

And we have to make, you know,

00:03:24

we are going to find out

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the nature of human

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nature we can’t have it

00:03:30

several ways

00:03:31

we can’t live in

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obfuscation

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I mean the real question is

00:03:37

is man good

00:03:38

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?

00:05:33

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.

00:06:25

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.

00:07:54

It’s harmless, meaning it can’t kill you.

00:07:58

That’s the guarantee there.

00:08:00

There is this experience.

00:08:02

It is in our cultural heritage.

00:08:17

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

00:08:52

and throw it in the air and go home.

00:08:53

No, it’s an absolute horse race.

00:08:56

Neck and neck, photo finish, race between education and disaster.

00:09:01

I mean, we’re going to either burst out into a millennium of freedom and caring and

00:09:10

decency, or we’re going to toxify the whole thing and just turn it into an ash heap. And the

00:09:16

responsibility falls largely on us. And we don’t know. I mean, the momentum, the lethal momentum

00:09:24

of these institutions is terrifying.

00:09:27

Our position is like that of people

00:09:29

who are attempting to turn a battleship 180 degrees

00:09:32

and we’re doing it with an oar.

00:09:37

You know?

00:09:37

I mean, the momentum of it is incredible.

00:09:42

But it is not a closed system.

00:09:48

And I say this as a reasonable person.

00:09:51

I mean, I want to keep stressing that,

00:09:53

that I won’t sit at the same table

00:09:56

with the channelers

00:09:58

and the people who have good news

00:10:01

about Atlantis and all of this stuff.

00:10:04

I mean, if this is your private thing, it’s okay,

00:10:07

but the rules of evidence preclude it being taken seriously

00:10:14

until you get your act more together.

00:10:17

But in the psychedelic experience,

00:10:20

there is confounding paranormal material.

00:10:24

It’s the only place I’ve ever found it.

00:10:27

I scoured India.

00:10:28

These guys, as far as I can tell, it’s a skin game.

00:10:32

But outlandish things are going on inside the psychedelic experience.

00:10:39

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

00:10:50

how do we take control of this language that allows us to say it right we we I

00:10:59

think I speak for most people here serve the idea that matter is ultimately at the command of mind.

00:11:10

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

00:11:21

in a sinking submarine.

00:11:24

And yet when you go into these psychedelic spaces,

00:11:28

what you discover is that all bets are off,

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that we can’t even tell how weird it is.

00:11:35

I mean, it may be possible to walk to Arturus

00:11:38

if you have the right set of coordinates.

00:11:43

And the whole concern is

00:11:46

to get the word out,

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to spread this meme,

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to empower people

00:11:51

to confirm the existence

00:11:54

of these realities for themselves

00:11:56

and to begin to form

00:11:58

a kind of community

00:12:00

consensus about it.

00:12:02

You know, it’s only, I guess,

00:12:04

in 1992

00:12:05

we will celebrate the 500th anniversary

00:12:09

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.

00:12:21

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

00:12:36

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.

00:13:10

Take note of that. If we could go there, we would go there. And the thing is, we don’t know that we

00:13:18

can’t go there. We have never taken the imagination seriously. We have never taken the self-management of culture seriously.

00:13:28

We’ve always sort of thought things should just go along

00:13:31

like a random walk.

00:13:35

But now, because of the immense technical power

00:13:38

that’s come into our hands,

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the design process of the whole planet

00:13:44

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

00:13:58

a vision we have to have a dream not a vision or or a dream, the vision, the dream.

00:14:06

And it can’t come from the personality of individual human beings.

00:14:13

It has to come out of the bones of the planet.

00:14:18

And this is, I think, what the psychedelic experience is broadcasting.

00:14:22

It’s broadcasting the hologrammatic, fractal,

00:14:27

altogether, all at once, image of totality

00:14:31

that our religions have sensed and called God,

00:14:35

that the shaman have learned to use

00:14:38

as a vast kind of computer for extracting information

00:14:42

and for generating healing energy.

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But it is that there is some kind of controlling,

00:14:49

minded, integrated thing behind nature.

00:14:54

And we’re not going to understand that this weekend, next week, or ever.

00:14:58

This is not a relationship of solving a problem.

00:15:02

It’s a relationship of being an initiate of a mystery

00:15:08

and then living your life, you know,

00:15:11

in the light of that.

00:15:12

And the task of understanding is endless

00:15:17

because understanding is simply

00:15:21

the integrated coordination of pattern.

00:15:25

And nature is pattern upon pattern

00:15:28

upon pattern upon pattern

00:15:30

upon level upon level.

00:15:32

It has no depth.

00:15:34

Its measure cannot be taken.

00:15:36

Everything is infinite

00:15:38

and everything is animate

00:15:40

and everything is filled

00:15:43

with a kind of deep concern for humanity. I mean,

00:15:49

we are the lame little brother because we seem to be cut off from all the rest of this.

00:15:57

Well, that’s kind of a Blakey and take on it. The shamanistic cultures themselves having a notion of a fall

00:16:07

and that

00:16:08

and this may just be the people that

00:16:11

we happen to interview in our

00:16:13

era where we’re actually studying it but

00:16:15

that the old

00:16:17

days of shamanism were the

00:16:19

good days and what we have now is

00:16:21

diluted.

00:16:23

Is that just a matter of cultural contact with other cultures

00:16:29

and that the original Shamanistic cultures were isolated?

00:16:34

Or is indeed there a different quality to the time of this 20,000 years ago

00:16:39

that led to a general fall amongst other species of people in general?

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It’s a very complicated question.

00:16:48

The answer gets pretty technical, or talking about it gets pretty technical.

00:16:55

The thing that’s so interesting about psilocybin and DMT

00:17:00

is that they’re so closely related to ordinary brain chemistry.

00:17:04

is that they’re so closely related to ordinary brain chemistry.

00:17:10

The brain chemistry of all higher animals runs largely on serotonin.

00:17:14

Serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine.

00:17:19

DMT is NN-dimethyltryptamine.

00:17:24

Psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy, NN-dimethyltryptamine,

00:17:28

but the phosphoriloxy group goes off as it crosses the blood-brain barrier,

00:17:33

so it’s 4-hydroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine. So it’s very interesting that these powerful naturally occurring hallucinogens

00:17:40

are in many cases only one molecule away from endogenous neurotransmitters.

00:17:49

So in answer to your question, it’s possible to suggest

00:17:53

that we’re as close as one mutation away

00:17:59

from significant shifts in the chemical mix of the human brain.

00:18:08

And, for instance, in the pineal gland,

00:18:12

there’s an enzyme called adenoglomerotropine,

00:18:17

which is chemically 6-methoxy-tetrahydroharmalan.

00:18:23

It’s very closely related to the harming alkaloids in ayahuasca.

00:18:29

Well, the persistent myth about ayahuasca is

00:18:34

that it creates states of group-mindedness and telepathy.

00:18:39

The original alkaloid was actually named telepathine

00:18:43

until it was discovered that it was

00:18:45

structurally similar to harming which had been previously described by

00:18:51

Hochstein and Paradis so in other words what’s going on here is the possibility

00:18:58

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.

00:19:27

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

00:19:34

even in the way that they created language in the first place.

00:19:39

In other words, I see language as a model A version of something which could

00:19:45

be made a lot

00:19:47

more efficient and better

00:19:50

and effective.

00:19:51

You had something?

00:19:53

You? Go ahead.

00:19:56

When humankind

00:19:58

changes direction

00:19:59

and goes towards

00:20:01

the

00:20:04

altered state,

00:20:05

the self-adhering altered state,

00:20:06

and that projection.

00:20:08

What do you think that we will do with science

00:20:10

and all of the stuff that we’ve created

00:20:12

that is destroying us?

00:20:15

Well, science,

00:20:18

there are different ways to practice science.

00:20:21

The Greek style was,

00:20:28

science was a spiritual undertaking the purpose was to know

00:20:30

the idea being that somehow there was something good about knowing

00:20:35

I mean I had a philosophy professor who said

00:20:40

first of all I’ll teach you how to recognize the truth

00:20:43

secondly I’ll try to teach you what’s so great about it.

00:20:48

And this is that kind of a situation.

00:20:54

Science, philosophers of science

00:20:57

are perfectly aware of the limitations of science.

00:21:01

It’s the thousands and thousands of workbench scientists who think of themselves as

00:21:07

servants of a world religion who create the problem. We need to know how matter works,

00:21:15

and we need to know the things which science tells us, but it is no basis for extrapolating into human values.

00:21:31

And the culprit there is the concept of social science. This is an obscene idea and we should disabuse ourselves of it immediately.

00:21:38

Social science, psychology, intellectual history, even linguistics, I would say, and philology,

00:21:47

all of this stuff. These people should find honest work. They’re not scientists, and they’re

00:21:54

mucking up. I mean, it was a grand dream of science that it would extend its methods into

00:22:00

social phenomena, having had such great success in the 19th century

00:22:05

with Darwin and Wallace and biology,

00:22:07

they thought, well, Lenin, Herbert, Spencer, and all these people,

00:22:10

why not just extend it into society?

00:22:13

But the problem is there are emergent properties in society

00:22:19

that exceed the descriptive engines of science.

00:22:23

There are emergent properties in biology.

00:22:25

I mean, biology is not…

00:22:29

may also have to be left out of science.

00:22:33

I mean, biology is classificatory,

00:22:36

and it works very well there,

00:22:37

but in terms of mechanism and understanding,

00:22:40

it’s pretty murky.

00:22:42

DNA was decoded in 1950. The molecular geneticists promised a

00:22:48

golden age shortly to follow, and it’s 40 years later, and they still don’t understand gene

00:22:54

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,

00:23:13

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.

00:23:21

very keen on science I just don’t like its philosophical

00:23:23

pontifications

00:23:24

as a method

00:23:27

it’s been very

00:23:29

effective but it’s bred

00:23:31

great pride in it

00:23:34

and it’s thought that it could turn

00:23:35

itself to domains where it was

00:23:38

completely inappropriate

00:23:40

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.

00:23:48

I haven’t tried mushrooms yet.

00:23:50

I sent away the kit and let it grow there.

00:23:53

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

00:24:06

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.