Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Culture is the sanctioned virtual reality.”
“They try to tell you that you’re in a social contract, but when you ask to see your signature on the document they tell you that you were born into this contract. Well what the hell kind of contract is that? It means that you were born into a kind of enslavement to a linguistically powered paradigm, a virtual reality within which you will walk around your entire life.”
“The clue that something weird is going on on this planet is ourselves. Obviously! I mean, we are like a fart at the opera.”
“History is no longer rationally apprehendable by the systems which created it.”
“We’re taking bone marrow from the children of the future in order to keep a corpse alive.”
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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 while I was originally planning to play another of the Palenque Norte talks for you today,
00:00:29 ►
I’m sorry to say that, well, apparently integration back into the default world
00:00:34 ►
must still be taking place among our intrepid burners,
00:00:38 ►
because, well, alas, they haven’t passed another of the talks along to me yet.
00:00:43 ►
But having been to Burning Man several times myself, I completely understand.
00:00:48 ►
Coming back to the default world can be, well, overwhelming sometimes.
00:00:53 ►
In fact, I’m not sure that I’ve ever completely recovered myself, now that I think about it.
00:00:58 ►
So, I’ve gone to Plan B and dug up another Terrence McKenna talk.
00:01:03 ►
Again, I think that it’s one that I haven’t played here yet,
00:01:06 ►
but if you’ve been following the comments after some of the McKenna program notes,
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you may have noticed the discussion about whether a recent talk was a repeat.
00:01:15 ►
Ultimately, I think it was decided that the talk was new, even though some of the stories weren’t.
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You see, when people send me these tapes, they sometimes have titles on them,
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and other times they just have a date or a place or event noted on it, and if I was a
00:01:31 ►
serious historian or something like that, I guess I’d most definitely do a better job
00:01:35 ►
of cataloging these talks for you, but I’m not anything like that, and this is just my
00:01:42 ►
hobby, so I’ll have to leave the scholarship to you.
00:02:09 ►
Thank you. But whoever made this recording, well, they did it for me. So you’ll notice a little jump in continuity when Terrence begins his main rap for the evening.
00:02:19 ►
As you’ll hear, this talk took place in February of 1992, which was a year of major events in the life of Terrence McKenna.
00:02:25 ►
One of those events was the publication of a new book, his first one after the publication of the Mushroom Grower’s Guide that he wrote with his brother Dennis. And now that we’re looking back more than
00:02:31 ►
20 years after the talk that we’re about to listen to, it’s, well, it’s fun to hear Terrence speaking
00:02:36 ►
in public for the first time about this new milestone in his life. As you’ll hear in just a
00:02:42 ►
moment, Terrence begins the program by reading his schedule for the rest of the year, which, as I said, was 1992.
00:02:49 ►
And the reason that I left this part in is twofold.
00:02:52 ►
First, I thought that you would find it interesting to hear a little bit about what was going to be happening over the course of the year for Terrence, at least in the way of public appearances.
00:03:01 ►
But it also may be of nostalgic interest to you in the event that you were able to attend one of these events.
00:03:08 ►
Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,
00:03:11 ►
when we get to the end of Terrence’s talk
00:03:13 ►
and he begins with his apes eating mushrooms story,
00:03:17 ►
well, feel free to fast forward to the end
00:03:19 ►
because he really doesn’t add anything new this time.
00:03:23 ►
However, I’ve left it in this time for any newcomers to our little gatherings here
00:03:28 ►
who haven’t heard this story yet.
00:03:31 ►
So now let’s join Terrence McKenna and a few of his friends on a February evening in 1992.
00:03:39 ►
So, welcome to Healing the Inner Elf through Trance, Dance, and Diet.
00:03:44 ►
Welcome to Healing the Inner Elf through Trance, Dance and Diet.
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If you think you’re in the wrong room, check your program.
00:03:53 ►
Let’s see.
00:03:59 ►
There’s some propagandizing to do in no particular order.
00:04:07 ►
This is just my schedule for the next year, fairly set,
00:04:16 ►
in case you want to avoid this kind of encounter again in the calendar year.
00:04:18 ►
This will help you coordinate that.
00:04:24 ►
I think there’s an event in there where it says it’s one or two things and it’s not the angels
00:04:25 ►
and archetypes in LA
00:04:27 ►
it’s the other event in New York City
00:04:29 ►
so scratch out the
00:04:31 ►
aliens event
00:04:33 ►
it’s in New York City
00:04:36 ►
that thing that weekend
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and then
00:04:40 ►
finally the desperate need
00:04:42 ►
to make a living overwhelmed
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my commitment to good taste
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and so like so many others
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I will lead a trip to Egypt
00:04:51 ►
in December
00:04:54 ►
hey
00:04:57 ►
listen, you too could be forced
00:05:00 ►
to these kinds of desperate measures
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and the only way to make it bearable is to
00:05:09 ►
insulate oneself with one’s friends so that you don’t have to have anything to do with
00:05:15 ►
the other people on these tours. So, you know, we can suffer together, if you want to pony up several thousand dollars
00:05:25 ►
I don’t think they’ll invite me back
00:05:30 ►
if they have anyone here listening to my pitch
00:05:33 ►
and the optional cruise up the Nile
00:05:42 ►
I’ll be there too
00:05:43 ►
it’s two weeks of incredible fun And the optional cruise up the Nile. I’ll be there too.
00:05:49 ►
It’s two weeks of incredible fun.
00:05:54 ►
There’ll be a come-as-you-were party on the third night of the cruise.
00:06:01 ►
So enough poking fun at our colleagues at their expense
00:06:07 ►
finally there is a book out
00:06:09 ►
those of you who’ve
00:06:12 ►
if you’ve ever wanted to buy a Terence McKenna book
00:06:15 ►
and have been frustrated because you didn’t want to grow
00:06:18 ►
psychedelic mushrooms in your kitchen
00:06:20 ►
which was the only other book around
00:06:23 ►
you can now purchase this book.
00:06:27 ►
However, only in the Esalen Bookstore
00:06:30 ►
because it can’t legally be sold
00:06:32 ►
until the 17th of February.
00:06:35 ►
So the Esalen Bookstore made a special deal with Bantam
00:06:39 ►
and got a couple of cases of it for this weekend.
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So you could actually be the first person on your
00:06:46 ►
block
00:06:46 ►
the title is food of the gods
00:06:50 ►
not why Eve was
00:06:53 ►
right which is what I wanted
00:06:55 ►
but you learn your place in the
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hierarchy of being when you work
00:07:00 ►
with Bantam books
00:07:01 ►
but seriously this is my best shot
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at making a rational argument
00:07:09 ►
sort of
00:07:11 ►
based on archaeology, history and so forth
00:07:15 ►
for the importance of psychedelics
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in culture and in the present situation
00:07:22 ►
and for a need to rethink
00:07:26 ►
cultural and legal
00:07:28 ►
attitudes toward these things
00:07:30 ►
so that’s
00:07:32 ►
in the mix
00:07:33 ►
and that’s
00:07:35 ►
I think I’ll save the rest of this paper
00:07:38 ►
for tomorrow morning
00:07:39 ►
what happened to the Harper’s book that was going to be released
00:07:41 ►
the first
00:07:42 ►
fans
00:07:43 ►
of internecine publishing struggles Harper’s book that is going to be released the first fans of
00:07:46 ►
internecine publishing
00:07:47 ►
struggles
00:07:49 ►
what happened was
00:07:51 ►
the two publishers decided
00:07:56 ►
some faster than others
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that it would be better
00:08:00 ►
if the Bantam book came out
00:08:01 ►
first
00:08:02 ►
so the Bantam book is out first. So the Bantam book is out.
00:08:06 ►
And the question refers to a second book
00:08:09 ►
called The Archaic Revival,
00:08:12 ►
which will be out in May,
00:08:14 ►
and which will in no way duplicate this.
00:08:18 ►
They’re completely different books,
00:08:20 ►
but there was a little jostling toward the finish line,
00:08:24 ►
and Harper’s
00:08:25 ►
decided to let Bantam go first after 20
00:08:30 ►
years of being ignored it was nice to
00:08:34 ►
see that these people were paying
00:08:36 ►
attention so anyway that’s it for the
00:08:44 ►
gossip department
00:08:45 ►
welcome to Esalen
00:08:48 ►
those of you who have never been here before
00:08:50 ►
welcome to the refurbished big house
00:08:54 ►
fans of renovation
00:08:58 ►
who have been here before
00:09:00 ►
and the best way these things work I think
00:09:05 ►
or what we’ve fallen into as a habit
00:09:07 ►
is on this first meeting
00:09:10 ►
people basically just state
00:09:14 ►
if they wish to who they are
00:09:16 ►
but for my edification
00:09:19 ►
what can I tell you
00:09:21 ►
what do you want, it’s brief enough
00:09:24 ►
and it will go past very quickly. So out of people stating their interests and concerns, tonight will come an agenda of topics for the rest of the weekend.
00:09:50 ►
weekend and once I get going my style is pretty much just to rave so feel free to interrupt otherwise it will just go past and you can interrupt for clarification or to ask a question
00:10:00 ►
or what whatever it’s very informal.
00:10:09 ►
It’s so informal that I don’t even know the name of it.
00:10:10 ►
Does anybody have a catalog?
00:10:12 ►
A weekend with Terrence McKinney.
00:10:17 ►
We finally just hurled all pretense to the wind rather than endlessly recycling.
00:10:21 ►
Aha, well,
00:10:23 ►
we can probably fill that bill.
00:10:27 ►
So to my mind, the importance of these things is that everybody is self-selected to be here.
00:10:39 ►
And it’s an extraordinarily peculiar set of concerns that fall into nexus in this situation.
00:10:48 ►
So we represent some kind of an affinity group,
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and I think it’s very important for the people
00:10:54 ►
to get to know each other,
00:10:56 ►
because all kinds of relationships,
00:11:02 ►
arrangements, possibilities
00:11:04 ►
can emerge out of these meetings.
00:11:07 ►
Someone in this room has what you’re looking for.
00:11:12 ►
And your problem is to figure out who
00:11:16 ►
and then go from there.
00:11:19 ►
So to aid you, the clues emerge tonight
00:11:24 ►
when we go around in the circle and everybody gets a
00:11:27 ►
brief chance and for some people it will be probably their only opportunity because some
00:11:32 ►
people step out of the light to um say anything you want uh provided it’s brief lack of brevity is proof of psychosis in this situation
00:11:46 ►
and after all
00:11:47 ►
we are in a center for
00:11:49 ►
psychophysical healing
00:11:52 ►
so please honor that
00:11:54 ►
my take on science
00:12:00 ►
I might as well
00:12:01 ►
couch it as a comment to you
00:12:04 ►
but it will come out in some other form anyway.
00:12:08 ►
Science is excellent at doing what it was designed to do,
00:12:14 ►
but it has expanded its province into all reality
00:12:18 ►
and seeks to pass judgment in areas where it has no real business going.
00:12:23 ►
in areas where it has no real business going. It’s a very limited method that achieves its claim to universality
00:12:31 ►
by wildly exaggerating its accomplishments.
00:12:36 ►
For example, science to do its work,
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I mean modern science post-Newton,
00:12:43 ►
depends on probability theory
00:12:45 ►
but probability theory
00:12:48 ►
has a built-in
00:12:50 ►
assumption that has
00:12:52 ►
never been thoroughly
00:12:53 ►
looked at and that
00:12:56 ►
is the assumption of
00:12:58 ►
what
00:13:00 ►
Newton called pure duration
00:13:01 ►
meaning that
00:13:03 ►
science if you you describe a scientific
00:13:08 ►
procedure to someone, they don’t ask whether you did it on a Wednesday
00:13:12 ►
or a Saturday. Science seeks to be time
00:13:16 ►
independent. And in order to do that, it has to
00:13:20 ►
make the assumption that time is invariant.
00:13:24 ►
There’s no…
00:13:25 ►
This is just a first try with Occam’s razor.
00:13:29 ►
In fact, in our own lives,
00:13:32 ►
what we experience is endless variation.
00:13:37 ►
In other words, it may be that the hydrogen bond,
00:13:40 ►
when it breaks, always breaks the same way.
00:13:44 ►
But love affairs affairs investment strategies
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political campaigns the building of empires these things are always characterized by a kind of
00:13:58 ►
uniqueness and science by in by invading these domains with probabilistic conceptions, gives us the science of statistics, polling, and hands to us mythical entities like the citizen or the average white male, or, you know, I mean, these are just absurd abstractions
00:14:27 ►
that are generated by a particular kind of worldview that is not really examining its first premises.
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So I would propose a modified definition of science that would then let it do its work in peace,
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which is science is the study of those phenomena
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which are time independent.
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But that in many realms of nature,
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a new theory to replace probability theory
00:15:02 ►
and flat duration is necessary.
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to replace probability theory and flat duration is necessary. The power of probability is simply based on its success
00:15:10 ►
in these very, very limited domains.
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And now there’s no way back from that.
00:15:16 ►
Modern science is thoroughgoingly probabilistic.
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If you were to try and remake,
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I mean, they’re always raving about the new paradigm in science, and it’s always usually some tiny diddling of what they’ve already got.
00:15:31 ►
If you were to really try and remake science, then you would have to replace the assumption of variability in time with a mathematical statement about its variability and
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we’ll talk more about that tomorrow
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because there is room for that I mean
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science is not reason reason is a
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different domain and and I think
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anything which is unreasonable
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ultimately unreasonable is just
00:16:03 ►
patently absurd
00:16:05 ►
that’s why I don’t feel great affinity with most of the marching hordes of the new age
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because you know the fact of the matter is
00:16:16 ►
they don’t possess any razors for separating the nuts from the berries but nevertheless our intellectual choices
00:16:26 ►
are not between the channelers
00:16:29 ►
of Lazarus and
00:16:30 ►
the American scientific
00:16:32 ►
establishment. There’s a vast
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set of possibilities
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in between there
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and beyond those
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those poles of
00:16:42 ►
discourse that can be
00:16:44 ►
worked out.
00:16:45 ►
Every society that’s always existed has had the built-in assumption
00:16:50 ►
that they only needed to find out 5% more about reality,
00:16:56 ►
and then it would all fall into place,
00:16:58 ►
and that they had the right tools for doing that.
00:17:04 ►
But we look back then with this great sense of superiority
00:17:09 ►
on the naivete of the ancient Egyptians, the ancient Greeks,
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the Maya, the 17th century English, everybody.
00:17:18 ►
We look back on their naivete.
00:17:21 ►
But in fact, our own cultural enterprise is obviously fraught with a peculiar illogic and childishness and naivete.
00:17:32 ►
I mean, we’re a culture that robs our children to create a potlatch culture in the present.
00:17:40 ►
And this will look fairly, this would look fairly pathological from any cultural perspective outside our own.
00:17:50 ►
The thing, I mean this is and many, many problems
00:18:06 ►
or choke points in our ideological effort to understand what’s going on
00:18:15 ►
is the contribution that they make is that they dissolve boundaries.
00:18:20 ►
And culture, I mean the word virtual reality was used as we went around the circle. Culture is the sanctioned virtual reality. And it is put in place by the machinery of local language, you see.
00:18:46 ►
So then you’re born into this circumstance and you’re told, you know, you are a male child.
00:18:47 ►
You are a citizen.
00:18:49 ►
You are a citizen of the United States.
00:18:50 ►
You are a Christian.
00:18:51 ►
You are a Jew.
00:18:52 ►
You will go to college.
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You will do this.
00:18:56 ►
And this you never question.
00:18:58 ►
It’s called the social contract.
00:19:02 ►
It hasn’t gone unnoticed by Western philosophers. It’s just it’s gone unnoticed by those of us
00:19:05 ►
who are its foremost victims they try to tell you that you’re in a social
00:19:12 ►
contract but when you ask to see your signature on the document they tell you
00:19:18 ►
that you were born into this contract well what the hell kind of contract is that? It means that you were born into a kind of enslavement
00:19:29 ►
to a linguistically empowered paradigm of virtual reality
00:19:34 ►
within which you will walk around your entire life,
00:19:38 ►
congratulating yourself on its accomplishments
00:19:43 ►
and ignoring its contradictions and weaknesses.
00:19:49 ►
So what psychedelics do and why they are in all times and all places such social dynamite
00:19:57 ►
is they dissolve the cultural machinery.
00:20:01 ►
Doesn’t matter. You know, head-shrinking
00:20:06 ►
Amazon native, Hasidic
00:20:09 ►
Jew, Chinese merchant
00:20:11 ►
in Singapore, whoever it is,
00:20:15 ►
the psychedelic dissolves their cultural
00:20:18 ►
construct and puts them in touch with
00:20:21 ►
the fact of being in organism.
00:20:24 ►
Being in organism is like what you get when you take off
00:20:28 ►
your real clothing, not this clothing, but the clothing of language, programming, and assumption.
00:20:37 ►
Then you find yourself within the context of organism, outside the context of culture.
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And for the reason this is not a mass movement,
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as many people hear that and they say,
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I know what that is, that’s called being nuts.
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I don’t want that.
00:20:59 ►
That sounds absolutely terrifying.
00:21:01 ►
Well, these are people for whom
00:21:05 ►
that cultural machinery
00:21:07 ►
is necessary armoring
00:21:11 ►
in an almost Reichian sense.
00:21:14 ►
Necessary armoring.
00:21:16 ►
They cannot face the world without culture
00:21:18 ►
because they are in fact defined by culture.
00:21:24 ►
Now, who are these people? These are the people, and we each to some
00:21:27 ►
degree imbibe in this category, these are the people whose values are set by the engines of
00:21:37 ►
commerce and propaganda. These are the people who dress as they are told to dress, spend as they are told to spend, believe as they are told to believe. against this kind of anesthesia of uniqueness.
00:22:08 ►
Because that’s what it is.
00:22:10 ►
You can put your uniqueness to sleep,
00:22:14 ►
and then, you know, you dress Gucci,
00:22:17 ►
and you invest with these people,
00:22:19 ►
and you drive this car,
00:22:20 ►
and you know you’re correct.
00:22:22 ►
Because your accountants, your managers, your agents, your public, whoever because your accountants your managers, your agents
00:22:26 ►
your public, whoever
00:22:27 ►
your husband, your lover
00:22:29 ►
is telling you that you’re correct
00:22:32 ►
definition from without
00:22:34 ►
means being defined
00:22:36 ►
by the cultural machinery
00:22:37 ►
cultures other than
00:22:42 ►
our own have somehow
00:22:44 ►
always known,
00:22:46 ►
perhaps because nature is such a huge force outside the Western industrial democracies,
00:22:55 ►
people have always known that this was a fiction,
00:22:58 ►
that the world of cultural values is a necessary
00:23:05 ►
illusion if you will and so they create
00:23:09 ►
a class of people called shamans or
00:23:12 ►
seers or magicians or trans ecstatics or
00:23:17 ►
what have you and these people are
00:23:20 ►
deputized by the cultural machinery to go beyond it
00:23:26 ►
to go beyond it and to return with
00:23:31 ►
truth, not culturally
00:23:35 ►
sanctioned truth, but just truth
00:23:39 ►
the felt experience of being an organism that I’m talking about
00:23:44 ►
and by this
00:23:46 ►
process
00:23:47 ►
cultures
00:23:49 ►
conduct their evolution
00:23:52 ►
if you’re an evolutionary thinker
00:23:54 ►
or their random walk
00:23:55 ►
through time if you’re more of a
00:23:57 ►
phenomenologist
00:23:58 ►
but whatever they’re doing
00:24:01 ►
we’re not doing that
00:24:03 ►
because the mechanisms that we have used to close off access to the beyond culture dimension
00:24:14 ►
have in our hands grown so strong that we have in a sense succeeded to the point where we’ve put ourselves out of business.
00:24:23 ►
And the people to blame for this are these wily Greeks.
00:24:29 ►
Because while everybody else was carving horned masks
00:24:36 ►
and painting themselves with cross hatching and stuff like that,
00:24:40 ►
the Greeks got the idea, we’ll do it differently.
00:25:08 ►
like that, the Greeks got the idea, we’ll do it differently. We will portray the surface of the naked human body in marble. What this means is that the eye rises to the surface of reality and looks around for the first time from the point of view that we would call naive realism.
00:25:14 ►
But what a cultural journey it took to reach naive realism, because you had to sever yourself endlessly from the intuition of a symbolic, magical, spirit-haunted universe.
00:25:26 ►
And the Greeks, through a series of cultural accidents,
00:25:30 ►
and I would say mistakes, ultimately, achieved this.
00:25:34 ►
And they had then an alphabet, a phonetic alphabet,
00:25:38 ►
which empowered a further severing of linguistic intentionality from the essence of the object intended.
00:25:49 ►
Because you see, a phonetic alphabet symbolizes sound.
00:25:53 ►
It doesn’t symbolize the way something looks or its thinghood.
00:25:59 ►
It just symbolizes sound. sound and the phonetic alphabet then issued into a series of cultural styles, science,
00:26:11 ►
rationalism, mathematical analysis of phenomenon. I mean this was something absolutely unheard
00:26:17 ►
of and is the unique contribution of the western mind that people noticed that
00:26:26 ►
you could take a gut string
00:26:28 ►
and shorten it by half
00:26:31 ►
and the tone would shift one octave
00:26:33 ►
and stuff like that
00:26:35 ►
and they got the idea of numerical analysis
00:26:39 ►
which opened up the path into culture
00:26:42 ►
to the present world
00:26:44 ►
well each of these steps opened up the path into culture, to the present world.
00:26:50 ►
Well, each of these steps into realism,
00:26:53 ►
and remember I said we would call it naive realism,
00:26:57 ►
now that word takes on a different meaning from the context of the 20th century.
00:27:00 ►
It was naive.
00:27:03 ►
It was horribly naive.
00:27:04 ►
In fact, we
00:27:06 ►
were led down the primrose
00:27:08 ►
path by such simplistic
00:27:10 ►
notions because what was
00:27:12 ►
suppressed was
00:27:14 ►
the invisible
00:27:16 ►
messy world of the
00:27:18 ►
spirit and the human unconscious.
00:27:21 ►
This is the great
00:27:22 ►
tension that
00:27:24 ►
illuminates Greek civilization. You know, on one, I mean, it’s all, take Plato as an example, because here in one thinker, these distinct strains of thought, these antithetical strains of thought are perfectly present. You have, you know, an overarching realism, a drive to categorize and
00:27:48 ►
to arrange in rational relationships, and you have a thoroughgoing mysticism with roots back
00:27:56 ►
into the Minoan religion of Crete and back into Egypt and Africa. I mean, it’s really extraordinary.
00:28:01 ►
to Egypt and Africa.
00:28:03 ►
I mean, it’s really extraordinary.
00:28:06 ►
And that was the last moment in the Western cultural enterprise
00:28:08 ►
when these things were in balance.
00:28:10 ►
And they were not in balance
00:28:12 ►
in any one particular person.
00:28:15 ►
If you lived in that world,
00:28:17 ►
you probably had to pick and choose.
00:28:20 ►
And, you know, the skeptics
00:28:23 ►
were sneering at the Gnostics who were saying secret knowledge came from an unspeakable place beyond the machinery of cosmic fate.
00:28:35 ►
And the skeptics just thought, you know, polony, what kind of talk is that?
00:28:52 ►
talk is that now we live in the consequences of this naive realism because like all forms of innocence if allowed to grow beyond the proper bounds it becomes festering it becomes decadent, it becomes not innocence but idiocy, it turns on itself.
00:29:11 ►
And this is, I think, the kind of world that we’re living in. Now, parallel to this, a cultural adventure of several thousand years, the rainforest peoples of the warm tropics of the world
00:29:27 ►
kept intact
00:29:29 ►
the high paleolithic style
00:29:35 ►
of cultural relativism
00:29:37 ►
mitigated by natural magic
00:29:41 ►
and what did natural magic mean?
00:29:44 ►
it meant these
00:29:45 ►
boundary dissolving experiences
00:29:48 ►
with hallucinogens
00:29:49 ►
now it isn’t simply
00:29:52 ►
I don’t want to make it sound
00:29:54 ►
reductionist
00:29:56 ►
it isn’t simply that
00:29:58 ►
culture builds up structure
00:30:00 ►
and psychedelics
00:30:02 ►
dissolve structure and then conduct
00:30:04 ►
you into some
00:30:05 ►
shimmering existential realm
00:30:08 ►
of transcultural
00:30:12 ►
being. It isn’t that
00:30:14 ►
it’s that in that shimmering transcultural
00:30:18 ►
realm of being you discover new
00:30:21 ►
modalities, new rules, there’s something
00:30:24 ►
there when you dissolve all the boundaries that you can.
00:30:29 ►
And the paradox of what is there, from the point of view of the legacy of rationalism,
00:30:36 ►
is what is there is an immense love and affection and intentionality
00:30:46 ►
waiting to engulf
00:30:49 ►
suffering mankind
00:30:51 ►
or the individual
00:30:53 ►
this is what I call the mind behind nature
00:30:58 ►
what people call Gaia
00:31:00 ►
the mind of the planet
00:31:04 ►
the organized intellect that somehow is the mothering force that encloses the whole of planetary life.
00:31:15 ►
This is a real thing, and I would never have thought so had I not had experiences which forced me
00:31:26 ►
to consider this
00:31:27 ►
I think without the experiences
00:31:29 ►
that rap comes off
00:31:32 ►
as horribly namby-pamby
00:31:34 ►
you know
00:31:35 ►
I mean it’s just oh my god
00:31:37 ►
not another one of these Gaia people
00:31:40 ►
you know
00:31:40 ►
but in fact
00:31:43 ►
this is a fact of reality, which anyone who has the courage to make the proper investigations can satisfy themselves is a real object of experience.
00:32:09 ►
object of experience. You see, I guess, I mean, I grew, I’m 45. I grew up through the 50s, and I can remember these movies where the white people get captured by the cannibals and put in the pot to
00:32:16 ►
be boiled, and there was always a witch doctor, right? Well, this guy just epitomized the most nightmarish forces of unbridled primitivism and ignorance imaginable
00:32:28 ►
now this has become
00:32:31 ►
or is in the act of becoming I hope
00:32:34 ►
the guiding paradigm of the culture
00:32:38 ►
because what the shaman is
00:32:42 ►
is the person who is still, and it’s men and women, the person who is still in touch with this organic intelligence that lies behind nature.
00:33:27 ►
And the puzzle behind all of this, I really don’t think that there would be much of a problem if what we were dealing with was a planet with teeming oceans, teeming jungles, climaxed forests in the temperate and tropical zone, Arctic tundra, so forth and so on the the the clue that something weird is going on on this planet is ourselves obviously i mean we are like a fart at the opera everything else makes sense
00:33:38 ►
we don’t make sense uh and the speed with which uh
00:33:58 ►
And the speed with which the human type size in under 3 million years,
00:34:05 ►
the most rapid doubling of organ size in a major animal
00:34:09 ►
in the entire history of life on this planet, us.
00:34:14 ►
There’s something weird about human beings.
00:34:19 ►
And so much of the explanatory machinery of culture
00:34:24 ►
is designed to make it go away
00:34:28 ►
you see
00:34:29 ►
even something as respectable
00:34:34 ►
and expressive of liberal values
00:34:39 ►
as Darwinism
00:34:41 ►
is in fact an effort to explain how
00:34:46 ►
it’s all okay, it’s natural
00:34:49 ►
don’t worry, it’s natural
00:34:51 ►
you just get mutation and you have natural selection
00:34:54 ►
and you have traits and these traits extend themselves
00:34:58 ►
but
00:34:59 ►
it’s a great step, you know
00:35:03 ►
to Milton, to the space shuttle
00:35:06 ►
to an integrated global
00:35:08 ►
economy I mean are these
00:35:10 ►
the products of animal
00:35:12 ►
existence the Darwinist
00:35:14 ►
says yes
00:35:16 ►
and we tend to huddle under
00:35:18 ►
his umbrella because you know these
00:35:20 ►
shit slinging fundamentalists seem to
00:35:22 ►
be the only other people out there
00:35:24 ►
but obviously when you’re impaled These shit-slinging fundamentalists seem to be the only other people out there.
00:35:30 ►
But obviously, when you’re impaled on the horns of that kind of a dilemma,
00:35:36 ►
there needs to be a breakthrough to a third, fourth, or fifth possibility.
00:35:46 ►
And what I will argue for this weekend is that something very very peculiar adheres to the adventure
00:35:50 ►
of being human
00:35:52 ►
and that it is not all business as usual
00:35:56 ►
we are not simply an advanced
00:35:59 ►
chimpanzee
00:36:00 ►
neither are we the sons and daughters
00:36:04 ►
of the Lord God Almighty I I mean, that also seems to
00:36:07 ►
me a stretch and to raise certain problems not easily swept under the rug. There has to be a
00:36:15 ►
third possibility. And I think that when we start, as we will tomorrow, talking about the way psychedelics synergize and stabilize certain abilities within a hominid population,
00:36:33 ►
and the way in which by being forced toward an
00:36:49 ►
omnivorous diet by virtue of having to leave the canopy homeland for a bipedal existence in the we had to undergo a huge dietary change.
00:37:12 ►
And part of our strangeness has to do with the evolutionary changes worked upon us by virtue of our exposing ourselves to unusually high amounts of mutagens in foods
00:37:20 ►
as we expanded our diet, and drugs and foods come in here.
00:37:24 ►
The other part of the equation
00:37:27 ►
which is much more speculative
00:37:29 ►
and which we’ll talk about tomorrow night
00:37:31 ►
has to do with the notion
00:37:35 ►
of an attractor
00:37:38 ►
and of trying to look
00:37:41 ►
at humanness
00:37:44 ►
not as a mistake, a cosmic error
00:37:49 ►
or as Heidegger said of man
00:37:52 ►
he said we are flung into being
00:37:55 ►
the idea always being that it doesn’t make sense
00:37:58 ►
that there’s an arbitrariness to us
00:38:02 ►
but I think that there’s a way of analyzing process that will show that we are not only part of what is going on, an embedded part of what is going on, but that we actually represent the place where all the eggs are poured into one basket.
00:38:28 ►
And I’ll just say a little bit about this tonight.
00:38:32 ►
When you look at the history of the universe,
00:38:35 ►
if you look with unbiased eyes,
00:38:38 ►
I think that what you will see
00:38:40 ►
is that the universe is a novelty- novelty producing and conserving system of some sort
00:38:49 ►
the early universe was so simple that if when we now rest we’re going with science here for a
00:38:57 ►
minute it it we’re asked to believe that it sprang from nothingness in a single moment that its diameter was less than that of an
00:39:07 ►
electron and then in a very short period of time a number of very dramatic things happened but they
00:39:15 ►
are all couched in terms of an expansion and uh cooling from the moment the universe is born, it begins to cool. And as it cools,
00:39:29 ►
complexity magically crystallizes out. The original universe, there weren’t even atoms
00:39:38 ►
because there was such high temperatures that atoms could not stabilize themselves into orbits around atomic
00:39:46 ►
nuclei. So there was what’s called a plasma, just a soup of naked electrons. And then gradually,
00:39:56 ►
as the universe cooled, the simplest of all atomic systems was able to form, the hydrogen atom.
00:40:04 ►
of all atomic systems, was able to form, the hydrogen atom.
00:40:09 ►
And these hydrogen atoms were produced in staggering amounts,
00:40:12 ►
and they began to clump together.
00:40:14 ►
And this is tricky, but not our problem.
00:40:16 ►
This is a problem for science.
00:40:18 ►
They don’t know why they clumped,
00:40:21 ►
because it should have all been smooth right down to today. But it isn’t.
00:40:23 ►
So in this clumping process, of course,
00:40:25 ►
great temperatures and pressures were created
00:40:28 ►
at the centers of these masses of hydrogen,
00:40:31 ►
and a novel process, therefore, could spring into existence,
00:40:37 ►
the process of fusion.
00:40:40 ►
And fusion of hydrogen in early stars
00:40:43 ►
cooked out heavier elements,
00:40:47 ►
iron, sulfur, and especially carbon.
00:40:52 ►
Well, after that, then you get all those molecular or atomic species,
00:40:57 ►
and then they can aggregate into molecular species.
00:41:02 ►
And then, because of the presence of four valent carbon, very complex
00:41:06 ►
molecules called polymers, which are chain molecules, can form. Some of them acquire the
00:41:13 ►
quality of being able to replicate. Some of them acquire the ability to enclose themselves in a
00:41:20 ►
membrane, and so forth and so on. And in short, the march is on toward you and i here this evening
00:41:26 ►
but what’s interesting to note is that each successive stage in this process happens more
00:41:33 ►
rapidly than the process which preceded it so that the early universe a billion ten billion years
00:41:41 ►
goes on and it’s all about this star formation cookout thing.
00:41:46 ►
And then, you know, planetary formation.
00:41:50 ►
And then a billion years,
00:41:53 ►
they wait for primitive prokaryotic life.
00:41:57 ►
And then, once it happens,
00:41:59 ►
the eukaryotes follow fast,
00:42:01 ►
and after them, the ciliated protozoas,
00:42:04 ►
and, you know, it’s just a moment to Madonna
00:42:07 ►
both of them
00:42:08 ►
okay now what science says about this process
00:42:14 ►
is that what we’re seeing is an illusion
00:42:18 ►
or that it doesn’t matter
00:42:21 ►
they’re saying it is not a law of the universe that novelty be conserved
00:42:28 ►
and that each new level of novelty proceed more quickly than the one which was its parent.
00:42:35 ►
And so by chopping it off like that, human history is denied any relevance in the natural order.
00:42:46 ►
It is not part of the natural order.
00:42:50 ►
Even though we think we’re a secular society,
00:42:53 ►
our assumptions about history are straight out of Genesis.
00:42:57 ►
We do not think of history as a branch of biology,
00:43:02 ►
which it obviously is so what I
00:43:05 ►
believe is happening is
00:43:07 ►
an accelerating process
00:43:10 ►
of novelty conservation
00:43:12 ►
that has reached
00:43:14 ►
such a point now
00:43:16 ►
at the close of the second
00:43:18 ►
millennium that it is
00:43:20 ►
absurd to
00:43:22 ►
try to propagate the human
00:43:24 ►
future
00:43:24 ►
by fantasy centuries into the future.
00:43:31 ►
There is no future.
00:43:33 ►
Because the rate of acceleration is so close to approaching infinity
00:43:38 ►
that no possible future can be imagined.
00:43:42 ►
Now, people talk about this, but they never draw the implications. You’ve probably seen some show on television talk where they say, you know, here’s the curve of human energy release, and here’s the Stone Age, and here’s the 16th century, and here’s the 20th century, and it’s headed for infinity. Okay, next slide. Here’s the curve of human speed.
00:44:06 ►
In 1750, people could go as fast as a horse could gallop.
00:44:10 ►
In 1820, the steam engine.
00:44:13 ►
And then the 20th.
00:44:15 ►
And then it goes to infinity.
00:44:16 ►
And they say, okay, here’s the human population curve.
00:44:20 ►
In the year 1000, there were 400 million people on earth
00:44:25 ►
in the year 1850 and so forth
00:44:27 ►
and it goes to infinity
00:44:28 ►
so nobody takes, they don’t believe it
00:44:31 ►
they don’t believe that the rational extrapolation
00:44:37 ►
of the trends visibly beheld in the present
00:44:41 ►
preclude the possibility of any imaginable future.
00:44:46 ►
Or at least I don’t believe so.
00:44:49 ►
I believe that we’re actually in the grip of a process
00:44:54 ►
that cannot be halted or accelerated,
00:44:59 ►
but which is now in a process of tightening its gyres,
00:45:04 ►
as William Butler Yeats said,
00:45:07 ►
that what we call the chaos of 20th century history
00:45:12 ►
is in fact the speeding up of this temporal process
00:45:17 ►
to the point where it is now visible within a single human lifetime.
00:45:23 ►
I mean, we’re like mayflies or something.
00:45:26 ►
You know, we’re born one day and we die
00:45:28 ►
the next. So only the
00:45:30 ►
most incredibly
00:45:31 ►
accelerated kinds of change
00:45:34 ►
make any impression
00:45:35 ►
upon us whatsoever.
00:45:38 ►
I mean, mostly we say nothing happens.
00:45:40 ►
But in fact, you know,
00:45:41 ►
in the 20th century, it’s incredible.
00:45:44 ►
In the last 12 months, there has been more change compressed into time than in the previous 20 years. And those 20 years had more change in them than the previous 100 years. And that 100 years had more change in it than the previous 1,000 years. And that 1,000 years had more change in it than the previous ten thousand years. But science tells us this is meaningless. This is not a real legitimate phenomenon that you’re talking about. You’re just lining up facts to make it appear as though there is an attractor, to make it appear as though the human historical enterprise is about to run itself into a stone wall or off a cliff or into another dimension.
00:46:29 ►
And this is really the question, I think,
00:46:32 ►
because psychedelics are or were once described
00:46:38 ►
as consciousness-expanding drugs,
00:46:42 ►
phenomenological description, consciousness expanding drugs. Well, if that’s true, or if there’s even the slimmest possibility that that’s true, then we have to avail ourselves of these things because consciousness is precisely what we are starving for the lack of.
00:47:06 ►
the lack of and history is no longer rationally apprehendable by the systems
00:47:09 ►
which created it I mean everybody who’s
00:47:11 ►
running around gloating over what
00:47:13 ►
happened to Marxist Leninism should
00:47:16 ►
understand that Marxist Leninism is
00:47:19 ►
traceable right back to the social
00:47:21 ►
contract theory of Henri Rousseau,
00:47:26 ►
and that Western liberalism is traceable to the same root.
00:47:33 ►
And the crisis of Marxism is they just died first.
00:47:37 ►
That’s all.
00:47:38 ►
But all these ideologies are on the brink of a coronary thrombosis,
00:47:42 ►
and we’re going to have to catch the falling bodies when it hits.
00:47:46 ►
I mean, do you think that mercantile capitalism,
00:47:50 ►
which extracts the environmental reserves at an ever-accelerating rate,
00:47:58 ►
has any future whatsoever on this planet?
00:48:03 ►
I mean, they’re just looting the last few hundred billion dollars worth of stuff
00:48:09 ►
before they announce that everybody’s going to have to go on a diet
00:48:12 ►
that will drop your jaw, you know.
00:48:16 ►
So we’ve come to the end of our rope.
00:48:19 ►
So then what do we have to do about it?
00:48:21 ►
Well, what we have to do is we have to look back in time
00:48:24 ►
and find cultural models that served in the past.
00:48:29 ►
And many of you who have been here before
00:48:32 ►
have heard me talk about what I call the archaic revival,
00:48:36 ►
an effort to jerk 20th century culture 180 degrees
00:48:42 ►
and send it right back to the value systems
00:48:45 ►
of the high paleolithic
00:48:47 ►
because that’s the last
00:48:50 ►
moment that
00:48:51 ►
intelligence, language, religion
00:48:54 ►
coexisted
00:48:56 ►
with nature on this
00:48:58 ►
planet in a less than
00:49:00 ►
fatal arrangement
00:49:01 ►
you know, from the
00:49:03 ►
moment that agriculture
00:49:05 ►
was invented
00:49:06 ►
the die was cast
00:49:09 ►
because first of all
00:49:10 ►
agriculture is a strategy
00:49:12 ►
for dumping a huge
00:49:15 ►
database
00:49:16 ►
the database of the hunter-gatherer
00:49:20 ►
and replacing it
00:49:21 ►
with a database
00:49:23 ►
that is important for only five or six species of plant.
00:49:27 ►
You then give up nomadism, which begins to concentrate your impact on the land into one place.
00:49:36 ►
You then plant these crops and you have such success producing food that now moving anywhere is unthinkable plus the big project after the fall
00:49:49 ►
harvest festival is now we have to build a wall to keep the starving people from stealing our surplus
00:49:57 ►
so immediately there’s a us successful people and those people who weren’t successful
00:50:05 ►
and who have different cultural values
00:50:07 ►
and who didn’t produce a food surplus.
00:50:10 ►
So we’ve decided we’re going to sharpen sticks
00:50:13 ►
and kill all of them.
00:50:15 ►
So then you have warfare,
00:50:17 ►
thicker walls,
00:50:18 ►
retreat into cities,
00:50:20 ►
standing armies,
00:50:21 ►
defensive territory,
00:50:23 ►
class structure emerge
00:50:26 ►
the notion of wealth as an abstraction
00:50:29 ►
because wealth in an aboriginal society
00:50:33 ►
is a sharpened stone
00:50:35 ►
not your portfolio
00:50:37 ►
with your investments neatly listed
00:50:41 ►
you see
00:50:42 ►
so this is you know just a
00:50:46 ►
pass over these themes
00:50:48 ►
I know a lot of people came hundreds of
00:50:50 ►
miles and drove a long way today
00:50:52 ►
and I tend to
00:50:54 ►
whip you with this
00:50:56 ►
stuff
00:50:56 ►
but
00:50:59 ►
the idea is that the
00:51:02 ►
psychedelics are more than
00:51:04 ►
the best fun there is, which they are, more than a tool for exploring your own psyche and straightening out your own kinks, which they are.
00:51:17 ►
They are, in fact, the key to understanding the pathology that culture has become and the way out.
00:51:28 ►
I mean, there has to be a way out.
00:51:30 ►
And it really is this archaic revival.
00:51:34 ►
I mean, and if you’re resisting it, think of it this way.
00:51:37 ►
If we don’t organize the archaic revival,
00:51:41 ►
it will be handed to us on a platter in the form of failed agriculture
00:51:48 ►
because the ozone hole is screwed up, infrastructures falling apart, financial systems falling apart,
00:51:55 ►
the rise of fundamentalist religion.
00:51:57 ►
In other words, we are going to have a return to a previous historical model
00:52:06 ►
and it can either be managed humanely
00:52:09 ►
through an honoring
00:52:12 ►
of the feminine, an honoring of the earth
00:52:15 ►
a return to the
00:52:17 ►
techniques of ecstasy
00:52:21 ►
that characterized the high paleolithic
00:52:24 ►
shamanism or it can be
00:52:26 ►
handed to us in the form of shortages
00:52:29 ►
famines disease internecine warfare
00:52:32 ►
nuclear proliferation toxic dumping so
00:52:36 ►
forth and so on but one way or another
00:52:39 ►
this whole edifice put in place by the
00:52:42 ►
Renaissance and jacked up to high speed by the european
00:52:46 ►
enlightenment and delivered into this hellish climax by mathematical analysis and and the global
00:52:54 ►
the rise of global technology and remember each of us has never seen these changes within a lifetime. And yet, within the past 200 years,
00:53:06 ►
the world has gotten tremendously more pathological,
00:53:11 ►
tremendously more ill.
00:53:13 ►
The size of cities,
00:53:14 ►
the power to extract natural resources,
00:53:20 ►
to mine Siberia and the mountains of Chile
00:53:24 ►
and the interior of the Amazon and Borneo.
00:53:28 ►
And these unimaginable technological infrastructures have been put in place to sustain a dying patient.
00:53:36 ►
And that’s what we have here.
00:53:38 ►
We’re on respirators.
00:53:40 ►
We’re getting intravenous feeding.
00:53:42 ►
They are monitoring everything because it’s not healthy.
00:53:46 ►
It can only be sustained through the most extraordinary and heroic means.
00:53:52 ►
We’re taking bone marrow from the children of the future in order to keep a corpse alive.
00:53:59 ►
And people don’t find their voice.
00:54:02 ►
They don’t seem to know how to call a halt.
00:54:05 ►
I listen to the politicos
00:54:07 ►
who aspire to leadership
00:54:09 ►
and they have the
00:54:12 ►
same problem with the vision
00:54:13 ►
thing as the maximum leader
00:54:16 ►
of the present moment.
00:54:18 ►
So these are the things that we’ll
00:54:19 ►
talk about this weekend and you
00:54:21 ►
must steer me or I will
00:54:24 ►
harangue.’s it’s not a pretty sight
00:54:29 ►
I must tell you are there legal ramifications or do you have like legal ramifications to this plant
00:54:35 ►
collection in hawaii are some of the plants regulated well this is sort of a touchy area.
00:54:53 ►
There’s nothing that is out and out, drag them away, kicking and screaming, illegal, like coca or something like that.
00:54:56 ►
It sounds like it would irritate the authorities nonetheless.
00:55:00 ►
It may potentially be some kind of irritant to them you would have to be a field botanist of great
00:55:05 ►
skill and sophistication
00:55:07 ►
to find anything that was
00:55:10 ►
a problem
00:55:10 ►
there are
00:55:14 ►
plants that have never
00:55:16 ►
been that are
00:55:17 ►
in some nebulous
00:55:20 ►
dimension illegal but there’s
00:55:22 ►
never been a test case
00:55:23 ►
of it you see Because one of the things that would be a rational reformation of the drug laws and would in fact follow the lead of English common law is to distinguish between a plant and a drug.
00:55:44 ►
in fact at one point I advocated what I called the vegetable drug act
00:55:46 ►
which would just be simply to state
00:55:49 ►
that plants are not drugs
00:55:52 ►
and plants cannot be illegal
00:55:56 ►
you can’t make a portion of nature illegal
00:55:59 ►
this is crazy thinking
00:56:01 ►
one of the things that I talk about
00:56:06 ►
in my book that we’ve never talked about
00:56:09 ►
much in these weekends because the groups don’t seem
00:56:12 ►
to have much interest in it but I found it sort of
00:56:14 ►
fascinating was
00:56:16 ►
for example in the case of
00:56:21 ►
opium most of us
00:56:24 ►
grow up with a completely demonized vision of the morphine family. I mean,
00:56:32 ►
this is the lowest of the low, and if somebody gets mixed up in junk, it’s just considered,
00:56:38 ►
you know, slow suicide and so forth. And it is certainly true that heroin addiction is fairly destructive and doesn’t do your relationships any good and that sort of thing. opium which has been known and used by human beings for at least
00:57:06 ►
4,000 years, possibly longer
00:57:09 ►
nobody ever suggested that
00:57:12 ►
opium was addictive until the 17th
00:57:15 ►
century when the English physician John
00:57:18 ►
Playfair noted for the first time
00:57:21 ►
that exposure to opium created a craving for more opium.
00:57:28 ►
It had been used for 3,000 years without anybody ever noticing that it was addicting.
00:57:33 ►
And one of the tendencies that this book traces fairly clearly is the tendency to refine and strengthen drugs until they become
00:57:49 ►
social problems we don’t seem to rest until we push them to the most virulent most destructive
00:57:57 ►
form a good example of this that you’re all familiar with is coca and cocaine and crack.
00:58:06 ►
Because coca is, if you go into a coca-using area of the Amazon or the Andes,
00:58:13 ►
the villagers, the people you meet,
00:58:16 ►
they are very well aware of the cocaine problem in the United States
00:58:21 ►
and the DEA and all this.
00:58:22 ►
And the first thing they want to tell you is
00:58:25 ►
coca is not a drug.
00:58:27 ►
It’s a food.
00:58:30 ►
And Tim Plowman, God rest his soul,
00:58:33 ►
a good friend of many of us who died a few years ago,
00:58:38 ►
a great field botanist,
00:58:40 ►
he did studies of the nutritional value of coca
00:58:44 ►
and discovered that in fact in a coca using population
00:58:48 ►
up to 30% of the vitamins and minerals in the diet
00:58:52 ►
are coming from coca
00:58:54 ►
and it is not a social problem
00:58:58 ►
it does not lead to antisocial behavior
00:59:01 ►
or child abandonment or violence
00:59:04 ►
or anything like that.
00:59:06 ►
It is in fact largely, it makes life possible in the jungle
00:59:12 ►
because it gives you the energy that you must have.
00:59:16 ►
The jungle is an extremely encroaching place.
00:59:21 ►
And if the only tool you have to hold back the jungle is a self-sharpened machete
00:59:26 ►
in the absence of coca you would toss in the towel after a couple of weeks of struggling with this
00:59:34 ►
in the presence of coca you can settle down to a lifetime it’s a short life you’ll be dead between
00:59:40 ►
35 and 40 but a lifetime of struggling with the jungle. You see, one misconception that
00:59:48 ►
it’s probably important to clear up that people have about the jungle is they, when they see the
00:59:54 ►
climaxed tropical rainforest, they assume that this tremendous richness of vegetation must signal a tremendous availability of food, fruits and things.
01:00:10 ►
This is not at all the case.
01:00:13 ►
It’s very easy to starve to death in a tropical jungle.
01:00:18 ►
The reason for this, especially an old tropical jungle like the Amazon,
01:00:22 ►
especially an old tropical jungle like the Amazon. The reason for this is because evolutionary competition is so keen among species
01:00:30 ►
that there is no luxury to produce rich, juicy fruits loaded with sugars and stuff like that.
01:00:39 ►
I mean, often in the Amazon, people will show you what they’re eating as a treat, something they found along the trail.
01:00:48 ►
And when you bear down on what it is, it’s often a fruit or something like that that has just a millimeter thin film of slightly sweet pulp or something like that around it.
01:01:25 ►
It’s not a place where it’s easy to get a food supply together. So a drug like coca, which suppresses appetite, this is its second important consequence, is in great demand and the suppression of appetite the providing of energy it’s made for this very
01:01:28 ►
very harsh environment. The other thing
01:01:30 ►
is there are other psychoactive
01:01:32 ►
compounds in coca
01:01:33 ►
other so called canes
01:01:36 ►
and they mitigate
01:01:38 ►
the
01:01:39 ►
property of the cocaine
01:01:42 ►
western science got a hold of this
01:01:46 ►
and quickly turned it into cocaine
01:01:49 ►
which is very hard on the major muscles
01:01:53 ►
of the heart, highly addictive
01:01:56 ►
and
01:01:57 ►
a fairly pernicious drug
01:02:02 ►
although it’s the monkey doing it that you usually have to wonder about.
01:02:08 ►
And then, you know, in our perverse way, we go to crack cocaine, which is an even more virulent
01:02:16 ►
form, more easily delivered. And the evolution of drug delivery systems is an interesting
01:02:28 ►
The evolution of drug delivery systems is an interesting aspect of the whole drug problem.
01:02:36 ►
Hypodermic syringes were invented in the 19th century, just in time for the invention of morphine.
01:02:42 ►
And following on the heels of those two inventions were two great wars, the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe
01:02:47 ►
happening at roughly the same time. Out of those two wars emerged the first population
01:02:54 ►
of hard drug addicts in Western culture. There had never been anything like that before. At the
01:03:01 ►
close of the Civil War, morphine addiction was called the soldier’s
01:03:05 ►
disease because there had been so much indiscriminate use of morphine on the battlefields
01:03:12 ►
of the Civil War. You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing
01:03:19 ►
their lives one thought at a time. The soldier’s disease.
01:03:25 ►
Overuse of morphine.
01:03:27 ►
Now, that’s something that I hadn’t heard of before.
01:03:30 ►
I guess that each generation of us humans
01:03:33 ►
gets so caught up in our own history
01:03:35 ►
that we forget the fact that in many instances
01:03:38 ►
we are just repeating the horrible history
01:03:40 ►
of the after effects of another war.
01:03:43 ►
How many wars is the U.S. currently engaged
01:03:46 ►
in these days, do you know? I’ve actually lost count now, now that these insane politicians in
01:03:52 ►
Washington have also declared war on Syria. What these bloodthirsty men seem to forget is that
01:03:58 ►
the scars of war that are left on the children who are affected will remain with them for the rest of their lives.
01:04:05 ►
What do you think are the prospects for a child in Gaza
01:04:08 ►
who has just seen his friends and family blown to bits,
01:04:13 ►
his home destroyed, and much of his country reduced to rubble?
01:04:17 ►
What do you think is going through his mind right now
01:04:19 ►
as he sits in the shell of his former school
01:04:21 ►
and begins to be taught to read and write?
01:04:25 ►
There’s no way any of us who haven’t been in that position can even imagine what’s going
01:04:30 ►
through the minds of, well, quite literally, millions of children all around the world
01:04:35 ►
who have become the children of war.
01:04:38 ►
We can blame these wars as contests over natural resources or about raw power or about religion,
01:04:45 ►
it really doesn’t matter what we see as the cause of these wars.
01:04:49 ►
It’s their effects that matter most.
01:04:52 ►
The way we begin our lives as children most often determines the state of our mind throughout our lives.
01:04:58 ►
I was born into a conservative, Catholic, flag-waving family.
01:05:03 ►
As an adult, I rose to the rank of lieutenant commander
01:05:06 ►
in the U.S. Navy. I was a lawyer in Houston, Texas, and I got an engineering degree from Notre Dame,
01:05:12 ►
a Catholic college. You don’t get a more mainstream product of the system than that.
01:05:17 ►
I was conditioned by my family, my religion, and my culture to be all those things. Need I add that
01:05:24 ►
I was also very unhappy with my life at the time,
01:05:27 ►
because it, well, it just didn’t feel like I was doing anything worthwhile.
01:05:31 ►
Then at the age of 42, I was introduced to psychedelics,
01:05:35 ►
and everything began to change for me.
01:05:38 ►
Now, I haven’t become who I am today by simply swallowing a little pill or two,
01:05:43 ►
but they did help.
01:05:44 ►
What helped most, though,
01:05:45 ►
was connecting with others who were also on this path. We helped one another, developed new rituals
01:05:51 ►
for using psychoactive plants. We grew, we learned, and we’ve, well, we’ve had a lot of fun in the process.
01:05:59 ►
As we just heard Terrence McKenna say, a revitalization of an archaic psychedelic culture may be the only hope that we have left
01:06:07 ►
to change the direction that our species has been heading in now for, well, several millennia.
01:06:13 ►
All of us, me, you, and the rest of our fellow salonners,
01:06:18 ►
we’re all the products of the families and the cultures that we were born into
01:06:22 ►
through no efforts on our own.
01:06:24 ►
The accident of birth is what determines the life path
01:06:27 ►
of most people in the default world
01:06:29 ►
who never take their minds off autopilot.
01:06:32 ►
That’s what our sacred medicines are for,
01:06:35 ►
to help us break out of the constraints
01:06:37 ►
that have been placed on our minds ever since birth.
01:06:41 ►
Take charge.
01:06:42 ►
Think for yourself.
01:06:43 ►
Question authority.
01:06:44 ►
All authority. And for now. Question authority. All authority.
01:06:47 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.