Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.”
“We are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicone and glass.”
“ We are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort.”
“What is happening is a globalizing of intelligence.”
“The reductionists who want to say these drugs just perturb the brain I don’t think have taken enough of these things.”
“Our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.”
“I think psilocybin three or four times a year definitely means that you are a psychedelic person. For sure it means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff. It doesn’t take very much because it’s a way of thinking.”
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
https://vimeo.com/67246327?width=800&height=600
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
And today, December 23rd, is a very special day for me.
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For you see, on this day, 47 years ago, my ship returned to California from our little trip to Vietnam.
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And waiting on the pier for me was my four-year-old son and the exceptional woman who was then my wife
00:00:42 ►
and who had just given birth to our daughter three days earlier.
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So it was on this day, not on the day of her birth, that I first saw the infant girl who is now the mother of my three oldest grandchildren.
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It was really a good day, just like today is shaping up to be,
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because at the end of the day I’ll be at the beach watching the sunset with some close friends and family.
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All the consumerism aside, this is really a lovely time of year for some of us.
00:01:11 ►
However, now that the end of the year holiday season is upon us,
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I’m sorry to report that our other correspondents who have been supplying talks for us to listen to here in the salon
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are all fully engaged in the season, I guess, just as you
00:01:25 ►
perhaps are, and as a result, they haven’t had a chance to get any new material to me.
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So, my dear friend, it looks like that for the next couple of weeks, it’s just going
00:01:35 ►
to be you and me and our old friend, the Bard Terrence McKenna, here in the salon.
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Now, if you listened to last week’s podcast, you may be wondering what direction I’ll be moving in next.
00:01:46 ►
Well, relax, the salon isn’t going anywhere and the format isn’t going to change,
00:01:51 ►
but the topics, hopefully, will begin to tend to follow the prevailing mood among some of us,
00:01:57 ►
and I’ll try to make more of a point about intersections between thoughts of long ago from the Bard McKenna and events on the ground today.
00:02:06 ►
And along the way, I’ll also try to fill in some of the history that has led up to where we are
00:02:10 ►
at this particular moment in time. But first, let’s rejoin Terence McKenna at the workshop he
00:02:16 ►
gave in May of 1993, 21 years ago, which is actually before many of our fellow salonners were even born. And we listened to the first part of this talk
00:02:28 ►
in Podcast 426, by the way. Now, after we listen to what
00:02:32 ►
Terrence has to say, I’ll be back with a few more comments and another of my
00:02:36 ►
little stories about the tribe. So, let’s begin with a new question
00:02:40 ►
for Terrence as this workshop session begins.
00:02:45 ►
How does your, when you were talking about the alien
00:02:48 ►
has latched onto us and is pulling with his
00:02:52 ►
tractor beam a long time ago, how do you relate
00:02:56 ►
your concept of the alien to
00:03:00 ►
world religions concept of the creator
00:03:04 ►
or, you know, to world religions concept of the creator or man’s karmic evolution to nirvana or samadhi?
00:03:16 ►
Well, I think what these religions are doing
00:03:21 ►
is that they are interacting with this same intuition
00:03:27 ►
the grandiosity comes in the sense that i don’t think we’re dealing with the god who hung the
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stars like lamps in heaven you know what milton said uh that’s some whole other scale but what we’re dealing with is something like the god of biology
00:03:47 ►
that there is something on this planet
00:03:50 ►
that we have completely overlooked
00:03:52 ►
I mean look at the situation
00:03:54 ►
we emerged from
00:03:57 ►
berry picking to photographing
00:04:01 ►
Europa in about
00:04:04 ►
a million years.
00:04:07 ►
Well, life has been on this planet,
00:04:12 ►
higher animal life,
00:04:13 ►
I don’t just mean algae and lichens and like that,
00:04:16 ►
I mean higher animal life
00:04:17 ►
has been running around on this planet
00:04:19 ►
for 300 million years.
00:04:24 ►
Well, how many, you know, biology is an engine of strategies.
00:04:31 ►
How many peculiar byways of evolution might be pursued,
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explored, and then perhaps quenched on that kind of a time scale?
00:04:43 ►
So we assume the only kind of intelligence there can be is our kind.
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But then the psychedelic introduces us,
00:04:53 ►
and then we have a limited number of choices.
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After you fiddle with psilocybin for a while,
00:04:59 ►
the question of whether or not there is an alien intelligence becomes moot.
00:05:04 ►
There is an alien intelligence becomes moot. There is an alien intelligence.
00:05:07 ►
And then the question is, what is it?
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And the choices are, and maybe you can help me add more,
00:05:14 ►
the choices are, it is a straightforward
00:05:17 ►
B-movie extraterrestrial of some sort
00:05:21 ►
that is God knows for what reason
00:05:23 ►
but coming at us through this.
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That’s one possibility.
00:05:27 ►
It is the Gaian mind in some version of that.
00:05:32 ►
In other words, it’s the integrated intelligence
00:05:35 ►
of the biome of the planet
00:05:37 ►
that because probably of the historical crisis
00:05:40 ►
is actually noticed us
00:05:43 ►
and is trying to twiddle our knobs
00:05:46 ►
in some dimension we’re not even
00:05:48 ►
aware of so that’s it
00:05:49 ►
extraterrestrial guy in mind
00:05:52 ►
could be
00:05:54 ►
some
00:05:55 ►
strange technological
00:05:57 ►
experiment launched from
00:06:00 ►
the future
00:06:00 ►
in other words since these things
00:06:03 ►
can communicate with
00:06:05 ►
us since they
00:06:06 ►
seem to have
00:06:06 ►
some kind of
00:06:08 ►
value system
00:06:09 ►
related to
00:06:11 ►
our problems
00:06:12 ►
maybe they are
00:06:13 ►
human beings
00:06:14 ►
of some sort
00:06:15 ►
perhaps it’s a
00:06:18 ►
time travel
00:06:19 ►
project in
00:06:20 ►
some distant
00:06:21 ►
century that
00:06:22 ►
has decided
00:06:23 ►
that the key
00:06:24 ►
screw up occurred in the 20th century
00:06:27 ►
and they’re going back trying to twiddle the knob.
00:06:30 ►
Notice that these theories have greater and lesser levels of elegance
00:06:35 ►
and I’m not advocating any one.
00:06:37 ►
Here’s one that I think is interesting and mildly alarming.
00:06:43 ►
is interesting and mildly alarming.
00:06:47 ►
This is the shamanic one,
00:06:53 ►
that this entity, this contact, whatever it is,
00:06:56 ►
is somehow coming from the afterworld,
00:07:02 ►
that this is a project launched from an ecology of souls,
00:07:08 ►
that somehow the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead
00:07:10 ►
is what is at stake here.
00:07:12 ►
I mean, now this is from, you know,
00:07:15 ►
raised as logical positivists,
00:07:17 ►
this is the one you would choose last.
00:07:20 ►
I think it’s much easier to believe
00:07:22 ►
in meddling extraterrestrials
00:07:25 ►
than that, you know, Uncle Herman and Aunt Fanny
00:07:29 ►
are somehow reaching in from the great beyond, yeah.
00:07:34 ►
I’ve heard you say before,
00:07:36 ►
I’m almost certain I’ve heard you say before,
00:07:38 ►
that you can define the they, the alien, the creature, whatever,
00:07:43 ►
at particular levels or dosage of hallucinogenic properties,
00:07:49 ►
that at precisely five measured grams of psilocybin,
00:07:55 ►
so lives, there lives the pink elephant.
00:07:58 ►
You, and I’ve heard you allude to the fact
00:08:00 ►
that not only for you is that a consistent dimension,
00:08:04 ►
but that for other people that you compare notes with who do consistent levels,
00:08:08 ►
that there are dimensions that are measurable,
00:08:10 ►
and that the, let’s now call it alien, consistently show up there.
00:08:16 ►
Well, yeah, that’s basically right.
00:08:18 ►
I mean, everybody views it through the filter of their own psychology,
00:08:22 ►
but everybody views this room through the filter of their own psychology, but everybody views this room through the filter of their own psychology.
00:08:26 ►
And it’s not that,
00:08:27 ►
we assume that it’s not that different
00:08:30 ►
for each of us.
00:08:32 ►
Yeah, I mean,
00:08:33 ►
what we’re talking about here
00:08:34 ►
is a phenomenon
00:08:35 ►
that contravenes reason,
00:08:38 ►
but that fortunately is replicatable.
00:08:43 ►
You know, it’s not like
00:08:44 ►
camping in cornfields
00:08:46 ►
waiting for flying saucers.
00:08:48 ►
If you camp in the cornfield and take six dried grams,
00:08:51 ►
it will find you.
00:08:57 ►
Yes.
00:08:58 ►
So finally we found a causal relationship
00:09:02 ►
which indicates a new level of the dialogue
00:09:06 ►
you see always the dialogue
00:09:07 ►
before was they could fax you
00:09:10 ►
in the form of lights
00:09:12 ►
in the sky, messiahs
00:09:14 ►
miracles, but you couldn’t fax
00:09:16 ►
them, now
00:09:17 ►
there is this peculiar
00:09:20 ►
zone
00:09:21 ►
that has opened up
00:09:23 ►
called the psychedelic zone the psychic zone, the psychological zone
00:09:28 ►
and of course we’re uncertain of the status of what goes on
00:09:32 ►
there ontologically, so you’re perfectly free to believe
00:09:36 ►
it was just a hallucination, or you’re perfectly
00:09:40 ►
free to believe that it was an ambassadorial
00:09:44 ►
contact with an alien mind. Yeah?
00:09:47 ►
Getting back to a couple of things and linking them together, you talk about
00:09:51 ►
the afterworld or the shaman’s idea that it comes from a society
00:09:56 ►
of souls. And this is one of the possible
00:10:00 ►
explanations for what this contact is. And then talking about the
00:10:04 ►
soul as the ultimate tool.
00:10:06 ►
Another thing that,
00:10:08 ►
another idea that goes
00:10:10 ►
around in mystical circles is that
00:10:12 ►
and even actually
00:10:13 ►
Carl talks about this, Carl is fascinated,
00:10:16 ►
is that one of the most important
00:10:18 ►
things we can do while we’re alive is
00:10:20 ►
develop a soul and
00:10:22 ►
strengthen a soul. And that this
00:10:24 ►
is our tool in the afterlife,
00:10:26 ►
and that all this atmosphere is for
00:10:32 ►
is that because we can’t actually strengthen our soul on the other side
00:10:35 ►
because there’s no friction, there’s no positive and negative.
00:10:38 ►
So this is the place where we can actually develop
00:10:40 ►
an internal inner shining body
00:10:43 ►
that is separate from this body,
00:10:48 ►
but that this body is used as a tool to create that one.
00:10:51 ►
So that’s something I wanted to put out there.
00:10:55 ►
And as a possibility, I don’t know.
00:10:58 ►
Well, this would be probably a good moment
00:11:00 ►
to return to the gentleman’s question about hypercarbolation.
00:11:06 ►
Yeah, I mean, it isn’t only castanated
00:11:08 ►
it’s a persistent idea
00:11:10 ►
worldwide at a certain strata
00:11:12 ►
that what life
00:11:14 ►
is for is
00:11:16 ►
the building and stabilizing
00:11:18 ►
and perfecting of
00:11:20 ►
an after death vehicle
00:11:22 ►
of some sort
00:11:23 ►
a light body.
00:11:26 ►
Hyper-carbolation.
00:11:27 ►
Well, hyper-carbolation, in the book I wrote called True Hallucinations,
00:11:34 ►
my brother proposed to essentially treat all this metaphysical baffle garb as actually engineering uh you know the the material
00:11:48 ►
for an engineering project and he set out to uh emanatize the soul to actually force it to
00:11:58 ►
physically appear in nearby physical space as a kind of little spinning disc-shaped object which would follow you around
00:12:07 ►
it would sort of be like a halo we would enter into a world where there were two kinds of people
00:12:13 ►
those who had gotten their after-death vehicle outside their body and into visible form and those
00:12:20 ►
who were still working on it and the idea being that this is a union
00:12:25 ►
of spirit and matter through
00:12:28 ►
the intercession of
00:12:30 ►
higher dimensional
00:12:31 ►
space I mean there’s a lot of
00:12:33 ►
intellectual and linguistic
00:12:35 ►
side of hand here nobody
00:12:37 ►
knows what he’s talking about
00:12:39 ►
the problem is that
00:12:41 ►
out of such theorizing
00:12:43 ►
came tangible consequences.
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And I still think that really what we need to do now
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is become actually conscious of the possibility of a technological,
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I guess that’s the word for it,
00:13:00 ►
undertaking to give birth to the collective soul of the species I mean the flying saucer which
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Jung made this very clear the flying saucer which haunts our collective imagination is a totality
00:13:18 ►
symbol that is in the unconscious but it is moving toward conscious
00:13:25 ►
appearance and its peculiar
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mercurial interfacing
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with the observer
00:13:31 ►
indicates that it is something
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on the borderline between the
00:13:35 ►
conscious and the unconscious mind
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but that’s a temporal
00:13:39 ►
a temporary situation
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and conceivably
00:13:46 ►
this thing is moving toward us
00:13:48 ►
and it vibrates with the alien
00:13:51 ►
but it is in fact ourselves
00:13:53 ►
and there is a kind of recurso here
00:13:57 ►
where the thing we lost
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at the descent from Eden
00:14:01 ►
is actually on a collision course, coming back again.
00:14:07 ►
This is the idea of the archaic revival, that we can really deconstruct reality in a fairly radical way.
00:14:17 ►
This is not my idea, by the way. I mean, this is what alchemy turned into.
00:14:25 ►
is what alchemy turned into and in the 16th century people like Gerhard Dorn and Robert Flood and John Dee and Michael Sandovorgis and all of these
00:14:31 ►
people were on the trail of what they called the lapis or the philosopher’s
00:14:37 ►
stone and it was a place where the normal either-or algebra of reality gave way to some kind of
00:14:45 ►
Boolean both and
00:14:47 ►
exception and strangely
00:14:50 ►
enough that strategy
00:14:52 ►
of mixed algebras now
00:14:53 ►
characterizes how quantum
00:14:55 ►
physics describes the
00:14:57 ►
base energy field of existence
00:15:00 ►
paradox
00:15:01 ►
cannot be eliminated
00:15:04 ►
from your model without sinking the model, because it becomes trivial.
00:15:11 ►
Yeah?
00:15:13 ►
We’re kind of talking about the end of history, and I’ve seen some of your tapes on the time wave wave. You’re writing on that.
00:15:27 ►
And the thing that occurs to me that this point that you’re talking about,
00:15:31 ►
like the 12 point,
00:15:32 ►
could be like the birth of a new kingdom of life.
00:15:37 ►
Like there’s, you’ve got the plant kingdom
00:15:40 ►
and the animal kingdom.
00:15:41 ►
And fungi is kind of thought of as a separate kingdom.
00:15:43 ►
But software is potentially a new kingdom of life
00:15:48 ►
that’s really coming out of the animal kingdom.
00:15:52 ►
It’s going to be an expression of human creativity and imagination.
00:15:57 ►
So that could be either part of that whole transition part
00:16:02 ►
or maybe the thing that makes, that really sort of blows people’s minds apart
00:16:06 ►
when they realize that we’ve like brought,
00:16:10 ►
we’ve birthed this new life force
00:16:12 ►
into the universe?
00:16:15 ►
Well, yes.
00:16:16 ►
I mean, we, it’s not clear
00:16:19 ►
that it will be overt and manageable
00:16:21 ►
and that there it will be in the laboratory it’s that it’s happening all
00:16:26 ►
around us it’s that we are we are embedding ourselves in a matrix of silicon and glass
00:16:34 ►
we are actually in the same way that free-swimming eukaryotic bacteria turn themselves into
00:16:41 ►
mitochondria and powered the cell by embedding themselves in primitive gels
00:16:47 ►
we are beginning to embed ourselves into a cultural membrane of some sort and and we are
00:16:56 ►
essentially the genetically driven components of an organometallic self-perpetuating matrix
00:17:05 ►
that is on the epigenetic level
00:17:09 ►
redesigning itself all the time.
00:17:12 ►
It was McLuhan who said
00:17:15 ►
human beings have become the genitals of machines.
00:17:18 ►
We exist only to improve next year’s model.
00:17:23 ►
And that is a kind of evolution, you see.
00:17:26 ►
I mean, the machines,
00:17:28 ►
they don’t change their physical form every million years.
00:17:32 ►
They change their physical form every 18 months
00:17:35 ►
because human engineers are doing this.
00:17:38 ►
Nine million computers a month
00:17:40 ►
are being linked into the global network.
00:17:44 ►
There’s one theory of brain function that says that the higher order functions of the
00:17:50 ►
brain are simply emergent properties that come out of a network that has 9 billion plus
00:17:57 ►
switching potentials in it, while our global network is quickly approaching this critical number
00:18:05 ►
so what is happening
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is a globalizing of intelligence
00:18:09 ►
new as this sounds you know these
00:18:11 ►
kinds of ideas have been around for a while
00:18:13 ►
if you haven’t read Teilhard de Chardin
00:18:16 ►
who you know my god
00:18:18 ►
S.J.
00:18:20 ►
right and he
00:18:21 ►
talks about an omega point
00:18:23 ►
and what he calls the noosphere, the atmosphere of electronic mind that is emerging as a shell and closing the planet. Yeah.
00:18:35 ►
I’m sort of backtracking from your list of possible explanations.
00:18:40 ►
Uh-huh, fine. And this one doesn’t, I’d like to hear your feedback on it.
00:18:46 ►
It doesn’t really sit real well with me.
00:18:48 ►
It’s sort of cynical, a little bit materialist.
00:18:50 ►
But, I mean, who’s to say that the psychedelic experience is not just really a brain experience,
00:19:01 ►
an experience that really is not transcendent, but yet we are so used to a very limited way
00:19:08 ►
in which we experience reality
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and use such a small section of our brain, supposedly,
00:19:15 ►
that it just seems so outwardly foreign
00:19:18 ►
that we externalize it.
00:19:21 ►
I mean, I’m not saying I’m biased,
00:19:22 ►
but just to add to the list,
00:19:24 ►
and what do you say to that?
00:19:26 ►
Well, what I think the major evidence against that view
00:19:31 ►
is the amount of, the sheer complexity and amount of information
00:19:38 ►
that seems to be in there.
00:19:41 ►
If evolution works with some kind of economy
00:19:45 ►
and that species that work without economy
00:19:49 ►
are eliminated
00:19:50 ►
then what in the world would have been
00:19:54 ►
the evolutionary res in detra
00:19:57 ►
of preserving this visionary function
00:20:00 ►
for 500 million years of evolution
00:20:03 ►
until you reach the human species.
00:20:06 ►
It seems to lack functional and engineering integrity
00:20:11 ►
as an approach.
00:20:13 ►
The reductionists who want to say
00:20:16 ►
that these drugs just perturb the brain
00:20:19 ►
I don’t think have taken enough of these things.
00:20:24 ►
It is not a mishmash that you get.
00:20:28 ►
What you get is order, often a more ordered and symmetrical and self-satisfying world than the one we’re living in.
00:20:41 ►
And as far as the mystical and metaphysical people are concerned
00:20:47 ►
they’re always saying there’s no difference between the inside and the outside
00:20:52 ►
until you suggest they take psychedelic drugs
00:20:55 ►
then they start raving about the necessary purity that has to be maintained
00:21:01 ►
and how there must be no artificial means.
00:21:05 ►
Well, which is it?
00:21:06 ►
That there’s no inside and no outside
00:21:08 ►
or that these anxiety-riddled boundaries
00:21:12 ►
have to be maintained at all costs?
00:21:16 ►
The problem is, you know, meaning
00:21:18 ►
and the meaning of meaning.
00:21:21 ►
Wasn’t it F.H. Bradley who wrote a book of that title I think
00:21:25 ►
what is meaning and then
00:21:29 ►
what does it mean that there
00:21:31 ►
is meaning is it simply
00:21:34 ►
as Whitehead suggests
00:21:35 ►
the perception of pattern
00:21:37 ►
as such or
00:21:39 ►
is there
00:21:40 ►
eventually some kind of a
00:21:43 ►
metaphysic some kind of a discernible mega-pattern in all of this?
00:21:52 ►
My thing is basically to raise questions
00:21:55 ►
and to destroy culturally contrived answers
00:22:00 ►
because I think they’re all horseshit.
00:22:04 ►
It hasn’t worked. We do not know where we are
00:22:08 ►
in the game. We’re not able to recognize the players. We’ve forgotten what our waitress looks
00:22:15 ►
like. And the whole thing is just we’re way at sea in this situation and what culture seems
00:22:26 ►
to do is some kind of strategy
00:22:28 ►
for calming everybody down
00:22:30 ►
cooking up some
00:22:32 ►
passel of lies
00:22:33 ►
which then everybody works
00:22:36 ►
with that and doesn’t notice
00:22:38 ►
the peculiarity of it all
00:22:40 ►
this is why I think psychedelics are so
00:22:42 ►
controversial because
00:22:44 ►
they break down cultural explanations, whatever they are. to go and you know it’s a rare
00:23:05 ►
personality that enjoys
00:23:07 ►
kicking all the supports
00:23:09 ►
out and just
00:23:11 ►
watching it all collapse
00:23:13 ►
into the big who knows
00:23:15 ►
but it’s very edifying
00:23:17 ►
because it’s honest
00:23:19 ►
I think
00:23:20 ►
well but what’s happening you see Isn’t that a logical threat to those who have a vested interest in maintaining these illusions?
00:23:27 ►
Well, but what’s happening, you see, is who has a vested interest in maintaining these illusions?
00:23:33 ►
People who want to die? Is that it?
00:23:37 ►
At one point, defense of the status quo made sense.
00:23:41 ►
Now, the straightest people in the world are beginning to quake
00:23:46 ►
in their boots. And the people
00:23:48 ►
who quote unquote run
00:23:49 ►
the world, they’ve got better
00:23:51 ►
information than you and I
00:23:53 ►
and they
00:23:55 ►
leave their offices
00:23:58 ►
white faced
00:24:00 ►
at night because they
00:24:02 ►
see that capitalism
00:24:04 ►
is finished
00:24:05 ►
because capitalism depends on an endlessly
00:24:08 ►
exploitable resource base to function
00:24:11 ►
they have no idea what you put in place
00:24:14 ►
of a market driven capitalist economy
00:24:18 ►
the population thing is under control
00:24:21 ►
it is out of control
00:24:23 ►
to get it under control you would have to take on
00:24:27 ►
the people who’ve run Western civilization for 1,700 years,
00:24:32 ►
i.e. the Roman Catholic Church.
00:24:34 ►
Who wants to dig into that mess?
00:24:37 ►
The ozone depletion of the atmosphere
00:24:40 ►
may have already passed criticality.
00:24:43 ►
That may be a death sentence waiting to be served,
00:24:48 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:24:49 ►
So I don’t think there is anybody…
00:24:54 ►
I think what we’re seeing is spreading panic
00:24:58 ►
in the control centers of Western civilization,
00:25:01 ►
and that very soon you can have a real discussion.
00:25:05 ►
Essentially, the Clinton thing is just a gesture in that direction.
00:25:11 ►
But eventually, we’re going to have to have a discussion about, you know,
00:25:15 ►
who gets to go to the lifeboats and who doesn’t and stuff like that,
00:25:20 ►
and it’s all going to be very dicey, I think.
00:25:22 ►
And it’s all going to be very dicey, I think.
00:25:31 ►
Could we just talk a little bit about how society then would be informed by psychedelics and what direction it might take,
00:25:33 ►
and how our present society could utilize this in a way that would be productive
00:25:39 ►
and not just a perpetuation of this whole sort of, you know, Nancy Reagan’s famous philosophy,
00:25:46 ►
just saying no type of thing.
00:25:49 ►
Well, our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.
00:25:55 ►
If we could actually feel the situation,
00:26:00 ►
everybody would immediately walk to the parking lot,
00:26:04 ►
get in their car, and go out and slave to stop the agony.
00:26:10 ►
But we don’t feel it.
00:26:12 ►
I mean, we see the pictures from Bosnia.
00:26:14 ►
We see the pictures from Somalia.
00:26:16 ►
We feel it to some degree.
00:26:18 ►
We send money, but we don’t stop consuming furiously.
00:26:22 ►
We don’t reconstruct our lives.
00:26:25 ►
Taking psychedelics, I think,
00:26:28 ►
because its primary function is to dissolve boundaries,
00:26:33 ►
it dissolves the boundary between you and the pain
00:26:37 ►
or the problem,
00:26:41 ►
and then you have to do something about it.
00:26:44 ►
Who do you propose in this society
00:26:47 ►
is going to distribute this stuff?
00:26:48 ►
I’d like to see that happen, I really would.
00:26:52 ►
But is it going to be the psychiatrist, psychologist,
00:26:54 ►
is it going to be the church?
00:26:55 ►
Or is it just going to be a body over the counter?
00:26:58 ►
I see that as a problem.
00:27:00 ►
I’d like to see what you’re proposing.
00:27:02 ►
Well, I think it should be self-organized.
00:27:04 ►
The way to do it is to make it legal. I’d like to see what you’re proposing. Well, I think it should be self-organized.
00:27:08 ►
The way to do it is to make it legal.
00:27:11 ►
You know, the spores are legal.
00:27:13 ►
They contain no psilocybin.
00:27:16 ►
There should be something called the Vegetable Drug Act, which simply states no plant is illegal.
00:27:23 ►
Period.
00:27:27 ►
Just, that’s it and it would all sort itself out
00:27:32 ►
and the junkie could have his little opium garden
00:27:36 ►
and I don’t know if coke heads could get it together enough
00:27:41 ►
to fill their backyard with coke
00:27:43 ►
it would all sort out very, very nicely.
00:27:47 ►
And it’s preposterous.
00:27:48 ►
I mean, you know, you read that in the Middle Ages,
00:27:52 ►
that in 1432 in Amsterdam, a pig was hung for murder.
00:27:58 ►
And then you, well, that’s the kind of thing we’ve got going
00:28:01 ►
with the concept of an illegal plant.
00:28:03 ►
I mean mean from any
00:28:05 ►
future enlightened point of view
00:28:07 ►
they would just look back at that and say
00:28:09 ►
how quaint
00:28:11 ►
you know what a
00:28:13 ►
bizarre notion of reality
00:28:15 ►
yeah
00:28:16 ►
I like your idea
00:28:18 ►
you talked about how the legalization
00:28:21 ►
of these substances
00:28:22 ►
was non
00:28:24 ►
doesn’t fit with our cultural context.
00:28:27 ►
And it made me think a lot about legalization.
00:28:31 ►
It made me think about making it really OK in my mind
00:28:35 ►
to defy the law and to defy the emperor’s morality
00:28:38 ►
in that regard.
00:28:40 ►
And I don’t know if I think that it’s
00:28:42 ►
possible for it to be legal.
00:28:53 ►
Without a battle, or without a major shift in the way things work,
00:28:56 ►
it seems like it’s something that I need to take on myself.
00:29:00 ►
Well, I think the hope… It’s a higher law than the one that’s imposed upon us.
00:29:03 ►
The hope comes from Europe.
00:29:04 ►
I think America will just be shamed into legalization It’s a higher law than the one that’s imposed upon us. The hope comes from Europe.
00:29:09 ►
I think America will just be shamed into legalization because in Europe, you know, the drug laws are very loose
00:29:14 ►
and Europe is a truly secular society.
00:29:17 ►
I mean, they just don’t have rattlesnake handling,
00:29:21 ►
christers and branch Davidians and all.
00:29:24 ►
They cannot figure this stuff out.
00:29:26 ►
I mean, I had a German friend visit me in Hawaii last summer
00:29:31 ►
and I took her to the beach and she immediately whipped her top off
00:29:35 ►
and then I had to explain that you couldn’t do that in America
00:29:39 ►
and she’d said she’d heard you couldn’t do that in America
00:29:42 ►
but she couldn’t believe that it was actually true.
00:29:47 ►
And then when I was looking at her thought what it would take to make it possible to take your top off at a public beach in America,
00:29:56 ►
you just realize this is a society of lost souls.
00:30:00 ►
I mean, this is a society of the screwballs that couldn’t handle the secularization of Europe
00:30:06 ►
and came here to practice what they called religious freedom,
00:30:10 ►
which basically meant crypto-fascism on everybody else, you know.
00:30:15 ►
Yeah, I agree.
00:30:17 ►
Look, black people didn’t break loose till they got their backs up.
00:30:23 ►
Gay people would have been forever marginalized.
00:30:25 ►
They’re not handing rights out in this society.
00:30:30 ►
You have to take it.
00:30:32 ►
And the drug thing has just been a polite conversation
00:30:36 ►
for far too long, I think.
00:30:40 ►
It’s getting a little louder,
00:30:42 ►
but weasel arguments are being used.
00:30:45 ►
I mean, the reason cannabis is moving toward legalization
00:30:49 ►
is because an appeal is being made to the darkest impulses of capitalism.
00:30:54 ►
You know, you could make so much money off this.
00:30:58 ►
What do you care that it’s a drug?
00:31:03 ►
What about the side of the rights, though,
00:31:05 ►
and that responsibility? I sometimes
00:31:07 ►
wonder, as much as we like
00:31:09 ►
to complain about law
00:31:11 ►
and structure,
00:31:14 ►
it seems like
00:31:15 ►
we also rely on that to provide
00:31:18 ►
certain social structures
00:31:20 ►
around how something would be…
00:31:21 ►
We don’t often claim the responsibility.
00:31:23 ►
How do you see, let’s say, if drugs were legalized,
00:31:27 ►
how would we self-manage in a responsible way
00:31:32 ►
to make that occur?
00:31:34 ►
Well, I maintain that since alcohol and tobacco are legal,
00:31:40 ►
we have already proven that we can absorb
00:31:43 ►
the social consequences of legalizing any drug.
00:31:47 ►
I mean, if you can tolerate the costs and what alcohol and all that does to insurance,
00:31:53 ►
then heroin is going to pose no problem.
00:31:55 ►
The problem with the law is that when the law becomes irrational,
00:32:01 ►
the law loses its moral force.
00:32:04 ►
And so it has to be reformed. And this is, I believe, very difficult in this drug area because nobody’s being straight about what’s at issue. let’s take cannabis which is you know most people whether they smoke cannabis or not
00:32:25 ►
have the impression i think that this is a generally benign and over-discussed peril
00:32:32 ►
and yet i don’t i cannot imagine america legalizing cannabis simply because its psychological consequences are that it erodes loyalty to the work ethic.
00:32:48 ►
You know, people are not interested in screwing widgets on wonkles if they smoke,
00:32:56 ►
and contrast it to caffeine.
00:33:01 ►
Now, caffeine is a dangerous drug, does liver damage,
00:33:04 ►
is known to be implicated in a number of pathologies.
00:33:09 ►
And yet, every contract, every labor contract signed in the Western world enshrines the right of laborers twice a day to stop the assembly line and tank up on coffee.
00:33:27 ►
This is an extraordinary folk way.
00:33:32 ►
And why?
00:33:34 ►
Because caffeine is a made-to-order drug for the purposes of slave capitalism.
00:33:41 ►
I mean, you just scurry right back to your keyboard or your assembly line and you can
00:33:46 ►
do the 3 p.m to 5 p.m shift then without you know falling on your face like a normal primate would
00:33:55 ►
but they weren’t jacked up on some alkaloid and so that’s very welcome you know know, it was McLuhan who made the point,
00:34:05 ►
and it still hasn’t been assimilated by enough people,
00:34:08 ►
that he said that technologies carry a hidden agenda
00:34:15 ►
and shape their user in ways that the user is never conscious of.
00:34:22 ►
And the great case that McLuhan made was print
00:34:25 ►
which he said the linear and uniform nature of print
00:34:29 ►
created the preconditioned mindset
00:34:32 ►
able to accept democracy
00:34:35 ►
the assembly line
00:34:37 ►
the concept of the citizen
00:34:39 ►
a whole bunch of modern ideas
00:34:42 ►
are a presupposed print.
00:34:46 ►
Well, drugs are technologies,
00:34:50 ►
and they shape the users in ways that the users never suspect.
00:34:55 ►
And our frenzied, goal-oriented, surface-obsessed society oriented surface obsessed society is a society of sugar alcohol red meat and television you know i
00:35:11 ►
mean television is an incredibly invasive and powerful drug the average american watches six
00:35:18 ►
hours a day imagine if following world war ii a drug had been introduced that now the average American spent six hours a day absolutely loaded on this drug,
00:35:30 ►
doing nothing else.
00:35:32 ►
But because we are materialists, we don’t see television as a drug.
00:35:39 ►
And yet, you know, your blood pools in your rear end,
00:35:44 ►
your brain waves fall into a measurable zone,
00:35:48 ►
you fixate, there is an entire set of symptoms,
00:35:52 ►
no less dramatic than the symptoms of smoking a bomber or honking up a line.
00:35:57 ►
But we don’t see television that way.
00:36:02 ►
And the horror of television is you don’t even get to have your own trip
00:36:05 ►
you have somebody else’s trip sponsored by the cosmetically enhanced surfaces of products i mean
00:36:14 ►
talk about a hell drug my god yeah
00:36:17 ►
an extreme minority of people who are using psychedelics right now on the planet,
00:36:31 ►
do you see this little minute portion scattered around really having an effect, which causes some sort of chain reaction before it’s too late to really work some change?
00:36:38 ►
Or is it more like small colonies in the same kind of…
00:36:42 ►
Well, see, the plan, see, if it were business as usual,
00:36:47 ►
these psychedelic communities might not amount to anything.
00:36:50 ►
But I think that the world is going to get so peculiar
00:36:54 ►
as the chickens come home to roost
00:36:58 ►
that you’ll have to take psychedelic drugs to understand what’s going on
00:37:03 ►
and that the people who don’t will be running
00:37:06 ►
around like chickens with their heads
00:37:08 ►
cut off because we
00:37:10 ►
haven’t come you know people
00:37:12 ►
yak about the apocalypse
00:37:14 ►
but this is not the apocalypse
00:37:16 ►
this is the garden party
00:37:18 ►
before the apocalypse
00:37:20 ►
I mean once it
00:37:22 ►
really hits it’s
00:37:24 ►
going to require a great deal of faith to believe that we’re going to make it through it.
00:37:29 ►
And I think that more and more organizations, governments, governing institutions are going to turn to the fringes for answers.
00:37:42 ►
Because what our circumstance is
00:37:45 ►
is that history failed
00:37:48 ►
orthodoxy failed
00:37:50 ►
science failed
00:37:52 ►
capitalism failed
00:37:54 ►
reason failed
00:37:55 ►
and we can’t keep practicing these things
00:37:59 ►
because they failed
00:38:01 ►
the ship is sinking
00:38:02 ►
we can’t have a debate about when we’ll arrive in Bermuda.
00:38:07 ►
We’re never going to arrive in Bermuda.
00:38:09 ►
The boat is now sinking.
00:38:11 ►
So the agenda has to change.
00:38:14 ►
And also, these people are dying off.
00:38:17 ►
You know, the old control freaks,
00:38:20 ►
the people who have one foot in the 19th century.
00:38:24 ►
As to your question of whether or not it will happen fast enough,
00:38:27 ►
well, that’s the horse race we’re involved in.
00:38:31 ►
That’s the excitement, you know.
00:38:33 ►
It’ll be a photo finish.
00:38:35 ►
H.G. Wells said history is a race between education and catastrophe.
00:38:40 ►
Yeah, and the other thing is Christianity took 300 years to become
00:38:45 ►
you know and it
00:38:46 ►
started off with different sets of
00:38:48 ►
people that were
00:38:50 ►
nurturing the Christian idea
00:38:52 ►
unfortunately the Roman Catholics back then
00:38:54 ►
but it could be the same thing we could start
00:38:56 ►
these little sort of copy
00:38:58 ►
clutches of peyote takers
00:39:00 ►
well and Christianity
00:39:02 ►
was able to do that in a world where
00:39:04 ►
information moved at the speed of a horse’s gallop.
00:39:08 ►
So, you know, there’s an enormous psychedelic religion flourishing in Brazil right now that just cannot convert people fast enough.
00:39:18 ►
It’s missionaryizing the United States.
00:39:22 ►
Shamanism.
00:39:28 ►
the United States. Shamanism. See, I think the reason I called my second book The Archaic Revival is because I think this is the overarching metaphor of the 20th century, that the 19th
00:39:37 ►
century was the gentleman’s century, the white gentleman. when it all worked commerce flourished
00:39:46 ►
cities were built
00:39:47 ►
the poor knew their place
00:39:50 ►
brown people
00:39:52 ►
held their position
00:39:53 ►
and the 20th century has been all about
00:39:56 ►
confronting
00:39:57 ►
the bankruptcy
00:39:59 ►
of all of that
00:40:01 ►
and from the time of
00:40:04 ►
surrealism
00:40:05 ►
and Freud and Jung and Dada
00:40:09 ►
right through to rave music
00:40:14 ►
and jazz and rock and roll
00:40:17 ►
and abstract expressionism
00:40:19 ►
these are all archaic impulses
00:40:22 ►
you know
00:40:22 ►
the 19th century is all about
00:40:25 ►
realism, materialism,
00:40:28 ►
and defined
00:40:29 ►
social structures. The
00:40:31 ►
20th century deconstructs
00:40:33 ►
the visual image,
00:40:35 ►
deconstructs the idea of
00:40:37 ►
simple location.
00:40:40 ►
We have body piercing,
00:40:42 ►
we have
00:40:43 ►
trance dancing, fire walking.
00:40:48 ►
All of these things are impulses to return to the primitive.
00:40:51 ►
And what it means is that in the aura of the realization that history has failed,
00:40:59 ►
we’re going back to an earlier model.
00:41:02 ►
This is what societies do when they get in trouble.
00:41:06 ►
You know, we forget
00:41:07 ►
because we’re the inheritors of it.
00:41:10 ►
But when medieval Christianity
00:41:12 ►
essentially got a flat tire
00:41:14 ►
by having 70 popes in 25 years,
00:41:19 ►
none of whom died a natural death,
00:41:21 ►
that clued people to the idea
00:41:23 ►
that there was something wrong
00:41:25 ►
with Christian idealism
00:41:27 ►
and the Renaissance capitalists,
00:41:31 ►
Italian city-state entrepreneurs,
00:41:34 ►
invented classicism.
00:41:37 ►
Classicism, meaning a society
00:41:40 ►
based on the ideals of Greece and Rome,
00:41:43 ►
was a science fiction option at that point.
00:41:47 ►
Greece and Rome had been buried in the ground for 1,500 years.
00:41:52 ►
And yet they dug it up.
00:41:54 ►
They dug up the buildings.
00:41:56 ►
They dug up the manuscripts.
00:41:57 ►
They dug it all up.
00:41:59 ►
And they said, this is how people should live.
00:42:02 ►
And we’ll found classicism.
00:42:04 ►
And we will be the patrons of the arts
00:42:07 ►
and we will undertake vast architectural undertakings
00:42:10 ►
and so forth and so on
00:42:11 ►
and it worked
00:42:12 ►
it set a model for society
00:42:16 ►
Roman law, Greek aesthetics
00:42:18 ►
clear into the middle of the 19th century
00:42:21 ►
when then the full consequences of the industrial reformation uh created you know
00:42:28 ►
a kind of new serfdom of some sort now uh we require such a radical re a new paradigm that
00:42:39 ►
we have to reach outside the domain of history entirely and And the archaic then, which is a model of nomadism,
00:42:48 ►
of very little material culture, of hedonism,
00:42:53 ►
a lot of focus on sexuality, sensuality, body adornment, this sort of thing.
00:43:03 ►
And an information-based culture ruled by magic. In the case of the archaic, it was
00:43:09 ►
natural magic. In our case, it will be the technological magic of electromagnetic technology.
00:43:19 ►
You know, a global tribe. McLuhan was right. I mean, McLuhan is given zilch credit. He understood all of
00:43:26 ►
this stuff. He said all of this by 1965. The people who dismissed him never understood
00:43:32 ►
him, I’m quite convinced.
00:43:34 ►
What role do you think the mutt scores and the muttions will play in this global atomic
00:43:39 ►
network?
00:43:40 ►
Well, I think that part of what we’re on the brink of is
00:43:45 ►
a technological innovation
00:43:47 ►
but I think also
00:43:49 ►
a rewiring of the human
00:43:51 ►
organism
00:43:52 ►
and that
00:43:54 ►
what psilocybin is about is it’s a catalyst
00:43:57 ►
for language
00:43:58 ►
production and evolution
00:44:01 ►
and that
00:44:02 ►
the future evolution of language
00:44:07 ►
involves language being shifted
00:44:10 ►
into the visual domain
00:44:12 ►
notice how much
00:44:14 ►
how more visual reality
00:44:16 ►
is becoming
00:44:17 ►
how icon driven
00:44:19 ►
the computer interface
00:44:22 ►
is and stuff like this
00:44:24 ►
I think that psychedelics hold the way toward a kind of telepathy,
00:44:32 ►
not a telepathy of you hear my thoughts,
00:44:36 ►
but a telepathy of I see what you mean.
00:44:41 ►
This would erode boundaries tremendously.
00:44:44 ►
I mean, it’s astonishing to think that our global
00:44:47 ►
civilization is linked together by nothing more than small mouth noises and the electronic
00:44:53 ►
transduction of saying. I mean, small mouth noises are a very, very crude way to communicate the kind of complexity that our scene requires.
00:45:07 ►
The great thing about psychedelics is whether these personalities are realized or less than
00:45:14 ►
realized is that you don’t need them.
00:45:18 ►
You know, the realized ones can be your friends, but the great thing about the psychedelic
00:45:24 ►
enterprise is that it’s
00:45:25 ►
democratic and self-directed and actually my experience is that if you really take high doses
00:45:37 ►
it’s hard to be a rat you have to have incredible defenses to be a real rat and take real high doses.
00:45:47 ►
And what it means is sooner or later it will ambush you in some tremendously unpleasant way.
00:45:53 ►
And then you will get straight.
00:45:57 ►
I think it’s tremendously exciting because it’s a chance to take control of one of the project of one of defining one’s own
00:46:07 ►
authenticity and i don’t really the the idea of the guide or i’m glad that that concept has given
00:46:16 ►
way to the idea of the sitter because the sitter gets it much better what the sitter is there to do is to keep you from rolling off the
00:46:26 ►
bed and to tell you that it’s going to be all right even though the sitter may have lost all
00:46:33 ►
confidence that it will ever be all right and they are guiding you nowhere because they haven’t the faintest idea where you are. You know, they’re just there to reassure.
00:46:48 ►
Guided trips are as often ambiguous, I think, as positive.
00:47:00 ►
You know, I know a guy who takes mushrooms fairly often,
00:47:03 ►
and he always says to me, he says, each time I take it, my goal is to stand more.
00:47:11 ►
And what he means is that there’s no bottom to it.
00:47:15 ►
And it will reveal literally as much as you can tolerate.
00:47:20 ►
And you can get into a lock with it where you say
00:47:25 ►
show me what you really are show me what you really are for yourself and instantly the cheerful
00:47:35 ►
scenarios of machine elves dancing mice and little candies spinning against black backgrounds that’s like suspended and there’s this organ tone
00:47:47 ►
like from the bach b minor mass and these black velvet curtains begin to lift and after about 15
00:47:55 ►
seconds of that you say that’s enough thank you of what you really are for yourself because you realize it is it is willing to comply with the request
00:48:07 ►
but your mind can’t handle it it is coming at you through a series of veils it is trying to be
00:48:16 ►
reassuring i mean you’re saying my god it’s an alien from the heart of the galaxy and what it’s trying to pass as is your next door neighbor
00:48:26 ►
because if it were ever to reveal
00:48:29 ►
the true dimensions of its alienness
00:48:32 ►
you would probably vaporize
00:48:34 ►
in the presence of such peculiarity
00:48:37 ►
death by astonishment
00:48:39 ►
we want to avoid that at all costs
00:48:42 ►
stories abound.
00:48:45 ►
I mean, stories upon stories, amazing stories.
00:48:50 ►
And once you collect enough of them,
00:48:53 ►
you start collecting them thinking that there’s going to be a pattern
00:48:57 ►
where you will learn something.
00:48:59 ►
Eventually you realize these stories are just designed to befuddle
00:49:03 ►
and lead you astray. I mean, you
00:49:06 ►
cannot tell what is
00:49:07 ►
going on.
00:49:09 ►
Instead of putting a book together of the stories,
00:49:11 ►
you probably would more than anything.
00:49:13 ►
Yeah, I’ve considered it.
00:49:15 ►
Great trip stories.
00:49:19 ►
Trading with the aliens. Some of you may
00:49:21 ►
know a wonderful little story
00:49:23 ►
by Clifford Simak.
00:49:25 ►
I was talking to somebody about this recently.
00:49:27 ►
It was about a man who goes to a garage sale and he buys an oak roll-top desk.
00:49:34 ►
And he gets it home and he discovers that in one,
00:49:37 ►
he just notices actually that in one corner of this desk,
00:49:40 ►
there’s what looks like an ivory dot, an inlay of ivory. And he then has this desk,
00:49:49 ►
and after a couple of months, he finds this thing on this dot, which he doesn’t know what it is.
00:49:59 ►
It’s just some little thing. He can’t figure it out. And and he discovers to make a long story short that if
00:50:07 ►
he will put something on this dot it will be traded and so he puts a paper clip and he gets
00:50:14 ►
a something or other and then he puts a dime and he gets something else every 24 hours and he begins trading through this alien trader.
00:50:30 ►
They are meme traders, these creatures from hyperspace. And the trick is to get them to trade something
00:50:35 ►
that’s very useful to you and valueless to them.
00:50:40 ►
I grew up in western Colorado,
00:50:42 ►
and up above 9,000 or 10,000 feet in the old mining camps,
00:50:48 ►
there are what are called pack rats.
00:50:52 ►
And what pack rats are about is they steal stuff.
00:50:56 ►
They steal little things, but they always leave something.
00:51:01 ►
They are trader rats.
00:51:03 ►
They don’t actually steal.
00:51:07 ►
something they are trader rats they don’t actually steal and there are many stories about people getting in league with a pack rat and trading seven up bottle caps for gold nuggets that were
00:51:15 ►
hidden in the walls that because of these old mining towns these rats have been stealing from
00:51:21 ►
the bar tills of a century ago and and so this is a you know and the strange thing
00:51:28 ►
is when you trade with a pack rat you have to discern its psychology because it may trade
00:51:35 ►
seven up bottle caps for gold nuggets but if you switch to dimes it will switch to dead bees
00:51:41 ►
and they’re no good to you so you you have to keep negotiating, you see,
00:51:48 ►
to get the good and to, yeah.
00:51:50 ►
Isn’t this an example of your language?
00:51:54 ►
Yeah, that’s right.
00:51:56 ►
That’s right, exactly.
00:51:59 ►
Although somebody pointed out to me,
00:52:01 ►
it was another one of these torpedoes, unexpected,
00:52:05 ►
that print is visible language, that print is the condensation of sound.
00:52:11 ►
It’s just that it requires a medium.
00:52:14 ►
Yeah.
00:52:15 ►
I was wondering, in view of what you pointed out about some of the liabilities of asking
00:52:20 ►
to reveal what’s deepest, darkest self, what’s truest being,
00:52:21 ►
of asking to reveal what’s deepest, darkest self
00:52:23 ►
or purest being.
00:52:25 ►
And I’m wondering
00:52:26 ►
if you could share
00:52:27 ►
some of your thoughts
00:52:28 ►
about setting an agenda
00:52:29 ►
for a trip
00:52:30 ►
and entering into a dialogue
00:52:32 ►
with this alien
00:52:34 ►
as opposed to perhaps
00:52:36 ►
being more passive
00:52:36 ►
and just allowing this emergence
00:52:40 ►
without any conscious direction
00:52:41 ►
to the extent that that’s possible.
00:52:43 ►
I tend to be very passive.
00:52:47 ►
I sense immense power and potential in these states,
00:52:52 ►
and I’m frankly afraid of it.
00:52:55 ►
I mean, I like to watch. That’s my bit.
00:52:58 ►
And I have no desire to seize the levers
00:53:03 ►
and start pulling and pushing buttons i had a bit of a few when i was
00:53:09 ►
younger we messed around in more radical ways and had experiences that really i felt like
00:53:17 ►
threatened our sanity because you just couldn’t believe what was going on I don’t set agendas some people do that what I do do
00:53:28 ►
is I talk to it and I ask it to to show itself and I do think you have to you
00:53:38 ►
you have to approach the thing it is shy or it’s tasteful it’s hard to figure out which but in any case it will not
00:53:48 ►
speak to you unless spoken to you can go through an eight-hour trip and it will never say a word
00:53:54 ►
because you never said a word and you have to say to it show yourself
00:53:59 ►
it doesn’t hurt to verbalize it i mean i think of it in my mind i sort of i i i invoke it but it’s
00:54:09 ►
also somewhat like a seduction i mean you say come out show yourself be beautiful and then this
00:54:19 ►
thing literally almost like a turmoil in the air and and they condense, and then they do show themselves.
00:54:28 ►
But unless invited, they won’t do that.
00:54:32 ►
Now, DMT, that isn’t true.
00:54:34 ►
They’re uninvited.
00:54:35 ►
I mean, you’re in their domain.
00:54:37 ►
You’re in Elfland Grand Central Station,
00:54:41 ►
and everybody’s trying to get on the train to Westport,
00:54:44 ►
Grand Central Station and everybody’s trying to get on the train to Westport and you’re just there, you know, in the middle of this crazy situation.
00:54:52 ►
Yeah.
00:54:53 ►
What do you consider regular use?
00:54:57 ►
I don’t know. I think that’s really a hard thing to say.
00:55:01 ►
I mean, I know people who say DMT is their favorite drug and the
00:55:05 ►
last time they took it was 67 and we’re not talking abuse here I think most
00:55:17 ►
psilocybin three or four times a year is definitely means that you are a
00:55:23 ►
psychedelic person for sure it definitely
00:55:26 ►
means that your every waking moment is informed and transformed by your relationship to this stuff
00:55:33 ►
it doesn’t take very much because it’s a it’s a way of thinking you know uh i admire people who
00:55:42 ►
can do it a lot and not go off the deep end.
00:55:45 ►
Because what I find is, you know, basically what we talk about in these workshops
00:55:51 ►
is what I would call the generic psychedelic experience.
00:55:56 ►
You know, it lasts four to eight hours.
00:55:59 ►
There are all kinds of crazy hallucinations, insights, tears, laughter,
00:56:06 ►
self-affirmation,
00:56:07 ►
then it goes away.
00:56:09 ►
That’s the generic psychedelic trip.
00:56:12 ►
But if you start pushing,
00:56:14 ►
then you get to be Columbus.
00:56:17 ►
You know, if you, for instance,
00:56:19 ►
take psilocybin every 72 hours
00:56:23 ►
for 10 days,
00:56:24 ►
you will cure in the marketplace you will preach to the
00:56:30 ►
masses you will become so convinced of dogmas and points of view so peculiar that it will hand
00:56:39 ►
your friends a crisis i mean i’ve been there and so it’s the trick is to understand when you need to chill
00:56:48 ►
because it just starts opening ahead of you like when we would take it in the amazon
00:56:56 ►
one of the things that we noted and talked about and was actually a moment of concern was in every psilocybin trip in the Amazon,
00:57:06 ►
there would come this moment
00:57:09 ►
where you would realize that the jungle was friendly
00:57:14 ►
and that that’s where you belonged.
00:57:17 ►
And there was this impulse to just take your clothes off
00:57:20 ►
and walk into it.
00:57:23 ►
And with perfect confidence, I could could survive it would take care of
00:57:27 ►
me it is not threatening it is not unfriendly it loves me i don’t know whether that’s true i don’t
00:57:35 ►
know what would happen to you when you came down i mean there are stories of people not on psilocybin
00:57:40 ►
who walked into the jungle and you know were mad from fly bites 12 hours later and
00:57:48 ►
basically had to be shot like dogs in the best Colombian fashion so you know that this is an
00:57:57 ►
so this is a very intense perception that you just don’t know what to make of is it true
00:58:02 ►
could one somehow sustained by psychedelics
00:58:06 ►
walk into that and survive or not?
00:58:10 ►
There’s people I think that do that without psychedelics.
00:58:13 ►
Some of these people that are asking
00:58:14 ►
to have original skills trips,
00:58:17 ►
they definitely…
00:58:18 ►
You mean white people who have…
00:58:20 ►
But they’ve trained themselves.
00:58:21 ►
They’ve hardened their bodies
00:58:23 ►
and they’ve learned how to make fire
00:58:25 ►
and how to get water from plants.
00:58:27 ►
And to do it just on the spur of the moment,
00:58:31 ►
I don’t know how long you’d last out there.
00:58:33 ►
Would you say something to compare LSD and psilocybin?
00:58:39 ►
Well, psilocybin is much more visual.
00:58:42 ►
Psilocybin is much more visual.
00:58:52 ►
LSD is more psychoanalytical, therapeutic, personal in some way.
00:58:59 ►
It may be more efficient at personality work, you know, reconstruction and overcoming trauma or phobia or something like that.
00:59:06 ►
Psilocybin is largely visual and spectacularly so.
00:59:13 ►
That’s what distinguishes the tryptamine hallucinogens
00:59:16 ►
is the ease with which they elicit really beautiful and complex hallucinations. I mean, people, straight scientists
00:59:28 ►
who write about what they call hallucination
00:59:30 ►
are really writing about
00:59:33 ►
what is technically called hypnagogia,
00:59:36 ►
which means the trivial hallucinations
00:59:39 ►
on the edge of sleep, you know,
00:59:41 ►
the spinning wheels, the moving grids of color,
00:59:44 ►
the dancing mice, that
00:59:46 ►
sort of thing. Psychedelic hallucinations are visionary operas of some sort. I mean,
00:59:55 ►
they are tremendous. They’re more visually dramatic than any film experience or experience
01:00:02 ►
in the real world that you could have there’s no very good
01:00:06 ►
explanation for what that’s all about in your trial near getting the five grams of mushrooms
01:00:11 ►
did you uh have you have you gotten 10 grams and that was too much or is it or have you built up
01:00:17 ►
that’s that’s enough 10 grams is too much for me i I mean, people have different reactions to it.
01:00:27 ►
I think if it gets too,
01:00:29 ►
if the episodes of un-Englishability are too prolonged,
01:00:34 ►
then you need to back the dose down, you know,
01:00:37 ►
because it just doesn’t make any sense.
01:00:40 ►
It’s also the power of it.
01:00:41 ►
I mean, my God, when you overdose on psilocybin,
01:00:41 ►
It’s also the power of it.
01:00:44 ►
I mean, my God, when you overdose on psilocybin,
01:00:50 ►
it’s like an asteroid struck the planet or something.
01:00:54 ►
It’s very hard to convince yourself that it’s confined between your ears.
01:01:02 ►
It’s more like, you know, everything from Las Vegas West just was vaporized.
01:01:06 ►
Well, I think we should knock off.
01:01:10 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:01:12 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:01:15 ►
And we’ll pick up with this talk in my next podcast
01:01:18 ►
because I’m as curious as you are
01:01:20 ►
about what’s coming next.
01:01:21 ►
To me, it’s really amazing how this talk
01:01:24 ►
that Terrence gave over 21
01:01:25 ►
years ago is still so very relevant today. He was truly a man ahead of his time. And I apologize
01:01:35 ►
for even mentioning this, let alone mentioning it first, but didn’t you find it kind of old-fashionedly
01:01:41 ►
charming when Terrence was talking about contacting aliens, and he said,
01:01:45 ►
they can fax you, but you can’t fax them. Fax them. This actually confirms the 1993 date of
01:01:53 ►
this talk, because today I’m sure he’d be talking about Skyping them or messaging them. My guess is
01:02:00 ►
that at the time Terrence gave this talk, he had not yet seen or even heard about such a thing as
01:02:05 ►
a web browser, because Mosaic, the first well-known browser and the one that eventually led to
01:02:11 ►
Netscape, was only released on April 22, 1993, just one month before this talk was given. Yet,
01:02:19 ►
when about halfway into the talk, Terrence said, our problem is that we are in denial of our circumstance.
01:02:25 ►
Well, it obviously made me think of where we actually are today. Everything has changed,
01:02:31 ►
but nothing is very different from what it was in 1993, I’m afraid. Now, when the question
01:02:37 ►
was asked as to whether such a small group of people as is the psychedelic community
01:02:42 ►
can actually do something that will have any noticeable
01:02:45 ►
effect on the world, well, it reminded me of a little story about how the action of
01:02:50 ►
just a single individual eventually led to something that I happen to think of as having
01:02:55 ►
global importance, and that is the worldwide dance and festival community.
01:03:01 ►
So here’s my little story, and the point that I hope that you’ll take away from it is that you never can tell how something that you do will ripple down through history.
01:03:11 ►
I think that it was Gandhi who once said,
01:03:13 ►
What you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
01:03:19 ►
Well, this is a story like that, and possibly if someone else hadn’t taken the seemingly insignificant step that I’m about to tell you about,
01:03:27 ►
well, then somebody else probably would have. We’ll never know.
01:03:31 ►
But the fact of the matter is that on one fateful day, someone handed another person a few little pills,
01:03:38 ►
and the chain of reactions that followed had a profound effect on a lot of people.
01:03:43 ►
Let’s begin at the end of the story, which is today’s state of the worldwide dance community.
01:03:48 ►
And I use this term really loosely.
01:03:51 ►
For argument’s sake, let’s say that the dance community had at least some of its roots
01:03:55 ►
in the early phase of the rave movement, which is still going on, by the way.
01:04:00 ►
And first of all, it’s important to keep in mind that this isn’t the only story
01:04:04 ►
about the genesis of the dance community, nor is it a definitive one.
01:04:09 ►
It is simply one of the many threads of a story that make up the tapestry of what is taking place today on, well, what I guess could be called the festival circuit.
01:04:18 ►
Now, if you’ve never been to a rave or a trance dance or one of the multi-day festivals where electronic music is
01:04:25 ►
featured, then you really can’t have a complete understanding of what I’m talking about.
01:04:30 ►
Now keep in mind that I’m a 72-year-old grandfather whose parents enjoyed Guy Lombardo waltz music and
01:04:36 ►
who was in eighth grade when Elvis first sang You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog.
01:04:41 ►
So electronic music wasn’t something that I was prepared for. However, once I first listened to house music while under the influence of MDMA,
01:04:50 ►
which in pure form at the time was known as ecstasy,
01:04:54 ►
well, experiences like that have transformed the lives of literally millions and millions of people,
01:05:00 ►
mainly young people, but also old guys like me.
01:05:03 ►
The combination of that form of music coupled with the mind state induced by MDMA
01:05:08 ►
is something that transforms a person’s life forever,
01:05:12 ►
even though they may not fully realize it at the time.
01:05:15 ►
At least that’s my opinion, and based upon that opinion,
01:05:19 ►
well, it seems to me that the genesis of those experiences should be of interest to us.
01:05:24 ►
So, right now,
01:05:25 ►
I’d like to add a thread of that story that I know a little bit about. What I can do is to
01:05:30 ►
place a few points of reference on our map, and I can connect a few of the lines connecting those
01:05:35 ►
points. The thing to keep in mind is the fact that there is more than one way that these points
01:05:40 ►
became connected. This is only one story, and hopefully some of our fellow salonners
01:05:45 ►
will add their threads in our comments section of the program notes,
01:05:48 ►
which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:05:52 ►
So, now we have this wonderful worldwide festival experience
01:05:56 ►
that is available all around the planet.
01:05:59 ►
To me, these festivals have a direct connection back to the early days
01:06:03 ►
of the large-scale rave scene in England.
01:06:05 ►
One of the direct connections to this scene was through the efforts of Genesis P. Orridge,
01:06:10 ►
who, legend tells us, first heard house music in Chicago and then brought it to London.
01:06:15 ►
Now, the origins of Chicago house music are murky,
01:06:18 ►
but one early connection that I can personally attest to is that
01:06:22 ►
before house, there was Rick Squanti at the
01:06:25 ►
Stark Club in Dallas and back in the early 1980s Rick was becoming one of the first major DJs in
01:06:31 ►
the world of techno music. And how big was the Stark Club back then you ask? Well those were the
01:06:38 ►
days when New York Studios 54 was falling into eclipse and so the Stark became the Jet Set’s new in-spot.
01:06:45 ►
Regular patrons included Stevie Nicks, Grace Jones, Robert Plant, Annie Lennox, Rob Lowe,
01:06:51 ►
Prince, the Talking Heads, the Pet Shop Boys, and George W. Bush during his Playboy years.
01:06:56 ►
At the time, Madonna even moved to Dallas just to be closer to the Stark.
01:07:01 ►
It was a truly amazing place, and it was a most amazing time to be living in
01:07:06 ►
Dallas. For you see, of all the places on the planet, Dallas, Texas in the 1980s became ground
01:07:12 ►
zero for the recreational use of MDMA, or ecstasy. Dallas, Texas, the buckle on the so-called Bible
01:07:20 ►
Belt, was where ecstasy first made a major impact as a recreational drug.
01:07:25 ►
Now, how did that happen, do you suppose? Well, there was this man from Dallas who had a friend
01:07:31 ►
living in Hollywood. And from time to time, the man from Dallas would visit his friend in Hollywood.
01:07:37 ►
During one of those visits, the Hollywood man told the Dallas man about this new drug.
01:07:41 ►
He said that not only was it the most amazing thing since LSD, it was also
01:07:45 ►
legal. Do you want to try it, he asked. Well, like many of us after his first experience with MDMA,
01:07:54 ►
the Dallas man had an epiphany and wanted to do everything that he could to let the world know
01:07:59 ►
about this amazing substance. But unlike most of us, he acted on his impulse and so became the person who
01:08:06 ►
brought X to the streets of Dallas and to the big bowls of it that could be found on the bar at the
01:08:10 ►
Stark Club. And again, this was before MDMA became illegal. And it was at the Stark Club that MDMA
01:08:17 ►
became deeply intertwined with house music, which at the time was called Stark Music. So it’s my opinion that the combination of MDMA and trance music
01:08:27 ►
originated at the Stark Club
01:08:28 ►
largely through the efforts of the person that I’ve been calling the man from Dallas.
01:08:34 ►
And in the video interview that I gave about those days in Dallas
01:08:37 ►
when I was involved in the MDMA scene
01:08:39 ►
you can learn more about this man who went by the handle of Thomas Crown.
01:08:44 ►
That video, by the way, is titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate, and I’ll link to it in the program notes.
01:08:51 ►
So, to me, Thomas Crown played a major role in combining MDMA and techno music,
01:08:57 ►
which has become such an important thread in the growth of today’s festival circuit.
01:09:02 ►
But my story isn’t about Thomas Crown,
01:09:05 ►
and actually it isn’t even about the man from Hollywood who first turned him on to MDMA.
01:09:10 ►
I’ll tell you that guy’s name in just a minute.
01:09:12 ►
But actually my story is about that unknown person
01:09:16 ►
who knew an unnamed chemist who produced some pure MDMA.
01:09:20 ►
And that unknown person then took a few of those pills
01:09:24 ►
and gave them to the man from Hollywood who then set these wheels in motion.
01:09:28 ►
Just think of the connections in this thread.
01:09:31 ►
Somebody, maybe it was you or someone you know,
01:09:34 ►
took the man from Hollywood on his first ecstasy trip
01:09:37 ►
and that trip has a direct connection to the festivals
01:09:41 ►
that will be taking place all over the planet in the coming year
01:09:43 ►
even though MDMA is no longer a major factor in that scene. But without those connections,
01:09:50 ►
my guess is that we would still be about where we are today. However, the people involved in
01:09:55 ►
this particular story provided some really powerful impetus to what we now think of as
01:10:01 ►
the worldwide dance community. As we all know, Terrence McKenna had a role in helping the newly evolving rave scene come into existence.
01:10:09 ►
His predecessor, Dr. Timothy Leary, however, never gets much credit for this new phase of the youth movement.
01:10:15 ►
But we shouldn’t forget the fact that the man in Hollywood who took the man from Dallas on his first ecstasy trip
01:10:21 ►
was none other than Dr. Timothy Leary.
01:10:21 ►
from Dallas on his first ecstasy trip,
01:10:24 ►
was none other than Dr. Timothy Leary.
01:10:28 ►
One never knows how a seemingly small action can ripple on down through countless lives.
01:10:31 ►
Timothy Leary’s dead
01:10:34 ►
No, no, he’s outside
01:10:39 ►
Timothy Lear is dead
01:10:47 ►
He’ll fly his astral plane
01:11:00 ►
Takes a trip around the plane
01:11:04 ►
Takes you back the same day
01:11:08 ►
Timothy Leary
01:11:10 ►
Timothy Leary
01:11:14 ►
Last week you heard me talk about Howard Zinn’s important book,
01:11:23 ►
A People’s History of the United States.
01:11:26 ►
During an interview about his book, Zinn said that his goal in writing it was to promote what he called a quiet revolution.
01:11:34 ►
Not a revolution in the classical sense of seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions.
01:11:46 ►
power from within the institutions. And from what I’ve heard from our fellow salonners during this past week, well, that seems to be exactly what is taking place.
01:11:51 ►
I’ve heard from teachers, police officers, members of the military service, college students and
01:11:56 ►
recent grads, and also young parents. None of these people left me with the impression that
01:12:00 ►
they were intent on taking to the streets to force change. All of them, each in their own way, have mentioned a new inner resolve
01:12:08 ►
to pay better attention to what’s taking place all around us,
01:12:11 ►
and they’re looking for the proper opportunity to do something that can affect
01:12:16 ►
what may only be an incrementally small change in their organization or surroundings,
01:12:21 ►
but a change from the status quo nonetheless,
01:12:24 ►
a change in a more
01:12:25 ►
positive direction than our so-called leaders have been herding us in. And what I’d like to
01:12:31 ►
suggest for all of us is to think about the task before us not as a problem or a challenge or a
01:12:36 ►
chore, but think of it rather as a dance, a great dance of us human beings as we join in the rhythm
01:12:43 ►
of the Gaian music that our dear old planet plays for us every day.
01:12:47 ►
I know that that famous song by the Eagles says,
01:12:50 ►
Some dance to remember and some dance to forget.
01:12:54 ►
But I’m thinking that we can also dance simply to express, for however brief the moment,
01:12:59 ►
that wonderful sense of the simple joy of being alive.
01:13:03 ►
It isn’t a feeling that we can sustain 24 by 7, but how
01:13:07 ►
wonderful it is to connect with it every once in a while out on the dance floor. If you’re in a
01:13:12 ►
position right now where you can’t risk being photographed at a demonstration, and you feel
01:13:17 ►
that for now you have no choice but to keep your head down and remain in the middle of the herd,
01:13:22 ►
well, I was there myself once upon a time, and I know how difficult that can be.
01:13:27 ►
But one thing that almost everyone may be able to do during the coming year
01:13:30 ►
is to find out about a weekend dance festival that’s nearby,
01:13:34 ►
and go to it, participate, dance all night under the stars,
01:13:37 ►
like our ancestors did a millennia ago.
01:13:41 ►
In the dark days of the 1930s,
01:13:43 ►
as the Nazis were coming to power in Germany,
01:13:47 ►
an incredible youth movement was thriving there.
01:13:50 ►
They were called the Swing Kids, and they were hounded by the authorities and forbidden to hold dances.
01:13:56 ►
So they waited until the last minute to let everyone know where to meet that night for the party.
01:14:01 ►
Sound familiar?
01:14:03 ►
Eventually their music banned, and many of them were put into
01:14:06 ►
concentration camps. The music was swing and jazz and it was banned mainly because most of the
01:14:12 ►
musicians who played jazz and swing music were black. The swing kids of Berlin and Hamburg quite
01:14:18 ►
literally risked their lives and freedom for the right to dance. To dance! Those were the days of the dancing, my friends,
01:14:26 ►
and the days of the dancing are upon us once again. In fact, they never ended.
01:14:31 ►
My parents met at a dance in 1935, and the music that night was swing music. They weren’t swing
01:14:37 ►
kids, obviously, since they lived in the U.S. and not Germany, but they must have had some of that
01:14:43 ►
swing kid spirit, which in some way or other they passed along to me.
01:14:47 ►
I still have very fond memories of my mother teaching me how to dance
01:14:50 ►
after first moving the table out of the way in our little 1950s kitchen.
01:14:55 ►
In fact, yet today, when I’m alone and nobody is watching,
01:15:00 ►
I often dance as I cook the evening meal.
01:15:03 ►
It would certainly look silly to an
01:15:05 ►
outside observer, but to me it sure is fun. Now my wife is the real dancer in our family,
01:15:11 ►
and as a part of our wedding ceremony, we included Marie Brennan’s lovely song, Days
01:15:16 ►
of the Dancing. And that’s the melody that I try to keep in my head as I dance through
01:15:21 ►
this mad world, sometimes desperately trying to find the right
01:15:25 ►
beat. It was also during the early 1930s, by the way, that Henry Miller, one of the contemporary
01:15:31 ►
writers of the day who was clearly in touch with the times, he wrote these words in his celebrated
01:15:37 ►
book, Tropic of Cancer. It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us,
01:15:44 ►
It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us.
01:15:50 ►
But if that is so, then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curling howl,
01:15:53 ►
a screech of defiance, a war-hoop.
01:15:58 ►
Away with lamentation, away with eulogies and dirges,
01:16:02 ►
away with biographies and histories and libraries and museums.
01:16:04 ►
Let the dead eat the dead.
01:16:07 ►
Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater,
01:16:09 ►
the last expiring dance.
01:16:11 ►
But a dance.
01:16:15 ►
Will you be joining us in our dance?
01:16:17 ►
We’re waiting for your answer.
01:16:21 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:16:24 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. This great world, people still, not again
01:16:49 ►
Worlds apart, out of tune, souls made well
01:16:58 ►
Then the music stops This is love.
01:17:27 ►
I give you my answer On the stepping ground
01:17:31 ►
I gave you my answer
01:17:35 ►
On the days of the dancing
01:17:38 ►
On the days of the dancing. Thank you. Shattered dreams, blood and tears, I found a pattern.
01:18:27 ►
Then the music starts.
01:18:31 ►
Here comes the man.
01:18:35 ►
Worlds apart, a step in time,
01:18:38 ►
I caught somebody.
01:18:42 ►
Whispered words, laughing eyes recognize someone like Valentine
01:18:49 ►
Dear, you’re just a lie
01:19:00 ►
La la la la la la la la la la
01:19:07 ►
I’ll give you my answer When we’re standing round
01:19:26 ►
I’ll give you my answer
01:19:30 ►
In the days of the dancing
01:19:33 ►
In the days of the dancing Thank you. I’ll give you my answer
01:20:30 ►
I’ll give you my answer
01:20:38 ►
In the days of the crossing
01:20:41 ►
In the days of the galaxy Days of the galaxy