Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Everything appears to me to be authored, in some strange way. And I wonder if this is not the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion/delusion/revelation that life is in fact art.”
“[This legendary Amazonian substance is] a cybernetic transdimentional medium of some sort that is generated out of the mysteries of the physiology of the human body.”
“You may miss the end of the world, but you definitely are going to have a front row seat for the end of your world.”
“Capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants”
“Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization.”
“The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt.”
“We cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning. We have to extend it.”
“Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosion.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And while I was tempted
00:00:25 ►
to play another of the Planque Norte lectures today, I thought that it would probably be best
00:00:30 ►
to wrap up this little Terence McKenna workshop that I started playing back in podcast number 416.
00:00:36 ►
As you’ll recall, this workshop took place in February of 1992, and it began on a Friday evening.
00:00:43 ►
Well, we’ve now heard the Friday night talk, as well
00:00:46 ►
as everything on Saturday, up to where he began a four-hour walkthrough of his TimeWave software.
00:00:52 ►
And if you’ve been with us for a while, you already know that, except for the rare case,
00:00:57 ►
I think that we’ve probably heard enough about that fated theory. But I should also warn you
00:01:02 ►
that early on in this talk, Terence tells us that in La Charrera he
00:01:06 ►
became what he called a kind of alien ambassador for the mushroom or perhaps for the other itself
00:01:13 ►
he really wasn’t too clear but this is precisely the same story even though it’s much abbreviated
00:01:19 ►
from an earlier telling that I played but it it’s the same story, nonetheless, that some of our fellow slaughters
00:01:25 ►
have taken to be a form of code
00:01:27 ►
that Terrence was using to let us know
00:01:29 ►
that he had actually become an agent of the CIA.
00:01:33 ►
Well, I guess if you eat enough mushrooms
00:01:36 ►
that you can maybe get that meaning out of what he says,
00:01:39 ►
but you’ll have to be the judge of that for yourself.
00:01:42 ►
But wait, there’s more.
00:01:44 ►
I most certainly don’t want any lovers of conspiracy theories, both real and imagined, to be let down.
00:01:51 ►
Personally, I think it’s kind of fun to come up with a new cockamamie theory once in a while,
00:01:55 ►
just to see how far along we can string somebody before they figure out we’re pulling their leg.
00:02:01 ►
So, there’s a new conspiracy theory that I’d like to say that I invented on my own,
00:02:06 ►
but in truth I’ve actually heard this one floated before. Anyway, I’m not going to be a spoiler,
00:02:11 ►
but in about 39 minutes you’re going to hear someone ask Terrence what he was going to do
00:02:15 ►
if nothing monumental happened at the end of 2012. And as I said, I won’t be a spoiler here,
00:02:21 ►
but when you hear his answer you’ll know what I I’m talking about and if you want to help, you can help me spread a new McKenna myth
00:02:28 ►
but one that we make up ourselves. And
00:02:31 ►
now let’s tune in to Terrence’s Sunday morning session, which he begins
00:02:36 ►
as he always did the final session of a workshop, tying up loose ends.
00:02:41 ►
So is there unfinished business
00:02:43 ►
from last night?
00:02:47 ►
Yeah.
00:02:47 ►
Was the voice that was directing you on the time wave stuff,
00:02:51 ►
is this something that’s under the influence you hear this voice,
00:02:54 ►
or is this your natural, you just hear this voice whenever?
00:02:59 ►
Well, it’s sort of, you know, we talked last night about
00:03:03 ►
Dennis had this notion that he could bond these molecules in permanently.
00:03:09 ►
And, you know, everybody gets, you only get to be one person,
00:03:15 ►
so it’s very hard to know what it’s like to stand in someone else’s shoes.
00:03:20 ►
But going into that experience in the Amazon, I was a fairly disorganized…
00:03:29 ►
I don’t think I had a very bright future, actually.
00:03:33 ►
And I spent my last dime to get in there.
00:03:36 ►
So there was essentially, I’d spent my…
00:03:39 ►
It was some kind of heart of darkness thing where I was just pulling out all the plugs and sinking deeper and deeper
00:03:46 ►
and since then my life has the character of pure science fiction I mean it’s I sort of became the
00:03:56 ►
alien ambassador and was given a sinecure and appointed to then, you know,
00:04:06 ►
mediate between the other and a certain kind of person
00:04:13 ►
in a certain kind of society.
00:04:17 ►
So the weirdness never leaves me to answer your question.
00:04:23 ►
But in a sense, this idea is completed now
00:04:28 ►
I mean there are always unanswered questions
00:04:32 ►
but the complete metaphor is there
00:04:35 ►
the mystery I think is
00:04:39 ►
well it has two sides
00:04:43 ►
it has a profound side and an absurd side.
00:04:47 ►
The profound side is, you know,
00:04:50 ►
is the world tidally locked with an extra-dimensional object of some sort
00:04:56 ►
that has sucked an animal species into history
00:05:00 ►
and is, you know, revealing itself through the transformation of our flesh and machines?
00:05:08 ►
Or, and if not, on this schedule of 2012 and so forth,
00:05:14 ►
then what does this idea exist for?
00:05:18 ►
Is it just simply that I have a peculiar pathology married to a certain amount of charisma,
00:05:25 ►
so instead of being locked up and dragged away,
00:05:29 ►
I can turn it into a marketable product in a very marginal way
00:05:35 ►
that allows me to keep paying my phone bill and stuff like that.
00:05:39 ►
Is that what it is?
00:05:41 ►
Notice that the idea is not designed to last it’s designed to
00:05:49 ►
auto-destruct one way or the other in
00:05:52 ►
2012 so this whole ideological vision
00:05:56 ►
has written all over it perishable apply
00:06:00 ►
immediately do not use after December 22, 2012 A.D.
00:06:06 ►
So I don’t really understand much about what’s going on.
00:06:16 ►
It seems to me there are levels and levels and veils and veils.
00:06:21 ►
It puzzles me that life seems to have become some kind of story
00:06:28 ►
it’s much more a literary construct
00:06:33 ►
than it is the product of the stochastic motions of atoms
00:06:38 ►
under the impingement of the four basic forces of physics
00:06:43 ►
everything appears to me to be authored
00:06:46 ►
in some strange way.
00:06:49 ►
And I wonder if this is not, you know,
00:06:52 ►
the spreading assumption of the psychedelic illusion,
00:06:58 ►
delusion, revelation,
00:07:00 ►
that life is in fact art
00:07:02 ►
in some very profound way.
00:07:06 ►
And then, you know, being somehow fated to literature and the spoken and written word,
00:07:16 ►
I wonder, you know, if this is a novel, if this is a construct of artifice,
00:07:32 ►
If this is a novel, if this is a construct of artifice, well then it behooves each one of us to ask the question, who am I in the plot?
00:07:37 ►
Who am I in the context of the story? I mean, maybe it’s your story, the Shlomo Ekbach story, you know.
00:07:43 ►
the Shlomo Ekbach story or maybe you exist
00:07:46 ►
to draw the bath for Milady
00:07:49 ►
on page 220 and then bow your way
00:07:52 ►
out of the room never to be heard of again
00:07:55 ►
in the story
00:07:56 ►
that wonderful line in
00:08:01 ►
Prufrock, I am not Prince Hamlet
00:08:04 ►
nor was meant to be
00:08:06 ►
am an attendant lord
00:08:07 ►
will do to
00:08:09 ►
start a scene, swell
00:08:12 ►
a procession, advise
00:08:14 ►
the prince
00:08:15 ►
careful, obtuse
00:08:18 ►
meticulous, at times
00:08:20 ►
a bit ridiculous
00:08:21 ►
anyway, are you
00:08:24 ►
that person or are you
00:08:26 ►
Prince Hamlet and then
00:08:27 ►
the question becomes
00:08:29 ►
if
00:08:31 ►
you the character
00:08:34 ►
in this literary construct
00:08:36 ►
are slowly becoming aware
00:08:38 ►
that it’s a literary construct
00:08:40 ►
then
00:08:41 ►
is that part of the plot
00:08:43 ►
is this a story about
00:08:46 ►
a sort of Pirandello-esque
00:08:49 ►
exposition of the levels of personality
00:08:53 ►
as we rise into awareness
00:08:55 ►
that we are caged by artifice
00:08:58 ►
or are you getting out from under
00:09:02 ►
the control of the author
00:09:03 ►
I sort of think that, well, one thing that I’ve sort of discovered as my career has gone through its circuitous and glacial advancement
00:09:17 ►
is that as you make your way into what are called the corridors of power,
00:09:24 ►
As you make your way into what are called the corridors of power,
00:09:27 ►
you discover they’re remarkably uncrowded and there are no waiting lines at the water fountains.
00:09:30 ►
There doesn’t seem to be anybody really running the show
00:09:36 ►
above the level which just makes sure that UPS delivers on time.
00:09:43 ►
Above there, where you would think
00:09:46 ►
there would be in the captain’s tower
00:09:48 ►
there’s a kind of eerie emptiness
00:09:51 ►
and I think that means that
00:09:54 ►
one can aspire upward
00:09:58 ►
in this matter of
00:10:01 ►
taking a little bit more control of the plot
00:10:04 ►
and that the goal is not so much to advance your character,
00:10:15 ►
act out your character,
00:10:17 ►
and by brilliant marriages or daring military campaigns
00:10:22 ►
or feats of investment genius to somehow begin to take over the stage.
00:10:29 ►
This isn’t the way to move the evolution of the personality.
00:10:34 ►
The way to move the evolution of the personality is toward empathy and eventual assimilation of the viewpoint of the author.
00:11:11 ►
eventual assimilation of the viewpoint of the author. The author is the one who is in charge of the pattern and has some kind of a vision, which if the author knows what she or he is doing, this is all being woven toward a hierophany, a catharsis that, you know, illuminates, educates, leaves us in a better place.
00:11:21 ►
And I think the payoff on this is if you become the author, the author is sort of in the position of a programmer. The author can save or destroy any character so if you become the author
00:11:32 ►
you can write an ending that will save your character from the destruction that was inevitably
00:11:40 ►
built into it for you to get into this mess in the first place.
00:11:45 ►
You see?
00:11:46 ►
So it’s…
00:11:49 ►
Now, what lies behind such raving as this?
00:11:56 ►
Can this coffee really be that strong?
00:12:03 ►
Terrence, when you were in the jungle
00:12:07 ►
and Dennis had his 14 day
00:12:09 ►
psychotic episode
00:12:11 ►
or whatever it was
00:12:13 ►
did he take the same drug that you did
00:12:16 ►
did you both
00:12:17 ►
do the same thing
00:12:18 ►
well after very shortly after
00:12:21 ►
we got into it he didn’t do
00:12:23 ►
any drugs
00:12:24 ►
because it was perfectly clear that he had no need of them.
00:12:31 ►
The way it worked was we had a series of mushroom trips.
00:12:37 ►
Well, we had walked all this way through the jungle.
00:12:40 ►
And later I had occasion to walk that trail again, 110 clicks. And it was so difficult the second time that I had to face the fact that the first time we had actually had like wings on our feet or something. accomplished an impossible physical feat without even noticing that we were doing it.
00:13:07 ►
I mean, and then when we got there, we had a series of mushroom trips,
00:13:12 ►
and on the third mushroom trip, we were talking in the hut.
00:13:20 ►
It was in the middle of the night,
00:13:46 ►
It was in the middle of the night, and he was saying how he regretted that he hadn’t been able to reach our father by telephone before he left for Colombia, because he hadn’t been able to really say goodbye properly. unsettled trip and we were all sitting in hammocks in darkness
00:13:47 ►
and you could hear a
00:13:50 ►
a Witoto
00:13:51 ►
walking on the trail
00:13:54 ►
because his transistor radio was on
00:13:57 ►
you always know when an Amazon Indian
00:14:00 ►
is nearby because
00:14:02 ►
they’re tuned to
00:14:04 ►
anyway Amazon Indian is nearby because they’re tuned to…
00:14:05 ►
Anyway.
00:14:08 ►
So, not El Paso.
00:14:11 ►
So, we could hear this Indian with his transistor radio winding up the trail toward us.
00:14:18 ►
I remember it was an ad for Costeña,
00:14:24 ►
La cerveza mas mejor de Colombia.
00:14:29 ►
And then as it came and faded,
00:14:35 ►
then Dennis made this very strange noise,
00:14:39 ►
which was like a metallic, well, a very strange noise.
00:14:47 ►
And it was like that was really for him the moment.
00:14:50 ►
It came in a moment.
00:14:52 ►
And then we talked, and he was agitated all night long,
00:14:56 ►
and he kept wanting to go down the hill to where these other people were sleeping.
00:15:01 ►
And by morning, he was saying,
00:15:06 ►
you know what we could do with this?
00:15:09 ►
And then he just laid out this whole theory of molecular cancelling
00:15:13 ►
and molecular intercalation.
00:15:16 ►
But drugs had a surprisingly little amount to do with it
00:15:21 ►
once he caught the wave.
00:15:25 ►
So you never used a coup head?
00:15:29 ►
We went through this whole thing at La Charrera and left at the end of March. And the woman
00:15:39 ►
I was with and I stayed in Colombia another month everybody else went back and we wrestled with it
00:15:48 ►
another month and I was quite out of it I think I believed that she would give birth to the word
00:15:58 ►
itself and I believed that it would be a little glass fiance bead that I had lost in Laos five years earlier.
00:16:07 ►
And when she began to develop a round sore on the top of her mouth that was exactly the size of this thing,
00:16:14 ►
then I realized that this little object would drop down onto her tongue someday soon.
00:16:22 ►
And she would deliver it to me and that it would be the word made flesh it would be
00:16:28 ►
the now are you alarmed now now do you begin to get the drift that we’ve attempted to suppress and you know I thought that this thing
00:16:48 ►
would essentially be
00:16:50 ►
a suitable second body
00:16:55 ►
a repository
00:16:57 ►
I can’t explain it
00:16:58 ►
I mean it was the philosopher’s stone
00:17:00 ►
it was everything
00:17:00 ►
we were nuts let’s face it
00:17:02 ►
but on the other hand
00:17:04 ►
there was
00:17:05 ►
concentrically surrounding this whole thing there were immense synchronicities I mean the world
00:17:16 ►
around us seemed to be mad as well it seemed like we were caught in the infundibulum of the concrescence or something
00:17:26 ►
i mean it’s now what i would expect to happen just days or hours before the final closure on
00:17:33 ►
that wave that we looked at last night but in our local domain it seemed to be happening for for us then and you know we just I was flaming
00:17:46 ►
and it took me
00:17:48 ►
years and years to dial it
00:17:50 ►
down so that it’s even
00:17:52 ►
as friendly and
00:17:54 ►
packageable as it is
00:17:56 ►
in the present moment because for a long
00:17:58 ►
time it wasn’t I mean it just drove
00:18:00 ►
people to the walls I mean they just said
00:18:02 ►
I don’t know and I don’t want to hear
00:18:04 ►
and I’ve had it and drove people to the walls. I mean, they just said, I don’t know, and I don’t want to hear any, and I’ve had it, and call me when you’re better.
00:18:07 ►
You know?
00:18:11 ►
Did you say, though, that there was a monamine oxidase inhibitor reaction?
00:18:16 ►
Well, we did brew ayahuasca and take it,
00:18:23 ►
but I think having seen it
00:18:25 ►
having lived with shamans since then
00:18:27 ►
and having learned a lot lot more about ayahuasca
00:18:30 ►
I think the ayahuasca that we brewed was so weak
00:18:34 ►
as to be dismissible
00:18:36 ►
you had mentioned the transformation
00:18:40 ►
of flesh and machinery
00:18:42 ►
with your understanding of shamanism
00:18:44 ►
could you speak a little bit to shape-shifting,
00:18:48 ►
their idea of shape-shifting,
00:18:50 ►
and how that may occur as far as our end point here,
00:18:55 ►
our common end point,
00:18:57 ►
and also the computer technology that allows us to pattern these theories
00:19:03 ►
and perhaps bring us our own notion of authorship
00:19:07 ►
due to that and what that means for our own flesh transformation?
00:19:12 ►
Yes, well, in a way, I think these new technologies
00:19:16 ►
of information retrieval and virtual realities
00:19:20 ►
and this sort of thing are simply the engineering mentality
00:19:25 ►
following along behind the shamanistic intent
00:19:28 ►
and putting it in place in silicone and glass and so forth and so on.
00:19:35 ►
The persistent rumor in real off-river Amazon psychedelic shamanism
00:19:46 ►
is of this fluid, this stuff,
00:19:52 ►
which you can generate out of your body
00:19:55 ►
under the influence of these compounds
00:19:59 ►
that is this translinguistic matter,
00:20:04 ►
this mind, this spirit matter amalgam,
00:20:09 ►
which you literally give birth to out of your own body.
00:20:12 ►
And what the claim is that’s made for this stuff
00:20:16 ►
is that it’s like a collapse of ordinary geometry.
00:20:26 ►
There are stars inside this stuff.
00:20:29 ►
You can also look into it and see who stole the pig.
00:20:34 ►
You know, you can look into it and you can see how the fishing would be if you moved up a river. It’s a cybernetic trans-dimensional medium
00:20:48 ►
of some sort
00:20:50 ►
that is generated out of the mysteries
00:20:55 ►
of the physiology of the human body.
00:20:58 ►
Well, God, this is so far off the beaten track
00:21:01 ►
from anything in the Western repertoire of conception
00:21:04 ►
that we just
00:21:05 ►
gape at the notion and it’s not it’s hard to get confirmation but what they say
00:21:13 ►
see ayahuasca is all about group mindedness states of group mind it’s also, when you analyze it chemically, it’s brain soup. There’s nothing in ayahuasca that isn’t in your brain as we sit here. It’s made out of DMT and it’s made out of beta-carbolines like harmin and harmaline. These things all occur naturally in your brain so uh in these off-river tribal
00:21:50 ►
situations people take it all in a group and when the boundaries dissolve there is a group mind that is able to make decisions. And the shape-shifting and the mystery of…
00:22:11 ►
Who was it we were just talking about?
00:22:14 ►
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
00:22:17 ►
This is the fallacy which haunts the Western mind.
00:22:21 ►
For the shaman, you know, attention gathers energy to itself. And so you can create a projection. So the mystery, I think the mystery of shamanism and the mystery of the psychedelic experience is a mystery of language.
00:22:42 ►
is a mystery of language.
00:22:44 ►
How can we… We are imprisoned by language
00:22:47 ►
and yet it should be our vehicle for liberation.
00:22:50 ►
And something has happened to our language
00:22:53 ►
through the phonetic alphabet,
00:22:56 ►
through the abuse that print has laid on to our thinking.
00:23:02 ►
You all probably know the ideas of Marshall McLuhan,
00:23:07 ►
who felt that the linear quality of print
00:23:11 ►
created such notions as the citizen,
00:23:16 ►
the industrial assembly line,
00:23:19 ►
the theory of interchangeable parts,
00:23:22 ►
a whole bunch of conceptions which we take totally for granted
00:23:27 ►
are in fact adumbrations of the shift of sensory ratios caused by an unexamined acceptance of the printed word.
00:23:38 ►
The, you know, one thing probably worth talking about this morning is how do you get, is there hope in all of this? we slapdashedly sometimes refer to as the end of the world or so forth seems
00:24:08 ►
number one irrational number two despairing well i don’t think we can do too much about
00:24:16 ►
its irrationality but i think living in the light of the expectation of something like that orders your priorities.
00:24:27 ►
And in case you didn’t notice,
00:24:29 ►
we all have our own mini-apocalypse built right in.
00:24:33 ►
You may miss the end of the world,
00:24:35 ►
but you definitely are going to have a front row seat
00:24:38 ►
for the end of your world.
00:24:42 ►
So, you know, is that any less
00:24:45 ►
profound are you such a selfless
00:24:48 ►
Democrat that you’re more interested in
00:24:51 ►
the end of the world than the end of
00:24:53 ►
your world I think it’s a sort of
00:24:58 ►
light-hearted way to follow the
00:25:00 ►
Tibetans into the notion that life is a
00:25:03 ►
preparation for the big D,
00:25:07 ►
although we don’t have to think of it like that.
00:25:09 ►
We just say life is preparation
00:25:11 ►
for the inevitable collapse of the state vector
00:25:13 ►
into a biological hyperspace.
00:25:18 ►
I heard a doctor on NPR last week,
00:25:21 ►
and they were talking about cancer or something,
00:25:24 ►
anyway, something where a lot of people die.
00:25:26 ►
And he was saying, yes, well, it isn’t easy to prepare people for the mortality experience.
00:25:34 ►
And the interviewer said, did I understand you to refer to death as the mortality experience?
00:25:42 ►
mortality experience.
00:25:50 ►
I thought that maybe that’s a good idea,
00:25:53 ►
you know, kind of soften the blow.
00:25:55 ►
It’s just one more experience.
00:26:00 ►
Well, someone asked when we first went around to try and talk about the future.
00:26:07 ►
I don’t know if I made the point strongly enough
00:26:09 ►
I wasn’t sure I felt it click
00:26:11 ►
and I think it’s a strong one
00:26:15 ►
and it’s somewhat new with me
00:26:17 ►
it’s this idea that
00:26:20 ►
our
00:26:21 ►
that we represent
00:26:24 ►
some kind of singularity or that we represent some kind of singularity
00:26:27 ►
or that we announce the nearby presence of a singularity,
00:26:35 ►
that the evolution of life and cultural form and all that
00:26:39 ►
is clearly funneling toward something fairly unimaginable.
00:26:44 ►
I mean, I really don’t think we can imagine our future,
00:26:48 ►
because when we try to project some little science fiction scenario of our future,
00:26:53 ►
we inevitably select a very small number of trends,
00:26:58 ►
and then we propagate them forward
00:27:00 ►
without integrating the forward propagation of everything else
00:27:04 ►
that is going to be happening
00:27:06 ►
simultaneously. You know, there are options such as nanotechnology, the building of super tiny
00:27:15 ►
machines. Space migration was once an option. This seems to be fading. It seems to have been written off the menu by the powers that be.
00:27:28 ►
As the Soviet Union cracks to pieces,
00:27:31 ►
the human race’s ability to leave this planet
00:27:34 ►
becomes a memory of ancient times.
00:27:37 ►
I mean, we could not return to the moon in less than 15 years
00:27:41 ►
if we committed ourselves to it tomorrow so the space thing
00:27:46 ►
seems to have been taken off the agenda there’s nanotechnology there’s virtual reality
00:27:54 ►
the present solution seems to be this enforced larval neoteny on the consuming blue-collar masses in the high-tech societies
00:28:07 ►
and triage through epidemic disease
00:28:10 ►
and mismanagement in the third world.
00:28:17 ►
I, you know, it’s a huge mix,
00:28:20 ►
this problem of saving the world
00:28:23 ►
or halting the forward thrust into catastrophe.
00:28:29 ►
People say, well, why do you worry about saving the world?
00:28:32 ►
You just said it’s going to end in 2012.
00:28:35 ►
I don’t see that wrap as any sort of permission for political irresponsibility
00:28:43 ►
or a lack of attention to
00:28:45 ►
world problems. If it’s
00:28:47 ►
true, great, we’re golden.
00:28:50 ►
If it’s not true, and what
00:28:52 ►
a long shot it is,
00:28:54 ►
then we should still keep
00:28:55 ►
our eye on the ball with
00:28:57 ►
all of this stuff.
00:29:03 ►
Somebody
00:29:04 ►
asked me once
00:29:05 ►
they said well why
00:29:06 ►
you’re always talking about saving the world
00:29:08 ►
why don’t you ask the mushrooms
00:29:10 ►
how to save the world
00:29:12 ►
and I
00:29:13 ►
I had never actually done that
00:29:17 ►
and I did it
00:29:19 ►
recently
00:29:19 ►
and the results were very interesting
00:29:22 ►
I don’t often get messages
00:29:24 ►
from the mushroom that I quake to bring into the public arena, fearing an avalanche of political criticism.
00:29:34 ►
But when I asked the mushroom how we could save the world, it hesitated approximately a third of a second, and then it said,
00:29:46 ►
every woman should bear only one natural child.
00:29:51 ►
An idea which had never occurred to me, actually,
00:29:55 ►
which I now have looked into.
00:29:57 ►
I’m the father of two children, by the way.
00:30:02 ►
This is a very interesting notion.
00:30:11 ►
The population of the earth would drop by 50% in 40 years without war, pogrom, displacement of populations
00:30:18 ►
so forth and so on
00:30:20 ►
another interesting thing about this suggestion from the mushroom
00:30:26 ►
is it requires very little input, impact, or management by men,
00:30:35 ►
this suggestion.
00:30:37 ►
Women have been powerless for millennia.
00:30:43 ►
Now, apparently, here’s a suggestion of how they could
00:30:46 ►
take great power
00:30:48 ►
without asking
00:30:50 ►
any man’s permission
00:30:52 ►
it’s not quite accurate
00:30:55 ►
it’s actually practically not that accurate at all
00:30:58 ►
oh well tell me why
00:31:00 ►
well because
00:31:02 ►
there’s two reasons I would say
00:31:04 ►
from a practical standpoint of being a woman who’s still fertile,
00:31:10 ►
and one is no birth control is 100% effective.
00:31:14 ►
Yes. Is that it?
00:31:17 ►
No, and the second one is that there are women in a lot of situations,
00:31:21 ►
for economic reasons and political reasons, where there are men.
00:31:28 ►
It’s just like there’s men all over the country sort of bombing abortion clinics.
00:31:34 ►
So to me it doesn’t seem accurate to say it’s totally in the hands of women. Let me try and convince you. I took this simple suggestion, each woman should have one natural child. And I began looking into it. And then I found a demographer who told me what I consider to be the second piece of this puzzle. And this I had never thought of.
00:32:28 ►
A woman who has a child on the Upper East Side of Manhattan or Malibu or Berkeley, that child will have 800 to 1,000 times the negative impact on the carrying capacity and resources of the earth of a child born to a woman in Bangladesh because of the difference in material culture, you see.
00:32:31 ►
Well, now that implies to me that if you wanted to make a social change
00:32:34 ►
in the area of the impact of the human population on the earth,
00:32:39 ►
then you should not preach contraception and birth control
00:32:43 ►
in the back streets of Dhaka and Lahore.
00:32:48 ►
You should preach it in Malibu and Berkeley and Manhattan.
00:32:52 ►
Now, the interesting thing about that is that these are the people,
00:32:58 ►
these women are the people you are most likely to convert to your point of view.
00:33:04 ►
are the people you are most likely to convert to your point of view. They are college educated, comfortable.
00:33:09 ►
All the resources of media are available to them.
00:33:13 ►
They are informed, intelligent, educated, healthy people.
00:33:18 ►
Able to, self-involved people.
00:33:21 ►
And so you can come to these women and you can say, here’s the deal.
00:33:27 ►
We want you to follow a course of action
00:33:31 ►
which will increase your income,
00:33:34 ►
your disposable income,
00:33:36 ►
increase your leisure time,
00:33:40 ►
and propel you to the forefront
00:33:43 ►
of political heroism without contest.
00:33:47 ►
You see?
00:33:49 ►
Now, the use of resource by these populations,
00:33:54 ►
these women and their children, is so intense,
00:33:57 ►
the pyramid is so steep,
00:34:00 ►
that your objections about birth control isn’t effective and so forth,
00:34:06 ►
I’ll bet you that if you could get 15% of the women in that population
00:34:11 ►
to commit themselves to this one natural child thing,
00:34:15 ►
that within 10 years there would be a measurable margin of relief
00:34:20 ►
on the extraction of world resources.
00:34:24 ►
So that here is a way
00:34:26 ►
to back away from the abyss
00:34:28 ►
without, you know,
00:34:32 ►
nightmarish reorganization of society,
00:34:35 ►
engineered diseases, third world triage,
00:34:38 ►
all this other stuff.
00:34:40 ►
And in the first 40 years, the population
00:34:44 ►
would fall by half. Then the next 40 the population would fall by half
00:34:45 ►
then the next 40 years it would fall by half again
00:34:49 ►
the amount of wealth
00:34:52 ►
that would be accruing to those still alive
00:34:56 ►
everybody would see their standard of living
00:35:00 ►
rise quite naturally
00:35:02 ►
as a consequence of
00:35:04 ►
the falling pressure on resources.
00:35:08 ►
Now, why is this, if it’s such a great idea,
00:35:12 ►
not being done?
00:35:15 ►
Here’s why, as far as I can figure out.
00:35:18 ►
It’s because nobody can figure out
00:35:20 ►
how you make a buck in that situation.
00:35:23 ►
Why don’t all the men have vasectomies
00:35:25 ►
after they’ve fathered one child?
00:35:27 ►
Well, yes, the method, how you achieve it, is debatable.
00:35:32 ►
I think men should cooperate with the effort,
00:35:35 ►
but the point is this one natural child per mother.
00:35:40 ►
Now, you see, the first argument you hear is that this is bad for children,
00:35:49 ►
but the average American family is under three children. Most people have two children.
00:35:59 ►
Now, what’s the history of having two children? Having two children has nothing to do
00:36:05 ►
with traditional family patterns
00:36:08 ►
or human child rearing.
00:36:10 ►
Two children is a compromise
00:36:12 ►
between the natural family of six to eight
00:36:16 ►
and the demands of the Industrial Revolution
00:36:18 ►
and the guilt of Christian civilization.
00:36:22 ►
Two children is a horrible number of children to have.
00:36:26 ►
Mostly when you have two children,
00:36:28 ►
they fight like cats and dogs.
00:36:31 ►
And it’s just a horrible compromise
00:36:34 ►
between the way people used to have
00:36:37 ►
huge extended families
00:36:39 ►
and the Industrial Revolution’s
00:36:42 ►
preference for you’re having actually
00:36:44 ►
as few children as possible to make you a more efficient worker.
00:36:48 ►
Well, this is a peculiarly nuts and bolts suggestion.
00:36:54 ►
It’s not airy-fairy at all.
00:36:56 ►
And yet it would work.
00:36:58 ►
And it’s the only other thing I’ve thought of besides mass dosing of the population with psilocybin
00:37:05 ►
that seems to
00:37:08 ►
be a humane way
00:37:10 ►
to put the brakes
00:37:11 ►
on because we have real problems
00:37:13 ►
folks don’t I mean we are
00:37:15 ►
very insulated but if
00:37:18 ►
you saw the data on the ozone
00:37:19 ►
hole last week
00:37:21 ►
you know they’ve been wailing about the ozone
00:37:24 ►
hole for five or six years, saying
00:37:26 ►
that it’s disappearing at a rate of 4%
00:37:28 ►
a year. Well, then last week
00:37:30 ►
they announced that 40%
00:37:31 ►
of it disappeared in the last six
00:37:33 ►
months. This should have
00:37:36 ►
been, you know,
00:37:38 ►
a special meeting of
00:37:40 ►
the United Nations with all heads
00:37:42 ►
of state attending, a complete
00:37:44 ►
emergency.
00:37:45 ►
Instead, you know, who Bill Clinton is screwing
00:37:50 ►
pushed it off the front page.
00:37:52 ►
I mean, this is the kind of shit-for-brains society
00:37:55 ►
that we’re living in.
00:37:57 ►
So, you know, we have real problems.
00:38:00 ►
And I have never heard a plan for pulling back from the abyss that had less coercion and
00:38:10 ►
less ideological freight to it than this one woman one child thing you see it doesn’t address
00:38:17 ►
politics it addresses biology it is overpopulation is what’s driving us crazy. All other problems, toxic waste disposal, epidemic disease, resource extraction, degradation of the environment, collapse of the atmosphere, inability to satisfy third world aspirations, all of these problems are population problems. And capitalism doesn’t want to talk about it because capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants and the more ants there are the more offerings there can be to moloch but this
00:39:08 ►
is not a good situation for us ants and uh you know capitalism is a gun pointed at the head
00:39:18 ►
of global civilization if you read the theoreticians of capitalism, Adam Smith and so forth, capitalism
00:39:27 ►
assumes an unlimited exploitable frontier. There is no such creature. So it has turned pathological.
00:39:37 ►
The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space but a frontier in time. We steal the
00:39:47 ►
future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt
00:39:53 ►
but this frontier the end is in sight and we when we hit that wall you know we
00:40:01 ►
will join the Eastern Bloc in a fundamental reappraisal of our situation.
00:40:08 ►
Democracy, I believe in.
00:40:11 ►
I mean, I think democracy is the psychedelic form of government
00:40:16 ►
because I don’t see it as a product of rational thought.
00:40:20 ►
I see it as institutionalized anarchy.
00:40:23 ►
I see it as institutionalized anarchy.
00:40:30 ►
It’s democracy is biology managed for human purposes.
00:40:34 ►
You know, it honors the biological unit.
00:40:39 ►
It takes the biological unit and gives it a vote.
00:40:45 ►
And that’s a way for Mother Nature to then enter into human history.
00:40:50 ►
I mean, I’m fairly mystical about democracy, sort of like William Blake.
00:40:58 ►
What about the experiment in China on one child, one woman? Well, I think it was very coercive, and I think it shows that it’s silly to preach it to poor women in rural populations.
00:41:08 ►
You want to preach it to educated urban women who can evaluate it from many different points of view.
00:41:18 ►
You don’t want it to be coercive.
00:41:21 ►
I think if you tried to do it from the top down, meaning through these college-educated
00:41:27 ►
wealthy women first, that the visible benefit of it would make it the very chic thing to do
00:41:37 ►
throughout the world. The reason people have large families in the third world, is because they fear for their security in their old age.
00:41:46 ►
You must provide an alternative to that anxiety that is believable,
00:41:53 ►
or they’re not going to go for it, you know.
00:41:56 ►
Here as well, not just in the…
00:41:58 ►
Here as well, but to a somewhat lesser degree.
00:42:01 ►
But yes, you’re right.
00:42:03 ►
How are you preparing for 2012 yourself personally? lesser degree but yes you’re right well by going way out on a limb i guess people ask me what will
00:42:14 ►
you do if nothing happens in 2012 well by god sent coincidence my 65th birthday occurs a month before the date so then I think I’ll just steal away and disgrace
00:42:28 ►
and find myself a girl on an island
00:42:32 ►
who runs fish traps and disappear forever
00:42:35 ►
as to what I do in the meantime
00:42:41 ►
I don’t, I should make it clear
00:42:44 ►
you know, I don’t believe this stuff.
00:42:50 ►
I find believing in these high-flown, complicated, synthetic systems to come off sort of like pathology.
00:43:01 ►
So I entertain ideas, but I don’t give belief over
00:43:07 ►
I’m very amazed by the time wave
00:43:10 ►
it continuously surprises and delights me
00:43:15 ►
and I don’t know
00:43:16 ►
very few people are obviously as into it as I am
00:43:21 ►
but it’s proof enough as far as I’m concerned
00:43:24 ►
I mean it’s all I ever
00:43:26 ►
would have asked for you know it’s a
00:43:29 ►
it’s a gem from the other it’s Aladdin’s
00:43:32 ►
lamp it’s what I wanted and I got it at
00:43:36 ►
one point in La Charrera naturally this
00:43:40 ►
question arose in our group why us you
00:43:45 ►
know why us?
00:43:46 ►
Why are the aliens revealing the unified field theory of space and time to us?
00:43:53 ►
And the mushroom just replied without hesitation,
00:43:57 ►
because you don’t believe in anything.
00:44:00 ►
You know, and that apparently is what’s required.
00:44:04 ►
And that apparently is what’s required.
00:44:13 ►
Do you all know that Van Morrison song about no guru, no method, no teacher,
00:44:17 ►
just you and me and nature in the garden?
00:44:19 ►
In the garden?
00:44:24 ►
I think that’s actually where it’s at.
00:44:35 ►
So what I do between now and 2012 is I’m a meme spreader, a meme replicator.
00:44:37 ►
A meme is a terrible thing to waste.
00:44:40 ►
A meme is a terrible thing to waste.
00:44:48 ►
And the purpose of these teaching things is to turn you into fellow replicators of the meme I mean I see it all in the metaphors of molecular biology
00:44:52 ►
you know I have a new sequence of codons here
00:44:56 ►
and I want to insert it into each one of you
00:44:59 ►
without error in copying
00:45:02 ►
and then you should go forth
00:45:04 ►
and tell other people
00:45:06 ►
and copy it into their head,
00:45:09 ►
and this meme will spread,
00:45:11 ►
because we cannot evolve faster than our language.
00:45:15 ►
The edge of being is the edge of meaning,
00:45:20 ►
and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning.
00:45:24 ►
We have to extend it
00:45:25 ►
because if we appear to be confronted
00:45:29 ►
by insoluble problems
00:45:31 ►
it’s because we have the wrong language
00:45:34 ►
for dealing with this problem
00:45:36 ►
you learn that with computers
00:45:38 ►
certain languages are good for certain kinds of problems
00:45:43 ►
and we have to constantly evolve
00:45:48 ►
language and push it forward and the way I think of the psychedelics is they are catalysts
00:45:57 ►
to the imagination I mean that’s what they were back 100,000 years ago. The imagination, which was just this glimmering, this iridescence on the surface of ape cognition,
00:46:12 ►
was under the influence of the reciprocal feedback of self-reflection, you know,
00:46:20 ►
that is created by watching your own mind because it has suddenly become interesting,
00:46:26 ►
because it has suddenly been flooded by a psychoactive amine,
00:46:30 ►
that iridescence has been coaxed into language,
00:46:35 ►
art, architecture, music, poetry,
00:46:37 ►
the whole ball of wax.
00:46:40 ►
But now we know these things.
00:46:43 ►
It’s no longer a sort of haphazard process. We can, by analyzing different kinds of cultures existing in the world today and cultures that existed in the past, we can uncover, reveal, unravel the lost secret of our origins. And I think, you know, I haven’t talked too much this weekend, but I’m very keen for the notion of what I call the archaic revival is this overarching metaphor that is the way for us to go to save our necks
00:47:29 ►
at this point it when a culture gets into trouble instinctively what it does is it
00:47:37 ►
goes back through its own past until it finds a moment where things seem to make sense
00:47:46 ►
and then it brings
00:47:48 ►
that moment forward
00:47:49 ►
into the present
00:47:50 ►
the perfect example is
00:47:53 ►
when
00:47:55 ►
medieval Christianity
00:47:57 ►
no longer made
00:47:59 ►
sense to a
00:48:01 ►
major
00:48:03 ►
proportion or percentage of the people of Western Europe
00:48:07 ►
because of the rise of new kinds of classes,
00:48:11 ►
new forms of wealth,
00:48:13 ►
new information about the world outside Europe.
00:48:17 ►
When the medieval vision lost its power,
00:48:22 ►
the intellectuals of that time
00:48:25 ►
instinctively reached backwards into the past
00:48:29 ►
looking for a stable model
00:48:32 ►
and finally they reached the golden age of Periclean Athens
00:48:36 ►
and there they found Plato, Aristotle, the dramatists, so forth
00:48:42 ►
and they created classicism
00:48:44 ►
now notice that we’re talking here Aristotle, the dramatists, so forth, and they created classicism.
00:48:48 ►
Now, notice that we’re talking here about the 1400s.
00:48:51 ►
Classicism was brought to birth in the 1400s,
00:48:55 ►
2,000 years after the death of Plato,
00:49:00 ►
and we are still, to a tremendous degree, we are the children of this classical revival, which we call the Renaissance.
00:49:28 ►
city planning, of architecture, of military planning, and so forth and so on, are all drawn from classical Greek and Roman models that were brought back from the dead 500 years
00:49:37 ►
ago by a bunch of Italian investment bankers who thought this was a good model to build on, to hang
00:49:46 ►
their civilization on.
00:49:48 ►
And now,
00:49:49 ►
this has run out.
00:49:52 ►
The contradictions are too extreme.
00:49:55 ►
This
00:49:55 ►
classicism, I don’t want
00:49:58 ►
to say it’s failed, but it has
00:50:00 ►
just taken us as far as it
00:50:02 ►
can go. So now,
00:50:04 ►
we again, we confront great existential confusion.
00:50:08 ►
We confront cultural values completely different from our own,
00:50:12 ►
such as rainforest aborigines and so forth.
00:50:15 ►
We confront the toxic legacy of modern science,
00:50:20 ►
the retreating species counts of the earth,
00:50:23 ►
the decaying atmosphere, all these things.
00:50:26 ►
So we must now reach far back into time for a new cultural model.
00:50:33 ►
Our crisis is so great that we have to reach back to the high Paleolithic,
00:50:44 ►
to the moment immediately before
00:50:46 ►
the invention of agriculture
00:50:48 ►
and the creation of the dominator ego
00:50:53 ►
and I see
00:50:55 ►
people talk about the new age and the new paradigm
00:50:58 ►
and this and that, well it’s larger than that
00:51:00 ►
it’s been going on throughout the 20th century
00:51:04 ►
the discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1897, Freud begins to brawling, incestuousipated, male-dominated,
00:51:46 ►
late 19th century post-Victorian cultural milieu.
00:51:51 ►
And then, following hard upon them,
00:51:54 ►
the Impressionists in the 1880s giving way to analytical cubism
00:51:59 ►
and all the…
00:52:01 ►
Cubism arose as a result of the fascination of a few artists with primitive African masks.
00:52:10 ►
Picasso and his circle.
00:52:12 ►
And when they brought this stuff back to Paris in 1905 through 15, nobody had ever seen this kind of thing. thing and these guys began trying to deconstruct the pictorial space of
00:52:26 ►
people like Degas and those people
00:52:28 ►
into the pictorial space of the primitive
00:52:31 ►
mentality meanwhile
00:52:34 ►
anthropologists were bringing
00:52:37 ►
in a Frazier published the golden
00:52:40 ►
vow which laid before the European
00:52:43 ►
intellectual community this vast repository of integrated mythology. National socialism, surrealism, all of these things, some negative, some positive, are all aspects of this, the 20th century fascination and revivification of the primitive,
00:53:05 ►
rock and roll, the rise of sexual permissiveness,
00:53:12 ►
the rise of, you know, styles of dancing,
00:53:17 ►
which were not this, you know, the minuet and so forth.
00:53:21 ►
All of this signals this fascination with the primitive, but at the center of it stand two phenomena or two integrated phenomena. The personality of the shaman and the fact of the psychedelic experience.
00:53:43 ►
and we’ve come late to that the 1960s is when this theme was first announced
00:53:47 ►
for any large number of people
00:53:50 ►
and I think that we have to deconstruct
00:53:54 ►
consciously deconstruct
00:53:56 ►
this constipated, classical, industrial
00:54:00 ►
linear dominator civilization
00:54:04 ►
that we’re trapped inside
00:54:06 ►
because it’s a vehicle we can’t steer.
00:54:09 ►
It’s glued to the tracks
00:54:12 ►
which run right over the cliff.
00:54:15 ►
If we cannot alter the assumptions of this society,
00:54:19 ►
if the George Bushes and Helmut Kohls of this world
00:54:23 ►
are going to continue to run things,
00:54:26 ►
then, you know, head for the bunkers, folks,
00:54:28 ►
and pray because the bunkers aren’t going to be any consolation.
00:54:33 ►
Yeah?
00:54:35 ►
I’m listening very closely to you for a few days.
00:54:41 ►
And I hear what you’re saying here,
00:54:43 ►
and I’m trying to formulate a question.
00:54:45 ►
I guess my question is, and maybe it’s a political question,
00:54:50 ►
because there’s so many people who at this moment,
00:54:55 ►
although they recognize that not all is well at Dodge,
00:55:01 ►
you know, they’re reasonably comfortable still.
00:55:03 ►
you know they’re reasonably comfortable still they have a certain amount of
00:55:06 ►
self-image
00:55:07 ►
and wealth
00:55:09 ►
and personality invested
00:55:11 ►
in this terrible corrupt system
00:55:13 ►
and by and large they’re the ones
00:55:15 ►
who are at the reins
00:55:17 ►
and control the resources
00:55:19 ►
you know how does
00:55:21 ►
the archaic revival
00:55:23 ►
be made attractive and seductive and pleasurable and aesthetic to these people especially?
00:55:31 ►
Not to mention the influx of Latino economic refugees into the country who just want a television set man.
00:55:41 ►
a television set man yeah well this is a real problem
00:55:44 ►
that the third world
00:55:45 ►
people can only aspire
00:55:47 ►
to the example they’ve been given
00:55:49 ►
and it’s an example of consumerism
00:55:52 ►
and
00:55:53 ►
so forth
00:55:54 ►
may I just say
00:55:58 ►
yeah go ahead
00:55:59 ►
it’s an example not only of consumerism
00:56:01 ►
but of a certain freedom and liberation
00:56:04 ►
of human expressiveness
00:56:05 ►
and spirit that they
00:56:07 ►
perceive. You know, it’s not all that people are
00:56:09 ►
fucked up. If they look at America
00:56:12 ►
and this consumer culture
00:56:13 ►
and they see the good parts,
00:56:16 ►
you know.
00:56:17 ►
Well, I think that you can’t
00:56:20 ►
reform human nature.
00:56:22 ►
So what we have to do
00:56:23 ►
then is dematerialize the culture
00:56:26 ►
in some way.
00:56:28 ►
And I don’t talk too much about this
00:56:31 ►
because frankly,
00:56:32 ►
I haven’t really got a clue
00:56:34 ►
as to how you would do that.
00:56:35 ►
I mean, I know there’s nanotechnology
00:56:37 ►
and so forth and so on,
00:56:39 ►
but what we need to do
00:56:41 ►
is take the matter out of thingdom
00:56:44 ►
so that everybody can live in the Frank Lloyd Wright waterfall house.
00:56:49 ►
I mean, it costs $9.95 and you buy it at the 7-Eleven
00:56:55 ►
and take it home and slap it on and you can live in it.
00:57:00 ►
So that’s why I’m interested,
00:57:03 ►
that’s why I, in spite of my nature boy thrust in most contexts, I’m very interested in virtual reality and the idea of making the imagination explicit or interiorizing the exterior world. I mean, one vision that I’ve had of a kind of future utopia is, you know, it opens on a world
00:57:29 ►
which looks like our world of 10,000 years ago. I mean, people live tribally, they are physically
00:57:37 ►
perfect, they are naked, they want for nothing, but they appear to have no material culture whatsoever,
00:57:45 ►
then when you shift your point of view so that you’re inside one of these people’s heads,
00:57:52 ►
you discover that when they close their eyes, there are menus hanging in space in front of them.
00:58:00 ►
And by glancing at these menus with a certain intensity,
00:58:28 ►
And by glancing at these menus with a certain intensity, they are able to make their way into a culture that is entirely three-dimensionally present for them, but which nowhere impinges on the world of three-dimensional space. could have the Vatican Library installed optionally when you have dental work, you know, and then just by pushing your tongue over there, why, you could view the Fabrianos or whatever. I don’t think this
00:58:38 ►
is that far-fetched. I mean, a lot of money is going toward this. Money can be made from this. And remember I was saying that we have to figure out, unless we’re ready to, you know, hang the rascals, then we’re going to have to figure out some way to make money out of saving the world
00:59:05 ►
so that capitalism can cease its rapacious destruction of things.
00:59:10 ►
And I think these entertainment technologies are the way to go.
00:59:16 ►
I think that what we should all be trading in, in 15 or 20 years from now, is ideas.
00:59:24 ►
And ideas should be worth more than anything.
00:59:31 ►
And this is happening.
00:59:32 ►
I mean, I was impressed.
00:59:34 ►
There was a virtual reality conference here last summer,
00:59:38 ►
and a number of people came from Fujitsu.
00:59:41 ►
And the Japanese are not dragging their ass on this stuff the way we are.
00:59:46 ►
They understand what it is.
00:59:49 ►
And Fujitsu has a research team of 30 people
00:59:53 ►
who work full-time on virtual reality.
00:59:56 ►
And their data sampling rates and their equipment
01:00:00 ►
was far superior to anything here.
01:00:04 ►
The Japanese culture is an excellent model for this future and their equipment was far superior to anything here.
01:00:09 ►
The Japanese culture is an excellent model for this future that we’re trying to move into,
01:00:11 ►
because what the Japanese seem to understand
01:00:14 ►
that nobody else understands
01:00:16 ►
is they’ve had centuries of experience
01:00:19 ►
with limited resource management.
01:00:22 ►
And, you know, our style is, you know,
01:00:25 ►
cut it down, dig it out,
01:00:27 ►
and when it’s gone, move on.
01:00:30 ►
And now we’re at the end of our rope with that.
01:00:33 ►
We have to manage this thing like a spaceship.
01:00:36 ►
Limited resources.
01:00:39 ►
Yeah.
01:00:42 ►
Isn’t looking at the context of the purpose that the events,
01:00:49 ►
a presumed purpose for the sequence of events or history or transformation
01:00:54 ►
and technology, the evolution of technology being the driver
01:00:58 ►
that’s now allowing all of these things,
01:01:01 ►
is being what else can you expect to have happened?
01:01:05 ►
That, you know, with that kind of power and with a monkey brain,
01:01:10 ►
what else would it do than just what it’s done?
01:01:14 ►
That’s right.
01:01:14 ►
And do you see this as not necessarily something to take apart, to undo a wrong,
01:01:23 ►
not necessarily something to take apart, to undo a wrong,
01:01:29 ►
but as a necessary intermediate or mediation toward a future that is being created
01:01:36 ►
through these stresses that this technology has set up.
01:01:41 ►
Yeah, history is just a 25,000 year dash
01:01:45 ►
from the trees to the starship.
01:01:49 ►
And while it’s going on, it’s wild and woolly.
01:01:52 ►
But it only lasts like that.
01:01:54 ►
And then you’re in the starship.
01:01:56 ►
Because we are like bacteria or something
01:02:00 ►
in the shortness of our lifespan,
01:02:01 ►
to us, 25,000 years,
01:02:04 ►
you can get lost in the middle of that
01:02:06 ►
and you can’t see either end
01:02:07 ►
but from the point of view of a species
01:02:10 ►
it’s just instantaneous
01:02:12 ►
anyway, these are
01:02:14 ►
the ravings of an unhinged mind
01:02:18 ►
I noticed last week
01:02:21 ►
speaking of unhinged minds
01:02:23 ►
did any of you see science news with the cover
01:02:27 ►
cretaceous catastrophe that shows an asteroid impacting the earth you know this thing happened
01:02:36 ►
65 million years ago it’s now pretty well confirmed that a very large object collided with the earth and laid down a layer of iridium
01:02:48 ►
isotope that is you can find in sedimentary material all over the world at a certain
01:02:55 ►
stratigraphic level it’s called the kt boundary the cretaceous-Tertiary boundary. 65 million years ago, everything on this planet larger than a chicken died.
01:03:09 ►
And some people think in a single moment, in a single cataclysmic impact.
01:03:16 ►
But what was interesting about this Science News article was they were saying
01:03:22 ►
there is puzzling data on the KT boundary because
01:03:27 ►
it does appear that there was this
01:03:30 ►
immense impact and catastrophe but what’s
01:03:33 ►
peculiar is there appears to have been a
01:03:36 ►
major dieback of species underway before
01:03:41 ►
the impact that in the million years preceding the impact, there was some
01:03:48 ►
kind of echo crisis on the planet. And then this asteroid struck. And I thought it had
01:03:57 ►
never occurred to me before. I thought, well, two possibilities occurred to me. Is it possible, you know, the dinosaurs that we find are the lumbering, enormous ones,
01:04:09 ►
but it’s always agreed that there were a vast number of small-boned, gray-sealed dinosaurs that were much smaller.
01:04:19 ►
Is it possible that there was a breakout of intelligence in the Saurian line
01:04:28 ►
and that as we were able to emerge in just under three million years,
01:04:34 ►
is it possible that there was an intelligent species of a reptilian sort
01:04:40 ►
that was actually evolving a technical civilization
01:04:46 ►
which then caused this dieback of species.
01:04:51 ►
I mean, this had never occurred to me before,
01:04:53 ►
and then it was wiped out by this impact.
01:04:56 ►
Although whenever you have intelligent life in the presence of large explosions,
01:05:02 ►
a safe bet is that the intelligent life is responsible for the large explosions, a safe bet is that the intelligent life
01:05:05 ►
is responsible for the large explosions.
01:05:08 ►
So it may be that there was war in heaven
01:05:12 ►
60 million years ago.
01:05:14 ►
The other possibility which occurred to me second
01:05:17 ►
was one scenario for solving our problem
01:05:22 ►
is a mass migration into the past
01:05:27 ►
that if we could, you know, we could literally dump this whole scene
01:05:33 ►
and go a hundred million years into the past of the planet
01:05:38 ►
and set up there in a confined zone.
01:05:42 ►
If it were only 10,000 years deep it would never
01:05:46 ►
show in any fossil record
01:05:48 ►
it would just be
01:05:49 ►
you know this if we held
01:05:51 ►
ourselves to a 10,000
01:05:53 ►
year wide window
01:05:55 ►
that’s such a brief period of time
01:05:57 ►
and so long ago
01:05:59 ►
that we would basically just appear
01:06:01 ►
to have disappeared
01:06:03 ►
anyway I’m constantly churning through this stuff,
01:06:07 ►
trying to understand.
01:06:09 ►
I think this is a haunted planet,
01:06:12 ►
and we are a haunted species.
01:06:15 ►
This business of these asteroidal impacts,
01:06:18 ►
you see as an aficionado of novelty,
01:06:22 ►
somebody who can project 500 million years
01:06:25 ►
on a computer screen,
01:06:27 ►
and at 500 million years,
01:06:30 ►
the only kind of novelty you’re tracking
01:06:33 ►
is biological novelty,
01:06:35 ►
the sudden punctuated forward surges of evolution and so forth.
01:06:43 ►
Well, every solid body in the solar system is heavily cratered.
01:06:50 ►
Some of these craters are planet smashers.
01:06:53 ►
There is considerable and ever-increasing evidence
01:07:00 ►
that the cosmic neighborhood is fairly unstable. one of the scenarios that i’ve had to
01:07:08 ►
entertain in trying to understand the voice inside the mushroom the time wave the 2012 thing and so
01:07:17 ►
forth and so on is is it possible that biology is somehow um prescient that biology is somehow prescient,
01:07:27 ►
that biology somehow exists in eternity
01:07:30 ►
and knows the fate of the planet,
01:07:33 ►
and that what we are is a desperate strategy of escape,
01:07:41 ►
and that the planet actually can sense the possibility of a complete life-destroying
01:07:49 ►
asteroidal impact and so a species, a bipedal monkey with binocular vision has been led
01:07:59 ►
into the antechamber of nature’s secrets in order to build machineries
01:08:05 ►
and unleash energies sufficient to
01:08:08 ►
either deflect that incoming object
01:08:11 ►
or flee the planet in anticipation of it.
01:08:15 ►
I think life is tremendously tenacious
01:08:18 ►
and has an immense capacity
01:08:22 ►
to organize itself,
01:08:24 ►
to meet any crisis, provided it knows it’s coming.
01:08:29 ►
And, you know, there are scars on this planet,
01:08:34 ►
enormous scars.
01:08:35 ►
There’s a scar a billion and a half years old
01:08:38 ►
on the Canadian shield that is twice the size
01:08:42 ►
of the lunar crater Copernicus.
01:08:48 ►
This thing that came down 50,000 years ago out near Flagstaff, Arizona, that was a tiny object. It was something like 30 meters across.
01:08:56 ►
It was moving nine times the speed of a rifle bullet. It was six miles into the earth in the first second of impact everything within 800 miles
01:09:08 ►
died instantly and this was a nothing burger this thing uh an object 500 meters across
01:09:17 ►
the planet would ring like a gong for 10 000 years years. And, you know, the thing at the K-T boundary,
01:09:31 ►
the thing which killed the dinosaurs,
01:09:33 ►
they now believe they have the impact point.
01:09:36 ►
Oh, in fact, this is interesting,
01:09:38 ►
and it reflects on our psychedelic mix.
01:09:42 ►
They’ve searched the planet for the impact point of the
01:09:45 ►
KT killer, whatever
01:09:47 ►
it was, and
01:09:49 ►
now they’ve located it
01:09:51 ►
and ground zero
01:09:53 ►
is at a little town
01:09:56 ►
called Progreso on the
01:09:57 ►
northern coast of Yucatan
01:09:59 ►
at the time of the impact
01:10:01 ►
the entire area was a shallow
01:10:04 ►
ocean, but what I find eerie about the location of this impact point is 65 million years afterwards, on this exact spot, a civilization will arise, obsessed with the end of time, and determined to give a date to it.
01:10:25 ►
I mean, it’s within 110 miles of Chichen Itzu.
01:10:29 ►
It’s near Zebel Chaltoon.
01:10:32 ►
It’s right in the heart of classic Maya country.
01:10:36 ►
So it’s almost as though, you know,
01:10:38 ►
the question that I would like to have you leave here with
01:10:43 ►
is, you know, a new appreciation
01:10:47 ►
of how hard it is to figure out what is going on.
01:10:52 ►
I mean, what is going on?
01:10:54 ►
It’s very easy to smooth it all out
01:10:57 ►
and say, you know, that the Pentagon runs it all
01:11:00 ►
and so forth and so on.
01:11:01 ►
But once you start digging,
01:11:04 ►
I mean, the world is a labyrinth
01:11:07 ►
a sponge of interconnected labyrinthine interstices the weirdest connections you know
01:11:15 ►
who knew who and what they were doing about it and then you know these these reports that come in,
01:11:28 ►
you know, and some are false and some are true,
01:11:30 ►
but the sum total of it all is to paint a picture of excruciating weirdness.
01:11:35 ►
And people are just not pushing the right buttons.
01:11:39 ►
I mean, I guarantee you,
01:11:41 ►
you take five dried grams of psilocybin in silent darkness in your own living
01:11:46 ►
room on a saturday night and you know ferdinand magellan move over you you will see things no one
01:11:55 ►
has ever seen before and no one will ever see again i mean and these things are real. They have existential validity. They have the power to move hearts and change lives if we can but bring them back into the domain of the group mind, alien intent, bizarre ideas.
01:12:28 ►
I mean, I’m convinced that these things which the tykes offer
01:12:33 ►
in the DMT holding pen are idea systems, ultimately.
01:12:42 ►
The time wave, which, you know, took me four years to create and requires
01:12:46 ►
computer assistance and all this stuff, it was just one of those things. I mean, they could, they have
01:12:53 ►
closets full of this stuff, and they just pull it out and show it to you and take it away. Oh, you
01:13:00 ►
like that? Try this. How about this? Each one of these things, you know, stretches the monkey mind to its limits.
01:13:10 ►
I am a rationalist, and yet if you press into these weird zones,
01:13:18 ►
you can overcome what I call the trailer court syndrome,
01:13:24 ►
which is, you know, that nobody ever gets kidnapped by a flying saucer
01:13:29 ►
except people who live in trailer courts.
01:13:32 ►
You can overcome that.
01:13:35 ►
You, with your B.A. in psychology and your friendship with Rollo May,
01:13:41 ►
you can be kidnapped by flying saucers.
01:13:45 ►
Yeah.
01:13:46 ►
Something about crop circles.
01:13:49 ►
What about crop circles?
01:13:50 ►
I know.
01:13:51 ►
I just wondered.
01:13:51 ►
You mentioned that earlier
01:13:52 ►
and I know these guys said
01:13:53 ►
that they made the crop circles.
01:13:56 ►
Well, the crop circles
01:13:57 ►
are such fun.
01:14:00 ►
First of all,
01:14:01 ►
it is a wonderful example of my contention
01:14:07 ►
that the world is made of language
01:14:09 ►
because what the crop circle, whatever the crop circles are,
01:14:14 ►
what they are is they are glyphs of some sort.
01:14:21 ►
I mean, they are designed to be seen.
01:14:24 ►
It would be absurd to maintain that someone they are designed to be seen. It would be absurd to maintain
01:14:26 ►
that someone was trying not to be seen.
01:14:29 ►
So these crop circles are to be looked at
01:14:32 ►
and then radiating out from the act of looking at them
01:14:35 ►
reality ripples
01:14:37 ►
like air above a desert
01:14:41 ►
highway. The UFO people
01:14:44 ►
who were just on the brink
01:14:46 ►
of seeking honest work
01:14:48 ►
suddenly
01:14:49 ►
you know this tremendous
01:14:51 ►
shot in the arm
01:14:53 ►
everybody declares themselves
01:14:55 ►
a seriologist and moves
01:14:58 ►
to
01:14:58 ►
I mean nobody
01:15:02 ►
seems to think it’s
01:15:03 ►
well I don’t know how much time to spend on this.
01:15:08 ►
No one seems to think it’s weird that all of these earth mysteries people in England,
01:15:15 ►
John Michel and so forth, that this tremendous mystery just happens to be within a three-hour drive of their front door.
01:15:24 ►
I mean, why isn’t it
01:15:25 ►
happening in the steppes of Central Asia? Obviously, it seems to me, it is to be
01:15:32 ►
seen by the very people who would then offer an explanation of it. Rupert and I
01:15:38 ►
have spent a fair bit of time trying to understand the psychology behind the crop circles. And here we have come up with two ideas, which I’ll try out on you.
01:15:51 ►
The first thing to notice about the crop circles
01:15:54 ►
is that southern England is peppered with military bases,
01:16:00 ►
of high-security military bases,
01:16:02 ►
where nuclear weapons, cruise missiles, so forth and so on.
01:16:05 ►
It’s all there.
01:16:07 ►
So now we’re asked to believe
01:16:10 ►
that the airspace of England
01:16:12 ►
is being nightly violated
01:16:14 ►
by an agency or agencies
01:16:17 ►
unseen and undetectable
01:16:19 ►
in the very area where these nuclear weapons are stored.
01:16:23 ►
And we’re asked to believe that the Ministry of Defense is not concerned about this.
01:16:30 ►
That either means that the Ministry of Defense is falling down on their job,
01:16:35 ►
or they must know what’s going on.
01:16:38 ►
Well, now Jacques Vallée is the person who pioneered in the study of flying saucers.
01:16:44 ►
He said the way to understand
01:16:45 ►
flying saucers is don’t ask who’s inside or where do they come from. Ask what effect are they having.
01:16:54 ►
If you assume they are succeeding in what they want to do, then watch what they do and you will
01:17:00 ►
see what their purpose is. Okay, so what effect are the crop circles having? Well,
01:17:08 ►
what they have done is they are a magnet for the fringe establishment of the British Isles
01:17:17 ►
to come out of the woodwork and proclaim the eminence of some great event. And they have come more and more out on this limb.
01:17:27 ►
And what I speculated to Rupert was that MI5, which is British intelligence,
01:17:36 ►
it’s possible that they could actually view the New Age as a resurgence of paganism that threatens the Christian
01:17:48 ►
establishment of Anglican England and so what they
01:17:52 ►
have done is they’ve created a disinformation
01:17:54 ►
program they will lure all these people out onto this
01:18:00 ►
limb where they are all saying you know couldn’t be done by
01:18:04 ►
human beings absolutely
01:18:05 ►
beyond the power of science to
01:18:07 ►
explain and then they will
01:18:09 ►
reveal a team of MI5
01:18:12 ►
folks who say you know
01:18:13 ►
watch we’ll do it for world
01:18:16 ►
TV you people are all
01:18:18 ►
flakes you should never have gained
01:18:20 ►
the power in this society that you
01:18:22 ►
have and now you do have to go
01:18:23 ►
find honest work
01:18:25 ►
those two guys
01:18:27 ►
they seemed like that
01:18:30 ►
so then we came up with a yet more elaborate
01:18:34 ►
theory which I somewhat prefer
01:18:38 ►
the only country that has really taken an interest in these crop circles
01:18:47 ►
other than the English themselves are the Japanese.
01:18:52 ►
And this has gotten immense coverage in Japan in the popular press.
01:19:01 ►
And when you go to these crop circles,
01:19:05 ►
the number of Japanese is astonishing
01:19:08 ►
because it has been written into all these tours, apparently,
01:19:12 ►
and it’s a photographic subject,
01:19:16 ►
and it’s very accurate, and so forth.
01:19:18 ►
So it’s a big deal.
01:19:20 ►
So what I suggested to Rupert was MITI, which is the Ministry of Trade and Industry, is obviously carrying on a clandestine project in the study of semiotics, in the study of the Western mind and how it relates to the manipulation of certain symbols,
01:19:46 ►
because they are in charge of marketing and advertising
01:19:51 ►
and creating a marketing psychology in Japan.
01:19:56 ►
So what I think we’re dealing with here is an ultra-clandestine team of ninja stem-snappers
01:20:06 ►
who pose as Japanese tourists and television crews and so forth,
01:20:12 ►
and then, at the drop of a hat,
01:20:16 ►
can flash into this Zen stem-snapping mode
01:20:21 ►
and create these things,
01:20:24 ►
and the press that it generates and the discussion
01:20:29 ►
provides a very deep index into the English mind notice how eerily appealing to the English mind
01:20:39 ►
this is and it’s possible that you can extend this to uh to the cattle mutilations of a few years ago
01:20:48 ►
in the midwest because in the the relationship of cattle mutilations in the lonely western prairie
01:20:58 ►
under a crescent moon the relationship of that image to the american mystique of the lonesome cowboy and the
01:21:08 ►
gun fight at the ok corral and all that is eerily similar to the relationship of the english mind
01:21:17 ►
to its earth mysteries out there on the salisbury plainain. So I think it’s a human agency
01:21:28 ►
and that therefore it’s some kind of a disinformation project.
01:21:33 ►
It’s very interesting that these two guys came forward
01:21:36 ►
because it completely shifted the argument
01:21:40 ►
from this no human being could possibly do it to they couldn’t have possibly done all of
01:21:48 ►
them it was like a deep defensive mood and i i was amazed at the vehemence of people in england
01:21:58 ►
because i thought it was good fun and that you could talk to anybody about it and talk about the Ministry of Trade and Industry
01:22:05 ►
and MI5
01:22:07 ►
and people were like
01:22:10 ►
they were shocked at my lack of sensitivity
01:22:15 ►
to the emerging messages
01:22:17 ►
from the telluric depths of the suffering earth
01:22:21 ►
hey, maybe it’s happening
01:22:23 ►
but I was raised in the tradition of Occam’s razor,
01:22:27 ►
which says hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
01:22:33 ►
And I saw no necessity of reaching out to that.
01:22:39 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
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where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
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to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
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You know, until near the end, when Terence got into his rap about the ninja stem snappers,
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well, I was thinking that he was going to leave us on a real downer with all of his talk about asteroid impacts and things like that, which, of course, is probably even more
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topical today than it was back in 1992 when this recording was made.
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But his tongue-in-cheek crop circle theories got him back to where early on in this talk he said,
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I don’t, I should make it clear, you know, I don’t believe this stuff.
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Of course, with what we now know about the crop circle phenomena,
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perhaps his wild theories are closer to the mark than he may have suspected himself.
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Now, if you’re new to us here in the salon,
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I should probably let you know why I didn’t include all of Terrence’s detailed comments
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about his time wave theory.
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In fact, I’ve received a lot of comments about the fact that my previous podcast of this workshop seemed to have left Terence in mid-thought.
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Well, you’re right about that.
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But the very next thing out of his mouth had to do with loading the TimeWave software on a computer.
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Now, when this talk was recorded in February of 1992, Terence was obviously still very enamored with his theory about novelty in time.
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Terrence was obviously still very enamored with his theory about novelty in time.
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Unfortunately, it led to a dead end, so to speak, when nothing of significance occurred on December 21, 2012.
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Since I’ve been doing these podcasts for over nine years now, and since in the early McKenna Talks the time wave was discussed in great detail,
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I’ve decided that unless he says something that we haven’t heard in an earlier podcast, that I should cut those sections out, because, well, they were just becoming somewhat repetitious. However, if you want to learn more about this interesting idea
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of his, you can go to our Program Notes blog, which you get to via psychedelicsalon.us,
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and in the right-hand sidebar, under the Categories section, there’s an entry for
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the Time Wave, where I think there’s somewhere around six programs that cover it in more detail.
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Now, I should close right here, since we’ve again gone a bit too long today, but there’s one more thing that I want to do.
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A few minutes ago, we heard Terence give a somewhat detailed account of his version of a utopian society, where people live very close
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to nature, but instead of a consumerist society, most of the experiences that are, well, I guess
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you’d say consumed, are to be virtual reality experiences that don’t burden the environment
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as deeply as we’re now doing. Well, I’ve always enjoyed listening to that little rap, but it also
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brings up another of our old but dearly departed friends to my mind.
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And that’s Fraser Clark.
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In the program notes, you can also learn more about Fraser and find links to some of his talks here in the salon.
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But what I want to mention right now is that Fraser and Terrence were also good friends.
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And in his lecture at Stanford University, Fraser retold this little tale of Terence’s,
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but he told it in his own way. And I’d like to play that short rap for you right now.
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I think McKenna talked about this a couple of years ago, Terence McKenna, and I used it
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last year as kind of, what is the zippy vision of where we want to go to? What is the balance
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between technology and organic? Okay. Imagine a world in the future, a planet
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where there isn’t one inch of concrete, it’s covered in rainforest, completely
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100% natural. A naked couple walking across
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a clearing, look pretty much like us, maybe a little bit hairier, but
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naked, yeah? They pause, she bends down,
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lifts the floor without breaking it and puts it in her mouth
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thereby making an electronic
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connection
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menus drop down in their eyes
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they plug into a sort of
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global computerized brain
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they go into a virtual reality
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super city, they make their deals
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they go to college, they have all
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whatever they’re doing
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we have meetings in virtual reality.
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But in fact, we’re all living as naked apes back in the jungle.
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In other words, the whole of technology has been inhaled into virtual reality.
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There’s no more concrete, no more physical buildings anywhere,
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instead of being exhaled on the planet.
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Now this, to me, this is a zippy vision,
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because I love nature, and I love the super city. The only thing I’ve got against the super city is that it’s killing off the nature. So if somehow we could put that into virtual reality, into
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cyberspace, then we’ll crack it up. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
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Be well, my friends.