Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Once you encounter [the psychedelic experience] you see that this is an aspect or an activity as informing of what it means to be human as something as inimical to our nature as sexuality.”
“What we lack is the will to change our minds.”
“WE are the anomalous factor in the natural world.”
“I think part of what being psychedelic is about, the real shock of psychedelics comes from the realization of the relativity of cultural positions.”
“Dissolution of boundary is somehow the precondition for understanding reality.”
“The truth about reality is that nowhere is it writ large that monkeys should be able to elicit the final understanding of it.”
“No theory of consciousness is going to be worth anything that doesn’t come to terms with the perturbation of consciousness by drugs.”
“This is how I think of mind, that put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience, and I use this kind of alchemical terminology deliberately, put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience the mind becomes fluid and then is recast in a higher dimensional manifold.”
“Culture is about to go hyperdimensional. That’s what’s creating the crisis at the end of history.”
“If consciousness doesn’t loom large in the human future then it is not a human future.”
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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And guess what?
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The boys and girls who are helping me source these new speakers are all really busy right now.
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Either that, or they’ve stopped talking to me.
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So that means that I’m going to have to play another Terrence McKenna talk for you today,
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and hopefully it’s a new one.
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I say that because a few weeks back, I apparently played a talk of his that I had previously played a couple of years earlier.
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And I think that’s the second time that I did something like that.
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You see, I get these tapes from various people, and some have good information about when and where they were recorded,
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and others just say Terrence McKenna talk or something equally cryptic.
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Anyway, I don’t remember hearing the one that I’m about to play for you today,
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so we’ll give it a try.
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And like usual, when there isn’t a written title on the tape’s label, I make one up.
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As you see, for today I’ve settled on alien footprints.
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But I tried out several other ideas along the way,
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and my other possibilities were a coming out party,
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a curious category of human experience, extraterrestrial pharmacology, and a psychedelic cosmology.
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My guess is that as you listen to this talk, you’ll probably come up with a couple other
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suggestions as well.
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Now as we begin, you’ll hear what was one of Terrence’s standard openings to a weekend workshop, where he says that there is probably someone in the room who has what you want.
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I can still remember the first time that I attended one of his sessions, and I’d already spent several years trying to find a source for DMT, but to no avail.
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So, when Terrence just came out in the open and said that there were people there who had what I wanted,
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well, it was a real thrill, as you can imagine.
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So as we listen together right now to Terrence’s opening remarks,
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try to imagine how exciting those calm words were to somebody like me who realized that he had finally found what he was looking for.
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I would never have to sing along with that old U2 song ever again.
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The important part of these things, I think, in terms of lasting impact is, you know, it’s
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set up to have a lot of energy fed into the white guy at the front of the room deal is the community, not in some airy sense,
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but in the sense that someone in this room has what you need or knows how to get it.
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And since we look like everybody else in society, more or less,
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I view these events as coming out parties of a sort.
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And if you actually connect with the people around you,
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it probably sets you up for a long-term involvement with these things.
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Hopefully it doesn’t set you up for anything else.
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You do have to use your native intelligence.
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More and more over the years,
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the motivation for these things
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has been simply to bring people together
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who have an interest in consciousness alteration
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and talk about the implications,
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the methods, the materials, and the ethnographic and social
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context of it. And the group sort of sets the agenda. I mean, some groups, it’s recipe
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exchange time, and it’s very much down on the practical nitty-gritty level new plants new
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techniques uh and that’s very useful other groups its implications i mean what does this mean it is
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a it is a very curious category of human experience uh the only thing I can compare it to
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is human sexuality,
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but the differences are vast
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because human sexuality
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is pretty much scripted
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into the biology of each one of us.
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In other words,
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it’s unlikely that you’re going to get
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to the grave without having
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some kind of confrontation
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or exploration of your sexuality.
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It is entirely possible to go to the grave
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without ever coming near to psychedelics
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or even having heard about it.
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Yet, once you encounter it,
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you see that this is an aspect or an activity
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as informing of what it means to be human as something as inimical to our nature as sexuality. So it’s sort of the secret agenda of the brain-mind system or the secret agenda of the human organism?
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Why, perturbed by the tertiary constituents
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of some few species of plants,
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does the human mind break forth
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with Niagara’s of alien beauty?
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It doesn’t make evolutionary sense uh it seems as aldous huxley
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said of it a gratuitous grace what he meant by that was it’s neither necessary nor sufficient
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for salvation but it’s a wonderful kick in the pants anyway it’s like a freebie from nature and
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culture at least the culture that we’re living in has over centuries in fact a couple millennia, become tremendously phobic about this aspect of what it is to be human.
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They’re also, it bears pointing out, fairly phobic about sexuality too.
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It’s just that they’ve never figured out a way to regulate it
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the way they can regulate this.
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If they could make it illegal, they would, you know.
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Instead, you know, such things as having people close
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their eyes when they undress so they’re not subject to temptation i mean this went on in
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the cult that i escaped from which was the roman catholic church and this has been going on for a long long time
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this perturbation of consciousness with plants
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and the exploration of these magical dimensions
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nevertheless it seems to me anyway
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that it has a potential role in the planetary crisis
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that somehow the nature of the crisis
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is in some sense psychological.
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In other words,
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we have the technology to save ourselves.
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We have the financial base.
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We have the tools of mass communication and propaganda and so forth but what we lack is the
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will to change our minds you know we’re trying to deal with a global situation on the brink of
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self-immolation and we’re doing it with the brains of Stone Age hunters.
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And it’s astonishing that we’ve gotten as far as we have.
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I mean, you know, if you think that human beings are sort of the little brothers of the angels,
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then it’s a pretty screwed up situation.
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But the fact of the matter is
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that human beings are some kind of advanced form of primate.
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And when you think about that,
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and that we hurl instruments outside the solar system,
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we can, if so inclined,
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call down the processes that light the stars in heaven
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down upon the cities of our enemies.
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Monkeys, you know,
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first cousin to the groundhog and the chipmunk,
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doing things like this is an extraordinary situation.
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Mind, you know, our whole culture
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is lived out in the light of the myth that everything is understood and that everything is as it appears, that the surface is everything. extraordinary intellectual sight of hand has to be performed because what has to
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be denied is the magical nature of the perceiver and that’s oneself if this
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planet were simply the habitat of sperm whales humming, and termites, then Darwinian evolutionary mechanics
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as modified by molecular genetics
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would be sufficient to explain
00:09:53 ►
what’s going on on this planet.
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But the extraordinary manifestation
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of cognitive ability in one species has created a situation that is entirely outside
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the domain of evolutionary theory we are the anomalous factor in the natural world something something happened to us a couple of million years ago not that long ago and an animal species an
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advanced animal species of which there have been many in the history of the earth began to fall
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under the influence of a kind of a tractor a kind well, in the same way that iron filings will arrange themselves into a complex pattern when a magnet is brought near them, like under theest of a kind of invisible field
00:11:06 ►
that was penetrating into this species.
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And what came out of this is what’s called epigenetic process.
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Epigenetic means processes not under the control of genes.
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Now, in nature, you have epigenetic processes at the inorganic level. We would call the dynamics
00:11:29 ►
of the sun epigenetic or the dynamics of continental drift or desert building or volcanism.
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These are epigenetic processes. But we established an epigenetic foothold at the other end of the spectrum in the domain of conceptuality. And for a hundred thousand years at least, the human form has not been physically modified in any dramatic fashion. They have human skeletons from the Klossos River cave mouth site
00:12:07 ►
in South Africa,
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a hundred thousand years old,
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people indistinguishable
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from modern humans.
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And yet, in that hundred thousand years,
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we have reinvented ourselves
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over and over and over again first as goddess worshiping
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nomads practicing an orgiastic religion and following our flocks across the plains of africa
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then as city builders in the middle east dominated by kingship and obsessed with agriculture and monotheism
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then as uh pantheistic uh philosophes with a penchant for uh metaphysical speculation the
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whole hellenistic world then a new phase of imperialism so forth and so on and this is simply i’m i’m just following
00:13:07 ►
the western thread of development so the elaboration of languages cultural forms styles
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of ornament uh all of these things represent something entirely new on the face of nature. And imagine, I mean, the planet has existed
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for four and a half billion years.
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And, you know, all kinds of evolutionary surges
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have taken place.
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The age of the Crossocterigian fishes,
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the age of amphibians,
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the carboniferous forests of the Pennsylvanian,
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the era of the sauropods,
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the age of mammals, so forth and so on.
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All of these things have come and gone
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without intelligence being called out of nature.
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But for some reason reason it happened to us
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I’m not going to discuss it this evening
00:14:07 ►
if somebody wants to ask a question about it
00:14:09 ►
tomorrow I can sketch for you
00:14:11 ►
why I think
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psychedelics had a role
00:14:15 ►
in human emergence
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but that’s not my point
00:14:19 ►
this evening, my point this evening
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is simply the fact
00:14:24 ►
of the matter
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the fact that consciousness is
00:14:27 ►
inexplicable and
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it is the confounding
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of the very
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reductionist theories
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that it itself has generated
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science
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beginning
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from the time of the Greeks
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the method was basically to attack the simplest problems first.
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So, you know, questions like what is matter?
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This we made great strides with.
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Questions like what is language were not even seriously asked
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until the 19th century and only began to be answered
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in the 20th century. The mind, as an object of psychology, is a study really less than
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100 years old or approximately 100 years old. So reductionism solved the simple problems first.
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Science is no better at providing final answers
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than is astrology or voodoo
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or any other self-consistent intellectual system.
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And where we’ve gotten into trouble is that science,
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based on its bubble production capacity,
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has claimed a kind of preeminence among intellectual systems
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so that all models of the universe
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are supposedly to be submitted to science
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for it to pass judgment upon.
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This is really a mistake.
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It’s a naive understanding
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of what the intellectual enterprise is.
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The best you can ask of a theory
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is that it be self-consistent on its own terms.
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So astrology is self-consistent on its own terms.
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Homeopathy is self-consistent on its own terms.
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Science, mathematics, terms homeopathy is self-consistent on its own terms science mathematics but no one of these systems can claim preeminence to judge the others I mentioned this because I think part of what being
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psychedelic is about the real shock of psychedelics comes from the realization of the relativity of cultural positions, that nothing is really secure.
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has assumed that it had a model of reality that was 95% correct and that the missing 5% would be provided in the next 20 years.
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And every society that held that assumption was wrong.
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We now, from our exalted position on the pyramid of epistemic enterprise,
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can make that judgment.
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pyramid of epistemic enterprise can make that judgment.
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But what we don’t get is
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that must mean then
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that we too are whistling
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past the graveyard
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and that these fine models
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that we entertain
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will, from the vantage point
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of some future world,
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appear as quaint,
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as contrived,
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and as cramped
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as the medieval cosmology or the Sumerian mythology appears to us today.
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Well, so then the deal is that life is some kind of an opportunity
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to basically indulge yourself in the exploration of circumstance
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what Wittgenstein called
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the present at hand
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and everyone is born into a preconceived
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modality of what the present at hand is
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you inherit this from your culture
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you’re educated into it
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and it’s possible to never question that
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and then to operate within the values of that system.
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So if it makes a premium of being a good warrior,
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you learn to kill cleanly.
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If it makes an idol of being able to amass vast amounts of money then you do that
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and then you gain the uh the respect of the culture but at a certain point for people above
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a certain level of intelligence which is not that high i might might add, the question arises as to, you know,
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just how real and enduring these cultural values are.
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And at that point, you’re set up to melt down
00:19:38 ►
the culturally inherited mind and attempt to recast it
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into something with which you can be more comfortable. And
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this is where the psychedelics come in. Over the course of the weekend, we’ll talk about
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them in different ways. But at the beginning, I like to talk about them in the simplest
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way possible and say, you know, I had a professor,
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actually some of you may have read his books,
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Paul Feyerabend,
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and he used to say to us in Epistemology 101,
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I’ll teach you to recognize the truth
00:20:19 ►
and I’ll teach you what’s so great about it.
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And the second question is much more interesting than the first.
00:20:28 ►
Well, psychedelics are like that,
00:20:33 ►
looked at generically,
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where we’re not concerned with the particularized exotica
00:20:42 ►
of your trip or my trip,
00:20:45 ►
but looked at on the scale of a thousand or ten thousand trips,
00:20:50 ►
what is generally true
00:20:53 ►
is that these things dissolve boundaries.
00:20:59 ►
And this turns out to be tremendously important
00:21:03 ►
because the only other points in life
00:21:06 ►
where boundaries are dissolved
00:21:08 ►
is at the brink of the yawning grave
00:21:11 ►
and at orgasm and at the edge of sleep.
00:21:15 ►
And dissolution of boundary
00:21:19 ►
is somehow the precondition for understanding reality. It’s a paradox and we will meet many
00:21:29 ►
paradoxes because the effort to create intellectual closure in any system is again a product of
00:21:38 ►
intellectual infantilism. The truth about reality is that nowhere is it writ large that monkeys should
00:21:48 ►
be able to elicit a final understanding of it. I mean, if you met a termite whose goal was to
00:21:55 ►
understand reality, you would think this was a charming naivete. Well, but I’ve got news for you.
00:22:02 ►
The difference between you and a termite cast against that enterprise
00:22:07 ►
is precisely zilch.
00:22:10 ►
So what sophisticated people,
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whatever that means,
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learn to do is live with unanswered questions,
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live without closure.
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It’s not unusual in a physics experiment to from theory be able to
00:22:29 ►
produce it predict an experimental result to three decimal points of accuracy so all of the sciences
00:22:38 ►
aspired to this level of mathematical precision and formality. Meanwhile, physics, moving ahead of the pack,
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moved into the domain of the microphysical
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and all that precision fell to pieces.
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And it was revealed that at that level,
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particles are both wave and congressed object.
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Time runs backward.
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Causality is slewed. and congressed object time runs backward causality
00:23:05 ►
is slewed
00:23:06 ►
particles
00:23:07 ►
virtually
00:23:08 ►
penetrate
00:23:09 ►
energy thresholds
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that they can’t
00:23:11 ►
get over
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I mean
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it is
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a funhouse
00:23:14 ►
of paradoxical
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effects
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and
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I think
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that
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I
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saw
00:23:22 ►
a
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videotape of a discussion
00:23:25 ►
that illuminated all this.
00:23:27 ►
Some of you may have seen this book
00:23:29 ►
that was published last year
00:23:31 ►
called Consciousness Explained by Dennett.
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It should have been called
00:23:36 ►
Consciousness Explained Away.
00:23:39 ►
It was really a stupid book.
00:23:42 ►
I picked it up,
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and this is my test for books on the origin of consciousness.
00:23:47 ►
You just flip to the index to drugs.
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And if there’s no entry, you don’t give up yet.
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You look at psychedelic, and if there’s no entry, save your money, folks,
00:24:00 ►
because no theory of consciousness is going to be worth anything
00:24:05 ►
that doesn’t come to terms with the perturbation of consciousness by drugs.
00:24:11 ►
Anyway, I saw Dennett in conversation with a physicist on Dutch TV
00:24:16 ►
and Dennett was saying,
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I just want to eliminate the idea that the brain is magical material.
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And the physicist turned to him and said,
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but don’t you realize, my dear fellow,
00:24:30 ►
we physicists have now established that matter is magical material.
00:24:36 ►
And so that’s where that discussion was left.
00:24:39 ►
As this realization of the paradoxicality implicit in all phenomenon
00:24:48 ►
rolls back into the sciences, the life sciences I’m talking about now,
00:24:53 ►
I think the psychedelics will become much more interesting
00:24:58 ►
and the data that they produce will become much more assimilable.
00:25:06 ►
The thing that got me into this in the beginning,
00:25:09 ►
I mean, other than that I was a hedonist
00:25:12 ►
and I like to get loaded and this and that,
00:25:14 ►
but the philosophical thing was this question of,
00:25:18 ►
it began basically as just the simple question
00:25:21 ►
of the source of the visions.
00:25:25 ►
Because trying to think with a certain degree of intellectual cleanness,
00:25:30 ►
you can see that there is no reason why every single one of us
00:25:36 ►
should have locked in our brain a Niagara of visual beauty.
00:25:43 ►
What is it doing there?
00:25:42 ►
of visual beauty what is it doing there
00:25:44 ►
evolution teaches us
00:25:47 ►
that organismic
00:25:49 ►
architectures
00:25:52 ►
must be efficient
00:25:54 ►
that a species that wastes energy
00:25:57 ►
on the retention of an organ
00:25:59 ►
or a chemical system
00:26:02 ►
or a behavior
00:26:04 ►
that does not promote survival
00:26:09 ►
is an organism on the way to being eliminated from life’s competitive game.
00:26:16 ►
Well, why then, you know, a billion and a half years after life started,
00:26:23 ►
do we each have this innate capacity to produce
00:26:27 ►
more art more beauty in an hour and a half episode of hallucination than the entire species has
00:26:35 ►
produced in 15 000 years of artistic endeavor doesn’t make any sense in evolutionary terms unless it’s not in the organism, this data.
00:26:51 ►
Unless the argument that evolutionary mechanics
00:26:54 ►
are impinging on this data is a false argument.
00:27:00 ►
This relates to, and this is sort of a subset
00:27:03 ►
of the neurophysiological problems that reflect on psychedelics, but the problem of memory.
00:27:25 ►
Because it’s well understood that in the course of a 70-year lifetime,
00:27:36 ►
you will swap out every atom in your body, except neural DNA, seven or eight times.
00:27:42 ►
And yet there are 80-year-old people who, with no difficulty at all, can remember the smell of their grandmother’s dress
00:27:45 ►
when as a three-year-old she used to take them into her lap.
00:27:50 ►
How is this possible?
00:27:52 ►
Where is the memory trace
00:27:56 ►
that it can survive all of this cycling of material?
00:28:03 ►
A physicalist
00:28:05 ►
would want to claim that it must
00:28:06 ►
be in the neural DNA
00:28:08 ►
but geneticists
00:28:11 ►
have such a limited definition
00:28:13 ►
of the kinds of information
00:28:15 ►
that can be stored in DNA
00:28:16 ►
that they totally heap
00:28:18 ►
scorn on the idea
00:28:20 ►
that you could for example
00:28:22 ►
store a phone number
00:28:24 ►
or an odor or a line of poetry in dna
00:28:28 ►
they say you’ve missed the concept you don’t realize what the information in dna is protein
00:28:35 ►
sequence information nothing else if true then that hands back to everybody the problem of memory. Is it possible then that
00:28:46 ►
memory is somehow stored outside the body? Of course, this sounds radical, but you have to
00:28:53 ►
remember to the 19th century, action at a distance was thought to be magic, the notion that a hundred years into the future
00:29:05 ►
the world would be bathed in an ocean of UHF, VHF, radio, TV,
00:29:13 ►
and other forms of electromagnetic information
00:29:16 ►
carrying data everywhere
00:29:19 ►
would have been totally occult to the 19th century.
00:29:23 ►
They would not have been able to conceive of that.
00:29:27 ►
Our paradigm, our scientific paradigm,
00:29:31 ►
is obviously in need of serious revision.
00:29:35 ►
And where the exhibits can be elucidated
00:29:39 ►
that make this point most strongly
00:29:41 ►
is in psychological and mental phenomena and in within that domain
00:29:48 ►
it’s the perturbation of the brain mind system by psychedelics that is most dramatic
00:29:55 ►
another point on this breakdown of physics thing to preserve its enterprise even in a diminished form
00:30:08 ►
what the physicists have had to do
00:30:11 ►
is make a place in their theorizing
00:30:14 ►
for the observer
00:30:15 ►
the observer becomes very important
00:30:19 ►
to these quantum mechanical processes
00:30:22 ►
and in fact outcomes are affected by the interaction
00:30:26 ►
with the observer
00:30:28 ►
the reason
00:30:29 ►
psychologists
00:30:32 ►
have been so
00:30:33 ►
standoffish with psychedelics
00:30:37 ►
is because they were operating
00:30:38 ►
under an earlier scientific
00:30:40 ►
paradigm where the observer
00:30:42 ►
was thought to be a kind
00:30:44 ►
of godlike point
00:30:46 ►
of view outside
00:30:47 ►
the system
00:30:49 ►
now the news comes from physics
00:30:51 ►
that there is no such thing as outside
00:30:54 ►
the system that that’s
00:30:55 ►
an intellectual fiction
00:30:57 ►
again based on naivete
00:30:59 ►
this seems to me to open
00:31:02 ►
the door for legitimate
00:31:03 ►
taking of psychedelics
00:31:06 ►
by the researchers who are then going to describe their effects on other people
00:31:11 ►
or their pharmacokinetics or any other parameter of these substances.
00:31:16 ►
And finally, I think that the model of psychedelics that I’ve come to rest with after operating with the others, and I’ll briefly enumerate them, this isn’t an exhaustive list, but the approaches to psychedelics that are one of the earliest ones was the madness model or the psychotomimetic model this said aha madness
00:31:49 ►
must be chemically based these chemicals are pseudo and near neurotransmitters they must
00:31:57 ►
mimic madness the obvious conclusion from believing that is that you would then go and look at the cerebrospinal fluid of insane people, and you should find psychedelic molecules.
00:32:13 ►
This has turned out to be incredibly frustrating, and in fact, it’s basically been abandoned.
00:32:21 ►
DMT for example which you would
00:32:22 ►
if you were naive you would just assume
00:32:26 ►
I think that
00:32:27 ►
human madness might be related
00:32:30 ►
to DMT and DMT does occur
00:32:32 ►
in human metabolism
00:32:34 ►
but not at elevated
00:32:36 ►
levels in schizophrenics
00:32:38 ►
and not in any
00:32:40 ►
way correlated to any
00:32:42 ►
other pathology
00:32:44 ►
so that was one model in any way correlated to any other pathology.
00:32:50 ►
So that was one model, the madness model.
00:33:00 ►
Then a more friendly model was the Freudian slash Jungian model, that there is a portion of our mental life called the
00:33:05 ►
unconscious which is hidden
00:33:07 ►
from the ordinary inspection
00:33:09 ►
of the conscious mind
00:33:11 ►
and that on psychedelics
00:33:13 ►
you access
00:33:14 ►
portions of this
00:33:16 ►
in the Freudian variety
00:33:19 ►
it’s all
00:33:21 ►
about
00:33:22 ►
repressed sexual stuff and wish fulfillment and what he called day residues, meaning jumbled memories of recent experience.
00:33:46 ►
except in the case of LSD, which is a rather Freudian drug, actually.
00:33:51 ►
In other words, you do recover memories of childhood episodes of abuse and you do realize that you’ve been treating people badly and so forth.
00:33:57 ►
It seems addressed to the psychodynamics of the self.
00:34:01 ►
The Jungian model is a broader model because
00:34:06 ►
it says, again, countervailing
00:34:09 ►
these geneticists who say DNA
00:34:12 ►
only contains protein sequencing information.
00:34:15 ►
The Jungians want to say that there is
00:34:18 ►
a race memory, a collective
00:34:20 ►
unconscious, that you can go deep
00:34:23 ►
into the self
00:34:25 ►
and reach beyond personal memory
00:34:28 ►
and personal trauma
00:34:29 ►
to racial memory and racial trauma
00:34:33 ►
and ultimately by a process of following
00:34:36 ►
these genetic trees,
00:34:39 ►
all life, all of the Gaian biosphere
00:34:44 ►
becomes available
00:34:46 ►
so that’s another model
00:34:47 ►
a model that is closer
00:34:52 ►
to my presupposition
00:34:54 ►
but not
00:34:55 ►
sufficiently
00:34:56 ►
formal
00:35:00 ►
I guess would be the word
00:35:01 ►
is shamanism
00:35:03 ►
shamanism as probably most of you know
00:35:06 ►
is the worldwide paleolithic religion
00:35:10 ►
of ecstasis and magical curing
00:35:14 ►
that is how religion was practiced
00:35:17 ►
for the first million years
00:35:19 ►
before weasels got hold of it
00:35:22 ►
and substituted dogma for experience
00:35:26 ►
I mean that’s the real difference
00:35:28 ►
between shamanism
00:35:30 ►
and other religious
00:35:32 ►
enterprises is there is no such thing
00:35:34 ►
as shamanic theology
00:35:35 ►
shamanism is
00:35:37 ►
experience and
00:35:39 ►
I for a long time found that
00:35:42 ►
the most satisfying model
00:35:44 ►
it’s even though shamanism I, for a long time, found that the most satisfying model.
00:35:50 ►
Even though shamanism is archaic, in a sense,
00:35:54 ►
that’s almost a science fiction model because what the shamanic model is saying
00:35:57 ►
is that there is a parallel universe or universes of some sort and that you can by ascending some kind of cosmic
00:36:09 ►
axis it differs from culture to culture it’s like an elevator in reality and you discover there are
00:36:17 ►
these different planes you can visit and acquire power and cut deals and become a curer and transcend cultural limitation.
00:36:28 ►
The model that I’ve come to favor that is more radical, I guess, in its implications
00:36:38 ►
because it takes the phenomenon more seriously is the model that is largely mathematical.
00:36:49 ►
In other words, saying that
00:36:51 ►
the proper way to talk about the psychedelic experience
00:36:56 ►
is in the vocabulary of non-Euclidean
00:37:00 ►
and higher plane geometry.
00:37:05 ►
The notion being something like this,
00:37:07 ►
that the mind is a multidimensional manifold
00:37:14 ►
of some sort,
00:37:16 ►
but it takes the shape of its vessel
00:37:20 ►
in the same way that a liquid
00:37:22 ►
takes the shape of its vessel.
00:37:24 ►
And because we are animals
00:37:27 ►
of meat and sinew the circumstance into which mind must pour itself is a situation of evolutionary
00:37:38 ►
competition and constant threat and so in our species mind has developed into a kind of all-purpose threat
00:37:48 ►
detection device the correlation of intelligence to paranoia ought to prove this so what mind does
00:37:58 ►
for us is it’s constantly calculating the odds of danger and physical attack and strategy of response and so forth and so on
00:38:08 ►
but that is not the essence of mind that is the response of mind to being contained or constrained
00:38:18 ►
by this lower dimensional space and when you take a psychedelic in silent darkness
00:38:26 ►
where there’s no extraneous
00:38:28 ►
parameters
00:38:30 ►
forcing themselves in upon you
00:38:33 ►
the mind
00:38:34 ►
unfolds itself
00:38:36 ►
or another way to think of it
00:38:38 ►
would be you know there are certain
00:38:40 ►
compounds in organic
00:38:42 ►
and inorganic chemistry
00:38:43 ►
that have more than one crystal formation.
00:38:48 ►
At a certain temperature, they crystallize
00:38:52 ►
and have a certain crystalline geometry.
00:38:54 ►
But if you keep raising the temperature,
00:38:57 ►
sulfur will do this, for example.
00:39:00 ►
It reliquifies.
00:39:02 ►
Then at a yet higher temperature, it recrystallizes again.
00:39:06 ►
This is how I think of mind,
00:39:08 ►
that put through the crucible
00:39:11 ►
of the psychedelic experience,
00:39:14 ►
and I use this kind of alchemical terminology deliberately,
00:39:18 ►
put through the crucible of the psychedelic experience,
00:39:22 ►
the mind becomes fluid
00:39:24 ►
and then is recast
00:39:27 ►
in a higher dimensional manifold.
00:39:30 ►
This is why, you see,
00:39:32 ►
what’s always claimed of shamanism
00:39:35 ►
by shamans
00:39:36 ►
is that they violate ordinary causality.
00:39:40 ►
And what that means is
00:39:41 ►
they can see who stole the chicken
00:39:45 ►
or who ran away with the game
00:39:52 ►
or who’s philandering who.
00:39:56 ►
Now, anthropologists dismiss this and say,
00:39:59 ►
oh, these people are naive about causality
00:40:02 ►
and ordinary epistemic categories
00:40:05 ►
and so forth and so on
00:40:06 ►
but that’s not what’s happening
00:40:07 ►
they actually do do these things
00:40:10 ►
anybody who spends time with shaman
00:40:13 ►
will become aware
00:40:14 ►
not of spectacular magic
00:40:16 ►
not of you know
00:40:19 ►
Carlos Castaneda style
00:40:21 ►
dances in the waterfalls
00:40:23 ►
and appearing 500 miles away
00:40:25 ►
from where you started 10 minutes later.
00:40:27 ►
But a very subtle kind of magic,
00:40:29 ►
all of which can be reduced to
00:40:32 ►
that these people have a slight
00:40:36 ►
hyperspatiality to their relationship to time.
00:40:42 ►
In the ordinary experience
00:40:44 ►
is a point-like experience of the now
00:40:48 ►
these shamans seem to diffuse their consciousness and can are actually running slightly ahead of
00:40:57 ►
everybody else this is why shamans can are always associated with weather prediction, because you only have to have a leg up 24 hours
00:41:07 ►
to produce spectacular weather prediction.
00:41:11 ►
This is why shamans know where the game went,
00:41:14 ►
because they see where the game went.
00:41:18 ►
And it doesn’t seem that far-fetched
00:41:20 ►
when you think about the fact that,
00:41:23 ►
from one point of view all biology is about the
00:41:31 ►
conquest of dimensionality this is a statement that is consistent from ourselves sitting here
00:41:40 ►
this evening down to the first protobiotic slimes on clay banks
00:41:45 ►
in the
00:41:47 ►
archaeozoic
00:41:49 ►
life conquers
00:41:51 ►
dimensions
00:41:52 ►
the earliest forms of life
00:41:56 ►
were fixed in space
00:41:58 ►
they were point like
00:41:59 ►
they had no organs of sense
00:42:02 ►
at all
00:42:02 ►
then what came was motility had no organs of sense at all.
00:42:08 ►
Then what came was motility,
00:42:14 ►
but still no extended preceptors.
00:42:18 ►
Life literally felt its way.
00:42:21 ►
Then light-sensitive pigmentation sequestered itself on the surfaces of primitive organisms,
00:42:26 ►
and they established a light gradient, a sense of here and there.
00:42:32 ►
Notice that to have a sense of here and there, you have to have a sense of time,
00:42:38 ►
which is another dimension.
00:42:40 ►
You are claiming that dimension and integrating it into your description of the world.
00:42:46 ►
Higher order animals simply build on that conquest of spatiality
00:42:51 ►
until you get to advanced, highly advanced primates.
00:42:57 ►
And then you get language.
00:43:00 ►
And language is clearly a strategy
00:43:02 ►
for escaping from the point-like nature of the present.
00:43:08 ►
Because with language, you can command the past and you can strategically anticipate the future.
00:43:17 ►
So your existence is extended in a geometric sense.
00:43:26 ►
Now I think this, in the same way that you all know the cliche,
00:43:31 ►
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
00:43:35 ►
In that spirit then, culture is now recapitulating
00:43:42 ►
the individual journey toward hyper-dimensionality.
00:43:46 ►
And culture is about to go hyper-dimensional.
00:43:51 ►
That’s what is creating the crisis at the end of history.
00:43:55 ►
The reason history is ending
00:43:56 ►
is because it’s a linear enterprise
00:43:58 ►
and it’s about to be phased out.
00:44:04 ►
Psychedelics make all of this
00:44:07 ►
operationally potentized, usable.
00:44:13 ►
In other words, it isn’t just simply a wrap of some sort.
00:44:16 ►
It’s a roadmap.
00:44:17 ►
It’s a way of relating to reality.
00:44:23 ►
And as the weekend goes forward,
00:44:26 ►
we’ll explore the implications of this
00:44:29 ►
for ourselves personally,
00:44:31 ►
as a tool for personal growth,
00:44:34 ►
and as a cultural metaphor,
00:44:39 ►
which is sort of what I have tried to bring
00:44:41 ►
to the psychedelic thing that other people haven’t.
00:44:44 ►
Ultimately, I see it
00:44:46 ►
as a culture-transforming engine. But of course, the elements of culture are individuals. And to
00:44:55 ►
the degree that individuals psychedelicize themselves, they force this process forward
00:45:02 ►
into completion. And I feel that there’s a certain urgency about this,
00:45:07 ►
or there may be a certain urgency about it.
00:45:11 ►
In any case, it has a moral imperative,
00:45:15 ►
which may sound strange since it’s illegal
00:45:18 ►
and invade against and excoriated as vice and degradation.
00:45:24 ►
But nevertheless, if consciousness doesn’t loom large in the human future,
00:45:31 ►
then it is not a human future.
00:45:34 ►
You know, nature is looking with hard eyes at this little experiment
00:45:39 ►
launched with the melting of the glaciers.
00:45:42 ►
We consider the dinosaurs a failure.
00:45:45 ►
For a hundred million years,
00:45:47 ►
they were the masters of the planet.
00:45:51 ►
We’ve pulled our act together in the last million years,
00:45:54 ►
and we’re already staring extinction in the face.
00:45:57 ►
And yet, the enterprise of intelligence
00:46:01 ►
is without precedent in the organic world.
00:46:05 ►
I mean, where are you going to get Milton? Where are you going
00:46:07 ►
to get Einstein?
00:46:10 ►
Where are you going to get
00:46:11 ►
Bach and Duccio
00:46:13 ►
and all the rest of the gang
00:46:15 ►
out of a world of hummingbirds,
00:46:18 ►
chipmunks, and glaciers?
00:46:20 ►
So I don’t think we should
00:46:21 ►
sell ourselves short.
00:46:24 ►
We are not epiphenomenal.
00:46:26 ►
We are the trigger species on this planet.
00:46:31 ►
We are now basically directing and impacting on the entire biome of the planet.
00:46:39 ►
The implications of this have yet to be worked out. We don’t know whether we’re witnessing a rush toward extinction
00:46:47 ►
or whether we are setting ourselves up for a leap into a higher order of reality.
00:46:58 ►
Psychedelics, I think, exists not only to birth this process,
00:47:02 ►
but to also assuage the anxiety that is connected with it.
00:47:08 ►
Because it is a phase transition of major magnitude.
00:47:13 ►
I don’t think it’s the yawning grave, but I also don’t think you’re going to take your Ferrari with you.
00:47:20 ►
It’s going to be tight indeed getting through this narrow neck. And what lies beyond it is as incomprehensible to us
00:47:29 ►
as a future life as a collector of mogul miniatures
00:47:33 ►
and stock brokering would be to a fetus trapped in the birth canal.
00:47:39 ►
You know, when you’re trapped in the birth canal,
00:47:41 ►
it just looks like suffocation, strangulation, termination, death.
00:47:46 ►
You cannot conceive that it is a necessary initiation to a higher order of existence.
00:47:56 ►
Yes.
00:47:57 ►
Regarding, you said last night that today, Petra, basically somebody, you raised the
00:48:01 ►
question, which I am, but on the mushroom’s role in the communication process,
00:48:05 ►
basically the food of God’s spirit.
00:48:08 ►
You said if you want to ask the question today, you can do that.
00:48:10 ►
Okay.
00:48:13 ►
Yes, well, the book that I did for Bantam called Food of the Gods,
00:48:18 ►
I sort of thought of as a Trojan horse for anthropology
00:48:23 ►
because I had a conscious political agenda which was I wanted to insinuate
00:48:30 ►
the notion of psychedelics as necessary to human evolution. I wanted to insinuate that idea into into orthodox anthropology and primate evolutionary theory.
00:48:46 ►
So I wrote a book addressed to the larger world,
00:48:52 ►
in other words, in an academic style with footnotes and so forth and so on,
00:48:56 ►
arguing that the way to account for our peculiar predicament in nature.
00:49:05 ►
In other words, that we are obviously some kind of animal,
00:49:09 ►
but yet carrying this enormous proclivity for code generation
00:49:15 ►
and manipulation of material.
00:49:18 ►
I mean, we are literally the idea excreting animal.
00:49:22 ►
We don’t make honeycombs and coral reefs. We make transistors and automobiles
00:49:28 ►
and skyscrapers and aircraft and all of this stuff that our predicament in nature can only
00:49:37 ►
be explained by some extraordinary confluence of unusual forces. And orthodox evolutionary theory,
00:49:46 ►
when it comes to human emergence,
00:49:48 ►
basically fails.
00:49:51 ►
Nobody has a clue
00:49:52 ►
because it happens so quickly.
00:49:55 ►
The human brain doubled in size
00:49:58 ►
in a million and a half years.
00:50:00 ►
The anthropologist, evolutionary biologist,
00:50:04 ►
Lomholtz, calls this the most dramatic modification of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.
00:50:23 ►
Darwinian theory as modified by molecular genetics to the great embarrassment of these concerns
00:50:26 ►
because it is after all the organ which generated this theory.
00:50:32 ►
A point not to be lost sight of, you see.
00:50:38 ►
So my notion was that there must have been
00:50:42 ►
an extraordinary catalytic interaction of some sort that had
00:50:48 ►
to be driven by some kind of factor in the environment. And bipedalism, binocular vision,
00:50:56 ►
incipient language, complex pack signaling, all of this comes together at a moment of dietary crisis in our remote ancestors
00:51:09 ►
because as we left the arboreal canopy of the climaxed rainforests,
00:51:14 ►
which were under climatological retreat at that time, that’s why we were leaving,
00:51:20 ►
we had to switch our diet from being fruititarian and insectivorous.
00:51:28 ►
Suddenly that was all very difficult to obtain.
00:51:33 ►
And the bit in nature is that animals tend to specialize foods
00:51:40 ►
as a strategy for avoiding mutagenic influence in the environment. In other words,
00:51:47 ►
if you only eat one thing and you have enzyme systems designed to guard you against any toxin
00:51:53 ►
present in that food, then you can hold the level of chemically induced mutation to a low level. If you’re an omnivore, you’re at high risk
00:52:07 ►
for toxicologically induced mutational stress.
00:52:12 ►
And when we went into this food experimental phase,
00:52:17 ►
one of the foods that we surely would have encountered
00:52:20 ►
was psilocybin mushrooms
00:52:23 ►
because ungulate animals, proto-cattle,
00:52:27 ►
were evolving in this same African grassland environment.
00:52:34 ►
Psilocybin, to my mind, is uniquely positioned
00:52:38 ►
environmentally and pharmacologically
00:52:41 ►
to be the trigger enzyme
00:52:45 ►
for this induction of consciousness into this advanced hominin.
00:52:51 ►
The reasons are that, well, the first reason is purely physiological,
00:52:57 ►
that low doses of psilocybin increase visual acuity.
00:53:03 ►
And this would have tremendous impact on an animal that
00:53:06 ►
was surviving through predation on low doses of psilocybin your sensitivity to
00:53:12 ►
edge detection which means movement of an animal in a grassland environment at
00:53:17 ►
a distance is up to 20% more sensitive than in an unstoned human being the guy who discovered this roland fisher
00:53:26 ►
said to me when i discussed it with him he said so you see here is a case where taking a drug
00:53:34 ►
definitely gives you a more accurate picture of reality than if you had avoided the drug. It’s just a perfect proof of it. Well, at higher doses, psilocybin induces
00:53:47 ►
group sexual activity, orgy, because it causes arousal. If any of you are primatologists,
00:53:56 ►
you probably know that we are very closely related to chimpanzees and that then there is a second set of chimpanzees
00:54:06 ►
a species or subspecies
00:54:08 ►
there’s argument about it called bonubos
00:54:11 ►
and the sexual style of these two
00:54:14 ►
brands of chimpanzees could hardly
00:54:17 ►
be more different. The ordinary chimpanzee
00:54:21 ►
it’s all about male dominance, female
00:54:23 ►
control, suppression of homosexuality just to you
00:54:27 ►
know the bit and the bonubos are like polymorphically sexual and pansexual and just
00:54:36 ►
you know complete ongoing party all the time and the genetic difference between these two species is very very slight but the behavioral
00:54:49 ►
difference is tremendous and more and more as you approach the realm of consciousness behavior
00:54:55 ►
becomes what is being modified rather than the physical expression um The third… Huh? Physical expression.
00:55:05 ►
You know, that behaviors are modified,
00:55:07 ►
but organs and general physical presentation isn’t.
00:55:11 ►
And the third level of catalytic action by psilocybin
00:55:15 ►
in terms of evolution
00:55:16 ►
is that it triggers cognition,
00:55:20 ►
whatever that means.
00:55:21 ►
It also triggers glossolalia,
00:55:24 ►
spontaneous displays of language-like activity.
00:55:28 ►
And I imagine that the secret to understanding
00:55:32 ►
the emergence of language
00:55:33 ►
is to realize that language was fully developed
00:55:38 ►
before meaning was attached to it,
00:55:42 ►
that it’s an abstract expressionist activity
00:55:46 ►
for most of the history of its use,
00:55:48 ►
and only in the past 50,000 years or so
00:55:52 ►
has it been enslaved to the concept of symbolic activity.
00:55:58 ►
The mystery of our position in nature
00:56:02 ►
has to do with the fact that
00:56:05 ►
like that
00:56:08 ►
the well let me put it this
00:56:10 ►
way all primates
00:56:12 ►
clear back to squirrel
00:56:14 ►
monkeys and lemurs
00:56:15 ►
have dominance
00:56:18 ►
hierarchies male dominance
00:56:20 ►
hierarchies what this means is
00:56:22 ►
that the young hard
00:56:24 ►
bodied longfanged males control
00:56:27 ►
everybody, the elderly, the females, the young, homosexuals, everybody is under the control.
00:56:34 ►
And what happened to us as a species by designer accident is another issue which we can discuss.
00:56:44 ►
Designer accident is another issue which we can discuss.
00:56:48 ►
But what happened to us is that for perhaps as long as a million years, by including psilocybin in the diet,
00:56:52 ►
we inhibited this tendency to form these dominance hierarchies.
00:56:57 ►
That’s what the group sex was all about.
00:57:00 ►
It represents a boundary dissolution.
00:57:29 ►
It represents a boundary dissolution. You see, in an orgiastic society, lines of male paternity cannot be traced. Consequently, a much more cohesive social mind, if you will. We functioned like this for perhaps 150,000 years in the light of consciousness. What was
00:57:38 ►
happening on the African plain was a slow migration of behaviors and and habits toward the domestication of cattle
00:57:49 ►
it began you see with our truly primitive hominid ancestors probably just following along behind
00:57:58 ►
these large herds of ungulate animals living on lion kills and stuff like that.
00:58:05 ►
But what following along behind cattle means is a familiarity with manure.
00:58:11 ►
And what that means is mushrooms in a tropical grassland environment.
00:58:15 ►
And over the millennia, the cattle, the mushrooms, and the human beings
00:58:22 ►
were drawn into a tighter and tighter symbiosis
00:58:25 ►
so that at the melting of the last glaciers 22,000 years ago,
00:58:30 ►
from then until about 10,000 BC,
00:58:34 ►
what you actually had was a kind of partnership paradise
00:58:39 ►
and the actual moment of human archaic fulfillment
00:58:45 ►
when men and women and human beings and the environment
00:58:50 ►
and everything was in balance for perhaps 10,000 years.
00:58:57 ►
And in that period, and it was not dramatic,
00:59:02 ►
I don’t mean to imply that,
00:59:03 ►
it was a process stretched out over the last 100,000 years. In that period, the things that make us most play, technology, all of these things came into being.
00:59:34 ►
Well, then when the mushroom religion faded and human populations blossomed out over the planet and the Sahara turned dry and the cradle was emptied
00:59:46 ►
these
00:59:48 ►
these
00:59:49 ►
pharmacologically suppressed patterns
00:59:52 ►
of male dominance
00:59:54 ►
reasserted themselves
00:59:55 ►
I mean there was literally a
00:59:58 ►
reversion to a set of
01:00:00 ►
behaviors that had been chemically suppressed
01:00:02 ►
for a very very long time
01:00:04 ►
and you get then control of women by men, classism, xenophobia, warfare,
01:00:13 ►
the whole set of screwball institutions that have pushed us to the brink of Armageddon
01:00:20 ►
come into play right then when we grew beyond the bounds of this
01:00:26 ►
symbiotic relation with psilocybin so that was the chimpanzee strain that you
01:00:32 ►
discussed who still have is that current is that it that strength is done what
01:00:36 ►
are you called is that’s the bone new bow we’re still assignment still grows
01:00:39 ►
and they still no no the none of these primates are grassland creatures.
01:00:48 ►
This was a unique human thing,
01:00:52 ►
probably because what happened was the forest environments in which we were at climax turned into islands,
01:00:58 ►
and the only environment available, they were islanded by grassland,
01:01:02 ►
the only environment available.
01:01:04 ►
And as the resource base in the canopy shrank,
01:01:07 ►
there was real pressure to explore this new environment.
01:01:13 ►
Grasslands are very recent.
01:01:15 ►
I mean, all the species of the grasslands can be found in the forest understory. And the forest itself is, you know,
01:01:28 ►
has many, many orders of magnitude more species than the grasslands, yeah.
01:01:30 ►
There’s a lot of people that say
01:01:32 ►
that the change happened
01:01:33 ►
when extraterrestrials came down
01:01:35 ►
and influenced the primates.
01:01:37 ►
Do you have any feeling?
01:01:38 ►
Well, there was a little genuflection
01:01:40 ►
to that in my rap
01:01:42 ►
when I said whether by chance or design our remote ancestors
01:01:49 ►
contacted the mushroom if you want to the extraterrestrials are in a sense an unnecessary
01:01:56 ►
hypothesis because it could have been perfectly chance that we encountered these mushrooms in the environment. The fact that they are so extraterrestrial in presentation.
01:02:10 ►
Actually, I was thinking about this two nights ago in the middle of the night,
01:02:13 ►
and Alan Bediner and I got quite excited because I saw more clearly than I’d ever seen before
01:02:21 ►
how this extraterrestrial pharmacology deal might work and it’s something like this
01:02:31 ►
imagine that you are an extraterrestrial with an incredibly advanced technical understanding of
01:02:40 ►
life matter so forth and so on so that you can essentially produce anything at the technological level. And for some reason, you want to contact a primate on the third planet of a G-type star off on the edge of Baboon Wazoo.
01:03:02 ►
and so then but you know you’re advanced
01:03:04 ►
you’re millions of years in advance of us
01:03:06 ►
and you have advanced ethics
01:03:08 ►
and so forth and so on
01:03:09 ►
so what you can’t do
01:03:11 ►
nor would it be fruitful
01:03:13 ►
is to land trillion ton
01:03:16 ►
beryllium ships
01:03:18 ►
in the center of North Dakota
01:03:20 ►
and hand out
01:03:22 ►
a cancer cure or something like that
01:03:24 ►
so it doesn’t something like that.
01:03:27 ►
So it doesn’t work like that.
01:03:32 ►
What you want to do is you want to have a contact with this species,
01:03:37 ►
but you don’t want it to be invasive at all, and you don’t, in a sense, even want the species to realize
01:03:41 ►
that the contact is, fact that and so you come and and by some means you
01:03:50 ►
study the situation on this planet that you want to penetrate and you and what comes to you is you
01:03:56 ►
say well they they uh have a curious lacuna in their epistemology.
01:04:05 ►
They intoxicate themselves chemically
01:04:09 ►
and do not apply the ordinary rules of evidentiary completion
01:04:15 ►
to these episodes of intoxication.
01:04:19 ►
Therefore, we will design a chemical approach.
01:04:25 ►
We will seed ourselves into the environment we will design a chemical approach we will
01:04:26 ►
seed ourselves into the
01:04:28 ►
environment and place ourselves
01:04:31 ►
in a dimension where they only
01:04:32 ►
encounter us in
01:04:34 ►
this domain of sanctioned
01:04:37 ►
peculiarity
01:04:38 ►
in other words
01:04:41 ►
we will hide behind
01:04:42 ►
the pink elephants
01:04:44 ►
and then In other words, we will hide behind the pink elephants.
01:04:51 ►
And then you, because it is like that.
01:04:53 ►
It is very much like that.
01:04:55 ►
Any of you have dealt with the mushroom.
01:04:59 ►
I mean, it presents itself, it’s incredibly kind to the beginner.
01:05:04 ►
And it presents itself in this cheerful, almost nursery-like, almost absurdly beguiling kind of mode.
01:05:08 ►
It’s like, welcome, come in.
01:05:11 ►
We’re all having fun here.
01:05:13 ►
You come too, orange juice.
01:05:20 ►
But as time goes on, you learn that no surface is the bottom and that it has these aspects to its personality.
01:05:36 ►
And I think that, I don’t know, I just saw with great clarity the other night how this would be the strategy of a super mind.
01:05:49 ►
It would not come in 3D.
01:05:51 ►
It would come through the mental dimension.
01:05:54 ►
It would either come through dream
01:05:55 ►
or it would come through an intoxication of some sort.
01:06:00 ►
And shamanism, these people have adjusted to this. I mean, this is the faith of shamanism these people have adjusted to this i mean this is the faith of shamanism
01:06:08 ►
for a hundred thousand years people have been going into trance and talking to spirits and you
01:06:17 ►
know we only got rid of this notion 300 years ago in a civilization so ass backward that we’re murdering the planet so how sure can we be
01:06:27 ►
that this concept of spirit doesn’t actually hold some water yeah so what use would the contact be
01:06:34 ►
unless the the primate race knew they were being contacted well it’s deepening is what’s happening
01:06:41 ►
whatever this thing is it’s patient and it’s willing to take a million years
01:06:47 ►
to reveal its true agenda
01:06:50 ►
so what it starts out is
01:06:52 ►
it says
01:06:53 ►
you can be my friend
01:06:55 ►
I’ll tell you what the weather is going to be next week
01:07:01 ►
I’ll tell you where the reindeer have gone
01:07:04 ►
you can use this information to become a
01:07:07 ►
high mucky muck in your social group. And furthermore, I will tell you how to set bones,
01:07:14 ►
how to treat disease, so forth and so on. So what it is, is it’s their meme traders. They trade knowledge for what?
01:07:25 ►
That’s the question.
01:07:27 ►
Involvement.
01:07:28 ►
They want involvement.
01:07:30 ►
They are somehow running the connection.
01:07:35 ►
We aren’t.
01:07:36 ►
They, in other words, they decided to initiate it.
01:07:39 ►
They designed these compounds or somehow insinuated themselves into this mental dimension.
01:07:47 ►
They have a plan.
01:07:48 ►
We don’t know the plan.
01:07:50 ►
And it seems to be, you know, in a nutshell, something about the condensation of the word.
01:08:00 ►
Their program is a program of linguistic reformation.
01:08:04 ►
Their program is a program of linguistic reformation.
01:08:11 ►
They are the bearers of the news that language can become a thing seen.
01:08:18 ►
They are the purveyors of a higher order of the logos.
01:08:23 ►
And, you know, what all this means is very hard to say.
01:08:28 ►
Science is, in a sense, sold us short in this dimension.
01:08:35 ►
I mean, we’re not in as opportune a position to understand this as rainforest ayahuasqueros are or pygmies singing in the rainforest.
01:08:41 ►
It’s really hard for us to come back in
01:08:45 ►
to what this is all about.
01:08:47 ►
Yeah.
01:08:48 ►
Would you clarify,
01:08:49 ►
is the mushroom the messenger
01:08:52 ►
or is that this other race?
01:08:56 ►
I’m a little unclear on that.
01:08:58 ►
Well, I mean, it’s hard.
01:09:00 ►
I’m a little unclear on it myself.
01:09:02 ►
You know, I’m the kid who took the radio apart
01:09:06 ►
to find the little people
01:09:07 ►
and
01:09:10 ►
I learned from that experience
01:09:15 ►
that I think of the mushroom
01:09:18 ►
as the transmitter
01:09:21 ►
but it may be the alien itself
01:09:24 ►
it’s very hard to say
01:09:26 ►
we’ve had this discussion before
01:09:28 ►
about how if you were
01:09:30 ►
if you were able
01:09:32 ►
well that since 1950
01:09:34 ►
we’ve been aware of the existence
01:09:36 ►
of DNA
01:09:37 ►
and we already some 40
01:09:40 ►
50 years later whatever it is
01:09:41 ►
are on the brink of the
01:09:44 ►
human gene sequencing project.
01:09:47 ►
Well, any species which could claim intelligence
01:09:51 ►
would, part of intelligence by definition, I would think,
01:09:56 ►
is knowing your complete genetic sequence.
01:09:59 ►
And what that places in your hands
01:10:02 ►
is the possibility of designing yourself.
01:10:05 ►
And when you take that point of view What that places in your hands is the possibility of designing yourself.
01:10:09 ►
And when you take that point of view and look at the mushroom,
01:10:14 ►
the mushroom may have started out as a gorilla or a salamander or a coral reef or anything else.
01:10:17 ►
But at some point in its evolutionary history,
01:10:21 ►
it took conscious control of what it looks like.
01:10:26 ►
And so here it is.
01:10:27 ►
It’s the perfect organism.
01:10:29 ►
All fungi are what are called primary decomposers.
01:10:33 ►
They only live on dead matter.
01:10:37 ►
Comparing that to vegetarianism,
01:10:41 ►
vegetarianism looks like an orgy of slaughter
01:10:44 ►
compared to
01:10:45 ►
this style of relating
01:10:48 ►
to the environment. And then
01:10:50 ►
you know, it has this
01:10:51 ►
cobwebby structure.
01:10:54 ►
It touches reality
01:10:56 ►
so lightly. And yet
01:10:58 ►
it can spread through acres.
01:11:00 ►
It can weigh more than a
01:11:02 ►
sperm whale. It is
01:11:04 ►
so tenacious that probably the star itself would have to explode to eliminate fungi from this planet.
01:11:12 ►
So it’s a strange contradiction of enormous endurance and strength.
01:11:19 ►
The spores can percolate through interstellar space.
01:11:23 ►
And yet, you know, it’s diaphanous, ephemeral,
01:11:27 ►
hardly more than a cobweb.
01:11:30 ►
Yeah?
01:11:31 ►
You talked yesterday about
01:11:33 ►
anguishing the unspeakable,
01:11:36 ►
or someone used that terminology.
01:11:38 ►
Have you ever really thought about the story that you’re telling,
01:11:41 ►
or can you articulate it in a circular, a causal kind of way
01:11:49 ►
rather than a typical story?
01:11:52 ►
Something about the very nature
01:11:54 ►
of what we’re talking about
01:11:55 ►
seems like there’s a whole other way,
01:11:59 ►
a deeper way to see this.
01:12:01 ►
We want to talk about time
01:12:03 ►
as if it’s a line,
01:12:05 ►
and time sure doesn’t look that way to me on
01:12:07 ►
so I don’t know if anyone else here
01:12:09 ►
knows what I’m talking about.
01:12:10 ►
Is there some other way that we can
01:12:12 ►
Well, actually
01:12:15 ►
the notes I made this morning
01:12:17 ►
for talking in case
01:12:20 ►
questions didn’t carry
01:12:22 ►
us home to
01:12:23 ►
Mama
01:12:24 ►
had to do with this
01:12:28 ►
a psychedelic cosmology
01:12:30 ►
we want to talk about
01:12:33 ►
this happened, this caused this, this caused this
01:12:37 ►
no
01:12:38 ►
see I think that what psychedelic
01:12:43 ►
thinking can contribute to that kind of question
01:12:48 ►
is the realization that time is not driven by causality.
01:12:54 ►
The big news is that teleology has to return to models of how reality works.
01:13:04 ►
What I mean by teleology is purpose and
01:13:07 ►
let me explain the briefly the history of this problem when Darwin invented
01:13:15 ►
evolution in the 19th century it was possible to call yourself an English
01:13:21 ►
intellectual and actually believe that the planet came into existence on
01:13:26 ►
September the 4th, 4004 BC. That was a respectable intellectual opinion in British parlors of 1850.
01:13:37 ►
Darwin, the whole intellectual world was under the spell of deism the idea that the universe
01:13:46 ►
was the creation of a benevolent
01:13:48 ►
God who was guiding it
01:13:50 ►
from its birth to its death
01:13:52 ►
and Darwin
01:13:54 ►
opposed
01:13:56 ►
this and said
01:13:58 ►
in the phenomenon of random
01:14:00 ►
mutation and natural selection
01:14:02 ►
no
01:14:03 ►
plan no purpose,
01:14:08 ►
no end state is being sought.
01:14:11 ►
And the word evolution, strangely enough,
01:14:14 ►
has come to mean progress.
01:14:17 ►
But in the 19th century,
01:14:18 ►
it meant the opposite of progress.
01:14:20 ►
Evolution meant change without progress
01:14:24 ►
because progress implies that you are
01:14:27 ►
vectoring on some kind of goal
01:14:30 ►
and the idea was that nature was not
01:14:33 ►
vectoring on some kind of goal
01:14:34 ►
it was simply a proliferation of form
01:14:37 ►
and they took that to the limit
01:14:41 ►
in order to overthrow deism
01:14:43 ►
and it probably was a necessary episode in Western intellectual history.
01:14:48 ►
But it is now dragging us back.
01:14:52 ►
We’ve gotten rid of God.
01:14:54 ►
We don’t, as a secular society,
01:14:57 ►
we don’t have the benevolent God that the 19th century was laboring under.
01:15:03 ►
But we need to preserve this concept of purpose
01:15:07 ►
and where it’s coming from
01:15:10 ►
in secular scientific and mathematical thinking
01:15:14 ►
is in the domain of chaos dynamics
01:15:19 ►
and the concept of attractors
01:15:22 ►
which are maximizable goals in the evolution of a system,
01:15:32 ►
but that lie forward in time.
01:15:35 ►
And I maintain that in order to understand what is happening on this planet,
01:15:42 ►
you have to begin to play with a kind of dynamical attractor notion
01:15:49 ►
what has happened to us as a species let’s just pick a date let’s say a million years ago
01:15:56 ►
the tractor beam of the alien latched on to us and from that moment we have been moved inexorably
01:16:06 ►
through a script
01:16:09 ►
that has drawn us deeper and deeper and deeper
01:16:14 ►
into an involvement with matter
01:16:16 ►
into global connectivity
01:16:18 ►
into the elaboration of codes and symbols
01:16:22 ►
these are all things which the animal world
01:16:26 ►
knows nothing of on the scale
01:16:28 ►
that we are involved in these things
01:16:30 ►
history
01:16:31 ►
is the
01:16:33 ►
distortion of animal life
01:16:36 ►
that goes on
01:16:38 ►
for about 25,000
01:16:40 ►
years before an animal
01:16:42 ►
species is
01:16:44 ►
transmogrified into something incomprehensible.
01:16:48 ►
The nature of the alien contact is human history. That’s the footprint of the fact that ordinary
01:16:58 ►
biological and geological processes on this planet have been intersected by something that is coming from
01:17:06 ►
another dimension and the reason it’s so hard for us to see is because you know we’re so ephemeral
01:17:13 ►
i mean we live 70 years and then we’re gone and until very recently you know there were no
01:17:19 ►
historical records i mean we’re just beginning to put in place a picture of how weird our circumstance actually is.
01:17:30 ►
Human history is a phase transition of incredible brevity.
01:17:37 ►
It is inconceivable to think of human history meandering forward 500, 1,000, 5,000 years into the future?
01:17:48 ►
How can it be when we’re already talking about turning ourselves into fruit flies
01:17:54 ►
and downloading ourselves into gold deterbium cubes buried at the heart of Copernicus
01:17:59 ►
or something like that?
01:18:00 ►
With stuff like that on the agenda, the notion that you could conceive a future 500 years
01:18:08 ►
of extrapolation of present trends is impossible.
01:18:12 ►
Yeah?
01:18:13 ►
I don’t remember which book it was in,
01:18:15 ►
but it created this image of the end of time as we know it,
01:18:19 ►
or the end of history as we know it,
01:18:21 ►
and mankind’s ultimate goal being this transcending and leaving the planet.
01:18:29 ►
Like you created a picture of the earth as the womb, at which we would eventually leave.
01:18:34 ►
And I had a lot of trouble with that because it kind of made it sound like the whole, like
01:18:40 ►
our body was like this fuel cylinder that we would eventually, like, kind of break away from,
01:18:46 ►
this meeting of heads in space,
01:18:48 ►
or like the image of us in these space parks, you know,
01:18:51 ►
doing, watching some sort of three-dimensional Bugs Bunny
01:18:55 ►
on a holograph.
01:18:58 ►
Meanwhile, waterfalls and, you know,
01:19:01 ►
and the ocean and the mountains
01:19:02 ►
were still happening here on Earth.
01:19:04 ►
So I kind of got this leery kind of feel when I read that,
01:19:08 ►
and it was kind of like, oh, you know.
01:19:11 ►
So you want me to talk about that?
01:19:14 ►
No, I mean, I agree with you.
01:19:17 ►
It’s something we always talk about in these get-togethers,
01:19:21 ►
that we’re coming up on some kind of a bifurcation where we’re either going to
01:19:27 ►
have to make a choice uh in favor of waterfalls and pristine beaches or you know our electronic
01:19:36 ►
coral reefs that stretch from boston to atlanta and stuff like that and it it’s very hard. It’s a Gnostic choice.
01:19:46 ►
You know, the new age,
01:19:47 ►
we always like to get rid of all of our differences.
01:19:51 ►
Well, here’s one where I don’t think
01:19:53 ►
you can cut it both ways.
01:19:57 ►
Are we the caretakers of the earth?
01:20:02 ►
And is it our destiny to preserve all of this
01:20:06 ►
and enfold ourselves back into it?
01:20:09 ►
Or is that simply like fetal nostalgia for the womb
01:20:15 ►
and we’re headed someplace that you can’t even wrap your mind around?
01:20:20 ►
I don’t know.
01:20:21 ►
I mean, I think every sane person feels that tension in their personality because the techno allure is demonic. I mean, those shiny surfaces and flickering screens. And I mean, it has this weird sadomasochistic glitter coming off of it. That’s real. You’re not kidding yourself. That is really there.
01:20:46 ►
And yet it’s coming out of us, you know.
01:20:50 ►
And then the preservation of nature.
01:20:52 ►
You can think of different scenarios ranging from the very practical.
01:21:00 ►
If we really see the question comes down to reason or faith.
01:21:05 ►
Or not faith exactly, but reason or miracle.
01:21:10 ►
If there is not going to be a miracle,
01:21:14 ►
then we are in deep, deep trouble.
01:21:21 ►
We’ve talked in some of these groups about what I call
01:21:24 ►
the one woman, one child option.
01:21:27 ►
If you don’t believe there’s going to be a miracle,
01:21:30 ►
that might work
01:21:32 ►
because it would cut the Earth’s population in half in 40 years.
01:21:37 ►
It would liberate women the way no rhetoric
01:21:40 ►
or political policy ever could.
01:21:44 ►
But that’s a response where you still believe in management.
01:21:49 ►
You still believe that you are in control of where everything is headed.
01:21:54 ►
If in fact what is happening is not that we are the fructifying consequences
01:22:02 ►
of original sin or something like that,
01:22:05 ►
but that instead nature itself
01:22:12 ►
is undergoing some kind of crisis.
01:22:14 ►
In other words, we tend to assume
01:22:16 ►
and take responsibility for the crisis on this planet.
01:22:22 ►
But it may be that this is what planets are for,
01:22:26 ►
that they seed intelligence into the universe
01:22:31 ►
in a process that usually leaves that planet a smoking ruin.
01:22:38 ►
Because the mushroom said this once to me.
01:22:41 ►
I was bemoaning something.
01:22:44 ►
And it said said you shouldn’t
01:22:47 ►
worry this is what it’s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars
01:22:52 ►
I mean it’s not a simple matter to go some picking bananas in the tropical
01:23:00 ►
rainforest to building something the size of Manhattan that you propose to propel at 90%
01:23:07 ►
of the speed of light out to Alpha at Centauri. I mean, it’s just hair-raising to even contemplate
01:23:15 ►
this kind of thing. So it’s a real question, you know, we don’t, and probably a question we won’t
01:23:22 ►
be asked to answer, you know,
01:23:25 ►
because the decision is being collectively made every hour of every day by decisions.
01:23:31 ►
It may be that stuff like the ozone hole, that we have already passed the fail-safe point.
01:23:38 ►
It’s just that the news hasn’t arrived on your desk yet, but that already the womb is closing behind us.
01:23:47 ►
Already the options are being foreshortened by continued lack of response to the crisis.
01:23:54 ►
As far as what psychedelics say about this, what they seem to be good for is getting various
01:24:03 ►
magnifications on our dilemma. You know, just where are we in the
01:24:09 ►
cosmic order of things? The other thing that psychedelics show is this, and science and
01:24:17 ►
mathematics now catch up, is the fractal nature of the way things are ordered which means that in reference to what was said earlier
01:24:29 ►
about the holographic model of memory the fractal nature of reality means that the transcendental
01:24:37 ►
end state has left its trace in every subset of experience. And this is almost like a rational basis for mysticism.
01:24:48 ►
It means that looking for, was it Rumi or who was it said,
01:24:54 ►
looking for God in the cabbages is a purely legitimate enterprise.
01:25:00 ►
And in fact, God is in the cabbages
01:25:02 ►
and should be easily magnified and extracted therefrom.
01:25:10 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:25:17 ►
And in a future podcast, I’ll pick up where Terrence left off just now, but we’re bumping up against some of our time constraints.
01:25:24 ►
where Terrence left off just now, but we’re bumping up against some of our time constraints.
01:25:30 ►
However, for the part that we just listened to, do you remember the point where Terrence said that when he was a little kid, he took apart a radio to find the little people inside?
01:25:35 ►
Well, this will only take a minute, but I’ve first got to tell another one of my old man stories.
01:25:41 ►
When my oldest son was about four years old, and he’s over 50 now by the way, but back
01:25:47 ►
when he was a little guy, I was in the Navy and stationed in San Diego. At the time, our television
01:25:53 ►
was a 15-inch black and white job that used vacuum tubes. Now don’t laugh, because they all used tubes
01:25:59 ►
back then, and periodically one of the tubes would burn out out and so you’d have to take the TV apart
01:26:05 ►
and try to figure out which one had gone out. But not knowing for sure just by looking at them you’d
01:26:11 ►
always take three or four of them out at the same time and then go down to the local convenience
01:26:15 ►
store where there was a tube tester and stock of new tubes. Back then almost every dad became a
01:26:21 ►
part-time TV repairman. So one Saturday morning the TV won’t work, and so I’m
01:26:26 ►
taking out some of the tubes for my trip to the C-Store, and that’s when my wonderful little son
01:26:31 ►
says, which one has the cartoons in it? And that was a very logical question for a four-year-old
01:26:38 ►
back then. It’s obviously one of my cherished moments of being a father, and that was just a
01:26:44 ►
long way of saying that there’s nothing out of the ordinary about Terrence if he was looking for little people by taking his radio apart.
01:26:52 ►
Now early on in this talk, do you remember when Terrence was saying that for at least 100,000 years the human form has not been dramatically altered in any way?
01:27:02 ►
When he said that, did you think the same thing that I was
01:27:05 ►
thinking? My thought was that this statement is probably no longer true when we consider such
01:27:10 ►
things like pacemakers and vat-grown organs, electronic implants, and other such things.
01:27:17 ►
It seems to me that we may now be at the dawn of some new evolutionary step for humans.
01:27:23 ►
And I don’t know if this is a welcome thing or not,
01:27:25 ►
but it certainly seems to be underway.
01:27:28 ►
So that’s worth thinking about.
01:27:30 ►
And in closing, I’d like to go back to what Terrence was saying
01:27:33 ►
about a lack of response to the ecological crisis we face
01:27:38 ►
and what the psychedelic community can and is doing about this.
01:27:42 ►
And the more I think about it, the more I want to say. So what I’m going to do is to sign off for now Thank you. can become more involved in creating the kind of world that we want to leave to those who come after us.
01:28:05 ►
So for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:28:10 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.